Because of this, I’ve always treated self-care as more of a casual hobby than an absolute necessity. It’s something I’ve dabbled in, like knitting, or ceramics, then ultimately abandoned. After the person I love ended up in the ER, however, people began to ask me — often — what I was doing to take care of myself. This question baffled me: From my point of view, it was obvious that I wasn’t the one who needed care (at least, any more than usual). But people kept asking anyway, until eventually, someone pointed out that what I was doing was unsustainable, that I was killing myself without reason, and that I couldn’t possibly give anything to someone else if I never did anything to replenish myself.
So I decided to make myself dinner.
Although the accuracy of Abramson’s reporting in this extensively footnoted book has been contested by some of her subjects, she clearly cares about the facts. But it’s ludicrous for her to pretend that she can tell this story in large part without bias. It’s also a missed opportunity. Abramson’s subjective experience as a major player in the story, her beliefs and values facing ceaseless challenges as the business model for daily newspaper journalism collapsed, is fascinating. However, the “newsman” in her dictates that she push that perspective to the margins. The result is a not-quite-convincing piece of feature journalism haunted by the ghost of the memoir it should have been.
As a mom, you can never have it all. Sometimes you have to be satisfied with just having enough. For me, enough meant providing a stable environment and being able to have flexible jobs where I could be a part of the PTA, pick my daughter up from school and be home with her after she got out of school. You could play a game of checkers on my work history with all of its gaps, part-time jobs, and underemployment. I’ve always encouraged my daughter to go off and conquer the world, but in building her up, I’d let myself go as a writer.
Years later, the world had changed, and I worried if anyone would want to hear what I have to say. I wondered, where did my voice fit in?
Take the child collecting different kinds of animals in a video game: “I got a new specie!”, he cries. The source of the mistake is obvious. The child has heard the slightly rarefied word “species” and assumed it was the plural of something called a specie. Children do this kind of thing all the time as they learn language; generalising from things previously heard and rules previously mastered is the only way they can progress with such speed. In most cases, errors disappear on their own.
Yet tempting, specie-type mistakes happen not just among children, but their parents too. Some survive, and even thrive, until they displace an old form and become the new standard. Few English-speakers today know it, but there was once no such thing as a pea. People ate a mass of boiled pulses called pease. But just as with specie, at some point English people misanalysed pease as a plural, and the new singular pea was born. The same thing happened with cherry, from the Norman cherise, and caper (the edible kind), from the Latin capparis, both singular.
Some people have labeled the LHC a failure because even though it confirmed the Standard Model’s vision for how particles get their masses, it did not offer any concrete hint of any further new particles besides the Higgs. We understand the disappointment. Given the exciting new possibilities opened up by exploring energy levels we’ve never been privy to here on earth, this feeling is easy to relate to. But it is also selling the accomplishments short and fails to appreciate how research works. Theorists come up with fantastical ideas about what could be. Most of them are wrong, because the laws of physics are unchanging and universal. Experimentalists are taking on the task of actually popping open the hood and looking at what’s underneath it all. Sometimes, they may not find anything new.
A curious species, we are left to ask more questions. Why did we find this and not that? What should we look for next? What a strange and fascinating universe we live in, and how wonderful to have the opportunity to learn about it.
When you eat a sandwich, you want equal portions of bread and filling in most every bite, yeah? A bagel sandwich denies you this pleasure. You usually end up getting a bite full of wet bagel, a few strands of red onion, and some messy wax paper, with cream cheese all over your fingers. It’s a pain in the ass. I still eat the whole thing, but it's still a pain in the ass.
As a whole, “The Collected Schizophrenias” provides a new and welcome map for the severe landscapes of schizoaffective disorder, of cerebral disease, diagnosis, recovery, and relapse, of the many human mysteries of the schizophrenias. The essays are resoundingly intelligent, often unexpectedly funny, questioning, fearless and peerless, as Wang makes for brilliant company on 13 difficult walks through largely uncharted territory. I’m reminded of Susan Sontag’s famous take on illness: “Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” She’s half right. Sontag speaks here of physical illness and does not speak for those who’ve traveled in the lands of psychosis, in the unreal realms of the mad, of the mentally ill. Wang does. She speaks for me too, and I thank her for that.
Tom Barbash’s arresting new novel takes place over a year and a half, from August 1979 to December 1980, in the roiling life of its eponymous New York family. The narrator of “The Dakota Winters,” the 23-year-old middle child, Anton Winter, is so decent and self-denying that we know from the beginning he won’t be the hero of his own life. In fact, he has ceded that role to a powerful, secular trinity: his father, Buddy; his home in the famed Upper West Side apartment building, the Dakota; and, most affectingly, his Dakota neighbor John Lennon.
When I asked him why he had not called
he explained to me that he had been buried alive
and that he did not have a phone.