David Lebovitz is rightly renowned for his dessert cookbooks--just ask anyone who's tried the chocolate/guinness ice cream I make following his instruDavid Lebovitz is rightly renowned for his dessert cookbooks--just ask anyone who's tried the chocolate/guinness ice cream I make following his instructions. And as his blog makes clear, he's an engaging, affable narrator. But until I read The Sweet Life in Paris, I hadn't realized quite how laugh-out-loud funny he is.
Ten years ago or so, Lebovitz was leading a happy existence in San Francisco, following a long stint as a Chez Panisse pastry chef with a series of acclaimed cookbooks. Then his boyfriend suddenly and tragically died, of causes that Lebovitz doesn't go into, and he decided to move to France. He describes this as running toward rather than away from something, an explanation that his loving depictions of French food support.
French food--if you don't want to go there after reading Lebovitz's descriptions of it, there's something wrong with you--is on the plus side of living in France. On the debit side, there are haughty salespeople, nonexistent customer service, and Parisians. But Lebovitz makes himself right at home, being so persistently friendly to shopkeepers that one of them consents to chat with him a mere five years into his stay. He also begins shaving before taking out the trash.
Interspersed among his very funny--and appetizing--accounts of life in Paris are recipes, all delicious-looking and no doubt well tested. You should make a lot of them. (Let me know in comments if you need my address.) And if you've ever wanted to go to Paris--or even more, if you haven't--read this book....more
It’s no secret that America has an obesity problem. And we know what we need to do about it: eat less and exercise more. Consume less fat. Rely less oIt’s no secret that America has an obesity problem. And we know what we need to do about it: eat less and exercise more. Consume less fat. Rely less on animal products. If we can all just control ourselves and eat a low-fat, plant-based diet and get some exercise, everyone will be fine. Right?
That’s certainly the prevalent doctrine, dispensed by more or less everyone except for the authors of a trickle of low-carb diet books. (Confession: until recently, I considered Atkins and co to be utterly misguided.) But does it take into account how our bodies actually work?
Not according to Gary Taubes. In “Why We Get Fat,” he argues that it is carbohydrates, not fat, that cause obesity. An earlier book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” made this point in a much more verbose and technical way; this is his attempt at a more layperson-friendly (though certainly not unscientific) account.
Taubes regards the calories in/calories out model of weight loss as distinctly unhelpful. Sure: to gain weight, I have to eat more than I discard, but what causes this? Is every overweight person really just gluttonous and lazy?
He illuminates matters by describing a group of female rats whose ovaries had been removed. They began eating incessantly and quickly became quite obese. In some cases, though, they were held to their usual diets. These rats also became obese, but in addition, were lethargic, moving only to gather food. Greed and sloth: end of story?
No. Without ovaries, they had no estrogen. Estrogen helps regulate how fat is stored, and prevents it from landing solely in fat, as opposed to, say, muscle cells. In the absence of estrogen, most of the fat that these animals consumed was being stored in their fat cells. This meant that their bodies had no fuel to run on. So they kept eating. Forcibly prevented from eating, they lacked the energy to move. They weren’t getting fat because they were overeating: they were overeating because they were getting fat.
Humans are in the same position: incoming fat can be shunted into storage or treated as fuel.* (And estrogen works the same way, which is probably why women who have had hysterectomies often struggle with their weight .) Taubes gives a somewhat technical but quite enlightening description of how we process food, with insulin in the starring role. We consume carbs, they’re turned into glucose, our bodies release a wave of insulin to cope with it. Insulin has a variety of effects, none very helpful to anyone who wants to lose weight. In particular, while insulin is elevated, it is impossible to burn anything other than glucose. It doesn’t matter how much fat is sitting around: we can’t burn it. In anyone with chronically elevated insulin, this is obviously a problem. Adding insult to injury, as we get older, we tend to become less sensitive to insulin, and some people become resistant. Obviously, this does not affect everyone equally (genetics plays a big role): we all know people who can eat piles of chocolate without gaining weight. “It may be easier to believe that we remain lean because we’re virtuous and we get fat because we’re not, but the evidence simply says otherwise. Virtue has little more to do with our weight than with our height,” Taubes says. Refined carbohydrates may not cause trouble everywhere, but where there are weight problems, Taubes says, carbs (and our hormonal response to them) are always to blame.
