After finally getting the speech draft turned around and sent back to the teleprompter technicians, we trudged back to the Family Theater, where [President George W. Bush] rehearsed. In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration. “Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked. The president was clearly frustrated with what was going on, but there was little he could do at this late hour. He went up to take a nap, saying he was beat. He looked it. I’d never seen him more exhausted. His hair was out of place and shaggy. His face looked drained and pale. Even more distressing, he was wearing Crocs. —“Me Talk Presidential One Day,” Matt Latimer, GQ
Spiderman rape comics;
British journalists scared to challenge pseudoscience;
mice forced to run on miniature treadmills become smarter
We could drop the metaphor of the brain or mind as a computer. This is what Aamodt and Wang recommend, because it’s “not really accurate… the brain works more like a Chinese restaurant that we know in Manhattan; it’s crowded and chaotic, and people are running around to no apparent purpose, but somehow everything gets done in the end– and efficiently too.” What’s most interesting in this image is that we are the customers in this neuro-restaurant, not its owners or managers or waiters; and the same little allegory is at work in the conception of our brains and ourselves being different moral entities (“Your brain lies to you a lot”). The brain in this sense is the adaptive unconscious but not the Freudian one, and “we” are our conscious minds, an internal projection of whatever we think we are doing. I think, therefore I am in the dark. —“Short Cuts,” Michael Wood, London Review of Books
Sam Shaw on cryonics;
Harper’s, 2007: Sam Shaw on the world’s longest footrace;
Malcolm Gladwell, the Mackademic;
the world’s angriest parliaments
Anytime someone did ask to see the Red Book, family members said, without hesitation and sometimes without decorum, no. The book was private, they asserted, an intensely personal work. In 1989, an American analyst named Stephen Martin, who was then the editor of a Jungian journal and now directs a Jungian nonprofit foundation, visited Jung’s son (his other four children were daughters) and inquired about the Red Book. The question was met with a vehemence that surprised him. “Franz Jung, an otherwise genial and gracious man, reacted sharply, nearly with anger,” Martin later wrote in his foundation’s newsletter, saying “in no uncertain terms” that Martin could not “see the Red Book, nor could he ever imagine that it would be published.” And yet, Carl Jung’s secret Red Book — scanned, translated and footnoted — will be in stores early next month, published by W. W. Norton and billed as the “most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology.” Surely it is a victory for someone, but it is too early yet to say for whom. —“The Holy Grail of the Unconscious,” Sara Corbett, the New York Times