Scott Stossel via The Atlantic:

‘If coroners were to pin an actual time of death on Freudianism, they might specify 1963. That year, the philosopher of science Karl Popper held up psychoanalytic theory as the archetypal instance of what he called “pseudoscience”: Worse than mere bad science, psychoanalysis was, in being untestable, simply not science. Based in large part on the highly speculative interpretation of imperfectly recalled dreams, of all things, psychoanalytic theory was impervious to real scientific inquiry. In presuming to explain everything, Popper pronounced, psychoanalysis explained nothing at all.

So who today would dare attempt a rehabilitation of Freud? And why? To take the second question first, here’s one reason: What has followed Freudianism has not been, by many reckonings, any better. In the 1970s, the mental-health profession fled from such squishy psychological concepts as transference and countertransference, the death drive, and seduction theory—as well as more outlandish ones like penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipal complex—and leaned instead into “biological psychiatry,” which had emerged from the drug discoveries of the 1950s and ’60s.

Physiological notions took hold, such as the “catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders,” which attributed anxiety and depression to deficits of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine. Three decades later, in the 1990s, the “chemical-imbalance theory of depression” arrived, tying depression and other mood disorders to dysregulation of another neurotransmitter, serotonin. Psychoanalysts’ highly subjective assessments gave way to the ostensibly more objective measurements provided by neuroscientific instruments that can capture brain activity, such as EEGs, PET scans, and fMRIs. Doctors turned to genetic testing to help identify various temperament types and emotional predispositions, and relied on standardized questionnaires assessed for their validity in diagnosing mental illness.

In repudiating Freudianism and touting the field’s proper medical grounding, science-based psychiatry confidently predicted that measurable success was soon to come. That’s not what happened. Biological psychiatry “overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated,” as the Harvard medical historian Anne Harrington put it in 2019. Which raises the question of whether psychiatry has simply exchanged one form of witchcraft for another….’

Brendan Brown via ScienceBlog.com:

‘The nightly choice between a book and a screen isn’t a minor preference—it’s a decade-long experiment that rewires your brain in measurably different ways….’

Dorothy Neufeld via Visual Capitalist:

‘Czechia ranks first globally for academic freedom, while Myanmar and Nicaragua rank last.

The U.S. scores 0.40, placing it at a level similar to Bhutan and Thailand.

India has recorded one of the world’s sharpest declines in academic freedom since 2010….’

Here & Now Newsroom via WBUR:

‘Scott Tong speaks with baker and writer Kate Lebo about embracing bitterness, complex flavors, and why baking with ultra-sweet fruit doesn’t make for better pies….’

Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily:

‘The writers of the Beat generation adopted ideas and images from cultural traditions ranging from Buddhism to jazz. William S. Burroughs repeatedly turned to another source: the ancient Maya. As independent scholar Paul H. Wild writes, Burroughs drastically reshaped Maya culture for his own purposes, but his stories were grounded in ideas about the civilization that were common in academic circles at the time…

Wild writes that, somewhat paradoxically, given his profession, Burroughs railed against the “Word Virus” as a tool of control. And so he was fascinated by the hieroglyphic nature of Maya writing, which he claimed could convey ideas more directly, avoiding the need for words. This followed a common scholarly notion that Maya hieroglyphics were not tied to spoken language.

Many of the ideas about Maya life that Burroughs had access to in the 1950s were turned on their head in the next decade, when epigraphers realized that Maya writing was, in fact, partly phonological, and could be directly translated into speech…’

Ellyn Lapointe via Gizmodo:

‘A set of engineered safeguards could protect Earth’s habitability for 9.1 quadrillion years, according to new research. The star that gave our planet life will one day take it away. Scientists have long agreed that the expansion and eventual death of the Sun will destroy Earth’s habitability, but one researcher believes he’s figured out a way for humanity to avoid this fate.

In a study set to appear in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, independent researcher Gabriel Harry outlines a plan that he claims could help us outlive the Sun. In fact, he presents megaengineering concepts designed to safeguard against a whole suite of long-term threats to Earth’s habitability: solar luminosity, solar engulfment, the end of tectonics, water loss, changes in the planet’s tilt and spin, object collision, and dangers from beyond our solar system. The findings are currently available on the preprint server arXiv….’