Colleen McCullough, Author of ‘The Thorn Birds,’ Dies at 77

Remarkable woman who had a marvelous time raising hell and writing delicious trash and crying all the way to the bank!

By MARGALIT FOX NY TIMES

Colleen McCullough, a former neurophysiological researcher at Yale who, deciding to write novels in her spare time, produced "The Thorn Birds," a multigenerational Australian romance that became an international best seller and inspired a hugely popular television mini-series, died on Thursday on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, where she had made her home for more than 30 years. She was 77.

The cause was believed to have been kidney failure, her agent, Michael V. Carlisle, said. Ms. McCullough had been in declining health with a variety of ailments in recent years.

Published in 1977 by Harper & Row, "The Thorn Birds" is set against the sweeping panorama of the author’s native land and was described often in the American news media as an Australian "Gone With the Wind." Spanning much of the 20th century, it centers on Meggie, the beautiful wife of a loutish rancher, and her illicit affair with Father Ralph, a handsome Roman Catholic priest.

"The Thorn Birds," which has never been out of print, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 20 languages. In hardcover, it spent more than a year on the New York Times best-seller list; the paperback rights were sold at auction for $1.9 million, a record at the time.

The book was the basis of a 10-hour television production starring Richard Chamberlain as Father Ralph and Rachel Ward as Meggie. First broadcast in 1983 on ABC, "The Thorn Birds," which also starred Christopher Plummer, Barbara Stanwyck and Jean Simmons, is among the most-watched mini-series of all time.

"The Thorn Birds" was only the second novel by Ms. McCullough, who, forsaking her scientific career, would write more than 20, though none sold nearly as well. Her most recent, "Bittersweet," about the lives and loves of four sisters in Depression-era Australia, appeared last year.

Ms. McCullough’s fiction was prized by readers for its propulsive plots, sympathetic characters and sheer escapist potential. Its critical reception was mixed; reviewers took the author to task for sins ranging from stilted dialogue to the profligate use of exclamation points.

" ‘Don’t be bitter, Meggie,’ " Father Ralph says in "The Thorn Birds." " ‘No matter what’s happened to you in the past, you’ve always retained your sweetness and it’s the thing about you I find most endearing. Don’t change, don’t become hard because of this. ... You wouldn’t be my Meggie anymore.’

"But still she looked at him half as if she hated him. ‘Oh, come off it, Ralph! I’m not your Meggie, I never was!’ "

Negative reviews did not appear to faze Ms. McCullough, whom The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a 1996 profile, described as "a woman supremely unafflicted by self-doubt."

"I think in their heart of hearts all these people know that I’m more secure than they are, more confident than they are and smarter than they are," she said of her critics in a 2007 interview on Australian television. In her nearly four decades in the limelight, it was one of her few printable replies on the subject.

Nearly everything about Ms. McCullough had unrestrained heft: her voice, her laugh, her frame, her opinions, the blizzard of cigarettes she smoked each day and, most conspicuously, her books. "The Thorn Birds" clocked in at 533 pages. Titles in her "Masters of Rome" series, a seven-volume cycle set in the ancient world, could run far longer: The inaugural entry, "The First Man in Rome" (1990), spanned 896 pages, some 100 of them devoted to a glossary.

Her profusion was matched by her speed. On a typical day, Ms. McCullough said, she might produce 15,000 words; on a very good day, 30,000. Her facility was all the more noteworthy in that she continued to use an electric typewriter well into the computer age.

"I spell perfectly," she told The Inquirer in the 1996 article. "My grammar’s very good. My sentence construction is excellent. So I don’t have a lot of mistakes."

In recognition of meritorious service to her homeland, Ms. McCullough was named an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2006. The country had named her to its list of 100 living national treasures in 1997.

"I gather I was one of the top 13," Ms. McCullough told The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2000. (The list was published in alphabetical order; Ms. McCullough is No. 59.) "In Australia I’m an icon, and it’s an interesting thing to be."

But as Ms. McCullough made clear between the lines of interviews, and more overtly in "Life Without the Boring Bits," her volume of memoiristic essays published in 2011, what passed for ample self-assurance was in fact the product of ample sorrow.

Colleen Margaretta McCullough was born in Wellington, in the Australian state of New South Wales, on June 1, 1937. Hers was a brutish family: Her father was an itinerant sugar cane cutter of savage temperament, her mother a cold, withholding woman. The couple fought constantly; after her father’s death in the 1970s, Ms. McCullough said, he was discovered to have had "at least two" other wives simultaneously.

In this maelstrom, Colleen and her younger brother, Carl, both bright, sensitive and bookish, grew up.

"I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again," Ms. McCullough’s memoir quotes her father’s telling her. "Get out and get a job as a mangle hand in a laundry. That’s all you’re good for — you’ll never get a husband, you’re too big and fat and ugly."

Carl fared no better at his father’s hands. In 1965, at 25, he drowned in the sea off Crete. His death was considered an accident, but a letter he wrote to Ms. McCullough, which arrived afterward, made her suspect he had committed suicide. Even half a century later, she could talk about his death only with extreme difficulty.

