Oxford University Press's Blog, page 324

Healthcare during Harvey

Following the days of Hurricane Harvey in Texas, Dr. Kevin Schwechten recounted his experience coordinating aide for the people of Beaumont, Texas while also manning the only operating medical facility in the city.

As an emergency room doctor, I was boots on the ground! I work at several companies and have several different hospitals I go to, Houston and Beaumont. Just after the storm hit Beaumont, record floods swamped the area. And I drove in to work. Through two feet of water. But after arrival, I manned my post and an extraordinary thing happened. Most of us in my neighborhood are pilots with small planes and it’s a great life. But during the storm, I was stranded as was all of Beaumont. What’s worse, the city water supply failed and we were out. I decided early I’d send an email to my neighborhood. Maybe someone would want to make a short flight with a case of water for me and my nurses. The response I got was overwhelming.

We were holding our own until mid-morning when the Beaumont Municipal Water supply lost a major pump that kept the city alive. Hence, water service was shut down with no hope of return in the foreseeable future. As many lab machines in the ER and other areas of the hospital run with water, the hospital grinds to a halt. Two large medical centers, St Elizabeth’s and Baptist Hospitals, could not sustain their patient volumes and acuity under such a blow and made the decision to close and evacuate. After that happened we seemed to get a bit busier. A brief discussion with our CEO led to the decision we would remain open and “do what we can”. The idea of our little surgical hospital being the only operating medical facility in Beaumont (all other urgent cares and clinics have long since been abandoned) and I as the only doc, made us all doubt any wisdom of that decision. The email was sent, though, and hope started to rise.

Left: Approaching the helicopter for the water delivery. Right: Kevin Schwechten on the hospital helipad during Hurricane Harvey as a shipment of potable water arrives. Photos provided by the author and used with permission.

First, my nurses and staff were openly skeptical about how much this “pilot guy” thought he could really do. But Russ actually landed. We actually had water on the ground. I sent my team to the airport for the pick-up. Another plane landed with water. Now everyone was paying attention. Hope again came from Russ with the schedule of a twin Commanche’s arrival. Then an R44 pilot contacted me and asked if he could just deliver to the hospital. I loved it. After he landed in the parking lot outside our ER door, all doubt was gone. The water was pouring in, if you excuse the pun, and we started running labs and quenching thirst. We were somewhat hoarding some of the water for our future needs in the back as we truly didn’t know how long it would last. Then the Army called.

An old friend called and over the course of hours, coordinated a massive military Blackhawk, combat style delivery of 6,000 pounds of needed water bottles. I’ve truly missed the helo-side unloading with rotors turning and ears roaring of my time in Iraq, but today that was exactly what I got. Medical staff and patients’ families formed a daisy-chain unloading-team to take 125 cases of water off each of two fully loaded birds. We passed case after case to each other and unloaded the massive helicopter in record time. Twice. This was truly one of the most amazing experiences and awesome activities I’ve ever gotten the pleasure to participate in. As the deliveries were made, people driving by stopped to record this operation on cell phone cameras. After the first Blackhawk left, the word got out about the water. As it should. By the second delivery, we ended up only taking several cases into the hospital as the people, being polite and respectful, claimed it for themselves. Which is the reason it came. Between this activity, I had an ER to take care of. After the military drop, patients were found in need. Roads were no better and two more patients were helicoptered out before midnight.

Now, its 12:55 AM and I hear voices behind my door. I think I’ll try to lay down, in my clothes, before they call me again.

Featured image credit: Hurricane Harvey near the coast of Texas at peak intensity late on August 25, 2017. ABI image captured by NOAA’s GOES-16 satellite – RAMMB/CIRA SLIDER. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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William Dean Howells and the Gilded Age [excerpt]

Through his writing, novelist and critic William Dean Howells captured the political and social aftermath of the Civil War. Given his limited involvement in politics, Howells’ works focused on the lives of common people over the uncommon, whom he deemed “essentially unattractive and uninteresting.” In the following excerpt from The Republic For Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White draws on the writings of William Dean Howells as he examines American Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.

Abraham Lincoln, the politician whose memory and legacy dominated the Gilded Age, died as this book begins, but he never really vanished. The novelist and critic William Dean Howells captured part of the reason when he reviewed John Hay’s and John Nicolay’s monumental biography of the president in 1890. Howells wrote that “if America means anything at all, it means the sufficiency of the common, the insufficiency of the uncommon.” Lincoln had come to be both the personification of the American common people and the nation’s greatest—and most uncommon—president. Howells thought it was the nation’s common people and common traits that most mattered.

Howells, famous then and largely forgotten since, knew most everyone, but he always remained detached. He watched, and he wrote. His interventions in politics remained minor. Howells was a Midwesterner, and this was the great age of the Midwest. Originally a committed liberal, he came to acknowledge liberalism’s failures and insufficiencies, and then struggled to imagine alternatives. He did so as a writer, and he and his fellow Realists created invaluable portraits of the age. In his confusion, his intelligence, and his honesty, he reminds us that for those living through the Gilded Age it was an astonishing and frightening period, full of great hopes as well as deep fears. When Howells cryptically embraces the common, it is worth listening to him. Understanding his judgment of the “sufficiency of the common, the insufficiency of the uncommon” provides a lens for assessing the Gilded Age.

“W. D. Howells” by Underwood & Underwood, featured in The North American review. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Gilded Age produced uncommon men and women. They abound in this volume, but in Howells’s lifetime, and during the twentieth century, businessmen who amassed wealth on a scale never seen before in American history became the face of the period. Contemporary caricaturists and later historians named them the Robber Barons, but this, as well as their later incarnation as farsighted entrepreneurs, gave them too much credit. They never really mastered the age. When Howells wrote of “the insufficiency of the uncommon,” he probably had them in mind, seeing them as insufficient to the demands of the period for the same reasons as Charles Francis Adams, who had aspired to be one of them and then dismissed them his Autobiography.

