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Seduced By Character

Obsessed, by Steve Volk. Published by Discover In-Depth. Available at Kalmbach Bookstore, $1.99.

Reviewed by Virginia Hughes  

A great long-form narrative demands at least one irresistible character. If a writer finds a protagonist who is quirky, contradictory, charming, sadistic, or interesting in any other way, the reader will follow that character through any number of complex ideas.

In OBSESSED: The Compulsions and Creations of Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, released this past weekend, writer Steve Volk finds that special character and describes him beautifully. According to Volk's depiction, Schwartz is a socially awkward, belligerent psychiatrist whose research has been unfairly shunned by the scientific establishment. He is an unsung hero whose revolutionary behavioral therapy has rescued thousands of people from the irrational fears and repetitive behaviors of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). If his success continues, Schwartz may even rescue the withering concept of free will.

Great long-form science writing is not only about the yarn, however. It's also about pulling away from the character's seductive orbit in order to put his or her ideas into a wider scientific context. And Obsessed, unfortunately, doesn't do that well. Volk tells a slanted truth about Schwartz, the man, and about how his work fits into the larger field of anxiety research. That shortcoming is particularly disappointing given that Obsessed is the debut long-form e-book of an established science magazine, Discover.

It's obvious from the first few pages of Obsessed that Volk, a senior writer at Philadelphia Magazine, is a master of narrative. If there was ever a dull moment in the book's 13,000-plus words, I don't remember it.

I worry, though, that because of its compelling and seemingly authoritative story, readers will come away from the book with inaccurate ideas about anxiety disorders and how the mind works.

Take Schwartz's therapy, for example, which is a combination of mindfulness—a technique borrowed from Buddhist meditation in which you try to detach yourself from your emotions by focusing on breathing or some other innocuous behavior—and reappraisal, or explicitly focusing on naming and re-framing your emotions. Volk describes Schwartz's therapy as novel and even revolutionary—a thorn in the side of the psychiatric establishment and its beloved pharmaceuticals.

But Volk largely ignores the fact that Schwartz's approach is only a slight variation of other kinds of cognitive behavioral therapies (including exposure therapy, which Schwartz oddly villifies). These treatments have been around for decades and are firmly established among psychiatrists as effective for some people with anxiety disorders.

So the fact that Schwartz's therapy works for many people with OCD is not at all surprising. The brain changes with our day-to-day experiences—it's why even adults can learn new things, and yes, why some people with addiction, depression, and anxiety disorders can overcome them without drugs. There aren't many neuroscientists or psychiatrists who would disagree with that.

Where Schwartz stirs up trouble, Volk explains, is in his leap from the existence of an adaptable brain to the existence of free will:

“We’re talking about people with a biological brain disorder,” says Schwartz, “who learn through the use of neuroplasticity to change their brain function! That’s free will in action!”

It is a claim that flies in the face of most modern neuroscientific research, which suggests an ever-increasing number of our “choices” are somehow hard-wired into us—from which candidate we vote for to which flavor of ice cream tops our cone.

But there are actually lots of neuroscientists who believe in free will. (Even David Eagleman, one of the three scientists whom Volk puts in the anti-free-will camp, is on the fence about it.) It's an age-old question that people have debated forever. I suspect that Schwartz's colleagues don't like him for two of his other, crazier ideas, neither of which is adequately challenged in the book.

The first is Schwartz's theory about the physical processes underlying free will. In one head-spinning chapter, Volk explains how a combination of wave-particle duality, quantum Zeno, and Hebb's law might prove that the mind is separate from the brain. Volk tells us that "this is an idea in its infancy", yet neglects to include any outside comments from independent physicists or neuroscientists. The reader is left with no sense of how plausible—or crackpot—this theory is.

