From the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine:
In his early 40s the torticollis began to worsen and was accompanied by increasing lumbar spine pain as he twisted his torso to compensate for a deviated field of vision. An occupational therapist suggested he try walking backwards, and this he did with some success. . . . Friends nicknamed him ‘The Sidewinder”. . . . He now never walks forwards unless asked.
Case report here.
In today’s Freakonomics column, Dubner and Levitt write:
we can’t think of a single person who, since the invention of the washing machine, practices “laundry for fun.”
Look no further: I do. And not just laundry: For my tenth high school reunion I listed my hobbies as “doing the dishes.” Yes, I enjoy doing the dishes. Long ago I hired someone to clean my apartment (including laundry) not because it was dirty but because I was spending too much time cleaning it. More recently, because of the growing success of The Shangri-La Diet (which Dubner and Levitt have everything to do with), I decided I could go back to cleaning a bit more so I hired someone to clean my apartment but not do my laundry.
Before watching faces in the morning I suppose I was as messy as a typical guy. The mood elevation produced by faces suddenly changed me: I discovered I enjoyed cleaning, and I started to spend lots of time (about an hour/day) doing it. It would be harsh to say that messiness is a sign of depression but I think that a very messy room or office — not to be confused with extreme hoarding — is a indication of the sort of problem that when it becomes extreme we call depression.
I have mentioned this letter three times (here, here and here) and Jeremy Cherfas rightfully complains that he can’t read it. Here is most of it:
Friday marked the deadline to enter The New York Times columnist Nick Kristof’s second annual “Win a Trip with Nick Kristof” contest. Open to students currently enrolled at any American college or university, as well as middle and high school teachers, the contest offers one student and one teacher an all expenses-paid trip through Africa with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to gather stories on the impoverished continent. . . The prize includes the chance – more accurately the expectation – to detail the experience on a blog on NYTimes.com.
Because I am currently a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I qualify to enter this competition, and have many reasons to do so. . . . .Yet, I refuse to apply. I think the way Kristof has cast this trip is a disservice to Africa. . . .
Kristof insists on telling the story of a failing Africa when instead he could report on its ability to overcome. On the competition’s webpage Kristof has posted a letter to potential applicants that provides this explanation: “Frankly, I’m hoping that you’ll be changed when you see a boy dying of malaria because his parents couldn’t afford a $5 mosquito net, or when you talk to a smart girl who is at the top of her class but is forced to drop out of school because she can’t afford a school uniform.” . . .
Last year’s student witnessed the death of a woman during childbirth despite the fact that both Kristof and his traveling companion donated blood in an attempt to save her. Though the doctor promised to help the young woman, he apparently ducked out the back door as she died. That was Kristof’s story of Cameroon, a West African nation with tremendous ecological diversity and a per-capita GDP higher than that of most other African countries. . . .
The story of Africa in turmoil is the African narrative that many Americans – and certainly those who read The New York Times – already know. It is virtually the only type of reporting that Western news outlets broadcast about the continent. Every American student who has to listen to National Public Radio in the car when Dad picks her up from soccer practice, or has had to read The Economist for a school assignment, or has read in a church newsletter about a local youth group’s spring break trip to a rural African village knows that people in Africa are hurting. Maybe we haven’t smelled an understaffed health clinic that cares for HIV-positive orphans, or walked through rows of coffee trees with a farmer whose young son was beaten into serving in a youth militia in a civil war between tribal groups whose names we can’t pronounce and whose agendas we can’t keep straight. But we know they are poor, and that Africa will break your American heart if its contaminated water doesn’t kill you first. . . .
Americans don’t need any more stories of a dying Africa. Instead, we should learn of a living one. Kristof and his winners should investigate how it is that Botswana had the highest per-capita growth of any country in the world for the last 30 years of the twenty-first century. Report on the recent completion of the West Africa Gas Pipeline that delivers cheaper, cleaner energy to parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Tell us about investment opportunities in Nigeria’s burgeoning capital markets.
