Farooq Ahmed in Nature:

Too much tea can treble cancer risk in women'. 'Tea could cut risk of ovarian cancer'. Just two examples of the frequent contradictory newspaper headlines that confuse the public about the health benefits — or risks — of food and confound genuine nutrition-related research.

For some diseases such as diabetes the link with food is subtle. “Although we know that dietary factors are related to the risk of diabetes, there are a lot of inconsistencies between studies in terms of what precise micronutrients or macronutrients associate with the disease. We're quite limited in terms of the data,” explains Nick Wareham, head of the epidemiology unit at the UK's Medical Research Council.

Using new tools and methodologies, ambitious projects are underway to make up this shortfall. One such effort, which Wareham coordinates, is InterAct — a multinational study to define how diet and lifestyle influence risk of type 2 diabetes. This disorder of blood glucose regulation is a growing problem in Europe, afflicting nearly 40% of the population at some point in their lifetime. InterAct estimates that the diabetes accounts for as much as 10% of health care costs in Europe.

Through endeavours such as InterAct, researchers are starting to expose the complex interplay of genetics, diet and disease, and bring order to the confusing array of nutritional information.

InterAct began in 2006 as part of the European Community's sixth Framework Programme. It has a budget of euro10 million and involves more than 12,000 patients recently diagnosed with diabetes across 10 countries — nine in Europe plus India. Such a broad cohort is important. “Sometimes variation within a country is not so great,” says Wareham. “International efforts give you heterogeneity in the lifestyles of patients, especially in the diet, and that's a major advantage.” This diversity provides scientists with more variables to study as they attempt to untangle what factors are responsible for causing disease.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

There were wonders to be discovered in New York on a recent cold, clear, brilliant December day. Eykyn Maclean, an elegant new gallery with space on two floors of a narrow building on East 67th Street, had mounted an exhibition of work by Alberto Giacometti. While there was a great deal of sculpture and much else to see, what I found myself thinking about was Giacometti’s curious habit of drawing on the pages of books or on newspapers and magazines, effacing an author’s words or journalism’s daily dose of reality with his masterful renderings of figures and faces. Something in the tidal wave of unmediated information in which we live today—the sense of words and images as detached from reasoned meanings in our crazily wired and Wikileaked moment—has set me to wondering about Giacometti’s willful obscuring or at least partial obscuring of words and images in some of his drawings. There can be something strangely illiberal—something almost demagogic—in the surfeit of information and pseudo-information we are grappling with now. Liberalism must be grounded in distinctions and discriminations, and the other day I found myself wondering if Giacometti’s habit of drawing over and around texts and images was in fact animated by a desire to make certain kinds of judgments, to explore the relative value of various kinds of experience.

Surely Giacometti—friend of Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Leiris, Crevel, and many other writers—was sensitive to the weight of words. So what do we make of the counterpoint he creates as he works his virtuosic lines against blocks of prose? Is he defacing the text or somehow celebrating it? Or are both impulses involved? When Giacometti copies a self-portrait by van Gogh in blue ink on the text page facing the reproduction in John Rewald’s history of Postimpressionism, my first impulse is to see this as nothing more than Giacometti’s spontaneous response to van Gogh. He’s drawing on the paper that is most immediately available, which means that he’s drawing over Rewald’s text. Now I am beginning to wonder if there is not something more going on. I would not be surprised if Giacometti admired Rewald’s writing, so perhaps when he draws over Rewald’s text he’s suggesting a competition between the interpretive arts, writing and drawing as parallel means of responding to the Dutch artist’s achievement. Through the lacework of Giacometti’s drawing, Rewald’s text can still be read. Word and image become two competing forms of knowledge, a modern-day version of the contests between the arts so beloved of the masters of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

John Timmer in ars technica:

It's been a busy year in research on recent human ancestry. Back in the spring, scientists completed a draft of the Neanderthal genome, which provided clear evidence that these now-extinct humans left some of their genes behind by interbreeding with some human ancestors. A bit earlier in the year, DNA sequencing revealed an even larger surprise: there seems to have been another population of premodern humans present in Asia that were genetically distinct from modern humans and Neanderthals. Now, the team behind both of these discoveries is back with a draft genome of this population that suggests it was genetically distinct from both humans and Neanderthals, and a single tooth that suggests it was physically distinct. And that it also interbred with the ancestors of a modern human population.

