Brendan I. Koerner's Blog, page 69

Grand Illusion?

In response to a rash of homicides, the bedraggled city of Chester, Penn., has instituted an unusually harsh curfew, which mandates that everyone be off the streets of certain crime-plagued neighborhoods by 9 p.m. A noble effort to reduce violence, perhaps, but the evidence doesn't bear out the crime-prevention strategy. Just ask the good citizens of Aberdeen, Scotland, who recently hoped that a curfew would ratchet down the drunken brawling and general ickiness that mars the fair city's...

Push Out the Jive, Bring in the Love

We couldn't bear to leave an AA-related post atop the blog all weekend, so let us instead sign off with another addition to our growing Asha Bhosle collection. Back on Monday with more AA extras, as well as the standard Microkhan fodder that hopefully makes the drudgery of existence a little brighter for all involved.

Not-So-Deadly Nightshade

One of the most controversial aspects of AA's history is the role that psychedelics may have played in Bill Wilson's creative process. As I discuss in the Wired piece, when Wilson experienced his spiritual epiphany in December 1934, he did so at a New York City drying-out facility. Part of his treatment there consisted of something called the Belladonna Cure, in which detoxing alcoholics were given hourly infusions of a potentially hallucinogenic drug. A recent New York Times piece gives...

Keeping the Lid On

When I started working on the AA piece for Wired, I assumed that the nascent organization insisted on anonymity because of a 1930s stigma against alcoholism. But as it turns out, Bill Wilson created the policy for a more pragmatic reason, which he explained thusly:

[In the past:], alcoholics who talked too much on public platforms were likely to become inflated and get drunk again. Our principle of anonymity, so far as the general public is concerned, partly corrects this difficulty by...

The Bottle

Regular readers know that I've been spending the better part of 2010 working on a Wired piece about addiction. Well, the feature is finally live, and now the full truth can be revealed—the article's central narrative is about the history and science (or lack thereof) of Alcoholics Anonymous, which just celebrated its 75th anniversary. Here's the essence of the tale:

It was in June 1935, amid the gloom of the Great Depression, that a failed stockbroker and reformed lush named Bill Wilson...

The Risk of the Chase

Those of you who follow Microkhan's microblog know that the situation near headquarters was beyond hectic yesterday—not just because we had the kid on our hands, but also due to our physical proximity to a senseless tragedy. A police pursuit of two robbery suspects ended with a massive collision about 50 feet from our front door, and the death of an elderly nun. As of this writing, the suspects have yet to be caught, though not for lack of beefy detectives peering into our basement for hours ...

The Venezuela of Its Day

We've been doing our best to work up a healthy antipathy toward Algeria, whose national team we face tomorrow in a must-win World Cup match. As big fans of The Battle of Algiers and longtime observers of the country's ruinous civil war, our hearts go out to the Algerian generations that have endured so much bloodshed. How can we credibly hate on a nation that has suffered to the Nth degree? (Also, they make some pretty decent wine.)

To get us in the sporting mood, then, we've dug deep into...

The Saga Continues

We're still on the hook with Microkhan Jr., at least until the early afternoon. We'll try to check back in then, as we don't want a long-gestating post on Algeria's legacy of anti-Americanism to go to waste. In the meantime, we present you with two data points involving public health in Mongolia. The video above should be self-explanatory—the nation's capital has some serious air-quality issues. Beyond that, according to the very first line of this 1993 paper, traditional Mongolian medicine p...

Waylaid By Progeny

So much for our grand plans to start this momentous week on the right foot. Microkhan Jr.'s sitter canceled on us last minute, and unlike our Mongolian forebear, we don't have a legion of fur-clad handmaidens waiting in the wings to take over childcare duties. And so we must dedicate our morning to tackling a brutal Wired deadline, as well as to locating some Thomas the Train training toothpaste before the home situation reaches something akin to DEFCON 2.

But fear not, we'll be back...

Her Dark Materials

Despite our general abhorrence of slasher flicks and Eli Roth-style "torture porn," we do have a soft spot for macabre statues. Hyungkoo Lee's series of cartoon skeletons, for example, still ranks as one of the finest exhibits we've ever seen in New York. And we're similarly enthralled by the work of Jessica Joslin, who incorporates animal bones and skulls into her steampunk-inflected works.

Adding to Ms. Joslin's appeal is her slightly kooky tilt, captured splendidly in this profile in...