Dr. Michael H. Stone, a psychiatrist affiliated with Columbia, said that the preponderance of patients with self-made fortunes, many made at a relatively young age, marked a striking shift.
“It used to be that my patients were the children of the rich: inheritors, people who suffered from the neglect of jet-setting parents or from the fear that no matter what they did, they would never measure up to their father’s accomplishments,” he recalled. “Now I see so many young people — people in their 30s and 40s — who’ve made the money themselves.”
Dr. Stone said those two kinds of patients tended to have different problems: “In my experience, there was a high incidence of depression in the people who were born rich. And by contrast, the people today who are making a fortune are so often narcissistic in a way that excludes depression.”
//NYTimes//
A further education college has banned its female students from wolf-whistling at builders.
Girls at West Kent College have been advised that whistling constitutes harassment and is unacceptable.
Officials sent an email to all pupils warning that the behaviour was “totally unacceptable”, and saying any students caught harassing contractors would face disciplinary action.
The email was sent after a demolition team started work on a £94 million, three-year building project at the campus.
A spokeswoman for the contractors, Galliford Try, said: “We have no registered complaints on this issue. However we do not condone inappropriate behaviour from any parties on our sites.”
//Ananova//
The temptation to lure Einstein posthumously into the theistic fold is understandable, if only due to his charm and humanity. He was that rare species of genius who didn’t espouse sinister or crackpot theories or go mad, as did logician Kurt Gödel, his walking partner on the quadrangles of Princeton and a likeminded proponent of a prioricity. Avuncular, playful, cuddly … Einstein could be all things to all people, though he never wanted to be. He was a socialist who enjoyed bourgeois creature comforts, a wit who courted celebrity but preferred his hermitage and frequently lost his way home, an internationalist who became an early and fervent Zionist, a pacifist who urged the invention of the atom bomb and then regretted doing so. Still, on matters of ideology, war, and peace, he could express himself plainly.
Einstein underwent a brief elective immersion in Judaism as a boy, but his parents were secular; his father thought the Abrahamic rituals “ancient superstitions.” Einstein later told New York Rabbi Herbert Goldstein that he believed in “Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.” (In the 17th century, philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism on suspicion of atheism—allegations that Rebecca Goldstein argues in Betraying Spinoza were, in fact, correct.) When a rumor was circulated in 1945 that a Jesuit priest had converted him, Einstein thundered back: “I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.”
//Slate//
The Simon Estes Amphitheatre, downtown Des Moines // June 13, 2008
“ When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
— Matt Groening on being God.
