Poets in particular seem to struggle with a bipolar mind, as discussed in Touched with Fire. But perhaps that visibility is just because they're poets, and inclined to make terrific material out of any experience. The new poetry anthology from Eastern Washington University, Living in Storms, shows no let-up to the harsh weather:
Schramm has collected more than a hundred poems by some four-score contemporary poets whose lives have been affected in various ways by bipolar disorder....more ›
Swoop, the mascot of Eastern Washington University, was stomped outside a bar Sunday night and briefly detained by none other than police chief Gil Kerlikowske. Apparently. Reports the Seattle P-I:
Lt. Kenneth Hicks, shift commander at the precinct that includes Pioneer Square, was leading Kerlikowske on a closing-time tour of the club district when the senior officers witnessed a man-on-eagle fracas, according to police documents.more ›
Whitman College: Jeffrey Sachs, economist and author
Kurt Vonnegut, up there with Twain and Melville and Kesey as the most original American novelists ever in the history of writing stuff, died tonight. He was 84. He'd been in the hospital since a fall a couple of weeks ago. Attention kids: this is what happens if you chain-smoke for 73 years.
They can handle uncertainty--it is a professional requirement, in fact--but they tend to avoid speaking about their research unless they are very certain about something. (At least the good ones do.) Increasingly so, the precision and certainty of science are being put on trial on a public scale never before experienced. And to a degree, the admirable tendency of scientists to demand certainty is in conflict with our need as the public to potentially act on less inviolable evidence.
might be the Best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it.
