Psilocybin Relieves Major Depression, Study Shows

In a small study of adults with major depression, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers report that two doses of the psychedelic substance psilocybin, given with supportive psychotherapy, produced rapid and large reductions in depressive symptoms, with most participants showing improvement and half of study participants achieving remission through the four-week follow-up.

A compound found in so-called magic mushrooms, psilocybin produces visual and auditory hallucinations and profound changes in consciousness over a few hours after ingestion. In 2016, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers first reported that treatment with psilocybin under psychologically supported conditions significantly relieved existential anxiety and depression in people with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.

Now, the findings from the new study, published Nov. 4 in JAMA Psychiatry, suggest that psilocybin may be effective in the much wider population of patients who suffer from major depression than previously appreciated.

"The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market," says Alan Davis, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. "Because most other depression treatments take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, this could be a game changer if these findings hold up in future 'gold-standard' placebo-controlled clinical trials." The published findings cover only a four-week follow-up in 24 participants, all of whom underwent two five-hour psilocybin sessions under the direction of the researchers.

"Because there are several types of major depressive disorders that may result in variation in how people respond to treatment, I was surprised that most of our study participants found the psilocybin treatment to be effective," says Roland Griffiths, Ph.D., the Oliver Lee McCabe III Professor in the Neuropsychopharmacology of Consciousness at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He says the major depression treated in the new study may have been different than the "reactive" form of depression in patients they studied in the 2016 cancer trial. Griffiths says his team was encouraged by public health officials to explore psilocybin's effects in the broader population of those with major depressive disorder because of the much larger potential public health impact.

by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, MedicalXPress | Read more:
Image: Eskymaks/Shutterstock via:

[ed. See also: Oregon leads the way in decriminalizing hard drugs (Rolling Stone/Yahoo)

The End of History and the Fast Man

By early 1967, just months after Ronald Reagan’s election as governor, James Q. Wilson had already tired of East-Coasters’ new favorite pastime, “Explaining California.” So the California-born Harvard professor penned a firsthand account of growing up in Long Beach, “to try to explain what it was like at least in general terms, and how what it was like is relevant to what is happening there today.” As Wilson explained in “A Guide to Reagan Country,” Reaganism reflected a southern Californian individualism focused not on changing the world but on improving your own small part of it — your home, your yard, and, before you were old enough for any of that, your car.

“Driving. Driving everywhere, over great distances, with scarcely any thought to the enormous mileages they were logging. A car was the absolutely essential piece of social overhead capital,” he recalled. You needed the car to “get a job, meet a girl, hang around with the boys,” go to the movies, to the beach, to Hollywood.

In the decades after writing that essay for Commentary, Wilson became the nation’s most insightful political scientist. From his early essays on city politics, to his studies of bureaucracy and police behavior, to his writings on morality and character in American life, Wilson saw more keenly than anyone else the relationships between American character and American institutions. And throughout his career, he returned time and again to cars — in California, in America, and in the crosshairs of progressive technocrats.*

His consideration of cars was more than academic. The son of an auto-parts dealer, Wilson loved to drive “very fast,” Christopher DeMuth remembered, “preferably with his wife Roberta at his side to share the thrill.” In Cambridge he shunned the standard-issue Harvard-prof Volvo — as a 1970s protester’s sign once complained, “James Q. Wilson Drives a Porsche.”

But for Wilson, owning a car meant not only enjoying the thrill of driving it, but also shouldering the responsibility for maintaining it, repairing it, improving it. Wilson knew this in his own life — his friend Shep Melnick recalled to me that Wilson once missed a Harvard meeting because his Porsche broke down en route, and he insisted on fixing it himself — but he also saw that it was central to the car’s importance in American life generally. The importance of a car was in gaining true ownership of it, and in the process gaining true ownership of one’s self.

Of course, a young man growing up in southern California wanted a car because of the pleasures it could deliver. “But the hedonistic purposes to which the car might be put did not detract from its power to create and sustain a very conventional and bourgeois sense of property and responsibility, for in the last analysis the car was not a means to an end but an end in itself.” If New York or Philadelphia neighborhoods raised boys with a sense of “territory,” Californians raised them with “a feeling of property.” And that feeling of ownership was nourished in the driveway, or the garage, or the alley, coaxing the power and beauty out of old Fords.

Today the young American who wants to tinker with his car faces an entirely different set of challenges. Matthew B. Crawford, a political philosopher and motorcycle mechanic (and a fellow contributing editor to this journal), writes in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, “Lift the hood on some cars now and the engine appears a bit like the shimmering, featureless obelisk that so enthralled the proto-humans in the opening scene of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Essentially, there is another hood under the hood.” We’ve traded genuine ownership and mastery for a combination of aesthetics and access to expert help.

Crawford’s first book (and the 2006 New Atlantis essay upon which it was based) was an appeal for more of us to get underneath modern life’s hoods: to study, to struggle with, and to master the machinery under our world’s slick outer shells. From cars and motorcycles, to appliances, to the rest of our day’s infrastructure and technology, Crawford urged us to roll up our sleeves. For only by moving from superficial abstractions to the brutal reality of working imperfect materials with imperfect tools can we appreciate what is necessary for “self-government” in both senses of the term.

