Zambia held presidential elections this week, a contest that’s had interesting implications beyond the borders of that southern African nation. When I speak about international news, I’m often asked about stories I think people should be following – this election is a great example of an important and underreported story. A quick update on what happened, and then three reasons why it’s important to watch.

The Zambian contest pitted incumbent Rupiah Banda against long-time opposition leader Michael Sata. Banda represented the Movement for Multiparty Democracy, the party that ruled in Zambia since Kenneth Kaunda, an autocrat whose one party “African Socialist” state ended in 1991. Banda was vice president under Levy Mwanawasa, who suffered a stroke in office, and narrowly won election in 2008. His rule was characterized by outreach to nations around the world to seek investment in Zambia, especially in the country’s lucrative mines… and by dismantling much of the anti-corruption mechanisms installed by his predecesor.

On the other side, Michael Sata is a firebrand who’s been nicknamed “King Cobra” for the ferocity of his attacks on political rivals and other targets. One of the targets of his ire have been Chinese mining companies, which Sata has argued aren’t protecting worker rights or sharing the wealth with Zambians. In 2006, he made statements so provocative that China threatened to stop investing in Zambia if Sata were elected to office. He’s softened many of those stances, but should be viewed as a populist who’s promising more equitable distribution of wealth within Zambia.

Sata believes he won the 2008 election, and there were worries about whether this year’s election would be free and fair… and whether a disputed election could end in violence. The just-concluded election didn’t start well. It took three days for votes to be tallied, and riots broke out in some southern cities, reflecting fear that the election might be stolen. But early this morning, the electoral commission gave Sata the win. Fingers are now crossed that a) the violence will cease and b) that Chinese investors won’t pull out of the country abruptly out of fear or dissatisfaction with the election.

So why pay attention to the story?

China in Africa. One of the major trends of this decade is China’s emergence as a major power on a world stage. We are entering a multipolar world, where American and European influence are complemented and counterbalanced by Chinese, Indian and other influences. This multipolar future has been unfolding more quickly in Africa than in other parts of the world, because so many weak economies are dependent on international aid and investment.

Global Voices held a meeting between African and Chinese bloggers in 2007, talking about China in Africa, and the perceptions each group had of the other. Chinese bloggers pointed out that state media was urging Chinese people to relocate to Africa, both in the hopes of growing rich and out of a sense of duty to “improve” lives on the continent. African bloggers saw the Chinese as a source of investment, but weren’t naïve about the idea that strings were attached (a promise not to recognize an independent Taiwan, for instance.) Some argued that smart African nations could play China off against the US and other powers and gain investment; others worried that Chinese investors would outcompete local business.

In Zambia, attitudes towards the Chinese have soured, both because of failed infrastructure projects and safety issues in the mines. Some have argued that the “fast and loose” culture of Chinese business can only succeed in more closed African societies, where protection of an autocratic ruler (like Mugabe) can shield investors and entrepreneurs from public pressure. Zambia suggests that this may be the case – a comparatively free African country appears to be voting, in part, against Chinese investment with the election of Sata.

Inequality Africa is growing, and fast. The World Bank forecasts 5.3% growth this year, a much faster rate than in most of the developed world. That growth is from a low base – many Africans are extremely poor. But there’s an emerging middle class, complementing a small and very wealthy upper class.

This growth hasn’t been evenly distributed, and in more democratic African countries, this rising inequality is manifesting as political dissatisfaction. Ghana’s 2008 election saw the ouster of the New Patriotic Party, associated with economic growth and the expansion of the middle class, at the expense of the NDC, seen as more likely to aid the poor and redistribute income. There’s a long history of socialist politics in sub-Saharan Africa. Some of that history is simply about Cold War geopolitics, but some reflects local attitudes that economic success needs to benefit society as a whole, not just those lucky enough to have good-paying jobs. As African nations get wealthier, expect to see more tensions over inequality and efforts to ensure redistribution of income. (God only knows when we might see such trends in the US.)

Democracy in Africa Do a quick Google search for “democracy in Africa”. You’ll find a number of stories bemoaning the failures of democracy on the continent, worrying about failed elections in Kenya and Nigeria. Don’t take these articles too seriously. They talk about important political situations, but they may be failing to see the forest for the trees.

