The kitchen. It’s made a big comeback in recent years. This is especially true for kitchens with open layouts that lend themselves to a more communal dining experience. According to Adilin Darling Design, an architecture firm based in San Francisco, when a kitchen has an open layout, it becomes a “stage” within which the most average of cooks can shine. In that vein, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite open kitchens that we’ve found inspiring for your enjoyment this Friday.

Photography, top to bottom: Tom Ackerman, John Nietzel, Maï Linh, Maï Linh, Adroam Houston, and Matthew Millman)



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The Secret History of the War on Cancer

The Secret History of the War on Cancer by Devra Davis Buy new: $12.89 / Used from: $0.38 Usually ships in 24 hours

By Dr. Ben Kim

For many years now, I have explained to questioning family members and friends why I cannot support conventional cancer-fighting fundraising campaigns.

I am not completely against conventional medical treatment options for different types of cancer. For example, for a good number of people that I have worked with over the past several years, I have fully supported and encouraged surgical excision of malignant tumours. My wariness of the mainstream cancer-fighting industry pertains to what I believe is excessive and often times inappropriate use of chemotherapy and radiation, as well as the lack of attention that is given to relevant environmental and personal lifestyle factors.

At long last, a devastating and truly noteworthy book on this topic has been published. It's called The Secret History of the War on Cancer, written by Devra Davis, PhD, MPH.

I am grateful to have the permission of Andrew Nikiforuk, a well known Canadian journalist, to share his impressive review of Dr. Davis' book.

I earnestly hope that The Secret History of the War on Cancer becomes a bestseller, as I believe that the people of our world desperately need to absorb its message.

***

Andrew Nikiforuk's Review of The Secret History of the War on Cancer, written by Devra Davis, PhD, MPH.

In 1936, the world's cancer experts assembled in Brussels to talk shop. The gathering heard a lot about workshop hazards and environmental toxins. A British scientist, who had studied identical twins, argued that cancer wasn't inherited, but mostly the product of early chemical exposures in life. A meticulous Argentine showed how sunlight combined with hydrocarbons could sprout tumours on rats. Others explained how regular exposure to the hormone estrogen prompted male rodents to grow unseemly breasts. Everyone agreed that arsenic and benzene were workplace killers, too.

Since then, the cancer establishment has retreated from the truth faster than Canada's commitment to a greener country. What began as sincere investigation into the economic root causes of a complex set of 200 different diseases, at the turn of the 20th century, quickly degenerated into a single-minded focus on treatments after the Second World War, argues Devra Davis, one of North America's sharpest epidemiologists (her previous book, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, was a finalist for the National Book Award).

In the process, industry and its propaganda hit men have used every opportunity to discredit, dismiss or disparage information on cancer hazards in the workplace or at home. So let me warn comfortable readers here and now. This courageous and altogether horrible book is about as unsettling as it can get. It painstakingly documents such a persistently foul pattern of deceit and denial that I often wanted to throw it against a wall and scream.

Furthermore, Davis's hair-raising investigation - in what is easily the most important science book of the year - will rob you of any lingering, Disney-like fantasies you might have entertained about the nobility of cancer fundraising campaigns. And if you have lost a relative or friend to a malignant tumour (odds are you have), Davis will make you weep again, knowing that fraud and outright criminal neglect have turned a 40-year-long medical war into a questionable $70-billion charade.

Even Davis can't hide her own disbelief at times: "Astonishing alliances between naive or far too clever academics and folks with major economic interests in selling potentially cancerous materials have kept us from figuring out whether or not many modern products affect our chances of developing cancer." She then diligently documents, for example, how some of the world's most prominent cancer researchers, such as the late Sir Richard Doll, the epidemiologist who was instrumental in linking smoking to health problems, secretly worked for chemical firms without disclosing these ties when publishing studies.

Davis, a modern scientist committed to moral clarity, knows her stuff and then some. After decades of front-line battles against air polluters, she now heads the world's first Centre on Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. She too has smelled and felt cancer firsthand, having lost two parents and many friends, including the comic Andrea Martin*, to the disease. She shines, in short, with a burning indignation about the abuse of power in medicine.

Her angry history of the way free and open discourse on cancers in the workplace has become as elusive as meaningful political debates reveals the rot with the bluntness of a chemo treatment. When men who bottled liquid lead as a gasoline additive in the 1920s started to drop like flies, General Motors blamed the workers and called lead a "natural contaminant." When dye-makers at DuPont got bladder cancer from working with benzidine in the 1930s, the company, like an errant spouse, first denied the findings. Then they refused to record cases. Finally, they suppressed or delayed publishing the results.

