Virginia Hughes

I found a delicious historical nugget tonight while researching for an article-in-progress about the link between autism and prenatal infection.

In 1971, Stella Chess published a paper about the 1964 rubella epidemic in New York City. She found that an unusually high number of kids with autism in 1970 were born to women who had been infected with rubella. That’s interesting (especially for my article). But what really shocked me was something Chess mentioned briefly at the end of the introduction:

A 1964 British survey of children in Middlesex aged 8 to 10 years found that 4.5 per 10,000 children were autistic….We recognize that the diagnosis of autism requires rigorous justification. The condition is often loosely defined and overdiagnosed.

Wait a minute…4.5 per 10,000 and she thought doctors were overdiagnosing? Now a half-century since that survey, autism is found in about 1 of every 150 kids, and most researchers I’ve interviewed say that even that is probably an underestimate.

Of course, now I’m going to get a few anti-vaxers in the comments telling me that this is evidence of an “autism epidemic” in the last few decades. This is almost certainly not true, as I’ve reported twice. Still, it’s interesting to see how the field’s perspective has changed since then. And how it hasn’t: Autism, unfortunately, is still “often loosely defined.”

You’ll never guess what’s in this photo:

From the NYT:

The black and green spheres are tiny particles of gunshot residue nestled among fibers of a cotton T-shirt, magnified 200 times. The black residue particle is roughly one-twentieth the size of the period at the end of this sentence. In research presented at an American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans, Garrett Lee Burleson and Jorn Chi Chung of Sam Houston State University in Texas have developed a test that can identify gunshot residues from a single particle. Some current tests rely on the presence of lead, which is being phased out of ammunition in some places because of environmental concerns; other tests can result in many false positives.

“At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot,” writes Rachel Donadio in a recent piece in the Times Book Review, “literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.”

Soooo true. During my rather long stint with Match.com last year, friends thought I was pretty open-minded. He’s an obsessive marathon runner? No problem. Only wears metrosexual embroidered dress shirts two sizes too small? Why not? Seventy-plus pounds heavier than “About Average” (and thus, not only obese, but a liar)? Well, you never know.

But no matter how otherwise good-looking, articulate, or humorous a potential match’s profile, his response in the “Last Read” field was make-or-break. The Da Vinci Code was a deal breaker.

Donadio claims it’s a gender issue:

Brainy women are probably more sensitive to literary deal breakers than are brainy men. (Rare is the guy who’d throw a pretty girl out of bed for revealing her imperfect taste in books.) After all, women read more, especially when it comes to fiction. “It’s really great if you find a guy that reads, period,” said Beverly West, an author of “Bibliotherapy: The Girl’s Guide to Books for Every Phase of Our Lives.” Jessa Crispin, a blogger at the literary site Bookslut.com, agrees. “Most of my friends and men in my life are nonreaders,” she said, but “now that you mention it, if I went over to a man’s house and there were those books about life’s lessons learned from dogs, I would probably keep my clothes on.”

However comforting/nauseating it may be to think that girls are brainier/more sensitive than boys, I know plenty of guys who care about books, and their girlfriend’s taste in books.

On her blog, Donadio asked readers to submit their own literary deal breakers. A few dozen of the 388 agreed with me about The Da Vinci Code (and other Dan Brown books). A few dozen more listed Ayn Rand, Danielle Steel, and Ann Coulter. But the vast majority were readers appalled at this kind of dating discrimination, calling people who do it: “petty;” “pretentious;” “judgmental;” “unoriginal, elite, and self-important;” “absurdly stereotypical;” etc.

For me (and probably for Donadio and the sources in her article), the aversion to bad writing has more to do with common values than pretension. I’m a writer, I value good writing, and probably wouldn’t get along with someone who didn’t.

(Anybody have an atypical literary deal breaker, preferably with an interesting back story? I’d love to hear about it…)