Oxford University Press's Blog, page 1039

No Panacea: Why a draft wouldn’t stop a war

By Andrew J. Polsky

The long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted a number of politicians and pundits to recommend a return to conscription. On several occasions Charles Rangel, the Democratic representative from New York City, has introduced bills to revive the draft. Stanley McChrystal, former military commander in Afghanistan, has urged that the country not fight another war without a draft. His call was the point of departure for noted journalist Thomas E. Ricks, who proposes a law mandating universal service for all 18-year-olds, with an option for either military or civilian public service.

Advocates offer a number of justifications for conscription, including the idea that a more representative military is healthy for American society and the notion that we should spread the risk of casualties across the entire population. One particular justification, though, calls for close inspection—the notion that a conscript military might, as Ricks puts it, “make Americans think more carefully before going to war.” At a time when the public has become disenchanted with recent military interventions, the assertion that a draft would give leaders pause before they resort to the use of force resonates.

There is, however, no reason to place any confidence is conscription as a war prophylactic.

At first glance, it may appear that the end of the draft during the Vietnam era increased the likelihood that the United States would engage in military action. Military interventions have occurred more frequently since the all-volunteer military was reestablished in the early 1970s. But the rise came after the end of the Cold War in 1989. In a world with but one remaining military superpower, it falls upon that superpower to police the world order. A draft wouldn’t alter the geopolitical status of the United States.

Although proponents of conscription haven’t spelled out the political logic behind its supposed preventive effects, the reasoning might go like this: a president would hesitate to commit American troops for fear of provoking a political reaction; the American people would be much less accepting of the rationale for war if their own sons and daughters were likely to be in the line of fire; and Congress would be less easily bulldozed into endorsing a military adventure if lawmakers’ constituents questioned or opposed it.

On close inspection, however, none of these claims seems plausible. To begin with, presidents never take the decision to use force lightly and they have always been mindful of the need for public support. But when they face what they regard as an international crisis, they have been very effective in framing the situation in terms that generate public backing. Whether we have a conscript or volunteer military seems to have no bearing on a president’s ability to tap the rallying effect of a crisis. Lyndon Johnson won public approval for his response to alleged North Vietnamese attacks in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964, as did George W. Bush when he announced the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

The military is at least as representative of the population today as it was during the Vietnam era. Generous deferments back then let wealthier college students put off military service. Certainly we can imagine a clean conscription bill that treats all young people the same way. But how often does Congress pass such pure measures?

Congress tends to give a president the benefit of the doubt when the national security seems imperiled, draft or no draft. When the Tonkin Gulf Resolution came to the floor, only two senators cast negative votes; no representatives opposed it. Congress showed much less enthusiasm when George H.W. Bush sought a resolution endorsing military action to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. The measure barely passed the Senate (52 votes in favor, 47 opposed). That the military in 1991 consisted entirely of volunteers did not make lawmakers any more eager for war.

Part of the faith in the war-inhibiting power of conscription may reflect our memories of the massive antiwar protests of the Vietnam era. But public support for a president’s war policy will decline sharply in any conflict that becomes a stalemate. Indeed, history suggests that it will take roughly as long for serious opposition to emerge whether the war is fought by draftees or volunteers. In the case of Vietnam, massive street protests erupted in late 1967, a bit more than two years after Johnson sent American troops, and he was repudiated politically in the New Hampshire primary in March 1968. Opposition to the Iraq War entered the political mainstream in November 2005 when Representative John Murtha urged immediate withdrawal. Here, too, it took two years for a significant part of the public to turn against the war.

Other arguments can be made for a draft. General McChrystal makes a compelling case that when we go to war, the burden needs to be shared across the entire national community, so “everybody has skin in the game.” (If we are serious about broad sacrifice, though, a tax surcharge to pay for the war will reach more people than any draft would.) But we should not delude ourselves into thinking that conscription makes the use of force less likely. The all-volunteer military doesn’t cause wars and a draft won’t prevent them.

Andrew Polsky is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. A former editor of the journal Polity, his most recent book is Elusive Victories: The American Presidency at War. Read Andrew Polsky’s previous blog posts.

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Public Health, Public Hypochondria

By Catherine Belling

We used to feel reassured by the possibility that medicine might soon be able to find any disease hidden inside our bodies before it could do real harm, and remove it before we even began to feel sick. “Disease awareness” and “early detection” became public health buzzwords. We have been encouraged to get screened for diseases we probably don’t have (but just might). Some began paying for full body CT scans in the hope of catching and fixing all possible anomalies and pathologies the instant they appeared. What could possibly be wrong with such diligent vigilance?

Hypochondria is based on two beliefs that are, on the face of it, perfectly rational: our bodies probably contain hidden diseases, and medicine should be able to find those disease and fix them. Yet when these two beliefs begin to dominate someone’s thoughts and activities, when s/he reads every sensation as the symptom of something serious needing urgent medical attention, we call him or her a hypochondriac, meaning both that s/he is mentally ill and the comical object of annoyance and scorn.

