Okay, the subtitle of this book is "Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions," which had me intrigued when it was first mentioned in the book feed of micro.blog. I'm not going to say no to reading a theory about Depression, especially when it comes with a promise of solutions.

The book starts off with the author's tale of his depression and time on anti-depressants and how his therapist keeps telling him he still sounds depressed. He insists no, he's not, but the therapist keeps repeating he still sounds depressed. No way!

Except... way.

The author goes on and keeps having include links to his references. Some of the references were really odd, "the audio of this conversation has been confirmed by my publisher" and "so and so recalled this the same way" kind of weird. Turns out, the author had previously been caught plagarizing himself and making stuff up, so he needed to be extra cautious in his books.

So, read with a bit of caution. Sure.

Except the studies and examples and anedcotes and stories and and and yeah, some of it isn't science but some of that not-science just... feels... right... as true, as something someone depressed needs to try when they want out of the cycle and want to heal, want to be whole.

Basic premise: we have lost the connections to our values, to ourselves, to our community, to our world. Without those connections, we are lost, we lack meaning, direction, purpose. Discover, embrace, and nurture those connection and the depression can be lifted.

It's very much along the lines of helping others can help oneself. We need our tribe, we need our community, we need nature (the green, the forests, the paths, the hiking, the sun, the water, the clean air), we need purpose. As long as we keep ignoring these connections, we perpetuate the cycle. Going it alone, as is the western culture's attitude, won't work, as being alone is a cause.

So, yeah, depression a thing in your life? Not the sadness thing, not the grief thing, the depression thing? "Why wouldn't you do anything you could to prevent it?" This book is a good start. Strongly recommended, might change your life.

It was only years later—in the course of writing this book—that somebody pointed out to me all the questions my doctor didn’t ask that day. Like: Is there any reason you might feel so distressed? What’s been happening in your life? Is there anything hurting you that we might want to change?
Page 7

No matter how high a dose I jacked up my antidepressants to, the sadness would always outrun it.
Page 10

I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong.
Page 10

You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. 9 We are literally awash in these drugs.
Page 11

Once you settle into a story about your pain, you are extremely reluctant to challenge it.
Page 11

Unhappiness and depression are totally different things. There is nothing more infuriating to a depressed person than to be told to cheer up, or to be offered jolly little solutions as if they were merely having a bad week.
Page 13

At that time, the English doctor had realized that when you give a patient a medical treatment, you are really giving her two things. You are giving her a drug, which will usually have a chemical effect on her body in some way. And you are giving her a story—about how the treatment will affect her.
Page 20

Somebody once told me that giving a person a story about why they are in pain is one of the most powerful things you can ever do.
Page 38

The grief exception revealed something that the authors of the DSM — the distillation of mainstream psychiatric thinking — were deeply uncomfortable with. They had been forced to admit, in their own official manual, that it’s reasonable — and perhaps even necessary — to show the symptoms of depression, in one set of circumstances.
Page 41

As Joanne Cacciatore researched the grief exception in more detail, she came to believe it revealed a basic mistake our culture is making about pain, way beyond grief. We don’t, she told me, “consider context.” We act like human distress can be assessed solely on a checklist that can be separated out from our lives, and labeled as brain diseases.
Page 42

“Why do we call it mental health?” she asked me. “Because we want to scientize it. We want to make it sound scientific. But it’s our emotions.”
Page 42

Jo sat on the floor, and held her, and let the pain come out, and after it did, the mother felt some relief, for a time, because she knew she was not alone.

Sometimes, that is the most we can do.

It’s a lot.
Page 43

And sometimes, when you listen to the pain and you see it in its context, it will point you to a way beyond it — as I learned later.
Page 43

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?
Page 44

This meant, he told me, that he arrived at the psychiatric treatment center he was going to work out of in South London “completely ignorant” of what you are supposed to think about something like depression, and he now believes “that was a great advantage. I had no preconceived ideas [so] I was forced to have an open mind.”
Page 46

They labeled the first category “difficulties” — which they defined as a chronic ongoing problem, which could range from having a bad marriage, to living in bad housing, to being forced to move away from your community and neighborhood.

The second category looked at the exact opposite — “stabilizers,” the things that they suspected could boost you and protect you from despair. For that, they carefully recorded how many close friends the women had, and how good their relationships with their partners were.
Page 50

For every good friend you had, or if your partner was more supportive and caring, it reduced depression by a remarkable amount.
Page 50

So George and Tirril had discovered that two things make depression much more likely — having a severe negative event, and having long-term sources of stress and insecurity in your life.
Page 51

For example — if you didn’t have any friends, and you didn’t have a supportive partner, your chances of developing depression when a severe negative life event came along were 75 percent. 12 It was much more likely than not.
Page 51

We all lose some hope when we’re subjected to severe stress, or when something horrible happens to us, but if the stress or the bad events are sustained over a long period, what you get is “the generalization of hopelessness,” Tirril told me.
Page 52

I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.
Page 59

“When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.”
Page 69

“Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health” — physical, mental, and emotional.
Page 69

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”
Page 70

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.
Page 73

It’s worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.
Page 74

If you do that, you always find that lonely people are much more likely to be depressed or anxious. But that doesn’t get us very far — because depressed and anxious people often become afraid of the world, and of social interaction, so they tend to retreat from it.
Page 75

It turned out that — for the initial five years of data that have been studied so far — in most cases, loneliness preceded depressive symptoms. 8 You became lonely, and that was followed by feelings of despair and profound sadness and depression. And the effect was really big.
Page 77

Humans need tribes as much as bees need a hive.
Page 77

Or, as he told me later: loneliness is “an aversive state that motivates us to reconnect.”
Page 78

Anywhere in the world where people describe being lonely, they will also — throughout their sleep — experience more of something called “micro-awakenings.” These are small moments you won’t recall when you wake up, but in which you rise a little from your slumber.
Page 78

The best theory is that you don’t feel safe going to sleep when you’re lonely, because early humans literally weren’t safe if they were sleeping apart from the tribe. You know nobody’s got your back — so your brain won’t let you go into full sleep mode. Measuring these “micro-awakenings” is a good way of measuring loneliness.
Page 78

This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.
Page 78

What this means is that people’s sense that they live in a community, or even have friends they can count on, has been plummeting.
Page 79

“How many confidants do you have?” They wanted to know how many people you could turn to in a crisis, or when something really good happens to you.
Page 79

Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt.
Page 82

To end loneliness, you need other people — plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.
Page 83

The Internet arrived promising us connection at the very moment when all the wider forces of disconnection were reaching a crescendo.
Page 84

When he got a job as a software developer and he was given an assignment that made him feel pressured, he found himself endlessly chasing down Internet rabbit holes. He would have three hundred tabs open at any given time.
Page 87

If you’re a typical Westerner in the twenty-first century, you check your phone once every six and a half minutes. If you’re a teenager, you send on average a hundred texts a day. And 42 percent of us never turn off our phones. Ever.
Page 87

The compulsive Internet use, she was saying, was a dysfunctional attempt to try to solve the pain they were already in, caused in part by feeling alone in the world.
Page 88

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it’s never satisfying.
Page 89

There’s a quote from the biologist E. O. Wilson that John Cacioppo — who has taught us so much about loneliness — likes: “People must belong to a tribe.”

