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50th Anniversary of Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Today was the 50th anniversary of the writing of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

Today marks the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter from Birmingham jail. Dr. King penned this letter as a response to white clergymen who called his campaign of non-violent protests, quote, “unwise and untimely,” unquote, and had urged him not to intervene in Alabama’s segregationist policies.

The full text of that letter was published in a number of news outlets, including the New York Post Sunday magazine and The Atlantic Monthly. It was controversial at the time, but it’s now recognized as an iconic statement of the principles underlying the civil rights movement.

We thought this was a good time to take a closer look at that letter, so we’ve called upon, once again, Clayborne Carson. He is the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. He’s a professor of history at Stanford University and he’s with us once again.

The entire report from NPR is definitely worth listening to here.

April 16, 2013/by dpogreba

Are We Living in the Age of Angst?

Daily Wisdom

Medical historian Edward Shorter thinks we certainly might be—and that much of the blame can be laid on psychiatrists:

Shorter believes that the increase in depression is more a problem of an expanding diagnosis and a surge in self-labeling than a genuine epidemic. Serious mental illness certainly exists, but is often misdiagnosed and ineffectively treated with Prozac-type drugs. He indignantly concludes that "psychiatry’s inability to stop the depression epidemic is an appalling story of the collective failure of a scientific discipline to ward off a public-health disaster." Abdication to Big Pharma "means that poorly diagnosed patients are denied the benefit of proper treatment." Ironically, however, Shorter’s solution to the disaster is not a return to the holistic concept of nerves, but the development of new and better drugs.

April 16, 2013/by dpogreba

Addicted to Farmville? Blame Your Brain

Daily Wisdom

If you can’t seem to stop checking your Facebook feed, it may be a compulsion beyond your control. The Atlantic notes that Internet companies are following the model of tobacco companies–making their products so addictive that you can’t stop:

The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.

In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, "I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent." In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra "create an obsession, then exploit it." Gaming companies talk openly about creating a "compulsion loop," which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.

April 15, 2013/by dpogreba

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