For half a century, meat producers have fed antibiotics to farm animals to increase their growth and stave off infections. Now scientists have discovered that those drugs are sprouting up in unexpected places: Vegetables such as corn, potatoes and lettuce absorb antibiotics when grown in soil fertilized with livestock manure, according to tests conducted at the University of Minnesota.

Today, close to 70 percent of all antibiotics and related drugs used in the United States are routinely fed to cattle, pigs and poultry, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists. Although this practice sustains a growing demand for meat, it also generates public health fears associated with the expanding presence of antibiotics in the food chain.

People have long been exposed to antibiotics in meat and milk. Now, the new research shows that they also may be ingesting them from vegetables, perhaps even ones grown on organic farms.

From the archive:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

This return to the preantibiotic era has become a reality in many parts of the world.

... Sarah Palin, the incarnation of red-meat, know-nothing Christian nationalism ...

Even a buffalo separated from the herd has reasonable chances.

Just as surely as the SUV will yield to the hybrid, the half-pound-a-day meat era will end.

Worried about Antibiotics in Your Beef?

In the social economy, relationships are the new currency.

From the archive:

Psychologists found that lovers frequently thought their partner should know what they want without the two of them having to talk.

I genuinely think I have learned more from my mistakes than I learned from my successes. It's absolutely critical that when working on any project you develop relationships with the people so you can hear what it is that they're really thinking.

People allow low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.

Innovations are double-edged swords that transform relationships among people, as well as between human societies and the natural world. Only through successful cultural appropriation can we manage to control the hubris that is fundamental to the innovative, enterprising human spirit.

For Paulo Coelho, digital is about relationships. Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate.

I will, at all costs, avoid this generic procedure.

The Conversation Prism

SIR – Thank you for not “starring out” Rod Blagojevich’s expletives when reporting his alleged exploits to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat (“The Chicago way”, December 13th). Apart from taking pleasure in being treated as a grown-up (many other newspapers deleted the swearing), I was struck by how much more powerfully the Illinois governor’s seedy, cynical greed was communicated when the obscenities were printed in full. F***ing good decision.

See also, from last week, William Safire:

Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations.

Star reporting on Rod Blagojevich | The Economist

A world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.

A new book, praised by John Seely Brown, DJ Spooky, Yochai Benkler, and others:

... thoroughly delightful ... penetrating ... masterful ... weaves a rich tapestry ... wonderful detail ...

Naturally the book is freely available for download. (It's also on sale in hardcover.)

From the archive:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Also:

History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.

Viral Spiral

Sherry Turkle published a new book last Halloween.

I have a closet full of ancient Apples and Macintoshes — even a Lisa — and I dare not throw one away.

Why?

From the Publishers Weekly review:

Providing a number of perspectives on how everyday technology "inhabits the inner life and becomes charged with personal meaning," this collection from author, editor and MIT professor Turkle reconsiders "sanctioned ways of understanding" average devices.

Edward Valauskas, editor at First Monday, offers a review:

This book will force you to think about your relationships with technology, and to more carefully watch those around you and their uses of different devices.

Indeed, it will make you think about the machines around you in a profound way; how do these things really make you feel?

From the archive:

Kids are certainly enthralled. "I know tons of people who are addicted."

The Inner History of Devices

Bernardo Huberman:

Scholars, advertisers and political activists see massive online social networks as a representation of social interactions that can be used to study the propagation of ideas, social bond dynamics and viral marketing, among others. But the linked structures of social networks do not reveal actual interactions among people. Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention. A study of social interactions within Twitter reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

Recently, Decius predicted:

Something interesting is about to happen here.

Today, we learned:

Twitter said Monday that 33 member accounts were hijacked, including those of President-elect Barack Obama, singer Britney Spears and CNN correspondent Rick Sanchez.

On Monday, fake updates were made to several accounts, including obscene references to body parts and mentions of illicit drug use.

From 2006:

As far as Los Angeles County Sheriff's Lt. Rocky Costa is concerned, "MySpace has absolutely exploded, and the only real way to protect ourselves -- besides filtering and firewalls -- is to always tell yourself, `I am not gonna give out authentic information.'"

