Our own Justin E. H. Smith has unearthed much information about yesterday's video. From Justin's blog:

The man singing is Edward Hill, also known as Eduard Khil', or, better yet, Эдуард Хиль. According to his Russian Wikipedia page, Hill was born in Smolensk in 1934, and finished his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1960. By 1974 he had been named a People's Artist of the USSR, and in 1981 he was awarded the Order of the Friendship of Peoples. He is best known for his interpretations of the songs of the Soviet composer, Arkadii Ostrovskii. As for the peculiar name, I could find no information, but imagine that he is descended from the English elite that had established itself in western Russian cities by the 17th century. He is not a defector of the Lee Harvey Oswald generation. He is entirely Russian.

The song he is interpreting, “I Am So Happy to Finally Be Back Home,” is an Ostrovskii composition, and it is meant to be sung in the vokaliz style, that is to say sung, but without words. I have seen a number of comments online, ever since a flurry of interest in Hill began just a few days ago, to the effect that this routine must have been meant as a critique of Soviet censorship, but in fact vokaliz was a well established genre, one that seems close in certain respects to pantomime.

Recent interest in Hill has to do with the perceived strangeness, the uncanniness, the surreal character of this performance. There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please –to genuinely please– Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context. The audiences would recognize, for example, that the same number had been performed by the Azerbaidzhani singer Muslim Magomaev in a film from the early 1960s, The Blue Spark:

More here.

Martin Luther King Jr. in The Nation:

From 1961 to 1966, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay for The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in America. This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1965, issue.

When 1963 came to a close, more than a few skeptical voices asked what substantial progress had been achieved through the demonstrations that had drawn more than a million Negroes into the streets. By the close of 1964, the pessimistic clamor was stilled by the music of major victories. Taken together, the two years marked a historic turning point for the civil rights movement; in the previous century no comparable change for the Negro had occurred. Now, even the most cynical acknowledged that at Birmingham, as at Concord, a shot had been fired that was heard around the world.

Before examining 1964 in greater depth, some comment is necessary on the events currently unfolding in Alabama. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and with the defeat of Barry Goldwater, there was widespread expectation that barriers would disintegrate with swift inevitability. This easy optimism could not survive the first test. In the hard-core states of the South, while some few were disposed to accommodate, the walls remained erect and reinforced. That was to be expected, for the basic institutions of government, commerce, industry and social patterns in the South all rest upon the embedded institution of segregation. Change is not accomplished by peeling off superficial layers when the causes are rooted deeply in the heart of the organism.

Those who expected a cheap victory in a climate of complacency were shocked into reality by Selma and Marion, Ala. In Selma, the position was implacable resistance. At one point, ten times as many Negroes were in jail as were on the registration rolls. Out of 15,000 eligible to vote, less than 350 were registered.

More here. (Note: Thanks to Abbas Raza)

It’s also—praise God—small. The Biennial has finally been pared down to a manage-able 55 artists. It is not visually assaultive; it gives all the art room to breathe, whereupon you realize how bombastic most such shows are. The 2010 Biennial is anti-blockbuster. It avoids razzmatazz, star power, and high production. It’s more like a medium-size group show than a big museum smorgasbord. It isn’t New York–centric, youth obsessed, or drawn mainly from a coterie of high-powered New York galleries. It is quiet. The art world has clamored for these things for years, and people should cheer this show. They probably won’t, though. By now it’s clear that there is no such thing as a “good biennial,” that the form itself is bound to generate a mixed bag. This time, the clunkers are the bland placeholders. Too much of the two-dimensional work either recaps ideas about craft and abstraction in generic ways or touches on issues of identity without saying anything. But the unexpected curatorial choices outnumber the banal. I love that, instead of encountering a huge installation in front of the giant fourth-floor window, we see Richard Aldrich’s tiny abstract voodoo doll. Huma Bhabha’s Giacometti-esque sculpture of decaying gods stands almost directly below Sharon Hayes’s videos of someone trying to listen very hard: Does she hear them? Or that the self-reflective, formalistic films and photos of Babette Mangolte are given an entire room, and thus form one of the beating hearts of this show. This veteran artist’s obsessive examinations of what it means to make and display art, her investigations into seemingly outmoded ideas of modernism and presentation, and the ways these things make visible the self are touchstones for much of the work in this show.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

