Call Me Boroughs: A Life

BookForum review of Call Me Burroughs: A Life. A choice quotation:

Cut-ups allowed Burroughs to efface himself in text the same way he effaced himself in person, by fading into the foreground. Miles chronicles the exuberant collaborations in Paris during which Burroughs and company experimented with scrying, Orgone boxes, dreamachines, telepathy, and drugs—always drugs. If Kerouac was the Beats' freewheeling angel and Ginsberg their tantric cheerleader, then Burroughs was the eternal saboteur: "I order total resistance directed against this conspiracy to pay off peoples of the earth in ersatz bullshit. I order total resistance.… With your help we can occupy The Reality Studio and retake their universe of Fear Death and Monopoly."

The man and his guns:

Not sure what else to add. A peculiar fellow.

Late Roman and early Christian attitudes towards sex

NYRB review of Kyle Harper's From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity.

Tyler Cowen on Growing Income Inequality and Our Unequal Future

1. Cowen's new book on our unequal future: "Average Is Over." Economist review of "Average Is Over." Daily Beast review of "Average Is Over."

2. "The great reset": In 2012, real median household income was 8.3% lower than in 2007.

3. New results on labor market polarization.

Links

1. Review of Katy Butler's Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death. 

2. "Noise is the supreme archenemy of all serious thinkers."

3. A thoughtful critique of Reza Aslan's Zealot.

4. Philosophy has a sexual harassment problem.

5.  Review of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

6. Sarah Stillman's stunning piece in The New Yorker on the injustices of civil asset forfeiture.

7. National Geographic profile of amaranth.

8. Progress towards explaining near death experiences.

9. Apps for pets. 

10. Never give up!

Links

1. Amazing Bowling Green artist Dennis Wojtkiewicz.

2. Alchemy Goods: "upcycing" bags etc. from used bicycle tires.

3. Kenyan Reality TV: advice for farmers, served up with politeness.

4. Drinking coffee lowers suicide risk. And here is a summary of recent research on the health benefits of coffee.

5. David Sloan Wilson on how evolution can reform economics. And here is a page with articles from a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization on this topic.

6. Who's who in the history of Western mysticism.

7. 16-year old pitching sensation Tomohiro Anraku, and the culture of Japanese baseball: "Only more throwing will allow Anraku to perfect his mechanics, and only perfect mechanics will prevent injury."

8.  Why singular "they" is grammatically correct.

9. Two book reviews for the price of one: on occultism during the Enlightenment. 

10. A summary of the evidence on supplemental vitamins and health: vitamins do not improve health, and seem to increase the risk of some cancers. This article also contains a profile of the role of Nobel-prize winner Linus Pauling's shameful role in spreading misinformation about the alleged benefits of vitamin supplements.

11. On German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's reimagining of the Nietzschean Uebermensch: the Superman as supreme self-trainer, with Jesus and Socrates (Nietzsche's blood enemies) as prime exemplars.

12. Elizabeth Anderson on the relevance of 17th century Levellers and 19th century abolitionists to contemporary debates about equality; e.g., “An Arrow against all Tyrants, shot from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever” (1646).

13. Discovery of a 3,000 year old palace reignites debate about the historical nature of the kingdom of Israel.

14. David Lynch was so traumatized by the song "It's a Small World" that he insists on referring to it as "Flappy" rather than its true name.

Links

1. On 3D printing as a "gateway drug", and other thoughts on digital manufacturing.

2. Book review of My Lunches with Orson: the mad genius of Orson Welles.

3. Kevin Vallier responds to Robin Corey on Hayek and Nietzsche.

4. An economist on 'the arithmetic' of space travel.

5. Lane Craig, theist philosopher and rhetorician extraordinaire.

Anthony Kenny reviews Alister McGrath on C. S. Lewis

Philosopher Anthony Kenny has written a TLS review of Alister McGrath's biography of C. S. Lewis, which discusses, among other things, Lewis' encounter with philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (it did not go well for Lewis), critiques of his theological arguments, and his influence on contemporary American Christians:

'The final chapter of McGrath’s book, entitled “The Lewis Phenomenon”, charts the writer’s posthumous reputation, particularly in the United States. In the 1960s, Lewis almost vanished from view: by the end of the century he had become a cultural icon. Initially, in America, he was read only by Episcopalians, and was upbraided by Evangelicals as a smoker, a drinker and a liberal. But as barriers between mainstream Protestant denominations began to weaken, the author of Mere Christianity began to be admired across the spectrum. Roman Catholics, too, began to link him with G. K. Chesterton and Tolkien, and to consider him a fellow traveller. Most surprisingly, we are told, Lewis has now become the patron saint of American Evangelicalism. In a centenary article in 1998, its flagship periodical, Christianity Today, declared him “the Aquinas, the Augustine and the Aesop of contemporary evangelicalism”. Polls of American Christians, McGrath tells us, regularly cite Mere Christianity as the most influential religious book of the twentieth century.'

Who needs Augustine and Aquinas when you have Lewis? God help us all.

Towards the end of the review is a brief (and perforce too quick) critique of naturalism by Kenny; his confidence that "indeed there are signs that naturalism is collapsing under its own weight" seems premature, given the recent work of Owen Flanagan and other naturalists. Although Kenny is correct to point out some difficulties faced by naturalists in defending and defining their position, I do not believe there is a single philosophical position which does not face grave difficulties which must be overcome through careful argument.

Links

1. A discussion of Jonathan Israel's controversial history of the 'radical Enlightenment', which highlights the role of philosopher Baruch Spinoza and a clandestine network of Spinozists in spreading the ideas of monism on the one hand and radical political freedom and equality on the other.

2. Neither barbequed nor grilled: Baltimore pit beef (slow cooked for around 2 hours over coals--less than traditional bbq, more than grilling). Traditionally served with horseradish on a roll.

3. Reading Tocqueville in Beijing. The political subtext: China's political elites seem to fear a revolution against their regime based in part on rising expectations--similar to what overthrew the Old Regime in France, according to Tocqueville's account.

4. Historical mystery solved: the recipe of Roman concrete revealed at last, and it could revolutionize construction and architecture. Roman concrete included lime and volcanic ash, which when combined with seawater produced a chemical reaction that created a powerful mortar.

5. Economist Felix Salmon summarizes some depressing facts about Detroit.

6. NYT review of "Confessions of a Sociopath," which purports to be a memoir of a noncriminal sociopath.

7. Hand-made Guinea-pig armor sells for $24,300.

Two Books on Samuel Johnson

Kate Chisholm reviews two books on Samuel Johnson at the Times Literary Supplement: Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone's edited anthology, Samuel Johnson: The arc of the pendulum, and Julia Allen's Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale: Sport, health and exercise in eighteenth century England. The review quotes Johnson on his struggles with the dictionary:

one enquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection, was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them

Allen's work reveals the surprising range of Johnson's physical activities (given his considerable bulk and reputation for melancholy):

Inspired by her knowledge of lexicography and a desire to rescue Johnson from caricature as a “stout, elderly-looking man in a wig”, Allen reproduces a collection of curious gobbets to illustrate the physical (as opposed to mental) activities enjoyed by Johnson and his contemporaries, and the opportunities for exercise afforded them by skating, riding, boxing, swimming, foot-racing and climbing. Of these we know that Johnson attempted all six; not something you might expect of a man noted for his physical awkwardness, depressive tendencies and prodigious hours devoted to his literary output. Yet, if anything, Johnson was a truly twenty-first-century man in his adoption of fast days and vegetarian diets, and his belief in the beneficial effects of exercise on mood and motivation. Allen gives us Johnson the swimmer, diving nude into the sea at Brighton; Johnson the physically daunting nephew of a champion boxer; and Johnson, aged fifty-nine, in defiance of time, space and the balanced life, rolling down a Lincolnshire hillside (is there such a thing in the fenlands?), “turning himself over and over till he came to the bottom”.

Who would have guessed it?: Johnson the boxer, the skinny-dipper; Johnson fasting, foot-racing, and rolling down a hill.

Links

1. The real Mongolian barbecue: cook an animal in its own skin. 

2. Journalistic cliches avoided at the Washington Post's Outlook section.

3. Derrida as intellectual outcast.

4. Explosives artist Cai Guo Qiang. "[H]is great influence was Chinese Taoist spirituality."

Hat tips to Arts & Letters Daily and The Browser.

Links

1. Times Literary Supplement review of David Foster Wallace's posthumously published The Pale King.

2. Onion AV Club interview with writer Neal Pollack. (What it means to be a writer today.)

3. Five Books interview with atheist Susan Jacoby.

4. Decline of the German bookseller business.

5. Tyler Cowen on the egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and civil libertarian core of economics.

As usual, hat tips to The Browser, Marginal Revolution, and Arts & Letters Daily.

Links

1. John Nye on the war in Iraq.

2. Terry Eagleton's book-review-as-essay on the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.

3. Toronto's Monkey Paw bookshop: curators of printed curios and curiosities. A future for bricks and mortar book stores?

Links

1. New York Times review of "Marley", the new Bob Marley bio-pic.
2. Wired profile of Joss Whedon.
3. Jennifer Tilly, poker player.
4. Chairs are dangerous.