The new population was identified based on sequence from a single bone found in a cave called Denisova. Sequencing the genome of its mitochondria indicated it had branched off from the ancestor of both humans and Neanderthals roughly a million years ago, making it a relatively archaic lineage. But mitochondrial DNA is prone to rapid sequence changes as well as founder and bottleneck effects, which could exaggerate the divergence. The bone it came from didn't differ significantly from either of these human populations, meaning there was no physical indication that the Denisova remains represented a new population.

In the new paper, which will be published in Nature, the researchers have gone back and corrected both of these issues.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Greta Christina in AlterNet:

If you follow the atheism debates in op-ed pieces and whatnot, you'll see that critiques of the so-called New Atheist movement are often aimed at our tone. Among the pundits and opinion-makers, atheist writers and activists are typically called out for being offensive, intolerant, disrespectful, extremist, hostile, confrontational, and just generally asshats. The question of whether atheists are, you know, right, typically gets sidestepped in favor of what is apparently the much more compelling question of whether atheists are jerks. And if these op-ed pieces and whatnot were all you knew about the atheist movement and the critiques of it, you might think that atheists were simply being asked to be reasonable, civil, and polite.

But if you follow atheism in the news, you begin to see a very different story.

You begin to see that atheists are regularly criticized — vilified, even — simply for existing.

Or, to be more accurate, for existing in the open. For declining to hide our atheism. For coming out.

Case in point: In Bryan/ College Station, Texas, the Brazos Valley Vuvuzela Atheist Marching Band recently marched in the annual Christmas parade. Now, let's be very clear about this: The 18-person marching band didn't march with signs saying “Fuck Your Religion,” or “You Know It's A Myth,” or even “There's Probably No God — Now Stop Worrying and Enjoy Your Life.” They wished people a merry Christmas, and a happy Hanukkah, and a merry Kwanzaa. They played “Jingle Bells” on vuvuzelas. And they carried a banner saying they were atheists.

Which was enough, apparently, to send many Christians into fits.

More here.

Insects are so often featured characters in children’s stories because they, like children, appear to adults as simultaneously fragile and invincible. Though most of us prefer the children to the insects, we recognize in both a tendency toward chaos. We want to control that chaos, but are often overcome by it in the process. We sometimes say about the insects that if they would only let us be, their existence would not vex us. That is, if they didn’t insist on reminding us of their existence, we wouldn’t insist on destroying them. This is the logic of xenophobia. In the classic essay “Men versus Insects,” Bertrand Russell wrote that if humans beings, in their rage against each other, invoke the aid of the insects and microorganisms, it is likely the insects will be the “sole ultimate victors”. He was writing in 1933 about the somewhat new idea of using bugs as weapons of mass destruction. Yet we don’t really need a war zone to see how humans use bugs against each other to satisfy their daily fears. Just go to any public place in New York City today and yell, “Bedbug.” Indeed, the ones who will be damaged the least, the sole ultimate victors, are the bedbugs themselves. “Perhaps,” writes Russell, “from a cosmic point of view, this is not to be regretted, but as a human being, I cannot help heaving a sigh for my own species.”

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

About Robert Frost, it should be borne in mind that he was fashioning his distinctive style and voice long after Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” had sounded to raze the old structures of meter and rhyme, when poets like Robinson Jeffers, say, were building up from that rubble. Perhaps partly for this reason, the several neat rows of poems Frost left behind look now, in posterity, to be weathering well, some maybe tilting in the turf these days, but deeply inscribed with a traditional, formal simplicity to keep them legible through many more ages’ storms of fashion. Frost always did say it was his goal “just to lodge a few poems where they’ll be hard to get rid of,” and in that effort he apparently sacrificed innovation. (If he was tempted at all by innovation.) Right up until his death in 1962, he went on offering out the same four trusty iambs, mostly—or sometimes three iambs, sometimes five—while the world’s podiums were occupied by such free-verse innovators as T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and even the first raiding parties of so-called “Beats.” All these phenomena Frost ignored or openly deplored. Wallace Stevens he called “the bric-a-brac poet.” Eliot he snubbed most churlishly on a number of awkward public occasions, always in the face of Eliot’s more debonair grace and forgiveness. He met with Pound in London before he’d ever published a book, and the great mentor did try to educate him in the new manner, though it didn’t stick.

more from Louis B. Jones at the Threepenny Review here.

