Call me on your cell, sugar

You've probably heard about glucose metabolism and cell phones. This sentence in the abstract got my attention:

[M]etabolism in the region closest to the antenna (orbitofrontal cortex and temporal pole) was significantly higher for on than off conditions (35.7 vs 33.3 μmol/100 g per minute; mean difference, 2.4 [95% confidence interval, 0.67-4.2]; P = .004).

If anyone can tell me what 2.4 μmol glucose/100 g means - is this a lot or a little? - I would feel more informed. For now, though, I will continue to shrug at the marauding cell phones.

Update: In this study, the regional cerebral glucose consumption rate was about 37 μmol/100 g per minute. So 2.4 μmol/100 g per minute is less than a tenth of the normal value (if I understand correctly). Whether a change of less than 10% is significant - again, I'm trying to find the relevant literature.

Historical Update: A friend comments:

The first author [of the glucose and cell-phones paper] is Trotsky's great granddaughter. Maybe she should have tested whether ice picks near the head change glucose metabolism.
Ouch.

The jerky hominem

In his perfectly reasonable essay about the Internet (a topic crying out for an extended treatment in the New Yorker), Adam Gopnik says

But if reading a lot of novels gave you exceptional empathy university English departments should be filled with the most compassionate and generous-minded of souls, and, so far, they are not.

Ideals, philosophies, abstractions always fail - then what? Gopnik's point is clever but not, on further thought, true at all. We don't say that the jerkiness of some English professors proves that the novel doesn't build empathy. We say, "The jerky ones aren't doing it right." Similarly, the abuses of corrupt rabbis, priests, and imams - or the jerkiness of many religious people - serve to convince no one (except perhaps Christopher Hitchens) that religion is untrue by virtue of that fact. The abusers and the religious asshats aren't doing religion right, is what we say.

I often think of the ad hominem argument as one against a particular hominem, but sometimes, it turns out, you can make it against a group. Since all groups have human frailties, you can always point at a group and say, "Look! It contains twits!" Unfortunately for human beings, that proves nothing at all.

What's the word for mustard?

Check out my poem Zeneft - and my reading of it - at the literary journal qarrtsiluni, currently featuring its Translation issue.

In Which Leon Wieseltier, Writer of Long Sentences, Lets Sense Plummet Into Disrepute

"I have watched ideals and traditions that I cherish -- a certain sort of liberalism; a certain sort of philosophy; the speaking of Hebrew; easel painting; the joyful making of books; long sentences; and even the sound of a voice, in personal communications--fall into disrepute. (We all have such a list.)"

Thus Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic (on what should be known, for as long as he occupies the real estate, as the Back Page Without Paragraphs). Do you know what is on my list, Leon? Making sense.

The "speaking of Hebrew" is in disrepute? 

There's a country where they speak Hebrew, Leon. All the time. 

And I'm not sure what you mean by "the sound of a voice, in personal communications," but I spoke to a fair number of people today.

Banal midrash

Are Velveteen Rabbi's "Torah poems" any good? My review gives the answer.

Herring and Coconuts

Two translations of mine are featured in the new issue of the journal Eleven Eleven from the California College of the Arts: one of Dvoyre Fogel's Herring Barrels, the other of Moyshe Nadir's My Pedigree. Let me know what you think!

What have I just started translating?

These sentences are the beginning of a famous Yiddish novel. If you guess what I'm translating, you will win a hearty congratulations and a drink the next time I see you in person.


The city of N is built in three rings. First ring: the very center, the trade market. Second: the great city itself, with the many houses, streets, byways, alleys around the market, where most of the dense habitation is located. Third: suburbs.

What should be translated?

The Yiddish Book Center (that Yiddish Book Center) has a blog post up by David Schlitt where he asks the question, "What Yiddish titles and/or authors would you most like to see translated?" An excellent question, that (and it's no surprise that I left a comment there). Follow the discussion, if you would.

