All You Need is Luck

This piece by Elitsa Dermendzhiyska about how and why psychotherapy works, the effectiveness of the bond between therapists and their patients, and attachment theory is interesting throughout but a bit tough to summarize. Let’s start here, with the idea that therapy provides the opportunity of a do-over in the building your emotional self that mirrors what happens, ideally, in early life between a loving, supportive caregiver and a child.

All of this suggests a tantalising alternative to both the medical professional’s and the layperson’s view of therapy: that what happens between client and therapist goes beyond mere talking, and goes deeper than clinical treatment. The relationship is both greater and more primal, and it compares with the developmental strides that play out between mother and baby, and that help to turn a diapered mess into a normal, healthy person. I am referring to attachment.

To push the analogy further, what if, attachment theory asks, therapy gives you the chance to reach back and repair your earliest emotional bonds, correcting, as you do, the noxious mechanics of your mental afflictions?

As someone who has been in therapy but doesn’t actually know a whole lot about how it works, I found the whole piece fascinating.

Lockdown was the longest period of quiet in recorded human history - MIT Technology Review: “When lockdown started in March, the world went instantly, strangely silent. City streets emptied. Joggers and families disappeared from parks. Construction projects froze. Stores closed. Now a network of seismic monitoring stations around the world has quantified this unprecedented period of quiet. The resulting research into “seismic silence,” published in Science today, has shown just how much noise we contribute to the environment. It has also let scientists get an unparalleled listen to what’s happening beneath our feet…”

CSIRO names new Aussie fly species after Marvel characters Deadpool, Thor, Loki, and Black Widow

The CSIRO has named more than 160 new species, including a fly named "Deadpool" after the Marvel comic character, in the past year.

Ruthless Australian 'assassin flies' named for Thor, Deadpool — and Stan Lee

Biologists named 5 newly-described species of Australian "assassin flies" after Thor, Loki and other Marvel heroes.

Why I Made This Future is a recurring feature that invites speculative fiction authors, futurists, screenwriters, and so on to discuss how and why they built their fictional future worlds.

There is nothing boring about Tim Maughan’s works of speculative fiction, which concern, for example, the total destruction of the internet as we know it, the insidious possibilities of monetized augmented realities, and the full collapse of global supply networks. He writes such dramatic devastations, he says, to better examine the digital injustices that are perpetrated on ordinary people every day, and which can look rather boring on paper: data profiling and automated trade networks and surveillance capitalism and other drab inflections of our shitty cyberpunk present.