Non-Fiction

From The New Statesman:

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) appears to be the only major work of philosophy to have been composed while the author was an active military combatant. René Descartes was serving in the Thirty Years War as a volunteer with the Dutch and then Bavarian armies when he first developed his philosophical ideas, but we don’t know whether he saw combat. Wittgenstein enlisted as an infantryman in the Austro-Hungarian army on 7 August 1914, about a week after the outbreak of the First World War. He was 25. From the start of the conflict he was intent on continuing the work on logic and philosophy that had occupied him for the past few years, growing out of his collaboration with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. It held him together under outward circumstances that he found hard to bear.

People are fascinated by the hidden lives of creative geniuses, the more sordid the better. Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks, 1914-1916 appeals to that interest by allowing the reader to eavesdrop on his agonised emotional life in two of those years of military service, during which he produced one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th century. The Tractatus is a founding document of the analytic tradition in philosophy. It set out a theory of logic, language and the limits of meaning which revealed, Wittgenstein argued, that traditional philosophical problems were based on linguistic confusion. The two tracks of his life – the emotional and the intellectual – can be followed in some notebooks Wittgenstein kept during that period. On the right-hand pages he entered his philosophical thoughts, in legible German. On the left-hand pages, in code, he entered his personal feelings – hopes, fears, prayers, despair, loathing of himself and other people, and gratitude when he was able to work.

Some of the notebooks were either lost or destroyed by Wittgenstein, but three from 1914-16 survive because they were left in his sister’s house in Vienna. After her brother’s death in 1951 she made them available to his literary executors, who in 1961 published the right hand pages (the philosophical material) as Notebooks 1914-16. The left-hand pages were not mentioned. They have since been deciphered (the code is a simple inversion of the alphabet: a=z, b=y… z=a),  and there was an unauthorised publication of those pages in 1991, but this book is the first translation into English of Wittgenstein’s private remarks.

Wittgenstein had been dead for only ten years when the philosophical notebooks were published, and it is hardly surprising that the literary executors, who were his close friends, omitted the personal material: they knew he would be appalled at its coming to light. And though he has been dead for 70 years, it still feels intrusive to read these monotonously repetitive and self-absorbed effusions. As Marjorie Perloff, the distinguished American literary scholar who has translated the notebooks, observes, Wittgenstein’s project was himself – self-creation and self-maintenance in a form that he would be able to bear. He isn’t interested in the war or the people he encounters, only in his own responses and feelings, and overcoming their inadequacy.

Link to the rest at The New Statesman

From The Wall Street Journal:

At its best, capitalism provides a cornucopia of products affordable to ordinary people. But when it comes to housing, the American economy is failing to deliver the goods. By one leading measure, housing prices in April 2022 were 15% higher, corrected for inflation, than their previous peak in 2006.

The free market has failed to deliver affordable housing to Americans because of government restrictions on supply. In those parts of the country, like Houston, where building activity is lightly regulated, prices remain low despite enormous demand. In other areas, including Boston and San Francisco, new developments are constrained by a thicket of building regulations supported by entrenched local interests—often referred to collectively as Nimby, or Not in My Backyard. Any new demand thus inexorably leads to higher home prices.

Artificial restrictions on housing supply have enriched older homeowners while limiting home ownership among the young. In turn, American GDP suffers, because our most productive regions, such as Silicon Valley, make it impossible to build, forcing people to move instead to less productive, lower-cost locales.

Setting housing markets free, however, would require more than the election of a pro-growth president or governor; there need to be countless smaller victories at the local, city-council and town-planning levels. Now there is Yimby—or Yes in My Back Yard—a pro-growth movement that may be our best hope for making coastal America more affordable.

Max Holleran’s “Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing,” focuses on the fascinating conflict between Yimbys and some more-progressive groups, including old-line environmentalists and community activists, such as the protesters who stormed the 2018 YIMBY town conference in Boston with their yellow shirts, drums, kazoos, vuvuzelas and “giant signs decrying displacement.”

Antigrowth advocates have long depicted developers as greedy destroyers of neighborhoods. Often forgotten is Adam Smith’s wise dictum that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” The Yimbys, Mr. Holleran tells us, “successfully reframed urban growth as a progressive goal for creating more equitable and sustainable cities.” The battle is no longer between wealthy developers and the little guys in the neighborhood, but the little-guy renters who are kept out of the market by wealthy boomers.

In one example, Mr. Holleran describes how, beginning in the 1950s, a “group of college professors, concerned citizens, and activists with links to the League of Women Voters” came together in Boulder, Colo., to work toward “a municipal ‘land bank’ of undevelopable property surrounding the city.” These citizens “were devoted to creating an environmental paradise,” Mr. Holleran tells us, but the “protective greenbelt” also created a de facto barrier to the city, inside of which growth was severely regulated. Meanwhile, outside the greenbelt there emerged “an endless stretch of unimaginative suburban homes on cul-de-sacs, connected by highways and strip malls, dotted with box stores.”

That greenbelt has since helped drive Boulder’s average home sales above $850,000 in the first quarter of 2022. Its environmental impact has surely also been negative, as it increases commuter distances—and hence carbon emissions—for those living outside of it and must travel into the city by car.

Boulder’s high housing prices and progressive politics made the city an ideal opportunity for the Yimbys, while the region’s house-rich environmentalists did not garner much sympathy. And so in 2015 the Yimbys easily defeated a ballot referendum that sought to give Boulder neighborhoods “veto power over land use.” It was, Mr. Holleran tells us, “a tremendous win for Yimbys in a city where voting on development mostly goes the other way.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

PG notes that there are still vast portions of the United States that feature land with very few inhabitants. Ironically, the population of many parts of rural America has been and is in long-term decline. The US equivalent of Britain’s country villages is crumbling in a great many places.

PG understands the economic and social forces causing people to leave rural areas and move to urban areas are an example of individuals making decisions in their own economic best interests, but in a nation filled with high-speed internet connections, he has yet to see very many large commercial enterprises decide to give up on offices that place employees into close physical proximity with each other. Even if the downtown core of a major city goes into decline, one or more nearby suburban areas start sprouting high-rise offices or suburban campuses where employees are expected to show up on a regular basis.

The COVID lockdowns in the US started a significant portion of the working population who had worked in office environments to begin working from home offices. Based upon what PG has read, now that COVID has declined, a lot of bosses have decided they want to have the worker bees concentrated in one place where face-to-face management may be conducted. A larger number of worker bees than expected have said they’re not going to do so.

PG suggests there is an age factor also at work. When he was young, PG enjoyed living in and visiting large cities quite a lot. Now, not so much. High-rises don’t make his heart go pitty-pat anymore.

One of the nice perks of being a successful indie author is that you can live and work in a place you enjoy being. You walk to work and Amazon doesn’t require you to ever show up at its offices.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Even as many in the world’s public-health community keep ratcheting up the alarm about the high transmissibility of the BA.5 variant of the coronavirus COVID-19, the problems of a mistrust in science are everywhere: Bare, unmasked faces fill crowded indoor settings; numbers on vaccinations and booster shots lag behind where they should be; lame excuses about “COVID fatigue” are never far behind if you point out to someone that the pandemic isn’t over.

. . . .

The basis for mistrust may go much farther than issues of diversity in the research ranks, too. During pandemic-era assaults on science by political personalities–and widespread disinformation on social-media channels–one of the virus’ major revelations has been just how science-averse many people are, with varying degrees of intensity from one international book market to the next. From Novak Djokovic’s deportation from Australia to the current reticence of many parents to allow young children to be vaccinated, even with full official approval, the

In “Why We Must Rebuild Trust in Science” at Pew Research in February, Sudlip Parikh wrote, “The COVID-19 pandemic will not be the last time that science will be essential to society’s triumph over existential threats. Addressing future public health concerns, such as climate change, food and water insecurity, and other challenges—some of which are yet to emerge—will require the long-term integration of science into policymaking in ways that have only been temporary in the past.”

Trust, Parikh write, is “absolutely critical to the success of our mission to improve the human condition.” And on Monday (July 11), the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a new paper from three researchers at Ohio State examining “Why Are People Anti-Science, and What Can We Do About It?”

. . . .

This is the real debate behind the Amsterdam-based Elsevier’s “Confidence in Research” program, announced today (July 13) by the publisher, a collaboration with the UK’s Economist Impact.  What the project’s work does is look at the internal element of this debate–the way researchers themselves see the field, their work in it, and  the deficiencies that might limit trust.

Elsevier Research’s announcement today says that the project is to be focused on two questions:

• What should change before the next crisis, the next pandemic? How should our experience with COVID inform future communications around science?
• How has the pandemic affected the academic research community?

. . . .

In a prepared statement, Anne Kitson, senior vice-president and managing director of Cell Press and The Lancet, is quoted, saying, “This work builds on our long-standing collaboration with Elsevier to support initiatives that improve understanding of research quality and accessible findings.

“If researchers have questions about the reliability of research on which to build, then these are also questions for the public and how we more broadly place confidence in findings.

“We are looking to this initiative to provide more of an evidence base on which initiatives can be developed and benchmarked.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The American Bar Association:

There is always a political element to public health decisions or, more broadly, public policy decisions that draw on science. Such decisions involve not only scientific data but also debates about how to allocate resources—and resources are always limited—and how to balance different values. But real problems arise when the decisions are not based on a shared factual foundation, or when the science used to describe and assess the situation is politicized. Such politicization of the science around vaccines, for example, can lead to decisions that directly increase the rates and harms of diseases, with potentially deadly consequences.

The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States was politicized relatively early, which made responding to the pandemic challenging. Politicization was not, of course, the only issue. The tricky nature of the infection, which can be transmitted before or without symptoms, public health messaging failures or errors, and previous underfunding of public health infrastructure all contributed to the United States’ failed response—resulting in the United States having a disproportionately high rate of both COVID-19 cases and deaths compared to other countries. But politicization had a role. For example, there is evidence that the Trump administration, concerned about the political impacts of the pandemic, put pressure on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to change not only the guidance it provided but also the scientific reports used by public health officials and other policymakers to make decisions. There is, again, an appropriate role for politics in making decisions in a pandemic situation. But manipulating the scientific evidence on which decisions are made can undermine the ability of politicians of all orientations to make decisions that match values.

. . . .

Traditionally, vaccines have not been a partisan issue. In the 1960s and 1970s, all states—with a variety of political views—adopted school immunization requirements for a variety of diseases. In the early 2000s, both left-leaning California and right-leaning Texas offered very easy-to-get exemptions from those school mandates. At the other extreme, left-leaning New York used a relatively hard-to-get religious exemption, and West Virginia never offered a non-medical exemption, while Mississippi’s religious exemption was struck down by its Supreme Court in 1979 and never revived. 

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to protect the vaccine supply by creating a no-fault program that provided limited liability protections to vaccine manufacturers—though with reservations. The bill was supported by other members of his administration (though opposed by civil servants in the Department of Justice) after being drafted by a Democrat chair of a congressional committee.

. . . .

In the past few years, struggles around vaccine mandates have become politicized. In many states—including Maine, California, Colorado, Connecticut, and New York—votes on laws regarding school vaccine mandates were along party lines. School vaccine mandates are not just about science; they involve a discussion of values and address views about the balance of parental rights with public health. But the discussion in legislatures often drew on conflicting views of the science. More often than not, opponents of bills aiming to change mandates (not all from one party) echoed or repeated misleading claims made by the anti-vaccine movement. For example, speaking about a bill that would have required doctors to give parents seeking to vaccinate the CDC’s excipient list, Republican Senator Bob Hall from Texas expressed inaccurate statements about vaccines ingredients, for example alleging vaccines contain “fetal parts” and expressing concerns about aluminum in vaccines. The first comment refers, inaccurately, to the fact that a small number of vaccines use viruses grown on cells descended—at long remove—from fetal cells deriving from abortions performed in the 1960s. The remoteness convinces even the most of pro-life commenters that using these vaccines to prevent harm is morally permissible and does not create complicity with abortions. But that is not how anti-vaccine groups present it, including to supporting legislators. As to aluminum, many vaccines contain tiny amounts of aluminum salts to help the vaccine work better—but extensive data supports the experts’ consensus that these tiny amounts of aluminum salts, far smaller than what we are exposed to through food, are not a danger.

In these cases, it is hard not to see the position as the result of misinformation legislators were provided by the anti-vaccine movement rather than a value choice. School mandates work; they reduce rates of outbreaks in the state. When legislators are led to weaken them because of anti-vaccine claims, they may be inadvertently causing direct harm to their constituents—without intending to.

Link to the rest at The American Bar Association

PG notes that politicized science is virtually always a threat to the quality of scientific research and the recommendations that politically-appointed professionals and politicians provide with respect to preventative activities or treatments are sometimes difficult to isolate from the influence of powerful non-scientific interests.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the 1953 movie Shane, there is a clear contrast between good and evil, the hard-working farm families and the greedy cattlemen who own the political power and are willing to employ violent means to get their way. The farmers aren’t really prepared for such a battle, but Shane, the mysterious man from the mountains, reluctantly meets violence with violence and wins the day for the good guys.

How does this relate to writers and publishers? The bad guys are seizing power and imposing their distortions of good and evil on creativity and informative thought with the power of book banning and censorship in schools. It’s a not-so-subtle form of violence.