Perhaps hypochondria is so disturbing because it has so much in common with medicine. Hypochondriacs detest uncertainty, so does medicine. As the technological capacity to find disease (or predispositions to disease, or risk of disease) increases, so does the pressure to use that technology to find disease earlier in larger populations. Public health exhibits the hypochondriac’s relentless need to track down disease rather than tolerate the insecure sense that things may be okay (for now).

But this may be changing. Lately we’ve been learning more about the risks of routine mass screening as a means of preventing cancer deaths. Public health guidelines are what your primary care physician consults in deciding whether to refer you for a mammogram or colonoscopy, when you show no symptoms of the conditions these tests seek. Over the last few years, US Preventive Services task forces have announced modifications to many of their guidelines for disease screening, adjustments that herald a solid challenge to the assumption that knowing more is necessarily better.

Perhaps the most controversial changes were to guidelines for seeking early breast cancer. The 2009 Task Force recommended against routine screening mammograms for women between forty and fifty. This came as a great shock to many, seeming to contradict decades of advice to healthy women in their forties to be scrupulous in hunting down breast anomalies.

This May, controversial new guidelines recommended against mass prostate cancer screening, saying the harms solidly outweighed the benefit of lives saved. (See editorial by the chair of the task force, opinion in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine, and critique of the task force in this week’s Annals.) Last month, a review article in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that only by limiting screening for lung cancer to high-risk subjects (like heavy smokers) could enough lives be saved to justify the harms.

These are difficult calculations to make. Even one saved life seems to trump most other considerations. There are also disparities in awareness of and access to screening. There is a cost here too. Guidelines that recommend less screening can be misinterpreted as rationing health care, where what is needed is a more even distribution of prudent screening for age- and risk-groups where evidence exists to show that benefits outweigh risks.

Screening entails harm to individuals: repeated radiation exposure from scans and positive results leading to invasive follow-up procedures. A significant number of those positives turn out to have been false alarms; others, while accurate, are the overdiagnosis of cancers so small and slow-growing they pose no meaningful threat within a patient’s lifetime. But once a diagnosis is made, the imperative to treat takes over. There are mental health harms, too. The anxiety and distraction of waiting for results and, if a positive finding emerges, the stress of undergoing more, often increasingly invasive, exploration.

Screening may also be harmful to the overall mental health of its populations. Screening teaches us that, as responsible health citizens, we must imagine our bodies as harboring diseases even when we feel perfectly well. It encourages us to think of ourselves as containing ticking time-bombs, hidden threats that can turn lethal in an instant. This pathology of the imagination, even if such fears are realistic, is a form of cultural hypochondria.

The idea that our bodies harbor hidden disease when we don’t feel sick is, historically, comparatively new. For a long time, the absence of symptoms was a conclusive (and rare) sign of health. This is because symptoms themselves constituted disease. Relieving them meant cure.

This was before the science of pathological anatomy worked out causal connections between hidden internal lesions and recognizable symptoms, teaching us to think of symptoms as signs of disease, warning of underlying pathology. This is why illnesses consisting of symptoms unexplained by visible pathology (like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue) are such a challenge to medicine. It is also why relieving hypochondriacs’ symptoms, removing valuable clues to hidden danger, can exacerbate anxiety.

But routine population screening changes the symptom-disease relationship again; disease becomes something that only medical technology can find. The subjective component of distinguishing between sickness and wellness is reduced to the anxious anticipation of test results. Waiting for symptoms seems irresponsible. Health, by this model of disease, is quite simply unattainable.

Of course the catch is that in a way this is true. The fact of our eventual and inevitable mortality has its seeds in all our bodies already. Hypochondria is no defense against death. So we have a choice: accept cultural hypochondria as a kind of mental health, both adaptive (there’s a small chance it will save your life) and ethical (vigilance is a virtue, complacency a vice, and we’re all responsible for keeping death rates down) — or recognize that such grasping after unattainable omniscience is misguided.

As the JAMA article on the risks and benefits of lung cancer screening concludes, “uncertainty exists.” In the face of this blunt fact, we need to work out when it is wisest to tolerate not-knowing. The counterintuitive acceptance of a degree of cheerful ignorance may be the best thing we can do for our collective — public — health.

Catherine Belling is the author of A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria. She is on the faculty of the Program in Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. She came to the United States from South Africa on a Fulbright grant to complete her PhD in English, on representations of anatomy and physiology in Renaissance drama, at Stony Brook University, New York, where, on graduating, she took up a position in the medical school before moving to Chicago in 2007.

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The Olympics and Music: then and now

By Lucy Allen

27 July 2012: the day that many Britons have been waiting for, and the day when the attention of the world will be focused on London and the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games. As a nation we have been holding our breath in anticipation of this extravaganza: a showcase of British and world sporting talent, and the spirit of competition. But the Games are more than just sport, they are also an opportunity for the host nation to demonstrate its cultural excellence and achievements.

