LONDON (Reuters) - Manil Suri has won the annual Bad Sex in Fiction award for a scene in his novel "The City of Devi" describing a sexual encounter in terms of exploding supernovas and streaking superheroes, Britain's Literary Review said on Tuesday.

They’re making a comeback:

“It’s so sad,” says Peter Hotez of Baylor College of Medicine, who founded the US’s first dedicated school of tropical medicine in 2011. He estimates that Chagas [disease], worms and other diseases typically associated with the developing world could afflict some 14 million impoverished people in the US. “They are called neglected tropical diseases,” says Hotez. “But in reality, this is about poverty, not climate.”

Worryingly, both situations are getting worse.

In 2008, Hotez made initial calculations of the number of cases in the US for several NTDs, most of which still stand as the best estimates available. Updated work on two parasites, however – Trichomonas vaginalis and Toxoplasma gondii – shows that many more people have the infections than was thought five years ago.

Much is specific to minority communities: 29 per cent of black American women carry T. vaginalis, versus 38 per cent of women in Nigeria. In the US, black women are 10 times as likely as white or Hispanic women to have the parasite, which increases the heterosexual spread of HIV and boosts the risk of a low-birthweight baby. Highly sensitive diagnostic tests were recently developed, and trichomoniasis can be cured with one oral dose of a common drug, metronidazole. But the startling prevalence of the disease suggests neither test nor treatment is routinely used.

Meanwhile, about 8 million people have Chagas disease worldwide, mostly very poor people across Latin America. In the US it mainly affects Hispanic communities. “Kissing bugs” that live in cracks in poor housing pass it to people by defecating while sucking their blood.

(Photo: An Aedes aegypti mosquito – the sort that caused Dengue fever outbreaks in Florida and Texas this summer – bites a human. By Matti Parkkonen.)

Or HPtFTU, for short.  That’s what Francis Spufford renames the Christian doctrine of original sin in his recent book, Unapologetic. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry praises the rhetorical move, writing that it presents “an old, and much-maligned, idea in a fresh new light”:

Casting original sin as HPtFTU shows how all our sins are somehow connected.

It allows, as Spufford masterfully writes, to realize how, on some level, my selfishly, dumbly cutting remark to my wife is, in its fundamental meanness and selfishness, the same thing as beating up a homeless vagrant, is the same thing as defrauding your employer, etc. It forbids us from casting the evils of others as “other” and therefore beneath us, and it reveals the important truth that all of the infinite panoply of human evil, despite the great diversity of its commission, ultimately has the same source.

Casting original sin as HPtFTU shows how original sin makes us all equal before the eyes of God, and shows that our HPtFTU means that none of us can ever think that we are better than any other, because all of us are fundamentally broken and equal in our brokenness. Therefore, casting original sin as HPtFTU shows that, contrary to the legend of sin as an instrument for enforcing guilt-ridden terror, the recognition of original sin is the first step on a path of love, because once I see in you the same brokenness that is in me, I am moved to love you. Casting original sin as HPtFTU, therefore, lets us enter into the properly Christian dynamic of, recognizing ourselves as broken, moving both towards God—since only He, and nothing of this world, can heal the HPtFTU—and towards our fellow man—equally fallen and, therefore, equally crying out for love.

Previous Dish on Spufford here, here, here, and here.

Phone Keypad

I use one of those old phones where you type with numbers—for example, to type "Y", you press 9 three times. Some words have consecutive letters on the same number. When they do, you have to pause between letters, making those words annoying to type. What English word has the most consecutive letters on the same key?

Stewart Bishop

We can answer that question with the following headache-inducing shell command, which finds all words in a given list which use the same key a bunch of times in a row:

cat wordlist.txt | perl -pe 's/^(.*)\$/\L\$& \U\$&/g' | tr 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' '2223334445556667777888999' | grep -P "(.)\1\1\1\1\1"

The winner, according to this script, is nonmonogamous, which requires you to type seven consecutive letters (nonmono) with the "6" key.[1]It's actually tied with nonmonotonic. These no doubt both lose to more obscure words which weren't in the wordlists I used.

Phone Keyboard Sentences

It's rare for a word to have all its letters on the same key; the longest common ones are only a few letters.[2]Like "tutu". Nevertheless, using only these words, we can write a high def MMO on TV, a phrase whose words use only one number key each.

There are plenty of other phrases like this, although some of them are a bit of a stretch:

Typing issues like this aren't limited to old phone keyboards. For any text input system, you can find phrases which are weird to type.

QWERTY Keyboards

It's a well-known piece of trivia among word geeks that "stewardesses" is the longest common word you can type on a QWERTY keyboard using only the left hand.

In fact, it's possible to write entire sentences with just the left hand. For example, try typing the words We reserved seats at a secret Starcraft fest. Weird, huh?

Let's take a look at a few more sentences—written with the help of some even messier shell commands and Python scripts[3]I constructed these sentences by searching text logs for sentence fragments that fit a particular constraint, then randomly connecting those groups together using a technique called Markov chaining. You can see the code I used here.—which follow various constraints:

Left hand only

Right hand only

Home row only

Top row only

And lastly, if anyone wants to know why you're not more active on social media, you only need the top row to explain that you're ...

Taking photos can worsen your memory of the things you see:

Two new studies published in Psychological Science found that people who took pictures of objects had more trouble remembering specific details about them, where they were situated, and even if they had seen them at all.

Fairfield University psychologist Linda Henkel had people take tours through the university’s Bellarmine Museum of Art. On the tour, the subjects were asked to take note of certain objects, either by photographing them, or simply by observing them. The next day participants had less accurate memories of the objects they photographed compared to the ones they had only observed. Henkel attributed this to something she called the “photo-taking impairment effect,” which is sort of like in The Phaedrus, where Plato warns that the written word kills our ability to memorize things, but with cameras instead of writing.

