4 CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE
Hot Type
[email protected]
www.chicagoreader.com/hottype
You Get What
You Pay For
Has the Sun-Times come up with
the perfect business plan for Red Streak?
By Michael Miner
their Sunday paper. Hopefully
we’re going to pull in some new
readers. It’s a fun thing. It’s postmodern. It’s ironic. It’s a joke,
and we’re in on it. We’re all having a good laugh.”
She did point out that the
Sunday paper isn’t all fun and
games. When the Sun-Times
added Fluff five weeks ago it also
added Controversy, a growly new
commentary section (with an
impressively expanded books
department). “And you know
‘Scurrilous’ has been immensely
successful, and ‘Scurrilous’ lives
in Fluff .”
It’s not in the daily paper any
longer? (I’d been caught napping.)
“‘Scurrilous’ lives in Fluff.”
But I’d called about Red
Streak. I was thinking Douglas
must spend ten minutes a day
tops on that paper.
“Red Streak is status quo,” she
said. “We’re publishing it five
days a week, and we’re going to
do that forever.”
I wasn’t so sure. Weeks ago,
when the Sun-Times decided to
give away Red Streak, I noticed
something. The Tribune’s competing RedEye was being handed
out free to commuters at CTA
stations, but most RedEye boxes
on street corners still required a
quarter. At the end of the day
those boxes were full, yet the
adjacent Red Streak boxes, with
big FREE stickers plastered on
them, were empty. It seemed
clear that the brand loyalty
RedEye worked so hard to cultivate didn’t exist. Its readers
seemed to have switched to Red
Streak the minute they didn’t
have to pay for it.
Then I noticed something
else. The Red Streak boxes that
were empty at the end of the
day were also empty at the
beginning. (The crumpled-up
paper at the bottom of one box
near my house is dated March
9.) Making the Red Streak
boxes free to open was a splendid gesture diminished by the
failure to put anything in them.
This made me wonder if Red
Streak still existed. The SunTimes admitted from the get-go
that the only reason Red Streak
was launched was to stir up confusion in the marketplace.
Perhaps the Sun-Times had figured out that empty Red Streak
boxes could do that by themselves. The big FREE stickers said
loud and clear to anyone tempted
to pay a quarter for the competition, “Don’t be a schmuck!”
And if RedEye retaliated and
marked all its boxes FREE, the Red
Streak boxes could switch to 25
CENT REBATE ON EACH PAPER.
This was the kind of circulation
war Red Streak couldn’t lose, since
it wouldn’t actually have any.
Douglas seemed intrigued by
the possibilities. But she
informed me that Red Streak
was really and truly still a daily
newspaper. She said, “I see it
every day when I walk in front of
the Apparel Center”—which is
where the Sun-Times now has
its offices. It’s a matter of knowing where to look.
Bad
Bedfellows
YVETTE MARIE DOSTATNI
E
veryone pitches in at the
Sun-Times. Take Deborah
Douglas. Her voice mail
identifies her as deputy features
editor and director of the library.
But I was calling to discuss Red
Streak, and when I reached her
she assumed I had questions
about Fluff. She’s in charge of
both these helium-filled products. She wears hat after hat.
“Fluff is fluffier than the previous fluff,” she said helpfully.
Feigning interest in her new
section, the Sun-Times’s latest
bid to find readers for its failing
Sunday paper, I’d asked what
distinguishes the fluff that
already stuffed every stray
crevice of the Sun-Times from
Fluff-worthy fluff.
“I guess I just haven’t codified
a philosophy of Fluff,” she said.
“If it’s fun and goes down easy,
then I run with it.”
What if it catches a little on the
way down? I asked. What if, like
pistachio ice cream, it’s a little bit
chewy?
“Fluff is uncomplicated,” she
declared. “It’s like cotton candy.
It won’t get stuck in your braces.”
Do most of your readers wear
braces?
“No, they’re not that young,”
she replied. “But twentysomethings I’ve talked about it with
say they love having Fluff. You
don’t have to pay $5 for your fluff
magazine because they have it in
Making the Red
Streak boxes
free to open was
a splendid gesture
diminished by
the failure to put
anything in them.
America Supports You is a
Defense Department program
that spoons up war the way noncombatants have always liked it.
