Thursday, October 4, 2012
A Great Pair of Bookshelf Speakers
These budget-minded speakers are some serious giant killers according to a number of well respected reviewers and people who own them. And if you want a fantastic pair of two-ways that perform as well as speakers costing 3-4 times as much, our research says these are the ones to get.Designed by legendary audio engineer Andrew Jones–the same guy who came up with the TAD Reference One loudspeaker ($70,000/pair)–these more modestly priced $150 speakers still have many of the high-end details. These includes things like radio frequency bonded, curved cabinets, improved multi-component crossovers, and gold-plated five-way binding posts.
Stereophile's Robert Reina was floored by their performance, saying that both the quantity and the quality of the Pioneer's bass reproduction was excellent. "One would expect the sound of a $149.99/pair bookshelf model to include some serious compromises and tradeoffs," he says, "but within its size limitations, the Pioneer SP-BS41-LR has none."
In his review, Reina compared the BS41s to a number of other well known entry-level benchmark bookshelves, including the Paradigm Atom v.6 ($250/pair) and the Wharfedale Diamond 10.1 ($350/pair). According to Reina, the Pioneer bested the more expensive Paradigm in nearly all ways (with a richer, more detailed midrange and cleaner, more extended highs). In fact, the BS41s came very close to matching Wharfedale Diamond 10.1, generally considered to be the reigning king of affordable loudspeakers.
by Brian Lam, Wirecutter | Read more:
Michelin, Get Out of the Kitchen!
A little more than a hundred years ago, a pair of brothers invented the food guide. It was an inadvertent invention. What they thought they’d done was compile a directory of places in France where you could grab a baguette and a bed for the night while some rural blacksmith or farrier tried to mend your broken-down Boitel, Motobloc, Otto, or Lacoste & Battmann. The brothers, Édouard and André Michelin, made pneumatic tires and were staring down the road at the biggest blue-sky start-up industry of the new century.The Michelin guide turned out to be prescient and inspired. This motoring thing wasn’t going to be about what you went in but where you went to. The guide quickly became not an emergency manual but a destination invitation. They added a star system—one, two, or three stars—and a hieroglyphic lexicon to show you where you could eat on a terrace, take your dog, or make a phone call.
The Michelin guide made kitchens as competitive as football teams, becoming the most successful and prestigious guidebook in the world, and along the way it killed the very thing it had set out to commend. It wasn’t the only assassin of the greatest national food ever conceived, but it’s not hyperbole to say Michelin was French haute cuisine’s Brutus. (...)
You think three-star food is expensive, but it’s nothing compared with compiling the world’s most famous guide. Michelin doesn’t say how many inspectors it has, what it pays them, how often they visit each establishment—they claim at least once a year—or what their expenses are like, but you do the math. Consider how many more restaurants there are now than there were 30 years ago. It’s a very, very expensive production. When the occasional ex-inspector goes public, there are stories of exhausting and unsustainable lives on the road, covering vast areas where the pleasure of food is made a relentless and lonely craft. There are admissions that many dining rooms are not revisited year after year.
But still, Michelin has launched in a number of foreign countries. And though it claims its standards are universal and unimpeachable, it proves how Francophile and bloated and snobbish the whole business really is and that, far from being a lingua franca, the food on our plate is as varied as any other aspect of a national culture. For instance, Italy has absurdly few three-star restaurants, apparently because the criteria of complexity and presentation aren’t up to Michelin—French—standards, and the marvelously rich and varied curries of India plainly seem to baffle the guide. The city with the most stars is Tokyo, but then, many of its restaurants have barely a handful of chairs, and most benefit from the Gallic reverence for O.C.D. saucing and solitary boy’s knife skills. In both London and New York, the guide appears to be wholly out of touch with the way people actually eat, still being most comfortable rewarding fat, conservative, fussy rooms that use expensive ingredients with ingratiating pomp to serve glossy plutocrats and their speechless rental dates.
