Sunscreen Warning May Be False Alarm

In “Sleeper,” Woody Allen arrived in the future and found that everything 20th-Century folks figured was unhealthy--smoking, red meat, etc.--turned out to be keys to longevity.

Now Mother Jones raises a reverse Sleeper possibility that’s not at all funny: Does sunscreen promote skin cancer?

In the May/June issue, Michael Castleman equates sunburn to a shrieking smoke detector.

But using sunscreen--which, for the most part, blocks only ultraviolet B rays--may well be like taking the batteries out of the alarm, he says.

The article itself is a bit alarmist.

Castleman bases his speculation largely on the work of Cedric and Frank Garland. These San Diego epidemiologists, he says, theorize that sunscreens not only don’t prevent malignant melanoma (the most deadly skin cancer), but also may contribute to it by fostering increased exposure to UV-A sunlight, and by depriving the body of UVB-generated Vitamin D, a possible cancer fighter.

An addendum says that for $8 Mother Jones will send readers the article and “the thirty scientific papers on which it is based.”

But the documentation in the article is flimsy. And Castleman doesn’t offer the Garlands’ credentials.

He does, however, make them sound petulant at best in reporting that they have declined to discuss their theory with the press since 1990, when colleagues chastised them for going public before publishing their analysis in scientific journals.

Another apparent flaw: The article and accompanying graphics state that the statistical rise in melanoma began around 1955, in parallel with “the first sunscreen sales.” But any fair-skinned outdoors lover knows that the lotions of the ‘50s, ‘60s and even early ‘70s are as different from later SPF 15 and higher “sunscreens” as a thong bikini is from a Muslim chador.

The earlier products didn’t slow sunburn; the latter do.

Still, the article is important for pointing out the need for better research and for demonstrating shortcomings in the way the $380-million sunscreen industry polices itself or is policed by the Food and Drug Administration and other agencies.

And Castleman is certainly right in suggesting that the fair-skinned folks who are most at risk for melanoma should not view sunscreen as a protective miracle, but rather should keep covered when the sun is high.

Required Reading

* The 100-day anniversary evaluation is as ubiquitous as the time frame is arbitrary. This week’s Time gives Bill Clinton a little report card on issues ranging from Bosnia to “Keeping Promises,” as rated by . . .

Oh, let’s be honest.

Who cares about Bill, anymore?

It’s Hillary Rodham Clinton who has caught America’s interest. It’s she who appears on the cover of both Time and People this week and it’s she who Vanity Fair profiles in its June issue.

Time’s profile, by Margaret Carlson, begins with a scene that smacks of spin-doctoring: the First Woman scrambling eggs at midnight for sick daughter Chelsea.

But, overall, this is the most thorough and balanced look at Ms. Clinton to date. It raises the stock criticisms, but also paints her as a brilliant and dedicated public servant without portfolio, as well a compassionate person.

In one speech cited in the article, Hillary Clinton quotes the late conservative mastermind Lee Atwater, who wrote as he lay dying: “What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family?”

Elsewhere, she brainstorms nationwide for health-care reform.

People’s profile is interesting, though less substantive, and all three magazines use some of the same anecdotes.

That may have something to do with the fact that Vanity Fair’s profile is also written by Carlson, a Time Washington correspondent.

Vanity Fair’s piece, while often well-written, elsewhere reads as if Carlson simply dumped the contents of her laptop, cramming in every scrap of information ever accumulated on HRC. The story details the day-to-day minutiae of HRC’s life, going on and on for 42 long paragraphs--and that only gets us to the second week of 13 Carlson chronicles.

The news here is that Bill sometimes snaps at Hillary--”arguably the most important woman in the world,”--to “hurry up!” And sometimes he pleads, “wait up.”

We also learn that HRC is “always on patrol against flakiness . . . she particularly dislikes self-actualizing jargon.”

And VF retells Billy Crystal’s Academy Awards joke: “Now that she’s won the Oscar, Marisa Tomei . . . wants to be known as Marisa Rodham Tomei.”

In Time’s accompanying Q&A;, Hillary says, no, she never tried to bean Bill with a frying pan or vase or whatever, as widely reported.

Time and People also reveal the worrisome fact that Hillary is addicted to playing Gameboy.

But People scoops its sister Time Inc. publication by quoting this new version of Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman:”

“I am Hillary, hear me roar, I’m more important than Al Gore.”

* Novelist Louise Erdrich can surely relate to Hillary Clinton’s efforts to balance her devotion to career, Chelsea and Bill.

In “A Woman’s Work” an exquisitely rendered essay in the May Harper’s, she writes that love of another adult is one thing.

“But love of an infant is of a different order. . . . It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”

* All the well-meaning pontificators on the jobless rate would be advised to buy crates of the May 17 Fortune and start passing them out to Congress and in unemployment offices.

According to “How We Will Work in the Year 2000” the buzzword for the next decade, if not century, will be the sobering descriptive scrambling.

If this article is on target, now is the time to start adjusting to non-hierarchical “spider web” corporate structures, to the obsolescence of traditional managers, and to technical workers taking over from labor.

It may also be time to truly come to grips with the notion of a “service economy.”

“If all this . . . begins to sound like an endless daisy chain with one person or organization providing service to another,” Walter Kiechel III writes, “then you are starting to grasp the future.”

Newsstand News

Following the lead of the New Yorker, Architectural Digest has just published an index to help readers sort through back issues for stories about interior designers, architects and other subjects featured in the magazine.

AD outdoes the New Yorker, though, by tracking articles back 25 years instead of just one, and by slapping its info between hard covers.