My first perception of Borges is Borges himself. In other words: I see Borges. Let me explain. I must be nine or ten and I’m walking my uncle, who’s in his twenties, along the pedestrian Calle Florida in Buenos Aires. I say that I’m walking my uncle because my uncle is blind. My uncle hoped to become a great painter. During his adolescence he’d won important scholarships and prizes, but he went blind from juvenile diabetes, and at this point – he doesn’t know it, but he senses it – he has two or three or four years left to live. So we’re walking and suddenly someone says, ‘There’s Borges,’ and I look and I see Borges and I say to my uncle, ‘There’s Borges.’ Borges is coming toward us and he, too, is on the arm of a friend or a fan and then my blind uncle – who was the humorous type, wickedly funny – shouts ‘Borges! How are you? You look great.’ And Borges turns his unseeing gaze on the precise spot from which the voice of my blind uncle issues and reaches him and the two of them look at each other without seeing each other, and there I am, in between, unable to believe what I’m seeing.

more from Rodrigo Fresán at Granta here.

We’ve all heard the trope that wine is an everyday pleasure, that there are so many interesting, authentic wines under $20. Yet so many people still ignore this notion, still remain intimidated by wine — or else approach wine as a luxury to be acquired, a foe to be conquered, or a scientific puzzle to be methodically solved. I want to weed out the so-called “luxury” experiences that don’t deliver, and seek out the ones that do. I want to tell stories about wines from lesser-known regions and grape varietals, as well as values from well-known producers. I want to talk about wine as an idea, rather than as a status symbol. Beyond the quality-price ratio, I want to explore wine as a legitimate plank of the humanities, worthy of the highest sort of criticism. A good value wine offers us an experience similar to that of a book or a film or an art exhibition. Tasting wine, then, becomes no different from study in any of the other humanities — reading works of Russian literature or looking at German Expressionist paintings or listening to Rigoletto. It goes without saying that you don’t have to be rich to enjoy those cultural activities. I believe it’s the same with the wine. That’s what this column will be about.

more from Jason Wilson at The Smart Set here.

My Mother's Sari

There, in the wooden box
my mother's sari, enveloped in white muslin,
with mothballs.

Her sense of order is in each one
of its folds,
and the press of her palm.
A universe of ironing lies beneath the pillow.
Tiny packets of camphor, incense and
fragrant roots –
her perfume.

My mother's sari's tucked-in eagerness
coupled with the jingling of bangles
is the zest to get down to work.

Lines running across the broad pallu,
the unbroken bridges of an upright life,
keeping all evil at bay –
a cane to reprove naughty children.

Folds tucked into a knot,
a mysterious treasure-house of meanings,
the pretty yellow Madhura sari
with its green border of blooms . . .
. . . that queen was perhaps like my mother.
Read more »

From The Telegraph:

On the evening of March 1 1983, Arthur Koestler sat down opposite his wife Cynthia in their Knightsbridge sitting room, swallowed a handful of sleeping tablets washed down with brandy and wine, and waited to die. It was the end of an extraordinary journey that had taken him from the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to British-occupied Palestine, Weimar Germany, the Spanish Civil War, the French Foreign Legion, George Orwell’s London and California at the height of flower power. To his admirers he was one of the greatest writers of the modern age, a brave, lonely man who had dared speak truth to power. And yet, even in death a shadow hung over him for, as Koestler’s friends were horrified to discover, Cynthia, then just 55 and in good health, had killed herself alongside him. As everyone knew, she was totally under her husband’s thumb, and their friend Julian Barnes was not alone in wondering: “Did he bully her into it?”

At once melodramatic, moving and disturbing, Koestler’s passing was typical of the man. Although he is best remembered today as the author of one of the 20th century’s most influential novels, Darkness at Noon, even he would surely have admitted that his own life story was too implausible for fiction. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, he was a shy, nervous boy who shocked his parents by dropping out of university, converting to Zionism and disappearing to Palestine, where he tried (and failed) to join a kibbutz and eventually wangled a job as Middle Eastern correspondent for a German newspaper empire. By 1931, he was well regarded enough to be picked as the chain’s correspondent on board the Graf Zeppelin’s pioneering flight over the North Pole. And if his odyssey had ended there, it would make an entertainingly unlikely story.