The New York guide has also swapped the dry information of the original for short, purple reviews. Food writing is already the recidivist culprit of multiple sins against both language and digestion, but the little encomiums of the Michelin guide effortlessly lick the bottom of the descriptive swill bucket. Take this, for instance, but only if you have a paper bag close at hand: “Can something be too perfect? Can its focus be so singular, pleasure so complete, and technique so flawless that creativity suffers? Per Se proves that this fear is unfounded.” That was written in chocolate saliva. Or this: “Devout foodies are quieting their delirium of joy at having scored a reservation—everyone and everything here is living up to the honor of adoring this extraordinary restaurant … Uni with truffle-oil gelée and brioche expresses the regret that we have but three stars to give.” That’s not a review of Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare—it’s a handjob.
The New York guide has also swapped the dry information of the original for short, purple reviews. Food writing is already the recidivist culprit of multiple sins against both language and digestion, but the little encomiums of the Michelin guide effortlessly lick the bottom of the descriptive swill bucket. Take this, for instance, but only if you have a paper bag close at hand: “Can something be too perfect? Can its focus be so singular, pleasure so complete, and technique so flawless that creativity suffers? Per Se proves that this fear is unfounded.” That was written in chocolate saliva. Or this: “Devout foodies are quieting their delirium of joy at having scored a reservation—everyone and everything here is living up to the honor of adoring this extraordinary restaurant … Uni with truffle-oil gelée and brioche expresses the regret that we have but three stars to give.” That’s not a review of Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare—it’s a handjob.
by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Illustration: Chris Crisman
The Dementia Plague
"You look gorgeous!" the doctor exclaimed when she greeted her patient, a 99-year-old woman with white hair and a wry smile, in the dining room of her apartment. In an hourlong conversation, Mrs. K (as we'll call her) recalled, in moving and sometimes mischievous detail, growing up in Poland, where soldiers on horseback took her brother away; coming to America on a ship and working in her parents' grocery story in Queens; and dealing with male colleagues in the real-estate business when they got "fresh." But when Granieri asked how old Mrs. K was when she got married, she looked puzzled.
"I can't remember," she said after a pause. A cloud passed over her face. "Was I married? To whom?" A framed photograph on a nearby table memorialized her 50th wedding anniversary.
Spirited and funny, her personality intact even as her memory deteriorates, Mrs. K is one of more than five million Americans with dementia. Far from the gleaming research centers where scientists parse the subtle biochemical changes associated with Alzheimer's disease and other forms of the condition, clinicians like Granieri, chief of the Division of Geriatric Medicine and Aging at Columbia University Medical Center, confront its devastating reality every day. And, often, they talk to relatives of patients. As Granieri and two interns probed Mrs. K's memory with small talk and measured her blood pressure, a niece called from Manhattan to see how her aunt was doing.
Almost every dementia patient has worried family members huddled in the background, and almost every story about dementia includes a moment when loved ones plead with the doctor for something—any medicine, any intervention, anything—to forestall a relentless process that strips away identity, personality, and ultimately the basic ability to think. Unfortunately, Evelyn Granieri is the wrong person to ask. In 2010 she served on a high-level panel of experts that assessed every possible dementia intervention, from expensive cholinesterase-inhibiting drugs to cognitive exercises like crossword puzzles, for the National Institutes of Health; it found no evidence that any of the interventions could prevent the onslaught of Alzheimer's. She can—with immense compassion, but equally immense conviction—explain the reality for now and the immediate future: "There really is nothing." Dementia is a chronic, progressive, terminal disease, she says. "You don't get better, ever."
These conversations have always been difficult for doctors and families alike, but perhaps never more so than in the past year, when public reports about dementia research have bounced between optimism and gloom. In the fall of 2011, financial analysts were giddily projecting a global Alzheimer's market of $14 billion a year by 2020 and touting a new generation of drugs known as monoclonal antibodies that were in advanced human trials. A year later, the prospect for the drugs no longer looked so positive. This past August, the giant drug makers Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson suspended advanced clinical trials of one of the monoclonals because it showed no effect in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's. A few weeks later, another leading pharmaceutical manufacturer, Eli Lilly, announced inconclusive results for a monoclonal drug it too was testing against the protein deposits called amyloid plaques that are characteristically found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. The disheartening results prompted some critics to start writing epitaphs for the prevailing hypothesis about the disease—that these amyloid deposits are causing the cognitive impairment.
