Today I submit for your edification, faithful reader, Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline, a blog covering the pharmaceutical industry with wit and panache. In discussing the different worldviews of science and humanities programs, he provides a fairly good summation of the m.o. of his blog:
And that’s one reason why the more irritating conspiracy theories still circulate. You know, the ones about how we pharma types really do have cures but we just aren’t selling them (yet). Or how we caused those diseases in the first place, just so we could sell more drugs - I always take that one really well. Or how there are simple, cheap, safe herbal remedies for just about everything, only we Evil Pharma Overlords won’t let them on the market. And so on, and so on. I’ve been arguing recently by e-mail with one of the “drug companies do nothing but rip off NIH” crowd, and it isn’t easy. The guy has no idea of what he’s talking about, or what I’m talking about, and it would take a fair amount of (unwanted) education to convince him.
But that’s one of the things I try to do here - no, not convince idiots, I mean provide some education for those who might be interested. I think that the broad concepts of drug discovery (or pretty much any scientific field) can be understood by any reasonably intelligent person.
He has another hilarious post with How Not to Do It: Bromine, which I find funny even though I have no idea what bromine is, English major that I am, though I am reasonably confident I could do a bit better than the poor schlep in the story.
The Wall Street Journal, one of the few national newspapers which allows access to its website only to paying subscribers, is opening the gates and taking all-comers for free this week. Check it out while you have a chance.
In other news, The New Yorker charts American dialects with linguist William Labov and details the aspirational origins of the dropped r’s of Brooklynese and the scintillating “Northern Cities Shift” currently ‘heahppening’ in Chicago - “Talking the Tawk“
If you happen to be following the Valerie-Plame-Karl-Rove-Scooter-Libby-Judy-Miller CIA name-leak pseudo-saga you won’t want to miss Nicholas Lemann’s take in this week’s New Yorker, Telling Secrets. Lemann, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, does his part to restore my faith in the current condition of the fourth estate with an elegant and insightful piece, abundantly overlaid with context and background, so often absent in today’s schlock fed straight from the AP to the teleprompter.
Update: As if there weren’t enough weirdness to this whole deal, the New Yorker follows up with Lauren Collins’ article “Scooter’s Sex Shocker” on the proclivity of some in the administration (Scooter Libby, Lynn Cheney) to write erotic fiction in their spare time. Good Lord.
It occurred to me that I post an awful lot of New York intelligentsia-type articles. I say that because I can’t help but mention Ronald Dworkin’s recent article “Judge Roberts on Trial” from the New York Review of Books, and Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker, “Getting In.”
Obviously the two articles were not written to be read in tandem or in light of each other, but since I read one right after the other, I can’t help but make some connections. Dworkin vents his frustration at the Roberts nomination a dollar short and a day late, exposing Roberts’ clever confirmation hearing gambit of claiming repect for the rule of law as a smokescreen for his insidious conservatism. Respectful bastard!
Gladwell analyses the Ivy-worship of American society. Interestingly, he finds the holistic approach to evaluating students - personal essay, letters of recommendation, interviews and demographic data - found its provenance as a means to an end as Harvard struggled to maintain its luxury brand status by excluding Jews.
What do the two have in common? Both play off delicate systems of identity and expectation which society has constructed to evoke a desired condition without having to deal directly with the details. Senators, for instance, want to nominate a jurist who shares their judicial philosophy; i.e. would decide cases the same way they would. They will not pose such an indecorous question directly nor would any candidate worthy of the Supreme Court stoop to answer it, rather they attempt to tease out this very fact from legalese such as ‘originalism’ and ‘constructionism’. More simply, they want a conservative justice or a liberal justice and care very little about the judicial philosophy he invokes to rationalize his decisions as long as he arrives at the right answer.
Similarly, we feel a sense of identity is conferred along with a degree from a Harvard or Yale. We feel these graduates are somehow destined for success and where they went tells us how smart they are, no need to find out for ourselves.
What a society thinks, and what a society wants to think it thinks, are often very different things. When they fail to resolve, some adjusting is in order. We are, of course, a heterogenous group and even when we think we agree we are often masking or subverting our secondary disagreements for the sake of the larger cause.