The second overlooked part of Schwartz's biography is his recent conversion to Christianity. Here's how Volk describes it:

The most important new development in Schwartz’s life underscores the schism between the champion of free will and the academics who oppose him: Schwartz has become a devoted Christian, his faith formed in great part by reading the essays of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor executed by the Nazis for insurrection. His faith seems odd at first—the young Jew, turned Buddhist, scientist and then Christian. But in the life-story of Deitrich Bonhoeffer, Schwartz’s guidepost for Christianity, there is a finer and firmer example of Schwartz’s own tough-mindedness. Bonhoeffer believed so strongly he died for it, openly opposing the Hitler regime that ultimately assassinated him.

What's never mentioned, however, is that in accepting Christ, Schwartz also seems to have rejected evolution. He is one of several hundred scientists to sign A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism, a document put together by the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank that lobbies for creationism. The signatories of that document, including Schwartz, endorsed the statement: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life."

With that kind of public rejection of a fundamental law of biology, is it any wonder that some scientists are skeptical of Schwartz's other ideas?* And doesn't his alignment with creationists deserve at least a mention in a story of his scientific career?

Jeffrey Schwartz is a character, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know. But ultimately, the man's obsessions corrupted his work—and Volk's work, too.

 

*Update, 9/8/13: Schwartz signed the Discovery Institute document in 2004, years after being condemned by his peers. So that couldn't be part of his critics' motivations, as I speculated in the review, and I regret that error. Since my review appeared, Volk and Discover In-Depth have issued an updated version of the book that includes a paragraph about Schwartz's ties with the Discovery Institute. You can download the book here.

 

Virginia Hughes is a science writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, and Slate, and her blog Only Human is part of National Geographic magazine’s Phenomena. Follow her on Twitter.

*

DTU Editor Maia Szalavitz contributed much to the reporting and thinking behind this review

The Wrong Way to Write about Epigenetics and Violence

"The Ghost in the Cell," by Scott C. Johnson. Published by Matter. Available via Web, ePub, Kindle. $.99.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

It's a prize that scientists have sought since the early nineteenth century: a biological marker that predicts violent behavior in humans. In the 1830s, phrenologists believed head bumps could reveal a criminal personality -- often, prostitutes and the poor were said to have bumps that marked them as deviants from birth. But today, it seems this pursuit may have moved beyond the realm of pseudoscience.

Thanks to recent discoveries, we have evidence that the genes of abused children are marked by the experience. Over time, these effects leave them prone to depression and make it harder for them to control their violent impulses. Could we be on the cusp of discovering a scientific approach to a social problem? In an essay for Matter magazine, former war correspondent Scott C. Johnson suggests that we are. Unfortunately, Johnson fails spectacularly to explain the complexity of this problem, and winds up telling a story that distorts both the science and the reality of abuse in many people's lives.

Autism, Inside and Out

Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect by Amy Harmon. A New York Times/Byliner Original. Available for Kindle, iPad, Kobo, and Nook, $2.99.

And Straight On Till Morning: Essays on Autism Acceptance, edited by Julia Bascom. Published by the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network. Available for Kindle, $2.99.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

In the early 1990s, a mother told a conference of autism professionals that the upside of having a teenager on the spectrum at home is that they will never want to do the things that often get kids in trouble. There will be no need for awkward conversations about sex, because people with autism are either uninterested in or incapable of intimacy. Parents won't have to worry about a late-night knock on the door from the local sheriff, because autistic teens have no desire to party. If these generalizations now seem naïve, offensive, or some combination of the two, this mother had a lot of company in her assumptions. The notion that people on the spectrum are disinclined to seek connection with others is embedded in the very word autism, which is derived from the Greek word for self, autos.

One of the world's leading authorities on the subject, psychologist Tony Attwood, devotes only a handful of pages in his Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome to sexuality and relationships. Specifically, there are two references to "lack of desire," four to pornography, two to exploitation by predators, and two to celibacy. Casting a further chilling effect on the notion of romance, Atwood cautions potential suitors that people on the spectrum may find a friendly touch on the arm "unpleasant and even difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy" because of sensory sensitivity, and compares embracing an autistic partner to "hugging a piece of wood." This is the historical backdrop that looms -- albeit invisibly to most readers -- behind the publication of a new ebook by Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, Asperger Love: Searching for Romance When You're Not Wired to Connect.

