“Jill Bolte Taylor, Phd, a neuroanatomist at Indiana University, Bloomington, had a major stroke and discusses it in her fascinating book, My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

As a brain expert, Dr. Bolte Taylor was able to analyze the physical and mental effects of her stroke — as it occurred, and as she recovered from the life-changing event.”

Injured Brains of Medical Minds: Views from Within Edited by Narinder Kapur: “This book provides a unique perspective on what it is like to be brain-damaged, seen through the eyes of doctors or neurosurgeons who have themselves suffered a brain injury or brain illness. Each of the personal accounts, written over the past 120 years, is accompanied by a commentary written by the author which critically examines the experiences of the sufferer, relating them to current issues in clinical neurology and cognitive neuroscience.”

Jeff Sharlet on How the Christian Right is reimagining U.S. history: “Is “fundamentalism” too limited a word for a belief system of such scope and intimacy? Lately, some scholars prefer “maximalism,” a term meant to convey the movement’s ambition to conform every aspect of society to God. In contemporary America—from the Cold War to the Iraq War, the period of the current incarnation’s ascendancy—that means a culture born again in the image of a Jesus strong but tender, a warrior who hates the carnage he must cause, a man-god ordinary men will follow. These are days of the sword, literally; affluent members of the movement gift one another with real blades crafted to medieval standards, a fad inspired by a bestselling book called Wild at Heart. As jargon, then, “maximalism” isn’t bad, an unintended tribute to Maximus, the fighting hero of Gladiator, which is a film celebrated in Christian manhood guides as almost supplemental scripture. But I think “fundamentalism”—coined in 1920 as self-designation by those ready to do “battle royal for the fundamentals,” hushed up now as too crude for today’s chevaliers—still strikes closest to the movement’s desire for a story that never changes, a story to redeem all that seems random, a rock upon which history can rise.

If the term “fundamentalism” endures, the classic means of explaining it away—class envy, sexual anxiety—do not. We cannot, like H. L. Mencken, writing from the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, dismiss the Christian right as a carnival of backward buffoons jealous of modernity’s privileges. We cannot, like the Washington Post, in 1993, explain away the movement as “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” We cannot, like the writer Theodor Adorno, a refugee from Nazi Germany who sat squinting in the white light of L.A., unhappily scribbling notes about angry radio preachers, attribute radical religion—nascent fascism?—to Freudian yearning for a father figure.

The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship” over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.” (Harper’s)

“Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has left the Pentagon, but not the Defense Department. On Jan. 4, Mr. Rumsfeld opened a government-provided transition office in Arlington and has seven Pentagon-paid staffers working for him, a Pentagon official said… ” (Washington Times)

Los Angeles Times op-ed piece by Johns Hopkins history professor and New Republic contributing editor David Bell: “Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?”