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Making Sense of Our Compulsions

Photo credit: Kayana Szymczak

Jessica Gross | Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (3,932 words)

 

Checking our smartphones every few minutes. Making sure every spice jar is in the exact right place in the rack. Shopping. Stealing. Working nonstop. Hoarding. “Compulsions come from a need so desperate, burning, and tortured it makes us feel like a vessel filling with steam, saturating us with a hot urgency that demands relief,” Sharon Begley writes in her new book, Can’t Just Stop. “Suffused and overwhelmed by anxiety, we grab hold of any behavior that offers relief by providing even an illusion of control.”

In a time of extreme anxiety for many of us, Begley’s book feels particularly relevant. In chapters that run the gamut from obsessive-compulsive disorder to compulsive do-gooding, Begley—a senior science writer for STAT, whose previous books include The Emotional Life of Your Brain and Train Your Mind, Change Your Brainexplores how behaviors that range widely in both character and extremity can come from a common root. “Venturing inside the heads and the worlds of people who behave compulsively not only shatters the smug superiority many of us feel when confronted with others’ extreme behavior,” she writes. “It also reveals elements of our shared humanity.” Begley and I spoke by phone about what anxiety is, exactly; her own compulsions; and whether it’s possible to have no compulsions (not likely).

What is the definition of “compulsion,” as compared to addiction and impulsive behaviors?

This was the first thing that I had to grapple with. The first thing I did was go around to psychologists and psychiatrists and start asking, “What is the difference between these three things?” To make a long story as short as possible, they really didn’t have a clue, or at least they were not very good at explaining it—to the extent that the same disorder would be described in the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders from the American Psychiatric Association, using “compulsive” one time and “impulsive” the next.

So where I finally came down, after finding people who had really thought about this, is as follows. Impulsive behaviors are ones that go from some unconscious part of your brain right to a motor action. There is very little emotion except for that feeling of impulsivity. There’s certainly little to no thought involved.

Behavioral addictions—and this is where I thought it started to get interesting—are born in something pleasurable. If you’re addicted to gambling, it probably is because, at least when you started, it was a whole lot of fun. You loved it. You got a hedonic hit, a pulse of enjoyment. And certainly as things go along, a behavioral addiction like gambling can cause you all sorts of distress and destroy your life. But at least at the beginning, it brings you extreme pleasure.

Compulsions are very different. They come from this desperate, desperate need to alleviate anxiety. They’re an outlet valve. The anxiety makes you want to jump out of your skin, or it makes you feel like your skin is crawling with fire ants. And what compulsions do is bring relief only after you have executed the compulsion, whether it is to exercise, or to check your texts, or to shop, or to keep something if you’re a hoarder. And crucially, compulsions, although they bring relief, bring almost no enjoyment except in the sense that if you stop banging your head against a wall, then it feels good to stop. Read more…

But What’s IT All About?: How We Forgot the Murderous Clown

Pennywise's House: image by Freaktography (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Adrian Daub’s fascinating essay in the LA Review of Books on the Stephen King classic IT — now 30 years old — reveals that the real horror of IT wasn’t Pennywise the supernatural clown, but our own, entirely human ability to forget the horrors of the past.

I realize now that I can’t even remember when I finally picked up one of these errant copies of It and started reading. But perhaps that’s a strangely appropriate mode of reception for a horror novel that reserves its greatest terror for the vagaries of memory. It features relatively little of the kind of horror that has protagonists shining their flashlights into dark corners to face unseen abominations. Instead, it dwells on the horror of having lived with something terrifying all along, of having become blind and numb to it. It strikes me only now, rereading the book decades later in English, that there’s something distinctively American about the pervasive, dreamlike fog of amnesia that envelops the town of Derry, Maine, in King’s novel. Not for nothing does It make its home in the town’s sewers; as one character puts it: “Nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why. When they work, nobody cares.”

