Microsoft's Shiny New Toy
Photosynth is dazzling, but what is it for?

At last March's Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference in Monterey, CA, a summit that's been described as "Davos for the digerati," the calm-voiced software architect from Microsoft began his demonstration abruptly, navigating rapidly across a sea of images displayed on a large screen. Using Seadragon, a technology that enables smooth, speedy exploration of large sets of text and image data, he dove effortlessly into a 300-megapixel map, zooming in to reveal a date stamp from the Library of Congress in one corner. Then he turned to an image that looked like a bar code but was actually the complete text of Charles Dickens's Bleak House, zooming in until two crisp-edged typeset characters filled the screen, before breezily reverse-zooming back to the giant quilt of text and images.

Microsoft had acquired Seadragon the previous year--and with it the presenter, Blaise Agüera y Arcas. But Agüera y Arcas had not come to TED just to show off Seadragon. Soon he cut to a pano­rama tiled together from photos of the Canadian ­Rockies; the mosaic shifted as he panned across it, revealing a dramatic ridgeline. Next came an aerial view of what appeared to be a model of a ­familiar building: Notre Dame Cathedral. The model, Agüera y Arcas explained, had been assembled from hundreds of separate images gathered from Flickr. It was a "point cloud"--a set of points in three-dimensional space.

As he talked, Agüera y Arcas navigated teasingly around the periphery of Notre Dame, which repeatedly came alive and dimmed again. The effect of hurtling through shifting images and focal points was softened by subtle transitional effects. It felt like a deliberately slowed reel of frame-by-frame animation; the effect was jolting. The crowd watched in wonder as Agüera y Arcas pushed deeper into the front view of the building's archway, ending with a tight close-up of a gargoyle. Some of the images the technology had drawn on were not even strictly photographic: it had searched Flickr for all relevant images, including a poster of the cathedral. What Agüera y Arcas was demonstrating wasn't video, but neither was it merely a collection of photos, even a gargantuan one. It was also like a map, but an immersive one animated by the dream logic of blurring shapes and shifting perspectives.

This was Photosynth--a technology that analyzes related images and links them together to re-create physical environments in a dazzling virtual space. The technology creates a "metaverse," Agüera y Arcas said (for more on the nascent blending of mapping technolo­gies like Google Earth and the fantastic realms of games like Second Life, see "Second Earth," July/August 2007); but it also constitutes the "long tail" of Virtual Earth, Microsoft's competitor to Google Earth, because of its ability to draw from and contribute to the wealth of local mapping and image data available online. It could provide "immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth," he said, "collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory." At which point the presentation ended as abruptly as it had begun some six minutes earlier. Agüera y Arcas's concluding statement met with a thunder of applause.

Beyond Image Stitching
Photosynth was born from what Agüera y Arcas calls the marriage of Seadragon and Photo Tourism, a Microsoft project intended to revolutionize the way photo sets are packaged and displayed. Photo Tourism had begun as the doctoral thesis of a zealous 26-year-old University of Washington graduate student named Noah Snavely. One of Snavely's advisors was Rick ­Szeliski, a computer-vision researcher at Microsoft Research, the company's R&D arm. "I described the need for the good elements of a strong slide show, like great composition," recalls Szeliski, whose earlier work at Microsoft had helped develop the image-stitching technology now commonly used in digital cameras to fill a wider or taller frame. He also sought fluidity between images and a sense of inter­activity in viewing them.

Working with Szeliski and a University of Washington professor named Steve Seitz, Snavely was intent on coding a way forward through a computationally forbidding challenge: how to get photos to merge, on the basis of their similarities, into a physical 3-D model that human eyes could recognize as part of an authentic, real-world landscape. Moreover, the model should be one that users could navigate and experience spatially. Existing photo-stitching software used in electronic devices such as digital cameras knew how to infer relationships between images from the sequence in which they'd been taken. But Snavely was trying to develop software capable of making such assessments in a totally different way. He devised a two-step process: "In the first step, we identify salient points in all the 2-D images," he says. "Then we try and figure out which points in different images correspond to the same point in 3-D."

"The process," Snavely says, "is called 'structure from motion.' Basically, a moving camera can infer 3-D structure. It's the same idea as when you move your head back and forth and can get a better sense of the 3-D structure of what you're looking at. Try closing one eye and moving your head from side to side: you see that different points at different distances will move differently. This is the basic idea behind structure from motion."

Computer vision, as Agüera y Arcas explains, benefits from a simple assurance: all spatial data is quantifiable. "Each point in space has only three degrees of freedom: x, y, and z," he says.

Attributes shared by certain photos, he adds, help mark them as similar: a distinctively shaped paving stone, say, may appear repeatedly. When the software recognizes resemblances--the stone in this photo also appears in that one--it knows to seek further resemblances. The process of grouping together images on the basis of matching visual elements thus gathers steam until a whole path can be re-created from those paving stones. The more images the system starts with, the more realistic the result, especially if the original pictures were taken from a variety of angles and perspectives.

That's because the second computational exercise, Snavely says, is to compare images in which shared features are depicted from different angles. "It turns out that the first process aids the second, giving us information about where the cameras must be. We're able to recover the viewpoint from which each photo was taken, and when the user selects a photo, they are taken to that viewpoint." By positing a viewpoint for each image--calculating where the camera must have been when the picture was taken--the software can mimic the way binocular vision works, producing a 3-D effect.

As Szeliski knew, however, the human eye is the most fickle of critics. So he and his two colleagues sought to do more than just piece smaller parts into a larger whole; they also worked on transition effects intended to let images meet as seamlessly as possible. The techniques they refined include dissolves, or fades, the characteristic method by which film and video editors blend images.

In a demo that showed the Trevi Fountain in Italy, Photo ­Tourism achieved a stilted, rudimentary version of what ­Photosynth would produce: a point cloud assembled from images that represent different perspectives on a single place. More impressive was the software's ability to chug through banks of images downloaded from Flickr based on descriptive tags--photos that, of course, hadn't been taken for the purpose of producing a model. The result, Szeliski remembers, was "surprising and fresh" even to his veteran's eyes.

"What we had was a new way to visualize a photo collection, an interactive slide show," Szeliski says. "I think Photo Tourism was surprising for different reasons to insiders and outsiders. The insiders were bewildered by the compelling ease of the experience." The outsiders, he says, could hardly believe it was possible at all.

And yet the Photo Tourism application had an uncertain future. Though it was a technical revelation, developed in Linux and able to run on Windows, it was still very much a prototype, and the road map for developing it further was unclear.

In the spring of 2006, as Snavely was presenting Photo Tourism at an internal Microsoft workshop, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, then a new employee, walked by and took notice. He had arrived recently thanks to the acquisition of his company, Seadragon, which developed a software application he describes as "a 3-D virtual memory manager for images." Seadragon's eye-popping appeal lay in its ability to let users load, browse, and manipulate unprecedented quantities of visual information, and its great technical achievement was its ability to do so over a network. (Photosynth's ability to work with images from Flickr and the like, however, comes from technology that originated with Photo Tourism.)

Agüera y Arcas and Snavely began talking that day. By the summer of 2006, demos were being presented. The resulting hybrid product--part Photo Tourism and part Seadragon--aggregates a large cluster of like images (whether photos or illustrations), weaving them into a 3-D visual model of their real-world subject. It even lends three-dimensionality to areas where the 2-D photos come together. Each individual image is reproduced with perfect fidelity, but in the transitions between them, Photosynth fills in the perceptual gaps that would otherwise prevent a collection of photos from feeling like part of a broader-perspective image. And besides being a visual analogue of a real-life scene, the "synthed" model is fully navigable. As Snavely explains,"The dominant mode of navigation is choosing the next photo to visit, by clicking on controls, and the system automatically moving the viewpoint in 3-D to that new location. A roving eye is a good metaphor for this." The software re-creates the photographed subject as a place to be appreciated from every documented angle.