I have known tolerably well, a good many “successful” men—“big” financially—men famous during the last half-century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again, either in this world or the next; nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive and uninteresting.

In a period that began with such exalted hopes and among a people so willing to proclaim their virtue as were Americans, sufficient seems condemning with faint praise, but a sobered Howells writing in the midst of what seemed a prolonged economic, political, and social crisis expressed a restrained optimism. Howells did not romanticize the “common people.” The failure of Reconstruction in the South was, in part, their failure. They often at least consented to the corruption of democratic governance. And for most of the Gilded Age the “common people” questioned whether they really had much in common as race, religion, ethnicity, class, and gender divided the nation. Yet their actions transformed the country, even if they undertook perhaps the most consequential of these actions—the movement into wage labor—unwillingly and under duress.

In judging them sufficient, Howells settled down in between the dystopian and utopian fantasies that marked the age. Millions of ordinary Americans had remade the country with their work, their movements, their agitation, their tinkering, their broad and vernacular intellectualism that neither aspired to nor created a high culture, and even with their amusements. They had not succumbed to the long economic and social the crisis that threatened to overwhelm the country. What they accomplished was sufficient. It was a foundation on which to build.

Howells and his contemporaries never escaped the great gravitational pull of the Civil War. The era began with the universal conviction that the Civil War was the watershed in the nation’s history and ended with the proposition that the white settlement of the West defined the national character. Changing the national story from the Civil War to the West amounted to an effort to escape the shadow of the Gilded Age’s vanished twin and evade the failure of Reconstruction. Rewriting the Civil War as a mere interruption of the national narrative of western expansion minimized the traumas and vestiges of the Civil War and downplayed the significance of the transformation of Gilded Age economy and society. But too much had changed, and too much blood had been spilled in the War, for such a simple story of continuity to be fully persuasive. The twin, never born, shadowed the Gilded Age. A vision of a country un-achieved lingered, and quarrels over what should come next remained unresolved.

Featured image: “Atlanta roundhouse ruin” by George N. Barnard, circa 1866. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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After Mosul, are borders and state sovereignty still an issue in the Middle East?

After three years of ISIS occupation, the Iraqi army reconquered most of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, in July. As the self-declared caliphate—the world’s richest terrorist organization—has been losing considerable territory over the last two years, and with the international borders of most states in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) still intact, is the survival of the state system in the region still an issue of concern? Does the issue of states, borders, and sovereignty in the Middle East and North Africa still deserve our attention?

There is no doubt that the political transformation processes following the so-called Arab Spring continue to destabilize the MENA region. In light of the civil wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, pundits were quick to predict that the post-uprisings turmoil would lead to a major redrawing of the post-World War I colonial borders. A radical transformation of the regional state system that rests on these externally imposed—and thus supposedly illegitimate—territorial borders was anticipated. With its vocally propagated claim to erase the (alleged) Sykes-Picot borders and its initially unprecedented territorial expansion, the growing power of ISIS in Syria and Iraq further fed the hype about “the end of Sykes-Picot” and the regional order it denotes. (In fact, the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 did neither impose the mandate system on the region, nor establish Iraq and Syria as two separate states; this would be decided at the San Remo Conference of 1920.)

But contrary to these predictions and myths, the borders of MENA states as signifiers of international legal sovereignty have been surprisingly resilient. This has been the case because the vast majority of regional and international actors and stakeholders have no real interest in the redrawing of borders, favouring the status quo instead. Equally, most of the armed non-state actors, except for ISIS, have been contesting political authority within the state rather than the legitimacy of the internationally- recognized territorial borders.

Even in the case of the most likely candidate for a potential redrawing of borders in the Middle East, Iraqi Kurdistan, the pro-status quo position of international and regional actors seems to prevail. While the US neither openly supports nor categorically rejects Kurdish independence in Iraq, the Iraqi government as well as Iran and Turkey already made it clear that they favour a unitary Iraqi state. It thus remains to be seen whether the Iraqi Kurds will succeed in obtaining de jure sovereignty and international recognition, should the independence referendum scheduled for 25 September pass.

However, statehood and domestic sovereignty in the Middle East and North Africa remain problematic. These notions are linked to the configuration of state authority, territoriality, and the legitimacy of political rule. While this arrangement has always been problematic in the Middle East, the Arab uprisings can be read as the culmination of the legitimacy deficit of Arab states. They expressed the popular discontent against repressive regimes that exclude large sectors of societies from the political process while reproducing socioeconomic inequalities, to the profit of these regimes.

While looking at the region today it is safe to say that the main issues at stake are not the erasing or redrawing of international borders.

Yet, the expectation that the uprisings would prompt reform processes leading to inclusive social contracts between state and society, thereby increasing the legitimacy of political rule, was not met. Egypt under Morsi produced new types of exclusion, and under al-Sisi, authoritarianism increased noticeably. In Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, power struggles degenerated into violent conflicts and wars, with these states witnessing an erosion or complete collapse of state authority. A plethora of armed groups have emerged in the region, exerting control over territories and fulfilling functions that traditionally belong to states, from providing services to controlling borders. While the Iraqi government and the Assad regime, both backed by international actors, have somewhat regained territorial control, two or three main groups (depending on how you count) are fighting over territory, legitimacy, and recognition in Libya. Both Morocco and Jordan initiated reform processes which are however falling short of the expectations of their citizens. In Tunisia, the only country that succeeded in the political reform process, the government is struggling for legitimacy in the face of severe security and economic challenges. Overall, the inherent weakness of many states in the region and their lack of political legitimacy are more precarious today than they were before the Arab uprisings.