Just like a bee goes haywire if it loses its hive, a human will go haywire if she loses her connection to the group.
Page 90

I asked Tim if, in Pinellas County where he grew up, he ever heard anyone talking about a different way of valuing things, beyond the idea that happiness came from getting and possessing stuff. “Well — I think — not growing up. No,” he said.
Page 93

It really did seem that materialistic people were having a worse time, day by day, on all sorts of fronts. They felt sicker, and they were angrier. “Something about a strong desire for materialistic pursuits,” he was starting to believe, “actually affected the participants’ day-to-day lives, and decreased the quality of their daily experience.” They experienced less joy, and more despair.
Page 94

Ever since the 1960s, psychologists have known that there are two different ways you can motivate yourself to get out of bed in the morning. The first are called intrinsic motives — they are the things you do purely because you value them in and of themselves, not because of anything you get out of them.
Page 95

And there’s a rival set of values, which are called extrinsic motives. They’re the things you do not because you actually want to do them, but because you’ll get something in return — whether it’s money, or admiration, or sex, or superior status.
Page 95

He got them to lay out their goals for the future. He then figured out with them if these were extrinsic goals — like getting a promotion, or a bigger apartment — or intrinsic goals, like being a better friend or a more loving son or a better piano player.
Page 95

But people who achieved their intrinsic goals did become significantly happier, and less depressed and anxious. You could track the movement. As they worked at it and felt they became (for example) a better friend — not because they wanted anything out of it but because they felt it was a good thing to do — they became more satisfied with life. Being a better dad? Dancing for the sheer joy of it? Helping another person, just because it’s the right thing to do? They do significantly boost your happiness.
Page 96

The first is that thinking extrinsically poisons your relationships with other people.
Page 97

[T]hey found that the more materialistic you become, the shorter your relationships will be, and the worse their quality will be.
Page 97

There’s strong scientific evidence that we all get most pleasure from what are called “flow states” 13 like this — moments when we simply lose ourselves doing something we love and are carried along in the moment.
Page 97

... highly materialistic people, he discovered they experience significantly fewer flow states than the rest of us.
Page 98

When you are extremely materialistic, Tim said to me, “you’ve always kind of got to be wondering about yourself — how are people judging you?” It forces you to “focus on other people’s opinions of you, and their praise of you — and then you’re kind of locked into having to worry what other people think about you, and if other people are going to give you those rewards that you want.
Page 98

What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals — from yourself and from society — depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet.
Page 99

So if you become fixated on getting stuff and a superior status, the parts of the pie that care about tending to your relationships, or finding meaning, or making the world better have to shrink, to make way.
Page 99

And the pressure, in our culture, runs overwhelmingly one way — spend more; work more.
Page 99

Tim suspected that advertising plays a key role in why we are, every day, choosing a value system that makes us feel worse.
Page 100

“Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser."
Page 100

This system trains us, Tim says, to feel “there’s never enough. When you’re focused on money and status and possessions, consumer society is always telling you more, more, more, more. Capitalism is always telling you more, more, more. Your boss is telling you work more, work more, work more. You internalize that and you think: Oh, I got to work more, because my self depends on my status and my achievement. You internalize that. It’s a kind of form of internalized oppression.”
Page 101

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments — the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values,” he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to “replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.”
Page 103

I ask him if he had withdrawal symptoms from the materialistic world we were both immersed in for so long. “Never,” he says right away. “People ask me that: “Don’t you miss this? Don’t you wish you had that?” No, I don’t, because [I am] never exposed to the messages telling me that I should want it.
Page 103

By living without these polluting values, Tim has, he says, discovered a secret. This way of life is more pleasurable than materialism.
Page 104

Joe is constantly bombarded with messages that he shouldn’t do the thing that his heart is telling him would make him feel calm and satisfied. The whole logic of our culture tells him to stay on the consumerist treadmill, to go shopping when he feels lousy, to chase junk values. He has been immersed in those messages since the day he was born. So he has been trained to distrust his own wisest instincts.
Page 105

Many of these women had been making themselves obese for an unconscious reason: to protect themselves from the attention of men, who they believed would hurt them.
Page 109

They needed someone to understand why they ate.
Page 109

Many scientists and psychologists had been presenting depression as an irrational malfunction in your brain or in your genes, but he learned that Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University, 15 had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.
Page 112

Some people don’t want to see this because, at least at first, “it’s more comforting,” Vincent said, to think it’s all happening simply because of changes in the brain. “It takes away an experiential process and substitutes a mechanistic process.” It turns your pain into a trick of the light that can be banished with drugs.
Page 113

If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you.
Page 113

Magic pill to fix everything!

When you are a child and you experience something really traumatic, you almost always think it is your fault. There’s a reason for this, and it’s not irrational; like obesity, it is, in fact, a solution to a problem most people can’t see.
Page 113

When you’re a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can’t move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you are powerless — that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there’s simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it’s your fault.
Page 114

In this way, just like obesity protected those women from the men they feared would rape them, blaming yourself for your childhood traumas protects you from seeing how vulnerable you were and are. You can become the powerful one. If it’s your fault, it’s under your control.
Page 114

“When people have these kind of problems, it’s time to stop asking what’s wrong with them,” he said, “and time to start asking what happened to them.”
Page 115

It’s hard to describe what depression and acute anxiety feel like. They are such disorientating states that they seem to escape language, but we have a few clichés that we return to.
Page 116

If you’re a female baboon, you inherit your place in the hierarchy from your mother, as if you were a posh Englishman in the Middle Ages, but if you’re a male baboon, your place is established through a brutal conflict to see who can clamber to the top.
Page 117

While I understand this is how it is, I'm still fully annoyed at how much in nature and our society being female is being second class.

