What Your Hair Tells Your Doctor

Does early graying or balding mean a shorter life span? According to a study of 20,000 men and women in the Copenhagen City Heart Study, neither baldness nor grayness are linked to premature death. The study, which followed the 20,000 participants over three years, found "no correlation between the mortality and the extent of graying of the hair or baldness or facial wrinkles in either of the sexes, irrespective of age."  Whew!

But even though this big random study indicates that having gray hair doesn't mean a person will die earlier, there is a risk associated with having prematurely gray hair. Dr. Lawrence Wood, the head of the Thyroid Foundation of America, recommends that women who start going gray before the age of 30 should be checked for a variety of auto-immune disorders. According to Wood, "juvenile (Type 1) diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, colitis and hypothyroidism are all conditions that may track with premature graying."

The thyroid, a gland just below the Adam's apple, produces a hormone that is essential for the muscles, organs and brain to function properly. Hypothyroidism, a condition created when the gland produces too little of the hormone, can cause a wide range of symptoms: fatigue, depression, and even high cholesterol.

I wish I had known this when I developed hypothyroidism about six years ago. I felt blue, like I was "under water," and began to gain weight. But it took a while to diagnose my condition - those symptoms are also the same as normal signs of aging.

Had I known that starting to go gray in one's 20s - as I did - is a signal to pay closer attention for the onset of auto-immune diseases, I certainly would have been more vocal in letting my doctors know that beneath my dyed hair I was gray.

Once I was diagnosed, I saw an endocrinologist who was emphatic in his support for checking thyroid function early - particularly in childbearing years.

Left untreated, hypothyroidism can lead to miscarriage, premature birth and pre-eclampsia. So regardless of whether you color your hair, do let your doctor know if you're gray underneath the dye, and when you started going gray.

On Hating Repetition And Trying New Things

On the eve of his first one-man show in New York, Jim Sutherland's Wall Street Journal profile of a man who refuses to be pigeon-holed captured my imagination. "IN THE CENTER of the Venn diagram that overlaps "artist," "philosopher," "designer" and "architect" sits Gaetano Pesce.

The 73-year-old Italian has spent more than a half century designing objects that defy description, furniture fraught with deeper meaning and buildings so visionary that most have never been built. He has crafted ashtrays in the shape of bleeding hands, doorways overhung by buttocks and sofas that pay homage to the Manhattan skyline. No color has been neglected, and no material has been safe: Rags and extruded polyurethane have been formed into armchairs; vinyl disks have been turned into shoes. Resin? It's to Mr. Pesce as teak was to the Danes.

Every Pesce project is a brave experiment, and he values humanity and expression over perfection. But amid the curiosities and eyebrow-raisers, there have been iconic achievements. His 1993 Organic Building in Osaka, Japan—its facade sprouting with a grid of planters—predated today's hanging gardens and living walls, and his 1969 Up5 chair is among the 20th century's most instantly recognizable pieces. A Manhattanite since 1980, Mr. Pesce is enjoying his first one-man New York show at Fred Torres Collaborations (through May 25). We recently talked with Mr. Pesce about Raphael as a pioneering multitasker, Darwin as exemplar and his love of unconventionally pretty feet. I am always evolving. I get tired of the way I think and so (to read more)

The architect and artist, Gaetano Pesce photographed by Adam Golfer for the Wall Street Journal

The Incidental Steward: Reflections On Citizen Science

A search for a radio-tagged Indiana bat roosting in the woods behind her house in New York's Hudson Valley led Akiko Busch to assorted other encounters with the natural world -- local ecological monitoring projects, community-organized cleanup efforts, and data-driven citizen science research.  Whether it is pulling up water chestnuts in the Hudson River, measuring beds of submerged aquatic vegetation, or searching out vernal pools, all are efforts that illuminate the role of ordinary citizens as stewards of place. Here are some excerpts from The Incidental Steward:

" I am grateful to all of the scientists for reminding me about the value of uncertainty; that questions are often more important than the answer; that the facts of the natural world are overwhelming and contradictory; and that there are rarely clear answers."

"Maybe another way of saying this is that there are two ways of paying attention:  when you know what yo are looking for, and when you don't."

"In Chinese folklore a bat represents the five great happinesses:  health, wealth, long life, good luck, and tranquillity."

"The only thing I was beginning to grasp for sure was what had brought me here, which had something to do with the chance to restore clarity to what is cloudy and cluttered in our lives.  That it is possible to weed something so fluid as river water speaks to our ability to put some kind of order to those things in our lives thought to be too quick, too changeable , too transparent to require our care."

"Ground truth means what is 'on location,' what is real, what your eyes and ears tell you rather than what the sensors suggest."

"But none, I knew, is still data; zero can be data, too.  I had heard this statement more than conce, and it's a good lesson:  when we don't see anything or hear anything or say anything or think anything, when we have nothing to go on, that, too, is information.  This seems to be a known fact that transcends the boundaries of discipline.  In music, silence can be as resonant as sound; in mathematics, zero can have the authority of a number.  Robert Ryman's white canvases are a primer in the richness of white space, Merce Cunningham's choreography an inquiry into stillness.  Waiting for Godot, one of the most celebrated plays in the English language, is famously described as the play in which nothing happens.   'I have always been as interested in what is not there as what is there -- the void, the interior spaces, the things that you don't see,' the designer Marc Newson has said.  And in the words of abstract painter Ellsworth Kelly, 'The negative is just as important as te positing.'  Absence can be as powerful as presence."

Anna Schuleit Paints The Urban Space

Anna Schuleit's "Just A Rumor"

Anna Schuleit, a good friend, is a visual artist who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence and Rome. After graduating from art school in 1998 she worked on two site-specific installations: Habeas Corpus at the abandoned Northampton State Hospital (2000), and Bloom for the closing of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (2003). From 2001 to 2004 she was a visiting artist at a psychiatric institution in Westborough, MA, that was being downsized and phased out, ending in another closure. During that time she also documented the closing of Medfield State Hospital. In 2005 she completed a master’s degree in creative writing / book arts at Dartmouth. From 2005 to 2007 she was commissioned by the ICA Boston to develop a site-specific project, Intertidal, for the military ruins of Lovells Island in Boston Harbor. In 2007 she created Landlines, a large-scale project that brought dozens of children together with artists, telephones, and the general public, in the forest surrounding the MacDowell Colony. In 2010 she was the visiting artist at UMass Amherst and completed Just a Rumor,

a site-specific  project involving a face, a pond, and wild ducks.

She's been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Bogliasco, Blue Mountain Center, The Hermitage, Yaddo, Banff, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and a visiting artist / guest lecturer at Brown University, MIT, Smith College, Harvard, The New School, Brandeis, University of Michigan, McGill, RISD, Boston University, Pratt, Bowdoin, and Syracuse University. In 2006 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Here is an excerpt from an interview from Bettery Magazine about some of her recent work.

In my paintings and projects, I am swinging back and forth between working on an intimate scale, and working on a large scale. The live drawing (see below) that I did for you, in response to Wayward Plants’ question, was an attempt to bridge my drawings with the sites I love, the streets and alleyways, on a one-to-one scale. I think that wish of drawing directly into the urban space comes from my frustration with the typical reduction of scale in most drawings. It’s a wish for working life-size, and moving beyond the rectangular canvas, out of the studio and into our built environment and public spaces.

Yotam Haber, Schuleit's fiance, composed the music.

