This brief history of tobacco has as its endpoint a Britain with no smokers. Assuming that trend is also true here in this country, the Citigroup study which makes the postulation has somehow predicted the date of my death. Unfortunately, it’s “30–50 years” from now, which, my word, seems like an awfully long time to stick around.

I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with “Boy that Jared Loughner is craaaaazy” talk. Like Time’s diving in to be servicey: “If You Think Someone is Mentally Ill: Loughner’s 6 Warning Signs.” Time says it’s “easy to see” that he’s crazy: because he laughed randomly a lot and posed strange questions! That’s literally what those mental health experts over there suggest. Which: uh oh? Am I headed for a psych eval again? But people’s first rationale for Loughner being crazy is that he shot a bunch of people. (Their second is that he believed that language enslaved you — yeah, well, so did bell hooks — and something something the gold standard — which, have you been to rural Vermont recently, for instance, or other parts of the U.S. where these beliefs about currency are actually rather common?) So the point is that people commit heinous, antisocial acts of violence all the time and we don’t think they’re crazy. And on the other side? Most of society’s “crazy people” (which range from perhaps you and I to a number of less “functional” people) don’t actually commit violence. But in our minds, thanks probably to the TV, people are most crazy when they are 1. weird and 2. mass murderers. But then you have to start asking hard questions, like: is bin Laden a murderous monster who knows what he’s doing? Or is he “crazy”?

by “David Shapiro”

today i worked on my movie script for four hours after work in the cafeteria at the Whole Foods in Tribeca and then when i was done i bought some sushi and took the train home and watched The Simpsons by myself in my living room and ate my sushi. i know this already sounds sad but it wasn’t sad, you know, like some days you just eat dinner by yourself and it’s not necessarily a sad occasion. some days there just aren’t other people around to eat dinner with

anyway so while i was at Whole Foods, working on my movie script, i asked my girlfriend if i could come over later and she said she was on deadline for a magazine story and she’d be working all night so i couldn’t come over. and then i Gchatted with someone at a website that i write for and she said said she wasn’t going to any parties tonight but she’s going to a party tomorrow night that i should come to. so then i started downloading a torrent of a movie so i’d have something to do tonight but then luckily my friend who works for Flavorpill Gchatted me and asked if i wanted to go to the Young Manhattanite Shabbat party so i said yes. i’m not saying i wouldn’t have gone to the Young Manhattanite party if i already had something to do but i would have weighed my options for longer than 5 seconds probably. i asked Mike if he wanted to come with me and he said sure

so Young Manhattanite is a group Tumblr that was written up in the New York Times a few months ago, and apparently their Shabbat parties are like some of the ultimate blog parties to go to (this sounds sarcastic but it’s not), so i was nervous to go. in the Times article the author writes, “Despite Mr. Krucoff’s aplomb within the ‘big, incestuous social circle’ of media types — some of whom attend his YM beer-and-challah Shabbat parties — he says he has little interest in being a snarky scenester.”

that declaration put me at ease but i was still nervous, and i thought about taking an anti-anxiety pill before going but then decided against it because i don’t have that many left and i promised myself i wasn’t buying more. i don’t really understand what the Young Manhattanite Tumblr does exactly, i followed it after the Times thing but haven’t really read the Tumblr, but i guessed the bloggers probably wouldn’t be asking guests in-depth questions about their own Tumblr at their own party so i figured i was in the clear re: not knowing about Young Manhattanite

so then i took the subway into Manhattan and me and Mike met up in the Lower East Side and walked over to the party which was at Andrew Krucoff’s apartment. i brought three Four Lokos (24 o.z. each, the equivalent of a six-pack of beer) with me in my backpack, which i got at the deli when they announced the Four Loko ban and i have been keeping them in the fridge ever since. as soon as i got to the party i put them on the counter in the kitchen so i’d have an automatic conversation starter — today i read that the company that makes Four Loko has started to turn it into fuel for cars, and if somebody made a comment about the Four Loko i brought, i could continue the conversation by talking about how they are turning Four Loko into car fuel and then we would be on our way to having a normal conversation! look at me go

