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And I think then what happened is that ... as an alternative [to asylums], people sought treatments. But the treatments turned out to be, in retrospect, pretty barbaric. And it's only really been in the last 50 years that psychiatry has established a scientific foundation for itself and developed treatments that truly work beyond a shadow of a doubt and are safe.

On Sigmund Freud's contributions to psychiatry and what he got wrong

Freud is undisputedly a towering figure and the most famous person in the history of psychiatry. And in the absence of any scientific theory of mental illness, he introduced concepts that were completely novel to civilization and endure today as valid and have really been given new life in the context of cognitive neuroscience. ...

I think his biggest mistake was that he was a very strict controller of how the theory was handled by his disciples. In other words, he permitted no deviation or modification of his theory or methods, and he didn't encourage any research to empirically validate his theory. So basically people that followed him and embraced this theory had to take it on faith.

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In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude." Henry Burroughs/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Henry Burroughs/AP

In the 1940s, psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich touted his orgone energy accumulators, exhibited here in 1956 by the Food and Drug Administration, as a treatment for emotional disturbances. Eventually, the FDA ruled Reich's treatment to be a "fraud of the first magnitude."

Henry Burroughs/AP

On psychiatrists going back and forth as to whether mental disorders are inherited

It's long been known that specific mental illnesses tend to run in families. But then, you know, the notion of this being kind of a Mendelian type of genetic condition was really not accurate. And if you looked at a family pedigree, you could see that schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, depression, autism often skipped generations in families or would occur in families that had no other biologic relative. So the mystery of the genetics of mental illness was really much more complicated than ever imagined and it's only recently started to be solved.

On whether the future of psychiatry is in the medicine chest

Not solely, no. And this is something that is commonly, I think, misunderstood. The cornerstone of the healing profession and the physician is the patient relationship. ... So medications were extraordinarily important — they were miraculous developments — but medications alone can't do it.

On why he wrote the book

In order for us to genuinely make a case for why psychiatry is a medical discipline that deserves sort of equal footing and respect as other medical specialties, we needed to fess up in terms of what the past was. And so in order to do so, we needed to tell the unvarnished history of the field and then describe why things may not have been helpful — and [in] some cases harmful — then [and] why that's different now. And nobody should avoid seeking treatment if they think they need it because of uncertainty or fear.

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Univision host Rodner Figueroa has been let go for offensive remarks about First Lady Michelle Obama.

It all started on Wednesday, when a picture of Obama flashed on the screen of the popular program El Gordo y La Flaca. Figueroa commented "Michelle Obama looks like she's part of the cast of Planet of the Apes."

Quickly, Figueroa was fired. Univision released this statement: "Yesterday during our entertainment program 'El Gordo y La Flaca' Rodner Figueroa made comments regarding First Lady Michelle Obama that were completely reprehensible and in no way reflect Univision's values or views. As a result, Mr. Figueroa was immediately terminated."

Figueroa released his own statement addressed to Obama: "I was verbally notified that because of a complaint from your office, my employment was being terminated." Figueroa claims his joke was a criticism of an artist's depiction of Obama.

The Washington Post reports Univision executives deny that the White House called to complain.

In his statement, the Venezuelan Figueroa, who was a fashion and entertainment commentator for the network, said he'd voted for Barack Obama twice. He also spoke about his own background, saying he comes from a biracial Latino family, and his own father is a black Latino. But he apologized, saying his comments where inexcusable, and that they "could be interpreted as offensive or disrespectful."

Figueroa's firing comes on the heels of another high-profile falling out over race and fashion. Recently on the popular E! show Fashion Police, host Giuliana Rancic was blasted for commenting on African-American actress Zendaya Coleman's dreadlocks. "I feel like she smells like pachouli oil," Rancic remarked "Or weed!" Rancic was accused of being racist, and a few days later co-host Kelly Osbourne quit the show. Shortly after Osbourne left, host Kathy Griffith stepped down, and released a statement on twitter, saying "Listen, I am no saint...But I do not want to use my comedy to contribute to a culture of unattainable perfectionism and intolerance towards difference. I want to help women, gay kids, people of color and anyone who feels underrepresented to have a voice and a LAUGH!"

