Corvus.corax

NYTimes: While everyone welcomes Crispr-Cas9 as a strategy to treat disease, many scientists are worried that it could also be used to alter genes in human embryos, sperm or eggs in ways that can be passed from generation to generation. The prospect raises fears of a dystopian future in which scientists create an elite population of designer babies with enhanced intelligence, beauty or other traits.

Does the author really think that smart, beautiful people are a bad thing? Should we shoot the ones we have now? (It seems unlikely that we are at a local maximum).

Sometimes my fellow humans depress me. But I hope for better ones in the future.

bookshop:

solongasitswords:

nullbula:

thesylverlining:

what happened in roughly 1870 though

why was there temporary internet

with a few people searching for pokemon?

It’s a search of Google books, but the question still stands, what the Fuck happened in 1870

I CAN ANSWER THIS!!

In the Cornish dialect of English, Pokemon meant ‘clumsy’ (pure coincidence).

In the mid 1800s there was a surge of writing about the Cornish language and dialect in an attempt to preserve them with glossaries and dictionaries being written. I wrote about it HERE.

I just love that this post happened to find the ONE HUMAN ON THE INTERNET who had the answer to this question

Good science arrived late. The modern techniques — observational testing, theory building — emerged in the 16th century. What took so long?

Fans of Game of Thrones know that “a Lannister always pays his debts.” So too do nearly all alumni from Notre Dame, Vassar, Harvey Mudd, and Brigham Young, at least when it comes to federal student loans.

There is more here, from Brookings, via Matthew C. Klein.  Ahem…and for whatever reason, students from St. Johns do well too…

“You are mostly not you… We are not individuals; we are ecosystems.”

Being alone may be the central anxiety of our time but, as it turns out, you are never really alone — at least in a biological sense: Every single cell of you — that is, every cell made of human DNA — is kept company by ten cells of microbes that call your body home. And because microbes are single-celled organisms that each carry their own DNA, the difference is even starker in genetic terms — you carry approximately twenty thousand human genes and two to twenty million microbial ones, which makes you 99% microbe. What’s more, although you and I are 99.99% identical in our human DNA, we are vastly different in our individual microbiomes — you have only one in ten of my microbes. Even more striking than the sheer number of these silent and invisible cohabitants is their power over what we consider our human experience — they influence everything from our energy level to how we handle illness to our moods to how tasty we are to mosquitoes.

The enormous implications of this micro-scale relationship, implicated in conditions as diverse as obesity, anxiety, arthritis, autism, and depression, are what Rob Knight explores in the deeply fascinating Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes (public library) from TED Books, who have previously published journalist Pico Iyer on the art of stillness and mathematician Hannah Fry on the mathematics of love.

Knight, a Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering and Director of the Microbiome Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, writes:

You are made up of about ten trillion human cells — but there are about a hundred trillion microbial cells in and on your body. Which means: you are mostly not you.

But we are not, as we have thought, merely the unlucky hosts to the occasional bad bug that gives us an infection. In fact, we live in balance with a whole community of microbes all the time. Far from being inert passengers, these little organisms play essential roles in the most fundamental processes of our lives, including digestion, immune responses, and even behavior.

Our inner community of microbes is actually more like a collection of different communities. Different sets of species inhabit different parts of the body, where they play specialized roles. The microbes that live in your mouth are distinct from those residing on your skin or in your gut. We are not individuals; we are ecosystems.

[…]

We’re discovering that microbes are deeply integrated into almost all aspects of our lives. Indeed, microbes are redefining what it means to be human.

And yet all this incredible complexity was practically unknown to us a mere forty years ago — a sobering testament to how inconstant knowledge is and how illusory our sense of its completeness. (Astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser captures this beautifully in his manifesto for living with mystery, in which he writes: “We strive toward knowledge, always more knowledge, but must understand that we are, and will remain, surrounded by mystery.”) Knight considers the staggering disconnect between our longtime obliviousness to the single-celled universe and its far-reaching dominion:

Single-celled organisms are more diverse than all of the plants and animals combined. As it turns out, animals, plants, and fungi; every human, jellyfish, and dung beetle; every strand of kelp, patch of moss, and soaring redwood; and every lichen and mushroom — all the life we can see with our eyes — amount to three short twigs at the end of one branch on the tree of life.

So staggering is this diversity that not only are the microbes on your hands 85% different from those on mine — meaning we each have a microbial fingerprint — but the microbes on your left hand are even different from those on your very own right hand.

Inspired by the theory of biogeography developed by the great British biologist and anthropologist Alfred Russel Wallace — Wallace, Darwin’s contemporary and the underdog of the race for evolutionary theory, mapped the relationship between land area and species diversity — Knight collaborated with University of Colorado evolutionary biology and ecology professor Noah Fierer to develop a similar way of mapping computer keyboard area and microbial species diversity. They came up with what they call the “Wallace line” between the letters G and H — the fault line of mingling for the microbial populations of your left and right hand, which each colonize the respective half of the keyboard.

Here is some perspective for our human solipsism, which tends to grasp things not in absolute terms but in terms relative to us: You carry about three pounds of microbes in your body, which renders your microbiome one of your largest organs — around the same weight as your brain. But more than a mere static presence, this hefty microbiome is an active agent in your dynamic state of being. Knight points to one particularly pause-giving point of impact — the growing body of evidence that our microbiome affects our behavior, shaping “who we become and how we feel”:

It turns out that, rather than too few mechanisms, there are almost too many to contemplate.

From their throne in our guts, microbes not only influence how we digest food, absorb drugs, and produce hormones, but they can also interact with our immune systems to affect our brains. Together the various interactions between microbes and the brain are called the microbiome-gut-brain axis, and understanding this axis could have profound implications for our understanding of psychiatric disorders and our nervous system.

Among the potential applications of this understanding is the promise of alleviating the physiological and psychoemotional burdens of obesity:

Sometimes our genes determine which bacteria live inside us, and then those bacteria turn right around and influence how we behave. This is very well demonstrated in mice lacking a gene called Tlr5, which makes them overeat and subsequently become obese. Mice missing Tlr5 have microbes that make them hungrier; they overeat and become fat. We can prove it’s the microbes doing this in two separate experiments. In one, we transfer the Tlr5-less mice’s microbes into other genetically normal mice, which then overeat and become fat. In the other study, we use antibiotics to wipe out the microbes in the Tlr5-less mice and watch as their appetites return to normal. It’s amazing to think a genetic tweak can create gut microbes that affect behavior and that this behavior can be transferred into another stomach and alter the behavior of its formerly normal host.

Knight points to similar studies being done on inhibiting anxiety by introducing microbes from anxiety-free mice to anxious mice, and considers the imminent development of vaccines against stress, PTSD, and depression. He points to one particularly promising area of study:

According to the World Health Organization, depression is now the leading cause of disability in the United States and is rapidly becoming more common in the developing world. This increase in depression rates matches the rise of other diseases frequently considered to be Western, such as inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, and diabetes, all of which, we now know, have both immune and microbial components. Could our estranged soil bacteria, which modulate the immune system, be playing a role? In experiments in mice, Mycobacterium vaccae, a soil bacterium, has reduced anxiety. Intriguingly, in a social stress situation (essentially, smaller mice are put in a cage with a much larger, dominant mouse, which beats them up), M. vaccae treatment makes the mice much more resilient against the effects of stress, possibly providing a model for treating stress disorders in humans.

But far beyond the realm of lab mice, we’re conducting everyday experiments on our human microbiome all the time, usually without realizing it — Knight points out that everything from our diet (for instance, the balance of grains and proteins we eat and our your alcohol intake) to the antimicrobial hand-soap we buy to our use of antibiotics alters our microbiome.

Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Knight’s book, far beyond its scientific fascination, is its role as a vital public service announcement against the misuse and overuse of antibiotics — an outcry against the monoculture of mainstream medicine and a call for reclaiming our agency in the handling of our own bodies.

Pointing out that vaccines have “saved more lives throughout the world than any innovation except clean water” and are thus “humanity’s greatest triumph in public health,” he turns a critical eye toward the ludicrous anti-vaccination movement, lamenting “how much people worry about vaccines and how little they worry about antibiotics.”

A quick primer here: Antibiotics work by killing harmful bacteria in our bodies with poison that is more toxic to them than it is to us. But because bacteria breed rapidly, they also adapt to evolutionary pressures fast. Antibiotics exert one such pressure, which means bacteria swiftly sidestep the poison’s effect by developing resistance to it. Like the spammers who are constantly outsmarting and bypassing our anti-spam systems, we end up bombarded with unwanted, harmful material despite our ephemeral defenses.

But apart from being largely ineffective in the long run, antibiotics have a darker and far more significant downside — they tamper with our microbiome, sometimes modifying it to a dangerous degree. They are especially perilous for newborns and young children — Knight notes that antibiotics in the first six months are associated with weight gain (which is hardly surprising, given we use antibiotics to fatten up livestock) and may put the child at greater risk for obesity in adulthood:

Antibiotics can have a profound effect on a child’s microbial development, which may account for their apparent influence on later obesity.

[…]

Antibiotic treatment of newborns, even briefly, causes significant alterations to the composition of their gut bacteria. Perhaps more worrisome, antibiotics disturb the normal patterns of colonization of Bifidobacterium, one of the beneficial microbes. Colonization by Bifidobacterium plays a critical role in the development of a child’s immune system. Antibiotic use early in life may thus elevate the risks of allergies and allergic asthma by reducing the beneficial effects of microbial exposure.

But we are creatures of instant gratification, which is probably why we are so much more accepting of antibiotics, even if they are far more dangerous, than we are of vaccines — we take antibiotics when we are ill and they make us feel better almost immediately, almost miraculously; we are given vaccines when we are healthy, in the hope that they prevent some far-off future illness which, if they perform their respective medical miracle and work, we actually never get to experience. It’s easy to choose something that works easily and quickly, however perilous the side effects, to something that works invisibly and with greatly delayed gratification, even if it’s the safest life-saver.

In the remainder of the altogether illuminating Follow Your Gut, Knight goes on to explore how we get our microbiome and what we can do to optimize it for better physical and psychological health, both as individuals and as a culture. Complement it with Knight’s TED talk, which planted the seed for the book:

Illustrations by Olivia de Salve Villedieu

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Encouraging students to challenge ideas is crucial to fostering a generation of Muslim scientists who are free thinkers, says Rana Dajani.

Nature 520 409 doi: 10.1038/520409a

Malevolent personalities come in flavours, says Del Paulhus, the University of British Columbia psychologist who coined the term ‘dark triad’ to describe a trifecta of human evil: the Machiavellian plotter strategising the downfall of others, smiling all the while; the impulsive psychopath, pouncing to steal a friends’ last penny; the self-entitled narcissist, seizing the corner […]

The post A touch of evil appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Duel After the Masquerade

Jonathan Gottschall is a Distinguished Fellow in the English Department at Washington & Jefferson College. His research at the intersection of science and art has frequently been covered in outlets such as The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, Scientific American, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, Science, and NPR. His book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Selection and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His latest book is The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch.

*  *  *

Harris: Jonathan, you and I seem to have had similar midlife crises: We each woke up one morning and were suddenly very interested in violence, self-defense, martial arts, and related topics. But you went so far as to have a real mixed martial arts (MMA) cage match, the training for which is the subject of your new book, The Professor in the Cage. How did this manic idea take hold of you?

Gottschall: Well, I think I was 38 at the time (I’m 42 now). I’m an adjunct English professor at a small college in Pennsylvania, and I’ve been an adjunct for ten years. I make about $16,000 a year. I publish fairly well but, for various reasons, it’s pretty clear that my academic career is not going to come to anything. The tenure track hasn’t happened, and it’s probably not going to.

