Lucan Way by way of Monkey Cage:

The nature of the transition in Kyrgyzstan, in which the Bakiev regime rapidly collapsed in the face of just a few thousand protestors (armed mostly with rocks), does not augur well for the future of Kyrgyz democracy. In our book, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (to be published by Cambridge in August), Steven Levitsky and I argue that democracy is less likely to emerge in cases of “rotten door transitions” where opposition seizes power from a weak autocratic regime with a weak ruling party and/or state.

Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Americas have recently witnessed several examples of “rotten door” transitions, in which protesters essentially knocked down doors that had already rotted from within. In such cases, even a small opposition push was sufficient to trigger regime collapse. In Georgia (2003), Haiti (2004), and Madagascar (2002, 2009), as well as Kyrgyzstan in 2005 and 2010, presidents fell because security forces would not or could not put down relatively small protests and were thus left defenseless as opponents overran the state. In Haiti, Aristide was toppled in 2004 by a “rag-tag army of as few as 200 rebels,” and in Georgia, police surrounding parliament dissolved so quickly that Shevardnadze was forced to flee mid-speech—leaving his tea on the speaker’s rostrum for Saakashvili to gulp down after storming the building. In Kyrgyzstan in 2005, a few hundred protestors were able to take over regional governments before Akayev abandoned power in the midst of an antigovernment rally of about ten thousand in the capital.

Rotten door transitions are often easy, in the sense that they require little opposition mobilization. Yet rotten door transitions often do not lead to democracy, for several reasons. First, they often take place in a context of extreme state weakness, in which state agencies cannot enforce the rule of law across the national territory. Although such conditions may aid protesters seeking to storm the capital, they are hardly favorable to stable democratization.

Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” isn’t even the best work of art called “The Age of Anxiety”: if I’m a junior minister in Auden’s world, I’m barely a tea-boy in that of Leonard Bernstein, but I’d accord that honour to his Symphony No 2. Bernstein found the poem “fascinating and hair-raising”. From the time he read “The Age of Anxiety” in 1948 “the composition of a symphony based on [it] acquired an almost compulsive quality”, he wrote, describing an “extreme personal identification of myself with the poem, the essential line [of which] is the record of our difficult and problematic search for faith.” Three years after the Holocaust, in the year of the founding of Israel, one can scarcely imagine how “difficult and problematic” faith had become for Bernstein. Like the poem, the symphony is divided into six movements, each movement itself sub-divided, but many of the movements fade or blur into each other. By his own admission, Bernstein followed the poem very closely, with the piano representing the self in quest of meaning and faith, struggling to be understood, to be loved, against a backdrop of jazzily detached and distracted woodwinds, horns, celesta and wild percussion. For the quest section, the piano descends a tentative, untrustworthy scale, like the onset of dream, while “The Masque” – the bit in Rosetta’s apartment – is a scintillating piano solo, a real dance for dear life. Bernstein’s daughter Jaime called it “ridiculously difficult . . . one of the hardest parts ever written”, and it does magnificently what the poem can’t do – spins the characters out beyond reason in their desire to blot out the dismal world.

more from Glyn Maxwell at The Guardian here.

Not so very long ago we humans thought of ourselves as a separate creation—the pinnacle of God’s work—that had been granted dominion over nature. But then along came Darwin, and we discovered that we are related, through descent, to other animals. Despite this blow to our dignity we long maintained a polite fiction that we’re special enough to merit classification in our own scientific family—the Hominidae. In our minds at least, we thus maintained a comfortable distance from the apes. But the analysis of DNA put an end to that, with the demonstration that only 2 percent of our genetic code differs from that of the chimpanzees. Now we and chimps must share a twig in the family tree, and the Hominidae has been expanded to encompass the other “great apes”—chimps, gorillas, and orangutans.

more from Tim Flannery at the NYRB here.

Mark Liberman in Language Log:

I'm going to venture to disagree with my colleague and friend John McWhorter's diagnosis of “What does Palinspeak mean?” (TNR, 4/6/2010).

