Academic literature on the topic 'Tom McCullough'

Adaptive T cell therapy using chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells and bispecific T cell engagers (BiTEs) have demonstrated encouraging responses in heavily pre-treated multiple myeloma (MM) patients. However, the cellular and molecular predictors of clinical response are not fully understood as well as the mediators of acquired resistance remain elusive. Local immune suppression and T cell exhaustion are important mediators of responses therefore, it is plausible to speculate that a tolerant tumor microenvironment and the expansion of specific T cell populations may dictate clinical responses. In this study, we performed at the single cell level a broad immunophenotypic and transcriptomic characterization of the blood and bone marrow (BM) T cells of sensitive and resistant MM patients treated with adaptive T cell therapies. Using cellular indexing of transcriptomes and epitopes by sequencing (CITE-seq) we measured the expansion of variable T cell subsets, T cell specific activation and inhibitor markers and their functional states in order to identify cellular mediators of resistance to these adoptive immune therapies. Serial blood samples and BM aspirates (n=12) were collected from patients treated with anti-BCMA CAR-T or BCMA-CD3 BiTEs at variable time points, prior and post initiation of therapy and at relapse. Bone marrow mononuclear fractions were isolated through ficoll density gradients coupled with magnetic sorting of CD3pos T cells. Unbiased mRNA profiling coupled with feature barcoding technology for cell surface protein (TotalSeq-B) of BM CD3pos T cells was then performed by using the chromium single cell (10x Genomics). Paired-end sequencing was performed on Illumina platform. Cell Ranger and Seurat pipeline were used for sample de-multiplexing, barcode processing, single-cell 3′ gene counting, cell surface protein expression and data analysis. CAR-T cells were identified by the expression of the chimeric CAR-T cell transcript. The parallel measurement of transcripts and cell surface protein phenotypes of CD3pos T cells using a panel of 19 immune surface markers underlined the T cell repertoire diversity and identified different T cell subsets among the CD8pos and CD4pos T cells. Notably, the cell surface protein information overlaid on the transcript-generated UMA allowed accurate identification of all main immune clusters, in particular for the CD45RA and CD45RO positive cells. Comparison of CITE-Seq features revealed that the T cells composition of the blood and BM niches differed significantly between sensitive and resistant patients. As such an enrichment of CD4pos T cells with a higher CD4:CD8 ratio was noted in responding patients. Phenotypic (CD45RA, CD45RO, CD95, CCR7, CD62L, CD28, CD27) and transcriptional signatures (TCF7, LEF1, GATA3, EOMES, TBX21, PRDM1) also identified a higher proportion of memory like T cells (Tscm, Tcm) in responding patients. In contrast, T cells of resistant patients were enriched with terminally exhausted (Tex) and senescent cells with loss of CD28, high GMZHand GMZB, CD57pos, CD69pos and CD160pos as well as upregulation of TBX21. Expression of T cell checkpoint inhibitors such as LAG3, TIGIT and PD1 was high in these Tex cells as well as in some Tem. Of note, ex vivo T cell activation studies with TIGIT blockade demonstrated T cell activation in an autologous MM and T cell co-culture system with enhanced MM cells death. An expanded cluster of regulatory T cells (Treg) FOXP3pos,CD25pos was also observed in two resistant patients. Of note, no loss of BCMA transcript or surface expression was noted in MM cells at the time of acquired resistance. Single cell transcriptome of primary MM cells and chromatin accessibility (ATAC-seq) analyses of T cells of these patients are ongoing to investigate the transcriptional programs and epigenetic factors underlying the immune escape. Combined single cell features profiling of the transcriptome and surface protein expression of T cells from MM patients receiving BCMA targeted CAR-T or BiTEs therapies revealed potential mediators of resistance. In particular, T cells composition (low CD4:CD8 ratio and reduced population of Tscm, Tcm) along with an enrichment of terminally exhausted T cells are the main features observed in resistant patients. Delineating these mechanisms will guide future T cells engineering studies to enhance the efficacy and response durability of adoptive immunotherapy in MM. Disclosures McCulloch: Amgen: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria. Duggan:Jannsen: Consultancy; Amgen: Consultancy; Novartis: Honoraria; Celgene: Consultancy; Astra Zeneca: Consultancy. Jimenez-Zepeda:Janssen, Celgene, Amgen, Takeda: Honoraria. Bahlis:AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria; Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria; GSK: Consultancy, Honoraria; Genentech: Consultancy, Honoraria; BMS/Celgene and Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: Travel, Accomodations, Research Funding; Karyopharm Therapeutics: Consultancy, Honoraria; Sanofi: Consultancy, Honoraria. Neri:Celgene/BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria.

Introdução: A avulsão dentária caracteriza-se pelo total deslocamento do dente para fora do seu alvéolo representando uma lesão complexa e dramática que pode afetar múltiplos tecidos. Representa uma situação de urgência, e o prognóstico depende de um tratamento rápido e apropriado. Objetivo: Este estudo tem como objetivo avaliar o nível de conhecimento dos alunos do curso de Odontologia do primeiro ano da Universidade Estadual de Maringá (UEM) sobre a avulsão dentária, abordando a forma de atuação clínica e conduta que deve ser adotada frente a esse tipo de traumatismo dentário. Material e método: Elaborou-se um questionário, contendo dados gerais e informações relacionadas a avulsão dentária. O questionário foi aplicado na aula de introdução à Endodontia aos acadêmicos do primeiro ano. As informações obtidas foram tabuladas e analisadas por meio de uma estatística descritiva. Resultados: Os resultados sugerem que o conhecimento sobre o manejo de dentes avulsionados é insuficiente entre os estudantes do primeiro ano de Odontologia. Conclusão: Dessa forma, a educação odontológica deve focar nas orientações sobre primeiros socorros em lesões odontológicas e enfatizar a necessidade de disseminar programas de treinamento e educação para os estudantes de Odontologia.Descritores: Traumatismos Dentários; Avulsão Dentária; Odontologia.ReferênciasAndreasen JO, Andreasen FM. Texto e Atlas colorido de traumatismo dental. 3ª ed. Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas; 2001.Gutmann JL, Gutmann M. Cause, incidence, and prevention of trauma to teeth. Dent Clin North Am. 1995;39:1-13.Andreasen JO, Borum MK, Jacobsen HL, Andreasen FM. Replantation of 400 avulsed permanent incisors. Factors related to periodontal ligament healing. Endod Dent Traumatol. 1995;11:76-89.Chan AWK, Wong TKS, Cheung GSP. Lay knowledge of physical education teachers about the emergency management of dental trauma in Hong Kong. Dent Traumatol 2001;17:77-85.Pohl Y, Filippi A, Kirschner H. Results after replantation of avulsed permanent teeth. II. Periodontal healing and the role of physiologic storage and antiresorptive - regenerative therapy. Dent Traumatol. 2005;21:93-101.Cohenca, N. Knowledge of oral health professionals of treatment of avulsed teeth. Dent Traumatol. 2006;296-30.Malmgren B, Malmgren O. Rate of infraposition of reimplanted ankylosed incisors related to age and growth in children and adolescents. Dent Traumatol.2002; 18:28-36.Flores MT, Andreasen JO, Bakland LK, Feiglin B, Gutmann JL, Oikarinen K et al. International Association of Dental Traumatology. Guidelines for the evaluation and management of traumatic dental injuries. Dent Traumatol. 2001;17:193-8. Ingle JI, Bakland LK, Baumgartner JC. Ingle’s endodontics. 6th ed. Hamilton, ON: B.C. Decker Inc; 2008.Lekic P, Kenny D, Moe HK, Barretti E, McCulloch CA. Relationship of clonogenic capacity to plating efficiency and vital dye staining of human periodontal ligament cells: implications for tooth replantation. J Periodontal Res. 1996;31:294-300.Lekic PC, Kenny DJ, Barrett EJ. The influence of storage conditions on the clonogenic capacity of periodontal ligament cells: implications for tooth replantation. Int Endod J. 1998;31:137-40.Layug ML, Barrett EJ, Kenny DJ. Interim storage of avulsed permanent teeth. J Can Dent Assoc. 1998;64:357-63.Lin DG, Kenny DJ, Barrett EJ, Lekic P, McCulloch CA. Storage conditions of avulsed teeth affect the phenotype of cultured human periodontal ligament cells. J Periodontal Res. 2000;35:42–50.Andreasen JO, Andreasen FM, Andersson L. Textbook and colour atlas of traumatic injuries to the teeth, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell Munksgaard; 2007. Andersson L, Bodin I. Avulsed human teeth replanted within 15 minutes – a long term clinical follow-up study. Endod Dent Traumatol. 1990;6:37-42.Courts FJ, Mueller WA, Tabeling HJ. Milk as an interim storage medium for avulsed teeth. Pediatr Dent. 1983;5:183-6.Ashkenazi M, Marouni M, Sarnat H. In vitro viability, mitogenicity and clonogenic capacity of periodontal ligament cells after storage in four media at room temperature. Endod Dent Traumatol. 2000;16:63-70.Hammarström L, Pierce A, Blomlöf L, Feiglin B, Lindskog S. Tooth avulsion and replantation – a review. Endod Dent Traumatol. 1986;2:1-8.Hiltz J, Trope M. Vitality of human lip fibroblasts in milk, hanks balanced salt solution and viaspan storage media. Dent Traumatol. 1991;7:69-72.Blomlöf L. Milk and saliva as possible storage media for traumatically exarticulated teeth prior to replantation. Swed Dent J Suppl. 1981;8:1-26.Huang SC, Remeikis NA, Daniel JC. Effects of long-term exposure of human periodontal ligament cells to milk and other solutions. J Endod. 1996;22:30-3.Khademi AA, Saei S, Mohajeri MR et al. A new storage medium for an avulsed tooth. J Contemp Dent Pract. 2008;9:25-32.Krasner PR. Avulsed teeth: improving the diagnosis. Dent Prod Rep. 2007;2:52-64.Fagade OO. Extra-alveolar storage media for tooth autotransplants and replants. Internet J Dent Sci. 2005;2:1-10.Udoye CI, Jafarzadeh H, Abbott PV. Transport media for avulsed teeth: A review. Aust Endod J. 2012;38:129-136.Blomlöf L, Andersson L, Lindskog S, Hedström KG, Hammarström L. Periodontal healing of replanted monkey teeth prevented from drying. Acta Odontol Scand. 1983;41:117-23.Bibby KJ, McCulloch CA. Regulation of cell volume and [Ca2+ ] in attached human fibroblasts responding to anisosmotic buffers. Am J Physiol. 1994;266:39-49Gopikrishna V, Baweja PS, Venkateshbabu N, Thomas T, Kandaswamy D. Comparison of coconut water, propolis, HBSS, and milk on PDL cell survival. J Endod. 2008;34:587-589.Gopikrishna V, Thomas T, Kandaswamy D. A quantitative analysis of coconut water: a new storage media for avulsed teeth. Oral Surg Oral Med Oral Pathol Oral Radiol Endod. 2008;105:61-65.Moreira-Neto JJS, Gondim JO, Raddi MSG, Pansani CA. Viability of human fibroblasts in coconut water as storage medium. Intern Endod J. 2009;42:827-830.Thomas T, Gopikrishna V, Kandaswamy D. Comparative evaluation of maintenance of cell viability of an experimental transport media “coconut water” with Hank’s balanced salt solution and milk, for transportation of an avulsed tooth: an in vitro cell culture study. J Conserv Dent. 2008;11:22-29.Souza BDM, Luckemeyer DD, Reyes-Carmona JF, Felippe WT, Simões CMO, Felippe MCS. Viability of human periodontal ligament fibroblasts in milk, Hank’s balanced salt solution and coconut water as storage media. Int Endod J. 2011; 44:111-115.Pearson RM, Liewehr FR, West LA, Patton WR, McPherson JC, Runner RR. Human periodontal ligament cell viability in milk and milk substitutes. J Endod. 2003; 29:184-186.

