The surprise is not that the web has begun its takeover as the prevailing pipeline for video entertainment — Hulu, Youtube, and Netflix streaming dominate the media lexicon like ABC, NBC, and CBS once did — the shock is that it has by no means triumphed already. Some U.S. households are cutting the cable cord and dismantling the satellite dish in favor of online streaming video and wireless alternatives, but mostly, the cable and satellite and telco TV faction still holds a sturdy grip on how you view video content in your living room. Unlike the newspaper and the compact disc, the television program remains a staple in conventional forums, still packing couches from Topeka to Tampa Bay.

Multichannel video programming distributors (MPVDs) continue to linger, waiting for the creative disruption of the internet’s progression to levy the industry a final death knell. To be sure, the cable or satellite companies own the pipe that’s running into your house or the dish on your roof and the set-top box that’s already hooked up to your TV. They also have long-standing contracts with their customers and, perhaps most important, mature relationships with networks. But those traditional ties will soon cease to be enough to maintain entrenchment, because live-transmission TV can’t rule in an on-demand world.

Watch whatever, watch now, watch anywhere – pervasive platitudes and slogans with a wealth of promise. The modern video consumer wants freedom over a hat trick of choice: what content to consume, when to consume the content, and where to consume the content. Content, time, platform; what, when, where. Audiences will no longer wait for a particular day and time to see their favorite shows; they want to operate according to their own schedule. The winner in the provider ring will be won by he who offers that flexibility of consumption, and the failure of major MPVDs to do so will be the theme of their business’ eulogy.

The web-connected consumer is certainly an empowered and demanding client, but to say he is a free-loader is a classic corporate cop out. The resounding financial success of iTunes, Apple’s digital music distribution platform, is proof both that savvy companies can capitalize on the creative destruction of traditional media and that consumers are willing to pay for content that might elsewhere be free, provided they can consume the content they want, whenever they want it, wherever and however they want to. Readily available premium content will always have value and warrant buyers, even if the model of payment sees its own upheaval (as it shall).

The technology is here. Consumers can now watch television content on computers at work or home or on the train, on their cell phone in the subway, on their iPod or iPad or iTouch. Slingmedia’s SlingBox product — a version of which DISH Network has integrated into its high-end set-top box — enables users to watch their DVR, digital cable, satellite receiver, or DVD player wherever they see fit. Others entering the TV media device arena seem to be on a similarly productive course of hardware development.

On the distribution side, Comcast is making in-roads with its Fancast library of online content, and DISH Network announced a similar service last month. Netflix boasts an extensive online library of films and television shows for at-will streaming. Hulu Plus is a new premium service for delivery of network television shows over the web. Still, much content remains available only as prime-time broadcasts or in pirated encore showings. Further, the hardware for viewing content from the internet in your living room neither replaces the set-top box nor offers synergies compelling or encompassing enough to be a desirable concomitant product.

Apple and Google are the latest high-profile insurgents in an industry dominated by MPVD stalwarts like Comcast and DirecTV. Making an aggressive push into the television market, Steve Jobs recently unveiled the new Apple TV, a device for the living room that can deliver 99-cent rentals of television shows over the internet. Also set to deploy this fall is Google TV, an ambitious attempt to make Google the focal point of your television experience. Google’s offering is a box that acts as an intermediary between your cable box and your television, telling your DVR what to record while searching the web — providing a kind of multi-tasking media menagerie.

As long as these underwhelming segues into distribution continue, the saturated paid television market will continue to house the established corporate players. Neither Apple nor Google seems ready to provide the consumer with a very simple product: television content of his choice, when he wants it, where he wants it. Technologies like DVR are important, but simplicity trumps complexity. MPVDs have long been terrible at user interfaces and design — traditional areas of strength for Apple, Google, and start-up tech firms — but their businesses blossomed because they got you the goods.

When the video revolution will occur and who will be the victor is impossible to predict. Upstarts like Redbox, which specializes in self-service DVD rental kiosks, flourished rather inexplicably in recent years even as the video content pendulum swung toward web-centric distribution — proof that there is not now and there never was a clean narrative, no obvious climax to or protagonist in this show.

Always apparent are the frames of change, an endless stream of new technologies and new consumers, with the progressive former trying to satiate the appetites of the latter. The winner will be he who navigates the waves of creative destruction, who watches for the right swells and rides through the white-caps – it will be he who, like Steve and Sergey and Bill before him, capitalizes in the tides of tech as others are carried out to sea.

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DISCLAIMER: The postings on this site are my own and do not represent the positions, strategies, or opinions of any other individual or entity.

Article published in today’s Pennsylvania Law Weekly, on their website (login needed) or on our firm’s here and here.

***

SILENCE REIGNS OVER the land. Glaciers and snowfields thaw in the sun, dissolving into the torrents of ceaseless rivers. The jagged banks show the green shoots of summer, but there are no commercial fishermen. The melted, mossy mush of beaver ponds, but no concrete dams. The stern, white faces of craggy buttes, but no ski tourers or snow machines. This is the Wild, the savage, vast Northland Wild.

Today, there are men here—gainseekers groping in the Arctic darkness. And they have found a yellow metal.

The place is the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, about two hundred miles southwest of Anchorage and seventy miles from tidewater at Cook Inlet. This place is the foremost wildlife area in all of Alaska, the source of the largest salmon runs on the planet, home to more than one hundred thousand caribou and tribes of moose and bear, and not least, the towns of Iliamna, Nondalton, and Newhalen—small villages of indigenous, subsistence peoples who have been in the region for thousands of years, carving a culture and a life out of nature.

And here lies a great fortune—a treasure trove tucked in the tundra, resting as calmly as the grizzly bear and caribou herds that graze on the doorstep of its vault. The booty, a vast depository of gold and copper, lies at the headwaters of the Mulchatna/Nushagak River and the Newhalen/Kvichak River—two of the most famous salmon-producing river drainages on the planet. Both feed into Bristol Bay, where an estimated forty million salmon come to spawn each year. Experts say the deposit—some eighty million pounds of copper, over one hundred million ounces of gold, and six billion pounds of molybdenum—could be worth as much as half a trillion dollars.

On far-away fields, in the courts of Anchorage and in the corridors of Washington D.C., there is a burgeoning battle over a proposed open-pit mine of almost mythical size—to be called Pebble—which would extract the metals while altering the landscape irrevocably and, many say, pushing the native salmon, ecosystem, and cultures into extinction.

If built, the mine will be one of the largest in the world. Its open pit will carve twenty-seven hundred feet into the earth’s crust. Each day, the resource-thirsty operation will soak up at least twenty million gallons of fresh water and use more energy than the city of Anchorage. It will include the grandest dam on the globe, a structure bigger than Three Gorges Dam in China—made not of concrete but of dirt and rock, in order to hold back the toxic waste created in the mining process. The estimated seven billion tons of toxic dust will need to be responsibly contained.

Ken Taylor, head of environmental assessment for the group seeking to develop the mine, pitches cleanliness as a certainty, boasting that the project will result in “zero loss” to fisheries.

But a rag-tag cadre of conservationists, sportsmen groups, businesses, commercial fisherman, and Natives—led by an improbable but powerful ally, Anchorage-based businessman Robert Gillam—is unconvinced. They think responsible containment is a fantasy or a fairytale at best, a lie or a scam peddled by Pebble’s backers at worst. They are forging a fierce oppositional fight.

If a portion of the seven billion tons of rock were not properly contained, if even traces of the toxic dust—arsenic, mercury, acid drainage, and copper tailings—were to flow or blow into the fish-filled streams, the red salmon, and by extension, all the wildlife in the area, would begin to die. Chemical concentrations of three or four parts per billion in fresh water destroy a salmon’s ability to navigate and thus threaten its ability to spawn. Gillam insists the mine would mean “the destruction of the last great salmon run on Earth.”

The impassioned, partisan hullabaloo over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) pales in comparison to the cataclysm erupting over Pebble. The Bristol Bay area of Alaska is shaping up to be ground zero for the most important environmental, ecological, and political war this nation has seen in years. The war—as Bill Lardley put it in a New York Times feature—is one between economies and cultures, copper and clean water, gold and wild salmon.

***

SINCE THE RUSSIAN fur trappers arrived in the 1780s, the Last Frontier has been a place where man harvested nature, pressing out of it, like juices from the grape, all the glittery exaltations and conjured self-values of his race. Fir and oil and natural gas dwelled among the blind elements and great forces of nature, where they were found and co-opted, transported, sold.

More than a century ago, man first discovered the yellow metal, and with steamship and transportation companies booming the find, thousands rushed into the Northland. Since then, mining has been encoded in Alaska’s genes.

