Sick of the US election dominating all media coverage? Dreaming of a future date, perhaps two weeks away, when it’s possible that headlines won’t feature Sarah Palin?

You could always turn to international news, where the question seems to be, “What does the rest of the world think about the US election?”

In other words, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”

That was more or less my response some months ago when some of the Global Voices team came to me and suggested we try to cover the US elections through the eyes of the developing world. Through the brilliant work of Amira Al Hussaini, support of authors like Hoa Quach and others, we’ve put together Voices Without Votes, a website that collects international blog perspectives on the US elections. Read today and you’ll discover reports on a shortage of pro-Obama yamulkes,
Voices without Votes, comments from the Philippines about a suspicious misspelling on New York ballots, and the reasons Cubans are hoping for an Obama victory. It’s been one of our most successful projects and one that I’m now inordinately proud of.

Just shows what I know.

Dominique Moisi at Real Clear World has an interesting essay wondering whether Europeans are “blue state voters” and Asians are “red staters”. Her argument is that Asians may be resistant to change and concerned about an Obama victory:

…a majority of Asian elites are awaiting the growing possibility of an Obama victory with some bewilderment and even apprehension.

For example, Japanese elites tend to favor continuity over change. In their mind, the hard power of the United States is more important than its soft power, and their vision of a United States that is “bound to lead” is largely unchanged. For them, Washington is above all the strategic counterweight needed to balance Beijing.

Recent image from theworldfor.com.

Guess those Asian elites aren’t participating in the various online polls designed to show how the world would choose to vote. TheWorldFor.com has Obama leading McCain 89%-11%, with only Afghanistan, the Ukraine and the Svalbard Islands favoring the Republican. Those change-phobic Japanese favor Obama 89-11, the same as the rest of the population sample.

Using a similarly unauthoritative methodology (allow people to identify whatever country they represent), the Economist has assigned the world an electoral college, offering electoral votes based on population. Obama’s dominating that competition, 8,954 to 88, with McCain claiming votes from Sudan, Georgia, Cuba and Macedonia. (How’s that for a voting bloc?) Oh, and the Japanese are 86/14 for Obama in their poll.

Foreign Policy’s map is lots more interesting to me, though somewhat less reassuring to fellow Obama supporters. Using data from the Gallup World Poll – which surveys people in 140 countries – they asked slightly more complex questions than “Obama or McCain?” Voters had the option to answer that they didn’t know or refused to answer. And they asked a second question – whether voters thought the US election would affect their own lives.

The addition of the third answer – don’t know or don’t care – is a fascinating one. In the Phillipines – one of the four countries where Gallup saw an advantage for McCain (28 versus 20), the majority (52%) didn’t express an opinion. Don’t know was the overwhelming majority in India, where 7% favor Obama, 2% McCain and 91% don’t have an opinion. Only 6% of Indian voters thought the US presidential election mattered to them – 87% answered that they didn’t know on that question as well. Given the shortage of undecided voters at this stage of the endless US election, perhaps it would behoove Obama and McCain to move their campaigns to the swing states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Even more interesting are the people who actively assert that the US presidency won’t make a difference to their country. 72% of people in Palestine state that it won’t matter who becomes the US president. (Israel is not included in the survey.) They lead a pack of nations that includes oil-rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, conflict-ridden Burundi, Pakistan and Lebanon, and some nations that are harder to explain: Estonia, Peru, Chile, Austria. The Palestinians, unfortunately, are probably right. And so are the Burundians, I fear.

For anyone who hopes that global support for Obama leads inexorably to victory… well, it’s worth reading up what happened when The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” urged readers of that liberal British newspaper to send letters to citizens in a swing county of a swing state. Some argue that the letters – which were not well-received by many voters – swung the county for Bush instead of for Kerry.

One way or another, it’s safe to say that you won’t hear Obama claiming global support via any of these polls any time soon.

