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Coffee Drinking Linked to Less Depression in Women
Morning pick-me-up? For many women, the mood-elevating effects of a cup of coffee may be more than fleeting.
A new study shows that women who regularly drink coffee — the fully caffeinated kind — have a 20 percent lower risk of depression than nondrinkers. Decaf, soft drinks, chocolate, tea and other sources of caffeine did not offer the same protection against depression, possibly because of their lower levels of caffeine, the authors say.
Dr. Albert Ascherio, an author of the study and professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said it was too early to recommend that women load up on extra lattes. More research is needed, he said, and “a very high level of caffeine can increase anxiety” and insomnia, potentially reversing any mood-lifting effects.
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How Much to Drink During a Marathon
The 2011 Chicago Marathon on Sunday marks the beginning of the fall marathon season in the United States, culminating on Nov. 6 with the New York City race. In those two events alone, more than 80,000 runners will attempt to cover the 26.2-mile marathon distance. But two newly released studies suggest that there are reasons to be concerned about some of the racers’ readiness. The studies show that a worrying large percentage of distance runners may not know how to drink.
Some runners may be drinking too much water or other fluids. Others may be taking in too little. And a disconcerting majority don’t seem to be concerned about whether they are drinking a safe amount at all, according to the new reports.
Attitudes and expert guidelines about how much fluid people should drink during prolonged endurance events have changed drastically in the past 15 years. A 1996 Position Stand from the American College of Sports Medicine concluded that “athletes should start drinking early and at regular intervals in an attempt to consume fluids at a rate sufficient to replace all the water lost through sweating (i.e., body weight loss), or consume the maximal amount that can be tolerated.” Many of us who ran a marathon in the 1990s were cautioned to “stay ahead” of our thirst, with the warning that by the time we felt thirsty, we would be clinically dehydrated. (Formal definitions of dehydration vary, but most experts agree that losing more than 3 percent of your body weight can be considered dehydration.)
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Doha Film Institute to fund production of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
With just under three weeks to go until the start of the Doha Tribeca Film Festival and the world premiere of Arabian epic Black Gold, the Doha Film Institute (DFI) has announced that The Reluctant Fundamentalist will be the second major international film to receive funding.
Based on the bestselling Booker Prize-nominated book by Mohsin Hamid, the film adaption of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is being directed by Mira Nair, with Riz Ahmed in the lead role of Changez, a Pakistani Princeton-graduate who tells the story of his love affair with America and his eventual abandonment of the country after the events of September 11. Kate Hudsen, Lieve Schrieber and Kiefer Sutherland also star.
The film started shooting earlier in the week on location in Atlanta, New York, Lahore, Delhi and Istanbul. No release date has yet been set.
“My father lived in Lahore before the partition of India and Pakistan,” says Nair, who is producing the film with the Doha Film Institute through her production company, Mirabai Films. “I am inspired to make a contemporary film about Pakistan, especially in this day and age when the perceived schism between Islamists and the Western world becomes more pronounced each day.”
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SAT reading scores drop to lowest point in decades
By Michael Alison Chandler, Published: September 15
SAT reading scores for graduating high school seniors this year reached the lowest point in nearly four decades, reflecting a steady decline in performance in that subject on the college admissions test, the College Board reported Wednesday.
In the Washington area, one of the nation’s leading producers of college-bound students, educators were scrambling to understand double-digit drops in test scores in Montgomery and Prince William counties and elsewhere.
“Once you hit a certain mark, you want to maintain that,” said Frieda Lacey, deputy superintendent for Montgomery schools. “Don’t think the decline didn’t bother us. It really did.”
Nationally, the reading score for the Class of 2011, including public- and private-school students, was 497, down three points from the previous year and 33 points from 1972, the earliest year for which comparisons are possible. The average math score was 514, down one point from last year but up five from 1972.
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What Do Egypt’s Writers Do Now?
The Egyptian revolution is over, the army wields power and the new government is in disarray. Tensions between Christians and Muslims are ascendant and members of the elite are leaving the country in droves while those who remain bemoan the masses as ignorant ideologues. This is the Egypt of Waguih Ghali’s “Beer in the Snooker Club,” a coming-of-age novel set in 1952 that, much like “The Catcher in the Rye” in America, articulated the identity crisis of a generation. Ghali’s characters — young, precocious, cosmopolitan — are lost in the bewildering aftermath of the military coup that overthrew the pliant boy-king Farouk. They pine for the easeful gambling, womanizing and drinking of the past even as they scorn both the ancien régime’s sordid pretensions and the new regime’s inability to deliver on its vaulted promises; “We have the worst of both systems,” one of them declares, exasperated. Ghali, who published his novel in 1964 and committed suicide five years later in the bathtub of his British editor’s Primrose Hill apartment, took the fall of the monarchy as his subject. Still, his tale presents uncanny parallels to today’s Egypt, where artists, intellectuals and youth at large are beginning to fashion a new cultural republic of sorts even as they also struggle to find their bearings.
