Quotulatiousness

September 16, 2012

The other side of the Philip Roth/Wikipedia spat

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

I admit that I didn’t follow this story when it got (for a literary spat) saturation coverage in various media outlets. Here (speaking in a private capacity and not as an official Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson) is Oliver, and he’s got a bit of refuting to do:

First, this is not a fundamental flaw in Wikipedia’s central precepts — this is one author and his agents being unable to navigate the internet and/or report the truth with any degree of accuracy. This is our attempt to make our information not only accurate, but verifiable — to ensure that readers have a hope in hell of actually checking the accuracy of our information. This is not achieved by enabling subjects to become the oracles of truth for any article that mentions them, or telling readers “we know it’s accurate because Philip Roth said so, and you’ll just have to trust us on that”. We don’t want readers to trust us. We want readers to think and be able to do their own research.

Second, maybe (although I doubt it) we need to have a frank debate over how we handle primary and secondary sourcing. But for all of the reasons explained above, Philip Roth and the Editorial of Azkaban is a terrible poster boy for such a debate.

Third: people should perhaps start having a debate about the way authors are treated in “proper” sources. The New Yorker, the Guardian, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times — all respected bodies. And all, without being able and/or willing to do their own research, happily published or republished Roth’s assertions. We rely on these organisations for reporting what our politicians do, what our armed forces do, how entities with the power of life and death over humanity are accountable to the people. And they happily gulp down the glorified press releases of anyone who offers to let them touch his Pulitzer.

There’s also a follow-up post providing more information and explanation.

September 14, 2012

The Bob Dylan interview within the Bob Dylan interview

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:53

I haven’t read Rolling Stone for decades, so I don’t know if this interview is typical of their house style these days:

Dylan talks about his new album, a bit about his apparent belief that the soul of a dead Hell’s Angel named Bobby Zimmerman (Dylan’s own birth name) took over his body in the 1960s (really, and I can’t explain it either), Dylan’s annoyance with people who attack him for using lines from other poets in his songs, and many other interesting things.

But around 10 percent of the interview is dedicated to a bizarre performance from interlocutor Mikal Gilmore seeming desperate to get Bob Dylan to say that he thinks criticism of Barack Obama is based on racism, say he voted for Obama, or say he really likes Obama.

Dylan leads into it with an impassioned and intelligent discussion of how the stain of slavery shapes this nation. “This country is just too fucked up about color….People at each others throats because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back — or any neighborhood back….It’s a country founded on the backs of slaves….If slavery had been given up in a more peaceful way, America would be far ahead today.”

This gives Gilmore his hook: didn’t Obama change all that? And isn’t it so that people who don’t like him don’t like him because of race? Gilmore takes five different swings at getting Dylan to agree. Some of Dylan’s responses: “They did the same thing to Bush, didn’t they? They did the same thing to Clinton, too, and Jimmy Carter before that….Eisenhower was accused of being un-American. And wasn’t Nixon a socialist? Look what he did in China. They’ll say bad things about the next guy too.” On Gilmore’s fourth attempt, Dylan just resorts to: “Do you want me to repeat what I just said, word for word? What are you talking about? People loved the guy when he was elected. So what are we talking about? People changing their minds?”

September 5, 2012

Nobody is getting to “have it all”

Filed under: Economics, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

I read Gregg Easterbrook’s NFL column partly for the football content and partly for the very-much-not-football stuff. Here’s an example from this week’s column where he reflects on the “having it all” meme:

Lately The Atlantic has been on the case of après-feminism. Hanna Rosin’s 2010 cover story showed how the double-XX cohort is taking over colleges and offices, positing trends in education and economics are such that “modern postindustrial society is simply better suited to women.” Those sci-fi stories set on worlds ruled by Amazonian females, where males exist solely for women’s amusement? Rosin sees this coming.

