Tag: late 19th century
Why Americans Are So Awful to One Another
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with
Will We Ever Find a Cure for Mental Illness?
Psychiatry, from its very inception, has been subject to raised eyebrows if not outright ridicule. Even before Freud came along with his batty theories about infantile sexuality and repressed wishes to kill one’s father, the discipline had struggled to define its methods and objectives. More than two centuries after it emerged as a profession devoted to the care—and hoped-for cure—of the mentally ill, psychiatry is still seen by many as half-baked, neither a science nor an art, pulled
China Will Have to Live With COVID Too
America has long thought itself exceptional, a blessed place destined to bring freedom to the world. China has an even longer history of self-proclaimed exceptionalism and, spurred by its many modern achievements, is more assertively promoting its brand of governance as a model for the world. The widening confrontation between the United States and China is thus becoming a “clash of exceptionalisms.”
From the Chinese viewpoint, the country’s successful containment of the coronavirus over the past two years is