By Shankar Vedantam
In Shakespeare's "King Lear," a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends who will not varnish the truth to please him.Several controversies in the past six years of the Bush administration -- including two in the news last week -- bring Lear to mind. From discrediting a covert CIA officer whose husband had criticized the invasion of Iraq to having the Justice Department find out which U.S. attorneys were "loyal Bushies," from sidelining a general who said more troops would be needed in Iraq to silencing government scientists who advocated action against global warming, from sniping at an actuary whose numbers didn't square with the administration's health-care cost projections to belittling those who warned against using inhumane techniques against detainees, the Bush administration has regularly evinced a with-me-or-against-me attitude to criticism.
Psychological experiments show that nearly everyone is susceptible to the lure of ignoring criticism. We are innately drawn to those who admire us and agree with us, and inclined to dislike the people who criticize us.
There are two important differences, however, between ordinary people and the powerful. Kings, presidents and CEOs get to decide who surrounds them and what they will hear. Even those leaders who invite critics into their circle may not hear contrary views because the bravest of employees can find it difficult to tell their bosses things they do not wish to hear...[READ MORE]
Tracing the Cigarette’s Path From Sexy to Deadly
By HOWARD MARKEL, M.D. for the New York Times
For many Americans, the tobacco industry’s disingenuousness became a matter of public record during a Congressional hearing on April 14, 1994. There, under the withering glare of Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, appeared the chief executives of the seven largest American tobacco companies.
Each executive raised his right hand and solemnly swore to tell the whole truth about his business. In sequential testimony, each one stated that he did not believe tobacco was a health risk and that his company had taken no steps to manipulate the levels of nicotine in its cigarettes.
Thirty years after the famous surgeon general’s report declaring cigarette smoking a health hazard, the tobacco executives, it seemed, were among the few who believed otherwise.
But it was not always that way. Allan M. Brandt, a medical historian at Harvard, insists that recognizing the dangers of cigarettes resulted from an intellectual process that took the better part of the 20th century. He describes this fascinating story in his new book, “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” (Basic Books).
In contrast to the symbol of death and disease it is today, from the early 1900s to the 1960s the cigarette was a cultural icon of sophistication, glamour and sexual allure — a highly prized commodity for one out of two Americans.
Many advertising campaigns from the 1930s through the 1950s extolled the healthy virtues of cigarettes. Full-color magazine ads depicted kindly doctors clad in white coats proudly lighting up or puffing away, with slogans like “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”
Early in the 20th century, opposition to cigarettes took a moral rather than a health-conscious tone, especially for women who wanted to smoke, although even then many doctors were concerned that smoking was a health risk.
The 1930s were a period when many Americans began smoking and the most significant health effects had not yet developed. As a result, the scientific studies of the era often failed to find clear evidence of serious pathology and had the perverse effect of exonerating the cigarette.
The years after World War II, however, were a time of major breakthroughs in epidemiological thought. In 1947, Richard Doll and A. Bradford Hill of the British Medical Research Council created a sophisticated statistical technique to document the association between rising rates of lung cancer and increasing numbers of smokers.
The prominent surgeon Evarts A. Graham and a medical student, Ernst L. Wynder, published a landmark article in 1950 comparing the incidence of lung cancer in their nonsmoking and smoking patients at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis. They concluded that “cigarette smoking, over a long period, is at least one important factor in the striking increase in bronchogenic cancer.”
Predictably, the tobacco companies — and their expert surrogates — derided these and other studies as mere statistical arguments or anecdotes rather than definitions of causality...[READ MORE]
Music
Placebo Covers
Placebo - "Running Up That Hill" (Kate Bush cover)
Placebo - "Where is My Mind?" (Pixies cover)
Placebo - "20th Century Boy" (T-Rex cover)
Placebo - "The Ballad Of Melody Nelson" (Serge Gainsbourg)
Placebo - "Jackie" (Sinead O' Conner cover)