News Notebook Friday 10.8.21
Shots in the Arm, Facebook Face-off... and Institutional Shadows Alive-&-Kicking
Warm weekend greetings, and welcome to the Friday News Notebook!
This week has proved jam-packed with material for both the News Notebook and for a deeper-dive on a timely Shrink-wrap theme I don’t want to postpone too long. So for you email readers, the Friday Notebook appears in your mailbox today as usual.
Then soon — I’m aiming for between later today and Sunday night — you should see a separate themed email Shrink-wrap, this one titled “A Neuroscientist, The Brain and Our Soul-Speaking Memory.” (It will have a classic movie-poster as a visual tease!) And anyone can also always access everything posted on the website directly from a browser by entering newshrink.substack.com.
Today’s Notebook as usual taps stories and issues with soul and psychological dimensions. And I’ll revisit and address several of these more extensively in the current separate Shrink-wrap as well as later ones in progress.
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Note: To open a link to any/all footnoted article(s) of the many cited here, you can click or browse to open today’s Library on the website and go to the article’s corresponding number. (From a browser it’s newshrink.substack.com.)
the week in headlines, quotes and cartoons
The shadow dimensions of our culture and its institutions, unconscious or merely unclaimed, are a theme recurring in a vast assortment of current news.
Facebook
(1) Regarding the often-riveting whistle-blower testimony at Senate hearings on social media mammoth Facebook, The New York Times’ complete coverage featured live updates and related links to topics including:
Whistle-blower Frances Haugen tells Congress that Facebook is not able to effectively police anti-vaccine misinformation.
Facebook researchers who studied teenagers over the past three years found that Instagram could damage mental health and body image, especially among girls. The document stated that Instagram exacerbated body image issues for teen girls already experiencing those feelings.
Republican and Democratic lawmakers are united on taking action to stop the harms caused to teenagers on Facebook.
The whistle-blower also unites Democrats and Republicans in calling for regulation of Facebook.
Lawmakers have gotten smarter about technology, and
Facebook is sitting on an even larger mountain of internal research.
(2) Frances Haugen says Facebook makes 'disastrous' choices, prioritizes profit: live updates. (USA Today.)
(3) The Washington Post: Whistleblower testimony on Facebook’s “harmful effects” on kids and teens.
In the coming Shrink-wrap I’ll discuss some of the psychological and brain-science issues this testimony raises — particularly around neurological and psychological effects of distracted attention and the dynamics and treatment of trauma, depression, and disordered eating in, but not limited to, teens and kids.
(4) Political historian Heather Cox Richardson presents a good recap of Facebook’s (immensely ironic) six-hour global outage during Monday’s Senate hearing. (You can browse her Letters from an American directly at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com, October 4, 2021.) An excerpt:
“Hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted this afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void caused by the absence of the internet giant illustrated its power at a time when the use of that power has come under scrutiny.”
(5) And for The Washington Post’s syndicated columnist Eugene Robinson. “Facebook’s promises of reform aren’t very reassuring.”
Meanwhile, considering the COVID pandemic…
Vaccines
(6) In an excellent piece, “The Right to Health,” The New York Times’ David Leonhardt explores the surprising successes of vaccine mandates throughout U.S history — starting with George Washington and smallpox during the Revolution and the early-to-mid 1900’s fight against polio.
(7) And here’s an excerpt — a paraphrase doesn’t quite capture it — from a column many have shared from Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist for The Miami Herald: “Goodbye, and good riddance” to the outraged anti-vaxers among us:
“So if you’re angry, guess what? You’re not the only ones.
But the rest of us, we’re mad at you. Because this thing could have been over by now, and you’re the reason it isn’t.
That’s why we were glad President Biden stopped asking nicely, started requiring vaccinations everywhere he had power to do so. We were also glad when employers followed suit. And if that’s a problem for you, then, yes, goodbye, sayonara, auf wiedersehen, adios and adieu. We’ll miss you, to be sure. But you’re asking us to choose between your petulance and our lives.”
On the COVID front beyond vaccines, I’ll be watching some hopeful trends that began to emerge this week with rates of new cases and deaths apparently falling.
