99 Percent Invisible: The Kirkbride Plan

Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States, many of them not all that different from Buffalo State. It’s one of the reasons we’re all so familiar with the idea of the big empty asylum in the woods. Few stop to wonder where all these structures came from, but, in fact, all of this was part of a treatment regimen developed by a singular Philadelphia doctor, a physician who was obsessed with architecture and how it could be harnessed therapeutically to cure those who’d become insane. [...]

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when someone was deemed insane, it was often thought to be the person’s own fault. “The assumption was they were […] forsaken by God or they were possessed by demons or they had done something to deserve to be in such a desperate condition,” says Carla Yanni, an architectural historian at Rutgers and author of the book The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States. She says that what happened to someone labeled insane in the early 19th century would have depended mostly on their class. Wealthy families often kept insane relatives at home or paid for them to live in private madhouses. Poorer people fared worse. They were cast out alone, and a lot of them ended up in jails or hospices. [...]

By the mid 20th century, the buildings had become overcrowded. Buffalo’s asylum, which was was designed for 600 was treating 3,600 patients in house. The state mental hospitals constructed during the early 20th century grew even larger, resembling institutional buildings, even prisons, the very thing Kirkbride had wanted to avoid. The largest, Pilgrim State Hospital on Long Island, at one point housed over 14,000 patients. By 1955, over half a million Americans were confined in state mental hospitals.

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The Guardian: The cult of Columbine: how an obsession with school shooters led to a murder plot

I am not alone in my appetite for dark stories. The vast majority of violent crimes are committed by men. Most murder victims are also male. Homicide detectives and criminal investigators: predominantly male. Attorneys in criminal cases are also mostly men. Put simply, the world of violent crime is masculine, at least statistically. But the consumers of crime stories are decidedly female. Women make up the majority of the readers of true-crime books and the listeners of true-crime podcasts. Women are not just passively consuming these stories; they are also finding ways to participate in them. Start reading through one of the many online sleuthing forums where amateurs speculate about unsolved crimes – and sometimes solve them – and you will find that most of the posters are women. More than seven in 10 students of forensic science, one of the fastest-growing college majors, are women. A few years ago, two undergraduates at the University of Pittsburgh founded a cold case club so they could spend their extracurricular hours investigating murders; the group is, unsurprisingly, dominated by women. [...]

Before the late 1990s, plenty of kids were furious and suicidal, but few of them dealt with their feelings by taking a gun to school. In 1977, Stephen King (writing under his pseudonym Richard Bachman) published a novel called Rage, which told the story of an angry young man who shot his algebra teacher and took his classmates hostage. Throughout the 1980s and into the 90s, a handful of school shootings roughly followed this formula – violence directed at teachers and classrooms taken hostage by teenagers, who were later discovered to be fans of the novel. After a 1997 school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky (whose perpetrator had a copy of Rage in his locker), King asked his publisher “to take the damn thing out of print”. [...]

A few weeks after my return home to Texas, I was still obsessing about Lindsay’s punishment. Court proceedings are supposed to provide some sense of closure, but this situation felt unfinished. I kept getting stuck on this one thing: how in imposing the strictest sentence possible, one usually reserved for the most violent criminals, the judge was validating Lindsay’s virtual self, giving too much credence to the part of her that loudly proclaimed how frightening she was, how unlike other people. She had never touched a gun; her flimsy plan had collapsed almost as soon as it was put in motion. A Canadian firearms expert publicly claimed that the massacre she had helped mastermind was virtually impossible, given her and James’s weaponry and lack of experience. I was told that, in prison, she seemed to be retreating even further into her internal world.

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WorldAffairs: Globalization and Robotics: Will AI Cripple the Global Workforce?

By 2030, up to 800 million global workers may lose their jobs to automation. Technological advancement in an ever-globalized economy is changing both service-sector and professional jobs at a staggering pace. How can governments help workers remain vital to the global economy? Richard Baldwin, author of the new book, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work, is in conversation with WorldAffairs co-host Markos Kounalakis.

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Independent: As Saudi Arabia grows desperate, this could be the beginning of the end of the war in Yemen

The Yemen war is about to come to an end. A Saudi official admitted this week that for the first time since 2016, Riyadh is in talks with the Houthi rebels. The talks have surfaced despite the Houthis being in charge of the capital Sanaa and the other most populous parts in Northern Yemen, which indicates that the Saudis are coming to terms with this status quo. The radical approach of effectively flushing the Houthis out of the north has been abandoned. The new approach of accepting the Houthis as part of the new post-war reality in Yemen, on the other hand, is much more sophisticated. [...]

Instead of the endless fighting, Saudi Arabia is trying to convince the Houthis to sever ties with its regional rival, Iran. After all, all the Houthis want is legitimacy of their new strategic posture in Yemen. This, in their view, must be cited in a similar power-sharing agreement that guarantees their share in a federation-like new system that includes president Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi’s government and separatists in the south. [...]

The attack on the Saudi Aramco oil installations in September, which knocked out half of the Kingdom’s production, was a tipping point. This week, Aramco launched an initial public offering (IPO) to be listed on the local stock market, abandoning Mohamed bin Salman’s original plan to list it on overseas markets. The escalation with Iran began to have a direct effect on the Saudi economy.

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The Guardian: ‘Completely bizarre’: Grieve campaigns to overturn his Tory majority

The former Tory MP, who was stripped of the Conservative whip by Boris Johnson for trying to stop a no-deal Brexit and in effect barred by his local association from standing for the party again, is not going quietly. To the horror of Conservative HQ, Grieve, the articulate and charming former attorney general, is contesting as an independent the normally safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield, which he has represented for his former party since 1997 – and he seems to be in with a chance. The constituency has included Marlow since 2010. 

The challenge is not a small one, and the mountain he has to climb is partly of his own creation. In 2017, he retained the seat with a huge 24,000 majority over Labour. “This area is Tory, Tory, Tory,” says one of his helpers, Katie Breathwick. “But the reason he can win again is that Brexit has made the whole thing much, much more complicated.”[...]

On Saturday night local Conservatives selected Joy Morrissey, an ardent Brexiter and Ealing councillor, to replace Grieve and take him on. He will not worry too much. He is happy on the stump sticking to his own views and principles, under the banner of independence. “I just think the Boris Johnson deal would be a catastrophe for the country, so what else can I tell people? What else can I do?”

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UnHerd: Has Brexit really divided Britain?

Places such as Boston (on one end of the spectrum), where 76% of people voted Leave, or Lambeth (at the other), which was 79% Remain, really are the exceptions. Most areas are just not that polarised. And even in these outliers, once you factor in the non-voters, the apparent overwhelming hegemony of the “winning” side is much reduced. Walk down a street in Boston, for example, and under 60% of people you encounter will have voted Leave. In Lambeth, the most Remain-voting authority in the UK, only 53% of all those who could vote, voted Remain. [...]

Multiple pieces of research have shown the extent to which this can make us judge people or not want them as their friends. A new study, in a book we’ve edited (and which is available for a very reasonable price) shows that the referendum vote can even affect how who you want to move in next door to you, far more so than any of the other variables that were tested. [...]

These two errors frequently come together when discussing the relationship between political parties and the referendum. Just because a majority of people in a constituency voted Leave, and just because a constituency returned a Labour MP, this does not mean that a majority of Labour voters in that seat voted Leave. This has now been pointed out so often that it should not need repetition, but it clearly does, because people keep on making this mistake.

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