There’s a quasi-famous shot I keep remembering in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 movie Brazil.  In it, Jonathan Pryce’s character, who has come to realize he lives in a fascist state, drives down an expressway.  The walls to either side of the road surface are covered in billboards and advertisements.  As Pryce’s car drives away from the viewer, the camera ascends, revealing that just outside the walls, invisible to drivers, lies a grim wasteland.  The vivid and friendly billboards hide the truth, which is that the actual world hidden from view by their flimsy walls is barren.  It is post-industrially empty–and having stripped it, the state consoles its subjects by substituting pasted-up two-dimensional images advertising island vacations.  When the movie opens, Pryce’s Sam Lowry is an obedient, crushed civil servant whose only escape is dreams.  Now he, and we, learn that this reality is a façade; the truth is bleaker and wilder.

That one shot has always seemed to me the most succinct visual expression of the heady thought that everyday life is an illusion.  George Orwell, from whom the movie derives its worldview, is only its most important recent progenitor; the history of philosophy teems with rehearsals of this idea.  Marx’s “all that is solid melts into air” might as well have been the production motto for Brazil.  To move right to the putative beginning, Plato’s cave serves as our most canonical and enshrined mythic allegory of the the founding philosophical idea that something floats above the tangible, physical world: metaphysics.  Critiques of fascism, capitalism and socialism all present the lived world as somehow fake.

The difference between various versions of the false consciousness concept lies in what lies behind the curtain.  For Orwell, a fascist state imposes the veil, and behind lies an anarchic zone of freedom and restored personal agency.  In much of American literature and film (particularly the Western), heroes must venture beyond the pale, into a realm of brutality and violence–paradoxically, this is done to ensure the safety of us civilized sissies.  In Marx, of course, it is the commodity fetish that hides the true reality of class conflict, and capitalism that blinds us to the organic, uncommodified world.  Though they differ in identifying the obscuring entity, all of these lines of thought share the trope of reality’s unreality.

Gilliam’s shot gets at this so directly that it replays in my mind from time to time.  When I first saw it, its political aspect seemed a dystopian fantasy; over time, the film seems more and more prophetic and, frankly, descriptive.  (I know you’ve been expecting that point.)  But before we came to be ruled by criminals, I also saw the shot as a powerful descriptor of the contemporary world of big-box retailers and how they have, within a generation, supersized the landscape of the U.S.  I truly believe this, Prince Charles-ish as it may sound: big box suburbia is an alienation factory.  Here’s the main reason: the sheer size of the various megastores means that when you’re inside one, your entire experiential world is produced by committee.  There’s no randomness.

You might find yourself in a “marketplace” aisle, but it’s all a Potemkin village staged by one massive concern.  Great big posters promise a vivid diversity of products inside; outside is best described by Rem Koolhaas’ term, junkspace.  And other people?  They have been turned into fellow shoppers or drones with no interest or stake in the larger enterprise.  Frank Lucas, the subject of the recent (and unenjoyable) Ridley Scott movie American Gangster, makes this point in a funnier way (in this New York Magazine article):

“Lucas scowled through glareproof glass to the suburban strip beyond. ‘Look at this shit,’ he said. A giant Home Depot down the road especially bugged him. Bumpy Johnson himself couldn’t have collected protection from a damn Home Depot, he said with disgust. ‘What would Bumpy do? Go in and ask to see the assistant manager? Place is so big, you get lost past the bathroom sinks. But that’s the way it is now. You can’t find the heart of anything to stick the knife into.'”

There it is.  Gangsters and cowboys are the ur-American figures for a reason: they represent freedom from political philosophy and empty consumerism.  If the everday world is false consciousness, these are the people who live beyond it.  The gangster lives in a world in which something like meritocracy holds–or at least, if not meritocracy, then true randomness, something besides the loaded dice of the system.  The cowboy lives beyond the arm of the Law, and thus is free to be a freer, simpler, and ultimately more just version of the law.  Both figures operate in zones of freedom that exist because of the failure of the state.  Having no respect for political philosophy IS America’s political philosophy.

