Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

In November 2010, NPR’s Fresh Air featured a story, “An Oncologist Writes a Biography of Cancer.” Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee was treating one of his patients, a woman with advanced abdominal cancer who had relapsed multiple times, when she asked him what seemed like a simple question. "She said, 'I'm willing to go on, but before I go on, I need to know what it is I'm battling,' " Mukherjee tells NPR's Terry Gross. But, as Mukherjee explains, describing his patient's illness wasn't so simple. Defining cancer, he says, is something doctors and scientists have been struggling to do since the disease's first documented appearance thousands of years ago. Mukherjee's new book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, grew out of his desire to better understand the disease he treats, through examining the way cancer has been described and treated throughout history. He chronicles the ways therapies evolved, particularly in the 20th century, as more treatment options became available and scientists worked to understand the underlying genetic mutations that caused the disease.

“A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

“What does it mean to be an oncologist? It means that you get to sit in at a moment of another person’s life that is so hyper-acute, and not just because they’re medically ill. It’s also a moment of hope and expectation and concern. It’s a moment when you get to erase everything that’s irrelevant and ask the most elemental questions — about survival, family, children, legacy.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

In November 2010, The Economist published “With hope, farewell fear: The long struggle to understand cancer.” It is said that when the good burghers of Amsterdam were first presented with a rhinoceros—armored, horned, three-toed, with a prehensile lip—spectators shook their heads in disbelief. Cancer provokes a similar bafflement. So protean are its forms and so varied its features that even specialist prognoses of aggressiveness, invasion and response to treatment have typically generated more exceptions than rules. Apparently, identical cancers in two patients may behave so unlike as to appear utterly different diseases. Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The Emperor of All Maladies” tells of the search for a “unifying theory” of cancer, the common attribute of all types of malignant cell growth that might reveal its cure. The arc of this rich and engrossing book matches Mr. Mukherjee’s personal evolution as an oncologist, beginning on the first day of his hospital residency. It seems that the diversity of this implacable, shape-shifting foe will defeat him. He is faced with dead-end discoveries, therapeutic disasters and revelations that lead only to more mysteries. But with the perceptiveness and patience of a true scientist he begins to weave these individual threads into a coherent and engrossing narrative.

“If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes. And the arrival of that moment really sent a chill down the spine of cancer biologists. Because here we were hoping that cancer would turn out to be some kind of exogenous event — a virus or something that could then be removed from our environment and our bodies and we could be rid of it — but as it turns out, cancer genes are sitting inside each and every one of our chromosomes, waiting to be corrupted or activated.”

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the book: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer

David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In July 2010, James Harkin wrote a review of the David Kirkpatrick book for The Guardian. Last month Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, stood in front of an industry conference in Las Vegas and announced that email was on the way out. Figures showed that only 11% of teenagers use email on a daily basis, she said; most preferred to send messages via social networks such as Facebook. Even though she herself couldn't imagine life without it, she predicted that email "is probably going away". Sandberg's figures weren't quite right; they referred to data on how many American teenagers were using email to communicate with their friends on a daily basis, not how they were using it in general. Given Facebook's enormous success in colonising our online activity, however, there's every reason to take her hubristic ambition seriously. A good way to understand that ambition is to read David Kirkpatrick's new book.

“Zuckerberg sees the world as moving very rapidly toward transparency and very rapid sharing of data between individuals in all sorts of ways, on and off Facebook. And from the day he first created his system, he had this ethos of sharing that he strongly believed in.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“But to everyone else the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg had a knack for making software people couldn’t stop using. That came as little surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talking to Microsoft and other companies about selling a program he’d written with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. The software watched what kind of music someone liked so it could suggest other songs. His friends called the program “The Brain” and were especially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as a million dollars for it.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In July 2010, Don Tapscott wrote “Changing the world, one friend at a time” for The Globe and Mail. It was well known among industry insiders a couple of years ago that David Kirkpatrick's book about Facebook was overdue. Some felt he'd lose the window – that Facebook's 15 minutes of fame, like those of Myspace, were coming to an end. Kirkpatrick ignored them, spending another 18 months researching. Good call; the book appears just as Facebook has become the most popular destination on the Internet. Our obsession is justified, as Kirkpatrick points out in the most meticulous and exhaustive exposition to date. Facebook has gone “from a dorm-room novelty to a company with an unbelievable 500 million users.” Canadians love it most: A whopping 40 per cent of us are users. It defies the conventional wisdom that social networks are here today and gone tomorrow. It has become “a technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life, both public and private.” Facebook has the capability to do everything from linking us with friends to saving lives in the Haitian disaster. It may “be the fastest-growing company of any type in history.”