so anyway, me and Mike get there and my friend from Flavorpill leads us upstairs and introduces us around. he doesn’t know that Mike blogs for a popular magazine and Mike doesn’t mention it. everyone at this party writes for somewhere cool on the internet, and gets around to mentioning it, so i can tell you that at this party was the girl who runs The Today Show’s Tumblr, my friend who writes for Flavorpill, a guy who writes for FastCompany, Andrew Krucoff who helps manage the 92nd St Y’s online presence, several people who write on Summer of Megadeth (Young Manhattanite’s sister Tumblr) and several who write on Young Manhattanite obviously, a girl who writes for Crushable, a guy who has done unspecified work for Gawker and The Forward, a guy who writes for The Nation, a girl who wrote for Idolator and now writes for a new music lifestyle startup that hasn’t launched fully yet, a guy who writes for Esquire, etc etc etc. there was a lot of talk about backchannel emailing. there are more people and publications that i just don’t remember. everyone was very nice to me.

so when we got there we stood in the kitchen talking to people and they started telling jokes and i mentioned that i had a lesbian joke that my friend who is in a lesbian punk band texted me a couple hours ago. Andrew Krucoff, who i think is about 5’8″ and has a beard and a warm smile (if you want to picture this) quietly mentioned that the girl sitting behind him was a lesbian, and i tried to explain that my lesbian joke wasn’t offensive (it’s just a play on words and was told to me by a girl in a lesbian punk band who has a pretty sensitive barometer for offensiveness i think), but then Andrew Krucoff strategically walked away before i told the joke (i guess he thought it was about to get really uncomfortable). so i told Mike the joke my friend sent me, which was “what do you call a thousand angry lesbians with guns?” and he said “what?” and i said “militia etheridge” and he laughed. and then Andrew Krucoff overheard and came back and said “i think i actually read that in an email today!!! or was it somewhere on the internet?” and it made me think my friend was just googling lesbian jokes or reading a popular site and passing the jokes off as her own

Andrew Krucoff’s apartment reminded me of my own first apartment in Manhattan, a 3-bedroom in the east village that me, beau, joe and chris lived in when we were 19 and also young Manhattanites. Krucoff’s was a 1-bedroom but it was pretty much the same idea. in my apartment i had a queen-size bed and it touched the walls on 3 sides because my room was converted from a kitchen by the management company. Joe slept on a queen-size mattress on the floor on the other side of the apartment, two feet from the wall and one foot from chris, who slept on a twin bed that was pushed up against the opposite wall. being young Manhattanites wasn’t as glamorous as we were expecting

anyway after i told the lesbian joke, i went to the bathroom and i imagined immigrant families cramming into this apartment like 150 years ago, sleeping on the floor and bathing in the kitchen and smelling sewage all day, and then i got a Negra Modelo out of the fridge and listened to the guy from Flavorpill tell a joke which was something like “two racehorses walk into a bar and order drinks. one racehorse says, ‘something bit me on the ass while i was racing today!’ and then the other racehorse says, ‘wow, something bit me on the ass too!’ and then a dog walks up to them and says ‘i couldn’t help but overhear your conversation — the exact same thing happened to me’ and then the bartender says ‘holy shit! a talking dog!!!!!’”

then it was time for the blessings and the challah. Andrew Krucoff ushered everybody into the living room and then the guy who works for Gawker read a summary of this week’s Torah portion (in Judaism, every week gets its own section of the story in the holy book) off his iPhone. then he tore off pieces of the challah and everybody passed the pieces towards the back of the crowd and since i was in the back, and probably like 5 people had already touched my piece of challah with unwashed hands, i thought about how to pretend i was eating my bread but secretly stuff it in my pocket while everyone else was eating theirs. then somebody came out of the bathroom and stood behind me, so it would have been impossible to fake eating the bread without him seeing, so i just ate it and wondered how many other New York Jews in the room were going through the same neurotic process at the same moment