Eight Books on the Effectiveness of Higher Education

At the New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton reviews a raft of books discussing the enormous problems facing higher education today. An example from his discussion of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift:

Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.

Grafton's analysis of the eight books under review is judicious but reaches few conclusions. This is only appropriate given the complex nature of the problems facing higher education, which resist easy analysis (let alone resolution).

Links of Interest

1. Profile of David Graeber, anthropologist and theorist behind Occupy Wall Street.

2. Scathing critique of Rick Perry's crony capitalism.

3. What happens at a Zen retreat run by Brad Warner.

4. Julian Baggini reviews Owen Flanagan's The Bodhisattva's Brain and James Austin's Meditating Selflessly.

The Illusions of Psychiatry?

Marcia Angell recently wrote a two-part article in the New York Review of Books containing numerous criticisms of the field of psychiatry. Angell's article contains a review of three books: The Emperor's New Drugs by Irving Kirsch; Robert Whitaker's Anatamoy of an Epidemic; and Daniel Carlat's Unhinged. I am interested primarily in discussing Irving Kirsch's claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos, and Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR).

Irving Kirsch gives two main arguments in defense of his claim that psychiatric drugs are no more effective than placebos. The first is that, when one takes into account all of the clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies--not just those successful trials which are more likely to get published in medical journals--placebos are 82% as effective as the six psychiatric drugs approved by the FDA between 1987 and 1999 (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, Serzone, and Effexor). This result shows that the drugs are at best not much more effective than placebos.

Kirsch's second main argument is that the apparent extra degree of effectiveness of psychiatric drugs over placebos is actually due to an enhanced placebo effect. Kirsch notes that the psychiatric drugs believed to be effective all have noticeable side effects. The problem is that the presence of noticeable side effects undermines the double-blind control put on the trials. Because the actual drug causes noticeable side effects, and because a placebo does not cause side effects, it is possible for a patient to figure out if he has been given the actual drug and not a placebo. The fact that the medications appear to work better in treating severe cases of mental illness may simply be due to the fact that higher doses tend to be given in severe cases, and the side effects are therefore more noticeable. When side effects are noticeable, it becomes more likely that the patient believes he is receiving the actual drug, and thus more likely that the placebo effect occurs. Thus, psychiatric drugs may out-perform placebos (by a small margin) just because they are better at producing a placebo effect.

Crucial to Kirsch's analysis is data from unpublished studies conducted by drug companies on the effectiveness of the psychiatric drugs in question. Kirsch had to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the FDA to release the data. The FDA requires drug companies to give them data on all of the trials conducted by drug companies--not just selected trials or trials which have been published in medical journals. However, the FDA only requires that two of the trials show clinical effectiveness before giving a drug approval. This is problematic, because drug companies can conduct any number of trials in an attempt to show effectiveness, and even if two of the trials do show effectiveness, these two trials do not necessarily reflect the overall data set. The FDA basically allows the drug companies to cherry-pick trials in determining the effectiveness of a drug.

The second part of Angell's article contains a discussion of Robert Whitaker's criticisms of the DSM-IV-TR and its predecessors. Angell portrays the DSM as largely the creation of one man, Robert Spitzer, a former professors of psychiatry at Columbia University. Angell portrays Spitzer as not giving sufficient weight to views other than his own in producing the DSM; Spitzer both hand-picked the 15-member task force who developed the DSM, and said in an interview in 1989 that "I could just get my way by sweet-talking and whatnot," for example. Angell claims that Spitzer's work on the DSM was biased by his goal of producing a diagnostic manual that would facilitate the use of psychiatric drugs to treat mental disorders. Finally, Angell notes that the DSM is free of citations to back up its decisions regarding the classification of and diagnostic criteria for mental disorders, which undermines its claims to represent an informed scientific consensus.

I would add that the DSM is inherently problematic in that its definitions of mental disorders and diagnostic criteria are generally symptom-based. My understanding is that it is preferable, perhaps essential, for a disease to be identified and diagnosed not on the basis of symptoms alone (especially behavioral symptoms, which are often hard to reliably assess), but rather on the basis of measurable physical indicators--such as the presence of antibodies in the blood in the case of a viral infection. The criteria proposed by the DSM seem to at best identify syndromes which consist of characteristic clusters of abnormal behaviors, and not true diseases with specific etiologies and biological markers.

I don't know enough about psychiatry to say whether Angell's article gives an accurate picture of the state of psychiatry as a whole, or whether she is exaggerating the problems the discipline faces. Nevertheless, I think she presents enough information to give reason for concern. I do think that psychiatry's medial model has great potential to help people with mental disorders, but it may be that this potential has been realized even less than we think.