Sarah Zhang

Teju Cole on the "Empathy Gap" and Tweeting Drone Strikes

"Mother died today. The program saves American lives."

| Wed Mar. 6, 2013 4:00 AM PST

"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist's." Thus begins a series of tweets from the writer Teju Cole, each one a famous novel's opening line rudely interrupted by drones. He calls them "drone short stories."

Discursive, allusive, and always thought-provoking, @tejucole stands out in a Twitterverse crowded by hashtags and throwaway jokes. The Nigerian American writer published his debut novel, Open City, to great acclaim in 2011, but Cole may be best known (online, at least) for his Small Fates tweets about Lagos. Small Fates is inspired by the French journalistic tradition of fait divers, roughly equivalent to "news briefs." Perfunctory accounts of crime from Nigerian newspapers are transformed with a literary, humanizing twist: "Love is so restless. When T. Dafe's girlfriend dumped him in Surulere, he went at her with a pen knife until she was no more."

His drone vignettes also breathe empathy into anonymous killings that happen far away. And Cole, also an occasional Twitter essayist, previously posted a a series of tweets linking drones, Downton Abbey, the IMF, and Virgin America. It's easy to ignore drone strikes quietly happening halfway across the world; it's harder to ignore them when they invade our familiar cultural turf.

Seven short stories about drones.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013

1. Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist's.

2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

3. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

4. I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

6. Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

7. Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

Intrigued by all of the above, I telephoned Cole to ask him what it means to be a writer in the 140-character era.

Mother Jones: What was the inspiration for your drone stories?

Teju Cole: I had been thinking so intensely so much about the global war on terror, especially the heavy silence that has surrounded the use of drones to assassinate people outside this country. I just realized that we're facing here is an empathy gap. And this was just another way to generate conversation about something that nobody wanted to look at. The weird way that things come together is that when I wrote those drone tweets, the subject was not on the front page of papers. Two, three weeks later, it's on the front page of the New York Times and everybody is talking in a very direct way because the release of this white paper.

[Read the full article]

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Why Calorie Labels Are Wrong

Studies suggest that calorie counts are inaccurate, especially for raw and unprocessed foods.

—By Sarah Zhang

| Mon Feb. 25, 2013 4:12 AM PST

Rob Byron/Shutterstock

To understand the modern calorie counting system, we have to go back to the late 19th century *, when Wilbur Atwater sat in his Connecticut lab and burned a bunch of food. Then he weighed some human feces and urine. The burning told him the amount of energy in the food; the human waste told him the amount excreted. Subtract the two, and the Atwater system was born: four calories per gram of protein, nine for fat, four for sugars. Check out the label on a supermarket salad in 2013, and the caloric value you see is largely based off of Atwater—even though scientists are increasingly suspicious the number is wrong.

Debate over the science of calories comes at the same time that health-conscious legislators are requiring restaurants to show calorie counts on their menus. Following the lead of New York City and California, Obamacare has a provision to make calorie labeling mandatory at chain restaurants across the country. For that to make a difference to our health, however, we have to understand what a calorie really means. At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science last week, a panel of scientists presented research that is just beginning to tease out the nuances of the calorie. Whether food is cooked, the energy it takes to break down tough-to-digest foods, and gut bacteria activity all affect how much energy humans actually get from eating.

[Read the full article]

Your Longreads Guide to Guns

—By Sarah Zhang

| Fri Feb. 15, 2013 4:01 AM PST

Saulius L/Shutterstock

"I know this is not the first time this country has debated how to reduce gun violence," President Obama said in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. "But this time is different." In light of the national debate set off by the massacre in Newtown, here are six stories about guns that will take you from the annals of the NRA to the Vietnam war to the US-Mexico border.

For more MoJo staffers' long-form favorites, visit our longreads.com page. Take a look at some of our own reporters' longreads here and follow @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter for the latest. And for additional in-depth reporting on gun laws and mass shootings in America, check out Mother Jones' yearlong investigation.