This is hardly the first time Univision has gotten in trouble for racist remarks and humor. In 2010, when the World Cup was played in South Africa, the network aired a segment where the hosts wore Afro wigs and held small spears. Univision apologized.

NYU Professor Arlene Davila studies Latino media, and she says she's not surprised. "I think that anybody who watches Univision regularly ... will notice the white, white space that station historically has been." She says, "You're not going to see Indo-Latinos, you're not going to see Afro-Latinos." In fact, she says, the Univision landscape is often whiter than mainstream U.S. television.

Davila says Latino television largely echoes, imports and repackages Latin American programming, with all its pitfalls. "Already in Latin America, our very [media are] skewed and not a representation. But then you're talking about the U.S. Latino world., you would think that it would be a different world — a world that would not be tied to the traditional racist views of our countries, but that rather would try to imagine a pan-Latino universe."

What troubles Davila is an idea "that you can't apply the same standards of racism because we have our humor and we are not racists, because we are Latinos, and we can get away with that without getting regulated."

How to regulate is an ongoing issue. In a recent New York Times opinion piece, lawyer Francisco R. Montero wrote, "Once a sleepy backwater of the broadcasting world, Spanish media is now big business and there is barely a city or town in the country where you cannot find some type of Spanish broadcasting on TV or radio. So it was only matter of time before questions of indecency would arise ... we still don't know precisely what Spanish terms may be 'indecent' in the F.C.C.'s view."

Davila adds that Spanish language media have a captive audience. "You can't blame the people that watch it," she says, "because those are the people that don't have the power to change it, you know? And they're watching it because it's what's available, it's the lack of choices in Spanish language television."

I was in the house watching by myself when Duke played Kentucky in the Elite Eight in the 1992 NCAA basketball tournament. I was home from college for what must have been spring break, and for whatever reason, my parents were out. I was in the deepest part of the Duke basketball fandom that had taken off in my family when my sister started there a few years earlier. ("Why didn't you root for your own teams?" you ask. "I went to a midwestern liberal arts school," I reply. "My sister. Went. To DUKE.")

I kneeled on the carpet in the living room watching the TV, the better to pound on the floor when I was upset and leap into the air when anything good happened. The game had plenty of both.

That game ends with this play, which happened with 2.1 seconds left, with Duke (in white with blue, rather than blue with white, uniforms) down by one point.

They call it "The Shot." Now in my opinion, they should call it "The Pass," because The Shot, by Christian Laettner, is a turnaround jump shot from the top of the key that, sure, is a cool shot, and it's clutch, and it's hilarious that he puts it on the floor like LA LA NO HURRY — which I still remember from 1992 because I think I got my first gray hair from it. But it's a shot I've seen a million times from different guys. The pass from Grant Hill (whose number, 33, found its way into things like my old AIM handle), on the other hand, is a one-handed hurl from one end of the court that ends up exactly where it needs to be, right where Laettner — who's 6'11" — has to jump up to get it, which makes it hard to contest for the guys who are guarding him. (They decided to put two guys on him instead of guarding the inbounds pass, which: oh, Kentucky.) All he has to do is turn and shoot. (She said, like a person watching on television.)

There was a time when I had watched the end of this game — on VHS — so many times that I could describe the sequence of shots. Not basketball shots; camera shots. Thomas Hill with his hands on the back of his head saying "Oh my God, oh my God," Tommy Amaker with his fists raised, Brian Davis and Bobby Hurley falling on the ground. I remember running down the steps to the basement and then back up to the living room, doing nothing except burning off energy. I don't remember calling my sister, but I must have, because I would have.

In this March 28, 1992, file photo, Duke's Christian Laettner takes the winning shot in overtime over Kentucky's Deron Feldhaus. Charles Arbogast/AP hide caption

itoggle caption Charles Arbogast/AP

On Sunday, ESPN's fabulous 30 For 30 documentary series is premiering the film I Hate Christian Laettner, which documents a phenomenon I was largely unaware of at that time — or at least I was unaware of its vehemence and the way it wasn't like other sports feelings: people hated that kid, and they hated Duke. They still hate him, and they probably hate Duke even more now. But I didn't really think about it. There were no meetings where Duke fans gathered to decide to be imperialists or came up with a joint attitude to share with the world. I learned how to love this particular team with my little family — mom and dad and sister. Even still, when people tell me how disappointed they are that this is my team, it feels bizarre to me; how can anyone actually hold this against me, that I learned to root for the team where the sister I idolized went to college? How is that possible?