"The field is in a precarious place right now," says Barry D. Greenberg, director of strategy for the Toronto Dementia Research Alliance, "because tens of billions of dollars have been invested in the development of new treatments, and nothing—not a single disease-modifying agent—has been identified." Granieri often sets off on her house calls from her second-floor office at Allen Hospital—literally the last building in Manhattan, on the northernmost tip of Broadway. That may sound like an out-of-the-way outpost in medicine's battle against dementia, but in reality it sits at ground zero for the looming medical and societal catastrophe. The hospital's catchment area includes upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx, one of the three densest concentrations of nursing home facilities in the entire United States, according to Granieri. "Here we sit, right in an epicenter," she says.
The epicenter is a contentious place these days. Frontline clinicians like Granieri are increasingly frustrated with the narrowness of dementia research. In the patients they treat every day, they see a disease that is complicated and insidious, often with multiple causes and murky diagnostic distinctions. In contrast, they see a research enterprise focused on several favorite hypotheses, and they see a drug industry that has profited handsomely from expensive, marginally effective treatments sought by desperate families.
Academic and pharmaceutical researchers, meanwhile, continue to throw money at the dementia problem—but finally, they insist, with better aim and much shrewder treatment strategies. They have begun to assemble a list of diagnostic markers that they believe may reliably indicate the first signs of Alzheimer's disease 10 or 15 years before symptoms appear, and they are gearing up to test new drugs that can be given to healthy patients, in an attempt to block the buildup of amyloid long before dementia's onset. Indeed, to hear researchers tell it, this summer's highly publicized clinical-trial failures are already ancient history. They are finally doing the right kind of science and hope to get the right kinds of answers, the first glimpses of which may appear in the next several years.
As Granieri and other physicians who treat dementia patients know, the stakes could scarcely be higher.
by Steven S. Hall, MIT Technology Review | Read more:
Illustration: William Utermohlen—Blue Skies (detail), 1995
The Death of the Golden Dream of Higher Education
Then California bled that system dry. Over three decades, voters starved their state -- and so their colleges and universities -- of cash. Politicians siphoned away what money remained and spent it more on imprisoning people, not educating them. College administrators grappled with shriveling state support by jacking up tuitions, tacking on new fees, and so asking more each year from increasingly pinched students and families. Today, many of those students stagger under a heap of debtas they linger on waiting lists to get into the over-subscribed classes they need to graduate.
California's public higher education system is, in other words, dying a slow death. The promise of a cheap, quality education is slipping away for the working and middle classes, for immigrants, for the very people whom the University of California's creators held in mind when they began their grand experiment 144 years ago. And don't think the slow rot of public education is unique to California: that state's woes are the nation's. (...)
This is something new in what was once known as “the golden state.” For nearly as long as colleges and universities operated in California, there was a place for every student with the grades to get in. Classes were cheap, professors accessible, and enrollments grew at a rapid clip. When my own father started at Mt. San Antonio College in southern California in August 1976, anyone 18 or older could enroll, and a semester's worth of classes cost at most $24. Then, like so many Californians, he transferred to a four-year college, the University of California-Davis, and paid a similarly paltry $220 a quarter. Davis's 2012 per-quarter tuition price: $4,620.
Today, public education in California is ever less public. It is cheaper for a middle-class student to attend Harvard (about $17,000 for tuition, room, and board with the typical financial-help program included) than Cal State East Bay, a mid-tier school that'll run that same middle-class student $24,000 a year. That speaks to Harvard's largesse when it comes to financial aid, but also the relentless rise of tuition costs in California. For the first time in generations, California's community colleges and state universities are turning away qualified new students and shrinking their enrollments as state funding continues its long, slow decline. Many students who do gain admission struggle to enroll in the classes they need -- which, by the way, cost more than they ever have. "We're in a new era," says John Aubrey Douglass, an expert on the history of higher education in California. He’s not exaggerating. Not a bit.
by Andy Kroll, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via:
For Suzuki, Respect for Bats Is Key to Hitting
Today, after a decade in the major leagues, Suzuki still displays that same reverence on a daily basis, caring for his bats like Stradivarius violins. While most players dump their bats in cylindrical canvas bags when they are not using them, Suzuki neatly stacks his best eight bats inside a shockproof, moisture-free black case that he keeps close by his locker at home and on the road.
