Important Story Research Articles

Genes and cardiovascular risk

This editorial refers to ‘Influence of common genetic variation on blood lipid levels, cardiovascular risk, and coronary events in two British prospective cohort studies’[†][1], by S. Shah et al. , 972 and ‘Impact of common genetic variation on response to simvastatin therapy among 18 705 participants in the Heart Protection Study’[‡][2], by J.C. Hopewell et al. , on page 982 If DNA really is the ‘blueprint’ for life, how can genetic analysis fail to tell us what life has in store for us? One of two excellent articles in this journal shows us that the usual way to calculate risk of cardiovascular disease, such as ascertaining smoking habits and measuring blood pressure and cholesterol, is better than analyses for commonly occurring variations in DNA sequences. From the other article, we learn that a statin drug reduces risk of cardiovascular disease irrespective of whether patients have or do not have common DNA variants that are associated with the degree of the drug's lowering of LDL cholesterol. What the two articles do not tell us is why all of this is so, but that explanation has apparently been published elsewhere since the articles were accepted for publication.. It is a dramatic and profoundly important story for biology and clinical medicine. Sonia Shah and her colleagues in London used data and samples from a subset of the middle-aged men and women ( n = 5059) in the Whitehall II Study … [1]: #fn-2 [2]: #fn-3

Oor Mad History: A Community History of the Lothian Mental Health Service Users Movement

This is a book of many voices, all of them telling an important story – the history of ‘the Lothian mental health users movement’ from the vantage point of the ‘users’. The speakers and authors stand in an important tradition – one dedicated to emancipation. What makes this book so compelling is that survivors and allies involved have essentially turned traditional history on its head. In place of conventional history about psychiatry, which centres the psychiatrists, this was to be a history about survivors – in this case, the movement of the survivors, primarily told by survivors, and indeed, from the vantage point of survivors. It is part, moreover, of a larger project, and one which unites them with survivor groups throughout the world – the claiming of history. This claiming of voice is important for all disenfranchised communities, none more so than the mad, whose voices have traditionally been invalidated and silenced.

DAVID WELKY. The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937.

Thanks to John M. Barry's bestselling Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America (1997), a wide swath of readers are aware that racial and urban power politics intertwined with one of the most devastating floods in American history. But floods are a staple of the American experience, and the 1927 inundation is only one among many that has ravaged the nation's riparian landscape over the past two hundred years. David Welky believes that the 1937 flooding of the Ohio River Valley rivals in scale and destructiveness its more famous predecessor. With almost 400 dead and close to a million people displaced (for at least a short time) from their homes, the case he makes is a strong one. While the flood of 1927 may remain in the public's mind as the major flood of the early twentieth century (at root, New Orleans is simply a more interesting city than Louisville or Paducah), Welky tells an important story that any historian interested the Ohio River Valley or in New Deal domestic politics will value and appreciate.

Correlation of Local Effects of DNA Sequence and Position of β-Alanine Inserts with Polyamide–DNA Complex Binding Affinities and Kinetics

To improve our understanding of the effects of β-alanine (β) substitution and the number of heterocycles on DNA binding affinity and selectivity, we investigated the interactions of an eight-ring hairpin polyamide (PA) and two β derivatives as well as a six-heterocycle analogue with their cognate DNA sequence, 5'-TGGCTT-3'. Binding selectivity and the effects of β have been investigated with the cognate and five mutant DNAs. A set of powerful and complementary methods have been employed for both energetic and structural evaluations: UV melting, biosensor surface plasmon resonance, isothermal titration calorimetry, circular dichroism, and a DNA ligation ladder global structure assay. The reduced number of heterocycles in the six-ring PA weakens the binding affinity; however, the smaller PA aggregates significantly less than the larger PAs and allows us to obtain the binding thermodynamics. The PA-DNA binding enthalpy is large and negative with a large negative ΔC(p) and is the primary driving component of the Gibbs free energy. The complete SPR binding results clearly show that β substitutions can substantially weaken the binding affinity of hairpin PAs in a position-dependent manner. More importantly, the changes in the binding of PA to the mutant DNAs further confirm the position-dependent effects on the PA-DNA interaction affinity. Comparison of mutant DNA sequences also shows a different effect in recognition of T·A versus A·T base pairs. The effects of DNA mutations on binding of a single PA as well as the effects of the position of β substitution on binding tell a clear and very important story about sequence-dependent binding of PAs to DNA.

Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere (review)

Reviewed by: Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere Sara Castro-Klaren Keywords Panamericanism, U.S. Architecture, Hispanic, Latino, Subject Construction, Art and Design, Pan American Fairs Robert Alexander González. Designing Pan-America: U.S. Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere. Austin: U of Texas P, 2011. 288pp. In four richly illustrated and fascinating chapters, Robert Alexander González covers a century of architectural history in the United States. His inquiry tells the story of the development of a visual language capable of conveying the American idea of Pan-Americanism. One of the gifts this book makes to the reader is the inclusion of a plethora of maps, photographs, posters, postcards, stamps, lithographs, and etchings. The visual contents of the book are thus as inviting as the critical analysis. We are able to literally see the development of an iconographic syntax and grammar of a visual language. This century-long architectural development of a monumental language of Pan-Americanism has not been studied as part of either the visual arts in the United States or its architectural history—and herein lies the most important contribution made by this book. Perhaps the most salient aspect of the book’s originality is its own understanding of the intricate connection between the development of an architectural language of Pan-Americanism and the ideological underpinnings of the construction of a Western Hemisphere peacefully shared and inhabited by citizens of this harmonious realm in which the paternal figure of the United States plays the key role. This book explores the development of this monumental language by offering extensively documented critical histories of the most important early Pan-American fairs, the building of the Pan-American Union building in Washington, D.C., the construction of the Light House Monument to Columbus in the Dominican Republic in 1992, and Miami’s “Iterama’s Underwater Gateway to the Americas.” Although my credentials as a reader of a history of architecture in the United [End Page 239] States are limited, as an intellectual historian and literary critic of Latin American culture I can appreciate the careful archival research and illuminating set of questions that drive and sustain the overall design and objectives of this book. For a cultural historian, the last chapter, in which González considers the construction of the “Inter-American Subject” to be one of the chief effects of the architecture and language of Pan-Americanism, offers one of the most intriguing arguments. He links this construction to the constitution of the identity of “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in the United States. González’s analysis of the last two hemispheric fairs, in Miami and San Antonio respectively, shows that “with their clever names, Interama and HemisFair ’68, illustrate the extent to which a well– known concept in the United States entered into a new era of hemispheric consciousness in the 1960s” (194). González further suggests that the Pan-American concept evolved into two distinct interpretations in Miami and San Antonio, reflecting a complex cultural urbanity that was transforming each city as the fairs were being planned. This occurred as Latinos in each city negotiated their cultural identities and associations with respect to their homeland nations. It occurred with various degrees of intensity, determined by infrastructural connections, governmental policies and generational developments. (194) How the concept of a Pan-American geopolitical subject identity went from Bolívar’s conception (a liberating, anticolonial force that would keep Latin America safe from North American dominance) to becoming a tool for negotiating inter-American subject identities in the United States is one of the several important stories that this rich book offers its reader. The book’s narrative opens with a reference to the publication in 1888 of A Banana Plantation by William Elroy Curtis. This richly illustrated travel book introduced images in the American imagination of a tropical landscape that in time came to synecdochically stand for Latin America as a whole. The banana plantation that the white man visits and examines is a space of transformation where the newly emerging national republics are stereoscoped and stereotyped as “plantations, farms and mines to be exploited by the United States” (1). In the Curtis...

Racism against the abnormal? The twentieth century Gay Games, biopower and the emergence of homonational sport

This paper focuses on the first two decades (1982–1998) of the Gay Games, in which an important story unfolds about normalisation and how that contributes (paradoxically) to further racism and sexual oppression. Following McWhorter’s (2009) important analysis of Foucault’s ‘racism against the abnormal’, I suggest the Gay Games have worked hard to distance themselves from the ‘abnormal’ from their very inception. The paper discusses how the early Gay Games are a homonormative leisure formation seeking mainstream acceptance through such examples as: the development of a commodified and conventional sporting spectacle; the individualising and privatising impulses to the AIDS crisis; the granting of a US immigration waiver in 1994; and the consumption of exoticised and racialised bodies in 1998. Moving beyond the celebration of lesbian and gay affirmation, I argue that the push for normalisation at the games produces them as a biopolitical technology of whiteness, class privilege and racism. The paper concludes by suggesting that the homonormative discourses of the twentieth century Gay Games functioned as a condition of possibility for the twenty-first century Gay Games to be mobilised homonationally, that is, as a form of post-9/11 (homo)sexualised racism that semiotically contributes to sustaining a global ‘war on terror’ (Puar, 2007).