This juxtaposition of sport and the arts is a traditional part of the Olympic Games. When London last hosted the Games in 1948, an arts competition was run with gold, silver, and bronze prizes in the categories of architecture, literature, painting, sculpture, and music. There were 36 entries across the three music categories: vocal, instrumental, and choral/orchestral. But this was the last Olympics to run an arts competition as concerns were raised over the ethics of allowing cultural competitors to be professional whilst only amateur athletes could compete in the sporting arena. For the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, the idea of holding an arts festival remained, but this time run as an exhibition. This removed any competitive element while still celebrating cultural achievements from around the globe and created the basis for today’s Cultural Olympiad.

The Cultural Olympiad has been running since 2008 and in this time has seen 16 million people participate or attend performances in the UK — the largest cultural festival in the history of the modern Olympic Games. A highlight of the celebrations has been New Music 20×12, a project run by PRS for Music Foundation, which has aimed to bring twenty of Britain’s most exciting composers together with arts organisations to create an eclectic mix of new music from across the UK, encompassing genres as diverse as bell ringing and beat boxing. Oxford University Press house composers Richard Causton and Howard Skempton were among the composers commissioned to write new works.

Richard Causton’s Twenty Seven Heavens is a concerto for orchestra, commissioned by the European Union Youth Orchestra and will receive its UK premiere on 23rd August in Edinburgh. The title is taken from William Blake’s Jerusalem, in which the writer draws imagery from some of the East London boroughs where the Olympics will be based to explore ideas about mythology and the divine. For Blake the “twenty seven heavens” represent both the layers that the individual must pass through to reach eternity in and the challenges that this brings. For Causton they have an added layer of meaning, representing the 27 nationalities of the EUYO’s players. Richard explains his ideas for the piece and his experience of being part of London 20×12:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Howard Skempton’s Five Rings Triple is a new works for eight church bells and was played on BBC Radio 3 as the first music of New Years’ Day to ring in the beginning of the Olympic year. When interviewed about his piece, Howard said: “I was attracted to the project because it was clear at the outset that it would be a unique challenge; that I would have almost no room for manœuvre. The rules of method ringing are determined by physical constraints and the need for methods to be memorised. I was determined to create something both distinctive and musical, but I was dealing entirely with numbers. The piece follows the “rules” of method ringing, but with the unprecedented five rings for the lead bell.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

While since 1952 the Cultural Olympiad has sought to maintain the spirit of only amateurs actually competing and professionals exhibiting, the sporting event has started moving in the other direction; professionals are now allowed to compete in nearly every sport. As sporting professionals compete, should we see a return to competition in the arts? Or should the Cultural Olympiad stay true to the spirit of the founders of the games? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

Richard Causton was born in London in 1971 and studied at the University of York, the Royal College of Music and the Scuola Civica in Milan. He has worked with world renowned performers such as the BBC Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and Sinfonieorchester Basel. He has won numerous awards for his compositions and from September 2012 he will be Professor of Composition at Cambridge University.

Howard Skempton was born in Chester in 1947, and has worked as a composer, accordionist, and music publisher. He studied in London with Cornelius Cardew from 1967 and Cardew helped him to discover a musical language of great simplicity. Since then he has continued to write undeflected by compositional trends, producing a corpus of more than 300 works. Skempton has been honoured with two British Composer Awards, in 2005 and 2008, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 2012.

Lucy Allen is the Print and Web Marketing Assistant in Sheet Music at Oxford University Press.

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Photograph of Howard Skempton playing the church bells by Anwen Greenaway.

AIDS in 2012

By Richard Giannone

The International Conference on AIDS is announcing the details about Trudeva, the new drug from Gilead Science that has shown to be effective in lowering the risk of HIV infection. It’s a single pill that in Brazilian trials reduces the rate of infection. The drug is expensive at about $12,000 a year. But with 15,000 new infections a year and 1.2 million already infected with HIV, the drug is well worth the price.

After three long decades that changed AIDS from a gay to universal disease, the medical breakthrough comes none too soon. This news provides a heartening accompaniment to the march on Washington reminding us to Keep the Promise on AIDS. Loud cheers all around!

I join the ovation not in the exhausted voice of a gay man of 77, but with the renewed conviction of an eyewitness to the now silent agony of early sufferers of AIDS in my Greenwich Village neighborhood in the 1980s. The unrelieved pain of friends and neighbors remains with me, always wrenching my heart, always sharpening. Back then, life was running down like a clock. Far from lessening the grief AIDS caused, recalling the sights and sounds of misery — especially the premature dying of the young — has deepened into a moral calling to bear witness to the ravages of AIDS.

Many early activists called state and church in account. With AIDS exploding through the 1980s, playwright Larry Kramer in 1987 founded The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power to demand lower prices of medications and access to experimental therapies. Militants broke into The New York Stock Exchange to protest the exorbitant price of the one approved AIDS drug. Militants occupied the pews of St. Patrick Cathedral on 5th Avenue.