The enormous economic challenges that many of these states are facing are not making the renewal of the social contract any easier. Since the Arab uprisings economic growth has declined in most MENA states, with the initial expansionary economic policies being financed by unsustainably high domestic debt levels. The tourism sector and foreign investments have taken a hit because of the repeated terrorist attacks in the region. However, internationally recommended measures to cut down state expenditures, raise revenues, fight corruption, reduce the large informal sector, modernize the state and generate economic growth are generally highly unpopular at home. High unemployment, a massive underemployment of skilled and educated workers, and a low participation of women in the labour force continue to characterize most MENA states today. Considering the “youth bulge” in Arab states, millions of people under the age of 30 will enter the job market in the coming decade. The economic—and political—challenges these states are facing are therefore truly herculean.

True, in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, many borders in the MENA region came under pressure because of conflicts, the collapse of central authority and the growing flows of weapons, fighters, and refugees. Some borders were initially porous but then became closed, as in the case of the Turkish-Syrian border, and different armed groups gained control over specific segments of borders, such as in Syria. Nevertheless, while looking at the region today it is safe to say that the main issues at stake are not the erasing or redrawing of international borders. Rather, what we should worry about is the domestic sovereignty of states and the legitimacy of political rule within these borders. The security situation in the region remains an enormous challenge, as are the reconstruction and political reconciliation processes that would unfold after the ending of the civil wars. But equally worrisome is the unrelentingly dire socio-economic situation in many states—the main triggers of the Arab uprisings in the first place. Without massive financial support by the international community, which is unlikely to happen, one should not bet on the ability or willingness of these states to engage in a serious political and economic reform process anytime soon. The next wave of social unrest and violence rattling the region is only a matter of time.

Featured image credit: ‘Barbed wire’ by Nikolai Ulltang. Public domain via Pexels . 

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Back to biology: a reading list

Autumn is here and it’s time for students to head back to University. To help our biology students ease back into their studies, we’ve organized a brief reading list. Whether you’re studying human biology, ecology, or microbiology – these selections will help undergraduate and graduate students get back into the swing of things this new school year.

1. “How Should We Study It?” from A Tapestry of Values: An Introduction to Values in Science by Kevin C. Elliott

This chapter discusses how values can influence how research is conducted. Particular examples include varying strategies for agricultural research, assumptions involved in studying environmental pollution, and how the questions that are asked in medical research can reflect implicit values that steer research in specific directions.

2. “Getting and Getting Acquainted with R” from Getting Started with R: An Introduction for Biologists, by Andrew Beckerman, Dylan Childs, and Owen Petchey

R is the preferred software of biologists. This introductory chapter gives you all the information you need to get started using this software for your research – including instructions on how to download R an RStudio from the internet, how to write code for R, and general tips for using R. There are also three short exercises you can practice with to solidify your learning.

3. “Comparing Groups: Analysis of Variance” from The New Statistics with R: An Introduction for Biologists by Andy Hector

If you’re already familiar with R, but find yourself looking for more detailed information on linear model analysis, this book reviews different variations and extensions of these models within R. In “Comparing Groups: Analysis of Variance”, the organization of the results of a linear model into an Analysis of Variance table is explained using underlying statistical concepts and the interpretation of the R output demonstrated.

4. “Biological Organization from a Hierarchical Perspective” from Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective by Niles Eldredge, Telmo Pievani, Emanuele Serrelli, and Ilya Tëmkin

Recently, the philosophy of biology has seen a renewed interest in levels of organization. This selection aims to ground the concept of levels of organization onto an explicit analysis of the specific inter-level relations involved, and also discusses the idea of biological organization being inherently hierarchical, not limited to a compositional view.

5. “Getting your message out using the written word” from Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques by Susan K. Jacobson, Mallory McDuff, and Martha Monroe

This selection relays the importance of how using the written word for education and outreach is essential for reaching vast numbers of people with important scientific information. Discussed with a focus on ecological conservation, the touch points in this chapter relay important techniques for how to disseminate new findings in science to mass and social media, and reviews tips for writing that will be clear and understandable to readers.

6. “Introduction: Darwinian ecology” from Theory-Based Ecology: A Darwinian approach by Liz Pásztor, Zoltán Botta-Dukát, Gabriella Magyar, Tamás Czárán, and Géza Meszéna

In reviewing Darwin’s explanation for the emergence and maintenance of biological diversity, this introductory chapter covers the conceptual basis for a self-consistent theory of ecology. With an overview of seven Darwinian principles, this selection covers concepts such as dynamical system, state description, fitness, regulation, impact, and sensitivity. It also explains and illustrates the important method of timescale separation.

7. “Combining Applied and Basic Research: The ABC Principle” from The New ABCs of Research: Achieving Breakthrough Collaborations by Ben Shneiderman

This chapter suggests that stronger outcomes occur when research includes both applied and basic goals in their projects. Shneiderman discusses current research methods, and how this research can be improved, in the hopes of improving team productivity and encouraging research projects that will more frequently address contemporary problems we face today.

Featured image credit: New York Public Library – Stephen A. Schwarzman Building by Davide Cantelli. CC0 public domain via Unsplash.

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Should bluegrass go to college? yes

On 5 July 2017, Ted Lehmann’s weekly bluegrass column in No Depression asked this provocative question: Bluegrass goes to college, but should it? Through deft turn of phrase, Lehmann hints that the answer may be no, and that perhaps both the music’s historical integrity and today’s aspiring performers might not be best served via the college route. Dialogue on such topics is always welcome, and the flurry of responses to his column on social media and through other venues including Inside Higher Ed suggests that the subject is acutely ripe for discussion. I write here to contribute a few ideas to this conversation, centering on three particular points: that bluegrass music has always intersected with college, that people rather than music go to college, and that a university’s role is fundamentally different than what is depicted in Lehmann’s essay. And while Lehmann focused specifically on programs that offer pre-professional training in bluegrass performance, I will expand that to the broader question with which he titled the essay.