A Portable Science Museum

Sound Uncovered by The Exploratorium. iPad (iOS6 required), Free.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi. 

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. 

Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music. It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered. 

The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum. A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want. B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you. 

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards. 

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes. 

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too. 

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

 

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of  Before the Lights Go Out.

The Elusive Psychology of Mass Murder

The Mind of a Madman: Norway's Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik. By Richard Orange. Kindle Single, $1.99.

Review by Maia Szalavitz

Following Aurora and Sandy Hook— and the concerns that have not surprisingly arisen over the questions of violence, guns and mental illness— I was eager to read journalist Richard Orange’s Mind of a Madman: Norway’s Struggle to Understand Anders Breivik .

The book ably and lucidly details the story of the trial of the man who carried out the world’s deadliest mass shooting by a single individual. It’s full of twists and turns, with Orange expertly doling out the suspense as to whether the killer will ultimately be declared sane or not. But it lacks the context and analysis I’d hoped to find in an account of an event in which psychiatry faces off against what can only be called evil.

Orange, a foreign correspondent for the UK’s Daily Telegraph, covered Breivik’s trial after the Norwegian right wing ideologue killed 8 people in bomb attacks on government buildings in Oslo, then gunned down 69 people, mostly teens, who were attending a political youth camp in July 2011.

Breivik claimed he committed the attacks to “save” Norway from Islam, multiculturalism, “cultural Marxism” and feminism. Initially, a psychiatric report by two of the country’s leading experts claimed that he had paranoid schizophrenia.

Their evidence for this diagnosis was his apparently false claims about being connected to a larger terrorist network, his self-bestowed medals and handmade military “uniform” and his belief that he had the right to kill for his ideas. These were seen as “delusions,” which occurred after a period of social withdrawal before the attacks and his rants were said to contain “neologisms” or made-up words, additional evidence of disordered thinking.

According to the initial report, these factors were apparently enough to qualify Breivik for a diagnosis of schizophrenia under the ICD 10, which is the international medical diagnostic manual and is similar in its psychiatric classifications to the DSM.

“His political world exists just to have a world to be psychotic in,” one of authors of the report testified.

But after the report was leaked, experts on the far right argued that Breivik’s “neologisms” were actually common terms used by others with similar views, making the diagnosis controversial. The ICD criteria apparently require that schizophrenic beliefs be “culturally inappropriate,” and the fact that the other far right groups he saw as his peers had similar views called that into question.

Breivik was surprisingly insightful about this paradox: “What I think is that [they] could not believe that a normal person could do such a thing. A person who does something so terrible cannot be normal. He must be sick.”

After widespread outrage, a second report was ordered. This time, a new group of professionals determined that Breivik had not been psychotic while carrying out the attacks. The second report accepted that his ideology and resulting actions, while clearly despicable, were not in and of themselves evidence of psychosis.

But there was still disagreement among the experts who testified as to what Breivik’s diagnosis— and everyone agreed that there should be one— actually was. Breivik had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder as a child because of his “pedantic” ways and obsessive compulsive behavior, so one psychiatrist suggested that this led to his “lack of empathy.”

However, a psychologist disagreed with the accuracy of that diagnosis, testifying that during an evaluation, Breivik was “polite and friendly and seemed empathetic.” One of Brievik’s childhood friends had called him “one of the most sociable people” that he knew.

Other psychiatrists argued that Brievik’s real problem was a personality disorder— either narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder, probably well into psychopathy— or some toxic combination of the two, along with his racist ideology.

Mind of a Madman, however, does not provide readers enough context to draw conclusions about Breivik's true state of mind. It does not include the ICD diagnostic criteria or give any background information about conditions like personality disorders, schizophrenia and Asperger’s. As a result, it’s very difficult to weigh the battling reports and conflicting testimony. The book doesn’t mention that autism spectrum disorders are not linked with violence, nor does it explore the controversy over the link between schizophrenia and violence. It also fails to examine the question of empathy itself. This quality is critical to several of the diagnoses and seems to have been misunderstood by some of those who testified, incorrectly claiming that autistic people always lack empathy.