The writers and thinkers, the publishers and agents? They are not gunslingers. Most writers and teachers—despite the insane proposal to arm teachers in rooms full of adolescents and young children—are not people who spend hours conniving, distorting, and threatening anyone who is not of like mind.

Make no mistake. There are writers who have come from police work à la Joe Wambaugh, and writers like Hemingway who enjoyed physical confrontations and challenges, as well as those who are hunters and even gun enthusiasts, but farming, like writing, is an all-consuming activity. Novelists spend most of their time alone with their characters and thoughts. Most depend on Shane to, in the end, protect and save them.

It’s not that we don’t want to get our hands dirty or we lack the courage; it’s that these new threats have all come in a storm of surprise. Many of us are so entranced with our own work that we don’t look out the window, much less keep up with the drumbeat of depressing and dangerous news. Libraries fighting for survival seems almost like science fiction.

But what if we pull up the shades and/or turn on the news anyway? Who is Shane for the publishing world?

He’s the politician who will stand up and challenge the book burners and would-be censors, the governor who remembers being excited by his teacher who presented a thrilling new idea. These are men and women with Shane-like courage, and we writers, publishers, and agents are looking toward the mountain, hoping they’ll arrive and save the day. Some of us are even eating popcorn and waiting for the movie to start. This is dangerous.

When America was developing—well into the last portion of the 20th century—it was moving in the direction of the farmers. Censorship and book banning was consistently challenged and defeated. You could cite such cases as Tinker v. Des Moines School District, which ruled that neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Check the decisions in Todd v. Rochester Community Schools in 1972, or Rosenberg v. Board of Education, which upheld the right to read The Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist. We all grew complacent disbelieving they could come back. We came too far, surely, to turn back.

But the bad guys have returned. Is there any doubt that they’ll be after Huckleberry Finn again, especially with this anti-critical-race-theory nonsense? When Huck decides to help Jim escape slavery and says, “Aw right, I’ll go to hell,” he really believes it. It makes him the most courageous American hero, and we can lose him and the lessons in an instant. Yet right now, Shane has not come out of the mountains.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG notes, as he has before, that he doesn’t necessarily agree with every item he excerpts in TPV. He also cautions against “the good old days” view of history. There are some things that are very much better about 2022 than there were in 1962, 72, 82 and 92.

In Congress, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

---

Georgia

• Button Gwinnett
• Lyman Hall
• George Walton

North Carolina

• William Hooper
• Joseph Hewes
• John Penn

South Carolina

• Edward Rutledge
• Thomas Heyward, Jr.
• Thomas Lynch, Jr.
• Arthur Middleton

Massachusetts

• John Hancock

Maryland

• Samuel Chase
• William Paca
• Thomas Stone
• Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia

• George Wythe
• Richard Henry Lee
• Thomas Jefferson
• Benjamin Harrison
• Thomas Nelson, Jr.
• Francis Lightfoot Lee
• Carter Braxton

Pennsylvania

• Robert Morris
• Benjamin Rush
• Benjamin Franklin
• John Morton
• George Clymer
• James Smith
• George Taylor
• James Wilson
• George Ross

Delaware

• Caesar Rodney
• George Read
• Thomas McKean

New York

• William Floyd
• Philip Livingston
• Francis Lewis
• Lewis Morris

New Jersey

• Richard Stockton
• John Witherspoon
• Francis Hopkinson
• John Hart
• Abraham Clark

New Hampshire

• Josiah Bartlett
• William Whipple

Massachusetts

• Samuel Adams
• John Adams
• Robert Treat Paine
• Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island

• Stephen Hopkins
• William Ellery

Connecticut

• Roger Sherman
• Samuel Huntington
• William Williams
• Oliver Wolcott

New Hampshire

• Matthew Thornton

From The National Archives

From I-D:

[B]ooks are markers of taste and self-expression. Picking which books to go on your shelf – or Insta story – is akin to picking out what to wear. TikTok, Instagram and Goodreads are full of ‘hot-girl book’ lists, but when exactly did reading become such a hot pastime? Noughties romcoms would have you believe that being cool and reading books are mutually exclusive, with the hot popular kids teasing the ones who spent lunch breaks with their noses between pages. The tables have since turned, however, with books becoming yet another means to present our most curated selves online through the culture we consume. Ergo, if you read ‘hot-girl books’ then you must be hot.

On the runway, designers are interpreting this trend through a sartorial lens. In recent seasons, we’ve seen fashion’s bibliophiles turn to both classic and contemporary literature for inspiration. Ottessa Moshfegh took up the mantle of fashion’s favourite novelist for AW22, making her runway debut at Maryam Nassir Zadeh’s NYFW show as well as writing a short story to accompany the show notes at Proenza Schouler. Meanwhile, Jonathan Anderson’s AW22 Loewe show featured a voiceover reciting Sylvia Plath’s poem Fever 103°. For SS22, the designer released three JW Anderson capsules inspired by the quote, “the secret of life is in art,” from one of literature’s fashion luminaries, Oscar Wilde.

Bookworm Kim Jones is no stranger to introducing literary codes to collections at both Fendi and Dior. For Dior Men AW22, he looked to Jack Kerouac’s beat classic On The Road, unfurling the original transcript along the runway with the stamp of approval from Kerouac’s estate. Previously, the creative director drew from Virginia Woolf for Fendi Couture SS21 in a collection inspired by school trips to Charleston Farmhouse, a beloved retreat of the Bloomsbury Set of which Woolf was a part. Elsewhere, Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli enlisted 17 renowned authors — including André Aciman, Leïla Slimani and Emily Ratajkowski — to create campaign layouts featuring their writing; and thirsty Parisian menswear label Louis Gabriel Nouchi has named each of his collections after a seminal French novel. To put it simply, literary interests have never been so in. Books tell us where we are, where we were and where we’ll be, so it’s no surprise they serve as an endless pool of inspiration for the fashion world.

Link to the rest at I-D

PG reminds one and all that he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he posts on TPV.

From The Wall Street Journal:

We have heard so much about vaccines in the past 18 months that we may not welcome still more. But “Moonshot: Inside Pfizer’s Nine-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible” is well worth looking at closely. Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, boasts of saving millions of lives while restoring the otherwise tarnished image of the pharmaceutical industry. Yet his victory lap races by a hard truth: Covid-19 continues to cause disruption and challenge our confidence in science.

To be fair, the number of new cases did decline by 85% during the first few months after the vaccines hit the market in December 2020. But when cases hit a low point, in February 2021, only about 5% of the U.S. population had been vaccinated. Although it is easy to blame recent surges on the people who decided not to get vaccinated, current data show that states with the highest vaccination rates also have the most cases, hospitalizations and deaths. (Because hot spots move around, such statistical profiles change from month to month.) The current wave of new cases is hitting the unvaccinated, vaccinated and boosted alike. This is not to say that vaccines don’t work. They do reduce the severity of infection, but they haven’t delivered the promised herd immunity that would end the pandemic.

Pfizer’s ability to develop, test and distribute a vaccine in less than a year is, without doubt, a stunning accomplishment, and Mr. Bourla is right to feel proud. But he overdoes it, dropping the names of the presidents, prime ministers and world leaders who have sought his counsel. At times, he praises his colleagues and advisers, yet often in a context that shows them being subservient to the CEO. He quotes Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s former prime minister, who relays a long-ago comment from his brother (who led the 1976 Entebbe Raid and was killed in action): “There are not good or bad soldiers. There are only good or bad commanders.” Mr. Bourla seems to take this maxim to heart.

Mr. Bourla stresses the importance—for Pfizer and, in general, for the battle against Covid—of high ethical standards, complete transparency and trust in science. Yet “Moonshot” shows, sometimes inadvertently, the difficulty of meeting these admirable goals. Well into the pandemic, in March 2021, Mr. Bourla canceled a trip to advise Israeli researchers. Why? Because Israel denied entry to anyone who was not one week beyond his second Covid jab. That’s right, one of the most prominent vaccine promoters in the world wasn’t fully vaccinated at the time. “Getting vaccinated had created a crisis of confidence for me,” Mr. Bourla writes. “I chose to wait until my vaccination might be used to encourage those with vaccine hesitancy later on.” Does this claim meet a high ethical standard? Mr. Bourla thinks so; others might not. An aghast Mr. Netanyahu said to him: “My wife, who is sitting next to me, is asking when you plan to vaccinate yourself. What shall I tell her?”

How transparent has Pfizer been? In the book’s more than 200 pages, one topic is not explored in any real depth—side effects. Although the vaccine is generally regarded as safe, side effects do appear to be more common—and perhaps more severe—than for other widely used vaccines. In the 2020 clinical trial that provided the basis for FDA emergency-use authorization, more than 83% of 18- to 55-year-old participants (in comparison with 14% of those injected with a placebo) reported arm pain after their first shot, and approximately a third had a fever in reaction to their second (in contrast to less than 1% for a placebo). More serious side effects, like myocarditis, are rare, but they happen slightly more often following vaccination. Mr. Bourla might have paused to address the concerns of those who worry about side effects, if only to put the matter in proper perspective.

Mr. Bourla asserts that, ultimately, “science will win.” Who could argue with that? The problem is that science is a process that works best when research findings are peer-reviewed and when calculations are verified by independent scientists with no vested interest in a commercial product. Pfizer skipped this step. Instead it used internally controlled trials and first made the results public through highly curated press releases that showed its evidence in the best light. “In the past,” Mr. Bourla explains, “politicians and governments would pressure us to share data and learnings more quickly than we were comfortable.” This time, he says, Pfizer held off on sharing data lest it fuel a counternarrative. Even now, Pfizer has not released data that would allow independent scientists to verify its analyses. If the evidence is in the public interest, shouldn’t the data be in the public domain?

At a Dec. 10, 2020, hearing on emergency-use authorization, conducted by the Food and Drug Administration, several of the presentations and a number of comments from the general public raised concerns about how long vaccine protection would last. But the one clinical trial used to justify the authorization followed participants for only two months, and Pfizer was so confident of the vaccine’s durable benefit that it vaccinated the placebo group, calling the decision the only “ethical” option. By June 2021, however, Pfizer understood that protection against infection declines after only a few months. When it acknowledged this fact, Mr. Bourla says, officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and at the FDA feared that the disclosure would provoke more vaccine hesitancy. Perhaps it did. But it also helped Pfizer gain the authorization and public financing for a third dose.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

At the peak of his fame, Elvis Presley was perhaps the most recognisable individual on the planet. Just as you may conjure Charlie Chaplin in your mind’s eye using only a bowler hat, a toothbrush moustache and a cane, it is easy to picture Presley with no more than a quiff, a curled lip and a high collar. He remains sufficiently alive in the cultural memory to be a mononym: nobody ever asks, “Elvis, who?” Yet Presley has faded from the forefront of the world’s collective consciousness. Reminders of his existence are no longer constant and inescapable.

Perhaps that is inevitable given he died almost 45 years ago, in August 1977, while his contemporaries of a similar stature have continued performing. More than 50 years after their split, the Beatles have retained much of their eminence: consider, for example, that Paul McCartney is headlining Glastonbury festival this year. Bob Dylan, a Nobel laureate in 2016, is earning plaudits for his latest work. The Rolling Stones are in the midst of a stadium tour. All those acts, or their principal members, have had the advantage of living on long after Presley died. John Lennon is an exception: he died only three years after Presley, yet is frequently invoked and commemorated.

Presley may be the bestselling solo artist of all time, but that feat leans heavily on the physical-format era. He ranks only 24th on Spotify’s streaming chart of legacy artists, behind other departed acts including Nirvana, 2Pac and Led Zeppelin. What is more telling is how relatively little he is seen. In the 1990s he was, in that overused and misapplied word, iconic: an object of what amounted to religious worship. He was also a go-to reference for cartoons, film and television scripts and comedy punchlines. Elvis impersonators were an industry: a film of 1992, “Honeymoon In Vegas”, featured an entire planeload of them dropping from the sky on parachutes in a symbolic display of both the singer’s godlike ubiquity and his descent into caricature.

A new film not only seeks to place Presley front and centre once again but also, if inadvertently, offers clues as to why he lost that spotlight in the first place. “Elvis” is directed with typical over-the-top brio by Baz Luhrmann. The Australian film-maker has a noted flair for lavish yet sincere camp and it chimes perfectly with Presley’s own sensibility, which could be gaudy and overblown, but was never less than heartfelt. It is this last quality that Mr Luhrmann has sought to restore to a superstar who became widely perceived as a self-parodic joke in his later years and even more so in his cultural afterlife.

“Elvis” is three different films brought together into a whole that, while unwieldy, is spectacular to look at and not for a moment boring (again, much like Presley himself.) One part is an exploration of the relationship between Presley and his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Parker was a former carnival worker who used every bit of that job’s manipulative tradecraft to promote and exploit Presley. In a delicious turn by Tom Hanks, Parker is a melodrama villain and an unreliable narrator.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Here’s a link to the movie’s trailer

From The Wall Street Journal:

If you’ve attended any classical-music concert in the past 50 years, you’re likely to have heard a technically superior performance of old music, and no new music at all that you could understand or enjoy. The situation is exactly reversed from what it was in Europe for nearly the entire history of classical music: Technical proficiency was largely unacceptable by today’s standards, but audiences heard—and expected to hear—the latest works of living composers.

What happened? The answers are many and tangled, but nearly all critics and historians who take up the “crisis of classical music,” as it’s inevitably described, sidestep or ignore the scarcity of new music that engages the public today and instead dwell on the decline in cultural pre-eminence of classical music in general. Their complaints are familiar: Concert halls are full of silver-hairs, Mozart can’t compete with rock ’n’ roll, governments have cut funding to orchestras, and so on.

