Sources: psychology

Review of A Web of Our Own Making by Antón Barba-Kay, the book and the review stand among the many recent attempts to capture the disruptive strangeness of what the internet is doing to us. This one, as is becoming the norm with such investigations, mostly concerns the internet on the phone, or the effects of the convergence of the two. Very nicely written with rather captivating reflections on depth of psychological change (for those of us old enough to remember a time before all this…) the convergence has wrought.

Helpful review of attitudes and studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder that shows how poorly understood it is, how persistent and pervasive discrimination against NDs is and on what poor grounds, how diverse and intetesting NDs typically are, and how complex the issue is despite casual reduction to a mere disorder. Makes you wonder what is so great about NTs.

Reflections on the idea of nature as something other than human; something in which humans intervene. The thesis is that we can’t make sense of nature by removing ourselves from it, nor make sense of ourselves by removing nature from us. Pleasing anecdotes and a refreshing engagement with the problem of our moral interpretations of animal behaviour beside instances of animal behaviour that seem to make no sense without a moral interpretation.

Striking summary of science/western culture’s prioritizing of vision, therefore light, over hearing and sound and the consequences of that priority for our ways of thinking about things. In contrast, the article presents some interesting stories about sonification in science as a way of revealing patterns in data ‘overlooked’ by standard visual methods of interpretation.

“Any story of madness has a good witch in it, a good witch who is not so good.”

This is a delighfully hallucinatory, poetic summary of The Wizard of Oz as if from the perpective of a psycho-therapist helping unpack Dorothy’s traumatic journey.

More a sympathetic narrative account of the path down the rabbit-hole of conspiracy theory devotion than an argument about its nature; almost reads like a very well written-short story. Ultimately a plea for liberal forebearance and open-minded empathy.