“Facebook was still burning tons of cash. It couldn’t keep endlessly pulling in investment money to cover losses, no matter how much contempt Zuckerberg had for ads. Luckily, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all wanted to talk about a deal to place display ads on Facebook. Zuckerberg authorized his deputies to begin negotiations. To him it seemed like easy money. He wasn’t going to give them much onscreen real estate anyway.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“A couple of Google executives came over to see if there might be a way to work with or even buy Thefacebook. Even at this early date, Google was well aware that something noteworthy was gong on in Palo Alto. Zuckerberg and Parker were leery, though, because the risk of becoming subsumed by Silicon Valley’s Internet giant was real. If they wanted ot do their own thing, they had to stay independent, they believed. Anyway, what they were trying to do was very different from what Google did. Their site was about people; Google was about data.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In June 2010, NPR’s Morning Edition did a feature on the David Kirkpatrick book, “Author Explores The Evolution Of Facebook.” The site, which essentially began as an online student directory, went live on Feb. 4, 2004. Thefacebook, as it was then called, became popular almost instantly. Within four days, more than 650 students had registered. After one month, the number had reached 10,000. And now, more than six years later, close to 500 million people worldwide actively use the site. Author David Kirkpatrick spent a considerable amount of time with Zuckerberg while writing his new book The Facebook Effect. Zuckerberg, Kirkpatrick tells NPR's Deborah Amos, is adamant in his belief that the world is becoming more open.

“As costs mounted, Zuckerberg mused to the Crimson, which had taken to idolizing him, that “it might be nice in the future to get some ads going.” By the end of March, with the active-user number surpassing 30,000, Thefacebook was paying $450 per month for five servers from Manage.com. Zuckerberg and Saverin each agreed to invest another $10,000 into the company. Meanwhile, Saverin had begun selling a little advertising and had secured a few small contracts with companies that sold moving services, T-shirts, and other products to college students. These ads began to appear in April.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

David Kirkpatrick on the Future of Facebook

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Recent Mark Zuckerberg Quotes:

"Before we do anything there, I'm personally spending a lot of time studying it and figuring out what I think the right thing to do is," he said, adding that he spends an hour a day studying Chinese.

Dec 22, 2010 Herald Sun (100 occurrences)

...founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who calls the social network's interactions-centered concept as the "social graph", said during an interview with the "60 Minutes" CBS show: "I think what we've found is that when you can use products with...

Dec 29, 2010 TopNews United States (50 occurrences)

On his Facebook page, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was "a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected."

Dec 26, 2010 Washington Times (24 occurrences)

"Privacy and making sure people have control over their information is, I think, one of the most fundamental things on the Internet," Zuckerberg said in a 60 Minutesinterview on Dec. 5.

Jan 12, 2011 WBIR-TV (8 occurrences)

At a talk this fall to aspiring entrepreneurs in Palo Alto, Calif., Zuckerberg said he was hoping to figure out the "right partnerships that we would need to do in China to succeed on our terms."

Dec 22, 2010 Herald Sun (10 occurrences)

"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he told TechCrunch this month."That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

Jan 17, 2011 New York Daily News (377 occurrences)

"The Farm Bureau agreed to sell us fb.com and we in return have agreed not to sell farm subsidies," Zuckerberg said in an account on techcrunch.com.

Jan 11, 2011 Reuters Blogs (blog) (15 occurrences)

"Most applications are going to become social, and most industries are going to be rethought in a way where social design and doing things with your friends is at the core of how these things work," he said.

Jan 2, 2011 Warc (27 occurrences)

"I don't care about the money," said Zuckerberg. "I just want my old life back."