then i went to the fridge and drank another Negra Modelo and listened to two girls talk about a guy that one of them is casually sleeping with. she said that she had texted him something like “i’m getting ready to leave a party in the Lower East Side — what are you up to?”, which made me feel like, okay, if someone is speaking so casually about getting ready to leave a party, i also should have been preparing to leave at that point, or at least mentioning that i was thinking about leaving. so the guy hadn’t texted her back and it had been a while, and also earlier that day it took him two and a half hours to respond to her text. honestly i didn’t think things were looking good for this girl but we had just met so i didn’t think it was my place to tell her the guy was just not that into her. then the other girl said something like “be more aggressive with him!” and also something like “tell him you wanna have sex in his bed right now!” and i almost told them both that i thought those were terrible ideas and i thought she was playing the situation appropriately with the “getting ready to leave a party” text, but i realized i was too drunk to get my thoughts together coherently and persuasively about why the “let’s have sex now” text was the wrong move, so i kept quiet and nodded

then it really seemed like time to leave. everyone was saying their goodbyes but i didn’t really have that many people to say goodbye to, so i listened to the guy from Esquire as he said goodbye to the guy from Flavorpill: the guy from Flavorpill put his hand on the guy from Esquire’s shoulder, and the guy from Esquire said “every time you touch me on the shoulder i feel like i’m having an intervention” and i laughed even though i was trying to pretend i wasn’t eavesdropping on what they were saying to each other. then i left, called my girlfriend on the way to the subway, told her about the party, got on the subway, wrote this, got out of the subway, and then read through a Google Alerts email for my blog, which included mostly insults. i stopped at the deli on the way home to get pretzels, but they didn’t have the kind i like. being a young Brooklynite is not as glamorous as i was expecting

Sent via Blackberry from T-Mobile

“David “Shapiro” is 22 and lives in New York City and has a Tumblr.

The levels of rudeness among British shoppers have apparently reached epidemic proportions: “A few examples from my local supermarket. Over Christmas, a punch-up broke out in a queue after one customer accused another of pushing in. A few weeks before that, the supermarket banned the sale of eggs to customers under the age of 16, because so many were buying them in bulk, going outside and then hurling them at the walls and each other. Another time, my parents, visiting from Scotland, witnessed two teenage boys chasing another around the aisles; while running at full speed, the one being chased was yelling into his mobile for reinforcements.” It’s grim!

by Ann Finkbeiner

Hanny’s back, this time with a plausible story. Back in 2007, Hanny van Arkel, a Dutch schoolteacher, was on her computer happily classifying galaxies on Galaxy Zoo and was about to click Next, when she thought, “Wait. What was that?” At first, nobody knew: it was green, it glowed, it was shapeless, they called it Voorwerp.

Eventually, after astronomers burned up telescope time looking at the Voorwerp in optical, radio, ultraviolet and xrays, they decided it was a blob of gas whose oxygen — oxygen is green, you know that, don’t you — was being lit up by something going on in a nearby galaxy with the unforgettable name of IC 2497. Finally astronomers got time on the Hubble Space Telescope (which is a little like getting time with the Pope) and have not only taken this pretty picture, they think they have the story.

IC 2497 isn’t the innocent, uninteresting little spiral galaxy they thought. It’s skewed and it’s violent. Another galaxy collided with it, and the collision riled up a lot of messy gas, some of which got warped into a long, invisible tail around IC 2497, and some of it got pulled into IC 2497’s center where unbeknownst lurked a dead black hole. The black hole came alive, sucked in the gas, lit up, and sent out a jet of high-energy light that turned a part of the long tail green and made the Voorwerp. A little later, shock waves in the gas hit the Voorwerp and created small, yellow-orange stars in it. As fireworks, it must have been spectacular: CRASH, whoooosh, ssssss, BLAMMO, WHAM, tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.

After it was all over, IC 2497’s black hole went back to sleep.

About the only thing left to figure out is why the Voorwerp seems to have a hole in it and why the hole’s edges are so smooth: maybe it’s really a shadow. Maybe when the black hole was active, its light got blocked by something nearby, and I’d rather not think about it. Meanwhile, at the astronomical conference where all this is being announced, Hanny remains her own natural self, being treated like a movie star, getting interviewed by the media, and feeling silly about it all.

Ann Finkbeiner is a coproprietor of The Last Word on Nothing.

