Orion May / June 2010

AS THIS ISSUE goes to press, the 2010 Major League Baseball season is getting underway. The new season features story lines that baseball fans have grown used to: the Yankees and Red Sox have outspent everybody, there is much affection but little hope for the Pirates and Royals, and several of the Mets are already on the disabled list. And, of course, there is the now-familiar reality of performance-enhancing drugs. For some years there was a fear that the steroid scandal would reduce interest in baseball, attendance at games, and could even destroy the sport. Fans and media protested that drug usage had turned the game into a farce. But even though the shadow of drugs has not lifted, concern about them seems to be diminishing — baseball is more…

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine in Brooklyn and a faculty member at Princeton University. He is author of Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest and Trying Leviathan, which won the New York City Book Award. Amy Casey received the 2009 Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artists and a Creative Workforce Fellowship. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and institutions nationally and internationally. She is represented by Zg Gallery in Chicago. Karen Glaser’s photography is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. In 2011, the Southeast Museum of Photography will feature a survey of her Florida Project. Tony Hoagland’s most recent book of poems is Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. He received the 2005 Mark…

Amy Irvine’s essay “Spectral Light” (January/February 2010) is a beautifully written and honest account of not only an event but also the challenge to all of us to cross the borders of our worldviews. In my native Alaska, we are all too familiar with the difficulty of balancing the old and the new. I do take issue with Irvine’s statement that “we are back on [the] menu.” We have never been on [the] menu. While there are clearly incidents resulting from encroachment on habitat, our self-exclusion from this habitat is the only thing that has allowed us to suffer under any delusions that we are not still prey. The necropsy performed on the bear that mauled the two Alaskans mentioned in Irvine’s piece, who the authorities said “did everything right,”…

We were delighted to learn that Orion is a finalist for the 2010 National Magazine Award in the category of Essay; the selected essay is Joe Wilkins’s “Out West” (September/October 2009). We are up against stiff competition: National Geographic, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. The winner will be announced on April 22. In February, Poetry Editor Hannah Fries was a judge at Great Barrington’s Monument Mountain Regional High School for Poetry Out Loud, a national recitation contest created by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Photographer Carolyn Drake has won the Picture of the Year International award in the Science / Natural History Picture Story category for her picture essay “Return to the Center of the World,” published in our March/April 2010…

What does it matter if the snail darter goes extinct, or the humpback chub, or an obscure beetle? This question has bedeviled conservationists and their critics for decades. Not long ago, Stefano Allesina, a computational ecologist at the University of Chicago, wondered whether he could use the power of Google to answer it — to calculate the relative significance of extinctions within an ecosystem. Allesina borrowed Google’s PageRank algorithm and applied it to a food web — a model of what eats what in an ecosystem. In its intended role, PageRank determines a website’s relative importance in a user’s search by the importance of the sites that link to it. If, for example, the New York Times links to a page, that page is assumed to be important, and so…

Whales and dolphins live in a rich acoustic world that is often inaccessible to us because it’s underwater in an ocean under aural siege, and sometimes far beyond the range of human hearing. They can be experienced in a different form through the work of Mark Fischer, who makes digital artworks out of whale sounds. An engineer who previously worked for defense and communications companies, Fischer turns these sounds into images using a technical process called wavelet analysis, which is the same kind of magic that compresses your photos for e-mailing as JPEG files. The parameters of this mathematical process can be adjusted for greater simplicity or more wild beauty — Fischer has chosen the latter course to bring us pictures of amazingly complex symmetry. In this sense his images…