New View of Depression: An Ailment of the Entire Body

Scientists are increasingly finding that depression and other psychological disorders can be as much diseases of the body as of the mind.

People with long-term psychological stress, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder tend to develop earlier and more serious forms of physical illnesses that usually hit people in older age, such as stroke, dementia, heart disease and diabetes. Recent research points to what might be happening on the cellular level that could account for this.

Scientists are finding that the same changes to chromosomes that happen as people age can also be found in people experiencing major stress and depression.

The phenomenon, known as "accelerated aging," is beginning to reshape the field's understanding of stress and depression not merely as psychological conditions but as body-wide illnesses in which mood may be just the most obvious symptom.

"As we learn more…we will begin to think less of depression as a 'mental illness' or even a 'brain disease,' but as a systemic illness," says Owen Wolkowitz, a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who along with colleagues has conducted research in the field.

Gaining a better understanding of the mechanisms that link physical and mental conditions could someday prove helpful in diagnosing and treating psychological illnesses and improving cognition in people with memory problems, Dr. Wolkowitz says.

In an early look at accelerated aging, researchers at Duke University found about 20 years ago that brain scans of older people with depression showed much faster age-related loss of volume in the brain compared with people without depression. The reasons for the accelerated aging appeared to go beyond unhealthy behaviors, like smoking, diet and lack of exercise, researchers said.

Recent efforts to study what is behind accelerated aging on a cellular level have focused on telomeres, a protective covering at the ends of chromosomes that have been recognized as playing an important role in aging. Telomeres get shorter as people age, and shortened telomeres also are related to increased risk of disease and mortality.

by Shirley S. Wang, WSJ |  Read more:

Sam Serafy (guywoodhouse on flickr) (via (5) Eloise Kay / Pinterest
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Lit

[ed. Reading this now, and it's terrific.]

In “Lit,” her searing new memoir, Mary Karr recalls that she and her impossible mother used to play a game, when they were driving or her mother was bored or sprawled on her bed with a hangover: “Tell me a story she liked to say, meaning charm me — my life in this Texas suckhole is duller than a rubber knife. Amaze me.”

This game, aided and abetted by her father’s abundant storytelling gifts — his ability to regale his drinking buddies with all manner of startling tales — would fuel Ms. Karr’s own hunger for putting “marks on paper.” Even when she was a child, stapling together a book of rhymes she’d done in crayon, she knew that writing was a way she “could puncture the soap bubble” of her mother’s misery, that writing was a way to seize people’s attention and enthrall them.

With “Lit” Ms. Karr has done just that: She has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go. It’s a memoir that traces the author’s descent into alcoholism and her conflicted, piecemeal return from that numb hell — a memoir that explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer.

“Lit” is by no means a perfect performance: the sections dealing with the author’s ex-husband, Warren, feel oddly fuzzy and abstract, but for the reader who can manage to push those sections aside, the book is every bit as absorbing as Ms. Karr’s devastating 1995 memoir, “The Liars’ Club,” which secured her place on the literary map.

That earlier book focused on her harrowing childhood with an increasingly absent father and a crazy mother, who, during one moment of madness, set fire to her two daughters’ toys and threatened them with a knife; the 2000 sequel, “Cherry,” dealt with the author’s drug-laced, boy-crazy adolescence in a small Texas town.

“Lit,” in contrast, deals with a less anomalous story — that is, a story of addiction and recovery, by now familiar in outline from the many A.A.-like autobiographies produced during the memoir craze of the late ’90s. Whereas many of these lesser efforts were propelled by the belief that confession is therapeutic and therapy is redemptive and redemption somehow equals art, Ms. Karr’s own work demonstrates that candor and self-revelation only become literature when they are delivered with hard-earned craft, that the exposed life is not the same as the examined one.

by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Marion Ettlinger

The Disconnect

Why are so many Americans living by themselves?