So I kind of reached this point where it was an authentic midlife crisis. It was like, Here I am: I’m pushing up on middle age, and I don’t quite have a real job. What am I going to do with my life? I knew the first thing I had to do was quit my job and move on to something else, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I really wanted to be an English professor when I grew up. It was my great ambition in life.

So I thought, “Well, maybe I can get myself fired.” At about that time, when I was going through this sort of crisis, an MMA gym—Mark Shrader’s Academy of Mixed Martial Arts—opened across the street from the English Department, and I thought that was just hilarious. A cage fighting gym was now as far away from my office as you could throw a snowball. The juxtaposition of the incredibly refined world of the English Department and this savagery across the street struck me as very, very funny, and I started to fantasize about going over there.

The fantasy was never about “Hey, I’m a serious tough guy. I’m going to go over there and kick ass.” It was like a joke. I thought I could make people in the department laugh. They’d see me walk over there. They’d look up from their poems and there I’d be, in the cage, getting beat up.

And then I had this other funny thought: “That’s how I’ll do it. That’s how I’ll get myself fired. That’s how I’ll get out of this job, because English Departments really don’t approve of blood sport.”

It all began as an elaborate career-suicide fantasy. But then I thought, “Maybe there’s a book in this.” So I went across the street and tried to learn how to fight and ended up writing a book.

Harris: Well, there definitely was a book in it, and a very good one. As you know, I’ve read it and greatly enjoyed it. I recommend that our readers pick it up.

Let’s discuss why it is taboo for an intellectual like yourself to become interested in violence. Of course, one can study violence historically or think about how to mitigate it politically—those are perfectly acceptable areas of academic interest—but to be motivated by the prospect that one might someday have to face it, and have to use it in turn, and to train for this possibility, is somehow disreputable.

Whenever I’ve written about self-defense, I’ve heard from readers who are totally nonplussed—even outraged—that a scientist would have any interest in this topic. Clearly, you assumed you were going to encounter a similar reaction when you started training in MMA, but to what degree did you actually encounter it?

Gottschall: I don’t know. I think that jury is still out. The people in my English Department are very nice people. I was really hoping that they would be a lot more intolerant than they actually are.

I think there was also a certain humor to my mission—or stunt, if you want to call it that—which mitigated the problem for them. They’d ask about it, but always with a little smirk on their faces. It was kind of funny to think about me doing these things, whereas your writing about self-defense—which I love, by the way—is very serious stuff. There’s none of the humor to take the edge off.

The reaction I feared will probably occur once the book actually comes out. It just won’t happen in the English Department, where my colleagues know me to be a decent person.

However, in my profession more generally, it’s not an exaggeration to say that masculinity is viewed as the root of all evil. If you were to take a literary theory course, you might think it would be about literature, but it’s really not. It’s about all the various forms of oppression on earth and how we can see them playing out in literary works. And behind all these forms of oppression is a guy.

So in a humanities department, masculinity is associated with everything oafish, violent, and oppressive. I thought that by going to train across the street, I would be seen as embracing all the worst attributes of manhood rather than doing what I should be doing, which is talking about just how awful they are.

Of course, if I were writing a polemic against cage fighting, then I’d get a free pass. But I think that because my feelings about the sport ended up being pretty positive, the book may be controversial in the intellectual world.

Harris: Doing this as a book project definitely gave you some cover. And you’re right—there probably is a difference between being interested in martial arts from the self-defense side and being interested in MMA as a sport. Maybe we should talk about that.

Gottschall: Yes, I’d love to. I didn’t know about your martial arts interest until that Atlantic article came out. Then I went to your website and read your piece about Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ), and that took me to your self-defense article.

In your self-defense article, you basically give three rules about what to do in an authentic self-defense situation. I think this advice is clear and sound, and everyone should read it. I sent it around to my family members just a couple of days ago. But it became clear to me that in order to follow your advice, one has to recognize and even turn off psychological biases that have been built into us by evolution—especially the honor-based psychology that leads men in particular to feel that it’s worth getting into a fight over some minor slight. Telling someone to “just walk away” is going against the grain of hundreds of thousands of years of hominid evolution, during which it really was damaging to suffer a slight to your honor.

The same thing goes for property defense: If you tell someone, “Hey, man, just give him the wallet,” you’re battling a psychology that’s evolved over millennia when giving up your property wasn’t always an option. You couldn’t just call the insurance company to reimburse you.

Harris: Yes, and that’s why avoiding unnecessary violence can be very difficult, especially for men. In your book, you write at some length about the history of duels and other forms of honor violence. But for most of us, the world has changed. In fact, civilization is “civilized” largely to the extent that we agree to leave this sort of violence in our past. Of course, there are places where honor violence still thrives, and these are contexts in which it might be rational even for people like ourselves to engage in it. In a maximum-security prison, for instance, it often makes sense for an otherwise decent person to act like a total barbarian—because the only thing likely to keep him safe in such an environment is a reputation for explosive violence. In most free societies, however, a propensity for such violence will ruin your life and most likely land you in prison—where, ironically, this attitude will suddenly become an asset.

I believe it was Rory Miller who coined the phrase “the monkey dance” to name the dominance ritual that men tend to fall into when in conflict with other men. It usually starts with a hard stare that elicits “What the hell are you looking at?” from the other party. This invites some version of “Fuck you,” and then the conflict escalates. It’s amazing how scripted these encounters tend to be—the first physical contact is a finger poke or a two-handed shove to the chest or a push to the face, which is answered by an overhand right. We are about as original in these contests as bears are.

The psychological forces here—honor and shame—are very captivating, however. If a man wants to reliably avoid violence in bars, soccer stadiums, and so forth, he has to somehow scrub this programming from the hard drive. Otherwise he stands a good chance of being lured into an escalating exchange that admits of no face-saving exit.

Gottschall: You said earlier that I had recently gone through a midlife crisis. And in some ways I had. But this crisis about fighting and about courage and about whether I was brave is an old crisis. I was a very late bloomer as a kid. I came into my adult size and muscle very late. Whenever I was confronted in the schoolyard, I found some way to avoid the fight. I ran for it. I backed down. Psychologically and emotionally, that isn’t a low-cost course of action for most boys. You avoid a physical beating, but you pay a real social and psychological cost for it. Those moments of walking away from fights, even though I knew it was the rational and civilized thing to do, cost me tremendously. I think that’s why I finally got in that cage to fight.

People say the duel is dead. The duel really isn’t dead in the sense of escalating conflict over honor. It’s now what it always was—the world’s leading cause of homicide—when one guy brushes another guy’s shoulder in a bar and says, “Hey, man, what the fuck?” Before you know it, they’re bashing each other over the head with beer bottles. That’s a kind of duel.

Harris: The depth of this emotional cost you mentioned is pretty fascinating. And it’s something I probably haven’t paid enough attention to. There’s a scene in Louis C.K.’s show Louie where he dramatizes a humiliating version of this—where a young punk confronts an older man on a date and makes him beg not to be beaten up. After it’s over, his date says, “I’m sorry, but that was a real turnoff… I don’t know why.”

There is a psychological cost to taking what is, from a self-defense perspective, very good advice. As you say, the cost can be very high—especially if you have avoided violence your entire life and therefore never discovered whether you can handle yourself in a fight. Real training, of the sort that you did, can help remove that doubt.

Gottschall: Yes, that’s true. It’s probably different in most martial arts, but in an MMA or boxing gym—which is to say, a real fighting gym—it’s always scary. When it’s grappling night at the MMA gym, I never go in scared. The worst that’s going to happen to me is I’ll tweak my elbow or somebody will choke me a little too hard and I’ll go to sleep for a bit. But I’m not scared.

However, you go into the real sparring nights—we call them “Punch in the face” nights—and you know you’re going to get punched lots and lots of times in the head, often by men who are much bigger and much more skilled than you are. We have a pretty small gym, and you can’t always fight in your weight class. So I’m always sparring with big heavyweights who can’t even pull a punch.

What you do in a fight gym is learn how to be brave. You’re learning how to punch and kick in a proper way, of course, but above all else, a fighter is someone who’s got courage, who’s dead game in a fight. Most guys don’t come into the world that way. You learn to be brave through that process of getting your fear and timidity beaten out of you night after night after night.

It’s an empirical question whether training makes one more or less likely to get in a fight outside the gym. In some ways, I’m probably more likely to get into a fight now, because I feel more competent, and I know what it’s cost me in the past to back down from fights, and I don’t want to feel that way.

Harris: Also, there may be some residual uncertainty as to whether what you learn in the gym translates fully into situations where the stakes are real and the variables uncontrolled. So I suspect that although training hard in MMA can remove some of the doubts and ego fears you’ve described, it might not remove all of them.

Gottschall: Exactly. An MMA fight can be a very brutal thing, but there comes a moment at which somebody saves you. Either your opponent saves you—he stops because you tap—or the referee physically rips him off you. In a real-world confrontation, you don’t know if someone’s going to stop that guy from stomping you to death.

Harris: So we’ve just cast doubt upon one of the sacred myths of martial arts and self-defense training—which is that the more one trains, the less likely one is to resort to violence unnecessarily. I more or less paid lip service to this idea just a second ago—suggesting that once a person works out his ego fears in the gym and knows that he has genuine skills, he’ll be less likely to be lured into the monkey dance, because he has less to prove. But now we appear to have gone back on that promise.

I think there is probably an unhappy valley between being a beginner and being a master who really has nothing to prove, where a martial artist is probably more likely to be lured into a fight—either because he’s actually been waiting for an opportunity to test his skills, or because he has developed an image of himself as a person who doesn’t have to take shit from anyone.

Gottschall: I don’t know what your experience in martial arts has been. I did karate for a few years, and a little bit of jiu-jitsu, and then I did mixed martial arts. I also traveled around to different dojos interviewing people for the book. But what I’ve found, especially in MMA gyms, is that the realm is dominated by young men. You’re talking about men who are 15 to 24 years old. In my gym there was almost no demographic diversity. There were very few women and graybeards. More or less everyone was a young man.

And if you ask these guys, “What are you doing here? This is kind of a weird thing to do, getting punched in the face all the time. Why do you do this?” one thing you don’t hear is “I want to know what to do in a self-defense situation. What if I’m walking down the street and a mugger comes along? How can I defend myself?” They’re not worried about that.

What these young men are worried about is winning a duel. They’re just like me. They’ve been in situations where they got bullied, and if that ever comes up again, they want to be in a position to stand up for themselves. They want to avoid humiliation and dishonor. They’re preparing for duels. So, generally speaking, I think they’re less likely to back down from a fight.

But part of the reason you prepare for duels is because then everyone knows you’re preparing for duels. So in their social network, these men are advertising themselves as the sort of men who are not going to take any shit because they’re dangerous. They are establishing a reputational deterrent against disrespect as well as aggression.

Harris: A good case of cauliflower ear can advertise one’s skills pretty successfully. It’s a kind of bully repellent.

Gottschall: I would walk around, and I would feel this weird sense of repulsion toward the cauliflower ears, and I’d also be thinking, “God, I want one of those.” I do have just a little touch of cauliflower on my left ear that I’m very proud of. You can’t really see it, but you can feel it with your fingers.

Harris: That’s hilarious. “Hey, Buddy. Just feel my ear. No, not there, there. Yeah, right there. Want to take this outside? I didn’t think so.”