It is impossible to decrease carbohydrate consumption without increasing fat intake. Taubes is fully aware of the environmental and ethical disadvantages of a heavily meat-based diet, though he does not offer a solution. He does, however, address the widespread claim that the key to both weight loss and good health is a low-fat diet. Rather shockingly, he makes a convincing case that its purported beneficial effects are not supported by science. (There is a revealing discussion of how the government came to claim that they were.) On the contrary, studies seem to show that people on low-carb, high fat diets have improved triglycerides and HDLs. As he points out, for a very long time our species lived chiefly on the fattiest meat it could find: the idea that we require carrots and orange juice isn’t entirely obvious. He dispenses with exercise similarly handily–while unquestionably very important, exercise does not seem to contribute much to weight loss.
David Kessler recently made clear that given that our brains treat combinations of sugar, salt, and fat more or less like heroin, judgmental harumphing isn’t a reasonable response to the obesity crisis. Given the large, intense–and utterly useless–guilt-fest that this country’s discussion of weight still is, this book couldn’t come at a better time.
*This is a simplified description: please do not treat this essay as an endocrinology manual. ...more
History is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There’s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein. But what about theHistory is written by the winners. Or at least about the winners. There’s no shortage of tributes to, say, Shakespeare or Einstein. But what about the losers? Happily, there’s Paul Collins—a great and, I think, under-appreciated writer—who in Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, brings to life a group of people who were famous in their own day, but for various reasons have been completely forgotten. The best-known (if that’s the right word) of Collins’ anti-heroes is Delia Bacon, who was renowned on two continents for her brilliantly erudite lectures, but went mad, and in the process invented the Francis Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare’s-plays theory. (She and Francis were unrelated, though late in her life she seems to have forgotten this.) Martin Farquhar Tupper was a famous writer of revoltingly treacly Victorian poetry, strangely much admired by Walt Whitman. René Blondlot was a brilliant scientist who believed that he had discovered N-rays. Collins manages to evoke sympathy for his hapless protagonists, though it’s perhaps not unmixed with schadenfreude. Still, in this deeply fun book, they finally have the last word....more
To all appearances, Lisa Nowak was both accomplished and sane, a holder of multiple advanced and highly technical degrees: and an astronaut, which meaTo all appearances, Lisa Nowak was both accomplished and sane, a holder of multiple advanced and highly technical degrees: and an astronaut, which means, inter alia, a survivor of the rigorous psychological testing given to prospective members of the space program. So it was surprising when she showed up in Orlando–having driven 950 miles from Houston, apparently using diapers along the way–and, wearing a bizarre disguise, attacked Colleen Shipman, her rival for the affections of fellow astronaut Bill Oefelein. (Amusingly, to her colleagues in the space program, one of the more mystifying aspects of this story was that she managed to find her way to Orlando without getting lost.) How could this possibly happen? And surely, nothing like it could ever happen to us.
Not so, says Laura Kipnis, who in How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, makes an intriguing–and convincing–case that we’re all much closer to public disgrace than we think.
Who among us is not guilty of the occasional bout of bizarre, blatantly rude, manic, self-sabotaging behavior? Mostly though, it’s not spectacular enough–or we’re not famous enough–for it to qualify as scandalous. I can think of occasions, say, when–lunch way past due and confronted with an elaborately rude stranger–I’ve publicly exhibited banshee-like behavior that I would be very loathe to have recorded on videotape. Lapses of self control, fits of bad temper, self-delusion: they’re all part of the human condition, and given the right set of circumstances, can manifest themselves in particularly explosive ways.
