ALDOUS HUXLEYhttp://web.mac.com/videopalitalia/iWeb/Site/Photos.html
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PEOPLE TO COLME TO THE AID OF THEIR COUNTRY!
Aldous Huxley, who artfully wrote "Brave New World (1932)," spoke with his Brother, Julian, about the dangers of using drugs to cope with life's problems. Is this criticism part of the Beetle's "Yellow Submarine" song:"We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine!" (Huxley, along with many others mysteriously appeared on that famous album jacket of "Sergeant Pepper's Band.") IS THIS THE WAY THAT THE ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT CAN "CONTROL THE HUMAN MIND?" WILL CITIZENS SOMEDAY BE IMPLANTED WITH MOOD AND THOUGHT CONTROL SIM CARDS (SINGLE INLINE MODULES)? It seems to me that we as a world society have a head start on this by giving Ritalin and Prozac to school-age children to combat ADHD. The Huxley's were "way ahead of their time." I am not a doctor, a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but my own experience with medication tells me that the pharmaceutical industry and its lobbies have incredible financial resources (THEY OUTFLANK THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX) and power in our global society. We see these drug company reps, young and bristling with free Starbucks coffee for the medical assistants in our waiting rooms of our doctors. How many thousands of people died of heart attacks from Celebrex and it is now back on the market? On which part of this communal bed with the drug companies is the FDA on? These mega cartels merge constantly. They define the term "unfriendly takeovers." Where is the competition? Where is the Mc Carran-Fergusan Anti-trust Act to combat monopolies? Finally, Aldous Huxley is a very complicated, intricate human being. He was certainly a visionary. The Doors were named after one of his books. He was a personal friend of Ray Bradbury. My point is that we all should question our nonchalant acceptance of and reliance on "prescription drugs." Wayne Dennis Kurtz.
Drugs That Shape Men's Minds
ReplyDeleteby Aldous Huxley
Essayist, satirist, critic, literary journalist and prolific novelist (Antic Hay, Point Counter Point, Brave New World, The Genius and the Goddess, and so on), Aldous Huxley had familial roots in the sciences. His grandfather was T.H. Huxley, famed English zoologist, and his brother is Sir Julian Huxley, contemporary biologist. Aldous Huxley's interest in mind-changing drugs led him, some years ago, to become an experimental subject for research on the effects of mescaline and similar drugs. He wrote two books on this experience and its implications.
Saturday Evening Post, 18 October 1958
Copyright © 1958 by Aldous Huxley
Used by CSP with permission of Laura Huxley
In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death preceded by enslavement. There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?
To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.
Thus, there are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism (Among rats, as Prof. Roger Williams, of the University of Texas, has shown, some are born drunkards; some are born teetotalers and will never touch the stuff.) Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence. Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an "excellent adjustment to their group" – a process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual. Nor must we forget that large class of addicts who have taken to drugs or drink in order to escape from physical pain. Aspirin, let us remember, is a very recent invention. Until late in the Victorian era, "poppy and mandragora," along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.
De Quincey, for example, first resorted to opium in order to relieve "excruciating rheumatic pains of the head." He swallowed his poppy and, an hour later, "What a resurrection from the lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse!" And it was not merely that he felt no more pain. "This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed.... Here was the secret of happiness. about which the philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered."
"Resurrection. apocalypse, divine enjoyment. happiness. . . ." De Quincey's words lead us to the very heart of our paradoxical mystery. The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics – a problem, one might almost say, in theology. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James has touched on these metaphysical aspects of addiction:
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only through the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in Our opinion of that larger whole.
William James was not the first to detect a likeness between drunkenness and the mystical and premystical states. On the day of Pentecost there were people who explained the strange behavior of the disciples by saying, "These men are full of new wine.
Peter soon undeceived them: "These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh."
And it is not only by "the dry critics of the sober hour" that the state of God-intoxication has been likened to drunkenness. In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she "regards the centre of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace."
Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance. It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols.
And finally it exists as a special kind of feeling or intuition – a sense of the oneness of all things in their divine principle, a realization (to use the language of Hindu theology) that "thou art That," a mystical experience of what seems self-evidently to be union with God.
The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence.
The mystical experience is doubly valuable, it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.
In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be "their sweating selves, but worse." On earth we are not worse than we are: we are merely our sweating selves, period.
Alas, that is quite bad enough. We love ourselves to the point of idolatry, but we also intensely dislike ourselves – we find ourselves unutterably boring. Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence. It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga – to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.
Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made psychological methods of self-control preferable from every point of view to complacency imposed from without by the methods of chemical control.
And now let us consider the case – not, alas, a hypothetical case – of two societies competing with each other. In Society A, tranquilizers are available by prescription and at a rather stiff price which means, in practice, that their use is confined to that rich and influential minority which provides the society with its leadership. This minority of leading citizens consumes several billions of the complacency – producing pills every year. In Society B, on the other hand, the tranquilizers are not so freely available, and the members of the influential minority do not resort, on the slightest provocation, to the chemical control of what may be necessary and productive tension. Which of these two competing societies is likely to win the race? A society whose leaders make an excessive use of soothing syrups is in danger of failing behind a society whose leaders are not over-tranquilized.
