By James Aitchison Psychotherapy and hypnosis had a strange genesis: the absurd quackery of Dr Franz Anton Mesmer. Like phrenology — the so-called science of reading lumps and bumps on someone’s head to determine their character — Mesmer’s theories would…
By David Topper Deeply absorbed in an exceptionally long essay in the New York Review of Books about a very esoteric book on “the trouble with reality” – and I’m speaking here of epistemology and ontology; namely, that nature of…
By: Leah Park While scrolling through TikTok, I came across a post in which a black mother accused her doctors of malpractice because of her race. Surely, I thought, in today’s day and age, such accusations were unfounded; doctors are…
By James Aitchison When Hollywood was simply a dusty backwater of fledgling studios and orchards, and Los Angeles an uncultured outpost, America’s film capital was New York City. The great Broadway theatrical stars were simply a taxi ride away. Even…
By: Jad S. Karkout In writing Dubliners, Joyce aimed to present a historical account of Dublin and create a vivid portrayal of Irish life. To achieve this, he centered Dublin as a hub of paralysis that afflicted most of…
By James Aitchison They called phrenology a science, but it was pure quackery, a pseudoscience that tragically labelled thousands of innocent people as criminals or mentally defective. By running their hands over a person’s skull and judging its shape and…
By: Christopher Johnson Glacial Park Conservation Area in McHenry County, Illinois–some 45 miles northwest of Chicago–is a stunning example of the Midwestern landscape. In the space of 3,400 acres, you hike through a restored prairie and past a bog and…
By James Aitchison We were touring Northern Ireland, my wife and I, tracing some of my Irish ancestors to the seaside town of Ballycastle. There, on the north-eastern tip of Ireland, we had booked a rather interesting cottage from the…
(Part of the Yin & Yang of Travel Series) By: Mark D. Walker Share our similarities, celebrate our differences. — M. Scott Peck Over the last fifty years, the why and where I travel have changed radically. In 2013, my…
By James Aitchison It all began in 1775 when Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele invented a stunning new pigment — a green more vibrant, more luminous, than anything seen before. The secret? The miraculous new pigment was copper arsenite, also…