While this probably reflects a newspaper journalist’s attempt to be “objective” and simply detail the (most certainly compelling) story of the trial, it left me frustrated. Underneath this story is a tale of the ongoing problems with our current system of psychiatric diagnosis and the lack of objective measures available to characterize mental illness. There’s also a story about why some diagnoses— like schizophrenia— are seen as mitigating, while others— like personality disorders— are seen as aggravating. And of what brain science suggests about moral responsibility.

Moreover, there’s also an untold story of a country which is not bent on vengeance even after such an unimaginable crime, a country that would have accepted either an insanity verdict or the one that came down, which found Breivik morally responsible and sentenced him to 21 years, a sentence that can and likely will be extended if he is still found dangerous at that time.

Of course, a short ebook may not be the place for such depth, but some basic facts about diagnosis and the controversies it evokes would have been extremely useful. There’s certainly room for greater exploration of the Breivik case in light of these distressingly frequent events— and especially for an examination of the role of culture, psychiatric ideas and varying legal systems so that we can become better at preventing or dealing with them.

 

Maia Szalavitz is a neuroscience journalist for TIME.com and the author of five books, most recently Born for Love: Why Empathy is Essential—and Endangered, with Bruce Perry, M.D. Ph.D.

Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science

Do No Harm, by Anil Ananthaswamy. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Talk about burying the lead.

Yesterday the Washington Post announced that they were hiring a new editor-in-chief. Reporting for the New York Times, Christine Haughney wrote that the Post made the switch because they were struggling with a steep decline in readership. It's not until deep in the piece that Haughney makes a startling statement:

"The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets, like Politico, whose founders include former Washington Post reporters."

Politico certainly didn't bring the Washington Post to its current moment of crisis singlehandedly. But it is striking to me that a web operation started from scratch in 2007 could baloon so fast that it could become a major threat to what was once one of the world's leading newspapers.

My attention was drawn to this buried lead because I've recently been getting to know a new player in the science news business, called Matter. This morning they are launching their web site, and their first piece of long-form journalism. It's way too early to predict whether Matter will become the Politico of the science world. But they definitely are entering the arena with impressive style.

Can Science Ever Truly Liberate Us From Evil?

Angel Killer, by Deborah Blum (The Atavist, October 2012). Available via The Atavist app and for Kindle.

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

With the essay Angel Killer, science historian Deborah Blum (a DTU editor) takes us into the disturbing world of Albert Fish, a serial killer who raped, murdered and ate perhaps dozens of children in New York City during the 1920s. But this essay is more than an elegant true crime story of atrocious transgression and dogged detection. It exposes the origins of a clash between the scientific and religious approaches to punishment, by reminding us of the most important aspect of the Fish case. Generally, the "Gray Man," as he was nicknamed, is remembered for his ghoulish crimes against children -- and himself, as he was fond of driving needles into his groin. In Angel Killer, however, Blum makes the case that his trial is what should go down in history. It was the first high-profile trial where psychologists argued that a murderer should not get the death penalty for reasons of insanity. 

Though we hear the phrase "not guilty by reason of insanity" a lot in fiction, Blum points out that in reality it is not generally a successful plea. Even today, very few criminals are found to be insane, even when they've done things that are as beyond the pale as Fish's cannibalistic rituals. By retelling the story of Fish and the society that condemned him to death, Blum is able to explore one of the areas where scientific reason is most often swept aside for an Old Testament notion of "eye for an eye" justice. Though judges, juries, and even psychologists knew that a child killer like Fish was in fact insane and therefore unable to distinguish between right and wrong, they could not bring themselves to treat him the way psychology would demand. Instead of offering him treatment, Fish's peers resorted to an ancient and ultimately superstitious notion that he was simply evil and therefore should be struck down by the state for his acts.  

