“The fascination of what’s difficult,” wrote WB Yeats, “has dried the sap out of my veins ... ” In the press coverage of this year’s Man Booker prize winner, Anna Burns’s Milkman, we’ve read a good many commentators presenting with sapless veins – but a dismaying lack of any sense that what’s difficult might be fascinating.
“Odd”, “impenetrable”, “hard work”, “challenging” and “brain-kneading” have been some of the epithets chosen. They have not been meant, I think, as compliments. The chair of the judges, Kwame Anthony Appiah, perhaps unhelpfully, humblebragged that: “I spend my time reading articles in the Journal of Philosophy, so by my standards this is not too hard.” But he added that Milkman is “challenging […] the way a walk up Snowdon is challenging. It is definitely worth it because the view is terrific when you get to the top.”
The grand term ‘intellectual property’ covers a lot of ground: the software that runs our lives, the movies we watch, the songs we listen to. But also the credit-scoring algorithms that determine the contours of our futures, the chemical structure and manufacturing processes for life-saving pharmaceutical drugs, even the golden arches of McDonald’s and terms such as ‘Google’. All are supposedly ‘intellectual property’. We are urged, whether by stern warnings on the packaging of our Blu-ray discs or by sonorous pronouncements from media company CEOs, to cease and desist from making unwanted, illegal or improper uses of such ‘property’, not to be ‘pirates’, to show the proper respect for the rights of those who own these things. But what kind of property is this? And why do we refer to such a menagerie with one inclusive term?
The phrase ‘intellectual property’ was first used in a legal decision in 1845 and acquired formal heft in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialised agency of the United Nations that represents and protects the commercial interests of holders of copyrights, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. The ubiquitous use of ‘intellectual property’ began in the digital era of production, reproduction and distribution of cultural and technical artifacts. As a new political economy appeared, so did a new commercial and legal rhetoric. ‘Intellectual property’, a central term in that new discourse, is a culturally damaging and easily weaponised notion. Its use should be resisted.
After 30 hours of bumping along on planes and buses, at long last I stood in the darkness and gazed upon an immense night sky. My long journey seemingly had brought me to the shoreline of interstellar space rather than the high-altitude plateau that is Chile’s Atacama Desert.
It was the first night of a monthlong journey to visit astronomy observatories in Chile, Los Angeles and Hawaii. Whether designed for professional use or for the general public, observatories nurture humanity’s explorations of the cosmos. They spark wonder and discovery, but even before I set foot inside the first one, I was seeing outer space in a spellbinding new way.
Craig Flournoy, a white reporter working at The Dallas Morning News, was among the reporters arriving from elsewhere to cover the story. He noticed that the articles published by his colleagues at mainstream, predominately white, news outlets lacked historical context about race relations in Clarksville and in the rest of the South. The stories delved little into the discrimination suit, which at that point was three years old; the swap had been, after all, a last resort. As Flournoy read, what stood out most was the characterization of the two housing projects as separate but equal—an assertion he doubted. “The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post—everyone who covered it said the two projects appeared similar,” Flournoy recalls. “They weren’t, by any sense of the imagination.” When he went to visit the buildings, he says. “It didn’t take a friggin’ rocket scientist to figure this out.”
By this time, newsrooms were no longer formally segregated and the nation was decades deep in legislation intended to improve racial politics. But even as legislative advances had begun to usher in, for black and other people of color, a new type of agency backed by the law, advances within news outlets were less than impressive. The beginnings of newsroom integration had little reckoning with the absence of black journalists; instead, there was tokenization, while displays of unconscious racial bias remained evident.
“Basically, she described the criteria in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5),” says Irina Manouilenko, a psychiatrist who runs a clinic in Stockholm, Sweden. Manouilenko translated Sukhareva’s original descriptions from Russian to English in 2013 and then compared them with the diagnostic criteria described in the DSM-5. The similarities between the two left Manouilenko in awe. “When you start looking at it all systematically, it’s very impressive,” she says.
For example, what the DSM-5 describes as social deficits, Sukhareva wrote about as a “flattened affective life,” “lack of facial expressiveness and expressive movements” and “keeping apart from their peers.” What the diagnostic manual portrays as stereotyped or repetitive behaviors, restricted interests and sensory sensitivities, Sukhareva explained as “talking in stereotypic ways,” with “strong interests pursued exclusively” and sensitivities to specific noises or smells. In her analysis, Manouilenko was able to match each of the manual’s criteria to one or more of Sukhareva’s observations.
Historians are beginning to ponder why it took nearly a century for the DSM-5—published in 2013 after years of debate—to arrive back at something so close to Sukhareva’s list. They have found that Sukhareva isn’t the only clinician whose research was overlooked or lost before autism was described in the DSM-III. As more archival material is digitized, it’s becoming clear that Kanner and Asperger may need to share credit for the ‘discovery’ of autism—and that the condition’s history could be as complex as its biology.
“I don’t want to go backpacking with Daddy. He’s too slow. I always have to wait for him!”
Alanna, 19, was explaining to my wife why she intended to venture into Yosemite’s back country with a friend rather than me.
But a few days later her friend canceled.
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
She looked at me sideways. “You will?”
“Sure. You figure out where we’re going, get the permits, and I’ll go with you.”
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