Then in 2011, an Atlantic cover had Kate Bolick declaring that men are already so inutile, a woman would be a fool to walk down the aisle. Her ideal evening: a romantic candlelit dinner for one. Bolick praised “the Mosuo people of southwest China, who eschew marriage and visit their lovers under cover of night.” That cheerful article ended by endorsing the Beguines, a Dutch order whose members live in secular chastity, vowing never to touch men.

Then this year came “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a cover by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton dean and recent State Department official. Slaughter filled 14 magazine pages with angst about how despite a high-paying super-elite job with lifetime tenure, personal connections in the White House and a husband who does the child care, despite writing about herself for the cover of the world’s most important magazine, nevertheless she feels troubled that every moment of her days is not precisely what she wants.

The assertion that women “can’t have it all” was received as earthshaking by the commentariate, a magazine article making the front page of The New York Times. Living a favored life and yet looking for something to complain about is part of the Upper West Side mindset, so perhaps the Slaughter article appealed to the part of the Times demographic that searches desperately for new complaints.

Some of Slaughter’s points were solid, but they were the grievances of the 1 percent — 99 of 100 women would love to have what Slaughter presented as her burdens to bear. Nobody’s ever satisfied. Jacques Brel wrote, “Sons of the thief, sons of the saint/Where is the child without complaint?”

What was vexing was that the article seemed to misunderstand its own topic. The phrase “having it all” meant a woman could pursue a career and also be a good mother. This is something millions of women have now achieved, proving career and motherhood are not mutually exclusive, as men long claimed in order to keep women out of the workplace. But “all” never meant a woman could have everything she wants at every second without ever facing hard choices or bending over to pick up a piece of laundry. Men can’t “have it all” in that sense either. No one has ever “had it all” and no one ever will.

The Atlantic‘s female readers have been told they finally hold the upper hand, but this seems hollow victory if men become motes. They’ve been told marriage is so awful, get thee to a nunnery. And Atlantic‘s female readers have been told if they achieve tremendous career success under ideal conditions while miraculously finding the last desirable man on planet Earth, they will be riven with anxiety anyway. But hey, have a nice day!

July 30, 2012

Pre-season rankings: lies, damned lies, plus statistics

Filed under: Football, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Even the most rabid Vikings fan isn’t really expecting a SuperBowl run this year: climbing from a 3-13 season to 8-8 would be a very significant improvement, and an honest fan would say that would be acceptable. Squeaking into the playoffs might be possible, except that the Vikings play in one of the toughest divisions in the NFL, so you’d need to be dangerously optimistic to expect that outcome.

That being said, the Vikings are getting no respect at all from the various pre-season ranking experts in the media. Christopher Gates explains why you shouldn’t pay too much attention to forecasts like the one published recently in Pro Football Weekly:

Ugh, there is so much wrong here, I’m not even sure where to start. . .but I’ll try.

– According to PFW, the Vikings’ defensive line (which tied for the NFL lead in sacks in 2011 and is led by the guy that probably should have been Defensive Player of the Year last season) is just as good as the Vikings’ secondary … a unit that allowed the second-highest passer rating against in NFL history, went nearly ten full games without an interception (setting an NFL record in the process), and allowed more touchdown passes than any team in the league last year. Yep … the same.

– Not only that, but the Vikings’ secondary is (according to PFW) just as good as Green Bay’s secondary. Yes, the Packers allowed the most passing yards in a season in NFL history in 2011 and only allowed five fewer TD passes than Minnesota did (34 to 29). The Packers also intercepted twenty-three more passes than the Vikings did (31 to 8) despite collecting about half as many sacks (50 for Minnesota, 29 for Green Bay) and their passer rating allowed was a full 27 points lower (107.6 for Minnesota, 80.6 for Green Bay). According to Pro Football Weekly? The secondaries are basically interchangeable. Seriously.

– Is Minnesota’s defensive line that much worse than Detroit’s, to the point where the Lions get an A- and the Vikings get the aforementioned C+? I really don’t think so. In fact, until Nick Fairley can become known for something other than personal fouls (in college) and getting arrested (since reaching the NFL), I fail to see where Detroit’s front four is better than Minnesota’s at all. (Sure, I’m biased … but come on.)

