Is reading on the loo bad for you?

　　From the moment Ron Shaoul took it upon himself to investigate the practice of reading on the toilet, scouring medical literature and turning up nothing of note as to its public health consequences, the situation became clear that here, on his hands, was a big job.

Shaoul's curiosity was driven by his work as a doctor specialising in paediatric gastroenterology. He mustered some colleagues, drew up a questionnaire and had hundreds of people of all shapes and sizes complete it. What resulted was perhaps the most scientific attempt yet to shine light on a habit that rustles unseen behind closed doors.
Shaoul, who published his study in 2009, lamented that toilet reading was woefully neglected by scientists, considering the habit probably dated back to the emergence of printed books. Writers, on the other hand, have shown no such aversion. For some, their authority on the matter has bordered on the connoisseur.
The anonymous author of The Life of St Gregory couldn't help but notice that the toilet of the middle ages, high up in a castle turret, offered the perfect solitude for "uninterrupted reading"; Lord Chesterfield too saluted the benefits, recounting the tale of a man who used his time wisely in the "necessary house" to work his way through Horace. This was but the beginning.
No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere. The environment was one that enriched substantial works – extracted their flavour, as he put it – while lesser books and magazines suffered. He singled out Atlantic Monthly.
Miller went so far as to recommend toilets for individual authors. To enjoy Rabelais, he advised a plain country toilet, "a little outhouse in the corn patch, with a crescent sliver of light coming through the door". Better still, he said, take a friend along, to sit with you for half an hour of minor bliss.
From a medical standpoint, there are plenty of questions to ask of toilet reading. Most can be worded in vague, euphemistic terms that convey the gist without delving into coprological detail. Does reading material become irreversibly infused with nasty contaminants when carried into the toilet? How long can unpleasant microbes live on glossy magazine covers or, for that matter, the pages of a newspaper? And what does the straightforward act of reading on the toilet do for bowel movements?
Val Curtis, director of the Hygiene Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is a self-confessed toilet reader. There is, she says, a theoretical risk. To be blunt, bugs in your poo can get on your hands, be transferred to your reading material, and on to the hands of some other unfortunate. That risk is quite slim though. As Curtis says, "we don't need to get anal about it".
"The important thing is to wash your hands with soap after using the loo to get the bugs off," Curtis says. This way, even if you flicked through a shit-smeared copy of the Metro left on the toilet floor at Reading station, washing your hands before leaving should keep you quite safe. Of course, if you ran your hands over the most soiled pages, picked your nose and rubbed your fingers in your eyes, you might well get an infection. For the determined, there is always a way.
Microbes don't fare too well on absorbent surfaces, and might survive only minutes on newspaper. But plastic book covers and those shiny, smooth surfaces of Kindles, iPhones and iPads are more accommodating, and it's likely bugs can live on those for hours. A recent study by Curtis suggests that in Britain one in six mobile phones is contaminated with faecal matter, largely because people fail to wash their hands after going to the toilet.
Curtis, who is writing a book on disgust, says evolution has honed our sense of infectious risk. Hence our revulsion of bodily fluids and all things excremental, particularly when they are other people's. But a squeamishness of reading in the toilet is probably our primitive selves making us over-sensitive. "Disgust helps us avoid the bugs that make us sick," she says, "but it evolved in ancient times. We now have this psychological tendency to over-detect contagion."
Shaoul, who works at the Bnai Zion Medical Centre in Haifa, Israel, agrees that there is little to fear from unpleasant bugs when reading in the toilet. Most people who indulge in the habit – and his questionnaire pointed to more men and more educated, white-collar workers – do so at home or at work with their own material, rather than in random excrement-spattered lavatories.
More interesting to Shaoul is whether the simple act of reading on the toilet has an impact on bowel movements. "We thought sitting and reading while you were on the toilet might be relaxing and make things go better," Shaoul says. "We thought we might cure the world of constipation with our research."
Shaoul cast his net wide. He received completed questionnaires from 499 men and women, aged 18 to over 65 – some unemployed or students, others builders and academics; some from rural villages, others from the city. More than half of the men (64%) and 41% of the women confessed to being regular toilet readers. More often than not, they described their reading material as "whatever is around". In practice, this usually meant newspapers.
It transpires that toilet readers spend more time on the loo and consider themselves less constipated than non-toilet readers, but other measures of their defecation habits show the two groups hardly differ. Shaoul's work hints that toilet readers suffer more haemorrhoids – something that made for cautionary news stories around the world – but the effect is neglible.
Finally, Shaoul concluded that reading on the toilet is widespread, alleviates boredom, and is ultimately harmless. This rings true to Curtis. "I always have New Scientist by the toilet. I use it as distraction therapy. I don't particularly want to think about crapping."

The Booker's narrative arc must change if its cultural dominance is to continue

A week is a long time in Grub Street. It seems only yesterday that the Man Booker was in the grip of an apparently terminal crisis provoked by the announcement of a rival, the Literature prize, and compounded by the worst shortlist in living memory.

Now, with Julian Barnes declared the 2011 winner for The Sense of an Ending, and the annual Guildhall dinner safely negotiated, the air of panic and atmosphere of annus horribilis has dissipated. Strangely, even Dame Stella Rimington's bizarre and defensive speech from the chair (aptly described by Sam Jordison) now seems like the buzz of interference you get on a radio before tuning into the right station. So how did the Booker get out of the locked room of "readability" into which it had incarcerated itself?
By a whisker, is the answer. On the night itself, it seemed as if former chairman of Booker plc Jonathan Taylor would continue his impersonation of those post-revolution Bourbons who had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing". He insisted on telling the Booker's diners the sales figures for last year's winner, The Finkler Question, and providing details of its foreign rights deals. You could see people shaking their heads in dismay at remarks that were barely appropriate for the works outing of a book warehouse union. What about contemporary fiction? Whither the culture of the English-language novel?
Well, eventually, we were allowed to think about books – specifically, about this year's winner. As is often the case in the book world, it's the quality of the work that provides a reality check, and prevents a drama from becoming a crisis. Barnes's 11th novel is perhaps not his best, and nowhere near as original as Flaubert's Parrot, but it is a work of art, and conforms to the high standard set by previous winners.
This is not a negligible point. Say what you like about this prize – and most of the commentariat have done that pretty freely this year – Booker has a record of picking winners, from In a Free State (Naipaul) and Rites of Passage (Golding) to Oscar and Lucinda (Carey) and Disgrace (Coetzee). Among UK literary prizes, only the Orange comes close in providing an appealing mix of the literary and the commercial – choosing titles that stand the test of time, at least in the short term. A lot of the credit there, I think, goes to Kate Mosse, who is as spirited and youthful as she is tough and brand-conscious. The Booker could do worse than find itself a Mosse to enunciate its vision for the future.
And that brings up another thing: compared with all the other great literary prizes, even the Orange, the Booker is impressively global. This is why its choice matters, why so many readers around the world are exercised by it. Indeed, part of the trouble it has got into lately derives from the disjunction between its 21st-century appeal to a global English-language audience and its 20th-century, literary London origins and organisation. The one is contemporary, the other in danger of becoming hopelessly outmoded.
I wrote last week: "The forthcoming prize dinner at the Guildhall next Tuesday will be fraught with interest." That proved true. In the end, however, there was a palpable sense of relief that good sense had prevailed, and that justice had been done to the best book on the shortlist.
In preparation for 2012, let's hope the placemen and women of the Man Booker don't sit back with a sigh of relief, and refuse to address the issues raised by their critics. The prize is in need of some urgent reforms. Many close to the heart of the organisation are privately anxious to address the way to ensure another 25 years of prize patronage. The Booker's dominant place in the cultural landscape is neither guaranteed, nor automatic; it has to be earned. Otherwise others, such as the Literature prize, will step in and take its place. The Guildhall evening speaks of grandeur, security and a certain cultural arrogance. But it's completely out of sync with the reality of the creative society whose activity it adjudicates.
For instance, it's notable that, with the exception of the winner and his publishers, everyone associated with the shortlist – writers, agents, publishers and so on – was under 45. Contemporary fiction is, generally, not about the old. Yet the Booker persists in handing the judging process to pensioners and retirees such as Rimington, who will go down in the Booker annals as the woman who compared London's literati with the KGB.

Snuff (Discworld Novels) by Kindle Edition

     The new Discworld novel from the master features the popular Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch.

 

    It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse.And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder.He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, there must be a chase and there must be a punishment. They say that in the end all sins are forgiven.But not quite all...

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch

The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch, depicts a medieval magician performing for a small crowd, while pickpockets steal the spectators' belongings. The painting, on display at the Musée Municipal in St.-Germain-en-Laye, France, illustrates that magicians have long known how to hack into our mental processes. The principles of magic, refined and perfected over the centuries, provide neuroscientists with new ways to study the brain and could help them in their quest to reveal how the organ performs the greatest trick of all - consciousness itself.
Studies of inattentional blindness show that focused attention can make us oblivious to sights that would otherwise be glaringly obvious, while studies of change blindness show that dramatic changes in a scene can go unnoticed if they occur during a brief interruption, even when we look directly at the scene.

Magicians take advantage of this to manipulate their spectators' attentional spotlight. They know, for example, that the eyes give off important social cues, and that people have a natural impulse to pay attention to the objects that others are attending to. They exploit this 'joint attention' by using their eye movements to divert the audience's attention away from the 'method' – the secret action behind the trick – and towards the magical effect.
They also know that the sudden appearance of a new and unusual object will immediately draw the audience's attention. Hence, producing a flying dove gives them an opportunity to perform other hidden manoeuvres.

"11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness," Martinez-Conde explains. "Traditionally, this was a very academic conference that had no impact outside the specialist field. We wanted to reach the general public as well, but we weren't sure exactly what to do."

The wife-and-husband team went to Las Vegas, where the conference was to be held. It was then, while scouting for potential conference venues, that the idea first came to them. "We saw a lot of ads for magic shows and realized that was the connection we were looking for. We contacted a number of magicians, such as Penn and Teller, James Randi and Apollo Robbins and invited them to a special symposium [at the conference], to share their insights into what makes magic work in the mind of the spectator."

Fighting talk from the prophet of peace

Pinker's assault on the common reader began in 1994 with The Language Instinct, an accessible introduction to the idea that humans are "language animals", biologically wired for linguistic communication. In 1997 he published How the Mind Works, which went beyond language to offer a similar portrayal of the rest of the mind, from vision and reasoning to emotions, humour and art. In 1999 he returned to the question of language with Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language, which drew on his research on regular and irregular verbs as a way of explaining how language works in general.

And in 2002 he published The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, which is basically an attack on what Pinker sees as three great misconceptions about human behaviour: the idea that the mind is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that is wholly shaped by one's environment; the notion of the "noble savage", the idea that humans are intrinsically good but get warped by society; and "ghost in the machine" theories that postulate the existence of a non-biological agent in the brain that can alter human nature at will.

This is a big idea if ever I saw one, and it requires a massive tome (700 pages plus footnotes) to deal with it. In the first place, Pinker has to locate, analyse and explain the empirical and other data that support his thesis: that, however you measure it, the past was not just a different country, but also a far more violent one. And then he has to provide some explanations for why the long-term reduction in violence happened. To do that he ranges far beyond his own professional territory – into forensic archaeology, political philosophy, intellectual and social history, population dynamics, statistics and international relations. He identifies a number of forces that were key factors in curbing mankind's capacity for inhumanity: the slow emergence of states capable of playing the role of Hobbes's "Leviathan"; the pacifying impact of commerce and trade on behaviour; the impact of the Enlightenment on the way people thought about others; the evolution of notions of etiquette over the centuries; the way print and literacy expanded the "circle of empathy" beyond people's immediate family; the importance of women in civilising men; and the "long peace" that followed the second world war.