The Legacy of Extraction

The Legacy of Extraction

A quiet victory for Latino rights: FDR and the controversy over "whiteness"

In 1935 a federal court judge handed down a ruling that could have been disastrous for Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and all Latinos in the United However, in an unprecedented move, the Roosevelt administration wielded the power of to neutralize the decision and thereby dealt a severe blow to the nativist movement. A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights recounts this important but little-known story. To the dismay of some nativist groups, the Immigration Act of 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted annually, did not apply to immigrants from Latin America. In response to nativist legal maneuverings, the 1935 decision said that the act could be applied to Mexican immigrants. That decision, which ruled that the Mexican petitioners were not free white person[s], might have paved the road to segregation for all Latinos. The League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), founded in 1929, had worked to sensitize the Roosevelt administration to the tenuous position of Latinos in the United Advised by LULAC, the Mexican government, and the US State Department, the administration used its authority under administrative law to have all Mexican immigrants--and Mexican Americans--classified as white. It implemented the policy when the federal judiciary acquiesced to the New Deal, which in effect prevented further rulings. In recounting this story, complete with colorful characters and unlikely bedfellows, Patrick Lukens adds a significant chapter to the racial history of the United States.

Conspiracy of silence: sportswriters and the long campaign to desegregate baseball

The campaign to desegregate baseball was one of the most important civil rights stories of the 1930s and 1940s. But most of white America knew nothing about this story because mainstream newspapers said little about the color line and less about the efforts to end it. Even today, as far as most Americans know, the integration of baseball revolved around Branch Rickey's signing of Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers' organization in 1945. This book shows how Rickey's move, critical as it may well have been, came after more than a decade of work by black and left-leaning journalists to desegregate the game. Drawing on hundreds of newspaper articles and interviews with journalists, Chris Lamb reveals how differently black and white newspapers, and black and white America, viewed racial equality. He shows how white mainstream sportswriters perpetuated the color line by participating in what their black counterparts called a conspiracy of silence. Between 1933 and 1945, black newspapers and the Communist Daily Worker published hundreds of articles and editorials calling for an end to baseball's color line. The efforts of the alternative presses to end baseball's color line, chronicled for the first time in Conspiracy of Silence, constitute one of baseball's-and the civil rights movement's-great untold stories.

A Hunger Strike - The Ecology of a Protest: The Case of Bahraini Activist Abdulhad al-Khawaja

This article uses the case of a Bahraini activist to explore the twin interrelated ecologies of a hunger strike. The first ecology is the ethical framing of a prison hunger strike as a corporeal-environmental act of (self) destruction intended to achieve political ends. The second ecology is the operation of global media where international inaction inadvertently foregrounds the political struggles that larger events and discourses surrounding Egypt, Libya and Syria overshadow. What connects these two ecologies is the body of the hunger striker, turned into a spectacle and mediated via a politics of affect that invites a global public to empathize and so enter into his suffering. The connection between the two lies in the emaciated body of the hunger striker in this case, Abdulhadi al-Khawaja

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

Hindi, Hinglish: Head to Head

Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation (review)