As a girl, Ms. McCullough dreamed of becoming a doctor. She entered medical school at the University of Sydney but was forced to abandon her studies after she developed a severe allergy to the soap widely used in Australian hospitals. She trained instead in neurophysiology, which is concerned with testing for and diagnosing neuromuscular diseases.

In the late 1960s, after working at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, Ms. McCullough accepted a position as a neurophysiological research assistant at the Yale School of Medicine. Discovering that she was being paid less than her male colleagues there, she cast about for another source of income.

"I loved being a neurophysiologist, but I didn’t want to be a 70-year old spinster in a cold-water walk-up flat with one 60-watt light bulb, which is what I could see as my future," she told The California Literary Review in 2007.

Interested in writing since girlhood, she took to her typewriter. Her first novel, "Tim," about the tentative romance between a middle-aged professional woman and a younger, mildly retarded man, was published in 1974 to enthusiastic notices if unspectacular sales. (The book became a feature film in 1979, with Piper Laurie and Mel Gibson in the lead roles.)

In 1970, Ms. McCullough’s Yale colleague, the classicist Erich Segal, had scored spectacular success with his novel "Love Story." Inspired, Ms. McCullough interviewed Yale students to discover what they liked about it. Their answers — romance, characters, plot — combined with her own Australian background, spawned "The Thorn Birds."

Before the book’s publication, Ms. McCullough had planned to move to London to study nursing. Afterward, she found she could not.

"I don’t believe a patient would appreciate the idea of having a millionaire nurse carrying the bedpan," she told The New York Times in 1977.

Ms. McCullough left Yale that year and eventually returned to Australia. Refusing to inhabit the same continent as her mother, she settled on Norfolk Island, a verdant, 13-square-mile fleck of Australian territory — population roughly 2,000 — a thousand miles northeast of Sydney.

She drew unwelcome attention in 1987 with the publication of her novella "The Ladies of Missalonghi," about an impecunious woman in early-20th-century Australia. As some critics pointed out, the book’s plot, characters and narrative details strongly resembled those of "The Blue Castle," a 1926 novel by L. M. Montgomery, the author of "Anne of Green Gables."

Ms. McCullough, who said that she had read "The Blue Castle" in childhood, swatted away charges of plagiarism.

"I am not a thief," she told The Daily Mail, the British newspaper, in 1988. "Neither am I a fool. I have too many wonderful ideas of my own to have to steal from another writer."

Ms. McCullough’s survivors include her husband, Ric Robinson; two stepchildren, Wayde Robinson and Melinda MacIntyre; and two step-grandchildren.

Her other novels include "A Creed for the Third Millennium" (1985), set in a dystopian future; "Morgan’s Run" (2000), about 18th-century Australia; "The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet" (2008), a sequel to "Pride and Prejudice" starring the middle Bennet sister, to whom Jane Austen had paid scant attention; and a series of crime novels featuring Carmine Delmonico, a detective in 1960s Connecticut.

Over the years, Ms. McCullough was often asked what she thought of the "Thorn Birds" mini-series, watched by more than 100 million people.

Her response packed her usual pith and punch.

"I hated it," she told People magazine in 2000. "It was instant vomit."

What is the Definition of a Market?

 By Ed Walker From Empty Wheel

The US economic system is based on what we’ve all agreed to call free

Markets. The entire system is often called the free market system instead of the capitalist system. I’ve been looking for a definition of the term market.

1. Textbook Definition. Samuelson and Nordhaus define markets early in their textbook Economics (2005 ed.):

A market is a mechanism through which buyers and sellers interact to determine prices and exchange goods and services. P. 26.

Markets consist of buyers and sellers interacting to determine prices? I’d call that moderately descriptive. Is it interacting when you go to the grocery store and decide to buy one brand of crackers rather than another? Is Macy’s is running an auction? You get into an accident and your car needs body work. The insurance company negotiates with your body shop. Is that interacting? You need to see a doctor. There’s no interaction over prices. This definition implies that as far as ultimate consumers are involved, a market is an arrangement where prices are set by sellers, and buyers get to pick whether or not to buy and from whom among the reasonably available sellers. It is a reasonable description for transactions among merchants. There isn’t really a mechanism, and the whole thing doesn’t constitute a mechanism, and the term interacting seems inaccurate. There is, of course, exchange of goods and services.

They also define the term "market economy"

A market economy is an elaborate mechanism for coordinating people, activities, and businesses through a system of prices and markets. It is a communication device for pooling the knowledge and actions of billions of diverse individuals. P. 26.

Again we see the word "mechanism". It must be a metaphor, and not a definition. These descriptions lead you to think a market is a circuit on the motherboard of a computer that is running the market economy program. You’d think a market economy operates by formal laws and in accordance with mechanical rules. You’d think it was a permanent thing, to be studied in the same way you’d study galactic movements or steel balls rolling down an incline. That seems completely wrong.

And anyway, the term mechanism doesn’t tell us anything about what a market is. The other terms are vague and unconnected to anything. It’s hard to see how this definition could serve as the basis for an economic system.

