Today I went to a talk about terrorism. After the talk, I asked a question: What’s the evidence for the recommendations you made at the end? The speaker, a professor at Harvard, began her answer by apologizing: I can only tell you case-by-case anecdotes, she said. She repeated this apology a little later. Well, of course no one has done a controlled experiment (or any experiment) on how to deal with terrorism. Of course all we have is a story here, a story there. The speaker, whose talk was good, had heard the pervasive dismissiveness I criticize here so many times that not only did she expect it, she accepted it. The academic Stockholm Syndrome.

This post by Dr. Erika Schwartz, complaining about a breast cancer story in the NY Times, makes important points. When politicians — such as Joe McCarthy or Jean-Marie Le Pen — try to scare us, most of us appreciate the psychology involved: The more fearful we become, the more we will look to them to protect us, thus increasing their power. Our fear = their power. Schwartz is saying that respected doctors and journalists do the same thing. How prophetic was The Coming Plague (1994) by Laurie Garrett?

Schwartz’s post has too little detail to convince me that this particular story is guilty. Nor do I agree with her that statistics are “totally meaningless when applied to the individual.” Her contribution is to ask: how can we discuss these issues without fear-mongering?

At Cato Unbound, David Cutler, a Harvard public policy professor whose research I used in The Shangri-La Diet, writes:

The most important reason why medical costs increase over time is because we develop new ways of treating patients and provide that care to ever more people.

At least in his essay, Cutler fails to consider an alternative explanation: Medical costs have increased a lot because we have become a lot more sick — more in need of help. Over the last 50 years, obesity has greatly increased. Diabetes has greatly increased. Depression has greatly increased. Depression, including subclinical depression, is now common and has so many bad effects or correlates — less activity, less socializing, less sunlight, poor sleep, less compliance with everything — that its impact on health must be great.

The New Yorker now has online abstracts, just like scientific journals. From the abstract of an article by Patricia Marx:

The writer spies from her living-room window a multitude of colorful puffy parkas from Pucci (24 East 64th Street). The writer then calls Dr. Andrej Romanovsky to ask how the body detects cold. New York is the city of coats. Real coats, not car coats, for in this town, we walk. . . . Still worried about the coming cold? There is always one thing left to do: Miami (U.S. Airways; flights as low as $59 one-way).

Surely this is better than the article itself. Just as brandy is better than the wine it is distilled from.

From Vanity Fair:

As for the thousand or so members of the online “Rachael Ray Sucks Community”—a pack who delight in obnoxious nicknames (Retchel, Raytard), mock her smile, hate her vocabulary (”yum-o” especially), criticize her over-reliance on canned chicken stock, and think she dresses like Greg on The Brady Bunch . . . Ray answers such critics by agreeing with them. “Most of what they say is absolutely true. I don’t know how to bake. I didn’t make my own pierogis in episode whatever. You can’t be all things to all people.”

Not bad.

In the current New Yorker, Mark Singer, one of my favorite writers, describes the “incredible career” of the late Joyce Hatto, a British pianist. According to her husband, she had a stillborn twin brother. Could that brother have in fact lived, and become Ranjit Chandra, a Canadian immunologist?

Consider the similarities:

1. Accolades. Toward the end of her life, Hatto released dozens of recordings that elicited great praise. “One of the greatest pianists I have ever heard,” said one critic. Chandra was awarded the Order of Canada, the country’s highest honor.

2. Man of mystery. Hatto recorded several concertos with Rene Kohler and the National Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra but “there was no mention of him or the orchestra in any reference book,” according to Singer. Saul Sternberg and I could not locate Amrit L. Jain, author of a study with the same results as one of Chandra’s studies. Nor could we locate his institution (”Medical Clinic and Nursing Home”).

3. One strange fact after another. Many of Hatto’s performances were identical or almost identical to performances by others. As Saul Sternberg, Ken Carpenter, and I examined Chandra’s papers, we discovered many unlikely or impossible details. Our letters to editors about this are here and here.

More about Chandra, who has sued the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) over its documentary about him. Part 1 of that documentary, for which Chris O’Neill-Yates won a journalism award.

Robin Hanson’s excellent essay in Cato Unbound is a proposal to cut medical spending in half. The evidence suggests that this would do little harm and it would help us focus on more helpful activities. I like the way this article summarizes the RAND experiment, searches for the right metaphor, and answers objections.

One question Robin answers is “How could we be this wrong about medicine?” My answer is different than Robin’s. I point to the way many scholarly and scientific disciplines start off useful and become useless. In the case of medicine, the lack of benefit is easier to measure. Try measuring the value of a class in 18th Century English Literature.

This story — about an NSA employee named Gene Carson — by Igor Vamos is so strange and affecting I would have thought it made up (like Truman Capote’s snakes story) except that almost every detail rings true.

I remember when you used to tell me that fruit from the supermarket is tasteless. I agree with you. If small markets work, why do we need the super markets? I miss you.

This is one of Carson’s diary entries. “You” is Imogene Campbell, whom Carson wiretapped daily but never met.

Given how little I can learn about Gene Carson and Imogene Campbell via Google, maybe it is fiction. If so, Igor Vamos is a genius.

Addendum: I guess it’s fiction.