environmental links to autism, cancer, etc.?

I recently posted the article below to Facebook and got a few comments from friends. One called the article pure speculation. Another pointed out the danger of these types of articles to parents desperate to find a "cure" and improve the lives of their children with autism -- his parents tried chelation therapy on his brother, and it made things "10x worse". Here is how I responded to the comments that were posted, and more about my mindset and motives for sharing the article.

O, your family has endured so much. Over the years, I've been sad each time I hear about what's happening with your brother and the toll it takes on all of you. I can't begin to imagine what it has done to each of you.

D, I don't think pure speculation makes sense. I also don't think the tone of Kristof's article is about pure speculation. He's citing mainstream scientific work and makes a point of calling out that we just don't know enough yet to draw a conclusion. He's doing what he believes is his duty as a journalist, asking questions in the interest of the public. Lastly, he's not some fringe crackpot -- he's a responsible journalist who also happens to have won two Pulitzer prizes.

So where does this leave us? I've seen the FDA and other federal agencies fail to acknowledge the growing number of studies proving that phthalates, organic solvents, Bisphenol-A, etc. are hormone disruptors. Do these chemicals cause autism? Who knows? But when I consider that each study is looking at a chemical in isolation, and not evaluating the aggregate effect of all of the chemicals to which we're exposed, I cringe. And every so often, I cheer, as I did when public pressure forced the FDA to pay attention to BPA and other substances that are finally being acknowledged for making epigenetic changes that lead to cancer.

Meanwhile, like Nicholas Kristof, I've adopted the precautionary principle. That's for a few reasons. The biggest is my own health history (kidney cancer at 28 with no genetic factors in play -- as confirmed by recent tests). The others boil down to:

1. My skepticism about whether government interests beholden to lobbyists are really going to be neutral and act in the best interest of the public (DDT, smoking, and Agent Orange come to mind) -- which is why I tend to look at the EU's response to many of these policy questions
2. Luck in having the income level to afford to spend more (because all of this costs more)
3. My own tendency to choose the 'safer' option, rather than the riskier one.

For me, the precautionary principle means that:

• I eat on and drink out of glass/ceramic/ porcelain/ stainless steel, when possible. (And not just because it's phthalate-free, but because it's much greener than plastic or styrofoam.)
• I limit my exposure, when possible, to heavy metals [insert Beavis and Butthead joke here] because mercury and other heavy metals are known neurotoxins and I really don't need the mercury exposure that happens via conventional mascara and certain fish.
• I've eliminated most shampoos, lotions, and cosmetics that are chock-full of the nasties (phthalates, parabens, mercury, lead, fragrances). (The EU has much more stringent labeling requirements and has already banned most of these substances in cosmetics and requires much more stringent labeling than the US does.)
• I eat organic and local, when possible. I know my farmer and his family and trust the produce he delivers via my CSA share. I drink organic milk and eat organic meat whenever it's an option. Part of it is because there might be pesticide residues in the food. Part of it is because organic is much better for the environment and the people growing it than petrochemical-fertilized-and-transported food. And part of it is because I think the taste, quality, and freshness are better.
• I'll choose organic or second-hand clothes for my children (when I eventually have them), because they don't need to be exposed to the hormone disruptors and neurotoxins present in the flame retardants that conventional new baby and kid's clothes sold in the US have on them. (The EU has banned the flame retardants on kid's clothing, in mattresses, etc.)
• I'll vaccinate my kids, but will spread out those vaccinations as much as possible and probably postpone vaccines like Hep B until the children are older (it is given to every infant these days a few days after birth), because the probability of an infant contracting Hep B is so unlikely that it just doesn't make sense.

Op-Ed Columnist: Do Toxins Cause Autism?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: February 24, 2010

Autism was first identified in 1943 in an obscure medical journal. Since then it has become a frighteningly common affliction, with the Centers for Disease Control reporting recently that autism disorders now affect almost 1 percent of children.

Over recent decades, other development disorders also appear to have proliferated, along with certain cancers in children and adults. Why? No one knows for certain. And despite their financial and human cost, they presumably won’t be discussed much at Thursday’s White House summit on health care.

Yet they constitute a huge national health burden, and suspicions are growing that one culprit may be chemicals in the environment. An article in a forthcoming issue of a peer-reviewed medical journal, Current Opinion in Pediatrics, just posted online, makes this explicit.

The article cites “historically important, proof-of-concept studies that specifically link autism to environmental exposures experienced prenatally.” It adds that the “likelihood is high” that many chemicals “have potential to cause injury to the developing brain and to produce neurodevelopmental disorders.”

The author is not a granola-munching crank but Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, professor of pediatrics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and chairman of the school’s department of preventive medicine. While his article is full of cautionary language, Dr. Landrigan told me that he is increasingly confident that autism and other ailments are, in part, the result of the impact of environmental chemicals on the brain as it is being formed.

“The crux of this is brain development,” he said. “If babies are exposed in the womb or shortly after birth to chemicals that interfere with brain development, the consequences last a lifetime.”

Concern about toxins in the environment used to be a fringe view. But alarm has moved into the medical mainstream. Toxicologists, endocrinologists and oncologists seem to be the most concerned.

One uncertainty is to what extent the reported increases in autism simply reflect a more common diagnosis of what might previously have been called mental retardation. There are genetic components to autism (identical twins are more likely to share autism than fraternal twins), but genetics explains only about one-quarter of autism cases.

Suspicions of toxins arise partly because studies have found that disproportionate shares of children develop autism after they are exposed in the womb to medications such as thalidomide (a sedative), misoprostol (ulcer medicine) and valproic acid (anticonvulsant). Of children born to women who took valproic acid early in pregnancy, 11 percent were autistic. In each case, fetuses seem most vulnerable to these drugs in the first trimester of pregnancy, sometimes just a few weeks after conception.

So as we try to improve our health care, it’s also prudent to curb the risks from the chemicals that envelop us. Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is drafting much-needed legislation that would strengthen the Toxic Substances Control Act. It is moving ahead despite his own recent cancer diagnosis, and it can be considered as an element of health reform. Senator Lautenberg says that under existing law, of 80,000 chemicals registered in the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has required safety testing of only 200. “Our children have become test subjects,” he noted.

One peer-reviewed study published this year in Environmental Health Perspectives gave a hint of the risks. Researchers measured the levels of suspect chemicals called phthalates in the urine of pregnant women. Among women with higher levels of certain phthalates (those commonly found in fragrances, shampoos, cosmetics and nail polishes), their children years later were more likely to display disruptive behavior.

Frankly, these are difficult issues for journalists to write about. Evidence is technical, fragmentary and conflicting, and there’s a danger of sensationalizing risks. Publicity about fears that vaccinations cause autism — a theory that has now been discredited — perhaps had the catastrophic consequence of lowering vaccination rates in America.

On the other hand, in the case of great health dangers of modern times — mercury, lead, tobacco, asbestos — journalists were too slow to blow the whistle. In public health, we in the press have more often been lap dogs than watchdogs.

At a time when many Americans still use plastic containers to microwave food, in ways that make toxicologists blanch, we need accelerated research, regulation and consumer protection.

“There are diseases that are increasing in the population that we have no known cause for,” said Alan M. Goldberg, a professor of toxicology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “Breast cancer, prostate cancer, autism are three examples. The potential is for these diseases to be on the rise because of chemicals in the environment.”

The precautionary principle suggests that we should be wary of personal products like fragrances unless they are marked phthalate-free. And it makes sense — particularly for children and pregnant women — to avoid most plastics marked at the bottom as 3, 6 and 7 because they are the ones associated with potentially harmful toxins.

feeling beautiful, inside and out

I was talking to some friends the other day about their pregnancies. One is having a boy. When she said that she was thrilled to be having a boy, I probed her as to why. Her answer: "It's easier to be a man in this culture than it is to be a woman." I agreed, and added that it's easier to be a man in pretty much every culture on this planet.

Another friend pointed out that there's something quite feminist about raising a compassionate son. I pondered that and have to say that I also agree with her viewpoint. Frankly, when I become a parent, I hope that my first child will be a boy, simply because (in general) they tend to internalize things less. The way I see it -- if I'm going to have a girl, I would love to have some parenting experience under my belt before foisting myself (and my psyche) on my daughter.

When I think back on the messages about body image I got as a girl and adult, my mother's own self-loathing (of her body) is more and more obvious, and I'm very sad for her. I have to believe that she said and did what she did because she loved me and hoped to shield me from some of the issues she had dealt with. But at the end of the day, a mother's voice is quite powerful and her negative messages about weight and "ideal" beauty colored my sense of self-worth in very ugly ways. The ensuing knots in my psyche took years to undo (with the help of several therapists, lovers, and friends), and are something I will always have to consciously work to dispel. Fortunately, I've finally learned how to move through life without craving approval and acceptance from authority figures and loved ones.