"The NRA vs. America" | Tim Dickinson | Rolling Stone | January 2013

While the National Rifle Association claims to represent more than 4 million "marksmen, hunters, and responsible gun owners," recent polls show its politics are out of whack with those of most Americans, gun owners included. Some observers believe that the NRA and its lightning rod of a front man, Wayne LaPierre, essentially acts as a lobbying outfit for the powerful firearms industry.

In more than three decades of service to the NRA, Wayne LaPierre has done more than any other man alive to make America safe for crazed gunmen to build warlike arsenals and unleash terror on innocents at movie theaters and elementary schools. In the 1980s, he helped craft legislation to roll back gun control passed in the wake of the Kennedy and King assassinations. And since the late 1990s, twice he has destroyed political deals that might have made it hugely difficult for accused killers like Holmes and Lanza to get their hands on their weapons.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Make Way for Princess, Maya Rudolph's Prince Tribute Band

—By Zaineb Mohammed and Sarah Zhang

| Mon Feb. 11, 2013 4:02 AM PST

Maya Rudolph and Gretchen Lieberum performing as their Prince cover band Princess on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

The enigmatic artist formerly and currently known as Prince is almost too easy to parody. Saturday Night Live played the joke for years in a recurring sketch that paired a whispering and mysteriously teleporting Prince with Maya Rudolph's divalicious Beyoncé. (Remember the 2004 Grammys?) But last Saturday night, Rudolph and Prince reunited on stage in San Francisco—well, sort of. The Artist himself wasn't present, but Rudolph and musician Gretchen Lieberum paid spirited tribute to him with their cover band, Princess.

If you've seen Rudolph as Beyoncé—or J. Lo or Whitney Houston or any other diva she's impersonated—you'll know there's no question the woman can sing. And she's mad funny. But Princess isn't playing just for laughs; it's an honest-to-god tribute to a musician Rudolph and Lieberum have adored for years. The pair hatched the idea for Princess in college, but the band didn't made its TV debut until last September, when they played Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

"I'm wearing my sensible shoes!" Rudolph announced at the beginning of Saturday's show. That was a good decision, because Princess proceeded to kick and writhe through classics from the funky "Controversy" to the sensual "Darling Nikki" (including the backwards vocals). They closed out the night, of course, with a much-demanded encore of "Purple Rain." Rudolph and Lieberum adopted Prince's lusty dance moves and sported glittery patches on their right shoulders as homage to Prince's costume in his most famous album.

Rudolph honed her impersonation chops at SNL, but Princess isn't about spoofing Prince's mannerisms. (Leave that to Fred Armisen.) Like all tribute bands from Hayseed Dixie to Mandonna, Princess walks the line between being the inherently ridiculous conceit of mooching off someone else's fame and earnestly paying tribute to the original music. Rudolph and Lieberum manage that balance, but the performance itself was less funny than the simple idea of two women covering Prince.

Girls talking dirty—think Sarah Silverman or Lizzy Caplan—is a trope of the post-feminist, post-Apatow comedy world. So when a band whose name invokes Disney and the color pink sings about a sex fiend "in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine," they're on to something. "There's a comedic element to it, of course, it's two women singing these raunchy songs and it's definitely funny," Lieberum told NPR. "But our love of the music is not funny, it's very dead serious."

Princess' take on Prince's music is, no surprise, pretty darn good. A particularly enthusiastic couple nearly torpedoed us off the dance floor in Yoshi's, a music club attached to a fancy Japanese restaurant that has surely seen quieter nights.

Princess was appearing as part of SF Sketchfest, an annual two-week comedy festival now in its twelfth year. From humble origins—the original festival featured six homegrown acts—Sketchfest has becomea gathering of comedy's glitteriest stars. It now encompasses events from live tapings of popular podcasts to cast reunions of dearly departed TV shows like Starz' Party Down. Are we having fun yet? We'd say so.

Can Antibiotics Cure Hunger?

A pair of new studies offers further evidence that the bugs in our gut may play a crucial role in our overall health.

