March 3, 2011, 3:58 pm
I’ve always loved the musical “Company,” a Broadway show by Stephen Sondheim that opened in 1970. It was about a 35-year-old Manhattan guy, still unmarried even though all of his best friends are married couples. The set, the tone and the score were all ultrachic, ultramodern, ultraurban. So urban and modern, in fact, that the first thing you hear as the show begins is a busy signal — in its day, the ultimate technological symbol of a fast-paced, full-up lifestyle.
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After a few repetitions of that insistent, one-note beep, the overture begins building off its rhythm. The busy signal became a musical theme for the entire opening number.
But when I went to see the revival of the show in 2006, the busy signal was gone. Mr. Sondheim later told me that nobody knows what it is anymore.
I had to admit that he was right. When’s the last time you heard one? These days, voice mail (or just sending a text message) has almost completely eliminated the busy signal. Still, that left the opening number of “Company” stripped of the original idea — and a really clever one — that had inspired it!
Then there’s the record-scratch sound, still used frequently in ads and comic scenes to indicate someone’s train of thought going off the rails. Isn’t it weird that we still use that sound? For the most part, the last 20 years’ worth of viewers and listeners have never even heard that sound in real life! (In a 2008 NPR segment, the host asked some teenagers if they could identify the sound. They couldn’t. “I have no idea…. I know I saw it on TV.”)
And then there’s the rewind/fast-forward gibberish sounds — of TAPE. What will they do in the movies, now that random-access digital video formats deprive producers of that audience-cuing sound?
What about modem-dialing shrieks? Sure, we’re all thrilled to have always-on Internet connections. But wasn’t there something satisfying, something understandable, about that staticky call-and-response from our computers to the mother ship?
We’re losing the dial tone, too. Cellphones don’t have dial tones. Only landlines do, and those are rapidly disappearing. And without the dial tone, how will movie producers ever indicate that someone’s hung up on a character? (Even though that was an unrealistic depiction to begin with.)
Funny thing is, we’re replacing these sounds mainly with … nothing! What’s the sound of broadband? Of rewinding a CD?
The point, of course, is that as digital technology takes over, we’re losing the sounds of analog technologies. And sometimes that’s a real loss. Cash registers don’t go “ka-ching” anymore, either. But we still SAY “ka-ching,” and there’s your proof — sometimes, our culture simply cries out for a certain audio meme, a certain sonic cue that used to have real meaning.
Every now and then, in fact, you find a case where the old analog audio cue is so important, the manufacturer actually installs a recorded version of it — right into the otherwise silent digital device — because the sound has a purpose. Digital cameras, for example, play a digitized version of an analog shutter. I recently tested an electric motorcycle that plays a recording of a gas motorcycle, just so you don’t mow down unsuspecting citizens sharing the roadway with you.
I’m not going to play Andy Rooney here and bemoan the pace of technological progress. Something’s always lost when we move from one format to another; that’s just the way it goes.
At the same time, I’d like to commemorate the loss of those record scratches, busy signals, tape-rewinding chatters, and ka-chings. Maybe with a moment of silence.
20 March 2011
26 February 2011
EMR in Ny Times
THE United States is embarking this year on a grand experiment in the government-driven adoption of technology — ambitious, costly and potentially far-reaching in impact. The goal is to improve health care and to reduce its long-term expense by moving the doctors and hospitals from ink and paper into the computer age — through a shift to digital patient records.
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In Walsenburg, Colo., the Spanish Peaks Family Clinic aims to complete conversion to digital records later this year.
Step back from the details and what emerges is a huge challenge in innovation design. What role should government have? What is the right mix of top-down and bottom-up efforts? Driving change through the system will involve shifts in technology, economic incentives and the culture of health care.
“This is a big social project, not just a technical endeavor,” says Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration’s national coordinator for health information technology.
This year is when the project really takes off. In the 2009 economic recovery package, the administration and Congress allocated billions — the current estimate is $27 billion — in incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic records.
Now, a new Congress with Republicans looking for budget cuts could take back the money. Legislation has been introduced by Representative Tom Latham, an Iowa Republican, to reclaim unspent stimulus dollars — and money for accelerating the adoption of electronic health records could be a target.
Still, steps to encourage adoption of computerized health records have had bipartisan support over the years, though only the Obama administration has pushed for big financing. Most health policy analysts say it is unlikely that the legislation will be overturned.
When well designed and wisely used, computerized records have proved valuable in improving care. Doctors have more complete information in treating patients, reducing the chances of medical errors and unneeded tests.
But the success stories to date have come mainly from large health care providers, like Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic and a handful of others. Most physicians are in small practices, lacking the financial and technical support the big groups provide for their doctors. So it is scarcely surprising that less than 30 percent of physicians nationwide now use digital records.
Late last year, the administration, working with health professionals and the technology industry, set out a roadmap for what digital records should include and how they should be used, for doctors to qualify for incentive payments, typically up to $44,000. The program begins this year, and the requirements for using the records to report and share health information increase in stages through 2015. After that, penalty payments from Medicare and Medicaid kick in for doctors who don’t meet the use and reporting rules.
The initial requirements to qualify for “meaningful use” are minimal, including being able to collect and electronically report basic information, like vaccinations for children or blood glucose levels for diabetes patients.
The long-range vision is that computerized patient data is a step toward what health care specialists call a “learning health system.” That means data across populations of patients can be analyzed to find what treatments are most effective or to get early warnings on dangerous drug interactions.
“Islands” of such learning networks already exist, notes Charles P. Friedman, chief scientist in the federal health information technology office. By mining its patient data, Kaiser, for example, was first to identify a link between the pain-relief drug Vioxx and a higher risk of heart failure, well before Merck pulled the drug off the market in 2004.
Yet the road to a national computer-enabled learning system, specialists agree, promises to be long. A major obstacle is that so many doctors, especially in small practices, are leery of technology they see as needlessly hard to use and time-consuming. “Doctors don’t want to become clerks,” says Dr. Isaac Kohane, a health technology specialist at the Harvard Medical School.
And complex technology — designed for big health groups, not small practices — could well increase medical mistakes, specialists say.
Such issues, Dr. Blumenthal says, are a reason that the government’s standards, and perhaps even the timetable for adopting electronic health records, will evolve and remain flexible.
The government, he adds, is looking closely at safety and usability. Dr. Blumenthal’s office gave the Institute of Medicine a grant of nearly $1 million for a yearlong study of electronic health records and patient safety. And his office is working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a “usability assessment tool” that can be used to evaluate the digital records offered by different companies.
Under Dr. Blumenthal, the office has tried to gradually build consensus on policy and technical standards rather than issuing edicts. However, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an independent group of academic and industry experts, said in a report last December that the time had come for more “top-down design choices,” which it called “an appropriate government role” and one that “requires a more aggressive approach than has been taken in the early stages.”
THIS month, the health information technology office announced a step that showed its preferred approach to setting standards, one that borrowed from the Internet model of open-source software development in an initiative called the Direct Project.
Many companies and groups contributed to the government-endorsed Internet-based tools for exchanging health data among institutions. Developers wrote code and suggested ideas, and a consensus built around an approach that was selected by the government. The design was inspired by the Web, with its minimal specifications that leave ample room for innovation, says Dr. Douglas Fridsma, head of standards at the health technology office.
Without a brisk market in information exchange, the campaign to adopt electronic records cannot really pay off. And more is needed than data-sharing standards and privacy and security protections, Dr. Blumenthal says.
The incentives have to change as well. Two hospitals a few miles apart, he notes, do not now view themselves as allies, but as competitors. To a doctor or a hospital, a patient is, among other things, a financial asset — and holding a patient’s information is valuable.
Insurers, he suggests, will have to pay for providers to share data or penalize them if they don’t. “Information exchange has to be a business goal, rather than a competitive threat, for this to work,” he says.
Add to Portfolio
* Merck & Company Inc
Go to your Portfolio »
Enlarge This Image
John Moore/Getty Images
In Walsenburg, Colo., the Spanish Peaks Family Clinic aims to complete conversion to digital records later this year.
Step back from the details and what emerges is a huge challenge in innovation design. What role should government have? What is the right mix of top-down and bottom-up efforts? Driving change through the system will involve shifts in technology, economic incentives and the culture of health care.
“This is a big social project, not just a technical endeavor,” says Dr. David Blumenthal, the Obama administration’s national coordinator for health information technology.
This year is when the project really takes off. In the 2009 economic recovery package, the administration and Congress allocated billions — the current estimate is $27 billion — in incentives for doctors and hospitals to adopt electronic records.
Now, a new Congress with Republicans looking for budget cuts could take back the money. Legislation has been introduced by Representative Tom Latham, an Iowa Republican, to reclaim unspent stimulus dollars — and money for accelerating the adoption of electronic health records could be a target.
Still, steps to encourage adoption of computerized health records have had bipartisan support over the years, though only the Obama administration has pushed for big financing. Most health policy analysts say it is unlikely that the legislation will be overturned.
When well designed and wisely used, computerized records have proved valuable in improving care. Doctors have more complete information in treating patients, reducing the chances of medical errors and unneeded tests.
But the success stories to date have come mainly from large health care providers, like Kaiser Permanente, the Mayo Clinic and a handful of others. Most physicians are in small practices, lacking the financial and technical support the big groups provide for their doctors. So it is scarcely surprising that less than 30 percent of physicians nationwide now use digital records.
Late last year, the administration, working with health professionals and the technology industry, set out a roadmap for what digital records should include and how they should be used, for doctors to qualify for incentive payments, typically up to $44,000. The program begins this year, and the requirements for using the records to report and share health information increase in stages through 2015. After that, penalty payments from Medicare and Medicaid kick in for doctors who don’t meet the use and reporting rules.
The initial requirements to qualify for “meaningful use” are minimal, including being able to collect and electronically report basic information, like vaccinations for children or blood glucose levels for diabetes patients.
The long-range vision is that computerized patient data is a step toward what health care specialists call a “learning health system.” That means data across populations of patients can be analyzed to find what treatments are most effective or to get early warnings on dangerous drug interactions.
“Islands” of such learning networks already exist, notes Charles P. Friedman, chief scientist in the federal health information technology office. By mining its patient data, Kaiser, for example, was first to identify a link between the pain-relief drug Vioxx and a higher risk of heart failure, well before Merck pulled the drug off the market in 2004.
Yet the road to a national computer-enabled learning system, specialists agree, promises to be long. A major obstacle is that so many doctors, especially in small practices, are leery of technology they see as needlessly hard to use and time-consuming. “Doctors don’t want to become clerks,” says Dr. Isaac Kohane, a health technology specialist at the Harvard Medical School.
And complex technology — designed for big health groups, not small practices — could well increase medical mistakes, specialists say.
Such issues, Dr. Blumenthal says, are a reason that the government’s standards, and perhaps even the timetable for adopting electronic health records, will evolve and remain flexible.
The government, he adds, is looking closely at safety and usability. Dr. Blumenthal’s office gave the Institute of Medicine a grant of nearly $1 million for a yearlong study of electronic health records and patient safety. And his office is working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop a “usability assessment tool” that can be used to evaluate the digital records offered by different companies.
Under Dr. Blumenthal, the office has tried to gradually build consensus on policy and technical standards rather than issuing edicts. However, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an independent group of academic and industry experts, said in a report last December that the time had come for more “top-down design choices,” which it called “an appropriate government role” and one that “requires a more aggressive approach than has been taken in the early stages.”
