Daniyal Mueenuddin in The New York Times:

I found most pitiful a family gathered around a prostrate brown-and-white brindled cow. The father told me that the cow had been lost in the water for four days, and the previous night it had clambered up on another section of the levee, a mile away. The people of this area recognize their cattle as easily as you or I recognize a cousin or neighbor — they sleep with their animals around them at night, and graze them all day; their animals are born and die near them. Someone passing by told the family that their cow had been found, and the father went and got it and led it to their little encampment.

In the early morning the cow had collapsed, and I could see it would soon be dead. Its eyes were beginning to dull, as the owner squatted next to it, sprinkling water into its mouth, as if it were possible to revive it. Its legs were swollen from standing in water, and its chest and torso were covered with deep cuts and scrapes, sheets of raw flesh where branches rushing past must have hit it. The rest of the family sat nearby on a string bed, resigned, waiting for the end. This was their wealth, but when it died they would tip it into the water and let it float away to the south. Through the past few days they had seen it all, houses collapsed, trees uprooted, grain spoiled, and this was just one more blow. Driving back to my farm, which has (so far) been spared from the flood, an image of the cow’s ordeal kept coming to me: splashing through the flood for hours and hours, at dusk or in the blank overcast night, with nothing around it but a vast expanse of water stretching away, an image of perfect loneliness. It must have found high ground, waited there as the water rose, then set off again, driven by hunger. In the immensity of the unfolding tragedy, this littler one, this moment of its death, seemed comprehensible to me, significant.

It is difficult to convey the scope of what was lost by those who had labored with ax and shovel to bring this land under cultivation. Fifty years ago, the area was all savanna, waving fields of reeds and elephant grass running for a thousand miles on both sides of the river. As a boy, I hunted there for partridge, walking among a line of beaters, the tall grasses so dense that I was invisible to the next man only 10 feet away. This was wild country.

More here.

The Life Cycle of the Common Man
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Read more »

From Seed:

Everyone knows yawning is contagious. If you yawn, someone else will probably yawn shortly thereafter. As I did the research for this column, I noticed that nearly every article about yawning pointed out that just reading the article itself could make you yawn. Even your dog will yawn if it sees you yawning. That last observation has been confirmed scientifically, in an elegant experiment discussed last week by psychology graduate student Jason Goldman. Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, Atsushi Senju, and Alex Shepherd had an experimenter visit dogs in their homes and yawn as the dogs looked on. In 21 of the 29 dogs tested, the dog yawned after seeing the human yawn. In a control condition, the experimenter made a yawning motion with his mouth but didn’t make other yawning gestures and sounds. Under these circumstances none of the dogs yawned. The research was published in Biology Letters. Goldman points out that yawning has been observed in many species of vertebrates, including dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and birds. But why do we yawn? Does it serve any real purpose (besides, perhaps, subtly hinting to a conference presenter that his or her allotted speaking time has elapsed)?

The biologist who blogs as “Grrlscientist” points to a pair of studies that seem to support one explanation: Yawns help cool the brain. Andrew Gallup, who led both studies, says the brain is more efficient when cooler, so if yawns allow us to cool our brains, then they may allow us to think more clearly. In one study, researchers had humans hold either cold towels or warm towels to their foreheads: people yawned more frequently when exposed to the warm towels. In the second study, budgerigars (parakeets) were observed in environments of varying temperatures. When the temperature was warmer, the budgerigars yawned more frequently, suggesting they might be using yawns to cool off. At extremely high temperatures, yawning again decreased, perhaps because yawns don’t help when the temperature is too warm.

More here.

From Science:

Why cooperate when you can be selfish? Many animal behaviors are self-centered and apparently evolved to pass on an individual's genes to future generations. Yet cooperative breeding, in which some members of a group help others to raise their young, has evolved independently many times, especially in birds and insects. A new study of birds concludes that parents get more help when they are sexually faithful to each other. Cooperation has been called an evolutionary paradox, and cooperative breeding is relatively rare, with members of only 3% to 10% of bird species helping to raise one another's young. Among the apes, only humans are cooperative breeders, although monkeys such as marmosets and tamarins do it, too.

