Non-Fiction

From The Wall Street Journal:

For families with young children, morning routines can resemble an assembly line: Make breakfast. Remind the kids to brush their teeth. Negotiate which snacks to include in their backpacks. Remind them again to brush their teeth. Look for shoes. Head out the door. Head back in the door to get the stray backpacks.

In our household, when one parent is out of town, the process seems to intensify and can feel like the “I Love Lucy” episode in which Lucy takes a job wrapping chocolates. Quickly overwhelmed by the speed of the conveyor belt, she starts shoving chocolates anywhere they’ll fit, and concludes, “I think we’re fighting a losing game.”

Over the past 50 years, the number of one-parent households in America have dramatically increased. In 2019, 57% of U.S. children lived with two parents, down from 80% in 1980. Is the rise of single-parent households an emblem of empowerment or a sign of dwindling support for children?

Discussions of parenting can be fraught, dominated by feelings over facts, and too often tinged with judgment rather than support. The problem is, in part, that there has been limited accessible evidence on the causal effect of household logistics on children’s outcomes.

Enter “The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind,” Melissa Kearney’s clear-eyed look at the economic impact of having a second parent at home. Ms. Kearney is an economist at the University of Maryland; her topics of research range from the social impact of the MTV show “16 and Pregnant” to the recent Covid baby bust. As she notes, “discomfort and hesitancy have stifled public conversation on a critically important topic that has sweeping implications not just for the well-being of American children and families but for the country’s well-being.”

Ms. Kearney’s objective is two-fold: first, to offer a data-driven overview of the rise and impact of single parenting; second, to propose strategies to enable more kids to live in stable households.

When it comes to the economic well-being of children, she argues, having two parents really is better than one—on average. Consider the conclusion of a 2004 paper, “Is Making Divorce Easier Bad for Children? The Long-Run Implications of Unilateral Divorce,” by the economist Jonathan Gruber. “As a result of the increased incidence of parental divorce,” Ms. Kearney tells us, “children wound up having lower levels of education, lower levels of income, and more marital churn themselves (both more marriages and more separations), as compared to similarly situated children who did not live in places where unilateral divorce laws were in effect.” Moreover, Ms. Kearney notes that children living with a stepparent also tend to have worse behavioral outcomes than those whose birth parents remained married.

While divorce is common, the spike in the number of single-parent households is mainly driven by an increase in the share of mothers who have never married—particularly among those who are less educated. In 2019, 60% of children whose mothers had a high-school degree (but less than a four-year college degree) lived with both parents, “a huge drop from the 83% who did in 1980” and low relative to the roughly 84% of children of college-educated mothers who lived with both parents in 2019. The author also notes significant gaps in family structure according to race: In 2019, 38% of black children lived with married parents, compared with 77% of white children and 88% of Asian children.

What is driving these changes? Among other factors, Ms. Kearney refers to the lack of “marriageable men,” pointing to a 2019 paper by the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men.” The paper analyzes the effect of drops in income for less-educated men, driven by increased international competition in manufacturing, and finds, Ms. Kearney tells us, that “the trade-induced reduction in men’s relative earnings led to lower levels of marriage and a higher share of unmarried mothers. It also led to an increase in the share of children living in single-mother households with below-poverty levels of income.” Reintroducing economic opportunities (for instance, through fracking booms) doesn’t seem to reverse this trend—suggesting an interplay between economic shocks and evolving social norms.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Jane Friedman:

Question

In the eighth decade of my life and after having three books traditionally published—a travel memoir 50 years ago and two novels more recently—I am pondering the wisdom of writing a very personal memoir.

What has moved me most to think about this is the #MeToo movement: I was the victim of date rape while working as a civilian employee on an American army base in France from 1963–1964. While my time in France was indeed a wonderful one, a dream come true, tarnished only by this one incident, I sometimes reflect on the high percentage of women who have suffered sexual abuse, many while serving in the military. I was advised not to report this case by my immediate superior with the very real threat that the perpetrator (an officer) most likely would not be punished, and it would likely mean the loss of my job.

The memoir I am thinking of and which I have partially written is about much more than this incident; it is also about the loss of innocence and the excitement of discovering a foreign culture. It includes the story of my first true romance, an interracial affair. I was the “innocent” white girl in love with an African American enlisted man—two “no-no’s” for I was told during my training that it was absolutely not advised to date enlisted men, but only officers, “men of a higher caliber.” Race was not mentioned but implied by the times and by several other statements. These experiences in addition to the opportunity I had to develop wonderful life-long friendships with several French citizens prompts me to want to share them in a memoir. I would like to know if this is worth my writing; would it be received well or would you offer a caveat to me, to avoid what may be a well-worn subject matter?

—Memoirist with a Dilemma

P.S. I would love to have a traditional publisher if I do finish this memoir, but in today’s world, I think it is highly unlikely I would find one interested in an octogenarian author.

Dear Memoirist with a Dilemma,

Oh my goodness, there are so many layers to this question!

I think I want to start by saying that even if #MeToo feels like it’s run its course, even if it feels like the publishing world is tired of women’s stories about rape, or maybe just tired of women’s stories or memoirs, period…I assure you, the market is not oversaturated with memoirs by women in their eighth decade.

Which, as you know, doesn’t mean there’s an easy path ahead of you. The publishing world may not be receptive to a memoir like this for any number of reasons—some of which might be valid and some of which are utter bullshit. Your age might be one of those reasons, but it’s not the only one. Publishing is a highly uncertain field with few guarantees, and the market for memoirs can be particularly uncertain.

As it happens, I’m writing this response on Labor Day, so in answering your question about the value of writing a memoir—and about the worth of writing—I do first want to acknowledge writing (and art-making, generally) as a form of labor that, like any labor, should be fairly compensated, monetarily.

That said, for better and worse, many artistic and writing projects fall largely outside the realm of capitalism. Recently, I was listening to one of the first episodes of the “Wiser Than Me” podcast*, hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus; it’s an interview with Isabel Allende (who didn’t start writing novels until 40), who channeled Elizabeth Gilbert giving advice to young writers—which you are not, but maybe this is actually just decent advice for any writer: “Don’t expect your writing to give you fame or money, right? Because you love the process, right? And that’s the whole point, love the process.” 

Which is just to say that, if you’re asking whether writing this memoir is likely to justify your time and energy, financially—well, unfortunately, that’s probably a very short response letter. It’s almost certainly not.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write it, or that writing this memoir would be unwise, in some way, or unworthy of your time and energy. The answer, here, lies in the why. Why do you want to write this memoir?

Do you love the process? Do you think you’ll feel better about the world on the average day when you’ve sat down to work on this book than on a day when you haven’t? Do you enjoy writing more than you don’t enjoy it?

If your answers to those questions are enthusiastically positive, then that’s reason enough to write.

There might be other, even more significant reasons to dive fully into this project. Writing a memoir isn’t therapeutic, per se, but the process of writing and rewriting our personal stories can be a rewarding process, one that’s often full of (good) surprises.

In this case, you’re talking about revisiting experiences—including an assault—after 60 years; the opportunity to reshape your story and to reconsider what you make of it might be incredibly meaningful. Indeed, it sounds like you’re already doing this to some extent, inspired in part by the #MeToo movement and other people’s sharing of their stories. One of the reasons #MeToo took off was because it defused and transformed a particular kind of shame and loneliness an awful lot of women had been sitting with for too long. Perhaps you, too, have been feeling that way.

Does revisiting this time and your experiences—the many good ones as well as the bad one—and considering them from fresh and maybe unexpected angles sound appealing and useful? Again, if your answer here is an enthusiastic yes: what are you waiting for?

(This might be an unpopular opinion, but for what it’s worth, I think it’s also completely valid to say, “Nah, I don’t need to relive all that.” But I think you wouldn’t have written in with this question if that were how you felt about it.)

Ultimately, both of those reasons are sort of personal and maybe even a little self-centered. And so what if they are? After all, as Mary Oliver put it in “The Summer Day” (which she wrote at age 62), “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” You really don’t have to please anyone but yourself.

But I also understand that writing a memoir solely for the pleasure of it might not feel entirely satisfactory, either. We want our stories to make connections, and to matter to someone, right?

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

From The Wall Street Journal:

An award-winning Harvard Business School professor and researcher spent years exploring the reasons people lie and cheat. A trio of behavioral scientists examining a handful of her academic papers concluded her own findings were drawn from falsified data.

It was a routine takedown for the three scientists—Joe Simmons, Leif Nelson and Uri Simonsohn—who have gained academic renown for debunking published studies built on faulty or fraudulent data. They use tips, number crunching and gut instincts to uncover deception. Over the past decade, they have come to their own finding: Numbers don’t lie but people do. 

“Once you see the pattern across many different papers, it becomes like a one in quadrillion chance that there’s some benign explanation,” said Simmons, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the trio who report their work on a blog called Data Colada. 

Simmons and his two colleagues are among a growing number of scientists in various fields around the world who moonlight as data detectives, sifting through studies published in scholarly journals for evidence of fraud. 

At least 5,500 faulty papers were retracted in 2022, compared with 119 in 2002, according to Retraction Watch, a website that keeps a tally. The jump largely reflects the investigative work of the Data Colada scientists and many other academic volunteers, said Dr. Ivan Oransky, the site’s co-founder. Their discoveries have led to embarrassing retractions, upended careers and retaliatory lawsuits. 

Neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne stepped down last month as president of Stanford University, following years of criticism about data in his published studies. Posts on PubPeer, a website where scientists dissect published studies, triggered scrutiny by the Stanford Daily. A university investigation followed, and three studies he co-wrote were retracted.

Stanford concluded that although Tessier-Lavigne didn’t personally engage in research misconduct or know about misconduct by others, he “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.” Tessier-Lavigne, who remains on the faculty, declined to comment.

The hunt for misleading studies is more than academic. Flawed social-science research can lead to faulty corporate decisions about consumer behavior or misguided government rules and policies. Errant medical research risks harm to patients. Researchers in all fields can waste years and millions of dollars in grants trying to advance what turn out to be fraudulent findings.

The data detectives hope their work will keep science honest, at a time when the public’s faith in science is ebbing. The pressure to publish papers—which can yield jobs, grants, speaking engagements and seats on corporate advisory boards—pushes researchers to chase unique and interesting findings, sometimes at the expense of truth, according to Simmons and others.

“It drives me crazy that slow, good, careful science—if you do that stuff, if you do science that way, it means you publish less,” Simmons said. “Obviously, if you fake your data, you can get anything to work.”

The journal Nature this month alerted readers to questions raised about an article on the discovery of a room-temperature superconductor—a profound and far-reaching scientific finding, if true. Physicists who examined the work said the data didn’t add up. University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias, who led the research, didn’t respond to a request for comment but has defended his work. Another paper he co-wrote was retracted in August after an investigation suggested some measurements had been fabricated or falsified. An earlier paper from Dias was retracted last year. The university is looking closely at more of his work.

Experts who examine suspect data in published studies count every retraction or correction of a faulty paper as a victory for scientific integrity and transparency. “If you think about bringing down a wall, you go brick by brick,” said Ben Mol, a physician and researcher at Monash University in Australia. He investigates clinic trials in obstetrics and gynecology. His alerts have prompted journals to retract some 100 papers with investigations ongoing in about 70 others.

Among those looking into other scientists’ work are Elisabeth Bik, a former microbiologist who specializes in spotting manipulated photographs in molecular biology experiments, and Jennifer Byrne, a cancer researcher at the University of Sydney who helped develop software to screen papers for faulty DNA sequences that would indicate the experiments couldn’t have worked.

“If you take the sleuths out of the equation,” Oransky said, “it’s very difficult to see how most of these retractions would have happened.”

The origins of Data Colada stretch back to Princeton University in 1999. Simmons and Nelson, fellow grad-school students, played in a cover band called Gibson 5000 and a softball team called the Psychoplasmatics. Nelson and Simonsohn got to know each other in 2007, when they were faculty members in the business school at the University of California, San Diego.

The trio became friends and, in 2011, published their first joint paper, “False-Positive Psychology.” It included a satirical experiment that used accepted research methods to demonstrate that people who listened to the Beatles song “When I’m Sixty-Four” grew younger. They wanted to show how research standards could accommodate absurd findings. “They’re kind of legendary for that,” said Yoel Inbar, a psychologist at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The study became the most cited paper in the journal Psychological Science.

When the trio launched Data Colada in 2013, it became a site to air ideas about the benefits and pitfalls of statistical tools and data analyses. “The whole goal was to get a few readers and to not embarrass ourselves,” Simmons said. Over time, he said, “We have accidentally trained ourselves to see fraud.”

They co-wrote an article published in 2014 that coined the now-common academic term “p-hacking,” which describes cherry-picking data or analyses to make insignificant results look statistically credible. Their early work contributed to a shift in research methods, including the practice of sharing data so other scientists can try to replicate published work.

“The three of them have done an amazing job of developing new methodologies to interrogate the credibility of research,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Va., which advocates for reliable research.

Nelson, who teaches at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, is described by his partners as the big-picture guy, able to zoom out of the weeds and see the broad perspective.

Simonsohn is the technical whiz, at ease with opaque statistical techniques. “It is nothing short of a superpower,” Nelson said. Simonsohn was the first to learn how to spot the fingerprints of fraud in data sets.

Working together, Simonsohn said, “feels a lot like having a computer with three core processors working in parallel.”

The men first eyeball the data to see if they make sense in the context of the research. The first study Simonsohn examined for faulty data on the blog was obvious. Participants were asked to rate an experience on a scale from zero through 10, yet the data set inexplicably had negative numbers.

Another red flag is an improbable claim—say a study that said a runner could sprint 100 yards in half a second. Such findings always get a second look. “You immediately know, no way,” said Simonsohn, who teaches at the Esade Business School in Barcelona, Spain. Another telltale sign is perfect data in small data sets. Real-world data is chaotic, random.

Any one of those can trigger an examination of a paper’s underlying data. “Is it just an innocent error? Is it p-hacking?” Simmons said. “We never rush to say fraud.”

. . . .

Bad data goes undetected in academic journals largely because the publications rely on volunteer experts to ensure the quality of published work, not to detect fraud. Journals don’t have the expertise or personnel to examine underlying data for errors or deliberate manipulation, said Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the Science family of journals. 

. . . .

Thorp said he talks to Bik and other debunkers, noting that universities and other journal editors should do the same. “Nobody loves to hear from her,” he said. “But she’s usually right.”

The data sleuths have pushed journals to pay more attention to correcting the record, he said. Most have hired people to review allegations of bad data. Springer Nature, which publishes Nature and some 3,000 other journals, has a team of 20 research staffers, said Chris Graf, the company’s research integrity director, twice as many as when he took over in 2021.

Retraction Watch, which with research organization Crossref keep a log of some 50,000 papers discredited over the past century, estimated that, as of 2022, about eight papers have been retracted for every 10,000 published studies.

Bik and others said it can take months or years for journals to resolve complaints about suspect studies. Of nearly 800 papers that Bik reported to 40 journals in 2014 and 2015 for running misleading images, only a third had been corrected or retracted five years later, she said.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Gay Talese and Frank Sinatra have enjoyed a rich, symbiotic relationship, one that has long outlasted the singer, who died at 82 a quarter-century ago. Back in 1965, Mr. Talese trailed Sinatra around Las Vegas and Hollywood for a profile for Esquire magazine. At his peak after a triumphant comeback, Sinatra brushed off the writer’s pleas for an interview, but Mr. Talese produced a piece anyway. The result, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” became one of the most celebrated magazine articles from the golden age of the slicks—and an enduring testament to Sinatra’s talent and fame.

Along with Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and others, Mr. Talese has been acclaimed as a virtuoso of the novelistic New Journalism. Now 91, he has published a short and charming second memoir, “Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener.” Once again, Sinatra takes center stage. But there’s more, especially the author’s take on the kind of journalism he’s practiced for seven decades, starting as a copy boy at the New York Times in 1953.

Mr. Talese takes his inspiration—and his title—from “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville’s 1853 short story about an inconsequential law clerk. “Growing up in a small town on the Jersey Shore in the late 1940s, I dreamed of someday working for a great newspaper,” Mr. Talese writes. “But I did not necessarily want to write news. . . . I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies.”

His first published piece, carried without a byline on the Times’s editorial page, was about a “nobody” who operated the illuminated ribbon sign that announced the latest news around a lower floor of the old Times Tower in Times Square—a Bartleby for the age of Ike.

Thankfully for magazine journalism, Mr. Talese eventually overcame his original preoccupation, but before he did so he chronicled alley cats, bus drivers, ferry-boat captains, dress-mannequin designers, even those who pushed the three-wheeled rolling chairs along Atlantic City’s boardwalk. After two years of military service at Fort Knox—during which he contributed pieces to the Louisville Courier-Journal—he returned to the Times as a sports writer. (As a college correspondent for the Times in the late ’50s, I sometimes squatted at an empty desk near his in the uncrowded sports department.)