“When people rely on technology to remember for them—counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves—it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences,” Henkel said.

One of your favorite holiday movies gets an blunt appraisal:

Sarah Wanenchak thinks meme-speak is revitalizing the language:

[O]ne of the things I love about it is that what stuffy English teachers would be horrified by has become a powerful, interesting, nuanced style of writing unto itself, homegrown on the internets.  I recall – and I imagine you do as well – all the panic a while back (a lot of which remains) about how communication on the web and via text message was going to destroy language skills in those damn kids with the clothes and the hair, that it was going to ruin people’s ability to communicate coherently at all. But here we are, and “bad” English is doing a very important job in a way that really didn’t exist before. 

A recent and pretty terrific article on The Atlantic’s site deals with the evolving grammatical conventions around the use of “because”, the “prepositional because”. Or in other words, “because” is changing because internet. That’s also “bad” English. And it’s awesome, because language.

I can clearly only speak about English here – something I regret – and I would love to know if other languages on the web are going through similar processes. Mostly I’m just pleased that this is getting attention, and I want to see it get more. Things like this help erode the intensely silly idea that cultural change that occurs via the web is somehow illegitimate, or stupid, or not worth paying attention to at all.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

(Homage to National Novel Writing Month [NaNoWriMo] by Flickr user Mpclemens)

Annalee Newitz looks to Chris Lavers’s book A Natural History of Unicorns for the answer:

As Lavers explains, the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament mentions an animal called a “reem.” When scholars tried to translate this word into Greek, they were flummoxed. They had no idea what this “reem” was. They knew it was big, and it had horns, and that it obviously wasn’t a goat. (Goats are mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.) So they translated it as “monoceros,” meaning “one-horn.” Then, when the Greek Bible was translated into Latin, the word became “unicornus.” And that word, translated into English, is unicorn.

Early in the 20th century, when scholars cracked the code on ancient cuneiform script, they finally learned what that mysterious reem really was. In these ancient texts, written around the time when the Hebrew Bible was being penned, there are many references to an animal called a rimu. Like the biblical reem, the rimu was enormous, strong, and had horns. That animal was an ox. So all of those references to unicorns in the Bible? Those are actually to an ox. Which, if you read the actual sections of the Bible, makes a lot more sense.

But for nearly 1500 years, Christians believed in the unicorn version of things. The unicorn came to symbolize Christ, its horn the cross, and its tribulations during the hunt were like Christ’s tribulations on earth. Interestingly, the idea that unicorns were attracted to virgins comes from a pagan source. A Latin book called the Physiologus, probably written in the second century CE, mentions that a unicorn can only be caught when it lays its head down in a virgin’s lap. Christian analysts seized on this idea, suggesting that this was symbolic of how Christ came into the world – with the help of a virgin. Keeping all of this in mind, it’s easy to understand what those 16th-century unicorn tapestries are all about.

(Image of a tapestry fragment from The Mystic Capture of the Unicorn, c. 1500, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Onion reviews Hunger Games:

Reviewing David Edmonds’ Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong, Robert Herritt suggests that the body politic could use intellectual exercise:

There’s a healthy tendency to dismiss these kinds of line-drawing disputes as frivolous or, even worse, lawyerly. Trolley examples in particular, as Edmonds admits, have grown so complex as to “stretch the limits of our credulity and imagination – the limits beyond which intuitions become fuzzy and faint.”

And yet, we confront fine-grained moral distinctions all the time, like when the NSA tells us there’s an important difference between monitoring the metadata of our phone calls and monitoring their actual content; or when lawmakers seek to ban some mind-altering substances but not others. How are we to make sense of the judgment that, if you’re a Syrian dictator, killing your own people with conventional weapons is one thing, but using sarin gas is quite another? And then there’s the issue that Philippa Foot was trying to clarify when she created the trolley problem all those years ago: abortion.

Many of us have strong beliefs about these matters and, one would hope, reasons for those beliefs. Even if you see trolleyology as a waste of time, it at least lays bare how truly difficult it is to figure out what those reasons are, much less to determine whether they are any good.

A review of the “trolley problem” thought experiment:

Philippa Foot‘s original formulation of the problem ran as follows:

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed. Beside this example is placed another in which a pilot whose aeroplane is about to crash is deciding whether to steer from a more to a less inhabited area. To make the parallel as close as possible it may rather be supposed that he is the driver of a runaway tram which he can only steer from one narrow track on to another; five men are working on one track and one man on the other; anyone on the track he enters is bound to be killed. In the case of the riots the mob have five hostages, so that in both the exchange is supposed to be one man’s life for the lives of five.

A utilitarian view asserts that it is obligatory to steer to the track with one man on it. According to simple utilitarianism, such a decision would be not only permissible, but, morally speaking, the better option (the other option being no action at all). An alternate viewpoint is that since moral wrongs are already in place in the situation, moving to another track constitutes a participation in the moral wrong, making one partially responsible for the death when otherwise no one would be responsible. An opponent of action may also point to the incommensurability of human lives. Under some interpretations of moral obligation, simply being present in this situation and being able to influence its outcome constitutes an obligation to participate. If this were the case, then deciding to do nothing would be considered an immoral act if one values five lives more than one.

The initial trolley problem becomes more interesting when it is compared to other moral dilemmas. One such is that offered by Judith Jarvis Thomson is called “the fat man”:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

Doug Bierend spotlights the work of photographer Thomas Jackson:

In Emergent Behavior … Jackson coaxes scores of disposable objects like keg cups, cheeseballs, glow sticks and Post-it notes into persuasively organic formations. The vast variety of ways that swarms manifest in the world — in the animal kingdom, robotics, biology — affords Jackson a lot of conceptual material to work with. “It gives me an ability to find inspiration in a focused way,” he says. “I can look at photographs of schools of fish, or flocks of birds, or data swarms, or microorganisms or whatever and really get ideas from that.”

