Confessions of the Flesh was Michel Foucault’s last manuscript, left unfinished after he died of AIDS and unpublished until 2018, against his wishes. The book reads rather differently compared to his older works, especially its companion books in the collection “History of Sexuality.” Confessions was straightforward, canonical, and historical. The other Sexuality books, in comparison, refused to submit to historiography; instead of laying down a social history of sexual rules, they danced around the “history of ideas” of sex. Read full article here
Oddities
The Curious Case of the Ancient Brain
In 2008, archaeologists examining the University of York discovered something strange: the decapitated head of an Iron Age man and his very shrivelled but very much intact brain. How a centuries-old brain was preserved is still unknown, but research suggests that it could have been because of brain diseases like dementia. The Yorkshire man’s brain’s proteins were bunched up together, much like how dementia causes brain proteins to bunch up into plaques. This bunching up, or aggregation, could continue even after death, turning regions of the brain into hard masses. Read full article here
Merv
September 30, 2022