Fascinating articles, regardless of whether or not you agree with what I’ve just said or it made any sense whatsoever. I humbly submit them for your perusal.
This week’s New Yorker pulled a fascinating article from the archives to occasion the award of the Nobel Prize in Medicine for 2005 to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. Terence Monmaney offers an insightful look at the research into gastritis and peptic ulcers, remarkable not only for the achievement but also for the nature of the obstacles in its path:
Marshall’s theory challenged widely held and seemingly unassailable notions about the cause of ulcers. No physical ailment has ever been more closely tied to psychological turbulence. “The critical factor in the development of ulcers is the frustration associated with the wish to receive love,” one social scientist reported in 1983. She went on, “When this wish is rejected, it is converted into a wish to be fed,” which ultimately leads, she said, “to an ulcer.”
The widespread skepticism Marshall’s theory received drove him to self-experimentation, swallowing a vialfull of water containing Helicobacter pylori, which triggered the characteristic stomach ailments. More interestingly, the prevailing belief that the stomach was a caustic, sterile environment in which no bacterium could survive, much less wreak that kind of havoc, caused many before Marshall to discount its presence as a mistake or anomaly. Monmaney concludes that the insight was not a technical or even theoretical leap, but rather the undogmatic, objective observation science prizes at its core.
But the discovery of Helicobacter is no crummy little paradigm shift. It’s a mindblower—tangible, reproducible, unexpected, and, yes, revolutionary. Just the fact that a bug causes peptic ulcers, long considered the cardinal example of a psychosomatic illness, is a spear in the breast of New Age medicine, which invokes the mind-body link as the key to health.
I remember getting into a pretty heated argument with a girl in one of my classes at U of H over the question of diversity in education today in the context of Brown v. Board. She felt that segregation remained a problem because of enduring racism and that the most expedient solution was further desegregation, something akin to the busing enforced in Boston and Baltimore in the 80’s.
I countered that the real failure of Brown was to use race as the criteria at all. You couldn’t really criticize the court for this, of course; that was the question posed, but at the same time, we shouldn’t expect it to work either, since the solutions (busing mostly) posed inherent logistical challenges and issues of community involvment and support that doomed whatever apparatus was involved.
Race, I proposed, was a correlation, not a causation. Poverty was the real differentiator. I failed to convice, but I did find some small consolation in reading this article in the NY Times today.
The New Yorker’s Henry Alford expounds on the venerable practice of encyclopedia and dictionary publishers including a fake entry in their tomes in order to catch poachers with their hands in the lexicographic cookie jar.
Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you’ll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!” Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die “at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”
Apparently the Oxford English Dictionary has paid homage and baited the trap with a word of it’s own design. Alford set out with a crack team of linguists to bag the culprit.
The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source. “It’s interesting for us that we can see their methodology,” McKean said. “Or lack thereof. It’s like tagging and releasing giant turtles.”
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has long believed the U.S. government has been trying to kill him. American Televangelist Pat Robertson did little to allay his paranoia with this statement:
“You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if [Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it,” Robertson said. “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war … and I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”
Read the full article from Fox News (just in case you think this is more conspiring by the liberal media)
Behold, an early christmas present from one wack-job to another. It will be interesting to see if Chavez is able to parlay this into an even stronger political position (he’s already got a 70% approval rating) in a country where many are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions (that oil comment at the end didn’t help) in a surge of anti-American sentiment. I would love to see how this plays in Venezuelan media, where the distinction between Robertson’s views and administration policy will likely be muddied.
As for Robertson’s suggestion - aside from the obvious theological issues it raises, the jaw-dropping stupidity of such an action politically, and the questionable strategery of notifying the person you’d like to see assasinated of your intentions in a very public way (not so covert now, is it Pat?) - it just happens to be illegal. Illegal for very good reason, I might add. World War I started with an assasination. (Franz Ferdinand isn’t just a cool band name, incidentally.) JFK tried to have Castro assasinated. Didn’t turn out so well for Jack, though Castro’s still kicking. Add to the mess that many in South America believe, not without reason, that the CIA has lead or had a hand in numerous assassinations and many more attempts. We would do well to remember that assassination is historically a form of terrorism, not a morally supportable or pragmatic defense against it. Venezuela’s Vice President notes this in responding to Robertson’s statement in a NY Times article.
