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Thus the depressed person you might be right now can change:

Earlier “Ask Anything” videos from Jennifer Michael Hecht are here and here.  A reader responds to the series:

Over the period of seven years that my two kids attended their public high school, there were six student suicides (make that seven suicides if you include the young adult son of my kids’ freshman English teacher). Two of those suicides were brothers whose oldest brother committed suicide in the years before. One of these suicides still haunt me, and I didn’t even know the boy, but I knew where he did it. I still can’t walk in that park’s wooded trails without thinking of him. So yes, suicides affect even those we don’t know personally.

I have absolutely no doubt that each suicide at my kids’ school contributed to the subsequent suicides. My son had a suicide scare as a sophomore. His girlfriend called us in a panic close to midnight and told us to check the garage because she thought our son might harm himself. Although it was a false alarm, we confronted him and he confessed to us that he had been thinking about suicide and making a plan. Obviously we got him counseling, but we also had several weeks where at night my husband and I alternated waking every hour for “suicide check”. Worst period of my life as a parent, hands down. But I still have my son.

I plan to read Hecht’s book. I have had my own fleeting thoughts on suicide, although I know I would never follow through. Your discussion thread on suicide is so helpful.

Another reader:

I think something is really being missed in all the discussion of suicide, which Lucinda William’s song that you posted crystallized for me:

When you are truly depressed, there is nothing to miss. You try to eat and enjoy food, but it is tasteless; you try to enjoy someone’s touch, but there is nothing there that you can feel. “This sweet old world” becomes like a mockery; you reach for it and simply bounce off, like off  of some invisible force-field. Even the memory of enjoyment seems like some kind of mad dream.

And then Hecht comes and adds to the mockery by telling you to think of others, when you cannot even stir yourself to think of yourself because it is all so affect-less – “all” meaning the entire gestalt of sense and meaning we call the “world.” And the thought twirls in your mind and bites you because you know that theoretically you should care about others, but there is nothing left to care with. My first thought when reading Hecht was: “She really doesn’t get it – what it is like to be in such a state.” And I hasten to add: I’m glad she doesn’t. I would not wish it on anybody.

What did help me was someone taking me to a doctor and being given medications that literally saved my life. If your leg is broken, someone telling you to walk doesn’t help. You need to get the bone set and put in a cast.

Update from a reader:

On reading a couple of posts about suicide, I had what I thought were some valuable insights about the suicidal thought process, in particular the non-relevance of the otherwise lovely Lucinda Williams song. But I am not a writer, and I was sure that whatever I did try to write would be lost in the shuffle anyway. Then today, one of your readers put my thoughts into point-for-point perfect words (“When you are truly depressed, there is nothing to miss…. you cannot even stir yourself to think of yourself because it is all so affect-less”), and I felt a sense of connection and gratitude for such a diverse community, and that you give us voices. It’s why I love the Dish.

For readers new to Hecht, a recap of her bio:

Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet, philosopher, historian and commentator. She is the author of the bestseller Doubt: A History, a history of religious and philosophical doubt all over the world, throughout history. Her new book is Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It, out from Yale University Press. Her The Happiness Myth brings a historical eye to modern wisdom about how to lead a good life.  Hecht’s The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award “For scholarly studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity.”

Popova called Stay “more than a must-read — it’s a cultural necessity.”

Does misery love company on Facebook? A recent study investigated the question:

The researchers created three distinct Facebook profiles of a fictitious person named Sara Thomas who had just experienced a break-up.

The three profiles were identical in all respects except for how much information was conveyed about the recent (fictitious) break-up. In their article, [researcher Andrew] High and colleagues use the expression “emotional bandwidth” to describe the extent of emotions conveyed in the Facebook profile.

In the low bandwidth scenario, the profile contained the following status update: “sad and depressed :(“. The medium bandwidth profile included a change in relationship status to “single” in the timeline, in addition to the low bandwidth profile update “sad and depressed :(“. Finally, the high emotional bandwidth profile not only contained the updates of the low and medium bandwidth profiles, but also included a picture of a crying woman (the other two profiles had no photo, just the standard Facebook shadow image). …

High and colleagues hypothesized that the high emotional bandwidth profiles would elicit greater support from the students. … To their surprise, the researchers found the opposite. The willingness to provide emotional or network support was significantly lower among students who viewed the high emotional bandwidth profile! For example, average emotional support scores were 7.8 among students who saw Sara entering the “sad and depressed:(” update (low bandwidth) but the scores were only 6.5 among students who also saw the image of Sara crying and updating her relationship status to single (high bandwidth). Interestingly, students who preferred online interactions over face-to-face interactions or those who felt that Facebook created a strong sense of community responded positively to the high bandwidth profile.