Generally, though, people blow up their lives only under distinctly exacerbated circumstances. Kipnis evokes a great deal of sympathy for Nowak, whose marriage had recently broken up, who had obviously been a great deal more in love with Oefelein than he had ever been with her, and who had recently lost a close friend in the Columbia shuttle disaster. (She had been caring for her friend’s motherless child, which would have put a significant strain on anyone.) Oefelein for his part seems to have waited until weeks into his relationship with Shipman to break things off with Nowak; and a sort of idée fixe had taken hold of her, that she must apprise Shipman of this, and find out when Shipman knew what she knew. Why she needed to do this in disguise, in the middle of the night, in an airport parking lot, using pepper spray, not even Nowak can explain–but then none of us, Kipnis argues, can say what we’re ultimately capable of. By the end of Kipnis’ tale, it is impossible to see Nowak, and the wholesale destruction of her career, as anything other than tragic.
Kipnis lends a similar perspective to the other scandals she describes (which tend to be notable, distinct from the more garden variety scandals in which actors yell racist slurs and have public outbursts)–the eminent jurist Sol Wachtler, imprisoned after a bizarre episode in which he wrote extortionary notes to an ex-girlfriend under an assumed personality, and James Frey, publicly pilloried (most notably by Oprah, whose own actions were distinctly weird) when aspects of his best-selling memoir turned out to be fiction. The only subject for whom–in my eyes, at least–Kipnis does not manage to drum up any sympathy at all, is Linda Tripp, who remains as staunchly repulsive as ever. Manic, even dangerous behavior: well, ok; the wholesale betrayal of a friend and–I would argue–her country: emphatically not ok.
Scandal, though always a popular topic, has not been the subject of much theory. Kipnis here makes an elegant (if, to my taste, excessively Freud-laden) attempt to remedy the situation, in a book that ultimately does not so much chronicle our differences as reveal our similarities. Scandal, Kipnis argues, both unites us and shows our society for what it really is; it allows us to laugh together while exposing the fault-lines of our culture. So scandal is not just endemic, but necessary to the human condition. And there, but for some really crappy luck, go you or I. ...more
A woman tries to walk across a room, but collapses. Another suddenly goes blind, for no obvious physical reason. Victorian hysteria, clearly a product
A woman tries to walk across a room, but collapses. Another suddenly goes blind, for no obvious physical reason. Victorian hysteria, clearly a product of a time when women lived highly constricted, repressed lives. A veteran suffering from PTSD, on the other hand: doubtless a real disease, immutable, applicable in all situations and cultures. Not so, says Ethan Watters, who convincingly argues that all mental illnesses are circumscribed and molded by the cultures in which they occur. A person who is distressed will express it by drawing from whatever pool of symptoms is available in his culture–which may well be completely different from what is available in my culture.
In Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, Ethan Watters, a veteran journalist who presented a scathing indictment of the recovered memory movement in Making Monsters, examines four illnesses in four parts of the world: anorexia in Hong Kong, PTSD in Sri Lanka, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and depression in Japan.
These four illnesses (and cultures) are quite different from each other, but share something important: none of them looked like the accepted Western clinical definition of the disease. Anorexics in Hong Kong did not believe that they were fat, trauma sufferers in Sri Lanka tended to describe physical symptoms and damage to family relationships rather than psychological problems, schizophrenics in Zanzibar were believed to be possessed by spirits, and in Japan, milder forms of depression were not viewed as an illness that requires treatment.
Watters describes a world far from the definitive-sounding edicts of the DSM (the diagnostical and statistical manual of psychological disorders, the handbook of Western psychology); one in which distress is signaled in an enormous variety of ways. “The simple but mind-bending truth,” the anthropologist Allan Young explains, “is that mental illnesses such as PTSD can be both culturally shaped and utterly real to the sufferer.” This world collides unhappily with the immutable-disease view of much of the Western mental health establishment. (Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down makes a good companion read.)
Western mental health professionals increasingly treat patients throughout the world, and are often far less helpful than they believe. A Western-trained therapist, unwilling to consider that a Hong Kong anorexic does not believe herself fat, is unable to hear what the patient is actually saying. This is one problem with the globalization of the DSM. An even larger concern is that in the course of describing an illness, particularly if the description is dispersed widely throughout a culture, therapists may actually create an illness where it did not exist before. The local expressions of mental illness begin to disappear, and the clues that could have been gleaned from them are lost.