As reliably as autumn brings Orion to the night sky, spring each year sends a curious constellation to the multiplex: a minor cluster of romantic comedies and the couples who traipse through them, searching for love. These tend not to be people who have normal problems. She is poised, wildly successful in an ulcer-making job, lonely. He is sensitive, creative, equipped with a mysteriously vast apartment, unattached. For all these resources, nothing can allay their solitude. He tries to cook. She collects old LPs. He seeks love in the arms of chatty narcissists. She pulls all-nighters in her office. Eventually, her best friend, who may also be her divorced mother, tells her that something needs to change: she’s squandering her golden years; she’ll end up forlorn and alone. Across town, his stout buddy, who is married to someone named Debbee, rhapsodizes about the pleasures of cohabitation. None of this is helpful. As the movie’s first act nears its end point, we spy our heroine in the primal scene of rom-com solitude: curled up on her couch, wearing lounge pants, quaffing her third glass of wine, and excavating an enormous box of Dreyer’s. She is watching the same TV show that he is (whiskey half drained on his coffee table, Chinese takeout in his lap), and although this fact assures us of a destined romance, it is not so useful for the people on the screen. They are alone; their lives are grim. The show they’re watching seems, from the explosive flickering, to be about the invasion of Poland.

Few things are less welcome today than protracted solitude—a life style that, for many people, has the taint of loserdom and brings to mind such characters as Ted Kaczynski and Shrek. Does aloneness deserve a less untoward image? Aside from monastic seclusion, which is just another way of being together, it is hard to come up with a solitary life that doesn’t invite pity, or an enviable loner who’s not cheating the rules. (Even Henry David Thoreau, for all his bluster about solitude, ambled regularly into Concord for his mother’s cooking and the local bars.) Meanwhile, the culture’s data pool is filled with evidence of virtuous togetherness. “The Brady Bunch.” The March on Washington. The Yankees, in 2009. Alone, we’re told, is where you end up when these enterprises go south.

And yet the reputation of modern solitude is puzzling, because the traits enabling a solitary life—financial stability, spiritual autonomy, the wherewithal to buy more dishwashing detergent when the box runs out—are those our culture prizes. Plus, recent demographic shifts suggest that aloneness, far from fading out in our connected age, is on its way in. In 1950, four million people in this country lived alone. These days, there are almost eight times as many, thirty-one million. Americans are getting married later than ever (the average age of first marriage for men is twenty-eight), and bailing on domestic life with alacrity (half of modern unions are expected to end in divorce). Today, more than fifty per cent of U.S. residents are single, nearly a third of all households have just one resident, and five million adults younger than thirty-five live alone. This may or may not prove a useful thing to know on certain Saturday nights.

by Nathan Heller, New Yorker |  Read more:
Illustration: Jean-François Martin

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It's Time To Set Your Fish Sauce Free

Sometimes it seems to me that practically everybody in America is a little uptight when it comes to Asian fish sauce. I mean, some folks are closed off to any condiment that might taste or smell “fishy,” while others are intent on dusting off the hand-hammered iron wok and slavishly chasing the dragon on that authentic dining experience in Phuket. To the former group I’d say, the tree of globalism can only grow tall when good men and women eat challenging ethnic food. Also, fish sauce is really not that fishy. To the latter: I respect that purist’s sensibility, but it’s also okay to use authentic Asian things in nontraditional ways. After all, look what the Asians have done with our Spam and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. It’s fine to color outside the lines here a little.

In my view, Asian fish sauce is an essential condiment, and I mean that in both senses of the word: It’s essential I have some in the house; and it imparts a flavor essence, a roundness or lip-adhesive quality that can and should be used in ways that exceed tradition. Think of how radically the uses of tomato paste, Parmesan cheese, and Campbell’s cream of mushroom have expanded beyond their initial roles in American and European cuisine. Heck, think of ketchup. (The word ketchup, by the way, is derived from the name of an Asian fish sauce—Henry Heinz could not have predicted I’d be using his sauce on my gyoza.)

Of course, using fish to flavor sauce is by no means an exclusively Asian thing. A fermented fish condiment called 'Garum' was widely used by the ancient Romans. Imagine how necessary that little injection of umami would be to soldiers subsisting mostly on spelt porridge. Today, Italians use a product called Colatura di Alici that’s made in a very similar way to Asian fish sauce. Anchovy is also a main flavor element in Worcestershire sauce and the even more peculiarly English foodstuff with the suggestive name “Gentleman’s Relish.”

The fish sauce we're talking about here, though, might more properly be called nam pla or nuoc mam; though I believe these are just the Thai and Vietnamese terms for ‘fish sauce.’ By whatever name, this stuff is produced by packing fresh anchovies with large amounts of salt, and sometimes sugar, and allowing the mixture to ferment over the course of months (sometimes to over a year), and finally filtering out the clear, dark caramel-colored fluid. Widely available in the U.S., it comes primarily from Thailand. That said, a couple of Thai brands I’ve tried are marketed as nuac mam, rather than nam pla, and are said to be produced in the Vietnamese style, which results in a milder, more complex flavor profile. I prefer the milder varieties, so I guess I’m a nuoc mam devotee. And I was quite pleased to find out that a super-premium brand of genuine Vietnamese fish sauce is now available in the States.

