I was talking to my friend Jamie about therapy a few months ago and he recommended the “Psychiatry” chapter in Michael Crichton’s 1988 memoir, Travels.

Around 1971, Crichton was separated from his wife. She suggested he see a psychiatrist. “I refused,” Crichton wrote. “I didn’t think psychiatry did any good for people. It was just a lot of hand-holding.”

Then his wife gave him the name of a prominent psychiatrist at UCLA but suggested that the doctor was probably too busy to see him. Crichton took offense at the idea he wasn’t important enough to be seen, and made an appointment. (It’s a very funny chapter.)

“I now found myself in a peculiar situation,” he wrote. “I didn’t really believe in psychiatry, I didn’t want to see a psychiatrist, and I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, but I was challenged to present myself to Dr. Norton in a fascinating way.”

After a fine performance, Dr. Norton took Crichton on as a patient.

But I still wasn’t sure psychiatry did any good. And it was expensive, sixty dollars an hour. Anything that cost so much must surely be an indulgence. Rich lazy people went to psychiatrists.

I decided to keep track of how much it was costing me to see Dr. Norton, and I assessed each session when it was over to determine if it had been worth the sixty dollars.

I found Dr. Norton puzzling because he was so normal. I’d tell him my story and he’s say things like ‘Time will tell’ or ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’

I thought, Sixty dollars an hour to hear you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs? What good is this?

But Crichton enjoyed “complaining about my life” and kept going back.

On the fifth session, “three hundred dollars down the drain,” as he put it, they had a breakthrough: it turns out that Crichton was an insecure person.

I felt amazed. Just as amazed as if he had shown me that I had a third arm coming out of my chest, an arm I had never noticed before. How could I not have noticed this before? But I never thought I was insecure. If anything, I saw myself as astoundingly confident.

Could I really have held such an incorrect view of myself?

Dr. Norton tried to soften the blow, and explained that many things about ourselves were difficult to see without outside help. That was the whole point of a therapist. He was an objective outsider.

This was a new idea to me, that there might be some things about myself that I couldn’t see without outside help. But it obviously was true.

I never kept track of how much I was spending again.

Crichton then goes on to tell a funny story about getting involved with several women and how Dr. Norton warns him that things are going to go very badly. Crichton doesn’t think so. He thinks he can handle it.

“Time will tell,” Dr. Norton says.

And it does: things go very badly for Crichton.

“What a mess” I said.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Dr. Norton said.

By now I saw the point of these homilies. Dr. Norton was trying to get me to understand that certain rules of life had been around for a long time and that life probably wasn’t going to make an exception for me.

Crichton gets divorced, goes to a psychic, becomes totally depressed after achieving all his goals in life (it happens!), reads Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and starts traveling again.

But he never really talks about psychiatry again in that chapter.

So I searched around, seeing if anything came up about Crichton and psychiatry.

The first thing that surfaced was this 1970 clip of his appearance on The Dick Cavett Show to promote his first non-fiction book, Five Patients:

Around 5:26, Cavett asks Crichton about psychiatry.

Cavett: What’s happening in psychiatry these days? There’s always something peculiar going on there. The latest thing I heard about is they’re using computers as psychoanalysts.

Crichton: There is a computer program which I put in the book because it was mostly amusing. It was done as a joke by a fellow named Weizenbaum at MIT several years ago. What he set out to do is to see if you could program a computer to interact in something approaching a conversation with a person. And he did it by a series of kind of tricks. So for example, the computer will pick up something in your sentence and play it back to you. If you mention parents it’ll pop something back, “Can you tell me more?” or “Why do you say that about [blank]?” and put in the parents. But it turns out in practice to be kind of successful, kind of frighteningly successful.

Cavett: It sounds ludicrous to begin with. I mean, it would seem like the idea of therapy would be that the genius of the therapist would be that he treats every person as individual and finds out what this individual’s problems are and he’s unlike any other individual. But how can a machine do that?

