A Matrix

Kurt Vonnegut

The night before St Valentine’s Day 1945, Allied bombers flattened Dresden, once the capital of Saxony, where two centuries earlier Augustus the Strong’s porcelain menagerie had hooted and honked in his exquisitely inept impression of a Japanese palace on the Elbe, but where little of great importance was going on now.

The raid had no obvious strategic goals beyond the infliction of human and cultural hurt – when the Germans did similar things, it showed up on the indictment sheet at Nuremberg. Only one person benefited, he would later say with a rueful grin: Private First Class Kurt Vonnegut, interned in Dresden at the time. His novel about the raid, Slaughterhouse 5 (even the title was a gift from the Nazis, who could have locked their prisoners of war up just as easily in a tram depot as a slaughterhouse), didn’t appear until nearly a quarter of a century after the raid; but when it did, it transformed Vonnegut’s life, and did a fair job of transforming the war novel.

By then, Vonnegut was already an established author, if by no means a prosperous one. Having left his native Indiana when he took up arms, after the war he lived out a mildly picaresque early adulthood (public relations, a short-lived Saab dealership) in New England and upstate New York, and started submitting short stories to magazines. A spell back in the Midwest teaching creative writing at Iowa University ignited lifelong friendships, and allowed his beliefs about his craft to coalesce (“Do not bubble. Do not spin your wheels. Choose words I know,” he advised his students, signing himself “Polonius”); but it put his first marriage under fatal strain.

Most of Vonnegut’s early writing is – despite his protestations about “genre-ism” – fairly easy to ghettoise as science fiction, though he is manifestly a “hard” SF writer (space ships, tentacles) who would like to be a “soft” one, exploring the Philip K Dick stuff about memory and identity. One of his richest themes – very notably in Slaughterhouse 5, which contains elements of SF, as well as memoir, realism and several other notes – is the conceit that we’re all somehow adrift, rogue cosmonauts in our own lives, an idea that is by no means confined to genre fiction (it is present in Proust, though clad there in white tie rather than a space suit).

Slaughterhouse 5 chimed with the anxieties of a new, young readership: refuseniks and psychonauts, clinging on to the rim of sanity – or probing new alternatives to it – as America inexorably upended itself into Vietnam. Vonnegut, who was no hippie, held strong liberal and pacifist views (the arrival of George W Bush and America’s post-9/11 contortions would provide him with a creative filip in the last years of his life, after a middle age spent largely working as a “cultural bureaucrat” for organisations such as PEN International, the charity that promotes literature and freedom of expression).

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His books were sometimes incinerated by conservative educationists, his letters to whom are small masterpieces of patient rage and constitutional vigilance. In the Seventies, he moved to New York City, but kept a place on Long Island. His children were a source of worry and pride. In the Nineties he opposed the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche, a ruined Baroque masterpiece in Dresden. His second marriage to Jill Krementz, a photographer who had been assigned to take pictures of him, ended untidily.

The writ of this collection of letters runs from about 1950 until 2007, the year of Vonnegut’s death. It is not exactly packed with revelations. We don’t write to those we see every day; anthologies such as these are documents of absence, plaster casts of empty rooms – involuted autobiographies. It’s only when Kurt, teaching in Iowa, steps up his correspondence with Jane, his first wife, that we sense their relationship is amiss – sure enough, he soon notifies a friend that “something telepathic has busted between us”. (The student he had an affair with there is the recipient of just one letter, about 25 years later.)

After parting company with Jane, he sends what is essentially the same letter several times over to their daughter Nanette, exonerating her and, less forcefully, himself. A bout of depression that led to an overdose on the 39th anniversary of the Dresden raids – and the eighth anniversary of the date foreseen by Slaughterhouse 5’s Billy Pilgrim as the day of his own death – is only briefly alluded to: “Now I’m an outpatient, allowed to carry matches again. Can you imagine someone living in Manhattan and having a psychiatrist called Ralph O’Connell?”

There isn’t really a huge amount of literary gossip, either. Although Vonnegut had many friends in the business, he clearly saw himself as something of an outsider (“We’re all space travellers”). His particular background – his ancestors had fled Germany in 1848, and made some fairly notable contributions to the cultural and political life of Indianapolis thereafter – left him with no time for Wasps (“T.S Eliot. F--- him. Everybody knows he’s from St Louis – everybody but him.”)

As for the Jewish writers he superficially resembles – well, we shouldn’t attach too much weight to that crack about Ralph O’Connell. But here too his background was an issue. He grips the wheel a little too tightly as he makes some apologetic comments on Céline in these pages; he insists on a kind of humanist perspective on the Holocaust which, it appears, won him some enemies – as, perhaps, did his belief that a shared heritage of migration gave him common cause with Jews in America. In its use of a homely vernacular to pursue high truths and parse deep problems, the voice in these letters can sometimes seem like that of a Bellow or Roth character; yet the symphonic achievement of their best work is absent from Vonnegut’s, with its pleated narratives, authorial interjections and slippages of genre.

That is not to say that he has been without honour or influence. Lt Col Kilgore, Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now, is surely named in honour of Kilgore Trout, a character deployed by Vonnegut inSlaughterhouse 5 and elsewhere. The title of David Foster Wallace’s early story about depression, “The Planet Trillaphon as it Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing”, has a strongly Vonnegutian whiff. John Irving was briefly a student of Vonnegut’s in Iowa; his baggy storytelling style, and the importance he ascribes to happenstance, show traces of his teaching. You could argue that the “tech noir” authors of the Eighties and Nineties such as William Gibson followed Vonnegut in their impatience with “genre-ism”, their somewhat overdrawn characters, their use of satire and black humour.

And Vonnegut himself is still redoubtably in print, even if Slaughterhouse 5 remained his biggest success – though another new audience discovered him in the Noughties, thanks in large part to his invections against the Bush regime.

It is for their literary rather than their documentary value that these letters commend themselves, in the end. They have a directness and a consistency, a scruffy but ensnaring humanity, that I’ve never quite been able to find in Vonnegut’s fiction, either two decades ago as a refusenaut and psychonik, or over the past fortnight, researching this piece. Kurt seems by turns kind, engaged, imaginative, witty, self-deprecating (“I write with a big black crayon… grasped in a grubby, kindergarten fist,”) and – on various fronts – courageous.

Of course, the other half of this correspondence might well portray a gutless, faithless, feckless, miserly drunk with a penchant for laughing at his own bad jokes. I shall have to hunt down a copy of Charles Shields’s 2011 biography And So It Goes (Macmillan) to find out.

Kurt Vonnegut: Letters ed Dan Wakefield

464pp, Vintage, t:£23 (plus £1.35 p&p)

0844871 1515 (rrp £25, ebook £11.39

George Bellows

Modernism's Margins
George Bellows may have died before his work reached its peak, but it’s the fact that he’s “unfinished” that makes him interesting.

By James Polchin

In a postscript to her short but engaging study of the painter George Bellows, Joyce Carol Oates offers an image of his death that mixes gothic tragedy with inspiration. Bellows died from a ruptured appendix in 1925 at the age of 42, ending a two-decades long career filled with success and artistic energy. "Why did George Bellows die? — so needlessly, and prematurely?" Oates asks. I find the rhetorical structure curious in how it suggests a different, more metaphysical question: Why do artists die? Oates concludes with a haunting narrative of his last months: 

   

• "George Bellows, 1882-1925: Modern American Life," Through June 9, 2013. Royal Academy of Arts, London.