Of course, I don't disagree with John's observation that Sarah Palin's speech style is folksy and informal. As for his comment that “Palin […] has grown up squarely within a period of American history when the old-fashioned sense of a speech as a carefully planned recitation, and public pronouncements as performative oratory, has been quite obsolete”, we could quibble over details — how much of the difference is in what public figures say, as opposed to what gets transmitted and reported? — but let's grant that John is right about this as well.

Where I think that John may go wrong is in his analysis of that and there.

Now, there's no doubt that Sarah Palin tends to use certain demonstratives more often than most other public figures, and also tends to use them in a different way. In “Affective demonstratives”, 10/5/2008, I noted differences as great as 15-to-1 between her and Joe Biden in the 10/4/2008 vice-presidential debate. Her demonstratives often seemed qualitatively as well as quantitatively different, in characteristic examples like “Americans are craving that straight talk”. Straight talk was John McCain's slogan, but “craving that straight talk” was pure Palin.

The voice explains a lot. You think, how could any woman live with the famously moody writer Norman Mailer for 33 years, and then you hear Norris Church Mailer’s soft, authoritative, Marilyn Monroe-ish voice, with its 61-year-old Arkansas twang still intact, and you have a revelation about men and women. It is important to remember that “A Ticket to the Circus” (Random House: 432 pp., $26) is Norris’s own memoir, not Norman’s — not even Mrs. Mailer’s. It is the story of a girl, born in Arkansas in 1949, who came of age in the 1960s and struggled to find her way of contributing to the world, which was still a man’s world. She was very tall and, by all accounts, beautiful — that made life both harder and easier (probably in equal measure).

more from Susan Salter Reynolds at the LAT here.

Reading Ian Buruma makes you feel parochial. In “Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents,” he writes intimately about the relationship between politics and faith in Britain, the Netherlands, France, China, Japan and the United States. And beneath every cliché — about American religious fervor, French intolerance or Japanese godlessness — he uncovers ironies that wreak havoc with popular stereotypes. Buruma shows, for instance, that the trendy, anti-imperial multiculturalism favored in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom actually echoes those countries’ policies of colonial indirect rule, in which native cultures were segregated and preserved so they could be dominated more easily. He suggests that America’s militant Christianity and Europe’s militant secularism stem from parallel anxieties about the pace of cultural change. And he explains why the jihadist fanaticism taking root among some of Europe’s Muslim young is more European than Middle Eastern, more modern than traditional, more political than religious. One can quibble with some of Buruma’s claims about the United States. Dinesh D’Souza notwithstanding, it’s an exaggeration to say that “American Christians . . . sometimes feel more akin to conservative Muslims than to secular liberals.” It would be truer to say that the Christian right moved from an apocalyptic struggle against a godless foe (Communism) to an apocalyptic struggle against a god-fearing one (“Islamofascism”) without missing a beat. Nor is it true, as Buruma claims, that Ronald Reagan “was not very religious.” Reagan may not have attended church much as president, but religion saturated his upbringing; while his faith was at times quirky, it was also deep.

more from Peter Beinart at the NYT here.

Study of Two Pears

I

Opusculum paedagogum.
The pears are not viols,
Nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.

II

They are yellow forms
Composed of curves
Bulging toward the base.
They are touched red.

III

They are not flat surfaces
Having curved outlines.
They are round
Tapering toward the top.

IV

In the way they are modeled
There are bits of blue.
A hard dry leaf hangs
from the stem.

V

The yellow glistens.
It glistens with various yelllows,
Citrons, oranges and greens
Flowering over the skin.

VI

The shadows of the pears
are blobs on the green cloth.
The pears are not seen
as the observer wills.

by Wallace Stevens

from Collected Poems, 1923
Random House

Rudolph P. Byrd interviews Alice Walker in Guernica:

After a little over a year in office, fierce and often unfounded attacks, and the painstaking process that eventually led to a victory for health care reform, perhaps now is a good time for President Obama to revisit the words of the open letter Alice Walker published the day after he was elected. Along with respectfully telling the soon-to-be president that he will never know the profoundness of his being elected president for “black people of the Southern United States,” Walker offers him some advice: make sure to make time for rest and play with family because, “From your happy, relaxed state, you can model real success, which is only what so many people in the world really want,” and to “remember that you did not create the disaster that the world is experiencing” and not to take on other people’s enemies, offering the Dalai Lama’s model for coexisting. It is, perhaps, a look into the evolution of an American icon known nearly as well for her fierce opposition to all forms of oppression as for her award-winning writing.

