[NOLA] COMMON GROUND co-founder admits being FBI INFORMANT first is a statement by a group of Austin-based community organizers to provide background info, followed below by the actual letter from Brandon Darby, co-founder of COMMON GROUND in New Orleans, in which he publicly acknowledges that he is working with the FBI and has been for some time…

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Go thou here.

The Boston Globe (Jan 2, 2009):

How the city hurts your brain
…And what you can do about it

By Jonah Lehrer

THE CITY HAS always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.

And yet, city life isn’t easy. The same London cafes that stimulated Ben Franklin also helped spread cholera; Picasso eventually bought an estate in quiet Provence. While the modern city might be a haven for playwrights, poets, and physicists, it’s also a deeply unnatural and overwhelming place.

Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it’s long been recognized that city life is exhausting — that’s why Picasso left Paris — this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so. Continue reading →