Anna Moore in The Observer:

Prozac hit a society that was in the mood for it. National campaigns (supported by Eli Lilly) alerted GPs and the public to the dangers of depression. Eli Lilly funded 8m brochures (Depression: What you need to know) and 200,000 posters. Previous antidepressants were highly toxic, lethal if overdosed on and had other nasty side-effects. Prozac was pushed as entirely safe, to be doled out by anyone. It was the wonder drug, the easy answer, an instant up, neurological eldorado. When launch day dawned, patients were already asking for it by name.

Twenty years on, Prozac remains the most widely used antidepressant in history, prescribed to 54m people worldwide, and many feel they owe their lives to it. It is prescribed for depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorder, eating disorders and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (formerly known as PMT). In the UK, between 1991 and 2001, antidepressant prescriptions rose from 9m to 24m a year.

Strangely, depression has reached epidemic levels. Money and success is no defence: writers, royalty, rock stars, supermodels, actors, middle managers have all had it. Studies suggest that in America, depression more than doubled between 1991 and 2001. In the UK, an estimated one in six people will experience it – and it costs more than £9bn annually in treatment, benefits and lost revenue. Meanwhile, according to the World Health Organisation, depression is set to become second only to heart disease as the world’s leading disability by 2020.

More here.

Regina Lynn in Wired:

[T]he space agency [NASA] is almost 50 years old, and while it likes to think it’s a leader in exploring new frontiers, it has yet to shake off the fetters of its childhood when it comes to sex, romance and relationships.

Yet it is starting to talk more publicly about the special considerations associated with long space flights, such as how to deal with illness and even death when you can’t just turn around and come home. And sex is on the list for future discussions.

In the past, NASA has not been comfortable talking about sexuality, says science journalist Laura Woodmansee, who encountered resistance while researching her book Sex in Space.

“It’s almost as if (retired astronauts) agreed not to talk about sex when they left (NASA),” she says. “And the current ones worry about their jobs and how it would make them look.”

Yet as humans begin to spend more time in space and to travel further from Earth, space agencies will need to factor sex into their equations.

“We will have to address crew compatibility, sexuality issues, whether there is a necessity for sexual activity,” says David Steitz, NASA senior public affairs officer.

He had the grace to laugh when I interrupted with a “Hell, yeah!”

In In These Times:

Like so many other films depicting the harshness of Communist regimes, The Lives of Others misses their true horror. How so? First, what sets the film’s plot in motion is the corrupt minister of culture, who wants to get rid of the top German Democratic Republic (GDR) playwright, Georg Dreyman, so he can pursue unimpeded an affair with Dreyman’s partner, the actress Christa-Maria. In this way, the horror that was inscribed into the very structure of the East German system is relegated to a mere personal whim. What’s lost is that the system would be no less terrifying without the minister’s personal corruption, even if it were run by only dedicated and “honest” bureaucrats.

Equally troublesome is the film’s portrayal of Dreyman. He is idealized in the opposite direction—a great writer, both honest and sincerely dedicated to the Communist system, who is personally close to the top regime figures. (We learn that Margot Honnecker, the Party leader’s wife, gave him a book by Solzhenitsyn strictly prohibited to ordinary people.) One cannot but recall here a witty formula of life under a hard Communist regime: Of the three features—personal honesty, sincere support of the regime and intelligence—it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive. The problem with Dreyman is that he does combine all three features.

To ask some obvious questions: If he was such an honest and powerful writer, how come he did not get into trouble with the regime much earlier?

Cathy Tumber in the new Boston Review:

Religion is risky territory for liberals, who generally wish to maintain a healthy respect for the legal separation of church and state and are also loath to criticize religious beliefs, though some have grown increasingly comfortable doing so.

Others have been tempted to revisit one of the most dubious aspects of the late-19th-century progressive movement: its tendency to conflate religion and politics in a mood of expansive moral high-mindedness. When progressives enlarged political liberalism to include a view of government as both regulatory and attentive to basic social welfare, many grounded their arguments in a belief in historical progress, often with a theological gloss. Then as now, of course, there was nothing like full consensus within the movement. After all, it comprised evangelical moralists, populists, anarchists, socialists, mainline churchgoers, seekers, Republicans, and Democrats. But of all the new ideas hatched by progressives, the notion of moral and technological progress was the most definitive. It came under bitter attack from the post–World War I generation, who lived with the tragic consequences of the naive arrogance it bred. The 1960s New Left similarly criticized the notion of historical progress, in response to the “elitism” of the liberal state that had plunged the country into a disastrous war in Vietnam.

Yet in recent years liberals have reflexively revived the term “progressive,” and two well-meaning books even argue for grounding liberal politics in a distinctively “progressive religion.” That move must be questioned carefully and with some urgency, given the mistakes of the past.

Rasool Nafisi in openDemocracy:

The detention of Haleh Esfandiari, a senior Iranian scholar based in the United States who had returned to Iran to visit her elderly mother and to touch the roots of her beloved country, has refocused the attention of political analysts on the Islamic Republic of Iran’s motives. In seeking an explanation for the new wave of arrests – of which Esfandiari’s is only one – some western observers have repeated the threadbare argument that American policy toward Iran is itself the culprit.

This line of thinking identifies the $75 million programme request from the US state department to promote democracy in Iran, unveiled in February 2006, as the trigger for Tehran’s crackdown on various groups of activists and intellectuals. The problem with such an analysis is twofold: first, it focuses principally on Washington (without being necessarily convincing even about that) rather than on Tehran’s own agency; second, it assumes that the Iranian government needs threats of regime change from the Bush administration to perpetrate such violations.

From Scientific American:

Many Americans fear they can do nothing to protect themselves from cancer, and they may be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. Their survey of more than 6,000 people found that nearly half — 47 percent — agreed that “nearly everything causes cancer” and that more than a quarter felt there was little they could do about it.

Yet an estimated two-thirds of cancer cases can be prevented with common-sense measures, such as not smoking, eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and avoiding too much sun, according to the American Association of Cancer Research and the National Cancer Institute. Most of all, Americans are confused, with 71.5 percent agreeing that “there are so many recommendations about preventing cancer, it’s hard to know which ones to follow,” researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.

More here.

From Nature:

Skin may have the capacity to regenerate lost hair follicles from within, according to a new discovery that could yield better treatments for baldness or abnormal hair growth. Researchers in the United States have found that, when skin is wounded, epidermal cells can respond by assuming the properties of stem cells that generate hair follicles and growing new hair. The researchers removed patches of skin from mice and studied the wounds as they healed during the ensuing weeks. Hair growth occurred regardless of the mouse’s age, the researchers report, although the new hairs did not contain pigment.

The process happened naturally after wounding. But the researchers found they could boost the effect by using mice that had been genetically engineered to produce higher levels of proteins that activate the genetic pathway underpinning the transformation to follicle stem cells. These mice responded to wounding by producing twice the density of hairs found in the coats of normal, untreated mice.

More here.

Kathy Matheson in the Chicago Tribune:

It’s like an iTunes for poetry — and it’s free!

Professors at the University of Pennsylvania are offering recordings of contemporary poets’ work to the public through an online audio archive of digital downloads, without charges or fees.

“It’s unprecedented within poetry,” Charles Bernstein, an English professor and the site’s co-director said, calling it the “first and the biggest site of its kind.”

Started more than two years ago, PennSound features about 200 writers and more than 10,000 digital recordings contributed by poets, fans and scholars worldwide. Some, such as Gertrude Stein recordings from 1934, date back decades.

The site (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound) mainly focuses on historical avant-garde and innovative contemporary poetry, such as works by Allen Ginsberg or current U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall.

More here.

Jerry Fodor on Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al, in the London Review of Books:

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this.

More here.

Roger Highfield in The Telegraph:

The non-popping balloon
How do you stop a balloon held under a candle from popping? The answer is simple and the science behind it compelling. This experiment was suggested by the author of Quirkology, Prof Richard Wiseman from the University of Hertfordshire. It shows the power of water to absorb heat, a fact which drives the world’s weather.

Measuring the speed of light
It is the fastest thing in the universe and, remarkably, you can measure it in your own home. This experiment comes from Simon Singh, best selling author and physicist. The amazing thing is that all you need is a microwave, a ruler and some chocolate buttons.

More here.

Mark Sappenfield in the Christian Science Monitor:

In the crowded and bug-infested movie halls of rural India, something is happening that has never happened before: An American superhero is saving the world while speaking flawless Bhojpuri.

In the grand scheme of the “Spider-Man 3” massive global release, it may seem a small thing that poor villagers in central India were able to queue up the same day as audiences in Los Angeles to see the film, dubbed into a local dialect. But to Hollywood and its Indian alter ego, Bollywood, it could signal the start of a new turf war between the world’s two most popular and influential film industries.

Worldwide, the film took in $230 million in its first weekend – breaking “The DaVinci Code” record by $75 million. In India, the $4.5 million opening set several records domestically as well…

…the success suggests that after years of tinkering, Hollywood has at last discovered a formula for more consistent success here: flooding Indian cinemas with nearly 600 copies and dubbing versions into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bhojpuri. The tactic of simultaneously releasing several dubbed versions on the global release date is not unique to India, but it is new here­ and is yielding results.

More here.

Judith Pascoe in the New York Times:

The owner of Napoleon’s penis died last Thursday in Englewood, N.J. John K. Lattimer, who’d been a Columbia University professor and a collector of military (and some macabre) relics, also possessed Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule. But the penis, which supposedly had been severed by a priest who administered last rites to Napoleon and overstepped clerical boundaries, stood out (sorry) from the professor’s collection of medieval armor, Civil War rifles and Hitler drawings.

The chances that Napoleon’s penis would be excised so that it could become a souvenir were improved by his having lived and died at a moment when the physical remains of celebrities held a strong attraction. Shakespeare didn’t become Shakespeare until the dawn of the romantic period, when his biography was written, his plays annotated and his belongings sought out and preserved. Trees that stood outside the bard’s former homes were felled to provide Shakespearean lumber for tea chests and tobacco stoppers.

More here.

Gavan J. Fitzsimons, Joseph C. Nunes, and Patti Williams in the Journal of Consumer Research (via EurekAlert!):

This research examines the impact of asking intention questions about “vice behaviors,” or behaviors about which respondents simultaneously hold both negative explicit and positive implicit attitudes. Asking questions about the likelihood of engaging in behaviors for which respondents maintain conflicting attitude structures appears to give respondents a “license to sin,” resulting in increased rates of behavior versus those of a control group not asked intention questions. However, when provided with defensive tools that highlight the negative explicit component of their attitudes toward the behaviors, respondents are able to dampen the increase in behavior caused by the act of prediction.

(Via PZ Myers) if only Hitch could be like this all the time:

From the contest website:

2007 First prize

The Leaning Tower Illusion
Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena Gheorghiu

Here is a novel illusion that is as striking as it is simple. The two images of the Leaning Tower of Pisa are identical, yet one has the impression that the tower on the right leans more, as if photographed from a different angle. The reason for this is because the visual system treats the two images as if part of a single scene. Normally, if two adjacent towers rise at the same angle, their image outlines converge as they recede from view due to perspective, and this is taken into account by the visual system. So when confronted with two towers whose corresponding outlines are parallel, the visual system assumes they must be diverging as they rise from view, and this is what we see. The illusion is not restricted to towers photographed from below, but works well with other scenes, such as railway tracks receding into the distance. What this illusion reveals is less to do with perspective, but how the visual system tends to treat two side-by-side images as if part of the same scene. However hard we try to think of the two photographs of the Leaning Tower as separate, albeit identical images of the same object, our visual system regards them as the ‘Twin Towers of Pisa’, whose perspective can only be interpreted in terms of one tower leaning more than the other.