Um, yes, actually. How weird is that? According to an article in Popular Science, the Cavendish, the only banana most people are aware of is under attack:
In 1992, a new strain of the fungus—one that can affect the Cavendish—was discovered in Asia. Since then, Panama disease Race 4 has wiped out plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia and Taiwan, and it is now spreading through much of Southeast Asia.
Experts are saying there’s not a whole lot that can be done, given the Cavendish’s remarkable genetic uniformity, the product of a few decades of perfecting “quite possibly, the world’s perfect food.” No more banana splits? Bananas Foster? Are you kidding? Even weirder, it’s turns out it’s deja vu all over again for the poor banana.
Until the early 1960s, American cereal bowls and ice cream dishes were filled with the Gros Michel, a banana that was larger and, by all accounts, tastier than the fruit we now eat. Like the Cavendish, the Gros Michel, or “Big Mike,” accounted for nearly all the sales of sweet bananas in the Americas and Europe. But starting in the early part of the last century, a fungus called Panama disease began infecting the Big Mike harvest. … Growers adopted a frenzied strategy of shifting crops to unused land, maintaining the supply of bananas to the public but at great financial and environmental expense—the tactic destroyed millions of acres of rainforest. By 1960, the major importers were nearly bankrupt, and the future of the fruit was in jeopardy.
In a related note, it’s beginning to dawn on me that I’m a culinary infant. Gurgling and squawking, oblivious to my environment and totally helpless in the kitchen. Not only did I not realize there was more than one type of banana (I do love fried plantains however)
It’s segments like this that make This American Life the best show on public radio.
American Life producer Alex Blumberg investigates a little-studied phenomenon: Children who get a mistaken idea in their heads about how something works or what something means, and then don’t figure out until well into adulthood that they were wrong. (13 minutes)
My favorite:
“there’s another guy I spoke to who thought well into his 20’s that the word ‘quesadillas’ was spanish for ‘what’s the deal’.”
Hal Varian of the NY Times has written an excellent analysis on the effect of Amazon’s used-book sales on the general market for books.
While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.
The publishers and authors may be unduly upset, he points out, due to the countervailing effects of the used-book market
When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there’s another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.
Applying the authors’ estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon’s sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon’s used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.
Apparently not everyonoe shares my enthusiasm about this article, judging by the dazed look I got from the co-worker I just accosted outside the bathroom. That may suggest either high boredom-elasticity among heterogeneous consumers of the article or a poor choice of venue.
Incidentally, the Times article links to an SSRN paper with empirical research. My spidey-sense is telling me that there’s been a bit of an about-face on the part of editors who some months ago would never allow an article to link to another source on a 3rd party’s website. Tech rags such as Wired have done that for a while, but it seems the Grey Lady has finally (and only recently) started wising up to the tao of the internet.
Oh and since we’re talking about books and this is a helluva long post any way, why not read my lonely little essay Hot Wet Book Love. I promise I’ll get around to writing another <fingerscrossed>one any day now</fingerscrossed>…
James Suroweiki has a fantastic piece in this week’s New Yorker, “A Farewell to Alms” -
In 1985, when Bob Geldof organized the rock spectacular Live Aid to fight poverty in Africa, he kept things simple. “Give us your fucking money” was his famous (if apocryphal) command to an affluent Western audience—words that embodied Geldof’s conviction that charity alone could save Africa. He had no patience for complexity: we were rich, they were poor, let’s fix it. As he once said to a luckless official in the Sudan, after seeing a starving person, “I’m not interested in the bloody system! Why has he no food?”
Whatever Live Aid accomplished, it did not save Africa. Twenty years later, most of the continent is still mired in poverty. So when, earlier this month, Geldof put together Live 8, another rock spectacular, the utopian rhetoric was ditched. In its place was talk about the sort of stuff that Geldof once despised—debt-cancellation schemes and the need for “accountability and transparency” on the part of African governments—and, instead of fund-raising, a call for the leaders of the G-8 economies to step up their commitment to Africa. (In other words, don’t give us your fucking money; get interested in the bloody system.) Even after the G-8 leaders agreed to double aid to Africa, the prevailing mood was one of cautious optimism rather than euphoria.