It's something I still struggle with, but that I am feeling more optimistic about as I move toward parenthood. I have to hope that when I'm a mom (to a boy or a girl), I'll be like Minnesota Matron. Her essay below helped me reframe my thoughts and feel a great deal more capable of raising kids who are healthy inside and out and who have a very positive sense of self.

Is it Really Getting Better Folks? (by Minnesota Matron)
Friday, February 19, 2010

My, my, my. . . the Matron read the Kevin Smith comments with a HIGH degree of interest. She chortled at Mrs. G’s temporary move from Switzerland to . . . well, at least Ireland.

But the outright vilification of flesh gave the Matron pause. Why? She’s thinking of our daughters. Yes, yes, the boys –and she has two of them—feel pressure to adhere to cultural ideals, yes, indeed. But she’s here to argue that there’s a unique condemnation of flesh in females. Is there any male counterpoint to Oprah’s battle of the bulge? Starr Williams? Ricki Lake? She could go on and on and on. For every Jared, there’s a Jenny Craig, Valerie Bertinelli, Kirstey Alley and every celebrity who has ever given birth. The Matron would love to take every “how she got her body back after baby” article to kerosene and torch. That would be one big bonfire. She’d toss in a few pages on Jennifer Aniston’s abs, just to make that flame burn brighter.

Every few days, she’s reminded of how cellular these issues are to women, how this deep-tissue condemnation of female flesh is being passed along to our daughters. You see, the Matron has a good friend – a rail-thin woman who, not unlike the Matron, works toward that condition--- who cannot get her daughter to be thin enough. The daughter is not fat. Not thin. She is firmly in the middle, a 12 year old with new breasts, hips, and a little bit of tummy. The Matron’s friend, Jay we’ll say, is routinely saying things like this:

“I’m taking Kay for a walk tonight to make sure she burns some calories.”

“Do you pack carbs for Scarlett's lunch? I’m just leaving carbs out of Kay’s diet unless she asks for something like a cookie.”

“I know, I know, I’m worried about the weight. But it’s so much easier to be thin. Your life as a woman is easier.” (True)

“Kay? Do you really need to eat a whole hamburger or is half okay?”

“Girls? Can we skip a snack after school and save our appetites for dinner?”

The Matron is not condemning Jay but putting her on a spectrum, a spectrum in which the Matron herself, survivor of an eating disorder, is firmly situated. With three spindly young ones, the Matron hasn’t (yet) navigated the land of ‘watch what you eat.’ But she sees plenty of mothers, not just Jay, fretting about their daughters’ physiques.

Last week, Jay’s daughter, Kay, said this to Scarlett. The Matron overheard from her secret spot out in the open two feet away from the kitchen table:

Kay: “Scarlett, let’s go on a cleansing diet next week. No carbs, no wheat, no diary, no meat, no sugar. What do you think?”

Scarlett: “Sounds good! We can get healthy just like our Moms!”

Oh darlings. It is a little more complicated. Please don't emulate your mothers.

Move beyond us.

What are your wars and/or wishes with a child's weight?

Minnesota Matron is a regular WC contributor. You can read more of her here.

loving the fates

I'm not a spiritual person and I don't put much credence in fate. But I do believe that some loves are simply meant to be.

Modern Love: Signs, Wonders and Fates Fulfilled
By STEPHANIE SALDANA
Published: February 20, 2010

THE first time I saw Frédéric, he was wearing a long monastic habit and carrying a battered teapot. “Would you like some tea?” he asked in English tinged with a French accent.

When I said “yes,” he smiled and lifted the teapot high, tipping it slightly so the tea poured in a long, steaming arc. The man clearly poured a lot of tea.

At 27, I had just arrived in Syria on a yearlong fellowship to study the Prophet Jesus in Islam. I was living in a dilapidated room in the Old City of Damascus with decaying wooden doors, a nonflushing toilet and a 73-year-old Armenian neighbor.

This was six years ago, when refugees from the war in Iraq were flooding the city, and my Arabic studies were progressing at a painfully slow pace. The cacophony of Damascus life exhausted me, not to mention the stream of admonitions from my neighbor: “What? Are you wearing that outside the house? People can see your legs! What? You’re from Texas? Do you know George Bush? Ha! Ha!”

By the end of each week, I was ready to escape to the desert.

The monastery of Deir Mar Musa is perched atop a mountain, and it can be reached only by climbing 350 stairs. The monastery had been built into the cliff some 1,500 years before, and the building occupies a space that appears to be nestled exactly between earth and sky. Soon I was visiting the monastery almost every weekend. Whenever I arrived in the courtyard, that young French novice monk would appear, asking me if I would like some tea.

I soon learned that Frédéric was in his third and final year of novitiate, having arrived on a journey through the Middle East several years before and more or less staying put. In that time he had come to look exactly as one might imagine a desert monk to look. He possessed a mane of wild curly hair, the requisite leather belt and sandals, and hands often swollen from beekeeping.

Beyond offering and accepting tea, he and I didn’t speak much. He seemed too otherworldly for me, and I had just had my heart broken by a man in Boston, leaving me suspicious of men in general, even novice monks.

We became friends only when I decided to become a nun.

Two months after I arrived in Damascus, I left the city for the monastery to undergo the monthlong Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. I spent weeks in silence. I prayed. In my afternoons on top of desert mountains, I wrestled with a difficult family past, a history of depression and the feeling of helplessness I experienced when confronting the chaos of a region I had come to love. Finally, I chose to offer up my life to God. In the words of my childhood religion teacher, I decided to “help carry the cross.”

I never knew if God accepted my offer. My body didn’t. A few weeks after I decided to become a nun, I grew so sick that it hurt to breathe. I spent two weeks in my bed in Damascus waiting to die, allowing my 73-year-old neighbor to ply me with 7-Up, which he insisted could cure any malady from flu to cancer. My neighbors referred to my illness as “the sickness of sadness.”

When I finally returned to the monastery, Frédéric found me sitting alone in the chapel, weak and overwhelmed. He approached quietly and sat near me for a long time. Finally, I began to speak about my month in the desert, about my confusion regarding my decision to become a nun. He listened.

Getting up to leave, he said, “I never really thought you should become a nun.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t believe in resurrection.”

He didn’t say it cruelly. In fact, he sounded sad.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s simple, Stephanie. You don’t love your life.”

And I didn’t — not the life I had left behind in America, and not the life I had assumed in Syria. But I wanted to start.

That February in Damascus, I set out in search of beauty. I studied the Koran, pausing to hear the music hidden in the verses. I watched children playing at the Ummayad Mosque at dusk, their bodies glowing golden as the sun set on the marble tiles. I began to speak Arabic, delighting in the cadence of the Syrian dialect. Then, on Thursday nights, I traveled to the monastery, where I prayed, walked in the desert and talked to Frédéric.

In the beginning, we spoke mostly about God. But we recognized something familiar in each other. Before long he was telling me about his childhood in Brittany, about his travels in Canada, the Far East and throughout the Arab world. I told him about sailing the Nile and walking across Spain. One Saturday morning we sang every Beatles song that we could think of while we washed the dishes.

Then we returned to the “life of the angels,” the monastic day that is siphoned off by bells and prayers. That evening after the meditation, when Frédéric picked up his guitar to play the hymn before the Mass, instead of “Alleluia,” he played the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” I knew he was telling me a secret.

There is no graceful way to fall in love with a man already engaged to God. By April, Frédéric and I knew that our relationship had passed the border of friendship. I blamed myself. Was I trying to compete with the divine? Was I temptation embodied, like those evil women who seduce monks in the legends of the Desert Fathers?

For his part, Frédéric tried to make sense of our relationship from the world in which he lived. “Remember, Stephanie: this is a spiritual love. Like the love between St. Francis and St. Clare.”

But Clare never daydreamed about retiring to a farmhouse in the French Alps with Francis and having three children.

“It’s clear we’re meant to be together,” he insisted. “But I’ve already been called to be a monk. Maybe this is God’s way of telling you that you should be a nun, after all.”

But if there was anything I was certain of now, it was that I was not meant to be a nun. For months I had agonized over whether or not I had a calling. Yet from the moment I fell in love with Frédéric, I had never questioned the truth of my emotions. I knew, for the first time in my life, that a calling felt like this.

