The Dish

Sort of:

It turns out almost every green plant that’s been studied releases its own cocktail of volatile chemicals, and many species register and respond to these plumes. For example, the smell of cut grass — a blend of alcohols, aldehydes, ketones and esters — may be pleasant to us but to plants signals danger on the way. [Martin] Heil has found that when wild-growing lima beans are exposed to volatiles from other lima bean plants being eaten by beetles, they grow faster and resist attack. Compounds released from damaged plants prime the defenses of corn seedlings, so that they later mount a more effective counterattack against beet armyworms. These signals seem to be a universal language: sagebrush induces responses in tobacco; chili peppers and lima beans respond to cucumber emissions, too.

University of Missouri Professor Jack Schulz discusses a mechanical nose he is developing that might help farmers understand and even respond to these plant signals:

One day, farmers might not just be able to eavesdrop in on their crops’ airborne anxieties. They might even be able to whisper back. The idea comes from Professor Jack Schultz at the University of Missouri, who earned a brief mention in Michael Pollan’s amazing article on plant intelligence in the New Yorker. Schultz, a chemical ecologist, pioneered some of the first studies of plant communication in the 1980s. He is now working to develop a mechanical nose a farmer could use to pick up the chemical alarm bells of a crop under attack. If it works (which remains an if) farmers could apply pesticides with a high degree of precision. …

Gaining a richer picture of plant conversations takes an extremely precise nose, which humans lack, but dogs have. Vineyards in California contract dog trainers to search out invasive mealy worms. “So if you could duplicate a dog’s nose,” says Schultz, “you could see the world of chemical signalling. Us humans just aren’t attuned to that.” Other animals know bits and pieces of plant language, which is exactly why the plants might put out the signals in the first place. When a caterpillar starts munching on a corn crop, Schultz has found, the plant releases a beacon for wasps to take care of the problem.

A reader writes:

Your post on black names reminds me of a study, which came out a decade ago: “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?” [pdf]. The title says it all, and the answer is yes. To conduct this experiment, researchers “applied” for jobs posted in newspapers by sending out identical resumes under both white and black names. They found that job applicants with white names needed to send out 10 resumes to get one callback, while job applicants with black names needed to send out 15.

I’m not sure how “white trailer park” names like “McKynleigh” or “Maddysen” or “Shain” would stack up, though. I suspect those applicants would also not do as well against the Emily Walshes and Greg Bakers of the world.

Another reader:

Penn Jillette named his daughter Moxie CrimeFighter. Gwyneth Paltrow named her kid Apple. APPLE. Sure there can be class and racial politics to names. But sometimes a weird name is just a weird name.

A former NYC teacher notes an upside to distinctive names:

It’s a lot easier finding my former African-American students on Facebook.

Another has a nuanced take on the whole issue:

De Boer is quite right to observe that much of the derision toward “ridiculous” black names is rooted in racism. He is correct that racism is far more harmful to society than the class envy that mocks similarly “ridiculous” names among affluent white children, and that names are invented constructs. So what are we to do with these observations? This was always the point at which this sort of diversity harangue broke down for me.

In principle no child should be mocked or disadvantaged for their name, just as in principle any woman should be free to walk home alone, drunk, at night, in perfect safety, or in principle a free market should always distribute resources efficiently. Unfortunately for black children with unusual names, college women at closing time, and Friedmanites and Randroids everywhere, reality couldn’t care less about principle.

It’s just as wrong to mock a child for their name as for their skin color, disability, or any other characteristic they can’t control. But I think it is perfectly all right to criticize the self-centered vanity of parents who impose highly unusual names upon their children, especially in cases when it has real, widely understood – and yes, unjust – consequences for their future.

Another observes:

Many non-black Americans have ethnic pride but do not give their children ethnic names. Why? Perhaps because they have ethnic last names, like Murkowski, Chang, Scalia, Jindal, Bierstadt, Ozawa, Chavez, etc. They can name their children Emily and Michael and not lose their sense of identity. Very few black Americans have African surnames, which were lost to slavery. First names are their only chance to tie their names to their heritage.

Another shares an article on the history of that heritage:

Distinctive black naming persisted through the centuries; the folklorist Newbell Niles Puckett turned up thousands of such names culling records from 1619 to the mid-1940s, names like Electa, Valantine and Zebedee. But by and large, it remained a minority practice within black culture, and most black names weren’t all that different from those given to whites. Then, in the 1960s, something changed, resulting in an unprecedented spike in black creative names, to the point where just a few years ago, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner noted that “nearly 30 percent of the black girls are given a name that is unique among the names of every baby, white and black, born that year in California.”

What happened? The dates, of course, are suggestive. The ’60s were a time of massive black protest from which emerged an accentuated separatist strain in black thought, epitomized in the Black Power movement. Blacks became increasingly interested in Africa and eager to show pride in their roots. (Indeed, “Roots” – Alex Haley’s book as well as the TV miniseries based upon it – itself had a remarkable effect on naming practices. According to Harvard sociologist Stanley Lieberson, the name Kizzy, which belonged to a “Roots” character, skyrocketed from oblivion to become the 17th most popular name for black girls in Illinois in 1977.)

Islam began in these years to have a clear influence, too, most visibly with Cassius Clay adopting the name Muhammad Ali in 1964. Others followed suit, including two fellows named Lew Alcindor and LeRoi Jones, whom you know as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Amiri Baraka. Around this time, an American boy named Barack Hussein Obama would be born. His given names, of Semitic origin, mean “blessed” and “good.” Soon, out of these more political traditions grew a new one of creating names whose sounds the parents merely found pleasing.

