So, I’ve been following this Columbia U course blog called “thing theory” for a while now, enjoying the smart discussions of philosophy of things as they’ve trickled out. (Things are a personal passion of mine, and my dissertation is on the material culture of modernist art/lit/cinema.)

Well, it being the end of the semester, the blog is now positively blowing up. People are taking stances, saying what and who they like and don’t like, and generally trying to put it all together for future thinking about, um, things.

So if you like sentences like these:

I understand that if one focuses on these aspects, the zebra ceases to exist, but the zebra is not a hard concrete thing, it is the manifestation of a particular network, a network that repeats itself (with slight variations of course) to create millions of similar networks we call zebras. I get it.

Then, my friend, you’ve got to jump in and check out this discussion. Tell them that Snarkmarket sent you.

Larry Kramer at Yale:

It took a long time for Yale to accept Kramer money. After a number of years of trying to get Yale to accept mine for gay professorships or to let me raise funds for a gay student center, (both offers declined), my extraordinary straight brother Arthur offered Yale $1 million to set up the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies and Yale accepted it. My good friend and a member of the Yale Corporation, Calvin Trillin, managed to convince President Levin that I was a pussycat. The year was 2001.

Five years later, in 2006, Yale closed down LKI, as it had come to be called. Yale removed its director, Jonathan David Katz. All references to LKI were expunged from Web sites and answering machines and directories and syllabuses. One day LKI was just no longer here.

When this happened I thought my heart would break.

I wanted gay history to be taught. I wanted gay history to be about who we are, and who we were, by name, and from the beginning of our history, which is the same as the beginning of everyone else’s history.

This is a great speech, even though it’s peppered with the occasional, um, surprising claims (“George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual… his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian”) and a tirade against queer studies that feels misplaced and, at times, childish:

It seems as if everything is queer this and queer that… Just as a point of information, I would like to proclaim with great pride: I am not queer! And neither are you. When will we stop using this adolescent and demeaning word to identify ourselves? Like our history that is not taught, using this word will continue to guarantee that we are not taken seriously in the world.

Just like dressing “in drag,” “acting” transgendered, or not wanting to let other people define your identities for you guarantee that you won’t be taken seriously in the world. Oh, it matters so much to be taken seriously.

In particular, it seems foolish to blame scholars of literature and anthropology or communication for doing what they do with anything rather than history or politics departments who refuse to give gay history a foothold.

Folks care about the words they use, and are chilly towards “homosexual,” not because they refuse to grant that same-sex desire/partnering/sex have always been around, but because 1) lots of people’s sense of their gender/sexuality doesn’t fall under what we’d just call “gay” or “homosexual,” not least because 2) to pick of an example, if you were born an anatomical woman but think of yourself as a man attracted to women, you wouldn’t think of your attraction as “same-sex,” and 3) people finally get to define the words for themselves! “Homosexuality” is a medical word; “sodomy” is religious; “queer” is social. They all have different valences, but the last offers a flexibility that for many, many people, is highly desirable.

Now, I absolutely agree that Eve K Sedgwick doesn’t do what George Chauncey does, and that we need about a hundred more Chaunceys a hundred times more than we need a hundred more Sedgwicks. But gosh, Larry, don’t bash folks for not being serious because you don’t like the name. Bash the institution for taking your money and not supporting what you wanted to do.

Also, pick up Epistemology of the Closet sometime and give it a read. I think you’d find that this marvelous turn of phrase you use (wait for the end) echoed nicely there:

Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.

A good anecdotal lead. Carolina Solis is a medical student who did research on parasitic infections caused by contaminated well water in rural Nicaragua.

Like many researchers, she plans to submit her findings for publication in a medical journal. What she discovered could benefit not just Nicaraguan communities but those anywhere that face similar problems. When she submits her paper, though, she says the doctors she worked with back in San Juan del Sur will probably never get a chance to read it.

“They were telling me their problems accessing these [journals]. It can be difficult for them to keep up with all the changes in medicine.”

Hey, Matt, if you want to sink your teeth into a medical policy issue that’s right up your alley, I think this is it.

There’s legislation:

Washington recently got involved. Squirreled away in the massive $410 billion spending package the president signed into law last month is an open access provision. It makes permanent a previous requirement that says the public should have access to taxpayer-funded research free of charge in an online archive called PubMed Central. Such funding comes largely from the National Institutes of Health, which doles out more than $29 billion in research grants per year. That money eventually turns into about 60,000 articles owned and published by various journals.

But Democrats are divided on the issue. In February, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., submitted a bill that would reverse open access. HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, would prohibit government agencies from automatically making that research free. Conyers argues such a policy would buck long-standing federal copyright law. Additionally, Conyers argues, journals use their subscription fees to fund peer review in which experts are solicited to weigh in on articles before they’re published. Though peer reviewers aren’t usually identified or paid, it still takes money to manage the process, which Conyers calls “critical.”

And cultural/generational change:

The pay-to-play model doesn’t jive with a generation of soon-to-be docs who “grew up Google,” with information no farther than a search button away. It’s a generation that never got lost in library stacks looking for an encyclopedia, or had to pay a penny for newspaper content. So it doesn’t see why something as important as medical research should be locked behind the paywalls of private journals.