From 2001:

antrophagus: It’s only a few days until March 9

cator99: Still, I would have rather met you yesterday and felt your teeth

antrophagus: One can’t have everything. There’s still some time before you really feel my teeth

In 2002, Huberman wrote:

The power distance index of a culture has been shown to be correlated with the importance and acceptance of status symbols in that culture.

Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope

William Safire:

Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations.

The need for today’s review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the F.B.I. as its shocked — shocked! — agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as “----ing” or with asterisks as “****ing” and was substituted in broadcasts, telecasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep. The Wall Street Journal went almost all the way, using both the first letter and three dashes in the participle before “golden,” the word it modified.

From the archive:

The New York Times said Cheney had used "an obscenity" against Patrick Leahy. The Los Angeles Times had Cheney saying "Go ... yourself." CNN said Cheney used "the F-word."

But The Washington Post printed the word yesterday for the first time since publishing the Kenneth Starr report in 1998. And that set the town buzzing.

"Readers need to judge for themselves what the word is because we don't play games at The Washington Post and use dashes."

For the judges:

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

See also:

Mr. Leahy then suggested that the president of the Senate take his gavel and use it to perform an act that, while not technically impossible in anatomical terms, would certainly be considered both unseemly and unhygienic, and which would require an unusual combination of single-minded ambition and physical relaxation.

Finally:

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation.

Bleeping Expletives

As we all know, lax writing practices earlier this decade led to irresponsible writing and irresponsible reading. This simply put too many families into books they could not finish. We are seeing the impact on readers and neighborhoods, with five million Americans now behind on their reading. Some are just walking away from novels they should never have been reading in the first place.

These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions.

From the archive, Christopher Hitchens:

Anyone who has ever tried to digest The Da Vinci Code, for example, or the Left Behind series, will know that bad writing, aimed at a subliterate audience, is actually much more difficult to read than anything by Borges or Kundera. But a certain populism, perhaps, inhibits critics from saying so.

Also:

Paulo Coelho certainly has nothing against selling books. He has sold an astounding 100m copies of his novels. But he also believes in giving them away. He is a pirate.

A bit of Jacques Barzun:

“You are a sky-high highbrow,” Barzun wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go braless, I go about brow-less.” Undeterred, I offered to rewrite the passages in question. My changes were acknowledged with fitting tribute. “To put it in a nice, friendly, unprejudiced way,” he responded, “your aim as shown in your rewritings of the ‘objectionable’ sentences strikes me as patronizing, smarmy, emetic!” My heart swells when I contemplate that exclamation point, as he seldom resorts to one.

A Modest Proposal for the Publishing Industry

Longer periods away from home always make me think about time and our experience of it.

Time is the stuff of music: music manipulates our experience of time; it plays with the rhythm of experience; it stretches and complicates our relationship to the passing of time. If the world of physics is a space-time continuum, music is a pitch-time continuum.

Here is Daniel Barenboim:

"Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness."

Recently, Rory Stewart:

Without music, time has a very different quality.

Freeman Dyson:

It's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Timing is Everything

Hundreds of the inmates in the Prince George's County jail are repeat offenders, recidivists who have done time and been released only to find themselves back in trouble with the law years, months, weeks or even days later.

Then there's Sean Hawkins.

On Dec. 14, the Temple Hills resident was charged with assault. Hawkins was taken to the jail in Upper Marlboro, where he appeared before a court commissioner and was released on personal recognizance.

Hawkins then walked out of the jail and, according to police, carjacked a Toyota 4Runner in the parking lot. Arrested in Suitland a short time later, Hawkins told police that he carjacked the vehicle "because he needed a ride home from jail," according to charging documents.

He has been ordered held without bond in the carjacking. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Jan. 12.

From a year ago:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. Some confess it sheepishly, and some announce it proudly. For some it is just a practical matter of fact, the equivalent of not keeping a horse on West 87th Street or Avenue A. Still, I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

From the archive:

Igbal Asghar reached across the counter at Super Halal Meat market and passed two butchered chickens to the man with the familiar face. Then he ducked into the walk-in freezer to fetch the customer's second order, goat meat.

When the butcher stepped out seconds later, the customer's severed left hand lay on the floor by the meat saw. The customer ran down the Springfield store's center aisle and into the front parking lot, leaving a trail of blood and yelling repeatedly that he was "not a terrorist." Outside, the man announced that he had used the meat saw to cut off his hand "for Allah."

Out of Frying Pan And Into Fire