After inhaling tar and poisonous fumes from coke ovens, black steel workers succumbed to waves of lung cancer in the 1950s. Yet industry argued that blacks were just more vulnerable to lung-consuming tumours. It took an enterprising study of dying Mormon coke-oven workers to challenge the lie. Damning studies on the health of asbestos workers couldn't find a home in the 1930s, and to this day, Canada shamefully remains an exporter of the lung destroyer.

Benzene, a true-blue leukemia-maker that can cause workers to bleed out, has been the subject of 100 years of deceit and denial. When Myron Mehlman, a toxicologist with Mobil Oil, told Japanese officials in 1989 that gasoline with 5-per-cent benzene was damned dangerous and shouldn't be sold, the company fired him. Davis reports that ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Shell have invested $27-million in China to "contradict earlier claims that link exposure to low- and mid-levels of benzene to cancers and other diseases."

In 1986, researcher William Fayerweather put together a computerized system for tracking the health of every worker at DuPont's chemical plants. Davis found that "neither he nor his system any longer work for DuPont." She reports that men and women who produced computer chips for IBM are now dying young from cancers of the breast, bone marrow and kidney.

While China now leads a global economic boom, it's also exploring new opportunities for cancer. Even its secretive, Ottawa-like government now concedes that the country's industries use the nation's rivers as industrial urinals. Not surprisingly, China now lists cancer as its number-one killer.

Many of Davis's findings simply stunned me. Consider the invasion of computerized imaging technology (CT scans) in modern medicine. Since its invention in the 1970s, CT scanning has become a $100-billion industry that creates nifty three-dimensional images, yet exposes patients to radiation. CT scans have become such a favoured technology that one in every three scans recommended for children is probably unnecessary.

In the last 25 years, the amount of radiation zapping North Americans from scanning and the like has increased fivefold. Now ponder this stunner: "Modern America's annual exposure to radiation from diagnostic machines is equal to that released by a nuclear accident that spewed the equivalent of hundreds of Hiroshimas across much of Russia and Eastern Europe." Most physicians don't know that a typical CT scan equals 400 chest X-rays. A group of researchers at Yale now estimate that radiation from CT scans of the head and abdomen will kill 2,500 people a year.

Davis also presents some disturbing data on aspartame, cellphones and Ritalin. Armed with what a prominent toxicologist would later describe as "uninterpretable and worthless" studies on aspartame, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of Searle & Co. (since acquired by Monsanto), used his formidable political contacts to gain government approval for the food additive in 1981. Yet the U.S. Air Force still reports that aspartame "can cause serious brain problems in pilots." Despite whatever malarkey you might have read, cellphone users still have double the risk of brain cancer and folks under 18 years of age really shouldn't be using them. Ritalin, the drug to slow kids down, can rearrange an individual's chromosomes, yet in some school districts more than 10 per cent of the students are now on the drug. As Davis notes, "Highly profitable industries have no incentive to ask whether the products on which they depend may have adverse consequences."

Each and every chapter in this book offers a uncomfortable revelation. Pioneering research on the deadly effects of tobacco and environmental hormones by the Nazis secretly found its way to many of U.S. corporations producing the same questionable goods. The American Cancer Society spends less than 10 per cent of its billion-dollar budget on independent studies. The great Wilhelm Hueper, the bold pathologist who wrote the book on "occupational tumours," suffered one indignity after another for simply reporting the dangers of uranium mining. And on it goes.

So, the strange reality of cancer fighting truly reads like one of Kafka's nightmares. Most of the 100,000 chemicals commonly used in commerce have not been tested. Their proliferation in the workplace has created a cancer epidemic and a medical-business industry to treat it. Given the toxic nature of many cancer treatments, including radiation and chemotherapy, Davis claims that cancer researchers and cancer physicians are dying in record numbers.

Davis not only sheds light on this darkness, she also opens many hopeful doors. She celebrates tough, rural, blue-collar mothers who have taken on the companies that have riddled their children with cancer-makers. And she welcomes groups such as Health Care Without Harm, a novel coalition focused on getting toxic products out of hospitals.

But her remarkable and disturbing history ultimately illuminates another hidden hydrocarbon holocaust. Our frightful addiction to fossil fuels has not only fouled the atmosphere but given us a wealth of chemicals, plastics and technologies that increasingly undoes the health of millions with cancers. It, too, has given us rich armies of PR men employing "the same expert public relations strategies that kept us tied in knots on tobacco."

Davis knows that changing medical perspectives and priorities, from treatment to prevention, will be an enormous task. But she does not despair. In fact she ends her book with a simple Talmudic story. Faced with a complicated assignment, a group of workers rhyme off the usual excuses: They haven't got the tools or they haven't got the energy. But a good rabbi (sounding much like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings) sets them straight: "It is not for you to complete the task," he says. "But you must begin."