So, Frank Lucas is saying, you know something’s wrong, something’s Orwellian about a landscape when gangsters and cowboys can no longer operate.  Right?    Right.  Is our continuing fixation on gangsters and our barely concealed adulation of gangsters any coincidence, then?  Are these gangster shows our colorful travel narratives, the compensation for living in a world as dreary as ours?  My provisional answer is: yes.  The one movie, by the way, that makes this symbiosis of exurb and gangster clear is GoodFellas–specifically it’s last shot, in which Ray Liotta, banished to Arizona by the witness protection program, stands in front of the tract housing in which he lives.  As he looks hopelessly, forlornly at the camera, we cut abruptly to Joe Pesci shooting up the screen, Great Train Robbery style.  Tearing right through the veil.  Now that’s living!  The gangster is the fantasy obverse of the man who knows his limits.

These days, people are especially fascinated by amoral protagonists: the absence of moral judgment is what everyone calls sophistication on The Sopranos and The Wire.  This isn’t new to American culture though.  It’s only new to TV.  For a century, there have been the ultimate landscape movies,  Westerns, in which the man who must blaze society’s trail is unfit for polite society.  (It’s no coincidence that the bleak landscape in Gilliam’s shot could easily be a Western one.)  As A.O. Scott wrote yesterday,

“The archetypal western hero is a complicated figure, and the world he inhabits is a place of flux and contradiction. At the end, the stranger rides off into the wilderness, since the civilization he has helped to save holds no permanent place for him… Modernity may be inevitable and desirable, but it comes at a price. The wilderness will be cut down and cultivated; the original inhabitants will be dispossessed; and an element of romance will be lost.”

Or will it?  Do we not have other countries in which to unleash our wild freedom?    The new frontier is the first frontier, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and our representatives act as gangster-cowboys there while we exult in the televised fictions detailing the same.  We sure do love some cleansing violence.  And where better to stage it than a ruined, apocalyptic landscape (even if we have to ruin it first ourselves)?  That’s the funny thing about Gilliam’s vision.  It’s equally bleak on either side.  I think that’s why it describes an enduring dialectic of paranoia.  On the one hand, an alienating and utterly superficial consumerist culture and on the other, bleak lawlessness.

Maybe it’s worth remembering that gangsters, unlike cowboys, do try to ensure some kind of stable order.  Lucas says he wouldn’t shake down the mom-and-pop stores, only larger establishments that had some profit in them.  You don’t want to strip your ecosystem past the point of collapse.  Similarly, there’s a famous story about the establishment of New York’s most venerable pizzerias, those founded by apprenctices of the baker John Lombardi: Patsy’s, Grimaldi’s, Totonno’s, Lombardi’s.  These places don’t serve individual slices, just whole pies.  The reason, the story goes, is that the mobsters who shook down pizza places exempted these oldest restaurants.  Outta respect.  But, so they wouldn’t take too large of a cut of their business, they let them off the hook on one condition: that they wouldn’t sell slices.

There’s something wise in this anecdote.  Don’t punish your poorest and oldest constituents.  Take more money from the large outfits, who can afford it.  The mob, it seems, practiced progressive taxation.  That’s more than you can say for our contemporary elites.  No wonder Lucas is so incensed by superstores.  Their business is conducted at such a metahuman scale, who could shake them down?  This is the final meaning, I think of all the gangster and cowboy fantasies: they are symptoms of a time in which ordinary people have knowledge of events but almost no ability to affect them.  Protest goes unheard, while our government and multinational concerns ensure their safety and privacy to the detriment of ours.  Gilliam’s movie rendered society as a choice between being a chump or being an outlaw.  For now, we’re one dreaming we’re the other.

The rest of my dispatches.

Vargas-Suarez Universal. Space Station Dystopia 1939 1964 2001.

Installation.

More here and here.

Upcoming show at Boston’s SpaceOther Gallery.

