hysteria
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On bad penis puns.
Modern English is built on a foundation of The King James Bible and William Shakespeare – the former, plagiarized from a person we burned on the stake for his efforts; the latter, Lord Regent of Bad Penis Puns, as though his very name compelled him: Willy-I-Am Shake-Spear, Billy Wagcock, old I am a dick now…
bad puns, Barbara Hamby, capon, Christopher Logue, competition, consensual nonmonogamy, cooperation, education, Emily Wilson, Entitled, etymology, Eugenia Cheng, fornicate, gender, history of English, humor, hysteria, James Joyce, jealousy, Joyce, Kate Manne, Mansplaining, Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender, men, mythology, OED, Oxford English Dictionary, patriarchy, Penelope's Lament, penis, penis puns, poetry, polyamorous, polyamory, puns, scortatory, sex, sexuality, Shakespeare, slang, teaching, Telemachus, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Ulysses, vagina, vulgar slang, War Music, women, X+Y
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On witchcraft and mass psychogenic illness.
Because she is N’s best friend’s grandmother, I recently had the pleasure of meeting the researcher who first proposed that the Salem witchcraft trials were inspired by ergot poisoning of rye crops. And that, of course, is one of the papers I read while researching mass psychogenic illness / conversion disorders / violence against women. Does…
bistable switch, Caporael, conversion disorder, dancing sickness, did drugs cause the Salem witch trials, did PTSD cause the Salem witch trials, ergot, ergot poisoning, history of women not being taken seriously by medical doctors, how to explain complicated mathematics to people without a math background, hysteria, Intoxication, Le Roy, lysergic acid, mass psychogenic illness, oppression, ordinary differential equations, pop psychology, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Ronald Siegel, Salem witch trials, self-reinforcing behavior, stress, tarantism, the tipping point, tics, witchcraft
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On minotaurs (and whether or not mothers are the root of all maladies).
While reading Eula Biss’s On Immunity, I was often reminded of Rebecca Kukla’s Mass Hysteria. Both works analyze the permeability of bodies, especially mothers and children, while drawing from literature, philosophy, and medicine. Their major divergence is in tone; Kukla’s work can veer academic (which I enjoy, being a pedantic fuddyduddy myself); Biss’s writing is…
Frank Brown Cloud 