A startling suggestion is buried in the fine print describing proposed changes for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — perhaps better known as the D.S.M. 5, the book that will set the new boundary between mental disorder and normality. If this suggestion is adopted, many people who experience [...]
Archive for August, 2010
Good Grief
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Health on August 15, 2010 | Comments Off
How to Lose an Election Without Really Trying
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
COULD George W. Bush be a kind of Gipper-in-reverse and win yet one more for the Democrats? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he [...]
Ditching Principles for Diplomacy
Posted in Politics on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
Westerwelle’s Moral Hara-Kari German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle (left) with his partner Michael Mronz (right). German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle is openly gay and likes his partner to accompany him on foreign trips. However, he now says that he will travel alone to countries where homosexuality is an offense. He wants to promote tolerance, but [...]
The precious unprinted contents of books
Posted in Living on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
Marginalia and forgotten mementoes are often squirreled away inside conventional books. What will become of such treasures in the age of the ebook? The first cocoa bean to be scientifically described in 1670, when chocolate was still unknown in Europe, glued inside a book more than 300 years old. The growing sense that books may [...]
The Spirit Level: how ‘ideas wreckers’ turned book into political punchbag
Posted in Other on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
Bestseller with cross-party support arguing that equality is better for all comes under attack from thinktanks Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue that all levels of society, not just the poorest, benefit from more equality. It was an idea that seemed to unite the political classes. Everyone from David Cameron to Labour leadership candidates Ed [...]
Disappointed, down, despondent
Posted in Politics on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
The Democratic left And not about to rush to the polls in November, either WHY, asks a Democrat leading a training session for fellow activists, doesn’t “Yes we can” work as a slogan any more? “Because we haven’t,” a jaded participant responds. Progressives, as bedrock Democrats like to call themselves, are despondent. The election euphoria [...]
Glorious failures
Posted in Law on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
WHEN it comes to criminal justice, Winston Churchill’s saying that Americans can be relied on to do the right thing after they have tried everything else has to be modified: the right thing tends to get its day only when states run out of cash. A squeezed budget is one reason why Los Angeles County’s [...]
Netanyahu’s warning
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years. To understand the man who [...]
Fire and Imagination
Posted in Economy and business, Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 14, 2010 | Comments Off
The Obama administration seems to be feeling sorry for itself. Robert Gibbs, the president’s press secretary, is perturbed that Mr. Obama is not getting more hosannas from liberals. Spare me. The country is a mess. The economy is horrendous, and millions of American families are running out of ammunition in their fight against destitution. Steadily [...]
Ten of the best wicked uncles in literature
Posted in Literature on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Creon Creon, King of Thebes, is Antigone’s uncle. He decrees that her brother should not, as a rebel, receive the proper rites of burial. In Sophocles’s Antigone, the heroine ignores his edict and secretly buries her brother. Creon sentences her to be buried alive. Antigone kills herself soon after she has been interred in a [...]
The Power Trip
Posted in Living on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: Authority atrophies the very talents that got them there. When CEO Mark Hurd resigned from Hewlett-Packard last week in light of ethics violations, many people expressed surprise. Mr. Hurd, after all, was known as an unusually effective [...]
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
Posted in Other on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
False confessions, graphic testimony, framed spouses and ‘unknown blondes’: a history of the difficulty in getting divorced, and how it could now change In 1961, as cheap, fast Mexican divorces became popular, Marilyn Monroe traveled to Ciudad Juarez to file for divorce from playwright Arthur Miller (above, in happier days). Unhappy couples in New York [...]
The Pursuit of Laughter
Posted in Literature on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
In Britain between the wars, the Mitford girls—Baron Redesdale’s six glamorous, garrulous, gadabout daughters— were a constant source of public amusement and surprise. Readers of the popular press followed Nancy from her early 20s, when she was a founding member of the party-mad socialites known as the Bright Young Things. Jessica made news when she [...]
Riders on a swarm
Posted in Other on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Mimicking the behaviour of ants, bees and birds started as a poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. It may, though, be the key to the real thing ONE of the bugaboos that authors of science fiction sometimes use to scare their human readers is the idea that ants may develop intelligence and take over the [...]
Philosophy and Faith
Posted in Religion on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
One of my jobs as a teacher of bright, mostly Catholic undergraduates is to get them thinking about why they hold their religious beliefs. It’s easy enough to spark discussion about the problem of evil (“Can you really read the newspaper every day and continue to believe in an all-perfect God?”) or about the diversity [...]
On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response
Posted in Religion on August 13, 2010 | Comments Off
My August 1 essay, “Philosophy and Faith,” was primarily addressed to religious believers. It argued that faith should go hand-in-hand with rational reflection, even though such reflection might well require serious questioning of their faith. I very much appreciated the many and diverse comments and the honesty and passion with which so many expressed their [...]