June 24, 2012

Do your media outlets suffer from ADD?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Okay, it’s a trick question: they all do. Gerard Vanderleun pulls out an older piece (originally posted in 2003) that explains how and why your mainstream media became afflicted with ADD:

Recently I became acquainted with a young boy, just turned nine. He’s a brilliant and happy kid, but he has a problem with cleaning up and organizing his room. It isn’t that he can’t do it, he simply has to be told about every five minutes to continue the process. In the course of picking things up to put away he discovers anew their potential to fascinate him.

The Gameboy? “Oh, here’s where I saved that last stage of Turoc. Let’s see if I can get the flame-thrower and…”

Any one of the 3,000 + Lego units? “Gee, I never did get the moon base hemi-dome set up, just let me put these 400 blocks in place and…” Books? “Sure thing and, hey, did Horton ever hatch that egg…”

On it goes until, after the sixth or seventh cajoling instruction, a path has been cleared for the vacuum cleaner. After which, he promptly begins taking everything he has put away out and strews it about the floor once again.

Today’s pop psychologists, addlepated educators and the marketing departments of large drug companies are hard at work trying to convince me children who behave like this have “Attention Deficit Disorder” or ADD. But I know enough to know it is the companies who are obsessed, confused and greedy in about that order.

What this young boy suffers from is no more than being a normal, heedless and all around great nine-year-old boy. He doesn’t have ADD anymore than I have an elephant chained in my back yard. (Yes, I just checked.)

The only group that I can see in the United States that, as a group, is seriously afflicted with ADD is a group of would-be adults — the group we call collectively “The Mainstream Media.” For members of this group ADD is not an option, it is a requirement. Far from being a means to informing and enlightening the public, the primary role of the MSM is to distract it. At this they are very good since they are “Distracted from distraction by distraction” by their very nature. They are “the ADD professionals.” They actually get paid for doing this. Paid well for having a disease.

May 29, 2012

Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?

Filed under: Britain, Media, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States:

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.

May 21, 2012

The answer to that burning question “Are libertarians misitreperted?”

Filed under: Humour, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:55

An interview with Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie in Salon gets the garble-for-comedy-gold treatment through Google Translate and Contentbot:

Chips Gillespie and Matt Welch, the writers of your primary libertarian distribution&Number160Reason, see pray for their many other People in the usa raising disenchantment while using governmental process. For their new publication &Promise of Independents: How Libertarian State policies Can Fix Whats Inappropriate With North america, they realize that independents now account for the best bloc of voters near your vicinity and craving far more defections from the two significant events. Only by taking apart this hierarchical process of electric power, they retain, will any of us achieve true deregulation of authorities-manage solutions, that will result in elevated shopper decision and a far more carefully democratized contemporary society.

Say what you want to about libertarian reasons, but they will be constantly entertaining to go about. So that we sat all the way down with Gillespie and Welch the 2009 weeks time and talked about their beliefs over the sushi the afternoon meal:

Your publication cravings the United states consumer to embrace an unregulated market free from authorities management. However you also have a quotation from Julian Assange, a self applied-described libertarian, stating that &a complimentary market results as being a monopoly if you do not power it to be free. You to get, some alternative entire body has to are available so that the liberty of an market &Number8212 doesn’t that imply that free financial markets are inextricable from some sort of authorities management?

H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.

May 20, 2012

“If I were to lose 14 pounds, I’d have to part with both arms. And a foot.”

