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On growing up poor, and hamsters.
I recently read a cute article by Emily Underwood, “How to tell if your hamster is happy.” There is an easy answer, too. The hamsters in question are research animals, so the answer is, “No, they probably are not.” Of all the research animals I’ve interacted with, the only one that seemed happy was the narcoleptic…
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On baby books.
Today is the first day of school in town (which seems so early! It’s still clearly summer outside), so I’m back to being primary daytime parent. Which means I’ll be doing a lot of reading. Which, okay, that in itself isn’t so different from how I spend my work time normally, but what I read…
Anthropology of Childhood, baby books, baby books with strong women, baby books with suicidal characters, Ben Hatke, best baby books, board books, David Lancy, depressing baby books, Everywhere Babies, Fuzzy Bee and Friends, Julia’s House for Lost Creatures, kid’s books with strong women, Marla Frazee, misnamed baby books, parenting, Susan Meyers, worm suicide -
On inflammatory language & music.
I recently spent an afternoon sitting in the “undergraduate resource room” at Indiana University reading Randall Kennedy‘s The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (which is not the book’s entire title… but that’s kinda the whole point of this essay). The book is good — a thorough history of our most damaging racial epithet, with special emphasis…
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On identical twins & opportunity.
If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and look up Susan Dominus’s article on accidentally-swapped identical twins (who were then raised as two sets of fraternal twins) in the New York Times Magazine. It’s long, so it might take you a while. But your time will have been well spent. I was…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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Frank Brown Cloud 