“Given the myths and emotions enveloping the issue of trigger warnings and safe spaces, it’s worth asking what science can tell us about the actual effects of verbal triggers on the body, brain, and psyche. Certain people experience certain words as dangerous. Should they have to listen to those words anyway?” Katy Waldman looks at the physical effects that being triggered can have on trauma survivors, the leading therapeutic approaches for overcoming the trigger effect, and the implications for teaching college students.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Dreams, Visions, Hallucinations, And Neurochemistry
It turns out that the neurochemistry of the human brain during REM sleep (the kind when we have the most vivid dreams) is similar to what happens after taking some hallucinogens. “Dreams, in short, are transient ‘trips’ and, when they forcibly and suddenly break through into waking life, they sometimes become visions or hallucinations.”
Russia’s Most Outrageous Performance (And That’s Saying Something) Gets A Burger King Menu
Pyotr Pavlensky – the man who literally sewed his lips shut to protest the Pussy Riot trial, nailed his scrotum to Red Square, and set fire to the headquarters of Russia’s secret service as an art project – is being honored by the St. Petersburg branch of the fast food chain with a series of special-edition hamburgers named for his most famous stunts projects.
What Happens When Small Theaters Have To Start Paying People For Overtime?
“How are the soon-to-be-implemented rules” – requiring that any employee earning less than $47,476 per year be paid extra for working more than 40 per week – “affecting workers and theatres on the ground?” Diep Tran talks to the people in the proverbial trenches.
Pittsburgh Symphony Musicians And Management Can’t Agree On Contract, Push Back Deadline
“The PSO’s management and musicians have agreed to a two-week extension on the musicians’ current contract, … [which] was to expire at midnight [Sunday night]. The extension ends on Sept. 18, allowing the PSO to go forward with its fundraising gala on Sept. 17.”
San Diego Symphony Musicians Accept New Five-Year Contract
“Annual wages for 82 full-time musicians in the 106-year-old orchestra will jump from just under $70,000 in the first year to $80,000 when the contract concludes in 2021.”
Ballet Hispánico Suffers Major Flood Damage – For Second Time
Following a water main break, “water began pouring into the ballet studio at 167 W. 89th St. around 9:30 p.m. Monday and quickly filled the basement with six feet of water, drenching the company’s stock of house-made costumes and props as well as the dance floors on the first floor.”
‘Back Off’, English National Opera’s New Chief Says To Opera Skeptics, ‘Stop Coming For Our Building’
Daniel Kramer: “Just because you don’t get opera, and that it does something superhuman, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a viable art form. … What we need to show is that this is such an important art form that we deserve to get back to 14 shows a year.”
Chinese Communist Party Turns ‘Core Socialist Values’ Into Songs For Nation’s Dancing Grannies
“The 12 ‘core socialist values’ are memorized by schoolchildren, featured in college entrance exams, printed on stamps and lanterns, and splashed on walls across China. Now they have made their way into 20 song-and-dance routines that the authorities in Hunan Province plan to promote to the country’s millions of ‘square dancers,’ the mostly middle-aged and older women who gather in public squares to perform in unison.”
Artists And Cultural Figures Jailed In Turkey’s Post-Coup Crackdown
“Artists, newspaper cartoonists and cultural figures are among the 35,000 people who have been detained in Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown after the failed military coup in July.”