The .Plan

Alison Lobron has come out with a few winners in the Boston Globe Magazine lately.

Call it the checklist approach to dating: the notion that if one identifies key characteristics and evaluates dates accordingly, one is more likely to find a perfect match, guaranteeing romantic and marital contentment. No doubt, singles have always had some version of checklists, but the culture of Internet dating has codified them, and it’s even spilled over to dates generated offline. Internet users can search for potential partners by educational attainment, age, height, weight, and income level. They can rule out the plump, the smokers, the separated-but-not-divorced, then narrow the field further to exclude (or include) those who like country music, those who have ferrets, and, yes, those who have roommates.

…If I were ever to design a dating site or TV show, it would have no boxes, no categories, and no interrogations. Instead, I would take two people who find each other reasonably cute and give them some unpleasant task to complete, like, say, emptying the dumpsters behind Fenway Park. If they laughed at all during the process, I would tell them to go on a date. So here’s my new plan: From now on, if a first date seems to have some chemistry, I’m going to fake food poisoning. If we both like each other by the time we leave the emergency room, well, sign me up for a second date. And if he pops me in a cab and high-tails it out of there? Good thing I didn’t get in too deep.
–Alison Lobron, “My Soul Mate? Check.”, Boston Globe Magazine, July 30, 2006

(See also Rev. Warren’s musings in Gone Shopping.)

In response to the entry on Snakes on a Plane:

this is easily the highlight of my summer. i can’t believe they cast SLJ without letting him rip a couple of f bombs. that’s like hiring denise richards or sharon stone and dressing her up in a burkha for 90 minutes.
–JSY

Fascinating fight going on in one of my sister churches…

Mr. Boyd said he never intended his sermons to be taken as merely a critique of the Republican Party or the religious right. He refuses to share his party affiliation, or whether he has one, for that reason. He said there were Christians on both the left and the right who had turned politics and patriotism into “idolatry.”

He said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.
–Laurie Goodstein, “Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for an Evangelical Pastor”, New York Times, July 30, 2006

Who cares if I’m going to be on home call? Guess where I’m going to be:

Jackson, who plays an FBI agent transporting a witness, was drawn to Snakes on a Plane not just by the title but by the film’s blend of three of his favorite genres: old-school monster flicks, outrageous modern horror, and, thanks to Yu, Hong Kong action. Jackson knew Yu — they had teamed on 2002’s dud The 51st State — and e-mailed him to volunteer for snake-slaying duty after hearing about the project. New Line, stunned that a legitimate star would be interested, called his agents: Is this for real? Jackson’s agents asked him the same question, but more incredulously…

Wanting to get Snakes under way before Jackson came to his senses, New Line moved quickly after Yu’s departure and called David Ellis, who had directed Final Destination 2 for the studio… Jackson knew and liked Ellis, who had worked as second-unit director on Sphere and Deep Blue Sea, so he had no qualms when Yu dropped out. His only question: ”’Is it still called Snakes on a Plane?’ When they said yeah, I said, ‘Then I still want to be in it.”’
–Jeff Jensen, “Kicking Asp”, Entertainment Weekly, July 29, 2006

One of my old supervisors told me that the Gates Foundation is recruiting for a Senior Program Impact Analyst to lead their Impact Assessment Team. AFAIK none of the other foundations involved in international health have a similar external review setup. Boy, would I hate to be that person. It’d be like serving on Internal Affairs for the LAPD.

Accountability is good — just like evidence-based medicine is good — provided that application of the methods doesn’t stretch their limitations too much…

A trial from a group of Kenyan schools gives us the average effectiveness of flip charts in the experimental schools relative to the control schools for an area in western Kenya, at a specific time, for specific teachers, and for specific pupils. It is far from clear that this evidence is useful outside of that situation. This qualification also holds for the much more serious case of worms, where the rate of reinfection depends on whether children wear shoes and whether they have access to toilets. The results of one experiment in Kenya (in which there was in fact no randomization, only selection based on alphabetical order) hardly prove that deworming is always the cheapest way to get kids into school, as Banerjee suggests.

The comparison with the FDA is very much to the point, but only because exactly the same problems come up. For a specific doctor facing a specific patient, the average outcome of a randomized controlled trial will often be unhelpful. The physician usually has some theory of how the drug works and also an understanding of her patient, who might, for example, be elderly, frail, overweight, and an ex-smoker, with a history of responding to some medications and not others. Therefore the physician will often not prescribe a drug that passed its randomized controlled trial with flying colors and instead prescribe one that did less well but that is a better fit for the patient. Much of medicine is not “evidence-based,” for good reason.