In 1965 Mr. Talese left the paper to join Esquire, then in its glory days under the brilliant editor Harold Hayes. The young writer promptly sold Hayes on a profile of figures at the Times, both obscure and heralded, starting with Alden Whitman. Whitman had revolutionized obituaries at the paper by conducting long premortem interviews with Harry Truman, Pablo Picasso and other luminaries. The lauded “Mr. Bad News” piece helped lay the groundwork for “The Kingdom and the Power,” Mr. Talese’s 1969 book about the Times—his first bestseller.

Bartleby’s murmurous response to the world was “I prefer not to,” while Sinatra famously belted out “I did it my way.” Still, the young Talese was drawn to him.

Fully a third of “Bartleby and Me” is a reconstruction of Mr. Talese’s frustrated pursuit of Sinatra—from his first glimpse of his lonely subject nursing a Jack Daniel’s at the bar of the Hollywood hangout The Daisy, to watching him pick a fight with a young writer because Sinatra didn’t like his boots, and at a recording session after an earlier one was aborted because the crooner had the sniffles. Sinatra genially blows off Mr. Talese’s requests to talk, so the writer interviews Sinatra’s entourage, including his sort-of-look-alike stand-in, as well as the little old lady who totes around his hairpieces, and his daughter Nancy. Mr. Talese even describes how he took his Sinatra notes on cut-down laundered-shirt cardboards.

The 14,000-word cover story ran in the April 1966 issue, was later published as a short book and, on the 70th anniversary of Esquire, was voted by its editors and staff the best piece ever to run in the magazine.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The City Journal:

Long before the rest of us were talking about blue and red America, Tom Wolfe not only recognized the cultural divide; he bridged it. When he began his career in the 1960s, the liberal establishment was more dominant and even smugger than it is today. There were no pesky voices on cable television or the web to challenge the Eastern elites’ hold on the national media. Then along came Wolfe, a lone voice celebrating the hinterland’s culture, mercilessly skewering the pretensions and dogmas of New York’s intelligentsia—and somehow triumphing.

How did he get away with it? The most entertaining analysis opens in theaters this weekend in New York and next weekend in Los Angeles and Toronto. The documentary, Radical Wolfe, is a superb chronicle of his life and career, told through footage of Wolfe (who died in 2018 at the age of 88) expounding in his famous white suits. It features the Jon Hamm reading from Wolfe’s work along with interviews with his friends and enemies, his daughter, Alexandra Wolfe, and his fans, including Christopher Buckley, Niall Ferguson, Gay Talese, and Peter Thiel. Director Richard Dewey draws on the insights and research of Michael Lewis, who pored through the archive of Wolfe’s letters and papers for a 2015 article in Vanity Fair, “How Tom Wolfe Became . . . Tom Wolfe.”

Wolfe grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and remained true to his roots when he went north. In private, he remained the quiet, courtly Southern gentleman, the perpetual outsider gently bemused by the Yankees’ tribal beliefs and customs. “He was a contradictory character,” Talese observes in the film. “Such a polite person, such a well-mannered person. With a pen in his hand, he could be a terrorist.”

After getting a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale, Wolfe worked as a fairly conventional reporter and feature writer at the Springfield Union in Massachusetts, the Washington Post, and the New York Herald Tribune. His breakthrough came during the New York newspaper strike of 1962–63. Needing money to pay his bills, he took an assignment from Esquire to write about custom-car culture in southern California, which fascinated him but left him with a severe case of writer’s block, as related in the film by Wolfe and Byron Dobell, his editor at Esquire.

With the deadline looming and a color photo spread already printed for the upcoming issue, Wolfe told his editor that he just couldn’t write the piece. Dobell told him to type up his notes so another writer could put some words next to the photo spread. Wolfe began typing that evening, stayed up all night, and delivered a 49-page letter to Dobell the next morning. The editor’s reaction: “It’s a masterpiece. This is unbelievable. We’d never seen anything like this. I struck out the ‘Dear Byron’ and struck out the parting words, and we ran it.” The headline was appropriately Wolfean: “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm) . . .”

 Wolfe went on writing in his inimitable voice for the Herald Tribune Sunday supplement, which would be reincarnated as the independent New York magazine. His prose style—exclamation points, ellipses, long sentences, and streams of consciousness—appalled the high priests of the literary world, particularly when he applied it against their temple, the New Yorker. Other writers in the 1960s dreamed of being published in the magazine, but Wolfe wrote a two-part series savaging it as a moribund institution. The first piece in the series was titled “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” The second article, “Lost in the Whichy Thicket,” mocked its plodding articles, with their cluttered subordinate clauses and understated pseudo-British tone. He dismissed its fiction as a “laughingstock” that kept the magazine in business by serving as filler between pages of luxury ads aimed at suburban women:

Usually the stories are by women, and they recall their childhoods or domestic animals they have owned. Often they are by men, however, and they meditate over their wives and their little children with what used to be called “inchoate longings” for something else. The scene is some vague exurb or country place or summer place, something of the sort, cast in the mental atmosphere of tea cozies, fringe shawls, Morris chairs, glowing coals, wooden porches, frost on the pump handle, Papa out back in the wood bin, leaves falling, buds opening, bird-watcher types of birds, tufted grackles and things, singing, hearts rising and falling, but not far—in short, a great lily-of the-valley vat full of what Lenin called “bourgeois sentimentality.”

The empire struck back. The novelist J.D. Salinger emerged from seclusion to declare that the Herald Tribune would “likely never again stand for anything either respect-worthy or honorable” after Wolfe’s “inaccurate and sub-collegiate and gleeful and unrelievedly poisonous” attack on the New Yorker. There were more denunciations from the writers E.B. White, Ved Mehta, Muriel Spark, Murray Kempton, and from the syndicated columnists Joseph Alsop and Walter Lippmann.

. . . .

Literary critics sneered at his work, but his nonfiction books and novels were best-sellers that changed the national conversation. His coinages entered the common usage—the astronauts’ “Right Stuff,” Wall Street’s “Masters of the Universe,” Park Avenue’s “Social X-Rays.” He identified lowbrow “statuspheres” across America and made heroes out of the stock-car racer Junior Johnson and the fighter ace and test pilot Chuck Yeager. While doomsaying journalists and intellectuals were decrying American culture and modern technology, he declared that we were experiencing a “happiness explosion” and explained, “It’s only really Eng. Lit. intellectuals and Krishna groovies who try to despise the machine in America. The idea that we’re trapped by machines is a 19^th-century romanticism invented by marvelous old frauds like Thoreau and William Morris.”

Link to the rest at The City Journal

PG was a huge fan of Wolfe’s writing style a very long time ago. The OP made him realize he should reread some of Wolfe’s books.

From The Economist:

wo and a half millennia ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students. With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorise. It is tempting to dismiss him as an old man complaining about change. Socrates did not have a stack of peer-reviewed science to make his case about the usefulness of learning concepts by heart.

Today a different debate is raging about the dangers of another technology—computers—and the typing people do on them. As primary-school pupils and phd hopefuls return for a new school year in the northern hemisphere, many will do so with a greater-than-ever reliance on computers to take notes and write papers. Some parents of younger students are dismayed that their children are not just encouraged but required to tote laptops to class. University professors complain of rampant distraction in classrooms, with students reading and messaging instead of listening to lectures.

A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.

For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superiornote-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

Handwriting—which takes longer for nearly all university-level students—forces note-takers to synthesise ideas into their own words. This aids conceptual understanding at the moment of writing. But those taking notes by hand also perform better on testswhen students are later able to study from their notes. The effect even persisted when the students who typed were explicitly instructed to rephrase the material in their own words. The instruction was “completely ineffective” at reducing verbatim note-taking, the researchers note: they did not understand the material so much as parrot it.

Many studies have confirmed handwriting’s benefits, and policymakers have taken note. Though America’s “Common Core” curriculum from 2010 does not require handwriting instruction past first grade (roughly age six), about half the states since then have mandated more teaching of it, thanks to campaigning by researchers and handwriting supporters. In Sweden there is a push for more handwriting and printed books and fewer devices. England’s national curriculum already prescribes teaching the rudiments of cursive by age seven.

However, several school systems in America have gone so far as to ban most laptops. This is too extreme. Some students have disabilities that make handwriting especially hard. Nearly all will eventually need typing skills. And typing can improve the quality of writing: being able to get ideas down quickly, before they are forgotten, can obviously be beneficial. So can slowing down the speed of typing, says Dr Oppenheimer.

Virginia Berninger, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, is a longtime advocate of handwriting. But she is not a purist; she says there are research-tested benefits for “manuscript” print-style writing, for cursive (which allows greater speed) but also for typing (which is good practice for composing passages). Since students spend more time on devices as they age, she argues for occasional “tuning up” of handwriting in later school years.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG admits that he has been using a keyboard to create letters, words and paragraphs for so long, his handwriting has degenerated to the point that he doubts anyone else could read it. And, sometimes PG has trouble reading what he has hand-written a day or two previously.

From Jane Friedman:

We need more debate.

I’m a firm believer that one of the biggest issues in our society—especially politically—is that people who disagree spend a lot less time talking to each other than they should.

Earlier in June, I wrote about how the two major political candidates are dodging debates. The next week I wrote about how a well known scientist (or someone like him) should actually engage Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his views about vaccines.

In both cases, I received a lot of pushback. There are, simply put, many millions of Americans who believe that some minority views—whether it’s that the 2020 election was stolen or vaccines can be dangerous or climate change is going to imminently destroy the planet or there are more than two genders—are not worth discussing with the many people who hold those viewpoints. Many of these same people believe influential voices are not worth airing and are too dangerous to be on podcasts or in public libraries or in front of our children.

On the whole, I think this is wrongheaded. I’ve written a lot about why. But something I hadn’t considered is that people are skeptical about the value of debate because there are so many dishonest ways to have a debate. People aren’t so much afraid of a good idea losing to a bad idea; they are afraid that, because of bad-faith tactics, reasonable people will be fooled into believing the bad idea.

Because of that, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about all the dishonest ways of making arguments.

The nature of this job means not only that I get to immerse myself in politics, data, punditry, and research, but that I get a chance to develop a keen understanding of how people argue—for better, and for worse.

Let me give you an example.

Recently, we covered Donald Trump’s fourth indictment, when a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia, indicted former President Donald Trump and 18 others over allegations of a sprawling conspiracy to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory in Georgia. As usual, we got some feedback and criticism from our readers—which we welcome. A couple people asked why Hillary Clinton isn’t also getting indicted, since she also has disputed that she lost a fair and open election.

This, of course, got me talking about the differences in these cases. Clinton conceded the election the night it was called, Trump didn’t. Clinton’s supporters didn’t swarm the Capitol hoping to overturn the results while she—as president—was silent. Trump’s supporters did, and he was.

Then we started having a conversation about what Hillary Clinton did do. She did say that the election was illegitimate and that Russia tampered, and continues to. She did use a private email server…

And now the topic of conversation has changed, from “did Trump deserve to be indicted” to “should Hillary Clinton have been indicted?”

This is an example of “whataboutism,” where the person you’re talking to or arguing with asks you about a different but similar circumstance, and in doing so changes the subject.

Whataboutism

This is probably the argument style I get from readers the most often. There is a good chance you are familiar with it. This argument is usually signaled by the phrase, “What about…?” For instance, anytime I write about Hunter Biden’s shady business deals, someone writes in and says, “What about the Trump children?” My answer is usually, “They also have some shady deals.”

The curse of whataboutism is that we can often do it forever. If you want to talk about White House nepotism, it’d take weeks (or years) to properly adjudicate all the instances in American history, and it would get us nowhere but to excuse the behavior of our own team. That is, of course, typically how this tactic is employed. Liberals aren’t invoking Jared Kushner to make the case that profiting off your family’s time in the White House is okay, they are doing it to excuse the sins of their preferred president’s kid—to make the case that it isn’t that bad, isn’t uncommon, or isn’t worth addressing until the other person gets held accountable first.

Now, there are times when this kind of argument is useful, and sometimes even enlightening. If we are truly asking where the line for prosecutable conduct is for a presidential candidate, it’s useful to find precedent and see where it is being applied inconsistently. If we’re asking “is the government consistent,” comparing Clinton, Trump, Biden, Nixon—it’s all on the table. The same is true if we’re asking about the bias of media organizations, and seeing if they cover similar stories differently, if the subject of the story is the major element that’s changing.

But if I write a story that says your favorite political candidate answered a question in a very poor way, and you respond by saying, “Well, this other politician said something bad, too—I think even worse. What about that statement?” That wouldn’t be helpful, or enlightening.

Furthermore, context is important. If I’m writing about Hunter Biden’s business deals I may reference how other similar situations were addressed or spoken about in the past. But when the topic of discussion is whether one person’s behavior was bad, saying that someone else did something bad does nothing to address the subject at hand. It just changes the subject.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

The OP is more political than PG’s usual selections. He requests that any disagreements in the comments not involve any personal attacks against anyone, candidate or not.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Historians! Put down your tools! Your labors are at an end. The scientists have finally solved history, turning it from a jumble of haphazard facts (“just one damn thing after another”), into something measurable, testable and — most importantly — predictable.

That, in short, is the message of Peter Turchin’s provocative new book, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. A theoretical biologist by training, Turchin came to the study of history late, after decades spent developing mathematical models for interactions between predators and prey. At some point he realized those same models could be applied to the boom-and-bust cycles governing the fortunes of states and empires.

Blessed with tenure, Turchin thus made a risky midcareer move to a different field. Or rather, with the historical sociologist Jack Goldstone, he co-founded a brand new one, which they dubbed cliodynamics. This is meant to be a “new science of history” that exposes the hidden processes driving political instability in “all complex societies.” End Times is at once a primer on this “flourishing” new field, which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a direct application of it to the political landscape of the United States as it appeared in the last quarter of 2022.

Turchin promises at the outset of the book that, by treating history itself as “Big Data,” he and his collaborators can explain why everything that happened in the past happened, and tell us, with reasonable certainty, what will happen next. Tackling the past, present, and future is a big job. As a consequence, the pace of End Times is brisk, the arguments flashy, and the conclusions, for the most part, unsatisfying.

The overall thesis of Turchin’s book is disarmingly simple. History is shaped by interaction between the elites and the masses. When these two groups are in equilibrium, harmony reigns. But when too many people are vying for elite status all at once, things go out of whack, and instability becomes inevitable. At this point, there are only two real ways to bring the system back in line. The first is to turn off the “wealth pump,” Turchin’s term for whatever economic mechanism — technological change, tax policy, or even agricultural overpopulation in the case of medieval France — is at work in a given moment enriching the elites and depressing the relatives wages of the masses. The second is for the elites to physically eliminate one another in a revolution or civil war.

Elite overproduction is thus for Turchin what class conflict was for Marx and asabiyyah, or group cohesion, was for Ibn Khaldun: It is the engine driving history forward. However, over the course of End Times, Turchin never pins down what exactly defines an elite, or whether they come in different or competing forms. Are cultural elites, for instance, distinct from economic elites, or political elites from religious elites? His explanation that elites are “power holders” is not so much clarifying as circular. For Turchin, elites — whether they are English barons, Russian serf owners, or Southern planters — are a natural fact, like gravity or the rain.

Some elites are more dangerous than others, however. Unemployed degree holders, according to Turchin, have been responsible for most social upheavals reaching back to the Revolutions of 1848. The law, a magnet for the politically ambitious, has been a particularly hazardous profession; as Turchin notes, Robespierre, Lenin, Castro, Lincoln, and Gandhi were all lawyers. In his telling, elite colleges have become factories for the creation of counter-elites, waiting to destabilize existing institutions and usurp the role of existing elites. The most dangerous of these by far is Yale Law School, that “forge of revolutionary cadres,” having produced both left-wingers like Chesa Boudin and right-wingers like Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers.

Even if the remark about “revolutionary cadres” is made in jest, it is one of many moments in End Times that leads a reader to question the objectivity of Turchin’s take on American politics. Is the Republican Party really in the process of becoming a “true revolutionary party”? Maybe if you see Steve Bannon as its Lenin. Did “The Establishment” run a “counterinsurgency campaign” to get Trump out of office in 2020? Only if you think the election was rigged.

Some of the problem comes from his sources. Turchin intersperses the book with interviews with voters drawn from different rungs on the American social ladder. There is Steve, a blue-collar guy who thinks liberal elites are driving America into the ground; Kathryn, a Beltway 1-percenter who reads Steven Pinker to reassure herself that life has never been better than it is right now; and Jane, an Upper East Side Trotskyite hoping to bring the system down from the inside — which is why she’s a student at Yale Law.

The problem is that all of these figures are fictional, products of Turchin’s limited political imagination. Shorn of real-life interlocutors, his account of contemporary politics feels like the generic product of an ideological echo-chamber. This has an unfortunate effect on End Times’s predictions. Some of Turchin’s forecasts have already been disproved. Will Tucker Carlson be the “crystallization nucleus” for the formation of a genuinely insurgent, anti-establishmentarian Republican Party? Even a year ago, when End Times was published, that seemed like a stretch, but after Carlson’s firing by Fox News this past April, it seems about equal to my hopes of becoming starting quarterback for the Steelers.

