Apparently it’s not just the milkman that can wake you up in the early morning. The Nobel committee decided to call up Mario Capecchi’s home at 3am to tell him he had just won the price in Physiology or Medicine, making him the first recipient from the University of Utah.

Capecchi, along with co-winners Evans and Smithies, developed in 1989 a technique known as ‘gene targeting’, which enables researchers to create animal models (e.g. mice, flies, etc.) with very precise genetic mutations in order to study the effects of those in living creatures. Oh, yes, if you happen to be one of those anti-evolution creationist, you should not listen to all of this. The technique is now used widely to understand normal as well as pathological biology.

The life of Capecchi certainly makes him worthy of the title of Jewcy Radical. He was born in Verona in the late ‘30s, and his mother, a poet, was arrested by the Gestapo as a political prisoner and transfered to Dachau when Capecchi was four years old. After the loss of his father, he lived on the streets with a band of orphans, until he fell ill and was hospitalized in 1945. His mother had survived Dachau and as soon as the American army freed the camp, she returned to Italy to look for her son. She found him in the hospital at Reggio Emilia, and immediately took him with her to the States, where, after debarking at Ellis Island, they met with her brother.

After re-adapting himself to a normal life, Capecchi followed a more ‘classical’ route to the Nobel, eventually studying under Jim Watson of DNA fame (his borrowed partly from another Jewcy Radical, Rosalind Franklin).

I foresee a cinematographic adaptation halfway between A Beautiful Mind and The Pianist coming up. In the meantime, here’s a man whose success we can all rejoice in.

Yesterday Jewcy published an exchange on the topic of evolution between author Neal Pollak and Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer. Jason Rosenhouse, a professor at James Madison University and host of Seed Magazine's Evolution Blog, sends us this response.

I do not know what you do for a living, but I suspect you are pretty good at it. You probably trained for years to learn the basic elements of your craft, and then honed those skills through more years of on-the-job experience. Now imagine that someone without that training and experience presumes to discourse on your profession. Worse, they make assertions and arguments that are obvious nonsense to anyone versed in the subject. Not an altogether uncommon experience for you, I suspect, but one that is no less annoying for that.

Now suppose that after ignoring your best attempts to explain things, your interlocutor goes running off to the press. It is alleged that your entire profession is corrupt and shot through with religious and political agendas. Then he goes running to the local school board to pressure them into teaching his view of things despite its complete lack of acceptance among knowledgeable people. Then he gives public presentations, announcing he is going to blow the lid off the scandal in your profession.

Are you there? Are you really picturing it? That, you see, is what scientists contend with in confronting proponents of intelligent design (ID). For more than a century every branch of the life sciences has reported that all of the considerable available evidence points to the conclusions that modern species are related through common descent, and that natural selection is an especially important mechanism guiding that descent. Scientists applying evolutionary thinking to their work have been met with a nearly unbroken string of successes in solving the practical problems they face in the field and the lab. Pretenders like ID, on the other hand, have led to precisely nothing.

That is why ID folks spend very little time arguing with scientists, preferring instead to take their case directly to a public unlikely to be familiar with the minutiae of genetics or biochemistry. Tell a roomful of mathematicians that some back of the envelope probability calculations are enough to refute evolution, and they will rightly laugh in your face. But I know from sad experience that such arguments are rhetorically effective. Tell a physicist or an engineer that Darwin runs afoul of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and watch how quickly you are sent to a remedial course. Tell a gathering of paleontologists that there are no transitional forms, and the most polite among them will simply refer you to an elementary textbook. Yet ID folks routinely parrot these bogus arguments, and many others besides.

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Slate's Sex Issue finally -- finally! -- highlights the female ass. "Most Read" status instantly achieved, proving more American males secretly wish they had wives for whom the toilet's reducing ring were unnecessary. Ugh, says Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Gadget addiction affects everyone: even kittiesIt’s easy to romanticize the days of typewriters and rotary phones, but if given the choice, how many of us would really give up our cell phones and laptops in exchange for the low-tech solutions of yore? 