Miners are now digging precious metals out of the ground in Alaska at the fastest clip since 1916. As several of the world’s most reliable currencies plummet in confidence and exchange value, precious metals are going for record prices—gold is now worth over $1,100 per ounce—boosting fervor for greater fortunes among mining conglomerates.

The Pebble Partnership—composed of Anglo American, a London-based company, and Northern Dynasty, a Canadian company that has never built a mine—seeks permission to build the Pebble mine. If allowed, Alaska could join the ranks of the world’s largest gold producers, bringing bullion to market on par with the outputs of South Africa or China or Russia.

The multi-billion-dollar industrial excavation at Pebble would require the construction of bridges and dozens of miles of roads and electric power lines across wild, undeveloped terrain; the erection of prodigious pipelines for fuel and rock slurries; the impoundment of large quantities of surface water; and the frenzied transport and use of toxic chemicals.

The opposition sees the environmental risks as unacceptably high. They frame their foes as despoiling, money-minded mischief-makers with no concern but immediate commercial success. They point to dire scientific research reports and enshrine the words of state and federal biologists who warn that toxic residue from the project could irreparably harm the salmon, crippling the fishing industry and the entire ecosystem.

Ultimately, the biggest battle is poised to erupt in the political realm, where the judgment is split. Three former Alaskan governors, two Republicans and a Democrat, and former Senator Ted Stevens, a Republican, have spoken out against the mine. In November 2009, Governor Sean Parnell shot back at the Pebble critics, pledging that the state would “vigorously defend” the permits it grants and its mine-permit process.

Proponents claim the mine would be an economic godsend to the region. The mining conglomerates say they will hire the rural peoples who have yet to enjoy the industrial innovations of the modern era. Others foresee broken promises, as the mining companies import skilled laborers from abroad.

Local, indigenous peoples are split. The business bigwigs boast of $70,000 annual salaries—the alluring promise of a better life and nicer things, the fruits of capitalism to which many of the peoples sustained by salmon have never been privy.

Supporters note that mining yields many millions each year in local and state tax revenue, as well as in payments to Alaska native corporations; newly swollen government coffers and villages flush with cash could pave asphalt roads and concrete runways, building better schools and post offices and playgrounds. The new money could buy tranches of American culture’s modern mainstays as well. Copper, credit cards, and Citigroup subprime. Bullion, Jeeps, and Jim Beam benders. The Good Life.

***

THE STORY BEGINS, like so many others, with Sarah Palin.

When she was a candidate for governor in Alaska, Palin bragged of her love for the vast and beautiful delta that drains into Bristol Bay—the salmon-filled province where tens of millions of the red swimmers come to spawn each year. In a campaign questionnaire, Palin promised that, “as part of a Bristol Bay fishing family”—her husband Todd is a part-time commercial fisherman and was raised near Bristol Bay—she would not “support any resource development that would endanger the most sensitive and productive fishery in the world.” Speaking to residents of a small native fishing village during her gubernatorial run, Palin gushed: “My daughter’s name is Bristol…I could not support a project that risks one resource that we know is a given, and that is the world’s richest spawning grounds, over another resource.”

But in August 2008, Governor Palin dealt a death-blow to a pivotal statewide ballot initiative, Ballot Measure 4 or Prop 4, that would have enacted stricter guidelines and standards under which all mines operate. The Pebble-interested mining companies and the Resource Development Council of Alaska spent more than $9 million to fight the proposal, an unprecedented sum for a political referendum in one of the nation’s least populous states. The opposition groups, led by Bob Gillam, the initiative’s architect and single biggest individual donor, pledged hefty sums as well.

Television, radio, and internet advertisements evoked disparate portraits of the Pebble proposal—exploding mine sites and suffering red sockeye salmon on one side, sturdy-looking miners and contented natives on the other. The pro-Pebble and anti-Pebble portraits clogged the state’s airwaves and stuffed mailboxes for months. (The total sum spent fighting the initiative was a state record.)

During the run-up, Palin remained officially neutral—as governor of the state, she was not permitted to take sides on ballot measures. Then, six days before the late-August vote, with the polls revealing a razor-thin difference in sentiment, Palin broke her silence. “Let me take my governor’s hat off for just a minute here and tell you, personally, Prop 4—I vote no on that.” She went on to defend the permit process and praised what she saw as the stringent regulatory requirements. “We’re going to make sure that mines operate only safely, soundly.”

The comments rocked the referendum. In less than twenty-four hours, the pro-mining coalition had placed full-page newspaper ads with Palin’s likeness and the word “NO” in large black typeface. The initiative was defeated, with fifty-seven percent against.

Palin was cleared of wrongdoing by the Alaska Public Offices Commission, which said Governor Palin made it clear her statement was a personal opinion and not the official position of the state or the governor’s office. Palin’s stunt irked many. Former Governor Tony Knowles, a Democrat who lost to Palin in 2006, said: “Being a governor is not a costume—you either are the governor or not.”

On August 29, 2008, three days after the vote, Sarah Palin was named Republican Senator John McCain’s running mate, and the referendum was forgotten.

McCain campaign spokeswoman Meghan Stapleton defended the charges against the then Vice Presidential candidate: “She supports responsible resource development…this is about process and ensuring that any company that wants to come to Alaska and develop our resources is at the very least provided the ability to avail themselves of the state’s process.”

The permitting process, involving both federal and state agencies, is a public-private hybrid whereby the agencies release their findings and conclusions for public comment. Many of the supporters do not defend the mine; they defend the process. But unfortunately for the opposition, the process is set up to approve, not to reject.

Alaska has never before denied a proposal for the construction of a large-scale mine.

***

THE REFERENDUM DEFEAT bruised the opposition cast, which remains an unlikely ensemble. At the helm is Gillam, a lifelong Alaskan with conservative political ties who happens to own land and a luxury lodge twenty-four miles from the area of the proposed mine. Ironically, Gillam spends his days and makes his dollars supporting global economic development; as president of an international investment firm he founded in 1990, he deploys billions of investor capital into enterprises just like Pebble all over the globe.

For years, Gillam avoided the media spotlight, but he revealed his stance on Pebble publicly in a July 2009 Anchorage Daily News op-ed. Gillam wrote: “When all the copper and gold is gone, we will be left with the largest earthen dam in the world holding back perhaps the largest toxic dump on Earth. The mine developers will take our copper and gold, make their money and be gone. Alaska will be left with a devastated river drainage system, a toxic dump and no jobs.”

In person, Gillam is a stern, gruff, bulk of a man—rotund but not soft. He’s hard to the core, adorned with a kind of weather-beaten and war-torn cloak of confidence, the living product of working-class roots, of days and nights working for his keep, of millions made and lost, of near-bankruptcy and fortune. Absent is the regal, haughty bearing of a man who has amassed an immense wealth. His stature is more fittingly low-brow, commensurate with his humble origins, nights spent cooking his catch in his old two-bedroom cabin, talent for fishing and facility with a shotgun, expert handling of a single-engine Cessna, and days traipsing the wild he now wants to protect.

Since his involvement began, Gillam has been the object of virulent attacks, public scorn, lawsuits, threats, and criminal allegations. Northern Dynasty employees and other potential Pebble beneficiaries have painted him as a villain, and a site called “Bob Gillam Can’t Buy Alaska” pilloried his character and charged that protection of his nine-bedroom, fourteen-thousand square-foot home was the self-interested motive for his opposition effort (the page has since been taken down).

The Pebble fight does not come cheap even to Gillam, reportedly among the richest men in Alaska. He has, in his own words, put his money where his mouth is. He was a pivotal player in the record-breaking political ad war over the 2008 ballot initiative. By his own admission, he contributed $2 million to Virginia-based Americans for Jobs Security (AJS) and more than $850,000 directly to the pro-initiative campaign.

How the money was donated became a headache and a campaign-finance conundrum for Gillam starting in March 2009. In the aftermath of the vote, trench warfare continued as the pro-Pebble conglomerate and the Resource Development Council filed campaign-finance complaints against Gillam and the anti-Pebble groups.

They squawked to the state of Gillam’s alleged improprieties and asked for civil and criminal prosecution. At issue was the connection between Gillam and the groups to which he contributed, organizations like AJS and the Renewable Resources Coalition (RRC). Both AJS and RRC in turn used the money to fund Alaskans for Clean Water (AFCW), a non-profit organization formed to raise money for and advocate in support of Prop 4.

The charge was that AJS and RRC used the money from Gillam to support the ballot campaign while keeping the original source of the funds secret according to its internal policies—an illegal “pass through.” The Alaska Public Offices Committee (APOC), the same watchdog who acquitted Palin of wrongdoing in the hat affair, dropped two out of eight charges, and they declined to recommend a criminal investigation. Gillam, supported by RRC and AJS, continued to claim that the decisions to use the money to fund AFCW were made by those organizations alone—a claim still disputed by APOC staff, reportedly, due to the timing of the contributions and the relationships among the parties.

