Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

socialist politician Julius Tandler, who understood that these kinds of early-life investments were a way of avoiding criminalization later. He memorably declared, “He who builds children palaces tears down prison walls.” It wasn’t paradise. These were years

politicians. Red Vienna introduced radically new and inclusive ways of living, putting up blocks of elegant public housing filled with natural light and airy courtyards. Some 200,000 working-class people were housed in this effort—11 percent of Vienna’s population at the time—and it is still studied today as a beacon of progressive social housing p

The syndrome was first diagnosed in 1943 by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner and, according to his definition, autistic children, though “unquestionably endowed with good cognitive potentialities,”

In this convergence of worlds, we can see more than a shared infrastructure of misinformation: there is also a shared worldview, a shared mindset, a shared way of seeing people as either normal or deviant, pure or tainted, successes or failures. And even, as in all doppelganger stories, real or impostors.

Your child does not need to be cured, they need to be respected, listened to, and above all, loved—truly loved.

say this because I have noticed, in my conversations with parents of autistic children, that they often undergo an intense grieving period as they mourn the fantasies that had taken deep root in their hearts. So sad are they about the child-double who wasn’t that they can’t really see the singular child who is. It’s not unlike what some parents of

Procreation has long been viewed, particularly by those who come from wealth, as a form of temporal doubling, with the child sometimes given the same name as the father or mother, extending the parent’s legacy and fortune into the future (e.g., RFK Jr.).

The Lancet in 1998. Twelve years later, it was retracted by its publisher, who described the claims as “proven to be false.” Ten of the paper’s thirteen original coauthors had issued a note of retraction years earlier, in 2004, based on faulty “interpretation” of the study’s data. The main author, the gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield, was banned

sound waves and subliminal messages that promised to reprogram brains and reminded me of the research I did into the CIA’s MKUltra experiments on psychiatric patients.