Author: Dish Staff

Our Microbes, Ourselves

Ed Yong reviews the first results from the Home Microbiome Project, which seeks to “map” the ecologies of microbes we carry with us wherever we go. What researchers learned after analyzing six weeks’ worth of participants’ swabs from around their homes:

[I]t rapidly became clear that each home has a distinctive microbiome, which comes largely from the people who live in it. Light switches and doorknobs look like hands. Floor looks like feet. Kitchen countertops look like skin. We turn our homes into microbial reflections of ourselves.

This happens quickly. As soon as we move into a space, we inject microbes into it, and those bugs colonise the area within 24 hours. One of the young couples demonstrated this in the starkest way:

at the start of the study, they were staying in a hotel. After they moved, their new home was microbially indistinguishable from the hotel room. “People always say, “Ewwwww, someone else was in this room and it has their microbes all over it.” That’s irrelevant,” says [researcher Jack] Gilbert. You are constantly overwriting the microbes in the world around you with your own. When you move house, your microbial aura moves too.

Yong shares why Gilbert decided to welcome a new addition to his family – a shelter dog named Captain Bo Diggley – after seeing the study’s results:

Dogs supercharge the flow of microbes between people and their homes. If two people share a house, they also tend to share their microbes, and couples do so more than mere roommates. But if there’s a dog around, that traffic surges. Dogs also increase the microbial diversity of a home by bringing in bacteria from the outside world. In a world where the presence of bacteria is equated to filth and squalor, some people might see that as a bad thing. Gilbert saw it as a plus. We need microbes to help train our immune systems and to ensure that they develop properly. “We wanted to make sure that our kids had that capacity,” he says.

The Gun Lobby’s Allergy To Any Gun Control

by Dish Staff

Last week, a nine-year-old firing an uzi accidentally shot and killed her instructor. Matt Valentine identifies pro-gun advocates critical of “putting a submachine gun in the hands of a slight nine year old” but he has “yet to hear any prominent gun rights advocates call for a change to the law—even to prohibit behavior they consider foolish and dangerous”:

To suggest a new regulation, no matter how reasonable, would be wholesale defection from the party line. The NRA tells us that gun laws are worse than useless. Criminals won’t obey them, so new laws “only punish lawful gun owners,” according to Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

Which regulations is he talking about? Take your pick—the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs uses that language, “punishment for law-abiding gun owners,” to describe dozens of proposed state and federal laws, from background checks to magazine capacity restrictions to safe storage laws—even to laws banning the transfer of ammunition to people who aren’t authorized to have guns. The same rhetoric has been used by gun-friendly politicians and pundits for years. “Bad guys don’t follow the laws,” Sarah Palin said after the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. “Restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer.”

That line of argument has always been a tautological black hole, but it seems an especially inadequate rationale for opposing a law prohibiting children from using fully automatic weapons.

Amy Davidson sighs:

The same political forces that gather around gun rights are those railing against government in any form, even the kind that involves keeping children and their gun instructors, or other teachers, safe. We are left not only with lax gun laws but shake-and-bake shooting ranges. This is part of the explanation for why talking to the gun lobby about “common-sense regulations” never seems to go well. They are drawing on, and stoking, a view that presumes the foolishness of regulations. It is sad and telling that the only department left to look into Vacca’s death is the state equivalent of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—regularly derided by Republicans—and that it’s unlikely to be able to do much at all.

Chart Of The Day

by Dish Staff

GOP Foreign Policy

The GOP is getting more hawkish:

Less than a year ago, just 18 percent of GOPers said that the United States does “too little” when it comes to helping solve the world’s problems, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Today, that number has more than doubled, to 46 percent. Over that same span – from November to today – the percentage of Republicans who say the United States does “too much” has dropped from 52 percent to 37 percent, and those who say the United States does about the right amount has declined from 26 percent to 14 percent.

Fight Ebola, Increase Hunger

by Dish Staff

A couple weeks ago, Laurie Garrett advocated for a stronger response to the outbreak. Yesterday, Adia Benton and Kim Yi Dionne called out Garrett for fear-mongering:

In her recommendations, Garrett often draws on her experience reporting on the Ebola epidemic in 1995 in Zaire (the work that won her a Pulitzer Prize). During this outbreak, Zaire’s ruler, the notorious Mobutu Sese Seko, isolated Kikwit, the affected region, with military force to keep people from leaving the city of 400,000 people. Honestly: Is Mobutu’s a model of health governance we want to repeat? Under his militarized quarantine, prices of food escalated, and people were deprived of common household goods. There is growing evidence that this is happening in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

Indeed, it appears that steps intended “to prevent the disease’s spread have hampered both food production and caused prices to soar”:

The Ebola outbreak is causing food harvests to dwindle in West Africa, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization said Tuesday. After infecting and killing more than 1,550 people across five countries, the disease has also put food supply “at serious risk,” with the F.A.O. issuing a special alert for Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, the three countries most heavily affected by the outbreak.

