intoxicating conversationalist

As a professor, Brickman was an affecting combination of exuberant and awkward, exacting and underconfident. He was an awful lecturer. But he was an intoxicating conversationalist, the type who’d burst into your office whenever a new thought occurred to him, eager to discuss it, even more eager to collaborate. - Happiness Won’t Save You

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The chapter was a mess, in chips and shards, when Coates first started to assemble it after Brickman’s death.

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Predicting who will die by suicide with any precision has long eluded mental health professionals. There are no refined algorithms for it. Matthew K. Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the country’s foremost scholar on suicide, did a famous study in 2010 showing that clinicians in a large city psychiatric E.R. were no better than a coin toss at predicting who, after leaving their care, would attempt suicide.

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Brickman’s paper had a comically small sample size, and its controls were lifted from a neighborhood phone book. Today, such a design would be laughed out of peer review.

бля, ну прямо еще один Исайя Берлин. тот, впрочем, был вполне самодовольный господин. и дожил почти до 90: no commitments is good for your health.

это Opinion piece in nyt. Opinion my ass. Fake Views ™

see also В поисках счастья

еще A Psychobiography of Philip Brickman - ну конечно Toward the end of the 19th century, the Russian Empire implemented pogroms, or the state-sponsored persecution of Jews. ясный пень, как же иначе. He [Leo Brickman, Philip's father] was fond of telling us that Jews ghettoize themselves and he didn’t want any part of it.