The Sleeping Cure
I have consulted four therapists in my life, and all four have fallen asleep on me. The ritual—forms, waiting rooms, Kleenex—starts up again, only each time with my own special twist: I pay someone to explore my unconscious mind and instead they sink into theirs. So consistently did I lose wakeful contact with my shrinks that I began to suspect—honest to God—that feigning sleep was a technique for provoking patients to confront their fears of abandonment. “Once in a 40-year career,” said a friend’s shrink, an ancient and cheerful Jungian, when I asked him if he’d ever drifted off while on the clock—making me, I suppose, the Ted Williams of narcissistic monotony.
Snapshots from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Marriage
I try to remind myself of who we are now and why it’s best that we are over. I think about the day he asked me for a divorce. Aug. 4, 2009. Just two days earlier, I had left for Warsaw, Poland, on a two-month research trip for a book I was writing. It was one of the few times in our relationship that I had done the leaving. I always feared that if we were both bouncing around the world for the sake of our careers, we’d never last.
The Billionaire Who Is Planning His 125th Birthday
There are health nuts, and then there is David Murdock: health paragon, patron and proselytizer, with a biography as colorful as that mural, a determination to write a few more chapters of it still and a paradox of sorts at the center of it all. What set him on this quest was a loss that no amplitude of wellness can restore, and even if he teased out his days into eternity, he would be hard pressed to fill them with the contentment they once had.
How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam
While expertise in counterterrorism training may be in short supply, money for it is not. Each year the federal government directs billions of dollars (no one knows exactly how much) in terrorism-related training grants to state and local governments. These funds cascade down into myriad training programs like the one at Broward College, where instructors ply their trade with only minimal supervision.
Plasticize Me
“Bodies… The Exhibition” is a for-profit traveling display of human cadavers that have been treated with a process that plasticizes tissue, allowing them to be manipulated and viewed in various states of artful dismemberment. Ostensibly the exhibition is scientific and educational in character, but given that there are no longer many mysteries within human anatomy, the most pressing questions it raises are ethical: Is posing a dead man with a tennis racket wrong? Is a failure to make specific provisions for the treatment of one’s remains the same as giving one’s body to science?
The Messy History Of Charlie Sheen’s ‘Winning’ Ring
As part of his relentless media odyssey this week, Charlie Sheen introduced himself to Twitter with a message that had a Chappelle-esque, “Kiss the rings, bitches” quality to it. It was an image of Sheen’s shimmering 1927 World Series ring that was once worn by another winner with an equally insatiable appetite for showgirls and booze: Babe Ruth. Industry experts estimate that the ring’s value would approach half a million dollars if it ever hit the auction market. In 1999, Sotheby’s sold what was believed to be Lou Gehrig’s 1927 ring for $96,000. The ring originated from the then-famous collection of super-collector (and Yankees limited partner) Barry Halper. That’s where the mystery of Sheen’s ring comes in.
The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See
Daniel Kish was born with an aggressive form of cancer called retinoblastoma, which attacks the retinas. To save his life, both of his eyes were removed by the time he was 13 months old. Since his infancy — Kish is now 44 — he has been adapting to his blindness in such remarkable ways that some people have wondered if he’s playing a grand practical joke. But Kish, I can confirm, is completely blind. He knew my car was poorly parked because he produced a brief, sharp click with his tongue. The sound waves he created traveled at a speed of more than 1,000 feet per second, bounced off every object around him, and returned to his ears at the same rate, though vastly decreased in volume.
Jason Fried of 37signals on the Art of Making Money
One thing I do know is that making money is not the same as starting a business. For entrepreneurs, this is an important thing to understand. Most of us identify with the products we create or services we provide. I make software. He is a headhunter. She builds computer networks. But the fact is, all of us must master one skill that supersedes the others: making money. You can be the most creative software designer in the world. But if you don’t know how to make money, you’re never going to have much of a business or a whole lot of autonomy.
Our Universities: How Bad? How Good?
If crisis there is, it surely has something to do with the larger crisis in American society: the increasing gap between haves and have-nots, the retreat from any commitment to economic fairness, the sense that the system is rigged to benefit a tarnished elite that no longer justifies its existence. The affluence gap between Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, plus a few others, and the rest of the universities has indeed increased, and permits a degree of luxury to both students and faculty in those institutions that are the envy of the rest. (Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley—generally considered the greatest public university in the world—had their telephones removed from their offices last year, in a nicely symbolic gesture of their helplessness under the budget knife.)
Twitter Was Act One
Considering that he invented Twitter and is about to launch another potential game changer with his new company, Square, Jack Dorsey has one of the lowest profiles in tech. But from his childhood obsession (city maps) to his dream job (mayor of New York City), Dorsey’s eclectic, ascetic vision has focused on the flow of human interaction. David Kirkpatrick gets the press-shy visionary talking about his taxicab inspiration, his ejection as Twitter’s C.E.O., and his ambition to make Square the payment network of the future.
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