I Have a Hat Today

Yesterday, I spent a fascinating 15 or 20 minutes looking at video of King's famous speech. ("Why is it in black and white?" asked my seven-year-old, and I resisted the temptation to give her the Calvin and Hobbes answer.) Two things I noticed:

1. The white folks were acting stereotypically white, sitting on their hands, pained smiles pasted on their faces, occcasionally nodding.

2. 1963 straddled an important boundary in history - in this case, between massive hat-wearing and widespread hatlessness. I didn't notice whether the white folks or black folks wore more hats, but it seemed to me like the split was about 50-50 total between hatteds and bareheads. 

Expectations

I'm doing about as well as I'd expect.
I'd expect to turn half cartwheels.
I'd tear up the floorboards
to find more floorboards
printed by my pacing.
You expect a letter
but you'll get a palimpsest.

Setting Out

Setting Out
Bei Dao 

To TT, on his 24^th birthday

In the watch store called The Stars
Twelve celestial hours chime
Along the clouds’ unending path
Twenty four mountains spin around

Migrating birds set out from you
The earth is covered with written signs
Waves turn the pages, wind reads aloud
Roots’ meaning is drawn out by trees

With song a music box protects
The juniormost of all the gods
Querulous teapot teaches how
To know the taste of wind and storm

Reality is another dream
The air is full of banknote kites
Fire’s ice and thunder’s shock
The chessboard kingdom sets its traps

The gravely ill disseminate
All the rumors of the age
But only those who guard the night
Will breach the lines of dawn’s defense

Shadows clear up, rainbows push
The swinging doors when seasons change
In the watch store called The Stars
Twelve celestial hours chime

Original here. Translation mine.

Not enough statistics?

Well, thanks for all the bioethics and Yiddish and poetry (the Yiddish bioethics poetry is yet to be written), say you, but what about statistics and mathematics blogs?

I didn't know Jordan Ellenberg (the novelist and mathematician of the Do the Math feature in Slate) has a blog. And he often links to the Three-toed Sloth. Andrew Gelman writes well about all sorts of statisticky stuff, though he's a touch more technical.

There you are. More such links please from you, if you know about them. (Or, heck, if you're an electrical engineer or astronomer or chemist and know about interesting blogs in those fields, the more the merrier.)

What does halachah say about how to improve American health care? Not much.

Someone skeptical about halachah might ask, "Does Jewish law have anything useful to say about a public policy debate as complicated and multifactorial as health care?" Unfortunately, after reading the chapter devoted to health care in Rabbi Jill Jacobs' There Shall Be No Needy, I have to say no.

I wanted Jacobs' book to provide halachic metaphors to help me understand better what it means to support health care reform - and, ideally, to help me judge the relative ethical benefits and risks of various alternatives, even in a general way. I don't need halachah to tell me about the necessity of health care, the critical role of the health care provider, or the community's role in providing such care: these are relatively uncontroversial, things that even opponents of health care reform support. Halachah should be a source of Jewish wisdom and  something more than the deployment of righteous cliches. It should provide a particular perspective, not a reinterpretation of universalist principles which can be found in any liberal ethos.

Rabbi Jacobs' chapter is a skillful summary of the general principles of Jewish law regarding the provision of health care to the individual and community. She discusses the well-known arguments about the healer's permission to "interfere" in Divine creation when healing the sick, the need for the physician to be remunerated for their services; and the requirement inumbent on the community to provide for medical care. In an esthetic and moral sense, the passages she cites are useful - as Jacobs herself points out, they serve as a troubling reminder of the inefficiencies of the American health care system. (1)

After these summaries, however, Jacobs seems to get lost. She acknowledges that "today's system presents us with many more players than the doctor, the patient, and the immediate community" and goes out to find what halachah will tell us about these multiple factors. Unfortunately, there isn't much there (when has there been a health care system on earth as fragmented, oversized, and inefficient as ours?), so she has to limit herself to an unsatisfying historical aside on the history of Jewish hospitals and an unsurprising teshuvah by Rabbi Shlomo Goren holding that the Israeli government is required to provide health care. (2)

Jacobs acknowledges in passing that most Americans today receive health care through their employers (though she neglects to mention that veterans and Native Americans also are cared for by a national system), a state of affairs which has no halachic precedent. What then is there to say?

