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The news of the passing of Evelyn Lauder, crusader for breast cancer awareness, on November 12 brought feelings of sadness for me and many in my family. Indeed, any family member of a survivor of cancer was probably affected by the news of Lauder’s death. Her pink ribbon campaign is as ubiquitous as air itself. Her tireless efforts to raise cancer awareness is admirable and appreciated.

Below Dr. Lauren Pecorino, author of Why Millions Survive Cancer, comments on Lauder’s influence and offers some hope for those diagnosed, or know someone close who has been diagnosed with cancer. – Purdy, Publicity

By  Lauren Pecorino

Cancer is managed throughout the world by teams of people, most notably those made up of doctors, nurses, hospice workers and scientists. But it took one powerful and astute businesswoman to use a successful marketing campaign to raise awareness of breast health around the world.

In 1992, Evelyn Lauder, daughter-in-law of Estee Lauder, along with Alexandra Penny, former Editor of SELF magazine, created the pink ribbon as a symbol of breast health. To date, the Estee Lauder Companies’ Breast Cancer Awareness (BCA) Campaign has given away more than 100 million pink ribbons and millions of informational brochures at its cosmetic counters around the world. The designation of October as Breast Cancer Awareness Month by politicians was a tribute to the success of her campaign.

In 2000, the BCA broadened its ‘Pink’ awareness campaign and began illuminating historic landmarks such as the Empire State Building, Niagara Falls, the Tower of London, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Tokyo Tower with pink lights to raise awareness on a highly visible scale. English actress and Estee’ Lauder spokeswoman Elizabeth Hurley worked with Evelyn Lauder on breast cancer awareness since the mid-1990s. Together they traveled the world to raise awareness of the importance of breast health and early cancer detection.

Back in 1993, Evelyn Lauder founded the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) as an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to funding innovative clinical and translational research. The BCRF has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and supports scientists across the USA, Canada, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia.

And as recently as 2009, the money raised from the sale of ribbons and related items helped Lauder establish the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. In so many ways, Evelyn Lauder contributed greatly to the progress we have seen in our fight against breast cancer.

The progress in our fight against breast cancer has been impressive over the last few decades and has resulted in a decreasing trend in mortality. In addition to better awareness, advances have been seen in screening participation, methods of surgery, new treatments, and quality of life. Participation of women in the USA over 40 years old in having a mammogram within the last two years is about 67%. Although different individual studies have reported different values, a re-examination of a mass of previous trials by experts commissioned by the World Health Organization has estimated that the reduction in mortality from breast cancer due to screening is about 35%. Advances in surgery include lumpectomy versus mastectomy and the use of robotics for more precise removal of tumor tissue.

Although tamoxifen has been a successful drug used for decades, newer alternatives such as aromatase inh

By Alexander M. Gelber

When tax incentives draw single women into the labour force, what activities do they sacrifice? Do they spend less time enjoying leisure? Do they cut back on household chores? Do they give up time with their children?

Over the past thirty years, US policymakers tried to increase participation of single mothers in the labour force by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and reforming the welfare system. One key motivation for reform was the perception that some single mothers were choosing to be idle and instead ought to contribute more productively to society by working. But did the policy reforms induce single mothers to shift from one productive activity – work at home – to another – work in the market? In a new paper published in the Review of Economic Studies, we find that the answer is “yes”: tax policy largely shifts single women between work at home and work in the market. Interestingly, however, when tax incentives draw them into the labour force, they may not cut much from their “quality time” with their children.

Remarkable patterns in the data suggest that tax policy had a very important effect on the labour supply and housework decisions of single women over this period. From the mid-1980s to the mid-to-late-1990s, the incentive to participate in the labour force greatly increased for single women with children relative to those without children. This was largely due to major expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit—which transfers money to low-income single households only if they participate in the labor force—and cutbacks in welfare, both of which impacted low-income single women.

The figure below shows that over the same period of years, hours of market work for single women with children increased substantially relative to those without children, as previous literature has documented. This suggests that the changes in policy may have been responsible for the large changes in market work over the same period.

Strikingly, the pattern for housework looks like a mirror image of the pattern for market work. Hours of housework fell substantially for women with children relative to those without children over the period of the primary policy changes, with little relative change outside of this period. The relative fall in housework accounts for over half of the relative increase in market work, suggesting that most of the change in market work came out of housework. We find that for every additional hour that a single woman spends working in the market in response to a change in tax policy, she spends about 40 minutes less time working at home.