Crazy Like Us is not a polemic against Western mental health care: it is clear that competent Western therapists can be very helpful, under the right circumstances. It is equally clear, though, that they can be distinctly unhelpful under the wrong circumstances, when they fail to understand that their definitions are not universal.
This is especially clear in Sri Lanka, as American therapists rush to the scene of the tsunami, insisting that the local population has no understanding of trauma, and no idea how to treat victims. The psychology professor Ken Miller suggests that we consider the opposite scenario, with Mozambicans telling 9/11 survivors which rituals they need to engage in to sever their relationships with deceased family members. That the therapists earnestly believe themselves to be doing good makes these scenes no less disturbing. They explain that large segments of the population will fall victim to PTSD, and that it is not necessary to understand Sri Lankan culture to make this prediction. (There is an obvious connection to Watters’ previous work, with echoes of the victim mentality that characterized the recovered memory movement in these PTSD predictions, as well as in the medicalization of very minor depression in Japan. Human beings occupy a large spectrum, from fragility to resilience, and it’s not clear why fragility should be the default option.) These therapists are, of course, wrong: Sri Lankan history is sadly full of tragedy, and Sri Lankans have developed specific and effective methods of coping with it.
In all of these cultures, a shift is underway to a more Western view of the mind. Watters believes that a society is most susceptible to this influence when it is under a great deal of strain: the Chinese takeover in Hong Kong, for instance, or the tsunami in Sri Lanka. These changes do not happen on their own, but tend to be encouraged by outside agencies. The most striking instance of Western intervention that Watters describes is a successful attempt by a consortium of pharmaceutical companies to change the definition of depression in Japan, through an enormous and society-wide campaign. The high regard in which U.S. knowledge is held in much of the world makes such attempts to influence local mental health practices particularly effective–and dangerous.
From the U.S. point of view, the culture-blind promotion of Western ideas on the mind could appear to be a good thing. Shift your vantage point a bit, though, and these efforts look misguided and even harmful. This is a brilliant and genuinely paradigm-shattering book. ...more
**spoiler alert** Ian McEwan has long been concerned with climate change, but had never found a way to put it into a novel--sensibly wanting to avoid **spoiler alert** Ian McEwan has long been concerned with climate change, but had never found a way to put it into a novel--sensibly wanting to avoid the polemic- disguised-as-fiction problem--until he was invited to a gathering of Nobel Prize winners. At a recent reading at the Folger Theatre, he described the people he met there. "You know how you're shaking a politician's hand, but he's already looking past you to see if someone more important has arrived? These men--and they were all men--were like that, but by a factor of twenty." And McEwan realized that he had his novel.
Solar is the story of Michael Beard, a piggish, serially philandering physicist, who decades previously did the work (on Einstein's photovoltaics) that led to his Nobel Prize. Nobel prizes in physics are always won for breakthroughs by young scientists, and in Beard's case this seems to have had roughly the effect that early stardom often has on child actors. Ever since, Beard's life has been a round of speeches, honorary degrees, chairmanships of committees, and teaching posts that involve no teaching, all full of glory, but devoid of real work or meaning. The novel is told entirely from Beard's point of view: selfish, irresponsible and immoral (much like the attitudes that have ushered in this crisis) but often very funny.
Beard has just become titular head of the National Center for Renewable Energy, notwithstanding his skepticism on climate change and fundamental disinterest in world-saving activities. To his dismay, his fifth wife Patrice, in unwelcome contrast to all of his previous wives, has responded to his most recent infidelity by taking a lover. To his even deeper chagrin, this has made her more, not less, attractive to him. At the Center, he finds himself unable to follow the explanations of the young physicists working there; even worse, in an idle comment, he committed most of the Center's resources to a valueless project.
Even a trip to the Arctic, where he is in stark contrast to his idealistic ship-mates, does not stir his his environmental conscience. The trip is hilarious, with Beard narrowly escaping being eaten by a polar bear, and the ship's uncontrollably untidy boot room evoking both humanity's failure to control nature and the very messy id beneath Michael Beard's ego. A comic high point arrives when Beard takes aim at an artist who carelessly invokes Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, furiously striking out at what Murray Gell-Mann so felicitously called quantum flapdoodle.
