Frank Brown Cloud
-
On reading Natalie Diaz’s “How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs” with a room full of men in jail for drugs.
Natalie Diaz wrings beauty from an impossible situation — how much hurt can you bear, trying to help someone who can’t be saved?
addiction, amphetamines, crystal meth, drugs, heroin, How to Go to Dinner with a Brother on Drugs, jail, jail poetry, juvenile detention, meth, methamphetamine, Natalie Diaz, opiate epidemic, overdose, poem, poetry, prison, prison poetry, rehab, relapse, sobriety, street drugs, teaching in jail, War on Drugs, When My Brother Was an Aztec
-
On prayer, diversity among deities, and ADHD.
Throughout the ages, humans have worshiped a wide variety of gods — tricksters, schemers, bullies, lovers — and could celebrate those same traits in themselves.
ADD, ADHD, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Atrahasis, attention deficit, Babylon, Bible, Christianity, computer games, deity, Enuma Elish, First Coming, flood, Gilgamesh, God, gods, Hebrews, history of religion, imaginary video games, intelligence, Jerusalem, Kings, Loki, Marduk, Maui, mythology, myths, Nebuchadnezzer, neurodiversity, Norse, Norse mythology, Octodad, Old Testament, ontological argument, origin of the cosmos, origin stories, pantheon, prayer, psalms, Rampage, real-time strategy, religion, Rick Riordan, Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, Starcraft, Stephen Greenblat, The Club Dumas, The Lightning Thief, Tower of Babel, trickster gods, vengeance, Warcraft, worship, Yahweh, YHWH, Zedekiah, Zion
-
On Sci-Hub, the Napster of science.
Can people really be “informed consumers” of modern healthcare when they can’t read the research their taxes pay for?
academic journals, Alexandra Elbakyan, autism, bad medical advice, biomedical research, concussion, folate, ghostwriting, health, healthcare, medicine, Napster, p-value, pop medicine, repair manual, replication crisis, research journals, Sci-Hub, science, scientific papers, scihub, statistical testing, superfoods, TBI, theft, traumatic brain injury
-
On apocalypse-preppers, technology, and oppression.
The plow helped wreck women’s lives … with modern technologies only *slowly* fixing world. Let’s hope we never slide back to plows.
A Brief History of Humankind, agriculture, apocalypse, CUMA Survival School, farming, feminism, Gabriel Tallent, Harari, history, history of technology, How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch, hunter-gatherers, inequality, Lewis Dartnell, My Absolute Darling, Nicky Woolf, plough, preppers, Preppers and Survivalists Expo, primates, Sapiens, sexual dimorphism, status of women in agricultural societies, survivalist dating, survivalists, The Knowledge, the plow, the plow and feminism, vegan, war, Yuval Noah Harari
-
On Gabriel Tallent’s “My Absolute Darling.”
Worlds collide in Gabriel Tallent’s beautiful, brutal ‘My Absolute Darling.’
-
On psychotropic drugs and optimism.
An optimist can’t help but see the world as it could be.
-
On correspondence.
With vague mail policies, guards can sever people from the world … often those who need help most.
activism, beginning of life, biotech catalogs, books to prisoners, central dogma, church outreach, correspondence, DNA, DOC, drug blotters, drugs, enforcement, Evil Dave versus Regular Dave, filing cabinets, greeting cards, Indiana, Indiana Department of Corrections, Indiana DOC, Indiana Prisoners’ Writing Workshop, K2, LSD, mail, Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project, MWPP, plasmids, poetry, post cards, prison, prison guards, prison mail policy, prison poetry, RNA world, RNA world hypothesis, spice, suboxone, synthetic marijuana, undergrad research assistants, USPS, vague policies, War on Drugs
-
On smell.
Humans actually smell pretty well … and scents affect our emotional wellbeing. Shouldn’t we want places of healing to smell good?
-
On animals that speak, including humans.
Tom Wolfe & Noam Chomsky both claim that no other animals are capable of anything like human speech … while scientists are finally learning to listen.
-
On clarity, Matthew Zapruder’s “Why Poetry,” and reading Bruce Weigl.
We should strive for clarity, out of love for those willing to listen.
abuse, Billy Collins, blaming victims, Blast Furnace, Bloomington, Bruce Weigl, childhood, clarity, drug abuse, drug use, honesty, honesty in writing, Introduction to Poetry, jail, mass incarceration, Matthew Zapruder, memory, metaphor, Monroe County Jail, New Leaf New Life, poems, poetry, prison, psychiatry, psychology, PTSD, rape, recovery dorm, rehab, rehabilitation, repressed memories, say it clearly and you make it beautiful, sexual abuse, Spotlight, symbolism, The Impossible, Tom McCarthy, trauma, Why Poetry, writing