Introduction Medical misinformation and conspiracies have thrived during the current infodemic as a result of the volume of information people have been exposed to during the disease outbreak. Given that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is a novel coronavirus discovered in 2019, much remains unknown about the disease. Moreover, a considerable amount of what was originally thought to be known has turned out to be inaccurate, incomplete, or based on an obsolete knowledge of the virus. It is in this context of uncertainty and confusion that conspiracies flourish. Michael Golebiewski and danah boyd’s work on ‘data voids’ highlights the ways that actors can work quickly to produce conspiratorial content to fill a void. The data void absent of high-quality data surrounding COVID-19 provides a fertile information environment for conspiracies to prosper (Chou et al.). Conspiracism is the belief that society and social institutions are secretly controlled by a powerful group of corrupt elites (Douglas et al.). Michael Barkun’s typology of conspiracy reveals three components: 1) the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence; 2) nothing is as it seems: the "appearance of innocence" is to be suspected; 3) the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern. At the heart of conspiracy theories is narrative storytelling, in particular plots involving influential elites secretly colluding to control society (Fenster). Conspiracies following this narrative playbook have flourished during the pandemic. Pharmaceutical corporations profiting from national vaccine rollouts, and the emergency powers given to governments around the world to curb the spread of coronavirus, have led some to cast these powerful commercial and State organisations as nefarious actors – 'big evil' drug companies and the ‘Deep State’ – in conspiratorial narratives. Several drugs believed to be potential treatments for COVID-19 have become entangled with conspiracy. At the start of the pandemic scientists experimented with repurposing existing drugs as potential treatments for COVID-19 because safe and effective vaccines were not yet available. A series of antimicrobials with potential activity against SARS-CoV-2 were tested in clinical trials, including lopinavir/ritonavir, favipiravir and remdesivir (Smith et al.). Only hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin transformed from potential COVID treatments into conspiracy objects. This article traces how the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin conspiracy theories were amplified in the news media and online. It highlights how debunking processes contribute to amplification effects due to audience segmentation in the current media ecology. We conceive of these amplification and debunking processes as key components of a ‘Conspiracy Course’ (Baker and Maddox), identifying the interrelations and tensions between amplification and debunking practices as a conspiracy develops, particularly through mainstream news, social media and alternative media spaces. We do this in order to understand how medical claims about potential treatments for COVID-19 succumb to conspiracism and how we can intervene in their development and dissemination. In this article we present a commentary on how public discourse and actors surrounding two potential treatments for COVID-19: the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin became embroiled in conspiracy. We examine public discourse and events surrounding these treatments over a 24-month period from January 2020, when the virus gained global attention, to January 2022, the time this article was submitted. Our analysis is contextually informed by an extended digital ethnography into medical misinformation, which has included social media monitoring and observational digital field work of social media sites, news media, and digital media such as blogs, podcasts, and newsletters. Our analysis focusses on the role that public figures and influencers play in amplifying these conspiracies, as well as their amplification by some wellness influencers, referred to as “alt.health influencers” (Baker), and those affiliated with the Intellectual Dark Web, many of whom occupy status in alternative media spaces. The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) is a term used to describe an alternative influence network comprised of public intellectuals including the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the British political commentator Douglas Murray. The term was coined by the American mathematician and podcast host Eric Weinstein, who described the IDW as a group opposed to “the gated institutional narrative” of the mainstream media and the political establishment (Kelsey). As a consequence, many associated with the IDW use alternative media, including podcasts and newsletters, as an "eclectic conversational space" where those intellectual thinkers excluded from mainstream conversational spaces in media, politics, and academia can “have a much easier time talking amongst ourselves” (Kelsey). In his analysis of the IDW, Parks describes these figures as "organic" intellectuals who build identification with their audiences by branding themselves as "reasonable thinkers" and reinforcing dominant narratives of polarisation. Hence, while these influential figures are influencers in so far as they cultivate an online audience as a vocation in exchange for social, economic and political gain, they are distinct from earlier forms of micro-celebrity (Senft; Marwick) in that they do not merely achieve fame on social media among a niche community of followers, but appeal to those disillusioned with the mainstream media and politics. The IDW are contrasted not with mainstream celebrities, as is the case with earlier forms of micro-celebrity (Abidin Internet Celebrity), but with the mainstream media and politics. A public figure, on the other hand, is a “famous person” broadcast in the media. While celebrities are public figures, public figures are not necessarily celebrities; a public figure is ‘a person of great public interest or familiarity’, such as a government official, politician, entrepreneur, celebrity, or athlete. Analysis In what follows we explore the role of influencers and public figures in amplifying the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin conspiracy theories during the pandemic. As part of this analysis, we consider how debunking processes can further amplify these conspiracies, raising important questions about how to most effectively respond to conspiracies in the current media ecology. Discussions around hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as potential treatments for COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 at the start of the pandemic when people were desperate for a cure, and safe and effective vaccines for the virus were not yet publicly available. While claims concerning the promising effects of both treatments emerged in the mainstream, the drugs remained experimental COVID treatments and had not yet received widespread acceptance among scientific and medical professionals. Much of the hype around these drugs as COVID “cures” emerged from preprints not yet subject to peer review and scientific studies based on unreliable data, which were retracted due to quality issues (Mehra et al.). Public figures, influencers, and news media organisations played a key role in amplifying these narratives in the mainstream, thereby extending the audience reach of these claims. However, their transformation into conspiracy objects followed different amplification processes for each drug. Hydroxychloroquine, the “Game Changer” Hydroxychloroquine gained public attention on 17 March 2020 when the US tech entrepreneur Elon Musk shared a Google Doc with his 40 million followers on Twitter, proposing “maybe worth considering chloroquine for C19”. Musk’s tweet was liked over 50,200 times and received more than 13,500 retweets. The tweet was followed by several other tweets that day in which Musk shared a series of graphs and a paper alluding to the “potential benefit” of hydroxychloroquine in in vitro and early clinical data. Although Musk is not a medical expert, he is a public figure with status and large online following, which contributed to the hype around hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for COVID-19. Following Musk’s comments, search interest in chloroquine soared and mainstream media outlets covered his apparent endorsement of the drug. On 19 March 2020, the Fox News programme Tucker Carlson Tonight cited a study declaring hydroxychloroquine to have a “100% cure rate against coronavirus” (Gautret et al.). Within hours another public figure, the then-US President Donald Trump, announced at a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing that the FDA would fast-track approval of hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria and arthritis, which he said had, “tremendous promise based on the results and other tests”. Despite the Chief Medical Advisor to the President, Dr Anthony Fauci, disputing claims concerning the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine as a potential therapy for coronavirus as “anecdotal evidence”, Trump continued to endorse hydroxychloroquine describing the drug as a “game changer”: HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine. He said that the drugs should be put in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST, and GOD BLESS EVERYONE! Trump’s tweet was shared over 102,800 times and liked over 384,800 times. His statements correlated with a 2000% increase in prescriptions for the anti-malarial drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in the US between 15 and 21 March 2020, resulting in many lupus patients unable to source the drug. There were also reports of overdoses as individuals sought to self-medicate with the drug to treat the virus. Once Trump declared himself a proponent of hydroxychloroquine, scientific inquiry into the drug was eclipsed by an overtly partisan debate. An analysis by Media Matters found that Fox News had promoted the drug 109 times between 23 and 25 March 2020, with other right wing media outlets following suit. The drug was further amplified and politicised by conservative public figures including Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani, who claimed on 27 March 2020 that “hydroxychloroquine has been shown to have a 100% effective rate in treating COVID-19”, and Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, who shared a Facebook post on 8 July 2020 admitting to taking the drug to treat the virus: “I’m one more person for whom this is working. So I trust hydroxychloroquine”. In addition to these conservative political figures endorsing hydroxychloroquine, on 27 July 2020 the right-wing syndicated news outlet Breitbart livestreamed a video depicting America’s Frontline Doctors – a group of physicians backed by the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative political organisation supportive of Trump – at a press conference outside the US Supreme Court in Washington. In the video, Stella Immanuel, a primary care physician in Texas, said “You don’t need masks…There is prevention and there is a cure!”, explaining that Americans could resume their normal lives by preemptively taking hydroxychloroquine. The video was retweeted by public figures including President Trump and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., before going viral reaching over 20 million users on Facebook. The video explicitly framed hydroxychloroquine as an effective “cure” for COVID-19 suppressed by “fake doctors”, thereby transferring it from potential treatment to a conspiracy object. These examples not only demonstrate the role of prominent public figures in amplifying conspiratorial claims about hydroxychloroquine as an effective cure for COVID-19, they reveal how these figures converted the drug into an “article of faith” divorced from scientific evidence. Consequently, to believe in its efficacy as a cure for COVID-19 demonstrated support for Trump and ideological skepticism of the scientific and medical establishment. Ivermectin, the “Miracle Cure” Ivermectin followed a different amplification trajectory. The amplifying process was primarily led by influencers in alternative media spaces and those associated with the IDW, many of whom position themselves in contrast to the mainstream media and politics. Despite scientists conducting clinical trials for ivermectin in early 2020, the ivermectin conspiracy peaked much later that year. On 8 December 2020, the pulmonary and ICU specialist Dr. Pierre Kory testified to the US Senate Committee about I-MASK: a prevention and early outpatient treatment protocol for COVID-19. During the hearing, Kory claimed that “ivermectin is effectively a ‘miracle drug’ against COVID-19”, which could end the pandemic. Kory’s depiction of ivermectin as a panacea, and the subsequent media hype, elevated him as a public figure and led to an increase in public demand for ivermectin in early 2021. This resulted in supply issues and led some people to seek formulations of the drug designed for animals, which were in greater supply and easier to access. Several months later in June 2021, Kory’s description of ivermectin as a “miracle cure” was amplified by a series of influencers, including Bret Weinstein and Joe Rogan, both of whom featured Kory on their podcasts as a key public figure in the fight against COVID Conspiratorial associations with ivermectin were further amplified on 9 July 2021 when Bret Weinstein appeared on Fox Nation's Tucker Carlson Today claiming he had “been censored for raising concerns about the shots and the medical establishment's opposition to alternative treatments”. The drug was embroiled in further controversy on 1 September 2021 when Joe Rogan shared an Instagram post explaining that he had taken ivermectin as one of many drugs to treat the virus. In the months that followed, Rogan featured several controversial scientists on his podcast who implied that ivermectin was an effective COVID “cure” suppressed as part of a global agenda to promote vaccine uptake. These public figures included Dr Robert Malone, an American physician who contributed to the development of mRNA technology, and Dr Peter McCullough, an American cardiologist with expertise in vaccines. As McCullough explained to Rogan in December 2021: it seemed to me early on that there was an intentional very comprehensive suppression of early treatment in order to promote fear, suffering, isolation, hospitalisation and death and it seemed to be completely organised and intentional in order to create acceptance for and then promote mass vaccination. McCullough went on to imply that the pandemic was planned and that vaccine manufacturers were engaged in a coordinated response to profit from mass vaccination. Consequently, whereas conservative public figures, such as Trump and Bolsonaro, played a primary role in amplifying the hype around hydroxychloroquine as a COVID cure and embroiling it in a political and conspiratorial narrative of collusion, influencers, especially those associated with alternative media and the IDW, were crucial in amplifying the ivermectin conspiracy online by platforming controversial scientists who espoused the drug as a “miracle cure”, which could allegedly end the pandemic but was being suppressed by the government and medical establishment. Debunking Debunking processes refuting the efficacy of these drugs as COVID “cures” contributed to the amplification of these conspiracies. In April 2020 the paper endorsing hydroxychloroquine that Trump tweeted about a week earlier was debunked. The debunking process for hydroxychloroquine involved a series of statements, papers, randomised clinical trials and retractions not only rejecting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, but suggesting it was unsafe and had the potential to cause harm (Boulware et al.; Mehra; Voss). In April 2020, the FDA released a statement cautioning against the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 outside of a hospital setting or a clinical trial due to risk of heart rhythm problems, and in June the FDA revoked its emergency use authorisation to treat COVID-19 in certain hospitalised patients. The debunking process was not limited to fact-based claims, it also involved satire and ridicule of those endorsing the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. Given the politicisation of the drug, much of this criticism was directed at Trump, as a key proponent of the drug, and Republicans in general, both of whom were cast as scientifically illiterate. The debunking process for ivermectin was similarly initiated by scientific and medical authorities who questioned the efficacy of ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment due to reliability issues with trials and the quality of evidence (Lawrence). In response to claims that supply issues led people to seek formulations of the drug designed for animals, in April 2021 the FDA released a statement cautioning people not to take ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19: While there are approved uses for ivermectin in people and animals, it is not approved for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 … . People should never take animal drugs … . Using these products in humans could cause serious harm. The CDC echoed this warning, claiming that “veterinary formulations intended for use in large animals such as horses, sheep, and cattle can be highly concentrated and result in overdoses when used by humans”. Many journalists and Internet users involved in debunking ivermectin reduced the drug to horse paste. Social media feeds debunking ivermectin were filled with memes ridiculing those consuming “horse dewormer”. Mockery of those endorsing ivermectin extended beyond social media, with the popular US sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live featuring a skit mocking Joe Rogan for consuming “horse medicine” to treat the virus. The skit circulated on social media in the following days, further deriding advocates of the drug as a COVID cure as not only irresponsible, but stupid. This type of ridicule, visually expressed in videos and Internet memes, fuelled polarisation. This polarisation was then weaponised by influencers associated with the IDW to sell ivermectin as a “miracle drug” suppressed by the medical and political establishment, thereby embroiling the drug further in conspiracy (Baker and Maddox). This type of opportunistic marketing is not intended for a mass audience. Instead, audiences are taking advantage of what Crystal Abidin refers to as “silosociality”, wherein content is tailored for specific subcommunities, which are not necessarily “accessible” or “legible” to outsiders (Abidin Refracted Publics 4). This dynamic both reflects and reinforces the audience segmentation that occurs in the current media ecology by virtue of alternative media with mockery and ridicule strengthening in- and out-group dynamics. Conclusion In this article we have traced how hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin moved from promising potential COVID-19 treatments to objects tainted by conspiracy. Despite common associations of conspiracy theories with the fringe, both the hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin conspiracy theories emerged in the mainstream, amplified across mainstream social networks with the help of influencers and public figures whose claims were further amplified by the news media commenting on their apparent endorsement of these drugs as COVID cures. Whereas hydroxychloroquine was politicised as a result of controversial public figures and right-wing media outlets endorsing the drug and the conspiratorial narrative espoused by America’s Frontline Doctors, notably much of the conspiracy around ivermectin shifted to alternative media spaces amplified by influencers disillusioned with the mainstream media. We have demonstrated how debunking processes, which sought to discredit these drugs as potential treatments for COVID-19, often ridiculed those who endorsed them, further polarising discussions involving these treatments and pushing advocates to the extreme. By encouraging proponents of these treatments to retreat to alternative media spaces, such as podcasts and newsletters, polarisation strengthened in-group dynamics, assisting the ability for opportunistic influencers to weaponise these conspiracies for social, economic, and political gain. These findings raise important questions about how to effectively counter conspiracies. 