Crawford returns to these themes once more in his new book Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. Those who enjoyed Shop Class will no doubt enjoy his latest volley, which once again benefits from Crawford’s autobiographical and biographical sketches, not to mention his hand-drawn sketches of the crankshafts and other gear that he’s writing about. And those who enjoyed his second book, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (2015), will appreciate his argument that self-driving cars will bring not more freedom but more captivity. (...)

This is the crucial message of Crawford’s book. “Virtue is more like a skill,” he writes, “acquired through long practice in the art of living.” And that practice depends upon the choices we make, and the choices we make about which choices we make. When we choose to delegate choice to rational control outside our immediate involvement, we choose wittingly or unwittingly to shape ourselves accordingly. We “become a certain kind of person,” Crawford emphasizes. “As embodied practical skills, the virtues have to be exercised or they atrophy.” And so when we drive autonomous vehicles, or cede control to other forms of automatic convenience, “it is we who are being automated, in the sense that we are vacated of that existential involvement that distinguishes human action from mere dumb events.” 

by Adam J. White, The New Atlantis |  Read more:

Image: Monterey Historic Races Laguna Seca, California, 1986 / Alamy

Skyfire (天之火), Off Work
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Michael Moore On the 2020 Election, Trump’s Brain, and What We Can Do Next

Filmmaker Michael Moore recently joined Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a conversation about Trump, Biden, and the election. Follow Michael Moore @MMFlint. This interview has been edited lightly for grammar and clarity and reduced in length. The full version can be viewed here on YouTube or listened to on the Current Affairs podcast.

NJR: ...The reason I wanted to talk to you—we’re recording this on a Thursday [10/29]. The United States presidential election is on Tuesday. I wanted to talk to you specifically because I think by the end of the cycle in 2016, you were almost the only person in the country saying that Donald Trump was going to be the president of the United States. That turned out to be true. So, how are you feeling now?

MM: Hmm, it’s a good question. Because this is not 2016. Funny, at the time, I didn’t think I was making a prediction. I was just commenting on what I saw in Michigan and I didn’t see much support for Hillary. And she lost the state by an average of two votes per precinct. So, now I have been virtually around the country every day, in some kind of Zoom. I’m always giving a speech somewhere over the internet, going on an MSNBC show or somebody’s podcast. I am of two minds and I don’t have a gray zone. I think it’s going to be one or the other. I think it is very possible Trump is going to be buried in a tsunami of ballots. I think that is actually something that can happen. I also believe that he is an evil genius and I put nothing past him. And I think that he’s smarter in this sort of way than all of us.

NJR: You’ve used this phrase before, “evil genius,” to describe him, and I agree with that. But I think that probably most people you say that to think you’re crazy. Because the consensus about Donald Trump is that he’s an idiot. He’s incompetent. He’s a horrible president. He has no idea what he’s doing. And I think I share with you the view that actually it is a real mistaken understanding of Donald Trump to just see him as a buffoon and a clown. He is those things, but that is a lack of a particular type of intelligence. And there is another type of intelligence, which is the intelligence of the con man. And that is a kind of smarts that he has.

MM: He and I are members of the same organization. It’s called the Screen Actors Guild. He’s the only sitting president I believe we’ve ever had that is still an active union member while he was president. Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild back in the day, but not when he was in the White House. This guy is still a member of our union. So I think just as you could say “That Jim Carrey, he’s crazy,” some of the craziest people in show business have been some of the smartest people and some of the most—not in Jim Carrey’s case, but I’m thinking of others—some of the most devious and some of the worst human beings that people have run across.

The fact that [Trump] had 14 seasons on NBC with that show of his—they’re not a charity. They just don’t let anybody on TV. They kept him on because he had an audience of millions and millions and millions of Americans. And millions and millions—60 to 70 million—are going to vote for him this week. That’s how many people we share the country with that love Donald Trump. So this is a problem. This is a problem because the enthusiasm level amongst his supporters is amazing. And the enthusiasm level for Joe Biden—no offense to Joe Biden…

NJR: Even to talk of an “enthusiasm level” for Joe Biden…

MM: Yes. So, exactly. That’s a problem. Why is the Republican in Michigan running for Senate, John James, almost in a virtual tie with our incumbent Democrat? What does that tell you about Michigan? Maybe not so solid blue. Maybe we should take nothing for granted in these last four or five days. So that’s why I think it’s better that we be game face on, all of us on our toes. Take nothing for granted and understand that if he did it once he could do it again.

NJR: Yeah. People would make fun of Trump every time he brags about his ratings on The Apprentice. But he has a real skill as an entertainer. And if you watch his long speeches, the guy has energy. You watch him for 90 minutes—

MM: And he’s still standing up straight! Watch it when he goes up the stairs or down the stairs of Air Force One, he’s not grabbing [the rail]. I’m going to be grabbing it when I’m 74… it’s amazing. There’s something. And I can’t explain it… He does not eat a single vegetable.

NJR: He’s a miracle of medical science.

MM: Well, he’s proof. He’s proof that the human body wants to live, no matter what abuse we do it. (...)

NJR: It’s maddening, but there is something incredible about it because he seems to have more energy than I do. And I watched these speeches. And the other thing is, he’s funny. He is compelling in a real way. His speeches are not boring. He makes fun of his opponents and it makes people laugh. And he says things that are often kind of true… And I think we have to understand what the source of his appeal is. And it’s not just that people are crazy. You can’t just blame the idiot voters, right? He’s a manipulator.

