Category: The Dish

The Elixir Of Life

They’ve found it – in Sardinia:

In fact, researchers have detailed an astonishing longevity hot spot in which they have documented 90 centenarians among a population of 18,000. That means that one out of every 200 people in Ogliastra has lived to celebrate a 100th birthday. It’s an extraordinary figure, about 50 times the rate of the United States, where only one person out of every 10,000 people lives to see 100.

“These are people who not only have a very long life, but they are healthy up to a very old age,” says Luigi Ferrucci, chief researcher of longitudinal studies at the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA) and a co-author of the Ogliastra study. “These are not people who’ve gotten diseased or dementia at 70 years old and somehow lived another 30 years.”

Censoring Bono

Or not:

The version you are looking at is actually an outside company that made a shortened version of the entire event for their purposes (it’s more of a tourism piece). Instead of using the entire one-hour ceremony, they just took highlights. The National Constitution Center has not edited Bono’s speech and the entire one-hour ceremony is available on our website today. 

Face of the Day

Baptismdavidsilvermangetty

Two-week-old Rene Arlson Santana Araujo, of Bahia in northern Brazil, is immersed by a priest in the water as Brazilian Evangelist Christians hold a mass baptism in the Jordan River on October 1, 2007 at Yardenit in northern Israel. The group of 700 worshippers descended in the biblical river as part of their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. By David Silverman/Getty Images.

What The Burmese Need

A second amendment:

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower – they appear to be mistaken.

"You are showing lack of respect for the dead" – perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty – you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

Meanwhile, a horrifying silence fills Rangoon.

An Atlantic Blog-Fight

Our editor has urged us to debate one another. And so it comes to pass:

The trouble, of course, is that Jeffrey Goldberg has no particular interest in the political enfranchisement of American Jews as such. He’s not talking about empowering Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Eric Alterman and Harold Meyerson and Josh Marshall and MJ Rosenberg and Daniel Levy. He’s talking about empowering Jeffrey Goldberg and Alan Dershowitz and Martin Peretz and Charles Krauthammer. Which is fine. Obviously, you’d expect Goldberg to want to see people who agree with him empowered vis-à-vis those who disagree with him, but this has nothing to do with empowering "the Jews" and everything to do with empowering some Jews whose ideas have not, over the years, served the United States or Israel very well.

Josh Marshall is Jewish?

Here is Jeffrey’s review of Walt and Mearsheimer. I’m traveling in Missouri and haven’t had time to read it. Will do soon. Everything Jeffrey writes is worth reading.