From Medical Xpress:

For thousands of years, people have used maggots to clean out wounds, particularly in battlefield situations when there were few other options. Use of maggots (fly larvae) virtually disappeared in the modern world though once antibiotics arrived on the scene, but that may change as a new study conducted by a team in France has shown that at least for some types of wounds, maggots may be the preferential form of treatment. The team, made up of doctors and researchers from various facilities in France, conducted a study with elderly male volunteers who had lower leg wounds or skin ulcers that weren’t healing well, and as they describe in their study published in Archives of Dermatology, the patients that were treated with maggots, fared better, at least in the first week, than did those treated with conventional surgical procedures.

In order to reproduce, flies lay their eggs in the carcasses of dead animals. The eggs develop into maggots which eventually grow into adults by eating the meat in which they exist. To accomplish this feat they secrete a substance into the dead tissue that helps to break it down first. The maggots then simply eat the result. When introduced into injured human flesh, the maggots perform the same trick, eating dead flesh while leaving healthy flesh alone, though not necessarily in the same fashion. In the wild, as anyone that has stumbled upon the carcass of a dead animal and found it literally crawling with the small rice looking larvae knows, it’s a truly stomach retching sight. In a medical environment, on the other hand it can be a truly innocuous experience.

More here.

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

1. Less is more. Or, “the only art is to omit” (Robert Louis Stevenson).

2. The Man Booker, our premier literary prize, is not “posh bingo” (Julian Barnes), it's a national sporting trophy.

3. Whatever works, works.

4. There are seven basic stories in world literature.

5. Writers who get divorced usually sack their agents.

6. Christopher Marlowe did not write Shakespeare. Nor did Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford. Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. It's a no-brainer. Just read the First Folio.

7. Poets are either the lions or the termites of the literary jungle.

8. Put a body on page one.

9. Literature is theft.

10. Everyone is writing a book. A few will publish it; but most of them will not be satisfied.

More here.

Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times:

Bollywood may love a rags-to-riches story, but historically India is not a nation of Horatio Alger stories. Social and economic mobility are limited, a product of India’s layers of cultural legacies: the Hindu caste system, the feudal hierarchies established by its many invaders and the imperial bureaucracy imposed by Britain. The idea that with hard work and determination, anyone could succeed found scant purchase here.

Independence changed that somewhat. India’s Constitution, which was largely drafted by a Dalit, Bhimrao Ambedkar, outlawed the practice of physical untouchability, which relegated Dalits to the bottom of the social ladder and condemned them to low-status jobs, like leather work and barbering.

It established affirmative action for Dalits and tribal people in politics and government jobs and education. The practice of physical untouchability, which prevented Dalits from walking on the same streets as upper-caste people, drinking from the same wells or even looking such people in the eye, has virtually disappeared, though it remains in practice in some remote areas.

Dalits still lag behind the rest of India, but they have experienced gains as the country’s economy has expanded. A recent analysis of government survey data by economists at the University of British Columbia found that the wage gap between other castes and Dalits has decreased to 21 percent, down from 36 percent in 1983, less than the gap between white male and black male workers in the United States. The education gap has been halved.

More here.

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

Christopher Hitchens, my colleague for twenty years, was clever, hilarious, generous to his friends, combative, prodigiously energetic and fantastically productive. He could write with equal ease about Philip Larkin, capital punishment, Henry Kissinger and having his balls waxed. I used to wonder, enviously, how he could write so much, especially given his drinking, his travels, his public appearances and his demanding social life. He told me once that a writer should be able to write with no difficulty, anytime, anywhere—but actually, not many writers can do that. I think part of the reason why he was so prolific—and the reason he had such an outsize career and such an outsize effect on his readers—is that he was possibly the least troubled with self-doubt of all the writers on earth. For a man who started out as an International Socialist and ended up banging the drum for the war in Iraq and accusing Michelle Obama of fealty to African dictators on the basis of a stray remark in her undergraduate thesis, he seems to have spent little time wondering how he got from one place to another, much less if he’d lost anything on the way. After he left The Nation he said he had a “libertarian gene.” It’s a rum sort of libertarianism, and a rum sort of gene, that expresses itself first as membership in a Trotskyist sect, and then as support for the signal deed of an administration that stood for everything he had spent his life fighting, from economic inequality to government promotion of religion.

More here.

