“Again I Saved Someone Today”

The bridge is four miles long. There are trains on the lower level, four lanes of traffic run above, and a sea of thousands of people walk it every day, crossing the Yangtzhe into Nanjing, a city of seven million. It’s estimated that one person jumps off every week. Mr. Chen Si has decided to try to stop them.

He’s often on his own, on foot or on a moped, scanning the crowds for signs of distress. He blogs about the experience. “This morning at 10:20 a.m. I saved a middle-aged woman on the east side of the bridge not 300 meters from the south end,” he wrote on January 16. “At the time I saved her, this woman had already put half her body over the bridge railing. Two bridge repairmen and I pulled her back.” Another morning, he slipped and cut his leg, and had to turn around. “Who knows what happened on the bridge that afternoon?” he wrote. “Beware heavy thoughts.”

Michael Paterniti recently visited with Mr. Chen for GQ; you can hear all about it on the latest episode of This American Life, and read translated selections from the blog here. In January of this year, Mr. Chen tallied up his efforts. “I have saved 174 people from committing suicide” since he began volunteering his time in 2003, he wrote. He’d spent 646 days on the bridge and counseled over 2,000 people.

We all fantasize about saving lives. We watch shows about doctors and firefighters, movies about superheroes and cops. We dream that our nervous, cloudy assessments of ourselves, of our productivity or creativity or virtue, could be cleanly overriden by that one act.

Of course, most of us don’t, because it takes a lot of work. What makes someone actually do it? What makes them show up day after day, year after year on a bridge far too long to be patrolled by one man? Surely the scales of virtue, in that selfish accounting, are already firmly in his favor.

Mr. Chen says he began patrolling after reading a newspaper article about bridge suicides, but of course thousands, maybe millions of others read that same story. There may be no explanation. On August 10, 2008, he wrote:

Saturday afternoon at 1:40 p.m., a young woman 300 meters from the south end of the bridge climbed onto the bridge railing. I immediately started my moped, but because I accelerated too quickly, the moped leaked oil and ignited. I had to run to her, but when I was 200 meters away she jumped into the Yangtze. He silhouette was visible in water at a spot 50 meters away, and I could still hear her yelling for help until a large wave obscured her from view!

The moped couldn’t be repaired, but Mr. Chen never thought of quitting. “Ah!” he wrote. “I’ll have to use my short legs!”

How The Internet Sees You

Once again, Facebook’s privacy options are in the news, with recent changes and ancient text messages fueling renewed concern. Provocative discussions of our changing expectations and norms are everywhere.

One abstract, and rather surprising, way of looking at your online footprint can be reached here. Aaron Zinman built the Personas engine for the MIT Media Lab, and it calls up one answer to the question “How does the Internet see you?” The colorful display changes each time you run it.

Even optimists and technophiles, and I count myself among them, would do well to admit that our networking is unprecedented, and consequences for law enforcement, politics, finance, friendship, and our workplaces are truly unknown.

I have not quit Facebook, like some are loudly recommending. I was, however, curious enough to spend a full half-hour examining and adjusting every single privacy setting on my account (top right hand side, Account > Privacy Settings). I recommend you do, too. I found very few of the settings where I wanted them.

Happy Days for Hitler

Nicole Fox got to India last fall. Once she found an apartment and started her American India Foundation Public Service Corps placement at Y.R.G. Care, an AIDS research and outreach clinic, she signed up for a few extracirriculars. “Mondays and Fridays are my gym days, Tuesdays and Thursdays are my hip-hop/Bollywood dancing days… and Wednesdays are Tamil lessons,” she wrote to her stunned friends and family. After a quick stop in Hanoi for a World Health Organization conference on dengue, she returned to work, took trips all around the subcontinent, and found time for a little rockclimbing. That’s who Nicole is.

Hitler… well, let’s start right there. “English people are not liking my name, because of German Hitler long time ago,” he cheerfully explained to Nicole the day they met at a busy tea stand. “But people here are not knowing,” he reassured her, “so Hitler is okay in India.”

Fearless and forward, Hitler drives an autorickshaw, a kind of motorized taxi, around the streets of Chennai. In his effusive “smoker’s gargle,” he delivers pronouncements like, “All life good life. Happy days!” He has a unique gift for loving life, and passing on that appreciation. Everyone who gets on his auto leaves smiling.

A few chance encounters turned Nicole into a fast friend. Once, Hitler spotted her at the bus stop and pulled over. As they drove, “fast even by normally crazy rickshaw standards,” he filled her in on his sick wife, the school for handicapped children where he sometimes works, and his life philosophy, dodging streetlife and livestock the whole time. Numbers and invitations were exchanged. “I think God think very well of Hitler today, to see my friend again,” he said. “I very thankful for good luck and wonderful life. All good life always!”

You can read Hitler’s story at Happy Days for Hitler, where Nicole is chronicling his struggle to purchase his own auto; about $660 USD would change his life. His wife’s medical bills, the debts from renting the rickshaw, and a new baby on the way won’t make it easy, but Hitler is unflappable. He will write “Happy Day” across the front of his auto when he gets it, he says. “Because now is today, and today is happy.”

“If you can spare a few dollars, all of them go so far here,” Nicole writes. You can donate here. “No matter what else I do this year, I would be most proud if my last view at the airport was Hitler waving from his own auto.”

