Stories from Slate Stories from Slate Mind-Blowing Fruit and Vegetable Facts That Will Seem Obvious in Retrospect <p>One of the great pleasures of gardening is growing enough food to share. At <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s D.C. office, Rachel Gross and Jamelle Bouie frequently bring in baked goods. I bring in tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini. I realize it’s more fun for me to show off my harvest than it is for my co-workers to actually eat any of it.</p> <p>The other day, I brought in a peck of peppers from my garden—poblanos, Anaheims, jalape&ntilde;os, and my favorite variety, “mucho nachos.” Some of the peppers were green and some were red. Several people asked me over the course of the day what the difference was between the two colors. That is when I blew their minds. The difference between red peppers and green peppers, I told them, is that the red ones <em>are ripe</em>.</p> <p>Did you know that? Admit it, you didn’t <em>always</em> know that, right? But it explains everything, or at least it explains why red bell peppers (or orange or yellow ones, which are also ripe) cost more than green bell peppers: You have to grow them for longer.</p> <p>Do you know what the difference is between green olives and black olives? Yes. You’re getting it. The black olives are ripe.</p> <p>Do you know what the difference is between green beans and bean-beans? The green beans are picked young, before the seeds develop. If you don’t pick them in time, the beans keep growing and the pods wither, and you end up with a pod full of navy beans. It’s all the same plant.</p> <p>Zucchini are baby squash. If you pick them young, they’re tender. Let them grow a while and they become solid and nutty. Let them dry out and you’ve got a gourd.</p> <p>Crimini, or “baby bella,” mushrooms are really baby portabella mushrooms, and baby corn is really baby corn. (Baby carrots, however, are <a href="">not actually baby carrots</a>.)</p> <p>Asparagus are the young shoots of <a href="">a plant with delicate fronds</a> that will grow taller than you are.</p> <p>Artichokes are thistle flowers that haven’t bloomed yet. <em>Really</em>.</p> <p>And Mr. McGregor, the villain who keeps chasing Peter Rabbit out of his garden, is the most misunderstood character in all of English literature.</p> Wed, 21 Oct 2015 18:37:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2015-10-21T18:37:00Z Arts Red Peppers Are Just Ripe Green Peppers, and Other Mind-Blowing Fruit and Vegetable Facts 205151021009 gardening fruit vegetables food Laura Helmuth Brow Beat Brow Beat false false false Mind-blowing fruit and vegetable facts that will seem obvious in retrospect: Did you know that black olives are just ripe green olives? 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 1519028539001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_2pKN0AJTySft1Irx-gT62t 3798331365001 3468598734001 Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Green bell peppers are just red (or yellow) bell peppers that aren’t ripe yet. Your Favorite Classes <p>This week, we at <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> have been sharing stories about our favorite high school, college, and adult education classes—the classes we think everyone should take. Now it’s readers’ turn to give the advice. We asked people to email us short descriptions of the best classes they’ve ever taken, and some of the most interesting and representative responses are below.</p> <p>Looking through all the submissions, one class stands out: religion. About 10 percent of the people who wrote in recommended some form of Bible study or comparative religion class—either to enrich your faith or to make you question it.&nbsp;</p> <p>The next most popular recommendation was taking a foreign language, followed by psychology, then logic or critical thinking.</p> <p>To read or share more recommendations, please dip into the discussion in the comments section below or on Twitter using the hashtag <a href="">#TakeThisClass</a>.</p> <p>And whatever you’re studying these days, in college or in life, may you ace every test that comes your way.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p><strong>Comparative religion</strong>. Considering how many news stories revolve around religion, and how many people are religious in the United States, it is important to have some understanding of the world’s faiths. All Christians, all Muslims, all Buddhists, or all Hindus do not maintain the same beliefs or conduct the same practices. Anyone who knocks a particular religion or religion in general without knowing anything about it is a bigot, and no one can claim to understand the underlying philosophy of any world civilization without understanding their religious beliefs.</p> <p>My college <strong>negotiations </strong>class was incredibly useful, if only because it taught me one very valuable lesson: You can’t get what you don’t ask for. Not only did I learn academic frameworks like BATNA (best alternative to negotiated agreement), but I was also taught some practical lessons in trust and relative value.</p> <p><strong>Intro to soil sciences.</strong> Dirt is everywhere, and it’s something that we don’t really think about that much—but it’s fascinating! It shapes the landscape, which dictates the flora, which supports the fauna, and ultimately, us.&nbsp;Some students have their epiphanies in comparative religions or philosophy.&nbsp;I saw the light in intro to soil sciences.&nbsp;It’s been 20 years since I sat in that classroom, but not a week goes by that I don’t think about something that I learned that quarter.</p> <p><strong>Anthropology</strong>. The study of human interaction: how communities, societies, and civilizations form and interact. Have the professor toss a little archeology into his lectures and this drama major was fascinated!</p> <p><strong>Critical Thinking.</strong> It was my first exposure to complex reasoning and exploring the poorly named concept of “common sense.” Without even having to dip into formal logic, the long list of informal fallacies and extensive practice identifying them in real world discourse prepared me to be a discriminating adult. In this world of constant media exposure, political correctness, and double-speak, it’s more important than ever to not take a lot of what we read/hear at face value. In my opinion, a critical thinking course should be required for all college students (maybe even at the high school level), to equip everyone with the ability to read between the lines and question what we read and hear. Maybe then “common sense” would actually be more common.</p> <p><strong>Social psychology. </strong>So much of what we think we do based on logic or rational thought is really just unconscious reactions to the social situations we find ourselves in.&nbsp;Learning about things like the fundamental attribution error (where you tend to attribute the actions of others to internal factors, and attribute your own actions to external factors—that is, you are late because you are lazy, but I am late because traffic was bad) or the Asch conformity experiments (where people convinced themselves that obviously true things—like the relative length of several lines—were untrue in order to conform with a groups opinion) make you realize that you are less in control of your mind than you once believed.</p> <p><strong>History of the scientific revolution</strong>. This is the origin of much of the modern world. Not just scientific and mathematical thought, but philosophy, medicine, agriculture, and economics. Out of the Reformation and the wars of religion that it spawned, an entirely new way to view the world grew: careful observation, logical analysis, and mathematical quantification instead of magical thinking and belief. This is the best class I took in college, and it gave me a much better understanding of who we are and how we got here.</p> <p>The most indispensable class for any truly educated person is a class on <strong>Shakespeare</strong>.&nbsp;It is a fundamental building block for understanding literature, literary criticism, poetry, history, politics, psychology, religion, and human nature, just to name a few of the benefits.</p> <p>The most important class I took as a political science major was called <strong>diversity, disagreement, and democracy</strong>. We were expected to embrace the process of seeing a variety of perspectives, and we had some really excellent discussions in that class.&nbsp;We learned that disagreement is a healthy aspect of a vibrant democracy, but we also came to understand that fewer people are willing to engage with each other, leading to the increasing polarization of the American political landscape.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Beginning basic drawing and computer graphics. </strong>Many people can’t even hand-draw a simple diagram, much less create one on a computer. I think if people were to get a course in drawing simple visual aids, such as a map, a chart, or just a simple line drawing of an object, they would find themselves in need of less lengthy explanations. As an artist, I am not the very best at learning foreign languages. Nevertheless, I have been able to navigate other countries with some assistance from my sketchbook and pen. When we recently were in an auto accident, I did a drawing of where the cars were when stopped, which assisted with the police report.&nbsp;I have never seen such a course offered, but there should be one.</p> <p><strong>Comparative mythology</strong> was one of the most eye-opening courses I took in college. It taught me that that’s exactly what religion is: mythology.&nbsp; And more importantly, it also showed me that one culture’s myths are no more valid than another’s (and that they often have more in common than you’d think). At the time I was struggling with the decision of whether to remain in and dedicate myself to the faith in which I was raised. Comparative mythology (and a few other world religion courses) taught me to think about the things I had been indoctrinated to believe as infallible, unquestionable Truth from a very early age in terms of historical context and with respect to other cultures’ viewpoints. It’s the class that, more than any other, made me the person I am today.</p> <p>I decided to take <strong>macroeconomics</strong> because I knew nothing about the subject, and it was Fall 2012 and the election was in full swing. I struggled through the class but was more informed during the election. I worked hard for a C-minus, and out of all the A’s I got during my time at college, that’s the grade I was proudest of: because it didn’t come naturally to me and I did have to work hard for it.</p> <p><strong>A foreign language</strong>. It stretches you way past your comfort zone. It makes you embarrassed when you’re conversing and making mistakes, but it also gives you the chance to study abroad and to travel. It also increases a person’s empathy to people from other cultures. Coming to the U.S. and learning a hard language like English is no joke (never mind leaving behind everything you know and entering the Great Unknown), and learning a foreign language sensitizes you to what others must overcome.</p> <p><strong>Introduction to materials science and engineering</strong>. Materials underlie all modern technology.&nbsp;Why aren’t electric cars better? Battery electrode materials don’t have the same energy density as gasoline and degrade after a few thousand cycles.&nbsp;Why didn’t Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan survive the tsunami? The cladding material reacted with steam to produce (explosive) hydrogen.&nbsp;What’s holding up the deployment of inherently safe Generation 4 nuclear power? Materials that can withstand the temperature and corrosion&nbsp;environment.&nbsp;Why are solar cells so god-awful&nbsp;inefficient? The most expensive epitaxial-layer solar cell materials&nbsp;are physically&nbsp;limited to about&nbsp;30 percent efficiency at most; the inexpensive, mass-consumption polycrystalline solar cell materials, closer to 15 percent.&nbsp;And so on, for thousands of pages of examples. All of modern technology—and the problems, like energy and the environment, we wish to solve via technology—can only be fully understood by understanding materials. Materials science&nbsp;is literally the subject from which all other subjects are made.</p> <p><strong>Death, dying, and beyond. </strong>The class included a field trip to a cemetery, funeral home, and mortuary! Some great fodder for thought and discussion for students in their early 20s.&nbsp;</p> <p>My most important class in college was a <strong>seminar</strong> on Virginia Woolf. While the content—the brilliant, challenging novels and the feminist political writing—shaped my future as a historian of women and gender, it was the seminar format of the class that had the biggest impact. There were only eight or 10 of us in the class, my smallest class by far at the large, land-grant public university I attended. Being in that environment, where the professor made it clear that we were there to learn from one another, that all of our ideas mattered, and that she saw us all as scholars in our own right who had important things to say, was powerful. I’ve never forgotten that class, and it shapes the teacher I try to be every time I step into the classroom. I know the empowerment I got from a class of that size and format would have gone with me no matter where I went in life. Take a seminar!</p> <p><strong>Classical literature</strong>.&nbsp;Sounds boring and potentially tedious, but a basic knowledge of the great books is extremely helpful on many levels, not the least of which is making you sound well educated at interviews and cocktail parties. I’ve been in the entertainment industry as a studio executive, a writer, and a producer, and I realized that I had a big hole in my education, having never taken a class in literature. I took on the task myself, and reading the classics helped me have a much deeper appreciation of not only literature, but of writing in general.</p> <p>Many colleges offer both group and private <strong>voice lessons</strong> for credit to nonmusic majors. Singing is an activity that offers incredible variety, whether you want to be the queen of the local&nbsp;karaoke club,&nbsp;take part in musicals in a community theater troupe, or&nbsp;be a member of a local opera chorus. Also, many singing-based activities (such as religious or community choirs)&nbsp;come with a built-in community that can help you find a social and support network whenever you move to a new city. The investment in learning to take care of your vocal instrument for many years to come, as well as to expand your knowledge of styles and genres, can yield dividends for many years after college. And in the case of private voice lessons, vocal instruction often represents a unique opportunity for students to receive one-on-one instruction.</p> <p><strong>Debate</strong> can enrich the college experience for anyone. Regardless of our background or future goals, we have all found ourselves in many situations where we must hold to our own knowledge and articulate why our vision or belief is more practical than another’s.&nbsp;Debate encourages us to expand our wealth of knowledge, and in so doing, the depth of our convictions.&nbsp;Anyone with a family, a group of friends, or co-workers and a boss has been building these skills.&nbsp;And anyone in debate class will have an unmatched opportunity to refine and polish those skills so necessary to all walks of life.</p> <p>When I was a freshman at Georgetown, all incoming students took a class called <strong>the problem of God</strong>. This course changed my life, and I think everyone should take it. Fewer Americans practice religion every day, although most of us profess a belief in God. But because we are exposed to less religious education—we are not going to church, and religion is taught in fewer schools—we are losing out on learning what religion teaches us: a framework of belief about who God is and how God works in the world. This is, of course, radically different from religion to religion. And it is radically different from every religion to say, for example, “I believe in a little bit of everything,” or “It’s all one God no matter what you believe.” Each religion (or no religion, or panreligion) has unique claims of truth, and all of us, ultimately, claim one. We have to, to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. It is worth our while to consider what our religion really is.</p> <p>The lessons I took away from <strong>literary theory</strong> made me a much&nbsp;better reader.&nbsp;Before this class, I was primarily reading in a passive manner, taking the words&nbsp;off the page, and my&nbsp;initial gut reaction to them,&nbsp;at face value.&nbsp;But the philosophical and sociological&nbsp;theories I learned from this class made me much more engaged with the text, whether it’s identifying&nbsp;gendered word choices, looking into postcolonial themes, or putting the piece in&nbsp;historical and philosophical contexts. Beyond reading and writing,&nbsp;I think literary theory made me a better observer and listener, too.&nbsp;The multiple&nbsp;interpretive approaches to the same text can also apply to worldviews as well, so this class also enhanced my ability to empathize and appreciate different perspectives to the same situation, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them.</p> <p>I would recommend taking a class about <strong>death in America</strong>, which covers: the criminal justice system and the disproportionality between races and genders/sexes, physician-assisted suicide, the military and its impacts on different socioeconomic classes, and the Second Amendment. Having the ability to openly talk about these issues with people from all backgrounds is incredibly valuable; especially when you consider the past year’s events across the county relating to police brutality. As someone coming from a privileged background, I never really considered these issues prior to college. I have gone from that blind ignorance to becoming passionate about reforming the prison system and introducing more re-entry programs here in the United States.</p> <p>As an English major, I was able to satisfy my math requirement with a class on <strong>logic</strong>. As a writer, I found this invaluable. I learned about logical fallacies, such as begging the question, the straw man, and burden of proof. These and about 50 others have improved both my writing and critical faculties. How many times have you heard someone trying to make an argument by citing several examples, which you counter with a fact that could disprove their point, and they respond: “That’s the exception that proves the rule,” which is of course logically impossible. “Prove” in this smug response actually means “tests,” and your exception in no way actually bolsters their argument.</p> <p>If you want to learn more about statistics in a fun way, I recommend&nbsp;<strong>Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics</strong>. It is offered by Boston University through&nbsp;EdX. It’s free. One of my favorite parts of the course is when professor Andy Andres and some of his students live-tweet with the online students while watching a Red Sox game. The live office hours are also fun. Andres is one of the few professors teaching online courses who you can actually have a bit of interaction with.</p> <p><strong>Communication writing</strong>. We learned to tighten our writing and make it evocative. People who just need basic writing skills will benefit. Florid academics and flowery prose writers will&nbsp;benefit from the discipline. Professionals who are subject to word limits will benefit.</p> <p>The best class I didn’t know I needed was a course on <strong>human sexuality</strong>. It was sex ed, the way sex ed should be taught to high school students. One part basic human anatomy, one part psychology, all brought together very modernly and in a&nbsp;nonjudgmental environment. Not simply&nbsp;the “how&nbsp;babies are made” class, the&nbsp;course talked about how and why&nbsp;humans are sexual.&nbsp;I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know until I took this course.</p> <p><strong>Child development</strong>. This should be a requirement for high school graduation.&nbsp;Most people don’t go into a field that has anything to do with children, but most people <em>have </em>children.&nbsp;They are not miniature adults, but fascinating, wonderful people in their own right.&nbsp;While it won’t answer all of parenting’s mysteries, it would make future parents better informed about what they're getting into!</p> <p><strong>Intro to physics</strong>. Without basic physics, electricity and magnetism is just magic.</p> <p><strong>Square dancing</strong>. After years of working hard and worrying about grades, it was wonderful to spend an hour twice a week laughing and dancing. It helped remind me that life should be fun, too.</p> <p><a href=""><em>Read more of <strong>Slate</strong>’s collection of classes you should take</em></a><em>.</em></p> Thu, 03 Sep 2015 14:00:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2015-09-03T14:00:00Z Readers recommend religion, logic, psychology, and dirt. Life Readers Recommend the Best Classes Everyone Should Take 100150903006 take this class education Laura Helmuth Classes false false false The best of readers’ advice for #TakeThisClass: religion, logic, psychology, and dirt: Fun collection: religion, logic, psychology … and dirt. Illustration by Mouni Feddag What Classes Should I Take? <p>It’s one of the most agonizing questions in education, a question students face every semester, a question you never really finish answering, no matter how many degrees you earn: What classes should I take? The stakes are high: in cost, time, and lost opportunities to take other classes. It can be an overwhelming decision; there are just so many good ones to choose from.</p> <p>We at <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> have a lot of opinions about the most worthwhile classes you can take in high school, college, and adult education, and like anybody, we like to give unsolicited advice, so welcome to our week of guidance counseling! We’re rolling out 17 class recommendations, starting with five today. These are the classes that taught us the most important lessons—even if we didn’t realize it at the time.</p> <p>Take a look at this week’s schedule, below. What’d we miss? On the final day of this series, we’ll collect readers’ best advice. Please let us know what was the most important class you ever took—or the one you wish you’d taken. Email us at <a href=""></a> with up to 200 words advocating for your class. And please add your recommendations to the comments section or share them on Twitter using the hashtag #TakeThisClass.</p> <p>Whether you’re still enrolled in school, taking independent online classes, or teaching yourself new things—there’s always more to learn.</p> <h3>Monday, Aug. 31</h3> <p><a href=""><strong>Introduction to acting</strong></a>. <a href="">Dan Check</a>, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s vice chairman and former head of technology, says you should take a class in something you’re really lousy at, a class that “exposes you to other people’s talents, rather than your own, and allows you to really bask in the feeling of utter, hopeless ineptitude.”</p> <p><a href=""><strong>Human anatomy with a cadaver lab</strong></a>. <a href="">Megan Cartwright</a>, a science writing fellow, is grateful to people who donate their bodies to science. She learned that “the human body is not magical. It’s beautifully mechanical, and you’ll see that in the cadaver’s dark red muscles, off-white nerves, and the glistening skeleton that holds it all together.”</p> <p><a href=""><strong>News media literacy</strong></a>. It’s tricky to know which news sources to trust these days. News editor <a href="">Chad Lorenz</a> proposes a class that would help people read more skeptically and not get suckered in by biased or irresponsible articles that look like legitimate news. (We may actually develop a course like this for <a href=""><strong>Slate Plus </strong>members</a>.)</p> <p><a href=""><strong>Statistics and probability</strong></a>. One of the most important things colleges do is teach people to think critically, and books and culture columnist <a href="">Laura Miller</a> says you can’t think critically without understanding stats.</p> <p><a href=""><strong>Coding</strong></a>.&nbsp;<a href="">Victoria Fine</a>, our director of strategy and audience development, was terrified of coding (and embarrassed about her math-based terror) until she learned a secret technique: Googling. She then taught coding to people who were just as terrified as she was. One girl in the first class period panicked, saying, “I won’t be able to do this! I need more time!” She ended the class elated and high-fived Victoria: “I built a website! I am awesome!”</p> <h3>Tuesday, Sept. 1</h3> <p><strong><a href="">Art history</a></strong>. Fine art has never been more democratic or accessible than today—but it can be intimidating and mystifying.&nbsp;<a href="">Mark Joseph Stern</a>&nbsp;says learning how to appreciate and understand art will make your life more rich, beautiful, and satisfying.</p> <p><strong><a href="">Geography</a></strong>. International affairs writer (and National Geography Bee flameout) <a href="">Josh Keating</a> says it’s never been more important to understand the political and natural features of the world. And Americans are embarrassingly awful at it.</p> <p><strong><a href="">Ethnic studies</a></strong>. Growing up, <a href="">Lisa Wong Macabasco</a> thought racism wasn’t much of a problem. She didn’t really understand American history—or the history of her people and her state—until she took an ethnic studies class.</p> <p><strong><a href="">Wittgenstein</a></strong>. <a href="">David Auerbach</a> is a software engineer and technology writer, but the most important—and practical—class he took was on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He says, “Wittgenstein’s philosophy also accounts for the disastrous state of Internet discourse today.”</p> <p><strong><a href="">Take classes pass/fail</a></strong>. Perfectionist <a href="">Rachael Larimore</a> had a 4.0 high school GPA and a dozen varsity letters, but says, “I didn’t know then that ‘doing it all’ would mean missing out on so much.” High schools should offer a pass/fail option, and college students should take as many extra classes as they can pass/fail, so they can keep their precious grades up while they try things they’re bad at.</p> <h3>Wednesday, Sept. 2</h3> <p><strong><a href="">Poetry</a></strong>. <a href="">Dahlia Lithwick</a>, our legal expert, hated memorizing and reciting poetry, an exercise that was terrifying and seemed “rote and silly and futile.” But today, “I do know that at more than one turn in my life, I have stumbled backward into a memory of a stanza or a phrase that suddenly made the moment briefly beautiful, and connected, and deep.”</p> <p><strong><a href="">Public speaking</a></strong>. Glossophobia, or fear of public speaking, is the most common phobia, but it’s easy to overcome with a good class. <a href="">Nicholas Duchesne</a> says speaking effectively is an incredibly versatile skill; it can help you land a job or manage social stress or deliver a punch line, no matter the size of the audience.</p> <p><strong><a href="">First aid</a></strong>. This class is <em>literally</em> a matter of life or death. <a href="">Miriam Krule</a> says everybody should learn the basics: the Heimlich maneuver, wound and burn care, how to recognize that someone is in distress, CPR—and make sure you keep your CPR knowledge current.</p> <h3>Thursday, Sept. 3</h3> <p><strong><a href="">Geology</a></strong>. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s editor in chief, <a href="">Julia Turner</a>, says you should take this class because it will fundamentally transform the way you see the world and your own place in it.</p> <p><strong><a href="">Math</a></strong>. If you think you’re bad at math, you’re wrong. Software engineer <a href="">Chase Felker</a> explains that math is simply logic and clear writing, a skill you improve upon with practice like any other, and that the classes get easier as you go along.</p> <p><strong><a href="">Gender studies</a></strong>. Teachers are sick of hearing the standard question: “When am I ever going to use this again?” When it comes to a women’s and gender studies class, <a href="">Anna Diamond</a> says, the answer is: “always.”</p> <p><strong><a href="">No class at all</a></strong>. “You don’t have to go to college” is the best advice <a href="">Amanda Hess</a> never took. If she had taken a gap year, she says, “I bet I would have gotten more out of the college experience itself had I paused long enough to feel like I was really choosing it.”</p> <p><strong><a href="">Your favorite classes</a></strong>. In the final story of this package, we’ll collect the best reader recommendations. Please email your advice to <a href=""></a> and weigh in on the comments section or tweet your advice using the hashtag #TakeThisClass. What class do you think people should take?</p> Mon, 31 Aug 2015 09:02:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2015-08-31T09:02:00Z These are the most useful, practical, life-altering, and enriching courses in an ideal catalog. Life What Classes Should You Take? 100150831006 take this class education cover story Laura Helmuth Cover Story false false false What classes should people take? Share your advice with #TakeThisClass: Excellent, practical advice about which courses are the most useful, mind-bending, entertaining, and enriching. Illustration by Mouni Feddag Merry and Bright <p>Satellite observations show that, starting the day after Thanksgiving and continuing through New Year’s Day, suburbs around major cities in the United States are lit up … well, like a Christmas tree. All those glowing Santas and sparkling snowflakes and blinking light–draped eaves are visible from space.</p> <p>The <a href="">Suomi satellite</a> carries an instrument designed to measure nighttime lights as a way to track energy use. It’s sensitive enough that it was able to detect a 20–30 percent increase in brightening in the urban cores of 70 major U.S. cities during the Christmas season and a 30–50 percent increase in the suburbs. &nbsp;</p> <p>Quantifying your neighbors’ aggressively merry decor is not why NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration mission launched Suomi into space. The finding, <a href="">announced Tuesday</a> at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, grew out of what originally appeared to be a measurement error.</p> <p>In 2012, scientists looking at some early data from the satellite noticed an odd brightening in light detected in Cairo at night. They analyzed a 36-month set of observations and figured out that the brightening occurred in many cities in the Middle East and lasted about a month. It was synchronized to the holy month of Ramadan, when people fast during the day and feast at sundown.</p> <p>In these satellite images, yellow patches represent areas with relatively unvarying seasonal light; the green patches show where light brightened by at least 30 percent either during Christmas (in Atlanta and the Washington, D.C., area) or Ramadan (in Cairo; see Tel Aviv, Israel, on the same map for a control city).</p> <p>Holidays sure take a <em>lot</em> of energy.</p> Tue, 16 Dec 2014 23:18:40 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-12-16T23:18:40Z Christmas decorations are visible from space. Health and Science Suburban Neighborhoods’ Christmas Lights Are Visible From Space 100141216016 holidays Laura Helmuth Science false false false Suburban neighborhoods’ Christmas lights are visible from space. By @laurahelmuth Suburban Neighborhoods’ Christmas Lights Are Visible From Space Photo by Bob Berg/Getty Images An energy-usage nightmare in Santa Monica, California. James Watson Throws a Fit <p>Jim Watson is one of the most important scientists of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. He is also a peevish bigot. History will remember him for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA, in 1953. This week, Watson is ensuring that history, or at least the introduction to every obituary, will also remember him for being a jerk.</p> <p>In a fit of pique and <a href="">self-pity</a>, Watson is <a href="">selling his Nobel Prize medallion</a>. He will become the <a href="">first Nobel laureate in history</a> to do so. He gave the <a href=""><em>Financial Times</em></a><em> </em>several reasons why, this Thursday, he will auction off the gold disk, symbol of the highest honor in science (expected price: up to $3.5 million). He claims that, even though he ran major research institutions and served on corporate boards until the age of 79, he needs the money. He might donate it to universities, he said, or buy a David Hockney painting. Oh, and he also mentioned to the <em>FT</em> that he’s selling the medal because he has become an “unperson,” and “no one really wants to admit I exist.”</p> <p>This is not about the Hockney. Selling the medal is Watson’s way of sticking his tongue out at the scientific establishment, which has largely shunned him since 2007. Watson had been making racist and sexist remarks throughout his career, but he really outdid himself seven years ago when he told the <a href=""><em>Sunday Times</em></a><em> </em>that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa&quot; because &quot;all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” He further said that while we may wish intelligence to be equal across races, “people who have to deal with black employees <a href="">find this not true</a>.”</p> <p><em>Finally</em>, for once in his life, Watson didn’t get away with making ignorant, prejudiced statements. The board of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which he had led for almost 40 years, <a href="">fired him</a> (although he’s still <a href="">chancellor emeritus</a>). The president of the Federation of American Scientists said, “<a href="">He has failed us</a> in the worst possible way. It is a sad and revolting way to end a remarkable career.” The director of the National Institutes of Health, where Watson ran the Human Genome Project for many years, released a statement saying Watson’s comments “are wrong, from every point of view—not the least of which is that they are <a href="">completely inconsistent</a> with the body of research literature in this area.”</p> <p>Watson was 79 at the time, and people familiar with his field knew that he was genetics’ embarrassing, cranky old uncle. But this wasn’t the ranting of someone who was losing his grasp on reality. He has always been a horrible human being.</p> <p>One of his earliest sins: Watson didn’t credit Rosalind Franklin, a chemist also working on DNA at the time, for her crucial research on X-ray diffraction images, without which he and Francis Crick <a href="">would not have been the first</a> to discover the double helix structure. (Linus Pauling and others were right behind them and would have figured it out.) In Watson’s <a href=""><em>The Double Helix</em></a><em> </em>memoir, he calls Franklin “Rosy” (not a nickname she used), critiques her clothing and makeup, and characterizes her incorrectly as <a href="">another scientist’s assistant</a>.</p> <p>Watson was also famously insulting and arrogant as a professor at Harvard, even for a professor at Harvard. Fellow faculty member E.O. Wilson described Watson in the 1950s and ’60s as the “<a href="">Caligula of biology</a>” for his contempt of scientists who studied anything other than molecules. Wilson wrote that, unfortunately, due to Watson’s stroke of genius at age 25, “He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously.”</p> <p>In 2000, Watson told an audience at Berkeley that there was a link between <a href="">sunlight exposure and libido</a>, and therefore “That’s why you have Latin lovers.” In the same speech, reported by the <em>San Francisco Chronicle</em>, he said that thin people are ambitious. “Whenever you interview fat people,” Watson said, “you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them.”</p> <p>He just wouldn’t stop dismissing whole groups of people, even after his disgrace in 2007. At a science conference in 2012, for instance, he said of women in science, “I think having all these women around makes it <a href="">more fun for the men</a> but they’re probably less effective.”</p> <p>Watson is also famous among science journalists for mouthing off about things he doesn’t really understand. This makes him an interesting dinner table companion but a <a href="">lousy source</a>, as when he told a <em>New York Times</em> reporter <a href="">16 years ago</a> that a researcher was “going to cure cancer in two years.” He files self-promoting amicus briefs in gene patenting lawsuits but “<a href="">fundamentally misunderstands</a>” the relevant legal points.</p> <p>And, of course, Watson fundamentally misunderstands research on race, genes, and intelligence. Scientists have been debunking ideas like his since well before <em>The Bell Curve</em> made a mockery of statistical analysis. The latest for-crying-out-loud-<a href="">do-we have-to-do-this-<em>again</em></a> moment came this year with the publication of Nicholas Wade’s book <a href=""><em>Troublesome Inheritance</em></a>, which Watson blurbed as “a masterful overview of how changes in our respective lineages let us begin to understand how human beings have evolved.” <a href="">Anthropologists</a>, <a href="">evolutionary biologists</a>, and pretty much anybody with real expertise explained why the book’s assumptions about race-based traits were wrong—and Wade is much more sophisticated in his thinking than Watson is.</p> <p>Watson had a major insight 61 years ago about the physical structure of DNA. He is one of the founders of a very important but very specific subset of modern biology, and he devoted most of the rest of his career to the study of cancer biology. But he knows fuck all about history, human evolution, anthropology, sociology, psychology, or any rigorous study of intelligence or race. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works for him to think that his expertise at one level of analysis—a molecular level—predicts anything at a higher level of analysis. The structure of DNA does not predict the workings of a cell, which does not predict the shape of a body, which does not predict the characteristics of a culture. It’s not as if the idea that people with dark skin are genetically inferior to people with light skin is some horrible secret that scientists had been trying to hide from the world until Jim Watson came along and revealed the truth. It’s simply incorrect.</p> <p>It’s a slight comfort to know that Nobel Prizes in science are awarded for a specific piece of research. They are not lifetime achievement awards, and they are not given simply to a scientist; they are always given to a scientist <em>for</em> something, in this case, to Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins <a href="">“for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material</a><em>.</em>”</p> <p>The auction of Watson’s Nobel Prize, a recognition of one of the biggest triumphs in the history of science, has presumably been in the works for a long time. Watson told the <em>Financial Times</em> that selling it is a way to “re-enter public life,” and he “insisted he was ‘<a href="">not a racist in a conventional way</a>,’ ” according to <em>FT</em>. Watson couldn’t have known that the auction would be announced while people all over the country are protesting police brutality against blacks—people too many police officers see as <a href="">subhuman</a>. But these protests are a reminder that racist ignorance is pervasive and dangerous, and that Jim Watson’s bid for attention isn’t just about him tarnishing his own legacy.</p> Mon, 01 Dec 2014 15:26:25 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-12-01T15:26:25Z The disgraced co-discoverer of DNA is selling his Nobel Prize. Health and Science James Watson Is Auctioning Off His Nobel Prize. Please Do Not Bid on It. 100141201006 human evolution genetics Laura Helmuth Science false false false Jim Watson is selling his Nobel Prize. Please do not bid on it. By @LauraHelmuth James Watson Is Auctioning Off His Nobel Prize. Please Do Not Bid on It. Photo by Daniel Mordzinski/AFP/Getty Images James Watson in 1993.&nbsp; &nbsp; Species Worth Saving <p>Humans are really good at killing things. We always have been; it’s kind of what we do. The fossil record shows that whenever humans reached a new landmass for the first time, we slaughtered everything that couldn’t get away. Any large, juicy, poorly defended species went extinct about two weeks, geologically speaking, after <em>Homo sapiens</em> washed up on their shores.</p> <p>In Europe, we wiped out woolly mammoths and cave bears. In Australia, giant kangaroos and giant wombats. In South America, glyptodonts (which looked a bit like gigantic armadillos) and giant sloths. And in North America, mastodons, tapirs, ground sloths, and more. We even eliminated the sabertooth cat, American cheetah, and American lion. <em>We used to have our own cheetahs and lions!</em></p> <p>And always, always, we killed off a bunch of birds. The dodo in Mauritius, the moa in New Zealand, the Carolina parakeet in North America. One of the most depressing books ever published is this <a href="">gorgeous monograph of extinct birds</a>, with hundreds upon hundreds of species.</p> <p>We ate the big and flightless birds, usually to extinction. We stole eggs from breeding colonies of puffins until there were <a href="">almost none left</a> in the United States, shot hawks and eagles for sport, and slaughtered millions of herons and egrets for <a href="">plumes to decorate hats</a>. (Just a reminder: Fashion is stupid.) We chopped down the trees ivory-billed woodpeckers lived in. And our parasitic fellow-travelers—<a href="">cats</a>, rats, dogs—drove species to extinction on islands around the world.</p> <p>But the most unexpected thing happened about a century ago—we started to stop. Commercial pigeon hunting wiped out passenger pigeons so swiftly that people still living had vivid memories of the tremendous flocks of passenger pigeons that used to darken the skies. “There was a sense of loss when there were no more wild birds,” says Joel Greenberg, author of <a href=""><em>A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction</em></a>. People horrified by the inconceivable decline of North America’s once most common bird and the carnage of the plume trade pushed for the <a href="">first laws and treaties</a> to protect wild birds.</p> <p>Passenger pigeons persisted in captivity for a few years in three haphazardly managed <a href="">populations</a> until Martha, the last of her kind, died 100 years ago. You can see her at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, <a href="">on display</a> with other specimens of North America’s extinct bird species—the great auk’s beady taxidermied eyes staring at museum visitors in grim reproach. There’s nothing like seeing the Carolina parakeet’s faded, once-vibrant colors to make you feel the loss of it.</p> <p>But there’s another kind of display you can go see these days: Living birds that <em>ought</em> to be extinct but amazingly, improbably, thankfully are <em>not</em>. They are alive thanks to science, strong laws, education, ingenuity, and heroic efforts by biologists, foresters, government agencies, and everybody who ever put up a bluebird box in his or her backyard.</p> <p>California condors, population 22 a few decades ago, soar over the Grand Canyon thanks to an elaborate capture and captive breeding program that involves feeding chicks with hand puppets, teaching them to fear power lines, and getting California to outlaw lead bullets that were causing released condors to die of lead poisoning when they ate carcasses. People dress up in bird costumes and teach whooping cranes to fly after ultralight aircraft to lead them to new wintering grounds. Conservation biologists and an endless supply of volunteers slide around on guano-slick cliffs to put up decoys, mirrors, and loudspeakers to lure <a href="">murres</a>, <a href="">puffins</a>, and other birds to safe new breeding territories.</p> <p>It’s utterly absurd, the measures people take to save endangered animals. It’s also the most touching, inspiring, selfless, redemptive thing we do as a species.</p> <p>My favorite example of a heroic long-term effort is the project to save <a href="">the red-cockaded woodpecker</a>. (Pronounced cock-ADE-ed; a cockade is a jaunty ornament worn on a hat, in this case a red patch on the male woodpecker’s head, not a plume ripped from the carcass of a gorgeous snowy egret.) I’d been reading about the red-cockaded woodpecker since I started birding about 25 years ago, and this month I finally went in hot pursuit.&nbsp;</p> <p>Red-cockaded woodpeckers are clever, socially adept, and adorable. They build nests by excavating cavities in old pine trees in the Southeast, which was a great evolutionary strategy until people chopped down 97 percent of their habitat. Here’s another great evolutionary strategy, one that has held up better: Snakes are some of their most dangerous nest predators, so the birds peck the pine trees’ bark to make sap ooze down the tree trunk. The slick of sap stops snakes and protects the nest cavities above. And they’ve got strong family ties on their side: Fledglings from one clutch stick around the territory to help their parents raise the next clutch of chicks.</p> <p>The problem, of course, is that even when you stop turning every pine tree in a forest into timber or turpentine, it takes a long time for trees to grow big enough to support decent-size nest cavities. And underbrush in the forests these birds evolved in was periodically cleared out by fire, which is now usually suppressed, leading to forests that are too dense for the birds.