Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days – the most seri­ous attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thurs­day and Fri­day – but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watch­ing TV and read­ing to dis­tract myself, and so this seemed like a per­fect time to start a “What I’m Read­ing” series of posts, which I’ve been want­ing to do for a while.

1. Via Fate­meh Fakhraie: Why Tay­lor Swift Offends Lit­tle Mon­sters, Fem­i­nists, and Weirdos. I don’t know Tay­lor Swift’s music – or, if I do, because I’ve heard it on the radio, I don’t know that I know it – but I enjoyed this analy­sis of her image and music.
2. From Crit­i­cal Mass: The Blog of the National Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Board of Direc­tors, which is doing a series called “30 Books in 30 Days,” each day given over to an NBCC award nom­i­nee, this brief review of a biog­ra­phy of John Cheever made me want to read Cheever’s work again for the first time in a long time.
3. Also from Crit­i­cal Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Vil­lage Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
4. I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Tay­lor, till I read this – yet one more from Crit­i­cal Mass–appre­ci­a­tion of Cap­tive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960 – 2008. She sounds like some­one I could learn some­thing from, not to men­tion I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semes­ter with the time to do noth­ing but read.
5. New York Times writer Kather­ine Bou­ton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fos­sil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evo­lu­tion and the Woman Whose Dis­cov­er­ies Changed the World, by Shel­ley Emling and Remark­able Crea­tures, by Tracy Cheva­lier. The first is a biog­ra­phy, the sec­ond is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a suc­cess in pale­on­tol­ogy and one of the fewer still whose suc­cess was not linked to that of a pale­on­tol­o­gist spouse (or any spouse: she was sin­gle). She made five major fos­sil dis­cov­er­ies from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspi­ra­tion for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
6. In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the eth­i­cal issues that arise when doc­tors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, some­times, in com­mer­cial ven­tures that make a whole lot of money. “A Last­ing Gift to Med­i­cine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immor­tal Life of Hen­ri­ette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Hen­ri­etta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cer­vi­cal can­cer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in ques­tions of race, class, med­ical ethics and more: Lacks’ can­cer cells, which were taken for analy­sis, went on to become a main­stay of mod­ern med­ical research, being used in devel­op­ing the first polio vac­cine and in the devel­op­ment of drugs for dis­eases includ­ing Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not inci­den­tally have made some peo­ple in the med­ical field very, very rich. Lacks’ fam­ily, who can’t even afford their own health insur­ance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as sim­ple a one of exploita­tion as that out­line would sug­gest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth read­ing, but so is Grady’s opin­ion piece.
7. Due in 2013, the fifth edi­tion of the Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­ual of Men­tal Dis­or­ders, will con­tain some sig­nif­i­cant revi­sions that could result, accord­ing to Times reporter, Bene­dict Carey, in “fewer chil­dren [get­ting] a diag­no­sis of bipo­lar dis­or­der[,] ‘[b]inge eat­ing dis­or­der’ and ‘hyper­sex­u­al­ity’ [becom­ing] part of every­day lan­guage” and a sig­nif­i­cant change in the way many men­tal dis­or­ders are diag­nosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called nor­mal and the so-called abnor­mal; changes in it could have a pro­found impact, there­fore, on soci­ety. It is, there­fore, worth pay­ing atten­tion to.
8. If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about Gout­Pal, the only infor­ma­tional site about gout that I have found – and it’s got a ton of infor­ma­tion – that is not also try­ing to sell you some­thing. I have glanced through it a cou­ple of times, and I am begin­ning to real­ize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you prob­a­bly should too.
9. An opin­ion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth read­ing about how to under­stand what hap­pened in terms of the Green Move­ment in Iran on Feb­ru­ary 11^th: Were the Greens Defeated?
10. Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehra­nis Don’t Revolt: Why some peo­ple who clearly see the régime as “them,” don’t see the oppo­si­tion as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are will­ing to risk join­ing the protests.