The Wound as Diploma

A transcript arrived this week: five signs of “traumatic intelligence,” clipped from a video and passed along as science. The research record tells a different story, and the difference matters. A reader sent me that transcript. It came without a link, without a channel name, without an author, the way most things travel now, and it ended in the middle of a sentence: “Sign five. Consider this for a moment. Everything you’ve heard so far, the perceptiveness, the empathy, the analytical mind, these are not weaknesses dressed up as strengths.” Then nothing. The clipboard closed before the payoff arrived. That dead cut turns out to be the most honest moment in the whole document, and I want to show you why. The reader’s question was whether the thing could run here as an article. It can, on the table, under the lights.

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If Republicans Won their Wants

I don’t think there’s any doubt now that the GOP is the Party of Punishment. Republicans relish their ongoing, self-mandate, to publicly humiliate and destroy anyone who doesn’t go along with their party plan.  The latest victim of their wrath is University of Wisconsin Professor William Cronon.

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Tracked in Wisconsin

A court in Wisconsin upheld the legal right of police attaching a GPS device to a vehicle without a warrant and without needing to alert the person being tracked.

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