Posts Tagged ‘forgetting’
Happy Captain Picard Day Links!
* Speaking of: a nice reflection on the first episode of Picard at the LARB blog.
* The more important observation at this point is that none of the Democrats have faced the full force of the contemporary Republican attack machine and none of them have demonstrated their capacity to survive it. I would argue that if Sanders seems unready, then all of his Democratic rivals are vastly more unready. And that all Democrats are now equally vulnerable to the way that the Republican Party now conducts itself politically, because the Republican Party no longer has any constraints on its behavior. Neither accuracy nor probity matters any longer. Legality is unimportant to a lawless party. The preservation of democratic norms and structures doesn’t matter to a party that no longer believes that the opposition has a right to govern if elected. The contemporary GOP and its base believe that by definition, only they have political legitmacy. The Democrats are still preparing to run in an election, while their opponents are preparing to go to war.
* Four ways America’s system of government is rigged against democracy (and Democrats).
* First Bernie, now this: Vermont might broaden license plate comedy forever by allowing emojis.
* Fair wages are anti-doctrinal: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Duquesne University’s status as a Roman Catholic institution exempts it from National Labor Relations Board’s rules on forming an adjunct union.
* The Age of Climate Authoritarianism Is Upon Us.
* Funded by the federal government, local governments in coastal states are buying out thousands of homes in vulnerable areas every year, reshaping and breaking up communities as they go. In their wake, the departed residents of these communities have left what may be the country’s first climate ghost towns, abandoned places made uninhabitable by the warming of the planet. The vacant lots of Arbor Oaks and neighborhoods like it provide a stark warning about the shortcomings of the government’s haphazard, market-driven response to climate change, and raise difficult questions about the rights of people who live in the path of climate disaster.
* Rewilding the Arctic could stop permafrost thaw and reduce climate change risks.
* Student group calls for university to divest in fossil fuels.
* How the gig economy leaves people poorer, in three or four tweets.
* The company that literally manufactured and sold Zyklon-B to the Nazis doing a Holocaust Memorial Day tweet is a great example of how the Holocaust exists in the Western imaginary as a decontextualized, abstract and perfect evil.
* The Curious Worldview of Michael Schur’s Television.
* This is exactly what Joe Biden sounds like, and I can’t understand how everyone doesn’t see it. Why does Joe Biden keep losing his cool with voters?
* It would sell! It would sell.
* Untitled Goose Game devs donate a percentage of profit to indigenous groups.
* Minneapolis police no longer to ticket for equipment violations under new policy. This seems like it could actually be good policy, as long as it’s not a smokescreen for surveillance or harassment.
* Here Are the Fare-Evasion Enforcement Data the NYPD Fought to Keep Secret.
* A constitutive contradiction in the law surrounding sex offender lists I hadn’t realized.
* What Earth Would Have Looked Like If It Spinned Clockwise Instead Of Counterclockwise.
Trumpsday Reading
* Trump is targeting up to 8 million people for deportation. Making America Cruel Again. The triumph of cruelty. Inside the White House-Cabinet battle over Trump’s immigration order. 24 Hours at JFK. ‘Breathtaking violation of rights.’ Constitutional crisis. Hero Lawyers. Stop that plane: The frantic race to halt a deportation. A Q&A With the ACLU. Our New Itinerary. Travel ban causes high anxiety for Milwaukee’s international students. The little-noticed bombshell in Trump’s immigration order. Half Of World’s Refugees Are Running From U.S. Wars. Trump’s First Weeks Leave Washington— and the White House Staff—Panting. The leaks coming out of the Trump White House right now are totally bananas. Yes, all this happened. Gasp! Trust Records Show Trump Is Still Closely Tied to His Empire. Ivanka lied about the leaving the Trump organization too. Make War with Mexico Great Again. Trainwreck in Yemen. Even Australia. Onward to Iran! 14 Versions Of Trump’s Presidency, From #MAGA To Impeachment. Trump and the Republicans Are on a Suicide Mission Together. Editing Trump. Authoritarian Government Watch. We just let this one go without even making a big deal about it. And this one was crazy too! A Series of Unfortunate Events. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. Seems legit. This is not normal. #TheResistance. A Reader for Trumplandia. Trump: A Resister’s Guide. SNL 1, 2, 3. Oh man. The law, in its majestic equality. 4 in 10. A whole year? Jesus. The numbers. A 3,900 percent increase. It takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance to topple brutal dictatorships. Here’s how much the anti-Trump protests cost, at Trump paid-turnout rates. Disobey.