In the meantime, I’m getting a great deal more from the comments from individual bloggers from the rest of the world. An interesting – and cautionary – note from Naseen Tarawnah of the excellent Black Iris blog (from Amman, Jordan):

My reluctance to get on the Obama bandwagon has mostly been due to the fact that he has this seemingly cult-like following. He is seen as this messiah of change, and is described and depicted as almost prophet-like. I have a problem with anyone who puts that much faith in a single politician, especially an American president. If the on-going history of America has shown the world anything, it’s that change (in the positive sense of the word) is not a big factor in a US presidency. So I am constantly astonished by any Arab who is entranced by Obama and have to constantly remind myself that most of the fan base in this part of the world comes from a particular more-westernized demographic and have been swallowed up by the wave of US election culture that is dominated by Obama. Everyone is entitled to their own perceptions but I remain realistic to the degree of change that is expected with either candidate in the Oval Office.

• jra%u2019s thoughts %u203A Ethan Zuckerman%u2019s Rules for Innovation
  A useful riff on my African innovation talk, arguing that a lot of NGO-driven, outside of African innovation won't work and can be damaging to local innovators.
  (tags: africa ict4d mine blog innovation)
• IFEX ::
  IFEX documents denial of service attacks against activist media in Tunisia and Burma. There have been lots of reports that important independent media outlets are starting to suffer DDOS attacks and become inaccessible – the belief is that repressive governments are "renting" DDOS, perhaps from Russian hackers
  (tags: journalism freespeech tunisia burma hacking internet conflict)
• Q&A: Journey's Arnel Pineda : Rolling Stone
  An interview with Journey's Arnel Pineda about his transition into working with the band. An edited version of the interview made it sound as if Pineda were having difficulties in his new role – this interview includes some strong comments from the Filipino community suggesting that people are mischaracterizing and misunderstanding Pineda's concerns about his role with Journey.
  (tags: music xenohilia globalization journey)

Four talks in eight days, four cities in three countries. (Tihany, Hungary; Barcelona, Spain; Camden, ME; Manchester, NH). I’ve come to two conclusions. One, I need to travel less. Two, I really love librarians.

I’ve had two chances recently to speak about homophily, xenophilia, bridge figures and disconnection to audiences of librarians, and the talks have been extremely good fun. The problems associated with creating serendipity are ones librarians are often well acquainted with. I finished the talk (very well reported at the NELA conference blog) and immediately fielded questions about how librarians could help patrons stumble onto serendipitious information about Nigeria or Niue. (A couple of ideas that came up: Leverage immigrant populations in your communities and ask people to suggest the best books to help neighbors understand their communities and home countries. Pick stories being featured in local or national newspapers and put up collections of resources associated with the countries or issues covered.)

I keep telling myself that I need to speak less and write more. Perhaps the answer is that I need to speak more to audiences that give me excellent and critical feedback, as I got yesterday. Good fun. Thanks to everyone at the New England Library Association for inviting me and for such a fun event.

It’s been good fun hanging out in Barcelona with my fellow speakers, both the wonderful organizers like Juan Freire and Ismael Peña-Lopez and guests like Carol Darr, Andrew Rasiej and Tom Steinberg. Tom was kind enough to hunt me down for dinner on Thursday, and we had an excellent conversation that I’ve been chewing over for the past 48 hours.

Tom is the brilliant founder of MySociety, a British organization that it relentless in its quest to make UK politics more open and participatory. Smart people around the world look to Tom and the folks he works with for ideas on how to make elected officials more accountable, link disconnected people in local communities and use distributed reporting to document social ills and push for change. Given the opportunity to pin Tom down for insights, I asked him about his thoughts on getting people to connect with people across national and cultural lines.

This can be a tricky topic for political organizers. Most organizers are deeply concerned about the erosion of local civic life, as documented by thinkers like Robert Putnam. It’s easy to misunderstand my obsession with pushing people to connect across lingustic, cultural and national barriers as a lack of interest in connecting locally. I see a great deal of importance in both, though I’m sobered by Bill Bishop’s new book, “The Big Sort“, which makes a pretty good case that Americans are sorting ourselves into homophily traps geographically, and that connecting with our neighbors may increasingly mean connecting with people who share our perspectives and prejudices.