So I tried to stay away from the monastery. I tried not to influence Frédéric in his choice. I even bought him a new monastic belt, as if donating to his ascetic wardrobe would somehow render me guiltless. He called me most evenings, and though we spoke of little other than studies and prayers, we knew that we did not want a day to pass without hearing from each other.

One afternoon he asked me to teach him the Koran.

That night, I sat down and opened my Koran to the story of the Prophet Joseph. A mystic, a stranger, he was so beautiful that the women who saw him became distracted from their work and cut their hands. His life was suffused with the memory of a night in his childhood when his brothers abandoned him at the bottom of the well. In the moment he lost hope, he received a message telling him the meaning of his life.

I could not tell Frédéric I thought he was beautiful. I could not tell him that sometimes the secrets of our lives do not belong to us but instead are given in the moment we feel abandoned at the bottom of the well.

Instead I sent him the passages on the Prophet Joseph. I added a note, saying that it contained the story of a beautiful young man, exiled far from his family, who dreamed great dreams and through those dreams understood the world.

It was the first love letter I ever sent him.

For the next two months, Frédéric and I courted each other through Koranic love letters. I hoped he would learn about me through the stories I loved.

I waited. I lighted candles, and then felt terrible about asking God for this favor. I tried to study. Most of all I wrestled with the uncomfortable fact that Frédéric was a novice monk who believed deeply in his vocation. But he was also in love with me. It was as though, he told me, he had been given two callings, and then asked to do the impossible: choose between love and love.

He decided to ask for God to send him a sign.

My lasting memory of that summer is of me in a crumbling room in the ancient city, and Frédéric in the desert, both looking out our windows for signs. For a few weeks everything became miraculous: ceramic tiles on old buildings, children holding hands.

On one of my last days in Syria, Frédéric passed me on the stairs of the monastery and handed me a note: “Maybe God finally spoke. I met you.”

I RETURNED to America as planned, and the next month Frédéric traveled to India to make a choice, far from the influence of abbots, monks and me. He wished to be invisible, so he wore his ordinary clothes.

In a crowded train station in Mumbai, he boarded a train to Kerala. Soon the countryside was flying past. He wrote in his notebook: “I can feel a miracle coming.”

The train slowed at the next station, and two elderly nuns boarded, followed by a young Indian girl.

How strange to see them here, he thought. They looked for the number on their ticket. It was next to his seat.

The two nuns approached him. “Are you going to Cochin?” they asked.

“Yes.”

“Then can you please take care of her? She’s traveling alone.”

Frédéric nodded.

It was quiet for a long time. When the train started moving, the girl glanced at him.

“Where are you going?” he asked her.

“I was a novice in a Carmelite monastery for three years,” she said. “And now I’ve decided to leave and return to my family.”

He looked at her in disbelief for a moment, and then smiled.

“Me, too,” he said.

And now we are a family.

Stephanie Saldana lives in Jerusalem. Her memoir about her life in Syria, “The Bread of Angels,” was just published by Doubleday.

quotable

Art is I; science is we. -Claude Bernard (1813 - 1878)

chess "hotties" and social stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport

According to Chess.com,

When Bobby Fischer was in a Japanese jail in 2004 for using a canceled passport, Boris Spassky wrote to President Bush to free Bobby or place him also in jail and supply them with a chess set. Bobby, in a rare display of humor, requested instead the young Russian model Alexandra Kosteniuk, whom they say is as beautiful as the young Elizabeth Taylor.

Alexandra is an International Grandmaster with a Fide rating of 2515.

Kosteniuk’s motto is “beauty and intelligence can go together”.

Kosteniuk is correct, yet female chess players are usually noted for their beauty, and not their brains. Take this contest, where viewers are encouraged to rate the most photogenic women chess players. More than half the women are master level and above, but they are displayed in order of their beauty (as determined by popular vote).

My understanding is that while there is definitely no shortage of professional female chess players, many tournaments and leagues are still separated by gender. This -- despite the fact that chess isn't usually a contact sport. (Yes, I know about chessboxing. I'm not referring to that.)

Finally, in Checkmate: The role of social stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport, a paper in the European Journal of Psychology, Dr. Anne Maass, et. al., pitted male and female players against one another to examine the role of gender in performance outcomes. In the study, women had a 50% performance decline when made aware they were playing male opponents. I find this interesting, but unsurprising, given the social pressures for women not to confront men in most cultures. If women and girls are socialized to be less confrontational (perhaps even submissive in some cultures) in their interactions with men, then it would likely carry over in competitive and other situations. I'm wondering how culture (religion, nationality, etc.) exacerbates this and if any other studies looked more in-depth at performance outcomes in societies where gender social constructs are especially rigid.

Thanks, Jimmy O.

losing my religion for equality

I've got nothing but love for you, Jimmy Carter.

Losing My Religion for Equality
By Jimmy Carter
Nov 2, 2009

Women and girls have been discriminated against for too long in a twisted interpretation of the word of God.

I have been a practicing Christian all my life and a deacon and Bible teacher for many years. My faith is a source of strength and comfort to me, as religious beliefs are to hundreds of millions of people around the world. So my decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention's leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service.

This view that women are somehow inferior to men is not restricted to one religion or belief. Women are prevented from playing a full and equal role in many faiths. Nor, tragically, does its influence stop at the walls of the church, mosque, synagogue or temple. This discrimination, unjustifiably attributed to a Higher Authority, has provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women's equal rights across the world for centuries.

At its most repugnant, the belief that women must be subjugated to the wishes of men excuses slavery, violence, forced prostitution, genital mutilation and national laws that omit rape as a crime. But it also costs many millions of girls and women control over their own bodies and lives, and continues to deny them fair access to education, health, employment and influence within their own communities.

The impact of these religious beliefs touches every aspect of our lives. They help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met.

In some Islamic nations, women are restricted in their movements, punished for permitting the exposure of an arm or ankle, deprived of education, prohibited from driving a car or competing with men for a job. If a woman is raped, she is often most severely punished as the guilty party in the crime.

The same discriminatory thinking lies behind the continuing gender gap in pay and why there are still so few women in office in the West. The root of this prejudice lies deep in our histories, but its impact is felt every day. It is not women and girls alone who suffer. It damages all of us. The evidence shows that investing in women and girls delivers major benefits for society. An educated woman has healthier children. She is more likely to send them to school. She earns more and invests what she earns in her family.

It is simply self-defeating for any community to discriminate against half its population. We need to challenge these self-serving and outdated attitudes and practices - as we are seeing in Iran where women are at the forefront of the battle for democracy and freedom.

I understand, however, why many political leaders can be reluctant about stepping into this minefield. Religion, and tradition, are powerful and sensitive areas to challenge. But my fellow Elders and I, who come from many faiths and backgrounds, no longer need to worry about winning votes or avoiding controversy - and we are deeply committed to challenging injustice wherever we see it.

The Elders are an independent group of eminent global leaders, brought together by former South African president Nelson Mandela, who offer their influence and experience to support peace building, help address major causes of human suffering and promote the shared interests of humanity. We have decided to draw particular attention to the responsibility of religious and traditional leaders in ensuring equality and human rights and have recently published a statement that declares: "The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable."

We are calling on all leaders to challenge and change the harmful teachings and practices, no matter how ingrained, which justify discrimination against women. We ask, in particular, that leaders of all religions have the courage to acknowledge and emphasize the positive messages of dignity and equality that all the world's major faiths share.

The carefully selected verses found in the Holy Scriptures to justify the superiority of men owe more to time and place - and the determination of male leaders to hold onto their influence - than eternal truths. Similar biblical excerpts could be found to support the approval of slavery and the timid acquiescence to oppressive rulers.

I am also familiar with vivid descriptions in the same Scriptures in which women are revered as pre-eminent leaders. During the years of the early Christian church women served as deacons, priests, bishops, apostles, teachers and prophets. It wasn't until the fourth century that dominant Christian leaders, all men, twisted and distorted Holy Scriptures to perpetuate their ascendant positions within the religious hierarchy.

The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views.

choosing sanity

The first time, it felt like I was like cutting off my arm. The second time, it didn't hurt quite as much.

I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with my mother over the past decade. I've come to realize that she's a clinical narcissist, a woman whose hate and sense of entitlement know no bounds. After her Prop 8 shenanigans, I came to the slow, calm realization that I didn't want her in my life, because it was too painful and too poisonous.

Mind: When Parents Are Too Toxic to Tolerate
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
October 20, 2009

You can divorce an abusive spouse. You can call it quits if your lover mistreats you. But what can you do if the source of your misery is your own parent?