Africa is becoming a hotbed for democracy. Freedom House (whose methods I sometimes disagree with, but who offer a global view of political freedoms over a long period of time) identifies three “free” states in West Africa (Ghana, Benin and Mali), and three in southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana and Namibia) as well as three of the small island states. And more than twenty states meet Freedom House’s “partly free” criteria, including powerhouses like Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. Zambia is listed as partly free, but this year’s successful election might lead to an upgrade. Nigeria, often dismissed as a basket case, had a pretty good election this year as well.

Contrast this to Freedom House’s map of the Middle East and North Africa, issued before the Arab Spring unfolded. It’s a sea of purple, the color of “not free”. From Algeria to Iran, nations are not free, with the sole exceptions of Israel, Morocco, Lebanon and Kuwait. Compared to its neighbors to the north, Africa looks like it is getting its act together.

We don’t hear much about the spread of democracy in Africa. Mugabe’s absurdities get a lot of ink, as do Bashir’s. And the current refugee crisis is affecting Somalia (not free) and Kenya (partly free). Rwanda, an increasingly popular spot for American investment and aid, and Ethiopia, home of the AU, aren’t free, but gain their share of ink, while stable democracies like Botswana and Mali are often too boring to report on.

There’s a danger that we miss a major story here: democracy is taking root in Africa and spreading rapidly. Nations like Zambia, which survived autocratic rule and then dominance by one party are now seeing democratic change. It’s important to cover African crises and tragedies, but not at the expense of the hopeful news of democratic success and change.

“Dreams seen by a man-made machine
How does it seem, how does it seem
That we can see each others dreams”
- CAN, “Last Night’s Sleep” from Until the End of the World soundtrack

It’s a rainy Friday here in western MA, the perfect day to curl up with some scientific papers. There’s two papers sparking a lot of online discussion today. One is CERN’s fascinating announcement of neutrinos that appear to travel faster than the speed of light. I know perfectly well that I’m not going to understand that paper, so I’m waiting for Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles to explain it to me. (After all, he’s the guy who explains relativity and quantum mechanics to his dog – I suspect he’ll get me to understand the paper and the controversy.)

Another is this fascinating paper from the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley, where the authors experimented on themselves, imaging their brains using functional MRI processes while they watched movies of the natural world. By analyzing the blood flow to their brains as they concentrated on these videos, they built a set of models that allow them to reconstruct visual imagery from brain response.

The reconstructed images are built from a library of 18 million seconds of YouTube video. A Bayesian system matches the brain signals to 100 likely videos and averages those videos into a visualization of what the scientists saw. We see the video the experimenters watched, then the reconstruction made from the brain signals and the collection of YouTube clips.

In other words, the scientists are using fMRI to pull images they’ve seen out of their brains and put them onto screens. That’s a pretty mind-blowing idea. And if you read the paper, you’ll see that the researchers aren’t just thinking about reconstructing images from sight: “This is a critical step toward obtaining reconstructions of internal states such as imagery, dreams and so on.”

The paper led Bob Moon on Marketplace last night to declare that scientists were exploring concepts he’d never even thought about.

It’s something I’d thought about, but only because Wim Wenders had thought about it at length.

“Until the End of the World” is one of the strangest and most beautiful movies ever made. It’s a deeply flawed gem, a commercial disaster remembered more for its soundtrack than its narrative. That’s in part because the film that screened, at over two and a half hours, was the “Reader’s Digest” version of a 280 minute film that Wenders shot and realized he could never get shown in theaters. For years, the only way to see the full film was to catch one of Wenders’s screenings at universities. (You can now purchase a set of region 2 (European) DVDs, which won’t play on a US DVD player, but which will let you see the full film on a laptop or other player.)

In an odd way, the 280 minute version is, itself, an abbreviation of Wenders’s vision. Wenders is a master of the road film, and Until the End of the World wanders from Europe to North America to China to Australia, and eventually into orbit above the planet. But Wenders had hoped to cover all continents, and the film was originally intended to end in the Congo, echoing a musical motif of pygmy lullabies introduced in the first act of the film. I’ve seen the short cut of the film dozens of times, the director’s cut twice, and feel like I’m starting to be able to imagine the film that might have been, had not money, logistics and sanity intervened.

The plot is convoluted, but at its core, it’s about a technology invented by reclusive scientist Henry Farber to allow his wife Edith to see, though she’s been blind since childhood. The camera he invents records both pictures and the brain activity of the videographer – afterwards, the images can be transmitted from the brain of the videographer (Farber’s son, Sam, and his lover Claire) to Edith’s brain, allowing her to see video interviews with her family, who are scattered around the world.