Jonah Leher in Seed:

In 1974 Oliver Sacks was climbing a mountain in Norway by himself. It was early afternoon, and he had just begun his descent when a slight misstep sent him careening over a rocky cliff. His left leg was “twisted grotesquely” beneath his body, his limp knee wracked with pain. “My knee could not support any weight at all, but just buckled beneath me,” he wrote in A Leg to Stand On. Sacks began to “row” himself down the mountain, sliding on his back and pushing with his hands, so that his leg, which he’d splinted with his umbrella, was “hanging nervelessly” in front of him. After a few hours, Sacks was exhausted, but he knew that if he stopped he would not survive the cold night.

What kept Sacks going was music. As he painstakingly descended the mountain, he began to make a melody out of his movements. “I fell into a rhythm,” Sacks writes, “guided by a sort of marching or rowing song, sometimes the Volga Boatman’s Song, sometimes a monotonous chant of my own. I found myself perfectly coordinated by this rhythm—or perhaps subordinated would be a better term: The musical beat was generated within me, and all my muscles responded obediently…I was musicked along.” Sacks reached the village at the bottom of the mountain just before nightfall.

America’s new village atheist in USA Today:

Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an intervening god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined. Defining matters in this way, I can allow myself to mention great critics such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who perhaps paradoxically regarded religion as an insult to god. And sooner or later, one must take a position on agnosticism. This word has not been with us for very long—it was coined by the great Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s stalwart defenders in the original argument over natural selection. It is sometimes used as a half-way house by those who cannot make a profession of faith but are unwilling to repudiate either religion or god absolutely. Since, once again, I am defining as religious those who claim to know, I feel I can lay claim to some at least of those who do not claim to know. An agnostic does not believe in god, or disbelieve in him. Non-belief is not quite unbelief, but I shall press it into service and annex as many agnostics as I can for this collection.

Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the “holy” books. So I have included what many serious novelists and poets have had to say on this most freighted of all subjects. And who, really, will turn away from George Eliot and James Joyce and Joseph Conrad in order to rescrutinize the bare and narrow and constipated and fearful world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Osama bin Laden?

In The Daily Mail (yes, THAT Daily Mail), Patrick French profiles Shakeel Ahmad Bhat (via Amitava Kumar):

Don’t you hate Islamic Rage Boy? ‘MoBlows’, writing on the Jihad Watch website, certainly does.

“I just want to put my fist down his throat,” he says. The ‘boy’ in question rose to prominence earlier this year when he was photographed at a demonstration in Srinagar, capital of Indian-administered Kashmir.

Later, he was spotted waving his fist at another camera during a protest against the awarding of a knighthood to author Salman Rushdie.

With his straggly beard and big shouting mouth, Rage Boy certainly looks like a threat.

His scary face now appears on boxer shorts and bumper stickers, and he scores more than a million results on Google.

A regular spoof diary appears online in his name and he has come to stand for all that is most frightening about radical Islam.

But who is the real person behind the cartoon and what does he believe in? I travelled to Kashmir in search of the poster-boy of fundamentalism.

In Discovery News:

A real da Vinci code is indeed hidden within Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” according to a book to be published in Italy next week.

But rather than conspiracy theories, the new code points to a hidden musical score, a sacred text and a three-dimensional chalice.

“This is not another spin-off of Dan Brown’s novel. It’s real,” musician Giovanni Maria Pala told Discovery News in an exclusive interview. “I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility of finding a (piece of) music in the Last Supper, but I would have never imagined to find myself decoding a secret message by Leonardo.”

Indeed, Leonardo was an accomplished lyre player who also enjoyed hiding puzzles in his work.

Pala, who will publish his findings next week in the book “La Musica Celata” (which translates to “The Hidden Music”) claims to have discovered nothing less than a sacred hymn and text, along with mystic symbols in da Vinci’s degraded masterpiece.

“I was first struck by the tablecloth, which features horizontal lines but also vertical lines in correspondence with the pieces of bread. This made me think immediately of music notes on a pentagram. I tried to play the notes, but it did not work. Looking at single details wasn’t the correct approach,” Pala said.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

Steve Paulson interviews the couple at Salon:

“I’ve always been obsessed with the mind-body problem,” says philosopher Renee Feuer Himmel. “It’s the essential problem of metaphysics, about both the world out there and the world in here.”