But these problems, if they are problems at all, are tertiary concerns next to the near-total inability of post-World War II America and Europe to produce more than a small number of classical works that any normal person would want to hear. That failure is slowly killing classical music. You can’t expect the public to remain engaged with works of the distant past if the present doesn’t produce anything interesting. Today’s concertgoers are not antiquaries; they, too, no less than music lovers in centuries gone by, want to enjoy and rave about the latest thing. 

The great virtue of John Mauceri’s “The War on Music: Reclaiming the Twentieth Century” is that it acknowledges what many writers on the subject know but can’t say: that something went badly wrong in music in the 20th century, and especially after 1945. The time has come, Mr. Mauceri writes, “to ask why so much contemporary music played by our greatest musical institutions—and supported overwhelmingly by music critics—is music that the vast majority of people do not want to hear—and have never wanted to hear.”

Mr. Mauceri, an accomplished conductor and music scholar, blames the two world wars and the Cold War. After the cataclysm of World War II, he contends, the cultural arbiters of Europe faced a dilemma. In Austria and Germany, critics and academics could not, for obvious reasons, champion composers whom the Third Reich had elevated. But many of the composers the Nazis had declared entartete, or degenerate—Paul Hindemith, Erich Korngold, Kurt Weill, Arnold Schoenberg—had by the 1950s fled to America and were writing in a more tonal and “accessible” style. Some of them, such as Korngold and Franz Waxman, were writing film music in Hollywood—a sure way to be dismissed by the anointed.

“A simple solution was found,” Mr. Mauceri writes, “that involved a tacit agreement between the masses and the masters: Do not play any of it.” Central Europe’s musical establishment thus ignored music the Nazis banned and the music they promoted. Italy’s music critics, meanwhile, had a similar problem and took a similar approach, according to Mr. Mauceri. Opera composers “up to and including Puccini,” who died in 1924, could remain in the repertory; everything from the ’30s and ’40s had to go.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From Antigone Journal:

The common saying that history is written by the victors is of uncertain origin. Whilst it may be true that the victors in a conflict (or, at least, those with superior power) can have a stronger influence over the prevailing version of events after the fact, it is certainly not true that historical accounts only ever emanate from the victors. This is perhaps especially difficult to appreciate in an age where information is more widely available than ever, and public expression of opinion (and thus of varying versions and viewpoints) is now far more widely accessible than it has ever been.

However, on rare occasions we are still able to glimpse historical views from the ‘other’ side. One particularly interesting example of this in action is the Greek second-century BC historian, Polybius of Megalopolis. Not only was he not one of the victors, but he was an eyewitness and active player in the events he describes. He did find favour with the victors, but not immediately. It is believed he began writing his famous work of history in the 150s BC, after over ten years’ detainment in Rome. In his work, he seeks to explain the Romans’ successful rise to power to a primarily Greek audience. He dwelt among the victors (the Romans), he conversed with them, and, in the end, they in turn sought his help.

. . . .

Polybius had been making a promising career for himself in the Greek Achaean League, a federal-style organization of cities, united to maintain their freedoms against the kingdoms that arose from Alexander the Great’s splintered empire. Onto this tense stage the Romans made their first proper entrance in 229 BC against the Illyrian Ardiaeae tribe, then under the rule of queen Teuta, wife of the former king Agron. Following their victory in this encounter, the Romans were cordially welcomed and thanked by the Greek city-states of the Achaean League, even being invited to the Isthmian games by the Corinthians (Histories, 2.12.4–8).

Just over 60 years later, in 168 BC, it was a dramatically different state of affairs. Following their defeat of Perseus, king of Macedon, the Romans were the dominant power in the Mediterranean, and not just over Greece. Another consequence of the conflict was that a thousand Greek statesmen, made up primarily of men from the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, found themselves bound for Italy. They were under suspicion of collusion with Perseus, and of being in active opposition to the Roman power’s presence in the Greek world. Polybius was among them. To understand why he was in this group, how he effectively ended up on the ‘losing side’, and how his experience connects to the spread of Roman influence over the Greek world, a little further examination of the historical context is essential.

Rome and The Tensions in Greek politics (196–167 BC)

Polybius saw the Roman victory in the war against Hannibal, the Carthaginian general, as a watershed moment (202 BC). Rome’s greatest rival had been defeated, her power had been proven. Victory over Philip V of Macedon, who had made a treaty with Hannibal, followed quickly in 198 BC. Despite an apparent show of respect for Greek freedom in the Isthmian proclamation of 196, which declared key Greek cities autonomous and free from tribute, Roman presence was certainly not withdrawn from Greece. This brought the Romans into conflict with Antiochus II of the Seleucid empire, the most powerful of the surviving successor kingdoms (those which were established following the break-up of Alexander the Great’s empire). Following Antiochus’ defeat, it was abundantly clear that Roman power could be neither cast off nor ignored.

What this meant for the Greeks, and how they were to deal with this new reality, stoked the fires of debate and division across the Greek-speaking world. Polybius portrays this issue as divided  irreconcilably between roughly three camps of thought: the cautiously cooperative, though not slavish advocates (like his own father Lycrotas, hero politician Philopoemen, and, at least originally, himself); the pragmatists who believed that Roman orders should be accepted to avoid hostile reprisals (see Polybius 18.13 on the urgings of Aristaenus in the 190s, when he cast off the Achaean alliance with Philip of Macedon); and finally – the group Polybius so evidently despises – the sycophantic types who favoured embracing Roman orders and who betrayed those who were less enthusiastic for their own aggrandisement.

On an embassy to Rome, after a debate in the League about whether to follow League procedure or Roman orders, a fawner, Callicrates, offered the Roman Senate some advice. He told them, essentially, that if they wanted to secure a foothold in Greece, they should support sympathetic ‘advocates’ like himself who could silence the more recalcitrant Greeks. Following this policy seems to have worked (24.12.1–4), as direct Roman micro-management seems to have escalated after that point.

Several scholars have argued that this brought a ‘new wisdom’ or ‘new policy’ from Rome, as their more active meddling and fostering of division now affected the Greek cities.^[1] These are not, however, Polybian coinages, nor do I think they reflect his view. At 24.12, Polybius does say that the Romans adopted a new policy of promoting those Greeks who favoured them, and of undermining those whom they perceived to be more hostile to Roman interests. However, what he is highlighting is a new method in enforcing Roman orders, not a new aim in terms of securing Greek obedience.

This state of affairs persisted, and deteriorated. The Roman Senate even tried to meddle in the Macedonian succession, promoting the older son of Philip V, who was favourable to their influence, as successor. He was murdered, Perseus succeeded, and – if you believe Polybius – he inherited his father’s hatred of Rome as much as the throne (23.7–8), a hatred which ironically hastened his downfall.

What did Polybius do wrong?

Polybius was certainly not going to advocate surrendering the freedoms of his league to curry favour for himself, but he was cooperative. Yet, despite this, in 168, he was deported as a hostile collaborator. Polybius himself attributed his exile to the following incident during the Roman war against Perseus.

At 28.13, Polybius describes how, while leading, troops that the League had voted in support of the Romans against King Perseus, he arrived to meet the Roman general Marcius. This suggests he was by no means on the side of the enemy. Marcius, however, greeted him by informing him that these troops were no longer needed. Polybius makes clear that he and the Achaeans with him were anxious to emphasise their willing cooperation and acceptance of the request that had come from the Romans for these soldiers. And Polybius himself remained to assist.

A further demand for extra troops then came from the Roman commander Cento, who was in Epirus. Polybius was sent back to the Peloponnese, having been told by Marcius that Cento had no reason to make such a demand and that Polybius should prevent compliance with this unnecessary expense for the Achaeans. Upon returning, Polybius was presented again with Cento’s request in the League assembly.

This left him in something of a quandary. Should he reveal Marcius’ private instructions? If so, he would risk disloyalty to another Roman general. He decided he could not openly oppose the demand. Instead, he suggested that the assembly should consult the Roman consul before they proceeded. However, the slavish pro-Roman sycophants among the Greeks had their ammunition to attack Polybius. This sequence of events could be twisted into a tale of Polybius trying to thwart the efforts of a Roman commander (Cento) by failing to provide the assistance he had sought. Polybius might as well have been on the losing side: his loyalty to Rome was in question.

Link to the rest at Antigone Journal

From The Economist:

In modern parlance, she was a “triple threat”. Josephine Baker could act, dance and sing—and did all three at Chez Josephine, her nightclub in Paris, and in several films. After escaping the Jim Crow South, she found fame in Europe in the period between the wars and made France her adopted home. Dancing in risqué costumes, she helped Parisians remember how to enjoy themselves. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a French author, likened Baker to a “most beautiful panther”. Ernest Hemingway reckoned the performer was “the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will.”

Perhaps Baker should be considered a quadruple threat, as she also displayed a talent for spying during the second world war. She helped the Allies as an honourable correspondent of the Deuxième Bureau, or French military intelligence, ferrying secret documents across enemy lines. (She often pinned papers to her underclothes.) Whereas the typical agent receded into the shadows, fame was her cover. As she brassily declared: “Who would dare search Josephine Baker to the skin?”

Her contributions to the war effort are now reasonably well known, described in numerous biographies, television series and films. Baker received the Légion d’Honneur and a symbolic interment in the Panthéon, a monument to French national heroes. But additional files on her intelligence activities were released by the French government in 2020 and are the occasion for a new book by Damien Lewis, a popular historian. “The Flame of Resistance” (to be published as “Agent Josephine” in America) is an entertaining, if occasionally breathless, account of a true hero of the second world war.

Baker’s early missions involved helping the British and French governments divine the intentions of Italy and Japan before they joined the Axis. With her easy glamour and charm, she earned the confidence of an attaché at the Italian embassy and got him talking about Mussolini’s plans to ally with Germany. Next Baker exploited a friendship with the wife of Japan’s ambassador to France to pick up titbits about that country’s intentions. Both efforts were cited in a later war decoration.

Her most important operation was to carry a priceless cache of intelligence from Paris to Lisbon. The documents included photographs of German military equipment, lists of Abwehr agents, details on Luftwaffe airbases and plans for the German seizure of Gibraltar. Accompanying Baker was her handler—and lover—Jacques Abtey, who posed as her tour manager. Mr Lewis narrates their train rides, airplane connections and border crossings with élan. At Canfranc, where France meets Spain, Baker beguiled the station agents, who were too dazzled to search the mountain of trunks that contained documents covered in invisible ink.

Baker lent support to the Allies in other ways, too. Her chateau in the Dordogne became an informal headquarters for the Resistance during Germany’s occupation of France. When she fell ill with peritonitis later in the war, she allowed her hospital suite to be used as a dead-drop location. After recovering, she returned to the stage to perform for Allied troops across north Africa and for prisoners at the Buchenwald concentration camp after it was liberated. She often stipulated that the crowds not be segregated by race. At all stops, her signature song was “J’ai Deux Amours”, the two loves being America and Paris.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Review of The Flame of Resistance: The Untold Story of Josephine Baker’s Secret War. By Damien Lewis. Quercus; 496 pages; £21.99. To be published as “Agent Josephine: American Beauty, French Hero, British Spy” in America by PublicAffairs in July; $32

From The Wall Street Journal:

John of Gaunt is among the best-known figures from medieval England. One reason is the speech that Shakespeare gives him in “Richard II,” a hymn to England itself: “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise.” Who, in history, was the man we know mostly from his eloquence on stage?

Shakespeare calls Gaunt “time-honoured Lancaster,” a reference to the duchy that he acquired as the result of the first of his three marriages. The liaison made him, as Duke of Lancaster, the richest nobleman in 14th-century England. He was also royal-born, the third (surviving) son of Edward III and the brother of Edward, the heir apparent, who died too young to assume the throne. Edward was called the Black Prince—no one is quite sure why, perhaps it was an allusion to the color of his armor. Helen Carr’s fascinating biography of John of Gaunt is called “The Red Prince,” a coinage meant to refer, presumably, to the heraldic red rose associated with the House of Lancaster.

As Ms. Carr reminds us, England’s 14th century was turbulent, to say the least. Two kings—Gaunt’s grandfather Edward II and his nephew Richard II—were deposed and then murdered in prison. England was intermittently at war with France. The bubonic plague—the Black Death—killed at least a third of the English population. A violent peasants’ revolt erupted.

Other aspects of the period were less disturbing. Most notably, English gradually replaced French as the language of the governing class, leading to the first flowering of English literature: Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and Langland’s “Piers Plowman.” Chaucer, a government official, would become, late in life, John of Gaunt’s brother-in-law.

Maturity came early in those days. At the age of 15, Gaunt was serving in France alongside the Black Prince, who was “without doubt,” Ms. Carr says, Gaunt’s “role model.” Gaunt shared the glory of his brother’s victory at Poitiers, one of the few decisive pitched battles of the war, which was otherwise a matter of sieges and plundering raids. Exhaustion led to a treaty and a temporary peace, but war soon broke out again. By the late 1360s, the health of the Black Prince was in decline, and the king himself, Edward III, was drifting into senility. John of Gaunt became, of necessity, the pillar of the regime. He was loyal, rich and capable.