Rather than being exhilarated by the return of her vision, Edith is overwhelmed by how much everyone has aged and the ugliness of the world – she dies shortly after. Claire, who’s proven a better operator of the camera than Edith’s son Sam, becomes addicted to another use of the camera: watching her dreams from the previous night. The third act of the film is dominated by the abstract imagery of Claire’s dreams, reconstructed on film from her neural activity. (The still above is from that section of the film.)

Part of what makes Wenders’s vision of the future so compelling for me is that the technology his scientist creates is far from magical – it requires intense concentration from camera operators to capture images, and Sam briefly goes blind from the strain of capturing images. It’s a profound effort again to transmit those images. In a striking parallel, it sounds like the Berkeley process is a lot of work as well:

“It takes several hours to acquire sufficient data to build an accurate motion-energy encoding model for each subject, and naive subjects find it difficult to stay still and alert for this long. Authors are motivated to be good subjects, to their data are of high quality. These high quality data enabled us to build detailed and accurate models for each individual subject.”

If the authors of this paper haven’t seen Until the End of the World, I can only hope they’ll go out and watch it immediately.

It’s a long way from the visualizations produced by the Berkeley researchers to “the disease of images“, the addiction Claire nearly succumbs to. But it’s fascinating for me to see science catch up with the most speculative of speculative fiction. I can only imagine the debates of ethics – and aesthetics – should we reach a point where we can see each other’s dreams. (I suspect YouTube would suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.)

• Shouting Fire in a Crowded Hashtag
  Important essay by Andres Monroy-Hernandes about the use of social media to document drug violence in Mexico, and the shameful government response.
  (tags: socialmedia citizenmedia journalism drugs terrorism mexico)
• Turkmenistan: One (Pre-Filled) Laptop Per Child | EurasiaNet.org
  Turkmenistan's version of One Laptop per China, courtesy of Lenovo. Lots of interesting questions about whether laptops can connect to the Internet (heavily censored in Turkmenistan) and what content they contain.
  (tags: turkmenistan china OLPC education technology)

Fifty years ago, Newton Minow, the 35 year old FCC chairman, gave a speech that’s still studied today. It’s taught in rhetoric courses, tested on the LSAT reading comprehension test and still is invoked in discussions of how communications technology affects entertainment, news, and democracy. The speech challenged broadcasters to actually watch their programming, and urged them to consider whether they were proud of what’s they’d see. It read, in part:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.
But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Today, Minow’s daughter, Martha Minow, dean of the Harvard Law School, welcomed her father to the stage at her institution as part of an event titled, “News and Entertainment in the Digital Age: A Vast Wasteland Revisited“. Minow (I’ll refer to Newton Minow throughout the rest of this post) starts his talk by noting that we’re a day past the ten year anniversary of 9/11, a time at which there was no YouTube, no Twitter, none of the social media we discuss today to understand the tragic events of the day. If that shift is difficult to comprehend, it’s much harder to understand the landscape of fifty years ago, when phone calls traveled by wire, when there were no computers, one phone company and two and a half television companies. There was no public television or radio. Audiences, Minow reminds us, were passive – they gathered around the single set in the house and watched in silence.

When Minow came to the FCC, it was a group wracked by scandal – previous commissioners had been fired for corruption. Minow’s relationship was a highly personal one with President Kennedy. He recalls a meeting with Kennedy and Commander Alan Shepard, recently returned from the first American voyage into space. Kennedy was enroute to a speech at the National Association of Broadcasters, and asked Minow what he thought Kennedy should say to the broadcasters. He told him, “Mr. President, tell them that this is the difference between a free and a closed society: when the Soviets send people into space, we don’t know whether they succeed or fail. In the US, we let people see and hear what’s going on.”

Kennedy gave a brief speech to the NAB which used Minow’s talking points and got a standing ovation. Minow’s infamous speech didn’t get quite as warm a reception. Minow reminds us that Sherwood Schwartz, producer of the television show Gilligan’s Island, honored him by naming the sinking ship on his show the S.S. Minow.

Why give such an incendiary speech? Television was the dominant medium of the era. The televised Kennedy/Nixon debate had decided the election. But there was little discussion about public interest and public responsibility on the part of broadcasters. Minow’s contribution as an FCC chairman was to try to expand choice – licensing the UHF spectrum, early cable TV systems and satellite television. When Kennedy invited him to visit the space program, Minow observed that satellites were more important to sending a man into space, because they permitted sending ideas into space, and ideas last longer than people. Minow notes that there’s a strong possibility that the recent events of the Arab Spring were a product, in part, of satellite communication.