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation Doug Slaymaker (bio) Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation. Edited by Roman Rosenbaum and Yasuko Claremont. Routledge, London, 2011. xiii, 251 pages. $140.00. Legacies of the Asia-Pacific War: The Yakeato Generation taps into the sense of high-stakes and scramble, and of the limited resources, possibilities, and confusion of the postwar years. The collection sets out to investigate the experience of “the yakeato generation.” It promises importance: [End Page 386] a focused interaction by a range of scholars on the generation that came of age in the burnt-out ruins after the Asia-Pacific War and their contributions to, and interactions with, wider areas of culture and art. As coeditor Roman Rosenbaum states in the introduction, The presence of members of what is known as the yakeato sedai or the generation of people who experienced the fire-bombings of the Asia Pacific War is conspicuous in all areas of contemporary Japan and is usually referred to as a distinct group. From literature to the visual arts, from music to theatre, from architecture to politics, their influence and in many cases guiding principles is evident everywhere and in many cases forms the keystone of modern Japanese society and culture. (p. 4) And continues: Upon close inspection, the pretermitted influence of this generation has been touched upon by many researchers, yet arguably never before has a single study connected all the strands of influence from this generation which transcend all aspects of post-war Japanese artistic production—from drama, theatre, movies, literature, poetry, women’s studies and manga. (p. 5) I provide this long quote to show both the broad ambition of the volume and its stylistic features. Rosenbaum’s introduction first solidly outlines issues and concerns of postwar society and then shows how the essays highlight the plights and contributions of the disenfranchised and underrepresented. The volume has a number of compelling essays. The lead article by Suzuki Sadami, translated by coeditor Rosenbaum, is strong in its details. Suzuki approaches the postwar era from three vantage points: “the continuity between the pre-war and post-war eras; how the defeat and the occupation were narrated; and how Japan’s fresh start has been narrated” (p. 25). Suzuki’s scholarly contributions are enormous, and he is a logical and welcome choice to introduce a volume on the postwar years. Suzuki draws from a wide range of secondary sources, leaning especially heavily on John Dower’s and Michael Molasky’s work in English. But a stronger editorial hand would have been welcome. For example, the first of these sections begins “First off, the problem of Class A war criminals will be considered,” leaving Suzuki sounding like one of our undergraduates. His discussion connects a wide group of politicians, intellectuals, and artists to outline how many of their concerns and strategies remained unchanged from pre- to postwar. The short third section reminds us of the canonical writers narrating the postwar moment. The result is a collection of interesting incidents that conforms to a style of Japanese critical discourse that most readers of this journal will well know; those readers will also know that Suzuki is usually much more cogent and concise. Among other essays deserving mention is Barbara Hartley’s chapter on Ariyoshi Sawako and Sono Ayako. As young women writing after the [End Page 387] war, they gained critical acclaim while remaining somewhat outside the main currents of literary production. Hartley offers nuanced readings of two important early stories that have not received the treatment they deserve.1 Sono remains a complicated figure, not least because of the increasingly conservative politics of her later years; by pairing Sono with Ariyoshi’s very different sort of narrative—a historical tale set prior to the Meiji Restoration—Hartley enriches the achievement of both, namely, that of young women writing about the changed relationships of women in society, and that society’s relationship with the West. Leith Morton’s considered essay on war and postwar poetry is a sophisticated discussion of “the poetics of war” and also deserving of note. Morton wades straight into the thorny problem of wartime poetry...

The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawai'iSydney LehuaIaukea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

The Queen and I: A Story of Dispossessions and Reconnections in Hawai'i Sydney Lehua Iaukea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. In The Queen and I, Sydney Iaukea is interested in linking two important stories, one ostensibly public and the other arguably private, but both necessarily hidden for various institutional and personal benefits. The first story explores contested dealings surrounding the attempts of Queen Lili'uokalani (the last reigning monarch of Hawai'i) to defend her power to bequeath royally-owned landholdings; both were laid claim to, by the U.S. government (that sought to rename these public), and by members of her own family (who were upset with their limited inheritance). The second story explores how this onehundred-year old tale dramatically affected Iaukea's family, starting with her great-great grandfather, Curtis P. Iaukea, who aided in the Queen's defense, and ending with Iaukea's nuclear family who have suffered materially due to their own relatives' concealment of family and profits. These stories are used to highlight how shifting sociopolitical structures and combative personal relationships sought to violate the longstanding, authentic, and native perspective on ka 'dina (the land-literally, 'that which feeds') (1) by inscribing a newer understanding based on the capitalistic acquisition of private property. In the end, the political and historical are personal and the personal is political and historical. Iaukea interweaves her stories through five chapters, beginning each with an extended portion of Curtis Iaukea's public (though unpublished) writings in which he recounts his role in establishing (and then defending) the Queen's deed of trust related to her landholdings. (These that had been designated Crown lands since the 1848 Mahele division of lands, which was designed to enable native Hawaiians to protect their from the large agricultural plantations then making their way into the islands.) The deed to the Queen's land was alternatively established, challenged, revoked, and rewritten many times between 1909 and a final settlement in 1918, aptly demonstrating that Curtis Iaukea, the Queen, and other royal and territorial government members' understood the [new] land laws [imposed by U.S. control] and used them to control their own property assets (140) to the best of their abilities. The fact that the Queen, her descendants, and her loyal supporters lost control of most of this land, particularly to the U. …