THIS month, the health information technology office announced a step that showed its preferred approach to setting standards, one that borrowed from the Internet model of open-source software development in an initiative called the Direct Project.
Many companies and groups contributed to the government-endorsed Internet-based tools for exchanging health data among institutions. Developers wrote code and suggested ideas, and a consensus built around an approach that was selected by the government. The design was inspired by the Web, with its minimal specifications that leave ample room for innovation, says Dr. Douglas Fridsma, head of standards at the health technology office.
Without a brisk market in information exchange, the campaign to adopt electronic records cannot really pay off. And more is needed than data-sharing standards and privacy and security protections, Dr. Blumenthal says.
The incentives have to change as well. Two hospitals a few miles apart, he notes, do not now view themselves as allies, but as competitors. To a doctor or a hospital, a patient is, among other things, a financial asset — and holding a patient’s information is valuable.
Insurers, he suggests, will have to pay for providers to share data or penalize them if they don’t. “Information exchange has to be a business goal, rather than a competitive threat, for this to work,” he says.
16 February 2011
09 February 2011
It is the network of developmental interactions, rather than the gene, that is the focus of selection.
Well THE hot new topic around will be Epigentics. So lots of what is being arguing 'round here may be only part of the story.
Back when Thomas Kuhn published on science thinking, someone came along with the notion of the "anomaly box". When trying to form basic theory, anomalies are stored away. Later when things are more settled, the box is dusted off and exceptions are examined. It may be Genetics time to look at its anomaly box
Quote:
The late 20th century version of the Modern Synthesis assumed:
1. Heredity occurs through the transmission of germ-line genes. Genes are discrete units of DNA that are located in chromosomes. Hereditary variations are the result of differences in DNA base sequence. There are no inherited variations that cannot be expressed in terms of inherited genetic differences.
2. Hereditary variation is the consequence of (i) the many random combinations of pre-existing alleles that are generated by the sexual processes; and (ii) new variations (mutations) resulting from accidental changes in DNA. Hereditary variation is not affected by the developmental history of the individual. There is no “soft inheritance.”
3. Heritable variations usually have small effects, and evolution is typically gradual. Through the selection of individuals with phenotypes that make them slightly more adapted to their environment than are other individuals in the population, some alleles increase in frequency. Mutation pressure is not an important factor in evolution. With a few exceptions, macroevolution is continuous with microevolution, and does not require any additional processes.
4. The ultimate unit of selection is the gene. Although genes interact and the interactions are often non-linear, the additive fitness-effects of single genes (which can be extracted from the fitness effects of the developmental networks in which they participate) drive evolution by natural selection. The genetic-developmental network and the phenotype it generates is not heritable and cannot be a unit of evolution.
5. Morphological innovations, like all innovations, are the results of gene mutations that, when beneficial, accumulate over time and lead to a qualitatively new form. Generic, physical-chemical properties of biological matter, which underlie plasticity, have no role in morphological and physiological innovations other than specifying the boundaries of the forms that are possible.
6. The targets of selection are individuals, which are well-defined entities. Although conspecifics in groups interact and may co-evolve with each other as well as with their symbionts and parasites, group selection and community selection are rare. Species selection may exist but is of marginal significance. The community is only rarely a target of selection, and species selection cannot explain the main patterns of macroevolution.
7. Evolution occurs through modifications from a common ancestor, and is based on vertical descent. Horizontal transfer of genes or other types of information has only minor significance, and does not alter the basic branching structure of phylogenies. The main pattern of evolutionary divergence is, at all times and for all taxa, tree-like, not web-like.
Biologists are now questioning each of these assumptions, arguing that:
1. Heredity involves more than DNA. There are heritable variations that are independent of variations in DNA sequence, and they have a degree of autonomy from DNA variations. These non-DNA variations can form an additional substrate for evolutionary change, and also guide genetic evolution (Jablonka and Lamb, 1995, 2005; Jablonka and Raz, in press).
2. Soft inheritance, the inheritance of developmentally induced and regulated variations, exists and is likely to be important. It involves both non-DNA variations and developmentally-induced variations in DNA sequences (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005, 2008).
3. The rate at which heritable variations appear is sometimes higher in stressful conditions, and the spectrum of variations may be different, involving amplification, transposition, and massive, heritable, gene-activation and inactivation (see for example Levy and Feldman, 2004; Cullis, 2005). Such changes can lead to saltational evolution (Jablonka and Lamb, 2008; Lamm and Jablonka, 2008). Furthermore, variations in the expression and organization of a small set of genes that seems to be common to the development in all animal phyla can have dramatic phenotypic effects (Carroll, 2005). Macroevolution may be a consequence of changes in these core genes as well as the operation of stress-induced mechanisms that result in systemic mutations and genome re-patterning.
4. It is the network of developmental interactions, rather than the gene, that is the focus of selection. A gene’s expression and the scope of its effects depend not only on its own intrinsic nature, but also – and often much more – on the regulatory structure of the developmental network in which it is integrated (Wilkins, 2002; West-Eberhard, 2003; Wray, Purugganam and Gavrilets, chapter ??). Developmental networks are commonly modular, and are usually stable during phenotypic evolution.
5. Generic and evolved mechanisms that generate phenotypic plasticity have played a major role in evolution, initiating morphological and behavioral transformations (Forgács and Newman, 2005; Kirschner and Gerhard, 2005; Newman and Müller, 2006; Newman, chapter?; Müller, chapter ?; Kirschner, chapter ?; Pigliucci, chapter ?).
6. Group selection, involving selection of interactions among cooperating group members, is common (Sober and Wilson, 1998; Wilson, chapter ?). Since many organisms (including humans) contain symbionts and parasites that are transferred from one generation of the “host” to the next, it may be necessary to consider such communities as targets of selection (Zilber-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, 2008). Many patterns of macroevolutionary change are the outcome of selection at the species level and above (Jablonski, 2005, chapter ?).
7. The “Tree Of Life” pattern of divergence, which was supposed to be universal, fails to explain all the sources of similarities and differences between taxa. Sharing whole genomes (through hybridization, symbiosis and parasitism) and partial exchange of genomes (through various types of horizontal gene transfer) lead to web-like patterns of relations (Arnold, 2006; Goldenfeld and Woese, 2007). These web-like patterns are particularly evident in some taxa (e.g. plants, bacteria), and in special circumstances (e.g. during the initial stages that follow genome sharing or transfer). Co-evolution between viruses, and between viruses and their cellularized hosts, is an ongoing feature of evolution (Villarreal, 2005).
In this chapter we are focusing mainly on the first two of these challenges and some aspects of the third, but epigenetic inheritance undoubtedly also has significant implications for all of the other challenges to the Modern Synthesis that we have listed.
The epigenetic turn
Epigenetic-oriented approaches to evolution all have the developing phenotype rather than the gene as their starting point, and focus on aspects of development that lead to flexibility and adjustment when the environment or the genome changes. Although their roots are old, these approaches became influential during the 1990s, and today are an important part of the alternative view of evolution that is taking shape. We call this revival, extension and elaboration of epigenetic approaches to evolution the “epigenetic turn.”
http://www.mfo.ac.uk/files/images/Jablonka-ms_MPGM_EEEMclean.doc
now expanded into
Jablonka et al. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Prevalence, Mechanisms, and Implications for the Study of Heredity and Evolution. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2009; 84 (2): 131 DOI: 10.1086/598822
Well THE hot new topic around will be Epigentics. So lots of what is being arguing 'round here may be only part of the story.
Back when Thomas Kuhn published on science thinking, someone came along with the notion of the "anomaly box". When trying to form basic theory, anomalies are stored away. Later when things are more settled, the box is dusted off and exceptions are examined. It may be Genetics time to look at its anomaly box
Quote:
The late 20th century version of the Modern Synthesis assumed:
1. Heredity occurs through the transmission of germ-line genes. Genes are discrete units of DNA that are located in chromosomes. Hereditary variations are the result of differences in DNA base sequence. There are no inherited variations that cannot be expressed in terms of inherited genetic differences.
2. Hereditary variation is the consequence of (i) the many random combinations of pre-existing alleles that are generated by the sexual processes; and (ii) new variations (mutations) resulting from accidental changes in DNA. Hereditary variation is not affected by the developmental history of the individual. There is no “soft inheritance.”
3. Heritable variations usually have small effects, and evolution is typically gradual. Through the selection of individuals with phenotypes that make them slightly more adapted to their environment than are other individuals in the population, some alleles increase in frequency. Mutation pressure is not an important factor in evolution. With a few exceptions, macroevolution is continuous with microevolution, and does not require any additional processes.
4. The ultimate unit of selection is the gene. Although genes interact and the interactions are often non-linear, the additive fitness-effects of single genes (which can be extracted from the fitness effects of the developmental networks in which they participate) drive evolution by natural selection. The genetic-developmental network and the phenotype it generates is not heritable and cannot be a unit of evolution.
5. Morphological innovations, like all innovations, are the results of gene mutations that, when beneficial, accumulate over time and lead to a qualitatively new form. Generic, physical-chemical properties of biological matter, which underlie plasticity, have no role in morphological and physiological innovations other than specifying the boundaries of the forms that are possible.
6. The targets of selection are individuals, which are well-defined entities. Although conspecifics in groups interact and may co-evolve with each other as well as with their symbionts and parasites, group selection and community selection are rare. Species selection may exist but is of marginal significance. The community is only rarely a target of selection, and species selection cannot explain the main patterns of macroevolution.
7. Evolution occurs through modifications from a common ancestor, and is based on vertical descent. Horizontal transfer of genes or other types of information has only minor significance, and does not alter the basic branching structure of phylogenies. The main pattern of evolutionary divergence is, at all times and for all taxa, tree-like, not web-like.
Biologists are now questioning each of these assumptions, arguing that:
1. Heredity involves more than DNA. There are heritable variations that are independent of variations in DNA sequence, and they have a degree of autonomy from DNA variations. These non-DNA variations can form an additional substrate for evolutionary change, and also guide genetic evolution (Jablonka and Lamb, 1995, 2005; Jablonka and Raz, in press).
2. Soft inheritance, the inheritance of developmentally induced and regulated variations, exists and is likely to be important. It involves both non-DNA variations and developmentally-induced variations in DNA sequences (Jablonka and Lamb, 2005, 2008).
3. The rate at which heritable variations appear is sometimes higher in stressful conditions, and the spectrum of variations may be different, involving amplification, transposition, and massive, heritable, gene-activation and inactivation (see for example Levy and Feldman, 2004; Cullis, 2005). Such changes can lead to saltational evolution (Jablonka and Lamb, 2008; Lamm and Jablonka, 2008). Furthermore, variations in the expression and organization of a small set of genes that seems to be common to the development in all animal phyla can have dramatic phenotypic effects (Carroll, 2005). Macroevolution may be a consequence of changes in these core genes as well as the operation of stress-induced mechanisms that result in systemic mutations and genome re-patterning.
4. It is the network of developmental interactions, rather than the gene, that is the focus of selection. A gene’s expression and the scope of its effects depend not only on its own intrinsic nature, but also – and often much more – on the regulatory structure of the developmental network in which it is integrated (Wilkins, 2002; West-Eberhard, 2003; Wray, Purugganam and Gavrilets, chapter ??). Developmental networks are commonly modular, and are usually stable during phenotypic evolution.
5. Generic and evolved mechanisms that generate phenotypic plasticity have played a major role in evolution, initiating morphological and behavioral transformations (Forgács and Newman, 2005; Kirschner and Gerhard, 2005; Newman and Müller, 2006; Newman, chapter?; Müller, chapter ?; Kirschner, chapter ?; Pigliucci, chapter ?).