Walker, the lauded poet, essayist, and Pulitzer Prize winner for The Color Purple, has led a life that rivals the creative intensity of any of her literary creations. From her birth in 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia, the youngest of eight siblings and the child of parents who made their living as sharecroppers, to her involvement with the civil rights, Black Arts, and feminist movements in the decades that followed, Walker has established herself as one of the most important and inspirational public intellectuals in America. She not only gave voice to the complex experience of African American women in what scholars term the renaissance in African American women’s writing of the nineteen seventies, but also made that voice heard in public conversations over issues as diverse as gender equality, racial and economic justice, and war and peace.

More here.

Garry Wills in The New York Times:

In 2004, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois attended a White House event wearing the campaign pin of her state’s candidate for the United States Senate. When she saw President Bush do a double take at the one word on her pin, she assured him that it spelled “Obama,” not “Osama.” Bush shrugged: “I don’t know him.” She answered, “You will.” Not long after this, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, and many people suddenly knew him. It happened so fast that he seemed to come out of nowhere. The truth was more intriguing — he had come out of everywhere. His multiple points of origin made him adaptable to any situation. What could have been a source of confusion or uncertain identity he meant to turn into an overwhelming advantage. As he told a Chicago Reader interviewer in 2000:

“My experience being able to walk into a public-housing development and turn around and walk into a corporate boardroom and communicate effectively in either venue means that I’m more likely to be able to build the kinds of coalitions and craft the sort of message that appeals to a broad range of people.” David Remnick, in this exhaustively researched life of Obama before he became president, quotes many interviews in which Obama made the same or similar points. Accused of not being black enough, he could show that he has more direct ties to Africa than most ­African-Americans have. Suspected of not being American enough, he appealed to his mother’s Midwest origins and accent. Touring conservative little towns in southern Illinois, he could speak the language of the Kansan grandparents who raised him. He is a bit of a chameleon or shape-shifter, but he does not come across as insincere — that is the importance of his famous “cool.” He does not have the hot eagerness of the con man. Though his own background is out of the ordinary, he has the skill to submerge it in other people’s narratives, even those that seem distant from his own.

More here.

More than half a century ago, New York’s Museum of Modern Art planned a “posthumous” exhibition of photographs by the then-little-known French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. At the time, MoMA’s first curators of photography, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, believed their friend had died in World War II. Cartier-Bresson, it turned out, was very much alive – so alive, in fact, that he would become the most influential photographer of the 20th century, which he outlived by four years. And with MoMA leading the way, his influence seems likely to continue well into the 21st. “Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century,” an audaciously titled exhibition of the work of HCB – as he is known in the shorthand of the art world – opens to the public on April 11. Adroitly selected by MoMA’s chief curator of photography, Peter Galassi, the show’s 300 prints offer fresh insights into the character and style of one of the most creative figures in modern art history. As a young man, Cartier-Bresson never intended to be a photographer, but a painter; photographers were not then considered artists. He studied under the Cubist painter Andre Lhote, but did not think much of his own early creations. So, after acquiring a Leica in 1931, HCB went off to see the world. This gave him an opportunity to pursue a kind of visual anthropology in carefully composed images.

more from John G. Morris at Vanity Fair here.