In the 1960s, British biologist William Hamilton proposed that natural selection could favor cooperation if individuals pass on their own genes by helping relatives raise offspring. But Hamilton argued that cooperation can arise only if such helpers are closely related to recipients and if the benefits outweigh the costs. Over the past few years, Jacobus Boomsma, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen, has argued that strict monogamous behavior, such as an ant queen mating for life, spurred the evolution of cooperative breeding in some social insects. Monogamy helps fulfill Hamilton's conditions, because all siblings are equally related to each other and to each parent. Promiscuity, on the other hand, leads to many half-siblings and lowers the relatedness of individuals in a group.

More here.

Alison Flood in the Guardian:

Widely acclaimed as Britain’s foremost literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode died yesterday in Cambridge at the age of 90.

The London Review of Books, for which the critic and scholar wrote more than 200 pieces, announced his death this morning. Kermode inspired the founding of the magazine in 1979, after writing an article in the Observer calling for a new literary magazine.

Prominent in literary criticism since the 1950s, Kermode held “virtually every endowed chair worth having in the British Isles”, according to his former colleague John Sutherland, from King Edward VII professor of English literature at Cambridge to Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and professor of poetry at Harvard, along with honorary doctorates from universities around the world. He was knighted in 1991, the first literary critic to be so honoured since William Empson.

A renowned Shakespearean, publishing Shakespeare’s Language in 2001, Kermode’s books range from works on Spenser and Donne and the memoir Not Entitled to last year’s Concerning EM Forster.

His publisher, Alan Samson, at Weidenfeld & Nicolson said Kermode would probably be most remembered for The Sense of An Ending, his collection of lectures on the relationship of fiction to concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis, first published in 1967, as well as for Romantic Image, a study of the Romantic movement up until WB Yeats.

Samson published Kermode’s most recent book, Concerning EM Forster, last year. Forster, who also died aged 90, gave the Clark lectures at Cambridge in 1927, which led to his seminal book of literary criticism, Aspects of the Novel. Kermode delivered the Clark lectures 80 years later, in 2007, and worked with Samson to turn them into a book. The pair had been discussing a further title, about TS Eliot, following a lecture Kermode gave at the British library, but “now this will never happen, sadly”, said Samson.

[H/t: David Schneider]

Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster in The Incongruous Quarterly (via bookforum):

Nearly 500 years later [after Juan Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth], hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of aging Americans scamper like lemmings to seek eternal youth in Florida. Nowhere expresses this quest better than The Villages retirement community in Lady Lake. We went there by chance recently on the way back from a disastrous canoeing trip with family. Perhaps that trip was the first sign of things to come – what you haven’t mastered should be left alone, particularly with respect to nature.

The Villages was designed by the same people who themed Universal Studios, in nearby Orlando. One can only marvel at the artifice: a virtual geriatric theme park. Ironically, invoking the de Leon heritage, you enter through Spanish colonial fake stucco gates with painted-on signs of aging – cracks, cement weathering, evidence of brick beneath the plaster, and spray-on rust for the replica cannons and cannon balls. It is a strange, childless world of vibrant seniors where visitors younger than 19 can only stay for a maximum of 30 days a year. The Fountain of Youth, it seems, can only be quaffed by eliminating all traces of the young. Walking around The Villages one realizes that the price of paradise is a perverse withdrawal from the world.

Now, rural Central Florida is a rather inhospitable, unforgiving environment, something we encountered on our little excursion – a swamp of slow-moving rivers banked by seemingly ancient Cyprus trees and an alligator every cubic meter of water. After miles and miles of country road, The Villages arises out of this backwater like a beacon of strip-mall light, replete with every modern convenience. With 40,000 homes, 70,000 residents – expected to pass 100,000 before long, 34 golf courses, 9 country clubs, 2 Disneyesque downtown squares replete with bars, restaurants, shopping, movie theaters, and, of course, many, many real estate offices, The Villages appears to be the epicenter of a new way for old living.

