The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie – NYTimes.com I can’t stop thinking about this article. Beautifully written deep-dive search for the identity of two iconic blues-women, the history of blues, the history of the history of blues, and the fuzzy line where digging for information becomes thievery. Hats off to John Jeremiah Sullivan, for enthralling writing, and to the New […]
Continue reading →I spent last evening utterly absorbed in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s account of his search for two long-dead blues singers, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” which takes him through blues history and the history of blues history and then some more layers after that. I hope to write more on this later, for the story raises […]
Continue reading →T. Delene Beeland’s essay on post-baby depression is among of the best such I’ve read. I judged myself against other mothers. It seemed everyone cared for their babies better than did I. They had secret ways to jiggle a baby asleep and entire repertories of nursery songs at the ready. I cared for my […]
Continue reading →From Mosaic, Roger Highfield reports on emerging evidence that some who are vegetative, seemingly unaware, may actually simply be locked in. People in a ‘vegetative state’ are awake yet unaware. Their eyes can open and sometimes wander. They can smile, grasp another’s hand, cry, groan or grunt. But they are indifferent to a hand clap, unable […]
Continue reading →The world has lost a truly splendid photographer — Anja Niedringhaus, murdered this week in Afghanistan. This was a determined, brave journalist and an unbelievably sensitive artist, finely attuned to both the technical demands and possibilities of every image and, even more exquisitely, the humanity of those in the frame. This is a terrible, terrible loss. […]
Continue reading →Is mental illness a product of biology or culture? Ethan Watters, over at Pacific Standard, argues that whatever the biology involved in mental illness, its expression and our responses to it are shaped by culture far more than we realize. The resounding lesson of the history of mental illness is that psychiatric theories and diagnostic […]
Continue reading →How to balance the risk of missing a cancerous tumor with the risk of treating — at substantial human cost — when treatment may be unnecessary or futile? The new Canadian study of mammography, published Tuesday in BMJ, sharpens this question once again. Most of us who’ve been around a while know people, some […]
Continue reading →Some I read and liked, others just look good. Not news: Most of us carry Neanderthal genes. News: Collectively we carry about 20 percent of the Neanderthal’s genome. As Ed Yong explains, the influence is huge, and will take time to sort out. Meanwhile, the technique that spotted this may — may — allow us to […]
Continue reading →I’ve been reading some of Harry Harlow’s papers, and am in wonder at his seminal “The Nature of Love,” his 1958 Presidential Lecture to the American Psychological Association, to what had to be a stunned room, about cloth-versus-wire mesh monkey mother studies with which he famously kicked aside a behaviorist view of infant love and […]
Continue reading →Helen Epstein, in an aside in her fine piece on public-health innovator Sara Josephine Baker, suggests it rises partly from the excellent healthcare, daycare, and social services we give our military: [T]here is one group of Americans that receives high-quality government-subsidized child-care services, including day care, preschool, home-visiting programs, and health care: the US military. […]
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