Jan 9, 2011 ProPakistani.pk (blog) (10 occurrences)

David A. Vise, Mark Malseed: The Google Story

In November 2005, David A Vise wrote “What Lurks in Its Soul?” for The Washington Post. Google doesn't need all that computer power to help us search for the best Italian restaurant in Northern Virginia. It has grander plans. The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google's immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as "Googling Your Genes."

“Soon after moving into their new offices in Palo Alto, Google expanded to eight employees and struggled to keep up with the growing number of daily searches. Its unique system of computing, which adapted cheap PC parts and custom software into a small supercomputer, gave it the power to handle a rising number of search requests and ever larger downloads of the Web.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

“We have been wrong on lots of occasions. It was the quality of the service that Google provided that was demonstrably better than you could get anywhere else. That is why we invested. And as the Internet developed, we thought search would be more important, not less important.”

- Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital

The Googleplex  

In November 2005, Janet Maslin wrote “Sorting the World by Design” for The New York Times. "The Google Story," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story" also includes an aerial view of the Googleplex taken from a B-24 bomber, with a machine gun visible in the foreground. Sunny or sinister? Either is a way to describe Google's fast, unstoppable rise from humble academic beginnings at Stanford University to (in the words of the author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."

“Moritz had first met Brin and Page through Yahoo’s David Filo back when they were stil students at Stanford. Moritz and his firm, Sequoia Capital, and backed Yahoo with $2 million and reaped a big gain from Yahoo’s $32 million IPO in 1996. Around that same time, Brin and Page were gathering information about starting a company, including valuation methods and other techniques, so they could work out an agreement with Stanford that would facilitate the patenting of PageRank and enable them to license it from the school.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

“With tech-savvy early investors such as Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to provide them with advice, Brin and Page decided to reach out simultaneously to two of the most established and prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital. If Things went well, their goal was to get both firms to pump cash into Google while leaving neither in charge of the company.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

In January 2006, John Lanchester wrote “Engine trouble” for The Guardian. Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that's the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997), its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn't taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn't been taken was because it should be spelled googol - and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Page and Brin are not bad-omen kind of guys. A little more than eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world - with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $129bn. Page and Brin, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10bn each.

“Brin and Page were persuaded that they had found the path toward a Ph.D. thesis by applying PageRank to the Internet. By early 1997, Page had developed a primitive search engine that he named BackRub because it dealt with the incoming—or “back”—links to Web pages. Ever thrifty, Page put his left hand on a scanner, converted the image to black and white, and the new BackRub site had its logo. Page, Brin, and Motwani all contributed ideas to the evolving project. Motwani said that it would soon become clear that what they had created together was more than just a way to further their academic research. Without intending to, the trio had devised a ranking system for the Internet.”

- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story

Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates

U.S. President Ronald Reagan

In January 1989, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued his “Farewell Address to the Nation” from the Oval Office. And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free. I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

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“John Cotton is forty-six years old. He is the most respected, famous, and beloved Puritan minister in England. Getting him to bless the send-off of these relatively unimportant castaways would be like scoring Nelson Mandela to deliver the commencement address at the neighbor kid's eighth-grade graduation. In fact, once the colonists arrive in Massachusetts they will name their settlement Boston, in honor of Cotton's hometown.”

- Sarah Vowell, author of the book: The Wordy Shipmates

In November 2008, Virginia Heffernan wrote “Mayflower Power” for The New York Times. Sarah Vowell is a problem. She’s a problem like Sarah Palin, Cyndi Lauper and Kathy Griffin. She’s annoying. Or, really, she’s double-annoying, because she styles herself as annoying — provocative-annoying — and if you become annoyed by her you seem to be conceding the point. She’s gotten to you. Vowell, who constantly emphasizes how nerdy (meaning impressive) she finds her own interest in the Puritans, introduces figures like John Winthrop and Roger Williams as if no one’s ever heard of them. She delivers a farrago of free-floating pedantry — “the kind of smart-alecky diatribe for which I’ve gotten paid for 20 years” — having evidently made it her job to enlighten slacker Gen-Xers with a remedial history of our own nation. It’s not right. Vowell’s whole alt-­everything vibe is just dated enough to be cringey. And then there’s her Great Plains accent: can something so wholesome-soundin’ be real? And her politics. Perfectly early-millennium coastal (green, be good, Obama, etc.). Can she really take pleasure in plumping for an autofill ideology that’s so widely shared?