First, should bluegrass go to college? In many respects, it already has, in ways that cannot be written out of the music’s history. From the 1960s Folk Revival onward, much of the development of bluegrass music has occurred at junctures between college-educated communities and the groups of musicians who work the road. Accounts of the Osborne Brothers’ career almost always include the impact of their performances at Antioch College in Ohio and their acquisition of a new, college-educated audience. The biographies of Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard—where working-class meets college-educated backgrounds—are a real-life illustration of that intersection, and the music that the two made together was incredible. Even today’s bluegrass festivals both foster and rely on the co-mingling of fans and performers from different educational demographics, an essential part of the formula that makes such events financially viable. Bluegrass Today’s 2012 “Special Report” on fans today confirmed that the bluegrass audience holds college degrees in approximately the same proportion as the general American population. In other words, it is only our nostalgic imaginings that frame yesteryear’s bluegrass as music removed from higher education in the first place.

Swarthmore, Columbia, Harvard, Indiana University, George Mason University… These universities pop up in the resumes of the people who have given lasting form and substance to bluegrass’s narrative. Individuals such as Ralph Rinzler, Neil Rosenberg, Fred Bartenstein, Bob Cantwell, Murphy Henry, David Freeman, and so many more, have been a living, breathing part of bluegrass music, and their approach to the music is shaped, de facto, by their education. So pervasive is the influence of their work that even fans and performers who have not read their writings first-hand understand the music through these individuals’ interpretations of it.

In other words: bluegrass going to college is really nothing new, and we should not pretend otherwise.

Second, musical genres don’t go to college; people go to college. Far from mere semantics, the idea that it is not “music” but rather people who embark on the journey of a college education is key to this discussion. At colleges and universities coast to coast, people study myriad topics: art history, literature, music, physics, math, sociology, engineering, foodways, biology, gender theory, business, etc. Many years ago, music departments enshrined a particular cultural hierarchy that declared only some musics worthy of study. During that era, music appreciation classes often centered on the apparent brilliance of western art music (“Ah, Bach…”) and those classes are a vivid memory for many former students. But that attitude—that only some musics were worthy of study—is one that many music departments have left in the past for all sorts of excellent reasons, including the fact that such an approach focused on an unacceptably narrow slice of music, limited by racial, regional, gender, and class-based identities. And in the face of students eager to learn and study, is the bluegrass community really willing to say that bluegrass is not worthy of study?

Third, a university education offers unparalleled opportunities for students, not limited to job placement. Lehman proposes that “Colleges essentially have two basic functions: to inform the past and to prepare workers for the future.” This assertion misses, in my opinion, the most central functions of a university on both counts. The past is just that–an abstraction of a time period that has passed, and not anything that can be “informed.” And preparing people to work is too narrow an interpretation. In contrast, consider the following:

A university serves as a nexus for knowledge and creative output (all the books in the library, recordings in the archives, field interviews in the oral history collections, and expertise of its faculty). The opportunity to dive into those resources (an archive full of field recordings, oral interviews, and rare singles!), and to do so in the company of peers under the guidance of scholars and librarians, is itself of immense value.

A university is a crucible where the next generations’ knowledge of science, medicine, humanities, and arts creativity are forged, where ideas take form, where books are written. Students take part in that knowledge formation. If one wants to understand the relationships between bluegrass and whiteness, working-class culture, the sounds and structures of the music that express that culture, and southern, rural America, university scholars are bringing their expertise and—yes—real-life ethnographic experiences to bear in classroom lectures and in new books and articles that are worth reading and re-reading under the tutelage of scholars, as Jordan Laney and others have pointed out in response to Lehmann’s article.

A university offers students an education. Note that an education is very different than “job training and placement.” The goals of that education are to develop students’ ability to think critically, to understand and interpret the world around them, to make sense of their place within that context, and to contribute original ideas to the world in meaningful ways. Colleges and universities are set up for students to work with experts, namely the faculty, on a regular and intense basis. In a college program, a team of faculty experts offers guidance; they teach not only how to play an instrument, but also how to write and communicate, how to do research, how to engineer a recording, how to market a band, and so much more. And they incorporate the full range of learning methods appropriate for the music, including oral transmission and aural acquisition. As Dan Boner, director of ETSU’s Bluegrass, Old Time, and Country Music degree program explained in his response to Lehmann’s article, ongoing access to the breadth and depth of faculty expertise is incredibly valuable.

There is, of course, a strong correlation between earning a college degree and finding a satisfying and lucrative career. It happens that many attractive employers seek to hire individuals with the skills and experiences afforded by a college education, and of course, as a result, colleges and universities advertise their job-placement and earnings statistics. But I would suggest that the real take-away for a student is the education itself, an education that students can build on for the rest of their lives, with the proven potential to open doors and raise standards of living for those holding degrees. It is not, directly speaking, job training.

Among the concerns that Lehmann articulates is that bluegrass music will change if it entwines itself in the world of the university. Yes, it likely will. But bluegrass music, as any musical genre, is a living, organic art form that is in a constant state of change and evolution. Monroe and Flatt and Scruggs all sounded different after they heard rock-n-roll; Fred Bartenstein has written persuasively that Josh Graves was likely hired as a response to those different external musical contexts. That was a change in bluegrass. In the late 1960s, young fans shifted the way that they consumed music in response to the social movements of the time, and bluegrass adapted in response. That was a change. Commercial opportunities have appeared at various junctures, whether Flatt and Scruggs on television or Alison Krauss gaining a mainstream country audience. Those moments changed bluegrass.

