Forty-Eight Hour Magazine is a raucous experiment in using new tools to erase media's old limits. As the name suggests, we're going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days. This was our first attempt at it. We Tweeted for the build-up, live-streamed the 48 hour work-a-thon and blogged our thoughts. We could not chronicle everything for this Spot.Us pitch.
In fact, the pitch on Spot.Us was more a tool to help us be transparent about money.
Here's how the editorial worked: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We'll unveil a theme [Hustle] and you'll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We'll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.
Writers and artists from some of your favorite publications like Rolling Stone, Wired, Dwell, Gizmodo, GOOD, Lapham's Quarterly, HiLoBrow, Fray, Paleofuture, and The Rumpus have already signed up. Mainly because we promise that this thing will be fun. No long commitments. No pitches. No grinding editing process. You make good stuff fast; we publish it with other good stuff.
We've been inspired by a range of other projects: Strange Light, Pop Up Magazine, Ash Cloud Tales, and The Whole Earth Catalog. But really, it is the existence of the tools themselves that have invaded our dreams.
The first issue of 48hrmag.com was "Hustle." Below are samples of what can be found in the print magazine that is available for order from MagCloud. These samples include
Mark Rabinowitz
May Day, 1991. Oakland Athletics left fielder Rickey Henderson stood near second base, slowly inching toward third. Everyone knew what was coming. The broadcasters up in the booth. Yankees pitcher Tim Leary. The rabid, 36,000-person home-field crowd. All that remained was the act. And so, without ever coming to a full stop, Henderson pivoted his right heel and successfully stole the 939th base of his then-12-year career. The crowd erupted. Henderson ripped third base from the dirt, shaking it above his head like a fresh kill. Lou Brock, the retired outfielder who had held the record for 14 years, came down onto the field and congratulated Henderson through a booming microphone. He passed the mic to his newly crowned heir, who wasted no time in anointing himself “the greatest of all time.”
It was hard to argue with the man.
When his 25-year career ended in 2003, Henderson had amassed 1,406 stolen bases—50 percent more than Brock. He had stolen the most bases of anyone up to age 29 (794) and the most of anyone over age 30 (612). He led the league in steals 12 times, including the single-season record in 1982 with 130—close to averaging one per game. Someone once asked renowned baseball historian Bill James whether he thought Henderson was a candidate for the Hall of Fame. James replied, “If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers.”
There have been more beloved players than Henderson. Babe Ruth carried a weary nation through the Great Depression; Cal Ripken proved that the mere act of showing up for work every day for 16 years could unite a sport. But Henderson’s place among these titans of pastime is assured not by public adoration. It’s just that no one in baseball history was—and probably will ever be—better at stealing bases than Rickey Henderson.
After Henderson’s first full season, the league-wide average of stolen bases per game jumped 10 percent. As players began to emulate Henderson, success rates climbed toward 70 percent. The Henderson Effect leveled off at 0.85 steals per game in 1987—a 68-year high—and baseball began its sad transition to one of steroids and a “chicks dig the long ball”– induced myopia that hinders the game to this day.
Still, no matter if base-stealing happens to be in style, it remains the single riskiest behavior that a player can attempt on the diamond. In 2004 Joe Sheehan, an author of Baseball Prospectus, the annually updated bible for baseball stat-heads, found that unless a player snags at least three steals for every time he is caught—a 75 percent success rate—he shouldn’t even bother. Henderson’s career success rate was just over 80 percent.
Glory through speed did not come free. In 1982, when Henderson stole his still-unmatched 130 bases, he set another, hardly mentioned milestone. He was caught stealing 42 times—and 335 times in his career. Both are all-time records. And each time Henderson walked back to his dugout, muttering to himself, he was proof—in dirty cleats and jittery feet— that even the “greatest of all time” had to live with utter failure every now and then.
