DON'T EAT FAT
If, as ex-tobacco scientist Jeffrey Wigand told 60 Minutes, the cigarette is a delivery system for nicotine, then the French fry might be considered a delivery system for fat, and though the effects of smoking and eating fat are quite different, a diet consisting of large quantities of fries may have serious consequences for your health. Malcolm Gladwell reports on the issue in this week's New Yorker: "As many Americans now die every year from obesity-related illnesses—heart disease and complications of diabetes—as from smoking, and the fast-food toll grows heavier every year." Not that every fat is bad—some are essential to good health—but the fat in fries, so-called "trans unsaturated fat," can, as Gladwell writes, "wreak havoc with the body's ability to regulate cholesterol."Walter Willet, the scientist who identified the substance, says this fat leads to at least 30,000 unnecessary deaths in America each year. Junk food is also the subject of Eric Schlosser's new book Fast Food Nation, which was reviewed by Slate's Rob Walker in the New York Times. (A chapter about abattoirs was published by Rolling Stone.)

DID ANYONE SAY McDONALD'S?
Currently, McDonald's has 28,000 restaurants in 120 countries, yet as the company's Web site points out, "on any day, even as the market leader, McDonald's serves less than one percent of the world's population." Room for growth, indeed, and according to a report published by the United Nations' Population Division, there will be 9.3 billion people on the planet by 2050—though who's to say whether McDonald's will be tending to one percent of humankind in 50 years' time. (Assuming normal service continues, McDonald's can expect to sell almost 34.8 billion meals a year—not the numbers Woody Allen anticipated in Sleeper.) Asia and Africa will witness the biggest population increases, while Europe's numbers will whither. Asked by the New York Times to explain why America's population is expected to rise, Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute said: "The U.S. is the most fertile of developed nations. …My pet theory—and you can't prove this—is that it has to do with greater religiosity than in Europe or Japan."

OH, WHAT A LOVELY WAR
Catesby Leigh of the Weekly Standard believes it is "politically correct" to say "I hate war." The words are Franklin Delano Roosevelt's, and they appear on the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., though the sentiment has been expressed by many people on many occasions—and, one imagines, by almost anyone who has fought in war. Leigh, however, believes that the presence of these words reflects a larger confusion about the nation's war memorials, though he refuses to believe that they may resonate with a public that is mightily ambivalent about warfare. "This confusion," he writes, "this anti-monumental monumentalism—is the overwhelming feature of memorial architecture today, and it is ruining America's public spaces. Modernism failed, in large part, because it could not satisfy our need for monuments: To be a human being …is to desire the monuments that modernism could not provide. … Every memorial and public building seems to be at odds with every other, and time and again one finds architects trying to duck the problem of monumentality by hiding their memorials…." The solution, so Leigh argues, are big sunny arches, just like those built by the Romans to commemorate a triumphant victory over those ghastly savages in northern Europe or the Middle East. One can only wonder which will be first the first war to receive the triumphal treatment—Korea or Vietnam or that hollow victory in the desert commonly known as the Gulf War?

PATIENTS' PATENT RIGHTS
If you (or someone you know) suffer from a rare genetic disease or affliction, how can you use your condition or illness to your best advantage? As the New Scientist suggests, you could follow the example of Patrick and Sharon Terry who founded PXE International after learning that their child had Pseudoxanthoma elasticum, which, as their useful Web site explains, is "a heritable connective tissue disorder. Calcification of connective tissue occurs in various places in the body, especially the skin, eyes, and arteries." As the NS reports: "In the 1990s, they set up blood and tissue banks and convinced patients with PXE to donate samples. These, they offered to scientists on the strict understanding that PXE International would receive a stake in any intellectual property that emerged. Fortunately, enlightened researchers and universities accepted their offer. Last year, when the gene for PXE was discovered with help from the group's samples, PXE International took control of the patent rights. The disease affects only 1 in 100,000 people, and no company is going to invest heavily in developing drugs that will sell to only a relatively few customers. Here, the Terrys have a plan. The PXE gene is implicated in wrinkling of the skin and in heart disease, areas that cosmetics and drugs companies are falling over themselves to research."

ANOTHER OUTBREAK OF EUROPEAN HYSTERIA?
Foot-and-mouth disease, a virulent virus that attacks animals with cloven feet (for example, hogs, cattle, sheep, deer, and goats), has broken out in Britain. (The aptly named thepigsite.com  explains the nature of the disease.) There's no cure, and inoculation is impractical for a variety of reasons. The origins of the outbreak remain uncertain, yet commentators have ransacked all the big and familiar questions about the modern food supply in the hope of finding something to blame. The Financial Times says the outbreak is a reflection of a farming industry tethered to the idea of producing pork, lamb, and beef at the cheapest possible price, while the BBC and various other news outlets blame the disappearance of the rural abattoir. The head of Britain's farmers union fingers globalization. "Is it a coincidence that we had classical swine fever in East Anglia last year of an Asian origin, and foot and mouth now, also of an Asian origin? It raises questions about freer world trade." Since it's possible that FMD has traversed the English Channel, the European Commission and member governments have adopted measures to halt the spread of the disease. According to the {{Frankfurter Allegeimene Zeitung#2:http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FCC-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={AE44CD31-0A14-11D5-A3B3-009027BA22E4}}}, German Consumer Affairs Minister Renate Künast "called for an end to the mass shipment of live animals throughout the European Union and said Europe's regional markets should be strengthened instead." But with no firm evidence as to how foot-and-mouth arrived in Britain—not only can FMD be carried by infected animals and animal feed, it can also attach itself to clothing and be found in food for human consumption (as the Times reports, in Germany "all uneaten on-board lunches found on aircraft from London are being taken away and incinerated")—blaming one part of the food supply or another seems premature.

