Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom. In “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” he says what he wants is a fair hearing and rigorous testing for ideas that might seem shocking.
Yet much of what Taubes relates will be eye-opening to those who have not closely followed the science, or lack of science, in this area. (Disclosure: At one point he approvingly cites my articles on the lack of evidence that a high-fiber diet protects against colon cancer.) For example, he tells the amazing story of how the idea of a connection between dietary fat, cholesterol and heart disease got going and took on a life of its own, despite the minimal connection between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol for most people. He does not mince words. “From the inception of the diet-heart hypothesis in the early 1950s, those who argued that dietary fat caused heart disease accumulated the evidential equivalent of a mythology to support their belief. These myths are still passed on faithfully to the present day.” The story is similar for salt and high blood pressure, and for dietary fiber and cancer.
When you walk into the enormous central hall of the Lahore Museum, your eye is quickly drawn to the two rows of miniature paintings displayed along the walls on either side. Women on horseback playing polo; Radha and Krishna consorting under a mango tree. You approach the glass cases to observe the minute details of individual strands of hair, of eyelashes, of fingernails. Perchance, you look up.
And you are transposed. Telescoped from the micro to the macro! There, 11 metres in the air, are the sparkling stars, the whirling planets, the spiralling galaxies, all beaming directly at you. A viewer may not be able to immediately recognise the intricate Kufic calligraphy, the use of the letter noon as a design element, but the dynamism of the geometric shapes, the bold and energetic lines, the feverish cross-hatching, will intrigue and engage any imagination. This is a mammoth, 29×7.8-metre oil painting by the famed Pakistani artist Sadequain, rendered in a genre called ‘calligraphic cubism’, spanning the entire ceiling of the entrance hall. If your vision is sharp and you know Urdu, you will read the line of a poem by Mohammad Iqbal painted on one panel: Sitaaro’n ke aage jaha’n aur bhi hai – Beyond the stars there are still other worlds. Standing there, humbled by the celestial orbs, another poet’s lines echo through this writer’s mind: Aur bhi dukh hai’n zamaane me’n mohabbat ke sivaa/ raahate’n aur bhi hai’n vasl ki raahat ke sivaa. These are Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s immortal words: There are sorrows in this world other than those of love/ joys, other than those of union with one’s beloved.
Between 1920, when she was thirty, and her death in 1976, Agatha Christie published seventy-one full-length murder mysteries. She also brought out five collections of stories, two volumes of poetry, a number of successful West End plays and a couple of autobiographies; five non-crime novels by her appeared under the name of Mary Westmacott. In some years there were several publications; between 1939 and 1946 there were nineteen. By 1950, she had sold a total of 50 million books and she is still the bestselling author in the world. It seems reasonable to wonder where it all came from.
Laura Thompson has been given full access to the unpublished letters, papers and notebooks kept at Greenway, the house in Devon that Christie purchased in 1938 and later turned into a family trust to avoid tax. There Thompson discovered a lifetime’s worth of old exercise books, scraps of paper, receipts, banker’s orders, souvenir menus and family albums. She also discovered that Christie, who never dated a letter, falsified the details of her life in her memoirs and lied about her age on her marriage certificate. But in any case Thompson’s biographical method is not organization but evocation; rather than order the material into a chronological narrative, she wants us to know what her Agatha feels and offers novelistic insights into her state of mind. “Her life, on the surface, was as grey and dreary as a prison exercise yard, her mind a prey to a daily succession of torments” is how she describes Christie’s reaction to her divorce from her husband Archie sometime in 1927, an important event in Christie’s life, the facts of which remain uncertain.
Shalom Auslander ends “Foreskin’s Lament,” his memoir of growing up in, and eventually breaking away from, the Orthodox Jewish community here, not with an acknowledgments page but with a list of people God might consider punishing instead of the author’s family. Mr. Auslander is no longer observant, but he is still a believer, and he believes in a wrathful, vengeful God who takes things personally and is not at all pleased when someone leaves the fold and writes an angry and very funny book about it.
“The people who raised me will say I am not religious,” he writes. “They are mistaken.” He adds: “I am painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious, and I have watched lately, dumbfounded and distraught, as around the world, more and more people seem to be finding Gods, each more hateful and bloody than the next, as I’m doing my best to lose Him. I’m failing miserably.”
