Month: June 2014

But first, a very NSFW reading of one of James Joyce’s love letters to his wife:

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In his about-to-be released The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham offers new evidence that the author was going blind from syphilis:

The Harvard scholar decided to “turn over every stone” to find out what might have caused Joyce’s deteriorating vision, compiling references to every symptom and treatment the author had. One item in particular sparked his curiosity: Joyce’s reference in two separate 1928 letters to the injections of arsenic and phosphorous he was receiving.

“It wasn’t too long before I found a medication that fit: galyl, a compound of arsenic and phosphorus that doctors injected multiple times. Galyl was only used to treat syphilis,” said Birmingham.

The drug is obscure, and Birmingham believes Joyce opted for this treatment, rather than the more effective drug salvarsan, because one of salvarsan’s side effects was that it could further damage his eyesight – and Joyce hated the idea of having to dictate his work.

As John Lingan’s review of The Most Dangerous Book makes clear, sex also figured into the obscenity trial that Ulysses sparked:

Fancying his book “an epic of the human body,” he filled it with every conceivable excretion and referenced a panoply of sex acts, from the mundane to the surreal. Moreover, its opening lines, a mock invocation of the Catholic mass over a shaving bowl, announced Joyce’s intention to revel in heresy.

Obscenity was the lifeblood of Ulysses, the proof that it truly comprehended all human experience. “To artists like Joyce,” Birmingham writes, “who considered free expression sacrosanct, censorship epitomized the tyranny of state power. … To publish a gratuitously obscene text—to deny ‘obscenity’ as a legitimate category altogether—was a way to expose and reject the arbitrary base of all state power. It was a form of literary anarchy.”

The novel was eventually published in 1922 by Shakespeare and Company, another literary institution (this one in Paris) run by a strong-willed American woman. Sylvia Beach had opened her store in 1919, and it quickly became the Lost Generation’s literary locus, functioning as a library and mailing address for itinerant artists. Her version of Ulysses, with its iconic blue cover and monolithic title font, was priced up to 10 times higher than the normal rate for a new book, but was nevertheless so popular that she had to remove a copy from her store window to prevent mob scenes.

In a detail that will resonate with anyone who’s tried to make it all the way through Ulysses, James Longenbach notices one of the defenses of the book during the obscenity trial – that no one actually would read it:

John Quinn, a powerful New York lawyer who was a friend of Pound’s and a patron of many modernist writers and painters, represented the editors at the Jefferson Market Courthouse. No passage from Ulysses was read into evidence; the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice argued that it would violate the law to do so, since the book was “so obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent and disgusting that a minute description of the same would be offensive to the Court and improper to be placed upon the records thereof.”

Cannily, Quinn based his defense on the Hicklin Rule (formulated by a British judge in 1868 and still current at the time), which maintained that the “test of obscenity” was whether or not the language in question would tend to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” Language could not deprave and corrupt, Quinn argued, if nobody read it: “You could not take a piece of literature up in an aeroplane fifteen thousand feet into the blue sky, where there would be no spectator, and let the pilot of the machine read it out and have it denounced as ‘filthy,’ within the meaning of the law.” Quinn was himself an avid reader of Joyce’s prose, but in court he argued that Ulysses was like the entry on “and” in theOED: Who would get through it?

Balko proclaims that “Colorado’s poster boy for ‘stoned driving’ was drunk off his gourd.” Kleiman chimes in:

The involvement of alcohol is hardly surprising. Drunk driving is much more dangerous than stoned driving, and the combination is worse than either drug alone.

In a followup, Kleiman asks, “what are the actual risks of stoned driving?”:

The answer, from what seems to be a well-done case-control study, is that driving stoned is hazardous, but much less hazardous than driving drunk. (A relative risk of 1.83 – meaning that driving a mile stoned is about as risky as driving two miles sober – strongly suggests that cannabis-impaired driving is a problem, but also that it isn’t much of a problem; the relative-risk number for alcohol is over 13.) On the other hand, the same study shows that adding cannabis or other drugs to alcohol substantially worsens the odds: alcohol-and-something-else has a relative risk of 23.

Given those numbers, and the technical difficulty of identifying cannabis-impaired driving (because impairment doesn’t track cannabinoid levels in blood nearly as well as it tracks alcohol levels) I’d propose the following rule: anyone who tests positive for cannabis on a mouth swab (which detects use within the past few hours) should be considered guilty of impaired driving if that person’s BAC is detectably different from zero. All that means is that, if you’ve been toking and drinking, you need to wait as many hours as you’ve had drinks before getting behind the wheel.

