I've been on the antidepressant fluoxetine (better known as Prozac) for nearly a year now, and I thought I'd write about what it's been like. I've heard a lot of scaremongering about how awful antidepressants are and how they don't actually work and they all have terrible side effects ranging from permanent impotence to a constant emotional ( Read more... )

Yesterday, hacker-turned-Tantric-priest-turned-global-resilience-guru Vinay Gupta went on one of his better rants on Twitter. I've Storified it for your pleasure here. The gist was roughly

1. We don't have enough resources to give everyone a Western lifestyle.
2. Said lifestyle isn't actually very good at giving us the things which really make us happy.
3. ( Read more... )

A while back I read a book called Gin: the Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva, from which I learned all kinds of interesting things about the Gin Craze (and parallel Gin Panic) in eighteenth-century London. I can't whole-heartedly recommend the book - it would have been better with fewer rhetorical flourishes and more serious analysis - but it ( Read more... )

Do I like this because of my time in Glasgow, or because of my unexamined class privilege?

Ah, the hell with it, it's still funny.

Click to view

NB: Real neds are harder to understand.

I found a used syringe in the street today ( Read more... )