“He dresses like a rock star and he carries his bats around in a case like a rock musician with a guitar,” Yankees pitcher Boone Logan said. “It fits his style perfectly.”
The case, which looks like a mini trunk, not only protects the bats from jostling and banging during transports, it also serves as a dehumidifier, drawing moisture out of the bats during the hot, humid American summers.
“In New York, Texas, Baltimore, you take your bat from the clubhouse to the dugout and it’s like it’s sweating from all the moisture,” he said through his interpreter. “It’s really shocking to see it.”
For Suzuki, a preeminent scientist in the field of hitting, regulating the amount of moisture in his bat is critical to the touch and feel of it. A hard, dry bat with just the right amount of water content has helped Suzuki become one of the best hitters in the game. Since he came to the United States in 2001 to play for the Seattle Mariners, he has led all of baseball in regular-season hits on seven occasions and recorded 200 hits in each of his first 10 seasons.
Apparently, that cannot be done with spongy, sweaty bats.
“The moment when the ball leaves the bat, that feeling of a moist bat, it doesn’t feel as good,” he said. “That feel of the ball coming off the bat is different.”
by David Waldstein, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Messerschmidt/Getty Images
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Factory Girls
K-pop is an East-West mash-up. The performers are mostly Korean, and their mesmerizing synchronized dance moves, accompanied by a complex telegraphy of winks and hand gestures, have an Asian flavor, but the music sounds Western: hip-hop verses, Euro-pop choruses, rapping, and dubstep breaks. K-pop has become a fixture of pop charts not only in Korea but throughout Asia, including Japan—the world’s second-biggest music market, after the U.S.—and Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia. South Korea, a country of less than fifty million, somehow figured out how to make pop hits for more than a billion and a half other Asians, contributing two billion dollars a year to Korea’s economy, according to the BBC. K-pop concerts in Hong Kong and on mainland China are already lucrative, and no country is better positioned to sell recorded music in China, a potentially enormous market, should its endemic piracy be stamped out. Yet, despite K-pop’s prominence in Asia, until recently few in the United States had heard of it. SMTown World Tour III, named for S.M. Entertainment, the Korean music company that is sponsoring the global tour, is hoping to change things, through a unique system of “cultural technology.”
Outside the arena, clusters of fans were enacting dance covers: copies of their favorite idol groups’ moves. (PSY’s horse-riding dance, from “Gangnam Style,” may be the Macarena of the moment.) People carried light sticks and bunches of balloons, whose colors signified allegiance to one or another idol group. The crowd was older than I’d expected, and the ambience felt more like a video-game convention than like a pop concert. About three out of four people were Asian-American, but there were also Caucasians of all ages, and a number of black women.
Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.
“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”
I had arranged to meet Toth because somewhere between my tenth viewing of the Girls’ video “Mr. Taxi” and my twentieth click on “Gee” it occurred to me that I might not know how much I loved these girls, either. “Listen, boy,” Tiffany coos at the outset of “Gee.” “It’s my first love story.” And then she tilts her head to the side and flashes her eye smile—the precise crinkle in the outer corner that texts her love straight 2U. Why was watching “Mr. Taxi” such pure audiovisual pleasure? Why did my body feel lighter in the chair? It wasn’t the music—bright, candy-cane-sweet sounds, like aural Day-Glo—and, while the dancing was wonderfully precise, the choreography had a schematic quality.
“They look like cheerleaders,” my twenty-one-year-old niece hissed over my shoulder one day as I was watching “Gee” again. “Uncle Pervy!”