Douthat pans the healthcare proposal announced last week by the Louisiana governor:

The Jindal theory, that the right shouldn’t bother competing with liberals on certain policy fronts because they’ll always be outbid, is generally problematic (why does his proposal have any coverage expansion, then?) but it’s a particularly odd idea to embrace in a case where the liberal program may not, as even its defenders allow, actually end up delivering the scale of coverage expansion that was expected.

By which I mean that if the current enrollment trends persist, there is a good chance that some version of a more catastrophic-focused reform could actually enroll somewhat more Americans in some kind of basic coverage than Obamacare, at a substantially lower cost. (A preliminary private score of the Senate Republican bill suggested it could get slightly higher coverage numbers, and that was — I believe — using the C.B.O. projections for Obamacare, which may turn out to have been too high.) Which in turn would offer Republicans an opportunity to effectively outbid the Democrats on enrollment while significantly underbidding them on spending.

Chait also tackles Jindal’s plan:

The only unique element of Jindal’s plan is a $100 billion grant program (over the next decade)  to states to “come up with insurance reforms and other solutions that can stem the rising tide of health costs.”

Is $100 billion a lot of money? No, it is not. It’s 1/20th the size of the coverage provisions in Obamacare. It could finance coverage for no more than a token few. The role the $100 billion plays is a kind of magic wand that allows Jindal to pretend that states will come up with some kind of solution to all our problems at a cost of 0.2 percent of the federal budget (my figure, arrived at by dividing $100 billion by the projected $47 trillion in federal outlays over the next decade).

Jindal, trying to maintain his wonk credibility, presents his hand-waving, kill-’em-all-and-let-the-states-sort-’em-out gesture as a detailed proposal

If Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, she will surely revisit her support for the Iraq War – and it may be a factor in the primaries if she does. But it’s not only on the Democratic side that the repercussions of that moral and strategic catastrophe will be aired. The Republican debate has been quashed for so long, but Rand Paul – peace be upon him – may help unquash it. David Corn passes along an old video in which Paul roundly accuses Cheney of going into Iraq because of his ties to Halliburton:

Of course, Paul has been a little more diplomatic of late – but YouTube is for ever. Meanwhile, as Sheldon Adelson literally buys politicians to advance his belief in Greater Israel, those Republicans willing to stand up against contracting out America’s foreign policy to West Bank fanatics are being targeted. Case in point:

Walter Jones is the first target. The ten-term North Carolina Republican has emerged as a leading antiwar voice in Congress. As a result, he faces a primary challenge from former George W. Bush aide Taylor Griffin—and a barrage of hostile spending from outside groups. The Emergency Committee for Israel has launched a six-figure ad campaign describing Jones as a convert to liberalism. “Once upon a time, Walter Jones was right for North Carolina but he’s changed,” says the narrator in the 30-second spot. “Isn’t it time your vote changed as well?”

It doesn’t matter, of course, that “Jones is pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, pro-gun, and has compiled one of the most reliable socially conservative records in Congress.” What matters is fealty to Jewish religious fundamentalists erecting a colonial state on the West Bank. The neocons may have lost most of the arguments. But they still have money and a willingness to lie. Expect them to use plenty of opportunities for both.

It sounded vague in the abstract, so check out the actual result: “Vox Cards” that act as instant primers on the background of an issue:

They’re inspired by the highlighters and index cards that some of us used in school to remember important information. You’ll find them attached to articles, where they add crucial context; behind highlighted words, where they allow us to offer deeper explanations of key concepts; and in their stacks, where they combine into detailed — and continuously updated — guides to ongoing news stories. We’re incredibly excited about them.

Incredibly excited? They must be bouncing off the walls in downtown DC. But check ’em out. Max Fisher has cards on Ukraine, Sarah Kliff on Obamacare, and Brad Plumer on GM. I’d say they’re useful, handy, but not exactly revelatory. We’ve already got Wikipedia, after all. And hyperlinks. But it’ll be interesting to see how these cards interact with breaking news in the days and months ahead. A reader has a similar take:

Before the Vox launch, I read Ezra and Matt for their generally astute analysis and, preferably, their candor.