Occasionally one hears a story about some high-level MMA fighter in a bar, and some tough guy who just couldn’t read the signs gets into a monkey dance with a world-class athlete who’s got double cauliflower ear, and tattoos everywhere, and who’s full-time job for the past decade has been to choke guys out or beat them unconscious. But that’s one of the amazing things about the monkey dance: It’s captivating even when it’s suicidal.

One thing you brought up earlier is a distinction between grappling and striking, which is interesting both from the point of view of training in the martial arts and from the point of view of being a fan of fighting sports. Like any neuroscientist, I generally believe that it’s wise to take as little trauma to one’s brain as possible, and I certainly regret some of the sparring I did as a teenager. I even regret heading the ball playing soccer. At the time, I had no notion that I might be damaging my brain, but I always noticed a fleeting metallic taste in my mouth. In retrospect, getting hit in the head just never felt right. 

Gottschall: Getting punched in the face with a padded glove doesn’t really hurt your face. It doesn’t hurt your skull. The only thing it hurts is your brain. You can feel the brain injury happening. It’s an instant headache.

Harris: Technically, you can’t feel the forces on your brain, but whatever you do feel is certainly a consequence of your brain sloshing around inside your skull. And it’s definitely not good for you.

So how did you, as a responsible adult in his forties, reconcile yourself to acquiring some degree of brain trauma in your training?

Gottschall: I was very aware of it, and it did worry me, because although it often seemed minor, all the minor things add up. And at other times it was fairly major. A couple of times I took punches and then wasn’t the same for a few days. I was thinking slow. I was hazy.

One time, I was sparring with a heavyweight—a guy who had killed me on 15 occasions. He didn’t go quite as easy on me as he needed to, and at one point I charged forward, and he just put his arm out like a telephone pole. I impaled my face on it. If you’ve ever seen that moment when Forrest Griffin is fighting Anderson Silva and Griffin just collapses from a jab—that was it.

This is something that people don’t understand about knockouts, because they’ve seen too much TV. One of the great inventions of film and television that allows for the action to happen is the one-punch knockout. MacGyver’s trying to get out of the sinking ship, and he punches the guard, and the guard just goes to sleep for a solid half hour. MacGyver doesn’t want to kill him (it’s not that kind of show), so he just knocks him out. But most knockouts aren’t like that. You go away for a second and then you’re right back.

There was a lot of that in my training. I guess the way I came to justify it is the way most people who fight justify it: Fighting is really, really rewarding. I truly enjoyed it. I got feelings from fighting that were bigger than those I had experienced in almost any other realm of my life. It made me feel awake in a way that I had never been awake. Those kinds of big emotions and big experiences may come with a heavy price tag.

MMA is really bad for you, but it’s also good for you in many ways. So that’s how I justified it. I felt like I was taking manageable risks in exchange for big rewards. When I eventually quit, I didn’t quit because I said, “Okay, that’s enough. The book project is over. I can go do something else.” And I didn’t quit because I was worried about my brain. I quit because the rest of my body gave out.

It was a very sad thing, sort of like the end of a romance. I left it very reluctantly, and I left it knowing that I’d never get it back, that I was just too old for it in this phase of my life. The phase of running with young men was over, and it wasn’t coming back.

Jonathan Gottschall (left)

Harris: I certainly can relate to this experience from the grappling side. I haven’t yet admitted to myself that I’m not training in BJJ, but I’ve gotten several lingering injuries, and the gaps in my training are getting longer and longer as I wait to recover.

Gottschall: That’s the bummer with grappling, Sam. You don’t hurt your brain, but you hurt everything else. Almost all my significant injuries came from grappling.

When you spar in boxing, the only thing that gets hurt is your brain. Everything else feels pretty good. But if you spar in grappling—wrestling and jiu-jitsu—it’s like one-on-one tackle football. There’s opportunity for mayhem that’s not present in a very controlled boxing match.

Harris: Do you think you can spar in boxing or kickboxing in a way that is truly benign and yet still gives you most of the benefit of full contact?

Gottschall: I don’t know. I just know what fighters do. The top fighters spar hard. They’re really sparring for two reasons: One is to improve their technique, but the other, which is just as important, is to build endurance, toughness, and courage. They want to practice as realistically as possible so that when they go into a real fight, the transition isn’t as jarring. In our gym, I was shocked at how hard these guys spar. I was like, “Wait a minute. You’re hitting me as hard as you can!” That’s what it felt like a lot of the time. It may seem barbaric, but that was the culture of the gym.

I have this chapter titled “The Myth of the Martial Arts,” about what I see as the failure of traditional martial arts. One thing they did was to start focusing on stuff that just doesn’t work in actual fights. Another thing they did was avoid making real contact in sparring. Those changes combined to make many styles all but useless in a fight.

Harris: I’ve been fascinated by the distance between what I’ve come to think of as the “fantasy martial arts” and real self-defense training. This isn’t the distinction one often hears between training for “sport” and training for “the street”—because much of what works in a sport like MMA will obviously work on the street too. But some techniques really don’t work reliably in either context, and they constitute the fantasy moves that have become central to many martial arts.

For a fight fan, there is also a major difference between grappling and striking. In a BJJ tournament, for instance, you don’t have to worry that the athletes are destroying their brains and might even die as a result. You might be aware that they sometimes get injured, but you’re not watching the damage occur moment by moment. When you see someone getting beaten unconscious in a striking-based match, it’s easy to wonder whether this exciting sport that you paid money to see should even be legal.

Gottschall: Yes. I feel the same way. I watch fights and I often feel morally compromised by it. I feel like I’m morally culpable for what’s occurring because I’m the spectator and ultimately footing the bill for the spectacle.

But I don’t think people are reacting primarily to the danger of the sport. There are many other activities that are truly dangerous that we have no inclination to ban. Motocross is incredibly dangerous. It’s really bad for your brain—some of these guys have had dozens of concussions. Bull riding is probably the most dangerous sport in the world in terms of head injuries (this New Yorker article on the subject is a fascinating read). Cheerleading is also very, very dangerous. You take a little girl and launch her into the air—sometimes she comes down hard. Cheerleaders can get catastrophic spinal injuries.

I think what bothers us about fighting sports isn’t the damage to the athlete but the fact that you win by doing more harm to your opponent than he does to you. It just seems ugly.

Harris: I think we should sharpen up that distinction a little. The issue relates to the physics and logic of striking: To strike someone effectively—so that it degrades his performance, allowing you to win the fight—is, by definition, to physically harm him. With wrestling, football, or any other sport that may entail a serious risk of injury, the harm is incidental to the performance. Here, injuring your opponent is the performance.

Gottschall: Yes. A boxing contest is a brain-damage contest. Who can give out more brain damage and who can absorb more of it? When Joe Rogan says during a UFC match, “Boy, this guy’s got a great chin,” that’s a euphemism for “You can punch this guy in the brain a lot and he won’t die.”

This is really tough. I think that anyone with any empathy at all will feel conflicted here. I think the proper attitude toward fighting sports is one of ambivalence. You can be drawn to them, but you should also be repelled by them.

My reason for arguing against abolishing these types of sports isn’t some kind of lofty, philosophical rationale. It’s just that I did it and I liked it. It comes down to a libertarian issue for me. I feel that if I know the risks and I want to take them, I should be allowed to do so.

In boxing, where most of the guys are from lower-class backgrounds and have darker skin than most of the fans, one might fear that the athletes are being exploited. But that narrative doesn’t hold up very well in the world of MMA, where 99 percent of fighters are amateurs who will never earn a dime. They aren’t seeking fame and fortune. For the most part, these guys are fighting because they want to and because it gives them an opportunity to strive for something big in their lives. It gives them a chance to become their best selves.

Harris: One thing that’s fascinating about MMA is that it has the character of Greek drama. You see these titanic egos clash, and only one survives. Many of these guys are the best fighters they’ve ever met and appear to think they’re invincible. This was especially true in the early days, when every discipline was isolated from every other, and people were just ignorant about what they were going to confront in the cage.

So you have the spectacle of two guys who can’t imagine losing thrown together, and one of them triumphs. Then you wait a few months, and this still-invincible fighter gets destroyed by the next guy. It’s a cascade of ego destruction that from a psychological point of view is pretty mesmerizing to watch.

Gottschall: That’s right. I think a lot of people assume that a fight fan is just a troglodyte who’s sitting in the stands grunting and wanting to see blood. I don’t think that’s the main allure of it. The main allure, from the fan’s point of view, is closer to what you’re saying: A really intense human drama is taking place in front of you.

There’s a whole lineage of great writers who have been fascinated by boxing especially (this was pre-MMA). They were drawn in not only by the spectacle of the fight, but by their own reaction to it.

They were thinking, “I’m Ernest Hemingway, or I’m Joyce Carol Oates, or I’m Norman Mailer. I’m one of the greatest artists in the world. I have all this empathy inside me. I have to have empathy to do my work, and yet here I am, watching two men destroy themselves for my pleasure. What’s going on here? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with all of us for wanting to watch this stuff?”

I think part of it is, just as you said, the appeal of tragic storytelling. So the promoters introduce you to the characters, and they usually try to build up a story of conflict between the two fighters. And then, as in almost all stories, you have a contest between the protagonist and the antagonist, depending on whom you happen to be rooting for. If your guy loses, it’s a tragedy. Even if your guy wins, it’s still a tragedy, because as you said, an ego has been more or less destroyed in the cage.

Of course, the fact that we see it that way, as a tragic brand of storytelling that produces lofty emotions in us, doesn’t necessarily justify it.

Harris: This invites other empirical questions: Which sports and other pastimes are the most damaging to people as a matter of course, and which entail the most risk of injury or death? It’s worth noting that those might be very different lists. I’m sure there are sports that entail no regular injuries but are far more likely to kill a person than MMA is. “Free solo” rock climbing is probably the best example: Everything is great—perhaps you hurt your fingers from time to time—and then suddenly you’re dead.

I agree with your views on personal freedom. Consenting adults should be informed about the risks of these activities and then be free to do what they want, short of imposing risks on other people who have not consented.

Gottschall: Let me say one more thing about the ethics here. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and it’s something that I didn’t fully figure out while working on the book. I’ve done a little writing about this, which I’m still drafting, but I hope to publish it around the time the book comes out.

What should be done about the danger of these sports, and the sort of ethical quandary fans find themselves in? It’s long been assumed that we’re stuck with this amount of risk, and that current levels of brain trauma are intrinsic to boxing and MMA. I don’t think that’s true at all. A huge percentage of this head trauma goes back to a single, simple mistake. In an effort to civilize combat sports, authorities mandated padded gloves and instantly made the sports far more savage. Granted, putting gloves on the hands seems like a nice thing to do. If you were being punched in the brain by a powerful man, wouldn’t you rather he strap a pillow around his fist? But the glove doesn’t do anything to diminish your brain damage. In fact, it magnifies it massively, because your opponent can then throw his hands around with wild abandon, punching from all angles—using the kinds of punches that you could never throw with bare fists without destroying your hands and crippling yourself in the course of a fight.

If you took the gloves off, you’d change the sport. You’d no longer see windmilling, Roy Nelson–style overhand rights being thrown. You’d see far fewer hook punches thrown. It would revert to a much simpler bag of techniques that was closer to the repertoire of old-fashioned bare-knuckle, and you would see a lot more grappling.

So BJJ guys, for instance, would be much more competitive, because you couldn’t just beat them to death from the top position. And BJJ guys could also attack more effectively, because bulky gloves make for clumsy grappling and give the opponent a good handle to grab onto. (Just to give one example, the rear naked choke has become harder and harder to finish in MMA because defenders just grab onto one of the attacker’s hands with both of theirs and hold on for dear life. The glove provides the grip that makes this defense possible.)