* * The worst, most terrible things that the United States has done have almost never happened through an assault on American institutions; they’ve always happened through American institutions and practices. These are the elements of the American polity that have offered especially potent tools and instruments of intimidation and coercion: federalism, the separation of powers, social pluralism, and the rule of law. All the elements of the American experience that liberals and conservatives have so cherished as bulwarks of American freedom have also been sources and instruments of political fear. In all the cases I looked at, coercion, intimidation, repression, and violence were leveraged through these mechanisms, not in spite of them.
* There is a style of political reasoning which the Trump moment lends itself to, which can be called conspiracism. Against omniscience.
* Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable.
* Screaming about Trump into a Well: A Text Adventure.
* The Democratic Response to Gorsuch Is Easy: Just Say No. Why Democrats Should Oppose Neil Gorsuch. Make Republicans Nuke the Filibuster to Confirm Neil Gorsuch.
* Football players at private institutions in college sports’ most competitive level are employees, the National Labor Relations Board’s general counsel stated this week, and will be treated as such if they seek protection against unfair labor practices.
* Chris Ware on George Herriman. A rebuttal.
* The African Speculative Fiction lecture series at the University of London.
* The Hot New Brand of Higher Education.
* Riot at Berkeley. #Milosexual and the Aesthetics of Fascism.
* After-the-Horse-Has-Left-the-Barn Department. Well at least you’re sorry.
* Who Cares If the Dow Jones Hit 20,000?
* Under A New System, Clinton Could Have Won The Popular Vote By 5 Points And Still Lost.
* The U.S. military’s stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported.
* Academics boycotting the U.S.
* The end of Locked-In Syndrome… in the Twilight Zone.
* Same.
* The new issue of the SFRA Review is up.
* The Youth Group That Launched a Movement at Standing Rock.
* Other Space, the best SF series no one but me watched.
* Against the Constitution. Against the Supreme Court.
* Video Game Voice Actor Strike Now Second-Longest In SAG History.
* How a Cult That Believes Cats Are Divine Beings Ended Up in Tennessee.
* Why the voting age should be lowered to 16.
* February 17 is the next time the general strike isn’t actually going to happen.
* In the Trump International Penal Colony and Golf Resort.
* Marquette in the ne — come on, again?
* Also they enslaved and tortured generations of animals, but that’s not important right now.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* Decolonizing Science Fiction.
* How an Interstellar Starship Could Actually Explore Alpha Centauri.
* How Astronauts’ Brains Are Changed By Spaceflight.
* In the future, everyone will be hated by thousands of strangers for 15 minutes.
* The Milwaukee Bucks Century.
* The war comes to Whitefish Bay.
* The richest society in human history.
* And like Nietzsche said: it is forgetting, not remembering, that makes life possible.
Close Every Tab from the Semester or Die Trying Links
* Some nice conference acceptance news: My semester of David Foster Wallace will end with a panel on “Infinite Jest at Twenty” with Lee Konstantinou, Carrie Shanafelt, and Kate Hayles at MLA 2017. I’ve put the full panel description in the comments for anyone interested…
* David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen. Guest appearance from my friend from grad school, Meredith Farmer!
* It’s been such a busy week I haven’t had time to crow about Jaimee’s poem appearing on Verse Daily.
* An obituary for my friend and Marquette colleague Diane Long Hoeveler.
* CFPs from Foundation: The Essay Prize (for graduate students and adjuncts) and a special issue on SF theater.
* Call For Papers: The Precariat & The Professor.
* For World’s Newest Scrabble Stars, SHORT Tops SHORTER: Nigerian players dominate tournaments with the surprising strategy of playing short words even when longer ones are possible.
* Want to See Hamilton in a City Near You? Buy a Subscription and Wait Two Years. Okay, maybe I will!
* How Hamilton Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda Is Building A Brand For The Ages.
* google d&d player’s handbook truth: The Curious Case of the Weapon that Didn’t Exist.
* Burlington College Will Close, Citing Longstanding Financial Woes. What Killed Burlington College?
* Ending HBCUs in North Carolina.
* Dear Colleague Letter on Transgender Students. And on the Harry Potter Social Justice Wizard beat: a genderqueer student comes to hogwarts and…
* How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth.
* More data on learning and laptops — but you’ll never convince me that students benefit more from pen-and-paper notes than from a searchable, permanent archive of their entire academic career Spotlight can access and retrieve instantly.