Right now, the innovation of the site – those yellow cards – seems to be not much more than a glorified wiki or an FAQ. I would be sad if we lost their voices in the service of their creating a new “news delivery model”. Format and organization are important, but to me what’s most important about the blogosphere are the opinions and the writing. Are they actually contributing perspectives that will drive the conversation? Otherwise the site’s a little too elementary for my taste. I remain open-minded, since it’s still early, but I was disappointed by the kickoff.

Another:

Vox Cards, eh? SNOOZE! That’s absolutely nothing new, as the New York Times and Bloomberg News (where I work) have had very similar round-ups of major topics for a while now. At Bloomberg we call them QuickTakes. Here are a few: Ebola, Bitcoin, ACA exchanges, Iran.

As the blogosphere continues to discuss the story of ZunZuneo, the USAID project to create a social media network in Cuba that could be used to foment political subversion, Zeynep Tufekci criticizes the project for lending credence to authoritarian claims that Internet activists are all American stooges:

Unfortunately, what might have been a well-meaning attempt to bring some free speech to the Castros’ Cuba now threatens the efforts of millions of people around the world who are harnessing the power of social media to challenge censorship and propaganda, and have no connection to the U.S. government. Admittedly, most authoritarian governments hardly needed an excuse to taint social media as a tool of foreign powers. They’ve being doing it for years. But for their core supporters, their rantings about American plots behind every tweet just got a lot more credible.

Jon Lee Anderson worries about our increasing reliance on private contractors to carry out sensitive state projects:

Quite apart from the rights or wrongs of the U.S. government using commercial social media for espionage or to organize political subversion in Cuba, the case presents another troubling issue: ZunZuneo was being run through a private operator, a firm called Mobile Accord, that had won a financial contract from the U.S. government. This is consistent with a growing pattern in recent years, in which implementation of the most sensitive aspects of American security policy is increasingly handed over to contractors who are working for money, not necessarily for philosophical or even patriotic reasons.

The mercenary firm Blackwater, renamed XE and then Academi (after earning notoriety in the killing of seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, in 2007), has effectively become an action arm of the C.I.A., its personnel loading the missiles on the drones that are fired at presumed terrorists based on White House decisions. Clearly, there are risks to this ever-expanding outsourcing. That outraged patriot who divulged the N.S.A.’s secrets was first a C.I.A. contractor and then an N.S.A. contractor.

Looking back at Mobile Accord’s relationship with the government, which began in 2009 with a similar project in Pakistan, Robinson Meyer notes an irony:

In 2010 and 2011, the White House, the State Department—the entire apparatus of American diplomacy—pushed an Internet freedom agenda. American interests, they said, were advanced by the penetration of networked tech abroad. Then the U.S. government got into being a tech client and discovered it wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. ZunZuneo’s story is that of hundreds of other startups in 2011 and 2012—ZunZuneo just happened to be supported by the U.S. government. ZunZuneo’s monetary supporters weren’t the only ones who, in 2011, discovered that they’d backed a product with no clear monetization strategy, nor were they the first to panic and look for an exit. …

Who did ZunZuneo benefit most of all, eventually? Cubacel: The Cuban government’s state-run mobile monopoly which owned the physical infrastructure through which ZunZuneo messages traveled. USAID, in trying to harass the Cuban government, wound up financially supporting it.

Greenwald was unsurprised at the revelations:

These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.

José Cárdenas, who was involved in USAID’s Cuba Democracy Program during the Bush administration, defends projects like ZunZuneo:

That the programs were implemented discreetly was precisely to protect peoples’ lives. The Castro regime has been abusing the Cuban people for five decades; no one was about to advocate advertising the details of what we were trying to accomplish on the island.

In any case, critics of U.S. policy towards Cuba have consistently mischaracterized the Cuba Democracy Program as something sinister or unprecedented. In fact, there is nothing sinister or unique about the program, which is administered by both the State Department and USAID. It is what is known within the bureaucracy as a “cross-border program” into a non-presence country — meaning we are trying to help support people living in repressive states in which we have no local development office. There are, or have been, at least six other countries in which the U.S. government runs similar cross-border programs.

