Last Week’s Links

The Women Who Write: Michelle Dean’s Sharp

A review of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Grove Atlantic).

This critical history is a rogues’ gallery of literary femaleness – even though most of the women in it rightly bristled at being defined as “woman writers.” Dean’s exemplars are, in chapter if not birth order, Dorothy Parker; Rebecca West; Hannah Arendt; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; Pauline Kael; Joan Didion; Nora Ephron; Renata Adler; and Janet Malcolm. Most have at least a few things in common. While some doubled as novelists, all are distinguished for their non-fiction, with fully half reaching eminence via The New Yorker.

The Civility Debate Has Reached Peak Stupidity

The depth to which the level of political and social discourse has sunk in the U.S. has prompted both sides to call for a return to civility. Here’s one writer’s opinion on the topic.

Five Features of Better Arguments

Here are some suggestions on how to deal with the problem of civility in public discourse.

A former Clinton administration official studied how to facilitate more constructive arguments among Americans. These are his conclusions.

The Neuroscience of Pain

For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective—only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others.

A report on scientists’ efforts to find “ways to capture the experience [of pain] in quantifiable, objective data.”

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Psychology Round-Up

At 81, Feminist Gloria Steinem Finds Herself Free Of The ’Demands Of Gender’

In this recent interview with NPR, Gloria Steinem discusses her life and her new memoir, My Life on the Road.

See what she has to say on these topics:

  • becoming pregnant at age 22, before abortion was legal, and why she didn’t talk about her abortion until years later
  • the morality of abortion
  • the most pressing issues facing women today
  • creating a home for herself after living much of her life on the road

Rewriting Your Nightmares

According to this article, as many as 25% of adults have at least one nightmare a month. There’s a new medical treatment, imagery rehearsal therapy, that works for many people who have chronic nightmares.

Developed by Dr. Barry Krakow at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, imagery rehearsal therapy focuses on rewriting a nightmare script. During the day, patients imagine a better version of the dream. For example, one woman who often had nightmares about sharks rehearsed the dream by imagining dolphins instead of sharks. After she imagined the dream with dolphins several times during the day, during sleep the sharks also morphed into dolphins.

The article reports that image rehearsal therapy is generally brief, requiring only two or three sessions. People who have only occasional nightmares may be able to perform the therapy successfully on their own, but those “who are developing insomnia or a fear of sleeping” should seek professional help to prevent the problem from becoming more severe.

The article ends with links to some related resources.

How Stress Makes You Sick

This article by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic contains a video of a TED talk by Sharon Bergquist, professor of medicine at Emory University, explaining how worry affects the body.

In some circumstances stress is a good thing: It’s responsible for the fight-or-flight mechanism that can help us avoid danger. But constant stress, for example at work or when worrying about paying the bills, can cause serious health consequences:

To mitigate some of these health consequences, Bergquist recommends viewing your stressors “as challenges you can control and master.”

The Coloring Craze: Adult Coloring Books, 2015

Publishers Weekly reports on adult coloring books, which have been selling well in both the United States and Canada during 2015. These books are generally marketed to help adults relieve stress.

When Publishers Weekly put out a call for information about these items, they received more than 150 titles. Some of those books are named here, both in the body of the article and in a table at the end.