Author: Art Diamond

“If Pro Is the Opposite of Con, Is Progress the Opposite of Congress?”

(p. B12) Gallagher, who became one of the most recognizable comedians of the 1980s for an outrageous act that always concluded with him smashing a watermelon with a sledgehammer, died on Friday [Nov. 11, 2022] at his home in Palm Springs, Calif.

. . .

In 1987, United Press International reported that researchers at Loma Linda University in Southern California studying laughter took blood samples from 10 medical students while they watched Mr. Gallagher in action. Not only did they laugh uproariously; their white blood cells increased. The comedian, the scientists said, appeared to have boosted the subjects’ immune systems.

. . .

Much of Mr. Gallagher’s humor was based on wordplay. (“I don’t know why they say you have a baby. The baby has you.” “If pro is the opposite of con, is progress the opposite of Congress?”) But he also prided himself on being outrageous and even offensive, defying political correctness. (Deaf people, he said, should be required to live near airports.) Many people, especially in his later years, felt his jokes about racial groups, gay people and women crossed a line.

“Look around — see any Mexicans?” he said during one 2010 show. “They’ll be here later for the cleanup.”

In 2011, Mr. Gallagher was a guest on his fellow comedian Marc Maron’s podcast but walked out when Mr. Maron asked him about this and similar jokes. Some critics agreed that his act had gone too far. But he never toned it down.

For the full obituary, see:

Douglas Martin. “Gallagher, 76, Who Smashed Watermelons With a Sledgehammer, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, November 12, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Nov. 14, 2022, and has the title “Gallagher, Watermelon-Smashing Comedian, Is Dead at 76.”)

The Sassoon Family’s Rags-to-Riches-to-Rags Story

(p. 8) The rise and fall of the Sassoon family, who, at their height, traded in opium, tea, silk and jewels, is charted in delectable detail in “The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire,” by the historian Joseph Sassoon, a distant relative who seems just as pleased as anyone unrelated might be to uncover the grit and gains of a tribe of fascinating figures.

. . .

Rags-to-riches stories may all be the same, but it’s the way in which a fortune is lost that’s truly compelling. Sassoon’s detailed account of the decentralization of family power and the proliferation of descendants interested in spending but not making money is well paced and supremely satisfying. An observer of the clan notes that “nothing suppresses an appetite for commerce more than a diet of gentlemanly pursuits,” and readers are treated through the second half of the book to a slow-motion sputtering out of David Sassoon’s great machine. You find yourself feeling for them: While masters of the universe inspire little sympathy, knowing from the first page that this empire has crumbled allows you to mourn the sunset of a particular kind of existence, even as a part of you revels in it.

For the full review, see:

Adam Rathe. “Dynasty.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, November 6, 2022): 8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Oct. 25, 2022, and has the title “The Rise and Fall of a Great Dynasty.”)

The book under review is:

Sassoon, Joseph. The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire. New York: Pantheon, 2022.

Environmentalists Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Landscape

(p. A7) Two climate activists threw mashed potatoes on a glass-covered painting by the celebrated French Impressionist Claude Monet on Sunday [Oct. 23, 2022] inside a German museum, the latest art attack intended to draw attention to climate change.

Videos show the activists dousing one of the artist’s works, “Grainstacks,” with a thick yellow substance that covered the painting’s warm red hues. The oil on canvas is one of 25 paintings the artist made around 1890 of stacks of hay in the fields near his house in Giverny, France.

The activists, a man and a woman, each glued a hand to the wall by the painting. Then, the woman shouted in German that the world was in “a climate catastrophe, and all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes in a painting,” referring to a similar attack this month in London by activists who threw cans of tomato soup on a painting by Vincent van Gogh.

. . .

Across Europe, climate protesters have sought to capture headlines in recent months by engaging in similar stunts tied to beloved pieces in the art world. In Britain, activists glued themselves to about a half-dozen masterpieces, including a 16th-century copy of “The Last Supper” at the Royal Academy, a major art museum in London. And in Italy, activists glued themselves to a sculpture held in the Vatican and to works in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence.

For the full story, see:

Eduardo Medina. “Monet Painting Is Splashed In Latest Stunt Over Climate.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 25, 2022): A7.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 8, 2022, and has the title “Climate Activists Throw Mashed Potatoes on Monet Painting.”)

