2010/2/27 excerpt
The word depression is used as a “catch-all” term to describe a “spectrum of symptoms.” I am wary of the medical standard which of late seems to prefer to medicate first and diagnose later, especially in children. Jonah Lehrer helps us to see that depression should not be dismissed so quickly:
“If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.”
A hefty price. However, it’s not always that simple, either:
“To say that depression has a purpose or that sadness makes us smarter says nothing about its awfulness. A fever, after all, might have benefits, but we still take pills to make it go away. This is the paradox of evolution: even if our pain is useful, the urge to escape from the pain remains the most powerful instinct of all.”
Read more about Depression’s Upside on the New York Times website.
2010/1/21 excerpt
You can read the first chapter of this book here at Scribd. To give you an idea:
As the conservative columnist George F. Will has written, today “we honor Jefferson, but live in Hamilton’s country.”
This is no cause for celebration. In fact, the triumph of Hamiltonianism has been mostly a curse on America. The political legacy of Alexander Hamilton reads like a catalog of the ills of modern government: an out-of-control, unaccountable, monopolistic beaurocracy in Washington, D.C.; the demise of the Constitution as a restraint on the federal government’s powers; the end of the idea that the citizens of the states should be the masters, rather than the servants, of the government;
And on and on. An eye-opening book which I simply cannot put down and which you absolutely must read if you have any interest in history, economics, politics, or the past, present, or future of the United States.
2010/1/14 excerpt
This is a short story by Wells Tower about bloodthirsty vikings and, strangely, the cost of love. Below is a colorful excerpt, or, if you found the title as interesting as I did, you can skip straight to reading here at Macmillan.
The clouds were spilling out low across the sky when we shoved off. Thirty of us on board, Gnut rowing with me at the bow and behind us a lot of other men I’d been in some shit with before. Some of their families came down to watch us go. ØrlStender fucked up the cadence waving to his son, who stood on the beach waving back. He was a tiny one, not four or five, standing there with no pants on, holding a baby pig on a hide leash. Some of the others on board weren’t a whole lot older, rash and violent children, so innocent about the world they would just as soon stick a knife in you as shake your hand.
2009/12/15 excerpt
All authors should have a website for this reason: I had never heard of Jim Butcher or The Dresden Files, and then I read a short story called The Restoration of Faith that is available for free on his website. Now I’ve bought and read the first book in the series (Storm Front) and the next couple are on top of my Christmas wishlist.
“I struggled to hold onto the yowling child while fumbling a quarter into the pay phone and jamming down the buttons to dial Nick’s mobile.” (read the rest of the story on butcher’s site)
2009/12/9 excerpt
Perhaps the most famous of H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling SciFi stories, The Call of Cthulhu (full text here) hooks you from the first line:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”