THE PREPOSTEROUS BOLLOX OF THE SITUATION

Remember Boorman’s famous memory of Lee, shitfaced in Hollywood at dawn, hailing a cab and saying, “Take me home; hills above Sunset Plaza … Uh, somewhere.” Failing to find it, Marvin found a kid selling maps to the stars’ homes. “OK, this is me, drive up here.” And arriving to hear the new owner of the house tell him, “Ah, Mr Marvin, you sold me this house four years ago.”

“Stephen King knew he was an addict in 1975, when he was writing The Shining. It manifested in his writing, as part of what he was doing; hidden from everybody else, it was in him, and on the page. Back then, it was only alcohol. As he became more popular, wrote more, earned more, took more time away from his family to work, his addictions escalated. How could they not? He needed to hit deadlines, and he liked the taste of what he was addicted to. You can see it through his fiction: in Jack Torrance’s alcoholic self-pity, desperately scared of becoming what he’s destined to be, trying to hold his family together even as he shakes it apart; in Larry Underwood throwing his life (and money, and 15 minutes of fame) away on drink and drugs at the start of The Stand; in his short stories, tales of addiction and internal collapse and death. Then, in case all this passed you by, along comes Cujo: and in the giant, slobbering, seemingly unstoppable dog, we find the bluntest metaphor for addiction yet presented in King’s oeuvre…”

“According to the data, drunk students solved more of these word problems in less time. They also were much more likely to perceive their solutions as the result of a sudden insight. And the differences were dramatic: The alcohol made subjects nearly 30 percent more likely to find the unexpected solution.”

“UC San Francisco pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig… says that added sweeteners have health effects comparable to alcohol and tobacco, and should be regulated accordingly. In a comment piece for the journal Nature, Lustig and his colleagues argue that the state should selectively block access to sugar…”