Scientists are trying to uncover why some people are better able to recover from trauma than others:
After Ebaugh crawled up the rocky riverbank, a truck driver picked her up, took her to a nearby convenience store and bought her a cup of hot tea. Police, when they arrived, were sympathetic and patient. The doctor at the hospital, she says, treated her like a daughter. A close friend took her in for a time. And her family offered reassurance and emotional support. ‘For the first month, I almost had to tell people to stop coming because I was so surrounded by friends and community,’ she says.
Studies of many kinds of trauma have shown that social support is a strong buffer against PTSD and other psychological problems. James Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has done a series of experiments in which women lie in an fMRI scanner and see ‘threat cues’ on a screen. They are told that between 4 and 10 seconds later, they may receive a small electric shock on the ankle. The cue triggers sensory arousal and activates brain regions associated with fear and anxiety, but when the women hold the hands of their husbands2 or friends3, these responses diminish.
Social interactions are complex and involve many brain circuits and chemicals; no one knows exactly why they provide relief.
“Stress: The Roots of Resilience.” — Virginia Hughes, Nature
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It was the inspiration for Obamacare, and beloved by the writer—but its biggest champion no longer wants to take credit for it:
“It was his signature achievement as governor of the commonwealth — a market- based solution to the problem of access to quality health insurance that included an individual mandate requiring that people be insured. If it was determined that you could afford health insurance and you didn’t buy it, you were assessed a penalty on your income taxes. The law has succeeded so well that six years into its implementation, 97 percent of the working-age adults in Massachusetts are covered by one form of health insurance or another, as are 99.8 percent of the children in the state. Before the law was passed, 67 percent of the businesses in the state offered health insurance to their employees. That number is up to 77 percent now. The program consistently polls at about 63 percent in its public approval. It has made thousands of lives easier, including my own.
“There is chronic disease in my immediate family. Last fall, I left a job that provided health insurance and went back on the open market. I worked through the Health Connector and Commonwealth Choice, both of them programs set up in order to implement the 2006 law. There was a remarkable lack of red tape involved, and I was able to insure my family with as good a health-insurance plan as I could afford. Under the old system, at least one member of my family would have been uninsurable for reasons with which Mitt Romney is very familiar.”
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Published: Sep 11, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,593 words)
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The “two bodies, one brain” of Lana and Andy Wachowski, creators of The Matrix and co-directors, with Tom Tykwer, of the new film Cloud Atlas:
Since Costa Rica, the Wachowskis and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of the script as an evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential decency of Zachry, with both characters embodying something of the Everyman. Tom Hanks, they agreed, was the ‘ultimate Everyman of our age.’ ‘Our Jimmy Stewart,’ Lana called him. They sent their script to Hanks, and he agreed to meet with them. On the way to his office in Santa Monica, the siblings received a phone call from their agent, who told them that Warner Bros. had decided to hold off on a distribution deal. ‘Cloud Atlas’ had been subjected to an economic-modelling process and the numbers had come back too low. The template that had been used, according to the Wachowskis, was Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’ (2006), because it had three autonomous story lines set in different eras; ‘The Fountain,’ which had a mixed critical response, had lost almost twenty million dollars.
‘The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,’ Lana told me. ‘So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.’ The template for ‘The Matrix,’ the Wachowskis recalled, had been ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.
“Beyond the Matrix.” — Aleksander Hemon, The New Yorker
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The “two bodies, one brain” of Lana and Andy Wachowski, creators of The Matrix and co-directors, with Tom Tykwer, of the new film Cloud Atlas:
“Since Costa Rica, the Wachowskis and Tykwer had viewed the dramatic trajectory of the script as an evolution from the sinister avarice of Dr. Goose to the essential decency of Zachry, with both characters embodying something of the Everyman. Tom Hanks, they agreed, was the ‘ultimate Everyman of our age.’ ‘Our Jimmy Stewart,’ Lana called him. They sent their script to Hanks, and he agreed to meet with them. On the way to his office in Santa Monica, the siblings received a phone call from their agent, who told them that Warner Bros. had decided to hold off on a distribution deal. ‘Cloud Atlas’ had been subjected to an economic-modelling process and the numbers had come back too low. The template that had been used, according to the Wachowskis, was Darren Aronofsky’s ‘The Fountain’ (2006), because it had three autonomous story lines set in different eras; ‘The Fountain,’ which had a mixed critical response, had lost almost twenty million dollars.
“‘The problem with market-driven art-making is that movies are green-lit based on past movies,’ Lana told me. ‘So, as nature abhors a vacuum, the system abhors originality. Originality cannot be economically modelled.’ The template for ‘The Matrix,’ the Wachowskis recalled, had been ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ a 1995 Keanu Reeves flop.”
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Published: Sep 3, 2012
Length: 29 minutes (7,251 words)
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A writer discusses the awful living conditions of China’s booming cities after seven years of living in the country for seven years, and visiting 21 of China’s 22 provinces:
“A Beijing-based blogger who lived in Harbin in 2003 told me about leaving Blues after several drinks and flagging a taxi driver, whom he recognized. ‘The taxi driver told me, “Hi, I just came from a wedding and I’m soused. You drive.”’ So he drove himself home through Harbin’s icy, deserted streets.
Like many Chinese cities, Harbin can be extremely challenging to the health — and not just due to the sometimes scandalously toxic food served in dim, poorly lit restaurants. Hospital bathrooms in Harbin and elsewhere often lack soap and toilet paper, ostensibly out of fear that residents will steal the items. Six months after I arrived, a benzene spill in the nearby Songhua River briefly left the city without running water. The air in Harbin was so polluted that I felt as though the coal dust had sunk into my lungs, and a fine layer of black soot seeped in through our windows overnight. But even Harbin wasn’t as filthy as Linfen, a city of 4 million people in central China’s Shanxi province that Time in 2007, on a list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, said made ‘Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park.’
“Unlivable Cities.” — Isaac Stone Fish, Foreign Policy
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A writer discusses the awful living conditions of China’s booming cities after seven years of living in the country for seven years, and visiting 21 of China’s 22 provinces:
A Beijing-based blogger who lived in Harbin in 2003 told me about leaving Blues after several drinks and flagging a taxi driver, whom he recognized. ‘The taxi driver told me, “Hi, I just came from a wedding and I’m soused. You drive.”‘ So he drove himself home through Harbin’s icy, deserted streets.
Like many Chinese cities, Harbin can be extremely challenging to the health — and not just due to the sometimes scandalously toxic food served in dim, poorly lit restaurants. Hospital bathrooms in Harbin and elsewhere often lack soap and toilet paper, ostensibly out of fear that residents will steal the items. Six months after I arrived, a benzene spill in the nearby Songhua River briefly left the city without running water. The air in Harbin was so polluted that I felt as though the coal dust had sunk into my lungs, and a fine layer of black soot seeped in through our windows overnight. But even Harbin wasn’t as filthy as Linfen, a city of 4 million people in central China’s Shanxi province that Time in 2007, on a list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, said made “Dickensian London look as pristine as a nature park.”
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Published: Aug 13, 2012
Length: 10 minutes (2,724 words)
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On the dying art of Weir fishing in Maine:
When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August darks,” when the tides are on and running hard, phosphorescent organisms can light up, or “fire,” weirs, almost like daylight. Light provides a good example of the enigmatic nature of herring. While they flee the electric lights onboard purse seiners, so the boats fish in darkness, as the day dims toward twilight, herring tend to migrate upward to feed near the surface, sometimes chasing luminescent organisms. (When you gut fish in the dark, you can find tiny glowing orbs in their stomachs.) In the late 19th century, dorymen exploited this behavior by lighting birchbark and kerosene torches over their bows and scooping the fish out of the water. One night when they were in their teens, Foster’s sons Carter and Justin collected wood along the beach and lit a huge bonfire under the high cliffs near their dad’s weir. The following day, the Fosters hauled in the biggest bunch of herring they had ever seen.
“Weir Fishing for the Last Sardine Cannery in North America.” — Peter Smith, The Art of Eating
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On the dying art of Weir fishing in Maine:
“When Foster rebuilt the Money Cove weir in 2002, he talked with an old-timer named Bill Blass, who had fished the weir for years, about the cove’s rocky bottom, the contours of that bottom, the tidal patterns, and the arrival of phosphorescent organisms. During the “August darks,” when the tides are on and running hard, phosphorescent organisms can light up, or “fire,” weirs, almost like daylight. Light provides a good example of the enigmatic nature of herring. While they flee the electric lights onboard purse seiners, so the boats fish in darkness, as the day dims toward twilight, herring tend to migrate upward to feed near the surface, sometimes chasing luminescent organisms. (When you gut fish in the dark, you can find tiny glowing orbs in their stomachs.) In the late 19th century, dorymen exploited this behavior by lighting birchbark and kerosene torches over their bows and scooping the fish out of the water. One night when they were in their teens, Foster’s sons Carter and Justin collected wood along the beach and lit a huge bonfire under the high cliffs near their dad’s weir. The following day, the Fosters hauled in the biggest bunch of herring they had ever seen.”
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Published: Jun 20, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,992 words)
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Reexamining Vonnegut’s body of work as an adult:
Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five taught me two things about the novel: how great it really is, and what it’s really about. It’s not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD. Vonnegut never explicitly negates the former possibility, but the evidence for the latter is overwhelming once you start to notice it. Billy Pilgrim, whose wartime experience closely parallels Vonnegut’s own, does not announce his abduction to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo and mated with the Earthling porn star Montana Wildhack—with the strong suggestion that he doesn’t imagine it, either—until after the plane crash that replays, in several respects, his wartime trauma. Despite the way we flesh them out in our minds into the semblance of a real story—as Vonnegut surely knew we would—the scenes on Tralfamadore add up to no more than a handful of discontinuous fragments: a moment in the flying saucer, a moment in the zoo and a few moments with Montana Wildhack, amounting altogether to scarcely ten pages. The whole scenario turns out to derive from a Kilgore Trout novel that Billy had read years before (as well as sharing plot points with The Sirens of Titan). And the compensatory nature of the wisdom Billy claims to learn up there is all too clear. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth one being time. ‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.’
“‘I Was There’: On Kurt Vonnegut.” — William Deresiewicz, The Nation
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Reexamining Vonnegut’s body of work as an adult:
“Rereading Slaughterhouse-Five taught me two things about the novel: how great it really is, and what it’s really about. It’s not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD. Vonnegut never explicitly negates the former possibility, but the evidence for the latter is overwhelming once you start to notice it. Billy Pilgrim, whose wartime experience closely parallels Vonnegut’s own, does not announce his abduction to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is displayed in a zoo and mated with the Earthling porn star Montana Wildhack—with the strong suggestion that he doesn’t imagine it, either—until after the plane crash that replays, in several respects, his wartime trauma. Despite the way we flesh them out in our minds into the semblance of a real story—as Vonnegut surely knew we would—the scenes on Tralfamadore add up to no more than a handful of discontinuous fragments: a moment in the flying saucer, a moment in the zoo and a few moments with Montana Wildhack, amounting altogether to scarcely ten pages. The whole scenario turns out to derive from a Kilgore Trout novel that Billy had read years before (as well as sharing plot points with The Sirens of Titan). And the compensatory nature of the wisdom Billy claims to learn up there is all too clear. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth one being time. ‘The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past.'”
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Published: May 16, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,459 words)
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