The last time I visited, its Web
site offered the headline “Denver
Broncos Thank Troops.” You
could also click on “Thank the
Troops for Your Freedom—Send
a Message” or choose the “Kids
Take Action” link. Or you could
follow the “Photo Essays” prompt
to the one titled “Armed Forces
‘Salute’ Suzanne Somers” or the
one of Donald Rumsfeld on the
set of CSI: New York.
On August 9 the Pentagon
announced the first-ever
“America Supports You Freedom
Walk,” a two-mile hike on
September 11 from the
Pentagon to Arlington National
Cemetery, where country singer
Clint Black would give a concert. The purpose of the walk
was “to remember the victims of
CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 19, 2005 | SECTION ONE 5
The Straight Dope
®
by Cecil Adams
I’ve always heard that baldness in males is inherited from their
mother’s father. However, I’ve seen plenty of families where the
father is bald, the mother’s father has plenty of hair, and the kid is
bald. So, what’s the scoop on inheriting baldness? —Debbie Brown, via e-mail
It might be a smart bomb
They find stupid people too
And if you stand with the likes of
Saddam
One just might find you.
I roq, I rack ’em up and I roll
I’m back and I’m a high tech GI
Joe
I’ve got infrared, I’ve got GPS
And I’ve got that good old fashioned lead
The involvement of the media in
the Freedom Walk became a
national issue in large part
because of Christopher Hayes, a
contributing editor at In These
Times. (Hayes also happens to be
the author of this week’s Reader
cover story.) On August 11 he
wrote a sharply indignant e-mail
to Jim Romenesko’s popular
media-news Web site: “Bracket for
a moment the heinous company
in which this places the Bush
administration (Cuba, Iran, and
China, just to name a few of the
regimes that regularly utilize
state-sponsored marches and rallies as propaganda tools), and
bracket for a moment the fact that
this march for ‘freedom,’ which
will take place on public streets,
apparently requires participants to
register with the DoD.”
What really widened Hayes’s
eyes was the willingness of the
media to sign on. “Funny,” he
wrote, “I thought it was the role
of the press to challenge not
collude with the government
when it attempts to disseminate
propaganda.” He pointed out
that the rally was being organized “by the United States military, the same entity currently
administering and promoting an
increasingly unpopular war, one
that remains the single biggest
news story in the nation.”
Romenesko immediately posted Hayes’s e-mail, and the heavily read blogger Atrios immediately picked it up. Denunciations
rolled in from coast to coast:
“Wait waitwaitwait! The fucking
Washington Post is sponsoring a
fucking Pentagon march/!?!?”
Meanwhile, Post columnist
Marc Fisher had gone online to
take questions from readers and
been hammered. “I mean, how
inappropriate is it to hold a
parade and country hoedown on
the Mall to celebrate 9/11?” “If
only Leni Riefenstahl hadn’t
died. Truly, she was the only person who could do film justice to
something like this.” Fisher
allowed that the promotional
tone of the event was “yucky.”
The next day the Post ran a
story in which various media
execs tried to defend themselves.
A spokesman for the commonly
owned TV stations insisted, “You
continued on page 6
Y
our note arrived more than a
year ago, Debbie, and I considered answering it promptly,
which I realize is a departure
from usual Straight Dope practice.
However, I didn’t. Most of what
Little Ed turned up on an initial
reconnaissance of the Internet was
expressed in terms so brisk and
confident you knew these guys had
no idea, leading me to think I’d
better bide my time. Good thing. A
newly published paper suggests
that much of the conventional scientific wisdom about inheriting
baldness (specifically male pattern
baldness, also known as androgenetic alopecia, the most common
type in men) is out the window.
Here’s the scoop as of now.
As you note, popular belief has
long held that male baldness is
inherited through the mother, and
that any lad curious about what’s
in store for him hairwise should check out
his mom’s father and her paternal uncles.
For just as long health-care types have
been patiently explaining that this belief
is groundless—that instead, as one doctor’s Web site (still) puts it, “a single dominant autosomal gene controls male pattern baldness.” In other words, baldness
isn’t a sex-linked characteristic, meaning
it’s not transmitted via the X or Y chromosomes that determine whether you’re
male or female. Rather it’s passed down
via one of the non-sex-linked chromosomes, or autosomes, which are randomly
contributed by both parents. So, according
to the old theory, you were equally likely
to get baldness from either mom or dad.