There is still an ongoing appeal in this one, but anyway: “A judge ordered former U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to serve three years in prison Monday for his role in a scheme to illegally funnel corporate money to Texas candidates in 2002.”

Finally, a breakthrough in the battle against piracy: “Marauding pirates could soon find themselves up against a new long-range laser weapon, designed to leave them blinded, bewildered and all at sea.” Also: “While the effects are not permanent, the light should leave pirates at least wishing they had worn an eyepatch or two: from as far away as 1500 metres the effect of looking at the beam is like accidentally looking at the sun, says Hore.” (Yes, groan.)

Of course we wish the people of Sudan good luck in this week’s referendum to decide whether or not the southern part of the country secedes to become its own nation. A vote for independence seems likely. While there’s much discussion about what the new country’s name should be, a national anthem has already been written and recorded. It’s called “Land of Cush,” a reference to a Biblical kingdom in the area. Unfortunately, it sucks. Before anything becomes official, they should talk to Dr. Dre about the possibility of using his song.

Or Iron & Wine.

Or Radiohead.

Or Leonard Cohen, or Rush, or Pitbull, or Deep Purple or Good Charlotte… I’m not going to get into all that. Jesus, who hasn’t written a song called “Anthem?”

Science is on its way to curing both baldness and the double chin. Now I can eat and take really hot showers with impunity!

by Maud Newton

Misha Angrist, otherwise known as member four of the Personal Genome Project, has — along with Stephen Pinker and some other science-world luminaries — given permission for his entire genome to be published online. As a trained geneticist, he’s more equipped to predict the direction and effects of DNA research than the rest of us. His new book, Here is a Human Being, ponders the implications of this kind of bioforensics for our culture at large, and also for those of us, like me, who’ve already opened this Pandora’s box by subscribing to 23andme or one of the other personal genomics outlets. Will our information be kept private? Will assumptions be made, a la Gattaca and Brave New World, about our proper place in the world — our abilities, our intelligence, our likely mental health and physical prowess? Will doctors fine-tune treatments based on individuals’ genomes? Will insurance companies drop people more likely to develop certain conditions? Do we really want to confront the truth about our ancestors? The author fields my barrage of questions below — and will field more in-person tonight at McNally Jackson Books in New York City.

Holy crap, Misha, you’re making your entire genome public! Are you nervous?

It’s already done. All of my data are here. Frankly I don’t think anything in my DNA could be as embarrassing as this kelly green shirt that continues to taunt me from the interwebs.

I spend a lot of time worrying about the long-term consequences of opening the Pandora’s box just by joining 23andMe.

Hmmm. What is it you’re worried about exactly?

Well, in addition to being an enthusiastic neurotic, I’m a hypochondriac with health problems, and I guess I’m anxious that I won’t be able to get insurance coverage in my old age, and I’ll end up being yelled at and bossed around in some grannies’ ward with rows and rows of beds, like in Memento Mori

. Here Is a Human Being includes some pretty sobering stories of insurance companies — and even the military — booting people because they’re at high risk for certain genetic conditions.

True, although I suspect that those types of stories are rare. But even if they’re not, I believe that one way of combating/preempting that sort of behavior is by having a cohort of people putting it all out there and seeing what happens. I am fairly well convinced that if an insurer or employer used a Personal Genome Project participant’s data to discriminate against him/her, the personal genomics hive would raise holy hell and quickly create a PR nightmare for the perpetrator.

Ah, so participation is actually a kind of insurance of its own! Where do I sign up?

Yeah, if you fuck with me, then you fuck with all of the public genomes and arguably the entire biomedical research enterprise.

So you feel okay about disregarding that one doctor’s advice to stock up on long-term health insurance.

For me personally, since I don’t carry the most important and predictive genetic risk factor for late-onset Alzheimer’s, my likely eventual need for long-term care is not demonstrably greater than anyone else’s… indeed, by not carrying APOE4 one could argue that I might actually want to go with less long-term care insurance.

And see, here’s where one of the systemic problems lies. If an insurer knows I’m at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s, then that company will want to either not cover me or charge me a shitload. But if I know that I’m at high risk and my insurer doesn’t, then I will want to game the system and do what my doctor recommended and stock up on insurance. My hope is that one of these days we will come to our collective senses and opt for a single-payer system. I know: bwa ha ha ha ha ha.

Yeah, it’s insane to me that a single-payer system still isn’t even an option on the table. At this point it seems like the health care industry is the only business in this country still raking it in, apart from banks and big oil… But I’m getting off-track. Why do you think so many bioethicists are suspicious of DNA research, and particularly of making genomic data available to the masses?

Well, in my colleagues’ defense, the 20th century eugenics movement was not pretty. It gave pseudo-scientific cover to all sorts of horrors and bad ideas, some of which continue to die hard. I don’t want to minimize that.

Right. It’s important to remember that even one of the most respected jurists of the age was saying things like “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

That said, a lot of bioethics tends to begin from the premise that science is harmful, that people cannot understand its risks or limitations, that whatever benefits there are must have some underlying capitalist motive, and that genetics will always be state- or corporation-sponsored and therefore should never be trusted. To many in the academic medico-legal-industrial complex, the idea that average people want access to this information, however preliminary, is still unthinkable and unpalatable.

23andme in particular, with its tie-in to genealogy, seems to stick in their craw. Like, DNA shouldn’t be fun, people! You mention that one scientist even compared it to astrology.

These are the persistent and pervasive criticisms of personal genomics: 1) that it’s useless; and 2) that it’s dangerous.

Yes, as far as having practical implications for one’s health, most of it is useless (today, anyway). But that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in it! We are constantly bemoaning the lack of science literacy in this country, but when DNA technology finally gets cheap enough to let the hoi polloi in, we say, “No no! It’s not ready!”

Or — and this speaks to the second criticism — we say, “You can’t handle the truth.” And I would readily concede that this stuff is not for everyone. If some people don’t want to know their genetic risk for X, Y or Z I don’t begrudge them and I don’t judge them. But I do want to know about my own and thousands of other self-selected people want to, too. And our numbers will only increase. In 2009 Francis Collins predicted that the day is coming when a full genome sequence will be a routine part of newborn screening. In this case I think he’s dead on.

I know you wanted DNA sequencing done to find out about your daughters’ risk for breast cancer because of your mom’s harrowing experience — two radical mastectomies. Can you talk a little bit about that?

My mother was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 42 (she is alive and well today, baruch haShem). Her youth at diagnosis, family history and her Ashkenazi heritage make it a real possibility that she carries a mutation in a gene for hereditary breast cancer. While it’s unlikely I would get breast cancer, I could transmit that mutation to my daughters. Since I was going to put everything on the web, I wanted to see my hereditary breast cancer genes. The idea was that if they were at risk they should find out from me and my wife, not from some intrepid genome blogger. My BRCA genes are clean, thankfully. And I realize that this was a luxury that other public genomes will probably not have.

God, what a relief! I joined 23andme for far, far less serious reasons, partly to find out about and obsess over health risks, sure, but mostly to learn more about my grandfather, who married thirteen times, died the year before I was born, and supposedly had only one surviving child, my mother.

Wow! That’s some serious serial monogamy.

Yup, although some of the unions were pretty short-lived. One wife shot him in the stomach after they’d been married only a few weeks.

I think your story raises a point that often gets overlooked. A lot of doctors say, “Why do you need a genetic test? Just look at your own family history.” Well, not everyone has access to his/her family history: What if you were adopted? What if you were conceived via an anonymous sperm donor? What if your family refuses to discuss certain aspects of your ancestry? And of course it’s not either/or: family history and personal genetic testing are not mutually exclusive.

I’ve found a number of relatives my racist father wouldn’t be too thrilled to encounter at his next family reunion.

Families can learn surprising and highly charged things about their histories, whether through genetic testing or simply by finding old correspondence in the attic. The Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings contretemps is a great example of both.

Speaking of using DNA to determine ancestry, I was fascinated by the story of Kirk Maxey, the former sperm donor who may have fathered up to 400 biological children.

I’ve met people whose only response to that story is “eww.” And I think that that’s a real shame. Kirk is a wonderful guy who was an ingenuous medical student in the late 70s/early 80s and donated sperm to make extra money and because he and his wife thought it would be an altruistic thing to do. They also thought that most of his donations were going to research, when in fact none of them were.

