The Dish

In light of the Grantland controversy, Parker Molloy defends transgender people who choose to stay in the closet:

I may meet someone, whether it be a coworker or acquaintance, and be treated with the same casual attitude I imagine they treat everyone. Then, should they find out that I’m trans, conversations start to take odd turns. Suddenly, the topic of my genitals becomes fair game in their minds. Suddenly, they feel the right to ask what my “real name” is. Suddenly, pronouns start slipping, and I find myself called “he” by these people who had just been referring to me as “she” five minutes earlier. Suddenly, I’m no longer a human being, but rather a biological freak show.

Is that something you’d like? For every conversation to veer away from you as an individual and to instead focus on one singular part of your history? As a writer, as an author, as an activist, this is a choice that I have made for myself. I am willing to endure the awkward questions, the stares, the misgenderings, and the gawking. I do this in an effort to urge society to come to terms with the fact that transgender people are just like anyone else. I do this because I choose to. Essay Vanderbilt did not choose to put her trans status front and center, and taking that from her is not journalism, but rather a betrayal of her right to privacy.

Update from a reader:

I read Parker Malloy’s piece on Dr. V and a lot of the commentary on the Grantland piece. And while I agree with Parker’s point of view – that no one has the right to “out” a person as transgender – I think Parker and others ignore an important fact:

Dr. V raised money from investors. When you do that, you may not make an untrue statement of a material fact or fail to disclose a material fact necessary to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances in which they were made, not misleading. In almost all instances that means disclosing biographical information about key employees. I don’t know how Dr. V could have possibly done that without revealing, indirectly, that she was transgender.

Professional investors in businesses such as hers typically conduct background checks on the founders/inventors/key executives. How could they have conducted a thorough background check without knowing her prior stereotypically male name? I’m not saying that the fact she was transgender was itself material or the failure to disclose that fact was fraudulent, but it seems as though it would have been impossible to avoid revealing she was transgender in order to make accurate disclosures about other material details of her life, such as her work and credit history.

And ask yourself this question: what if you knew her background disclosures were misleading? The obvious course would have been to encourage her to update them or pull the offering, but what if she refused? A lawyer would be obligated to keep such information confidential, but probably would also be obligated to withdraw as her counsel (and perhaps make what’s called a “noisy” withdrawal).

But what if you were the CFO of the business, not subject to attorney-client confidentiality? Would the “you may not out a transgender person” rule apply to you? If you don’t say anything, you could find yourself in the legal crosshairs. Put another way, should you be forced to commit securities fraud because she chose to keep her transgender status a secret? Again, I’m not saying you’d be obliged to reveal she was transgender, but I can’t see how you could correct the misstatements and omissions without also inadvertently revealing she was.

People have rights – like a transgender person’s right to decide whether to keep her personal history secret – but they also have duties – like an entrepreneur’s obligation to make accurate and complete disclosures to investors. If a transgender person wants to keep that part of her personal history a secret, then she’s going to have a real hard time raising capital from investors in a manner that complies with law.

You may be doing it soon:

The obvious starting point for smell communication is the smartphone, a ubiquitous device we already bling to death, and for which a growing panoply of notifications, vibrations and ambient signals are added with each new release. Japan’s Scentee sells a plug-in atomizer for smartphones (currently selling for around $35 on Amazon.jp), which can be customized when triggered by an app to spritz standard aromas such as rose and lavender, as well as more unique tastes of curry, coffee or cinnamon roll, costing just over $5 for 100 sprays. The company suggests its product be shared by “lovers,” and lists use cases such as getting a whiff of your chosen scent each time you get a Facebook like or, as part of a wakeup alarm. There’s no word yet on whether it will come to the US.

Liz Stinson speaks to David Edwards about the oPhone, one of several “smellable” devices currently being developed:

There’s one big problem when it comes to doing this, says Edwards: “Odor transmission to date is not smart,” he explains. “If I give you the odor of a pizza, I have a difficult time immediately after giving you the odor of the sea and then giving you the odor of a cactus.” Basically what Edwards is saying, and what we already know from letting trash sit in our apartments a day too long, is that odors linger. Which makes it hard to craft any sort of cohesive and decipherable olfactive narrative.

The oPhone solves this problem with its main innovation: the oChip. This little cartridge, about the size of a fingernail, contains olfactive information that can produce hundreds (and soon thousands, says Edwards) of odor signals. The idea is that these chips can be installed in the oPhone, and via a bluetooth-connected app called oTracks, scents can be sent to yourself or an oPhone-carrying friend with the push of a button.