From August 1924 to January 1925 . . . he had known that his appendix was dangerously inflamed and might rupture at any time; yet he'd resisted medical treatment, made light of the severe pain with which he lived—for what tragic reasons of stoicism, death-denial, sheer masculine stubbornness one can only guess . . . He continued to work as usual at his art, no doubt imagining . . . that he might, through sheer inspiration and genius, paint his way out of a merely physical predicament. Bellows was tearing up rotted boards from his studio floor when his appendix finally burst. He died in a New York hospital following emergency surgery a few days later.

This image of Bellows ripping up his studio floor just as his body was giving way has it own clawing sense of intrigue and sadness. Oates finds in Bellows last days art’s ability to transform physical pain into something aesthetically vital. But it is the energy here that most compelled her, the efforts of ripping up a floor coupled with painting a canvas. “Bellows was a man in the grip of a compulsion to ceaselessly reimagine and reinvent himself,” writes Oates. Oates, who exhibits her own compulsive energy in her writing, admires Bellows range of subjects as well. He did not limit himself to a particular genre or style, composing illustrated lithographs for magazines, and experimenting with different techniques of oil painting creating portraits and landscapes and street scenes, and of course those famous paintings of murky and illegal boxing matches that have become so iconic.

The Royal Academy’s retrospective, a paired down version from an earlier exhibition that traveled from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to Washington’s National Gallery and ending in London this summer, makes clear that Bellows’ reinventions confound us in their uncertainties, undermining any easy definition of his work.

The show rambles along in a simple timeline starting from early portraits and landscapes in New York and his seascapes done in Maine, to his lithographs for popular and political magazines, to his later portraits. Some of the most captivating canvases in this show come right at the beginning in a series of portraits of New York’s working poor. “Little Girl in White (Queenie Burnett)” (1907) gives us a large dark canvas of a small figure wearing a white dress thick and heavy under Bellows’ paintbrush, her body nearly weighted down amidst the dark brown background. She stares out at us with a cautious dignity. Her duties were not to be the subject of a painting but rather to clean homes. Bellows gives this little girl and other similar subjects a powerful presence, turning the working class into a subject of refined portraiture in the tradition of Diego Velazquez or Frans Hals or Edouard Manet. That is the thing about Bellows, his works can often feel like an aesthetic Rorschach test: look deeply into the canvas and tell us the first artist that comes to mind?

Arriving in New York in 1904 from a comfortable middle-class family in Ohio, Bellows was searching for a life in sports, basketball precisely, rather than art. But in New York he enrolled in the New York School of Art and there took courses with Robert Henri, the artist and educator whose influence over 20th century American painting has yet to be fully explored. It was Henri who impressed on his students to look to the everyday, the streets and domestic spaces for subjects for their canvases. Drawing on his own studies and travels in Europe in the late 19th century, Henri eschewed the traditions of academic painting, encouraging his students to redefine not only the subject of art but also the methods of painting. He came to despise Impressionism as all surfaces, and instead instructed his students to capture the textured reality of a scene, to use paint like mud, as he often declared. His ideas about painting were of the era of Upton Sinclair’s dark realities of Chicago meatpacking in The Jungle, and Lewis Hine's darkly composed factory floors of wearied workers and hard-shelled child laborers. Henri imagined that oil paint on canvas could attain a similar kind of reality, and could offer another way to witness the realities of industrialization. His ideas and the canvases they produced were called the Ashcan School, now a relic of art history. But Henri’s vision and the artists he influenced (including such notables as Rockwell Kent, Stuart Davies, Joseph Stella, and Edward Hopper) was another thread of American modernism that often gets overlooked.

"Stag at Sharkey's" (1909)

It was perhaps Bellows in the early years of his career that best exemplified Henri’s ideas. And no less so than in his well-known scenes of boxing matches. “Stag at Sharkey’s” (1909) captures an energy and force that leaves you stunned, and shows what Bellows was best at: the body in motion. The two boxers are nothing more than thickly layered paint, their skin glossy with the sheen of the oil paint, conjuring the sweat that you know was dripping off the men’s bodies. The lighting turns the men’s encounter into its own isolated moment. We don’t really care that the bodies are distorted — the boxer on the right couldn’t possibly find his balance in that position, and the other seems wholly disproportioned. In these scenes of illegal boxing matches (the sport was outlawed in New York, and operated under the law in private “members only” clubs) we are not looking for realism in the way Hine’s photographs reveal the life of the factory. But like Hines workers who he often portrayed as blending with the machines they were tailored to, Bellows gives us a scene richly imagined as our own witnessing. Notice the spectator in the bottom left, his head turned back towards us, meeting our gaze, drawing us into the moment and making us aware of ourselves as part of the spectators.

"New York" (1911)

Bellows brings us into the painting again in his scenes along the docks of the Hudson River, standing us alongside the men and horses, the paint smeared and layered to convey the roughness of the moment. But this intimacy is lost in his series of excavation for the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in New York City, or the more dramatic painting “New York” (1911) that captures the crowded chaos and utter synchronicity of Times Square amid a morning rush. There is something lacking in such painting so expansive and panoramic, looking like a stage setting for an opera. I wished for the closeness of those earlier portraits, or the singular jab of one boxer for another. But these scenes are what consumed him for a good part of his life, and more acutely so after the Armory Show of 1913 when New York was introduced to European modernism, post-Impressionism and Cubism. Henri was a big supporter of the show, and Bellows exhibited three works along with helping to install the exhibition, hauling works by the post-Impressionist and cubist through the exhibition hall, each work giving him a close-up view of the paint on the canvas. This experience only fueled his distain for cubism and its siblings.

The Armory Show did little to inspire Bellows, and instead seemed to have moved him even further back into the roots of Impressionism. His works after 1913 are often deeply concerned with color, whether in his landscapes of middle-class New Yorkers in the park in winter, or his series of seascapes that capture the energy and light along the Maine coast. In these works you see clearly the influence of Seurat and Monet, the abstractions of the landscape succumbing to the pleasures of light and brushstrokes. It would be this interest in color, and a move to more staged and controlled scenes in the 1920s that prefigure the regionalism of artists such as Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton in the 1930s, or even Bellows fellow student Edward Hopper, whose explorations into the psychology of color was something that both men must have learned from Henri. There are a few seascape scenes of lonely houses sitting along the coast that hauntingly recalled images of Hopper’s later works. Bellows has this way of slipping away from us quicker than we can judge. His canvases, collected in this way, feel a bit caught in the past and the future all at once.

And this has been his fate over the years. As the Ashcan School faded into art history, eclipsed by more powerful movements of surrealism and abstraction, so did Bellows fade with it. His canvases can be thrillingly engaging, particularly in the earlier works, with their direct subject matter. But his later canvases often feel too composed, the portraits too stiff, the landscapes too orchestrated. The best of his paintings reminds us how complex his art can be, how interlaced its concerns were with modernism’s experiments with technique. Those nearly abstract seascapes of light and color were attractive to the mid-century art critic Clement Greenberg, who in 1949, praised Bellows for reasons that had nothing to do with his boxing matches or portraits of the working poor. Greenberg writes:

George Bellows is one of the most important artists America has produced in this century... like Manet, Bellows modeled his forms broadly, in varying shades of local color, not in gradual grays or blacks. This style was a continuation, essentially, of Manet’s phrase of impressionism, but... Bellows... extracted something sufficiently new from it.