Renee is the fictional alter ego of novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. In her 1983 novel, “The Mind-Body Problem,” Goldstein laid out her own metaphysical concerns, which include the mystery of consciousness and the struggle between reason and emotion. As a novelist, she’s drawn to the quirky lives of scientists and philosophers. She’s also fascinated by history’s great rationalist thinkers. She’s written nonfiction accounts of the 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the 20th-century mathematician-philosopher Kurt Gödel.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that Goldstein would end up living with Steven Pinker, a leading theorist of the mind. He’s a cognitive psychologist at Harvard; she’s a philosopher who’s taught at several colleges. Although they come out of different disciplines, they mine much of the same territory: language, consciousness, and the tension between science and religion. If Boston is ground zero for intellectuals, then Pinker and Goldstein must rank as one of America’s brainiest power couples.

More here.

From Matthew Hedman’s introduction to his book, at the University of Chicago Press website:

From our twenty-first-century perspective, events from the past can often seem impossibly remote. With today’s complex technology and constantly shifting political and economic networks, it is sometimes hard to imagine what life was like even a hundred years ago, much less comprehend the vast stretches of time preceding the appearance of humans on this planet. However, thanks to recent advances in the fields of history, archaeology, biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and astronomy, in some ways even the far distant past has never been closer to us. The elegantly carved symbols found deep in the rain forests of Central America, uninterpretable for centuries, now reveal the political machinations of Mayan lords. Fresh interdisciplinary studies of the Great Pyramids of Egypt are providing fascinating insights into exactly when and how these incredible structures were built. Meanwhile, the remains of humble trees are illuminating how the surface of the sun has changed over the past ten millennia. Other ancient bits of wood are helping us better understand the lives of first inhabitants of the New World. Fossil remains, together with tissue samples from modern animals (including people) suggest that anthropologists may be close to solving the long-standing puzzle of when and how our ancestors started walking on two legs. Similar work might also help biologists uncover how a group of small, shrew-like creatures that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs gave rise to creatures as diverse as cats, rabbits, bats, horses and whales. The origins of the earth and the solar system are being explored in great detail thanks in part to the rocks that fall from the sky, while the history of the universe can be read in the light from distant stars. The cosmic static that appears on our television sets even allows cosmologists to look back to the very beginning of our universe.

To accomplish all this (and much more besides), scholars and scientists have had to develop a variety of clever ways to figure out when things happened.

More here.

Via NoUtopia.com:

The Just

Jorge Luis Borges

A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.

Translation: Alastair Reid

William Grimes in the New York Times Book Review:

Joel Hafvenstein returned to Afghanistan in late 2004 armed with nothing but good intentions. Employed by Chemonics, a private company with a contract from the United States Agency for International Development, he was part of a team trying to discourage cultivation of the opium poppy by providing an alternative income for poor farmers.

Within months the mission was in disarray, its American workers huddled in a fortified bunker after eight of its Afghan employees had been murdered. The next year’s poppy harvest would be the largest on record.

The sobering dispatches in “Opium Season,” a wrenching account of lofty hopes and bitter disappointments, shed a dismal light on American efforts to improve the lot of ordinary Afghans.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

LAST MONTH, two economists published a working paper suggesting an unusual way to diversify one’s investment portfolio: buy something called sukuk, or bonds that conform to the demands of Islam. The Koran, most Islamic scholars agree, forbids the charging of interest, so traditional bonds are off-limits to devout Muslims. But sukuk generate a steady income from actual, tangible assets, like a rented piece of land. Sukuk are also, it turns out, more stable than traditional sovereign bonds. While the sample size was small, the study by Selim Cakir, of the International Monetary Fund, and Faezeh Raei, a graduate student at the University of Texas, suggested that a portfolio that mixed sukuk with traditional bonds would do a better job than an all-bond portfolio of hedging against unpredictable seesaws in the financial markets.