Mean usual hours of market work and housework of single women with and without children, 1975-2004

Importantly, we find no evidence that single women’s amount of time spent with children (as the primary activity, i.e. “quality time”) decreases significantly. We also find that single women’s time spent eating and preparing food decreases and that time spent sleeping changes insignificantly.

We find evidence that single women’s purchases of food away from home, such as takeout and restaurant meals, increase in response to an increase in the incentive to participate in the labour force. This makes sense: Women are busier when they enter the labour force and make up some of the time by purchasing food prepared by others instead of themselves. We also find some evidence that overall food purchases rise. Single women thus appear to use market goods to substitute for time: they become busier when they enter the labor force and save time by buying food in the market instead of themselves spending time on food.

Interestingly, howev

By Danielle Venton

For millions of years, the stout, muscular Przewalski’s horse freely roamed the high grasslands of Central Asia. By the mid-1960s, these, the last of the wild horses, were virtually extinct: a result of hunting, habitat loss, and cross breeding with domestic horses.

Recovering from a tiny population of 12 individuals and only four purebred females, there are now nearly 2,000 Przewalski’s horses around the world. Once again, the light-colored horses, standing about 13 hands, or 1.3 meters, tall, are beginning to graze on the Asian steppe, thanks to captive breeding and reintroduction programs.

Protecting Przewalski’s horses, listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, will require far more than protecting their habitat. Understanding and safeguarding their genetic diversity is key, said Kateryna Makova, an evolutionary genomicist at Pennsylvania State University. In a new study (Goto et al. 2011), Makova and her colleagues Hiroki Goto, Oliver Ryder, and others report on the most complete genetic analysis of Przewalski’s horses to date, clarifying previous genetic analyses that were inconclusive.

Because Przewalksi’s horses are the only remaining wild horses, many people have hypothesized that they gave rise to modern domestic horses. The Australian Brumbies or the American Mustangs, sometimes referred to as wild horses, are actually feral domestic horses, adapted to life in the wild. Przewalski’s horses are not the direct progenitors of modern domestic horses, Makova and her colleagues conclude, but split approximately 0.12 Ma. Horses were likely domesticated several times on the Eurasian steppes. It is not known where and when the first event took place. Recent excavations in Kazakhstan indicate humans were using domestic horses as early as 5,500 years ago.

Przewalski’s horse and offspring

The team base their findings on a complete sequencing of the mitochondrial genome and a partial sequencing, between 1% and 2%, of the nuclear genome. They used one horse from each of the historical matrilineal lines. After processing the DNA samples with massively parallel sequencing technology, they compared the Przewalski’s horses to each other, to domestic Thoroughbred horses, and to an outgroup, the Somali wild ass.

Their results carry several implications for breeding strategies. Przewalski’s horses and domestic horses come from different evolutionary gene pools, so breeders should avoid crosses with domestic horses, they advise. Przewalski’s horses and domestic horses have a different number of chromosomes (66 for the former, compared with 64); yet their offspring are fertile (with 65 chromosomes). The hybrids are viable because they differ only by a centric fusion translocation, also called a Robertsonian translocation. The process of pairing chromosomes during meiosis is not disrupted. Cross breeding should be a last resort, if too few Przewalski’s horses are available. Their analysis also suggests that, since diverging, Przewalski’s and domestic horses have both retained joint ancestral genes and swapped genes between populations. One of the two current major blood lines, the “Prague” line, is known to have a Mongol pony as one of its ancestors. The other primary line, the “Munich” line, is believed to be pure. However, because the two groups have historically mixed, keeping “pure” Przewalski’s horses from Przewalski’s horses with known domestic horse contributions might not be necessary, the authors write.

By Edward Zelinsky

Although he had said it before, Warren Buffett struck a nerve with his most recent observation that his effective federal tax rate is lower than or equal to the effective federal tax rates of the other employees who work at Berkshire Hathaway’s Omaha office. Mr. Buffett’s observations have provoked extensive comments both from those supporting his position (e.g., President Obama) and those critical (e.g., the editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal).

In response to Mr. Buffett’s remarks, President Obama has promulgated what he calls “the Buffett Rule,” namely, that those making $1,000,000 or more per year should pay an effective federal tax rate higher than the effective rate paid by moderate income taxpayers. To implement this rule, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has proposed a 5.6% federal surtax on annual incomes over $1,000,000. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has issued a report on the Buffett Rule. Deviating from Mr. Obama’s formulation of the Buffett rule, Mr. Buffett himself has indicated that he only favors higher income taxation for “the ultra rich,” a group which apparently consists of individuals earning substantially more than $1,000,000 annually.