I venture to bring the shadowed past alive into the present in my newly published Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire. Hidden provides a window on the first religious steps that led to the July 22 march and conference. In the 1980s, when AIDS brought shame and denunciation, it was the people with AIDS who revealed the truth about the body that medical science has come to treat and that the church neglected.

Though the Catholic church hadn’t been mother to her gay children, some came anyway to the 5:30 afternoon Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village. Clothes drooped on emaciated men in their mid-twenties to early forties. Pustules rutted the withered flesh of several. Some sported baseball caps to keep facial lesions shaded out of sight of onlookers. A few men used make-up to screen darkened facial spots. But nothing covered the bones of suffering or muted the sound of sickness from the pews punctuating the words of God from the altar.

Living in wrack and ruin, these men brought life back into a church that left them for dead. They walked to the Lord’s Table for sustenance, more life. The vitality of their appeal stood out in sharp relief against the lifeless Christianity that vilified their gayness. Such spiritual defiance taught me what I needed to know and need to remember.

AIDS was our passion. Its agony thrust gay life into the vortex of twentieth-century history. This previously censored truthfulness came to rest in rows of church benches for all to bear gayness in mind as part of providential history. Their perseverance asked me to trust the body. I did.

At the liturgy, persons with HIV were not seen as the reviled carriers of plague rejected by society. Bodies that were hosts for infections sought the host of sacred healing. Their return to the home that spurned them showed that the divine spirit was far beyond any barrier of separation that humans erected for themselves. The love that dare not say its name howled out from its heart with what voice it had left to reclaim its place in God’s plan. Worship modeled a church and society to which I felt I could belong.

One regular parishioner anchors this back-story. He stood tall with a cane supporting him. He neither wore a hat nor used cosmetics to cover his malignant tumors. Such complete confidence in his skin inscribed with scarlet marks expressed a quiet and intractable dignity. He had faith in his body. He was not ashamed of his gift from God, his own skin, which is something to think about. In slow motion this young man was bringing his entire person of ensouled flesh for the fullness life of his body. One day he no longer showed up. It was like that. AIDS was a disease of disappearance.

No longer. As my memory goes backward, my heart hurls forward to reminisce about the future that medical science presages for HIV/AIDS.

Richard Giannone, emeritus professor at Fordham University, is the author of Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire. Read his previous blog posts: “National HIV Testing Day and the history of HIV testing” and “The anxiety of AIDS recognition.”

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HIV and AIDS in Latinos

By Kurt C. Organista

Thirty years into the epidemic I remain struck by is how HIV continues to exploit our country’s entrenched social, cultural, and economic cleavages — almost to the point of appearing to be a homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic virus! Latinos now rank second to African Americans in their disproportionately high rates of AIDS cases: 50% & 20%, respectively, despite only composing 13% & 15% of the US population. Consider for example that 75% of AIDS cases in the US are among men who have sex with men (MSM), and the same is true within US Latino population. Women continue to be primarily infected by male sex partners, and African American women and Latinas are, respectively, 20 times and five times more likely to become infected than their white female counter-parts.

While research on transgendered people is nascent, preliminary studies suggests alarming rates of between 8% & 78% in male-to-female transgendered people of color! The latter should not surprise us considering the additive risks inherent in the multiple marginalities experienced by transgendered people who frequently face rejection from family, community, peers, and school while young, followed by job discrimination while transitioning into adulthood. Survival sex and alcohol and substance use are not uncommon responses to such rejection.

HIV/AIDS continues to exact tremendous cost in human lives and dollars. Globally we have lost 25 million people to AIDS, with over 40 million currently infected with HIV. 1.2 million are infected in North America with Africa (26 million) and China (8.3 million) sharing the global burden. The US spends over 27 billion dollars annually on HIV/AIDS: 52% on HIV/AIDS care and treatment, 25% on the global epidemic, 11% domestic HIV research, 10% domestic cash/housing assistance, and 3% on domestic HIV prevention.

Interestingly, of the 3 billion dollars allocated to HIV research annually, over 80% is spent on biomedical research including vaccine and anti-retroviral medication (ARVM) development, and more recently PREP and PEP (pre-exposure & post-exposure prophylaxis or ARVM treatment). The latter have been shown to actually prevent HIV transmission in sero-discordant couples when the infected partner takes enough medication to render viral loads undetectable (PREP), or when those exposed to HIV (e.g., nurses encountering infected needle stick) are promptly treated with ARVM. While PREP is being celebrated (e.g., Science magazine’s 2011 breakthrough of the year), concern is growing regarding its effectiveness outside of the research lab. Similar concerns abound regarding the heavy emphasis on biomedical solutions to HIV, or the growing conviction that HIV/AIDS is not 80% a biomedical problem, and 20% social problem, as the HIV research budget implies.

