As journalist Robert Kaplan flew into Bamako, Mali, in 1993, he saw tin roofs appear through thick dust blowing off the presumably advancing desert. He used this image of a “dying region” to conclude his Atlantic Monthly article “The Coming Anarchy,” in which he drew a connection between environmental degradation and growing disorder in the Third World, a hypothesis that certainly seemed to fit not only Mali but most of West Africa. When the article was published in February 1994, it made a considerable splash in Washington policy circles.

But even as Kaplan predicted doom, the situation on the ground in Mali did not quite fit his thesis. Yes, life was hard in this impoverished West African nation of 12 million people, and remains so. The 2005 United Nations Human Development Index, based on a combination of economic, demographic, and educational data, lists Mali as fourth from the bottom among 177 countries. Only Burkina Faso, Niger, and Sierra Leone rank lower. But despite persistent poverty and ongoing turmoil in neighboring states, in a single decade Mali has launched one of the most successful democracies in Africa. Its political record includes three democratic elections and two peaceful transitions of power, a transformation that seems nothing short of amazing.

more from The Wilson Quarterly here.

For this 4th of July: Barak Obama’s speech on how and why liberals must engage religion has captured the attention of many in the left-liberal side of the blogosphere and pushed the discussion of the role of religion in public life. (Audio here.)

Our failure as progressives to tap into the moral underpinnings of the nation is not just rhetorical, though. Our fear of getting “preachy” may also lead us to discount the role that values and culture play in some of our most urgent social problems.

After all, the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect ten point plan. They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness – in the imperfections of man.

Solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.

Amy Sullivan on the speech in Slate.

Millions and millions of faithful, including many evangelicals, have this sort of complicated relationship with their God. One of the enduring mysteries of faith is that it’s not easy to determine divine will. Most of us who consider ourselves religious are engaged in a constant struggle to discern God’s will for us, and we’re always aware of just how far we fall short of meeting that standard. Obama received one of his loudest ovations when he admitted: “The questions I had didn’t magically disappear.”

This humbler version of faith has been in the shadows for the past few years, derided as moral relativism or even a lack of true belief. Obama stepped up not to defend this approach to religion, but to insist on the rightness of it. That should be comforting to anyone who has been deeply discomfited by Bush’s version of Christianity. A questioning faith is a much better fit for a society like ours than one that allows for no challenge or reflection. It also acts as a check against liberals who would appropriate God for their own purposes, declaring Jesus to be the original Democrat and trotting out New Testament verses to justify their own policy programs. Liberals don’t have the answer key to divining God’s will any more than conservatives do.

There’s something quintessentially Angeleno about David Hockney. In spite of the fact that he was born, raised and received his art training in England and spends only a fraction of his globetrotting year in his adopted hometown, his hypersaturated palette, crackpot scholarship and unapologetic hedonism are somehow able to encapsulate L.A. more succinctly than any number of homegrown painters are. One key facet of this serendipitous mesh is a climate that encourages endless socializing. In London or New York, artists can blame the weather for their antisocial binges of studio sequestering. In L.A., where it is beautiful all the time, you have to entertain.

Hockney is a master entertainer, and “David Hockney Portraits” — organized by London’s National Portrait Gallery and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with (and currently on view at) LACMA — stands as testimony to the artist’s stubbornly idiosyncratic formalism as a tool in a kind of social sculpture.

more from the LA Weekly here.

From: Alex Cooley and Mark Blyth

To: All Brazil Jockers

Memo: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Wow – what a couple of days. Big teams playing each other in the World Cup usually produce, well, big games. Certainly, the two “clash of the titans” in 2006 delivered. I was also given an amazing lesson in the contrasting psychology of taking penalties across footballing cultures.

The penalty shootout remains perhaps the most tension-filled and cruelest way to settle a football match and two of this year’s quarterfinals (Germany-Argentina and Portugal-England) demonstrated just how differently winning and losing teams approach the spot kicks. Now, anyone who spouts this junk that the shootout is a “lottery” has obviously lost more than their fair share. And growing up in England, I always just assumed that settling a match on penalties was necessarily a torturous and depressing affair for all fans. How wrong I’ve been!

