Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
—Irish Murdoch
—from The Sea, The Sea
iatrogenic /iy-A-tro-jen-ik/. adjective. In medicine: an illness or symptom caused by a physician’s treatment or medications. In more general use, a problem caused by the means of treating another problem but ascribed to being a natural part of the original. From Greek iatro- (pertaining to medicine or physicians) + -genic (producing, caused by).
“In healthcare, a significant percentage of illnesses are iatrogenic. In other words, they are caused by the treatment. Antibiotics may solve the problem of a current infection but also may be the cause of a future infection.” (Michael J. Gelb)
“Weber suggested they go outside and stroll down toward the river. A little nervously, Mark agreed. The brisk air worked on Mark. The longer they talked, the more adamant Mark became. It struck Weber that maybe he’d been helping the man create this illness. Iatrogenic. Collaboration between doctor and patient.” (Richard Powers)
“Those who cannot pay constitute about one-third of the population of our overcrowded and hopelessly mismanaged prisons, and the business of their trial by due process delays and overtaxes the courts beyond all reason. These are nomogenic crimes, caused by bad laws, just as iatrogenic diseases are caused by bad doctoring.” (Alan Watts)
The always awesome 99% Invisible podcast put out a particularly tasty episode last week on the interrobang (‽‽‽) and the octothorpe (###) || See also, two new (to me), conversational word nerd/language podcasts I’ve been enjoying lately: Lexitecture and Words for Dinner. Speaking of podcasts, how has it taken this long for something like Wilson—a podcast magazine (sadly iOS only right now)—to become a thing?
“The Race Card Project encourages people to condense their observations and experiences about race into one sentence with just Six Words.” Some of them are extremely powerful.
Play the Font Memory Game for the 30% discount on a quality book…or just because it is addictive.
This week in Twitter: @WYR_Bot is a neural network that asks deliciously weird, sometimes surreal “would you rather” questions every three hours on Twitter. A few from recent days: “Would you rather eat your own hair or have a cat with a giant cake?” “Would you rather be able to run anywhere or have no pain?” “Would you rather be santa or climb uncontrollably??”
This Week in Wikipedia: the bizarre story of Jára Cimrman, “universal genius, and one of the greatest Czech playwrights, poets, composers, teachers, travellers, philosophers, inventors, detectives, mathematicians, and sportsmen of the 19th and early 20th century.” And entirely fictional.
This week in heists: ATMs spewing cash, jet-setting money mules, and more than a billion dollars still missing and the Con Queen of Hollywood (Thanks, Reader B.!)
“Such ambiguous words not only allow the speaker to avoid being pinned down but also allow the receiver to interpret the message in a way that is consistent with their preconceived notions. Obviously, the result is poor communication.” → How to communicate likelihood and probability more effectively.
“There’s an ambient grandiosity to it all, like fridge poetry for Roman Emperors.” → I don’t get the appeal of Jordan Peterson. This has to be the best (and most brutal; same thing) assessment of Peterson and his “thinking” I’ve been lucky enough to read.
Today in 1919, novelist and philosopher (Dame Jean) Irish Murdoch is born in Dublin, Ireland. Winner of the Booker and James Tait Black Memorial prizes, the Whitbread Award, and routinely listed as a top 10, 50, 100 etc novelist, Murdoch’s fiction nevertheless remains under-read, though not as criminally under-appreciated as her philosophy. Murdoch led a rather unconventional lifestyle, marrying novelist and critic John Bayley (who declared that sex was “inescapably ridiculous”) in 1956 and remaining with him, while engaging in numerous destructive affairs with men and women, until her death from Alzheimer’s—a cruel end for such a bright mind—in 1999. To learn more about Murdoch, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum’s insightful 2001 assessment of Murdoch, the “anomalous” novelist and philosopher. Good places to start with her deeply various fictions are the Booker-prize winning The Sea, The Sea, her first novel Under the Net and the unrepentant and racy A Severed Head.
“The film shows the most in-depth and visually easy-to-understand process of making type. It follows the entire process of type making from original design (showcasing Lydian by Warren Chappell) to pattern making, punch cutting, matrix making, and the use of the Benton engraving machine.” → ► Type Speaks - 1948
► Formation Wingsuit Terrain Flying at the Mettlehorn in Switzerland
Reader V.: “Readers might be interested in another OED appeal for reader contributions. This one is for hobby words.”
Reader B.: “Love those British PSAs.”
Reader S.: “your word today brought to mind another that I have been recently investigating, psychopomp a term that has come up in my preliminary investigations of ‘death doulas’ as a potential new career choice (not sure how serious I am, but am intrigued and feel like it’s a critical element missing in modern society, proper relation to death and dying.)”
Reader K.: “That poem… Can I apply it to every single ex-boyfriend I have ever had? The ex-husband? Select family members?”
Reader D.: “Your poem about darkness reminded me of an episode of RadioLab called Dark Side Of The Earth, specifically the part starting at 9:00 from the beginning, a wonderful and beautiful description of the darkness of space by an American astronaut, Dave Wolf, who was aboard the Mir spacecraft, the precurser of the International Space Station operated by the Russians in the 1990’s. Dave is a riveting story teller. I’ll never forget this segment of RadioLab.”
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