I inevitably find that the New York Times Magazine is feast or famine — there’s either nothing of interest at all on a given Sunday, or almost everything in the magazine is worth reading. [I think, but I’m not sure, there’s almost a strict alternation of the two types.] This Sunday was a bountiful one: an article about Elaine Scarry, a professor of English literature at Harvard who has devoted her analytical skills most recently to the possibility that electromagnetic interference (EMI) caused three recent high-profile airplane crashes; a grueling description of the proverbial clash of irresistible force and immovable object in the guise of a gruesome murder in a Kentucky hill town; and a portrait of Dr. Martin Kafka, a McLean Hospital psychiatrist who has, serendipitously it seems, made a career of treating sexual addictions.

Rising suicides cut a swath through Amazon’s children. “The largest tribe of Amazonian Indians, the 27,000-strong
Guarani, are being devastated by a wave of suicides among their
children, triggered by their coming into contact with the
modern world.” Telegraph

An Ally in Asia. Since the end of the war, Vietnam has been “one of China’s
major headaches. There have been border skirmishes and
battles for influence in Cambodia, and the two have settled into
a state of not-very-neighborly mutual disgruntlement.” There are hints that, despite the recent granting of more favorable trade terms, Chinese military doctrine increasingly views the U.S. as an adversary to its Asian goals, including “reunification” with Taiwan. We may need Vietnam as a more important ally in the containment of China than conventional wisdom dictates, writes Anne Applebaum in Slate.

Is that why Clinton went to Vietnam? I doubt it: According to
one cynical American diplomat, he went because he knew that,
as a former opponent of the war, he would get a hero’s
welcome. But although that may be part of the explanation for
the mobs who turned out to wave American flags at his
motorcade, I suspect it doesn’t account for all the crowds. They
were partly there, as they would be anywhere, because the
American president is just about the most famous person in the
world, after Michael Jackson. And perhaps they were partly
there because some are already beginning to see that the
United States is not Vietnam’s past but its future.

Lying Awake by Mark Salzman: A Divine Gift in Sickness Vanishes Painfully in Health. “A cloistered Carmelite nun in
Southern California
experiences a prolonged burst of
ecstatic illumination. The poems
Sister John writes as a result are
published and praised; the Vatican
invites her to Rome to read them.

One day she collapses after what
seem to be flashes of light and a
series of blinding headaches. She is
taken to a hospital, where a
neurologist diagnoses treatable
epilepsy. He removes a tiny brain
growth; the symptoms cease, and so
do the visions. So do the poems.

Were Sister John’s flashes of
divinity medical or mystical? Were
her poems the product of art or of a
raisin-sized tumor? A variation on
the mind-body problem —
God-body, in this case, or art-body
— the question goes beyond the
religious or artistic. It continues to
ferment in the centuries-old debate
over the nature of human thought
and endeavor. How free and
distinct are they from biological
mechanics?” New York Times

New issue of Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal

A New Way to Be Mad (Caution: the referenced article has graphic details not for the squeamish) Carl Elliott, a philosopher of psychiatry, with a medical degree, writes a long reflection on the growing epidemic of apotemnophilia, a psychological malady in which people seek the amputation of one or more of their limbs without medical cause. This is done with or without the assistance of a surgeon, some of whom feel there are no humane alternatives to relieve their patients’ distress. (“It was the most satisfying operation I have ever
performed. I have no doubt that what I was doing
was the correct thing for those patients”, said one.)

I
was interested in the way that previously
little-known psychiatric disorders spread, sometimes
even reaching epidemic proportions, for reasons
that nobody seems fully to understand. But I had
never heard of apotemnophilia or acrotomophilia
before the Falkirk story broke. I wondered: Was this
a legitimate psychiatric disorder? Was there any
chance that it might spread? …I also wondered about the ethical and
legal status of surgery as a solution. Should
amputation be treated like cosmetic surgery, or like
invasive psychiatric treatment, or like a risky
research procedure?

Other interesting questions — is this a problem of sexual desire (there are certainly large numbers of “devotees” who are sexually aroused by people missing limbs, but it does not appear that the “wannabes”, those who seek amputation, are sexually motivated) or a disorder of body image or sense of self? What does it say about the nature of our self-identity? What relationship does it bear to other, less extreme, body modification techniques in our own and other cultures? What is the balance between its psychological, possible neurobiological, and sociological determinants? How deep do the homologies between amputation-by-choice and sex-reassignment surgery go? Is it adequately explained as a subset of some other existing category of psychopathology — e.g. body dysmorphic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, the paraphilias — or is it something distinct from all of them? More radically, is it a disorder at all? If it is, what is to be considered acceptable treatment, in light of the “extraordinary and often very destructive collaboration” between psychiatry and surgery over the past seventy-five years?

clitoridectomy for
excessive masturbation, cosmetic surgery as a
treatment for an “inferiority complex,” intersex
surgery for infants born with ambiguous genitalia,
and — most notorious — the frontal lobotomy. It is a
collaboration with few unequivocal successes. Yet
surgery continues to avoid the kind of ethical and
regulatory oversight that has become routine for
most areas of medicine.

I’ve long had professional concern about the role that popularizing faddish new diagnoses may have in spreading them. Consider for example multiple personality disorder, which I’m convinced barely exists if at all but has hordes of adherents (“wannabe” sufferers, and “devotee” clinicians). Dr. Elliott has a fine summary of the arguments of a historian of medicine, Ian Hacking, whose thoughtful work about how “transient mental illnesses” arise and take hold I’ve followed closely.

Crucial to the way this worked is what Hacking calls
the “looping effect,” by which he means how a
classification affects the thing being classified.
Unlike objects, people are conscious of the way
they are classified, and they alter their behavior
and self-conceptions in response to their
classification…In the 1970s, he
argues, therapists started asking patients they
thought might be multiples if they had been abused
as children, and patients in therapy began
remembering episodes of abuse (some of which may
not have actually occurred). These memories
reinforced the diagnosis of multiple-personality
disorder, and once they were categorized as
multiples, some patients began behaving as multiples
are expected to behave. Not intentionally, of
course, but the category “multiple-personality
disorder” gave them a new way to be mad.

Is apotemnophilia going to be a particularly malignant example of such contagion? What is the balance between the extent to which cultural and historical conditions reveal, as opposed to create, new disorders? How far do we want to go in regarding it as a psychiatric diagnosis, including it in DSM-V, the next edition of the “Bible” of officially acceptable diagnoses (and, by the way, the basis for insurance reimbursements). In essence, is this going to spread like a new meme, to which Hacking refers as “semantic contagion”? Its severity may be enhanced by the potential for connectivity among “devotees” and wannabes”. As Dr. Elliott points out, part of the motivation of apotemnophiles may be an aspiration to heroism, and of their devotees to hero worship, which the web facilitates tremendously. One discussion group on the topic has over 1400 participants. Atlantic Monthly

The LEGO Star Wars Trilogy is a series of sixty tableaux of scenes from the first Star Wars trilogy, made of LEGOs and constituting a sort of storyboard of the three films. “…My biggest project ‘LEGO Star
Wars trilogy’ was completed by autumn 1996. It consists of three series of 60 pictures each.
Most of my free time, approximately 2,500 hours, was devoted to making it. Actually, there
were several intervals due to my job. During those years I gradually added new LEGO bricks,
so the pictures that were taken later are more satisfying.”

Has the threat of bioterrorism been overestimated? Are Aum Shinrikyo-like attacks the wave of the future? Some like the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Defense Program of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies at Johns Hopkins feel that today’s terrorists have less to lose by unleashing a biological or chemical threat, and raise the hue and cry about our unpreparedness. Others such as Milton Leitenberg of
the University of Maryland Center for
International
Security Studies feel such claims are alarmist, and that “only the most sophisticated
terrorist organizations could master the complicated process
of launching a biological weapons attack. Most countries
that experimented with biological warfare in the 1970s
eventually gave up because the results were discouraging. ” Economist

Cryptome “welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on cryptology,
dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence — open, secret and classified documents — but not limited to those. In
particular, now that the US Congress adopted an official secrets act on October 12, 2000, increasing penalties for disclosing
government secrets, Cryptome invites those secrets for publication here.” Follow your Echelon and Carnivore concerns here. For example, a recent wire service report claiming that “the FBI’s controversial e-mail surveillance tool, known as Carnivore, can retrieve all communications that go through an Internet service, far more than FBI officials have said it does, a recent test of its potential sweep found, according to bureau documents” is refuted with a bit of back-of-the-napkin calculation here.