While we applaud ARVM for transforming HIV infection from a death sentence to something akin to a chronic disease, it’s sobering to consider that 80% of those infected globally have no access to these miracle drugs. And while we anxiously look forward to an HIV vaccine, we should recall that it was promised back in the mid-1980s by then president Regan’s Secretary of Health, Margaret Hecker. Further, the main concern with depending on PREP as a quasi-magic bullet is this:

– of the approximately 1,200,000 people with HIV in the US, only 80% are diagnosed
– of those, only 62% are connected to care
– of those only 41% remain in care
– of those only 36% are on ARVM
– with only 28% registering viral loads sufficiently suppressed to prevent infecting others.

Social problems require social solutions and HIV/AIDS is at least 50% a social problem. Structural-environmental (including cultural, social, interpersonal, and situational) factors compose the many contexts of HIV risk, and produce and reproduce risky situations and environments for US Latinos. Consequently, structural-environmental solutions are proposed and tested, including scaling up community and cultural resources with the power to mitigate harsh living and working conditions in which HIV risk and other health and social disparities fester. Some of the exciting community-based interventions for preventing HIV risk in diverse Latino populations include: community engagement and AIDS activism to prevent risk in LGBT Latinos; facilitating discussions about HIV and sex in Latina mother and daughter dyads; local, state, and international infrastructure to address the basic human needs of transgendered Latinas, and immigration reform migrant laborers).

In closing, we need to continue investing in prevention research that is not only biomedical and behavioral but structural-environmental in its attention to the complex context of HIV risk and prevention for Latinos and other populations.

Kurt C. Organista, PhD, is Professor at the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley and the editor of HIV Prevention With Latinos: Theory, Research, and Practice.

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Was Elizabeth I Richard II?

By Dr Jason Scott-Warren

You go to libraries and archives in search of new things, but sometimes you get waylaid by old friends. When I took a train to Maidstone one Saturday morning four years ago, I was researching a seventeenth-century politician, Sir Edward Dering. The Kent Archives have a cache of Dering letters: begging letters, affectionate letters, letters full of gossip and news. One of them came with an enclosure that caught my attention; it was the handwritten transcript of a conversation, almost a playlet. It rang bells; I remembered reading it years back, although most of the details were beyond recall. The document recorded an encounter between Queen Elizabeth I and William Lambarde, a legal theorist and pioneering antiquarian, whose writings included the first ever county history (the 1576 Perambulation of Kent). Elizabeth had recently given Lambarde a new job as keeper of the records in the Tower of London — the Tudor precursor of our National Archives. Now Lambarde was popping into the court at Greenwich to present the Queen with a book: a catalogue of all of the ‘Rolls, Bundles, membranes & parcels’ that were mouldering in the Tower. Elizabeth looked over it, reading bits out loud and asking Lambarde earnest questions. But quite early on in their conversation, Elizabeth launched a potentially deadly conversational exocet. “Her Majesty fell upon the reign of Richard II saying, ‘I am Richard II know you not that?’”

Richard II? Via Wikimedia Commons

Queen Elizabeth I? Via Wikimedia Commons

A lesser spirit might have been thrown by this claim; how could Elizabeth I be Richard II, who (for one thing) was a man, and (for another) had died in 1400? Fortunately Lambarde got her drift. Richard II had been deposed. And in February 1601 a former royal favourite, the Earl of Essex, had attempted to oust Elizabeth by force, and had been executed for treason. (That was the official version of events; as far as Essex and his accomplices were concerned, they were just trying to save the Queen from her ‘evil counsellors’). Lambarde’s reply was circumspect: “such a wicked imagination was determined, & attempted, by a most unkinde gentleman, the most adorned creature that ever your Majestie made”. The Queen agreed: “he that will forget God will also forget his benefactors, this tragedy was forty times played in open streets & houses”.

It was this last sentence that made the document so memorable — and not just for me. Back in the 80s and early 90s, when ‘new historicist’ critics were beginning to think in new ways about the relationship between literature and history, the Queen’s enigmatic line was a clincher. During the government investigation of Essex’s uprising, it had emerged that his accomplices had paid a theatre company to revive an old play about Richard II on the afternoon before the rising. The play was probably Shakespeare’s Richard II, which focuses on the deposition. In the courtroom, Francis Bacon said that the Earl’s servants wanted to watch a tragedy that their master would soon bring “from the stage to the state”. Elizabeth’s “tragedy … forty times played in open streets & houses” can be read as another response to these events, one that registers Shakespeare as a political threat. As Jonathan Dollimore asked, “can ‘tragedy’ be a strictly literary term when the Queen’s own life is endangered by the play?” Lambarde’s conversation with Elizabeth thus not only feels like drama, emulating the cut-and-thrust of stage dialogue. It creates a connection between the texts we consider as literature and those we treat as historical documents. For historicist criticism, there was no fundamental difference between the two; ‘the textuality of history’ matched ‘the historicity of texts’.