* Big-Time College Sports Neglect Academics, Deflect Blame.
* Huge, if true: In other words, the rush to embrace entrepreneurship is ideological rather than practical.
* Diversity defunded in Tennessee.
* UW English Chair Caroline Levine: Enough with Scott Walker and the GOP — I’m leaving.
* Texas School District Votes to Build Totally Tasteful $62 Million High School Football Stadium.
* A new documentary, Agents of Change, describes the five-month SF State protest and a similar strike at Cornell University through the voices of former students like Tascoe who were involved. The film is a gripping case study of the meticulous organizing, community engagement, and careful planning that went into two of the most effective student strikes in American history. Black Studies Matter.
* I was seriously thisclose to writing a #TeamCap blog post to comicsplain Civil War to the confused, but Mightygodking got there first.
* Milwaukee in the ne — oh for fuck’s sake.
* Wisconsin communities dominate “Drunkest Cities” report.
* Wisconsin woman has confirmed case of Zika virus.
* “Rare detailed personal memory a burden, and ultimately a gift.”
* “This 90-Year-Old Lady Seduced and Killed Nazis as a Teenager.”
* “Why do all old statues have such small penises?”
* Probably the most honest thing ever said about this election: 87-Year-Old Billionaire Endorses Trump, Says He Doesn’t Care If It’s A Mistake Since He’ll Be Dead. Meanwhile, this is just totally bananas: Donald Trump masqueraded as publicist to brag about himself.
* What Would It Take for Donald Trump to Deport 11 Million and Build a Wall?
* A First-Person Account of a Texas Artist’s Deportation.
* From what I can tell, the current Sanders campaign is riven between people who are increasingly upset or bewildered by what we might call the resurgent “burn it down” turn of Sanders outlook and others who are fully immersed in the feedback loop of grievance and paranoia that sees all the political events of the last year as a series of large and small scale conspiracies to deny the rectitude and destiny of Bernie Sanders. I’ve seen many, many campaigns. People put everything into it and losing is brutal and punishing. Folks on the losing side frequently go a little nuts, sometimes a lot nuts. The 2008 denouement really was pretty crazy. But it’s not clear that this time we have any countervailing force – adulthood, institutional buy-in, future careers, over-riding pragmatism to rein things in.
* Why Pennsylvania Could Decide The 2016 Election.
http://mobile.twitter.com/AlexJamesFitz/status/732583842175975428
* Almost starting to see a pattern here, Disney: Shane Black reveals Iron Man 3 scrapped a female villain because of toy sales. Why Disney needs a gay princess.
* A brief history of the giraffe.
* “When you have a child with a life-threatening illness, you have an irrevocably altered existence,” Barbara Sourkes had told the Levys, and Esther feels that is true. She had always felt in control of her fate, but now she believes this to be a fiction. She finds it difficult to reconcile bitterness over the blight of Andrew’s illness with gratitude for the reprieve. “We are the luckiest of the unluckiest people in the world,” she says. “I truly believe that.”
* Can Graduate Students Unionize? The Government Can’t Decide.
* After all this time, who can say really who sent whom to Robben Island for 27 years.
* I too like to live dangerously: Uber Says Riders Will Pay the Most When Their Phone Battery Is Dying.
* Small Beer Press to Publish 400-Year-Old SF Novel.
* On Kim Stanley Robinson and “solarpunk.”
* Nate Moore, 37, is the lone African-American producer in the film division at Marvel Studios. And elsewhere in Marvel news: Agents of SHIELD Star Says Marvel Doesn’t Care Enough About Its Own TV Show.
* DC has, to all reports, done something utterly crazy. Big shakeup in their film division to boot. Can Booster Gold save the DC Cinematic Universe?
* Not even $100 million can make Daniel Craig give a fuck about James Bond.
* World-famous ethicist isn’t.
* What terrible luck! The CIA has “mistakenly” destroyed the sole copy of a massive Senate torture report in the custody of the agency’s internal watchdog group, Yahoo News reported Monday.
* Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing — They Miss Unions.
* University title and salary generator.
* Behind Some Campus Protests, a Team of Paid Professionals.
* Attempt no landings etc: Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected.
* Outrageous slander: The Warriors Still Aren’t the Best Team Ever.
* Liberal Think Tank Fires Blogger for Rude Tweets. Bruenighazi.
* Against the Crowdfunding Economy.
