Oliver Sacks died yesterday. He was a brilliant man, a neurologist who was intrigued by how the brain worked on every level. He was uncommonly insightful, deeply thoughtful, invariably kind. He was a fine writer, and very skillful at relaying a highly complex and difficult subject in a way that made it not just understandable to the layperson, but compelling reading. His books and his work are still with us, but his unique voice, both humane and human, will be missed.
This is from a piece he wrote back in February of this year.
A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out — a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver. ...
I feel grateful that I have been granted nine years of good health and productivity since the original diagnosis, but now I am face to face with dying. The cancer occupies a third of my liver, and though its advance may be slowed, this particular sort of cancer cannot be halted.
It is up to me now to choose how to live out the months that remain to me. I have to live in the richest, deepest, most productive way I can. In this I am encouraged by the words of one of my favorite philosophers, David Hume, who, upon learning that he was mortally ill at age 65, wrote a short autobiography in a single day in April of 1776. He titled it “My Own Life.”
... one line from Hume’s essay strikes me as especially true: “It is difficult,” he wrote, “to be more detached from life than I am at present.”
Over the last few days, I have been able to see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts. This does not mean I am finished with life.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
I don't know to what extent Dr. Sacks reached those goals in the seven months since he wrote those words. But based on the evidence of his life to that point, I'm guessing that he loved well, traveled far, and understood much. So long, doc.
Now come on in. There's political stuff to discuss...
Andy Parker watched his daughter die on live TV.
Last Wednesday, my daughter Alison was brutally struck down in the prime of her life by a deranged gunman. Since then, I have stated in numerous interviews with local, national and international media that I plan to make my life’s work trying to implement effective and reasonable safeguards against this happening again.
In recent years we have witnessed similar tragedies unfold on TV: the shooting of a congresswoman in Arizona, the massacre of schoolchildren in Connecticut and of churchgoers in South Carolina. We have to ask ourselves: What do we need to do to stop this insanity?
In my case, the answer is: “Whatever it takes.”
Parker concentrates on the legislators in his state and district who have had opportunities to enact sensible policies – background checks and a means of temporarily removing firearms from those who are in the midst of a mental crisis – and concludes that his legislators
...elected to serve their gun lobby masters and voted no .
And the results of those votes is the absence of those who should be with us still.
E. J. Dionne looks at the nuclear treaty with Iran.
Foreign policy debates rarely get away from being reflections of domestic political conflicts, but they are also usually based on unstated assumptions and unacknowledged theories.
That’s true of the struggle over the Iran nuclear agreement, even if raw politics is playing an exceptionally large role. ...
There is also the unfortunate way in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen to frame Congress’s vote as a pro- or anti-Israel proposition. Many staunch supporters of Israel may have specific criticisms of the inspection regime, but they also believe that the restraints on Iran’s nuclear program are real. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), for example, has said that U.S. negotiators “got an awful lot, particularly on the nuclear front.” And the “nuclear front,” after all, is the main point. ...
A yes vote from Cardin, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, would be a true profiles-in-courage moment — and have a real influence on his wavering colleagues.
Courage. We could use a bit of that.
Michael Shear predicts the predilections of post-president Obama.
And as he mulls his future as the newest member of America’s most exclusive club, history suggests he has a choice to make.
Will he fade quietly into the background like Ronald Reagan and both Presidents George Bush, ceding the public spotlight and returning, as much as possible, to a less documented life not commandeered by news cycles, tweets from foreign leaders and congressional outbursts?
Or will he follow the lead of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, building a post-presidential institution that thrusts him back onto the public stage and helps cement his legacy by further advancing his domestic and foreign policy agendas?
At 55, Mr. Obama will leave office as a relatively young man.
As a relatively young person myself, I'm tempted to stop there, but let's look at just who turned ex-president from a title to a platform.
until the 39th president formed the Carter Center after his single term, most presidents had been largely content for their libraries to be relatively static monuments to political careers that had firmly ended.
Mr. Carter, who recently disclosed that he has cancer that has spread to his brain, changed that, leveraging America’s evolving role as the world’s sole superpower and a technology-fueled media environment to bolster his global relief effort.
Good on you, Mr. President. Good on you. And sticking with the theme of the day...
Paul Krugman examines some bad economic advice.
In the early stages of the Lesser Depression, those of us who knew a bit about the macroeconomic debates of the 1930s, and realized how relevant the hard-won insights of Keynes and Hicks were to the post-financial crisis world, often felt a sense of despair. Everywhere you looked, people who imagined themselves sophisticated and possessed of deep understanding were resurrecting 75-year-old fallacies and presenting them as deep insights.
... So here’s William Cohan in the Times, declaring that the Fed should “show some spine” and raise rates even though there is no sign of accelerating inflation. ...
...Cohan’s theory of interest rates is basically the old notion of loanable funds: the interest rate is determined by the supply of and demand for credit. As Keynes and Hicks explained three generations ago, this is a completely inadequate story
Economics is the "dreadful science" not because cause and effect are so poorly understood, but because so many of its practitioners refuse to acknowledge evidence. It kind of acts how conservatives
wish the physical sciences would behave.
And speakind of science, let's visit Science Daily to look at a little physics article.
The Standard Model of particle physics, which explains most of the known behaviors and interactions of fundamental subatomic particles, has held up remarkably well over several decades. This far-reaching theory does have a few shortcomings, however--most notably that it doesn't account for gravity. In hopes of revealing new, non-standard particles and forces, physicists have been on the hunt for conditions and behaviors that directly violate the Standard Model.
Now, a team of physicists working at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has found new hints of particles--leptons, to be more precise--being treated in strange ways not predicted by the Standard Model. The discovery, scheduled for publication in the September 4, 2015 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, could prove to be a significant lead in the search for non-standard phenomena.
A lot of people were very excited when the Higgs Boson was nailed down, but I found that one a bit disappointing. After all, it was right where it was predicted to be, and its existence pretty much put paid to several interesting, off-beat theories. But lately there have been a couple of discoveries that simply don't fit. Best of all, they don't fit in a way that works particularly well for any well-defined model. Which is just the sort of thing that leads to breakthroughs. Stay tuned.
Let's play this column off with one last Sacks solo...
I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
Now let us praise famous men, and our fathers that came before us...