Even so, his task was formidable and at times beyond even his capacities. The taxation required to finance the French war was immensely unpopular. In 1371, Parliament became assertive, attacking the government for corruption and inefficiency. To appease the Commons, the old king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, was banished from court. According to Ms. Carr, Gaunt “was furious that the king’s dirty laundry had been aired before Parliament.” The Black Prince died in June of that year, the king a year later. The new king, Richard II, was still a child, and discontent seethed.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From Lapham’s Quarterly:

Color is among the most challenging aspects of our experience to describe. Spectrophotometers and colorimeters can quantify light waves, yet their measurements have little impact on our feeling for color. As the philosopher Zeno Vendler put it, “Vincent van Gogh loved the color yellow—and certainly not because of its wavelength.” Color is infamous for its variability in language and perception. How can we know that what we are seeing is the same as what someone else sees? How can we separate what we are seeing from the thing itself? Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in his Remarks on Colour, “Where do we draw the line here between logic and experience?” In the Remarks, written the year before his death in 1951, the philosopher’s thoughts about color invariably lead back to the study of philosophy. What things are knowable? How are they known? What can be determined through philosophical reasoning? Wittgenstein reflected, “Colors are a stimulus to philosophizing.”

Color can reveal the variety of experience in a way that few other subjects can. Vision, whether described in language or represented in paintings or film or virtual reality, is the quotidian version of locked-in syndrome. In literature and poetry, the personal nature of color perception often serves as a metaphor for other sweeping failures of communication. In everyday conversations, those stumbling, destabilizing references to a blue sweater (it’s actually black) or a green car (it’s blue, in fact) are both forgettable and earth-shattering. For some philosophers, the experience of color is most similar to that of pain: an internal state that resists quantification. But who wouldn’t rather philosophize about azure instead of aches and pains?

In the Remarks, Wittgenstein briefly considered color in photography, though he was quick to note that his example was “not a color photograph.” For someone born in 1889, color photography was still an exception to the rule. Wittgenstein describes but does not name an image of a scene in a machine shop. In it, he saw “a man with dark hair and a boy with slicked-back blond hair standing in front of a kind of lathe, which is made in part of castings painted black.” “What does it mean,” he asks, “that hair looks blond in a photograph?” He identifies several types of metal in the shop—the painted castings, galvanized wire, iron, and zinc, which all seem truthfully represented by shades of gray in the photograph. But the blond hair confounds him: “How does it come out that it looks this way as opposed to our simply concluding that this is its color?” Wittgenstein seems to immediately perceive color in the black-and-white photograph, rather than logically deducing that the light-toned hair must be blond.

For Wittgenstein’s younger readers, color photography was fast becoming the norm. A 1956 color film booklet enthused: “The lifelike beauty, the realism, the high-fidelity color quality that you get with your camera and Anscochrome Film will give you endless satisfaction. For you will not only record but actually reproduce and re-create the original beauty and sparkle of the subject in the finest form for future enjoyment.” As color photographic processes proliferated so, too, did boosters’ praise for them. The most common descriptors were “natural” or “lifelike,” despite the obvious differences in color rendition between film stocks. Kodachrome appears blocky to contemporary viewers, offering a limited dynamic range and low contrast. Fujifilm is known for its vivid greens. Polaroid instant color prints can seem milky and unsharp. All were touted as “natural.”

Photographers’ studios have added color to photographs by hand since the medium’s earliest days. Three of the first five U.S. patents related to photography described methods to add color to the monochrome process. Painters employed by photography studios added everything from a subtle blush tint to the lips and cheeks or dabs of gold to jewelry to create radically overpainted images. While the public apparently clamored for colored photographs, critics were unconvinced. Their most common charge was that by painting over the image, less skilled photographers could cover up their errors—and the truth of the original photograph.

In comparison, mechanical color processes promised to amplify photography’s authenticity. They did not rely on the artist’s hand to add color after the fact. Some mechanical color processes, such as the French Autochrome, were available to professionals in the early twentieth century. But color photography became a widespread possibility only in the mid-1930s with the invention of Kodachrome film, first made available for 16 mm motion pictures in 1935 and for 35 mm still cameras the following year. Technicolor film stock was introduced in 1932. It was critically praised in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, which used the transition from black-and-white to color film to dramatize the shift from Dorothy’s reality in Kansas to the fantastical world of Oz. Technicolor, with its vibrant, highly saturated colors, was celebrated as better than the real thing.

Kodachrome and other films designed for the still photography market instead claimed faithfulness to reality. One very early instruction manual promised that “the introduction of Kodachrome has placed in the hands of the nonprofessional user a color medium which will reproduce color with almost perfect fidelity.” A spate of how-to books accompanied the new technology, offering instructions on everything from exposure and printing to “how to see color.” These included warnings about using “color for color’s sake” or including so many colorful elements in the frame that it became, in one Kodak editor’s words, “a veritable ‘color hash.’ ” Another author cautioned against making a very specific, but apparently ubiquitous, picture: “We are not particularly interested in a beautiful girl clad in a brilliant red bathing suit playing with an equally brilliant blue, yellow, and green beachball.”

Professional photographers remained skeptical of color film. In instructional guides, they qualified the manufacturers’ claims about natural color. A photographer for the American Museum of Natural History explained in 1941 that Kodachrome “has no subjective reactions. What it sees is not colored by previous knowledge or experience. When the color film sees grass, it doesn’t insist, as we are so apt to, that all grass is green. It may see brown grass or blue grass or other colors that look all wrong to us in the processed film.” Notable photographers, including Berenice Abbott and Louis Stettner, also took care to point out that humans and film “see” color differently. Abbott suggested that some of the difference lay in our past experiences: “When we judge the color photograph, we not only think of how the subject looked in nature, but we also remember how painters throughout the centuries have rendered similar objects. The color photograph has to satisfy a double standard—fidelity to real life and a recognizable approximation to traditional art.” These caveats beg the question: Which color is natural? What we’ve trained ourselves to see or what is out there in the world?

By the 1960s color film dominated the amateur market as well as the movies. Color negative film became available for Kodak’s easy-to-use Instamatic camera in 1963; Polaroid debuted instant color prints the same year. Snapshots in color offered a broad swath of viewers some of their first apparently objective experiences of light, uninfluenced by the brain’s adjustments. The new film, which was initially color balanced for daylight, could not make the perceptual changes that we do when we see objects in different types of light. We think of an apple as being the same color whether we look at it on a tree or on display in a grocery store. When asked to draw an apple, a child will seldom stop to inquire where that apple appears: Indoors or out? Under warm or cool light? But, as physicists will eagerly tell you, color is merely the product of reflected light. An apple doesn’t possess the color red; it reflects red wavelengths while absorbing others. We see the reflected light. But which colors are reflected is also determined by which colors are present in the light. Film prepared to respond to the color temperature of bright sunlight (6500 Kelvin) makes the lower temperatures of incandescent lights appear orange, while fluorescent bulbs render the scene markedly green. An apple is never simply red.

. . . .

Although the changing colors of sunlight had been amplified by Impressionist painters of the late nineteenth century—think of Monet’s snowy haystacks in periwinkle dawn or the Aperol orange of his Rouen Cathedral at sunset—these strange visions now began appearing in amateur snapshots. A 1962 Kodak manual recommended the warm tones of sunset and sunrise for dramatic landscapes but cautioned that they were inappropriate for portraits. The reddish light would render the family like a pot of “boiled lobsters,” according to the author, evidently thinking only of the effect on light skin tones. Similarly, the popular how-to author Fred Bond wrote of photographing during those forbidden hours, “If flesh tones appear badly ‘sunburned,’ do not blame Kodachrome. It recorded what it saw.” During this period color film privileged not only bright, white sunlight but also white skin. Kodak film labs and at-home printers used a company-provided color chart that featured a photograph of a white model, designating white skin as “normal.” Owing to the limited tonal range of color film at the time, when photographers exposed and developed for the light end of the spectrum, darker tones fell into shadow, leaving no detail or tonal gradations.

. . . .

Long before the invention of photography, natural scientists, artists, and craftspeople had struggled to communicate about color. Although Japanese artists had been creating multicolor woodblock prints since the mid-eighteenth century, printing in the West largely relied on a secondary process of hand coloring until the rise of chromolithography in the late nineteenth century. Some disciplines, such as heraldry, established notational systems to specify color in monochromatic prints. Engravers used different styles of hash marks to indicate the colors used in coats of arms. Sometimes engravings and woodblock prints were colored by teams of colorists before their sale, but others were colored by their owners, according to their own preferences or interpretations.

Link to the rest at Lapham’s Quarterly

PG notes that any photographer who takes more than a handful of photos has had the experience of being disappointed because the colors in the photo are not those the photographer saw when she/he pressed the shutter button.

PG couldn’t resist linking to Paul Simon’s Kodachrome.

From The Economist:

Sometime in the early autumn of 1944 Mimi Weitmann, as she then was, added her name to a list. She thought she would take the risk. Unfortunately she had to use the horrible first name, Carmen, which her opera-loving father had given her; “Mimi”, from “La Bohème”, was the much nicer nickname they settled on later. Sadly, too, she had to add the surname of her dead husband, Yozsi Weitmann, her love since university, who had been shot by the Germans at the gate of the Krakow ghetto as he had tried to escape.

That had happened in 1942. She had been widowed in her 20s, left with a baby son, Sasha, whom she and Yozsi had managed to smuggle to Hungary with her grandmother. She was very uncertain when, or even whether, she would see either of them again. As she typed “Carmen Weitmann”, there seemed to be nothing left of herself. Her old life as carefree Mimi, in a Vienna where Jews were integrated and the word “Aryan” unnecessary, was too long ago and far away. She was now in a blank place, among the dead.

At least she was no longer in the ghetto, which had been liquidated anyway, with those too ill or old to work simply shot in the street. She was in the Plaszow labour camp, to which most of Krakow’s Jews had now been moved. There were horrors in Plaszow, too: a small child killed for refusing to take off his clothes, the digging of a mass-grave which was also meant to be hers. But she was given a relatively sheltered desk-job because, being Austrian, her German was perfect, and because she had learned shorthand from a stenography course. Not that these were much use for taking down and typing up—as she was tasked to—a list that eventually ran to 1,200 names.

The list had been growing for a while. At first it had around 1,000 names, those of the Jews who worked in Oskar Schindler’s German Enamel Factory in Krakow. Then it got longer. It was added to by Mietek Pemper, secretary to Amon Goeth, the vicious camp commandant, and by Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant. Then Schindler himself (and his wife) contributed yet more, the relatives and friends of his employees and, it seemed, anyone he could think of. She typed them up as he asked her. In the end there were at least seven versions, possibly even nine, and her job was to make each one presentable.

Every name was Jewish (with “Ju.” typed before it), even though Schindler was not. These were meant to be essential workers in his factory, which he was going to move from Plaszow (where it had moved from Krakow) westward to Brünnlitz, in his native Sudetenland, and repurpose to make arms. But as Mimi typed the date-of-birth column she could see there were children on it, and as she typed the “skills” column she could spot photographers and rabbis among the metalworkers, so something else was clearly going on. Even her own qualification, Schreibkraft, “typist”, looked odd, especially as she added it with two slow fingers. Typing was something she had never learned.

She did not have much direct contact with Schindler, but liked him as a boss. He was charming and outgoing, and treated his Jewish workers kindly, not like scum. Perhaps even too kindly, for he was a great womaniser, with several pretty secretaries besides her, and got into trouble once for kissing a Jewish girl on the cheek at his birthday party. Maybe she was there because he liked her cool blonde elegance, rather than her mind. She knew, too, that he was very rich, and struck deals with the Nazi high-ups all the time by bribing them with black-market luxuries to get better conditions and more food for “his” Jews, as he called them. But that sounded patronising as well as protective, as if they were just cogs in his factory, since Jewish slave-labour was cheap. She also could not forget that he was a thoroughgoing Nazi, an ss man, who sometimes spent whole nights carousing with the officers.

In short, her boss was no angel. And there was something chilling about the list, with its constant repetition of number, race, name, skill. Perhaps he did not mean to save “his” Jews after all, but simply move them to another camp, a fatal one. His closeness to Goeth, though it was tactical, was worrying. Some people, she knew, had refused to let their names be put on the list for those reasons. She decided, though, that she would trust him. She added her name partly to be useful to him, by swelling the numbers. Then she added three friends as well.

That was a gamble, and for one terrifying moment she seemed to have bet the wrong way. Three hundred of the women and girls on the list, including her, were transferred by mistake to Auschwitz, where they endured two weeks that reminded her (from her language-and-literature studies) of Dante’s “Inferno”. With even more bribery, and threats too, Schindler got them out. In the end the list and the transfers worked, and everyone was saved.

She restarted her life then, moving to Morocco, marrying Albert Reinhard, reclaiming her son and settling first in New York, which she loved, and then in her 90s in Israel. Of the time with Schindler, and the list, she said little or nothing over those years. When Steven Spielberg’s film appeared in 1993 she was invited, with the other Schindlerjuden, to the premiere, but left before the screening. The memory was still too fresh. When at last she felt able to see it, she approved of the casting but not of the prisoners. They were too well-dressed, not demeaned in rags.

Link to the rest at The Economist

Ms. Reinhard died on April 22, 2022, in Israel, at the age of 107.