But when a brilliant young colleague accidentally dies in Beard’s living room, he sees the chance to begin anew. After framing his wife's lover for murder, Beard steals his colleague’s plan to create energy through artificial photosynthesis. Finally convinced of climate change, he begins working furiously to save the planet. He is no more palatable a human being than before, all of his moral inclinations (assuming he has any) channeled into his work. He is a familiar type--if an exaggerated version thereof--in the environmental world, which raises the interesting question of just what part altruism and what part messianic drive underlies this kind of work.
There is little to admire about Beard, dishonest, self-centered, mostly devoid of morals or decency, prone to extreme overeating, his early genius seemingly exhausted in his Nobel prize calculations. But he is not a caricature. There are aspects of Beard that everyone can relate to, in particular his tendency to eat more than necessary. Beard is difficult to sympathize with, but not impossible to understand.
People can always redeem themselves, but don't tend to do so in response to any particular thing or on any particular schedule. It is to McEwan's credit that he allows Beard not to redeem himself, not to draw any human lessons from these events. But though Solar ends bleakly, it is a deeply funny and altogether admirable novel....more
Human beings have an interesting dilemma. Sanity, I suspect, hinges to some degree on believing ourselves to be right more often than not, on believinHuman beings have an interesting dilemma. Sanity, I suspect, hinges to some degree on believing ourselves to be right more often than not, on believing that what we see is actually there, and that what we remember actually happened. Unfortunately, we are very often wrong, about almost everything. In Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, Joseph T. Hallinan entertainingly plumbs the depths of our errors.
In a style familiar to readers of Freakonomics and Outliers, Hallinan gives a plethora of examples, from medicine to criminal justice to the military. We are never safe from mistakes, though this is due less to problems of intelligence and organization, and more to the inherent flaws of our approach to the world.
One facet of this approach is efficiency. For instance, if we are looking for something and conclude that it is unlikely to be there, we tend to stop looking. This has unfortunate implications for radiologists and airport screeners: in one 2002 study, TSA officers missed one in four guns. (Screeners have a literally one-in-a-million chance of seeing a gun.)
Equally, if we believe that we know what will be there, we don’t look very closely: we skim. Hallinan describes a misprint in a piece of music that had gone unnoticed for decades, and was not detected until an unskilled pianist played the piece. All other pianists had simply automatically substituted the correct note. This suggests, counterintuitively, that the best proof-readers may not be experts.
And we see what we expect to see. I once read of a study in which wine experts were given white wine that had been colored to make it appear to be red. Many of the experts failed to notice that it was red wine. I explained this to a delighted waiter at Cookshop once; I wonder if he ever tried it out on the sommelier.
The list of things that we get wrong goes on and on, often driven by just the sorts of devices that have advantages in other situations. We often have trouble drawing a penny from memory or reciting the national anthem (I failed the penny test, but recited the anthem without error), we are terrible at judging risk, and we tend heavily toward overconfidence–think, for instance, of the millions of unused gym memberships we pay for every year. We also think that we can multi-task. We can’t.
Fortunately, Hallinan does not regard these problems as unsolvable, and the last few chapters of the book describe ways in which we can attempt to overcome them. Forewarned is forearmed, at least some of the time.
Readers of Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell will recognize both Hallinan’s style and a number of the examples he gives, but for anyone interested in the disjoint between what we believe and what is true–and how to tell the difference–this book provides a fascinating account. ...more
Academia has long been excellent fodder for fiction, from David Lodge to Amanda Cross. In Double Negative, David Carkeet–somewhere in between these twAcademia has long been excellent fodder for fiction, from David Lodge to Amanda Cross. In Double Negative, David Carkeet–somewhere in between these two writers, though less gifted than Lodge and, happily, less cerebral than Cross–draws a highly entertaining picture of a quarrelsome group of linguists who study language development in children. They work at an institute that doubles as a day care center, where they record every utterance of their small charges.
