Hawaiian Culture Changed Swiftly in Century After 1777

(p. C1 & C6) It’s startling just how swiftly change came to Hawaii after Capt. James Cook first sighted the island of Kauai in 1777: In little more than a century, Ms. Moore writes, “a closed and isolated culture, bound by superstition and religious ritual, with no understanding of individual freedom or private property,” had been transformed into “a society of thriving capitalism, Protestant values, and democratic institutions.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “Hard Truths in the Past of a Tropical Eden.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPT. 22, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 21, 2015, and has the title “Review: ‘Paradise of the Pacific,’ the Hard Truths of Hawaii’s History.”)

The book under review, is:
Moore, Susanna. Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

“The Market for Greek Philosophers Has Tightened”

(p. A25) Senator Marco Rubio sent fact-checkers aflutter when he said at the Republican presidential debate on Tuesday that philosophy majors would be better off going into welding. The value of a vocational degree, he argued, was greater than the payoff that comes with contemplating the cosmos.
“Welders make more money than philosophers,” Mr. Rubio said. “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
. . .
On Wednesday [November 9, 2015] Mr. Rubio doubled down on his assertion, sending out a fund-raising email with the subject line “more welders” and calling for the overpriced higher education system to be dismantled.
The argument echoed one he makes frequently on the stump, which the senator admits probably irks some intellectuals: “You deserve to know that the market for Greek philosophers has tightened over the last 2,000 years.”

For the full story, see:

Alan Rappeport. “Philosophers Say View of Their Skills Is Dated.” The New York Times (Thurs., Nov. 12, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added. The last two quoted paragraphs were combined into one paragraph in the print version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 11, 2015, and has the title “Philosophers (and Welders) React to Marco Rubio’s Debate Comments.”)

Greek Grave Found from Start of Age of Homer

(p. D1) Archaeologists digging at Pylos, an ancient city on the southwest coast of Greece, have discovered the rich grave of a warrior who was buried at the dawn of European civilization.
He lies with a yardlong bronze sword and a remarkable collection of gold rings, precious jewels and beautifully carved seals. Archaeologists expressed astonishment at the richness of the find and its potential for shedding light on the emergence of the Mycenaean civilization, the lost world of Agamemnon, Nestor, Odysseus and other heroes described in the epics of Homer.
. . .
(p. D5) An ivory plaque carved with a griffin, a mythical animal that protected goddesses and kings, lay between the warrior’s legs. The grave contained gold, silver and bronze cups.
. . .
The Minoan culture on Crete exerted a strong influence on the people of southern Greece. Copying and adapting Minoan technologies, they developed the palace cultures such as those of Pylos and Mycene. But as the Mycenaeans grew in strength and confidence, they were eventually able to invade the land of their tutors. Notably, they then adapted Linear A, the script in which the Cretans wrote their own language, into Linear B, a script for writing Greek.
Linear B tablets were preserved in the fiery destruction of palaces when the soft clay on which they were written was baked into permanent form. Caches of tablets have been found in Knossos, the main palace of Crete, and in Pylos and other mainland palaces. Linear B, a script in which each symbol stands for a syllable, was later succeeded by the familiar Greek alphabet in which each symbol represents a single vowel or consonant.
The griffin warrior, whose grave objects are culturally Minoan but whose place of burial is Mycenaean, lies at the center of this cultural transfer. The palace of Pylos had yet to arise, and he could have been part of the cultural transition that made it possible. The transfer was not entirely peaceful: At some point, the Mycenaeans invaded Crete, and in 1450 B.C., the palace of Knossos was burned, perhaps by Mycenaeans. It is not yet clear whether the objects in the griffin warrior’s tomb were significant in his own culture or just plunder.
“I think these objects were not just loot but had a meaning already for the guy buried in this grave,” Dr. Davis said. “This is the critical period when religious ideas were being transferred from Crete to the mainland.”

