Category Archives: Well Worth Reading

Ben Stiller Won’t Do Just Anything for a Laugh

Humor, Well Worth Reading

The June 25 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating long-form profile on Ben Stiller written by Tad Friend. “Funny Is Money” uses the planning process for the upcoming Stiller-directed “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” film as a springboard to examine the comedian’s career.

It offers a candid look at the sausage-making process of studio filmmaking–“four quadrants” appeal and margin percentages. But it also breaks down Stiller, revealing him to both an obsessive worker and a prickly character put off by the gross-out humor he’s often called to do.

Engineering Mosquitoes Out of Existence

Science, Well Worth Reading

The July 9 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating article by Michael Specter looking at how a biotech firm is looking to fight dengue by engineering male mosquitoes that can thrive when provided tetracycline in the lab, live long enough upon release to compete for mates and fertilize offpsring that then wither and die.

Flooding an ecosystem with infertile males has helped eradicate other pests, like the screw-worm, but that relied on good old radiation to scramble the genes. Mosquitoes are too small for that to work, so researchers have turned to genetic techniques instead.

As Specter reports, regions that bear the brunt of dengue are open to the approach, but Key West, which has endemic dengue it manages with insecticides, has proven resistant. A town hall on the subject raised fierce opposition. As one participant said, “I, for one, don’t care about your scientific crap…I don’t care about money you spend. You are not going to cram something down my throat that I don’t want. I am no guinea pig.”

The article is a great read, outlining potential problems in the GM approach while making a persuasive claim that it’s the right one. It’s concerning to see several people make the simplistic argument that “natural” is good and “man-made” is bad. After all, a virus is natural and a vaccine is engineered. But if enough people in Key West catch dengue, they may find they want some “scientific crap” after all.

Sugar and the Nanny State

Well Worth Reading

Certainly. And if people want to ride motorcycles without helmets or smoke cigarettes that’s their prerogative, too. But it’s the nanny-state’s prerogative to protect the rest of us from their idiotic behavior. Sugar-sweetened beverages account for a full 7 percent of our calorie intake, and those calories are not just “empty,” as is often said, but harmful: obesity-related health care costs are at $147 billion and climbing.

New York Times Food Magazine columnist Mark Bittman has a compelling column supporting Mayor Bloomberg’s move to limit portion sizes of sweetened drinks. I’d be more swayed by arguments about the nanny state if it weren’t so obvious that most of us need to be thoroughly nannied, especially when society foots the bill.

An American in Havana

Well Worth Reading

Yet it was possible to see Morgan, with his brooding blue eyes and cigarette perpetually clamped between his teeth, as heralding a new social type: a beatnik, a rolling stone. A friend of Morgan’s once told a reporter, “Jack Kerouac was still imagining life on the road while Morgan was out there living it.”

The May 28 New Yorker has an amazing story by David Grann about an American who traveled to Cuba to fight in the Cuban revolution, only to be chewed up by the aftermath. The subject, William Alexander Morgan, is a petty criminal and drifting soul, who turned a revolution into the culmination of his search for meaning.

Grann illuminates the man and the nation he chose to identify with, proving equally adept with Morgan’s abandoned children and the brutality of one dictator that slides into the murderous repression of another.