Other predictions in End Times are more ominous, and even harder to credit. Turchin’s historical models predict that America will go through a spasm of political violence in the 2020s bad enough to thin the herd of elite aspirants and thus restore political cohesion, only for the violence to recur in 50 to 60 years. Only if wages can be brought up in the near term can this recurrence of violence can be avoided. However, even if this hypothetical New New Deal were to be implemented, it would not prevent a major internal crisis sometime later this decade.

Is America really on the cusp of a second Civil War? Perhaps, perhaps not, but no concrete piece of evidence presented in End Times would lead you to think so. Turchin has valuable things to say about rising inequality in the United States. But the connection between elite enrichment and popular rebellion is neither reliable, nor predictable — least of all in democracies.

In the absence of clearly drawn historical mechanisms, we have to trust Turchin’s models. But he never lets us see under the hood. For an approach to history that prides itself so much on quantitative rigor, cliodynamics — at least as presented in this book — seems strikingly low on actual data. Not a single graph or chart graces the pages of End Times. A pair of appendices do promise to explain the detailed workings of the databases and computations underlying Turchin’s predictions and pronouncements. But while this annex features a variety of things, including ruminations on Tolstoy, scenes from a science-fiction novel, and a rather charming thought experiment about social scientists orbiting Alpha Centauri, it does not clarify the inner workings of cliodynamics. All it offers are generalities along the lines of “one death is a tragedy … but a thousand deaths give us data” without ever explaining what it is that makes such data useful.

. . . .

Turchin is singularly ungenerous to professional historians. He rarely cites the work of scholars in the field, preferring to rely on his own summaries of major events or Wikipedia. Instead of crediting major historiographical concepts, such as the Military Revolution of the 17th century, to their original articulators, he refers readers to his own (often, forthcoming) books. At one point, Turchin even expresses his regret that so much precious historical knowledge is trapped in books and articles and — worst of all — in the “heads of individual scholars,” and fantasizes about a future in which spiderbots could automate the process of learning and harvest information directly from experts’ brains. One gets the feeling reading End Times that Turchin would like to do away with the messy business of human analysis and judgment entirely: all of the things that make history, from his perspective, such a frustratingly inefficient discipline.

Link to the rest at The Chronicle of Higher Education

From The Wall Street Journal:

A foundational text for every American Studies program, and one of the most original books published by an American author, “The Education of Henry Adams (An Autobiography)” ought to be read by educated citizens twice. First for its insight into contemporary history and then for what it reveals about the nature of education. Written in 1905, privately printed the next year, and published in 1918, its importance lies in its innovative form and prophetic content. A work startlingly idiosyncratic and unprecedented in the genre, its only forebear was Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography” (1793), which Adams called a “model of self-teaching.”

Adams (1838-1918) would demonstrate that writing autobiography was a fusion of record and reflection. In a radical decision, he wrote about himself in the third person, which permitted an important detachment that allowed him to make arbitrary additions or deletions. The best known of the latter was in the center of the book, where he eliminated mention of many years in his life. In 1885 his wife, Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams, had died by suicide. The shock led Adams to suppress any record of the event and its aftermath—and, for that matter, any reference at all to his spouse. He destroyed his diaries of the period and all correspondence between them. He resumed his narrative only after several years of silence. His life’s education would be the only compensation for his loss.

Adams was born in Boston, a direct descendant of two presidents and son of a diplomat. He would end up building a house across Lafayette Square from the White House, and becoming a dominant intellectual figure in American life.

Much of the first half of the book is about his disappointment with, and the failure of, his education. Of his early schooling, he recalled, “In any and all its forms the boy detested school.” From the beginning he felt his learning was inadequate. Of Harvard, which he entered in 1854, he concluded, “The education he had received bore little relation to the education he needed.”

There followed travel to Europe’s major cities of learning, but in Berlin “the experience was hazardous,” and in Rome he found “no education.” In England in 1868, he observed that the typical educated statesman “did not know what he was talking about.”

Back in Washington, Adams noted that the capital was “a poor place for education.” He summarized that “he had been mistaken at every point of his education.” But this also turned out to be a moment of revelation and advance, expressed in some of his memorable sentences: “He knew he knew nothing” and “He knew enough to be ignorant.” “Then he asked questions. . . . Probably this was education.” For Adams, even self-examination was painful: “He knew no tragedy so heartrending as introspection.”

In fact, he had learned the primacy of self-teaching—that it was participatory, not receptive; dynamic rather than passive. The second half of his book would be engaged in the great issues of his time as he envisioned them, and often these were startlingly prophetic.

Visits to the two major expositions of his era helped to reshape his thinking. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago gave him an image of American power, and the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris presented him with the new dynamos on display—symbols, he found, of the energy of the modern age. This led him to conceive of a dynamic theory of history, one that was in constant motion and in which all facts were relative. At last, “he was getting an education. . . . The new forces would educate.”

Having previously written a book about the architecture of Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres and the power of the Virgin as the embodiment of 13th-century unity, he could contrast the present as a study of 20th-century multiplicity—the absence of absolutes. The language of science explained the manifestations of modernism, as he took note of the new research on radium, the X-ray and the atom. The idea of magnetism in particular required an understanding of relationships, rather than one fixed position.

Adams was an elegant literary stylist, and he frequently crafted sentences of paired phrases, joined by a central semicolon. One of the most famous in “The Education” was “In plain words, Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.” On the one hand, this was like the structure of a Gothic arch, two parts leaning together with a keystone at its apex. But it also conveyed a contemporary notion of balanced opposites.

Politically he was prescient in his comments on Russia, Germany and China. He wrote, “The vast force of inertia known as China was to be united with the huge bulk of Russia in a single mass which no amount of new force could henceforward deflect.” In turn, the difficult step was to “bring Germany into the combine.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘Evangelicals,” or born-again Protestants—Christians who believe in converting non-Christians to their faith—haven’t had a lot of great press of late. The mainstream media all but blamed them for the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Going further back are evangelical ties to the Moral Majority and the religious right. Evangelicals in both politics and religion have a reputation for intolerance. They may have earned it: In 2017, the Pew Research Center found that evangelicals, more than any other Christian group, viewed Hindus, Buddhists, Mormons, atheists and Muslims unfavorably.

Mark Valeri’s “The Opening of the Protestant Mind” isn’t about 21st-century America, but his exploration of born-again Protestantism’s historical roots upends assumptions about religious conversion. Instead of making Christians intolerant, coming to faith by conversion historically went hand in hand with reasonableness, civility and religious toleration. Most readers would likely assume the opposite: If you believe other people need to convert to your faith from theirs, chances are you won’t give them much of a hearing. In Mr. Valeri’s interpretation, though, a figure like Jonathan Edwards, famous for preaching “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” may have been among the most liberal and progressive thinkers in the Anglophone world.

Mr. Valeri’s narrative of Anglo-American Protestantism between 1650 and 1750 is not as oxymoronic as it initially sounds. The Protestant outlook that prevailed in English society at the time of Charles I’s execution in 1649 assumed that the “health of the state depended on a . . . religious confession” to supply social coherence. For the rest of the 17th century, when English writers (including American colonists) encountered non-Christians, they saw “illegitimate, dangerous, and demonic” religions.

But after the Glorious Revolution in 1688, in which the threat of a Catholic monarch was decisively ended, English Protestants began to distinguish “loyalty to the kingdom” from “conformity to any one creed.” English writers—some zealous Protestants, others philosophically inclined—“minimized theological orthodoxy” as a requirement for social standing. Not only did these authors discover “republican ideas of toleration and moral virtue” in other religions; they also revised Christianity. Conversion became the path to faith not by submission to dogma but by persuasion. This shift aided the ascendant Whigs in governing a diverse religious constituency. It also prompted Protestants to regard conversion (and awakenings) as the mark of true faith.

Mr. Valeri, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, refers to a variety of authors well known and obscure. In the case of John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration” (1689), the key to civil liberty was separating the purpose of the state from that of the church. If religious controversy threatened public order, the state should intervene. Otherwise government should leave religious groups to themselves. Locke’s outlook extended to Native Americans: “If they believe that they please God and are saved by the rites of their forefathers, they should be left to themselves.” Jonathan Edwards, who for a time served as a missionary to Native Americans, echoed Locke. Although an advocate for the First Great Awakening, Edwards regarded the Mohawks and English people as spiritual equals because they shared the same sinful human nature. For that reason, Edwards thought acculturating Native Americans to Anglo-American conventions as unimportant compared with converting them through persuasive preaching.

The 1733 English publication of “The Ceremonies and Religious Customs of the Various Nations of the Known World” is Mr. Valeri’s best example. Compiled by two French Protestants, Bernard Picart and Jean Frédéric Bernard, this popular book reinforced the ideal of conversion. Especially appealing to Anglo-American Protestants was the French catalogers’ contention that ceremonial religion represented an illegitimate “alliance between priests and secular rulers who persecuted religious dissenters.” Ritualized Christianity went hand-in-hand with imperial ambition and produced “uncivil, unreasonable, and coercive” religion.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG notes that there were periods in history (including the times that the book described in the OP discusses) when religion had the power to impel men and women to many different actions.

The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims that started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups. In all, eight major Crusade expeditions—varying in size, strength and degree of success—occurred between 1096 and 1291.

The Muslim conquests were a military expansion on an unprecedented scale, beginning in the lifetime of Muhammad and spanning the centuries down to the Ottoman wars in Europe.

PG compares the general power of religion to cause humans to exert substantial amounts of money and blood in ancient times with the far more subtle influences of religion in the 21st Century. PG is certainly pleased that there have been no major religious wars lately, but he also wonders if religion, taken as a whole, occupies a smaller place in the minds of humanity, speaking generally, in today’s world.

PG asks that comments to this post not insult any particular religion or its adherents.

From The Economist:

After Alexander Pushkin was shot in a duel in 1837, crowds of mourners formed in St Petersburg. Russia’s nervy authorities moved his funeral service and mustered 60,000 troops. When the wagon bearing the poet’s body reached Pskov province, where he was to be interred, devotees tried to unharness the horses and pull it themselves.

The death of Rudolph Valentino, a silent-movie idol, in 1926 set off similarly fervid lamentation. Mounted police restrained the fans who mobbed the funeral parlour in New York where he lay on view (several reportedly killed themselves). In 1975 some of the millions of Egyptians who paid their respects to Um Kalthoum, a megastar singer, took hold of her coffin and shouldered it for hours through the streets of Cairo.

Today’s celebrity obsequies tend to be less fanatical, and largely digital rather than in-person. But they are passionate all the same. In the past few months, grief has coursed around the internet for Martin Amis, Cormac McCarthy, Tina Turner and, most recently, Jimmy Buffett. If you stop to think about it, many such outpourings for writers, actors and musicians are odd, even irrational.

Unlike other kinds of grief, this one does not stem from personal intimacy. If you ever interacted with a cherished author, it was probably during a book tour when, caffeinated to the eyeballs, she signed your copy of her novel and misspelled your name. Maybe you delude yourself that you once locked eyes with a frontman hero during a gig and that he smiled only for you. But you didn’t really know them, and they certainly didn’t know you.

Nor would you always have liked them if you had. Their books or songs may be touching and wise, but (in the parlance of criticism) it is a biographical fallacy to assume that the work reflects an artist’s life or beliefs. Your favourites may indeed have been lovely people; or perhaps, beneath their curated images, they were spiky money-grubbers, consumed by rivalry or solipsists who drove their families nuts. Rarely do you know for sure.

Though the artists are gone, meanwhile, the art you prize is not. Death does not delete it—on the contrary, curiosity and nostalgia often drive up sales. (David Bowie’s only number-one album in America was “Blackstar”, released days before he died in 2016.) The dead, it is true, write no more books and record no songs. Philip Roth will never set a novel in the era of Donald Trump; you will never hear another operatic Meat Loaf ballad. The cold reality, however, is that many artists’ best work was done long before their demise.

The sorrow makes more sense when a star dies young or violently. Had she not perished at 27, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, who knows what music Amy Winehouse would have added to her small, exquisite oeuvre? Sinéad O’Connor, another casualty of 2023, lived a troubled life that ended too soon. Buddy Holly (killed in a plane crash), Amedeo Modigliani (dead of tubercular meningitis at 35), Wilfred Owen (slain in action a week before the armistice in 1918): such premature and cruel exits are tragic.

Objectively, though, the death of a long-lived and fulfilled artist is far from the saddest item in an average day’s headlines. And whereas most mortals sink into oblivion, laureates live on in their output, which Horace, a Roman poet, called a “monument more lasting than bronze”. The standard reasons for mourning don’t apply. Why, then, are these losses felt so widely and keenly?

One interpretation is that the departed celebrities are merely the messengers. The real news is death itself, which comes for everyone, immortal or impervious as some may seem. If the reaper calls for Prince, with all his talent and verve, he will certainly knock for you. As Jim Morrison sang before he, too, died at 27: “No one here gets out alive.”

Part of your past—the years in which the mute musician was the soundtrack, the silenced writer your ally—can seem to fade away with them. Just as plausibly, the grief can be seen as a transmuted form of gratitude for the solidarity and joy they supplied. On your behalf, they undertook to make sense of the world and distil beauty from the muck of life.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

In 1976, Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 programmable calculator for $500 to start a computer company with Steve Jobs. It wasn’t a huge sacrifice. As a calculator engineer at Hewlett-Packard, he knew that the HP-67 was on its way and, with his employee discount, he could buy one for $370. His more highly prized gadget was the HP-35—the world’s premier scientific calculator and his inspiration for going to work at HP in the first place.

The HP-35 was a technological wonder. Until its appearance in 1972, pocket calculators performed only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The $395 HP-35 packed advanced functions like logarithms, sines and cosines into a relatively affordable, user-friendly package. Suddenly a computer’s worth of power could fit into anyone’s pocket. In “Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator,” Keith Houston surveys the engineering advances that led to that moment and the human drive to solve equations faster and smarter.

Mr. Houston, whose previous books explored punctation and symbols (“Shady Characters,” 2013) and the history of books (“The Book,” 2016), begins by looking back to when humans started counting using the tools at our immediate disposal: our fingers. The earliest archaeological evidence of counting is a baboon fibula incised with notches indicating the number of whatever its owner wanted to track. That 42,000-year-old tally stick, discovered in 1973 in a cave near South Africa’s border with Swaziland, “marks the point at which we began to delegate our memories to external devices,” Mr. Houston writes.

As civilizations progressed, they moved on from anatomical calculators, conferring numerical values to objects. The Sumerians, for instance, developed tokens whose varied shapes and sizes corresponded to smaller or larger quantities. But the biggest leap forward was the abacus, the first purpose-built calculator, invented in Mesopotamia or Greece between three and five millennia ago. The abacus made solving complicated equations possible, but getting results still required mental gymnastics.

Some shortcuts finally arrived in the 17th century courtesy of John Napier, a Scottish landowner, astrologer and mathematician. His invention: logarithms, a quick means of multiplying or dividing numbers through addition and subtraction. Not long after he published his revelation in 1614, logarithms became the basis for at least two important physical tools. Edmund Gunter placed them on a wooden rule to help seafarers with navigational calculations. Then William Oughtred produced his easier-to-use linear sliding rules, which, with a few later modifications, became the trusty and enduring slide rule.

As some mathematicians sought to simplify equations, others tried to automate them. Blaise Pascal was the first, in 1645, to build and sell a mechanical adding machine. Using gears similar to those of a clock, his Pascaline was an elegant metal box featuring windows for displaying a running total. Unfortunately, it didn’t do much more than add whole numbers, and its cost made it inaccessible to most. Over the next 200 years, more machines with greater functionality were introduced, the most important of which was Charles Xavier Thomas’s mid-19th-century arithmometer. None, however, would be as convenient or portable as a slide rule—until the Curta, a pepper mill-like mechanical gadget designed by the Austrian engineer Curt Herzstark during World War II.

In a book that’s long on technical details and short on compelling anecdotes, Mr. Houston’s profile of Herzstark is a notable highlight. As a salesman for his family’s factory manufacturing unwieldy calculators, Herzstark heard his customers’ calls for a truly portable machine. Not long after Herzstark hatched the idea for one, however, German troops annexed Austria. As the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, Herzstark was sent to Buchenwald. There he supervised a factory of inmates fabricating rocket parts and repairing looted calculating machines. As Herzstark later recounted, his manager urged him to pursue his Curta side project, promising: “If it is really worth something, then we will give it to the Fuhrer as a present after we win the war. Then, surely, you will be made an Aryan.” When Buchenwald was liberated in April 1945, Herzstark took his blueprints with him and eventually produced the Curta. It was a palm-size engineering marvel but a commercial failure.

. . . .