Granted, no parent is perfect. And whining about parental failure, real or not, is practically an American pastime that keeps the therapeutic community dutifully employed.

But just as there are ordinary good-enough parents who mysteriously produce a difficult child, there are some decent people who have the misfortune of having a truly toxic parent.

A patient of mine, a lovely woman in her 60s whom I treated for depression, recently asked my advice about how to deal with her aging mother.

“She’s always been extremely abusive of me and my siblings,” she said, as I recall. “Once, on my birthday, she left me a message wishing that I get a disease. Can you believe it?”

Over the years, she had tried to have a relationship with her mother, but the encounters were always painful and upsetting; her mother remained harshly critical and demeaning.

Whether her mother was mentally ill, just plain mean or both was unclear, but there was no question that my patient had decided long ago that the only way to deal with her mother was to avoid her at all costs.

Now that her mother was approaching death, she was torn about yet another effort at reconciliation. “I feel I should try,” my patient told me, “but I know she’ll be awful to me.”

Should she visit and perhaps forgive her mother, or protect herself and live with a sense of guilt, however unjustified? Tough call, and clearly not mine to make.

But it did make me wonder about how therapists deal with adult patients who have toxic parents.

The topic gets little, if any, attention in standard textbooks or in the psychiatric literature, perhaps reflecting the common and mistaken notion that adults, unlike children and the elderly, are not vulnerable to such emotional abuse.

All too often, I think, therapists have a bias to salvage relationships, even those that might be harmful to a patient. Instead, it is crucial to be open-minded and to consider whether maintaining the relationship is really healthy and desirable.

Likewise, the assumption that parents are predisposed to love their children unconditionally and protect them from harm is not universally true. I remember one patient, a man in his mid-20s, who came to me for depression and rock-bottom self-esteem.

It didn’t take long to find out why. He had recently come out as gay to his devoutly religious parents, who responded by disowning him. It gets worse: at a subsequent family dinner, his father took him aside and told him it would have been better if he, rather than his younger brother, had died in a car accident several years earlier.

Though terribly hurt and angry, this young man still hoped he could get his parents to accept his sexuality and asked me to meet with the three of them.

The session did not go well. The parents insisted that his “lifestyle” was a grave sin, incompatible with their deeply held religious beliefs. When I tried to explain that the scientific consensus was that he had no more choice about his sexual orientation than the color of his eyes, they were unmoved. They simply could not accept him as he was.

I was stunned by their implacable hostility and convinced that they were a psychological menace to my patient. As such, I had to do something I have never contemplated before in treatment.

At the next session I suggested that for his psychological well-being he might consider, at least for now, forgoing a relationship with his parents.

I felt this was a drastic measure, akin to amputating a gangrenous limb to save a patient’s life. My patient could not escape all the negative feelings and thoughts about himself that he had internalized from his parents. But at least I could protect him from even more psychological harm.

Easier said than done. He accepted my suggestion with sad resignation, though he did make a few efforts to contact them over the next year. They never responded.

Of course, relationships are rarely all good or bad; even the most abusive parents can sometimes be loving, which is why severing a bond should be a tough, and rare, decision.

Dr. Judith Lewis Herman, a trauma expert who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, said she tried to empower patients to take action to protect themselves without giving direct advice.

“Sometimes we consider a paradoxical intervention and say to a patient, ‘I really admire your loyalty to your parents — even at the expense of failing to protect yourself in any way from harm,’ ” Dr. Herman told me in an interview.

The hope is that patients come to see the psychological cost of a harmful relationship and act to change it.

Eventually, my patient made a full recovery from his depression and started dating, though his parents’ absence in his life was never far from his thoughts.

No wonder. Research on early attachment, both in humans and in nonhuman primates, shows that we are hard-wired for bonding — even to those who aren’t very nice to us.

We also know that although prolonged childhood trauma can be toxic to the brain, adults retain the ability later in life to rewire their brains by new experience, including therapy and psychotropic medication.

For example, prolonged stress can kill cells in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for memory. The good news is that adults are able to grow new neurons in this area in the course of normal development. Also, antidepressants encourage the development of new cells in the hippocampus.

It is no stretch, then, to say that having a toxic parent may be harmful to a child’s brain, let alone his feelings. But that damage need not be written in stone.

Of course, we cannot undo history with therapy. But we can help mend brains and minds by removing or reducing stress.

Sometimes, as drastic as it sounds, that means letting go of a toxic parent.

Dr. Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.

country-bumpkinish sophistication

It's interesting to see one's culture through the lens of another culture. While I make every effort to be polite abroad and at home, I'll admit to taking exception to this characterization.

Letter From London: My American Friends
By GEOFF DYER
Published: December 31, 2009

The first thing I ever heard about Americans was that they all carried guns. Then, when I came across people who’d had direct contact with this ferocious-sounding tribe, I learned that they were actually rather friendly. At university, friends who had traveled in the United States came back with more detailed stories, not just of the friendliness of Americans but also of their hospitality (which, in our quaint English way, was translated into something close to gullibility). When I finally got to America myself, I found that not only were the natives friendly and hospitable, they were also incredibly polite. No one tells you this about Americans, but once you notice it, it becomes one of their defining characteristics, especially when they’re abroad.

This is very strange, or at least it says something strange about the way that perception routinely conforms to the preconceptions it would appear to contradict. The archetypal American abroad is perceived as loud and crass even though actually existing American tourists are distinguished by the way they address bus drivers and bartenders as “sir” and are effusive in their thanks when any small service is rendered. We look on with some confusion at these encounters because, on the one hand, the Americans seem a bit country-bumpkinish, and, on the other, good manners are a form of sophistication.

Granted, these visiting Americans often seem to have loud voices, but on closer examination, it’s a little subtler than that. Americans have no fear of being overheard. Civic life in Britain is predicated on the idea that everyone just about conceals his loathing of everyone else. To open your mouth is to risk offending someone. So we mutter and mumble as if surrounded by informers or, more exactly, as if they are living in our heads. In America the right to free speech is exercised freely and cordially. The basic assumption is that nothing you say will offend anyone else because, deep down, everyone is agreed on the premise that America is better than anyplace else. No such belief animates British life. On the contrary. A couple of years ago a survey indicated that British Muslims were the most fed-up of any in Europe: a sign, paradoxically, of profound assimilation.

If the typical American interaction involves an ostensibly contradictory mixture of the formal (politeness), the casual and the cordial, what happens when one moves beyond the transactional? Like many Europeans, I always feel good about myself in America; I feel appreciated, liked. It took a while to realize that this had nothing to do with me. It was about the people who made me feel this way: it was about charm. Yes, this is the bright secret of life in the United States: Americans are not just friendly and polite — they are also charming. And the most charming thing of all is that it rarely looks like charm. The French put a rather charmless emphasis on charm, are consciously or unconsciously persuaded that it is either part of a display of sophistication or — and it may amount to the same thing — a tool in the service of seduction.

You can see all of this in operation on flights back across the Atlantic from America to Euroland. At first we are under the spell of America. Instead of plunking ourselves down next to someone without a word, we say “Hi.” Maybe even indulge in a little conversation, though this American readiness to chat is counterbalanced by the fear that once we’ve got into a conversation we might not be able to extricate ourselves from it. By the time we’re mid-ocean, a kind of preparatory freeze has set in. As the flight stacks up in the inevitable holding pattern over Heathrow, we begin to revert to our muttering and moaning national selves. But, for a week or so after landing, a form of what might be called Ameristalgia makes us conscious of a rudeness in British life — a coarsening in the texture of daily life — that had hitherto seemed quite normal.

For example. I pay a considerable sum of money to play indoors at Islington Tennis Centre. Eighty percent of the time, the next people to play indicate that your time is up by unzipping their racket covers and strolling on court, without saying a word, without a smile, without acknowledging your existence except as an impediment. In America that would be not just unacceptable but inconceivable.

What is the relevance of this anecdotal trivia to a serious debate about the status of America in the world?

Most of my American friends were depressed and gloomy about the Bush years. Several said that if Bush were re-elected in 2004, they would leave the country. He was and they didn’t. The bottom line is that given the choice, Americans love it rather than leave it. Day to day, American life remained as pleasant as could be expected, even in the midst of considerable economic hardship. There was even a bonding, anti-Bush feeling similar to the kind of consensual opposition that we experienced under Margaret Thatcher. A visiting American artist like Patti Smith found that while the usual torrent of name-­dropping — Rimbaud, Mapplethorpe, Kerouac et al. — got a smattering of appreciative applause, a single gibe about Bush brought the house down.