The great thing about sports, of course, is that Christian Laettner doesn't have to care. He went to four consecutive Final Fours and he won two national championships. You don't like him? So what? Sports is a binary in this way: in a basketball game, one team wins and the other team loses, and no matter how hard anyone argues for moral victories or blames the officials or makes excuses, losing is losing and it is terrible. Winning is winning and it rules. I know this as a fan, of course, because two years earlier in 1990, I had watched Duke take a 30-point pants-down spanking from UNLV in the national championship game. Watching a team you love lose, and especially watching it have an orderly, slow-motion collapse like an imploded building, is the worst. Oh, it is the worst.

I Hate Christian Laettner — and there are those on both sides who will not want to hear this — is not a 75-minute parade of people saying that they hate him, or gleefully high-fiving each other over the fact that he's an arrogant jerk who gave people plenty of reasons to hate his guts. Nor is it a sympathetic revisionist argument that haters are just jealous and he was targeted by a voracious and vicious sports culture that encourages people to reduce opponents to something both less and more than they are.

What it is, in fact, is an argument that he was an arrogant jerk who gave people plenty of reasons to hate his guts who was simultaneously being targeted by a voracious and vicious sports culture that encourages people to reduce opponents to something both less and more than they are. And while not all haters are jealous and not all jealous people are haters, if you don't want to be despised, going to four consecutive Final Fours doesn't help. In other words, this was a perfect storm of what came from him and what came from a lot more than just him.

Director Rory Karpf interviewed a lot of people for this film: Laettner himself; his coach Mike Krzyzewski; guys who played with him like Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, and his best friend Brian Davis; guys who played on opposing teams, like Jalen Rose and Jimmy King from Michigan and Eric Montross from UNC; Laettner's parents and siblings; and two grown men who have tried to make themselves famous by hating Duke more and better than anyone else. And when you start to unravel all of this, there is a lot going on.

Karpf is unafraid of some of the trickiest parts of Laettner's identity and Duke's, and spends a good chunk of time interrogating how the perception that Duke is all rich white kids — and that Laettner was a rich white kid — affect the way the team was perceived. This comes through sometimes straightforwardly, and sometimes with the use of words like "entitlement," which one of the professional Duke haters, Andy Bagwell (whose primary credential seems to be that he's the author of Duke Sucks), hilariously uses as one of his real reasons for hating Laettner, and then uses it next to the slightly less persuasive argument that the guy had "floppy hair." Floppy hair and entitlement! Those are ... equivalent things?

Laettner himself feels obligated to explain his background and the fact that he was not born rich: he lived in Buffalo, his mother was a teacher, his dad was a printer at the newspaper. He was on financial aid and work-study in order to go to the prep school where he played.

I do think Karpf's thinking is a little bit limited at times in its approach to the very importance of these things in the first place: it's all well and good to challenge the idea that this particular kid was rich or that his parents weren't hard-working, but on what planet would it be okay to hate an 18-year-old because his parents were rich? There are times when the fetishizing of the idea of Laettner being "blue collar," or other people being "blue collar," or proving you're "blue collar," seems just as problematic as any misapprehension that he wasn't. I mean, when 20-year-olds are playing basketball, are any of them really "blue collar"? It reminds me of the film Breaking Away, in which Dennis Christopher, playing a guy about to go to college, insists to his father that he and his buddies proudly wear the mantel of their fathers' work cutting quarry stone. "I'm proud of being a cutter," he says. "You're not a cutter," his dad clarifies. "I'm a cutter." Kids are not entitled to the benefits — social or narrative or character-based — of their parents' work ethic.*

There's a lot in here about the way being tough is mixed up with being unpleasant, some of which comes from Krzyzewski, who calls Laettner "a little bit of a rebel" right after we've seen some of his most obnoxious high-school behavior. (An awfully generous notion of what "rebellion" is.) There's a lot about the way Laettner seemed to be playing out the bullying he got from his older brother with Bobby Hurley. There are a lot of pieces of tape of mischievously eye-twinkly fortysomething former teammates who, aside from Davis, you can watch and see whether you saw what I did: guys trying to figure out how to explain that they were all young, he was a great player, they hold no grudges, but are you kidding? No, they didn't like him a whole lot.

