Most Men Don’t Realize They’re Depressed

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“Men are more likely to externalize their symptoms, so depression can come out as anger rather than sadness, making it less likely to be diagnosed as such,” says Michaelis. In fact, depressed men are more likely to feel angry and aggressive, exhibit more risky behavior, and more likely to turn to substance abuse than women, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry. Alcohol isn’t the only mechanism, either. Men more often use tools like drugs, abuse, inappropriate sex, or gambling to attempt to control their feelings or quell their anxiety, Michaelis adds.

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Rachael Schultz — Men’s Journal

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The School of Life — Why so Many People Want to Be Writers

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A question I too have had.

The longing one day to turn out a book — probably a novel or, less likely, an autobiography lies close to the center of contemporary aspirations. This is, at one level, a hugely welcome development, a consequene of widespread literacy, higher educational standards and a proper focus on the power of books to change lives.

But looked at from another angle, it may also, in private, be the result of something rather more desultory: an epidemic of isolation and loneliness.

The army of literary agents, scouts, editors and writing coaches testifies not only to our love of literature, but also, less intentionally, to an unaddressed groundswell of painful solitude.

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William Cho — Student Voices

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Stranger Things #1: But I’m a Creep

Every now and then a starry-eyed academic reminds us that there is something called Eros and that we have to be careful not to sacrifice it on the altar of conventional morality. A recent essay in the Boston Review is the latest instance of this genre. The writers, Marta Figlerowicz and Ayesha Ramachandran, two junior Yale professors, warn that “in our current rush to respond to sexual harassment claims with effective actions, we may be engaging in … a moral panic.” They hope that the classroom remains a “safe space” which leaves room for “ambiguity”, and that we have to recognize that “we and our students are embodied beings.”

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Gal Katz — The Point Magazine

How GPS tracking is changing football

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One for the football season. Will sports remain sports?

The Brazilian fitness staff claims that since their players started using GPS wearable devices in 2015, soft-tissue injuries have been rare. Ramos, the physiologist, recalls that during the Rio Olympics in 2016 he needed to have a word with Neymar because of the exceptional number of high-intensity sprints registered by his GPS device during training. “We had to tell him to slow down or else he would get injured.” If he had, he wouldn’t have been on the pitch to score the winning goal in the final against Germany. Whoever strikes the decisive shot at this year’s World Cup will probably have done so with a computer at his back.

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Joao Medeiros — 1843

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Elon Musk’s Fall from Grace

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Will Musk come out of this?

The conflicts of interest certainly seem problematic—and not just for the shareholders. Consider the following: as the two companies, SolarCity and Tesla, were delaying operations and refusing to bargain with workers, Brad W. Buss received $4.95 million as a Tesla director in 2015 alone, on top of his $32 million as the Chief Financial Officer at the insolvent SolarCity. Antonio J. Gracias, founder and CEO of the private equity firm Valor Management, sits on Tesla’s board and owned 211,854 SolarCity shares at the time of the merger. Steve Jurvenston, another Silicon Valley venture capitalist, earned over $6 million as a Tesla board member in 2016 and owned over 417,450 shares of SolarCity during the merger. His investing firm, Draper Fisher Jurveston, put $18.9 million in SolarCity. Nancy Pfund, a venture capitalist at DBL investors, another equity firm, owned over 1.5 million shares of SolarCity at the time of the merger, and Pfund’s partner at DBL is Ira Ehrenpreis, who owns the map software firm MapBox and is also a Tesla director. (In 2015, he secured an agreement with the auto company to use his software, at a $5 million fee on top of sales.)

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Andrew Elrod — Boston Review

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Fifty years on, Joan Bakewell remembers speaking to the pioneering artist for the BBC, shortly before his death

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Fifty years on, the interview remains a compelling watch. Duchamp’s significance was not what it is today but his reputation had risen again, after years in which it was thought he had given up art for chess. Artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage had befriended him and seen him as a mentor. They prompted a revival of interest in the 1950s that was bolstered in the 1960s by Pop artists in Britain and the US and the first stirrings of conceptualism. It was only then that Duchamp had his first retrospective, at the Pasadena Art Museum in California in 1963. That was followed by one at the Tate Gallery in London in 1966.

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Land of the Lawless

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“How power in America has turned the rule of law into a mere myth.”

One pervasive way this affects consumers is in debit- or credit-based cell-phone payment plans—an intricate system of consumer incarceration in which cell-phone users surrender access and privacy and become beholden to fine-print contractual servitude. Any attempts to fight back mean one is confronted with a series of difficult tasks, including reaching a human being working for the vendors. Consumers then have to deal with low bargaining power, nonexistent alternative competition, and the potential arbitrary actions of lowered credit ratings and credit scores. The judiciary usually protects vendors by invoking the myth of consumer consent while precluding practical remedies by the aggrieved. Computerized transactions between consumers and financial vendors have turned unconscionable penalties and fees into corporate profit centers worth tens of billions of dollars a year, especially against the poor, who are forced into these difficult, rigged arrangements and so pay more.

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Ralph Nader — Lapham’s Quarterly

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Tears ‘R’ Us: The World’s Biggest Toy Store Didn’t Have to Die

Toys R US To Close 87 Stores

All stores will be empty by the end of June, but until then customers can stand in front of a “selfie banner featuring Geoffrey,” the retailer said in May. Soon after, Brandon and four other senior executives, now deemed nonessential, left the company. Brandon received almost $7 million in compensation in 2017, including a $2.8 million retention bonus paid just before the bankruptcy filing. He’s already started a consulting company. Former employees have started a Facebook page, Dead Giraffe Society. Some rallied outside the offices of Bain, KKR, and Vornado to protest losing their jobs without severance and occupied a soon-to-be-closed Toys “R” Us store in Union, N.J. Twenty miles away, the company began to liquidate its headquarters. Photos of what’s for sale, including a giant Sully from Monsters, Inc. posed next to a pool table, are available online.

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Bloomberg Businessweek

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How Christians Destroyed the Ancient World

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A book review of – THE DARKENING AGE The Christian Destruction of the Classical World By Catherine Nixey

Actions were extreme because paganism was considered not just a psychological but a physical miasma. Christianity appeared on a planet that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.) But for Christians, the food that pagans produced, the bathwater they washed in, their very breaths were thought to be infected by demons. Pollution was said to make its way into the lungs of bystanders during animal sacrifice. And once Christianity became championed by Rome, one of the most militaristic civilizations the world has known, philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil became martial instructions for purges and pugilism.

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Bettany Hughes — The New York Times

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How a Georgian Princess’s Cookbook Helped Build a Celebrated Restaurant

This is for friends who fantasize about food all day long.

The book, entitled Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes, was published in 1874 by a Georgian princess named Barbare Jorjadze. Today, Princess Jorjadze is a national hero: She is considered the first feminist of the country, and is famous for her advocacy of women’s rights in Georgia. In her decree, she wrote about the damning expectations placed on women: “From a very young age, we are told, ‘since god made you a woman, you must sit silently, look at nobody, go nowhere, shut your ears and your eyes, and just sit there. Education and learning of languages is none of your concern.” Now, the Georgian National Library has dedicated a full room to her, in honor of her advocacy efforts. A copy of Georgian Cuisine and Tried Housekeeping Notes is on display at the Georgian Literature Museum and the Georgian National Library, too.

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Will McGough — Atlas Obscura

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