Both Minow and Kennedy had lived in cities where there was a strong public television statement. They both assumed that public television would spread throughout the country, but there was no public TV in New York, LA or Washington DC. When Minow left the FCC, he went on to serve on the board of governors of the Public Broadcasting Service, and on the Carnegie Foundation, one of the major funders of public broadcasting.

As someone who’s been concerned with public broadcasting for his entire career, Minow tells us that he’s deeply disappointed by the relationship between money and politics. “Politicians need massive amounts of money to buy radio and television ads. They raise money from the public to gain access to something the public owns: the airwaves.” This is an absurdity – the US is one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide access to the airwaves to candidates. In the UK and Japan, it’s not possible to buy access to the airwaves. Much of the cost of American campaigning comes from the media.

Minow ends his remarks with praise for his host: “I wish the Berkman Center had existed 50 years ago,” because the issue of the responsibilities of broadcasters was neglected 50 years ago, and is still neglected today.

Anne Marie Lipinski, the new curator of the Niemann Center, is one of the three designated “respondents” to Minow’s remarks. She suggests that the most inspiring aspect of Minow’s remarks is the idea that we can do better – as individuals, as broadcasters. One of the challenges in helping us become better is defining the public interest. “I don’t think we have a shared ethos around te public interest in contemporary society.”

Journalist Jonathan Alter reminds us that Minow is also the father of the televised presidential debate. While we still see this important form of civic programming, most of what passes for civic discourse online is extremely poor. “The news business is the only business recognized by the Constitution and it’s largely dysfunctional.” Talk is cheap and reporting expensive, he argues – “the vast wasteland has a Tower of Babel on top of it.” Much of the news we get is “people like me babbling on MSNBC or Fox”, rather than the sort of expensive newsgathering required to report facts on the ground.

Yochai Benkler calls on a section of Minow’s speech where he challenges broadcasters to challenge their sponsors: “Tell your sponsors to be less concerned with cost per thousands and more concerned with understanding per millions.” This section points to the core tension between an American broadcast model that is anchored in markets, and the challenges of public responsibility. Public funding for media and nonprofit models tend to be foreign to American audiences. Yet there’s evidence that networks like the BBC produce some of the highest quality news content available.

Benkler provokes Alter by suggesting that there’s the possibility of producing key and investigative reporting via radically distributed methods. He suggests that the Neda Aga Soltan video, which Alter alluded to in his remarks, was an example of the power of citizen production. He (generously) references a talk I gave the week before about the complex interaction of Tunisians on the ground, activists in the diaspora and Al Jazeera – a state-funded media network – to amplify voices in Sidi Bouzid leading to the Tunisian revolution. “Because we all now carry sound, video and text generating and disseminating tools – phones – we’ve got an unprecedented opportunity to close the gap between what costs a great deal of money and what we all need as citizens.”

Lipinski asks whether anyone is prepared to pay for this sort of crowd-sourced media, asking if any of us pay people whose blogs and twitter feeds we read. Minow suggests that this may be the wrong place to ask for support. He notes that the Japanese closely studied media models around the world before starting NHK and based their model on the BBC, including charging a license fee for television sets. “Other countries started building public media before they built commercial. We tacked on public broadcasting after the fact, without a way to pay for it.” This leaves us with a difficult choice: “Do you want the market to decide and provide everything? And if the market is not going to provide everything, do you want to build an alternative system?”

Alter suggests we don’t hold our breath waiting for the rise of a new public media system in the US. What’s happening instead is the fragmentation of what media exists. He points to the evening entertainment market, where big shows like Leno’s and Letterman’s are ceding ground to the Colbert Report. “It’s a move towards greater choice.” But the downside of this move is that we may be seeing a divide between elites who have access to a vast selection of media, and masses who get little critical media. “The political conversation involves a maximum of 10 to 15 million people,” he asserts, “but 130 million vote in Presidential elections.”

Ellen Goodman offers a nutritional analogy. “People don’t want to eat their broccoli, but they still might vote.” She’s suspicious of the idea that public media will produce the broccoli and be able to get people to eat it, because “public broadcasting in the US is weak and designed to be weak.” Proposals that are unrealistic but still worth making for the production of marketing of broccoli might not be directed to our existing public media institutions, she argues, because these institutions may not be capable of innovation. “It’s reasonable to ask these actors to solve our problems, but they are not going to solve them.”