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What the Thousands of Calls Against Betsy DeVos Say About American Public Schools

An Iowa public school. Photo by photolibrarian

Congress was inundated with thousands of phone calls from people urging their representatives to vote against Trump’s education secretary nominee Betsy DeVos. Given her poor performance during confirmation hearings, her lack of experience, and her history of supporting attempts to dismantle traditional public education, Americans had visceral, negative reaction to DeVos. But this defense of our schools comes after years of anti-public education rhetoric by our country’s leaders about “failing schools” and teacher accountability.

Dana Goldstein’s 2015 book The Teacher Wars seeks to understand how America’s relationship with its public school teachers became so complicated. It goes much farther back than the battles of the past few decades: Read more…

How America Lost Its Identity

Longreads Pick

From the outside looking in: reporter Holger Stark, who spent the past four years as Der Spiegel’s Washington correspondent, asks “What led this once mighty nation into decline?”

Source: Der Spiegel
Published: Jan 27, 2017
Length: 12 minutes (3,192 words)

StrawberryGate: Why Does Tom Brady Insist He Has Never Eaten a Strawberry?

Credit: Todd Shoemake/Flickr

What mattered during last night’s Super Bowl LI wasn’t the Atlanta Falcons’ collapse. It wasn’t the New England Patriots’ stunning comeback and overtime win—the first time ever a Super Bowl went into overtime—or that Tom Brady has cemented his status as the greatest quarterback of all-time. No, what mattered most about the 2016 Super Bowl is that Brady is a blatant liar.

Dayna Evans of The Cut spent a day this past fall with the Patriots’ quarterback during his suspension as part of the team’s Deflategate penalty, and her resulting piece is full of fantastic tidbits about a player who is famously vanilla off the field: Brady loves nothing better than relaxing in sweatpants and UGGs; he likes to read a book every now and then; and he has never eaten a strawberry in his life.

Tom Brady has learned that he doesn’t love strawberries or coffee by never having tried either at all, a commitment no mortal man could ever conceive of pulling off. “I’ve never eaten a strawberry in my life. I have no desire to do that.” Never? “Absolutely not.”

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‘There Is Something Distinctly Grown-Up About Being Attracted to Tiny Things’

At Harper’s, Alice Gregory ruminates on the world of miniature collecting, and explores why people make and admire such tiny things.

It is difficult for me, in the presence of miniatures, not to feel like a pervert. Tiny things have always filled me with a devious and urgent covetousness. “Delight” is too casual a word to describe it, and not at all physical enough. The first and last thing I ever stole was a Sudafed-size doubloon from a friend’s pirate-themed Lego set. I needed it. More than twenty years have since passed, but preventing myself from buying Polly Pocket sets on eBay is a feat of near-constant diligence. Sometimes I slip up, though, see a tiny thing I simply must own, and breathlessly buy it. The lining of my purse was once destroyed by the tines of several miniature forks that I kept stashed away for almost a week; on my mantel sit lead soldiers and ceramic seals, a single reduced radish, and a U.S. passport smaller than a Chiclet. They gather dust and puzzle friends. I don’t see myself as a trinkets person, and yet when I heard of a woman at the fair who hid her extensive miniatures collection at her son’s house so that her husband would never learn of it, I thought to myself, “Good idea,” and made a mental note to maybe one day do the same.

It feels gluttonous—and good—to hoard so much sensual detail at once. Miniatures are the most concentrated form of extravagance I know, a decadent combination of ontological and visceral attraction. There is wickedness to it, a pleasant brand of self-disgust. The masochistic ecstasy of seeing myself as a monster when next to a miniature is unshakeable. A hand never appears more sun-ravaged than when cradling a ticking grandfather clock that is the height of a stick of chewing gum and carved from an especially fine-grained pearwood. Nothing compares more favorably to a hangnail than a christening gown for a doll’s doll, made of embroidery thread so thin it must be sewn with acupuncture needles.