2. Markets as defined by early neoclassical economists. One of the first neoclassical economists was William Stanley Jevons, a mathematician and philosopher. His principle contribution to economics is his book The Theory of Political Economy, published in 1871. The book includes an early effort to apply the new Riemann Integral to the field of economics. Compare the drawings in III.17 and III.21 with the graphics at this link. Here’s his definition of Market:

By a market I shall mean two or more persons dealing in two or more commodities, whose stocks of those commodities and intentions of exchanging are known to all. It is also essential that the ratio of exchange between any two persons should be known to all the others. It is only so far as this community of knowledge extends that the market extends. Any persons who are not acquainted at the moment with the prevailing ratio of exchange, or whose stocks are not available for want of communication, must not be considered part of the market. Secret or unknown stocks of a commodity must also be considered beyond reach of a market so long as they remain secret and unknown. Every individual must be considered as exchanging from a pure regard to his own requirements or private interests, and there must be perfectly free competition, so that any one will exchange with any one else for the slightest apparent advantage. There must be no conspiracies for absorbing and holding supplies to produce unnatural ratios of exchange. Were a conspiracy of farmers to withhold all corn from market, the consumers might be driven, by starvation, to pay prices bearing no proper relation to the existing supplies, and the ordinary conditions of the market would be thus overthrown.

The theoretical conception of a perfect market is more or less completely carried out in practice. IV.16-17

This is an excellent description of what we call a competitive market, you know, the kind that doesn’t exist in the real world today, if it ever did. Jevons thinks the model is close enough to reality to allow him to create equations, which he thinks this is crucial.

But if Economics is to be a real science at all, it must not deal merely with analogies; it must reason by real equations, like all the other sciences which have reached at all a systematic character. IV.38

3. Post WWII economics. Neoliberal economists of the Chicago school updated the metaphor of the early neoclassicals. Bernard Harcourt in his excellent book The Illusion of Free Markets explains that neoliberal theory extolling marvels of markets rises from 18th and 19th Century theories that markets are part of the natural order of things. One branch, related to the ideas of Friedrich Hayek, springs from Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand of the market, a form of spontaneous order, updated with "new models from computer science." Chapter 8.

Harcourt describes another strand of thought about markets, this one closely linked to Gary Becker and Richard Posner of the Chicago school of economics. He says it focuses on the alleged economic efficiency of the market economy, and he traces its roots to French Physiocrats who believed that markets were the embodiment of a natural order. Just as we perceive order in the physical universe (more or less, depending on how you understand quantum behaviors), so markets reproduce that efficiency. Efficiency is set up as the chief goal of the economy. With this step, we incorporate a determinative model of the economy, one that can be represented by equations.

But there is still no definition of the term market.

4. Contemporary works. Now, as in the past, economists raid the physical sciences for new ideas. Here’s a fascinating example: The Market as a Creative Process, available starting at page 378 here [huge .pdf] by James M. Buchanan and Viktor J. Vanberg. They discuss an early book on complexity theory by Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers; Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, and later turned to the study of complexity. His book is about the role of chaos theory in the self-organization of more complex forms.

Buchanan and Vanberg discuss a very old problem arising from Newtonian physics. That system is thought to be deterministic, in the sense that if you knew the position and motion of every particle in the universe, you could predict the future. Nobody has actually thought that was true for decades, at least. As far as I know, economists don’t think that markets are deterministic. Buchanan and Vanberg point out that lurking in a system of equations based on the idea of general equilibrium, there is a kind of determinism lurking. They explain that Prigogine’s book should bring an end to ideas about determinism in economics, and presumably an end to the idea of equilibrium in the economy.

Ideas about chaos theory were cutting edge in the mid-80s. Chaos theory is a mathematical field, so I’m not sure it’s the best argument Buchanan and Vanberg could have made. There has been much progress since then in both complexity theory and ideas about self-organization. This seems to me to be a very elegant solution.

Buchanan and Vanberg’s paper is in a book titled Philosophy and Economics. Therefore, you’d expect a bit of formalism, like a definition of market. But no. We learn that standard economic teaching is based on the "self-organizing nature of markets." 383. That doesn’t accord with Samuelson, which I have set up as standard economic teaching, but it seems to be at the heart of the Austrian School; you can see it in this paper by Friedrich Hayek. This school preaches that markets are self-organizing and automatically compute the proper allocation of resources without resort to any centralized apparatus. Hayek explains that the "price system", which seems to mean the market system, "evolved without design". H.24. He doesn’t cite any evidence for this proposition, and surely no one really thinks the bread markets in 18th Century France evolved without design, any more than the Chicago Board of Trade did. See Harcourt’s The Illusion of Free Markets.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to look at, but so far, I don’t see a formal definition of "market" that will bear any scrutiny. Why it matters is the subject of a future post.