At the same time, either sterling went up or the dollar went down (I don’t really understand this stuff), and as a consequence, Americans felt poor when they visited our rainy little island. So, for a brief period, we felt richer — planeloads of us went to Mannahatta and bought up everything in sight — and ideologically and ethically superior. Man, that felt good. We had a less blinkered attitude to Israel, didn’t drive big gas-guzzling S.U.V.’s, and if we were chilly of an evening we put on a sweater rather than turning up the heating (or, more accurately, turning off the A.C.). Sure, Blair went along with invading Iraq, but wasn’t that partly because he hoped to restrain the crusading fundamentalism of Bush? Now the dollar is back up — or down, or whichever it is — Europe is no longer expensive, and with the election of Barack Obama, the brief cushion of political superiority has been permanently deflated.

The Obama election was a real kick in the teeth, because although we Britons still seethe with class hatred, we pride ourselves on our highly evolved attitude to the question of race that has consistently undermined the American dream. The slight problem is that racial intermingling in Britain is most conspicuous in the ethnically diverse makeup of the groups of yobs — Asian, black and white — who exercise their antisocial behavioral skills without any kind of discrimination as to whom they happen to be terrorizing. In this regard, as in so many others, we seem to be leading from the bottom up.

Across the board, the grounds for all our feelings of superiority have been steadily whittled away. It turns out that the qualities that make us indubitably British — that is, the ones that we don’t share with or have not imported from America — are no longer conducive to Greatness. They actually add up to a kind of ostrich stoicism that, though it can be traced back to our finest hour (the blitz, the Battle of Britain), manifests itself in a peculiar compromise: a highly stylized willingness to muddle on, to put up with poor quality and high prices (restaurants, trains), to proffer (and accept) apologies not as a prelude to but as a substitute for improvement. We may not enjoy the way things are, but we endure them in a way that seems either quaint or quasi-Soviet to American visitors.

A tiny example. There’s a fashionable gastro pub near where I live. You scrum at the bar, desperate to get the attention of the barman. After a while, he will raise his eyebrows and glare at you. Unschooled in our rough ways, a visitor from America might assume he is being threatened, but actually the glare means that your order can now be taken — as long as you’re quick about it. When a friend from California had managed to order, he was handed the credit card terminal, which showed the amount and the option to add something for service. Americans are predisposed to tip, but my friend was slightly taken aback because, far from being in receipt of anything that might be described as service, it felt as if he had been fighting for a place aboard the last lifeboat on the Titanic. “Welcome to England,” I said.

Geoff Dyer’s latest book is a novel, “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.”

quotable

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need." - Cicero

why old dogs are the best dogs

It's been almost 2 years to the day since my Golden Retriever Casey went to the giant dog park in the sky. Although we've welcomed Ruby, a sassy Flat-Coated Retriever, into our home and hearts, there are still many times when I find myself missing Casey.

The last word: Why old dogs are the best dogs
By Gene Weingarten
Friday, October 17, 2008
They can be eccentric, slow afoot, even grouchy. But dogs live out their final days, says The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten, with a humility and grace we all could learn from.

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk
home was almost … jaunty.

Some years ago, The Washington Post invited readers to come up with a midlife list of goals for an underachiever. The first-runner-up prize went to: “Win the admiration of my dog.”

It’s no big deal to love a dog; they make it so easy for you. They find you brilliant, even if you are a witling. You fascinate them, even if you are as dull as a butter knife. They are fond of you, even if you are a genocidal maniac. Hitler loved his dogs, and they loved him.

Puppies are incomparably cute and incomparably entertaining, and, best of all, they smell exactly like puppies. At middle age, a dog has settled into the knuckleheaded matrix of behavior we find so appealing—his unquestioning loyalty, his irrepressible willingness to please, his infectious happiness. But it is not until a dog gets old that his most important virtues ripen and coalesce. Old dogs can be cloudy-eyed and grouchy, gray of muzzle, graceless of gait, odd of habit, hard of hearing, pimply, wheezy, lazy, and lumpy. But to anyone who has ever known an old dog, these flaws are of little consequence. Old dogs are vulnerable. They show exorbitant gratitude and limitless trust. They are without artifice. They are funny in new and unexpected ways. But, above all, they seem at peace.

Kafka wrote that the meaning of life is that it ends. He meant that our lives are shaped and shaded by the existential terror of knowing that all is finite. This anxiety informs poetry, literature, the monuments we build, the wars we wage—all of it. Kafka was talking, of course, about people. Among animals, only humans are said to be self-aware enough to comprehend the passage of time and the grim truth of mortality. How, then, to explain old Harry at the edge of that park, gray and lame, just days from the end, experiencing what can only be called wistfulness and nostalgia? I have lived with eight dogs, watched six of them grow old and infirm with grace and dignity, and die with what seemed to be acceptance. I have seen old dogs grieve at the loss of their friends. I have come to believe that as they age, dogs comprehend the passage of time, and, if not the inevitability of death, certainly the relentlessness of the onset of their frailties. They understand that what’s gone is gone.

What dogs do not have is an abstract sense of fear, or a feeling of injustice or entitlement. They do not see themselves, as we do, as tragic heroes, battling ceaselessly against the merciless onslaught of time. Unlike us, old dogs lack the audacity to mythologize their lives. You’ve got to love them for that.

The product of a Kansas puppy mill, Harry was sold to us as a yellow Labrador retriever. I suppose it was technically true, but only in the sense that Tic Tacs are technically “food.” Harry’s lineage was suspect. He wasn’t the square-headed, elegant type of Labrador you can envision in the wilds of Canada hunting for ducks. He was the shape of a baked potato, with the color and luster of an interoffice envelope. You could envision him in the wilds of suburban Toledo, hunting for nuggets of dried food in a carpet.

His full name was Harry S Truman, and once he’d reached middle age, he had indeed developed the unassuming soul of a haberdasher. We sometimes called him Tru, which fit his loyalty but was in other ways a misnomer: Harry was a bit of an eccentric, a few bubbles off plumb. Though he had never experienced an electrical shock, whenever he encountered a wire on the floor—say, a power cord leading from a laptop to a wall socket—Harry would stop and refuse to proceed. To him, this barrier was as impassable as the Himalayas. He’d stand there, waiting for someone to move it. Also, he was afraid of wind.

While Harry lacked the wiliness and cunning of some dogs, I did watch one day as he figured out a basic principle of physics. He was playing with a water bottle in our backyard—it was one of those 5-gallon cylindrical plastic jugs from the top of a water cooler. At one point, it rolled down a hill, which surprised and delighted him. He retrieved it, brought it back up and tried to make it go down again. It wouldn’t. I watched him nudge it around until he discovered that for the bottle to roll, its long axis had to be perpendicular to the slope of the hill. You could see the understanding dawn on his face; it was Archimedes in his bath, Helen Keller at the water spigot.

That was probably the intellectual achievement of Harry’s life, tarnished only slightly by the fact that he spent the next two hours insipidly entranced, rolling the bottle down and hauling it back up. He did not come inside until it grew too dark for him to see.

I believe I know exactly when Harry became an old dog. He was about 9 years old. It happened at 10:15 on the evening of June 21, 2001, the day my family moved from the suburbs to the city. The move took longer than we’d anticipated. Inexcusably, Harry had been left alone in the vacated house—eerie, echoing, empty of furniture and of all belongings except Harry and his bed—for eight hours. When I arrived to pick him up, he was beyond frantic.

He met me at the door and embraced me around the waist in a way that is not immediately reconcilable with the musculature and skeleton of a dog’s front legs. I could not extricate myself from his grasp. We walked out of that house like a slow-dancing couple, and Harry did not let go until I opened the car door.

He wasn’t barking at me in reprimand, as he once might have done. He hadn’t fouled the house in spite. That night, Harry was simply scared and vulnerable, impossibly sweet and needy and grateful. He had lost something of himself, but he had gained something more touching and more valuable. He had entered old age.

In the year after our move, Harry began to age visibly, and he did it the way most dogs do. First his muzzle began to whiten, and then the white slowly crept backward to swallow his entire head. As he became more sedentary, he thickened a bit, too.

On walks, he would no longer bother to scout and circle for a place to relieve himself. He would simply do it in mid-plod, like a horse, leaving the difficult logistics of drive-by cleanup to me. Sometimes, while crossing a busy street, with cars whizzing by, he would plop down to scratch his ear. Sometimes, he would forget where he was and why he was there. To the amusement of passersby, I would have to hunker down beside him and say, “Harry, we’re on a walk, and we’re going home now. Home is this way, okay?” On these dutiful walks, Harry ignored almost everything he passed. The most notable exception was an old, barrel-chested female pit bull named Honey, whom he loved. This was surprising, both because other dogs had long ago ceased to interest Harry at all, and because even back when they did, Harry’s tastes were for the guys.