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Over at io9, an excerpt from Jessica Langer's new book:

Most readers will be familiar with the classic oppositional science fiction tropes of the grotesque bug-eyed alien bent on Earthly domination and the beautiful but empty planet, ripe for colonization – or, of course, the dangerous planet whose inhabitants dare to fight back against the lantern-jawed colonial hero. Several studies have addressed the parallelism between historical and science-fictional “alien” encounters, the most comprehensive and recent being John Rieder's exploration of this period in science fiction and history, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008). The figure of the alien – extraterrestrial, technological, human-hybrid or otherwise – and the figure of the far-away planet ripe for the taking are deep and abiding twin signifiers in science fiction, are perhaps even the central myths of the genre. They are, to riff on the most famous work of Robert A. Heinlein, one of science fiction's most famous writers, the Stranger in a Strange Land. Aliens, including humans – who are, of course, alien to those aliens – and strange, foreign, other planets – which includes, of course, our own Earth, from the perspective of the alien. What the alien signifies, of course, varies greatly, as does the signification of the similarly central intergalactic terra nullius.

These two signifiers are, in fact, the very same twin myths of colonialism. The Stranger, or the Other, and the Strange Land – whether actually empty or filled with those Others, savages whose lives are considered forfeit and whose culture is seen as abbreviated and misshapen but who are nevertheless compelling in their very strangeness – are at the very heart of the colonial project, and their dispelling is at the heart of the postcolonial one.

How, then, can a genre so steeped in, so built upon, the Stranger and the Strange Land in its diegetic reality work to undo them in our consensus reality, what Darko Suvin calls our “zero world”?

It is still too soon to tell what may come of the French Revolution, so it is a fortiori far too soon to tell what may come of the revolutions in North Africa. I hope nothing I have written here will be taken as jejune triumphalism about the fall of Qaddafi—or that of Hosni Mubarak, or Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It is not inconceivable that a popular uprising against a brutal dictator, some elements of which are supported by Western liberals, could produce an Islamist state whose policies are abhorrent to Western liberals. What is now called the Arab Spring might eventually become known as “the year 1979 went viral.” But one thing does seem clear even now: when the Arab Spring began, American liberals and leftists generally cheered it on; American conservatives were torn, holding fast to Kissingerian realism or the desires of the Likudnik bloc or the firm conviction that whatever Obama was or was not or might be doing, it was wrong. (This last principle, infinitely elastic, is what allowed senior Republican statesmen and Deeply Serious People like John McCain and Newt Gingrich to take three or four positions on Libya in the course of a week; when Qaddafi was finally killed, the same statesmen graciously congratulated the French while chastising Obama for delaying the necessary regime change through his dithering.) When, however, the American military joined NATO forces in an armed defense of the Libyan rebellion and a counterattack on Qaddafi, suddenly thousands of leftists had second thoughts. With astonishing rapidity, the “Arab Spring” signs disappeared, and thousands of “Power to the People” signs were replaced with newly minted slogans about stopping the imperialist war machine and its wanton rape of Libya.

more from Michael Berube at The Point here.

The awakening is not over, but the heady days of the Arab Spring have come to an end. The counter-revolution, Régis Debray once observed, is revolutionised by the revolution. And so it has been. In Syria, protests have degenerated into sectarian warfare, fomented by a thuggish ruling clique that seems ready to bring the entire country down with it. In Yemen, President Saleh has agreed to stand down after nearly three decades in power, but on the northern border with Saudi Arabia, the dirty war between Shia Houthi rebels and Salafists is getting nastier. In Libya, the oil companies are doing business again, but the country’s new rulers, swept to power by Nato, are talking about restoring Sharia law, perhaps even polygamy. In Bahrain, a peaceful uprising by the Shia majority has been crushed by the al-Khalifa monarchy, with help from troops dispatched by Saudi Arabia. (Tehran, the Saudis claimed, was behind the protests, an assertion rejected by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry in November.) Never keen on popular politics, and furious with the Americans for ‘deserting’ their mutual friend Mubarak, the Saudis have been assiduously fighting the revolutionary wave, mostly with petrodollars, sometimes with guns. The Obama administration was not pleased with the Saudi intervention in Bahrain, but it barely uttered a word of criticism: the Fifth Fleet is stationed there, and preserving the special relationship with the House of Saud is paramount.

more from Adam Shatz at the LRB here.