The concept coalesced for Jackson after working with the first two photos of the series — the first portraying shards of broken wooden palettes conspiring to jump over a city sidewalk, the second a matrix of leaves hovering among the trees in an upstate New York forest. “I spent a lot of time staring at them and I realized, these are swarms,” he says. “I arrived at my theme a little bit into the project, sort of like the novelist who doesn’t know where his story is going to go — he just starts writing.”

(Photo by Thomas Jackson)

If I had one single reason for supporting Obama in the last election, it was that he and he alone had the strategy and perseverance to end the Cold War with Iran. He hasn’t done that yet – but he has, with remarkable global unity, started down a diplomatic path that could liberate the forces for moderation and democracy in that country, and unwind a dangerous ratchet toward war. That was always his larger promise from the get-go: not just to end the disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; not just to end the torture regime that made a war criminal of the president and ruined both our moral authority and the integrity of our intelligence-gathering; but to begin to defuse the deeper forces of polarization and conflict that seemed only likely to intensify after 9/11. I have always seen Obama as the antidote to Bush. This weekend, he fully inhabited the role.

For this blog, the question of Iran has particular resonance. Patrick, Chris and I truly soldered our partnership in the heady days of the Green Revolution, as we became immersed in every tweet, every gesture and every tragedy of that great awakening. I know Dish readers were glued to those events as well – and feel the relief and exhilaration of this partial but still real breakthrough.

Which is why we should make this clear: this blog favors this agreement primarily because of our love of and admiration for the people of Iran. We saw them in June 2009 dare to believe that their long nightmare of isolation, extremism and theocratic rule might end one day. And there are times when commentary on all of this too easily misses their central place in this diplomacy. We are doing this not just because it is in the interests of the United States for there to be peace and non-proliferation in the Middle East; but because it as an act of basic respect toward the people of Iran. They were the ones who risked their lives and fortunes to fight against theocracy in 2009 and they are the ones who recently elected the most moderate leaders allowed. And we owe it to them to reciprocate their courage and perseverance. To be sure, Rouhani is not all of the regime, but he is very much a part of it, and has the sole democratic legitimacy. Not to engage this newly elected leader’s diplomatic outreach would be to turn our back on fledgling democracy in the Middle East – and kindling those democratic forces was and is the best response to the polarization unleashed in the crime of September 11, 2001.

Now consider this: in the past few months, Obama has both begun to remove the threat of WMDs in Syria through diplomacy and found a way to ensure that Iran’s irrevocable nuclear know-how will be verifiably channeled into peaceful, civilian use. These two acts of diplomacy compound one another to make the world a much more peaceful place. Yes, there remains a risk. Of course there does.

But there was also a risk in reaching out to Gorbachev in the 1980s, and yet two Cold Warriors, Reagan and Thatcher, chose to do business with him. And they were right to. As with the Soviets and the arms race, there comes a point when the pain inflicted on the other party by sanctions is so great you have maximal external leverage for reform. Too much and the sanctions would be counter-productive; not enough and we would only have military power as a lever. It takes judgment to know if the time is ripe to take yes for an answer. But, in my view, Reagan was as right to embrace Gorbachev as Obama is to reward Rouhani.

Reagan’s pragmatism and genuine horror of nuclear weapons have not been replicated in today’s Republican right. But those qualities defined him and his legacy just as much as his ideological fervor did. Obama is today acting on exactly those principles – as well as those of president George H W Bush, and Dwight Eisenhower. He is, in other words, the corrective to the second Bush and the neoconservative propensity for both utopianism and war (always a deadly combination). He is, yes, fulfilling his initial promise – to bring about the change we can still believe in and to rekindle the hope that region so desperately needs.

Update from a reader:

Hearing news of the deal with Iran makes me incredibly happy. I am a first-generation Persian and have lived happily in the United States all my life and have never truly understood our country’s issues with Iran. Understandably, there is the tumultuous political history for the past 40 years, but it’s even weirder that it took so long for this deal to come around. My family’s immersion into American life, along with thousands of other Iranians, has left me wondering why Iranians and Americans can get along but Iran and America can’t.

But really the problem was that the two countries just won’t - or at least it used to be that way. And it wasn’t until each leader decided to seize upon the opportunity to talk again. You highlighted the Green Revolution extensively and always showed an enormous amount of respect towards Iranians. You remained skeptical of the mullahs and the Ayatollah while always seeing the best in the people. Not everyone dedicated daily attention to their marches for freedom and the impact of bringing them back into the international community. So it’s with Obama and Rouhani (with the Ayatollah’s backing or permission we don’t know) that finally found a way to make it happen.

I’ve never thought of myself out of place in the US and adore the Stars and Stripes, so I can’t tell you how great it is that my ancestral home and my home are finally moving towards peace.

(Photos: Getty Images)

Melissa Keating rounds up the “four best beards in the history of Christendom.” One belonged to St. Thomas More:

Henry VIII condemned St. Thomas More to death after he refused to deny papal supremacy. More had been confined in the Tower of London for over a year (hence the beard, and why it’s not pictured). As the executioner lifted his axe, More asked him to wait. The blindfolded saint-to-be carefully laid his beard on the outside of the block, out of the executioner’s path. “This hath not offended the king,” he quipped, thus protecting his beard from the blade.

Then the axe fell.

You read that correctly. His last words before beholding the Beatific Vision were a beard joke. While that might not fit the modern notion of a saint, it completely matches his personality. One biographer wrote, “that innocent mirth which had been so conspicuous in his life, did not forsake him to the last … his death was of a piece with his life.”

Thomas More was my confirmation saint. Now it makes even more sense.