In late February of this year, the prosecutors and the defendants agreed to a settlement of $100,000, which was not a “fine” or a “penalty.” The defendants admitted no wrongdoing but promised not to make “pass through” donations in the future.

There are outstanding campaign-finance charges against the pro-Pebble groups as well. In an e-mail, Gillam reminds: “There are new APOC complaints over the miners that now show that foreign mining companies spent over $15 million to defeat [the ballot measure]…and that much of it was not reported until six months after the election.” Byzantine financing aside, there is no doubt that the mine’s backers spent princely sums in an effort to buy the election.

Gillam is quick to point out that he made contributions—at least $1 million to AJS, records show—before the initiative was even approved by the Alaska Supreme Court on July 3, 2008. Gillam pledged the funds after having surgery and while battling life-threatening blood clots—he contributed the money, he says in an admission of his own mortality, “knowing I might not make it.”

Gillam, whose health has since rebounded, believes the complaints were filed by the mining interests to intimidate him. But instead of running scared, he is emboldened. No longer press-shy, he wants to proclaim his position to the public. In addition to his op-ed, he was a willing subject of a lengthy profile published this spring in Alaska Magazine. He thinks he has been unfairly vilified and that his critics’ caricature of him as a well-endowed not-in-my-back-yarder belies his motive, protecting the interests of his home state. “I’m doing this,” he told his profiler, “because it’s the right thing to do.”

George Jacko, a resident of impacted community Pedro Bay, wrote in defense of Gillam as early as 2007: “Bob Gillam has given concerned local folks a voice; without his involvement and resources, we would be buried under hundreds of pages of Northern Dynasty permit applications, dependant on state and local borough governments for understanding, protection and balance.” Jacko continued: “Agree or disagree with the way Bob Gillam wages war against the Pebble Mine, but agree and give thanks to him for being a good neighbor, willing to lend a hand, willing to engage us all in debate over the pros and cons of the mine.”

Gillam cites three pillars of cons in opposing the mine: history and science—which he says shows that mines of this size built in environments of this kind are sure to see problems; business sense—which he draws on in supporting renewable resources over non-renewable resources and in siding with profits for the local fishing industry over profits for foreign corporations; and cultural heritage—of which, he says, vibrant local villages and peoples would be deprived by the mine’s incursion.

When he talks about Pebble, his measured, cocksure voice becomes rushed with a frenzy of thoughts and words—the flavor of marked urgency, almost anger, reveals that he’s driven both by love for what he thinks is at stake and by contempt for those he feels are slighting Alaska, underestimating and denigrating him, abusing the public trust, and betraying treasures of unrivalled, if perhaps unexplainable, import.

At summer’s dusk, Gillam is composed before a group of guests at his lodge. He sits on his spacious wooden deck with views of Lake Clark, an aquamarine pool in a faraway paradise, where he is prone to rock peaceably in his chair, tell a good story, and argue the finer points of Bourbon and Scotch. As he rocks, the successes and accomplishments of his life seem the bedrocks of his ease. But for all the spoils of past victories, he is now embroiled in a fight for a victory that could prove Phyrric. He does not say it, but there is a sense that a loss here would be costlier than any prize he has failed to capture in life, more pivotal than any bravado or ego he might have forfeited before.

Listening to him talk about Pebble, fluctuations of sentiment are apparent, and Gillam tempers bouts of near-manic optimism and upswings of gusto with cautious pessimism and doubt, as he laments the power of his foe.

Indeed, Bob Gillam is still David to the pro-Pebble Goliath, which altogether wields more power, more money, and more motive than Gillam ever will. They are a multi-billion-dollar mining behemoth vying for the flagship jewel in their fleet. For 2009 alone, the Pebble Partnership—the joint venture between Northern Dynasty and Anglo American—allocated $70 million to advance the project. The companies announced that they would spend $72.9 million in 2010.

The eight- and nine-figure sums purchase influence even Alaska’s wealthiest cannot afford, but in Bob Gillam’s case, votes might help trump dollars. Last year, the Anchorage Daily News’ gossip section suggested that Gillam’s anti-Pebble editorial in July 2009 was the strongest indication yet that a rumored run for Governor was in the works. Gillam admits that he has considered a run for the office, from which he might wield voter-backed power and squash the Pebble project. Alaska’s political climate often looks like a lawless frontier. Given the state’s history of political mavericks and ruthless, moneyed power-brokers, Bob Gillam might be uniquely suited to the task of navigating its terrain—one not dissimilar to that of the multinational business he already knows.

If he decides to run and wins, Gillam will have an advantage against the enemy mercenaries, so many of whom are lining up to back the Pebble Partnership. Charles Hawley, a geologist-geochemist and board member of the pro-Pebble non-profit group Truth About Pebble, loudly disagreed with Gillam, whose opinion he derided as “cynical” coming from a man made by investing capital. In his own op-ed this summer, Hawley argued that the money from the mine would stay in Alaska in the form of payment for labor, utilities, and equipment, all while providing royalties and taxes. As far as the environmental concerns, he asserted: “Fugitive dust from surface facilities is controllable and always subject to permit.”

The trouble is, the fugitive dust must be kept from the water not for the mine’s lifetime, or even for a decade or a century after its retirement, but for perpetuity. Controlling seven billion tons of anything is a shaky proposition in a region fraught with torrential rains, titanic gusts of wind, and winter temperatures dropping to seventy below. An active volcano spews its steam nearby. There is also a fault line thirty miles away, a geologic menace credited with several medium-sized earthquakes each year—and one capable of producing a catastrophic shock sure to crumble the constructs of men.

For a grain of fugitive dust, it is tough to stay contained. The waterways surrounding the site are less like lines on a map and more like a spider’s web, the strands of the ecosystem similar to the overlapping and twisted streets of a poorly planned city. Organs of marshy tan tundras sit between the coronaries of mountain brooks and the veins of fledgling streams. Haphazard conduits of complex hydrology flow and stagnate—each responding to rain and ice-melt and tree cover in unique ways according to an invisible mayor, the arbiter of their biocomplexity. They house life in millions of minute, fragile microcosms like scattered walk-up lofts and dilapidated row homes, the mammals and fish and insects and floral fauna dwelling in undetectable, severed pockets, like miniature Manhattans.

The list of threatening menaces is long: cyanide leakage, acid drainage, mercury pollution, dam failures, volcanic events, torrential rains, and earthquakes. And the menacing forces are permanent forces, there to remain as long as the fusion of the sun. “Perpetuity,” Gillam says, asking with a sardonic smirk: “Do you know how long perpetuity is?”

***

TIFFANY & COMPANY CHAIRMAN and Chief Executive Officer Michael Kowalski seemed to echo Gillam in lending his support: “[The waste] will require containment and perpetual treatment—forever.” Two years ago, Tiffany became the most powerful voice in its $3.7 billion industry to oppose the precious-metal proposition in Alaska. Since then, Tiffany has aired its opinion, running a full-page, cyan-colored ad in the October 2009 trade magazine National Jeweler, which stated that the mine’s threat to Bristol Bay superseded “all…immediate financial self-interests.”

Tiffany has helped recruit a bevy of other major jewelers to the preemptive boycott. The growing coalition of leading U.S. and U.K. jewelers is refusing to buy any gold mined from Pebble in light of the environmental risks. The players range from small, family-owned boutiques to publicly-traded juggernauts, from prestigious jewelers like Helzberg Diamonds and Zale Corporation to department store chains like Sears and Wal-Mart. Kowalski asked: “Is the price of developing the Pebble mine simply too high to pay for the jewelry industry, for Tiffany jewelry?”

The debate spread south in November 2009. Controversy erupted in Seattle after thirteen area restaurants featured wild Alaska salmon on their menus and warned their habitués about the future of Bristol Bay’s salmon should Pebble proceed as planned. Pebble supporters called for a boycott of the restaurants in their “Save Bristol Bay” campaign.

Closer to home, the contentious campaign continues as civil lawsuits fly. In July of last year, a coalition of eight Bristol Bay Native village corporations, former Alaska first lady Bella Hammond, and state constitutional convention delegate Victor Fischer alleged that state regulators violated the state constitution when they initially approved exploration permits for Pebble without public knowledge. The group filed suit in the Anchorage Superior Court, asking the court to halt exploration at Pebble until a judge could issue a ruling.

More recently, letters are being sent and petitions are being filed on both sides. In February of this year, the Alaska Board of Fisheries asked for a review of the permitting system. Days later, several prominent conservation and business groups filed a petition with state regulators to designate a river near the site a protected resource.