Additional obituaries can be found in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

From The Literary Hub:

Like William Faulkner or Thomas Hardy, and not unlike the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Edith Wharton loved some milieus too much for just one story. In its setting and characters, The Old Maid is quintessential Wharton, the New York-born author who wrote fifteen novels and novellas and became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Today she is most closely identified with the upper-class, hermetically sealed New York of her childhood and young adulthood, which she sharply indicted in The House of Mirth (1905) and satirized more gently in The Age of Innocence (1920).

Few realize that she wrote even more stories set in Gilded Age Manhattan. Indeed, Wharton summoned up the lost world of her childhood almost compulsively as an adult, long after she resettled as an expatriate in France. Edith Newbold Jones was born in 1862 into a grand New York family related to the Astors and van Rensselaers. As a novelist, she was a late bloomer. She wrote a number of poems and stories during her itinerant childhood in the U.S. and Europe, but her work was sidelined by her society debut at age seventeen and, a few years later, a long and miserable marriage with a Boston Brahmin named Teddy Wharton.

. . . .

The Old Maid, first published in 1924, was part of a four-novella collection called Old New York, which dedicates a story to each decade from the 1840s through the 1870s. They are set among the same mercantile elite of Dutch and English families as is The Age of Innocence, and their casts of characters sport familiar surnames like Archer and Van Degen, creating a sort of Yoknapatawpha on the Hudson. The Old Maid takes place a generation before the famous 1870s love triangle among Newland Archer, Ellen Olenska, and May Welland.

A couple of minor characters have roles in both novella and novel: Mrs. Manson Mingott is a convention-defying aunt instead of a convention-defying grandmother, and Sillerton Jackson, The Age of Innocence’s gossip-loving old man, is prefigured as The Old Maid’s bachelor-about-town.

And yet these surface similarities are a little misleading. The exquisite drama of The Age of Innocence revolves, above all, around characters yearning to be free: free from their custom-bound society, and free to follow passion over duty. “Women ought to be free—as free as we are,” Newland proclaims. His love interest, Countess Olenska, is equally given to statements like, “I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past.” Of course, they can’t be free in those ways, and Wharton ultimately breaks up the would-be lovers with stylish, genteel, epigrammatic finality.

The word “free” never appears in The Old Maid. Its two main characters, Delia Ralston and Charlotte Lovell, don’t want to be free from their imbroglio, their society, or each other. Their predicament is a thorny one – and rather more risqué than what one might expect of this author in this milieu. (The Ladies Home Journal politely rejected the story for being “a bit too vigorous;” it was only published after the success of Innocence.) Charlotte has an illegitimate baby with an artistic dilettante and can’t bring herself to abandon the child to an orphanage. She pleads with her wealthy, married, older cousin, Delia, to support baby Tina, which she agrees to do—if, and only if, Charlotte breaks off her high-society engagement to become the titular old maid. To top it off, the father of Charlotte’s child was once the (chaste) love of Delia’s life.

The novella spans twenty years, from Charlotte’s pregnancy to the eve of Tina’s marriage. Delia and Charlotte each have intense maternal feelings for Tina: one biological but secret and the other based on both affectionate proximity and long-ago passion.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

From History.com:

Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. Memorial Day 2022 will occur on Monday, May 30.

Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Many Americans observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries or memorials, holding family gatherings and participating in parades. Unofficially, it marks the beginning of the summer season.

. . . .

The Civil War, which ended in the spring of 1865, claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history and required the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries.

By the late 1860s, Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.

It is unclear where exactly this tradition originated; numerous different communities may have independently initiated the memorial gatherings. And some records show that one of the earliest Memorial Day commemorations was organized by a group of formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina less than a month after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865.

. . . .

Decoration Day

On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed.

. . . .

On the first Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Civil War soldiers buried there.

Many Northern states held similar commemorative events and reprised the tradition in subsequent years; by 1890 each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Southern states, on the other hand, continued to honor the dead on separate days until after World War I.

Link to the rest at History.com

From The Nation:

fter years of dominating American capitalism by grinding workers into the dust, Amazon is on a hot losing streak, and it’s absolutely invigorating to watch. If the Amazon Labor Union had only organized workers in a blowout vote on Staten Island, it would’ve been enough. And if Amazon had only spent $4.3 million fighting them just to fail, it would’ve been enough. But, dayenu! A judge also just threw out the company’s motion to dismiss a case of race- and gender-based discrimination filed by a corporate worker, too!

Except it’s not actually enough.

Until a few weeks ago, the last time I bought anything on Amazon was in 2017. Then my vet told me that I had to get special diagnostic strips to monitor the sugar content of my cat’s urine (long story). When I asked her if I could just buy them at my local pharmacy, she sent me a link to Amazon, where I could get them delivered in two days for $16. I clicked. Immediately, I felt the anger and guilt that comes with trying to be a person of conscience in a culture of pathological convenience. And I felt foolish for imagining that ethical consumerism can do anything other than temporarily assuage those feelings. The fact that The New York Times uses Amazon Web Services—something it’s disclosed while also publishing exposés about Amazon’s atrocious labor practices—doesn’t stop me from reading the paper of record. Zephyr Teachout calls it the “too big to boycott” trap in her most recent book, Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. Beyond being futile, she writes, symbolically avoiding mega-­corporations is also masturbatory: “The ‘vote with your feet’ model has a lot of appeal, in that it allows people to import virtuousness into their lives without the struggle of organizing and building a coalition.”

Chris Smalls, who was fired by Amazon following his organizing efforts in Staten Island, has done that hard work. That includes appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show to speak to the masses of old white people mainlining the signature Fox blend of racism and Reaganomics, a move that was seen as controversial by some on the left. Charlotte Newman—the head of Underrepresented Founder Startup Business Development at AWS—tried to do the work when she sent memos and e-mails to corporate leadership outlining the steps Amazon could take to address the discrimination she faced as a Black woman in the workplace. No one ever responded to her, but David Zapolsky, the same executive who’s presumably lived to regret calling Smalls “not smart or articulate,” sent an e-mail to Amazon employees inviting them to call his cell phone and tell him how it feels to be Black in America. Derp.

Even though she’s now suing the company, Newman told me, she doesn’t recommend a boycott. “There’s this idea—could an organization be so corrupt that people shouldn’t seek employment or work with it? But I don’t see Amazon through that lens. Given the size of the company and gridlock in Congress, I don’t think we’ll see a space where Amazon ceases to exist. The more likely change that we’ll see is if consumers ask more of the company. Amazon is customer-obsessed, and I think if customers start to ask more questions about Amazon’s practices, that would move the needle more than anything.”

Walking away isn’t an option for Newman either. The first in her family to attend an Ivy League school, she told me how proud her parents were when she got a job offer from Amazon. She loved working in public service for people like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, but she also felt selfish for not pursuing a career that would better support her family. So, encouraged by management, she took the job even though it was lower-level than the one she had applied for, learning only later about the dramatic pay disparity between her and her white peers with similar qualifications. As soon as she assumed the role, she encountered shocking levels of discrimination, which left her wondering how she could spend her weekends marching for Black lives and then keep her head down during the week: “I’ve tried to keep working through the comments, low[er] pay [than white peers], being promoted slower, through the harassment. But who am I if I don’t say anything?” In essence: how to be a person of conscience at Amazon? After exhausting the internal remedies, she finally sought counsel and filed a 63-page federal complaint that details Amazon’s total disregard for equity in favor of showboating social media posts.

Link to the rest at The Nation

PG didn’t realize The Nation was still around. It’s been decades since he’s read anything from the magazine.

The OP reminds him why he hasn’t checked to see if that enterprise is still in existence or not.

PG won’t get into politics, but, suffice to say, in the United States, many unions have become very corrupt, at times associating with organized crime.

From The United States Department of Justice:

Historically, organized criminal groups such as La Cosa Nostra or the Mafia gained substantial corrupt influence, and even control, over labor unions by creating a climate of fear and intimidation among employers and union members by threats and acts of violence. Working the United States Attorney’s Offices, the Labor-Management Racketeering Unit in OCGS has assisted criminal prosecution and civil RICO lawsuits to eliminate such corrupt influence and control of labor unions and their affiliated organizations. As of 2020, the United States had obtained relief in 24 civil RICO cases involving labor organizations affiliated with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the Laborers International Union of North American (LIUNA), the former Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HEREIU), and the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA).

During the period from 2017 to 2021, the Labor-Management Racketeering Unit worked with the United States Attorney’s Office in Detroit to charge and obtain guilty pleas from the Fiat-Chrysler Association (FCA), officials of the FCA, and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union involving more than $3.5 million in illegal payments and gifts from the FCA to officials of the UAW. As a result of those and other guilty pleas involving abuse of union funds, the UAW agreed to be subject to court-approved officers as part of an anti-fraud consent decree directed at the removal of corruption within the UAW.

Link to the rest at The United States Department of Justice

From The Wall Street Journal:

Earlier this year, the police in Eugene, Ore., said they had identified a serial killer who committed three murders from 1986 to 1988. The man, John Charles Bolsinger, had escaped attention so thoroughly for three decades because he had killed himself in 1988.

Investigators had stored DNA from the crimes, and recently plugged it into a genealogy database, zeroing in on Bolsinger by first finding his distant cousins. It is the latest in a growing string of cold cases solved by law enforcement using techniques developed by genealogy hobbyists. Take a DNA sample, identify a second cousin here, a third cousin there, and then use public records to reconstruct a killer’s family tree.

If you’re concerned about the privacy implications of this, you might think, “Well, I would never submit my DNA to one of those sites.”

Sounds reasonable? In fact, it is far too late to completely protect your genetic privacy via personal abstention. A brief exploration into the mathematics of genetics explains why it has become possible to track down killers—but also anyone—through distant relatives.

“If somebody wanted to use the skills of forensic genealogists to try to track you down through a third cousin, they could,” said Jennifer King, a privacy scholar at Stanford University.

To understand how exposed your genes potentially are, consider an obscure unit of measurement—the centiMorgan, or cM. (It is named for Thomas Hunt Morgan, whose experiments on fruit flies led to the Nobel Prize in 1933 for showing how chromosomes are inherited.) It lies at the heart of all the stories you read nowadays of people discovering unknown links through their DNA and genealogical research.

It gauges genetic distance, specifically the length of identical segments of DNA that two people share due to descent from a common ancestor.

In general, people have about 6,800 cMs. A child inherits half their DNA—one set of chromosomes—from each biological parent. So child and parent will have around 3,400 cMs of DNA that match.

(Because of slightly different methodologies, the major testing companies report slightly different numbers.)

For every “degree of relatedness,” the length of shared cMs halves. An uncle or grandparent, one degree removed from parents, shares half as much DNA on average. That is 25%, or about 1,700 cMs. One more degree removed: A first cousin or great-grandparent shares half again, or around 850 cMs. And so on.

How much DNA you share with distant relatives

Even with all these halvings, very distant relatives out to fifth cousins share so much identical DNA that a common ancestor is the only possible source.

“I think most Americans don’t realize this,” said Libby Copeland, author of “The Lost Family: How DNA Testing Is Upending Who We Are.” “It’s a profound shift.”

It is easy to find distant relatives, because a typical individual has so many: according to various methods, around 200 third cousins, upward of 1,000 fourth cousins and anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 fifth cousins.

This isn’t just relevant for crime scenes. There is no such thing anymore as truly anonymous sperm or egg donors, unknown fathers, or closed adoptions. They are all examples of scenarios where secrets involving parentage are easily solved by the centiMorgans. No court ruling or confidentiality agreement can erase this science.

An adopted child who doesn’t know his biological parent still shares 3,400 cMs with that person, and hundreds of centiMorgans with numerous cousins from that parent’s family. The child, or generations from now that child’s descendants, could upload their DNA to a database and by looking for matches with others who have uploaded theirs, discover some of those distant cousins. That would be enough to reconstruct his family tree and identify the parent, even though the parent never uploaded their DNA—the exact same process used to identify DNA in cold cases.

Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, which advocates for protections against genetic information being abused, says that only collective action—not individual precaution—can address the privacy concerns this creates.

“Right now, forensic genealogy is very labor intensive and new, and being used for very serious crimes and cold cases,” said Ms. Hasson. “The likelihood it will be confined to that, without actual enforceable restrictions and regulations, is slim.”

The scale of testing is enormous: around 21 million samples on AncestryDNA, 12 million at 23andMe, 5.6 million at MyHeritage and 1.7 million at FamilyTreeDNA, according to data from the International Society of Genetic Genealogy.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

History offers no promise of an answer or a happy ending. There is not even a promise of a happy beginning: The further back we go, the less we have to go on. Worst of all, a historian cannot make anything up, but must still make everything into a story. No wonder historians tend to avoid historiography, writing about how history is written. It would give the game away.

Richard Cohen’s “Making History” is a substantial, ambitious and consistently readable inquiry into the history of history. His search for how the historical sausage gets made leads him to examine the biographies of the butchers, from Herodotus (the “father of history,” Cicero said, the “father of lies,” Plutarch said) to Nikole Hannah-Jones (the mother of more recent inventions in “The 1619 Project”). Academics may object that biography is vulgar, like writing for money, but the approach of Mr. Cohen, a longtime London book editor, has the weight of history behind it. Character always was destiny. “It is not histories we are writing, but Lives,” Plutarch wrote in the early 2nd century. The characters of the past, and the stories we tell ourselves about them, shape our present and future.

