Of all the discouraging stories to come out of the war in Iraq, few match the widespread use of fake bomb detectors that were hawked to the Iraqi government by an English con man named James McCormick. Adam Higginbotham gives a detailed account of the bizarre affair in a recent article in Businessweek. The so-called bomb detectors were nothing more than plastic handles with non-operational antennae sticking out of them, a design based on a gizmo from the nineteen-nineties that supposedly found lost golf balls. Reading about it now, McCormick’s scam seems flimsy and cartoonish—the detectors came with laminated cards “programmed” with “electrostatic ion attraction” to find various substances, and with white gloves for proper handling. Yet McCormick became a millionaire by travelling around the world selling these devices to governments and police forces for thousands of dollars each, and many of the people he sold them to are still using them. Higginbotham’s story is a case study in people’s capacity for both deviousness and credulity. It’s hard to tell which side of equation gives a bleaker view of human nature.
Or maybe the source of the McCormick scam isn’t a tragic flaw in human nature but a specific quirk that predisposes us to believe in the ability of sticks to point at things. According to Ben Marks, who wrote a piece about water dowsing for Collectors Weekly, people have been doing this since at least the Renaissance. Dowsing is the practice of finding water (or sometimes oil or other underground substances) by traversing land holding a forked stick and sinking a well at the spot where the stick turns toward the ground. Marks’s history of the practice revolves around a dowser named Romie Nunn who was well known in Wyoming in the mid twentieth century. Scientists would say that Nunn was a victim of the ideomotor effect, when the power of suggestion causes unconscious movement. But Nunn remained convinced, even after he began to lose money on unsuccessful oil-dowsing ventures, and some of his children swear by his abilities even today.
Turning from a man who used Renaissance-era science in the modern world, Tom Mueller writes in the latest Smithsonian about a man who applies modern science to the Renaissance: paleopathologist Gino Fonaciari, who examines the bodies of the long deceased, looks for clues to their causes of death. His investigations give insight into the political and personal intrigues of the Italian noble families he exhumes, including a shocking amount of venereal disease and medicinal-mercury consumption.
Another story of unconventional investigation appears in Kevin Poulsen’s piece for Wired about a Secret Service operation to catch identity thieves by setting up an online vendor of fake I.D.s. Operation Open Market was a four-year-long sting that ended with the indictment of dozens of accused identity thieves across the country earlier this year. Poulsen lays out the twists, turns, and complications of the elaborate investigations, along with the legal nuances that are likely to keep the case in court for a very long time.
And finally, this weekend provides an opportunity to return to New York Magazine’s 2001 profile of Monica Lewinsky by Vanessa Grigoriadis, written a few years post-scandal, when Lewinski was still making purses and putting her life back together in New York. The article is doubly timely this week: first, we’re deluged with news of another political sex scandal, and second, because Lewinski, who remains in many of our minds a perennial twenty-one-year-old intern, had her fortieth birthday this week. The profile is full of sharp observation and keeps outright commentary to a minimum.