In 1972, abortion was illegal in Minnesota. One day that year - the exact day has vanished from memory - a 21-year-old man drove his terrified 16-year-old girlfriend to a women’s clinic in Minneapolis. He left her there for a pregnancy test and drove away.
Siri reviews "Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness" for the Washington Post
Hate is human. It is hard to imagine a person who has never hated someone at one time or another and in rage or indignation uttered words intended to wound, humiliate, or silence.
Antonio Damasio has been an influential and highly regarded neuroscientist for decades, not only in his field but beyond it. As a person who roams among disciplines, I have seen his and his frequent co-author Hanna Damasio’s work referenced by scholars from anthropology to psychology to literary studies. In The Strange Order of Things, he sets out to do nothing less than tell the story of the evolution of mind and culture through his central, organizing theory of homeostasis.
Twenty-nine years ago, a group of anonymous feminist artists known as the Guerrilla Girls unveiled a poster that read, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? Less than 5% of the artists in the Modern Art Sections are women, but 85% of the nudes are female."
There is an old phrase often credited to the American demagogue Huey Long, but which was actually written by an obscure American professor: “When fascism comes to America, they will call it Americanism.” It has come, and it has come by public vote. I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.
An interview with WDR, German public broadcasting's editor in chief Sonia Mikich, published in Tagesschau.
Clinton vs. Trump: Reason against the emotion, worldliness against paranoia. What's going on in the US?
Let’s talk about the misogyny in the traveling carnival that is the presidential race, shall we? I don’t mean the obvious strain of the disease, the DTs. Donald Trump sickness is a well-known contagion by now, a virus that attacks the especially vulnerable: aging, white men who never went to college.
“The Spectacle of Skill” is a compilation of selected writings by Hughes with new material from the unfinished memoir he was working on when he died in 2012. The collection’s title is taken from a passage in an earlier book about his life, in which he tells the story of the horrific car accident that nearly killed him in Australia in 1999, as well as the legal wrangling and lurid press coverage that followed. His fellow Aussies in the media cast him as “a vile elitist,” an uppity, vainglorious heretic to the egalitarian faith of the continent known as Oz.
In August of 2002 I survived a car accident. Although I can still see the van speeding toward us, I cannot bring to mind the crash itself, only its aftermath.
I am convinced that during bouts of insomnia I have sometimes slept without knowing it. The thoughts of waking seem to mingle with thoughts that may be part of sleep. Has the clock moved too quickly? Did I doze off?
I remember a lamp that stood on the floor in the opened doorway to the bedroom where my sister Liv and I slept. My mother put it there every night so the darkness would never be total. This is an old memory and around it are the usual fogs that dim recollection, but the light offered the hope that blackness would not snuff out the visible world entirely during my anxious transition to sleep.
The narrator of Chaucer’s poem, “The Book of the Duchess,” cannot sleep. As his fitful thoughts come and go, he lies awake. He hasn’t slept for so long, he fears he may die of insomnia. But what is the reason for his sleeplessness? “Myselven can not telle why,” he says.
I've been puzzling over an old question. What is mental? What is physical? The most recent DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders IV) describes the separation of mental and physical as "a reductionistic anachronism of mind/body dualism." That dualism—we are made of two things: spirit and matter—is very old, but it is a philosophical conundrum of the most befuddling kind, and the authors of the DSM want to make it clear that they haven't fallen into that trap.
