All posts
-
On the mortgage crisis and buffoonish, unethical prosecution.
…of course, despite the title of this post, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office called the jury’s verdict exonerating Abacus bank “disappointing.” But that’s getting ahead of the story. One of the most disheartening things you’ll learn if you read Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia is that, of all the gigantic banks that perpetrated fraud before, during,…
-
On avuncular master-shamble-works.
Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Abroad follows the protagonist, Ananda, a young Indian man studying poetry in London, as he strolls through the city, completing errands, reminiscing, before meeting his uncle and striking out together. A single day, á la Ulysses, although the protagonist often predicts what his uncle will do — what he will say about his…
-
On memory (part three): getting rid of memories.
This is third in a series. See parts one and two. Not all memories are good, obviously. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, blurted out plenty of awkward remarks in conversations, that I’d prefer to forget. And those are harmless. They might make me flush and feel retroactively embarrassed if I think of them at night,…
Blueberry, cognitive behavioral therapy, Do No Harm, Henry Marsh, Jan Kounen, memory, memory erasure, memory replacement, PKM zeta, post-traumatic brain disorder, psychedelics in psychiatry, PTSD, Ramayana, Renegade, speculative science, thought substitution, treating mental illness with psychedelics -
On how human different humans happen to be (hint: equivalently human).
I finally read some of the initial papers (circa 1981) describing an outbreak of opportunistic infections among previously-healthy homosexual men in the United States. The case studies are harrowing — a dispassionate litany of suffering, ending with death. And, yes, these are papers from before I was born. I should’ve read them already, or at least…
-
On reading books in prison (which luckily I have never done).
In case you want to read more about mothers hurting their daughters to protect them from worse horrors, but you’ve already finished Toni Morrison’s Beloved and you want something longer than Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” you could pick up Morrison’s new God Help the Child. God Help the Child felt less powerful than Beloved (as do most books, honestly); the…
-
On death (by gun violence) and taxes (progressive ones).
Devone Boggan’s opinion piece in the New York Times, which discusses a gun violence reduction program where counselors work with & pay at-risk young people to help them stay out of trouble, is lovely. Well worth reading, especially to get a sense of the numbers: these young men are being given such small amounts of…
-
On racism and the empathy gap (while sneakily building toward the idea that teaching kids to root for your favorite sports team might be kinda evil).
There is an unfortunately compelling evolutionary model to explain why humans are so predisposed to racism. The rotten treatment of presumed outsiders may well be a corollary of our genetic inducements toward altruism. Which is grimly ironic, the idea that the same evolutionary narrative could explain both the best & worst sides of human nature. In…
-
On undeserved forgiveness and global warming.
I wish there were more essays focused on philosophy in Freeman Dyson’s collection Dreams of Earth and Sky. I thought all his remarks on morals and philosophy were nuanced and compelling. His essay “Rocket Man,” for instance, is very powerful. This essay discusses Wernher von Braun, a German scientist who helped develop Nazi weaponry during…
Frank Brown Cloud 