</p> <p>The red-cockaded woodpecker was one of the first birds protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and people have been trying to bring its numbers up ever since. The first thing to do was stop chopping down their nest trees, and the ESA protected the birds’ critical habitat. Millions of acres of national forest, national wildlife refuge, <a href="">military installations</a>, and state lands are now managed for the benefit of red-cockaded woodpeckers. Some large pine trees are allowed to grow to nest-cavity size, and planned fires keep the forest from getting too dense. The Fish and Wildlife Service has established “safe harbor” agreements with private landowners, including timber companies, to encourage them to protect red-cockaded woodpeckers on their property.</p> <p>Red-cockaded woodpeckers aren’t particularly troubled by people. They establish colonies right by roads. In Francis Marion National Forest, one territory has a rifle range on one side (<em>BLAM BLAM BLAM</em> from dawn to dusk) and a cycle trail on the other (not for bicycles, as I originally thought, forgetting for a moment that I was in South Carolina, but for motorcycles and very loud off-road vehicles <em>grr-grr-grring</em> along sandy pine forest trails).</p> <p>Their territories aren’t hard to find in Francis Marion: Trees the woodpeckers have started cavities in are marked by the forest service with two bands of white spray paint on the trunk and a tie of bright flagging tape. “We need managers to not accidentally cut cavity trees,” says Will McDearman, who coordinates the <a href="">species recovery project</a>.</p> <p>During breeding season, biologists remove chicks from the nest at seven days of age and put bands on their legs to help keep track of the population. They capture young female and male birds from different groups and release them as new breeding pairs to create new colonies in suitable habitat.</p> <p>But what has really made a difference is artificial nesting cavities. “They’ve virtually saved the species,” McDearman says. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo swept through Francis Marion, which was then home to the largest population of red-cockaded woodpeckers. The storm toppled nesting trees like matchsticks. “In 1990, the situation was dismal,” McDearman says.</p> <p>The red-cockaded woodpecker recovery team experimented with artificial cavities and quickly figured out the best technique. Biologists carve a nesting cavity and entrance tunnel out of a block of wood, climb 60 feet up a suitable pine tree, through a haze of mosquitoes and biting flies, cut out a slice of the tree, insert the block, then seal it back up. The entrances have metal “restrictor plates” around the opening to prevent the much larger pileated woodpeckers, who routinely commandeer red-cockaded woodpecker cavities, from blowing out the opening to make it wide enough so they can fit through. Another nice touch: When the biologists install new cavities, they coat the lower part of the tree with resin to mimic the bird’s strategy of releasing pine pitch to keep snakes away.</p> <p>The team began adding nesting cavities throughout the red-cockaded woodpecker’s range, and these cavities have been the largest contributor to a population boom in the past 20 years. “They are desperate for cavities,” McDearman says. The birds’ numbers have been increasing at a rate of 4 to 5 percent every year and there are now 7,200 active territories. Francis Marion, with 400 of those territories, has already “surpassed our recovery population size objective,” McDearman says.</p> <p>I spent a few days hiking and kayaking in Francis Marion, desperately searching for a red-cockaded woodpecker, and after scanning enough clumps of spray-painted, flagged nesting trees, I finally saw a family of them. They were off a dirt road deep in the forest, close to a swamp. It was the first time I’d ever seen the species, which meant I’d sighted a “life bird”—a triumph for any birder. The birds were hopping about high in a stand of pines, pecking in a perfectly woodpeckerly way, showing off their definitive field mark, a white cheek patch. They were the most beautiful birds in the world.</p> <p>So, anyway, this year I’m thankful for the hundreds of foresters, biologists, and other recovery team members who work directly to track, band, drill nesting cavities, and set fires for the red-cockaded woodpecker. And for the people who manage Air Force bases, golf courses, and ranches for the benefit of this sociable, white-cheeked, 9-inch-long bird. And for everybody who advocated for environmental legislation and the politicians who passed it and the government agencies that enforce it. Mostly I’m thankful that we as a species recognize—not always too late—that other species are worth saving.</p> Wed, 26 Nov 2014 20:07:06 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-11-26T20:07:06Z Why we should be thankful for the red-cockaded woodpecker. Health and Science Saving This Bird Is the Best Thing Humans Have Ever Done 100141126020 conservation wildlife conservation endangered species animals Laura Helmuth Science false false false Thankful for the red-cockaded woodpecker and other heroically saved species. By @LauraHelmuth Saving This Bird Is the Best Thing Humans Have Ever Done Photo by snowmanradio via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region/Wikimedia Commons A red-cockaded woodpecker eating a well-earned Thanksgiving feast. Hugger-in-Chief <p>Barack Obama displayed inspiring leadership on Friday. He also promoted public health, fought bigotry, and helped calm raging paranoia. His heroic act? He hugged somebody.</p> <p>Nina Pham, the first person to be infected with Ebola within the United States, had just been <a href="">declared disease-free</a> and discharged from the National Institutes of Health. Obama is a rational, science-friendly guy, so he knew she wasn’t any danger to him. It didn’t take courage to hug her.</p> <p>And yet, another modern president failed a similar test. Facing the greatest public health crisis of <em>his</em> administration, Ronald Reagan was not heroic. He was a dithering coward.</p> <p>The hateful, homophobic, racist response to the AIDS crisis is one of the most shameful episodes in recent American history. Within a few years after the <a href="">first AIDS cases were reported in 1981</a>, scientists knew the disease was transmitted primarily by sex, blood transfusions, and shared needles.</p> <p>That knowledge didn’t stop the prejudice and fear mongering. HIV-positive people were fired from their jobs, forbidden from entering the country, kicked out of the military. Jerry Falwell claimed AIDS was “God’s punishment not just for homosexuals” but for a “society that <a href="">tolerates homosexuals</a>.” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in a widely syndicated column that people diagnosed with AIDS should have that fact <a href="">tattooed on their buttocks</a>. Schools refused to enroll children with HIV. When a judge ordered a Florida school to admit young brothers Ricky, Randy, and Robert Ray, their neighbors <a href="">burned their house down</a>.</p> <p>Some people did behave nobly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was on it from the very beginning, with research, new surveillance programs, and <a href="">prompt</a> and clear <a href="">updates</a> and <a href="">reports</a>. A year after the first recognition of AIDS, Rep. Henry Waxman held a congressional hearing on the crisis and directed AIDS funding to the National Institutes of Health. (We’re really going to <a href="">miss that guy when he retires at the end of this term</a>.) The surgeon general pushed for sex education and mailed a frank report to <a href="">every household in the country</a> on how AIDS is and isn’t transmitted. San Francisco established new clinics and a model for how to care for AIDS patients. The <a href="">Shanti Project</a>, <a href="">Gay Men’s Health Crisis</a>, <a href="">ACT UP</a>, and other groups advocated for better treatment, faster testing, and more funding. People cared for the sick and dying. Afterward they sewed panels for the <a href="">AIDS Quilt</a>, the most heartbreaking memorial in the history of human civilization.</p> <p>But Ronald Reagan? He didn’t do a goddamn thing. He was president when the first cases were reported. He was president when Congress, the National Academies of Science, and anybody with a sick loved one or a conscience called for the federal government to do more to fight the medical and social crisis. He let his reprehensible press secretary Larry Speakes, Reagan’s face to the media, repeatedly <a href="">joke about AIDS</a>. Via <em>BuzzFeed</em>, here’s a partial transcript of a White House press briefing from 1982:</p> <blockquote> Q: Larry, does the President have any reaction to the announcement—the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, that AIDS is now an epidemic and have over 600 cases? <br /> MR. SPEAKES: What’s AIDS? <br /> Q: Over a third of them have died. It’s known as “gay plague.” (Laughter.) No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this have died. And I wondered if the President is aware of it? <br /> MR. SPEAKES: I don’t have it. Do you? (Laughter.) </blockquote> <p>Reagan could have spoken out against panic and called for compassion; the man knew how to give a <a href="">powerful speech</a>. He could have hugged an AIDS patient, or at least <a href="">shaken hands</a>. He knew (or should have known) that wouldn’t have been dangerous—just as well as Obama knew hugging a recovered Ebola patient wasn’t dangerous. <a></a>It would have made a difference.</p> <p>Instead, Reagan said nothing about AIDS for a full six years after the crisis began. To his everlasting shame, he was <a href="">silent</a> at a time when silence equaled death. Only after <a href="">36,058 people had been diagnosed</a> in the United States and 20,849 had died did Ronald Reagan give his first speech about AIDS.<a>*</a></p> <p>The Ebola outbreak, especially once the disease appeared in the United States, has revived some of the more ignorant and dangerous myths of the AIDS era. Once again, religious leaders claim the disease—caused by a well-studied virus—is <a href="">God’s wrath</a>. This is a common but unspeakably cruel belief about sickness, particularly cruel because this disease <a href="">preys on people’s humanity</a>, spreading to those who selflessly care for the sick and dying.</p> <p>Politicians are once again <a href="">stoking fear</a> for political gain, pushing for travel bans and quarantines that could make the outbreak in Africa worse and put the United States at greater risk. Universities, which really ought to know better, are <a href="">disinviting speakers</a> and <a href="">visitors</a> who have been to Africa. <a href="">Conspiracy theories</a> abound, and people far from the crisis buy into a smug <a href="">outbreak narrative</a> that distorts the true dangers and puts <a href="">public health at risk</a>. As Roy Peter Clark points out, public health officials and responsible members of the media are fighting two of the most <a href="">powerful forces in human history</a>: the narrative of the leper and the fear of Darkest Africa.</p> <p>When people are governed by fear, the most important thing a president can do is be calm, clear, and compassionate. This is why a hug matters. It was an intentional photo-op to demonstrate that people with Ebola and their contacts shouldn’t be shunned and stigmatized. This disease is <a href="">treatable</a> if we <a href="">act</a> based on science rather than superstition, xenophobia, victim-blaming, and panic. <a></a>The hug was a message that we must and we <em>can </em>stop this terrible disease. It’s the kind of message Ronald Reagan should have sent three decades ago.</p> <p><a href=""><strong><em>Read more of Slate’s coverage of Ebola.</em></strong></a></p> <p><em><strong>*Correction, Oct. 27, 2014: </strong>This article originally stated that Ronald Reagan uttered the word AIDS in public for the first time in 1987. In a 1985 press conference, he used the word in response to reporters' questions about AIDS. (<a>Return.</a>)</em></p> Sun, 26 Oct 2014 17:29:19 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-10-26T17:29:19Z In embracing an Ebola victim, Barack Obama succeeded where Ronald Reagan failed. Health and Science Barack Obama Hugged an Ebola Victim. Ronald Reagan Refused to Even Say the Word AIDS. 100141026003 ebola Laura Helmuth Medical Examiner false false false Barack Obama hugged an #Ebola victim. Ronald Reagan wouldn’t even say the word AIDS. By @LauraHelmuth Barack Obama Hugged an Ebola Victim. Ronald Reagan Refused to Even Say the Word AIDS. Photo by Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images President Barack Obama hugs Dallas nurse Nina Pham in the Oval Office of the White House on Oct. 24, 2014, after she was declared free of the virus on Friday. Get Smashed <p>Throwing big parties, as many Americans will do this Labor Day weekend, is a great way to express affection for your friends, discharge multiple social obligations at once, get to know your co-workers better, and indulge in match-making (romantic or professional). It’s a real treat to see people from different parts of your life mingling and laughing together—but first you have to break the ice.</p> <p>Most of the people who come to my parties are scientists or journalists or other bookish types. Lovely, fascinating people once you get them going, but attending parties can be a real chore for the introverts among them. Many of them bring children who are shy about playing with strange kids, or irritated teenagers who keep getting told how much they’ve grown.</p> <p>The best way to cut through all the intergenerational awkwardness, I’ve found, is lawn games. And the best summer party lawn game of all is <a href="">badminton</a>.</p> <p>Lawn games draw people outside and away from your crowded kitchen. (It helps if you set up your bar, and a cooler full of Sunkist and Hawaiian Punch for the kids, outside as well.) They keep poorly supervised children from tipping over your tomato plants. And they give everybody something to do or watch or talk about while they’re finding common interests.</p> <p>The beautiful thing about badminton is that anybody can play, but almost nobody plays that well. Even people who have never picked up a racquet can get the hang of it after whiffing on the first few tries. Badminton is disarmingly silly; people naturally make sound effects and yell at the birdie. The game is engaging enough that people forget their self-consciousness, but not so much that they take it seriously. (With the exception of my colleague <a href="">Will Saletan</a>, who at one of my parties hit <a href="">smash shots</a> at middle school kids.)</p> <p>The only rule in badminton is that you have to hit the birdie over the net. (Oh, sure, there are <em>real</em> rules, but don’t let people who know them enforce them.) You don’t need to bother marking the court boundaries or limiting how many people can play at once. Just set out a bunch of racquets and encourage anybody to jump in.</p> <p>Logistically, badminton sets are easy to set up, and they roll up into a small bundle for storage when the party’s over. You don’t need much lawn space at all—you can buy sets with <a href="">30-feet-wide</a>, <a href="">20-feet-wide</a>, or even <a href="">7-feet-wide</a> nets. Most of the sets are flimsy but good enough for backyard use, or you can get a little fancier with a <a href="">pro set</a>. (Buy <a href="">extra shuttlecocks</a> because they <em>will</em> get snagged in trees or on roofs; <a href="">glow-in-the-dark birdies</a> are great for night games.)</p> <p>It’s hard to hurt oneself or others playing badminton. You can hit the birdie as hard as you like and probably not do any damage. You can make heroic lunges, but it’s also perfectly possible to play badminton with a racquet in one hand and a beer in the other.</p> <p>There are plenty of other reasons to enjoy the game. Badminton is the only sport I know in which top players who are not paid off by some mafia betting ring still try to <a href=";contentCollection=Soccer&amp;module=RelatedCoverage&amp;region=Marginalia&amp;pgtype=article">throw their own matches</a>. (We’d share video of the “oopsie missed again” badminton debacle at the 2012 Summer Olympics, but as <em>Business Insider</em> points out, the <a href="">International Olympic Committee is run by world-class jerks</a>.)</p> <p>Other lawn games make decent icebreakers, of course, but they’re no badminton. Whiffle ball is safe and easy, but it has fewer active players at any given time. Bocce takes a lot of explanation for young kids to catch on. With Frisbee, it’s just a matter of time before somebody gets hit in the back of the head. (I was guilty of a wild throw at a party years ago and still feel awful about it.) Ping-pong is a great crowd-pleaser, but you need space to store a table and have to haul it outside during a party.</p> <p>Best of all, it’s impossible not to laugh while playing badminton.</p> Wed, 27 Aug 2014 03:47:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-08-27T03:47:00Z Badminton is the best party icebreaker (well, next to alcohol). Life The Best Summer Party Icebreaker (Next to Alcohol) 100140826011 entertaining sports summer games Laura Helmuth Better Summer false false false Badminton is the best party icebreaker ever (well, next to alcohol). By @LauraHelmuth The Best Summer Party Icebreaker (Next to Alcohol) Courtesy of Andrew Malone/Flickr/Creative Commons Anybody can play. Almost nobody plays that well. Don’t Feel Sorry for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. <p>Most paranoid, grandiose, relentless conspiracy theorists can’t call a meeting with a U.S. senator. Then there’s Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A <a href="">profile of Kennedy</a> in this weekend’s <em>Washington Post Magazine</em> shows that Sens. Barbara Mikulski and Bernie Sanders listened politely while Kennedy told them that a vaccine preservative causes autism.</p> <p>It doesn’t. It just doesn’t. Every <a href="">major</a> <a href="">scientific</a> and <a href="">medical</a> <a href="">organization</a> in the country has evaluated the evidence and concluded that the preservative thimerosal is safe. The question is settled scientifically. Thimerosal, out of an abundance of caution, was <a href="">removed from childhood vaccines</a> 13 years ago, although it is used in some flu vaccines. And yet Kennedy, perhaps more than any other anti-vaccine zealot, has confused parents into worrying that vaccines, which have <a href="">saved more lives</a> than almost any other public health practice in history, could harm their children.</p> <p>Mikulski and Sanders, to their credit, both politely blew Kennedy off. That’s a sign of great progress: Not that many years ago, Rep. Dan Burton held congressional hearings on <a href="">the entirely made-up</a> dangers <a href="">of vaccines</a>. I’m especially proud of Sanders, who represents Vermont, a state with one of the highest rates of vaccine denial and <a href="">misinformation</a>.</p> <p>But the more people dismiss Kennedy, unfortunately, the more obsessive and slanderous he becomes. Keith Kloor describes some of Kennedy’s recent outrageous claims in the <em>Post</em> profile:</p> <blockquote> The more Kennedy talked on the subject, the more his rhetoric became hyperbolic. During one 2011 segment on his Air America radio show, he accused government scientists of being “involved in a massive fraud.” He said they skewed studies to demonstrate the safety of thimerosal. “I can see that this fraud is doing extraordinary damage to the brains of American children,” he said. </blockquote> <blockquote> Last year, he gave the keynote speech at an anti-vaccine gathering in Chicago. There, he said of a scientist who is a vocal proponent of vaccines and already the object of much hate mail from anti-vaccine activists that this scientist and others like him, “should be in jail, and the key should be thrown away.” </blockquote> <p>I got a taste of Kennedy’s delusions last year. After <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s Bad Astronomy blogger, Phil Plait, <a href="">criticized Kennedy for speaking at an anti-vaccine conference</a>, Kennedy called me to complain, and I wrote about <a href="">our very one-sided conversation</a>. He told me scientists and government agencies are conspiring with the vaccine industry to cover up the evidence that thimerosal is “the most potent brain killer imaginable,” and journalists are dupes who are afraid to question authority. He claimed that several specific scientists had admitted to him that he was right. I called these scientists up. Here’s one representative answer, from a researcher who preferred I not use his name because he gets death threats from anti-vaccine activists: “Kennedy completely misrepresented everything I said.”</p> <p>To recap: Kennedy accuses scientists of fraud, which is pretty much the worst thing you can say about a scientist. He distorts their statements. He says they should be thrown in jail. He uses his powerful name to besmirch theirs. That name, the reason he has power and fame, is inherited from a family dedicated to public service. He now uses the Kennedy name to accuse employees of government agencies charged with protecting human health—some of the best public servants this country has—of engaging in a massive conspiracy to cause brain damage in children.</p> <p>In his profile of Kennedy and in <a href="">blog posts</a> about the story, Keith Kloor is remarkably generous to his subject, presenting him as dogged and genuine. (I have a lot of respect for Kloor and have <a href="">published his work in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong></a>.) I asked Kloor what he thinks about Kennedy after spending so much time with him. “I have conflicted feelings about Robert Kennedy Jr. and this story I wrote. I’m sympathetic to him on a human level,” Kloor said. “I came to believe he genuinely believes he’s pursuing the truth. He has a moral certitude about what he’s doing ... I really think he sees himself as a martyr for a cause.”</p> <p>When I read the <em>Post</em> story, I worried that some readers would see Kennedy as a heroic underdog. Kloor disagrees that the story depicts him in that way, and I hope he’s right. “I think he comes off as an obsessive, tone-deaf crusader on an issue that nearly everyone he respects in his professional sphere thinks he should drop immediately. … The fact that he’s been willing to keep at it, even while he’s alienating close friends and associates—truly pissing them off—astounds me. That level of stubbornness and self-righteousness is fascinating in a public figure like Kennedy, and it’s one of the elements that convinced me this was a legitimate story.”</p> <p>Fascinating it is, and absolutely maddening. And dangerous. Even if some senators know enough to nod politely, thank him for stopping by, and then ignore him, Kennedy still commands large and rapturous audiences. He is publishing a <a href="">book</a> about the supposed dangers of thimerosal, which will bring him another burst of publicity and potentially cause even more parents to refuse to vaccinate their children. The number of measles cases in the United States <a href="">tripled last year</a>—an entirely preventable disease whose resurgence has been made possible in part by Kennedy’s tireless efforts.</p> <p>There are a lot of people who deserve your sympathy as they work tirelessly and thanklessly to improve the world. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not one of them.</p> Sun, 20 Jul 2014 18:54:38 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-07-20T18:54:38Z A <em>Washington Post</em> profile portrays him as passionate and sympathetic. He’s actually obsessive and dangerous. Health and Science The <em>Washington Post</em>’s RFK Jr. Profile Paints Him as Sympathetic. He’s Not. He’s Dangerous. 100140720001 vaccines Laura Helmuth Science false false false Don’t feel sorry for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s a dangerous loon. By @LauraHelmuth The <em>Washington Post</em>’s RFK Jr. Profile Paints Him as Sympathetic. He’s Not. He’s Dangerous. Photo by Leigh Vogel/Getty Images Rebel with a terrible cause. Witness to an Exorcism <p>Old-school Satan is making a comeback in the Catholic Church. The <em>Washington Post</em> published <a href="">a fascinating story</a> over the weekend about Pope Francis and his understanding of the devil. The past several popes and many modern theologians have downplayed Satan’s significance, but according to a bishop who spoke anonymously to writer <a href="">Anthony Faiola</a>, “Pope Francis never stops talking about the Devil; it’s constant.” And Francis isn’t preaching about the metaphorical devil of temptation and evil and bad decisions, but a supernatural entity engaged in guerrilla warfare against the church and the faithful. As the bishop observes, “had Pope Benedict done this, the media would have clobbered him.”</p> <p>One result of this emphasis on the devil is a new respect for exorcists. Last week the Vatican hosted its largest convention on exorcism, which Faiola attended; it was the first time media have been allowed into such a conference. The story is full of rich details and observations, and you should <a href="">read the whole thing</a>. Here’s a teaser:</p> <blockquote> During the conference, the Rev. Cesar Truqui, an exorcist based in Switzerland, recounted one experience he had aboard a Swissair flight. “Two lesbians,” he said, had sat behind him on the plane. Soon afterward, he said, he felt Satan’s presence. As he silently sought to repel the evil spirit through prayer, one of the women, he said, began growling demonically and threw chocolates at his head. </blockquote> <blockquote> Asked how he knew the woman was possessed, he said that “once you hear a Satanic growl, you never forget it. It’s like smelling Margherita pizza for the first time. It’s something you never forget.” </blockquote> <p>Faiola’s story gets even more dramatic, though—he witnessed a full, official exorcism, something involving five demons, a purple sash, and a lot of Latin. I talked to him about how he reported this respectful, insightful, revealing story. (The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)</p> <p><strong>In the </strong><a href=""><strong>photo gallery</strong></a><strong> that ran online in the <em>Post</em> to accompany your story, it looked like there were a lot of young people at the exorcism conference.</strong></p> <p><strong>Anthony Faiola:</strong> We found that a lot of young priests, especially from Africa and Latin America, are interested in pursuing vocations in exorcism. They’re not officially exorcists yet, but most had some observational experience with exorcisms that had happened in their dioceses.&nbsp;</p> <p>It’s an incredibly hard thing in the Catholic Church to get an appointment as an exorcist. Some bishops out there officially buy into exorcism but unofficially don’t. The “ordinary,” the bishop or governing authority, has to appoint one, otherwise the exorcist can’t be considered official. What these guys are hoping to do is to break into the field. There are only about 500 to 600 exorcists worldwide, which seems to be a startlingly low number given how large the church is. But some dioceses are really upping their number, ostensibly because the bishops are seeing high demand—more people insist that they are possessed.</p> <p><strong>The lesbian detail in the Cesar Truqui story seems significant. Was there much talk of gays and lesbians at the conference?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> No. I had not heard others speak in that way. It was just an odd thing to pick out: How could he possibly know? He didn’t say whether or not they kissed or were holding hands. But he suggested they had pronounced themselves as being gay. This was in the middle of a talk, one of the lectures at the conference.</p> <p><strong>Did he say how the story ended? Did he cast out their demons?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> If I remember correctly, at some point in the flight, he stood up, looked at them, and they both looked at him with a look that he felt indicated they had been reading his mind. That was how he was communicating with them. He sensed a malevolent force and started praying—prayers for liberation, used to fight off demons—when he got chocolate thrown at him.</p> <p>At some point, he seemed to suggest, the confrontation stopped. On an enclosed airplane, there was only so much he could do. In addition, he wouldn’t have been able to do an exorcism on a plane at random. Exorcisms have to be sanctioned by a diocese. He couldn’t spring into action; he had to do a minimal level of prayer.</p> <p>It’s interesting: There are scales of prayers. Some prayers are considered outright exorcisms, others are used to ward off evil spirits in a less direct way. He was using one of those lower-grade prayers.</p> <p><strong>How did you get permission to witness the exorcism?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> It took some negotiating to see the exorcism itself, to get sanctioned to go see it. The exorcist has to get various permissions. Father Amorth is so senior that he takes it upon itself to make these decisions. He’s been press-friendly in the past.</p> <p>Stefano Pitrelli, an Italian journalist who helps us out in Rome, arranged our&nbsp;first meeting with&nbsp;Father Amorth. He&nbsp;accompanied me throughout the process and&nbsp;was&nbsp;really a huge help in getting access to the&nbsp;exorcism.</p> <p><strong>Has a reporter ever witnessed an exorcism before?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> I wasn’t able to find any other journalist who had done it before. I’ve been talking to Italian journalists who were shocked that we had actually been able to get permission to do it.</p> <p>Apparently there was one Spanish film crew that pretended to be members of the church who wanted to help out and filmed one. That was a big burn for a lot of exorcists. Most of them are just not very media friendly, with the exception of Amorth. They’re afraid of being mocked, and they’re just a little cautious.</p> <p>We had to get permission from the woman before the priest would allow us to observe the exorcism. She gave permission as long as we agreed to use her first name only and not cite her age or other details. She has two little kids.</p> <p><strong>What was it like to witness an exorcism?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF: </strong>When we walked into the room, the priest was consoling her in the corner of this converted kitchen where all sorts of images of Mary and Jesus Christ were strung up. I didn’t get the feeling that the woman was uneasy because of our presence there. There were a couple of other observers in the room who were somehow associated with the priest and three helpers with him that day.</p> <p>It’s a bit surreal: At one moment he’s chanting in Latin, and the helpers are saying rounds of Ave Maria, so you’ve got an odd vocalization happening in the room.</p> <p>The woman was quiet for five minutes before there were any signs of metamorphosis. Then she started grunting, burping, coughing up phlegm, and her characteristics became more what you would expect in a movie. He started making the sign of a cross, and she was physically repelled from his touch. She was obviously made uncomfortable by any religious gestures. That’s when the drama really escalated: The priest asked, “What is your name?” calling the demons out. Making it answer questions is supposed to be a sign of the devil’s submission to the priest’s authority. He got the name Asmodeus. In the world of exorcism, there is only one Satan but many lesser demons.</p> <p>The priest asks several really arcane questions. His voice starts escalating, his gestures become more dramatic and reach some sort of a climax. She looked like she was ready to vomit. Gradually she regressed and came out of her trancelike state. The whole thing took about 40 minutes.</p> <p><strong>Apparently she’s been participating in exorcisms for years?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> I used to think exorcisms were just a one-shot deal, but they’re not at all. Apparently it takes years for these cleansings to happen. She said she started coming to the priest four years ago, when she was in the throes of her most violent stages. They told us it would take two or three men to hold her down. She was provoked by someone praying for her, or a church, or a religious object. Over four years, she has not been cleansed, not yet. But the demons have been greatly weakened, as they put it, so their power to influence her, in their minds, has weakened.</p> <p><strong>Whatever works, I guess?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> There would be critics who say she needs serious psychiatric help. She insists she has had that, but I can’t estimate how serious those evaluations really were. She also said that it took her a while to get permission to go to the exorcist, which goes back to the fact that not every bishop in the church embraces exorcism.</p> <p><strong>How do you follow up a story like this?</strong></p> <p><strong>AF:</strong> I’ve been with the paper for 20 years, and this is probably my most bizarre assignment.</p> Mon, 12 May 2014 18:24:19 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-05-12T18:24:19Z How Pope Francis and the Vatican deal with the devil. Life The Catholic Church’s New Respect for and Openness About Exorcism 100140512008 pope francis catholic church religion exorcism Laura Helmuth Faith-based false false false The Catholic Church’s new respect for exorcism. Conversation with @Anthony_Faiola by @laurahelmuth The Catholic Church’s New Respect for and Openness About Exorcism Photo By Marco Di Lauro/Reportage by Getty Images for the Washington Post Participants of the Exorcism and Prayer of Liberation annual conference at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome on May 5, 2014. Here's How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink <p>Oh, Portland. A teenager urinated into one of the city’s drinking water reservoirs the other day. That’s gross, sure, and aggravating—what a brat! But in one of the most spectacularly stupid decisions in years, the city is going to <a href="">drain the reservoir</a>. The most spectacularly stupid decision in about three years, anyway—if this sounds familiar, that’s because <a href="">Portland did the same thing in 2011</a>.</p> <p>The decision seems to be based on some combination of <a href="">chemophobia</a>, <a href="">homeopathy</a>, and pee shame. The <a href="">dose makes the poison</a>, and clearly this dose is negligible. But is it possible to calculate precisely how illogical Portland’s decision is? Let’s try to put some numbers on it.</p> <p>Several <a href="">smart people on Twitter</a> quickly did the math and figured that a typical urination of about 1/8 gallon in a reservoir of 38 million gallons amounts to a concentration of 3 parts per billion. That’s billion with a <em>b</em>. For comparison, the Environmental Protection Agency’s limit for arsenic in drinking water—arsenic!—is 10 ppb.</p> <p>The EPA doesn’t appear to have a limit for urine in drinking water, but it does limit <a href="">nitrates in drinking</a> water to 10,000 ppb, and urine does contain a lot of nitrogen, so let’s use that as a proxy.</p> <p>How many times would that teenager have to pee in a Portland reservoir to produce a urine concentration approaching the EPA’s limit for nitrates in drinking water? About 3,333 times.</p> <p>But of course urine is 95 percent water. (If you’re ever trapped in rubble after a natural disaster, go ahead and <a href="">drink it</a>.) Only about 2 percent of urine is nitrogen-rich urea. That means he’d have to urinate 166,666 times for the concentration of urea to approach that of the EPA’s limit for nitrates in drinking water.</p> <p>Since most animals, including idiot teenaged show-offs, take about 21 seconds to urinate, that means he’d have to urinate constantly for 3,500,000 seconds, or about 40 days. Hopefully, he’d have friends constantly supplying him with <a href="">tasty Portland microbrews</a>.</p> <p>Needless to say, this doesn’t take into account the fact that the resulting 1.3 million gallons of urine, which again is 95 percent water, would raise the volume of the reservoir. So add another day or two of peeing to <em>really </em>make the water unsafe to drink.</p> <p>Draining the reservoir is paranoid, illogical, and expensive. But the most frustrating thing to me about the whole episode is that there is actually something Portland could do to its water supply that would have an immediate, positive, and repeatedly scientifically validated impact on public health: <a href="">Add fluoride</a>. Paranoia is not healthy.</p> Fri, 18 Apr 2014 01:44:43 GMT Laura Helmuth 2014-04-18T01:44:43Z briefing Here's How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink 227140417010 skepticism Laura Helmuth The Slatest The Slatest false false false Just how long would you have to pee to poison Portland’s reservoir? By @laurahelmuth Here's How Long That Teen Would Have to Pee in the Portland Reservoir to Make It Unsafe to Drink Photo by PORNCHAI KITTIWONGSAKUL/AFP/Getty Images Calm down, Portland. You're going to be fine. Animals of the Year <p>We here at <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> tend to have strong opinions about things, and that includes animals. Boss-man David Plotz is <a href="">opposed to pandas</a>. Technology columnist Farhad Manjoo would like you to <a href="">get your dog out of his face</a>. And I say <a href="">lock up your cats</a>, because they are ecologically evil. We defend <a href="">brown recluse spiders</a> and <a href="">condemn dolphins</a>. Controversial opinions aside, some of our loveliest, funniest, and most surprising stories this year have been about animals. We ran a special issue in February about how various species are <a href="">likely to fare as the climate changes</a>, and we launched a new blog called <a href="">Wild Things</a>. Here, in no particular order, are some of our favorite animals stories of the year.</p> <p><strong>1.</strong> “<a href="">What the State Birds<em> Should</em> Be</a>”<em><br /> By Nicholas Lund, May 17</em><br /> Seven cardinals are on the list of state birds—but no hawks? Come on, states. Here’s how you can do better.</p> <p><strong>2.</strong> “<a href="">The Worst Marine Invasion Ever</a>”<em><br /> By Christie Wilcox, July 1</em><br /> A marine biologist could not believe what she found inside a lionfish.</p> <p><strong>3.</strong> “<a href="">The Great ‘Do Bears Hibernate?’ Debate</a>”<em><br /> By Jason Bittel, Feb. 15</em><br /> Their sleeping patterns are weird. Their sex is weirder.</p> <p><strong>4. </strong>“<a href="">Sea Otters Are Jerks. So Are Dolphins, Penguins, and Other Adorable Animals.</a>”<em><br /> By Brian Switek, Oct. 28</em><br /> It’s true—some of the cutest species engage in some of the most shocking behavior.</p> <p><strong>5.</strong> “<a href="">Don’t Call it a Monster</a>”<em><br /> By Constance Casey, April 26</em><br /> Gila monsters are venomous, have two penises, and can kill a man. But who are we to call them monsters?</p> <p><strong>6.</strong> “<a href="">No, Mermaids Do Not Exist</a>”<em><br /> By David Shiffman, May 30</em><br /> A marine biologist’s blood boils at Animal Planet’s fake documentary. Here’s what’s really cool about the ocean, and it doesn’t involve fake flippers.</p> <p><strong>7.</strong> “<a href="">Save the Ugly Animals!”</a><em><br /> By Sarah Zielinski, Nov. 20</em><br /> Conservation decisions are being driven by the desires of a bunch of toddlers. It’s time to stand up for Tasmanian devils and aye-ayes rather than cheetahs and pandas.</p> <p><strong>8.</strong> “<a href="">No, I Do Not Want to Pet Your Dog</a>”<em><br /> By Farhad Manjoo, May 9</em><br /> They’re in our gyms, offices, and cafes. It’s time to take America back from the slobbering, sniffing, snapping beasts.</p> <p><strong>9.</strong> “<a href="">Penguins Investigate Antarctica’s Artist-in-Residence</a>”<em><br /> By Jynne Dilling Martin, Dec. 12</em><br /> The National Science Foundation sent a poet to Antarctica, and she’s sending back the most delightful <a href="">dispatches</a>. There’s pretty much nothing more adorable than a googly-eyed penguin, especially when it’s tugging on your shoelaces.</p> <p><strong>10.</strong> “<a href="">Namibia’s Most Fascinating Wildlife</a>”<em><br /> By Mark Vanhoenacker, Feb. 13</em><br /> Forget the cheetahs, giraffes, and rhinos. Behold the armored ground cricket.</p> <p><strong>11.</strong> “<a href="">Swimming in Sperm and Eggs</a>”<em><br /> By Michelle Nijhuis, Feb. 26</em><br /> Coral sex is explosive, exquisitely timed, and really funky.</p> <p><strong>12.</strong> “<a href="">Fishing With Dolphins</a>”<em><br /> By Joe Roman, Jan. 31</em><br /> It’s not a myth—fishermen and dolphins really do cooperate to catch fish off a beach in Brazil.</p> <p><strong>13.</strong> “<a href="">Do Animals Know When They Are Dying?</a>”<em><br /> By Jessica Winter, Nov. 4</em><br /> The most touching story you will ever read about a sick cat.</p> <p><strong>14.</strong> “<a href="">Everything You Wanted to Know About Quokkas, Courtesy of a Quokka</a>”<em><br /> By Katy Waldman, Feb. 6</em><br /> Is this the world’s most adorable creature? Yes. The answer is yes.</p> <p><em><strong>*Update, Dec. 23, 2013:</strong> We forgot our friend the Florida panther. Sneaky Florida panther!</em> </p> <p><strong>15.</strong> &quot;<a href="">Heroic Measures to Save Florida's Panthers, Including Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation</a>&quot;<br /> <em>By Craig Pittman, July 17</em><br /> Conservation biologists hatched a desperate plan to save Florida's panthers—but what about their habitat?</p> Mon, 23 Dec 2013 15:34:42 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-12-23T15:34:42Z <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s best stories about other species. Health and Science <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s Best Animal Stories of the Year 100131223002 best of 2013 Laura Helmuth Science false false false Our favorite animal stories of the year. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s Best Animal Stories of the Year Photo courtesy Michael L. Baird/Flickr A sea otter swims in Morro Bay, Calif., in November 2010. Watch Francis Collins Lunge for the Nobel Prize <p>One of the juiciest, most heated, and ultimately <a href="">most productive rivalries</a> in the recent history of science was the race to sequence the human genome. On one side was a methodical, massive, publicly funded international project managed by the National Institutes of Health. On the other side was a lean, speedy, profit-driven company run by a brash scientist who came up with a method for sequencing DNA that ran circles around the NIH technique. The public consortium, led by Francis Collins, now head of the National Institutes of Health, criticized the company, Celera, for trying to turn a profit off the genome. <a href="">J. Craig Venter</a>, who ran Celera, had quit the public effort in frustration at its slow pace. His company’s slogan was “Speed Matters.” Members of the two teams <em>despised</em> one another. It was delicious.</p> <p><a href="">Self-interest trumped rivalry</a> for a <a href="">brief time</a> in June 2000, when the two teams called a truce and shook hands at a White House ceremony. They announced that they each had a working draft of the human genome and would soon publish their independent sequence maps jointly and reveal what they had discovered about life’s code.</p> <p>The peace ended a <a href="">few weeks later</a> as they raced to piece together their sequences. The public consortium tried to prevent <em>Science</em> from publishing Celera’s genome over questions of how the data would be made available. (Disclosure: I worked for <em>Science</em>’s news department at the time.) And its scientists spent the days leading up to publication telling science reporters that Celera’s method <a href="">had failed</a>. (It <a href="">hadn’t</a>.)</p> <p>After an exhausting final sprint by thousands of scientists, the two sequences of the human genome were revealed to the world on Feb. 12, 2001, to great acclaim, in <em>Science</em> and <a href=""><em>Nature</em></a> (themselves archrivals). There were press conferences and celebrations and headlines around the world. The <em>New York Times</em> said the publications opened “<a href=";msgnum=677&amp;batchsize=10&amp;batchtype=Next">a new era in human biology and medicine</a>.” Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the public consortium, said, “We are standing at an <a href="">extraordinary moment in scientific history</a>. It's as though we have climbed to the top of the Himalayas. We can for the first time see the breathtaking vista of the human genome.” Collins wrote that “the publications in February 2001 carried with them the kind of <a href="">satisfying scientific significance</a> that laborers in the genome fields had longed for.” He told <em>Science</em>, “There’s a long list of things that blew my socks off,” such as the unexpectedly low number of genes. Venter, still reeling over the concerted effort to discredit his genome, told the <a href=";src=pm"><em>New York Times</em></a>, “If we weren't resistant and somewhat defiant this never would have gotten done,” and Don Kennedy, editor of <em>Science</em>, told the paper, “There is no doubt the world is getting [the human genome sequence] well before it otherwise would have if Venter had not entered the race.”</p> <p>The genome sequences were accompanied in <em>Science</em> and <em>Nature</em> by <a href="">dozens of analysis papers each from the two teams</a>, wall-size posters of human chromosomes with their genetic sequences spelled out, timelines, and CD-ROMs. Scientists celebrated with Champagne, teary speeches, and blowout parties, including one at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Francis Collins was there: He performed onstage with his band. (They were called <a href="">the Directors</a> because the band members all directed NIH divisions, and everybody played lead guitar.) <em>That date, again, was February 2001.</em></p> <p>So why in the world are the National Institutes of Health and the Smithsonian Institution <a href="">celebrating the 10<sup>th</sup> anniversary</a> of the sequencing of the human genome <em>this year</em>?