THG 27: Getting the pain-pleasure balance right plus great reads on China
A truly miscellaneous edition of THG recommendations
First things first. If you can read Nepali but were excusing yourself from reading my book with being outside Nepal, it is now available via Amazon in 11 countries including US, UK, Australia, Japan, Germany and France. Please find the Amazon link to the book here.
If you cannot read Nepali, the 12k strong student-focused edition of an expanded/illustrated chapter from the book is soon coming in English. The preliminary title: From Creation to Climate Crisis: Biography of a Troubled Planet.
As I have exploited my background in natural sciences and drawn insights from the works of physicists like Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse Tyson to tell the scientific creation story, I hope even the adults from non-science background will amply benefit from reading the book.
Podcasts:
Past week, I savored the riveting 2-part podcast from the Hidden Brain dealing with the issue of pain and pleasure. Anna Lambke, an addiction psychiatrist at Stanford University and the author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, explains lucidly the neuroscience behind addiction of every kind. It was like revisiting the psychiatry posting in the medical school for me but non-doctors too can easily grasp her talk and can immensely benefit from this.
Part 1: The Paradox of Pleasure
All of us think we know what addiction look like. It’s the compulsive consumption of drugs, alcohol, or nicotine. But psychiatrist Anna Lembke argues that our conception of addiction is far too narrow — and that a broader understanding of addiction might help us to understand why so many people are anxious and depressed. This week, we begin a two-part series that explains how and why humans are wired to pursue pleasure, and all the ways the modern world tempts us with addictive substances and behaviors.
Part 2: The Path to Enough
This week, we bring you the second part of our conversation on the perils of too much pleasure. Psychiatrist Anna Lembke explains the neuroscience behind compulsive consumption, and how it alters our brains. She also shares techniques she’s learned from her patients to overcome the lure of addictive substances and behaviors.
Articles:
Last week, there was a truly insightful piece at Foreign Affairs from China by Cai Xia, a former insider of Chinese Communist Party. As the magazine gives you limited free articles, you may access the full text by providing your email address in this page.
Here is the part of the article that struck me the most:
The skeptics [to Xi Jinping] I knew fell into two categories. Both proved prescient.
The first group consisted of princelings—descendants of the party’s founders. Xi was a princeling, as was Bo Xilai, the dynamic party chief of Chongqing. Xi and Bo rose to senior provincial and ministerial positions at almost the same time, and both were expected to join the highest body in the CCP, the Politburo Standing Committee, and were considered top contenders to lead China. But Bo fell out of the leadership competition early in 2012, when he was implicated in his wife’s murder of a British businessman, and the party’s senior statesmen backed the safe and steady Xi. The princelings I knew, familiar with Xi’s ruthlessness, predicted that the rivalry would not end there. Indeed, after Xi took power, Bo was convicted of corruption, stripped of all his assets, and sentenced to life in prison.
The other group of skeptics consisted of establishment scholars. More than a month before the 18th Party Congress of November 2012, when Xi would be formally unveiled as the CCP’s new general secretary, I was chatting with a veteran reporter from a major Chinese magazine and a leading professor at my school who had observed Xi’s career for a long time. The two had just wrapped up an interview, and before leaving, the reporter tossed out a question: “I hear that Xi Jinping lived in the Central Party School compound for a period of time. Now he’s about to become the party’s general secretary. What do you think of him?” The professor’s lip twitched, and he said with disdain that Xi suffered from “inadequate knowledge.” The reporter and I were stunned at this blunt pronouncement.
Having looked at all China has gone through under Xi’s rule, the insinuation that he is ‘inadequately knowledgeable’—incompetent in other words—in addition to being autocratic makes a lot of sense to me.
As always Noah Smith has a comprehensive piece on China’s economic perspectives at Noahpinion:
Movie for the week
Here is a 4-hr-long-but-worth-the-time Hindi movie with English subtitles—a rallying cry against the entrenched patriarchy in India—if you have leisure of that kind: