springheel_jack has produced a handy guide for the perplexed. Useful only if the person you're talking to is actually perplexed and not a sociopath, but hey, we can't have everything.

on being clinically depressed: a primer

More than 40 years ago, my father wrote a short story called "Dr. Pettigott's Face." The eponymous doctor of the story has a theory that pushing the face into happy expressions will make people happy, and has constructed a machine to do this. I remember that for years he had a correspondence with some neuro researcher who was interested in facial ( Read more... )