Our increasing dependence on these tools has led the Times to publish a list of the warning signs of gadget addiction. Would you rather text than talk face-to-face? Has the Internet become a more powerful draw than spending time with family or friends? If so, you could be a gadget junkie.

Headlines were made in Britain this week when it emerged that some checkout workers at one of our largest supermarket chains, Sainsbury’s, are refusing to handle alcohol products because of their Muslim beliefs. The supermarket has pronounced itself happy to accommodate their sensibilities, and so if your cashier objects to the bottle of wine you’ve got in your basket, you’ll have to wait for another member of staff to come across and ring the purchase through for you. There has been some pleasingly acerbic commentary from the blogosphere as a result, notably Scottish schoolteacher Shuggy, who’s now on the lookout for a new posting:

Quite. But a private retailer is perfectly entitled to make whatever arrangements it sees fit with its employees; if my local Sainsbury’s has long lines at the checkout, maybe next time I’ll take my custom elsewhere. The consequences of allowing people to pick and choose which parts of their jobs they are happy to perform, however, go much further than queuing to buy booze. Some Muslim doctors in the British National Health Service are going so far as to purposely avoid lectures on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases, because it offends their religious beliefs. From the Sunday Times:

Nor, of course, is this solely a Muslim issue. In the US such religious considerations are more often voiced by Christian doctors, particularly in the context of emergency contraception and fertility treatments. Notable cases have included a lesbian woman in California was refused artificial insemination because of her sexual orientation, and a doctor in Washington refused to fill out the prescription that would have put lead in a gay man’s pencil.

Religious groups argue that individual physicians and pharmacists should be allowed to choose what procedures they will perform (being pro-choice isn’t always bad, then, eh?). And some degree of accommodation for religious sensibilities does seem sensible – no doctor is forced to perform abortions, and indeed many on both sides of the Atlantic do not, and this is surely right.

But abortion in the US and UK is, by and large, freely available. You schedule an appointment to have the procedure done and it is done; you don’t give a damn if someone has passed on performing it. And, despite the best efforts of activists, time limits are generally fairly generous; a delay of a day or two is seldom of much consequence. But not all medical situations have time on their side.

Picture the case of the woman who has been raped and goes to an emergency room to try and get the morning-after pill, only to be turned away on religious grounds. It’s been claimed – by a pro-choice Catholic group – that only 167 of 597 Catholic hospitals in the US offer emergency contraception to women who have been raped. Quite apart from the emotional distress involved in having to go from hospital to hospital to find a non-judgemental pharmacist (“I sympathise, honey, but you don’t have the right to kill that baby”), emergency contraception is more effective the quicker it is taken. (Nor, by the way, is this a mere debating point. It’s estimated that there are 25,000 pregnancies in the US every year as a result of rape. Read that sentence again.)

Freedom of religion is an important right and, in the sphere of private worship, inviolable, but it seems to me that if you take the Hippocratic oath then you don’t get to turn patients away at the door because you don’t approve of their lifestyles. I say this as a libertarian who believes, strongly, in an individual’s freedom to believe whatever he likes and practice his religion accordingly. But when we have a situation where doctors are not even willing to learn about diseases like gonorrhea, or cirrhosis of the liver, simply because they disapprove of the lifestyle choices that hasten their onset, then those choices are putting lives at risk, and that’s just not acceptable. Refusing to show up for those bits of the course you don’t care for just shouldn’t be an option.

And who’s to say it ends here? What about white supremacists that don’t want to treat black patients? Are we to permit Christian fundamentalists to refuse treatment to drug users? Democrats? Jews? (If so, that’s Aaron Sorkin fucked.) And if you think that’s ridiculous, exactly what is the bloody difference? If you call yourself a doctor, and you’re tempted – even for a second – to pass on treating a patient with liver damage because your religion forbids you from drinking alcohol, you might want to stop and ask yourself if you aren’t in the wrong profession. Wouldn’t you be happier cutting hair or running a dry cleaner’s instead? 

Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what religious garb you dress it in. It’s a shame so many people are willing to make excuses for it.

Evolution: The big question.

In this week's Jewcy feature, How to Raise an Ideological Warrior, Neal Pollack worries that opponents of evolutionary theory will corrupt his son's education. If Neal's nightmare comes to pass, it'll be in large part due to the efforts of The Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank that promotes the theory of Intelligent Design (ID). ID holds that the diversity of life on earth is "best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection," and it includes among its backers President Bush, parents and school board members across America, and a growing list of dissident academics.

We've asked David Klinghoffer, a Jewcy contributor and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, to tell us "What would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about Intelligent Design?" Here is David's answer:

No thoughtful, feeling person would find it palatable to live a life without meaning. For many Americans, meaning is obtained primarily through religious faith. For others, through family, career, or politics. For lots of people in the Jewish community, but not only there, life’s meaning is supplied by fear.

Some fear the so-called Islamofascist threat. Many liberal Jews, however, are terrified by the scientific critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

My stake in the matter? I work at the Discovery Institute here in Seattle, which almost single-handedly put the issue Darwin v. Design before the public. For the record, I’m a fellow in DI’s program on Religion, Liberty & Public Life, which is not focused on evolutionary or other scientific questions. What exactly would the Discovery Institute like to teach Jewish-American children about intelligent design?

Paranoia has been running high. The Anti-Defamation League calls ID a “challenge to religious freedom in America.” The group warns that, “Many who believe in intelligent design want to teach this idea as science — either alongside the scientific theory of evolution or in place of it.”

Outside the more fevered precincts of the Jewish community, a few of the Republican presidential candidates would not oppose teaching both sides of the Darwin controversy to public school students. Hillary Clinton affirmed her own faith: “I believe in evolution, and I am shocked at some of the things that people in public life have been saying….I am grateful that I have the ability to look at dinosaur bones and draw my own conclusions.”

Like The Shroud of Turin, but for Atheists: When Hillary Clinton looks at dinosaur bones, her faith in evolution is reaffirmed Setting aside the question of how Senator Clinton could draw a scientific conclusion from gazing at dinosaur bones, one notes her implication that Republicans sympathetic to ID pose a “shocking” threat to her freedom to “draw her own conclusions” about life’s origins.

There are so many misunderstandings here.

ID theory represents an inference from scientific facts, facts agreed to by all scientists, like the nanotechnology in the living cell and the information-rich software of DNA. This is not Bible-based creationism. No Darwin critic that I know differs from established scientific conclusions about the age of the earth or of the universe since the moment of the Big Bang. The issue dividing Darwin advocates and Design theorists is a question of the interpretation of universally accepted data for the purpose of describing events in the distant past.

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Being an online media professional is very much like being a sociologist or a psychiatrist. None of us really have any clue how anything in our field works or how it ought to work, so we spend much of our time making shit up and hoping that it sounds awesome. This is what we call "theory." And for every Lacanian psychoanalyst or critical theorist, there is some digital swami blathering about "increased layers of meaning" or "intertwingled longtails" or some such ginned-up piffle.

The paradigm-smashing theoretical framework of the moment is "Web 3.0." Theorists of Web 3.0 manage to use the language and tone of Viktor Frankl while describing what is, so far as I can tell, a plan to steal shit from other websites while keeping your ass covered legally.

My question: instead of "scraping" from other websites—"scraping" being trade talk for taking their stuff while ensuring they get nothing out of it—why can't we just revert to the old method of "transcluding" their content. Transcluding means that everyone on Jewcy gets to read their stuff, but they still get their pageviews and advertising revenue.

Transcluding seems to have gone of out fashion sometime in internet pre-history (the 90s? Is that possible?), but it seems like a more effective, less labor-intensive, and vastly fairer way to poach proprietary content.

You can't transclude a New York Times page, because they have some sort of fancy technical barrier set up. So in the spirit of ethnic fraternity I'll just sample the content of someone closer to home.