More here.

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books Blog:

“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In Italy, the politics of identity were reduced in December 2009 to house-to-house searches in the Brescia region for unwanted dark faces as the municipality shamelessly promised a “white Christmas.”

In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves—thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

As so often, academic taste follows fashion. These programs are byproducts of communitarian solipsism: today we are all hyphenated—Irish-Americans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and the like. Most people no longer speak the language of their forebears or know much about their country of origin, especially if their family started out in Europe. But in the wake of a generation of boastful victimhood, they wear what little they do know as a proud badge of identity: you are what your grandparents suffered. In this competition, Jews stand out. Many American Jews are sadly ignorant of their religion, culture, traditional languages, or history. But they do know about Auschwitz, and that suffices.

More here.

Megan McArdle in The Atlantic:

A couple of years back, I learned that an adult I had grown up around was a pedophile. He had never, to anyone's knowledge, done anything about it. Certainly he was never anything but decent to me, and I babysat his kids when I was a pretty young kid myself. Rather, a technician mucking around on his work computer had discovered a stash of child porn. He went to jail for a while. His life was destroyed.

This changed a lot of the way that I think about pedophiles. I used to use the kind of hyperbole one often hears–that people who look at child porn “should be shot” and so forth. I don't say those things any more.

Obviously, I am not going to defend the use of child porn at all; it's despicable, and jail is the appropriate sentence, because the man who purchases child pornography is encouraging its manufacture. But it made me think of them for the first time with sympathy. They didn't choose to be like this–God, who would? Sex is one of the most powerful drives we have, and as Dan Savage's columns testify every week, we have little control whether it focuses on something relatively normal, or something . . . um . . . extremely statistically unlikely.

What do you do when your sex drive is channeled towards something so utterly morally wrong–something it is socially taboo to even think about, that you can't help thinking about?

More here.

Chris Wilson in Slate:

The war in Iraq will always be remembered for the failures of intelligence that preceded it and the insurgency that bedeviled coalition forces long after President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations. Amid all that disaster, the capture of Saddam Hussein has become a forgotten success story. It's an accomplishment that wasn't inevitable… I'll explain how a handful of innovative American soldiers used the same theories that underpin Facebook to hunt down Saddam Hussein. I'll also look at how this hunt was a departure in strategy for the military, why its techniques aren't deployed more often, and why social-networking theory hasn't helped us nab Osama Bin Laden.

In the war's early days, coalition forces raced through the deck of the cards. By May 1, 2003, when President George W. Bush stood beneath that infamous “Mission Accomplished” banner, 15 of the men on the cards had surrendered or been captured. Coalition troops bagged another 12 top targets in May, including one of Saddam's sons-in-law. But despite snagging all those high-profile detainees, the trail to Saddam—if he was alive—was not getting any warmer. And when the military did catch someone important, he usually wasn't much help.

More here.

March 22, 2010, NOTE: The winners have been announced here.

March 10, 2010, NOTE: See list of nine finalists here.

March 8, 2010, NOTE: Voting round closed. See list of twenty semifinalists here.

March 1, 2010, NOTE: Nominations are now closed. Go here to see the list of nominees, and vote.

February 22, 2010, NOTE: Nominations are now open.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

In May of last year we announced that we would start awarding four sets of prizes every year (on the two solstices and the two equinoxes) for the best blog writing in the areas of science, philosophy, politics, and arts & literature. We awarded the science prizes, judged by Steven Pinker, on June 21, and then announced the winners of the philosophy prizes, judged by Daniel C. Dennett, on September 22. This was followed by the politics prizes, judged by Tariq Ali, for which the winners were announced on December 21. We are now going to do the Arts and Literature Prizes, and here's how it will work: we will soon begin accepting nominations for this prize. After the nominating period is over, there will be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this period, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the four main daily editors of 3 Quarks Daily (Abbas Raza, Robin Varghese, Morgan Meis, and Azra Raza) will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky, who, we are extremely pleased, has agreed to be the final judge.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of one thousand dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of three hundred dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a two hundred dollar prize.