Rather than fighting the local versus global battle, Tom offered interesting and provocative advice about what might work to get people who aren’t otherwise inclined to connect to do so. His projects are finding interesting ways to use games to get participation that would otherwise be difficult to organize. For instance, MySociety wanted to align thousands of hours of taped debates in the House of Parliament with transcripts, so that these videos would be wholly searchable. When automatic methods failed, he and his team built a tool that asked users to complete a simple task – watch a video and push a button when a certain person began speaking. Participants would be scored on “league tables” for the number of times they’d pushed the button, aligning the video – some participants ended up coding hundreds of videos for the project, and all the video was tagged within a few weeks.

Using the same technique, Tom’s now trying to get people to classify Yahoo groups for him, specifically Tahoo groups that mention the term “residents” or “neighborhood”. There are 45,000 of these groups, and Tom wants to know what geographies they address. That way, he can build a service where you send a text message containing your zip code to his servers, and they respond with information on online groups you could join that cover issues in your neighborhood or community. (You should pitch in and help him, if you have a chance.)

So riffing on the idea of games and league tables, Tom wondered whether the way to engineer more international connection is football. Specifically, he suggested that Global Voices or some similarly globalizing entity organize online chats around World Cup matches. Chats would invite nationals from both sides represented – Ghana versus Brazil, for instance – to chat online during the game. Trashtalking would be heartily encouraged, but the hope would be to get beyond insults to an actual conversation about football heroes, national pride, politics, etc. I’m guessing this would require a certain amount of careful engineering – we’d probably limit participation so that one side didn’t overwhelm the other (20 Brazilians, 20 Ghanaians per chatroom, for instance) and recruit some bridge-figures, people who spoke both English and Portuguese and had some understanding of each country and culture.

Tom offered another idea, which is either a great way to start intercultural conversations or a surefire way to start a war. He proposes putting together an online database of regional and national prejudices, offering as an example a recent trip he took to Germany where conference organizers declared they’d be taking “a Belgian lunch”, i.e., a very long lunch. What do expressions like this reveal about what we think about one another? Are these opportunities for conversation about cultural quirks, or are these invitations to flamewars and fisticuffs? (I offered the data point that, when I visited Yerevan, Armenia, a few years ago, one of my hosts excused himself to go to the bathroom with the phrase, “I need to visit the Turkish embassy.”)

Ghana’s one of the healthiest societies I’ve ever seen in terms of resolving tensions between ethnic groups. One of the reasons, I think, is a healthy sense of humor. A great deal of Ghanaian humor depends on ethnic jokes and laughing at each other’s perceived quirks. (I watched a Ghanaian comedian bring the house down in Accra by stepping onto stage and singing a song. When my companion finally recovered enough to explain the joke to me, she told me, “He’s an Ewe, and he’s singing a Ga song, but he’s singing it in Twi.” And then she collapsed into laughter again. Guess you had to be there.) So maybe a wikipedia of ethnic stereotype – Tom calls it a “hatebase”, but I prefer the time “haterbase” – isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds in sparking conversation about and across our differences.

I suspect I’ll be rolling around Tom’s ideas around games and crowdsourcing until I can think of a clever way to harness this power for Global Voices. We are, after all, a community based around voluntary participation – finding a way to make that participation more fun, less involved and easier to accomplish is probably a smart thing to think about. I susect that folks like Tom are likely to find a profitable line of work somewhere soon figuring out how complex problems can be broken into crowdsourcing tasks and outsourced either to volunteers or to systems like Mechanical Turk.