At present, the American magazine essay, both the long feature piece and the critical essay, is flourishing, in unlikely circumstances. Despite the slightly tedious nostalgia for the world of the New York intellectuals and the patient outlets of nineteen-fifties high journalism, I doubt that Edmund Wilson or Alfred Kazin would rightfully find much to complain about. New and new-ish journals such as McSweeney’s, n+1, The Point, and The Common have found their way; older magazines have been optimistically refurbished, or just optimistically survive anyway. There are plenty of reasons for this. One is that magazines, big and small, are taking over some of the cultural and literary ground vacated by newspapers in their seemingly unstoppable evaporation. Another is that the contemporary essay has for some time now been gaining energy as an escape from, or rival to, the perceived conservatism of much mainstream fiction.

more from James Wood at The New Yorker here.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Alcohol abuse does its neurological damage more quickly in women than in men, new research suggests. The finding adds to a growing body of evidence that is prompting researchers to consider whether the time is ripe for single-gender treatment programs for alcohol-dependent women and men.

Over the past few decades scientists have observed a narrowing of the gender gap in alcohol dependence. In the 1980s the ratio of male to female alcohol dependence stood at roughly five males for every female, according to figures compiled by Shelly Greenfield, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. By 2002 the “dependence difference” had dropped to about 2.5 men for every woman. But although the gender gap in dependence may be closing, differences in the ways men and women respond to alcohol are emerging. Writing in the January 2012 issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, principal investigator Claudia Fahlke from the Department of Psychology at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and her colleagues found that alcohol's ability to reduce serotonin neurotransmission, was “telescoped” in alcoholic women compared with their male counterparts. In other words, although the alcohol-dependent men and women in the study differed substantially in their mean duration of excessive drinking—four years for the women and 14 years for the men—both sexes showed similar patterns of reduced serotonin activity compared with controls. The researchers gauged serotonergic neurotransmission by measuring its response to citalopram, a drug that stalls serotonin molecules in the synaptic gap (as measured by the hormone prolactin's response to citalopram. This pattern of reduced serotonergic neurotransmission matters, because some of the alcohol-induced abnormalities were found in brain regions involved in judgment, self-control and emotional regulation.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

With its acid colors and slapdash brush strokes, the painting still jolts the eye. The face, blotched in mauve and yellow, is highlighted with thick lines of lime green; the background is a rough patchwork of pastel tints. And the hat! With its high blue brim and round protuberances of pink, lavender and green, the hat is a phosphorescent landscape by itself, improbably perched on the head of a haughty woman whose downturned mouth and bored eyes seem to be expressing disdain at your astonishment. If the picture startles even after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. One outraged critic ridiculed the room at the Grand Palais in Paris, where it reigned alongside the violently hued canvases of like-minded painters, as the lair of fauves, or wild animals. The insult, eventually losing its sting, stuck to the group, which also included André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Fauves were the most controversial artists in Paris, and of all their paintings, Woman with a Hat was the most notorious.

So when the picture was later hung in the Parisian apartment of Leo and Gertrude Stein, a brother and sister from California, it made their home a destination. “The artists wanted to keep seeing that picture, and the Steins opened it up to anyone who wanted to see it,” says Janet Bishop, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which organized “The Steins Collect,” an exhibition of many pieces the Steins held. The exhibition goes on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from February 28 to June 3. (An unrelated exhibition, “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories,” about her life and work, remains at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery until January 22.)

More here.

Quilts

—for Sally Sellers

Like a fading piece of cloth
I am a failure

No longer do I cover tables filled with food and laughter
My seams are frayed my hems falling my strength no longer able
To hold the hot and cold

I wish for those first days
When just woven I could keep water
From seeping through
Repelled stains with the tightness of my weave
Dazzled the sunlight with my
Reflection

I grow old though pleased with my memories
The tasks I can no longer complete
Are balanced by the love of the tasks gone past

I offer no apology only
this plea:

When I am frayed and strained and drizzle at the end
Please someone cut a square and put me in a quilt
That I might keep some child warm

And some old person with no one else to talk to
Will hear my whispers

And cuddle
near

by Nikki Giovanni

Eric Michael Johnson in his blog The Primate Diaries at Scientific American:

Johnson: When you were first developing your voice as a writer, who were some of your most important influences? I know you were particularly fond of Melville and Faulkner as an undergrad at Yale. What did studying literature offer for developing your own style compared to the work of other science writers?