We are, Mr. Cohen writes, in a “golden age” of history writing. For most of human existence, the recording of the past has been “sacred history,” propaganda put forth by a priestly caste or authorities who claimed to rule by divine right—or, sometimes, simply to be divine. History as we know it—honest and free inquiry across the disciplines—has, he argues, only been possible in two epochs. The first was the founding era of the Greeks and the Romans. The second is ours, the era initiated in 1520, when Pope Leo X commissioned Niccolò Machiavelli to write a “History of Florence.” Homer uses histor to mean a “good judge.” A historian’s judgment is impaired when a theological thumb is on the scales—but is the judgment of secular historians any better?

Historians can be divided into followers of Herodotus (c. 485-425 B.C.) and Thucydides (c. 460-395 B.C.). The Herodotus of “Histories” is a storyteller—“the world’s first travel writer, investigative reporter, and foreign correspondent”—and his eye for local color can lead him astray. Team Herodotus is made up of bold synthesizers, and can sometimes play fast and loose with the sources. Cicero acclaimed Herodotus but lumped him with Theopompus, a later Greek historian who was, Mr. Cohen notes, “a notorious liar.”

Team Thucydides starts from scratch, trying not to let a good story get in the way of the facts. Thucydides was a nobleman and a general, and a generation younger than Herodotus. He fought against the Spartans, was blamed for a defeat and found himself exiled with time on his hands. In “The Peloponnesian War,” Mr. Cohen writes, he “developed the art of war reporting almost overnight.” If the hero of “Histories” is Herodotus himself, the hero of “The Peloponnesian War” is Pericles, the Athenian leader who recites Thucydides’ pile-driving rhetoric. Thucydides speaks over our heads, to posterity. He is an analyst, not an entertainer, and the founder of international relations theory. “His dry parts,” Lord Macaulay rued, “are dreadfully dry.”

The Roman empire mass-produced history like its Greek precedecessors, but Roman historians were more than imitators. For Team Thucydides, Polybius dismissed “sensational descriptions,” advised historians to “record with fidelity what actually happened,” preferably from eyewitness accounts, and developed the highly influential cyclical theory of history. For Team Herodotus, Livy added moral example to entertainment. A witness to Rome’s transition from republic to empire, Livy condemns the present by implied comparison to the past. The greatness of the past is ethical—legends of “patriotic heroism and self-sacrifice”—but also a matter of scale. Livy, Mr. Cohen writes, has the heart of a “tabloid journalist” reporting tall tales about “weeping statues; downpours of blood, stones, or meat; monstrous births; and a talking cow.”

The author endorses Petrarch’s opinion that the thousand years after the Roman historians were saeculum obscurum, a “dark age.” Both Christians and Muslims subordinated inquiry to dogma; the revival of Greek-style history in Florence rather than Constantinople, and the repression of free inquiry under Islam, were not foregone conclusions. In the 14th century, while Boccaccio was reduced to tears at the neglect of manuscripts in monastery storerooms, Ibn Khaldun wrote the “Muqaddimah,” the first “systematic social analysis” whose search for the “inner meaning of history” anticipated Hegel. Team Herodotus, meanwhile, struggled on with the Christian chroniclers of the new European nations: Froissart on the chivalric slaughters of the Crusades, Geoffrey of Monmouth on the mythical origins of the English.

Machiavelli’s revival of the Greek method was a heresy. The “History of Florence,” Mr. Cohen writes, is “the first modern analytical study.” The first to judge without religious bias, it marks “a turning away from a God-centered universe toward a man-centered one, in which the heavenly returns of virtuous behavior were no longer seen as a safe bet.” The pursuit of earthly rewards did not uniformly ennoble the modern historians: Many of them pursued the situational morality that Machiavelli advised in “The Prince.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Should be a free link, sorry if it doesn’t work for you.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

Like any good soldier, Maj. Gen. George Patton wrote regularly to his wife, though perhaps not as tenderly as she would have liked: “I wish I could get out and kill someone,” he told her in the winter of 1942-43.

November had started out in pleasing fashion, with Patton commanding 35,000 soldiers and 250 tanks in Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa that marked the first time that Americans had faced German and Italian troops in World War II. But within a few weeks he was stuck in Casablanca. Gen. Dwight Eisenhower had him moving supplies and men to the front, while the rest of the Anglo-American army marched through Morocco and Algeria and into Tunisia. This wasn’t his idea of warfare. When it came to the enemy—in the words of his son-in-law, then-Col. John K. Waters—Patton expected “to hold them by the nose and kick them in the ass.”

That job had unfortunately been entrusted to a more timid two-star, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, who preferred to stay well away from the fighting. Even with roughly 90 miles between him and the Axis forces, as Stephen L. Moore tells us in “Patton’s Payback: The Battle of El Guettar and General Patton’s Rise to Glory,” Fredendall ordered his engineers to dig “subway-like tunnels and underground complexes” to protect his headquarters in Tunisia from German bombers.

. . . .

Not until spring 1943 was Fredendall kicked upstairs, promoted and sent home to train young Americans for future combat—thus delaying Patton’s return to a front-line command. The hiatus doesn’t trouble Mr. Moore, who isn’t writing a campaign history. Instead, like a latter-day Ernie Pyle, he wants to tell the story of men at the tip of the spear. Letters home, diaries and postwar interviews are the grist for Mr. Moore’s mill, and he has a gift for melding them into a coherent narrative.

Thus we learn the story of the invasion and the subsequent march across North Africa through the eyes of the men who fought it. We read about the gallant Col. Bill Darby of the Ranger battalion and about enlisted soldiers like Pfc. Harley Reynolds, who in his first hour under fire notices that his platoon’s machine-gunner has frozen up. “Reynolds grabbed the gunner’s feet and yanked him away,” writes Mr. Moore, and another brave lad flops down beside him to feed the ammunition. At one point, we see troops just ahead of combat, as viewed by a lieutenant who is gauging their mental state: “Some chatted excitedly while heating C rations over their little stoves, while others enjoyed a few hours of sleep ‘after rereading by candlelight for the hundredth time a crumpled and smudged letter from home.’ ”

Such details are so absorbing that one scarcely notices that it is not until halfway through the book—and halfway across North Africa—that Patton takes charge. He shows up for breakfast at Fredendall’s bunker-like headquarters at 0700 hours (7 a.m.) on March 7, 1943. Only one other officer is present. “Patton immediately passed orders to the cooks that the mess hall would be closed at 0730 on this day and every day forward,” Mr. Moore tells us. Nor is that his only dictate. “Every man old enough will shave every day,” he decrees. “Officers will wear ties into combat. And anyone wearing a wool knit cap without a steel helmet will be shot.” Appearances are important to Patton, and he is seldom photographed without a tie, steel helmet, knee boots, flared cavalry breeches and an ivory-handled pistol on each hip.

He immediately gathers Fredendall’s scattered American forces—now 88,000 men in three infantry divisions, an armored division, a field artillery brigade and seven battalions of “tank destroyers” (basically heavy trucks, each with a cannon firing over the driver’s head)—into a unified command. His headquarters is never far from the fighting. More than once, the troops plead with him to get back, perhaps for fear that his three stars (he’s now a lieutenant general) will attract sniper fire.

. . . .

Since November 1942, as Mr. Moore reminds us, the Operation Torch troops (British, American and French) have taken a 1,000-mile swath of land, from Casablanca to central Tunisia, while another British army has pushed the enemy out of Egypt and across Libya to the Tunisian coast. Against orders, Patton tells his troops to drive for the coast

. . . .

[O]n April 14, Patton is called to Eisenhower’s headquarters and told to start planning Operation Husky, the forthcoming invasion of Sicily that will mark the Allies’ return to the European continent. “In a mere five weeks of command,” concludes Mr. Moore, “Patton had turned the tide. . . . He had charted a course for victory, and had whipped an ill-prepared army into shape.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Should be a free link, but PG apologizes if you hit a paywall.)

From Matthew Butterick:

In 1979, Bob Wood­ward and Scott Armstrong published The Brethren, a chron­icle of the Supreme Court during the tumul­tuous and conse­quen­tial terms from 1969 to 1975. Including, of course, the delib­er­a­tions around Roe v. Wade. I’ve recom­mended the book before—it’s my favorite work of legal jour­nalism.

At the time, The Brethren was contro­ver­sial. Despite the Supreme Court’s long­standing policy of secrecy around internal delib­er­a­tions, it was apparent that sources within the court had spoken to Wood­ward and Armstrong off the record. After the death of Justice Potter Stewart in 1985, Wood­ward confirmed that Stewart had been one of his key sources.

Thus, the bad news for those who contend that the recent leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion is “unthink­able” or, in the words of Chief Justice John Roberts, a “singular and egre­gious breach”—the horse is long out of the barn. Indeed, with so many more ways to securely leak infor­ma­tion these days, the only surprise in recent years is that there haven’t been more.

Much as I enjoy Wood­ward’s writing, his sources are not neces­sarily well concealed. One just needs to ask: “which person in this story takes the fewest hits?” For instance, in Wood­ward’s earlier book about the Trump admin­is­tra­tion, Fear, this line of thinking led inex­orably to former White House economic adviser Gary Cohn.

Cohn publicly ques­tioned the accu­racy of the book. Tellingly, he didn’t specify any partic­ular fact it had gotten wrong. In general, when sources deny jour­nal­istic reporting, I trust the jour­nal­ists, because there are still serious legal conse­quences for news orga­ni­za­tions that publish false­hoods; mean­while, no conse­quences at all for sources who issue blanket denials.

(This dynamic isn’t limited to polit­ical reporting. In 2018, Bloomberg Busi­ness­week published a story called “The Big Hack” that was vigor­ously denied by Apple and Amazon. Based on these denials, certain tech blog­gers became convinced that the story was false. The fact that neither Apple nor Amazon sued Bloomberg for defama­tion—despite being extremely rich, finicky, and liti­gious—made nary a dent.)

To be fair, this exchange of favors is not unique to Wood­ward. Rather, it’s a long­standing feature—or bug, some might say—of Wash­ington polit­ical jour­nalism. Much of the oper­a­tion of govern­ment is committed to the public record. But much more is not. Thus, leaks become currency, traded constantly. Without them, there would be no national polit­ical news.

So when you hear the cater­wauling—“egad, the leakers!”—assume it refers to the leaks that the cater­wauler finds unflat­tering. Although disclosing actual clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is a crime, much infor­ma­tion about the govern­ment doesn’t fall into that cate­gory. In partic­ular, it doesn’t appear that leaking a draft Supreme Court opinion breaks any law. So the hot-blooded idea that the leaker should be “pros­e­cuted” is misplaced.

Not every leak is published, however. Over time, one of the reci­p­rocal favors that Wash­ington jour­nal­ists have offered is to plug certain leaks rather than publi­cize them. For instance, during his first 10 years on the Supreme Court—including the time depicted in The Brethren—Justice William Rehn­quist became addicted to Placidyl, a powerful seda­tive. Never­the­less, this fact was not mentioned in Wood­ward’s book, nor much other jour­nalism of the time. As best I can tell, the Wash­ington Post didn’t explic­itly connect Rehn­quist to Placidyl until after he had completed a detox program in early 1982. (Current Chief Justice John Roberts clerked for Rehn­quist during the 1980–81 term.)

Bringing us to this week’s leak by Politico of a draft Supreme Court opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Orga­ni­za­tion. I don’t usually comment on current events. But the possi­bil­i­ties for typo­graphic foren­sics were too intriguing to ignore.

Consis­tent with the Wash­ington jour­nal­istic prin­ciple of leaks-for-favors, I infer that whoever leaked this draft must foresee a benefit from the leak—as usual, cui bono?

. . . .

So what can we tell from the docu­ment itself?

For thor­ough­ness, I ran the PDF through some meta­data checkers to see if there were any inter­esting tidbits left behind. There weren’t. Though I didn’t expect to find any, based on the appear­ance of the docu­ment.

How was it created? Let’s go in steps:

• An orig­inal color PDF was created on a computer using the US Supreme Court’s usual type­set­ting soft­ware. (And what is that? Programmer Faiz Surani noticed (perhaps unin­ten­tional) refer­ences in the Supreme Court Style Guide to a tool called “Opin­ions 2003”, which he spec­u­lated is a custom version of Microsoft Word 2003 used by the clerks for drafting opin­ions. This sounds plau­sible. For the type­set­ting and layout, designer Dan Rhatigan noted that the Supreme Court once used (and likely still uses) an XML-based publishing system made by Miles 33, appar­ently called OASYS. I’ve seen theo­ries else­where that La­TeX is involved—this wouldn’t surprise me either, because to my eye, the line breaking in Supreme Court opin­ions resem­bles that produced by the La­TeX algo­rithm.)
• It seems that the PDF was created on a modern computer and not with a different device because of the use of Arial in the upper right corner of the first page.
• It seems that the PDF was created in color because the yellow high­light around “1st Draft” is a rectangle that perfectly fits the text. Thus, the box must’ve been present in the digital file, and not, say, drawn by hand with a high­lighting pen.
• It seems the PDF was printed and stapled because of the pres­ence of staple holes on the top left corner of each page. The opinion is 98 pages, so that must’ve been a pretty big staple.
• It seems that the printed PDF was unsta­pled and then rescanned. Why? The reso­lu­tion of the page itself is very coarse and uneven, which is a kind of typo­graphic degra­da­tion char­ac­ter­istic of sheet scan­ners. Further­more, the pages have been scanned at different angles, which indi­cates the use of a low-volume home-office device. A typical office scanner would have an auto­mated sheet feeder that would keep the sheets in a more uniform vertical orien­ta­tion.
• The text of the PDF is search­able because OCR was run on the PDF after it was created. Perhaps by the leaker, but more likely by the recip­ient, Politico.