Greenberg found in Bellows an artist whose explorations in color and paint drew on Manet’s early works and prefigured the experiments of abstract expressionists that he so valued. In reading the wall texts, you encounter many Bellows in this show, his canvases floating somewhere between 1880s Paris and 1950s New York. (In an unplanned coincidence, this show overlapped for a few weeks with the large Manet exhibition just one floor below.) Much of this show echoes Greenberg’s praise, asking us to ponder the artist’s use of paint to capture the burst of a crashing wave or the rise of a snow bank. But the best of his canvases show us that there was another vital thread in the history of modern art, one composed of bodies in motion and excavated cityscapes, of dockworkers and river barges, of boxing matches and tenements dwellers. The artist used the techniques of modernism to create spectacles of modernism’s margins.

"Men of the Docks" (1912)

What Bellows might have accomplished if he attended to the pain of his abdomen — if the artist hadn’t died — is unclear. It is hard not to think of his work and life as unfinished. And perhaps it is this unfinished quality that turns the artist into a medium of interpretive efforts, channeling the past and prefiguring the future, stuck in an uncertain stasis. Like the floor of his studio he never completed on that cold January day in 1925, Bellows art remains caught in a constant process of becoming. 

Online Reviews

Star Wars

by Tom Vanderbilt

Online review culture is dotted with black holes of bad taste.

In the days before the Internet, eating at an unknown restaurant meant relying on a clutch of quick and dirty heuristics. The presence of many truck drivers or cops at a lonely diner supposedly vouchsafed its quality (though it may simply have been the only option around). For “ethnic” food, there was the classic benchmark: “We were the only non-[insert ethnicity] people in there.” Or you could spend anxious minutes on the sidewalk, under the watchful gaze of the host, reading curling, yellowed reviews, wondering if what held in 1987 was still true today. In an information-poor environment, you sometimes simply went with your gut (and left clutching it).

Today, via Yelp (or TripAdvisor or Amazon, or any Web site teeming with “user-generated content”), you are often troubled by the reverse problem: too much information. As I navigate a Yelp entry to simply determine whether a place is worth my money, I find myself battered between polar extremes of experience: One meal was “to die for,” another “pretty lame.” Drifting into narrow currents of individual proclivity (writing about a curry joint where I had recently lunched, one reviewer noted that “the place had really good energy, very Spiritual [sic], which is very important to me”), I eventually capsize in a sea of confusion. I either quit the place altogether or, by the time I arrive, am weighed down by a certain exhaustion of expectation, as if I had already consumed the experience and was now simply going through the motions.

What I find most striking is that, having begun the process of looking for reviews of the restaurant, I find myself reviewing the reviewers. The use of the word “awesome”—a term whose original connotation is so denuded that I suspect it will ultimately come to exclusively signify its ironic, air-quote-marked opposite—is a red flag. So are the words “anniversary” or “honeymoon,” often written by people with inflated expectations for their special night; their complaint with any perceived failure on the part of the restaurant or hotel to rise to this momentous occasion is not necessarily mine. I reflexively downgrade reviewers writing in the sort of syrupy dross picked up from hotel brochures (“it was a vision of perfection”).

In one respect, there is nothing new in reviewing the reviewer; our choices in pre-Internet days were informed either by friends we trusted or critics whose voices seemed to carry authority. But suddenly, the door has been opened to a multitude of voices, each bearing no preexisting authority or social trust. It is no longer merely enough to read that someone thought the vegetarian food was bad (you need to know if she is a vegetarian), or the hotel in Iowa City was the best they have ever seen (just how many hotels have they seen?), or a foreign film was terrible (wait, they admit they don’t like subtitles?). Critics have always had to be interrogated this way (what dendritic history of logrolling lay behind the rave about that book?), but with the Web, a thousand critics have bloomed. The messy, complicated, often hidden dynamics of taste and preference, and the battles over it, are suddenly laid out right in front of us.

In The German Ideology, Karl Marx famously ruminated on the predicted collapse of the division of labor in a communist society, where he would be free to “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.” It may not be communism, but the Internet has enabled the fruition of at least one of these activities: criticizing after dinner—particularly if the object of criticism is dinner itself.

The rise of this crowd-sourced aggregate of amateur reviewers, a reserve army of critical labor, is generally seen as an egalitarian blossoming, freeing consumers from the tyranny of individual mandarins, each harboring his or her own agendas and tastes. “The excising of the expert reviewer is happening right across the board,” writes Suzanne Moore in The Guardian. “Who needs expertise when every Tom, Dick, and Harriet reviews everything for free anyway. Isn’t this truly democratic? The nature of criticism is changing, so this hierarchy of expertise is crumbling.”

One can almost hear the anticipatory echoes of something like Yelp in the context of José Ortega y Gasset’sThe Revolt of the Masses (1930). The multitude, he wrote, once “scattered about the world in small groups,” now appears “as an agglomeration.” It has “suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society. Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character.” The disgruntled diner, now able to make or break a restaurant through sheer collective will. Against this leveling of critical power, the old guard fulminates. Ruth Reichl, the former editor of Gourmet, recently harrumphed that “anybody who believes Yelp is an idiot. Most people on Yelp have no idea what they’re talking about.”     

If the God Criticism—in the sense of experts telling the anxious middle what to read, what to see, and how to be—now lays on its side, an Enver Hoxha statue in a Tirana back alley, what’s left? A new utopia of fisherman-critics who are free to make up their own minds and influence others? A glorious world of transparency and objectivity? A radical rewriting of the canon?

Perhaps. But there are complications with this idea that the Internet has obviated the need for experts and for critical authority. One question is what is happening to criticism itself when the evaluative architecture on a site such as Amazon is the same for leaf blowers as it is literature, when everything seems to be quantifying one’s hedonic response to a consumption activity; when we are forced into a ruthless dyad of thumbing up or thumbing down, or channeled into expressing a simple “liking” for something when the actual response may be more complex.

If the Internet was supposed to wrest criticism from elites, a good deal of the reviewing energy on Yelp (and other sites) is precisely an effort to establish one’s bona fides. In the reviews for a new seafood restaurant in my neighborhood, a number of the writers tout themselves as “New Englanders,” thus implying that they implicitly know of what they speak. A reviewer for an Indian restaurant in midtown Manhattan lays down a sort of tripartite claim on authority: “I am a foodie and my love for Indian food (as an Indian) is tough to match. I eat at this restaurant at least once a week. Really innovative mix of ingredients, and yet extremely authentic.” Not only is he a foodie, he is an Indian foodie who, like all true food critics, has eaten here more than once—thus no need to unpack that thorny word “authentic.”

Yelp is filled with this sort of signaling, as economists call it—making discreet references affirming one’s authority in an effort to rise above the masses of similar reviewers (“I knew the chef from his previous stint at . . . ”; “of all the Henan cuisine places I’ve eaten, this is one of the . . . ”). And even as it aggregates its democratic horde—after filtering out reviews for various reasons, including those suspected of being fraudulent—Yelp itself strives to reintroduce hierarchy, by designating a class of “elite” reviewers (identified by special badges), picked by a team known as The Council. “We don’t share how it’s done,” a Yelp spokesperson said, as if describing the shadowy process by which Michelin inspectors are hired.

What further complicates this picture of the masses liberating the objects of criticism from the tyranny of critics is that so many reviewers seem to turn toward petty despotism. Reading Yelp reviews, particularly of the one-star variety, one quickly senses the particular ax being ground—the hostess who shot the “wrong” look at the “girls’ night” group; a greeting that is too effusive, or insufficiently so; the waiter deemed “too uneasy with being a waiter”; or any number of episodes (each example has been taken from Yelp) that have little to do with food.