Just west of Highway 101 near Geyserville, California, from the side of a dilapidated gray barn, a long-dead man named Dr. Pierce hawks his wares to passing cars. In head-high white block letters, he beckons drivers to greater health from the grave: “FOR YOUR BLOOD: DR. PIERCE’S MEDICAL DISCOVERY.”
Patrick Guarino
There he is too, on a barn in Cottage Grove, Oregon, with a remedy “FOR YOUR LIVER: Dr. PIERCE’S PLEASANT PELLETS.” In Cache Valley, Utah, framed by mountains north of Salt Lake City, the good doctor proffers “THE WOMAN’S TONIC: DR. PIERCE’s FAVORITE PRESCRIPTION.” On a barn in Toledo, Washington, he suggests this Favorite Prescription is especially apt “FOR WEAK WOMEN,” and a few hundred miles east, he’s got something “for your KIDNEYS: Dr. PIERCE’s ANURIC.”
People like to take photos of Dr. Pierce’s barn-side ephemera. I’ve found dozens of them posted online, from all around the country. A Dr. Pierce ad will often serve as a local landmark, as in Geyserville, where it’s listed as a wine tour stop on the town’s website. Something about Dr. Pierce’s insistent capitalization, his grandiose claims aimed at a more credulous time, seem alluring enough to stop the car for a moment and ponder the source.
In fact, Ray Vaughn Pierce was once one of the best-known doctors in America. His sales of mail-order “patent medicines” made him a vast fortune, as did the world-renowned sanatorium he built to dispense them. He wrote a home-diagnosis manual that stayed in print for decades, selling over four million copies. He served in Congress. President Garfield is reported to have called Pierce “one of the best men in the world, at the head of one of the best medical institutions in the world.”
But if Dr. Pierce had one singular quality, it was not medical talent, but gall. An unparalleled huckster—a pioneer in praying on the public’s scientific ignorance and desire for longevity—he knew the value of the Big Sell. Dr. Pierce was bold enough to offer not just a tonic for some of your ills, but a one-stop cure for all of them.
Corey Scherrer
I first encountered Dr. Pierce—a squat, bearded man with tufts of hair blowing backward around his balding crown—in the photo archives of the Apalachicola Times, the newspaper of the Florida town where my parents live. He’d gained local fame for having owned St. Vincent, a small, swampy island just offshore, which he bought toward the end of his career to use as a winter home. He built a small compound and in 1908 turned the rest into a game preserve stocked with exotic animals. (Their descendants live there still, on what is now a federal preserve.)
Born in 1840, Dr. Pierce was only in his early 20s when he set up his first practice in Titusville, Pennsylvania, claiming he’d earned a degree from Philadelphia University of Medicine and Surgery. “In fact he did not,” Ohio University Medical Historian
Norman Gevitz wrote in a 1990 examination of Pierce’s life. “Undoubtedly, the diploma was purchased.”
But lack of formal medical education didn’t hold Pierce back from quickly developing what would become his most lucrative invention: a liquorice-flavored tonic he dubbed “Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery.” Designed to cure multiple chronic diseases from thin blood to stomach upset to TB, the contents and nature of the discovery were proprietary, but it was advertised as giving “men an appetite like a cow-boy’s and the digestion of an ostrich.”
Pierce moved his operation to Buffalo in the late 1860s, and added “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” (for “female complaints”) to a growing treatment arsenal of pellets and tonics: “blood cleaners” and “Smart Weed” and “Vaginal Tablets.” He seeded the nations great newspapers with advertising—the barn billboards would come late—promising to cure every ill under the sun, and sales began to take off.
Paging through Dr. Pierce’s ads can make one yearn for a more literary time, when even a huckster’s wares had to compete on the playing field of words. Each ad’s artfully crafted copy is unique, full of scientific-sounding terms like “rich red corpuscles,” and “bronchial affections.” Pierce understood the importance of a captivating opener. “The mystery of life and death has puzzled many a wise man,” one ad begins. Another commences, “The wolf of starvation howls at the doors of thousands of men who are well to do and surrounded by plenty.” Dr. Pierce could be direct or elliptical, unfurling elaborately strange metaphors or straightforwardly announcing, “Nowadays there is not much to admire about the average man from a physical standpoint.”