Talking about the decision to use volunteers rather than Turkers, Tom argues that people are looking for ways to participate in useful projects. That squares with my experiences as well. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, I lent a hand recruting volunteers to enter data on missing persons in the southeastern US – we were completely overwhelmed by people’s interest, and a task we thought might take two weeks was done overnight. I’ve lately been wondering whether one of the keys to getting people interested in international news is attaching the ability to get involved in social change projects. It seems logical that people who are interested in changing circumstances in Darfur are likely to be especially interested in news from Sudan. Is it possible that this runs in the other direction as well, that attaching an opportunity to get involved with a protest or a fundraising effort would make people more likely to read a story on Somalia?

In other words, it was a very good decision to have dinner with Tom, rather than staying in my hotel room and answering email. That’s now my official excuse for everyone’s email I’ve recently failed to answer…

A quick post, but a beautiful story that I wanted to share.

You’ve seen the image from the 1968 Olympics. Two American runners – Tommie Smith and John Carlos – stand on the medals stand, bow their heads and raise their fists in the air in a black power salute. They were promptly ejected from the US olympic team, but the image of their protest is one of the lasting icons of the Olympics and a powerful statement about race relations in America – and globally – in the 1960s.

In an excellent piece for the BBC, Caroline Frost reminds us that there was a third man on the podium, silver medalist Peter Norman. An Australian caucasian, Norman had no special reason to be in solidarity with his co-medalists. But he was – it was he who suggested Smith and Carlos share a pair of black gloves when Carlos discovered he’d forgotten his. And Norman wore a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights which Smith and Carlos had given him.

The reaction from the Australian athletic community was swift and harsh. Norman was censured, and was left off the subsequent Olympic team. 32 years later, when the Olympics came to Sydney, he was the only Aussie olympian not invited to participate in the opening ceremony. The US olympians embraced him instead, inviting him to stay in their lodgings during the game and honoring his role in the civil rights struggle. When he died two years ago, Carlos and Smith travelled to Melbourne to serve as his pallbearers and to offer eulogies.

The comment thread on Frost’s story is interesting as well. Some Aussies are saddened to learn about a sad chapter of their Olympic history; some Americans (myself included) are proud that our athletes honored Norman’s solidarity. John Turnbull from the UK offers a contrasting point of view:

People should be careful how they conduct themselves when representing their country. Something that a lot of international sportsmen and women all too easily forget. The moment you accept the invitation to wear that jersey, and represent your nation, you must accept that your personal views are no longer your primary objective. I have great respect for men and women who stand up for their beliefs, but I wonder how much more Mr Norman could have achieved if he had become a spokesperson for the subject and used his fame from the Olympics as a springboard, rather than ending his career (albeit unfairly) under a shadow.

Don’t especially agree with that point of view, but thought this was one of those well-crafted stories that does a great job of inviting reactions, positive and negative.

One of the great fears as a speakeris that you’re going to give a talk too similar to the person you’re sharing the stage with. Clay Shirky and I gave talks at an event a year or so back, and discovered that we were using two of the same stories in our presentations. (I, unfortunately, found this out by listening to Clay’s talk and frantically editing mine in response.)

That wasn’t a problem today at the seminar on the Information Society in Barcelona I’m participating in. I had the good fortune to share the stage with Carlos Domingo, who runs the R&D unit for Spanish telephone giant, Telefonica. Domingo is working hard to bring some of the most successful tools and techniques of web 2.0 into a large and often conservative telehone company. He’s a classic
early adopter, with a Nabaztag and a Pleo in his office, and a blog that he’s abandoning so he can spend more time Twittering.

Inside Telefonica, Domingo’s hoping to unlock information and increase communication between members of his team by aggresively embracing social media. Rather than trying to dig ideas out of a giant document repository, the knowledge management system that so many large companies have embraced, he’s instituted an internal video sharing service. Researchers working on projects get two minutes to explain their work to their colleagues – some break the rules and run long, but most as well-behaved, and it’s possible to get the gist of most projects with just a few seconds of video, making it far easier to surf through than a huge document repository. (I assume they’re heavily tagged and annotated to make them highly searchable.) Using Yammer, 350 members of his team share ideas on a Twitter-like network that’s closed to the company, and encourages employees to share what they’re working on and what problems they could use help with.