Davis's masterful book has shown us why we must begin rethinking cancer research and treatment now for our children's sake.

To listen to an NPR interview with Dr. Devra Davis, click here: Devra Davis: Chemicals, Cancer and You

***

Andrew Nikiforuk has written extensively about the cancerous legacy of uranium and oil sands mining in northern Canada. He is the author of Pandemonium, about how global trade and climate change threaten food security.

* Correction by Andrew Nikiforuk: First the good news: Canadian comic Andrea Martin is alive and well. Now the bad news: I mistakenly buried her in the course of a book review (Malignancies - Books, Nov. 17). What I meant to say was that Andrea Ravinett Martin, the brave founder and former director of the Breast Cancer Fund and a woman with a good sense of humour, too, died of cancer.

The Friendship Detox: How to Say Goodbye and Good Riddance

The drama queen. The attention addict. The relentless pessimist. The exploiter. When poison pals infect your life, sometimes you just need to say goodbye—and good riddance.

My closest friends live all over the place—in North Carolina and New York, in Mississippi and California, in Las Vegas and London and Atlanta, in Oregon and Alabama and Andalucía, Spain. Sometimes we see each other a lot, and sometimes, for stretches, not at all, which is fine. I'd rather see the true friend once a year than suffer a faux friend every day of the week just for the sake of having someone around. The deepest friendships have nothing to do with proximity; they aren't based on how long we've known each other but on how well we love each other.

We never have to wonder where we stand, these friends and I. We never fear for our mutual emotional safety in each other's company. I can tell these friends anything and know they'd never belittle me, or think less of me, or write me off, or gossip, or use my past or current spasms of childishness/pettiness/insecurity/anger/fear against me. I'm talking about genuine affection and goodwill. I'm talking about two-way faith. I'm talking about protecting and sincerely celebrating each other. I'm talking about Do No Harm. I'm talking about intentions. With these people, I've never worried what slights or betrayals await me, and I've never felt used or exploited. At my most vulnerable, I've probably relied on them for clarity and comfort a little too much, but the balance has always been restored.

Other friends, though, just aren't good for us, no matter how hard we try to make things work.

A few years ago, I was bordering on being as broke as I've ever been. I was a full-time graduate student working several jobs while freelancing every minute of the day and trying to start, and finish, a novel, all amid the stress of rapidly compounding debt. A friend invited me out for coffee, during which time she talked at length about her hugely successful business. I was—and I mean this—happy for her, proud of her, until she kept talking about her hugely successful business and ended our coffee date by suggesting we indulge in pricey mani-pedis. (I like a good mani-pedi, but no thanks.) The next time I saw her, she insisted we eat at a restaurant I couldn't afford, then ordered a really nice bottle of wine and asked to split the check. The last time I saw her, she invited me to her apartment to show me her two new pairs of Manolo Blahniks (roughly $350 per shoe). "I treated myself," she said, "for not having any debt."

Small infractions like these add up and wear you down, the way rivers forge canyons. If we're ridding our lives of stuff that threatens our well-being, a bad friend belongs right there on the junk pile along with stress, overspending, American Idol, and trans fats. She takes up far more psychic space than she deserves or we can handle, and yet we keep her around for the same reasons we hang on to those size 6 jeans: We think things will turn around and/or we can't confront reality. Maybe this friend will change, we tell ourselves yet again. Yeah, and maybe we'll magically shrink five jeans sizes overnight.

I'm starting to think a frenemy can be exposed with a few easy questions: Do you look forward to seeing this person, or do you consider it a chore? Is she truly happy to see you, or do you suspect she wants something from you or needs to lord something over you? Will you walk away from this meeting feeling good—or feeling manipulated, demeaned, poisoned, or played?

The damage can play out in a million different ways. A friendship terrorist knows you're trying to eat more nutritiously yet says, "You won't be able to handle it; you're hungry too much." You tell her about a project that excites you and can actually see her mind scrambling for a negative response, the way game-show contestants dive for dollar bills in a wind machine. You get an editing job after being unemployed for months and she says, "Sheesh, I'd rather drink acid than work in publishing right now." You say this job takes you to Boston, a city you love, and she shrieks, "Boston? I hate Boston! How can you stand the cold?"

You need that kind of friend like you need a Members Only jacket. While you're at it, reconsider the drama addict who can't let a day go by without drawing you into her pseudo life-or-death dilemma and the high-maintenance friend who ratchets up everybody's stress level by overcomplicating everything.