Here are some notes on a few of the brands I was able to purchase at some Asian specialty markets near my house and one Anglo gourmet shop:

Squid Brand: This is a fairly typical Thai brand, salty with a fairly fishy, robust flavor. I’d use it primarily in very strongly flavored, cooked Thai dishes like curries stir frys. Under $2 for a 24-oz.bottle.

Three Crabs: This is the brand most American foodies rely on. It’s from Thailand but made in the Vietnamese style. Mild and slightly sweet, this sauce pretty good for all-around use. Please note that Three Crabs is the only one of this group that incorporates hydrolysed vegetable protein as a flavor enhancer. Those sensitive to MSG or leery of food additives should take this into account. Under $4 for a 24-oz.bottle.

Flying Horse on Earth Brand: Salty but mellow. Good all-around fish sauce, but keep the saltiness in mind. I find I like to use this one as a go-to cooking fish sauce and used it on the shortribs and enchilada sauce. I love the name and logo, too. Under $3 for a 24-oz. bottle.

Red Boat 40°N: This is the super premium stuff, first-press and actually from Phu Quoc, Vietnam, an island that is said to produce the best fish sauce . The N-designation refers to grams of nitrogen per liter. Very clean tasting, more subtle, no off tastes at all. It’s pretty dear, so I’d use this for mildly flavored dishes and non-cooking uses like in vinaigrettes or on pasta. I had to go to a pretty gourmet, white-people shop in Berkeley to get this. Under $7 for an 8.45-oz. bottle. (Note that Red Boat also comes in a 50°N version that is said to be even higher quality and more complex. It’s currently out of stock and runs about $10 for 80 ml.)

I’m sure you’re aware of how fish sauce can be used in Thai curries, Vietnamese fried-rice dishes and dipping sauces. As seasoned internet users, you have available to you all kinds of authentic uses of nuoc mam and nam pla. So I've focused here on fish sauce as a general condiment, for use on dishes that you and I haven’t thought up yet, or as enhancements to your mama’s traditional recipes:

by Ben Choi, The Awl |  Read more:

Elaine Pamphilon, Dark Tulips, Dark Table and Lemon Bowl
2011
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The Big Business of Breast Cancer

Aside from the slow-rolling hot dogs at concession stands and the sideline billboards for Hubba Bubba bubble gum, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hint of pink at any of the National Football League's 31 stadiums, where, during most of the six-month season, the decor tends to match the distinctly masculine nature of the game. Not so in October, when pink becomes the de facto color of the sport. Players bound onto the field sporting pink cleats, wristbands, and chin straps, and punt pigskins emblazoned with pink decals under the watchful eyes of refs with pink whistles. It's all part of the league's massive sponsorship of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which by October's end will have seen the distribution of 650,000 pink ribbons at stadiums across the country.

Though the NFL has, shall we say, a complicated history with women, its embrace of breast cancer awareness is perhaps only fitting. After all, in the nearly 20 years since the pink ribbon became the official symbol of the cause — Estée Lauder cosmetics counters handed out 1.5 million of them in 1992 as part of the first-ever nationwide awareness campaign to leverage the pink ribbon — breast cancer has become the NFL of diseases, glutted with corporate sponsorships, merchandise deals, and ad campaigns. This is true year-round, but especially in October, when breast cancer marketing reaches a frothy pink frenzy. This month, an awareness-minded consumer can buy almost any knickknack or household item in pink — from lint brushes and shoelaces to earbuds and Snuggies. If she happens to be in an American Airlines Admirals Club, she can snack on pink cookies while drinking pink champagne. If instead she finds herself at one of the nation's 500 Jersey Mike's Subs franchises, for about $7 she can order the "pink ribbon combo," consisting of a sandwich, chips, and soda served in a limited-edition pink plastic cup (because nothing says "cancer awareness" like chips and soda).