Infoviz Art

I went for the naked people, and they didn’t disapoint: The Artist is Present, the big-deal performace art retrospective at MoMA through May 31, is well worth the trip. A few of Marina Abramović’s pieces broke through my instinctive skepticism, doing wierd and entrancing things to the passing of time. A few didn’t, but were interesting enough anyway. See it for yourself.

On our way out, my friend and I found ourselves in front of a big screen filled with bobbing pink baloons. Each represented a real profile pulled from a dating website; touching the screen sorted them by age, sex, opening and closing lines, ideal first dates. You were invited to explore the swirling shapes, wondering about the people on the other side, or try your hand at avatar matchmaking.

Around the corner were other examples of “infoviz” art, creative representaions of real world data. Carefully planned and yet largely out of the artist’s control, data mining and information visualization is fertile ground. Edits to Wikipedia entries, airplane and taxi traffic, and computers pondering chess moves translate surprisingly well to museum walls.

Every morning, planes take off in a wave that rolls across the country with the rising sun. Rendered in glowing white against blank black in a looping video, this looks like fireworks, or anemone orgasms. Wonder about all those journeys and destinations; watch the cycles, like breaths. The sensual and cerebral layer deliciously.

Explore more artist/data collaborations in this Slate slideshow. Don’t miss the massive and engrossing piece on break-ups, or the eerie Radiohead music video. Of course, most data visualization doesn’t get labeled fine art, but it can be as fascinating and moving as anything in a museum: check out some of the best here and here.

Broadcast Journalism 101

Ever watch the news and think, where have I seen this before? BBC 4 shows us how it’s done.

I have to agree with those randomly selected strangers: I really don’t care what randomly selected strangers think.

History of The World: Part 1 (through 100)

The British Museum is producing a series of stories attempting to tell the story of the human race. They selected 100 objects from their collection, and with BBC Radio 4, are building fifteen minutes of radio around each, releasing them in chronological order.

It’s worth noting the disenchantment over how the museum acquired these pieces, and the institution’s claims to universal importance; the imperial roots of this collection are clearly audible as you listen. The skillful storytelling and the range of experts you’ll hear goes a long way towards selling this project despite that, but the gorgeous story itself is the draw here: how humanity developed, grew, and changed over these last thousands of years.

No one account can do world history justice, but it would be criminal to give up trying. Nothing gives me a greater thrill than great big stories about the shape of the human story, and like other entries in this genre, A History of the World reminds you how complex and amazing this story really is.

We have accountants to thank, for example, for our species’ most important achievement: writing. What we would call literature was content with spoken language, memorized and performed generation after generation. The first bureaucrats, on the other hand, looked to reliable, physical accounting to administer an expanding state. Some of the earliest surviving writing concerns itself with rationing beer in 3000 BC.

It doesn’t hurt that Radio 4 delivers everything in a British accent and peppered with dry humor. One of the learned experts, on the topic of beer as currency, quips, “no liquidity crisis here.” Then he chuckles to himself. It’s so bad it’s awesome.

You can stream episodes here, but the site’s pretty messy. I recommend downloading the podcasts.

An article in The Economist first convinced me this project was worth following. The kicker is delicious: “Of the 100 objects, only one has not been selected yet. Mr MacGregor is waiting until the last possible moment to pick out the best symbol of our own time. Suggestions, please, on a postcard to: British Museum, London WC1B 3DG.”

“We Are Searching For Haiti”

This week Studio 360, an arts and culture podcast, went to Brooklyn to profile Djarara. All fifteen members of the rara band lost someone in the earthquake. The musicians do a beautiful job explaining how and why they look to music and tradition in the aftermath of the disaster. “Haiti will get better,” one says. “We are searching for Haiti. For a better Haiti… But don’t worry. Haiti will be Haiti again.” Listen:

Courage in Creole

Explore Haitian aid donations here (J.P.Morgan Chase, 1 million; Czech Republic, 1.25 million; Gisele Bundchen, 1.5 million). The Red Cross was reporting on January 18th that around half of its donations, or seven million dollars, had come in by text.

Djarara in Prospect Park

Learn more about rara and Studio 360.

See You There

How I Learned I Might Be Obsessed is tonight at Happy Ending, 302 Broome Street (it’s the hot pink awning that says XIE HE HEALTH CLUB), at eight. Tracy Rowland, Jeff Simmermon, Christen Clifford, Erin Bradley and Joel Derfner will be reading. Come!

Sons of an Illustrious Father graciously let me interview them all today and record them practicing for their upcoming show: tomorrow night at ten, Lit Lounge, 93 2nd Ave. Some day soon it’ll all be worked into the radio show.

The Sons, in their kitchen, being cute.

Also some day soon: the calendar will be updated, the blogging will resume, and the actual show will commence. Stay tuned!

Good Advice from Ira Glass

This was sent to me over the holidays, and made my month. The advice is priceless and perceptive, and I think almost everyone can relate: no one gets into game design because they want to make mediocre games, or takes up an instrument if they’re not in love with what music can do. Since it’s delivered by Ira Glass, who every week on This American Life reminds me how great radio can be, it felt like a special gift. Enjoy.

Remember: you’ve got to be a warrior. Best of luck to you all.