Jalees is a German with Pakistani roots. He currently lives in the USA and spent some of his childhood in Nigeria. He lives in a state of perpetual confusion and enjoys talking to people who are also confused. When he is not reading books, Jalees works as a stem cell biologist and as a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). He regularly blogs about science at The Next Regeneration and about a variety of topics on his personal blog Fragments of Truth. Email: jalees.rehman [at] gmail.com
by Jalees Rehman “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” —Hannah Arendt The recent revelations by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA (National Security Agency) is engaged in mass surveillance of private online communications between individuals by obtaining data from “internet corporations” such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft…
by Jalees Rehman “Shorter sentences and simple words!” was the battle cry of all my English teachers. Their comments and corrections of our English-language essays and homework assignments were very predictable. Apparently, they had all sworn allegiance to the same secret Fraternal Order of Syntax Police. I am sure that students of the English language…
by Jalees Rehman I grew up in a culture of guilt. One of the defining characteristics of post-war Germany was the “Vergangenheitsbewältigung“, a monstrous German word that describes the attempts to come to terms with the horrors of Nazi-Germany and World War II. How could Germans have abandoned all sense of humanity and decency? Why…
by Jalees Rehman Nietzschean, Heideggerian, fascist, anarchist, libertarian, brilliant genius, blabbering nutjob – these and many other labels have probably been used to describe Peter Sloterdijk, who is one of Germany's most widely known contemporary philosophers. He has achieved a rock-star status in the echelons of contemporary German thinkers, perhaps because none is more apt…
by Jalees Rehman “For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.” Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel“ The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. His untimely death shocked the Australian art community, not only…
by Jalees Rehman Many of my German high school teachers were intellectual remnants of the “68er” movement. They had either been part of the 1968 anti-authoritarian and left-wing student protests in Germany or they had been deeply influenced by them. The movement gradually fizzled out and the students took on seemingly bourgeois jobs in the…
by Jalees Rehman “This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man’s flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.” Frank Herbert – Dune Land grabbing refers to the large-scale acquisition of comparatively inexpensive agricultural land in foreign countries by foreign governments or corporations. In most cases, the acquired land…
Before I started my psychiatry rotation in San Diego, I had been convinced that mental illness fostered creativity. I had never really studied the question in much detail, but there were constant references in popular culture, movies, books and TV shows to the creative minds of patients with mental illness. The supposed link between mental illness and creativity was so engrained in my mind that the word “psychotic” automatically evoked images of van Gogh’s paintings and other geniuses whose creative minds were fueled by the bizarreness of their thoughts. Once I began seeing psychiatric patients who truly suffered from severe disabling mental illnesses, it became very difficult for me to maintain this romanticized view of mental illness.