Most of the controversy around Learning to Drive has been around the title story and especially its followup, “Webstalker,’ which are about a painful breakup and its aftermath. As in the other essays, I aimed to put close together sadness and comedy, high diction and low, the romantic and the reflective. It’s not for me to say if I achieved those effects– but that was the idea. What has really floored me, I must say, is that the book is controversial. I thought I was writing about experiences that are shared by many, if not indeed most people, including men. Who doesn’t have areas of incompetence and fear — mechanical stuff for me, maybe foreign languages, or I dunno, cooking, for you? Who hasn’t been hurt in love? And not just young people, either, thank you very much.
This, as I see it, is the pass to which we have come. Women can write about shooting heroin and being sex workers and spending years zoned out on prozac and having nervous breakdowns and hating other women and lord knows what else and that’s okay by feminism, as indeed it should be. But writing that you didn’t learn to drive for years and years out of technophobia and overreliance on men? Loving a man unwisely and feeling terrible for more than a long weekend when he left? Writing about how another person really got to you and how you even, OMG, googled him and the other women in his life rather a lot for a while, which is basically all that happens in “Webstalker”? Oh, that is so unfeminist–and from a longtime feminist political columnist too! That really undermines all our progress. Now we’ll never get the ERA.
The distance between reading and seeing has been an ongoing interest for me. Since 1998 I have been exploring this space through the use of letterforms, and have used the letter E as my primary starting point for the last two years. Since E is often found at the top of vision charts, I questioned what I saw as a familiar hierarchy. Was this letter more important than other letters? E is, after all, the most commonly used letter in the English language, it denotes a natural number (2.71828), and has a visual presence that interests me greatly. In my research E has become a surrogate for all letters in the alphabet. It now replaces the other letters and becomes a universal letter (or Letter), and a string of Es now becomes a generic language (or Language). This substitution denies written words their use as legible signifiers, allowing language to become a vacant parallel Language— a basis for visual manufacture.
After months of compiling Es into abstract compositions through various systemic arrangements, I started recognizing my studio time as a quasi-monastic experience. There was something sublime about both the compositions that I was making and the solitude in which they were made. It was as if I were translating some great text like a subliterate medieval scribe would have years ago—with no direct understanding of the source material. The next logical step was to find a source. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, a story rich in theology, philosophy, and psychosis provides me with a roadmap for my work, but also with a series of underlying narratives. My drawings, prints, and collages continue to speak of language and the transferal of information, but now as a conduit to Melville’s sublime narratives.
Universities create jobs, develop new therapies and technologies and train America’s young people for the modern knowledge economy. All this is true. But comparable claims could be made for a pharmaceutical company. What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?
There is more and more reason to think: less and less. Driven by big science and global competition, our top universities compete for “market share” and “brand-name positioning,” employ teams of consultants and lobbyists and furnish their campuses with luxuries in order to attract paying “customers” — a word increasingly used as a synonym for students. Since 1980, when Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act permitting patents on discoveries made with public funds, universities and faculty members have been raking in royalties from technologies developed with the help of government grants. More recently, universities have been expanding into adjacent neighborhoods (Harvard into Allston, Columbia into Harlem, Penn into an undeveloped tract near its current campus) and establishing satellite campuses abroad. Yale has announced the acquisition of an entirely new research campus outside New Haven —from, as it happens, a pharmaceutical company.
How are college students treated in this brave new academic world?
One of the arguments used to assuage our fears that the mass movement being built by the Christian right is fascist at its core is that it has not yet created a Praetorian Guard, referring to the paramilitary force that defied legal constraints, made violence part of the political discourse and eventually plunged ancient Rome into tyranny and despotism. A paramilitary force that operates outside the law, one that sows fear among potential opponents and is capable of physically silencing those branded by their leaders as traitors, is a vital instrument in the hands of despotic movements. Communist and fascist movements during the last century each built paramilitary forces that operated beyond the reach of the law.
And yet we may be further down this road than we care to admit. Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq, champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves.
It’s like something out of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Once upon a time in northeastern Argentina there was a village of grape and almond farmers and goat breeders. This place, called Aicuña, also known as “the town of the Ormeños,” or later “the mysterious albino town,” remained isolated for more than three centuries, two hundred and fifty years longer than García Márquez’s Macondo. Inbreeding was punished in Macondo by the birth of a boy with a pig’s tail. In Aicuña, say some vicious people in neighboring villages, the punishment is colorless children. Forty-six of them, to be precise, in little more than a century.