Though breast cancer researchers and advocates perpetually plead for more money, the disease is, in fact, awash in it. Last year, the National Institutes of Health, the nation's top agency for health-related research, allocated $763 million to the study of breast cancer, more than double what it committed to any other cancer. The Department of Defense also funds breast cancer research ($150 million this year), as do several states, most notably Texas and California. All that is in addition to the money raised by the roughly 1,400 IRS-recognized, tax-exempt charities in this country devoted to breast cancer. They operate in every state and in just about every major city. The largest of them, Dallas-based Susan G. Komen for the Cure, grossed $420 million last year alone. All told, an estimated $6 billion is raised every year in the name of breast cancer. And the money keeps pouring in.

Which seems like great news for the fight against breast cancer, and in part it is (though not as great as it sounds, and we'll get back to that). But it's also been a boon for charity scammers — the charlatans who prey on the public's beneficence and its inveterate laziness when it comes to due diligence. The nonprofit world is full of them. (Greg Mortenson, the celebrated author of Three Cups of Tea, is only the latest philanthropist to battle allegations that his organization, the Central Asia Institute, misused funds.) Breast cancer makes a particularly alluring target — not just because there is so much money involved or because women across all income levels tend to give more than men, but because we give to breast cancer forcefully, eagerly, superstitiously. Breast cancer holds a peculiarly powerful sway with us — it's a disease dreaded so profoundly that not supporting the cause feels like tempting fate.

by Lea Goldman, Marie Claire |  Read more:
Photo: Stephen Lewis

zakaryjohnstudio:  Green Shadows - 7” x 8”, Oil on hardboard
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Elwyn Chamberlain:  Christian in the Slough of Despond II (1961) via the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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The Father of Loud: Jim Marshall (1923 - 2012)

It was the physical embodiment of rock's power and majesty — a wall of black, vinyl-clad cabinets, one atop the other, crowned with a rectangular box containing the innovative circuitry that revolutionized the music.

This was the famed Marshall stack, the amplification gear that has dominated rock stages since its introduction in the early 1960s, bestowing on guitarists the ability to achieve unprecedented volume and controlled distortion.

From the Who, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix in the 1960s on through Peter Frampton, Van Halen, AC/DC, Motley Crue, Guns N' Roses and Nirvana in succeeding decades, the cursive "Marshall" emblazoned on the speakers has served as an inescapable backdrop signature.

The Marshall stack was so much larger than life that it lent itself to excess as well. The famous amp in the mockumentary "Spinal Tap" with a unique setting of 11 on the dial was a Marshall, and no rock image was more over-the-top than that of KISS' four members performing in front of some 40 Marshall cabinets.

Of course, they didn't need that many.

"Hendrix used three 100-watt amps and three stacks," their inventor Jim Marshall once said. "KISS go a lot further, but most of the cabinets and amps you see on stage are dummies. We once built 80 dummy cabinets for Bon Jovi. They all do it — it's just backdrop.

"It would be stupid to use more than three 100-watt amps, wherever and whoever you are."

Marshall died Thursday at 88 in an English hospice after suffering from cancer and several severe strokes, his son Terry Marshall told the Associated Press. Musicians, competitors and fans were quick to salute Marshall, who had retained an active role at Marshall Amplification well into his 80s.

by Richard Cromelin, LA Times |  Read more:
Photo: Robert Knight Archive / Redferns / Getty Images / April 6, 2012 )

Neil Young Trademarks New Audio Format

They might sound like great song titles, but "21st Century Record Player," "Earth Storage" and "Thanks for Listening" aren't new Neil Young tunes. They're trademarks that the rocker recently filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Rolling Stone has found, and they indicate that Young is developing a high-resolution audio alternative to the MP3 format.

According to the filed documents, Young applied for six trademarks last June: Ivanhoe, 21st Century Record Player, Earth Storage, Storage Shed, Thanks for Listening and SQS (Studio Quality Sound). Included in the filing is a description of the trademarks: "Online and retail store services featuring music and artistic performances; high resolution music downloadable from the internet; high resolutions discs featuring music and video; audio and video recording storage and playback." The address on file corresponds to that of Vapor Records, Young's label. (Young's representatives declined Rolling Stone's request for comment.)

Young faces about a year of paperwork before the government will register his trademarks. Last week, they were approved for publication in a public journal for 30 days, a step that allows competitors to challenge Young if they find his registration harmful. The journal is set to be published later this month; if the trademarks face no opposition or snags, Young must then file documents detailing how he intends to use the trademarks, which the government could register as early as the holidays, according to the filing schedule.

