MSI Press Blog

  Excerpt from Tucker and Me (Andrew Harvey) PLAYING WITH FIRE               My father, George, had a rather odd love-hate relationship with fire. It reminds me of an old joke about a famous monster, which stated that Frankenstein’s primary form of problem solving was strangulation. Deadly effective, but not the most subtle approach. George never strangled anyone as far as I know, but he did use fire as a key solution for vexing problems around his property.             Fire is one of those things that can be either good or bad; it all depends on the context and care in which it’s put to use. George’s judgment was never his strong suit, but he did have protocols he employed when using fire. Now you might think this would involve things like safety equipment, universal precautions, and the like. However, none of these cumbersome things were taken into account. There really was only one rule. When you used fire to solve a problem, you had to drink beer. A lot of it.             The first

  Our beloved 12-year-old cat, Snyezhka , a Siamese mix whom we rescued from a life on the street when she was 1-2 years old, pulling her from a fight with two tom cats that she seemed to be winning in spite of unfair odds, has appeared in Caturday posts before. So, if you want to see more information about her -- and more pictures -- just click on the link. Snyezhka went from street cat to lap cat not immediately but gradually, with time, gaining confidence in her relationships with the humans and other felines in our house. She immediately recognized Happy Cat because he had been rescued from the street before she was, and they had bonded. That helped her to blend into the family (of six cats and three people) fairly quickly. She became my lap cat, always snuggling up to me even when there was not a lap available. Clearly, she loved her family. She had no desire to go back on the street nor to take even a step outdoors when a door was left accidentally open although she loved sitting

    Today's book excerpt comes from  Weekly Soul: Fifty-two Meditations on Meaningful, Joyful, and Peaceful Living   by Frederic Craigie . INTRODUCTION   In August, 2004, my friend and psychologist colleague Peter Flournoy, Ph.D., died of cancer at the age of 45. Peter was a remarkable person, an energetic professional, and a gentle soul. He experienced his cancer as a blessing that taught him more about life than he otherwise would have understood. He packed a lot into the last couple of years of his life, ice climbing several times and sea kayaking to Monhegan Island (ten miles off the Maine coast—not for the faint of heart) a month before his death. Peter was also excited about his spiritual life, which was informed particularly by Buddhist philosophy and practice in his last years. His memorial service took place on a glorious summer day. We who attended all received a card with a favorite meditative image of Peter’s and his words:   Life has taught me not to grasp and hold but

Introduction This book examines the critical role of modern architecture and individual architects in shaping and transforming national Israeli symbols, especially in the Old City of Jerusalem. It is generally held that Israeli national symbols image Zionism as a pioneering movement awakening the Jewish nation from a stagnant Diaspora tradition and restoring to it its biblical origin in Palestine as a sovereign progressive Jewish state. The opening section of the book analyses pre-1967 designs by architects including Baehrwahld, Geddes, Mendelsohn, “Bauhaus” practitioners, and Rau, each of whom attempted to construct a National Jewish style in Palestine. The analysis reveals the elusiveness of the hard-sought national Jewish style, and the problems inherent to the search. The Diaspora’s memory was still too vivid to be discarded, especially in regard to the Old City of Jerusalem. Indeed, the “official” Zionist memory’s suppression of more than two thousand years of Jewish experi

  Perception Is Not Reality In nearly every liberal arts college offering psychology as a major, you can find an advanced course labeled something like “Sensation and Perception.” This course studies how the brain reads information sent to it from the five senses and how these data are recognized and converted into thoughts, sensations, images, sounds, and memories. To make the point that it is the brain that sees and hears and then interprets the information it receives, the instructor will often show a video of a famous video experiment [1] wherein a student is given a pair of glasses fitted with a prism in front of each eye, functionally inverting the image that is sent to the brain. Through the inverting prism glasses the world looks upside down. At first the student has difficulty knowing up and down, but then she successfully pours milk into a tea cup. After a day, the student walks about quite a bit more easily but still at times reaches up for something that is low down. How