This is where the rubber meets the road. If there are no exact parallels in halachah to the matter at hand, perhaps there are at least useful metaphors, engaging stories, gripping ultimatums, solid philosophies. Jacobs: "From a Jewish perspective...a major problem with the American health care system is the lack of community oversight over the distribution of funds." This is disappointingly tepid and unfocused.

"Community oversight," like Mom and apple kugel, sounds good on its face. (I supported a public option and I think that a single-payer system is the way to go - I assume this is what Jacob is reaching towards with her "community oversight.") But what we need is help with a hard question: what kind of community oversight is needed, and at what level of government? Do we need more state control of apportionment of Medicare and Medicaid, or less (both could be called "community oversight")? Do we need Congressional interference in decisions about comparative effectiveness research? Should the Federal government have a role in deciding what health care should be available to which doctors? Democracy is all about the conflict of different communities, and "the Jewish perspective," at least as Jacobs is presenting it, has nothing whatever to say about these conflicting priorities.

In a concluding chapter which is useful in understanding her overall approach, Jacobs lays out her vision for how Jewish law and tradition should inform public policy (or the "public sphere," as she vaguely calls it). Unfortunately, this vision is not convincing.

Why unconvincing? Her "essential principles" ("the dignity of human life," "the inherent disparity of power" between different classes, and the reciprocal responsibilities of individual and community) are not unique to Judaism. This would not be a problem if halachah provided a unique perspective on issues of public policy - but I don't see any evidence of that here either. How, according to Jacobs, should Jewish law inform our discussions? "Jewish sources should help us to see various sides of an issue,challenge our assumptions, and enable us to formulate a response that takes multiple factors into account." Again, this is nothing we need halachah for - only a liberal cast of mind and general civic virtues of tolerance and open inquiry. (3)

It is not inspiring to say that halachah offers us no guide in some areas of life, but I think that's the case. I will not ask a posek the next time I prescribe an antibiotic and I don't think I need one either when considering various aspects of health care reform. (4) General moral guidelines about the importance of health care are available in halachah, should one choose to seek them there (though they can be found nearly everywhere else in a liberal society). For practical approaches to systematic reform, we should look elsewhere.

Update: See Rabbi Josh Yuter's shiur on the topic here, which I haven't listened to all of yet.

1. Jacobs says that our country's systematic inefficiencies and profit-driven nature "prevents many patients from being able to afford needed medical care." This is undoubtedly true, but another issue - which Jacobs does not explicitly address - is that Americans want too much medical care: too many labs, tests, and procedures, which drive up costs without improving care. This, among many other complications of the health care system, is something which our halachic predecessors simply could not envision, although I am sure one could, by stretching some precedent to the breaking point, find a proof text of use.


2.  Jacobs calls this teshuvah influential, but I suspect she is mixing up the chicken and the egg. Surely more determinative in today's halachic world is the fact that Israel is a democracy. Democracies legislate and administer national health care. Were Israel not a democracy, or not able to administer health care, the Goren teshuvah would be forgotten.


3. In fact, one could argue that Jewish law - in many places - does not place a premium on tolerance or open inquiry. There is the apikores and the min, after all.


4. In this regard, Rabbi Jacobs' philosophy bears a surprising (and disquieting) resemblance to Charedi daas Torah: that rabbis have a variety of expertise which equips them to offer advice even in practical situations far afield from their formal erudition. 

Maybe cell phones do maraud a little bit, but so what?

Now, instead of thinking that the concern for cancer risk from cell phones is BS, I think the concerns are exaggerated and misplaced. Let me explain.