As Paul Myerscough, an editor at The London Review of Books, has written of the “affective labor” that is now such a prominent feature of the service economy (and is drilled into workers at chains such as Pret A Manger through quasi-Stakhanovite uplift campaigns), “Work increasingly isn’t, or isn’t only, a matter of producing things, but of supplying your energies, physical and emotional, in the service of others.” For consumers-turned-overseers who feel they did not receive the right kind of emotional energy, Yelp becomes a place to catalog these litanies of complaint.

When I was in college, around the time critical theory was in full bloom on the American campus, a favorite professor of mine kicked off a seminar by saying we were to going to do criticism. “I’m not talking about the sort of gonadal, ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ kind of criticism,” she said. Rather, we would analyze texts, films—any kind of cultural product—assisted by an array of high-powered lenses: deconstructionism, semiotics, structuralism, reader-response, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes. (My writing career may actually have launched with a Mythologies-style analysis of the “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” ad campaign.) Whether we liked something or not was irrelevant; our job was to think about what the work said, what the work did, and what we brought to it.

There may be no field besides criticism more open, or indeed appropriate, to perpetual, almost Maoist self-examination; I do not imagine that accountants or podiatrists much concern themselves with impassioned forums in which the “role of the accountant” or the “future of podiatry” is debated. Criticism itself is meant to be criticized—an idea nicely captured in the title of an H. L. Mencken essay, “Criticism of Criticism of Criticism.” Wrote Mencken of the critic: “He makes the work of art live for the spectator; he makes the spectator live for the work of art. Out of the process comes understanding, appreciation, intelligent enjoyment.” Nearly a century later, despite all the hand-wringing, some version of this definition is extant. In his critics’ “manifesto,” Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the recent Waiting for the Barbarians, argues that the “critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.”

Most online reviewing, Mendelsohn notes, “isn’t criticism proper”—it’s full of heat, yes, but lacks light. And before you cry elitism, he notes that academics and other “expert” reviewers often fall prey to the reverse condition. For a comparison of criticism and online reviewing, let us first turn to Mendelsohn himself, writing about Mad Men, the cable television series chronicling mid-20th-century social upheaval,

"Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical 'issues'—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth."

This is a critic at the top of his game, a few deft strokes forcing you to reassess your own judgment—and not in a purely “like” or “dislike” sense—of a show, one that comes bedecked with awards and other tokens of critics’ adoration.

And now let us turn to Netflix. Here is the review of Mad Men deemed “most helpful” (whatever that means) by an impressive 393 out of 394 viewers, as of the time of writing, "I am in the middle of Season 3 and I cannot stop watching, this show is incredible! If my math is correct Sally Drapper [sic] was born in 54. In 1962 she is 8. I was born in 1954. I had an Aunt, Cousin, and family friend that were ‘working girls’ in the 60s and for me the show depicts this world perfectly."

It goes on, in a similar vein. Netflix formerly featured quotes from working critics on the title pages of films and shows, but as a Netflix employee who counts himself a committed cineaste explained to me with a certain chagrin, by his reckoning, only 15 percent or so of Netflix users were interested in professional critics’ opinions.

Yet freed from the yoke of expert opinion, what are we left with? Hundreds of individual reviews, each written by people who, like critics, come bearing their own agendas and biases. You may not “like” A. O. Scott’s taste, but at least you know who he is and what he stands for. And so we look for new forms of authority and trust, new ways to filter. We ourselves are invited to review the reviewers (if only in that “gonadal” good/bad sort of way) by “liking” their comments or rating their helpfulness. Data points pile upon data points.

It is precisely in this vast range of online activity where the value and interest lie for researchers investigating what is not actually known as “criticism” but, rather, “electronic word of mouth.” The trove of data generated from online reviews, the thinking goes, may offer quantitative insight into a perpetually elusive dynamic: the formation of judgments, the expression of preferences, the mechanics of taste. The results, filled with subtle biases and conformity effects, are not always pretty.   

While any one review is essentially useless—the low transaction cost, as the Columbia Business School’s Ray Fisman has noted, tags it with the “cheap talk” problem—the aggregate level is where, through sheer numbers, the noise can be filtered, the outliers marginalized, and statistical consensus achieved.

For example, Yelp compiles key lines that more or less repeat in reviews (“the homemade whipped cream on the side hit the spot”) and posts these “highlights” near the top of the page. The shift to smartphones and smaller screens has made the idea of reading through dozens of reviews even less palatable, encouraging greater compression by opinion-mining projects such as the University of Washington’s RevMiner. It rates descriptive words by their “strength”; for example, “exquisite” is stronger than “good.” A person searching for something like “good dim sum,” the researchers note, does not really mean good dim sum, but “dim sum that others have described as ‘great’ or ‘amazing.’” Good is no longer good enough. You need to be awesome.

Customers deem this feedback desirable, and it can move cultural markets. The Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca has found, for example, that a one-star uptick in a Yelp review can lead to a nine percent improvement in revenues for independently owned restaurants. Other studies have shown a similar impact for independent hotels—and for books.

In a discussion on the future of literary criticism, Jen Doll noted in The Atlantic Wire that “book reviews are not science.” And yet, on Amazon they approach it. One can discover that the average rating for goods sold on the site is approximately 4.3 stars out of 5, as it is elsewhere on the Internet. Why so high? There is, undoubtedly, a raft of selection biases going on—an author’s fans are more likely to weigh in positively; an existing review’s rating wields an influence on later reviewers; the mere fact of having purchased something may make someone less likely to issue a negative review. But curiously, as more ratings trickle in, a study by business professors David Godes and Jose Silva has found, the average rating begins to decline. “The more reviews there are,” Godes and Silva suggest, “the lower the quality of the information available”; later reviewers tend to be either less serious or less disposed to like the book, or to respond to other reviewers rather than to the book itself. While one might think a five-star review would summon more passion than a four-star review, one study found that four-star reviews were, on average, longer.

What consumers make of reviewers is also a fertile field of study. A team of Cornell University and Google researchers, for example, found that a review’s “helpfulness” rating falls as the review’s star rating deviates from that of the average review—as if it were being punished for straying. As the team noted, defining “helpfulness” is itself tricky: Did the review help people make a purchase, or were they rewarding it for conforming with what others were saying? There are a number of feedback effects: Early reviews tend to draw more helpfulness votes, simply because they’ve appeared online longer. The more votes a review has, the more its “default authority,” and the more votes it tends to attract.

One thing the Internet reviewing culture makes clear is that, at least with “experience goods”—things such as books or music—we often seem to react more strongly to someone else’s opinion than to the work itself. As Temple University’s Susan Mudambi and David Schuff found, people tend to rate longer reviews for “search goods”—such as cameras or printers—more positively than those for “experience goods.” A strong negative review for a camera might reflect some discrete product failure (pictures were blurry), but a strong negative review for a book might simply be another person’s taste getting in the way.

Indeed, one might protest that reviewing restaurants at Yelp and books at Amazon and films at Netflix are all different enterprises, but I would argue that there is a sort of metalogic to online reviewing that subsumes all categories. What people are doing, after all, is generally not situating a work in its historical context—or performing some other kind of critical heavy lifting—but reflecting upon their own consumption experience. This logic has become so ingrained, so expected, that one occasionally spies a flummoxed “review” of a simple product such as paper clips: “What can I say? They’re paper clips!” Four stars!