Even the staunchest traditionalists today who play in bands that sound every bit as close to Monroe circa 1947 as possible are not making music “the same” as Monroe: he was an ambitious progressive who shaped the songs and repertory he borrowed to be his own sound, boldly facing the future (as we hear so clearly with the way his version of “Muleskinner Blues” altered Jimmie Rodgers’s version, and then kept changing it over the years). A band today imitating those performances is working from a position of retrospective nostalgia. So yes, bluegrass will change. But not because “it goes to college.” It will change because it is music, and like the currents of the river, it flows onward through time, continuously carving new paths.

Most important, perhaps, the demographics of the bluegrass audience—and of Americans in general—have changed and are continuing to change. In 1947, when Monroe’s most famous line-up was crafting the classic sound of bluegrass, fewer than 5% of women and 7% of men held college degrees. Those numbers have been climbing steadily, to the point that today nearly six times as many Americans hold a college degree. In other words, the role of college itself has changed since the founding of bluegrass music. If we exclude bluegrass musicians from higher education, we ensnare them in a world of limited opportunity.

Consider that since World War II, advocates of education, governmental policy makers, and others have advocated tirelessly to get first-generation college students from rural America into college for the very reason that a college education affords a person more avenues for success, agency to choose and/or change where one lives, and in general, a leg up in the world. Enormous efforts from the GI Bill to tuition-reimbursement programs have been deployed toward these ends. For many first-generation college students, these opportunities are more than exciting.

Wouldn’t it be much better, therefore, if more colleges and universities recognized and rewarded a wider set of skills and talents from their applicant pool? Wouldn’t it be great if a young bluegrass musician who otherwise would never set foot on a campus were able to leverage bluegrass skills to gain an education and receive a college diploma? And wouldn’t the fan culture around bluegrass music benefit if the diverse population of students at colleges and universities encountered bluegrass in serious, informed, and critically reflective ways as part of their overall education?

Yes, bluegrass should go to college in all respects to take its place in the discourse and education of future generations of thinkers, artists, and leaders.

A version of this post first appeared on Jocelyn Neal’s blog “Reflections on Country and Bluegrass” on July 14, 2017, and is reprinted with permission from the author.

Featured Image credit: 2013 Telluride Bluegrass Festival by Doug Anderson. Some rights reserved via Flickr.

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How a failed suicide affects the brain

The numerous factors that induce someone to think about suicide, the “ideators,” are often different from those who actually attempt suicide, the “attempters.” For example, the traditional risk factors for suicide, such as depression, hopelessness, many psychiatric disorders, and impulsivity, strongly predict suicide ideation but weakly predict suicide attempts among ideators. Alternatively, a diminished fear of pain, injury, and death can increase one’s probability to attempt suicide and facilitate the progression from suicidal thoughts to suicidal acts.

Out of the approximately 120 successful suicides that occur each day in the United States, 70% are committed by white, mostly middle aged, males. Fifty percent of all successful suicides are achieved using firearms, which are chosen, mostly by males, for their extreme efficacy.

In contrast to the certainty of using a firearm, each year thousands of people deliberately inhale carbon monoxide (CO) in order to end their lives, usually via the exhaust fumes from their own cars while sitting at home in their own garage. For example, out of all of the fatal CO poisonings in Utah between 1996 and 2013, 70% were due to suicides. The incidence of successful CO-induced suicide has actually declined due to strict federal CO emissions standards for motor vehicles following the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the widespread presence of catalytic converters. One recent study examined the CO levels in a standard size garage after 20 minutes. The CO level was 253 PPM for a car without a catalytic converter and 30 PPM for the car equipped with one. Emissions controls on automobiles have thus significantly reduced the success rates of CO related suicides. Subsequently, although thousands of people every year attempt suicide by this widely familiar method, a greater percentage of them survive the attempt.

When the blood becomes enriched with CO it is much less capable of transporting adequate amounts of oxygen to the tissues of the body. Neurons in the brain are particularly vulnerable to hypoxia due to their constant high demand for oxygen. The hypoxia kills neurons when their energy demands, primarily for the production of the energy molecule ATP, outpace the ability of the blood to provide sufficient oxygen. When the oxygen supply via the blood falls below a critical level, energy failure occurs. The level of ATP can decline by 90% in less than five minutes! At this point, everything critical for normal neuronal function begins to fail and neurons rapidly begin to die. Interestingly, not all neurons are equally vulnerable to the consequences of the hypoxia. This may explain the consistent appearance of specific cognitive and motor symptoms.

In contrast to the certainty of using a firearm, each year thousands of people deliberately inhale carbon monoxide (CO) in order to end their lives

Following a failed suicide attempt, acute CO poisoning causes serious mental health problems due to the death of neurons in brain regions that are particularly vulnerable to hypoxia, such as the hippocampus, a brain structure that is critical for learning and memory abilities, and the basal ganglia, a brain region that controls normal movement. During the first few days and weeks after the failed attempt, the initial symptoms include headaches, dizziness, fainting with loss of consciousness and, following severe poisoning, seizures. Later, after many weeks, survivors often report significant learning and memory impairments, movement disorders that resemble Parkinson’s disease, depression, psychosis, and even symptoms of dementia. The degree and number of neurological symptoms depends upon the extent and location of the most severe oxygen deprivation inside the brain as well as the ability of some neurons to defend themselves from the consequences of the hypoxia.

Two therapies are often used for these patients. The first is hyperbaric oxygen therapy. This method remains somewhat controversial; some reports suggest that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can enhance recovery, while other reports suggest that hyperbaric oxygen therapy can induce greater brain injury. The second approach to therapy involves administration of a drug that is commonly given to patients with Alzheimer’s disease, donepezil, marketed under the name, Aricept. Aricept is an inhibitor of the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. The benefits provided by this drug suggest that neurons that release the neurotransmitter acetylcholine were likely injured by the CO poisoning. Aricept enhances the function of this neurotransmitter in the hippocampus and frontal lobes. In addition, Aricept may be able to induce the birth of new neurons, called neurogenesis, within the hippocampus and improve cognitive functioning. This knowledge about the role of acetylcholine neuronal damage, and the potential benefits of Aricept, may lead to the development of better therapies for survivors of CO poisoning related to a failed suicide attempt.

Featured image credit: “Nerve Cell” by ColiN00B. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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The coinage of the Roman Emperor Nerva (AD 96-98)

On 18 September, in AD 96, the 65 year-old senator, Nerva, became emperor of Rome (Figure 1). His predecessor, Domitian, was assassinated in the culmination of a palace conspiracy; there is no evidence that Nerva had anything to do with the plot. The Senate officially damned Domitian’s memory, erasing his name from public monuments and tearing down his statues and portraits. Rome’s senatorial aristocracy bitterly resented him on account of his autocratic governance and the excessive treason trials and executions that befell senators towards the end of his reign.

Figure 1. Portrait head of Nerva (Image Courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California).

Nerva had no children and ruled for only sixteen months until his death on 27 January AD 98. As historical sources attest, there was palpable tension with the armed forces owing to their affections for Domitian and thirst for vengeance. In the summer of AD 97, the imperial bodyguard surrounded Nerva in his palace and forced him to hand over the conspirators in Domitian’s assassination for punishment. In the fall of that year, Nerva adopted the popular military general, Trajan (ruled AD 98-117) as his son and successor, evidently easing tensions and the threat of civil war. Nerva’s reign is thus often characterized as mere interlude in history, between the Flavian Dynasty and the remarkable reign of Trajan, during which the empire reached its greatest geographical extent, and public building, art, and literature flourished. In most history and art history textbooks, Nerva is given at best a cursory treatment.

Roman authors no doubt convey accurately the tensions between Nerva’s administration and the army, but perhaps it is unfair to characterize Nerva’s rule as a simple interlude and to suggest that he was a relatively weak and ineffective emperor based on these circumstances. The military tensions have prompted scholars to read anxiety and weakness into the coinage, the best source of visual art in Nerva’s reign since his brief rule left little time for public building encrusted with relief sculpture. Images of Victory on Nerva’s coinage are interpreted by scholars as reflective of the emperor’s desperation to capitalize on military victories, or to flatter the army, even though Victory appears only on rare denominations, quinarii, and was the standard image to adorn those coins since the reign of Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) (Figure 2). Historians often read Peace, seated and holding a branch and scepter, on Nerva’s coinage as hope for stability (Figure 3). A closer look indicates, however, that Peace was a standard image on the imperial coinage when a new emperor took power, even when transitions of power were relatively peaceful (e.g., from Vespasian to Titus, or Nerva to Trajan). Indeed, much of Nerva’s coinage program is traditional when viewed in terms of precedents, and later uses, and need not be read as the appeals or aspirations of an impotent and pleading ruler.

 

Figure 2. Gold aureus of Nerva from January, AD 97. The obverse depicts a portrait of Nerva with his titles; the reverse depicts Victoria (Victory) seated left on a throne, holding a wreath in her right hand and a palm branch in her left. She is labeled VICTORIA AVGVST(I), “Victory of the Emperor.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

 

Figure 3. Bronze sestertius of Nerva from September, AD 96. The obverse depicts a portrait of Nerva with his titles; the reverse depicts Pax (Peace) seated left on a throne, holding an olive branch with her right hand and a scepter in her left. She is labeled PAX AVG(VSTI), “Peace of the Emperor.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

 

The search for the “character” of an emperor in the visual arts is a specious exercise and has sometimes misdirected art historical study. For instance, some art historians have sought to see cruelty and wickedness in the portraits of Caligula and the empress Julia Domna. Political art operated differently than historical texts that faulted certain imperial figures only after their deaths to magnify the virtues of living emperors. Political art would have glorified the living emperor just as any contemporary literature would also have aggrandized him. Additionally, coinage and other state-sanctioned art was probably not produced at the instigation of the emperor to make appeals for support. The Senate and Roman People frequently dedicated monuments, such as arches, to the emperor. Like poetry, panegyric, and honorific monuments that glorified the emperor, one may read coin imagery as praise for the emperor and as communicating expectations of his rule.

In the reign of Nerva, there is a strong correspondence between contemporary text and the coinage. For example, personifications of Fairness and Justice mirror the Martial’s and Frontinus’s praise of these qualities in Nerva (Figures 4 and 5). A common image on each of Nerva’s denominations is Liberty, who holds the cap of a freed slave and a rod (Figure 6). The coins visualize the pronounced rhetoric of liberty espoused by writers such as Tacitus, Martial, and Pliny in the age of Nerva and Trajan.

 

Figure 4. Gold aureus of Nerva from January, AD 97. The obverse depicts a portrait of Nerva with his titles; the reverse depicts Aequitas (Fairness) standing towards the left, holding scales in her right hand and cradling a cornucopia with her left. She is labeled AEQVITAS AVGVST(I), “Fairness of the Emperor.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

 

 

Figure 5. Silver denarius of Nerva from January, AD 97. The obverse depicts a portrait of Nerva with his titles; the reverse depicts Iustitia (Justice) seated right on a throne, holding a scepter in her right hand and an olive branch in her left. She is labeled IVSTITIA AVGVST(I), “Justice of the Emperor.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

 

 

Figure 6. Bronze sestertius of Nerva from January, AD 97. The obverse depicts a portrait of Nerva with his titles; the reverse depicts Libertas (Liberty) standing towards the left, holding the cap of a freed slave in her right hand and a rod in her left. She is labeled LIBERTAS PVBLICA, “Public Liberty.” © Trustees of the British Museum.

 

Tacitus wrote that it was in Nerva’s reign that imperial rule was first joined with liberty. The Senate and Roman People also erected an inscription dedicated to Liberty on the occasion of Nerva’s accession. The rhetoric of liberty, which pervaded literature in the decades after the assassination of Domitian, promoted the new age in which Rome would be ruled by evenhanded emperors such as Nerva and Trajan.

