It’s a little weird to write a review of an individual issue of a magazine, but it provides a chance to collect my thoughts. Also, I found The Onion’s A.V. Club reviews of individual TV shows kind of interesting. That said, this is less a review, but short summaries of some pieces I thought stood out. I don’t know what I’m paying for The New Yorker these days, but this issue was surely worth it.

Today’s Assignment

A short piece on homework, after the French President proposed banning it. More or less? How does it correlate with success? Answer: not at all, really.

Occupy Art School

Cooper Union announced it would have to start charging graduate students tuition because the reduced endowment couldn’t afford to pay for them. Students lock and barricade themselves in the clock tower in protest. “It’s a paradigm shift from normal thinking. You learn how to work together as a cohesive group in non-hierarchical means.” Also, the Debt Chorus performed an interpretive dance. OK, I’m kind of a hater.

Music from the Machine

Everything you wanted to know about Trent Reznor.

Operation Delirium

The centerpiece of the issue. James Ketchum used to direct an Army program to develop nonlethal chemical weapons. For example, delivering aerosol LSD to Soviet missile crews to incapacitate them. The theory being it’s more humane than shooting them with bullets. The research developed after WWII as a continuation of previous investigations into lethal nerve gases. For the most part, all the proposed chemicals are hallucinogens; apparently not much interest in sleeping gas. Perhaps because overdoses would be lethal? Article doesn’t go into that at all. It does wrestle a little with the question of whether violating the mind is truly more humane than violating the body.

A lot of the article is devoted to recounting the experiments and how they were conducted. The Army would recruit volunteers, dose them with a chemical, then observe them try to perform a task like sentry duty. As you can imagine, just about every thing that could go wrong did. Overdoses and unexpected reactions were commonplace. The volunteers were only given a vague description of the experiment, in violation of the Nuremberg Code. Afterwards, as soon as they were basically recovered, they were released back into service with no followups.

As I was reading, I kept thinking of the movie A Scanner Darkly. (The book, too probably.) Superficially, the chemicals the men were exposed to caused them to have ridiculous hallucinations. Ethically, what happened to these men is a lot like what happened to Arctor.

There is also another article online about Army experiments with LSD featuring the same Van Sim as the print article, but with different experiments. (I just found out that the print/Kindle version of The New Yorker is missing good stuff. Now I have to check the web site too? Sigh.)

Unrelated to the magazine, but the drug BZ is featured prominently in the TV show Last Resort episode “Another Fine Navy Day”.

General Principles

A compilation review of Thomas Ricks’s The Generals Fred Kaplan’s The Insurgents. The short version is that American generals are not what they used to be, and stuck in a “if at first you don’t succeed, fail harder the next time” kind of mentality.

Ring Cycle

A not very flattering review of The Hobbit, appreciated more for its analysis of the source material.

Creatures

Fiction. A father with a preschooler inclined to pretend he’s shooting the other kids recollects his own unhappy experiences with a gun. Completely forgettable, if not for the coincidental timing.