Author: Andrew Sullivan

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The jacket copy for J.D.McClatchy’s Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems, just published by Alfred A. Knopf, is worth quoting to introduce the three poems of his we’ll be featuring today and in the days ahead: “With his first several books, J.D.McClatchy established himself as a poet of urbanity, intellect, and prismatic emotion, in the tradition of James Merrill, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop—one who balances an exploration of the underworld of desire with a mastery of poetic form, and whose artistry reveals the riches and ruins of our ‘plundered hearts.’… All of his poems present a sumptuous weave of impassioned thought and clear-sighted feeling.” Last night, McClatchy read from his new book at New York University’s Vernon House on West 10^th Street to an intimate, enthralled audience.

“Mercury Dressing” by J. D. McClatchy:

To steal a glance and, anxious, see
Him slipping into transparency—
The feathered helmet already in place,
Its shadow fallen across his face
(His hooded sex its counterpart)—
Unsteadies the routines of the heart.
If I reach out and touch his wing,
What harm, what help might he then bring?

But suddenly he disappears,
As so much else has down the years . . .
Until I feel him deep inside
The emptiness, preoccupied.
His nerve electrifies the air.
His message is his being there.

(From Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems © 2014 by J.D. McClatchy. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Detail from Hendrik Goltzius’ Mercury, 1611, via Wikimedia Commons)

Godzilla keeps getting bigger and bigger:

Brian Merchant’s explanation for this growth:

In the 50s, Godzilla was a single atomic bomb—horrific and deadly, capable of leveling a single city. By the 80s, Godzilla was tapping into Cold War unease; he was big enough to represent a bevy of metropolis-destroying bombs. In the globalizing 90s, he was bigger still. In the film debuting this month, Godzilla is truly massive. He is three times the size of that original lumbering vessel of existential dread. Which is to be expected. Godzilla is no longer just a metaphor for the nuclear destruction, but for the largest-scale environmental disaster of our era. The newest trailer begins with scenes of Hurricane Sandy-like flooding, and models its depiction of destruction on global warming disaster footage.

Earlier commentary on Hollywood’s ever-larger monsters here.

Last week, a study published in Nature revealed that lab mice react differently to their male and female researchers:

Mice, and rats, it turned out, are made especially stressed out by men. One way to watch the rising anxiety and depression of a mouse is to force it to swim. “Mice can swim very well, and they can swim for a long time, but they don’t really like it,” [psychologist Robert] Sorge said. Over a series of experiments, the team determined that even if a female scientist is working with a mouse, “just having a man in a room was similar to three minutes of forced swim.” …

The team determined that the rodents were responding to the scent of men, not the sight. … To confirm the smell theory, Sorge went on, “we’d have the man wear a T-shirt overnight in bed, with no cologne or anything. We’d have him take the shirt, put it in a bag, and drape it over a chair.” Sorge couldn’t detect the smell, though others in the lab could; the stink depends on the dose, he explained.

The team conducted the same musk test with other males—guinea pigs and cats and dogs, fixed and unfixed. (All male mammals, including humans, produce testosterone.) “We just used the bedding,” Sorge said. He brought in the pillow that his daughter’s cat sleeps on. In each case, the masculine scent provoked the same response from the mice. And it wasn’t just the introduction of a strong odor: “We tried vanilla smell. We tried banana—none of them did anything. It didn’t have to do with being a novel smell. It had to do with a testosterone smell.”

Ian Steadman suggests next steps for scientists:

Scientists working with rodents will need to begin acknowledging and studying these further biases that their implicit assumptions introduce to each experiment, or there may be huge bodies of potential knowledge out there that we just will never know. At the very least, scientists could begin reporting the genders of those taking part in experiments with mice subjects, to address the problem of men ruining things with their presence.

A reader illustrates how impactful our reader threads can be:

I have been extremely judgmental of parents who have put their children on ADHD medications in the past. I still believe there is a broad swath of parents who use medication as an easy path around engaged parenting.

However, life has a way of mocking hubris and making you eat your words. My 12-year-old son started 6th grade this year, and he has been struggling with the new responsibilities that middle school entail. Rather than a group of 20 to 25 kids herding from one class to another as a group, which was what he was used to from elementary school, in middle school each student is assigned an independent locker and schedule and must find his or her own way to class and keep track of homework. When I would get home from work every day, he would have done none of his homework, which was a heavier load than most of his classmates, since he didn’t get anything done during the school day, either. Thus would start a 4-5 hour nightly battle of wills to get his homework done. That is no exaggeration: 4 to 5 hours every single weeknight. It was so bad that I dreaded coming home, and he would burst into tears when he saw me drive up the driveway. He even mentioned several times that he wanted to kill himself. That’s when he started seeing a psychologist.

I started reading the Dish’s discussion on “Hyperactive Prescribing” with a sense of smugness, since I was fighting the good fight and wasn’t letting the fact that my son was struggling push me into being a bad mother reliant on better living through chemistry. But then it struck me that the reader who talked about being diagnosed at 32 years old could be my son in 20 years. His struggles sounded so much like what I observed in my son, and it literally gave me goosebumps. Another excerpt you posted from the man whose life fell into place after his diagnosis and prescription resonated deeply, too.

So the next time we saw my son’s psychologist, I asked her opinion on whether medication could help. She told me that she honestly hadn’t considered medication because she doesn’t have a degree that allows her to prescribe, but now that I mentioned it, he probably would benefit from it. Next stop: pediatrician. She said it seemed clear that our family was suffering, and medication would almost definitely help. Prescription obtained.

The first day he took the medication, he came home with 15 minutes of homework to do, since everything else had been done in class. He finished it while I was cooking dinner. Next night, he had his
homework done before I got home from work. A sample test of 15 extended-response questions (which I don’t believe he had ever finished even ONE question on before) was finished before class was over, with a score of 100%. My husband literally started crying with relief when our son told him about it.

My home no longer has a gray cloud hanging over it. It’s seriously lollipops and unicorns. My son’s teachers have e-mailed me to tell me what an amazing transformation they’ve seen, and everyone in our house is much more relaxed and happy. Last week, out of the blue, as he was about to get out of the car to be dropped off at school, he said, “Thanks for putting me on that medicine, Mom. School’s so much easier now. I’m so happy!” I know that sounds like some sort of e-mail glurge, but that’s what he said, verbatim.

I just thought you – and the readers who shared their experiences – might like to know that they have saved the sanity of a family, and possibly the life of a pre-adolescent. Thank you.

Read more about the Dish community here and here. Photos of readers used with their permission.

The recently republished Letters of James Agee to Father Flye collects Agee’s lifelong correspondence with James Harold Flye, a priest two decades his senior whom he met at age 9. In a review, John Lingan finds that the letters come closer to revealing the fullness of Agee’s character than any of his other works:

[Agee is], in the manner of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, almost perversely attentive to his own shortcomings as a writer and a man. “I haven’t yet learned at all well how to use either time or myself,” he confesses while in the thick of writing that book, a few months before claiming, “I have a really dangerous and to me terrifying lack not only of discipline of thought and conduct but of any hold to take towards learning discipline.” The letters spill over with projects never seen through, dietary and health concerns, and Agee’s constant apologies for not corresponding sooner. … Flye and Agee sometimes went a decade or more without seeing each other in person; other than a few years of close contact in childhood, Agee’s relationship to this man was forged in words and in thought, not by close knowledge of each other’s daily lives.