It’s possible that Politico received the printed docu­ment and made their own scan. If that were the case, however, I’d expect them to have better quality scan­ning equip­ment and produce a nicer PDF.

But Politico has a strong incen­tive to protect their source. By making their own scan from a paper orig­inal, they wouldn’t open them­selves up to the disclo­sures of confi­den­tial infor­ma­tion that have tripped up others. (That said, printed docu­ments are not neces­sarily free of meta­data, as Reality Winner found out the hard way.)

Is it possible the docu­ment was scanned twice—once by the leaker, once by the publisher? I don’t think so. If it had been, I’d expect to see more pecu­liar pixel-level arti­facts and distor­tions.

So what does the state of the PDF tell us about the iden­tity of the leaker?

• I conclude it must be someone who only had access to a stapled, printed copy of the draft opinion. (If the person had access to the under­lying digital file, they wouldn’t have printed & stapled it just to unstaple it.)
• As explained above, I don’t think the leaker was an oppo­nent of the opinion, because there would be no tactical value in doing so. More­over, if the objec­tive of the leak was indeed to recon­sol­i­date support, then the leak didn’t come from someone whose support is wobbling.
• Further­more, notice also that the docu­ment is completely unmarked, so whoever owned this copy didn’t find anything to disagree with.
• In sum—I’d suppose it’s a friend, spouse, or family member of a Supreme Court justice who has consis­tently opposed Roe v. Wade, acting with some­thing between autonomy and plau­sible deni­a­bility.

Link to the rest at Matthew Butterick

There are lots of enlargements of various parts of the original leaked document at the link.

From MYZ:

“To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer ‘by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.’ Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by it’s abandoned prostitution to falsehood.
Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. divide his paper into 4. chapters, heading the 1st. Truths. 2d. Probabilities. 3d. Possibilities. 4th. Lies. the 1st. chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. the 2d. would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. this however should rather contain too little than too much. the 3d. & 4th. should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.

Such an editor too would have to set his face against the demoralising practice of feeding the public mind habitually on slander, & the depravity of taste which this nauseous aliment induces. defamation is becoming a necessary of life: insomuch that a dish of tea, in the morning or evening, cannot be digested without this stimulant. even those who do not believe these abominations, still read them with complacence to their auditors, and, instead of the abhorrence & indignation which should fill a virtuous mind, betray a secret pleasure in the possibility that some may believe them, tho they do not themselves. it seems to escape them that it is not he who prints, but he who pays for printing a slander, who is it’s real author.

Thomas Jefferson, 1807

Excerpt from letter to John Norvell, 11 June 1807

Link to the rest at MYZ

Link to the entire original HERE

From Quillette:

Two years ago, I was fired from my job as a professor at a small mid-western college. I was not fired because of poor teacher ratings, student complaints, data fraud, or any other job-related shortcomings. I was fired because I spoke and wrote openly about human psychological variation, and because I maintained that I would continue to speak and write candidly about that subject and about other potentially controversial topics.

At the time, this development left me shocked and bewildered. In retrospect, it was probably inevitable. Today, my overriding feeling is one of profound disappointment that my perception of an academia guided by evidence and argument instead of political ad hominem attacks proved to be illusory. Although I was quite naïve back then, I was never so foolish as to believe that scholarly debates are always cordial affairs between monocled gentleman who decorate their discourse with phrases like “my dear sir” and “I do beg your pardon.” But I did believe that academia encouraged open exploration and argument and discouraged character assassination and scientific censoriousness. I was wrong.

I encountered intimations of the problems that plague modern academia as soon as I began my college career, but I largely dismissed them because I was studying literature, not electrons, atoms, brains, birds, bears, or anything that could be pinned down. Nevertheless, as a sober-minded student, I was surprised by the popularity of implausible but fashionable ideological currents. So, like any curious scholar, I read the work that was celebrated by my professors and other eminent people in the field—Baudrillard, Barthes, Butler, Derrida, Freud, Jung, Kristeva, Foucault, and Lacan. Some of it was sensible and intelligible, but much of it was so obscure, involuted, or risibly unconvincing that I was left perplexed. For a while, I assumed that my brain simply could not apprehend the profundities of postmodern thought.

While wrestling unsuccessfully with poststructuralism, I also read Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, both of which offered excellent overviews of Darwinian approaches to animal behavior. After many more books and articles and lively debates, I became persuaded of the general power and plausibility of evolutionary psychology. I was baffled by the persistence of literary criticism that remains uninformed by Darwinian analysis, and that even defies it (e.g., Freudianism). After all, why should we not use the best intellectual tools at our disposal to understand Shakespeare, Dickens, or Faulkner?

I was even more taken aback by the antipathy my professors (and other scholars) expressed toward evolutionary psychology. I had encountered many tendentious and hyperbolic denunciations of evolutionary psychology in the literature, but I figured these were the exaggerated attacks of sophisticated partisans, not manifestations of a widespread attitude. Yet, when I started to include evolutionary analyses in my papers, my arguments were vehemently attacked. Some professors even compared Darwinism to fascism and Nazism.

. . . .

My love for literature was propelled by a delight in language and a desire to explore the human condition. But many critics and influential professors seemed to be more interested in advancing avant-garde identity politics than in carefully reading texts and discussing the nuances of diction or symbolism. A popular textbook on literary criticism at the time, for example, included sections on Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, deconstruction, postcolonial and multicultural criticism, and eco-criticism. Man is a political animal, so I have no objection to thinking about the political motivations of authors or characters, but I do object to obsessing over these at the expense of other important features of literature. And I especially object to forcing texts onto a procrustean bed of progressive ideological concerns. (A popular critical activity was to search for what was not in the text to illustrate how that revealed the racism or sexism of the author or his society.)  

Link to the rest at Quillette and thanks to C for the tip.

From Educational Data:

The average debt for a 4-year Bachelor’s degree is $28,800.

• The average 4-year Bachelor’s degree debt from a public college is $27,000.
• 65% of students seeking  a Bachelor’s degree from a public 4 year college have student loan debt.
• The average 4-year Bachelor’s degree debt from a private for-profit college is $39,900.
• For private non-profit colleges, the average Bachelor’s degree debt is $33,700.

. . . .

Roughly 50% of Bachelor degree graduates who went to a private for-profit 4-year school owed over $40,000 in debt.

. . . .

Average 4-year Bachelor’s Degree Debt by State

The majority of the states with the highest levels of debt are located in the northeast. The low debt states are primarily concentrated in the west. In 26 states the average debt was over $30,000 – 5 of them in particular had an average over $35,000.

• Over the past 17 years, the student debt load has grown by twice the rate of inflation in 18 states.
• In 5 states, inflation outpaced the student debt load.
• New Hampshire has the highest average debt for students with a 4-year Bachelor’s degree – $39,410.
• Utah has the lowest average debt for students with a 4-year Bachelor’s degree – $17,935.
• At 74%, New Hampshire and South Dakota are tied as the states with the most amount of students in debt.
• At 40%, Utah is the state with the least amount of students in debt.

Table of Average Bachelor’s Degree Debt per State

State	Average Debt	Percent of Students with Debt
Alabama	$29,791	50%
Alaska	$25,925	48%
Arizona	$24,712	49%
Arkansas	$26,679	53%
California	$21,485	47%
Colorado	$26,562	50%
Connecticut	$38,546	56%
Delaware	$37,447	59%
District of Columbia	$32,039	46%
Florida	$24,629	48%
Georgia	$28,081	56%
Hawaii	$23,577	43%
Idaho	$25,942	60%
Illinois	$29,666	61%
Indiana	$28,112	59%
Iowa	$30,259	63%
Kansas	$26,788	60%
Kentucky	$28,482	58%
Louisiana	$25,512	48%
Maine	$33,591	67%
Maryland	$30,303	53%
Massachusetts	$33,256	55%
Michigan	$30,677	59%
Minnesota	$31,856	66%
Mississippi	$31,651	55%
Missouri	$28,740	57%
Montana	$27,265	57%
Nebraska	$26,026	57%
Nevada	$21,254	46%
New Hampshire	$39,410	74%
New Jersey	$33,566	64%
New Mexico	$20,991	45%
New York	$31,155	58%
North Carolina	$26,583	55%
North Dakota	$32,745	64%
Ohio	$29,886	60%
Oklahoma	$25,793	47%
Oregon	$27,542	54%
Pennsylvania	$39,027	65%
Rhode Island	$37,614	59%
South Carolina	$31,524	60%
South Dakota	$31,653	74%
Tennessee	$27,525	60%
Texas	$26,951	48%
Utah	$17,935	40%
Vermont	$30,566	60%
Virginia	$30,574	56%
Washington	$24,645	50%
West Virginia	$29,272	67%
Wisconsin	$31,550	64%
Wyoming	$23,444	46%

Link to the rest at Educational Data

PG notes that the average debt of graduates from Law School and Medical School are much higher.

According to the American Bar Association:

• The average law school graduate owes approximately $165,000 in educational debt upon graduating.
• More than 95 percent of students take out loans to attend law school.
• More than 55 percent of students surveyed postponed buying a house, and nearly 30 percent postponed or decided not to get married.

According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 70% of medical degree recipients in 2019 had used student loans to pay for medical school. The median amount of medical education debt for those graduates was $200,000.

US News and World Report

From The Babbler:

AT THE EDGE OF BERKELEY’S CAMPUS, where concrete meets traffic, Euclid Avenue stretches up and north into the hills beyond. I usually stopped on the first block for pizza and beer at La Val’s. But occasionally, on the way to a professor’s house or a graduate student party, I continued the climb on my creaky French bike, purchased in a misguided act of aspirational hipsterdom. Along Euclid’s curves, the ascent begins to level out, opening up a panoramic view of San Francisco Bay. At the top, around the corner on Grizzly Peak Boulevard, stands a dark wooden house. For almost twenty years, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz lived here in obscurity, descending to teach Slavic literature to long-haired students he didn’t understand—until one day in 1980, when the Nobel committee called to inform him that he’d won their prize for literature.

Born in 1911 to Polish nobility in Lithuania (then part of the Russian Empire), Miłosz personally witnessed many of the major events of the twentieth century: World War I, the Russian Revolution, World War II, the rise of the Cold War. In Nazi-occupied Poland, he wrote poems including “Campo dei Fiori,” a haunting meditation on bystander apathy in which revelers ride a carousel outside the walls of the Warsaw ghetto as it goes up in flames: “That same hot wind/blew open the skirts of the girls/and the crowds were laughing/on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.” After moving to California in 1960, however, Miłosz largely turned away from history and politics to reflect on more internal questions. In a poem, he compared Berkeley to the setting of The Magic Mountain, the favorite novel of his youth. Thomas Mann’s hero, Hans Castorp, arrives at a Swiss sanatorium for a brief visit but invents an illness that allows him to stay for seven years, far from the war that will soon break out below. 

Miłosz is best known outside Poland for The Captive Mind (1953), his study of how Eastern European intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism. Through several character portraits, he showed how a combination of opportunism, exhaustion, and hope led Polish writers to swallow the pill of contentment in exchange for compliance. Some prospered, like “Alpha, the Moralist” (based on Jerzy Andrzejewski), a pious Catholic who became a celebrated Marxist. Others choked on their mixed feelings, like “Beta, the Disappointed Lover” (Tadeusz Borowski), an Auschwitz survivor and author of sardonic stories about life in the camp, who briefly wrote in a “socialist realist” mode before gassing himself to death at age twenty-eight. 

The Captive Mind became a classic study of “totalitarianism,” a framework bound up in Cold War narratives about the civilized West versus the backward East. I first read it in a PhD seminar in fall 2014, with little patience for a writer who seemed like a reactionary. My specialty was Soviet history, and I thought that Miłosz’s profile of Communist double-think—exemplified by the “Ketman,” who wears a mask that conceals his inner doubts—overlooked how the “free world” also ran on hypocritical conformity. We were living in a post-Fukuyama age, when trust in liberal democracy had dwindled while its slogans lived on. With President Obama deep into his second term and both parties unable to confront inequality or climate change, Miłosz’s warnings about fervent conviction felt far away. 

. . . .

With the Bay Area housing bubble reserving hillside real estate for senior scholars and the new tech elite, graduate students paid exorbitant sums to rent rooms on the city’s lower-altitude south side, which came with the earthbound awareness that we were preparing to enter a severely contracting profession. Thanks to our excellent health insurance, steady if inadequate stipends, and free food hoarded from campus events, we, too, found a degree of insular security in academia, if only for a while. 

. . . .

Recently, I returned to [The Captive Mind] in search of answers for why so many believe in systems that they know to be destructive—and how some decide to break ranks. Instead of an artist who saw himself as above the fray, I discovered a thinker who constantly grappled with the tension between engagement and resignation, certainty and doubt. The Captive Mind does not speak with the confidence of the unconverted. Miłosz wrote it to dispel his continued attachment to Communism and to his friends who remained within its fold.