* In other words, Zootopia advances a sublimated theory of power that is strangely conservative, and — perhaps not so strangely — fundamentally allied with the project of economic neoliberalization. After a humiliating stint as a traffic cop, Judy Hopps is assigned to the case of a group of predators who have suddenly gone “savage,” which in this anthropomorphized universe means ripping off their clothes, dropping to all fours, and attacking other animals. It turns out that this crisis of respectability was engineered by the unassuming Bellwether, a champion of rabbits and mice who has dosed the predators with a weaponized narcotic that returns them to a “primitive” state of bestial violence. In order to bolster her own political prospects, Bellwether has engineered an interspecies crisis of what 1990s Clintonites called “super-predators” run amok. This is very close — if we pursue the allegory to its political ends — to alleging that the state has manufactured crises of, say, black masculinity in order to whip up the white public-safety vote and secure its own legitimacy. Now that would be an interesting intervention, if the film took us all the way there. And it really almost does.
* What Kinds of Difference Do Superheroes Make?: An Interview with Ramzi Fawaz. Part Two.
* NCDOT tries something new to thwart Durham’s Can Opener bridge.
* The Most Successful Female Everest Climber of All Time Is a Housekeeper in Hartford, Connecticut.
* The Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines.
* Ted Chiang vs. Chinese logograms.
* An unorthodox anthropologist goes face to face with ISIS. Is the payoff worth the peril?
* CBS All-Access gets a second show. And that’s why The Good Wife had a terrible ending!
* Mitch Hurwitz is still confident that another season of Arrested Development will happen.
* I’m feeling pretty on board with Luke Cage, I have to say.
* As with the comic before it, the film version of The Dark Tower will likely detail a different, later iteration of the series’s defining time loop.
* “Perfect” Donkey Kong score achieved.
* The only Twitter account you need: @LegoSpaceBot.
* No human alive has seen 7 months this hot before. Get with the program, Great Lakes!
* What drought? Nestle plans $35 million plant to bottle water in Phoenix.
* Alas, Venezuela: There has never been a country that should have been so rich but ended up this poor.
* Project Earth is leaving beta.
* In the back room of the morgue.
* But it’s not all bad news: Our Solar System Could Remain Habitable Long After Earth Is Destroyed.
Happy graduation day, Marquette!
gerrycanavan.com Is Pleased to Offer This Sunday Reading Experience
* The schedule for the final third of my Cultural Preservation course. This has been one of the best teaching experiences I’ve ever had; I’m hoping things go as well next spring when I do it all again.
* Starting out with two strikes with this guy and he hasn’t even found out where I work yet.
* The institution of the faculty wife is alive and well in academic culture. She’s an adjunct.
* Nietzsche was right: it turns out without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.
* Elsewhere in the American nihilism files: NASA study concludes it’s not just you, we really are doomed.
* Meanwhile, we can’t even agree on the incredible, undeniable, world-historical usefulness of vaccines. One map sums up the damage caused by the anti-vaccination movement.
* Surely we’ll start the school day later, when every bit of science backs this up… Oh.
* Unreal: Malaysian investigators conclude missing airliner hijacked. Could the Passengers Still Be Alive?
* Don’t be evil: Google’s anti-copyright stance is just a way to devalue content.
* There’s no escape from the corporate-NSA surveillance network.
* Five Cops Beat Innocent, Unarmed Father to Death Outside Cinema.
* No one could have predicted a completely unregulated peer-to-peer hotel network would lead to bad outcomes. Next up: Hey, Uber, your unregulated taxi was just some random creep’s unsafe car!
* For the true believers: A Brief History of the Quidditch World Cup.
* It’s not Mortal Kombat we should fear; it’s Candy Crush Saga and FarmVille.
* 50,000 Activists Demand Sexual Assault Reform At Dartmouth After Student Publishes A ‘Rape Guide.’
* On the spell-binding catastrophic collapse of the Juan Pablo season of The Bachelor.
* If we make the world a paradise where everyone is immortal, will we still be able to have all these awesome jails? Aeon Magazine reports.
* Car Dealers Are Terrified of Tesla’s Plan to Eliminate Oil Changes.
* Kim Stanley Robinson is all over the ASU “Thoughtful Optimism” project.
* As of 2010-2011, the most recent year with available data, recent humanities and liberal arts majors had 9 percent unemployment. That’s right about on par with students in computer and math fields (9.1 percent), psychology and social work (8.8 percent), and the social sciences (10.3 percent). And it’s just a bit above the average across all majors of 7.9 percent. The larger problem, as always, is that there’s still not enough work for young people post-recession.