One of the fastest growing areas of finance today is based on the 1,400-year-old strictures of shariah, or Islamic law. Sukuk are part of the field of “Islamic finance,” which – while it emerged in its modern incarnation in the late 1970s – has in recent years been attracting money at a precipitously quick clip. Sukuk issuance in 2007 is on pace to at least double last year’s total. And while exact figures are impossible to come by, industry analysts estimate that as much as $500 billion is now invested worldwide under Islamic guidelines. Most of the world’s leading banks and investment companies, including Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and HSBC have started offering financial tools and services that meet the Koran’s requirements.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What a charming and peculiar bulletin from the past is this little book from 1927, supposedly written by a man famous in his day as a cultural impresario and libertine but now remembered as the husband of Colette. Ostensibly a quasi-scientific tour of the male homosexual world in France, Italy and Germany in the 1920s, “The Third Sex” is by turns leering, sympathetic, philosophical, patronizing, exuberant, impenetrable, tender and hilarious, often all on the same page. As the translator, Lawrence R. Schehr, points out, Henri Gauthier-Villars, who used the pseudonym Willy, did not “write” this book any more than he “wrote” Colette’s Claudine novels, to which he cheerfully attached his name as well. No one knows who actually put the words on these pages. Willy’s interest, avarice and curiosity, however, caused the book to come into being; we might say he produced “The Third Sex,” which Schehr, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, has translated for the first time into English. Until recently, there was only one publicly available copy of it, in French, in the rare-book room of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Whoever wrote it, this slender volume offers a fascinating glimpse not so much of exotic homosexual practices but of something much more delicate and transitory: the moment just before homosexuality became an identity, before sexual acts had been organized into the solid categories we recognize and traffic in today.

More here.

Jerry Coyne and Philip Kitcher respond to Jerry Fodor’s piece in the LRB:

Jerry Fodor makes the striking claim that evolutionary biologists are abandoning natural selection as the principal, or even an important, cause of evolutionary change, and that ‘it’s not out of the question that a scientific revolution – no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory – is in the offing’ (LRB, 18 October). This is news to us, and, we believe, will be news to most knowledgeable people as well. The idea of natural selection is, in fact, alive and well, and remains the only viable explanation of the apparent ‘design’ of organisms – the remarkable fit between them and their environments and lifestyles – that once was ascribed to the divine.

As does Daniel Dennett:

He does provide two of his favourite foretastes, however: evo-devo and the famous case of the domesticated Russian foxes. These interesting developments both fit handsomely within our ever-growing understanding of how evolution by natural selection works. Briefly, evo-devo drives home the importance of the fact that in addition to the information in the genes (the ‘recipes’ for making offspring), there is information in the developmental processes (the ‘readers’ of the recipes), and both together need to be considered in a good explanation of the resulting phenotypes, since the interactions between them can be surprising. Of course the information in the developmental processes is itself all a product of earlier natural selection, not a gift from God or some otherwise inexplicable contribution. The foxes are a striking instance of how selection acting on one trait can bring other traits along with it – which may then be subject to further selection.

And Steven Rose, Colin Tudge, and Kit Evans.

In the FT, Simon Kuper reviews Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Laquer’s The Last Days of Europe, Phillips’ Londonistan, and Ye’or’s Eurabia (via Crooked Timber):

All these authors start with disclaimers that not all Muslims support terrorist jihad. This is then swiftly forgotten as the plans for jihad in Europe are outlined. Ye’or, for whom Muslims are always the same, describes jihad as a 1,400-year-old strategy. Like Bawer, she explains that “they’’ never got over losing Andalusia in 1492.

Mixed with the hysteria are kernels of truth. Phillips’ Londonistan rightly recalls that in the 1990s the British authorities let many radical jihadists settle in London. Some later plotted terrorism against the UK. Phillips leaps from this to claiming that Britons cannot see the terrorist threat. However, this is rather negated by the fact that almost all her information about British terrorism comes from British newspapers.

About 16 million nominal Muslims live in the European Union, less than 4 per cent of the EU population. A tiny minority are terrorists. Nobody sane denies that. But the “Eurabia’’ theorists – with the partial exception of Walter Laqueur, the most judicious of them – seem to regard the mass of Muslims as the enemy. Phillips sees “a continuum that links peaceful, law-abiding but nevertheless intensely ideological Muslims at one end and murderous jihadists at the other’’.

