Via The Morning News

See also: 30 Minutes a Day.

Here’s the transcript. Have at it, nerds!

[T]he issue this time around, at the end of the twentieth century, is not the evolution of the species, which can seem a remote business, but the nature of our own precious inner selves.

Tom Wolfe, in 1996, on the troubling implications of modern neuroscience. It’s a little dated by now, but it dovetails nicely with yesterday’s post.

But when you think about it, the issue broke free of academic science a long time ago. For sure, it’s undermined the popular distinction between clinical depression and plain old despair. And it’s given rise to a new, annoying trend in literature: the neuronovel.

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.

A brief video on the importance of cutting out every once in a while. Via Kottke.

Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” If nothing else, there’s reason to think this could be a contentious point among men and women of learning, debatable on both sides.

The condensed version, for those of you who don’t have time: 38-year old Swiss psychologist Carl Jung has a sort of psychotic existential breakdown sometime in 1914 and, consequently, begins cataloguing and exploring the debilitating hallucinations he experiences. What results over the next 16 years is 205 pages of meticulous illustration and writing, which is all eventually bound together in a gigantic eponymous red leather tome.

The magazine article describes it thusly:

The book tells the story of Jung trying to face down his own demons as they emerged from the shadows. The results are humiliating, sometimes unsavory. In it, Jung travels the land of the dead, falls in love with a woman he later realizes is his sister, gets squeezed by a giant serpent and, in one terrifying moment, eats the liver of a little child. (“I swallow with desperate efforts — it is impossible — once again and once again — I almost faint — it is done.”) At one point, even the devil criticizes Jung as hateful.

Jung dies in 1961, before he can complete his book. His son, who inherits the estate, decides to leave this book of disjointed writings and mindbending mandalas where it lies, locked in a cupboard. Twenty years later the family has it transferred to the Union Bank of Switzerland’s vault—where it’s been ever since, existing in a sort of ethereal, self-mythologizing state.

At most, just two dozen people have ever gotten a substantial look inside. But those long odds haven’t deterred many of Jung’s followers, who have apparently spent the 48 years since Jung’s death trying to get through to Jung’s family – the book’s stalwart protectors. Every inquiry, even the ones delivered from the family’s literal doorstep, has been turned down – sometimes viciously.

Until now. Someone – somewhere, somehow – must have been successful, because The Red Book comes out October 7.¹

With an apparent list price of $195², but Amazon’s selling it for $105.30. Barnes and Noble is doing the same. Borders, predictably, is not.

That’s just a little blue for my blood. This sort of thing practically begs to be read during a long afternoon spent in a chair at Barnes and Noble.

1. Note: link to Amazon
2. Hope you didn’t just spit that coffee all over your computer screen – I know how those repair bills can be

Via Airbag

When I ask Clay what he would do if he couldn’t surf, he looks confused for a second, as if he’s unable to imagine such a terrifying possibility. “I don’t know,” he says. “I guess then I would just want to surf.”

The whole concept sounds like some NYT bestseller, but don’t let that stop you.