(Image of a not-so-bearded More at the chopping block via Flickr user CircaSassy)

For his “Restless America” project, pictured above, Chris Walker drew on data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey to illustrate the migration patterns of Americans. Walker explains how it works:

The visualization is a circle cut up into arcs, the light-colored pieces along the edge of the circle, each one representing a state. The arcs are connected to each other by links, and each link represents the flow of people between two states. States with longer arcs exchange people with more states (California and New York, for example, have larger arcs). Links are thicker when there are relatively more people moving between two states. The color of each link is determined by the state that contributes the most migrants, so for example, the link between California and Texas is blue rather than orange, because California sent over 62,000 people to Texas, while Texas only sent about 43,000 people to California. Note that, to keep the graphic clean, I only drew a link between two states if they exchanged at least 10,000 people.

Explore an interactive version of the graphic here. Update from a reader:

I live in Austin, Texas and drive downtown to work everyday, and during my commute I play a game with myself: if I don’t see a California license plate, I allow myself to stop by the taco truck near my office for a breakfast taco. I always lose, and I never buy tacos. Since I’m on a diet, it’s probably a good thing that there are so many Californians in Austin.

(Hat tip: John Metcalfe)

Liberals and conservatives are both wrong about how mainstream their views are – but in different ways:

It isn’t just that liberals are more divided and conservatives are more united, it’s also that liberals believe they’re more divided, and conservatives believe they’re more unified, even when it’s not necessarily true. The study asked people about their opinions on a range of questions on both political and non-political topics, then asked them to guess what proportion of people who shared their general ideology agreed with them on that particular question. The results showed that liberals displayed a “truly false uniqueness effect”—they were more likely to think that their views were different from those of their peers, even when they weren’t—while conservatives displayed a “truly false consensus effect,” believing that their views were the same as their peers, even when they weren’t.

The authors also found evidence that the liberal false uniqueness effect has at least part of its origins in liberals’ personal desire to feel unique, as measured by a “need for uniqueness” scale. In other words, liberals who were more likely to see themselves as the type of person who’s different and special were more likely to think their opinions were unique as well.

Beinart reviews polling on the subject:

A November 2011 Pew study found that young Americans were more than 20 points more likely than the middle-aged, and a whopping 30 points more likely than the elderly, to favor a bigger, more expensive government over a cheaper, smaller one.

But the same failures that have made young Americans eager for government help also have left them dubious that government can provide it. When a 2009 Center for American Progress study compared millennials to previous generations of young people, it found them significantly less likely to trust government to “do what is right most of the time.” A 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggests that this paradox is typical of people who enter adulthood during rough economic times. “Recession-stricken individuals on the one hand ask for larger involvement by the state in redistribution,” observed authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, “but at the same time are more skeptical of the state institutions’ ability to intervene effectively.”

During Obama’s first term, this contradiction only grew. According to pollsters, young Americans were far more supportive of Obamacare than their elders. But between 2010 and 2013, their faith in government continued to fall. Until a month ago, it seemed possible that when health-care reform took effect, and young Americans began to feel its positive results, the gap might close. Now it seems likely to widen further.

A Polish concert pianist has turned a Renaissance dream into a reality (click “CC” for English captions):

The story behind the instrument:

Buried in the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous 15th century notebooks, amongst the sketches of flying machines, parachutes, diving suits, and armored tanks, was a curious idea for a musical instrument that merged the harpsichord and cello. The Italian Renaissance polymath referred to it as the viola organista. The general idea for the instrument was to correlate keyboard fingerwork with the sustained sound of a stringed instrument, but among the dozens of ideas pursued by the gifted artist and inventor, this was one he never explored further. Nearly 100 years would pass before an organist in Nuremberg would build the first functional bowed keyboard instrument, and many others would try throughout history to realize Da Vinci’s vision with various levels of success.

Now, after an estimated 5,000 hours of work over three years and nearly $10,000 invested in the project, Polish concert pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki has unveiled his own version of the viola organista.

The mechanics:

The flat bed of its interior is lined with golden spruce. Sixty-one gleaming steel strings run across it, similar to the inside of a baby grand. Each is connected to the keyboard, complete with smaller black keys for sharp and flat notes. But unlike a piano, it has no hammered dulcimers. Instead, there are four spinning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair, like violin bows. To turn them, Zubrzycki pumps a pedal below the keyboard connected to a crankshaft. As he tinkles the keys, they press the strings down onto the wheels, emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion. The effect is a sound that da Vinci dreamt of, but never heard.

J. Bryan Lowder is delighted:

While the viola organista is unlikely to replace pianos or string ensembles (or more practical string synthesizers for that matter) any time soon, it seems compelling as a compositional tool in certain special cases where a dense, acoustic string sound is desirable, but the trouble of hiring multiple string players is not. That’s assuming you can get Zubrzycki to lend you his one-of-a-kind realization. In any case, it’s always good to have a little more music in the world, especially when it comes straight from the 500-year-old mind of a maestro.

The second volume of Mark Twain’s Autobiography - the entirety of which was delayed from publication for 100 years – reveals a man with a serious mean streak:

[T]here’s no doubt that Twain says certain things in this book that he couldn’t have said while still alive, including calling Jesus a fraud, the afterlife a sham, God a sadistic madman, and Christianity “bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory.” But Twain’s distaste for religion was an open secret among those who knew him, and the atheism in this volume won’t astonish anyone familiar who is with his work.

The hundred-year ban seems less about protecting Twain’s reputation than about sparing the feelings of the many people whom he attacks in his autobiography. The list is long. He has total recall of past slights, as well as an undiminished stream of vitriol for those whom he feels disrespected or deceived him. But he wants to make sure that his victims—and their wives and children—are dead before he dismembers them as cruelly as necessary. He feels a special hatred for publishers, especially Charles L. Webster, the nephew-in-law who headed Twain’s ill-fated publishing venture—“one of the most assful persons I have ever met.” “The times when he had an opportunity to be an ass and failed to take advantage of it were so few that, in a monarchy, they would have entitled him to a decoration.”

Previous Dish on Twain’s autobiography here and here.

In the above short film, Brian Merchant documents his month-long abstinence from food as a beta tester for Soylent, a liquid food substitute:

After I got back to New York, I didn’t lust after food. I didn’t go hungry, and I didn’t curse Soylent. I was still anxious, sure, as I missed lunch hours and dinner dates and nights out drinking. I found that my new Soylent-fueled body wasn’t well-equipped for drinking. I’d get dizzy, a little ill, but not exactly drunk, if I downed more than two or three drinks. Long, intensive physical activity seemed an undue strain, and I started to lose weight.

A few of the packets were infested with mold, but that didn’t bother me; I was a beta tester after all, and the packaging hadn’t been finalized yet. It’d gotten punctured en route somehow, and moisture had got in—which did highlight its vulnerability to mold, an important point given that [Soylent creator] Rob [Rhinehart] touts its non-spoiling benefits as a solution to sending nutritious food to far-flung places.

Yet I felt fine—even good. Some days I was downright grateful I was on Soylent; a packed day with deadlines, interviews, and edits to finish blew by seamlessly, and I never had to leave my desk. Those days, I embraced Soylent wholeheartedly.

Soylent has a new liquid-food competitor in Ambro:

“Soylent’s goal is to be synthetic and affordable,” argues [Ambro co-founder Mikko] Ikola[.] “Ambro is organic and premium”. … Ambro has a very different customer target to Soylent: the busy entrepreneur, the overworked employee, the constantly moving field rep and the conscious healthy eater. “It is about getting over hunger five minutes before your meeting, but doing it in a way which completes all your nutritional needs,” says Ikola.

A passage from “Find the Bad Guy” by Jeffrey Eugenides:

I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each family smelled had to do with bodily functions deep inside their bodies? The whole thing sort of turned your stomach, the more you thought about it.

Now I live in an old house that probably smells funny to outsiders.

Or used to live. At the present time, I’m in my front yard, hiding out between the stucco wall and the traveller palms.

Read the rest here. Check out a Q&A with Eugenides about the story here. Peruse his latest novel, The Marriage Plot, here. Last week’s short story is here.

One hundred years ago this week, Proust published Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Richard Lea ruminates on what draws Proust aficionados back to the seven-volume novel again and again:

The memories that the narrator recalls over the course of seven volumes include childhood anguish in the country, an intrigue with a courtesan, a portrait of high-society entertaining, an exploration of fin de siècle gay life, a relationship doomed by jealousy and more and more and more. It’s a novel so voluminous, so capacious, so complete you can spend weeks, months or even years submerged in its crystalline waters. When you surface – gasping a little from the spectacular dénouement – you find that the world you have just left seems big enough, mighty enough to encompass the world around you, to measure up to life itself. For about a year or so after I finished Le Temps retrouvé I couldn’t read another novel without thinking Proust had written it already. It’s a universe that you are obliged to explore at the languid pace of Proust’s serpentine prose, snaking from enumeration towards explication, from description into deviation.

If you’ve attempted to crack the novel and been turned off, you’re not alone, as Adrian Tahourdin recounts:

As is well known, André Gide turned the novel down for the [literary magazine] Nouvelle Revue Française, thinking it, on the evidence of the sections he skimmed, the work of a snobbish dilettante – a decision he was to regret for the rest of his life (and a lesson to all publishers’ readers maybe); by 1918, he was writing in his Journal of “Proust’s marvellous book, which I was rereading”, almost as if in a quest for private redemption for his earlier misjudgement.

Fortunately another publisher, Bernard Grasset, stepped in. William Carter writes in his mammoth and invaluable Marcel Proust (2002) that Grasset regarded the publication of Proust’s work as a “business deal” and had tried to read it “but found it impenetrable”. He told a friend “it’s unreadable; the author paid the publishing costs”.

Colin Marshall marks the centennial by digging up a letter from a 16-year-old Proust to his grandfather, pleading for 13 francs to cover a disappointing visit to a brothel:

I so needed to see if a woman could stop my awful masturbation habit that Papa gave me 10 francs to go to a brothel. But first, in my agitation, I broke a chamber pot: 3 francs; then, still agitated, I was unable to screw. So here I am, back to square one, waiting more and more as hours pass for 10 francs to relieve myself, plus 3 francs for the pot. But I dare not ask Papa for more money so soon and so I hoped you could come to my aid in a circumstance which, as you know, is not merely exceptional but also unique. It cannot happen twice in one lifetime that a person is too flustered to screw.

Also in commemoration, The Public Domain Review has assembled a collection of works of art mentioned in Swann’s Way. Previous Dish on Proust here, here, and here.

In a 1977 interview, the late Kurt Vonnegut — born 91 years ago this week — stressed the importance of plot in modern storytelling:

VONNEGUT: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless one of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don’t praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep readers reading. When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time. One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn’t get it out all day long. I thought that was wonderful. The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger. Now, there’s an admirable practical joke for you. When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone’s wanting anything, you exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do. You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are—

INTERVIEWER: And what they want.

VONNEGUT: Yes. And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other. Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life. “Modern life is so lonely,” they say. This is laziness. It’s the writer’s job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all. If a writer can’t or won’t do that, he should withdraw from the trade.

(Hat tip: Sadie Stein)

An out-take from Breaking Bad meets James Bond:

Gareth Williams, 31, a Welsh-born mathematician involved in code-breaking work, was found dead on Aug. 23, 2010, by police officers who entered his London apartment. His naked body was curled in a fetal position inside a sports bag in an otherwise empty bathtub. In a twist worthy of a spy movie, the bag was padlocked, but the keys to the lock were inside the bag, beneath the decomposing body.

The first explanation was the bleeding obvious:

Last year, a coroner concluded that Williams was probably unlawfully killed and his death the result of a criminal act. Following an eight-day inquest, the Westminster coroner, Dr Fiona Wilcox, said he was probably either suffocated or poisoned, before a third party locked and placed the bag in the bath.

But Scotland Yard, which took three years to investigate the death,  just argued that he did it himself! They are not a teensy bit suspicious that a spy service was the primary source of witnesses about the man, and that the cops had not been able to access Williams’ personnel and vetting files until after the first coroner’s inquest. As for the feasibility of locking oneself into a bag in a bath tub:

At the coroner’s inquest, two experts tried 400 times to lock themselves into the 32in by 19in holdall without success, with one remarking that even Harry Houdini “would have struggled” to squeeze himself inside. But days after the inquest, footage emerged of a retired army sergeant climbing into the bag and locking it from the inside.

So maybe he could have. One woman seems to prove it’s possible here:

But: wait a minute!

Scotland Yard’s inquiry also found no evidence of Williams’s fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner last year said supported her assertion of “third-party involvement” in the death. Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the holdall without touching the rim of the bath.

Aw, come on. The dude was in an MI6 safe house. No solid evidence of suicidal tendencies. Another kinky auto-erotic asphixiation? Well, the Brits love their gags almost as much as Richard Cohen. And there is some evidence of Williams looking at claustrophilia porn online. (Look it up). But if you’re the kind of person who does not take anything spy services say very seriously, this is paranoia crack.

So when’s the movie?

In an interview, Detroit pastor Christopher Brooks, author of the forthcoming Urban Apologetics, discusses how he tries to overcome the “disconnection” between typical arguments for Christianity and the realities faced by urban minorities:

Many people in our community are simply asking, “How do we make it in this country right now?” Unfortunately, traditional Protestant apologetics has rarely addressed questions of justice. Pick up a Catholic catechism, and you will find a section on social consciousness, social responsibility, and social justice. But in the average evangelical systematic theology, it’s not there. Sadly, in the black community, we have conceded these issues either to liberation theology or to black nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam. There needs to be a strong evangelical voice in our urban areas that says, “Here is what the gospel has to say about justice.”

White evangelicals typically are drawn to the righteousness of God—the importance of right doctrine and right practices—whereas African Americans and minorities are drawn more to the justice of God. Yet Psalm 89 says the foundations of God’s throne are righteousness and justice. We can’t bifurcate the ethics of God into categories of righteousness—issues like abortion and human sexuality—or justice—issues like educational and economic equality.

One way his congregation is living that message:

Our church has embraced adoption and foster care in a huge way. The foster-care system is disproportionately populated by minority children. There has been an antagonistic relationship with the state because of the perception that the state somehow profits from pulling our children out of our homes.

But as we were studying Scripture, talking about the Father God, we encountered the language of adoption in Ephesians 1 and the orphan and the widow in James 1:27. We had to ask, “What is our obligation to the orphans in our community?”

We have a goal that there would be no children in our community waiting for a home. There are about 2,000 children waiting, and our goal is to be able to find 2,000 homes for them. We have 3,000 churches in Detroit. So if each church can get just one family to adopt, we can eliminate the need for children to wait. That is a matter of praxis and apologetics: showing how the gospel makes a difference.

In response to Twitter going public, Benjamin Kunkel pens a manifesto arguing that “social media can either be profitable or it can be social. In the end, it can’t be both”:

The IPOs of Facebook and Twitter should therefore be reversed, through the socialization of both companies and other social-media services that attain a similar scale. The time has come, in other words, to socialize social media. Keynes long ago called for “a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment” in modern economies, while leaving room for the skill and inventiveness of entrepreneurs “(who are certainly so fond of their craft that their labor could be obtained much cheaper than at present), to be harnessed to the service of the community on reasonable terms of reward.” The broader question can await another day. But large social media companies particularly invite socialization—that is, going public in the sense of public ownership—for the reasons that follow.

One of the reasons he outlines:

Social media should be socialized because attaining profitability (through ads or fees) is impossible without degrading the service.

So far executives hope to turn a profit by providing ad space and/or by data-mining users so that information can be sold to advertisers to use more broadly. The more social-media services are infiltrated by ads, the less the user enjoys the fundamental social right of choosing her own company. On Twitter I follow who I want and don’t follow the others. On Facebook, as IRL, I choose my friends as well as those people I find it socially convenient to call “friends.” And as with social life generally, there are no directly assessed fees for participation, any more than I have to pay a toll to walk down the street with a friend (or follower).

Advertising degrades this freedom. I don’t get to choose whose ads I see, or whether I want to see any. Some people may enjoy corporate advertisements—and they should be able, accordingly, to follow Burger King or Pfizer. But I have something to advertise as well: my opinions, the articles I write, the books by other people I think you should buy, et cetera. That is my freedom, just as it’s yours to follow or block or unfriend me. We only lack this freedom when it comes to corporate entities with the budgets to override our choices. And everything suggests that as Facebook and Twitter try to increase revenues and share value, they will pollute social media with ever more ads.

Meanwhile, Kentaro Toyama argues that social media is less and less a liberating force:

[W]hat both Chinese censorship and American surveillance show is that there is nothing inherently democratizing about digital networks, at least not in the political sense. Far-reaching communication tools only make it easier to impose constraints on the freedom of expression or the right to privacy. Never before have Chinese censors had it so easy in identifying subversive voices, and never before has the NSA been able to eavesdrop on the private communications of so many people.

Silicon Valley feeds us a myth of technology trumping politics, but if anything, it’s the other way around. How else would the NSA have been able to strong-arm nine tech giants like Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft into cooperating with its PRISM program? What’s telling was the embarrassed semi-apology that these firms issued to the public – their excuse came down to, “We didn’t want to. What we did wasn’t so bad. They made us do it.” Meanwhile in China, Internet companies are a seamless extension of the government’s censorship machine.

Mariah Blake chronicles the collapse of the Unification Church:

[I]n recent years, [Rev. Sun Myung] Moon’s plans to remake America and salvage humanity had run into trouble. Followers had drifted away; his political influence had ebbed. With his ninetieth birthday approaching, he increasingly looked to his children to preserve his life’s work.