William Ahrens, in a December 2009 letter to the editor published in the Anchorage Daily News, wrote in support of Pebble, lobbing a thinly veiled potshot at Gillam: “Those opposing the development of Pebble strike me as myopic or ignorant or perhaps they’re the wealthy wanting to protect their overpriced luxury fishing lodges where they’re pampered.” Ahrens argued that the mine’s cleanliness would be ensured by “state of the art checks and balances.”

Another reader, Ken Green, fired back at Ahrens, scoffing at the charges of myopia and ignorance. He cited the Exxon Valdez spill and the Summit County mining fiasco near Leadville, Colorado as disasters impervious to any check or balance—and as messes taxpayer dollars had to clean up. Green warned ominously: a screw up in Bristol Bay would dwarf, in cost and long-term damage, the disasters at Valdez and Leadville.

Pebble opponents released a poll in September 2009, conducted several months before, that found seventy-nine percent of local residents surveyed believed the mine would damage Bristol Bay’s wild salmon fishery. Another survey sponsored by Nunamta Aulukestai, an organization representing thousands of Alaska Native shareholders in the Bristol Bay region, found that eighty-eight percent of Bristol Bay residents do not want Pebble built.

Scott Hawkins, a board member of Truth About Pebble, denounced the polling techniques of the opposition as extremely biased and unprofessional. He wrote that “phony” polls were “one more well-funded attempt to bias the public against a project that has not even completed its development plan yet.”

Polling legitimacy notwithstanding, a recent schism shows that Pebble opposition support among native Alaskans is far from unified. Early in December 2009, the board of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation (BBNC) broke its neutrality on the Pebble project with a vote against its development, citing “the unquantifiable impacts the project could have on the natural resources of the Bristol Bay region.” The BBNC, as the combined voice of thousands of Alaska Native shareholders residing in the region, was an important addition to the opposition. The mining companies expressed disappointment.

But days after news of the vote was released, two Bristol Bay village corporations said they were outraged by the BBNC’s decision to oppose the mine. Alaska Peninsula Corporation and Pedro Bay Corporation condemned the opposition by the BBNC, which they said is endangering their development and growth by hampering the mine’s progress. The BBNC release was “an outrageous and dictatorial act,” and was “…based on irrational fear mongering, [threatening] our very ability to survive,” said Pedro Bay Chairman John Adcox and Alaska Peninsula President Ralph Angasan, respectively.

The pro-Pebble Angasan sung a tale of woe—of the highest unemployment rates and living costs in the nation, of declining populations in villages, of closing schools and withering communities. He argued that wise development of the area resources was the cure.

Less clear is what hidden motive Adcox and Angasan might have in defending Pebble. When exploration began, lawmakers raised concerns that mining officials were trying to buy the loyalty of native leaders, paying ludicrous sums to house workers in the homes of influential locals and showering them with gifts.

Ethel and John Adcox were reportedly receiving $25,000 per month in rent money for their modest guesthouse in tiny Iliamna. Pebble was feeding their entire village—literally—with weekly steak and lobster dinners. Ethel Adcox cooed: “It leaves a good taste in your mouth.”

***

THE NEW MONEY taste is foreign to a people who have thrived on Alaska’s salmon for thousands of years—a bare-bones existence sustained by the red gold of nature.

And in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, the two precious resources remain. The salmon is a lavish renewable resource, the lifeline of rural Alaska and the darling of the state’s lucrative fishing industry. The salmon is forever. And so far it has been—from the time their ancient ancestors crossed the Bering Strait up until now, red salmon have been the benevolent beings by which the natives have survived. The precious metals are a finite discovery that could yield riches now.

Though the prize is from nature, the war over Pebble is a war among men. It is one of now versus later, instant wealth versus delayed gratification, lust versus prudence. At issue is man’s use of the natural world in which he lives; man’s power to harness the pearls of the planet for his own needs and his own desires; and the treatment of the gift bestowed upon man and his transformation of it, for better or poorer, for the re-wrapping, and re-bestowment, of that gift upon the generations of men who will follow.

The war over Pebble involves sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its noblest manifestations, involves man giving up something he values—a possession or a pastime or a lifestyle or a resource—for something he deems greater. The sacrificial exchange: something ephemeral for something eternal; an object of desire for an object of necessity; the finite for the infinite; less for more.

In the coming months and years, the men—from governors and state senators and state representatives to business tycoons to average citizens—will make a sacrifice.

Governor Parnell, while remaining officially neutral, supports the permit process and has recently ordered an independent review of the project to aid its progress. John Shively, head of the Pebble Partnership, anticipates that the mine project could proceed to the permitting stage as early as next year. Shively is hopeful that the man in the seat of power, the Commissioner of Natural Resources, currently Thomas Irwin, approves the mine and that, some day, he can glimpse the glimmer of gold and copper in the light of the Alaskan day.

Other men fear the day that a gust of wind or a shift in the earth’s tectonic plates or a careless mine worker or the force of gravity starts a process of environmental decay and destruction that cannot be stopped or reversed. They fear a wound that no taxpayer surcharge or out-of-court settlement or municipal bond or synthetic swap agreement can heal.

Shively framed the issue well: “Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other…just to see what people would do with them.” Perhaps he is right—men are endowed with this absolute gift, but it is a black-and-white pie that is subject to rationing according to endless shades of grey, over which men haggle like street vendors in suits and ties, apparently unaware that life and death are absolutes—and that a drop of the latter spoils a sea of the former.

For now, the water flows pure, and the gold and copper sits secure, waiting to be mined and processed and carted off in diesel trucks. Or left alone. The mining process, opponents say, would likely destroy the infinite wealth renewed each year by the silently churning cogs of the ecosystem’s eternal engine.

This engine churns far from the bustle of commerce and civilization. Far from the busy nations and great enterprises of modern-day man, who dwells among strip malls and galleries and crowded avenues, in places where money changes hands with the clink and clash of changing cultures, where blindness and confusion reign. Upheaval and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter ruled by chance and movement—endless, tireless movement.

Today, the moose and lynx and caribou roam still, splay hoofs and palmated antlers passing quietly through the shadowy ravines and hump-like hills. The cub hunts for his salmon—his voracious appetite just one of a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all according to a kind of cosmic justice by which the Wild lives on, forever.

Mebrahtom Keflezighi can cut the mile run in four minutes and fifty five seconds flat—and then repeat it twenty five more times without rest. You might grant Keflezighi the title of the best American distance runner and marathoner in a generation, if not ever. Assuming, that is, you consider him an American at all.

On a humid August morning in 2007, Meb stands out as he cruises Central Park. His slender, chiseled calves pump like chainsaws as he churns along at speeds that stun and dismay West Side walkers. He’s black as coffee, a man who, without the top-dollar training gear, wouldn’t turn a head in the war-torn African country of his youth. But here, now, he looks different, alien, as he charges forward in the most American of cities—his taut figure toiling in the shadows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the engines of a nation founded on a promise.

His stride and steps, like his temperament, are quiet and industrious. I know the Olympic silver medalist from four football fields, though when I catch him, I feign ignorance as he peppers me with questions about my training and track season. With an obviously un-American drawl, he offers his hand mid-step—“Meb, by the way.” Pride without pomp and brawn without braggadocio—Meb stands out in a nation that forgives appalling arrogance from athletes.

Meb’s sociability and unassuming air belie his stature in the annals of American athletics: four-time NCAA champion; American record holder in the ten thousand meters; marathon silver medalist at the Athens Olympics; and, on the morning of November 1, 2009, New York City Marathon champion—the first American victor in nearly three decades. The American Champion, or so the headlines read, has inflamed a contingent of critics who deny he’s one of us.Keflezighi is only “technically American,” argued CNBC sports writer Darren Rovell, “like a ringer who you hire to work a couple hours at your office so that you can win the executive softball league.”

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free—all of which Meb once was and seemed destined to remain. On October 21, 1987, his family fled their Eritrean village and their hut with no electricity or running water. The story of Meb’s life, so often told, is a uniquely American one: his father dragged the family from the wretched refuse of an unforgiving life to the San Diego shores, where he would rise hours before dawn to teach the kids English, driving a taxi and scrubbing tables to provide the daily bread.

Meb has been an official, naturalized citizen since 1998, and he wears the same red, white, and blue singlet and shorts as Jim and Steve and Bob did before him, even while living, stride by stride, an ethos more characteristically American than those runners ever did. He told a reporter recently: “You live here, you pay taxes—you live by the American way. I’ve been here for twenty two years. I’m as American as you can get….You start on the bottom, work hard, and your dreams will come true—and that’s what happened.”

The statutes say he’s just as American as the distance boys from Kansas and Oregon and Ohio, as the boys with last names Ryun and Scott and Kennedy, but his name is Mebrahtom, and he hails from Eritrea. Years beyond the civil rights movement, after Lyndon Johnson and Lincoln, after Jesse Owens, even in the age of a multiracial titan called Tiger, Americans are still hesitant to stir folks like Meb into their proverbial melting pot.