MM: Yes. But all art is manipulation. Right? All acting. A reality show is not a reality show. It’s a manipulation. Everything’s being manipulated with performance and with timing. And he has great timing. It’s amazing when he knows how to switch it up. And then he goes off onto some—he starts talking about semi-trucks for no reason, you know? And then about Biden’s sheets and pillowcases, and you’re just left gobsmacked. And for the next minute or two, he’s moved on, but you’re still with pillows and sheets that he’s just talking about Biden having. And what does that mean? What’s the coded message there?

The way he did that—the other night with the senator from Arizona. He made her come up on the stage saying “Come on, get up here.” Come on, come on. Like she’s a dog. Just talked to her like she was a dog and the crowd was going crazy! They loved it. And then he booted her off! It was like, wow. And I think, especially now, speaking—I’m speaking inside of the white man’s head, because I have a white man’s head—a lot of guys, oh man. They look at him and they go, “Yeah, get up here now, get outta here. Now, get up here, get outta here.” They love that. We love that sense, whatever that is that he has.

But let me say, to that point of timing, that first debate, his timing was way off. I mean, he had to get COVID, then he had to have been on some kind of drugs or whatever. You go back and watch the debate now, it is so out of whack. For his history as an entertainer and a performer, he completely blew it. And I think the smart thing for the Biden people would have been after he refused to show up for debate number two, just say, “that’s the end, we’re not messing around with this.” That’s the end of the debates. Don’t give him another microphone. ‘Cause he will get it together at some point. And he did, I think, in that second, or what should have been the third debate.

NJR: In 2016, I remember watching the debates with people who were saying Hillary was winning them. And I think it was kind of wishful thinking, because when I watched them, I was like, “My God, he’s actually scoring some points here.” Not intellectually, but points where I can see people at home cheering them on.

MM: Well, yeah. And especially like in Michigan—his rallies in Michigan, he was constantly talking about how he was going to tax those hedge fund guys on Wall Street. He hated Wall Street. He knew it was going to play well and it would sound believable because it is believable for him. He knows that the elites in New York hate him, the uber-rich hate him, Wall Street hates him, always hated him. And he’s always been treated like he came from the trailer park called Queens and that they are never going to let him into the elite of the elite… So when he would say, “Those hedge fund guys, they’re sitting there not paying their taxes… They’re going to pay more taxes.” All the cheers would go up in Ohio… But the reason it sounded like he meant it is because somewhere inside he wanted to really stick it to those guys. And that’s why it sounded so believable.

by Michael Moore and Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs  |  Read more:

Image: Current Affairs

Disinformation is a Bell That Can’t Be Unrung

Although the winner of the 2020 presidential contest is still unknown, one thing is clear: disinformation is becoming an endemic feature of U.S. politics.

Why it matters: Every nation is an "imagined community," political scientist Benedict Anderson said, bonded together by shared understandings, values and historical narratives. Disinformation cleaves those commonalities, making a country more dysfunctional, more divided and altogether weaker.

What's happening: In 2016, a defining story was how a foreign government, after correctly identifying long-running fractures in American society, perpetrated a covert action campaign using cyber espionage and other forms of malign online activity to heighten those political tensions. It worked spectacularly.

• This year, foreign campaigns have been quieter, seemingly limited to instances like crude pre-election shenanigans from Iran and Russia. Instead, the story of this election entails powerful U.S. actors, including the sitting president and some of his closest confidants, unleashing a torrent of domestic disinformation.

The state of play: President Trump and his allies spent the period before and after the election ramping up the sharing of false claims and misleading media.

• Overnight following the election, Trump tweeted, "We are up BIG, but they are trying to STEAL the Election. We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!"
• There is no evidence — none — of attempted large-scale election fraud. This is just the latest version of Trump’s claim that "the only way we're going to lose this election is if the election is rigged," one that he continued to gesture at in further tweets Wednesday morning.
• Trump’s former acting director of National Intelligence posted a tweet Monday with photos of Joe Biden wearing a face mask outdoors and going maskless on an airplane, suggesting he only follows coronavirus safety protocols for show. In fact, the airplane photo was taken pre-pandemic, in 2019. The misleading tweet was shared more than 27,000 times.
• A senior adviser to the president falsely claimed that only ballots counted on Election Day itself should be considered valid — and that if the president appears ahead on election night, he is the rightful winner.

Between the lines: It matters that these messages have come from the White House and figures like a former top intelligence official. This brand of disinformation is far more pernicious than anything Russia's FSB or GRU could have dreamed up, because people in positions of authority and those in their orbit enjoy built-in credibility within American institutions and society.

• Foreign actors will likely soon move to amplify and seize on these American-made narratives. Already, U.S. officials worry that Russia and Iran are likely waiting until the immediate post-election period to execute their more fully realized online disinformation campaigns.
• Officials believe those will focus on discrediting the election results, no matter the winner.

The big picture: The last four years have seen a dramatic acceleration and escalation of the U.S.'s digital Balkanization, with many Americans living in entirely parallel information environments that share fewer and fewer first principles and basic truths. In the era of COVID-19, this has had tragic and deadly consequences.

by Zach Dorfman, Axios | Read more:
Image: Eniola Odetunde/Axios

This Nail-Biter Election Is Not A Repudiation Of Trump

Progressives hoping that the nation would be cleansed of President Trump and the GOP that enabled him in a mandate election Tuesday evening woke up to disappointment Wednesday morning.