When Solomon was lying on a rock with one of the hottest babes of the troop, Uriah walked up in between them and started trying to have sex with her — right in front of the boss-man.
Page 119

Robert had discovered that having an insecure status was the one thing even more distressing than having a low status.
Page 120

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are.
Page 121

It’s hard for a hungry animal moving through its natural habitat and with a decent status in its group to be depressed, she says — there are almost no records of such a thing.
Page 128

all humans have a natural sense of something called “biophilia.” It’s an innate love for the landscapes in which humans have lived for most of our existence, and for the natural web of life that surrounds us and makes our existence possible.
Page 128

When you are depressed — as Isabel knows from her own experience — you feel that “now everything is about you.” You become trapped in your own story and your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with a dull, bitter insistence. Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner of your ego, where no air from the outside can get in.
Page 129

Faced with a natural landscape, you have a sense that you and your concerns are very small, and the world is very big — and that sensation can shrink the ego down to a manageable size.
Page 129

But the research is very hard to find funding for, he said, because “a lot of the shape of modern biomedical research has been defined by the pharmaceutical industry,” and they’re not interested because “it’s very hard to commercialize nature contact.” You can’t sell it, so they don’t want to know.
Page 130

The lesson the depressed bonobos had taught her, she said, is: “Don’t be in captivity. Fuck captivity.”
Page 131

Especially if the prison is of your own making.

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains you of the desire to be as fully alive as this — to swallow experience whole.
Page 131

How do you develop your sense of identity? How do you know who you are? It seems like an impossibly big question. But ask yourself this: What is the connecting thread that runs from your baby self, vomiting out teething biscuits, to the person who is reading this book now? Will you be the same person twenty years from now? If you met her, would you recognize her? What is the relationship between you in the past and you in the future? Are you the same person all along?
Page 136

A sense of a positive future protects you. If life is bad today, you can think — this hurts, but it won’t hurt forever. But when it is taken away, it can feel like your pain will never go away.
Page 138

I took her for a long lunch, and she started to tell me the story of her life since we last met, 10 in a hurried gabble punctuated by her apologizing a lot, although it was never quite clear what for.
Page 138

We give it a fancy name: we call it being “self-employed,” or the “gig economy” —
Page 141

For most of us, a stable sense of the future is dissolving, and we are told to see it as a form of liberation.
Page 141

It made intuitive sense to her, she said. When you have a stable picture of yourself in the future, she explained, what it gives you is “perspective — doesn’t it? You are able to say — ‘ Okay, I’m having a shitty day. But I’m not having a shitty life.’
Page 142

When I told Marc that I had been given antidepressants for thirteen years and had always been told that all my distress had been caused by a problem inside my brain, he said: “It’s crazy. It’s always related to your life and your personal circumstances.”
Page 145

Because you are feeling intense pain for a long period, your brain will assume this is the state in which you are going to have to survive from now on — so it might start to shed the synapses that relate to the things that give you joy and pleasure, and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair.
Page 146

The pain caused by life going wrong can trigger a response that is “so powerful that [the brain] tends to stay there [in a pained response] for a while, until something pushes it out of that corner, into a more flexible place.”
Page 146

Everyone reading this will know somebody who became depressed, or anxious, yet seemingly had nothing to be unhappy about.
Page 150

Yet now, if we could go back in a time machine and talk to these women, what we’d say is: You had everything a woman could possibly want by the standards of the culture. You had nothing to be unhappy about by the standards of the culture. But we now know that the standards of the culture were wrong. Women need more than a house and a car and a husband and kids. They need equality, and meaningful work, and autonomy. You aren’t broken, we’d tell them. The culture
Page 151

You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture — but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life. The culture can create a picture of what you “need” to be happy — through all the junk values I had been taught about — that doesn’t fit with what you actually need. 19
Page 151

For a long time, we have been told there are only two ways of thinking about depression. Either it’s a moral failing — a sign of weakness — or it’s a brain disease.
Page 153

[T]here’s a third option — to regard depression as largely a reaction to the way we are living.
Page 153

One reason why is that it is “much more politically challenging” 25 to say that so many people are feeling terrible because of how our societies now work. It fits much more with our system of “neoliberal capitalism,” he told me, to say, “Okay, we’ll get you functioning more efficiently, but please don’t start questioning … because that’s going to destabilize all sorts of things.”
Page 154

Dr. Rufus May, a British psychologist, told me that telling people their distress is due mostly or entirely to a biological malfunction has several dangerous effects on them. The first thing that happens when you’re told this is “you leave the person disempowered, feeling they’re not good enough — because their brain’s not good enough.” The second thing is, he said, that “it pitches us against parts of ourselves.” It says there is a war taking place in your head. On one side there are your feelings of distress, caused by the malfunctions in your brain or genes. On the other side there’s the sane part of you.
Page 154

But it does something even more profound than that. It tells you that your distress has no meaning — it’s just defective tissue.
Page 156

He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti, 26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”
Page 156

To them, an antidepressant wasn’t about changing your brain chemistry, an idea that seemed bizarre to their culture. It was about the community, together, empowering the depressed person to change his life.
Page 160

What if changing the way we live — in specific, targeted, evidence-based ways — could be seen as an antidepressant, too?
Page 161

When they lived in Turkey, the women there had referred to their entire village as “home.” And when they came to Germany, they learned that what you are supposed to think of as home is your own four walls and the space within them — a pinched, shriveled sense of home.
Page 176

They had made themselves public. And it was only by doing that — by being released into something bigger than themselves — that they had found a release from their pain.
Page 177

We met in a coffee shop in downtown Berkeley, which is seen by the outside world as a font of left-wing radicalism, but on my way to meet her, I passed lots of young homeless people, all begging, all being ignored.
Page 179

Yeah, having recently passed the armies of homeless in Berkeley, I know this view.