Amid serious drought in the American West, once-flooded towns are re-emerging:

Near this Sacramento suburb [of El Dorado Hills], man-made Folsom Lake has receded to less than one-fifth of its capacity amid bone-dry conditions in California, recently revealing outskirts of a ghost town called Mormon Island founded during the mid-19th century gold rush. On an unseasonably warm winter day recently, throngs of visitors descended on the cracked mud flats of the reservoir to inspect hand-forged nails, rusted hinges and other vestiges of frontier life that were inundated when the lake was created in 1955. …

Texas’s Lake Buchanan shrank in 2011 to reveal the original site of the town of Bluffton, drawing visitors to the remains of homesteads, a store and cotton gin that had been mostly under water since the reservoir was created in 1937, said Alfred Hallmark, a local historian. The town is one of more than 200 archaeological sites in Texas, including cemeteries, that have been uncovered by drought, said Pat Mercado-Allinger, director of the Texas Historical Commission’s archaeology division.

Geoff Manaugh stresses the fragility of these rediscovered locations:

Curious visitors and amateur collectors alike are beginning to pick the old sites dry, rambling through the ruins of these dead towns revealed by drought, carrying metal detectors and looking for worthy artifacts. In the process, they are removing old objects – even whole pieces of architecture – before local authorities have the time and resources to catalog and protect what is re-emerging there. This surreal and unexpected opportunity to explore what was lost – in some cases nearly 100 years ago – mummified by water and preserved beneath the rising waves of western reservoirs, might thus simply go to waste.

Instead, the best option might be for the sites to be drowned all over again, assuming the drought will end and that these historic locales can once more be inundated, taken off the tourist map and sealed for their own protection beneath the calm surfaces of artificial lakes. Perhaps, then, future archaeologists better prepared for moments like this might yet be able to explore these historic sites when yet another drought rolls through.

(Photos from Texas’s Lake Buchanan by Merinda Brayfield)

Space is a bad place to be sick:

As far as space dangers go, illness doesn’t get much attention, which is kinda strange given that one of the most distinct effects of microgravity on the human body are tanking immune systems. A 2012 piece in Time reports, “the immune system can go on the fritz in space: wounds heal more slowly; infection-fighting T-cells send signals less efficiently; bone marrow replenishes itself less effectively; killer cells— another key immune system player—fight less energetically.” Meanwhile, many pathogens have an awesome time in space, growing stronger and increasing their resistance to antimicrobials. In particular, both herpes and staph have been shown to thrive in the gravity-free, hyper-sterile environment of a space vessel.

A study out this week examining space-born Drosophila flies—often studied because of the similarity between the flies’ immune systems and that of humans—found that in the case of fungal infections, microgravity effectively nullified the immune response.

How the study worked:

To figure out why the space flies had trouble with the fungus, the scientists analyzed all of the flies’ genes. Both the space flies and the Earth flies were born with the same genes, but exactly which of those genes turned on and went to work differed between them. In Earth flies, the genes associated with their immune systems kicked into high gear after they got infected with the fungus. Among other genes, Earth flies activated something called the Toll signaling pathway, which scientists have long known flies use to fight off fungi. Humans have Toll-like genes, too, and they also work in immunity.

The space flies reacted differently from their stay-at-home siblings. They turned on some immunity genes after encountering Beauveria bassiana, so it’s not like they were totally helpless. But they didn’t use all of the genes the Earth flies used, and they didn’t turn up their Toll pathway genes. In their paper, the biologists called their spacefaring flies “severely immunocompromised.” Strangely, when the biologists raised flies in a centrifuge to simulate higher-than-Earth gravity, they were more likely to survive a fungal infection than normal Earth flies.

Suzy Khimm points out the staggering inequality in Congress’s backyard:

The gap between low- and high-income households in D.C. is one of the biggest in the country—the third-highest of the 50 largest cities in the U.S., according to the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute. While the D.C. metro area was spared the worst of the recession, the downturn and subsequence recovery have exacerbated the long-standing differences between the area’s rich and poor.

Between 2007 and 2012, 18.5% of D.C.’s residents were in poverty, compared to 8.4% in the entire metro region, which includes six of the 10 richest counties in the U.S. The massive growth in federal contracting dollars—hitting $80 billion in 2010 alone—helped push the median household income to nearly $120,000 in Virginia’s Loudoun County. But the disparities aren’t just in terms of income. While the region’s unemployment rate has dipped to just 4.9%—far below the national rate—it’s stuck at 8.6% in the District. Within the city itself, the differences are even starker: The jobless rate in Ward 8, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods is 18.6 percent; in Ward 3, it’s 1.8 percent.

Alex Leary examines the demographic shifts driving these changes:

Washington, which boasts one of the most educated workforces in the country, has gotten younger. The “millennials” — those 18 to 29 — now account for 35 percent of the population, while the same group is only 23 percent of the national population. It also has gotten whiter.

The black middle class began to leave after riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., leaving 14th Street, Columbia Heights and other parts of the city in ruins. In 1970, African-Americans made up 70 percent of the city’s population. In 2010, it was down to 51 percent and many of those left are among the poorest and least educated, concentrated in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River that have been untouched by revitalization.