Sure, Joe Biden is set to reap the largest popular vote total ever in U.S. electoral history. And of course, he’s likely taken Arizona and is seriously contesting Georgia, two states long considered part of the Republican firewall.

But after four years, Trumpism has not been repudiated.

Many progressives harbored high hopes that a landslide election in Biden’s favor, inaugurating a new Democratic Senate majority with him, would wash the past four years away — that the 230,000 COVID-19 deaths, Trump’s family separation policy, his administration’s obvious corruption, and his cozying up to white nationalists would seem like the death rattle of a spent and diseased political force in American politics.

“There’s a spiritual sickness that has still not been cleansed from the veins of American democracy,” said Rev. William Barber II, a North Carolina pastor and progressive political activist, on Sunday.

But if anything, the results have ratified Trumpism as an electoral force that will remain in our politics for years to come.

Ben Rhodes, a top Obama adviser, tweeted Wednesday morning that the problem with the election is that “this many Americans took a hard look at Trump and determined, ‘yeah, I want four more years of that.”

It’s an emotional loss for those who wanted to believe that President Trump was a simple aberration from American history, or that some invisible guard of Republicans were always waiting in the wings to come and help sweep him away in the name of democratic norms.

And even for others, who recognized that Trump’s worst impulses, intentionally or not, tap into deep currents in American history and our current politics, the results fail to suggest that those troubling trends of racial hatred and plutocracy have been put at bay.

by Josh Kovensky, TPM | Read more:

Seattle City Council Mulls Law That Could Dismiss Many Misdemeanor Crimes

Seattle - The Seattle City Council is considering new legislation that would create a legal loophole that would make substance addiction, mental illness or poverty a valid legal defense for nearly all misdemeanor crimes committed in the city.

The council's consideration of the plan has occurred with virtually no public discussion about the proposal, which has been included in the municipal budgeting process. The council has not, so far, conducted a standalone meeting to discuss the idea.

Scott Lindsay, the former public safety advisor for the city, said Seattle would be in a class of its own if it ultimately enacted the ordinance.

"I'm not aware of any legislation like this anywhere in the United States (or) even globally," he said Monday. "All cities have criminal codes to protect their citizens from criminal acts. This would essentially create a legal loophole that swallows all those codes and creates a green light for crime."

The legislation was proposed by Seattle City Councilwoman Lisa Herbold last Wednesday.

The proposal would allow for the dismissal of crimes of poverty and it would do so by revising the definition of duress as a defense against prosecution.

Seattle police currently make about 12,000 arrests every year that are not DUI offenses or related to domestic violence. In 2019, charges were filed for just over 5,400 misdemeanor cases, not including DUI charges or domestic abuse allegations.

If approved, the ordinance would excuse and dismiss -- essentially legalizing -- almost all misdemeanor crimes committed in Seattle by offenders who could show either:

• Symptoms of addiction without being required to provide a medical diagnosis;
• Symptoms of a mental disorder; or
• Poverty and the crime was committed to meet an "immediate and basic need." For example, if a defendant argued they stole merchandise to sell for cash in order to purchase food, clothes or was trying to scrape together enough money for rent. The accused could not be convicted.

"If you don't feel very protected right now, this would wipe out almost all remaining protections that we have," Lindsay said.

The offenses that would be covered by the Seattle ordinance would include just about any crime below the level of a felony while excluding charges of driving under the influence or domestic violence.

"This would absolutely open the floodgates for crime in Seattle, even worse than what we often currently struggle with," Lindsay said. "It's basically a blank check for anybody committing theft, assault, harassment (and) trespass to continue without disruption from our criminal justice system."

by Eric Johnson, KOMO News |  Read more:

Image: KOMO News

[ed. This Council is just plain nuts. See also: A criminal defense for poverty, behavioral health? Seattle officials to weigh controversial proposal (Seattle Times).]

A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind

A Guide to Watching the Election Without Losing Your Mind (Rolling Stone)

[ed. Unless Trump wins, then kiss your mind goodbye.]
Image: Joe Rodriguez. Images in illustration:Maksym Yemelyanov/Adobe Stock (TVs); Luis Santana/Tampa Bay Times/AP Images(Biden); Bruce Kluckhohn(Trump)

Does Knowing God Just Take Practice?

I was nine or ten when my parents left their stolid Anglican church for one that was undergoing what was known as “charismatic renewal.” This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in the northern English city of Durham, but the energies were all American. The young congregants—our church was popular with local university students—played guitars, gave testimonials, raised their hands in rhapsody, and “danced with the spirit” in the aisles. Sometimes, though not often, people spoke in tongues, a diabolical glossolalia that I found deeply fascinating. There was a church band—twelve-string guitars, tambourines, trumpet, and flute. We sang American hymns, songs I vaguely thought of as “Californian.” I grew to dread one of the most popular, “I Am the Bread of Life,” which had a chorus with the words “And I will raise him up.” As the chorus soared, earnest hands were raised heavenward—including the hands of my parents, who were always moved by this song to forgo their customary physical reticence. I would glance sideways at them and then quickly look away, as if I’d witnessed the throes of some primal scene.

