How did we human beings become the hypersocial creatures we are today?
The biologist E. O. Wilson credits fire, among other causes. In a recent history of human evolution, Wilson offers the following explanation: Fire was precious because it flushed animals out of the brush, then made it possible for people to cook them. Campfires had to be guarded, which made them like “nests” and made us feel safe enough to be “eusocial” or altruistic. Sounds plausible to me.
Fortey’s dozen or so subjects have survived the many cataclysms the planet has thrown at them over the past 450 million years. As if repeated earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and ice sheets weren’t enough, there were two mass-extinction events. The best known was the disaster 65 million years ago that led to the downfall of the dinosaurs. We’re less familiar with the more devastating earlier extinction — about 251 million years ago — that erased 90 percent of life from the sea and almost as large a percentage of the little things struggling on land. The horseshoe crab made it through; its fossil remains date from 450 million years ago.
The novel begins with Lewis’s return to his mother’s home in Wichita, Kan., from New York, where he has just graduated from Columbia. His pompous professor father, Virgil, expects him to attend graduate school, though Lewis is unsure of his next step. His girlfriend has left him, and his divorced, eccentric mother, Abby — who invests in one “multilevel marketing” scheme after another — has “half-facetiously” suggested he return to “the healing powers of the Great Plains,” where she has begun a storm-chasing business.
The first script I submitted was reverse-engineered from a survey of viral videos: it featured a hot girl, my cat, a catchy song and a child being humiliated. It was ix-nayed without much discussion — presumably because it was not remotely SFW — so I dutifully wrote a more conventional version whose only concession to plebeian taste was a brief image of Ulysses S. Grant in drag. Filming this video was not exactly grueling, since it forced my friend and co-star Boyd to visit me in New York and required us to drink free beer before noon. My own reaction on seeing the final cut was to contemplate, for the first time in my life, getting cosmetic surgery, but people who’ve seen it tell me it’s funny and melancholic and successfully conveys the spirit of the book. I now have hopes, I think not wholly unjustified, of joining that pantheon shared by the Star Wars Kid, Obama Girl and the internationally renowned cat Maru.
Enter Eric Alterman, defiant to the last. In 2008, this columnist and media critic published a handbook called “Why We’re Liberals,” a crisply written and emphatically argued retort to the Coulters, Hannitys and others for whom liberalism is a strain of fascism, totalitarianism, socialism and overmothering (why choose?). Alterman’s new book, “The Cause,” written with an assist from the historian Kevin Mattson, is something of a companion volume: a history of liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to the present. (Mattson’s role is a bit ambiguous; in the book’s acknowledgments, Alterman credits him with providing “raw material.”)