Copyright issues are nothing new to a generation that watched the recording industry deal its beloved original music sharing service, Napster, a painful death in 2001. Last October, it watched Google settle a class-action lawsuit brought on by book publishers upset over its Book Search engine, which makes entire texts searchable. And just last week, a Swedish court sentenced four founders of the the Pirate Bay Web site to a year in prison over making copyrighted files available for illegal file sharing. And now the long-familiar copyright war is spilling over into medicine.

There’s even WikiDoc

And, the article doesn’t mention this, but I’ll contend there’s a role for journalism to play. Here’s a modest proposal: allow medical researchers to republish key findings of the research in newspapers, magazines, something with a different revenue structure, and then make it accessible to everyone. Not perfect, but a programmatic effort would do some good.

Speaking of which — what are the new big ideas on the health/medicine beat? This is such a huge issue — it feels like it should have its own section in the paper every day.

Been recently fascinated with learning more about health care, reading a lot of Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, catching up on essays by the likes of Paul Krugman and Atul Gawande. And the best thing I’ve read so far is this wonkish-but-accessible interview with health care policy super-couple Uwe Reinhardt and Tsung-mei Cheng. The interview teases out a number of distinctive policy critiques and ideas that aren’t surfaced in most of the layperson-friendly health policy lit I’ve come across, like this point about the oft-derided drug company profiteers:

If you look at total drug company profits in a given year, of every retail dollar sale, drug companies who manufacture the stuff get 75 cents. And of that, they make 16, 15 percent profit. So if you multiply that out, we have about $220 billion in drug sales; that’s about, say, $25 billion in profits. Now, that is a lot; you can buy two Princetons for that. However, if you then divide $25 billion through $2.2 trillion in national health spending, you get 1.2 percent; that is, drug company profits are 1.2 percent of total national health spending.

This was from Frontline’s excellent “Sick Around the World” documentary, where they profiled the health care systems of five developed countries and compared them to the US system. See also: Frontline’s follow-up, “Sick Around America.” (Note: T.R. Reid, the correspondent on “Sick Around the World,” refused to participate in “Sick Around America” after he found that the producers shafted the option of single-payer health care in the final edit.)

Jonah Lehrer + Allison Gopnik on baby brains:

The hyperabundance of thoughts in the baby brain also reflects profound differences in the ways adults and babies pay attention to the world. If attention works like a narrow spotlight in adults – a focused beam illuminating particular parts of reality – then in young kids it works more like a lantern, casting a diffuse radiance on their surroundings.

“We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children,” writes Gopnik. “But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They’re better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus.”

This (in bold) is the money-quote, though:

Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”

I can confirm that this is true.

Also, peep this graph charting synaptic activity + density according to age (via Mind Hacks):

Apparently, that’s where the real action is: contra Lehrer’s article, baby brains don’t actually have more neurons than adults, but way more (and way denser) synapses (aka the connections between neurons).

Also, just to free associate on the whole synapse thing: I had knee surgery a few weeks ago to repair a torn quadriceps tendon, and I’m in physical therapy now. Part of my PT involves attaching electrodes to my thigh to induce my quad to flex (this is called “reeducating the muscle.”).

Anyways, it is always weird to confirm that we are just made out of meat, and that if you run enough electrical current through a muscle, it’ll react whether or not your brain tells it to. That’s all your brain is — an extremely powerful + nuanced router for electricity.

Goodbye, Bea Arthur:

Copyblogger lays out some guidelines for producing engaging podcasts or other audio recordings. Please note that if you maximize every suggestion, you wind up with a perfect episode of Radio Lab. This seems like a halfway-decent validation of their merit.

Via iLibrarian.

Something Walter Benjamin said has interested me for a while now:

If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisements force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.

— One Way Street (1928)

If Benjamin’s right, then this is a reading revolution that’s still underway — expanding from film, advertisements, and newspapers to television, computer, and telephone screens. Even though we’re using all these different devices, they just might be participating in this dyad of vertical vs. historical reading.

I’ve become something of an amateur anthropologist of how people read — watching people read books or papers or from their phones or laptops in public places — but I’m curious: how do you read?

* What kind of device(s)?

* Where is your body?

* Where is your reading material?

* How do you prefer to read?

* How do you read most often?

* Where/how is it hardest for you to read?

* What are your reading surfaces — desks, tables, a bed, your own body?

* Do you use any prosthetic aids — glasses, something to raise your laptop upwards?

* How did you read as a child? Ten years ago? What’s changed?

Send pictures or movies even! Images of reading!

Guillaume Apollinaire, “La Jolie Rousse [The Pretty Redhead]”:

Here I am before you all a sensible man

Who knows life and what a living man can know of death

Having experienced love’s sorrows and joys

Having sometimes known how to impose my ideas

Adept at several languages

Having traveled quite a bit

Having seen war in the Artillery and the Infantry

Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform

Having lost my best friends in the frightful conflict

I know of old and new as much as one man can know of the two

And without worrying today about that war

Between us and for us my friends

I am here to judge the long debate between tradition and invention

Between Order and Adventure

You whose mouth is made in the image of God’s

Mouth that is order itself

Be indulgent when you compare us

To those who were the perfection of order

We who look for adventure everywhere

We’re not your enemies

We want to give you vast and strange domains

Where mystery in flower spreads out for those who would pluck it

There you may find new fires colors you have never seen before

A thousand imponderable phantasms

Still awaiting reality

We want to explore kindness enormous country where all is still

There is also time which can be banished or recalled

Pity us who fight always at the boundaries

Of infinity and the future

Pity our errors pity our sins

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