No, it was nothing like that. For pervy, try the J-pop group AKB48, a Japanese girl ensemble, with scores of members, who, affecting a schoolgirls-in-lingerie look in their video “Heavy Rotation,” pillow-fight, kiss, and share heart-shaped cookies mouth to mouth. Girls’ Generation is a group of preppy-looking young women in skinny trousers. When they wear hot pants, it’s to display the gams, not the glutes.
“They take the love the fans feel for them, and they return it to the fans,” Toth told me. “When you see them onstage, it’s like they’ve come to see you.”
I must have looked skeptical.
“Just wait,” he said. “You’ll see.”
by John Seabrook, New Yorker | Read more:
Photo: Matthew Niederhauser.
Why Your Car Isn’t Electric
The easiest assumption is that some powerful entity suppresses one technology and favors another, and so the wheel of progress slowly turns. But historians of science and business will tell you that this isn’t the whole story. Instead, the culture we live in and the technologies we use are constantly shaping and being shaped by one another, and it’s this messy and unpredictable process that determines winners and losers.
There are plenty of reasons Americans should have adopted electric cars long ago. Early E.V.’s were easier to learn to drive than their gas cousins, and they were far cleaner and better smelling. Their battery range and speed were limited, but a vast majority of the trips we take in our cars are short ones. Most of the driving we do has been well within the range of electric-car batteries for decades, says David Kirsch, associate professor of management at the University of Maryland and the author of “The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History.” We drive gas-powered cars today for a complex set of reasons, Kirsch says, but not because the internal-combustion engine is inherently better than the electric motor and battery.
At the turn of the 20th century, the Electric Vehicle Company was the largest carmaker in the United States. It was also the biggest owner of cars in the country. That’s because the E.V.C. opted to rent or lease its vehicles instead of selling them. You could pick up an E.V.C. car for a short trip or take it for a week or a month, but you couldn’t own it. The business model was based on the E.V.C.’s assumption that its customers didn’t have the know-how or facilities to maintain their own cars. This may have been true, but when a series of shady business dealings drove the New York-based company into bankruptcy, it took electric cars down with it. Investors, soured by their experience with the E.V.C., swore they’d never put money into the industry again, and in the lull in electric-car development that followed, gasoline-car companies improved their technology and made their vehicles cheaper. Over the next 20 years, Americans formed a new idea of what a carwas. And from that point on, right up to today, it was hard to get them to try anything else.
“Part of what makes infrastructure is its invisibility,” Kirsch told me. “When we have to create infrastructure for ourselves — installing charging stations at our houses, for instance — we make the invisible visible. It becomes an overwhelming task, like having to remake the world. Most people just want a car.”
Society shapes the development and use of technology (this is a function of social determinism; for example, cars didn’t really become ubiquitous until they became easy to operate and cheap to buy), but technology also shapes society (technological determinism; think of the way cars then essentially created the suburbs). Over time, the two interact with and change each other, an idea known as technological momentum, which was introduced in 1969 by Thomas P. Hughes, a historian of technology. According to Hughes’s theory, the technologies we end up using aren’t determined by any objective measure of quality. In fact, the tools we choose are often deeply flawed. They just happened to meet our particular social needs at a particular time and then became embedded in our culture.
by Maggie Koerth-Baker, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Getty Images
The Weird, Black, Spidery Things of Mars
See those weird, black, spidery things dotting the dunes in this colorized photo taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2010? Yeah. Nobody knows what the hell those things are.
What we do know about them just underlines how incredibly unfamiliar Mars really is to us. First spotted by humans in 1998, these splotches pop up every Martian spring, and disappear in winter. Usually, they appear in the same places as the previous year, and they tend to congregate on the sunny sides of sand dunes — all but shunning flat ground. There's nothing on Earth that looks like this that we can compare them to. It's a for real-real mystery, writes Robert Krulwich at NPR. But there are theories:
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, from Hungary, from the European Space Agency have all proposed explanations; the leading one is so weird, it's transformed my idea of what it's like to be on Mars. For 20 years, I've thought the planet to be magnificently desolate, a dead zone, painted rouge. But imagine this: Every spring, the sun beats down on a southern region of Mars, morning light melts the surface, warms up the ground below, and a thin, underground layer of frozen CO2 turns suddenly into a roaring gas, expands, and carrying rock and ice, rushes up through breaks in the rock, exploding into the Martian air. Geysers shoot up in odd places. It feels random, like being surprise attacked by an monstrous, underground fountain."If you were there," says Phil Christensen of Arizona State University, "you'd be standing on a slab of carbon dioxide ice. All around you, roaring jets of carbon dioxide gas are throwing sand and dust a couple hundred feet into the air." The ground below would be rumbling. You'd feel it in your spaceboots.