</p> <p>They didn’t miss a deadline or mess up the math. By designating 2003 as the year the genome was sequenced, the NIH is still fighting against Celera. It’s laying exclusive claim for credit and trying to push its rival out of the history books. It’s trying to give the leaders of the public consortium an edge in the battle for the inevitable Nobel Prize.The Celera genome paper had more than 200 authors, and the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium’s paper listed more than 300, from 25 institutions. The Nobel Prize can be split only three ways.</p> <p>In 2001 both teams clearly acknowledged that their sequences were first drafts. The maps had some gaps and fuzzy bits, but the main structure was known. Scientists could tally genes and place them in the correct positions on chromosomes. The two teams proved that their techniques for assembling 3 billion base pairs could work. They compared the human genomes with the genomes of other species. (We’re much more mouselike than anyone anticipated.)</p> <p>After the dueling sequences were published, Celera <a href="">shifted its focus from genome sequencing</a> to drug development. The public consortium spiffed up its sequence and published the “complete” human genome in <em>Nature</em> in April 2003. This publication didn’t get a lot of attention, and it didn’t make major changes to the analyses from 2001.</p> <p>I asked the National Human Genome Research Institute why it celebrated 2003 rather than 2001, and a spokesman replied (emphasis mine): “This is because 2003 marked the final release of the genome sequence, and the research the institute does now is widely based off of it. You’re right by saying that the <strong>2001 papers were extremely important and groundbreaking</strong>, but 2003 marks the year that the Human Genome Project was completed and the <em>completed </em>genome sequence was released. There was still <strong>a little more research to be done to complete the sequence</strong> after the 2001 sequence was released.”</p> <p>The NIH has been hosting anniversary events all year, but the most galling anniversary claim is made in an exhibit that opened this year at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the second-most-visited museum in the world. (Dang that Louvre.) It’s called “Genome: Unlocking Life’s Code,” and the <a href="">promotional materials claim</a>, “It took nearly a decade, three billion dollars, and thousands of scientists to sequence the human genome in 2003.” (Disclosure: I worked for <em>Smithsonian</em> magazine while the exhibition, produced in partnership with the NIH, was being planned, and I consulted very informally with the curators. That is, we had lunch and I warned them they were being played.) To be clear, I’m delighted that the Smithsonian has an exhibit on the human genome. And I’m a huge fan of the NIH. (To its credit, the NIH did host an <a href="">anniversary symposium in 2011</a>.) But the Smithsonian exhibit enshrines the 2003 date in the country’s museum of record and minimizes the great drama and triumph of 2001.</p> <p>Celebrating 2003 rather than 2001 as the most important date in the sequencing of the human genome is like celebrating the anniversary of the final Apollo mission rather than the first one to land on the moon. Just this once, don’t listen to the NIH. Remember the thrills and rivalries and breathtaking accomplishments of 2001. And happy 12<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome.</p> Wed, 30 Oct 2013 18:14:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-10-30T18:14:00Z An underhanded attempt by the National Institutes of Health to claim full credit for sequencing the human genome. Health and Science Francis Collins and the NIH’s Scandalous Attempt to Claim Full Credit for Sequencing the Human Genome 100131030012 genetics big questions Laura Helmuth Human Genome false false false Francis Collins and the NIH’s Scandalous Attempt to Claim Full Credit for Sequencing the Human Genome Francis Collins and the NIH’s Scandalous Attempt to Claim Full Credit for Sequencing the Human Genome 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2784657102001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2784657102001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2784657102001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2784657102001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2784657102001 Photo & photo illustration by Slate Sorry, National Institutes of Health: 2001 isn't 2003. Don’t Be a Creep <p>I take back every bad thing I have ever said about Twitter. It’s fast, responsive, and efficient, and it’s the medium of record when gossip breaks. Like pretty much every other science journalist in the world, I’ve been glued to Twitter for the past several days. <a></a>It all started when a biologist named Danielle Lee, who writes a blog called the <a href="">Urban Scientist</a>, tweeted that some minor-league editor had called her an “<a href="">urban whore</a>.”<a>*</a> Really, that is what he called her. To show support for her, people started renaming their own blogs with the word <em>whore </em>using a <a href=";src=typd">#WhoreItUp</a> hashtag. The insult was infuriating and the response heartening, but things got more serious when <em>Scientific American</em> <a href="">removed Lee’s blog post</a> about the exchange. The magazine issued a <a href="">misleading explanation</a>, then <a href="">an apology</a>, then it finally <a href="">reposted her story</a> with a not entirely satisfying update.</p> <p>Then it got better. I mean, sorry, it got worse—what follows is all terrible and sad. But it’s also fascinating and useful to examine. A writer named Monica Byrne <a href="">wrote on her blog about being harassed</a> by one of the most influential people in the science blogging world, Bora Zivkovic. He founded an <a href="">extremely popular conference</a> for science bloggers, established science blog networks at various publications, and now (at least <a href="">as I write</a>) runs the well-respected collection of <a href="">blogs at <em>Scientific American</em></a>. His nickname is the Blogfather. One common route into a science writing career in the past several years has been through Zivkovic: He routinely publishes young writers and promotes their stories with his <a href="">large social media audience</a>. Zivkovic has always been extremely solicitous of young journalists, generous with his time, charming, enthusiastic, gregarious. A Twitter meme popped up at science blogging conferences: #IHuggedBora.</p> <p>Zivkovic has a lot of friends, and after Byrne’s story went public, many of them expressed support for him, and others questioned Byrne’s <a href="">decision to name him</a>.</p> <p>Zivkovic admitted to the incident, <a href="">apologized</a>, and said it was not “behavior that I have engaged in before or since.”</p> <p>Only apparently it was. Another science writer, Hannah Waters, then <a href="">described similar experiences</a>:</p> <blockquote> I saw him at various events and he began flirting a little. It didn’t ring any alarm bells; he is flirtatious by nature. But sometimes talk would veer into more uncomfortable territory, but only vaguely uncomfortable, which made it hard to call out. He would talk about how he gets to hang out with so many smart, beautiful women for his job (as if we should be flattered), make offhand comments about his own sex life, and occasionally tell me that he loved me. Once, while the two of us were outside Ninth Ward in New York City at a science tweetup, he bought a flower for his wife, who was inside. The seller gave him an extra for free, which he gave to me, joking that I was his “concubine.” I didn’t even know how to respond, awkwardly laughing it off, but fled the scene without goodbyes soon after. “I just want to call him out when he makes any kind of offhand comment,” I wrote to my best friend later. “But what I could lose by doing so is too great, so it’s really just degrading.” </blockquote> <p>Waters and Byrne were careful to be precise and not exaggerate what happened to them, which is that they felt very uncomfortable when their conversations with one of the most powerful people in their profession turned sexual. They weren’t raped or groped, and they suffered no obvious career setbacks by failing to take Zivkovic up on what they perceived as the implicit request for sex. But they felt lousy and confused. Here’s what I found most distressing in Waters’ post: “At my most insecure moments, I still come back to this: Have I made it this far, not based on my work and worth, but on my value as a sexual object? When am I going to be found out?”</p> <p>I told Waters directly and repeat here that she and Byrne are talented writers who are not faking it. But of course they wonder about how their career trajectories will be perceived, and I’m sure many other people who have gotten a break or a boost from Zivkovic have the same nagging worries.</p> <p>Here’s how the score stands after several days of turmoil. The racist and sexist blog editor who called Lee an urban whore <a href="">has been fired</a>. Lee is blogging away and working on a feature story related to the ordeal. Zivkovic has <a href="">apologized on Twitter to Byrne and Waters</a> and <a href="">resigned from the board</a> of the conference he helped found. Byrne and Waters are getting a deluge of positive responses. Scores of science bloggers are writing powerful stories (many of them published by <em>Scientific American</em>) about <a href="">harassment</a>, <a href="">microaggression</a>, <a href="">sexism</a>, and <a href="">racism</a>. The whole extended episode has made the community more aware of the problems of harassment and more welcoming to people who call out inappropriate behavior. It’s been an amazing consciousness-raising session, and the science writing world is stronger for it.</p> <p>What lessons can the rest of the world learn from the small corner of creation that participates in science blogging? I mean, what the hell just happened?</p> <p>Zivkovic clearly creeped out at least two and probably more women, so he is by definition creepy. At the most reprehensible end of the spectrum of possible explanations, Zivkovic is a predator who surrounded himself with inexperienced women because he considered them easy prey. Or perhaps he has some mental health problems with impulse control. But there’s a chance he was just extremely optimistic about his chances, <a href="">blind to the power differential</a>, and unaware of why so many young women wanted to have coffee with him in the first place. If so, he is still entirely at fault. These explanations aren’t exhaustive or even mutually exclusive, but the last scenario is something we can potentially learn from.</p> <p>Before this week, the word I often heard people use to describe Zivkovic was <em>mentor</em>. And the mentor-mentee relationship is one of the most fraught of adulthood. We glibly advise people starting out in business to find a mentor, to identify a successful, established, generous person in your field and somehow get her to help you become her.</p> <p>This is <em>terrible</em> advice. It perpetuates old-boy networks, wastes time that early career people could spend actually doing their work, and tells them they are only as good as their contacts and charm. Young people, don’t look for a mentor. Listen to and learn from people who have more experience, but don’t hitch your wagon to their star. Just do your job well.</p> <p>Now, you established people, listen up. You will occasionally meet younger people who go out of their way to speak with you at professional events, ask you interesting and sometimes personal questions, and hang on your every word. Those are not puppy-dog, crushed-out eyes staring up at you. These are eyes hungry for a professional break. These people are not trying to sleep with you. They are trying to get hired by you.</p> <p>I’m an editor, which means I have a certain amount of power because I assign stories to freelance writers. Several years ago I noticed that handsome young male freelancers tended to gather around me at journalism conferences and laugh at all my jokes. And I’m not <em>that</em> funny.</p> <p>It can be hard to tell the difference between flirtation and exuberance. The men and the women who approach me are doing exactly what they should do at a professional meeting: introducing themselves, expressing enthusiasm for what I do, asking questions, making clever conversation. They are looking for guidance, not lechery. It’s my job to interpret their behavior correctly. (The gender roles are usually reversed, which often adds to the problem, but plenty of men, including a dear younger friend of mine, have been harassed by women.)</p> <p>If you are established in your career and in a position to help others, congratulations. Be as generous as you can be, and while you’re at it, remember to thank the people who helped you. But recognize that you have a tremendous responsibility to take your mentees seriously. It’s easy to forget how insecure and uninformed someone can be starting out, and it’s hard to remember that you have a lot of power in comparison, even if you have just a few years more experience or feel like a cog yourself. Be respectful, be appropriate, be professional. Above all else, do not be a creep.</p> <p><em><strong><a></a>*Correction, Oct. 17, 2013:</strong> This article originally misstated Danielle Lee’s scientific specialty. (<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)<br /> </em></p> Thu, 17 Oct 2013 16:06:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-10-17T16:06:00Z Lessons from the latest terrible, sad, fascinating scandal in the science blogging world. Double X Don’t Be a Creep, and Other Lessons From the Latest Scandal in the Science Blogging World 100131017009 science media sexism Laura Helmuth Doublex false false false Don’t Be a Creep, and Other Lessons From the Latest Scandal in the Science Blogging World Don’t Be a Creep, and Other Lessons From the Latest Scandal in the Science Blogging World Photo by Fuse/Thinkstock No mentor necessary. Who Will Win a Nobel Prize? <p><em>The Nobel Prize in literature in 2013 was awarded to&nbsp;<a href="">Alice Munro</a>, who the Nobel committee called a &quot;master of the contemporary short story.&quot; Last year, <strong>Slate</strong> book editor Dan Kois picked her for a prize and said her &quot;work has evolved and grown in fascinating, boundary-shattering ways.&quot; The original Oct. 3, 2012, story about our Nobel predictions is below.</em></p> <p>We’re coming up on the most wonderful time of the year for science fans: Nobel Prize week. Science makes it to the front pages only a few times annually: when <a href=";src=pm">cancer research gets hyped</a>, when a <a href="">panda cub is born</a> (and then <a href="">dies</a>), or when a natural disaster <a href="">kills many thousands of people</a> in the developing world or <a href="">tumbles chimneys</a> in a major media market. But starting this Monday, we’re going to read about amazing breakthroughs in biology, physics, and chemistry. They’ll be followed by those lesser Nobels, in peace and literature, and the <a href="">faux Nobel</a> in economics, technically known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.</p> <p>As with <a href="">the Olympics</a>, it’s more fun to follow the competition if you know who the contenders are. And as with Olympic-level athletics, Nobel-level science has plenty of rivalries, scandals, and miscarriages of justice. The scientist who got a Nobel for the discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin <a href="">took credit for his student’s work</a>. Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle discovered that most <a href="">chemical elements were forged in dying stars</a>; only physicist Fowler was awarded a Nobel, possibly because of a bias against astronomers by the physics committee.* Two teams simultaneously discovered that our universe is not just expanding but <a href="">accelerating in its expansion</a>. There was a <a href=";keytype=ref&amp;siteid=sci">lot of tension between them</a> over who should get credit, which was <em>mostly</em> resolved last year when the Nobel committee settled the matter by picking its three laureates.</p> <p>A lot of the drama comes from the somewhat arbitrary decision by the Nobel Foundation that a maximum of three people can share most prizes (the Peace Prize can go to groups). As <em>Scientific American</em> points out, that’s <a href="">just not how science is done anymore</a>. Given the three-person rule, though, it’s fun to watch, from a safe distance, as scientists in a crowded field engage in fevered one-upmanship. Researchers from the two teams that sequenced the human genome haven’t said a kind word about one another since Bill Clinton <a href="">hauled them to the White House</a> to celebrate the achievement.<strong></strong></p> <p>So who are the top contenders? <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> polled some smart people who follow these things and asked them what we should watch for this year. Here are our tips (you can still <a href="">place your bets</a>), in the order in which the prizes will be announced: medicine, physics, chemistry, peace, economics, and literature.</p> <p><strong>The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine</strong></p> <p><strong><em>Update, Oct. 8: </em></strong><em>The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for their work on turning mature cells into stem cells. <strong>Slate</strong>’s health care columnist Darshak Sanghavi and Science magazine editor John Travis both predicted Yamanaka’s win. </em><strong><br /> </strong></p> <p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em>’s health care columnist </em><a href=""><em>Darshak Sanghavi</em></a><em>, chief of pediatric cardiology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School:</em></p> <p>Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan for discovering in 2007 that normal human cells have a set of four genetic switches that allow the creation of <a href="">pluripotent stem cells</a>. Though challenges remain, this discovery paves the way for scientists to <a href=",9171,1632740,00.html">create personalized stem cells</a> from anyone and then program them to form any type of cell in the body.</p> <p>For my off-the-beaten-path long shot, I'd like to see a prize for Donald Berwick, the pediatrician and founder of the <a href="">Institute for Healthcare Improvement</a>. He applied principles of industrial quality and efficiency for the first time on a large scale to medical care, and in the process he focused on improving the terrible systematic defects in medical care that cost thousands of lives each year across the world.</p> <p>His prize might be shared with Lucian Leape, the author of the Institute of Medicine report, “<a href="">To Err Is Human</a>,” which identified the massive costs and problems of medical errors and inadequate delivery of medical care.</p> <p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em> contributor </em><a href=""><em>Vaughan Bell</em></a><em>, a clinical and research psychologist at King’s College London:</em></p> <p>Some of the folks associated with <a href="">optogenetics</a> would be at the top of my list.</p> <p><a href=""><em>John Travis</em></a><em>, an editor for </em>Science<em> magazine’s news department who covers molecular and cell biology:</em></p> <p>I’m notoriously bad at conjuring up who might win, and one has to think back five to 10 years ago given the normal time lag. Here is my pure speculation.</p> <p>Shinya Yamanaka for <a href="">induced pluripotent stem cells</a> is the obvious choice, but the work may be too recent. I wonder if they might add Jamie Thomson for <a href="">embryonic stem cells</a> and even John Gearhart for <a href="">embryonic germ cells</a> for a stem cell trio.</p> <p>Thomas Starzl is a decent possibility for his work on <a href="">organ transplants and rejection</a>. He just won the Lasker Prize this year.&nbsp;They did give a <a href="">Nobel on the topic already</a>, which might hurt his chances.</p> <p>I think Jeff Gordon may eventually win a <a href="">Nobel for the microbiome</a>, but a colleague here says it's too soon—that the microbiome hasn't proven its medical worth yet.</p> <p><strong>The Nobel Prize in Physics</strong></p> <p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em> contributor </em><a href=""><em>Charles Seife</em></a><em>, a journalism professor at New York University:</em></p> <p>We have to get one thing out of the way first. It's not going to be <a href="">for the Higgs</a>. It's too early. Even if the Higgs evidence from CERN was hammer-hitting-you-on-the-head conclusive (which it isn't), it would be a few years before the Nobel committee would likely award a prize.</p> <p>For me, the big news in physics in the past 15 years comes from cosmology. A large set of new observations confirmed a number of big predictions about the way we thought the universe worked—and revealed a whole bunch of things that we didn't expect at all. For example, <a href="">last year's Nobel</a> went to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess; they studied ultradistant supernovae, and by looking at how fast those exploding stars were receding into the distance, they discovered that the universe is full of &quot;dark energy,&quot; a mysterious force that is forcing the universe to expand ever faster. I think this is just the beginning of a new rush of cosmology Nobels.</p> <p>The single person I most want to win the Nobel is Jim Peebles at Princeton University. He was part of the team that <a href="">predicted the cosmic microwave background</a>—the leftover glow from the hot, young universe shortly after the Big Bang. In the early 1970s, along with Jerry Ostriker, Peebles ran some computer simulations that strongly implied that galaxies would fly apart without something else, some unseen ingredient, to bind the galaxy together more strongly. We now call that ingredient &quot;dark matter.&quot; However, I predict that the <a href="">long-overdue dark matter Nobel</a> will go to a very deserving Vera Rubin and other experimentalists. What I think <em>should</em> win Peebles the Nobel Prize is that he, along with a number of other scientists (Edward Harrison, Yakov Zel'dovich, and J. T. Yu) made a very specific prediction about how the cosmic microwave background—which is incredibly uniform—would show tiny little hot and cold spots of certain sizes once we looked hard enough. Sure enough, in the past decade, their prediction has been confirmed by a number of experiments. (<a href="">Such as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, or WMAP</a>—which may eventually yield a Nobel for Charles Bennett, David Spergel, and Lyman Page.) Also worthy of mention are Rainier Sachs and Arthur Wolfe, who made a somewhat different (and also recently confirmed) prediction about how <a href="">dark matter distorts the cosmic microwave background</a>.</p> <p>Of course, there's a good dose of politics involved. If a candidate has pissed off enough of the wrong people, there's no way he'll win the Nobel, no matter how deserving. There is also Old World vs. New World politics: It'll be very interesting to see whether Geoff Marcy or Paul Butler get to share a Nobel with Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for the <a href="">discovery of extrasolar planets</a>.</p> <p>So what's on tap for this year? I don't think it will be cosmology, as last year's prize went to that field. The Nobel committee seems to want to rotate among the fields of physics, as well as giving prizes for practical inventions and the occasional nod to theorists.</p> <p>I think that it's high time that some of the work in quantum computation and quantum information theory gets a Nobel. Depending on how the committee divvies it up, it could go to any number of people, such as Ray Laflamme, Charles Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Chris Monroe, David Wineland, Seth Lloyd, Neil Gershenfeld, Ike Chuang, David Deutsch, and Peter Shor. (Shor, in particular, had two big insights that showed that it was both possible to build quantum computers and that they would be useful things to build.) Even more fundamental is Alain Aspect's gorgeous 1982 demonstration of quantum &quot;<a href="">spooky action at a distance</a>&quot;—he should definitely win the Nobel, perhaps sharing it with Anton Zeilinger, who's doing exquisite experiments that, among other things, probe the border between the quantum realm and the normal macroscopic world we're all familiar with.</p> <p>I think there will probably be some pressure to give the Nobel to someone in solid-state physics or cold condensed matter physics or perhaps an inventor of some practical device, but if I had to put my money on one person, I think I'd put it on Aspect.</p> <p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em> contributor </em><a href=""><em>Geoff Brumfiel</em></a><em>, a physics reporter for </em>Nature:</p> <p>The obvious story in physics this year has been the Higgs particle, but it seems unlikely that it will get a prize. For one thing, nominations began before this summer's announcement. For another, we're still not entirely sure what we've found. More data will be released next month and again in December. Without that additional data, it would be unusually daring of the Nobel committee to make an award for anything Higgsish.</p> <p>Of course, that doesn't rule out making an award to Higgs and others for the theoretical prediction of a Higgs particle, but that would create its own problems. Adrian Cho wrote that there are a number of <a href="">theorists who all predicted the Higgs</a> at the same time. Since the Nobel can only go to three, it has the potential to be controversial.</p> <p>The smart money here at <em>Nature</em> Towers is on specially structured materials that do cool stuff to light. As anyone who wears glasses knows, dense materials bend light. The denser the stuff, the more the bend, but it always goes in one direction (toward the &quot;normal,&quot; or a line perpendicular to the surface). Metamaterials are cleverly engineered structures that can bend light the opposite way, away from the normal. The most hyped use for them is &quot;cloaking&quot; objects from view, which, while theoretically possible, is probably too tough to be practical anytime soon. But metamaterials and the principles behind them are already finding use in electronics.</p> <p>The <a href="">father of the field</a> is a guy named John Pendry at Imperial College in London. He could end up sharing the prize with someone else who did clever things with structures—Thomas Ebbesen, for example, who found a way to <a href="">pass light through holes</a> far smaller than people thought was possible. It's called extraordinary optical transmission and has potential uses in data storage.</p> <p>The physics gurus over here also keep bringing up something called the Aharonov-Bohm and Berry Phases. These are complex quantum effects I only vaguely understand, so I'm praying it's not those.</p> <p><a href=""><em>Adrian Cho</em></a><em>, physics reporter for </em>Science<em>’s news department:</em></p> <p>In the past, I've been able to pick people who would win within the next few years, although never on the right year. For example, it was pretty clear that Ray Davis would get it for <a href="">measuring neutrinos from the sun</a> and&nbsp;that Kobayashi and Maskawa would win it for their <a href="">explanation of an asymmetry in particle physics that predicts three kinds of quarks</a>. And I did, in fact, ask researchers about both of these possibilities before these folks got the prize. In both those cases, there was an experimental development that made it seem more likely that they would win. I don't have a strong suspicion like that now—the Higgs thing isn't likely to hit this year because nominations closed in February.</p> <p>If I had to stick my neck out, I would guess Vera Rubin for <a href="">measuring galaxy rotation curves and inferring the presence of dark matter</a>. She really ought to win one of these years. Chuck Bennett for the WMAP satellite could win, but he may have to wait a while longer, especially as a cosmology finding won last year. Once you get into condensed matter physics, it's a lot harder to predict.</p> <p>There is also&nbsp;an idea that is so elegant it deserves the Nobel on those grounds alone—John Pendry's transformation optics, which is the theory behind cloaking. Basically, he started with the idea from general relativity that warped space-time can bend the path of light and then figured out a recipe for mimicking that bending by <a href="">tailoring the optical properties of a metamaterial</a> in unwarped space. The challenge is to actually achieve the spatially varying optical properties required by the mathematical transformation, which so far has been done only imperfectly. But the idea itself is so pretty, it's the kind of thing that makes a physicist's toes curl.</p> <p>Whatever it is, chances are that after it's given, it will seem like an obvious winner. That's usually the case.</p> <p><strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em> contributor </em><a href=""><em>Jennifer Ouellette</em></a><em>, </em><a href=""><em>science writer and blogger</em></a><em> at Cocktail Party Physics:</em></p> <p>I don't usually engage in the annual speculation or betting pools, but I do follow the discussions pretty closely.</p> <p>The discovery of the Higgs boson is by far the biggest physics news of the year, but it's probably premature to give it a Nobel. There was a time when the discovery of <em>any</em> new particle was cause for a Nobel Prize. That was also a time when one to three people could make the discoveries; such is no longer the case. The reason this might not win a Nobel Prize is because the prize is limited to three individuals, and thousands contributed to the discovery of the Higgs. That's not even counting all the theorists who first developed the notion—including but <a href="">not limited to Peter Higgs</a>. Expect this to be a contentious discussion wherever particle physicists are gathered: Who gets credit?</p> <p>Metamaterials have a&nbsp;negative index of refraction, akin to tossing a pebble in a pond and seeing the ripples move inward instead of outward. This sounds impossible, but it's not. Metamaterials have fascinating optical properties, needless to say, and expect to see them used in lenses, for advanced microscopy, and as cloaking mechanisms to make objects invisible—at least to radar, if not visible light. Those most commonly associated with it are Victor Veselago, John Pendry, David Smith, Xiang Zhang, Sheldon Schultz, and Ulf Leonhardt (who has also done interesting work on artificial black holes).&nbsp;</p> <p>Photonic crystals are found in nature: opals and butterfly wings are the best examples. But their unique structure makes them the equivalent in optics to semiconductors in electronics. They are tunable, i.e., they only allow light of certain energies to pass through them, and that makes them ideal for practical applications. The top contenders for the Nobel would be Eli Yablonovitch, Shawn Lin, John Joannopoulis, and possibly Sajeev John.&nbsp;</p> <p>Personally, I am rooting for Vera Rubin for&nbsp;<a href="">cold dark matter</a>, based on&nbsp;Fritz Zwicky's 1933 assertion&nbsp;that individual galaxies were moving so quickly that they should be able to escape from a galaxy cluster if visible mass was the only thing contributing to the cluster's gravitational pull. He proposed the existence of <a href="">dark matter</a> to account for the observational data.&nbsp;Rubin was one of the first to directly observe Zwicky's predicted effects in the rotation of spiral galaxies, and she'd likely share the prize with&nbsp;Marc Davis and Joel Primack. I would love to see Rubin&nbsp;<a href="">get some recognition for this work</a>;&nbsp;only two women have won the physics prize, Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.&nbsp;</p> <p>Who's going to actually win? It's always a bit of a crap shoot. But last year's was for the accelerating universe, and the year before that was for graphene (materials). So some of the more esoteric contenders in quantum information or quantum teleportation might be due. <strong></strong></p> <p><strong>The Nobel Prize in Chemistry</strong></p> <p><a href=""><em>Sam Lord</em></a><em>, postdoctoral chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and blogger at </em><a href=""><em>Everyday Scientist</em></a><em>:</em></p> <p>The line between chemistry and other fields (especially biology) is often blurred, and that's a wonderful thing; but this fact sometimes results in a chemistry Nobel Prize being awarded for a decidedly biological discovery (like the 2009 prize for <a href="">the structure of the ribosome</a>). This may be exacerbated by the fact that the physiology or medicine prize tends to go to things directly related to health, and the chemistry prize often is used to cover the more basic biological science feats. Personally, I think it is a testament to the central position the field of chemistry holds in the Venn diagram of science.</p> <p>My top prediction is for single-molecule spectroscopy. In 1989, W.E. Moerner at IBM (now at Stanford) was the first to use light (lasers) to perform measurements on single molecules. Before this, millions or trillions of molecules or more were measured together to detect an average signal. His amazingly difficult feat required ultrasensitive detection techniques, perfect samples, and temperatures just above absolute zero! A year later, Michel Orrit in France observed the fluorescent photons from a single molecule. With those early experiments, Moerner and others laid the experimental groundwork for imaging single molecules.</p> <p>Single-molecule spectroscopy and imaging has become a subfield unto itself. I performed my Ph.D. research in the Moerner lab, and I know firsthand that the technique reveals events that would otherwise be hidden in averages of &quot;bulk&quot; measurements. Biophysics, the field of understanding how cells and biomolecules operate on a physical level, is particularly aided because rare events can have major effects in biology. (Think of a single cell mutating and then dividing into a tumor.) For example, Sunney Xie at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (now at Harvard) performed the early work on how individual enzymes experience multiple states, which otherwise would be averaged away in a bulk experiment. More recently, imaging single molecules has been instrumental in novel &quot;super-resolution&quot; techniques that reveal structures in cells at tenfold higher resolution than ever available before. Several companies (Pacific Biosciences, Helicos, Illumina, Life Technologies) have either released or are developing products that use single-molecule imaging to sequence individual strands of DNA. My prediction is bolstered by others along the same vein. In 2008, Moerner <a href="">won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry</a>, which is often considered a harbinger for the Nobel. More importantly, <a href=""><em>The Simpsons</em> were betting on Moerner in 2010</a>. Of course, that was Milhouse's prediction, and maybe it's more reasonable to go with Lisa.</p> <p>My other prediction is for <a href="">biomolecular motors (aka molecular motors)</a>. These are proteins in cells that move important cargo around, and on a more practical level, make muscles contract. Ron Vale (now at University of California, San Francisco) and Michael Sheetz (now at Columbia) discovered kinesin, a protein that walks along tiny tubes and pulls cargo to different parts of the cell. This is supremely important because it would take far too long (months in some cases) for diffusion alone to bring nutrients and signaling molecules to all parts of the cell. (Interestingly, kinesin was discovered from the neurons of squids because they are extraordinarily long cells!) Jim Spudich (at Stanford), Sheetz, Vale, and others have developed many important techniques for studying the actions of these tiny machines. Spudich shared this year’s Lasker Award, which many see portending a Nobel, with Vale and Sheetz.</p> <p>It's hard not to allow hope to creep into almost anything we humans do, and I have clearly failed to prevent my own desires from influencing my predictions: I would be thrilled to see either of the above discoveries—<a href="">or any that I list on my blog</a>—win a prize. But there are many, many deserving scientists who have discovered amazing things and helped millions of people. Unfortunately, only a handful of these amazing individuals will be awarded the ultimate recognition in science. So it goes.</p> <p><a href=""><em>Paul Bracher</em></a><em>, a postdoctoral chemist at Caltech and blogger at ChemBark:</em></p> <p>Predicting a Nobel Prize in any given year is like trying to predict which film would win a super-Oscar for best picture over the last three decades: There’s a limited number of legitimate contenders, but any of them have a relatively small shot of winning. I arrive at my detailed set of odds using a complex, time-tested formula that is two-thirds educated guesswork, one-third gut instinct, and 100 percent likely to displease everyone with an opinion.</p> <p>If I were forced to make a single pick for this year’s prize in chemistry, I’d choose Pierre Chambon, Ronald Evans, and Elwood Jensen for their <a href="">discovery and investigation of nuclear hormone receptors</a>. These scientists were the leaders in figuring out how hormones such as estrogen can serve as chemical messengers to tweak our biochemistry by turning specific genes on and off. They discovered a superfamily of proteins that recognize the presence of hormones and accompany them to the nucleus of the cell, where genes are regulated. In this way, hormones can issue orders like “STORE MORE FAT!” to a cell, and we can alter the receptors or fool them with synthetic molecules to countermand these orders. How hormones turn genes on and off has profound implications for the treatment of diseases such as breast cancer, so these scientists could easily snag the Nobel in medicine rather than chemistry. The discovery has already been recognized by a number of pre-Nobel prizes, including a Lasker Award in 2004 and a Wolf Prize in 2012.&nbsp;</p> <p>My pick is certain to rankle the most hard core of chemists, because the discovery leans more toward molecular biology than pure chemistry. But there is no Nobel Prize in biology, and the Nobel committee seems to feel obligated to give them our prize every three years or so. As the last two prizes have gone to physical and organic chemistry, the biologists are probably due once again.</p> <p>That’s who I think <em>will</em> win the Nobel Prize—if not this year, then soon. If you want to know who I think <em>should</em> win the Nobel Prize, it is chemist Carl Djerassi for work leading to the <a href="">development of the birth control pill</a>. Starting with chemicals isolated from Mexican wild yams, Djerassi and his co-workers developed synthetic methods for the preparation of compounds that mimic the hormones responsible for regulating pregnancy. Although the invention of the pill had profound medical and sociological implications, I’ve <a href="">assigned relatively long odds to Djerassi</a> (at 99-1) because it is widely assumed that if the Nobel committee had wanted to recognize this discovery, it would have already done so. The work dates back to the 1950s!</p> <p><strong>The Nobel Peace Prize</strong></p> <p><a href=""><em>Will Dobson</em></a><em>, Slate’s politics and foreign affairs editor:</em><strong></strong></p> <p>Like anything, there are good peace prizes and bad peace prizes. The good ones recognize individuals or organizations that actually did something. Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi are prime examples. But sometimes the Nobel committee misses. It doesn't so much recognize people who are doing the heavy lifting as much as try to ride popular political&nbsp;currents. Whether you think Barack Obama deserved a Nobel Peace Prize—he obviously didn't—the first black U.S. president doesn't need a new piece of hardware for his trophy case.</p> <p>So, if the committee wants&nbsp;to be guided to where it could actually do some good, it should consider&nbsp;someone whose ideas or actions are actually bringing change. Near the top of that list should be Gene Sharp, the once obscure Harvard researcher whose lifelong study of dictatorship and strategic nonviolence has infected thousands across the globe.&nbsp;I can personally attest to the reach of&nbsp;Sharp's research. In one authoritarian capital after another,<a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0385533357&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">&nbsp;I saw dog-eared copies of Sharp's work</a> on the bookshelves of dissidents and human rights defenders.&nbsp;Modern authoritarians from Burma, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere denounce his work—because they fear&nbsp;it. His thin volume, <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1595588507&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>From Dictatorship to Democracy</em></a>, is considered required reading for those who are trying to upend tyranny, and&nbsp;it is getting read.&nbsp;The Nobel committee champions the notion of expanding peace. Who better than the man whose ideas have helped inspire peaceful democratic change&nbsp;in so many countries? That is, of&nbsp;course, if they want to hand out one of the good&nbsp;ones this year.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</p> <p><a href=""><em>June Thomas</em></a><em>, a <strong>Slate</strong> culture critic:</em></p> <p>My pick would be Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani human rights lawyer. She was <a href="">written about in</a> <em>The New Yorker</em> five years ago.</p> <p><a href=""><em>David Plotz</em></a><em>, <strong>Slate</strong>’s editor:</em></p> <p>Bill and Melinda Gates, for their work on malaria and vaccines.</p> <p><a href=""><em>Dan Engber</em></a><em>, a columnist for <strong>Slate</strong>:</em></p> <p>I’m fond of the <a href="">Ig Nobel</a> peace prize pick from some years back: Daisuke Inoue, inventor of karaoke. Here’s Inoue’s 2004 <a href="">acceptance speech</a>:</p> <p>Hello everyone. I am Daisuke Inoue. I am from Japan. I am the last samurai—but Tom Cruise couldn't come ... I am very happy to be here to be awarded the Ig Nobel peace prize. One time I had a dream to teach people to sing, so I invented karaoke. I didn't know it would be the start of something big. Now more than I ever, I want to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.</p> <p>Although there have been some cases of karaoke-related violence in the <a href="">Philippines</a> and the <a href="">United States</a>, so maybe that’s not such a good idea.</p> <p><strong>The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel</strong></p> <p><a href=""><em>Matt Yglesias</em></a><em>, <strong>Slate</strong>’s business and economics correspondent:</em></p> <p>None of the <a href="">folks who won last year</a> had ranked very highly in predictive surveys that I saw—which means there are some likely suspects left over. That includes Paul Romer and Robert Barro for work in growth theory (which hasn't gotten a Nobel in a long time now), Douglas Diamond for the basic model of bank runs and financial panics, and Jean Tirole (possibly in conjunction with Diamond), a leading game theorist who has also done important work in financial regulation.</p> <p>I'd love to see it go to William Baumol, who doesn't seem to rank highly in others' predictions. He has done the core work on why there's so little productivity growth in sectors like health care and education and what follows from that.</p> <p><strong>The Nobel Prize in Literature</strong></p> <p><em><a href="">Katy Waldman</a>, a <strong>Slate</strong> editorial assistant:</em></p> <p>In the poetry world, I would not be super surprised to see Lebanese poet Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) showered with glory. A lot of people were surprised when last year’s Nobel went to Tomas Transtr&ouml;mer instead. Adonis’ poems are steeped in Arab mythology but not dependent on it—and he’s experimented with nontraditional forms, too (prose poems, poems with shifting meters).</p> <p>Otherwise, I’m kind of rooting for Philip Roth! Although Joyce Carol Oates would be nice, too.</p> <p><a href=""><em>David Haglund</em></a><em>, the editor of <strong>Slate</strong>’s Brow Beat culture blog:</em></p> <p>At this time last year, the betting site Ladbrokes gave Swedish poet <a href="">Tomas Transtr&ouml;mer</a> 7-1 odds to win the Nobel Prize, second only to perennial also-ran Adonis. Granted, the odds aren't always nearly so predictive, but the top of the list does offer plausible choices again this year: Two Asian novelists, Haruki Murakami of Japan and Mo Yan of China, occupy the top spots. No Asian writer has won since Gao Xingjian in 2000, and it wouldn't surprise me if the Nobel committee looked East for this year's laureate. The place I wouldn't look to is Europe, where nearly all of the recent recipients have come from. My personal guess: Chinua Achebe, whose much-anticipated memoir has just come out in the United Kingdom. He's been touted as a possible winner for years, and since the Nobel only goes to living authors, the committee may be running out of time to honor him.</p> <p><a href=""><em>Dan Kois</em></a><em>, <strong>Slate</strong>’s books editor:</em></p> <p>Who's the frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature? If you ask the <a href="">lads at Ladbrokes</a>, it's Haruki Murakami, who's down for 5-1 odds, although Ladbrokes also gives credence to the chatter that pops up every year that the aging hippies on the prize committee might just give it to Bob Dylan. (For the record: No way.)&nbsp;From the list of other favorites I'd pluck Korean poet Ko Un and the puckish Chinese novelist Mo Yan as likely bets. But I'd be delighted if the prize went this year to one of two Canadian women whose work has evolved and grown in fascinating, boundary-shattering ways: Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. (Also, 500-1 for E.L. James seems way low.)</p> <p><em><strong>Correction, Oct. 4, 2012: </strong>This article stated that Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle discovered that most chemical elements were forged in dying stars, but only Hoyle was awarded a Nobel. Fowler, not Hoyle, received the prize.