This summer day, Meb is surveying the battlefield to make Beijing, the course of the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. I tell Meb that, with a silver medal in his bag, he’s bound for Beijing. He smiles coyly, but shakes his head; Meb, a man of more defeats than victories, denies that he’s a lock.

His humility is strangely prescient, for at the Trials, he has the most disappointing race of his life, finishing eighth; he breaks his hip, nearly ending his career; and to a freak heart attack, he loses a close friend and training partner, Ryan Shay, whose funeral he can’t attend because he’s immobile. Forced to crawl about the house on his hands and knees, Meb resolves to rehab and resume running, and eighteen months later, redeems himself on the turf of his meltdown, running the race of a lifetime.

For the distance runner, and for Meb Keflezighi, the race of Rudy-like redemption, of hard work and failures, of setbacks and successes, plays out in one hundred and thirty mile weeks, on dusty trails and hot, hard California hills—principally without the glamour and glory of the podium. Meb’s race is an American race on Tartan and asphalt—a race of opportunity gleaned and then seized with grit and grind. And so far, it’s an American race he’s winning, unless, of course, we deny his status as a runner altogether.

We’ve all heard it, the standard money-won’t-buy-you-happiness argument—that amassing wealth only begets a desire for more (the “hedonic treadmill” concept); that working too hard and too long creates stress and stifles relationships; and that doing what you love is most important. The grey-haired gremlins coo with either smug satisfaction or uncomfortable regret, “Do what you love, kid.”

As a college senior choosing a career, I’m increasingly frustrated by the aching naiveté of the whole do-what-you-love-and-be-happy line of reasoning. If somebody were willing to pay me to snowboard down the back slopes of the Tetons, embark on a safari in the Great Rift Valley, or guide a speedboat through Amazonian rainforests, I’d be doing those things already. I would love to skip out of work and sip Johnny Blue at the corner bar, or tear across the country in a beat up Subaru—blasting music, windows down, feet out the window, arm casually resting on the cinnamon-tan inner thigh of an impossibly attractive brunette in a baby blue miniskirt. Yes, then I’d get a cozy cabin in the Adirondacks, read tattered paperback classics and wax poetic in my leather-bound diary about Dickens and Faulkner. If there is a company out there writing checks for the things I love, please forward my résumé.

The fact is, much of what I love—and most of what I want to spend my time doing—can only be had by doing other, less glamorous things. I know I’m not alone. Millions of people sit in air-conditioned skyscrapers all day, tirelessly churning out the motions of a mechanized existence, dreaming of the things they aren’t able to do because they are trapped by their total lack of short-term cash flow. The truth is, money is important—many of the things that contribute joy to existence, and many of the things which detract from it, actually can be measured in dollars and cents. Cold, hard currency is all too often, and way more frequently than the bleeding-heart poor wish or care to admit, the means able to provide the ends we desire.

I’m not saying we’re all going to be cubicle-dwelling accountants, or that we’re all going to dislike our jobs, or that we’re all going to be suppressed forever by four-figure checking accounts. Conversely, I am not saying that the solution to all of our problems is winning the lottery. Indeed, some of us, many of us, will find the fulfillment we are looking for in a family or an art form or a career. Some of us will start booming businesses that incite our inner passions. Maybe you find yourself three thousand miles away, taking notes for a National Geographic feature on the tragedy of the Burmese clergy.

As economists never tire of reminding us, life is about trade-offs—and the work and money versus love and happiness tug of war is perhaps the toughest trade-off decision we are forced to make. The trouble is, as humans, we are miserably bad at getting the trade-offs right. To our own detriment, we are usually just plain wrong when trying to predict what decisions will lead to joy. We spend too much time in painful labor for the money we end up spending on things we don’t need. What we think will make us happy, in the end, just won’t. Most of us end up working too hard for too long, spending too much on too little. I’m in that camp.

It is an enduring human pull to attempt what economists call maximization—that is, we constantly, and at times frenetically, seek out the best options in life. In virtually every psychological study, researchers have found that people who try to maximize are far more miserable than people who are willing to make do. We are all counterfactual historians, men and women who obsessively imagine different and better outcomes for ourselves.

I am a clear maximizer. I fluctuate madly—from day to day, from week to week—between different goals and plans and ideas. Some days, I feel as if I would be content to settle into a ninety-hour-per-week job in law or finance. Other days, I want to take a long shot and try to be that reporter in Burma, money be damned. Some weeks, I try to hit the kill switch on that lightning rod of adrenaline, unplug the live wire of naked impulse that lurks within, and settle down into the more predictable tedium of mature life. Other weeks, I want to foster it, nourish it, feast rapturously on the idosyncratic thoughts and difficult passions that speed and instability and risk inspire. 

There’s no clear solution. What to do with our lives, and how to lead them, is the monster trade-off, the most important decision we make. Maybe we shouldn’t let a trifle like happiness muck it up.

It’s 12:34 a.m. Somewhere in the world, lovers are embracing, DJ’s are mixing, tourists are beaching, and Matthew Gardner is writing cover letters. He’s executing a sale, and he’s selling himself — the product of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said to be the nation’s finest undergraduate business program.

Always be closing, they say, but this pitch is a tough sell, because Matt is a long way from the top. His suit hangs limp, shirt untucked; he sighs, beleaguered. Scanning his resume, his eyes keep returning to his GPA, which he knows puts him around the fortieth percentile in his class of six hundred students.

Somewhere else in the building, a fellow classmate is about to “drop” a resume that includes a crowning achievement, writ large in bold black typeface: 3.88. His application will merit a first round interview with Goldman Sachs, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and a host of other banks and consulting firms. Matt says matter of factly, “You can’t compete with guys like that. No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, they’ll beat you. Every single time. You’ll never win.”

Percentile is destiny in America, and the cold reality is that you’re never quite high enough. Matt’s SAT scores put him in the ninety-ninth percentile. His talent for multiple-choice tests earned him an early slot at Wharton.

It was December 14, 2005 when he heard the news. Matt’s grandfather had passed away. He was a mess of emotion, but he managed to get to his computer at 7:50 p.m. Refresh. Refresh. Eventually, the screen appeared: “Congratulations! You’ve been accepted…”

“I thought I’d made it, that this was it, you know…fait accompli.” He was only 18 years old, but Matt had been running for half his life. He’d been amassing momentum, from middle school spelling bees onward. Vying for honors, medals, distinctions, promotions. Founder of Quizboal; Co-captain of Speech and Debate – “Where I learned how to bullshit so well,” he says with a wry smile; math team; and varsity soccer. He even headlined as Antonio, the anti-Semitic merchant in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Motivated to go on to a top college, the desire to get ahead was the only inspiration Matt needed. At Penn, at Wharton, he would be able to morph his current life into something dramatic and meteoric. “I thought I’d meet all these interesting people and we’d start businesses and foundations and, and…”

Maturity muddled such fantasies. “…it was such a letdown. Such a letdown.” Matt came to realize that the early life grind wasn’t temporary. Pointless classes and clubs, test-prep books, AP exams, private schools, grade-grubbing nerds, nagging parents, college applications—these were not temporary, single-play chores, but precursors to another thirty years of the same routine.

“My freshman year, I called my high school advisor and told him, ‘I hate this place. I’m transferring to Yale. But, you know, it never happened. Here I am.’”

Matt is way out on the bell curve’s leading edge, but he’s still scrambling for that next promotion: a full-time job offer from a reputable financial firm. Steeped in the intricacies of finance and management and accounting, Matt is applying to bulge-bracket Wall Street firms, major consulting conglomerates, and a select group of Fortune 500 companies like American Express.

The task is less method than art. Matt is hyperaware that, unless his pitch is refined, unless he networks and emails and climbs—up and up, higher on the ladder of life—he’ll end up on a rung lower than he thinks his smarts and savvy merit. “I’m not going to apply to some no-name boutique,” he says caustically.

Finishing up, Matt walks to a nearby bar to relieve some pressure. He recites his order, one he knows as reflexively as the format of his cover letter: “Double Dewars on the rocks.”

As the scotch hits, relief washes over him, and he appears happy. He banters with three friends, laughing, passing off an abridged quote from Plato as his own. His strain forgotten, camaraderie takes hold. They laugh and talk and laugh some more.

But there’s a great deal of desperation and sadness in the laughter, because they’re carrying with them the knowledge that this is one of the few respites they’ll have in the coming months. This group of friends is about to leave the haven of the university and be thrown into the brutal, free-spinning world.

