The Dish

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Many readers disagree with my stance on the brain-dead pregnant woman in Texas whose family isn’t able to take her off life support:

I have to say I’m surprised – quite bracingly so – by the opinions you expressed in the AC360 Later clip.  After all the great testimonials that you facilitated in your It’s So Personal thread, it would appear that you’ve learned nothing from them.  One of the points of those stories, it seems to me, is that the decision to end a pregnancy, sometimes under the most unfortunate circumstances, is not one that ought to be second-guessed by outsiders.  You have done that exactly that in your comments, and by doing so have placed your value judgments ahead of that of the family members and the brain-dead woman in question.  While what you said may be right for you and your family, it is beyond presumptuous to assert that it is right for their family.  I hope that after some reflection, you’ll give a little more deference to their expressed wishes in the future.  I’m pretty sure you’d demand it for yourself.

The trouble is: there was no expressed wish for the baby to be aborted in this terribly painful situation. The mother did not express – understandably – any course of action if that were to happen. And the answer to the question – does this unborn child have a chance to be born and have a healthy life? – was unknown to me, even as I tried to find it. And to be precise, I did not stake out a position as such. I didn’t know enough to do that. I simply questioned the assumption that an unborn child was obviously dispensable in a very rare and tragic situation like this one.

I remain very sensitive to the wishes of the family, and deeply skeptical about crude laws that cannot take into account very specific circumstances. I should have expressed more sympathy for the horrible plight the family is in. But I cannot acquiesce in arguments that treat unborn human life as if it has no dignity and no relevance. I believe all human life has dignity and deserves to be weighed in a moral balance in exquisitely difficult circumstances such as this one.

Another reader emphasizes the extreme rarity of the case, adding, “While I understand the high emotions involved, this is precisely the sort of situation in which “‘hard cases make bad law.'” Another dissent:

I’m having a very hard time grasping your point of view as anything but a complete anti-abortion stance.  If a woman dies and is survived by her husband, assuming no other person was specifically named by the decedent prior to death, it’s handled like this:

• The husband is the default executor of her estate.  Handling of insurance, assets, liabilities, subscriptions, service contracts … everything falls on him.
• The husband is the default recipient of any of the wife’s assets unless specifically given to another.
• The husband is in charge of any outstanding legal affairs.
• The husband is given custody of any children he has fathered.

So if the woman had to right to have an abortion and is now deceased, why do you think it’s OK to prevent that right from passing on to the husband, who is responsible for half of the fetus’s DNA? If her supposed “wishes” in every other legal instance don’t matter and all choices are to be made by her surviving husband, what makes this one different?

That a man can make a woman have an abortion when she hasn’t explicitly consented to one as such? Another has more questions:

Who do you expect to pay for this? The family? The state, since it was mandated by the state? Have you given any thought to the idea that as a result of this, the child, if it lives at all, may be profoundly disabled and require 24/7 care – to be paid for by whom? Why do I or my relatives not deserve state mandated medical care at this level of cost? Is my current “living” life any less important that this extremely “potential” life?

That was a question I didn’t get an answer to in an impromptu conversation. And another:

If the possibility that a brain-dead human can be used to save the life of a fetus, why not forced organ transplants to save the lives of several other people. A heart, two kidneys, two lungs, a liver that could save several … why not?!

If that brain-dead person had consented in advance, no problem at all. The issue here is that the woman had not addressed the central question.

Nina Strochlic highlights new products meant to replace plastic surgery in Asian markets. One of the devices:

This glasses-like contraption pledges to provide a double-fold eyelid after five minutes a day of wearing it, as an alternative to the increasingly popular 20-minute eyelid surgery. The $16 plastic frame appears to push up into the eyelid cover to separate it from the lid. As you blink, the device supposedly trains your lids into the desired look of depth. The product apparently sold thousands of units in its first month, and was expanded to 200 stores.

Last month, Geoffrey Cain noted that the DIY approach is “popular among anxious Korean teens who lack the funds” to pay cosmetic surgeons:

Another popular contraption: the $6 jaw-squeezing roller device. Vendors claim it pushes the jaw line into a pleasing petite, oval form. The two teens spend hours rolling and molding the product along their jaw, trying to fit their faces into the perfect shape — and inflicting a good deal of pain in the process. … The pain pales compared to the infamous double-jaw surgery, a recent fad among South Korean and Chinese women. The procedure involves cutting off and realigning part of the jaw bone, and carries the risk of permanent damage.

Previous Dish on plastic surgery here, here, and here.

Maria Kannikova explains the drawbacks of open offices:

[T]he most problematic aspect of the open office may be physical rather than psychological: simple noise. In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative.