Read the rest of Robert Krulwich's post — and check out some spectacular photos of the things — at NPR
by Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing | Read more:
The Forgotten Mapmaker
But there are more than two horses in the race to create an index of the physical world. There's a third company that's invested billions of dollars, employs thousands of mapmakers, and even drives around its own version of Google's mythic "Street View" cars.
That company is Nokia, the still-giant but oft-maligned Finnish mobile phone maker, which acquired the geographic information systems company Navteq back in 2007 for $8 billion. That's only a bit less than the Nokia's current market value of a bit less than $10 billion, which is down 93 percent since 2007. This might be bad news for the company's shareholders, but if a certain tech giant with a massive interest in mobile content (Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo) were looking to catch up or stay even with Google, the company's Location & Commerce unit might look like a nice acquisition they could get on the cheap (especially given that the segment lost 1.5 billion euros last year). Microsoft and Yahoo are already thick as thieves with Nokia's mapping crew, but Apple is the company that needs the most help.
Business considerations aside, I'm fascinated by the process of mapping. What seems like a rather conventional exercise turns out to be the very cutting edge of mixed reality, of translating the human world and logic into databases that computers can use. And the best part is, unlike web crawlers, which were totally automated, indexing the physical world still requires people heading out on the roads and staring at imagery on computers back at the home office.
As I described last month, Google has spent literally tens of thousands of person-hours creating its maps. I argued that no other company could beat Google at this game, which turned out to be my most controversial assertion. People pointed out that while Google's driven 5 million miles in Street View cars, UPS drives 3.3 billion miles a year. Whoever had access to these other datasets might be in the mapping (cough) driver's seat.
Well, it turns out that Nokia is the company that receives the GPS data from both FedEx and UPS, the company's senior VP of Location Content, Cliff Fox, told me.
"We get over 12 billion probe data points per month coming into the organization," Fox said from his office in Chicago. "We get probe data not only from commercial vehicles like FedEx and UPS trucks, but we also get it from consumers through navigation applications."
by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic | Read more:
The F Word
"She's bossy," Lucy complained.
"Mmm-hmm," I said as I returned the milk to the refrigerator, thinking that my daughter can be a little on the bossy side herself.
"She's turning everyone against me," Lucy muttered, a tear rolling down her cheek. "She's mean, she's bad at math, she's terrible at kickball. And...she's fat."
"Excuse me," I said, struggling for calm, knowing I was nowhere in calm's ZIP code. "What did you just say?"
From the way her eyes widened, I knew that she knew she'd done what her sister, four-year-old Phoebe, called a Big Bad. "She is fat," Lucy mumbled into her bowl.
"We are going upstairs," I said, my voice cold, my throat tight. "We are going to discuss this." And up we went, my blithe, honey-blonde daughter, leggy as a colt in cotton shorts and a gray T-shirt with Snoopy on the front, and her size-16-on-a-good-day mom.
I'd spent the nine years since her birth getting ready for this day, the day we'd have to have the conversation about this dreaded, stinging word. I had a well-honed, consoling speech at the ready. I knew exactly what to say to the girl on the receiving end of the taunts and the teasing, but in all of my imaginings, it never once occurred to me that my daughter would be the one who used the F word. Fat.
by Jennifer Weiner, Allure | Read more:
Tap The Healing Power of Poop
The procedure of transferring stool to a patient—technically called fecal microbiota transplantation—was first performed in the United States in 1958 to treat an intractable case of C. difficile colitis, a gastrointestinal condition caused when the balance of microbes in the gut—called the microbiome—is destabilized or destroyed. The goal was to banish C. difficile by overpowering it with healthy microbes so that balance could be restored. The experiment worked, and last year a review of 317 patients treated by 27 different research groups found an astounding 92 percent cure rate from this unusual therapy.
