thisisforyou

Before that:

'Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps' by Robert Conquest. A nice, short overview of the Kolyma Region with a special focus on the especially brutal years of 1937-1938. Has some great eyewitness accounts as well as some semi-rigorous historical analysis (as well as appendices of camps, administrative regions at c.)

Not really, the results were a bit more subtle and technical than that. They just found that there was a (fairly small) negative correlation on left amygdalar BOLD signal in the active group. They did not measure subjective fear, nor did they make any explicit claims about it. Just because blood oxygen levels changed does not mean the participants necessarily experienced less fear or anything different from the placebo group (in terms of fear at least).

The authors also mention toward the end of the paper that this was a fairly small dose, and that larger doses would likely induce more anxiety than placebo:

"Third, we can only provide data about one moderate dose. Higher doses of psychedelics are possibly difficult to use with fMRI, because they are more likely to induce anxiety,45 although the overall effects are still described as positive in the higher doses investigated.2, 45 The observed anxiolytic effect probably also depends on personal and environmental factors and might thus be different in the mentally ill or in uncontrolled settings."

-Alarm goes off at 5:35. Depending on how sleepy I am I may lay in bed for 1-10 minutes, usually petting the cat.

-Put on clothes in dark.

-Get out of bed, fill up a large jar of water and sit in living room. One pillow behind back, one pillow on lap, laptop on lap pillow.

-Put computer on airplane mode, open word doc of current novel manuscript.

-Write at least 500 words in manuscript (generally finish by 6:15).

-Get back in bed until partner's alarm goes off at 6:35.

-Get up, put on hot water. Eat cereal and read Harper's.

-Off to work at 7am.

-Spend first 30-45 minutes at work reading HN, ArsTechnica.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek -Dillard, Annie

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick -Mandelbrot, Benoît B.

Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories -Blackwood, Algernon

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience -Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly

Death in Venice -Mann, Thomas

Whites -Rush, Norman

The Room -Selby Jr., Hubert

Book of Numbers -Cohen, Joshua

Maggot: Poems -Muldoon, Paul

The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia -Vucinich, Wayne S.

The Mezzanine -Baker, Nicholson

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender -Ugrešić, Dubravka

What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches -Schrödinger, Erwin

Dictionary of the Khazars -Pavić, Milorad

Honored Guest -Williams, Joy

Martyrs and Miracles -Trickey-Bapty, Carolyn

Noa Noa -Gauguin, Paul

Their Eyes Were Watching God -Hurston, Zora Neale

Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party -Stewart, George R.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale -Melville, Herman

Eileen -Moshfegh, Ottessa

Haute Surveillance -Göransson, Johannes

Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development -Matthews, W.H.

A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret History of Chemical and Biological Warfare -Harris, Robert

Our Lady of the Flowers -Genet, Jean

*The House of the Dead -Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

Current: Black Swan, Nassim Taleb