</em><br /> </p> Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:14:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-10-10T12:14:00Z Everything you need to know about the contenders, rivalries, scandals, and politics of the famous awards. Health and Science The Politics, Rivalries, and Sweet Science Behind the Nobel Prize Decisions 100121003019 nobel prize Laura Helmuth Science false false false The Politics, Rivalries, and Sweet Science Behind the Nobel Prize Decisions The Politics, Rivalries, and Sweet Science Behind the Nobel Prize Decisions Photo by Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images. The 2011 Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm Watch the Ig Nobel Prizes <p>It’s one of the most exciting nights of the year for fans of science, humor, and bizarre, unexpected, highly <em>improbable</em> research. Tonight, the 10 winners of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes will be announced. Who will they be? The suspense is killing me! Watch a live webcast here on <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href="">starting at 5:35</a>.</p> <p>For those who have never seen an Ig Nobel ceremony before, you’re in for a treat. One never knows what to expect, but the show will feature real Nobel Prize winners presenting prizes to their, um, peers. Past winners include researchers who studied <a href="">race-based cheese preferences</a>, brain activity in a <a href="">dead salmon</a>, injuries caused by <a href="">falling coconuts</a>, the <a href="">five-second rule</a> for judging the safety of food dropped on the floor, and homosexual necrophilia <a href="">in a mallard duck</a>. There will also be an opera: <em>The Blonsky Device</em>, celebrating 1999 winners George and Charlotte Blonsky, who invented a machine for “facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force.” <a href="">U.S. patent No. 3216423A</a>. For more about the Ig Nobels, read <a href="">master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams’</a> book <em>This Is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens, and Other WTF Research</em>.</p> <p><em><strong>Update, Sept. 13:</strong> This year’s Ig Nobel Prize in medicine goes to a team from Japan, China, and the United Kingdom that studied the effects of opera music on heart transplant patients. That are mice. Good news: Post-surgery, mice that listened to </em>La Traviata<em> </em><a href=""><em>lived longer</em></a><em>. The psychology prize goes to a team from France, the Netherlands, Poland, and the United States (Ig Nobel–worthy work requires big international teams) for a study of faux beer goggles. People who are drunk—or who merely think they are drunk—also think they are extra attractive. The </em><a href=""><em>prestigious physics prize</em></a><em> is awarded to a team from Italy, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Russia, and France, that calculated that people could walk on water, at least if the water is in a low-gravity environment such as the moon. </em></p> Thu, 12 Sep 2013 21:15:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-12T21:15:00Z Tonight is the weirdest night in science. Health and Science Watch the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, the Weirdest Night in Science 100130912015 science humor Laura Helmuth Science false false false Watch the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, the Weirdest Night in Science Watch the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, the Weirdest Night in Science Photo courtesy of Richard Baguley/Flickr The paper plane target at the 2012 Ig Nobel awards prepares to be bombarded. What Saved Your Life? <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's&nbsp;</em></strong><a href=""><strong><em>series on longevity</em></strong></a><strong><em>.<br /> <br /> </em></strong>At the beginning of this series of stories about why lifespan has doubled in the past 150 years, we asked you to tell us <a href="">why you’re not dead yet</a>. We got hundreds of responses through email and Twitter (using the hashtag #NotDeadYet), and even more on Facebook and the comments sections of the story.</p> <p>The responses were fascinating. The most commonly cited lifesavers were antibiotics and medical interventions during childbirth. Lots of people are alive thanks to emergency appendectomies. Others have ongoing life support from pacemakers, asthma inhalers, or insulin pumps. Some were treated with antivenins for snakebite. Many people had horrible accidents in childhood (one poor guy inhaled a sewing needle) and are lucky they ever made it to adulthood. Congratulations on being alive!</p> <p>We also ran a survey with our partners at <a href="">SurveyMonkey</a>, who&nbsp;collected responses from 400 people using the&nbsp;<a href="">SurveyMonkey Audience</a>. Almost half of the respondents said they would have died without medical care, and three-fourths of them would have lost a family member. The results are below, along with a word cloud of the disasters people reported having been spared from.</p> <p>Thanks very much to everyone who emailed or tweeted their stories. Here are 50 chilling, surprising, or heartwarming ones that will make you glad to be alive.</p> <p>Roy: Almost every day I get out of bed&nbsp;with the thought&nbsp;that I am in life's bonus round. Diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at 14, here I am 47 years later. Born just 30 or so years earlier, I would've been dead before I hit 15. Even with the good luck to be born in 1952, I am way past my predicted expiration date. I was told my lifespan would be shortened by 15 to 20 percent. Doing the math, I figured 50 would be the outside limit of my lifespan.</p> <p>Rachel: When I was 7, I thought the best thing about being in the hospital was that they'd bring you ice cream whenever you asked for it. I'd had a ruptured appendix and didn't realize at the time how lucky I was to be living at a point in history where emergency surgery wasn't a death sentence.</p> <p>Chris: When I was 8, I contracted a disease called Reye's syndrome. We know now it's caused by giving aspirin to a child with chicken pox. We didn't know that then, in the 1970s. <a href=",0,3901192.story">Dr. Peter Huttenlocher helped everyone figure it out</a>, and he saved countless children in doing so. I slipped into a coma for three days. Mom says she remembers the look on Dr. Huttenlocher's face when I woke up from the coma, like he was a proud papa.</p> <p>Scott: I had a blockage of the bundle branch in my heart, the nerves that deliver the electric shock to my heart to make it beat. Our family doctor said that he was not sure what was wrong but that there was a new thing recently invented called a pacemaker and he felt that I would need that. In March of 1975 I had a General Electric Pulse Generator implanted in my chest. It weighed 8 ounces, which is pretty hefty for something in your chest. I have had a pacemaker now for 38 years.&nbsp;Without a pacemaker&nbsp;I would have wasted away and eventually died. I went on to college, law school, and have had a successful career as a lawyer, but I owe it all to the pacemaker.</p> <p>Heather: My mom was born in 1938 with spina bifida (spine improperly formed, open hole in spine). There were no treatments at the time, so the doctors told her mother she would die.&nbsp;When she didn't die after three days, her mother took her home, and they put a pie plate over the hole in her spine. Her mom dragged her around to multiple doctors, finally ending up at Johns Hopkins, where she was operated on by pioneers in orthopedic surgery.&nbsp;She had 20-plus surgeries before she graduated high school. They said she'd never have children, but she had two.</p> <p>Heather: It's not that dramatic, but I've had asthma all my life, so I'm sure one of those attacks would've killed me in my childhood.&nbsp;The Albuterol inhaler gets my vote for the greatest invention ever—unless you have asthma, you can't imagine how frightening it is to feel your lungs tightening, the oxygen decreasing ... and then the immediate, incredible relief of breathing normally again.&nbsp;</p> <p>Anonymous: I would have bled out from a postpartum hemorrhage as a result of the manual removal of a placenta that had become too tightly attached to the uterine wall. Because it was so routine, it never felt like a near-death experience, and because of modern medicine, it really wasn't.</p> <p>Gardiner: I’m 56, the youngest of six children, all still very much alive. Without modern medicine, five of us would be dead. My two older sisters are both 10-year cancer survivors: malignant melanoma and lung cancer both cured with aggressive surgery. One brother was one of the first civilians treated with sulfa drugs in infancy.&nbsp;Another ran himself over with a tractor, collapsed a lung, and was saved at the ER.&nbsp;When I hear people denigrating modern medicine, or pining for the good old days when people took care of their medical issues themselves, it makes me sick.</p> <p>Rob: I have a severe allergy to horses. That wouldn't have gone over well in the pre-horseless carriage age. I would have been dead by 6 months, if not 6 weeks or days.</p> <p>Jacob: I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck and I had aspirated fluids into my lungs. I spent the first two weeks of my life in the intensive care unit. I'm alive today because my parents chose to take advantage of modern medicine and a competent obstetrician. If I had been born 150 years ago, I would not have survived birth.</p> <p>Richard: It is interesting to reflect on the number of sublethal health threats that we all endure and survive easily because of modern medicine. Aside from severe things like cholera, think of simple bacterial food poisoning, which I have suffered maybe 10 times in my life (largely from traveling to places where sanitation was poor). Before modern water purification, refrigeration and such, those episodes must have been pretty common in ordinary life, even of the wealthy.</p> <p>Anonymous: I’m alive because of psychological therapy, a treatment that wasn't routinely employed until the 1950s. If not for a gifted and extraordinarily helpful therapist, I'm almost positive I would have killed myself around age 17. I wonder how many people committed suicide in prior generations who could not be helped by some talk therapy or even by a simple prescription for Zoloft.</p> <p>Amanda: 361 days ago I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. If this date had been prior to 1920, I would likely have been six feet under by now. At diagnosis I realized fully the miracle of modern medicine and experienced a level of elation previously never experienced. That elation was indescribable,&nbsp;and to this day I feel bursts of it at unplanned and unpredictable moments.</p> <p>Sara: I am a survivor of the rarest form of a rare disease, saved by a science that was only imagined by the likes of Mary Shelley long ago and not yet reliable 20 years ago. I was diagnosed with veno-occlusive disease, a rare form of primary pulmonary hypertension. My lifesaving double lung transplant was 9&frac12; years ago.</p> <p><em>Nicholas Duchesne provided reporting for this story.</em></p> <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's&nbsp;</em></strong><em><a href=""><strong>series on longevity</strong></a></em><strong><em>.</em></strong><em></em></p> Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:42:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-12T09:42:00Z <strong><em>Slate </em></strong>readers shared fascinating, heartwarming stories. Here are 50 fun ones. Health and Science Why <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Readers Are Still Alive: Best 50 Stories About Saved Lives 100130912003 fresca longevity twitter Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false Why <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Readers Are Still Alive: Best 50 Stories About Saved Lives Why <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Readers Are Still Alive: Best 50 Stories About Saved Lives Photo by Comstock/Thinkstock Was this you? #NotDeadYet Just How Long Can People Live? <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's&nbsp;</em></strong><a href=""><strong><em>series on longevity</em></strong></a><strong><em>.<br /> <br /> </em></strong>There’s an <a href="">oddly persistent myth</a> that people have always had a good chance of living to a ripe old age if they could just survive childhood. Socrates was old, after all, and what about Ben Franklin? It’s true that infants and children were once more likely to die than people of any other ages. Eliminating many of the deadly diseases of childhood gave the biggest boost to our average life expectancy as it <a href="">doubled in the past 150 years</a>. But children aren’t the only ones who are less likely to die than they were in the past. <a href=";width=100%25&amp;height=100%25#R12">At every age</a>, even older than 100, people are <a href="">more likely to survive</a> the next year than they were at any other time in human history.</p> <p>Why has life expectancy continued to go up steadily over the past several decades? And what’s in store for us: Will we continue to live for more and more years than ever before?</p> <p>Public health measures get the credit for most of the increase in life expectancy that happened from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s. Clean water, safe food, comfortable housing, and a healthy respect for germs made the world <a href="">a completely different place</a>.</p> <p>If you look at the <a href="">top causes of death</a> in the United States in 1900 and 2010, you might think you’re examining data from two entirely different species. In 1900, we died of tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections, and diphtheria. In 2010, none of those diseases made it into the top 10. Take a tour of this interactive to see how death rates changed over the course of the past century. (The spike in 1918-1919 was caused by the Spanish flu, the <a href="">worst pandemic in history</a>.) While infectious diseases plummeted over the course of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, cancer and heart disease shot up.</p> <p>Heart disease isn’t a new invention. <a href="">Egyptian mummies</a> show evidence of atherosclerosis. But it and cancer were masked by other diseases that killed people before they got old enough to die of a stroke.</p> <p>Because <strong>heart disease</strong> is such a killer, anything that reduces its incidence or treats it can save a lot of lives and boost our overall average life expectancy. The death rate from heart disease (adjusting for age, since there are more and more older people in the population) was cut in half between 1980 and 2000. That’s a screaming success for <a href="">public health and biomedicine</a>. Who gets the credit? About half of the credit goes to medical treatments (statins, aspirin, heart surgery), and the other half goes to reductions in risk factors such as high blood pressure, smoking, and <a href="">eating red meat</a>. More good news is that some risk factors, including high cholesterol, are <a href="">continuing to drop</a>.</p> <p>Heart disease is still a horribly common way to die, and it’s hard to appreciate the number of deaths that didn’t happen. But you probably have loved ones who are alive today because careful epidemiological studies identified <a href="">risk factors for heart disease</a> and medical researchers found effective treatments.</p> <p>My great-great-grandmother died at age 57, probably of a heart attack. My great-grandmother died at age 67 of a stroke. My grandmother takes medication for high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She will celebrate her 90<sup>th</sup> birthday next week. She is the first person in her family to live long enough to see a great-grandchild. Preventing and treating heart disease is a huge unsung victory of modern times.</p> <p>Deaths from many kinds of <strong>cancer</strong> also decreased during the past few decades. Cancer isn’t a single disease, and it won’t be eliminated anytime soon, <a href="">foolish talk</a> from George W. Bush’s head of the National Cancer Institute aside. But researchers and clinicians are making steady progress at identifying and treating most forms of the disease. <a href=";did=2009&amp;chid=95&amp;coid=927&amp;mid">Long-term survival rates are up</a>. In 1975, about half of all cancer patients lived for five more years. Now the rate is two-thirds.</p> <p>Even more important than treatment, though, is prevention. The <strong>reduction in smoking</strong> rates gets credit for much of the decrease in incidence of heart disease and cancer, especially lung cancer, which is by far the <a href="">most common cause</a> of cancer deaths. <strong>Smoking bans</strong> are lifesavers, too—fewer people are <a href="">dying of heart attacks, stroke, or lung disease due to secondhand smoke</a> now that it’s not stinking up all our restaurants, offices, and airplanes.</p> <p><strong>Controlling air pollution</strong> has been a big lifesaver in the United States. In 1948, a noxious smog choked <a href="">Donora, Pa.</a>, killing 20 people and sickening half of the population of 14,000. In 1952, a great smog in London killed at least 4,000 people. Air pollution provokes heart attacks and asthma attacks and increases the risk of lung cancer, heart disease, bronchitis, and other diseases. The Clean Air Act was <a href="">passed in 1970</a> and has been revised several times with stricter limits on pollutants. The law has led to great improvements in public health: It <a href="">prevented 160,000 premature deaths</a> in 2010. You can even <a href="">see the mountains outside Los Angeles</a> now, which you couldn’t do in 1968. Air pollution is still a big killer in the developing world, however, and is <a href="">blamed for more deaths</a> worldwide than high cholesterol.</p> <p>We have a completely different relationship to <strong>safety</strong> today than we did at the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Workplace deaths are <a href="">down by 90 percent</a>, thanks to efforts by <a>labor unions, researchers, and overreaching government agencies</a>. We’re driving more miles than in the past but are much <a href="">less likely to die in traffic accidents</a>. People complain about U.S. culture being excessively litigious, but there’s nothing like the threat of a lawsuit to make companies <a href="">recall dangerous products</a>. Even death by lightning strikes is down; <a href="">God is smiting 70 percent fewer people</a> than he did in 1960.</p> <p>Fewer women die in <strong>childbirth</strong>—although it took a shamefully long time for the <a href="">maternal mortality rate to decrease</a>. Safe and effective birth control has saved women from dying in unwanted pregnancies. Improved delivery practices cut death rates from infection, hemorrhage, and other complications. And <a href="">continuing improvements to neonatal care</a> mean that more infants and mothers survive the dangers of childbirth.</p> <p><strong>Antibiotics</strong> are the lifesavers that are most familiar to us. When I asked my acquaintances <a href="">why they weren’t dead yet</a>, the most common stories involved infections that had been cured by antibiotics. Today we’re publishing some of the best #NotDeadYet stories that people <a href="">tweeted or emailed to us over the past week</a>. Many of you alive today would have been vanquished by bacteria in previous eras.</p> <p>The <strong>public health interventions</strong> that protect children from infectious disease continue to echo throughout their lifespan. People who reach old age today are <a href="">stronger and healthier</a> than earlier generations, partly because they weren’t <a href="">weakened in childhood</a> by <a href="">repeated infections</a>. As more people live to old age, they have more time to develop diseases of aging, the most devastating of which is dementia. But taking age into account, the rate of dementia <a href="">seems to be falling</a>, probably because of improved overall health.</p> <p>Life expectancy can make sudden jumps even in older populations in response to <strong>social conditions</strong>. Before the reunification of Germany, retirees living in the former East Germany had much lower life expectancies than their cousins in the West. After reunification, they started living much longer—even <a href="">people in their 80s and 90s</a> had years added to their lives.</p> <p>People with more years of <strong>education</strong> <a href="">live longer</a>, and the <a href="">gap is widening</a> between people who didn’t graduate high school and those who have college degrees. That may not be surprising since the well-educated are also wealthier on average and have safer jobs and better access to health care. But a few studies have found that <a href="">education in itself</a> prolongs life; it seems to allow people to manage chronic diseases better, handle stress, and make better judgments. The proportion of the population with some college education has been growing, and that may pay off in better long-term health outcomes.</p> <p>It’s all connected, of course—the reason we live longer today is that we are <a href="">living in an entirely different world</a> than the one people inhabited at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. It’s less nasty, <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143122010&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">less brutish</a>, and less short. One final reason we’re living longer is that we have less exposure to the most heart-breaking risk factor for death: bereavement. In other words, we are living longer because <strong>our loved ones are living longer</strong>, and thus we are less likely to be sunk in grief than at any time in human history.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>So what’s next? What are the little things that could make our average life expectancy jump again? Some of them sound simple but really aren’t. “The biggest low-hanging fruit is smoking,” says medical historian David Jones of Harvard. “But is it really low-hanging?” About half of the population smoked in the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century. That rate <a href="">dropped steadily</a> until the latter part of the century, but it seems to have plateaued (although a recent <a href="">gruesome ad campaign</a> had promising results). About 20 percent of the population smokes, and it may be very difficult to get the remaining holdouts to quit.</p> <p>Obesity is the other major risk factor for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and any number of other causes of death. The obesity rate climbed so much in the past few decades that S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois–Chicago, and his colleagues estimate that <a href="">obesity could swamp the effects of reduced smoking</a> on average life expectancy.</p> <p>The most disturbing fact about life expectancy in the United States today is that African-Americans live about four years fewer on average than whites. The good news is that <a href="">the gap has been narrowing</a>. This disparity has been seen as a matter of social justice, but as Jones points out, there’s also a major gap in life expectancy between males and females. “I can expect to live five years less than my wife,” he says. “To me, this feels totally unfair.” We tend to think of this difference as something biological and immutable, but finding ways to help men live as long as women would go a long way toward improving life expectancy and making the world a less sorrowful place.</p> <p>The United States could learn a lot from other developed countries. Our life expectancy is much shorter than it should be considering how wealthy we are. By some estimates, we’re <a href="">40 years behind</a> other countries in terms of advancing life expectancy. The National Academy of Sciences took a <a href=";page=2">hard look at what we’re doing wrong</a> and identified nine things that set the United States apart from other countries, including drug and alcohol use, HIV and AIDS, adolescent pregnancy, and <a href="">injuries and homicide</a>. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls many of these problems “<a href="">winnable battles</a>.”</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>One of the most fascinating debates in life science these days is between <a href="">Olshansky</a> and <a href="">James Vaupel</a> of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. They disagree fundamentally about whether and how average life expectancy will increase in the future, and they’ve been arguing about it for 20 years. Olshansky, a lovely guy, takes what at first sounds like the pessimistic view. He says the public health measures that raised life expectancy so dramatically from the late 1800s to today have done about as much as they can. We now have a much older population, dying of age-related diseases, and any improvements in treatment will add only incrementally to average life expectancy, and with vanishing returns. He explains his point of view in this charming animated video.</p> <p><em><a href="">Video</a>&nbsp;is courtesy of&nbsp;<a href="">Project M</a>.</em></p> <p>On the other side of the ring is Vaupel, who says that people are <a href=";width=100%25&amp;height=100%25#!po=8.33333">living longer and healthier lives</a> all the time and there is <a href="">no necessary end in sight</a>. His message is cheerier, but he takes the debate very seriously; he <a href=",_Magazine,_and_Radio_Interviews_on_Aging_files/ScienceStory2011.pdf">won’t attend conferences</a> where Olshansky is present. His charts are heartening; he takes the records of the longest-lived people in the longest-lived countries for each year and shows that maximum lifespan has been <a href="">zooming up linearly</a> from 1800 to today. One wants to mentally extend the line into all of our foreseeable futures.</p> <p>Olshansky says the only way to make major improvements in life expectancy is to find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases of aging. And the most efficient way to do that is to <a href="">delay the process of aging itself</a>. That’s something that some people already do—somehow. Olshansky says, “The study of the genetics of long-lived people, I think, is going to be the breakthrough technology.” Scientists can now easily extend lifespan in flies, worms, and mice, and there’s a lot of exciting research on genetic pathways in humans that might slow down the aging process and presumably protect us from the age-related diseases that kill most people today. “The secret to longer lives is contained in our own genomes,” Olshansky says.</p> <p>Predictions about medical breakthroughs are notoriously optimistic, of course. When the human genome was sequenced, people predicted personalized medical interventions in a decade. That was 12 years ago. Richard Nixon’s war on cancer has yet to be won. So while you’re waiting, do what you can. Eat right, exercise. Drive safely. Don’t smoke or play with fire. Get that mole looked at. Are you sitting in front of a computer screen now? <a href="">Stand up and stretch</a>, do some lunges, we won’t laugh. Here’s to your health and long life.</p> <p><strong><em> Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's&nbsp;</em></strong><a href=""><strong><em>series on longevity</em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> Thu, 12 Sep 2013 09:41:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-12T09:41:00Z It’s one of the juiciest debates in science. Health and Science What’s the Longest Lifespan I Could Have? 100130912004 medicine public health fresca life expectancy Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false What’s the Longest Lifespan I Could Have? What’s the Longest Lifespan I Could Have? 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795021001 Photo by Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images What can we do to make our average life expectancy jump again? Above, residents of a continuing care retirement community practice chair yoga. The Best Critique of Alternative Medicine Ever <p>There’s nothing like reading about the history of disease to make you appreciate modern times. Until just a century or two ago, most people died horribly of contagious diseases we <a href="">barely remember the names of today</a>. Our world is full of life-saving luxuries: We turn on a tap and clean water comes out. Our diets are so rich and varied that almost nobody suffers from rickets or scurvy. We live in airy, spacious homes that aren’t clouded with the coughs of consumptives—and when we share a bed with someone, it’s due to desire rather than overcrowding.</p> <p>It is in the nature of luxuries to eventually be taken for granted, and some of the greatest underappreciated luxuries are public health and modern medicine. Thanks to massive vaccination drives, almost no children in the developed world die of measles or mumps. And because these diseases are now so rare, anti-vaccination activists have the luxury of <a href="">indulging in conspiracy theories</a>. Many of us <a href="">would have died already</a> if it weren’t for routine medical interventions; we are on our second or third lives. And because death is so much more distant than in the past, some people have a romanticized notion of our place in the natural world. We used to be more in harmony with nature, the thinking goes, and our bodies naturally know how to heal themselves. I have a hard time following the logic—something about auras and <a href="">herbs</a> and energy fields? It’s utter nonsense, of course—what’s <em>natural</em> is to serve as a host and vector for deadly parasitic microbes.</p> <p>Tim Minchin, an Australian singer, songwriter, poet, comedian, and <a href="">all-around genius</a>, has the best response I’ve ever seen to people who prefer alternative medicine to modern medicine. His “Storm” is funny, educational, and cathartic. If you’ve been buttonholed by someone who wants to tell you all about an “alternative,” “natural,” “superior” health care regimen, this film is for you.</p> <p><em>Written and performed by Tim Minchin (<a href="">@timminchin</a>). Directed by DC Turner (<a href="">@dcturner</a>). Produced by Tracy King (<a href="">@tkingdoll</a>). See more at <a href=""></a>.</em></p> <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a>.</em></strong></p> Wed, 11 Sep 2013 12:06:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-11T12:06:00Z It’s an animated video. And it’s hilarious. Health and Science Watch Tim Minchin’s “Storm,” the Best Critique of Alternative Medicine Ever 100130911004 medicine fresca skepticism humor alternative medicine video Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false Watch Tim Minchin’s “Storm,” the Best Critique of Alternative Medicine Ever Watch Tim Minchin’s “Storm,” the Best Critique of Alternative Medicine Ever 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2649795045001 Fourteen Oddball Reasons You’re Not Dead Yet <p>Lifespan has doubled in the United States <a href="">in the past 150 years</a>. This ridiculously wonderful change in the nature of life and death is something we tend to take for granted. When we do think about why we’re still alive, some of the big, fairly obvious reasons that come to mind are vaccines, antibiotics, clean water, or drugs for heart disease and cancer. But the world is full of underappreciated people, innovations, and ideas that also save lives. A round of applause, please, for some of the oddball reasons, in no particular order, why people are living longer and healthier lives than ever before.</p> <p><strong>Cotton.</strong> One of the major killers of human history was typhus, a bacterial disease spread by lice. It <a href="">defeated Napoleon’s army</a>; if Tchaikovsky’s <em>1812 Overture</em> were historically accurate, it would feature less cannon fire and more munching arthropods. Wool was the clothing material of choice before cotton displaced it. Cotton is easier to clean than wool and less hospitable to body lice.</p> <p><strong>Satellites.</strong> In 1900, a hurricane devastated Galveston, Texas. It killed 8,000 people, making it the <a href="">deadliest hurricane in U.S. history</a>. In 2008, <a href="">Hurricane Ike</a> hit Galveston. Its winds were less powerful at landfall than those of the 1900 storm, but its storm surge was higher, and that’s usually what kills people. This time we saw it coming, thanks to a network of <a href="">Earth-monitoring satellites</a> and decades of <a href="">ever-improving storm forecasting</a>. More than 100 people died, but more than 1 million evacuated low-lying coastal areas and survived.</p> <p><strong>Fluoride.</strong> There were plenty of miserable ways to die before the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century, but dying of a tooth abscess had to be among the worst—a <a href="">slow, painful infection</a> that limits your ability to eat, causes your head to throb endlessly, and eventually colonizes the body and kills you of sepsis. Now it’s a rare way to go, thanks to modern dental care, toothbrushes, and (unless you’re in <a href="">Portland</a>) <a href="">fluoridated water</a>.</p> <p><strong>Window screens</strong>. Houseflies are irritating today, but they used to be major vectors of deadly diarrheal disease. Clean water and treatment of sewage eliminated the most obvious means of transmitting these diseases, but pesky houseflies continued to spread deadly microbes. By the 1920s, according to James Riley in <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0521002818&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History</em></a>, a growing aversion to insects and the introduction of window screens reduced this risk.</p> <p><strong>The discovery of unconscious bias.</strong> The reason we trust double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to tell us which medical treatments actually work is that we know <em>we can’t trust ourselves</em>. If you take a sham drug that you think will alleviate your symptoms, it will—that’s the placebo effect. If you think the drug will cause side effects, it will—that’s the nocebo effect. If you’re a clinician and think you’re administering a real drug, you will send all kinds of signals, unintentionally, to tell the patient you think the treatment will work. If you’ve seen anecdotal evidence for a treatment, you notice confirmatory evidence rather than cases that <a href="">make you revise your original hypothesis</a>. When analyzing the data, it’s all too easy to squint at the numbers in a way that confirms your expectations. Double-blind trials overcome these biases by preventing both patient and clinician from knowing whether a tested drug is real or not.</p> <p><strong>Botts’ Dots</strong>. Those raised ceramic reflectors between road lanes were invented by <a href="">Elbert Botts</a>, a chemist who worked for the California Department of Transportation. The dots help motorists see the edge of their lane even in the dark or when it’s raining. Botts died in 1962, four years before the first Botts’ dots were installed on California highways.</p> <p><strong><em>Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report</em>.</strong> That’s the no-nonsense name of one of the most important publications most people have never heard of. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been <a href=";pid=cdc:101&amp;type=1&amp;facetRange=11">publishing it since 1952</a> to provide “timely, reliable, authoritative, accurate, objective, and useful public health information and recommendations.” When a new disease or danger emerges—such as AIDS or a new strain of influenza—the <em>MMWR</em> is often the first to identify it.</p> <p><strong>Air-conditioning.</strong> As Dan Engber pointed out in a two-part <a href="">ode to A/C</a> last summer, heat is deadly and we don’t respect it enough. A Chicago heat wave killed more than 700 people in one week in 1995. The National Weather Service issues <a href="">heat alerts</a>, and cities have started to offer air-conditioned cooling centers for people who would overheat at home. A recent study shows that air conditioning has cut the death rate on hot days <a href="">by 80 percent</a> since 1960.</p> <p><strong>The residents of Framingham, Mass.</strong> In 1948, researchers signed up more than 5,000 adults for a long-term study of heart disease. Nobody anticipated just how long-term the study would be—it’s still going strong and now includes the <a href="">children and grandchildren</a> of the original cohort. It taught us much of what we know about heart disease. Before the study, high blood pressure was thought to be a sign of good health; now it’s recognized as a risk factor for heart attacks and strokes. Thanks to the generosity and commitment of volunteers in Framingham and other studies, we know the dangers of high cholesterol, obesity, inactivity, and smoking.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Pasteurization.</strong> This should be an <a href="">obvious lifesaver</a>, right up there with hand-washing and proper nutrition. But the rise of the <a href="">raw milk movement</a> suggests that a lot of people take safe dairy products for granted. Contaminated milk was one of the major killers of children, transmitting typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and <a href="">other diseases</a>. One of the most successful public health campaigns of the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries was for pure and pasteurized milk—so successful that we don’t really remember how deadly milk can be.</p> <p><strong>Shoes.</strong> Hookworms are parasites that enter the human body <a href="">through bare feet</a>—often by biting into the soft skin between the toes (shudder). The disease was common in the Southeast, spread when people walked barefoot across ground that was contaminated with feces of people who were already infected. Education initiatives at the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century encouraged people to build sanitary outhouses and <a href="">wear shoes</a>.</p> <p><strong>Cows.</strong> I mentioned in an <a href="">earlier story</a> that the Midwest—including Michigan!—once had some of the worst malaria outbreaks in the country. <em>Anopheles</em> mosquitoes had always flourished in the damp lowlands around streams and melting snow, and when settlers came, some of them carried <em>Plasmodium</em> parasites that the mosquitoes spread widely. The settlers’ farming practices made for even more stagnant water, and their sod and log houses were perfect habitat for biting pests. After farmers had exhausted the soil, they started raising cows rather than crops—and mosquitoes prefer to suck bovine blood even more than that of humans, helping break the malaria cycle. In the South and other parts of the country, larvicides, pesticides, better drainage, bug-proof housing, mechanized agriculture that replaced human labor, and fewer people living in lowlands helped eliminate malaria.</p> <p><strong>Oppressive, burdensome, over-reaching government regulations</strong>. People like to complain about the government, but when you start looking through the alphabet soup of agencies, you realize that most of them are there to <em>save your life</em>.&nbsp;The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration runs the National Weather Service and warns you about hurricanes. The Environmental Protection Agency enforces the Clean Air Act and has dramatically reduced the amount of deadly pollutants in the air you breathe. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration keeps you <a href="">safe at work</a>. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and National Transportation Safety Board investigate vehicles and accidents and make recommendations so accidents <a href="">don’t happen again</a>. The Food and Drug Administration keeps deadly microbes <a href="">out of your food</a>. The Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls toys that could <a href="">kill your child</a>. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks and tries to cure or avert basically <a href="">any health hazard</a>, and the National Institutes of Health supports some of the most important biomedical research in the world.</p> <p><strong>Goodness</strong>. Philosopher Daniel Dennett <a href="">had an epiphany</a> after emergency surgery a few years ago. It wasn’t a religious epiphany—instead of thanking God, he realized he should thank human <em>goodness</em>:&nbsp;</p> <p>“To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years … the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean. … I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the CT scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology. … So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of <em>Science</em>,&nbsp;<em>Nature</em>,&nbsp;<em>Journal of the American Medical Association</em>, <em>Lancet</em>, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning&nbsp;out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.” &nbsp;</p> <p>These are just a few of the countless ways people have made life safer, healthier, less painful—and longer—than we ever could have imagined a few centuries ago. Thank goodness.</p> <p><strong>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's&nbsp;</strong><a href=""><strong>series on longevity</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p> Wed, 11 Sep 2013 09:10:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-11T09:10:00Z A selection of underappreciated people, innovations, and ideas that save lives. Health and Science Fourteen Unsung Heroes, Inventions, and Ideas That Save Lives 100130911002 medicine health fresca psychology life expectancy Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false 14 surprising reasons you’re #NotDeadYet. Fourteen Unsung Heroes, Inventions, and Ideas That Save Lives 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2659972958001 Photo by Robert Riger/Getty Images These Yankee fans in 1958 should be crowing about their increased lifespan. The Disturbing, Shameful History of Childbirth Deaths <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a>.</em></strong></p> <p>The best person I know almost died in childbirth. We met during college when we both volunteered at a commune in Georgia, the place Habitat for Humanity grew out of. Being a do-gooder was an anomaly for me, but it’s how Gwen has spent her life—she’s wise and kind and generous. She works in a mental health agency for HIV-positive people. When she was seven months pregnant, her diaphragm, the band of muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen, split, and a piece of stomach pushed up through it and necrotized. She went into labor, gave birth to her daughter, and had emergency surgery followed by massive doses of antibiotics. If this had happened even a few decades ago, she and the baby would both be dead. Instead, she’s fine, and her daughter is a wise, kind, generous child who wants to be a scientist.</p> <p>Bearing a child is still one of the most dangerous things a woman can do. It’s the sixth most common <a href="">cause of death</a> among women age 20 to 34 in the United States. If you look at the black-box warning on a packet of birth control pills, you’ll notice that at most ages the risk of death from taking the pills is <em>less</em> than if you don’t take them—that’s because they’re so good at preventing pregnancy, and pregnancy kills. The risk flips only after age 35 because birth control pills increase the risk of stroke. (Psst, guys, you know what makes an excellent 35<sup>th</sup> birthday present for your partner? Getting a vasectomy.)</p> <p>In the United States today, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. That’s way too many, but a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that: By some estimates, between 1 and 1.5 percent of women giving birth died. Note that the rate is per birth, so the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth was much higher, perhaps 4 percent.</p> <p>Evolutionarily, childbirth seems like an exceptionally bad time to die. If by definition the ultimate measure of evolutionary success is reproducing successfully, the fact that women and newborns frequently died in childbirth suggests that powerful <a href="">selective forces</a> must be at work. Why is childbirth such an ordeal?</p> <p>Compared to other primates, human infants are born ridiculously underdeveloped; they can’t do much more than suck and scream. They would be better off if they could gestate longer—but the mother wouldn’t be. The classic explanation for why human infants are born at such an early stage of development has to do with anatomical limits on women’s hips. If the fetal head had time to grow any larger in utero, the baby wouldn’t fit through the pelvic girdle. And the pelvic girdle can’t get any wider or women wouldn’t be able to walk efficiently.</p> <p>This is called the “obstetric dilemma” hypothesis and it’s been dominant for years, but it’s almost certainly wrong, or at least not the full story. Anthropologist Holly Dunsworth and her colleagues found that broadening the pelvis wouldn’t actually <a href="">interfere with walking</a>, and they point out that gestation is actually pretty long in humans compared to other primates (even though newborns’ brains are relatively less developed). Other researchers suggest that the problem of “obstructed labor”—when a baby basically gets stuck in the birth canal—seems to have become common <a href="">fairly recently in human history</a>.</p> <p>The real reason women give birth when they do, Dunsworth says, is that it would take <a href="">too much energy</a> to feed a fetus for any longer. This is the “metabolic hypothesis” and it’s based on the finding that the maximum metabolic rate people can sustain is about 2 or 2.5 times their standard rate of using energy. During the third trimester, that’s exactly how much metabolic activity the pregnancy demands. Carrying a fetus for those final few months “is like being an incredibly good athlete,” Dunsworth says. No wonder it’s so exhausting.