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"Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin as a Treatment of COVID-19: Results of an Open-Label Non-Randomized Clinical Trial." International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents 56.1 (2020): 105949. Golebiewski, Michael, and danah boyd. "Data Voids: Where Missing Data Can Easily Be Exploited." Data & Society (2019). Kelsey, Darren. "Archetypal Populism: The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ and the ‘Peterson Paradox’." Discursive Approaches to Populism across Disciplines. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 171-198. Lawrence, Jack M., et al. "The Lesson of Ivermectin: Meta-Analyses Based on Summary Data Alone Are Inherently Unreliable." Nature Medicine 27.11 (2021): 1853-1854. Marwick, Alice E. Status Update. Yale University Press, 2013. Mehra, Mandeep R., et al. "RETRACTED: Hydroxychloroquine or Chloroquine with or without a Macrolide for Treatment of COVID-19: A Multinational Registry Analysis." (2020). Parks, Gabriel. "Considering the Purpose of ‘an Alternative Sense-Making Collective’: A Rhetorical Analysis of the Intellectual Dark Web." Southern Communication Journal 85.3 (2020): 178-190. Senft, Theresa M. Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks. Peter Lang, 2008. Smith, Tim, et al. "COVID-19 Drug Therapy." Elsevier (2020). Voss, Andreas. “Official Statement from International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (ISAC).” International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 3 Apr. 2020. <https://www.isac.world/news-and-publications/official-isac-statement>.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. 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Introduction: Our current obsession with the lives of others “Biography—that is to say, our creative and non-fictional output devoted to recording and interpreting real lives—has enjoyed an extraordinary renaissance in recent years,” writes Nigel Hamilton in Biography: A Brief History (1). Ian Donaldson agrees that biography is back in fashion: “Once neglected within the academy and relegated to the dustier recesses of public bookstores, biography has made a notable return over recent years, emerging, somewhat surprisingly, as a new cultural phenomenon, and a new academic adventure” (23). For over a decade now, commentators having been making similar observations about our obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives. In a lecture in 1994, Justin Kaplan asserted the West was “a culture of biography” (qtd. in Salwak 1) and more recent research findings by John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge affirm that “the undiminished human curiosity about other peoples lives is clearly reflected in the popularity of autobiographies and biographies” (218). At least in relation to television, this assertion seems valid. In Australia, as in the USA and the UK, reality and other biographically based television shows have taken over from drama in both the numbers of shows produced and the viewers these shows attract, and these forms are also popular in Canada (see, for instance, Morreale on The Osbournes). In 2007, the program Biography celebrated its twentieth anniversary season to become one of the longest running documentary series on American television; so successful that in 1999 it was spun off into its own eponymous channel (Rak; Dempsey). Premiered in May 1996, Australian Story—which aims to utilise a “personal approach” to biographical storytelling—has won a significant viewership, critical acclaim and professional recognition (ABC). It can also be posited that the real home movies viewers submit to such programs as Australia’s Favourite Home Videos, and “chat” or “confessional” television are further reflections of a general mania for biographical detail (see Douglas), no matter how fragmented, sensationalized, or even inane and cruel. A recent example of the latter, the USA-produced The Moment of Truth, has contestants answering personal questions under polygraph examination and then again in front of an audience including close relatives and friends—the more “truthful” their answers (and often, the more humiliated and/or distressed contestants are willing to be), the more money they can win. Away from television, but offering further evidence of this interest are the growing readerships for personally oriented weblogs and networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Grossman), individual profiles and interviews in periodical publications, and the recently widely revived newspaper obituary column (Starck). Adult and community education organisations run short courses on researching and writing auto/biographical forms and, across Western countries, the family history/genealogy sections of many local, state, and national libraries have been upgraded to meet the increasing demand for these services. Academically, journals and e-mail discussion lists have been established on the topics of biography and autobiography, and North American, British, and Australian universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses in life writing. The commonly aired wisdom is that published life writing in its many text-based forms (biography, autobiography, memoir, diaries, and collections of personal letters) is enjoying unprecedented popularity. It is our purpose to examine this proposition. Methodological problems There are a number of problems involved in investigating genre popularity, growth, and decline in publishing. Firstly, it is not easy to gain access to detailed statistics, which are usually only available within the industry. Secondly, it is difficult to ascertain how publishing statistics are gathered and what they report (Eliot). There is the question of whether bestselling booklists reflect actual book sales or are manipulated marketing tools (Miller), although the move from surveys of booksellers to electronic reporting at point of sale in new publishing lists such as BookScan will hopefully obviate this problem. Thirdly, some publishing lists categorise by subject and form, some by subject only, and some do not categorise at all. This means that in any analysis of these statistics, a decision has to be made whether to use the publishing list’s system or impose a different mode. If the publishing list is taken at face value, the question arises of whether to use categorisation by form or by subject. Fourthly, there is the bedeviling issue of terminology. Traditionally, there reigned a simple dualism in the terminology applied to forms of telling the true story of an actual life: biography and autobiography. Publishing lists that categorise their books, such as BookScan, have retained it. But with postmodern recognition of the presence of the biographer in a biography and of the presence of other subjects in an autobiography, the dichotomy proves false. There is the further problem of how to categorise memoirs, diaries, and letters. In the academic arena, the term “life writing” has emerged to describe the field as a whole. Within the genre of life writing, there are, however, still recognised sub-genres. Academic definitions vary, but generally a biography is understood to be a scholarly study of a subject who is not the writer; an autobiography is the story of a entire life written by its subject; while a memoir is a segment or particular focus of that life told, again, by its own subject. These terms are, however, often used interchangeably even by significant institutions such the USA Library of Congress, which utilises the term “biography” for all. Different commentators also use differing definitions. Hamilton uses the term “biography” to include all forms of life writing. Donaldson discusses how the term has been co-opted to include biographies of place such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and of things such as Lizzie Collingham’s Curry: A Biography (2005). This reflects, of course, a writing/publishing world in which non-fiction stories of places, creatures, and even foodstuffs are called biographies, presumably in the belief that this will make them more saleable. The situation is further complicated by the emergence of hybrid publishing forms such as, for instance, the “memoir-with-recipes” or “food memoir” (Brien, Rutherford and Williamson). Are such books to be classified as autobiography or put in the “cookery/food & drink” category? We mention in passing the further confusion caused by novels with a subtitle of The Biography such as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The fifth methodological problem that needs to be mentioned is the increasing globalisation of the publishing industry, which raises questions about the validity of the majority of studies available (including those cited herein) which are nationally based. Whether book sales reflect what is actually read (and by whom), raises of course another set of questions altogether. Methodology In our exploration, we were fundamentally