Seth's Blog

From a parent’s account of her autistic son in Recovering Autistic Children (2006) edited by Stephen Edelson and Bernard Rimland, p. 79:

James took matters into his own hands at about the time of his first birthday, and started refusing milk except in the form of yogurt or cheese.

The parents, alas, did not draw any conclusions from this.

The wisdom of the five-year-old picky eater.

The Spring 2009 issue of Wise Traditions, a quarterly sent by the Weston A Price Foundation to its members, has an article by Katherine Czapp about traditional Scottish food. They too ate fermented food (pp. 56-7):

Farmers who grew their own oats but sent them to the local mill . . . received in return a bag of “sids” — the inner husks of the oats . . . From these sids, an ancient Celtic dish called “sowans” (or sowens) was made.

The sids were soaked in water for approximately one week (or even more) until they were well-soured.

Sowans takes more than week to make. Presumably the ancient Celts discovered this method of souring by accident and kept doing it because the result tasted good. It’s an example of how, in the right situation, what tastes good guides us to a good diet.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, Reed College, my alma mater, gets some very bad publicity. An extremely smart student named Chris Langan chose Reed over the University of Chicago, which thirty years later he calls “a huge mistake.” While he was at Reed, his mom failed to fill out a form to renew his scholarship. Here’s what Langan told Gladwell:

At some point, it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed. So I went to the office to ask why, and they told me, Well, no one sent us the financial statement, and we allocated all the scholarship money and it’s all gone, so I’m afraid you don’t have a scholarship anymore. That was the style of the place. They simply didn’t care. They didn’t give a shit about their students. There was no counseling, mo mentoring, nothing.

Losing his scholarship did Langan enormous damage. He never finished college. According to Gladwell, Langan is wrong.

Langan talks about dealing with Reed . . . as if [it] were some kind of vast and unyielding government bureaucracy. But colleges, particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed, tend not to be rigid bureaucracies. [No examples given.] . . . Would [the physicist Robert] Oppenheimer [supposedly more persuasive than Langan] have lost his scholarship at Reed? . . . Of course not.

That is the myth of the small liberal arts college, yes. But how true is the myth — at least in the case of Reed?

About seven years ago, I returned to Reed to give a talk. I had some spare time so I decided to visit Reed’s best-known course, a survey of Western Civilization that is required of all freshman and sophomores. I hadn’t had to take it because I entered Reed as a junior. I wondered what it was about. I found it. The large lecture hall was almost empty. Maybe there were 15 students; the enrollment must have been about 400. A young professor was giving a staggeringly boring lecture about some Greek classic.

Later I asked a Reed student why attendance was so low. She said that in the very beginning, fall semester (it was now spring semester), attendance was high but the students quickly realized the lectures weren’t helpful and stopped coming. The lecturer, I realized, didn’t care about the students. He didn’t have tenure and was trying to impress an older professor I’d seen in the audience who might influence whether he got tenure.

I’ve told Reed professors this story. They did not explain why a required course, really the required course, supposedly the centerpiece of a Reed education, was/is so poorly taught.

I think Langan’s story and the Western Civ story are two examples of how most colleges, including small liberal arts colleges, are not run for the benefit of students. I imagine the Reed professors I spoke to understood this; but it was unspeakable. I think the result is a power-law distribution of damage: A large fraction of students suffer small bad things (such as a lecture that’s a waste of time and tuition) and a small fraction of students (such as Langan) suffer nightmarishly-bad treatment.

For Whom Do Colleges Exist?

The !Golden Rule and Reed College.

A new study in PLoS Pathogen has found that mosquitoes benefit from bacteria-laden food. The bacteria stimulate their immune system and protect them against the malaria parasite. From the abstract:

Malaria-transmitting mosquitoes are continuously exposed to microbes . . . Global transcription profiling of septic and [microbe-free] aseptic mosquitoes [made aseptic with antibiotics] identified a significant subset of immune genes that were mostly up-regulated by the mosquito’s microbial flora . . . Microbe-free aseptic mosquitoes displayed an increased susceptibility to Plasmodium infection while co-feeding mosquitoes with bacteria and P. falciparum gametocytes resulted in lower than normal infection levels. Infection analyses suggest the bacteria-mediated anti-Plasmodium effect is mediated by the mosquitoes’ antimicrobial immune responses, plausibly through activation of basal immunity.

Another view of this study is that it is more evidence of the dangers of antibiotics: They weakened the immune system. As you may know, and as I was told recently by a pediatrician, doctors “hand out antibiotics like candy.”

Thanks to Janet Rosenbaum.

By Wensheng Sun.