* * *

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS feed.)

* * *

Details:

The winners of the Arts & Literature Prize will be announced on March 20, 2010. Here's the schedule:

February 22:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are not eligible.
• We will accept poems and fiction, as well as book or art reviews, criticism, and other types of writing about arts or literature.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after February 21, 2009.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.
• You may also comment here on our prizes themselves, of course!

February 28, 2010

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened immediately afterwards.

March 7, 2010

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

March 22, 2010

• The winners are announced.

And another Mini-Contest!

For each of our contests, I have asked designer friends of mine to produce “trophy” logos that the winners of that prize can display on their own blogs. You can see all of them here. I am now running out of designer friends, so here is an offer: send me your design for a logo for the winners of the Arts & Literature Prize (it must contain the same info as in the examples I have linked to, and the size is 160 X 350 pixels), and if I use it, I'll send you $25. Try. It'll be fun. Deadline: March 10, 2010.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

In many of O’Connor’s best stories, “Parker’s Back” prominent among them, the religious theme is so subtly dramatized that it can be overlooked by casual readers unaware of the author’s larger purpose. Whatever else her fiction is, it is not Catholic propaganda.6 In the end, though, a critical approach that denies or downplays O’Connor’s faith will necessarily result in only a partial appreciation of her work. It is no more possible to understand a book like Wise Blood without taking Catholicism seriously—if only to reject it—than it is possible to understand the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer without taking Judaism seriously. The difference, of course, is that Singer viewed religion with reluctant skepticism, O’Connor with unswerving certitude. As I once wrote in these pages: O’Connor’s Christ-haunted characters differ profoundly from Singer’s demon-infested Jews. In O’Connor, unbelievers living in a fallen world tainted by modernity suddenly find themselves irradiated by grace, but, like Hazel Motes . . . they struggle in vain against its revelatory power. In Singer’s world, by contrast, there are no sudden revelations, only the unquenchable desire to believe, against all evidence to the contrary, that life has meaning.7

more from Terry Teachout at Commentary here.

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney. You find—a novel recognition—not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

more from Louis Menand at The New Yorker here.

“Never in my life have I taken first place”, muses the narrator of Kamennyi most (The Stone Bridge), as he lines up his toy soldiers on a flea market stall in Moscow on a quiet autumn Sunday in 1998. Such is the opening of Alexander Terekhov’s 832-page novel, last year’s most talked-about work of fiction in Russia which took second prize in the Big Book awards. A graduate of the Journalism Faculty of the Moscow University (like many of the leading literary figures of his generation), Terekhov, who was born in 1966, began his career as an essayist and journalist. He published his first novel, Krysoboi, in 1995 (it came out in English as The Rat Killer in 2008). Kamennyi most is his second, and so far it exists only in Russian. Greeted with mixed and sometimes muddled reviews but always acknowledged as compelling, Kamennyi most takes its title from Moscow’s Bolshoy Kamennyi most, or Great Stone Bridge, the site of the murder mystery at the centre of the novel. The bridge’s single span connects the two banks of the Moscow River in the heart of the capital. On one bank stands the residential apartment complex for high Soviet officials – a brooding Constructivist giant of the 1930s, echoing the Lenin Mausoleum which was the setting for Yuri Trifonov’s novel The House on the Embankment (1976). The other bank is dominated by the Kremlin, a medieval fortress in Gothic style, the seat of the “Emperor”, as Terekhov’s narrator calls Joseph Stalin.

more from Gregory Freidin at the TLS here.

Pears

…The pears are not seen
…as the observer wills
………….Wallace Stevens

1
Sometimes they are pears.
At other times sirens in a basket.
And not so often, violins
one tunes with a stem.

2
Pears hold their heads up high
they have cello-shaped waists and
curvy hips.
Buddha adapted their way of sitting
in order to reside inside
nothingness.

3
The pears are dressed in a green suit
with red pockets.
The poets among them wear
a felt fedora with a leaf.

4
Their single hair jumps to attention
or curves like a whip, raised against
the clay-ness of the bowl, the
pressing of fingers,
of teeth.

5
The great communist painter,
Pablo Picasso, framed them into
cubes.
With lopped heads they resemble
their common bretheren, the apples.