Filed under: Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Scarlett Johansson at the Huffington Post on healthy living and healthy weight:

People come in all shapes and sizes and everyone has the capability to meet their maximum potential. Once filming is completed, I’ll no longer need to rehash the 50 ways to lift a dumbbell, but I’ll commit to working out at least 30 minutes a day and eating a balanced diet of fruit, vegetables and lean proteins. Pull ups, crunches, lunges, squats, jumping jacks, planks, walking, jogging and push ups are all exercises that can be performed without fancy trainers or gym memberships. I’ve realized through this process that no matter how busy my life may be, I feel better when I take a little time to focus on staying active. We can all pledge to have healthy bodies no matter how diverse our lifestyles may be.

Since dedicating myself to getting into “superhero shape,” several articles regarding my weight have been brought to my attention. Claims have been made that I’ve been on a strict workout routine regulated by co-stars, whipped into shape by trainers I’ve never met, eating sprouted grains I can’t pronounce and ultimately losing 14 pounds off my 5’3″ frame. Losing 14 pounds out of necessity in order to live a healthier life is a huge victory. I’m a petite person to begin with, so the idea of my losing this amount of weight is utter lunacy. If I were to lose 14 pounds, I’d have to part with both arms. And a foot. I’m frustrated with the irresponsibility of tabloid media who sell the public ideas about what we should look like and how we should get there.

Every time I pass a newsstand, the bold yellow font of tabloid and lifestyle magazines scream out at me: “Look Who’s Lost It!” “They Were Fabby and Now They’re Flabby!” “They Were Flabby and Now They’re Flat!” We’re all aware of the sagas these glossies create: “Look Who’s Still A Sea Cow After Giving Birth to Twins!” Or the equally perverse: “Slammin’ Post Baby Beach Bodies Just Four Days After Crowning!”

According to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA), as many as 10 million females and 1 million males living in the US are fighting a life and death battle with anorexia or bulimia. I’m someone who has always publicly advocated for a healthy body image and the idea that the media would maintain that I have lost an impossible amount of weight by some sort of “crash diet” or miracle workout is ludicrous. I believe it’s reckless and dangerous for these publications to sell the story that these are acceptable ways to looking like a “movie star.”

May 16, 2012

Thomas Mulcair: your “go-to guy [for] cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theor[ies]”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:24

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells gets in a small dig at Stephen Harper before unloading on Thomas Mulcair:

Before I make a bit more fun of Mulcair, and then try to take some of his arguments seriously, I should first stipulate that the Harper government is fully capable of childish absurdity on the energy/environment front. Indeed I think the confrontation between resource exports and environmental activism is turning into less of a slam-dunk political winner for Harper than he seemed to think in the New Year.

But we see two longstanding Mulcair traits in his remarks. First, a kind of Byzantine certainty. Not just that he knows what’s going on, but inevitably that what’s going on is so complex that only a fellow such as he can grasp its intricacy. Journalists have known for a long time that Mulcair was their go-to guy for some cockamamie wheels-within-wheels theory about his opponents’ motives and actions. It cannot possibly be that Alison Redford, Christy Clark and Brad Wall simply disagree with Mulcair, or even that they don’t care whether he’s right but are playing to different electorates. No, they say what they say because they are in league with Harper against him. Mulcair surely knows Christy Clark’s chief of staff, Ken Boessenkool, helped script Harper’s winning 2006 campaign. If he didn’t know that Brad Wall’s former environment minister, Nancy Heppner, worked in Harper’s PMO for a year after that campaign, he knows it now and will take great satisfaction in tucking it away for future use. See? She’s the go-between. I knew it.

The notion that Alison Redford is Harper’s preferred Alberta premier, or that she scans the skies at night for the light from the Harpsignal, is harder to square with the available data, but whatever. On to the second Mulcair characteristic: the belief that disagreement is synonymous with illegitimate attack against him. You will tell me that’s hardly unique. You’ll be right. Just look at the prime minister. But now we know Mulcair is no more immune from the garden-variety political martyr complex. Wells would write crap like “martyr complex.” He’s from Maclean’s. They hate me.

