The Long Read

This week: a philosopher's account of how the brain builds the lives we didn't live, and a psychiatrist-adjacent essay on what is lost when pain is cleared away before it has been questioned. A personal essay follows on seven years of one family's life after a diagnosis.

How the brain uses memory to imagine what might have been

Felipe De Brigard, newly named a MacArthur fellow, has spent years on a question that sounds idle until you notice how much of ordinary life it occupies: what happens in the mind when we imagine how things could have gone otherwise? This conversation traces his argument that counterfactual thinking is memory put to a different use. The same machinery that reconstructs the past also edits it. The piece moves from laboratory findings to the texture of regret, nostalgia, and the bargaining we do with decisions already made. It treats the "what if" as a working part of how a person comes to understand who they are. Read it slowly, ideally with something unresolved in your own past close at hand.

Scientific American · 15 min read

If you get rid of pain before you have answered its questions, you get rid of the self along with it." — Lewis Hyde, quoted in *Mad In America

Getting Rid of the Pain Before Answering Its Questions: Psychiatry's Damage to Self and Culture

The essay takes its title from a line by Lewis Hyde and builds from it a sustained argument about what a culture loses when suffering is treated chiefly as a malfunction to be removed. It sits outside the mainstream of psychiatric thought, which is part of its value: it asks what the self owes to its own distress, and whether the speed of relief has become a way of not listening. You need not agree with every turn of the case to feel its pull. The best passages hold the tension between suffering that deserves relief and the older human practice of asking pain what it came to say. It reads as much as cultural criticism as clinical critique, drawing on poetry, myth, and the long history of how people have made meaning from their worst hours. It rewards a reader willing to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it.

Mad In America · 20 min read

Seven years

This personal essay begins in 2009, when the author's father was diagnosed with kidney disease and had to stop working, and follows a household through a decade lived off savings. It is unhurried: the writing lets time pass on the page, so the reader feels the accumulation of ordinary days instead of being handed a summary of hardship. It is restrained, refuses easy catharsis, and attends to the small, practical shifts that illness forces on a family's sense of what is possible. Essays like this are rarer than they should be, because they depend on patience from both writer and reader, and they leave you thinking about your own people. Set aside a quiet stretch of the afternoon for it.

ST · 15 min read