If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Single psilocybin dose can relieve cancer-related depression long-term (Paul McClure, June 21, 2025, New Atlas)
A single dose of psilocybin coupled with “talk therapy” can significantly reduce depression in people with cancer for up to two years, according to a new study.
Pills or Perseverance: How Japan and Other Nations Tackle Headaches (Nippon, Jun 23, 2025)
When asked whether headaches should be endured to some extent, 78.2% of respondents in Germany either “strongly agreed” or “somewhat agreed,” which was the highest level among the five countries. Japan had the lowest level of agreement, at 59.8%.
However, 77.2% of the respondents in Japan said that they do in fact tend to endure their headaches. This suggests a significant gap between the attitude towards headaches and actual behavior.
Children shouldn’t fear their feelings (Josephine Bartosch, 26 June, 2025, The Critic)
Report author and counsellor Lucy Beney says that rather than toughening kids up to deal with the challenges of life, today’s schools may be talking them into fragility.
Every school is now required to appoint a “Senior Mental Health Lead”, and there’s cross-party enthusiasm for parachuting therapists into educational institutions. By 2023, over a third of schools had signed up with Mental Health Support Teams (MHSTs), and though the Department for Education doesn’t routinely collect data, a 2017 survey suggested that around 85 per cent of secondary schools and 55 per cent of primary schools were already offering counselling services.
This shift is amplified outside the classroom, as social media picks up where school counsellors leave off. On TikTok mental health labels like anxiety and depression, or conditions like ASD, ADHD are used as social capital — with young people trading symptoms like status symbols.
ADHD linked to elevated levels of these common heavy metals (Bronwyn Thompson, June 23, 2025, New Atlas)
Exposure to common heavy metals has been linked to the prevalence of ADHD, according to a new study. It builds on existing research that has found that there’s a strong association between certain metals like lead and copper and increased cases of both ADHD and how serious the condition’s symptoms are.
The God that Glitched: Matthew Gasda on why the simulation theory is the religion of our time. (Matthew Gasda, Jun 06, 2025, Wisdom of Crowds)
[T]his is where I think critical engagement with ST really gets interesting. I hypothesize that SA has been disseminated as ST because we can no longer imagine a God in our own image, and have instead reworked the idea of God into a computer. Ontologically, Bostrom’s depiction of Godlike simulators (and Godlike simulators simulating Godlike simulators … simulators nested inside of simulators) bears so much resemblance to religion that it’s functionally indistinguishable from religion. It is basically an ultra-reductionist, ultra-scientistic vision of how God or Gods or higher or lower levels of reality could exist (like in Buddhism). In pragmatic terms, I’m not really sure what the point of thinking about SA is. The only point in engaging with either SA or ST is that you want to: the theory allows you to experience less experiential friction; you don’t have to worry so much; you don’t have to try to puzzle out why you’re on earth anymore, or what it’s all for. You aren’t really here.
Stated thusly, simulation theory and God ultimately are versions of the same thesis with different names and points of emphasis; simulation theory is a blend of monotheism and Buddhism without any duties, demands, or standard practices. Moreover, the trope of simulation theory better fits our current understanding of ourselves, and the direction of our technological civilization; it projects an astonishingly anthropomorphic idea of the divine: simulational theory is a narcissistic new projection of a God who resembles what we’ve become. We live more and more on and through screens; so God must too.
…”Love one another.”
Drug-free pain relief game progresses to the next level in clinical trial (Bronwyn Thompson, June 05, 2025, Nautilus)
They found that four weeks of gameplay with the animated program and accompanying brain-monitoring headset, showed that 75% of participants had a significant reduction in pain – and it matched a level that was either on par with opioids or even better.
AI Signals The Death Of The Author: The meaning of a piece of writing does not depend on the identity of the author, even if the author is not human (David J. Gunkel, June 4, 2025, Noema)
I hold a different view. LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn’t a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the “author.”
If you were to ask someone what an author is, they would most probably answer that it is someone who writes a book or some other text and is therefore responsible for what it says. They could reel off the names of people we identify as such: William Shakespeare, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, maybe even this guy David Gunkel. But this understanding of an author is not some kind of universal truth that has existed from the beginning of time. Rather, it is a modern conception. The “author” as we now know it comes from somewhere in the not-so-distant past; it has a history.
The French literary critic Roland Barthes, in his 1967 essay “The Death of The Author,” traced the roots of this now-commonplace idea to the modern period in Europe, beginning around the mid-16th century. Before then, people did of course write texts — but the idea of vesting responsibility and authority in a singular person was not common practice. In fact, many of the great and influential works of literature — the folklore, myth and religious scripture that we still read today — have circulated in human culture without needing or assigning them to an author.
Bioprinted organs ‘10–15 years away,’ says startup regenerating dog skin (Thomas Macauly, May 29, 2025, The Next Web)
Human organs could be bioprinted for transplants within 10 years, according to Lithuanian startup Vital3D. But before reaching human hearts and kidneys, the company is starting with something simpler: regenerating dog skin.Based in Vilnius, Vital3D is already bioprinting functional tissue constructs. Using a proprietary laser system, the startup deposits living cells and biomaterials in precise 3D patterns. The structures mimic natural biological systems — and could one day form entire organs tailored to a patient’s unique anatomy.
It’s impossible to overstate deflationary pressures.
Study: Intervention for long COVID sees majority return to work (Dr. Tim Sandle, May 28, 2025, Digital Journal)
A new study shows that doing progressively challenging computerized brain exercises (with coaching) drove significant gains across multiple symptoms of people with long COVID-19, producing ‘large’ to ‘very large’ improvements in the primary measure of functional performance at daily tasks.
The Nostalgia for Dark Satanic Mills (Aidan Grogan, 5/26/25, Law & Liberty)
The dark, satanic mills were engines of economic progress, but wistful longing for manual labor in factories overlooks how these economic conditions undermined traditional social structures and uprooted men and women from an environment conducive to child-rearing. For whatever growing pains the American heartland must suffer during the transition from manufacturing to services, the emergent “knowledge economy” offers tremendous opportunities to restore the bonds of kith and kin stifled by the industrial and sexual revolutions.
By emphasizing automation, education, and expanded telework, the industrial economy may at last complete a full circle and empower men and women to remain where they are—in the home, the nucleus of pre-industrial economic life. The twenty-first century’s digital economy may ironically enable a true “return to tradition” that conservatives, in particular, should welcome.
But such an epochal transformation necessitates the cultivation of a new post-populist elite—one with a more refined, conservative outlook, a renewed embrace of free markets, and a willingness to set and maintain a high moral standard.