The extremity of emotion that pulsed through the congregation every Sunday alarmed me. I came to think of that church as the place where grownups weep. Charismatic or evangelical churches are theatres of spiritual catharsis. You come to such places and lay your burdens before the Lord, open your soul to the Holy Spirit, and “let all the sadness and evil out” (as my mother once put it). This crisis of transformation was often physically arduous. People shuddered and their eyes filled with tears, while others who had already been through such experiences held their hands or prayed over them. “Free prayer” was encouraged; worshippers might blurt out their hopes, secrets, prophecies. The natural order of things was inverted: adults, spasming in emotion, appeared to need the calm intervention of the dry-eyed child. This was where perfectly ordinary English people seemed to lead a kind of double life, an existence that, in its strange abandon and abnormality, appeared almost criminally intense.

What was unsettling to the child, in other words, was probably what was so exciting to the adult convert: the drama of transferred authority. The believing adult, pulled toward the commanding Christ, felt the divine power of God’s call, and the divinely inspired power of the pastors and the elders who voiced that call: You must change your life. But the unbelieving or skeptical child, with no great desire to change his life, felt abandoned by those who should have been in charge, and wondered furtively at the authority of that divine command. Who was this God, this Jesus, this Holy Spirit? If he didn’t exist, then Sunday morning was a mass sickness, nothing more than the contagion of hallucination. That prospect seemed quite troubling. But the alternative scenario didn’t seem any better. Evangelical practice presumes a highly interventionist Jesus, a surveillance God who not only numbers the hairs on your head but cares about your job interview, whom you go out with, the house you want to buy. When my mother told the pastor that I had done well in a recent school exam, he gave me a hug and offered a hearty “Praise the Lord!” I thought that this God probably didn’t exist, but, if he did exist, he had all the scrutinizing powers of a meddlesome headmaster, always alert for the smallest failures and successes.

I know how unbalanced this is. I’m sure I should have seen all the human goodness and decency—there was plenty of that around, too. I bring it up as a way of explaining my somewhat unbalanced interest in the work of the Stanford anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, who has been studying American evangelical worship for at least twenty years. In 2012, Luhrmann published “When God Talks Back,” an account of her experiences in charismatic churches in Chicago and the San Francisco area. These were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, a network of congregations founded in California in the nineteen-seventies. Curious about everything, open-eyed, endlessly patient, Luhrmann embedded herself like a military correspondent. Over several years, she interviewed more than fifty congregants, worshipped and prayed with them, joined Bible-study groups, and reported, with scrupulous neutrality, on their daily spiritual practice.

Her new book, “How God Becomes Real” (Princeton), represents a distillation of that deep work on American Evangelicalism, and expands her acute discussion of spiritual practice across other forms of religious devotion that she has studied or encountered over the years—charismatic Christian worship in Ghana and India, Santería (“a blend of Yoruba spirit possession and Catholicism that emerged among West African slaves in the Caribbean”), and British witchcraft (Luhrmann’s first book, “Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England,” from 1989, was the product of field work among apparently ordinary Londoners who practiced magic and witchcraft).

This comparative framework suits Luhrmann, precisely because she is not interested in the questions that so gripped me when I was young: what or who is God, and how can we know if this God exists? Luhrmann passes over questions of belief in search of questions of practice—the technologies of prayer. She wants to know how worshippers open themselves up to their experiences of God; how they communicate with gods and spirits and in turn hear those gods and spirits reply to them, and she is interested in the kind of therapeutic transformation that such prayerful conversation has on the worshipper. She calls this activity “real-making,” and adds that her new book is not a believer’s or an atheist’s, but an anthropologist’s work. “Rather than presuming that people worship because they believe, we ask instead whether people believe because they worship,” she writes. Thus “the puzzle of religion,” as she defines it, “is not the problem of false belief but the question of how gods and spirits become and remain real to people and what this real-making does for humans.” Whether these questions—of belief and of practice—can be separated quite as staunchly as she wishes is the “puzzle” that surely haunts her own work.

Readers without firsthand experience of evangelical communities were probably surprised by some of the day-to-day details in “When God Talks Back.” Luhrmann describes, at the Vineyard churches, a relationship with God of casual and remarkably friendly intimacy. She prepares us by cautioning that her evangelical subjects approach God in a way that, to traditional believers, might seem “vulgar, overemotional, or even psychotic.” Among her interviewees, Elaine prays for guidance about whether to take a roommate or move to a new apartment. Kate gets angry with God and “yells at him when things go wrong—when she organizes a trip for the church and the bus company is flaky or it rains.” Stacy prays for a good haircut, and Hannah asks God about whom to date, and sometimes feels he is pranking her in little ways: “I’ll trip and fall, and I’ll be like, Thanks, God.” Rachel asks for help with how to dress: “Like, God, what should I wear? . . . I think God cares about really, really little things in my life.” Other women speak of setting an evening aside for a “date night” with the Lord (men speak of “quiet time” with God, Luhrmann reports). They are perhaps encouraged in this thinking by their pastor, who suggests that his congregants should “set out a second cup of coffee for God in the morning—to pour God an actual cup of steaming coffee, to place it on an actual table, and to sit down at that table . . . to talk to God about the things on our minds.”

