By Steve Rhodes
* Who reads New Yorker fiction?
* The Top 10 Most Sought-After Out-Of-Print Books of 2008. (via Short Stack)
* “A few weeks ago in the Book Review, Henry Alford wrote about strange things found stashed (and smashed) inside books, from money and photographs to baby’s teeth, insect corpses and pieces of superannuated bacon,” Jennifer Schuessler writes at Paper Cuts.
“Bacon. Really?”
Hail Insulin!
“On January 11, 1922, a diabetic patient at Toronto General Hospital was given the first injection of insulin,” according to the University of Chicago Press’s blog. “Though the first dose cause an allergic reaction, the insulin was purified and, twelve days later, Leonard Thomspon received a second injection and his symptoms began to disappear. The treatment of diabetes with insulin transformed the disease from a death sentence to a manageable condition, and today the nearly 24 million people with diabetes in the United States rely on insulin injections to treat their disease.
“Michael Bliss chronicles all this in more in The Discovery of Insulin: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. In this now-classic study, Bliss unearths a wealth of material, ranging from scientists’ unpublished memoirs to the confidential appraisals of insulin by members of the Nobel Committee.”
Snow Job
You had me at The Snow Tourist: A Search for the World’s Purest, Deepest Snowfall.
Game Theory
“The 1948 board game Clue was recently updated so that Colonel Mustard morphed into a former football star, Professor Plum into a dot-com millionaire and the mystery’s British mansion setting into a big, American, celebrity-filled spread complete with spa and home theater,” begins Janet Maslin in a recent book review.
I don’t care much about the book, I just had no idea Clue was like that these days.
Drug War
“No one knows the total amount provided by drug companies to physicians, but I estimate from the annual reports of the top nine US drug companies that it comes to tens of billions of dollars a year. By such means, the pharmaceutical industry has gained enormous control over how doctors evaluate and use its own products. Its extensive ties to physicians, particularly senior faculty at prestigious medical schools, affect the results of research, the way medicine is practiced, and even the definition of what constitutes a disease,” Marcia Angell writes in the New York Review of Books.
Slang Bait
Pixies, Sheilas, Dirtbags and Cougar Bait.
Gaza Gala
“The Palestinian leaders, says Mr. Indyk, later misled their people into believing that Mr. Clinton had offered only three disconnected cantons on the West Bank,” the Economist reports. “In fact he had offered the whole of Gaza, 94-96 percent of the West Bank, 1-3 percent compensation for the rest, the Arab parts of Jerusalem and sovereignty over the Haram.”
I was always amazed by the debate about what was offered in these negotiations; surely there was an official, undisputed map on the table. From everything I’ve read over the years, the preponderance of the evidence sides with the Americans and Israelis on this one.
Posted on January 13, 2009