More illusions here.

Martha Nussbaum in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in the station of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group of Hindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purported birthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angry Hindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed was on top of the remains of Rama’s birthplace). The pilgrimage, like many others in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple over the disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, frustrated in their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily emotional. When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers got into arguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one Muslim vendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram (“Hail Rama”). As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.

Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames. Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the dead were Hindus. In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violence swept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highly politicized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with “Kill! Destroy!” and “Slaughter!” There is copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned before the precipitating event by Hindu extremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion. No one was spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with their families, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women. Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped, mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and then set on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims were killed.

More here.

From BBC News:

An extraordinarily diverse array of marine life has been discovered in the deep, dark waters around Antarctica. Scientists have found more than 700 new species of marine creatures in seas once thought too hostile to sustain such rich biodiversity. Groups of carnivorous sponges, free-swimming worms, crustaceans and molluscs were collected. The findings, published in the journal Nature, could provide insights into the evolution of ocean life in this area.

Dr Katrin Linse, an author of the paper and a marine biologist from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), said: “What was once thought to be a featureless abyss is in fact a dynamic, variable and biologically rich environment. “Finding this extraordinary treasure trove of marine life is our first step to understanding the complex relationships between the deep ocean and distribution of marine life.”

More here.

Escort’s new single and a short review in Pitchfork:

Good/bad news: Escort just released their “final” 12″, according to the press release that accompanies “All Through the Night”. Good news is that it’ll be the last just while they take time to complete their upcoming full length album.

The “I’m about to pop” warning from vocalists Zena Kitt and Toy is worth noticing, because “All Through the Night” is all control, all precision, all good diction: Check the aspiration on the p’s in “pop,” the way a single string follows each syllable.

You can stream the song from the link on the page.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Miriam Wolf reviews Shauna Seliy’s new novel When We Get There.

It’s 1974, and the coal mining town of Banning, Pa., is struggling. The mines are closing one by one, and the close-knit population of Croat, Hungarian, Russian and other Eastern European immigrants is feeling the stresses and uncertainty of change in the winds.

Lucas Lessar is feeling more stressed than most. When the novel opens, it’s Christmas Eve, and 13-year-old Lucas is in the bosom of his extended family — his great-grandfather, the patriarch of the family; Slats, his grandmother, who works at “the Plate Glass”; and his gaggle of rowdy great-uncles and great-aunts. (They drink shots of whiskey and “feed each other moonshine cherries.”) It’s a poignant evening for Lucas. His father was killed in a mine explosion several years ago, and his mother mysteriously disappeared only a couple of months ago…

“When We Get There” is a novel all about mood. There is a sadness running through the book, uniting all the characters, even when they are having an evening out at the Croatian Club. Seliy is wonderful at creating lingering images, such as her description of Great-Grandfather’s pear tree, its fruit growing inside bottles fitted to the blossoms, the otherworldly quality of the pear brandy that fills the bottles. Or her meditation on Slats’ post-work ablutions, a metaphor for the woman’s strength and the toll her life takes on her body:

“Slats came home from the Plate Glass, stopped up the sink in the bathroom, and soaked her hands. She cursed the whole time. She cleaned her cuts every day so they wouldn’t get infected. Most of them were small, invisible from a few feet away, and she painted them over with iodine. The white basin had a pink glow from all the years of her rinsing her hands and spilling the iodine.”

From BBC News:

Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award. It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl’s Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise.

Reviewed by Malcolm Gladwell:

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future–or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We’re terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that’s so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating–and in some ways troubling–facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination.

More here.