There's some dynamite material from Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, who talks about not just literal whiteness but the "variety and brand of whiteness with which Duke is associated." Dyson points out that Laettner was not just a white player, but a white player who, through some of the unapologetic attitude he adopted was "appropriating black styles of masculine projection, but onto white bodies." Now whether you think that holds water or not, that is a really interesting piece of thinking for any sports documentary, particularly one about a topic as seemingly straightforward as the hating of one of the most hated guys in basketball. And nobody's behavior here is above examination: what about the white dude who says he loved Michigan — a team of young black kids — because they fit right in with his discovery of hip-hop? That is, itself, not uncomplicated. A lot of people who hated Laettner for being a lousy sport responded with homophobia. Brian Davis recalls being called an "Uncle Tom" for playing for Duke. Also not great.

What the film is about, I think, is that the same binary that's a really useful way to think about basketball games — you win, you lose, you leave it all on the floor and for that period of time you are 1000 percent about yourself winning and someone else losing — is a terrible way to think about basketball players. It's a particularly terrible way to think about basketball players who, when they earn the loathing of opponents, are often 18 or 19 years old. (Particularly looking at old tape of Hurley, I thought, "Oh, my. That is someone's ... child.")

Speaking solely for myself, I always thought Laettner, though I was loyal to him as a player because he was ours, seemed like a jerk. In that same Kentucky game where we began — and the documentary covers this in detail — he stepped on the chest of a guy who was on the ground under the basket. The intent was to taunt, not injure, but it was dumb and petty and all it accomplished, really, was to scuff up the victory for the guys on the team and the fans. Sure, he was in college, but I get to still think he was a pill, right?

Good, because I still do. And in the light of my own adulthood, he looks even worse, to be honest. If he hadn't been on my team, I would have felt exactly the same way everybody else did. I would have considered his the most punchable face in sports, figuratively speaking. I can't be with you on that, but I don't blame you.

But what I like about the film is that it's completely comfortable with his having earned a lot of what he got, and it's completely comfortable with his not deserving some of what he got. It exists in that place where sports fans don't always do quite as well: ambiguity. There is always so much more in sports than just sports, and this film does an exceptional job of looking at the way things get very, very personal.

*Oh, man, go watch Breaking Away. That is such a good movie if you care about sports or class or humans.

In an expansive interview coinciding with the second anniversary of his unexpected election, Pope Francis said his time as the head of the Roman Catholic Church will be brief.

Francis said he misses the relative anonymity he had as a bishop. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports, "He also said he doesn't mind being pope, but would like to go out in Rome unrecognized, for a pizza."

The pope's comments came in an interview with the Mexican broadcaster Televisa.

From Rome, Sylvia reports:

"Pope Francis said, 'I have a sensation that my pontificate will be short: four or five years, or two or three.'

"'I feel the Lord,' the pope added, 'has placed me here for a short time.'

"Francis also praised his predecessor's decision to resign as courageous. Benedict's decision, the pope said, opened the door to popes emeritus.

"Francis also focused on one of his favorite themes, denouncing what he called the injustice of wealth, saying it's a mortal sin to give someone an unjust salary or for the rich to take advantage of the poor.

"Later in the day, Francis announced a special jubilee year starting in December to focus the church on its main priority: mercy."

Remembering the week that he was named pope, Francis said he had packed only a small suitcase for his trip to the Vatican, and he had already written a homily to deliver on Palm Sunday, after returning to Argentina.

"He was not on any list of eligible candidates and neither had the thought entered his mind," according to the Vatican News agency. "In fact, in London bookies had ranked his name in 42nd and 46th place. Yet an acquaintance, as a joke, bet on him and did very well."

Discussing the idea that he would only remain pope for a short while, Francis said, "It is a somewhat vague sensation. Maybe it's like the psychology of the gambler who convinces himself he will lose so he won't be disappointed, and if he wins, is happy. I do not know."

Pope Francis