The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Sex, Politics, and Operation Dildo Blitz John Michael Greer I planned on posting an essay on a different subject today. In fact, I had another essay all written and revised, waiting for whatever fame and fortune a weekly blog post by a writer well out on the cultural fringes can expect these days. That essay is going to be cooling its heels for another two weeks before it gets its day in the sun, though. A comment I made during a recent speaking gig, which was duly recorded and posted to the internet, sparked quite a little tempest in a couple of minor online teapots. I don’t follow social media, but I have friends who do, and several of them happened to tell me about certain saliva-flecked rants responding to the comment. It’s a normal experience if you’re a blogger who doesn’t just parrot somebody’s party line. If people want to denounce me, of course, I have no problem with that. I’ve criticized various people fairly harshly over the twenty years I’ve been blogging, and it wou...

  Are tiny parasites messing with our brains? Think before you swallow Peter Frost \ Reverie , 1872, Edward Radford (Wikicommons) Toxoplasma gondii  is a tiny protozoan. It’s also a parasite. Like a surprising number of parasites, it can infiltrate brain tissue and make its host behave in ways that help it spread to new hosts. For example, an infected rat is attracted to the smell of cat urine and ends up getting eaten by a cat, the only host in which  T. gondii  can sexually reproduce. Once inside a host, the parasite targets the amygdala—an area of the brain that stores emotional memories. Autopsies of infected rodents show twice the density of  T. gondii  cysts in the amygdala as in other brain regions ( Vyas et al., 2007 ). Primates can also get infected, and the behavioral changes are similar. Infected chimpanzees like the smell of leopard urine ( Poirotte, 2016 ). Although a feline species is the only host in which  T. gondii  can sexually r...