Book Review: Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture by Mark Feldstein

Poisoning Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture. Mark Feldstein. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 462 pp. $30 hbk.This book richly deserved AEJMC's 2011 Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award for 2010's best book on journalism and mass communication based on original research published. It is a modern Greek tragedy, forces of evil and goodness battling each other to death, with evil ultimately winning. It's a page-turner, reading more like a novel than carefully researched work of history that it is.(Full disclosure: Feldstein is now a professor at University of Maryland, but as a professor emeritus there myself, I have not met him. I should also note that as a young journalist in Washington, I regarded Jack and Drew Pearson as heroes-the only real investigative reporters in town; later did guest lecturing in my classes. I was also a victim of an abusive investigation by Nixon FBI. So I'm not exactly objective about two main characters in this book.)That said, as I was reading, it seemed to me that Feldstein was too even handed in dealing with (once a near saint in my estimation) and Nixon (the devil incarnate). But by end of book, poisoning of press in title makes sense.Nixon did approve a plot to assassinate (and poison was weapon of choice), and he would have loved to eliminate investigative journalists altogether. Feldstein makes it clear that Anderson's last twenty years were bizarre, and he became poisoned with money. But I don't think it was who poisoned press, and, in account of Mott award, stoked the toxic sensationalism that contaminates contemporary media discourse. By mid-1980s, was no longer influential in journalism circles (where he was often mocked), and did not inspire media's growing obsession with profits.But in 1960s and early 1970s, landed one great scoop after another, beating large newspapers at their game. In 1972, he won Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for his expose of Nixon administration's tilt toward Pakistan. He also did groundbreaking reporting on Watergate break-in and burglary, though he was upstaged by Woodward and Bernstein, who got glory and Pulitzer.While Anderson's reporting often led way on important stories in sixties and seventies, he was cramped by his format. More than a thousand newspapers carried his Washington Merry-Go-Round at its peak, but column was limited to 750 words, and he was unable to give his work in-depth and extensive coverage available in large news hole of Post, New York Times, and other newspapers.His critics complained constantly about ethics of his news gathering. He didn't hesitate to pay sources for crucial information. He encouraged whistle-blowers to break law to provide him with classified documents. The so-called Anderson Papers, based on a large cache of classified material leaked to him by a fellow Mormon and Navy yeoman who had typed many of documents, exposing Pakistan affair, were in some quarters considered as important as Pentagon Papers. …