Still, when we met Honey on walks, Harry perked up. Honey was younger by five years and heartier by a mile, but she liked Harry and slowed her gait when he was around. They waddled together for blocks, eyes forward, hardly interacting but content in each other’s company. I will forever be grateful to Honey for sweetening Harry’s last days.

Some people who seem unmoved by the deaths of tens of thousands through war or natural disaster will nonetheless grieve inconsolably over the loss of the family dog. People who find this behavior distasteful are often the ones without pets. It is hard to understand, in the abstract, the degree to which a companion animal, particularly after a long life, becomes a part of you. I believe I’ve figured out what this is all about. It is not as noble as I’d like it to be, but it is not anything of which to be ashamed, either.

In our dogs, we see ourselves. Dogs exhibit almost all of our emotions; if you think a dog cannot register envy or pity or pride or melancholia, you have never lived with one for any length of time. What dogs lack is our ability to dissimulate. They wear their emotions nakedly, and so, in watching them, we see ourselves as we would be if we were stripped of posture and pretense. Their innocence is enormously appealing. When we watch a dog progress from puppy­hood to old age, we are watching our own lives in microcosm. Our dogs become old, frail, crotchety, and vulnerable, just as Grandma did, just as we surely will, come the day. When we grieve for them, we grieve for ourselves.

From the book Old Dogs, text by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson, based on a longer excerpt that originally appeared in The Washington Post. ©2008 by Gene Weingarten and Michael S. Williamson.
Via Sharon

gendering halloween costumes

I'm not a fan of the ho-riffic Halloween costume for women. There's no need for any female to dress like a trick, especially when she's a kid.

This cartoon from Sociological Images sums up my point quite nicely.

quotable

To find our calling is to find the intersection between our own deep gladness & the world's deep hunger. -Frederick Buechner

sweet dreams

"Sweet Deams" by Kirsten Lepore was named for a Special Jury Award at SXSW 2009.

The film follows the sugar-coated journey of a cupcake who longs to head out on the open sea. When he finally scrapes together the courage to set out, it isn’t long before he is marooned on a lone island. I won’t spoil the ending for you...

instruction manual for life

Why does everyone have to have the same cupboard? This seemingly simple question sparks the journey of one kid who grew up under the influence of intolerant and fearful parents.
Via Matador Travel

consuming kids: the commercialization of childhood

Consider this -- prior to 1981, children's spending rose 4% each year. Since Reagan's deregulation, children's spending has risen by 35% yearly. That's no accident. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not place limits on advertising and marketing to children.

Marketers have created entirely new segments of consumers (tweens, and other age-compressed categories) using sophisticated techniques (the nag factor) to ensure cradle-to-grave mindshare. The trouble is, kids (especially young children) don't have the ability to differentiate between advertising and the truth.

It's bigger than sugary cereal and soda in schools. It is more sophisticated than simple product placement or a toy in a Happy Meal. It is Webkins, an online environment that is only accessible after a child or parent purchases a $15 toy with an access code. And movies whose sole purpose is to spin off a merchandising empire. And the emergence of the luxury clothing market for kids (baby Pumas, Dior kids jeans, Abercrombie Kids sweaters) who will outgrow the item before it's even worn in. And mani/ pedis for six year-olds. And ho-rrific dolls with bling in miniskirts that all but reveal the doll's anatomically incorrect ass. And the GIA's slumber party in a box that gets girl "agents" to gather market data on their friends in exchange for a free product.

Beyond this, many of the messages (and their implications) are quite troubling. Our culture is increasingly embracing the idea that you are what you own. While it's fine to have and appreciate nice things, a child's self-worth shouldn't be driven by the designer labels her parents can afford to buy for her. Others play up narcissim and entitlement. It gets even uglier when the message is about appearance/ body types/ beauty and sexualizes girls in a way that short-circuits childhood's innocence and creates unhealthy body image. The message to girls is what you wear, how you look, and how sexy you are determine how valuable you are. The message to boys is that "real men" only use violence, power, and domination to solve differences.

But it begins much earlier. Researchers are finding that edutainment (Baby Einstein, Brainy Baby, Leapfrog) doesn't work. Putting a kid in front of an electronic screen just teaches that kid to watch more. It is no substitute for face-to-face interaction and the tactile manipulation of objects in order to learn. Free and unstructured time and play are essential to the cognitive, physical, and emotional well-being of children. Creative play, which has declined by 94% among 9-12 year olds in the past decade, is the foundation of learning, problem solving, and empathy. But kids are being sold on the idea that they can't just play pirates or wizards, they have to own the official accoutrements from Pirates of the Caribbean or Harry Potter. The fundamental message is that kids need to have something outside themselves in order to play. That is tragic. It is also creating a future generation of superconsumers with ADD, diabetes, and hypertension. Juliet Schor's research found that the more media (TV, video games, internet) a child consumed, the more likely that child was to suffer from depression or anxiety.

I recently watched the "Consuming Kids" video series, which looks at how marketers target kids, both for their own spending power and for their influence over parents’ spending. I came away outraged. Disclaimer: I have an MBA in marketing and already know a fair amount about techniques and market segments. But this seven-part series is simultaneously fascinating and horrifying.

musical youth, mashed up

My love of music defies genres. So it makes sense that I dig mashups. A few years ago, my neighbor Zach introduced me to the joys of Party Ben and the Kleptones. As soon as I heard Closer to the Boxer, I was hooked. The song includes tons of samples, and it seamlessly blends The Cure, Simon and Garfunkel, and DJ Asheru.

Other faves:

the sounds of my childhood

I got my love of music from my father. His tastes, like mine, are eclectic. My dad will listen to almost anything, and his collection ranges from folk to soul to rock to pop to country to world to gospel. For as long as I can remember, music has played in the background wherever my father is.

Over the years, I've spent countless hours with his records, tapes, CDs, and reel-to-reels, getting a musical education that defied classification. The Beatles and the Stones, Simon and Garfunkel, Diana Ross and the Supremes, June Carter and Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond and Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys and BB King, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye, Willie Nelson and the Byrds, Waylon Jennings and ABBA, Don McLean and Roberta Flack, Parliament and Elton John ... all of these are the sounds of my childhood.

There were also concerts, usually at the county fair. By the time I got to high school, my dad started letting me go to concerts with friends (and a responsible adult). Once I reached adulthood, music and live shows were a staple. I've enjoyed festivals like Bonnaroo and have many happy memories of wonderful performances. And a few years ago, I decided to surprise my dad and take him to a concert that we would both never forget.

Once the dates were announced, I called and asked him if he could be in San Diego to join me for a surprise nighttime event. He asked what he should wear, I suggested that he dress for a ball game. When the day arrived, I told him that we were going to a concert and that I was pretty sure he'd like it. He gamely smiled and we headed off to SDSU. Once we walked into the arena and he realized that we were seeing Simon and Garfunkel's 2003 reunion tour, his eyes went wide and his smile got even wider.

There was no opening band, and we were on our feet (along with the rest of the crowd) for about 90 minutes when Paul and Art finally took a break. We were both surprised when the Everly Brothers took the stage for nearly half an hour before Paul and Art came back and rocked for another 90 minutes. My dad clapped his hands and grinned the whole night, thanking me repeatedly for the surprise. I responded honestly -- I had great time, too and never would've been there if it weren't for his old records and love of good music.

toxic exposures and the secret history of the war on cancer

***Update: My test results came back negative. The good scientists at John's Hopkins are 97% certain that I do not have genetic abnormalities consistent with VHL.

Six years ago last Friday, surgeons carved my right kidney out of my body, removing malignant cells that, left untreated, would have led to certain death. The tumors that my doctors later biopsied indicated that I had the most common form of kidney cancer - clear cell. My medical record was updated to read "T1N0M0".

After absorbing the shock of my diagnosis and proceeding to my straightforward and relatively easy treatment (I say that because I have many friends who endured much worse in their battles with cancer), I was left with two key questions:

1. Why did this happen?
   
2. And how do I keep it from happening again?

To answer these questions, I had to learn a great deal more about my cancer. The American Cancer Society's Cancer Facts & Figures 2009 will tell you that kidney cancer is the seventh most common cancer in the US; the five-year survival rate is about 67%. It will also provide trend data for who the "typical" kidney cancer patient is.