Clive Davis on Risk

In a new memoir, The Soundtrack of My Life, Clive Davis, the Chief Creative Officer for Sony Music Entertainment and the former head of Columbia, Arista and J Records, describes one of his biggest professional risks, signing Janis Joplin and Big Brother and The Holding Company. “But my most startling and decisive revelation occurred on the afternoon of Saturday, June 17, when the second band of the day, Big Brother and the Holding Company, took the stage [at the Monterey Pop Festival, 1967].  They were a San Francisco group and did not have a record out yet.  In the rigorously democratic spirit of that time and place, the band’s singer, the electrifying Janis Joplin, received no special introduction or billing.  But as everyone now realizes, she was unquestionably the star of the band, and her performance was incendiary…Janis’s performance somehow brought the entire meaning of the festival home to me.  The impact of seeing an artist that raw, earthy, and fiery just floored me.  This is a social and musical revolution, I thought, how could it be that none of us in the East knew that this was taking place?  It was literally spine-tingling, and along with the larger insights that came to me about what was going on in the culture, I experienced a personal epiphany as well.  This has got to be my moment, I thought.  I’ve got to sign this band. That was a defining realization.  Although I had begun to make some creative decisions at Columbia, I had no idea that I would really be in the business of signing artists.  I was still very conscious of my lack of a musical background.  But opportunity conspired with necessity for me at Monterey.  Yes, seeing Janis Joplin perform provided one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.  But that occurred within the context of my continual, unspoken awareness that I was running a company that was virtually on the brink.  Nothwithstanding the grandeur of its past, Columbia was barely breaking even.  I had to do something soon, or all my promotions and important titles would amount to nothing.  I’d been relatively cautious for more than a year, but now I had to take some risks and put myself on the line.  Time was of the essence.”

Here's a video from Janis's performance:

Traffic Jams: Hazardous to Our Health

I'm a New Yorker who loves Los Angeles.  In no other American city is wild, raw nature so immediately accessible.  One can be hiking deep in a canyon, hearing only the sounds of birds, within a half hour from almost every part of the city.  Yet a week ago I was stuck for two hours in a traffic jam trying to go five miles.  I could have been relaxed and walked to my destination in that time.  Instead, I was stressed and felt like I was having a heart attack.  According to a report published by the Texas Traffic Institute, Americans spend a shocking average of 38 hours a year sitting in our cars, stuck in traffic - instead of attending kids' soccer games and excellent dinners and sprawled out on sofas with loved ones reading good books. And this matters because we’re not simply missing out on meaningful experience or destroying our environment; we’re literally killing ourselves sitting in our cars.

Dwight Hennessy and David Wiesenthal, at York University in Canada, investigated the influence of traffic congestion on stress and discovered that "one of the most common contributors to driver stress is traffic congestion, and most regular commuters experience some level of daily traffic congestion. Congested traffic is often interpreted as a negative event in that it tends to slow or block the attainment of goals, such as driving at a certain speed or getting to a destination at a scheduled time. Those who are forced to drive below a desired speed, especially for long distances, tend to report greater levels of stress."

The study emphasized the following: “repeated exposure to stress, without effective coping, has been linked to a series of physiological and psychological pathologies including increased heart rate, blood pressure, anxiety, and negative affect. Driver stress has also been found to influence performance, mood, and health in work and home environments."

Yikes! We knew our blood was boiling as we sat in our cars, but I had no idea the actual physical nature of the ill effects.

In a piece in New York Magazine, Lawrence Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia, added yet another health risk to idling in traffic: "the more you drive, the more you weigh."

The Texas Institute calculated that it costs the U.S. economy almost $78 billion per year in lost time and wasted fuel while people sit in traffic jams.

What would we do with $78 billion a year? Who knows what futuristic solutions would emerge if we launched a national competition, funded at that level of investment, to solve our transportation crisis by 2020?

Alan Pisarski, a transportation expert and the author of Commuting in America, put it this way: "Things are bad and they’re getting worse. We’ve used up the capacity that had been bequeathed to us by a previous generation, and we haven’t replaced it." I’d say the rubber has more than hit the road.

Until we make this kind of investment, you might want to plan ahead and anticipate the wait with a good audio book – learn a new language or how to meditate – it might add years to your life.

Can A Fruit Fly Teach Us Anything About Our Emotional States?