Growing Up the Future: Children's Stories and Aboriginal Ecology

Growing Up the Future: Children's Stories and Aboriginal Ecology

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later

Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Second Edition with an Update a Decade Later. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, 480 pp. $US 24.95 paper (978-0-520-27142-5) The second edition of Annette Lareau's award-winning Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life was released in 2011, adding more than 100 pages of new material. At its heart, the second edition tells two stories--one empirical, and the other a cautionary tale of qualitative methods. In the first edition of Unequal Childhoods, Lareau demonstrated that working-class and poor families enacted the Accomplishment of Natural Growth. Their children participated in few, if any organized leisure activities, and had extensive interactions with kin. Parents used directives in speaking to children, and saw a clear boundary between the activities of adults and children. Regardless of race, working-class and poor parents did not tend to intervene with institutions on their children's behalf. In contrast, middle-class parents supported Concerted Cultivation, developing children's talents through organized leisure activities and lessons, eliciting children's thoughts, and actively intervening in institutional settings. Lareau began her data collection for Unequal Childhoods in 1989, intensively observing twelve families between 1993 and 1995. The passage of time takes nothing away from this new edition, nor does it mitigate the impact or resonance of its findings. The book's lasting contribution is Lareau's conclusion that the childrearing patterns persist over time. Unlike in the 1990s, when she interviewed schoolteachers and other relevant adults, Lareau was unable to triangulate her family interviews with other data, and did not complement her interviews with intensive visits, naturalistic observations, nor interviews with employers, college professors, or others. For the second edition, she conducted 2-hour interviews with each of the 12 young adults (6 white, 5 African-American, 1 biracial), and usually interviewed at least one parent and a sibling. The follow-up interviews with the twelve original children tell the most important story of the second edition: how their lives unfolded from the age of nine or ten. Lareau offers a detailed qualitative panel study of sorts, documenting life trajectories of the twelve children--now aged 19-21--and the larger patterns their stories illuminate. Lareau questioned whether the class-based differences in childrearing she witnessed when the children were younger persisted into adulthood. The answer is a resounding yes. Some of these youth struggled--academically and otherwise--to graduate from high school, as four of the eight working-class and poor students dropped out. Others, with talent and determination to attend college, were not able to make the transition. Working-class and poor parents desperately wanted their children to attend college, but lacked the resources, connections, and know-how to effectively help their children with the labyrinthine American college application process. Despite their and their parents' hopes for college attendance, only one of the eight working class or poor youth persisted as a college student. Six are living with family members and working full-time in a variety of jobs, with one working-class girl married and a full-time homemaker. Three out of the four middle-class children studied graduated from high school, and are attending Ivy League colleges. The remaining student, Melanie Handlon, whose academic struggles were chronicled in the first edition of Unequal Childhoods ultimately abandoned community college for cosmetology school, leaving her parents disappointed, and her mother wishing she had intervened more in Melanie's schooling. The second edition of Unequal Childhoods is a testament to the lasting effect of parents' intervention in institutional settings. Middle-class parents took it upon themselves to actively manage and monitor their children's transition from high school to college. …

Immigration and Belonging Nation, Class, and Membership in New Migration Policies

We are pleased to present this collection of essays. They tie together some of the most important overlaps between immigration studies and Asian American Studies, and they present collectively a compelling portrait of how Asian American communities have continued to change as a result of on-going migration trends. These essays remind us that new Asian migrants have enlarged and complicated the very definition of the term, “Asian American,” and they tell important stories about how class, immigration status, and settlement patterns have altered the communities and regions that have been so central to Asian American Studies scholars. In addition, the essays in this volume indicate the growing importance of Asian American topics and approaches within several academic disciplines and fields, including labor economics, qualitative sociology, studies of migration and acculturation, and discourses of globalization. These authors have a great deal to say about how skilled people in general can move across the wor...

“You Can’t Trust Wolves No More Nor Women”: Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

