“Everyone’s vain,” he continues. “It just depends on how vain you are on the day. Everyone’s vain when they have their photo taken.” He is right: everyone is vain. Everyone wants to look good in a picture. Few, though, can muster Jagger’s steely commitment to achieving that end. More, perhaps, than any other rock star of his generation, Jagger has made it his business to understand and control the mechanics of his own stardom. He manifests no tempery neurosis; he pulls no celebrity sulks. He just insists, calmly, on getting things done as he wants them. “I think of him as coming from the English tradition of the actor-manager,” says Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of “Saturday Night Live.” “If you watch him get ready to put on a show, you’ll see that there is nothing that he is not aware of, that he is not intimately involved with, from lighting and design to how the curtain is going to hit the floor. There are very few people whose production skills impress me, but he’s one of them. He’s as good a showman and a producer as there is.”

“I got a powerful sense of his mastery of every detail of every aspect of the production,” says Martin Scorsese, who collaborated with Jagger on the Stones concert documentary “Shine a Light.” “And by that, I don’t just mean the music; he also has a sharp sense of cinema.” (As the documentary attests, Jagger even gave Scorsese his thoughts on where to place the cameras.) “You can delegate things to other people,” Jagger observes, “and you have to, to a certain extent, but if you’re not behind it and getting your knowledge and input into it, it’s not going to turn out as interestingly and probably it won’t be what you would like. It’ll be disappointing.”

via The New York Times.

Doctors who carried out a stem cell transplant on an HIV-infected man with leukaemia in 2007 say they now believe the man to have been cured of HIV infection as a result of the treatment, which introduced stem cells which happened to be resistant to HIV infection. The man received bone marrow from a donor who had natural resistance to HIV infection; this was due to a genetic profile which led to the CCR5 co-receptor being absent from his cells. The most common variety of HIV uses CCR5 as its ‘docking station’, attaching to it in order to enter and infect CD4 cells, and people with this mutation are almost completely protected against infection.

The case was first reported at the 2008 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, and Berlin doctors subsequently published a detailed case history in the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2009.

They have now published a follow-up report in the journal Blood, arguing that based on the results of extensive tests, “It is reasonable to conclude that cure of HIV infection has been achieved in this patient.”

via HIV & AIDS Information.

A Marshall amplifier. A hybrid electric car battery. A Braun ET66 calculator. A mortar board. A Moleskine notebook. An Apple iPhone chip. An American Express Centurion charge card. A Sony PlayStation2 console. A floppy disk. The letter “l” in the font Helvetica. An audio cassette tape. What do they have in common? Not much, you’d think, since they are so different in terms of function, price, complexity and how they were made. But they are all (various shades of) black and (roughly) rectangular.

When the German industrial designer Konstantin Grcic (that’s pronounced GEAR-tichich) started thinking about the color and shape of objects he most admired, he realized that many took the form of black rectangles. He has assembled a collection of them for “Black2 (Black and Square),” an exhibition running through Feb. 12 at the Swiss Institute in Rome. Among the items he included are a gravestone, a wallet, soap, a table, a perfume bottle, a cooking pot, a television set, a cart, an accordion, a Sudoko cube, a fireplace, a laptop, a Chanel handbag, a gas tank, a bible and Prince’s “Black Album,” from 1987.

“How is it that so many different things made in so many different ways end being black rectangles?” Mr. Grcic asked. “They can be extremely elegant and sophisticated, or very basic, but they are such strong and powerful parts of our lives that it is impossible to imagine a world without them.”

via NYTimes.com.

PROSOPAGNOSIA, or face-blindness, affects 2.5% of the population. Those afflicted cannot recognise faces, even ones they have seen before and know well. They must learn to rely on other cues such as gait, spectacles and manner of dress. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist and writer, is himself face-blind. He has also been living with ocular cancer. In his latest book, "The Mind's Eye", he considers six cases of people who have had to adjust to big changes in their vision, including himself. The stories, some previously published in the New Yorker, are heartbreaking: a writer who loses the ability to read, a pianist who can no longer read music, Dr Sacks's own face blindness and loss of stereo vision as a result of cancer. His stories humanise his subjects and give shape to conditions that seem otherwise impossible and unliveable. Yet these are hardly sob stories. Rather, Dr Sacks offers up many examples of the plasticity of the human brain, which can adapt to almost anything.

More Intelligent Life spoke to Dr Sacks over the phone about face-blindness, the line between biology and biography, and what it was like for him to become one of his own subjects.

When was the first time you realised you were face blind, and when did you start thinking of it as a real condition?

Probably the first time was in ‘85 when I visited my brother in Australia, whom I had had no personal contact with since the 1950s. He had difficulties recognising faces and places in the same way I have and we both had a sudden feeling that this was a family thing, though my other siblings don’t have it. This was the first time I consciously thought that way. And then after my "hat" book [" The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"] was published, I received letters [about conditions] that were confined to faces. Neurologists started to wonder whether there was a congenital form which had been under-reported. It turns out face recognition is a pre-attentive process, and should be instant.

via The Economist.