If you decide to pursue happiness in the United States or Britain, you pursue it for yourself — because you think that’s how it works. You do what I did most of the time: you get stuff for yourself, you rack up achievement for yourself, you build up your own ego. But if you consciously pursue happiness in Russia or Japan or China, you do something quite different. You try to make things better for your group — for the people around you. That’s what you think happiness means, so it seems obvious to you.
Page 181

Yet if I’m honest, that’s the kind of solution I craved. Something individual; something you can do alone, without any effort; something that takes twenty seconds to swallow every morning, so you can get on with life as it was before. If it couldn’t be chemical, I wanted some other trick, some switch I could flip to make it all fine.
Page 182

Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself — I try to do something for someone else.
Page 183

I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better.
Page 183

When you went to see your doctor, you didn’t just get pills. You were prescribed one of over a hundred different ways to reconnect — with the people around you, with the society, and with values that really matter.
Page 192

Most people come to their doctor because they are distressed. Even when you have a physical pain — like a bad knee — that will feel far worse if you have nothing else in your life, and no connections.
Page 196

He says he has learned, especially with depression and anxiety, to shift from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?”
Page 197

It’s not the work itself that makes you sick. It’s three other things. It’s the feeling of being controlled — of being a meaningless cog in a system. It’s the feeling that no matter how hard you work, you’ll be treated just the same and nobody will notice — an imbalance, as he puts it, between efforts and rewards. And it’s the feeling of being low on the hierarchy — of being a low-status person who doesn’t matter compared to the Big Man in the corner office.
Page 207

Our politicians are constantly singing hymns to democracy as the best system — this is simply the extension of democracy to the place where we spend most of our time. Josh says it’s an amazing victory for their propaganda system — to make you work in an environment you often can’t stand, and to do it for most of your waking life, and see the proceeds of your labor get siphoned off by somebody at the top, and then to make you “think of yourself as a free person.”
Page 208

From this experience, she has learned that “people want to work. Everybody wants to work. Everybody wants to feel useful, and have purpose.” 5 The humiliation and control of so many workplaces can suppress that, or drive it out of people, but it’s always there, and it reemerges in the right environment. People “want to feel like they’ve had an impact on other humans — that they’ve improved the world in some way.”
Page 209

It made me think: Imagine if we had a tough advertising regulator who wouldn’t permit ads designed to make us feel bad in any way. How many ads would survive?
Page 212

As they explored this in the conversation, it became clear quite quickly — without any prompting from Nathan — that spending often isn’t about the object itself. It is about getting to a psychological state that makes you feel better.
Page 214

Just asking these two questions — “What do you spend your money on?” and “What do you really value?” — made most people see a gap between the answers that they began to discuss. They were accumulating and spending money on things that were not — in the end — the things that they believed in their heart mattered. Why would that be?
Page 214

He learned that the average American is exposed to up to five thousand advertising impressions a day — from billboards to logos on T-shirts to TV advertisements. It is the sea in which we swim. And “the narrative is that if you [buy] this thing, it’ll yield more happiness — and so thousands of times a day you’re just surrounded with that message,” he told me.

He began to ask: “Who’s shaping that narrative?” It’s not people who have actually figured out what will make us happy and who are charitably spreading the good news. It’s people who have one motive only — to make us buy their product.
Page 215

At the next session, he asked the people in the experiment to do a short exercise in which everyone had to list a consumer item they felt they had to have right away. They had to describe what it was, how they first heard about it, why they craved it, how they felt when they got it, and how they felt after they’d had it for a while. For many people, as they talked this through, something became obvious. The pleasure was often in the craving and anticipation. We’ve all had the experience of finally getting the thing we want, getting it home, and feeling oddly deflated, only to find that before long, the craving cycle starts again.
Page 215

But as she began to read about envy, she realized that our culture was priming her to feel this way. She had been raised to constantly compete and compare, she said. “We’re highly individualistic,” she explained, and we’re constantly told that life is a “zero sum game.

There’s only so many pieces of the pie, so if somebody else has success, or beauty, or whatever, somehow it leaves less for you.
Page 219

We are trained to think that life is a fight for scarce resources — “ even if it’s for something like intelligence, when there’s no limit to how much human intelligence can grow across the world.” If you become smarter, it doesn’t make me less smart — but we are primed to feel that it does.
Page 219

And she discovered an ancient technique called “sympathetic joy,” which is part of a range of techniques for which there is some striking new scientific evidence. It is, she says, quite simple. Sympathetic joy is a method for cultivating “the opposite of jealousy or envy … It’s simply feeling happy for other people.”
Page 220

She was surprised that she could change in this way. “You think that certain things aren’t malleable,” she says, but “they completely are. You can be a total jealous monster, and you think that’s just part of who you are, and you find you can change it [by just] doing some basic thing.”
Page 221

“I’ve pursued happiness for myself my whole life, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t feel any closer to it — because where does it end? The bar just keeps getting moved.” But this different way of thinking, she said, seemed to offer a real sense of pleasure, and a path away from the depressing, anxiety-provoking thoughts she’d been plagued by.

“There’s always going to be shit coming into your life to be unhappy about. If you can be happy for others, there’s always going to be a supply of happiness available to you.
Page 222

She’s conscious that to many people, this would sound like a philosophy for losers — you can’t make it, so you have to get a thrill when somebody else does. You’ll lose your edge. You’ll fall behind in the constant race for success. But Rachel thinks this is a false dichotomy. Why can’t you be happy for other people and for yourself? Why would being eaten with envy make you stronger?
Page 222

He also brought a chestnut he had found on the ground the day his divorce came through, which he had kept, though he didn’t know why.
Page 229

They both, he said, break our “addiction to ourselves.”
Page 235

As Fred put it to me, these experiences teach you that “you don’t have to be controlled by your concept of yourself.”
Page 236

“You could say people have forgotten who they are, what they’re capable of, have gotten stuck … Many depressed people can only see their pains, and their hurts, and their resentments, and their failures. They can’t see the blue sky and the yellow leaves, you know?” This process of opening consciousness up again can disrupt that — and so it disrupts depression. It takes down the walls of your ego and opens you to connecting with what matters.
Page 237

Our egos protect us. They guard us. They are necessary. But when they grow too big, they cut us off from the possibility of connection. Taking them down, then, isn’t something to be done casually.
Page 238

There is a great deal of evidence — as I discussed before — that a sense of humiliation plays a big role in depression.
Page 243

“Time and again,” he said, “we blame a collective problem on the individual. So you’re depressed? You should get a pill. You don’t have a job? Go to a job coach — we’ll teach you how to write a résumé or [to join] LinkedIn. But obviously, that doesn’t go to the root of the problem … Not many people are thinking about what’s actually happened to our labor market, and our society, that these [forms of despair] are popping up everywhere.” Even middle-class people are living with a chronic “lack of certainty” about what their lives will be like in even a few months’ time, he says.
Page 250

Rutger told me: “When I ask people — ‘ What would you [personally] do with a basic income?’ about 99 percent of people say — ‘ I have dreams, I have ambitions, I’m going to do something ambitious and useful.’” But when he asks them what they think other people would do with a basic income, they say — oh, they’ll become lifeless zombies, they’ll binge-watch Netflix all day.
Page 251

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.
Page 253

The response to a huge crisis isn’t to go home and weep. It’s to go big. It’s to demand something that seems impossible — and not rest until you’ve achieved it.
Page 254

