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Basics: In Hollywood Hives, the Males Rule
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
In his new animated film, Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson, a wisecracking, moony-eyed, charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t want to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know, Dad, the more I think about it,” Barry says, “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father, a proud, lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of, what, making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”
Swell comeback, Pop, but your son has a point, starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well, male honeybees don’t have stingers, for the simple anatomical reason that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor, the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.
Barry is absolutely right, however, to doubt his fitness for the honey trade. In the real world, every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen, fanning nectar into honey, fawning over the queen, squirting out wax, battling off bears, tossing out the trash and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile, yes, with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be, but female nonetheless.
By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society, Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too? Besides, there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling, poignant and cartoonish enough.
( Read More )
Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.
The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.
The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.
Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.
But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.
( Read More )
Essay: Old Story, Updated: Better Living Through Pills
By KEITH WAILOO, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
Athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs. Growing concern about a reliance on pills for relief from pain, stress and anxiety. Medical leaders alarmed about drug fads, calling on doctors to exercise restraint when prescribing.
Headlines from 2007? Try 1957. Today, the drugs are OxyContin, steroids and Ritalin. Fifty years ago, they were tranquilizers, sedatives and amphetamines: America was a Cold War nation in need of both pep and relief.
And while the context is different today (we have a larger and more complex array of drugs), the underlying issues are unchanged: Americans, athletes as well as nonathletes, grappled then as now with the proper role of drugs in their lives.
( Read More )
Redesigning a Condom So Women Will Use It
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 13, 2007
The female condom has never caught on in the United States. But in the third world, where it was introduced in the late 1990s, public health workers hoped it would overthrow the politics of the bedroom, empower women and stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks.
It did not. Female condoms never really caught on there, either.
Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms. Couples complained that the female version was awkward, unsightly, noisy and slippery — or, as Mitchell Warren, who was one of its earliest champions, now says, “the yuck factor was a problem.” Many women tried it, but in the end, it was adopted mainly by prostitutes.
Now scientists are trying again. A new design — much the same at one end, different at the other — has been developed, and its makers hope it will succeed where its predecessor failed.
( Read More )
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
In his new animated film, Jerry Seinfeld plays Barry B. Benson, a wisecracking, moony-eyed, charmingly petulant New York honeybee who doesn’t want to spend his days as a worker bee stuck on the honeymaking assembly line. “You know, Dad, the more I think about it,” Barry says, “maybe the honey field just isn’t right for me.” To which his father, a proud, lifelong “honey stirrer,” snaps: “And you were thinking of, what, making balloon animals? That’s a bad job for a guy with a stinger!”
Swell comeback, Pop, but your son has a point, starting with the posterior one he shouldn’t have in the first place. Isn’t Barry supposed to be a he bee? Well, male honeybees don’t have stingers, for the simple anatomical reason that a bee’s stinger is a modified version of an ovipositor, the distinctly feminine organ through which a female insect lays her eggs.
Barry is absolutely right, however, to doubt his fitness for the honey trade. In the real world, every job on a beehive’s spreadsheet — foraging for nectar and pollen, fanning nectar into honey, fawning over the queen, squirting out wax, battling off bears, tossing out the trash and dead bees — is performed by a cast of workers that is homogeneously female. Sterile, yes, with stingers where their egg-laying tubes should be, but female nonetheless.
By bowdlerizing the basic complexion of a great insect society, Mr. Seinfeld’s “Bee Movie” follows in the well-pheromoned path of Woody Allen as a whiny worker ant in “Antz” and Dave Foley playing a klutzy forager ant in “A Bug’s Life.” Maybe it’s silly to fault cartoons for biological inaccuracies when the insects are already talking like Chris Rock and wearing Phyllis Diller hats. But isn’t it bad enough that in Hollywood’s animated family fare about rats, clownfish, penguins, lions, hyenas and other relatively large animals, the overwhelming majority of characters are male, despite nature’s preferred sex ratio of roughly 50-50? Must even obligately female creatures like worker bees and soldier ants be given sex change surgery, too? Besides, there’s no need to go with the faux: the life of an authentic male social insect is thrilling, poignant and cartoonish enough.
( Read More )
Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.
The left says global warming is a real-time crisis requiring swift curbs on smokestack and tailpipe gases that trap heat, and that big oil, big coal and antiregulatory conservatives are trashing the planet.
The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant, and argues that liberals’ thirst for top-down regulations will drive American wealth to developing countries and turn off the fossil-fueled engine powering the economy.
Some books mirror the divide, like the recent “Field Notes from a Catastrophe,” built on a trio of articles in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert, and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming” by Chris Horner, a lawyer for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Ms. Kolbert sounds a strong warning call, and Mr. Horner’s book fits with the position of the institute, a libertarian and largely industry-backed group that strongly opposes limits on greenhouse gases.
But in three other recent books, there seems to be a bit of a warming trend between the two camps. Instead of bashing old foes, the authors, all influential voices in the climate debate with roots on the left or the right, tend to chide their own political brethren and urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy.
( Read More )
Essay: Old Story, Updated: Better Living Through Pills
By KEITH WAILOO, The New York Times, November 13, 2007
Athletes taking performance-enhancing drugs. Growing concern about a reliance on pills for relief from pain, stress and anxiety. Medical leaders alarmed about drug fads, calling on doctors to exercise restraint when prescribing.
Headlines from 2007? Try 1957. Today, the drugs are OxyContin, steroids and Ritalin. Fifty years ago, they were tranquilizers, sedatives and amphetamines: America was a Cold War nation in need of both pep and relief.
And while the context is different today (we have a larger and more complex array of drugs), the underlying issues are unchanged: Americans, athletes as well as nonathletes, grappled then as now with the proper role of drugs in their lives.
( Read More )
Redesigning a Condom So Women Will Use It
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, November 13, 2007
The female condom has never caught on in the United States. But in the third world, where it was introduced in the late 1990s, public health workers hoped it would overthrow the politics of the bedroom, empower women and stop the AIDS epidemic in its tracks.
It did not. Female condoms never really caught on there, either.
Only about 12 million female condoms are delivered each year in poor countries, compared with about 6 billion male condoms. Couples complained that the female version was awkward, unsightly, noisy and slippery — or, as Mitchell Warren, who was one of its earliest champions, now says, “the yuck factor was a problem.” Many women tried it, but in the end, it was adopted mainly by prostitutes.
Now scientists are trying again. A new design — much the same at one end, different at the other — has been developed, and its makers hope it will succeed where its predecessor failed.
( Read More )