When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child, he didn’t really have any toys, so he made his own, out of wood and string. He put on performances with homemade puppets and made cartoon flip-books. He pretended that there were magical realms hidden behind the sliding shoji screens in his family’s little house. There was no television. His parents were of modest means but hardly poor. This was in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, in the rural village of Sonobe, about thirty miles northwest of Kyoto, in a river valley surrounded by wooded mountains. As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls. Miyamoto has told variations on the cave story a few times over the years, in order to emphasize the extent to which he was surrounded by nature, as a child, and also to claim his youthful explorations as a source of his aptitude and enthusiasm for inventing and designing video games. The cave has become a misty but indispensable part of his legend, to Miyamoto what the cherry tree was to George Washington, or what LSD is to Steve Jobs. It is also a prototype, an analogue, and an apology—an illuminating and propitious way to consider his games, or, for that matter, anyone else’s.

more from Nick Paumgarten at The New Yorker here.

House

Up the white road through the olive groves,
past the stretched red string, plumb line for the mason.

At the last bend below the high-tension wires
a three-coned trullo someone has let go.

No lights inside―shuttered windows turn back the stars.
Just as in her last year my mother’s eyes flattened.

Her starlessness caught in the camera at the registry of motor vehicles.
Record of her letting go.

Our guide tells us, “In Puglia, olive trees and stone.”
(And so, white faces peek from shadows.)

In my mind I have made this house my mother.
I have opened her gate; righted her tumbled walls;

painted the petroglyph for Joy on every cone.
What we do not see we cannot change.

by Miriam On'Neal
from Blackbird, Spring 2010

From The Guardian:

Procrustes, in Greek myth, was the cruel owner of an estate in Attica who abducted travellers and cut off their heads to ensure they fitted his bed perfectly. Every aphorism here is about a Procrustean bed of sorts: faced with the imperfection of the unknown and the unobserved, we humans tend to backfit the world into reductive categories such that only someone of my immense intellect is able to point out the inherent futility of modern life. Since aphorisms lose their charm whenever explained – especially when they are as banal as the ones that follow – I pompously relegate further discussion to the postface, though they all revolve around matters more deeply dealt with in my extremely significant and influential book, The Black Swan.

▶ If your anger decreases with time, you did injustice: If it increases, you suffered injustice.

▶ The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology.

▶ Most of what they call humility is successfully disguised arrogance.

▶ The more a writer thinks himself to be serious, the less serious his writing becomes.

▶ A man who is labelled a guru for his last book, will think himself a philosopher in the next.

▶ You can be once, twice, three times a lady; but only once a man.

▶ People used to wear ordinary clothes weekdays and formal attire on Sunday. Today it is the exact reverse.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

For a century, people have been devising tests that aim to capture a person’s mental abilities in a score, whether it is an IQ test or the SAT. In just an hour or an afternoon, a slate of multiple choice questions or visual puzzles helps sift out the superstars — people whose critical thinking skills suggest they have potent intellectual abilities that could one day help solve real-world problems. But separating the spectacularly bright from the merely average may not be quite as important as everyone believes. A striking study led by an MIT Sloan School of Management professor shows that teams of people display a collective intelligence that has surprisingly little to do with the intelligence of the team’s individual members. Group intelligence, the researchers discovered, is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member. And this collective intelligence was more than just an arbitrary score: When the group grappled with a complex task, the researchers found it was an excellent predictor of how well the team performed.

More here.

Lewis H. Lapham has picked the three winners:

1. Top Quark, $1000: Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
2. Strange Quark, $300: Huffington Post, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir
3. Charm Quark, $200: The Philosopher's Beard, Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?

Here is what Mr. Lapham had to say about them:

As an editor, I take seriously the craft of writing. The political blog at its best accounts for the editorial process—for the checking of facts as well as the redrafting of manuscripts; the political blog at its worst disregards even the semblance of considered judgment, leaving the internet user to portion out the wheat of informed opinion from the chaff of paranoid rant. The readers and editors of 3QD nominated more than forty pieces of internet writing, then narrowed the field by a public vote to nine finalists. I cannot say these are the best pieces of political blog writing on the internet, but they are representative of the impassioned rhetoric that has engulfed the public political discourse.