A press release issued last September by Penguin Group imprint Blue Rider Press, which is publishing Young's upcoming memoir, may have revealed the working title of Young's entire project. In addition to the memoir, says the release, "Young is also personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings. Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono's cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented."

by Patrick Flanary, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Photo: Christopher Polk/WireImage

Allison Stewart, Water Borne #7
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Just One More Game ...

In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.

The unit came bundled with a single cartridge: Tetris, a simple but addictive puzzle game whose goal was to rotate falling blocks — over and over and over and over and over and over and over — in order to build the most efficient possible walls. (Well, it was complicated. You were both building walls and not building walls; if you built them right, the walls disappeared, thereby ceasing to be walls.) This turned out to be a perfect symbiosis of game and platform. Tetris’s graphics were simple enough to work on the Game Boy’s small gray-scale screen; its motion was slow enough not to blur; its action was a repetitive, storyless puzzle that could be picked up, with no loss of potency, at any moment, in any situation. The pairing went on to sell more than 70 million copies, spreading the freedom of compulsive wall-building into every breakfast nook and bank line in the country.

And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.

Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”

Tetris was invented exactly when and where you would expect — in a Soviet computer lab in 1984 — and its game play reflects this origin. The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game’s final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can’t make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

In 2009, 25 years after the invention of Tetris, a nearly bankrupt Finnish company called Rovio hit upon a similarly perfect fusion of game and device: Angry Birds. The game involves launching peevish birds at green pigs hiding inside flimsy structures. Its basic mechanism — using your index finger to pull back a slingshot, over and over and over and over and over and over and over — was the perfect use of the new technology of the touch screen: simple enough to lure a suddenly immense new market of casual gamers, satisfying enough to hook them.

Within months, Angry Birds became the most popular game on the iPhone, then spread across every other available platform. Today it has been downloaded, in its various forms, more than 700 million times. It has also inspired a disturbingly robust merchandising empire: films, T-shirts, novelty slippers, even plans for Angry Birds “activity parks” featuring play equipment for kids. For months, a sign outside my local auto-repair shop promised, “Free Angry Birds pen with service.” The game’s latest iteration, Angry Birds Space, appeared a couple weeks ago with a promotional push from Wal-Mart, T-Mobile, National Geographic Books, MTV and NASA. (There was an announcement on the International Space Station.) Angry Birds, it seems, is our Tetris: the string of digital prayer beads that our entire culture can twiddle in moments of rapture or anxiety — economic, political or existential.

by Sam Anderson, NY Times |  Read more:
Image via:

Native Tongues

The scene is a mysterious one, beguiling, thrilling, and, if you didn’t know better, perhaps even a bit menacing. According to the time-enhanced version of the story, it opens on an afternoon in the late fall of 1965, when without warning, a number of identical dark-green vans suddenly appear and sweep out from a parking lot in downtown Madison, Wisconsin. One by one they drive swiftly out onto the city streets. At first they huddle together as a convoy. It takes them only a scant few minutes to reach the outskirts—Madison in the sixties was not very big, a bureaucratic and academic omnium-gatherum of a Midwestern city about half the size of today. There is then a brief halt, some cursory consultation of maps, and the cars begin to part ways.

All of this first group of cars head off to the south. As they part, the riders wave their farewells, whereupon each member of this curious small squadron officially commences his long outbound adventure—toward a clutch of carefully selected small towns, some of them hundreds and even thousands of miles away. These first few cars are bound to cities situated in the more obscure corners of Florida, Oklahoma, and Alabama. Other cars that would follow later then went off to yet more cities and towns scattered evenly across every corner of every mainland state in America. The scene as the cars leave Madison is dreamy and tinted with romance, especially seen at the remove of nearly fifty years. Certainly nothing about it would seem to have anything remotely to do with the thankless drudgery of lexicography.

But it had everything to do with the business, not of illicit love, interstate crime, or the secret movement of monies, but of dictionary making. For the cars, which would become briefly famous, at least in the somewhat fame-starved world of lexicography, were the University of Wisconsin Word Wagons. All were customized 1966 Dodge A100 Sportsman models, purchased en masse with government grant money. Equipped for long-haul journeying, they were powered by the legendarily indestructible Chrysler Slant-Six 170-horsepower engine and appointed with modest domestic fixings that included a camp bed, sink, and stove. Each also had two cumbersome reel-to-reel tape recorders and a large number of tape spools.

