Meanderings, 6 May 2023

Summer has arrived in Chicagoland, but it took a few weeks of cold and rain and wind to work its way to our neighborhood.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Bees, bees, and more bees — too many bees:

(NEXSTAR) – Anyone who has ever flown knows it’s not uncommon for flights to be delayed. It could be for any number of reasons – weather, waiting for flight crews to arrive from other delayed flights, maintenance, and, in extreme cases, security breaches are just a few.

For passengers hoping to board a flight from Houston to Atlanta on Wednesday, it was a different type of delay: bees on a wing.

Twitter user Anjali Enjeti shared a photo of a group of bees that had congregated on a wingtip. She noted crews wouldn’t let passengers board until the swarm was removed.

In one photo shared with Nexstar, seen below, the swarm can be seen covering the upper half of the wingtip, entirely concealing the blue color of the piece.

Enjeti explained in a Twitter thread that crews hoped to bring in a beekeeper but, according to the flight’s captain, they wouldn’t be allowed to touch the airplane. For similar reasons, the plane couldn’t be sprayed by pest control and a hose wasn’t available to spray them off.

The captain then told passengers he was “going to taxi the plane and hope the bees leave,” Enjeti wrote.

After the flight crew deplaned, ground equipment was used to push the plane back. At that point, the bees finally left the wing.

Delta confirmed the rare – but not unheard of – occurrence to Nexstar in a statement, saying, “Bee-lieve it or not, Delta flight 1682 from Houston-Bush to Atlanta took a delay this afternoon after a friendly group of bees evidently wanted to talk shop with the winglet of our airplanes, no doubt to share the latest about flying conditions at the airport.” 

Overall, the flight was delayed about three hours before completing its flight to Atlanta.

Do we need more sun or more vitamin D supplements?

If there was one supplement that seemed sure to survive the rigorous tests, it was vitamin D. People with low levels of vitamin D in their blood have significantly higher rates of virtually every disease and disorder you can think of: cancer, diabetes, obesity, osteoporosis, heart attack, stroke, depression, cognitive impairment, autoimmune conditions, and more. The vitamin is required for calcium absorption and is thus essential for bone health, but as evidence mounted that lower levels of vitamin D were associated with so many diseases, health experts began suspecting that it was involved in many other biological processes as well.

And they believed that most of us weren’t getting enough of it. This made sense. Vitamin D is a hormone manufactured by the skin with the help of sunlight. It’s difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities through diet. When our ancestors lived outdoors in tropical regions and ran around half naked, this wasn’t a problem. We produced all the vitamin D we needed from the sun.

But today most of us have indoor jobs, and when we do go outside, we’ve been taught to protect ourselves from dangerous UV rays, which can cause skin cancer. Sunscreen also blocks our skin from making vitamin D, but that’s OK, says the American Academy of Dermatology, which takes a zero-tolerance stance on sun exposure: “You need to protect your skin from the sun every day, even when it’s cloudy,” it advises on its website. Better to slather on sunblock, we’ve all been told, and compensate with vitamin D pills.

Yet vitamin D supplementation has failed spectacularly in clinical trials. Five years ago, researchers were already warning that it showed zero benefit, and the evidence has only grown stronger. In November, one of the largest and most rigorous trials of the vitamin ever conducted—in which 25,871 participants received high doses for five years—found no impact on cancer, heart disease, or stroke.

How did we get it so wrong? How could people with low vitamin D levels clearly suffer higher rates of so many diseases and yet not be helped by supplementation?

As it turns out, a rogue band of researchers has had an explanation all along. And if they’re right, it means that once again we have been epically misled.

These rebels argue that what made the people with high vitamin D levels so healthy was not the vitamin itself. That was just a marker. Their vitamin D levels were high because they were getting plenty of exposure to the thing that was really responsible for their good health—that big orange ball shining down from above.

HT: LNMM

Ah, yes, a library. What’s a home without one?, this professor asks.

When I was moving to New York City, the main question was what to do with all the books. My parents didn’t want me to take them. They liked still having a room in the house to stand as a library, and of course if the books remained, that meant that I was only leaving temporarily. I would come back for the books. But I needed to take a substantial amount of them as well. I needed to be surrounded, everywhere that I stayed, with these books that were doors to endless worlds. I needed the ones that I hadn’t read, and the ones that I might not ever get to read, much more than I did the ones that I had. Those books were the unknown, the unexplored dark forests – they both comfort and thrill me with the possibility that one day I might open them up and find myself among new monsters, friends, adventures, and tragedies. Even if that opening never happens, that it might happen is enough.

My parents and I compromised on eight boxes. Eight boxes of books shipped to Brooklyn, which filled three shelves and spilled onto the floor as they should. I believe that a library, personal or otherwise, should be a little messy. In the year and change that I’ve been in Brooklyn, the books have accumulated so much that I’m starting to shift furniture to accommodate them. It won’t be long until this place also becomes a library with a bed. When I think of where I want to live in the future and the requirements of the house, the first thing that comes to mind is that I must be able to have an expansive library. Not only for myself, but for my friends and family to walk through. It doesn’t need to be the same as Umberto Eco’s, but it needs to be substantial.

Sometimes when I’m going through a phase of exhaustion or alienation, I imagine an escape the same way that some people imagine running away to a farm or to a small town where they can live modestly with their friends or family. This is my runaway fantasy: not to move towards the margins of the world, but to build a great library. A great library in the village that I’m from, in a small town by the water, in Marseille, in New York, anywhere. A library that doesn’t demand anything, as the best libraries usually don’t. One that is simply present as part of life, where I and anyone else can go sleep, play, read, or do nothing but let the hours pass. A library like the one that nurtured me at home.