Dan Charnas: The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

In December 2010, an NPR Staff writer wrote, “How Hip0Hop Became a Cash Machine” for the show, All Things Considered. Thirty years ago, hip-hop was background noise at small house parties in Harlem and the South Bronx. Now, it's a multibillion-dollar empire. A new book, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop, tells the story of the genre's humble beginnings — from one person behind a few turntables and a microphone — and how it morphed into a way of life, with designer clothing lines, political movements and vast wealth. But in the early days of rap, a lot of the money stayed with the label owners, not with the musicians. Charnas notes that some hip-hop dignitaries railed against "how onerous recording contracts were and how tilted the relationship was between artists and record companies."

“Sometime in the middle to the end of the last decade, BusinessWeek estimated that the hip-hop business had grown to, on the music side, about $1 billion a year, and on the fashion side, $2 billion a year.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

“For the first time, black artists were really not only embracing but insisting on their own self-worth.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

In December 2010, Jim Farber wrote “'The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop' by Dan Charnas follows the money” for the New York Daily News. The story of hip hop has been told from many points of view, but never from those who've had the strongest power over its destiny. That would be the corporate backers and entrepreneurial enablers, those market forces that finessed a street trend from New York's most embattled neighborhoods into a global phenomenon. Dan Charnas has done a real service to pop history by following the money -- a pursuit which ultimately tells a far larger tale: In hip hop, it seems, cash isn't just a matter of bling. It's the currency that gave this once outsider art -- and by extension, a marginalized race -- a louder, clearer and more important voice all over the world.

“I think Sugar Hill saw themselves as riding out a fad. I don't think they had any particular belief that this was a powerful culture that had staying power. We'd just come off of the disco era, which turned out to be very, very short-lived, and I'm sure that a lot of people, including Sylvia and Joe Robinson, thought that the same would happen to this rap stuff. The difference was that Russell Simmons did not like the records that Sugar Hill was turning out because they didn't sound to him like the hip-hop that lived in the streets and the parks and the clubs, which was very raw, very beat-oriented, and didn't sound like disco at all. And so Russell Simmons' key innovation, when he made Run-D.M.C.'s first record, was to basically order his producer-partner Larry Smith to take out all the music. 'I just want to hear a beat,' he said.”

- Dan Charnas, author of The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop

Author Quinlan on Superpowers, `New Globalization’: Audio from Bloomberg - All Podcasts

The author, Joseph P. Quinlan, recently sat with Bloomberg. Listen to the show.

Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Theodore Newton Vail, born July 16, 1845, was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, is what’s come to be known as Vailism. He served as the president of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named “American Telephone & Telegraph” before 1894). Vail convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if brought under one monopoly, so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country. He called this "one system, one policy, universal service."

“Mr. Vail is a big man.”

- Thomas Edison

According to Columbia University, professor and policy advocate Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.

“History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Wireless is going to be a big problem because as these smart phones develop into more complex devices, I think the consumers will expect the same kind of experience on their wireless device than they expect on their wired connection at home. There may be a performance difference, but you wouldnt expect that you would be told you cant use certain applications.”

- Scott Jordan, professor at the University of California at Irvine

In December 2010, David Leonhardt wrote “From Hobby to Industry” for The New York Times. AT&T is the star of the new Tim Wu book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The Master Switch covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they’re composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be. Tim Wu argues that the government has little choice. Not only are communications businesses particularly prone to consolidation, but the political effects are far greater than they would be in other industries. The Tim Wu book’s title comes from a line by Fred Friendly, the longtime CBS News executive, in which he distinguished between free-speech laws and “exclusive custody of the master switch.” They are two different things, but either has the ability to shape the flow of information. The same cannot be said, Tim Wu notes, “of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes or dozens of other industries, no matter their size.”

