I am puzzled by the media critic Howard Kurtz's reaction to the federal panel's controversial recommendation on mammograms, which starts out sounding like reportage then turns into, basically, a rant:

I have never seen a government health-care finding get shouted down as loudly or vociferously as this strange recommendation on mammograms.

Almost in unison, journalists, politicians and ultimately White House officials reacted to the advice that women in their 40s no longer seek breast cancer screening with this question: What were they thinking? (And I'm cleaning it up.)

I understand that there's a serious scientific debate over the positive and negative aspects of mammography, and the don't-worry-be-happy-till-you're-50 finding of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force grows out of such research. But that brings us to the essential problem with such studies.

In the broad sphere of health care, it may well be that some tests produce minimal returns -- and, worse, might lead to unnecessary surgery, as the task force noted.

But what if the patient involved is your mother, your sister, your daughter?

Well. I don't want my mother, sister, or daughter to get breast cancer, but nor do I want them to have unnecessary, life-endangering surgery. If the data show that mammograms are causing false alarms, which come with their own grave health risks, then it's conceivable that more mammograms lead to worse health outcomes.

I understand that this panel has just handed opponents of health reform an opportunity: they can cry "rationing"! But the recommendation has to do with risk analysis. Perhaps the recommendation is wrong. Some experts think it is. But the unwillingness of commentators like Kurtz to grasp its basic logic is disconcerting.

Why set the current guidelines at 40 years, after all, and not 30, 25, or 16? If it were your mother, sister, or daughter, wouldn't you want her scanned as much as possible, as early as possible? No, you would not.

The Believer asked the "forensic artist" Barbara Anderson to sketch eight literary criminals, working from descriptive details offered by their creators. In real criminal cases, observes The Believer's Joshua Cohen, it is amazing that sketch artists like Anderson "work from so little information": a few half-remembered glimpses from one shaken witness, perhaps. Likewise, novelists can be stinting with the details: "just a hint here, a shade there."

From such hints, Anderson drew up sketches of such notorious rogues as Dickens' Fagin, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, and Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, and also a few lesser-known bad guys, including Judge Holden, a rapist and murderer in Cormac McCarthy's Gothic-Faulknerian Western "Blood Meridian."

Raskolnikov: "He was, by the way, exceptionally handsome, above the average in height, slim, well-built, with beautiful dark eyes and dark brown hair … his face was pale and distorted."

Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden: "… bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them … His face was serene and strangely childlike."

(Illustrations: Barbara Anderson)

Boston.com commenters circle around it, but I think commenter Gen Hendry over at Fast Company nails the conceptual problem with the redesign of the Patriots helmet that has been proposed by a prominent graphic designer:

[T]hey're not just "The Patriots." They're "The New England Patriots." Up here, being a patriot isn't about wearing a flag pin and isn't proved by wrapping oneself in the stars and stripes. The "patriots" in our team's name *are* the Minute Men and the founding fathers.

Andrew Sullivan:

Just get on with it, my fellow hacks. Know your place. It's cold and lonely work, but we chose this profession and we should get off our high meta-horses and do it.

He's talking about why he's still writing about Sarah Palin, despite some suggestions that she is so transparently attention-craving that perhaps silence would be the wiser response. But the counsel seems to have more general applicability. It's almost worthy of printing on a t-shirt.

Ken Carbone, a graphic designer and blogger for Fast Company, has pronounced the look of the New England Patriots' helmets the bottom of the barrel in a league teeming with bad design work. And he's not just criticizing: he's devised a replacement.

In general, Carbone writes, NFL helmet design is in a rut, "usually involving slapping the team's primary logo on both sides." This works when there's a certain logic to the approach, he thinks, as with the St. Louis Rams (two ram horns) or Philadelphia Eagles (wings).

But when teams like the Washington Redskins and Tampa Bay Buccaneers stamp their "visually complicated logos" on the side of their headgear, he writes, the result is "a graphic mess when televised and, I imagine, even if you're sitting on the fifty-yard line."

"At the very the bottom of the list are the New England Patriots. The Patriots' helmet is plastered with their logo, which comes dangerously close to looking like a wind-swept John Kerry dressed up like a Minute Man."

There has been an upwelling of nostalgia for the Patriots' old helmet insignia this year, provoked by seeing the team play in its "throwback," AFL uniform. But Carbone goes in a different direction, bypassing the dual-logo approach in order to use the entire helmet to make a single statement (as the Cincinnati Bengals do with their tiger stripes).

"A team as legendary as the New England Patriots deserves a more celebratory helmet," he writes. His mock-up includes bold red and white stripes running front-to-back on the top of the helmet; on the sides, bright white stars stand out against a blue background.