In India, there is only 1 psychiatrist for every 400,000 people, according to the Indian government. The Lancet study involved about 2,600 people in the state of Goa with common mental illnesses such as anxiety or depression. About half were assigned case managers that had taken a two-month training course in mental health counseling. All of the patients in the study got whatever routine care was provided by private doctors or public clinics. And half of them had 6 to 12 meetings with the lay therapists. The therapists talked with them about their illnesses and problems, taught them coping mechanisms such as breathing exercises, and in some cases offered psychotherapy.

In the public health clinics, 66 percent of the people who talked to the lay therapists recovered after six months, compared to 43 percent of people who got the standard care. The researchers call this "modest evidence of a beneficial effect" of using lay counselors.

via NPR.

September 1, 1939, the day Hitler's army invaded Poland, is one of the most infamous dates of the 20th century. But how many of us recall September 17, 1939, when Soviet forces charged into Poland from the west? Germany and Russia, acting together on terms laid out in a secret pact, tried to destroy an entire country - and nearly succeeded. The sinister partnership would not last. Two years later, Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, which would spell doom for the Wehrmacht. In the West, we think of the heroics of D-Day, but it was the Soviet Army that ultimately broke the Nazi war machine; the British and Americans merely finished it off. Stalin ends up in the history books as a saviour, along with Churchill and Roosevelt, in the struggle against Hitler. Even now, it is far easier to think of Stalin as an opponent of Hitler than as a partner. We like to tell ourselves that the virtuous side won the war, but what happened in the east confounds such notions. Even before a shot was fired, Stalin had the blood of a nearly four million Soviet citizens on his hands. Between them, the Soviets and Germans killed nearly 200,000 Poles - targeting doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and religious figures. They all died in a region that the historian Timothy Snyder, in his striking and important new book, calls the "bloodlands".

It was a place of shifting allegiances, an ethnic and linguistic patchwork. The zone extended east from central Poland into western Russia, and from the Baltic States in the north to the Black Sea in the south. It was a place where German, Slavic, Baltic and Jewish cultures collided and mingled.

This was the terrain of Europe's killing fields, "where the power and malice of the Nazi and Soviet regimes overlapped and interacted". Here is where the Holocaust unfolded with a grim relentlessness. The scale of battles - at Kursk, for example, where some 7,000 German and Soviet tanks clashed - dwarfed any of those fought on the Western front. The death toll, civilian and military, exceeded 20 million. Some of the regions of the bloodlands were doubly or triply occupied. It was a theatre of immense, pervasive suffering, which almost defies comprehension.

via Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.

Researchers have noted, for example, that within backpacker enclaves there is a clear hierarchy based on shorthand status cues curiously similar to those of home. Whereas back home income and influence might lend to status, backpackers fixate upon travel experience and fashion. Anderskov’s research subjects assert that “real backpackers” travel at least three months, and they demonstrate their credibility through their clothing, spending, and storytelling. Backpacker novels confirm this ideology, frequently using such markers to communicate experience and travel savvy. In Gardner’s “Losing Gemma,” for example, readers learn immediately upon meeting Coral that the character’s “scuffed canvas carry-all” and well-worn clothing (a “dark red sarong, tied loosely around her concave stomach, a droopy cheesecloth top, and leather flip-flops”) advertise her two years of travel experience. Through these grungy fashion details, she is identified as “a true traveler, her soft Western edges eroded by months or even years of vivid Third World Experience.” Before long, Coral rescues the passports and money carelessly lost by two travel neophytes, Gemma and Esther, and recommends they deliberately roughen their bags in order to boost their street cred.

In addition to such strict adherence to anti-fashions, all the novels depict disheveled backpackers earning rite-of-passage by enduring the workaday hardships that come with independent travel in the developing world. When Sutcliffe’s Dave suffers a bout of diarrhea, he notes that, “crapping your pants ... is a dire and miserable experience; but having crapped your pants—I mean, that’s a pretty good conversational party piece.” Over time, status within the community’s hierarchy hinges on the accumulation of such difficult travel experiences, which travelers collect and trade like blue-chip stock portfolios.

Accordingly, upon meeting “older” Australian travelers in their 20s, Sutcliffe’s Dave admits, “I felt I couldn’t really talk about what I’d done, because they’d all been on the road for months and had amazing stories I couldn’t possibly compete with—about how they’d got lost in the Thai jungle with heroin smugglers, had fought off kitten-sized cockroaches in an Indonesian prison, or had done the entire Everest trek dressed in flip-flops and a Bondai Beach T-shirt.” Anderskov adds that this kind of social hierarchy is “situational and floating”—it depends on whom the backpacker is socializing with. As a result, it is possible for the initially clueless protagonists in the novels by Sutcliffe, Gardner, and Barr to accumulate status over time, with each of them near the end of their stories encountering “fresh-faced scared bunnies” who remind them of their previous, less experienced selves and confirm their advanced clout within the independent travel community. In this way, a typical story arc of the backpacker novel focuses not on a deepened understanding of local cultures, but on gaining social standing within travel communities that aren’t all that demographically distinct from cliquish subcultures back home.

via World Hum.