Photosynth's startling technical achievement is like pulling a rabbit from a hat: it produces a lifelike 3-D interface from the 2-D medium of photography. "This is something out of nothing," says Alexei A. Efros, a Carnegie Mellon professor who specializes in computer vision. The secret, Efros explains, is the quantity of photographs. "As you get more and more visual data, the quantity becomes quality," he says. "And as you get amazing amounts of data, it starts to tell you things you didn't know before." Thanks to improved pattern recognition, indexing, and metadata, machines can infer three-dimensionality. Sooner than we expect, Efros says, "vision will be the primary sensor for machines, just as it is now for humans."

Microsoft is demonstrating Photosynth online with photo collections such as this one of Venice's St. Mark's Square. The shots in this collection were taken by a single photographer over 10 days.
Credit: Courtesy of Microsoft Live Labs

What It Might Become
Microsoft's work on Photosynth exemplifies the company's strategy for the 100-person-strong Live Labs. Part Web-based skunk works, part recruiting ground for propeller-heads for whom the corporate parent is not a good fit, Live Labs aims in part to "challenge what people think Microsoft is all about," says Gary Flake, a 40-year-old technical fellow who is the lab's founder and director. Its more immediate aim is to bring Web technologies to market.

Flake's pitch about the Live Labs culture is an energetic one, as he speaks about his efforts to bridge research science and product engineering. Flake, who has worked for numerous research organizations, including the NEC Research Institute and Yahoo Research Labs, which he founded and also ran, describes this as an industry-wide challenge. At Live Labs, "we have a deliberate hedge portfolio," he explains. "We have a very interesting mix," encompassing "40 different projects."

Flake is unwilling to discuss many of his projects in detail, but he brims with excitement about his mandate to "to bring in more DNA" in the way of raw talent. "We want to create and advance the state of Internet products and services," he says, but he also speaks passionately about Live Labs employees as "human Rosetta stones" who can serve as translators in an R&D world where engineers and scientists often, in effect, speak different languages.

The Photosynth project, Flake says, epitomizes the kind of success he wants to champion through his efforts to overcome the traditional divide between science and product engineering. It "represents a serious advancement of the state of the art."

Currently, Photosynth can be seen only in an online demo, but Agüera y Arcas's team hopes to release it by the end of the year. What somebody who acquires it can actually do with it remains to be seen. Point clouds can be made from as few as two or three images, so one can imagine users creating relatively unsophisticated synths of their own photography--of, say, a family trip to Mount Rushmore. (Of course, people who have Photosynth might begin to shoot many more pictures of a given place, in the interest of being able to make a rich synth later.) But it could also be that users will tap into online libraries of photos--which will probably have to be downloaded to a local computer--to create their own synths of highly photographed sites.

Still, Photosynth is mostly promise with little proof. Technical questions abound as to how easy it will be to use and what, exactly, its capabilities will be. Also, despite the Linux origins of Photo Tourism, Photosynth will remain Windows only for the foreseeable future.

And for all Photosynth's immediate appeal, its applications, too, remain unclear. The world doesn't need another image browser, even a groundbreaking one. It seems even more unlikely that users would pay for Photosynth in its current form. In the meantime, Photosynth's fortunes will depend on whether it can build a broad-based community of users. Will it take on new uses for those who embrace it, as Google Earth has done? More important, will ­Microsoft release a final product sufficiently open that such a community can seek uses different from those initially intended?

Flake reports that the Photosynth team has conjured dozens of potential uses, two of which look especially likely.

One is to integrate it more fully with Microsoft Virtual Earth, making it that tool that takes users to the next step in deep zoom. With Virtual Earth handling topography and aerial photography while Photosynth coördinates a wealth of terrestrial photographic material, the two applications could give rise to a kind of lightweight metaverse, to use the term that Agüera y Arcas invoked at TED.

Noting Photosynth's facility with buildings and city squares, Seitz also envisions a "scaling up in a big way." "We'd like to capture whole cities," he says. Indeed, Agüera y Arcas and Stephen Lawler, general manager of Microsoft's Virtual Earth project, announced in August 2007 in Las Vegas, at the annual hackers' convention Defcon, that they're planning a partnership. Once some relatively minor technical hurdles are cleared, Seitz says, "there's nothing stopping us from modeling cities."

As people create and store ever greater amounts of digital media, Photosynth might even enable users to "lifecast" their family photo albums. "Imagine if you could watch your kids grow up in your own house," says Flake, "just from your photo collection."

As such ideas percolate, the Photosynth team is hardly sitting still. Last summer the researchers released an online demo collaboration with NASA, and now they are working with the Jet Propulsion Lab to synth a small part of the surface of Mars.

One does wonder how far Microsoft is willing to bankroll this kind of geek-out. Then again, as Agüera y Arcas and Flake ask rhetorically, how does one put a value on this kind of technical achievement? For while Photosynth seems somewhat lacking in a clear path to market, it also seems wholly lacking in competition.

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a freelance journalist who writes widely on culture, science, and technology.

The Tao of Screen:
In search of the distraction-free desktop.

If your computer desktop is anything like mine—and, brother, it is—you've paved over every spare pixel in an iconistan of clutter. Desktop design originated in a wistful visual metaphor, the clean, still work surface, encouraging users to productive ends. Leaps forward in computing horsepower and the rise of constant Internet use has transformed the tabletop terra firma into a cockpit, an antic terminal for the networked self. Our desktops are now a thick impasto of tabbed windows, pull-down menus, dashboard widgets, and application alerts. No possible distraction gets left behind, no link, feed, IM, twitter, or poke unheeded.

It's blindingly obvious to note that disarray is one of the defining aspects of the frequent Web user. (I could cite some pertinent statistics, but I don't trust myself to get back to this word processor window.) Ask any designer: Without white space, humans have difficulty focusing. Chances are, you're reading this alongside a flurry of other twinkling points of attention splayed across your monitor. But it doesn't have to be that way. There's an emerging market for programs that introduce much-needed traffic calming to our massively expanding desktops. The name for this genre of clutter-management software: zenware.

The philosophy behind zenware is to force the desktop back to its Platonic essence. There are several strategies for achieving this, but most rely on suppressing the visual elements you're used to: windows, icons, and toolbars. The applications themselves eschew pull-down menus or hide off-screen while you work. Even if you consider yourself inured to their presence, the theory goes, you'll benefit most from their absence.

Zenware promises to help the ADHD user who lurks in each of us. But does any of this stuff actually work? As every freelance writer is a trusted authority on the powers of distraction, I decided to put a range of programs through the paces to see if they helped complete my daily computing tasks more punctually and efficiently.

Deep within the steamer trunk of features in this fall's Mac OS X Leopard update is an innocuous-seeming application called Spaces that is designed to extend desktop real estate. The goal is to parcel your applications into task-specific groups. I use Spaces to divide my desktop into three areas: word processing, spreadsheets, and dashboard-type applications (e-mail, newsreader, and calendar), with each screen a quick keystroke away. (In a winningly antique way of transitioning between tasks, the screens shuttle across like a ball bouncing along a roulette wheel.)

I've found this approach to screen expansion—making more with less—works nicely, acting as a natural encouragement to concentration and organization. Deep-surfing RSS feeds is my most frequent vice. With this system, when I start reading something I know will blow away my five-minute break, I click to minimize it to my dock for retrieval later. Rather than indulge my worst surfing habits, Spaces encourages fastidiousness. Every time I use Spaces, though, I'm forced to remember VirtueDesktops, an antecedent application for the Mac that allowed a greater range of configurability. (As old-school Unix and newer Windows users can crow, virtual desktops have been around the PC market for years.)

The most common zenware programs are the mini-apps that act to quiet the desktop in tiny ways. Widely available for PC or Macintosh, they variously dim the menu bar, highlight or isolate an active window, darken an inactive one, or minimize inactive applications completely. Most of these are niche-marketed to microscopic groups with particular screen annoyances; in combination, they are all a bit much.
Writeroom. Click image to expand.WriteRoom screenshot

In trying out these various widgets, I learned that some zenware holds unexpected benefits. One program I tried, called Spirited Away—the PC equivalent is Swept Away—works by automatically hiding any program that's been sitting on your screen unused. Unfortunately, this feature assumes that you're always staying on task. If you get distracted and, say, start surfing RSS feeds, the pressing tasks that you're supposed to be working on drift away to help you focus on your procrastination. Even so, I've stuck with Spirited Away because it enforces a happy habit: alertness to the task at hand. If one of my important windows disappears, I know it's time to start working again.