Sacrilege at Ground Zero
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz). When we speak of Ground Zero as [...]
Karl Marlantes’s top 10 war stories
Posted in Literature on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
From Homer to Norman Mailer, the novelist and Vietnam veteran chooses books that tell the ‘numbing, confusing, occasionally thrilling’ truth about combat A still from Terrence Malick’s film version of The Thin Red Line After studying at Yale, Karl Marlantes served as a marine in Vietnam and was awarded numerous medals including two Purple Hearts. [...]
The Secrets of Songwriters
Posted in Arts and Entertainment on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Whether they’re poets or hired guns, modern lyricists are fighting to keep their words in tune with a wildly changing music business. How top writers, from country to hip-hop, nail the phrases they hope will last forever. ‘In an instant, lightning flashes, and the burst might leave me blind. When the bolt of lightning [...]
The Real-Life Murderesses’ Row
Posted in Other on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Before Velma and Roxie in ‘Chicago,’ there were Beulah and Belva and a bevy of other good-looking inmates A gorgeous young woman in 1920s Chicago takes a short-cut out of an extramarital affair: She guns down her lover—and convinces her husband to pay for her defense. In prison, she joins Murderesses’ Row, a veritable chorus [...]
Never Mind Tolstoy
Posted in Living on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
‘This is kind of our protest to say that we’re in charge of our sexuality,’ says one campus sex columnist. In the late 1990s something called a “sex column” began to appear in the nation’s college newspapers. A blend of light-hearted advice and salacious tattling, these writings, according to Daniel Reimold, a professor of journalism [...]
What a Shame That Guilt Got a Bad Name
Posted in Other on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Studies show that humiliation is not an effective motivator, but it’s good twin, guilt, can encourage us to behave well. Authorities in China recently made a surprising announcement: They want to see an end to public shaming of miscreants by the police. It’s a step in the right direction that shame is falling out of [...]
We Pay Them to Be Rude to Us
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Living on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
In the service economy, all of us want to take the chute. Why has the JetBlue flight attendant story captured everyone’s imagination? Because the whole country wants to take the emergency chute. You know the story: A steward named Steven Slater, after a difficult flight, apparently got fed up, grabbed the intercom, cursed out passengers, [...]
A healthy relationship
Posted in Other on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
The mere presence of women seems to bring health benefits to men FOR hormone-addled teenagers, finding a date can often seem to be a matter of life and death. As it turns out, that may not be so far from the truth. In a paper in the August issue of Demography, a team of researchers [...]
Netanyahu, the anti-Obama
Posted in Conflicts and wars, Editorials and opinion on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Two photographs adorn the office of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike — in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies — than Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist. One photograph is of Theodor [...]
Listen to Congressman Rangel
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 12, 2010 | Comments Off
Representative Charles Rangel may have given ethics reform an unintended boost when he took the House floor on Tuesday to attack the ethics committee and ended up underlining the pervasive power of money in politics. “I am not going away,” declared the once-powerful New York lawmaker as fellow Democrats winced. In a passionate defense of [...]
Gay Marriage: Leave It to the Voters
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Law on August 11, 2010 | Comments Off
I support it as a policy matter, but having the courts mandate it promises trauma of the sort that followed Roe v. Wade. In his State of the Union address last January, President Barack Obama attacked the justices of the Supreme Court for making a deeply unpopular decision. He demanded that Democratic members of Congress, [...]
The Blame Bush Strategy Won’t Work
Posted in Editorials and opinion, Politics on August 11, 2010 | Comments Off
Polls reveal voters are receptive to GOP ideas. To save themselves in the midterm elections, Democrats are counting on selling two themes: The state of the economy is all George W. Bush’s fault, and Republican policies will take us backwards. President Obama relished going to Texas this week to blame his predecessor for the current [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry on August 10, 2010 | Comments Off
The Sorrow of Love by WB Yeats This early masterpiece combines great symbolic resonance with pin-sharp observation of the natural world WB Yeats. This early poem by WB Yeats comes from his second collection, The Rose (1893). Superficially, it may look like a typical, heady-scented 1890s love-poem, but “The Sorrow of Love” is actually a [...]
In Alaska, a Frenchman Fights to Revive the Eyak’s Dead Tongue
Posted in Language on August 10, 2010 | Comments Off
Natives Take Dialect Lessons From Guillaume Leduey; Blurting Out ‘Keełtaak’ Mona Curry recently stared teary-eyed at a film of her late mother speaking in the native-Alaskan language of Eyak at a tribal ceremony. Then she turned to a 21-year-old Frenchman for translation. “She said that it’s beautiful,” Guillaume Leduey explained without hesitation. “It’s a pleasure [...]