Though we can see the war between scientific and religious ideas of transgression slowly building throughout Blum's essay, she never beats the reader over the head with socio-political analysis. Instead, she allows the story to speak for itself. One of the most intriguing characters to emerge, other than the mysterious Fish, is the psychologist who worked most on the killer's case. That was the young Fredric Wertham, who became famous in the 1950s for arguing that violent and sexual images in comics were inspiring juvenile delinquency in his book The Seduction of the Innocent. Wertham, who worked with many of New York's poorest populations, was eager to take on Fish's case because he was all too familiar with how little attention was usually paid to the sorts of working class and impoverished families who had lost their children to Fish's knife. 

Wertham was also oddly sympathetic to Fish. After hours of interviews with the jailed killer, Wertham became convinced that Fish was absolutely insane. Aside from his known crimes, Fish also spoke to angels, mutilated himself, and had religious delusions about becoming a god. He'd even been committed to asylums a couple of times, once by his own daughter. Wertham wanted to find out how such a man could have been in and out of mental institutions without anyone ever noticing that he was violently unstable. In court, Wertham argued that Fish could not have understood that his crimes were wrong, and that he deserved life in a mental institution rather than the electric chair.

What emerges from Blum's tale of Wertham's court battle is a profound sense of our struggle as a culture to deal scientifically with mental illness. Most people fundamentally believe that criminals like Fish are "bad" and "evil" and should therefore be killed. Psychologists today still fight to convince juries and the public that some criminals have damaged minds, shaped by horrific circumstances. Fish's story, which begins with his abusive childhood in an orphanage, is a classic tale of a troubled person who was neglected and mistreated by the very institutions that were supposed to aid him. Even the psychologists who saw him as an adult, and knew about his profound delusions, released him onto the street because he was "sane enough." Instead of recovering, Fish only sank more deeply into madness.

Blum's essay is available via the Atavist app, whose enhancements make the experience of reading almost cinematic. The story begins with a haunting 1920s-era film of Staten Island ferries docking in downtown Manhattan, set to period music. Maps of the crime scenes walk us through the early twentieth century streets of New York City like we were cops on the beat. And Blum treats us to snapshots of the screaming headlines about Fish's murders and trial, which help us understand how his crimes were depicted at the time. At one point, we have the opportunity to pull up a creepy letter that Fish sent to the mother of one of his victims (complete with a warning that it may be too graphic for some readers). The multimedia extras never feel extraneous, and aid enormously with the historical scene-setting required here.

Ultimately Angel Killer is not a story of crime -- it is a story of how we understand crime. More than that, it is about how science has the opportunity to change profoundly the way we treat both criminals and the mentally ill. The tragedy is that when it comes to human atrocity, science often fails to persuade us and superstition takes over. Albert Fish was killed in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1936.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of the forthcoming book Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive the Next Mass Extinction.

The Science of Sports: An eBook Goes for the Gold, Gets A Bronze

The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. Scientific American $3.99   Kindle, iBook, Nook,  Sony Reader

Guest review by Jaime Green

I love the Olympics, although I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the special-occasion feel, or the every-two-years anticipation--a longer wait than for next Christmas. (I do remember when both summer and winter games were held in the same year, though not well enough to recall whether the four-year wait heightened the thrill or if the crush of excitement was too much, gymnastics and archery only six months from figure luge and ski jump.)

The exotic sports at the Olympics also add to its thrill. Sure, people will snark about the two weeks a year we care about synchronized diving --“Where were you during world championships last year!?”--but for those two weeks we do care! We cram our brains with obscure knowledge. Every four winters we learn about triple axels and the salchow--how the heck to spell salchow--and then we let it all go dormant for the next four years, until we can debate the finer points of fencing again.

It's this thrill of the unusual, and of learning its finer points, that I was looking for in Scientific American's ebook, The Science of Sports: Winning in the Olympics. And coming into it looking for that angle, I was disappointed that the book stayed so true to the first part of its title: the science of sports. That's what this ebook is full of. What it is not full of, and what I missed, was the science of the Olympics.

