The Therapeutic Wonders of a Smashed Supply Chain
The supply chain is a royal mess, and I find it refreshing. Subtract serious delays and shortages and economic ruin, and what you have left is a strikingly effective form of psychotherapy.
By Jeannette Cooperman
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
I roll my eyes at people who are smug about ordering off-menu and having their whims catered to. But that is exactly what those Fridays represented: a chance to go someplace where we were known, our whims catered to.
Swing Time
Swing gave us back a little joy after the market crashed. Swing kept up our spirits as we entered a grim war. What is accessible is not always dumb or devoid of talent; sometimes it is just something we can all share. There is less and less of that, these days, and we need it desperately.
Nellie Bly, the Heroine Nobody Hears About
Elizabeth Jane Cochran, actually. Nellie Bly was her pseudonym. She landed her first newspaper job by writing a furious letter to the editor, words leaping off the page to slap a misogynist columnist. This was in 1885. Then she moved to New York and spent four penniless months persuading Joseph Pulitzer to hire her at the New York World.
Talking Suicide Blues
Turning grief around, using sorrow’s dark energy to help others—that was what Brandon Grossheim wanted to do, too. In his mind, suicide was a matter of free will. But when someone is young, inexperienced, swept by intense emotion, refusing professional counseling and prescribed medication, and preferring the swift release of drugs, booze, maybe even death—how “free” are they?
The Uncanny Parallels Between Islamic and American Extremists
In "Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism," Carla Power—a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award—moves slowly, gently, into a terrifying psychology.
That Controversial Jab Could Help Prevent Mental Illness
Researchers found that people with schizophrenia had two and a half times the average risk of dying from COVID-19, even after controlling for other risk factors as well as age, sex, and race. Meta-studies consistently show worse COVID-19 outcomes among people with depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.
Woke M&Ms Will Not Save Us
I mention the emerging need for woke M&Ms to another friend, and she blinks, puzzled. “But they’re just candy,” she says. “We know the difference.” And this time even I, quick to see and argue symbolism, have to agree with her.
Software That Weaves Your Dreams
Tech’s latest promise is to engineer our dreams. By rehearsing with VR, zapping certain parts of the brain awake, and cueing it with whispered dream prompts, sounds, even smells, we will be able to rid ourselves of nightmares and implant dreams that make us happy, help us learn, and enhance our memories.
How Beethoven Would Rage at the AI That Dares Finish Him Off
AI can teach us about patterns and processes, theory and extrapolation, math and aesthetics. But what it communicates will not be sensient, self-aware, rooted in profound emotional experience, or conscious of its audience. Listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 10 “finished” with AI is a different experience than hearing music wrought by one man’s genius.
Enough of Sloths. Bring in the Capybara
Face it: we love . . . ourselves. And therefore anything that resembles us or adores us. Which made switching to the sloth seem incongruous. Those stupid unicorns were our creation and could fulfill our fantasies. Sloths just hang there.
The Perfect Dress (Just Ask Proust, Sontag, Bacall)
The word “feminine” is seldom feminist. But I chose it deliberately, because Fortuny’s dress frees the body to be both elegant and erotic. He did not throw us into a well-tailored pantsuit. Instead, he and Negrin made a dress that required no undergarments, and they did so in a corseted and slipped Edwardian era that refused to trust the female body to be itself.