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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked some of the week’s best reads for you to savour.
A new trial saw clinicians give an identity to the voices being heard by those experiencing acute psychosis in an attempt to get them to stop, and the results have been astounding.
(The Guardian, approx 29 mins reading time)
If you hear voices, clinicians don’t generally ask what they’re saying to you, beyond whether they are asking you to harm yourself or others. “There’s been a reluctance to engage much with the content of voices,” Ben Alderson-Day, an associate professor of psychology at Durham University who specialises in psychosis, told me. “That’s in part because of a concern that if you ask voice-hearers to elaborate, you might engage in ‘collusion’: you may make [the voices] more real for people.” A clinician may diagnose a patient with psychosis, and prescribe them medication or CBT, without knowing what the patient’s voices say to them. This new therapy demanded that voices were listened to closely, and responded to as if they were spoken by entirely real external beings. Trial participants would create an avatar of their voice: a moving, three-dimensional digital embodiment that looks and sounds like the persecutor inside their heads. They would be guided by a therapist to have a dialogue with the voice – and the hope was, through doing so, gain control over it.
Do animals understand what it means to die? This question is explored in a fascinating new book, which is reviewed here by Kathryn Schulz.
(The New Yorker, approx 20 mins reading time)
Idiomatically, “playing possum” means “pretending to be dead,” but what exactly playing possum means to a possum is considerably harder to say. Does the possum have any idea what it means to be dead (to say nothing of what it means to pretend)? When it is moved to begin its Oscar-worthy performance, does it know that it is in mortal danger? Does the implacable fact of death have any purchase whatsoever on its possum-y heart? And if it does not—which seems likely, given its unusually small brain—what of all the other creatures that feign death: frogs, snakes, spiders, sharks, swifts? And what of all the other creatures in general? The octopus, the elephant, the great horned owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, the chimpanzee: who, in all the vast animal kingdom, joins us in having intimations of mortality?
A waltz by Polish composer Frédéric Chopin was unearthed this week, nearly 200 years after it was written. You can read about how it was found – and hear how it sounds – in this piece.
(The New York Times, approx 8 mins reading time)
McClellan, who is also a composer, snapped a photo of the manuscript and played it at home on a digital piano. Could it really be Chopin? He had his doubts: The work was unusually volcanic, opening with quiet, dissonant notes that erupt into crashing chords. He sent a photograph to Jeffrey Kallberg, a leading Chopin scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. “My jaw dropped,” Kallberg said. “I knew I had never seen this before.” After testing the manuscript’s paper and ink, analyzing its handwriting and musical style, and consulting outside experts, the Morgan has come to a momentous conclusion: The work is likely an unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin, the great fantasist of the Romantic era, the first such discovery in more than half a century.
55 years ago, two scientists sent the first internet message – and then the system crashed. In this interview, they talk about the history-making moment, and what the internet has become since.
(BBC, approx 9 mins reading time)
Kline sat at his keyboard between the lime-green walls of UCLA’s Boelter Hall Room 3420, prepared to connect with Duvall, who was working a computer halfway across the state of California. But Kline didn’t even make it all the way through the word “L-O-G-I-N” before Duvall told him over the phone that his system crashed. Thanks to that error, the first “message” that Kline sent Duvall on that autumn day in 1969 was simply the letters “L-O”. They got their connection up and running about an hour later after some tweaks, and that initial crash was just a blip in an otherwise monumental achievement. But neither man realised the significance of the moment. “I certainly didn’t at that time,” Kline says. “We were just trying to get it to work.”
The football club has sacked yet another manager – the fifth permanent one to come and go since Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 – and he’s already been replaced.
This is the inside story of the timing around Erik ten Hag’s departure and why United executives think Ruben Amorim is the right man to replace him.
(The Athletic, approx mins reading time)
It was only September 1, less than two months ago, that Berrada and Ashworth told journalists during a briefing at Old Trafford that Ten Hag had their “full backing”, and that is perhaps an awkward look in hindsight. Some at the club feel the two executives erred in speaking at that moment, with the quotes coming out, as agreed with reporters, after that day’s game against arch-rivals Liverpool, which United lost 3-0 at home. But from their perspective, communication is important for fans, whatever the prospects of becoming a hostage to fortune, and United wanted Ten Hag to be a success. Results changed matters.
As I’m sure you’re aware, the US election is on 5 November. There are seven swing states that will decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump win the White House – and they are incredibly close. Reporters went to each one to gauge how voters are feeling.
(The Guardian, approx 13 mins reading time)
Mary Holewinski lives in Carrollton, Georgia, which is home turf for the far-right representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But Holewinski is a Kamala Harris supporter and has a sign in her yard. It draws nasty looks, she said: “I’ve lost neighbor friends.” Those tensions are ratcheting up, because the presidential election is already well under way in Georgia. More than 2 million Georgians – a quarter of its electorate – have already gone to the polls, setting early voting records each day. Both Harris and Trump consider Georgia – no longer a stereotypical “deep south” state but one propelled by the economic and cultural clout of Atlanta – a crucial pickup. In 2020, the state went for Joe Biden by 11,779 votes, and Trump has since been charged in an election interference case after calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” 11,780 votes. A Georgia victory would represent belated validation for the former president.
Halloween may be over for another year, but here’s a longread where Wes Craven and John Carpenter look at how the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead set the standard for modern horror movies.
(Vanity Fair, approx 25 mins reading time)
Horror had been stuck in a musty, cobwebbed past filled with Victorian ghost stories and evil scientists that didn’t frighten a generation of young people used to seeing bloody images from Vietnam and the civil rights backlash. “In the 60s, horror wasn’t much of anything,” says Alan Ormsby, who went on to write the screenplay for his own zombie film, Deathdream, in 1970. “There was Vincent Price stuff and the Hammer movies, which weren’t so good anymore. Night of the Living Dead seemed to make a social statement. I didn’t realize a horror film could have that kind of intelligence.” Neither did Romero. “It was all the 60s,” he says inside his modest Toronto apartment, flashing a child-like grin that seems at odds with his severe black glasses and intimidating height. (He’s almost six and a half feet tall.) “We were automatically disenchanted with authority, but we didn’t particularly care about the war.” John Russo, who wrote the script with Romero, is more blunt: “All that [political] stuffs bullshit.”
Note: The Journal generally selects stories that are not paywalled, but some might not be accessible if you have exceeded your free article limit on the site in question.
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