Non-Fiction

From The Wall Street Journal:

A few years ago, an Australian scientist was bushwhacking through the wilderness when he felt a twig snap against his leg. Or so he thought. He’d actually been nipped by an Eastern brown snake, one of the most venomous serpents on Earth. Oblivious, he walked on and even went swimming in a nearby river before blacking out and nearly dying.

We’ve probably all heard similar stories, about athletes or warriors who suffer serious injury but power through without realizing they’re hurt. What’s surprising is what happened next. Nothing if not intrepid, the scientist plunged back into the bush six months later for another hike—at which point he again felt something snap against his leg. He crumpled to the ground in agony, writhing and screaming.

But this time, it really was just a twig. Identical sensation, completely different reaction. “There is no grievous injury . . . just a very powerful memory of last time,” explains science writer Leigh Cowart about the story. “The basic sensory processing is the same, but the cognitive understanding of the pain differs.” All of which goes to show that, for something so basic to human experience, pain remains a highly subjective and even slippery phenomenon.

There’s possibly no one alive more qualified to write about pain than Leigh Cowart, who uses the pronoun they and prefers the Mx. honorific. A self-described “gorehound,” the author has been, at different points in life, “a ballet dancer, an overexerciser, a serious bulimic and self-harmer, a tattoo aficionado” and a hard-core BDSM enthusiast. This eye-opening book, “Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose,” explores why so many people pursue painful activities like these, and especially what people get out of pain when they encounter—or achieve—it. “Many people engage in the ritual of deliberately feeling bad to feel better,” the author notes, “and once I started looking for the pattern, I saw it everywhere.”

. . . .

Beyond plumbing their personal past, the author also engages in what might be called gonzo science writing. They dive into one excruciating situation after another (a polar bear plunge, a chili pepper-eating contest), and things go hilariously awry. The mush from one superhot pepper (2.2 million Scoville units; jalapeños max out at 8,000) burns the author’s mouth like “Dante’s gazpacho.” In their stupor, they then rub some into their eye. The author is especially good at describing escalating pain: just when you think a passage has reached a crescendo, Mx. Cowart ups the ante with some new turn of phrase. More than once, I found myself sucking in my breath and feeling my feet tingle as some new horror unfolded on the page.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on extreme running, which covers the fiendish Big Dog’s Backyard Ultra in Tennessee. Every hour, the contestants in this ultramarathon have to complete a four-mile circuit. Doesn’t sound too bad, except that the race sometimes continues all day and all night for nearly three days, with zero breaks. Quite literally, the last person standing wins. Overall, the chapter is a beautiful reflection on the capacity for human endurance, and for pushing yourself beyond what you thought possible. It’s also wickedly funny. God help me, but I still laugh at one poor soul who, 40-some hours in, pitched forward in exhaustion and crashed asleep atop a mailbox.

Yet this running chapter does highlight a problem with the author’s objective to find masochists everywhere they looked. Before the Tennessee race, the organizer initially revoked the author’s press pass because he objected to the pastime being characterized as masochism. As he wrote, “like many sport[s], there is discomfort involved, but it is a cost of competition, not an objective.”

The author objects to that distinction, but I think the organizer is right. For most runners and ballet dancers, pain is a byproduct of their ultimate goal—to run fast or dance beautifully.

. . . .

[T]his book makes a far better case for the importance of pain in dance or athletics than I expected. Imagine you could win an Olympic marathon without enduring any pain. You’d still have to train, but you could sidestep all the misery—the soreness, the burning lungs, the bloody blisters, the toenails falling off. Would you accept this deal? Many of us probably would; suffering stinks. But the author makes a strong argument that the medal would mean far less to you than to someone who suffered for it. Suffering creates meaning, and the joy of victory is sweeter for having suffered.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From The Wall Street Journal:

In the United Kingdom, there is a tradition of printing 100-page books—booklets, really—from lectures given by notable judges and lawyers. The Hamlyn Lecture series, for example, has featured such distinguished talks as Lord Denning’s “Freedom Under the Law” (1949), Professor Arthur Goodhart’s “English Law and the Moral Law” (1953) and Dean Erwin Griswold’s “Law and Lawyers in the United States” (1964). The primers are collectible, memorable and quotable.

Now Harvard University Press has perhaps embarked on a similar plan for Harvard Law School’s annual Scalia Lecture series, instituted in 2013. This year the program turned to Justice Stephen Breyer, who has thought deeply about judicial power, the rule of law and the role of the judiciary in the American polity. Perhaps these three subjects are in the nature of a trinity: three that make up one. In any event, their position in the U.S., when compared to the rest of the world, has been enviably secure. Yet insiders know that, here as elsewhere, the institution is perennially precarious.