The American Society for Clinical Oncology explains how cells mutate and the role that genes play:

Genes control how a cell functions, including how quickly it grows, how often it divides, and how long it lives. To control these functions, genes produce proteins that perform specific tasks and act as messengers for the cell. Therefore, it is essential that each gene have the correct instructions or "code" for making its protein so that the protein can perform the proper function for the cell.

Cancer begins when one or more genes in a cell are mutated (changed), creating an abnormal protein or no protein at all. The information provided by an abnormal protein is different from that of a normal protein, which can cause cells to multiply uncontrollably and become cancerous.

A person may either be born with a genetic mutation in all of their cells (germline mutation) or acquire a genetic mutation in a single cell during his or her lifetime. An acquired mutation is passed on to all cells that develop from that single cell (called a somatic mutation). Most kidney cancers (about 95%) are considered sporadic, meaning that the damage to the genes occurs by chance after a person is born. Inherited kidney cancers are less common (about 5%) and occur when gene mutations are passed within a family, from one generation to the next.

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has correlated environmental factors (smoking, obesity, and occupational hazards such as asbestos, cadmium, organic solvents, and petroleum) with kidney cancer, yet stops short of proclaiming causality. (Agent Orange is another suspect substance.) You'll notice that although researchers can characterize the abnormal growth and correlate the incidence of cancer with genetics and some substances, they can't tell us with certainty what causes it. Part of that is because more research needs to occur, but can't because industry and government make it difficult for that research to take place (see the article below).

Barbara Ehrenrich's amazing essay, Welcome to Cancerland, forever changed how I think about the role of the environment in my health. It also set me down a path to try and answer the Why and How questions I grappled with immediately after diagnosis. But like most cancer patients, I'll probably never know exactly what caused my body to turn on itself when I was 28. However, unlike most cancer patients, I've gotten a step closer to knowing if my genes are the reason for my illness.

A few months ago, I saw a genetic counselor. I chose to do so because Leo and I hope to start a family soon. I wanted to know the risk factors for certain hereditary conditions. Most of all, I wanted to know if my cancer was something that I could pass on to our children. Over the years, I've casually researched the topic and given up the hope of ever finding out if there was a genetic basis for my cancer, in short because every time I broached the topic with medical professionals, they would immediately tell me that I'd already had kidney cancer, so they already knew I was at a higher risk for having it. With this context, you can only imagine how dumbfounded I was when, after asking me a series of questions, the genetic counselor asked if I had heard of Von Hippel-Lindau Syndrome (VHL) and suggested that I be tested for it.

Last week, the counselor called me back to let me know that my HMO had agreed for me to be tested for VHL because it is the most common cause of clear cell kidney cancer (and a host of other life-threatening issues). Setting aside the interesting Hatfield-McCoy connection, it's some seriously scary stuff. If I do have it, those same skeptical medical professionals will now need to routinely screen me for a whole host of other medical issues that have nothing to do with my cancer history. Also, if I do have the VHL genetic mutation, there's a 50% chance that I'll pass it along to my children.

Setting VHL aside, I'm still unsure if the mutation that caused my cancer (whether it occurred in me or started in my parents or grandparents) happened because of something I ate, drank, breathed, or absorbed. All of this puts me back at square one in this maddening, dizzying recursive loop of what triggered the chain of events that led to my current health.

So ... I'm back to casually researching the connections between cancer and our environment and disgusted to see how, for the past century, our government and industry have failed to act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer. Read on to learn more about the ugly toxic exposures and the secret history of the war on cancer ...

Theories of cancer: How paradigms shift and culprits change in the fight against the disease, and what concerned citizens can do about it
Sandra Steingraber -- From The Times Literary Supplement
January 30, 2008

Devra Davis
SECRET HISTORY OF THE WAR ON CANCER
505pp. Basic Books. £16.99.
978 0 465 01566 5

Phil Brown
TOXIC EXPOSURES
Contested illnesses and the environmental health movement
356pp. New York: Columbia University Press. £19 (US $29.50).
978 0 231 12948 0

One advantage of being a long-time cancer survivor – besides the obvious – is that it provides a front-row seat in the auditorium of ideas about the disease’s causation. Theories go in and out of fashion over the years, paradigms shift this way and that, and the patient is viewed differently by the medical community depending on which idea is currently on top.

I was diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1979, when I was twenty years old and just at the beginning of my career as a biologist. At that time, US newspaper headlines featured Love Canal, the upstate New York community whose residents had been evacuated a year earlier when 20,000 tons of industrial chemicals were discovered buried under their basements. Toxic-waste activism in the United States was in the ascendant, the newly formed US Environmental Protection Agency was committed and passionate, and major environmental legislation had been recently enacted by Congress to defend clean air and clean water in the name of human health.

After breaking the bad news from the pathology lab, my urologist asked me about tyres: automobile tyres. Had I ever vulcanized tyres? His second question was about textile dyes. Any exposure to the colour yellow? And had I ever worked in the aluminium industry?

Back at the university, I began to research the causes of bladder cancer. Indeed, there were data on dyes and bladder cancer going back to the nineteenth century. In fact, there was absolute proof that certain textile dyes caused bladder cancer in humans. And yet, mysteriously, this evidence had not resulted in the abolition of these chemicals from the economy. Other suspected bladder carcinogens, for which the evidence was highly troubling, if not outright damning, were produced and used by the industries in my home town. The National Cancer Institute was generating maps of cancer mortality in an attempt to unveil other possible environmental carcinogens that could explain rising rates of cancer.

And then Ronald Reagan was elected President, and everything changed. No one asked me any more about my possible environmental exposures. In fact, by the mid-1980s, I was hard-pressed to find the word “carcinogen” in any pamphlet on cancer that I collected from my doctors’ various offices. Meanwhile, in the medical literature, the search for cancer clusters that might point towards environmental contributors became a disparaged practice. The new focus of the National Cancer Institute was on “lifestyle” explanations for cancer.

As a young adult I hadn’t really had enough time to develop bad habits. In fact, I was a vegetarian who ran four miles a day. Thus there was no explanation for my situation. “Some kind of fluke”, said one of my doctors. Wherever I lived, I dutifully submitted to cancer check-ups. By the 1990s, the new explanation for cancer was genetic, and I started receiving lots of questions from young intake doctors about my family history. I had fun with this. I would describe in detail my mother, diagnosed with breast cancer, my various uncles with prostate and colon cancers, and – the crowning point – my aunt who died of the same kind of bladder cancer that I had. The young doctors took furious notes. I would always pause a few beats before adding, “Oh yeah. And I’m adopted”. (There is no evidence for a hereditary link to bladder cancer. And there never has been.)

Today, I’m a forty-eight-year-old professor in Ithaca, New York, and during my last renal ultrasound, the technician asked me casually if I’d ever worked with textile dyes. I suppose Al Gore should get the credit: the environment is once again on the collective radar screen.

Two new books expose and explicate the ongoing social contest that is at the heart of our shifting understanding about cancer. They are both important and deserve to be read together. Devra Davis’s book examines the historical forces at work when doubt is cast on the environmental evidence. Phil Brown’s book explores the opposing social movements that are struggling to rescue this evidence and to bring about public health policy change based on it.

Devra Davis’s Secret History of the War on Cancer is a big, sprawling book whose argument is more implicit than it should be. Her autobiographical style – which served her so well in her earlier treatise on public health, When Smoke Ran Like Water – often gets in the way of her analysis here. Nevertheless, Davis, who directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an epidemiologist and public-health scientist at the top of her game. In her new book, she reveals what she knows about the interlocking structures of government and corporate interests, and how these relationships have affected the social construction of knowledge about cancer. Davis deserves to be taken seriously as a former adviser to the World Health Organization, a public-health servant in both the Carter and the Clinton Administrations, and the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology in the National Academy of Sciences.

The basic thesis of this book is that 1.5 million lives have been lost, because Americans failed to act on existing knowledge about the environmental causes of cancer. This failure has been created by at least eight different factors, both acting together and independently of each other. The first is the cowardice of research scientists, who publish thoroughly referenced reports but pull their punches at the end, by claiming that more research needs to be done before action can be taken. Statements like these are then exploited by those who profit from the status quo. Like the cigarette industry during the 1960s, the chemical industry has learned how to buy time and create wholesale public doubt from small data gaps and remaining scientific uncertainties.