concerned with two questions. Is life writing as popular as claimed? And, if it is, is this a new phenomenon? To answer these questions, we examined a range of available sources. We began with the non-fiction bestseller lists in Publishers Weekly (a respected American trade magazine aimed at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents that claims to be international in scope) from their inception in 1912 to the present time. We hoped that this data could provide a longitudinal perspective. The term bestseller was coined by Publishers Weekly when it began publishing its lists in 1912; although the first list of popular American books actually appeared in The Bookman (New York) in 1895, based itself on lists appearing in London’s The Bookman since 1891 (Bassett and Walter 206). The Publishers Weekly lists are the best source of longitudinal information as the currently widely cited New York Times listings did not appear till 1942, with the Wall Street Journal a late entry into the field in 1994. We then examined a number of sources of more recent statistics. We looked at the bestseller lists from the USA-based Amazon.com online bookseller; recent research on bestsellers in Britain; and lists from Nielsen BookScan Australia, which claims to tally some 85% or more of books sold in Australia, wherever they are published. In addition to the reservations expressed above, caveats must be aired in relation to these sources. While Publishers Weekly claims to be an international publication, it largely reflects the North American publishing scene and especially that of the USA. Although available internationally, Amazon.com also has its own national sites—such as Amazon.co.uk—not considered here. It also caters to a “specific computer-literate, credit-able clientele” (Gutjahr: 219) and has an unashamedly commercial focus, within which all the information generated must be considered. In our analysis of the material studied, we will use “life writing” as a genre term. When it comes to analysis of the lists, we have broken down the genre of life writing into biography and autobiography, incorporating memoir, letters, and diaries under autobiography. This is consistent with the use of the terminology in BookScan. Although we have broken down the genre in this way, it is the overall picture with regard to life writing that is our concern. It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed analysis of whether, within life writing, further distinctions should be drawn. Publishers Weekly: 1912 to 2006 1912 saw the first list of the 10 bestselling non-fiction titles in Publishers Weekly. It featured two life writing texts, being headed by an autobiography, The Promised Land by Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, and concluding with Albert Bigelow Paine’s six-volume biography, Mark Twain. The Publishers Weekly lists do not categorise non-fiction titles by either form or subject, so the classifications below are our own with memoir classified as autobiography. In a decade-by-decade tally of these listings, there were 3 biographies and 20 autobiographies in the lists between 1912 and 1919; 24 biographies and 21 autobiographies in the 1920s; 13 biographies and 40 autobiographies in the 1930s; 8 biographies and 46 biographies in the 1940s; 4 biographies and 14 autobiographies in the 1950s; 11 biographies and 13 autobiographies in the 1960s; 6 biographies and 11 autobiographies in the 1970s; 3 biographies and 19 autobiographies in the 1980s; 5 biographies and 17 autobiographies in the 1990s; and 2 biographies and 7 autobiographies from 2000 up until the end of 2006. See Appendix 1 for the relevant titles and authors. Breaking down the most recent figures for 1990–2006, we find a not radically different range of figures and trends across years in the contemporary environment. The validity of looking only at the top ten books sold in any year is, of course, questionable, as are all the issues regarding sources discussed above. But one thing is certain in terms of our inquiry. There is no upwards curve obvious here. If anything, the decade break-down suggests that sales are trending downwards. This is in keeping with the findings of Michael Korda, in his history of twentieth-century bestsellers. He suggests a consistent longitudinal picture across all genres: In every decade, from 1900 to the end of the twentieth century, people have been reliably attracted to the same kind of books […] Certain kinds of popular fiction always do well, as do diet books […] self-help books, celebrity memoirs, sensationalist scientific or religious speculation, stories about pets, medical advice (particularly on the subjects of sex, longevity, and child rearing), folksy wisdom and/or humour, and the American Civil War (xvii). Amazon.com since 2000 The USA-based Amazon.com online bookselling site provides listings of its own top 50 bestsellers since 2000, although only the top 14 bestsellers are recorded for 2001. As fiction and non-fiction are not separated out on these lists and no genre categories are specified, we have again made our own decisions about what books fall into the category of life writing. Generally, we erred on the side of inclusion. (See Appendix 2.) However, when it came to books dealing with political events, we excluded books dealing with specific aspects of political practice/policy. This meant excluding books on, for instance, George Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror,’ of which there were a number of bestsellers listed. In summary, these listings reveal that of the top 364 books sold by Amazon from 2000 to 2007, 46 (or some 12.6%) were, according to our judgment, either biographical or autobiographical texts. This is not far from the 10% of the 1912 Publishers Weekly listing, although, as above, the proportion of bestsellers that can be classified as life writing varied dramatically from year to year, with no discernible pattern of peaks and troughs. This proportion tallied to 4% auto/biographies in 2000, 14% in 2001, 10% in 2002, 18% in 2003 and 2004, 4% in 2005, 14% in 2006 and 20% in 2007. This could suggest a rising trend, although it does not offer any consistent trend data to suggest sales figures may either continue to grow, or fall again, in 2008 or afterwards. Looking at the particular texts in these lists (see Appendix 2) also suggests that there is no general trend in the popularity of life writing in relation to other genres. For instance, in these listings in Amazon.com, life writing texts only rarely figure in the top 10 books sold in any year. So rarely indeed, that from 2001 there were only five in this category. In 2001, John Adams by David McCullough was the best selling book of the year; in 2003, Hillary Clinton’s autobiographical Living History was 7th; in 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton reached number 1; in 2006, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman was 9th; and in 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8th. Apart from McCulloch’s biography of Adams, all the above are autobiographical texts, while the focus on leading political figures is notable. Britain: Feather and Woodbridge With regard to the British situation, we did not have actual lists and relied on recent analysis. John Feather and Hazel Woodbridge find considerably higher levels for life writing in Britain than above with, from 1998 to 2005, 28% of British published non-fiction comprising autobiography, while 8% of hardback and 5% of paperback non-fiction was biography (2007). Furthermore, although Feather and Woodbridge agree with commentators that life writing is currently popular, they do not agree that this is a growth state, finding the popularity of life writing “essentially unchanged” since their previous study, which covered 1979 to the early 1990s (Feather and Reid). Australia: Nielsen BookScan 2006 and 2007 In the Australian publishing industry, where producing books remains an ‘expensive, risky endeavour which is increasingly market driven’ (Galligan 36) and ‘an inherently complex activity’ (Carter and Galligan 4), the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures reveal that the total numbers of books sold in Australia has remained relatively static over the past decade (130.6 million in the financial year 1995–96 and 128.8 million in 2003–04) (ABS). During this time, however, sales volumes of non-fiction publications have grown markedly, with a trend towards “non-fiction, mass market and predictable” books (Corporall 41) resulting in general non-fiction sales in 2003–2004 outselling general fiction by factors as high as ten depending on the format—hard- or paperback, and trade or mass market paperback (ABS 2005). However, while non-fiction has increased in popularity in Australia, the same does not seem to hold true for life writing. Here, in utilising data for the top 5,000 selling non-fiction books in both 2006 and 2007, we are relying on Nielsen BookScan’s categorisation of texts as either biography or autobiography. In 2006, no works of life writing made the top 10 books sold in Australia. In looking at the top 100 books sold for 2006, in some cases the subjects of these works vary markedly from those extracted from the Amazon.com listings. In Australia in 2006, life writing makes its first appearance at number 14 with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby’s My Story. This is followed by another My Story at 25, this time by retired Australian army chief, Peter Cosgrove. Jonestown: The Power and Myth of Alan Jones comes in at 34 for the Australian broadcaster’s biographer Chris Masters; the biography, The Innocent Man by John Grisham at 38 and Li Cunxin’s autobiographical Mao’s Last Dancer at 45. Australian Susan Duncan’s memoir of coping with personal loss, Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life makes 50; bestselling USA travel writer Bill Bryson’s autobiographical memoir of his childhood The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid 69; Mandela: The Authorised Portrait by Rosalind Coward, 79; and Joanne Lees’s memoir of dealing with her kidnapping, the murder of her partner and the justice system in Australia’s Northern Territory, No Turning Back, 89. These books reveal a market preference for autobiographical writing, and an almost even split between Australian and overseas subjects in 2006. 