The year the P101 launched, Texas Instruments decided to enter the calculator market with its big innovation, the microchip. The company had industrial and military customers for its chips, but to expand demand it needed to sell them to consumers. The idea: an electronic calculator that could fit in one’s pocket. The resulting prototype didn’t quite live up to expectations—it was the size of a paperback and weighed 3 pounds—but it laid the groundwork for the smaller, lighter gadgets to come, notably Busicom’s first truly pocketable calculator in 1971 and Hewlett-Packard’s HP-35 in 1972. The era of calculator mania had begun, and throughout the late ’70s and ’80s calculators were everywhere, as standalones and as combinations with other electronics, including clock radios, digital watches and even synthesizers.

The pocket calculator’s heyday would be brief compared with that of the slide rule it replaced. Even scientific calculators grew cheaper and profit margins waned. HP, despite Mr. Wozniak’s pleas to build a personal computer, refused to take the risk, only to see calculators absorbed into PCs, palmtops and, finally, smartphones. The pocket calculator sublimed, becoming “everywhere and nowhere at once,” Mr. Houston writes. “The calculator is dead; long live the calculator.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

On holiday, many will find themselves in places where they do not speak the language. Once upon a time, they might have carried a phrasebook. The rise of English has made that less necessary. But most people—at least seven of the world’s eight billion—still do not speak English. That leaves options like pantomime, a willingness to be surprised by what arrives at dinner—or, increasingly, technology.

More and more people are using simple, free tools, not only to decode text but also to speak. With these apps’ conversation mode, you talk into a phone and a spoken translation is heard moments later; the app can also listen for another language and produce a translation in yours.

You may still get a surprise or two. Google Translate may be the best-known name in machine translation, but it often blunders. Take “my wife is gluten-free,” the kind of thing you might say at a restaurant abroad. In French or Italian, Google Translate renders this as “my wife is without gluten”—true to the words rather than the meaning. DeepL, a rival, does better, offering various options, most of them along the correct lines.

The best tool may not be a translation app at all. Though not marketed for the purpose, Chatgpt, a generative ai system that churns out prose according to users’ prompts, is multilingual. Rather than entering an exact text to translate, users can tell Chatgpt to “write a message in Spanish to a waiter that my wife and I would like the tasting menu, but that she is gluten-free, so we would like substitutions for anything that has gluten.” And out pops a perfect paragraph, including the way Spanish-speakers actually say “my wife is gluten-free”: mi esposa es celíaca. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation, more like having a native-speaking dinner companion than an automated interpreter.

Travel has long been a motivator for study—unless people start to feel ai tools offer a good-enough service. Some are concerned that apps are turning language acquisition into a dwindling pursuit. Douglas Hofstadter, a polyglot and polymath writer, has argued that something profound will vanish when people talk through machines. He describes giving a halting, difficult speech in Mandarin, which required a lot of work but offered a sense of accomplishment at the end. Who would boast of taking a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest?

Others are less worried. Most people do not move abroad or have the kind of sustained contact with a foreign culture that requires them to put in the work to become fluent. Nor do most people learn languages for the purpose of humanising themselves or training their brains. On their holiday, they just want a beer and the spaghetti carbonara without incident (and sometimes without gluten).

As ai translation becomes an even more popular labour-saving tool, people will split into two groups. There will be those who want to stretch their minds, immerse themselves in other cultures or force their thinking into new pathways. This lot will still take on language study, often aided by technology. Others will look at learning a new language with a mix of admiration and puzzlement, as they might with extreme endurance sports: “Good for you, if that’s your thing, but a bit painful for my taste.”

This is largely an Anglophone problem, since native English-speakers miss out on the benefits of language-learning most acutely. In many countries, including Britain and America, schools’ and universities’ foreign-language departments have been closing. (The British government recently devoted a modest fund to trying to get more secondary-school pupils to study foreign languages.) In the rest of the rich world, there is one thriving language that people still study: English. And in poorer countries, many people are multilingual as a matter of course; Africans and Indians learn languages because they are surrounded by them.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From BookBrowse:

Walk into any office and you’ll likely find a mix of people at different points of their lives: Baby boomers, Generation Xers, millennials. And the presence of Generation Z continues to grow.

Iona, the main character in Clare Pooley’s Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, often experiences people judging her competencies based on her age. She’s on the older side, some feel she’s past her prime, and she tries desperately to prove them wrong. But what do generational identities say about our capabilities as workers? To tackle this question, we’ll first have a look at the impact our generational differences have on us in the workplace, and then delve into the truth of the issue.

How do generational differences affect us in the workplace?

It isn’t hard to notice the differences between one age group and another: music, communication methods and even values. These differences can manifest themselves in a negative way in the workplace and cause us to argue, taking work from productive and efficient to a situation of lowered engagement. Soon enough, this can become frustrating, and we may have a tendency to blame our generational differences for it, especially if we already hold biases towards one another based on our ages.

The truth

Though some employees may think that they are simply unable to work with a person who isn’t in the same stage of life as them, or that some generations are less reliable, our distinctions in work patterns and capabilities aren’t as accentuated as all that. Research has indicated that the correlation between our generational upbringing and the way we act in and experience the workforce is close to zero, meaning there is little difference in attitudes towards work between generations.

. . . .

Megan Gerhardt, a management professor at Miami University, has researched the impacts of generational differences in the work field. “Many of the generational conversations in the news today rely on false stereotypes and clickbait headlines, rather than taking the time to understand the important differences that are a part of our generational identities,” she claims.

Link to the rest at BookBrowse

From The Wall Street Journal:

A hardworking teenager—let’s call her Amanda—excels at school. She’s a pianist, a varsity athlete, an honor student and the president of the debate club. She gets early acceptance to an elite university, lands the right summer internships, and, after graduation, secures the job of her dreams. Amanda has run the race; she has hit the mark; she has lived up to her potential and fulfilled the ambitions of her parents. Unfortunately, she’s also a mess. For years, despite the accolades, Amanda has felt “utterly vacant inside,” as Jennifer Breheny Wallace puts it in “Never Enough,” a timely exploration of adolescent achievement culture.

At once a description of an insidious problem and a call to arms, “Never Enough” is full of people like Amanda: young men and women whose personal accomplishments and affluent, ultra-supportive environments might be expected to guarantee them blissful satisfaction but have instead produced anxiety, loneliness and a feeling that life lacks meaning.

These effects are the unintended consequences of social norms that have come to prevail in many upper-middle- and upper-class families. The desire that young people succeed has morphed into something more like a demand. Writes Ms. Wallace: “Our children are living under a tyranny of metrics.” Numerous rueful parents testify in these pages, as do social scientists, educators and the author herself, a married journalist who writes with disarming candor of her own moments of overreach in the raising of her three children.

Why have things turned “toxic” for high-flying kids? Ms. Wallace sees widespread status anxiety fueled by a post-1980s stalling of social mobility and a rise in economic precariousness. Competition has intensified for spots in exclusive colleges and universities. So even mothers and fathers who try not to push, who try to be mellow and undemanding—dwelling less on grades and more on effort, for instance—can feel the pressure and pass it on to their children.

“As parents, we listen and chauffeur and chaperone and coach and cheer and help with homework and attend games and even practices,” Ms. Wallace writes of the “intensive parenting” that has become ubiquitous in the moneyed strata of American life. This style of raising children may be well-meaning, but it can suffocate and dispirit its young recipients. With every hour scheduled and every interest maximized for the purposes of a future résumé, children’s lives, observes the author, “become high-budget productions meant to attract the attention of admissions officers, scholarship committees, and football recruiters, not unique and imperfect stories just beginning to unfold.”

There’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of personal excellence, of course. Without the tug of ambition or the spur of competition, few among us would bother to distinguish ourselves, and the cause of human flourishing would go unserved. In the context of childhood, the problem arises when excellence is pursued as monomania. Focused on their AP textbooks and musical instruments and free of domestic chores (adolescence is “their time to be selfish,” says one unreconstructed mother), young people become sleek, siloed missiles aimed at the Ivy League. Once the rocket has delivered its payload—well, then what? As students like Amanda have found, the rewards of a self-oriented childhood spent sprinting toward high achievement may not be rewarding at all.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG notes that it doesn’t take many years after graduation for an individual to meet one or more complete idiots who graduated from an Ivy League or similar “selective” college/university.

The likelihood of meeting such an individual increases significantly if one meets children from wealthy families who attended prestigious institutions. It’s not the done thing to ask them how large a donation mom and dad made to the selective institution to ensure little Suzy’s or little Johnie’s admission.

It is also the case that such an individual will meet graduates from one or more blue-collar college/university who is brilliant.

Long ago, one of PG’s offspring had been admitted to more than one prestigious university. This offspring decided at almost literally the last day to apply to another university that was entirely respectable, but not regarded as prestigious. This offspring was admitted to this institution very quickly, in a matter of days.

It was the perfect choice for this individual and they flourished during their years of college and afterwards.

From Public Books:

If you, like me, have participated in the #AcademicTwitter rite of passage that is bemoaning the lack of pedagogical training in graduate education, The New College Classroom is just the book for you. Authors Cathy Davidson and Christina Katopodis aim to fill this yawning gap with “a practical book dedicated to a lofty mission, a step-by-step ‘how to’ for transformation.” Even the most well-intentioned professors, they explain, who believe in “discussion” and equity can get things wrong.

This should be my favorite book of 2022! Not just because it’s about pedagogy and equity; because it’s coauthored by two practitioners, both (white¹) women, one a senior scholar held in high regard across US higher ed studies, the other an early career scholar who adjuncted in graduate school, recently completed her doctorate, and took a tenure-track position. The authors are more than qualified through their research and teaching experience to write this text. Moreover, the book is incredibly readable and easy to digest. Every chapter is broken into manageable chunks, with neat subheadings like “What to Do When Nobody Does the Homework” and “How Do I Address Racial and Other Forms of Discrimination?” It also feels timely, having been written remotely during COVID-19, when the always-ongoing crises of teaching exploded in ways that made all academic laborers’ challenges more obviously similar than different. And in a practice that seems to put communitarian principles into action, Davidson and Katopodis “wrote every word together,” meeting online twice a week to discuss ideas, practice the strategies they would recommend, and get “students’ feedback on what was most effective for their learning.”²

This is the book that pedagogy Twitter has been crying out for. So why does it give me the ick?

Because The New College Classroom is not concerned with the material conditions that produce the crisis academics have to navigate today. Despite its romantic visions of “transformation” it is, ultimately, a guide for coping with the status quo. It offers no help for demanding something better, nor for creating alternatives ourselves.

Changing myself and my classroom might help me renew my one-year contract with the university, but it cannot prepare me to demand an alternative to the contract as the basis of my employment. Instead of mystifying “pedagogy” as some pure way of thinking and being in the world, instead of lamenting that we weren’t trained in this special field of study, perhaps we should recognize that to speak of pedagogy is to speak of labor. And that academic labor is not exceptional.

Certainly, the authors made a heroic effort to ground their pedagogical practices in research. Their introduction cites “an exhaustive study of twelve thousand classrooms” that showed that even instructors who believe they are “conducting a seminar or discussion class” fill 89 percent of class time with lecturing. The book illustrates what truly equitable participation can look like and advocates for active and participatory work that puts students in charge of their learning.

The first part of the book, “Changing Ourselves,” analyzes the classroom practices we have inherited and makes the argument for turning away from these modes of study to center “active learning,” which makes the student both “the agent and the source of the learning” rather than a passive recipient of facts from an authority figure. The second part of the book, “Changing Our Classrooms,” offers “practical, easy-to-follow methods for every part of teaching a class.” The authors explain the principles of active learning and distill them into “grab-and-go activities” that an instructor can pick up and implement immediately in any class (think: think-pair-share or entry and exit tickets). Together, these sections are “an invitation to change—ourselves, our classrooms, our society.”

There isn’t a third part on “Changing Our Society,” but the conclusion is titled “Changing the World” and ends with the provocation that “we are the people we’ve been waiting for,” a slogan otherwise popularized by climate justice activists. It might sound ostentatious to speak of higher education in the same way that we speak of the climate crisis, but within higher education circles, it is commonly held that academic labor is facing an existential quagmire (the apocalypse du jour is generative artificial intelligence. A whole field of critical university studies has grown around this crisis. And of course, so have books helping faculty navigate their lot in this crisis (including texts offering “hacks” for the academic job market; ones identifying the challenges faced by minoritized faculty members; ones Putting the Humanities PhD to Work; even practical guides for leaving academia).

Link to the rest at Public Books

There’s nothing like flattering your intended audience with “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.” Self-satisfaction should be one of the seven deadly sins.

From The Wall Street Journal:

What is a public school? Is it an institution that is paid for by the public? One staffed by government employees? One that teaches a publicly approved curriculum? One that educates a broad swath of the public’s children? In the view of Cara Fitzpatrick, the author of “The Death of Public School,” it possesses all of these qualities, and properly so. That more than a few parents don’t agree—or have become disenchanted with the idea of public schools altogether—is a source of concern for her.

For Ms. Fitzpatrick, a veteran reporter and an editor at the education site Chalkbeat, the public school’s death—or at least its decline—is attributable mostly to conservatives, who have, as her subtitle has it, “won the war over education in America.” They have advanced their attack, as she sees it, by supporting school choice, school vouchers and charter schools.

Ms. Fitzpatrick’s not-very-sympathetic history of these alternative policies and institutions starts with the segregationists of the 1950s. She shows how the people who opposed racial integration in the civil-rights era lined up behind the idea that parents should get to choose their children’s school—with the goal, in that era, of avoiding black children. She notes that within four years of Brown v. Board of Education—the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools—some Southern states had “taken steps to abandon public schools if necessary” and “created grants that students could use to pay tuition at private schools.” Ms. Fitzpatrick says that such moves were “the first steps toward creating a school voucher system” similar to the one that Milton Friedman notably proposed in 1955.

Though Ms. Fitzpatrick doesn’t accuse Friedman of sharing the motives of the Southerners—she quotes him saying that he despised segregation and racial prejudice—she says that his views on vouchers seem “either naive or willfully ignorant of the racial oppression in the South.” Friedman had argued that a private system—with vouchers helping families pay for tuition—would offer a range of voluntary associations: exclusively white, exclusively black and mixed schools. Rather than force parents to send their children to one kind or another, he said, people opposed to racial prejudice should “try to persuade others of their views.” If they were successful, “the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the non-mixed, and a gradual transition will take place.”

Whether such an idea was naive is hard to say; it certainly wasn’t ignorant or baleful, as Mr. Fitzpatrick seems to imply. At the time, there were high-quality institutions devoted exclusively to black students, notably the Rosenwald schools set up in the South by the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald in the first decades of the 20th century. If black parents had been given the vouchers needed to support them, such schools might well have continued to flourish.

Of course, people have supported school choice for more than one reason. Some have favored limited government, feeling that, when it comes to the education of children, the state should yield to the preferences of parents. Some have favored more resources for religious schools. Virgil Blum, a Jesuit professor at Marquette University, wrote an article in the late 1950s calling for “educational benefits without enforced conformity,” by which he meant that children shouldn’t be denied access to either public or private schools for lack of funds. In part, he wanted to make the system of Catholic schools an even more robust alternative to public schools, which were sometimes run by Protestants intolerant of religious dissent.

How good is the education that results from school choice or vouchers—or from charter schools, which function outside government strictures and teacher-union rules while receiving public funds? Ms. Fitzpatrick says that the jury is still out. She cites various studies, with mixed conclusions. She doesn’t mention the astronomically improved test scores of students who have attended Success Academy, a network of New York City charter schools founded in 2006 and now serving more than 20,000 students in grades K-12.

Debates over education can make for strange bedfellows. Ms. Fitzpatrick tells the story of the alliance in the 1990s between the Milwaukee-based black Democratic legislator Polly Williams, who favored private-school vouchers, and Wisconsin’s white Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson. After helping to implement the country’s first voucher program, Williams turned on Thompson because he wanted vouchers to be universal and she wanted them to go only to the poor.

Ms. Fitzpatrick seems to feel that Democratic-leaning black parents are getting played by white, Republican-leaning advocates who push for alternatives to public schools. Such advocates say they care about the best interests of inner-city children—whose public schools are often miserable—but Ms. Fitzpatrick implies that they really want to engage in religious indoctrination (with church-defined curriculums) or to make money by ultimately privatizing public schools. She uncharitably describes Clint Bolick—who argued many of the first school-voucher cases—as “never one to miss a good public relations opportunity.”

For someone who seems inclined to question the motives of those who favor school choice, Ms. Fitzpatrick doesn’t seem much interested in why others oppose it. Democrats from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama at first favored charter schools and school choice but backed away when teachers unions threatened to withdraw their political support.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG attended public schools exclusively for all twelve years of his pre-college education. Some of the public schools were very good, some were mediocre and some were really terrible.

He suggests that teachers are the determining factor that results in good or poor educational experiences for students. When he had good teachers, public school was a wonderful learning experience. When his teachers were poor, public school was often pure torture.

PG thinks that the politicization of public schools and public school systems is almost certain to result in poorer educational experiences for students.