THE SHAKE SHACK ECONOMY

By James Surowiecki The New Yorker

In 2004, when Danny Meyer opened a burger stand named Shake Shack in Madison Square Park, it didn’t look like the foundation of a global empire. There was just one location, and Meyer was known for high-end venues like Gramercy Tavern. But the lines became legendary, and in 2008 other outlets started appearing—first in New York, then in the rest of the country, then as far afield as Moscow and Dubai. Today, Shake Shack brings in at least a hundred million dollars a year and is planning an I.P.O. that could value the company at a billion dollars. That seems like a lot of burgers, but Meyer’s venture was perfectly timed to capitalize on a revolution in the fast-food business, the rise of restaurants known in the trade as "fast-casual"—places like Panera, Five Guys, and Chipotle.

Unlike traditional fast-food restaurants, fast-casuals emphasize fresh, natural, and often locally sourced ingredients. (Chipotle, for instance, tries to use only antibiotic-free meat.) Perhaps as a result, their food tends to taste better. It’s also more expensive. The average McDonald’s customer spends around five dollars a visit; the average Chipotle check is more than twice that. Fast-casual restaurants first emerged in serious numbers in the nineteen-nineties, and though the industry is just a fraction of the size of the traditional fast-food business, it has grown remarkably quickly. Today, according to the food-service consulting firm Technomic, it accounts for thirty-four billion dollars in sales. Since Chipotle went public, in 2006, its stock price has risen more than fifteen hundred per cent.

The rise of Chipotle and its peers isn’t just a business story. It’s a story about income distribution, changes in taste, and advances in technology. For most of the fast-food industry’s history, taste was a secondary consideration. Food was prepared according to a factory model, explicitly designed to maximize volume and reduce costs. Chains relied on frozen food and assembly-line production methods, and their ingredients came from industrial suppliers. They were able to serve enormous amounts of food quickly and cheaply, even if it wasn’t that healthy or tasty, and they enjoyed enormous success in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The number of outlets septupled between 1970 and 2000.

But, even as the big chains thrived, other trends were emerging. Most of the gains from the economic boom of the eighties and nineties went to people at the top of the income distribution. That created a critical mass of affluent consumers. These people led increasingly busy work lives. They typically lived alone or in dual-income households, so they cooked less and ate out a lot. Michael Silverstein, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and the co-author of the book "Trading Up," has made a study of this kind of consumer. "These aren’t people with unlimited resources, but they have plenty of disposable income," he told me. "One of the things they’re willing to spend money on is food away from home." In the same period, affluent consumers developed a serious interest in food and became more discriminating in their tastes—a development often called "the American food revolution." Wine consumption jumped fifty per cent between 1991 and 2005. After the U.S.D.A. started certifying food as organic, in 1990, sales of organic food rose steadily, and stores like Whole Foods expanded across the country.

Traditional fast-food chains pretty much ignored these changes. They were still doing great business, and their industrial model made it hard to appeal to anyone who was concerned about natural ingredients and freshness. That created an opening for fast-casual restaurants. You had tens of millions of affluent consumers. They ate out a lot. They were comfortable with fast food, having grown up during its heyday, but they wanted something other than the typical factory-made burger. So, even as the fast-food giants focussed on keeping prices down, places like Panera and Chipotle began charging higher prices. Their customers never flinched.

It might seem that the success of fast-casual was simply a matter of producing the right product at the right time. But restaurants like Chipotle and Five Guys didn’t just respond to customer demand; they also shaped it. As Darren Tristano, an analyst at Technomic, put it, "Consumers didn’t really know what they wanted until they could get it." The archetype of this model is Starbucks. In 1990, the idea of spending two dollars for a cup of coffee seemed absurd to most Americans. But Starbucks changed people’s idea of what coffee tasted like and how much enjoyment could be got from it. The number of gourmet-coffee drinkers nearly quintupled between 1993 and 1999, and many of them have now abandoned Starbucks for even fancier options.

As Starbucks did for coffee, Chipotle and Shake Shack have changed people’s expectations of what fast food can be. The challenge for the old chains is that new expectations spread. Millennials, for instance, have become devoted fast-casual customers. So McDonald’s is now experimenting with greater customization, and has said that it would like to rely entirely on "sustainable beef." The question is whether you can inject an emphasis on taste and freshness into a business built around cheapness and convenience. After decades in which fast-food chains perfected the "fast," can they now improve the "food"? ♦

The Darkness Comes Alongside The Light…

David A Fairbanks

 

 

In the 1870’s and 1880’s Robert Ingersoll and in the 1920s H.L. Mencken gave his readers a smooth sophistication that was sought after and cherished. In the 1940’s The New Yorker became a fabulous Middle Brow read that gave comfort to anyone stuck in “Nowhere Ville” In the 1950’s Gore Vidal Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley lit up the commentary and well into the 1990’s a collection of remarkable erudite and rational folk gave us a comfort in an increasingly mean spirited public space. James Reston, Hugh Sidey, Eric Severid and Tom Blakely among others spoke well and we read them with joy.  

 

In the 2000’s Josh Marshall at TPM, Camille Paglia at Salon, Tina Brown at The Daily Beast (for a while) and Andrew Sullivan offered passion intelligence and a daily pill of what we all needed.