The Germany-Argentina game was instantly an epic encounter – gone was Germany’s earlier flamboyant attack play; the Argentine midfield pressured the German build-up and killed off the tempo of the game through possession football and short passing. When just after half-time Argentine center back Roberto Ayala powerfully headed home a corner the host’s progression in the tournament was put in serious jeopardy. Argentina expertly held on to the ball and wasted time as the Germans looked toothless. Then out of nowhere, with 10 minutes left, Germany’s jack-in-the-box striker Miroslav Klose sprung forward to nod in a flicked on Ballack freekick. 1-1. The packed crowd at my local bar “Schmidt’s” went ballistic and I bear-hugged about 37 random people. As extra-time drew to a close, everyone seemed more and more upbeat. The Germans had taken an Argentine punch, but had survived and the end of the game was a mere formality.

For the first time in my life I saw a crowd actually cheer the end of extra time as if they had already won. As the shootout progressed everyone rhythmically clapped on every German PK taker. The German kicks were flawless, the Argentine kicks less so and Berlin soon erupted into jubilant celebrations and a cacophony of honking cars, world cup anthems and pretty much everything else that you can imagine. The Argentines were left to brood over a stinging defeat and their manager Pekerman’s questionable substitution pattern, especially his decision to take off playmaker Riquelme and not insert the wunderkind Messi to run at a tiring German defense.

In the evening game the Italians clinically dismantled the overmatched Ukrainians (darn, got close with that one although I still maintain they should have played the Aussies!), setting up a 1982 World Cup final repeat against the Germans in the semis.

The next day I experienced what can only be uncreatively described as the “anti-Germany shootout” with a bunch of England fans. Cooley had predicted a Germany-England final, mainly because the draw was kind to England and they, for once, actually had some decent players at almost every position…oops. Although England mostly controlled the first half of the game and Portugal looked toothless without their suspended playmaker Deco, the match followed an all-too-familiar script for the English. In the second half England’s lone striker hothead Wayne Rooney, just like David Beckham against Argentina in 1998, was red carded for stomping all over a Portuguese defender’s private parts. Afterwards, down a man, England elevated their game as the unfairly maligned Owen Hargreaves heroically ran everywhere, but in the end neither team would have scored even if they had played on for another week.

So, just 24 hours later after the German PK party, the inevitable happened – final whistle and groans from all the En-gur-land fans at our large outdoor beach bar screen and lots of grown men half-staring at the screen through gaps in their hands. Even as Portugal missed two PKs and gave England a golden opportunity to claim their spot in the semifinals, England’s supposedly world class midfield duo bottled their penalties. Rubbish kicks from Lampard and Gerrard as well as a retaken miss by Carragher meant that England scored just 1 penalty in 4 – pathetic. English fan began to sob, as did defender John Terry into David Beckham’s arms. There’s no sugar-coating this one – England lost to a relatively poor side that even gifted them two penalty misses. Absolutely not good enough for a team that aspired to win the tournament.

We had no time to drown our sorrows (..well maybe we squeezed in a bit of drowning) as the main course of the quarterfinals was shortly kicking off – France vs. Team NikeFIFASamba in a repeat of that memorable Paris 1998 final. So we settled into our seats and tuned into the pre-match show.

The rest of the evening was simply delicious. It started with Pele waltzing into the ZDF pre-game show in front of a packed studio of blue and gold jockers clashing their approved thundersticks, and then lip-synching his new loungy “hit” single. After the musical promo he and the ZDF analysts patted each other on the back, reviewed tapes of various Brazilian goals and backheels and predicted a comfortable 2-0 or 2-1 Brazil victory. Everyone agreed that now that the important matches were starting we would see what Ronaldo and his buddies could really do. Back on planet earth, however, once the game kicked off it was obvious that only one team was in control.