Fighting bare-handed would also move the UFC back to what it originally was—a pretty good simulation of an actual fight. Putting on gloves is completely artificial. You are basically giving the fighters weapons that allow them to do more damage, and this completely changes the character of a human fistfight.

Harris: That’s very interesting. It would make MMA even more engaging as a sport for those fans who care about what really works in a violent confrontation.

Gottschall: Right.

Harris: So why haven’t they done it?

Gottschall: Well, good question. First, there’s a well-founded fear of hand injury, and that’s what would happen in the beginning. Guys would try to throw an overhand right because they’ve been throwing overhand rights their whole lives, and they would break their fists into pieces on the other guy’s skull.

But very quickly these guys would evolve. Mixed martial arts is all about changing in relation to new pressures, and fighters would very quickly adapt. They’d change up the game, and there would be a whole lot less head trauma.

The main reason I think it probably won’t happen—and this is brutal and ugly—is that people like head trauma. They love knockouts. The crowd is silent, silent, silent… and then a knockout happens, and everyone goes native. There would be far fewer knockouts without the gloves.

So for guys like you and me, who have a real theoretical interest in what works in a fight, it would be fascinating. But to the average sports fan, who maybe isn’t inspired by questions like that, it might seem a lot less exciting.

Harris: I don’t recall whether the first UFCs used gloves.

Gottschall: Most guys chose to fight without gloves—but a few did wear them, including, famously, the boxer Art Jimmerson, who fought Royce Gracie wearing just one boxing glove. I don’t recall exactly when things changed, but this was the “human cockfighting” era: John McCain was on the warpath, and the UFC was banned in most states. Putting gloves on the fighters was a symbolic change that suggested that we were now making it a civilized sport, and it was no longer this crazy gladiatorial throwback to ancient Rome.

It’s even in our language: If you want to get serious and violent, what do you do? You “take the gloves off.” Bare-fisted is supposedly a much more dangerous way to hit someone. But we’ve got it completely backward. The glove is a weapon. It massively accentuates the ability of the fist to do harm.

Harris: That’s really ironic. Everyone is so confused that the sport must cater to this confusion and “clean up” its image by making itself far more dangerous.

Gottschall: Exactly. It was a great PR move, sort of like the football helmet. The football helmet was a way of making kids safer, or so they thought. It was a well-intended humanitarian gesture, but it was a horrible mistake. It made football more dangerous.

You would diminish the risk in MMA to an acceptable level if you just took off the gloves. This would reduce the violence from an insane, NFL level to a rugby level. You would still have a rough, tough, bloody sport that really tests its fighters, but you wouldn’t introduce silly risks that don’t need to be there.

This proposal faces a serious uphill battle—but, boy, I feel very strongly that it would be the way to go.

Harris: It makes a lot of sense to me. Let’s return to your initial motivation for training. Was self-defense, as opposed to preparing for a duel, part of the picture? Did you ever think in terms of “What if somebody broke into my house in the middle of the night, and I had to protect my wife and kids”? And insofar as you went down that rabbit hole, did you ever train with weapons?

Gottschall: Yes. But I had to make a decision about what my book was going to be about. Violence is a huge topic, and I found that the kind of violence that I was really interested in was the duel, broadly understood. In my definition of the duel, we have everything from sports to a staring duel to a pissing contest to certain kinds of arguments, and so forth. So I stayed away from the more tactical, real-world, self-defense type of writing.

One of the reasons I think your article on the topic is so great is that I think every guy our age can relate to this. Men with families suddenly realize, “Holy shit. My dad doesn’t live with us anymore. If somebody comes through that door, it’s my job to deal with it.” So I absolutely have thought about that.

I live in a place—southwestern Pennsylvania, right on the border with West Virginia—where almost everyone owns a gun. And most working-class guys carry their guns everywhere.

So I’m living in the heart of gun culture, but I’m not a gun guy. I didn’t grow up with them; I was never a hunter; my dad was never a hunter. I’ve shot a handgun, and it really scared me. I also enjoyed it as I got more comfortable with it. And I do think about getting a gun. I’m not comfortable being at such a force disadvantage when everyone else is armed.

Right now, my self-defense, home-invasion plan is based on an ax handle that’s within easy reach in the kitchen, and I also have a hatchet in my bedroom. I chose the hatchet very carefully. In the sitcom, the dad always keeps a bat handy. But a bat is too long. You can’t swing it in a hallway, and it’s also not as terrifying as a hatchet.

Harris: I see that you’re determined to make this as horrifying an encounter as possible. A gun is clinical compared with what you have in store.

Gottschall: Well, yes. So I have given it some thought, but I’ve been lazy in some ways. The message I take from your articles is “Hey, this really could happen, and you should be systematic in your thinking about it. It’s not necessarily all that costly to do a bit of homework and some planning.” I know that’s true, and I always tell myself I’m going to think about it in a couple months, and then I never get around to it.

Harris: It’s interesting to hear that you live where so many people are walking around armed. I’m not in that same context—or I don’t think I am, although I realize that many people carry illegally. Of course, men often carry knives wherever one happens to live. The truth about physical conflict in the real world is that it is always prudent to assume that the other guy is armed.

One thing about the prevalence of weapons is that it rules out the monkey dance as a sane option. You’ve been talking about your friends at the gym—tough MMA guys with shiny new egos who are now probably more prone to get into fights—and yet you’re all living surrounded by men who are carrying guns. That’s a bad combination.

In fact, the logic of the monkey dance erodes from the other side as well: If you’re carrying a gun, or even a knife, you really must avoid those kinds of confrontations. And given that you are armed, you can avoid them in a way that is face-saving, at least internally. It may not be face-saving in the eyes of your antagonist, but if you know you’re carrying a weapon, you should also know that you can’t afford to be throwing punches or rolling around on the floor with some stranger just because he told you to go fuck yourself.

If you are armed, you simply have to find some way out of those situations. Otherwise you stand a very good chance of having to use your weapon. And if you can’t prove self-defense—and you won’t be able to if you’re involved in a duel—you’re going to wind up in prison.

Gottschall: Yes. That’s very true. A few times a year in my small town, one of these monkey dances goes off, and the guys are carrying guns, and they shoot each other. Or they shoot each other after a road-rage incident.

I think we have very similar attitudes toward guns and gun culture. I’m not an abolitionist, but I would like the laws to be stiffer. Now I can walk into a gun store in my town and buy military-grade weapons. You’d be shocked by the amount of firepower you can buy—.50 caliber sniper rifles and the same shotguns the Marines carry in Iraq or Afghanistan. It doesn’t matter whether I know how to use these things—I can just walk into a store and buy them.

And if I do get a handgun, I can take it to the sheriff’s department, and in about as much time as it would take me to order a value meal at Wendy’s, they will give me a concealed-carry license. There will be no screening at all to see whether I’m qualified to carry a gun in public—which I absolutely am not. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t gotten a gun in the first place: I don’t know how to use one.

Harris: Well, that’s the right way to think about it. If you are going to own a gun, you definitely want to be trained to use it. And the safe handling of firearms is a highly nontrivial skill—one that has a tendency to degrade the more comfortable one becomes around them. As much as anything else, you want to be trained to counteract this tendency. You have to learn to treat every gun as loaded at all times, even when the one you’re holding isn’t. Laziness on that point gets people killed.

Obviously, owning a gun doesn’t make sense for everyone. But once you decide that it makes sense for you—and this can be a very controversial opinion in our circles—you suddenly pass through the wall of judgment you probably have about gun culture and arrive at a place of simply wanting to learn a potentially valuable skill. The same kind of experts you met in the MMA world await you in the gun world—SWAT operators, Navy Seals, and so forth—and they’re just as fun to train with. There’s a lot to learn—and learning it need not make you a fan of the NRA.

Gottschall: Yes, I thought about it. I even thought about doing a book called Shooters, about gun culture and that kind of violence.

My little brother is a federal law enforcement officer, and he’s also a firearms instructor. He came up recently to visit, and we went out to the range. Part of why I was attracted to the idea of owning a gun was self-defense, and part of it was that I’ve been fascinated by guns since I was a little kid, and I want to play with them. It seems like a lot of fun. And I had a great time. It was probably because I had such a skilled teacher. My brother really knows what he’s doing, and he knows how to make it safe. Shooting with him, and seeing his expertise, I had a tiny eureka moment. I suddenly realized that when it comes to the use of firearms, my brother is a badass martial artist. And I think that a lot of people who like training with guns are probably drawn to it not only for practical reasons, but also in that same restless quest for physical excellence that draws people to a martial arts dojo.

Harris: Yes. It can be like playing a high-stakes video game. It can also be surprisingly meditative. My favorite firearms instructor, Scott Reitz, calls it “Zen with bullets.” He’s not just being flippant. You really have to get out of your own way—and be both extremely relaxed and extremely focused—to shoot well.

Insofar as a person’s interest in martial arts has a realistic self-defense component—that is, he actually wants to be prepared for the unlikely intrusion of real violence into his life—training with weapons is more or less unavoidable. We’re not talking about a duel or a fair fight here. If you are truly doing whatever you reasonably can to avoid violence and you nevertheless find yourself in a violent encounter, that means some psychopath wouldn’t let you leave the room. There are no rules in situations like that. And many of the habits, expectations, and fantasies that we acquire while training as martial artists are quite dangerous in a context of real violence without rules. Notions of a fair fight, of honor, or that being a martial artist, you shouldn’t need a weapon—all that can get you killed.

Gottschall: Yes, it’s a completely different bird. It really is. All my experience has been with honor-based violence, not the sort of violence you’re talking about. As you said in your article, which I thought was really insightful, if someone breaks into your home when you’re there—that is, they don’t wait to be sure that the house is empty—it’s a bad situation. Honor doesn’t come into it at all. Anything you need to do to survive at that point becomes A-OK.

Harris: Again, most people in academic circles will consider us paranoid to even discuss these possibilities, much less train for them. But if a person has spent five minutes in his life worrying that a plane might crash, he has exhibited a far less rational fear than we have here. Most of us are lucky to live in societies where violent crime is rare. That’s a wonderful thing. But it isn’t as rare as it should be, or as many people assume. And fear need not be one’s motive for training. Ultimately one trains because it’s fun to master new skills.

Well, I think we’ve covered a lot of ground here, Jonathan. I really appreciate your taking the time to speak with me. And I hope our readers will immediately get your book. Here’s the blurb I wrote, in case there’s any doubt about my endorsement:

Jonathan Gottschall has written a wonderfully honest, entertaining, and insightful book about violence, manhood, courage, and the wisdom that can be gleaned from getting punched in the face. If you’ve ever wondered why combat is a perennial source of fascination for us, and whether this fascination can be channeled toward truly productive ends, The Professor in the Cage is the book to read.

Gottschall:Thanks, Sam. I’ve been a fan of your work for a long time, so it’s been great to meet you.

What a charming and illuminating book! With scientific acumen and literary panache, Gottschall immerses himself, and us, in an ancient part of the male psyche. Among the many treats in this book are the history of recreational fighting, a limpid explanation of sexual selection, and a sympathetic portrayal of working-class men that’s worthy of a great novelist.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University; and author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature

“The separation between doing science and popularizing science has been overdone,” says Richard Dawkins. To explain an idea to others, he must first explain it to himself… more»

The Dr. Oz Show provides critics with ample material: séances, energy healing, miracle diet products. Once a media darling, Oz has been subjected to a steady stream of public humiliations, from his shaming in front of a Senate subcommittee to an April 15 letter that a group of doctors wrote to Columbia University, urging his dismissal from the faculty, accusing him of promoting “quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain”—to which Dr. Oz responded with an ad hominem attack on the letter-writers and a defense of free speech. But despite numerous subsequent think pieces about the man behind the curtain, a crucial question stands out: Why call for Dr. Oz’s dismissal, when many medical schools and hospitals endorse the most outlandish of his claims?

