Month: July 2009

Growing From E-mail

by Patrick Appel

DiA interviews Slate editor Jacob Weisberg:

The tone of good web writing grows out of email. It's more direct, personal, colloquial, urgent, witty, efficient. It doesn't waste your time. It reflects that engagement, responsiveness and haste of web surfers, as opposed to the more general passivity of print readers. It integrates the use of links into the creative and intellectual process as opposed to tacking them on afterwards. And it uses multimedia in an organic rather than an ornamental way.

Ant Suturing

by Chris Bodenner

Since my early childhood I've been fascinated by ants. The latest reason:

In Africa and South America large ants or beetles are put along the closed “lips of a wound” so that their mandibles clamp down at the edge. When ants along the edge have sufficiently stapled the gash closed, the surgeon twists the bodies from the clamped heads and lets that sucker heal. Once they’ve clamped, there’s little you can do to unclamp these demons.

Another blog examines the practice in ancient texts.

Face Of The Day

FootballGetty
Josh Preston competes in the Red Bull Street Style National Final at Bondi Icebergs Pool on July 18, 2009 in Sydney, Australia.The Street Style football competition determines who is Australia's fleetest of foot when it comes to juggling, balancing and performing the most outrageous acrobatic feats with a soccer ball, the winner will go on to represent Australia in South Africa. By Lisa Maree Williams/Getty.

America’s Growing Waistline

by Patrick Appel

The New Yorker addresses obesity:

Men are now on average seventeen pounds heavier than they were in the late seventies, and for women that figure is even higher: nineteen pounds. The proportion of overweight children, age six to eleven, has more than doubled, while the proportion of overweight adolescents, age twelve to nineteen, has more than tripled. (According to the standards of the United States military, forty per cent of young women and twenty-five per cent of young men weigh too much to enlist.) As the average person became heavier, the very heavy became heavier still; more than twelve million Americans now have a body-mass index greater than forty, which, for someone who is five feet nine, entails weighing more than two hundred and seventy pounds. Hospitals have had to buy special wheelchairs and operating tables to accommodate the obese, and revolving doors have had to be widened—the typical door went from about ten feet to about twelve feet across. An Indiana company called Goliath Casket has begun offering triple-wide coffins with reinforced hinges that can hold up to eleven hundred pounds. It has been estimated that Americans’ extra bulk costs the airlines a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of jet fuel annually.

(Hat tip: Sunil)

Foie Gras Jelly Donut, $16

Le-pigeon-2

by Patrick Appel

Scott Gold found one on a menu:

Le Pigeon’s executive chef, Gabriel Rucker — a 2007 Food and Wine Best New Chef — clearly knew what he was doing.  He’s become part of a new breed of cook, the kind that brashly gives the middle finger salute to all conventional wisdom regarding food, health and nutrition.  Like Mario Batali’s generous employment of lardo crudo or Au Pied de Cochon’s Martin Picard topping his signature poutine (french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy) with, yes, foie gras, Rucker joins the movement of culinary maximalism currently sweeping America’s food scene.  Especially in Portland, as evidenced by the borderline insane “Voodoo Doughnut Cheeseburger” at The Original, and Voodoo’s own Maple Bacon Bar.  This trend is obviously a backlash, a thumbing of collective noses against years of picky eaters, sauce-on-siders, vegans and other dietary malcontents so frequently bemoaned by fine-dining chefs, as well as a celebration of that delightful category of ingredients that will likely send you — both literally and figuratively — to heaven.  Moderation and good common dietary sense have no place here.

(Hat tip: Bainbridge)

The “Good” War

by Patrick Appel

Peter Bergen thinks Afghanistan is winnable:

Even the most generous estimates of the size of the Taliban force hold it to be no more than 20,000 men, while authoritative estimates of the numbers of Afghans on the battlefield at any given moment in the war against the Soviets range up to 250,000. The Taliban insurgency today is only around 10 percent the size of what the Soviets faced. And while today’s Afghan insurgents are well financed, in part by the drug trade, this backing is not on the scale of the financial and military support that the anti-Communist guerrillas enjoyed in the 1980s. The mujahideen were the recipients of billions of dollars of American and Saudi aid, large-scale Pakistani training, and sophisticated U.S. military hardware such as highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ command of the air.

I'm not as optimistic, but food for thought.

The Most Trusted Man In America

by Patrick Appel

In 1976 David Halberstam wrote a big two-part article on CBS and Walter Cronkite. Here is just the part on Cronkite. A taste:

His was a profession filled with immense egos, crowded with very mortal, often quite insecure men blown overnight to superstar status. Cronkite too had considerable ego, but unlike many of his colleagues he had considerable control over it, and his vanity rarely showed in public. He knew by instinct the balance between journalism and show biz; he knew you needed to be good at the latter, but that you must never take it too far. He was enough of an old wire-service man to be uneasy with his new success and fame. He was just sophisticated enough never to show his sophistication

Where Are The Conservative Health Care Wonks?

by Patrick Appel

Drum investigates:

[T]he fundamental conservative problem: you can either have universal coverage or you can have a quasi-free market.  There's no way to have both, but no one is willing to say publicly that it's OK to leave millions of people without healthcare.  So instead conservatives hem and haw and nibble around the edges with things like HSAs and tax exclusions, even though these ideas don't do anything to make healthcare coverage more widely and securely available.  No free market solution can do that.

E.D. Kain responds.

A Sea Of People, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

It is indeed a month old, and was linked (at least) from here (scroll down to the update at 1:50 pm). I can't tell whether it was linked by Andrew (my guess would be yes), because it seems I can only go back 19 or 20 pages, to around June 24, before getting an error from the server. I'm not quite certain why I was determined to find it, given all the other things I would still like to accomplish today. I suppose the biggest factor was simply the importance of accurate reporting – I find it incredibly frustrating that I have yet to see any truly credible crowd estimates, for any of these demonstrations, and it seems the best we can do is at least try to make sure we're looking at the right videos.