I’d been asked by the organizers to talk about how NGOs and social change organizations innovate, with the special challenge that I wasn’t supposed to celebrate innovative projects so much as I was to talk about the process of innovation. As I thought about this, I realized that I a) didn’t have much understanding of how social entrepreneurs innovate and b) didn’t have much confidence that social entrepreneurs generally did a good job of innovating with social media tools. Generally, I think that social entrepreneurs place far too much faith in social media tools and assume that they’ll be more popular, useful and powerful than they actually turn out to be.

So I offered a talk about some very different types of innovation – African innovations including the zeer pot, William Kamkwamba’s windmill, biomass charcoal, and endless examples of innovation using mobile phones. My argument was that innovation often comes from unusual and difficult circumstances – constraints – and that it’s often wiser to look for innovation in places where people are trying to solve difficult, concrete problems rather than where smart people are sketching ideas on blank canvases.

I offered seven rules that appear to help explain how (some) developing world innovation proceeds:

- innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)

- don’t fight culture (If people cook by stirring their stews, they’re not going to use a solar oven, no matter what you do to market it. Make them a better stove instead.)

- embrace market mechanisms (Giving stuff away rarely works as well as selling it.)

- innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)

- problems are not always obvious from afar (You really have to live for a while in a society where no one has currency larger than a $1 bill to understand the importance of money via mobile phones.)

- what you have matters more than what you lack (If you’ve got a bicycle, consider what you can build based on that, rather than worrying about not having a car, a truck, a metal shop.)

- infrastructure can beget infrastructure (By building mobile phone infrastructure, we may be building power infrastructure for Africa – see my writings on incremental infrastructure.)

The most experimental part of a very experimental talk was applying these seven principles to three ICT4D experiments – One Laptop Per Child, Kiva and Global Voices. Ismael has a review of my talk including the scores I offer for each of the projects on these criteria.

The talk was pretty well received, and it’s great, great fun to try out new ideas on stage. I’m looking forward to thinking through whether these seven rules are the best way to characterise the lessons of the sorts of innovations I watch on sites like Afrigadget, and just what these rules mean for those of us trying to use internet tools for social change – thanks to my friends in Barcelona for a chance to start playing with these ideas, live on stage.

Just as it’s hard to argue with finding oneself on the shores of Lake Balaton, I’m hard pressed to find anything to complain about now that I find myself in Barcelona.

Actually, I have a single complaint about my time in Hungary – someone needs to tell these people that it’s autumn. I decided to make a concession to European formality and give my talk wearing a suit. As it’s late October, I brought a lightweight wool suit. But it was about 25C outside, and roughly 45C under the lights on stage where I gave my talk, and I spent much of my time on stage with the right hand on the mouse and my left wiping my brow with a handkerchief. One of the people who heard the speech approached me afterwards and told me, “That wasn’t public speaking, that was public sweating.” Great. I always prefer to be known for my perspiration than for my perspicacity.

I’m in Barcelona for a three-day workshop being organized by friends at CUIMPB. The course is called “Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens“, and I’m speaking on the final day, on the general topic of “innovation”. I’m still working through what this will entail – the friend who asked me to speak suggested that I talk about innovation in the NGO sector. I spent a couple of days thinking about this and concluded that most NGOs I’ve worked with innovate really slowly, if at all, and my talk now is focusing on innovating from positions of constraint… which lets me point to lots of brilliant African examples via Afrigadget. It’ll all come into focus in the next 24 hours, I’m sure. (It better.)