If the word processors WriteRoom (Mac) and DarkRoom (PC) are any indication, the virtues of the zenware approach shine brightest when it comes to full applications. Almost immediately upon starting up WriteRoom, I felt a kind of aesthetic arousal normal people reserve for, say, tattoos or kung fu movies.

Part of this is nostalgia, as WriteRoom tosses its user into a monochrome void that's lit only by the blinking green cursor. But the true charm here is the configurability of the user interface, which allows you to craft an ideal composition space. The key is that, unlike in Word, the choices are kept shrewdly off-screen: WriteRoom's blank slate reduces the urge to twiddle with margins and other formatting gewgaws. Instead, I find myself forgoing cosmetic changes for more functional ones, like bumping up the type size when my office window light starts to falter.

Unlike practically everything else in our digital lives, WriteRoom's minimalist interface implies a truly flattering proposition: It's you, not the software, that matters. After repeated use, I found a pure joy in writing that my computer mainstays—from basic notepad apps to Word—had siphoned away years before. Part of this could be novelty, so I'm remaining cautious. I can't quite say it's made me a better writer, but then neither can any technology. But WriteRoom has me composing more quickly, and it's brought back the elemental thrill of assembling thoughts by tossing words onto the screen. As outrageous and premature as it sounds, programs like WriteRoom could have the kind of impact for this generation that The Elements of Style had for another, by distilling down the writing process and laying bare its constituent parts.

A little screen simplification can go a long way. For those keeping score, the computer is supposed to be the thing with the electrical plug, not the wired drone operating it. So try dialing down the Twittering itch for a moment and see where it leads you. The pundits have told us about the dangers of info glut and data smog, how our screens are accumulating noisy riots of data. But with zenware, the cure is right at hand—for those who really want it.

Jeffrey MacIntyre is a Canadian freelance journalist in New York.

THE GIFT: CREATIVITY AND THE ARTIST IN THE MODERN WORLD
By Lewis Hyde
Vintage, 435 pages, $14.95

That first solo exhibit, magazine contract or book advance—for creative types, there’s nothing so thrilling as the promise of artistic breakthrough. Ask friends in publishing, fashion and art, and they’re bound to confide that they’ve fantasized about sudden, liberating success. And for good reason. Among New York’s creative underclass, it’s part of an enticing, dogged hope: that a career-making moment will erase years of hardscrabble adversity on the slippery lower rungs of the culture industry. Yet daydreams of creative triumph and financial reward are mostly just that: daydreams. So where is the guide to surviving, let alone accepting, the ongoing struggle of living the creative life?

A survival guide (of sorts) already exists: Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World. First published in 1983, it’s now being reissued in a 25th-anniversary edition. Audacious, unusual and singularly penetrating, The Gift proposes “an economy of the creative spirit”: a theory speculating on how art is produced and consumed, why some art lasts and how artists can cope in a society that provides little material compensation for their labors.

“The true commerce of art is a gift exchange,” writes Mr. Hyde, whose central argument is that art exists both in the market economy and also in a social, or gift, economy. Unlike the artist, whose survival depends on some sort of financial gain, great art needs only steady circulation in the gift economy to prosper and endure over time.

The gift economy includes an array of activities from the individual reader’s experience to college syllabi to book clubs and endorsements, whether official or casual. The “gift” given by a poem, say, or a play or a painting is the artist’s talent, according to Mr. Hyde, and its influence on future artists is part of its living circulation within the so-called gift economy. Art, in other words, is a meme that’s spread virally among those who come into contact with it.

If that sounds far-reaching and vague—well, it absolutely is. The Gift is no beach read, and its dense, expansive tone may frustrate even a dedicated reader. It’s reminiscent of another eccentric, contemplative study: Thoreau’s Walden. Mr. Hyde’s book is its own odd duck, and his resolute focus is not on the micro-world around a 60-acre pond but rather on the creative process, what Mr. Hyde calls the inner and outer life of art.

As with Thoreau, the most plainspoken, powerful passages in Mr. Hyde’s book speak to the art of the life well lived. Mr. Hyde is a poet, and before he began piling up professional distinctions (a MacArthur, a Guggenheim, a handful of other prestigious grants), he made a meager living as a journeyman tradesman. He’s therefore well qualified to speak of the penury of the artist.

“How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market?” He offers three answers—day jobs, patrons and commercializing your art—and in each case he provides historical examples.

Though it’s always enjoyed a small cult following and word-of-mouth circulation (reflected in the admiring new blurbs by David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem and Zadie Smith), The Gift was generally overlooked when it was first published. But what once puzzled critics about Mr. Hyde’s ambitious and complex thesis looks prophetic today.

He shines particularly in anticipating the issues of culture in the age of the Internet. The radical democratization of access to media of all forms, from the print newsstand to blogs, from user-pay Radiohead album downloads to the long tail of Amazon’s back catalog, has irrevocably shifted our sense of the cost as well as the shelf life of art. It’s now cheaper than ever, in most cases, to produce and disseminate art—as well as to curate, discuss and appreciate it. Mr. Hyde’s central idea about art’s social function—that the consumption (and enduring value) of art ultimately transcends any commercial transaction—is looking increasingly like an idea tailor-made for our present moment. Meanwhile, his warnings about encroaching commercialization crowding out art and artists seem as relevant as ever.

Sure, there are a few things the artist in your life would be more likely to wish for this season—an award nomination, a teaching appointment, health insurance—but The Gift’s curious, contemplative wisdom may be just what’s needed.

Jeffrey MacIntyre writes on culture, science and technology for The New York Times, Slate and Wired. He can be reached at books@observer.com.

Who is the most important person in your local hospital? Seek - or, rather, listen - and ye shall find, according to Oliver Sacks.

Leading a documentary crew through his Bronx psychiatric hospital posting in 1973, as the distinguished psychiatrist-author recalls in his new study, "Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain," the film's director declared, "Can I meet the music therapist? She seems to be the most important person around here."

Sacks has long acknowledged the influence of music in his work and life, and in "Musicophilia" - alongside a cast of characters like the Beth Abraham music therapist, Kitty Stiles - music receives its due. The case studies of "Musicophilia," many of them revisitations of his thick patient file, recapitulate a career-defining focus of the scientist as witness: human resilience glimpsed through the prism of mental health.

In the view of psychology, which this book takes as its scenic vantage point, music is variably balm and blessing, cure and curse. "Musicophilia" lends credence to the aphorism Sacks reports the poet W.H. Auden (quoting German Romantic writer Novalis) presented him upon reviewing one of Stiles' music therapy sessions with patients: "Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution."

Music is a touchstone in the author's life and practice, and longtime Sacks readers will recognize cameos by many past patients, among welcome asides into his own life experience, too. Dr. P., immortalized by Sacks' namesake account of him in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," was, after all, prescribed "a life that consisted entirely of music and singing." Among other things, "Musicophilia" is a bow to this salvational power of music.

Yet, to his great credit, Sacks may surprise pop science readers of "Musicophilia" by transcending a kumbaya call for "singing cures" to all the world's maladies. Alongside remarkable portraits of musical giftedness - jolts of genius set off by lightning, in one instance, or the statistically proof-positive composing chops of idiot savants and those born blind- are numerous examples of those losing musical appetites or appreciation, or unable to shut off the blaring symphonies in their subconscious.

Breadth is "Musicophilia's" great asset, the one that recommends it as a commanding contribution to the field of understanding music's influence on the human mind. Among the many other conditions and incidents Sacks treats in detail here are synesthesia, hearing aids, musical hallucinations and seizures, amnesia, catchy tunes, absolute pitch, amusia and dysharmonia, savantism, aphasia, dreams and depression. Music is also studied in relationship to epilepsy, dementia, Tourette's, Parkinson's, dementia and Williams syndrome. The author's impressive feat is to encyclopedically argue for music's pervasive influence in human life.

