“I regret to inform you,” wrote Mike Sowden on his blog Everything Is Amazing, “that despite what your eyes are yelling at you, these lines are parallel.”
Hesitant as I was to call this guy Mike a boldfaced liar, it was blindingly obvious those lines were zig-zagging in all directions. Right? Will you back me up on this?
Sorry! It turns out Mike was giving us the straight skinny. This is a clever modern variant of the café wall illusion, which dates back to 1894 and relies on the fact that lighter shapes look larger than darker ones.
Still rolling your eyes and suspecting trickery? You’re not alone. I had to consult Wikipedia, which put the controversy to rest with these two images, which both show (as God is my witness) identical squares in perfectly parallel rows; the only difference is the colors.
Rich refused to believe me. I had to place a Post-it note on the screen covering all but the top row to convince him the black and white blocks were perfectly identical squares. (I’ll pause while you do the same.) I know. It’s mindboggling. Take deep breaths. You’ll be fine in a moment.
These days we’re all struggling to make sense of a world that seems as cockamamie and cattywampus as the café wall illusion. Reality feels profoundly out of kilter.
To restore any sense of order to the universe, we must keep working for change, helping those we love hold on to what’s left of their sanity, and celebrating things we humans (and our animal allies) have managed to get right lately.
Take the new murals at San Quentin. When I was in the prison in May, I was struck by its ominous, so-this-is-hell, brutalist look, the one favored by penitentiary architects throughout history. But San Quentin’s style is now being transformed from traditional dungeon to Scandinavian modern — and for extremely practical reasons.
The experiment began twenty-five years ago, when Norway’s prisons were as overcrowded and violent as ours, with 70% of released prisoners becoming repeat offenders (compared to 76.6% in the US). Norway went all in on a new approach, based on rehabilitation and resocialization rather than retribution. Today their recidivism rate is just 20%.
To recap: Norway reduced crime, made the population safer, and saved billions of kroner. Our governor, Gavin Newsom, saw the win-win-win potential here in San Francisco.
Not surprisingly, his $239 million makeover budget didn’t include a dime for art. But the prisoners themselves, led by an innovative community group called San Quentin SkunkWorks, got permission to raise money and reach out to muralists. Artists across the world offered their services, and this summer, South African Faith XLVII transformed a prisonyard wall into The Heart of the World.
“The murals aren’t just about making the place look better. They change the mood out here,” San Quentin Correctional Sgt. Freddy Brenes told reporters. “A calmer yard means a safer yard — for staff and for the people living here.”
Of course, it’s not just us humans who are stepping up. In Victoria, Australia, paddleboarding pups are pursing platypuses to protect the population of duck-billed mammals. (Try saying that three times real fast!) The dogs’ keen sense of smell lets them locate platypus habitats so they can be tracked without disturbing the burrows.
Michigan State University researchers gave Maple, an ex-police search-and-rescue K-9, her own beekeeper’s suit and a new mission: sniffing out American foulbrood, a bacteria that destroys honeybee larvae. She’s way faster than humans, who rely on sight inspections that can take days.
It’s a good thing dogs are diversifying, because one of their time-honored jobs, searching rubble for disaster survivors, is now being outsourced to another beast with a sensitive schnozz: the African giant pouched rat.
These supersmart rodents are being fitted with tiny backpacks and sent deep into wreckage that dogs, robots, and even camera probes can’t penetrate. They’re trained to pull a microswitch on their vests when they locate someone; a tiny microphone lets rescuers speak with survivors. When their shift is over, the rats scamper back up to the surface to enjoy well-earned treats.
Animals aren’t achieving all the glory; I’m pleased to report some of us humans are also finding new ways to bring relief to others. “Spain is having a moment,” writes the New York Times’ Omar G. Encarnación. “At a time when many Western democracies are trying to keep immigrants out, Spain is boldly welcoming them in.”
Why? Because birthrates are down, the economy is booming, and workers are needed. The undocumented are getting amnesty so they can stay and help Spain continue to outproduce its neighbors.
“Pro-migrant measures stem from society at large,” explains Encarnación. “The push for the undocumented immigrants’ amnesty did not originate with the government, tellingly, but with a popular petition that garnered 600,000 signatures and was endorsed by 900 nongovernmental organizations, business groups, and even the Spanish Conference of Bishops. The government, in turn, has designed a humane and pragmatic approach, offering an example for other countries to emulate.”
Spain is really on a roll right now. It’s making major efforts to reduce food waste (doggie bags are suddenly a thing), to moderate the impact of tourists in overcrowded cities, and in Seville, a popular destination for rowdy stag and hen parties, to enforce a modicum of decorum in the streets.
But not too much decorum, I hope. I’ll never forget sitting with friends at a sidewalk café in Seville and hearing gusts of laugher rolling up the street. A stag party came into view, half a dozen young men walking beside a motor scooter, where the groom-to-be was standing up on the back foot pedals, dressed as a matador, waving the traditional bullfighter’s hat to the cheering crowd.
As he swept past us, I realized it wasn’t a real matador’s suit, it was an apron, with nothing beneath, giving us all a splendid view of his naked posterior. The entire city roared with laughter. I hope the new laws aren’t so strict they deprive future generations of that kind of fun.
Legislative change is just one of a thousand things I need to catch up on when I return to Spain later this month. Friends and readers keep asking me: How is the mood over there? What do my Seville neighbors think of the new world order? Do my expat friends still feel welcome in pubs and cafés throughout Europe?
Amigos, I am on the case. I’ll spend the next six months in tapas bars and taverns, checking in with expat friends to discover what they’re seeing and hearing, how they’re feeling about their place in the local and global society, and whether they’re returning to America any time soon or hunkering down abroad for the duration.
With my own country feeling increasingly like a funhouse filled with trick mirrors and shifting floors, I am hoping that Europe’s thousand-year perspective will help me find solid footing again. Because in the end, so much of how we feel about life depends on how we look at it.
”Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.” — Art Buckwald
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