THAT GREAT BEAST OF A TOWN

This is a historical piece I wrote for the March issue of Natural History magazine:

In November, 1774, a cask of rum arrived in London, spiked with four dead electric eels, the largest of them three feet eight inches long and up to 14 inches around.   They had smooth, snaky bodies, flattened heads, blunt snouts with a pronounced underbite, and two small fins, resembling ears, at the sides.  Their eyes were small and round, and their dark facial skin was heavily pockmarked, as if with the point of a knitting needle.

The eels, actually knifefish of the species Electrophorus electricus, had come from the Suriname River in South America, and the sensation they caused in England was literally electrical. One of them had survived aboard ship all the way to the port of Falmouth, in southwestern England, and duly delivered electric shocks to British thrill-seekers, before finally expiring.  But even dead and consigned to rum, a standard preservative then, the specimens still had the power to excite educated minds. 

John Hunter, master dissector, avid client of grave robbers, Surgeon-Extraordinary to King George III, and father of modern surgery, “danced a jig when he saw them, they are so compleat and well preserved,” wrote his equally eminent naturalist friend Daniel Solander. 

Eliot Spitzer’s Bright Red Ferrari

This is a piece I wrote last year for the New York Times.  For New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the appetite was for 20-something hookers rather than bright red Ferraris.  But his sad demise suggests that the message bears repeating. 

 

April 4, 2007

 

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me

By RICHARD CONNIFF

Old Lyme, Conn.

THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.

So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?

Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

Let’s begin with what I call the “Cookie Monster Experiment,” devised to test the hypothesis that power makes people stupid and insensitive — or, as the scientists at the University of California at Berkeley put it, “disinhibited.”

How Fear Can Cost You Big Money

This is part of a series about fear and greed, which I wrote for MSN Money. 

         A Connecticut couple started with an investment account of several thousand dollars in the 1960s. They put it all in a single stock, PepsiCo, and then watched as $800 vanished in a market downturn. The experience was so traumatic that the couple dumped Pepsi, and they haven’t bought a single share of stock in the 40 years since.

            But here’s the killer, says a member of the family: “That position, if they had held on to it, would be worth over $3 million today.”

            This is the sort of episode that gives fear a bad name.

            Fear is what makes people bail out of good stocks when they could easily wait out a downturn. It’s what makes them feel it’s safer to stash their money in a bank account or under the mattress, even when they know it’s being nibbled away by inflation. 

             It’s also what made USA Today run a hapless headline, “Where’s the bottom? No end in sight . . .” on Oct. 10, 2002, after the Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed at 7,286. As it happens, though, that was the bottom. Today, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up more than 70% at 12,580. In other words, Oct. 10, 2002, was a perfect day to buy — except for fear.

             Yet fear is a good thing, in its place.