Daniel D’Addario suggests that print books are becoming luxury objects:

And, of course, aesthetic pleasure is what books are all about. But the era in which publishers could meaningfully restrict their books from being sold digitally has effectively closed; to refuse to sell a book online, even in spite of how much less money one can make from Amazon than from physical sales in stores, is to cut off a revenue stream and to ensure money is spent on a competing publisher’s book. And more and more consumers, accustomed to reading on screens, are using e-readers, and fewer physical outlets even exist to sell books in the first place. If a book isn’t immersive and incredibly visual, is there much of a point in seeking out a paper copy?

Anna Holmes defends print copies, explaining that “the volumes we keep on our shelves — and in our hands on a busy subway — tell several stories” (NYT):

There’s the author’s story, which is the actual text; there’s the publisher’s story, which has to do with the choice of format and design; and, finally, there’s the reader’s story — what a particular book telegraphs about one’s education and tastes. Who or what we choose to read can be as telling as the clothes we wear, and an e-book feels like a detail withheld, even a secret kept. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it probably explains why the three books I own about dealing with a loved one’s alcoholism are on my Kindle, not my bookshelf.)

Meanwhile, Nicholas Clee defends Amazon’s book business:

Price and convenience point me towards Amazon. I enjoy reading ebooks, and if the print equivalents are bulky and have small type, I prefer to read them on a lightweight device with adjustable fonts. I love browsing in bookshops, but I love browsing online, too, and get a small thrill every time I make an order that enables an instant download or a posted parcel. Furthermore, Amazon’s service is superb. Its website is the best, its Kindle Paperwhite is by reputation the best e-reading device of its kind, and its prices are usually the lowest.

My point is that this is what the overwhelming majority of Amazon’s customers feel about the company. Yes, we disapprove of its tax avoidance, but we have learned that every multinational will behave in this way, given the opportunity. It is for governments to sort out. But giving publishers a hard time? Why should we care about that? And if we felt that Amazon did not deserve to take business from the terrestrial bookshops, we would click on those Buy buttons less frequently.

Previous Dish coverage of the death of print here, here, and here.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twB2zAOzsKE%5D

After watching Jehane Noujaim’s documentary, The Square, Eric Trager blames the original Tahrir Square revolutionaries for the failure of Egypt’s revolution:

The protesters’ relationship with the military stands out in this regard. While the small group of protesters on whom The Square focuses warily accepts the military takeover following Mubarak’s fall in February 2011, the bulk of the film highlights the profound violence of the junta’s 16-month rule. During this period, over 12,000 Egyptian civilians were tried before military courts, and security forces’ deadly crackdowns on protesters are now memorialized by their geographic locations around Tahrir Square—Maspero, Mohamed Mahmoud, Magles al-Wuzara—as if they were major battles in a drawn-out war. The film’s protagonists are occasionally among these battles’ casualties: They are chased and beaten by thugs, and repeatedly choke on expired teargas. At one point, Ahmed takes some birdshot to the head. The violence subsides temporarily after Mohamed Morsi’s victory in the June 2012 presidential elections, as the junta’s reign ends shortly thereafter. But one year later—and only 15 minutes after Morsi’s victory in the 100-minute film’s run-time—the activists are suddenly willing to accept the military’s return to power.

In an interview with Larry Rohter, Noujaim explains how she decided on a place to end the film, even as the events in Egypt continued to unfold:

That’s always the most difficult part of making these films, but especially so with this one, because the revolution was ongoing, things were changing constantly. The first time that the film allowed us to end it was when Morsi was elected. That was a political continuum, from the bringing down of a dictator to the election of a president. And we had finished that film and were on our way to Sundance in January 2013, and two weeks before we went there, all of our characters were back in the streets again saying, “Morsi is using the tools of democracy to create another dictatorship.” We realized there was a much more interesting story to tell, and it required us to continue filming, because the story became about holding government accountable, no matter who that government is.

So did you feel a twinge when Morsi was overthrown last summer, a desire to keep going?

We felt we were like on another chapter, of the military coming back into control again. But this was the beginning of another cycle, and another film. In the end it’s a character-driven film rather than a news-driven film, and our characters had come to the point where their arc had come to a conclusion, even though events continued on the ground.

Andrew McConnell Stott muses over the dual personas of many comedians:

Is it a condition of comic genius to be perpetually wrestling with demons? From Canio, the iconic, stiletto-wielding clown of Ruggero Leoncavallo’s 1892 opera, Pagliacci, to modern greats like Richard Pryor, Andy Kaufman, and John Belushi, it would seem so. Even in Chaplin’s day, the depressed and often violent clown was a well-established trope, both offstage and on.

Around the time of his divorce, Chaplin had fallen into such “full-blown despair” that he told the journalist Benjamin De Casseres:

There are days when contact with any human being makes me physically ill … I am oppressed at such times and in such periods by what was known among the Romantics as world-weariness. I feel then a total stranger to life.

Back to Stott:

That comedy is a mansion built on tragic foundations was a theory given credence by Sigmund Freud.

“A jest betrays something serious,” he wrote in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, which argued that humor was a means of circumnavigating taboo and repackaging unpalatable thoughts into digestible form. At the heart of Freud’s argument is a reluctance to accept comedy on its own terms as comedy, viewing it rather as a proxy for something kept hidden. For Freud, Chaplin was “a particularly simple and transparent case” of someone who used humor to explore the darker states of mind. Writing to his friend Max Schiller, Freud commented how Chaplin always seemed to play the same part:

The weak, poor, helpless, clumsy young man for whom things turn out right in the end. Do you think he has to forget his own ego for this role? On the contrary, he only acts himself as he was in his bleak youth. He cannot escape from those impressions, and even today he is compensating himself for the deprivations and discouragement of that period.

On that note, Harmony Korine depicts a deeply conflicted Chaplin in a NSFW scene from his 2007 film Mister Lonely: