About a year ago I heard a pop song on my Pandora that was a little less annoying than Ke$sha, and I looked up the singer up. Her real name was Jessica Malakouti. My immediate though was “that last name sounds Iranian.” Then I watch the video above, and my revised thought with the new priors (i.e., what she looks like) was “well, she’s probably of Lithuanian heritage, and that’s an archaized surname that sounds vaguely Iranian.” For reasons I don’t even recall somehow I stumbled onto this singer’s Wikipedia page recently, and it had been updated with the fact that she is of Iranian heritage. It turns out her father is from Iran, and she is a product of the greater Los Angeles Iranian Diaspora community. The citation for the Wikipedia entry is a Youtube interview where she refers to herself as “mixed-race” and talks about rapping in Farsi (I guess she’s a wannabe Arash).
If someone who looks like this refers to herself as “mixed-race” this country is going to need to update its 1960s era Civil Rights framework soon. One of the podcasts I listen to is On Point with Tom Ashbrook, and a week it ago it had a show with the title Race In America, From Watts To Ferguson And Beyond. Actually, on the podcast version it was shortened to “Race in America.” Despite the fact that less than 40 percent of people who are in some way not non-Hispanic white (which includes people from the Middle East, like Jessica Malakouti’s father in any case) are of black American heritage, they loom large enough in this nation’s history and consciousness that I knew that “Race is America” was going to be about two races, with the rest of us rendered invisible. Of the guests on that particular show only John McWhorter even grappled with the fact that there were groups outside of the black-white dichotomy. When I was a kid in the 1980s this was how it went too. And to a great extent it was how it should have gone. Black Americans have been in this country since the Founding, and most of their ancestry dates to before the Founding. They were the largest racial minority for most of its history, and were when I was a child. Things are different now on the ground. But you wouldn’t know that from the media. 15 years ago The New York Times published its prize winning series How Race is Lived in America. I thought that that was going to be the last testament to the old biracial America due to the nation’s changing demographics. I was wrong.
After finishing The Making of Modern Japan, Japan is big in the media this week. There are yearly stories on the apology, but there is a new twist with the current Prime Minister’s attempts to modify the hyper-pacifist orientation of the Japanese state and society (more precisely, it strikes me that he wants to make it so that the “Self Defense Forces” have some real bite and can be more flexible in their operations internationally). After reading a book which outlines how Japan got to where it is today, I really value the importance of dense historical knowledge. It’s like going from sepia photographs to high resolution digital color imagery. I had been meaning to get back to A New History of Western Philosophy, which I dropped in the medieval section when I switched to reading The Indo-European Controversey, but now I am curious as to whether I should fill in my blank spot (in relative terms) in regards to modern Chinese history. Perhaps it’s the antiquarian in me, but I’ve never been much curious about Chinese history beyond the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. Now I’m inclined to pick up Jonathan Spencer’s The Search for Modern China, though part of me wants to finally learn about the Taiping Rebellion through God’s Chinese Son. Recommendations are welcome.
Recently I posted some analysis where it seems pretty clear that there’s Indian admixture into the Cambodian population. The main issue that I have when trying to get a fix on this is whether it’s deep common shared ancestry via the South Eurasian substrate which was present from India all the way to the South China Sea and down toward maritime Southeast Asia, or, whether it was more recent, on the edge of historical times (and whether it was connected to the cultural impact of India on Southeast Asia). I think I presented persuasive evidence that it was in part more recent. Yesterday I stumbled onto a smoking gun which was right in the literature all along. In the supplementary table for Norton et al.’s 2007 paper on convergent light skin adaptation it reports that of 22 Cambodians the frequency of the derived variant of SLC24A5 is 9% (so 4 allele copies out of 44). They are the only East Asian group south of the Yangzi with this allele. One hypothesis is that it could be French admixture. But there are no copies of SLC45A2 derived allele. The sample size is small, but I checked the 1000 Genomes, and the Vietnamese have very low frequencies of both alleles, consistent with French admixture. The best candidate for a donor group is obviously a South Asian one. It is interesting that the allele frequency is pretty low, probably consistent with overall admixture proportion, consistent with no selection in situ.
In January I wrote that op-ed in The New York Times last year so that the debate would be a little less “battle of the sexes” in rhetoric about abortion. But whenever I read/listen to liberals talk about it they often fallback on the trope that women implicitly support abortion rights and men do not. I have no idea what the point of this caricature is, because if you are talking to your own side everyone already agrees, while pro-life people are probably going to be pretty annoyed by your blatant mischaracterization. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I think part of it is that some people feel better about their own viewpoint when they can couch it in anti-sexism, where they (often these are liberal men) are on the side of women and their opponents are not.
Over the last year and a half or so I’ve gotten more into my fitness. Partly it was for reasons of health. I’m South Asian, and we have issues with morbidity relating to metabolic disease. It runs in my family. I have kids now and I want to be around for them. I was never that fat. Probably the highest my BMI ever got was 26 in March of 2002 (I’m 5’8, that’s 170 lbs), when I pretty much cut out all soft drinks from my diet (I was never a big consumer, but I went from occasional to literally zero). Since then I’ve been as light as 140 lbs (spring of 2008), but have veered between 150 and 160 in graduate school. My weight had has not shifted much since I began to make changes, but I’ve been lifting, so losing fat and gaining muscle. This has really helped the second, and not secondary, reason that I am working out, and that is aesthetic. It is really nice not to be soft anymore!
In any case, there was a recent link posted about low fat vs. low carb diets. The problem is that nutrition is basically a semi-science, and people rightly can offer their own opinions. Personally I find cutting carbs the main way I can sustain cutting calories, but the robotic pattern of responses by low-carb folks is too reminiscent of low-fat propoganda. For a balanced, and striving toward scientific view, I’d suggest you check out my friend Kevin Klatt’s blog (or send him questions on Twitter, that’s what I do).
Preemptive apology if I can’t respond to all your comments, though I try to read the “open threads.” I’ve got a lot of responsibilities in “real life” as I attempt to be a “grown-up,” so don’t take it personally.
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