The magnificent French just outclassed TeamNikeFIFASamba. Zidane was majestic in midfield, orchestrating passes as if in his prime, cleverly creating spaces and flicking telling balls everywhere, while Ribery terrorized Roberto Carlos down the right side. Carlos was also responsible for marking Henry on a free kick but obviously had more important matters to attend to – in the 57th mintue Henry found himself alone at the far post and thumped in Zidane’s sweetly struck ball and the French had their deserved goal. Although ZZ was singled out as the top player on the pitch, the defensive midfield duo of Viera and Makele produced outstanding performances as they built a wall around the French defense and effortlessly cut off all Brazilian passing lanes. In the end TeamNikeFIFASamba went out with a whimper and was reduced to lobbing in aimless balls into the box as Ronaldo and Ronaldhino whined about the refereeing and flung themselves to the turf in search of free kicks. Not only was this over-hyped bunch of millionaires dispatched in style, we were also mercifully spared a future Berlin fashion trend of Ronaldhino-style headbands with a big “R” on them.

Some seem a bit down on the quality of the tournament, but I thought these Q-finals lived up to the hype – lots of tension, drama and high-quality football. I think its a bit unfair to simply compare the number of goals scored at World Cups across different eras as the defenses and tactics these days are just stifling and the fitness of players so much better than in the past. As with most Q-finals, you win some and lose some, and so I am now officially out of the prediction business even though, of course, I do have a dream final in mind. I will be out of Germany for the semis, but will be back in Berlin under the Brandenburg gate for the final. Best to all and remember to practice those PKs!!

Werner Bischof. Farmer, Cambodia. 1952.

Photograph.

More on this superb young Swiss photohournalist here and here.

Ehsan Masood in Prospect Magazine:

It is a scene I won’t forget in a hurry: Jean-Marie Lehn, French winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, defending his atheism at a packed public conference at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt. In much of the Muslim world, talking about atheism in public is dangerous.

But the Alexandria Library is run by Ismail Serageldin, a Muslim intellectual who has a bold and ambitious project for Egypt. This is to create a place for dissent in public life. He wants to encourage people to grow thicker skins, help them appreciate that if Muslim societies want to return to the forefront of global intellectual life, they need to be comfortable with public dispute. The library is one place where open debate can take place—although this is partly because it is protected by having as its chair Suzanne Mubarak, wife of President Hosni Mubarak.

Serageldin is not alone. In my travels across the Muslim world, I am finding that what he (and others) are trying to do in Egypt is also happening elsewhere.

More here.

“The first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut’s is raising new questions for archaeologists about ancient Egypt’s burial practices.”

Andrew Lawler in Smithsonian Magazine:

The child-size coffin in KV-63 held the flashiest artifact: a second, nested coffin coated in gold leaf. It was empty. Instead of the usual mummies, the other coffins opened so far contain only a bizarre assortment of what appears to be debris and constitute a 3,000-year-old mystery: Why fill coffins and jars with rocks and broken pottery, then carefully seal them up? Why hew out a subterranean chamber only to turn it into a storeroom? And who went to all this effort? “It may not be the most glamorous find,” says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University, “but it is a whole new kind of entombment—which raises all kinds of questions.”

More here.

In the 1970’s, 80s and 90’s, “economic imperialism”–a term that refers to the invasion by the methods of neoclassical economics and game theory of the other social sciences–was the rage. Now evopscyh begins its tear across the social sciences and the “standard social scientific model”. A review of Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists (edited by Jerome H. Barkow), in Evolutionary Psychology.

I began my graduate career in the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington, where the great sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe taught all his career. I was a stupid SSSM (“Standard Social Science Model”) sociology graduate student then, and I joined the chorus of the confederacy of dunces to ridicule Pierre’s sociobiological work. More than a decade later, I discovered evolutionary psychology on my own by reading Wright’s The Moral Animal, and converted to it overnight. When I began working in EP, I apologized to Pierre for having been too dense to see the light a decade earlier, and told him my grand plan to introduce EP into sociology and revolutionize social sciences. Pierre was encouraging but cautious. He told me that he had tried to do that himself a quarter of a century earlier but to no avail. Sociologists were just too stupid to understand the importance of biology in human behavior, a view that he has expressed in print (van den Berghe, 1990), and he eventually left the field in disgust. Blinded by youthful optimism and ambition, I did not heed Pierre’s cautionary words and tried very hard to introduce EP into sociology. Nearly ten years later, I too have now come to his conclusion, and have left sociology in disgust. I have given up on the social sciences.