Zimmer: At the time I was reading Melville, Faulkner, or Mark Twain, I had vague ideas about writing fiction. That was my initial impetus for reading them. Gradually I realized that I was actually more interested in the natural world. It was at that point I began to appreciate really good science writing. I was reading people like Jonathan Weiner, John McPhee, or David Quammen, writers who could construct a sentence that left you breathless. But it was very important for me to have had that different experience in reading beforehand. It taught me how important it is to tell a story when you’re writing as well as all the different ways you can tell that story. These are elements you can bring into science writing to great effect.

The fact is there is a lot of science writing in great literature. I’m a big fan of Moby Dick, for example. Melville’s novel is probably a quarter to a third science writing. It’s the story of an obsessed captain going after a whale interspersed with long passages about marine biology, paleontology, even consciousness. It’s all science. But he writes about it in a style that can be quite humbling. When you read it you see how beautiful someone can make these descriptions of the natural world. I’ve always been frustrated with the flatness of a lot of science writing. I think that science writers should try to aim high rather than going for a lot of these clichés you often see both in magazines and in books.

More here.

Nicolette Hahn Niman in The Atlantic:

As Americans gather around holiday tables this year, many of us will be setting places for vegetarians and vegans. In some families, diverse diets co-exist peacefully. In others, well … maybe there's a health-obsessed uncle who relishes warning that “Meat will kill you!” Or an idealistic college student, eager to regale her complacent elders with grim details of the cruelty and environmental damage wrought by factory farms. Or omnivores who resent the suggestion that they should worry — or feel guilty — about eating meat.

The three of us can relate to both sides of such discussions. Though reared by omnivorous families, as young adults we each came to the conclusion that meat was to blame for health problems, environmental destruction, and cruelty to animals. Collectively, we have lived 52 years vegan or vegetarian. Yet we no longer think that vegetarianism is the answer to these ills. Now — as a rancher, a hunter, and a butcher — we firmly believe foods from animals can be healthful, environmentally appropriate, and ethical.

More here.

Inspired by Andrew Sullivan's use of Urtak's reader-driven poll, I thought I'd start one here on 3QD, just to know a little more about our readers, and to help readers know a little more about each other. If you want to add a question, feel free. You will have to create a Urtak account or sign in via facebook or twitter. Have fun. (UPDATE: If you don't want to go through the hassle of signing up in order to pose a question to your fellow readers, just pose it in the comments and I will add it to the widget, provided it's a reasonable question.)

3QD readers ask and answer questions

A friend comments, “[I]n the past 72 hours we've gone from obsequy to backlash to satire.” Neal Pollack in Salon:

University, as you know, is the only time in one’s life when anything really worthwhile happens. I met Hitch there. The first time I saw him, he had a bird on each arm and a woman by his side. She beamed as he read aloud passages from “Homage to Catalonia.” He looked up.

“Who the hell are you?” he said.

“I’m your housemate,” I said.

“Are you in favor of the war in Vietnam?”

“Of course not.”

Hitch put down the book and took a swig of cheap Scotch.

“Good,” he said. “Because I refuse to fraternize with men who are afraid to be intellectual heroes.”

In the annals of history, only Orwell, Voltaire and maybe a half-dozen other guys could match’s Hitch ideological bravery and breadth of political knowledge. In 1977, after I’d returned to his graces by aiding him in a plot to assassinate Henry Kissinger’s character, Hitch and I visited Borges’ library in Buenos Aires. At the time, Hitch was working for the KGB while pretending to work for the BBC, and I was working for the Mossad while pretending to work for Burger King. But our many identities were merely covers for our lives as political writers at low-paying magazines.

Ahdaf Soueif in The Guardian:

The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting – maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.

Six years ago, when popular protests started to hit the streets of Egypt as Hosni Mubarak's gang worked at rigging the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime hit back – not just with the traditional Central Security conscripts – but with an innovation: militias of strong, trained, thugs. They beat up men, but they grabbed women, tore their clothes off and beat them, groping them at the same time. The idea was to insinuate that females who took part in street protests wanted to be groped.

Women developed deterrent techniques: layers of light clothing, no buttons, drawstring pants double-knotted – and carried right on protesting. Many of the smaller civil initiatives that grew into the protest movement: “We See You”, “Against Corruption”, “The Streets are Ours” were women-led.

But, a symbiotic relationship springs up between behaviours. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman turn Egypt into the US's favourite location for the torture of “terror suspects” and torture becomes endemic in police stations. The regime's thugs molest women as a form of political bullying – and harassment of women in the streets rises to epidemic levels.

More here.