However, it seems that Aicuña’s isolation has something to do with those same villages that now spread rumors about its strangeness. Some say that the animosity and subsequent estrangement all began with a disagreement over property. Who owned what land. Or who wanted to take over what land. But that is another story—another taboo—which almost no one here wants to talk about.
When people look at abstract paintings and say, “My kid could do that,” they’re right—up to a point. Given the right materials and a little bit of coaching, any kid—or elephant or chimpanzee—can produce something that looks like art, or at least something that looks like Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, artists like de Kooning and Pollock proposed a radically new way of thinking about painting: as the direct trace of the artist’s physical engagement with the materials. Harold Rosenberg, the critic who first coined the term “action painting,” put it like this: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.” The Ab-Exers were great formal innovators, but even more important than Pollock’s drips or de Kooning’s arabesques was their revolutionary insight that a painting can represent nothing other than the process of its own creation.
Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West. Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public she was announcing that she was anybody’s.
It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite. He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by describing bin Laden’s view of history less inflammatorily — not as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a single-cause theory of history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory. Moreover, Judeocentrism comes in positive forms and negative forms. The positive form of Judeocentrism is philo-Semitism, the negative form is anti-Semitism. (There are philo-Semites who regard the Jews as the inventors of modernity, and there are anti-Semites who do the same; but the idea that Spinoza, Freud, and Einstein are responsible for us is as foolish as the idea that their ideas are judische Wissenschaft.) In both its positive and negative forms, Judeocentrism is always a mistake. Human events are not so neatly explained.
In the inflamed universe of negative Judeocentrism, there is a sliding scale of obsession. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, seems at times to view the world entirely through the prism of a Jewish conspiracy, and he regularly breaks new ground in the field of state-supported Holocaust denial.
Good news for your Viagra-using hamster: On his next trip to Europe he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends. The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of 10 Ig Nobel prizes awarded Thursday night for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to U.S. military efforts to make a “gay bomb.” The recipients of the annual awards, handed out by the Annals of Improbable Research, were honored at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater.
Best (and worst) of the rest Other winners include:
A Dutch researcher who conducted a census of all the creepy-crawlies that share our beds.
Spanish scientists who found that rats sometimes could not distinguish between Japanese spoken backwards and Dutch spoken backwards.
An Australian woman who documented the indexing problems caused by the word “the.”
A Japanese researcher who extracted vanilla flavoring from cow dung.
A Taiwanese man who patented a Batman-like device that drops a net over bank robbers.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a series of inventions — the Conté pencil, “wove paper,” and hard-cake watercolor paints — resulted in the rapid spread of a revolutionary art form, which we call watercolor. The portability of the medium promoted plein air painting, while the use and superimposition of colored washes fed artists’ fascination with atmospheric effects rendered subtly and with optical precision. The medium at once dared artists to take risks, yet demanded of them a control without which simple mistakes could corrupt hours of intensive work, unlike painting in oils in the studio, where such mistakes could be reversed. The watercolor revolution marks a great moment in Western art. While the early innovations took place in England and France, and great British watercolorists — Turner, Girtin, Blake — tower over the first half of the 19th century, the medium took off at the time American art began. With their love of landscape, Americans created a body of watercolor that stands as one of our nation’s proudest artistic triumphs.
The k43-t69 train that follows China’s great northern steppes and the legendary Silk Road could be dubbed “the desertification train.” Travelling from east to west, from Beijing to Urumqi, it cuts through 3,343 kilometres of dusty grasslands, dried-up riverbeds, threatened oases, and deserts both ancient and new. A few hours after the train leaves Beijing, a lunar black mountain range welcomes passengers into a vast arid landscape.
Deserts cover 18 percent of China today. Of those, 78 percent are natural, while 22 percent were created by humans. Almost all of them lie along the k43-t69’s route through the provinces of Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Gansu, and finally Xinjiang, at the edge of Central Asia.