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>By the late stages of pregnancy and during childbirth, almost anything can go wrong. Pregnant women are sapped of energy. They are susceptible to infectious disease. The baby’s head is enormous. Labor takes much longer in humans than in other primates; women often pushed for days. Historically, women <a href="!po=12.5000">died of</a> puerperal fever (also called childbed fever, or postpartum sepsis, an infection usually contracted during childbirth), hemorrhage, eclampsia (dangerously high blood pressure and organ damage; that’s what <a href="">killed Sybil on<em> Downton Abbey</em></a>), and obstructed labor.</p> <p>Given all the dangers, how did deaths in childbirth fall to about one-fiftieth of the historic rate? Life expectancy in the United States and the developed world basically <a href="">doubled in the past 150 years</a>, and a decrease in maternal mortality is ultimately a big reason for our longer, healthier lives. But the history of childbirth death rates is complicated and disturbing. It’s a story of hubris, mistrust, greed, incompetence, and turf battles that live on today.</p> <p>The death rate in the overall population started dropping at the end of the 1800s, and it dropped most dramatically during the first few decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Childbirth deaths <a href="">were different</a>. They actually <em>increased</em> during the first few decades of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Even though pregnant women had less exposure to disease and were more likely to have clean water, proper nutrition, safe food, and comfortable housing than at any previous time in human history, they died in droves in childbed.</p> <p>It was doctors’ fault.</p> <p>For most of European and U.S. history, midwives had attended births. Some were incompetent, some were skilled. The best ones wrote and read reports on techniques and treatments, and there’s some evidence they were becoming better trained and having better outcomes during the early 1800s. Doctors had little to do with childbirth—they were all men, and it was considered obscene for a man to be present at a birth.</p> <p>As the profession of medicine grew during the 1800s, though, doctors started to edge their way into the potentially lucrative business of childbirth. The first ones were general practitioners who had no training and little experience in childbirth. It was considered a low-status specialty and wasn’t taught well or at all in most medical schools.</p> <p>In the delightfully named book <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0058M937Q&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank</em></a>, Randi Hutter Epstein describes the state-of-art treatment: “Before forceps, babies stuck in the birth canal were dragged out by the doctor, often in pieces. Sometimes midwives cracked the skull, killing the newborn but sparing the mother. Sometimes doctors broke the pubic bone, which often killed the mother but spared the baby. Doctors had an entire armamentarium of gruesome gadgets to hook, stab, and rip apart a hard-to-deliver baby. Many of these gadgets had an uncanny resemblance to medieval torture tools.”</p> <p>The biggest danger to expectant mothers was infection. Before the germ theory of disease, people suspected puerperal fever could somehow be contagious, and they knew that some midwives and doctors had worse records than others, but no one knew how it was transmitted. (“Putrid air” was one popular hypothesis.) To avoid blame for maternal deaths, doctors lied on death certificates—they’d attribute a new mother’s death to “fever” rather than “puerperal fever” or mention hemorrhage without mentioning that the hemorrhage was caused by childbirth.</p> <p>In the mid-1800s, Ignaz Semmelweis discovered that doctors in his hospital in Vienna were spreading puerperal fever when they went directly from performing autopsies to delivering babies—but his work was mostly ignored. There were many reasons for this: He was apparently a real pill, the methods he suggested for sanitizing the hands were caustic and difficult, and most doctors attending births at home hadn’t been near a corpse. Doctors were also offended by the accusation that their filth was responsible for deadly disease: Gentlemen didn’t have dirty hands.</p> <p>The best source of historic information on this subject is a book called <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0198229976&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Death in Childbirth: An International Study of Maternal Care and Maternal Mortality 1800-1950</em></a>, by Irvine Loudon. (If you are pregnant, whatever you do, <em>do not read this book</em>.) It’s a very serious work, rich in data and graphs and analysis, but you can tell he’s <em>furious</em> about all the unnecessary deaths at the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Here’s how he described puerperal fever: “A woman could be delivered on Monday, happy and well with her newborn baby on Tuesday, feverish and ill by Wednesday evening, delirious and in agony with peritonitis on Thursday, and dead on Friday or Saturday.” During the 1920s in the United States, half of maternal deaths were caused by puerperal fever. For a disease that was “preventable by ordinary intelligence and careful training,” he wrote, “these figures were a reproach to civilized nations.”</p> <p>One piece of evidence Loudon uses to attribute blame for unnecessary early 20<sup>th</sup> century deaths to doctors is that rich women were <a href="">more likely to die</a> in childbirth than poor women. (Mary Wollstonecraft was one victim of an incompetent doctor; she <a href="">died of puerperal fever</a> after delivering a daughter who would grow up to write <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0486282112&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Frankenstein</em></a>.) For almost any other cause of death, the poor were more likely to die than the rich. But for childbirth, poor women could afford only midwives. Rich women could afford doctors. Doctors in turn had to justify their fees and distinguish themselves from lowly midwives by providing new tools and techniques.<strong></strong></p> <p>Things got worse as obstetricians started professionalizing and coming up with new ways to treat—and often inadvertently kill—their patients. Forceps, episiotomies, anesthesia, and deep sedation were overused. Cesarean sections became more common and did occasionally save women who would have died of obstructed labor, but often the mother died of blood loss or infection. (Fun fact: Julius Caesar wasn’t born of a C-section. As Hutter Epstein points out in<em> Get Me Out</em>, until recently the technique was used to extract a baby from a dying woman. “Cesarean sections were death rituals, not lifesaving procedures. If a doctor suggested a cesarean, you knew you were on the way to the morgue.”) Women giving birth in hospitals were at greater risk than those delivering at home. Disease and infections spread more readily in hospitals, and doctors were all too eager to use surgical equipment.</p> <p>Too many doctors and midwives were chasing after a limited number of pregnant women, and they gained market share by touting dazzling new techniques and bad-mouthing their competitors. Exacerbating the problem, there was little government oversight of medical care or education in the early part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. As Loudon explains, “Medical care in the United States was dominated by the belief in the virtues of competitive free enterprise combined with an intense distrust of government interference.”</p> <p>“If I was forced to identify one factor above all others as the determinant of high maternal mortality in the USA,” Loudon wrote in <em>Death in Childbirth</em>, “I would unhesitatingly choose the standard of obstetric training in the medical schools.” They instilled an attitude of carelessness, impatience, and unnecessary interference. These deaths were “a blot for which the leaders of the medical profession are wholly to blame.”</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>Death rates in childbirth finally began to drop in the 1930s with the introduction of sulfa antibiotics that were highly effective against the streptococcal bacteria responsible for most cases of puerperal fever.</p> <p>Doctors cleaned up their acts, too. A series of reports in the 1940s linked high death rates to improper medical procedures. Training improved, and doctors abandoned the most dangerous techniques. Complications from C-sections declined steadily. Medical researchers now rigorously evaluate success rates and risks of new techniques and drugs.</p> <p>As nutrition improved, there were fewer women with rickets, which causes bone deformations; many obstructed births in the late 19<sup>th</sup> and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries were caused by abnormal pelvic bones in the mother. Prenatal care became a standard part of medical practice.</p> <p>Reliable, safe, and legal birth control allowed women to limit and time their pregnancies, and it led to a decrease in illegal abortions, a <a href="!po=12.5000">leading cause of death</a> in pregnant women historically.</p> <p>Improved maternal survival eventually did turn into one of the <a href="">great public health and medical achievements</a> of the 20<sup>th</sup> century—it just took an unconscionably long time. The good news today is that, globally, maternal mortality is <a href="">continuing to decrease</a>. More women are <a href="">surviving childbirth</a>, and that’s a big reason—and one of the most joyful reasons—why lifespan is continuing to climb in the 21<sup>st</sup> century.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>The midwives and doctors, though—they’re still tangling. Midwives accuse doctors of endangering women by continuing to perform too many unnecessary procedures. Doctors accuse midwives of allowing pregnant women and newborns to die of preventable deaths.</p> <p>The main battlefield today is over home births. About 1 percent of women in the United States choose to give birth at home. Counterintuitive as it may sound at first, they often cite safety concerns—they’re worried about unnecessary procedures if they give birth in a hospital. And they “trust their bodies’ <a href="">inherent ability to give birth</a> without interference.” Melissa Cheyney is an anthropologist at Oregon State University as well as a home-birth advocate and midwife. She reports that women who choose home birth “value alternative and more embodied or <a href="">intuitive ways of knowing</a>.” Home-birth advocates say women are better off giving birth in a comfortable environment, <a href="">letting nature take its course</a>.</p> <p>I’m personally opposed to letting nature take its course—nature will kill you. And “<a href=";userIsAuthenticated=false">intuitive</a> ways of knowing” is just a flowery term for “ignorance.”</p> <p>A meta-analysis of outcomes from home births and hospital births shows that women who give birth at home do have fewer procedures and complications—but their newborns are <a href=";refuid=S0002-9378%2812%2901074-5">three times more likely to die</a>. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises that hospitals and birthing centers are the <a href="">safest places to give birth</a>, and they have published guidelines for <a href="">how to talk pregnant women out of a home birth</a>. Many states are considering or tightening restrictions on midwives and home births, including <a href="">Idaho</a>, <a href="">North Carolina</a>, <a href="">South Carolina</a>, and <a href="">Indiana</a>, often in response to heartbreaking and infuriating cases of women or infants dying due to incompetent treatment.</p> <p>But it turns out home birth isn’t as clearly dangerous as I expected. The Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected organization that carefully judges medical treatments, analyzed the available evidence—which is admittedly a bit of a mess. (Among other problems, if a home birth delivery goes wrong, the woman has to be rushed to the hospital, where the complicated case may be recorded as a hospital birth rather than a home birth.) But the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that planned home births with low-risk mothers are <a href="">as safe as hospital births</a>. Once more for emphasis, though: This is only for women who have an extremely low chance of complications and who have access to emergency medical treatment if anything goes wrong. It’s tricky to compare outcomes across countries—especially because licensing and training regulations differ—but a Canadian study showed that home births <a href="">were safe</a>. (In the United States there are <a href="">two main types of midwives</a>: registered nurses who specialize in midwifery and are highly medically trained, and certified professional midwives, whose training may be, ah, less medically rigorous.)</p> <p>The conflict between doctors and midwives puts pregnant women in the middle and can be uncomfortable and <a href="">dangerous in itself</a>. And it turns both sides into caricatures of themselves. Doctors focus on risks and complications; midwives focus on a pregnant woman’s comfort. Midwives talk about intuition and say pregnancy is the most natural thing in the world. They accuse doctors of lacking empathy—which isn’t surprising since medical students get a lot of <a href="">empathy squeezed out of them</a> during their training.&nbsp;</p> <p>For individual <em>simple, low-risk </em>births, having a home birth overseen by a highly trained midwife isn’t necessarily a clearly terrible decision. But when you take a world-historical look at childbirth, it’s not midwives and cozy home births that get credit for making maternal death such an unthinkable outcome today. One of the great victories of modern times is that childbirth doesn’t need to be natural, and neither does the maternal death rate. It’s modern medicine for the win. Doctors may have killed a lot of women in the first part of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, but they can save your life today.</p> <p><strong><em>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a>.</em></strong></p> Tue, 10 Sep 2013 09:15:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-10T09:15:00Z If you are pregnant, do <em>not</em> read this story. Health and Science The Never-Ending Battle Between Doctors and Midwives. Which Are More Dangerous? 100130910001 childbirth fresca pregnancy childbirth fresca pregnancy Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false The Never-Ending Battle Between Doctors and Midwives. Which Are More Dangerous? The Never-Ending Battle Between Doctors and Midwives. Which Are More Dangerous? Photo by Martin Valigursky/iStockphoto/Thinkstock In the early&nbsp;20th century, cesarean sections became more common and occasionally saved women who would have died of obstructed labor. Above, a baby born via modern-day C-section. Long Lives Made Humans Human <p><em><strong>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a></strong></em><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> <p>The fundamental structure of human populations has changed exactly twice in evolutionary history. The second time was in the past 150 years, when the average lifespan <a href="">doubled in most parts of the world</a>. The first time was in the Paleolithic, probably around 30,000 years ago. That’s when old people were basically invented.</p> <p>Throughout hominid history, it was exceedingly rare for individuals to live more than 30 years. Paleoanthropologists can examine teeth to estimate how old a hominid was when it died, based on which teeth are erupted, how worn down they are, and the amount of a tissue called dentin. Anthropologist Rachel Caspari of Central Michigan University used teeth to <a href="">identify the ratio of old to young people</a> in <em>Australopithecenes</em> from 3 million to 1.5 million years ago, early <em>Homo</em> species from 2 million to 500,000 years ago, and Neanderthals from 130,000 years ago. Old people—<em>old</em> here means older than 30 (sorry)—were a vanishingly small part of the population. When she looked at modern humans from the Upper Paleolithic, about 30,000 years ago, though, she found the ratio reversed—there were twice as many adults who died after age 30 as those who died young.</p> <p>The Upper Paleolithic is also when modern humans really started flourishing. That’s one of the times the population boomed and humans created complex art, used symbols, and colonized even inhospitable environments. (The modern humans she studied lived in Europe during some of the bitterest millennia of the last Ice Age.) Caspari says it wasn’t a biological change that allowed people to start living reliably to their 30s and beyond. (When she looked at other populations of Neanderthals and <em>Homo sapiens</em> that lived in the same place and time, the two different species had similar proportions of old people, suggesting the change was not genetic.) Instead, it was culture. Something about how people were living made it possible to survive into old age, maybe the way they found or stored food or built shelters, who knows. That’s all lost—pretty much all we have of them is teeth—but once humans found a way to keep old people around, everything changed.</p> <p>Old people are repositories of information, Caspari says. They know about the natural world, how to handle rare disasters, how to perform complicated skills, who is related to whom, where the food and caves and enemies are. They maintain and build intricate social networks. A lot of skills that allowed humans to take over the world take a lot of time and training to master, and they wouldn’t have been perfected or passed along without old people. “They can be great teachers,” Caspari says, “and they allow for more complex societies.” Old people made humans human.</p> <p>What’s so special about age 30? That’s when you’re <a href="">old enough to be a grandparent</a>. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers and historical records suggest that when older people help take care of their grandchildren, the grandchildren are more likely to survive. The evolutionary advantages of living long enough to help raise our children’s children may be what made it biologically plausible for us to live to once unthinkably old ages today.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>No matter how many grandmothers were around during most of human history, though, many children <a href="">didn’t survive</a>. Until the 20<sup>th</sup> century, most deaths occurred in children and infants. According to most estimates, quarter to half of them <a href="">died</a>.</p> <p>We’re now on the other side of the second great demographic change in human evolutionary history. The main reason lifespan doubled in the past 150 years is that infant mortality plummeted. Just as having old people around changed human culture profoundly 30,000 years ago, having infants and children survive has fundamentally changed modern society.</p> <p>If you walk through an old cemetery, you’ll see all the tiny headstones of nameless infants. Abandoned cemeteries are the most peaceful. The small <a href="">Bolen graveyard</a> in Shenandoah National Park has about 40 stones &nbsp;that are still legible: <em>Infant son of John H. and Lula Hindall, Born &amp; Died Jan. 15, 1913. Daughter of Waverly H. Bailey, age 11 days. Mollie E. Pullin, Age 7 Years, Gone Home.</em> Some cemeteries are full of infants buried next to mothers who died in childbirth. It’s like strolling through the medieval wing of an art museum: Everywhere you look is Madonna and Child, Madonna and Child.</p> <p>Parents knew they couldn’t expect infants to live. In the United States and other parts of the world, infants often <a href=";context=jpps">weren’t named immediately</a>; a tradition in China and other parts of Asia is to name a child only after 100 days. According to some interpretations of Jewish law, if a baby dies before 30 days, it <a href="">never really lived</a>. Was this meant to keep parents from getting too attached to their children?</p> <p>People certainly grieved when they lost a child. In the <a href="">haunting words</a> of an Alabama cotton tenant: “You ain’t never seen trouble till you lose a young’un.” He had lost seven. An analysis of poems written by parents who had lost children from the 16<sup>th</sup> century on reveals <a href="">plenty of grief</a>.</p> <p>But overall, parents’ relationships with their children were fundamentally different than they are in much of the world today. “It was very difficult to invest emotionally because at least half of them would die,” says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. French historian Philippe Ari&egrave;s popularized the notion that childhood is a <a href="">modern invention</a> and that until recently children weren’t as coddled or precious as they are today.&nbsp;</p> <p>The history of infanticide, child labor, and child abuse—outright torture by today’s standards—shows just how cheap young lives were. Steven Pinker writes in <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143122010&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Better Angels of Our Nature</em></a> that “From time immemorial, parents have abandoned, smothered, strangled, beaten, drowned, or poisoned many of their newborns.”</p> <p>As infant and child mortality declined, so did fertility. Women didn’t need to bear “replacement children” for the ones who died, and they could be confident that a baby would live to adulthood. Survival became expected. Each child gets his or her own name right away now, and not just the recycled name of a dead older sibling.</p> <p>Infanticide is a shocking crime today. And even though we allow parents to brainwash their children with <a href="">fundamentalist home-schooling</a>, when those parents choose <a href="">religion over medical care</a>, we quite rightly charge them with neglect, manslaughter, or—when it happens <a href="">the second time</a>—murder.</p> <p>Today we go to heroic financial and technological efforts to save every newborn. The United States’ high infant mortality rate compared to other developed countries—about 0.6 percent of all live births, which is tragic but a lot better than the 25 to 50 percent it was in the past—is considered shameful. As Darshak Sanghavi points out, the <a href="">data are complicated</a> but mostly explained by a high rate of premature births. Neonatal medicine is one of the highest-paid medical specialties (to the point that we may sometimes be <a href="">doing too much</a> for preemies) and it has made constant improvements in the survival rate of the smallest neonates.</p> <p>Children were the focus of many early public health drives—for clean milk, vaccinations, proper nutrition. Today children’s safety is the motivation for many product recalls, from cribs to window blinds to magnetic balls. Letting them roam unattended is almost as unthinkable as sending them to work in a textile factory. I don’t mean to make light of these precautions—they’re a sign that we’ve become more civilized and humane, that the world is a better and altogether different place than it was more than a century ago, and it’s all tied to our new expectation of long and healthy lives, starting at birth.</p> <p>It’s the best time in the history of the world to be a child, a parent, or a grandparent.</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>After the increase in child survival, the other major demographic change to come from the doubling of average human lifespan is a robust population of old people. In 1850, the proportion of people age 60 or older in the United States was about 4 percent. Today they account for about 20 percent of the population.</p> <p>Economists fret about declining birth rates in the developed world and the challenge of financially supporting large elderly populations. But old people are awesome. Having a high ratio of older to younger people isn’t just a consequence of living in peace and prosperity—it’s also the foundation of a civilized society.</p> <p>Things go horribly wrong in societies composed largely of young people. <em>The <a href="">Lord of the Flies</a></em> is fiction, but the <a href="">Lord’s Resistance Army</a> is all too horrifyingly real. One of the worst centuries in recorded Western history is the 14<sup>th</sup>, a time of Black Death, famine, and endless war between England and France. As Barbara Tuchman points out in <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0345349571&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14<sup>th</sup> Century</em></a>, one of the reasons the Hundred Years War lasted <em>a hundred years</em> is that repeated plagues killed off anyone, including kings and other established leaders. Again and again, teenagers or very young people inherited the throne and promptly did stupid, aggressive, <a href="">frontal-lobe-deficient</a> teenage nonsense like invading neighboring countries.</p> <p>Old people aren’t merely less bellicose and impulsive than young people. They’re also, as a group, wiser, <a href="">happier</a>, and more socially adept. They handle <a href="">negative information</a> better, have stronger relationships, and find <a href="">better solutions</a> to interpersonal conflicts than younger people do. Laura Carstensen of Stanford is one of the leading researchers in this field, and she says the fact that the population is getting older is “going to change every aspect of life as we know it, including education, politics, culture, and the nature of relationships.” That’s because older people “have greater knowledge, better emotional stability, and they care deeply about making a meaningful contribution.”</p> <p>“If you could take everything desirable about growing older and put it in a pill, do you know who would take it?” says Olshansky, the longevity researcher. “The young.” The <a href="">magic pill</a> would confer “a profound sense of self-confidence … a sense of peace and joy that comes from decades of a loving relationship … the sheer joy in caring for grandchildren … financial security … and thoughtful reflection and intelligence.”</p> <p>If lifespan is going to continue to increase throughout the world, it may well require a positive feedback loop like the one that allowed humans to flourish 30,000 years ago. As then, more old people may lead to public health and <a href="">social justice improvements</a> that create more old people, who make the world an even better place. Something to look forward to.</p> <p><em><strong>Read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a></strong></em><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> Mon, 09 Sep 2013 09:45:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-09T09:45:00Z Old people were invented in the Paleolithic Age and perfected in the 20th century. Health and Science Long Lives Made Humans Human, From the Paleolithic to Today. 100130909002 evolution fresca elderly Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false Long Lives Made Humans Human, From the Paleolithic to Today. Long Lives Made Humans Human, From the Paleolithic to Today. 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2654317817001 Photo by iStockphoto/Thinkstock It’s the best time in the history of the world to be a child, a parent, or a grandparent. How Would You Have Died in 1811? <p><em><strong>Please read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a></strong></em><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> <p>The main reason life was so different 100, 200, or 300 years ago than it is today is that <em>death</em> was so different. People died young—in infancy or childhood, mostly—and <a href="">they died miserably</a> of communicable diseases. We barely remember the names of some of these diseases today, but they were once the most dreaded words in the English language: consumption (tuberculosis), pleurisy (swelling), putrid fever (typhus), quinsy (tonsillitis), and iliac passion (a particularly violent gastrointestinal disorder). <a href="">Life expectancy has doubled</a><strong> </strong>in just the past several generations, and that’s largely because public health efforts and modern medicine have vanquished the diseases of the past.</p> <p>If you’ve ever fantasized about traveling back in time, this game is for you. Pick a year on the timeline and spin the wheel of fortune. If you had existed back then, what would have killed you? Our tool serves up causes of death in proportion to how many lives they claimed in the chosen year. The earliest data come from parish records or local “bills of mortality,” lists of how many people died of various causes in a given year. Medical historians have translated some of the old terms into modern disease categories—<em>ague</em> probably referred to malaria, for instance—but most of the terms are merely descriptions. We’ll never know what caused most of these fatalities from fever, flux (dysentery), or chrisomes (death in an infant younger than one month). Death was capricious and mysterious.</p> <p>Spin the wheel as many times as you like—you get infinite reincarnations. Not that you would want to be reborn many times in, say, 1811 if you could help it, though. It was a lousy time to be a human but a great time to be a germ—sewage mixed with drinking water, houses were cold and crowded and ridden with vermin, and everybody coughed tuberculosis bacilli on one another. Go ahead, face your fate!</p> Thu, 05 Sep 2013 11:08:00 GMT Laura Helmuth Chris Kirk 2013-09-05T11:08:00Z Play our Wretched Fate game and risk dropsy, quinsy, consumption, and worms. Health and Science How Would You Have Died in 1811? Play Our Grisly Game and Find Out. 100130905003 fresca history longevity death Laura Helmuth Chris Kirk Two Lives false false false Fun! Go back in time and die a horrible death. #NotDeadYet How Would You Have Died in 1811? Play Our Grisly Game and Find Out. Why Are You Not Dead Yet? <p>The most important difference between the world today and 150 years ago isn’t airplane flight or nuclear weapons or the Internet. It’s lifespan. We used to live 35 or 40 years on average in the United States, but now we live almost 80. We used to get one life. Now we get <em>two</em>.</p> <p>You may well be living your second life already. Have you ever had some health problem that could have killed you if you’d been born in an earlier era? Leave aside for a minute the probabilistic ways you would have died in the past—the smallpox that didn’t kill you because it was eradicated by a <a href="">massive global vaccine drive</a>, the cholera you never contracted because you drink filtered and chemically treated water. Did some specific medical treatment save your life? It’s a fun conversation starter: <em>Why are you not dead yet?</em> It turns out almost everybody has a story, but we rarely hear them; life-saving treatments have become routine. I asked around, and here is a small sample of what would have killed my friends and acquaintances:</p> <ul> <li>Adrian’s lung spontaneously collapsed when he was 18.</li> <li>Becky had an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding.</li> <li>Carl had St. Anthony’s Fire, a strep infection of the skin that killed John Stuart Mill.*</li> <li>Dahlia would have died delivering a child (twice) or later of a ruptured gall bladder.</li> <li>David had an aortic valve replaced.</li> <li>Hanna acquired Type 1 diabetes during a pregnancy and would die without insulin.</li> <li>Julia had a burst appendix at age 14.</li> <li>Katherine was diagnosed with pernicious anemia in her 20s. She treats it with supplements of vitamin B-12, but in the past she would have withered away.</li> <li>Laura (that’s me) had scarlet fever when she was 2, which was once a leading cause of death among children but is now easily treatable with antibiotics.</li> <li>Mitch was bitten by a cat (<a href="">filthy animals</a>) and had to have emergency surgery and a month of antibiotics or he would have died of cat scratch fever.</li> </ul> <p>After a while, these not-dead-yet stories start to sound sort of absurd, like a giddy, hooray-for-modernity response to <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0151003084&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Gashleycrumb Tinies</em></a>. Edward Gorey’s delightfully dark poem is an alphabetical list of children (fictional!) who died gruesome deaths: “<em>A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil assaulted by bears</em>.” Here’s how modern science, medicine, and public health would amend it:</p> <p><em>M is for Maud who was swept out to sea</em> … then brought back to shore by a lifeguard and resuscitated by emergency medical technicians.</p> <p><em>O is for Olive run through with an awl</em> … but saved during a four-hour emergency surgery to repair her collapsed lung.</p> <p><em>S is for Susan, who perished of fits </em>… or who would have, anyway, if her epilepsy hadn’t been diagnosed promptly and treated with powerful anticonvulsant drugs.</p> <p>Now we’d like to hear <em>your</em> stories. What would have killed you but didn’t? Which friend or relative is alive today thanks to some medical intervention, whether heroic or trivial? Please send your stories to or share them on Twitter using the hashtag #NotDeadYet. We’ll collect the best stories and publish them in <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> next week, at the end of a series of articles about why life expectancy has increased. And congratulations on being alive!</p> <p></p> <p>* * *</p> <p>When I first started looking into why average lifespan has increased so much so rapidly, I assumed there would be a few simple answers, a stepwise series of advances that each added a few years: clean water, sewage treatment, vaccines, various medical procedures. But it turns out the question of who or what gets credit for the doubling of life expectancy in the past few centuries is surprisingly contentious. The data are sparse before 1900, and there are rivalries between biomedicine and public health, obstetricians and midwives, people who say life expectancy will rise indefinitely and those who say it’s starting to plateau.</p> <p>It’s important to assign the credit correctly. In much of the developing world, average lifespan hasn’t increased nearly as dramatically as in the United States and the rest of the developed world. (And the United States has a <a href="">lousy life expectancy</a> compared to other wealthy nations.) Even within the United States, there are huge differences among races, geographic regions, and social classes. Even <a href="">neighborhoods</a>. These discrepancies are among the greatest injustices of the 21<sup>st</sup> century. How can we prevent <a href="">needless premature deaths</a>? What interventions are mostly likely to grant people in poorer countries extra years? And what’s the best way to prolong life and health even further in rich countries?</p> <p>To understand why people live so long today, it helps to start with how people died in the past. (To take a step back in time, <a href="">play our interactive game</a>.) People died young, and <a href="">they died painfully</a> of consumption (tuberculosis), quinsy (tonsillitis), fever, childbirth, and worms. There’s nothing like looking back at the history of <a href=";pg=PA185&amp;dq=colonial+american+death+rates&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=3Rn0UdXpIc-y4AOR2YGQCQ&amp;ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;q=colonial%20american%20death%20rates&amp;f=false">death and dying in the United States</a> to dispel any romantic notions you may have that people used to live in harmony with the land or be more in touch with their bodies. Life was miserable—full of contagious disease, spoiled food, malnutrition, exposure, and injuries.</p> <p>But disease was the worst. The vast majority of deaths before the mid-20<sup>th</sup> century were caused by microbes—bacteria, amoebas, protozoans, or viruses that ruled the Earth and to a lesser extent still do. It’s not always clear which microbes get the credit for which kills. Bills of mortality (lists of deaths by causes) were kept <a href="">in London starting in the 1600s</a> and in certain North American cities and parishes <a href=";lr=&amp;id=-QoNAAAAIAAJ&amp;oi=fnd&amp;pg=PR3&amp;dq=%22bill+of+mortality%22&amp;ots=kCnGgUcUAg&amp;sig=I8CZRNC4HZEZiJ7GFp2mKfqHjfU#v=onepage&amp;q=%22bill%20of%20mortality%22&amp;f=false">starting in the 1700s</a>. At the time, people thought fevers were spread by miasmas (bad air) and the treatment of choice for pretty much everything was blood-letting. So we don’t necessarily know what caused “inflammatory fever” or what it meant to die of “dropsy” (swelling), or whether <em>ague</em> referred to typhoid fever, malaria, or some other disease. Interpreting these records has become a <a href="">fascinating sub-field of history</a>. But overall, death was mysterious, capricious, and ever-present.</p> <p>The first European settlers to North America mostly died of starvation, with (according to some historians) a side order of stupidity. They picked unnecessary fights with Native Americans, sought gold and silver rather than planting food or fishing, and drank foul water. As Charles Mann points out in his fascinating book <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307278247&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created</em></a>, one-third of the first three waves of colonists were gentlemen, meaning their status was defined by not having to perform manual labor. During the winter of 1609–10, aka “<a href="">the starving time</a>,” almost everyone died; those who survived engaged in <a href="">cannibalism</a>.</p> <p>Deadly diseases infiltrated North America faster than Europeans did. Native Americans had no exposure and thus no resistance to the common European diseases of childhood, and unimaginable pandemics of smallpox, measles, typhus, and other diseases swept throughout the continent and ultimately reduced the population by as much as <a href="">95 percent</a>.</p> <p>The slave trade killed more than 1 million Africans who were kidnapped, shackled, and shipped across the Atlantic. Those who survived the journey were at risk of dying from European diseases, as well as starvation and abuse. The slave trade introduced African microbes to North America; malaria and yellow fever were the ones that killed the most.</p> <p>Global trade introduced new diseases around the world and caused horrific epidemics until the 1700s or so, when pretty much every germ had made landfall on every continent. Within the United States, better transportation in the 1800s brought wave after wave of disease outbreaks to new cities and the interior. Urbanization brought people into ideal proximity from a germ’s point of view, as did factory work. Sadly, so did public schools: Children who might have toiled in relative epidemiological isolation on farms were suddenly coughing all over one another in enclosed schoolrooms.</p> <p>One of the best tours of how people died in the past is <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0674017579&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Deadly Truth: A History of Disease in America</em></a> by Gerald Grob. It’s a great antidote to all the heroic pioneer narratives you learned in elementary school history class, and it makes the <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0064400409&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Little House on the Prairie</em></a> books seem delusional in retrospect. Pioneers traveling west in wagon trains had barely enough food, and much of it spoiled; their water came from stagnant, larvae-infested ponds. They died in droves of dysentery. Did you ever play with Lincoln logs or dream about living in a log cabin? What a fun fort for grown-ups, right? Wrong. The poorly sealed, damp, unventilated houses were teeming with mosquitoes and vermin. Because of settlement patterns along waterways and the way people cleared the land, some of the most notorious places for malaria in the mid-1800s were Ohio and Michigan. Everybody in the Midwest had the ague!&nbsp;</p> <p>* * *</p> <p>How did we go from the miseries of the past to our current expectation of long and healthy lives? “Most people credit medical advances,” says David Jones, a medical historian at Harvard—“but most historians would not.” One problem is the timing. Most of the effective medical treatments we recognize as saving our lives today have been available only since World War II: antibiotics, chemotherapy, drugs to treat high blood pressure. But the steepest increase in life expectancy occurred from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. Even some dramatically successful medical treatments such as insulin for diabetics have kept individual people alive—send in those #NotDeadYet stories!—but haven’t necessarily had a population-level impact on average lifespan. We’ll examine the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century in a later story, but for now let’s look at the bigger early drivers of the doubled lifespan.</p> <p>The credit largely goes to a wide range of public health advances, broadly defined, some of which were explicitly aimed at preventing disease, others of which did so only incidentally. “There was a whole suite of things that occurred simultaneously,” says <a href="">S. Jay Olshansky</a>, a longevity researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Mathematically, the interventions that saved infants and children from dying of communicable disease had the greatest impact on lifespan. (During a particularly awful plague in Europe, James Riley points out in <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0521002818&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History</em></a>, the average life expectancy could temporarily drop by five years.) And until the early 20<sup>th</sup> century, the most common age of death was in infancy.</p> <p><strong>Clean water</strong> may be the biggest lifesaver in history. Some historians <a href="">attribute one-half of the overall reduction in mortality</a>, two-thirds of the reduction in child mortality, and three-fourths of the reduction in infant mortality to clean water. In 1854, John Snow traced a cholera outbreak in London to a water pump next to a leaky sewer, and some of the big public works projects of the late 1900s involved separating clean water from dirty. Cities ran water through sand and gravel to physically trap filth, and when that didn’t work (germs are awfully small) they started chlorinating water.</p> <p>Closely related were technologies to <strong>move wastewater</strong> away from cities, but as Grob points out in <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0674017579&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Deadly Truth</em></a>, the first sewage systems made the transmission of fecal-borne diseases worse. Lacking an understanding of germs, people thought that dilution was the best solution and just piped their sewage into nearby waterways. Unfortunately, the sewage outlets were often near the water system inlets. Finally understanding that sewage and drinking water need to be completely separated, Chicago built a drainage canal that in 1900 <em>reversed the flow of the Chicago River.</em> The city thus sent its sewage into the greater Mississippi watershed and continued taking its drinking water from Lake Michigan.</p> <p>The <strong>germ theory of disease </strong><a href="">didn’t catch on all that quickly</a>, but once it did, people started washing their hands. Soap became cheaper and more widespread, and people suddenly had a logical reason to wash up before surgery, after defecating, before eating. Soap stops both deadly and lingering infections; even today, kids who don’t have access to soap and clean water have <a href="">stunted growth</a>.</p> <p><strong>Housing</strong>, especially in cities, was crowded, filthy, poorly ventilated, dank, stinky, hot in the summer, and cold in the winter. These were terrible conditions to live in as a human being, but a great place to be an infectious microbe. Pretty much everyone was infected with tuberculosis (the main cause of consumption), the leading killer for most of the 19<sup>th</sup> century. It still has a bit of a reputation as a disease of the young, beautiful, and poetic (it claimed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, not to mention Mim&igrave; in <a href=""><em>La Boh&egrave;me</em></a>), but it was predominantly a disease of poverty, and there was nothing romantic about it. As economic conditions started improving in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, more housing was built, and it was airier, brighter (sunlight kills tuberculosis bacteria), more weather-resistant, and less hospitable to vermin and germs.</p> <p>We live like kings today—we have upholstered chairs, clean beds, a feast’s worth of calories at any meal, all the nutmeg (<a href="">people once killed for it</a>) and salt we could ever want. But <strong>wealth and privilege</strong> didn’t save royalty from early deaths. Microbes do care about breeding—some people have evolved defenses against <a href="">cholera</a>, <a href="">malaria</a>, and possibly the <a href="">plague</a>—but microbes killed off people without regard to class distinctions through the 1600s in Europe. The longevity gap between the rich and the poor grew slowly with the introduction of effective health measures that <a href="">only the rich could afford</a>: Ipecac from the New World to stop bloody diarrhea, condoms made of animal intestines to prevent the transmission of syphilis, quinine from the bark of the cinchona tree to treat malaria. Once people realized citrus could prevent scurvy, the wealthy built <em>orangeries</em>—greenhouses where they grew the life-saving fruit.</p> <p>Improving the standard of living is one important life-extending factor. The earliest European settlers in North America suffered from mass starvation initially, but once the Colonies were established, they had more food and better <strong>nutrition</strong> than people in England. During the Revolutionary War era, American soldiers were <a href="">a few inches taller</a> than their British foes. In Europe, the wealthy were taller than the poor, but there were no such class-related differences in America—which means most people had enough to eat. This changed during the 1800s, when the population expanded and immigrants moved to urban areas. Average height declined, but farmers were taller than laborers. People in rural areas outlived those in cities by about 10 years, largely due to less exposure to contagious disease but also because they had better nutrition. Diseases of malnutrition were common among the urban poor: scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), rickets (vitamin D deficiency), and pellagra (a niacin deficiency). <a href="">Improved nutrition</a> at the end of the 1800s made people taller, healthier, and longer lived; fortified foods reduced the incidence of vitamin-deficiency disorders.