Now a group of ambitious scholars, under the leadership of no less an authority on EP than Jerome H. Barkow, attempts to accomplish what Pierre and I failed to do. Missing the revolution: Darwinism for social scientists is a collection of essays by evolutionary scientists from a range of disciplines, all with the aim of convincing social scientists to take evolutionary theory seriously and join the “Darwinian revolution.” If social scientists continue to miss the revolution after reading this book, they have nobody but themselves to blame. They certainly cannot blame Barkow and his collaborators in this volume, because (with one exception) they compile truly impressive contributions in an earnest attempt to show the Darwinian light to the social scientists.

Katha Pollitt on Linda Hirshman, in The Nation:

Hirshman first made her vigorous, no-holds-barred case against stay-home motherhood in an article called “Homeward Bound,” in The American Prospect. She got a huge amount of media attention–at last, a feminist who admits she thinks stay-home moms are wasting their lives!–and has now expanded the essay into a (very slender) book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. Fans of the original article will be pleased to know that the book preserves the abrasive, my-way-or-the-highway features of the essay. Don’t major in art. Do prepare yourself for a lifetime of work–and by work Hirshman means things like corporate law and business, not social work or, I fear, writing for The Nation. Don’t ever “know when you’re out of milk”–i.e., don’t take on the role of domestic expert. Do “marry down”–i.e., a lower-earning husband, so his job won’t be more important than yours. Don’t have more than one child.

It’s easy to make fun of Hirshman’s directives. Corporate lawyers are miserable! Everyone should know if there’s milk in the fridge! As for marrying down, well, whatever floats your boat, but anyone who thinks a less successful husband means a more equal marriage doesn’t know much about men, or women either. Her potted history of second-wave feminism as a contest between a properly “judgmental” pro-work Betty Friedan and a wishy-washy “choice feminist” Gloria Steinem is off the mark too. For Friedan the enemy was not stay-home moms but “man-hating” feminists and lesbians; Steinem, for her part, could be plenty judgmental: I once heard her compare women who enjoyed pornography to Jews who enjoyed Mein Kampf. On work and family, though, both women had similar, flexible views, as indeed any leader who hoped to make a mass movement would need to have.

That said, there’s something refreshing about Hirshman. Why should the antifeminists monopolize the high ground? It’s about time someone asked, again, such basic questions as: If cleaning the house is so fulfilling, how come men don’t want to do it, and how can you get them to do it anyway (cf., milk, obliviousness to lack of)? And if having a mom at home is so beneficial to kids, how come even Flanagan admits she could see no difference in children raised by stay-homes and working mothers except that the working mothers’ kids seemed smarter?

A review of Rabbi Michael Lerner’s The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right, in the Boston Globe.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, founding editor-publisher of the liberal interfaith magazine Tikkun , is forming a national “Network of Spiritual Progressives” in an effort “to provide an alternate solution to both the intolerant and militarist politics of the Right and the current misguided, visionless, and often spiritually empty politics of the Left.”

His new book, “ The Left Hand of God,” is a rallying cry and a theoretical and scholarly analysis of the appeal of the religious right. It is also a kind of handbook for creating a movement “that can be for the Democrats and Greens what the Religious Right has been for the Republicans,” by providing “intellectual, political, and spiritual inspiration for those in the party even while not being formally aligned when it comes to elections.”

Lerner is stumping the country on his book tour much the way the progressive evangelical Jim Wallis did a year ago with his book “God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It.” As writers, speakers, and organizers, Lerner and Wallis have come to fill the void left by the leaders of the civil rights and the antiwar movements in the ’60s and ’70s.

