"It’s easier to believe that objects of human skin are made by monsters like Nazis and serial killers, not the well-respected doctors the likes of whom parents want their children to become someday."

Says Megan Rosenbloom, author of "DARK ARCHIVES/A Librarian’s Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin," quoted in "Yes, Books Were Bound in Human Skin. An Intrepid Librarian Finds the Proof" by James Hamblin (NYT).

In fact, anthropodermic bibliopegy was not the practice of some singularly heinous regime.... Human skin leather looks indistinguishable from that of other mammals, and only recent developments in DNA sequencing technology have made it possible to tell a skin-bound book from a forgery. The making and selling of such books was pursued at many times and in many places, including late-19th-century America. John Stockton Hough, a Philadelphia physician, is known to have bound three textbooks about reproduction in the skin of Mary Lynch, a local woman who died at 28 in 1869 of tuberculosis and a parasitic infection. During an autopsy, Hough removed and preserved skin from her thighs, and then bound his books with it — presumably as a form of homage....

Rosenbloom [details]... the techniques of tanning, soaking and scraping the “hides” to preserve them. At times her descriptions seem gratuitously to indulge the same morbid fascination that has long drawn people to these objects....

Cremated remains are manufactured into all sorts of keepsakes: paperweights, gazing balls, blown-glass "art," jewelry. Is that more acceptable because it's processed into glass and retains none of the feeling of a human body?

What if a dying person wanted her skin used to make a keepsake book? My hypothetical requires the future dead body to want to be used to make a book — what book would you want to be if you wanted to be a book? — and someone who wanted to receive such a book. Presumably, the cost would be high, so deduct that from your inheritance before you say, sure, I'd love a copy of "12 Rules for Life/An Antidote to Chaos" bound in the skin of my late father. 

"Anyone complaining about it being too hot in the bedroom is not just being 'a whining loser.'"

"People who sleep in hot environments have been found to have elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol the next morning.... A study of people with a sleep disorder found that they slept longer in temperatures of 61 degrees Fahrenheit versus 75 degrees. The cold-sleepers were also more alert the next morning. The basic physiology is that your body undergoes several changes at night to ease you into sleep: Your core and brain temperatures decrease, and both blood sugar and heart rate drop. Keeping a bedroom hot essentially fights against this process. Insomnia has even been linked to a basic malfunctioning of the body’s heat-regulation cycles—meaning some cases could be a disorder of body temperature.... There is no universally accepted temperature that is the correct one, but... I will say this: 60 degrees is the correct temperature for winter sleep. Anything warmer is incorrect. If 60 degrees is simply intolerable, physically or existentially, the National Sleep Foundation recommends sleeping in socks or putting a hot water bottle at your feet. Or maybe wear a warm hat...."

From the inaptly titled "Your Bedroom Is Too Hot" — by James Hamblin in The Atlantic. If 60° is "the correct temperature for winter sleep," then our bedroom is too cold. We let the temperature drop down to 50° (and keep a window open if it's above 30°). 60° is too hot. Anyway, even if you stick to 60°, there's still the problem of summertime. Hamblin nails down 60° as "the correct temperature for winter sleep." Why isn't it also "correct" in summer? The answer has nothing to do with health and individual wellbeing. It's just morally wrong to use what he calls "a vicious amount of air conditioning."

"Pressure from the platforms at least has people thinking, This is something I shouldn’t be posting."

"A change in desire to post about a high-status product has consequences. The value of a status symbol plummets when people decide to reconsider how they ascribe status. Maybe it takes a journey on a stationary bike to realize the spiritual gangster was inside you all along."

The last few sentences of "People Actually Quit SoulCycle/Most boycotts fail. Why does this one seem to be working?" by James Hamblin. The answer to that question seems to be that where you were doing the thing to show off, it's rather easy to stop when it doesn't work for showing off.

But is "spiritual gangster" a term I'm supposed to know? (It reminds me of "the gangster of love.")

I see, at the beginning of the article, that someone is wearing a shirt with the words "spiritual gangster." Ah, I've figured it out: Spiritual Gangster is a clothing brand and it's one of the brands that you can buy at the SoulCycle shop. At the Soul Gangster website, the name of the brand is explained with these words (in all caps which I am to lazy to retype to spare you annoyance):

SPIRITUAL GANGSTER IS A MOVEMENT DESIGNED TO JOIN ANCIENT WISDOM WITH MODERN CULTURE.