And then Maxey decided he wanted to find all his children.

He is really the antithesis of the stereotypical frat-boy sperm donor getting paid to jerk off. He feels terrible about what happened and wants to know that his biological children are okay.

His donations were split, you say, sometimes by as much as 8:1. Jesus.

According to Kirk, by diluting donations down to levels that were unlikely to impregnate, the clinics could force women to buy additional vials of sperm. In other words, poor quality control was a money-making proposition.

Sperm banking was — and in many ways, is — the Wild West: it is an almost completely unregulated industry. Wendy Kramer, who founded the Donor Sibling Registry for donor-conceived kids to find their biological half-siblings, has a million stories about the shit that goes on. I hope she writes a book someday.

What do you think about the arguments that DNA research is dangerous because it’s inherently deterministic?

I think that DNA research itself has shown that that argument is utterly specious. We know, for example, that the variation in a trait like height, which is highly heritable, is caused by hundreds of thousands of genetic variants. So yeah, height is genetic — if our parents are short, then we’re likely to be short. But the idea that we’re going to create some designer eugenic panel to select for genes that will give us tall kids is laughable. And similarly, we know that common diseases tend to be caused by a combination of many genes and the environment, probably interacting in subtle and complicated ways that make a deterministic scenario extremely unlikely.

When I look at my own genome I see dozens and dozens of broken genes. I see hundreds of mutations that, by all rights, should have put a stop to me when I was a microscopic ball of cells inside my Mom. But here I am, reading Harry Potter to my healthy and amazing kids, both of whom have half of my broken genes… and half of their otherwise perfect mother’s.

So you don’t envision a Brave New World- or Gattaca- type result?

Not in any monolithic, predictable way. However… I think what will happen is that more and more people of reproductive age will undergo carrier screening in order to avoid conceiving kids with relatively rare genetic diseases that are caused by single genes gone awry. I’m talking about cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, etc. One can imagine a day when having kids with those maladies will be stigmatized — a kind of GATTACA-lite.

That would suck, IMHO, and perhaps not only because of the icky eugenic implications. It could also suck because the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who’s to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn’t similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?

After the Tuskegee “studies” of untreated syphilis in African American males, many African Americans are pretty wary of bio-medical research.

To say the least! Anyone interested in the full, horrific story should read James Jones’s book. And of course, not long ago Susan Reverby discovered that similar atrocities were taking place in Guatemala in the 1940s.

Really sobering stuff. And yet Henry Louis Gates — you say he’s a “keen student of genetics” — believes “we have to become scientifically literate so that we can learn how to intelligently challenge the potential abuses.” Which sounds similar to your own perspective.

I couldn’t agree more. This doesn’t mean that everyone needs to go out and participate in research or get their genomes done. The former costs time and the latter costs money. But I think we owe it to our kids and grandkids to foster that literacy early on for all sorts of reasons: to avoid and confront abuses, to improve the public health, to keep us globally competitive… and because science is cool!

Tell me how Francis Collins, a fundamentalist Christian given to religious pronouncements on genetics, ended up at the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

I think that the full, unexpurgated answer to that question is probably well above my pay-grade. Francis was an accomplished researcher on human genetic disease for many years and he was a loyal soldier at the head of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He is politically savvy and is also seen as a consensus-builder. And while many in the science community are wary of his religious beliefs, I think that those same beliefs are exactly what endear him to many in Congress on both sides of the aisle, but especially to Republicans. And I think that that combination made him irresistible to the Obama administration.

He was supposed to be the villain of your book, but, once he steps down from that position, he turns out to be, if not exactly the good guy, a lot more nuanced than you expect.

You know, I’m not enamored of everything he does, but on personal genomics he turned around completely and I was surprised and impressed by that. He came to accept the idea that maybe Prometheus shouldn’t have his liver pecked out for all eternity for giving fire to the masses, and on the contrary, maybe it was actually a good thing.

Maud Newton and Misha Angrist continue the discussion about Here is a Human Being tonight at McNally Jackson.