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The Messy Divides in Travel Writing

Departures board in airport
Helsinki departures board / Wikimedia Commons

Travel writing is where I cut my teeth as a blogger and how I found my way as a writer. An early adopter of blogging, I benefited directly from the shift to a focus on independent voices. I never quite made the leap to full on commercial blogger, though — my heart lies elsewhere and I figure we’ve all got enough marketing in our lives. That’s just the context behind why the wonky part of my brain loves this piece at Nieman Storyboard about what travel writing is:

It wasn’t until I discovered the notion of writing about “place” during my early years as an undergraduate studying journalism at the University of Missouri that I realized that perhaps travel writing isn’t what I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to travel, but I also want to tell stories. I want to get to know people – what brought them to their spot on the map, how they shaped that spot and were shaped by it.

What makes a work a piece of “travel writing”? Where do we draw the line between writing about “travel” and writing about “place”? I turned to a few writers who have straddled this line to find an answer.

Ten-plus years in the field makes me think there’s:

  • Marketing: projects underwritten by travel brands who what to promote themselves via content.
  • Vacation writing: Guide books and how-to articles that help travelers plan.
  • Travel narrative: Stories that aren’t just “What I did on my summer vacation” style reporting.
  • Journalism: Reporting and deep dives about place, regional food, history, culture… the definer “travel” is optional here.

The writers interviewed here — Lauren Quinn, Paul Salopek, and the new to me Mark Johanson — don’t need “travel” appended to their work to make it sing of places that are not home. That’s the stuff I like best.

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The Successful Boycott of #DeleteUber and a New Era of Activism

Uber has courted controversy since the ride-sharing company’s inception in 2009. At the time, it made sense that such a disruptive company would cause others concern, but these weren’t typical complaints, ranging from underpaying drivers to disturbing accounts of poor labor practices, all of which ultimately culminated in a class-action lawsuit in California that contended Uber illegally paid its drivers as independent contractors rather than employees (that suit, along with another in Massachusetts that argued the same provision, was ultimately settled, and Uber was allowed to continue using the designation ‘independent contractors’).

But as Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick continued to grow the company, Uber looked to advance itself as a leader amongst a new wave of monolithic tech companies—a group for which the phrase ‘don’t be evil’ might not share the same distinction.

That is, until this past weekend: During the rollout of the Muslim ban, otherwise known as Executive Order 13769 (which bars citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from the U.S. for up to 90 days, and disrupts off the United States’ refugee system for upwards of 120 days), the New York Taxi Workers Alliance declared a solidarity strike at JFK International Airport, the hub of the country’s protest against the ban. Read more…

Exxon, Rex, and Russia: A Deep Drilling

Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil and recipient of Russia’s Order of Friendship, has become our new Secretary of State. I took a deep dive into the archives, and, like all the amateur Kremlinologists and power-hungry oilmen who’ve tread this ground before me, I’ve learned that the deeper you drill, the bigger the risk. Stop somewhere around point #10 if you start to feel like you’re on shaky ground, or like you’re one nesting matryoshka doll short of a shell company. Read more…

“Madness and the Hurling of Furniture,” or How You Know It Was a Good Night in Ancient Greece

Andrew Curry’s thorough history of our relationship to and use of alcohol is informative, enlightening, and just plain entertaining.

Throughout history, ethanol’s intoxicating power has made it an object of concern—and sometimes outright prohibition. And through the ages, says Rod Phillips, author of Alcohol: A History, most societies have struggled to strike a balance: “Allow people to drink because it makes them happy and is a gift from the gods, but prevent them from drinking too much.”

The ancient Greeks were a good example. A crucial part of their spiritual and intellectual life was the symposium fueled by wine—within limits. Mixing wine with water in a decorated vessel called a krater, Greek hosts served their (exclusively male) guests a first bowl for health, another for pleasure, and a third for sleep. “When this bowl is drunk up, wise guests go home,” the comic poet Eubulus warned in the fourth century B.C., according to one translation. “The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to violence; the fifth to uproar; the sixth to drunken revel; the seventh to black eyes. The eighth is the policeman’s; the ninth belongs to biliousness; and the 10th to madness and the hurling of furniture.”

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