6. Group selection, involving selection of interactions among cooperating group members, is common (Sober and Wilson, 1998; Wilson, chapter ?). Since many organisms (including humans) contain symbionts and parasites that are transferred from one generation of the “host” to the next, it may be necessary to consider such communities as targets of selection (Zilber-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, 2008). Many patterns of macroevolutionary change are the outcome of selection at the species level and above (Jablonski, 2005, chapter ?).
7. The “Tree Of Life” pattern of divergence, which was supposed to be universal, fails to explain all the sources of similarities and differences between taxa. Sharing whole genomes (through hybridization, symbiosis and parasitism) and partial exchange of genomes (through various types of horizontal gene transfer) lead to web-like patterns of relations (Arnold, 2006; Goldenfeld and Woese, 2007). These web-like patterns are particularly evident in some taxa (e.g. plants, bacteria), and in special circumstances (e.g. during the initial stages that follow genome sharing or transfer). Co-evolution between viruses, and between viruses and their cellularized hosts, is an ongoing feature of evolution (Villarreal, 2005).
In this chapter we are focusing mainly on the first two of these challenges and some aspects of the third, but epigenetic inheritance undoubtedly also has significant implications for all of the other challenges to the Modern Synthesis that we have listed.
The epigenetic turn
Epigenetic-oriented approaches to evolution all have the developing phenotype rather than the gene as their starting point, and focus on aspects of development that lead to flexibility and adjustment when the environment or the genome changes. Although their roots are old, these approaches became influential during the 1990s, and today are an important part of the alternative view of evolution that is taking shape. We call this revival, extension and elaboration of epigenetic approaches to evolution the “epigenetic turn.”
http://www.mfo.ac.uk/files/images/Jablonka-ms_MPGM_EEEMclean.doc
now expanded into
Jablonka et al. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: Prevalence, Mechanisms, and Implications for the Study of Heredity and Evolution. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2009; 84 (2): 131 DOI: 10.1086/598822
30 January 2011
My Go-To Places for Regional Italian Food in San Francisco
Craig Lee for The New York Times
Salsiccia cruda di Bra, spiced veal and pork sausage on grilled crostini and salumi, at Perbacco. More Photos »
By MARK BITTMAN
Published: January 28, 2011
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ABOUT 20 years ago a friend took me to Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach for an espresso. It wasn’t easy to find a stand-up espresso in those pre-Starbucks days, but — more to the point — it helped me to recognize the strength and authenticity of that city’s not-especially-large Italian community.
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San Francisco’s Italian Flavor
Northern Italians, mostly from Liguria (specifically Genoa), were among the first European immigrants to arrive in San Francisco in significant numbers, right about the time of the Gold Rush. Perhaps because their arrival coincided with the region’s development, and because much of California is essentially “Mediterranean” in both climate and topography, their impact was profound.
It’s not novel to say that so-called Californian cuisine is essentially Italian (perhaps “Italian-dominated Mediterranean” would be more accurate). But no comparably sized city has more authentic and better regional Italian food — of all the cities in Italy only Rome has the audacity to support restaurants whose food originated in other regions — and, really, with the possible exception of New York, it may be said that San Francisco is the world’s best city for regional Italian food.
There have been better-than-average Italian restaurants in San Francisco for as long as I can remember, but at no time have there been more than there are right now. (The East Bay is equally good.) In addition to those described here, there are Pesce, 54 Mint, Dopo, A-16, Incanto, SPQR, Ragazza, Little Star, Odesso, Corso, Boot & Shoe and others. These four, all in San Francisco proper, are my go-to places for regional Italian food.
Perbacco
Now nearly five years old, Perbacco would be the best restaurant in the vast majority of American cities; here, where the cult of the new dominates, it’s become an afterthought. (It doesn’t help that it’s in the financial district, which is not exactly happening, at least at night — more’s the pity.) Few corners are cut and few accommodations made to timid eaters; this is not what the Italians would call a trattoria (unlike the other places here, more or less), but a real ristorante, an establishment that focuses on traditional dishes done in the highest possible style. The space is large and elegant — if anything, a bit sterile, though not unattractive. The emphasis is on the food of the Piedmont, among the most luxurious of regional Italian cuisines.
Yet two perfect examples sound anything but luxurious: tripe, slow-cooked in white wine and diced aromatic vegetables, with big white beans, rosemary and of course garlic; and pig trotter meat made into cakes, cooked very crisp, with a vinaigrette — known locally (in Piedmont, that is) as batsua, or “silk stocking.” Indeed, the latter dish, though as humble in origin as they get, is really high-class eating — carefully prepared and beautifully served — while the first could convert many who are repelled by offal.
Not that all the food here is challenging. The pastas are accessible and just short of incredible: agnolotti stuffed with veal and cabbage and sauced with a reduction of veal stock and grated cheese (a must); taglierini with a ragù of pork and porcini, with Parmesan; and gnocchi that were light, not eggy or doughy, topped with sheep’s cheese and hazelnuts. They all left our party clamoring for more.
Meat dishes keep the quality level high: a plate of salumi was brilliantly varied and heavenly; meatballs of pork and veal, lightened with apples, is a creation I wanted to replicate at home; hare cooked in its own blood — a dish I’d never previously taken to — was easily the best I’ve ever tasted. Everything was spot on.
Unlike too many good San Francisco restaurants, it’s open for lunch. The wine list is fantastic (there are 20 wines by the glass, most of them interesting), and the desserts are almost as good as the savory dishes. It’s a winner, and one that promises to stay that way.
Perbacco, 230 California Street; (415) 955-0663; perbaccosf.com. An average meal for two is about $100. (None of the prices include drinks or tip.)
La Ciccia
On my last visit to San Francisco I found myself near the once-remote corner of 30th and Church (I think this is called Upper Noe Valley, though there are disagreements) three times. One visit was to Incanto — which is good — and to Tataki, my friend Casson Trenor’s excellent “sustainable sushi” restaurant. The third was my now-regular visit to La Ciccia, the Sardinian restaurant that holds close and well to its roots. Its menu, written in the Sardinian dialect (translated, fortunately), is small and appealing.
Start with pani guttiau, a kind of carta musica, or super-thin flatbread baked with oil, rosemary and pecorino. (Sardinia is one of the world’s best places for sheep’s cheese.) It wouldn’t be amiss to order a thin-crusted pizza or two, also; the one with big fat capers, pecorino, a little mozzarella, oil and oregano is a personal favorite. There is good salumi here, too, including cooked pancetta and cured raw bacon, both of which are divine.
The octopus in dark tomato sauce is simply magnificent; it must have been cooked for many hours. Fresh spaghetti with grated bottarga is a classic and very likable dish; most people I’ve eaten with prefer it to the powerful and possibly hard-to-take sauce of pecorino and tuna heart, which is decidedly “fishy.” Fregola (something like toasted big couscous) with squid ink and a sauce of many different seafoods, is meaty and very good.
Not everything succeeds. Shrimp in a credible but uninspired tomato sauce thrilled no one; lamb with beets, honey and truffle oil felt less than authentic; and the house bread — which you probably won’t eat much of anyway — is weak. But the Sardinian wines are fine and not expensive; most of the food is local and/or organic (though no fuss is made about it); and the desserts, like saffron ice cream and ricotta rosemary cake, shy away from cloying sweetness — a welcome change.
La Ciccia is small (about 40 seats), with an intentionally and elegantly simple design that some might find generic. It’s also homey, if a tad noisy. I intend to keep going until I get sick of it, which hasn’t happened yet.
La Ciccia, 291 30th Street; (415) 550-8114; laciccia.com. An average meal for two is $80.
Delfina Pizzeria
It’s now 12 years since I wrote about the original Delfina, so I can’t be accused of jumping on the bandwagon. But in recent years I’ve become a bigger fan of the operation’s two pizzerias, one of which is in the Mission, next to the original restaurant; the other, which I favor, is in Pacific Heights. (Full disclosure: my daughter is a server there, though it doesn’t help me get reservations, because there aren’t any.)
The place is a joint, and it’s noisy and crowded — the best seats are probably those on the sidewalk, and on my last visit that’s where I sat, semi-sheltered by a canopy, in a light drizzle — and the food is sensational. (To get anyone over the age of 25 into the place, it had better be; this isn’t an atmosphere for unwinding. And often it seems that those who are unwinding do so at high volume. I know, I’m old.)
Anyway. This is southern Italian food done well. I suppose it’s closest to Neapolitan, but there is much here that reminds me of Rome. The cooked vegetables — a simple plate of escarole or chard with raisins and pine nuts, grilled fennel, cauliflower with garlic, capers and bread crumbs — are just perfect, and seem to me the best way to start a meal here, while you’re waiting for a pizza. The pigs’ ears with chili and lime will turn some people off, obviously, but they’re super-popular, for good reason: nothing is crunchier.
There is a lot of disagreement on which are the best pizzas. My favorite, hands down, is the Napoletana, made with tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chilies, olives, oregano — and no cheese. It’s the kind of pizza I grew up eating on Avenue A in New York City, actually, right down to the slightly burnt crust. But if you prefer cheese or meat, there are plenty of good options.
Delfina Pizzeria, 2406 California Street; (415) 440-1189; pizzeriadelfina.com. An average meal for two is $60
Farina
Liguria comes to the Mission at this bright, modern and pretty restaurant with a big open kitchen. The region is represented most vividly here by the focaccia di Recco — golden, poofy, cheese-stuffed dough made in a hill town southeast of Genoa known for little else. I’ve never even seen focaccia di Recco tackled elsewhere, yet Farina has made it a staple here, and they do it well, and in the open — which is fun.
Much of the rest of the menu follows suit. You can get pansotti, another dish you rarely see outside of Liguria. Stuffed with cheese and greens (chard, perhaps, or nettles, or spinach, depending on the month), this triangular pasta is served with a “pesto” made largely from walnuts and is rich, filling and delicious. Mandilli (pasta handkerchiefs), served with classic pesto, is also irresistible, as are raviolini with shrimp, butter and sage. In fact I have not had a pasta dish here that wasn’t perfectly cooked and well worth eating.
Second courses are not as reliable; they’re simple — broiled or roasted or grilled or sautéed pieces of fish or shellfish or meat, barely sauced — but the modest treatment they receive here works only when the ingredients are absolutely superior, and that’s not always the case. Maybe I eat too much pasta, but that was my judgment more than once.
Farina’s front wall is nearly entirely glass, so it’s bright during the daylight hours; there is a lovely sidewalk seating area, and the interior is modern and pretty. The wines are pan-Italian, fairly priced and interesting. And I left there happy each of the three times I visited.
Farina, 3560 18th Street; (415) 565-0360; farina-foods.com. An average meal for two is $100.
Salsiccia cruda di Bra, spiced veal and pork sausage on grilled crostini and salumi, at Perbacco. More Photos »
By MARK BITTMAN
Published: January 28, 2011
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ABOUT 20 years ago a friend took me to Caffe Trieste in San Francisco’s North Beach for an espresso. It wasn’t easy to find a stand-up espresso in those pre-Starbucks days, but — more to the point — it helped me to recognize the strength and authenticity of that city’s not-especially-large Italian community.
