Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 215

Learning From Mindless Pleasure

For Oliver Sacks, who turned 81 this week, getting high can be a lesson in empathy. Melissa Dahl marked Sacks’ birthday with the above video, in which the neurologist talks about what he gained from his experiences with LSD and amphetamines:

So one bonus, then, of drug experiences is that it allowed me to be more empathic, and to understand from my own experiences what various patients were going through. But also, it gave me some very direct knowledge of what physiologists would call the ‘reward systems’ of the brain. It had been found, for example, with rats in the 1960s that if they had an electrode in certain nuclei of the brain, and could get a jolt of electricity, which apparently gave them great pleasure, the rats might go back to the lever again and again. They would ignore food, they would ignore sex, and they would keep pressing the lever, till they died. …

For good and for evil, I think I experienced a similar sort of thing when taking large doses of amphetamine.

It produced intense pleasure, sometimes pleasure of an almost orgasmic degree. And this sort of pleasure is one sort of wants it to go on and on even though it doesn’t really teach one anything, and it’s maybe sort of base in a way, and it almost reduces one to the level of one of these rats pressing the reward center.

Also paying tribute, Popova quoted from Sacks’ recent book Hallucinations, in which he describes the distinction between ordinary imagination and hallucinogenic experience:

When you conjure up ordinary images— of a rectangle, or a friend’s face, or the Eiffel Tower —the images stay in your head. They are not projected into external space like a hallucination, and they lack the detailed quality of a percept or a hallucination. You actively create such voluntary images and can revise them as you please. In contrast, you are passive and helpless in the face of hallucinations: they happen to you, autonomously — they appear and disappear when they please, not when you please.

Watch his TED talk on hallucinations here. Previous Dish on Sacks here, here, and here.

Writers’ Remorse

Anna Holmes reflects on her rookie mistakes as a writer (NYT):

Mostly, what I regret is the ease with which I assumed that others’ prose styles were something not just to study and learn from but to imitate. This chameleonic impulse, a talent I developed at an early age, certainly came in handy during my stints as a writer and editor for women’s service and celebrity magazines — publications that, then and now, demand a cheerful and wholly unremarkable “female” voice — but it also did a fair amount of damage to my writerly sense of self, not to mention my ability to execute stories on issues that had nothing to do with sex tips for singletons, swingy summer dresses or the assignations of Angelina Jolie. My adoption of others’ voices made it even more difficult to find mine, and it wasn’t until I was well into my 30s that I began to realize I could honor other writing styles while also asserting my own. (This development may or may not have been influenced by my entrance into the world of blogging, an environment whose freewheeling, breezy and often very personal approach to prose has inspired any number of now-established writers.)

Leslie Jamison, meanwhile, shakes her head at her early commitment to an idea of “honesty” that translated to oversharing “the parts of myself I liked least — or the situations I most regretted”:

These were my two first mistakes about honesty: I thought it meant relentless self-flagellation, and I thought it could redeem everything. I believed there was nothing self-awareness couldn’t save. My readers taught me otherwise: They often read my self-awareness as meanness or self-indulgence or delusion. It didn’t endear me to them at all. It didn’t dissolve the flaws it confessed.

I’d always believed I was being unfair to my fictional characters if I didn’t grant them the chance to redeem themselves with desire or effort, with earnest attempts to transcend their flaws and limitations. It felt unfair to be their God and then refuse them certain saving nuances. But in my essays I was doing just this — refusing myself access to anything but my own worst tendencies. So I had to consent to making myself something more than a brat or a binger — to treat myself to the rigorous grace of complication instead.

Mental Health Break

A music video that catches the eye:

A Short Story For Saturday

This week’s story is Amy Bloom’s “Silver Water,” in which a woman movingly describes her older sister’s descent in mental illness. How it begins:

My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body. After we went to see La Traviata, when she was fourteen and I was twelve, she elbowed me in the parking lot and said, “Check this out” And she opened her mouth unnaturally wide and her voice came out, so crystalline and bright that all the departing operagoers stood frozen by their cars, unable to take out their keys or open their doors until she had finished, and then they cheered like hell.

That’s what I like to remember and that’s the story I told to all of her therapists. I wanted them to know her, to know that who they saw was not all there was to see. That before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast-food jingles there had been Puccini and Mozart and hymns so sweet and mighty you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap. That before there was a mountain of Thorazined fat, swaying down the halls in nylon maternity tops and sweatpants, there had been the prettiest girl in Arrandale Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High. Maybe there were other pretty girls, but I didn’t see them. To me, Rose, my beautiful blond defender, my guide to Tampax and my mother’s moods, was perfect.