That a site such as Amazon sells virtually everything under the sun offers a chance for these varying groupings of products—“search goods,” “experience goods”—to blur and flatten, as do the lines of authority; what does the competent paper clip critic have to say about French symbolist poetry?

Trawling through the reviews of a book I recently purchased, The Old Ways, an elegy to life on foot by the travel writer Robert Macfarlane, I was struck by the sole one-star review: “I too use walking as a way of thinking. But without maps of his walks this book is seriously incomplete. I wonder why there are no maps.” One might argue that this is to have missed much of the point of Macfarlane’s work. But the ground on which this person was engaging the book—a narrow quibble over a functional attribute of the book itself having nothing to do with the writing—was not unlike the assessment of any other consumer good on Amazon, such as a conferral of one star on the iPad for not having a USB port.

Yet all may not be lost. That one-star review of The Old Ways has received not a single “helpful” vote. What’s more, two readers felt compelled to weigh in on the review itself. “It appears you had one criterion, and only one, for your rating of this book,” wrote one. “Did anything make you think this book would include maps?” asked another. The rise of online reviewing may be toppling the singular critical voice from its pedestal, and with its fall, taste has shattered into a thousand fragments. We are every day sifting through those shards, trying to make meaning of everyone else’s attempt to say what something meant to them.

Spring

Scott & Zelda

  In the shell-shocked aftermath of World War I, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were among the lost generation that led the literary world into the raucous and roaring Jazz Age. They both died young -- he of a heart attack and she in an asylum -- after lives laced with alcohol and desperate abandon:

  

"[F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)] exploded onto the lit­erary scene with his first novel at the age of twenty-one. The book, This Side of Paradise, was little more than thinly veiled autobiography -- a struggling Princeton graduate makes a living writing advertising copy -- but it was nonetheless an eye-opening look at the young men and women of his generation. ...

"While he rode the zeitgeist to literary bestsellerdom, Fitzger­ald did little to endear himself to the public. His comments about women are especially grating to the modern ear. 'I know that after a few moments of inane conversation with most girls I get so bored that unless I have a few drinks I have to leave the room,' he said. 'All women over thirty-five should be mur­dered.' (He was, one hopes, kidding.) He once told a reporter that the average Midwestern girl 'is unattractive, selfish, snob­bish, egotistical, utterly graceless, talks with an ugly accent and in her heart knows that she would feel more at home in a kitchen than in a ballroom.' Still, he wasn't entirely dismissive of the fairer sex. 'The southern girl is easily the most attractive type in America,' he said.

  

"His wife, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald (1900-1948), was a southern girl, born and raised in Alabama. Scott proposed to her with his mother's ring in 1919. Zelda, however, wasn't yet sure if Scott was marriage material. She locked the ring away and cut off sexual relations with Scott until he showed signs of material success.

   

Zelda Fitzgerald

  

"At one point, Zelda even returned the ring to her fiancé and called things off. Fitzgerald went on a three-week bender. He wrote to his friend Edmund Wilson, 'Since I last saw you, I've tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death.' Fitzgerald's prospects changed for the better after he sold his first novel for publication; Zelda readily agreed to get married as soon as possible. ... 

   

"Early on in his career, Fitzgerald said, 'We were married and we've lived -- happily --ever afterwards. That is, we expect to.'

"But then came the parties, and then came Zelda's madness. Ah, the parties . . . Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald perfected the art of professional party crashing. They were prone to show up at the door uninvited, on all fours and barking like dogs. If they tricked the host into letting them into the house, they might strip naked and take a bath in the master bathroom tub. Zelda frequently shed her clothing in public, and stories abound of her panties or bra coming off at parties. Dorothy Parker found them 'too ostentatious for words. Their behavior was calcu­lated to shock.' "

Author: Andrew Shaffer 

Title: Literary Rogues

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Date: Copyright 2013 by Andrew Shaffer

Hmm

100 Very Cool Facts About

The Human Body

The human body is an incredibly complex and intricate system, one that still baffles doctors and researchers on a regular basis despite thousands of years of medical knowledge. As a result, it shouldn’t be any surprise that even body parts and functions we deal with every day have bizarre or unexpected facts and explanations behind them. From sneezes to fingernail growth, here are 100 weird, wacky, and interesting facts about the human body.

The Brain

The human brain is the most complex and least understood part of the human anatomy. There may be a lot we don’t know, but here are a few interesting facts that we’ve got covered.

1. Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour. Ever wonder how you can react so fast to things around you or why that stubbed toe hurts right away? It’s due to the super-speedy movement of nerve impulses from your brain to the rest of your body and vice versa, bringing reactions at the speed of a high powered luxury sports car.
2. The brain operates on the same amount of power as 10-watt light bulb. The cartoon image of a light bulb over your head when a great thought occurs isn’t too far off the mark. Your brain generates as much energy as a small light bulb even when you’re sleeping.
3. The human brain cell can hold 5 times as much information as the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or any other encyclopedia for that matter. Scientists have yet to settle on a definitive amount, but the storage capacity of the brain in electronic terms is thought to be between 3 or even 1,000 terabytes. The National Archives of Britain, containing over 900 years of history, only takes up 70 terabytes, making your brain’s memory power pretty darn impressive.
4. Your brain uses 20% of the oxygen that enters your bloodstream. The brain only makes up about 2% of our body mass, yet consumes more oxygen than any other organ in the body, making it extremely susceptible to damage related to oxygen deprivation. So breathe deep to keep your brain happy and swimming in oxygenated cells.
5. The brain is much more active at night than during the day. Logically, you would think that all the moving around, complicated calculations and tasks and general interaction we do on a daily basis during our working hours would take a lot more brain power than, say, lying in bed. Turns out, the opposite is true. When you turn off your brain turns on. Scientists don’t yet know why this is but you can thank the hard work of your brain while you sleep for all those pleasant dreams.
6. Scientists say the higher your I.Q. the more you dream. While this may be true, don’t take it as a sign you’re mentally lacking if you can’t recall your dreams. Most of us don’t remember many of our dreams and the average length of most dreams is only 2-3 seconds–barely long enough to register.
7. Neurons continue to grow throughout human life. For years scientists and doctors thought that brain and neural tissue couldn’t grow or regenerate. While it doesn’t act in the same manner as tissues in many other parts of the body, neurons can and do grow throughout your life, adding a whole new dimension to the study of the brain and the illnesses that affect it.
8. Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Not all neurons are the same. There are a few different types within the body and transmission along these different kinds can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec.
9. The brain itself cannot feel pain. While the brain might be the pain center when you cut your finger or burn yourself, the brain itself does not have pain receptors and cannot feel pain. That doesn’t mean your head can’t hurt. The brain is surrounded by loads of tissues, nerves and blood vessels that are plenty receptive to pain and can give you a pounding headache.
10. 80% of the brain is water. Your brain isn’t the firm, gray mass you’ve seen on TV. Living brain tissue is a squishy, pink and jelly-like organ thanks to the loads of blood and high water content of the tissue. So the next time you’re feeling dehydrated get a drink to keep your brain hydrated.

Hair and Nails

While they’re not a living part of your body, most people spend a good amount of time caring for their hair and nails. The next time you’re heading in for a haircut or manicure, think of these facts.

11. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body. If you’ve ever had a covering of stubble on your face as you’re clocking out at 5 o’clock you’re probably pretty familiar with this. In fact, if the average man never shaved his beard it would grow to over 30 feet during his lifetime, longer than a killer whale.
12. Every day the average person loses 60-100 strands of hair. Unless you’re already bald, chances are good that you’re shedding pretty heavily on a daily basis. Your hair loss will vary in accordance with the season, pregnancy, illness, diet and age.
13. Women’s hair is about half the diameter of men’s hair. While it might sound strange, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that men’s hair should be coarser than that of women. Hair diameter also varies on average between races, making hair plugs on some men look especially obvious.
14. One human hair can support 3.5 ounces. That’s about the weight of two full size candy bars, and with hundreds of thousands of hairs on the human head, makes the tale of Rapunzel much more plausible.
15. The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger. And the nail on the middle finger of your dominant hand will grow the fastest of all. Why is not entirely known, but nail growth is related to the length of the finger, with the longest fingers growing nails the fastest and shortest the slowest.
16. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee. Humans are not quite the naked apes that we’re made out to be. We have lots of hair, but on most of us it’s not obvious as a majority of the hairs are too fine or light to be seen.
17. Blondes have more hair. They’re said to have more fun, and they definitely have more hair. Hair color determines how dense the hair on your head is. The average human has 100,000 hair follicles, each of which is capable of producing 20 individual hairs during a person’s lifetime. Blondes average 146,000 follicles while people with black hair tend to have about 110,000 follicles. Those with brown hair fit the average with 100,000 follicles and redheads have the least dense hair, with about 86,000 follicles.
18. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails. If you notice that you’re trimming your fingernails much more frequently than your toenails you’re not just imagining it. The nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. On average, nails on both the toes and fingers grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.
19. The lifespan of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average. While you quite a few hairs each day, your hairs actually have a pretty long life providing they aren’t subject to any trauma. Your hairs will likely get to see several different haircuts, styles, and even possibly decades before they fall out on their own.
20. You must lose over 50% of your scalp hairs before it is apparent to anyone. You lose hundreds of hairs a day but you’ll have to lose a lot more before you or anyone else will notice. Half of the hairs on your pretty little head will have to disappear before your impending baldness will become obvious to all those around you.
21. Human hair is virtually indestructible. Aside from it’s flammability, human hair decays at such a slow rate that it is practically non-disintegrative. If you’ve ever wondered how your how clogs up your pipes so quick consider this: hair cannot be destroyed by cold, change of climate, water, or other natural forces and it is resistant to many kinds of acids and corrosive chemicals.

Internal Organs

Though we may not give them much thought unless they’re bothering us, our internal organs are what allow us to go on eating, breathing and walking around. Here are some things to consider the next time you hear your stomach growl.

22. The largest internal organ is the small intestine. Despite being called the smaller of the two intestines, your small intestine is actually four times as long as the average adult is tall. If it weren’t looped back and forth upon itself it wouldn’t fit inside the abdominal cavity.
23. The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30 feet. No wonder you can feel your heartbeat so easily. Pumping blood through your body quickly and efficiently takes quite a bit of pressure resulting in the strong contractions of the heart and the thick walls of the ventricles which push blood to the body.
24. The acid in your stomach is strong enough to dissolve razorblades. While you certainly shouldn’t test the fortitude of your stomach by eating a razorblade or any other metal object for that matter, the acids that digest the food you eat aren’t to be taken lightly. Hydrochloric acid, the type found in your stomach, is not only good at dissolving the pizza you had for dinner but can also eat through many types of metal.
25. The human body is estimated to have 60,000 miles of blood vessels. To put that in perspective, the distance around the earth is about 25,000 miles, making the distance your blood vessels could travel if laid end to end more than two times around the earth.
26. You get a new stomach lining every three to four days. The mucus-like cells lining the walls of the stomach would soon dissolve due to the strong digestive acids in your stomach if they weren’t constantly replaced. Those with ulcers know how painful it can be when stomach acid takes its toll on the lining of your stomach.
27. The surface area of a human lung is equal to a tennis court. In order to more efficiently oxygenate the blood, the lungs are filled with thousands of branching bronchi and tiny, grape-like alveoli. These are filled with microscopic capillaries which oxygen and carbon dioxide. The large amount of surface area makes it easier for this exchange to take place, and makes sure you stay properly oxygenated at all times.
28. Women’s hearts beat faster than men’s.The main reason for this is simply that on average women tend to be smaller than men and have less mass to pump blood to. But women’s and men’s hearts can actually act quite differently, especially when experiencing trauma like a heart attack, and many treatments that work for men must be adjusted or changed entirely to work for women.
29. Scientists have counted over 500 different liver functions. You may not think much about your liver except after a long night of drinking, but the liver is one of the body’s hardest working, largest and busiest organs. Some of the functions your liver performs are: production of bile, decomposition of red blood cells, plasma protein synthesis, and detoxification.
30. The aorta is nearly the diameter of a garden hose. The average adult heart is about the size of two fists, making the size of the aorta quite impressive. The artery needs to be so large as it is the main supplier of rich, oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.
31. Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart. For most people, if they were asked to draw a picture of what the lungs look like they would draw both looking roughly the same size. While the lungs are fairly similar in size, the human heart, though located fairly centrally, is tilted slightly to the left making it take up more room on that side of the body and crowding out that poor left lung.
32. You could remove a large part of your internal organs and survive. The human body may appear fragile but it’s possible to survive even with the removal of the stomach, the spleen, 75 percent of the liver, 80 percent of the intestines, one kidney, one lung, and virtually every organ from the pelvic and groin area. You might not feel too great, but the missing organs wouldn’t kill you.
33. The adrenal glands change size throughout life. The adrenal glands, lying right above the kidneys, are responsible for releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. In the seventh month of a fetus’ development, the glands are roughly the same size as the kidneys. At birth, the glands have shrunk slightly and will continue to do so throughout life. In fact, by the time a person reaches old age, the glands are so small they can hardly be seen.

Bodily Functions

We may not always like to talk about them, but everyone has to deal with bodily functions on a daily basis. These are a few facts about the involuntary and sometimes unpleasant actions of our bodies.

34. Sneezes regularly exceed 100 mph. There’s a good reason why you can’t keep your eyes open when you sneeze–that sneeze is rocketing out of your body at close to 100 mph. This is, of course, a good reason to cover your mouth when you sneeze.
35. Coughs clock in at about 60 mph. Viruses and colds get spread around the office and the classroom quickly during cold and flu season. With 60 mph coughs spraying germs far and wide, it’s no wonder.
36. Women blink twice as many times as men do. That’s a lot of blinking every day. The average person, man or woman, blinks about 13 times a minute.
37. A full bladder is roughly the size of a soft ball. No wonder you have to run to bathroom when you feel the call of the wild. The average bladder holds about 400-800 cc of fluid but most people will feel the urge to go long before that at 250 to 300 cc.
38. Approximately 75% of human waste is made of water. While we might typically think that urine is the liquid part of human waste products, the truth is that what we consider solid waste is actually mostly water as well. You should be thankful that most waste is fairly water-filled, as drier harder stools are what cause constipation and are much harder and sometimes painful to pass.
39. Feet have 500,000 sweat glands and can produce more than a pint of sweat a day. With that kind of sweat-producing power it’s no wonder that your gym shoes have a stench that can peel paint. Additionally, men usually have much more active sweat glands than women.
40. During your lifetime, you will produce enough saliva to fill two swimming pools. Saliva plays an important part in beginning the digestive process and keeping the mouth lubricated, and your mouth produces quite a bit of it on a daily basis.
41. The average person expels flatulence 14 times each day. Even if you’d like to think you’re too dignified to pass gas, the reality is that almost everyone will at least a few times a day. Digestion causes the body to release gases which can be painful if trapped in the abdomen and not released.
42. Earwax production is necessary for good ear health. While many people find earwax to be disgusting, it’s actually a very important part of your ear’s defense system. It protects the delicate inner ear from bacteria, fungus, dirt and even insects. It also cleans and lubricates the ear canal.