Sacks also recruits a dose of predictably startling fresh neuroscience. His considerations of the visibility through multiple resonance imaging of innate musical talent versus training are particularly provocative. Attesting to its particular value for further study, he notes: "Anatomists today would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician - but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation."

"Musicophilia" is structured as a series of psychiatric inquiries: into musical hauntings, good and bad; into musicality; into memory and movement; and finally, into emotion and identity. This approach is clean and doubtless helpful to readers coming with a particular or academic focus to the material, but it hinders a wider synthesis of connections and questions laying, presumably, inches beyond the source material. More engaging are Sacks' faithful toasts to fellow leading thinkers in this field, such as Daniel Levitin, upon whose work he carefully expands. But there are no connective essays, reflective passages or even linking epigraphs. The author's clinical voice verges on tourism, at times traveling through the material, repeatedly leaving stranded those readers hungry for a deft handling of the cui bono (or so what?) of music and the mind.

Like music, the sphinx of consciousness continues to bedevil our best minds. And like the mind, our relationship to music deepens its essential mystery: the riddle of knowing, as the author observes of dementia patients, "that there is still a self to be called upon, even if music, and only music, can do the calling." If music therapy is, in one practitioner's words, "a can opener," we still do not know, scientifically, how or what will be revealed. But we do know the why: Music is an indisputable cornerstone of human expression.

"Musicophilia" does not open new frontiers in Sacks' work, but it may represent a fresh trailhead in the neuroscience of the creative arts. As a far-ranging survey of existing data, and directions to future clinical study, this book suggests a fresh, flourishing avenue for scientific and artistic inquiry may be little more than a whistle away.

Jeff MacIntyre, who writes widely on culture and science, is a Canadian freelance writer in New York.

MACHIAVELLI PREDICTED THE Blackwater debacle. The Qing dynasty's homeland security experts knew Great Walls make for great neighbors. Riding the rails was safer in Joseph Conrad's, not today's, Congo.

Few literary heavyweights cast their wit about like Lewis Lapham, 72, and fewer still are capable of publishing an independent historical journal that wears its anachronisms so gleefully. The journalism legend and erstwhile Harper's editor is launching a new print journal, Lapham's Quarterly, that will be available at major bookstores on Nov. 13.

Lapham's Quarterly, alongside a companion radio show and weekly blog, extends his abiding interest of recent years: the theme of history's revenge upon those who ignore it. "Everything I've written," he told Kurt Andersen in 2005, "is a chronicle of the twilight of the American idea." Using historical texts to plumb our political, cultural, and economic moment, Lapham is now aiming to add a new chapter to his career-long act as ruling class scold.

Born in San Francisco, grandson of a city mayor, and great grandson to a founder of Texaco, Lapham was educated at Yale and Cambridge. During his Harper's tenure, the magazine received 14 National Magazine Awards, including one recognizing his own writing. His 28-year editorship of Harper's remains an astonishing feat of longevity, even if the magazine itself is nearly 160 years old. (Roger Hodge succeeded him as editor there two years ago.) Earlier this year, the American Society of Magazine Editors accorded Lapham its highest honor, inducting him into its Hall of Fame.

"The best storyteller I knew was my grammar school history teacher," recalls Lapham, who would listen for hours, transfixed by his teacher's accounts of faraway lands and ancient times. Each themed issue of Lapham's Quarterly - the first three concern war, money, and man in nature - finds Lapham the pupil, and a platoon of historian advisers, scouring the historical record, reaching to recreate that childhood rapture. The weave of voices is threaded through separate chapters exploring a concept or motif, with the intention of casting readers into the deep back catalog of culture and thought - "whether you count history as a poem, chronicle, manuscript, totem pole, or painted ceiling" - before arriving at the connections to our present-day headlines.

IDEAS: Not many publications can tout Shakespeare and Thucydides on their masthead.

LAPHAM: You're right. This is really my finest masthead.

IDEAS: There's an instructive quality to a viewing of the present rendered through the past.

LAPHAM: Twain said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. What I'm doing here in this new magazine is listening for the rhyme, and you can hear it, whether it's through Saint Augustine or Joseph Goebbels. The first issue, "States of War," includes historical addresses made by a British general in 1917, exhorting his troops that they are liberating, not conquering, Baghdad, and by Pope Urban, centuries earlier, summoning the faithful to war with the "Wicked Turk." The echoes of our present day are everywhere and they do instruct and inform us - if we're listening.

IDEAS: You've written a lot about imperial history, and the way empires, past and present, regard themselves through periods of ascendance and fall. Do you see yourself using the historical record as an editorialist?

LAPHAM: Mine is the sense of a history that defends the future against the past. I'm not trying to teach dates. My purpose is to foster and encourage and delight in the acquaintance with history. Not to know our own story, after all, is to be at a severe loss. You become easily frightened. And I, for one, would not know how to read the newspapers. I'm not being polemic; I'm trying to open it out. I want to say: Behold dear reader, what a wonderful archive and treasure one can find in the history of our long journey across the frontiers of four millennia.

IDEAS: But you are not working alone here.

LAPHAM: I'm an enthusiast. I have an editorial board and am always widening my range of acquaintance among historians. I pick their brains. For the first issue, I went around the circle and asked what I should be reading, where I should be looking. For instance, in my first issue, to illuminate the concept of rules of engagement, they indicated a certain exchange in the very elegant correspondence between William T. Sherman and the Confederate officer John Hood.

IDEAS: Your radio show is described on your website as "discussing the events of fifty or 500 years ago, not Meet the Press politicos or This Week pundits grappling with the events of last week."

LAPHAM: One of the problems with contemporary media is it's without context. In the eternal now of 24-seven, there is no past and no future. The news comes in short phrases or paragraphs, and it's without the backstory. Without that, how can you write the front story?

This is a point that McLuhan makes in "Understanding Media." Print is based on narrative, cause and effect, and there are consequences, or a history. Instead, our media tends to move in circles, drumming up emotion, regardless of the subject matter.

IDEAS: Is this something you've seen in the decline of long-form journalism?

LAPHAM: It's a fact. For at least 15 years, I was a judge of the [National Magazine Awards]. You go up to Columbia and they have this pile of magazines. Scanners and readers have been through it and judges are presented various nominees. Nevertheless, you get to see the full array. Over time, I saw that pile getting shorter and shorter.

IDEAS: You've been involved in small publishing much of your career. What is your take on the prevailing winds in independent publishing today?

LAPHAM: I think it's a matter of finding a niche. Small circulation numbers don't discourage me at all. It's a mechanical thing, an equation to get to break even, or even profitable. The economics are not daunting to me exactly because this magazine is not a mass-market product.

IDEAS: What are your plans with LQ on the Web?

LAPHAM: I hope it would be a means of attracting contributions. I would hope to set up some kind of interactive community for like-minded people to contribute historical sources. During my years at Harper's I kept up a very extensive correspondence with many of our readers. A remarkable number of really wonderful letters from people all over the country. That's the same kind of community I'd like to establish with the Web. It's one of the Web's great virtues.

IDEAS: Two years ago, you claimed you still didn't own a computer. Did you ever buy one?

LAPHAM: I now have a computer. I probably don't use it to its full capacity and I don't use it to write on, but it is my search engine.

IDEAS: There are many theories of history: the Great Man thesis, Hegelianism, Spengler's declinism. What's yours?

LAPHAM: I don't have a pet theory. If I get to do this for a while, I might develop one!

Jeffrey MacIntyre, a freelance journalist in New York, writes on culture, science, and technology for publications including The New York Times, Slate, and Wired.

Last Night's Gig: Gloves-Optional Literary Death Match Crowns New Champ

"Judging you is like egging a convent," observed New Yorker editor Ben Greenman of one contestant, shortly before the flinging commenced at last night's Literary Death Match at The Kitchen.