Under Mubarak, the Egyptian literary scene, long the center of the Arab cultural universe, floundered. While the state remained the primary patron of Egyptian literature, absorbing and co-opting anyone it possibly could, many authors escaped prickly Egyptian censors by publishing their books in more lenient Lebanon. Meanwhile, plush literary foundations and glittering prizes popped up in the much wealthier gulf countries. Still, there were pockets of activity. In the late 1990s, a former journalist named Mohamed Hashem founded Merit, a publisher credited with nurturing a new Egyptian avant-garde. Merit published Alaa al-Aswany, the dentist turned literary star whose “Yacoubian Building” captured the jaded grandeur of downtown Cairo. It also put out Ahmed Alaidy, whose stories of youthful mall culture used a vernacular Arabic — complete with text messages — that challenged the high orthodoxy of classical Arabic, and Khaled al-Berry, who skillfully narrated his experiences as a teenage jihadist in “Life Is More Beautiful Than Paradise.”
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The Dinner Guest Who Never Left
Ali Smith loves words. She loves playing with them, calling attention to them, listening to them as if they were members of a vast extended family, each precious in its own right and she their fair-minded parent, determined not to play favorites. She can give the word “but” such a star turn that you wonder why you’d ever taken it for granted.
Smith’s love of language lights up all her books, a body of work that encompasses four previous novels and four volumes of short stories, and that has garnered prizes including the Whitbread Award in Britain. But (Oh there it is! As one of Smith’s characters says, “The thing I particularly like about the word but . . . is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”) Smith’s wordplay never comes at the expense of the many other facets in her complicated creations — characters, places, ideas.
Smith’s new novel, “There but for the,” is a witty, provocative urban fable about an unexpected guest who shows up at a dinner party in the London suburb of Greenwich and then, midway through, locks himself inside the guest bedroom and refuses to leave. The novel is divided into four main sections, “There,” “But,” “For” and “The,” though the title phrase is nowhere spoken, leaving us to wonder which “There” Smith is referring to, and whether she intends for her readers’ minds to echo with the phrase “Grace of God Go I” — and if so, which God and, for that matter, which I. Such uncertainties typify Smith’s sly and circuitous method. She is not a writer to seize on if linearity and a clear plotline are what you’re after. On the other hand, if you enjoy surprising, often comic insights into contemporary life, she’s someone to relish.
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Must Read 2 Oct 2011
What’s Next for the Arab Spring? Author Marwan Muasher
Moammar Qaddafi’s exit from Libya is a reminder that the Arab awakening will not just fizzle out, despite what some observers are saying. Recently, commentators pointed to the public cheers heard in Egypt as the army pushed protesters out of Tahrir Square as a signal that the uprisings were petering out and the hope of the Arab Spring would soon be lost. The doomsayers were wrong.
Indeed, the uprisings are entering a difficult but inevitable phase where the two sides — the protesters and the leaders — are at a loss on how to proceed. Read More
The Ghosts of Israel’s Past Author John Barry
“There were two hunters,” Yitzhak Rabin began. It was 1975, and Rabin was prime minister of Israel. He was trying to explain to a visiting reporter Israel’s policy toward “the Palestinian question.” And, as usual, he was telling a story to make his point. “The hunters were stalking deer in thick brush. Suddenly, a deer appeared in front of them. They fired and the deer dropped. They took the deer by its antlers and began to drag it back toward their car. But the deer’s antlers caught in the brush. Finally one of the hunters suggested: ‘If we drag it the other way, the antlers won’t catch like that.’ So they took the hind legs of the animal and began to drag it the other way. After a while, the first hunter said: ‘There, didn’t I say it would be easier this way?’ ‘Yes,’ the other replied, ‘but aren’t we getting a long way from the car?’ ” Read More
My Unfinished 9/11 Business – Author BILL KELLER
Ten years after the attacks, we memorialize the loss and we mark the heroism, but there is no organized remembrance of the other feelings that day aroused: the bewilderment, the vulnerability, the impotence. It may be difficult to recall with our attention now turned inward upon a faltering economy, but the suddenly apparent menace of the world awakened a bellicose surge of mission and made hawks of many — including me — who had a lifelong wariness of the warrior reflex. Read More
If Obama Is a One-Term President – Author JULIAN E. ZELIZER
“I’D rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.
With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history. Read More
Love and War – Author JANINE DI GIOVANNI
MOGADISHU, winter, 2002. The sun was beginning to drop as I climbed the roof of my guesthouse and began the finicky task of setting up my satellite telephone. From the roof, I could hear the call to prayer from a nearby muezzin. It was the time of evening between twilight and night — what the French call “entre le chien et le loup.” I took out my flashlight and began to phone the other world. Read More
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