“I Was There and I Was a Part of This Wonderful Thing That He Was Doing”

(p. A20) If Snow White looked suitably snowy in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” if Pinocchio’s nose grew at just the right rate, if Dumbo was the correct shade of elephantine gray, all that was due in part to the largely unheralded work of Ruthie Tompson.

. . .

In 1922, after her parents divorced and her mother married John Roberts, a plein-air painter, Ruthie and her sister moved with her mother and stepfather to Los Angeles, where her mother worked as an extra in Hollywood movies. The family lived down the street from Robert Disney, an uncle of Walt Disney and his brother Roy.

The Disney brothers founded their first film studio nearby in 1923, and it happened to be on Ruthie Tompson’s route to school. Walking past it each day, she peered through a window, transfixed, as the work of animation unfolded.

One day, Walt Disney spied her.

“He came out and said, ‘Why don’t you go inside and watch?’” Ms. Tompson recalled some nine decades later in a podcast for the Walt Disney Family Museum.

“I was really fascinated,” she said. She returned to the studio many times, becoming something of a fixture there.

During those years, the studio was shooting the Alice Comedies, a series of silent shorts combining animation and live action, and sometimes enlisted neighborhood children as extras.

Among them was Ruthie, who appeared in several pictures, receiving 25 cents for each. Her cinematic salary, Ms. Tompson recalled, went toward licorice.

Her association with the Disneys might well have ended there had it not been for the fact that a decade later Walt and Roy chose to take polo lessons.

. . .

“Ruthie Tompson!” Walt Disney declared on seeing her there. “Why don’t you come and work for me?”

“I can’t draw worth a nickel,” she replied.

No matter, Mr. Disney told her: The studio would send her to night school to learn the rudiments of inking and painting.

“Of course,” Ms. Tompson recalled, “everybody around me said: ‘Don’t say no! Don’t say no!’”

. . .

In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.

The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.

“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”

. . .

In the Walt Disney Family Museum podcast, Ms. Tompson fondly recalled her long-ago association with Walt Disney and the unexpected career to which it gave rise.

“I never got over being awe-struck at the fact that I was there and I was a part of this wonderful thing that he was doing,” she said.

For the full obituary, see:

Margalit Fox. “Ruthie Tompson, Invisible Hand Behind Pinocchio’s Nose, Dies at 111.” The New York Times (Wednesday, October 13, 2021): A20.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Oct. 12, 2021, and has the title “Ruthie Tompson Dies at 111; Breathed Animated Life Into Disney Films.”)

Cutting Out Time to Do Key Tasks on Vacation, Can Allow More Vacation Time and Choice

(p. A18) Loosening up the vacation vs. work binary opens up possibilities for living in new ways. Karen Raraigh, a Baltimore-based genetic counselor with a focus on research, gets a generous quantity of vacation days each year. But as with many professionals, her specialized projects won’t move forward in the same way if she’s not tending them — and she finds these projects quite meaningful.

“I like the work I do,” she told me. “The fact that I do a little work on vacation makes me feel a little better about taking more of it.” Her family spends multiple weeks visiting extended family in Maine, but she sometimes holes up for an afternoon to manage work matters while relatives play with her kids.

. . .

. . . if doing some work at the beach means you can be at the beach for two weeks instead of one, and moving work time around means you can play with your kids in the afternoons and still keep your clients happy, then those blurred boundaries might be working to your advantage.

For the full commentary, see:

Laura Vanderkam. “Go Ahead, Work While on Vacation and Vacation While at Work.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 16, 2022): A18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 13, 2022, and has the title “Don’t Feel Guilty About Working on Vacation — or About Vacationing at Work.”)

Through Evolution, Body Parts Are Inelegantly Repurposed into Workaround Kluges

If the body itself is an amalgam of workaround kluges, then maybe our regulators should be more tolerant of medical MacGyvers who attempt to keep the body working through medical workaround kluges.

(p. A15) Mr. Pievani is a professor of biology at the University of Padua. His brief and thoughtful book (translated from the Italian by Michael Gerard Kenyon) isn’t just a description of imperfection, but a paean to it. There’s plenty of description and discussion, too, as “Imperfection” takes the reader on a convincing whirlwind tour of the dangers as well as the impossibility of perfection, how imperfection is built into the nature of the universe, and into all living things—including ourselves.

