by John D'Agata
But it was Bob Gerye who did say: As the mother of the boy I was investigating explained in an interview with me at the Olive Garden, Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 2, 2002.
an eyewitness to that death: I attempted to interview this witness in Las Vegas by telephone on September 26, 2002.
Yet more people kill themselves in Las Vegas: See Adam Goldman, “The Suicide Capital of America,” Associated Press, February 9, 2004.
you have a better chance of killing yourself: Confirmed by Joleen Nemeth, Tim Pollard, Andrea Rivers, and Wei Yang in Nevada Vital Statistics 2001–2003, Nevada Department of Human Resources, 2005, pp. 201–03.
one of the most dangerous places: See David Littlejohn, “The Ultimate Company Town,” in The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip, ed. David Littlejohn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 7.
more people kill themselves than die in car accidents, etc.: Confirmed by Nemeth, et al., Nevada Vital Statistics 2001–2003, pp. 201–06.
the highest number of smokers per capita: See Parker, “The Social Costs of Rapid Urbanization,” in The Grit Beneath the Glitter: Tales from the Real Las Vegas, ed. Rothman and Davis, p. 135.
the highest rate of drug use among teenagers: Marie Sanchez, “Growing Up in Las Vegas,” in The Real Las Vegas: Life Beyond the Strip, ed. Littlejohn, p. 76.
the highest number of American arrests: Ibid., p. 85.
The highest high school dropout rate: Ibid., p. 7.
Highest household bankruptcy rate: Bob Lawless, “Bankruptcy Filing Rates by District, April 2006–March 2008,” at creditslips.org.
the highest number of divorces: See “America’s Most (and Least) Stressful Cities,” Sperling’s Best Places, January 9, 2004.
an average of 500 residents seek psychiatric treatment: Larry Wills, “Mind Matters,” Las Vegas Mercury, April 29, 2004.
devotes just four…beds: Damon Hodge, “Five Reasons Westcare Needs to Be Saved,” Las Vegas Weekly, July 15, 2004.
the homeless rate in Las Vegas quadrupled: Quoted by Parker, “The Social Costs of Rapid Urbanization,” in The Grit Beneath the Glitter, ed. Rothman and Davis, p. 141.
dozens of downtown sweeps: “Vegas Rated Nation’s ‘Meanest City’ for Homeless,” Associated Press, August 5, 2003.
“The New All-American City,” etc.: As reported by Parker in “The Social Costs of Rapid Urbanization,” p. 126.
the single most stressful city: See “Top Ten Most Depressed Cities,” Sperling’s Best Places, February 11, 2009.
“The only real problem Las Vegas faces”: Quoted in Hal Rothman, “The Many Faces of Las Vegas,” in The Grit Beneath the Glitter, ed. Rothman and Davis, p. 14.
“Another sign of how much America’s”: Sally Denton and Roger Morris, “Big Deal in Vegas,” Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 39, no. 4, November 1, 2000.
when Las Vegas casino owner Steve Wynn decided…and the story that follows: Ibid. The publisher of John L. Smith’s Running Scared was Barricade Books.
provided several weeks’ worth of coverage: As reported by Michael Miner in “Rules of the Game,” Chicago Reader, July 4, 2003.
“With Jimmy Chagra on trial in Texas”: Jim McManus, Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion’s World Series of Poker (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), p. 44.
“the Mayor took offense”: Steve Sebelius, “Truth and the Media,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 12, 2003.
“Mayor Oscar Goodman may have defended”: Michael Squires, “Full-page Apology to Goodman Appears in New York Times,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, July 8, 2003.
“ironies abound in Mayor Goodman’s life”: See John L. Smith, “Lack of Proof Linking Mayor to Murder Brings Swift End to Defamation Suit,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 11, 2003.
“not only was the allegation”: John L. Smith, “Inaccuracies Don’t Impair Sales of Book That Led to Goodman’s Complaint,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 13, 2003.
a full-page ad appeared: See Michael Squires, “‘Outrageous Falsehood’: Mayor Wins Retraction,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, June 11, 2003.