It turns out, however, that the old theory was based primarily on one study conducted in—get this—1916. Doctors were
still prescribing mustard plasters in 1916.
Clearly the time had come for a fresh
look, particularly in light of our expanding
knowledge of the human genome.
Preliminary investigations hinted that
baldness had something to do with the
sex chromosomes—to be precise, the X
chromosome, which a man inherits from
his mother. (His father contributes the Y
chromosome that makes him male.) Now
SLUG SIGNORINO
Sept. 11, 2001, to honor U.S.
troops and veterans, and to
highlight the value of freedom.”
The curious assortment of
cosponsors included Lockheed
Martin, Subway, and various
media entities, who’d be providing publicity: the Washington
Post, two Washington-area TV
stations, and radio station
WTOP. When the role of the
media was called into question,
in view of the debate over the
war in Iraq, a WTOP vice president explained, “We’re not making a connection between the
war and 9/11.”
Plenty of critics of the war in
Iraq would agree that there’s
no connection, beyond 9/11
giving President Bush cover to
start a war he wanted to fight
anyway. But the Pentagon’s
press release drew no distinction between American troops
and the war they’re fighting at
the moment. And it’s probably
not a coincidence that Clint
Black made the charts with a
song that goes like this:
comes a German study (Hillmer et al,
American Journal of Human Genetics, July
2005) stating flatly that the major determinant of early baldness is a gene men
get from their moms.
The researchers, led by Markus Nöthen
of the University of Bonn, rounded up several hundred balding and nonbalding men
and compared their androgen receptor
(AR) genes, which are located on the X
chromosome. Androgens (male sex hormones) play a key role in balding—castrated men don’t go bald—and the AR gene
helps them do their work. The researchers
found the balding men were much more
likely to have a particular version of the
AR gene than the nonbalding men, which
they took to mean they’d found a genetic
variant that triggers baldness. Nöthen and
company emphasize that this variant isn’t
the sole cause of baldness—other recent
research suggests that baldness on your
father’s side of the family has something
to do with it too. No doubt this helps
explain cases of hairy maternal
grandpa/bald dad/bald son. But Nöthen’s
group thinks the mother’s contribution is
the principal factor.
In retrospect it seems obvious baldness
is at least partly an X-linked trait. About
1,000 genes are Xlinked, among them
those encoding redgreen color blindness, one type of
muscular dystrophy,
and hemophilia, conditions predominantly
afflicting males. Men
are more prone than
women to X-linked
abnormalities because
they receive an XY
chromosome combination while women get
XX. In women, a
recessive abnormality on one X chromosome will likely be
masked by a dominant normal gene on
the other. Men, however,
have only one X chromosome—their other sex chromosome, remember, is a Y. That means an
X-linked abnormality, e.g., the aforementioned baldogenic variation in the AR
gene, won’t be masked and has a greater
chance of being expressed, one reason
you see a lot fewer balding women than
balding men. (Nöthen gently reminds me
that another, frankly more important reason is that men have an abundance of
androgens and women generally don’t.)
In short, after 89 years geneticists are
finally getting straight on the hereditary
basis of hair loss. But let’s not be too
quick to criticize—theirs is a confusing
business. A previous demonstration of this
fact, if you’ll excuse my digressing a bit, is
the seemingly simple matter of ascertaining how many chromosomes we humans
have. By the early 1920s researchers were
in wide agreement that there were 48,
and for decades it was stated in textbooks
as incontestable fact, leading at least one
investigator to halt a research project
when she kept coming up with a different
figure. Not until more than 30 years later,
in 1956, did Joe Hin Tjio count the chromosomes again and find, admittedly with
the aid of an improved microscope slide
preparation technique, that there were
(ahem) only 46.
Comments, questions? Take it up with Cecil on the Straight Dope Message Board, www.straightdope.com,
or write him at the Chicago Reader, 11 E. Illinois, Chicago 60611. Cecil’s most recent compendium of knowledge,
Triumph of the Straight Dope, is available at bookstores everywhere.