Still more sobering news…
a massive new institutional child/teen sex-abuse case…
(8) “Alleging rampant sex abuse, alumni backed by powerful lawyers sue elite UNC arts campus.” Kudos to journalists Sara Coello and Carli Brosseau for investigative reporting on both current and decades-old court and other documents regarding this unfolding story. (Excerpt from The Charlotte Observer):
Seven alumni have sued North Carolina’s most prestigious arts school, accusing leaders of ignoring evidence that faculty and other adults on campus sexually abused them while they were underage students. The former students, each of whom studied dance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in the 1980s, listed allegations against teachers that include inappropriate comments and fondling in class, as well as violent sexual assault off-campus.
UNCSA opened in 1965 as the nation’s first public arts conservatory, housing both high school and university students. Considered by many to be an internationally renowned jewel in the University of North Carolina system, its founders envisioned a salon-like utopia, where artists would pass their craft on to young performers. About 1,250 students are enrolled today.
(9) Continuing the Observer’s coverage: “Records from earlier decades show little action following the last UNCSA sexual abuse scandal.”
(10) And the devastating read, “‘I am broken’: UNC School of Arts alumni describe decades-long suffering from sexual abuse.” (also from The Charlotte Observer).
In the coming Shrink-wrap on neuroscience, our brains and how memory works I’ll revisit this story in discussing the kinds of memory-retrieval, repeated-replay amid safe new context, re-experiencing and overlay of new story and meaning required for the deep work of healing acute- and post-traumatic stress — as well as the various buried griefs of life. All of which illustrates how statutes of limitations in child sex-abuse cases perpetuate and re-traumatize victims via forced secrecy long into adulthood.
Here is The Observer’s brilliant cartoonist Kevin Siers’ take on this story.
Now to a historic case national in scope…
Anita Hill takes on gender violence
Along with this week’s news and reviews of Hill’s new book, I will be revisiting her with a deeper dive in another upcoming, separate Shrink-wrap in progress. It will be a (long-gestating!) psychological and soul-dimension take on the cases of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey Ford, and now-sitting Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh.
(11) On her book, here’s an excerpt from “Anita Hill Has Some Perspective to Offer” by The New York Times’ Jessica Bennett:
“Anita Hill still speaks in the measured tones she did while being questioned before an all-white, all-male panel before the Senate in 1991 — a young law professor in a blue linen suit who would give the nation an overnight education in workplace sexual harassment.
Thirty years later, she is more academic than activist, focusing on pathways to progress, and continuing to teach law as a professor of social policy, law and gender studies at Brandeis University…
Her new book is Believing: Our Thirty-Year Journey to End Gender Violence.
(12) From an excellent NPR interview, “Believing is a book only Anita Hill could have written,” by Danielle Kurtzleben:
“Altogether, Believing is an elegant, impassioned demand that America see gender-based violence as a cultural and structural problem that hurts everyone, not just victims and survivors.
And the phrase ‘gender-based violence’ is intentionally chosen. It covers nonbinary people and men in addition to women, and the ‘violence’ includes a range of behaviors, from rape to intimate partner violence to stalking to harassment.
It's a phrase chosen, in short, to be expansive and all-encompassing. And Believing, as a book, is itself expansive and all-encompassing.'“
(13) Interesting to me, playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin similarly addresses a broader intersectionality — of role power and aggression via bullying — in workplace harassment. The Vanity Fair interview is Sorkin’s first concerning the rapid downfall of longtime film and theater collaborator Scott Rudin because of Rudin’s pervasive pattern of workplace bullying that is not necessarily or overtly sexual.
Other news of note
Opening of new U.S. Supreme Court term
(14) Associated Press: “What’s old is new again: Justices back at court for new term.” More, I’m sure lots more, to come on this one.
Now, a shift of tone and emphasis to the wealth of material so many of you have sent for newShrink.
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recent quotes and articles shared by readers:
(15) To lead off, this excellent and timely Atlantic piece — “The New Puritans,” by Anne Applebaum — brings relevant dimension to such current issues as the discussion, Congressional hearings and recent whistleblower leak regarding largely unregulated social media as well as other news of the day.
“Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.
By contrast, the modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums.”