From his student days, Miłosz expressed both pride and shame over his inability to commit. In his 1959 memoir Rodzinna Europa (translated into English as Native Realm), he writes that a sense of otherness as a Lithuanian-born Pole and instinctive “allergy to everything that smacks of the ‘national’” drew him toward the left. While reading The Magic Mountain, he identified with Castorp as well as Naphta, the Mephistophelean voice of ideological orthodoxy (Jesuit and Marxist alike) who faces off against the Enlightenment humanist Settembrini. Yet Miłosz’s self-styling as a revolutionary was short-lived: “Completely incapable of action, unfit for organizing or leadership or even blind obedience, I compared myself to my colleagues: they were drawing conclusions from their reading of Lenin; they were courageous and purehearted.” Convinced of the need for a more equal society but reluctant to back the Soviet Union or the aesthetics of its artists, Miłosz compared his discomfort with taking a clear position to Castorp’s retreat to the Berghof: “Did not Hans Castorp fabricate his fever so that he could stay in Davos on the Magic Mountain, far removed from the world, because the world terrified him?”  

After World War I, Vilnius had been incorporated into newly independent Poland. Miłosz attended university and worked at a radio station in this city of “narrow cobblestone streets and an orgy of baroque.” In September 1939, however, Stalin invaded Vilnius and transferred it to Lithuania, which belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence under the terms of his pact with Hitler. The following year, when the entire country was annexed into the Soviet Union, Miłosz fled Vilnius for Warsaw. There, he participated in the remarkably rich cultural life of Nazi-occupied Poland, translating plays for the Underground Theater Council and publishing illegal literature. According to Nazi ideology, Poles were racial inferiors who were destined either for enslavement or execution. Yet they were not subject to total extermination like the country’s Jews, three million of whom died in the Holocaust. In “A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto,” Miłosz expressed his sense of complicity as one of “the helpers of death:/The uncircumcised.” He wrote elegies for friends who died during the war, including in the suicidal Warsaw Uprising of summer 1944, when the Red Army stood on the other side of Vistula River and watched as the Wehrmacht razed the city to the ground. In a 1945 poem, Miłosz addressed the fallen as “You whom I could not save.”

After the war, the new Polish nation established at Yalta fell under Soviet dominion. At the time, Miłosz believed that only Communism could abolish the country’s semi-feudal social structure and rebuild the region. Yet disheartened by seeing his home turned into a “Stalinist province,” he found a middle ground by working abroad as a diplomat, serving as a cultural attaché for the Polish embassy in the United States and France. The culture of loyalty and subservience grew to be too much for him, however, and he defected to France in 1953. There, while struggling with “the corroding effects of isolation”—according to biographer Andrzej Franaszek, he repeatedly considered suicide—Miłosz wrote The Captive Mind. He had misgivings about the book’s international success, which alienated him from both the left and members of the right who still saw him as a Communist lackey. In 1960, he received an invitation to teach at Berkeley and bid farewell to Paris for a new life in the Golden State.

Link to the rest at The Babbler

From The Wall Street Journal:

The title of Olivier Zunz’s biography of Alexis de Tocqueville—“The Man Who Understood Democracy”—would appear to be a direct appeal to readers who believe democracy is, to use one popular formulation, “under assault.” Anxiety over the fate of democracy has become the de rigueur emotional stance of the nation’s enlightened influencers. Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post’s media columnist, asserted this week that “our very democracy is on the brink” and that one of the country’s major parties has dedicated itself to “the destruction of democratic norms.” Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times, headlined “DeSantis, Disney and Democracy,” registered the same sentiment. Barack Obama, in a speech on “disinformation” at Stanford University on April 21, spoke mournfully of “democratic backsliding” and “the weakening of democratic institutions” at home and abroad. 

In none of these or a thousand other lamentations is it clear what the authors mean by “democracy.” It is perhaps an opportune time to consider the life and work of a man who, as this book’s title has it, “understood” the thing Mr. Obama et al. want to rescue and revive.

Mr. Zunz, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia and a respected scholar of Tocqueville, has written an exhaustively researched and discretely focused biography of the great Frenchman. Readers unfamiliar with “Democracy in America” are best advised to read that work first. Its two volumes appeared in 1835 and 1840, after Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de Beaumont, spent 9 ½ months touring the American Northeast, Midwest and South in 1831-32. “Democracy in America” is, as its reputation suggests, a masterpiece of political reflection. It is also, as I was reminded by Mr. Zunz’s biography, a work of stylistic grace. Tocqueville—this is apparent even in English translations of his work—constantly revised his writing to achieve maximum clarity and felicity. 

The crucial fact of Tocqueville’s upbringing and early adult years—he was born into an aristocratic family in 1805—was that a large number of his elder relatives had lost their property or their heads during the Terror of 1793-94. Surviving nobility were permitted a gradual return, and the Bourbon monarchy was restored after the fall of Napoleon in 1814-15, though in constitutional, not absolutist, form. Tocqueville’s familial provenance led many to assume that he would defend the pro-Bourbon, backward-looking “Legitimist” cause even after the July Revolution of 1830 and the inauguration of the more liberal and reformist regime of Louis-Philippe.

. . . .

Mr. Zunz’s biography situates Tocqueville’s great treatise in its French context. Americans, this reviewer included, tend to read “Democracy” as though the author were explaining America to Americans. He was in fact asking France’s political class to consider the promise—and the perils—of political equality.

Tocqueville often used the term “equality” as a synonym for democracy, since democratic reforms by definition bring citizens into closer parity with each other. “Democracy in America” sought in essence to answer this question: Would the work of cultivating equality destroy liberty? That question haunts every modern democratic state, but the United States more so than any other.

Tocqueville, despite a retiring demeanor and ill health, would use his reputation as a first-rate political mind to press his way into elective government. There, too, as Mr. Zunz relates, he would labor to reconcile liberty and equality in French political life. In the 1840s, as a member of the Chamber of Deputies (the French Parliament’s lower chamber), he tried to find a middle path between the French left’s insistence that all children be educated by the state and the clergy’s use of education as a way to retain political influence. He didn’t succeed in that effort, but the episode reminds us that problems of educational curriculum were known to societies far less pluralist than our own. 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (should be a free perma-link)

From The Literary Hub:

What is it like to be blind in an industry overwhelmingly dominated by sighted individuals? Jessica Powers, founder and publisher at Catalyst Press, spoke to George Mendoza and Kristen Witucki about crafting stories for sighted readers, finding community and release in fiction, and battling ableism in traditional publishing and publicity.

Jessica Powers: When did you both start writing?

Kristen Witucki: My favorite toy as a child was the tape recorder. I destroyed my first one by pouring water on it so that I could hear the sound of water. Once I got that life lesson out of the way (and did not kill myself, as my mother worried), it became my best tool for telling stories, writing, and revising, long after I learned how to read and write. I wanted to write because I love to read and to live in stories, and I want to create that experience for others and for myself.

I wrote (on paper) my first “novel” when I was 12. It was based on my grandmother’s life; she had to take care of her mother while her brothers could continue in school. My mother unearthed the manuscript 25 years later, and it has every literary stereotype gone amuck. (Think Caddie Woodlawn, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Anne Shirley mushed together.) I might never be able to fix it, but it was mine. My teacher took me the whole way through the drafting, revising, and publication-seeking process, and a very kind editor realized that a child wrote this and gently turned it down in a way that I emerged from the experience thinking, “Ok, I was rejected this time, but so is everyone else, and I can do this sometime.”

But I came to writing and the subject of disability during college in my composition classes when my professors asked me to work on the blindness stories more. And as a senior in college, I was fortunate to hear the author Jhumpa Lahiri speak as our college’s writer-in-residence. At the time she was writing about the experiences of immigrants from India and their first-generation American children and the lives they were forging here; she was also writing about love and loss, commitment and betrayal, human longing. She said that writing gave her a center and a way to be a participatory observer in the world, and I thought maybe I could try this as a blind person.

George Mendoza: I come from a family of writers and artists so I guess in a way it is an inherited gift. However, because I went blind at 15, I really had no other choice but to find my creative juice. Creativity saved my life! I grew up listening to talking books for the blind, books like The Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia. Books took me away from my own suffering and doubts. I am a painter, too. I find painting very relaxing, while writing and working on a novel is hard work and labor intense.

Jessica Powers: The world of books has long been associated with sight, with the exception of books in braille. But now there are audiobooks, voice-activated text to page, software that can read emails and books to you. What technology do you two use to read books? What technology do you use to write?

Kristen Witucki: I grew up reading with braille and audio, and I still use both those methods. I write on either a small braille notetaking computer or on my laptop using Jaws, a screen reading program.

. . . .

George Mendoza: I use Jaws computer software to write with on my computer. Jaws has a human-like voice. When I type, the program reads the words back to me so am directed with my sentences as I construct them. Jaws also lets me proofread to make sure the sentences read well and make sense. When I proofread, the spell check is once again using a human voice.  It is not perfect, but it is the best thing next to a human proofreading for me. As for reading, I listen to digital audiobooks provided to the blind by the New Mexico Library for the Blind.

Jessica Powers: I know writers who have to physically write their books, others who use their computers, writers who read their books out loud to revise, writers who cut and paste physically. What is the process of writing like for you that might be different than a sighted person? How do you think that changes both your experience of writing and changes the book that you end up writing?

George Mendoza: My writing process goes something like this: I usually dream about the words I am going to write about while sleeping. Then I write down some notes in very large print, because of my blindness. I review them and then I write those words and scenes on my computer using the Jaws speech system for the blind. I dream in color and I can actually see the words on a printed page.

Kristen Witucki: I think the computer has brought my process of writing closer to that of a sighted person so that writing itself is very similar. If I send a manuscript for feedback, I still find it easier to respond to narrative comments written in the body of an email than I do to comments embedded into the text. But I’ve learned to work with all of these features.

Link to the rest at The Literary Hub

From Publishing Perspectives:

In its second round of research-into-research, Elsevier has returned to the field of its initial inquiry in 2019, when a study sequence was begun in an attempt to look at how research might look and fare in a decade.

With input from more than 1,000 researchers in an internationally structured study, the company in 2020 (1,173 respondents) and 2021 (1,066 respondents) continued the work, releasing nine days ago, on April 20, a new set of insights targeting pressures on publishing, funding, and women in research, with an eye to opportunities developing in funding sources, technology, and collaboration.

. . . .

• In the United States, 40 percent of researchers predict that a longer-term impact of COVID-19 will be a greater dependency on technology, such as artificial intelligence, when doing research–that compares to 47 percent of researchers internationally
• Internationally, it’s less widely thought (than other predictions) that a longer-term consequence of the pandemic will be more higher-quality research being produced and shared (24 percent) or that it will lead to more students going to university in the next two to five years (17 percent)
• However, researchers in the States are even less optimistic than the international average, with only 17 percent predicting more quality research, and only 12 percent predicting more university students.

. . . .

For women, a key area of our conversation with Kolman, unique challenges persist, in the purview of the new study.

“Women reported having less time to do research during lockdowns,” the company reports, “which could slow or hamper their future career prospects. Sixty-two percent reported they were finding it difficult to find a good work-life balance during the pandemic, compared to just 50 percent of male researchers—a trend that could have significant negative long-term effects on the careers of women in research.”

Ironically, women in research were also seen embracing technology “faster than their male counterparts: 53 percent of women scientists [said they] think the use of technology in research will accelerate over the next two to five years versus 46 percent for men.”

And women are deemed in this study to be more likely to have shared their research with the public than men, 60 percent women vs. 55 percent men saying they’ve shared their work publicly.

In the chart below, you see study response analysis indicating that more women and younger researchers said they’d seen project stoppages during the pandemic years.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From PsyPost:

People who have had COVID-19 tend to report having more nightmares than people who have not been infected by the virus, according to research published in Nature and Science of Sleep.

Previous research has indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with changes in sleep and dream activity among healthy individuals. A study published in 2021, for example, found that pandemic-related stress was associated having nightmares revolving around specific apocalyptic themes.

But Luigi De Gennaro, a professor at the University of Rome Sapienza, and his colleagues noted that whether dream activity in COVID-19 patients differed from dream activity in healthy people had not yet been investigated.

Link to the rest at PsyPost

PG suspects a great many people experienced thoughts, fears, dreams, etc., etc., regarding “apocalyptic themes” during the past couple of years regardless of whether they were asleep or awake.

What is a Philologist?

From Language Humanities:

A philologist is a type of linguist, though the exact meaning of the term has changed over the years. Philology literally means “love of words,” and the field often deals with literature more than other branches of linguistics do. In the modern academic world, the term is usually understood to mean the study of written texts, usually ancient ones.

It was much more common in the 19th century than it is today for a linguist to be called a philologist. Philology was the precursor to today’s linguistics, which has changed to favor spoken data over written data. Comparative and historical linguistics, in which words from different languages are compared and contrasted to determine the current or historical relationships between languages, have their roots in the 19th century field.

In an earlier era, this person focused his or her study on language as it pertains to literature and culture. Individual words, their history, and the common history of words in different languages were also of interest. Literary interpretations and the study of language went hand in hand; in this respect, the modern field of comparative literature can also be seen as having its roots in philology.

. . . .

In an earlier era, this person focused his or her study on language as it pertains to literature and culture. Individual words, their history, and the common history of words in different languages were also of interest. Literary interpretations and the study of language went hand in hand; in this respect, the modern field of comparative literature can also be seen as having its roots in philology.

Link to the rest at Language Humanities

Here’s a photo of a portion of The Rosetta Stone:

PG apologizes for the Object code fragment at the top of this post, but couldn’t track it down to apply a fix during the time he had to post today.