April 17, 2012

Chateauguay Magazine: a clear and present danger to the integrity of the French language in Quebec

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:45

Because it publishes with both French and English contents, the Quebec government’s language police have launched an investigation:

A monthly newsletter in the city of Chateauguay, Quebec, has caused a stir and it has nothing to do with its content. A resident complained there was too much English in the newsletter and now, Quebec’s language watchdog has launched an investigation.

The Office Quebecois de La Langue Francaise is looking into why the newsletter, called the “Chateauguay magazine,” is written in both French and English. The office says that’s a clear violation of the Charter of the French language, or Bill 101.

The office wants to ensure that the all the city’s communication with citizens is done only in the official language of French.

The folks in Chateauguay are apparently being oppressed because the magazine includes content addressed to the 26% of the population that speaks English.

April 10, 2012

Mark Steyn: Derbyshire should not have been fired

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:46

On the National Review Online‘s “The Corner” blog, Mark Steyn expresses the unpopular-even-among-Republians thought that John Derbyshire’s sins did not amount to a firing offence:

… for what it’s worth, I regret the loss of John Derbyshire to National Review. Short version: Didn’t like the piece, but don’t think NR should have hustled him into the drive-thru guillotine on the basis of 24 hours of hysteria from the Internet’s sans-culottes.

[. . .]

On the career-detonating column, I don’t have anything terribly useful to add. But Derb’s wife is Chinese and his children are biracial. And I can see why, in a world in which a four-time mayor of America’s capital city can disparage your own family’s race (“these Asians coming in . . . those dirty shops . . . they ought to go”) and pay no price, a chap might come to resent the way polite society’s indulgence of racism is so highly selective.

[. . .]

The net result of Derb’s summary execution by NR will be further to shrivel the parameters, and confine debate in this area to ever more unreal fatuities. He knew that mentioning the Great Unmentionables would sooner or later do him in, and, in an age when shrieking “That’s totally racist!” is totally gay, he at least has the rare satisfaction of having earned his colors. Yet what are we to make of wee, inoffensive Dave Weigel over at Slate? The water still churning with blood, the sharks are circling poor old Dave for the sin of insufficiently denouncing the racist Derbyshire. Weigel must go for not enthusiastically bellowing, “Derbyshire must go!” Come to think of it, I should probably go for querying whether Weigel should go.

April 8, 2012

The chronicle of the declining “old media” empires

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

Matt Welch explains why, even though more reporting is being done now than ever before in human history, the “old media” portrays the situation in the same way the dinosaurs might view the end of their era:

Imagine for a moment that the hurly-burly history of American retail was chronicled not by reporters and academics but by life-long employees of A&P, a largely forgotten supermarket chain that enjoyed a 75 percent market share as recently as the 1950s. How do you suppose an A&P Organization Man might portray the rise of discount super-retailer Wal-Mart, or organic foods-popularizer Whole Foods, let alone such newfangled Internet ventures as Peapod.com? Life looks a hell of a lot different from the perspective of a dinosaur slowly leaking power than it does to a fickle consumer happily gobbling up innovation wherever it shoots up.

That is largely where we find ourselves in the journalism conversation of 2012, with a dreary roll call of depressive statistics invariably from the behemoth’s point of view: newspaper job losses, ad-spending cutbacks, shuttered bureaus, plummeting stock prices, major-media bankruptcies. Never has there been more journalism produced or consumed, never has it been easier to find or create or curate news items, and yet this moment is being portrayed by self-interested insiders as a tale of decline and despair.

It is no insult to the hard work and good faith of either newspaper reporters or media-beat writers (and I’ve been both) to acknowledge that their conflict of interest in this story far exceeds that of, say, academic researchers who occasionally take corporate money, or politicians who pocket campaign donations from entities they help regulate, to name two perennial targets of newspaper editorial boards. We should not expect anything like impartial analysis from people whose very livelihoods—and those of their close friends—are directly threatened by their subject matter.