The morning comes, and the lingering effects of last night’s escape make it hard to adjust to the drone of the professor’s voice. Matt’s mind rolls to where he’d rather be, on some beach, or in a beat-up Mercedes on the Autobahn, drinking draft beer in a tavern booth. Anywhere, really, but here. But here he is, running.

This was an “observational” piece, an exercise in journalistic writing for a writing course, so don’t be offended by the details. It’s less objective fact or strait-laced opinion than a work of writing. This is art, not science. Also, this is an early draft, and will likely be revamped and revised many times.

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In just thirty-two minutes, you can drive from the exit of Broadway’s bustling midtown corridor to the entrance of a less prestigious artery. From the brains of America to its bowels. From its heart to its gut. Veer right. Welcome to the New Jersey Turnpike.

Jammed into one contour of the Turnpike’s 12-foot-wide concrete intestines, it’s hard not to notice the toxicity—the stools of the gritty Gotham you left behind. The slimy marshes are a spitting distance from the precipice of the cigarette-strewn shoulders; they shine a mossy, golf-course green in the September sun, speckled with empty Marlboro cartons and tin Sunoco canisters, tobacco and diesel, the lingering poisons to a fading body. The smoky, gassy smell confirms: this place is Three Mile Island toxic – a cavern of festering bacteria sprinkled over the putrid plains of the polity it serves.

The fertile marsh-land of silt and mud holds recycled beer cans and plastic milk jugs, Anheuser Busch and Kellogg, Madison Avenue’s consumer crap, used and tossed aside. Thrown out and forgotten.

A mid-90s Jeep Cherokee rattles along. It’s a bag of steely, American-made nuts and bolts with enough intra-Jersey miles to round trip this toll road ten thousand times. The SUV of old creaks through the turns of northeast Jersey’s cantilevered truss bridges like a motor home on a dirt track: past Newark and Jersey City; high above the Meadowlands; past the sagging drawbridges spanning the Passaic and Hackensack Rivers; beneath the Britain-bound Boeing jets of Newark’s airport; alongside the nameless, rusting boxcars traversing tarnished tracks; atop the dirt-blackened cement, atop the sand-filled caissons, atop the soft, swampy earth…sinking lower.

The Jeep, a weather-beaten paint shaker of a vehicle, is a Jersey story in itself, with 120,000 miles to its pages. Its narrative is borne out of miles upon miles of trips to Jersey’s branded bastions: trips east on State Route 72 for Beach Haven weekends – LBI, baby! – and north on the Garden State Parkway, to Exit 116, for Coldplay and Springstreen and Dave Matthews Band concerts at the PNC Bank Arts Center – Trippin’ Billies!; of trips south on I-95 for a sunny summer day at Six Flags; of trips west on I-80 for the weekend flea market near the Delaware Water Gap; and trips up and down, along this pike, this roadway that runs past towns of European name but American tradition: Elizabeth, Bayonne, Woodbridge, New Brunswick…New Jersey.

New Jersey– new, better, that was the promise. When the Turnpike was constructed in the early 1950s, it was a promise of better access to the engine of capitalism by which global commerce is sustained. Perhaps, some imagined, with the Turnpike, Jersey’s proximity to New York could be tapped – and its less esteemed neighbor could abscond with some of the ingenuity, some of the culture, some of the power.

But that power can only be seen from afar, not grasped. Travelling north on the Turnpike, New York’s skyline explodes into the purview, eminently visible over the retaining walls that were built to contain the semis and Hummers heading north to the Hudson River moat. Look east, and look high, toward New York—unencumbered by the trash heap below, you might forget that you’re in the throes of its waste.

The piercing rays of sunlight on this autumn Saturday illuminate the massive buildings, with their dizzying turrets and iridescent facades—these blue-hot, skyscrapered fantasyparks of finance that rise so inexplicably from an island of cold rock. They seem to taunt, to position themselves like elder statesmen over the kids on the Turnpike, as if they might be daring doe-eyed dreamers to approach, to join its ranks, to try and conquer The City. But it’s like a bullying bookie in a seedy, Atlantic City casino – because the odds are fixed, and the patron is but a fool for buying in. The draw? To win big, of course. Jackpot.

The Jersey Turnpike is not New York’s Royal Flush; it is New York’s bust, a meek and disenfranchised rounder, hoping for some luck on the river. Day by day, the hands are dealt, and the Turnpike continues to service the house. New York gets the lion’s share even while the Turnpike sells its goods and services, facilitating the arrival of new junkies hoping for a hot hand.

One rest area promises a respite, a dealer change for the Turnpike driver. Here, overpriced junk food is served by unapologetic minimum-wage workers. They grovel, grumbling, a sea of defeated countenances. The dull eyes tell the story of dreams deferred and dreams deceased.  Road-weary retirees and scruffy, unkempt middle-aged men carry plastic containers into aged Buick boats and smoke-black Ford trucks– inhaling the calorie-packed sleaze of Burger King and Roy Rogers, Popeye’s Chicken and Sbarro. Tired, beer-bellied truckers scarf up greasy slices of pizza from Sbarro, feasting out of triangular green and red-branded boxes they’ll later pitch from their windows – onto the receptacle below.

Foreign tourists stand out, Kodak cameras draped over their shoulders and fanny packs full of U.S. dollars strapped to their hips. They’re here to catch a glimpse of the American dream, to capture digitally the sublime portrait that the ceaseless American marketing machine has painted for the world. The jubilant Japanese travelers might be fooled by the Statue of Liberty postcards in the gift shop, but they’re in the wrong place.

Others, the more enlightened—some of them, perhaps, defeated Manhattan refugees—proceed to the Turnpike Starbucks. This branch is just forty miles from New York, but it couldn’t be more different from Manhattan. No stilettoed savants, no Ferragamo loafers. No Bowery-dwelling, botoxed beauties or fashion-forward, Upper East Side mommies.

The “baristas” are not the young, educated-looking urban-dwellers one’s used to in New York. Here, a hair-gelled Indian fatso named Nik barks orders to a frail-looking albino girl, Claire. She looks tired and abused. “Grande toffee nut latte with fat-free skim milk. Fat free, I said. That means no fat,” he bellows in a bastardized accent as he snickers. Claire doesn’t feign amusement. She’s new here.

The fixin’s bar is a standalone island of condiments, and it’s crowded with caffeine addicts readying themselves for the next stretch of road. The cylindrical glass sugar container has run dry – the snow white cane powder has been emptied, the sweetness sucked out.

There’s nothing sweet about this place. It’s a runoff of bitterness: New York’s indigestion, America’s acid reflux.

Here are the courses I’m taking. Feel free to salivate, for this is enviable college coursework.

Class 1: The Art of Profile Writing (Dick Polman)

I’ve been a fanboi of the profile genre for some time, and I have written about it twice on this blog (here and here). Dick Polman, one of my favorite writers and teachers (as well as my potential Thesis advisor), leads the course. Here is the course description:

One of the toughest challenges for any journalist is to master the art of profile-writing. In this new course, students will read and critique some of the classic profile articles of the past 40 years, and, most importantly, write profile articles of their own. Writing about people is often very rewarding, but rarely easy. In this course, students will debate the questions that have plagued and energized journalists for generations: How do you persuade somebody that he or she is a worthy topic for a profile? How do you ask sensitive questions? If the person is a celebrity, how do you avoid being manipulated into writing a “puff piece”? Do you tape the interviews or just take notes? How do you structure a profile in order to keep the reader’s attention? Is it even possible to capture the essence of a person on the written page? Are you a friend to the profile subject – or a manipulator? A journalist at The New Yorker recently said that a writer’s relationship with the profile subject is “a kind of love affair.” On the other hand, a famous author once said that a profile writer is typically “gaining their trust and betraying without remorse.” Which is closer to the truth? Students, in addition to writing their own profiles, will kick around these questions while reading some of the best contemporary profile writers, including Susan Orlean, Gay Talese, David Remnick, Mark Bowden, and Judy Bachrach. The instructor will also offer several of his own.

Class 2: The Call of the Wild (Rachael Nichols)

On the heels of my trip to Alaska, I thought this course would be a good pick:

Jack London’s novel, published in 1903, was tremendously popular—but it was not alone. It was written in a climate of intense interest in the U.S. wilderness; only a few decades earlier Theodore Roosevelt had worked to establish Yellowstone as the country’s first national park. While some attempted to memorialize the wild in writing, others hunted for specimens to display in the new museums of natural history in New York and D.C. All, however, feared the wilderness was in danger and in need of protection. This class will chart a history of conservation in the United States, with an emphasis on the turn of the century, to consider the lasting appeal the wilderness has had as a site of economic and cultural capital, and the various ways people have sought to sustain it. We will read works by Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Burroughs, Sarah Orne Jewett, Jack London, Sarah Winnemucca, and Willa Cather. This class will focus on analytical reasoning skills and argumentation, both written and oral. Looking at a range of material, from novels to newspapers, we will experiment with different genres of persuasive writing. Class requirements include weekly blog posts, several short papers and one final long paper.