Sadly, it’s impossible to report on Africa’s successes without relaying its tragedies. Virtually every African victory is somehow also a story of malnourishment and malaria, misogyny and malevolence. That’s important because Africa’s horrors are massive and crushing, and demand attention. I agree with Pope John Paul II, who said “a society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members.” Clearly Africa will be the [basis of] judgment of our global community.
Kristof knows this, of course, and I am certain he means well when he writes that his original purpose for the contest was because he thought that “plenty of young people [who] tune out a fuddy-duddy like myself might be more engaged by a fellow-student encountering African poverty for the first time.” But they would also be excited to encounter African hope, something equally unknown to most Americans, students or otherwise.
So I’m asking Kristof to refine his summer travel itinerary to include a tour of a thriving organic farm owned and operated by a local Ethiopian cooperative. And the Ugandan health clinics that are reducing the number of AIDS cases despite a continuing guerilla war. And the wonderful “PlayPumps” scattered throughout the continent that provide safe drinking water via a pump system powered by children as they play on a playground. Brilliant idea. And something many people don’t know about.
Africa needs a lot of things. It needs money and aid workers, vaccines and functioning governments. Some of those things can be provided by outside donors, and other can’t. But universally, Africa needs us to believe in it. And that is something we have to be taught.
On the left-hand side of The New Yorker website is a series of sections: Goings-On, In This Issue, Cartoon Caption Contest, and so forth. Pretty standard stuff. Then comes a section called Awards:
AWARDS
Lawrence Wright has won a Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Looming Tower.” Read “The Master Plan”; watch an excerpt from “My Trip to Al-Qaeda.”
The New Yorker has been nominated for a Webby Award for Best Copy/Writing. Vote for us at webbyawards.com.
The New Yorker received nine nominations for the National Magazine Awards. View a list of finalists and read nominated articles.
I wouldn’t be so casual about such great accomplishments. Such things — at least for most of us — are more noteworthy and wonderful than what’s In This Issue.
Speaking of missteps, I mentioned a few days ago how New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof put in his blog a letter from a University of North Carolina student that was more interesting and insightful than anything in the NY Times in a long time. If someone wrote a letter like that to me, I would have begged her to allow me to use her full name so that she would get credit for her brilliant comment. I would have responded to it, not just printed it. I would have gotten other people’s reactions to it. I would have gone on and on about it.
Maybe I should have titled this post Too Little Emphasis on Success to go with Too Much Emphasis on Failure.
Addendum: Kristof has now posted the student’s full name: Loren Berlin.
The grandfather of Gillian Anderson, who starred in a wonderful Bleak House mini-series,
once bet someone in a bar in Kentucky that he’d marry the next girl who walked into the place; he did and they went on to have nine children together.
From this interview with Anderson.
I think could read the New York Times for a hundred years and not come across anything as well-written as this gem of a blog post by Joyce Cohen, who writes The Hunt column in the Times. I love her column — but this is better. It’s about something I don’t even care about, New York real estate.
By incredible coincidence, Nicholas Kristof’ s most recent blog entry (April 17, 2007) is also better, in my opinion, than essentially everything that appears in the Times (or any other paper). Kristof reprints a letter to him from a student that makes an extremely important point about Africa coverage in the Times (and, probably, all other Western newspapers): It is unceasingly focussed on failure. I wonder why.
Several months ago I got this email from someone at the Seed Media Group:
Thank you for your interest in being hosted by ScienceBlogs. In the last couple of months, we have received well over a hundred queries from bloggers representing an impressive breadth and depth of science
expertise. However, as we are trying to maintain a sense of community at ScienceBlogs, we are able to extend only a small number of invitations at a time. . . . In light of the very limited number of spaces we have to offer, we regret to inform you that we cannot extend you an invitation at this time.