The drivers and passengers who manned the wagons were volunteers bent to one overarching task: that of collecting America’s other language. They were being sent to more than a thousand cities, towns, villages, and hamlets to discover and record, before it became too late and everyone started to speak like everybody else, the oral evidence of exactly what words and phrases Americans in those places spoke, heard, and read, out in the boondocks and across the prairies, down in the hollows and up on the ranges, clear across the great beyond and in the not very long ago.

These volunteers were charged with their duties by someone who might at first blush seem utterly unsuitable for the task of examining American speech: a Briton, born in Kingston, of a Canadian father and a Jamaican mother: Frederic Gomes Cassidy, a man whose reputation—he died twelve years ago, aged ninety-two—is now about to be consolidated as one of the greatest lexicographers this country has ever known. Cassidy’s standing—he is now widely regarded as this continent’s answer to James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary; Cassidy was a longtime English professor at the University of Wisconsin, while Murray’s chops were earned at Oxford—rests on one magnificent achievement: his creation of a monumental dictionary of American dialect speech, conceived roughly half a century ago, and over which he presided for most of his professional life.

The five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE, is now at last fully complete. The first volume appeared in 1985: it listed tens of thousands of geographically specific dialect words, from tall flowering plants known in the South as “Aaron’s Rod,” to a kind of soup much favored in Wisconsin, made from duck’s blood, known as “czarina.” The next two volumes appeared in the 1990s, the fourth after 2000, so assiduously planned and organized by Cassidy as to be uninterrupted by his passing. The fifth and final volume, the culminating triumph of this extraordinary project, is being published this March—it offers up regionalisms running alphabetically from “slab highway” (as concrete-covered roads are apparently still known in Indiana and Missouri) to “zydeco,” not the music itself, but a kind of raucous and high-energy musical party that is held in a long swathe of villages arcing from Galveston to Baton Rouge.

“Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco”—between these two verbal bookends lies an immense and largely hidden American vocabulary, one that surely, more than perhaps any other aspect of society, reveals the wonderfully chaotic pluribus out of which two centuries of commerce and convention have forged the duller reality of the unum. Which was precisely what Cassidy and his fellow editors sought to do—to capture, before it faded away, the linguistic coat of many colors of this immigrant-made country, and to preserve it in snapshot, in part for strictly academic purposes, in part for the good of history, and in part, maybe, on the off chance that the best of the lexicon might one day be revived.

by Simon Winchester, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:
Image: Fred Cassidy and fieldworkers Reino Maki and Ben Crane standing in front of one of DARE's "Word Wagons." (UW-Madison Archives)

The Serious Eats Guide to Bourbon

After wading in barrels of the Scotch and Irish drams, it's time to turn our attention homeward, to that quintessential American spirit: good old bourbon whiskey. We'll look today at what makes bourbon unique, how it's made, and how it came to be.

What Is Bourbon?

In brief, bourbon is a whiskey, made predominantly from corn and aged in charred oak barrels. But if you've been reading this column for a while, you know that I'll probably hit you with a formal, legal definition of bourbon that complicates things. Indeed, here it is.

According to the United States government, bourbon sold in the United States must meet these requirements:

• Made from a grain mixture that is at least 51% corn. (Other grains in the mix may include wheat, rye, malted rye, and malted barley, in any combination.)
• Aged in new charred-oak barrels.
• Distilled to no more than 160 proof, or 80% alcohol by volume (ABV). In practice, most bourbon is distilled out at a lower proof than this.
• Entered into the barrel for aging at a proof no higher than 125 (62.5% ABV).
• Bottled at no less than 80 proof (40% ABV).

Bourbon must be aged, but there are no specific requirements as to time. ("But wait! Doesn't bourbon have to be at least two years old?!" Read on.)

When we looked at the legal regulations about the manufacture of Scotch and Irish whiskies, we saw some language in them about the origins of the enzymes and yeasts used in fermentation. Bourbon has no such restrictions, so bourbon makers may use added enzymes to break down the grain mash.

