World Gone Research Articles

“An advertising world gone completely haywire”: MAC VIVA GLAM

“An advertising world gone completely haywire”:MAC VIVA GLAM Andrea Benoit (bio) “Pucker up, Buttercup. It’s VIVA GLAM time. MAC VIVA GLAM time.” ~ RuPaul1 Introduction The famed drag artist RuPaul opened the 1995 Canadian AIDS fundraiser, Fashion Cares, by descending a long, winding staircase flanked by two human-size red lipsticks. Strutting down the runway to the tune of his song, “House of Love,” wearing his signature red bustier, red thigh-high stiletto boots, and long blonde wig, RuPaul coyly surveyed his audience before announcing, “My name is RuPaul, the first face of MAC Cosmetics.” Indeed, this seven-foot black drag queen was the new model for MAC VIVA GLAM lipstick. This lipstick, the first product the Canadian brand had ever advertised, raised funds for the brand’s newly formed AIDS charity. MAC has been called “the hippest thing to come out of Canada,” and with a drag queen as its first “MAC Girl,” it is not difficult to see why.2 MAC’s inventive new advertising challenged the cosmetic industry’s advertising conventions and narrow definitions of female beauty. It also spoke to AIDS with humor, whimsy, and even camp amidst the fear and despair that characterized the epidemic. RuPaul marked the beginning of an illustrious history of VIVA GLAM spokespeople and advertising by a brand that otherwise did not advertise.3 MAC’s original, and arguably most classic, ad with RuPaul arose from a unique historical moment. It was released just as several larger economic, cultural, creative, and political forces were converging, developing alongside shifts both in the cosmetics industry and the Toronto fashion industry that coincided with the AIDS epidemic. MAC was a very fashionable brand and a key player in the Toronto fashion scene. Starting in the 1980s, the Toronto fashion industry was the new centre for fashion in Canada-for both producers as well as consumers- and it was an unusually creative time for those in the cultural industries.4 The rise of the AIDS epidemic, however, greatly affected those working in these cultural industries, and the fashion industry in Toronto responded. This article chronicles the origin and rise of this “hip” Canadian cosmetics brand as it created the first cosmetic product to raise money for AIDS, and the innovative, irreverent, and original advertising campaign that promoted it.5 Fashionable Origins Toronto hairstylist Frank Angelo and makeup artist Frank Toskan began creating their own cosmetics in the early 1980s because Toskan could not find the right colors, intensities, textures, and tools for his work.6 “The Franks,” as they were called, felt that the cosmetics industry did not offer color cosmetics that suited their own specific needs for the type of photography and beauty work they were doing. Enlisting the help of chemistry student (and Toskan’s future brother-inlaw) Victor Casale, the Franks began developing a diverse range of products, and MAC was officially born in 1984. The Franks made cosmetics with intense colors using rich pigments that were appropriate for the variety of skin colors, particularly darker skin tones, that they encountered in their daily fashion work in multicultural Toronto. Toskan recalled that: “[v]ery few companies were addressing the issue of color or different ethnic backgrounds or the needs of the photographer and the makeup artist on set.”7 MAC’s colors were notable because of the unusual flat, nonreflective matte. They also developed a more imaginative range of neutral shades, instead of the pinks and purples that seemed to dominate other mass market and prestige cosmetics lines. Toskan said it bothered him that everything from the major cosmetics houses looked the same: “I hate it when you can get every shade of frosted shadow possible when all you want is a matte. I hate it when somebody has 30 lipsticks in their line, but they all look alike-either all corals, or all reads, or all pinks.” This, he felt, did not respect anyone’s personal choice or sense of individuality. The Franks strategically positioned MAC as a professional cosmetics line created by a makeup artist, for a makeup artist-a completely new approach at the time. Toskan was soon asked by makeup artist friends to make products for...

Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong

Research Article| December 01 2013 Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong: Courmayeur Noir In Festival Randy Malamud Randy Malamud Randy Malamud is Regents’ Professor of English and chair of the department at Georgia State University. He is the author of six books, including An Introduction to Animals in Visual Culture (Palgrave 2012), Poetic Animals and Animal Souls (Palgrave, 2003), and Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (NYU Press, 1998). He is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2013) 67 (2): 73–79. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.73 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Randy Malamud; Ominous Faultlines in a World Gone Wrong: Courmayeur Noir In Festival. Film Quarterly 1 December 2013; 67 (2): 73–79. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.73 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2014 by the Regents of the University of California2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

World gone wrong: the financial crisis, labor market transitions and earnings in Serbia

While results are starting to emerge, not much is known yet about the dynamics of the labor markets of the former Eastern economies, especially in the context of the current financial crisis. Arguably, this is mainly due to paucity of (panel) data. By examining labor market transitions and earnings growth and their correlates using a recent panel data set for Serbia, this paper combines both of these issues. Estimation of gross transition probabilities reveals that females are disadvantaged in the Serbian labor market in terms of moving out of the two undesirable states, unemployment and economic inactivity, relative to males during the first year of the financial crisis—though males are harder hit than females in terms of the levels of unemployment. In terms of earnings growth, the picture is reversed, with females experiencing smaller earnings decreases than males (though, owing to the gender earnings gap, from a much lower base). Examining the determinants of employment, unemployment, and inactivity transitions and of earnings growth reveal substantial gender differences related to individual, job, and firm characteristics. The overall results therefore hint at both males and females being hit in terms of employment and earnings, though in different ways. Finally, the paper discusses policy implications and provides suggestions for further research.

Wise Young Fool by Sean Beaudoin (review)

Reviewed by: Wise Young Fool by Sean Beaudoin Karen Coats Beaudoin, Sean . Wise Young Fool. Little, 2013. 412p. ISBN 978-0-316-20379-1 $18.00 R Gr. 9-12. Ritchie Sudden is a straight-edge rocker in a world gone askew. A drunk driver has killed his sister, his dad has left, and his mother's girlfriend has moved in. Ritchie himself is serving a ninety-day sentence in a juvenile detention center, where his smart-aleck aloofness has made him the favorite entry in an illicit fighting ring. His counselor suggests that he keep a journal, in which his explanation of how he came to be in the detention center is withheld until the end, and in which he traces his romantic exploits (he's hopelessly in love with an unreachable girl, and he has sex with the wrong girl before he ends up with his crush, who disillusions his dreams). Just as the plot summary suggests, this hits all of the expected plot points of the Angry Young Man genre, hewing so close to the line Frank Portman traced in King Dork (BCCB 5/06) that the two are almost indistinguishable in tone and conceit (there's even a chapter devoted entirely to band names, as well as an appendix devoted to a snarky hipster critique of existing band names). Such imitation is unusual for Beaudoin, who has proven nothing if not starkly original in his previous works (You Killed Wesley Payne, BCCB 1/11, etc.), but he nonetheless plays language like Hendrix plays a guitar, so what might seem stale in conception makes up many thousand bonus points in linguistic style, inventiveness, and dexterity. Ritchie is ultimately likable in his grief, even when he is being a bad friend, a raging son, or a chauvinistic jerk, and the characters around him, especially his mom's girlfriend, add perspectives that Ritchie knows are important even if he can't quite accept them yet. Give this to fans of Tim Tharp, Chris Lynch, and, of course, Frank Portman. Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective

Communicating Resilience: A Discursive Leadership Perspective

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Open-Learning Workshops

MorningAdvice to a novelistSupply the characters of the story with a set of travel-brochures, then let them talk amongst themselves. NB: Your characters must always be vastly more intelligent than you are. This puts you immediately above critical notice. Buy a sheep dog and avoid blondes at cocktail parties. A sober, disgruntled approach to the reading public is advisable. Short bursts of articulate invective highly recommended. Take up darts.Advice to a poetDon't take the whole business too seriously. Adopt long-distance walking as a hobby. Don't become a typographical cowboy or you will be mistaken for a sign-writer. Guard against becoming a funambulist sans balancing pole. Failure means you are one step away from becoming a successful copywriter. Success means you are one step closer to never having to write another lousy word.Advice to a playwrightInvite all those detestable people in your circle to first night. Then leave alone by taxi for the nearest nightclub. This will prepare you for the morning review notice. Structure your dialogue as you would a scaffold: vocal pictographs around an imagined community of individuals. Discard long monologues about the world gone to hell. All people want to do is get home safely. The more avant-garde your play the better; the audience loves nostalgia. Acts are for the apostles.Advice to a performance artistAdmit defeat in the face of rap-take up line dancing. Train as a CD ROM/DVD salesperson. Personality-plus has replaced everything. Television / and interactive media are the magnetic pole of achievement You are a neo- vaudevillist in a cyber-dream. To be taken at face value is recognition. To be taken under contract to endorse a product is out there. In your profession this is the pinnacle of success. Retire into the Talking Books Business. Advice to a landscape painterIgnore the existing mytho/historical landscape that you have either inherited, or migrated to. You are Adam. Nothing can be created without the imposition of your unique will. Size is important and affirms to the viewer's eye that you are a monumentalist in breadth and neo-classicist in scope. They fail to see that you are a dedicated billboard artist. One day you will move to Las Vegas.Advice to a linguistLanguage? Hardly. Hair-bound words slavering at the mouth's cave. Speech clubbed to falsehood. Why is this so? Listen to Production's moist purr that blocks the way back. To where? No sacred groves remain to ask in. Get a job as a taxi driver in a third-world country. Storerooms are regarded as primordial, sacred places.Advice to an English lecturerYour future lies with the private sector. Stage dinner parties for book reviewers. Court publishers as your intermediate friends. Start up a literary magazine with an east European bias and nominate yourself as a cultural commissar. This is your birthright. Push pet critical theories through other writers. Culture = Power = exclusivity. You are a cultural supremacist whose root cause is self-loathing and hatred. Join the local Press Club.AfternoonAdvice to a philologistConverse with tramps. Record the patois of those who prefer to live under viaducts as opposed to storm-water drains. For a location guide consult your local Centrelink unemployment center. Avoid detention camps. The language of the tin-cup tapped out on bars in high security prisons is central to your understanding of visualizing primitive speech patterns. Read George Borrow's Lavengro. Move into a housing estate.Advice to a medievalistLecture Notes: Catholic church as living reliquary of medievalism. Opulence continues to flagrantly contradict each new interpretation of modernism and contemporary thought. Catholic authority prevails as anachronism. The last stand of medieval land-baron mentality in an IT world. The website viewed as religious icon and new covenant.Advice to homepage designerYou are the modern equivalent of the sandwich-board man and the world is your pavement. …

Habermas and Bateson in a World Gone M.A.D.: Metacommunication, Paradox, and the Inverted Speech Situation

This study compares the applicability of 2 normative theories, Habermas's theory of communicative action and Bateson's ecology of communication, by applying them to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Habermas's theory of communicative action observes how communication is strategically distorted into an extreme version of what we call the inverted speech situation. This paradoxical form of systematically distorted communication does not explain the successful outcome of a deterrence situation such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Bateson's ecology of communication shows how metacommunicative messages can affect the relations between nations, generating potentially catastrophic relational dynamics but also opportunities for constructive change. Bateson's theory explains the communicative dynamics and ultimate resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis in terms of metacommunication, paradox, and schismogenesis.

Into the silence: the Great War, Mallory, and the conquest of Everest

If the quest for Mount Everest began as a grand imperial gesture, as redemption for an empire of explorers that had lost the race to the Poles, it ended as a mission of regeneration for a country and a people bled white by war. Of the twenty-six British climbers who, on three expeditions (1921-24), walked 400 miles off the map to find and assault the highest mountain on Earth, twenty had seen the worst of the fighting. Six had been severely wounded, two others nearly killed by disease at the Front, one hospitalized twice with shell shock. Three as army surgeons dealt for the duration with the agonies of the dying. Two lost brothers, killed in action. All had endured the slaughter, the coughing of the guns, the bones and barbed wire, the white faces of the dead. In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: 'The price of life is death.' Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but 'a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day'. As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive. For all of them Everest had become an exalted radiance, a sentinel in the sky, a symbol of hope in a world gone mad.

Following in the Footsteps of Sisyphus:

Following in the Footsteps of Sisyphus:

Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School (review)

Reviewed by: Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School Lally Grauer (bio) Sam McKegney . Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. University of Manitoba Press. 2007. 242. $28.95 Magic Weapons opens with a powerful and revelatory introduction by Basil H. Johnston, and the chapters that follow do not let the reader down. McKegney's text no doubt will itself become an important 'weapon' for the field of Indigenous studies as well as other fields such as Canadian literature and history, auto/biography, and life writing. Texts that deal with the residential school experience by Inuit writer Anthony Apakark Thrasher, Mi'kmaq poet Rita Joe, and Cree playwright [End Page 308] and novelist Tomson Highway are the focus of this volume, and McKegney suggests that activism by authors and critics is possible and necessary. He does not see the authors and their texts as activist in the ways that one might first imagine: that is, through revising colonial history, exposing injustice and the victimization of Indigenous people, or advocating political solutions to injustices. Rather, they are activist in the ways they enable and demonstrate 'narratives of agency' through the use of artful literary and narrative strategies. As McKegney puts it, the autobiography of a residential school survivor may document the erosion or 'suffocation' of a particular Indigenous identity, but the act of that documentation also 'revitalizes, . . . recreates, performs and displays that identity anew, while establishing spaces of interpretation in which readers can conduct similar examinations of their own experiences.' It is up to the critic to be alert to these strategies. Another way the critic can take on an activist role is to consider ways in which the authors' strategies empower their communities - what he calls, borrowing the term from scholar and critic Jace Weaver, 'communitist' readings. McKegney applies these kinds of approaches productively to all three of the writers he focuses on, bringing to the fore how Thrasher, for example, is able to create agency and complexity in a life story that, in the trajectory of its events, points to disaster and defeat. Probably the most knowledgeable scholar on Thrasher's writing, McKegney draws upon not only the 164-page published work, Thrasher . . . Skid Row Eskimo, but also the 512-page unedited manuscript that preceded it. In his exploration of The Autobiography of Rita Joe, McKegney confronts the potential for her textual lacunae and almost relentlessly positive narrative perspective to be read as obscuring or denying crucial history and experience concerning residential school. He teases out, through his readings of poems she includes in the text and their interaction with her prose, how her work can be understood as empowering both to her and to her community. His readings add to our understanding of the intricacy of the seemingly simple language she uses and the gaps she employs. Finally, in examining Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen, McKegney unfolds how Highway's narrative, like Rita Joe's poems, enacts the kinds of processes and solutions it presents to his community for dealing with the traumatic history of residential schooling: in Highway's case, the relearning of Cree spiritual teachings and the reinterpretation, through these teachings, of that history and trauma. McKegney's title comes from Highway's telling of a traditional Cree story in Kiss of the Fur Queen, in which the hero is bid by his father to remake a world gone evil with 'magic weapons.' These few highlights, however, only touch on the breadth of this engaging work. For example, McKegney brings in an exploration of [End Page 309] the particular history of Mi'kmaq colonial experience in his analysis of Rita Joe's autobiography and discusses the place of criticism focused on the authenticity of the author's voice and the editing in his examination of Thrasher's text. The first two chapters of Magic Weapons provide important contextual material, such as historical interpretations of the residential school phenomenon in Canada and a survey of Indigenous literature dealing with residential schooling, as well as a discussion of critical approaches to Indigenous literature. My only caveat is that in carving out his critical territory McKegney can sometimes be dogmatic, so he...

The hyper-social organization: eclipse your competition by leveraging social media

BE HYPER-SOCIAL. GET HYPER-SUCCESSFUL. A thought-provoking read and a comprehensive introduction to today's business challenges as social media and social networking become increasingly vital to success...Highly recommended. --Choice magazine If you want to really understand what makes some online communities thrive while others shrivel and fade, you have come to the right place. Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran understand just what makes us all so social-ascustomers, as employees, and as business partners-both online and off. -- David Rogers, executive director, Columbia Business School Center on Global Brand Leadership,author of Network Is Your Customer The Hyper-Social Organization is not simply a guide to navigate through the fundamental and far-reaching transformations of today caused by social media, but it also provides insight into how to optimize and profit from -- Mark Yolton, senior vice president, SAP the extent that we can be 'human' with what we know-and share it as freely as we possibly can-we'll go along way toward fostering a deeper level of trust with consumers. Hyper-Social Organization not only explains why that happens--it also provides a road map for how to embed it in all your customer-facing processes. -- Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy Rather than getting hung up on the 'media' side of social media, Gossieaux and Moran have figured out thatthe real killer app is the ability to create a 1:1 communication between your customers and your brand. -- Marty St. George, CMO, JetBlue With this book's simple yet profound prescriptions for all parts of the organization, Francois Gossieaux and Ed Moran have distilled the chaos, excitement, and fear business is feeling from a world gone social into an elegant framework of understanding. (And I'm buying books for my whole tribe.) -- Janet Swaysland, SVP of Social Media, Monster.com About the Book: Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. LinkedIn. Unless you're living in the Stone Age, it's hard to ignore all the social networking tools that have taken the world by storm. To keep up--and stay competitive--you need to rethink how your organization interacts with this brave new world. You need to stop marketing to consumers and start socializingwith communities who know what they like and aren't afraid to share it. You need to understand the power of social media-and use it to your best advantage. You need Hyper-Social Organization. Based on the famous Tribalization of Business Study--a wide-ranging annual survey conducted by Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs and Ed Moran of Deloitte--this is the definitive guide to using social media for organizational success. book's surprising findings and in-depth interviews will challenge everything you know aboutcorporate-consumer relations-starting with The5 Steps to Being Hyper-Social: Forget technology-understand thefour drivers of successful communities. Forget market segments and consumers-think and humans. Forget company-centricity- think human-centricity. Forget channels-think networks. Forget process and hierarchies- think social messiness. Social media is changing the world as we know it. This book shows you how to change your organization and be on the leading edge of the movement. Instead of marketing to general target groups, Gossieaux and Moran reveal how you can refocus your efforts to home in on what matters most to people-the communities or tribes that are at the core of their identities-and unite them through their shared passions, problems, responsibilities, wants, and needs. You'll discover how to establish a real human presence on the Web and in social media communities and sites toopen up a naturally flowing, mutual-and mutually beneficial-exchange of ideas and information. And you'll see what leading companies like Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, IBM, Marriott, Eli Lilly, and others are doing right-and how you can do it too. Best of all, you'll hear fascinating, in-depth interviews with today's trendsettersabout what their businesses are doing to become Hyper-Social. Being social has always played a key role in success. Being a Hyper-Social organization will take youto the next level.