Crichton: That particular point is why this thing is kind of frightening the psychiatrist.

Cavett: Because it’s succeeding?

Crichton: Yeah!

There are at several things that are interesting to me about this clip.

• This was filmed 56 years ago.
• Crichton, seen here, is about one year away from going to therapy himself.
• Cavett sort of completely gets wrong what therapy is about, which Crichton later discovers for himself: seen through the eye of an attentive but impartial observer, your problems aren’t actually that unique  at all.

But by far the most interesting is the story of MIT professor and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum himself, and how his experience ELIZA caused him to turn against AI.

From his MIT obituary:

Weizenbaum was shocked to discover that many users were taking his program seriously and were opening their hearts to it. The experience prompted him to think philosophically about the implications of artificial intelligence, and, later, to become a critic of it.

In 1976, he authored “Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation,” in which he displayed ambivalence toward computer technology and warned against giving machines the responsibility for making genuinely human choices. Specifically, Weizenbaum argued that it was not just wrong but dangerous and, in some cases, immoral to assume that computers would be able to do anything given enough processing power and clever programming.

“No other organism, and certainly no computer, can be made to confront genuine human problems in human terms,” he wrote.

“‘Computer Power and Human Reason’ raised questions about the role of artificial intelligence, and spurred debate about the role of computer systems in decision making for many years,” said Eric Grimson, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Weizenbaum’s initial wariness about computers — and humanity’s reliance on them — later evolved into a deep resentment. By the early 1980s, he was railing against the concept of computer illiteracy, saying it was a form of “mass hysteria” drummed up by computer manufacturers as a way to sell more product. The real focus, he said, should not be on computer literacy but literacy itself.

In a 1985 interview with New Age journal, he proudly described himself as a heretic of technology.

“The dependence on computers is merely the most recent — and the most extreme – example of how man relies on technology in order to escape the burden of acting as an independent agent,” Weizenbaum told the journal. “It helps him avoid the task of giving meaning to his life, of deciding and pursuing what is truly valuable.”

I was telling this all to my friend Marty on the phone and he was like, “Wait, I just heard a guest talking about this guy while listening to On Point this morning!”

That guest was Sherry Turkle, who’s making the rounds promoting her book Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. 

When Turkle arrived at MIT in the 1970s, she was one of the only psychologists there, and Weizenbaum wanted to meet her because he was trying to figure out why people were so into this ELIZA program he had written.

She told Weizenbaum’s story on The Ezra Klein Show:

They wanted so much to believe that it was a thinking creature that they would ask it questions in a way that, with practice, they knew would cause it to give the most humanlike response… And again, that was one of the early things I learned, that it’s not just that we come to a machine and say: “Oh, is this intelligent? Does this understand me?” But we come to these conversations wanting it to be there for us. And that really concerned Weizenbaum because he thought that was a very dangerous road, because the machine really understood nothing.

And that was my afternoon on the internet!

My Friday newsletter began:

Molly Ivins called Texas “the laboratory for bad government,” and that’s been the case my entire adult life. I was a 17-year-old in Ohio during the 2000 election, and since I couldn’t vote, I went around waving a copy of Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush at my family members, warning them that the whole country could become Texas. (Whenever other Americans joke that they wish Texas would go ahead and secede, I reply, “But then you’d lose your early warning system!”) 19 summers ago, Meg and I moved to Austin so she could go to grad school. We stayed. She gave birth to a couple of native Texans during the Obama administration (I was able to become a full-time writer thanks to the Affordable Care Act), and since then we’ve been raising them in a sunny city full of friendly people and great food, all the while knowing that just five miles down the road, some of the most corrupt men in the world do their best to wreck the place. So you can imagine how it felt on Tuesday night, when a good number of those creeps were sent packing by our fellow Texans. The vibe around here is: jubilant.