Sex and Reproduction

As taboo as it may be in some places, sex is an important part of human life as a facet of relationships and the means to reproduce. Here are a few things you might not have known.

43. On any given day, sexual intercourse takes place 120 million times on earth. Humans are a quickly proliferating species, and with about 4% of the world’s population having sex on any given day, it’s no wonder that birth rates continue to increase in many places all over the world.
44. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and the smallest is the male sperm. While you can’t see skin cells or muscle cells, the ovum is typically large enough to be seen with the naked eye with a diameter of about a millimeter. The sperm cell, on the other hand, is tiny, consisting of little more than nucleus.
45. The three things pregnant women dream most of during their first trimester are frogs, worms and potted plants. Pregnancy hormones can cause mood swings, cravings and many other unexpected changes. Oddly enough, hormones can often affect the types of dreams women have and their vividness. The most common are these three types, but many women also dream of water, giving birth or even have violent or sexually charged dreams.
46. Your teeth start growing 6 months before you are born. While few babies are born with teeth in place, the teeth that will eventually push through the gums of young children are formed long before the child even leaves the womb. At 9 to 12 weeks the fetus starts to form the teeth buds that will turn into baby teeth.
47. Babies are always born with blue eyes. The color of your eyes depends on the genes you get from your parents, but at birth most babies appear to have blue eyes. The reason behind this is the pigment melanin. The melanin in a newborn’s eyes often needs time after birth to be fully deposited or to be darkened by exposure to ultraviolet light, later revealing the baby’s true eye color.
48. Babies are, pound for pound, stronger than an ox. While a baby certainly couldn’t pull a covered wagon at its present size, if the child were the size of an oxen it just might very well be able to. Babies have especially strong and powerful legs for such tiny creatures, so watch out for those kicks.
49. One out of every 2,000 newborn infants has a tooth when they are born. Nursing mothers may cringe at this fact. Sometimes the tooth is a regular baby tooth that has already erupted and sometimes it is an extra tooth that will fall out before the other set of choppers comes in.
50. A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months. When only a small fraction of the way through its development, a fetus will have already developed one of the most unique human traits: fingerprints. At only 6-13 weeks of development, the whorls of what will be fingerprints have already developed. Oddly enough, those fingerprints will not change throughout the person’s life and will be one of the last things to disappear after death.
51. Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell. All life has to begin somewhere, and even the largest humans spent a short part of their lives as a single celled organism when sperm and egg cells first combine. Shortly afterward, the cells begin rapidly dividing and begin forming the components of a tiny embryo.
52. Most men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep. Most people’s bodies and minds are much more active when they’re sleeping than they think. The combination of blood circulation and testosterone production can cause erections during sleep and they’re often a normal and necessary part of REM sleep.

Senses

The primary means by which we interact with the world around us is through our senses. Here are some interesting facts about these five sensory abilities.

53. After eating too much, your hearing is less sharp. If you’re heading to a concert or a musical after a big meal you may be doing yourself a disservice. Try eating a smaller meal if you need to keep your hearing pitch perfect.
54. About one third of the human race has 20-20 vision. Glasses and contact wearers are hardly alone in a world where two thirds of the population have less than perfect vision. The amount of people with perfect vision decreases further as they age.
55. If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it. In order for foods, or anything else, to have a taste, chemicals from the substance must be dissolved by saliva. If you don’t believe it, try drying off your tongue before tasting something.
56. Women are born better smellers than men and remain better smellers over life. Studies have shown that women are more able to correctly pinpoint just what a smell is. Women were better able to identify citrus, vanilla, cinnamon and coffee smells. While women are overall better smellers, there is an unfortunate 2% of the population with no sense of smell at all.
57. Your nose can remember 50,000 different scents. While a bloodhound’s nose may be a million times more sensitive than a human’s, that doesn’t mean that the human sense of smell is useless. Humans can identify a wide variety of scents and many are strongly tied to memories.
58. Even small noises cause the pupils of the eyes to dilate. It is believed that this is why surgeons, watchmakers and others who perform delicate manual operations are so bothered by uninvited noise. The sound causes their pupils to change focus and blur their vision, making it harder to do their job well.
59. Everyone has a unique smell, except for identical twins. Newborns are able to recognize the smell of their mothers and many of us can pinpoint the smell of our significant others and those we are close to. Part of that smell is determined by genetics, but it’s also largely do to environment, diet and personal hygiene products that create a unique chemistry for each person.

Aging and Death

From the very young to the very old, aging is a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Learn about the process with these interesting, if somewhat strange facts.

60. The ashes of a cremated person average about 9 pounds. A big part of what gives the human body weight is the water trapped in our cells. Once cremated, that water and a majority of our tissues are destroyed, leaving little behind.
61. Nails and hair do not continue to grow after we die. They do appear longer when we die, however, as the skin dehydrates and pulls back from the nail beds and scalp.
62. By the age of 60, most people will have lost about half their taste buds. Perhaps you shouldn’t trust your grandma’s cooking as much as you do. Older individuals tend to lose their ability to taste, and many find that they need much more intense flavoring in order to be able to fully appreciate a dish.
63. Your eyes are always the same size from birth but your nose and ears never stop growing. When babies look up at you with those big eyes, they’re the same size that they’ll be carrying around in their bodies for the rest of their lives. Their ears and nose, however, will grow throughout their lives and research has shown that growth peaks in seven year cycles.
64. By 60 years of age, 60-percent of men and 40-percent of women will snore. If you’ve ever been kept awake by a snoring loved one you know the sound can be deafening. Normal snores average around 60 decibels, the noise level of normal speech, intense snores can reach more than 80 decibels, the approximate level caused by a jackhammer breaking up concrete.
65. A baby’s head is one-quarter of it’s total length, but by age 25 will only be one-eighth of its total length. As it turns out, our adorably oversized baby heads won’t change size as drastically as the rest of our body. The legs and torso will lengthen, but the head won’t get much longer.

Disease and Injury

Most of us will get injured or sick at some point in our lives. Here are some facts on how the human body reacts to the stresses and dangers from the outside world.

66. Monday is the day of the week when the risk of heart attack is greatest. Yet another reason to loathe Mondays! A ten year study in Scotland found that 20% more people die of heart attacks on Mondays than any other day of the week. Researchers theorize that it’s a combination of too much fun over the weekend with the stress of going back to work that causes the increase.
67. Humans can make do longer without food than sleep. While you might feel better prepared to stay up all night partying than to give up eating, that feeling will be relatively short lived. Provided there is water, the average human could survive a month to two months without food depending on their body fat and other factors. Sleep deprived people, however, start experiencing radical personality and psychological changes after only a few sleepless days. The longest recorded time anyone has ever gone without sleep is 11 days, at the end of which the experimenter was awake, but stumbled over words, hallucinated and frequently forgot what he was doing.
68. A simple, moderately severe sunburn damages the blood vessels extensively. How extensively? Studies have shown that it can take four to fifteen months for them to return to their normal condition. Consider that the next time you’re feeling too lazy to apply sunscreen before heading outside.
69. Over 90% of diseases are caused or complicated by stress. That high stress job you have could be doing more than just wearing you down each day. It could also be increasing your chances of having a variety of serious medical conditions like depression, high blood pressure and heart disease.
70. A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated. While it might be gross to think about, the blood in the head may be enough to keep someone alive and conscious for a few seconds after the head has been separated from the body, though reports as to the accuracy of this are widely varying.