“We don’t want anything in our city”: Quoted in Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, Public Broadcasting Service, American Experience, 2005.
the Nevada Motion Picture Division refused: See Francisco Menendez, “Las Vegas of the Mind,” in The Grit Beneath the Glitter, ed. Rothman and Davis, p. 47.
“Well of course people are paranoid”: As Ron Flud, Coroner of Clark County, Nevada, explained during two interviews on October 2, 2002, one of which took place over lunch at the Olive Garden, and another in his office later that afternoon. Ron Flud has since retired as Coroner of Clark County, Nevada.
at the second Council of Orléans: See Geo Stone, Suicide and Attempted Suicide (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999), p. 16.
The Talmud forbids even mourning: C. W. Reines, “The Jewish Attitude Toward Suicide,” Judaism, vol. 10, no. 2 (Spring 1961).
Islam’s ancient question: See Leon E. Rosenberg, “Brainsick: A Physician’s Journey to the Brink,” Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, vol. 4, no. 4 (Fall 2002), pp. 43–60.
Hindus condemn it: Technically, a Hindu who commits suicide will go to neither heaven nor hell. Instead, he or she will remain in the earth’s consciousness as a “bad spirit,” wandering aimlessly until his or her allotted time has been fulfilled. So, suicide is not exactly condemned, but its repercussions are not a treat.
the Buddha always forbade it: There is, however, an argument that could be made that the Buddha would have allowed a suicide just as long as its victim had achieved enlightenment, as Michael Attwood explains in “Suicide as a Response to Suffering,” Western Buddhist Review, vol. 4 (2005).
there was an ordinance once: Nils Retterstol, “Suicide in a Cultural History Perspective, Part 2,” Suicidologi, 3 (2000).
Psychologists were still debating the criminality: See Edward Robb Ellis and George N. Allen, Traitor Within (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 125.
as Albert Heim…once did: As Robert Owen reports in “The Near Death Experience,” British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 153 (1988), pp. 607–17.
We were stopped at the southeastern guard gate: I toured Yucca Mountain several times with different groups. The visit that is detailed here is a combination of those tours.
the National Cancer Institute has subsequently determined: See Miki Meek, “Compensating Life Downwind of Nevada,” National Geographic (November 2002).
During the nuclear testing that was conducted on the site: Besides those details observed during my tours of Yucca Mountain, some additional details (including technical descriptions of the animals that were blown up at the site, the fabrics that were tested, and the housing structures that were studied) have been taken from Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, 1977), pp. 282–89.
There is a bowling alley still on the grounds, etc.: These details are reported in “Mercury, Nevada,” Nevada Test Site History, National Nuclear Security Administration, Washington, D.C., 2005.
A row of twenty newspaper vending machines: Andy Walton, “Post-Nuclear Ghost Town: History Radiates from Artifacts at Nevada Test Site,” CNN Interactive, 2005.
one of America’s seven National Nuclear Stockpiles: See Keith Rogers, “Nuclear Bombs Stored at Nellis,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 2, 1991.
Fourteen hundred missiles await decommission: As reported in “Half of U.S. Nuclear Arsenal in New Mexico, Georgia,” CNN, August 26, 1997.
“We have glorified gambling”: Quoted in Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, Public Broadcasting Service, American Experience, 2005.
free twelve-month color calendars, etc.: See Barbara Land and Myrick Land, A Short History of Las Vegas (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1999), p. 114.
Miss Nevada praised: “Miss Nevada, Newly Crowned, Supports Yucca Mountain,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, January 20, 2006.
2
50 people in the state of Nevada petitioned: Ray Hagar, “Mushroom Cloud License Plate to Be Tested,” Reno Gazette-Journal, April 23, 2002. The proposed mushroom cloud license plate was eventually abandoned.