This first ebook from the editors of Scientific American reads much more like a collection of articles than a single work, and as such it is a perfectly serviceable survey on the science of sports. Pieces are divided into eight sections: The Psychology of Winning, Pushing Human Limits, Drugs and Doping, Concussions, Comeback from Injury, Gear that Gives an Edge, Fitness: Expert Advice for You, and Closing Ceremonies. The pieces, written especially for this ebook by individual Scientific American editors and contributors, explore the physiology, biochemistry, and neurobiology of sports. They also examine recent incidents, such as doping scandals, that bring science and sports together in less savory ways.

Although the lack of unity was sometimes frustrating on a straight-through read--back-to-back articles sometimes retread each other's ground, re-explaining a concept or re-defining a blood protein--it still makes for a nice collection to pick your way through. There's no need to read in order, so you can follow your interests, from the mental acuity of an elite athlete to the most common Olympic injuries and then over to how playing sports can boost children's brain power. You'll learn something cool whichever path you take. And there's a lot to learn. Even if you didn't need this ebook to teach you that the ACL isn't the Achilles tendon but is actually in the knee, there is satisfyingly deep discussion of topics ranging from psychology to blood doping to the physics of prosthetic legs.

The questions tackled in this ebook go beyond the science of sports, too, in several cases engaging with the ethical questions that scientific advances raise. Do steroids make better athletes, or do they make cheaters? How many restrictions should be put on young athletes to protect their brains from concussions? Where does an athlete find the balance between improved performance and dangerously low body fat? These questions make interesting food for thought, and perhaps also foundations for important decisions. The ramifications extend far beyond the Olympic arenas.

Yet I still wished this ebook spent more time within those Olympic arenas. Many pieces focus surprisingly squarely on the topic of the ebook's subtitle: winning. It's as if the ebook's authors decided that Olympic equals elite, and then just wrote about how elite athletes win. But I don't care if Michael Phelps gets the gold. I care that he is stunning to watch. (In the pool, I mean.) And I want to know the science behind his performance--of something that feels specifically, uniquely Olympic. Articles that focused on baseball and American football felt similarly dissatisfying. They're sports, yes, but hardly what we think of as Olympic sports. (In fact, now that baseball's been dropped from the games, neither is an Olympic sport.) For readers drawn to this ebook for the Olympics and not for the sports, this may be a disappointment.

Also potentially disappointing--or virulently frustrating, depending on your level of investment--are some gaps in the scientific and athletic arguments. Jesse Bering's piece, “Why We Love Sports: Success of the Fittest,” proposes that sports compel us as fans and spectators because they serve as a demonstration of reproductive prowess. (Think of football as the peacock tail-feathers of our species.) This argument itself is a stretch. Sports audiences are so dramatically weighted toward men who are not looking to the field for mates. Bering doesn't even give the plausible counterarguments lip service. What about the primal need for play? Tribal affiliations and the strengthening power of us vs. them? The evolution and ritualization of hunting and combat practice? Heck, maybe even mirror neurons, who knows?

In a piece called “Does Exercise Really Make You Stronger?” Coco Ballantyne asserts that “the longer, harder and more often you exercise, the greater the health benefits.” She fails to offer the important caveat against overtraining, which plagues professional and devoted amateur athletes alike, with increased risk of injuries and often dramatic negative effects from overstressing the body. An article on preventing shin splints was similarly narrow-sighted, failing to mention the calf-strengthening exercises that have saved the shins of every new runner I know. 

The highlights of the book examined the subjects that I, and most readers, have no experience with. The articles on top-level cyclists and swimmers, on Olympic runner Oscar Pistorious' prosthetic legs, drew me in much more and carried that charge of the slightly esoteric that make me love the Olympics. Even an article on advanced swim gear brought a little frisson of elite, advanced technology. And “Who Wins the 40-Yard Dash: Squirrel, Elephant, Pig, Human?” armed me for some fun small-talk to fill the breaks between track and field events over the next two weeks.

For the most part, though, the science here is decidedly pedestrian. Readers who want to learn about the geometry of a rhythmic gymnast's twirling ribbon or how a pentathlete slows her heart rate before she shoots will have to wait. Maybe there will be something for us in another four years.

