An essay in my 6th grade Hindi textbook was titled “Shok Sabha” and narrated the scene during a Hindu bereavement ritual. In it was described the life of a “Rudaali” (“one who cries”) or a professional mourner from Rajasthan. She was a peasant woman who wore black and was hired to mourn at the untimely death of a young […]
An essay in my 6th grade Hindi textbook was titled “Shok Sabha” and narrated the scene during a Hindu bereavement ritual. In it…
Daniel Todes’s massive tome on physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), the man who, our textbooks tell us, trained dogs to salivate to a bell, transformed almost everything I had come to learn about that towering figure over my twenty-year career as a psychologist. For one thing, Pavlov rarely ever used a bell in his experiments. Instead […]
Daniel Todes’s massive tome on physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), the man who, our textbooks tell us, trained dogs to salivate…
[to Simon Bishop] “Nelly, you’re a disgrace to depression.” – Melvin Udall, As Good As it Gets “The only memory of my father I have is the regular beating we got from him. He died young of liver cirrhosis. My mother had psychotic episodes, but at the time we did not know what to call […]
[to Simon Bishop] “Nelly, you’re a disgrace to depression.” – Melvin Udall, As Good As it Gets “The only memory…