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San Francisco’s Italian Flavor
Northern Italians, mostly from Liguria (specifically Genoa), were among the first European immigrants to arrive in San Francisco in significant numbers, right about the time of the Gold Rush. Perhaps because their arrival coincided with the region’s development, and because much of California is essentially “Mediterranean” in both climate and topography, their impact was profound.
It’s not novel to say that so-called Californian cuisine is essentially Italian (perhaps “Italian-dominated Mediterranean” would be more accurate). But no comparably sized city has more authentic and better regional Italian food — of all the cities in Italy only Rome has the audacity to support restaurants whose food originated in other regions — and, really, with the possible exception of New York, it may be said that San Francisco is the world’s best city for regional Italian food.
There have been better-than-average Italian restaurants in San Francisco for as long as I can remember, but at no time have there been more than there are right now. (The East Bay is equally good.) In addition to those described here, there are Pesce, 54 Mint, Dopo, A-16, Incanto, SPQR, Ragazza, Little Star, Odesso, Corso, Boot & Shoe and others. These four, all in San Francisco proper, are my go-to places for regional Italian food.
Perbacco
Now nearly five years old, Perbacco would be the best restaurant in the vast majority of American cities; here, where the cult of the new dominates, it’s become an afterthought. (It doesn’t help that it’s in the financial district, which is not exactly happening, at least at night — more’s the pity.) Few corners are cut and few accommodations made to timid eaters; this is not what the Italians would call a trattoria (unlike the other places here, more or less), but a real ristorante, an establishment that focuses on traditional dishes done in the highest possible style. The space is large and elegant — if anything, a bit sterile, though not unattractive. The emphasis is on the food of the Piedmont, among the most luxurious of regional Italian cuisines.
Yet two perfect examples sound anything but luxurious: tripe, slow-cooked in white wine and diced aromatic vegetables, with big white beans, rosemary and of course garlic; and pig trotter meat made into cakes, cooked very crisp, with a vinaigrette — known locally (in Piedmont, that is) as batsua, or “silk stocking.” Indeed, the latter dish, though as humble in origin as they get, is really high-class eating — carefully prepared and beautifully served — while the first could convert many who are repelled by offal.
Not that all the food here is challenging. The pastas are accessible and just short of incredible: agnolotti stuffed with veal and cabbage and sauced with a reduction of veal stock and grated cheese (a must); taglierini with a ragù of pork and porcini, with Parmesan; and gnocchi that were light, not eggy or doughy, topped with sheep’s cheese and hazelnuts. They all left our party clamoring for more.
Meat dishes keep the quality level high: a plate of salumi was brilliantly varied and heavenly; meatballs of pork and veal, lightened with apples, is a creation I wanted to replicate at home; hare cooked in its own blood — a dish I’d never previously taken to — was easily the best I’ve ever tasted. Everything was spot on.
Unlike too many good San Francisco restaurants, it’s open for lunch. The wine list is fantastic (there are 20 wines by the glass, most of them interesting), and the desserts are almost as good as the savory dishes. It’s a winner, and one that promises to stay that way.
Perbacco, 230 California Street; (415) 955-0663; perbaccosf.com. An average meal for two is about $100. (None of the prices include drinks or tip.)
La Ciccia
On my last visit to San Francisco I found myself near the once-remote corner of 30th and Church (I think this is called Upper Noe Valley, though there are disagreements) three times. One visit was to Incanto — which is good — and to Tataki, my friend Casson Trenor’s excellent “sustainable sushi” restaurant. The third was my now-regular visit to La Ciccia, the Sardinian restaurant that holds close and well to its roots. Its menu, written in the Sardinian dialect (translated, fortunately), is small and appealing.
Start with pani guttiau, a kind of carta musica, or super-thin flatbread baked with oil, rosemary and pecorino. (Sardinia is one of the world’s best places for sheep’s cheese.) It wouldn’t be amiss to order a thin-crusted pizza or two, also; the one with big fat capers, pecorino, a little mozzarella, oil and oregano is a personal favorite. There is good salumi here, too, including cooked pancetta and cured raw bacon, both of which are divine.
The octopus in dark tomato sauce is simply magnificent; it must have been cooked for many hours. Fresh spaghetti with grated bottarga is a classic and very likable dish; most people I’ve eaten with prefer it to the powerful and possibly hard-to-take sauce of pecorino and tuna heart, which is decidedly “fishy.” Fregola (something like toasted big couscous) with squid ink and a sauce of many different seafoods, is meaty and very good.
Not everything succeeds. Shrimp in a credible but uninspired tomato sauce thrilled no one; lamb with beets, honey and truffle oil felt less than authentic; and the house bread — which you probably won’t eat much of anyway — is weak. But the Sardinian wines are fine and not expensive; most of the food is local and/or organic (though no fuss is made about it); and the desserts, like saffron ice cream and ricotta rosemary cake, shy away from cloying sweetness — a welcome change.
La Ciccia is small (about 40 seats), with an intentionally and elegantly simple design that some might find generic. It’s also homey, if a tad noisy. I intend to keep going until I get sick of it, which hasn’t happened yet.
La Ciccia, 291 30th Street; (415) 550-8114; laciccia.com. An average meal for two is $80.
Delfina Pizzeria
It’s now 12 years since I wrote about the original Delfina, so I can’t be accused of jumping on the bandwagon. But in recent years I’ve become a bigger fan of the operation’s two pizzerias, one of which is in the Mission, next to the original restaurant; the other, which I favor, is in Pacific Heights. (Full disclosure: my daughter is a server there, though it doesn’t help me get reservations, because there aren’t any.)
The place is a joint, and it’s noisy and crowded — the best seats are probably those on the sidewalk, and on my last visit that’s where I sat, semi-sheltered by a canopy, in a light drizzle — and the food is sensational. (To get anyone over the age of 25 into the place, it had better be; this isn’t an atmosphere for unwinding. And often it seems that those who are unwinding do so at high volume. I know, I’m old.)
Anyway. This is southern Italian food done well. I suppose it’s closest to Neapolitan, but there is much here that reminds me of Rome. The cooked vegetables — a simple plate of escarole or chard with raisins and pine nuts, grilled fennel, cauliflower with garlic, capers and bread crumbs — are just perfect, and seem to me the best way to start a meal here, while you’re waiting for a pizza. The pigs’ ears with chili and lime will turn some people off, obviously, but they’re super-popular, for good reason: nothing is crunchier.
There is a lot of disagreement on which are the best pizzas. My favorite, hands down, is the Napoletana, made with tomatoes, anchovies, capers, chilies, olives, oregano — and no cheese. It’s the kind of pizza I grew up eating on Avenue A in New York City, actually, right down to the slightly burnt crust. But if you prefer cheese or meat, there are plenty of good options.
Delfina Pizzeria, 2406 California Street; (415) 440-1189; pizzeriadelfina.com. An average meal for two is $60
Farina
Liguria comes to the Mission at this bright, modern and pretty restaurant with a big open kitchen. The region is represented most vividly here by the focaccia di Recco — golden, poofy, cheese-stuffed dough made in a hill town southeast of Genoa known for little else. I’ve never even seen focaccia di Recco tackled elsewhere, yet Farina has made it a staple here, and they do it well, and in the open — which is fun.
Much of the rest of the menu follows suit. You can get pansotti, another dish you rarely see outside of Liguria. Stuffed with cheese and greens (chard, perhaps, or nettles, or spinach, depending on the month), this triangular pasta is served with a “pesto” made largely from walnuts and is rich, filling and delicious. Mandilli (pasta handkerchiefs), served with classic pesto, is also irresistible, as are raviolini with shrimp, butter and sage. In fact I have not had a pasta dish here that wasn’t perfectly cooked and well worth eating.
Second courses are not as reliable; they’re simple — broiled or roasted or grilled or sautéed pieces of fish or shellfish or meat, barely sauced — but the modest treatment they receive here works only when the ingredients are absolutely superior, and that’s not always the case. Maybe I eat too much pasta, but that was my judgment more than once.
Farina’s front wall is nearly entirely glass, so it’s bright during the daylight hours; there is a lovely sidewalk seating area, and the interior is modern and pretty. The wines are pan-Italian, fairly priced and interesting. And I left there happy each of the three times I visited.
Farina, 3560 18th Street; (415) 565-0360; farina-foods.com. An average meal for two is $100.
1966: Rib Roast of Beef
By ANN SERANNE
Published: January 26, 2011
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This recipe appeared in The Times in an article by Craig Claiborne. Recipe adapted from Ann Seranne, a former editor of Gourmet.
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Food: Recipe Redux: Rib Roast of Beef, 1966 (January 30, 2011)
*
2011: Grilled Prime, Dry-Aged Rib-Eye Steak With Savory Crust (January 30, 2011)
One 2- to 4-rib roast of beef, weighing 4½ to 12 pounds
Flour
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper.
1. Remove the roast from the refrigerator 2½ to 4 hours before cooking.
2. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
3. Place the roast in an open, shallow roasting pan, fat side up. Sprinkle with a little flour, and rub the flour into the fat lightly. Season all over with salt and pepper.
4. Put the roast in the preheated oven and roast according to the roasting chart below, timing the minutes exactly. When cooking time is finished, turn off the oven. Do not open the door at any time. Allow the roast to remain in the oven until oven is lukewarm, or about two hours. The roast will still have a crunchy brown outside and an internal heat suitable for serving as long as 4 hours after removing from the oven. Makes about 2 servings per rib.
Roasting Chart:
No. of Ribs Weight Without Ribs Roasting Time at 500 Degrees
2 4½ to 5 lbs. 25 to 30 mins.
3 8 to 9 lbs. 40 to 45 mins.
4 11 to 12 lbs. 55 to 60 mins.
Published: January 26, 2011
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This recipe appeared in The Times in an article by Craig Claiborne. Recipe adapted from Ann Seranne, a former editor of Gourmet.
Related
*
Food: Recipe Redux: Rib Roast of Beef, 1966 (January 30, 2011)
*
2011: Grilled Prime, Dry-Aged Rib-Eye Steak With Savory Crust (January 30, 2011)
One 2- to 4-rib roast of beef, weighing 4½ to 12 pounds
Flour
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper.
1. Remove the roast from the refrigerator 2½ to 4 hours before cooking.
2. Preheat the oven to 500 degrees.
3. Place the roast in an open, shallow roasting pan, fat side up. Sprinkle with a little flour, and rub the flour into the fat lightly. Season all over with salt and pepper.
4. Put the roast in the preheated oven and roast according to the roasting chart below, timing the minutes exactly. When cooking time is finished, turn off the oven. Do not open the door at any time. Allow the roast to remain in the oven until oven is lukewarm, or about two hours. The roast will still have a crunchy brown outside and an internal heat suitable for serving as long as 4 hours after removing from the oven. Makes about 2 servings per rib.
Roasting Chart:
No. of Ribs Weight Without Ribs Roasting Time at 500 Degrees
2 4½ to 5 lbs. 25 to 30 mins.
3 8 to 9 lbs. 40 to 45 mins.
4 11 to 12 lbs. 55 to 60 mins.
29 January 2011
The Problem With Memoirs
The Problem With Memoirs
Illustration by Timothy Goodman
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: January 28, 2011
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A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
By Heather Havrilesky
239 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95.
THE THINGS THAT NEED DOING
A Memoir
By Sean Manning
240 pp. Broadway Paperbacks. $15.
TWIN
A Memoir
By Allen Shawn
232 pp. Viking. $25.95.
