Month: January 2013

Jacob Leland hypothesizes from the numerous examples of gluttony he finds in famous books from the early 20th century:

This obsession with what people put in their bodies shows us literature and culture doing what became, in the years between the World Wars, their job: to create a better consumer. After all, a nation of consumers needs a nation of salespeople telling it what and how much to buy. Modernism made a more prolific consumer by making sense of and often glorifying the shift from production to consumption. It created a more discriminating one by distinguishing serious art, or "high modernism," from mass culture and mechanized entertainment.

This may be the readiest association that most of us have with literary high modernism: Joyce, Faulkner, Eliot, Dos Passos, et al are good because they’re difficult. We are taught it takes an entire liberal arts education just to learn to appreciate and discuss them—that is, to consume them correctly.

William Pesek assesses the evolving political crisis sparked by the gang-rape and death of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi:

The immediate focus is on the six men accused of torturing a medical student so sadistically that they destroyed her internal organs. The issues of women’s rights, safety and respect have seldom been the stuff of headlines in the biggest democracy. It’s also a complicated issue prone to unhelpful generalities. But the rape cast a spotlight on something well-known to India watchers but given little heed globally: how badly India often treats its women, how sexual harassment is tolerated and the extent to which backward attitudes must be stamped out. Misogynistic comments from a variety of officials suggesting the victim may have encouraged the attack based on her dress and mannerisms don’t help.

But he thinks the outrage will probably transform the country's politics:

It is telling that so many young, urban men are among the aggrieved denouncing the rapes. That is a nod to the important role that gender equality plays in eradicating poverty. But these demonstrations are also shaking the conscience of middle-class Indians who sense that their leaders have lost their way. 

Max Fisher points to other consequences of the rape problem in India:

[Y]ou don’t expect to see violence against women translate into immediate and quantifiable national economic damage. But, in a sign of just how serious India’s problem really is, that may already be happening. A study across several cities found that a staggering 82 percent of Indian women say that they are reducing their working hours, leaving the office early because they don’t want to be traveling after dark, when the risk of assault could be higher. Some quit outright, afraid that commuting has become too dangerous.

Mira Kamdar explains how the rise of women in Indian society is making their lives more dangerous:

A woman who can be seen is seen as a woman available for violation. 

Rapid modernization and urbanization in India have made women, especially young women, visible as never before. More and more women are seeking education and employment. They go out to school, to work and to socialize with friends. They, like the young woman who was gang raped in Delhi, go out to movies. Increasingly, they go out with men, and, increasingly, they, instead of their parents, choose their life partners.

The young woman who was attacked had come to Delhi from a small village where her enlightened parents had scrimped and saved to educate her. She was studying to become a physical therapist. She was making her own life on the new exciting terms offered by India's changing society. While these opportunities have increased, they can't meet the volume of raised aspirations. Competition for slots in the better schools and for jobs remains fierce. The competition for women is also fierce. In India, girls are too often seen as temporary members of their families who will one day marry and join a new family. Male children are preferred, and sex-selective abortion, female infanticide and the sheer neglect of girls have made for a growing gender gap. Too many young men simmer with aspirations and desires that are simply not likely to be realized.  

Erika Christakis elaborates on the link between sex-selection and violence:

Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. "The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying," says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. "At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing," says Hvistendahl.

Update from a reader, who caught an error in the post that we immediately fixed:

The 23-year-old victim did not commit suicide. She died from her injuries, which included brain damage, heart failure, internal organ failure (including her disembowelment at the hands of the attackers), and subsequent gangrene and sepsis. It took her the better part of two weeks to die after surviving multiple surgeries, getting on her feet once, and being transferred to a hospital in Singapore where doctors thought she had a better chance. As a result of her death, the six accused men are now being charged with murder in addition to rape and kidnapping. 

You were perhaps thinking of the 17-year-old gang rape victim who did commit suicide after being pressed to drop charges and marry one of her attackers. Her suicide took place while the world waiting to see if the 23-year-old medical student could beat the odds and recover. 

One of the more interesting and horrifying aspects of the case has been the employment of euphemism to cover it. I have noticed that most articles discuss the victim "having internal injuries" or "having some of her intestines removed", but most seem to suggest that these injuries resulted from her being beaten with an iron rod. Some may, but one or two stark reports have given the full truth, which is that after being penetrated by six attackers (a horror I cannot imagine), one or more inserted an iron rod into the woman and partially disemboweled her. I can't help but think that had such treatment occurred as part of a military operation, we'd be getting the graphic details in every report. 

My point here is that as horrific as the crime was, I don't think the reporting on it has been up to the task. If we can't bring ourselves to fully discuss the violence and torture that sometimes accompanies rape – if we can't discuss what such an invasion is capable of inflicting in terms of pain and injury – how can we possibly stop it?

(Photo: Indian students of various organisations hold placards as they shout slogans during a demonstration in Hyderabad on January 3, 2013. A gang of men accused of repeatedly raping a 23-year-old student on a moving bus in New Delhi in a deadly crime that repulsed the nation are to appear in court for the first time. Police are to formally charge five suspects with rape, kidnapping and murder after the woman died at the weekend from the horrific injuries inflicted on her during an ordeal that has galvanised disgust over rising sex crimes in India. By Noah Seelam/AFP/Getty Images)

Carolyn Abbate, co-author of A History of Opera, explains how the genre has evolved:

I have teenaged sons, and I ask, "What’s the difference between a [popular music] concert and the opera?" They say the difference is at the opera you have to be quiet and you can’t move. But that wasn’t always true. Two hundred years ago no one was required to be attentive and focused. It was routine for people to talk amongst themselves. They could go in and out whenever they wanted. And eating was allowed in boxes, as was gambling and chess playing. It was a social occasion that happened to have something going on at one end of the room that you could pay attention to if you wanted to.

She blames Wagner for the current state of affairs:

He was the first to declare that the auditorium had to be pitch dark. At Bayreuth [which opened in 1876], he imposed all kinds of other religiosity on the experience — like having to be absolutely quiet. He talked about how people had to be utterly attentive to the stage world and not each other. He erased the social function of opera.

More on Abbate's book here.

Just in time for the work-out boom in the new year, Megan Garber remembers Dr. Jonas Gustav Wilhelm Zander, "the Swedish physician and orthopedist and all-around genius who invented the exercise machine":

Though Dr. Zander wasn't alone in realizing the market for machines that would aid in exercise — and though exercise equipment as a more general thing has been around since long before the Greeks and their gymnasia — it was Dr. Zander who popularized the connections between physical exertions and overall well-being. He was the one who looked at a horse and realized it could be replicated for purposes of recreation. He was the one who looked at a bicycle and realized it could be used for more than transportation.

And his inventions signaled a change in how we view exercise – as an elite past time: 

Zander pitched his machines, the writer Carolyn de la Pena notes, as "a preventative against the evils engendered by a sedentary life and the seclusion of the office." And he pitched them as well, implicitly and explicitly, as luxury experiences — experiences that were expensive, and rarified, and therefore available only to society's elites. Mechanized workouts enforced, for the first time, a separation between exercise and labor: They posited physical activity as something to be engaged in not by economic necessity, but by personal choice. 

On a related note, Denise Winterman ranks history's weirdest fad diets. First up, Fletcherism – the promotion of extensive chewing by Horace Fletcher at the turn of the 20th century:

He was fairly prescriptive in how many times you had to chew different foods. Just one shallot needed to be chewed 700 times.  It was hugely popular and had some famous followers, including Henry James and Franz Kafka. It got to a point where people were timed at dinner parties to make sure they were chewing enough, says Foxcroft. "The diet also meant only defecating once every two weeks and it was nearly odourless, described by Fletcher as smelling like 'warm biscuits'," she says.

(Photo: Side-bending device designed by Gustav Zander, via the Tekniska Museet/National Museum of Science and Technology, Stockholm)

Amanda Marcotte summarizes a Steubenville, Ohio rape story from August that has steadily spread online. Now that the hacktivist group Anonymous has gotten involved, Marcotte ponders the implications of Internet vigilantism:

Anonymous has been vital in getting out at least some of the evidence of the assault to the media. As the group shows no signs of slowing down the hacking, this is a story that could very well develop further. But the role Anonymous now plays in this case is certainly hard to reconcile, morally.

As some initial gleeful Twitter responses from students to the alleged rape demonstrate, one reason rape continues is that communities not only don't hold perpetrators responsible, but close ranks to defend or even celebrate them. By stepping in and holding people accountable, Anonymous stands a very good chance of taking action that actually does something to stop rape.

But: This type of online vigilante justice is potentially invading the privacy of or defaming innocent Steubenville residents, and even if everything published is true, there are very serious legal limits to the Anonymous strategy. Not all of the leaked allegations are attached to Twitter or YouTube accounts—many of the most serious cover-up claims, which we won't reprint here, are at this point only rumor. The allegations will infuriate you, but they don't rise to the level of real evidence that can be used to truly hold responsible those who participate in sex crimes.

A local crime blogger, Alexandria Goddard, became a crucial player in drawing attention to the case, highlighting how multiple people witnessed the alleged assault and did nothing to stop it. They even documented what transpired in social media postings and videos, which have been deleted but were preserved by Goddard.

New research in the US supports the case for nature's cognitive benefits:

David Strayer, a professor of cognition and neural science at the University of Utah, noticed that his brain felt more limber, his thoughts more fluid, on backcountry trips in the Southwest than they did in the lab. His undergraduates reported a similar mental boost, as did his colleagues. The peripatetic life seemed ideal for thinking about thinking.

Strayer began to organize yearly camping trips for his fellow neuroscientists. In 2010, Ruth Ann and Paul Atchley, a wife-and-husband team of psychologists from the University of Kansas, joined him on a weeklong trek through Utah’s Grand Gulch. Ruth Ann asked the group to complete the [wordplay "remote associates test," or RAT] before hitting the trail, and again a few days into the 32-mile hike. "It worked really, really well," Strayer says. "We had about a 45 percent improvement. So we said, ‘This seems to be perfect. It’s cheap, and it produces a nice big effect.'"

(Photo of Freya and Ralph Bodenner in Forest Park, Portland)

NASA is considering lassoing a nearby asteroid and bringing it into the moon's orbit:

Why is NASA so keen to give our moon a moon? Well, the Obama administration has said it wants to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid. Currently, the best target for a trip—a space rock called 1999 AO10—would require a dangerous six-month trip by the astronauts in question. Bringing an asteroid into the orbit of the moon is a safer—if complex—option.

Ian Chant explains the logistics:

[Keck Institute for Space Studies] researchers envision a slow, steady spacecraft powered by solar ions — a sort of spacefaring tugboat that would rendezvous with a small asteroid, probably about 7 meters wide.