Christian‐Muslim Dialogue in a World Gone Religiously Awry

Christian‐Muslim Dialogue in a World Gone Religiously Awry

This World We Live In (review)

Reviewed by: This World We Live In April Spisak Pfeffer, Susan Beth. This World We Live In. Harcourt, 2010 [256p]. ISBN 978-0-547-24804-2 $17.00 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 6-9 In this intriguing follow-up to Life As We Knew It (BCCB 12/06) and The Dead & the Gone (BCCB 7/08), the protagonists of those novels (Miranda from the former, Alex from the latter) meet one another and fall into an ill-advised romance. Miranda, narrating through her usual diary entries, describes the year that has passed since the moon was hit by an asteroid and life changed in dramatic and horrible ways on Earth. The arrival of her father, his new wife, and a few additional members of their group brings Alex, the boy from New York on whom the second novel was centered, into her life. The adjustment from four (Miranda, her two brothers, [End Page 350] and mother) to ten is extraordinarily difficult because of the lack of space, heat, or food, but all adapt to the larger community. In spite of Alex's temper, stubborn nature, and determination to depart as soon as possible, Miranda falls for him hard, in no small part because he is literally the only adolescent boy she may see again. What follows is some romance, more tragedy, and the haunting revelation that not much remains in the form of hope for this world. The creepy, poignant descriptions of a world gone gray and dead for who knows how long will certainly give readers chills. Unfortunately, the romance by convenience and the bizarre shock ending that comes out of it are less believable; in addition, neither Miranda nor Alex are particularly sympathetic characters, so readers may find it difficult to connect with them. Nevertheless, fans of the two earlier novels will be unable to resist seeing the worlds collide, and there is enough drama herein to make it worth their time. Copyright © 2010 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The 2009 Presidential Address: Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat

The 2009 Presidential Address: Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat

The 2009 NCTE Presidential Address: Sailing over the Edge: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of a World Gone Flat

The following is the text of Kylene Beers’s presidential address, delivered at the NCTE Annual Convention in Philadephia, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 2009.

Religion, Greed, and the Insanity of War

This article quantifies only a brief encounter with the violent intersection of religion, business, and war. It surveys war in the modern world by including the following topics: the effects of war such as environmental degradation; psychological costs, including post-traumatic stress syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome; violence against females; children at war; costs of war; causes of war and globalization. It wonders if there is such a thing as a killer-instinct that needs an antidote. Several religions from East and West, violent and non-violent, are discussed against the backdrop of war noting the presence of warrior gods and sacrifice. Finally the economic and pseudo-creative benefits of war are summarized. Selvidge poses a final question to readers, "How can we change the direction of a world gone mad?"

