Writing Samples by John Boykin "The Marines"--sample chapter from book "Cursed is the Peacemaker" Web site accessibility for visually impaired users--PDF of white paper Master of lost causes--book award acceptance speech Galapagos Islands --excerpt from magazine article Amazon River --excerpt from magazine article Economic sanctions --excerpt from magazine article Earthquake preparation --topic and video script from CD-ROM Replace window screen --topic and video script from CD-ROM Hyperinflation--video script from CD-ROM on macroeconomics Valley View Inn--marketing copy for B&B's Web site Photography --complete text of a magazine article Return to Editing and Writing page | Home Galapagos Islands [from intro to "Enclave of the Castaways: A Stanford Visit to the Galapagos Islands," by John Boykin,© Stanford Magazine.] You don't go to the Galapagos Islands to sip piña coladas and watch native dancers in a casino. There aren't any. You go to step back a few million years, to try to slip unobtrusively into the private world of blue-footed boobies, sea lions, and waved albatrosses going about the quiet business of being themselves. The startling thing is that they let you. Some will even swim with you, as I found out off the north shore of Floreana Island. Just beyond my fingertips, a dark female sea lion circled, checking me out like a child who hasn't been taught not to stare. She dodged in and out around me until I tried to get close enough to touch her. I barely managed to brush her fat, bristly whiskers before, with a mere gesture of her left flipper, she veered off sharply and rejoined the other six sea lions hovering nearby. Though they wouldn't let me touch them, they weren't afraid of me, really. We just hadn't been properly introduced. It's not clear just why animals of the Galapagos Islands are so tame, but one theory is that whatever fear instinct they brought with them from the mainland originally has proven generally unnecessary in the simple island environment, and has therefore been lost over time. The food chains on small islands are shorter and simpler than normal mainland food chains and lack large predators that require a lot of space. So smaller creatures may have fewer natural enemies to fear. Nor have humans been a part of their experience long enough for them to know they're supposed to fear us. They have simply never figured out just what to make of us odd vertical creatures with the black cylindrical beaks that say "Nikon" and go click-wind-click. Pelican photo accompanying article | Panga photo accompanying article Editing and Writing page | List writing samples | Other science articles | Home Amazon River [From the intro to "Amazon: The River and the Rainforest," by John Boykin,© Stanford Magazine.] Shrine with Chicken Francisco Nunes greets you with a handshake and a hug and proudly shows you around his place. For the Amazon, it's quite a spread. His house, a 40' x 15' box made of tightly woven palm fronds, stands about fifty yards back from the river on stilts, the better to straddle floodwaters. The bare plank floor holds no furniture; two hammocks rock gently in the whisper of humid breeze. On the left wall hang pictures of Jesus. On the outside of that wall Francisco keeps his fishing harpoons. With mime and more enthusiastic Portuguese than you could ever hope to understand, he shows you how they work. Behind him on the back porch, the real center of activity, Francisco's wife sweeps dust off the wooden planks down onto a chicken ruffling in the dirt, his daughter sews on a tired treadle Singer, and his newest grandchild snoozes in a hammock. Twice a day Francisco heads out front where eight measuring posts parade down the riverbank into the water, and wades out to measure how high the river is. His meticulous records are the raw data from which scientists make their calculations about the mightiest river on earth. Francisco lives outside Obidos, Brazil, one of the last points downstream where the entire flow of the splintery Amazon merges into a single channel. His twice-daily ritual for the past twenty years has made Obidos what hydrologist Robert Meade calls "one of the shrines of hydrology." Editing and Writing page | List writing samples | Other science articles | Home Economic Sanctions [from "With a Small Stick, Loudly," by John Boykin,© Stanford Magazine.] Do Sanctions Work? Trade restrictions have become America's foreign policy weapon of choice. Alone or with allies, we have imposed sanctions more often in the past twenty years than have all the other nations and international organizations of the world combined in the past seventy years. This raises a fundamental question: Do sanctions accomplish their stated objectives? In a word, no. In a few more words, not very well and not very often. "You can practically count on the fingers of one hand how many times sanctions have worked," says Stanford professor of international law John Barton. And academics who study such things generally agree. "You then have to ask yourself why people keep using sanctions," says Stanford political science professor Stephen Krasner. "Don't they read history? Don't they know what they're doing?" The answer requires a clearer sense of what we mean by "work" and a brief look at the record. . . . [Review of the track record of sanctions] So Why Use Them? If sanctions so rarely produce even modest results and may defeat their own purposes, the why are they still used? "There aren't very many arrows in the quiver of statecraft," says Krasner. "There's diplomatic posturing, explicit armed conflict, covert activity, and economic pressure. Sanctions are the best among a bad set of alternatives." There are basically three agendas in imposing sanctions: to force the target country to change its ways, to announce to the world that you disapprove of what the target country is doing, and to satisfy domestic political interests. "If you consider it in those three ways," says Stanford political science professor Judith Goldstein, "then economic sanctions may in fact work in two out of the three. They are always successful in that at least they make a public statement that something is wrong. They show our allies and political constituencies within the U.S. that we are on the right side of an issue, even if we don't affect the target country's behavior." Krasner emphasizes, "You have to ask what game you're playing. There are a lot of purposes other than altering the behavior of some other country. It is quite important to make a statement about your own identity and moral beliefs, regardless of whether your behavior is going to alter the outcome." Making a statement to allies is not always the fluff it may seem. In October 1978, for example, the U.S. imposed a total trade ban against the Uganda of Idi Amin. The prime mover, Congressman Donald Pease, openly acknowledged that the purpose was to destroy Amin. The same month Amin attacked neighboring Tanzania, and in January 1979 Tanzania counterattacked. By April Tanzania had driven Amin out of Uganda and ended his eight-year reign of terror. Journalist Judith Miller writes in Foreign Policy that "there is considerable evidence that . . . the American sanctions proved devastating to the Ugandan economy and that they helped set in motion the events that led to the fall of the regime. In that respect, the U.S. boycott can appropriately be called a success." More specifically, the Tanzanian ambassador to the U.S. said that "the U.S. boycott was a definite factor in our counterattack. . . . We sensed that public opinion would not be violently opposed to Tanzania's measures." [Since this was written, there have been two other notable cases in which sanctions have been instrumental in bringing about changes: persuading the apartheid regime in South Africa to hold honest elections that brought Nelson Mandela to power, and persuading Slobodan Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia to pressure the Bosnian Serbs to negotiate the 1995 Dayton agreement.] Editing and Writing page | List writing samples | Other social science articles | Home Bracing for Earthquakes [Topic and video script for Home Repair Encyclopedia, the flagship interactive multimedia CD of Books That Work. Written by John Boykin. © Books That Work. Hot text in bold type but not actually linked here.] [intro text on screen:] Earthquakes have an uncanny knack of picking on the weakest part of a house's structure and focusing their energy there. That could be a disaster if the weak link is the cripple walls, since they carry the weight of a wood-frame house. So one of the smartest precautions you can take is to brace them with plywood. First replace any rotten wood and bolt the mudsill to the foundation if it isn't bolted already. The difficulty of the project depends largely on how cramped the space is under the house. [button: More Info] [button: Tip from the Pros] [button: Safety] [button: Video Script] [button: Old House] [button: Related Topics] [Video script. Video demonstrates steps; voice-over gives instructions:] If you don't have enough wood top or bottom to nail into securely, add blocks like this and nail them in. Measure the height and width of each section to be covered. It's best to work in sections 4 to 8 feet long. Be sure to measure around plumbing and other obstacles. Then cut your plywood. Before you put up the plywood, mark the location of each cripple stud top and bottom. Also mark where the house vents are. Now set the plywood in position and tack it in place. Snap a chalk line between your marks to indicate where to nail. Nailing will go a lot faster and easier if you rent a nail gun. It's also less likely to split the wood. Be sure to nail every 4 inches all the way around the edges and every 7 inches along each stud inside. Whenever two pieces of plywood come together, they should meet in the center of a stud. In every cavity between studs, use a hole saw to drill two 1-1/2-inch vent holes. Center them between studs about two inches from the top and bottom. Put an extra hole opposite each house vent. Brace the walls at least four feet out from every corner. For maximum strength, brace their whole length.   Editing and Writing page | List writing samples | Other interactive media writing | Home Replacing a Window Screen [Topic and video script for Home Repair Encyclopedia, the flagship interactive multimedia CD of Books That Work. Written by John Boykin. © Books That Work. Hot text in bold type but not actually linked here.] [intro text on screen:] The sign of a good replacement job is a taut, wrinkle-free screen. Use C-clamps to hold the screen to the frame on one side while you stretch the screen across and attach it to the opposite side. Install the screen by using a spline roller, which has two wheels: The convex wheel presses the new screen down into a channel in the frame; the concave wheel presses the spline into the channel on top of the screen. [Button: More Info] [Button: Tip from the Pros] [Button: Video Script] [Video script. Video demonstrates steps; voice-over gives instructions:] First, you remove the old spline, which is what holds the screen in place. You might need to use a knife to pry up one end to get started. Take the old screen out and set the new screen over the frame. Press one side of the new screen into the channel with the smooth wheel of the spline roller. Use short strokes. Now lay the spline over the channel and press it into place with tool's grooved wheel. Use short strokes for this too. Keep the screen tight as you work one whole side, then the opposite side. When the spline is all in, trim off the excess screen.   Editing and Writing page | List writing samples | Other interactive media writing | Home