UPDATE: Lots of Evel Knievel references in the comments.

UPDATE 2: And "Easy Rider."

UPDATE 3: Okay, the new Patriots design is bombing. What about the proposals for the Redskins and Buccaneers (scroll down)?

In a statement that is less sternly worded than that of The New York Times, the editors of The New York Review of Books write, concerning Peter Galbraith: "We regret that we were not informed of Mr. Galbraith's financial involvements in business concerning Kurdish oil. If we had known about them, we would have wanted them to be disclosed when his articles were published."

If you had to come up with a parody of a contrarian story--turn that c.w. right on its head! zig when the others zag!--you could not do better than this teaser from Slate: "How the Reviled Aztek Could Save G.M."

The Pontiac Aztek, you may recall, was one of the worst-reviewed, worst-selling, worst-resale-value vehicles in modern history. In fact, the phrase "Pontiac Aztek ugly" has entered the vernacular. (From a review, at about.com, of the 2007 Subaru Tribeca S.U.V.: "It's not slipshod, design-by-committee, Pontiac Aztek ugly, but it is ugly nonetheless.")

Yet the article the headline refers to, which appears in Slate's sister publication, The Big Money, says we should reconsider our mockery of the Aztek and view it instead as representative of ahead-of-the-curve thinking. "With the Aztek," writes Matthew DeBord, "GM created something that had SUV size, minus the SUV stigma." It created, in other words, the crossover category--one that today includes the Toyota Highlander, Honda CR-V, and the GMC Terrain (a hit for General Motors today). Indeed, the Terrain "recalls" the Aztek, writes DeBord. (Me, I don't see it. And if there's one thing the Aztek carried under its homely hatchback, it was stigma.)

I think I'll stick with the c.w., on display, for example, in a 2005 Washington Post article about G.M.'s woes. "'The Aztek was a turning point because it did articulate everything that was wrong with the system," said one GM official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job."

The "temptation" that must be avoided at all costs, writes DeBord, will be for the new G.M. "to copy successful market formulas, rather than try to define new market segments." Well, yes and no: that's a false dichotomy. When creativity leads to the original Honda Civic, the minivan (a Dodge innovation), or the Prius, then it's a good thing. When it leads to a comically dismal end product, then it's time to get back to incremental improvement of successful formulas. Good car companies do both.

In honor of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last month, Matthew Battles, a Boston-based journalist and lecturer, has created an online-book-group-cum-group-blog devoted to talking about Lévi-Strauss's classic work "The Savage Mind." The project, called The Savage Readers, is loosely based on the "Infinite Summer" online reading group which, last summer, worked its way through David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," also as a memorial of sorts.

"We've got anthros, artists, and theory-smitten literature profs in on the game so far," Battles writes, in an email. If you're a Lévi-Strauss buff, or just wondered what his intellectual contributions were--why Susan Sontag, among many others, rated him so highly--you might want to check it out.

They're only on Chapter 2, so it should be easy enough to get up to speed.

Matthew Continetti, of The Weekly Standard, reviewing Sarah Palin's new book:

Like a lot of people, as soon as I got my copy of Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue," I immediately thought of the German literary critic Hans Robert Jauss.

I spent part of last weekend reading Clive James's excellent collection "As of this Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002." (Yes, it includes the famous Judith Krantz one.)

On the cover is this blurb, from Anthony Burgess:

"Clive James is the funniest man we have."

But Burgess also appears on page 297, in an essay on George Orwell that originally appeared in The New Yorker. The passage has to do with the reluctance of the British left to think that Orwell was targeting in any way the Soviet Union in his novel "1984":

The late Anthony Burgess sincerely believed that "Nineteen Eighty-Four," because the Ministry of Truth bore such a strong resemblance to the BBC canteen, had been inspired by the condition of post war Britain under rationing. As Orwell said so resonantly in his essay "Notes on Nationalism," "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool."

Burgess, for understandable reasons, is unlikely to retract the blurb.

Like everyone else, I thought it was ridiculous that Bill Belichick went for it on fourth down, at the end of the game, deep in his own territory, instead of punting away and forcing the Colts to drive 70 yards to win.

Like everyone else, however, I may have let bogus common sense get in the way of the cold statistics. I love the idea that the numbers may have been on Belichick's side. Judging from the heavy-breathing statistics-free commentary in most quarters regarding the decision, football is at least a decade behind baseball when it comes to the use of statistical analysis.

Today, when you hear the word "Hartford" the description "verdant and lush" may not come instantly to mind.