The coinage of Nerva does not communicate, as has been asserted, the realities of Nerva’s vulnerable position and the anxieties of his reign, but instead projected the image of a progressive and capable ruler who was the opposite of Domitian, exercising the qualities of fairness, justice, and liberty. The messages on the coinage were not concocted at the emperor’s instruction to appeal for support, but instead visualized the written and spoken rhetoric in the weeks and months after Nerva assumed power and illustrated the expectation that he would rule differently than his predecessor.

Viewed in this light, and without judgement of historical hindsight, what coins from Nerva’s reign depict is the contemporary praise directed at his administration in the aftermath of Domitian’s assassination. Other coins celebrate new policies and reforms for which Nerva would have been praised, as they corrected Domitian’s abuses and perceived maladministration. When Nerva was alive and wielding power, his public image was that of a progressive reformer, the antidote of hated and demonized predecessor; it was not the image of a desperate ruler in an anxious historical interlude.

Headline image credit: Photo of the Tabula Traiana plaque that is found in the Iron Gate gorge of the Danube on the Serbian coast. Was erected to commemorate the defeat of the Dacian kings by the Romans by Rlichtefeld. CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .

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The independence of Anne Bradstreet

When the eighteen year old Anne Bradstreet first arrived in the New World in 1630, she confessed that “her heart rose.” She had made the voyage on the Arbella from England to Salem, Massachusetts with her extended family as part of the Puritan “Errand into the Wilderness.” But now, instead of a life of comfort and considerable luxury on the Earl of Lincoln’s estate, where her father had been Manager and her husband had been his assistant, she had to contend with muddy paths instead of streets and a cramped house with no privacy. No longer could Anne spend leisurely hours reading such classic authors as Virgil, Homer, and Ovid as well as more contemporary writers like Spenser, Sidney, and Milton in the Earl’s grand library; instead, she had a household to manage for her extended family, which would later include the eight children born to her and Simon Bradstreet in rapid succession. However, in spite of her demanding domestic responsibilities, Anne Bradstreet somehow managed to find the time to produce a collection of poems that her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, arranged for publication as The Tenth Muse in London in 1650 when Bradstreet was thirty eight years old.

Anne Bradstreet’s early work was often slavishly imitative, focusing on public and political issues that preoccupied her male peers; however, as she grew more confident, she became committed to writing about her own experiences. “Meditations Divine and Morall” (1664) underscores this powerful shift in in the focus of Anne Bradstreet’s work; as she explains to her son Simon, this volume consists of “nothing but myne owne.” This declaration of independence makes it clear that Bradstreet is no longer relying on the literary authority of the male poets who had preceded her. Instead, Bradstreet will write of her own experiences as a daughter, wife, and mother— as a woman in seventeenth-century New England.

Gravestone of Anne Bradstreet in North Andover, Massachusetts by Sarnold17. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The sonnet, “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” boldly expresses Anne Bradstreet’s intimate feelings as a wife for her husband which many Puritans would have seen as heretical:

If ever two were one, then surely we


If ever man were lov’d by wife, then thee;


If ever wife was happy in a man


Compare with me ye women if you can.

And “Before the Birth of One of Her Children” gives voice to her concerns as a mother for her children’s welfare, should she die in childbirth:

Look to my little babes, my dear remains.


And if thou love thyself, or loved’t me,


These o protect from step Dames injury.

Anne Bradstreet’s journey from deferring to traditional male social, religious and poetic authorities to writing poems that foreground her experience as a woman in the domestic sphere is representative of the trajectory of many American women writers who followed her. By resisting the prevailing ethos of her time which included very little support for women writers, Bradstreet paved the way for poets like Emily Dickinson in the 19th century and Adrienne Rich in the 20th. Bradstreet’s resolution to write from her personal experience as a woman is the wellspring of her most memorable poetry—poetry which has emphatically established her place in American literature.

Featured image credit: Title page of The Tenth Muse, a 1650 collection of poems and writings by Anne Bradstreet by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Introducing Jessica Barbour, the one behind the OUP Summer Choir Session

This year New York Oxford University Press office started a Summer OUP Choir Session! Originally, it began as a holiday initiative in the Winter of 2014–ending with a spectacular performance at the holiday party. The purpose of the Summer session was to bring employees together for an exciting singing or listening session in the lobby conference room during lunch every two weeks.

Here is an interview with Jessica Barbour, the one who spearheads both the Holiday Choir and Summer Choir Session.

Please describe a bit of yourself. How long have you been with OUP? What Department do you work in?

I’ve been at OUP since September 2010, nearly 7 years ago. I started in the Reference department, and now work as the senior sales data analyst for the Institutional Sales department.

What brought you to OUP? Favorite moment during your time in OUP? I was hired at OUP the fall after I graduated with my master’s degree in voice performance. 

I got a job as an editorial assistant on Grove Music Online, where my specific academic background actually came in handy.

What motivated you to start the OUP Summer Choir Session? 

In 2014 I started the OUP Holiday Choir in conjunction with the social committee, because I knew a handful of people who loved singing in choirs, and because I thought it could be a nice thing to incorporate into the holiday party. We’ve done that for three years now, and it’s been very fun—two of our choristers unofficially named the group The Dulcet Tomes last year, if that gives you a sense of the personality of that group—but other people have come to me saying that they love singing but don’t enjoy performing, especially in front of their peers. So I wanted to form another choir that meets in the summer and doesn’t culminate in a performance; we’re just there to get together, have fun, release a little stress, and make music. It’s been great.

Growing up were you in a choir? 