—By Sarah Zhang

| Mon Feb. 4, 2013 4:06 AM PST

A malnourished child with kwashiorkor. Lyle Conrad/Wikimedia Commons

In the early 2000s, malnutrition got a squishy new peanut-flavored enemy. Kids fed a calorie-rich paste of peanuts, sugar, milk, and the whole alphabet of vitamins and minerals recovered at rates nearly twice that for previous treatments. However, some 15 percent of the severely malnourished children still didn't recover on the ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), puzzling and frustrating doctors. A pair of studies in Malawi recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine and Science suggest a clue: bacteria living in the kids' guts.

The first study, led by peanut-based food therapy pioneer Mark Manary, found that antibiotics plus RUTF cut mortality among severely malnourished children by 36 to 44 percent compared to RUTF alone. The WHO is now planning to recommend wider antibiotic use for malnutrition, which kills a million kids each year.

"We were completely shocked," says the study's first author Indi Trehan. The researchers initially thought their study would prove cutting antibiotics saves money. The antibiotics were a holdover from the old milk-based malnutrition therapy that required kids to spend weeks in the hospital, which left them susceptible to hospital-acquired infections. RUTF, on the other hand, comes in packets easily distributed at home and should have eliminated that problem.

Why antibiotics helped these kids is still unknown. Trehan says it may ease chronic infections in these malnourished and immunodeficient kids. In addition, the intestinal linings of malnourished children break down, so bacteria normally harmless in the gut enter the bloodstream and cause trouble. Antibiotics could help those infections.

A mother feeding her kids peanut-based RUTF in Malawi. Indi Trehan

A second study in Science suggests that imbalance in the gut microbiome causes kwashiorkor, an extreme form of malnutrition characterized by swelling. Identical twins could eat the same diet, the authors puzzled, but only one would have the bloated belly associated with kwashiorkor. So they looked at 13 discordant twin pairs in Malawi and found their gut microbes were markedly different. RUTF helped in the short term, but the kids with kwashiorkor reverted to abnormal microbiota at the end of treatment. And over time, the microbiota of kids with kwashiorkor didn't mature like their twins'—a finding that suggests kwashiorkor is a permanent condition.

Back in St. Louis, Washington University professor Jeffrey Gordon transplanted the Malawi twins' gut bacteria into sterile mice, a technique he's used before to study links between the gut microbiome and obesity (PDF). These mice were then fed either a protein-poor Malawian diet or regular chow. Only the mice with both kwashiorkor microbiota and Malawian diets lost significant weight. This suggests that RUTF longer than the normal nine weeks may help correct the bacterial imbalance. An additional set of experiments looking at metabolites in mice urine and feces found that kwashiorkor microbiota messes with proper nutrient absorption.

This study solves some of the mystery of kwashiorkor and points toward a possible cure. "If you think of the microbiota as an organ, then repair requires microbes that can fill different 'professions,'" says Gordon. Thus, in addition to longer RUTF, treatment could directly target the bacteria, either in the form of probiotics to replace a missing microbe or a fecal transplant that repopulates the entire community.

In light of what we know about the opposite problem, obesity, it makes perfect sense that antibiotics and the gut microbiome play a role in starvation. Obese mice (and humans) have altered microbial communities compared to their normal counterparts. And antibiotics in early childhood has been linked to higher body mass.

The antibiotics study may also echo the process that of fattening up animals with regular doses of antibiotics (which my colleague Tom Philpott wrote about here), but Trehan cautions lumping against them together in one biological mechanism. The kids are given only one dose of antibiotics, rather than continual doses over a whole lifetime. This also mitigates the problem of resistance, as the antibiotics are selectively doled out to malnourished kids rather than everyone in a particular town. "I spend half my time telling people to stop taking antibiotics as a pediatric fellow [in the US]," says Trehan, but "in an underfunded healthcare system, access to antibiotics is pretty rare."

Trehan's comment highlights the obvious gulf between healthcare in Malawi and St. Louis. The microbiome is one of the hottest areas in biomedicine right now, but research about its disease implications has focused on decidedly First World problems like obesity, high blood pressure, and autoimmune disorders. An age-old and seemingly simple problem like malnourishment can benefit from cutting-edge science, too.