report from abroad
I'm writing this from the Houston airport where the supposedly free wi-fi appears to be a doubtful proposition. So this may wind up having a Seattle dateline.

My seat mate on the Jax-Houston leg was a grizzled veteran of three marriages returning to his Las Vegas son after spending a week with his Florida son. He was pleasant enough and I was way more sociable than I usually am on flights. It's nice to have someone to carp about the seats with, I suppose. Actually, we had a set of three all to ourselves. So there was room to stretch out. Not bad.

The bad news: if you look at an extremely up-to-date map of the area between Jacksonville and Houston, you might notice a weather formation like a cloud galaxy with a black hole at its center. That would be Hurricane Dolly, and we had to avoid it. I think it extended our flight time slightly. They kept the fasten seat belt sign on the whole way, but there was only one big bump, near the end. Felt like it about knocked us out of the sky, though.

That's OK, I had reading material. I've branched out! I'm reading Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores, which is to the AIDS epidemic what Freakonomics is to economics. Holy Martha. It's like... I don't know what it's like. No, it's like I'm my world is an Etch-a-Sketch, and someone's just turned it upside down and shaken it.

The book is unavoidably explicit about practices that I had never even conceived of. I should be horrified. But maybe it's just too much to take in, I don't feel that way. Just sort of... wow.

The reason I'm reading such unusual material is due to a conversation Owen and I had the other day. We were discussing my upcoming trip to Amsterdam and the whole issue of rampant prostitution there. Or we were trying. After a moment, Owen admitted, "Man, I don't have any clue about this issue." My feeling exactly. I decided to educate myself, and I'd read about this book a while back on Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution blog, so I started here. I think it's exactly what I was looking for.

I don't imagine this book will ever make much of a splash, because there's something in here to upset everybody. I certainly come from a certain perspective on AIDS and I expected going in that I would not agree with the author, but I doubt that very many people of any political persuasion would be in full agreement. This is the kind of book where alternative lifestyles of every variety or explored without blinking while Jesse Helms and Franklin Graham are name-dropped - positively, I might add.

After an opening chapter delving into the evolving global awareness of the AIDS epidemic, full of numbers and anecdotes about UN bureaucracy, we dive into deepest, darkest Jakarta, where the sexual habits of an entire culture are a long, long way from Boise, Idaho. It's easy to dismiss the peccadillos of a lone individual. It's harder when it's clear that the difference is cultural, that this is to some degree part of the way of life for an entire nation. Where do you go with that?

I was looking for a fresh perspective, even if it was one I largely disagreed with. This book is that, in spades.