Speaking of books, how about this one?!

When Laura Moulton began bicycling out a cart of books around Portland, Oregon in the summer of 2011, she had no idea what the project she was launching would become. An artist, writer, and educator, Moulton had conceived the idea of a mobile public library as an art project. Focused on serving community members living without shelter, the library issued each patron a library card without asking for an identification or proof of address that brick-and-mortar libraries require. For three months she brought out books on bicycle-powered carts, lending them to neighbors she got to know well.

As the summer drew to an end, she was preparing to wrap up the project. But as one library patron named Keith returned his books and checked out new ones, he said, “See you next week.” The reality of what she had established became clear.

“I was really struck by how I created this community through this service. And I couldn’t just fold it up like any old art project. It was something that I initially had imagined to be a short-term thing, but there was an immediate community that sprung up around books, and conversations about books. So I immediately began to figure out how I could keep it going.”

And kept it going, she has. With the help of volunteers and community partners, Moulton expanded the mobile library service to become Street Books. Twelve years since the launch of the art project, the organization is now an officially registered non-profit. Running it is a full-time job. Volunteers have become paid staff and board members, the team runs shifts five days a week, and operations have expanded to provide winter weather gear and reading glasses.

And this one?!

he 17th century rector of St Alban’s College in Valladolid, Spain, must have rolled his eyes at the size of the book he had to review for the library. The Jesuit seminary, known as the English College because it produced missionaries committed to the reconversion of England to Catholicism, had received a 900-page volume of Shakespeare’s plays.

William Sankey prepared his quill and began the long work of censoring ungodly, anti-Catholic and otherwise unsuitable material. “Holy-day fools” – a jibe in the Tempest that seemed to impugn the Christian calendar – struck out. “Heavier soon by the weight of a man”, as Margaret tells Hero on the eve of her wedding in Much Ado About Nothing – filth – blotted into unreadability with heavy ink. A play about a pretend friar and a novice nun: actually, at Measure for Measure Sankey admitted defeat, put down his pen and took a sharp blade to cut out the pages of the entire play.

What’s striking about this, however, is not the censorship. It is that these cheerfully secular, prominently anti-Catholic, ribald dramas were even considered for inclusion in this religious institution in the first place. Sankey’s redactions were less about censorship and more about doctoring the text to enable it to circulate. He made it more possible, not less, for seminarians to read Shakespeare (except Measure for Measure).

That censorship might actually enable the circulation of books rather than restrict it seems counterintuitive, but it’s a pattern we see again and again. As an addendum to the better known Index of Forbidden Books, the Vatican published an Index Expurgatorius: a list of the bits that could be cut from otherwise offensive books to make them acceptable. Of course this became the book equivalent of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to restrict the online circulation of images of her Malibu beach home: a move that inadvertently drew attention to the very things it was intended to suppress. The Protestant librarian Thomas Barlow wrote gleefully that the Catholic church had done his work for him, by pointing to what he himself wanted to read. Similarly in 1960s Oklahoma, when the moral crusading group Mothers United for Decency set up a “smutmobile” filled with objectionable books, surely some locals used this as a handily curated wishlist?

The best sales pitch is the threat of censorship. It draws attention to books that might otherwise have gone under the radar. The academic Indologist Wendy Doniger observed that the lawsuit against her book The Hindus: An Alternative History had had the effect of making it an unexpected bestseller. The publishers, Penguin, originally defended her against charges of being defamatory about the Indian national movement and the pantheon of Hindu gods and goddesses, but then agreed to cease publication and pulp copies. There were none to be found, because they’d sold out. Probably relatively few readers in 1961 were agog for a cheap copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but the trial created an eager market. Had the prosecutors wanted to restrict access to DH Lawrence’s explicit novel, they might have done better simply to keep quiet about it.

From books themselves to the publishers, to the Supreme Court justices, yes indeed:

Two Supreme Court justices did not recuse themselves from cases that came before the court over the past decade involving a publishing company that’s paid them in lucrative book deals.

In two separate copyright infringement cases concerning the publishing conglomerate Penguin Random House, the high court declined to take up the appeals, with the court saying in 2013 that it wouldn’t hear the first case, and the second case being turned away from the court in 2019 and again in 2020. In both cases, the publisher won at the lower court level, and those decisions stood.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court in 2009 and has been paid millions of dollars from the publisher over the years, declined to recuse herself in all three instances.

Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who joined the court in 2017 and also has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in book deals with the publisher, declined to disqualify himself from the more recent case when it came before the court for consideration.

The justices’ actions were earlier reported by Fix the Court, a watchdog group that presses for more transparency from the judiciary, and The Daily Wire.

The Supreme Court has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks following a series of reports on ethical lapses among some justices related to a lack of transparency around their financial disclosures. Watchdog groups have been especially focused on the court’s recusal practices, an area they say is ripe for reform given that no mechanism exists for ensuring a justice won’t participate in a case in which they might have a conflict.

The Supreme Court did not respond for comment.

The court does not typically say publicly how a justice voted in a decision over whether to take up an appeal, but it does briefly note when a recusal has occurred.

In both cases, former liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, who also has received book royalties from the publisher, recused himself.

Gabe Roth, executive director of Fix the Court, told CNN that the federal law concerning recusal has long been interpreted as applying to stock ownership on the part of the justice or a close family member.