Good intentions aside, is the “brain disease” of addiction really beyond the control of the addict in the same that way that the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease or multiple sclerosis are beyond the control of the afflicted? Showing how the two differ is an important theme of the book. If, as Heyman says, “drug-induced brain change is not sufficient evidence that addiction is an involuntary disease state,” then how are we to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary behavior?
Heyman’s answer is that "voluntary activities vary systematically as a function of their consequences, where the consequences include benefits, costs, and values.” Take, for example, the case of addicted physicians and pilots. When they are reported to their oversight boards they are monitored closely for several long years; if they don’t fly right, they have a lot to lose (jobs, income, status). It is no coincidence that their recovery rates are high. Via entities called drug courts, the criminal justice system applies swift and certain sanctions to drug offenders who fail drug tests—the threat of jail time if tests are repeatedly failed is the stick—while the carrot is that charges are expunged if the program is completed. Participants in drug courts tend to fare significantly better than their counterparts who have been adjudicated as usual. In so-called contingency management experiments, subjects addicted to cocaine or heroin are rewarded with vouchers redeemable for cash, household goods, or clothes. Those randomized to the voucher arm routinely enjoy better results than those receiving treatment as usual.
Contingencies are the key to voluntariness. No amount of reinforcement or punishment can alter the course of an entirely autonomous biological condition. Imagine bribing an Alzheimer’s patient to keep her dementia from worsening, or threatening to impose a penalty on her if it did. This is where choice comes in: choosing an alternative to drug use. Heyman realizes how odd this might seem. How can otherwise rational people choose self-destruction unless they are diseased? This question was raised in colonial America. Dr. Benjamin Rush, also known as the father of American psychiatry, was among the first to promote the notion that alcoholism was a disease. And he did so not on the basis of medical evidence, Heyman reminds us, “but rather [upon] the assumption that voluntary behavior is not self-destructive.”
It may strike some as insensitive to insist that addiction is a disorder of choice. “I have never come across a single drug-addicted person who told me [he or she] wanted to be addicted," Nora Volkow, the current director of NIDA says. Exactly so. How many of us have ever come across a person who wanted to be fat? So many undesirable outcomes in life are achieved incrementally. In a choice model, full-blown addiction is the triumph of feel-good local decisions (“I’ll use today”) over punishing global anxieties (“I don’t want to be an addict tomorrow”). Let’s follow a typical trajectory. At the start of an episode of addiction, the drug increases in hedonic value while once-rewarding activities such as relationships, job, or family recede in value. Although the appeal of using starts to fade as consequences pile up—spending too much money, disappointing loved ones, attracting suspicion at work—the drug still retains value because it salves psychic pain, suppresses withdrawal symptoms, and douses intense craving.

What seems clear is that without Murry prodding her on, without his fantasies of literary greatness for both of them, Mansfield might have produced less sterling work. At the same time their union was founded on a delusion of intimacy that was belied by how much time they spent apart and how erotically arrested they were when together. McDowell believes that Murry truly loved Mansfield and that Mansfield “loved him as much as she was capable of loving anyone.” What they had in common was a devotion to Mansfield’s art, which, in her case, suited her more than not. “It was the needs of the writer that came first,” McDowell notes, “and to those needs, she was ever faithful and true.” Perhaps she would have been happier with a different man—or, if she had followed her bisexual leanings, with a woman—but it is impossible after reading this account to see Mansfield as anyone’s victim.Microsoft Office is my best friend.
In similar fashion, making use of primary texts as well as journals, biographies, and letters, McDowell dissects the emotional mechanics that underlie the other eight couples—mechanics that are traditionally viewed as having been detrimental to the woman. Since McDowell’s interest is less in assigning blame than in bringing to light the symbiotic connection—a fusion of vocation and passion—that linked Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, or Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, she focuses on the vicissitudes of creative ambition and sexual attraction rather than on a simpler psychological pattern (the one dear to critics of a doctrinaire feminist persuasion) of exploiter and exploited. The extraordinary women in these accounts—even the fragile Jean Rhys and the suicidal Sylvia Plath—hold their own, taking as well as giving, writing despite the damage they inflict or have inflicted on them. “The aim of this book,” McDowell observes, “is...to demonstrate that none of the women artists mentioned here were victims at all, but that they chose their own fates knowingly and without the taint of victimization; that they chose such relationships in order to benefit their art and poetic consciousness.”
It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature.

Over the past quarter of a century, prominent conservative constitutional scholars and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have argued that originalism—interpreting the Constitution according to what well-informed people at the time of its adoption would have understood to be the meaning of its clauses—is the only legitimate way of interpreting the Constitution. Scalia calls himself a faint-hearted originalist because he understands that originalism cannot be applied all the time. Implicit in his self-description is the recognition that throughout American history originalism has been but one of several means of interpretation, along with text, structure, precedent, and evolving traditions. But there is one area in which originalism was dominant long before it went by that name: church-state relations.Office 2007 Professional is very good!
In its two seminal religion cases, Reynolds v. United States in 1879, and Everson v. Board of Education, in 1947, the Supreme Court turned to the Framers and concluded that the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion meant, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, that there must be “a wall of separation between church and state.” The “wall of separation,” taken from a letter by President Jefferson to a Baptist congregation, has been one of the two most enduring metaphors in constitutional interpretation. (The other is the “marketplace of ideas.”) Protestant justices were originally drawn to the wall, and subsequent Protestants have reached the separationist results that it demands. Catholics, for the most part, reject the idea of a wall of separation and (along with some Evangelical Protestants) support what they call non-preferentialism, whereby government is forbidden only in preferring one religion over another. Over time, however, the Court has moved away from originalism and relied on cases decided in the 1970s and 1980s. The results and the doctrine no longer reflect a supposedly impregnable wall.
Donald L. Drakeman’s new book covers these issues thoroughly. Drakeman goes behind Reynolds and Everson with a fascinating investigation of where the Courts found their history. In Scalia’s opinion for the Court in Heller v. District of Columbia, the Second Amendment case on which the Court ruled a few years ago, the majority asserted that the meaning of the various provisions of the Bill of Rights in 1791 was clear (a point somewhat belied by the fact that four justices found exactly the opposite meaning for the Second Amendment in 1791). Scalia may have been right about a provision such as the Confrontation Clause that allows criminal defendants to confront their accusers in open court, which had an extensive and consistent history. But scholars such as Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood have demonstrated that the era from 1765 to the turn of the century was a dynamic period of consistent change and deep thought about political relationships. One cannot freeze a particular moment during that era and infer from it precisely what well-informed people thought, because they had not yet finished thinking about what something like freedom of speech or the relationship of church and state should be. Drakeman is quite persuasive in showing that there were a multitude of meanings about “establishment.” But he is far less persuasive in his conclusion that the best meaning is non-preferentialism.