 

Tina Brown comes and goes, Josh Marshall’s TPM is okay but appears tired and now Andrew Sullivan is going away, to rest and well…

 

The Dish was and is a one-man band but a very intense and stunningly broad sound and it gave 30,000 readers a strong daily dose and at times migraine headaches when Sullivan got lost in some thread. He never batted 1,000 but he came close! He stumbled badly several times; rants against Sarah Palin were often embarrassing and revealed an inner infantilism. Occasional pornography reminded readers that Sullivan could be crude like all of us. 

 

Sullivan’s genius is his frankness and so very human want to be apart of intelligent civilization and to add his thoughts to the edifice of knowledge and acquired wisdom. He educated his readers in a most positive way and he earned recognition from all camps as a listener and honest carrier of opposition views and opinions. He gave space to critics and he allowed serious rivals a remarkable access when it was never quite necessary. He was a whiner with class and an asshole with grace, thus he earned respect from all sides and he was trusted to listen in an honest way.

 

Andrew Sullivan is that rare adult who understands we are all flawed and we all believe in ourselves a bit much.  He is merciful in a way Bill Maher never has been, forgiving in a way Chris Hitchens was unable to be, and finally has that extraordinary ability to be very wrong, come to realize it and make amends with genuine style and grace.

 

I will miss him as if losing something dear, for a decade he’s been my friend and ally and advisor.

 

Thank you Andrew, I weep with sadness at what is lost and with tender affection at what is ahead for you, may it be wonderment and the deepest joy.

 

A reader writes:

I’m know you’re getting a thousand-and-a-half of these emails today, but some bizarre, sentimental impulse compels me to write my own goodbye. It’s hard to see you go, and it certainly came as a shock: standing at the urinal yesterday between classes, bored out of my head and reading the Daily Dish for a precious few seconds, I read the news, stumbled in surprise, and (truly) pissed myself. If only soapy water and paper towels could mend my broken heart!

Really, though, I’ve felt a bit bereft since. Your blog has come to seem like a friend. It’s weird to think about it in those terms, and probably a bit cultish, but it feels true.

Another reader:

I’ve read your blog for 12 years. I’m not sure if I’ve ever before felt such closeness with a complete and total stranger, which perhaps explains why your decision to quit is something then that almost feels like an important change happening in my personal life.

But honestly, I can’t believe you’ve done it this long. I’m exhausted just trying to keep up.

And don’t let anyone tell you that you owe anything to “us.” You don’t. You’ve already given so much to strangers, in this most public airing of all the constitutes the life of your mind, with all of its beauty, sadness, love, hope, loss, brilliance, and yes, even maddening myopia. That is something truly, inexpressibly human, and therefore worthy of all my respect and thanks.

 Another:

I hate to add my snowflake to the avalanche that you’re surely receiving from readers, but I just can’t help myself. Over the past five-ish years, the Dish has become my go-to source for just about everything. Not just “news,” but cultural relevance. It’s been invaluable as such. It’s helped me to be a more knowledgable, thoughtful, and well-rounded person, and I’m insanely grateful.

From my heart, I understand – even applaud – the decision that’s been made, and I will miss you. It didn’t fully hit me until yesterday evening when no posts came to fill the strange vacuum following your fateful 1pm missive. Refreshing did nothing! Nothing? Nothing.

Another:

I have literally no idea how I am to get my news now. I went through the whole internet trying to add things to my Feedly, and I find myself skipping everything and forlornly looking back at my empty Daily Dish …

Another:

No words. None. I’ve been struggling with this since I read your post yesterday. Then re-read it. Then read it again, just to try and absorb it.

I’ve been reading you since the early days of the Iraq War, and through all the madness since. You helped me clarify my own thinking on so many things in so many ways. Even when I didn’t agree, the Dish was thoughtful and welcome.

I will miss you all so much. I will miss Dishness. You were the best thing about my mornings, no matter how crappy the world was.

Another:

I think it was sometime in 2005 when I first heard your voice on a podcast of “Real Time with Bill Maher”, and I must admit that you mystified me a bit. So much about you felt very contradictory, I thought, who IS this guy?? But the more I’ve listened, and the more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned about the “liberalism” I apparently stand for, how to look at it more critically and fully, and how to more effectively parse the gray area that exists amid the extremes. That’s really hard to do these days. Thank you for teaching me how to think for myself.

Another:

If anything has kept me reading you, while I’ve long left behind the others (I used to read Mark Steyn compulsively), it’s your unpredictability, your breadth of curiosity, and your willingness to change your mind. First, of course, you were the gay conservative Catholic, a combination that sounds incoherent until you see it embodied in a real, thinking human being, as you were in your blog. Of course I didn’t agree with everything you said (though I ended up agreeing with an awful lot of it), but the honesty and passion (sometimes obsession) with which you would continue to make your case many times won my over, if only slowly.

