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A reader writes:

In your post, you quote two paragraphs about an unconventional treatment for drug and alcohol addiction. I clicked the link, hoping to find some data on the effectiveness of the treatment, and instead discovered  that the man who developed it, Charles Dederich, was a cult leader responsible for a murder attempt and repeated instances of child abuse. I was shocked. I got an entirely different impression from reading the article than I did from your quotation. If I had not clicked that link, I would have gone on believing that a method used by a cult leader to control and economically exploit his followers was, in fact, a legitimate psychological treatment.

But another reader describes how that same sort of treatment had subsequently been adopted by a legit organization:

Well, this post really struck a nerve. I was a hardcore heroin/cocaine/anything-to-get-me-high addict through my late teens into my twenties. I was in and out of rehab/detox on more occasions than I can remember (and I mean that literally – there are whole years in the ’90s that I don’t remember).

But in 1998, I checked in to a behavior modification center in San Diego called CRASH. It was truly unlike anything I had ever experienced. First, it was free, whereas every other facility I’d checked into cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars (all on my parents’ dime, and I’m still making amends for that). Second, it was primarily populated with men (it’s a men’s only facility) who were mandated by the courts. These guys were gnarly criminal types. For example, my roommate toward the end of my stay had committed homicide a few years before I met him. And third, and most importantly, it was the complete opposite of any facility I had gone to before.

Every other rehab I’d been in was 30 days or less. CRASH was, at minimum, a 90-day stay. Every other facility had a team of doctors, therapists and psychiatrists. CRASH had three drug counselors, all former addicts and graduates of CRASH. Every other facility had either a pool, a meditation garden, a gourmet buffet, a private room, a spiritual walking trail, a horseshoe pit, or some combination of these. CRASH had none of that. All it had was a stark, ugly, utilitarian building in the middle of the ghetto, with two or three men to a room.

But this was not rehab – it was behavior modification. The core of the program consisted of “giving treatment” to the other residents.

What this meant, in essence, was that twice a day, the 50 or so men would sit in a circle in hard plastic chairs in the treatment room, with their feet flat on the floor and their hands palm down on their knees (this was called being “posted up”), along with the counselor who supervised the group. The counselor would be holding “slips,” which were small pieces of off-white paper on which were the name of one of the residents and some rule they had broken, as reported by another resident.

The infractions themselves were generally fairly minor and absurd – Jim didn’t make his bed this morning, David didn’t complete his chores, Mark was talking to a girl at the AA/NA meeting. But the “treatment” that was given by other residents around these seemingly small mistakes was anything but minor or absurd. When your name and your infraction got called, it was open season. You had to sit there, posted up, while 49 other men unleashed on you for whatever you had done wrong. This was a typical exchange:

Counselor: Jason, the slip says you were four minutes late for breakfast this morning. Does anyone have anything to say to Jason about this?

Resident 1: Man, you’re always fucking late. You think that’s gonna cut it on the outside, at a job or something?

Resident 2: Job?  Jason ain’t never gonna get a job. He’s a piece of shit. No one would hire him.

Resident 3: Man, Jason, YOU’RE A DISRESPECTFUL MOTHERFUCKER. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY WE WASTE OUR TIME ON YOU. WHY DON’T YOU JUST FUCKING LEAVE ALREADY.

And it would escalate from there. Everyone in the room got a chance to take a swipe, and you just had to sit there – feet flat on the floor, hands on your knees – and take it. But then, like that, they would be done with you and move on to the next slip, another guy, and now it was your turn to yell all crazy about how he didn’t clean the pubic hair off the shower wall well enough during chore time.

The punishment for violating rules was “time on the bench.” This consisted of sitting on a hard wood bench, posted up, in one-hour increments. Bench time was assigned by the counselor, and was seemingly arbitrary – this guy got an hour for oversleeping through a whole meeting, whereas that guy got four hours for being two minutes late to the same meeting. Everyone hated bench time, but looking back, I think that being alone with my thoughts an hour at a time was maybe exactly the thing I needed most.

The first day I was in CRASH, I almost walked out, because it all seemed so fucking crazy. I didn’t leave, though, because I really had nowhere else to go.

By my final day (101 days later), I was giving treatment with the best of ’em. I was shouting down armed robbers, rapists, killers, and petty thieves about putting their cigarette butts out on the ground instead of in an ashtray or not writing enough slips on other guys (yes, this was a real reason to slip someone – if they didn’t call out other residents to an acceptable degree). At the end of my stay, I felt better about my life going forward than I had in years (though I was truly scared to leave when the time came to walk out the doors alone). I was healthy and happy and had a job in a small, hip coffeeshop lined up. I felt like the men I had been in CRASH with were my family.

That was my behavior modification experience, 15 years ago now. I’m not sure CRASH even exists anymore (just googled it – it’s still there). For a couple months after I moved out, I stayed in touch with some of the guys I had become friends with in CRASH, but that faded as I found people in other recovery groups closer to my own age, with more similar interests (I was very into the indie music scene then, whereas I doubt anyone I was in CRASH with knew about Drag City and Touch and Go Records).

I’m 40 now, the father to a wonderful 13-year-old son, engaged to be married in the fall, and have a great extended family. I graduated college in 2002, and grad school in 2006. I own and operate a $50 million a year business, where I am able to employ a number of bright, amazing people. And I haven’t touched drugs since the day before I went into CRASH.

That is my behavior modification story. It’s probably too long and possibly boring, but reading that post about Synanon (and the link it went to) just overwhelmed me with memories. This is the first time I have written about my experience at CRASH, and I guess I needed the catharsis … thank you!

A fun fact about one of the most popular shows on TV:

More than 5m people now hear a few words in Dothraki or Valyrian, the fabricated languages spoken in the television series “Game of Thrones”, each week—more than the number who hear Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scots Gaelic combined.

How fictional languages mimic real one:

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin, were influenced by Finnish and Welsh, two languages that Tolkien loved. Navi includes popping-like sounds found in Georgian and Amharic, but few English ones, to enhance its foreignness. Estonian’s negative verb system inspired Dothraki’s. Inventors also insert systematic irregularities into the language by imagining how it might have evolved over hundreds of years. They decide which words should exist and which should not: Dothraki has no word for toilet, for example, but (being the language of horse-riding warriors) more than 20 for horse.

For those really interested, Denise Martin is sorry to report that everyone is mispronouncing “Khaleesi”: 

But don’t feel bad. On the HBO show, her smitten man-servant Jorah has been saying it incorrectly as well; the more accurate pronunciation should be “KHAH-lay-see,” not “ka-LEE-see.” That’s according to David J. Peterson, the language creator responsible for all of the Dothraki and Valyrian dialogue spoken on the show, and he’s driven mad every time he hears it. “Ugh. God. That’s not how it’s supposed to sound,” said Peterson. “The vowel change bugs me.” As the architect of the language’s grammar and pronunciation rules, he’s the only one who can correct it with authority, but he lost the battle to correct the pronunciation on the show early on. “The producers decided they liked the other way better. They probably thought most people were pronouncing it that way anyway, which is true.”

Hamza Mohamed describes the life of a journalist in Somalia, where four have already been killed this year:

After the death of many of our colleagues we in the media industry here in Somalia have developed a unique way of greeting each other. “You are still a live?” One will ask with a smile. “Dead people don’t walk or talk,” the other will respond with laughter. Behind the smiles and laughter are serious safety worries.

Meeting or bumping into fellow journalists is becoming a luxury. Because of the alarming number of targeted assassinations against journalists many of us are choosing not to gather in groups to socialise or stray far from their work place – even for work. Every chance we meet could be our last one. Every journalist here knows a colleague who has been killed. It is also not rare to see journalists who’ve survived attempts on their lives.

His daily routine could come straight out of a spy novel:

Depending on who your employer is and the last story you worked on, our morning usually starts with phone calls to next-door neighbours who also double up as our lookouts before leaving the house. We change houses many times a year – I don’t know where my closest colleagues live. I will be surprised if they said they knew where I live. …

The few who can afford to buy second hand cars usually jump into their tinted vehicles and speed off to work. Tinted windows are a must as they help lower the profile of the occupant. But most journalists here don’t earn enough to afford their own car. They’ve to brave the streets and take public transport to get to work. Taking public transport vehicles makes you a sitting duck.