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Grace J. Kim

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AOC's Next Four Years

Her Republican colleagues had, up until then, been civil. But one day in late July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol while Representative Ted Yoho lost his shit. The Florida Republican, incensed by the New York congresswoman’s recent comments linking crime and poverty, jabbed his finger in her face, calling her “crazy” and “disgusting.” She froze. The situation felt dangerous, with Yoho towering over Ocasio-Cortez, who calls herself “five-five on a good day.” Congressman Roger Williams, a Texas Republican, bumbled next to him like a wind puppet at a used-car dealership. She told Yoho he was being rude and went into the Capitol to vote. As Yoho descended the steps, he called her a “fucking bitch.” A reporter nearby witnessed the exchange, and soon the whole world had heard the epithet.

This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.

Ocasio-Cortez flashed back to one of her first jobs out of school, when a male colleague whom she’d edged out for a promotion called her a bitch in front of the staff. She had been too stunned to reply, and no one came to her defense. She wouldn’t let it happen again.

Forty-eight hours later, Ocasio-Cortez delivered one of the most eloquent dunks in political history, a “thank u, next” for the C-SPAN set, taking on not just Yoho but the patriarchy itself. She took care to enter “fucking bitch” into the Congressional Record. “I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women,” she told the House. “It happens every day in this country.” And the line that spawned headlines, T-shirts, hashtags, and memes: “I am someone’s daughter too.”

The 2020 horse race may be between two white, male septuagenarians, but it is a millennial Puerto Rican Democratic Socialist who produced a seminal political moment. Her Yoho rebuke inspired a fresh wave of awe for the youngest U.S. congresswoman in history and cemented her status as eopolitical icon—not just good on Twitter (where she schooled her congressional colleagues in a tutorial) and Instagram Live (where she gave an impromptu address on the dark night of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death), but a skilled orator with the power to move even her most cynical congressional colleagues. “They were like, ‘I didn’t know you’re that eloquent,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez says with a wry smile. “ ‘I’m so pleased and surprised by your restraint.’ ”

Ocasio-Cortez does not name Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, in a separate conversation, rejects reports of a clash, calling it media-manufactured misogyny. “Two powerful women coming from different perspectives,” she shrugs, “and there has to be a catfight.” Still, “House leadership is, sometimes, a little wary of me speaking on the floor. Not that I’m not allowed to, but it’s a little more dicey,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “I think a lot of people, including my Democratic colleagues, believe the Fox News version of me.”

Most of Ocasio-Cortez’s family and close friends call her Sandy. A few, like Representative Ayanna Pressley, go with “Alex.” But becoming AOC—and @AOC—has simultaneously vaulted her into a pantheon of triple-initialed legends and, alternately, given a handy tagline to the right’s worst nightmare. Her beatific face is commodified on twee Etsy greeting cards (“I AOC It’s Your Birthday”) and stamped alongside those of RBG and Frida Kahlo on “feminist prayer candles” and “Latina icon stickers.” Conservative attack ads depict her as socialist villainess. One especially disturbing spot shows a photo of her face on fire before cutting to a pile of skulls.

“It’s very dehumanizing in both ways, strangely, both the negative and the positive,” the congresswoman tells me one afternoon from behind the desk of her Bronx campaign office. “It’s not an accident that, every cycle, the boogeyman of the Democrats is a woman,” says Ocasio-Cortez. “A couple of cycles ago, it was Pelosi. Then it was Hillary, and now it’s me.” (...)

Despite the base level of ego required to run for any office, Ocasio-Cortez seems uncomfortable with the mania about her future. “I think it’s part of our cultural understanding of politics, where—if you think someone is great, you automatically think they should be president,” she says. “I joke. I’m like, ‘Is Congress not good enough?’ ”

Her aspirations are a matter of endless speculation: New York Senate, House leadership, a Cabinet post? “I don’t know if I’m really going to be staying in the House forever, or if I do stay in the House, what that would look like,” she says. “I don’t see myself really staying where I’m at for the rest of my life.” This is one of the few times AOC seems guarded and cautious about her words. “I don’t want to aspire to a quote-unquote higher position just for the sake of that title or just for the sake of having a different or higher position. I truly make an assessment to see if I can be more effective. And so, you know, I don’t know if I could necessarily be more effective in an administration, but, for me that’s always what the question comes down to.” She does not believe in political messiahs, nor does she see herself as a “hierarchical, power-based person.” At the beginning of her first term, her staff still called her Alex. It was only when journalists on the Hill started to follow suit that her team collectively decided to address her as Congresswoman. She blends into the crowd at Pelham Bay Park, even though she’s the only one in a suit. When a nearby gender-reveal party pops a blue confetti cannon, she throws her hands in the air and cheers. When I ask Pressley what the popular narratives miss, she cites humility. “She certainly did not set out to be an icon or even a historymaker. I think it was her destiny, but there is no calculation.”

As Ocasio-Cortez puts it, “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.”

by Michelle Ruiz, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Tyler Mitchell
[ed. See also: The Most Important Thing About AOC Is That She Is Normal (Current Affairs).]

Grant Green

Idle Moments (Rudy Van Gelder Edition / Remastered 1999)

The Epigenetic Secrets Behind Dopamine, Drug Addiction and Depression

As I opened my copy of Science at home one night, an unfamiliar word in the title of a new study caught my eye: dopaminylation. The term refers to the brain chemical dopamine’s ability, in addition to transmitting signals across synapses, to enter a cell’s nucleus and control specific genes. As I read the paper, I realized that it completely upends our understanding of genetics and drug addiction. The intense craving for addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine may be caused by dopamine controlling genes that alter the brain circuitry underlying addiction. Intriguingly, the results also suggest an answer to why drugs that treat major depression must typically be taken for weeks before they’re effective. I was shocked by the dramatic discovery, but to really understand it, I first had to unlearn some things.

