Spalding Gray’s Catastrophe. Newyorker. Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy. The Trouble With Brain Science. Photo ARE we ever going to figure out how the brain works?
After decades of research, diseases like and still resist treatment. Despite countless investigations into serotonin and other neurotransmitters, there is still no method to cure clinical depression. Citizen Bezos by Steve Coll. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Little, Brown, 372 pp., $28.00 In the mid-1990s, when Amazon emerged as an online bookseller, publishers welcomed the company as a “savior” that could provide an alternative to the stifling market power of that era’s dominant chain stores, Barnes & Noble and Borders.
Book publishers with exceptional foresight may have understood that they “had to view Amazon as both an empowering retail partner and a dangerous competitor,” as Brad Stone puts it in The Everything Store, his deeply reported, fiercely independent-minded account of Amazon’s rise. Yet at first, Amazon seemed innovative and supportive. Among the management books Bezos read devotedly were ones by and about Walmart executives. The Elusive, Manipulative Adopted Child - Tina Traster.
Learning how to bond with my daughter, who found comfort in the familiarity of being alone, has come through understanding reactive attachment disorder.
Stephanie Loos/Reuters My hands hover over the computer keyboard. They are trembling. I hold down the shift key and type the words with intention, saying each letter aloud: “R-e-a-c-t-i-v-e A-t-t-a-c-h-m-e-n-t D-i-s-o-r-d-e-r.” The words “reactive attachment disorder” are memory beads I gather into a pile and attempt to string along on a necklace. The Ghosts in the Machine. Photo BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — A SURPRISING number of knife attacks on and by teenagers have appeared in the national news in recent weeks, but in terms of sheer tragic weirdness, nothing can match the case of two 12-year-old Wisconsin girls who stabbed a classmate 19 times, nearly killing her — and then said they did it to appease someone called “Slenderman.”
Slenderman is not, in fact, a man, but an Internet meme, an urban legend for the digital age, a fictitious figure — tall, thin, faceless and dressed in a black suit — who appears in homemade “found” videos on YouTube, in Photoshopped pictures and on blogs describing alleged sightings around the country. Although Slenderman has been around since 2009, the stabbing case has brought the phenomenon, most popular among teenagers, into the harsh glare of the media spotlight, with worried parents and pundits wringing their hands about the dangers of modern technology. Mr. The Biology of Risk. SIX years after the financial meltdown there is once again talk about market bubbles.
Are stocks succumbing to exuberance? Is real estate? We thought we had exorcised these demons. It is therefore with something close to despair that we ask: What is it about risk taking that so eludes our understanding, and our control? Part of the problem is that we tend to view financial risk taking as a purely intellectual activity. War’s Elite Tough Guys, Hesitant to Seek Healing. Continue reading the main story Video.
Kay Redfield Jamison. Kay Redfield Jamison in 2007 An Unquiet Mind cover Kay Redfield Jamison (born June 22, 1946) is an American clinical psychologist and writer.
Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has suffered from since her early adulthood. She is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. Education and career[edit] Krugman-crisis-of-the-eurocrats. A century ago, Europe tore itself apart in what was, for a time, known as the Great War — four years of death and destruction on an unprecedented scale.
Later, of course, the conflict was renamed World War I — because a quarter-century later Europe did it all over again. But that was a long time ago. It’s hard to imagine war in today’s Europe, which has coalesced around democratic values and even taken its first steps toward political union. Indeed, as I write this, elections are being held all across Europe, not to choose national governments, but to select members of the European Parliament. To be sure, the Parliament has very limited powers, but its mere existence is a triumph for the European idea.
The Deepest Self. There is, by now, a large literature on the chemistry and biology of love and sex.
If you dive into that literature, you learn pretty quickly that our love lives are biased by all sorts of deep unconscious processes. When men become fathers, their testosterone levels drop, thus reducing their sex drive. Violence against women—it's a men's issue: Jackson Katz at TEDxFiDiWomen. The Dark Psychology of Being a Good Comedian - Olga Khazan. New research shows that the best humor is both a little bit wrong and a little bit right.
Is there something about comedians that makes them better at subversion? Comedian Tin Vodopivec performs. (Camera on autopilot/flickr) Immediately after 9/11, comedy ground to a halt. The Daily Show went off the air for nine days. The staffers of The Onion, the satirical paper that had just relocated to New York, weren’t sure how to answer that question. The Onion staffers agonized, but they eventually settled on publishing an entire paper devoted to 9/11 on September 26. The paper was deluged with fan mail from readers who seemed to find catharsis in the terrorists' derisive rendering.
The Onion’s triumph reflects McGraw’s long-held theory that comedy is equal parts darkness and light. Why Study Philosophy? 'To Challenge Your Own Point of View' - Hope Reese. At a time when advances in science and technology have changed our understanding of our mental and physical selves, it is easy for some to dismiss the discipline of philosophy as obsolete. Stephen Hawking, boldly, argues that philosophy is dead. Not according to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist, studied philosophy at Barnard and then earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University.
An Ethicist on Wolf of Wall Street: The Most Anti-Greed Movie Ever? - John Paul Rollert. Critics have accused the Best Picture contender of being a reckless celebration of excess. It's actually one of the most scathing critiques of Wall Street that Hollywood's ever produced. Paramount I gave in. With all the controversy surrounding The Wolf of Wall Street—a celebrated director assailed after an advance screening, stunned showgoers wondering what it takes these days to get an NC-17-rating, and two impassioned reviews from the New Yorker that would lead one to believe the authors had seen different movies—I bought a ticket to see the polarizing film up for five Oscars including Best Picture.