Berlin’s essay on Montesquieu is a good candidate for the most resonant piece he ever wrote about anything, but even then he stopped short conceptually of the conclusions he was on the point of reaching by instinct. He gives a detailed account of how Montesquieu’s pluralism valued all cultures; and then a further account of how Montesquieu, seeing the danger, wanted to leave room for some cultures being more valuable than others; but he made comparatively little of the device by which Montesquieu furthered the concept of an absolute morality that would apply even in the world of relative values that he had done so much to celebrate. Yet the device was right there in Montesquieu’s prose, and Berlin actually quoted it. “Justice is eternal, and doesn’t depend at all on human conventions.” Berlin thought Montesquieu had merely deepened his problem by saying that there could be universal laws in a relative world. But Montesquieu wasn’t saying that there were universal laws instinctive to all men. He was saying that there were eternal laws instinctive to some of them. Montesquieu argued that it didn’t matter who says torture might be necessary: our better nature, if we have one, tells us it is wrong. He was, in other words, a good man by instinct. The implication is that there were good men among the first men, and bad men too. If Berlin had faced the likelihood that his own goodness, like the evil of Stalin and Hitler, stemmed from a time when there was no idea in mankind’s head except where the next meal was coming from and how to kill it, he might have been better equipped to deal with modern malevolence in its full horrific force. There was an Isaiah Berlin in the cave. He just had less to talk about at dinner, and the food was terrible.
Put off by his controversial words on Israel, the University of St. Thomas snubs a Nobel Laureate.
Matt Snyders in the Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages:
Back in April, when University of St. Thomas staffer Mike Klein informed his colleagues in the Justice and Peace Studies program that he’d succeeded in booking Archbishop Desmond Tutu for a campus appearance, the faculty buzzed in anticipation. For a program dedicated to fostering social change and nonviolence, there were few figures who embodied that vision more aptly than the world-renowned civil rights activist and Nobel Laureate.
Tutu’s appearance—slated for the spring of ’08—was made possible by the university’s partnership with PeaceJam International, a youth-centered project that taps Nobel Laureates to teach young adults about peace and justice. For four straight years, the Catholic university’s St. Paul campus had played host to PeaceJam festivities featuring Nobel Peace Prize winners such as Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Shirin Ebadi.
But in a move that still has faculty members shaking their heads in disbelief, St. Thomas administrators—concerned that Tutu’s appearance might offend local Jews—told organizers that a visit from the archbishop was out of the question.
A “drug-free world,” which the United Nations describes as a realistic goal, is no more attainable than an “alcohol-free world”—and no one has talked about that with a straight face since the repeal of Prohibition in the United States in 1933. Yet futile rhetoric about winning a “war on drugs” persists, despite mountains of evidence documenting its moral and ideological bankruptcy. When the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on drugs convened in 1998, it committed to “eliminating or significantly reducing the illicit cultivation of the coca bush, the cannabis plant and the opium poppy by the year 2008” and to “achieving significant and measurable results in the field of demand reduction.” But today, global production and consumption of those drugs are roughly the same as they were a decade ago; meanwhile, many producers have become more efficient, and cocaine and heroin have become purer and cheaper…
Demand for particular illicit drugs waxes and wanes, depending not just on availability but also fads, fashion, culture, and competition from alternative means of stimulation and distraction. The relative harshness of drug laws and the intensity of enforcement matter surprisingly little, except in totalitarian states. After all, rates of illegal drug use in the United States are the same as, or higher than, Europe, despite America’s much more punitive policies.
Pakistan’s tourism ministry designated 2007 as “Destination Pakistan”, the year when tourists were urged to discover the country’s sights and delights. Their timing couldn’t have been worse. A military ruler clinging to power, al-Qaida fanatics hiding in the mountains, suicide bombings booming across the cities – in 2007, Pakistan has become a byword for peril and turmoil.
But there is another Pakistan, one the majority of its 165 million people are more familiar with. It is the thrusting software entrepreneurs and brash new television stations. It is the kite flyers and partygoers and the strangers who insist you sit for a cup of tea. And it is Sehwan Sharif.
A sleepy town on the Indus river, Sehwan Sharif is on the heroin smuggling route that runs through Sindh from Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea. In summer it is a sauna – stepping from my air-conditioned car last month, the heat carried a five-knuckle wallop.
I joined about 1 million people who come to Sehwan Sharif for three days every year, to mark the death of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, an ancient Sufi mystic. It is one of south Asia’s greatest parties.
Gary Taubes is a brave and bold science journalist who does not accept conventional wisdom. In “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” he says what he wants is a fair hearing and rigorous testing for ideas that might seem shocking.