Growing up in Syracuse, New York, I was in a lot of choirs! I was in two choirs in elementary school, the general chorus and the select chorus that you needed to audition for called the Notable Singers. (Har har.) I was also in an audition-only choir outside of school called the Syracuse Children’s Chorus, whose founder, Barbara Tagg, wrote a book for OUP recently called Before the Singing. And I sang in choirs at my church.

What is your favorite type of music?  

I love all kinds of music. My household soundtrack growing up was all Beatles, musical theater, classical music, and Tom Lehrer. My taste has expanded as I’ve gotten older; recently I’ve been playing a lot of folk and writing podcast theme songs, one of which Anna-Lise Santella, the Senior Editor for Grove Music Online, called “vaguely unhinged Victoriana”. Not sure that’s strictly a musical type yet, though.

What is your favorite piece of musical work and why? 

It would be completely impossible to pick a favorite musical work, but I will say that my favorite choral work is A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten. (My favorite movement from it is Balulalow, with its major-minor fluctuations, compound meter, and the soprano solo soaring over the harp and the choir; it’s deceptively complex and beautiful.)

Do you play any instruments? 

If yes, which ones? I play violin, and bring it to the fortnightly acoustic group sessions at OUP. (There’s a lot of music here!) I also play the guitar and piano, badly, and recently got a mandolin that I’m slowly getting the hang of.

What is your favorite part about being in a choir? 

There is an incredible feeling when a group of people work together towards a common that’s dependent on listening to each other and collaboration. I get a rush when I sing music I love, and when I’m doing it with more voices, whether 2, 12, or 50, that feeling is only amplified.

What voice part are you? 

I’m a soprano. In choirs I like singing soprano II because you get to harmonize.

What do you hope to take away from the OUP Summer Choir Session? Or what do you hope others take away from this?

I hope that the choir gives us all a creative outlet in a relaxing, non-judgmental, collaborative space. We all need that sometimes. It’s good for the soul, or at least for the lungs.

https://blog.oup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Jubilate-Deo-summer-choir.mp3

Jessica Barbour is a Senior Sales & Data Analyst in the New York office of Oxford University Press.

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Aesthetics and politics: Donald Trump’s idea of art and beauty

President Donald Trump’s description of Confederate statues as “beautiful” merely mirrors his previously-mentioned objects of aesthetic preference. Before the statues, there was the “beautiful wall,” an oddly-conceived barrier prospectively bedecked with a “beautiful door.” Still earlier, in a more expressly deconstructive vein, and when the erection of Trump Tower had required prior demolition of the Bonwit Teller building in Manhattan in 1980, Mr. Trump’s artful response was to jackhammer its widely-prized art relief into dust.

For Donald Trump, this treasure, that had been singled out for rescue by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the loss was lamented, among others, by Ashton Hawkins, then Vice-President of the Met’s Board of Trustees) was just not sufficiently beautiful to preserve.

But it’s not just about walls and buildings. Mr. Trump’s most frequent references to beauty have had to do with women. By themselves, of course, such references are not intrinsically wrong or objectionable. Rather, the problem has been (1) the stunning inappropriateness and choice of words of the pertinent occasion – most recently, his plainly obtuse remark to Madame Brigitte Trogneux, French president Emmanuel Macron’s wife, that she is “in great shape” or, (2) the implicit reciprocal of all such compliments. This “flip-side” reciprocity, which has not always remained diplomatically implicit (e.g., Trump’s disparaging comments about Carly Fiorina, during the presidential debates) is that women who are not beautiful, according to Mr. Trump, are obviously less worthy.

Other things “beautiful” to Donald Trump include gold-plated toilet accessories, and the “great people” attending his “rallies.” Here, the cheerfully rancorous festivities invariably begin with the president acknowledging the noteworthy beauty of his faithful listeners. The point for participants, however, and certainly the only point, is to revel in the contrived warmth of a thoroughly reassuring mass.

This Trump convened gathering offers uniquely special comfort to each and every chanting member. It does this by renouncing all bewildering complexities of science or intellect, thereby reducing any hard-to-fathom national or personal difficulties to a far more manageable list of “enemies.” Why, after all, trouble oneself with sorely difficult analytic tasks if a readily available alternative is simply to identify “those responsible.”

 Donald Trump’s steeply corrupted ideas of beauty could lead us not toward any reasonable expressions of truth.

Moreover, if there are hideous things on this fractured planet that are distressingly lacking in beauty, according to Donald J. Trump and his still-adoring fans, science and intellect would be at the very top of this second list.

“Intellect rots the brain,” shrieked Joseph Goebbels to fevered Nazi rallies in Nuremberg in 1935. With little doubt, such earlier “insights” would resonate deeply with today’s Trump followers, and with their leader’s curious idea of beauty.

Nonetheless, this persistently blatant lack of meaningful content had literally nothing to do with its reception by the mass, which was unerringly enthusiastic and grateful. Perhaps the best way to gain any genuine insight into this historical disjunction between truth and “beauty” is to recall or revisit Charlie Chaplin’s closing speech in The Great Dictator. It remains a brilliantly timeless parody of seemingly profound oratory.

More than anything else, Donald Trump and his steadfast rally adherents loath anything cerebral or intellectual; no one even marginally respects the promisingly great beauty of serious ideas. Within this demeaning “crowd” (a term once favored over “mass” by the 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard), each member tremulously holds all notions of “mind” at a safe distance, that is, in pleasingly stark contempt.

Beauty, in the final analysis, must lie within an authentically valued sphere of unfettered contemplation and reflection. Always, it should conduct us gracefully into a world of harmony-generating thoughts, and not toward hideously primal screams of hatred or howls of execration. Left embedded in presidential power, Donald Trump’s steeply corrupted ideas of beauty could lead us not toward any reasonable expressions of truth, but rather to a conspicuously ugly future of bonfires, book burnings, and perpetual conflict.

Surely we are much better than any such narrowly incendiary visions.

Featured image credit: National Statuary Hall by USCapitol. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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