JK Rowling hints at killing off two main characters in the 7th Harry Potter novel, including perhaps Harry himself.

“The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly,” she said in a rare live television interview with Channel 4’s teatime chat show hosts Richard and Judy. “One character got a reprieve, but I have to say two die that I did not intend to die.”

When asked whether the characters were “much loved”, she replied: “A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here.

“They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well I do.” In a phrase sure to be closely analysed by the legions of visitors to Harry Potter fansites that deconstruct the author’s every word, she said she empathised with Agatha Christie, who killed off her detective Hercule Poirot so that other writers would not be able to continue his stories after her death.

“I’ve never been tempted to kill him [Harry] off before the end of book seven, because I always planned seven books and that’s where I want to go,” she said.

I’m surprised that this hasn’t been getting more prominent headlines. The government of Jan Peter Balkenende has fallen over a controversy resulting from the horrid Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk’s threat to strip Ayaan Hirsi Ali of Dutch citizenship.

From the BBC:

A junior partner in the coalition, the centrist D-66 party, walked out after failing to get Mrs Verdonk sacked.

It objected to the way she had handled the citizenship case of a Somali-born Dutch MP, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The MP has been under police protection since a militant Islamist murdered Theo van Gogh, her collaborator on a film they made lambasting the treatment of women in Islamic society.

Mrs Verdonk threatened to strip Ms Hirsi Ali of her Dutch citizenship for lying in her asylum application in 1992.

But this week Mrs Verdonk did a U-turn, claiming she had found a legal loophole that would allow Ms Hirsi Ali to stay in the Netherlands.

Also more from Scott Martens at A Fistful of Euros here. And more here in Der Spiegel.

From The Washington Post:

LET EVERY NATION KNOW: John F. Kennedy in His Own Words By Robert Dallek and Terry Golway.

JACK KENNEDY: The Education of a Statesman By Barbara Leaming.

The generation of Americans who were teenagers and young adults when John F. Kennedy was inaugurated — the idealists who were the most likely to have asked what they could do for their country — is starting to grow old. As the lives that were inspired by JFK’s presidency begin to slow, Kennedy may suffer in the opinion polls that have consistently placed him among the four or five greatest chief executives, ranking him up there with Washington, Lincoln and FDR despite his abbreviated presidency and lack of major legislative accomplishments. These books focus on the two outstanding features of his time in the White House — his rhetoric and his statesmanship — and together they make a convincing case against any demotion.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Can American foreign policy be fixed? First, the United States is nowhere near as powerful as it was five years ago, or as many within the Bush administration believe it to be. The disproportionate military and economic might that this country brought to bear in the 1990s lulled a lot of people into a false sense of security: we measured power on an old-fashioned, twentieth-century abacus—according to gross domestic product, advantageous trade deficits, or unsurpassed military and technological supremacy. The memory of how the Cold War was allegedly won further fueled this idea. We outspent and outgunned the Soviet Union, the story went, and our freedoms won the affections of repressed peoples.

But what we recognize now, as the Bush administration tries to exert American will around the world, is the degree to which the old power metrics are anachronistic.

More here.

Reviewed by C J Schüler in The Independent:

In this lucid and engaging book, John Armstrong blows away the dust from this most misunderstood of major writers, and reveals a fascinating and often likeable figure whose work is of the utmost relevance to the problems we face today. And if Love, Life, Goethe is more of a straightforward cradle-to-grave biography than its subtitle might lead one to expect, Armstrong, a philosopher at Melbourne University, never loses sight of his central idea: Goethe’s belief that the job of the artist is to help people to live happily and well.

It is ironic, then, that Goethe first shot to international fame, at the age of 25, with a novel that became the handbook for moody, alienated youth everywhere: The Sorrows of Young Werther. Yet Goethe’s intention was not to glorify romantic disaffection but to warn against it.

More here.