From The Economist:

Few writers have achieved the cult status of George Orwell. He is so much a part of the collective imagination that John Rodden, an Orwell scholar, goes so far as to call him “the most important writer who ever lived”. He was not the best writer of his time, explains Mr Rodden, author of several books on the writer’s “afterlife”, but his universal recognition, continuous publication and repeated spikes in popularity are “an unprecedented phenomenon rivalled only by Shakespeare himself”.

Orwell’s most celebrated novel, “1984”, tells the story of Winston Smith, an everyman who embarks on a love affair in defiance of the surveillance state led by Big Brother, the supreme leader, whom some believe Orwell modelled after Josef Stalin. With “telescreens” that snoop on citizens, “thought police” enforcers and a system called “doublethink” in which both everything and the opposite are equally true, Orwell’s fiction has been prescient, invoked to describe the ills of nearly every age. “1984” has repeatedly topped English-language bestseller lists, including in 1954 (the year the bbc did a television adaptation), 1984 and 2003 (the centenary of Orwell’s birth). Political events bring Orwell new readers, including Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and fomenting of the riot at America’s Capitol in 2021. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “1984” became the most-downloaded electronic fiction book in Russia last year.

. . . .

Angst over totalitarianism, the manipulation of truth and the spread of surveillance technologies has hardly abated. Today’s world is increasingly Orwellian, argues Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation: consider social-media pile-ons, analogous to the “Two Minutes Hate” the novel’s characters spew at enemies of the state. The dangers Orwell flagged are as easily used by the left to bludgeon autocrats as by the right to denounce the left’s punishment of “wrongthink”.

It is thus no surprise that in 2023, with fears of autocracy and culture wars at fever pitch, the man who wrote so deftly about dark subjects is back in the spotlight. Films in production include a new documentary on Orwell’s life and an animated “Animal Farm”; a Russian-language “1984” was recently released. At least three Orwell books have been published in the past year, grappling with subjects including Orwell’s relationship with Russia.

Two more books are forthcoming, which look more closely at the women in Orwell’s life and work. For all his prescience and scrutiny of tyranny, Orwell was blind to another sort of repression: towards women. Along with a new biography by D.J. Taylor, a British historian, the books draw on letters discovered in the past 20 years between the writer and various paramours, as well as some written by Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, to her best friend. The picture that emerges is disheartening—but hardly unusual for a man of Orwell’s time.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy was married to Orwell from 1936 until her death in 1945. One of the first women to attend Oxford University, she was brilliant and witty but abandoned a master’s degree in psychology to wed Orwell. Their life was one of hardship. Eileen struggled to make a remote, unheated cottage a home, nursing the tubercular Orwell back to health while typing up and advising him on his work. She was often the main breadwinner.

Anna Funder’s “Wifedom” offers bleak details, including the day Eileen cleaned a blocked toilet, standing knee-deep in excrement, when Orwell appeared at a window to ask, “Teatime, don’t you think?” His wife dedicated her life to helping Orwell “fulfil his destiny”, one friend wrote, to the point of fatally ignoring her own health. Meanwhile Orwell was conducting numerous affairs. Before and after they married, her husband was a “sexual opportunist” who pounced on women who came his way, Mr Taylor writes.

. . . .

For decades feminists have called out the sexism of Orwell’s depiction of Winston Smith’s lover, Julia, who is presented as a nymphomaniac and honeypot trap, leading to their crushing by the state. “With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality,” Orwell wrote. Whether the writer was himself a misogynist or simply satirising a group of sexist men, the author’s estate had long felt there was something missing in the story. They sought a writer who might give a new dimension to the tale, writing a spin-off of “1984” for the 21st century. “The only way to approach it was from a feminist perspective, because the whole regime was so horrifyingly misogynist,” says Bill Hamilton, Orwell’s literary executor.

Ms Newman’s “Julia” offers a female character with a rich inner life. Her Julia is a survivor, more subversive than Winston, adroit at evading control, finding a kind of liberty in “sexcrime”. “She imagined freedom as exuberance, a clumsy romping,” Ms Newman writes. If Julia entraps Winston, it is because she too has been coerced and victimised. A twisty ending in keeping with the original makes this an enjoyable read even to those unfamiliar with “1984”.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG says, shame on Knopf and Mariner Books for getting a high-profile review while not having Look Inside working and no ebook preorders on Zon.

80 %-90% of the people who read The Economist will have forgotten about these books when they come out in a couple of weeks (for Wifedom) and over two months (for Julia).

From The Wall Street Journal:

There comes a moment in every job interview when the applicant will be asked to name his or her greatest weakness. “Well, I’d have to say it’s my perfectionism” is the smart answer, a humblebrag that is pretty short on humility. These days—as Thomas Curran writes in “The Perfection Trap: Embracing the Power of Good Enough”—this “weakness” is a strength. It assures a prospective employer of your commitment to the highest standards, “counted in hours of relentless striving, untold personal sacrifices, and heaps of self-imposed pressure.”

Perfectionism was not always held in such high regard; it was once the stuff of horror. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 cautionary tale “The Birth-Mark” tells of a scientist who becomes fixated with his beautiful wife’s single blemish—a birthmark. She internalizes his revulsion and wants to remove the defect “at whatever risk.” The scientist at last concocts a remedy and his wife gulps it down. Fine, except it kills her. The lesson? Perfection is a form of madness, one best avoided.

Mr. Curran, an associate professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, writes that perfectionism “seems to be the defining characteristic of our time.” Our rise-and-grind work lives are animated by the notion that “if you’re slacking, slowing down or, worse, taking a moment to simply think about what all the relentless grinding is even for, then you’re going to be left behind.”

I expected “The Perfection Trap” to attack the self-defeating behavior of perfectionists—the author counts himself as one—with a predictable hodgepodge of mindfulness, leavened with a little cognitive behavioral therapy and maybe a phone app thrown in for good measure. Instead, Mr. Curran has produced a manifesto damning our economic system for creating and maintaining a warped set of values that drive perfectionism, values we have internalized without examination. There’s no easy fix, he warns. The task calls for the kind of deep introspection that is both hard and unpopular; we must confront “our most basic assumptions about what’s ‘great’ and ‘good’ in modern society.”

The case of Lance Armstrong exemplifies the dynamic. The cyclist admitted to doping his way to seven Tour de France victories, but wasn’t sorry for it—it was simply, in his mind, leveling the playing field. “The culture was what it was,” he told Oprah Winfrey. “We were all grown men, we all made our choices.” But step back for a moment, Mr.Curran tells us, and see how Mr. Armstrong is attempting to normalize irrational and shocking behavior. The arms race that he willingly took part in risked every cyclist’s health but didn’t make any single rider more likely to succeed. It paid off for Mr. Armstrong, but not everyone was so lucky, costing some cyclists their health, others their lives.

“The same destructive arms race is playing out in wider culture right now,” Mr. Curran writes. We subjugate our own well-being to that of the economy, which “needs to grow far more than we need to feel content. Perfectionism is just the collateral damage.” Mr. Curran is explicit. To him, healthy perfectionism—a hedge used by those of us seeking to exclude ourselves from his critique—is an oxymoron.

. . . .

The lifeblood of social media and advertising is unhappiness. Every day, some two billion of us—a quarter of the earth’s population—log in to Facebook or Instagram and measure the ways our lives are lacking compared to the photoshopped images of impossibly well-turned-out people living their fabulous lives. “Isn’t this what Instagram is mostly about?” an Instagram employee asked rhetorically in a leaked memo. “The (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%?” It is. And children pay an especially high price when they feel like they’re falling short. “We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls,” according to a slide from a leaked Facebook presentation.

Even more disturbing was a leaked chart indicating that 6% of teens in the U.S. and 13% of teens in Britain said “spending time on Instagram was one reason why they felt like they wanted to kill themselves.” The company has no incentive to remedy this. “Facebook (now Meta),” which owns Instagram, “has increased its advertising revenues exponentially since 2009, to almost $115 billion today,” Mr. Curran reminds us. It didn’t do that by telling us we’re fine the way we are. “Their algorithms can even pinpoint moments when young people ‘need a confidence boost.’ ”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Jane Friedman:

Two temporal elements—the time frame of the story and where you are standing in time while you tell your tale—are central to the idea of structure in memoir.

But they are tricky to determine because you are still living the life you are writing about in your memoir, and you existed at all the points in time throughout the story you are telling. It’s easy to think that you are just you and the story is just the story, and to believe that you don’t have to make any decisions around time the way a novelist does. But if you neglect to make conscious choices about time, you risk getting tangled up and writing a convoluted story.

The first decision: choose a time frame for your story

What time period will your story cover? Don’t think about flashbacks to your younger self or memories of times gone by; all stories have that kind of backstory and it doesn’t count when answering this question.

Also don’t think about whether you are going to write your story chronologically or present the story in some other way (such as backward or in a braid); these are questions about form that get sorted out later.

For now, just think about what is known as “story present”: the primary period of time that the reader will experience as they are reading the story.

Here are some examples of story present from well-known memoirs:

• The several weeks I spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (Wild by Cheryl Strayed)
• The year I planted my first garden (Second Nature by Michael Pollan)
• The three years I was in an abusive relationship (In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado)
• The three years consumed by the trial of my rapist (Know My Name by Chanel Miller)
• The four years when I was a dominatrix (Whip Smart by Melissa Febos)
• My childhood in Ireland (Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt)
• The 18 years following the accidental death of my high school classmate (Half a Life by Darin Strauss)
• The 30-something years of my marriage (Hourglass by Dani Shapiro)
• My whole life (I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell)

If you find yourself considering a time period that covers your whole life or a big chunk of time like the last two examples in my list, make sure that you actually need to include the entire period of time to effectively tell your story.

Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass doesn’t cover her whole life, but it covers many decades. That’s because her topic is itself time—the way it moves and flows in a long marriage, the impact it has on the relationship. Even her title cues us into this truth: She is making a point about the passage of time. The time frame she uses fits her point.

Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: 17 Brushes with Death, starts in her childhood and covers the entirety of her life up until the moment she is writing the book. It is a beautiful and effective story. But note that the intention of this book is not to tell her life story; it’s to discuss the specific ways that she is mortal and the reality that we are all mortal, and to remind us that every moment is a gift. She imposes a concept onto the material—a form or structure to unify or organize the material so that it’s not just a bunch of things that happened but a very specific and highly curated progression of things that happened. The story presents her whole life, but she only chooses to tell 17 stories. The time frame she uses fits her point as well.

The second decision: where you are standing in time as you tell your tale

While you are thinking about the time frame of your story, you also must decide where you are standing in time when you tell your story. There are two logical choices:

1. Narrating the story as you look back on it

The first option is that the story has already happened, and you are looking back on it with the knowledge and wisdom gained from having lived through those events. You are standing in time at a fixed moment that is not “today” (because today is always changing). It’s a specific day when the story has happened in the past and the future life you are living has not yet happened. This choice has to do with what we call authorial distance, or how far from the story the narrator is standing. In fiction, a first-person point of view often feels closer to the story than a third-person point of view. In memoir, if you are telling the story from a specific day that is just after the events that unfolded, you will be closer to the story than if you were telling the story from a specific day three decades later.

I wrote my breast cancer memoir just months after my treatment had ended and the friend who inspired me to get an (unusually early) mammogram had died. Her recent death was the reason for the story and part of the framing of it. She died young and I did not; the point I was making was about getting an early glimpse at the random and miraculous nature of life—a lesson that most people don’t really metabolize until they are much older. I wanted to preserve the close distance to the events of the story. If I told that story now, I would be telling it with the wisdom of having lived well into middle age—a very different distance from the story and a very different perspective.

I once worked with a client who had been a college admissions officer at an elite private high school. The pressure of the work, the outrageous expectations of the kids and parents, and the whole weight of the dog-eat-dog competitive culture contributed to him having a nervous breakdown. He wrote a memoir in which he answered college application questions from the perspective of a wounded and reflective adult. It was brilliant, and part of its brilliance was the wink and nod of doing something in his forties that so many people do at age seventeen.

We are talking here about authorial distance related to time, but there is also the concept of authorial distance related to self-awareness. I know that sounds a little like an Escher staircase circling back on itself—and it kind of is. The narrator of a memoir (the “you” who is standing at a certain moment in time) has some level of self-awareness about the events and what they mean. One of the reasons that coming-of-age stories are so beloved is that, by definition, the narrator is awakening to themselves and the world for the first time. There is very little distance (temporal or emotional) between who they were and who they became and there is a purity and poignancy to that transformation. It’s as if they are awakening to the very concept of self-awareness.

It is entirely possible for an adult to write a memoir and not bring much self-awareness to what they are writing about; it’s unfortunately quite common. A narrator who is simply reciting what happened—“this happened to me and then this happened and then this other thing happened”— is not exhibiting self-awareness about their life. They are not stepping back emotionally from it, so they don’t have any perspective to offer no matter how far away they are from it in time. They are just telling us what happened. These kinds of stories tend to feel flat and self-absorbed. They make no room for the reader. They don’t offer any sort of reflection or meaning-making, don’t offer any emotional resonance, and don’t ultimately give us the transformation experience we are looking for when we turn to memoir.

Laurel Braitman, author of What Looks Like Bravery, explains it like this: “I tell this to my students now: You can only write at the speed of your own self-awareness. You do not want the reader to have a realization or insight about your life that you haven’t had already or they will lose respect for you.”

If you are telling your story as you are looking back on it, make a clear decision about exactly where you are standing in time and make sure you have enough self-awareness to guide the reader with authority through the events you are recounting.

2. Narrating the story as it unfolds

The second logical option in terms of where the narrator stands in time is to tell the story as though you are experiencing it for the first time. There is no temporal distance from the events you are writing about. You narrate the story as the story unfolds, which means that you narrate it without the knowledge of how it all turned out. In this kind of story, the self-awareness that is necessary for an effective memoir is unfolding as the story unfolds as well.

I wrote a memoir about getting married and the structure of it was a “countdown” to the wedding. In this format, the concept is that events were unfolding as I was living them. This wasn’t technically true—I wrote the book after the wedding had taken place—but I had taken extensive notes and was able to preserve the concept of not knowing how people would behave or how I would feel. (This book embarrasses me now—the whole idea of it. I was 25 when I wrote it, so what can I say? I am grateful for its role in my career and here it is being useful as an example.)

In Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, she wrote about the year after her husband dropped dead at the dinner table, and of the difficulty that the human mind has grasping that kind of catastrophic change. In the first pages of the book, she writes, “It is now, as I begin to write this, the afternoon of October 4, 2004. Nine months and five days ago, at approximately nine o’clock….” What she is doing here is signaling to us that there is not a whole lot of authorial distance or self-awareness to what she is sharing. She is figuring it all out—this tendency to think magical thoughts about the dead not really being dead—as she writes. But the key thing is that she knows that she is figuring it out, and she invites us into the process. She has self-awareness about her own lack of self-awareness. She is not just telling us about the dinner and the table and the call to 911.

In Bomb Shelter, Mary Laura Philpott places her narrator self at a point in time when the story is still unfolding; she has perspective and self-awareness, but those elements are still clearly in flux. The New York Times reviewer Judith Warner called this out in her rave review of the book. Warner said, “I want to say something negative about this book. To be this positive is, I fear, to sound like a nitwit. So, to nitpick: There’s some unevenness to the quality of the sentences in the final chapter. But there’s no fun in pointing that out; Philpott already knows. ‘I’m telling this story now in present tense,’ she writes. ‘I’m still in it, not yet able to shape it from the future’s perspective.’” Like Didion, Philpott was well aware of the choice she made around narration and time, and those choices perfectly serve her story.

Link to the rest at Jane Friedman

PG notes that on the date he posted this item, the book written by the author of the OP had not been published yet. You can find the book here for preorder. Here’s a link to a broken home page for the publisher, Tree Farm Books.

PG was about to comment about a publisher that can’t even keep a home page operating when a large number of readers, including PG, spend time online gathering information for books they might be interested in reading. Not to mention that the profit margins for selling ebooks are much larger than for books on paper.

PG mentions again that, in his opinion, it’s stupid to get a blurb for a book or, in this case, have the author of a book write a detailed online article about the subject of the book when the book isn’t available on Amazon yet. In the case of the book shown below, the publisher, Tree Farm Books, hadn’t even made the book eligible for preorders on Zon.

But PG’s opinions could be entirely wrong.

From The Wall Street Journal:

As a young man, Christian Madsbjerg was poking around a library and came across a passage by Aristotle that struck him as ridiculous. In “Physics,” Aristotle explained that objects drop earthward because they want to return to the place where they belong. As Mr. Madsbjerg re-read the lines, he felt his derision give way to dizziness. “In [Aristotle’s] world, objects fell to the ground because they were homesick,” Mr. Madsbjerg writes in “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World,” a provocative, sometimes elusive work of inquiry and instruction. That a philosopher two millennia ago knew nothing of gravity was not in itself surprising; what moved Mr. Madsbjerg was the realization that Aristotle must have really believed what he’d written.

