Richard Wright on H. L. Mencken

Richard Wright on reading H. L. Mencken for the first time, and seeing the doors of an entire world thrown open to him. 

Perhaps there should be a plaque outside the Memphis library where Wright, with his borrowed library card and note from his white boss, strode in to begin his career in literature.

The City of Toronto in one sentence...

"My experience is that if you run into any trouble, it takes several years to shut it down," Mr. Pantalone said. "It's much easier to shut down the trouble at the beginning."

Easier to shut down the trouble - and the possibilities.

 http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/toronto/story.html?id=2041772#ixzz0SQ8UD1Ni

The mysteries of psychiatry

Charles Barber, a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale, penned an engrossing article about the state of psychiatry in this month's Wilson Quarterly.

Modern psychiatry has gone through three stages, suggests Barber: the "asylum psychiatry" of the Victorians, with its confinement and involuntary lobotomies, gave way to "community psychiatry" after the invention of the first antipsychotic drug, Thorazine. Now, after an explosion in brain imaging, and the discovery of drugs such as Valium and Prozac that seem to be able to help more and more of the population, the age of "corporate psychiatry" is upon us.

Besides being a great summary of the history of psychiatry, Barber points out some of the limitations of our age of brain scans and psychoactive drugs advertised on prime-time TV.

To this day, no one knows exactly how psychoactive drugs work. The etiology of depression remains an enduring scientific mystery, with entirely new ways of understanding the disease—or diseases, since what we think of as “depression” now is probably dozens of discrete disease entities—constantly emerging. Indeed, the basic tenet of biological psychiatry, that depression is a result of a deficit in serotonin, has proven to be one that was too eagerly embraced. When this “monoamine” theory of depression emerged in the 1960s, it gave the biologically minded practitioners of psychiatry what they had long been craving—a clean, decisive scientific theory to help bring the field in line with the rest of medicine. For patients, too, the serotonin hypothesis was enormously appealing. It not only provided the soothing clarity of a physical explanation for their maladies, it absolved them of responsibility for their illness, and to some degree, their behavior. Because, after all, who’s responsible for a chemical imbalance?

Will there be a new age of psychiatry? I wonder if our increasing knowledge of the brain, and our progress in designing and refining new psychiatric drugs, will only take us so far. So many psychiatric problems may be, in part, a "problem in living" rather than a problem in chemistry.

"Why is it so dark?"

The "Finno-Ugrian world" is the topic of Anders Kreuger's fascinating and lyrical essay in Eurozine. Lying buried underneath Russia's northern forests is the heritage of its Finno-Ugrian peoples. Speakers of obscure languages related to modern Finnish, Estonian and (distantly) Hungarian, their minority culture has passed through neglect, open hostility, and neglect from Czarist through Soviet to Putin-era Russia.

Kreuger traveled to Russia's Republics of Mordvinia, Udmurtia, Mari El and Komi to see how these languages and their speakers are getting by in a forsaken corner of Russia. Encounters with suicides, non-functioning parachutes and blindness ensue. Oh, and contemporary art.

Everything you know about Pythagoras is wrong

A genuinely interesting article from the LRB about Pythagoras. Far from being the founder of mathematics, he was actually some sort of proto-L. Ron Hubbard or Shoko Asahara who used thought control techniques, arbitrary rules and far-out superman stories to convince his followers he was Apollo. Not content to abstain from beans, ponder numerology and speculate about reincarnation, his restless acolytes succeeded in seizing power in several southern Italian cities.

The article raises some interesting questions, starting from the interesting insight that the conventional legend of Pythagoras as history's first mathematician is in fact totally wrong. This was established by one giant and completely obscure book first published in 1962 as Weisheit und Wissenschaft: Studien zu Pythagoras, Philolaus und Platon.

This raises the question: Why is it that so many significant discoveries in the field of classics are:

1. Established by one dedicated scholar?
   
2. Totally unknown outside the field by otherwise well-educated people?

Two anecdotes

1. The man we know as "Ivan the Terrible" is called, in Russia, "Ivan the Awesome."
2. William Wilberforce, famous abolitionist and opponent of the slave trade, was an opium addict. It makes sense if you know where he came from.
   

We hoped for the best but things turned out like always

Do you think this article will start changing their minds? I'm not holding my breath.

For more on the appeal of dictators to "progressives," read this.