INSPIRED BY YOGIS, ATHLETES, ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS WORLDWIDE, WE CREATE COLLECTIONS TO ENCOURAGE THE HIGH VIBRATION PRACTICES OF LIVING IN GRATITUDE, GIVING BACK, AND CHOOSING KINDNESS. OUR MISSION IS TO INSPIRE POSITIVITY, GENEROSITY, KINDNESS AND CONNECTEDNESS WITH THIS GOAL IN MIND : MAY ALL BEINGS EVERYWHERE BE HAPPY AND FREE....

WE ARE CONNECTED. WE ARE THE SAME. WE ARE ONE.

Okay, but stop yelling.

And now I'm stuck researching the term "high vibration." Yes, it's a term of art and it's not sex-toy-related. Here you can amuse yourself by trying to determine if you have the problem of "low vibration"?

Do you have "no real direction" and "repress lots of toxic feeling" and "feel like you don’t really care what happens to you" and "spend much of your time complaining about things" and "have an argumentative conversation style"? Or do you "feel like you live in the present moment... grateful for the resources, people and experiences you have in life" and "find yourself laughing at multiple points every day"?

And here's "How to Become the Best Version of Yourself by Raising Your Vibration/8 things you can do to raise your vibration and live your best life." You know what you can do? "Stop complaining." "Have fun." Etc. And here are "21 Tips for Keeping a High Vibration – How to Keep Your Vibrations High."

Raising your vibration, and aligning with your full light and authenticity is how you open to a new level of abundance, clarity, certainty, and self-love. This is how you not only align with fulfillment, joy, love, and harmony in your life, but this is how you step into your role as a way-shower for humanity. This is how you step into your role, ushering in the positive change and the return to greater love, light, and balance on earth.

I was going to research "way-shower." Let's just say I stopped when I saw there were 568,000,000 results. I think I'll take my energy elsewhere.

"Someone attempted to move Christian away from the girls he was verbally harassing with a slight push or shove."

"'Touch me again, or I'm going to kill you,' Macy heard Christian respond. Namkai-Meche was holding up his phone, Macy said. She wasn't sure if Namkai-Meche was trying to show Christian something on the phone or was recording the interaction. Suddenly, Christian hit the phone away and stabbed Namkai-Meche in the neck, she said. 'It was just a swift, hard hit,' she said. 'It was a nightmare.'"

A witness, Rachel May, describes what she saw on the MAX Green Line train in Portland.

It made me think of what James Hamblin wrote in The Atlantic, in response to the Gianforte/Jacobs "body-slamming" incident: "

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary. That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision...."

Hamblin was praising Jacobs for not reacting to a shove with violence. The ground for the praise was that it's so hard to override the bodily urge to hit back. As Rachel May tells it, Jeremy Christian — who'd been using words (very offensive words) — received a "slight push or shove" and managed to restrict himself to words (a dire warning, "Touch me again, or I'm going to kill you"). He was working on the difficult override of what Hamblin called "the surge of adrenal hormones" that makes physical retaliation "feel possible and necessary." And what came next, the trigger Christian didn't override, was the phone in the face, presumably Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche's effort to get the paranoid/racist's awful behavior on video to show the world.

Also at the link, May's touching story of helping and praying for Namkai-Meche as he died of Christian's attack. She gave him the shirt of her back, literally. Namkai-Meche's last words to her were: "Tell everyone on this train I love them."

"The visceral instinct to physically attack a person who has just attacked you is strong; the surge of adrenal hormones makes it feel possible and necessary."

"That circuitry is increasingly vestigial, but overriding it and playing the longer game requires an active decision," writes James Hamblin — in "How a Man Takes a Body Slam/In an assault in Montana, two very different ideas of masculinity" (The Atlantic) — praising the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs for his "judicious, prescient reaction" to the body-slamming he seems to have received from Greg Gianforte.

Hamblin likes the idea of "redefining strength" by accepting, in the moment, that one has been "physically overpowered" and not getting caught up in "the idea of masculinity as an amalgam of dominance and violence." Instead, Jacobs, speaking "as if narrating for the audio recorder," said “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses." He also "started asking for names of witnesses to the assault who will be assets to his case as it plays out in courts of law and public opinion," and reported the incident to the police.

Of course, Jacobs's choices were not merely a matter of overcoming physical impulses and meritoriously eschewing violence. I don't know how much of an impulse to retaliate on the spot he may have felt. I don't really know how violently he was hit. I don't even know if he did something first toward Gianforte and Gianforte was doing the old tit for tat retaliation. But narrating the audio, dropping it on line, going to the police, and taking names for litigation purposes is also a form of dominance. Some people would even call it violence. Why, here's an article in The Atlantic from just last June: "Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent/A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify."

