Soviet-Harvard Style

Nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future. [Brasilia] is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent, and talented men start thinking in terms of space rather than place; and single rather than multiple meanings. It's what you get when you design for political aspirations rather than real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens. This, one may fervently hope, is the last experiment of its kind. The utopian buck stops here. — Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, Episode 4: Trouble in Utopia, (1980)

From a 1950s perspective, however, cigarettes weren't that different. The annual consumption of tobacco was approximately 12 pounds per capita, and 80 percent of men smoked cigarettes at least occasionally. Smoking was an important social practice, and, for many, a reliable way to relieve anxiety. Although the link between smoking and lung cancer was evident by the end of the decade, few people recognized that tobacco would become the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Smoking cessation seemed unnecessary and unwise, if not unfathomable. Giving up grilled, smoked and fried meats seems equally bizarre today, but population-wide changes in dietary staples have dramatically affected cancer rates in other parts of the world. (slate)

Parking Lot Success

“Today, if you walk across the University of South Florida campus, I’d like to think that whether it’s the parking lot attendant, the food services attendant, a resident assistant or a professor, they all recognize and are committed to how important this thing we call student success is,” said Ralph Wilcox, USF’s provost and executive vice president. “It really has become part of the university’s DNA.” (tbo)

Truthiness

C. Glenn Begley, who is chief scientific officer at TetraLogic Pharmaceuticals, described an experience he had while at Amgen, another drug company. He and his colleagues could not replicate 47 of 53 landmark papers about cancer. Some of the results could not be reproduced even with the help of the original scientists working in their own labs. Given what is at stake, it seems like a moral failing that the titles of the papers were not revealed. That was forbidden, we’re told, by confidentiality agreements imposed by the labs. (nyt)

...identity politics of the 1970s through the 1990s stressed the import of gay identity and community. Unsurprisingly, histories generated during that time privileged and, in part, produced identity and community in prior eras. My call today for a queer history, to be focused upon the ever-changing relationship of normalcy to deviancy, happens alongside a contemporary focus on queer desire over gay identity. A deeply historicist project thus situates in time not only the object of study but also the conductor of the study. Both the history and the historian must be historicised. We should ask not only what do we study, but who are we who study? Who are we in relationship to what we study? (howard)

It was not that it was all right to be a lesbian because there had been lesbians in the past. Nor was it that what I was feeling was all right because it was not “homosexuality.” Rather, it was that our modern categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality (and even bisexuality) are not complex enough to capture the slippery reality of love and desire. I seized upon this article because Smith-Rosenberg’s vision of a world in which love and sexuality had no easy relation to sexual identity made sense to me, unsure as I was if I yet merited the label “lesbian.” And though the woman I fell in love with is now married to a man and I happily identify as a lesbian, I do not take that to mean those were the only possible outcomes. (rupp)

Sexist Shooters

He began his attack by entering a classroom at the university, where he separated the male and female students. After claiming that he was "fighting feminism" and calling the women "a bunch of feminists," he shot all nine women in the room, killing six. He then moved through corridors, the cafeteria, and another classroom, specifically targeting women to shoot. Overall, he killed fourteen women and injured ten other women and four men in just under twenty minutes before turning the gun on himself. (1989)

He ordered the hostages to line up against the chalkboard and released the 15 male students present, along with a pregnant woman and three parents with infants. The remaining 10 female students he kept inside the schoolhouse. […] The gunman apparently killed himself along with five school girls. Three of the girls died at the scene, with two more dying the next morning from related injuries. Five girls were in the hospital in critical condition. Reports have stated that the girls were shot execution style in the head. The ages of the victims ranged from 6 to 13. (2006)

The shooting occurred at a women's aerobics class at the LA Fitness center in The Great Southern Shopping Center of Collier Township at approximately 8:15 pm EDT. The shooter entered the class, placed a duffel bag on the ground, turned off the lights, took out two handguns and began firing […] Three women and the gunman died, and about nine other people were injured. (2009)

Ed. the case of Arunya Rouch (heard of her?) makes me think there might be more cases of women attempting the reverse, they just don't get much attention. Amy Bishop is a conspicuous example, along with Aileen Wournos. Some Googling turns up Laurie Dann, Jennifer San Marco, Brenda Spencer, and Sylvia Seegrist. It's all nonsense, of course. Like hutu and tutsi, the difference between males and females (above the shoulders, anyway) is fiction.
Ed. how could I forget Julie Schenecker? We must specialize in this stuff in the bay area. To whit: all our female teacher sex scandals, Debra Lafave et al.

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In May, the journal Psychological Science published the results of a randomized trial showing that undergraduates instructed to spend a mere 10 minutes a day for two weeks practicing mindfulness [meditating] made significant improvement on the verbal portion of the Graduate Record Exam — a gain of 16 percentile points. They also significantly increased their working memory capacity, the ability to maintain and manipulate multiple items of attention. (nyt 1-14-2014)

I meditate at bus stops.

Breathe it All In

Theo de Kok of Maastricht University in the Netherlands […] and his collaborators found that PM10 from candles might be especially harmful because, in the body, unidentified constituents of the smoke readily generate free radicals that damage cells. After candles had burned in a Dutch chapel for 9 hours, particles in the air there formed 10 times as many free radicals as airborne particulates collected along busy roadways do, de Kok’s group reported

A study published in 2008 in the medical journal Cancer found that incense use is associated with a statistically significant higher risk of cancers of the upper respiratory tract […] The link between incense use and increased cancer risk held when the researchers weighed other factors, including cigarette smoking, diet and drinking habits. The research team noted that "This association is consistent with a large number of studies identifying carcinogens in incense smoke, and given the widespread and sometimes involuntary exposure to smoke from burning incense, these findings carry significant public health implications."

According to recent research, some laser printers emit sub-micrometer particles which have been associated in other environmental studies with respiratory diseases. An unpublished study at the University of Rostock in Germany is reported to have found that the microscopic particles in toners are carcinogenic, similar to asbestos.

2013-09-24

“Decisions in this country need to be made by females and Latinos and Asians and blacks.” Florida Representative Alcee Hastings nyt