Take séances. The University of Virginia Medical School houses a “division of perceptual studies,” where respected scientists authenticate memories of past lives and advise parents on how to help their children separate genuine memories from “fantasy.” The director, psychiatrist Jim Tucker, has written a popular book on the subject and promotes the authenticity of past lives on television. His account of how it works sounds like it could have been written by Harvard guest faculty member Deepak Chopra: “Quantum physics indicates that our physical world may grow out of our consciousness.”

Or take energy healing. The prestigious Cleveland Clinic has a “fact sheet” on reiki—the Japanese energy healing tradition practiced by Oz’s wife, Lisa—which explains how reiki uses “universal life force energy” to “detoxify the body” and “increase the vibrational frequency on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels.” (Pets and other animals “respond positively to Reiki healing as well.”)

Like Oz, other established academics lend their credentials to miracle diet products. Antioxidant expert Carmia Borek is a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, and she allows herself to be listed as part of the scientific advisory board for an unsubstantiated “revolutionary weight-loss formula” called TAISlim. Borek is in good company: Another member of the board is the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine professor Judith Stern. (Borek and Stern also appear on a website that sells acai berry “anti-aging serum.”)

One need not even look beyond the walls of Oz’s own university. Woodson C. Merrell, executive director of Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s Center for Health and Healing and former assistant clinical professor at Columbia Medical School, lists homeopathy as one of his clinical interests—despite a scientific consensus that homeopathy is inconsistent with some of the basic laws of chemistry and physics.*

Indeed, a vocal minority of physicians and scientists have long claimed that Dr. Oz is a symptom, not the problem. Most prominent among them are the Yale neurologist Steven Novella and the Wayne State University surgical oncologist David Gorski, who refer to the problem as “quackademic medicine.” For Novella and Gorski, the concern is not merely that people will waste money on homeopathic sugar pills or fruitless miracle diets. They emphasize that Dr. Oz and universities alike endanger public health by legitimating alternative medical traditions such as naturopathy and chiropractic. This, in turn, can lead people to reject standard medical care. Vaccination is a classic case: Though most people are unaware of it, the official position of the American Chiropractic Association supports “providing an alternative elective course of action regarding vaccination.” Similarly, the New York University medical ethicist Arthur Caplan expresses concern that naturopaths—who practice an unstandardized mix of therapies including traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, craniosacral therapy, iridology, and reiki— routinely grant vaccine exemptions, and are licensed to do so in 17 states.

Oz and like-minded doctors defend themselves by appealing to the importance of humility and open-mindedness. They stress, as Oz did Thursday for, that these virtues need not come at the cost of rejecting so-called conventional medicine:

Critics often imply that any exploration of alternative methods means abandoning conventional approaches. It does not. In fact, many institutions like mine use the names ‘complementary’ or ‘integrative’ medicine, which is also appropriate.

But integration requires a delicate balancing act. It’s good to be open-minded, but not, as the old saying goes, “so open-minded that your brain falls out.” For those who believe that past lives exist and energy healing increases our vibrational frequency, who’s to say that there aren’t good alternatives to vaccines, or that miracle diet pills don’t actually work?

Thursday, millions watched as Dr. Oz defended himself against critics on his show. What his audience might not have realized is that some other respected physicians at prestigious medical schools were watching along and hoping, if quietly, that he would succeed.

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* This article originally stated that Woodson Merrell is currently an assistant professor at Columbia Medical School. His appointment ended on December 31, 2013. We regret the error.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/dr-oz-and-the-pathology-of-open-mindedness/391370/

(photo via endless_vanity)

In the early days of music streaming, perhaps 15 years ago, using services like Napster and Limewire meant constantly holding two thoughts together: This can’t possibly be legal, and They can’t possibly catch me. At the time, the legality of music piracy wasn’t really in question—copyrighted material was being distributed without royalties—but the ability of the courts to do anything about it was.

But that was more than a decade ago, so it is somewhat shocking that as late as earlier this week—in 2015—Grooveshark, which was essentially a Napster in the cloud, still existed. The site didn’t have the proper licenses to host all of the music it offered to users for free, and even had the gall to put up ads, from companies as established as Mercedes-Benz, alongside that unlicensed, copyright-protected material. (Sometimes, though Grooveshark's library was mostly the product of crowdsourcing, it was employees who were the ones uploading the tracks.) On top of all that, the company sold subscriptions, for a premium ad-free service.

Given this business model, it is no surprise that Grooveshark shut down, but it is a surprise that it took until now for that to happen. How did it survive all these years? “Good lawyers, basically,” says Mark Mulligan, the founder of MIDiA Research, a media consultancy. “It took [the labels] time to be able to make the case. Ultimately, they were always going to get there, but the complexity of copyright law almost always means that these cases can take a huge amount of time.”

The first lawsuit against Grooveshark was filed in 2009, and, Mulligan says, the company stalled for legal time by claiming at times that it wasn’t infringing on copyrights, and at others that it was making efforts to remove any illegal music. (A note currently posted on Grooveshark’s website leaves little room for legal or moral gray area: “We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation,” it reads in part.)

Explaining what took so long in this particular instance might have to do with some of the legal details that are currently unknown. Catherine Moore, a professor of music business at NYU, observes that the note on Grooveshark’s website doesn’t specify whom the site’s ownership is being passed off to. “The answer to that would explain why this has taken so long,” she says.

Ever since Napster launched in 1999, the music industry has witnessed the life cycles of sites and services that distribute its product for free. Every time one service is shut down by a court, another swoops in to take its place: Limewire launched the year before Napster was shut down, and Grooveshark got started the same year Limewire’s legal troubles were brewing. "It's essentially like Whack-a-Mole," says Mulligan. "Another service could do exactly what [Grooveshark has] done, and if they play the same game … then that makes it really difficult, often impossible, for an outright, immediate closure."

But Mulligan thinks that free, semi-legal music’s circle of life is finally complete. “Why do you need to have any other free service when you’ve got YouTube?” he asks, noting that the site has a bigger catalogue than other licensed services and is available for free on any smartphone. "There actually isn't much of a business case for trying to launch a new Grooveshark,” he says. If record labels start pressuring YouTube to remove unlicensed material, that could change. “Then you have a bit of a demand vacuum,” he says, “and that may well end up getting filled.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/05/grooveshark-shut-down/392138/

When Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao fight this Saturday in Las Vegas at 11:30 pm ET, it'll be the biggest boxing match in decades.

After years of delays, backroom negotiations, and anticipation, the two biggest stars in boxing will face each other for the first time. In an era when boxing's prominence is fading, this is one of few matches in recent memory to pop up on the mainstream radar.

This means non-boxing fans might be hearing a lot about an idiosyncratic, oftentimes confusing sport. In boxing, after all, matches are negotiated by the athletes, to be broadcast for a huge fee, with a mysterious agglomeration of different championship titles at stake. These seven numbers will help you make sense of the fight — and the sport as a whole.

5 years

Manny Pacquiao celebrates are defeating Oscar De La Hoya in 2008. (JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

This is how long it's been since Mayweather and Pacquiao were first tentatively scheduled to fight, in March 2010.

Back then, Mayweather was a dominant figure who'd recently defeated the legendary Oscar De La Hoya. He then retired, only to return to boxing with another resounding victory. Pacquiao was an undersized fighter who'd become a national hero in his native Philippines with a string of surprising upsets, including his own defeat of De La Hoya the year prior. The two boxers had become the sport's best-known figures, and their representatives reportedly came close to agreeing on the terms for a marquee fight.

But boxing isn't like other sports. There are no playoffs or tournaments forcing the best teams or players to compete. Instead, boxers negotiate all the terms of a fight, much like political candidates hashing out the mundane details of a televised debate. And negotiations for the 2010 fight fell apart over drug testing: Mayweather reportedly wanted blood drawn the day before the fight, and Pacquiao, who claimed to be afraid of needles, wanted only urine testing during the 30 days before the bout. Mayweather accused him of doping, and a defamation lawsuit ensued.

It took five more years — which included a pair of losses for Pacquiao — for the fight to finally happen. Now both boxers are in their late 30s, and many fans say they're well past their prime. Still, they're two of the best boxers in the world, and certainly the top two in their weight class (welterweight, which goes from 140 to 147 pounds).

$300 million

Mayweather, holding lots of cash. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

This is the projected total earnings to be split between Mayweather and Pacquiao, easily an all-time record. It'll mostly come from pay-per-view revenues, ticket sales, and sponsorships.

Mayweather is reportedly guaranteed $120 million, while Pacquiao is only guaranteed $80 million. They'll both end up getting more than that (with the exact number based on pay-per-view sales), but regardless, Mayweather will take home most of it — and it doing so will remain the world's highest-paid athlete.

The difference is mostly due to the fact that Mayweather is the bigger draw (in boxing, this is called the "A-side"), as he typically brings in more money through pay-per-view. He's also undefeated throughout his career.

As a result, Pacquiao had more to gain by fighting Mayweather than vice versa, giving Mayweather more leverage during the negotiations. If the pair had fought back in 2010, the purse would have reportedly been split 50-50, but the two fighters are no longer on level ground. Mayweather is considered the favorite.

$99.99

(Comcast)

This is the amount you'll need to pay to see this fight in HD on TV (it's $89.99 for standard definition). An estimated 3 million to 4 million homes are expected to pay to tune in.

Unlike most sports in the US, boxing's biggest matches aren't available on broadcast TV or even cable. Starting in the 1980s, fight organizers began selling TV rights to companies that sold the fights directly to subscribers for increasingly high prices.

In the short term, this arrangement makes sense for fighters, promoters, and TV networks (including HBO, which carries most of boxing's biggest fights today). They can make way more through pay-per-view than through selling the TV rights to networks that would broadcast the bouts for free, supported by commercials.

But in the long term, pay-per-view is cutting off new fans from boxing matches and is one of the biggest factors in the decline of the sport. Viewers can simply watch other sports for free — and they are.

"I can't tell you that pay-per-view helps the sport, because it doesn't. It hurts the sport because it narrows our audience, but it's a fact of life," then–HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg told Thomas Hauser for his 2008 book The Boxing Scene. "But if HBO stopped doing pay-per-view, the promoters would simply do it on their own."

$10,859.55

MGM Grand Garden Arena, during a fight in March. (Alex Trautwig/Getty Images)

This is currently the average resale price for a ticket to the bout at the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas — again, easily an all-time record.

Tickets originally went on sale for prices ranging from $1,500 to $10,000. But the resale market has been especially hot because very few tickets ever went on sale to the public. The venue seats nearly 17,000 people, but about 16,500 were directly given to sponsors, the fight promoters, casino high rollers, and the fighters themselves for friends and family. This left a tiny number of tickets for a large number of rich people who wanted to attend — and they sold out within 60 seconds.

The crazy prices, though, also reflect a huge amount of pent-up interest in this long-awaited fight. Tickets for the weigh-in — an event at which the two fighters are weighed, do some talking, and go back home — went for an average of $155.