Virginia Heffernan, cultural critic for the New York Times, suggests we consider not just news. When we look at television entertainment, especially HBO and Bravo, we’re no longer facing a vast wasteland. Minow invites us to imagine the forces of art, daring and imagination unleashed on the television screen, and the artistic explosion we’ve seen the last few years suggests that “television both as an art form and a public health hazard makes these things possible.”

She offers a caution to Alter’s skepticism about digital media and direct sources – we quickly found dangerous media online, like Loose Change, a video that offered the conspiracy theory that 9/11 was an inside job. But we also were able to find video of Saddam Hussein’s execution, shot and distributed by an American serviceman. “Our million dollar Baghdad bureau didn’t get the execution story right” because they were working from eyewitness testimony from individuals in the room, and that testimony wasn’t correct. The actual account of Hussein’s final words came from the video, not the reporting.

What’s key in this world of internet video, she offers, is contextualization. As the New York Times invests in international reporting, they need to make a major investment in contextualizing these images and videos. Asked by Jonathan Zittrain, our moderator, how we might take on Minow’s challenge to “do better”, Heffernan asks us to “register as a Wikipedia editor today. Twice, if you’re a woman.”

Zittrain observes that the phenomenon of Doris Kearns Goodwin, sitting next to Heffernan, registering on Wikipedia could lead to some interesting edit battles over Lincoln’s biography. Asked whether she will register as a Wikipedian, Goodwin offers, “I didn’t know I could!” (Note to Jimmy Wales – we still have work to do.) C

With three former FCC chairs in the room, Susan Crawford – introduced as a “shadow FCC commissioner” in the Obama administration – is offered the first FCC response to Minow provocations with a line about “beauty before age”. She responds to Reed Hundt with a quip about pearls before swine(!) and suggests we think about parallels between Minow’s speech in the service of a “handsome young president, with a beautiful family” and suggests that such a speech would be unthinkable nowadays. For one thing, Minow would have been speaking to the wrong people. Distribution networks are now so much more powerful than content providers, and players like Comcast now control programming and internet access. “There’s only four actors in America who have any power” around these issues of content of the media, “and they really believe that personal preferences equal good programming.”

Kevin Martin, FCC chair under George W. Bush, focused his observations on a topic dear to my heart – the state of international media. He observed that business network Bloomberg now devotes significantly more resources to overseas coverage than the New York Times. (For the record, so does the Wall Street Journal – business papers cover international more thoroughly than “general interest” sources…) Despite those coverage resources, some Bloomberg channels have had difficulty gaining carriage on some cable systems, where they are perceived as specialist content.

Reed Hundt, who chaired the FCC under President Clinton, calls his moves to force broadcasters to show three hours a week of children’s programming his way of honoring Minow’s legacy. “Mandating children’s programming turns out to be a violation of the first amendment, to my amazement.” Like Minow, Hundt was “honored” by broadcasters’ response to his work – the WB network’s show Animaniacs introduced a clown named Reed Blunt… and offered the show as evidence of their compliance with creating children’s programming.

Minow points out that lawyers end up as chairmen of the FCC because “it’s the only government agency that’s regulating a medium of communication.” Lawyers who understand the first amendment understand how treacherous it is and how complicated regulation in the space can be.

Asked to comment on Minow’s legacy, Nicholas Negroponte offers the observation that photography is a medium where artists have been the technical innovators, while broadcasting is a field where the engineers have worked out the tech while the artists were creative. What the Media Lab tries to do, he tells us, is do for computer media what photographers have done – advance the field by advancing both the tools and the creativity.

Zittrain invites Minow to comment on the rise of Twitter: “threat or menace?” Minow demurs, arguing “the more communication the better.” And he thanks us for considering these issues of public interest fifty years after he raised their importance.

Terry Fisher offers a summation that introduces several new, important ideas. New technologies, and some of the practices that surround them (though are not dictated by them) are eroding some existing, long-standing dichotomies: public/private, professional/amateur, speaker/audience, news/entertainment, university/society. There are huge benefits and costs to this corrosion. We see the collapse of oligarchies, address of systematic biases, democratization of processes. But we also have fragmentation, loss of a coherent single culture, the rise of a tower of pundit babel, and the superficiality of much programming. This move, he argues, is impossible to stop. Instead, we need to think through the new opportunities the shift presents: the ability to change who contributes to this process. And we need to figure out how to ameliorate the costs we suffer. That means creating distributed models for sifting, curating, organizing, like Wikipedia, Slashdot and academic projects like Jeffrey Schapp’s Digital Humanities project. In this new world, the FCC may not be the prime mover – the real power is located in intermediaries like Google, and if we were to push for the public interest, that’s where we’d apply leverage.

This is one of the more surreal weeks of my recent life. On Sunday, I took possession of an adorable and small apartment near Inman Square in Cambridge, fought my way through Ikea and spent the first night of my new itinerant academic existence in Cambridge. Monday, I moved into my office in the Media Lab, using a borrowed ID from a student as my ID card isn’t turned on yet. Tuesday, I met with my new masters students and other colleagues at the Center for Civic Media, then retreated to the Berkman Center to be part of their iLaw series. And then I found myself in a lecture hall in the Harvard Science Center, attending a lecture on cooking, given in part by David Arnold, one of the leading minds in haute cuisine… and a guy I used to hang out with more than twenty years ago. It feels like a very strange compression of history into a single (very long) weekend. But it was a great talk, so I thought I’d share it with you as well. (And that I’m not posting until two days later helps show how crazed the week has been…)

The lecture is a public talk associated with a Harvard class called “Science and Cooking – From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science“, taught by David Weitz. It’s a science class focused on the chemical and physical changes associated with cooking. The text for the class is “On Food and Cooking” by Harold McGee, the opening speaker. McGee wrote the book in Cambridge and tells us “In late 1970s, I never dreamed Harvard would give a course on cooking – I can make a living now.”

McGee is accompanied by Arnold, who he introduces as the director of culinary technologies at French Culinary Institute in NYC and “the one guy in the world who knows the most about cutting edge tech in the modern kitchen.” Arnold insisted that the class needed a definition of cooking, and so we’re working with this definition: “The preparation of food for eating, especially by means of heat”. The term comes from the Latin coquere, “to cook, prepare food, ripen, digest”. Cooking is the application of energy and ingenuity to change foods so they’re easier, safer and more pleasurable to eat.

McGee quotes Arnold as observing that if a peach is perfectly right, the best thing you can do with it is put it on a plate with a knife. Nature, McGee argues, wants us to eat peaches so that we’ll carry seeds far and wide. What we do in cooking is, in part, trying to approach the complexity and the balance of the perfectly ripe piece of fruit.

The first stop on a history of cooking has to be fire. McGee references Richard Wrangham’s “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human”. Cooking allows us to turn raw starch into something digestible. We needed these calories, Wrangham argued, to build our big brains. In that sense, learning to cook may literally have helped us become human. For us to tell if Wrangham is right, we need to see evidence of cooking much further back in history. We currently see evidence of 100,000 years ago, while Wrangham speculates we should see evidence 1 million years back.

By the Middle Ages, cooks had figured out how to make gelatins and clarify them, and how to do very complex decorative work for the courts. They’d also invented food as entertainment. We see a recipe from the 15th century titled “To Make a Chicken Sing when it is dead and roasted”. It involves stuffing a chicken with sulfur and mercury and sounds like a very bad idea… but it is amusing, and that notion of food as amusement is returning to modern kitchens today.

By 1681, we see the introduction of a very different way of cooking – the pressure cooker. In 1681, Denys Papin was a member of the Royal Society, working with Boyle on gases. He figured out that you could cook food using pressurized water and speed cooking processes. Because the Royal Society are mostly bachelors, there’s a wonderful set of literature of dinner parties where scientists brought ingredients and Papin cooked and served them.

Arnold jumps into explain that pressure cookers allow us to cook at temperatures other than what we could normally achieve. This leads to some fun discoveries. He read an influential book on pressure cooking that advised increasing use of onions in pressure cookers because the onion flavor dissipates. So he pressure cooked other similar foods, and discovered that foods like garlic lose their stink when pressure cooked. “The sulfur compounds in horseradish get totally knocked out so you can eat it by the bushel.” Mustard seeds cooked with vinegar puff up like caviar. And other effects can’t be replicated any other reasonable ways. “Pressure cookers speed up Maillard reactions – you can pressure cook an egg for an hour and get browning that you otherwise wouldn’t get without cooking for several days.”