Elizabeth Barber has more details:

“Even prior to the Ebola outbreak, households in some of the most affected areas were spending up to 80% of their incomes on food,” Vincent Martin, head of an FAO unit in Dakar, Senegal, said in a statement. “Now these latest price spikes are effectively putting food completely out of their reach.”

One Cheeseburger With A Side Of Zoloft

by Dish Staff

David Robson surveys the latest findings suggesting that “fatty, sugary diets are bad for the mind, as well as the body”:

[A]round 2010, three landmark papers caused more doctors to sit up and take notice. One took place in southern Europe, where doctors were charting the transition from the traditional Mediterranean diets, full of seafood, olive oil and nuts, to the fast food served in the rest of the West. Besides studying the risks of heart disease and diabetes, the scientists also looked at the 10,000 participants’ mental health. The differences were striking; those who lived almost exclusively on the traditional Mediterranean diet were about half as likely to develop depression over the period as those eating more unhealthy food – even when you control for things like education and economic status.

Around the same time, psychologists examining UK civil servants – in the famous ‘Whitehall’ studies – found exactly the same pattern; over the course of five years, people who regularly indulged in processed, high-fat and high-sugar foods were about 60% more likely to develop depression over the same period. Then Jacka confirmed the results with a further 1,000 Australian volunteers. Finally, the ball started rolling. “Over the following years we’ve seen an exponential growth in the number of studies,” says [Felice] Jacka. Perhaps the best evidence came this year from the lab of Frank Hu at Harvard University, who directly traced the contributions of certain diet patterns with levels of cytokines, and depression; sure enough, foods rich in olive oil, leafy vegetables and wine reduced inflammation, and slashed the risk of depression by about 40%, compared to the ‘pro-inflammatory diet’, which includes sugary drinks, processed grains and red meat.

Celebrities: They Sext Like Us

by Dish Staff

https://twitter.com/fmanjoo/statuses/506577527070916608

The Internet is atwitter over a number of celebrities’ phones getting hacked for nude photos. Jessica Valenti urges the curious to look elsewhere for titillation:

There’s a reason why the public tends to revel in hacked or stolen nude pictures. It’s because they were taken without consent. Because the women in them (and it’s almost always women who are humiliated this way) did not want those shots to be shared. If Jennifer Lawrence was to pose naked on the cover of Playboy, for example, I’m sure it would be a best-selling issue. But it wouldn’t have the same scandalous, viral appeal as private images stolen from her phone. Because if she shared nude images consensually, then people wouldn’t get to revel in her humiliation. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? To take a female celebrity down a notch? (We have a term for when this is done to non-celebrity women: “revenge porn.”)

Jessica Roy pens a modern-day J’Accuse:

To be clear, it’s not just the hacker who’s guilty here.

It’s also the fault of administrators and vocal male users of platforms like 4chan and Twitter that cling to misinterpreted notions of the First Amendment to excuse the systematic harassment of women online, who blatantly favor the protection of misogynist hate speech over the well-being of women. It’s the fault of people who tweet the photos or users who re-upload the cache of images to sites like Imgur with no regard for the victims (and make no mistake — the women in these photos are victims).

And it’s the fault of those who actively seek out those photos, who link to them on blogs or upvote them on Reddit or even run a simple Google search for them. You, too, are complicit in perpetuating the cycle of abuse, shame, and sexual violence that women are forced to fight against every day.

But Ben Popper notes that for millennials, there’s nothing unusual about having this sort of content on one’s phone to begin with:

According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of teens reported sending or receiving a sexually explicit text, or sext, a jump of nearly double the 26 percent who reported doing so in 2012. The number of users among all age groups who say they have received a nude photo is now one in five, compared to 15 percent two years ago. A separate study from Purdue University found that among 21 year olds, 80 percent had sent or received a sext and 46 percent had sent a nude selfie. A report from the security firm McAffe found half of adults surveyed had used their mobile device to send and receive “intimate content” and half of those kept the images and texts stored on their phones.

And keep in mind that the number of people who could be photoshopped into a compromising image is 100%.

Michael Sam Loses His Spot

by Dish Staff

Sam was cut from the Rams over the weekend. Eric Edholm examines the situation:

Sam was unclaimed by the other 31 NFL teams and remains a free agent, with no teams offering a practice squad spot — despite those rosters increasing this season from eight to 10 players per team — with nearly every slot around the league believed to be filled. Does this mean Sam’s NFL shot has passed him by? Not necessarily. He had three sacks in the preseason, none of them gifts, and didn’t play poorly otherwise. Sam put some decent tape out there to be considered. But he is what he is: a left defensive end who likely can’t hold up for three downs in the NFL and has little to no special teams value. Still, there are teams that value pass-rush specialists, and it’s surprising that he hasn’t been brought in, even for a look.

Michelle Garcia somewhat blames bigotry:

Did the Rams cut Michael Sam out of sheer homophobia? I doubt it. But it was homophobic reasons that got him to such a precarious position in the first place.