It’s a sign, Rutger says, of how badly off track we’ve gone, that having fulfilling work is seen as a freakish exception, like winning the lottery, instead of how we should all be living.
Page 254

Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes — biological, psychological, and social. They are all real, and none of these three can be described by something as crude as the idea of a chemical imbalance.
Page 255

The United Nations — in its official statement for World Health Day in 2017 — explained3 that “the dominant biomedical narrative of depression” is based on “biased and selective use of research outcomes” that “cause more harm than good, undermine the right to health, and must be abandoned.”
Page 255

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.
Page 255

I know this is going to be hard to hear, I’d tell him, because I know how deep your suffering cuts. But this pain isn’t your enemy, however much it hurts (and Jesus, I know how much it hurts). It’s your ally — leading you away from a wasted life and pointing the way toward a more fulfilling one.
Page 255

We have lost faith in the idea of anything bigger or more meaningful than the individual, and the accumulation of more and more stuff.
Page 255

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have. 6 It’s a signal, saying — you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.
Page 255

I really liked and enjoyed this book. I hadn't read anything by Claire North, yet she joins the surprisingly large number of authors who have books I want to read, but I read a different book by the author instead.

I'm glad I did. This was such a fun read.

Harry August was born in 1919, died in 1989, and was born in 1919 to live his life over again. Given the era of his childhood and his death being three years before the release of the film Groundhog Day, it isn't surprising that the second time through, he pretty much did what most people would do: went insane. The third time through, though, hey, wait a moment.

Honestly, if I had a chance to redo life with all my memories of the previous life / lives, I would be so f'ing full of "HOT DAMN!" I'd likely be labeled insane from giddism. Is that a word? Is now.

I'd probably start to worry about the boredom of never dying sometime past the thirty or fortieth time through. Pretty sure I'd be able to figure out how not to come back when I was truly and goodly done.

I'd also hide immediately, along the lines of the Remembrance of Earth's Past idea that there's likely someone more powerful out there with greater skills, best stay hidden. Or was that After On and being the first sentient computer?

Anyway. Harry. We lurves the Harry.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I strongly recommend this book for any science fiction fan. I recommended it to my mom, and she doesn't read science fiction, I enjoyed it that much.

In my first life I enlisted of my own volition, genuinely believing the three great fallacies of the time – that the war would be brief, that the war would be patriotic and that the war would advance me in my skills.
Page 14

I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all.
Page 19

I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department. She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a woman – and she judged them for being idiots. “The benefit being,” she explained, “that I can be both a woman and a fucking brilliant surgeon, but they’ll always only be idiots.”
Page 33

They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect.
Page 36

Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me.
Page 40

I told him to study the Great Game, to research the Pashtun, look at a map.
Page 44

Oooooo! I know this reference! Thanks, Moazam!

I was out of shape, having never been in much of a shape to get out of, and my confinement had hardly aided the process.
Page 57

“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”

“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”
Page 70

“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”
Page 72

Cancer is a process on which the healthy cannot impose.
Page 89

Private Harry Brookes poured his heart out to a distant stranger who made no reply, but I knew that what I needed was not so much the comfort of return, but to speak of what I had been. The telling was all, the reply merely a courtesy.
Page 89

"I was bleeding out of my insides I stood there and said, ‘I am a daughter of this beautiful land, and I will never participate in the ugliness of your regime!’ And when they shot me, it was the most magnificent I had ever been."
Page 151

Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off. The art lies in convincing the target that whatever harm they do themselves – for, by definition, you are compelling them rather than coaxing them into obedience – is less than the harm which will be caused by the revelation of the secrets in your power.

More often than not the blackmailer overplays their hand, and nothing is achieved except grief. A light touch and, more importantly, an understanding of when to back away is vital to achieve success.
Page 153

Short of a society where religion obligated modesty, a Russian winter could do wonders for thwarting facial recognition.
Page 155

"I don’t understand what drives you. You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push and keep on pushing at things which really don’t bother you."
Page 162

In truth, my own words rang hollow in my ears. I spoke fine sentiments about participation in the world around us, and yet what was my participation to be?
Page 162

“Linears only have one life,” she said at last, “and they don’t bother to change anything. It’s just not convenient. Some do. Some… ‘great’ men, or angry men, or men that have been beaten so low that all they have left to do is fight back and change the world. But, Harry, if there is one feature most common to ‘great’ men, it’s that they’re nearly always alone.”
Page 163

“Only one thing surprises me any more,” she explained, “and that’s the things people admit when they’re pissed.”
Page 163

I spent the long waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual.
Page 165

Rationality, if not intellect, can still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.
Page 166

Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted?
Page 211

Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out –I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”
Page 216

Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.
Page 224

In another time, I felt, I would have enjoyed Soviet Dave’s company, and wondered just what stories lurked behind his polite veneer, to have made him a security man.
Page 226

I waited with the light out in my room for the dead hour of the night when the mind shifts into a numb, timeless daze of voiceless thought.
Page 228

The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are.
Page 228

The doctrine I spouted was, in fact, absolutely correct for the times we lived in, but I had underestimated how quickly the times changed and, vitally, how much more important the interpretations of rivals were than the truth of what you said.
Page 291

No one ever considers the question of bladder when dealing with matters of subterfuge.
Page 296

Or when writing fiction...

Armies tend to exploit science faster than civilians, if only because their need tends to be more urgent.
Page 322

I also believe that single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity.
Page 345

She was an Indian mystic, one of the first to realise that the most profitable way to be enlightened was to spread her enlightenment to concerned Westerners who hadn’t had enough cultural opportunities to nurture their cynicism.
Page 385

I really need to start keeping notes about why I add books to my reading list. I'm pretty sure this was a book on some "You should read this" list, as the book is on a number of said lists.

When I first started reading the book, I connected with the Kushner's descriptions of San Francisco. Quickly I realized, however, that her San Francisco was definitely not my San Francisco, nor was the main characters's childhood. The names, places, streets, landmarks, yes, I recognized all of those. The drugs and goofing off and delinquency, not so much, and no.

Everyone's raving about the book, though.

The writing is engaging. The plot was slow, but wasn't a bad thing because the writing was good. The characters were interesting. I don't know, worth the hype, maybe? Would I recommend it? I can't say I would, but that's because the book is outside what I normally read and what I would recommend. It can still be worth reading.

I guess if you're looking for a fictionalized account of a woman's prison life, from the perspective of an innocent (in an objective, just world, one could call the crime she committed justified), this book is good. It triggers my "not fair!" button, along with a couple other buttons about human nature, redemption, loss, and justice. But it isn't a comedy, nor does it try to be funny, which makes it better than most fictionalized women's prison accounts.