6
Their shadow is like sudden
excitement,
a breathtaking leap that ends
in disenchantment:
the murmur of the stem, the echo of
the leaf.

by Shai Dotan

from On the Verge;
publisher: Am Oved, Tel Aviv, 2005
translation:Ohad Stadler, 2008

From rosaparks.org:

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement” in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history.

Mrs. Parks was born Rosa Louise McCauley, February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She was the first child of James and Leona Edwards McCauley. Her brother, Sylvester McCauley, now deceased, was born August 20, 1915. Later, the family moved to Pine Level, Alabama where Rosa was reared and educated in the rural school. When she completed her education in Pine Level at age eleven, her mother, Leona, enrolled her in Montgomery Industrial School for Girls (Miss White's School for Girls), a private institution. After finishing Miss White's School, she went on to Alabama State Teacher's College High School. She, however, was unable to graduate with her class, because of the illness of her grandmother Rose Edwards and later her death.

As Rosa Parks prepared to return to Alabama State Teacher's College, her mother also became ill, therefore, she continued to take care of their home and care for her mother while her brother, Sylvester, worked outside of the home. She received her high school diploma in 1934, after her marriage to Raymond Parks, December 18, 1932. Raymond, now deceased was born in Wedowee, Alabama, Randolph County, February 12, 1903, received little formal education due to racial segregation. He was a self-educated person with the assistance of his mother, Geri Parks. His immaculate dress and his thorough knowledge of domestic affairs and current events made most think he was college educated. He supported and encouraged Rosa's desire to complete her formal education.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect?

A) More than 44,000 deaths would be prevented annually (as estimated recently in The New England Journal of Medicine).

B) About 150,000 deaths per year would be prevented annually (as estimated by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene).

C) Hundreds of millions of people would be subjected to an experiment with unpredictable and possibly adverse effects (as argued recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association).

D) Not much one way or the other.

E) Americans would get even fatter than they are today.

Don’t worry, there’s no wrong answer, at least not yet. That’s the beauty of the salt debate: there’s so little reliable evidence that you can imagine just about any outcome. For all the talk about the growing menace of sodium in packaged foods, experts aren’t even sure that Americans today are eating more salt than they used to.

When you don’t know past trends, predicting the future is a wide-open game.

More here.

Spencer Michels at the website of the PBS Newshour:

A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free…

Khan's story — featured Monday on the NewsHour — is inspiring. A math and science graduate of MIT with an MBA from Harvard, he was one of those math-savvy kids who did great in school, and then decided to make some money. As an Indian-American (born in New Orleans), education — especially math and science — were important in his household. But when one of his cousins, a seventh grader, told him at a family gathering that she was having trouble with math — especially converting grams to kilograms — he decided to help her, long distance. He devised a method where he talked to her via the computer, with a blackboard on the screen, and after a few weeks she started to get it. Her progress was speedy, and he decided that the method he'd improvised, would work for others.

So he began putting short math lessons on the Internet, never showing his face, but keeping it simple and direct. He has a great gift for communicating, for explaining math concepts that I used to have problems with, and so did a lot of others.

More here. And here's a short overview video about the Khan Academy [recipient of the 2009 Microsoft Tech Award in Education]:

Melly Alazraki in Daily Finance:

Britain's House of Commons on Monday dealt a blow to CAM. “Homeopathic products perform no better than placebos,” said the Parliamentary committee's report, which concludes: “To maintain patient trust, choice and safety, the Government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments, including homeopathy.”

In the face of the looming health-care reform, U.S. Senators have been trying to add various provisions to the bill: Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has tried to push insurance coverage for alternative medicines; and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) has attached a provision that would cover Christian Science prayer treatments.

It's unclear whether faith-based medicine has ever been clinically tested, but a spotcheck of the NCCAM Health page and its Office of Dietary Supplement fact sheet shows that many remedies have very limited health benefit, if any. WIth an industry whose products offer a greater risk of danger than a promise of benefit, and as the public keeps buying into these remedies, the U.S. should intervene not to support the trend of their growing use, as Harkin and Hatch would seem to support, but reducing our reliance on quackery.

More here.