2007 similarly saw no life writing in the top 10. The books in the top 100 sales reveal a downward trend, with fewer titles making this band overall. In 2007, Terri Irwin’s memoir of life with her famous husband, wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, My Steve, came in at number 26; musician Andrew Johns’s memoir of mental illness, The Two of Me, at 37; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography Infidel at 39; John Grogan’s biography/memoir, Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog, at 42; Sally Collings’s biography of the inspirational young survivor Sophie Delezio, Sophie’s Journey, at 51; and Elizabeth Gilbert’s hybrid food, self-help and travel memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything at 82. Mao’s Last Dancer, published the year before, remained in the top 100 in 2007 at 87. When moving to a consideration of the top 5,000 books sold in Australia in 2006, BookScan reveals only 62 books categorised as life writing in the top 1,000, and only 222 in the top 5,000 (with 34 titles between 1,000 and 1,999, 45 between 2,000 and 2,999, 48 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 33 between 4,000 and 5,000). 2007 shows a similar total of 235 life writing texts in the top 5,000 bestselling books (75 titles in the first 1,000, 27 between 1,000 and 1,999, 51 between 2,000 and 2,999, 39 between 3,000 and 3,999, and 43 between 4,000 and 5,000). In both years, 2006 and 2007, life writing thus not only constituted only some 4% of the bestselling 5,000 titles in Australia, it also showed only minimal change between these years and, therefore, no significant growth. Conclusions Our investigation using various instruments that claim to reflect levels of book sales reveals that Western readers’ willingness to purchase published life writing has not changed significantly over the past century. We find no evidence of either a short, or longer, term growth or boom in sales in such books. Instead, it appears that what has been widely heralded as a new golden age of life writing may well be more the result of an expanded understanding of what is included in the genre than an increased interest in it by either book readers or publishers. What recent years do appear to have seen, however, is a significantly increased interest by public commentators, critics, and academics in this genre of writing. We have also discovered that the issue of our current obsession with the lives of others tends to be discussed in academic as well as popular fora as if what applies to one sub-genre or production form applies to another: if biography is popular, then autobiography will also be, and vice versa. If reality television programming is attracting viewers, then readers will be flocking to life writing as well. Our investigation reveals that such propositions are questionable, and that there is significant research to be completed in mapping such audiences against each other. This work has also highlighted the difficulty of separating out the categories of written texts in publishing studies, firstly in terms of determining what falls within the category of life writing as distinct from other forms of non-fiction (the hybrid problem) and, secondly, in terms of separating out the categories within life writing. Although we have continued to use the terms biography and autobiography as sub-genres, we are aware that they are less useful as descriptors than they are often assumed to be. In order to obtain a more complete and accurate picture, publishing categories may need to be agreed upon, redefined and utilised across the publishing industry and within academia. This is of particular importance in the light of the suggestions (from total sales volumes) that the audiences for books are limited, and therefore the rise of one sub-genre may be directly responsible for the fall of another. Bair argues, for example, that in the 1980s and 1990s, the popularity of what she categorises as memoir had direct repercussions on the numbers of birth-to-death biographies that were commissioned, contracted, and published as “sales and marketing staffs conclude[d] that readers don’t want a full-scale life any more” (17). Finally, although we have highlighted the difficulty of using publishing statistics when there is no common understanding as to what such data is reporting, we hope this study shows that the utilisation of such material does add a depth to such enquiries, especially in interrogating the anecdotal evidence that is often quoted as data in publishing and other studies. Appendix 1 Publishers Weekly listings 1990–1999 1990 included two autobiographies, Bo Knows Bo by professional athlete Bo Jackson (with Dick Schaap) and Ronald Reagan’s An America Life: An Autobiography. In 1991, there were further examples of life writing with unimaginative titles, Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn, Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography by Kitty Kelley, and Under Fire: An American Story by Oliver North with William Novak; as indeed there were again in 1992 with It Doesn’t Take a Hero: The Autobiography of Norman Schwarzkopf, Sam Walton: Made in America, the autobiography of the founder of Wal-Mart, Diana: Her True Story by Andrew Morton, Every Living Thing, yet another veterinary outpouring from James Herriot, and Truman by David McCullough. In 1993, radio shock-jock Howard Stern was successful with the autobiographical Private Parts, as was Betty Eadie with her detailed recounting of her alleged near-death experience, Embraced by the Light. Eadie’s book remained on the list in 1994 next to Don’t Stand too Close to a Naked Man, comedian Tim Allen’s autobiography. Flag-waving titles continue in 1995 with Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and Miss America, Howard Stern’s follow-up to Private Parts. 1996 saw two autobiographical works, basketball superstar Dennis Rodman’s Bad as I Wanna Be and figure-skater, Ekaterina Gordeeva’s (with EM Swift) My Sergei: A Love Story. In 1997, Diana: Her True Story returns to the top 10, joining Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and prolific biographer Kitty Kelly’s The Royals, while in 1998, there is only the part-autobiography, part travel-writing A Pirate Looks at Fifty, by musician Jimmy Buffet. There is no biography or autobiography included in either the 1999 or 2000 top 10 lists in Publishers Weekly, nor in that for 2005. In 2001, David McCullough’s biography John Adams and Jack Welch’s business memoir Jack: Straight from the Gut featured. In 2002, Let’s Roll! Lisa Beamer’s tribute to her husband, one of the heroes of 9/11, written with Ken Abraham, joined Rudolph Giuliani’s autobiography, Leadership. 2003 saw Hillary Clinton’s autobiography Living History and Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Princess Diana’s butler, A Royal Duty, on the list. In 2004, it was Bill Clinton’s turn with My Life. In 2006, we find John Grisham’s true crime (arguably a biography), The Innocent Man, at the top, Grogan’s Marley and Me at number three, and the autobiographical The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama in fourth place. Appendix 2 Amazon.com listings since 2000 In 2000, there were only two auto/biographies in the top Amazon 50 bestsellers with Lance Armstrong’s It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life about his battle with cancer at 20, and Dave Eggers’s self-consciously fictionalised memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius at 32. In 2001, only the top 14 bestsellers were recorded. At number 1 is John Adams by David McCullough and, at 11, Jack: Straight from the Gut by USA golfer Jack Welch. In 2002, Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani was at 12; Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro at 29; Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper by Patricia Cornwell at 42; Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative by David Brock at 48; and Louis Gerstner’s autobiographical Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance: Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround at 50. In 2003, Living History by Hillary Clinton was 7th; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson 14th; Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How President Bill Clinton Endangered America’s Long-Term National Security by Robert Patterson 20th; Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer 32nd; Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life by Queen Noor of Jordan 33rd; Kate Remembered, Scott Berg’s biography of Katharine Hepburn, 37th; Who’s your Caddy?: Looping for the Great, Near Great and Reprobates of Golf by Rick Reilly 39th; The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship about a winning baseball team by David Halberstam 42nd; and Every Second Counts by Lance Armstrong 49th. In 2004, My Life by Bill Clinton was the best selling book of the year; American Soldier by General Tommy Franks was 16th; Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush 18th; Timothy Russert’s Big Russ and Me: Father and Son. Lessons of Life 20th; Tony Hendra’s Father Joe: The Man who Saved my Soul 23rd; Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton 27th; Cokie Roberts’s Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised our Nation 31st; Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty 42nd; and Chronicles, Volume 1 by