Seth's Blog

• How one obscure sentence upset the New York Times by Renata Adler. A great and revealing story. My explanation of the Times’s over-the-top hostility to Adler’s book (Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker) differs from Adler’s. She says it was due to her lack of deference, whereas I suspect currying favor with Charles McGrath, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, was a big part of it. In Gone, Adler criticized McGrath, who was apparently very upset. Gone is the rare critique that combines negativity and deep familiarity. Usually you have one or the other.
• fish oil and joint pain
• life and death consequences of job choices
• one more reason for health care stagnation. Innovations excluded by hospital purchasing groups.
• pickled vegetables and cancer. Alas.
• On the other hand, yogurt linked with lower risk of colon cancer. This study points in the same direction.

Thanks to Dave Lull and Alex Chernavsky.

From The New Yorker website:

My brother and I had by then been authorized by Willie’s next of kin to make his medical decisions. When we asked to discontinue life support, the hospital began putting up barriers; they did all they could to prevent our doing what Trish, my brother, my father, I, and everyone else who knew and cared about Willie agreed he’d have wanted. . . . . Hospital officials repeatedly accused me of murdering him, and wildly misrepresented New York State law relevant to his case. We had, with his biological family, the legal right to decide on his behalf, and having to duke it out with these doctors exacted a great cost we should not have had to pay.

Rajiv Mehta asked some questions about using one-legged standing to improve sleep. I do three sets of two (left leg, right leg) each day.

Q. How do you spread out your three sets (have you found some minimum time between sets, say 3 hours)?

A. I make sure there’s at least 4 hours between sets. The effect was weaker with only 2 hours between sets. The time of day doesn’t matter but for convenience I usually do one set in the morning, another set in the afternoon, and a third set in the evening.

Q. They say exercise before bed is not a good idea. Do you make sure your last set is at least X hours before bed?

A. No. If anything this particular exercise will make you more sleepy, not less.

Using the Tonic app for this.

Christine Peterson’s poster of her Zeo research was one of the highlights of the QS conference for me, as I said. Here’s why. (more…)

After having guests over for dinner, my friend Carl Willat realized he had the ingredients for a root-beer float: Haagen-Daz vanilla ice cream and A&W root beer. He hadn’t thought about root beer floats in years.  He made one. The next day he made another one. He ran out of root beer, bought some more. The day after that, another one. They seemed to taste better and better each day. He ran out of ice cream, bought some more. The next day, another root-beer float. The next day, another one. Toward the end of the week, he found himself thinking: When am I going to have one tomorrow? He had to force himself to stop buying ice cream and root beer, and after a while he didn’t think about them anymore.

At the heart of the theory behind the Shangri-La Diet is the idea that we learn to associate flavors (more precisely, smells) with calories. Here is a vivid example.

I’ve noticed this learning with liquor. A few months ago I bought my first bottle of rum — to flavor yogurt. Sometimes I drank the rum without yogurt, and it tasted better and better.