Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Time has put some distance between the ever-urgent "now" and the death of Jeffrey Epstein, from an "apparent" suicide in a jail cell. With the benefit of dispassion, and hindsight, let us look back at that. The points that pop to mind are these: 1. This was a man with documented connections to two Presidents and a member of the British royal family; 2. Who had attempted suicide once before while in custody 3. Had been placed on suicide watch 4. But then strangely suicide watch was lifted 5. The ME performed the autopsy the day after his death, but hung onto the report for several days thereafter 6. ... only to disclose when she did release it that he had broken the bones in his neck in multiple places, something a good deal more common in murders than in actual suicides and 7. His death came just hours after the release of a lot of previously sealed court documents, as reporters on this beat were combing through them. Most like a hack Hollywood writer...

If you've actually looked down here at the body of this blog entry after that headline, congratulations on possessing a baroque sense of curiosity. In 1898 the U.S. Supreme Court considered Ritter v. Mutual Life Ins. Co.   The case arose because a fellow named William M. Runk, a Philadelphia businessman, and an insured of the respondent, had shot and killed himself six years before. Runk was a partner in a dry-goods firm. Not perhaps directly involved in sales, but what little I know of his death reminds me of Arthur Miller's character.  Also, a minor character in the Miller play was about to argue a case of indefinite nature before the Supreme Court, so perhaps Miller was shyly suggesting he knew about Ritter. In this case, and usually in the 1890s, the insured's insurance policy contained no express exclusion for cases of suicide. The law as interpreted by a trial judge held that a sane man's suicide does not warrant an insurance company pay-out, but an insa...

Suicide is a deep-rooted reaction to disgrace in many cultures, and at least in pop-culture stereotypes Japanese culture is an outlier in this regard. I cannot judge the over-all validity of those stereotypes, but they do naturally come to mind with news of the death of Yoshiki Sasai, deputy director of the Center for Development Biology, part of the Riken center, in Japan. Sasai supervised recent research into stem cells that seemed for a brief heady time to constitute a great breakthrough. A younger scientist working under him got the lead-author credit on the key paper, but there was plenty of limelight to go around while it lasted. The apparent breakthrough, in January of this year, was the discovery of stimuli, external stressors, that could trigger the return of specialized, a/k/a differentiated cells back to the "pluripotency" of the stem cell state. Their process involved bathing blood cells in acid at a specified temperature -- 37 C. My quick math t...