When I wrote my previous post, I was not aware of the meta-analysis from 2009 by Myung et al. in the Journal of Clinical Oncology. (A meta-analysis uses statistical techniques to classify and then pool results from a number of studies.) The work by Myung et al. needs some detailed discussion, but it presents some findings which bear consideration: first, that in the subgroup of studies they considered which were of higher quality, there is a positive association between any cell-phone use (compared to rare or never use) and brain tumors both benign and malignant. Second, there is a significant association, in all studies which consider cell-phone use of 10 years or longer, between that length of use and brain tumors.

There are some caveats here. First, the "high-quality studies" are all chips off one larger study, i.e. done by the same group of researchers - and the lower-quality studies are all from another larger study. This means that there haven't been too many separate groups studying this topic recently in a scientifically legitimate way. Second, all the studies considered in this meta-analysis (23 of them) are case-control studies, which for various reasons are often considered more susceptible to bias than cohort studies, in which groups of subjects are followed for the development of brain tumors. Thus the biases I talked about in my previous post still apply.

Since the associations are small, susceptible to bias, and only in a subgroup of available studies, I would say the jury is still out.

Even when the jury comes back from sequestration (cell phones turned off, I guess), my general impression from my previous post holds true. I would not make any individual change in lifestyle, much less any public policy decisions, based on these weak-if-true associations, just because there are so many things in this world (even confining ourselves to our individual and public health) which are more important to worry about.

Happy Rambam's yortsayt!

In honor thereof, Rambam's authorized manuscript copy of of the Mishneh Torah...online. Hat tip to Language Hat.

Goldberg the Tank Engine

Goldberg had been out all of Thursday and Friday; he was hot and tired. Towards Friday afternoon, he saw that the Driver and the Fireman were coming out. He decided to speak to them.

"Are we going out this evening?" he asked.

"Yes," said the Fireman, lighting the fire and making a lot of steam.

Goldberg looked cross. "It is my Sabbath," he said, "my day of rest. I do not want to go out on the Sabbath."

Goldberg's friend Patel the Locomotive chimed in. "Please do not make Goldberg go out on Saturday," he said.

The Driver pulled the lever, and Goldberg began to pull away. "Oh no!" he cried. "We are going out. I will have to travel beyond the inhabited boundaries of Sodor."

Patel shouted, "Help! Somebody help Goldberg!"

Another friend of Goldberg's, Peng the "Old Warrior," shunted a car onto the track that Goldberg was traveling on. There was a tremendous noise.

The Fireman shook his finger at Goldberg. "I am very cross that you are not going out today," he said. The Driver agreed.

"I am sorry," said Goldberg.

Epic recommendations

I asked my Facebook friends to recommend book-length poems to me. I am stashing the list here for my reference and anyone else's curiosity.

Garbage, A.R. Ammons
Letter from Iceland, W.H.Auden & Christopher Isherwood
A Poetics, Charles Bernstein

Beowulf
Der Geyer, M. Boraisho
The Ring and the Book, Robert Browning
Don Juan, Lord Byron
Watercolor Women/Opaque Men, Ana Castillo
Points for a Compass Rose, Evan S. Connell
The Bridge, Hart Crane
South America Mi Hija, Sharon Doubiago
The Song of Hiawatha

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Odyssey, Homer
Anathemata, David Jones
Dizner Tshayld Harold, Moyshe Kulbak
Fungi from Yuggoth, H.P.Lovecraft
Idylls, Jonas Mekas
Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
Metamorphoses, Ovid.
The Same Sea, Amos Oz
Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin
Testimony, and Holocaust, Charles Reznikoff
Golden Gate, Vikram Seth
‎Paterson, William Carlos Williams
Deepstep Come Shining, C.D. Wright
A, Louis Zukofsky

Unanswered Questions for Philip Larkin in Poetry Magazine's new Q&A Issue

What are your thoughts about confessional poetry?