* Pussy Riot launches a prisoners rights center in Russia, demands freedom in Wisconsin.
* Promisingly specific: Projecting ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’ in Theaters Requires Special Instructions.
* Game of the Weekend: 2048, an addictive simplification of Threes!, in your browser.
* And good news for fans of medieval maps.
Thursday! Thursday! Thursday!
* The newest Ted Chiang story details the struggle of forgetting against memory.
* CFP for ICFA 2014, always my favorite conference experience of the year. This year’s theme is “Fantastic Empires.” If history is any guide, I’d wager Ted Chiang will be there!
* Am I Yanomami or am I nabuh? The child of a Yanomami woman and a male American anthropologist goes to the Amazon to look for his mother.
* The Internet Explained By Prisoners Who Have Never Seen It.
* The five (and a half) stages of humanitarian military intervention. Great moments in op-eds: Bomb Syria, Even if It Is Illegal. Adam Kotsko: If the U.S. government lacks either the will or the ability to take care of those very serious problems in a country where it enjoys largely unquestioned legitimacy, stable institutions, and a docile population, exactly why the fuck is it remotely plausible that it can solve problems in a foreign country embroiled in a civil war?
* Hometown news! A Morris County court has determined that knowingly texting a driver could leave you on the hook for their crash.
* Football’s Concussion Crisis, Explained. The NFL has just settled with the players for $765 million in the latest round of concussion-related lawsuits.
* Johnny Manziel’s suspension exposes ridiculousness of NCAA’s double standards.
* Even if he wins, will Bill de Blasio actually be able to accomplish anything?
* Do Republicans really have better-than-even odds to take the presidency in 2016?
* Northeastern just has its adjuncts’ best interests at heart. If anything, maybe it loves too much.
* Meet Dr. Donna Nelson, science advisor for Breaking Bad.
* Eric Holder Says DOJ Will Let Washington, Colorado Marijuana Laws Go Into Effect.
* Science proves men are just the worst.
* The New York Times has a feminist history of Monopoly.
* Definitely, 100% accurate: Scientists say they’ve found key to actual warp drive.
* Teju Cole’s Dictionary of Received Ideas.
SCANDAL. If governmental, express surprise that people are surprised. If sexual, declare it a distraction, but seek out the details.
SEMINAL. Be sure to use in a review of a woman’s work. Proclaim your innocence after.
SMART. Any essay that confirms your prejudices.
STRIKE. Always “surgical.” (See EGGS.)
* Mitch Hurwitz keeps making promises that he better by God deliver.
* And SEK’s Internet Film School is officially open for business. Go read up!
All the Sunday Links
* Outrageous even by the bargain basement standards of the war on the terror: the United Kingdom held Glenn Greenwald’s partner for nine hours at Heathrow (and seized all his electronics) purely for the purposes of harassment. More from Greenwald himself.
* “I can’t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange.”
* Speaking of which, ugh.
* Domestic violence victims in Milwaukee faced eviction for calling police, study finds.
* “Since 1998, 92% of white males who were considered for tenure got it. During the same period of time only 55% percent of women and minority candidates were granted tenure. Looking at ethnicity alone, USC granted tenure to 81% of its white candidates but only to 48% of its minority candidates.”
* The New York Times runs what amounts to an unpaid* ad for Georgia Tech’s new all-MOOC master’s degree. * At least I assume it’s unpaid.
* As many as 40% of university language departments are likely to close within a decade, the former government adviser charged with bolstering foreign language uptake in higher education has warned, delivering a huge blow to the UK’s diplomatic and economic hopes.
* Poverty is therefore a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society…It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches, no refinement, no comfort, and no benefit to those who may be possessed of wealth.
* Are liberals finally ready to oppose neoliberal education reform?
* Vietnam and Historical Forgetting.