Well, yes.  It turns out that the mind of a fly can reveal a lot about the underlying mechanisms of ADHD and hyperactivity.  In a TEDxCalTech talk, neurobiologist David Anderson describes how modern psychiatric drugs treat the chemistry of the whole brain, but that his research into the emotional states of fruit flies could yield more precisely targeted psychiatric medications that are more effective with fewer side effects.  His work  is dedicated to deciphering the neural circuits that underlie fear, anxiety, pain, and other instinctive behaviors and is revealing that disruptions in those neural circuits can underlie psychiatric disorders like anxiety and depression. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute reports, "Elucidating these neural circuits is an important first step to understanding how genes, drugs, and experience act on and modify these circuits, in both normal behavior and in disorders such as anxiety and depression. Our hope is that this work will eventually improve the diagnosis of these conditions and lead to new, improved treatments," Anderson said.

One Question for Sheryl Sandberg

In the 90s, as an executive at Nickelodeon, Gerry Laybourne, my boss, and I began a trial flex-time program.  I'd already made the commitment to leave  the office at 5:30 two days a week to squeeze in an essential work-out before going home to my family.   Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, agrees that leaving work at a reasonable time still remains provocative.  In her new book, Lean In:  Women, Work, And The Will To Lead, she examines the progress, or not, women have made in securing leadership positions during these past two decades.   As a former Google executive and Chief of Staff at the United States Treasury Department, she has been at the table (one of her commandments for women to be successful) watching what separates the career trajectories of women from men.  Taking risks is a big piece of her manifesto to "lean in."

Q: What’s the most significant risk you’ve taken professionally?

Sheryl: This felt extremely risky.  After I had my first child, I began to leave work at 5:30 so I could get home in time to nurse.  Once my son was asleep, I would jump back online and continue my workday.  Still, I went to great lengths to hide my schedule and worried that if anyone knew I was leaving the office at that time, they might assume I wasn't completely dedicated to my job.

Once I became COO, I wanted co-workers to know that Facebook cared more about results than face-time so I opened up at a company-wide meeting and stated that I left at 5:30.  Later, this "news" became public and spread throughout the internet.  Journalist Ken Auletta joked that I could not have gotten more headlines if I "had murdered someone with an ax."

While I was glad to jump-start the discussion, all the attention gave me this weird feeling that someone was going to object and fire me. I had to reassure myself that this was absurd. Still, the clamor made me realize how hard it would be for someone in a less-senior position to ask for or admit to this schedule. We have a long way to go before flextime is accepted in most workplaces. And it will only happen if we keep raising the issue.

Reading Now

3.4.13

Articles:

"How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy" - The Atlantic Monthly.  Kathleen McAuliffe profiles Jaroslav Flegr who for years suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

"What Data Can't Do" - The New York Times. David Brooks explores why data mining won't solve all of our problems.  "This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, 'The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.'”

Books: 

When I read Madeleine L'Engle's, A Wrinkle in Time, I was roughly the same age as Meg, the protagonist. L’Engle transported me out of my quotidian Midwestern kid world through the wormhole of her imagination. I wanted nothing more than to be a heroine, traveling, tessseracting, through time and space, to save my father. What I didn’t know at the time was how pioneering L’Engle was. Among the first women to write science fiction, she persevered in the face of 26 publisher’s rejections. In A Circle of Quiet, the first of her Crosswicks journals, she explores themes of work-life balance that remain powerfully resonant. “Every so often I need out—away from all these people I love most in the world—in order to regain a sense of proportion. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings… [there] I move slowly into a kind of peace that is indeed marvelous, ‘annihilating all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade.’”

MS MR Fantasy Song

I would like the song, Fantasy, from MS MR's upcoming album, Second Hand Rapture, even if Max Hershenow (MR) had not roomed with my daughter in college.  Lizzy Plapinger (MS) is going to give Florence Welch a serious run for her money.  Take a listen. Buy the album when it comes out May 14th.