Dionysian Symphony of Distorted Reality: Elevator Repair Service's Eisegesis of The Sound and the Fury

The paper explores an innovative, 2008, production of The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) by Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theatre group headed by John Collins. By creating an arguably new theatrical form –sound drama– not only did Collins bridge the inner stasis of Faulkner's novel (presenting its Chapter 1 verbatim) with the physicality of a stage performance; he also, through a deliberately Dionysian approach, broke out of the novel's highly subjective principium individuationis to make it more accessible to the general public. By invoking Lukács's theory of transcendental homelessness, Schopenhauer's concept of an inner eye/outer ear, and Wagner's ideas of a music drama, the paper infers that the new hybrid form – dramatized symphony of the ‘world gone out of joint’ – effectively theatricalizes non-dramatic postmodern narratives putting them on stage sans textual changes, bypassing the step of a written adaptation, which has been considered necessary until now. Collins's discovery broadens the realm of theatre, expanding it to other literary forms. Faulkner's anti-narrative delivered by Benjy, a 33-year-old idiot, who can neither speak nor write, let alone chronologically, or simply logically, present the sequence of events in his life, presented, before Collins, no dramatic interest. Who could have thought that a misfit's anfractuous tale of meta-temporal phantasms that is verbalized in a dissociated stream-of-consciousness technique would result in enthusiastic applause by New York theatre critics and audiences?

Biological Perspectives

He's gone country Everybody's gone country Yeah we've gone country The whole world's gone country --Alan Jackson Psychotropic drugs are in. Even psychiatric nurses who once considered psychotropic drugs a necessary evil or a treatment of last resort, now embrace the inevitability of the times--the fusion of public expectations, third-party considerations, and time constraints. As a result, psychotropic medications have become firstline options in treatment. However, several serious and potentially fatal side effects are related to these agents--for example, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, serotonin syndrome, and agranulocytosis. All these adverse responses were discovered the fact: that is, these effects were not anticipated but were described after patients had developed symptoms or had died. With careful assessments demanded by unacceptable levels of morbidity and mortality, both incidence and death rates have dropped significantly in recent years. Rather than risk allowing these catastrophic consequences to drift to the periphery of practice, we attempt in the following pages to bring the discussions up to date. Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is a potentially fatal reaction to dopamine blockade caused by antipsychotic and other medications. The majority of these medications are prescribed in the treatment of schizophrenia and work by antagonizing dopamine D2 receptors (Keltner & McIntyre, 1985). Although uncommon, NMS may be fatal if left untreated. Estimates of the incidence of NMS range from 0.5% to 2.4%, and the mortality rate may be as high as 20% in those who are not treated (Reeves, Mack, & Torres, 2001). Persing (1994) identified four cardinal symptoms of NMS: hyperthermia, muscle rigidity, mental status changes, and autonomic instability. NMS most often occurs with high potency antipsychotics, and was first described during clinical trials with haloperidol in 1960 (Reeves, Torres, Liberto, & Hart, 2002). Although haloperidol has been most often implicated, cases also are reported with atypical antipsychotic and other dopamine receptor-blocking medications (Beauchemin, Millaud, & Nguyen, 2002; Harradine, Williams, & Doherty, 2001; Philibert, Adam, Frank, & Carney-Doebbeling, 2001; Solomons, 2002). Ninety-six percent of NMS cases occur within the first 30 days of treatment (Persing), with a duration of 5 to 10 days after antipsychotic medications are discontinued (Lappa et al., 2002). Dopamine and NMS. Dopamine is a catecholamine. It has as its immediate precursor levodopa and is itself a precursor to norepinephrine. Dopamine is synthesized from the amino acid tyrosine, which crosses the blood brain barrier and is converted to levodopa in dopaminergic and noradrenergic neurons. Dopamine's metabolic pathway, then, may be summarized as: tyrosine [right arrow] levodopa [right arrow] dopamine [right arrow] norepinephrine (Keltner, Hogan, & Guy, 2001). Pathophysiology of NMS. Central nervous system dopamine is localized in four specific pathways. Altered functioning in two of these pathways is thought to induce the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Treatment strategies aimed at manipulating dopamine affect all four tracts. Chemical manipulation of three of these pathways may contribute to NMS (Table 1). Some of these symptoms of NMS are interrelated. For example, high temperatures may develop and can be exacerbated by massive muscle contraction and hypermetabolism (Lappa et al., 2002). Rigidity also may cause rhabdomyolysis, which can lead to acute renal failure when kidneys are flooded with myoglobin. Severity is assessed by measurement of creatine phosphokinase (CPK). Renal failure is the most common cause of death in NMS (Persing, 1994). Mental status changes can be an early sign of NMS and may progress to coma. Changes in mental status may be characterized by delirium, catatonia, and agitation. …

Dr. StrangeLoan: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Financial Collapse

Last week, on Wednesday September 17, 2008, the Bush Administration almost stumbled upon a way to eliminate the U.S. debt and even taxes. Aaron Edlin's ironic take on a world gone mad.