A Thought on Mental Illness
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
Freedom to be insane is an illusory freedom, a cruel hoax perpetrated on those who cannot think clearly by those who will not think clearly.
-E. Fuller Torrey
Quick: What do you get when you mix a Nobel Prize winner with a MacArthur genius? You get this: “The claims of some heavy drinkers and smokers that they want to but cannot end their addictions seem to us no different from the claims of single persons that they want to but are unable to…
Not long ago, I had the pleasure of reading Fooling Houdini, by Alex Stone. It is a marvelous book, part memoir about how his obsession with magic pulled him away from his career in physics, but also a wonderful explanation of the psychology of how magic works its wonders. Get rid of all those images…
I’ve done a fair amount of research on how people emotionally adapt to life circumstances. My research is mainly in the context of illness and disability, where people bounce back from adversity more than expected. But people can also emotionally adapt to good things, a very important phenomenon for consumer behavior. We are ecstatic when…
I read for lots of reasons, of course. For entertainment. For information. For intellectual stimulation. To fill up a rainy day, since I can’t play piano for eight hours at a time. But another reason to read is to make me a better writer. In a wonderful essay in the Atlantic monthly, Richard Bausch makes…
There has been controversy recently about whether obesity is truly bad for people’s health, or in fact whether it might even protect people from early mortality. A study from the New England Journal in January provides strong evidence that obesity kills. It shows that people with very low body mass index have high mortality rates,…
Speaking of time of day, here is George C. Marshall opining on originality: “No one ever had an original idea after 3 o’clock in the afternoon.” A totally false statement, of course. But I don’t think that was his point!