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “A Grave, and a Gateway.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 27, 2015): D1 & D5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 26, 2015, and has the title “Grave of ‘Griffin Warrior’ at Pylos Could Be a Gateway to Civilizations.”)

FDA Has No Right to Stop the Terminally Ill from Seeking Cures

(p. C4) Ms. Olsen notes that “today, about 40 percent of cancer patients attempt to enroll in clinical trials, but only about 3 percent end up participating. That means that the vast majority don’t make the cut, whether because they fail to meet the strict criteria, or a trial is thousands of miles from their home.” Many of those who don’t get these experimental drugs are the sickest patients because they are deemed “too sick to be useful for the study.”
Ms. Olsen argues that terminally ill patients should be able to access such drugs–at their own risk and outside the context of FDA-required studies–if the companies are willing to provide them, and the book’s title alludes to her proposed remedy: the state-by-state campaign the Goldwater Institute is leading to pass “Right to Try” legislation. The bills would allow terminally ill patients who have “exhausted all conventional treatment options” to access an experimental treatment if their doctors believe it is “the best medical option to extend or save the patients’ life” and “the treatment has successfully completed basic safety testing and is part of the FDA’s ongoing evaluation and approval process.” Insurers, critically, would not be required to cover the treatment–a significant hurdle, largely unexplored here, since such costs could be significant.
The think tank’s campaign has been incredibly successful, with 24 states passing Right to Try laws to date. Still, Ms. Olsen doesn’t present such laws as a panacea. She doesn’t expect experimental treatments to always–or even often–work for terminally ill patients. But she believes that some chance is better than the alternative. “If you have the Right to Die, you have the Right to Try,” Ms. Olsen writes. “And you don’t have to wait on Washington to secure it.”
Yet therein lies the book’s main shortcoming. Washington, it turns out, has a fair bit of say here. Courts have found that the FDA’s powers to regulate drug development are extraordinarily broad. Many changes Ms. Olsen champions won’t be possible without congressional action to revamp the FDA’s drug development process and find new ways of paying for experimental drugs that would make widespread access sustainable for patients, companies and insurers. These issues, though touched on, are not grappled with in detail.

For the full review, see:
PAUL HOWARD. “BOOKSHELF; Hail Mary Medicine; Patients spend their last days pleading with reluctant drug companies and the FDA to get access to treatments that could save their lives.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 13, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 12, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Olsen, Darcy. The Right to Try: How the Federal Government Prevents Americans from Getting the Lifesaving Treatments They Need. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

Top College Football Programs “Do a Little Education on the Side”

(p. C7) When it is reported that the University of Alabama pays its head coach an annual salary of $6.5 million a year, or that the University of Oregon erected a $42 million academic support center for it players, or that the University of Texas assesses its fans as much as $20,000 in the form of “seat donations” for preferred locations, it is clear that college football is no longer just a game.
Gilbert M. Gaul contends precisely that in his persuasive new book, “Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football.” . . . the elite college football programs have become a (sic) “giant entertainment businesses that happened to do a little education on the side,” . . .
. . .
Given the revenue streams that winning programs generate year in and year out, it is easy to see why college administrators are drawn in by the siren call of football. But Mr. Gaul leads the chorus of those who are beyond dismayed by this juxtaposition of priorities. In the more than a decade that has passed since Mr. Gaul, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes, began collecting data on the economics of college football as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, he asserts that the staggering revenues of the 10 largest football programs has come largely at the expense of the academic mission.
At Texas, Michigan, Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Penn State, Notre Dame, Louisiana State University and Arkansas, revenues have increased to $762 million from $229 million from 1999 to 2012. That is a whopping 233 percent increase. Mr. Gaul observes that during this period “profit margins had ballooned to hedge-fund levels,” generated by television broadcast rights, luxury suites, seat donations and corporate advertising. Mr. Gaul reports that the big universities “have netted 90 percent of all the new money that has flowed into college football the last decade or two.”

For the full review, see:
MARK KRAM Jr. “Books of The Times; A Sport’s Most Alluring Statistic Is Found on the Balance Sheet.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 26, 2015): C4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review was updated on AUG. 25, 2015, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Billion-Dollar Ball’ Explores the Economics of College Football’s Top Programs.”)

The book under review, is:
Gaul, Gilbert M. Billion-Dollar Ball: A Journey through the Big-Money Culture of College Football. New York: Viking, 2015.

Comedians Censored on College Campuses

(p. A3) Stars such as Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld have said they don’t play college shows anymore because the audiences are too easily offended. Schools now often have contracts that forbid performers from using certain words or even broaching entire subjects.
. . .
Alvin Williams, who is from Chicago, said he did some college shows this year, after largely swearing off them for cruise ships about three years ago. He had been doing a lot of what he regarded as G-rated material, but was shocked to find even that could be offensive on campus.
“I’d never thought I’d see the day when family-friendly material is not appropriate for college kids,” said Mr. Williams.
. . .
Mr. Williams said he no longer mimics Indian or Chinese accents or tells jokes about camels. He believes the only reason Apu, the Indian convenience-store owner on the television show “The Simpsons,” still exists is because he has been grandfathered in and audiences are used to him.
The increasing sensitivity is being driven by peer pressure, Mr. Williams said. “They think, if I’m not offended by this then I’m not a good friend,” he said. “If I tell a joke about black people, whites are more likely to get more offended.”
Mr. Williams, who is black, refuses to jettison all his racial material, but is more apt to focus the joke on himself. One of his favorites: “I hate stereotypes with a passion,” he deadpans. “The problem is I love fried chicken.”

For the full story, see:
DOUGLAS BELKIN. “Comedy at College Is Often No Laughing Matter.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 13, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipses added. The online version of the article is much longer than the print version. A couple of the paragraphs quoted above, appear only in the online version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 12, 2015, and has the title “For Stand-Up Comedians, Shows on Campus Are Often No Joke.”)

Venture Capital Backed Unicorns that Become Unicorpses

(p. 1) The technology industry’s boom over the last few years has been defined by the rise of “unicorns,” the private companies that investors have valued at $1 billion or more. Before the term came into vogue, LivingSocial was among the biggest unicorns of its day. It now offers a glimpse of what some of today’s unicorns might look like several years down the road if things go awry.
. . .
Venture capitalists anointed daily deals as the way that the Internet would invade local business, and by late 2011 LivingSocial had raised more than $800 million and reached a valuation of $4.5 billion, according to data from the research firm VC Experts. The company counted Amazon and the mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price among its investors. LivingSocial spent heavily, blanketing the airwaves with TV ad campaigns. Riding a wave of momentum, the company explored going public.
Today, LivingSocial is more unicorpse than unicorn. The company never filed for an initial public offering and consumer fervor for daily deals has cooled. T. Rowe Price has written down its stake in LivingSocial to nearly zero, data from Morningstar shows. The company’s work force has shrunk to around 800 employees from 4,500 at its peak in 2011. (Groupon, which did go public, is trading at more than 85 percent below its I.P.O. price.)
. . .
LivingSocial may soon have more company. There are now 142 unicorns that are together valued at around $500 billion, according to the research firm CB Insights. Some of those highly valued start-ups are starting to show some cracks.
Snapchat, the messaging company, and Dropbox, the online storage business, were recently marked down in value by mutual fund investors. Zenefits, a human resources start-up, has said it missed sales targets and that it is slowing its hiring. On Wednesday, the payments company Square, which was valued at $6 billion by private investors last year, priced its public offering at $2.9 billion. Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital have warned that a unicorn shakeout is coming.

For the full commentary, see:
MIKE ISAAC and KATIE BENNER. “LivingSocial Offers a Cautionary Tale to Today’s Unicorns.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., NOV. 22, 2015): 1 & 9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on NOV. 21, 2015. The wording of the last quoted sentence is slightly different in the print and online versions. The version above is the online version.)