A favourite rhetorical trick of these writers is the pars pro toto: isolated examples of Islamic extremism come to stand for a vast Muslim movement. It’s true, as Laqueur twice notes, that one group said: “We shall hoist our flags over 10 Downing Street.’’ But this is atypical. European Muslims almost all vote for mainstream parties, mostly of the left. In surveys the great majority profess satisfaction with their lives in Europe.

Richard Pyle at Associated Press, via CNN:

Norman Mailer, the macho prince of American letters who for decades reigned as the country’s literary conscience and provocateur, died of renal failure early Saturday, his literary executor said. He was 84. Mailer died at Mount Sinai Hospital, said J. Michael Lennon, who is also the author’s official biographer.

From his classic debut novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” to such masterworks of literary journalism as “The Armies of the Night,” the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner always got credit for insight, passion and originality.

Some of Mailer’s works were highly praised, some panned, but none was pronounced the Great American Novel that seemed to be his life quest from the time he soared to the top as a brash 25-year-old “enfant terrible.”

Mailer built and nurtured an image over the years as pugnacious, streetwise and high-living. He drank, fought, smoked pot, married six times and stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, during a drunken party.

More here.  Longer New York Times obituary here.  An interview with Mailer here.

At Trevor Paglen’s website:

A number of military bases and installations exist in some of the remotest parts of the United States, hidden deep in western deserts and buffered by dozens of miles of restricted land. Many of these sites are so remote, in fact, that there is nowhere on Earth where a civilian might be able to see them with an unaided eye. In order to produce images of these remote and hidden landscapes, therefore, some unorthodox viewing and imaging techniques are required.

Limit-telephotography involves photographing landscapes that cannot be seen with the unaided eye. The technique employs high powered telescopes whose focal lengths range between 1300mm and 7000mm. At this level of magnification, hidden aspects of the landscape become apparent.

Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. In some ways, however, it is easier to photograph the depths of the solar system than it is to photograph the recesses of the military industrial complex. Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away), for example, there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series.

More here.

WALTER KIRN in The New York Times:

Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers have found that plaque accumulation in the arteries is greater in women who use birth-control pills than in those who never have. Plaque is the hardened fat and cholesterol that can clog arteries and lead to heart disease and stroke. Researchers at Ghent University in Belgium studied more than 1,000 women who had taken oral contraceptives for a period of time and then stopped. They found a 20-30% increase in the amount of plaque for every decade the woman was on the pill. The results were presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Florida, but have not yet been published.

Meanwhile, another study published this week in The Lancet confirms previous findings that the risk of cervical cancer is higher in women who are on the pill. That risk drops back down to normal levels within ten years of quitting the pill, they found.

More here.

Patrick West in Spiked:

But why marry a Beatle in the first place? The Beatles may have made some of the best pop music of the twentieth century, but they were largely horrible people who sent out a horrible message. OK, Ringo was just a nice simpleton who really can’t be blamed for much, and I did enjoy Thomas the Tank Engine. And, yes, yes, George Harrison was actually a decent cove, who wrote one of the great conservative anthems of our time, ‘Taxman’, and funded two of my favourite films: Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Withnail & I. But John Lennon was a truly horrible character: a drug-taking, allegedly wife-beating, air-headed utopian whose legacy is that ultimate Stalinist anthem: ‘Imagine.’

And then there’s Paul McCartney, the idiot, pouting sentimentalist who created the band Wings, sang about frogs and then did a clichéd bit of multi-racial rubbish with Stevie Wonder about ebony and ivory – which was not at all about black and white people living in harmony, but about two incredibly rich popstars playing the piano together.

More here.

Ray Fisman in Slate:

Another clear gender divide, this one less expected, emerged in our findings on racial preferences, reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don’t seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman’s race had no effect on the men’s choices.

Two wrinkles on this: We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women’s neutrality, not the men’s pronounced preference. We also found that regional differences mattered. Daters of both sexes from south of the Mason-Dixon Line revealed much stronger same-race preferences than Northern daters.

More here.