Transgender activist and author Janet Mock tries to convince Colbert to substitute “they” for “he” or “she”:

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Meanwhile, linguist Gretchen McCulloch gets technical about why the singular “they” became nonstandard in the first place, arguing that it’s time to rescue the all-purpose pronoun from Middle English obscurity:

[I]n the late 18th century, grammarians started recommending that people use he as a gender nonspecific pronoun because they was ostensibly plural…. Many excellent writers proceeded to ignore them and kept using singular they, just as English-speakers had been doing for some four hundred years by that point, although … a whole bunch of style manuals did end up adopting generic he. That is, until they started facing pushback in the 1970s from people like the incredibly badass Kate Swift and Casey Miller, who you should go read about right now.

Recognizing that it’s useful to have a gender-neutral (aka epicene) pronoun but that many people are uneasy with both generic he and singular they, various creative people in both language reformer and nonbinary activist camps from the 1850s to the modern day have developed and advocated for an assortment of options.

While some invented epicene pronouns never made it past 1850s obscurity (heesh) and others are deliberately more fanciful (bun, bunself), a few made it to relative popularity particularly in certain communities, including ey, eir, em (the Spivak pronouns) and xe, xir, xem, both with a variety of spellings. It’s pretty hard to change the most common words in a language though, so at the moment the only one that has really wide use is our old friend singular they.

Despite this occasional lingering sense of unease around it, these days reputable usage guides endorse singular they for a whole host of reasons and institutions from Facebook to the Canadian Government are increasingly accepting of it, so maybe in another couple hundred years we’ll have finally forgotten about this foolish vendetta.

David Despain observes the breast milk energy drink phenomenon:

Far away from government oversight or official scrutiny, hundreds of gallons of breast milk flow through online classifieds, according to one of the leading online facilitators, OnlytheBreast.com. The site officially caters to mothers who want to sell their “liquid gold” (their language, not ours) to other women, but about a third of the requests for milk on the site are posted by men. The demand has set off an arms race among the 10 percent of women willing to sell their milk to the other sex. One St. Louis provider catering to athletes boasts that her milk is best because she adheres to a “Paleo-style diet with added grass-fed butter,” only organic foods, and a daily regimen of supplements including charcoal and probiotics.

The “breast is best” believers drink this stuff up. They say they the milk is more nutritious than anything you can get from a cow, best for body building, the secret to fighting off disease, and a sure-fire way to boost energy levels. It’s the energy drink of the future, New York Magazine reports.

It’s too bad it’s soggy logic—on all counts, says Bo Lonnerdal, a professor of nutrition and internal medicine at University of California at Davis. “I don’t see much sense in it all,” she says. “It doesn’t provide more energy than other drinks with the same energy content.”

Marcotte is among the dubious:

Of course, the fact that this appears to be a male-only endeavor that involves boobs suggests that maybe, just maybe, all this talk about health and fitness is just a cover story. One of the men [Chavie] Lieber spoke with was refreshingly honest on this front: “All I’ll say is it’s a fetish for me.” And the discussion on Bodybuilder.com took a turn toward the pornographic, with men posting pictures of women pumping milk and making jokes about getting aroused thinking about it. I suspect these guys are never going to be convinced that eating a steak is as, uh, energizing as drinking breast milk.

But if you’re really set on unusual alternatives, there’s always “ass milk“:

Two things that may surprise you. One, you can milk a donkey (and yes, it’s also sometimes called ass milk). Two, people love the milk.

Over the past couple of months, Jean-Michel Evequoz, a chef and teacher at Les Roches International School of Hotel Management in Switzerland, has been experimenting with donkey’s milk, with a view to figuring out just how well it lends itself to traditional European cuisine. Thus far, he’s made a simple panna cotta, a “mousse au chocolat blanc” and he’s working on an emulsion of donkey’s milk and wild flowers to complement a poached lobster. “The milk works very well in a number of recipes,” says Evequoz, “and when you add in sugar and chocolate in particular, the taste is amazing.”

Evequoz is one of a small yet growing number of donkey milk aficionados in Europe, all of whom are instrumental for what’s become a sort of renaissance of both the milk as well as the animal that produces it.

Previous Dish on breast milk here, here, and here.