Our family had visited an old friend there recently, a woman in her 60s who had moved to The Villages from south Miami and couldn’t be happier. Why? After a lifetime of failing at the singles scene, winding up alone in her 50s with three cats and an administrative job at a university, she retired to The Villages and found herself with a date almost every other night.

Tom Wright and Siobhan Gorman in the WSJ:

Pakistan's main spy agency says homegrown Islamist militants have overtaken the Indian army as the greatest threat to national security, a finding with potential ramifications for relations between the two rival South Asian nations and for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

A recent internal assessment of security by the Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's powerful military spy agency, determined that for the first time in 63 years it expects a majority of threats to come from Islamist militants, according to a senior ISI officer.

The assessment, a regular review of national security, allocates a two-thirds likelihood of a major threat to the state coming from militants rather than from India or elsewhere. It is the first time since the two countries gained independence from Britain in 1947 that India hasn't been viewed as the top threat. Decades into one of the most bitter neighborly rivalries in modern history, both countries maintain huge troop deployments along their Himalayan border.

“It's earth shattering. That's a remarkable change,” said Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism specialist and professor at Georgetown University. “It's yet another ratcheting up of the Pakistanis' recognition of not only their own internal problems but cooperation in the war on terrorism.”

Peter Feaver in Foreign Policy:

Al Qaeda has sought to turn a broad civil war within the Muslim world into a war between Islam and the infidels (everyone else). If al Qaeda ever succeeded in that aim, our prospects for success would dim considerably. In fact, as President Bush and his advisors made clear within hours of the 9/11 attacks, and as leaders from both parties have emphasized repeatedly ever since — and as most Americans have accepted to a remarkable degree — the United States has not viewed the war on terror as a war against Islam. On the contrary, Americans have expended considerable blood and treasure to help protect Muslim victims of al Qaeda and other like-minded terrorist groups. And American leaders have sought, wherever possible, to reach out to the Muslim world and highlight America's long tradition of religious freedom and unrivaled record as a society that welcomes and integrates immigrants from all walks of life.

President Obama has made this particular aspect of the ideological struggle a personal priority of his and he deserves some credit for doing so.

Yet, all of the focus on the Ground Zero mosque controversy may now be having the ironic effect of distracting us from a much more important and much more urgent issue in that ideological struggle: the vast humanitarian crisis caused by the floods in Pakistan. The human toll is staggering, and that alone ought to be enough to prompt an outpouring of generosity from the American people.

But if you are not moved by the human suffering, perhaps the national-security concerns will prompt you into action. Pakistan is at the epicenter of the war on terror, and it is hard to see how that larger struggle will turn out well if the Pakistani state collapses and the society plunges into anarchy.

More here.

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:

Last week, I spent a delightful afternoon (and evening, actually) with Hitch at his Dupont Circle HQ. We talked mainly about the Middle East, good vs. evil, the existence or non-existence of God — the usual sorts of things — and we'll be posting some of those conversations as well in the coming days. But here's a short video of our discussion about sickness and theology. As a bonus, Martin Amis makes a very special guest appearance:

Salman Hameed in his blog Irtiqa:

Business Recorder – Pakistan's biggest financial daily – confirms that little knowledge, when combined with pre-existing religious beliefs, can be a source of a major embarrassment (hat tip to Muhammad Akbar Hussain and Zakir Thaver). This story also upsets me personally as the Business Recorder idiocy is related to astronomy. Okay, I don't want to make you wait any longer. Here is the headline: “Signs of the Day of Judgement: NASA confirms the possibility of sun rising from the West”

So first you notice that the story is about religion – rather than science. Second, there is a clear desire to seek an affirmation of a religious claim from science. Third, the source of authority regarding this lies in the West – in this case (and quite often) NASA (even though there is no mention of NASA in the story itself). Nidhal Guessoum recently attended a whole meeting dedicated to finding science in the Qur'an – and you can read his posts here and here.