Sometime in 2006, I think, it seemed that I was reading five posts a day on the marriage amendment, and up to that point gay marriage was not an issue of interest for me, and if anything I leaned to mild opposition. But I kept reading, because I now had this connection to you and the blog, and your arguments, your reasoned arguments persuaded me (it would be the same story on the recognition of the disaster of the invasion of Iraq, or of the growing power of the maximalist settler movement in Israel, and others).

That brings me to the last, and for me most important, quality of your writing and thinking: your commitment to free debate, free speech, and free thought, in the fullest sense. It’s this liberal attitude that I fell in love with in college while studying philosophy, and which I respect so much in you. I now teach university in the US, and am dismayed at the trends I see and feel. It’s not so much that I have to be careful about what ideas I bring up, how my words might be misconstrued, or that a passing joke might be felt to cause offense to someone. It’s more what I see in my students, who have already learned these lessons so well that many of them seem unwilling to debate any remotely controversial idea in the classroom. When so few people seem to be willing to live out freedom of speech when it counts, you are a guiding example of its value.

Another:

Who the else is going to curate the Internet for me, keeping me abreast of current events while also keeping a keen eye out for psychedelics, Marilynne Robinson, animal cruelty and corporate media whoredom? Seriously. This is fucking impossible.

What a strange relationship. I’ve read a number of authors deeply. But the nature of the Dish is so personal, it feels like something different. In an amazing way, I have trusted you, and I’ve trusted you in a way that I have never trusted someone who is not actually a personal friend. I have allowed you to change me. I don’t think the same way I used to, I don’t occupy the same philosophical ground that I did pre-Dish.

I think the reason I allowed you to change me is that you yourself changed. You were publicly vulnerable in a way that few people are. The courage it took to do that has helped me over the years to muster the courage to truly examine my own beliefs, thoughts and opinions.

Another:

So long, and thanks for all the Dish.

Another:

I cannot actually remember the first time I read the blog, but it was awhile ago. I do remember telling my mother that she needed to read it … and read it she did. She and I would talk daily about the things you discussed – it was a connection we shared for many years. When something would happen in the world, we would often remark “I wonder what Andrew will have to say about this” or she would often tell me “Can you believe Andrew said that!!??” She was a big fan of yours, as am I.

When she died suddenly at the age of 71 a little over a year ago, I was devastated. But I kept reading The Dish, kept wondering what my mom would make of your take on the world she left too soon. Even now, I often remark aloud “Mom, I wish you were here to read this” or “Mom, Andrew’s lost his mind again.” It kept that connection, and I will forever be grateful.

Another:

The only accurate way to state this is the simplest: You were the best practitioner of this “new thing” that has come along so far. And second place wasn’t particularly close.

You had an instinct for what political/cultural blogging could be; you were unrelentingly respectful of the diversity of thought and opinion that gravitated to you; you were unfailingly honest in admitting your mistakes in judgment (more so than virtually anyone in the business, Andrew); and you never stooped to insulting the intelligence of either your follower/subscribers or your adversaries. You never took the low road – even when you occasionally flipped out over something, and even when you were compelled by circumstances to comment on a certain former half-term governor (which took some doing).

The quality of the content – every single freaking day – was always first rate, whether I disagreed with you, or came out of my chair pumping my fist in the air. The best, most intellectually satisfying, challenging, and enlightening blog on the web.

After PTSD, More Trauma

By David J. Morris NY TIMES

Going in for therapy at a Veterans Affairs hospital is a lot like arriving at a large airport in a foreign country. You pass through a maze of confusing signage. Your documents are scrutinized. There are long lines you must stand in and a series of bureaucratic rituals that must be endured before anything resembling a human encounter occurs.

In April 2013, after doing a series of intake interviews and sitting on a waiting list for three months, I had my first human encounter with my assigned therapist at the big V.A. hospital in San Diego. Little did I know that the delay in treatment would be less agonizing than the treatment itself.

My first session began with my therapist, a graduate student finishing up his doctorate in clinical psychology, offering a kind of apology. "Now, I’m probably going to make some mistakes and say some stupid things," he said. "Are you going to be O.K. with that?"

I understood. Two decades before, as a newly minted infantry lieutenant in the Marine Corps, I’d been charged with the welfare of a platoon of 30 young Marines. Too often my best wasn’t good enough, and I made a number of errors in judgment while in command, errors that bother me to this day. Offering my therapist some grace seemed like my only option.

I’d come to the V.A. for a number of reasons. After being discharged in 1998 from the Marine Corps, I worked as a reporter in Iraq from 2004 until one day in 2007, when I was nearly killed by an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., in southern Baghdad. Occasionally I had weird dreams about the war that mixed people and places from my time in the Marines with my time in Iraq. But what really concerned me was something that happened a few years later. I was sitting in a movie theater with my girlfriend when the world suddenly went black. When I regained consciousness, I was pacing the lobby of the theater, looking at people’s hands to make sure they weren’t carrying weapons.

Afterward, I asked my girlfriend what happened. "There was an explosion in the movie," she said. "You got up and ran out."

Post-traumatic stress disorder has stalked me for most of my adult life. I don’t mean to say that I’ve suffered from it all that time. But the idea of it, the specter of it, has haunted me, as it haunts virtually everyone who has served in the military. You may not have PTSD, but most of your fellow citizens assume you do, and this fact alone has a powerful effect.