Meanwhile, Davis argues, regulatory agencies have become unresponsive to new scientific evidence altogether. Hamstrung by small-government-is-better reforms of the Reagan Administration, environmental and public agencies shrank even as the science began pointing to the need for more regulation. As for the government agencies and charities whose mission it is to eradicate cancer, these institutions, too, have had meaningful work on cancer prevention compromised by corporate interests. Throughout the 1980s, for example, the chief executive officer of Occidental Petroleum served as the chair of the National Cancer Institute’s advisory board. Ultimately, the so-called War on Cancer is not really a war at all, argues Davis, but a cunning re-enactment.

The evolutionary history of epidemiology itself has also played a role in muffling the evidence for environmental harm. With its necessary focus on workers – who are exposed to the highest amounts of suspected carcinogens – epidemiologists require access to industry. The price for access, too often, is the promise of secrecy. Having struck a Faustian bargain, occupational epidemiologists can have – and have had – their funds withdrawn if they go public with their results.

A further factor involves the court system. Davis shows brilliantly the ways in which various kinds of scientific evidence – such as animal research – have been gradually declared inadmissible in legal cases, thanks to clever lawyering. “Basically”, says Davis, “before you can collect damages, you must get cancer or some other awful disease, show that someone else already got it from the same things you did, prove that you had specific exposures to a particular agent, find the firm that caused your harm and can now pay for it, and prove that they knew the exposure was harmful.”

The last two factors involve outright harassment of researchers, including Davis herself, and plain old terrible timing, which has occurred at least twice in the last century, as when major treatises on the environmental contributors to cancer were released, first on the brink of the First World War, and then again right before the Second World War. Indeed, Davis’s crowning achievement with this book is her resuscitation of old publications, along with secret memos and various other original manuscripts, which show how much we used to know about the role that chemical exposures play in the burden of cancer. Some of these were subsequently doctored to serve particular purposes.

The Secret History of the War on Cancer is a remarkable piece of sleuthing from one of our most brave and knowledgeable scientists, on a topic that affects millions. Having closed Davis’s book, one should immediately open Phil Brown’s Toxic Exposures, which focuses on the ways in which environmental- health activists and their advocates in science are challenging the carcinogen-deniers that Davis writes about. Like Devra Davis, Brown, a medical sociologist at Brown University, has been a researcher in the field of environmental health for several decades, beginning with his groundbreaking work on the Woburn cancer cluster, made famous in the Hollywood movie A Civil Action. His new book represents many years of work. Toxic Exposures can be read as a guidebook for those wishing to understand the environmental-health movement, which, according to Brown, is the Civil Rights movement of our times. As he demonstrates, almost all cases of cancer clusters and contaminated communities, from Love Canal onwards, have been discovered by citizen activists – not by scientists, nor government agencies. This is because no governmental agency or scientific body engages in routine surveillance that would uncover sentinel health events. It is also because cancer registries, which could function as early-warning systems, publish their results in obscure almanacs and do not actively investigate communities where cancer rates are elevated. Often, as Brown notes, these communities are never even informed that their cancer rates are statistically excessive.

But, in the cases where citizens have engaged in their own lay epidemiology and have become environmental detectives in their own communities, new avenues of scientific research have been made possible, which, in turn, have spurred on better environmental decisions. When sympathetic scientists work hand in hand with these activists, new forms of knowledge are created that challenge the lifestyle and hereditary foci of conventional epidemiology.

In one my favourite examples from the book, Brown describes how science alone failed to produce regulations sufficient to reduce lead poisoning among children. It was only the efforts of black and Latino rights groups – most notably the Black Panthers and the Young Lords – in the 1960s that finally led to the social changes necessary to get lead away from children’s brains. Once that happened, science had the human experiment it needed to prove that exposures to an environmental toxicant at levels once considered acceptable and unavoidable were not safe or necessary after all.

Brown’s book systematically examines citizen-science alliances in three disease areas: breast cancer, asthma and Gulf War Syndrome as reported by US veterans of the first Iraq war. While individual readers who are not sociologists will no doubt be drawn, by personal experience, to one of the three, all offer important lessons about the construction of scientific knowledge. It was fascinating to learn, for example, how environmental -justice activists working on asthma clusters in urban areas are now forcing scientists to investigate the health effects of very fine particles, which are not yet regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the end, Phil Brown’s analysis of contested illnesses makes a strong case for better health tracking to monitor diseases, and better chemicals tracking to monitor the flow of hazardous substances in consumer goods, in the jet stream, in our groundwater, and in our tuna-fish sandwiches. Toxic Exposures also makes clear that neither will happen without citizen participation in the scientific process.

Sandra Steingraber is the author of Living Downstream: An ecologist looks at cancer and the environment, 1997, and Having Faith: An ecologist's journey to motherhood, 2001.

the princess problem

I'm decidedly anti-princess. Hopefully, I'll never have a daughter who lives for Disney.

Enough With the Princesses! Forget about whether the new Disney princess is black or white. The problem is with princesses. Period.
By: Monique Fields
Posted: June 2, 2009 at 6:59 AM

There was Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Mulan.

Tiana arrives this fall in the first Disney film featuring a black American princess.

Set in 1920s New Orleans, The Princess and the Frog tells the story of a young waitress and gifted chef who dreams of following her father’s lead and owning a restaurant. The trailer can be viewed online [1] or on the big screen in the previews of Disney Pixar’s Up, which opened May 29.

Tiana’s creation has been lauded as a milestone. She is a first in a long succession of Disney princesses, which began more than 70 years ago. The toys she inspires will acknowledge the beauty of young black women as children of all colors identify with Tiana.

Still, as the mother of two young girls, I fear I will be doing damage control for years after the credits roll.

In a recent New York Times article, critics railed on whether or not Tiana conquers racial stereotypes [2]. Forget about all that. The problem is with the princess mentality.

The princess mentality is pervasive in our society. Everything from baby bibs to bicycles is scrawled with the P-word. A mother has to shop long and hard to find clothing that isn’t glittery or pierced with rhinestones. Just when you think you’ve defeated the princess marketing monster, someone else shows up on your doorstep with the cutest thing ever.

I’m not the wicked stepmother when it comes to princesses. I just want a dash of reality thrown into my daughter’s entertainment from time to time.

Unlike princesses, my daughters, 4 and 2, will be disappointed. They will want something my husband and I can’t afford, or they will miss the mark for some achievement. There will be no magic wand to go poof and make their dreams come true.

While I’d like for them to run away with a prince and live happily ever after, they had better get college degrees first. All princesses need to have their own money.

Sure, they can dress up for dance recitals, prom and other events, but I’ll be sure to warn them that outward superficialities like glitter and makeup will not compensate for any deeper flaws some women try to hide.

Disney and other toymakers are selling a fantasy, pure and simple. What is troubling is when fantasy mingles with reality. Some little girls are telling anyone who will listen that they want to be princesses when they grow up. If nothing else, I expect a more ambitious and attainable goal from children who haven’t yet learned to read or write. Their goals don’t have to be engraved in their scrapbooks, but thoughts of becoming lawyers, doctors or entrepreneurs is a start.

A princess? Whatever in the world do princesses do? More importantly, how do they get paid? Real life is not a fairy tale, and few folks live happily ever after. So just what are we telling our girls when we dress them up in frilly dresses, dust them with makeup and put glitter in their hair before they really know who they are? We’re telling them outward beauty is more valuable than being responsible, trustworthy citizens who don’t always get what they want. If we aren’t clear what’s acceptable now, we’re setting them up for a time in the not-too-distant future when they want something they can’t have and have no way of dealing with rejection.

Consider this: Simone is my oldest child, and a few days ago, she rushed up to a dress in a department store and cooed, “Oooh, sparkles.”

I have what is called a girly girl—a child who only wants to wear dresses or what she calls big tutus. These days she even casts aside skirts, known to her as little tutus. Shorts and pants aren’t even part of her wardrobe. So she spotted this big tutu from afar, and it looked a lot like, well, a wedding dress—and she wanted it.

“We’re not buying today,” I told her. I distracted her with some more modest dresses, and then we walked away.

Not two minutes later, she scampered up to a counter. “Ooh, sparkles.”

This time she was in the jewelry department.

When the salesman asked if there was anything he could show me, as I arrived a good five paces behind Simone, I informed him we weren’t in the market for engagement rings and wedding bands.

Simone gladly skipped off to the next thing. She didn’t ask for or expect anything. But I shot my husband a concerned look. If she does this at 4, what is she going to be like at 14, when she may not be as easily distracted? Many girls grow out of the princess fascination, while others request the star treatment from their parents and friends for the rest of their lives.

I’m not going to wait around to find out, especially with a black princess making her debut later this year. As soon as I see an opening, the evil stepmother in me is going to pull Simone aside and tell her that princesses don’t make any money.

Monique Fields is a regular contributor to The Root.