In accordance with the rules of the 3QD political prize, I have chosen three entries that exemplify the spirit of the times.

1st Place: “Why America is Going to Regret the Cordoba House Controversy” by Stephen M. Walt

A measured, thoughtful response to the religious intolerance that surrounded the “mosque” at ground zero.

2nd Place: “The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies of George W. Bush's Memoir” by Dan Froomkin

This post uses the publication of George Bush's memoir Decision Points as the occasion to reexamine the Bush years and remind us of the facts embedded in the history of his presidency.

3rd Place: “Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?” by Thomas Rodham

A philosophical look at the constraints imposed upon liberal politicians during their terms in office. They expect too much from their time in government and their constituents expect too much from them.

Congratulations also from 3QD to the winners (I will send the prize money later today–and remember, you must claim the money within one month from today–just send me an email). And feel free to leave your acceptance speech as a comment here! And thanks to everyone who participated. Thanks also, of course, to Lewis Lapham for doing the final judging.

The three prize logos at the top of this post were designed, respectively, by Sughra Raza, Carla Goller, and me. I hope the winners will display them with pride on their own blogs!

Details about the prize here.

Nathan Schneider interviews Simon During over at The Immanent Frame:

NS: Why is capitalism the focal point of your recent book? And what about capitalism is “postsecular”?

SD: Can I begin with the “postsecular”? It’s a rather confusing term. Mainly it points to a ceasefire—or, anyway, a slowdown—in the long battle between secular reason and religion. That’s ultimately what it implies in the recent work of Habermas, for instance. And that’s also what it means in the kind of intellectual history that uncovers the religious prehistory of secular concepts. But I suspect such work can usually be understood as secularism proceeding under the flag of its own decease. I am more interested in two other possibilities that occur when we think about a zone that is neither secular nor non-secular. The first appears when the limits of the (secular) world become apparent in everyday or mundane life, outside of religion. The second appears when we are compelled to radical leaps of faith—again, outside religion.

Both of these have a direct relation to democratic state capitalism. That’s because democracy and capitalism have each become compulsory and fundamental. They ground everything we do, including religious practice—so we can only get outside them through the kind of postsecular leap of faith that I am talking about. That realization is one of the things that is important about Alain Badiou’s thought. Such leaps may also be relevant to situations in which we encounter secularism’s limits—when secularism can’t contain the ethical and epistemological demands we make of it.

NS: Why can’t secularism itself contain leaps of faith? Why do we need to move past it, to the postsecular?

SD: Of course, there are all kinds of secular leaps of faith. But the will to get outside democratic state capitalism requires something else. It’s true that secular reason is useful in adjudicating upon the current system. You can at least attempt to measure its benefits—the joys, capacities, wealth, and opportunities that it does indeed provide us, and the way that it makes so much seem “interesting,” for instance—against the insecurities, inequalities, restrictions, and controls that it also imposes.

Kalidasa in the 4th or 5th century C.E. (translated by W. S. Merwin & J. Moussaieff Masson):

Even the man who is happy
glimpses something
or a hair of sound touches him

and his heart overflows with a longing
he does not recognize

then it must be that he is remembering
in a place out of reach
shapes he has loved

in a life before this

the print of them still there in him waiting

Emily Badger in Miller-McCune:

The Sons of Confederate Veterans are holding a gala this week in Charleston, S.C., a hundred-dollar-a-ticket affair celebrating the state’s secession from the Union 150 years ago. It’s the first of countless commemorations planned for the coming four years — lectures, conferences, parades, re-enactments, museum exhibitions and government proclamations — to mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

The Charleston “Secession Ball” — advertised as “an event of a lifetime” — includes a theatrical re-enactment of the signing of the Ordinance of Secession (the original version of which will be on display), as well as dinner and a dance.

“We’re celebrating that those 170 people risked their lives and fortunes to stand for what they believed in, which is self-government,” one of the event’s organizers told The New York Times. “Many people in the South still believe that is a just and honorable cause.”

“Of course, when South Carolina did secede, there was enormous celebration, dancing in the streets and so on,” said James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning history Battle Cry of Freedom.

But something about the Charleston event of 2010 strikes an odd tone.