Bezos Built Amazon with Methodical Patience

(p. B1) There is a simple explanation for Amazon’s rise, and also a second, more complicated one. The simple story involves Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud-computing business, which rents out vast amounts of server space to other companies. Amazon began disclosing A.W.S.’s financial performance in April, and the numbers showed that selling server space was a much bigger business than anyone had realized. Deutsche Bank estimates that A.W.S., which is less than a decade old, could soon be worth $160 billion as a stand-alone company. That’s more valuable than Intel.
Yet the disclosure of A.W.S.’s size has obscured a deeper change at Amazon. For years, observers have wondered if Amazon’s shopping business — you know, its main business — could ever really work. Investors gave (p. B11) Mr. Bezos enormous leeway to spend billions building out a distribution-center infrastructure, but it remained a semi-open question if the scale and pace of investments would ever pay off. Could this company ever make a whole lot of money selling so much for so little?
As we embark upon another holiday shopping season, the answer is becoming clear: Yes, Amazon can make money selling stuff. In the flood of rapturous reviews from stock analysts over the company’s earnings report last month, several noted that Amazon’s retail operations had reached a “critical scale” or an “inflection point.” They meant that Amazon’s enormous investments in infrastructure and logistics have begun to pay off. The company keeps capturing a larger slice of American and even international purchases. It keeps attracting more users to its Prime fast-shipping subscription program, and, albeit slowly, it is beginning to scratch out higher profits from shoppers.
. . .
Why is Amazon so far ahead? It is difficult to resist marveling at the way Mr. Bezos has built his indomitable shopping machine, and the very real advantages in price and convenience that he has brought to America’s national pastime of buying stuff. What has been key to this rise, and missing from many of his competitors’ efforts, is patience. In a very old-fashioned manner, one that is far out of step with a corporate world in which milestones are measured every three months, Amazon has been willing to build its empire methodically and at great cost over almost two decades, despite skepticism from many sectors of the business world.

For the full commentary, see:
Manjoo, Farhad. “STATE OF THE ART; Long Game at Amazon Produces Juggernaut.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): B1 & B11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; How Amazon’s Long Game Yielded a Retail Juggernaut.”)

Do Entrepreneurial Results Excuse Entrepreneurial Arrogance?

(p. A1) Robert Whaley is a professor of finance at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management and the developer of the two major so-called fear indices — the VIX and VXN on the Chicago Board Options Exchange — that are used to make bets on market volatility.

READING Right now it’s “Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. It has a somewhat different take than Walter Isaacson’s “Steve Jobs.” I felt Isaacson’s version was a little negative. But what the books have in common is that Jobs was sheer genius. So what if he was arrogant? Consider what he’s done. We wouldn’t have iPhones and iPads if it wasn’t for his vision. I absolutely think that excuses his behavior. If everyone just wanted for people to look back and say you were kind, how would we move forward?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY. “Download: Robert Whaley.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 6, 2015): 2.
(Note: the bold above is in the original. The first paragraph quoted above was written by the interviewer Kate Murphy. The paragraph following the word “Reading” is the response by the interviewee Robert Whaley.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date SEPT. 5, 2015.)

The Steve Jobs books mentioned by Whaley, are:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Schlender, Brent, and Rick Tetzeli. Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. New York: Crown Business, 2015.