The news began bubbling out over the weekend: “Missing link between man and apes found,” declared an April 3 story in the London Telegraph. When I saw that headline, I thought to myself, “Please, please, not again.” Whenever scientists make a major discovery about human evolution, we get treated to a lot of misconceptions. The most popular of them all is the myth of the missing link—the idea that paleontologists are on an eternal quest for ancestors linking us directly back to earlier forms of life. Last May, for example, scientists reported the discovery of a 47-million-year-old fossil of a primate called Darwinius. “Fossil is evolution’s ‘missing link,’ ” blared a headline in the Sun.”The beautifully preserved remains—dubbed Ida—is believed to be a direct connection between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom,” the article said—a sentence that makes no sense the first time you read it and then somehow manages to make even less sense the longer you look at it. The Sun was not alone in its delivery of nonsensical hype. Shortly after Darwinius was unveiled, the History Channel aired a show about its discovery, called The Link. The show itself may be long gone, but its elaborate Web site lives on, still “uncovering our earliest ancestor.” To all our wormlike ancestors and primordial bacterial forerunners: You have my deepest sympathy for that slight.

more from Carl Zimmer at Slate here.

“Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters,” quipped Clement Greenberg, the legendary critic of modernism, to Rosalind Krauss, his most brilliant disciple. It was 1974: Krauss had made a name for herself writing on Minimalism in the pages of Artforum but would soon leave the magazine to cofound October. As promised by the journal’s name, a revolution in art history was afoot. All of which is as familiar to students of contemporary art as the legacy of Richard Serra—one of many artists whose reputations are bound to Krauss’s pioneering analyses. Her key essays remain mainstays of academia, and for good reason. With a tenacity unmatched by other critics of her time, Krauss insisted on the possibility, the necessity, of shoring up valid art-historical methodologies at a moment when “art” and “history” appeared to be collapsing. Greenberg’s remark graces the back cover of Perpetual Inventory, a collection of Krauss’s writing from the mid-1970s to today, most of it previously published. It’s no accident that Greenberg is literally inscribed onto this volume: Each of the book’s six chapters is organized to tell the story of its author’s debt to, and distance from, her mentor’s central claim. As formulated most succinctly in his 1960 essay “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg proposed that the art of the twentieth century was engaged in a process of self-awareness and critique, honing its “area of competence” to a set of increasingly small but necessary refinements of the essential material conditions of its medium. Famously, this entailed foregrounding the “flatness” of painting’s picture plane, a developmental narrative that the critic suggested stretched from Manet to Pollock.

more from Nathan Lee at Bookforum here.

Will Wilkinson on the OKCupid data:

Conservative conceptions of American identity are ad hoc, opportunistic, and evolving, but they are conservative conceptions in large part because they deny that they are in fact contingent or historically conditioned. That’s how they go on meeting the needs of Americans who long for rootedness, continuity, and a sense that their political commitments are based on transcendent, fixed moral truths, and the authority of tradition. But, I’d argue, those aren’t the primary ideological needs of those with libertarian inclinations.

I think there is good evidence that those inclined to favor libertarian policies are closer temperamentally to liberals than conservatives. But the vogue of socialism in the 20th century split the ranks of temperamentally liberal Americans. (Some thought democratic socialism was the fulfillment of liberalism, while others thought steps in that direction would take us down the road to serfdom.) During the Cold War-era especially, the conservative imaginary highlighted libertarian elements of American tradition and identity in a way that was especially attractive to libertarians. Because anti-leftism is a core element of this conservative conception of American identity, older libertarians raised on fusionism sometimes have a hard time telling the difference between loving liberty and hating the left.

However, since libertarian personalities are close to liberal personalities, and since young folks with a libertarian cast of mind have little or no memory of the threat of socialism at home and communism abroad, there is little in the right-wing politics of traditional American identity that resonates with them. The party of liberal-minded Americans, the Democratic Party, just feels more like home, despite its often pointedly un-libertarian economic policy.

[H/t: Alan Koenig]

In Psyorg.com:

Such a scenario in which the universe is born from inside a wormhole (also called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge) is suggested in a paper from Indiana University theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski in Physics Letters B. The final version of the paper was available online March 29 and will be published in the print edition April 12. Poplawski takes advantage of the Euclidean-based coordinate system called isotropic coordinates to describe the gravitational field of a black hole and to model the radial geodesic motion of a massive particle into a black hole.

In studying the radial motion through the event horizon (a black hole’s boundary) of two different types of black holes — Schwarzschild and Einstein-Rosen, both of which are mathematically legitimate solutions of general relativity — Poplawski admits that only experiment or observation can reveal the motion of a particle falling into an actual black hole. But he also notes that since observers can only see the outside of the black hole, the interior cannot be observed unless an observer enters or resides within.