ANNALS OF SELF-PROMOTION
Among the people presumed to have written The Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation—an anonymous book on evolutionary theory that preceded Darwin's The Origin of the Species—was Ada, Countess of Lovelace and Byron's daughter. She was not the author (years later, a Scottish publisher Richard Chambers   was so identified); nor was she, as many Ada fanatics believe, the inventor of the computer. In The New Yorker, Jim Holt writes about the Lovelace myth. Ada was a colleague of sorts to Charles Babbage, who developed a never-realized plan to build a "Thinking Machine," and her notes on Babbage's contraption became a sensation when they were published. But as Holt says: "It is doubtful whether Ada herself ‘originated' any of the ideas contained in her notes, except perhaps some of the more exuberantly speculative ones. On all technical and scientific points, regardless of how trifling, her letters show that she deferred to Babbage. Babbage, for his part, had good reason to connive in the fiction that the work was primarily Ada's: it not only made her notes a more effective piece of propaganda for his Analytical Engine but also enabled him to escape responsibility—on the pretense of not having been consulted—for some of her more hyperbolic claims."

SPIRIT OF THE BOTTLE
One of the subjects discussed at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting was wine connoisseurship—" Wine and Conversation: The Semantics of Talking About Taste." As billed by the AAAS, the symposium addressed "the problem of how linguistic semantics connects with sensory experience, the fundamental neurobiology and psychophysics of the human sense of taste, the vocabulary used to describe wines and the consistency with which it is applied, and the chemistry of wine tasting as it forms part of the professional discipline of Oenology." According to Wine Spectator, one of the participants, Ann Noble of the University of California at Davis, objects to the idea that a wine can be described as either masculine or feminine. "The problem I have with that is you need a linguist to translate and guess what someone means. It also often comes from a chauvinistic perspective." If a wine should therefore be neither full-bodied nor lithe, it nevertheless has an unavoidable ancestral spirit, although the origin of certain grape varieties has until recently remained mysterious. As the Economist reports, there's more bastard in the bottle than you might think. "By applying genetic techniques more familiar in the courtroom than the pressing house, [Carole Meredith] has been able to clarify the relationships between many of the great wine-making grapes that dominate both the old and the new worlds. On the way she has shown that a number of noble grapes have some surprisingly vulgar ancestors."

THE SORROWS OF PUBLISHING
Much of this week's Los Angeles Times Book Review is devoted to the future of book publishing—a question that has, over the last three decades or so, developed a genre all of its own. Indeed, hardly a year goes by without someone pronouncing that the book trade is just about to enter rigor mortis. Marian Wood, a well-known and well-respected New York publisher, identifies the chief problem: Management—more specifically, the corporate management imposed by large media conglomerates. "What may surprise some is that the immediate impact of the bottom line was not some ruthless hacking away at literature. The truly important effect was that this was the moment when management ceased to be drawn from editorial or even marketing ranks and publishing houses began to be headed by MBAs, men with little or no connection to, or knowledge of, the product or the customer, and when middle management ceased to be a bookkeeper and a contracts manager and became bloated with hundreds of financial officers all dutifully engaged in doing the numbers ... But neither could publishing any longer ignore the imperatives of modern management. Problems … of management, leadership and finance have been with us for quite a while, though perhaps not as prominently as today."

THE SHAPE OF SMALL THINGS TO COME
In Saturday's "Arts and Ideas" section of the New York Times, Emily Eakin wrote about a vogue for everyday objects that's sweeping through humanities departments across the country. "In fields like art, architecture, history and even English, a growing number of experts are turning to things in an effort to better understand the past. … The academic name for the stuff of everyday life is material culture." As if to emphasize its own interest in quotidian things—or perhaps not to be outdone by the academy—the Times published an article about marginalia  in the same issue and in the same section. According to Edward Rothstein, there's much significance in the notes readers write in the margins of books. "Marginalia create a form of extended argument in which the reader has the upper hand, taking over the text. But the text also stakes its claims: it determines (literally) the boundaries within which a reader's reactions are to be constrained."

THE CITY AND ITS NEW PILLARS
Richard Friedman was installed as the head of National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) at the end of last year. In that capacity, he has considerable say over the design and construction of new buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C. As the Boston Globe puts it, the commission's powers are "sweeping … It has the right to approve or disapprove any proposed building or monument in the District of Columbia, public or private, if the building has an impact on the federal interest, and 'impact' can mean anything from looks to shadows to traffic." In a statement found on the NCPC's Web site," Extending the Legacy: Planning America's Capital for the 21st Century," the commission says they hope to "preserve … the historic character and open space of the Mall and its adjacent ceremonial corridors while accommodating growth and new development." In an interview with the Globe, Friedman outlines his views: "There are already 100 monuments in Washington, and dozens more are proposed. They can't all go on the Mall. If you put too many in one place, you get a memorial ghetto. … I want to site them in less active places, where they can be triggers for new development… I feel as if I've been training all my life for this job. If we're the greatest country, we should have the greatest capital. Washington should be one of the 10 greatest cities in the world. " A bold ambition, but to what extend can (and should) a non-elected federal official hope to carry out such a plan? Is a great city one where citizens do not have their say?