7 allegations of assault

Mayweather is led away to serve a three-month jail sentence in 2010. (David Becker/Getty Images)

It's impossible — and irresponsible — to talk about this fight without mentioning Mayweather's lengthy and appalling history of violence against women. He has been accused of assault seven different times, by five different women, as detailed in this harrowing piece by Louisa Thomas at Grantland.

Mayweather has pleaded guilty twice, serving brief jail sentences both times. In other instances, he's benefited from his accusers changing their stories before or during the trial, insisting that Mayweather was merely holding them back as they attacked him. In the most well-known instance, in 2010, Mayweather allegedly showed up at his ex-girlfriend's house at 5 am, punched her in the head, and tried to break her arm. When their 9- and 10-year-old children entered the room, he threatened to hit them if they left the house or called the police.

The fact is that Mayweather, the world's highest-paid athlete, has gotten relatively little punishment during his history as a serial abuser of women. Some are calling for people to boycott the fight over it, but this story still isn't getting nearly as much attention as it should be.

3 championship belts

Mayweather and Pacquiao, with one of several belts on the line. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

This is the number of championships at stake in this fight: the welterweight titles as decided by the World Boxing Council, the World Boxing Organization, and the World Boxing Association.

The fact that three championship titles exist for the exact same weight class might be the most bizarre aspect of boxing. And there are actually more: in total, there are 111 belts for 17 weight classes, handed out by a mess of different organizations.

Over the years, these for-profit organizations (and many others) have proliferated, each creating their own rankings and championships. And as these groups gain credibility, fighters pay them fees to sanction fights.

To most boxing fans, this has ultimately rendered all of them meaningless (and, some say, has also helped kill the popularity of the sport). "Belts are a dime a dozen, meaningless straps churned out by meaningless sanctioning bodies in order to collect a portion of each paper champion's purse," Connor Ruebusch at SB Nation's Bad Left Hook writes.

But many fans pay more attention to a non-sanctioned idea: that of lineal championships, which can be earned only by beating the fighter who previously held the lineal championship. Because Mayweather beat "Sugar" Shane Mosley in 2010, he currently holds the lineal welterweight crown.

To Ruebusch, this crown gives this fight more importance than any number of belts. "The wearers of the crowns — there are eight currently in the sport — are the closest things boxing has left to true champions," he writes.

12 rounds

Mayweather hits Marcos Maidana during a May 2014 fight. (JOHN GURZINSKI/AFP/Getty Images)

This is how long the fight will probably last.

During each three-minute round, if one fighter knocks the other down and he can't get up before the referee counts to 10, the fight is over in a knockout. It can also end in a technical knockout (TKO), if the referee, doctor, or either fighter's corner calls the fight for safety reasons.

In all likelihood, though, it'll go the full 12 rounds, to be scored by a panel of three judges to determine the winner. The scoring system is extremely complicated, but in short, the judges will decide which boxer won each round, and the guy who won more rounds (according to the majority of the judges) is declared the victor. If all three judges split the rounds equally between both boxers, the fight is a draw.

WATCH: SB Nation's fight night preview show

Foods are either natural or unnatural. They are good or bad. Bad foods harm you, and good foods cleanse you. Bad foods are sinfully delicious, or guilty pleasures. Good foods are whole, real, clean, and natural. Bad foods are fake, unnatural, and processed.

The terms we use reflect idiosyncratic dietary faiths, the religion scholar Alan Levinovitz explains in his new book The Gluten Lie, in which he examines why people tend to put moral and religious lenses on food terminology. Much of people's relationships to food can be explained by religious patterns of thought. Our words are often more philosophical than scientific. And our words inform approaches to eating, and overall well-being, in deeply consequential ways.

What happens, then, if you reject these words and frames entirely?

Levinovitz recounts a confrontation at a farmer's market, where he asked a vendor whether her juice was processed. She impressed upon him that processing fruit into juice doesn’t result in processed food, that only corporations are capable of making processed food.

It doesn't surprise me at all that he confronted the juice vendor. He probably laughed out loud, too, and not in a mean-spirited way. Levinovitz—who not long ago took a faculty position at James Madison University, after finishing his doctoral work at the University of Chicago—is a student of logic and argument. He delights in challenging beliefs. And that is what he accomplishes in The Gluten Lie, which dismantles popular arguments for categorically avoiding fat, sugar, salt, and, maybe most contentiously, gluten.

When Levinovitz was studying in China, during the era when everyone in the U.S. was terrified of monosodium glutamate (MSG), he talked to local people who were wholly unconcerned. MSG was everywhere, and it was fine. It was simply, Levinovitz writes in the book, "a sodium salt first extracted from seaweed by Japanese scientists in 1908, and a staple seasoning in the cuisine of long-lived East Asians. But health-conscious Americans knew better." In the states, MSG was an interloper.

Through study of people like Daoist monks who practiced ritualistic avoidance of grains—long before the recent best-selling books Grain Brain and Wheat Belly told fantastical tales of the havoc grains wreak on the body—Levinovitz came to think that maybe we can account for a lot of food beliefs by applying mythical, superstitious patterns of thinking. And it turned out, he was right.

"I was shocked to learn that people thought sugar was bad in the late 1700s," he said, still appearing genuinely shocked as he told me when we met recently in D.C. "Basically as soon as it was introduced, people said it was bad."

Yes, sugar was bad even before diabetes and obesity existed in the average person's mind. The reasoning? Pleasure was sinful. People blamed hypersexuality and alcoholism on sugar. Sugar was foreign, it was associated with savages who eat it; it was bad. According to James Redfield's 1852 book Comparative Physiognomy, animals that eat honey are courageous and careful, like the bee, the hummingbird, and the bear, while those that prefer sugar are not virtuous, like the housefly or "the ant that lives in the sugar bowl." Even though honey is higher in fructose than the high-fructose corn syrup people now love to blame for all of our health problems, honey has long had enjoyed a halo of naturalness. It's the same halo that protects juice but demonizes soda, even though the differences at a macronutrient level are negligible.

A younger Levinovitz initially thought he’d become a bioethicist, but took to religion because of an interest in the way narratives inform beliefs. Philosophy is all about evidence and logic, but then there's religion, where people just tell stories, and that was a way of convincing someone of a worldview. He assumed for a long time, like most people who haven't studied the origins of religious food traditions, that people were taught to avoid pork for rational reasons like outbreaks of Trichinosis, and shellfish because of food spoilage. But that biological theory was rejected by many anthropologists, Levinovitz explains. In the 1960s Mary Douglas wrote a book called Purity and Danger, where she pointed out that most food taboos can't be accounted for by medical concerns. She makes the argument that the foods that were prohibited in Leviticus had to do with animals that cross boundaries. For instance, fish without scales. They were dirty not because there was some plausible biological basis for ingesting shark and getting sick. They were dirty, Levinovitz agrees,  "because they didn't fit into a neat creation scheme.” In other words, they weren't natural.

Pope Francis has embodied this position in his entreaties to respect nature and, at least implicitly, not to genetically modify foods. "This is one of the greatest challenges of our time," he said last year, "to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation.”

He is not at all alone in approaching food production through the romantic lenses of nature and the past. Combine that with basic puritanical fears of pleasure and the monotonic fallacy that if something is impure it must be totally avoided, and almost any popular dietary approach can be explained. Bacon is not kosher, and eating a little bit of bacon is not more kosher than eating a boat full of bacon. This is the way that many people simply choose to treat sugar or gluten: I need to not eat any of these things.

Some people have diabetes mellitus or Celiac disease, and they really must avoid these things, or they will become seriously ill. Other people don't have these conditions—or any trace of insulin resistance or non-Celiac gluten sensitivity (the significance, definition, and very existence of which is disputed by experts)—but they insist on absolutist attitudes toward things whose effects are clearly dose-dependent.

Wrapping science around beliefs creates arguments like, in the 19th century, that interracial marriage leads to sickly offspring. Now the same logic is used against genetically modified plants. People use biological arguments to justify the same belief that has been around since the beginning of time: New things are unnatural and dangerous. Stuff was better before. We're risk averse and scared of new things. That makes sense from a survival perspective, but it makes for lousy science.

This is the point of The Gluten Lie. I talked more with Levinovitz about the intersection of religious thought and nutrition, storytelling and motivational psychology, and how it all informs faith in science. Here’s our lightly edited conversation.

---

James Hamblin: You write about the role for storytelling and myth in the world. What's the role of myth in understanding health?

Alan Levinovitz: Myth is great for talking about where everything came from. Or what happens after you die. Or whether there was something before nothing. What is free will? We don't have great scientific accounts for these things. I think there are religious narratives that help people deal with really important but as-yet unanswerable questions. But myth is terrible for dietary rules.

Ideas about religion can be so powerful that people can't endorse them without giving up a part of their identity. It's the same thing with diets. If you've adopted a diet and it's become part of your identity, asking someone to reconsider something as simple as eating sugar or gluten is kind of like asking someone to give up their faith. To admit that the core of their identity is fundamentally mistaken. The pointy-head scientists and the people affiliated with Big Agriculture couldn't possibly be right because they are demons.

Hamblin: The thing I concede to people with things like fad diets is, like a diet where you don't eat yellow things, okay, well you're getting some placebo effect. You're developing a sense of identity and awareness about what you put in your body. So what about the benefits of belief?

Levinovitz: The question I ask, then, is do we have empiric evidence that irrational beliefs about the power of food lead to better real-world outcomes? In other words, I might be convinced that it's worth thinking that gluten causes autism or that Paleolithic dieting is good for you if having those beliefs were genuinely better in terms of outcomes. To take a similar argument with religion: Emile Durkheim, sociologist of religion—he didn't think religion was true. But he thought it was necessary for cultivating ethics. Religion was a sort of belief engine that would keep people good. The argument then is, if we don't have this set of beliefs, how are we going to get along? Why would we treat each other nicely? We'll just dissolve into chaos. Which is not true. We can treat each other just fine without a false belief system that tells us to. I would argue the same thing for living healthfully. There's just no reason to think that quasi-religious beliefs about the miraculous powers of foods, or the demonizing of foods, benefit our health. And if that's the case, then we should work to get rid of them.

And I think it does hurt our health, because we decide on easier things like miracle berries. And we live in fear, because the world is filled with these invisible antagonists of modernity: toxins and chemicals and radio waves. If there's one thing we do know it's that being terrified of life is not good for you.

Hamblin: At least we're not going to war over diets.

Levinovitz: Well, if you look back in history, the first thing leaders do to introduce an us-them dichotomy is introduce dietary rules. It's the best thing: What do we eat? What do they eat?

As for what we eat, I think the USDA and academic nutritionists need to stop coming out with nutritional guidelines. Because it's an extremely fallible science that's constantly contradicting itself, and it makes people think that science is not to be trusted. First they thought this about cholesterol, now they think that? I guess we just can't trust those pointy-head scientists! You can tell people to eat in moderation and get physical activity, and then you don't have to flip-flop on anything. And 99 percent of doctors will agree that the problem is not that people eat in moderation but slightly too much dairy or something.

Hamblin: My sense is that the nutrition guidelines now are more reactive than anything. There are so many people out there who believe that carbs are just bad, for example, that it makes sense to have a confluence of experts going on the record saying  that moderate whole-grain intake is part of a healthy approach to life.

Levinovitz: Rhetorically, though, it's something of a mistake to engage in these arguments to begin with. What enables dietary nonsense is the quibbling about ratios and constructions about kinds of food. So the way to counter dietary nonsense is not by coming up with a new set of more reasonable laws; it's by saying I refuse to even participate in this conversation. We don't even need to think about food this way.

Hamblin: What about people who are eating three meals a day from CVS?

Levinovitz: I know. I go to some stores and see ten flavors of Oreos and I'm like, good God, I clearly don't understand reality.

Hamblin: But I agree that self-correcting science isn’t well received by a lot of people. Like how it’s bad in politics, where you can't "flip flop" on things you've said or advocated. There's some kind of virtue in the political economy to holding one view and never changing it, regardless of situations changing. That makes you a hero. Is that because of the importance we put on faith? In terms of a belief that is unshakably held in the face of evidence to the contrary. Or at least finding ways to fit new information into your worldview without changing your worldview.

Levinovitz: I think the faith you’re describing is a part of overconfident religion. It’s the faith of pseudoscience. We often generalize about religion, but not all religion is incompatible with science. Just look at the Vatican scientists supporting golden rice. You’re talking about a bad faith that you see in religious people and atheists alike, a type of faith that thinks there’s something virtuous about being unshakeable in your opinion.

Hamblin: Well my opinion is that the guidelines are worthwhile and won’t blow up in anyone’s face, if only because this time around they’re especially vague. Opposite that, there are national fitness guidelines, that say everyone should get 150 minutes of exercise every week. I asked one of the people who helped write the recommendation recently, what about 149? And he said, obviously don’t expect a difference. The number 150 is really about behavioral research. You have to give people something concrete and short-term. If you tell them to just be more physically active this year, they won't do it. It's not actionable. So I still retch when I see books or article like 10 Days to a Better Butt, but now I retch slightly less. I don't know how many people selling 10-day plans are thinking about motivational psychology as opposed to strategic marketing, but they do have something on their side. It probably works better than something vaguer, like The Better Butt Lifestyle. Or, even safer, The Long, Difficult Road to a "Better" Butt.

Levinovitz: So the current state of the art in motivational psychology is to ask people, what do you want to accomplish for yourself? And then giving them ways to fulfill that goal. Which is very different from national guidelines.

Hamblin: But can't you motivate people by changing priorities and values?

Levinovitz: We just don't know how. And let's not tell noble lies unless we have really good evidence that they're going to work, because they're going to bite us in the ass when we come back and recant. There's so much science that's good. Like vaccines. Why would we undermine the validity of this incredibly beneficial and solidly grounded enterprise through a few unfounded but highly public decrees?

Hamblin: I think a lot of the mixed public messaging comes from the pace of the news cycle. Because on the Internet, no one seems to want to read things that are three days old, and there are a lot of health writers who have to write something every day. In most of the media industry, motivations are not aligned for people to be successful and also to tell entirely accurate, staid stories. Dr. Oz has to talk for an hour every day of the week. What a challenge, to keep so many people constantly tuned in and never get carried away, over thousands of hours of talking.

Levinovitz: It's really important for media to help separate science from corporate interests and debunk bad science. But the problem comes when, in doing that, people associate all science with corporate interests, and they want to hate it all. We have a religious understanding of moral pollution in terms of people who have consulted to corporations. In writing my book, I wanted to talk with biotech people about GMOs, but I was scared that if I even talked with them, I would be seen as tainted. Do we want academia that never talks with industry? It's equally pernicious in understanding how corporations interact with academics and journalists as it is in understanding how foods interact with the body.

Hamblin: So how do you highlight corruption without feeding monotonic mistrust?

Levinovitz: People seem to think that a scientific consensus can be bought by industry. And while the scientific consensus has shifted in nutrition, it's never been bought. The example people always point to is tobacco companies: They bought the scientific consensus, and that's why we can't trust science. The truth is that since the late 1800s scientists have said tobacco is terrible. It wasn't until the 1950s that it was connected to cancer, but scientists knew even before that that smoking blackened the lungs, et cetera. Were doctors influenced by the PR machine in being slow to stop people from smoking? Yes. But no scientific consensus ever said it was okay. The tobacco industry only got to the people who publicly represented the scientists. People need to know they can trust scientific consensus, it is reliable, and it is impossible to buy.

Granting people the ability to believe in quasi-religious narratives about food and medicine will have very real public-health consequences, like the kind we are seeing with the anti-vaccine movement.

Hamblin: I think that there are, broadly, two types of patients: the anxious, not super analytically-minded people who want to hear what's good and bad and just follow what the doctor thinks is best. And the opposite, people who want to know every potential risk and benefit and weigh everything for themselves. Some people handle that well, other people get unduly scared by the smallest risk. So when speaking to a mass audience, how much do you talk about extremely rare failures and adverse effects? When you have to boil it down to a sound bite or tweet, do you just say, vaccinate, it's safe and smart? Because, for some people, that will only feed into a conspiracy theory.

Levinovitz: It's incredibly hard. This is disclosure ethics, listing all of the potential side effects on medicines. Anti-vaccine advocates will say, well look at all of the things that are on the packaging label! Which, to me, is an argument for being paternalistic and removing those things because, is it doing any good? I don't think that it is, on the whole. It's just giving people material to be scared by. At the same time, you have to have transparency. You don't want to encourage a black box of medical knowledge, where no one's disclosing anything. What people are deciding with vaccines is that when there's something so important to public health, we're just going to legislate it. But then people think, Oh no, big government.

Hamblin: Which is most of America. And vaccines are products of the pharmaceutical industry, of which the public is especially wary. So will vaccine legislation pass?

Levinovitz: Yes, but I think it'll take a minor disaster. There will have to be a couple deaths that are so prominent in the public consciousness that people are willing to pass legislation. Which is sad. But thank God we're having measles outbreaks and not polio outbreaks, and that that's what it might take to get people to mandate vaccination. It's like hoping a small island sinks to convince people of the importance of global warming, not waiting until all of California is underwater.

Hamblin: If California were underwater, that would eliminate a lot of the anti-vaccination problem. No, but it's just such an easily politicized conspiracy theory, educated elite doctors telling us one thing but we know better.

Levinovitz: That's the thing with food narratives, and all branches of pseudoscience. Creationism, climate denialism, whatever it is. If you resent pointy-head authority, there are these other areas—Paleo dieting, for example—where there's extremely technical literature that doesn't take long to master but gives you a sort of esoteric expertise that allows you to feel as though you have something that those pointy heads don't. I've seen that a lot within these diet communities: macrobiotic or probiotic, Paleo, they'll say things like, Well, my doctor doesn't even know about the gamma-three globulin protein. She hasn't even looked at the studies about X, Y, or Z Neanderthal. She doesn't even know. And all of a sudden you feel like you have this expertise that other people don't.

Hamblin: Well that's how every conspiracy theory works, right? Along with some realization, some moment of enlightenment?

Levinovitz: Take Gary Taubes, who's a great science writer and skeptic who debunked the dangers of salt really effectively, and the dangers of fat, and then all of a sudden, he became a convert and called sugar toxic. He became the kind of person he'd been criticizing for so long. People can be totally reasonable and also endorse something that is just not.

Hamblin: As a writer it's easy to want to defend positions you've taken even as new evidence and legitimate critiques come along.

Levinovitz: What about people who’ve never been reasonable?

Hamblin: Well when I talked with Vani Hari [The Food Babe], who has been so accused, I got no sense that she’s less than genuinely concerned about everything she tells the public to be concerned about. She’s accused of profiteering, but I think that's simplistically cynical. I don't think many people are legitimately willing to sell their identities—and knowingly do harm to public understanding—solely for money. Maybe I'm wrong.

Hari tends to underestimate the complexity of most of the issues she mobilizes people for/against. But she's great at mobilizing. I hope she'll move into working with good scientists on issues that really need awareness—climate impact of certain foods, human rights issues in agriculture, depletion of bees. I've gotten so into bees lately. You know I used to hate them? Now I love them. Anyway, she and others in her ilk are fundamentally anti-establishment in their messages. So many things are myths that we've been fed. She says the idea that nutrition science is complex is itself a myth that we've been fed.

Levinovitz: And they can end up making more money from fueling paranoia than the people they accuse of selling out to biotech or pharma.

I just don't want people to get caught in this endless cycle of nonsensical dietary practices, in the same way that I wouldn't want people to still be doing exorcisms. But the exorcists are way more exciting than the people who are telling the public that exorcism doesn't work.

The problem is that we just don't know a whole lot beyond eating in moderation, and we can't promise a lot, and there are a lot of limits to medicine. That doesn't sell books. Michael Pollan's rule "Don't eat anything your great-great-great grandmother wouldn't recognize as food"? That's a terrible idea. My grandmother wouldn't eat any international food. Don't eat anything that contains things you can't pronounce?

Hamblin: Ascorbic acid!

Levinovitz: That turns everyone into the Food Babe. "Cook for yourself" is safe, but it's classist. It assumes that you have a stove and the time to cook.

Hamblin: It's not as classist as saying go out to restaurants every night.

Levinovitz: Sure. And I think most people really do have enough time to cook for themselves.

Hamblin: I'm told they do. So what more than that can we actually responsibly recommend to everyone? You write in the book about "eating in the fourth dimension."

Levinovitz: The idea is that three dimensions of food we normally consider are quantity, quality, and type. So, for a month, or however long is tolerable, you eat in the fourth dimension, which is time. You read no nutrition labels, and you “detox” from thinking about food. Instead you think about the time you spend preparing food. You make sure to spend a half hour four nights a week, or whatever, cooking and eating. If people really ate in the fourth dimension, I think we'd be much happier, and healthier, and not as beholden to pseudoscience. I think that would be great.

Look, now I'm an evangelist.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/05/the-puritanical-approach-to-food/392030/

An anonymous reader writes: English teacher Michael Godsey writes in The Atlantic what he envisions the role of teachers to be in the future. In a nutshell, he sees virtual classrooms, less pay, and a drastic decrease in the number of educators, but thinks they will all be "super-teachers". From the article: "Whenever a college student asks me, a veteran high-school English educator, about the prospects of becoming a public-school teacher, I never think it's enough to say that the role is shifting from 'content expert' to 'curriculum facilitator.' Instead, I describe what I think the public-school classroom will look like in 20 years, with a large, fantastic computer screen at the front, streaming one of the nation's most engaging, informative lessons available on a particular topic. The 'virtual class' will be introduced, guided, and curated by one of the country's best teachers (a.k.a. a "super-teacher"), and it will include professionally produced footage of current events, relevant excerpts from powerful TedTalks, interactive games students can play against other students nationwide, and a formal assessment that the computer will immediately score and record. I tell this college student that in each classroom, there will be a local teacher-facilitator (called a 'tech') to make sure that the equipment works and the students behave. Since the 'tech' won't require the extensive education and training of today's teachers, the teacher's union will fall apart, and that "tech" will earn about $15 an hour to facilitate a class of what could include over 50 students. This new progressive system will be justified and supported by the American public for several reasons: Each lesson will be among the most interesting and efficient lessons in the world; millions of dollars will be saved in reduced teacher salaries; the 'techs' can specialize in classroom management; performance data will be standardized and immediately produced (and therefore 'individualized'); and the country will finally achieve equity in its public school system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

They were coming home from a park, on this gorgeous, blossoming weekend, after playing.

And for this, a 10-year-old and his 6-year-old sister ended up in the back of a squad car. Again. For hours this time.

In the bizarre, nationwide culture war over how much freedom children should have to play outside alone, the youngest combatants — Rafi and Dvora Meitiv — are the ones being damaged the most.

This is all getting pretty ridiculous. Somehow, we’ve morphed from being a village that helps raise children to a parenting police state.

[‘Free-range children’ taken into custody again in Maryland ]

The Silver Spring siblings were about 2 ¹/₂ blocks from their home Sunday when Montgomery County police got a call reporting them — gasp — playing alone.