In Jin, Moon and his wife’s fourth child, seemed suited for the task. She had a modern American upbringing and a master’s degree from Harvard. In 2009, she took over the Unification Church of America and introduced a bold modernization program. Her aim, she said, was to transform the church into one that people – especially young people – were “dying to join.” She renamed the church Lovin’ Life Ministries, shelved the old hymn books, and launched a rock band, an offshoot of which played New York clubs under the moniker Sonic Cult. She also discarded the old Korean-inspired traditions: bows and chanting gave way to “Guitar Hero” parties, open mics, concerts, and ping-pong tournaments.

And then, early last year, she disappeared:

After several months passed with no sign of her, some parishioners began pressing for information on her whereabouts. They were blocked at every turn. Even the highest circles of church leadership couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say what had happened to In Jin Moon. Before long, it became clear that the House of Moon was crumbling and In Jin had become caught up in its downfall. But her disappearance was only one part of a much more complicated saga – one that involved illegitimate children, secret sex rituals, foreign spy agencies, and the family of Vice President Joseph Biden. Even by Moon’s famously eccentric standards, the collapse of his American project would turn out to be spectacular and deeply strange.

Previous Dish on the Moonies here and here.

(Video: From the Washington Times’ 15th anniversary dinner, in 1997)

Poring through the cultural, historical and genealogical attributes of America’s regions and states is not a new phenomenon. But it’s always fascinated me. The different brands of religion that colonized different parts of the country in stages, the interaction with existing institutions, and the very different approaches to politics help explain why this fantastically diverse country comes close to being ungovernable as a whole. What Colin Woodward has done is create eleven states of North America and focus on their attitudes toward violence. Here’s the map:

He has a book out explaining his analysis – but here’s the essay’s money quote:

Most scholarly research on violence has collected data at the state level, rather than the county level (where the boundaries of the eleven nations are delineated). Still, the trends are clear. The same handful of nations show up again and again at the top and the bottom of state-level figures on deadly violence, capital punishment, and promotion of gun ownership.

Consider assault deaths. Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist, broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010. In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per 100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of Yankeedom.

It’s this regional disparity that helps explain the impossibility of federal gun control of any bite. And on many issues, like stand-your-ground laws and the death penalty, deep cultural legacies about the permissibility of violence still propel the debate:

Of the twenty-three states to pass stand-your-ground laws, only one, New Hampshire, is part of Yankeedom, and only one, Illinois, is in the Midlands. By contrast, each of the six Deep South–dominated states has passed such a law, and almost all the other states with similar laws are in the Far West or Greater Appalachia …

The pattern for capital punishment laws is equally stark. The states dominated by Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Far West have had a virtual monopoly on capital punishment. They account for more than ninety-five percent of the 1,343 executions in the United States since 1976. In the same period, the twelve states definitively controlled by Yankeedom and New Netherland—states that account for almost a quarter of the U.S. population—have executed just one person.

The North-South rubric is way too crude. And the reality shows why federalism is the only workable system for this deeply divergent congeries of religion, culture and history.

“People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?)” – Richard Cohen, Washington Post.

The argument that the GOP is fueled by cultural bewilderment at a multi-racial, multi-cultural, gay married, multi-faith America is a vital one if you want to understand our irrational politics right now. So I wasn’t going to pile on. But when I thought about it, two words really leaped out at me: “conventional” and “gag-reflex.” No one who holds conventional views gags at an inter-racial couple; only someone with reactionary views does that. Yes, some older folks may still feel discomfort at the sight of an inter-racial couple, but, Gallup shows they only count for a third of even the over 65s. The total approval of a marriage like De Blasio’s hit a record of 86 percent in 2011. So 14 percent is now conventional? Or is Cohen once again telling us something about his issues with African-Americans?

And seriously: “must repress a gag reflex”? Makes you want to vomit? It’s not even a Buchanan “recoil”!

A reader writes:

Not to pooh-pooh the efforts of these guys, but it’s worth mentioning that their “strong suit”, California, has its own exchange and website, and the CA site has had none of the problems of healthcare.gov. It’s long had an easy way to preview plans with subsidy information. So, to the extent that these dudes are making things easier for non-Californians, good for them. But presenting this as a “fix” and using California as an example does CoveredCA.com a disservice.

Another points out:

Go to https://www.healthcare.gov/find-premium-estimates/ and you can do exactly what Health Sherpa does. This feature was functional from the start but no one knows about it. Also the big issue is the back side compatibility with the insurance companies and their systems. That’s where the big problems are. Also, HealthSherpa isn’t getting anywhere near the traffic, but that’s really an early launch issue at this point. Now why did they decide not to display shopping options upfront (which IS a big design flaw)? Two reasons:

1) ID verification: This is necessary for the “conservative” means-testing so that there won’t be fraud by people getting extra discounted insurance

2) Subsidies: In an attempt to avoid sticker shock, they want people to know they aren’t going to pay full price.

You can’t show people the discounts (aka subsidies) they get without the ID verification. So you want people to see that they aren’t getting a raw deal? Well, you have to verify. If anything this is showing the flaw of conservative reform, which in any version was based upon exchanges and subsidies.

Another reader:

The Health Sherpa has received some good press over the past couple weeks, mostly along the lines of “3 geeks built a better Obamacare in almost no time”. This is not a very complete or accurate picture of what’s going on here. Here are a few things to note:

* This site would not be possible without heathcare.gov because it uses data directly off https://data.healthcare.gov - a freely available service provided by the government.  CMS (Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services) and their contractors did the hard work of getting, and approving, the rates from the insurance companies, often through processes regulated by the states, and building out infrastructure to store and deliver that data.