“I have since encountered that vertigo of coalescing insight many, many times,” writes the Danish-born entrepreneur, who has built a career on the pursuit of perceptual breakthroughs. In “Look,” Mr. Madsbjerg attempts to impart the wisdom he has acquired from art and philosophy and from the practical experience of running a corporate consultancy and teaching a class on “human observation” at the New School in New York. His book is full of intriguing goodies: anecdotes and precepts originating in a wide array of sources, as well as summaries of the work of gestalt theorists and practitioners of phenomenology, a discipline he defines as “the study of how the human world works and everything that gives our life meaning.”

The breadth and vagueness of that definition bespeaks the book’s enthusiastic overreach. There’s a lot here, and a lot of it makes sense, but there are moments when the argument is so diffuse as to feel precarious. At times Mr. Madsbjerg teeters on the edge of banality, even incoherence. Yet he never tips over, for there is unmistakably truth in what he’s getting at. And, to be fair, the distinction between apparent understanding and deep understanding is difficult to draw. It is difficult even to describe. Mr. Madsbjerg does a heroic job of seeking to capture the experience of sudden insight.

The “richest reality,” he argues, is reached not by thinking but by looking—by which he means broadly using one’s perceptual apparatus. This dictum sounds simple to follow, but it is not. Looking takes time. Looking requires silencing the chattering mind. Looking means not only letting the eye follow the shiny bouncing object but also taking in the vast realm of context around the object and noticing what is not shiny and not bouncing. Perhaps most challengingly, it means surrendering the idea that we are necessarily seeing what we think we see. For, as Mr. Madsbjerg explains, “perception happens inside us; we change what we see to reflect who and where we are in the world.”

A rose may be a rose may be a rose, to mangle Gertrude Stein, but a rose is going to have very different meanings for a botanist, an interior designer or a love-struck suitor. When we glance at a rose—or any other thing—we see it amid the connotations it holds for us. This is the idea of gestalt, the recognizable “wholeness” of things. To take another example, few of us would stop to assess the color, size, shape and composition of a dining table and a set of chairs before drawing conclusions about their nature and purpose. The same is true with the gestalt of a picnic lunch or a museum gallery or a crowded bus stop: It’s easy to register a scene without noticing any of the details.

This capacity to make rapid sense of what we see equips us to get on with daily life, but it can also be an obstacle to clarity, fitting us with blinkers and causing us to miss important signals. “Look” is full of stories of people who have struggled to see the forest for the trees, or the trees for the forest, or the reason the forest is growing where it is and not some other place. One anecdote tells of an executive at an electronics company who was so intent on developing sophisticated big-screen televisions that he missed the cultural shift toward TV-viewing on laptops and smartphones. Another relates how the city-born biographer Robert Caro had to spend long hours in the open-skied isolation of rural Texas before he felt he could begin to understand his subject, Lyndon Johnson.

Looking through an ideological lens can also be blinding, as Mr. Madsbjerg knows firsthand, having grown up in a Marxist milieu on a Danish island in the Baltic Sea. “For a teenager, Communism was a totalizing, energetic, and angry faith,” he writes. “I was enraptured by fervor—furious about the class inequities in the world.” Only when his revolutionary ardor faded was he able to see how the ideology had distorted his perception of the world. The fall of the Berlin Wall became, in his telling, the impetus to begin a quest to understand how fashions in thinking advance and retreat; why people change their minds; and whether it is possible to anticipate social change, to “feel signs of a storm approaching.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Imagine that you could shrink yourself small enough to be able to travel inside a brain. Hiking up the hippocampus or sailing around the cerebellum would no doubt be an awesome experience and well worth the trip. But nowhere would you be able to experience what the person with the brain was thinking, hearing or feeling. The buzzing hive of conscious life would be, to you, just a collection of cells.

The limits of such a fantastic voyage point to two seemingly irreconcilable ways of viewing ourselves: as biological matter and as self-aware mind. The contrast has stumped philosophers and scientists for centuries and is sometimes framed in terms of the objective and subjective, the external and internal. Neuroscientist Erik Hoel, taking up these two realms of human self-perception, calls them the extrinsic and intrinsic perspectives. In “The World Behind the World,” he tries to explain why they exist, how we might try to bring them under a common understanding and why we might never fully succeed. On top of that, he attempts to rebut the argument, ever more frequent these days, that the firings of neurons—not thoughts and desires—are the only real causes of human action. As if that weren’t enough, he tries to save the idea that we have free will too—all in slightly more than 200 pages. His project is, he admits, “impossible in scope,” but he still has the chutzpah to give it a go.

Mr. Hoel begins by challenging the idea that the dual perspective—inside and outside—has been a perennial, unchanging feature of human experience. He argues instead that the intrinsic perspective took a while to come into its own. Since the time of Homer, he says, our ability to describe and express our inner world has developed considerably. The first stirrings can be seen in ancient Greek writers like Simonides, who developed the “memory palace” method of memorization, and Euripides, who gave voice to the inner lives of his characters. This perspective languished during medieval times, Mr. Hoel says, but was given new life in the Renaissance by writers like Cervantes and developed yet more with the rise of the novel in the 18th century.

The argument is speculative and the timeline too neat, but the key point is well-made: Consciousness may be a human universal, but our desire and ability to articulate its qualities and recognize it explicitly as a distinctive perspective are human variables, not any more innate than our ability to study the world scientifically. And indeed, Mr. Hoel says, the rise of science, too, depended on our learning a perspective—the extrinsic one. He gives an even faster whistle-stop tour of this process of development.

Mr. Hoel begins by challenging the idea that the dual perspective—inside and outside—has been a perennial, unchanging feature of human experience. He argues instead that the intrinsic perspective took a while to come into its own. Since the time of Homer, he says, our ability to describe and express our inner world has developed considerably. The first stirrings can be seen in ancient Greek writers like Simonides, who developed the “memory palace” method of memorization, and Euripides, who gave voice to the inner lives of his characters. This perspective languished during medieval times, Mr. Hoel says, but was given new life in the Renaissance by writers like Cervantes and developed yet more with the rise of the novel in the 18th century.

The argument is speculative and the timeline too neat, but the key point is well-made: Consciousness may be a human universal, but our desire and ability to articulate its qualities and recognize it explicitly as a distinctive perspective are human variables, not any more innate than our ability to study the world scientifically. And indeed, Mr. Hoel says, the rise of science, too, depended on our learning a perspective—the extrinsic one. He gives an even faster whistle-stop tour of this process of development.

But then, in perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, Mr. Hoel changes tack and argues that the achievements of neuroscience—the quintessential mode for extrinsic self-examination—fall far short of what the hype and headlines suggest. We have been promised so much, as if the close study of the brain’s collection of cells will yield a complete explanation for consciousness. The truth is, Mr. Hoel says, that mapping the brain’s neuronal activity has provided us with very little predictive information. You cannot, for example, reliably tell if someone is depressed by looking at a brain scan. The brain is simply too malleable, too fluid in its structures and too complex for scans to pinpoint what does what at the neuronal level and what effects will arise from any particular pattern of neural activity.

But there is a deeper problem. Neuroscience has assumed that it can proceed purely by adopting the extrinsic perspective. However, as our hypothetical miniaturized journey around the brain shows, this perspective has severe limits—almost by definition, it excludes consciousness itself. Neuroscientists carry on as though this exclusion doesn’t matter. They tend to see consciousness, Mr. Hoel writes, as “some sort of minimal subsystem of the brain, possessing no information, almost useless. The steam from an engine.” Mr. Hoel argues that “our very survival as an organism” depends on consciousness and its ability to track reality accurately—or, as he puts it, on “the stream of consciousness being constantly veridical and richly informative.” Nothing in the brain makes sense, he adds, “except in the light of consciousness.”

At this point, Mr. Hoel has deftly set the stage for another whirlwind tour, this one surveying the theories of consciousness that have come out of both psychology and neuroscience. But here the going gets tougher. To mix metaphors, the reader faces a steep learning curve across terrain that is slippery at the best of times. It doesn’t help that Mr. Hoel starts to use logic truth tables as though they were as easy to read as bar charts.

. . . .

You cannot, for example, by analyzing the movement of individual atoms in the atmosphere, tell whether or not it’s going to rain or blow a hurricane. You have to look at a larger, more-inclusive scale, the one of air-pressure systems and cloud formation. Because only events at this level can explain and predict weather events, we rightly say they are their causes. Similarly, patterns of individual neurons firing don’t tell you how a person is going to act. But what someone thinks and feels may do so. These states of mind, Mr. Hoel says, are rightly called causes of action: They have “agency” in a way that mere cells do not.

As if he hasn’t taken on enough already, Mr. Hoel finishes by tackling the thorny problem of free will. The ambition of this task is suggested by his conclusion: “Having free will means being an agent that is causally emergent at the relevant level of description, for whom recent internal states are causally more relevant than distant past states, and who is computationally irreducible.” This is a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but it requires more than the 13 pages it is given to make its meaning clear, let alone to build a case for it.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Not exactly to do with books, but certainly to do with genres.

From The Economist:

The gathering is like an auction crossed with a game of Mad Libs. Up steps a medium, mic in hand. Visions appear to her: the first, she says, is an old woman with a spinal deformity who liked caring for kids. The medium asks whether anyone recognises the spirit; a hand shoots up. “Know that she’s proud of you and wants you to treat yourself more!” Applause, then a second apparition, whom someone else recognises.

Such demonstrations of public mediumship are a staple of summers at Lily Dale, a hamlet in western New York founded in 1879. About 250 residents live in gingerbread-trimmed houses in the gated community. All are adherents of spiritualism, a 19th-century movement that got its start 200km away, in Hydesville, New York. Spiritualists believe that the living can contact and glean insights from the dead; mediums are the conduit. At its peak spiritualism had somewhere between 4m and 11m followers in America, including Abraham Lincoln’s wife, who hosted séances at the White House.

Each year more than 20,000 people visit Lily Dale, the oldest and largest spiritualist centre in America. Others are Cassadaga, in Florida, and Camp Chesterfield, in Indiana. Only 34 certified mediums, having passed a test, are allowed to charge for their services on the grounds. Private “readings” cost up to $140 for half an hour.

The mediums operate a guild of sorts. To get inducted one must perform well in trial readings. “We’re like the Harvard of mediumship,” says Sharon Klingler, who earned her credentials a decade ago. Candidates are scored on how many spirits they conjure and the accuracy of the evidence—mannerisms, symptoms, jobs, hometowns—that they give. “People who come here expect someone who’s been vetted,” says Kris Seastedt, vice-president of the Mediums League.

There are dos and don’ts of the trade. Don’t diagnose or prescribe: that could bring legal trouble. Brenda Reading, a newly certified medium, won’t inform women if she thinks that they have breast cancer, though she will ask if they have put off their mammogram. (Nothing stops her from telling your correspondent that he seems a bit low-energy. She recommends vitamin supplements.)

Clients want assurances that their loved ones are at peace. Best to keep the message uplifting; no one likes to relive tragedy. And the more specific the evidence, the better. It’s not enough to say that dead grandma baked. Everyone had a grandma who baked. Helpfully, most visitors to Lily Dale want to believe. The occasional sceptic can be a spoiler. So can people who get too dependent and expect to be told exactly what to do by their dearly departed. Ms Klingler sometimes asks needy clients to stop calling. She reminds them that they have free will, and suggests meditation.

Link to the rest at The Economist

A reminder that PG doesn’t always agree with items he posts and usually avoids pieces with strong political position-taking. On occasion, he breaks from his usual pattern.

PG will observe that, at least in the United States, there are periods of time that are characterized by those who hold differing political opinions or values speaking past each other, frequently utilizing straw men strategies.

PG does continue to urge commenters to be respectful of those with differing opinions even if those opinions seem wrong in some way. PG will also note that the large majority of those who choose to leave comments here are intelligent individuals and suggests that differing opinions that appear in the comments are made by intelligent adults, not idiots.

(PG just checked and found that there have been 328,174 comments left on TPV in discussions of the various posts PG has made over several years. The number of comments PG has deleted for going beyond the limits of respectful dissent can be counted on his hands plus a couple of toes.)

From New York Magazine:

A couple decades ago, liberals began to see the structural asymmetry in the news media as one of the major problems in American politics. The Republican Party had an unapologetically partisan media apparatus — anchored by Fox News, founded in 1996 — that it used to promote its message. Democrats lacked anything similar. Even worse, the mainstream media had become highly sensitive to charges of liberal bias and habitually treated Republican-promoted narratives, however superficial or farcical, as inherently newsworthy. The conservative media was slavishly partisan, and the “liberal” media was filled with stories about how Al Gore was seen as a pathological liar, or John Kerry an effete flip-flopper.

Two phrases came into circulation that expressed this frustration. One was working the refs, which was borrowed from the sports world to describe how Republicans pushed reporters and editors rightward with nonstop complaints of bias.

The second was hack gap, which described the imbalance in professional ethos between left and right. Liberal pundits tended to see themselves as journalists rather than activists. They were expected to advance original arguments rather than echo a common message, and the rewards of career advancement generally went to those willing to criticize Democrats and fellow progressives. Conservative pundits usually came out of the conservative movement, saw themselves as working toward an ideological project, and operated with the tight discipline of a movement. Democrats would face swift internal criticism if they fudged the truth or violated any ethical norm, while Republicans, as long as they remained faithful to conservative doctrine, could count on the support from their chorus no matter what they did.

Over time, these critiques have exerted a profound effect on the news media. The mainstream media has moved distinctly to the left, and its once-universal practice of covering every factual debate merely by alternating quotes from opposing parties while treating the truth as unknowable has become rarer.

Progressive opinion journalism has changed even more dramatically. Breaking from the pack to question a shared belief on the left is no longer a prized trait; it is now possible to build a career unswervingly affirming progressive movement stances. On the whole, the profession has changed for the better. The internet has opened up far more voices on the left, in every way. There are more writers from more perspectives and bringing more expertise, and more of them are not white men. The absurdity of the 1990s world in which the ideological spectrum of mainstream thought ended at the center left needed to die. My work as a liberal writer is far more interesting today than it was when I began. Liberalism as a whole benefits from a strong critique from the left as well as the right.

As a political matter, the conservative-messaging apparatus no longer operates without any parallel opposition. The asymmetric structure of the media 15 or 20 years ago, which shaped Republicans into a party free to violate norms while Democrats felt constrained to follow them, is giving way to a more balanced system. After years complaining why liberals lacked their own version of Fox News, we can now see something like it, cobbled together from websites and cable-news programming.

At the same time, the downsides of this new media world have become increasingly obvious. Along with their partisan messaging system, progressives are constructing a counterpart to the information bubble in which conservatives have long resided. Where it was once rare to encounter some pseudo-fact circulating among the left, it is now routine to find people believing Michael Brown was shot with his hands up, lab-leak is a debunked conspiracy theory, or that Republicans are routinely banning instruction about racism.

In 2010, libertarian writer Julian Sanchez described the sealed universe of conservative thinking as “epistemic closure” — any source that refuted conservative claims was automatically deemed untrustworthy. One can now discern on the left at least the embryonic formation of a similar alt-universe, in which any inconvenient challenge is reflexively dismissed as “bothsidesing,” “concern trolling,” some form of bigotry, or any other of an ever-expanding list of buzzwords used to delineate wrong-think.

. . . .

Independence should be understood as a set of habits that can be practiced by writers from the breadth of the ideological spectrum. It does not mean having an “independent” identity in the partisan voting sense, or having a moderate personal politics. Independent-opinion journalism can be produced by writers occupying perspectives located between the two parties, outside of or orthogonal to them, or squarely within them.

Independence encourages (though hardly guarantees; we are all fallible) certain kinds of mental hygiene: Trying to imagine every situation if the partisan identities were reversed, conceding that people whose political commitments you generally oppose sometimes have correct or sympathetic points, testing your own arguments for logical and historical consistency. Would I oppose this tactic currently being used by the opposing party if my own party used it? Would I defend this tactic being used by my party if the opposing party used it?

An activist’s job is to promote (or, in some cases, prevent) political change. This is a completely honorable profession. But the contours of this job of moving public opinion toward the position you desire involves shading some truths and omitting others. Both forms of argument can be persuasive and articulate, but one is designed for edification, and the other is designed to advance political ends.

Think of the difference between a professor analyzing a legal question and a lawyer advocating for a client. The former has a point of view but is using argument for the sake of promoting deeper understanding for their readers. The latter is using whatever facts are most helpful to their client.

If you consider the metaphor working the refs, the distinction between independent-opinion journalism and political activism becomes perfectly clear. The phrase describes the way many coaches berate referees, in the belief that they will force those officials to call the game in a more favorable way. The coach may be biased enough to genuinely believe everything he screams at the refs, and the fans of his team may see the refs the same way the coach does. But a coach who’s working the refs is not setting out to give fans a fair assessment of the officials. His goal is to win the game.