The resident social misfit genius is Jeremy Cook, eternally irritated by his colleagues and convinced that the feeling is mutual. The colleague who is his chief rival with the female graduate students who arrive every summer draws his particular ire. Nerdy in the extreme, Cook subsists off revolting but efficient “grunt meals” so as not to lose any research time.
The institute’s uneasy peace is shattered when a linguist dies under suspicious circumstances, and Cook is framed for the murder. As he tries to extricate himself–even occasionally interrupting his studies of toddlers’ use of made-up words–he is distracted by a beautiful graduate student, his irritating colleagues (who appreciate him more than he imagines), and an idiosyncratic police detective.
By the end, Cook–an interesting and likable, if flaky, character–has learned something about relationships, and, mercifully, food. The solution to the mystery is truly original and clever, as is the entire novel. (It’s also laugh-out-loud funny.) Double Negative is the first volume in a trilogy: I am looking forward to reading the other two. ...more
Remember that point, in recent years, when we all started to notice something strange? Houses were getting more and more expensive, interest rates werRemember that point, in recent years, when we all started to notice something strange? Houses were getting more and more expensive, interest rates were dropping more and more, and most of us knew someone who had no money, but was able to get a huge mortgage. And then there were all the stories of people buying houses with no money down and interest-only payments for three years. How exactly were these people expecting to make principal payments in three years? And why was anyone lending them money?
In “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis explains that all of this was just the tip of an iceberg: an iceberg floating in exceedingly murky water. There was a reason for all of the bad mortgages. The people making the mortgages were selling them, so they didn’t care how bad they were. The mortgages were being bought by companies that bundled them and turned them into bonds—which they were able to sell, so they didn’t care how bad the mortgages were either.
In order to be sold, the bonds had to be rated by one of three rating agencies. In a reasonable financial system, rating agency analyst would be the career the most ambitious business students aspired to. As it is, these analysts are some of the lowest-paid and least-respected employees in the financial world. The smartest and most talented people on Wall Street are never at the rating agencies. (They tend to become bond traders.) The agencies are paid to rate bonds by the very companies that produce the bonds. As mortgage bonds were a new kind of bond, they needed help understanding them. So the same companies also explained the bonds to the rating agencies. None of this was illegal: in fact, it is standard practice.
Not surprisingly under the circumstances, a great many of these bonds (which increasingly consisted of utterly worthless mortgages) were rated triple A, the highest possible rating. The bonds that consisted of the absolutely worst mortgages were given a triple B rating. But the financial companies soon realized that triple B-rated mortgage bonds could in turn be bundled into another financial product, a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). Presented with the CDOs, the rating agencies tended to give them triple A ratings—which suggested that they were as safe an investment as U.S. Treasury bonds. Shockingly, very few people, at any level of the financial world or the U.S. government, understood that the ratings—and the bonds they described—were worthless.
This is a book about many things, but it is particularly a story of incentives, and the calamitous effects of incentivizing irresponsible behavior. In a system in which virtually everyone had an incentive to do the wrong thing, almost everyone did: and almost everyone, from mortgage lenders to the Fed, failed to understand that disaster was imminent. “The Big Short” describes the very small—and very eccentric—group of people who saw it coming.
The cast of characters begins with Steve Eisman, a socially inept hedge fund manager, who had turned cynic after witnessing a flagrant case of fraud on which the government refused to take action. Mike Burry is a brilliant hedge fund manager who is virtually incapable of human relationships, a problem which he blamed on his glass eye but turned out to be undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome. Charlie Ledley and Ben Hockett were two rather aimless friends who proved to have an uncanny ability to work the financial market. Greg Lippmann was a cynical Deutsche Bank bond trader who realized that the market was unsustainable.
They shared a key insight: that the market was going to collapse, and therefore the only safe bet was a bet against the market. (To short a bond is to bet that it will lose value.) Michael Lewis rivetingly describes how they first made, and then won, this bet, becoming extremely rich in the process.
