What does it mean to live in a space? And what do we do once we have recognized that the choices we make are not, after all, entirely our own? Are we left floating in a haze of it-doesn’t-matter? Are we left to choose between boundless freedom and the imprisonment of law? The choice between …
Who’s watching your drink?
“Who’s watching your drink? Let your hair down, not your guard.” In bright pink with big black block lettering, of course. “Enjoy your night. Know your limits. Zero tolerance towards violence.” A textual exhibition of the physiology of alcohol (and its rapacious others). A drug defines its own textuality, its own social limits, its own …
Controlled addiction
I just finished reading a really interesting article by Daniel Nunn (pdf) that details William Halsted’s thirty-year cocaine addiction. Halsted was the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, and has been widely credited with being the first to describe the principle of local anesthesia by blocking nerves. In the 1880s, Halsted developed a …