</p> <p><strong>Contaminated food</strong> was one of the <a href="">greatest killers</a>, especially of infants; once they stopped breast-feeding, their food could expose them to typhoid fever, botulism, salmonella, and any number of microbes that caused deadly diarrhea in young children. (Death rates for infants were highest in the summer, evidence that they were dying of food contaminated by microbes that thrive in warm conditions.) Refrigeration, public health drives for pure and pasteurized milk, and an understanding of germ theory helped people keep their food safe. The <a href="">Pure Food and Drug Act</a> of 1906 made it a crime to sell adulterated food, introduced labeling laws, and led to government meat inspection and the creation of the Food and Drug Administration.&nbsp;</p> <p>People had started finding ways to <strong>fight disease epidemics </strong>in the early 1700s, mostly by isolating the sick and inoculating the healthy. The United States suffered fewer massive epidemics than Europe did, where bubonic plague (the Black Death) periodically burned through the continent and killed one-third of the population. Low population density prevented most epidemics from becoming widespread early in the United States history, but epidemics <a href="">did cause mass deaths locally</a>, especially as the population grew and more people lived in crowded cities. Yellow fever killed hundreds of people in Savannah in 1820 and 1854; the first devastating cholera epidemic hit the country in 1832. Port cities suffered some of the worst outbreaks because sailors brought new diseases and strains with them from all over the world. Port cities instituted <strong>quarantines</strong> starting in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, preventing sailors from disembarking if there was any evidence of disease, and on land, quarantines separated contagious people from the uninfected.</p> <p>A smallpox epidemic in <a href="">Boston</a> in 1721 led to a huge debate about variolation, a technique that involved transferring pus from an infected person to a healthy one to cause a minor reaction that confers immunity. Rev. Cotton Mather was for it—he said it was a gift from God. Those opposed said that <a href="">disease was God’s will</a>. People continued to fight about variolation, then inoculation (with the related cowpox virus, introduced in the late 1700s), and finally vaccination. The fight over <a href="">God’s will</a> and the dangers of <strong>vaccinations</strong> (real in the past, <a href="">imaginary today</a>) are still echoing.</p> <p>In the early 1900s, antitoxins to treat diphtheria and vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis helped stop these deadly diseases, <a href="">followed by vaccines</a> for mumps, measles, polio, and rubella.</p> <p>Anne Schuchat, assistant surgeon general and the acting director of CDC's Center for Global Health, says it’s not just the scientific invention of vaccines that saved lives, but the “huge social effort to deliver them to people improved health, extended life, and kept children alive.” Vaccines have almost eliminated diseases that used to be common killers, but she points out that “they’re still circulating in other parts of the world, and if we don’t continue to vaccinate, they could come back.”</p> <p>Vaccines have been so effective that most people in the developed world don’t know what it’s like to watch a child die of <a href="">pertussis</a> or <a href="">measles</a>, but parents whose children have contracted these diseases because of anti-vaccine paranoia can tell them. “The mistake that we made was that we underestimated the diseases and we totally overestimated the adverse reactions [to vaccines],&quot; says a father in New Zealand whose child almost died of an <a href="">agonizing bout of tetanus</a>.</p> <p>Schuchat says the HPV vaccine is a huge priority now; only one-third of teenage girls have received the full series of three shots required to <a href="">protect them against viruses</a> that cause cervical cancer. The vaccines “are <a href="">highly effective</a> and very safe, but our uptake is horrible. Thousands of cases of cervical cancer will occur in a few decades in people who are girls now.”</p> <p>Some credit for the historical decrease in deadly diseases may go to the disease agents themselves. The microbes that cause rheumatic fever, scarlet fever, and a few other diseases may have <strong>evolved to become less deadly</strong>. Evolutionarily, that makes sense—it’s no advantage to a parasite to kill its own host, and less-deadly strains may have spread more readily in the human population. Of course, sudden evolutionary change in microbes can go the other way, too: The pandemic influenza of 1918–19 was a new strain that <a href="">killed more people</a> than any disease outbreak in history—around 50 million. In any battle between microbes and mammals, the smart money is on the microbes.</p> <p>Over the next week, we’ll take a closer look at deaths in childbirth and changes in life expectancy in adulthood. We’ll examine the evolution of old age and the social repercussions of having infants that survive and a robust population of old people, and we’ll list some of the oddball, underappreciated innovations that may have saved your life. In the meantime, please play the <a href="">Wretched Fate</a> game and send us your #NotDeadYet survival stories on Twitter or</p> <p><strong><em>Please read the rest of Laura Helmuth's <a href="">series on longevity</a>, and play our &quot;<a href="">Wretched Fate</a>&quot; interactive game to learn how you would have died in 1890. </em></strong></p> <p><strong><em>&nbsp;</em></strong></p> <p><strong><em>Correction, Sept. 5, 2013: </em></strong><em>This article originally misspelled John Stuart Mill's middle name</em><em>.</em><br /> </p> Thu, 05 Sep 2013 09:18:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-09-05T09:18:00Z Life expectancy doubled in the past 150 years. Here’s why. Health and Science You Used to Get One Life. Now You Get Two. #NotDeadYet 100130905001 medicine fresca public health life expectancy Laura Helmuth Two Lives false false false Tell @Slate why you’re #NotDeadYet. You Used to Get One Life. Now You Get Two. #NotDeadYet Photo courtesy of Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services Fresh air was a part of the regimen to battle tuberculosis. Above, patients receive fresh air treatment on the sun porch at Waverly Tuberculosis Hospital in Louisville, Ky., in the 1950s. Virginia Heffernan’s Shameful Confession <p>Until <em>Project Runway,</em> I never really understood people who are intimidated by science. My officemates at the time were fascinated with the show and talked about it with great passion. They used words I didn’t know and cited famous people I’d never heard of. I felt queasy, confused, and self-conscious.</p> <p>What did I do about my uneasy ignorance? Did I watch the show, read smart articles about fashion, educate myself about its history and practice? Of course not. I rolled my eyes with disdain. And after a while I finally had my epiphany: Oh! So <em>this</em> is what people feel like when they say they don’t like science and don’t <em>get</em> it and don’t think it’s worth the bother.</p> <p>This is all just to say that I am trying to sympathize, I really am, with Virginia Heffernan. Heffernan is a writer for Yahoo News, formerly of the <a href=""><em>New York Times</em></a> and formerly-formerly a TV critic for <a href=""><strong><em>Slate</em></strong></a>. Last week she published an essay in which she revealed that <a href="">she is a creationist</a>. I’m not exaggerating. The essay is titled “Why I’m a Creationist,” and she wrote: “Also, at heart, I am a creationist. There, I said it.”<br /> </p> <p>Heffernan wasn’t raised in a creationist household. She wasn’t home-schooled to believe that Darwinists are <a href="">condemned to eternal damnation</a>. She came to her decision as an adult, on the basis of <a href="">scriptural comparisons</a>: &nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;“I wanted to know the truth of how the world began, so I was handed the Big Bang. That wasn’t a metaphor, but it wasn’t fact either. It was something called a hypothesis. And it was only a sentence. I was amused and moved, but considerably less amused and moved by the character-free Big Bang story (“something exploded”) than by the twisted and picturesque misadventures of Eve and Adam and Cain and Abel and Abraham.”<br /> </p> <p>Darwin’s <a href=""><em>On the Origin of Species</em></a> was fine, as far as it went: “I still wasn’t sure why a book that never directly touches on human evolution, much less the idea of God, was seen as having unseated the story of creation.” (Darwin was deliberately vague in <em>Origin</em> about how evolution by natural selection <a href="">shaped modern humans</a>—he knew it would be a touchy subject—but he published <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1463645961&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Descent of Man</em></a> a few years later, which does “directly touch on human evolution.”)</p> <p>She calls evolution merely “another hypothesis” and says “I have never found a more compelling story of our origins than the ones that involve God.”</p> <p>At first I thought Heffernan was joking when she additionally described herself as a believer in angels, but she was not: “Those scientists no doubt see <em>me </em>as a dopey sheep who believes in angels and is carbon-ignorant. I have to say that they may be right.”</p> <p>Heffernan is a talented writer who sometimes writes about technology, which is made by science and not by angels. This essay can’t be a good career move. As Hamilton Nolan <a href="">tells Heffernan at <em>Gawker</em></a>: “you should probably expect that, from now on, when people read your musings on, say, the future of internet communications, they might stop, in a moment of gathering doubt, and recall that you are a science-phobic angel-believing climate change skeptic, and that therefore your dedication to facts is somewhat in question.”<br /> </p> <p>She has written ignorant things about science in the past, though, including a <em>New York Times Magazine</em> piece about <a href="">science blogs</a> that recommended a notorious climate-change denier’s blog. She lumped it with <a href=""><em>Scientific American</em>’s website</a>, which must be one of the most embarrassing endorsements in that magazine’s 168-year history.</p> <p>The only glimmer of reason in the new essay comes when she critiques evolutionary psychology analyses of sex roles, but she misses the point that the most sophisticated and vehement critiques of evolutionary psychology come from other scientists, particularly evolutionary biologists, who are trying to make their colleagues adhere to scientific standards—rather than to the literary or narrative standards that Heffernan finds so persuasive.</p> <p>Evolution is a theory the way gravity is a theory. It’s not a story or an aesthetic choice or one side of a debate; it’s the way the world works. Everything we know about geology, paleontology, isotope chemistry, genetics, taxonomy, experimental biology, biomedicine, biochemistry, paleoanthropology, and yes, in some cases even psychology … all of it enriches our understanding of evolution. Whatever levels of analysis you care to use, from molecular to planetary, they all mutually reinforce the discovery that all living things evolve through a process of natural selection. Absolutely nothing in the 154 years since <em>Origin</em> was published has undermined the theory.</p> <p>If Heffernan were claiming that the <a href="">Earth is the center of the universe</a> or that <a href="">it’s turtles all the way down</a>, I’d just shake my head in disbelief and move on. But creationism matters. It’s a powerful political and social force. Heffernan says she may be the only creationist in New York City, but that is unlikely given that only 44 percent of the U.S. population <a href="">believes in evolution</a>. Her Facebook feed is now full of seemingly educated people who are <a href="">thanking her for the essay</a> and saying they agree with her.</p> <p>People, please. This is important. You may feel clever debating evolution and creationism in New York City, but stop by a school in Louisiana sometime. The Louisiana Science Education Act allows creationism to be taught there. <a href="">In science class</a>. Gov. Bobby Jindal, <a href="">a biology major at Brown</a>, endorses spending millions of dollars in state money to support the teaching of creationism. The National Center for Science Education keeps track of similar efforts in other states: <a href="">Kansas</a>, <a href="">Oklahoma</a>, <a href="">Indiana</a>, and <a href="">more</a>. If you endorse creationism, you’re giving comfort to people who brainwash children and prevent them from learning about the most powerful and fascinating discoveries people have ever made.</p> <p>And science <em>is</em> fascinating. As <a href="">Carl Zimmer</a> pointed out in an <a href="">epic Twitter war</a> with Heffernan, dismissing the evidence for evolution betrays a profound lack of curiosity. Their 140-character bits of back-and-forth show that she really does think of creationism and evolution merely as competing narratives: “What I believe is stories—hodgepodge of magic &amp; facts—like what you believe. What I do is: aim to be kind.” (She apparently thought people who tweeted about evidence for evolution were being mean. Zimmer has devoted his career to <a href="">telling excellent stories</a> about evolution—stories that are true. He’s entitled to be <a href="">incredulous</a>.) Heffernan is simply wrong. There is no hodgepodge. Creationism and evolution aren’t equivalent stories to be believed or not. Creationism is magic and evolution is facts.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<br /> </p> Mon, 15 Jul 2013 19:56:48 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-07-15T19:56:48Z She says she’s a creationist. Seriously. Health and Science Virginia Heffernan’s Nutty Revelation: She’s a Creationist 100130715011 evolution creationism Laura Helmuth Science false false false Virginia Heffernan’s Nutty Revelation: She’s a Creationist Virginia Heffernan’s Nutty Revelation: She’s a Creationist Photo by Scott Wintrow/Getty Images Writer Virginia Heffernan Happy 30th, Sally Ride’s First Space Flight. You Came Too Late. <p><em>Thirty years ago today, Sally Ride became the first American woman to travel into space. When Ride died in 2012, Laura Helmuth paid tribute to her by asking what the hell took so long. Her post is reprinted below.</em></p> <p>Don’t get me wrong. Sally Ride, <a href="">rest her soul</a>, absolutely rocked. She was smart and courageous, unabashedly a feminist, and she <a href="">called out sexism</a> <a href=",,20085312,00.html">before</a>, during, and after her time as an astronaut. She was a great <a href="">advocate for science and math education, especially for girls</a>; she wrote science books for kids, and her organization runs science camps and fairs and trains science teachers.</p> <p>The first American woman in space, Ride flew on the Space Shuttle <em>Challenger </em>in 1983. A few years later she helped identify the systematic failures that led to that shuttle’s <a href="">explosion</a>. When the <em>Columbia </em>disaster killed another batch of astronauts, she <a href="">served on an accident investigation board</a> again (Ride was the only person to serve on both boards, which must have been incredibly grueling), and then she <a href="">helped write NASA’s plans</a> for the future of human spaceflight. She arguably contributed more to NASA, and probably the world, than any other ex-astronaut. She was the Jimmy Carter of ex-astronauts, especially compared with Buzz “<a href="">Show Me The Money</a>” Aldrin or Harrison “<a href="">Don’t Fret Climate Change</a>” Schmitt. She dedicated her career to science, space, safety, and girls’ education, and I was crushed to hear of her death.</p> <p>But back in 1983, when Ride made her historic trip into space, it was already too late. Judging by Google query completions, a lot of people think Sally Ride was the first woman in space. But that was cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who was also the first civilian in space. Do you remember how many years the Soviets beat us by in this particular race? Twenty. Tereshkova piloted the Vostok 6 into space in 1963. The first woman to walk in space was Svetlana Savitskaya, in 1982.</p> <p>By the time Ride got there, we already had a lot of female “firsts,” which made some of the attention lavished on her—what an <em>amazing</em> feat for a woman!—feel a little condescending to, say, a 14-year-old girl in Indiana. Sandra Day O’Connor had just been named to the Supreme Court in 1981—also sadly overdue. Janet Guthrie raced in the Indy 500—one of the most macho, daredevil, balls-scratching sports—in 1977, for crying out loud. And never mind that Amelia Earhart got her pilot’s license exactly 60 years before Ride’s flight.</p> <p>The fact that it took until 1983 to have a female astronaut just emphasized NASA’s nasty history of sexism. The United States could have sent the first woman into space much, much earlier. The Mercury program <a href="">trained 13 women</a> starting in 1961. They performed well, but despite their skills (or perhaps because of them), the program was eventually canceled. NASA redefined its astronaut prerequisites to include jet fighter experience, thereby ruling out any possibility of female candidates.</p> <p>As much as I admire Sally Ride the person, do you know who should have been the first woman astronaut? One of the Mercury 13, definitely—all of whom by the way <a href="">were honored guests</a> in 2005 when shuttle commander Eileen Collins led the first shuttle flight after the <em>Columbia </em>disaster. But if not them, it could have been Janet Guthrie. She <a href="">applied to an astronaut training program</a> in 1964 and would have raced circles around those other guys.</p> Tue, 18 Jun 2013 20:45:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-06-18T20:45:00Z Double X Happy 30th Anniversary, Sally Ride’s First Space Flight. You Came Too Late. 201120723013 Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false Sally Ride was amazing, but her space flight came much too late. Happy 30th Anniversary, Sally Ride’s First Space Flight. You Came Too Late. Photo by AFP/Getty Images Sally Ride in January 1983, five months before her <em>Challenger</em> flight. So Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Called Us to Complain … <p>There are two sides to almost every story, and sometimes we publish <a href="">both</a> of <a href="">them</a>. That’s true even for science. When the new edition of psychiatry’s <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0890425558&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual</em></a> came out, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> ran <a href="">stories</a> <a href="">criticizing</a> <a href="">it</a> and <a href="">praising it</a>. We’ve made the case that coal <a href="">still rules</a> and that it <a href="">is doomed</a>. But three areas of science are beyond scientific debate even though they are still debated by a lot of people. <a href="">Evolution</a> and climate change are two. (It makes sense to debate <a href="">what to <em>do</em></a> about climate change, but the fact of it has been <a href="">thoroughly established</a>.) The other is vaccines.&nbsp;</p> <p>Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for <em>Discover</em> about RFK Jr.’s <a href="">keynote address</a> to a convention of people who think vaccines cause autism. You can read about their conversation <a href="">at Kloor's blog</a><a></a><strong>.</strong> Phil Plait wrote a story <a href="">about RFK Jr. for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong></a> last week, pointing out that the idea that vaccines cause autism is a crackpot theory that has been thoroughly debunked, that it is dangerous, and that RFK Jr. is one of its most effective proponents.</p> <p>RFK Jr. was displeased. His managing director emailed me (I’m the health and science editor) to say that the story was full of inaccuracies, and I offered to correct any errors right away. He said Kennedy wanted to speak to Plait or me; I requested comments or corrections in writing; we went back and forth. Eventually Kennedy got me on the phone and he talked and I listened.</p> <p><strong><em>Slate </em></strong>doesn’t give <a href="">equal time</a> to <a href="">creationists</a>, and given the overwhelming evidence, we would never publish a story claiming that vaccines cause autism. But it’s fascinating, in a horrified head-shaking sort of way, to hear how anti-vaxxers think. I requested a transcript or video of Kennedy’s speech to <a href="">the 2013 AutismOne/Generation Rescue Conference</a>, but neither the conference hosts nor Kennedy’s office provided them. I can tell you what he said to me instead.</p> <p>The short version of the vaccine conspiracy theory (if you are stuck on the phone with RFK Jr., you will be subjected to the long version) is that a vaccine preservative called thimerosal causes autism when injected into children. Government epidemiologists and other scientists, conspiring with the vaccine industry, have covered up data and lied about vaccine ingredients to hide this fact. Journalists are dupes of this powerful cabal that is intentionally poisoning children.</p> <p>For a guy whose family has such a distinguished record of public service, Kennedy says some pretty awful things about government employees: “The lies that you are hearing and printing from the CDC are things that should be investigated.” He spoke to one scientist (he named her but I won’t spread the defamation) who, he said, “was actually very honest. She said it’s not safe. She said we know it destroys their brains.”</p> <p>I asked the scientist about their conversation. She said there is in fact no evidence that thimerosal destroys children’s brains, and that she never said that it did.</p> <p>Like a lot of conspiracy theories, this one started with a mystery: Autism diagnoses were going up, and it wasn’t entirely clear why. It was reasonable to ask whether vaccines were disrupting neural development somehow, and a paper published in a prestigious medical journal claimed to show evidence of a link. So scientists studied the question. They found that the incidence of autism is independent of <a href="">when and how many vaccines</a> children are given, that taking thimerosal out of vaccines <a href="">doesn’t reduce the incidence</a> of autism, and that the study by Andrew Wakefield purporting to show a link was <a href="">entirely made up</a>. Thimerosal is a mercury compound, which sounds scary, but mercury comes in many forms that behave differently in the body, and this <a href="">isn’t the dangerous kind</a>. And in any case, a decade ago thimerosal was removed from the childhood vaccines that anti-vaxxers claimed were causing autism. The evidence is pretty clear now that the increase in autism rates is mostly a matter of <a href="">better diagnoses</a> and more parents seeking services.</p> <p>But RFK Jr. disagrees. A scientist told him about the changes in diagnostic criteria, but “I knew that that was not true, because I spent my life working with people with intellectual disabilities. My family started the Special Olympics. I worked at Camp Shriver from when I was 8 years old. … I saw every kind of mental disability, but I had never seen autistic. I didn’t know what autism was until I saw <em>Rain Man</em>.”</p> <p>Kennedy claims that scientists admit to him in private that they are lying about the data. When he challenged one university scientist about the accuracy of studies showing that the presence of thimerosal in vaccines had no effect on autism diagnoses, “He folded like a house of cards. Three weeks later I heard him on the radio and he was saying the same things he said to me, which I knew he knew was lying.”</p> <p>A cover-up of such proportions might sound like Pulitzer bait, but he says journalists aren’t pursuing the story because we won’t read scientific papers. (Phil Plait and I both have science Ph.D.s.) As RFK Jr. explained, “journalists get their information from government officials who are saying there’s no problem. Not one of them has picked up the multitude of studies that say thimerosal is the most potent brain killer imaginable.” When RFK Jr. challenged the university scientist about a study of the biological activity of thimerosal in vitro, which “everybody accepts because journalists hadn’t read it,” the scientist said, “ ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right about that.’ He backpedaled.” That’s because “now he was dealing with somebody who wasn’t afraid to read science.”</p> <p>I talked to the scientist, who would prefer I not use his name because he gets death threats from unhinged anti-vaxxers. He said, “Kennedy completely misrepresented everything I said.”</p> <p>Kennedy brought up his own article about autism and vaccines, which <em>Salon</em> <a href="">published</a> and eventually <a href="">retracted</a>. It covered a meeting in 2000 at which scientists discussed what additional research should be done on thimerosal. Here’s how RFK Jr. described it: “They panicked. They had a 3.5-hour discussion about how to hide this from the public, which I published in <em>Rolling Stone</em> and <em>Salon</em>.<em> Salon</em> later pulled it, said it was taken out of context. Read those quotes in [Seth] Mnookin’s book [<a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1439158657&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Panic Virus</em></a><em>: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy</em>], not even in my article, better yet read the transcripts. If you even read it in Mnookin’s book where he’s trying to disparage me and explode me and say I used them out of context, he proves just the opposite. … The stuff they’re saying is so outrageous and blatant.”</p> <p><a href="">Seth Mnookin</a> knows the vaccine-autism conspiracy theory as well as anyone. I asked him about Kennedy’s claims, and he said, “What he has done is taken concern that there could be a problem as evidence that there was a problem.” Kennedy also said that Mnookin, in his book, “doesn’t talk about the science.” <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1439158657&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Panic Virus</em></a> has 66 pages of source notes and 38 pages of bibliography.</p> <p>RFK Jr. likens people who believe that vaccines cause autism to scientists whose discoveries were shunned by their small-minded peers. “I watched this happen to Rachel Carson, who I knew, who came to my home. My uncle President Kennedy introduced me to her. … &nbsp;She was condemned in the press by <em>Time</em>, <em>Life</em>, <em>Look</em>, <em>US News &amp; World Report</em>, <em>Newsweek</em>, and <em>Sports Illustrated</em>. She was totally marginalized as a kook. My uncle, I’m proud to say, John Kennedy, went against his own Agriculture Department and vindicated her.”&nbsp;</p> <p>William Souder, who wrote the <a href="">fantastic</a> Carson biography <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0307462218&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>On a Farther Shore</em></a> and has <a href="">debunked conspiracy theories</a> about her, says that “generally, Carson and <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0618249060&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Silent Spring</em></a> were treated fairly and with respect by the press. The few negative reviews and skeptical articles were far outnumbered by the positive responses.” As with most of what Kennedy said, a kernel of truth is distorted into something malevolent.</p> <p>The underdog narrative is powerful. So is <a href="">fear of chemicals</a>. So is the desire for a simple solution to a complicated problem. And conspiracy theories are alluring. <a href="">For some people</a>, it’s deeply rewarding to believe that you and your fellow conference attendees are the only ones who know the real story behind the moon landing, Area 51, or the obvious example. Like doomsday cultists <a href="">after the world doesn’t end</a>, they misinterpret every new bit of information to make it fit into their existing worldview.</p> <p>And vaccines are a special case. You’re allowing your healthy child to be injected with some mysterious substance to prevent a disease that—<em>because vaccines work so well</em>—you have never even seen. There’s a long history of conspiracy theories about vaccines, and it’s sometimes easier to recognize the paranoia from afar. In parts of Pakistan, Nigeria, and other countries, people are convinced that a polio eradication campaign is a Western <a href="">plot to sterilize Muslim children</a>. They know it is: They have it on good authority from leaders with famous names.</p> <p>Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s elaborate conspiracy theory is just as delusional and <a href="">dangerous</a>. Rather than accepting the findings of the <a href="">Institute of Medicine</a>, the <a href="">National Institute of Mental Health</a>, or the <a href="">American Academy of Pediatrics</a>, Kennedy says the scientists are lying. He says vaccine-makers are intentionally poisoning kids and giving them autism. Only he and his fellow activists know the truth because journalists, although they may report aggressively on the National Security Agency, Defense Department, and Central Intelligence Agency, are cowed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.</p> <p>Kennedy had one substantive objection to Phil Plait’s story that I hope shows he may someday change his mind. We refer to people who say vaccines cause autism with the shorthand “anti-vaxxers” or say that they are part of the “anti-vaccine movement.” Kennedy said that he is “very much pro-vaccine” and that “vaccines have saved millions and millions of lives.” They will <a href="">save even more lives</a> if he and his colleagues stop <a href="">spreading fear and misinformation</a> about them. Kennedy is a passionate guy with practically unique name recognition, powerful connections, and the ability to command attention. He could reverse the course of the anti-vaccine movement today if he announced that his concern about vaccines had been well-intentioned, but that research has shown that vaccines don’t cause autism after all. It would be a proud legacy, one worthy of his name.</p> Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:05:14 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-06-11T17:05:14Z He says scientists lie, journalists are scared of the CDC, and the government is poisoning children. Health and Science The Conspiracy-Ridden Worldview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 100130611010 vaccines autism skepticism Laura Helmuth Medical Examiner false false false The Conspiracy-Ridden Worldview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Conspiracy-Ridden Worldview of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Photo by Andy Kropa/Getty Images Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 2011 Ripple of Hope Awards dinner on Dec. 5, 2011, in New York City. The Next Doctor Should Be a Woman. You Should Care Even if You Don't Watch Doctor Who. <p><em><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00CVMI3RC&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">Doctor Who</a></em>, like a lot of science fiction, sounds goofy from the outside. The main character is a thousand-year-old alien who can travel through space and time. He is the last of the Time Lords; the others of his kind, who lived on the planet Gallifrey, were killed in the Time War. Since then, he has traveled the universe protecting other planets and sentient species from being obliterated, and he has adopted Earth as his pet project.<br /> </p> <p>The Doctor is basically immortal. In the biggest power grab in the history of television screenwriting, the showrunners decided that any given incarnation of the Doctor could die and the character would simply regenerate into a new body. This comes in handy whenever an actor playing Doctor Who quits or gets too demanding: Just kill him off and start fresh with another. The show has been around for 50 years thanks to this conceit.</p> <p>The<sup> </sup>11<sup>th</sup> Doctor, Matt Smith, <a href="">just announced that he is leaving the series</a>. The 12<sup>th</sup> Doctor should be a woman. It’s time.</p> <p>Each new doctor has a new personality and costume. The ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, who was the first one in the 21<sup>st</sup> century reboot of the series, was moody and mysterious. <a></a>David Tennant was dashing and wore a long coat given to him by Janis Joplin.<a>*</a> Smith is a funny, sometimes corny, physical comedian in a bow tie.<br /> </p> <p>The Doctor’s essential characteristics, the ones that show up in every reincarnation, are intelligence, courage, cleverness, adventurousness to the point of recklessness, and a sentimental affection for humans. The Doctor also has two hearts, but there’s no reason he has to have a penis.</p> <p>We know it’s possible for Time Lords to switch genders when they are reincarnated. When the Doctor woke up in Smith’s body, he patted down his legs and face to get a feel for his new form, and he confirmed that he was a male by grabbing his … Adam’s apple. This would have been funnier if he hadn’t seemed so <em>relieved</em>.&nbsp;</p> <p>The show has a huge following of smart, passionate fans, and everyone has an opinion of who should be the next doc. Alley Pezanoski on <em>BitchMedia</em> makes a <a href="">strong case for a female doctor</a>, as does Matt Patches at <a href=""><em>Hollywood</em></a>, and “<a href="">informed sources at the BBC</a>” say it might happen. But the official BBC <em>Doctor Who</em> TV site presented the possibility as an <a href="">April Fool’s joke</a> last year, and as you can imagine, there’s a backlash. The <em>Daily Mail</em> says “<a href="">ANYONE but a woman</a>.” Opponents cite tradition, of course, the first refuge of sexists.</p> <p><a href="">Mac Rogers</a>, who runs <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s <a href=""><em>Doctor Who</em> &quot;TV Club&quot;</a>, points out that there is precedent for a female Doctor: &quot;Exhibit A is Lalla Ward's performance as the second Romana in the classic series. As another Time Lord—and the rare companion whose intelligence equals the Doctor's—Ward showed the command, humor, flamboyance, and lightning-fast thought process required for the character.&quot;</p> <p>Science <a href="">writer</a> <a href="">Jennifer Ouellette</a> says her reasons for championing a female Doctor go beyond feminism and the obvious fact that a female Doctor would be really cool. “Artistically, it would be a very rich vein for the series writers to mine, both thematically and in terms of character development. It's a perspective on history he hasn't experienced yet: that of being the &quot;other&quot; in, shall we say, a less than enlightened time. It changes everything: where he can go, what behavior is appropriate, how others respond to him (both intellectually and sexually).”</p> <p><em>Doctor Who</em> fans have come up with some great picks for their fantasy next Doctor. Phil Plait, who writes <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s &quot;<a href="">Bad Astronomy</a>&quot; blog, suggests <a href="">Jennifer Saunders</a>. (He also suggests <a href="">Tim Minchin</a>, who is a dreamboat and pretty much the only male pick who would make me recant my call for a female Doctor.) <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> culture critic and <em>Doctor Who</em> <a href="">TV Clubber</a> <a href="">June Thomas</a> picks <a href="">Lara Pulver</a>. <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> designer <a href="">Andrew Morgan</a> says <a href="">Natasha O'Keeffe</a>: “She could pull off the look/attitude and can deadpan like no one’s business.” Amanda Marcotte suggests <a href="">Natalie Dormer</a> or <a href="">Lena Headey</a>.&nbsp;<a href="">Greg Laden</a> says, “That’s easy. <a href="">Emma Watson</a>.”</p> <p>A female Doctor would go a long way toward making up for the show’s recent regression into tiresome stereotyped sex roles. The Doctor travels with human companions, usually one lovely young woman at a time. As Ted Kissell writes at the <em>Atlantic</em>, the recent companions have been <a href="">weaker and younger</a> than the ones who accompanied the earlier Doctors.</p> <p>The adorable, plucky, but somewhat pathetic sidekicks started appearing when Steven Moffat took over as showrunner. As writer <a>Elizabeth Lopatto</a> says, &quot;I'm fine with the next Doctor being a dude,&nbsp;as long as we get more interesting women and a more emotionally competent writer. Because if Moffat writes us a female Twelve, I imagine she'll be just as sad and broken as the other women he's written (most notably abuse victim River Song, whose lives are stolen from her by the man she loves, for whom she later goes to jail for a crime she didn't commit; although placeholder/perfume model Amy Pond should get special mention for blandness).&quot;<br /> </p> <p>The nadir for me was an episode from this season called “<a href="">Hide</a>,” in which the Doctor and Clara meet their 1970s doppelg&auml;ngers, a male war-hero genius and a female assistant who is so sensitive that she can communicate with ghosts. Please could we just once have a <em>female</em> mad scientist and a <em>male</em> empath?</p> <p>Science fiction matters. The <em>Doctor Who</em> world penetrates into our own—even if you don’t care to watch a show about a Time Lord whose only weapon is a sonic screwdriver, you probably get the reference when someone says “<a href="">it’s bigger on the inside</a>” or jokes about a <a href="">cybermen</a> attack. The writers have created some of the scariest monsters of modern times—stone angel statues that attack you when you blink—without resorting to torture porn or gratuitous dismembered bodies. They’ve sent the Time Lord to visit Van Gogh, Shakespeare, and <a href="">Madame de Pompadour</a>. They’ve shown us Pompeii, the end of the Earth, and endless aliens and planets. Most of all, in the Doctor they’ve created one of the most lovable, resilient, moral, inspirational, and entertaining characters in modern culture. If they can imagine all that, they can imagine a world without gender essentialism or rigid sex roles. The 11<sup>th</sup> Doctor will soon be dead. Long live the next female Doctor.</p> <p><em><strong><a></a>Correction, June 3, 2013: </strong>This article originally stated that the coat worn by David Tennant was made of leather. It was fabric. (<a>Return</a> to the corrected sentence.)<br /> </em></p> Mon, 03 Jun 2013 17:06:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-06-03T17:06:00Z Double X The Next Doctor in <em>Doctor Who</em> Should Be a Woman 201130603003 television doctor who women in television tv Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false The next Doctor in Doctor Who should be a woman. The Next Doctor in <em>Doctor Who</em> Should Be a Woman Photo by Loic Venance/AFP/Getty Images Should Emma Watson be the next Doc? What’s the Worst Thing a Teacher Ever Said to You? <p>Tuesday was National Teacher Day, and in honor of the occasion, the <a href="">National Education Association</a> and other groups encouraged people to thank educators. They suggested you <a href="">update your Facebook profile</a> to express your appreciation and use the hashtag <a href=";src=hash">#ThankATeacher</a> on Twitter.</p> <p>Now that we’ve thanked the good teachers, it’s time to recognize the bad ones. The majority of teachers may be generous, dedicated, inspirational, and kind. But in their midst are some of the most unpleasant characters you encountered in your childhood. Remember them? We sure do. Here are some of the most outrageous things teachers once said to us at <strong><em>Slate</em></strong>.<strong></strong></p> <p><strong>William Dobson</strong>: My family had recently moved to South Carolina from &quot;up north,&quot; and I had a hard time understanding my teachers' accents. Early in the school year, my second grade teacher asked me to lead the class out to recess. I stood up and the class filed in line behind me at the door. Then she asked me to take the class to &quot;down yonder hill.&quot; I had never heard this phrase. I thought &quot;down yonder hill&quot; must be the proper name of a place, not a direction. I stood there, immobile. She said it louder. Then louder. Finally: &quot;What are you, stupid? Get to the back of the line.&quot; It was that moment that I decided, <em>My parents can choose to live here, but I will never adopt a southern accent</em>.</p> <p><strong>Jeffrey Bloomer</strong>: From an English teacher, I got &quot;feminism is why I have to be here with you instead of with my own kids.&quot;</p> <p><strong>Abigail Ohlheiser</strong>: I had a chemistry teacher once tell me, in front of the class, the following: &quot;I think you and I are both glad there are only two weeks left in the school year, because frankly, I don't think I can stand to look at your face any longer than that.&quot; I obviously remember this, and the long speech before it, pretty much verbatim. It seemed to come out of nowhere, but I was later told what set him off. My crime? Relentlessly correcting all of the typos on his handouts and tests. I thought I was helping.</p> <p><strong>Laura Helmuth</strong>: I got sent out of class for telling a fifth-grade teacher that it’s pronounced <em>Ill-in-oy</em> rather than <em>Ill-in-ois</em>. This was in Indiana, which shares its longest border with Illinois, so I thought she might like to know.</p> <p><strong>Matt Yglesias</strong>: I had a teacher who explained to the class that there are three races: caucasoid (or white), negroid (or black), and mongoloid (or yellow) and that there's a myth out there that a fourth red race of Indians exists but properly understood they're a subset of yellow people.</p> <p><strong>Brandon Long</strong>: I went to high school in rural North Carolina. My U.S. history teacher my junior year referred to the Civil War exclusively as the War of Northern Aggression. (<a href="">So did</a> <strong>J. Bryan Lowder</strong>’s teachers!)</p> <p><strong>Will Saletan</strong>: When I got through the second-grade math textbook, they gave me the third-grade textbook. I didn't understand that while you were supposed to write answers in the second-grade book, you weren't supposed to write in the third-grade book. When my substitute teacher saw I'd written in it, she angrily told me, &quot;You could be BANNED for this!&quot; She failed to understand that in Texas, we ban the textbook, not the student. We paddle the student.</p> <p><strong>Dahlia Lithwick</strong>: A math teacher told my mom it was a good thing my little brother was good looking because he was dumb as a post. I also had a PE teacher tell our class that girls shouldn’t play sports.</p> <p><strong>John Dickerson</strong>: In seventh-grade math class I was a new student at this fancy private school and I finally got enough courage to answer a question, and the teacher said, &quot;That answer makes no sense. It's like if I asked you what color the chalk board is and you said 'fast.' &quot; It really took me aback because until that point I didn't even know fast was a color.</p> <p><strong>Torie Bosch</strong>: My high school health teacher was a conservative Catholic who told the class that he was not comfortable teaching sex ed and thought that it did not belong in the classroom, but the district was making him do it. He made us all calculate our dates of conception, and then asked everyone whether that was near our mother or father's birthday, their anniversary, Valentine's Day, etc.</p> <p><strong>Mike Vuolo</strong>: A kid in my ninth-grade English class had a big, and not especially kempt, Jewfro. One day the teacher asked him, &quot;Who does your hair, ConEd?&quot; I've always wondered if he remembers that as vividly as I do. It seemed so gratuitous and cruel.</p> <p><strong>Juliana Jim</strong><strong>&eacute;nez Jaramillo</strong>: My ninth-grade geometry teacher, who was ex-Marine or some sort of military type, made us summarize each chapter of the textbook in webpage form. I misunderstood the instructions because I couldn't fathom that summarizing a textbook was an actual assignment. I thought it was each <em>section</em> and made drawings and examples for each. I didn't sleep or eat that night (my first all-nighter!). I still couldn't finish it, but what I had was badass. We had to turn the assignment in on a floppy disk, and it somehow got jammed in his computer when he called me up to present it. He was furious. It was a long rant but I specifically remember: &quot;You disgust me, YOU MAKE ME WANT TO THROW UP,&quot; which I guess is standard Marine-speak or something. Not appropriate for a 15-year-old. I started crying, he threw me out of the class, and I almost passed out (I still hadn't slept or eaten). Asshole. Ended up with a C-plus in that class.</p> <p><strong>Chris Wade</strong>: Monday: Mr. A. teaches our calculus class the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus.<br /> Tuesday: Mr. A.: &quot;Okay, now can anyone tell me the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus?&quot;<br /> [silence]<br /> &quot;Anyone?&quot;<br /> [silence]<br /> &quot;ANYONE? It's the FUNDAMENTAL theorem.&quot;<br /> [silence]<br /> &quot;Y'all are fuckin' cocksuckers, get out of here.&quot;</p> <p>What’s the worst thing a teacher ever said to <em>you</em>? Please share your most outrageous quotes using the hashtag #BadTeacher on Twitter. Check out some of our <a href="">favorite #BadTeacher submissions here.