“You Can’t Trust Wolves No More Nor Women”:Canines, Women, and Deceptive Docility in Bram Stoker’s Dracula Keridiana Chez (bio) Although they may pass as little more than a comic aside in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the novel’s fictional news clippings about a wolf’s escape from the London Zoo tell an important story about a very bad wolf that has tricked its masters into believing it is a very good dog. While the zookeeper declares that “you can’t trust wolves no more nor women” (126), the Bilders foolishly “receiv[e] and pe[t Bersicker] like a sort of vulpine prodigal son” (129), fawning over the “nice well-behaved wolf” (126) with “most tender solicitude” (129). The skeptical reporter expresses surprise that “neither Bilder nor his wife thought any more of the wolf than I should of a dog” (128)—a wolf that has, after all, spent his night of freedom terrorizing London and aiding the vampire Dracula in his attacks on Lucy Westenra. Both beloved pet and dangerous threat, Bersicker embodies an argument against the mismanagement of a deceptively docile household member. Returning to the quiet comforts of the domestic space, Bersicker appears, notes the reporter, “as peaceful and well-behaved as that father of all picture-wolves—Red Riding Hood’s quondam friend” (129). While many of his contemporaries embraced dogkeeping and humaneness towards animals,1 Stoker crafted a novel that represents dogs and wolves as agents of Dracula, susceptible to his “rabid”—that is, unreasonable or fanatical—control. In turn, the discourse and management of rabies linked petted canines and petted women; their supposed innate susceptibility to rabidity represents both anxieties regarding intimacy and how such intimacy threatens gender and species hierarchy. Studies of Dracula have emphasized the desire to eradicate whatever evil Dracula and vampirism can be said to represent (variously identified as New Women or reverse colonization, for example). Understanding the discourse of rabies management and its relation to the novel allows us more fully to reconstruct the perceived risk to the late-Victorian family suggested by Dracula—not so much the risks of dalliances with prostitutes, but the risky affects that are supposed to inhere in marriage: love, esteem, and adoration.2 Dracula, in fact, functions as a handling manual for untrustworthy canines and women, illustrating the dangers posed by prized domesticates. This [End Page 77] reading of Dracula moves beyond etymology and symptomology to investigate how Dracula not only fomented but also managed these anxieties, effectively teaching the English how to live with the quotidian terror of domestic intimacy at the heart of their hearths. In effect, Dracula functions as a pedagogical tool to teach, through the vehicle of terror, how to love one’s wife (or pet dog, or other similarly positioned household dependent). The logic applied to dogkeeping resonated discursively with wife management, producing husbands comfortable with the paradox of feeling positive attachment—love—for that which might need to be destroyed, euthanized, at a moment’s notice.3 Rabies discourse evinces this paradoxical love for a dispensable object—what I call “paranoid love”—that mediated Englishmen’s relationships with their wives as well as interspecies relationships. In “becoming with,” in Donna J. Haraway’s words (19), humans and their canine companions have participated in a reciprocal “co-constitution” (27, 63) that, as I will show, has been defined by love and terror. Lover-killers, killer-lovers: these are the paranoid lovers produced by the discursive logic of Dracula. Rabid Dogs, Rabid Women We are hardly pressed for choice when it comes to locating a real-life referent for Dracula’s disease: critics have read it as cholera (McNally and Florescu 137), syphilis (May), degeneration (Spencer, Pick), onanism (Mighall, D. Mason, Sellers), and, more lately, tuberculosis (Byrne). While many of these choices seem well-grounded, the consensus within the medical field is, according to Juan Goméz-Alonso and Jean Theodorides, that rabies offers the most likely origin for the myths of vampirism (856; 114). According to Victorian encyclopedias, the vampire was well known to appear in the form of a dog, among other forms (“Vampire,” Chambers’s; “Vampire,” New International), and the vampire bat was...

Behind the Statistics: The Ethnography of Suicide in Palestine

As part of the first anthropological study on suicide in the modern Arab world, statistics gathered from the Ramallah region of the West Bank in Palestine painted an apparently remarkably similar picture to that found in Western countries such as the UK and France. More men than women completed suicide, more women than men attempted suicide. Men used more violent methods such as hanging and women softer methods such as medication overdose. Completed suicide was higher in the older age range, attempted suicide in the younger. However, ethnographic fieldwork and detailed examination of the case studies and suicide narratives gathered and analysed within the cultural, political and economic contexts illustrated more starkly the differences in suicidal practices between Palestinian West Bank society of the 1990s and other regions of the world. The central argument of the paper is that although statistics tell a very important story, ethnography uncovers a multitude of stories 'behind the statistics', and thus helps us to make sense of both cultural context and subjective experience.

Dense subgraph maintenance under streaming edge weight updates for real-time story identification

Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of social media. People around the globe author, every day, millions of blog posts, micro-blog posts, social network status updates, etc. This rich stream of information can be used to identify, on an ongoing basis, emerging stories, and events that capture popular attention. Stories can be identified via groups of tightly-coupled real-world entities, namely the people, locations, products, etc., that are involved in the story. The sheer scale, and rapid evolution of the data involved necessitate highly efficient techniques for identifying important stories at every point of time. The main challenge in real-time story identification is the maintenance of dense subgraphs (corresponding to groups of tightly-coupled entities) under streaming edge weight updates (resulting from a stream of user-generated content). This is the first work to study the efficient maintenance of dense subgraphs under such streaming edge weight updates. For a wide range of definitions of density, we derive theoretical results regarding the magnitude of change that a single edge weight update can cause. Based on these, we propose a novel algorithm, DynDens, which outperforms adaptations of existing techniques to this setting, and yields meaningful results. Our approach is validated by a thorough experimental evaluation on large-scale real and synthetic datasets.