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Why do women date such miserable assholes? Could it have something to do with facial movements pertaining to flirtation? Why of course it could, say the British.

To tests their importance, the team filmed the faces of 28 men as they talked. To remove all complicating factors, the researchers erased the soundtrack, created a wireframe animation of each face, and standardised the face shape across all subjects. Women were then shown the animations, which were randomly paired with a written prosocial or antisocial statement, such as "I really enjoy helping old people", or "Old people bore me".

Click on the link to see the pale-faced sod they've turned into an animated Etch-a-Sketch of sexual psychology. 

This might be why women pay more attention to flirtatiousness if they are thinking about a short-term relationship.

Might be.

See that, underemployed writers of the world? She's not going home with Bachelor Number 2 because he got out of Bear Sterns' collateralized mortgage department just in time. It's because he lifts his eyebrows and nods his head and he listens. 

Jewcy’s multimedia-tastic Neille Ilel turned her four-part essay on the “cancer gene” into a public radio story for Weekend America. Listen to her piece about her mother's obsession with breast cancer, and her own ambivalence about finding out her genetic future, in Real Player or streaming mp3 (scroll down to the second item.)

The British Medical Journal decries the trend of "designer vaginas" (aka "labial reduction") among women in the West. (In Somalia, you get the procedure performed for free whether you like it or not.)

Normally, I'd wait out the news day to pluck the most eminently quotable tidbit, but fuck it, I done found it already. See the bold:

"Our patients sometimes cited restrictions on lifestyle as reasons for their decision," they say.

"These restrictions included inability to wear tight clothing, go to the beach, take communal showers or ride a bicycle comfortably, or avoidance of some sexual practices.

"Men, however, do not usually want the size of their genitals reduced for such reasons. Furthermore, they find alternative solutions for any discomfort arising from rubbing or chaffing of the genitals."

Actually, I was just thinking the other day, for portability's sake... You know?

Google has unleashed a truly extraordinary technology: Street-level zooming.  Go on, lose your job by playing all day.  Below: the Jewcy offices.

Jose Canseco writes in his tell-all book that steroids in baseball were "as prevalent in the late 1980s and 1990s as a cup of coffee." Sammy, widely accused of juicing, issued the statement in 2005 that he had "never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything." But he didn't say anything about coffee.

Fresh off his return to the major leagues after a brief retirement, Sosa yesterday belted his 600th home run, and today we present the Sammy Sosa Comeback Award.

This inaugural award goes to butlerwebs.com for their many comebacks, such as...

Man: How do you like your eggs in the morning?
Woman: Unfertilized.

I have no problem with the poor fools who choose to dine on refuse, much of which is perfectly eco-friendly as food. Here's my problem: Giving refuse to the homeless and calling it eleemosynary:

Freeganism dates to the mid-’90s, and grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements, as well as groups like Food Not Bombs, a network of small organizations that serve free vegetarian and vegan food to the hungry, much of it salvaged from food market trash. It also has echoes of groups like the Diggers, an anarchist street theater troupe based in Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the 1960’s, which gave away food and social services.

That goes way beyond the "Top of the Muffin" episode of Seinfeld, in which Elaine baked whole muffins, then ripped the stumps off and left those at homeless shelters, much to the chagrin of the homeless. "Beggars can't be choosers" did seem the comic moral of that story. But discarded food mingling with all sorts of other filth and probably infested with bacteria -- what right does anyone have to pass this on to the indigent, who can just as easily dumpster dive themselves?

Isn't it weird how cigarette manufacturers now have to actively dissuade people from buying their product?

Can we smokers tell you militant anti-smoking nutjobs something? Most of us started smoking because it seemed cool. It seemed cool because it signified (in our youthful minds) a rebellion against the nanny culture of fear, and the conservative tendency to avoid sensual pleasures and all manner of vice. We knew better than to buy into that joyless way of life, so we started smoking to say 'Fuck you,' and then we eventually discovered that it can be quite pleasurable. Maybe even too pleasurable. Now you've gone and made it nearly criminal and in the process you've upped the wee fag's currency as a social signifier of revolt.