Those Who Try Japanese Toilets, Praise Them with “Cultish Devotion”

(p. D12) Last year, Bennett Friedman, who owns a plumbing showroom in Manhattan called AF New York, took a business trip to Milan. On the morning of his return he faced a choice: stop in the bathroom there or wait until he got home. The flight was nine hours. He waited.
The move seems almost masochistic. But in his home and office bathrooms, Mr. Friedman had installed a Toto washlet. To sit upon a standard commode, he said, would be like “going back to the Stone Age.”
“It feels very uncivilized,” he said.
For those who own Japanese toilets, there is a cultish devotion. They boast heated seats, a bidet function for a rear cleanse and an air-purifying system that deodorizes during use. The need for toilet paper is virtually eliminated (there is an air dryer) and “you left the lid up” squabbles need never take place (the seat lifts and closes automatically in many models).
. . .
Most washlet owners, then, are converted after trying one out in the world. At a boutique hotel, say, or on a trip to Asia.
Such was the case with Robert Aboulache. Before he and his family went on a vacation to Japan, he said, friends who had visited the country told him he would love the toilets. “I thought, ‘How great can the toilets be?'” Mr. Aboulache said. “They were amazing. Some have noisemakers to cover up the sound. You can pivot that little sprayer. The water can be heated or not. We got home, and I thought, ‘This is not the same.'”
Three days later, Mr. Aboulache went online and bought a Toto washlet, which he installed in the shared upstairs bathroom of his home in Los Angeles as a surprise for his wife and son.
“We’ve been delighted,” he said. “It’s our favorite toilet.”
. . .
Mr. Friedman, too, is an enthusiastic proselytizer for washlets, in his showroom and out in social situations, something you gather he would do even if he didn’t sell them.
Whenever he talks about their virtues, he said, “I feel like one of the Apostles passing the word of God.”

For the full story, see:
STEVEN KURUTZ. “For Its Devotees, the Seat of Luxury.” The New York Times (Thurs., NOV. 19, 2015): D12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 18, 2015, and has the title “The Cult of the Toto Toilet.”)

Spontaneous Mummification in San Bernardo Is Unexplained

Some claim that science has gone about as far as it can go. The claim is often a step in an argument for pessimism on the future of technological progress. But that claim has been made many times in the past, and so far has always proven wrong. There’s plenty of phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation, implying that there is plenty of room for the advance of science. Mostly we ignore or forget these phenomena, because it causes cognitive dissonance for us to carry around facts that do not fit into our current theories. Add spontaneous mummification in San Bernardo to the list.

(p. A14) Locals and mummification experts agree San Bernardo is a somewhat unlikely place for what’s known as spontaneous mummification, a phenomenon that occurs naturally, without embalming fluids and other techniques. The climate here is neither excessively dry, like in Northern Africa, nor freezing, like the Alpine environment that preserved Otzi the Iceman, a prehistoric body found in 1991.
San Bernardo’s temperature hovers around 70 degrees during the day, with enough rainfall to support crops like corn, onions, and green beans.
Cemetery workers here began noticing the mummification phenomenon in the mid-1960s, after a new graveyard was built. In Colombia, due to both tradition and earth that is often too soggy for proper burial, it is typical to inter loved ones in aboveground cement vaults, called bovedas. The bodies are generally removed after about five years because of space constraints and regulations.
Bodies in such vaults usually deteriorate significantly after a year or two, but that hasn’t been the case in San Bernardo–where it is believed that most of those buried in vaults are at least partially mummified.
“Hmmm,” said Ronn Wade, a member of the World Congress on Mummy Studies, an international organization, when asked about San Bernardo’s spontaneous mummification. “It could be dietary, environmental, or even the concrete of the vaults where they are stored.”
“It would be nice to have an explanation,” added Mr. Wade, who directs the anatomical services department of the University of Maryland.
. . .
“Whatever it is, it’s very local,” said Gonzalo Correal, a professor at Bogota’s Academy of Natural Sciences, who has studied San Bernardo’s mummies.

For the full story, see:
SARA SCHAEFER MUÑOZ. “In Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies attract tourists, but remain a mystery; something in the diet?” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 1, 2015): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated on Sept. 30, 2015, and has the title “In This Small Colombian Town, People Love Their Mummies; Preserved bodies of people born in roughly the last hundred years become tourist attraction.”)