“They didn’t know what was going to happen to them,” McPherson said of the original revelers. “Now we do know what happened to them, and maybe a celebratory note is not very appropriate.”

Scholars today are mostly of one mind about why South Carolina seceded and what caused the war. But Americans, even a century and a half later, still deeply disagree with each other and historians, many of them embracing a Civil War story about self-government and “states’ rights” that reveals more about America in 2010 than what actually occurred in the 1860s.

In Science magazine, Elizabeth Pennisi interviews Felisa Wolfe-Simon:

Three weeks ago, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, 33, a former performance oboist with a doctorate in oceanography and a NASA fellowship in astrobiology, published a paper online in Science about bacteria that can use arsenic instead of phosphorus in DNA and other biomolecules. Four days before the publication, NASA sent out a media advisory that it would hold a press briefing “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” That led to wild speculations on the Web about extraterrestrial life, and when the paper was published, many headlines made the most of the “alien” nature of the discovery by Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California.

Then came a torrent of criticism by scientists. A highly critical blog post by Rosie Redfield, a microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, quickly drew hundreds of comments, many also finding fault with the study. Wolfe-Simon and her co-author Ronald Oremland then came under attack by journalists when they declined to respond to media calls for a response to these comments. On 16 December, the authors posted responses to some of the issues, and Science will publish technical comments and responses in early 2011. In the meantime, Wolfe-Simon agreed to share some of her thoughts in an interview with Science’s news department, which covered the original finding in early December. The following has been edited for brevity.

Q: How would you characterize your life since the press conference?

F.W.-S.: Since the press conference, my life has been really busy and stressful. When the paper was accepted for publication, we told the Astrobiology Program and NASA, … and when they asked me to come in and talk about the paper, I said, “Sure.” I was obliged. It had been 2 months or so, and the paper had been accepted for a while, so I thought this would be great, I’ll bring the information to the public.

Marina Warner in the LRB (photo from Wikipedia):

Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to talk. Six years later, in Weimar, they dreamed up the idea of a summer school in which young musicians from the Arab world and from Israel could play together. They hoped, Said remembered in Parallels and Paradoxes, that it ‘might be an alternative way of making peace’. It was in Weimar, he noted, that Goethe had composed ‘a fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam … He started to learn Arabic, although he didn’t get very far. Then he discovered Persian poetry and produced this extraordinary set of poems about the “other”, West-östlicher Divan, which is, I think, unique in the history of European culture.’ The West-Eastern Divan: the orchestra had a name; it was never discussed again.

It seems odd that Said, the fierce critic of European Orientalism, chose to use the title of a work that, on the face of it, belongs in the Orientalist tradition. Goethe’s poems are filled with roses and nightingales, boys beautiful as the full moon, wine, women and song. Yet as Said saw it, Goethe’s lyric cycle is animated by a spirit of open inquiry towards the East, grounded in a sense of the past in art and culture, not in dogma or military and state apparatuses. He read it as calling for an understanding of individuality as a process of becoming and therefore fluid. He also believed that poetry can have the metaphorical power to proclaim a visionary politics. The cycle represented for him an alternative history and epistemology, concerned with the cross-pollination between East and West. It seemed to confirm the orchestra’s principle that ‘ignorance of the other is not a strategy for survival.’

Said’s approach was always historical; his work as a critic and intellectual was rooted in an examination of context, both cultural and political, and the orchestra, which this summer toured South America, embodies his commitment to the work of art as an actor in its time. The word theoria, he liked to remind us, means ‘the action of observing’; for him, theory was a dynamic, engaged activity, not a matter of passive reception. The theorist-critic should be a committed participant in the works he observes, and the works themselves aren’t self-created or autonomous but precipitated in the crucible of society and history. ‘My position is that texts are worldly,’ he writes in The World, the Text and the Critic. ‘To some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.’ The making of music is an event in this sense too.

Julia Ioffe in Foreign Policy:

When journalists showed up to hear the judge read the long-awaited verdict in the case of jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, they found a note on the courthouse door. The reading of the verdict, it said, would be postponed. It was still early in the morning, though, and the note — unsigned and typewritten — seemed like it could easily be fake. This was, after all, the denouement of a highly politicized, hyper-publicized trial, both in Russia and abroad. So one of the puzzled journalists called Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Genrikh Padva, who had not yet heard of the note's existence. “I might have expected this,” he said. “But no one warned me about it ahead of time.”

