Over at Overcoming Bias:

Phlogiston was the 18 century’s answer to the Elemental Fire of the Greek alchemists. Ignite wood, and let it burn. What is the orangey-bright “fire” stuff? Why does the wood transform into ash? To both questions, the 18th-century chemists answered, “phlogiston”.

…and that was it, you see, that was their answer: “Phlogiston.”

Phlogiston escaped from burning substances as visible fire. As the phlogiston escaped, the burning substances lost phlogiston and so became ash, the “true material”. Flames in enclosed containers went out because the air became saturated with phlogiston, and so could not hold any more. Charcoal left little residue upon burning because it was nearly pure phlogiston.

Of course, one didn’t use phlogiston theory to predict the outcome of a chemical transformation. You looked at the result first, then you used phlogiston theory to explain it. It’s not that phlogiston theorists predicted a flame would extinguish in a closed container; rather they lit a flame in a container, watched it go out, and then said, “The air must have become saturated with phlogiston.” You couldn’t even use phlogiston theory to say what you ought not to see; it could explain everything.

This was an earlier age of science. For a long time, no one realized there was a problem. Fake explanations don’t feel fake. That’s what makes them dangerous.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl in The Nation:

[O]n a day-to-day basis, the danger is more that the Bolivarian Revolution will operate increasingly like a perverse bank; it is, like Iran’s, what might be called a Resources Revolution, one keyed to the world-historical moment in which those who control natural resources can spend independently of the wealthy elites they have overthrown. Chávez, the petro-revolutionary, does not have to pay any attention to people who grew wealthy–or even just got technically and professionally educated–under the Punto Fijo regime.

Much of the money has gone into the creation of a kind of alternative society, and more controversy surrounds this development than any other, making it the hardest dimension of the revolution for an outsider to assess. The government directly funds hundreds of so- called misiones in communities. The missions do provide employment and bring food (delivered in military trucks), healthcare (aided by Cuban doctors) and education directly to the people, which is surely a good thing; but they are not like the revolutionary councils that have sprung up, Arendt noted, in all revolutions, constituting the people’s forums for ongoing political participation (until they were, time and again, crushed by parties aspiring to total control). Despite a lot of rhetoric about participatory democracy, the missions are not political formations that could reform local, city and provincial governments, making them more responsive to the grassroots, and they have alienated rather than inspired the country’s labor unions because they are run and firmly controlled from the center, often quite literally from Chávez’s office. No totalitarian military and secret police bureaucracy has been built up in Venezuela, but a controlled service sector has, and a rerun of centralized state socialism will ensue unless the political problem is grasped by the Chavistas, by the anti- Chavistas or, more likely, by the students, who are grassroots political actors and not caught up in haggling about whether the missions have, in statistical terms, benefited the poor or not, at what cost and how efficiently or inefficiently.

A poem by Robert Pinsky:

The statistics of death show leaps in modern life expectancy but fail to answer the question: Why do we die?

Robert Dorit in American Scientist:

We may be the only species that is aware of its own mortality. Yet despite death’s central role in shaping human self-consciousness, mortality remains an elusive biological phenomenon. Fate and accident shape some ends, but these things aside, we cannot answer what seems like a straightforward question: Why do we die? The question, of course, is not really simple, nor does it yield a single answer. We will each die in our own way. But an answer collected from individual stories is not what we are after. We are, instead, seeking a more general explanation, rooted in material cause, which accounts for the patterns of human mortality. For now, we will leave out deaths that come from external causes—accidents or acts of violence—for they tell us little about the biological underpinnings of mortality.

The pattern of death has changed through history. We can infer something about this pattern from fossils of early Homo sapiens. Judging by the condition of their skeletons and the extent of tooth wear, their life expectancy has been estimated at around 25 years. Tens of thousands of years later, as written records and gravestones become available, our ability to estimate life expectancy takes a major leap forward. The story told by these later records is dramatic: In the past 1,000 years, life expectancies and, presumably, their underlying causes have fundamentally changed. In the United States, for instance, the Social Security Administration has predicted life expectancies for the year 2050 will reach 77 years for men and 83 years for women.

So what are we to make of so drastic a change, a tripling of life expectancy at birth in 50 generations?

More here.

From the BBC:

The Road, McCarthy’s tale of a father and son in a post-apocalyptic America, was named the best novel of the year.

He wins £10,000, as does Byron Rogers, who won in the biography category for his book about Welsh poet RS Thomas.

The University of Edinburgh has awarded the two prizes since 1919. Past winners include DH Lawrence and EM Forster.

McCarthy, 74, was not at the ceremony at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to collect the award.

More here.

Elizabeth C. Economy in Foreign Affairs:

China’s rapid development, often touted as an economic miracle, has become an environmental disaster. Record growth necessarily requires the gargantuan consumption of resources, but in China energy use has been especially unclean and inefficient, with dire consequences for the country’s air, land, and water.

The coal that has powered China’s economic growth, for example, is also choking its people. Coal provides about 70 percent of China’s energy needs: the country consumed some 2.4 billion tons in 2006 — more than the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom combined. In 2000, China anticipated doubling its coal consumption by 2020; it is now expected to have done so by the end of this year. Consumption in China is huge partly because it is inefficient: as one Chinese official told Der Spiegel in early 2006, “To produce goods worth $10,000 we need seven times the resources used by Japan, almost six times the resources used by the U.S. and — a particular source of embarrassment — almost three times the resources used by India.”

More here.

During a writing career that began more than 50 years ago, Paley published only three collections of stories, but those books — “The Little Disturbances of Man” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute” (1974) and “Later the Same Day” (1985) — garnered elaborate praise from critics, fellow writers and a loyal core of readers. One noted admirer, novelist Philip Roth, said her stories offered “an understanding of loneliness, lust, selfishness and fatigue that is splendidly comic and unladylike.” In 1993 Paley received the $25,000 Rea Award, which has been described as the Pulitzer Prize of short-story writing. Declaring that Paley’s voice was like no other in American fiction, the judges called her “a pure short-story writer, a natural to the form in the way that rarely gifted athletes are said to be naturals.”

more from the LA Times here.

In 1805, a young scholar-official of the East India Company was invalided home to Suffolk at the age of only 35. Edward Moor had first gone out to India at the age of 11, soon learnt to speak several Indian languages, and became passionately interested in the cosmology and beliefs of the Hindus.

Now, back in England with time on his hands and in an unfamiliar country he hardly remembered, Moor filled his time by gathering together and organising the artistic, anthropological and textual materials he had been collecting for many years on the deities and images of Hinduism. Five years later, in 1810, he finally published his masterwork, The Hindu Pantheon.

more from The Guardian here.

The brainwave to create castrati had first occurred two centuries earlier in Rome, where the pope had banned women singing in churches or on the stage. Their voices became revered for the unnatural combination of pitch and power, with the high notes of a pre-pubescent boy wafting from the lungs of an adult; the result, contemporaries said, was magical, ethereal and strangely disembodied. But it was the sudden popularity of Italian opera throughout 1600s Europe that created the international surge in demand. Italian boys with promising voices would be taken to a back-street barber-surgeon, drugged with opium, and placed in a hot bath. The expert would snip the ducts leading to the testicles, which would wither over time. By the early 1700s, it is estimated that around 4,000 boys a year were getting the operation; the Santa Maria Nova hospital in Florence, for example, ran a production line under one Antonio Santarelli, gelding eight boys at once.

more from The Smart Set here.

From Powell Books:

The most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction. Qurratulain Hyder’s River of Fire makes a bid to be recognized in the West as what it has long been acknowledged in the East: the most important novel of twentieth-century Urdu fiction. First published as Aag ka Darya in 1959, River of Fire encompasses the fates of four recurring characters over two and a half millennia: Gautam, Champa, Kamal, and Cyril—Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. In different eras different relations form and reform among the four: romance and war, possession and dispossession. Interweaving parables, legends, dreams, diaries, and letters, Hyder’s prose is lyrical and witty. And she argues for a culture that is inclusive: River of Fire is a book that insists on the irrelevance of religion in defining Indian identity.

From The New York Times:

In his sixth novel, “The Bloodstone Papers,” the Anglo-Indian novelist Glen Duncan, who typically writes painfully lucid, bereft books about modern men obsessed with sex and death, steps halfway out of his den of regret to look back at the gilded, sun-weathered pages of empire. He’s still got a painfully lucid, bereft main character: Owen Monroe, a depressed Anglo-Indian teacher in London, nearly 40, whose students’ heads are “full of mobile phone numbers and contraception, hip-hop lyrics, diets, the gaggle of celebrities having a permanent soirée in their brains.”

Jaded and morose, mourning a vanished ex, Owen plumps out his “bitty,” wifeless life by tending bar at a place called Neon Hallelujah and writing pornography under the pseudonym Millicent Nash. But this time Duncan’s protagonist isn’t focused entirely on himself: Owen is obsessed by an Englishman named Skinner and by the mystery of whether Skinner did or did not repeatedly dupe Owen’s father, Ross, in India in the 1940s and ’50s — and if so, why he did, and why Ross let him get away with it.

More here.

Rapid advances in genetic testing promise to transform medicine, but they may up-end the insurance business in the process.

From The Economist:

“If you can make a good soufflé, you can sequence DNA.” That assertion sounds preposterous, but Hugh Rienhoff should know. When his daughter was born about three years ago, she suffered from a mysterious disability that stunted her muscle development. After many frustrated visits to specialists, Dr Rienhoff, a clinical geneticist and former venture capitalist, decided to sequence a specific part of her genome himself. He discovered that her condition, which most resembled a rare genetic disorder known as Beals’s syndrome, was probably due to a new genetic mutation. “Without a lab and for just a few hundred dollars, you can contract or outsource almost all the steps,” he explains.

What a well-connected and highly motivated scientist in California can do today the rest of the world will be able to do tomorrow. Indeed, a number of firms are already offering tests for specific ailments (or predispositions to ailments) directly to the public, cutting out the medical middle-man. Dr Rienhoff, for his part, will soon launch MyDaughtersDNA.org, a not-for-profit venture intended to help others to unravel the mysteries of their family’s genes in the way that he unravelled those of his own.

The much-heralded genetics revolution thus appears, at last, to be arriving. As with every revolution it brings hope: rapid diagnosis of disease; treatments tailored to have maximum effect with minimum side-effect; even the possibility of prevention through early warnings of susceptibility. However, as with every revolution, there is fear as well. That fear is focused mainly on the question of what has come to be known as genetic privacy.

More here.  [Thanks to Saifedean Ammous.]

Brian Braiker in Newsweek:

Hackers around the world had one goal this summer: “Unlock” the iPhone and allow users to ditch AT&T’s exclusive service contract. The glory today goes to George Hotz, a 17-year-old New Jersey tinkerer who logged some 500 hours (and downed a river of energy drinks) to post detailed instructions on his blog on how to liberate an iPhone and operate it on any cellular network. It’s an ingenious and fully functional solution, but be warned. Hotz’s hack requires a soldering gun and some fairly technical know-how. Apple declined to comment.

While Hotz is the hot topic around the Internet watercooler this weekend, other purely software-based hacks were also being unveiled. One group that claims to have broken the chains that bind iPhone owners to AT&T says they have been ordered to cease and desist by the carrier’s lawyers. Uniquephones, a Belfast-based cell phone service that boasts having unlocked phones on more than 600 mobile networks, had been planning to sell its software download online beginning this weekend. The fix is supposed to be as simple as plugging an iPhone into your USB port, downloading a software patch and clicking an “unlock” icon.

More here.  And more here.

In EurekAltert!, a brief on Allan A. Tulchin’s forthcoming article in the Journal of Modern History:

A compelling new study from the September issue of the Journal of Modern History reviews historical evidence, including documents and gravesites, suggesting that homosexual civil unions may have existed six centuries ago in France. The article is the latest from the ongoing “Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective” series, which explores the intersection between historical knowledge and current affairs.

Commonly used rationales in support of gay marriage and gay civil unions avoid historical arguments. However, as Allan A. Tulchin (Shippensburg University) reveals in his forthcoming article, a strong historical precedent exists for homosexual civil unions.

Opponents of gay marriage in the United States today have tended to assume that nuclear families have always been the standard household form. However, as Tulchin writes, “Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize, and Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures.”

For example, in late medieval France, the term affrèrement – roughly translated as brotherment – was used to refer to a certain type of legal contract, which also existed elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe. These documents provided the foundation for non-nuclear households of many types and shared many characteristics with marriage contracts, as legal writers at the time were well aware, according to Tulchin.

In the NYT Magazine, Fernanda Eberstadt profiles José Saramago:

Saramago is the kind of old-fashioned atheist who is hopping mad at a God who he believes does not exist. His novel’s starting point is the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod, the Roman king of Judea, learns that the future king of the Jews has just been born in Bethlehem and orders that all the baby boys in that village be slaughtered. In Saramago’s telling, Joseph, husband of Mary, overhears the collective death sentence by chance and manages to hide his own son while leaving the others to perish. It is therefore in atonement for his earthly father’s sin in indirectly colluding with Herod’s iniquity, as well as for God’s in allowing the massacre to occur, that Jesus is later forced to give his life. (The amateur Freudian may wonder if there isn’t an echo here of a Communist son’s guilt at his father’s serving as a policeman under Salazar.) On the cross, Saramago’s Jesus asks humankind to forgive God his sins.

“The Gospel” polarized readers, both in Portugal and abroad, and led to Saramago’s self-imposed symbolic exile in the Canary Islands. The effect on Saramago’s work has been stark. His Canary Island novels are denuded of all the aching particularity, the clamor, reek and clutter of his Portugal works: austere and monitory parables, they often take place in an allegorical urban landscape as stylized as a computer game. In a book like “Las Intermitencias de la Muerte,” which will be published in the United States in the spring, his subject is nothing less than the folly of man’s search for eternal life.

Stephen Greenblatt in Harvard Magazine:

“The calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness”

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance—and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig—is to understand the nature of the occasion. This particular occasion, the Gordon Gray Lecture, is unusually gratifying, since I am called on to talk about something I care passionately about—writing—and, indeed, about that aspect of the subject to which I have given the most sustained practical attention: my own writing. Under most other circumstances, so self-centered a focus would seem fatuous, and I would fear to cut what Italians call a brutta figura. In the sixteenth century, a famous behavior manual by Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, counseled what it called sprezzatura, or “nonchalance.” The successful courtier must cunningly hide all signs of practice, calculation, and effort, so as to make everything he or she does seem spontaneous and natural. But the Gordon Gray Lecture is an invitation to lift the curtain and reveal the calculation that underlies the appearance of effortlessness.

Editor’s note: Cogan University Professor of the humanities Stephen Greenblatt adapted this essay slightly from his Gordon Gray Lecture on the Craft of Scholarly Writing (sponsored by Harvard’s Expository Writing Program), presented to students and colleagues last October.

More here.

Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine:

Not long ago, Virginia Heffernan, Ph.D. ’02, who writes about television and on-line media for the New York Times, got an e-mail from her boss, culture editor Sam Sifton ’88. Heffernan had submitted a draft that contained the word chthonic, a term from classical mythology that refers to deities and other spirits living in the underworld. As a smiling Heffernan recalls, Sifton reminded her that “you can’t use words that would stop a reader on the A train.”

Heffernan is no lightweight: her hip, funny pieces bristle with fresh ideas. In the fall of 2004, for example, she began her review of the hit nighttime soap opera Desperate Housewives with a synopsis of a 1958 John Cheever short story, “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill,” a dark tale about a suburbanite who loses his job and eventually turns to burglarizing his neighbors’ homes. Heffernan then segued into Housewives, which had “bold ly flung off prime-time’s imperative to topicality, and embraced an overtly literary mode. It is not an innovation, but a clever throwback, a work of thoroughgoing nostalgia and a tribute to Cheever’s war horse, the suburban gothic.” Later, she noted that “Desperate Housewives has succeeded because, like the best of reality television, it derives suspense by threatening its characters with banishment. All of the characters look as though they belong—but only for now.”

More here.

Elizabeth Lowry in TLS:

“We used to believe”, laments J. M. Coetzee’s fictional writer Elizabeth Costello, “that when the text said, ‘On the table stood a glass of water’, there was indeed a table, and a glass of water on it, and we had only to look in the word-mirror of the text to see them. But all that has ended.”
Quite. Coetzee has always avoided the flat mirror of realism in favour of the many-layered mise en abyme of metafiction, and his Elizabeth Costello (2003) is a case in point: not so much a novel as a series of infinitely regressed reflections on the nature of writing itself and the writer’s contract with the reader. Costello first appeared in 1997, in a journal article by Coetzee called “What Is Realism?”, later took centre stage in The Lives of Animals (1999) – quite literally, being Coetzee’s preferred voice for the Princeton Tanner Lectures on which that book was based – and has since featured as a deus ex machina author figure in his novel, Slow Man (2005), popping up to debate the interrelationship between the real and the literary with the book’s main character, Paul Rayment. The TLS printed a cartoon of Coetzee in drag (September 5, 2003), and even the most astute of his critics fell into the trap of accepting the outspoken Costello as a surrogate for the notoriously guarded Coetzee himself.

More here.

From OneWorld:

“Given today’s universal vulnerability to these threats, better security calls for global solidarity,” said Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General of WHO. “International public health security is both a collective aspiration and a mutual responsibility. The new watchwords are diplomacy, cooperation, transparency and preparedness.” …

More than at any previous time in history, global public health security depends on international cooperation and the willingness of all countries to act effectively in tackling new and emerging threats. That is the clear message of this year’s World health report entitled A safer future: global public health security in the 21st century, which concludes with six key recommendations to secure the highest level of global public health security:

• full implementation of the revised International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) by all countries;
• global cooperation in surveillance and outbreak alert and response;
• open sharing of knowledge, technologies and materials, including viruses and other laboratory samples, necessary to optimize secure global public health;
• global responsibility for capacity building within the public health infrastructure of all countries;
• cross-sector collaboration within governments; and
• increased global and national resources for training, surveillance, laboratory capacity, response networks, and prevention campaigns.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Two years ago Katherine M. Flegal, a re­search­er at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a new statistical analysis of national survey data on obesity and came to a startling conclusion: mildly overweight adults had a lower risk of dying than those at so-called healthy weights.

Decades of research and thousands of studies have suggested precisely the opposite: that being even a little overweight is bad and that being obese is worse. The distinction between overweight and obese—which are sometimes both classified under the rubric of obesity—can be confusing. It relates to the measure called body mass index (BMI), derived by dividing one’s weight in kilograms by the square of one’s height in meters. A myriad of Internet-based calculators will handle the math for you. The only thing to remember is that a BMI of at least 25 but less than 30 is considered overweight, and one of 30 or more is characterized as obese.

More here.