Month: May 2013

From Ferris Jabr’s round-up “A Brief History of Mental Illness in Art,” Kate Davey features the work of Théodore Géricault:

Géricault’s Monomaniac series once consisted of ten portraits of the mentally ill, however, only five have survived into the present day. The surviving paintings include the Monomanie du commandment militaire (Napoleonic veteran suffering from the delusion of military authority), Monomanie du vol des enfants (A compulsive kidnapper), Monomanie du vol (A kleptomaniac), Monomanie du jeu (A compulsive gambler) and Monomanie de l’envie (A woman suffering fits of neurotic jealousy).

The term ‘monomania’ was first coined by French psychiatrist Jean-Etienne Esquirol, and it was an exclusively nineteenth century term referring to a person who was outwardly well, but harboured one obsessive fixation. The portraits themselves and the context within which they were painted raise many questions regarding the state of psychiatry and the treatment of the mentally ill at the time, the public’s view of the mentally ill, the progression of science and the morbidity and tragedy that art encompassed during this period. The reason for the portrait’s creation can be interpreted in a number of ways, ranging from the rarer thought that it was encouraged as a therapeutic exercise for Géricault by his psychiatrist, to the more widely received idea that the paintings were produced as part of a commission from psychiatrist Dr Etienne-Jean Georget.

Many more Géricault portraits here.

(Image: La Monomane de l’envie, Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault, c. 1822, via Wikimedia Commons)

Kevin Hartnett traces a line from today’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) controversies to the dawn of education by textbook:

Before textbooks, learning typically happened through the dialogic method—exchanges between students and professors. But beginning in the 18th-century, scholars began redacting blocks of information into standardized books that laid out content in logical, easily digestible fashion. The goal of the textbook, according to one 18th-century French pedagogue, was to “make all truths universally familiar, and spare [ourselves] any useless effort in learning.”

The modern day textbook wars have taught us, of course, that one man’s universal truth can be another man’s heresy. [Scholar Hansun] Hsiung explains that these types of concerns were present with textbooks from the start. 18th-century Europeans worried about who had the authority to write textbooks and, as textbooks took hold, there was a backlash against the idea that a real education could take place through a book. In this way, textbooks spawned similar concerns to the ones we grapple with around MOOCs— that it’s dangerous to have a single, massively popular online course dominate the way a particular subject is taught, and that there’s only so much learning that can take place through a computer.

A couple weeks ago, Nathan Heller reported from inside the academy on views towards MOOCs:

To [historian Peter K. Bol], MOOCs look like a victory for open-access scholarship. “The question for us here was: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group?” Bol told me late one morning in his office, a kind of paper jungle piled with journals, manuscripts, and books. “Unless I’m writing popular books, I’m not reaching those people. I’m not telling them stuff that I’ve worked hard to try to understand.”

Others, like my ex-boyfriend Andy Conway at Princeton, are suddenly Internet stars – because they’re good at teaching. But not everyone is enthused:

In mid-April, the faculty at Amherst voted against joining a MOOC program. Two weeks ago, the philosophy department at San José State wrote an open letter of protest to Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard professor whose flagship college course, Justice, became JusticeX, a MOOC, this spring. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” the letter said. The philosophers worried that the course would make the San José State professor at the head of the classroom nothing more than “a glorified teaching assistant.” They wrote, “The thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary.”

Then create and teach a better one.

Lisa Hix explores the history of female pin-up painters from the genre’s Golden Age, the 1920s through the early 1960s:

“If you really get into it, you begin to see that women have a different way of portraying women than men do, even when they’re all trying to do something sexy for a pin-up calendar or a magazine,” [pin-up art expert Louis K.] Meisel says. “There is a certain sexy look, with black stockings, garters, and emphasis on [Gil] Elvgren, [Alberto] Vargas, and other male pinup artists do. I would say that the women portray very beautiful, idealized women, but the images are less erotic.

“With Pearl Frush, for example, her girls were very beautiful, with wonderful-looking bodies, but it wasn’t so much about being sexy as being the all-American girl. She had less emphasis on breast size and legs than the male artists,” he continues. “Zoë Mozert was often her own model. Usually, she painted a different face, but she used her own body. And I guess in doing so, she had a different idea of what she should look like to men than maybe men would.” … The men tended to make the breasts larger, and they made the legs longer. The women tended to paint very proportionate women, more of a 36-26-36 look, whereas men would make them a little top-heavy.”

(Image: A pin-up painting by Zoë Mozert)

My take here.

It turns out the US and USSR came closer to nuclear conflict than previously thought, according to freshly declassified documents detailing a set of American war games called “Autumn Forge,” launched 30 years ago:

A total of 40,000 U.S. and NATO troops were moved across Western Europe, while 16,044 more U.S. troops were airlifted overseas in 170 missions conducted in radio silence. More ominously, U.S. and NATO officers practiced the procedures they would have to follow to authorize and conduct nuclear strikes in an unpublicized exercise called Able Archer 83, shifting their headquarters as the game escalated toward chemical and nuclear warfare. In communications, they several times referred to non-nuclear B-52 sorties as nuclear “strikes” — slips of the tongue that could have been intercepted by Soviet eavesdroppers. …

Even if his intelligence advisers were sanguine, Reagan himself was worried after the exercise that the Soviets genuinely feared the U.S. was preparing to commit nuclear aggression, writing at one point in his diaries that “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h–l have they got that anyone would want.”