Sometimes what other people want is wantable, briefly, before dissolving in the face of your own wants.
Page 8

I sometimes think San Francisco is cursed. I mostly think it’s a sad suckville of a place. People say it’s beautiful, but the beauty is only visible to newcomers, and invisible to those who had to grow up there.
Page 9

I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless. But not having plans doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets.
Page 12

We loved life more than the future.
Page 34

I talk to the clerk at the comic book store, who told me what blue balls was (I was probably blue-balling him by asking).
Page 41

Cracked me up.

And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.
Page 43

That was what beauty was, he supposed, when someone’s face stirred feelings.
Page 51

More typically, the good-looking ones were overly aware of their beauty. It was something to which they subjected others, a thing they hawked, bartered, and controlled.
Page 51

The touch of this girl’s comb produced a feeling that was both terrific longing and something like longing fulfilled.
Page 54

Most people talked to fill silence and didn’t know the damage they reaped.
Page 56

He understood there were people who didn’t want to be the wanter, but he could not make himself feel that way.
Page 56

A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.
Page 57

People who tinkered with trucks and dirt bikes and made assumptions of Gordon that he did nothing to dispel, because he knew those assumptions would work in his favor if he needed their help.
Page 94

Gordon withheld judgments. These people knew much more than he did about how to live in the mountains. How to survive winter and forest fires and mud flows from spring rains. How to properly stack wood, as Gordon’s neighbor from down the hill had patiently showed him, after his two cords of chunk wood were dumped in the driveway by a guy named Beaver who was missing most of his fingers.
Page 94

She made it the usual way, with juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar. A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.
Page 100

"The seventies is the end of good American cars. We used to make trucks in this country. Now we make truck nuts."

...

The idea that men would want to display an artificial scrotum—the most fragile part of a man’s body—on the back of their trucks, I said it made no sense and Conan agreed.
Page 105

I knew to let them make their mistake. You never correct, because their wrong might be your right. You wait, see how it’s going to play, see if you are getting some angle from their fuck-up.
Page 108

They were interested in having people to call, people who wanted something from them; it felt good to be pursued. It was a game to get attention. A game that was not a game because it was all they had.
Page 114

Like in the dressing room at the Mars Room, you don’t give your real name. You don’t offer information. You don’t talk about yourself because there is nothing to be gained from it.
Page 115

Men don’t holiday from their addictions. Holidays are busy, because the men need to escape from their real lives into their really real lives with us, their fantasies.
Page 124

But she sulked a lot, and he realized quiet people can control you just as effectively as loud ones. They do it differently is all.
Page 140

Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.
Page 166

“It’s okay to make a promise," London said to Gordon, as if summarizing for the teacher how life actually worked, “but it’s not always a good idea to keep one."
Page 188

I was forced to look at his tattoo, a chest-sized upside-down cross. “Got this to spite my brother," he said, his words thick from pain medication. “He’s a minister."

You sure showed him, I did not say.
Page 211

The women paid extra attention to Gordon, not knowing already what the problem was with him, as they had already established with the other single men at that party, according to Alex.
Page 219

The interaction brought back anxieties from grad school, the way his peers could casually criticize others they didn’t know anything about.
Page 220

...

The women were doing that grad school thing of air-quoting to install distance between themselves and the words they chose, these bookish women with an awkwardness he used to find cute.
Page 220

I could roam neighborhoods, visit my apartment in the Tenderloin, with the Murphy bed, my happy yellow Formica table, and above it, the movie poster of Steve McQueen in Bullitt. If you’re from SF, you love Bullitt and are proud because it was filmed there. Plus, Steve McQueen had been a delinquent kid who became a star but stayed cool, did his own stunt driving.
Page 238

I had started helping Button with her homework for Hauser’s class. I took more pleasure in it than I would have guessed.
Page 241

The singer, a barrel-chested baritone, launched into a song about a pulpwood hauler who demolished a roadside beer joint with a chain saw. Why did he do it? The song explained why. The pulpwood hauler did it because the bartender called him a redneck and refused to serve him a cold beer. So he destroyed the place.
Page 256

He had in his mind something Nietzsche said about truth. That each man is entitled to as much of it as he can bear. Maybe Gordon was not seeking truth, but seeking to learn his own limits for tolerating it.
Page 261

There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.
Page 262

After indulging in the difficult facts, he all at once grasped why these kids, Button and her friends, had killed the poor student and ruined their own lives. The student was not a person to them. That was the reason. They would not have harmed someone they knew was a full person. He was alien to them, his fluency in Mandarin something the kids never considered.
Page 262

Racism and misogyny in a nutshell.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.
Page 265

Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.
Page 266

To stay sane, that was the thing. To stay sane you formed a version of yourself you could believe in.
Page 269

Geronima, and Sanchez, and Candy, all of them were people who suffered and along the way of their suffering they made others suffer, and Gordon could not see that making them suffer lifelong would accrue to justice. It added new harm to old, and no dead person ever came back to life that he had heard about.
Page 269

It was probably an improvident time to quit a job, with the economy tanking, but the rhythms of the world did not always coordinate with the rhythm of the person.
Page 271

As I said it, I realized that he was luring me into the water, by suggesting he would end his life he was luring me to end mine.
Page 288

There were women in San Francisco who rode motorcycles. This bothered him. Because women, how did they understand the physics of it. If you don’t get physics you can’t be in control of speed.

...

He could put her on the back, though. Teach her how to hold on tight, lean with him as he leaned. So many broads didn’t even know how to be a passenger, leaned the wrong way when he cornered.
Page 311

This was from the misogynist part of the storyline.

Appropriately, I'd want to pipe this fictional character, too.

The life is the rails and I was in the mountains I dreamed of from the yard. I was in them, but nothing stays what you see from far away when you get up close.
Page 335

Okay, here we go, traipsing both down memory lane AND across the periodic table. I so much enjoyed this book. It took me a while to read it, however, and I totally missed the Caltech Bookclub meetings about it. I ended up checking it out from two different libraries for a total of three checkouts, not because it wasn't interesting, but rather because I needed to just start reading it.

The book is all about the periodic table, its history and its current state. Kean gives us stories about the different parts of the table, along with the stories of the main characters in its development, including those who sidetracked along the way.

Kean discusses the various parts of the periodic table, going through the chemistry and the physics of different elements, along with the science of finding the elements and the politics of naming them.

So... much... fun.

Probably helped that a lot of it happened at Tech and at Berkeley.