McGee notes that Arnold hasn’t mentioned his durian experiments. Arnold sheepishly explains that this is a lesson in the importance of repetition. Durian smells bad (or wonderful, if you grew up in certain corners of Asia) because of sulfur compounds, and so you should be able to knock out the smell in a pressure cooker. “So I threw some stuff with durian into a pressure cooker and got the most incredible Durian caramel.” But he’s never been able to replicate it, with more than a month’s worth of attempts. “Don’t be a schmuck,” he tells us – document your work so you can replicate.

Replicability is, of course, the essence of experimental science. In 1770, McGee tells us, Ben Franklin was spending a huge amount of time on ships, traveling between the US and France. He noticed that when the cooks threw out the waste from cooking, the wake behind the ship calmed. He later tried an experiment in Clapham Pond in London, putting a teaspoon of oil onto a pond on a windy day. The water calmed over an area of half an acre. Had Franklin made a further leap, he could have pretty easily calculated the size of a molecule based on the experiment, assuming that the layer of oil eventually was a single molecule thick.

To get a sense for the molecular scale, Arnold gives us a demonstration of Dragon’s Beard candy, a preparation seen in China, Turkey and Iran. Cook sugar to a particular hardness and you can stretch and fold it at will. Arnold takes a centimeter-thick piece of sugar, turns it into a loop, and stretches it. Folding it once, it’s now two loops. He repeats until we have over 15,000 strands, each about a micron thick. It’s flavored with cocoa, but Arnold likes to serve it with vinegar and mustard powder, with peanuts wrapped inside.

McGee would like us to take Count Rumford as seriously as we tend to take Franklin. Rumford was a Colonial New Englander who was on the wrong side of the war, so he spent much of his career in England. Amongst his many discoveries, Rumford discovered that slow cooked meat is delicious, a discovery that’s come into fashion recently with sous vide cooking. Rumford accidentally discovered the technique by trying to cook a leg of mutton in his potato drier, and left it overnight. In the morning, he encountered an “amazing aroma”. And because was scientifically minded, he replicated the experiment and tried an objective taste test. At a cocktail party, he cooked one leg of mutton over a fire and another using the slow technique and put them at opposite sides of the room, and weighed the remnants – the slow-cooked mutton was far more popular.

The opposite of Rumford was Justus Liebig, a German chemist who was a theoretician, not an experimentalist. Working only from his own “brilliance”, not from experiments, Liebig introduced a new way of cooking meat – searing it to seal in the juices. It’s revolutionary, but also really bad. Apparently he never actually tasted it.

In 1969, the British scientist Nicholas Kurti suggested that we bring scientific methods back to ordinary, everyday phenomenon. “I think it is a sad reflection on our society that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés”. His investigations were part of a movement towards “soft matter science”, a study of phenomena like soap bubbles that led to a 1991 Nobel prize.

McGee found himself investigating these phenomena in 1984 when he wrote his book on the history of food. In collaboration with scientists, he began testing a Julia Child assertion about whipping egg whites in a copper bowl – Child advocated always whipping in copper. Experiments testing whipping in copper demonstrated that it took a much longer time, but led to lighter whites. The paper was eventually accepted by Nature, though one reviewer commented, “The science is good, but the subject is fluffy.”

While much of what’s emerged in science in the kitchen, like molecular gastronomy, is fairly recent, nouvelle cuisine is very old. In 1759, a poem was published that read:

Every year nouvelle cuisine
Because every year tastes change;
And every day there are new stews:
So be a chemist, Justine.

French cooking, historically, has been far from experimental. Classic French cooking as compiled by Escoffier and others codified cuisine to the point where it was difficult to innovate, since the classic textbook offers 100 “correct” recipes for beef tenderloin. McGee cites Michael Bras as helping invert these dynamics with the melting chocolate cake, an inversion of the “correct” idea that a cake is surrounded by a sauce – instead, a cake contains a ganache. A later dish, the Gargouillou, recreated a salad as a walk through a garden, whatever ingredients were most appropriate on the given day.

Chef Jacques Maximin was influenced by these experiments and observed, ” To be really creative means not copying.” His maxim struck a chord especially with Ferran Adria, who recreated the gargouillou as an endlessly surprising salad – nothing is quite what it seems. Adria went on to thoroughly revolutionize cuisine as we know it, with techniques like flavored foams and the spherification of ingredients like melon into texturally odd balls of flavor.