We've already talked a lot about barrel aging in this space, but it's worth mentioning again. Bourbon requires the use of new, charred-oak barrels. This allows the barrel to impart more of its own flavors of oak, caramel, and vanilla into the whiskey than you get with Scotch, which generally uses second-hand barrels. We'll talk more about aging in a minute.

by Michael Dietsch, Serious Eats | Read more: 

2 04-01-12 by Lee Kaloidis
Oil 4x4-foot canvas
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To Accept What Cannot Be Helped

“Your hands are so wrinkly. Are you going to die?” my nephew asked my mother when he was about three. “Yes I am,” she answered, pausing to stick a knitting needle behind her ear and take his small, smooth hand in hers as they sat on the couch more than 15 years ago. “And you never know when it might happen.” Here she resumed work on the row of whatever it was she was knitting and added, “I’m an old toad, you know.” Daniel looked stricken. Telling this story, my sister rolls her eyes, knowing the rest of the family won’t be surprised by it. “Promise me you’ll pull the plug when my time comes” is a refrain we’d been hearing from my mother for ages.

Two years ago this coming June my mother—“an 80-year-old in a 60-year-old’s body,” the pulmonologist told her—was ambushed by a diagnosis of Stage IV adenocarcinoma of the lungs. It had already spread to her spine and left hip. Barely two weeks earlier, she’d gone out west for another grandchild’s college graduation and hiked along a cliff on the Oregon coast. Could she really have inoperable lung cancer? The pulmonologist, to whom she was referred by a GP alarmed at what he saw on her chest x-ray, needed a CT scan to be convinced. In the windowless examining room at the hospital in Brooklyn, my mother said sadly yet matter of factly, “Well, I guess that’s pretty much what I’ve been expecting to hear. We’ve all got to go somehow, don’t we?”

We all do, of course. But I don’t think there are many bustling, nonbelieving souls like my mother who are ready to face that fact when rudely confronted with it. In her case, facing it meant ruling out treatment—the chemotherapy and radiation that the pulmonologist urged to ease pain and eke out a few more months. “If geezers like me have lots of tests and treatments,” she told the doctor, “there isn’t going to be enough money to spend on the other end. This health-care mess isn’t going to be fixed if we aren’t ready to get out of the way.” Nonplussed on his little stool, he shook his head and raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ve heard that view before, but never from someone in your situation. People generally change their tune when it suddenly applies to them.”

Actually, I think my mother delivered her pronouncement so she wouldn’t cry. As she sat there, suddenly told she would soon be gone, I imagine it helped a little to take aim at the Medicare cliché. With the nation’s health-care debate heating up in the summer of 2009, those words were at the ready: she could voice the non-interventionist, parsimonious, yet also generous sentiments long lodged in her now “moth-eaten” (the doctor’s words) bones. For she was a rarity—a grandmother in favor of having the plug pulled and ready to live, or rather die, by that all-but-taboo vision of the end of things. But right then, in that airless room, she needed most of all to rise above an abyss. Look at me, a very lucky old lady who has made it to 80; tell me it makes any sense to rack up huge bills trying to add on an extra couple of months (at best) to a life that isn’t likely to last out the year. It was her way of rallying, and relieving us of the awful weight of the moment. My father looked stricken.

Over a late dinner one evening three months after that day in the doctor’s office, I asked her if I might write something, sometime, about her end. An owl had just hooted as we sat at the table on the screened-in porch of my parents’ country place in a tiny Massachusetts town. She nodded, though almost imperceptibly in the candle-lit darkness, and waved away the notion that there was anything particularly notable in her approach to her last months (if only she knew how many). Yet as those numbered days passed at a curious pace, so slow and so swift, the experience of taking no extraordinary measures felt, well, extraordinary. The owls hooted, answering questions with questions. We listened and gazed at the coneflower in the bud vase, picked the first day my mother had arrived up there from New York, two months earlier. She’d had to trim its weakening stem, and the neck of the vase now offered crucial support, but the petals drooped only slightly and the yellow was still vibrant. (“O’Henry,” she had named it.) She savored the last bite of what little had been on her plate and looked at me: “Could I really be dying?”

My mother, who died six months after she was diagnosed, was acutely grateful to be supported at almost every turn in her quest to end life on her own terms—which is not to say that “letting go” came at all naturally to her. Even for someone thoroughly out of step with our more-care-is-better medical ethos, it proved anything but easy to relinquish control. For her, resisting the doctors’ edicts was not so hard; that was her way of taking charge. Yet then what? To embrace ordinary, loving care, knowing the burden it put on others, was a struggle. But her odyssey—our odyssey—allowed us to feel our way toward those feats together, with few regrets and many rewards alongside the inevitable fear and pain. In a culture of Promethean aspirations, and in busy hospital corridors, it is rare to get that chance.

by Ann Hulbert, American Scholar |  Read more: