This is a major blow to anti-vaccine nutters. David Rose in the Times of London:

A leading medical journal has officially retracted the discredited study which sparked a health scare over the MMR vaccine.

The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers which linked MMR to bowel disorders and autism, were “false”.

It comes after Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have been irresponsible and dishonest in carrying out the original study on 12 children.

MMR is the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine which was introduced in 1988. The fall-out from the research, first published in February 1998, caused vaccination rates to plummet and has been blamed for a resurgence of measles in Britain.

The General Medical Council (GMC) ruled last week that Wakefield showed a “callous disregard” for the suffering of children and that two fellow authors of the paper also “failed in their duties” as responsible doctors in carrying out the study.

More here. And see also Peter Lipson in Forbes:

Yesterday, Matthew Herper discussed the latest watermark in the Andrew Wakefield Affair. Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, ran a small, unethical study which ignited the modern anti-vaccination movement. Vaccines, which have done more for public health than anything besides clean water and good sewers, have been under attack from activists such as Jenny McCarthy (with her degree from Google U), and by some medical and scientific professionals, such as Wakefield and others, many of whom also promote and sell “alternative” vaccine programs and dangerous and disproved autism treatments, such as chelation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Wakefield's disgrace will do little to stop the hardcore believers in the failed vaccine-autism hypothesis, but while the denialists at Age of Autism, Huffington Post, and other outlets whine to each other about the evils of vaccines, real scientists are helping real people.

More here.

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

Is the Green Movement finished? That is what the Iranian government wants the world to believe. And it has recently been trumpeting a few pieces of evidence to make its case.

First came a statement by Mir Hossein Mousavi on New Year’s Eve, which offered five conditions for ending the current impasse. But because it did not directly repeat Mousavi’s oft-quoted notion that the June elections were rigged, Kayhan and Rajanews—the two news outlets closest to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad—tried to claim the statement as a major victory for the regime.

Then in late January came reports of a “confidential” letter of repentance written by former Iranian president (and leading reformer) Mohammad Khatami, addressed to Khamenei. The letter supposedly recognizes the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad’s presidency. Again, Kayhan and Rajanews reported on the letter, construing it as a sure sign of the Green Movement’s defeat.

Finally, there was the alleged coup de grace: a statement reported by Fars News Agency, the government-run Iranian news service, from Mehdi Karroubi—known as an uncompromising and defiant leader of the reform movement.

More here.

Joanna Smith Rakoff in Slate:

On my first day of work at Harold Ober Associates—one of New York's oldest and most storied literary agencies—I was shown the enormous, outmoded IBM Selectric on which I would type letters for my boss, the clunky Dictaphone that would provide me with the content of those letters, and the vast metal cabinets in which I would file all correspondence with authors. I was then escorted into the dimly lit corner office occupied by Phyllis Westberg, the company's president, whom I would be assisting.

“Sit down, sit down,” said Phyllis. “We need,” she said, as I arranged myself in the chair across from her large wooden desk, “to talk about Jerry.” I nodded in an attempt to mask the fact that I had no idea what she was talking about. This was 1996, and the first “Jerry” to come to mind was Seinfeld. It was only later, when I noticed a wall of books opposite my new desk—all with plain spines, in maroon, yellow, and white—that I realized the Jerry in question was Jerome David Salinger.

“Now, his address and his phone number are in the Rolodex on your desk,” Phyllis explained. “People are going to call and ask for his number. You think it won't happen, but it will.” She paused to light another cigarette. “Grad students. Reporters. Just … people. They may try to trick you or manipulate you. They may give you some song-and-dance routine.” She laughed a throaty laugh, then fixed me sharply in her pale blue eyes. “But you can never, ever give out that address. Or that phone number. NEVER. OK?”

More here.

From The New York Times:

The best book blurb I’m aware of came from Roy Blount Jr., who said about Pete Dexter’s 1988 novel, “Paris Trout”: “I put it down once to wipe off the sweat.” I’m not sure I know what that means. Was the sweat on Mr. Blount’s forehead? On the dust jacket? On the inside of his fogged-up reading glasses? But I like it. I put down Rebecca Skloot’s first book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” more than once. Ten times, probably. Once to poke the fire. Once to silence a pinging BlackBerry. And eight times to chase my wife and assorted visitors around the house, to tell them I was holding one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time.

A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” also floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill and purify the more addictive qualities of “Erin Brockovich,” “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” and “The Andromeda Strain.” More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book Ms. Skloot was born to write. It signals the arrival of a raw but quite real talent. The woman who provides this book its title, Henrietta Lacks, was a poor and largely illiterate Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. No obituaries of Mrs. Lacks appeared in newspapers. She was buried in an unmarked grave.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Ruchira Paul)

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

“Mannerism” sounds stupid. One immediately associates it with manners. And “manners” are not in the highest regard these days. Mannerism would seem to be a movement of affected and empty gestures, of style over substance.

That's what many do mean when they use the term. Mannerism has come to refer, primarily, to the group of Italian artists working just after the close of the High Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci died in May 1519; you could say, then, that Mannerism started in early June of that same year. The Mannerists, left with nowhere to go by the transcendent greatness of the High Renaissance artists, had no choice but to become decadent and unhinged.

Mannerist artists like Jacopo da Pontormo thus wasted little time in screwing up the Renaissance. Pontormo painted his figures in crazy contorted poses that would have made Leonardo revisit his lunch. Pontormo also went nuts with color. Many of the scenes he painted have an otherworldly luminosity that is hard to describe. You almost want to call it DayGlo. His compositions veer toward the “jumbly.” What, exactly, is happening in “Joseph in Egypt”? The staircase to nowhere dominates the canvas and it looks like Pontormo simply forgot to finish the landscape in the background. A cherub vamps atop a random column stuck on the far right side of the scene. This, gentlemen, is not Michelangelo.

It is for all these reasons and more that I have come to love Mannerism.

More here.

Len Burman, James K. Galbraith, Robert Greenstein, John S. Irons, Grover Norquist, and Alice Rivlin respond in the National Journal. Galbriath:

At the peak at the end of FY 1946, gross US national debt was 121.7 percent of GDP. Today the number is just under 70 percent. In 1946 the debt held by the American public – including by the Federal Reserve System – was 108.6 per cent of GDP. The comparable figure for 2009 is just under 60 percent of GDP. As of the 2010 budget it was expected to rise to 70 percent in FY 2011, and to decline thereafter.

After 1945, the debt/GDP ratio declined gradually. Levels comparable to the present were seen throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s. They were lower in the 1970s – an economic period marked by inflation, which reduced the debt/GDP ratio – and higher again in the 1980s, as the economy recovered from the sharp slumps of 1980-82. That's the record.

Those high public debt levels of 1946 were completely benign. Long-term interest rates were pegged at two percent. Series E bonds — Victory bonds — formed a very large part of the financial wealth of the American middle class at that moment. In fact, they created the American middle class — a working population that had never before enjoyed any financial security at all. Their existence, as claims on future purchasing power, gave businesses confidence to invest, and so helped avert a relapse to the Great Depression.

Comparatively, US public debt in relation to GDP today is well within the normal range for advanced and solvent countries, including Germany, Canada, France and Austria. It is lower than many, including Italy or Greece — a small, vulnerable country whose bond offerings just last week were nevertheless 3:1 oversubscribed. The US position is obviously stronger than most, because of the dollar's international role. So there is no basis, whether in history or cross-country comparison, for the current panic over public deficits and debt.

Yes, conditions are different today. The American public no longer holds the American public debt directly. Some of it is held abroad, where interest payments just pile up, with no good effects on financial wealth or spending here. Much of it is held by banks, who are doing nothing to promote economic recovery. The middle class, which holds housing, stocks and cash, is hurting on all fronts. These are problems. But they are not problems of too much public debt, rather of its distribution.

In this interview with Zizek in the Times of India, he says something that seems patently stupid (via Crooked Timber, which has an interesting conversation going on).

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

A lot of people will find it ridiculous to even imagine that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler? Are you serious when you say that?