Hence my nostalgic pleasure in reconnecting with this knotty document. But where were the other manuscripts? How had the text survived? When I got back to Cambridge and started investigating, the significance of my chance discovery became clear. There were no known early manuscripts, and the only evidence for the conversation had thus far come from a printed edition of 1780. I also learnt that the absence of documentation had recently been discussed in a British Academy lecture by an eminent literary scholar, Jonathan Bate. Asking ‘Was Shakespeare an Essex Man?’, Bate had reassessed all of the evidence relating to the Essex Rising and Richard II, and in the process had cast doubt on the authenticity of the Lambarde conversation. Where did it come from? Who recorded it? And where was the book that Lambarde had supposedly given to Elizabeth? According to the account, the Queen lavished praise on Lambarde’s present, saying “she had not received since her first coming to the crown any one thing that brought therewith so great delectation unto her”. But if she loved it so much, why had it not been seen since she “put the book in her bosom”? And so on. Bate’s hunch was that the account of the meeting was at worst a forgery, at best thoroughly unreliable.

My manuscript dated from 1627, and came with lots of authenticating details, including the claim that Lambarde had expired in “the passion of joy that he fell into, upon her Majesties gracious acceptance” of his gift. (He did indeed die fifteen days after their meeting.) Although I was not naive enough to think that any of this was objective evidence, I had some reasons to have faith where Bate had sown doubt. My chance find, together with the provocation of his argument, set me on a new paper-chase to understand the textual history of Lambarde’s conversation and to work out what had become of the book last seen in Elizabeth’s bosom.

Dr Jason Scott-Warren is a Senior Lecturer in English at Gonville and Caius, Cambridge University. His paper, Was Elizabeth I Richard II?: The Authenticity of Lambarde’s ‘Conversation’, has been made publicly available for a limited time by The Review of English Studies journal.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online has granted free access for a limited time to the biographies of Sir Edward Dering and William Lambarde.

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#litdozens and the best rhyming literary insults in 140 characters or less

English has two great rhyming slanguages, cockney rhyming slang and the dozens, the African American insult game. We’ll leave the parsing of cockney phrases to news reporters covering the Olympics for now and examine the lewd, bawdy, and wonderful world of verbal street duels. Elijah Wald investigated the origins of this cacophony of dirty jokes in The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama. While it may have begun in “yo’ mama” jokes, this language was meant for music, as rap and hip-hop today can attest. The dozens even appears in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston.

We played our own dozens game on Twitter today with the hashtag #litdozens and we’d like to share some of the best tweets with you. We hope you have the same reaction as Lavanya Proctor:

#bbpBox_226330917445173248 a { text-decoration:none; color:#EB540E; }#bbpBox_226330917445173248 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }Cracking up over @about 1 hour ago via web Reply Retweet Favorite Lavanya M Proctor

The rules of the game (in 140 characters or less):

Friday Twitter game time! We’re trying a new one this week for you bookish types: an insult game inspired by “the dozens” called #litdozens.
The dozens is an insult game based on African American street rhyming and verbal combat, which eventually became rap & hip-hop. #litdozens
Our game: Create a rhyming insult based around a literary figure and use the hashtag #litdozens. We’ll RT the best. Please keep it clean.
And the best five dozens (judged by # of RT) win a copy of ‘The Dozens’ by Elijah Wald http://oxford.ly/PCpHTA. #litdozens

And now for the outstanding tweets:

View the story “Twitter Game #litdozens” on Storify

And thank you to Sreddy Yen for the compliment:

#bbpBox_226327211366555648 a { text-decoration:none; color:#1F98C7; }#bbpBox_226327211366555648 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }LOL! This is definitely the best one.RT @about 1 hour ago via Samsung Mobile Reply Retweet Favorite Sreddy Yen

What say you to #scidozens in a couple weeks?

Elijah Wald is a musician and writer who has toured on five continents and written thousands of articles for newspapers, magazines, and album notes. His ten published books include The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘n’ Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music, and The Blues: A Very Short Introduction. He has taught blues history at UCLA and won multiple awards, including a 2002 Grammy.

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You are essentially what you wear

Aran Cardigan, 1996. Photo by Lisa Dusseault. Creative Commons License.

By Bruce Hood

I have been known on occasion to offer an audience the opportunity to wear a second-hand cardigan that it has been cleaned for $20. After an initial “what’s the catch?” reluctance, a large proportion of the audience usually raise their hands to volunteer. At this point, I tell them that the cardigan previously belonged to a mass murderer. For US audiences, it’s Jeffrey Dahmer whereas Fred West is our psychopath of choice in the UK. At this point you probably realize that I am lying and the cardigan does not belong to either. However, just the mention of a killer is enough to make most of the audience lower their hands. There is something deeply repugnant about coming into contact with the clothing of someone we revile. There are always the few who say that they would wear the offensive clothing but invariably, the rest of the audience are equally disgusted that these brave individuals would do something so repellent.

This stunt is based on work by Paul Rozin and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania who showed that most of us harbor an intuitive sense of moral contamination that is difficult to overcome. It’s as if a killer’s evil might rub off on us. Murderers kill for various reasons and sometimes for no reason at all, but they are all individuals that we want to steer clear of so much that even coming into contact with an item of their clothing revolts us.