Many readers will be put off by the lines about mum and dad "fuck[ing] you up." Should they be, or not? What are the lines there for?


Whence the coastal shelf?


The last lines are more revealing than others in the poem. Tell us why you would rather not procreate.

Let us discuss the murderous cell phones stalking our fair land

Cancer and cell phones - I meant to blog about this for some time, since it has long trended among the most read articles at the Times website.

To be charitable, the article did make me go and look up the literature, so that's not a bad thing. In short, however, the Times treatment is irresponsible and fear-mongering.

First, let me remark that the Times article mentions by name a refereed study of cellphones in humans only in the 14th paragraph. And it neglects to mention the multiple studies which have shown no connection.

Now, let's consider the INTERPHONE study referred to in the Times piece (it's one of these with the fake acronyms). It showed no connection between cell phone use and cancers, when all brain cancers are taken together. Now, it's reasonable for them to analyze different cancers separately, since they are of different severity and prevalence. It's not questionable in itself that they looked at an effect on gliomas. However, this effect was not significant. Only when they looked at cell phone use for 10 years or longer did they find an association with gliomas.

Several caveats - screaming sumo-size caveats - were not mentioned in the Times piece. (A science reporter presumably would have read the article.)

1. As far as I can figure out from reading the article, it's a secondary analysis. There was no a priori hypothesis that cell phone use for 10 years would be associated with glioma. Post hoc analyses are suspect - as you know - since data mining is biased. How many associations were fished through and discarded before this positive one was found? There is always a probability of a false positive, so if there were twenty post-hoc associations (properly consigned to an on-line appendix, pace the Times's conspiratorial mutterings), the chance of one positive finding is 5% - just by probability.

2. The association itself is not statistically significant! This is mentioned nowhere in the Times article, but the authors of the study themselves make haste to note this up front, in the abstract - which makes them responsible. I would not call this a hook to hang anyone's hat on.

3. The INTERPHONE study is a case-control study. A big question in any study of this kind is how we are to judge the accuracy of the cases' self reporting. People with cancer are understandably eager to find a cause, and might recall cell phone use out of proportion to the controls. Such recall bias is hard to control for.

4. Even if recall bias is controlled for, the correlation between recollected number of cell phone calls and the actual number of cell calls is not perfect. Heavier cell phone users tend to overestimate the number of calls they have made. In addition, the correlation between subject recall and their actual exposure to electromagnetic frequency is not airtight either.

5. Let's say the effect is real (which I very much doubt by reason of the sumo caveats just mentioned). (This would contradict another case-control study done on the very relationship between gliomas and cell phone use, in 2005, which was negative.) How high should this putative danger even rank on our public-health agenda?  Gliomas are rare.

To quote a 2004 study in the journal Cancer (first thing I could Google): "The incidence rate of central nervous system (CNS) tumors in 2000 was 6.7 per 100,000 persons as reported from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry and gliomas account for approximately 51% of all CNS tumors.". Let's say then 3.5 per 100,000 people. or 10,000 cases a year, more or less. Horrible cases to be sure. If cell phone use increased this number to 20,000 cases a year that would be a tragedy, but a tragedy comparable to the million deaths caused yearly by malaria?

6. In toto: bullshit.

Update: but see some second thoughts here.

Contemporary Yiddish Literature: a personal view

The original of an article of mine published in Polish.

What people used to call "Yiddish literature" without qualification is fading away, and what we are not used to calling "Yiddish literature" is thick on the ground.

We'll start with the first. This includes everyone who writes in Yiddish who is not Chasidic. For lack of a better word, we'll call them secular Yiddish writers, though their ideological, religious, and cultural sympathies run the gamut from the settler poetry of Velvl Chernin to the loud radicalism of songwriter Daniel Kahn. They are the heirs to the literary tradition of Eastern Europe and America, what was Yiddish literature with a capital L: a social phenomenon complete with newspapers, journals, books, printers, publics, writers, controversies, scandals, sex, and violence.

