When the next administration takes office, reconstruction of the Food and Drug Administration should receive high priority and generous resources. That we’ve dodged a pharmaceutical catastrophe from neglect of this indispensable guardian of safe medicine is merely good luck. Fresh evidence of the FDA’s decline comes in a new report, FDA’s Oversight of the Promotion of Drugs for Off-Label Uses, by the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s investigative agency.

“Off-label uses” is the descriptive term for one of the many slippery tactics employed by Big Pharma for evading FDA scrutiny while seemingly abiding by FDA’s strict, but poorly enforced, regulations for drug safety and efficacy. When a drug passes FDA’s muster, it is approved only for treatment of a specified condition, and for no other use. Look at the...

I did a foolish thing last weekend. I performed a Google search on my new book — just to see if there were any references to it online that I hadn’t already seen. (Of course, I realize that the Web can be merciless on the thin-skinned, but most authors can sometimes be gluttons for such surefire cyberpunishment, pretending that the one gem they might unearth could ever outweigh the playa-hating hordes.)

I found quite a few references to the book, mostly in fairly obscure/specialty venues, the bulk of them positive. But I was blown away by one interesting dismissal of the work, a dismissal seemingly tethered (in the first instance) to my academic background as a cultural anthropologist. My training as an anthropologist was the first strike against me.

Why are people sometimes so dismissive of anthropology?

In the era of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, anthropologists were public in...

Partly because of my age, and partly because I am an historian who believes in human agency, I am an avid reader of New York Times obituaries. While it seems to me that jazz musicians are overrepresented lately (even though I am a jazz aficionado), several times a week there are fascinating memorial biographies. I wrote recently about the Polish scholar-statesman, Bronislaw Geremek, who died in the Times (well, people also get married in the Times, don’t they?). Last week the paper carried a couple of long and fascinating obits, a study in contrasts.

The first was of the medical geneticist Victor McKusick. McKusick was one of the earliest to establish a medical genetics clinic (in 1957), only a few years after the Crick-Watson discovery of the ...

(Crossposted at Campaign U.)

One of the stories this campaign season has been the youth vote, and the main story line comes down to this: Obama gives them inspiration. Type “youth vote inspired Obama” into Google and more than 600,000 hits come up.

If the youth vote does jump from its showing in 2004 (a significant increase from 2000), we should applaud 18-to-24-year-olds for their civic growth, and if Obama motivates them to cast their ballots in record numbers, he counts as more than a politician. He’s a leader.

We should pause, however, over the source of the increase in youth civic engagement. It sounds all to the good, and parents and teachers should advance the project of youth voter participation. But inspiration does have a down side, too, one that mentors should discuss with the young, for while it may ensure larger participation, it isn’t the best motivation for...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 1 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago, a portrait of an emerging union drive at a private institution. Graduate employee unionization in the U.S. is more advanced at public institutions, and organizing at private schools stalled for a while in the aftermath of the Bush mob’s hijack of the NLRB, but there is a resurgence of militancy among grad employees at private institutions.

Part 2: Ballad of the Dissertators Part 3: Pushback Part 4: Unions and Academic Democracy

I’ve restarted the video series in connection with the summer conferences of contingent faculty and graduate employees in the U.S. and Canada. The next installments will feature an interview with leaders of the graduate employee union at NYU and with faculty serving contingently: Melanie Hubbard, a ...

cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com

Part 2 of 4 in my extended interview with activists from Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago. They sing “Ballad of the Marooned Dissertation Writers,” by radical folklorist Joe Grim Feinberg. Graduate employee unionization in the U.S. is more advanced at public institutions, and organizing at private schools stalled for a while in the aftermath of the Bush mob’s hijack of the NLRB, but there is a resurgence of militancy among grad employees at private institutions.

Part 1: Why Graduate Students Unionize Part 3: Pushback Part 4: Unions and Academic Democracy

I’ve restarted the video series in connection with the summer conferences of contingent faculty and graduate employees in the U.S. and Canada. The next installments will feature an interview with leaders of the graduate employee union at NYU and with faculty...

(Crossposted at Campaign U.)

These are halcyon days for Barack Obama, right? A successful trip to Europe and the Middle East. A steady 5-point lead in the polls. An opponent who can’t seem to get his campaign in gear.

Having spent the morning crunching — that is, adding, dividing, listing, typing, and checking — a wearying array of political numbers, I’m not so sure.

My purpose was to find out what I could learn by compiling a list of all the states ranked according to how much support they gave to the Democratic presidential nominees in 2000 and 2004. Scroll down a few clicks, poke around the data to see what catches your eye (isn’t it amazing, for instance, that Vermont, one of only two states that Alf Landon carried against FDR in 1936, is now the Democrats’ fifth best state?), then scroll back up and see if you agree with the two observations that follow.

1. A good number...

What wakes you up in the middle of the night, not in fear, but in the threshing buzz of low-grade panic?

Dread of being alone?undefinedOf getting older?undefinedOf illness? Of death?undefinedOf being unable to help alleviate the sadness of those close to you?

What’s your demon?

I have a friend, a woman I consider one of the blessings in my life, who is facing a whole bunch of those nightmares right now. Her nightmares are sitting there at the kitchen table with her. Maybe you know her; maybe you ARE her. Many of us have been where she is, in the dark night of the soul, at some point — but when you are inside the tumble and hiss of the bad time, it is almost impossible to imagine rescue or survival.

But we, more or less, survive.undefinedEither the worst happens or it doesn’t. We brush up against the savage edge of loss and cut ourselves, counting ourselves lucky to have be...

Ah, here we go again. In an article written by Motoko Rich in today’s New York Times, there’s yet another summary of what, and how, the nation’s young people are reading, and the surrounding debate about what it all means for the future of reading.

Once more: Young people no longer read books for fun. The little reading they do, outside of school, takes place on the Internet. And because kids are spending more time than ever on the Internet, they rarely get to read a sustained narrative. Instead, they read as if they are leapfrogs, jumping willy-nilly from Web site to Web site. Since they no longer read books — especially long ones — they never learn the skills we oldsters developed of crawling along in turtle-like fashion, following a sustained and steady narrative determined by an unseen author....

At the University of California-Irvine library is an interesting collection of manuscripts, letters, and writings entitled the Critical Theory Archive. It holds the papers of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Stanley Fish, Murray Krieger, and a few other leading literary theorists of the mid-century. I was there today and came across a letter dated 13 Jan 1960 that began, “I feel I must say a word for Paul de Man, if only for the record. Probably it is wise for him to accept the Cornell offer, especially if there is no prospect of an ultimate permanency here.”

The writer was Reuben Brower, legendary teacher of close reading at Harvard, head of Humanities 6. The recipients were Renato Poggioli and Harry Levin, two other famed figures on campus. De Man was a teacher at Harvard without tenure, even though he was 40 years old, and a position at Cornell had come through providing some...