By the time Padva got to the courthouse, there was a scrum of reporters and elderly Khodorkovsky supporters by the door. They swarmed him, demanding an explanation. “Apparently the court just didn't have enough time to write the verdict,” the lawyer explained. He also had not gotten an official explanation (just an official version of the note on the door) but Padva and the rest of the legal team tried to play it down. This happens all the time, they said. Only Khodorkovsky's father, Boris, had a more probing — and Russian — explanation: After the delay, he said, “a lot fewer people will come” for the actual verdict.

The date was April 27, 2005.

Five and a half years later, on December 15, journalists awaited another Khodorkovsky verdict; the scene was almost identical, with a few names and details changed around. It was a different Moscow courthouse and a different case in question, this one brought in 2007 when Khodorkovsky and his partner Platon Lebedev were just about to be up for parole. The new charges alleged that the two stole all the oil their company Yukos ever produced and then laundered the ill-begotten proceeds. (The first case was that they neglected to pay taxes on this laundered oil money. The apparent contradiction between these two cases has yet to be explained.)

Ian Johnson in the NYRB blog:

Yang Jisheng is an editor of Annals of the Yellow Emperor, one of the few reform-oriented political magazines in China. Before that, the 70-year-old native of Hubei province was a national correspondent with the government-run Xinhua news service for over thirty years. But he is best known now as the author of Tombstone (Mubei), a groundbreaking new book on the Great Famine (1958–1961), which, though imprecisely known in the West, ranks as one of worst human disasters in history. I spoke with Yang in Beijing in late November about his book, the political atmosphere in Beijing, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.

Tombstone, which Yang began working on when he retired from Xinhua in 1996, is the most authoritative account of the Great Famine. It was caused by the Great Leap Forward, a millennial political campaign aimed at catapulting China into the ranks of developed nations by abandoning everything (including economic laws and common sense) in favor of steel production. Farm work largely stopped, iron tools were smelted in “backyard furnaces” to make steel—most of which was too crude to be of any use—and the Party confiscated for city dwellers what little grain was sown and harvested. The result was one of the largest famines in history. From the government documents he consulted, Yang concluded that 36 million people died and 40 million children were not born as a result of the famine. Yang’s father was among the victims and Yang says this book is meant to be his tombstone.

From Salon:

A set of drawers in Philadelphia's Mütter Museum of human pathology contains some very curious artifacts: thousands of objects, from umbrella tips to diminutive opera glasses, that have been extracted from the human body. They were swallowed or inhaled (sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose) and later removed by Dr. Chevalier Jackson, a man who dedicated much of his life to removing odd objects from people's insides. The collection is a remarkable testament to the strangeness of the human experience — and our ability to swallow.

In her new book, “Swallow,” Mary Cappello uncovers the stories behind those objects, and the peculiar life story of Chevalier himself. Cappello is a professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of the bestselling book “Awkward,” a meditation on uncomfortableness. Here, she packs her story with surprising imagery and extravagant lyricism, taking a highly literary approach to the subject — meandering from Chevalier's biography to the odd story of early 1920s women who compulsively ingested pieces of hardware.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Young female chimpanzees like to play with sticks as if they were dolls, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology. Although both juvenile male and female chimpanzees were seen playing with sticks in Kibale National Park in Uganda, females were more likely to cradle the sticks and treat them like infants. In human children, societal stereotypes may dictate what boys and girls play with, said Sonya Kahlenberg, a biologist at Bates College in Maine and one of the study’s authors. “The monkeys tell us there is something different there,” she said. The researchers studied juvenile behavior in a single chimpanzee colony over 14 years, and observed 15 females and 16 males.

Of the 15 females, 10 carried around sticks, while five of the males were seen with sticks. The young females were apparently mimicking their mothers, she said. “Females are the main caretakers,” Dr. Kahlenberg said. “Though it’s not that we didn’t see that in male chimps at all.” In one instance, an eight-year-old male with a stick stepped out of his mother’s nest, built a smaller nest and laid his stick in it. Although adult chimpanzees are also known to use sticks, they use them as foraging tools, not toys. Juveniles were defined as chimpanzees between the ages of five and 7.9. This is roughly equivalent to the human age range of six to nine, Dr. Kahlenberg said.

More here.