I love that last line. The same could be said of Iran. But Reagan’s Republicanism has long gone, replaced by militarism and paranoia.

A reader writes:

As a Dish addict, I’m biased. But I’m stunned that you still need to send out the occasional call to action for new subscribers. This post from over the weekend managed to sum up in a throwaway sentence why the Dish is required reading – and it wasn’t even from the entry itself. The delight I experienced seeing there at the bottom, with understated charm: “Previous Dish on the nexus of scholarship and heavy metal here.” If that sentence’s existence isn’t worth $20 (I’m on the “fuck the penny!” side of that reader thread), then we’re all doomed.

I’m usually a doomster myself, but I remain doggedly hopeful about the Dish model. 26,422 of you are now subscribers, which makes us, I think, the most successful subscriber-only purely-online site on the web. More encouraging, there are another 22,000 of you who have already shown you’re true Dishheads, by clicking through the maximum number of free read-ons, but who haven’t yet taken the plunge.

Without you, we’ll have trouble surviving and growing. With all of you, for just $1.99 a month, we’d be financially secure for the indefinite future – an amazing feat without advertizing or corporate subsidies. So please, if you’ve been procrastinating, [tinypass_offer text=”take a moment now”] and take out your credit card and help [tinypass_offer text=”brighten the future”] for independent online media. It takes [tinypass_offer text=”two minutes max”]. Click [tinypass_offer text=”here”].

On the bright side, we have just seen a big up-tick in the percentage of people signing up after hitting the meter. It started over the weekend, with much lower traffic but much higher response rates:

Maybe it’s easier to pay when you’re at home and not rushed at work. Either way, we’re grateful. To continue with full transparency, revenue has slowed but remains reasonably steady, and we’re inching very close toward $700,000 gross revenue (we’re around $696K as of today), with our goal of $900,000 by December 31 looking less likely, given the slowing of the pace.

Another financially strapped reader makes the case for you:

I just subscribed to the Dish for $2.68. It’s the price I pay for coffee every day. I will abstain one day each month to support this innovation.

A few more readers sound off (with a non-metered readon below, so nonsubscribers can go ahead and click without it counting towards your limit):

I’m an avid reader of the Dish and just happily subscribed.  But I thought you might be interested in why it took me so long to pay up. My reason is quite mundane, but it may reveal something about the decision-making process other yet-to-subscribe readers are going through.

Years ago I stopped carrying my wallet in my back pocket.  Instead, I stick it in the inside pocket of my suit jacket.  When I get to work, I hang my jacket up on the back of my office door.  Therefore, when I’m sitting at my desk and using my computer I don’t have ready access to my wallet.  To get my credit card (since I don’t have a PayPal account), I have to get up and get my wallet.  That simple detour away from whatever I’m doing at my desk has been enough to delay my subscription to the Dish.

Today I dressed casual.  I didn’t wear a jacket.  My wallet was in my back pocket.  When I had some time to check out my favorite blogs, it was easy to pull out my wallet and subscribe to the Dish.

Personally, I think my excuse for failing to subscribe sooner is a sad example of human laziness.  But I wonder how many other folks have similar reasons for not yet subscribing.

Another:

Longtime reader, never subscribed. Here’s what would get me to subscribe: a digest that never climbed above some fixed number of posts per day – maybe the top ten or twenty. Over time, reading the Dish has become more and more work. A recent business trip underscored this. After two days offline, my RSS feed had two unread posts from Coates, maybe eighteen from Yglesias, and 162 for the Dish. Historically I’ve been a Dish completist, but I can’t persuade myself that an hour frantically skimming those 162 posts (or three hours reading them properly) is a good use of my time.

Please understand I’m writing this from a place of deep admiration for your work. If I didn’t value the Dish, I would happily drop it, instead of agonizing. But honestly, trying to read every post eats into my day. Sampling a random 40% or 20% is no good – what if I’m missing the good stuff? So yeah, even though I don’t pay for the rest of my media diet, I’d easily throw you $20 per year in exchange for some curation, and a feed that only pinged maybe once an hour.

I hope you all will consider this. If you do, I hope you’ll reply to this email, because I’m pondering a Dish fast. And notwithstanding all of the above, thanks for your work.

What we’re going to do is replace the Daily Wrap with my own quick digest of the best posts of the day. We hope that helps.

The GOP keeps demonstrating it’s ready for government:

Best wishes to @senjohnmccain in Syria today. If he doesn’t make it back calling dibs on his office.

— Lindsey Graham (@GrahamBlog) May 27, 2013