Quitting really would make a great deal of sense--especially for those of us who aren't enticed anymore by the rock and roll martyr ethos of living fast and dying young. Some of us have discovered how fun it is to live fast and noticed the 'die young,' part of the equation is a logical error. But you make it nearly impossible. For every year we grow both wiser and closer to cancer/emphysema/heart disease, you guys up the ante with your imposing, obnoxious, health bullying and it just makes us want to light up. With every new smoking ban in every new town, we hate you more.

Just because none of us wants to die any time soon doesn't mean that we care to spend every last ounce of energy avoiding it and forcing others to take the same measures. When you force people to make commercials like the one below for a legal product, it makes us wish there was a way to hotbox every last one of you so that you'd choke on your own rancorous paternalism.

TB-Press-Conference

Is anyone else enjoying the historical oddity of tuberculosis patient Andrew Speaker being treated at the Infectious Disease Division at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, with the name of the hospital showing up behind the speakers at today's press conference? Anyone?

Well I'm enjoying it. The obsessively fraught connection of Jews and tuberculosis -- and, more specifically, of Jews and tuberculosis in the minds of turn-of-the-20th-century "scholars" and "scientists" -- is too complicated to go into fully here, especially when I've felt a gnawing scratch in my throat/chest all day, but suffice it to say that Jews were considered both especially susceptive to and especially immune to the disease. I'll whet your lungs with words by the Master himself, historian Sander Gilman. The following is from his hypochondriacally amazing Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. The passage starts by referencing French historian Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1842 - 1912):

Leroy-Beaulieu uses tuberculosis as a means of distinguishing between two classes of Jews -- the "healthy" and the "sick." And being a tubercular Jewish male is being doubly feminized -- for if circumcision is the first act that "unmans" the Jewish male, acquiring tuberculosis is the second:

Let us take tuberculosis, the disease that creates most havoc in Europe. Although in London, even in the most squalid dens of Whitechapel, consumption is, according to medical testimony, less frequent among the Jews than the Christians, it has been proved that in Poland and Russia the Jews are often subject to consumption as well as to scrofulous diseases. Indeed, they seem predisposed to these evils. The Jews of Lithuania, Poland, and Little-Russia are frequently characterized by narrow chests. This alone would suffice to render them liable to consumption. The Russian councils of revision are well aware of this. They are obliged yearly to reject as invalids, or to put off for future examination, a number of Jewish conscripts whose chests are not sufficiently developed. The narrowness of chest must not be ascribed to the origin of the race or to its Semitic blood. ... The "healthy" are those males who can serve in the military; the "sick" cannot, and thus are feminized. [Israel Among the Nations: A Study of the Jews and Anti-Semitism, p. 162]

Now there is a basic contradiction in Leroy-Beaulieu's argument typical of the discourse about the Jewish body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand, Jews have an immunity to certain diseases, such as tuberculosis, though an affinity for others, such as neurasthenia and hysteria. On the other hand, the male Jew's body is depicted in terms of the habitus phthisicus, the tubercular patient, especially the female tubercular patient. How can the Jew be both immune to and defined by tuberculosis? Here the stereotype's peculiar power to accommodate antitheses comes into play. At the turn of the century, Jews are both the arch-bankers and the arch-revolutionaries, both the false nobility of Paris and the Wandering Eastern Jews of Warsaw, all things to all groups who need to define outsiders. Thus their supposed immunity, whether racial or acquired, is a sign of their "nature," as is the assumption that the Jew, because of his body form, is predisposed to tuberculosis. Both point to a close association between the body of the Jew and the Jew's character. This difference from an established norm of "beauty/health" comes to be inscribed on every part of the Jew's anatomy, especially the chest.

A Happy Fourth of July to all, but remember, whether you're an arch-banker or an arch-revolutionary, you're still a narrow-chested Jew. So do like me and take your Airborne.

