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Many mocked him for that question, though it seems a fair one. Many others shuddered at the implication that Donald Trump, presiding over a trillion-dollar makeover of our entire nuclear arsenal that he inherited as a program from Barack Obama, might feel that he could actually use some of these weapons. But of course he planned to use them, as he had clearly implied to Chris Matthews. He wants to use them like every other president: in “negotiation,” in threats, in exploiting uncertainty in our opponents as to whether he might launch “a nuke” in a stalemated armed conflict or a crisis, or perhaps in pique at what he experienced as humiliating provocation. Whether he would carry out such threats in any given circumstances, or otherwise use them in attacks, remains as uncertain, and as possible, as it has been for every other president in the nuclear era. Trump hinted strongly to Matthews, and he even came close to saying outright—“I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table”—that he would be bluffing. Most, if not all, of the time. Nevertheless, the last bargaining strategy mentioned above,312† advertising and exploiting his own unpredictability, deliberately creating uncertainty in an adversary by demonstrating impulsive, erratic, vindictive behavior—reminiscent, to many observers, of Nixon’s madman theory313—is especially worrisome to many in America and elsewhere because of a growing sense that this particular president actually may be mad. There’s ample evidence supporting that impression. Still, in some ways he has shown himself to be crazy like a fox, or he would not be president. He may yet elude his domestic pursuers and survive in office, and we and our democracy might survive that too. Or not. Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
As an intern, I was taught that when patients thank us, it helps to remind them that they did the hard work. It’s all you, we tend to say. I was just here to guide you. And in a sense, that’s true. The fact that they picked up the phone and decided to come to therapy and then work through things every week is something no one else could do for them. But we’re also taught something else that we can’t really understand until we’ve done thousands of hours of sessions: We grow in connection with others. Everyone needs to hear that other person’s voice saying, I believe in you. I can see possibilities that you might not see quite yet. I imagine that something different can happen, in some form or another. In therapy we say, Let’s edit your story.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
As we will discover in chapter 6, a key function of deep NREM sleep, which predominates early in the night, is to do the work of weeding out and removing unnecessary neural connections. In contrast, the dreaming stage of REM sleep, which prevails later in the night, plays a role in strengthening those connections.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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