Mental Hellth

This is part 2 of 2 in a series about “wokeness” and how activism and discourse became so poisonous. You can read part 1 here.

This is part 1 of 2. Next week will be about the history and psychology behind these pyramid schemes. That one will be paywalled, just FYI. This one is not. Imagine, if you will, a segmented pyramid. Kinda like the FDA food pyramid. At the bottom of this pyramid is the working class—oppressed, struggling to make ends meet. There’s a lot of them. The base of the pyramid is, like any pyramid, bigger at the bottom than at the top. Then in the middle you have, you guessed it, the middle class.

I found this image in an advertisement for massage tables but I also thought it was a kind of great representation of what happens on the table. You are addressing…the elephant! The last session I had with Kento Spanos, my friend and also someone I do bodywork with, made me feel insane in a good way. As I lay on his table, I could feel different emotions in different parts of my body as Kento pushed his weight into them, or gently held them.

Recently, the White House proposed raiding federal funds set aside for people living in poverty to create $9,000-per-child bonuses for couples in which one person stays home to take care of the kids. Like everything done by this current White House, it wasn’t only a stupid and evil proposal, but one based in a very specific form of stupidity and evil.

Gabe Bullard is a journalist living in Basel, Switzerland.

In or around the year 1849, Princess Alexandra Amelie of Bavaria walked down the corridors of her palace slowly and sideways, like a crab, gingerly crossing through doorways as if she was nearly too big to fit through them. Those around her wondered what was afoot. Alexandra told them there was a problem: she’d swallowed a grand piano made completely of glass as a child and it was still inside her. If she bumped into something, the piano, and thus her body, would shatter.

[The title of this piece is a reference to the Smashing Pumpkins, in case you didn’t get it]. What Would You Do Alone in a Cage with Nothing but Cocaine?is the title of philosopher and bioethicist Hanna Pickard’s recently-published book, and also a question I can’t stop thinking about (I would probably do a lot of cocaine).

Good news! The rural upstate New York school district that spent almost $60,000 to bring “Sally,” an AI-powered human-esque robot, to its classrooms, has paused its plans. The school board had partnered with an AI startup called Realbotix to introduce the bot in order to theoretically teach kids about technology. But the plans hit a snag when the New York State teacher’s union pointed out that Realbotix’s sister company was a hyperrealistic sex doll manufacturer.

Ancient millenial wisdom. This is part five (the final part, I think) of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here, and part four here.

This is part four of a series on fostering your own agency. You can read part one here, and part two here, and part three here. Go forth and prosper or whatever!!!! I remember peeing in a gender-neutral bathroom of the science building at my hippy-dippy college and seeing a poster on one of the stall’s walls that said something like you can be whatever gender you want to be, you can have whatever pronouns—he/him, she/her, xe/xir—you want.