&nbsp;</a></p> Wed, 08 May 2013 10:00:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-05-08T10:00:00Z We thanked the good teachers yesterday. Now let’s remember the ones we hated. Life What’s the Worst Thing a Teacher Ever Said to You? 100130508001 education Laura Helmuth Culturebox false false false What’s the Worst Thing a Teacher Ever Said to You? What’s the Worst Thing a Teacher Ever Said to You? Photo by Everett Collection/Shutterstock Now that we’ve thanked the good teachers, it’s time to recognize the bad ones Confidential to Elizabeth Wurtzel From Your Future Self: The Real Secret to Looking Young <p>Last week, Elizabeth Wurtzel published a story in the <em>Atlantic</em> about how she maintains her youthful appearance: “<a href="">I Refuse to Be a Grown-Up: Secrets to Looking Young at 45</a>.&quot; It had some practical advice about sunscreen (do) and cocaine (don’t), but mostly it was as self-indulgent as you might expect. Amanda Marcotte had fun <a href="">batting the story around in XX Factor</a>, but she accepted the premise of the article, which is that it’s legitimate and worthwhile to worry about how old you look.</p> <p>This premise is incorrect. The only time it is legitimate and worthwhile to worry about how old you look is when you are younger than 21 and would like to get into a bar without being carded. After you have reached your majority, worrying about how old you look is silly, shameful, counterproductive, and a complete waste of time.</p> <p>You are as young as you will ever be. Ten years from now, your future self will look back on your current self and wonder why you didn't just appreciate the body you currently inhabit. Enjoy the hair, skin, joints, and height you have today, but not obsessively or anxiously, and not because you think you can pass for a younger person. This is something Elizabeth Wurtzel should have learned in the past 45 years: Vanity is ugly. It is beneath you. Let us discuss this no further. Walk away from the mirror and do not fear age.</p> Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:00:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-04-15T13:00:00Z Double X If You Want to Look Young, Ignore Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Advice on Looking Young 201130415001 Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false If you want to look young, ignore Elizabeth Wurtzel in the Atlantic. If You Want to Look Young, Ignore Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Advice on Looking Young Photo by Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images Walk away from the mirror. Danica Patrick, Shut Up and Drive <p>If you’re going to watch one football game a year, it’s probably going to be the Super Bowl. And if you watch one car race, it’s going to be the Indy 500. The Super Bowl is better on TV than in person: You can’t see the field well from the stands, and you <a href="">miss all the commercials</a>. The Indy 500 is better in person. It’s loud—so loud that vibrations from the speeding cars shake you in the stands. It’s constantly thrilling: Even under a yellow flag (which means a hazard on the track), competitors are still driving and strategizing rather than standing around scratching themselves. And its opening ceremony is more stirring than Alicia Keys on piano, as grown men drinking Coors Lights before noon sniffle after Jim Nabors belts out “<a href="">Back Home Again in Indiana</a>.” (Congrats to Jim and new <a href="">lawfully wedded husband</a>, Stan.) The race has more history than the Super Bowl does (103 years vs. 46); a &nbsp;greater concentration of all-star families (the Bettenhausens, Unsers, Andrettis, Mears, etc.); and its characters are every bit as colorful as football’s: I’ll take A.J. Foyt, the crabbiest person in pro sports, <a href="">drunk</a> Al Unser Jr., and <a href="">wall-climber</a> Helio Castroneves over Ray Lewis any day.</p> <p>But the very best thing about auto racing is that it’s the only major sport in which women compete directly against men. Danica Patrick is the most visible right now, but dozens of women have raced at the highest levels, <a href="">including some in the 1940s</a> for NASCAR. (No disrespect to marathons, but they have a top women’s time and a top men’s time. Mixed doubles is nice, and Billie Jean King kicked Bobby Riggs’ ass. Basketball player Nancy Lieberman was tough and <a href="">funny</a>. And, sure, a few women have competed against men in golf and horse racing. But so far no other major sporting event has women and men routinely competing as equals.)</p> <p>Janet Guthrie was the first woman to compete in the Indy 500 in 1977. It was a big damn deal. Auto racing was a ridiculously manly sport, and Indianapolis was a very gender-normative kind of city. Racing requires all kinds of skills that people (unfortunately still) think of as masculine: speed, agility, aggression, spatial reasoning, fast reaction times. You have to have endurance—500 miles is the distance from Indianapolis to Toronto—and &nbsp;you have to understand engines and other supposedly macho shit.&nbsp;</p> <p>And don’t forget courage. Auto racing is the most dangerous sport. If something goes wrong in football, a player gets a concussion. If something goes wrong in racing, a driver <a href="">gets decapitated</a>.</p> <p>Guthrie was the best role model a kid (me) could ask for. In addition to having courage, speed, etc., she was smart, cool, and determined. She was a <a href="">physics major, aeronautics engineer</a>, pilot, and flight instructor. She applied to be an astronaut. (To NASA’s everlasting shame, it <a href="">clung to its sexism</a> longer than auto racing did.) Guthrie had mechanical trouble her rookie year at Indy and dropped out before the finish, but the next year she came in ninth, well ahead of Mario Andretti and Johnny Rutherford.</p> <p>Since Guthrie retired from racing in 1980, <a href="">10 other women</a> have competed in the Indy 500. In both 2010 and 2011, four women were among the 33 qualifiers to start the race. <a href="">Lyn St. James</a> founded a program to train girls to race. <a href="">Sarah Fisher</a> runs her own racing team.</p> <p>Danica Patrick is by far the most famous of these women race car drivers. She was the first to lead the Indy 500, in 2005, her rookie year. She was out front for 19 laps, and they were the most thrilling laps in the past few decades of racing. Everybody in the stands was jumping up and down. (I wasn’t there that year, dammit, but my dad and brother were.) People were screaming. People were crying. She finished fourth that year and third the next, and she won an <a href="">Indy car race in Japan</a> in 2008. She became the most popular driver on the circuit. (The <a href="">guy who came in first</a> in 2005 knew he couldn’t compete with her for attention. He wore a T-shirt that read, “I Actually Won the Indy 500.”) After years of losing audience and drivers, Indy car racing was suddenly exciting again. So what did Patrick do with this newfound and well-deserved renown?</p> <p>After Janet Guthrie became famous, she starred in an <a href="">ad for Havoline Oil</a>. After Danica Patrick became famous, she starred in a <a href="">series of stupid, sexist ads</a> for a Web-hosting company. The fastest woman in the history of Indy car racing—again, an absurdly dangerous sport requiring rapid reflexes and superior strategizing—<a href="">became a (shudder) “Go Daddy Girl.&quot;</a></p> <p>Last night’s Super Bowl ad was a <a href="">spectacularly offensive example</a> of the genre. It dominated the highly competitive most-offensive-Super-Bowl-commercial contest. It features a model, representing beauty, making out with a guy who is supposed to look freakish in TV world and so represents brains. In the real world, he’s not the least bit hideous or even odd. On any given physical dimension (height, body mass index, hours per week spent on personal grooming), many more audience members would fall on his end of the spectrum than hers. Their kiss is noisy, prolonged, and lippy. Patrick narrates the ad and explains that the company has a “sexy side” and a “smart side” and that “together, they’re perfect.”</p> <p>Offensive commercials are everywhere, and there’s only so much outrage to go around. But people are right to be pissed at Danica Patrick. She squandered the good will of a multitude of fans who wanted to see a woman win at what used to be a man’s game. Guthrie and the other woman drivers pushed one of the most sexist subcultures to respect women or get the hell out of the way while they pass you on the backstretch, and Patrick undermines it all. She’s become a harmless, hair-flipping mascot for another subculture, technology services, that still suffers from rampant sexism.</p> <p>Patrick recently left Indy car racing to compete in NASCAR. Good luck and good riddance. In the meantime, tune in to the Indy 500 on the Sunday before Memorial Day to cheer for Simona De Silvestro, Ana Beatriz, Pippa Mann, Katherine Legge, or any other woman who is smart, fast, brave, and self-respecting.</p> Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:33:05 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-02-04T19:33:05Z Racing’s fastest female is throwing the women’s movement into reverse. Double X Why It Matters That Danica Patrick Stars in Offensive Ads 100130204008 super bowl 2013 super bowl women in sports advertising Laura Helmuth Doublex false false false Why It Matters That Danica Patrick Stars in Offensive Ads Why It Matters That Danica Patrick Stars in Offensive Ads 1519028538001 AQ~~,AAAAAASoY90~,_gW1ZHvKG_1U0LqDiRqg6y9siD7-Z_bO 2141034735001 Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images for NASCAR Danica Patrick in January Cats Are Evil <p>You know what animal makes a good pet? No animal.</p> <p>Dogs will <a href="">bite you to death</a> and then <a href="">eat your corpse</a>. Snakes will <a href="">asphyxiate you</a>, escape, infest the Everglades, and <a href="">eat all its mammals</a>. Pet parrots perpetuate a trade that <a href="">upends ecosystems</a>, and hamsters pass you <a href="">dangerous</a> <a href="">zoonotic diseases</a>. But perhaps the worst pet of all, environmentally speaking, is a cat.</p> <p>Domesticated cats started out as parasites on human civilization. Unlike other species, and admittedly to their credit, <a href="">they domesticated themselves</a>. When humans started growing grain, the crops attracted rodents that attracted cats. Wild cats evolved into housecats, and they were quite useful for thousands of years, killing disease-ridden rats and mice and protecting our food stockpiles. But now that we have industrial farming, reliable food storage, and mostly mouse-proof houses, cats are mere parasites again. Playful and often affectionate parasites, sure, and adorable when young, but a scourge on the landscape.</p> <p>An economist in New Zealand named Gareth Morgan has made the logical and quite correct case that <a href=";_r=1&amp;">his island nation should eliminate its cats</a> in order to protect its endangered birds. He means “elimination” in the most humane way possible: Existing pets should be spayed and neutered and allowed to live out their lives, but no new cats should be allowed to be born or imported. He is not advocating that people poison feral cats, as a former researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo was <a href="">convicted of doing</a> a few years ago. Nor does he say people <a href="">should shoot them</a>, as particularly avid birdwatchers have done. That would be really wrong.</p> <p>Morgan points out that your cat “is actually a friendly neighborhood serial killer.” He may sound like some <a href="">wretched</a>, obsessed <a href="">Jonathan Franzen character</a>, but his <a href="">Cats To Go</a> project isn’t meant as a caricature of environmentalism. He’s asking people to pledge to neuter their cats, keep them indoors, and not get any new ones.</p> <p>Cats are a <a href="">globally invasive species</a>. They kill millions of birds each year <a href=";uid=2&amp;uid=4&amp;uid=3739256&amp;sid=21101697466027">in Wisconsin alone</a>. Cats feast on endangered North American ground-nesting birds such as the <a href="">California clapper rail</a>, <a href="">least tern</a>, and <a href="">piping plover</a>, any one of which is cuter than a laundry basket full of kittens. A study in the D.C. area a few years ago showed that in some neighborhoods (neighborhoods in which a lot of people who really ought to know better let their beasts roam free), outdoor cats <a href="">eat basically all juvenile birds</a> as soon as they fledge.</p> <p>Cats are particularly damaging in island ecosystems that are home to species found nowhere else on earth. A lot of island birds and mammals evolved in the absence of cat-size predators. They nest on the ground and have no defenses against an invasive species that plays with and then decapitates its victims. Cats have endangered or caused the extinction of <a href="">bird species in Hawaii</a>, <a href="">Australia</a>, the <a href="">Chatham Islands</a>, and <a href="">New Zealand</a>, among others. Morgan points out that 40 percent of New Zealand’s land birds are extinct, and 37 percent of the survivors are endangered.</p> <p>Humans are responsible for most modern extinctions, whether through hunting, habitat destruction, introduction of invasive species, or other environmental disruptions. If we give up or at least contain our cats, wild animals will have more of a chance.</p> Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:48:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-01-23T20:48:00Z Why New Zealand is right to consider banning them in order to save its wildlife. Health and Science Why New Zealand Is Right To Consider Banning Cats 100130123013 wildlife wildlife Laura Helmuth Science false false false Why New Zealand Is Right To Consider Banning Cats Why New Zealand Is Right To Consider Banning Cats Photo by Ausra Barysiene/iStockphoto/Thinkstock. Bye-bye, kitty? Chernobyl’s Wildlife Survivors <p><em><strong>Read Mary Mycio’s <a href="">story about Chernobyl’s wildlife here</a>.</strong></em></p> <p>When Mary Mycio tells people she visited the radioactive fallout zone around Chernobyl to study the region’s animals, the questions are always the same. Do the animals have two heads? Do they glow?&nbsp;</p> <p>Actually, according to Mycio and photographer and field biologist <a href="">Sergey Gaschak</a>, the animals are thriving. The 1986 explosion, the worst nuclear accident in history, forced 300,000 people to abandon the highly contaminated area around the wreckage of the power plant. Communal farms turned to wetlands and forests, and the animals came back. The area is now the largest, if unintentional, wildlife sanctuary in Europe.</p> <p>Gaschak has been photographing animals near Chernobyl since 1995. He uses camera traps with motion detectors to capture some of the animals, but he sees and photographs plenty of them in person: lynx, otters, eagle owls, Przewalski’s horses, several species of bats, and footprints of brown bears.</p> <p>.<br /> <br /> <br /> </p> Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:34:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2013-01-21T10:34:00Z The radioactive fallout zone has turned into a refuge. Health and Science The Animals That Have Taken Refuge in Chernobyl’s Radioactive Zone 100130121002 big questions chernobyl wildlife Laura Helmuth Nuclear Power false false false The Animals That Have Taken Refuge in Chernobyl’s Radioactive Zone The Animals That Have Taken Refuge in Chernobyl’s Radioactive Zone Photo by Sergey Gaschak. A wolf in the Chernobyl exclusion zone Is The Impossible Reprehensible? <p><em>This article contains spoilers.</em></p> <p><strong>Dan Kois: </strong>Hi Laura! My <a href="">positive review of <em>The Impossible</em></a>, the new movie based on a Spanish family’s survival story during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, is competing in the marketplace of ideas with some super-destructive pans. The most notable was written by <a href="">Devin Faraci for Badass Digest</a>, who says the movie “deplorably milks human tragedy for awards season buzz.” So what do you think, Laura? Is <em>The Impossible</em> deplorable?</p> <p><strong>Laura Helmuth: </strong>Reprehensible! I haven't seen the other negative reviews so I hope I'm not repeating too much what everybody else is saying, but yeah, it's offensive in dozens of ways.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Dozens?! That's so many ways! Give me the biggest way it's offensive.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>It's hard to get past No. 1, which was represented by the tagline in <a href="">the trailer</a>: &quot;Nothing is more powerful than the human spirit.&quot; Because one thing that <em>is</em> more powerful than the human spirit is a motherfucking tsunami that kills a quarter of a million people. I was willing to think that the tagline was something dreamed up by the marketing department and the movie wouldn't be that triumph-of-human-spirit-y, but it <em>is</em>.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>So do you feel like a tragedy like this is basically off-limits to Hollywood? Or is there a version of <em>The Impossible</em> that you could imagine not being completely offended by?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>I think the mix of Hollywood emotional manipulation (horror-show graphics, dramatic changes in volume, horror-show techniques like having the audience see things that the characters can't see, etc.) does cheapen the tragedy. But the worst Hollywood-ization of the story was that it was about tall, skinny, white people. A film about a Thai family would have been much less offensive.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Well, here's where I get into my biggest argument with <em>Impossible</em>-haters. I would love to watch a movie about a Thai family that survives the tsunami! But as it happens no Thai family has managed to meet producers, sell their life rights, interest stars, or get the movie made. We can decry the systematic global problems that make that the case, but that's not the fault of <em>this</em> movie.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>But <em>this</em> movie is about one of the worst catastrophes of our lifetimes, one that hit only a few Europeans. It's fundamentally misleading to make it about white people.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Saying that this movie is only inoffensive if it stars Thai people suggests to me that the actual trauma suffered by the actual family whose story this is was somehow less authentic because they were on vacation at the time.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>And, for the record, the original family was Spanish, and these people look and sound more Scandinavian.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>But that's just what I'm saying! Now we're dealing in shades of brown. The actual family was not brown enough to be an authentic story of tsunami suffering. And Naomi Watts is not brown enough to be an authentic version of that Spanish lady. But c'mon! Thousands of vacationers died! Thousands more had their lives forever changed!</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>But <em>these</em> people did <em>not</em> lose their lives. That's also fundamentally misleading. It's a happy ending! If there's a film about any one event in recent history that should <em>not</em> have a happy ending, it is a film about this fucking tsunami.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Are you really getting angry at a movie for having a happy ending?</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>What's your counterproposal? By definition a movie that accurately reflected the actual experience of the tsunami would indeed star only South Asians, and it would end after 15 minutes as every character is instantly killed.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>Yes. I am angry at this movie for having a happy ending. It is utterly offensive that this movie has a happy ending. But that is just No. 2 in the offensive files! In no particular order, just so I don't forget it, how about the gratuitous scene of a sun-dappled and nekkid Naomi Watts putting on a bikini? Hollywood, come on.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Wait I can argue for that from an artistic standpoint! I thought that shot was in the movie to contrast with the later scene when her son is suddenly shocked to see that her top's been ripped off. I mean, yes, it's probably gratuitous, but that's European-style libertinism, not Hollywood T&amp;A.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>Uh huh.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Hahaha.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>So, we gotta talk about the crying, I think. By the way, for being fundamentally wrong about the entire film, your review was terrific.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Thanks! Whose crying? My crying? Sure, let's talk about it. Were my tears hollow because they were tears for white people?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>No, genuine! I cried too. By the way, I was watching this in the office yesterday and bawling my eyes out when who stopped by? Our boss. Thanks for making me look real professional.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>I actually think Plotz is probably a real crier. He runs hot!</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>He had to look away when I told him what was on my screen.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>I don't think anybody could avoid crying, but it's such a cheap cry. Anybody who was ever separated from her mommy in the grocery store when she was 4 years old would cry at this movie. You see extended scenes of a kid watching in agony as his mom is battered and swept away by deadly flood waters. It's the most primal tear-jerker there is.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>I guess I don't mind cheap tears.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>But you don't think there's value in seeing the ways that people responded and helped each other in the wake of the tsunami? For me that was the real lesson of this movie. All those (Thai!) doctors and nurses and surgeons working their asses off nonstop for hours.That guy with the teeth who dragged a screaming Naomi Watts to safety. And the people Ewan McGregor met—who didn't <em>want</em> to stop at this hospital, because they were searching for <em>their</em> daughter. But they did! They hated it, they were pissed—but they stopped!</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>True! Everybody should read <a href=";tag=slatmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143118072"><em>A Paradise Built in Hell</em></a> for more on how people are generous and resourceful when faced with tragedy. This is the best message of the movie. And Lucas being so resourceful was another tear-jerker and a powerful message. (Even though he's white.)</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>But nevertheless if you had your druthers this movie would be buried in a deep dark hole.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>I'm no censor. Bad art wants to be free.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>But, yeah, in the world of movies that could be made, this one should not have been a contender.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Look, I can't say I disagree with you. I just think that given the unpromising and, yes, culturally objectionable source material, this movie is extremely artful and moving. And in the end I'm gladder that I watched it than I would be if it hadn't been made in the first place.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>As a white person, I learned things about myself, I guess.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>The thing is, and I know this is the science editor in me talking, there <em>could</em> be interesting films made about the tragedy. Did you know that cheap shrimp killed people? Shrimp farms are made by cutting down mangrove forests, and mangrove forests absorb a lot of tsunami power. The waves' impact was worse where there were no more mangroves.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>OK, that's not something for Hollywood, now that I type it out.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong><a href="">In a world</a> ... where a tsunami was coming ... ONE MANgrove ... STOOD IN ITS WAY.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>I'd pay good money to see that one!</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>But if you break it down, this film has all the elements of a soap opera: disaster, missed connections, families split apart, a deathbed reunion. If only it had a love triangle, it'd be like a month's worth of <em>The Young and the Restless</em> squeezed into two hours.</p> <p><strong>Kois: </strong>Right! The fact that that soap-opera idea sounds awesome to me is perhaps a reflection on my taste.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>This movie is an exaggerated case of slumming. The family goes to an exotic location, eats spicy food, endures a horror, then <em>flies home</em> and dines out on it forever by making a movie.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>All they suffered was a bum leg and five cases of PTSD.</p> Thu, 20 Dec 2012 19:09:08 GMT Laura Helmuth Dan Kois 2012-12-20T19:09:08Z Laura Helmuth and Dan Kois argue about the new movie based on the 2004 tsunami. Arts There Are Barely Any Thai People in the New Movie About the Tsunami in Thailand 100121220017 science movies Laura Helmuth Dan Kois Im false false false There Are Barely Any Thai People in the New Movie About the Tsunami in Thailand There Are Barely Any Thai People in the New Movie About the Tsunami in Thailand Summit Entertainment. A still from <em>The Impossible</em> Plenty of Marriages Should Be Put up for a Vote. Just Not Gay Marriages. <p>The most important vote I cast yesterday was for Maryland’s Question 6, which confirmed that the state’s marriage laws apply to same-sex couples. Maine, Minnesota, Washington, and Maryland became the first states to <a href="">legalize gay marriage by popular vote,</a> in the most historic, inspiring, tear-jerking, <a href=";feature=player_embedded">it-just-got-better</a> outcome of the election.&nbsp;</p> <p>But it felt really creepy to cast that vote. What the hell business was it of mine—or even worse, of all those goobers in line ahead of me—who gets to get married? The only reason <a href=",_Question_6_%282012%29">the question was on the ballot</a> was that after the state legislature approved gay marriage earlier this year and the governor signed the bill, anti-gay-marriage activists gathered enough signatures (some 56,000 were required and the referendum supporters submitted more than 162,000) to put the question up to a popular vote. The bigots expected to win, and they lost.</p> <p>But they might have been on to something. Who among us hasn’t wanted to veto a wedding or two? Perhaps more marriages ought to be put up for a popular vote. Marriage is broken, after all, and <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> <a href=";utm_medium=sm&amp;utm_campaign=button_chunky">already proposed some fixes</a>. If all it takes is 56,000 signatures, we could reform Maryland’s civil marriage laws for the benefit of not just the gay and lesbian communities, but for all humankind. Here’s what I propose, for next time:</p> <p><strong>Question 6</strong></p> <p><strong>Referendum Petition</strong></p> <p><strong>Civil Marriage Protection Act of the 2014 Legislative Session</strong></p> <p>Establishes that Maryland’s civil marriage laws allow gay, lesbian, transgender, and opposite-sex couples to obtain a civil marriage license, provided they are not prohibited from marrying under the following new conditions. A confirmatory vote by at least seven (7) close friends, including representatives from the social circle of each individual, shall be required if:</p> <p>-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Either of the two individuals fails to disclose to the other the existence of known sexually transmitted diseases, financial debts, or children</p> <p>-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Either individual has consulted <a href="">Dear Prudence</a> more than twice about his or her proposed spouse</p> <p>-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Either individual is using the relationship primarily to re-enact unresolved family-of-origin issues</p> <p>-&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; During a break-up in an on-again, off-again relationship, either individual discloses to his or her friends any behaviors that would make said friends queasy and sad during the proposed wedding ceremony</p> <p>Couples whose proposed marriage fails the confirmatory vote may be eligible to apply again for a civil marriage license after a waiting period of at least one (1) year and the promise <a href="">to elope</a>.</p> Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:26:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-11-07T22:26:00Z Double X Gay Marriage Won the Vote, But Would Your Marriage? 201121107006 gay marriage family marriage Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false Gay marriage won the vote. Would your marriage? Gay Marriage Won the Vote, But Would Your Marriage? Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images. These Maryland voters don't think you should have gone out that night when you guys were broken up How Did Science, Medicine, and the Environment Do in the Elections? <p>Overall, it was a pretty good night for science. Voters may have had other issues in mind, but when they re-elected President Obama, they endorsed one of the most <a href="">scientifically accomplished administrations</a> in U.S. history. Obama has been a great <a href="">supporter of science education</a> and research; he has appointed science-friendly people to science posts (which <a href="">shouldn’t be</a> a big accomplishment <a href="">but is</a>); and although it wasn’t the first act of his presidency (there’s no shame in losing out to Lily Ledbetter), he did <a href="">give a great shout-out to science</a> just a few weeks after taking office:</p> <p>Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.</p> <p>A win for Obama was <a href=";WT.mc_id=SA_Twitter_mdichristina">a win for science</a>, the environment, and <a href="">health care</a>.</p> <p>The election was also an affirmation of the magical powers of math, statistics, and <a href="">social science research</a>. <a href="">Well-conducted polls</a> gave <a href="">Bayesian statistics god</a> Nate Silver the raw data to predict electoral outcomes with satisfying accuracy. <a href="">Numbers work</a>!</p> <p>At the state level, California’s genetically-modified food labeling initiative <a href="">failed</a>. Providing information on food labels may sound innocuous, but fear of GMOs is <a href="">misguided and irrational</a>; on this particular issue, some liberals <a href="">compete with right-wingers</a> in their rejection of research. Another win for science.</p> <p>Massachusetts voters weren’t quite as wise. <a href="">The Death With Dignity Act</a> appears to be <a href="">heading toward a loss</a>. Washington and Oregon passed similar physician-assisted laws and have had no abuse of the system. The main opposition to the law was inspired by religious beliefs.</p> <p>Voters in Michigan had a chance to put renewable energy in their constitution; Proposal 3 would have required <a href="">25 percent of the state’s electricity</a> to come from renewable sources by 2025. It failed.</p> <p>Locally, San Francisco voters—who are normally famously pro-environment—<a href="">rejected a proposal</a> to study alternative sources of water for the city. <a></a>The eventual goal of the effort was to restore the <a href="">once spectacular but now submerged Hetch Hetchy Valley</a>.<a>*</a> California’s water wars tend to bring out the worst in everybody.</p> <p>The number of <a href="">physicists in Congress doubled</a> last night. Bill Foster, a particle physicist from Illinois, will join Rush Holt, a plasma physicist from New Jersey. They’re both Democrats.</p> <p>Congress lost a physiologist, though: Roscoe Bartlett, a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, was a <a href="">member of the Tea Party Caucus but a booster of scientific research</a>.</p> <p>Rep. Henry Waxman, a force for science and the environment as the ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, was <a href="">re-elected to a redrawn district in a squeaker</a>.</p> <p>There’s a lot of competition in the Senate and House (especially the House) for the most scientifically-illiterate member. But this year <a href="">Todd Akin really distinguished himself</a>, and his loss was a victory not just for women and rationality and good judgment, but also for basic biology.</p> <p>The impact of the election on science and the environment will play out over many years, of course, but to take the big-picture view: It looks like we’re <a href="">going to an asteroid</a>.</p> <p><em><a></a><strong>Correction, Nov. 7, 2012:</strong> This article originally misspelled the name of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. (<a>Return</a>.)</em> </p> Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:13:55 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-11-07T15:13:55Z Your House of Representatives now has twice as many physicists. Health and Science Overall, It Was a Good Election for Science and Reason 100121107008 campaign 2012 campaign 2012 Laura Helmuth Science false false false Overall, It Was a Good Election for Science and Reason Overall, It Was a Good Election for Science and Reason Photo by Molly Riley/Getty Images. Barack Obama talks tours student science fair projects on exhibit at the White House in Februrary Dexter, Season 7 <p>Every week in&nbsp;<strong><em>Slate</em></strong>’s&nbsp;<em>Dexter</em>&nbsp;TV club, Katy Waldman will have an IM conversation with a different&nbsp;<em>Dexter</em>&nbsp;fan. This week, she rehashes episode 7.4 with Laura Helmuth, <strong><em>Slate</em></strong><em>'s science and health editor.</em>&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Katy Waldman</strong>: I’m so glad you could make it, Laura. It means more to me than pizza.</p> <p><strong>Laura Helmuth</strong>: Aww. <em>Dexter</em> is secretly heart-warming, isn't it? And he gets better at expressing affection all the time. Possibly feeling it, too? In the first season (and in the first book), one of my favorite lines by him was: &quot;If I could love anyone, it would be Deb.&quot; And by Season 7, he clearly loves her.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: I was surprised at the shift in their dynamic this episode. Usually we have Debra chasing Dexter, while he plays the secretive, brooding guy. But now that, to quote Dex, &quot;everything's changed,&quot; he’s desperate to recapture Deb's love and acceptance, and she's the one holding back. I think she really wounds him when she asks whether he is &quot;capable of love.&quot;</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong><strong>:</strong> That whole exchange in the alley was classic Dexter (the show, not the guy): snappy, surprising, funny. When she asks him that question he says, &quot;I love you&quot; and that he's still the same guy he was before she caught him stabbing creepy Travis. &quot;Nothing's changed!&quot; he says.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Which maybe just means, “I don’t want anything to change, even though it has.” Dexter had a pretty good thing going. A beautiful son, a loving sister, a career he’s good at, and the freedom to pursue his nocturnal “hobby” without arousing suspicion.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>One thing that hasn’t changed is that, on <em>Dexter</em>, it’s a really bad idea to get into a bathtub. Deb's dream started out sort of erotic but quickly turned horrorshow. I wonder if the &quot;Deb, will you be mine&quot; line she dreams Dexter saying presages a return of the misguided incest theme of Season 6.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong><strong>: </strong>I worried about that too! Especially given the strange exchange of vows between Dexter and Debra later in the episode. Deb says she's not sure she feels the same way she once did about her brother and Dexter replies, &quot;I do.&quot; Then Deb echoes him, before adding, &quot;But I don't, too.&quot;</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Relationships are complicated, aren't they? Especially with your adopted brother / love interest / serial killer / competitor for catching bad guys. Deb and Dex have some superstrong bond. Did the “Deb, be mine” line mean that Debra might soon join her brother in murdering people?</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Well, we should also remember that Dexter repeatedly calls Ray Speltzer &quot;mine.&quot; In the bathtub, Debra could be an accomplice, a lover <em>or </em>a victim.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Yes! Dex is very passionate and jealous of his conquests, which makes for some real confusion around love and violence. And Deb is definitely wrestling with a lot of fears and temptations right now.</p> <p>But I have to say, although I'm willing to accept a Minotaur serial killer building elaborate mazes in Miami's warehouse district, Deb's sexual attraction to Dex is just too implausible. He was adopted as a two-year-old, and she would have been a newborn, so they would have had just as much of an incest taboo as any biological siblings, thanks to the Westermarck effect.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Ooh! Fact checking <em>Dexter</em>. What's the Westermarck effect?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: That's the phenomenon that children raised together, as in the early Israeli Kibbutzes, don't become sexually attracted to one another once they hit puberty. It seems like there are incest taboos that work the same way in all kinds of species--if you spend too much time together in childhood, that means you're related, which means it's a really bad idea to mate.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Another reason to despise the Dex-and-Deb-forbidden-love subplot!</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Speaking of children, how about the different models of fatherhood explored in tonight's episode? Poor Alex gave the last full measure of devotion to his kids, killing himself for them. Isaac turns out to be Viktor’s dad. (Why did they make that relationship so secret?) Dexter refuses to give up Harrison when Deb pressures him to turn over custody to Rita's parents. What do you think--Selfish? Or is he really a great father?</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: I think the <em>show</em> badly wants us to consider Dexter a warm, loving father. (He has sentimental attachments to Harrison’s toys, at least.) And to be honest, I’d be thrilled to have such a bad-ass dad. But maybe I’m not giving the dark passenger his due.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth: </strong>Dex is certainly a sentimentalist! Look no further than his boxes of blood slides. But I think Deb makes a good point that Harrison could get exposed to Dexter's dark side. He does his best to keep his serial killing hidden, but Deb figured it out, and he wasn't able to protect Rita--so she’s right to point out that Dex could get killed or arrested before Harrison is old enough to go off to college.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: I was sort of fascinated by the way Dexter ended up acceding to so many of Deb's demands, perhaps without realizing he was doing it. She gave him grief about the slides, and one episode later, he consigned them to the flames. She tells him to send Harrison away, and he does (even though he justifies it to himself by saying it's only for a few weeks.)</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: As a bossy sister myself, I am all for her bossing him around.</p> <p>Speaking of assertive women, I’d like to see more of the officer who accompanied Quinn to the strip club. When Quinn and Nadia made goo-goo eyes at each other, she snapped: &quot;Do NOT tell me you are fucking her.&quot; I hope she's being groomed to replace whoever gets knocked off this season. Maybe even Quinn himself. Who, by the way, is apparently even more crooked than we know. George Romanov’s allusion to the dirty old times is a detail that should pay off nicely in the future.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Yes! Poor Quinn. I also have to ask you: What on earth was going on with the Ray Speltzer interrogation?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: It was great to see Deb at the top of her head-game during that scene. I wonder how much of Batista's good-cop routine had an element of truth to it, though. Perhaps he's still smarting about being passed over for promotion.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: That's an interesting point. Every episode of <em>Dexter</em>, Batista seems a bit more defeated. His heartbreaking line about a twice-divorced cop staring down the barrel of retirement made me wonder if he's about to leave this world.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Defeated is exactly right. His last attempt to put his life together was the purchase of a muscle car. I think you're right that he might be looking at lights-out. Especially with a fuck-up like Quinn as his partner.&nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: But back to Speltzer, I just found the interrogation tactics so unconvincing. We were supposed to think that he killed women because he desired his mother? Seriously? Couldn't they have dreamt up something more creative?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: I agree that the interrogation was a little melodramatic. There must be too many Freudians on the writing staff. Listen up, Freudians: Sibs don't lust after one another and an Oedipal complex isn't really as strong or deadly as you think it is.</p> <p>Also, somebody who can build that elaborate a maze and kill for so long without getting caught probably has a little more self-control.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Ha! So true. What did you make of Deb's murderous impulses when it came to Speltzer? Did they seem in character?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: I think Deb was sort of being used as a moral compass in this episode, channeling emotions the audience has or should have. It does make sense, given her temperament and past frustrations, that she also feels a desire to kill bad guys. Who doesn't sometimes? But I thought it was also interesting that she voiced what we guilty-pleasure audience members don't, which is: Dexter! You kill people! And, even more damning, you let Rita be killed.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Was that a fair charge?</p> <p><strong>H</strong><strong>elmuth</strong>: It was awfully harsh, but it does have some truth to it. If Dex had cooperated with Deb, maybe they could have gotten Trinity earlier. I am waiting for her to accuse him of not acting in time to stop Trinity from killing her love interest Lutz.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: The criticism struck me as unfair—How could Dex have known what Trinity would do? But I suppose it makes sense in the context of Dexter's own worldview. He says, &quot;Everything is in my control.&quot;</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Yes, and his control just keeps slipping. He doesn't make many mistakes, but each one ends up getting somebody killed.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: He is ever-so neat! I thought it was odd and intriguing when he mocked Speltzer at the graveyard by imitating his shouts. He seemed completely deranged, getting in Speltzer's face and screaming, &quot;Fuck!&quot; Then he said, &quot;It feels good, doesn't it?&quot; What do you think that meant?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: The deranged &quot;Fuck&quot; I took as Dex waiting too long between killing episodes—I think he was really jonesing for a fix.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: To me, it echoed Deb's crazy attack on Speltzer at the victim's funeral and bound the brother-sister duo together.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Ah, yes, those Morgans and their tempers. That was a nice symmetry.</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: Right. I wasn't surprised to see her car in the parking lot in the scene after Speltzer’s murder.</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: And her sort of flattered comment when he pointed to the smoke: &quot;Did you do this for me?&quot;</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: And I thought he so clearly had! He even told Speltzer he hoped his relationship with Debra could rise from Speltzer’s ashes. That said, I didn’t know how to read the ending. Did Dexter finally bring Debra around? Was that the moral-compass-to-accomplice turning point?</p> <p><strong>Helmuth</strong>: Wasn't it thoughtful? My brother never killed any of my enemies and cremated them in the middle of the night. And I think you're right that it was a turning point. She seems to be coming around to Dexter's point of view. I'm eager to see what happens next week—will she agonize some more? Punish him emotionally? Break down? Pretend not to notice what he does? Send victims his way like Harry did?</p> <p>But we should go! We have to celebrate another thrilling week of <em>Dexter</em>. Can I buy you a bloody Mary?</p> <p><strong>Waldman</strong>: I don't drink. I make other people drink.</p> <p>On the other hand, I will drink if someone comes after me with a delicious cocktail.</p> <p>Related post: <a href="">Could Neuroscience Exonerate Showtime Serial Killer Dexter Morgan?</a></p> <p><strong><em>Monday: What other writers and Slate commenters thought about Episode 1.</em></strong></p> Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:45:00 GMT Laura Helmuth Katy Waldman 2012-10-22T01:45:00Z Isn't there an incest taboo for adopted siblings? Arts Dexter 7.4: Shouldn't Adopted Siblings Feel An Incest Taboo?