Many of the writers engaging in public critiques of the mainstream media, either from the left or from the right, are working the refs. To the extent you rely on ref-workers as sources of political information, you are putting your brain in the hands of people who aren’t principally interested in enlightening you. They may want you to be informed about stories that encourage you to support their political coalition. They don’t, however, want to inform you about stories that undermine it. They are working you.

Link to the rest at New York Magazine

From The Hedgehog Review:

One day early in the pandemic, when schools and colleges first went online, my undergraduate students and I had just finished discussing an essay on the rise and decline of the innovative and powerful Comanche empire. I logged off and walked downstairs, where my elementary school-aged child was sitting at the dining table. “What did you learn in school today?” I asked, as I always do. He recounted to me—not in these exact words, of course—that North America had been an Edenic paradise before the Europeans arrived. I was shocked. This was the racist myth of the noble savage repackaged by the antiracist left. In reality, Native Americans did not need Europeans to introduce them to warfare, imperialism, slavery, or violence. This does not diminish the significant impact European pathogens and ambitions had on Native American polities. But to teach such distortive myths about the past? That’s the kind of thing historians should be upset about.

So imagine my surprise when I opened Princeton historians Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume on contemporary historical myths and found no essay—not a single one!—that challenged myths that came from the left. The editors acknowledge “bipartisan” myths, but with a few exceptions, such as David A. Bell’s essay on American exceptionalism and Akhil Reed Amar’s on the Founding, the contributors focus on myths from the right. On their own, many of the essays, written by some of our best historians, are insightful. Collectively, they reveal the challenges facing the historical profession—my profession. When it becomes an axiom that truth comes from the left and lies from the right, something is amiss. When all the bad things America did are true, but none of the good things, something is definitely amiss.

The editors attribute the spread of “right-wing myths”—they do not distinguish analytically between myths and lies—to two causes: the “conservative media ecosystem” and the “devolution of the Republican Party’s commitment to truth.” So far, so good. Many prominent Republicans embraced and propagated former president Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. Even after it was revealed that Fox News commentators, including Tucker Carlson, knew that they were lying to their viewers, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy entrusted Carlson with exclusive access to video footage of the January 6 storming of the Capitol. Such brazen disregard for truth threatens the basic norms and principles of American democracy.

Or does it? To believe that Republican lies threaten our democracy, you also have to believe that our basic norms and principles are worth defending. But why sustain something as corrupt as American democracy? In her contribution to Myth America, Kathleen Belew, professor of history at Northwestern University, condemns those who proclaim that the events of January 6 do not reflect who we are as a country. She argues instead that this is “exactly who we are,” and a careful examination of the white nationalism and violence in our history will prove it. Belew simply inverts the story: White nationalists—including the Ku Klux Klan—embody the true America. Any story suggesting that we Americans are something better, or even that we have ideals that should inspire us to be better, is naive and false.

Like Belew, other contributors to Myth America write in absolutes. There is little that is tentative in this volume. The United States is an empire. American exceptionalism is a lie. The United States is xenophobic. There is no complexity. The world is divided into right and wrong, true and false, left and right. There is a lot of either/or but not much both/and. We find few good people doing bad things, much less flawed people achieving good things. There is almost no engagement with competing scholarly perspectives.

There are many missed opportunities. For example, in his essay on American exceptionalism, David Bell notes in passing that “the more progressive that Americans are in their politics, the more likely they are to see America as exceptional, if at all, in large part because of the harm it has done: the treatment of indigenous peoples, slavery, US foreign policy in the twentieth century, and contemporary inequality and racism.” Why leave this as an aside? Why not devote some space in the volume—especially given our public controversies over how we should teach American history—to the dangers posed by exceptionalist narratives from the left?

Myth America’s editors rightly worry that our divisions over history are caused by “unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of the facts.” They argue that “this shift has been driven by the rise of a new generation of amateur historians who, lacking any training in the field, or familiarity with its norms, have felt freer to write a history that begins with its conclusions and works backwards to find—or invent, if need be—some sort of evidence that will seem to support it.” They condemn the “cottage industry on the right” with “partisan authors producing a partisan version of the past to please partisan audiences.” I think that they are referring to the best-selling publications of journalists such as Bill O’Reilly, but might the same words also apply to other amateur historians such as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the primary editor of and contributor to The 1619 Project?

Myth America does not engage with The 1619 Project because, the editors write, there has already been much public debate, but the American Historical Review, the nation’s most exclusive and influential journal of academic history, disagrees. In its December 2022 issue the AHR published an eighty-two-page forum involving nineteen of the country’s most prominent historians. In it, only a few contributors offer truly critical assessments. Speaking truth to power is hard, and the power that most shapes historians’ careers is our reputation among our colleagues. Do “we” want to risk sounding like “them”? Whose side are you on? Instead, many contributors to the forum take the easy path, accusing The 1619 Project of not being radical enough. For instance, it did not fully account for the displacement of indigenous people. Worse, they argue, Hannah-Jones has not freed herself from American exceptionalism because she hopes that the sacrifices made by generations of black Americans might be redemptive and let Americans, in Hannah-Jones’s words, “finally, live up to the magnificent ideals upon which we were founded.”

It is unusual for historians to be so gentle (just read the book review section of any journal or sit in on one of our graduate seminars). Perhaps Cornell historian Sandra Greene, in her contribution to the forum, explained why: “The publication of The 1619 Project is so important, despite its flaws,” which include “factual errors” and “several chapters [that] simplify to the point of distortion.” Important how? Politically. For Greene, The 1619 Project is “a necessary book” and its flaws “should not be used as an excuse to deny the reality that slavery and racism have influenced every aspect of US history.” But one need not deny slavery’s and racism’s historical significance to ask whether historians should defend public narratives that simplify to the point of distortion—what Kruse and Zelizer call myths.

Fortunately, most Americans have a much more nuanced understanding of American history than professional historians (or their most vocal right-wing opponents). Most Americans recognize that the past is complicated. According to an American Historical Association poll, 78 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of Republicans agree that students should learn painful history even when it makes them uncomfortable. According to another recent poll by the organization More in Common, 95 percent of Democrats and 91 percent of Republicans agree that Americans “have made incredible achievements and ugly errors.” Indeed, despite what one learns in the headlines, 87 percent of Democrats believe Washington and Lincoln should be admired for their role in American history and 83 percent of Republicans agree that all American students should learn about slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. In other words, we Americans know that we have much to atone for in our past, but also much to celebrate. Americans understand that we contain multitudes. It should give historians pause when the common sense of ordinary American people shows more appreciation for historical complexity than trained experts.

After reading Myth America and the AHR forum, one can understand why Republicans have become so distrustful of professors and have proposed dangerous policies that threaten academic freedom, such as weakening tenure or banning entire fields of study. We historians would like to say that it’s because we speak truth to power, but perhaps the truth is that we are afraid to do so when it endangers our reputations or politics. I’m nervous just writing this review.

Link to the rest at The Hedgehog Review

From The Wall Street Journal:

Hollywood is famous for successfully pairing acting couples, some “married” on screen (Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon), some musical (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers), and some who became involved both off-screen and on (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy). The gold standard of the on-screen romance that becomes an off-screen love affair is the one that contains a good lesson on how to whistle: Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who first starred together in 1944’s “To Have and Have Not.” Their relationship was unexpected and unlikely but ultimately enduring and finally legendary, which is why nearly 80 years later William J. Mann has published “Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair.”

The author of several books on film, including a well-researched biography of gay silent film star William Haines, Mr. Mann clearly states his purpose regarding Bogart and Bacall: “to trace myths back to their origins and to draw connections between what was said at the start of their careers and what was said later.” He puts the famous couple under an informed scrutiny, giving the full background of both stars before they met and questioning everything they did after. He pins down every rumor or error connected to their histories: Bogart’s naval service (he saw no action), the origin of his famous lip scar, the legend of Bacall’s discovery and arrival in Hollywood, their encounters with the House Un-American Activities Committee, his part in the original Rat Pack, her infatuation with presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and so on. He was a child of wealth, a heavy drinker, “a drifter and idler” who bungled into acting. She was the only child of an impoverished single mother, and she knew from the beginning that she wanted to be a star.

Humphrey DeForest Bogart (original nickname: Hump) was born on Christmas Day in 1899. “I got cheated out of a birthday,” he always crabbed. His father was a New York society doctor and his mother a successful commercial artist who used him as a baby model. Bogart claimed, “There was no affection in my family, ever.” In his youth, he made a mess of everything, including boarding school, early jobs and his World War I service. After Bogart’s discharge in 1919, the Broadway producer William A. Brady (father of his best friend) took pity on the hapless 20-year-old and gave Bogart a nonacting job. From that day forward, Bogart never left show business. Mr. Mann calls Brady “the most influential figure of Humphrey’s early life.”

. . . .

Bogart’s stardom was hard-earned, but never deserted him after it arrived, having been born from such films as “High Sierra” and “Maltese Falcon” in 1941 and “Casablanca” in 1942. Today Bogart ranks as the American Film Institute’s No. 1 most popular actor in film history. (Bacall is No. 20 on the women’s list.)

Her road to fame was smoother. Born in the Bronx in 1924 as Betty Joan Perske, she was determined to become successful and moved quickly. Mr. Mann shrewdly points out that “she wondered when . . . not if ” success would arrive, already impatient by age 13. In 1941, at 17, she started modeling. Mr. Mann describes her as “savvy, confident, and resourceful,” adding she was also “a fawning young woman who was drawn to older men and had already proven her ability to charm them.”

After Bacall posed for an issue of Harper’s Bazaar, director Howard Hawks invited her to Hollywood to take a screen test. He was not impressed: “She had a high nasal voice and no training whatsoever.” In October 1943 he took her to the set of “Passage to Marseille” and introduced Bogart. He was 44, 5-foot-8, a big star and married. She was 19, 5-foot-9, a nobody and single. They said hello and shook hands. Bacall said: “There was no clap of thunder, no lightning bolt.” Not yet.

. . . .

“To Have and Have Not” began filming in March 1944. Nobody expected much from it, but the atmosphere on the set began to crackle. What happened can be seen on the screen. Bacall’s lack of experience and minimum of talent is overcome by her casual confidence, unusual looks and an insolent, slightly sullen manner. She’s fresh and different, and what Bogart sees in her is in his eyes and his amused little smile.

It became a short story: They met in 1943, filmed in 1944, married in 1945 (after Bogart’s divorce) and remained together until Bogart’s death of esophageal cancer on Jan. 14, 1957. (“Goodbye kid,” he said to her.) He died with one Oscar (for 1951’s “The African Queen”), 75 films, two children with Bacall and a marriage that had lasted nearly 13 years. (In terms of Hollywood unions, that’s a lifetime.)

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

St John’s, a district in central Manchester, has long reflected the city’s ambitions. Thanks to its proximity to the River Irwell, the site became a hub for the booming cotton and timber trades during the Industrial Revolution. After the second world war, as the city’s economy turned towards services, Britain’s first purpose-built television studios were set up there. (Most of the studios were closed or relocated in 2013.) Now the area is undergoing yet another transformation. On June 30th a multi-use arts venue on the banks of the river—costing £211m ($268m) and spanning more than 140,000 square feet—welcomed its first visitors.

The building, initially called Factory International but recently rebranded as Aviva Studios, was announced in 2014 by George Osborne, then the chancellor of the exchequer. It is mostly funded by the government and Manchester City Council and is the biggest investment in a cultural project in Britain since Tate Modern in 2000.

Mr Osborne saw Factory International as part of his “northern powerhouse” policy, which aimed to boost the economies of places such as Manchester and Newcastle, and to shift jobs, investment and influence away from the south-east of England. According to recent data from the Office for National Statistics, London’s gross value added (gva, a measure of output) is around 10% higher than the total of 11 other “core” cities, including Manchester. Mr Osborne has since left politics—he is now chairman of the British Museum—but talk of “levelling up” continues.

The venue was designed by Ellen van Loon of oma, an esteemed architecture firm, and its façade evokes Manchester’s mishmash of period buildings. Inside, a vast warehouse space can be configured in various ways; thanks to high-tech acoustic walls, different events can take place simultaneously. It will be the permanent home of the Manchester International Festival, a biennial event founded in 2007.

The venue can host enormous installations. The inaugural exhibition, “You, Me and the Balloons”, is the largest-ever show by Yayoi Kusama, a blockbuster Japanese artist (see picture). For the full launch in October, Danny Boyle, a Mancunian film-maker, has created an immersive production inspired by “The Matrix”.

Aviva Studios’s aims are grandiose, too: executives say it will contribute £1.1bn in gva in the next decade and directly and indirectly create more than 1,500 jobs. The Factory Academy, established in 2018, provides people with the technical skills needed by the venue and by the arts sector at large. “Yes, we’ve built a really exciting international arts venue that people across the world will travel to see,” says Bev Craig, the leader of Manchester City Council, but “that’s only half the story…It’s purposeful growth, not just any old growth.”

Manchester is not alone in betting on culture as a catalyst of regeneration. In America, Jersey City hopes to become a “destination for the arts” and is footing the bill for Centre Pompidou’s first North American outpost, due to open in 2026. In 2021 Abu Dhabi confirmed it would spend $6bn on its creative industries over five years in an attempt to diversify from oil; Muhammad bin Salman hopes to turn Al Ula into Saudi Arabia’s capital of culture. China has opened scores of new museums in recent years, as has South Korea.

. . . .

The idea of state support for culture can be a controversial one, as the well-off are most likely to participate in the arts; detractors would often rather see the money spent on hospitals or schools. Yet evidence suggests that a vibrant culture scene brings several benefits. Research by Centre for Cities, a think-tank, found that proximity to recreation facilities is important to 25- to 34-year-olds and influences their decisions about where to live.

Culture has an impact on well-being, too. Researchers at University College London analysed a series of longitudinal studies conducted between 2017 and 2022 in America and Britain. Controlling for income, education and other demographic factors, they found that enjoying the arts was good for your health. Whether you are reading a book or going to the opera, you are guarding against depression, dementia and chronic pain.

In the 19th century, as Americans and Europeans moved to the city, governments built public institutions to enrich people’s lives. Some economists have long sensed that this kind of investment can pay dividends. In Britain the Arts Council was established in the wake of the second world war to distribute government money across England, Scotland and Wales. John Maynard Keynes, a lover of opera and ballet, was its first chairman. “At last the public exchequer has recognised the support and encouragement of the civilising arts of life as a part of their duty,” he said.

. . . .

The idea of state support for culture can be a controversial one, as the well-off are most likely to participate in the arts; detractors would often rather see the money spent on hospitals or schools. Yet evidence suggests that a vibrant culture scene brings several benefits. Research by Centre for Cities, a think-tank, found that proximity to recreation facilities is important to 25- to 34-year-olds and influences their decisions about where to live.

Culture has an impact on well-being, too. Researchers at University College London analysed a series of longitudinal studies conducted between 2017 and 2022 in America and Britain. Controlling for income, education and other demographic factors, they found that enjoying the arts was good for your health. Whether you are reading a book or going to the opera, you are guarding against depression, dementia and chronic pain.

In the 19th century, as Americans and Europeans moved to the city, governments built public institutions to enrich people’s lives. Some economists have long sensed that this kind of investment can pay dividends. In Britain the Arts Council was established in the wake of the second world war to distribute government money across England, Scotland and Wales. John Maynard Keynes, a lover of opera and ballet, was its first chairman. “At last the public exchequer has recognised the support and encouragement of the civilising arts of life as a part of their duty,” he said.

. . . .

A multitude of factors make a city appealing to tourists as well as migrants. Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, calculates a city’s “liveability” according to five broad categories: culture and environment, education and infrastructure, health care and stability. Abu Dhabi welcomed an outpost of the Louvre in 2017; in recent years, its score has risen thanks to improvements in public services. Yet it still ranks only slightly above the average rating globally.

The authorities in Manchester know there is no single formula for growth. In 2022 it was announced the city would receive £1bn to improve its public-transport system; it is also focusing on attracting technology companies and startups. A wide cultural ecosystem has been established over the past 25 years, with Media City, a bbc outpost, the National Football Museum and home, an arts complex.

“This building is a manifestation of Manchester investing in creative industries as part of its future,” says John McGrath, the artistic director and chief executive of Factory International (the moniker was retained for the organisation that runs Aviva Studios and the arts festival.) That name hints at the city’s particular cultural heritage: between 1978 and 1992 Factory Records, a music label, championed bands including Happy Mondays, Joy Division and New Order.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

The youth of the American republic is one of its oldest traditions. Its unique origins will always make it younger than any other nation. Yet the United States is also the world’s oldest democracy. Britain in the time of George III was a liberal monarchy, but Britain democratized only by degrees in the 19th century. France was neither liberal nor democratic before the revolution of 1789, and the French are now on their fifth republic. The American ideal of democratic self-governance looks ever more exceptional as it creaks toward its 250th birthday.