In general, the right seems committed to some mixture of denying the atrocities in Vietnam, claiming that everyone did it or the misdeeds were somehow justified by what the North Vietnamese did, and blaming the hippies. Latterday liberals acknowledge that bad things happened, but mostly don’t want to open up the can of worms, for fear that they’d be accused of being unpatriotic and hating the troops or something. The result is a strange form of historical forgetting, where there’s a general sense that bad things happened, but no understanding of how general these bad things were, nor desire to hold people accountable for them.By comparison: can you imagine a monument to the genocide of Native Americans or the Middle Passage at the heart of the Washington Mall? Suppose you could walk down the street and step on a reminder that this building was constructed with slave labour, or that the site was the home of a Native American tribe before it was ethnically cleansed? What we have, instead, are national museums of Native American and African American culture, the latter scheduled to open in 2015. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian boasts exhibits showing superbly crafted Pueblo dolls, the influence of the horse in Native American culture, and Native American athletes who made it to the Olympics. The website of the Smithsonian’s anticipated National Museum of African American History and Culture does show a shackle that was presumably used on a slave ship, but it is far more interested in collecting hats worn by Pullman porters or pews from the African Methodist Episcopal church. A fashion collection is in the making, as well as a collection of artefacts belonging to the African American abolitionist Harriet Tubman; 39 objects, including her lace shawl and her prayer book, are already available.
* The combination of drought and fracking are leaving Texas communities with no water.
* “Thornsbury is the county’s only judge.”
* Two from Buzzfeed (sorry): 25 Facts And Tidbits About The Muppets That Might Blow Your Mind. 21 “Breaking Bad” Easter Eggs That Will Blow Your Mind.
* History becomes more sensible when you imagine its participants as any other mammal.
* Two Timelines of Slang for Genitalia, from 1250 Through Today.
* A Map of the Lands Actually Discovered by European Explorers.
* And a damn good science fiction pitch from Tumblr. I’d love to see this optioned as a film.
Friday Night Links
* The last days of Gabriel García Márquez.
* In light of this criticism, the Court today announces a new clear standard to guide lower courts in their application of the commerce clause. This new standard will govern when a law exceeds Congress’s power under the commerce clause and when it does not. The new standard is this – a law passed pursuant to the commerce clause is constitutional if Justice Scalia likes the law and unconstitutional if he does not. Similarly, if the law is regulating things that Justice Scalia wants regulated, it is constitutional. If it does not, it is not.
* io9 tries to suss out just how much of the “Uncle Ben never told you what happened to your father” plot from the trailers got cut from The Amazing Spider-Man. But the joke’s on io9; they’re just saving this for the three-boot with Justin Bieber, coming in 2014.
* Elsewhere at io9: A Luminescent Map of the World’s Earthquakes Since 1898 and Don’t worry, people! NASA has a plan for moving the Earth.
* Why are Superman movies all so terrible? Because of Siegel’s Curse, of course.
* Nice work if you can get it: Duke Energy CEO Bill Johnson resigns after one day, gets $44 million in severance.
* Ladies and gentlemen: the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association.
* And the Border Patrol has let former Arizona Gov. Raúl Castro slip through their fingers once again…
‘Without Forgetting It Is Quite Impossible to Live at All’
By coupling these amnesia cocktails to the memory reconsolidation process, it’s possible to get even more specific. Nader, LeDoux, and a neuroscientist named Jacek Debiec taught rats elaborate sequences of association, so that a series of sounds predicted the arrival of a painful shock to the foot. Nader calls this a “chain of memories”—the sounds lead to fear, and the animals freeze up. “We wanted to know if making you remember that painful event would also lead to the disruption of related memories,” Nader says. “Or could we alter just that one association?” The answer was clear. By injecting a protein synthesis inhibitor before the rats were exposed to only one of the sounds—and therefore before they underwent memory reconsolidation—the rats could be “trained” to forget the fear associated with that particular tone. “Only the first link was gone,” Nader says. The other associations remained perfectly intact. This is a profound result. While scientists have long wondered how to target specific memories in the brain, it turns out to be remarkably easy: All you have to do is ask people to remember them.
This isn’t Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-style mindwiping. In some ways it’s potentially even more effective and more precise. Because of the compartmentalization of memory in the brain—the storage of different aspects of a memory in different areas—the careful application of PKMzeta synthesis inhibitors and other chemicals that interfere with reconsolidation should allow scientists to selectively delete aspects of a memory. Right now, researchers have to inject their obliviating potions directly into the rodent brain. Future treatments, however, will involve targeted inhibitors, like an advanced version of ZIP, that become active only in particular parts of the cortex and only at the precise time a memory is being recalled. The end result will be a menu of pills capable of erasing different kinds of memories—the scent of a former lover or the awful heartbreak of a failed relationship. These thoughts and feelings can be made to vanish, even as the rest of the memory remains perfectly intact. “Reconsolidation research has shown that we can get very specific about which associations we go after,” LeDoux says. “And that’s a very good thing. Nobody actually wants a totally spotless mind.”
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