“Half of what you learned in college is wrong,” my biology professor, David Lange, once said. “Problem is, we don’t know which half.” How right he was. I was taught to scoff at Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his theory that traits acquired through life experience could be passed on to the next generation. The silly traditional example is the mama giraffe stretching her neck to reach food high in trees, resulting in baby giraffes with extra-long necks. Then biologists discovered we really can inherit traits our parents acquired in life, without any change to the DNA sequence of our genes. It’s all thanks to a process called epigenetics — a form of gene expression that can be inherited but isn’t actually part of the genetic code. This is where it turns out that brain chemicals like dopamine play a role.

All genetic information is encoded in the DNA sequence of our genes, and traits are passed on in the random swapping of genes between egg and sperm that sparks a new life. Genetic information and instructions are coded in a sequence of four different molecules (nucleotides abbreviated A, T, G and C) on the long double-helix strand of DNA. The linear code is quite lengthy (about 6 feet long per human cell), so it’s stored neatly wound around protein bobbins, similar to how magnetic tape is wound around spools in cassette tapes.

Inherited genes are activated or inactivated to build a unique individual from a fertilized egg, but cells also constantly turn specific genes on and off throughout life to make the proteins cells need to function. When a gene is activated, special proteins latch onto DNA, read the sequence of letters there and make a disposable copy of that sequence in the form of messenger RNA. The messenger RNA then shuttles the genetic instructions to the cell’s ribosomes, which decipher the code and make the protein specified by the gene.

But none of that works without access to the DNA. By analogy, if the magnetic tape remains tightly wound, you can’t read the information on the cassette. Epigenetics works by unspooling the tape, or not, to control which genetic instructions are carried out. In epigenetic inheritance, the DNA code is not altered, but access to it is.

This is why cells in our body can be so different even though every cell has identical DNA. If the DNA is not unwound from its various spools — proteins called histones — the cell’s machinery can’t read the hidden code. So the genes that would make red blood corpuscles, for example, are shut off in cells that become neurons.

How do cells know which genes to read? The histone spool that a specific gene’s DNA winds around is marked with a specific chemical tag, like a molecular Post-it note. That marker directs other proteins to “roll the tape” and unwind the relevant DNA from that histone (or not to roll it, depending on the tag).

It’s a fascinating process we’re still learning more about, but we never expected that a seemingly unrelated brain chemical might also play a role. Neurotransmitters are specialized molecules that transmit signals between neurons. This chemical signaling between neurons is what enables us to think, learn, experience different moods and, when neurotransmitter signaling goes awry, suffer cognitive difficulties or mental illness.

Serotonin and dopamine are famous examples. Both are monoamines, a class of neurotransmitters involved in psychological illnesses such as depression, anxiety disorders and addiction. Serotonin helps regulate mood, and drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are widely prescribed and effective for treating chronic depression. We think they work by increasing the level of serotonin in the brain, which boosts communication between neurons in the neural circuits controlling mood, motivation, anxiety and reward. That makes sense, sure, but it is curious that it usually takes a month or more before the drug relieves depression.

Dopamine, on the other hand, is the neurotransmitter at work in the brain’s reward circuits; it produces that “gimme-a-high-five!” spurt of euphoria that erupts when we hit a bingo. Nearly all addictive drugs, like cocaine and alcohol, increase dopamine levels, and the chemically induced dopamine reward leads to further drug cravings. A weakened reward circuitry could be a cause of depression, which would help explain why people with depression may self-medicate by taking illicit drugs that boost dopamine.

But (as I found out after reading that dopaminylation paper), research last year led by Ian Maze, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, showed that serotonin has another function: It can act as one of those molecular Post-it notes. Specifically, it can bind to a type of histone known as H3, which controls the genes responsible for transforming human stem cells (the forerunner of all kinds of cells) into serotonin neurons. When serotonin binds to the histone, the DNA unwinds, turning on the genes that dictate the development of a stem cell into a serotonin neuron, while turning off other genes by keeping their DNA tightly wound. (So stem cells that never see serotonin turn into other types of cells, since the genetic program to transform them into neurons is not activated.)

That finding inspired Maze’s team to wonder if dopamine might act in a similar way, regulating the genes involved in drug addiction and withdrawal. In the April Science paper that so surprised me, they showed that the same enzyme that attaches serotonin to H3 can also catalyze the attachment of dopamine to H3 — a process, I learned, called dopaminylation.

Together, these results represent a huge change in our understanding of these chemicals. By binding to the H3 histone, serotonin and dopamine can regulate transcription of DNA into RNA and, as a consequence, the synthesis of specific proteins from them. That turns these well-known characters in neuroscience into double agents, acting obviously as neurotransmitters, but also as clandestine masters of epigenetics. (...)

To put it plainly, the discovery that monoamine neurotransmitters control epigenetic regulation of genes is transformative for basic science and medicine. These experiments show that the tagging of H3 by dopamine does indeed underlie drug-seeking behavior, by regulating the neural circuits operating in addiction.