 

Jaime Green is a graduate student in Columbia's MFA writing program. Her work has appeared in The Awl, Spezzatino, The Hairpin, and Parabasis. She is writing a book about the possibility of life in the universe.

Rudy Rucker Resurrects a Lost Classic of Psychedelia

Be Not Content: A Subterranean Journal, by William J. Craddock. Originally published in 1970 by Doubleday. Reprinted in 2011 by Transreal Books. Available for Kindle and NOOK from publisher Rudy Rucker, $6, or in paperback from Amazon, $16.

Reviewed by Steve Silberman

A Place You'll Never See

In the late 1960s, my family lived in a middle-class housing development in New York City called Fresh Meadows. An attempt to build a suburban-style utopia in the middle of Queens for returning World War 2 veterans, it was a cheerful place to grow up, with lots of trees, playgrounds linked by winding paths, and a grassy slope behind our apartment complex that was perfect for sledding in the winter. It was on that hill, one day in 1968 or so, that I met a group of refugees from another brave attempt to construct utopia in the midst of an American city.

It was a strange time to be a kid. Every night the sober, gray-faced men on TV issued dispatches from the ongoing apocalypse: liquid fire raining from the sky onto huts in Vietnam; mobs of police charging into crowds of college students, clubs flailing; flags torched, ghettos ablaze, and an actual pig running for President. Meanwhile, when my mother and father took me and my sister to Central Park on Sundays, Bethesda fountain was filled with longhaired men and women splashing around naked. I decided that when I grew up, I wanted to be like them. I turned my room into a little shrine of freakdom lit by candles weeping rainbow tears down the straw sides of chianti bottles.

In that context where anything at all might happen, it didn't seem unusual to walk behind our building on 69^th Avenue one day and find a group of older kids lying on a blanket, limbs intertwined, gazing up at the clouds and giggling occasionally between lengthy intervals of silence. Always curious, I walked right up and started asking questions. They were very friendly, and invited me to join them in playful activities like cutting leaves out of paper and hanging them in the trees. Every now and then, one of them would utter a cryptic remark along the lines of, "Should we drop another tab of blue or wait?" Even at age nine, I was savvy enough to realize that they were talking about something illegal, probably drugs. It didn't matter. The sly elves that had mysteriously appeared in my backyard were obviously harmless, and I wasn't surprised when I walked out the next morning and found them still camping out beside the basketball court.

After another day of soaking up the ambience of their psychedelic idyll, I invited them upstairs to meet my parents. This wasn't as foolish as it appears: my parents were anti-war radicals, albeit of the academic, buttoned-down, cigarette-smoking, Marx-and-Engels-quoting, Mao's little-red-book-reading, New Leftist type; but I hoped everyone might see eye-to-eye on the coming revolution. I don't remember how my parents reacted to my new pals from the backyard, but all seemed to go well. And I'll never forget what one young woman in the group said to me, right before they were sucked back into the space-time continuum, when I asked them where they came from: "We're from a place you'll never see -- the Haight-Ashbury."

O the patchouli-scented portents, O the irony! Because, dear reader, I have now been a resident of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco for 33 years -- a fact I definitely attribute to my chance meeting in Fresh Meadows with those echt hippies. But in truth, the nice lady in the purple paisley schmatte was right on. As it has been since I moved here, Haight Street is a tie-dyed dump, a dreadlocked tourist trap lined with sleazy smoke shops and prep-school refuseniks on the road to rehab under macabre murals of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix -- hardly the shining New Jerusalem that the first-generation hippies hoped to build here in the belly of the beast.

As it turns out, even seeing the Haight-Ashbury of that era through the borrowed eyes of eyewitnesses and historians has been difficult. The Paradise Now! aesthetic of the lysergic lotus-eaters didn't lend itself to careful chronicling and recollections in sober tranquility, as anyone who has tried to sit through the cosmically tedious home movies of the Merry Pranksters sloshing in the mud can attest. Ironically, a book that was thought to be insufferably square by anyone who appeared in its pages -- Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, published in 1968 -- has stood virtually unchallenged as the most vivid literary representation of the era, with its hurtling descriptions of the young Grateful Dead in full fury at Ken Kesey's multimedia clusterfucks, shining in the chaotic din "like a light-bulb in a womb."

