You are sitting in a comfortable chair by the fire, on a cold winter’s night. Perhaps you have a mug of tea in hand, perhaps something stronger. You open a magazine to an article you’ve been meaning to read. The title suggested a story about a promising — but also potentially dangerous — new technology on the cusp of becoming mainstream, and after reading only a few sentences, you find yourself pulled into the story. A revolution is coming in machine intelligence, the author argues, and we need, as a society, to get better at anticipating its consequences. But then the strangest thing happens: You notice that the writer has, seemingly deliberately, omitted the very last word of the first .
The missing word jumps into your consciousness almost unbidden: ‘‘the very last word of the first paragraph.’’ There’s no sense of an internal search query in your mind; the word ‘‘paragraph’’ just pops out. It might seem like second nature, this filling-in-the-blank exercise, but doing it makes you think of the embedded layers of knowledge behind the thought. You need a command of the spelling and syntactic patterns of English; you need to understand not just the dictionary definitions of words but also the ways they relate to one another; you have to be familiar enough with the high standards of magazine publishing to assume that the missing word is not just a typo, and that editors are generally loath to omit key words in published pieces unless the author is trying to be clever — perhaps trying to use the missing word to make a point about your cleverness, how swiftly a human speaker of English can conjure just the right word.
Sitting at a big wooden table at Ken Ruzicka’s home on a cold November morning in Fire Island Pines, the 79-year-old artist and landscape designer is telling me how he acquired the table. We’re surrounded by space heaters, which keep the one-story cottage warm, and his own artwork, accumulated from more than 40 years of painting; a smell of summer mold hovers in my nose as Ruzicka explains that the table comes from famed furniture designer and friend David Ebner, for whom he made a garden in exchange for the table many years ago.
Just who was this man? And why did he matter to so many people in so many different places? The historian Jerry Z. Muller has been studying the Taubes legend for many years, and now we have this fascinating, judicious biography. “Professor of Apocalypse” is at once a history of ideas, a gripping psychological melodrama and a study of the surprising power of intellectual charisma to make and unmake lives.
As Insel acknowledges in his new book on the state of our nation's psychiatric care, "Healing: Our Path From Mental Illness to Mental Health," this failure to make a major difference in the lives of people suffering from serious mental illness — say, chronic major depression or schizophrenia — haunts him. "Our science was looking for causes and mechanisms," he writes, "while the effects of these disorders were playing out in increasing death and disability, increasing incarceration and homelessness, and increasing frustration and despair for both patients and families." He argues that while research should continue to play the long game, mental health policy urgently needs major reforms now.
Seven in the evening
the announcement blew up
the city’s telephone lines
My sedan was jogging down the lane