David Rieff’s memoir of the last, excruciatingly painful months of his mother [Susan Sontag]’s life, is as riveting as it is unremittingly harrowing. In those months, Sontag swung between despair and stubborn hope. She interrogated the Internet and her doctors, emboldened by a lifelong certainty that information equals knowledge equals power. The irony isn’t lost on Rieff that his mother, a resolute atheist, had an almost religious belief in the always onward and upward progress of scientific research. ‘Was it not…magical thinking disguised as practical research…on the false premise that with that information there would be something new and transformative that could be done?’

She made herself, her son and her friends walk an absurdly wobbling tightrope. She did not want bromides, consoling lies or blind hope; she wanted the truth. But she could not bear to hear a death sentence; anytime she looked directly at mortality, she came close to going insane. Her doctors and her retinue of companions, all of whom knew that death was imminent, had simultaneously to believe that she could live. So they cherry-picked the ominous statistics for promising news and found mandarin ways of changing the subject and not saying certain things.” (Minneapolis Star Tribune via Powells Books)

(Is the Pope Catholic?) A review of Oliver James’ The Selfish Capitalist: The Origins of Affluenza: “Given the frequency with which reports appear in the media about rising levels of emotional distress (anxiety, panic attacks, depression) among children and teenagers, James will find a receptive audience, eager for explanations. Whether they will be convinced by his argument that market capitalism is the cause of mental ill-health is another matter; we have had various competing explanations for social ills in recent decades, usually sponsored by the right, ranging from rising divorce rates and moral breakdown to decline in religion. James has now provided the left – if one can still talk in such terms – with a powerful counter-argument: our emotional malaise is not an accidental byproduct of market capitalism, but a direct result of increased competitiveness and the way that it exploits our insecurities.” (Guardian.UK)

…and it may depend on the inner ear. “…[T]here are well-documented differences in how men and women get from Point A to Point B — perhaps giving a scientific root to timeworn jokes about women being batty drivers and men never admitting (though committing) error. Studies over the past decade have shown that women are likelier to rely on landmarks and visual cues, and men on maps, cardinal directions (such as north and south) and gauges of distance.

“Women are more dependent on a surrounding frame,” says Luc Tremblay, an assistant professor of physical education and health at the University of Toronto, who has led studies on the matter. If landmarks change, women are more apt to notice and question their sense of orientation. “Men are capable of relying on another source of information alone,” Tremblay says.

While some scientists theorize that hormones account for navigational differences between the sexes, Tremblay thinks the answer may lie in the inner ear. There, a group of three semicircular canals — which are usually larger in men than in women — help track the body’s motion, speed and direction. Men, in other words, get stronger internal directional cues, Tremblay speculates.” (Washington Post)