And, equally exciting, the implications likely go well beyond addiction, given the crucial role of dopamine and serotonin signaling in other neurological and psychological illnesses. Indeed, Maze told me that his team’s latest research (not yet published) has also found this type of epigenetic marking in the brain tissues of people with major depressive disorder. Perhaps this connection even explains why antidepressant drugs take so long to be effective: If the drugs work by activating this epigenetic process, rather than just supplying the brain’s missing serotonin, it can take days or even weeks before these genetic changes become apparent.

by R. Douglas Fields, Quanta | Read more:
Image: James O’Brien

Bruce Springsteen

There's No Art in This White House (spoken word)

[ed. See also: When Disaster Is an Invaluable Lesson (Hedgehog Review).]

Harold Ancart

via:

Karen O & Willie Nelson

[ed. Interesting arrangement. Willie is sounding a little frail these days.]

Amadeo de Souza Cardoso, The Leap of the Rabbit, 1911

via:

Hawai‘i Restaurant Card

Hawaii Restaurant Card Program (with FAQs)

via:

Anatomy Of An Outbreak: Once Unleashed, The Coronavirus Moved Swiftly On Lanai

No one knows exactly when the coronavirus arrived on Lanai. The first recorded cases on Oct. 20 were detected in a health care worker who had traveled to Oahu and three employees of the Four Seasons Resort Lanai at Manele Bay.

But those were just the first visible cracks in a growing public health crisis that has shattered this island’s distinction as the state’s lone coronavirus-free sanctuary.

In six days the infection count shot up from four to at least 79, stoking fears that this tiny isle of fewer than 3,000 close-knit residents could be on the verge of a coronavirus free fall. Health workers say they expect the positive case count to continue to climb as hundreds of results trickle in from a massive weekend testing drive.

The virus has infected numerous kupuna, including some with preexisting health conditions, which, along with their age, make them more vulnerable to the deadly disease. At least 15 students at Lanai High and Elementary School are also infected. Some of these students brought the virus home, spreading the contagion to family members. 

With one school, one gas station, two grocery stores and less than 30 miles of paved roads, health officials worry the island could prove to be the ultimate petri dish.

As health workers rush to uncover how deeply the virus has pervaded the Lanai population, many residents say what they fear as much as the virus is the unknown. How many people have been infected? Is it even safe to hunker down with other family members at home?

“We don’t have a plan for how we’re going to handle this,” lamented Butch Gima, a state social worker. “We’re in dire straits here and we’re still in reaction mode.”

On Monday Gov. David Ige approved a request from Maui Mayor Mike Victorino to send the island into a strict shutdown. Starting Tuesday Lanai residents and visitors will only be permitted to leave their homes or hotel rooms for essential purposes, such as grocery shopping or to see a doctor.

Over the weekend many residents started sheltering at home preemptively. Those with second homes on the mainland boarded airplanes and fled.

“We have a friend who flew in Wednesday thinking that he’s coming to the one place in the United States that doesn’t have COVID,” said Manele resident David Green. “Of course, he had very bad timing.”

Coronavirus Free Fall

The fact that the island was COVID-free for the first seven months of the pandemic led some residents to gradually relax their vigilance. People loosened their adherence to mask-wearing and physical distancing guidelines. Some residents resumed having baby showers, birthday parties and children’s sleepovers, according to a dozen residents and health care workers interviewed for this story. A Civil Beat reporter traveled to Lanai last week to document the public health crisis that was just beginning.

“We were locked down here for so long, it felt like prison,” said Neal Byumanglag, a 59-year-old construction worker, referring to longstanding travel restrictions that kept most Lanai residents confined for months on end to the island’s 140 square miles.

“It’s like putting a dog in a cage,” he said. “What do you think that dog’s going to do when you open the cage back up? It’s the same thing with people here.”

But it was more than island fever. Many Lanai residents depend on regular trips to Maui to access cheaper prices on food and supplies at Costco and other big box stores.

When travel restrictions eased in mid-October to allow Maui County residents to bypass the mandatory 14-day quarantine when traveling between Maui, Mokokai and Lanai, some Lanai residents resumed regular trips to Maui to shop or see family and friends.

The return of tourism to the island on Oct. 15 signaled another psychological shift toward normalcy. Hundreds of hotel workers returned to their jobs for the first time in months.

So when the virus finally seeped onto the island, it met a population that had largely let down its guard — and it exploded.

Worst Case Scenario

If cases continue to mount, a frightening set of challenges could be in store for the sickest patients.

The island’s only hospital is a three-bed emergency department with no critical care beds or specialists. The hospital has a ventilator, but no respiratory therapist trained to operate it. Patients who develop COVID-19 symptoms severe enough to need hospital care must be flown off the island.

On Friday, Medeiros said he tried unsuccessfully to gain clearance to fly several coronavirus-infected kupuna with less acute symptoms to Maui or Oahu, where there is readily available hospital capacity to treat them should their conditions deteriorate.

“I was told they don’t do just-in-case scenarios,” Medeiros said. “So you want us to just wait until they need to be on a ventilator to ship them out?”

There are risks involved in transporting critically ill patients. But this has always been the case when someone on Lanai suffers a heart attack or loses blood in a car wreck.

The unique quandary posed by Lanai’s COVID-19 outbreak is a numbers problem. What happens if several Lanai residents who’ve contracted the virus fall ill and need critical care all at once? 

by Brittany Lyte, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: markk
[ed. My beloved island. Larry Ellision (of Oracle fame) owns 98% of the island, why can't he use a small portion of his $75 billion net worth to help out, at least with off-island transportation?]