A year or so after the episode at the movie theater, with my symptoms not improving, I went to the V.A. for help.

There are two widely used treatments for PTSD at the V.A. One is called cognitive processing therapy. The other is prolonged exposure therapy, the effectiveness of which the V.A. heavily promotes. After explaining my symptoms to the intake coordinator, I was told that prolonged exposure was the best therapy for me. He said that the treatment worked for about 85 percent of people ("some pretty darn high odds if you ask me").

My therapist, with whom I would meet twice a week, started with a short overview. Prolonged exposure therapy was developed in the 1980s by Edna Foa, a professor of clinical psychology, and colleagues of hers at the University of Pennsylvania. It is built on the idea that after traumatic experiences like I.E.D. ambushes, plane crashes and sexual assaults, survivors can "overlearn" from the event, allowing fears arising from their trauma to dictate their behavior in everyday life. Some survivors find that the only way to feel safe is to restrict their daily routine to a small range of activities. One Iraq veteran I knew, who had lost several buddies in an I.E.D. blast near Falluja, stopped leaving his apartment.

The promise of prolonged exposure is that your response to your trauma can be unlearned by telling the story of it over and over again. The patient is asked to close his eyes, put himself back in the moment of maximum terror and recount the details of what happened. According to the theory, the more often the story is told in the safety of the therapy room, the more the memory of the event will be detoxified, stripped of its traumatic charge and transformed into something resembling a normal memory.

The process sounded like all my dealings with the V.A.: Before you could find any relief, you had to traverse a little bit of hell.

MY therapist instructed me to select a traumatic event to focus on. As someone who had spent 10 months in some of the deadliest parts of Iraq, I had collected a number of near-death experiences. Would I choose the time I rode in a helicopter that was nearly shot down over Falluja? The I.E.D. ambush I saw near the town of Karma that killed two Pennsylvania National Guardsmen? The week I spent with some Marines from my old battalion when we were shelled for seven days straight? To focus on a single event seemed absurd, the equivalent of fast-forwarding to a single scene in an action film and judging the entire movie based on that.

In the end I chose the story of the I.E.D. ambush I survived in 2007 in southern Baghdad. Over the course of our sessions, my therapist had me tell the story of the ambush dozens of times. I would close my eyes and put myself back inside the Humvee with the patrol from the Army’s First Infantry Division, back inside my body armor, back inside the sound of the I.E.D.s going off, back inside the cave of smoke that threatened to envelop us all forever.

It was a difficult, emotionally draining scene to revisit. This was the work site of prolonged exposure therapy, where the heart’s truest labor was supposed to happen. Given enough time and enough story "reps," when I opened my eyes again, I wouldn’t feel forever perched on the precipice of a smoke-wreathed eternity. I wouldn’t feel scared anymore.

But after a month of therapy, I began to have problems. When I think back on that time, the word that comes to mind is "nausea." I felt sick inside, the blood hot in my veins. Never a good sleeper, I became an insomniac of the highest order. I couldn’t read, let alone write. I laced up my sneakers and went for a run around my neighborhood, hoping for release in some roadwork; after a couple of blocks, my calves seized up. It was like my body was at war with itself. One day, my cellphone failed to dial out and I stabbed it repeatedly with a stainless steel knife until I bent the blade 90 degrees.

When I mentioned all this to my therapist, he seemed unsurprised.

"You weren’t drunk at the time?" he asked.

"No. That came later."

Following a heated discussion, in which I declared the therapy "insane and dangerous" and my therapist ardently defended it, we decided to call it quits. Before I left, he admonished me: "P.E. has worked for many, many people, so I would be careful about saying that it doesn’t work just because it didn’t work for you."

WITHIN a few weeks, my body returned to normal. My agitation subsided to the lower, simmering level it had been at before I went to the V.A. I began once more to sleep, read and write. I never spoke about the I.E.D. attack again.

In one sense, my therapist was right: Prolonged exposure has worked for many people. It has arguably the best empirical support of any PTSD therapy currently in use by the V.A. One recent study found that among veterans who completed at least eight sessions of treatment, prolonged exposure therapy decreased the proportion who screened positive for PTSD by about 40 percentage points. But the treatment may not be as effective as the V.A. would have you believe: About a quarter of the veterans in that study dropped out of the treatment prematurely, much as I had.

After my experience with prolonged exposure, I did some research and found that some red flags had been raised about it. In 1991, for example, Roger K. Pitman, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, conducted a study of exposure therapy on Vietnam veterans and observed some troubling complications: One subject developed suicidal thoughts, and others became severely depressed or suffered panic attacks. A similar study, published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress in 1992, found that Israeli army veterans experienced an increase in the "extent and severity of their psychiatric symptomology."

There are many reasons to be disappointed, even angry with the V.A. right now — the unforgivably long wait times, the erratic quality of care, the reports of administrators’ falsifying records to cover up those shortcomings. My own disappointment is that after waiting three months, after completing endless forms, I was offered an overhyped therapy built on the premise that the best way to escape the aftereffects of hell was to go through hell again.