* The data provided by data.healthcare.gov is out of date and does not contain accurate plan specifications such as deductibles, coinsurance rates, OOP maxes and copays.  All it gives for each plan is an estimated premium for a single adult aged 27, a child of unspecified age, an older adult aged 50, a couple of unspecified age, a single-parent household where the parent and child’s ages are unspecified, and a family of unspecified size and ages.  Tobacco is not factored in, as it would be if you actually applied for insurance.  So, if you are a smoker aged 49, you’re getting the same estimate from this data as if you’re a nonsmoker aged 21.  Premiums and Metal Ratings alone are a bad way to shop for insurance. Depending on the cost of the care you need, a Bronze plan could end up costing you less overall than a Silver plan, depending on the deductibles and coinsurance rates.

* Since the data was released in mid-October, building apps to make use of it was a logical step. Here are a few your readers might enjoy: a search engine using the same data (including subsidy calculations), another search engine using the same data (including subsidy calculations and support for Idaho and New Mexico), and http://www.healthdig.info (disclosure: I am the author of this site).

Another shifts gears with an epic rant:

This post hits home. I have worked as a government contractor for over 20 years and the system is broken and wasteful. It’s no surprise to me that the Obamacare website doesn’t work. The bigger the project is, the more money at stake, the more the overpaid and unqualified managers fight for work scope within and between companies and the more bureaucratic gamesmanship within the agency. I’ve been wanting to write an article or call a whistleblower group or stand on the street and scream. Instead, I keep collecting my paycheck waiting for someone else to break the story on this huge example of waste, fraud, and abuse – the legal contracting activity right in front of your nose.

There’s so much wrong, I hardly know where to start. First, the federal staff – the more the government relies on contractors, the less the government employee knows how to DO the actual work. They only “manage” the work. After a few years of this, few have kept abreast of changing industry standards and practices. The experience they may have once had becomes increasingly irrelevant.  They know the jargon and the history of a project(s) but they rely increasingly on contractor managers to develop strategy, budget, and schedules. These contractor managers’ influence over their federal counterparts derives more from their friendship or their powers of persuasion more than actual skill.

Plus, the federal staff have civil service protections, so if they screw up a project, there are few repercussions.  I’ve seen federal staff spend $5-10 million dollars on a project that we knew would not further project goals and in most cases alienated the very players, such as state and local governments, that we needed as partners. No amount of polite warnings (you don’t want to say anything too bluntly because friendly relations keep the task assignments and cash flowing) can dissuade a federal manager from their path if their ego is at stake. And yet, I have never seen consequences for incompetent decision-making. They keep getting their salaries and their promotions and can do so for 30 years all without a track record of success or productivity.

Next is the demented contracting system. Often, a government office responsible for a project will have a “Management & Operating” (M&O) contractor and a “support services” contractor. There are legal differences between these two but in practice the feds simply pit the contractors against each other. The M&O contractor will write a project plan. The client doesn’t like the M&O so they hand the document to the support services contractor to review and comment. The competitor rips the document and tells the client they aren’t being well served. The client asks the support services contractor to draft their own project plan and now taxpayers have paid twice for the same work. Before the 1960s (pick your decade, government contracting has been expanding rapidly since WWII), the federal employee would have written the damn project plan. Now they aren’t competent enough to assess the work on their own.

The world of government contracting is very hard to enter, therefore a few companies get much of the work (just look around DC and the suburbs at the HUGE buildings that go on for miles along each commuter artery with the names of contracting companies). These companies become bureaucracies themselves. I’ve had a few excellent managers who would succeed anywhere but most have one skill – they retired from the agency for which they now contract and have excellent relations with the federal staff. They make six figure salaries for holding meetings with the clients and then their staff to relay the message from the meeting with client. They hold another meeting make sure everyone is trained to the latest irrelevant safety measure, and generally interfere with the work. They seldom do any of the work themselves and often don’t know anything about the subject they oversee.

The staff at the contracting companies, who often have the field experience and actually conduct the work, spend equal amounts of time 1) explaining the work to their managers, and 2) explaining and educating their clients why a project needs to roll-out a certain way. The real work to advance a project is squeezed in around these wasteful responsibilities. In addition, the profit for these companies increases with the number of employees they can directly charge to the project. The surfeit of people on these large multi-million dollar contracts makes me sick. Supposedly they can be fired at will, but sleeping at your desk, harassing other employees, having no skills directly related to the work at hand has never gotten someone fired in my experience – because their presence generates profit. Because of the profit motive, there is no incentive to work efficiently.

For example, the client may need to post material on a website to further public communication. The contractor has no incentive to see if a satisfactory website already exists that meets the client needs. Instead, they will spend millions developing a new site with fancy bells and whistles and populating with their own studies without regard to cost-savings or the needs of the users.

Finally, what drives me the most crazy is the argument that private companies replacing government is somehow supposed to be more conservative??? It is nothing but corporate welfare and inefficient use of taxpayer dollars. If you want to shift responsibility for weapons production or waste management or environmental cleanup, then shift the responsibility to private industry and get government out of it. But if anyone thinks hiring companies to do the work the feds used to do is efficient, they haven’t stepped outside their echo chamber long enough to look at reality. These contracting company officials are so savvy at playing the politicians, the regulatory system, the contracting system, and the legal system, that they’ve taken us taxpayers for a ride. Sickeningly, many of my colleagues are Tea Party sympathizers who see no conflict in their positions. I wonder how they would fare if they were thrown to the street and had to survive without a federal tit.

Twitter users dropping the F-bomb in real time:

John Metcalfe elaborates:

What ties together a Bostonian upset over being ignored, a woman in Dallas angry about her empty refrigerator, and a resident of Portland, Oregon, who’s still steaming over the wars of George W. Bush? It’s their potty-mouths: Last night, each of these people blasted their Twitter followers with the word “fuck,” or one of its variants like WTF or OMFG. Each of these guys are included in this gloriously profane “FBomb Map,” which displays real-time instances of Twitter cursing as mushroom clouds popping up all over the world.