This was sent to about 50 people. Their email addresses were visible. One of the recipients thought that we, the rejectees, could form our own umbrella website and wrote to us about this. I replied:
I love the idea of a form rejection letter leading to the founding of a competitive website — count me in!
Four months later I got an invitation to join the result, www.scientificblogging.com. It is now a well-functioning website with lots of interesting stuff.
I showed something I’d written to Marian Lizzi, my editor at Penguin. She advised me not to quote someone: “It sounds like you’re sneering at them,” she said. She was right — it did sound that way, although I didn’t want it to. Unfortunately, there was no alternative punctuation that conveyed neutrality or respect. It was sneer or nothing.
So here’s my proposal: Let the number of apostrophes indicate degree of respect for the speaker. Like this:
1. Single quotes = disrespect. Example: ‘Has a good chance of working’? You can’t be serious.
2. Double quotes (normal American usage) = neutral. Example: “We’re running out of working waterfront,” said Jim Barstow.
3. Triple quotes = respect. Example: According to a recent research report, “‘40% of the subjects failed to seek help.’”
4. Quadruple quotes = great respect. Example: According to Jane Brody, cataract surgery “”can be life-changing.””
For the non-set-theorists, I’m using braces to express set membership:
pets = {cats, dogs, . . . }.
A week ago self-experimentation and the Internet struck me as wildly different. Self-experimentation is a tiny method of inquiry. The Internet is a gigantic physical network. Self-experimentation: one person alone. The Internet: everyone together.
But then I read this fresh essay by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, managing editor of the on-line journal First Monday. Thanks to Ghosh, I now see two similarities between self-experimentation and the Internet:
1. Both are growth media. They encourage things to grow. Self-experimentation helps develop new ideas about health. The Shangri-La Diet is an example; so are my ideas about mood. The most influential example is diabetes self-monitoring, which grew from self-experimentation by Richard Bernstein. The Internet, of course, has helped many things grow, especially new businesses (Ebay, Google), new forms of interpersonal communication (blogs, forums, chat rooms, MySpace), and new forms of collaborative work (Wikipedia, open-source software).
2. They encourage the growth of similar things. Self-experimentation doesn’t equally encourage all ideas about health; it especially encourages very low-cost ones. My self-experimentation led me to realize the benefits of skipping breakfast (improves sleep), seeing faces in the morning (improves mood), and standing a lot (improves sleep). The Shangri-La Diet costs almost nothing — less than nothing if you count the money saved on food. Ghosh points out that the Internet has especially encouraged the rise of businesses where the basic transaction does not involve money. Stuff is “given away” (that is, no money changes hands); payment is in terms of reputation. Both self-experimentation and the Internet are focusing intellectual attention on how people lived and thrived many thousands of years ago.
Yesterday morning I listened to Ira Glass. Yesterday evening I listened to Bill McKibben. And I reflected:
1. Bill McKibben wrote a whole book, The Age of Missing Information (1992), about the malign influence of TV. He spent a year watching a single day’s output of the 100-odd channels of one cable company. TV makes people self-centered, he decided.
2. Ira Glass said we are living in a Golden Age of Television and listed a handful of current shows — including The Wire, The Daily Show, Colbert, Friday Night Lights, Project Runway, Entourage, House, and “anything with Ricky Gervais” — in support of his claim. He has just spent a year starting a TV version of This American Life.
3. Bill McKibben wrote an article (in The Nation) praising This American Life to the skies.
I think of McKibben and Glass as the two Boy Geniuses of American intellectual life. (Curiously I cannot think of any Girl Geniuses.) Both of them did great work while really young. When McKibben was in his twenties, he wrote a long series of editorials in The New Yorker that were inspiring. (They were unsigned. I found out who wrote them by writing to the magazine.) His first book, The End of Nature (1989), about global warming, was prophetic. I think it was the very first general-audience book on the subject. As for Glass, This American Life was terrific right from the start, twelve years ago. He was 36 when it started.