God initiated this, etc.: The predictions that follow come from a variety of sources, many of them dubious. The point here is only to illustrate their abundance.
a study by the RAND Center: Charles Meade and Roger Molander, Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Terrorist Attack, RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management Policy, Arlington, Virginia, 2006.
ten miles away from downtown Las Vegas: Rogers, “Nuclear Bombs Stored at Nellis,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, October 2, 1991.
the resulting blast would only take: Estimated by Glasstone and Dolan in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, pp. 24–31.
if the temperature of the Sun is: The temperature of the Sun’s surface is actually 9,800º Fahrenheit, but the core is estimated to be around 15 million Kelvin, which is roughly 26,999,540º F., according to Philip F. Schewe and Ben Stein, The AIP Bulletin of Physics News, 146, October 5, 1993.
the temperature at which a human body combusts: Depending on the weight of the body being burned, the Cremation Association of North America recommends that temperatures of crematoria be set at between 1400º and 2100º F. Approximately 95 percent of a human body will be vaporized at these temperatures.
pain impulses in the human body: The estimated speed of nerve impulses varies enormously for some reason—from as fast as 100 miles per second to as slow as a couple feet per hour—but the most reliable figure seems to come from David G. Myers, Psychology, 5th edn. (New York: Worth Publishers, 1998), p. 42.
until sixteen hundredths of one second afterward: Based on my own loose math.
a man named Wally: As noted earlier, I made several visits to Yucca Mountain, and I had a different guide for each trip. “Wally” is a composite of my more entertaining guides.
“I’ve got you going with the press”: This portion of the tour is also a combination of several different trips, but each figure on the van represents an actual tourist who traveled with me.
When I started to volunteer: Details and quotations about this experience were gathered during a three-month period in the summer of 2002 when I volunteered as a counselor at the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center.
Marjorie Westin: I have changed the name and identity of the director of the center at the time I was volunteering.
This is a variation on the standard: Details about the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center’s unorthodox procedures are reported very well by Stacy J. Willis in “Stopping Suicide: Nevada Lags Behind Nation in Prevention Programs,” Las Vegas Sun, November 23, 2001.
In comparison, the Suicide Crisis Call Line: See Joan Whitley, “Calling for Help,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 9, 2000.
my mom and I attended a cake-cutting: Details about the cake-cutting event are confirmed by Lisa Kim Bach in “Centennial Celebration Takes the Cake,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 16, 2005.
“All weekend people have been coming up”: Quoted in Las Vegas: An Unconventional History, Public Broadcasting Service, American Experience, 2005.
It was seven layers high, etc.: “Las Vegas Celebrates 100th Birthday with Giant Cake,” SIFY News, May 16, 2006.
organizers arranged to have it bulldozed: As reported in “Swine Pig Out on Las Vegas’ Birthday Cake,” WNBC-5, May 17, 2005.
after documents leaked by workers…showed proof: Seth Borenstein, “Scientists Suspected of Falsifying Documents on Nuclear Waste Site,” Knight Ridder, March 17, 2005.
my mom moved out of Summerlin: She now lives happily off Flamingo Avenue, a couple blocks from the Strip, in an unincorporated township called Paradise. The median income there is approximately $31,000, compared to about $78,000 in the community of Summerlin, which is eleven miles away from the Strip.
a spate of suicides: See Alan Maimon, “Experts Brace for Suicide Spike,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, December 21, 2005.
strange fish at Lake Mead: As reported in “Water Contamination Affecting Fish,” Associated Press, March 10, 2008.
“the beginning of the extinction”: A fear that has been emphasized at length, and beautifully, by Timothy Egan in Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (New York: Vintage Press, 1999), pp. 106–7.
“I have often wondered why”: Quoted by Monica Bohm-Duchen in The Private Life of a Masterpiece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 172.
“I was walking along the road”: This is my own rough translation of one of Munch’s many retellings of his experience with that sunset. It is based on a much more authoritative translation by Poul Erik Tojner, Munch in His Own Words (London: Prestel, 2003), p. 67.
“I live with the dead every day”: Quoted in Bohm-Duchen, The Private Life of a Masterpiece, p. 153.
It was there in Darwin too: See Charles Darwin, in “Surprise, Astonishment, Fear, Horror,” in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, ed. Francis Darwin (London: William Pickering, 1989), pp. 218–43.
I think that what I believe is: A few years after my first summer in Las Vegas, and nearly thirty years after the mountain’s nomination for waste storage, President Barack Obama—the fifth executive to oversee Yucca Mountain—vaguely indicated that he would like to “investigate the possibility of scaling back the Yucca Mountain project to some degree,” a gesture to that 55 percent of the state of Nevada that had helped him win the White House (cf. Marc Ambinder, “Eighteen States versus One Country,” Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 17, 2008). Within a day of that announcement, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a plan to develop an “independent expert committee” to investigate the issue of nuclear waste storage—a committee, however, with rather limited independence, as it would also be “instructed to disregard Yucca Mountain as it performs its work” (Steve Tetreault, “Yucca Missing from Plan to Remake Nuclear Waste Policy,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 13, 2009). Not to be outdone, Senator Harry Reid announced one day later his own plan to form an “independent committee,” one that he would instruct “to only consider 49 states in its review” (Steve Tetreault, “Nuclear Industry to Fight Yucca Mountain Bill,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, March 14, 2009). It goes without saying that the one excluded state in Harry Reid’s plan would be his own home state of Nevada, which suggests, unsurprisingly, that none of this was about the science, not any of it about “what’s right” or “what’s fair,” nor the “health and security of everyone in our state,” nor certainly what Harry Reid had once referred to as “the honest truth.”
Why
“The reason why we scream”: My conversation with Aaron Sell took place by telephone on October 16, 2006.
“We have equipment all over our bodies”: My conversation with Michael Karnell took place in his lab on the campus of the University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa, on October 18, 2006.
“Even relatively simple changes can take tens”: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 21.
only 39 percent of Americans believe: As reported in a poll that was conducted by the University of Chicago in 1999 entitled Reflections 2000. The question was: “Will humans survive into the 22nd century?” 175 There will also be a new axial tilt: Martin Siegert, “The Day After Tomorrow,” The New Scientist, vol. 184, no. 2476 (December 2004).
lowering global temperatures by as much as: As predicted by Alan Cooper and John Behrendt in Antartica: The Dynamic Heart of It All, Fact Sheet, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D.C., December 1, 2003.
A new volcanic island will appear: Predicted by Alex Tomimbang, “Hawaii’s Land Grab, New Real Estate Everyday,” Hawaiicam, June 28, 2004.
And while we won’t be living longer: Predicted by Frank Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Doubleday, 1994).
Physicist John Fremlin believes: See John Fremlin,
“How Many People Can the World Support?”, The New Scientist, vol. 24, no. 415 (October 1964).
Rodney Brooks…believes however that humans: Rodney Brooks, “The Merger of Flesh and Machines,” in The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century, ed. John Brockman (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), p. 187.
Warwick Collins: This prediction was first posited by Collins in an essay entitled “Lock Up Your Laptops,” Prospect, vol. 25 (December 1997). See also Computer One (London: Marian Boyars Publishers, 1997).
we might look down at “Black Hole”: See Trauth, Hora, and Guzowski, eds., Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, pp. F70–F71.
Or we might stand on Yucca: As described by Gregory Benford in Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, p. 59.
“pitch extraction from music”: Martin Braun, “Inferior Colliculus as Candidate for Pitch Extraction: Multiple Support from Statistics of Bilateral Spontaneous Otoacoustic Emissions,” Hearing Research, vol. 145 (2000), pp. 130–40.
Or we may see “Forbidding Blocks”: See Trauth, Hora, and Guzowski, eds., Expert Judgement Panel on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, pp. F62–F74.
But these will be environments: As detailed by Michael Brill in “An Architecture of Peril,” Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter, Kansas State University (Fall 1993). Further details about the theories behind this part of the panel’s recommendations were provided to me by Michael Brill, himself a member of the panel, and founding director of the Buffalo Organization for Social and Technological Innovation. Michael and I spoke by telephone during the summer of 2002. He passed away before we could meet in person in New York.
a small series of twenty-foot-high monuments: Gregory Fehr, Thomas Flynn, and William Andrews, Feasibility Assessment for Permanent Surface Marker Systems at Yucca Mountain, U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., 1996.
“It’s the most recognizable painting”: See, e.g., a report by Douglas Cruickshank, “How Do You Design a ‘Keep Out!’ Sign to Last 10,000 Years?”, Salon, May 10, 2002.