There are different possible explanations for this reaction. Perhaps we don’t want to be seen to be doing something that we know others find revolting. However, that explanation simply restates the question about why so many people feel it is wrong to wear a killer’s clothing in the first place. A second account is based on a naïve biological understanding of evil. They may have some form of infection that influences their behavior in which case, it is best to avoid any possible contamination.

Most people, however, dismiss the killer’s cardigan demonstration as simple association. When you hear the names of Dahmer and West, these trigger negative emotions and possibly memories that are related to their vile acts. But that explanation is too simple. As common and appealing as association may be as an explanation, it fails to explain why an object of clothing is more likely to produce the negative reaction than say reading a biography detailing all the horrors of these murderer’s crimes. There is something more than just the thought of a killer which triggers our reaction

Chief specialist cognac of business of Moldova. Photo by Ion Chibzii. Creative Commons License.

Embodied cognition is a recent theoretical perspective that seeks to explain cognition not as disembodied thought bubbles percolating up from our unconsciousness, but rather as multidimensional representation made up from the way we perceive and act in the world. Our perceptions and actions influence our thoughts just as much as the other way round. In the case of clothing, a recent study by researchers from Northwestern University demonstrated that wearing a white coat triggered more diligent attention on a task if the participants were told that it was a doctor’s coat than if they were told that the same coat was a painter’s coat. Apparently, we are more likely to associate thoughts of a doctor as signifying detailed mental focus than the thoughts related to an artistic painter. The important point was that there was no effect unless the participants wore the coat. Simply seeing the doctor’s coat was not enough to induce a shift in performance on the attention task. Embodied cognition is certainly an advance in explanation over simple associative priming, but why does wearing the clothing have such an important influence on our thoughts?

One possibility I favour is essentialism, the psychological assumption that there are invisible essences to things that make them what they are, regardless of how they look on the outside. This idea of hidden essential properties can be traced back to Plato’s notions of ideal form and, as scientifically literate adults, we now know that there is an essential quality that makes things what they are: DNA! But researchers such as Susan Gelman at Michigan have shown that even preschoolers reason about biology from an essentialist position. For example, they categorise different animals on the basis of some invisible property or essence that makes the animal belong to one species but not another. A little older and children understand that while you can change the outward appearance of an animal so that it looks different, it is essentially still the same. Preschoolers know little about genetics or philosophy so it seems that essentialism is a naturally occurring bias in the way that we make sense of the world. And it’s not just children. Biologist Richard Dawkins laments the general public’s failure to understand natural selection because of essentialism or “the dead hand of Plato” as he calls it. As essentialists, we see each species as unique, rather than understanding that all life is related by common genetic ancestry.

What has biological essentialism got to do with reluctance to wear a killer’s cardigan? Rozin’s work on moral contamination shows that we treat contact as a potential opportunity for infection. If we believe that certain people are essentially bad and “rotten to their core,” then it is easy to see how the combination of essentialism and naïve biological reasoning about morality can elicit thoughts and behaviors where one avoids contact.

Of course, the pendulum swings both ways. Killers might repel us, but researchers at Yale have shown that people are willing to pay good money for a cardigan they think belongs to George Clooney but especially if it has not been washed. In fact, when you take an essentialist perspective on the world, it explains so much of why we value certain objects over other identical objects, why genetic modification seems inherently wrong and why duplication of individuals is abhorrent. It is an intriguing world view.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Bruce Hood is Professor of Developmental Psychology in Societya at the University of Bristol. He has written two popular science books, SuperSense (2009) and The Self Illusion (2012). In 2011, he delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, “Meet Your Brain” which were broadcast on the BBC.

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What is the health impact of the 2012 London Olympic transport plans?

While the UK government worries about visitors streaming through customs at Heathrow, locals around the new Olympic site are worried about what the sudden wave of visitors will mean to them. What can they expect as ticket-holders jam roads, crowd public transport, and over-run East London? Will the commitment to public health hold true for transportation? And what will happen after the closing ceremony?

We spoke with Mark McCarthy, Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health and co-author of “Health impact assessment of the 2012 London Olympic transport plans” in the European Journal of Public Health, about the what East Londoners can expect when the Olympic Games kick off next week.

London committed to achieving a high level of sustainability in its Olympic bid, including ‘encouraging healthy living’. How do transport plans reflect this goal?

Physical activity, including walking and cycling, makes an important contribution to our health. Exercise lengthens life by reducing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, and helps (along with healthy eating) to reduce obesity. Most people visiting the Olympics Games will arrive and leave by public transport for visitors, and will walk to and from their transport stops. However, the Olympic officials will be transported in cars.

How is public transport in the area being modified to cope with the large number of spectators?

Trains (including Underground) will be the main transport for visitors and there have been major improvement of stations, lines, and interchanges. During the Games themselves, there are special arrangements to manage crowding at peak times.

Your study also showed that road traffic would increase in East London after the Games. Will the public transport improvements offset this potential negative environmental health impact?