Unlike Tihany, I’ve been to Barcelona before. I’ve spent almost no leisure time in Europe – I generally get to see cities in the few hours before and after business or speaking commitments – but I took myself for vacation in Barcelona a few years ago, “killing time” between a meeting in London and one in Rome with three days of Gaudí, Picasso and arroz negro. So, as I sit here outlining slides for Friday’s talk and trying to catch up on the vast pile of writing assignments I owe various people, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I can’t tell myself, “You’ve never seen this city before – you’ve got to get out and experience the city.” On the other hand, I have a sense for just how remarkably beautiful it is, which makes me want to show up Friday with no slides at all and talk about all the gorgeous buildings I spent Thursday staring at.

Barcelona, from one of the steeples of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia, taken on a previous trip. It’s really one of those buildings you need to see before you die.

My solution so far has been to run errands and get lost in the process. I went out for a bottle of water earlier today and wandered aimlessly for an hour, encountering:
- a vast cathedral containing a cloistered garden with moss-covered fountains
- pedestrian malls crowded with teenagers with complex designs shaved into their hair
- an open air pet market
- elderly couples dancing on street corners, surrounded by a crowd of admirers
- baguettes stuffed with Iberian ham

In typical fashion, I also failed to buy a bottle of water. At the moment, that’s my only complaint.

• Ghana News | Feature Article | Saving African Industry Through Trade
  Bright Simons profiles an ambitious new effort by software entrepreneur Herman Chinnery-Hesse to build a trade system linking artisans in rural areas to online commerce via a combination of SMS, web and online currency. Looking forward to learning more about Hesse's new "protocol" for online African trade.
  (tags: africa ghana economics trade craft software commerce)
• From God to Verse Blog Archive Genesis 1
  Been meaning to read the first five books of the Old Testament? Been waiting until someone translated them into rhyming couplets? Wait no longer. My friend Seth Brown presents "From God to Verse", the Torah in rhyme. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's quite wonderful, and an easy way to get a dose of biblical text, one chapter per week, in verse.
  (tags: friends funny religion bible verse humor torah judaism christianity text translation)

My backyard, Lanesboro, MA

It’s so beautiful in the Berkshires this time of year that it’s a little dangerous to drive. Rachel and I went into Williamstown on Saturday to buy some groceries and get our mail, and nearly rear-ended several drivers who stopped at arbitrary intervals to gawk at the leaves.

It’s hard to blame them. I always feel like a sucker when I leave town at this time of year. I know I’m missing one of a couple dozen perfect days – warm in the sunshine, cold in the shade, crisp in the morning, filled with color.

Lake Balaton, the backyard of the hotel in which I’m currently staying.

But 19 hours after I took that first photo, I’m by the shores of Lake Balaton in the town of Tihany in southwestern Hungary. Tomorrow I speak at the Internet Hungaria conference, here in this lovely place. Nice people as well – had a lovely dinner with a set of entrepreneurs from around Central Europe, and a friendly pair of my countrymen as well.

Wednesday I fly to Barcelona, where I give a talk on Friday. On Saturday, it’s back to Boston, and then to Camden, Maine to lend a hand with the workshop to train the Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows. Then a talk in Manchester a week from Tuesday. And then home, to stare at my backyard again.

In the meantime, that’s a really beautiful lake. Both of them, come to think of it.

Friends in New York City tell me that they never visit the tourist attractions – the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building – until they’re hosting guests from out of town. I’m not a Cambridge resident, nor am I ever really resident at Harvard, but I had the same experience yesterday when my friend Nate came to visit me at the Berkman Center. He dragged me across the street to visit the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

In a sense, he also dragged me back about a hundred years in time. These museums, in a sense, are a museum of museums, a memory of museums past. They remind us of when museums were places for collectors to store their objects and experts to study them, not tools to educate or entertain the public.

The central attraction of the Museum of Natural History is a collection of glass models of plants and flowers, created by Bohemian glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were comissioned by a Harvard botany professor and paid for by one of his students, and ended up becoming the life’s work for Leopold and his son. The models were used to teach botany to Harvard students – the fragile models now are art objects, more than scientific curiosities.

One of the Blaschka flowers in the Harvard collection.