. . .

Readers wanting to get up to speed on imperfection would do well to attend to two little-known words with large consequences. The first is “palimpsest,” which in archaeology refers to any object that has been written upon, then erased, then written over again (sometimes many times), but with traces of the earlier writings still faintly visible. Every living thing is an evolutionary palimpsest, with adaptations necessarily limited because they’re built upon previous structures.

Consider, for example, childbirth. As smart critters, we’ve been selected (naturally) to have big heads. But in becoming bipedal, we had to rotate our pelvises, which set limits on the size of the birth canal. As a result, an unborn baby’s head is perilously close to being too big to get out. Usually, they manage it, but not without much painful laboring and sometimes, if this cephalopelvic disproportion is too great, or if the baby is malpositioned, by means of a cesarean delivery. In such cases, obstetricians take the newborn out the obvious way: through that large, unobstructed abdominal space between pelvis and lower ribs. Things would have been much easier and safer for mother and baby if the birth canal were positioned there, too, but our palimpsest nature precludes such a straightforward arrangement.

Which brings us to our second unusual word: “kluge,” something—assembled from diverse components—that shouldn’t work, but does. A kluge is a workaround: often clumsy, inelegant, inefficient, but that does its job nonetheless. Because we and all other living things are living palimpsests, we are kluges as well.

For the full review, see:

David P. Barash. “BOOKSHELF; Unintelligent Design.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, October 26, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 25, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Imperfection’ Review: Unintelligent Design.”)

The book under review is:

Pievani, Telmo. Imperfection: A Natural History. Translated by Michael Gerard Kenyon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022.

California Law Mandating $22 Wage for Restaurant Workers Is “Discouraging” Entrepreneurs

(p. A3) A government-appointed council could increase wages for California’s estimated half-million fast food workers to as much as $22 an hour starting next year, under a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Monday [September 5, 2022].

. . .

“You can’t charge enough for food to offset what will happen from a labor perspective,” said Greg Flynn, president of Flynn Restaurant Group, which operates franchise brands in 44 states and owns 105 restaurants in California. “California is already the most difficult state in the nation to operate as a restaurateur. This just makes it more difficult and less attractive.”

. . .

Michaela Mendelsohn, an El Pollo Loco franchisee in Southern California, said she recently put on hold plans to add to her group of six stores because of the measure.

If wages shoot up, she added, she will consider eliminating cashier positions or installing kiosks in her California locations that allow customers to input orders.

“We’ve gone too far here,” Ms. Mendelsohn said. “It’s just really discouraging.”

For the full story, see:

Christine Mai-Duc and Heather Haddon. “California Fast-Food Bill Signed, Opening Path to Higher Pay.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 6, 2022): A3.

[Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 5, 2022, and has the title “California Governor Signs Fast Food Bill, Opening Way to Higher Wages.” The last two sentences quoted above appeared in the online, but not the print, version.)

Entrepreneurs Harvest Useful Protein Collagens From “Precision Fermentation” Rather Than From Slaughter of Animals

(p. B4) The multibillion-dollar push to make animals obsolete in the food industry has already produced pea-protein “bratwurst,” fungus molded into “ham” and “leather,” and “meat” cultured from chicken cells. Geltor, a seven-year-old company based in the Bay Area, is taking a different tack: bioengineering bacteria cells to produce animal proteins you’ll likely never taste.

Geltor is producing forms of collagen they say are identical to the proteins extracted from skin and bones. For now, those vegan collagens can be found in high-end skin care creams. But as the company grows, it’s eyeing other ingredients few Americans associate with animal farming, such as the elastin in your shampoo, the collagen peptides in your smoothie, and even the gelatin (which is hydrolyzed, or slightly broken-down, collagen) in your marshmallows. Alex Lorestani, co-founder and chief executive of Geltor, likes to talk about how the company’s proteins impose a lighter burden on the environment than the meat industry. The challenge, however, is how the company gets to the scale necessary to exert that kind of impact.

In 2012, Dr. Lorestani and co-founder Nick Ouzounov, both 35, were both pursuing doctorates in molecular biology at Princeton University when the invention of Crispr turbocharged the field of bio-design. “We can bio-design medicine,” Dr. Lorestani recalled discussing with his labmates that summer. “Why can’t we bio-design everything?”