But in 1853, when the Reverend Horace Bushnell led a movement to set aside green space--"an outdoor parlor," he called it--in the industrializing city for the enjoyment of the city's citizens, the resulting Bushnell Park became the first municipally funded public park in the United States, according to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group.

The Swiss-born landscape architect Jacob Weidenmann, who helped to shape Bushnell Park, used clusters of trees to wall off the sights of the city, on the philosophy that an city park should be an oasis, not a kind of public square.

By the 1930s, Hartford had one of the most extensive parks systems in the country, one that had been worked on by Frederick Law Olmstead (who, in fact, is buried in the Old North Cemetery, part of the Hartford parks network) and other leading architectural figures.

Today however, the "economic downturn threatens the very survival of Hartford's park system," according to the Cultural Landscape Foundation. "Disinvestment and deferred maintenance starting in the 1960s has eroded and weakened the historic landscape." Responsibility for the parks is unproductively split among various city entities, it adds, none of which have a vision for how to make use of the rich inheritance.

Which explains why the Hartford Parks System finds itself on the Cultural Landscape Foundation's 2009 "Landslide" list of endangered American spaces. It's the only New England spot on this year's list.

(Photos: via Cultural Landscape Foundation)

Garry Wills argues that President Obama should order the withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, even though it would be political suicide:

During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama said he would rather be a one-term president than give up on his goals. Here is a goal no other president we can imagine would have a possibility of reaching. Presidents who just kick the can down the road are easy to come by. Lost lives and limbs are not.

In a move befitting his subject, the Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker has come up with a snappy name for a recurrent flaw in the work of the megaselling journalist Malcolm Gladwell: the Igon Value Problem.

(Five years ago, I briefly profiled the work of a psychologist Gladwell had written about in his book "Blink"--Paul Ekman, who claimed he could identify liars via their facial expressions. Gladwell endorsed and trumpeted Ekman's supposed breakthrough. But many psychologists, it turned out, don't think Ekman can do what he claims to be able to do. That kind of dismissal of countervailing evidence in pursuit of striking, contrarian conclusions is one of several things Pinker objects to in Gladwell's work.)

It makes sense: wound coverings that secrete proteins and other good stuff to speed the healing process.

Dr. Damien Bates, Chief Medical Officer at Organogenesis, creator of this new product, hates the name the reporter has given it. "It's living," he objects. "Meat isn't living."

The debate continues over whether, or how, the foreign-policy expert Peter Galbraith's financial arrangements with a Norwegian oil company affected his actions as an advisor to the Kurds. Galbraith played a part--how substantial is a subject of dispute--in negotiations over how much political and economic autonomy Kurdistan would be granted, after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, vis-a-vis the central Iraqi government. More independence equalled more money for Galbraith, it now seems, since the Norwegian oil company had access to Kurdish oil.

Journalistically, however, there's no question that Galbraith, son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, should have disclosed his financial interests when he wrote on matters involving relations between the Kurds and the central Iraqi government. The New York Times today published a statement to that effect: It effectively says that the pieces Galbraith wrote for the Op-ed page from 2004 on were tarnished by that omission. (The editors say Galbraith signed a standard contract attesting that he had no financial interests related to what he was writing about, which was flatly untrue.)

No word yet from the New York Review of Books--Galbraith's main platform for journalistic commentary.* I certainly would have liked to have known, as I read his long polemical essays there in favor of Kurdish independence, that he stood to earn $100 million or more if his proposals were enacted.

It really is not sufficient that, as he told the Globe: "The business interest, including my investment into Kurdistan, was consistent with my political views."

*UPDATE, 11/18: The New York Review speaks.

On a walk this morning, I listened to an "All Songs Considered" podcast on musical trends of the past decade, part of a decade-capping series for the NPR feature. (Let's sidestep the argument over whether 2009 is, in fact, the last year of the decade.) It featured a good discussion of some noteworthy phenomena, including the appropriation of hiphop by mainstream rock and pop artists, the effect on nostalgia of the iPod (old favorites never fade into memory; if you have a big-enough MP3 player, they're literally in your pocket), the rise of mashups ("The Gray Album"), etc.

One thing that leapt out, however, was a certain inconsistency--the unexamined assumptions--in an extended conversation about musical boundaries. One the one hand, the podcast's participants, who include the genial host, Bob Boilen, and the incisive Carrie Brownstein, of Monitor Mix, argued that the iPod and new prevailing tastes have erased all boundaries between genres. Hit shuffle and a rap song segues into an old piece of Americana; Randy Newman fades away and the Minutemen kick in.

