Where is psychiatry headed? What the discipline badly needs is close attention to patients and their individual symptoms, in order to carve out the real diseases from the vast pool of symptoms that DSM keeps reshuffling into different “disorders.” This kind of careful attention to what patients actually have is called “psychopathology,” and its absence distinguishes American psychiatry from the European tradition. With DSM-V, American psychiatry is headed in exactly the opposite direction: defining ever-widening circles of the population as mentally ill with vague and undifferentiated diagnoses and treating them with powerful drugs.
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou hast made, and dost forgive the sins of all those who are penitent; Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that we,worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our wretchedness. may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy, perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
In college, I was lucky enough to take an English class with the novelist Reynolds Price, before he died in January—and one of his most striking arguments was that John Milton, with his instant transitions from Hell to Earth to Heaven, was one of the inventors of the cinematic jump-cut. It was a throwaway comment, but it led me to think that we ought to pay more attention to writers’ tricks of ‘editing’: not in the usual sense of revision, but in the cinematic sense of transitions from image to image and from scene to scene. I’ve come to believe that writers, as much as filmmakers, are responsible for our visual grammar—that their imaginary jumps, and the thematic use they’ve made of those jumps, have laid the groundwork we take for granted today whenever we watch anything more demanding than Blue’s Clues. If the camera goes somewhere special, the chances are good that a writer’s imagined camera has gone there before—and shaped not just filmmakers’ sense of what’s possible, but the expectations we bring to the screen.
I spoke to an academic at a US university (who wishes to remain anonymous) who regularly sets open-book, open-laptop exams for his maths students. “I do this so that the students can draw from all of their resources instead of just their memory,” he explained. “There is something to be said for mentally preparing oneself to answer questions on the fly and think on one’s feet, but with the way technology is evolving today, being able to look things up quickly and competently is a skill that should be encouraged.”Surprisingly enough, these exams don’t result in all students getting full marks; far from it. The sad fact is that many students “choose to prepare very little or not at all, thinking that they will be able to look up all the answers without any trouble. Since they are not adept at using the internet or their books or notes to look things up quickly, I don’t know why they assume they will be able to do this under a time constraint.”
What we really need to be worrying about is a generation of students who can’t answer maths questions even if they have access to the entire internet.
HarperCollins has informed libraries that henceforth, ebooks will be sold on the condition that they can only be circulated 26 times before they self-destruct. HarperCollins argues that this reflects the usage characteristics of the print editions that HarperCollins has sold to libraries for literally centuries. That is, HarperCollins argues that once one of its print books lands on the shelves of a local library, it will only survive for 26 checkouts before it has to be discarded because it is in such an unreadable state.Now, in point of fact, many ordinary trade books circulate far more than 26 times before they’re ready for the discard pile. If a group of untrained school kids working as part-time pages can keep a copy of the Toronto Star in readable shape for 30 days’ worth of several-times-per-day usage, then it’s certainly the case that the skilled gluepot ninjas working behind the counter at your local library can easily keep a book patched up and running around the course for a lot more than 26 circuits. Indeed, the HarperCollins editions of my own books are superb and robust examples of the bookbinder’s art (take note!), and judging from the comments of outraged librarians, it’s common for HarperCollins printed volumes to stay in circulation for a very long time indeed.
But this is the wrong thing to argue about. Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it’s bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article, to simulate the damage that might have been done by our careless patrons to the newsprint that had once borne it.
McEnroe believes that Florida’s live-in tennis academies have created an assembly-line sameness to America’s young players and have contributed to the country’s inability to produce big winners on the men’s and women’s professional tours.In starting the academy, he envisioned talented boys and girls from not only the New York metropolitan area but also from around the country and even abroad coming with their families to “the most stimulating city in the world” to lead normal lives while learning to embrace their individuality and creativity in a sport that demands it at the very highest levels.
The great power of modern digital filters lies in their ability to make information that is of inherent interest to us immediately visible to us. The information may take the form of personal messages or updates from friends or colleagues, broadcast messages from experts or celebrities whose opinions or observations we value, headlines and stories from writers or publications we like, alerts about the availability of various other sorts of content on favorite subjects, or suggestions from recommendation engines - but it all shares the quality of being tailored to our particular interests. It’s all needles. And modern filters don’t just organize that information for us; they push the information at us as alerts, updates, streams. We tend to point to spam as an example of information overload. But spam is just an annoyance. The real source of information overload, at least of the ambient sort, is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And as filters get better, that’s exactly the stuff we get more of.It’s a mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they have the effect of reducing the information we have to look at. As today’s filters improve, they expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of overload increases. This is not an indictment of modern filters. They’re doing precisely what we want them to do: find interesting information and make it visible to us. But it does mean that if we believe that improving the workings of filters will save us from information overload, we’re going to be very disappointed. The technology that creates the problem is not going to make the problem go away. If you really want a respite from information overload, pray for filter failure.
The organizers called everyone together to read the rules — likely the only national championship where this needs to be done — and then they played the Swedish national anthem. The boom box was so small that no one could hear anything. Some people continued to talk. Others were looking around, sizing up their opponents. A few old men stood erect, their hands over their hearts. The rest of us looked down at the ground, straining to hear the music and unsure of the decorum, anxiously looking around to see what others were doing. It reminded me of every kid birthday party I had ever had when my mom would make everyone pray before we ate cake, and I would pretend to close my eyes but would peek to see if my friends had their eyes closed.After playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” the organizers read off the group assignments for the seating portion of the tournament. Most of the sixty-four team names involved a play on kubb: Kubbsicles, Kubbra-Kahn, Carpe Kubb’em, Kubb Your Enthusiasm, Kubb De Grace, ad nauseam. The clever names got chuckles; no one chucked at our team name. There was one team from North Dakota and another from Helena, Montana, and a few teams from Des Moines. The rest were from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, which makes the title of “National Championship” seem rather specious. This did not prevent me from texting several people to let them know, “No big deal, I’m just competing in THE KUBB NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS.”