Search Results for: Harvard

A Grieving Parent on Sadness and Yearning

The sorrow and anger that followed Kate’s death, however, pale next to the terrible yearning. “Sometimes I feel panic sweeping over me,” I wrote to a friend, “and I’m so overwhelmed with yearning for Kate that I don’t know how I’ll manage.”

I searched for “yearning” and “grief” on the Internet and found a Harvard Medical School study that concluded yearning after a loss is far more debilitating than sadness or depression. The study included people who had lost a husband or wife, a parent, or a brother or sister. I wrote the author, Dr. Holly Prigerson at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to ask why parents who had lost children weren’t included. Losing a child, she told me, is so many “orders of magnitude worse” that it couldn’t be meaningfully compared to other losses.

On his third birthday without Kate, Steve and I were standing in our kitchen, crying, when he choked out these words: “It’s not that I want her back. It’s not that I need her back. It’s that I have to have her back.”

Nancy Comiskey, in Indianapolis Monthly, on what she learned about grieving, 10 years after the death of her daughter.

Read the story

Mortal Enemy, Immortal Ally: How Writers Measure Time

Time carried back to the future, once again seen and understood as it was in antiquity, not only as mortal enemy but also as immortal ally. The counterrevolution against the autocratic regime of uniform, global time (commercially and politically imperialist) was pressed forward by many of the artists and writers of Einstein’s generation unwilling to bide time emptied of its being in order to accommodate the running of railroads and the rounding up of armies. In 1889 the French philosopher Henri Bergson discredits the measurable magnitude of time; Marcel Proust encapsulates the whole of a lifetime within a moment’s swallowing of a pastry; the cubist paintings of Picasso, Duchamp, and Braque play with the rearrangement of time in space, and the advent of Thomas Edison’s motion pictures in 1891 provide a means of printing time as a currency more durable than money. The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky suggests that “what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had,” time in the form of fact, “a way of reconstructing, of recreating life.”

Time moves more quickly and efficiently by wire than it does on horseback or on foot, but the faster it goes, the harder it is to know (or taste or smell or touch), an observation that William Faulkner, in his novel The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, locates in the head of his Harvard undergraduate protagonist, who first breaks, and then refuses to repair, a watch—“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, published in 1931, presents a petition protesting the tyranny of Captain Clock: “It is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always deep below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights—elm trees, willow trees, gardeners sweeping, women writing—that rise and sink.”

The pagan appreciations of time implicit in the writing of both Faulkner and Woolf (as well as in the novels of James Joyce and the dream interpretations of Sigmund Freud) correlate with Jay Griffiths discovering that the Maori in New Zealand envision themselves moving backward into the future as they face the past, a practice consistent with the thought of Søren Kierkegaard (life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward) as with the thirteenth-century reflections of the Zen Buddhist Dōgen.

Lewis Lapham, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly about the nature of time and the “the uses and abuses of our minutes and days.”

 

Read the story

Tom Magliozzi, 1937-2014

Tom Magliozzi, the popular co-host of the public radio show Car Talk, passed away today at the age of 77. In 1999, Tom and his brother Ray gave a commencement address at MIT. Tom talked to the graduating class of engineers about a Latin mantra, non impediti ratione cogitatonis, which means “unencumbered by the thought process.”

TOM: I was once trapped by the scientific, logic, left brain life. I graduated from here and I went to work as an engineer. And I will tell you about my defining moment. I was driving — I lived in Cambridge at the time — I was driving from Cambridge to my job in Foxboro, Massachusetts, and I was driving in a little MG. It weighed about 50 pounds and on Route 128 I was cut off by a semi and I almost, as they say, bought the farm. And as I continued my drive, I said to myself, if I had in fact bought the farm out there on Route 128, how ticked off would I be that I spent all my life — that I can remember at least — going to this job, living a life of quiet desperation. So, I pulled into the parking lot, walked into my boss’s office and I quit, on the spot.

RAY: See, now most people would have just bought a bigger car.

TOM: [LAUGHTER] See, those people would have been using their left brains. I had been saying my mantra in the car. That’s why the guy cut me off. I think I cut him off. In any event, I quit my job. I became a bum. I spent two years sitting in Harvard Square drinking coffee. I invented the concept of the do-it-yourself auto repair shop and I met my lovely wife. None of which would have happened if I had been using my left brain.

My second great defining moment came also showing the power of the mantra, unencumbered by the thought process. I was having an argument with my lovely wife one day. I mean how can you argue with such a wonderful person. Well, left brain people do that because all they can think of is: this is an argument. This person is over here and I am over here and I am going to use every ounce of logic and skill that I have so that I can win this argument, and my wife says to me, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Holy shit, says I! [LAUGHTER] I wanted to be happy. So now I have reached nirvana and my brother and I can help you to reach it. If you want to repeat after me, unencumbered by the thought process. Say it.

Read the address

Photo: YouTube

The Decline of Student Activism: Our College Pick

Longreads Pick

Writing for the Harvard Political Review last month, Gram Slattery reported on the intersection of old activism and new media via Divest Harvard, a student group that wants the university to stop investing in fossil fuels.

Source: Longreads
Published: Oct 29, 2014

The Decline of Student Activism: Our College Pick

Social media allows us to be passive activists, liking and hash tagging our way to political ideologies or social justice. On college campuses, Twitter campaigns flourish while forums and sit-ins languish. Writing for the Harvard Political Review last month, Gram Slattery reported on the intersection of old activism and new media via Divest Harvard, a student group that wants the university to stop investing in fossil fuels. Divest Harvard had significant media coverage, but few members. Slattery, a wary observer, spent months with the group wondering how they could possibly achieve their goals given the “small-ball, meetings-on-meetings cycle that wastes many modern activist causes on campus.” By the time Divest members try to blockade a building in the pouring rain you’re cheering not only their cause, but their willingness to go outside and stand up for their beliefs in the most analog of ways.

A Semester With Divest

Gram Slattery | Harvard Political Review | September 2, 2014 | 20 minutes (4,935 words)

The Intersection Between Religion and Mental Health: A Reading List

This week, I’ve compiled four pieces about the intersection of religion, mental illness, safe spaces and alternative caregiving.

“Humanist Caregiving: Do We Need Chaplains or Counselors?” (Walker Bristol, Patheos, October 2014)

Atheist communities at Yale, Harvard and Tufts have chaplains who believe the work they do transcends religion; they provide a safe space for existential exploration. What does it mean to be a humanist chaplain? How does their work differ from social work or therapy?

Read more…

Interview: Simon Rich on Guilt, Humor Writing, and Being the Worst Person Ever

Jessica Gross | Longreads | Oct. 2014 | 17 minutes (4,290 words)

By the time Simon Rich graduated from Harvard, where he served as president of the Harvard Lampoon, he had a two-book deal from Random House. Less than a decade later, the humorist has written four short story collections and two comic novels. He also spent four years writing for Saturday Night Live (he was the youngest writer SNL ever hired) and about two years at Pixar, and is now at work on a film and a television series.

Rich’s level of productivity, impressive as it is, takes a backseat to the quality of his humor writing. His stories are crystalline, eccentric, and universally hilarious. Many of the stories in his new collection, Spoiled Brats are built on an unusual premise, or told from a surprising angle. In “Animals,” a hamster narrates his wretched existence as a class pet at an elementary school. In “Gifted,” a mother insists that her son—born as a monster, with horns and a tail—is exceptional. And in “Distractions,” a writer believes the whole world is out to get him, and they really are.

* * *

How old were you when you started actively, seriously writing?

Well, I always loved to write. As early as kindergarten, I plagiarized Roald Dahl stories that I would try to pass off as my own. But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

Read more…

Interview: Kiera Feldman on Oral Roberts, God and Journalism

In our latest Longreads Exclusive, Kiera Feldman and Tulsa-based magazine This Land Press went deep into the downfall of the Oral Roberts family dynasty—how Richard Roberts went from heir to the televangelist’s empire, to stripped from his role at Oral Roberts University.

Feldman, a Brooklyn-based journalist, and This Land Press have worked together before—her story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named our top pick for Best of Longreads 2012, and it explored another scandal inside a religious institution, sex abuse at a Tulsa Christian school. I exchanged emails with Feldman to discuss the making of the Oral Roberts story, and her start in journalism.

* * *

Read more…

It’s 1969 And This Is Robert Lanza’s First Time Experimenting with Embryos.

His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. It’s a word he’ll hear many times.

Down in the basement, wedged between the furnace and clothes dryer, a homemade Styrofoam incubator on the table in front of him, he’s decided the chicken experiment is challenging, but not impossible. He talked his way into syringes and penicillin at local hospitals and borrowed tabletop centrifuges from a guy across town who works for the state health agency. His neighbor drove him to local farms so he could gather eggs from white chickens and black ones. Now he’s been working in the furnace room for months, trying to introduce pigmented genes into white embryos while his mom stands in the kitchen telling her friends that “Robby is downstairs trying to hatch chicken eggs.” Not quite, Mom, he thinks.

Eventually several white chicks will emerge from their eggs with brown spots. Lanza will drop by Harvard Medical School to get help repeating the results, and in a scene straight out of the movies, he’ll mistake the founder of Harvard’s neurobiology department for a janitor. Stephen Kuffler, “the father of modern neuroscience,” won’t mind a bit. He’ll introduce Lanza to a graduate student who will later become director of Harvard’s Center for Brain Science, and who will spend hours chatting with the eager teen about his chicken project.

Molly Petrilla, writing in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the early life of Dr. Robert Lanza. Dr. Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells.

Read the story

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Evolution of Our Diet and What Modern Menus are Doing to Us

The latest clue as to why our modern diet may be making us sick comes from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, who argues that the biggest revolution in the human diet came not when we started to eat meat but when we learned to cook. Our human ancestors who began cooking sometime between 1.8 million and 400,000 years ago probably had more children who thrived, Wrangham says. Pounding and heating food “predigests” it, so our guts spend less energy breaking it down, absorb more than if the food were raw, and thus extract more fuel for our brains. “Cooking produces soft, energy-rich foods,” says Wrangham. Today we can’t survive on raw, unprocessed food alone, he says. We have evolved to depend upon cooked food.

To test his ideas, Wrangham and his students fed raw and cooked food to rats and mice. When I visited Wrangham’s lab at Harvard, his then graduate student, Rachel Carmody, opened the door of a small refrigerator to show me plastic bags filled with meat and sweet potatoes, some raw and some cooked. Mice raised on cooked foods gained 15 to 40 percent more weight than mice raised only on raw food.

If Wrangham is right, cooking not only gave early humans the energy they needed to build bigger brains but also helped them get more calories from food so that they could gain weight. In the modern context the flip side of his hypothesis is that we may be victims of our own success. We have gotten so good at processing foods that for the first time in human evolution, many humans are getting more calories than they burn in a day. “Rough breads have given way to Twinkies, apples to apple juice,” he writes. “We need to become more aware of the calorie-raising consequences of a highly processed diet.”

— Ann Gibbons in National Geographic on how our diets have evolved and whether returning to a “Stone Age diet” would help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

Read the story

Photo: Dollen