Nathanael Yellis

The second essay in the 2012 version of The Best American Essays, is Marcia Angell's "The Crazy State of Psychiatry", originally published in The New York Review of Books. Reading it now makes you realize just how much has shifted. Not in the sense of the psychoactive drugs she questions having become more demonstrably effective nor in the sense of psychiatry's diagnostics becoming more scientific. These are more-or-less unchanged. Also unchanged is our willingness for drug-based solutions to most medical problems (see Ozympic). What surprised me about the essay is that the books it reviews are classic left-of-center attacks on pharmaceutical companies; it takes for a given that a progressive person ought to be skeptical of medicines, like vaccines, and their side effects. The good leftist assumes that right-leaning people are carrying water for drugs of unknown origin with unknown side effects.

A lot of the more entertaining reading these days amounts to nervous hand-wringing about potentially bad futures. A lot of the best writing is the essay equivalent of ruin porn. Smartphones, front-facing cameras, and mobile social media accounts are ruining kids (especially girls). Increasing personal atomization is ruining the social fabric of our society. The nationalization of our politics promotes national tribal division and increasing violence. Various of the crazies are perpetually attempting an immanentization of the eschaton, with ruinous results. I've linked to enough of these pieces for you to know the authors getting worked up about the ruination.

I like reading what's well-written. If there's a recurring theme here, it's that the topic matters less than the quality of the writing. When I try to make a point with what I share, the links are always less fun for you.

A fun workplace lunch conversation recently has been my boss's idea that Boston is held back by the number of separate municipalities that comprise what most people think of as Boston. While driving around, you might think you're in Boston, but you really make your way from Revere to Malden, Summerville and Cambridge, Boston itself, then quickly to Brookline or Newton. These aren't villages or neighborhoods, like Chestnut Hill or Mattapan or East Boston; these are separate municipalities with their own schools, police departments, and boards and mayors. I'm not sure if the theory that these separate cities hold the region back is correct. It seems to me that a little competition over which city can be the best could result in them all being a bit better. But the core of this idea is that our places and how we manage them matters.

Stories are interesting to the degree they are specific. Nothing's less interesting than a social scientist trying to summarize the results of focus groups or survey responses. There's little that tops the interest we give to gossip offered by a person we know about other people we know. There's a corollary in journalism. When reporters get people to use their own names to talk badly about other people, both we and they find it highly interesting.

There have been a few trend-pieces on age gaps recently. I guess people dating or marrying people far older/younger than themselves is interesting, although most of the pieces take the more judgmental approach. There seems to be no one more blameworthy than the person who slightly upends a social convention to make themselves better off. The age gap in a relationship often signifies a wealth or status gap as well: the rich older man finds a younger, more attractive woman than his poorer peers find; the wealthy older woman finds a younger, more attractive man; etc. The self-interest these relationships signify gives the cultural commentator just enough to write the trend-piece.

After leaving my job in politics, I found that I had a whole lot of freedom to rethink things. My old views seemed to matter a whole lot less. Upton Sinclair had it right, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." When my salary became apolitical, my opinions stopped being sacrosanct.

It's Holy Week. So let's talk about the American Religion.

Over the past year or so, I've read a bit in the modern type of Zen Buddhism promulgated by Alan Watts. The books have been uniformly interesting and wildly diverse: from the delightfully titled meditation guide Don't Just Do Something, Sit There to the fairly dense The Way of Zen to the ur-text of white people going on Tibetan pilgrimages The Snow Leopard. I've also sprinkled in some of Watts's essays and other authors aiming for the same thing: explorations of meaning, spirituality, and mindfulness untethered from western religious tradition.