A study found (NYT) that “the emotional mood of literature reflects the mood of the economy over the previous 10 years.” Ben Richmond doesn’t buy it:

The actual researchers didn’t analyze any books specifically, they just filtered everything that Google scanned through their literary misery index, but something seems amiss when I test other examples. I pulled up the economic misery index for the second half of the 20th century and looked for spikes in misery. The George H.W. Bush years are pretty rough, but the highest years under his bespectacled watch are still lower than the least miserable years in the decade from 1974 through 1984, which includes peak misery, in 1980. So 1984 should have some real downers right? And it sort of does: There was a sequel to The Godfather by Mario Puzo, the Dr. Seuss that came out that year was a metaphor for war, Gore Vidal published a book about Lincoln, and we all know how that ended.

But to honest, it doesn’t seem that much darker any other bestsellers list. The top-selling Stephen King book wasn’t even a horror novel, it was the fantastical The Talisman, which might start with someone’s mother dying from cancer, but by Stephen King standards is still pretty upbeat. The nonfiction list had a book by John Madden and a book called Moses the Kitten, in addition to your standard CEO biographies (Leo Iacocca, in this case) and books about motherhood. Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic was in there too.

A new study suggests that a drug gives adults the opportunity to learn “perfect pitch” – defined as “the ability to identify or produce the pitch of a sound without a reference point” – long after the “critical period” for this capacity has passed in early childhood:

Valproate [a mood-stabilizing drug] was given to a group of healthy young men with no musical training. The men were then asked to perform a set of exercises for two weeks with the aim of improving their pitch while another control group was asked to perform the same exercises, but given a placebo.

According to the study, those subjects given valproate learned to identify pitch “significantly better than those taking the placebo.” [Researcher Takao] Hensch calls the results remarkable, telling NPR that until now there had been “no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.” The implications of the study aren’t limited to learning how to sing beautifully: by altering brain plasticity, users of valproate could conceivably learn other skills normally picked up during the early critical period. Hensch picks out language learning as an obvious area of application for the drug.

In an interview, Hensch stresses the potential risks of his findings:

I should caution that critical periods have evolved for a reason, and it is a process that one probably would not want to tamper with carelessly. If we’ve shaped our identities through development, through a critical period, and have matched our brain to the environment in which we were raised, acquiring language, culture, identity, then if we were to erase that by reopening the critical period, we run quite a risk as well.

(Video: Ella Fitzgerald, who had perfect pitch, performing in 1957)

In a meditation on the low esteem afforded caregivers in the US, Anne Marie Slaughter calls for a new emphasis on care:

I imagine a new America in which citizens recognize that providers of physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual care are as indispensable to our society and our economy as providers of income. If we truly valued breadwinning and caregiving equally—as equal components of the American promise of equal opportunity—then we would value male caregivers as much as we value female breadwinners and every permutation and combination in between. But we would also recognize that single parents—who must be sole breadwinners and caregivers in families that often include elder relatives, as well as children—need special help and support. We would embrace marriage for everyone and support policies that would strengthen long-term commitments among family members, however these families might be constructed.

As we strive for equality, we must also redefine and reprioritize the pursuit of happiness, the most personal of America’s founding values. Happiness can certainly be achieved through individual achievement, through winning the competition. But it is equally reached through a web of strong and fulfilling relationships—the warp and woof of connectedness and care.

Marc F. Bellemare argues that “[w]hen development agencies and nongovernmental organizations try to do too many different things, not only do they suffer from the policy equivalent of attention deficit disorder; they also spread their already scarce resources ever more thinly”:

Instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep, the practice of development should be narrower and deeper by focusing on those things that matter most to the poor. The political scientist Kim Yi Dionne has found that in Malawi, people who are HIV-positive or who have lost a loved one to HIV/AIDS ranked improved HIV/AIDS services very low among their priorities. They were much more concerned about access to clean water, followed by agricultural development. Yet most public donors don’t seem to care. And private donors, often heralded by free-market proponents as knowing better than public donors, are not much better: in August, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to deliver Internet access to the five billion people who are not yet online — a priority that Bill Gates called “a joke” when compared to eradicating malaria.

In the spirit of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, ensuring that basic needs are met by focusing on boosting incomes would be a good place to start. Many of the things promoted nowadays by development — breastfeeding, the use of cookstoves, gender equality, environmental sustainability, an independent media, Internet access, and so on — fall into place naturally once people have met their basic needs, such as clean water, plentiful and nutritious food, and found a steady source of income. In other words, many conditions targeted by idealistic development goals arose in wealthier countries as byproducts of higher incomes, and trying to provide them at the same time as more fundamental things puts the cart before the horse.