Category: The Dish

Martin Furmansky chronicles the history of dangerous viruses escaping from labs. The bottom line:

Looking at the problem pragmatically, the question is not if such escapes will result in a major civilian outbreak, but rather what the pathogen will be and how such an escape may be contained, if indeed it can be contained at all.

Experiments that augment virulence and transmissibility of dangerous pathogens have been funded and performed, notably with the H5N1 avian influenza virus. The advisability of performing such experiments at all—particularly in laboratories placed at universities in heavily populated urban areas, where potentially exposed laboratory personnel are in daily contact with a multitude of susceptible and unaware citizens—is clearly in question.

If such manipulations should be allowed, it would seem prudent to conduct them in isolated laboratories where personnel are sequestered from the general public and must undergo a period of exit quarantine before re-entering civilian life. The historical record tells us it is not a matter of if but when ignoring such measures will cost health and even lives. Perhaps many lives.

Ted Trautman explores America’s public toilet regulations, which still mandate gender-segregated restrooms in most states and cities:

Many states follow the guidelines laid out in the Uniform Plumbing Code, which stipulates that “separate toilet facilities shall be provided for each sex,” with exceptions for very small businesses as measured in square footage and/or customer traffic. In the eyes of the law in these places, a business with two unisex toilets can be considered to have no toilets at all, since neither facility explicitly serves men or women.

Such laws date back to 1887, according to Terry S. Kogan, a University of Utah law professor and a contributor to the book Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. One hundred and twenty-seven years ago, Massachusetts passed the first law mandating gender-segregated toilets, and many states quickly followed suit. Many of those laws have never been substantially modified, with obvious exceptions in progressive enclaves like D.C. and San Francisco, meaning that much of the United States’ toilet-related building codes reflect a literally Victorian prudishness that we might mock in other contexts.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown delves deeper into this regulatory morass:

These days, America’s public restrooms are regulated by two separate federal agencies.

Workplace restrooms are the purview of the U.S. Department of Labor, which sets state guidelines through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Non-workplace public restroom guidelines are governed, broadly, by the Department of Health and Human Services.

More specific regulations are largely enacted though through state and municipal building codes. These codes dictate exactly how many toilets and/or urinals that buildings, businesses, and other public entities must provide, based on occupancy capacity. And they mandate not only the existence of separate men’s and women’s bathrooms but also how many “fixtures”(toilets or urinals) must exist for each.

“Restrooms are still almost exclusively gendered,” writes Suzanne LaBarre at Fast Company. “It’s a form of exclusion that’s written into state building code, presenting an obstacle for gender neutral bathroom advocates.”

Zachary M. Seward finds that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is scoring big in movie theaters worldwide:

America’s greatest export is entertainment, and its improbable brand ambassador is now Captain America. The second installment of Marvel’s movie franchise is drawing huge audiences outside the United States, even in areas of the world that might ordinarily reject a jingoistic superhero clad in red, white, and blue. Captain America: Winter Soldier pulled in $107 million overseas [the weekend before last], even more than its record-breaking $96 million draw in the US. It was the number one film in China ($39 million), South Korea ($20 million), the United Kingdom ($18 million), Mexico ($16 million), France ($12 million), Russia ($7 million), and Australia ($6 million).

Warner Brown explains the appeal in China:

Why has an avowedly all-American hero proved so popular here? Launching the film on a three-day holiday weekend shortly after its stars toured Beijing certainly didn’t hurt. But Winter Soldier also resonates because it keeps the hero’s fundamental patriotism intact while modernizing his conflict for a complicated new era, pitting him against enemies burrowed deep within the government he serves. ”[The new villain] is the very country he loves and protects,” writes one Douban reviewer. “To love one’s country isn’t the same as loving one’s government: This is the main draw of Captain America.”

Update from a few readers:

Twice now, your blog has gotten something about comics totally backwards.

The first time some months ago was by implying that Batman started out in the 1960s Adam West goofy stage, when in reality he killed people (although their deaths are only implied) quite often in his early appearances.

Now you are not just making remarks that are dead wrong about Captain America. You have the character totally wrong, and worse you quote someone who is as well. Captain America has never been the jingoistic “America first, America only” hero. He is the moral heart of the marvel universe. He has actually gone against the government and given up being Captain America, rather than go against his values in the early 1970s and in the mid 2000s he led the anti-government faction in the “Civil War” event. Captain America has only been that sort of character during his original run in WWII and the “commie smasher” era, the later of which has been removed from the character.

The idea that a good-hearted idealist that stands for truth, justice and freedom doesn’t have an overseas appeal because he is dressed up in the American flag is only a skin deep analysis of the character, which everyone seems to acknowledge but ignore anyway. To those familiar with the character the idea Iron Man is popular overseas is much more surprising (because he actually is that sort of character much more so).