A month after dropping out of prolonged exposure therapy, I began a treatment of cognitive processing therapy at the V.A. Here, our group was asked to examine our thoughts and feelings about our war experiences without revisiting specific traumas. We were allowed to let sleeping dogs lie. This has helped. As I wrote in my journal at the time, "If P.E. is a kind of emotional chemo, then C.P.T. is a kind of emotional tai chi."

I never saw my therapist again at the V.A., but I did I run into him one day at the Y.M.C.A. pool near my house. Recognizing him in the water, I said hello and mentioned a surfing trip I had planned to Costa Rica for the following month. We chatted about the many wonders of Central America, the beauty of the jungle, the power of the waves down there. Away from the hospital, he seemed able to express himself in a way he hadn’t before. He seemed looser, more at ease.

Before us, a classic California tableau was painting itself, the sun setting through bands of liquid gold. Whatever secrets might have passed between us in the therapy room, whatever mistakes we might have committed together or on our own, whatever things separate survivor from healer, were gone. We were just two people alive together in the dying light. Before I ducked back under the water he turned to me and said, "Look at all that, isn’t it beautiful, the colors and everything?"

David J. Morris, a former Marine infantry officer, is the author of the forthcoming book "The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

Ukraine conflict: Battles rage in Donetsk and Luhansk

BBC Ukraine

Dozens of people have been killed or wounded as fighting escalates along the front line in eastern Ukraine and the battle for Donetsk airport continues.

Artillery fire was reported in several areas of the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions and a hospital in Donetsk city was hit, reports said.

Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels both said they controlled the airport.

As Russia warned Ukraine not to make a strategic mistake, Kiev said more Russian troops had crossed the border.

Russia has repeatedly denied claims that its regular forces are in eastern Ukraine, but has admitted that a number of "volunteers" are fighting alongside the rebels.

The surge of violence began last week as the fight for control of the airport intensified. Government forces fought back after rebels said they had finally seized the new terminal building having besieged government forces for months.

The rebel military command said its forces had halted a government offensive at the strategically important Putylivskiy bridge between the airport and the city. The bridge was destroyed in the fighting.

Buildings in the centre of Donetsk have been badly damaged and there are reports that a hospital has been hit. Eight civilians have been killed and many more wounded in recent days, local authorities say.

Meanwhile the rebels accuse government forces of shelling civilians in rebel-held Horlivka, a town north of the airport. Nine civilians were killed there and 44 wounded by a bomb dropped by a Ukrainian plane, said Eduard Basurin at the rebel "defence ministry".

A boy and his father were killed and 10 other civilians were wounded when shells hit the government-held town of Debaltseve, north-east of Donetsk, Ukrainian TV reported.

A hospital in Donetsk was badly damaged and its patients had to be moved elsewhere

The escalating fighting prompted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gregory Karasin to warn Ukraine that relying on a military solution was "the biggest, even strategic mistake" that could "lead to irreversible consequences for Ukraine's statehood".

Ukraine said two large groups of Russian forces had crossed the border into Ukraine on Monday, but there was no independent confirmation.

Donetsk airport has symbolic and strategic value to both sides. It has been the scene of heavy fighting for months.

Ukrainian media view it as a symbol of "Ukrainian fighting spirit". The troops defending the airport have been called "cyborgs" for their toughness in repulsing constant attacks, and for many they symbolise a new Ukrainian army. Social media users say the destruction of the airport looks like Stalingrad during World War Two.

Separatists have tried hard to undermine the "cyborg myth". They view the airport as part of their capital and, while it remains in government hands, a bridgehead for a potential Ukrainian offensive.

Despite the airport's infrastructure being almost completely destroyed, some experts have pointed out that its runway could still be used for flying in supplies, which is proving difficult for the rebels.

The airport's control tower is now in ruins (R) but was intact last autumn (L) despite repeated shelling

Military officials said on Sunday they had "succeeded in almost completely cleansing the territory of the airport" but rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko denied the claims on Monday.

Both sides admitted sustaining losses. A senior rebel officer in Donetsk said eight rebel soldiers had died and 33 were wounded while Ukrainian defence officials said three soldiers had been killed and dozens more were hurt.

A presidential adviser in Kiev said many soldiers in the airport terminal were wounded when a ceiling collapsed after it was blown up by separatists.

Russian officials say the Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko, did not respond to a proposal from President Vladimir Putin for the warring sides to pull back their heavy weapons and stop fighting.

However, Ukraine insists that it wants the September ceasefire - agreed in Minsk - to be implemented. The foreign ministry urged Russia again to withdraw troops and heavy weapons from the conflict zone.

Ukraine says some 8,500 Russian regular troops are helping the rebels, a claim denied by Moscow.

More than 4,800 people have been killed since the rebels took control of a parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine last April. Many more civilians have been displaced.

The fighting began a month after Russia annexed Ukraine's southern Crimea peninsula.

BBC Ukraine 1/19/2015