Dr. Ouzounov eventually came up with a method — which he and Dr. Lorestani, in typical Bay Area techspeak, call “a platform” — for genetically modifying bacteria cells to reproduce a wide variety of animal proteins, a process that biotech firms are calling “precision fermentation.” In 2015, the two scientists formed Geltor.

For the full story, see:

Jonathan Kauffman. “Going Beyond Vegan ‘Meat’ to Bio-Designed Collagen.” The New York Times (Wednesday, August 3, 2022): B4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 2, 2022, and has the title “Is Bio-Designed Collagen the Next Step in Animal Protein Replacement?”)

Chinese Citizens Tune Out Randomly Linked Nonsense Propaganda Phrases

(p. B1) China is now one of the last places on earth trying to eliminate Covid-19, and the Communist Party has relied heavily on propaganda to justify increasingly long lockdowns and burdensome testing requirements that can sometimes lead to three tests a week.

The barrage of messages — online and on television, loudspeakers and social platforms — has become so overbearing that some citizens say it has drowned out their frustrations, downplayed the reality of the country’s tough coronavirus rules and, occasionally, bordered on the absurd.

. . .

(p. B4) Yang Xiao, a 33-year-old cinematographer in Shanghai who was confined to his apartment for two months during a lockdown this year, had grown tired of them all.

“With the Covid control, propaganda and state power expanded and occupied all aspects of our life,” he said in a phone interview. Day after day, Mr. Yang heard loudspeakers in his neighborhood repeatedly broadcasting a notice for P.C.R. testing. He said the announcements had disturbed his sleep at night and woke him up at dawn.

“Our life was dictated and disciplined by propaganda and state power,” he said.

To communicate his frustrations, Mr. Yang selected 600 common Chinese propaganda phrases, such as “core awareness,” “obey the overall situation” and “the supremacy of nationhood.” He gave each phrase a number and then put the numbers into Google’s Random Generator, a program that scrambles data.

He ended up with senseless phrases such as “detect citizens’ life and death line,” “strictly implement functions” and “specialize overall plans without slack.” Then he used a voice program to read the phrases aloud and played the audio on a loudspeaker in his neighborhood.

No one seemed to notice the five minutes of computer-generated nonsense.

When Mr. Yang uploaded a video of the scene online, however, more than 1.3 million people viewed it. Many praised the way he used government language as satire. Chinese propaganda was “too absurd to be criticized using logic,” Mr. Yang said. “I simulated the discourse like a mirror, reflecting its own absurdity.”

His video was taken down by censors.

. . .

In June [2022], dozens of residents protested against the police and Covid control workers who installed chain-link fences around neighborhood apartments. When a protester was shoved into a police car and taken away, one man shouted: “Freedom! Equality! Justice! Rule of law!” Those words would be familiar to most Chinese citizens: They are commonly cited by state media as core socialist values under Mr. Xi.

For the full story, see:

Zixu Wang. “China’s Covid Propaganda, Often Seen as Absurd, Stirs Rebellion.” The New York Times (Friday, September 30, 2022): B1 & B4.

[Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2022, and has the title “China’s ‘Absurd’ Covid Propaganda Stirs Rebellion.”)

Medical Entrepreneurs “Muster the Courage and Determination to Forge Brazenly Ahead”

(p. C7) The accidental birth and stuttering development of cell biology is the focus of Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Song of the Cell.” It is an audacious, often mesmerizing, frequently dizzying, occasionally exhausting and reliably engaging tour of cell biology and scientific inquiry. Dr. Mukherjee, an oncologist at Columbia University and the author of “Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” (2010), enthusiastically instructs and, much of the time, delights—all the while hustling us across a preposterously vast and intricate landscape.

. . .

In the course of describing the evolution of cell biology, Dr. Mukherjee reminds us of the critical role of technological innovation, like the microscopes used by Leeuwenhoek and Hooke, which first revealed the existence of the cellular world. Similarly, it was the invention of the electron microscope, and its deliberate application to biology by pioneering Rockefeller University scientist George Palade, that afforded researchers the resolution needed to examine the components of an individual cell.

. . .