Another:

I’ve been a little bit disappointed by the media’s coverage of Captain America: The Winter Soldier but in no way surprised. It starts with the disadvantage of being a comic book movie, which God forbid we take seriously on it’s own terms; but it might also be a symptom of the media’s downplaying dissent in the mainstream. The Winter Soldier is a work of pop entertainment, to be sure, but it takes on establishment civil liberty and defense policies fairly specifically. This has gone mostly unnoticed in the press, but even Brown seems to be only skimming the service on this film’s appeal. It’s essentially the first product of the mainstream American film industry to take on these issues with any genuine focus, let alone in the Obama era.

It’s important to point out that the first Captain America, 2011’s The First Avenger, is Marvel Studios’ second lowest grossing film, largely because it did so poorly internationally. It’s fair to say this is partly because the film was essentially a pastiche of a World War II propaganda film, and took a rah-rah attitude toward American military force. The Winter Soldier is not an intellectualized polemic by any means, but it does very viscerally place the ultimate symbol of Patriotic Heroism at odds with clear and pointed analogues for NSA domestic spying, drone warfare, the president’s Kill List, JSOC, preemptive warfare, and the manipulation of terror to pressure the public into accepting encroaching state power structures. This is a film largely about Captain America explicitly choosing to dismantle the corrupt American paramilitary espionage apparatus, and I think that might have something to do with it’s international appeal.

Adam Grant (NYT) discusses how parents can successfully impart moral values to their children:

In a classic experiment, the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton gave 140 elementary- and middle-school-age children tokens for winning a game, which they could keep entirely or donate some to a child in poverty. They first watched a teacher figure play the game either selfishly or generously, and then preach to them the value of taking, giving or neither. The adult’s influence was significant: Actions spoke louder than words. When the adult behaved selfishly, children followed suit. The words didn’t make much difference — children gave fewer tokens after observing the adult’s selfish actions, regardless of whether the adult verbally advocated selfishness or generosity. When the adult acted generously, students gave the same amount whether generosity was preached or not — they donated 85 percent more than the norm in both cases. When the adult preached selfishness, even after the adult acted generously, the students still gave 49 percent more than the norm. Children learn generosity not by listening to what their role models say, but by observing what they do.

Razib Khan thinks these studies overlook the question of social environment:

To illustrate what I am getting at, imagine two children who are given up for adoption, and whose biological parents are alcoholics. Imagine that you know the biological parents are both carrying genes which are strongly correlated with alcoholism. Both these hypothetical children are adopted into conservative white upper middle class families, one in Orange county California, and another in an affluent suburb of Salt Lake City. Both families are socially conservative, and do not tolerate drinking among their children. My prediction is that the child adopted into a Mormon culture which is far less tolerant of individual choice on the issue of alcohol consumption will have lower risks of being an alcoholic simply because the whole landscape of decisions is going to be altered throughout their whole life. An adopted child with a family history of alcoholism is stilling going to have a higher risk within their population, but the nature of the population is likely to shift the baseline odds.

Katy Waldman focuses on another aspect of Grant’s argument, that children respond better to praise of their character than praise of their choices, but that the opposite holds true for criticism:

In a way, criticism that invokes a kid’s inner nature boomerangs for the same reason that praising her intelligence can: A parent’s estimation of character becomes a prison sentence. For children constantly told they are smart, the pressure of living up to that epithet looms large. Depending on how confident the kid is, the weight of the prophecy sometimes outweighs the thrill of getting complimented. Meanwhile, for children led to believe they harbor secret moral flaws, it’s easier to retreat or throw a tantrum than to fight the “truth.”

Itella, the Finnish postal service, has approved stamp designs based on the homoerotic art of Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland:

Laaksonen remains a towering and iconic figure in the gay art scene. His sketches, often explicit, were unapologetic depictions of gay sex and relationships. Laaksonen’s subjects were almost always muscle-bound, handsome figures, often bursting out of their clothes. His work, a meditation on masculinity, was also heavy on leather fetish imagery. It’s a pretty risque sheet of stamps. … “The sheet (of stamps) portrays a sensual life force and being proud of oneself,” said graphic designer Timo Berry, who selected the work that will be printed on stamps released this fall. “There is never too much of that in this northern country.”

Martin Schneider elaborates:

Tom of Finland’s images of leather-clad bikers mark the early boundary of what can be considered contemporary queer art designed for mainstream consumption. They shred the boundaries between porn and art. What makes them so intriguing, in a way, is that the male figures have a sensitivity accorded them that makes them something beyond mere “beefcake.” They’re images of pure fantasy, without being oppressive; they are obscurely real. In contrast to the once dominant gay stereotype of the “fairy,” “ponce,” etc., Tom of Finland’s bikers were unquestionably empowering. We salute the progressive minds at Itella who worked to make these stamps a reality.

Check out the risque three-stamp set here. A short documentary about Tom of Finland and his influence is here.