Now a group of physicians have designed the fecal treatment’s first double-blind trial, in which neither patient nor researcher knows whether a placebo or a healthy microbiome is being delivered to the ailing gut. Before that can happen, though, the FDA needs to approve the use of healthy donor stool as an “investigational new drug.” Then the National Institutes of Health must provide funding.
Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist in Providence, Rhode Island, who is helping design the trial, says the first patient she treated with a fecal transplant was a premed student in 2008 who was completely debilitated by six painful months of C. difficile colitis. “I tried every standard regimen of treatment. Nothing worked,” Kelly says. After the patient received a transplant of her live-in boyfriend’s stool, she was cured. “When I saw her at follow-up, she looked fantastic,” Kelly says, “smiling and completely symptom free. She told me she’d felt better the same day as the transplant. I’ve done 72 of these now, and I hear that again and again.”
Growing interest in the unconventional therapy is due in part to the fact that C. difficile colitis cases have tripled in the past decade and now afflict more than half a million people a year. “C. difficile colitis is a terrible problem, and fecal transplant results are astounding,” says Lawrence J. Brandt, emeritus chief of gastroenterology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. He is a proponent of fecal transplant therapy as a primary treatment for C. difficile, rather than as a last resort.
by Jill Neimark, Discover | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
Grizzly Bear Members Are Indie-Rock Royalty, But What Does That Buy Them in 2012?
Still, the question of how “big” Grizzly Bear are—where they fall on the long scale between celebrity megastars and those unwashed touring-in-vans-for-the-love-of-it indie rockers whose days consist of, as Droste remembers it, “cars breaking down, sleeping on floors, being allergic to the cat in someone’s house, making literally no money, playing in a diner, having ten people show up, being like Why are we doing this?, eating beef jerky from the gas station for protein”—is a funny and unsettled one, and its answer might depend on your perspective. (...)
For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. “People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,” says Droste. “Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.” Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with “a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’ ” They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.”
Rock bands are generally obligated to express profound gratitude for any kind of success, and Grizzly Bear’s seems thoroughly genuine. They will also acknowledge that it’s “a weird life,” that it’s not always easy, that it requires a mix of sacrifice and raw compulsion and rigorous overhead-cutting, and that they sometimes wonder what they’d do if the band fell apart. Chris Bear is just now, for the first time, ceasing to handle management of their tours, though he still can explain the band’s accounting in detail, sounding almost guilty about any expenses that rise above a monastic level: The occasional hotel-room rental, he says, is so they can take showers, and the sound and lighting engineers are inarguable necessities. (“You can’t roll into Radio City and be like, ‘Yeah, just plug in my acoustic guitar and turn it up.’ ”) He and Droste go out of their way to stay in the top tier of an airline rewards program for the upgrades on long tour flights. (“I’m six-four,” says Droste, “and I don’t want to pay for business class.”) Sit down with the four of them, and you get the overall sense that the band’s high profile has taken them from ordinary early-twenties NYU grads—working as a temp, a caterer, a coffee-shop employee, and “the guy who edits out the coughs” in audio documentaries—to the early-thirties proprietors of a risky small business: very busy, stuck somewhere between “scraping by” and “comfortable enough,” and unsure how they’d ever manage to do things like support families or pay for any children’s educations, especially given the slim chances that this business will exist twenty or even ten years from now. “If your livelihood is in songwriting, you never know when that’s just gonna stop,” says Rossen. Now that they’ve reached success, they seem to wonder about stability. “There’s people that know they make X dollars a year, and that’s not going to change,” says Bear. “Or if anything, they’ll get a raise. That seems like a pretty reasonable setup, compared to maybe having one really good year, and then who knows what the future is.”
by Nitsuh Abebe, Vulture | Read more:
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