Pierce, too, was a pioneer in the art of the testimonial. He layered his advertisements with glowing reviews from supposedly real folk, often accompanied by sketches to prove their veracity: “‘I must say that Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery is the most wonderful medicine I ever used,’ writes Geo S. Henderson, Esq. of Denaud, Florida. ‘I had a bad bruise on my right ear and my blood was badly out of order … From the first bottle I began to feel better.”
Dr. Pierce’s singularly brilliant hustle, however, came not in telling people which illness to fear, but in selling them a way to discover entirely new fears on their own. He did it by writing a self-treatment manual for the general public, akin to the medical advice websites of today. “It is the interest of every person,” he writes in the beginning of The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English, “to know what remedies should be employed for the alleviation of the common ailments of life.” That those remedies were often made by Dr. Pierce himself, well, that was just a quirk of scientific discovery. “No one,” he went on, “would expect, with only a dish of hot water and a stew kettle, to equal in pharmaceutical skill the learned chemist.”
First published in 1875 to glowing reviews in The New York Times and papers across the land, the book sold four and a half million copies and went through more than 100 printings. You can find it on Google Books today, in all of its pseudoscientific glory. Reasonable lessons on the known physiology and biology of the day are intermixed with discourses on already long-discredited nonsense like phrenology.
Dr. Pierce took particular interest in disorders of a sexual nature. He was, as one historian puts it, “an anti-masturbation crusader,” prescribing liberal doses of his Golden Medical Discovery as cures for spermatorrhea—“a loss of semen without copulation”—and impotency. (On the former subject, however, he seemed of two minds, evidenced by a device described in The People’s Common Sense Manual. Called the Manipulator, it was a mechanical contraption designed by Pierce and complete with a number of “rubbing attachments,” including the “rock-shaft” and the “double-rubber,” which were designed to “present a rubbing surface in all four directions” to “any intermediate part of the body.”)
At the height of his empire, Pierce was reported to be raking in over $1 million a year on international sales of his books, pellets, and tonics. He built a six-story manufacturing facility in Buffalo and dubbed it the “World’s Dispensary Medical Association.” Down the street he constructed a luxury hotel and sanatorium with a staff of a dozen doctors, reportedly visited by the Sundance Kid for treatment while he was on the lam. He was an aficionado of gadgets and medical devices, from bottle washers to one of the earliest electric elevators. “There were electric generators, ozone generator, and an X-ray equipment,” one Pierce scholar wrote of his Buffalo empire. “The hotel featured electric lighting and a fire sprinkler system. His use of this technology exposed many influential people to the possibilities of new technologies and science.”
Three years after his book came out, Pierce won a seat in the New York State Legislature. A year after that he was elected to Congress as a Republican. He resigned a year later due to, the papers said, ill health.
All success brings backbiters and naysayers, of course, and Dr. Pierce was no exception. The Buffalo medical establishment shunned him, and by the late 1800s public doubters began to challenge his credentials and the efficacy of his concoctions. One rival accused him of never having attended medical school at all, labeling him “the Prince of Quacks.” Another referred to him in print as “a most arrogant impostor,” even “a swindler.”
In The Common Sense Medical Adviser, Pierce had anticipated just this kind of criticism, which he dismissed as “modern twaddle,” and “the poorest kind of trash…expressing and inculcating more errors and whims than it does common sense.” He was the People’s doctor, and what did the specifics of credentials mean in the context of the millions of people to whom he brought comfort? The advent of muckraking journalism in the early 1900s, however, brought a greater challenge. Investigations by Collier’s and Ladies’ Home Journal declared the palliative powers of Dr. Pierce’s “Favorite Prescription” to be largely fueled by opium and alcohol. Dr. Pierce went on the offensive again, suing Collier’s for libel and winning. Sales recovered, and R.V. Pierce soon handed off control to his son, Valentine Mott Pierce, who ran the business until his own death in the 1940s.
Dr. Pierce’s concoctions continued to be sold, in various forms, into the 1970s.
In some ways, it’s surprising not to find them on the shelves still. After all, if Dr. Pierce scanned our ubiquitous health food stores today, stocked with Echinacea and bee pollen, what might he say? What would he think of acai smoothies or vitamin regimens long discredited by modern science? It’s tempting to look back at Dr. Pierce with a snicker at his racket, at the gullibility of his millions of customers. But if Dr. Pierce were here today, he’d be the one snickering. The great longevity chase remains afoot, and there are still fortunes being made in urging us all on.
In 1914, Ray Vaughn Pierce died at age 76 on St. Vincent Island, after several months of paralysis and having lost part of his fortune in a wayward gold mining venture in California. Lost to history is whether he dosed himself with his own concoctions, believing to his dying day in the power of his Golden Medical Discovery and his Favorite Prescription. Or if, as he lay there unmoving, the words of his own 1898 advertisement rattled through his head. “The imbecility of some men,” it began, “is always inviting the embrace of death.”
Your favorite hip-hop hero was far from the first musician to embrace the virtue of hard work, self-reliance, and, er, prostitution. Hustling and pop music have a joint history nearly as long-lived as Stratocasters and 16-bar blues.
“I’m Gonna File My Claim”
Though the lyrics lay claim to an idle life (“A girl should never hustle with a pick and pan to dig for gold, that isn’t her game”), when Monroe belts this brass to the boys in River of No Return, there’s no doubt she’s workin’ it.
“The Hustle”
McCoy was the quintessential hustler, writing songs for Gladys Knight and the Pips before his flute funk track transformed a small-time dance craze into a full-sized disco dance-aster that topped both the pop and R&B charts. Number of words in the 4:10 step-along? Four.
“9 to 5”
Sorry, Ice-T. In our songbook, Ms. Parton is the true O.G. thanks to hardcore rhymes that step to the struggle like “It’s a rich man’s game/No matter what they call it/And you spend your life/Puttin’ money in his wallet.”
“Everyday Struggle”
Many modern-day rappers glorify the game, but Biggie painted a more painful picture in this track from “Ready to Die”: “I don’t wanna live no mo’/ Sometimes I hear death knockin’ at my front do’/ I’m livin’ everyday like a hustle, another drug to juggle/Another day, another struggle.”
“Hustlin’”
Thanks to this Rawse joint, remixed and sampled by everyone from Lil Wayne and DJ Drama to Girl Talk, chances are if you’ve heard “hustlin’” in a song in the last four years it was probably proceeded by “every day I’m.” We’re guessing Ross can afford to take a day or two off now.
“Trans-Continental Hustle”
The punk/Gypsy-esque/something- else-entirely outfit Gogol Bordello took hustling international with this Rick Rubin–produced record that showed hustling can’t be confined to one genre any more than it can a decade.
In the mid-1960s, my great aunt Genevieve was a well known character in parts of Greenwich Village, and a regular at Danny Letteri’s No-Name Bar. He was apparently captivated by her ability to recite Irish poetry and sing. Every day, with increasingly failing eyesight, she would make the trip from her nursing home, across West 12th Street, to the bar. Every day, without fail, she would have a bottle of Guinness, sometimes a martini, two cigarettes and a packet of mints. After this, she would recite poetry or sing a song. And before leaving, she would continue her long-running mock spat with the barman, for her own amusement, and the amusement of anyone who happened to be listening. She never paid for anything.
Duncan Harris
Ten years later, for her 94th birthday, Mr. Letteri tore up her bar tab: $10,462. When questioned by the local press, Mr Letteri said “She was 83 when she asked if she could run up the tab and I figured…how much longer could it last?” Mr Letteri said that he was going to start a new tab for Genevieve and he didn’t care if it ran for another 10 years. The Guinness Brewery gave Mr Letteri $5,000, but he turned it over to her financially strapped nursing home.
“Figure one Guinness, one bottle of spring water and a pack of mints every day for ten years—I could retire on that,” Letteri said once. “But Genevieve earns her keep.”
Nicholas Rombes
Isaac Miller spends almost all his daylight hours cradling the bees’ eggs, sampling their honey, and tricking their drones into breeding extra queens that he sells to beekeepers eager to inject some fresh genes into their own hives. “The whole process is fooling hives into thinking they need queens,” he says. “It’s a bait and switch.”
But Miller, a bearded young bee- keeper in San Luis Obispo, has learned that the bees are no easy marks. There’s an art to breeding queens for profit.
You have to locate a healthy hive filled with strong workers. Then, search the honeycombs for the queen. When you find her amid her 30,000 subjects, kill her. Don’t be squeamish. Load the hive with 48 newly hatched bees squirming in plastic chambers. With the hive mother gone, the drones feed the larvae royal jelly to bulk them up to brood-laying size. If you time it just right—after a few days have gone by but before the new queen crawls out— you might just find yourself with 38 baby queens squirming in the four dozen larvae.
While they mature in an incubator for a day or two, scoop a Spam tin through an established colony and dump the resulting 200 or so bees into a shoebox with three combs and a sugar-water dispenser. Add an emerging queen and you’ve got the base of a new hive. She’ll take her mating flight and start laying eggs.
After a couple weeks, pull her out, paint a dot on her with model airplane enamel, and sell her to a commercial beekeeper for at least $15. Repeat.
The Green Day concert at Madison Square Garden on July 27, a Monday night, was not sold out. There were packs of teenagers, many with parents in tow, piling out of New York’s Penn Station and into the Garden, but most wore shirts with the words “American Idiot”—the band’s 2004 atomic bomb on the pop culture landscape—and not “21st Century Breakdown,” the 2009 follow-up that landed more like a surgical strike. Five years ago, this was a hot ticket. In a recession, it was just a hard sell.
“Tickets are still available at the box office,” said an MSG security guard through a bullhorn, sounding rather resigned. “All tickets purchased on the street will not be honored inside the arena.”
The latter clause was a veiled threat aimed at two groups: the teenagers with 25 bucks in their pockets, and the hundred or so middle-aged men prowling the plaza, whispering “Tickets…tickets…I got floor seats…tickets.”
Ryan Catbird
I noticed one of these ticket whisperers in action. A six-foot, burly man with a shaved head, he’d squeezed himself into a circle of Italians. They spoke enough English to know why he was there, and lucky for him, they were looking for tickets. Three, to be exact. The scalper pulled a handful of 8 1/2 × 11 sheets of paper —the computer printout, this century’s paperboard stub—out of his cargo shorts. He was wearing a loose-fitting baby-blue tank top and looked the part of a charming vagrant with his unkempt Van Dyke beard and sporadic teeth. The Italians were in pressed shirts. After a moment of haggling, they walked off without any tickets and he turned away with a look of frustration.
Scalping has been a fact of life for both the ticketed and the ticketless at any event worth attending since Romans ponied up extra denarii for seats at the Colosseum. Scalpers serve an economic purpose, as middlemen. They’re also hustlers and, occasionally, scam artists. Some have gotten desperate kids in to see a Yankees-Red Sox at the last minute, at face value; others have made desperate parents pay three times the going rate for a Jonas Brothers concert. It’s a checkered history for a profession that’s become a victim of its own success, of the success of the internet, and of course, a victim of the lack of success in any sector of the economy over the last two years. I approached the bearded scalper.
“Hi…are you selling?” “What are ya looking for?” “Actually,” I said,. “I’m writing a story about scalpers in New York and I was wonderi—” “Business is shit,” he said. “What the hell else do you wanna know?”
There are three types of scalpers outside the Garden—and for that matter, outside Gate 4 at Yankee Stadium, along 57th street in front of Carnegie Hall, and in the Meadowlands parking lot. There are the counterfeiters: the punks with an HP printer, some software, and enough smarts to fake it. Then there are the young kids, down to make a few bucks with a few friends. And then there are the Scalpers: the ones who see honor in their profession, and remember selling Led Zeppelin tickets for 20 bucks, taking half the profits around the corner to the Blarney Stone and the rest home to the wife and kids.
Scott, the bearded scalper, told me he’s one of the latter. He’d been a short order cook and longshoreman, which helped pay his bills with disability checks. Nothing stuck, or was as lucrative as scalping. But two great bubbles crashed the scalping business.
First, more people started doing it. In the ’80s, Scott would have been one of 25 or so scalpers at the Garden. Today, he’s one of 125. “One kid would come down and bring seven of his friends and they’d all start selling. The place got overrun,” said Scott, “We had rules. You didn’t do that.”
The other bubble, which poured a seemingly unlimited supply of unclaimed tickets into the market, was the internet. Now, anyone willing to pay a premium can get tickets at home, online. Good days have become fewer and fewer, and Scott has resorted to traveling. In the South and Midwest, NASCAR, with 200,000 tickets at some races, provides good opportunities. He went to New Jersey the day before the Green Day concert for the Gold Cup soccer final, between the U.S. and Mexico.
“I made 1,100 bucks in one night,” Scott said. “Every Mexican in the Northeast wanted to go to that game.”
“Oh, so it’s my fault, it’s my fucking fault,” yelled Officer Tizzo, loud enough for everyone in the 8th Avenue plaza outside the Garden to hear. He was slapping black handcuffs on Jack, a scalper Scott knows. Jack had been selling six of Scott’s tickets, with half of each sale kicking back to Scott. The officer pulled out four tickets from Jack’s pocket. (He’d only been able to sell two.)
“I’m just going to the concert,” said Jack, a white-haired man dressed in black, save for a giant silver bracelet on one wrist and an even larger silver watch on the other. He was more Neil Armstrong’s generation than Billie Joe’s.
“Oh yeah, you’re going in with four fucking tickets,” said Officer Tizzo, laughing, as he pulled out black gloves to handle the evidence.
“Yeah, I got ‘em off StubHub,” said Jack.
Scott said he’s been arrested “hundreds of times.” It’s just part of doing business. For higher profile events, like a Paul McCartney concert, half a dozen guys could end up in handcuffs. If you’re arrested at the Garden, like Jack, the officer will call in your ID and, if you’re clean, offer a mere warning. If you have a previous infraction, then you’re likely headed to the Midtown
South Precinct headquarters on West 35th Street. Because you’ve probably been arrested after hours, there won’t be a judge present, so you’re spending the night in jail. It’s even worse in New Jersey, where you end up in county prison, not jail, and the fine can reach into the hundreds of dollars. That’s one reason Scott said many non-natives rarely even bother with the Meadowlands. (The other reason is the handful of teenagers whom, he claimed, the Giants and Jets employ to scout out scalpers, hiding up in the stadium with binoculars and walkie-talkies to alert security to deals in progress.)
It didn’t escape Scott that the world’s biggest scalpers make huge profits with no risk – yet – of getting arrested. StubHub and Ticketmaster’s extortion-wing, TicketsNow, makes millions on the lawless internet. In most states, scalping is completely legal —as long as you’re selling tickets somewhere other than at the event (say, on the internet). It’s a curious double standard that exists simply because no one’s quite figured out how to regulate the Web. Scott, as he sees it, is just another victim of the information age.
The World Series between New York and Philadelphia last October was the 40th such appearance for the Yankees, but the first in the team’s new palace. Game One, with a pregame Jay-Z concert (later rescheduled), was a hot ticket. A Phillies fan had offered sex, via Craigslist, in exchange for a seat. In the Bronx, I found two cops patrolling the streets for every scalper trying to hide from them. One scalper led customers into a McDonald’s bathroom across the street to complete transactions.
Scott used to scalp at the Stadium almost exclusively, but he said the cops started cracking down too hard to make it worthwhile. As he tells it, he had 400 tickets a night and would supply other scalpers as his grunts. I told him I scalped a ticket in the grandstand for 30 bucks during the regular season. He told me I did well. I asked if I could have haggled for less.
“See, you kids, you come in and say, ‘I want a seat and I’ll give you 10 bucks for it,’ and I just wanna crack you in the fucking head,” Scott said. “Do you go to your job and work for free? Show some respect.”
Scott’s no longer a ticket kingpin. He gets his tickets from one of the bigger brokers in town, and often won’t know how many tickets he has to sell, or if there are any at all, until hours before an event. The company tries to sell as many as possible online before releasing them to the human scalpers. He lives on Staten Island with a wife and five kids, he said, and it costs 25 bucks for him to travel into the city, with food and tolls and gas. He would only barely make his money back tonight.
“It’s all a hustle. Some people sell drugs; some people sell guns; I sell tickets,” he said, opening a can of Sprite. “I like to think it’s the lesser evil.”
The concert was starting, and he had given up unloading the last few tickets he had. Sometimes he goes into the concert if he can’t sell the tickets – he was hoping to have a few extra for his kids when he scalps a Coheed and Cambria concert later in the summer – but not tonight. I asked if he can support his family on this lifestyle.
“I used to. Now I gotta do whatever I can on the side. I gotta hustle.”
“Hustle what?” I ask.
“That don’t matter,” he said. He turned away and, spotting a young couple sheepishly approaching the arena, made one last attempt at a sale.
Ancient Egyptians called it the “flesh of the gods.” To the Incas, it was “sweat of the sun.” No object in the world has driven humanity to lust quite like gold has. Explorers and conquerors, pharaohs and bankers—all have coveted the shiny metal known by the chemical symbol Au. Gold fever has funded wars and empires. It even built the state of California. Now, it’s destroying the Amazon.
Over currency fears, the price of gold has roughly tripled in the past decade. Rushing to get in on the action are some 15 million artisanal gold miners worldwide, who generate more than 20 percent of the world’s gold production—using rudimentary methods that are a leading cause of the planet’s mercury pollution.
The nation of Suriname occupies a tiny slice of the Amazon River Basin north of Brazil, between Guyana and French Guiana. Its population of less than 500,000 people is settled largely on the Atlantic coast, around the capital city of Paramaribo. Vast tropical rainforest blankets about 80 percent of the country, which sits above a unique geological formation called the Guiana Shield. The jungle is home to indigenous peoples and Maroons, descendants of runaway African slaves—and abundant in minerals such as alumina, oil, and gold, exports of which exceed 50 percent of Suriname’s GDP.
Since the 1990s, when it became more difficult to find work in Brazil, dreams of riches have called thousands of wildcat miners, or garimpeiros, across the porous border into Suriname. Bar owners, shopkeepers and sex workers follow their footsteps. Suriname’s government has failed to control small-scale gold mining and largely looks the other way to this steady influx, yet in the interior—where the state is virtually nonexistent—their illegal presence creates an uneasy coexistence with local Maroons.
In 2007, I spent five days in Benzdorp, a remote mining settlement in southeastern Suriname, near the border with French Guiana. Benzdorp is inaccessible by road; reaching the town requires a trip of several days up the Lawa River, from Paramaribo, or an hour flight in an Antonov An-28, a Ukrainian light prop plane. On my flight were two lipsticked Brazilian women in tight shirts and pumps, three Surinamese Maroons, a garimpeiro, and a baby-faced New Zealand geologist working for a Canadian mining company—all in it for the gold.
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