Despite that peril, a reporter is more likely to be killed in Iraq or Syria, the two most dangerous beats at the moment.

(Photo: Mourners pray beside the coffin of Somali journalist Mohamed Ibrahim Rageh in Jazira on the outskirts of Mogadishu on April 22, 2013. Rageh worked for Somali National Television and Radio Mogadishu and was shot dead by unknown gunmen as he reuturned home. Rageh is the fourth reporter to be murdered in Mogadishu this year. Somalia is one of the most dangerous places for journalists to work, with at least 18 media workers killed in 2012. By Mohamed Abdiwahab/AFP/Getty Images)

Caleb Crain explains how difficult it is to avoid:

Suppose you want to write a brand-new popular tune. A piano has only eighty-eight keys, and the span of the human voice is even narrower. Only a few rhythms and chord progressions reliably please the palate of the masses, and myriad tunes have already been written under these constraints and are protected by copyright. Is it possible to write a new one that doesn’t echo an old one?

Is plagiarism inevitable in pop music? Thanks to combinatorics, the answer is certainly no for a song at full length. And the answer is probably still no if one focuses on just the heart of a song—whatever, legally speaking, that is. But even a genius would probably be unable to write a new pop song that doesn’t resemble some old one for at least a bar or two. When music plagiarism cases go to trial, lawyers and judges must somehow distinguish inevitable echoes from willful theft. “If a song writer is ethical,” A.J. Liebling once quipped, in a book he ghost-wrote for an unscrupulous music publisher, “he will not cop a tune within three years of its publication.” The law aspires to something a bit longer-lasting and maybe even less cynical. But to formulate a rule for distinguishing accidental from larcenous parallels is a fiendish challenge, and in attempting to rise to it, a mind could easily lose its way.

In a follow-up post, Crain features early 20th-century composer Ira B. Arnstein, who “not only ruined his musical career through the chronic litigation of music plagiarism cases; he literally went mad”:

[At the Music Copyright Infringement Resource] you can listen to the songs on both sides and make up your own mind as to whether, say, Shilkret plagiarized Arnstein, as Arnstein alleged he did (the judge’s 1933 verdict: “there was not sufficient originality in the plaintiff’s eight measures to make it worthwhile for anyone to steal them”). In a case decided in 1936, Arnstein claimed that a CBS music director had taken the gypsy-themed tune “Play, Fiddle, Play” from him; you can listen for yourself to that tune, too, as well as to Arnstein’s supposed original. In Unfair to Genius, Rosen points out that judges of the day applied conflicting rules about how to determine plagiarism in music: there was one standard in Allen v. Walt Disney Productions (1941), and a different one in Carew v. RKO Pictures (1942). The songs fought over in both cases are in the Music Copyright Infringement Resource. As are the songs at issue in Arnstein’s lawsuits against Broadcast Music, Inc. and against Cole Porter. The Cole Porter case is the show-stopper of Rosen’s book; it led to a Second Circuit ruling still used by the courts to determine whether there’s been a copyright infringement. Was a pious song of Arnstein’s degraded into, as Arnstein put it, “a song to a cow,” namely, Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In”?

Details are still emerging about the escape of three young women, including Amanda Berry, kidnapped a decade ago and trapped in a house in Cleveland. Amy Davidson is following the story:

According to a police conference on Tuesday morning, her chance came when she forced a hole in a screen covering the lower part of the door which was big enough for her to push her arm through. Then she started to make noise. (One recalls the way that Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl held for eight years, kept looking for a moment to run, and finally found one.) [Neighbor Charles Ramsey, seen in the above interview] came when Berry screamed; and yet she took a risk by trying to get the attention of a stranger. What if he had just told his neighbor, with whom, he told reporters, he’d hung out at local barbecues—“ribs and what not”—that someone in his house was being loud? …

Ramsey’s 911 call is transfixing.

