Thursday, August 31, 2017

The New Yorker

I Share Something with Marilyn Monroe--And You May Too
By Robin Wright
Marilyn Monroe had a condition called synesthesia, a kind of sensory or cognitive fusion in which things seen, heard, smelled, felt, or tasted stimulate a totally unrelated sense—so that music can be heard or food tasted in colors, for instance. Monroe’s first husband, Jim Dougherty, told Norman Mailer about “evenings when all Norma Jean served were peas and carrots. She liked the colors. She has that displacement of the senses which others take drugs to find. So she is like a lover of rock who sees vibrations when he hears sounds,” Mailer recounted, in his 1973 biography of Monroe.
I have synesthesia, too. The condition, which has been described in literature for centuries but only recently studied scientifically, takes more than a hundred forms. About four per cent of people are believed to have at least one variation; some have many. We’re called synesthetes.
I see numbers in colors, which is one of the more common forms. For me, three is a sunny yellow, four is bright red, five is a brilliant green, six is pale blue, seven is royal blue, eight is muddy brown, and so on. I do Sudoku puzzles by colors, not by the shapes of numbers. I remember phone numbers by colors, too. If the colors go together, I’ll never forget the number. If they clash, it’s almost impossible to recall. When I went to my home town, Ann Arbor, for my thirtieth high-school reunion, I picked up the phone and called a friend I hadn’t seen in decades—on a number I remembered (and still do). I hate the number nineteen: one is white, nine is black. It’s like good and evil in one number. It makes me shudder.
“Synesthesia is a genuine phenomenon, and people who have it are actually experiencing the world differently,” Dr. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, told me. Research into synesthesia has led to a broad reconsideration of perception in general. 

Read on.....
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/i-have-something-in-common-with-marilyn-monroeand-you-might-too

Monday, August 14, 2017

The New Yorker


Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?
By Robin Wright
Having spent my life covering wars, I've thought a lot about this subject. So I wrote about it for The New Yorker today: "Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?
A day after the brawling and racist brutality in Virginia, Governor Terry McAuliffe asked, “How did we get to this place?” The more relevant question after Charlottesville—and other deadly episodes in Ferguson, Charleston, Dallas, Saint Paul, Baltimore, Baton Rouge, and Alexandria—is where the United States is headed. How fragile is the union, our republic, and a country that has long been considered the world’s most stable democracy? The dangers are now bigger than the collective episodes of violence. “The radical right was more successful in entering the political mainstream last year than in half a century,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reported in February. The organization documents more than nine hundred active (and growing) hate groups in the United States.
America’s stability is increasingly an undercurrent in political discourse. The pattern of civil strife has evolved worldwide over the past sixty years. Today, few civil wars involve pitched battles from trenches along neat geographic front lines. Many are low-intensity conflicts with episodic violence in constantly moving locales....
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Friday, August 4, 2017

The New Yorker

Why is Donald Trump Still So Horribly Witless About the World?
By Robin Wright 
Max Boot, a lifelong conservative who advised three Republican Presidential candidates on foreign policy, keeps a folder labelled “Trump Stupidity File” on his computer. It’s next to his “Trump Lies” file. “Not sure which is larger at this point,” he told me this week. “It’s neck-and-neck.”
Six months into the Trump era, foreign-policy officials from eight past Administrations told me they are aghast that the President is still so witless about the world. “He seems as clueless today as he was on January 20th,” Boot, who is now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. Trump’s painful public gaffes, they warn, indicate that he’s not reading, retaining, or listening to his Presidential briefings. And the newbie excuse no longer flies.
“Trump has an appalling ignorance of the current world, of history, of previous American engagement, of what former Presidents thought and did,” Geoffrey Kemp, who worked at the Pentagon during the Ford Administration and at the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration, reflected. “He has an almost studious rejection of the type of in-depth knowledge that virtually all of his predecessors eventually gained or had views on.”
Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-is-donald-trump-still-so-horribly-witless-about-the-world