I've had a few such friendship terrorists in my life, and I'm absolutely certain I've been one at times, too, but part of growing up means knowing when to stop playing pretend. Remaining attached to some people is like slaving over a withered garden without realizing all the plants are dead. And letting the negative relationships suck up time and energy only deprives us of the opportunity to nurture and appreciate those friendships that actually do work.

"The interchange between us captured my mind: conversations and joking, doing favors for each other, reading together good books, being foolish and being serious together, disagreeing without hatred almost as though I was debating with myself," wrote St. Augustine of Hippo, that ancient arbiter of relationships, in Confessions, 1,600 years ago. "These and so many other like signs coming from the hearts of friends are shown through their eyes and mouths and speech and a thousand little gestures. All of these expressions of friendship brought our hearts together like bundled kindling, making one out of many."

The truth never fails to show itself in those "thousand little gestures." True friends bear each other's burdens and accept each other's weaknesses, because without reciprocity, there's nothing. Friendship is about collaboration, not domination. Because we should be stewards of each other's rooms, I am happy to help you keep yours clean, but life is too fleeting to let you continue trashing mine.

The drama queen. The attention addict. The relentless pessimist. The exploiter. When poison pals infect your life, sometimes you just need to say goodbye--and good riddance.

The Friendship Quiz: Good Friend, Bad Friend?

There's an unspoken contract in friendship: You be there for me, I'll be there for you. But what if one of you isn't living up to her end of the deal? (What if it's you ?) Sometimes it's okay to keep score, says Martha Beck . Just go through this who-does-what-for-whom list, and find out how you score.

1. Initiate contact between the two of you (by calling, e-mailing, dropping by for a visit, sending an invitation to an event, etc.).

I do this for my friend:

never rarely sometimes often always



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Did she miss out on fame because Hollywood is ruthless or because she consulted wackos like the psychic who spoke in the voice of an ovary?

By Janice Harayda

Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir of Near-Fame Experiences by Nancy Balbirer
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Nancy Balbirer updates the saying that acting is a hard way to earn an easy living in this uneven memoir of two decades of near-misses in show business. Balbirer tells lively stories about how she landed modest roles on Seinfeld and MTV while paying her rent through jobs like cocktail-waitressing and blow-drying friends’ hair for $20, all the while yearning for stardom that came neither in New York nor Hollywood.

But it’s unclear how much of her book you can believe, and not just because an author’s note warns – here we go again – that some facts have been changed “for literary reasons.” Balbirer takes her title and theme from a warning she says she got during a private conversation with the playwright David Mamet, one of her acting teachers at the Tisch School of the Arts. As she tells it, Mamet said that as a woman in show business, she’d be asked to do two things in every role she played:

“Take your shirt off and cry. Still, there’s no reason that you can’t do those things and do them with dignity and the scene properly analyzed.”

Did Mamet really say those lines as written? Good writers tend to keep related words together unless they have reason to split them up, and you wonder if Mamet said, “Take your shirt off” instead of the more graceful “Take off your shirt.” And his “still” seems stilted for a conversation between two people walking toward a Seventh Avenue subway stop.

In the years that followed her talk with Mamet, Balbirer took her shirt off – literally and figuratively — more than once. Yet her willingness to expose herself may have had more to do with a lack of self-awareness than with the raw exploitation envisioned by Mamet. On the evidence of Take Your Shirt Off and Cry, Balbirer has that paradoxical combination so often found in actors: enough intelligence to welcome complex Shakespearean and other roles but too little of it to stay away from con artists, whether they take form of tarot card readers or manipulative lovers. She’s hardly alone among would-be stars in having found an eviction notice taped to her door before she earned redemption (which came, in her case, from writing and starring in the solo show I Slept With Jack Kerouac). But you wonder if she might have avoided some disasters if she’d given less money to people like “a psychic in Tennessee” who spoke to her in the voice of one of her ovaries.

“Wacky, yes, and even wackier that my ‘ovary’ had a thick Southern accent,” she admits, “and still … I believed.”

Best line: Two of the “the enormous angry placards” Balbirer saw in the waiting areas of casting offices: “ACTORS MAY NOT EAT IN THIS AREA!!!” and “ACTORS: CLEAN UP YOUR GARBAGE!!” See also the quote posted earlier on May 20.

Worst line: No. 1: Some parts of Take Your Shirt Off and Cry are so neat, they leave you wondering if they include made-up scenes, dialogue, or characters. Balbirer doesn’t clarify the issue in a vague author’s note that says that she has “in some instances, compressed or expanded time, or otherwise altered events for literary reasons, while remaining faithful to the essential truth of the stories.” No. 2: Balbirer likes cute words (such as “humonguous,” “bazillion” and “suckiest”) that at times work against the serious points she is trying to make.

Published: April 2009

About the author: Balbirer co-owns the Manhattan restaurant Pasita.

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