Daniel Mendelsohn, author

Just finished reading The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, a book by Daniel Mendelsohn about trying to find out what happened to six family members (his grandfather's brother, the brother's wife, and their four daughters) who were killed by the Nazis in then-Poland during World War II. It's a really good book, both for the history, the historiography, the way it's written (the closest analogy I can come up with is Toni Morrison-like, bits of it are almost like poetry), the way it deals with family, and just...yes. But, you know, be warned, Holocaust book, there are definitely some not-happy moments. I did like that he spent a fair bit of time trying to find out what his deceased family members were like when they were alive, as opposed to just what their deaths were like.

So I looked up Mendelsohn's website, and read some of the articles linked there, and found one I thought might be of interest to folks on my circle. It made me giggle.

"Republicanism Can Be Cured"
Published July 26, 1993
in the New York Times

The startling discovery that affiliation with the Republican Party is genetically determined, announced by scientists in the current issue of the journal Nurture, threatens to overshadow the announcement by Government scientists that there might be a gene for homosexuality in men.

Reports of the gene that codes for political conservatism, discovered after a long study of quintuplets in Orange County, Calif., has sent shock waves through the medical, political and golfing communities.

Psychologists and psychoanalysts have long believed that Republicans' unnatural and frequently unconstitutional tendencies result from unhealthy family life -- a remarkably high percentage of Republicans had authoritarian, domineering fathers and emotionally distant mothers who didn't teach them how to be kind and gentle. But biologists have long suspected that conservatism is inherited. "After all," said one author of the Nurture article, "It's quite common for a Republican to have a brother or sister who is a Republican."

[more on the link above]