Yes. Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here. For me, that is a problem.

Kuhu Tanvir, who was present at the interview, states that this is a misquote:

I read this interview on Sunday and I am sorry to report that the journalist has taken some serious liberties with Zizek’s responses. I can say this because I was present for the interview. While I understand the constraints of newspaper journalism and their problems with space, the journalist has here presented Zizek’s answers in such a way that they seem arbitrary and silly. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but I want to clarify that this was not the case. Zizek, though controversial and provocative, gave a detailed response to each question, explaining all his comments, contextualizing them. More importantly, if memory serves me right, the answer about Gandhi and Hitler has been completely misquoted. Zizek said, (at more than one event in New Delhi) the exact opposite of what this report has printed. He DID NOT say “his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here,” he in fact said the opposite, that the paradigm shift that Gandhi wanted required an inherent violence.

Doug Henwood in the Left Business Observer:

Few pieces in the 23-year history of LBO have attracted as much hostile correspondence as “Web of nonsense” in #119. It was a critique of the mode of thought, almost foundational to a brand of populism on both the left and the right, “that sees the problems of capitalism—like the polarization of rich and poor and the system’s vulnerability to periodic crises—as primarily financial in origin.” While this tendency has a long history, and pervades a lot of the pseudo-radical tradition in the U.S., it always achieves special prominence at the time of financial crises.

To reprise for a moment before taking on a fresh eruption of the syndrome: capitalism is a system organized around money. Almost nothing is undertaken in the realm of production for reasons other than the accumulation of money. As the money accumulates, something must be done with it, which is why financial wealth expands over time. But even though that financial wealth often seems to inhabit a world of its own, it is ultimately connected to what Wall Street calls the “real” sector. For example, all the mortgage securities that caused the recent mischief were ultimately connected to one of the most basic needs of all, shelter. There is no way to separate neatly the monetary from the real. The social problem emanating from the securitization of mortgages isn’t only the increasingly baroque development of financial assets but also the commodification of the house and its transformation into a speculative asset. Which is why populist financial reforms can’t take you very far: they address symptoms, not pathogens.

But that never stops people from trying. The latest populist spasm is Arianna Huffington’s “Move Your Money” campaign, which would have those of us with money in large banks move it to small ones. This touches on another foundational populist fantasy: that virtue and size are inversely related. Her website, which thrives on the unpaid labor of hundreds of eager contributors, even provides a helpful list of convenient local banks if you enter your zip code.

What’s wrong with this scheme? Several things.

More here.

Harriet Harris in Broadway.com:

The good people at Broadway.com have invited me to get up on my high horse and talk about “acting in Noel Coward.” This is a topic about which I know precious little—and, as I have an aversion to horses of any height, I am left to ponder why I said “yes” when my character, Monica Reed, would have dictated a “polite refusal.”

My ignorance is both deep and wide. My preferences, however, are shallow and narrow as a gerbil’s grave. I don’t absolutely know how to act Noel Coward. But I like to think he has left us clues on every page.

I like to see a page full of punctuation—it makes me as happy as fresh snow on Christmas or fireworks on the Fourth of July. Out of laziness and an inability to accessorize, I skipped a lot of school as a child and can’t punctuate my way out of a paper bag, but I am full of admiration for those who can. Coward was an actor, author, director, painter and a musician (ay-yi-yi, I feel so small), so certainly he meant us to observe the melody and rhythm of his lines. Sometimes they leap and gallop, sometimes they canter or trot. Yes, the rhythm lies is in the words. But it lives in the punctuation.

More here.

This is from 2008, but it’s a good speech:

A well-turned interpretation in the mind of a narcissist
may end in a long walk off a short pier.
— Anon.

Nero’s Term

Nero was not worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
“Let him fear the seventy three years.”
He still had ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty. More than sufficient
is the term the god allots him
to prepare for future perils.