But what is this bold claim, in a major newspaper, based upon? Well, as it turns out, it is based upon a gross misunderstanding of how planets of our solar system appear to move in the sky. Muslim astronomers, a thousand years ago, had a better understanding of astronomy than these editors of Business Recorder in the 21st century.

Belongings

If my heart were a mud pie baking on a slate plate,
the ants regaling me with news of home—

You are coming. You are gone.
This way, this way. Follow along…

If my heart were a popsicle stick stuck to the white bin,
purply kissing the assertion that some things are past use.

If I were the forced rush of water
breaking into brightness.

If everything I once knew
tucked itself back into the book.

If the clocktick double-timed me.

If I were the dim of light-rimmed shades.

The hum of the mower too distant
to speak my name distinctly.

That yellow heat. That green endurance.

If my flower ripened to seed.

If the beetle's lace undressed me.

If the dark under the pillow kept its promises.

by Lisa King

William Dalrymple in the New York Times:

President Obama's eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

More here.

From The Guardian:

I dearly love a good coming-of-age story. The genre's very existence implies that at some point In Real Life, all shy, scabby teenagers will grow into the boots of mature self-possession, developing skins thicker than silk pocket squares and generally drawing themselves up to their full heights. There's hope for me yet.

Lately, I've read several – some funny, some desperately sad, some both – of a very high standard. Repellently prodigious Simon Rich, already a writer for Saturday Night Live despite looking barely old enough to shave, recently produced a first novel, Elliot Allagash, the beginning of which made me laugh so much over breakfast that a mushroom fell off the end of my helplessly jigging fork into my coffee. The resultant scald didn't stop me wholeheartedly enjoying the adventures of Elliot, black-hearted adolescent puppet-master, and geeky narrator Seymour Herson, subject of his machinations. Wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus' and Midas' love-child, Elliot offers to buy Seymour high-school popularity, basketball fame and the class presidency, and does so by labyrinthine and atrocious means, stomping on the deserving as he goes. It's not pure whimsy – Seymour eventually, and touchingly, wises up to the soul-corroding side-effects of Elliot's vendettas – rather, it's a fantastically ingenious and unique approach to the tale of a turning worm (empowered by a puff adder).

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers claim to have found the first evidence of 'zombie' ants in the fossil record. They have matched peculiar cuts on a 48-million-year-old fossil leaf with the 'death bites' made by modern ants infected by a fungal parasite. The research is published today in Biology Letters¹. The leaf was part of a group of fossilized leaves and plants unearthed recently from the Messel Pit in Germany's Rhine Rift Valley — an area famous for the discovery, in 2009, of Ida, a well-preserved primate fossil touted as a human ancestor (see 'Reunion of fossil halves splits scientists'). Initially, the fossil plants and leaves did not raise much interest and they were stored for years at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

The idea of examining the fossil record for evidence of the distinctive bite marks came to David Hughes, a behavioural ecologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as he was sitting in on a palaeobotany undergraduate course. He had just returned from fieldwork in southern Thailand where he had been studying fungal parasites infecting carpenter ants and controlling their behaviour. “Could this parasitic relationship have evolved much earlier in Earth's history?” he asked himself. So Hughes talked to Conrad Labandeira, a palaeoecologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. It turned out that Labandeira had seen strange markings on a fossil leaf and had been puzzled by the specimen for years. “This was a serendipitous discovery when a project on modern insect ecology crossed paths with a long-running palaeontology programme on the Messel Shale,” says Labandeira.

More here.

Diego Trelles Paz in n+1 (Ttranslated from the Spanish by Carolina De Robertis):

The first time I read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives I was 22 years old. I lived in Lima on a miserable salary and the only thing I was doing with my life, other than getting drunk to the point of senselessness, was reading and writing, imitating and attempting, as well as throwing myself against the door each time my literary style proved to be nothing more than a pale and clumsy echo of the voices of writers who’d influenced me: a kind of polyphonic collage of Vargas Llosa with Ribeyro, Onetti with Puig.

Anagrama’s gray edition cost exactly 78 soles. I remember this clearly as it was the period in which I’d go to Quilca Avenue in Downtown Lima and literally submerge myself in a pile of Populibros and Comida Peruana manuals to salvage books by classical authors that cost no more than 8 soles. Thanks to Oveja Negra and Seix Barral, an underpaid and curious young man such as myself could, in Lima, read Céline and Faulkner and Carson McCullers and García Márquez for 40 soles.

So the mere idea of spending 78 soles on this anonymous Chilean’s fat novel not only seemed idiotic and insane, but also, in terms of physical health, would deprive me for a week of the inexpensive fare at the restaurant where I regularly ate. On the other hand, there were two powerful factors that complicated my decision. The first was the absolute devotion that The Savage Detectives had generated in a friend of mine, the only person in the world who introduced me to books and authors that seemed essential to my future as a writer. The second, without a doubt, was the fantastic title, so appealing and precise, so Welles and so Godard, which I immediately associated with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, translated into Spanish as La pandilla salvaje, which uses cowboys to speak of solidarity and codes of honor and friendship among delinquent friends.

In summary: I decided to buy it and devoured those 78 soles in a single day, and that didn’t matter one bit: I read it again and again, and talked about it and recommended it to others. I wrote a masters thesis about the novel and, in addition, went to Mexico in search of the diffuse shadow of a promiscuous female poet who resembled María Font.

What did I like about Bolaño’s novel?

In formal terms, it was clear to me that his prose, while apparently simple, has a restrained and suggestive lyricism and a powerful musicality that are very different than what the authors of the “Boom” produced.

Simon Cox in More Intelligent Life:

I first visited Delhi ten years ago, drawn not by the city but by one of its citizens. I had fallen in love with a Dilliwalli I met at university in America two years before. It was past time I saw her in her “native place”, as Indians put it.

We visited the usual tombs, markets, shrines and gardens, including the domed presidential palace on Raisina Hill that once housed the viceroy. Our trip coincided with a visit by the wives (they were all wives) of the British High Commission. They cooed and fussed, like previous owners checking up on the new landlords. One even looked for dust under the carpet. It was a relief to escape into the palace’s Mughal Gardens, where a tiny Dilliwalla peed on the lawn while his parents smiled helplessly.

Delhi can be grand, but it is rarely solemn. The people can be rude, but never cold. Earlier this year I returned to Raisina Hill to watch India’s military bands beat the retreat, overseen by members of the camel cavalry. After the last bugle was sounded and the last bagpipe squeezed, a switch was flicked, and Delhi’s imposing imperial buildings, strung with bulbs, lit up like a Christmas decoration.

Visitors to Delhi often see a faded glory, like a grand carpet collecting dust. The city is casually littered with history, much of it neglected or buried under the paraphernalia of the present. But Delhi’s past will surely be overshadowed by its future. There are three times as many Indians alive today as there were at Independence in 1947, and Delhi is home to over 16m of them. Over the next three decades India should begin to regain the economic clout it lost over three centuries. To visit Delhi in a mood of nostalgia, then, is to close your eyes to history in the making.

Samuel Moyn in The Nation:

A mere thirty-three years ago, on January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter inaugurated his presidency by proclaiming from the Capitol steps, “Because we are free we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere…. Our commitment to human rights must be absolute.” Most people had never heard of “human rights.” Except for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a couple of passing references, no president had really mentioned the concept, and it never had gained much traction around the world either. Carter's words sparked an intense debate at every level of government and society, and in political capitals across the Atlantic Ocean, about what it would entail to shape a foreign policy based on the principle of human rights.

The concept of rights, including natural rights, stretches back centuries, and “the rights of man” were a centerpiece of the age of democratic revolution. But those droits de l'homme et du citoyen meant something different from today's “human rights.” For most of modern history, rights have been part and parcel of battles over the meanings and entitlements of citizenship, and therefore have been dependent on national borders for their pursuit, achievement and protection. In the beginning, they were typically invoked by a people to found a nation-state of their own, not to police someone else's. They were a justification for state sovereignty, not a source of appeal to some authority—like international law—outside and above it.

In the United States, rights were also invoked to defend property, not simply to defend women, blacks and workers against discrimination and second-class citizenship. The New Deal assault on laissez-faire required an unstinting re-examination of the idea of natural rights, which had been closely associated with freedom of contract since the nineteenth century and routinely defended by the Supreme Court. By the 1970s, rights as a slogan for democratic revolution seemed less pressing, and few remembered the natural rights of property and contract that the New Deal had once been forced to challenge. Carter was free to invoke the concept of rights for purposes it had never before served. (Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once called on future historians to “trace the internal discussions…that culminated in the striking words of the inaugural address.” No one, however, yet knows exactly how they got there.)

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in Discover:

Eleni Dagiasi flew from Athens to Delhi in January 2008 on a mission to save her life. With her husband, Leonidas, she took a taxi from the airport past sparkling multiplexes and office buildings to a guesthouse in the booming exurb of Gurgaon. A kitchen staff was on hand, the rooms had cable, and there was a recreation area with billiards, providing patients with creature comforts while kidney transplants were arranged. Over the next week, as her operation was scheduled, Dagiasi went to a makeshift hospital for dialysis. Then one night, while she was watching TV with her husband, a chef turned off the lights and urged everyone to leave. Shortly afterward, 10 policemen stormed in. “We were too stunned to react,” says Leonidas Dagiasis, a former fisherman who borrowed money from his employer to finance the trip. The couple and other guests were hauled off for questioning. The Gurgaon hospital, it turned out, was the hub of a thriving black market in kidneys. The organs were harvested from poor Indian workers, many of whom had been tricked or forced into selling the organ for as little as $300.

The mastermind, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) charged, was Amit Kumar—a man who performed the surgeries with no more formal training than a degree in ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine. In a career spanning two decades, Kumar had established one of the world’s largest kidney trafficking rings, with a supply chain that extended deep into the Indian countryside. Some of his clients were from India. Many came from Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, Canada, and the United States.

At parties in India and abroad, Kumar introduced himself as one of India’s foremost kidney surgeons, said Rajiv Dwivedi, a CBI investigator based in Delhi. The claim wasn’t entirely illegitimate: Investigators estimate that Kumar has performed hundreds of successful transplants, a practice so lucrative that he was able to finance Bollywood movies and had to fend off extortion threats from the Mumbai mafia. Two weeks after the police crackdown in Gurgaon, Kumar was arrested at a wildlife resort in Nepal and brought back to India, where he now awaits trial.

Kumar’s operation was a microcosm of the vast, shadowy underworld of transplant trafficking that extends from the favelas of São Paulo to the slums of Manila. The tentacles of the trade crisscross the globe, leaving no country untouched, not even the United States, as evidenced by the July 2009 arrest of a New York rabbi who has been charged with arranging illegal transplants in this country by bringing in poor Israelis to supply kidneys.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

From Prospect Magazine:

In our book The Spirit Level, Kate Pickett and I demonstrated that, first, many problems which are more prevalent lower down the social ladder are worse in societies with bigger income differences, and second, that almost everyone would benefit from reduced inequality. To some, however, these seem impossible notions. Writing in the August 2010 edition of Prospect, Matthew Sinclair from the Taxpayers Alliance claimed our research was “simply untrue.”

Sinclair believes he has spotted statistical sleights of hand that hundreds of fellow academics who reviewed our research papers for numerous journals have failed to detect. Decades of peer-reviewed epidemiological research, funded by research councils have, he imagines, been torn to shreds by Christopher Snowdon—author of The Spirit Level Delusion. While Snowdon is described as a “public health researcher,” in actual fact he has no public health qualifications and appears never to have published research in a peer-reviewed journal. Instead, his main contribution to public health is a diatribe against tobacco control and a denial of the ill effects of second-hand smoke.

More here.