Greenman, the "literary merit" judge, was joined by jurists Amanda Stern (host of the Happy Ending reading series) and Joshua Furst (The Sabotage Cafe, Short People). Inside their crosshairs was reader Susan Buttenwieser, a single parent who teaches writing to LGBT youth. She was representing the indie lit publication failbetter in the multi-pub brawl for a tiara, sash and bragging rights.

Stern gently mocked Susan's surname before concluding, brightly, "You get points for that!" Furst, judging "intangibles," noted darkly, "I don't trust people who raise children in New York City."

The event's tone was offbeat, flip and gently derisive, a refreshing antidote to the sober-bordering-on-sombre tone that pervades certain readings. A big crowd of indie publishers and literary types jammed the large space for this latest tilt in the periodic reading series presented by Opium Magazine. Quick Fiction was also represented in an engrossing reading by Pedro Ponce.

A soft-spoken GianCarlo DiTrapano, publisher of New York Tyrant, was the eventual winner, clinching the honor in a lively "Cyrillic-Off" competition to recognize Pulitzer-winners' names. Contemplating his sash with one hand, DiTrapano remarked to Vulture with careful brio, "This is encouraging."

Also encouraging was the lack of gauntlet-dropping contretemps. The last Death Match, in San Francisco, erupted in a drink-tossing tiff by one affronted contestant. The next New York event will likely be at the end of January.

Some say that readings should die a quick death. Maybe they just needed a little chin music? -Jeffrey MacIntyre

[Pictures]

THE CANON: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science. By Natalie Angier. Houghton Mifflin, 293 pages. $35.95

'Science is huge," explains Natalie Angier, "a great ocean of human experience; it's the product and point of having the most deeply corrugated brain of any species this planet has spawned. If you never learn to swim, you'll surely regret it; and the sea is so big, it won't let you forget it."

So begins the charming high dive act of Angier's The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science , the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer's playful riposte to our day's popular indifference to the wages of the scientific enterprise. The book, a conversational survey of the fundamentals of the hard sciences (physics, geology, chemistry, astronomy, biology), also limns world-shifting discoveries from each (like DNA, plate tectonics, the Big Bang and natural selection) and sketches its colourful, white-coated natives. Smartly foregoing snobbery, defensiveness and scare tactics -- oh, well, the "average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon" -- Angier takes her subject into a full-bodied embrace. Her egghead croon to science's virtues lends The Canon an unexpectedly appealing emotional tilt.

Written for science novices, Angier's bid for attention is sustained most effectively in the early chapters, in which she decodes the scientific mindset through a series of scientist walk-ons and, cue this review's surprise, in epiphanic asides from the presumably dry world of probabilities and statistics. Her dissection of established human penchants - for imparting coincidence to random events and for valorizing Gladwellian gut-check thinking - are particularly spirited. The rub of a probabilistic mindset? Suddenly, "the less amazing the most woo-woo coincidences become." Finally, the real-world utility of scientific notation, explained -- with nary a dweeby math punch line.

The Canon comes into its own not just as a guidebook to science fundamentals, but also as a primer on the scientific mind. Here, Angier's argument for a scientifically literate public shines brightest. Science literacy is not a matter of knowledge; it's a manner of thinking about the world. "Science is not a body of facts. Science is a state of mind. It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing on its face." The empirical universalism of science, Angier suggests, tugs us past the overwhelming dread of "inconvenient truths" such as ecological collapse, to a shared way of seeing the world, one that transcends the parochially political for the scientifically self-evident.

How does one survive, let alone thrive, in such uncertainty?

Turns out, science's steady emphasis on critical thinking can be a balm. For one thing, scientists talk "about the need to embrace the world as you find it, not as you wish it to be." What's more - prick up your ears, poststructuralists - there is an objective reality. "To say there is an objective reality," Angier writes, "and that it exists and can be understood, is one of those plain-truth poems of science that is nearly bottomless in its beauty."

Well, maybe. But here's the kicker: It's just as likely we'll never know it. " 'Working scientists don't think of science as 'the truth,' " notes one of Angier's interview subjects, " 'They think of it as a way of approximating the truth.' " Scientific sloganeering of this sort, science as an ironic T-shirt phrase, has enticing philosophical chops for today's ideologically savvy but politically adrift Westerner.

Despite its primer-level content, The Canon may prompt some surprises. I was caught by the molecular biology discussion in which Angier enthuses that, like ants that can hoist objects 10 to 20 times their size, the humble cell can yank beads, with the right encouragement, "an act not unlike a human uprooting a tree." Which is a fine way of rekindling one's Franken-fright for nanotech's near future. In another passage, the late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould puts to rest the myth of the nature-nurture debate in a manner likely to cheer readers long exhausted by the seeming irreducibility of that flawed binary.

Angier's comic touches work best when she slides the lab-coated specimens under her microscope. For instance, cue the lowly chemists: "They may be thought by many adult survivors of a high-school education to have the sex appeal of a cold sore," and yet, "all the material needed to construct any device imaginable, a warp drive, a transporter, the perfect toupee, is already there, somewhere in the periodic table." Or the geologist, the "ultimate interdisciplinarian" for whom "every stone is a potential Rosetta stone." Then there are astronomers, who sometimes "complain about being comically misunderstood." " 'I don't do horoscopes, and I am not a failed astronaut,' " explains one, aptly. Instead, she considers theirs the "chaste science": "Astronomers are pure of heart and appealingly puerile" since they gaze into the sky, posing cosmically big questions.

And yet, for the sprawling menagerie of scientific personae, the zoology still feels a little thin when Angier opts to become the dominant voice. In those stretches absent the contributions of her quirky interviewees, the pacing slows to an occasional slog reminiscent of this lifelong arts major's finest moments of science-class boredom. But that fault -- where are the explanatory diagrams? -- may be inherited, Mendeleevian style.

More distracting is how Angier's excitement leads to a surfeit of extravagant diction: "Climb to a scenic overlook in the mountain range of your choice and gaze out over the vast cashmere accordion of earthscape, the repeating pleats swelling and dipping silently into the far horizon without even deigning to disdain you," and "We are all of us starstruck from the start, mesmerized by the spangled velvet of the nighttime sky, now longing to pull it close, like a mother, now shrinking beneath its inviolate diamond detachment." Such passages have a slackening effect and could have been treated through the ministrations of a surefooted editor.

Whatever its blemishes, Angier's "geography of the scientific continent," as she has described The Canon , will make tourists of some readers, and immigrants of others. It's difficult not to be taken with Angier's sense of the transporting outlook onto human knowledge, and life itself, that science makes possible.

Consider her hymn to evolution's central, world-redeeming insight: "Natural selection is the force that transforms drift and randomness into the gift of extravagance. It takes the doctrinaire sloth of the second law of thermodynamics, the tendency of every system to get frowzier over time, and hammers it into a magic, all-purpose, purpose-making machine that turns around and breaks entropy at the knees."

Take that, you millennial downers. Science saves.

Jeffrey MacIntyre, who writes on culture, science, media and technology, is a Canadian freelance journalist in New York.

Dead-tree books may be passé, but kids still want a place to keep their memories—and keep them current.

When students at El Camino High School in South San Francisco began photo-editing the yearbook this fall, adviser Stephanie Lipman noticed some curious changes. Head shots complete with drop shadows. Flirtatious, studied poses. A whole new veneer of self-presentation. Where, she wondered, did the high school yearbook begin and the MySpace resemblance end? "You understand that their online lifestyle is influencing the way they document their real one," Lipman says.

Today, popular online communities like MySpace and Facebook are usurping a role that once belonged to paper yearbooks; the result is an open dig into the archaeology of youth. Here inside their digital lockers are snapshots of the tribe: They mug for webcam shots, stow MP3s, and flog their friend lists. They meticulously broadcast all manner of hopes, dreams, and whims. Testimonials for friends and crushworthy strangers abound. "Autographs are the most important part of a yearbook," says Catherine Cook, a Skillman, New Jersey, high school student. "It's all about finding out what people think of you."