She had her first psychotic break when she was fifteen. She had been coming home moody and tearful, then quietly beaming, then she stopped coming home. She would go out into the woods behind our house and not come in until my mother went after her at dusk, and stepped gently into the briars and saplings and pulled her out, blank-faced, her pale blue sweater covered with crumbled leaves, her white jeans smeared with dirt. After three weeks of this, my mother who is a musician and widely regarded as eccentric, said to my father, who is psychiatrist and a kind, sad man, “She’s going off.”

Read the rest here. The story also can be found in Bloom’s collection, Come to Me. Previous SSFSs here.

Faces Of The Day

CYJO’s series “Mixed Blood” portrays mixed-race families:

CYJO identifies herself as a Westerner of Korean ethnicity (she was born in South Korea and raised in the United States) and photographed the series “Mixed Blood” from 2010–13 in both New York and Beijing. … CYJO said one of the reasons she began the series was a curiosity about exactly what “mixed ethnicity” currently represents, noting that as countries such as China continue to modernize, how the mix of new culture will blend with longstanding traditions will be interesting to follow. While there are people who fear cultural blending, CYJO said the idea of a global identity and our definition of self, culture and race is rooted in life experiences and personal choices.

“But the bigger question is how will cultures and people maintain their individuality?” she asked. “What will be those cultural differences aside from language and food that will make a culture unique? There’s so much more we can learn from each other, especially from our differences.”

“Mixed Blood” is traveling to multiple cities in China. The exhibition, which launched at Today Art Museum in Beijing, is sponsored by the US Embassy, Beijing, curated by Nik Apostolides, and designed by Timothy Archambault. Check out the book here. See more of CYJO’s work here.

(Photo: Doyle Family, 2010. Citizenship: American. Ancestries: African, American Indian, Creole, Cuban, French, Irish. Languages: English, Spanish, French. Live in New York. © CYJO)

The Misery For Child Migrants

Susan Terrio spent years interviewing children who had crossed into the US unaccompanied and were detained by US immigration. In a distillation of her research, she gives a sense of what life is like in the facilities:

Being locked up with no set endpoint creates feelings of helplessness among children who are already suffering from trauma. Ernesto remembers his feelings of disorientation: “You don’t know what’s going to happen. I asked, ‘Why do they send me here?’ We were so afraid. Were they going to take us somewhere and kill us?’”

In 2012, the length of stay in [Office of Refugee Resettlement] facilities for unaccompanied children averaged 60 to 75 days, ORR officials told me. And the longer the children stay, the more anxious they tend to feel and the more likely they are to act out. Some who qualify for protective status instead choose to self-deport in order to escape prolonged confinement. …

Based on site visits and 100 interviews with federal staff, I found that immigration custody is plagued by systemic problems. It takes an ad hoc approach that undermines consistency and fairness, lacks coordination in data collection, restricts information flows, enhances redundancy and concentrates power in the hands of senior government administrators whose decisions are difficult to review or appeal. Complaints about the abuse of children by facility staff have continued. Government officials have been slow to report abuse and have repeatedly failed to hold abusers accountable. More troubling is the lack of independent oversight to track the government’s compliance with its own detention standards—those who oversee operations are supervisors working for the ORR.

(Photo: A young boy bows his head in a holding cell where hundreds of mostly Central American immigrant children are being processed and held at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Nogales Placement Center in Nogales, Arizona on June 18, 2014. Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, have been central to processing the more than 47,000 unaccompanied children who have entered the country illegally since October 1. By Ross D. Franklin-Pool/Getty Images)

Colorado Is So High Right Now

Residents are smoking a lot of pot:

Six months into marijuana legalization, the Colorado Department of Revenue has issued outlining findings about the size of the newly legal market. It turns out that the demand for marijuana far exceeds earlier estimates; according to the report, statewide demand is at a whopping 121.4 tons per year. That’s 31 percent higher than a previous Department of Revenue estimate and 89 percent higher than an oft-cited study by the Colorado Futures Center. And while the vast majority of the increase is the result of resident smokers consuming more than expected, the growth of the retail market — particularly among tourists — is a promising sign for the success of legalization.

Colorado makes substantially more money from taxes on recreational marijuana than medical marijuana. So the success of recreational legalization can be measured by the state’s ability to make loads of money from pot taxes. For advocates, Colorado (so far) appears to be a first victory and may become proof of concept. If Colorado is able to rake in a substantial amount of tax revenue, legalization advocates’ pitches to legislatures in Oregon, Massachusetts and Alaska become that much easier.