“The police coerced our children into the back of a patrol car and kept them trapped there for three hours, without notifying us, before bringing them to the Crisis Center, and holding them there without dinner for another two and a half hours,” their mom, Danielle Meitiv, said to her Facebook friends. “We finally got home at 11 pm and the kids slept in our room because we were all exhausted and terrified.”

What a pathetic way to fight about parenting styles. Because the kids are the biggest victims in all this.

Imagine the cops telling two young children to get into the car as they argue that they know their way home, they know where they are going and that their dad said they could walk home. This is what happened in December. And Rafi and Dvora had nightmares about police snatching them that time, their mom told me.

Mom and Dad were dragged into court for that incident, and the nation debated whether they are good or bad parents. Montgomery County ruled that they were guilty of unsubstantiated child neglect. Which means no one could decide who was right.

[Why are we criminalizing childhood independence?]

This time, police were called again by an adult worried about these kids playing outside alone.

Capt. Paul Starks, the county police spokesman, told The Washington Post that the children were taken into custody at a county park about 5 p.m. and turned over to Child Protective Services. They were released to their parents at 10:30 p.m., said Starks, who added that the matter remains under investigation.

Danielle Meitiv, a climate-science consultant, offered a scarier account of what happened to her children. “The cops said they would drive them home, then kept the kids in the patrol car for three hours,” she told me on Monday. “Wouldn’t even let them out to use the bathroom.”

Imagine the message our society is sending the Meitiv kids by holding them in the back of a squad car and in a crisis center for nearly six hours because they were playing alone outside. And if what Danielle said is true — that police initially told the kids they were going to just drive them home — how is this not a kidnapping?

It’s outrageous, really.

If that adult who called police was worried about the kids, why not talk to them? Ask them where their parents were? Walk them home?

Or maybe it was someone who recognized the Meitiv kids, hated their parents’ very public free-range advocacy campaign — multiple television appearances included — and decided to get back at them.

If this is how we respond to children playing alone, my kids and I would’ve been locked up multiple times. Walking the dog around the block? Call the Capitol Police! Getting a popsicle at the corner store? Alert the social workers! Getting me the cheese I ran out of while making dinner? Book ’em!

We need to get a grip. I get that it’s a scary thing to let kids go. But it is absolutely necessary for them to become normal, functioning adults.

My kids play basketball and lacrockey (a made-up hockey/lacrosse thing) in our alley on Capitol Hill. It’s not a suburban cul-de-sac, believe me. The other day, a motorcycle cop rode up to them and asked if they had seen a man running past them.

This was the search that ended on H Street in Northeast Washington, with the capture of a man suspected of killing a security guard at the U.S. Census Bureau.

Did I let them play in the alley again the next day? You bet.

Because when I drove past the fatal accident on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway earlier this year, I did not stop driving, either. There are risks in living, no matter what.

Our rapid march toward police-state parenting has got to end.

Today, when you look at the readiness checklists for first grade, you’ll find that we are concerned only with their academic performance, being able to “expand sight words” or “read a graph” or “locate the seven continents and four oceans.” Really.

But take a look at the first-grade readiness checklist from a 1979 book, “Your Six-Year-Old — Loving and Defiant.”

Back then, your child was ready for first grade if he or she had two to five permanent teeth, were at least 6 years and 6 months old and these:

● Can your child tell, in such a way that his speech is understood by a school crossing guard or police where he lives?

● Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to store, school, playground, or to a friend’s home?

● Can he be away from you all day without being upset?

Yeah. Life skills, social development. Becoming actual people, not just little graph readers. We’ve kind of forgotten about that, haven’t we?

sciencehabit writes: What are the oldest fossils on Earth? For a long time, a 3.46-billion-year-old rock from Western Australia seemed to hold the record. A 1993 Science paper (abstract) suggested that the Apex chert contained tiny, wormy structures that could have been fossilized cell walls of some of the world's first cyanobacteria. But now there is more evidence that these structures have nothing to do with life. The elongated filaments were instead created by minerals forming in hydrothermal systems, researchers report (abstract). After the minerals were formed, carbon glommed on to the edges, leaving behind an organic signature that looked suspiciously like cell walls.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Don't have an hour or even twenty minutes to exercise each day? You might not need it. This routine of 12 exercises is a complete workout based on the latest fitness research—and it only takes 7 minutes.

As with other short, but highly efficient exercises, this routine is based on interval training, where you're combining intense activity with brief recovery periods. We've seen interval training touted before as the most efficient type of exercise. You could do it with cycling, but this workout is an alternative guide and you can do it basically anywhere with almost no equipment.

The routine was posted in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine's Health & Fitness Journal and highlighted by The New York Times. In this program:

The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each [with a 10-second rest between exercises], while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, [director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute] Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done.

As you can see from the chart at the top of this post, all you need is your own body weight and a chair to get "maximum results with minimal investment." However, this was designed for people with pretty sedentary lives, so if you're starting out somewhat in shape, you should probably do this a few times in a row. Hit the link to read more.

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout | The New York Times

HBO's Game of Thrones is on a course to outpace the books. Is there any way readers can avoid spoilers?

The post Is There Any Escape From Game of Thrones Spoilers? appeared first on WIRED.

A conglomerate on the order of the old Gulf + Western, China National runs more than 160 cigarette brands, manufactured in about 100 factories across the country, and uses its earnings to invest in banks, luxury hotels, a hydroelectric plant, a golf course, and even drugmakers. Most of its money goes to its owner, the Chinese government; the tobacco industry accounts for about 7 percent of the state’s revenue each year [emphasis added], and China National controls as much as 98 percent of the market. All told, the industry in China employs more than 500,000 Chinese. They are among roughly 20 million people who get some income from tobacco, including members of 1.3 million farming households and workers at 5 million retailers, according to government figures. The extent to which the government is interlocked with the fortunes of China National might best be described by the company’s presence in schools. Slogans over the entrances to sponsored elementary schools read, “Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.”

From Andrew Martin, there is more here.  Of course this helps explain why the Chinese government has such mixed feelings about conducting a successful anti-tobacco campaign.  By the way, do any of you know of a source on the 7 percent figure?

Real Vegan Cheese is made from the same proteins found in cow's milk, but they came from genetically modified yeast. But is it real? Vegan? Cheese?

The post Cow Milk Without the Cow Is Coming to Change Food Forever appeared first on WIRED.

How a voraciously curious little boy became one of the world’s greatest healers.

Humanity’s millennia-old quest to understand the human body is strewn with medical history milestones, but few individual figures merit as much credit as Persian prodigy-turned-polymath Ibn Sina (c. 980 CE–1037 AD), commonly known in the West as Avicenna — one of the most influential thinkers in our civilization’s unfolding story. He authored 450 known works spanning physics, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, logic, poetry, and medicine, including the seminal encyclopedia The Canon of Medicine, which forever changed our understanding of the human body and its inner workings. This masterwork of science and philosophy — or metaphysics, as it was then called — remained in use as a centerpiece of medieval medical education until six hundred years after Ibn Sina’s death.

As a lover of children’s books that celebrate the life-stories of influential and inspiring luminaries — including those of Jane Goodall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Neruda, Henri Rousseau, Julia Child, Albert Einstein, and Maria Merian — I was delighted to come upon The Amazing Discoveries of Ibn Sina (public library) by Lebanese writer Fatima Sharafeddine and Iran-based Iraqi illustrator Intelaq Mohammed Ali, a fine addition to these favorite children’s books celebrating science.

In stunning illustrations reminiscent of ancient Islamic manuscript paintings, this lyrical first-person biography traces Ibn Sina’s life from his childhood as a voracious reader to his numerous scientific discoveries to his lifelong project of advancing the art of healing.

A universal celebration of curiosity and the unrelenting pursuit of knowledge, the story is doubly delightful for adding a sorely needed touch of diversity to the homogenous landscape of both science history and contemporary children’s books — here are two Middle Eastern women, telling the story of a pioneering scientist from the Islamic Golden Age.

The Amazing Discoveries of Ibn Sina comes from Canadian indie powerhouse Groundwood Books, who have also given us such treasures as a wordless illustrated celebration of the art of noticing, a tender love letter to winter, and a heartening celebration of gender diversity.

Illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books; photographs my own.

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Half of Americans reject evolution, the second-lowest acceptance rate of 34 developed countries. Just try defending Darwin in Kentucky… more»

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers studying the commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen found it has a previously unknown side effect: It blunts positive emotions (abstract). Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol, has been in use for more than 70 years in the United States, but this is the first time that this side effect has been documented.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This sprawling comic novel cum history is likely to go down as one of the books of the year.  I thought Lawrence D. Mass’s review was excellent, here is one excerpt:

Conversely, is The American People the War and Peace or Gone With The Wind of LGBT history? The American People is so many disparate things that comparisons will inevitably fall short. It’s a Swiftian journey through an America we never knew; a Voltairean satire of American life and ways; a literary offspring of Gore Vidal’s Lincoln and Myra Brenckenridge; a pornographic American history through the eyes of a Henry Miller; a Robin Cook medical mystery. It’s a Sinclairean expose of American industrial and corporate skulduggery, and otherwise breathtakingly testimonial to the art of muckraking. It’s a treasure trove of historical findings, especially of the history of sex in America — of prostitution, communal living, of STD ‘s, of medicine and infectious diseases, of sanitation and health care, of medical and historical institutions, research, opinion, publications, figureheads and testimony. It’s an ultimate coming together (pun intended) of the personal with the political. And it’s the grandest telling yet of Kramer’s own story.

But as you can see from the above description, a significant chunk of readers will reject the book’s premise, language, and topics altogether.  I think it is very, very good, you can order it here.

I will be speaking at the Voice and Exit Festival in Austin, Texas, June 20-21. Voice and Exit is like a TED conference on steroids, an edgier, more radical TED. It looks like a lot of fun. Hope to see you there.

Here is a bit from V&A:

We assemble those who ask: What are the systems and ways of life that are holding us back? What can we create to make those old ways obsolete? What innovations enable us to find wellbeing, life meaning and stronger connection to others? How can we live intentionally today so as to create that better future? Voice & Exit is an environment of exploration where we “criticize by creating” a better world.

theodp writes: After stressing how important the funding of Washington State education — particularly CS Ed — is to Microsoft, company general counsel Brad Smith encountered one of those awkward interview moments (audio at 28:25). GeekWire Radio: "So, would you ever consider ending that practice [ducking WA taxes by routing software licensing royalties through Nevada-based Microsoft Licensing, GP] in Nevada [to help improve WA education]?" Smith: "I think there are better ways for us to address the state's needs than that kind of step." Back in 2010, Smith, Steve Ballmer, and Microsoft Corporation joined forces to defeat Proposition I-1098, apparently deciding there were better ways to address the state's needs than a progressive income tax.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ratatat have returned with "Cream on Chrome", their first music since 2010's LP4. It arrives ahead of the duo's appearance at Coachella later this evening (you'll be able to watch their performance via the festival livestream). Give it a spin below, and check out Ratatat's upcoming tour dates to see if they're coming to a town near you. Update: Watch them perform the song at Coachella.

Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000 dream catchers. […]

The post Into the mystic appeared first on Aeon Magazine.

New submitter Analog24 writes: The QWERTY keyboard was not designed with modern touchscreen usage in mind, especially when it comes to swype texting. A recent study attempted to optimize the standard keyboard layout to minimize the number of swype errors. The result was a new layout that reduces the rate of swipe interpretation mistakes by 50.1% compared to the QWERTY keyboard.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.