McCain Drain: “E.J. Dionne hits the nail on the head today when he says that the positions that John McCain will need to take in order to win the Republican primary may very well lose him the support of the more moderate voters who’ve hailed him as a maverick, to his perhaps permanent electoral or reputational detriment…” (Tapped)
Daily Archives: 29 Mar 06
Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome
A User Guide to Adolescence by Luke Jackson, a 13-year old with Asperger’s Syndrome. Social morés in adolescence are difficult enough, but the lack of interpersonal perceptual skills in autistic-spectrum disorders can make it an unmitigated disaster from which recovery is difficult. Some of this was gotten at in Mark Haddon’s poignant novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but this gets at it more explicitly.
Visions of the dying
“‘Iknew something had happened to him – I just knew it’; ‘There was this light which seemed to come from him’; ‘She smiled, as if she was greeting someone – and then she died’. Intimations of a loved one’s death; warm, enveloping lights; visions of dead relatives – deathbed phenomena such as these have become a passion for Dr Peter Fenwick, a consultant in neuropsychiatry at the universities of London and Southampton.”
Fenwick, doing ongoing research on deathbed phenomena, feels they are common, they are not attributable to medication effects, and they are more diverse than the stereotypical “going toward the light” phenomenon.
Celebrity Death Watch
Could The Country’s Insane Fame Fixation Come to an End?: “For years, I’ve thought that the intense fascination with famous people must be about to end—and I’ve been repeatedly, egregiously mistaken. But now—truly, finally—I believe that we are at the apogee, the zenith, the plateau, the top of the market. After 30 years, this cycle of American celebrity mania has peaked. I think. I hope.” — Kurt Andersen (New York Magazine)
A Poverty of the Mind
Orlando Patterson: “Several recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.” (New York Times op-ed)
