Mukhtaran Bari

Thought this article, “Raped, Kidnapped and Silenced,” was worth linking to. (Use http://www.bugmenot.com to view the article if you’re not registered on the New York Times Web site.) I first read about Mukhtaran Bibi last year, most likely in the New York Times, and Newsweek later ran a short article on her. Her story’s quite amazing, and it’s upsetting what’s happened to her.

Anonymous Sources

In a case illustrating the peril of relying upon anonymous sources, Newsweek retracted its story that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a Koran down the toilet. Read a BBC report about the situation here. Read a statement from Newsweek editor Mark Whitaker here.

On Pain

Terri Schiavo died this morning. But what I wanted to write about is Schiavo’s problems with bulimia, which I have not really seen expounded upon by anyone. Did find this AP piece that states, “It is a cruel twist lost on no one close to the case: A woman who is said to have struggled with an eating disorder is now in the middle of a court battle over whether her feeding tube should be removed so that she can starve to death.”

On Pain and Death

A friend turned me on to the blog No Milk Please. Hilarious. I wish I could write as wittily as the author.

So coming upon the following quote makes me feel that I can actually improve as a writer, despite all the edits on the latest draft of an article:

There have now been many studies of elite performers — concert violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve accumulated. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself. K. Anders Ericsson, a cognitive psychologist and an expert on performance, notes that the most important role that innate factors play may be in a person’s willingness to engage in sustained training. He has found, for example, that top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That’s why, for example, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But, more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.
–Atul Gawande, “The Learning Curve,” The New Yorker, Jan. 28, 2002

In addition to writing for the New Yorker, Gawande has a book out called Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science. I haven’t read it yet, but from what I’ve read in the New Yorker, Gawande is an excellent writer. He really makes the field of medicine accessible to lay readers.

[Later in the day]

Was listening to the Brian Lehrer Show today and heard the tail end of a discussion on “whether doctors work for profit or for the benefit of their patients.” Apparently an article by Gawande in this week’s New Yorker prompted the discussion. So that might be worth checking out.

And then on the Leonard Lopate Show, Garret Keizer spoke about issues surrounding the Terri Schiavo case. He made really good points, which I’ll try to post here later. But Keizer’s article, “Life Everlasting,” published in the Feb. 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine, can be read here. In the article, he makes such points as the following:

Women in Iraq

I finally got around to reading last week’s issue of Newsweek and found the article “Iraq’s Hidden War” discouraging and depressing. The article is about violence that has been perpretrated against Iraqi women as Islamist extremists struggle for control of the country. Women activists have been murdered. Women who appear in public without veils have been attacked. I find it hard to believe that this sort of violence didn’t occur during Saddam’s reign, but the article claims that prewar Iraq “had a good record on women’s rights, at least by the standards of the region.”