The debate following Mr. Buffett’s comments has been spirited, but, for many, confusing. Here is my effort to clarify the facts and arguments.

1) FICA taxes are the predominant tax burden on most working Americans. As I discussed in last month’s blog, many working Americans pay little or no federal income taxes, but do pay significant FICA taxes to finance Social Security and Medicare. Democrats and Republicans alike have ignored this reality. Democrats prefer to ignore the heavy FICA tax burden on lower income Americans to preclude an honest discussion about the fairness of those taxes to younger Americans, even after considering the Social Security and Medicare benefits younger Americans may receive in the future. Republicans avoid the reality of FICA taxation because it undermines the mantra that half of all Americans pay no federal income tax. That statement is true but incomplete. Working Americans who don’t pay income taxes do pay significant FICA taxes. When Mr. Buffett compares his federal taxes to those paid by his secretary, it is the secretary’s FICA taxation which constitute much of the secretary’s obligation to the federal Treasury.

2) As to the taxation of the affluent, the real issue is the lower rates applicable to capital gains. The CRS estimates that approximately 1/4 of those with annual incomes over $1,000,000 violate the Buffett rule by paying federal taxes at effective rates equal to or lower than the effective tax rates of Americans of modest incomes. Besides the FICA taxes borne by working Americans, this phenomenon is caused by lower federal taxes on capital gains. Today, capital gains (including dividends) are generally taxed at a maximum federal tax rate of 15%. This is essentially the same as the combined employer-employee tax rate which applies under FICA to the first dollar of a working American’s wage income.

3) Millionaires pay higher taxes on their ordinary incomes. Mr. Buffett is evidently one of the millionaires whose income largely consists of lightly-taxed capital gains (including dividends). However, the bulk of those making more than $1,000,000 pay taxes at much higher rates than does Mr. Buffett because they earn ordinary incomes such as salaries and other business profits. These millionaires generally do not violate the Buffett rule since the federal inco

By Corina Logan

It’s 4:00 am and I can’t believe I’m (just barely) awake. Not only that, but I have to go out there in the cold and rain. It’s so cold! I’m in the tropics – it’s not supposed to be cold in the tropics. I pull on my clothes (quickly, while still hiding under the covers), grab my gear, and head out into the darkness. I hurriedly walk up the muddy path; time is of the essence. I find the trail into the woods, which is marked with flags, and I hike across the hilly terrain through the dense tropical forest, arriving at my field site about 30 minutes before dawn – just in time. I go over to the army ant nest (called a bivouac because it is made from the interlocked bodies of the ants themselves) and look for activity, being careful not to step near any ants (I learned that lesson a couple of days ago when I decided that I could watch the ants while wearing trainers and not Wellington boots. Ouch. The soldiers have very strong mandibles and they leave a pheromone trail on you which attracts more soldiers by the masses). Just a few ants milling around outside of the hole. I walk about 5 meters away and sit down on a piece of plastic so I stay dry, then I open my umbrella above me. I hold as still as I can while searching the darkness around the army ant nest with my bare eyes and binoculars. My prize? Bivouac-checking birds.

I happened upon bivouac-checking birds when I agreed to be a field assistant for Sean O’Donnell, a professor at the University of Washington (now at Drexel University). We spent a month in a high-elevation Costa Rican cloud forest (which is why it was so cold) studying army ants and the migrating birds that come to the tropics over the winter and eat insects that flee from the thousands of army ants raiding through the forest. After we got to our field site, Sean told me about the bivouac-checking behaviour that is performed by some of the birds that attend army ant raids. After foraging at the front of the raid, some birds follow the column of army ants that connects the raid front to the bivouac (the column is a two-way highway: ants at the raid front bring prey to the bivouac and then return to the raid front to collect more prey) from the raid front to the bivouac and check the location of the bivouac. Then they fly away. The next morning when the ants start raiding again (after retreating to their bivouac for the night), usually just after dawn, these birds will come back to check the bivouac again: if the ants are already raiding, the birds will follow the ant column to the front of the raid for another meal, and if the ants are not yet raiding, then the bird flies to another army ant colony that it is tracking to check their raiding status.

For a biologist, this is a very interesting behaviour because it appears that some birds are able to track army ants in time and space which allows them to consistently encounter abundant food resources, which are patchily distributed throughout the forest making army ant raids difficult to encounter by chance. At this point I was a biologist but I was preparing to start a PhD in experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of animal cognition expert Professor Nicola Clayton. I had read some of Nicky’s papers on episodic-like memory (the ability to remember the what, when, and where of a personal experience) and future planning in western scrub-jays (a bird in the big-brained crow family) by the time I joined Sean in Costa Rica so I was starting to also think in terms of psychology. What struck me about bivouac-checking bird behaviour was that it looked like these birds might need to remember the past event of checking the bivouac location (episodic-like memory) to be able to return to the bivouac the next morning to see if the ants are raiding (planning for a future meal). This seemed like it could be a perfect system for merging my past in biology with my future in psychology. Had I not been exposed to both fields before I went to Costa R

By Gayle Sulik Some people don't even know that disease-specific ribbons besides pink exist. Nan Hart wrote on the discussion board of the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance (Sept. 19th) that after her daughter got a teal ribbon tattoo on her wrist, one of her daughter's coworkers asked why her breast cancer ribbon wasn't pink? Umm...Because it's not a breast cancer ribbon? The assumption that one ribbon

By Elvin Lim The two front-runners in the Republican nomination contest, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, narrowed the distance between them in the last debate in Florida sponsored by Fox and Google. This is a debate that showcased both their Achilles’ heels. Perry's problem is not the "ponzi scheme" comment about Social Security. Most conservatives agree with him, and the consistent conservative would actually agree with him that Social Security is a matter that should be sent back to the states to handle. Perry's problem is his

By Julie MacLeavy In recent years, governments of both the right and left have been involved in debates over the best way to deliver public services. Whereas during the post-war period it was widely accepted that state provisioning of infrastructure, health, education and social services was the best way to ensure the well being of citizens, in the latter decades of the twentieth century the market was claimed to be a better way of delivering public goods and services because it was associated with competition, economic efficiency and consumer choice. Commitment to the market entailed a qualitative shift in welfare provision, whereby welfare was based less on a model in which the state counters the market and more on a model where the state serves the market.

By Richard Landes In the years before 2000, as the director of the ephemeral Center for Millennial Studies, I scanned the global horizon for signs of apocalyptic activity, that is, for movements of people who believed that now was the time of a total global transformation. As I did so, I became aware of such currents of belief among Muslims, some specifically linked to the year 2000, all predominantly expressing the most dangerous of all apocalyptic

By R. Michael Alvarez After my co-editor, Jonathan N. Katz, and I took over editorship of Political Analysis in January 2010, one of our primary goals was to extend the readership and intellectual reach of our journal. We wished to grow our readership internationally, and to also deepen our reach outside of political science, into other social sciences.

By Claire Potter As a citizen, it is sometimes a jolt to realize that September 11 is now a decade in the past. As a teacher of modern United States history who ended her twentieth-century survey last fall with the attack on the twin towers, it was even more of a jolt to realize that a first-year college student who had matriculated in September 2010 might recall only the faint outlines of an event that definitively altered the course of our century. A student who entered high school in that same month would likely have been familiar with images of the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center towers

Carl R. Weinberg Editor, Magazine of History On Tuesday March 11, 2003, I was working in my office at North Georgia College and State University (NGCSU), when I received an email that I will never forget. It was sent to all faculty and staff on the campus listserv from one of my colleagues on the subject of “America's Defense.” His email noted that some of our

By Louis René Beres In Plato’s Republic, a canonic centerpiece of all Western thought, we first read of the “philosopher king,” a visionary leader who would impressively combine deep learning with effective governance. Today, almost 2400 years later, such leadership is nowhere to be found, either in Washington, or in any other major world capital.

By Bianca Haase Cats are among the most common household pets and they share the same environment with humans and thus many of the risk factors. Obesity is a growing problem for feline health for the same reasons as it is in humans and has become a serious veterinary problem. Multiple diseases, such as type II diabetes mellitus and dermatosis, are associated with excess body weight and obesity in cats and may result in a lowered quality of life and potentially lead to an early death. Appleton et al. demonstrated that about 44% of cats developed impaired

By Charles Kurzman Last month, a few hours after a bomb exploded in downtown Oslo, I got a call from a journalist seeking comment. Why did Al Qaeda attack Norway? Why not a European country with a larger Muslim community, or a significant military presence in Muslim societies? I said I didn't know. A second media inquiry soon followed: Given NATO's involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the number of disaffected Muslims in Europe, why don't we see more attacks like the one in Norway? This question was more up my alley. I recently

It's being called "a whale of a problem," and not just by me. According to research published in the Journal of Heredity, endangered Southern Resident orcas are mating within their family groups. This "genetic bottleneck" means the whales could be more susceptible to diseases, early mortality or failure to produce calves. The study's lead author is Michael J. Ford, a scientist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.

By Daniel Byman and Charles King Three years ago this month, Russia and Georgia fought a brief and brutal war over an obscure slice of mountainous land called South Ossetia that had declared its independence from Georgia. Flouting international law, Russia stepped in to defend South Ossetia and later formally recognized the secessionists as a legitimate [...]

By Bill Wiist In 2009, there were 2,733 corporate foundations with assets of more than $10 billion and an annual donation of $2.5 billion. In that year foundations made grants of more than $38 billion of which $15.41 billion was from family foundations. In 2009, the 50 largest contributors to health donated more than $3 billion through almost 5,000 grants. The extent of corporate-based foundation funding in public health raises two critical questions for public health policy, research, and programming. First, should corporate-based foundations be setting the public health research and program agenda?

By Elvin Lim

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By F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk

 
After fighting each other for over a decade, the egg industry and the largest animal advocacy organization came to an agreement, one which will increase the welfare of egg-laying hens but also increase egg prices.  The United Egg Producers, under persistent pressure from the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), has agreed to transition hens out of battery cages and into enriched colony cages.  The HSUS certainly believes the higher welfare standards are worth the increase in egg prices, but do consumers agree?  My research says that when consumers are informed about the issue, yes, they applaud the move—even when they know higher egg prices will follow.

Most consumers do not wish to see farm animals crammed into small cages, but if they take the time to discover the source of their pork and eggs, these cramped animal cages are what they will see.  Chickens raised for egg production are placed in groups of 4-6 birds and raised their entire lives inside a cage so small that they cannot turn around without bumping into another chicken.  Spreading their wings is out of the question.  Sows (female hogs used for breeding) are confined even tighter, spending most of their lives in a stall so small the sow cannot even turn around.  There are more farm animal welfare issues than just space allotments.  Both layers and sows desire to forage for food, scratch or dig, socialize, and find comfortable places to rest.  All of these “behavioral” needs are neglected in the typical egg and pork production facility.  By transitioning from battery cages to enriched colony cages, the egg industry goes a long way towards meeting these space and behavioral needs.

Why are animal cages used in the first place, when the average person finds them disturbing?  In the competitive marketplace for food, farmers must employ confined production facilities to keep their costs low, because consumers generally emphasize low prices over animal welfare at the grocery store.  Yet, at the same time, consumers who purchase food from so-called “factory farms” donate money to the HSUS, who uses some of this money to ban the same animal cages used to produce most eggs and pork.  In surveys, referendums, and economic research, consumers consistently support the banning of the same cramped animal cages used to produce the food they purchase.

One reason the farm animal welfare debate cannot be quickly resolved is that consumers have difficulty resolving the issue for themselves.  They want livestock to be treated kindly, but they also want low food prices, and it is difficult to reconcile the tradeoff between animal well-being and food prices in the grocery store and/or in referendums.  For these reasons, the farm animal welfare debate is a messy, contradictory debate—the trademark of a democratic process.

Although consumer attitudes can be elusive to identify, research has revealed a few facts.  The most important fact to stem from consumer research is that, when consumers are informed about how layers and sows are raised, they consistently state they are willing to pay the higher food prices that would result from better animal care.  This does not imply that regular grocery store shoppers will reflect this level of concern in their willingness-to-pay for food, because the regular grocery store shopper is uninformed. 

However, the farm animal welfare debate is largely a policy debate.  Should we ban colony cages for layers?  Should we ban gestation stalls for sows?  It would seem prudent to base policy on the opinions of informed consumers, as opposed to uninformed consumers.  When employing this prudent procedure, there is little doubt that the ban on cramped animal cages occurring in the European Union and US states is justifi

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By Edward Zelinsky

Receiving my AARP membership card was one of the truly traumatic events of my life. I had marched for civil rights. I had protested the war in Vietnam. I walked the streets for Gene McCarthy. I was a legitimate Baby Boomer. How could this have happened to me?

My wiser and more self-confident spouse took it in better stride. Doris quickly became adept at pulling out her AARP card and demanding old-age discounts, as I stood sheepishly aside.

My personal disquiet about my AARP card reinforced my deeply-seated, policy-based misgivings about the AARP. President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich could have emulated President Reagan and Speaker O’Neill by negotiating a reasonable, bi-partisan approach to Social Security. At that time, increasing the retirement ages for Baby Boomers and other similarly modest measures would have brought Social Security’s projected payments into line with its expected revenues, with only minor impacts on future retirees.

There were many reasons such a deal didn’t happen during the Clinton years, but the AARP’s strident opposition was chief among them.

As the financial problems of Social Security and Medicare became more acute, I became increasingly troubled by the AARP’s refusal to address them. The AARP’s effective opposition to reforming these entitlement programs has implemented perfectly the ethic of Baby Boomer narcissism.

I was accordingly surprised and reassured to learn that the AARP has at last acknowledged the need for us geezers, i.e., its members, to reform Social Security benefits for the financial sake of our children and grandchildren. As a mushy moderate, I am convinced that there is a balanced package of tax increases and benefit reductions which can allow the Baby Boomers to retire without bankrupting our offspring.

It is good news that the AARP has belatedly recognized this reality.

Medicare will be tougher to reform. It is now finally sinking in that the Independent Payment Advisory Board President Obama and Congress created as part of the health reform package will effectively ration medical care through its control of Medicare’s payments to health care providers. This should surprise no one: Rationing is how government outlays are controlled. Medicare’s outlays must be controlled.

The same is true of the consumer-driven approach to controlling Medicare expenses proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan. The Ryan plan would place greater responsibility on Medicare consumers to control costs. This approach is also going to be necessary to control Medicare outlays.

Determining the right mix of these two approaches is going to be a difficult task. Regrettably, neither Republicans nor Democrats are now prepared to undertake the serious enterprise of governing.

It would be good for the AARP to also raise its voice on behalf of the cause of Medicare cost reform.

However, for now, I’ll take what I can get. It is progress for the AARP, however gingerly, to acknowledge that Social Security entitlements for the elderly must be curbed in the interests of national solvency and the futures of our children and grandchildren.

But I will still step aside while Doris demands the elderly discount.

Edward A. Zelinsky is the Morris and Annie Trachman Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He is the author of The Origins of the Ownership Society: How The Defined Contribution Paradigm Changed America

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By Dennis Baron

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it.

According to the Guardian, growing numbers of “authors” are churning out meaningless ebooks by harvesting sections of text from the web, licensing it for a small fee from online rights aggregators, or copying it for free from an open source like Project Gutenberg. These authors—we could call them text engineers—contribute nothing to the writing process beyond selecting passages to copy and stringing them together, or if that seems too much like work, just cutting out the original author’s name and pasting in their own. The spam ebooks that result are composed entirely of prose designed, not to convey information or send a message, but to churn profits.

The other new source of empty text is content farms, internet sweatshops where part-timers generate prose whose sole purpose is to use keywords that attract the attention of search engines. The goal of content farms is not to get relevant text in front of you, but to get you to view the paid advertising in which the otherwise meaningless words are nested.

Ebook spam and content farms may sound like the antitheses of traditional writing, in that they don’t inform, stimulate thought, or comment on the human condition. They’re certainly not the kind of repurposed writing that Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly foresaw back in 2006 when he wrote that we’d soon be doing with online prose what we were already doing with music: sampling, copying, remixing, and mashing up other people’s words to create our own personal textual playlists.

Kelly, who was paid for his essay, also predicted that in the brave new world of digital text the value we once assigned to words would shift to links, tags, and annotations, and that authors, no longer be paid for producing content, would once again become amateurs motivated by the burning need to share, as they now do with such abandon on Facebook and Twitter.

But if we mash up Kelly’s futuristic vision with the harsh reality that strings of keywords may bring in more dollars than connected prose, then it’s possible that tomorrow’s writers won’t be bloggers, Tweeters, or even taggers, they’ll be scrapbookers, motivated by the burning need to cut and paste. The web may be making authors of us all, but the growing number of content-free links threatens to put writing as we know it out of business.

A cynic might argue that far too many writers have already mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing, so we shouldn’t be surprised if our feverish quest to capitalize on the internet, combined with the vast expansion of the author pool that the net makes possible, have created the monster of contentless prose. We get the writing we deserve.

Plus, things online having the attraction that they do, instead of damning these new genres, soon we may be teaching students how to master them. After all, no writing course is considered complete without a unit on how to write effective email. So it won’t be long before some start-up offers a course in text-mashing instaprose. Or an

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By Gregory A. Daddis

David Ignatius of The Washington Post recently highlighted several “positive signs in Afghanistan,” citing progress on the diplomatic front, in relations between India and Pakistan, and on the battlefield itself. Of note, Ignatius stressed how U.S.-led coalition forces had cleared several Taliban strongholds in Kandahar and Helmand provinces.  The enemy, according to the opinion piece, was “feeling the pressure.” That same day Britain’s former ambassador to Afghanistan condemned General David Petraeus’s tactics as counterproductive and “profoundly wrong.” Denouncing an overemphasis on military action, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles noted that the use of body counts and similar statistics was reminiscent of the Vietnam War and “not conducive to a stable political settlement.”

The allusion to Vietnam, made frequently in the last five years, suggests uncertainty over the true amount of progress being made in Afghanistan today. For nearly a decade Americans in South Vietnam similarly tried in vain to assess progression towards the daunting political-military objective of a stable and independent noncommunist government in Saigon. Military officers and their civilian leaders employed a range of metrics to track success in the myriad political, military, economic, security, and social programs. As early as 1964, analysts were wading through approximately five hundred U.S. and Vietnamese monthly reports in an attempt to appraise the status of the conflict. In the process, the American mission in Vietnam became overwhelmed with data, much of it contradictory and, thus, of dubious value. By war’s end, questions remained over whether the U.S. Army in particular had achieved its goals in Southeast Asia. That debate continues to this day.

The American experience in Vietnam has served—rightfully so—as only an imperfect roadmap for our more current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In short, all wars are unique. Our recent conflicts, however, do illustrate the continuing challenges of defining progress and success in unconventional wars and of developing a coherent strategy for such wars. It is here that an objective study of Vietnam can offer insights and perspectives into the unresolved problems of measuring what matters most in an environment like Afghanistan. Quantitative statistics often do not tell the whole story as governmental allegiances, population security, and political stability all are highly subjective assessments. As in Vietnam, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have varied from province to province and any broad, centralized appraisals of the war likely miss the finer points of local conditions driving the political and military struggle.

Even in a war without front lines, Americans expect wartime progress to be linear. Effort should equal progress. Progress should lead to victory. The widely contrasting views of David Ignatius and Sherard Cowper-Coles, however, imply a battle is being waged over the very idea of “progress” in Afghanistan today. (Asking if the United States “won” in Iraq would provoke equally opposing responses.) If historical examples can be instructive in any way, the problem of metrics in Vietnam arguably helps illuminate the reasons why gauging wartime progress in Afghanistan has produced such a wide range of opinions. Assessing wars oftentimes is just as difficult as winning them.

Colonel Gregory A. Daddis is the author of No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War. Daddis teaches history at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He has served in a variety of

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Who, we sometimes ask, at the dinners and debates of the intelligentsia, was the 20th century’s more insightful prophet — Aldous Huxley or George Orwell? Each is best known for his dystopian fantasy — Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984 — and both feared where modern technology might lead, for authorities and individuals alike. But while Huxley anticipated a world of empty pleasures and excessive convenience, Orwell predicted ubiquitous surveillance and the eradication of freedom. Who was right?     —William Davies, New Statesman, August 1, 2005

Image: Lisa Jane Persky

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

The long-standing Huxley vs. Orwell debate got a 21st century New Media makeover in 2009, courtesy of cartoonist Stuart McMillen. In May of that year, he published an online comic entitled “Amusing Ourselves to Death” that quickly went viral. At the top of this strip, which has been tweeted and re-tweeted many times and can now be found posted on scores of websites, we see caricatures of the two authors above their names and the respective titles of their best-known novels. Below that comes a series of couplet-like contrastive statements, accompanied by illustrations. The top couplet reads: “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books; What Huxley feared was that there would be no need to ban a book, for there would be no one who would want to read one.” The first statement is paired with a picture of a censorship committee behind a desk, with a one-man “Internet Filter Department” off to one side, a wastebasket for banned books off to the other. The illustration for the second statement shows a family of couch potatoes waiting for The Biggest Loser to return after a word from its sponsors.

McMillen’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” might best be called an homage, or perhaps a reboot, for the lines in it all come straight from media theorist Neil Postman’s influential 1985 book of the same title, which made the case for Huxley’s famous 1932 novel being a superior guide to the era of television than Orwell’s from 1949. But Postman himself was far from the first to play the Huxley vs. Orwell game. The tradition of comparing and contrasting Huxley and Orwell goes back to, well, Huxley and Orwell, two writers who — though this is not mentioned as often as one might expect — knew one another from Eton, where Orwell was Huxley’s pupil in the 1910s.

Orwell had not yet written 1984 when he first questioned his former teacher’s prescience. In the early 1940s, a reader of his newspaper column solicited Orwell’s opinion of the danger that consumerism and the pursuit of pleasure posed to society. Orwell replied that, in his view, the time to worry about Brave New World scenarios had passed, for hedonism and “vulgar materialism” were no longer the great threat they once had been.

In October 1949, just a few months after Orwell published 1984 (a work that presumably spelled out the more pressing threats he had in mind), Huxley wrote to his former pupil to make the opposite point. Orwell’s book impressed him, he said, but he did not find it completely convincing, because he continued to think, as he had when crafting Brave New Word, that the elites of the future would find “less arduous” strategies for satisfying their “lust for power” than the “boot-on-the-face” technique described in 1984.

Huxley wrote that letter in Britain during a month that began with a momentous event taking place a

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By Louis René Beres

Today, Israel’s leadership, continuing to more or less disregard the nation’s special history, still acts in ways that are neither tragic nor heroic. Unwilling to accept the almost certain future of protracted war and terror, one deluded prime minister after another has sought to deny Israel’s special situation in the world. Hence, he or she has always been ready to embrace, unwittingly, then-currently-fashionable codifications of collective suicide.

In Washington, President Barack Obama is consciously shaping these particular codifications, not with any ill will, we may hope, but rather with all of the usual diplomatic substitutions of rhetoric for an authentic intellectual understanding. For this president, still sustained by an utterly cliched “wisdom,” peace in the Middle East is just another routine challenge for an assumed universal reasonableness and clever presidential speechwriting.

Human freedom is an ongoing theme in Judaism, but this sacred freedom can never countenance a “right” of collective disintegration. Individually and nationally, there is always a binding Jewish obligation to choose life. Faced with the “blessing and the curse,” both the solitary Jew, and the ingathered Jewish state, must always come down in favor of the former.

Today, Israel, after Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement,” Ehud Olmert’s “realignment,” Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes for “Palestinian demilitarization,” and U.S. President Barack Obama’s “New Middle East,” may await, at best, a tragic fate. At worst, resembling the stark and minimalist poetics of Samuel Beckett, Israel’s ultimate fate could be preposterous.

True tragedy contains calamity, but it must also reveal greatness in trying to overcome misfortune.

For the most part, Jews have always accepted the obligation to ward off disaster as best they can.

For the most part, Jews generally do understand that we humans have “free will.” Saadia Gaon included freedom of the will among the most central teachings of Judaism, and Maimonides affirmed that all human beings must stand alone in the world “to know what is good and what is evil, with none to prevent him from either doing good or evil.”

For Israel, free will must always be oriented toward life, to the blessing, not to the curse. Israel’s binding charge must always be to strive in the obligatory direction of individual and collective self-preservation, by using intelligence, and by exercising disciplined acts of national will. In those circumstances where such striving would still be consciously rejected, the outcome, however catastrophic, can never rise to the dignifying level of tragedy.

The ancient vision of authentically “High Tragedy” has its origins in Fifth Century BCE Athens. Here, there is always clarity on one overriding point: The victim is one whom “the gods kill for their sport, as wanton boys do flies.” This wantonness, this caprice, is precisely what makes tragedy unendurable.

With “disengagement,” with “realignment,” with “Palestinian demilitarization,” with both Oslo, and the Road Map, Israel’s corollary misfortunes remain largely self-inflicted. The continuing drama of a Middle East Peace Process is, at best, a surreal page torn from Ionesco, or even from Kafka. Here, there is nary a hint of tragedy; not even a satisfyingly cathartic element that might have been drawn from Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides. At worst, and this is the more plausible characterization, Israel’s unhappy fate has been ripped directly from the utterly demeaning pages of irony and farce.

Under former Prime