You know, if somehow I were given the choice between getting body slammed and getting charged with a crime and the question were How hard would the body slam need to be before you'd prefer to get charged with a crime?, I'd say pretty damned hard. And I'm just a little old lady. I'd rather be body-slammed than get sued in tort. If you body-slammed me, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't hit you back.* But I'll tell you one thing: If you sue me, I will defend to the hilt, and —  where ethically appropriate — there will be counterclaims.

___________________

* And I have been body-slammed, at rock concerts, when I was trying to stand out of the range of a mosh pit and some young man came flying out obliviously. And sometimes it was intentional, an effort to provoke non-moshers to listen to the music the properly physical way. But I didn't call the cops or take names or file lawsuits.

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH says:

A "body-slam" is lifting someone completely of the ground and then driving their body to the ground.

It's not the same as "slam-dancing" on the periphery of a mosh pit, where one person slams his body into someone else's.

Wait. Let's get some shared understanding here. Does anybody think Jacobs intended to refer to the professional wrestling move? Here's a careful, precise demonstration of what that is:

"It's True, Hot Baths Burn Calories."

But: "calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading."

"When I packed my suitcase, it was as if I were doing the bidding of the money I’d paid."

Writes Jonathan Franzen, describing his feeling as he got ready for a cruise to Antarctica on a luxury ship that he'd chosen to make his girlfriend — who wasn't going after all — comfortable.

I love the whole story — in The New Yorker — but that sentence jumped out at me as the one to blog because it so quickly and precisely expresses a classic anti-travel feeling. And it goes beyond travel. Perhaps it would help in many situations as you are about to spend money to buy an experience — "Buy Experiences, Not Things" — to contemplate whether that experience, as it approaches, is going to feel as if you are doing the bidding of the money you paid.

Mark Bittman shows James Hamblin how to cook spaghetti squash.

Comment at The Atlantic: "Oh James, I could so teach you to cook. And I love the look of bewilderment on Mark's face when James eats the raw spinach of the box."

"You need to put the technology away, we're going outside. You're going to look at some trees."

Repurposing disease as art: Photographing dermatographia.

So you have skin that swells up when even lightly scratched, so that it's possible to make a drawing on yourself, a drawing made of welts. Interesting medium... and I'm sorry you have an ailment... but draw something interesting.

"The idea that gluten and carbohydrates are at the root of Alzheimer's disease, anxiety, depression, and ADHD has now reached millions of people."

"It is the basis of a number-one bestseller written by a respected physician. What is it worth?" asks James Hamblin in The Atlantic.

Even as someone who was seriously skeptical of [David] Perlmutter’s story, after reading his 336 pages — and watching his whole YouTube channel and most every TV appearance — I have found myself hesitating around grain. His message is so ardently and unwaveringly delivered. That is how one-sided pop-science works. Katz wrote a tongue-in-cheek case that the 1974 advent of the Post-it note was the cause of the obesity pandemic, to show how easily correlations can be spun. If I read 336 pages on the evils of Post-its, I might set our office supply room on fire....

When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof should be enormous....

"The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being: So wrong?"

"Surrogacy involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient."

In March, the French National Ethics Committee decided that sexual surrogacy was an "unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes."Anne-Marie Dickelé of the National Ethics Committee justified it to Rousselle: "The sexuality of the disabled cannot be considered a right."

But some French people like Laetitia Rebord, who is confined to a wheelchair due to spinal muscular atrophy, are campaigning passionately against the committee's decision. She's 31, a virgin, and wants to have sex -- "In her sexual fantasies, she is a fit and impetuous blonde who dominates her male partners." As she told Rousselle, "Eventually, one has to address the issue and understand why we are demanding this. I can't move. I can't masturbate."...

As the world increasingly sees health care to be a human right -- Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama understand health care to be "not some earned privilege, it is a right'' -- it might seem a leap to not only fail to address sexuality in caring for people with conditions like Rousselle's, but to go the additional step of precluding them from procuring it for themselves. Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany agree.

How can you have a right to something that would require another human being to do something with his/her body, when the other human being has a right over his/her body? I suppose you could frame it as a right against criminalizing the activities of sex service providers who restrict their business to the disabled. This reminds me of medical marijuana as a leading edge in the movement to legalize marijuana. It seems like a steppingstone to the legalization of prostitution for anyone who wants to buy it, because who will count as disabled enough for the authorization to buy what is criminalized for everyone else?