While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various metabolic and hormonal changes while it’s losing weight, the Australian team detected something new. A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.“What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”
Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.
Whenever I think of Pinter, I think of this story: He had for many years given generous financial support to the Comedy Theatre in London — so much so that he began to pressure them to change their name to The Harold Pinter Theatre. This they were reluctant to do, but he kept pressuring them, and they began to wonder whether he would withdraw his support. Finally Tom Stoppard, who was observing the whole thing, wrote to Pinter: “Dear Harold, Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?”
But Pinter (or perhaps his heirs) didn’t see the appropriateness of the joke — so it now appears.
I happen to think copyright does induce creation and that creators and consumers as classes would worse off without it. And I think returning creative works to the commons in, say, 20 or 30 years also induces creation and that creators and consumers both are made worse off by longer copyright terms. That’s just a guess, but presumably there’s some vague fact of the matter about optimal terms for various types of creative work. Whatever that is, that’s what we’re entitled to. Extending terms past the optimum, locking down more than a lifetime flow of monopoly rents for a few at the expense of the many, doesn’t strike me as like theft. It’s a straightforward plundering of humankind’s common cultural inheritance.
Proponents of ever stronger and longer copyrights, supported by ever more draconian enforcement mechanisms, like to throw around terms like “piracy” and “theft” for the emotional reactions they provoke. This is not, as Matt Yglesias notes, an aid to clear thinking: Copyright infringement and theft are both illegal—along with jaywalking, murder, and speeding—but they’re otherwise quite different acts, which are quite properly treated very differently as a matter of law, and prioritized differently as a matter of enforcement practice. The most obvious reason the analogy fails is that “theft” centrally involves depriving the owner of the thing that’s stolen. Copying a CD or DVD for a friend—or letting them borrow your copy, for that matter—may occasionally displace a legitimate purchase, but it doesn’t leave the artist or rightsholder with any fewer copies than they had before. That’s not to say copyright infringement isn’t also problematic, or something the government needn’t worry about deterring. Copyright maximalists insist on “theft” instead of “copyright infringement,” however, mostly because they don’t want people thinking too hard about the myriad ways these offenses are different, and how they might therefore call for different policy responses.
It’s a safe bet that in the history of state funerals, no former president has been sent off to the Absolute Horizon by not one but at least three different live, nationally televised rock songs about heroin. Such was Václav Havel’s genre-straddling life and thoroughgoing conception of freedom that it seemed as natural as tartar sauce on fried cheese to bookend a portentous, Dvořák-haunted National Requiem Mass in Central Europe’s oldest Gothic cathedral with a loose-limbed, hash-scented rock and roll celebration at the Czech Republic’s most storied music venue, all while the non-VIPs on the streets of Prague (and their counterparts outside the capital) lent the most dignity of all to the three-day National Mourning by creating ad-hoc candlelit shrines in whatever patches of cobblestone reminded them of the man who made them most proud to be Czechs.
For students who are not talented with words and numbers but who are talented with mentally rotating figures and shapes in their minds, there is often very little offered to recognize and challenge them in the regular school system. We tend to value people who can write, read, do math, and talk. But if a student can’t do these things so well, we don’t recognize how brilliant some of them actually are.Consider the SAT and ACT, the critical college entrance exams. Neither of them includes a spatial measure. Some of my research with my colleagues David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow on the importance of spatial ability for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields demonstrates that as a society we have neglected spatially-talented students who are not as good with words and numbers. We miss a large number of them when selecting talented students using typical standardized tests because these tests do not include a measure of spatial ability.
In Madrid, a freeway turned into a park
Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does well to nurture a modest, unguarded sense of comedy. Some droll sensibility is required to keep in due proportion the pompous pretensions of the study of divinity. I invite the kind of laughter that wells up not from cynicism about reflection on God but from the ironic contradictions accompanying such reflection. Theology is intrinsically funny. This comes from glimpsing the incongruity of humans thinking about God. I have often laughed at myself as these sentences went through their tortuous stages of formation. I invite you to look for the comic dimension of divinity that stalks every page. It is not blasphemy to grasp the human contradiction for what it is. The most enjoyable of all subjects has to be God, because God is the source of all joy.
I called it!
I think one of the odder locutions currently in use is this: “I call bullshit.” “I’m calling bullshit on that.” Aren’t you really just saying, “I disagree” or “I think you’re wrong”? But people act like they’re taking disagreement to some higher level of meaning and truth when they “call bullshit.”
I think this is rooted in the habits of childhood: “I got dibs,” and especially “calling shotgun.” You can’t sit there, I called it! — as though “calling it” establishes some kind of ontological priority, some unbreakable connection between you and the thing you want. Likewise, if you just say “I disagree” it’s an invitation to debate, but if you “call bullshit” the conversation is over. “Why are you talking back to me, man? Don’t you realize that I called bullshit?”
Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the incarnation. From the time Christ came, the ancient slavery is ended, the devil is confounded, demons take to flight, the power of death is broken, paradise is unlocked, the curse is taken away, sin is removed from us, error driven out. Truth has been brought back. The speech of kindliness is diffused. A heavenly way of life has been implanted on the earth.