Category: books

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts7 Comments
  • Experiments suggest flu shots reduce heart attacks and death. Huge reduction: 50%. The new report (a conference talk, not a paper) is a reanalysis of four earlier experiments. I was surprised to learn that the CDC uses heart attack outbreaks to locate flu outbreaks, implying that the new finding is not a fluke — there really is a strong connection. I already knew heart attacks are more common in the winter, which also supports a connection with flu.
  • Une histoire des haines d’écrivains by Boquel Anne and Kern Etienne. Published 2009. About literary feuds. One of my students was reading a Chinese translation.
  • Correspondences between sounds and tastes.
  • Report on fraudulent Dutch research. “The 108-page report says colleagues who worked with Stapel had not been sufficiently critical. This was not deliberate fraud but ‘academic carelessness’, the report said.” I doubt it. Based on my experience with Chandra, I believe Stapel’s colleagues had doubts but did nothing from some combination of careerism (doing something would have cost too much, for example a lot of time, and gained them nothing), ignorance (not their field), and decency (they saw no great value in ruining someone). I wonder if the report considered these other possible explanations (careerism, ignorance, decency).

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

How I Read

Seth Roberts8 Comments

In a review of a book by Alice Munro, Charles McGrath, who edited her at The New Yorker, wrote:

Many of these stories are told in Munro’s now familiar and much remarked on style, in which chronology is upended and the narrative is apt to begin at the end and end in the middle. She has said that she personally prefers to read stories that way, dipping in at random instead of following along sequentially,

That’s what I do. Most books I find are improved if I start in the middle and hop around. Doing so adds difficulty and mystery, which otherwise they are deficient in. Same reason I usually like reality shows more than scripted shows, scripted shows lack that attractive raw edge. Spy magazine had an article about writing guidelines for a woman’s magazine. The guidelines said start in the middle: Talk about someone (“he” this, “he” that) before identifying them.

A few great writers (Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Jacobs, Tolstoy) I don’t do this with. Some true crime (The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule) I don’t do it with. But most books benefit.

 

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments
  • Olive oil and the Willat Effect. “You can read about great olive oils, and their vast superiority over bad oils, all you want. . . . But until you try first-rate olive oil for yourself – actually put the good stuff in your mouth, and compare that experience to the bad stuff you’ve eaten in the past – you won’t really get it. . . . . Once you taste fine olive oils and their low-class imitations [side by side], though, you start to care.”
  • Petraeus Affair: The journalism of what we don’t know.
  • Tucker Max on book publishing. Disruptive innovation for popular authors.
  • Animal self-medication. Sick animals eat differently than healthy animals.

Thanks to Alex Blackwood.

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Thanks to Anne Weiss and Dave Lull.

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Thanks to Anne Weiss and Dave Lull.

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Edward Jay Epstein Reviewed Movies For Vladimir Nabokov

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Edward Jay Epstein attended college at Cornell. When he was a freshman, he took Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture course about European and Russian literature. Nabokov told his students that a great writer creates pictures in readers’ heads. One of the exam questions, about Anna Karenina, was Describe the train station where Anna met Vronsky.

Epstein hadn’t read the book. However, he had seen the movie, so he described in great detail the train station in the movie. After the exam, Nabokov asked to meet him. Epstein told him he hadn’t read the book. Nabokov said it didn’t matter, and gave him an A. He offered Epstein a job. Ithaca had four movie theaters. Movies were released on Wednesday, so every Wednesday each theater would have a new movie. Nabokov loved movies. He went on Friday. He wanted to know which movie to choose. Epstein’s job, for which he was paid, was to watch all four movies and report back.

Epstein did this conscientiously but in retrospect, he said, one of his comments was a mistake. The Queen of Spades (from Pushkin’s story) was one of the movies. Epstein told Nabokov it reminded him of Dead Souls. (They were reading Dead Souls in class.) This interested Nabokov. He looked at Vera, his wife, who was sitting at his desk facing him. He asked Epstein why The Queen of Spades reminded him of Dead Souls.

“They’re both Russian,” said Epstein.

More: Epstein tells the story himself.

The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I came away from The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett (copy sent me by publisher) full of admiration for two people the book barely mentions: Bennett’s parents. How did they raise her to be such a competent and resourceful person? The book isn’t about her. It is mainly about her husband’s fatal illness and their marriage. She never brags, but glimpses of staggering competence slip through. In 2006,

I am the only editor of a major newspaper in the United States [the Philadelphia Inquirer] to run the Danish cartoon of Mohammed wearing a bomb on his head instead of a turban–the cartoon that causes riots in Europe. By the following Monday, protesters are in front of our building carrying signs with my face and the face of Hitler. Joe Natoli, my publisher, and I plunge into the crowd, shaking hands, talking to families, listening to their stories. The crowd turns friendly. I emerge with several copies of the Koran.