As Suroweiki notes, American aid in Asia, particularly South Korea and Taiwan played a major role in revitalizing the economies of those countries. Not only have they emerged from third-world levels of poverty, but they have become productive trading partners and manufacturing hubs for high-tech enterprise. Foreign aid has had some stunning successes in recent years, not to mention the overwhelming effect of the Marshall plan on Germany and the restructuring of the Japanese economy after WWII.
One of the assignments for the St. Anthony’s team members who went to Mexico was to read Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty in order to guide our discussions of the role St. Anthony’s could play in the communities in which it is active.
There are a lot of wonderfully well-meaning people out there who give sacrificially to important causes, but there is a difference between charity and investing in community with the expectation of tangible improvements in quality of life and economic development. While many economists treat problems of economic development with the clinically detached interest of someone performing an autopsy, Sachs’ approach is that of a doctor (his wife is a pediatrician) underlining this approach by making a differential diagnosis for each country in which he works. If you’re interested in getting informed and involved in charitable activity in developing countries, this is a great place to start. A number of Sachs’ articles are available through Project Syndicate.
The NY Times covers the latest trend among marketers - tapping the Christian market. It’s a bit strange to realize you’re part of demographic that Hollywood is trying to target and seems to be having an awfully hard time wrapping their little pinheads around. We’re not all that mysterious, are we? I mean, there’s a BOOK that tells you everything. Sharon Waxman does a great job with the piece, but I must confess to an eyebrow spasm when she described “The Da Vinci Code” as “the best-selling novel that challenges basic Christian dogma.” Dogma? is that really the word you want to use there?
I’m still amazed that Hollywood was so surprised by the success of the Passion. I don’t think I’ve seen single group of people feel so obligated to see a movie since Shindler’s List. How could that surprise anyone? Does no one working in Hollywood go to church? Does no one who goes to church work in Hollywood? Please, Hollywood, quit putting cruxifices in shots as if it were product placement. We’re the same as everyone else, just in a differenty sort of way.
I did find this bit interesting and quite revealing, in my experience -
The researchers found that “when it comes to popular movies and popular shows, tastes don’t differ at all” between religious and nonreligious, said Joseph Helfgot, president of MarketCast. “What you find is that people with conservative religious doctrine are the most likely to see movies rated R for violence. If you compared it to liberals, it’s a third more.”
Just remember kids, not all Christians are conservative…
Intellectual Historian Louis Menand offers an insightful look at O’Connor’s time on the Supreme Court and the nature of the impending confirmation battle to replace her spot on the bench.
While you’re there, take a minute and read through the stories. Terrific writer.
I killed the rat. Even though the woman who swept the courtyard told me I would bring bad karma upon myself. The rat was menacing the bunk room. It was an oily sewer rat. Every night it crept into the room after we were asleep and clawed into our backpacks, gorging itself. One night it leapt onto the face of a Danish girl and got its claws tangled in her long blond hair and she woke up screaming. Enough is enough.
John Heileman’s at it again with a breathtaking new piece for New York Magazine. Heileman profiles Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor and one of the top intellectual property minds, on Hardwicke v. Boychoir, in which Lessig was both appellate lawyer and participant.
Lessig has told me that he too was abused at the Boychoir School, and by the same music director that Hardwicke claims was one of his abusers. Lessig is by nature a shy, intensely private person. The fact of his abuse is known to almost no one: not the reporters covering the case, not the supreme-court justices. The fact of his abuse isn’t even known to Larry Lessig’s parents.
In taking this case, however, Lessig has cast aside his caution about a secret that haunts him still. And while his passion about his client’s cause is real and visceral, Hardwicke isn’t the only plaintiff here. Lessig is also litigating on behalf of the child he once was.
in order to guide our discussions of the role St. Anthony’s could play in the communities in which it is active. 