If you like science, this is a good book. If you enjoy pondering the periodic table even a hundredth as much as I do (yes, I have it memorized!), I strongly recommend this book. Even if you don't even think about the periodic table much, it still makes a great book to read to the kids before bed.

The discovery of eka-aluminium, now known as gallium, raises the question of what really drives science forward — theories, which frame how people view the world, or experiments, the simplest of which can destroy elegant theories.
Page 54

Melts in your hand! Geranium doesn't!

And after such a breakthrough, Böttger reasonably expected his freedom. Unfortunately, the king decided he was now too valuable to release and locked him up under tighter security.
Page 61

But if Ytterby had the proper economic conditions to make mining profitable and the proper geology to make it scientifically worthwhile, it still needed the proper social climate.
Page 61

They’re neither created nor destroyed: elements just are.
Page 65

Since the pinprick that existed back then, fourteen billion years ago, contained all the matter in the universe, everything around us must have been ejected from that speck.
Page 65

And if you’re looking for truly exotic materials, astronomers believe that Jupiter’s erratic magnetic field can be explained only by oceans of black, liquid “metallic hydrogen.” Scientists have seen metallic hydrogen on earth only for nanoseconds under the most exhaustively extreme conditions they can produce.
Page 70

Sure, promethium was useless, but scientists, of all people, cheer impractical discoveries, and the completion of the periodic table was epochal, the culmination of millions of man-hours.
Page 103

Yasssss.

At this point, rooms full of young women with pencils (many of them scientists’ wives, who’d been hired to help out because they were crushingly bored in Los Alamos) would get a sheet with the random numbers and begin to calculate (sometimes without knowing what it all meant) how the neutron collided with a plutonium atom; whether it was gobbled up; how many new neutrons if any were released in the process; how many neutrons those in turn released; and so on.
Page 108

Other elements absorb extra neutrons like alcoholics do another shot at the bar — they’ll get sick someday but not for eons.
Page 113

The New Yorker staff answered, “We are already at work in our office laboratories on ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ So far we just have the names.”
Page 116

But his first major scientific discovery, which propelled him to those other honors, was the result of dumb luck.
Page 116

As many inventions and discoveries are, alas.

A little childishly, he never earned more than a bachelor’s degree, not wanting to subject himself to more schooling.
Page 118

Cracked me up.

Jokes aside, much of a generation of Soviet science was squandered extracting nickel and other metals for Soviet industry.
Page 124

Hate politics like this.

“Leave [physicists] in peace,” Stalin graciously allowed. “We can always shoot them later.”
Page 125

However, though good science itself, Mendeleev’s work encouraged a lot of bad science, since it convinced people to look for something they were predisposed to find.
Page 138

Confirmation bias is a bitch.

Given that nationalism had destroyed Europe a decade earlier, other scientists did not look kindly on those Teutonic, even jingoistic names — both the Rhine and Masuria had been sites of German victories in World War I.
Page 139

In fact, Lawrence blurted out, oblivious to the Italian’s feelings, how happy he was to save $184 per month to spend on equipment, like his precious cyclotron. Ouch. This was further proof that Lawrence, for all his skill in securing funds and directing research, was obtuse with people.
Page 141

“Fission… escaped us, although it was called specifically to our attention by Ida Noddack, who sent us an article in which she clearly indicated the possibility…. The reason for our blindness is not clear.”

(As a historical curiosity, he might also have pointed out that the two people who came closest to discovering fission, Noddack and Irène Joliot-Curie — daughter of Marie Curie — and the person who eventually did discover it, Lise Meitner, were all women.)
Page 142

Yeah. The "reason" is not clear. Right.

It’s not clear why Pauling bothered to have someone check him if he wasn’t going to listen, but Pauling’s reason for ignoring the student is clear. He wanted scientific priority — he wanted every other DNA idea to be considered a knockoff of his.
Page 147

If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. This effect — the oligodynamic, or “self-sterilizing,” effect — makes metals more sterile than wood or plastic and explains why we have brass doorknobs and metal railings in public places.
Page 168

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.
Page 179

I need this on a t-shirt.

Hundreds died within weeks — further proof that when it comes to panaceas the credulity of human beings is boundless.
Page 181

After determining that life has a bias toward handedness on a deep level, Pasteur suggested that chirality was the sole “well-marked line of demarcation that at the present can be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter.”

If you’ve ever wondered what defines life, chemically there’s your answer.
Page 181

The clever part was that both the chiral catalyst with the rhodium atom and the target 2D molecule were sprawling and bulky. So when they approached each other to react, they did so like two obese animals trying to have sex.
Page 183

Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you’ve ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen.

Those organs judge only two things: whether we’re inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we’re exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO2 with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax.

It’s an evolutionary kludge, really. It would make more sense to monitor oxygen levels, since that’s what we crave. It’s easier — and usually good enough — for cells to check that carbonic acid is close to zero, so they do the minimum.
Page 188

More than anything, politics proved the folly of scientists burying their heads in lab work and hoping the world around them figured out its problems as tidily as they did their equations.
Page 205

After years of willed invisibility, Meitner was suddenly subject to Nazi pogroms. And when a colleague, a chemist, tried to turn her in, she had no choice but to flee, with just her clothes and ten deutsch marks.
Page 218

The eka-lanthanum Joliot-Curie had found was plain lanthanum, the fallout of the first tiny nuclear explosions! Hevesy, who saw early drafts of Joliot-Curie’s papers from that time, later reminisced on how close she’d come to making that unimaginable discovery. But Joliot-Curie, Hevesy said, “didn’t trust herself enough” to believe the correct interpretation. Meitner trusted herself, and she convinced Hahn that everyone else was wrong.
Page 218

He had read Goethe in the original German and found him mediocre. I was still young enough to be impressed by any strong convictions, and the denunciation made me suspicious of Goethe as a great thinker. Years
Page 240

He did so with all the enthusiasm of a dilettante, and about as much competence.
Page 240

As usual, Goethe picked the losing side because it pleased him aesthetically.
Page 241

In the late 1920s, the legendary Hungarian (and later American) designer László Moholy-Nagy drew an academic distinction between “forced obsolescence” and “artificial obsolescence.” Forced obsolescence is the normal course of things for technologies, the roughage of history books: plows gave way to reapers, muskets to Gatling guns, wooden boat hulls to steel.

