This is a big year for Darwin, and his work. Also a big year for over-evolved shoes. Multiple celebrations will offer self-loathers numerous opportunities to fall off our platform pumps, put our feet in our mouths and generally humiliate ourselves in the festivals of academe.
Click thumbnail to see larger version of my T Magazine piece on the subject of Darwinian Shoes, or download the PDF file below.
This piece of mine ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here. It is unusual for The Times to do humor, let alone about neuroscience, so attempting a project like this was an invitation to a kind of filigree-style self-loathing, wherein the insatiable concerns of psychobiologists for repertorial accuracy (you just can’t convey the complexity of neurocircuitry in ten words and still have room for the graphics) and the delicate feelings of celebrities’ lawyers (note the ample use of words like “seemingly”) twist their tendrils about your waking mind and spin spiderwebs through your dreams.
Is it clear in my article that the brain doesn’t really have clearly-definable “centers” for complex functions like speech? No. Is it clear that diffusion of Botox into the upper reaches of the cranium from a shot in the forehead has (as yet) no support from experimental evidence? Not really. Was I able to suggest that the nicotine receptors that Botox blocks have never specifically been shown to occasion the release of dopamine – a neurotransmitter associated with a very different set of receptors? Barely.
So this article makes me out to be something of an idiot, neurology-wise. And that for me is the fun of it. Because really we don’t need Botox to make us into fools; the simple task of trying to write clearly will do that nicely and far less inexpensively. Alas, it also causes the brow to wrinkle.
ClickHERE to order Self-Loathing for Beginners from Amazon.
As a people becoming world-famous for locking up innocent people, isn’t it time for Americans to start to 
wear handcuffs as jewelry?
Ever since my alt-ego, Maggie Cutler, co-founded The Shackle Report in an effort to combat (with dark, knowing laughs) the shame of complicity — however involuntary — in her nation’s incarceration policies (carried out under the baleful eye of US media) Cutler had wanted to do a fashion piece on color-coded handcuffs.
The fall in the NY Times Fall Fashion Supplement, “T Magazine,” gave me a chance to do it for her. The piece ran Aug 17th in print, and can be found online here.
The article is jumpy, because a section was chopped out about Clive Stafford Smith, the Gitmo detainee lawyer, who participated in two demonstrations against Hiatt’s factory in Birmingham England to proteest their manufacture of shackles for Gitmo. One demo was in 2005 and the other, celebrating Gitmo’s fifth anniversary, was in ‘07. I had hoped to urge fashionable people who took up the handcuff idea to prepare themselves for political challenges by reading up on the issues, starting with Stafford Smith’s latest, The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side.
It goes without saying that handcuffs are a great, and relatively inexpensive way to accessorize self-loathing. Compared to more conventional ornaments, like dunce caps, prep school blazers and giant nose rings, items that suggest that you are actively loathed by others, cuffs declare that you’re not only guilty of something serious, but know it. For other tips on flaunting your self-loathing…
ClickHERE to order Self-Loathing for Beginners from Amazon.
learn to do it properly!
