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.
53.1% of You Already Know What This Story’s About. Or Do You? Need a Hint?
It’s about Professor Daryl Bem and his cheerful case for ESP. “Over seven years, Bem measured what he considers statistically significant results in eight of his nine studies. In the experiment I tried, the average hit rate among 100 Cornell undergraduates for erotic photos was 53.1 percent. (Neutral photos showed no effect.) That doesn’t seem like much, but as Bem points out, it’s about the same as the house’s advantage in roulette.”
The Madoff Tapes
One evening a few weeks ago, my home phone rang. “You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,” a recorded message announced. Out of nowhere, there was that accent, familiar to anyone who’s visited Queens. Madoff apologized for calling collect. “I don’t have that much money in my commissary account,” he told me, before starting on a remarkable conversation that would stretch to several hours in more than a dozen phone calls. This being Bernie Madoff, in dollar terms the greatest criminal in history, I didn’t know what to believe. But I listened.
Why Fashion Keeps Tripping Over Race
The fashion world considers itself so cosmopolitan and sophisticated that it can play fast and loose with racial stereotypes—occasionally shattering them, sometimes benefiting from their stubborn existence. Fashion folks naïvely—bravely?—attempt to be racially blasé in a culture that still struggles with the burdens of prejudice and the wounds of history. As a result, the fashion community in general often comes across as bumbling on the topic of race. It gets tripped up by ignorance. Fashion editorials can be thoughtful and exasperating—sometimes in the same breath.
The Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Celexa, Effexor, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan, Restoril, Xanax, Adderall, Ritalin, Haldol, Risperdal, Seroquel, Ambien, Lunesta, Elavil, Trazodone War
Depending on the war, post-traumatic stress can have many expressions, but this war, because of its omnipresent suicide bombers and roadside explosives, seems to have disproportionately rendered its soldiers afraid of two things: driving and crowds. David Booth manages his driving anxieties by leaving his Long Island home every morning at 4:30 a.m., when there’s no risk of traffic (especially under bridges, which militants in Iraq are always blowing up), and avoiding the right lane (in Afghanistan and Iraq, one generally drives in the middle of the road to avoid setting off IEDs).
Steven Slater’s Landing
When an irate female passenger cursed him out after their plane arrived at JFK, the then-38-year-old JetBlue flight attendant with twenty years in the flying business grabbed two cans of beer off the beverage cart, activated the emergency-escape chute, and promptly exited the aircraft, his job, and much of his former life. He now refers to that day simply as “August 9th,” as if it were a major disaster or Independence Day—both of which, in a sense, it was.
Travis the Menace
He was the most famous ape in America. But to really understand a chimp, you have to know his mother. “In her arms, swaddled and in a diaper, lay tiny Travis—named after her favorite singer, Travis Tritt. Travis was the son of Coco, who’d been snatched from the jungles of equatorial Africa in the early seventies and purchased for $12,000, and an 11-year-old retired zoo chimp named Suzy.”
The West Wing, Season II
For Obama, retooling on this scale does not come naturally or happily. Among the hallmarks of his political career has been constancy: a tight and basically static cadre of close advisers and a stubborn resistance to calls for midcourse corrections. Yet in a series of interviews in early January with senior White House officials and many of Obama’s closest confidants outside the building, a picture emerged of a president engaged in a searching, clear-eyed, and sometimes painful process of self-scrutiny, and now determined to implement a plan to fix what has ailed his enterprise—and himself.
Night-Shifting For the Hip Fleet
Cab stories are tales of survived disasters. The flat-tire-with-no-spare-on-Eighth-Avenue-and-135th-Street is a good cab story. The no-brakes-on-the-park-transverse-at-50-miles-an-hour is a good cab story. The stopped-for-a-red-light-with-teen-agers-crawling-on-the-windshield is not too bad. They’re all good cab stories if you live to tell about them. But a year later the cab stories at Dover sound just a little bit more foreboding, not quite so funny. Sometimes they don’t even have happy endings. A year later the mood at shape-up is just a little bit more desperate. They gray faces and burnt-out eyes look just a little bit more worried. And the most popular cab story at Dover these days is the what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? story.
Marty Peretz in Exile
For decades, Martin Peretz taught at Harvard and presided over The New Republic—a fierce, if controversial, lion among American intellectuals and Zionists. Now, having been labeled a bigot, taunted at his alma mater, and stripped of his magazine, he has found peace in a place where there is little: Israel.