AN EXCLUSIVE LOVE
By Johanna Adorjan
Translated by Anthea Bell
185 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Related
Excerpt: ‘Disaster Preparedness’ (Google Books)
Excerpt: ‘The Things That Need Doing’ (randomhouse.com)
Excerpt: ‘Twin’ (Google Books)
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Books of The Times: ‘Twin’ by Allen Shawn (January 10, 2011)
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Share your thoughts.
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There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.
But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.
Sure, the resulting list has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.
So in a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre, here are a few guidelines for would-be memoirists, arrived at after reading four new memoirs. Three of the four did not need to be written, a ratio that probably applies to all memoirs published over the last two decades. Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped. We don’t have that many trees left.
1
That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Disaster Preparedness,” by Heather Havrilesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.
And so Havrilesky, a former writer for Salon who is now a critic for the iPad publication The Daily, spends 239 pages dragging us through what seems to be an utterly ordinary childhood in North Carolina. Her mother is a little odd, but no odder than yours or mine. There is a divorce, but so what? There are siblings. “We filled each other with fear and anger, then made jokes and laughed together, to soften the blows,” she writes — in other words, they did what all siblings do.
The prose isn’t particularly surprising, and, more to the point, neither is the selection of anecdotes: cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity. Maybe the vignette about the time she and her sister wrote to Amy Carter at the White House would have made a passable subplot in an episode of a mediocre Disney sitcom. The rest belongs on a blog.
2
No one wants to relive your misery. Say you get stuck under a rock and have to cut off your own arm to escape. If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop. You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.
Sean Manning did not lose any limbs, but he did watch his mother die a lingering death from cancer, and in “The Things That Need Doing” he pummels us with the details of every intubation, change in medication and debate with doctors. Why does he do this? It’s certainly not to memorialize his mother; not only does he tell us little about her, but he also strips her of any and all dignity by describing in voyeuristic detail her vomiting, diaper changes and such.
No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. Manning, who was in his mid-20s when he took his lengthy turn at the bedside, seems on every page to be looking for someone to say, “Poor Sean; how about a hug?” But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal.
3
If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it. Imitation runs rampant in memoir land. There can’t be just one book by a bulimic or former war correspondent or spouse of an Alzheimer’s sufferer; there has to be a pile. And lately, the biggest pile of all has been books by parents, siblings and teachers of people with autism.
Allen Shawn, who teaches at Bennington College, is the latest to climb on this heap, with “Twin.” The gimmick: his twin sister, now in her 60s, is autistic. Seems like a potentially interesting variation of the overworked theme. Until, that is, you start reading the book and realize that Shawn’s parents — his father was William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker — had his twin, Mary, institutionalized when she was 8, and that, psychic twinship or not, Allen Shawn doesn’t really know a thing about her.
Shawn describes how the family would arrive in a limousine for their occasional visits with Mary, an image that will infuriate those who have not had the luxury of paying someone else to make their problems go away. “Only a more naturally unified and self-sacrificing family than ours could have tolerated the enormous challenge of bringing her up at home,” he writes of Mary, part of a stunningly tone-deaf attempt to explain away the institutionalization as necessary because the rest of the family was quirky and William Shawn was busy not only with work but also with being a lifelong adulterer.
Institutionalization was just what people did back then, you say? “I am awestruck that, even in the time of my childhood, there were families that had the love, fortitude and resourcefulness to incorporate such children into their world,” Shawn writes near the end of this appalling example of coattail-grabbing. Yes, there were. And they’re the ones who are qualified to add to the heap of autism memoirs.
4
If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. That is basically what Johanna Adorjan has done in “An Exclusive Love” (translated by Anthea Bell), her spare, beautiful exploration of why her grandparents killed themselves. Adorjan, a journalist in Berlin, artfully reconstructs the day in 1991 when her grandparents, who lived in Denmark, took their own lives in a suicide pact. Although she is part of the story, she wisely keeps herself on its edges, occasionally noting personality traits or mementos she inherited from her grandparents, but mostly bringing the two of them to life through her recollections and the memories of contemporaries she interviews.
“We all felt the force of her thrift,” she writes of her grandmother. “Her presents were always received apprehensively: what were we not going to be pleased to get this time? I remember T-shirts much too small for me, and you knew from the smell of them that they had been in my grandparents’ house for a long time (in fact they smelled as if they had been stored in an ashtray). A book that looked as if it had been read. A bottle not quite full of bath foam.”
This fascinating couple, who had survived the Holocaust and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, come slowly into focus for the author and the reader simultaneously, or so Adorjan makes it seem. That’s what makes a good memoir — it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery.
Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.
Neil Genzlinger is a staff editor at The Times.
Illustration by Timothy Goodman
By NEIL GENZLINGER
Published: January 28, 2011
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A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
By Heather Havrilesky
239 pp. Riverhead Books. $25.95.
THE THINGS THAT NEED DOING
A Memoir
By Sean Manning
240 pp. Broadway Paperbacks. $15.
TWIN
A Memoir
By Allen Shawn
232 pp. Viking. $25.95.
AN EXCLUSIVE LOVE
By Johanna Adorjan
Translated by Anthea Bell
185 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
Related
Excerpt: ‘Disaster Preparedness’ (Google Books)
Excerpt: ‘The Things That Need Doing’ (randomhouse.com)
Excerpt: ‘Twin’ (Google Books)
*
Books of The Times: ‘Twin’ by Allen Shawn (January 10, 2011)
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.
* Post a Comment »
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.
But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the “memoir” listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produces about 40,000 hits, or 60,000, or 160,000, depending on how you execute it.
Sure, the resulting list has authors who would be memoir-eligible under the old rules. But they are lost in a sea of people you’ve never heard of, writing uninterestingly about the unexceptional, apparently not realizing how commonplace their little wrinkle is or how many other people have already written about it. Memoirs have been disgorged by virtually everyone who has ever had cancer, been anorexic, battled depression, lost weight. By anyone who has ever taught an underprivileged child, adopted an underprivileged child or been an underprivileged child. By anyone who was raised in the ’60s, ’70s or ’80s, not to mention the ’50s, ’40s or ’30s. Owned a dog. Run a marathon. Found religion. Held a job.
So in a possibly futile effort to restore some standards to this absurdly bloated genre, here are a few guidelines for would-be memoirists, arrived at after reading four new memoirs. Three of the four did not need to be written, a ratio that probably applies to all memoirs published over the last two decades. Sorry to be so harsh, but this flood just has to be stopped. We don’t have that many trees left.
1
That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Disaster Preparedness,” by Heather Havrilesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.
And so Havrilesky, a former writer for Salon who is now a critic for the iPad publication The Daily, spends 239 pages dragging us through what seems to be an utterly ordinary childhood in North Carolina. Her mother is a little odd, but no odder than yours or mine. There is a divorce, but so what? There are siblings. “We filled each other with fear and anger, then made jokes and laughed together, to soften the blows,” she writes — in other words, they did what all siblings do.
The prose isn’t particularly surprising, and, more to the point, neither is the selection of anecdotes: cheerleader tryouts, crummy teenage jobs and, that favorite of oversharers everywhere, the loss of virginity. Maybe the vignette about the time she and her sister wrote to Amy Carter at the White House would have made a passable subplot in an episode of a mediocre Disney sitcom. The rest belongs on a blog.
2
No one wants to relive your misery. Say you get stuck under a rock and have to cut off your own arm to escape. If, as you’re using your remaining hand to write a memoir about the experience, your only purpose in doing so is to make readers feel the blade and scream in pain, you should stop. You’re a sadist, not a memoirist; you merely want to make readers suffer as you suffered, not entertain or enlighten them.
Sean Manning did not lose any limbs, but he did watch his mother die a lingering death from cancer, and in “The Things That Need Doing” he pummels us with the details of every intubation, change in medication and debate with doctors. Why does he do this? It’s certainly not to memorialize his mother; not only does he tell us little about her, but he also strips her of any and all dignity by describing in voyeuristic detail her vomiting, diaper changes and such.
No, the sole purpose of this memoir, like many, many others concerning some personal trial, is to generate sympathy for its author. Manning, who was in his mid-20s when he took his lengthy turn at the bedside, seems on every page to be looking for someone to say, “Poor Sean; how about a hug?” But it’s the reader who will need a hug after choking down this orgy of self-congratulation and self-pity. That’s what happens when immature writers write memoirs: they don’t realize that an ordeal, served up without perspective or perceptiveness, is merely an ordeal.
3
If you’re jumping on a bandwagon, make sure you have better credentials than the people already on it. Imitation runs rampant in memoir land. There can’t be just one book by a bulimic or former war correspondent or spouse of an Alzheimer’s sufferer; there has to be a pile. And lately, the biggest pile of all has been books by parents, siblings and teachers of people with autism.
Allen Shawn, who teaches at Bennington College, is the latest to climb on this heap, with “Twin.” The gimmick: his twin sister, now in her 60s, is autistic. Seems like a potentially interesting variation of the overworked theme. Until, that is, you start reading the book and realize that Shawn’s parents — his father was William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker — had his twin, Mary, institutionalized when she was 8, and that, psychic twinship or not, Allen Shawn doesn’t really know a thing about her.
Shawn describes how the family would arrive in a limousine for their occasional visits with Mary, an image that will infuriate those who have not had the luxury of paying someone else to make their problems go away. “Only a more naturally unified and self-sacrificing family than ours could have tolerated the enormous challenge of bringing her up at home,” he writes of Mary, part of a stunningly tone-deaf attempt to explain away the institutionalization as necessary because the rest of the family was quirky and William Shawn was busy not only with work but also with being a lifelong adulterer.
Institutionalization was just what people did back then, you say? “I am awestruck that, even in the time of my childhood, there were families that had the love, fortitude and resourcefulness to incorporate such children into their world,” Shawn writes near the end of this appalling example of coattail-grabbing. Yes, there were. And they’re the ones who are qualified to add to the heap of autism memoirs.
4
If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it. That is basically what Johanna Adorjan has done in “An Exclusive Love” (translated by Anthea Bell), her spare, beautiful exploration of why her grandparents killed themselves. Adorjan, a journalist in Berlin, artfully reconstructs the day in 1991 when her grandparents, who lived in Denmark, took their own lives in a suicide pact. Although she is part of the story, she wisely keeps herself on its edges, occasionally noting personality traits or mementos she inherited from her grandparents, but mostly bringing the two of them to life through her recollections and the memories of contemporaries she interviews.
“We all felt the force of her thrift,” she writes of her grandmother. “Her presents were always received apprehensively: what were we not going to be pleased to get this time? I remember T-shirts much too small for me, and you knew from the smell of them that they had been in my grandparents’ house for a long time (in fact they smelled as if they had been stored in an ashtray). A book that looked as if it had been read. A bottle not quite full of bath foam.”
This fascinating couple, who had survived the Holocaust and the Hungarian uprising of 1956, come slowly into focus for the author and the reader simultaneously, or so Adorjan makes it seem. That’s what makes a good memoir — it’s not a regurgitation of ordinariness or ordeal, not a dart thrown desperately at a trendy topic, but a shared discovery.
Maybe that’s a good rule of thumb: If you didn’t feel you were discovering something as you wrote your memoir, don’t publish it. Instead hit the delete key, and then go congratulate yourself for having lived a perfectly good, undistinguished life. There’s no shame in that.
Neil Genzlinger is a staff editor at The Times.
26 January 2011
The Minimalist Chooses 25 of His Favorites
By MARK BITTMAN 
Evan Sung for The New York Times Pernil, garlicky slow-cooked pork.