Class 3: Advanced Journalistic Writing (Dick Polman)

Another course by Dick Polman. It should be a solid one:

This is a how-to course for talented aspiring writers–how to write well in the real world; how to hook the reader and sustain interest; how to develop the journalistic skills that enable a writer to gather, sift and report information. The instructor will share his own real-world experience, as a full-time working journalist for the past three decades. He will be joined on occasion by eminent journalists- including several star journalists from the New York Times–who will address the class and appear at mandatory forums to be held at the Kelly Writers House.

Even though students will read and critique some famous practitioners of non-fiction writing-among them, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr, Truman Capote and Richard Ben Cramer–along with contemporary newspaper storytellers that include the instructor (a national correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer), the emphasis will be on the students’ own writing.

The goal is to inspire students to tap their own potential, gain fresh insights, and feel comfortable enough to share their assigned work-both short and long pieces-with others in the class over the span of the semester. Students will write all kinds of non-fiction pieces, from personal memoirs to long-form features about anything from the Philadelphia scene to campus issues and events. The topics are less important than the craftsmanship; anything can be a great read if it’s written and reported well.,P. Journalistic issues, both practical and ethical, will also be addressed–among them: how to decide who to interview, and how to handle an interviewee; how to use (and not use) the Internet; when to use (or not use) anonymous sources.

Class 4: Transatlantic Romanticism (Jeff Edwards)

This class looks good, though I think the instructor, Dr. Edwards, and I will disagree often. Gauging from the first two sessions, he and I have different conceptions of Romantic literature — mine is more narrow and traditional; his strikes me as a wider and more a product of the modern-day academic avant garde — though his enthusiasm for the texts is contagious and he’s humble in discussion and debate. Here’s the info:

Between the 1760s and the 1860s an Atlantic-rim literary phenomenon termed Romanticism occurred. This was not simply a British movement led by a handful of men (Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, and Wordsworth), but a vast conversation between men and women, Europeans and Americans, blacks and whites. In this class, we will immerse ourselves in the conversations and debates taking place during this time concerning revolution and reform, civilization and nature, gender formation, and slavery and abolition. Among the writers we will read are the five mentioned above, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Margaret Fuller, Quobna Ottobah Cuoano, Phillis Wheately, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Apess, Joanna Baillie, Samsom Occom, Mary Prince, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Lydia Sigourney.

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There are no highways here. No railroad tracks. No hiking trails. No wide concrete landing strips. It’s a place most of us will never go. A place I might never have seen. But this is the most beautiful place on earth. And it’s a place that could be sacrificed forever.

From the air, it appears a pristine wasteland. There are no signs of life. Glaciers and snowfields thawing in the August sun, dissolving into the deep, violent rapids of ceaseless rivers. The jagged banks lined with the green shoots of summer, but no hordes of fishermen. The melted, mossy mush of beaver ponds, but no dams. The stern, white faces of craggy buttes, but no ski tourers or snow machines. Shadowy ravines and humplike hills, but no mountain bikers.

The place is the Bristol Bay region of Alaska, about 200 miles southwest of Anchorage and 70 miles from tidewater at Cook Inlet. And there is life here – this place is the foremost wildlife area in all of Alaska; the source of the most productive commercial and sport salmon fisheries on the planet; home to more than 120,000 caribou and tribes of moose and bear; and not least, the hut-filled habitats of Iliamna, Nondalton, and Newhalen – small villages of indigenous, subsistence peoples who’ve been in the region for thousands of years, building a culture and a lifestyle many would consider third rate and third world.

And in this place sits a great fortune – a treasure trove tucked in the tundra, resting as calmly as the grizzly bear and caribou herds that graze in its footsteps. The treasure, a vast depository of gold and copper, lies at the headwaters of the Mulchatna/Nushagak River and the Newhalen/Kvichak River – two of the most famous salmon producing river drainages on the planet, both of which feed into Bristol Bay, where an estimated 50 million salmon come to spawn each year. Experts say the metals could be worth up to half a trillion dollars.

A proposed open pit mine of almost mythical size – to be called “Pebble Mine” – would extract the metals while altering the landscape irrevocably. The multi-billion-dollar industrial excavation would require: the construction of bridges and dozens of miles of roads and electric power lines across wild, undeveloped terrain; the erection of prodigious pipelines for fuel and rock slurries; the impoundment of large quantities of surface water; and the frenzied transport and use of toxic chemicals.

Pebble Mine would be one of the largest mines ever built. Its open pit would carve 2700 feet into the earth’s crust. It would include the largest dam in the world, a structure larger than Three Gorges Dam in China – made not of concrete but of earth, in order to hold back the toxic waste created in the mining process. Each day, the resource-thirsty operation would soak up as much energy as the city of Anchorage.

The estimated seven billion tons of copper-laden, toxic-waste scrap-crap would have to be contained not for a month or a year but for perpetuity.* Controlling seven billion tons of anything is a shaky proposition in a region fraught with torrential rains, titanic gusts of wind, and winter temperatures swooning to 70 below. An active volcano spews its steam nearby. There’s also a fault line some 30 miles away, a geologic menace credited with several medium-sized earthquakes each year – and one capable of producing a catastrophic shock sure to crumble the constructs of men.

If a small portion of the seven billion tons of rock were not properly contained, if even traces of the toxic dust were to flow into the fish-filled streams, the red salmon – and by extension, all the wildlife in the area – would face extinction. Even copper concentration of 3 or 4 parts per billion in fresh water destroys a salmon’s ability to navigate and thus imperils its ability to spawn.

The impassioned, partisan hullabaloo over ANWR looks like child’s play in light of the proposed Pebble Mine, which is shaping up to be ground zero for the most important environmental, ecological, and political battle this nation has seen in years. In a New York Times feature, Bill Lardley wrote that the war is one “between economies and cultures, between copper and clean water, gold and wild salmon.”

Proponents claim the mine would be an economic godsend to the area. The multinational mining conglomerates, Northern Dynasty Minerals and Anglo American, say they will hire the rural peoples who have yet to enjoy the industrial innovations of the modern era. Others foresee broken promises, as the mining companies import skilled laborers from abroad.

Tribes of Yupik Eskimos, Aleuts, and Athabascan Indians are split. The business bigwigs boast of $70,000 per year salaries – the alluring promise of a better life and nicer things, the fruits of capitalism to which the salmon-smoking simpletons have never been privy. Supporters note that mining yields $200 million a year in state tax revenue; newly swollen government coffers could pave asphalt roads and concrete runways, building better schools and post offices and playgrounds. Copper, credit cards, and crew cuts. Bullion, Jeeps, and Jim Beam benders. The Good Life.

Others say that the real gold shines red, and it’s found in the salmon.** The Alaskan red salmon is a lavish renewable resource, the lifeline of rural Alaska and the darling of the state’s $300 million per year fishing industry. Precious metals are a finite discovery and yield finite riches. The salmon is forever. And so far it has been – from the time their ancient ancestors crossed the Bering Strait up until now, red salmon have been the benevolent beings by which the natives have survived.

The gold and copper lies dormant, waiting to be mined and processed and carted off in diesel trucks…or left alone. The mining process, opponents say, would likely destroy the infinite wealth restored each year by the silent churning of the cogs in the engine of the eternal ecosystem.

At its root, the conflict over Pebble Mine is one of human nature. It’s a battle of now versus later; instant wealth versus delayed gratification; greed versus prudence. At issue is man’s respect for the natural world by which he is sustained; man’s power to harness the pearls of the planet for his own needs and his own desires; and the treatment of the gift bestowed upon man and his transformation of it, for better or poorer, for the re-wrapping, and re-bestowment, of that gift upon the generations of men who will follow.

John T. Shively, head of the foreign consortium that’s pushing for Pebble Mine, may have said it best: “Perhaps it was God who put these two great resources right next to each other…just to see what people would do with them.” Maybe that’s right. It might be a biblical-scale challenge of character and conscience, a tug of war among men over a decision of sacrifice.

Religious doctrine is riddled with annals of sacrifice. Sacrifice, in its noblest manifestations, involves man giving up something he values – a possession or a pastime or a lifestyle or a resource – for something he deems greater. The sacrificial exchange: something ephemeral for something eternal; an object of desire for an object of necessity; the finite for the infinite; less for more.

Something valuable must be sacrificed. What color is the gold?

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*As one mine opponent put it: “Do you know how long perpetuity is?”

**This red-gold trope is borrowed from a film called Red Gold, which is awesome. Read about it here.

We all remember Gordon Gekko, cinema’s epic representation of the 1980s Wall Street titan. Gekko is a slimy master of the universe, an unscrupulous speculator with morals as flexible as the tape he trades. “Greed…is good.”

Less remembered is the the 90s equivalent of Wall Street, the movie Boiler Room. The protagonist signs on at a brokerage house (J.T. Marlin) alongside a bunch of cocky, smooth-talking Turks who seem to be making a lot more money than they deserve by pushing mysterious investments hard-sale style through aggressive cold calling and practiced coercion. It’s a standard pump-and-dump scheme. The salesmen recruit the capital of their unsuspecting clients and deploy the money into the stocks of bogus companies, thereby ratcheting up the share price. The large stakeholders – the top brass at J.T. Marlin and their pals – sell at the top of the run-up right before the shares swoon.

The pump and dump is a tired classic in the annals of market manipulation, and it’s little different from petty thievery. You’re taking the money from the fools you convince to buy. This happens all the time. In some cases, it’s egregious fraud, like the scheme in Boiler Room. In other cases, it’s almost morally defensible. Take Jonathan Lebed, a kid who, at 15 years old, became the first minor to ever face proceedings for stock-market fraud. Michael Lewis wrote a great piece, from which I quote:

[Lebed] had used the Internet to promote stocks from his bedroom in the northern New Jersey suburb of Cedar Grove. Armed only with accounts at A.O.L. and E*Trade, the kid had bought stock and then, ‘using multiple fictitious names,’ posted hundreds of messages on Yahoo Finance message boards recommending that stock to others. He had done this 11 times between September 1999 and February 2000, the S.E.C. said, each time triggering chaos in the stock market. The average daily trading volume of the small companies he dealt in was about 60,000 shares; on the days he posted his messages, volume soared to more than a million shares. More to the point, he had made money…The kid’s take from six months of trading had been nearly $800,000.

While it seems like the kid should be reprimanded, Lebed comes to his own defense quite well:

People who trade stocks, trade based on what they feel will move and they can trade for profit. Nobody makes investment decisions based on reading financial filings. Whether a company is making millions or losing millions, it has no impact on the price of the stock. Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market. If it wasn’t for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn’t be a stock market at all.

Very. Scary. Stuff. My friend Boris may have said it best: “I don’t even know what it means when a stock goes up anymore.”

I just finished a summer gig working for StockTwits, a start-up, Twitter-based, social-media client built to facilitate stock and financial chatter and distribute finance-related content. The question StockTwits users answer is “What are you trading?” in 140 characters. Simply, it’s a service to talk about and talk up your positions. Twitter will probably be defunct before the bureaucrats at the S.E.C. get their pants on, but the new technology could facilitate exactly what Lebed did on message boards and, more generally, what J.T. Marlin does in Boiler Room.

A recent feud on the interweb between Mahalo founder Jason Calcanis and StockTwits head Howard Lindzon touched on the subject. Calcanis said it feels like tweeting trades on StockTwits is pumping positions. Lindzon lashed back on his blog, saying:  “I look forward to the time when a tweet from someone on Stocktwits can move a stock. They will have earned the respect of enough legitimate people to be followed.”

I agree and disagree. Pumpers do have to earn respect to be effective (or else be really clever). But since when does earning respect from others and the following of the masses absolve one from moral lapse? Sometimes it doesn’t. If I’m a pro at technical analysis and I make money through trades demonstrated in real time, it’s conceivable that I could garner a substantial following on Twitter, whereupon I might notice that, gosh, when I buy the stock of a small capitalization company and tweet my trade to my following, I get a bit of an extra boost. Volume up. Price up. Sell. Profit. Money.

Money perverts and corrupts. Win or lose, rich or poor, money shapes us even as we earn it and spend it and lose it. Respect from others can be abused for personal gain. At StockTwits, we’ve been banning and blocking scores of users who seem to be doing exactly this. There are the telltale signs: repeated focus on micro-cap companies or lightly traded stocks; repetitive, unnecessary enthusiasm for a position; and clear use of dual accounts. But there are also the covert tactics. Some users create many fictitious names (like Lebed did) and claim to enter positions, increasing the interest in the pump-and-dump darling of the man behind the avatar. Twitter is viral, so it’s not hard to be relentlessly self-promotional without being discovered until it’s too late. I’ve been sniffing these scammers out all summer, and they only get smarter.

Many times, the pump and dump works. And often, it’s a fraud being perpetrated by a talented trader who has earned the respect and following of legitimate people but then steps over to the dark side of easy money. Who needs technical analysis when you can just take money from the dopes who follow you in?

Other times it’s unintentional. Brian Shannon from Alphatrends is a great trader and a technical analysis pro, and he certainly has the capacity to enact a pump-and-dump scheme at will for his own enrichment. He has nearly 9,000 followers on Twitter, and he runs an awesome premium trading product. I’ve noticed that when Brian enters a position and tweets his entry, people follow him in blindly. He’s so good that great traders like Doug from Wall Street Media swear by the follow-Brian-blindly gambit. (Doug is also one of Covestor’s seminal crew of investment managers.)

I’ve seen this on the StockTwits stream and on my platform concurrently. On June 11th, Brian tweeted an entry – “bot $PLLL 222” – and I thought to myself, hell, if Brian is in maybe I should get in also. But it was too late. I noticed three or four other user’s tweets after Brian’s saying things like “long $PLLL 2.25” and “bought $PLLL 2.27” – and this was all happening in real time, and it was backed up by the tape. One of Brian’s followers lamented that he didn’t enter at $2.25 when he had the chance — so sudden was the spike, he lost the opportunity. The volume in Parallel Petroleum Corporation surged and the share price jumped. From the numbers, it appeared that everyone who was buying shares in this tiny, rinky dink energy company was on StockTwits. Seven minutes after his initial post, Brian tweeted that he sold part of $PLLL at 2.29. Not a bad way to make a few bucks. 3% profit. You do the math.

This is a memorable case I refer to for its demonstrative effect, not to criticize Brian. I’m familiar with Brian’s trading and I use his premium service, and I’m convinced that his morals are beyond reproach and his intent is pure. I am sure the PLLL trade was one he pursued for other reasons. It was a speculative play that he didn’t even mention to his premium subscribers. Also, at day’s end, he was still holding a position in the stock. Moreover, Brian focuses almost exclusively on heavily-traded stocks of mid- and large-cap companies. His premium members are rarely (if ever) given an entry instruction on a micro-cap stock that a bunch of rogue, tweet-tastic traders could move. (Save the heavy lifting for the Goldman machines, kiddos.)

Brian’s innocence notwithstanding, it’s easy to see how a person, having built up a following and demonstrated speculative skill, could engineer a quick, easy pump-and-dump scheme for a great profit.

I suspect that the more savvy and sinister pumpers utilize many different Twitter accounts and build followings through the most covert methods. They claim to trade larger cap stocks too, as if to take the dogs off the scent. They don’t pump and dump every time. They show their followers a profit, sometimes, before sticking them really deep on a centi-million-dollar market-cap crap-trap. They work in groups. Bulls On Wall Street is a lame StockTwits alternative that was just recently launched by a cadre of pennystock pumping, speculator-deviants whom StockTwits banned for their market-milking machinations.

So Jason Calcanis may have a point. In some cases, tweeting a trade is pumping (both intentional and unintentional) and in other cases it’s clearly not. When Howard mentions that he’s bought a bucketful of Wal-Mart shares, that’s not pumping. When the crew from Bulls on Wall Street put their stamp on a stock, cavet emptor people. The internet is supposed to make everything transparent. But the “transparency” afforded by emerging technology can be harnessed for evil ends. Transparency can muddy as well as enlighten.

It’s fundamentally about human nature. In a way, we’re all pumpers. We’re always grinding, always chasing that trade. Always on the lookout for The. Big. Score. We’re all looking out for our own self-interest. We want money and we want it right now. We want in, baby. Let’s trade.

The introductory scene from Boiler Room is instructive here. The sentiment shared is one attractive to me and many others:

The $87 Million lottery winner, that kid actor that just made 20 million on his last movie, that internet stock that shot through the roof, you could have made millions if you had just gotten in early, and that’s exactly what I wanted to do: get in. I didn’t want to be an innovator any more. I just wanted to make the quick and easy buck. I just wanted in. The Notorious BIG said it best: ‘Either you’re slingin’ crack-rock, or you’ve got a wicked jump-shot.’ Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There’s no honor in taking that after school job at Mickey Dee’s…honor’s in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slinging crack-rock: I became a stock broker.

We just want in. But don’t forget, how you get there matters. A man is only as good as his last trade. You’re good or bad, honest or dishonest, noble or ignoble. Are you willing to trade character for cash, morals for money, principles for power? Those are the most important trades or non-trades we make in this life. Believe that.