Now he will return to Rome slightly tired,
but delightfully tired from this journey,
full of days of enjoyment —
at the theaters, the gardens, the gymnasia…
evenings at cities of Achaia…
Ah the delight of nude bodies, above all…

Thus fared Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly assembles and drills his army,
the old man of seventy three.

by Constantine P Cavafy

from The Complete Poems of Cavafy;
Harcort Brace, 1961

Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this Tino Sehgal show which is currently at the Guggenheim in New York. In an email about the New York Times review (below), Asad [shown in photo here] writes:

I think Holland Cotter got it pretty well. We are, I think, doing something, reaching so many people in their subjective particularity rather than as a mass audience, on a scale that no one has ever done before, which took lot of homework–in addition to finding and training all the people and organizing everyone and everything, we were running computer models, studying how it would work with thousands of people a day–we had 3753 people on saturday! Tino said to me the other night, as we were sitting alone talking over the next day, that this scale is way beyond anything he's ever done. It really is a big operation.

Holland Cotter writes about the show in the New York Times:

It begins when you walk a short way up the rotunda ramp. A child comes over to greet you. My greeter, a girl of 9 or 10, introduced herself as Giuliana and stated matter-of-factly, “This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.” She invited me to follow her and asked if she could ask me a question. “What is progress?” I gave a broad answer, then at her request, a clarifying example. We went further up the ramp.

Soon we were joined by a young man, a teenager, who said his name was Will. Giuliana carefully and accurately paraphrased for him my response to her question and slipped away. I walked on with Will, who commented on my comments on progress, which prompted me to try to refine my initial thoughts.

About halfway up the rotunda, Will was replaced by Tom, whom I took to be in his mid-30s and who introduced a new topic.

He had read a scientific report that morning saying that dinosaurs, long envisioned as drab-gray and green, might have been brightly colored, even gaudily striped. We had both, we said, been fascinated by dinosaurs as kids, as was his young son today. And now everyone would have to reimagine them, though artists already had done that. So Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” turns out to be natural history. Art beats science to the punch.

As we neared the last stretch of the ramp, Tom handed me over to Bob, who was, like me, in late middle age and who broached another topic. He had just returned from Bulgaria where he had talked with a range of people over 20 about their feelings about the state of their country and lives. He found, he said, a pervasive nostalgia for life under Communism, a yearning for a society that promised to take care of everyone.

More here.

Christopher Lydon in conversation over at Open Source:

Terry Teachout’s fine reconsideration of the man called “Pops” solidifies Louis Armstrong’s standing as not just the greatest horn player since the angel Gabriel, but an all-transforming artist at the level of James Joyce or even Shakespeare, and a black American freedom fighter of character and conscience, too. Louis Armstrong’s power to astonish was never in doubt. Hoagy Carmichael, the songwriter of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink the first time he heard Louis, barely out of his teens, in 1921. “Why,” Hoagy moaned, “isn’t everybody in the world listening to that?” Over the next 50 years the whole world heard Louis, and marveled, but there were always questions, too: Could honky-tonk music from red-light New Orleans get standing, really, with Schubert and Bach? Was Louis in artistic decline after the Twenties? Was he an Uncle Tom in all that Satchelmouth clowning?

All the modern answers as Terry Teachout documents them are over the top now in favor of Louis Armstrong. Listen to the testimonies his fellow horn players Ruby Braff and Wynton Marsalis gave me on Louis’s legendary centennial, July 4, 1900: that if Louis wasn’t actually God, he was at least proof of God. His grandeur, complexity and consistency as man and artist seem now beyond question. Harold Bloom, keeper of the cultural canon and an astute jazz listener, too, pairs Armstrong with Walt Whitman as the greatest American contributor to the world’s art, the genius of this nation at its best. It turns out we could believe our ears after all.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White)

Charles Leadbeater in Edge:

We are about to get a very different kind of Internet, one replete with huge potential and danger. The spread of cloud computing will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real time connection and easier collaboration. Cloud computing will give rise to a cloud culture. Many of the purveyors of that culture will be cloud capitalists. Our chief challenge will be to make cloud culture and cloud capitalism work, for public as well as private good.