On the other hand, the podcast itself enforced some rigid, undiscussed lines of demarcation. Brownstein proclaimed the show American Idol to be "anti-music" and "anti-art," and the American Idol winner Taylor Hicks was roundly mocked. Fair enough, of course, but the criteria of judgment went undiscussed. Given the theme that music consumers (and critics) have become omnivores, the erection of such a firm barrier was striking.

On the other end of the spectrum from glossy pop, it was unthinkable that any participant would highlight a jazz track or a new piece of concert music (so-called "classical" music) on the podcast. Also absent were Nashville country and heavy metal, to name just two (popular!) subgenres of pop music. So something interesting is going on with boundaries in popular music, but some impermeable ones remain. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but critics who sing the praises of tearing down walls should be more aware of which ones remain.

Monitor Mix is also running a series of items, some from guest contributors, on musical trends of the '00s. Douglas Wolk touches on a crucial, non-obvious one: the loudness wars. In the last 20 years, recording engineers have been making songs sound louder at any given volume level, at the cost of reduced sonic quality. The post comes complete with a video tutorial.

(Graphic via The Wall Street Journal)

"The Washington Times has to take responsibility for people going to hell in America."

--Unification Church leader Rev. Sun Myung Moon, speaking in September.

This month, one of Moon's sons, perhaps acting in accordance with his father's wishes, perhaps not--much is murky here--fired the business-side leadership of Washington's "other" newspaper, which has traditionally had a conservative bent. As a result, the paper's executive editor, John Solomon, left, too. He has never been known as a conservative activist and had only been hired in 2008.

Apparently, in condemning America, the elder Moon was thinking largely of "homosexuality and lesbianism."

Hyun-jin Preston Moon made the decisions regarding the Times, according to Talking Points Memo. He has apparently been feuding with his younger brother, Hyung-jin Moon, over the future control of the Unification Church and its holdings.

"Both men are Harvard-educated and revered in the church," says TPM.

(Via Politico)

Design ObserverJohn Gall, the art director for Vintage Books,* asked 21 noted designers and artists to create new covers for the works of Vladimir Nabokov. The common thread: each cover was to be conceived as a specimen box, of sorts, to reflect the author's interest in lepidoptery.

"Invitation to a Beheading," designed by Helen Yentus and Jason Booher as part of the Nabokov Specimen Box Project

*Correction, 11/13: Design Observer is highlighting the work, but this project, as a commenter points out, is quite real: these covers will appear on future Vintage editions of the books.

Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford historian and author of "The Nazi War on Cancer" (1999) and "Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know About Cancer" (1995), has earned $500,000 as an expert witness in suits filed against tobacco companies. He works on the plaintiffs' side, arguing that tobacco companies knew that their products were deadly but that they hid this knowledge from consumers.

That eye-popping figure is just one of the juicy details in a Chronicle of Higher Education article* about the rough politics at the nexus of scholarship and the legal campaign against Big Tobacco.

Lawyers for tobacco companies are demanding to see the unfinished manuscript of Proctor's next book--hoping to mine it for information to use while cross-examining him--and a Florida judge has authorized a subpoena, which Proctor is fighting.

Meanwhile, Proctor has mounted a campaign against what the Chronicle calls the "much larger group of historians who do work for the other side" -- that is, for tobacco companies. (That alleged imbalance is itself startling.) Proctor has argued in the past that historians who work as paid expert witnesses for tobacco companies should be forced to disclose that fact when they publish on related subjects in scholarly journals. Unlike medicine, history journals presently have no such rules to combat these supposed financial conflicts of interest. Presumably Proctor would have to disclose his own role under his proposal.

Now tobacco-company lawyers are going after Proctor for what the Chronicle summarizes as "illegal witness tampering and witness harassment." What Proctor did is exchange email with a historian at the University of Florida, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis, telling her that he thought it was unethical that--as, indeed, was the case--several grad students in the Florida history department were doing part-time work for a historian who consulted for tobacco-side lawyers.

The students were working for Gregg L. Michel, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They had responded to a job notice that a University of Florida professor posted to a departmental email list.

Smocovitis says she raised some informal objections about the work the students were doing, but her colleagues told her to butt out, and she dropped the issue.

Underscoring the toxicity of the tobacco issue where academic careers are concerned, the author of the Chronicle piece, Peter Schmidt, wrote that the newspaper "has chosen not to identify the students by name unless they agreed to be interviewed on the record, which none did."

At least so far, Chronicle subscribers see few heroes: "A plague on both their houses," wrote one commenter.

*The link is free for five days. Subscribers can access it permanently here.

(Photo: Linda A. Cicero, Stanford University)