Evan Sung for The New York Times Pernil, garlicky slow-cooked pork.Picking 25 favorites out of more than 1,000 recipes from The Minimalist — the last weekly column appears this week — is an awesome task. But each of these, listed in order of appearance, represents something special either to me or to regular readers of The Minimalist, or in a couple of cases — most notably Jim Lahey’s bread — to a wider audience. It’s a list that will make you want to cook, I think. What are your favorites?
RED PEPPER PURÉE The first Minimalist. Check out the roasting technique; it works. (Published Sept. 17, 1997)
CHICKEN UNDER A BRICK So popular that a group in Santa Cruz, Calif., made a T-shirt that reads, “We love chicken under a brick.” (Oct. 22, 1997)
PEAR, GORGONZOLA AND MESCLUN SALAD Not my invention, but truly a ’90s classic. (Nov. 19, 1997)
SPAGHETTI WITH FRIED EGGS Made this the other night; insanely easy and soothing. (March 10, 1999)
BRAISED SQUID WITH ARTICHOKES Braised fish, artichokes, sometimes potatoes, always garlic and powerful olive oil; that’s Liguria. (April 28, 1999)
PASTA ALLA GRICIA The basis for some of the simplest and best pasta dishes I know. (Nov. 8, 2000)
PUMPKIN PANNA COTTA The headline on this Thanksgiving column said it all: “No Time for Crust? Who Needs It, Anyway?” (Nov. 22, 2000)
WATERMELON AND TOMATO SALAD A Jean-Georges Vongerichten special; especially good with feta. (July 24, 2002)
45-MINUTE ROAST TURKEY Many readers swear by this one. (Nov. 20, 2002)
CRISP-BRAISED DUCK LEGS WITH AROMATIC VEGETABLES This has many of the qualities of duck confit — but no fussiness. (Dec. 25, 2002)
SICHUAN CHICKEN WITH CHILIES Overcook the chicken, overdo the chilies, you’ll be happy. (Sept. 3, 2003)
BLACK COD BROILED WITH MISO Yes, you can do this at home. (April 14, 2004)
STIR-FRIED CHICKEN WITH KETCHUP Perhaps the highest and best use of ketchup. (May 12, 2004)
CORN SALAD WITH SOY AND TOMATO Soy and tomato is a marriage made in heaven; the corn adds crunch. (Aug. 17, 2005)
PARSLEY-HERB SALAD Think of parsley as a green, not an herb, and you get the idea. (Sept. 7, 2005)
SOCCA (FARINATA) From my first taste of this, I’ve been an addict. Best made at home. (Oct. 19, 2005)
STIR-FRIED LAMB WITH CHILI, CUMIN AND GARLIC As soon as I tasted this, in Flushing, Queens, I knew I had to make it. (Sept. 20, 2006)
NO-KNEAD BREAD My most popular recipe, and it isn’t even mine. Credit Jim Lahey. (Nov. 8, 2006)
SCRAMBLED EGGS WITH SHRIMP I know of no dish that exploits the texture of shrimp better. (Jan. 17, 2007)
PERNIL Just the other day, a guy stopped me on the subway and said, “Your pernil is terrific.” It’s not really mine, but I made it that weekend, and it is terrific. (Jan. 2, 2008)
SOUTH INDIAN EGGPLANT CURRY If you are an eggplant fan, this will really turn you on. If you’re not, this will make you one. (April 2, 2008)
BRAISED TURKEY Cooked this way, turkey will remind you of pork. (Nov. 12, 2008)
FENNEL AND CELERY SALAD My wife’s staple. Try it with toasted hazelnuts or pine nuts. (Nov. 26, 2008)
MEXICAN CHOCOLATE TOFU PUDDING What? Yes. (May 20, 2009)
MORE-VEGETABLE-LESS-EGG FRITTATA Just enough eggs to hold it together. One of those transformative recipes. (July 15, 2009)
14 January 2011
India, Through a Birder’s Eyes
Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Eyes on the skies at Chhatra Sagar, a luxury camp on the banks of a dam in parched western Rajasthan. Its reservoir attracts water birds. More Photos »
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: January 14, 2011
IT began with parakeets, the brash, busybody rose-ringed parakeets of Delhi, with their lipstick red beaks and their irrepressible chatter, gossiping in the crevices of 15th-century tombs.
Then one morning while I drank coffee, a shimmering blue-black sunbird came to drink nectar in my garden. At twilight one day, I looked up to see a hornbill perched on a neighbor’s tree. An interview with the prime minister of India was repeatedly interrupted by the calls of a cantankerous peacock in his garden.
And so went my discovery of the birds of India. It was an accumulation of accidental discoveries. A friend in Mumbai recommended that I check out the flamingos dancing in the stinky, mucky mud flats of Sewri. Then one day, not far from the Taj Mahal, a pair of sarus cranes, the tallest flying bird in the world, stood in a shallow pond. On a trip to the outsourcing hub of Bangalore, I was urged to drive off the highway to see pelicans roosting in banyan trees. And trekking across the Himalayan plateau called Ladakh one summer, I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a black-necked crane flying across a still blue lake.
Most improbably of all, on a trip back to that clattering, honking, riotous city called Calcutta, where I was born, I woke up one morning to songbirds.
From the cold lakes of the Himalayas to the sand dunes of western Rajasthan to the tropical rain forests in the south, India hosts a dizzying variety of birds, like a dizzying variety of everything else. Residents and visitors, common and rare, more than 1,200 species have been recorded in India, which puts it somewhere between the United States (just under 900 recorded species) and Colombia (more than 1,800 species).
Several bird species in India are, however, endangered and their habitats are increasingly threatened, as this rapidly modernizing nation expands roads, mines and steel plants into environmentally sensitive areas. It helps that farming is done largely without the thrashers and tractors that ravage nests in more industrialized countries. Most of all, it helps that birds, just like millions of Indians, adjust to difficult conditions: They roost on rooftops. They hide their chicks in rice paddies. They fly away when they must.
“We think of nature as pristine,” said K. S. Gopi Sundar, an Indian ornithologist who studies cranes. “But it’s amazing what nature can do.”
Birding has taken me to some of the most extraordinary landscapes in this country — mangroves and desert, rain forest, cloud forest, mountains and miles and miles of coast.
But even in ordinary surroundings, birding has taught me to appreciate the rewards of being still. You hear a call. You look for a flutter. Suddenly something astonishing comes. And then goes.
What follows is a sampling of birding spots in North and South India. (The northeast and the Andaman Islands, two of India’s most important but least accessible birding areas, must be left for later.)
In an age of so much inconsequential tweeting, it’s worth recalling the advice of yogis: Sit still, they say, so still that a bird can land on your head.
North India: Delhi, Rajasthan, Himalayas
India’s crowded, boorish capital is an improbable haven of birds — and a natural place to linger for a few days, before venturing out to the wilds of the north.
In city parks, hoopoes and hornbills are plentiful; the haunting call of the koel can break the stillness of a muggy afternoon. Owls are everywhere. And on the flood plains of the Yamuna River, now a filthy drain that swallows the sewage of Delhi, a city of an estimated 18 million inhabitants, sits one of North India’s richest nature reserves, the Okhla Bird Sanctuary. At daybreak one scorching Monday at the end of May, I persuaded Mr. Sundar, the ornithologist, to take me there. A flock of garganey ducks was still hanging around before making its way to northern China. A purple heron — “rakish, with long thin neck” in the words of the Oxford “Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” — landed in a clump of water hyacinth.
Mr. Sundar pointed to a tailorbird stitching its delicate, egg-shaped basket of a nest. In a bird version of “MasterChef,” if you will, the males of the species compete to construct the finest nest. The female chooses a nest (and nest-maker) of her liking.
Winter is the best time to visit Okhla, particularly for water birds: storks, flamingos, geese that can fly over Mount Everest. But even in the peak of summer — not exactly prime birding season — Mr. Sundar pointed out at least 20 species over the course of two hours: a yellow-footed pigeon, an oriole, a pair of partridges that waddled across the road just as we drove out.
The road out of Delhi offers three distinct birding habitats: plains, desert and hill. The first option: Hire a car from Delhi and take an extra couple of days on the well-trodden trail connecting Delhi, Agra and Jaipur to visit Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, the former duck-hunting grounds of maharajas and now the country’s best-known bird park.
If you’re spending a day in Agra to see the Taj Mahal, drive two hours to Bharatpur by nightfall and retire early. There are a variety of inns within a mile or two of the sanctuary — as well as a spartan state-run lodge right inside the park. The Birders Inn, where I spent one Christmas Eve, offers clean, unremarkable rooms encircling a pretty garden. The Laxmi Vilas is a renovated 19th-century palace. No matter where you stay, the real charm of Bharatpur is to wake up before dawn and head into the park. Songbirds stir themselves awake. Sambar deer come to drink at a pond. Painted storks spread their pink-dipped wings and alight from their roosts.
If the rains are good and Keoladeo’s lakes are full, the park in winter can host close to 400 species.
A road trip across the North Indian plains usually takes you along a noisy highway, past fields, markets and truck stops. But if you time it right (mornings and evenings are when birds are most likely to reveal themselves), you may well spot the sarus crane in a paddy field, standing nearly five feet tall on spindly pink legs. It is considered good luck for a newlywed couple to see a sarus on their wedding night. Locals believe the sarus mates for life. This is probably apocryphal. But how can seeing a sarus on your honeymoon be anything but a boon?
A second option takes you to the Kumaon Hills, a favorite of many birders because it covers such a wide variety of landscapes: the grasslands and gently rolling hills of Corbett National Park, the alpine woods just above, and then, farther up into oak and rhododendron forests that stretch up to an elevation of 8,000 feet. The rhododendron blooms from February to April, painting the forest red and drawing flocks of nectar-thirsty warblers. The village of Pangot, at about 6,500 feet, is a decent base from which to explore the hills.
The drive up the razorback hills to Pangot is a tricky venture. You may be rewarded by the sight of the reclusive cheer pheasant crossing the road. But you might also find that unseasonal rains have shut the road for fear of landslides. My one trip to Pangot, at what I thought was the tail end of a monsoon, was blanketed by rain. The tour group I used, Asian Adventures, did not warn me in advance of the roads or the rain, and I spent a wet weekend cooped up in a cabin in their Jungle Lore lodge without much electricity; the power was out, and soon the generator conked out too.
In all that rain and wind, the birds hid from view. But they couldn’t hold back their song. As I walked through the forest during an early morning dry spell, they sang and sang, like a choir performing for a blind woman in the mist. My guide could identify each bird by its call. A pair of rufous sibias screeched at each other from across the trees. A gray-headed canary-flycatcher trilled. White-throated laughingthrush giggled like schoolgirls. “Birdsongs,” says the blind narrator of “To the Wedding,” a novel by John Berger, “remind me of what things once looked like.”
The wind shook the rain off the trees. Two men, their bald pates shining, walked slowly up the gravel road, hands clasped behind their backs. The smoke of cooking fires rose up through the dark, damp forest. This is one of the great rewards of birding: In searching for birds, you end up hearing, seeing, smelling a great deal more.
In pursuit of a less rustic sensory feast, I went this winter to a luxury camp, Chhatra Sagar Nimaj, erected on the banks of a dam in parched western Rajasthan. I woke up before sunrise to the twitter — “see here, see here” — of a small, reclusive gray francolin. Mist hung above the water as I stepped out of my tent. Terns dived in for fish. A cormorant sat on the steps of the dam, jerking its neck forward and back, as if peering into the future, and then nervously turning right back to the past — or, more likely, just hunting for fish.
Even if not a storied birding destination, Chhatra Sagar can be a lavish one for the senses. A hundred years ago, a local Rajput noble known as Thakur Chhatra Singh dammed a stream that ran through his fields to store Rajasthan’s most precious resource: water. Ten years ago, his descendants cleverly leveraged it to draw tourists.
The reservoir, full this year, thanks to good rains, is the centerpiece of the resort. Thirteen spacious tents face the water, including two that sit on a nearby hill.
On a guided walk along a dirt trail that encircles the reservoir, I could see through my binoculars a flock of bar-headed geese pecking at the grass on the far edge of the water. An antelope, known in Hindi as nilgai, ambled ahead of us on the path; it had lost one of its horns, presumably in a neelgai version of a barroom brawl. At night, from my tent, I heard jackals.
At sundown, a full bar was laid out under the stars. An inventive kitchen created a meal for a spice-averse Western palate: peas dipped in coriander pesto and a local delicacy of smoked, lightly curried lentil cakes. The spacious tents were equipped with space heaters, often fired by a generator, I later learned, because the electricity supply here, as in much of rural India, remains erratic.
Guests are served bottled water, a common amenity in luxury hotels in India, but excessive, it seemed to me, in a place where locals use and re-use everything nature gives them. (Properly filtered water is safe to drink across India.) And the service was characterized by too much ritual servility for my liking. Waiters bowed, holding trays laden with juice and rose petals, and a porter was deployed to haul a scope and guidebook during our walk, along with bottled water.
Western Ghats: Goa and Kerala
The Western Ghats is a mountain chain that runs nearly 1,000 miles parallel to the Arabian Sea, from just above Mumbai to the tip of the Indian peninsula. It contains craggy hills, tropical evergreens and several rivers that pour down into peninsular India. So rich is its variety of birds, snakes, frogs and butterflies that the Western Ghats is considered a global biodiversity hot spot in urgent need of conservation. Mining poses the greatest threat.
“You pick any spot in the Western Ghats,” said Rajah Jayapal, an ornithologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society in India, “and you will see no less than 300 species.”
The Western Ghats also run through two of India’s most popular tourist destinations: Goa and Kerala.
Goa is a treasure trove of birds. There are shorebirds, forest birds, birds that forage in the mud flats along the Zuari River, great raptors that hover over paddy fields. I have spent entire mornings in a friend’s garden doing nothing but listening to bird songs: orioles, coppersmith barbets, Malabar trogons.
But the richer bird habitat in the Western Ghats lies in Kerala. Like the Kumaon range, it offers a variety of landscapes. You can fly into the spice coast port city of Cochin, drive past paddy fields and within two hours reach a low-altitude deciduous forest. After a day or two here, you can take a narrow, winding highway to highland cloud forests near Munnar. Then, a half-day’s drive east and you’re in the Indira Gandhi National Park in the Annamalai Hills, with its tropical wet evergreens that shelter the great hornbill.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I went with friends to the edges of the Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary, a mosaic of 11 habitats packed into about 50 square miles about a two-hour drive from Cochin. Salim Ali, India’s most famous ornithologist, identified Thattekkad as having one of the richest concentrations of bird diversity in the country. But alas. The sanctuary was closed when I went — a fact disclosed by the tour operator, Kalypso Adventures, only after I had already reached its camp.
At the Hornbill Camp on the banks of the Periyar River, the tents were clean and comfortable, with a pair of lounge chairs on the porch, facing the river. Unwittingly, our visit coincided with one of Kerala’s most important Hindu pilgrimage seasons. So, at 5 a.m., I was jarred awake not by songbirds but by Hindu hymns blasting from loudspeakers at a nearby temple.
The clouds hung low as we drove uphill into the forest that morning. We parked and walked, following the droppings of elephants that must have passed by earlier that morning. A pair of white-bellied treepies flew ahead.
The Malabar parakeets — smaller and screechier than their cousins in Delhi — flitted through the forest. We watched three hill mynahs fly overhead when we heard the long, lilting song of the Malabar whistling thrush. We found the thrush, nearly as black as a crow, with a streak of blue across its head, sitting in a tree, just below a woodpecker. Our guide, Jijo Mathew, reckoned the thrush was happy to be singing like this. I couldn’t argue. So was I.
Late in the day, as darkness crept over a grove of ailanthus, Mr. Mathew extracted an MP4 player from his backpack, hooked it up to a small, plastic Radio Shack speaker and played an unusual track: the territorial call of a jungle owlet, going “kook, kook,” like a terrified kitten, drowning the silence of the forest.
The trick worked. Being territorial creatures, an owlet is irked by another owlet in its lair. And so, just as Mr. Mathew had intended, the recorded call prompted a real jungle owlet — indeed barely bigger than a kitten, with big curious owl eyes — to reveal itself. It fluttered in the trees. Then it came and sat on a branch right in front of us. Owlet stared long and hard. We stared long and hard back.
The forest soon grew dark. Owlet disappeared from view. Mr. Mathew dug into his bag of tricks and pulled out a flashlight. He shone the light across the forest, searching for small, bright eyes in the dark.
PLANNING
A word to the birder going to India: First, ask your tour agency or lodge operator about weather, road conditions, park closures and rain. If you’re visiting a body of water and there hasn’t been enough rain that year, water birds are unlikely to come. Second, do not assume that India’s ecological treasures are always well cared for. After I tried to visit Thettakkad and found it closed, I read in a newspaper that a local citizens’ group had sued the owners of a stone quarry for blasting near the sanctuary.
For the North Indian destinations, fly to New Delhi; there are many international flights daily. For the Western Ghats, Mumbai and Bangalore are the closest international airports; from those cities, take local flights or trains.
WHERE TO STAY
If you go to Corbett, there are a number of inns and cottages on the periphery of the park, including Camp Corbett (cornwall-online.co.uk/camp-corbett; cottages are $68 a person a night, double occupancy), run by Siddharth Anand. His guides can take you birding into Corbett and up to the Kumaon hills.
In Pangot, Mr. Anand runs a lodge called Mountain Quail (blazeatrailadventures.com; 2,400 rupees, or about $54 at 44.8 rupees to the dollar, for two). Its wood-paneled cottages are inviting, and the large windows of the dining room overlook a wide expanse of the Himalayas.
At Jungle Lore (pangot.com) two nights, with meals and birding guide, came to just under 16,000 rupees. I was first offered a cottage next to a neighbor’s barn. The aroma of cow dung was a little too overpowering for me. I asked to be moved. Corbett and Pangot are accessible by train (rctc.co.in).
In Goa, avoid the beach resorts and stay in a village inland; try to take a boat ride on the Zuari River. If you go to Munnar and Top Slip, there are a number of home stays, particularly in old plantation houses, listed in guidebooks and specialized Web sites like homestayskerala.com.
Chhatra Sagar Nimaj (chhatrasagar.com; double rooms 19,800 rupees, including meals and tours) is a two-hour drive from the medieval fort city of Jodhpur, one of a handful of luxury resorts in Rajasthan that offers tourists a respite from the frenzy of India’s human habitats.
To go birding usually means dawdling for hours at your lodge or camp, which for me means that the food had better be good. At Hornbill Camp (thehornbillcamp.com; 5,000 rupees for two) in Kerala, the meals were among the highlights — fresh, local fare like vegetable avial, simmered in coconut milk, spice-rubbed fish, sweet buttery halvah for dessert.
Birding lodges should have proper coffee, since birding demands early morning wake-ups. I have been uniformly disappointed. If you care for good coffee, carry your own.
WHAT TO READ
Salim Ali’s autobiography, “Fall of a Sparrow,” offers a window into the making of an unlikely early Indian naturalist. For visitors to Kumaon, “Man-Eaters of Kumaon” is an old-fashioned, though amusing chronicle of how Jim Corbett went from being a hunter to a conservationist. I find the Oxford “Pocket Guide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent” easy to use.
17 December 2010
In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture
By PATRICIA COHEN
With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.
The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.
The intended audience is scholarly, but a simple online tool allows anyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time — a diversion that can quickly become as addictive as the habit-forming game Angry Birds.
With a click you can see that “women,” in comparison with “men,” is rarely mentioned until the early 1970s, when feminism gained a foothold. The lines eventually cross paths about 1986.
You can also learn that Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe don’t get nearly as much attention in print as Jimmy Carter; compare the many more references in English than in Chinese to “Tiananmen Square” after 1989; or follow the ascent of “grilling” from the late 1990s until it outpaced “roasting” and “frying” in 2004.
“The goal is to give an 8-year-old the ability to browse cultural trends throughout history, as recorded in books,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a junior fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard. Mr. Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, assembled the data set with Google and spearheaded a research project to demonstrate how vast digital databases can transform our understanding of language, culture and the flow of ideas.
Their study, to be published in the journal Science on Friday, offers a tantalizing taste of the rich buffet of research opportunities now open to literature, history and other liberal arts professors who may have previously avoided quantitative analysis. Science is taking the unusual step of making the paper available online to nonsubscribers.
“We wanted to show what becomes possible when you apply very high-turbo data analysis to questions in the humanities,” said Mr. Lieberman Aiden, whose expertise is in applied mathematics and genomics. He called the method “culturomics.”
The data set can be downloaded, and users can build their own search tools.
Working with a version of the data set that included Hebrew and started in 1800, the researchers measured the endurance of fame, finding that written references to celebrities faded twice as quickly in the mid-20th century as they did in the early 19th. “In the future everyone will be famous for 7.5 minutes,” they write.
Looking at inventions, they found technological advances took, on average, 66 years to be adopted by the larger culture in the early 1800s and only 27 years between 1880 and 1920.
They tracked the way eccentric English verbs that did not add “ed” at the end for past tense (i.e., “learnt”) evolved to conform to the common pattern (“learned”). They figured that the English lexicon has grown by 70 percent to more than a million words in the last 50 years and they demonstrated how dictionaries could be updated more rapidly by pinpointing newly popular words and obsolete ones.
Steven Pinker, a linguist at Harvard who collaborated on the Science paper’s section about language evolution, has been studying changes in grammar and past tense forms for 20 years.
“When I saw they had this database, I was quite energized,” he said. “There is so much ignorance. We’ve had to speculate what might have happened to the language.”
The information about verb changes “makes the results more convincing and more complete,” Mr. Pinker added. “What we report in this paper is just the beginning.”
Despite the frequent resistance to quantitative analysis in some corners of the humanities, Mr. Pinker said he was confident that the use of this and similar tools would “become universal.”
Reactions from humanities scholars who quickly reviewed the article were more muted. “In general it’s a great thing to have,” Louis Menand, an English professor at Harvard, said, particularly for linguists. But he warned that in the realm of cultural history, “obviously some of the claims are a little exaggerated.” He was also troubled that, among the paper’s 13 named authors, there was not a single humanist involved.
“There’s not even a historian of the book connected to the project,” Mr. Menand noted.
Alan Brinkley, the former provost at Columbia and a professor of American history, said it was too early to tell what the impact of word and phrase searches would be. “I could imagine lots of interesting uses, I just don’t know enough about what they’re trying to do statistically,” he said.
Aware of concerns raised by humanists that the essence of their art is a search for meaning, Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden emphasized that culturomics simply provided information. Interpretation remains essential.
“I don’t want humanists to accept any specific claims — we’re just throwing a lot of interesting pieces on the table,” Mr. Lieberman Aiden said. “The question is: Are you willing to examine this data?”