Uber’s latest funding round broke Facebook’s record:

Will Oremus comments:

[N]o one has the foggiest idea how much Uber will be worth once it matures. Anyone who tells you that he does is not to be trusted. Investors are looking at a company whose possible outcomes range from “the Amazon of the transportation industry” to “the Webvan of the 2010s.” (Amazon, in case you were wondering, has a market cap of about $150 billion.) They’re taking semieducated guesses that attempt to capture both the sky-high upside and the steep downside of its prospects. Less than a year ago, the guess was around $3.5 billion. Today it’s $17 billion. Welcome to Silicon Valley circa 2014.

Mark DeCambre’s take:

Bloomberg notes that, at $17 billion, Uber rivals the valuation of well-established, publicly traded companies such as car rental firm Hertz Global and retailer Best Buy. Critics aren’t necessarily buying Uber’s valuation. “Uber’s uber-valuation is a stretch given Uber’s numerous legal and regulatory challenges not fully discounted in Uber’s $17 billion valuation,” said PrivCo president Sam Hamadeh via email. Maybe Hamadeh has a point: Uber is said to be battling more than a dozen lawsuitsstemming state and local agencies aiming to limit the company’s car-sharing business. However, that hasn’t driven investors away.

Yglesias ponders Uber’s worth:

Right now, Uber is in a fight with Florida regulators and taxi incumbents. If Uber wins, it will poach market share from existing Miami-area cab companies. But it will do more than that. It will significantly increase the number of taxi rides that people in the Miami area take.

And that is the fundamental Uber value proposition. That by making it much easier to drive a cab to make money on the side (you just need a decent car and time on your hands) and much more convenient to hail a cab, you can greatly increase the size of the paid rides market.

Mark Rogowsky makes similar points:

So long as you look at Uber as a taxi replacement, you’ll see it as something less than it’s already becoming in its early markets: A transportation app. In San Francisco, for years the taxi commission didn’t want to issue more medallions for additional cabs because there was ostensibly no real demand for them (As of last year, the city had 1,600 taxi medallions). Yet just 4 years after Uber’s launch, there are often well over 1,000 rideshare vehicles on the road during peak times.

Wait, what? Surely all those additional cars aren’t making any money, right? Actually, they are. In fact, demand is so strong Uber is guaranteeing drivers $40 an hour in gross fares throughout the summer during prime time (the company takes a 20% commission and $1 per ride for insurance, so drivers make less than the nominal amount — but typically far more than they would driving a taxi).

Last week, Ezra listed reasons he expects America to lose the battle against climate change. In a follow-up, he adds another cause for pessimism:

States like Kentucky and Montana and West Virginia care much more about pulling fossil fuels out of the ground than other states care about keeping them in the ground. And the American political system, which makes action hard under any circumstances, cares much more about the strong objections of individual states than the weak preferences of the country.

As I wrote in the original piece, “if you were going to weaponize an issue to take advantage of the weak points in the American political system – to highlight all the blind spots, dysfunctions, and irrationalities – you would create climate change. And then you would stand back and watch the world burn.”

In response, Plumer insists climate change is still worth fighting:

Different models have different estimates for how costly global warming will be. But everyone agrees on the general point — risks and damages keep piling up as the world gets hotter. So if the world can’t prevent 2°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to try and avoid 3°C of warming. If we can’t avoid 3°C of warming, it’s still a good idea to avoid 4°C. And so on. …

Setting hard boundaries — and framing things in terms of success and failure — is a much more intuitive way to think about the issue. (I’ve been guilty of this sort of talk myself.) But it doesn’t really make sense to declare “game over” at any point.

Ronald Bailey wonders about international cooperation:

International climate negotiations are somewhat similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Assuming man-made global warming is costly to all countries, the optimum solution is for all countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. But for an individual country, the better option is to keep burning low-cost fossil fuels while other nations reduce their emissions. Since all countries recognize that other countries are likely to cheat and continue to use fossil fuels, they all fail to cut their emissions.

Is there a way out of that dynamic? Two political scientists, Scott Barrett of Columbia and Astrid Dannenberg of Princeton, tried to find one in a 2013 study using game theory experiments. They concluded that if game players know for sure where the threshold for huge losses is located, they will cooperate to avoid it. The catastrophe threshold acts a form of punishment that encourages cooperation.

However, the experiments showed that “when the threshold for catastrophe was even slightly indeterminate, the players crossed essentially every time”:

The current uncertainties about the effects and intensity of future climate change suggest that countries are unlikely to follow the Obama administration’s lead. Based on their experimental results, Barrett and Dannenberg hold out the hope that climate research that reduces threshold uncertainty might help spur countries into mutual cuts of their greenhouse gas emissions.