In contrast, artificial obsolescence did and increasingly would dominate the twentieth century, Moholy-Nagy argued. People were abandoning consumer goods not because the goods were superannuated, but because the Joneses had some newer, fancier design. Moholy-Nagy — an artist and something of a philosopher of design — couched artificial obsolescence as materialistic, infantile, and a “moral disintegration.”
Page 244

He had read and absorbed Moholy-Nagy’s theories of design, but instead of letting the moral reproach of artificial obsolescence hem him in, Parker saw it in true American fashion: a chance to make a lot of money. If people had something better to buy, they would, even if they didn’t need
Page 245

Either way, the name fit the confessional poet, who exemplified the mad artist — someone like van Gogh or Poe, whose genius stems from parts of the psyche most of us cannot access, much less harness for artistic purposes.
Page 251

Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls — at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants.
Page 253

Many artists report feeling flatlined or tranquilized on lithium.
Page 254

Though an essential trace nutrient in all animals (in humans, the depletion of selenium in the bloodstream of AIDS patients is a fatally accurate harbinger of death), selenium is toxic in large doses.
Page 258

what pathological science is not. It’s not fraud, since the adherents of a pathological science believe they’re right — if only everyone else could see it. It’s not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method.

It’s also not politicized science, like Lysenkoism, where people swear allegiance to a false science because of threats or a skewed ideology. Finally, it’s not general clinical madness or merely deranged belief.

It’s a particular madness, a meticulous and scientifically informed delusion. Pathological scientists pick out a marginal and unlikely phenomenon that appeals to them for whatever reason and bring all their scientific acumen to proving its existence.
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But the game is rigged from the start: their science serves only the deeper emotional need to believe in something.
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A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as evidence — claiming that scientists don’t know everything and therefore there’s room for my pet theory, too.
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But what really makes the ongoing hunt for megalodons pathological is that doubt from the establishment only deepens people’s convictions.
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Still, a few skeptics, especially at Cal Tech, seethed. Cold fusion upset these men’s scientific sensibilities, and Pons and Fleischmann’s arrogance upset their modesty.
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One word, little t. Caltech, please.

Whenever pure tin tools or tin coins or tin toys got cold, a whitish rust began to creep over them like hoarfrost on a window in winter. The white rust would break out into pustules, then weaken and corrode the tin, until it crumbled and eroded away. Unlike iron rust, this was not a chemical reaction. As scientists now know, this happens because tin atoms can arrange themselves inside a solid in two different ways, and when they get cold, they shift from their strong “beta” form to the crumbly, powdery “alpha” form.
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Various European cities with harsh winters (e.g., St. Petersburg) have legends about expensive tin pipes on new church organs exploding into ash the instant the organist blasted his first chord. (Some pious citizens were more apt to blame the Devil.)
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Scientists can now coax ice into forming fourteen distinctly shaped crystals by using high-pressure chambers. Some ices sink rather than float in water, and others form not six-sided snowflakes, but shapes like palm leaves or heads of cauliflower.
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Some cosmologists today calculate that our entire universe burst into existence when a single submicronanobubble slipped free from that foam and began expanding at an exponential rate. It’s a handsome theory, actually, and explains a lot — except, unfortunately, why this might have happened.
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The first complex organic molecules may have formed not in the turbulent ocean, as is commonly thought, but in water bubbles trapped in Arctic-like sheets of ice. Water is quite heavy, and when water freezes, it crushes together dissolved “impurities,” such as organic molecules, inside bubbles. The concentration and compression in those bubbles might have been high enough to fuse those molecules into self-replicating systems.
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Oklo was powered by nothing but uranium, water, and blue-green algae (i.e., pond scum). Really. Algae in a river near Oklo produced excess oxygen after undergoing photosynthesis. The oxygen made the water so acidic that as it trickled underground through loose soil, it dissolved the uranium from the bedrock.

All uranium back then had a higher concentration of the bomb-ready uranium-235 isotope — about 3 percent, compared to 0.7 percent today. So the water was volatile already, and when underground algae filtered the water, the uranium was concentrated in one spot, achieving a critical mass. Though necessary, a critical mass wasn’t sufficient.

In general, for a chain reaction to occur, uranium nuclei must not only be struck by neutrons, they must absorb them. When pure uranium fissions, its atoms shoot out “fast” neutrons that bounce off neighbors like stones skipped across water.

Those are basically duds, wasted neutrons. Oklo uranium went nuclear only because the river water slowed the neutrons down enough for neighboring nuclei to snag them. Without the water, the reaction never would have begun. But there’s more. Fission also produces heat, obviously.

And the reason there’s not a big crater in Africa today is that when the uranium got hot, it boiled the water away. With no water, the neutrons became too fast to absorb, and the process ground to a halt. Only when the uranium cooled down did water trickle back in — which slowed the neutrons and restarted the reactor. It was a nuclear Old Faithful, self-regulating, and it consumed 13,000 pounds of uranium over 150,000 years at sixteen sites around Oklo, in on/ off cycles of 150 minutes.
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Wow.

Almost all life forms use metallic elements in trace amounts to create, store, or shuttle energetic molecules around inside them. Animals primarily use the iron in hemoglobin, but the earliest and most successful forms of life, especially blue-green algae, used magnesium.
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And because Einstein determined that space and time are intertwined, some physicists believe that alpha variations in time could imply alpha variations across space. According to this theory, just as life arose on earth and not the moon because earth has water and an atmosphere, perhaps life arose here, on a seemingly random planet in a seemingly unremarkable pocket of space, because only here do the proper cosmological conditions exist for sturdy atoms and full molecules.
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First are superatoms. These clusters — between eight and one hundred atoms of one element — have the eerie ability to mimic single atoms of different elements. For instance, thirteen aluminium atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine: the two entities are indistinguishable in chemical reactions. This happens despite the cluster being thirteen times larger than a single bromine atom and despite aluminium being nothing like the lacrimatory poison-gas staple. Other combinations of aluminium can mimic noble gases, semiconductors, bone materials like calcium, or elements from pretty much any other region of the periodic table.
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Assuming that he would decipher DNA, Pauling had not broken much of a sweat on his calculations at first, and Ava lit into him: “If [DNA] was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder at it?” Even so, Linus loved her deeply, and perhaps one reason he stayed at Cal Tech so long and never transferred his allegiance to Berkeley, even though the latter was a much stronger school at the time, was that one of the more prominent members of the Berkeley faculty, Robert Oppenheimer, later head of the Manhattan Project, had tried to seduce Ava, which made Linus furious.
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Overall, the history of varying constants resembles the history of alchemy: even when there’s real science going on, it’s hard to sift it from the mysticism. Scientists tend to invoke inconstants to explain away whatever cosmological mysteries happen to trouble a particular era, such as the accelerating universe.
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