We assessed the plans for Olympics, including the predictions for transport in East London after the Games. Cars are a health hazard. They cause premature deaths from air pollution, are a danger for accidents, and reduce exercise in travelling. Over the next decade, contrary to the Mayor’s policies, road traffic in East London is predicted to increase, failing the Olympics commitment to ‘sustainability’.

Has space been provided at the Olympics site to promote walking or cycling?

The Games have been promoted as an opportunity to encourage personal exercise and fitness across the nation. There will be parking spaces for cyclists (for up to one visitor in twenty) at the Games site at Stratford and visitors will get to their Olympic stadium by walking from the train station.

Will the proportion of “green spaces” in the area increase?

A new park is being built at Stratford. It will be both a pleasant area for walking during the Games, and a new green space afterwards with connections to pan-London routes for walking and cycling.

How will transport impact on the local community?

During the period of the Games, there will be alterations to both road traffic and public transport around Stratford. For the longer term, the Olympics has provided transport improvements, with new stations, more frequent services, and better links across London. The challenge for the Olympic legacy, however, is to change behaviour: promoting walking and cycling, and reducing car use. East London has poorer levels of health than the rest of London, and these measures would promote for health and well-being for the local community.

What efforts are being made to track the environmental and health impact of the Olympic developments in East London?

Our study made predictions of how the Olympics transport plans would affect the local community’s health. We also voluntarily prepared and submitted a full scientific proposal to track the health impacts during and after the Games. Unfortunately, the national scientific funding body rejected our proposal. And so, as far as we know, the unique opportunity to determine how the community’s health is being affected by transport has been lost.

Mark McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Public Health at the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, London, UK. He is the co-author with Robert J. Ravelli and Mike Sinclair-Williams of “Health impact assessment of the 2012 London Olympic transport plans” in the European Journal of Public Health.

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The continuing life of science fiction

Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction
By David Seed

In 1998, Thomas M. Disch boldly declared in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World that science fiction had become the main kind of fiction which was commenting on contemporary social reality. As a professional writer, we could object that Disch had a vested interest in making this assertion, but virtually every day news items confirm his argument that science fiction connects with an amazingly broad range of public issues.

Take the ongoing debate over different forms of surveillance. There is a long libertarian tradition in science fiction of describing resistance to any kind of private or governmental surveillance in the works of Philip K. Dick and many others. The novelist David Brin joined the debate with his polemic on freedom and privacy in The Transparent Society, but that was published before the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 changed the political climate. Nowadays the USA has even to a certain extent institutionalized science fiction through the SIGMA think tank which advises government agencies including the Bureau of Homeland Security on likely futures.

And what about space? Many members of NASA grew up on a diet of science fiction which has no doubt fed into their projects and designs, but, apart from that, it has become obligatory to signal any new development by drawing a comparison with science fiction. When NASA offered a prize for the best design for an autonomous robot which could be used to explore remote planets, it was immediately compared to the Imperial Probe Droid from Star Wars.

Back in the science fiction of the 1980s and 1990s, virtual reality was something characters accessed through elaborate helmets and suits with complex sensors, which, writers like Pat Cadigan showed, could function like a powerful drug and alienate the wearer from any kind of external reality. Now the development of computerized eyeglasses is trumpeted as ‘making science fiction real’ through this new technology.

One difference from the older VR suits is that they tended to robotize the  appearance of the wearer, but the new glasses look conventional visually while they speed up the processing and transfer of information.

Another standard theme in science fiction has been the exploration of the nature of humanity and of our relation to constructs like hybrid combinations of machine and organism — the cyborg — or projected versions of humanity which have become known as ‘avatars’. While he was working on his film Avatar (2009), James Cameron explained his title term as follows:  “In this film what that means is that the human technology in the future is capable of injecting a human’s intelligence into a remotely located body, a biological body.”

Cameron’s application follows a principle of transference and repeats the old science fiction dream of the human mind being projected beyond its bodily limits. Indeed, Cameron admitted that he was drawing on the whole tradition of science fiction for his film and attempting to apply ‘wrap-round’ technology to give the viewer maximum immersion in the spectacle. The more common use of ‘avatar’ denotes a computerized human simulation, introduced as early as 1975 in John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider and then further dramatized in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992).  Brunner shows his character in flight from a threatening government programme; Stephenson evokes a more complex situation where his protagonist negotiates his way between different information systems. In Snow Crash avatars confuse their observers by blurring the boundaries between the physical body and its representations, whereas since the 1990s they have become staples of modelling and self-modification. The website Technovelgy includes these cases among many others embodying links between SF and technology.

As the UK novelist Paul Kincaid has said, science fiction is uniquely concerned with novelty, which very quickly produces ennui and so in that sense it is a ‘genre at the end of time.’

This is another way of saying that science fiction is constantly re-inventing itself. A concern with novelty involves a hyper-awareness of time. As Kincaid argues, maybe it’s a paradoxical sign of the continuing energy of science fiction that we hear so often of its demise.

David Seed is Professor in the School of English at the University of Liverpool and the author of Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction.

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