“This condition would be satisfied if our universe were the interior of a black hole existing in a bigger universe,” he said. “Because Einstein’s general theory of relativity does not choose a time orientation, if a black hole can form from the gravitational collapse of matter through an event horizon in the future then the reverse process is also possible. Such a process would describe an exploding white hole: matter emerging from an event horizon in the past, like the expanding universe.”

Excerpted from The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler in Vanity Fair:

Paris during the Belle Époque—the “beautiful time” between the late 19th century and the outbreak of World War I—had become an international center for painting, dance, music, theater, and publishing. The construction of Gustav Eiffel’s tower for the 1889 world’s fair had made it the “city of light”—both literally and metaphorically. The city could boast many of the world’s foremost medical and scientific institutions of the day, and Europe’s most modern manufacturing facilities. The face of the future, many believed, could be seen in Parisian leadership in such brand-new fields as motion pictures, automobile manufacturing, and aviation.

This made the disappearance of France’s most treasured artwork all the more unbearable. In the days and weeks immediately following the theft, anyone carrying a package received attention—including, at one point, a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso, who, four years earlier, had purchased several small Iberian stone heads that were filched from the Louvre by the secretary of avant-garde writer Guillaume Apollinaire. (Apollinaire spent a few days in jail, but Picasso had the last laugh—he used the Iberian heads as models for his Demoiselles d’Avignon.) Police at checkpoints on roads leading out of the capital examined the contents of every wagon, automobile, and truck. Fearing that the thief would try to flee the country, customs inspectors opened and examined the baggage of everyone leaving on ships or trains. Ships that departed during the day that had elapsed between the theft and its discovery were searched when they reached their overseas destinations. After the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm II docked at a pier across the Hudson River from New York City in late August, detectives combed every stateroom and piece of luggage for the masterpiece.

In the following days, from Manchester to São Paulo, the crime became front-page news. The Times of London declared, “Paris has been startled.” The Washington Post claimed, “The art world was thrown into consternation.” But perhaps The New York Times most accurately conveyed the enormity of the heist when it asserted that the crime “has caused such a sensation that Parisians for the time being have forgotten the rumors of war.” Nowhere, however, did the media cry out louder than in France itself. “What audacious criminal, what mystifier, what maniac collector, what insane lover, has committed this abduction?” asked Paris’s leading picture magazine, L’Illustration, which offered a reward of 40,000 francs to anyone who would deliver the painting to its office. Soon the Paris-Journal, its rival, offered 50,000 francs, and a bidding war was on.

[H/t: David Schneider]

[H/t: Liza Urrutibeheity]

Audrey Williams June in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Lori Whisenant knows that one way to improve the writing skills of undergraduates is to make them write more. But as each student in her course in business law and ethics at the University of Houston began to crank out—often awkwardly—nearly 5,000 words a semester, it became clear to her that what would really help them was consistent, detailed feedback.

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn't deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last fall. She outsourced assignment grading to a company whose employees are mostly in Asia.

Virtual-TA, a service of a company called EduMetry Inc., took over. The goal of the service is to relieve professors and teaching assistants of a traditional and sometimes tiresome task—and even, the company says, to do it better than TA's can.

[H/t: Linta Varghese]

From Scientific American:

The human body's immune system can quickly track down and kill cells that don't belong. Take certain kinds of bacteria: molecules on their surfaces flag them as foreign invaders, alerting the body's defenders to the breach and drawing a full-fledged attack on anything waving that molecular flag. But sometimes the system mistakenly attacks the body's own cells. The result is autoimmune disease, such as type 1 diabetes, in which the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas are attacked and destroyed by T cells.

Scientists have struggled to find ways to treat autoimmune disease without compromising overall immunity. Therapies that suppress the immune system carry the risk of letting infections and even tumors go unchecked. But researchers in Canada have found a way to prevent type 1 diabetes in mice by doing just the opposite—vaccinating to boost the immune system. The approach, published April 8 in Immunity, exploits the immune system's built-in safety mechanism—a group of regulatory T cells whose job is to squelch overactive immune responses.