Ted Conover in the New York Times Magazine:

The figures behind China’s car boom are stunning. Total miles of highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today. Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars (and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of China’s car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.)

But of course the story is not only about construction and production; car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars, AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam (“The Car — The Street — The Travel — The Racing”). Two dozen titles now compete for space in kiosks. The McDonald’s Corporation said last month that it expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs. Whole zones of major cities, like the Asian Games Village area in Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms.

More here.

Julia Keay reviews the book by Tristram Stuart in Literary Review:

One of the hardest things about writing on what might be called a ‘special interest’ must be convincing potential readers that you are not going to preach at them. Rest assured. Tristram Stuart doesn’t preach. What he does do is try to make us think about what we eat, and why, and what effect our choice of diet has on ourselves, the animal world, and the ecology of the planet. And, in spite of his misleading subtitle, he succeeds triumphantly. ‘Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India’ suggests a claim to spectacular achievement on the part of a fringe group trying to enhance its credentials. In fact The Bloodless Revolution is a scholarly, wide-ranging and utterly absorbing history of vegetarianism.

Although the word ‘vegetarian’ was not coined until the 1840s, as long ago as the sixth century BC Pythagoras propounded a theory of immortality that entailed the transmigration of the soul between living creatures – and thus the immorality of eating the flesh of any of them. Pythagoras was thought to have encountered this theory while travelling in Egypt, to which country it was believed to have been introduced by philosophers from India.

More here.

David Cohn in Seed Magazine:

In 580 BC the Greek philosopher Pythagoras discovered that harmonies could be expressed mathematically. His insight, which is based on the observation that doubling or halving the size of an instrument’s string produces a new octave, is the cornerstone of the musical scale.

Twenty-five hundred years later, two Canadian mathematicians from the University of Moncton in New Brunswick have created an entirely new kind of string instrument that exploits a kind of mathematics owing more to Pythagoras’s theorem for triangles than to anything he ever thought about music.

The Tritare is a Y-shaped guitar-like instrument, custom made by Claude Gauthier and Samuel Gaudet. The strings twist through three necks (Spinal Tap, eat your heart out), all of which project from the body of the instrument at different angles. When strummed, the result is a “network” of vibrations that yields a

More here.

Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian:

Driving through Toronto earlier this week I saw a shiny black 4×4 with an English flag sticking out of one side window and a German flag out of the other. Presumably a Canadian family of mixed English and German origin, so rooting for both teams in the World Cup. A little later I saw a car with the Portuguese flag on one side and the Italian on the other. It occurred to me that this pretty much sums up what we’ve been trying to achieve in Europe since the second world war. Welcome to the European Union – in Canada.

In fact, why doesn’t the European Union invite Canada to join at once? In most respects it would be a much easier fit than Ukraine, let alone Turkey. It effortlessly meets the EU’s so-called Copenhagen criteria for membership, including democratic government, the rule of law, a well-regulated market economy and respect for minority rights (Canada’s a world-leader on that). Canada is rich, so would be a much-needed net contributor to the European budget at a time when the EU has been taking in lots of poorer states. One of Europe’s besetting weaknesses is disagreement between the British and the French, but on this the two historic rivals would instantly agree. English-speaking Canada would strengthen the Anglophone group in the EU, Quebec the Francophone…

More here.  [Thanks to Seanna Blair.]

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Two hundred thousand years ago or thereabouts, an African lion killed someone. Along with a meal, the big cat got a wicked stomachache. Today a record of that unfortunate death still survives, in the bacteria that make big cats sick.

The trail of this strange story starts in the 1980s, when scientists discovered that ulcers are caused by bacteria known as known as Helicobacter pylori. H. pylori is found in people around the world, and scientists learned how to recognize the different strains they carried. Based on the patterns of the strains, a team of scientists concluded in 2003 that Helicobacter pylori must have been present early in the history of our species, and was spread across the world during the migration of humans. (I wrote a long post on H. pylori and human evolution when the scientists who discovered its link to ulcers got the Nobel Prize.)

But there were skeptics.

More here.