That's been the case for quite some time now. But online, at the social networking sites, every day is signing day, and the venerable yearbook senior blurb is being replaced by profile pages that are updated as frequently as teenage tastes require. Best of all, this playground of personality is almost always supervision-free.

The metaphor was not lost on Cook and her brother, Geoff. Dismayed by their own school annual, in April 2005 the two started Myyearbook.com, a community site that encourages students to connect, flirt, goad, and vote for Most Likely to Succeed. In 19 months it has amassed 1.5 million users, outstripping even the growth of MySpace—a site, as a Myyearbook.com ad banner warns, is now populated mainly by stodgy thirtysomethings. Talk about harshing a kid's buzz.

Even beyond the world of high school, the demise of the dead-tree yearbook is proceeding apace. According to The Kansas City Star, only 100 of the Associated Collegiate Press's 700-member organizations still publish yearbooks. After 114 years, the University of Texas is thinking about axing its traditional yearbook, which sold to only 5 percent of enrolled students in 2005. Likewise, the University of Missouri's Samitar folded after publishing annually since 1894, to be survived by a web-only version.

Some reasons for this slow fade from relevance seem obvious. The physical appearance of traditional book-form yearbooks remains largely the same as it ever was. The noticeable differences owe more to the tools used to create them, which have become much more sophisticated in recent years. In fact, the yearbook club has come to resemble the AV club, if not a media lab. While El Camino High sells a DVD version of the school's yearbook as well—not much more than a hodgepodge video collection of school events—its function is to raise funds to absorb the cost of producing the paper edition, which is $70; high price is another factor favoring web-based alternatives to the dinosaur commemoratives. Selling hundreds of paid advertisements is a virtual necessity, too. While the large "McYearbook" publishers like Jostens and Taylor have begun to roll out some multimedia suppliments, costs remain steep.

But alternatives are emerging. While teaching art in a home-schooling co-op that enrolls more than 200 students in Kansas City, Ruth Downey was disappointed by the lack of affordable yearbook resources available. "Here I was teaching Photoshop to our students," Downey recalls, "and our school was sprouting sports leagues and debate teams—yet we had no way of producing a professional quality yearbook [to show them off]. It was very frustrating."

Downey eventually discovered Blurb.com, a web-based print-on-demand company in San Francisco. Impressed by the product quality and price, Downey plans to allow student groups to make class- and club-specific editions. "I can really see the kids personalizing their own annuals for the robotics club, say, or the baseball team." Downey surmises that bigger schools could benefit from yearbook customization, too. "My college yearbook didn't tell me what I did at college—it just had my name and picture. A big impersonal book doesn't get it done anymore."

This assumes a book can still do the job. Joseph Wolfson, yearbook adviser for two decades at the PEAN at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, has presided over many changes in content and technology. He has no problem policing for language, but other changes have proved more difficult to control. "I have colleagues who bemoan the absence of faculty in our books now," he says. "There's less text—the emphasis has moved to the strictly photographic. But the textual material we had was usually pretty terrible," he notes with a dry laugh. "It was typically done on the fly and without much editing." He concludes, "It would not surprise me if the PEAN went completely onto the web some day."

All this serves to underscore the most obvious reason for year-books' waning appeal: They are no longer the most representative record of students' identities, their peer groups, or their memories. "Everyone's online," Cook says of her peers, and signing day isn't what it once was. There's no keepsake like community, and from homework to hooking up, for better or worse, the web is that place today. It is also the virtual backdrop against which adolescents are growing up. It could not be otherwise for a generation weaned on the immediacy of texting, IM, and the hyperlink. From puberty to postgrad, Facebook, MySpace, and its cousins offer their kindred members a shared spot, like a movable yearbook, to document their place and times IRL: In Real Life.

As long as there have been books, there have been people eager to judge them--and their respective owners--by their covers. As Rob Gordon, the vinyl addict of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, enthused, we used to like people for what they're like--now it's about what they like.

Bibliophile Tim Spalding savors a time when nosing through a fellow grad student's bookshelf wasn't just egghead sport: it was the shortcut to sizing up possible affinities, not to mention a window onto that person, and how they saw themselves. "Today," he concedes, "that just looks quaint."

In recent years the profusion of social networking sites online has dragged Spalding's bookworm parlor game kicking and screaming into the wired world, where Amazon Wishlists, Netflix Queues and MySpace playlists trumpet everyone's media libraries--and their artistic tastes, discerning or otherwise. In August 2005, when Spalding quietly launched LibraryThing.com as a pet project for cataloguing his own library, he didn't realize he was giving book lovers a new way to connect.

Or to strut their collections, like a doctor's office approvingly festooned with mounted degrees. "For many people, their personal libraries are an important indicator of who they are. Whereas the first social networking sites all presupposed connections between friends, we did away with the concept altogether; your connection here is through books themselves."

The premise of LibraryThing.com is that in building your virtual library, you'll be inexplicably drawn to the far reaches of others' stacks. Users enter the ISBNs or titles of their books and a virtual shelf is erected, featuring the edition-appropriate cover and all. They can then tag books or use the existing information slurped from Library of Congress metadata. A simple field indicates how many and which of your books are shared with the wider LibraryThing community, and with whom. Groups and forums exist to enable users to strike up dialogue and congregate.

LibraryThing.com's users run far afield of librarians and academics, and the frequent reviews of it as a literary MySpace have doubtless helped spread the word. From the Cincinnati College of Morticians to rare collectors, a wide community of book fiends is represented. Spalding recalls a few New Orleans area users logging on, post-Katrina, and trying to virtually recreate the physical libraries they lost.

Ultimately, LibraryThing.com's about our own compulsion to collect and our intimate relationship with books. "There is a certain measure of exhibitionism and voyeurism going on in LibraryThing," Spalding allows, although it's a far cry from the shrill, pouting kid-scapes of MySpace or Friendster. "We don't have that meat market thing happening."

Maybe not, but some still find the idea declasse. George Murray, co-founder of the popular Bookninja literary blog, sees in LibraryThing.com "the digital equivalent of nice shelving or display cases." Murray believes half the pleasure of searching out a book in his own cluttered stacks is the process of unearthing foregotten volumes and their associated memories, but acknowledges that the site is probably better suited to "the Moleskine and fountain pen set." He's reminded of a childhood analogy: "Like those little suitcases we used to get as kids that lined our Hotwheels and Matchbox cars up in orderly rows. Any kid could have a lot of cars, but the kid with his cars organized was a connisseur."

While old-fashioned books show few signs of imminent demise, are virtual libraries and the increased use of metadata to parse our possessions--and in voyeurs' eyes, our selves--taking us further from our books, or reacquainting us with them in new ways? Even if we're not hurtling fast towards some Platonic ideal of the book, it looks like our bookshelves are already well on their way.

-end-

IAN HUNDLEY'S QUILTING BEE

The "B" here should stand for Brooklyn, which is where the North Ontario native Ian Hundley calls home and studio for a haute-quilting operation that has turned heads and excited fashionistas and art gawkers alike.

In the late 90s, Hundley and his brother left behind their 500-person rural hometown for the New York City modeling world. While they never made it Doublemint big--"Those are juicy contracts, I tell you!" Hundley exclaims--the experience did open both brothers' eyes to the art world, where they both make their living now. Hundley's medium is fabric, from which he quilts topographically-inspired landscapes hearkening back to a high-school geography textbook. It still sits in their Williamsburg studio, among Ian's brother's graphic design work as well as Hundley's quilts.

When Hundley was granted space last year in the appointment-only Earnest Sewn studio in the Meatpacking District, hype descended upon him. His work has since earned a number of commissions, as well as mentions in VOGUE and ARTFORUM, which celebrated fabrics "quilted into a flood of abstract waves."

While spinning off a few private commissions, this spring finds Hundley poised to mount his next big gallery show, evaluating possibilities in New York, LA and Toronto. Regardless of his decision, it's only a matter of time before Canada claims him as its own. Come summer, Hundley et frere set off for their annual creative retreat to the Northern Ontario cabin they've built.