More here.

From Nature:

A team from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, has revealed two remarkably well preserved hominin fossils aged just under two million years old. The fossils were discovered at Malapa cave, part of a site known as the Cradle of Humankind, some 40 kilometres west of Johannesburg. But the researchers' suggestion that the fossils represent a transitional species in human evolution, sitting between Australopithecus and Homo species, has been criticized by other researchers as overstated. The fossils, a juvenile male and an adult female, were found together in the Malapa cave, part of an eroded cave system, leading to speculation that the two fell to their deaths while searching for water. The fragile parts of the skeleton that are often missing from fossils this old, such as the hands and feet, have been preserved (see videos showing fossilized cranium here and here). The collar bone of the first specimen was discovered by team leader Lee Berger's nine-year-old son during a visit to the site in 2008.

Controversially, the researchers have named the fossils as a new species, Australopithecus sediba. 'Sediba' means fountain or wellspring in Sotho, which is one of the 11 official languages of South Africa. Berger deems this an appropriate name, as he says that A. sediba is a good candidate for being the transitional species between the southern African hominin, Australopithecus africanus, and early Homo species — either the earlier Homo habilis or even a direct ancestor of the more recent Homo erectus. The research is published in Science. But palaeoanthropologist Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, says that A. sediba and A. africanus are merely chronospecies: names given to describe slightly different anatomy in fossils from a single evolving species. White says that the suggestion by Berger and his team that this lineage split before the emergence of Homo is “fossil-free speculation”, adding that “the obsession with Homo in their title and text is difficult to understand outside of a media context”.

More here.

One in four adults in the U.S. suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year—over 57.7 million people. A much smaller share of this group, about 6%, suffer from a severe and persistent mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder or major depression. My friend Lisa Guidetti is working on a documentary on the issue and is looking to raise finishing funds for editing and post production on the film. So check out the trailer if you're interested, and consider helping.

Lisa:

Lavender Hall is a feature documentary about a residential care home housing a wild bunch of irreverent residents with backgrounds from pianist to plastic surgeon. A family-run residential care home in an era of expanding corporate-run facilities, Lavender Hall is an anachronism. So too is its owner, Bill Kopec, with his drill sergeant-like approach to caring for residents. Founded and run by Bill’s mother in the seaside town of Wildwood, NJ, Bill struggled to keep his mother's dream alive after her death. After almost 50 years of caring for incongruous residents, most from Ancora, the local psychiatric institution, Bill Kopec is closing Lavender Hall. He managed the home every weekend on top of being a full-time Executive at Xerox. But with Bill now older than most residents, and no family member willing to take over, the home will be demolished to make way for condos. Numerous Lavender Hall residents battle serious problems. Linda, the youngest resident at 52, is a chronic alcoholic, bi-polar, with an eating disorder. Some, like Joel, have been at Lavender Hall for more than 19 yrs, and at 62 composes and performs dozens of original operettas and musical theatre works, despite his severe autism. This dysfunctional family of 14 residents will be made homeless in 4 months unless their only advocates, Bill Kopec and his daughter Renée, can navigate the medical insurance labyrinth to find them new homes. Lavender Hall is a frequently funny and occasionally disquieting portrait of the oddball residents and their equally eccentric carers. We reveal the challenges of the enduring life on the invisible margins of society, when you are considered either too old or too crazy for anyone to care what you do.

Lavender Hall’s residents represent two growing problems in the US: how to care for an aging population that cannot afford care for themselves, and the lack of support available to those with mental health or addiction problems, many of whom are elderly. Too many are housed in secure psychiatric units instead of having access to supported independent living or residential homes. And upon Lavender Hall’s closing, many of the residents could be re-institutionalized, overmedicated, and placed at the mercy of a system that erodes their independence and control of their lives. Normally off limits to cameras, this film’s unprecedented access to a privately run facility hopes to cross that threshold of crazy and breach that lonely aging divide. But as Debbie the Care Assistant warns, “If you're not crazy when you come in, you're crazy when you leave!”