And, though they fault the project for lacking a long-term strategy, the Bloomberg editors commend its aims:

Yes, the Cold War is over, and the end of the Cuba embargo is long overdue. But the Cubans are not gentle socialists. And there is a kind of Cold War 2.0 – between democratic nations and a growing cadre of repressive states that stretches from Russia to Egypt and onward to Latin America. These countries will use any digital means necessary to stifle free expression. USAID’s so-called “Cuban Twitter” plan was by no means perfect, but arguing that such programs are unnecessary is the equivalent of bringing pen and paper to a flame war.

#Afghans are voting with pride & excitement in #AfghanElections, they are also giving a clear message to #Taliban. pic.twitter.com/Xne5yfsbdC

— Bashardost بشردوست (@Quettagee) April 5, 2014

The Economist reports that the Afghan election “was marred by sporadic violence, allegations of fraud, and other controversy – yet by some measures it was perhaps the most successful election Afghanistan has ever held”:

Before the polls opened at 7am, eager voters were already queuing outside polling centres in cities across the country. Even as rain fell across much of the country, the patient and orderly queues (somewhat of a rarity in Afghanistan) were well served by election officials who handed out plastic sheets to keep them dry. And the voters kept coming. So many came in fact that some polling centres had run out of ballots by midday.

Juan Cole lists “surprising pieces of good news” from the election:

1. The nearly 400,000 Afghanistan National Army and police forces were deployed throughout the country effectively. They stopped traffic into the capital of Kabul from afternoon on Friday, allowing the Saturday vote to avoid being disrupted. This operation was a difficult and complex one, and that the security forces were capable of it is a good sign.

2. Afghans were relatively enthusiastic about voting. Some 7 million went to the voting both out of 12 million who are eligible to vote (58%). The turnout was about twice that of the 2009 presidential [campaign].

3. Fully one third of those who voted were women. Women came out in large numbers in the big urban centers. In Taliban strongholds in the south and east, however, many had to stay home.

Liza Schuster is a bit less sanguine:

Afghanistan is still an insecure country.

The security forces did an amazing job yesterday and the people responded by turning out to vote in unexpectedly high numbers. But this was only achieved by effectively shutting down the city. Traffic was virtually non-existent. I lost count of the number of times our car was stopped and searched and our ID cards examined. Some of the voters talked of the importance of signing the Bilateral Security Agreement as soon as the new president is installed. Even given the success of yesterday’s security operation, there is a strong sense that some international forces will be needed for the foreseeable future.

Hyder Akbar went home to vote:

A phone call comes in to give us good news that people have lined up to vote in a certain area — only to be updated half an hour later that everyone has scattered after the Taliban attacked the polling station.

Another friend calls to say the Taliban have already warned him that he will be dealt with — they had heard he had been campaigning for one of the candidates. My own vote becomes an eventful event: just as I receive my ballots, another wayward missile comes flying toward the town, and everyone hunches down — another close call, but it lands in some field, and I go on to vote.

As I walk out, I notice a man vigorously trying to clean the ink off his fingertip — a sign that you have voted. Overhearing his conversation, he is telling his friend that he has to travel on the road up north and doesn’t want it chopped off — a grim reminder of how easily the tentative progress of the past decade can be erased.

The BBC explains what comes next:

Although there are eight candidates for president, only three are considered frontrunners – former foreign ministers Abdullah Abdullah and Zalmai Rassoul, and former Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai. Analysts say Dr Abdullah has fought a polished campaign, Mr Ghani has strong support among the new urban youth vote, and Dr Rassoul is believed to favoured by Mr Karzai. However, no candidate is expected to secure more than the 50% of the vote needed to be the outright winner, which means there is likely to be a second round run-off on 28 May.

Max Boot calls the election a “triumph” but thinks “we should not exaggerate its likely impact”:

The three leading candidates are said to be Ashraf Ghani, Abdullah Abdullah, and Zalmai Rassoul. All three men, who have served at various times in Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, are qualified for the top job and reasonably friendly to the United States. All three have indicated they will sign the Bilateral Security Accord that Hamid Karzai negotiated. But there is a huge question as to whether any of them will be up to the job of improving one of the most corrupt and dysfunctional governments on the face of the earth and defeating one of the most potent insurgencies in the world.