Following the execution of Zheng Xiaoyu, the former director of China's state Food and Drug Administration, the Times reports today on Zheng's transgression, and it wasn't just exporting shoddy seafood:

In his confession, Mr. Zheng acknowledged that during his eight-year tenure, he had accepted gifts and bribes from eight drug companies that sought special favors: a car, a villa, furniture, cash. And corporate stock. All told, he and his family accepted gifts valued at more than $850,000 — in a country where the average worker earns less than $2,000 a year.

For his crimes, the 62-year-old was executed on Tuesday, making him one of the highest-ranking Chinese officials ever to be put to death.

But his real crime was worse than getting rich off brides: while acting as chief of the organization that approved new drugs, many unsafe medications made there way into pharmacies. These included Xinfu, an antibiotic that left young Du Haipeng, below, with cerebellar atrophy. Xinfu caused the death of 14 people and injured many more.

Haipeng underwent 22 days of emergency treatments. "When he woke up from the coma he didn't recognize us," said his mother, Fu Liguang. Today, Haipeng rarely speaks and doctors say he may never recover.

From FuturePundit by way of a University of California newswire: The more you look like a brown condom filled with walnuts*, the more you get laid. But there's a catch:

Interestingly, women in the study seemed to be on to muscular men. When presented with six standardized silhouettes of men ranging from brawny to slender, 141 undergraduate women consistently identified the most muscular ones as not only less likely to commit but also more volatile and domineering. In the study, the women rated "toned" guys - the physical type two notches down from "brawny" - as the most sexually attractive.

"Moderate muscularity demonstrates that men are in good condition, but they're not so overloaded with testosterone that they are volatile, aggressive and dominant," Frederick said. "Just based on their experiences, women seem to be able to weigh good and bad male traits."

Still, in a study by Frederick and Haselton of 82 college coeds, most women reported that their short-term partners were more muscular than their long-term ones. They characterized their long-term - and presumably less muscular - partners as more trustworthy and romantic than their one-night stands or brief affairs. 

Our esteemed editor-in-chief, whose own physique is best described as "Sharon: The Boon Years," sent me this clipping, which I'm also filing under "Tellingly TMI." 

* Clive James' line on Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

I hope the freed spirit of the animal comes back and rips his balls off: 

AMSTERDAM - A 28-year-old Frenchman killed his dog in Amsterdam on Friday while under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms and marijuana.

The animal had to be slaughtered using scissors and a knife in order to free its spirit, the man told police.

Get Off the Bus: Dope grille and an illin' rackVia my mates the Trots: 

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German bus driver threatened to throw a 20-year-old sales clerk off his bus in the southern town of Lindau because he said she was too sexy, a newspaper reported on Monday.

"Suddenly he stopped the bus," the woman named Debora C. told Bild newspaper. "He opened the door and shouted at me 'Your cleavage is distracting me every time I look into my mirror and I can't concentrate on the traffic. If you don't sit somewhere else, I'm going to have to throw you off the bus.'"

I'll not cross any picket line that Ms. Debora chooses to convene... 

"Bitch" is a teenage girl who sets cats on fire: 

The male shorthaired kitten, named Adam, received second- and third-degree burns over 75 percent of its body and was being treated at the Animal Hospital in Cotati, located in Northern California's Sonoma County, officials said.The kitten has undergone two surgeries and had its tail and the tips of its ears amputated.

Two girls have been charged with cruelty to animals in connection with the case. They were arrested last Friday after allegedly pouring flammable liquid on the cat, only 8 weeks old at the time and setting it on fire.A boy and his friend said they saw the smoke and heard the cat shrieking while the girls laughed.

Breaking news from the Times:

Exxon Mobil Cleanup Effort Continues on Brooklyn Spill:

The Brooklyn spill, which resulted from an industrial explosion in 1950, released an estimated 17 million gallons of oil and oil products, polluted the soil, left traces of toxic chemicals in Newtown Creek, led to years of community and environmental outcry and became the basis of several continuing lawsuits.