There are no quilts to be found there, however: "I'm afraid the local mice would gnaw away at them!" (http://ianhundleystudio.com).

Available via PDF.

(Millennial jewel or map's edge, Vancouver is a blue-green study in literary solitudes.)

The first thing to know about Vancouver is that it resembles the last, if not no other, place on Earth. A sinewy swoop of land framed by mountains and water, it's the final terminus of the North American frontier, half postindustrial pan-Asian metropolis and half primeval nature. The beacon city of an implausibly clean-scrubbed future in an environment echoing its native people's history, Vancouver scenery feels like the glimmering set design for a dreamy, what-if alternative to How the West Was Won.

Visiting Vancouver is like simultaneously taking a step forwards and back. In its near-future, Vancouver boasts an uncharted, wet-lab urbanity that "Generation X" author and Vancouver native Douglas Coupland has dubbed "the city of glass". Its past, the deep native roots in the region, is also present, right from the international arrivals terminal. Air travellers are greeted by a dramatic installation, festooned with the First Nations iconography of totems, masks and canoes, echoing the aboriginal people's distinct sense of place. Now the native Vancouverite's reverence is land value, product of a generation-long development boom instigated by the transition of Hong Kong to China and the waxing of Asia's economies. Vancouver is today among the select handful of world centers--think Geneva or Sydney--recognized solely by its livability: a happy accident of freeway-forbidding geography, Canadian social engineering and the best lessons of urban development.

Looks aren't everything, but the city's self-advertisement suggests they may get you by. The province of British Columbia, an expanse of wetland, desert, mountain and fjord larger than Washington, Oregon and California combined, has emerged from the tall shadow of its resource economy for a second act. Vancouver is now a full, on-the-mouth kiss to the revels of twenty-first century commerce: tourism, Hollywood, video games and biotech. The backbeat is a rampaging real estate market to compare with that of San Francisco. But--imagine California without votes, industry or capital--it is a parochial place, a branch-plant R&R town better known for its way-chill lifestyle economies of yoga fashion, adventure tourism, culinary cosmopolitanism and the world's finest marijuana.

The inveterate contrasts of the place have not been lost on its artists. Instead, they've been formative to a hermetic literary culture borne of the past's remoteness and the future's alien-bright sheen.

The year-round damp and mild climate, for which the region is dubbed the Rain Coast, is suffused in its literature. It is one of the finer expressions of Margaret Atwood's formulation that all Canadian literature is foremost a product of the nation's physical environment. Coupland, whose "City of Glass" (2001) is the contemporary Vancouver's unofficial travel guide cum decoder ring, describes the exit from the city: "I want you to imagine you are driving north, across the Lions Gate Bridge, and the sky is steely grey and the sugar-dusted mountains loom blackly in the distance. Imagine what lies behind those mountain--realize that there are only more mountains--mountains until the North pole, mountains until the end of the world, mountains taller than a thousand me's, mountains taller than a thousand you's." Here in a soaked-through rainforest vision of New England, Henry Thoreau would have succumbed to cabin fever.

West of Vancouver, dotting the Georgia Straight, are the Gulf Islands. North is the Sunshine Coast. Here in these places as in Vancouver, the literary sensibility is less Thoreau's ponderous outdoorsman than a gimlet-eyed castaway. Picture a writer's colony gone feral. Both are inhabited by aging American draft dodgers, expats of all stripes, organic farmers, artists and others who cleave to alternative lifestyles -- even their own currency, based on resident naturalist 's design. (Neil LaBute's recent remake of The Wicker Man, which shot there, finds Nicholas Cage convincingly outacted by the Islands, an apt setting for a pagan cult.) An army of artists from musician Joni Mitchell to writer Michael Ondaatje have quietly whiled away decades there in relative obscurity, but never write or speak of the place. Some, like the crime writer William Deverell, jokingly lament letting the secret out about the remote area's charms.

Befitting Vancouver's boom-time reinvention, neither of its two most internationally recognized authors, Coupland or the science fiction luminary William Gibson, are native sons. Yet each draws on Vancouver's 21st-century internationalism, and their books--meditations bisecting mass culture, technology and humanity--are shot through with a similarly darkly-humoured, contemplative outlook on the world. They even each launched trademark-worthy movements. Gibson coined "cyberspace" in publishing the landmark novel, "Neuromancer" (1984), itself one of the most influential science fiction works of the last quarter century. For his part, Coupland put his name on the map by plumbing his peers' psyche with "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" (1991).

In his most recent work, "JPod" (2006), Coupland mines an inviting setting for generational anomie in the world of a fictional game company, noticeably modelled after Vancouver-born Electronic Arts. (A previous novel, "Microserfs" [2003], is a cruise down the I-5 to the Redmond, Washington campus of Microsoft.) But it is "City of Glass" that serves as the best street guide to Vancouver's curiously polethnic parochialism: of everything from the city's straight-outta-Harajuku teen tourists to its post and beam residential architectural glories. Artist and polymath, perhaps even "his generation's most interesting curator,"" Coupland looks to continue moving deftly in other artistic mediums, such as these sculptures of his own, personally-chewed first editions.

Gibson, for his part, considers Vancouver as an uninvited ghost in his work: "I almost never mention Vancouver in my fiction, but every city in my fiction definitely is, in some oddly Borgesian way, Vancouver. It's a city awaiting the excavation of its own deeper psychogeography." Psychogeography sounds like a good definition for his own sensitive preoccupation, in works like "Pattern Recognition" (2003), for the way technological advancements abrade our sense of place and time:

"Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

....

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

For its few literary lights, there have been many other writers for whom Vancouver doused their creative fires. Even today, it is a town lacking any public literary life approaching the scale of its coastal peers Seattle and San Francisco. Beyond small press concerns, a media monopoly maintains the culture on simmer. While local John Valliant leapt to the pages of The New Yorker in 2002 with the story that would become The Golden Spruce (2006), a widely celebrated book in Canada pondering the actions of a man who cuts down a spruce deemed sacred by the natives, the only distinct local writer's group is, appropriately enough, a band of travel journalists.

The best living short story writer, Alice Munro, was a 1950s Vancouverite, and describes the time as her most creatively fallow. A New York Times travelogue of Munro's Vancouver years recently pondered the contradiction: "[T]he urban geography is so exact you can practically map the city off her fictions. But though the addresses match, the vibe is unrecognizable." Munro-era Vancouver was a much smaller, undeveloped place than it is today, but its landscape also perhaps overwhelmed the austere Southern Ontario Gothic that would become her hallmark. "For her, this was always the wrong place, the views too grand, the weather too gray, the trees too tall." Nevertheless, she contemplated the setting throughout her career, from "The Love of a Good Woman" (1998) to "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage" (2001). Yet Munro bristled at what she called the "enclosed" city suffocating her flame. "I have never even been able to do much with it fictionally because I hated it so much," she revealed to an interviewer.

But it is her very sense of creative dislocation that, oddly, puts her on the map along with Vancouver's greatest literary eminence, Malcolm Lowry. In the 1940s, he was living a life of destitution and alcoholic squalor in a squatter's shack, doggedly biding his time and his creative muse. Despite the fire that burned his dwelling down in 1944, he managed to complete the novel "Under the Volcano" on a fourth rewrite by that Christmas Eve. Days later, he announced in an audacious letter to his publisher its importance: "It can be regarded as a kind of symphony, or in another way as a kind of opera--or even a horse opera. It is hot music, a poem, a song, a comedy, a farce, and so forth. It is superficial, profound, entertaining, and boring, according to taste. It is a prophecy, a political warning, a cryptogram, a preposterous movie."

A decade in the writing, since its appearance it has come to be seen as one of midcentury classics of western literature, a hinge-point between the modern and postmodern. Its Joycean plot revolves around the passions animating the last day in the life of a dying alcoholic in Mexico. Lowry himself lived to see some of this success, but not in Vancouver, which he referred to dismissively in letters as the city of the son of Cain. As the possibly apocryphal story goes, Under the Volcano was instantly heralded in France, quickly a bestseller in the US, and immediately a failure in Canada, where it sold just two copies.