Dr. Mukherjee’s dual roles as clinical oncologist and cell biologist find a common voice as he grapples with the complexity of cancer, “cell biology visualized in a pathological mirror.” He notes the heterogeneity of tumors, observing that while “two ‘breast cancers’ may look identical under the pathologist’s microscope,” the cancers may differ genetically and require different treatments. Even a single breast tumor, he writes, “is actually a collage of mutant cells—an assembly of non-identical diseases.” Because of the maddening similarity between cancer cells and normal cells, targeting cancer can be challenging: A promising therapy may fail, as it did for one of his friends, because it also attacks healthy cells.

Ultimately, Dr. Mukherjee seems to decide, we must accept, rather than rationalize away, the baffling idiosyncrasies that we observe in cell biology and see reflected in the behavior of cancers. Why did his friend’s cancer spread to some organs but spare others? Why did the treatment his friend received eliminate tumors in the skin but not the lungs? “There are mysteries beyond mysteries,” he writes, and he cautions us against succumbing to reductionist explanations. Cells, by themselves, are “incomplete explanations for organismal complexities.” We must understand the context in which a cell exists, he emphasizes, its local environment. Even then, he admits, we often “don’t even know what we don’t know.”

Dr. Mukherjee’s hard-won lessons contain a message for us all: We should resist simple, universal explanations in life science—cell biology, in particular, is rarely that cooperative. The journey he relates also reminds us to appreciate the researchers who, despite the unforgiving and rarely predictable terrain before them, muster the courage and determination to forge brazenly ahead.

For the full review, see:

David A. Shaywitz. “Fantastic Voyage Within.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 29, 2022): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 28, 2022, and has the title “‘The Song of the Cell’ Review: Fantastic Voyage Within.”)

The book under review is:

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human. New York: Scribner, 2022.

Venezuelan Is Grateful Texas Governor Bussed Him to Opportunities in Washington, D.C.

(p. A1) When Lever Alejos of Venezuela arrived at the southern border penniless in July [2022], he gladly accepted a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., courtesy of the state of Texas. He had no family or friends to receive him, and spent one night in the plaza across from Union Station. He soon settled into a homeless shelter.

“I have nothing,” Mr. Alejos, 29, said on his third day in the city, “but I have the will to work and succeed.”

Two months later, Mr. Alejos is making between $600 to $700 a week, saving up to buy a used car and planning to move out of the shelter.

“There is so much opportunity here,” he said on Thursday [Sept. 15, 2022], at the end of a day’s work. “You just have to take advantage of it.”

Since April [2022], thousands of migrants, most of them Venezuelans, have been coaxed onto buses and planes heading to Washington, New York, Chicago and, last week, Martha’s Vineyard after enduring a perilous journey over land from their broken country to make a fresh start in the United States.

. . .

(p. A16) Democrats have called the stunts cruel, and many migrants have been left at least temporarily homeless as their new host cities scramble to help them.

But others, like Mr. Alejos, have called the free transportation a blessing. They are already employed and achieving some measure of stability. They have found jobs in construction, hospitality, retail, trucking and other sectors facing worker shortages in an economy still recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

“In most big cities, including the ones where governors are shipping migrants, employers are scrambling to find workers,” said Chris Tilly, a labor economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They are meeting a need.”

. . .

For himself, Mr. Alejos has acquired a new cellphone and ear buds, shirts and trousers, and shoes. “I try to keep my priorities straight,” he said. “I’m not splurging. I am trying to build an emergency fund.”

In three weeks, he hopes to buy a 2012 Honda Civic.

His only regret is that his schedule does not allow him to attend in-person English classes. But he has found a way to teach himself, the Duolingo language-learning app — and then he tries to practice with customers.

. . .

In his free time, Mr. Alejos explores his adopted city with fellow Venezuelans, visiting the Natural History Museum, the Zoo, Chinatown and the Capitol.

“I always try to see something new on my days off,’’ he said, and often during the outings he posts selfies on Facebook.

He misses his family, he said. But he is philosophical about his circumstances.

“Often you have to suffer to be compensated down the road,” he said.

. . .

“I feel fortunate the governor put me on a bus to Washington,” Mr. Alejos said. “It opened up doors for me.”

For the full story, see:

Miriam Jordan. “Bus Ticket Out of Texas Was a Ticket to Stability.” The New York Times (Monday, September 19, 2022): A1 & A16.

[Note: ellipses, bracketed years, and bracketed date, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 18, 2022, and has the title “After Texas Sent Him to Washington, One Migrant Launches a New Life.”)