Nearly eight million gallons remain beneath the Exxon Mobil property and nearby properties along Kingsland Avenue, though the contamination cannot be seen or smelled. How long it will take to get rid of the remaining material is unclear. “We’ll be here until the job is done and done right,” said Barry Wood, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil.

Having begun the cleanup effort almost twenty years ago, do-gooder, community-minded Exxon Mobil is still churning along in ridding Greenpoint, Brooklyn of its petrotoxins. Maybe by 2027 Newtown Creek will no longer resemble rainbowy puddles near gas stations.

Apparently, cleaning oil spills progresses with the same efficiency as lawsuits. Decades pass. Platform shoes come and go and come again. The Red Sox win the World Series. Multiple wars happen.

Despite its cleanup effort, Exxon Mobil remains under scrutiny. It was one of five companies cited in a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general’s office on Tuesday seeking to compel a faster cleanup. The other four were BP, Chevron, KeySpan and Phelps Dodge. Two other lawsuits resulting from the spill, one filed by Riverkeeper, an environmental group, and another filed by local residents, are pending.

From Jacob Goldstein's WSJ blog:

Bush Opposes Expansion of Children’s Health Insurance

President Bush won’t back a Senate plan to expand health insurance for children whose families don’t qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford private insurance, the Washington Post reports.

In a Providence, RI hospice, a cat named Oscar has been predicting deaths. When Oscar curls up next to a gravely ill patient, it means the person has four hours to live. So far he's been right 25 times.

Usually, this is the kind of story you hear from someone's friend's mom's friend's cousin's piano teacher, who happens to be named Snopes.com, but Oscar's been profiled in the New England Journal of Medicine and the AP. The story's really haunting, so we had to make an appropriately solemn graphic to go with it:

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Infertility is an issue most people know very little about. But that doesn't stop those same individuals from having strong opinions on the subject. Strong opinions based on ignorance are often deeply misinformed and prejudicial. Such is the case with infertility. A subject more fraught with personal anguish, confusion and ignorance you'll be hard put to find.

Jews have a special interest in infertility. There has been much talk about the decline in Jewish fertility. We are having less children and we are having them later in life as we tend to marry later than our parents and grandparents. As a result, fertility issues tend to rear their ugly head when a Jewish couple is ready to have children. That's precisely what happened to my wife and I. We were married in our 40s and had no previous children. When we started trying we found we couldn't conceive naturally. That started us on the maddening, exhausting, intense whirlwind of fertility treatment.

Our final stop before turning to adoption was egg donation, a procedure by which a young woman's donated egg is impregnated with the husband's sperm and the resulting embryo implanted in the wife. Getting to egg donation as a viable option is sometimes difficult for a woman. It means that her genetic material will not be present in the resulting child (though she will carry the fetus to term). For women culturally inculcated with the notion that they carry the responsibility to bring children into the world, the notion that this child will be yours emotionally, but not yours genetically can be hard to surmount.

For Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, it is sometimes important that the female egg donor be Jewish. There is a halachic requirement that a mother must be Jewish for a child to be considered Jewish. And since the birth mother is not genetically related to the child, there is some question as to whether the egg donor should be Jewish. Some rabbis say that the contributions of the gestational mother are so critical to the process that she should halachically be considered the actual mother.

My wife and I didn't care whether our donor was Jewish. It just so happened that the NYU Fertility Clinic we chose (where our doctor was Jamie Grifo) has a large Jewish clientèle and maintains relationships with brokers who specialize in securing Jewish donors. The donors for both our children (we have a 6 year old boy and 2 year old twins) were Israeli. Their ethnic backgrounds were very similar to our own. In fact, our 2 year old daughter looks enough like my wife that people point it out to her.

Though we never had to face the question of whether our children were Jewish if they had a non-Jewish donor, I would have sided with the rabbinical opinion that the sweat and equity exerted by my wife during pregnancy earned her the halachic title of "mother."