Now let us consider another kind of drug – still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner – a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled. Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill. In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry. The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man's rights – liberty.
It is quite possible, however, that pharmacology will restore with one hand what it takes away with the other. Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty:, but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty's strongest bulwark. Most of us function at about 15 per cent of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?
Two methods are available – the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals. If these superior individuals are given a superior education, the results will be revolutionary. They will be startling even if we continue to subject them to the rather poor educational methods at present in vogue.
Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce "pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work." Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins – nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example – sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy. A combination of two enzymes – ethylene disulphonate and adenosine triphosphate, which, when injected together, improve carbohydrate metabolism in nervous tissue – may also turn out to be effective.
Meanwhile good results are being claimed for various new synthetic, nearly harmless stimulants. There is iproniazid, which, according to some authorities, "appears to increase the total amount of psychic energy." Unfortunately, iproniazid in large doses has side effects which in some cases may be extremely serious! Another psychic energizer is an amino alcohol which is thought to increase the body's production of acetylcholine, a substance of prime importance in the functioning of the nervous system. In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.
in the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual's psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R., would probably mean the end of Russia's present form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. Even in the democratic West we could do with a bit of psychic energizing. Between them, education and pharmacology may do something to offset the effects of that deterioration of our biological material to which geneticists have frequently called attention.
From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers. We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Peyote contains mescaline – which can now be produced synthetically – and mescaline in William James' phrase, "stimulates the mystical faculties in human nature" far more powerfully and in a far more enlightening way than alcohol and, what is more, it does so at a physiological and social cost that is negligibly low. Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways – it introduces the taker into the Other World of visionary experience, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with his fellow worshipers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.
The effects of peyote can be duplicated by synthetic mescaline and by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a derivative of ergot. Effective in incredibly small doses, LSD is now being used experimentally by psychotherapists in Europe, in South America, in Canada and the United States. It lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind. The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary and even mystical experience.
When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand not only intellectually but organically, experientially the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as "God is love," or "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him."
It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self-transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a "gratuitous grace," which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring spontaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of "spiritual exercises" or bodily mortification.
Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; and the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentration upon it single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing.
Many ascetics and mystics have practiced their chemistry-changing mortifications and spiritual exercises while living, for longer or shorter periods, as hermits. Now, the life of a hermit, such as Saint Anthony, is a life in which there are very few external stimuli. But as Hebb, John Lilly and other experimental psychologists have recently shown in the laboratory, a person in a limited environment, which provides very few external stimuli, soon undergoes a change in the quality of his consciousness and may transcend his normal self to the point of hearing voices or seeing visions, often extremely unpleasant, like so many of Saint Anthony's visions, but sometimes beatific.
That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion.
Writing of William James' experiments with nitrous oxide, Bergson has summed up the whole matter in a few lucid sentences. "The psychic disposition was there, potentially, only waiting a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But it could just as well be brought about materially, by an inhibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle; and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the drug." Where, for any reason, physical or moral, the psychological dispositions are unsatisfactory, the removal of obstacles by a drug or by ascetic practices will result in a negative rather than a positive spiritual experience. Such an infernal experience is extremely distressing, but may also be extremely salutary. There are plenty of people to whom a few hours in hell – the hell that they themselves have done so much to create – could do a world of good.
Physiologically costless, or nearly costless, stimulators of the mystical faculties are now making their appearance, and many kinds of them will soon be on the market. We can be quite sure that, as and when they become available, they will be extensively used. The urge to self-transcendence is so strong and so general that it cannot be otherwise. In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of a premystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence. The powerful but nearly costless mind changers of the future will change all this completely. Instead of being rare, premystical and mystical experiences will become common. What was once the spiritual privilege of the few will be made available to the many. For the ministers of the world's organized religions, this will raise a number of unprecedented problems. For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols. To men and women who have had direct experience of self-trascendence into the mind's Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is not likely to be very staisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner. We are exhorted to "taste and see that the Lord is good."
In one way or another, the world's ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them. In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the other hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way – exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.
My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous "revival of religion," about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition – an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."
ReplyDeleteALDOUS HUXLEY
1894 - 1963
"If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution-then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise."
ALDOUS HUXLEY
"Two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists were subsidized. Six years later it was being produced commercially. The perfect drug. Euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant. All the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects. Take a holiday from reality whenever you like, and come back without so much as a headache or a mythology. Stability was practically assured."
ALDOUS HUXLEY ( Brave New World )
"Rational and kindly behavior tends to produce good results and these results remain good even when the behavior which produced them was itself produced by a pill."
ALDOUS HUXLEY ( Brave New World Revisited, in Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, New York, 1977, p. 99 )
"What fun it would be if one didn't have to think about happiness!"
World Controller Mustapha Mond ( Brave New World )
Aldous Huxley talks about Brave New World
(video: mp4; 3.35Mb; also wmv 4.69Mb)
Aldous Huxley Interview
(mp4 and wmv; three parts)
pinion
ReplyDeleteADHD's Facebook 'friends'
Parents should be skeptical of a drug company's Facebook page on the disorder.
By Katherine Ellison
March 30, 2009
I'm the mother of a child diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. What this often means is I feel lonely and stigmatized, and turn to the Internet in search of support.
In other words, I'm just the kind of mom for whom McNeil Pediatrics, manufacturer of the popular, long-acting stimulant drug Concerta, is offering "practical, credible information" on its ADHD Moms Facebook page, launched last July.
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"Our research is telling us that these women feel very isolated," company spokeswoman Tricia Geoghegan told me. "We saw these moms going on Facebook. They're going on WebMD late at night." The Facebook page was designed to "put the information in their comfort zone," Geoghegan said.
Naturally enough, this Facebook page, with its atypically non-interactive content, is especially comforting about the use of stimulant medications to treat ADHD. At a time of a growing national backlash against the $250-billion drug industry, parents taking this route -- even as a painful last resort -- can feel like pariahs. But McNeil, a division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., assures us we have lots of company -- and furthermore, that the outcomes can be fabulous.
"After dinner one night my son sat and played with Lego for hours it seemed, he looked so happy, peaceful, and I turned to my husband and said, 'We did good,' " wrote Michelle Goodman-Beatty, a mother of four, a recent medication convert and one of the page's more than 8,000 "fans." Another mom boasts that her daughter has made the honor roll and "become a more focused dancer."
I'm not against medication per se. Concerta helped our family during a crisis, allowing us the emotional wherewithal to make difficult, time-consuming changes in our behavior.
But that doesn't mean that McNeil Pediatrics is my "friend."
Check out, for instance, the "advice" about drug holidays -- periodic breaks from medication. Federally sponsored researchers in a follow-up phase of the largest ADHD study to date, published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in August 2007, found this common practice to be supported by clinical evidence that the initial benefits of medication "completely dissipated" for many children as they matured.
These authoritative findings aside, Washington pediatrician Patricia Quinn, a paid consultant for McNeil, declares in a podcast conversation with a mom named Laura Willingham that medication breaks aren't a good idea for "a good number of children," including Willingham's third-grader, Jackson.
(Willingham, in a telephone interview from her Texas home, described herself to me as an "average-Joe mom," but also acknowledged she'd been recruited to the Facebook page by McNeil's Chicago public relations firm, drawn by her musings on Cafe Mom, a social networking site. McNeil also paid Willingham a fee and expenses to attend a New York conference on adult ADHD.)
Kids like Jackson "really do need to continue on their medication because their ADHD symptoms are continuing to interfere with their functioning," says Quinn, who characterizes such interference as "problems with organization or listening or following directions or even interacting with other children."
Whoa, that describes quite a lot of kids, don't you think?
Quinn, herself the mother of three ADHD children, continues, in a tone that sounds urgent: "It's important for the family interaction. I know that by keeping my son on medication after school and on weekends and on holidays, we could have family vacations. We even went to Disneyland in an RV!"
My two Facebook friends then proceed to allay listeners' worries about reported side effects of the stimulants with some artful misinformation. "I did my own research," says Willingham, "and found that children who did receive treatment, whatever the path, typically have lower rates of addiction."
In fact, this long-lived claim was disputed in a peer-reviewed study last year in the American Journal of Psychiatry, which found there was "no evidence that stimulant treatment increases or decreases the risk for subsequent substance use disorders" in young people with ADHD. But Quinn doesn't correct the record.
Willingham goes on to say she'd feared the drugs would stunt her son's growth, until she talked the issue over with her pediatrician. "He told us we could expect some weight loss or no weight gain," she says, "and we talked about how to pad his diet."
Now, here's what I mean by "artful." My Facebook chums don't mention height, which you can't make up by "padding," unless you "pad" with growth hormones. But height is indeed an issue, according to that federally sponsored study, which found children on meds lose on average about three-fourths of an inch after three years, apparently permanently.
When I asked Geoghegan, the McNeil spokeswoman, why the company didn't make sure its podcast was accurate, she said, "Patricia Quinn is a doctor. I'm not. It's her medical opinion. Plus, she's a mom. Remember, this is moms talking to moms."
Oh, right! Shame on me for forgetting!
We ADHD mothers are really in a pickle. There is so much misinformation and disinformation out there about brain disorders and drugs and how best to cope with the difficult children we love. There is so much that even top scientists still simply don't know. What's more, a few of these top scientists have been revealed by recent congressional investigations to be taking questionable payments from ... yep, pharmaceutical firms.
The difficulty of doing our own, independent research when we're feeling panicked, isolated and stigmatized makes it all the more tempting to rely on people we feel we know, like the smiling Facebook moms or the site's former paid celebrity hostess, Deborah Phelps. (Phelps, mother of Olympic champion Michael Phelps, left the page in January, for reasons she and Geoghegan say were unrelated to the dust-up arising from a photo published that same month of Michael with a bong.)
Alas, there's still no such thing as one-click parenting. Our choices about how to treat our children's emotional and mental travails surely shouldn't be as lonely, painful, costly or shaming as they are today. But virtual "friends" aren't the answer.
Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent. Her latest book, "Hotheads: A Mother, a Son, and a Year of Paying Attention," will be published next year by Hyperion Books.