“The reason people like Google or Facebook is it's just simpler. If we go back to AT&T in the 1910s, we had a monopoly for 70 years, and why was that? It was easy—you picked up the telephone, and it worked. There's nothing wrong with that. But our desire to follow the leader does tend to lead to monopolization.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books)

BizDaily: Facebook's future 12 Jan 11 from Business Daily

It's got 600 million members and a truly international reach but is Facebook really worth $50 billion? And as new shareholders buy in, is the company destined to go public? Justin Rowlatt interviews the author of the biography of Facebook, David Kirkpatrick. Plus, life after Facebook, why some members aren't happy with the success of the social networking site and are deciding to erase their on-line existence. We talk to Mike Atherton, one of these "Facebook suicides". Plus our regular technology commentator Jeremy Wagstaff asks why the future of computing could be up in the clouds. Listen to the podcast.

Lessons Learned from WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Bloomberg administration officials got grilled by the NY City Council yesterday about the city’s response to last month’s blizzard. WNYC’s Ailsa Chang breaks down the lessons learned as the city braces for another winter storm. Plus, WNYC's Bob Hennelly gives a preview of Governor Christie’s State of the State address; Eric Alterman on kabuki politics; New America Foundation fellow Parag Khanna talks about his new book How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance; and a continued conversation about the shooting in Tucson, Arizona with NJ Congressman Bill Pascrell and others.

Amy Chua: Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

In January 2011, Janet Maslin wrote “But Will It All Make ‘Tiger Mom’ Happy?” for The New York Times. “There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids’ true interests,” Amy Chua writes. She ought to know, because hers is the big one: “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a diabolically well-packaged, highly readable screed ostensibly about the art of obsessive parenting. In truth, Ms. Chua’s memoir is about one little narcissist’s book-length search for happiness. And for all its quotable outbursts from Mama Grisly (the nickname was inevitable), it will gratify the same people who made a hit out of the granola-hearted “Eat, Pray, Love.” You might wonder how this is possible. In “Eat, Pray, Love,” Elizabeth Gilbert presented herself as a seeker of solace, whereas Ms. Chua eagerly overacts the role of wicked witch. The litany of her outrages has made her an instant conversation piece. What kind of mother throws her 3-year-old out in the cold? (“You can’t stay in the house if you don’t listen to Mommy.”) Or complains that her family’s pet rabbits aren’t smart enough? (“They were unintelligent and not at all what they claimed to be.”) Or, most memorably, makes her two daughters’ music lessons so grueling that one girl leaves tooth marks on the piano?

“In Disney movies, the [studious kid] always has to have a breakdown and realize that life is not all about following rules and winning prizes, and then take off her clothes and run into the ocean or something like that. But that's just Disney's way of appealing to all the people who never win any prizes. Winning prizes gives you opportunities, and that's freedom - not running into the ocean.”

- Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

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“Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable — even legally actionable — to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, "Hey fatty — lose some weight." By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of "health" and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image. ... Western parents are concerned about their children's psyches. Chinese parents aren't. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently.”

- Amy Chua, author of the new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

In January 2011, Maureen Corrigan wrote “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother” for NPR. Amy Chua may well be nuts. What kind of a mother hauls her then-7-year-old daughter's dollhouse out to the car and tells the kid that the dollhouse is going to be donated to the Salvation Army piece by piece if the daughter doesn't master a difficult piano composition by the next day? What kind of a mother informs her daughter that she's "garbage"? And what kind of mother believes, as Amy Chua tells readers she does, that: "an A- is a bad grade; ... the only activities your children should be permitted to do are those in which they can eventually win a medal; and ... that medal must be gold"? What kind of a mother? Why, a mother who's raising her kids the Chinese, rather than the Western, way. In her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua recounts her adventures in Chinese parenting, and — nuts though she may be — she's also mesmerizing. Chua's voice is that of a jovial, erudite serial killer — think Hannibal Lecter — who's explaining how he's going to fillet his next victim, as though it's the most self-evidently normal behavior. That's the other gripping aspect of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother: There's method to Amy Chua's madness — enough method to stir up self-doubt in readers who subscribe to more nurturing parenting styles. Trust me, Battle Hymn is going to be a book club and parenting blog phenomenon; there will be fevered debate over Chua's tough love strategies, which include ironclad bans on such Western indulgences as sleepovers, play dates, and any extracurricular activities except practicing musical instruments ... which must be the violin or piano. Listen to the podcast of that episode of NPR's Fresh Air about the Amy Chua book, here.