Mr. Michel and Mr. Lieberman Aiden first started their research in 2004 on irregular verbs. Google Books did not exist then, and they had to scrutinize stacks of Anglo-Saxon texts page by page. The process took 18 months.
“We were exhausted,” Mr. Lieberman Aiden said. That painstaking work “was a total Hail Mary pass; we could have collected this data set and proved nothing.”
Then they read about Google’s plan to create a digital library and store of every book ever published and recognized that it could revolutionize their research. They approached Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, about using the collection to do statistical analyses.
“He realized this was a great opportunity for science and for Google,” Mr. Michel said. “We spent the next four years dealing with the many, many complicated issues that arose,” including legal complications and computational constraints. (A proposed class-action settlement pertaining to copyright and compensation brought by writers and publishers as a result of Google’s digitization plans is pending in the courts.) Google says the culturomics project raises no copyright issue because the books themselves, or even sections of them, cannot be read.
So far, Google has scanned more than 11 percent of the entire corpus of published books, about two trillion words. The data analyzed in the paper contains about 4 percent of the corpus.
The warehouse of words makes it possible to analyze cultural influences statistically in a way previously not possible. Cultural references tend to appear in print much less frequently than everyday words, said Mr. Michel, whose expertise is in applied math and systems biology. An accurate picture needs a huge sample. Checking if “sasquatch” has infiltrated the culture requires a supply of at least a billion words a year, he said.
As for culturomics? In 20 years, type the word into an updated version of the database and see what happens.
15 December 2010
nobel boycott - friedman
Under pressure from Beijing, the following countries joined China’s boycott of the ceremony: Serbia, Morocco, Pakistan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ukraine, Algeria, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Vietnam and the Philippines. What a pathetic bunch.
12 December 2010
Now Grandma Can ‘Win a Trip’ Too
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Each time I announce my annual “win-a-trip contest,” to take a university student with me on a reporting trip to the developing world, I get indignant letters.
“Why put such a confining restriction as ‘university students’?” asked Laura McNamara. “How about students of life?”
Betty Michelozzi wrote that she got her first passport at age 63 to go to Guatemala on a Habitat for Humanity team and spent the next 15 years leading such groups. And Peggy from Oregon asked tartly what I was going to do for “us old folks, who aren’t dead yet?”
Point well taken. So for this fifth anniversary trip, I’m going to take not only a university student but also someone over 60. Seniors, dig out your anti-malaria mosquito netting now.
But first, a caution: Colleagues are sadly suspicious of these trips. Maybe it goes back to a night a co-worker and I spent in an abandoned hut in Congo.
My friend noticed a huge tarantula in the thatch roof directly above him and objected to turning out the flashlight. I scolded him for his timidity, suggested the tarantula was probably dead, mocked the idea that it would fall on him, noted dismissively that it would be absurd to switch places, and bullied him into silence. We turned off the light — and the next thing I heard was a small “thud” beside me. And then a scream.
I’m not sure where we’ll go on this win-a-trip, but one possibility is overland to Timbuktu, another is across either Sudan or Malawi, and a third is to Pakistan, India and Nepal. We’ll explore education, health and nutrition, and you’ll blog on NYTimes.com and record video diaries.
On the very first win-a-trip in 2006, we were held up at gunpoint in the Central African Republic. But we also were able to shine a powerful spotlight on maternal mortality when we came across the wrenching scene of a woman dying in childbirth in Cameroon.
One point of these trips is that there are solutions. Helping people is hard, and plenty of interventions fail. But we’re getting smarter at figuring out what makes a difference. In Congo, we saw how deworming children once a year — for about 50 cents per child — reduces anemia and sickness, and leaves children more likely to attend school.
(In case our win-a-trip cuisine has shortcomings, I offer each companion a special bonus: a free deworming pill.)
While one aim of the win-a-trip contest is to focus attention on global issues, another is to encourage Americans to travel in the developing world. That’s why I started with young people: arguably, the single biggest failing of American universities is that they are parochial and don’t adequately expose students to the one-third of the world that lives on less than $2 a day.
Each year, some of the luckiest entrants in my contest are those who lose — and are so miffed at me that they organize their own trips. It’s crazy to spend college tuition studying Spanish on campus, for example, when you can learn the language far more cheaply in Peru.
If you’re graduating from college, think about the Peace Corps, Princeton in Africa, or other chances to work or live abroad. I recently met Molly Fay, who spent a year after college in Kenya helping with “camel clinics” — health clinics that travel to remote villages by camel. That experience transformed her life. She resolved to become a doctor and is now at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
If you’re a high school senior, think about taking a “gap year” — nearly all colleges will defer admission — and exploring the world. It’ll be cheaper than a year of college and may well be more educational.
I took a gap year myself, working for the Future Farmers of America youth organization and then picking peaches on a farm in France. My eldest son is taking a gap year in China right now.
Look up Global Citizen Year, which places gap-year students in Africa and Latin America. Or find a country to teach English in through WorldTeach .org. Or volunteer through omprakash .org.
It used to be that it was mostly young people who wanted to change the world. But increasingly older generations are joining in and doing extraordinary work — the winners of the annual “Purpose Prize” for people over 60 are extraordinarily inspiring. And an “encore career” — a post-retirement job, possibly volunteer — allows seniors to do meaningful work on their own schedule. Encore.org is an excellent resource.
So, whether you’re a student or a senior, apply for my win-a-trip contest, and together we’ll try to spotlight some of the world’s neglected problems. To apply, visit my blog, nytimes.com/ ontheground, and thanks in advance to the Center for Global Development for helping screen applications.
But even if you don’t win my trip, I hope that you’ll go out and fashion your own.
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom Shanker
Countries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
Adrian Bradshaw/European Pressphoto Agency
A coal mine in Mongolia near the Chinese border.
In the intellectual heart of the American military and policy-making world, these are emerging not just as environmental issues, but as the potential stuff of conflict in the 21st century.
In some ways, the role of resources in shaping conflict is nothing new. Much as the Spanish conquistadors sought gold,
Now a new field of systematic study is opening within research centers, the Pentagon and intelligence institutions. It assumes that the 21st century will be shaped not just by competitive economic growth, but also by potentially disruptive scarcities — depletion of minerals; desertification of land; pollution or overuse of water; weather changes that kill fish and farms.
National security experts have begun to label such factors threats to “natural security” and to study them, often alongside environmental or advocacy groups. A basic question frames their thinking: What are the new relationships among resources, diplomacy, crisis and conflict?
One hint of the complexity can be seen along the
Strategists also knew that there were other stakes in the outcome. Afghanistan has been seen for decades as a potential route for pipelines carrying Central Asian gas — but only if there is peace. And underground lie huge deposits of riches like
The National Intelligence Council has a major effort under way to analyze threats from water and food shortages related to
National security officials are careful to say that resources are only one factor in the development of conflicts. How politics and diplomacy shape relationships is, in the end, decisive. “But these can be a trigger of instability,” said one senior American intelligence official, whose job forbids him to speak for attribution. “They cause the magnification of other issues.”
Last summer, for example, flooding that uprooted millions of Pakistanis stirred fear in Washington that militant movements might prove more adept than Pakistan’s weak government at delivering aid. Last month, the advocacy group Refugees International reported that the Pakistani Army did respond effectively, but that civilian authorities struggled and American and international agencies should be better prepared for climate-related calamities.
Senior military and intelligence officials who focus on “natural security” issues say the Obama administration has shown a greater understanding of the subtleties than its predecessor, in part because it does not challenge basic assumptions about the harmful impact of climate change.
“But the issues are so complex, the number of actors and the uncertainties are high,” the senior American intelligence officer said. “So the analysis is still speculative. It makes planning much harder and preventive action much harder.”
The natural security risks take many forms. Here are five scenarios, current or anticipated.
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom ShankerCountries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
Dale de la Rey/Bloomberg News
China, once a symbol of underdevelopment, is now the world’s No. 2 economy.
THE POLITICAL ISSUE
As rising nations industrialize, they compete for resources, or use resource exports as bargaining chips in disputes;
RESOURCES IN PLAY
Oil,
China is buying mineral concessions across
China has risen, in less than 40 years, from a symbol of underdevelopment to the world’s No. 2 economy, and the transformation has left a vast gulf between rich and poor. Its leaders’ greatest fear is political instability, and so it seeks rapid growth to spread the benefits of the new wealth. But its voracious appetite for minerals has at times set it at odds with the West over policies toward countries like
“The Chinese look at the most important thing to keep that growth going, and it is natural resources,” said Vice Adm. Doug Crowder, a former commander of Navy forces in the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom ShankerCountries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
Jehad Nga for The New York Times
Members of a pirate militia guarded the beach in Hobyo, Somalia, on the lookout for foreign fishing vessels.
THE POLITICAL ISSUE
RESOURCES AT PLAY
Arable land, water, oil, sea lanes
Warships from more than half a dozen nations, on the lookout for
Both problems are usually traced to weak governments and lawlessness. Less appreciated is the role that changes in climate have played in the disintegration of political authority.
Many Somalian pirates are fishermen who can no longer make a living in waters depleted by overfishing. Meanwhile, arable land and water supplies have been drying up, increasing poverty and driving farmers off the land. These shifts have only fed civil conflict and warlordism.
Desertification, disorder and weak government also plague Yemen. “These trends feed cycles of violence, instability and conflict,” said one intelligence officer, who calls the trends “a recipe for a failing state.”
It was in Yemen that a Navy destroyer, the Cole, was attacked by Al Qaeda in 1998, and where terror cells that swear allegiance to the bin Laden network have since set up shop. Secret diplomatic cables released by
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom ShankerCountries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
Jane Hahn for The New York Times
Oil spilled from a well in Kegbara Dere, Nigeria, last April and May.
THE POLITICAL ISSUE
Pollution and extraction complicate local conflicts in lands rich in minerals and fossil fuels
RESOURCES IN PLAY
Oil, wetlands, fisheries, water
Oil and gas operations are centered in the ecologically delicate Niger Delta, which has long been lawless; rebels sabotage foreign oil operations, local residents tap into pipelines to pilfer fuel, and the companies have let aging infrastructure deteriorate, all of which feed intense pollution that threatens
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom ShankerCountries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
John McConnico/Associated Press
An iceberg off Ammassalik Island in Greenland.
THE POLITICAL ISSUE
Rights to the seabed under the melting
RESOURCES AT PLAY
Exploration for minerals,
In 2007,
Russia has already used its oil and gas exports as instruments of state power in dealing with other former Soviet republics. Now, how the seabed would be divided, managed or protected promises to be a subject of dispute with other Arctic nations, presumably to be settled by new treaties or conventions.
Meanwhile, changing ecosystems threaten Arctic
Why We Might Fight, 2011 Edition
By Thom ShankerCountries thirst for oil, compete for minerals and confront climate change. The American military, with surprising allies, worries that these issues represent a new source of conflict.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
A soybean field in Mato Grosso, Brazil; formerly a forest.
THE POLITICAL ISSUE
What one country can do in the interests of all
RESOURCES AT PLAY
Rain forests, wetlands, habitable areas, arable land;
Even as periodic international conferences fail to achieve consensus on how to address
The Amazon is Earth’s largest oxygen-replenishing
Since 2004, deforestation has slowed dramatically, and now global experts give Brazil’s leaders high marks for environmental stewardship.
“Brazil is a major emerging economic powerhouse, which is going to give it all kinds of influence,” said Sarah O. Ladislaw at the
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