Niraj Chokshi looks at who is toking up exactly:

Adult residents either smoke pot (relatively) few times a month or nearly every day—there are few in the middle. More than half of all adult resident users consume the drug in some form fewer than six times a month. (More than 1 in 4 consume less than once a month.) At the same time, about 1 in 5 users are near or at daily consumption. While those roughly daily users account for just a fifth of the user population, they consume fully two thirds of the product.

Jon Walker highlights other details:

A particularly interesting finding is where most of the new retail consumers are coming from. Because of the low tax rate on medical marijuana and greater number of medical marijuana stores, most existing patients are not switching their buying outlets for now.

The report finds, “Using the latest retail marijuana tax statistics from the Department of Revenue, we also found that conversions from medical to retail consumption is relatively low. Instead, retail supply of marijuana is growing, while medical marijuana is relatively constant. This may indicate that medical consumers would rather pay the medical registration fees as opposed to the higher tax rates, or that there are currently relatively few retail outlets compared to medical centers. Therefore, the retail demand is derived primarily from out-of-state visitors and from consumers who previously purchased from the Colorado black and gray markets.”

For example, in Denver it is estimated that 44 percent of recreational marijuana sales are to visitors and the rate is even higher in some ski towns. Clearly, many people are coming the Colorado to enjoy the new freedom.

A Poem For Friday

“In my country” by Jackie Kay:

walking by the waters

down where an honest river

shakes hands with the sea,

a woman passed round me

in a slow, watchful circle,

as if I were a superstition;

or the worst dregs of her imagination,

so when she finally spoke

her words spliced into bars

of an old wheel. A segment of air.

Where do you come from?

“Here,” I said. “Here. These parts.”

(From Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley, Reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books. Photo by Andrew Rollinger)

A Milestone For The T

Laverne Cox recently became the first openly transgender woman to receive an Emmy nod. Jos Truitt applauds the news:

Cox is certainly deserving of the nomination: she brings a depth and humanity to the role that is more than what’s in the script. Sophia’s interactions with her wife and fight to get the medical care she needed were powerful moments, and it’s fantastic to see the Emmys take notice.

Cox’s celebrity has been met with some bigoted responses. So, given the occasional fool in the media, like Kevin D Williamson who still thinks that Cox’s gender should be up for debate, it’s nice to see the Emmys committee underscore that Cox is a woman nominated as an actress, full stop.

Parker Molloy considers how far the film industry has come:

In the early 1980s, Caroline Cossey tried to follow up what was at the time a successful modeling career by taking on some acting work. After appearing as an uncredited featured extra in the 1981 James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, Cossey was outed by the tabloid News of the World when they ran a headline proclaiming “Bond Girl Was Born a Boy.” As she later recounted, the experience not only destroyed her career, but nearly drove her to suicide.

What we’re seeing now is a world in which being transgender is not necessarily the career-killer it once was. These gains – of Laverne Cox scooping an Emmy nomination, Candis Cayne appearing on shows like Elementary and Dirty, Sexy Money, and Jamie Clayton finding herself cast in a recurring role in an upcoming TV show—may be small, but they are a true sign of progress.

Meanwhile, Esther Breger wonders what the full field of nominations says about TV today:

Despite all the silliness, [yesterday] morning’s nominations – the glaring omissions and the boring deja vu – do indicate a larger cultural shift. When the Emmys overlooked The Sopranos‘ first season in 1999, awarding best drama to David E. Kelley’s campy legal procedural, The Practice, instead, the awards show was widely derided for being out of touch, unwilling to recognize cable shows that seemed unfamiliar. Fifteen years later, HBO is racking up 99 nominations, more than any other channel.

But just as shows like The Practice once crowded out innovative shows, the dominance of HBO and HBO-lite can overshadow the actually exciting TV being made today, across all channels. “Quality television is now platform-agnostic,” the TV Academy’s chief said [yesterday] morning, referring to services like Netflix. And he’s right. The defining character of this post-”Golden Age” TV era is plenty; cable, broadcast, and online streaming services all have brilliant shows and boring ones – and the great ones are as likely to look like pulpy fluff as gritty crime drama. Some of them will even have clones.

Faces Of The Day

Vicki Cowart, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, listens to Colorado Senator Mark Udall talk during a news conference about a bill to override Hobby Lobby decision, July 11, 2014. The news conference was held at the Denver Place in downtown Denver. By RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images. Details on Udall’s effort here.