Leopold Blaschka began his work making glass eyes for taxidermists. His incredible skill with lampwork – heating small sticks of glass over lamp flames to fuse together into fine, colorful models – was first displayed when he began making models of exotic flowers he saw in natural history books. A local aristocrat commissioned him to produce replicas of his orchid collection, and Blaschka discovered that the fascination with the natural sciences that was sweeping the academic community made his work extremely timely and popular.

It’s hard for me to imagine a time at which fused glass was the best material to build model plants for scholarly study. Then again, Blaschka’s work was likely a vast improvement on the work done by Louis Auzoux, making plaster and paper-mache models of the natural world. The glass models make a bit more sense to me when looking at the Blaschka models of marine life. It’s very hard to represent a jellyfish without showing transparent structures, something that glass is uncommonly well suited as a material to portray.

I like to imagine Rudolph Blaschka, in youthful rebellion against his father Leopold, throwing down his glass rod and tongs and declaring, “Father, I cannot bear to make a single stamen more. I’m going to make a sea slug!” Of course, there can be no greater example of filial devotion than spending a career perfecting your father’s craft.

A Blaschka model of maple leaves. Not a sea slug.

Or perhaps Rudolph rebelled later in life, when he made a set of models of diseased trees, colloquially known as the “rotten fruit” series. As the glass decays with the ravages of time, it’s harder to determine whether the rot on the models is what Rudolph meant to depict, or simply the ageing of the materials. There’s an amazing conservation challenge associated with these pieces, as the Blaschka’s made their own, unique formulations of glass to achieve colors and textures not available in conventional glass.

Walking through the museum, I got lost in another story of fathers and sons. The Museum of National History is filled with endless cases of stuffed, mounted animals. A peacock backs into a Bengal tiger, now dusty and threadbare. Beetles are arranged in mandalas, mounted on pins in glass cases. (Apocryphal: “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?” “I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”) A hundred birds, tacked to their perches, all facing west. Just as Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had planned it.

Photo by davidgalestudios.

Agassiz was one of the first great American scientists. An emigree from Switzerland and an ichthyologist and paleobiologist by inclination, he declared an intention as a young man to build a great museum of natural science. This strange, dusty, beautiful museum is one of his legacies. But Agassiz is remembered more for his theoretical work.

He was perhaps the first scientist to propose the theory of an Ice Age, based on observations of glaciers in the Alps. Not all of his theories stand up as well to history – he was a fierce critic of Darwin and argued, to his death, that species were introduced into the stream of life at different times at the whim of the Creator. He’s also closely associated with the theory of polygenism, a form of “scientific racism” that taught that different races had different intellectual capacities.

There’s another Agassiz represented in the museums, especially in the fourth floor balcony of the Peabody Museum, which houses art and artifacts from the Pacific Islands. I think it may be my favorite space on the Harvard campus: a vast, lonely, light-filled space where you can spend an hour contemplating bark cloth or shark-tooth knives without encountering another soul. The labels in this section are poetically cryptic. It would be wonderful to know who made this cloth, what they made it of, what it was used for. Instead, the label says, “Cloth. Tonga. Collected by A. Agassiz 1899, Donated by A. Agassiz 1902.”

Again, my fantasties of rebellion led me to wonder if Louis Agassiz’s son rejected the natural sciences and became an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckling anthropologist. Alas, it’s another story of a dutiful son following his father’s footsteps. Alexander Agassiz followed his father to the US as a teenager, studied the sciences at Harvard and became, like his father, an ichthyologist. The artifacts from the South Pacific were collected while he was studying fish around the Great Barrier Reef.

Unlike his father, Alexander had a successful business career as well, as an adventurous investor in copper mines in northern Michigan. His business success gave him a vast fortune, which allowed him to give $500,000 to Harvard University to found a zoological museum… the museum that houses his father’s collection.

What’s making me see rebellion in this building, a veritable temple to visionary fathers and dutiful sons? Is it that I’m playing hooky from Harvard Law School, losing myself in a museum, one of my father’s favorite pursuits?