While the Rams were able to at least push this dream of having an out player a little further, and he was given a platform to show the entire league that he has potential for the pros, at the end of the day, the Rams did not have any use for him — they already had a nearly-full slate of defensive linemen, minus the one spot that undrafted rookie Ethan Westbrooks now has. And when 31 other teams had the chance to pick Sam up, it seems none of them needed him (and according to Outsports, at least six teams could probably use his talents right now).

Update from a reader along those lines:

I’ve been an avid football fan for years and I’m also very sympathetic to Michael Sam. I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that he wasn’t cut because of homophobia. Furthermore, I don’t think his personal situation had much of an impact on his status.

Michael Sam’s biggest problem is that he is best-suited to a 4-3 defensive scheme. Over half the teams in the NFL rely on a 3-4 defense, where Sam really doesn’t have the skill set to perform well. Furthermore, he does not excel in special teams. Players who aren’t stars and aren’t sure-fire starters need to also perform well in special team play. Very few teams can afford the luxury of putting a guy on their roster who doesn’t fit their defensive scheme and who doesn’t play special teams. I suspect when teams start to suffer injuries and start needing bodies on their rosters, then you’ll see Sam picked up by another team.

Another sports fan from the inbox:

This is most keyed-into-the-NFL reality reaction I’ve seen to the Michael Sam story. The writer, Rick Telander, was in an NFL camp after his college days at NU and got cut.  He knows whereof he writes.

Cyd Zeigler is confident that the Rams’ cutting of Sam was “just a hiccup”:

Many in the LGBT community are lashing out at the NFL today, claiming homophobia. It’s understandable. Gay men have been told for decades they’re not good enough to play football, they’re not welcome in the locker rooms. Some of those messages have even reverberated in 2014. While the Rams’ decision wasn’t based on homophobia, it’s hard not to afford gay men a little foot-stomping at this latest rejection.

You know who isn’t lashing out? Michael Sam. He knew this was always a possibility, part of the cold business that is the NFL. A coach is your mentor and father-figure one day. The next afternoon he gives you a pink slip. Sam understands this is not the end, but rather another opportunity to prove his doubters wrong, earn his spot at the very top of his profession and take his rightful place in history.

Regardless of what happens to Sam, Scott Shackford expects a gay NFL player soon:

Even if Sam isn’t ultimately the first out player, I give it a year, tops. The media may have gotten weird about him, but polls and public reaction to Sam show that an athlete’s homosexuality isn’t the big deal it would have been, say, a decade ago.

Photos With Depth

by Dish Staff

tautochronos series

Leslie Tane features the delightful work of Michel Lamoller, who “takes multiple photographs of the same place at different times, then prints and layers them, physically carving them into one image, sculpting two-dimensional space into three-dimensions”:

By then photographing the transformed image Lamoller returns the work to two-dimensions, playing with space and volume, echoing the compression of time and place in his work. The deconstructed figures in the resulting photographs are a visual reminder that people are always changing and never fully revealed.

Margaret Rhodes connects the series to Lamoller’s previous projects:

Tautochronos evolved from an earlier series of Lamoller’s, called Layerscapes, that applies the same technique to landscapes and cityscapes. It’s not nearly as personal as Tautochronos, which is dotted with Lamoller’s personal acquaintances (and sometimes shot in their own homes or bedrooms), but both “come from a more personal wish to describe this happening of two things at the same time in one place,” he says. Like much of Lamoller’s work (he’s also created trompe l’oeil collages of banal objects like power outlets), they have a heavy Surrealist slant, and look like x-rays and camouflaged characters all at once.

“The ‘Great Man Theory’ At Its Most Frightful”

by Dish Staff

Andrew Heisel read more than 600 Amazon customer reviews of Mein Kampf, and came away disturbed:

Again and again, reviewers praise Hitler as “one of the most powerful men in history,” or “the greatest mover in history.” He was a “man of strong principles, discipline and good organizational skills,” and overcame poverty “to create the worlds largest empire.” Try to set aside your negative feelings for a moment and appreciate the impact: “Greatness is not measured by good or evil. Greatness is. Fascist or not, Hitler was a great leader.” The praise is qualified, but the tribute paid to morality often feels trivial alongside the esteem. Hitler “did some bad things,” one of the above says. Although he “crossed that line and spiraled into madness” and “evil,” says another, he was “wonderful leader.” Few leaders, offers another, have “matched the depth of his dedication, evil though it was.” They see that he’s a “monster” just like many of the other reviewers; they just don’t think it’s worth dwelling on instead of the positive takeaways.

Some would suggest this discourse is the effect of relativism, and there’s some of that in there, but I think, more than that, it is the value-neutral language of enterprise, where what matters most is getting things done—having an impact, being a “mover.” It’s a language that reveres action, power, and profit as goods in themselves and overlooks the ethical failings of those with power. With mere achievement as your focus, you can whittle away the details until Hitler has an affinity with Jesus. It’s the “Great Man Theory” at its most frightful. If you accomplish so much, you become beyond judgment, become simply History.