Month: April 2013

According to Joseph Bennington-Castro, “we don’t just eat foods because we like them, we like them because we eat them”:

After birth, your preferences continue shaping for the next two years. “Up until the age of 2 you will eat anything,” [psychologist Elizabeth Phillips] says. But then you become neophobic — that is, you don’t like new food. So if you hadn’t already been exposed to a certain flavor by the time you hit your terrible twos — whether through amniotic fluid, breast milk or solid food — chances are you won’t like it. At this point, most parents make a big mistake. “They think, ‘Oh my child doesn’t like this,’ but it’s actually anything new that they don’t like,” Philip says. So parents typically stop trying to feed their child that food and the kid ends up apparently hating it for years to come. “They don’t know that if they just keep giving it to their child, they’ll eventually like it.”

The key, then, is to make the food not new. Basically, you’ll like a new or previously hated flavor if you’re repeatedly exposed to it — studies suggest that it takes 10 to 15 exposures. “So if there’s something you don’t like, just eat it over and over and over again,” Philip says.

This weekend on the Dish, we took a break from politics to provide our usual eclectic mix of religious, books, and cultural coverage. In matters of faith, doubt, and philosophy, Gary Greenberg questioned psychiatry’s claims to be scientific, Barry Schwartz told us why we should settle for good enough, and Thomas de Zengotita offered an incisive critique of evolutionary psychology. Anne Kingston examined the mainstreaming of Buddhist mindfulness, Shel Silverstein described what God’s love feels like, and Richard Wolin pondered the dangers of monotheism. Christopher Hutton argued that to doubt is Christian, Vatican doctors gave their stamp of approval to JPII’s second miracle, Jim Holt thought the was universe wasn’t beautiful, and Adam Gopnik reflected on a parent’s love.

In literary coverage, Ernest Hemingway ruminated on the writer’s life, Flannery O’Connor noted why Southern writers love freaks, and Terrence Malick assigned books to his cast and crew. Mary Mann praised the cantankerous writing style of Max Beerbohm, Daniel Matthew Varley compared William Styron and DFW on despair, and wine turned out to be connected to writing in more ways than we realized. Will Glovinsky considered on attitudes toward crowds in literary history and digital modernity, Robert Frost didn’t hit it off with Ezra Pound, and Tony Hoagland suggested changes to the poetry curriculum. Victorian marriages were not something to aspire to, John McWhorter analyzed the linguistics of texting, and Jennifer Szalai investigated the various iterations of Oprah’s book club. Read Sunday’s poem here.

In assorted news and views, Viola Gad chemically-enhanced her dating life, researchers connected attractive voices to what they might indicate about the rest of a person’s body, and Jim Giles appraised Wikipedia’s demographics. Adam Baer reviewed the new Hummingbird music-notation system, Francie Diep reported on a creative way to increase the efficiency and bring down the cost of solar power, the U.S. government hoarded narcotics in the lead-up to WWII, and J. Hoberman saw a new installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Street. MHBs here and here, FOTDs here and here, VFYWs here and here, and the latest window contest here.

– M.S.

(Image by Dr. Manfred Anders, from Wikimedia)

The Sunlight Foundation’s new site, Churnalism, helps hunt it down. Rebecca J. Rosen explains:

“The tool is, essentially, an open-source plagiarism detection engine,” web developer Kaitlin Devine explained to me. It will scan any text (a news article, e.g.) and compare it with a corpus of press releases and Wikipedia entries. If it finds similar language, you’ll get a notification of a detected “churn” and you’ll be able to take a look at the two sources side by side. You can also use it to check Wikipedia entries for information that may have come from corporate press releases.

The worst culprit? Science writing:

In general, according to Devine, “science press releases seem to get more plagiarized than others.” For example, the Sunlight Foundation points to a CBS News article from last fall which shares several phrases — typically information-laced descriptions such as the list “found in hard plastics, linings of canned food, dental sealants” — with a press release from EurekaAlert!, as the Churnalism tool’s results show. Devine speculates that science journalism may run into this problem more frequently because “the language around the findings in those is so specific that it becomes very hard to reinterpret it.”

A reader writes:

In response to Vanessa Vaselka’s thoughtful essay on the lack of female road narratives, there is, of course, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which is a quest narrative in the long tradition of Western quest narratives that also addresses issues of gender roles and expectations about female sexuality. There are also many travel narratives written by female authors which also raise Vaselka’s concern about rape and violence. While there are many other kinds of exploration based upon careful attention and observation – I’m thinking about Dickinson and Marianne Moore, for example – these writers reinforce Vaselka’s point in other ways. Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas,” about an American woman active in revolutionary politics in Mexico in the early 1920’s, yet intensely self-protective against male sexual advances and potential sexual assault, also speaks to Vaselka’s concerns.

Another reader suggests:

While it lacks the fame of Huck Finn, there is a really weird and wonderful book about the world’s greatest hitchhiker, a beautiful woman with massive oversized thumbs called Even Cowgirls Get The Blues by Tom Robbins. Sissy meets all sorts of people from a fashion designer to Jack Kerouac to a bunch of Lesbian Cowgirls and the sex guru/hermit that watches over them the hills of the badlands.

The trailer for the film adaptation is seen above.

The US isn’t one of them:

Lindsey Bolger, director of coffee for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, says if you measure the amount of coffee consumed per coffee drinker, the world champions live in Nordic countries. “Depending on which country, they’re up to eight cups of coffee per person, per day. In the U.S., we’re at maybe 2 or 2.5 cups of coffee per day,” she says. Americans actually used to drink a lot more coffee. Per person, we drank almost twice as much during World War II.

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him,” – Ernest Hemingway, 1954 Nobel Prize Speech

(Hemingway circa 1950, via Wikimedia Commons)

A quote from Flannery O’Connor’s essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”

Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.

Mike Springer finds audio of O’Connor reading from the same essay.