This goes a long way toward explaining a persistent media-criticism dissonance that has been puzzling observers since at least the mid-1990s: Successful, established journalism insiders tend to be the most dour about the future of the craft, while marginalized and even unpaid aspirants are almost giddy about what might come next. More kids than ever go to journalism school; more commencement speeches than ever warn graduates that, sadly, there’s no more gold in them thar hills. Consumers are having palpable fun finding, sharing, packaging, supplementing, and dreaming up pieces of editorial content; newsroom veterans are consistently among the most depressed of all modern professionals.

March 28, 2012

Science and journalism, two flavours that have uneven results when mixed together

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

James Randerson on the intersection between science and popular journalism:

Just to be clear, we are talking here about standard news stories based on a single journal paper — the science hack’s bread and butter. For me, the answer is straightforward. Of course a good science/health/environment journalist should read the paper if possible. It is the record of what the scientists actually did and what the peer reviewers have allowed them to claim (peer review is very far from perfect but it is at least some check on researchers boosting their conclusions).

Without seeing the paper you are at the mercy of press-release hype from overenthusiastic press officers or, worse, from the researchers themselves. Of course science journalists won’t have the expertise to spot some flaws, but they can get a sense of whether the methodology is robust — particularly for health-related papers.

In any case, very often the press release does not include all the information you will need for a story, and the paper can contain some hidden gems. Frequently the press release misses the real story.

The tricky question is whether you go ahead and write the story if you can’t get hold of the paper. I think a blanket ban would be going too far. Sometimes, it is not possible to get hold of the research paper in the time available.

I’m not scientifically trained, so the odd time when I post something with a link to a recent scientific paper, you can be pretty sure that I’ve only read the summary — but I’m not being paid to present my readers with scientific information. I’d expect professional science journalists to at least do a bit more due diligence than I expect bloggers to do…

March 14, 2012

The red meat of medical churnalism

Filed under: Food, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Rob Lyons on the latest red meat scare from the medical press, who “churn out scary-sounding studies about steak and bacon faster than McDonald’s produces Big Macs”.

It’s official, it seems: red meat — particularly processed red meat — will be the death of you. ‘Small quantities of processed meat such as bacon, sausages or salami can increase the likelihood of dying early by a fifth, researchers from Harvard School of Medicine found. Eating steak increases the risk of early death by 12 per cent’, declared the Daily Telegraph yesterday. BBC1 Breakfast’s resident GP, Dr Rosemary Leonard, told millions of viewers the link was ‘very, very clear’.

[. . .]

The topline results were that, after adjustment for major lifestyle and dietary risk factors, there was a 13 per cent increase in the risk of death for each portion of red meat eaten per day and a 20 per cent increase in mortality for each portion of processed meat consumed per day. This is not the first study to suggest that eating meat is bad for you. But that might simply mean that this study shares many of the same problems that all the other studies have had.

However, before we get to the problems, here’s some brighter news. At the end of the study, the members of the two groups studied had, on average, reached the grand old age of 75. How many had died along the way? Less than 20 per cent. Those who started the study were four times more likely than not to reach 75. So, whatever your eating habits when it comes to eating red meat or processed meat, the most important lesson is that most people live a long time these days. ‘Early death’ is very much a relative concept.

The authors claim that 9.3 per cent of deaths in men and 7.6 per cent of deaths in women could be avoided by eating little or no red meat. To put that into some back-of-an-envelope statistical perspective: multiplying that 9.3 per cent by the 20 per cent who actually died shows that about 1.8 per cent of red-meat eaters would die by the time they were 75 because of their meat-eating habit. Even if that claim were absolutely accurate (and even the authors call it an estimate), would you really give up your favourite foods for decades on the slim possibility of an extra year or two of old age?

February 12, 2012

Interested in early SF pulps?

Filed under: History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:17

You can now read the full text, including pictures and ads, of the first six issues of Amazing Stories online:

The Pulp Magazines Project has just posted the first several issues of Amazing Stories. Read the classic pulp magazine edited by Hugo Gernsback in all its scanned-in glory, with stories by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, Murray Leinster and more.

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