There is no simple way to use randomized controlled trials to eliminate global poverty. They are expensive and technically and politically difficult to do well. We must be careful to apply them only where there is a good chance that the results will be applicable elsewhere. Otherwise, we will be gathering evidence, not knowledge.
–Angus Deaton, “‘Evidence-based aid must not become the latest in a long string of development fads’, Boston Review, Jul/Aug 2006

Most of my friends who are hard core scotch enthusiasts prefer their scotch neat. If they do have the bartender cut it with water, they tend to be rather picky about the kind of water used. I like my scotch — preferably a Speyside — neat, or any old house blend mixed with Drambuie, but I certainly can’t claim to have a sophisticated enough palate to be able to taste the differences that might result from using tap water or different kinds of bottled/filtered water.

Looks like the $46 billion global bottled water industry is about to expand:

Icerocks marketed as “secured spring water ice cubes,” are set to hit the U.S. market in October. Four trays with slots for 12 cubes each will cost about $3.99. AquaICE sealed ice-cube trays — containing purified municipal tap water in plain, lemon and lime flavors — are already sold in a handful of Ohio stores. The product, made by aquaICE LLC of Dublin, Ohio, costs about $5 for 50 cubes…

Manufacturers…say their ice cubes taste better because the water is shielded from odors that linger in freezers. And just because tap water is frozen doesn’t mean there’s no bacteria lurking in the cubes — E. coli and hepatitis A and C, in fact, are potential health threats, says Jane McEwen, spokeswoman for the International Packaged Ice Association, a trade group based in Tampa.
–Gwendolyn Bounds, “After Bottled Water? Purified Ice Cubes”, Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2006

Keira Knightley, who played Guinevere in King Arthur, said her normal breasts were blown out of all proportion and looked droopy on the advert to promote the film.

‘Those things certainly weren’t mine,’ she told a US magazine yesterday. ‘I remember we had an interesting discussion when they said, “We want to make them slightly larger and you’ll get approval” and I was like, “OK, fine. ‘I honestly don’t give a s***.”

…She then went on to say the incident was certainly not the first time she has had her chest digitally enhanced.

She explained: ‘I did one magazine and found out you’re not actually allowed to be on a cover in the US without at least a C cup because it turns people off. ‘Apparently they have done market research and found that women want to see no less than a C cup on other women. Isn’t that crazy? ‘So they made my t*** bigger for that as well.’
–Katie Hampson, “My Flat Chest is a Turn Off, Says Keira”, Daily Mail (UK), July 19, 2006

Harvey Blume interviews my psychiatrist-hero, Arthur Kleinman:

KLEINMAN: There are key psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression, but I’m very concerned about people who have ordinary unhappiness, or have experienced a catastrophe, or just bad luck, and are renamed depressed or having an anxiety disorder. That’s happening in a big way right now. I’m concerned about taking ordinary life, stripping it of its moral content, and making it over into a disease.

IDEAS: Are you still a practicing psychiatrist?

KLEINMAN: I stopped practicing about six years ago. But I had 25 years of practice and saw thousands of cases. I saw many people in psychotherapy and also used psychopharmacology. It’s precisely because I believe in the seriousness of mental illness that I’ve been concerned about medicalization, remaking the normal into the abnormal.

IDEAS: Why is this happening?

KLEINMAN: There’s a hyping not just of psychiatry, but all of medicine. This has come out of the medical-industrial complex, and the need to get medicine the resources and support it needs, for research, among other things. I’m all for medical research-but not the hyping. The other day I received a solicitation from a medical foundation, and was surprised by the first sentence, which said: ‘‘Imagine a world free of disease.’’ That’s inhuman! There can’t be a world free of disease. Disease is part of what life is about.

Sometimes an actress will ask for a body double because she’s not comfortable flashing her parts on camera. Mandy Moore requested a professional booty during the filming of Chasing Liberty, as did Sarah Michelle Gellar when she starred in Scooby Doo. But most of the time, it’s the director or the producers who call in the ringers: “The director made that decision not to use my butt,” says Owen Wilson. “I don’t know how to interpret that.”
–Daniel Engber, “I Want a Butt Double”, Slate, July 24, 2006

In suburbia:

Mr. Mayer, who recently moved with his wife and three young children to New York, said he believed that it was important for children to grow up in a place that is racially, ethnically and economically diverse. He calls those places more vibrant. In most places, the upper middle class is less diverse than the middle, he said. New York would be less attractive to him without its still-expansive and lively middle.

“This trend toward living and interacting with people who are like you is intensifying a lot,” said Professor Gyourko, who lives in the affluent suburb of Swarthmore, Pa. “I do not meet the full range of incomes and social classes within my neighborhood. Well, think about what happens if metropolitan areas like New York, San Francisco and the like turn into my suburb. You’ll have even less interaction. The most interesting and potentially foreboding implication of this sorting is that it changes the way we view life.”
–Janny Scott, “Cities Shed Middle Class, and Are Richer and Poorer for It”, New York Times, July 23, 2006