The literary DNA of Vancouver and its corner of the Pacific Northwest speaks to Lowry's cottage-cloistered solitude. A blue-green lagoon perched on the San Andreas fault, Vancouver is Canada's Los Angeles for its similar sense of mirage and cartoon inconsequentiality. But it is also inimitable and may be the millennial city par excellence. Picture the world's best backwater, a cabin with a view.

Information wants to be free. But Digg’s Kevin Rose is giving newsstands a run for their money

“What is news?” asks Digg.com creator Kevin Rose (front), and he’s got a point. “For the longest time, it’s just been the sum of a bunch of decisions by newspaper editors and TV producers.” Cue the little guy.

Somewhere between Brangelina and Beirut the future of news media in the digital age is emerging, and Digg is taking center stage in a way that even Dan “What’s the Frequency, Kenneth?” Rather can appreciate. The frequency is social.

Rose likens Digg to a newspaper crossed with a voting booth. Users find a story and either promote (“digg”) it or bury it. Content is corralled in various subject areas, from politics to tech, by user tagging, and users forge relationships based on their converging tastes. It’s the Daily Planet of Web 2.0, with every user starring as Clark Kent. “It’s changing the way we consume news,” offers Rose with characteristic understatement.

“Our users tell us they’re seeing a new way of gathering, sharing, and using information,” he explains. “Initially, it was all about finding stories and ‘digging’ them to the front page. Now, people are more interested in digging what their friends are digging. This causes chain reactions way beyond Digg, affecting Technorati and Del.icio.us and other sites. We’re seeing a mass pollination effect now with Digg. It’s pretty wild.”

Can Digg catalyze change for specific user communities, like political interest groups or professional associations? “Absolutely,” says Rose.

The Web has always been recognized as a buffet for news junkies, but it has long lacked the organizing power of a real-world newsstand. Now, thanks to Digg’s eponymous algorithmically driven news, it’s possible to tap the pulse of what Rose calls “a collaborative social filter for the news.” The result, as he is the first to admit, is a “unique and obscure” mélange of news stories. Unlike Slashdot, Digg story rankings are determined by the users. Unlike Google News, there’s a human face—many of them—behind the stories. New visualization features like Digg Stack and Digg Swarm will make its user-driven dynamics even more apparent.

Listening to Rose, there’s a sense that Digg isn’t done changing the way we will cook up our online media diets. What’s the endgame? How about a next-gen MySpace environment that ties users to ever more intimate ways of linking to their interests—and to likeminded friends who talk (and share content) among themselves? If Rose is right, we might soon be Digging much deeper. —Jeff MacIntyre

A Shakespearean monologue delivered mid-blow job. A robber baron channeling spirits. Period detail as studied as dissertation endnotes. A tangled thicket of baroque and blue dialogue. How does HBO's Deadwood—TV's finest ensemble drama, which concluded its third and final regular season on Sunday—get away with this stuff? Concealed well behind the camera, Deadwood's signal performance has been the single-minded creative control of series creator, writer, and executive producer David Milch. Deadwood's two DVD box sets, packed with Milch sit-downs, asides, and voice-overs, shine a new light on the scope of his ringmaster talents. The DVDs reveal the Milch persona, a throwback figure familiar to English-degree-holders everywhere: the male literary intellectual as hipster shaman. A former Yale and Iowa English lecturer, Milch dresses up his auteurlike compulsiveness with a professorial bearing and impressive erudition, a pose that allows him to effectively advance his idiosyncratic vision for the series. He gets what he wants by keeping the line between perfectionism and egghead narcissism deliciously vague.

Cast, crew, and HBO executives alike appear throughout the DVD special features and commentary to testify to Milch's manic, extemporaneous lectures. "He will talk for 20 minutes," begins producer Davis Guggenheim. "He won't talk about the scene, he'll talk about Socrates. You don't know what any of it means—until he wraps it up." Timothy Olyphant (Seth Bullock) goes a step further: "Quite honestly, I don't think I understand 50 percent of the stuff he's saying. But when he's done talking I think we might win a Nobel Prize." Actors enthuse about his pursuit of "the truth" and how he "pushes" them and also of his attention to every detail. Everything is in service to a scene's dramatic payoff, we're told. And while an actor might wince at "eight pages of new dialogue" rolling off his fax machine late in the evening before a shoot, who's going to argue for line changes with a script practically requiring its own CliffsNotes?

Milch's rousing off-camera performances are in full evidence throughout the DVDs. He provides a particularly spirited defense of Deadwood's unmatched blue streak, a colorful cocksucker-to-cunt parade of verbiage that struck many early critics as particularly gratuitous. "Apes beat their chests so they don't have to fight 24 hours a day," Milch says, before veering into a discussion of the place of hyperbole in the oracular tradition of the American frontier and the role of language in "muscling up" for the rugged work of mining—as well as how profanity helps create a sense of vagabond community among those with a threadbare, uneducated grasp of the language. It adds up to a sly and historically accurate end-run around those who would complain that a fuck is still a fuck. Keith Carradine (Wild Bill Hickok) reveals that Milch even composed an FCC-worthy treatise on the subject should HBO executives have needed it in a legal defense. The lesson to any would-be TV provocateur: Do the research.

Beyond his lectures, there is the business of "trusting the process," as one featurette is titled—meaning "trusting Milch." He refuses to write alone, instead dictating aloud to his producers, and he rewrites constantly. As a result, the show's improvisatory shoots have, in at least one instance, extended to 14 days for a single episode. "We often start and don't have a script," remarks Stephen Tobolowsky (Hugo Jarry). "It's almost impossible you'd begin shooting a scene and then have it completely rewritten after rehearsal, before you shoot. But that's the way David works." And the way David works—a steady flow of script changes and reshoots—just happens to limit the ability of his higher-ups at the network, if they wanted to, to make editorial calls.

Reading the Milch tea leaves is a required skill on the Deadwood set. (No easy sport with Milch admissions like, "I don't have an outline.") And by no means is it a skill everyone has mastered. Dayton Callie (Charlie Utter) is direct about Milch's lack of patience with misunderstandings: "He reminds me of the looks my father would give me. 'Are you that fucking stupid?' There's that look." Producer Elizabeth Sarnoff says that time spent away from Milch's writing room means "you're hopelessly behind." Why? "Because everything here changes 600 times a day." And Milch rewrites can extend five hours for a scene shy of three pages.

The DVDs also show that there is more than a glimmer of the bullshit artist at work. In the first episode's commentary track, Milch swears offhandedly throughout, pausing ironically for another disquisition on the show's own profanity. With his defense in full flight, Milch tosses off a reference first to H.L. Mencken on the nature of American language and then to Marvel Comics, before catching himself midlecture and conceding, "Well, that last thing, I guess comics have nothing to do with swearing." And as brilliant as he is, Milch sometimes toes the line between far-reaching insight and nearsighted shtick. He's given to repeating gauzy platitudes, such as a line from the scientist Friedrich August Kekule, that "what writing should be is a going out in spirit," and this precious aphorism of craft: "You can't think your way to write action; you can only act your way to write thinking." If a shaman's stock in trade is invoking the spirit, Milch's mysticism is well up to the task.

Regardless, in Deadwood Milch has conjured a perfectly realized vision of the Old West by way of Cormac McCarthy and Karl Marx. It's either a scofflaw fantasy in which the arcane and the obscene are at the center of life or a warts-and-all lightning history of strong-arm capitalism finding its feet—America, as he says, discovering "its organizing principles." Maybe it's both. Praising Milch, Tobolowsky argues that Deadwood captures "the essence of that historical time, and of violence, fear, and desire."

"Never trust the teller, trust the tale," D.H. Lawrence wrote. Deadwood will culminate in two feature-length episodes airing next year, and enjoying the show on DVDs until then doesn't require taking all of Milch's rhetoric at face value. (A decade of grad school won't hurt.) But there'd be no masterpiece, no "payoff," without it.