“Yeah hey bro,” it begins, “you check this out.” His intensity, the McDonald’s shout-out, his undoubtedly loose paraphrase of Berry’s account (“This motherfucker done kidnapped me and my daughter”), and also his competence (he does a better job with the essentials like the address than the 911 operator) make him one of those instantly compelling figures who, in the middle of an American tragedy, just start talking—and then we can’t stop listening. (See Ruslan Tsarni, Ashley Smith.) But one phrase in particular, from the interview, is worth dwelling on: “I figured it was a domestic-violence dispute.” In many times and places, a line like that has been offered as an excuse for walking away, not for helping a woman break down your neighbor’s door. How many women have died as a result? They didn’t yesterday.

Kathryn Schulz confesses:

I know how I’m supposed to feel about Gatsby: In the words of the critic Jonathan Yardley, “that it is the American masterwork.” Malcolm Cowley admired its “moral permanence.” T. S. Eliot called it “the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James.” Lionel Trilling thought Fitzgerald had achieved in it “the ideal voice of the novelist.” That’s the received Gatsby: a linguistically elegant, intellectually bold, morally acute parable of our nation.

I am in thoroughgoing disagreement with all of this. I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent; I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains. None of this would matter much to me if Gatsby were not also sacrosanct. Books being borderline irrelevant in America, one is generally free to dislike them—but not this book.

Her biggest criticism? The lack of love:

Indeed, The Great Gatsby is less involved with human emotion than any book of comparable fame I can think of. None of its characters are likable. None of them are even dislikable, though nearly all of them are despicable. They function here only as types, walking through the pages of the book like kids in a school play who wear sashes telling the audience what they represent: OLD MONEY, THE AMERICAN DREAM, ORGANIZED CRIME. …  Of the great, redemptive romance on which the entire story is supposed to turn, [Fitzgerald] admitted, “I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy.”

Lisa Hix takes issue with the book’s portrayal of flappers:

Narrated by a man, the cautionary tale seems to warn against the wiles of The New Woman—the feminist ideal of an educated and sexually liberated woman that emerged in the 1900s.

So instead of intelligent, independent women telling their own stories of rebelling and rejecting their mother’s values, you have male war buddies sharing how vapid, spoiled socialites carelessly wrecked their lives. In “A Feminist Reading of the Great Gatsby,” Soheila Pirhadi Tavandashti points out the pattern:

“The novel abounds in minor female characters whose dress and activities identify them as incarnations of the New Woman, and they are portrayed as clones of a single, negative character type: shallow, exhibitionist, revolting, and deceitful. For example, at Gatsby’s parties we see insincere, ‘enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names,’ as well as numerous narcissistic attention-seekers in various stages of drunken hysteria.[“]

Hix emphasizes that what may be remembered as merely a fashion trend was in fact a complicated, “full-blown, grassroots feminist revolution” that we are still feeling the effects of today:

[The flapper] rejected the notion that women should be submissive and keep to their “separate sphere” of the home. She proved that women could work and live independent from men—and party just as hard.

Meanwhile, Zachary M. Seward sighs at how high school teachers commonly interpret the classic:

[They] use the book to teach their students how to strive, filling in the blank, “My green light is _____.” In the novel, Gatsby’s infatuation with social class is represented by the green light on the dock of the Buchanan estate across the bay from his house. And if there’s one line that neatly, almost overbearingly, conveys the novel’s jaundiced view of the American dream, it’s this one: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

At Boston Latin School, however, the green light is just good old American ambition. “My green light is Harvard,” a 14-year-old Chinese-American immigrant told a reporter visiting her English class. On the wall of the classroom, students had written their own “green lights” (pdf) on a large piece of green construction paper in the shape of a lightbulb: Pediatric neurosurgeon … Earn a black belt … Make it to junior year… Become incredibly rich.

Previous Dish on Fitzgerald and his novel here, here and here.

