moniwasweissich recommended The New Eugenics – same as the Old Eugenics? from wiringthebrain.com:

The impression one gets is that the people proposing such ideas think the world would be a better place if there were more people like them in it.

moniwasweissich recommended Appreciating the politics of psychiatry from guardian.co.uk:

When taken up as cultural self-understanding, the knowledge offered by science and, in particular, the psy-sciences must be considered as having political consequences and, indeed, as being inherently political in the first place.

moniwasweissich recommended Yes, I Am One Of Those Parents from snagglebox.com:

We’re not looking for special treatment when we ask for help. All we need is for our kids to be able to use services as they’re intended in a safe, painless and stress-free way. If that’s special treatment, then that says more about the service being provided than it does about us.

moniwasweissich recommended The D.S.M. and the Nature of Disease from newyorker.com:

The D.S.M. has enormous impact on the public health. It determines which conditions insurers will cover, which drugs regulators will approve, which children will receive special-education services, and which criminal defendants will be able to stand trial and, in some cases, how they will be sentenced. Psychiatry has already reached far into our daily lives, and it’s not by virtue of the particulars of any given D.S.M. It’s because the A.P.A., a private guild, one with extensive ties to the drug industry, owns the naming rights to our pain. That so significant a public trust is in private […]

moniwasweissich recommended A Better Quality of Agony from newyorker.com:

Grief is a frightening condition, and at its extreme is like the sun: impossible to look at directly. That Deraniyagala wrote down what happened is understandable. But why would some unconcerned individual, someone who has not been similarly shattered, wish to read this book? Yet read it we must, for it contains solemn and essential truths.

moniwasweissich recommended On the business of literature from vqronline.org:

It was not at all clear at the time that the printing press would transform religion (by eliminating the Church's monopoly on reproducing and interpreting the Bible), on art (by allowing innovation in the depiction of three-dimensional objects to spread across the world; in other words, the Renaissance), and on science. In this last instance, the printing press essentially made science possible by allowing experiments to be replicated through the introduction of falsification, the ability to prove something wrong. The effects took more than a hundred years to begin playing out (nor have they f[…]

moniwasweissich recommended The Problem with Processed Storytelling from newyorker.com:

As we moderns become more isolated—more occupied with our virtual lives, more distracted by a greater flow of information and stimulation—the emotional comfort food that the rules provide and the illusion of human connection by way of stories become all the more alluring. And that’s why, in the age of the Internet, the success of TV series is self-perpetuating: the plethora of online discussion they spark drives viewers further into online isolation and makes them all the hungrier for contact with characters and their stories.

moniwasweissich recommended Seeing at the Speed of Sound from alumni.stanford.edu:

But despite its frustrations and misunderstandings, lipreading is sustenance for me. I once heard that prominent deaf educator Madan Vasishta said that he would rather have an incomplete conversation with a hearing person, one on one, than a conversation using a sign-language interpreter in which he understood everything. I take his point: The rawness of unfiltered contact surpasses even the reassurance provided by translation.

moniwasweissich recommended Our brains, and how they're not as simple as we think from guardian.co.uk:

Scientific concepts have always washed in and out of popular consciousness but like never before, the brain has become part of contemporary culture.

moniwasweissich recommended Autistic People Should…get a high five from leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk:

Ever notice how as you enter terms in the search box for Google, it creates suggestions for you? Well, it turns out that sometimes those suggestions are ugly. For example, if you entered “autistic people should” you would get answers like “die” or “be exterminated”. Autistic self advocates reacted and got Google to respond.

moniwasweissich recommended Working Girl by Kate Bolick from poetryfoundation.org:

Millay’s untouchability wasn’t a pose. She kept a close watch on her heart, tracking its every surge and plunge, until her deeply felt subjectivity was her most powerful creative instrument. She was fearless with it, tripping up and down the tonal scales to evoke the slightest fluctuation in mood—defiant, wistful, exuberant, indifferent—and as anyone who has spent a significant stretch of time in and out of relationships knows, romantic experimentation is a moody business.

moniwasweissich recommended Why You Truly Never Leave High School from nymag.com:

Not everyone feels the sustained, melancholic presence of a high-school shadow self. There are some people who simply put in their four years, graduate, and that’s that. But for most of us adults, the adolescent years occupy a privileged place in our memories, which to some degree is even quantifiable: Give a grown adult a series of random prompts and cues, and odds are he or she will recall a disproportionate number of memories from adolescence.

moniwasweissich recommended How the Vatican built a secret property empire using Mussolini's millions from guardian.co.uk:

Behind a disguised offshore company structure, the church's international portfolio has been built up over the years, using cash originally handed over by Mussolini in return for papal recognition of the Italian fascist regime in 1929.

moniwasweissich recommended Meet the Flannery O’Connor of the Internet age from salon.com:

Ullman writes so beautifully and clearly about technology that people, including very smart people, mistake what she’s about, reducing her to an ephemeral, finger-on-the-pulse sort of writer, when in fact what she’s giving us is much deeper and more enduring than that.

moniwasweissich recommended How we read - FT.com from ft.com:

The physical book seems like a fitting reward for the labour of writing a book.