Now I’d like you to meet the sender of this clip, in case you don’t yet know her…
Dr. Elizabeth Éowyn Nelson is a CA reader, writer/professor and dear friend whose work as well as her profound personal support have sustained my depth psychology and writing work for more than a decade. As department head and professor of all of my PhD program’s research courses, Elizabeth ultimately also chaired my doctoral dissertation committee. She’s served as core faculty and in several key roles at Pacifica Graduate Institute since 2002 (and also is known for doing a lot of unrelated cool things — like fencing!)
Elizabeth is co-author (with fellow Pacifica faculty Dr. Joe Coppin) of The Art of Inquiry, a seminal work on psyche-focused scholarly research in depth psychology. Her own wonderful book, developed out of her dissertation work, is Psyche’s Knife: Archetypal Explorations of Love and Power. Among so many of David Whyte’s poems I have long treasured — nuggets of which I’ve shared in newShrink — Elizabeth’s reference in this book was my first glimpse of his line that I’ve loved and shared here before, about writing (and living) from a deep place:
“the blade is so sharp — it cuts things together — not apart.” (From the Whyte poem No One Told Me.)
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This response to my recent call for quotes that have spoken to or inspired you comes thanks to reader, friend (and wonderful YMCA instructor) Leslie Wilson:
“There are 120,000 US children waiting for an adoptive family. There are over 3,500 in Texas alone. The average wait time for a child in foster care to be adopted is 3 years. Imagine if every pro-life Chrsitian cared as much about life after birth as life before birth.”
— Pastor Shane Claiborne, leader of The Simple Way church in Philadelphia, posted online 2 September 2021.
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(16) Gratitude also to friend and reader Linda Bird of Lake Norman, a longtime psychotherapist, for sending over this David Brooks column from The New York Times, “Is Self-Awareness a Mirage?”
She included her comment that “this confirms our suspicions that Brooks has been in therapy?!” (My briefest response to that, for now: “No kidding!”)
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Meanwhile, my appreciation to the close attention of a CA Jungian-analyst and regular reader, who sent along a separate piece with timely relevance to some of my thoughts about David Brooks’ periodic explorations of the psyche in print. To summarize a bit for the general concepts involved:
In the Jungian/post-Jungian view, the purpose and goal of analysis — and indeed the process of our individuation of the self over the entire adult life cycle — is to bring the conscious ego- (“lower case s”) self into relationship with the greater personality (that “upper-case-soul-Self”) within the psyche, which incorporates the unconscious, the soul.
The late Jungian Edward Edinger’s useful, though rather wonky, term for this developing stronger relationship between self and Self is “the ego-self axis.” My thanks again to my veteran Jungian-analyst reader for this informative tribute to Edinger from a C. G. Jung website and blog. (17)
And on a lighter note…
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In response to the recent Shrink-wrap piece on Mary Boykin Chestnut and her Civil War Diary, this from veteran journalist and unparalleled quote-maestro Lew Powell:
“Just imagining MBC bringing her acerbic observations to 2021.... One of my favorites:
Awaiting war's end in Chester, S.C., to her friend’s gloomy observation that “[He] said he knew the thing was up when he saw how anxious the Charlotte people were for the Yankees to come…”
Chesnut comments (with her usual signature wit):
‘I hope they will get enough of them and take our share, too....’"
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And this from Judith Ratcliffe, reader and friend from both my Lake Norman and Charlotte banking years — who’d texted that she also was at last week’s Rolling Stones concert:
“It was worth the ticket price to hear Mick Jagger say ‘pimento cheese.’”
(The rockstar was telling the Charlotte crowd about his under-the-radar visit the night before to the too-cool-for-groupies Thirsty Beaver bar… a Jagger sighting that had gone breathlessly viral both on social media and in national news.)
Judith adds, “What’s in my frig?”:
(Apologies here to non-Charlotte readers, for the inside-hometown humor…)
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This share from a longtime veteran journalist friend and reader illustrates beautifully the idea of what I have called “inside-out” or soul-story-focused — versus merely “résumé” — approach to life-story.
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And I leave you with this lovely line that I’d never seen in her work, before stumbling on it as the epigraph used by journalist/author Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind (which I am discussing in the upcoming Shrink-wrap piece on Memory and the brain):
And, that is all I have for now. Talk to you soon!
🦋💙tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
Post Notes
To open a link to any/all footnoted article(s) of the many cited here, click or browse to open today’s Library on the website and go to the article’s corresponding number. (From a browser it’s newshrink.substack.com.)