Recently–at Politics & Prose Bookstore, at an entertaining event with Michael Lewis–Joel Achenbach said that this book had undermined his belief in capitalism, and asked if we should all become socialists. It was a joke, but it’s also a fair question. Lewis depicts a system in utter disarray, where financial products are too complex to be understood by either buyers or sellers; the agencies in charge of evaluating these products are both under-valued and embroiled in a serious conflict of interest; and there are no incentives to encourage responsible behavior. All of this links the health of the U.S. economy to a large gamble in which virtually no one has any idea what he is doing. It is to be hoped that this book will help foster a movement toward a truly sane financial system.
Twilight is the first volume of Stephenie Meyer's staggeringly successful series, which I had managed to be only dimly aware of until I found it in paTwilight is the first volume of Stephenie Meyer's staggeringly successful series, which I had managed to be only dimly aware of until I found it in paperback at Manhattan's aptly-named Books of Wonder.
Bella Swan--who serves as the narrator--has moved from Phoenix (which she inexplicably loves) to Washington State to live with her father. Bella was not popular at her old school, but this does not seem to be the whole reason for her move. Things have changed at her new school, where she has attracted the attention of the beautiful, but odd and stand-offish Cullen family. Edward Cullen in particular becomes her friend.
The Cullens turn out to be vampires, though of an unusually scrupulous sort who do not drink human blood. Skirmishes with less-friendly vampires ensue, as Bella and Edward try to stifle their growing--and dangerous--feelings for each other.
The plot moves along briskly, and is entertaining. But having finished Twilight, I didn't feel especially driven to read the next volume in the series. It doesn't quite rise to the level of compelling. Fun, though. ...more
Open google and type in “HeLa cells,” and a million and a half hits appear. This is because these cells are used and known universally throughout the Open google and type in “HeLa cells,” and a million and a half hits appear. This is because these cells are used and known universally throughout the medical world: far, far more than any other cell line. What has been much less well known is that HeLa stands for Henrietta Lacks, the woman from whom the original cells were taken. In “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” Rebecca Skloot–a born storyteller–set out to tell both stories, Henrietta’s and the cells’.
In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a poor African-American woman living in Baltimore, was diagnosed with a virulent form of cervical cancer, and began receiving treatment at Johns Hopkins. During the same period, scientists had been trying to culture an “immortal” cell line: a line of cells that would survive for an extended period of time in the laboratory. All of their attempts had failed.
Without the knowledge of Henrietta or her family (a common practice), doctors took samples from her cervix and sent them to a lab to culture. Several days later, it became clear that they had finally found an immortal cell line–HeLa, as it was named, following the conventions of the time, multiplied rapidly and was virtually indestructible. By the time Henrietta died, eight months later, her cells were famous.
In the intervening years, HeLa cells were used for everything from the development of the polio vaccine to testing how cells survive in space. But Henrietta’s family did not learn of the cell line until decades later, and then were repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to pry information from the medical world, which rarely told them anything, and provided information of only the most technical kind.
The family’s difficulties were exacerbated by both their scientific illiteracy and their timidity about challenging doctors. Neither is a condemnation: in a country where the reality of evolution is still being debated, the Lackses’ failure to understand cells is hardly shocking. Nor is it surprising that they felt unable to stand up to the vastly better-educated doctors at Johns Hopkins.
Nonetheless, one of the most haunting passages in the book describes a conversation between a Hopkins researcher and Henrietta’s husband Day. Day believed the researcher to have said that Henrietta was still alive at Johns Hopkins and being experimented on. He asked no questions of the researcher, and issued no demands. The value of both scientific literacy and a middle-class sense of entitlement is compellingly clear.
As HeLa cells made vast contributions to medical knowledge and large profits for medical companies (though never for Johns Hopkins), Henrietta’s family remained extremely poor, often unable to afford health insurance. Resentment and confusion grew within the family, and Henrietta’s daughter Deborah–Skloot’s lead character, who became a friend to Skloot over the ten years she spent working on the book–was driven almost to a nervous breakdown.
Finally, though, the family began to learn the facts surrounding HeLa. A sympathetic Austrian researcher led Deborah and her brother to a bank of freezers containing their mother’s cells. Deborah warmed a vial in her hands. “You’re famous,” she whispered. “Just nobody knows it.” Thanks to Skloot’s marvelous book, they do now. ...more