Britain has a kind of old-fashioned pseudo-constitution: an accumulation of legal precedent and patchwork legislation, standing on unwritten assumptions and topped by a hollow crown. Americans were the first to spell out their social contract and specify the rights of individuals in plain English. But what did the magic words of the Declaration of Independence—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—mean to their authors?

History is best written by the losers. In “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Britain and the American Dream,” Peter Moore, a historian who teaches at Oxford, shows how Britain exported its highest ideals to the Americans who rejected it.

Mr. Moore breaks the American creed into three sections and examines each in context. “Life” explores how Benjamin Franklin embodied colonial intellectual potential in the 1740s, and how he developed in London in the 1750s and 1760s. “Liberty” shows how the London rabblerouser John Wilkes catalyzed the politics of liberty in the 1760s, and why he resonated so loudly in the Colonies. “Happiness” explains what the Enlightenment blend of action and emotion meant in England in the early 1770s, and how Americans understood it on the cusp of their reinvention.

Bible reading made colonial Americans perhaps the most literate population on the planet, but the “life” of the American mind was rooted in London. In 1740, Philadelphia was the Colonies’ leading city, with a modern street grid and a handy location on the post road between Boston and Charleston, but its population of 10,000 was half that of Bristol in England. London’s coffee-house culture, and periodicals such as Addison and Steele’s short-lived Spectator, were the templates for Benjamin Franklin’s self-improving “Junto” book club, his Pennsylvania Gazette, and the Almanack that he published under the pseudonym Richard Saunders.

All American roads led to London, and back. A London printer, William Strahan, supplied British news for the Pennsylvania Gazette. Strahan’s protégé, David Hall, emigrated to Philadelphia and worked in Franklin’s print shop. In 1747, Franklin retired from trade, passed the shop to Hall, and commissioned his “coming-out” portrait as a gentleman. Franklin’s scientific studies were not just an expression of practical polymathy. England’s aristocracy of the mind were fascinated by science. When Franklin went to London in the 1750s, his electrical speculations were his calling card.

Meanwhile in London, Strahan was printing Samuel Johnson’s “Dictionary” in installments. Johnson was writing his own one-man periodical, the Rambler. Franklin launched Johnson in America, publishing excerpts in “Poor Richard’s Almanack.” Though Strahan linked the leading minds of American and British letters, Franklin and Johnson’s “division of perspectives” anticipated the parting of imperial ways. Franklin presented himself carefully, playing the “Gentleman in Philadelphia” for his London correspondents, just as he would later play the noble savage for Parisian admirers during the American revolution. Johnson was a tic-ridden social bumbler. Franklin was irreligious but believed in progress. Johnson, a prayerful Anglican, thought that “all change is of itself an evil.”

Mr. Moore describes their differences in the 1750s as “liberalism against conservatism,” but neither of those terms existed in those happy days before everyone had an “ideology.” The only word that made the king and his ministers “sit up and think hard about America,” Mr. Moore writes, was “France,” and that made the colonists want “more of Britain than less of it.” The Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) brought London and the colonists together, but the subsequent tax burden demonstrated how unequal the relationship was. Americans began to sour on the distant mother country, especially after George III and his ministers tried to ruin John Wilkes.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Fourth of July celebrations arrive with special resonance for conservatives this year. It is clear now that we are in the throes of a full-scale American cultural counterrevolution, propelled by rising popular opposition to the coercive orthodoxies of a hegemonic left and enforced by a string of impeccable decisions from a Supreme Court intent on reviving the spirit of 1776. Spectacular displays of pyrotechnics from an endangered establishment, increasingly hysterical at the dawning realization of its imminent overthrow, are as entertaining—and ultimately harmless—as any you will witness in the night skies this holiday.

Fourth of July celebrations arrive with special resonance for conservatives this year. It is clear now that we are in the throes of a full-scale American cultural counterrevolution, propelled by rising popular opposition to the coercive orthodoxies of a hegemonic left and enforced by a string of impeccable decisions from a Supreme Court intent on reviving the spirit of 1776. Spectacular displays of pyrotechnics from an endangered establishment, increasingly hysterical at the dawning realization of its imminent overthrow, are as entertaining—and ultimately harmless—as any you will witness in the night skies this holiday.

. . . .

The popular rebellion against the cultural left that has seized so many of the institutions of American life has enjoyed mixed success at the political level. But since that hegemony was established in large part through half a century of grotesque judicial overreach, it was likely to be truly overturned only by a judiciary that would finally move to substitute restraint for activism.

With last week’s timely, pre-Independence Day succession of decisions by the court we can see better than ever that the counterrevolution is advancing apace. In Biden v. Nebraska, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, and 303 Creative v. Elenis, a solid majority struck solid blows for the principles and values that helped create the U.S. in the first place.

In the three cases—respectively over the Biden administration’s student debt cancellation plan, racial preferences in college applications, and free-speech protections in commercial interactions—the judgments rescinded the usurpation by an expansive executive of the power of the purse, restored the principle of merit over group membership as a key determinant of individual opportunity, and reaffirmed a citizen’s right not to be compelled to endorse ideas with which she disagrees.

Note the common prefix in the principal verb in each of those subclauses, “re-.” One meaning is “back” or “backward.” But this is no reactionary backlash to the inevitable march of modernity, as most of the media, with predictable and prejudicial alarmism, calls it. These decisions, along with other critical rulings in this and the preceding court term, represent the necessary undoing of successive judicially authorized derogations of the most defining American principles—fairness, equality, freedom, the proper exercise and distribution of government powers.

The counterrevolution has been achieved through painstaking efforts by conservatives to recruit, develop and advance jurists of reliably originalist disposition, as well as through presidential nomination—by Donald Trump, especially—of well-qualified justices who wouldn’t, for a change, acquiesce to the left’s dominance.

But reading last week’s decisions, I would argue that the most important force working in this revolution’s favor—perhaps as it was in 1776—is the sheer intellectual weight of the argument.

Contrast the various majority opinions last week with the left’s dissents. The opinions of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority in the three cases, are characterized by taut writing, unimpeachable logic, close adherence to argument, legal principles, facts and evidence, and detailed interpretation of existing case and statutory law. The fulcrum of the legal argument is—curiously enough—on the law as it was written, as it must be applied, not on some larger political or social objective.

With the exception of Justice Elena Kagan, the court’s members from the left write and speak with the apparently unchallengeable conviction that their role is not to apply the law but rather to make it, in the pursuit of some desired higher outcome—one that happens to conform to their ideological priors rather than to any constitutionally mandated principle or process.

In the process they adduce not legal reasoning, but political rhetoric of the crudest character and most clichéd language.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting from the racial-preference ruling, tells us that “deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life,” and that race still matters to the “lived experiences” of Americans. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, misrepresenting the decision in 303 Creative—which was, remember, about whether a business can be required to engage in a form of speech that violates its owner’s conscience—by saying the “symbolic effect of the decision is to mark gays and lesbians for second-class status.”

The left’s response to the reversal of its long success in making the court a second legislative branch of government is also telling. Instead of accepting, as limited-government, originalist conservatives did, the need for a long campaign to undo the hegemony of the rival philosophy, they want to short-circuit the process. This means protecting or restoring their authority by making radical institutional changes to the court or, failing that, by delegitimizing it, using a friendly media to impeach the reputation of justices they oppose with spurious allegations of impropriety.

Like almost all rebellions, the current American cultural counterrevolution is certain to face further and intensified resistance from the institutions and people whose dominance it threatens.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Not necessarily to do with books, but a legal earthquake for US colleges and universities.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Most politically attuned Americans will have some idea of what libertarianism is. Some think of it as an embrace of “business” or “capitalism” in all its forms; others as the anything-goes morality of 1960s radicalism. Still others, coming nearer the truth, will know libertarians as the people who want government “out of the bedroom and the boardroom,” as the slogan has it. In fact, as we are reminded by John Tomasi and Matt Zwolinski in “The Individualists,” libertarianism is a bit of all these things. It is a wildly diverse and inveterately fractious political tradition whose adherents have taken opposite sides on nearly every important political question.

The book documents libertarian thought, from its origins in the second half of the 19th century until now, on an assortment of topics, including markets, poverty, racial justice and the international order. The authors themselves claim the libertarian label and write clearly and charitably about all factions of the philosophy.

What is libertarianism, anyway? The easy answer: an approach to politics that seeks to minimize state coercion and maximize individual liberty. That generalization, though, covers a multitude of disputes. Most libertarians support legal abortion, for example, and some oppose it, in both cases for reasons of individual sanctity. In the absence of any easy formulation for what all libertarians think, Messrs. Tomasi and Zwolinski propose six “markers”: property rights, individualism, free markets, skepticism of authority, negative liberties, and a belief that people are best left to order themselves spontaneously. Libertarians, the authors contend, keep all six principles in view at the same time. 

They divide libertarianism into three historical eras, each responding to particular threats to liberty. The “primordial”-era libertarians—Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) in France, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in Britain—formed their ideas in opposition to socialism. In 19th-century America, the great threat to liberty wasn’t socialism but slavery. Early American libertarians like the journalist Lysander Spooner (1808-1887) saw slavery “primarily through the lenses of authority and property rather than of race,” the authors write. “Libertarians condemned slavery as an unjust usurpation of individual sovereignty and a denial of the individual’s rightful entitlement to the fruits of their labor.” There was wisdom in understanding chattel slavery as theft—a definable crime—rather than as a form of the more nebulous sin of racism.

During the Cold War—the authors’ second era—libertarians tended to align with conservatives in opposition to central planning and devoted their attention mostly to economic subjects. It was an uneasy alliance. Libertarians and conservatives were both anticommunist on questions of personal liberty and economics, but the right favored military buildup and libertarians hated militarism. The two camps clashed on crime, drug legalization, abortion, obscenity on the airwaves and more. Already in 1969 the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) urged his readers “to go, to split, to leave the conservative movement where it belongs.”

The alliance largely dissolved in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Libertarians, quite as much as conservatives and liberals, experienced a crisis of identity. With socialism discredited everywhere, what held libertarianism together? In the 21st century, the movement in the U.S. has consisted in an assortment of competing, often disputatious intellectual cadres: anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, paleo-libertarians (right-wing), “liberaltarians” (left-wing) and many others.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

You know you are in for quite a ride when an enormous tome of world history begins: “I am Enheduanna, let me speak to you!” An Akkadian high priestess of the moon god Nanna from the third millennium B.C., Enheduanna had been seized by raiders, likely raped, and then miraculously saved and restored to power. According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Enheduanna was “the first woman whose words we can hear, the first named author, male or female, the first victim of sexual abuse who wrote about her experiences.”

This is not the history you learned in school.

“The World” tells the story of humanity through families, be they large or small, powerful or weak, rich or poor. It is a book for people who want to read about people. There’s little attention paid to impersonal forces. Readers interested in isms—feudalism, imperialism, capitalism, etc.—won’t find these subjects explicitly discussed in this book. Rather, the author addresses the faceless structures of human existence by writing about who advocated for and implemented them, and who benefited from or suffered under them. “The World” pulsates with the hundreds of human stories Mr. Montefiore brings to life in vivid, convincing fashion. Enheduanna has about a page dedicated to her life; other individuals have a bit more; some, a single paragraph. This is history as collective biography, a journey across almost two million years, from the appearance of Homo erectus in east Africa to the rise of Xi Jinping’s China.

Mr. Montefiore has been working up to this ambitious project over his career, from biographies of Prince Grigory Potemkin and Stalin, to a fine study of the Romanov dynasty, to a 3,000-year history of Jerusalem. That book was aptly subtitled “a biography” of the city, for Mr. Montefiore is a biographer at heart. Combining literary flair with keen insight into human psychology, he can evoke a person with a few choice words—“porcine tyrant,” his description of Belarus’s current leader, Alexander Lukashenko, nails its subject.

Among the many strengths of “The World” is its truly global perspective. This is an unabashedly multicultural history that refuses to privilege any particular perspective, be it geographic, cultural or ethnic. Africa warrants as much consideration as Europe, Asia as the Americas. Nor does the book forsake the lives of the common folk for kings and queens, tycoons and presidents. The focus on families allows for light to shine on women, children and others often ignored in our master narratives. In a tactic typical of his original approach, the author opts not to tell the familiar story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, but instead focuses on Sally’s mother, Betty, a child of rape with a white father, a certain Capt. Hemings, who later tried to buy her and once tried to kidnap her.

. . . .

For the very powerful, family has often meant dynasty. For many others, it has meant intimacy, care and love. But enslaved persons, throughout human history, have been denied such essential goods. “Slavery shattered families,” Mr. Montefiore writes, “it was an anti-family institution.” Where enslaved families did exist, in Roman households or Islamic harems, for example, they “encompassed coercion without choice, and often outright rape.” His account in “The World” pays significant attention to such injustices and acknowledges the victims of the past. Mr. Montefiore tells us that among the first names ever recorded in writing were the enslaved persons En-pap X and Sukkalgir in Uruk roughly five thousand years ago.

At the same time, history shows that, along with being nests of succor, families can be “webs of struggle and cruelty.” The Chinese statesman Han Fei Tzu warned the monarch in the third century B.C., “Calamity will come to you from those you love.” This truth recognizes no constraints of class, power or wealth.

The relentless chronological march of Mr. Montefiore’s book is leavened, and given an aspect of suspense, by his habit of picking up the family stories of significant individuals long before they take center stage. The Kennedys are introduced through patriarch Joseph Kennedy, swanning about in 1920s Hollywood and cashing out before the crash. Barack Obama’s story begins with his father, a Kenyan economics student whose political patron, Tom Mboya, had met Sen. John F. Kennedy at Hyannisport, Mass., and made the case for foreign scholarships. “Mboya chose Obama, who left for Hawaii; Kennedy won the presidential election.” Donald Trump has long been “the personification of American illusion,” Mr. Montefiore remarks: a “bombastic bazooka of complex inferiority.” But he begins keeping an eye on the “quintessential American story” of the Trump family as far back as the 1880s.

The author is equally on target with his account of Vladimir Putin. He highlights Mr. Putin’s rapid transformation from an awkward, clumsy leader into a murderous authoritarian, notorious for his “gangsterish swagger.” Mr. Montefiore rightly rejects the argument that the West and NATO are to blame for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. If the war amounts to a needless tragedy, it is not unexpected. After all, such acts of mass violence are nothing new. After decades of peace, as he puts, “normal disorder has been resumed.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

Never think the world is in decline. A recent book, “Speak Not” by James Griffiths, looks at the bad old days when it was seen as acceptable to impose a culture on others through force. The author tells the stories of Welsh and Hawaiian—languages driven to the brink of death or irrelevance before being saved by determined activists.

Americans fomented a coup in Hawaii that led to its eventual annexation. Missionaries built schools and fervently discouraged local customs like the hula, a performance in honour of ancestors that the Americans considered lascivious. Oppression of culture and of the language went hand in hand: by the late 20th century the only fluent Hawaiian-speakers were worryingly old. But activists fought to expand teaching of it, and eventually brought Hawaiian into many schools. The number of speakers is now growing. Even some of the state’s many citizens of other ethnicities find it fashionable to learn a bit.

Welsh survived centuries of union with England largely because of Wales’s relative isolation and poverty. But in the 19th century British authorities stepped up efforts to impose English; schoolchildren had to wear a token of shame (the “Welsh Not”) if they spoke their native language, the kind of tactic seen in language oppression around the world.

Again, activists fought back. In 1936 three of them set fires at an air-force training ground built despite local opposition. The perpetrators turned themselves in, then refused to speak any language but Welsh at their first trial. It ended in a mistrial; their second resulted in a conviction, but on their release nine months later the arsonists were feted as heroes. They had lit a fire under Welsh-language nationalism, which in later decades would not only halt the decline in Welsh-speakers, but reverse it. Today the right to speak Welsh at trial (and in many other contexts) is guaranteed.

Mr Griffiths’s book ends with a sadder tale. Though Mandarin is the world’s most-spoken native language, China still has hundreds of millions of native speakers of other Chinese languages such as Cantonese (often misleadingly called “dialects”), as well as non-Han languages like those used in Inner Mongolia and Tibet. Evidently regarding this variety as unbefitting for a country on the rise, the authorities have redoubled their efforts to get everyone speaking Mandarin—for instance by cutting down Cantonese television and resettling Han Chinese in Tibet, part of a wider bid to dilute its culture. A regime indifferent to the tut-tutting of outsiders can go even further than American and British colonialists.

But English spreads by less coercive means, too. Rosemary Salomone’s new book, “The Rise of English”, tells the tale of a language that has gone from strength to strength after the demise of Britain’s empire and perhaps also of America’s global dominance. These two forces gave English an impetus, but once momentum takes hold of a language, whether of growth or decline, it tends to continue. Everyone wants to speak a language used by lots of other influential people.

The triumph of English led to the death of many languages (notably indigenous ones in America, Canada and Australia), but elsewhere it has merely humbled them. Ms Salomone looks at the Netherlands, where English fever has led to its explosion in universities. Entire graduate and even undergraduate curriculums are in English. Students submit essays on Dutch poets in English.

Link to the rest at The Economist