Muscles and Bones

Muscles and Bones provide the framework for our bodies and allow us to jump, run or just lie on the couch. Here are a few facts to ponder the next time you’re lying around.

71. It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. Unless you’re trying to give your face a bit of a workout, smiling is a much easier option for most of us. Anyone who’s ever scowled, squinted or frowned for a long period of time knows how it tires out the face which doesn’t do a thing to improve your mood.
72. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood the number is reduced to 206. The reason for this is that many of the bones of children are composed of smaller component bones that are not yet fused like those in the skull. This makes it easier for the baby to pass through the birth canal. The bones harden and fuse as the children grow.
73. We are about 1 cm taller in the morning than in the evening. The cartilage between our bones gets compressed by standing, sitting and other daily activities as the day goes on, making us just a little shorter at the end of the day than at the beginning.
74. The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue. While you may not be able to bench press much with your tongue, it is in fact the strongest muscle in your body in proportion to its size. If you think about it, every time you eat, swallow or talk you use your tongue, ensuring it gets quite a workout throughout the day.
75. The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone. The next time someone suggests you take it on the chin, you might be well advised to take their advice as the jawbone is one of the most durable and hard to break bones in the body.
76. You use 200 muscles to take one step. Depending on how you divide up muscle groups, just to take a single step you use somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 muscles. That’s a lot of work for the muscles considering most of us take about 10,000 steps a day.
77. The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself. If you’ve ever chipped a tooth you know just how sadly true this one is. The outer layer of the tooth is enamel which is not a living tissue. Since it’s not alive, it can’t repair itself, leaving your dentist to do the work instead.
78. It takes twice as long to lose new muscle if you stop working out than it did to gain it. Lazy people out there shouldn’t use this as motivation to not work out, however. It’s relatively easy to build new muscle tissue and get your muscles in shape, so if anything, this fact should be motivation to get off the couch and get moving.
79. Bone is stronger than some steel. This doesn’t mean your bones can’t break of course, as they are much less dense than steel. Bone has been found to have a tensile strength of 20,000 psi while steel is much higher at 70,000 psi. Steel is much heavier than bone, however, and pound for pound bone is the stronger material.
80. The feet account for one quarter of all the human body’s bones. You may not give your feet much thought but they are home to more bones than any other part of your body. How many? Of the two hundred or so bones in the body, the feet contain a whopping 52 of them.

Microscopic Level

Much of what takes place in our bodies happens at a level that we simply can’t see with the naked eye. These facts will show you that sometimes that might be for the best.

81. About 32 million bacteria call every inch of your skin home. Germaphobes don’t need to worry however, as a majority of these are entirely harmless and some are even helpful in maintaining a healthy body.
82. Humans shed and regrow outer skin cells about every 27 days. Skin protects your delicate internal organs from the elements and as such, dries and flakes off completely about once a month so that it can maintain its strength. Chances are that last month’s skin is still hanging around your house in the form of the dust on your bookshelf or under the couch.
83. Three hundred million cells die in the human body every minute. While that sounds like a lot, it’s really just a small fraction of the cells that are in the human body. Estimates have placed the total number of cells in the body at 10-50 trillion so you can afford to lose a few hundred million without a hitch.
84. Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour. You may not think much about losing skin if yours isn’t dry or flaky or peeling from a sunburn, but your skin is constantly renewing itself and shedding dead cells.
85. Every day an adult body produces 300 billion new cells. Your body not only needs energy to keep your organs up and running but also to constantly repair and build new cells to form the building blocks of your body itself.
86. Every tongue print is unique. If you’re planning on committing a crime, don’t think you’ll get away with leaving a tongue print behind. Each tongue is different and yours could be unique enough to finger you as the culprit.
87. Your body has enough iron in it to make a nail 3 inches long. Anyone who has ever tasted blood knows that it has a slightly metallic taste. This is due to the high levels of iron in the blood. If you were to take all of this iron out of the body, you’d have enough to make a small nail and very severeanemia.
88. The most common blood type in the world is Type O. Blood banks find it valuable as it can be given to those with both type A and B blood. The rarest blood type, A-H or Bombay blood due to the location of its discovery, has been found in less than hundred people since it was discovered.
89. Human lips have a reddish color because of the great concentration of tiny capillaries just below the skin. The blood in these capillaries is normally highly oxygenated and therefore quite red. This explains why the lips appear pale when a person is anemic or has lost a great deal of blood. It also explains why the lips turn blue in very cold weather. Cold causes the capillaries to constrict, and the blood loses oxygen and changes to a darker color.

Miscellaneous

Here are a few things you might not have known about all different parts of your anatomy.

90. The colder the room you sleep in, the better the chances are that you’ll have a bad dream. It isn’t entirely clear to scientists why this is the case, but if you are opposed to having nightmares you might want to keep yourself a little toastier at night.
91. Tears and mucus contain an enzyme (lysozyme) that breaks down the cell wall of many bacteria. This is to your advantage, as the mucus that lines your nose and throat, as well as the tears that wet your eyes are helping to prevent bacteria from infecting those areas and making you sick.
92. Your body gives off enough heat in 30 minutes to bring half a gallon of water to a boil. If you’ve seen the Matrix you are aware of the energy potentially generated by the human body. Our bodies expend a large amount of calories keeping us at a steady 98.6 degrees, enough to boil water or even cook pasta.
93. Your ears secrete more earwax when you are afraid than when you aren’t. The chemicals and hormones released when you are afraid could be having unseen effects on your body in the form of earwax. Studies have suggested that fear causes the ears to produce more of the sticky substance, though the reasons are not yet clear.
94. It is not possible to tickle yourself. Even the most ticklish among us do not have the ability to tickle ourselves. The reasonbehind thisis that your brain predicts the tickle from information it already has, like how your fingers are moving. Because it knows and can feel where the tickle is coming from, your brain doesn’t respond in the same way as it would if someone else was doing the tickling.
95. The width of your armspan stretched out is the length of your whole body. While not exact down to the last millimeter, your armspan is a pretty good estimator of your height.
96. Humans are the only animals to produce emotional tears. In the animal world, humans are the biggest crybabies, being the only animals who cry because they’ve had a bad day, lost a loved one, or just don’t feel good.
97. Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do. This doesn’t have a genetic basis, but is largely due to the fact that a majority of the machines and tools we use on a daily basis are designed for those who are right handed, making them somewhat dangerous for lefties to use and resulting in thousands of accidents and deaths each year.
98. Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day. Most men have a much easier time burning fat than women. Women, because of their reproductive role, generally require a higher basic body fat proportion than men, and as a result their bodies don’t get rid of excess fat at the same rate as men.
99. Koalas and primates are the only animals with unique fingerprints. Humans, apes and koalas are unique in the animal kingdom due to the tiny prints on the fingers of their hands. Studies on primates have suggested that even cloned individuals have uniquefingerprints.
100. The indentation in the middle of the area between the nose and the upper lip has a name. It is called the philtrum. Scientists have yet to figure out what purpose this indentation serves, though the ancient Greeks thought it to be one of the most erogenous places on the body.