Evan Carroll, John Romano: Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What's Your Legacy? (Voices That Matter)

When people die, they leave behind sensitive information—all their online profiles, email accounts, and social media histories. This produces a dilemma for one's family members or friends to either leave it up or take things down. Of course, different sites have different policies regarding a person's death with an account on either Facebook, Twitter, any email service, etc.

"Accounts like PayPal are really interesting because many of us have our PayPal accounts linked to our checking accounts and it's very easy to transfer money out of those accounts, so it's worth looking at it systematically, and thinking about, 'If so-and-so has access to this, then they might also have access to this,' and really thinking about [the] worst-case scenario of what could happen and safeguarding yourself against that."

- Evan Carroll, co-author of Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What's Your Legacy? (Voices That Matter)

In September 2009, Duncan Jefferies wrote “Preparing for the digital afterlife” for the Guardian. Unless you're an undertaker, chances are you spend as little time as possible thinking about death. Eventually, however, most of us get round to drawing up a will. Beneficiaries for houses, cars, stocks and shares must all be decided upon. But who gets your email account? Although people increasingly live their lives online, few bother to specify what should happen to their digital assets once they log off for good. But failure to plan for the digital afterlife can cause problems for those left to sort out the affairs of the deceased. Without a username and password family members can struggle to access valuable web domains, online accounts – even photographs and documents on a PC. "People aren't very aware of what you might call their living online legacy – potential employers looking at their Facebook accounts, for example. The issue of what happens to that information after their death is an extension of that," says Yorick Wilks, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

"It's our recommendation that you realize that anything of a financial matter should be executed according to your legal will as we like to call it — to provide a differentiation between your digital estate planning. That said, there are a lot of accounts that allow you to spend money and make money online that only exist online. I would recommend that you take steps and store those passwords so that your executor has access to them. Let's say, for instance, you may run an online business and may need to provide your business partner or spouse with that information."

- Evan Carroll, co-author of Your Digital Afterlife: When Facebook, Flickr and Twitter Are Your Estate, What's Your Legacy? (Voices That Matter)

Seth Mnookin: The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

The MMR vaccine controversy refers to claims that autism spectrum disorders are a direct result to having the MMR vaccine administered. MMR is an immunization against measles, mumps and rubella. Claims of a connection between the vaccine and autism surfaced in a 1998 paper, The Lancet, a respected British medical journal. Investigation by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer discovered that the lead author of the article, Andrew Wakefield, had multiple undeclared conflicts of interest, had manipulated evidence, and had broken other ethical guidelines and codes. The Lancet retracted the, and Wakefield was found guilty by the General Medical Council of serious professional misconduct in May 2010, and was struck off the Medical Register—meaning he could no longer practice as a doctor in the United Kingdom. In 2011, media circulated the news that the BMJ had declared the research about the MMR link to autism “fraudulent.”

"This type of cognitive relativism — or "truthiness," as fictional talk show host Stephen Colbert termed it — has become the defining intellectual trend of our time."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

"It gives credence to the belief that we can intuit our way through all of the various decisions we need to make in our lives and it validates the notion that our feelings are a more reliable barometer of reality than the facts."

- Seth Mnookin; April 2010, Larry King Live

"Looking at the diseases mumps, measles and rubella in a country like the US... it doesn't tend to be a problem. Children will do fine with these diseases in a developed country that has good nutrition. And because I live in a country where the norm is vaccine, I can delay my vaccines."

- Mother of a grade-schooler that was infected while on vacation in Europe

“By 2005 … a preoccupation with vaccine safety and an opposition to traditional institutions were viewed by an ever-growing number of ‘autism advocates’ as prerequisites for membership in their community.”

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

In January 2011, David M. Shribman wrote “Anatomy of a panic” for the Boston Globe. In the past decade Seth Mnookin has become a chronicler of some of the icons of American popular culture. He wrote a popular book, Feeding the Monster,on the ascent of the Red Sox, and a controversial book, Hard News, on the scandals of The New York Times. Now he is taking on another modern phenomenon, the movement against vaccinations. "The Panic Virus"is sure to attract attention — and the virulent criticism of one of contemporary life’s most ardent insurgencies, those who believe inoculations possess the power to injure. Specifically the Seth Mnookin book focuses on the scare triggered by a flawed 1998 scientific paper suggesting that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine could cause autism. […] In his book, Seth Mnookin traces the spread of the panic and the role of the media in it. A new parent himself, Mnookin admits a certain fear of vaccines — but an even greater fear that his child might encounter someone with measles or whooping cough before he gets all his shots. He understands the panic and passion of parents with sick children — but fears that waves of “self-righteous hysteria’’ have the power of overcoming “critical thinking.’’ […] The Seth Mnookin book is an unsparing brief against the vaccine skeptics. But in a larger sense, this volume is less about the insurrection against inoculations than it is about the democratization of information. It is less about the movement to battle the medical establishment than it is about the ability of social networks to mobilize for what Seth Mnookin and most mainstream scientists and doctors believe is a bad cause.

"That MMR paper is the best example there has ever been of a very, very dodgy paper that has created a lot of discomfort and misery."

- Dr Richard Smith, editor of the British Medical Journal, speaking about Dr. Andrew Wakefield's MMR-autism research

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"Anxiety about the individual's fate in industrialized societies [plays a role in motivating anti-vaccination crusaders]. Then, as now, they appealed to knee-jerk populism by conjuring up an imaginary elite with an insatiable hunger for control. [...] Then, as now, they preached the superiority of subjective beliefs over objective proofs, of knowledge acquired by personal experience rather than through scientific rigor."

- Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

January 2011: Dr. Michael Shermer, publisher of the Skeptic Magazine and author of the forthcoming book, The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies---How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, wrote “An Epidemic of Ignorance” for the Wall Street Journal. Seth Mnookin's "The Panic Virus" is a lesson on how fear hijacks reason and emotion trumps logic. But the story starts with a bit of bad science. On Feb. 26, 1998, the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet published a paper by a medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield who claimed that he had found a causal link between autism and the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine. Even though the journal's editors made it clear that further research was needed, at a press conference Dr. Wakefield announced: "With the debate over MMR that has started, I cannot support the continued use of the three vaccines given together." […] In a brilliant piece of reportage and science writing, Seth Mnookin explains precisely how medical researchers set about determining whether there is a causal connection in an apparent pattern. "Broadly speaking, there are three ways scientists collect data to test new theories," he explains. "The best possible method is through a randomized clinical trial, in which researchers take a sampling of a population and arbitrarily test their hypothesis on one half while leaving the other half untouched."

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From the website of the James Randi Educational Foundation, dated April 1, 2009: Jenny McCarthy is well known as a model and actor, but in recent days she's getting far more publicity for her stance that vaccines cause autism. She has a son who may be autistic, and of course we are sympathetic to her plight. But that can only go so far when Ms. McCarthy appears on endless chat shows, is interviewed in magazine articles, and even writes books encouraging people not to vaccinate their children. Numerous, well-done studies have shown conclusively that there is no causal link between vaccines and the onset of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) - the claim that they are connected is spurious, based on anecdotes and the fact that vaccines are given to children around the same time that ASD symptoms begin to appear. The antivaccination movement has been directly linked with outbreaks of various vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles, and there have been numerous illnesses and even deaths associated with these outbreaks. The facts are in, and have been for quite some time: vaccines are an overwhelming modern medical success story, having eradicated such scourges as smallpox, and hugely lowering rates of other diseases such as measles, mumps, rubella, polio, influenza, and diptheria. The evidence is also overwhelmingly against any link between vaccines and autism as well. Yet all that evidence has been overturned in the public's mind with ease and alacrity by Ms. McCarthy, so she wins the Pigasus award for her contribution to the country's ill-health.