Saturday Links

On drinking, medieval wall paintings, saving Nietzsche, revisiting the Stray Dog Café, "The Killer Angels" at 50, and more.

Hendrick ter Brugghen, The Merry Drinker (1625). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Good morning! A lot of people take a break from drinking alcohol in January, and for good reason, but as a recent article in Harvard Public Health shows, the discourse about drinking—about how bad it is for your health (The New York Times recently reported that even a little alcohol is bad for you)—has gone a little off the rails. Does alcohol increase your risk of cancer? Yes—particularly if you are a woman and the cancer in question is breast cancer. Does drinking also lower blood sugar levels and reduce your risk of diabetes? Yes:

We have been researching the health effects of alcohol for a combined 60 years. Our work, and that of others, has shown that even modest alcohol consumption likely raises the risk for certain diseases, such as breast and esophageal cancer. And heavy drinking is unequivocally harmful to health. But after countless studies, the data do not justify sweeping statements about the effects of moderate alcohol consumption on human health.

Yet we continue to see reductive narratives, in the media and even in science journals, that alcohol in any amount is dangerous . . . It’s important to keep in mind that alcohol affects many body systems—not just the liver and the brain, as many people imagine. That means how alcohol affects health is not a single question but the sum of many individual questions: How does it affect the heart? The immune system? The gut? The bones?

As an example, a highly cited study of one million women in the United Kingdom found that moderate alcohol consumption—calculated as no more than one drink a day for a woman—increased overall cancer rates. That was an important finding. But the increase was driven nearly entirely by breast cancer. The same study showed that greater alcohol consumption was associated with lower rates of thyroid cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and renal cell carcinoma. That doesn’t mean drinking a lot of alcohol is good for you—but it does suggest that the science around alcohol and health is complex.

A nearly complete skeleton of an Ice Age fox is found in Utah: “Radiocarbon dating places the red fox bones at ‘just before the last glacial maximum during the Ice Ages,’ according to a Utah Division of State Parks blog post from Dec. 30. ‘This means that the skeleton had already been lying in the cave for more than 10,000 years when humans first started farming founder crops and for more than 20,000 years when the Giza pyramids were built,’ officials said.”

Medieval wall paintings displayed for the first time in over 500 years: “Medieval wall paintings considered the finest of their type surviving from late 13^th-century France, with close style links to the court of Henry III, have been revealed in all their multi-coloured splendour for the first time in more than 500 years. The walls are still, however, concealed behind panelling in the cathedral of Angers in western France. A team of UK-based art historians and conservators has worked for a decade on creating the first full-colour image of the paintings of the life and miracles of Saint Maurille, a fifth-century bishop of Angers whose relics were once held in a silver shrine in the cathedral. The image was created by digitally stitching more than 8,000 photographs of the curving walls, taken in the crawl space behind the panelling which could not be dismantled as it forms part of the choir stalls.”

In Commonweal, Morten Høi Jensen recounts how two Italian men—a washed-up academic and a depressed Communist—saved Nietzsche from disrepute following WWII by producing the 40-volume Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Collected Critical Edition): “Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as ‘Operation Nietzsche’: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR. The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa. Montinari, a former high-school student of Colli’s, was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party ‘incapable of practical work,’ as he put it himself. And yet these loveably eccentric dilettantes emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who hoped that the patient, determined study and transcription of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers would not merely absolve him of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time. As Colli later put it: ‘In truth, Nietzsche must not be interpreted in any way. We must simply lend him our ears.’”