Few certifiably clued-in alumni of that scene, it seems, were left with enough cognitive fortitude to compile the definitive tale of the tribe. Charles Perry's The Haight-Ashbury: A History is a dutifully researched, workmanlike account of events, but it lacks the bravado and flash that gave the era its lasting mythological dimension. Before ODing on a New York subway, Emmett Grogan, the swashbuckling founder of the Diggers -- the prototypical commune that kept the pilgrim hordes fed with dumpster-dive cuisine until the Mafia, speed, and busloads of free-love rubberneckers trampled down flower power for good -- wrote a memoir of the Haight called Ringolevio that had an appealing hip swagger, but never quite rose to the level of great art, as Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and Jack Kerouac's On the Road had done for the previous Beat generation of seekers.

Now, however, another title has been added to the very short list of engaging books about the golden age of neuro-hacking, when a bunch of scruffy street kids laid claim to the most potent "mind-manifesting" molecules in history, and used them to storm the synaptic gates of Heaven. First published in 1970 and long out of print, moldering on a few select dusty bookshelves beside copies of A Separate Reality, Das Energi, and The Whole Earth Catalog, William Craddock's Be Not Content is now back as an ebook and limited-edition paperback, snatched out of the memory hole by Rudy Rucker, the computer scientist and mathematician who helped launch the cyberpunk genre of fiction with his Ware tetralogy and "transrealist" novels like White Light.

Ballsy, redemptively honest, astonishingly inventive, flawed, and ultimately heartbreaking, Be Not Content made a significant impact on the handful of freaks who read it, including Rucker himself, who writes on his website, "I quickly began to idolize Craddock. I had my own memories of the psychedelic revolution, and when reading Be Not Content I felt -- Yes. This is the way it was. This guy got it right." Rucker's act of digital resurrection also represents another appealing potential for the ebook format: the revival of obscure, obsolete titles by readers obsessed enough to secure the reprint rights.

I Point To TED Talks and I Point to Kim Kardashian. That Is All.

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. TED Books. Kindle, Nook, iBooks, $2.99

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Tonight, I want to talk to you about a national crisis. A global crisis. A crisis of such tremendous proportions that you may not even be aware that it is engulfing you and your loved ones and your neighbors in flames.

What is this crisis? It is a crisis of our brains. The brains of our fellow citizens are being digitally rewired. How? Here is how. Hundreds of millions of people are gazing at online videos, spending billions of aggregate hours slack-jawed in front of their monitors. These videos are sucking up all the time that these people would otherwise spend reading the great books that you and I grew up with. Remember those days back in the Reagan administration when we little tykes would page through Cicero and Racine? No more. Instead, we face an epidemic of short-term distraction. These videos last no more than 18 minutes, and often less. As soon as one video is over, we can choose from hundreds of others with the click of a mouse. Each one is different from the last, flooding our brains with an unnatural wealth of variety. Very soon, we even become addicted to that variety. Yes, that's right, addicted. It's an addiction no different from cocaine, heroin, vodka, bingo, Ben & Jerry's, Law & Order streamed on Netflix, or MySpace.

Wait, I meant Facebook. Nobody uses MySpace anymore, so that can't be addictive.

Right. Where was I?

These videos are so addictive that they are cracking the very foundation of human civilization. The endless barrage of these tiny films erodes the circuitry in our prefrontal cortex that normally enable us to focus for long periods of time and compose Petrarchan sonnets to our loved ones. These videos evade the true complexity of life. They provide us with easy resolutions. They flatter us, rather than forcing us to ask tough questions about ourselves or our political system. We become zombies as the reward centers of the brain explode like fireworks, leaving us helpless victims for mind-controlling masters. Is it any wonder that the rise of these videos to global domination correlates perfectly with the rise of Kim Kardashian? What else could possible account for this coincidence?

Therefore we must take immediate steps to ban TED talks.

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