He’s had many followers. Joan and Jordi Roca use rotary evaporators to separate aromas from ingredients – this makes possible a dish of foods that are shades of white which have flavors usually associated with visually dark ingredients. Jose Andres experimented with a chemical most often used to make cough drops, offering a bonbon of liquid olive oil within a clear shell. Wylie Dufresne uses an enzyme called “meat glue” to offer a chicken nugget that’s white meat wrapped in dark, wrapped in skin. And now the field has been exhaustively documented by Nathan Myrvold, who’s published a massive, five-volume book on Modernist cuisine.

At this point, McGee gives the reins to Arnold, who offers a rapid-fire walk through some of his favorite techniques and his creative process. He shows us a Japanese ring that features a wavy woodgrain effect, produced by beating two different metals together. Arnold achieved something similar using fish as a way of persuading Hobart, the cooking machine company, to give him a really badass slicer. Using meat glue and casein, he glues salmon and fluke together and slices them into a thin sheet that looks a little like mortadella and a bit like wood grain. It’s served with creme fraische seasoned with nitrogen-frozen herbs, a fennel apple salad infused with curry and pressure cooked mushroom seeds, a veritable tour of modernist technique on a plate.

(The nitrogen chilled herbs allow fresh herbs to be broken into very small pieces, as you would break up a dried herb, but maintain the fresh flavor and texture. Arnold recommends you blanch your fresh herbs, flash freeze in liquid nitrogen, shatter into tiny pieces and pass through a chinoise, using only the tiny bits that escape the mesh.)

Using agar, a gelling agent made from seaweed, Arnold produces a concord grape jelly, a thick, stiff substance. He points out that it cuts cleanly and can’t be put back together. But if you break it violently – in a blender, say – you get a different effect: a microgel or fluid gel. It looks like a puree on the plate, but tastes like juice in the mouth.

Agar works well as a clarifier too, in lower concentrations. Arnold makes a loose gel of lime juice, then uses a whisk to separate it into “whey and curds”. He passes this through cheesecloth, making rude comments about “gently massaging the sack”, before producing a liquid that looks very much like water, but turns out to have intense lime flavor.

We clarify liquids, he tells us, because then we can infuse them into other foods. “We can make a cucumber better by adding liquor to it… we can make a lot of things better by adding liquor to them.” Injection techniques work better with clear liquids, and Arnold shows us how to infuse a cucumber with lime and sugar in a vacuum machine. The vacuum pulls air out of the cucumber, and rapidly threatens to boil it, as liquids boil at lower temperatures in vacuum. (Arnold recommends you heavily chill your ingredients as you vacuum infuse…) While the air is sucked out, the liquid is incompressible, and as air floods back into the chamber as he turns the vacuum off, liquid infuses into the cucumber in a flash, turning the vegetable into something that looks like stained glass. “It’s one way to get something that looks cooked, but still has crisp, clean lines to it.”

You can rapidly infuse using pressure as well. Arnold puts vodka and coffee into an ISI whipped cream maker, and uses nitrous oxide to force the coffee into the vodka. What results is heavily flavored, but not carbonated – the tingle of carbonation comes from carbon dioxide escaping from solution. Nitrous oxide offers pressure and fluff without carbonation.

Arnold offers his advice on carbonating some of his favorite things. As with infusion, clarified liquids work better. “If you’re going to carbonate liquor – which I highly recommend – you’re going to need more pressure than carbonating water because CO2 is more soluble in alcohol than in water.” You can force carbonate a wine at 30 psi, sake at 35psi, and liquors at about 40 psi.

Why would you infuse vodka with coffee? “The flavors you pull out of a product are dependent on time, temperature, pressure.” You don’t just get yummy coffee vodka – you can get different flavors than you’d ever experience through conventional means.

It must be fun to have a kitchen where liquid nitrogen is as common as hot water. Arnold chills a glass with liquid nitrogen, pointing out that it’s cold only on the inside, and doesn’t generate condensation. He pours himself a carbonated gin and lime concoction as the audience is served marshmallows frozen with liquid nitrogen. McGee returns to explain the history of the marshmallows – they were served at The Fat Duck as both a palate and “mind cleanser”. The chef responsible wanted to reset his diners’ expectations, so he served them a marshmallow flavored with lime, tea and vodka and frozen. The heat of your mouth melts the treat and you find yourself with vapors pouring from your mouth and nose. We have a similar experience with the frozen marshmallows, and like the Fat Duck diners, find ourselves laughing, our expectations reset.