PTSD
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On elephants.
We humans have treated elephants abysmally — not in spite of their magnificence, but because of it.
animal abuse, animal cognition, Animals Strike Curious Poses, broken families, Ciaran Berry, circus, dance, ecotourism, electricity, electrocuting an elephant, Elena Passarello, elephant brains, elephants, environmental destruction, exploitation, high school, hippocampus, Jumbo II, male role models, memory, post traumatic stress disorder, prom, PTSD, Ringling Brothers, tool use, torture, wayward youth
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On preventing future crime.
Mass incarceration hurts all of us, even if we don’t know anyone locked away. It may have cost my mother-in-law her life.
A Visit from an Outsider, C. J. Chivers, Cathy O’Neil, jail, James Trent, Jason Chambers, judicial discretion, Leviathan, Lori Milks, mass incarceration, Michael Mueller-Smith, New Yorker, prison, prosecutorial discretion, PTSD, randomized study, recidivism, rehabilitation, Sam Siatta, Selma, sentencing reform, state violence, The Fighter, Thomas Hobbes, Weapons of Math Destruction
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On stalking and the risk of seeming crazy.
Group stalking sounds crazy… but no crazier than the online harassment of women that’s been widely documented already.
Bill McKibben, David James, delusions, graphic threats not taken seriously by law enforcement, group stalking, how to discuss legitimate worries without enabling mental illness?, if you torture the data it will confess, internet harassment, internet trolls, Lorraine Sheridan, middle-school girls harassed to death, National Security Agency, NSA, on-campus stalking, one reason why women drop out of college, online harassment, online harassment of women, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, stalking, suicide, telephone metadata, trolls
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On horror, healing, and Joanna Connors’s ‘I Will Find You.’
In a courageous effort to heal, an investigative reporter uncovers the long history of violence behind her own trauma.
American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell, forgiveness, healing, hurt people hurt people, I Will Find You, inequality starts before birth, investigative journalism, Joanna Connors, lost innocence, meth, methamphetamine, nature versus nurture, preemptive punishment, PTSD, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, rape, rape prosecution, sexual assault, The Trespasser, vengeance
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On PTSD and David Means’s ‘Hystopia.’
Saying “thank you” isn’t enough to cure trauma.
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On Edin & Shaefer’s ‘$2.00 a Day.’
You can’t learn what it takes to survive poverty when you think about people as numbers.
$2.00 a Day, budget, ethnography, Evicted, extreme poverty, food deserts, food insecurity, food stamps, H. Luke Shaefer, Hand to Mouth, high cost of rent in the United States, Kathyrn Edin, Linda Tirado, Living on Almost Nothing in America, Matthew Desmond, Paul Theroux, people want jobs, poverty, PTSD, sexual assault, SNAP, The Hypocrisy of Helping the Poor
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On Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.
Just Mercy: an achingly-beautiful account of the arduous pursuit of justice for all.
abuses of power, brain plasticity, Bryan Stevenson, children sentenced to death in prison, civil rights march, death penalty, EJI, Equal Justice Initiative, execution, false conviction, Ferretcraft, heroic human rights worker trading card game, innocents condemned to death, Just Mercy, Lydia Cacho, Midwest Pages to Prisoners, New Life New Leaf, police abuses, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, racial disparities in the criminal justice system, racial injustice, Slavery Inc, solitary confinement, state-sponsored murder in the United States, the human potential for growth and change, Walter McMillian trial, with liberty and justice for all, wrongful imprisonment
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On my own attempt to understand what motivates people to join the terrorist organization Daesh.
Kent Russell’s essay on juggalos helped me think about Middle Eastern terrorism.
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On military drones.
Sleep Dealer is a lovely film. Flawed, sure — the romantic bits are corny, the characters’ sudden shifts of heart are abrupt — but the ideas behind the film and they way they’re depicted are great. If you like mildly-speculative science fiction that conveys powerful social commentary, you should definitely look for it. But you should…
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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
Frank Brown Cloud 