The Net we have grown up with was based around data and software stored quite close to where it is used on personal and mainframe computers. That gave people a sense of ownership and control, exploiting cheap local storage because the bandwidth to download data from remote sources was too expensive and unreliable. The Net was a way for us easily to link these disparate and disconnected machines, with their separate data and software. In the world of cloud computing our data — emails, documents, pictures, songs — would be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there for us to access from any device we like: computer, television, games console, handheld and mobile, embedded in our kitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it.

More here.

One day back in graduate school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a lot to me and whom I had just traveled three thousand miles to come work with, called me into his office and sat me down sternly. “Look, no offense,” he said, holding up a page of my manuscript, a page so capillaried with red marks it looked like the face of a stroke victim, “but you’ve got to cut it out with these frigging F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.” This was, on one level, the nicest compliment the man ever gave me. After all, it was my love for Fitzgerald and his frigging sentences that had made me want to be a novelist in the first place. If every writer, as Bellow once said, is a reader moved to emulation (and my advisor wasn’t so hot on Bellow’s sentences either), then to be told I was now writing the kinds of frigging sentences that had made me want to, uh, write those kinds of frigging sentences? On one level it was very nice to hear. Unfortunately my advisor didn’t mean it on that level. He meant it on a different level, a lower level. He meant that being enthralled as I was to lovely, thrilling, Daisy Buchananish prose was in my case less the solution than the problem. He himself was a rough-and-tumble realist, streety and sharp—a Redskin, in Philip Rahv’s famous phrase. Already he had me pegged as a member of that wan lesser tribe, the Palefaces, one of those cerebral, overly refined aesthetes who hung out in libraries and coffee shops doodling bon mots in overpriced notebooks. Moi! That this peremptory judgment was ludicrously unfair, ungenerous, and reductive did not make it any less true. I hurried out of his office that day with my face burning, my hands clenching and unclenching, shadow-boxing with shame.

more from Robert Cohen at The Believer here.

One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills’s elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills’s startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It’s General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for today’s secret government and imperial presidency. And his reasoning will scare the hell out of you. The Manhattan Project was the single most awesome undertaking in the history of the country, occupying some eighty facilities nationwide. Hanford, in Washington State, where project officials collected and prepared the plutonium, employed more than one hundred thousand people. The electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, covered 825 acres. Project administrators also commandeered an entire Pacific island as the staging ground for the fatal atomic-bomb flights. To staff the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, Groves enjoyed the kind of powers ascribed to Jesus in the Left Behind series: All of a sudden, the greatest scientists in the country and their families would suddenly disappear, Hoovered up into the desert behind a triple ring of fences, “with sentries on horseback or in jeeps patrolling the circuit twenty-four hours a day.” Almost nobody was allowed to know what any of it was for, and only one man understood how to master all its parts: Groves, who “carried the whole enterprise in his head.”

more from Rick Perlstein at Bookforum here.

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them. In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can. Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

more from Steven Strogatz at The Opinionater here.

February is Black History Month. Like previous years, we will be posting at least one story each day which pays tribute to African Americans.

From The Root:

The Root wants you to help us celebrate Black History Month. We will publish photos that chronicle your family’s experience in this country. We’re looking for historical photographs, family reunions, graduations, weddings and funerals—in other words, images that chronicle African-American life, past and present.

We will post these photos to our site throughout February. We've published some of our favorites here as inspiration.

(Picture: 50th wedding anniversary)

More here.

Magritte

I am a man in a black bowler hat,
showing my back to the world.
If I turn, an apple blocks my face.

My first glimpse of art was in a churchyard,
so close it is to death.
I listened to the silence of that place.

Sometimes, laid out, she elevates behind me
as I walk the towpath.
Stiff-necked, I do not look around.

My art has no laws of gravity,
but a woman’s chestnut hair falls to the ground
and bowler-hatted men are falling rain.

I have seen boulders floating in the sky,
and every day a cloud comes in my door.
Baguettes, instead of clouds, go drifting by.

In woods, between the horse’s head and rider,
a vista slips, slim as the trunk of a tree.
What’s visible hides what’s also visible.

The sea is one with what is not the sea.

by Ciaran O'Driscoll

from Surreal Man; Pighog Pres, Brighton, 2006

Magritte