The biology of mental illness is still a mystery, but practitioners don’t want to admit it.
The protracted attempt to usher psychiatry into medicine’s modern era is the subject of Anne Harrington’s Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. As her subtitle indicates, this is not a story of steady progress. Rather, it’s a tale of promising roads that turned out to be dead ends, of treatments that seemed miraculous in their day but barbaric in retrospect, of public-health policies that were born in hope but destined for disaster.
Researchers tested blood and semen found on a shawl near the body of the killer’s fourth victim, a woman whose mutilated body was found in September 1888.
The identity of Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer from the late 1800s in England, may finally be known.
A DNA forensic investigation published this month by two British researchers in the Journal of Forensic Science identifies Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber and prime suspect at the time, as the likely killer.
The “semen stains match the sequences of one of the main police suspects, Aaron Kosminski,” said the study authored by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds.
Murderabilia is an online market where collectors buy and sell items related to serial killers. William Harder is the owner of murderauction.com, where murderabilia items are for sale. Here & Now‘s Robin Young talks with Harder and Andy Kahan, a long-time victims advocate for the city of Houston, Texas.
Welcome to the r/collapse wiki! Our goal is to provide an effective and concise introduction to the subject of collapse. We consider these the best resources, concepts, and questions for getting started.
The rate of lethal violence is 7 times higher than the average for all mammals
A new study of 1,024 mammal species has determined which animals are the most vicious killers of their own kind. Killer whales perhaps? Pit bulls maybe? For the answer, just look in the mirror.
The strange tale of Valerie Solanas reads as both tragedy and farce. In 1967, the radical feminist wrote one of the most vitriolic, misandrist treatises in American history, entitled “The SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.” So absurd that it reads like parody, the work nevertheless offers a striking (if deranged) record of 1960s tensions, many of which persist today. The manifesto might have remained a historical oddity if Solanas hadn’t turned her rage into actual violence: In 1968, she shot
A Review of The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson, Oxford University Press, (January 2, 2018) 418 pages.
“The elephant in the room” is any important and obvious fact that, for whatever reason, no one is willing to talk about. In their new book, The Elephant in the Brain, authors Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson extend the concept to one the most important and obvious, yet unspoken, facts about the human mind: that we are masters of self-deception, equipped by evolution with an “introspective blind spot” that hides our deeper, selfish motives, even when the same motives are easy to spot in others. The result is an entertaining and insightful book that sheds light on a diverse collection of perplexing human behaviors — from laughter to religion to the origin of language.
“Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam war, has attracted to it maybe the largest corpus of legends and anecdotes of any film ever made. Sort-of an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” the production became a slog through natural disasters, directorial megalomania, and latter-day Marlon Brando‘s sprawling eccentricity. If you are a film student with an idea for a movie set in a jungle, take a quick look at the legends surrounding “Apocalypse Now,” and similar films like those of Werner Herzog, and write a new script, for God’s sake.
But if you just enjoy stories of hubris and chaos, then by all means dive in. We have here, courtesy of No Film School, a new window on the production, in the fascinating form of the director, Coppola, interviewing the writer, John Milius. Milius is a fascinating figure all to himself, a buddy of Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the rest of the “brat pack” from way back in the day who also wrote “Dirty Harry,” directed the original “Red Dawn” and created the HBO series “Rome” (check out our list of essential Milius films right here). Here he and Coppola delve back to the days before they shipped out to the jungle, when the only complexity facing them was Milius’ ten-draft, thousand-page monster-script. “What could possibly go wrong?” they must have been asking themselves…