She tells this story because her husband is proud of her, which means a lot to her:

The pride I see on Terence’s face . . . keeps me going, even when I am scared.

However, she was courageous before she met him. In 1983, she took a job in Beijing as a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which is where she met her husband. Their first encounters, she says, were a series of fights.

Most of the book is about what happened when her husband came down with a rare form of kidney cancer — especially how much the treatments cost. For $600,000 — paid mostly by insurance — they bought a few more years of life together. It was worth it, says Bennett, adding but did it have to cost so much? Her best insight comes when she notices the wildly different prices paid for exactly the same treatment (CAT scans) — exactly the same treatment, same machine, same operator. The “retail” rate is, let’s say, $20,000. One insurer pays $5,000, another pays $1,000. She wonders why. Her moment of insight comes when she is back in Beijing at a fakes market with her 10-year-old daughter. At such markets, tourists are told prices wildly above what the seller will accept. In one case a fake Chanel purse is offered for 2000 yuan ($300). A woman who pays 200 yuan walks away happy. “I got it for 200!” she tells her friends. Bennett’s (adopted Chinese) daughter pays 20 yuan. (Apparently Bennett has her parents’s parenting skills.) Wildly inflated retail prices for health care — so much more than what sellers will accept that they are almost meaningless — exist to take advantage of poor negotiators, Bennett realizes.

The Cost of Hope was a pleasure to read and, as I’ve said, Bennett is an astonishing person, but it omits an important point. Bennett, like most people who write about the high cost of American health care, fails to point out its central tenet: First, let them get sick. Bennett’s husband died young (early 60s). He was significantly overweight, how much we aren’t told. Apparently he had diabetes — again, few details are given. Obesity and diabetes are preventable. One of the first treatments her husband receives for his cancer is IL-2, meant to boost the immune system. What about boosting his immune system before he got sick? For example, by improving his sleep. This neglected approach might have prevented or delayed her husband’s cancer and extended his life much more cheaply and painlessly than what happened. The biggest flaw of her book is her failure to ask — literally ask, such as ask the head of the National Institutes of Health — why prevention, especially cheap prevention, is ignored.

Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

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When Clinton was President, Ryan Holiday writes in Trust Me I’m Lying (copy sent me by publisher, Ryan is a friend),

[Matt] Drudge accused prominent journalist and Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenhthal of a shocking history of spousal abuse — and one covered up by the White House, no less. Except that none of it was true. . . . An anonymous Republican source had whispered into Drudge’s ear to settle a political score against Blumenthal. . . . [Drudge] refused to apologize for the pain caused by his recklessness.

In spite of knowing this, I still read Matt Drudge. I don’t have to. There are a zillion other things to read. That may or may not make me a horrible person but it illustrates the depth of the problem that Ryan writes about: Spreading lies pays.

A more mundane example is press releases. Bloggers love press releases, Ryan says (speaking from experience working at American Apparel). All the work is done for them. So what if press releases are profoundly dishonest in the way they present a half truth (positive stuff about the product) as if it is a whole truth? It’s an easy way to get a few thousand clicks. “I recall sending e-mails to Gawker and Jezebel on several occasions over matters of factual errors and not receiving a response,” writes Ryan. “My anonymous tips seem to arrive in their inboxes just fine — it’s the signed corrections that run into issues.” A car site published a rumor that turned out to be false. A friend of Ryan’s complained that the headline wasn’t fixed:

[Ryan’s friend:] Why keep the headline up since we now know it’s not true?
[Car site:] You guys are so funny.

Taking the headline down would generate fewer clicks than leaving it up. Shameless.

“That way lies madness,” I told a friend who worried about how much traffic his blog attracted. Bloggers who will do anything for a click do so, of course, because their salary depends on it, whereas my friend did not get significant income from his blog. Sure, paying bloggers by the click pushes them to write stuff that people want to read — which sounds good, aren’t snobs bad? — except what if people don’t care that much about the truth?

I think of science. Who do professional scientists more closely resemble? 1. Bloggers who will do anything for a click. 2. Disinterested seekers of truth. Well, it’s a job, not a hobby. Science and job are not a good fit (as I’ve written), just as factory food and health are not a good fit. We can see the consequences of the bad fit between factory food and health in the obesity epidemic (which I believe is caused by eating calorie-dense quickly-digested food that tastes exactly the same each time — factory food is much more standardized than food you make yourself) and the epidemic of digestive problems (caused by too-sterile food — factory food is more sterile than food you make yourself). We can see the consequences of the bad fit between science and job in the failure to find solutions to one growing problem after another (obesity, Crohn’s disease, autism, depression, poor sleep, etc.). Trust Me I’m Lying is about the consequences of the poor fit between being paid by the click and caring about the truth of what you write.