Finally, as a member of a formerly infertile couple, I can't say enough how important these treatments are. Many of us want to bring children into the world and but for biological impediments cannot do so. Procedures like egg donation allow us to make our dreams come true. I urge anyone facing the problems that my wife and I faced to consider the path we chose. There are many online resources available, but one of the best is RESOLVE.

Finally, there is the question of how to deal with your children once they are born. Do you tell them? If so, when? And what and how do you tell them? We've chosen the route of absolute openness. We told our first child he was an egg donor baby when he was about 3 years old or so. We talk openly about our childrens' origins with friends, family, neighbors and virtually anyone. Some parents in similar circumstances choose to address these issues differently. There is no single correct way to deal with this. But my approach is that there is too much fear and ignroance swirling around infertility. I want to lower the curtain and make egg donation as normal as natural childbirth in the average person's mind. If my openness on the subject will open a single person's formerly closed mind then it will have been worthwhile.

 For more of my blog posts on infertility and egg donation.

So I understand that “practically” could formally mean “in practical terms”; however the most common definition is certainly “virtually; almost” (OED) -and in this sense, this small panel from the Africa exhibit of the Field Museum in Chicago is pretty much unacceptable.

Rest easy, however, dear reader: the Field is making up for this by restocking Egyptian tomb sites… right here in Chicago!

Meanwhile, the itinerant Darwin exhibits is kind of sucky (one of the books that goes with it, however, is excellent). It pretty much follows a biographical format, with highlights in each explanatory signs in big red capital letters; and if there’s one thing that you will remember from the exhib as you walk out, it’s that Darwin really didn’t like school that much. (I think this is part of an annoying plan to make us understand that geniuses, truly, could be any of us. Thus, about Einstein: “Those of us who are parents can take heart that he was no Einstein when he was a kid.” Well, actually, he must have been, unless you have some serious problems with personal identity.)

The whole exhibit is pretty much plunged in the dark. This is probably to emphasise the dramatic quality of all the Darwin memorabilia. Actually, replica of memorabilia, really. There’s a couple of live amphibians, though. The most annoying part of the exhibition is that it stops before what even a first-year biology textbook would give you -but it does so in the same tone. There are a few videos of dry academics in silly and/or old-fashioned clothes making sure their body language (or absence thereof) is putting the audience to sleep while discussing the finer points of what scientific method is and why religion and science shouldn’t interfere with each other.

Why is this of any importance, you will ask? Well, if you’ve got any interest in defeating the latest baloney from the Creationist/Intelligent Design ranks, lately embodied in a very expensive and technologically enhanced “museum,” (see a nice article about this in print) it’s about time to cry out loud for a more effective design of scientific vulgarization displays.

Interestingly enough, the exhibition next door at the field, on Ancient Americas, seems to achieve this much more effectively than the Darwin show. (Is it because it seems to me privately funded throughout?) It may be ridiculous, but at least the signs engage the audience (and particularly the children, which should definitely be targeted if one wants to ensure that the next generation isn’t as mislead as the current one) by the simple use of the pronoun “you” and by more interactive displays and activities at children’s height.

Of course, what we really need is not just for museum exhibitions to be more engaging and more convincing; albeit to remain competitive in the international arena, the U.S. needs to reform its science curriculum (truism). And despite the optimism of some, the sad truth is that academia is perhaps one of the places most refractory to evidence-based advancements, although the research behind those usually originates within academia itself. I personally think that this will eventually prove to be its demise. My bet usually includes the progressive disappearance of literature-based “humanities” departments within the next 75 years. Anybody willing to wager?

Two things to make you cry: Watching a dog shiver in the rain, watching an Irishman light up outside and stare longingly at his pint through the window of a pub that no longer fucking allows smoking. A.N. Wilson's argument that nicotine means great literature is well founded and to the point. I would add to his list a few names from this side of the Atlantic: Mark Twain, Edmund Wilson, Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Murray Kempton, Raymond Chandler... Even self-righteous killjoys may post more puffing notable in the comments section below.

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.