Reviewing my friend Jesse Norman’s Edmund Burke: The First Conservative, Charles Hill spots a paradox in attempting to write such a book:

While recognizing that Burke’s persona, like Walt Whitman’s, contains multitudes, Norman boldly summarizes Burke’s thought for our time. Any such effort, however, is fundamentally un-Burkean. There is no catching Leviathan with a hook. Burke’s writing and speaking—style and substance—are all of a piece, coming together organically. His 1790 masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France is clear, but stubbornly resistant to summation. There are no chapters or subheadings, no table of contents, no index.

When the luminous intellectual historian Frank Turner edited a new edition of Burke in 2003, he was determined to produce an index. It was, Turner told me, “the damndest fool’s errand I ever set myself.” When he had finally completed it, he found that the first item he looked up in the index had not been included. To grasp the full force of Burke’s ideas, one must read through his entire oeuvre, without assistance.

About those multitudes:

For Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century Irish statesman who served in the British House of Commons, the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past.

We live our lives in the present, with time always progressing forward in a linear direction, so Burke’s respect for the past makes him conservative. Given the modern world’s appetite for change, Burke’s emphasis on continuity and permanence makes him seem like a strange outsider. Furthermore, Burke’s conservatism is expressed in a fierce and fiery, almost reactionary, style.

This puzzled his detractors, who were constantly suspecting Burke of some ulterior motive, of exerting some nefarious influence in the cause of some hidden agenda. The Duke of Newcastle said, “Burke’s real name is O’Bourke, a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a papist, a concealed Jesuit.” At best, but equally threatening to the state, Burke was an eighteenth-century Socrates, a dangerous gadfly, challenging the settled assumptions of Britain.

The portrayal of Burke in Boswell’s Life of Johnson avoids quoting the statesman directly, and sometimes disguises the identity of the “Burkean” speaker, as if to conceal Burke from the authorities. If this was a conservative, it was a strange conservative indeed. Moreover, Burke took contrarian positions on world issues, positions his critics found difficult to reconcile: religious liberty for Ireland, independence for America, justice and respect for India’s traditions, and to hell with the French Revolution.

Of course, all these positions are entirely easy to reconcile, once you abandon rigid categories of agitprop and actually think. The founder of Anglo-American conservatism was, in reality, a Whig. These nuances would not fare well on, say, the Mark Levin show. But any true appreciation of conservatism as a political disposition would be thoroughly engaged.

The atmospheric carbon dioxide reading taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii is expected to reach 400 parts-per-million this week. Andrew Freedman puts that number in its historical context:

The news that CO2 is near 400 ppm for the first time highlights a question that scientists have been investigating using a variety of methods: when was the last time that CO2 levels were this high, and what was the climate like back then? There is no single, agreed-upon answer to those questions as studies show a wide date range from between 800,000 to 15 million years ago. The most direct evidence comes from tiny bubbles of ancient air trapped in the vast ice sheets of Antarctica. By drilling for ice cores and analyzing the air bubbles, scientists have found that, at no point during at least the past 800,000 years have atmospheric CO2 levels been as high as they are now.

That means that in the entire history of human civilization, CO2 levels have never been this high.

This is a new era – in which humanity has the power to change the entire climate of the planet so that it is more clogged with carbon than at any time since homo sapiens took dominion. This is the mark of dystopian science fiction – except that it’s real, and apparently unstoppable. What right does one species have to change the world’s climate so structurally it will destroy countless other life-forms? Greg Laden reminds us nonetheless about the seasonal variations in CO2 levels:

There is a lot more land in the Northern Hemisphere that goes through a dramatic cycle in plant activity, with most plants playing (or even being) dead over the winter and springing to life in the Spring. The Southern Hemisphere has much less land. So a small amount of CO2 moves into the atmosphere over the Northern Hemisphere winter and into spring, and then moves back into newly grown plant tissue during the northern growing season.

So, right now, CO2 should be at a short term peak. The range of this variation is around 8 ppm, so if we hit, say, 401 ppm next week, expect that value to go back below 400 ppm in a few weeks. In other words, we can and should note that we are probably hitting the 400 ppm barrier, but then later when we drop slightly below, temporarily, 400ppm, the climate science denialists will be all over that claiming that there is no global warming. Cuz they’re morons. In a few years … certainly by the end of the present decade …. the low values will be over 400 ppm unless something dramatic happens.