Dr. John Nash, the Nobel Prize winning mathematician whose life is portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film A Beautiful Mind, denies being anti–Semitic. His wife denies he’s homosexual. And a son denies he’s a bad father.
Critics of the box-office hit, based on a biography of the same name, have accused the filmmakers of whitewashing Nash’s life and leaving out depictions of that dark side of him.
But in an interview with correspondent Mike Wallace of the CBS News program 60 Minutes, Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia, his wife, Alicia, and son Johnny deny these allegations, which have made this Academy Award contender controversial in recent weeks.
This is the first time Nash has spoken out since the movie was released. CBS News
Daily Archives: 16 Mar 02
Michael Walzer: Can there be a decent left?
The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left=s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened. Dissent
“People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you’re excluded, this has significant effects.” Rejection can dramatically reduce a person’s IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing their aggression, according to new research.
“It’s been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive,” says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. “But we’ve found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive.” New Scientist