&nbsp; 100121021003 tv Laura Helmuth Katy Waldman TV Club false false false Dexter 7.4: Shouldn't Adopted Siblings Feel An Incest Taboo?&nbsp; Dexter 7.4: Shouldn't Adopted Siblings Feel An Incest Taboo?&nbsp; Why Is Romney Campaigning on Medical Quackery? <p>Let’s play doctor. A patient comes to you with joint pain, difficulty concentrating, anxiety, poor attention, and mood swings. You might run a series of tests to rule out a persistent infection or other disorder. If your patient lives in a tick- and Lyme-disease-infested area, you would be wise to test for the bacterium <em>Borrelia burgdorferi</em> and, if detected, <a href="">prescribe a course</a> of antibiotics. But suppose the tests come back negative and there is little evidence that your patient was bitten by a tick or was infected with the Lyme disease bacterium. If you are a good doctor, and you are, you might explore a diagnosis of depression, a disease that <a href="">afflicts almost 10 percent</a> of the population at any given time.</p> <p>If you are a doctor who believes that the CDC and NIH have misrepresented <a href="">carefully vetted clinical trial data</a> about the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease, however, you might diagnose your patient with chronic Lyme disease and prescribe an intensive, long-term, side-effect-laden, mega-dose of antibiotics.</p> <p>And who would be the biggest supporter of your and your patient’s right to pursue a worth-testing-but-found-wanting treatment? Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.</p> <p>A <a href=""><em>Weekly Standard</em> tipper</a> sent in a campaign mailer from northern Virginia titled: “Romney-Ryan: Doing More To Fight the Spread of Lyme Disease.” It’s a <a href="">little more tightly focused</a> than most campaign mailers, maybe, but I admire them for thinking about the local angle: The D.C. suburbs are filthy with ticks, and Lyme disease and <a href="">other tick-borne illnesses</a> <em>are</em> a huge public health problem.</p> <p>But the details are delicious. The mailer promises that Romney and Ryan will:</p> <p>IMPROVE SYNERGY<br /> Ensure that government agencies have an open line of communication and work with patients, researchers, doctors, and businesses in an objective, comprehensive manner.</p> <p>SUPPORT TREATMENT<br /> Encourage increased options for the treatment of Lyme Disease and provide local physicians with protection from lawsuits to ensure they can treat the disease with the aggressive antibiotics that are required.</p> <p>Here’s a translation: Forget the science, just channel your legitimate fear of a dangerous disease and your misguided fear of the medical establishment into a vote for us.</p> <p>As a <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> story <a href="">pointed out years ago</a>, chronic Lyme disease—not the persistent effects of a long-term bacterial infection but a collection of mysterious symptoms—has powerful supporters. Advocates for the diagnosis tend to blame the medical establishment for not taking them seriously enough. In 2008, the attorney general of Connecticut investigated the <a href="">Infectious Diseases Society of America</a>, a 50-year-old organization with more than 9,000 physician and scientist members, for <a href="">misrepresenting the science</a> of Lyme disease.&nbsp; Not to be outdone, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell assembled a governor’s task force on Lyme disease. He appointed Michael Farris as its chair. Farris is a lawyer and the <a href="">chancellor of Patrick Henry College</a>, aka <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B00155M2GE&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>God’s Harvard</em></a>, whose motto is “<a href="">For Christ and for Liberty</a>” and whose “<a href="">Statement of Faith</a>” holds that the “Bible in its entirety” is “inerrant.” The school isn’t known for its biology department.</p> <p>The <a href="">task force’s report</a> (<a href="">PDF</a>) makes some reasonable suggestions. People should be warned about the dangers of ticks. They should shower and do a tick-check after walking in tick habitat. We should shoot more deer. But the task force seems to have bought into the conspiracy theory that the infectious disease establishment is maliciously interfering with proper treatment. It states: “There is no scientific basis for concluding that 30 days or less of antibiotics is sufficient treatment for every case of Lyme disease.” Again, tell it to the <a href="">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention</a>.</p> <p>Another treatment point is telling: “We received substantial testimony from lay witnesses that they had been successfully treated with long-term antibiotics.” Pro tip: the plural of <em>anecdote</em> is not <em>data</em>. Just because someone signed up to address a public portion of the task force meeting does not mean their understanding or explanation of their own medical care is accurate or relevant.</p> <p>I don’t mean to make fun of people who are suffering from what they think is chronic Lyme disease. Their symptoms are real, and they deserve help. But giving them a phantom diagnosis and making them part of a crusade to bring truth to medicine just perpetuates the idea that the symptoms they describe must be part of a complex, classic disease. It’s much more likely to be depression, and depression is treatable. As the CDC <a href="">gently points out</a>, mentioning <a href="">other diagnoses that have been favorite catch-alls</a>, “Your doctor may want to treat you in ways similar to patients who have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome. This does not mean that your doctor is dismissing your pain or saying that you have these conditions. It simply means that the doctor is trying to help you cope with your symptoms using the best tools available.”</p> <p>Disregarding my own advice about not taking an anecdote as data, I have my own story about chronic Lyme disease. A friend of one of my brothers had been suffering for years from headaches, fatigue, a sense of despair, a belief that she wasn’t worthy of her job or her boyfriend. She was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease and was treated with antibiotics, which were ineffective. What she wasn’t treated for, and could have been, was severe depression. She killed herself.<br /> </p> <p>Listen up, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Bob McDonnell: Medical research and treatment save lives. Please do not perpetuate a mistrust of them in vulnerable, confused people.</p> Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:23:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-09-29T14:23:00Z He's going after the ultimate niche voter: Virginia’s Lyme disease conspiracy theorists. Health and Science Romney Targets Lyme Disease Conspiracy Theorists 100120929004 campaign 2012 campaign 2012 Laura Helmuth Science false false false Romney Targets Lyme Disease Conspiracy Theorists Romney Targets Lyme Disease Conspiracy Theorists Photo By Getty Images A close up of an adult female, an adult male, nymph and larva ticks. Ticks do transmit Lyme disease, which is treatable with antibiotics, but some doctors prescribe mega-doses of antibiotics to patients who they say suffer from &quot;chronic Lyme disease.&quot; New Study Is Good News for Women Who Want Men Who Cook and Clean <p>What do you want in a mate? If you’re a free-thinking, independent, feminist woman in a relatively egalitarian society, you might want all kinds of things: a guy with a sense of humor, maybe, or who likes to cook exotic foods. And if you’re not overly familiar with certain annoyingly persistent theories of mate selection, you’ll be surprised to find out that you’re looking for all the wrong qualities, evolutionarily speaking. You’re supposed to want someone stronger, smarter, and richer than you. Someone who would sire healthy offspring and protect them from saber-toothed cats on the Pleistocene Epoch savanna.</p> <p>And if you’re a free-thinking, independent, feminist man in a relatively egalitarian society, you might not realize that you are supposed to prize youth, fertility, and chastity (a woman who will birth all those babies you’re supposed to protect and let you know they’re really yours) over quirky taste in movies or a love of travel.</p> <p>There’s <a href="">nothing inherently wrong with evolutionary psychology</a>—our thoughts and behaviors have been shaped by millions of years of hominid evolutionary history, and it’s worth studying how natural selection acted on traits that we still express today. But too often, evolutionary psychology is a force for social conservatism. Researchers identify a pattern of behavior, <a href="">usually some stereotypical sex difference</a> (in part because it’s easy to measure whether men and women score differently on a standardized test), construct a scenario in which that behavior would have been adaptive in the distant past, and say the <a href="">behavior is therefore evolutionarily selected</a> and encoded in our genes.</p> <p>David Buss, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas, is the worst. He <a href="">has theorized that women are jealous of pretty rivals and men are jealous of rich ones</a>, that men <a href="">prefer more sexual variety</a> than women do, that women need to trap a mate and men are motivated to sleep around—and attributes all of these traits to our genetic makeup. Also, you may think your <a href="">opposite-sex friends are just friends</a>, but he thinks <a href="">you’re fooling yourself</a>. And he’s a big proponent of the idea that men and women are <a href="">seeking fundamentally different qualities</a> in a mate. Because, he says, of evolution—and that’s the problem.</p> <p>It’s tricky to <em>disprove</em> the notion that some human trait is the result of evolution. <a href="">The logic is circular</a>: if some trait exists, it must not have been fatal to our ancestors and it may have helped them reproduce. To critique a claim of evolutionary privilege, you have to show that the trait has no genetic component and therefore can’t be inherited, or demonstrate that the trait is instilled by culture, not necessarily biology.</p> <p>And that’s why my favorite paper of the week is “<a href="">Stepping Out of the Caveman’s Shadow: Nations’ Gender Gap Predicts Degree of Sex Differentiation in Mate Preferences</a>.” Marcel Zentner and Klaudia Mitura of the University of York, U.K., asked more than 3,000 people in 10 countries what they valued in a mate. On a four-point scale, people rated the importance of various qualities: chastity, ambition, financial prospects, good looks, etc.—all identified by Buss and his likeminded peers as being qualities that only men or only women are evolutionarily predisposed to seek out.</p> <p>The researchers used a World Economic Forum measure of gender equality to rank the 10 countries as (a) relatively gender-equal, (b) backwards but improving, or (c) screamingly sexist (my &nbsp;terms, not theirs). And the results were clear: The more egalitarian the country, the less likely men and women were to value traditional qualities that Buss and co. believe to be innate. In Germany, women said they’d very much like a man who is a good housekeeper. In Finland, men were more likely than women to prefer a mate a bit smarter than themselves. In the United States, women ranked chastity as more important than men did. At the other end of the scale, in Turkey and South Korea, women wanted mates with good financial prospects and men valued good cooks.</p> <p>None of this is especially surprising, but there’s something so satisfying about having a chart with a straight line and a steep slope showing that the more egalitarian the country, the less constrained people are by stereotyped sex roles. That is progress.</p> <p>The study fits with other recent research showing that supposedly gender-determined cognitive abilities, like <a href="">math and spatial reasoning, are also a function of culture</a>. The more egalitarian a society, the better girls are at algebra.</p> <p>You can read about mate preferences and sex roles changing in real time in my colleague Hanna Rosin’s new book, <a href=""><em>The End of Men: And the Rise of Women</em></a>. An <a href="">excerpt that ran in the <em>New York Times Magazine</em></a> over the weekend told the stories of women who are adapting (take that, Pleistocene Epoch!) to the new economy and becoming bread winners for husbands who are trained for self-described macho jobs that have disappeared.</p> <p>And that’s the real lesson of evolutionary psychology. <a href="">The main quality evolution acted on over all those millions of years was our ability to adapt</a>. It’s possible there are some ugly, genetically-predisposed legacies of jealousy and mate guarding and sexual deception rattling around in our great ape brains, but they’re nothing compared to our capacity to form friendships, value a relationship independent of its ability to produce offspring, and love a highly evolved guy for baking a great loaf of bread.</p> Thu, 06 Sep 2012 16:30:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-09-06T16:30:00Z Double X New Blow To Evolutionary Psychology is Good News for Women Who Want Men Who Cook and Clean 201120906002 science dating evolution Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false New study is good news for women who want a man who cooks and cleans. New Blow To Evolutionary Psychology is Good News for Women Who Want Men Who Cook and Clean Photo by JANEK SKARZYNSKI/AFP/Getty Images Things change. Romney Out-Debates Obama <p>President Obama has assembled the most scientifically accomplished administration since the time of the founding fathers. His head science adviser, <a href="">John Holdren</a>, is a physicist, a MacArthur genius, and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The <a href="">President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology</a> is lousy with university deans, officers of the National Academies of Science, and Nobel Prize winners. The head of NOAA, <a href="">Jane Lubchenco</a>, is a marine scientist and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Energy Secretary <a href="">Steven Chu</a> has a Nobel Prize in physics.</p> <p>And these folks aren’t just in D.C. for decoration. A few years ago, Obama issued a <a href="">memorandum to all heads of executive departments and agencies on the subject of scientific integrity</a>. It began:</p> <p>Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.</p> <p>With that dream team in his corner, and with his powerful belief in the scientific method, you’d think Obama would have an overwhelming advantage over Mitt Romney in a debate of the top American science questions. You’d be wrong.</p> <p>On Tuesday, <a href="">the candidates submitted answers</a> to the 14 “most important science policy questions facing the United States.” The Q-and-A session was organized by <a href="">Science Debate</a>, a grassroots, nonpartisan, do-gooder group that has been trying since 2008 to get the presidential candidates to <a href="">engage in a live debate about science and science policy</a>. Subjecting politicians to a science debate might sound like a cruel pop quiz, but it isn’t meant to be. As <a href="">Science Debate explains</a>:</p> <p>Candidates readily debate jobs and the economy even though they are not economists; they debate foreign policy and military intervention even though they are not diplomats or generals; they debate faith and values even though they are not priests or pastors. We call on the candidates for President to also debate these Top American Science Questions that affect all voters' lives.</p> <p>According to Science Debate, both the Obama and Romney campaigns say they are considering participating in a live science forum. In the meantime, these written answers will have to do. If you scroll through them quickly, one thing is immediately apparent: Mitt Romney’s team took this very seriously. His answers are longer, they have subtitles, they have bullet points. It’s not just great presentation: The Romney text is substantive, specific, and detailed. Obama’s answers to some of the same questions are single paragraphs that are vague, repetitive (two in a row start with “Since taking office”), and poorly written.</p> <p>Question No. 4 is about pandemics: <em>Recent experiments show how avian flu may become transmissible among mammals. In an era of constant and rapid international travel, what steps should the United States take to protect our population from emerging diseases, global pandemics and/or deliberate biological attacks?</em></p> <p>This question is an invitation to show strong leadership, expertise, creativity, and a sense of urgency. Obama’s answer starts like this: “We all are aware that the world is becoming smaller every day.”</p> <p>Romney nailed it. An excerpt of his answer: “To further improve preparedness, we must continue to invest in the best public health monitoring systems that can be built. I will also encourage advancements in research and manufacturing to increase scientific understanding of new pathogens and improve response time when they emerge. The development of new countermeasures, from diagnostics to antibiotics and antivirals to respirators, will help protect human lives in the face of new bugs and superbugs.”</p> <p>If you look more closely at Romney’s answers, though, it’s clear that some of his policy proposals are either not informed by science or directly contradict the scientific evidence. He starts out strong while answering Question No. 2, about climate change: “I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences.” Yes! He gets it! <a href="">Maybe he’s even atoning for his pick of Paul Ryan</a>. We can all stop debating a question that <a href="">has been settled scientifically for years</a> and move on to an honest discussion of how to deal with the problem of global warming.</p> <p>But then Romney goes on. “However, there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue—on the extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution, and the severity of the risk—and I believe we must support continued debate and investigation within the scientific community.” Sure, scientists are continuing to refine their understanding of climate change—they’re stubborn like that, always trying to improve their models—but there’s no true debate on the extent of the human contribution (if it weren’t for <a href="">the human contribution</a>, <a href="">the climate would likely be cooling</a>) and the question of severity of risk isn’t between “a smidge of risk” and “something we should probably pay attention to.” It’s between <a href="">“really bad” and “difficult to imagine just how really bad.”</a></p> <p>And Obama clearly wins Question No. 8, about fresh water. His answer emphasizes the importance of water for health, recreation, and international relations, and he names and enumerates specific conservation and distribution plans.</p> <p>Romney’s answer to the same question sounds promising at first: “America has made extraordinary environmental progress in recent decades thanks to the laws that protect our air and water. But while these laws have served us well, they have not been modernized in over 20 years and are now significantly out of date.” One might think, just for a moment and against all evidence, that the Republican candidate for president realizes that the Clean Water Act was one of the <a href="">greatest accomplishments of legislative history</a> and should be updated to reflect the latest science and make it even more effective. But again he goes on: “Our communities and businesses must contend with excessively costly and inflexible approaches that impose unnecessary economic constraints and trigger inevitable litigation.”</p> <p>Sigh. Mitt, take a break from the campaign for an afternoon and go kayaking on the Potomac River. In your lifetime, it has gone from a filthy, acidic drainage ditch for coal mine tailings to a thriving, cleaner-all-the-time waterway teeming with fish and birds.</p> <p>It’s clear from Romney’s answers that his top priorities are reducing government and promoting business, and that science is fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with those ends. But what is impressive and kind of surprising about the science debate is how much thought and effort the Romney campaign put into responding to these questions. It’s not clear how many votes he could pick up with his answers: Scientists and science enthusiasts don’t make up a big chunk of the electorate, and <a href="">they tend be Democrats</a>. But Obama’s campaign team shouldn’t take them for granted.</p> <p>And maybe by the next presidential election, we’ll get to see the candidates debating science policy not in writing but on stage.</p> Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:52:38 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-09-05T18:52:38Z How the GOP candidate schooled the president on science policy. Health and Science Obama Has a Great Science Record, but You Wouldn’t Know It From His Debate Performance 100120905015 campaign 2012 campaign 2012 Laura Helmuth Science false false false Obama Has a Great Science Record, but You Wouldn’t Know It From His Debate Performance Obama Has a Great Science Record, but You Wouldn’t Know It From His Debate Performance Photograph by Jezperklauzen/Thinkstock. Both candidates submitted answers to the 14 “most important science policy questions facing the United States&quot; Dude, Bank Your Sperm. It’ll Get You Laid. <p>Psst, young fella. Want to get lucky? Bank your sperm in a sperm bank and get a vasectomy.</p> <p>Stay with me here: The latest and most extensive <a href="">study of the effect of a father’s age on genetic quality</a> came out this week, and the news is grim. A 20-year-old father endows his offspring with about 25 mutations—mostly harmless, but small tweaks to the genetic code that could potentially cause problems for the child. A 40-year-old father bequeaths about 65 mutations. The study also adds to previous evidence that older fathers are more likely to have children who develop autism, schizophrenia, and other brain disorders, probably because so many genes are required for the proper care and feeding of developing brains. A disruption in any one of these genes could have lingering effects.</p> <p>I know. It’s entirely unfair that biology wants one thing (babies, now!) and culture wants another (maybe a baby or a few eventually, after you finish your education, start your career, travel a bit, and meet somebody really special). But the beautiful thing about modern medicine and technology is that you can overcome biology.</p> <p>If you choose to bank sperm and get a vasectomy while you are still young, you will immediately get to shut out the societal pressure to reproduce now. (Women who want children have been hectored incessantly about biological clocks for years; they can tell you that it’s no picnic.) Your stored sperm will stay fresh and squirmy for decades. You’re saving time in a bottle.</p> <p>Plus, chicks are going to dig it. Storing your sperm and having a vasectomy makes you sound considerate, smart, responsible, and forward-thinking. It says that you think men should take just as much responsibility for birth control as women do. Swoon!&nbsp; Anxiety is the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac, and there are few things more anxiety-inducing than a missed pill or broken condom. (True, some women might think your early planning is gross or weird, but you really shouldn’t be dating those women. Stupid gets boring fast.) And if you do decide to have children, you’ll be better prepared financially and emotionally if you wait for the right time and the right partner, and you can still endow the children with the best your genes had to offer.</p> <p>This idea is not new. One of the <a href="">first advocates for the cryopreservation birth control technique</a>, strangely enough, was Carl Djerassi. You may not recognize his name, but he’s one of the heroes of all time, the father of the birth control pill, the <a href="">greatest invention of the last millennium</a>. He felt kind of conflicted that the pill and other hormonal methods put all the responsibility for controlling fertility on women, and he’s been advocating for better options for male birth control for decades. Back in 1981, <a href=";lpg=PA26&amp;ots=oVkoGyAqHr&amp;dq=carl%20djerassi%20bulletin%20atomic%20scientists%20vasectomy&amp;pg=PA26#v=onepage&amp;q=carl%20djerassi%20bulletin%20atomic%20scientists%20vasectomy&amp;f=false">he estimated that developing a male pill would take 15 to 20 years</a>. We do now have <a href="">a male pill—for mice—as of last week</a>. It’s going to be a while before there’s a human version. So let’s not wait for it.</p> <p>Sure, there’s a remote risk that some catastrophic failure of infrastructure will pull power from the sperm banks and deplete all the back-up generators. Maybe some horrible pandemic or a nuclear war or an asteroid impact will cause society to crumble. Your sperm will thaw and die, and any surviving doctors won’t have the resources to reverse your vasectomy. But do you really want to bring a child into such a world anyway?<br /> </p> Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:30:00 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-08-23T18:30:00Z Double X Dude, Bank Your Sperm. It’ll Get You Laid. 201120823003 birth control sex family Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false Hey, dude, bank your sperm. It will get you laid. Dude, Bank Your Sperm. It’ll Get You Laid. Photograph by Slim Allagui/AFP/Getty Images Vials of frozen sperm. Women go crazy for this. Todd Akin's &quot;Legitimate Rape&quot; Comment Was Not a Misstatement. It Was a Worldview. <p>Rep. Todd Akin of Missouri, the Republican candidate for the Missouri Senate race, told a St. Louis news station on Sunday that <a href="">“legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy</a>: “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”</p> <p>He later took it back, but this wasn’t a misstatement. It wasn’t a gaffe or a stray bit of medical misinformation that could have attached itself to any one of us. The statement was a crystallization of Akin’s worldview: sexist, blame-shifting, and profoundly ignorant.</p> <p>In case anybody missed this dig at the “no means no” crowd, “legitimate rape” is a coded phrase meant to distinguish between a stranger attacking you in a parking garage, or, say, your date or your youth pastor doing the same. If you’re tipsy or wearing a short skirt, it’s not rape-rape, etc.</p> <p>The statement was actually intended to soften Akin’s absolute opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. Why bother to have loopholes for such conditions when they’re going to be so rare, goes his thinking? As <a href="">Talking Points Memo notes</a>, the congressman has long suspected that rape and abortion laws are less likely to protect women from abuse than to allow them to be abusive:</p> <p>Akin’s past includes <a href="">praising a militia group</a> linked to anti-abortion extremism in the 1990s and <a href="">voting against creating</a> a sex-offender registry in 2005. Back in 1991, as a state legislator, Akin voted for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (via LexisNexis).</p> <p>The sexism is outrageous, but it’s the stupidity that really burns. It takes a lot of work for a member of the House science committee to cultivate an ignorance of science as profound as Todd Akin’s. It’s not accidental and it’s not incidental to his worldview—his belief system <em>requires</em> a rejection of science.</p> <p>The thing about science, as Neil DeGrasse-Tyson says, is that it’s true whether you believe it or not. And the truth is that biology does not give a goddamn how sperm meets egg, whether it’s within the bounds of a sanctified marriage, in a test tube, or after a rape.</p> <p>One of the great gifts of modern medicine is that we can control when and whether eggs are released (through the pill), whether sperm encounter the egg (condoms or vasectomy), whether a <a href="">fertilized egg implants in the uterus (IUDs),</a> and yes, whether it stays there (abortion). Trauma may increase the spontaneous miscarriage rate, but the effect is trivial, and tens of thousands of women are <a href="">impregnated by rape annually</a>.</p> <p>But if you believe that the Bible is the “inerrant word of God,” as Akin apparently does, given his <a href="">Master of Divinity</a> from the <a href="">Covenant Theological Seminary</a>, then you can believe all kinds of things. That the world is 6,000 years old, for instance, and that evolution is a conspiracy organized by pretty much every biologist, geologist, paleontologist, ecologist, biochemist and geneticist working in the past century and a half, plus Satan. If God can produce Jesus through a virgin birth, he can certainly prevent a worthy-enough victim of “legitimate rape” from carrying her rapist’s child.</p> <p>(And just to be clear, it’s not that he’s up on the latest <a href="">evolutionary biology speculation about sperm priming and miscarriage</a>. This idea has been <a href="">bouncing around conservative circles for years</a> as an excuse for defending an absolute ban on abortion.)</p> <p>Akin and other Missouri conservatives are now trying to perpetuate this massive misinformation campaign on school children. Missouri’s “Right to Pray” amendment, <a href="">which passed this month</a>, allows kids to opt out of any educational assignments that conflict with their beliefs. As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out, that means <a href="">children have a legal right to refuse to participate</a> in biology class. Or, presumably, sex ed, where they would have to learn about basic reproductive biology, a class Todd Akin apparently skipped.</p> Mon, 20 Aug 2012 14:24:52 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-08-20T14:24:52Z Double X Todd Akin's &quot;Legitimate Rape&quot; Comment Was Not a Misstatement. It Was a Worldview 201120820001 abortion politics women Laura Helmuth The XX Factor The XX Factor false false false Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment was not a misstatement. It was a worldview. Todd Akin's &quot;Legitimate Rape&quot; Comment Was Not a Misstatement. It Was a Worldview Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Nickelodeon Rep. Todd Akin did not simply misspeak. The Culture Gabfest: Batman and Robins Edition <p><strong><em>Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 201 with Laura Helmuth, Stephen Metcalf, Dana Stevens, and Julia Turner</em></strong><strong><em> by clicking the arrow on the audio player below:<br /> </em></strong><br /> </p> <p><a href=""><strong>Subscribe in iTunes&nbsp;</strong></a><strong>∙&nbsp;</strong><a href=""><strong>RSS feed</strong></a><strong>&nbsp;∙</strong><a href=""> <strong>Download</strong></a><strong> ∙<strong> </strong></strong><a href=""><strong>Play in another tab</strong></a><strong></strong></p> <p><br /> <strong><em>And join the lively conversation on the </em></strong><a href=""><strong><em>Culturefest Facebook</em></strong></a><strong><em> page here:</em></strong><br /> <br /> </p> <p><strong><em>The sponsor of today’s show is </em></strong><a href=""><strong><em></em></strong></a><strong>. <em>Get a free audiobook from Audible’s collection of more than 100,000 titles and a subscription to a daily audio digest when you sign up for a 30-day free trial at </em></strong><a href=""><strong><em></em></strong></a><strong><em>.</em></strong></p> <p>On this week’s Culture Gabfest, our critics consider Christopher Nolan’s final Batman installment, <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em>, whether it makes for a worthy conclusion to the trilogy, and how to think about the movie in the wake of the Aurora tragedy<em>. </em>The Gabfesters then explore Christian Marclay’s addictive and inspired cinematic mashup, the 24-hour movie <em>The Clock</em>. Finally, the critics are joined by <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> Science and Health Editor Laura Helmuth to discuss the HBO documentary <em>Birders: The Central Park Effect,</em> and the quirky world of score-keeping, list-making birders.<em> <br /> </em></p> <p>Here are some links to the things we discussed this week:</p> <ul> <li>Dana’s <a href="">piece</a> for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> on the parallels between the world of the <em>The Dark Knight Rises</em> and our own.</li> <li><strong><em>Slate’s</em></strong> <a href="">review of and Spoiler Special</a> for <em>The Dark Knight Rises </em>by Dana.</li> <li>A few of Christopher Nolan’s other movies, including <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B002ZG980U&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Inception</em></a><em>, </em><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B000PC6A3E&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Batman Begins</em></a><em>, </em>and <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B001GZ6QEC&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Dark Knight</em></a>.<em></em></li> <li>David Remnick for <em>The New Yorker </em>on <a href="">Bruce Springsteen at 62</a>.</li> <li>The superhero blockbuster <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B0083SBMBM&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Avengers</em></a>.<em></em></li> <li>Christian Marclay’s <em>The Clock </em>at <a href="">Lincoln Center</a>, <a href="">where it’s been exhibited, and where it’s going next</a>.</li> <li><em>Studio 360’s</em> 2011 <a href="">field segment</a> on the bizarrely compelling experience of viewing <em>The Clock.</em><em></em></li> <li><em>The New Yorker’s</em> <a href="">profile of Christian Marclay and <em>The Clock</em></a> by Daniel Zalewski.</li> <li><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B000TGJ8CQ&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Next</em></a>, the 2007 movie in which Nicolas Cage and Jessica Biel play lovers.</li> <li>Laura Helmuth for <strong><em>Slate</em></strong> on <a href="">why Jonathan Franzen is an annoying birder</a>.</li> <li><a href="">“My Bird Problem,”</a> Jonathan Franzen’s 2005 meditation on his history with bird-watching.</li> <li>Jonathan Franzen’s 2011 <em>New York Times </em><a href=";pagewanted=all">op-ed</a> about his relationship to wild birds, nature, and techno-consumerism.</li> <li>Laura’s nemesis bird, the <a href="">Mangrove Cuckoo</a>, and her proudest get, the <a href="">Harlequin Duck</a>.</li> <li>The <a href="">Red-tailed Hawk</a>, Stephen’s favorite bird.</li> <li><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0141182598&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Lucky Jim</em></a> by Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov’s <a href=";ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1343177783&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=nabokov+pnin"><em>Pnin</em></a><em></em></li> </ul> <p>Endorsements:</p> <p>Dana’s pick: <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=B00000149Q&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Petites esquisses d'oiseaux</em></a>, Olivier Messiaen’s compositions of sounds related to birds, nature’s best musicians.</p> <p>Julia’s pick: In keeping with the theme of observing one’s surroundings: Kate Ascher’s <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0143112708&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>The Works: Anatomy of a City</em></a>, a coffee table book about the systems that make New York City run.</p> <p>Stephen’s pick: Randall Jarrell’s satirical portrait of the American college in the 1950s, <a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0226393755&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20"><em>Pictures From an Institution</em></a>.</p> <p>Outro: Olivier Messiaen’s “Le Rouge Gorge (European Robin)”</p> <p>You can email us at <a href=""></a>.<br /> <br /> This podcast was produced by Dan Pashman. Our intern is Sally Tamarkin.</p> <p><em>Follow us on the new </em><em></em><a href=""><em>Culturefest Twitter feed</em></a><em>. And please Like the Culture Gabfest<strong> </strong>on </em><a href=""><em>Facebook</em></a><em>.</em></p> Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:19:47 GMT Laura Helmuth Stephen Metcalf Dana Stevens Julia Turner 2012-07-25T17:19:47Z Slate's podcast about <em>The</em> <em>Dark Knight Rises, </em>Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film <em>The Clock</em>, and the HBO documentary <em>Birders: The Central Park Effect</em>. Podcasts Slate’s Culture Gabfest on <em>The Dark Knight Rises, The Clock, </em>and <em> Birders: The Central Park Effect</em> 100120725008 birding movies art documentaries Laura Helmuth Stephen Metcalf Dana Stevens Julia Turner Culture Gabfest false false false Slate’s Culture Gabfest on <em>The Dark Knight Rises, The Clock, </em>and<em> Birders: The Central Park Effect</em> Slate’s Culture Gabfest on <em>The Dark Knight Rises, The Clock, </em>and<em> Birders: The Central Park Effect</em> Jonathan Franzen Is the World’s Most Annoying Bird-Watcher <p>There are plenty of reasons to find Jonathan Franzen irritating. He was a jerk about having his novel <em><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312421273&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">The Corrections</a></em> chosen for Oprah’s book club. A <em><a href=",16641,20100823,00.html">Time magazine cover</a></em> proclaimed him the “Great American Novelist” who “shows us the way we live now.” &nbsp;And then there’s the writing itself: <em><a href=";camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312576463&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=slatmaga-20">Freedom</a></em>, his latest, is full of David Brooks-style clich&eacute;s about anyone who ever had a charitable thought or ate a slice of multigrain bread.</p> <p>But the thing that bugs me most about Jonathan Franzen is that he’s becoming the public face of bird-watching. There are many famous birders (there are <a href="">lists</a>, because birders love lists), but Franzen is probably the <em>most</em> famous, thanks to his novels and the essays he’s written for <em>The</em> <em>New Yorker</em> about his birding exploits. And now he’s an annoying central character in <em>Birders: The Central Park Effect</em>, an otherwise charming film that premieres on HBO tonight. If you’ve never seen an <a href="">indigo bunting</a>, a <a href="">rose-breasted grosbeak</a>, or a <a href="">prothonotary warbler</a>, you really need to watch this film. And if you have checked these birds off your life list, you’ll be delighted to see that this film does them justice with its stunning high-definition footage of brightly colored, perky little birds cavorting in Central Park. The film’s explanations of the birds’ natural history and behavior are engaging and economical—this isn’t a five-part BBC production with a whispered-awe narration, but a snappy introduction to a surprising subculture: the birders of New York City.</p> <p>The film’s human characters (aside from Jonathan Franzen) are quirky and funny, their eyes constantly darting around after birds as they’re talking to the narrator. Here’s Chris Cooper, a handsome young black man (not all birders are white retirees) whose friends complain that they never see him from March to May. He lists seven pleasures of birding to explain why he spends migration season in the park (No. 1: the beauty of the birds). No. 7 is the unicorn effect: “After you’ve been birding for a little while, you become familiar with a bird from seeing it in the field guide, but you’ve never seen it in real life. It takes on a mythological status. Then, one day, there it is in real life, almost like a unicorn walking out of the forest.”</p> <p>And here’s Jonathan Franzen on birding: “I thought it was embarrassing. I still think it’s embarrassing, a little bit. You’re basically defenseless. You’ve got your binoculars up and you’re looking at something nobody else is looking at, and everybody else is looking at you and thinking, what a dweeb.”</p> <p>Jonathan Franzen, nobody is looking at you. You're in New York City. A guy in cowboy boots and underpants plays guitar for tips in Times Square, and another guy walks around town with <a href="">a cat perched on his head</a>. Carrying a pair of binoculars is not exactly letting your freak flag fly.</p> <p>Franzen has written before about how mortifying it is to be a birder. He <a href="">came out publicly</a>, as far as I can tell, in a 2005 essay for <em>The New Yorker</em>. (It’s behind a pay wall there but <a href="">available on <em>Oprah</em></a>’s website. Oprah, honey, you’ve got to stop chasing after someone who thinks he’s too good for you.) He wrote, “I had a creeping sense of shame about what I was doing. Even as I was learning my gulls and sparrows, I took care, in New York, not to wear my binoculars on a strap but to carry them cupped discreetly in one hand, and if I brought a field guide to the park, I made sure to keep the front cover, which had the word birds in large type, facing inward.”</p> <p>There are plenty of things about being a birder that might seem embarrassing to an outsider. Birders have their own jargon (peeps are small, difficult-to-distinguish shorebirds; LBJs are small, difficult-to-distinguish little brown jobs, usually in a thicket; birds are often called by a four-letter code used in tracking studies, “CAGU” for California Gull, or by their genus and species name, which admittedly is a little off-putting to someone who doesn’t speak Latin). They keep odd hours and speak very softly when outdoors. They tuck their pants into their socks so ticks don’t crawl up their legs, though getting Lyme disease is almost a badge of honor for a birder, the bull’s-eye rash like a fencing scar.</p> <p>Franzen has somehow managed to swallow his shame long enough to have developed considerable skill as a birder and to experience true joy in nature, <a href="">at least fleetingly</a>. But even this joy brings Franzen agita: “My response to this happiness, naturally, was to worry that I was in the grip of something diseased and bad and wrong. An addiction. Every morning, driving to an office I'd borrowed in Santa Cruz, I would wrestle with the urge to stop and bird for ‘a few minutes.’ Seeing a good bird made me want to stay out and see more good birds. Not seeing a good bird made me sour and desolate, for which the only cure was, likewise, to keep looking.”</p> <p>More troubling still, Franzen doesn’t seem to always abide by the good birder’s code of honor. His 2005 essay begins with him thinking he’s spotted an extremely rare bird (well, rare in the United States, which matters for people who keep a list of birds seen in the country) and reporting it to the visitors center at a birding hotspot. Despite a creeping doubt about whether he’d really seen a masked duck and not a more common female ruddy duck, he lets other birders chase after his phantom and never admits that he made a mistaken identification. He could easily have added a line to the log that it was a probable or possible sighting, but he’s determined to bag that bird. He even goes to the trouble of calling the visitors center from a friend’s phone to disguise his identity while he asks if anyone else reported the duck.</p> <p>It’s pathetic to fake it as a birder. It’s cheating at solitaire—nobody else really cares whether you have a genuine masked duck on your life list. If you don’t get a clear look at the stripes on a bird’s cheek, try again later. Take a look at a different guide book. Ask another birder for help—they’re really very generous people. If a birder schlepped a telescope a mile through a haze of mosquitoes to see a white-faced ibis, and if you come along with a pair of binoculars and can’t quite make out the field marks, the birder with the scope will share. That’s why there are rare-bird alerts and log books at visitors centers—birders are ridiculously cooperative.</p> <p>They can also be ridiculously misanthropic. There’s nothing like spending years chasing birds to make you notice habitat fragmentation, climate change, and overpopulation. It’s one thing to wish abstractly that more people enjoyed the great outdoors, and another to have your solitude ruined by a troop of Boy Scouts trailing Milky Way wrappers and scaring away all the birds. Franzen shares this misanthropy, and he’s come by it honestly, by noticing humans’ impact on the natural world. <em>Freedom</em>’s bird-loving character—Walter, a former Nature Conservancy lawyer who gets outsmarted by Big Coal—shares it too. But Walter is so absurdly misanthropic and crazed, such a caricature of a conservationist, that he makes birders look not just embarrassing but unhinged.</p> <p>In a <a href=""><em>New York Times</em> essay</a> last year, Franzen pitted his love of birds against the disengagement and rush-to-judgment brought on by using sites like Facebook. He wrote that actually <em>doing</em> something (birding, participating in bird conservation efforts) made him more aware of environmental problems. The essay also covered love, and the alienation caused by technology, and ugly arguments with a romantic partner—it was a little over-thought and overwrought. Still, it’s nice that he loves birds and that he’s bringing attention to their plight.</p> <p>But in birding, as in life in general, don’t be like Jonathan Franzen. Don’t let neurosis, self-involvement, and pride inhibit your enthusiasms<strong>.</strong> Be like Chuck McAlexander, a machinist in <em>Birders</em> who makes bird feeders out of coconut shells. Be like Starr Saphir, who schedules her chemotherapy appointments around her bird walks in Central Park. Here’s what she says about birding: “Looking at birds takes away sadness. … When you look at the natural world, it puts things in perspective and makes you forget about yourself.”</p> Mon, 16 Jul 2012 20:48:23 GMT Laura Helmuth 2012-07-16T20:48:23Z He shouldn’t be the public face of this wonderful pastime. Arts Jonathan Franzen Is the World’s Most Annoying Bird-Watcher 100120716013 freedom jonathan franzen birdwatching Laura Helmuth Culturebox false false false Jonathan Franzen Is the World’s Most Annoying Bird-Watcher Jonathan Franzen Is the World’s Most Annoying Bird-Watcher Photograph courtesy HBO. <em>Birders: The Central Park Effect </em>