For secular Yiddish writers, nearly all of that has fallen away. Traditional venues, things still published on paper, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There's the newspaper: the Yiddish Forward. There are the two or three literary journals. There is about a book, maybe two or three books at most, published a year. There is the Internet, certainly providing community - or the illusion of community - and a way for writers and readers to interact. But this cannot substitute for a community of people who spend their lives and make their living writing and reading. At this point, the number of people who make their living writing Yiddish in the secular community is about a minyan: the number of people on staff at the Yiddish Forward.

This does not mean that individual writers are not still producing individual works worth reading, or that the few literary institutions that still exist in the Yiddish secular world are not valuable. The Yiddish Forward, polished to a high literary sheen by Boris Sandler, has few parallels among Jewish publications anywhere - except perhaps the cultural pages of Israel's Haaretz in Hebrew. I suspect that some readers find it difficult to understand its mix of politics, culture, and academic analysis, but won't admit it. Gilgulim, a literary journal in Paris, is lovely (and I hope will come out for many more issues). Afn Shvel, the journal of the League for Yiddish, has been transformed into a modern publication, beautifully laid out and with a variegated content. It looks like the 21st century's last gesture towards the relevance of print in Yiddish.

There are a number of writers still working in Yiddish, though it's hard to know exactly how many - probably a hundred or so. Which to mention is an interesting question. In a healthy, king-size literature, like English, critics try to predict things: which writers will turn the great ship of written language in some unlooked for direction? out of all the abundance, what is worth reading? The first question is irrelevant to contemporary secular Yiddish literature, since the greatest ship of all is the daily language use of the ultra-Orthodox. We are gnats on it. The second question is irrelevant for other reasons. If you wanted to, you could easily afford to buy every single new book published this year by secular Yiddish writers. But let me name-check some loves of mine: anything published in Gilgulim; the strict, erudite, and tightly edited reviews of Mikhail Krutikov in the Forverts; the prolific post-Holocaust yearning of Alexander Shpigelblat; the monumentum aere perennius of Avrom Sutzkever, may his poetry be for a blessing.

The editors asked me to address some particular questions of contemporary secular Yiddish literature. They want to know what the challenges are. The challenges of writing in Yiddish! I don't know if writing in a language without readers is harder than writing in a language almost without fellow writers. But then they gave me an excuse to answer another question: is there communication between Chasidim and secular writers?

Chasidim: our brothers and sisters who create a literature merely by virtue of speaking a language daily and expressing themselves in writing. An enviable writing, as natural as breathing. But most would never call what they write literature, since they don't believe in aesthetics and know that secular literature is viewed by most in their community with suspicion.

So much of what is worth reading in Chasidic literature is written by anonymous hundreds who post at great length on a number of message boards. They write in a variety of genres and though I don't think much of what's written there is worth reading, it has the virtue of life, slippery and unmediated. There are a very few writers who write literature with a capital L - the blogger Katle Kanye is the most widely known of them, though there are others (such as Pinchas Glauber) who are on a similar level.

Do the secular and the ultra-Orthodox have something to say to each other? I read them, but they (with some exceptions) don't read me, and have never heard of me. There is no incentive for a Chasidic writer to read a secular writer, unless they want to benefit from a secular esthetic and the variety of topics available to it. That would be strange indeed - but stranger things have happened to Jews and Yiddish. Why shouldn't some of the strange things be blessings?

If I could imagine a work of literature in Yiddish, what would it be? An epic poem about today's Chasidim, written in Chasidic Yiddish, perhaps. Or a sprawling novel of contemporary Jewish life (about either sector, ultra-Orthodox or secular) written by an observer "on the other side." More than likely, though, the coming Yiddish classic will be written in a genre not even on my radar, outside my dyadic model of contemporary Yiddish culture. I look forward to it.