Filed under: Texas

I wrote about art, therapy, and cognitive distortion pedals.

The latest typewriter interview is with cartoonist Edward Steed.

A few summers ago, I started one of my mixtapes with a very specific, silly concept: a pair of elder millennial parents have a few drinks after dinner and start playing their kids the rap and hip-hop of their youth, but the songs get increasingly filthy and inappropriate, until the kids flee in terror and the parents are left grinding on each other in the kitchen:

A good number of these songs surfaced while listening to Confucius and Fresh bring more hip-hop stuff to their turns on “Old School Dance Party” or from watching the Vevo 90s channel on TV and drinking too much during the pandemic.

At some point in 2021, we realized that the channel was basically on a loop and that Marky Mark came on at about 10 P.M. every night. We became obsessed with the bullying nature of the way Marky Mark tells you to feel the vibrations, like he’s a trainer at the gym shouting at you. “Come on, feel it, FEEL IT!” (Compared to the way, say, Sam Cooke tells you to “Don’t fight it, baby, feel it.”)

We decided the key to understanding the “Good Vibrations” video is insecurity. Marky Mark has looked around at the cool people in the video and he suspects that it is he who cannot truly feel the vibrations. Marky Mark appears to be yelling at you to feel the vibrations, but he is really yelling at himself.

It’s a raunchy batch of music, but also a jubilant one, and perfect, I think, for post-election partying.

You can listen to the mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Filed under: mixtapes

This mix began as a Halloween party mix (complete with “Monster Mash”) and then morphed into something weirder and scarier, I think: a mix of songs (mostly) about being crazy — maybe even psychotically! —  in love. (The more you listen to love songs the more you realize, “Man, this person is not well!”)

These mixes usually begin with what I call “seed songs” — a song that you kind of want to build a whole mix around. In this case it was the Sonics’ “Psycho” and Girls’ “Lust for Life,” which I couldn’t get out of my head for weeks. I also found that picture of Frankenstein’s monster with the little girl by the lake and these lyrics became more relevant: “I wish I had a father / And maybe then I would’ve turned out right / But now I’m just crazy / I’m totally mad…”

Another thing I learned from this mix: I really build theses mixes based on vibe, so if I have a band that captures the vibe I’m going for, I can use their influences to build up variety in the mix. For example, The Cramps’ “psychobilly” thing is what I wanted for the first side, so I simply searched “cramps influences” and got this Apple playlist that had more of the sort of stuff I was going for. Having the original versions of songs the Cramps covered (like Charlie Feathers’ “Can’t Hardly Stand It”) just thickens the stew, so to speak. (Same for searching for “Creedence covers” — this playlist popped up.)

I filled the tiny gaps on each side with Uncle Monty’s “I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!” monologue from Withnail & I and a snippet of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All.”

You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

I used this poem at the top of my letter, “Everything you can see.”

See also: “Do you have a nemesis?”

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Lisa Hanawalt.

I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole newsletter about the game called  “Baseball on the brain.” It begins:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in the slim, wonderful volume A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Highly recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.

Read the rest here.

I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc.

But it’s hard to know how to point people back at stuff.

A few weeks ago I had a sale on paid subscriptions, so I used it as an excuse to gather some of the more popular letters, like:

a look inside of my notebooks, a tour of my studio, my guide to block printing, how I make color brush pens, motivational posters for your studio, and the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next. Get it!

The week after that, I gathered up the letters regarding what I know about writing books:

All good things must begin, there’s an abyss between researching and writing and a gulp between when you finish and publish, coming up with a good title matters, there are many tricks for self-editing and the best is “just cut stuff,” you have to love your work long enough to see it through, and it often helps to think of your book (and everything else you write) as a letter to a friend.

I need to spend more time in the newsletter archives doing this kind of work: figuring out what I have and how I can bundle it together. Because honestly, that’s how most of the books were written!

But then again, I’d rather, you know, actually be writing.