Body & Mind Archives - Page 10 of 16

Psyche

In Search of Lost Time—And Misplaced Memories

June 24, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

You are in your twenties but have lived with petit mal epilepsy your entire life. Dr. Penfield has promised you a solution: he will peel back your scalp, open up your cranium, and probe your brain with electrodes for signs of injury. He believes that your epilepsy is due to ...

In Search of Lost Time—And Misplaced Memories

Activism

Social Justice Is More Important Than Social Distance

Why a researcher who understands the health consequences of mass gatherings is in the streets fighting racism

June 19, 2020 • by Miranda Yaver

My first political memory was watching officers of the Los Angeles Police Department beating Rodney King on television. I did not fully comprehend what I was watching at 5 years old, though I sensed that it was unjust. Nearly three decades later, braving coronavirus and angry about police brutality against people ...

Social Justice Is More Important Than Social Distance

Prisons and Police

Behind Bars in the Age of Coronavirus

A letter from prison

June 18, 2020 • by Phyllis Dietrichson

Is it wise or exploitative? My “soap shop” job is part of a difficult matrix of concepts. On the one hand, I am grateful to have the opportunity to work and contribute to the cause. On the other, I feel expendable and like a slave. But then again, I once ...

Psyche

Fear of Death Amid a Pandemic

Divergent psychoanalytic approaches

June 11, 2020 • by Howard Steele

Throughout the modern period, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether anxiety and fear are fundamental human feelings. For those treating patients using psychoanalytic methods, I have long pondered two divergent psychoanalytic approaches to two specific kinds of fear: (1) the fear of annihilation and (2) the fear of loss of ...

History

Taking Children

An excerpt from Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs

June 8, 2020 • by Laura Briggs

The past stalks the present, the ghost in the machine of memory. This is why history writing matters; it gives us ways to understand the specters already among us and to assemble tools to transform our situation. Things change; the epidemic of child taking in the context of mass incarceration ...

Kinships

The Bookkeeper

The racist legacy of a mixed-race family

June 5, 2020 • by Julia McKenzie Munemo

In The Book Keeper, the journey of finally reading those pulpy paperbacks set during slavery entwines with questions about Munemo’s father’s mental illness, the tale of her own love story, and her exploration of the fears she carries for her sons in a country where, as we continue to be ...

Democracy

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Reading Shakespeare in a time of plague

May 28, 2020 • by Emily Pitts Donahoe

We are perennially curious about what Shakespeare can teach us about our own world, hoping to find instruction and solace in his plays, poems, and exemplary turns of phrase. Recently, this curiosity has produced a score of tweets and articles speculating about Shakespeare’s productivity during periods when the plague ravaged London, ...

Troilus and Cressida and a Diseased Body Politic

Labor

I, Face Mask

A reconsideration of the classic essay, “I, Pencil”

May 27, 2020 • by Fred Block

“I, Pencil” uses a genealogy of an ordinary lead pencil to explain that nobody knows how to make one. It is, rather, the genius of the market system that coordinates the efforts of people around the world to manufacture the final product. They include loggers in Northern California, graphite miners ...

Democracy

Misinformation in a Moment of Crisis is Incredibly Dangerous

May 26, 2020 • by Jonathan Beale

It’s madness. But it’s not difficult to imagine people resorting to similar actions now, influenced by misinformation about how to stave off the novel coronavirus. Most of us would also take desperate measures to evade death. And indeed, unreasonable desperate measures are multiplying during the Covid-19 pandemic. Gary and Wanda Lenius, ...

Misinformation in a Moment of Crisis is Incredibly Dangerous

Public Health

The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic

Around the world, far-right leaders’ responses to the pandemic feature key elements of fascist ideology

May 25, 2020 • by Federico Finchelstein and Jason Stanley

There is nothing like a pandemic to bring out the fascist ideology in countries under far-right rule. In the world's three largest democracies, national leaders are using the COVID-19 crisis to wage war on immigrants and minorities, while testing the limits of common sense. NEW YORK/NEW HAVEN -- In stark contrast ...

Public Health

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Human beings forget that they will always share the planet with microbes

May 21, 2020 • by Joshua Lederberg

Pasteur and Darwin Charles Darwin’s role in nineteenth-century thought, how that shapes our own thinking about man’s place in Nature, is too well-known and oft-discussed to bear extensive elaboration on my part. His contemporary, Louis Pasteur, is a culture hero, world-renowned for the human benefits of his germ theory of disease: the ...

Pandemic as a Natural Evolutionary Phenomenon

Disability

One Question

May 21, 2020 • by Renée Schultz

When Ian calls from his group home with one question, it usually involves money. Two days ago, when he asked me to buy him a Star Wars DVD, I said “sure.” Even though I don’t want to contribute to the abuse of Amazon warehouse workers, I do want to take ...