Bob Dylan was 43rd. In 2005, auto/biographical texts were well down the list with only The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion at 45 and The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeanette Walls at 49. In 2006, there was a resurgence of life writing with Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman at 9; Grisham’s The Innocent Man at 12; Bill Buford’s food memoir Heat: an Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany at 23; more food writing with Julia Child’s My Life in France at 29; Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell: Discovering God amidst the Rwandan Holocaust at 30; CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival at 43; and Isabella Hatkoff’s Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship (between a baby hippo and a giant tortoise) at 44. In 2007, Ishmael Beah’s discredited A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier came in at 8; Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life and Universe 13; Ayaan Hirst Ali’s autobiography of her life in Muslim society, Infidel, 18; The Reagan Diaries 25; Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI 29; Mother Teresa: Come be my Light 36; Clapton: The Autobiography 40; Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles 45; Tony Dungy’s Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices & Priorities of a Winning Life 47; and Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant at 49. Acknowledgements A sincere thank you to Michael Webster at RMIT for assistance with access to Nielsen BookScan statistics, and to the reviewers of this article for their insightful comments. Any errors are, of course, our own. References Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). “About Us.” Australian Story 2008. 1 June 2008. ‹http://www.abc.net.au/austory/aboutus.htm>. 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Online edition. 1 June 2008 ‹http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C1569514%2C00.html>. Gutjahr, Paul C. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.com, Reader Response, and the Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5 (2002): 209–36. Hamilton, Nigel. Biography: A Brief History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Kaplan, Justin. “A Culture of Biography.” The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions. Ed. Dale Salwak. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996. 1–11. Korda, Michael. Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900–1999. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2001. Miller, Laura J. “The Bestseller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction.” Book History 3 (2000): 286–304. Morreale, Joanne. “Revisiting The Osbournes: The Hybrid Reality-Sitcom.” Journal of Film and Video 55.1 (Spring 2003): 3–15. Rak, Julie. “Bio-Power: CBC Television’s Life & Times and A&E Network’s Biography on A&E.” LifeWriting 1.2 (2005): 1–18. 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The significance of the Mildura Sculpture Triennials from 1961 to 1978 lies in their role as critical nodal points in an expanding and increasingly complex system of institutions and agents that emerge, expand and interact within the Australian art world. These triennial events provide a valuable case-study of the developments in sculptural practice in Australia and offer a close reading of the genesis of an autonomous field of visual art practice; a genesis dependent upon the expansion of the new tertiary education policies for universities and colleges of advanced education that arose in response to the generational pressure created by the post war baby boom. Given that there was virtually no market for modern sculpture in Australia at the inauguration of these triennials in the 1960s, the extent of the impact of the pressures and expectations of a burgeoning young population upon tertiary education, specifically the art schools, art history departments and art teacher training and, the expanding desire for cultural fulfilment and rapid developments in the cultural institution sector, is delineated at these triennial events. The expansion of the education system and the consequent expanded employment opportunities this offered to young sculptors in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, posited the first real challenge and alternative economy to the existing heterogeneous market economy for artistic works. In order to reinscribe the Mildura Sculpture Triennials into recent Australian art history as an important contributor to the institutional development of Australian contemporary art practice, I have drawn upon the reflexive methodological framework of French cultural theorist and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his explanation of the factors necessary for the genesis and development of autonomous fields of cultural production. Bourdieu's method provides an interpretative framework with which to identify these components necessary to the development of an institutional identity - the visual arts profession. This autonomous field parallels, conflicts with and at times connects with the heterogeneous art market economy, depending on the strength of its relative autonomy from the field of economic and political power. However, this is beyond the scope of this thesis. Mildura's significance lies in the way that the triennial gatherings provide a view into the disparate components that would connect to and eventually create an autonomous field of artistic production, that of the visual arts profession. However, the evolution of each of the components, which were the bedrock of Mildura, was driven by its own needs and necessities and not by the needs of the larger field of which they would eventually become a part. Bourdieu's understanding of the ontologic complicitiy between dispositions and the development of an autonomous field offers a non-teleological approach to the significance of Mildura as a site to map these rapid changes and also Mildura's subsequent displacement from the historical record.

McCulloch v. Maryland’s nationalizing potential has not been fully realized, having been reined in by the Supreme Court for most of the years since it was written in 1819. Had McCulloch’s logic of implied powers been applied fully to the Commerce Clause, it would have been difficult to deny recognition of congressional powers to pursue internal improvements, to restrict slavery and child labor, and to regulate the areas of economic life now deemed within Congress’s authority under the Commerce Clause. Despite McCulloch’s importance, the claims that it made law or built the nation can all be traced to times when participants in constitutional politics felt the need to give a historical gloss to a contemporary argument. But liberals’ canonizing of John Marshall and McCulloch is not effective to make Supreme Court justices overcome their strongly held judicial views. McCulloch is simply too ambiguous to mandate a particular result in most contested cases.

This chapter-length close reading of Grey Granite, the third volume of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, considers how he set out consciously to probe the limits of modernist technique by bringing it into conjunction with a fully industrialised social life. The result was not the ‘revolutionary’ perspective of the working class that Gibbon’s peers such as James Barke and Hugh MacDiarmid demanded and it has become a commonplace ever since for male critics of the left to fault Gibbon for ‘lack of engagement with urban working-class lives’. This chapter counters this view with a close reading of the novel focusing on the central female character, Chris Guthrie, drawing particularly on the work of feminist critics (including Jenny Wolmark, Deirdre Burton, Glenda Norquay, Alison Lumsden and Margery Palmer McCulloch) to show how by identifying with female subjectivity, Gibbon found an answer to both the proletarian question of how to express a post-capitalist culture and the modernist question of how to identify a collective that would support a liberated identity.

The article substantiates the necessity to develop training methods of computer simulation of neural networks in the spreadsheet environment. The systematic review of their application to simulating artificial neural networks is performed. The authors distinguish basic approaches to solving the problem of network computer simulation training in the spreadsheet environment, joint application of spreadsheets and tools of neural network simulation, application of third-party add-ins to spreadsheets, development of macros using the embedded languages of spreadsheets; use of standard spreadsheet add-ins for non-linear optimization, creation of neural networks in the spreadsheet environment without add-ins and macros. After analyzing a collection of writings of 1890-1950, the research determines the role of the scientific journal “Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics”, its founder Nicolas Rashevsky and the scientific community around the journal in creating and developing models and methods of computational neuroscience. There are identified psychophysical basics of creating neural networks, mathematical foundations of neural computing and methods of neuroengineering (image recognition, in particular). The role of Walter Pitts in combining the descriptive and quantitative theories of training is discussed. It is shown that to acquire neural simulation competences in the spreadsheet environment, one should master the models based on the historical and genetic approach. It is indicated that there are three groups of models, which are promising in terms of developing corresponding methods – the continuous two-factor model of Rashevsky, the discrete model of McCulloch and Pitts, and the discrete-continuous models of Householder and Landahl.