In April Justice Breyer spoke from a lectern to a Zoom audience, and now his speech is preserved in book form. Those wishing to know Justice Breyer’s thoughts can choose either to read the book or to watch the two-hour speech on YouTube. You’d feel edified in doing either.

Quoting Cicero, Justice Breyer argues that the only way to ensure obedience to the Supreme Court’s pronouncements is to convince people that the Court deserves obedience because itsdecisions are just. That means an observer must assess not the justness of each individual decision, but the justness of the Court’s decisions collectively and in general.

In support of this thesis, Justice Breyer gives a mini-lecture on American constitutional history and on the struggle, when interpreting the Constitution, for judicial supremacy. He explains how Chief Justice John Marshall, in Marbury v. Madison (1803), decided the case in a most unexpected fashion—pleasing President Thomas Jefferson with the specific result but only by establishing the Court’s ability to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional. That all but guaranteed acceptance of the Court’s power, at least in that case, while establishing the doctrine of judicial review.

Nearly 30 years later, when the Supreme Court declared that the State of Georgia had no rightful control over Cherokee lands there—lands where gold had been discovered—President Andrew Jackson and the state of Georgia both ignored the decision. There was no enforcement. As a result, the Cherokee Nation was driven to Oklahoma on the infamous Trail of Tears.

After that outrage, adherence to the principle of judicial review was, reassuringly, mostly re-established. Yet even as late as the 1950s, with Brown v. Board of Education, it wasn’t at all clear whether the Court’s decision would be enforced by the Executive Branch. Some today may have forgotten that, to enforce Brown, President Eisenhower sent 1,000 parachutists from the 101st Airborne Division into Arkansas. Central High in Little Rock would no longer be white-only. In taking that bold action, Eisenhower ignored the advice of James Byrnes, the South Carolina governor who had once briefly served on the Supreme Court, before returning to the Roosevelt administration to aid the war effort. At the time of Brown, Byrnes advocated taking the Jacksonian stance of doing nothing to enforce the Court’s decree. The U.S., in other words, came perilously close to a 20th-century trail of tears—one that would have resulted from reducing the Brown decision to empty words on a piece of paper.

. . . .

If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it’s that the established institutions of the United States are more fragile than almost any of us had previously thought. We used to believe, for example, that strongman coups were exclusively in the domain of Third World countries. Now we know that the potential is also here on our shores.

Meanwhile, judicial institutions are under attack once again. We can’t say “under attack as never before,” because Justice Breyer shows us that such attacks are a persistent problem. Although he abjures speaking directly about the current Court-packing proposals, the author wants to “ensure that those who debate these proposals also consider an important institutional point, namely how a proposed change would affect the rule of law itself.” His voice is a powerful one, and the brevity of this book, together with its readability, should ensure its lasting influence. Like anyone else, Washington leaders can absorb its message in a single evening.

. . . .

The central question is whether courts should interpret legal documents by giving them a fair reading of what they denoted at the time of adoption, or whether courts can interpret those texts according to their broad purposes (not getting too caught up in grammar and historical dictionaries) and even the desirability of results. As Justice Breyer puts it: “Some judges place predominant weight upon text and precedent; others place greater weight on purposes and consequences.” As the popular mind conceives it, conservatives do the former, and liberals do the latter. And the latter approach, according to Scalia, leads inevitably to appointing judges who will vote for outcomes they personally favor. Hence the process becomes more politicized the further judges stray from the text.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (This should be a free link, but, if it doesn’t work, PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

The United States Constitution includes only a broad overview of the US court system. Here is all that document says about courts:

The “good Behavior” language means that federal judges can be removed from office only via an impeachment process.

The House of Representatives impeaches a judge and the Senate holds a trial to determine whether removal is justified. A simple majority vote in the House is required to impeach and a two-thirds majority is required in the Senate to convict the judge of the charges laid in the impeachment and remove the judge from office.

Only one Supreme Court justice has ever been impeached, Samuel Chase, who was appointed an Associate Justice in 1788 by George Washington.

President Thomas Jefferson was upset at several federal judges who had held some of his legislative initiatives to be unconstitutional. Jefferson and his supporters in the House and Senate repealed the Judiciary Act of 1801, under which federal courts subordinate to the Supreme Court were established, thus abolishing the federal courts and, effectively terminating their lifetime appointments as provided in Article III of the Constitution.

Thereafter, Chase severely and publicly criticized this action. For this, he was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1803. Following a trial in the Senate, several votes were taken, but the required 2/3 majority voting for Chase to be removed from the bench could not be attained. Chase continued to serve on the Supreme Court until his death in 1811.

See Wikipedia for more information about Chase. This Wikipedia article includes lots of links to third-party information regarding Chase and his trial.

From Electric Lit:

The history of women hiking in nature is almost non-existent. Instead, Cheryl Strayed is widely believed to be the first woman to boldly walk day after day in remote, unpeopled landscapes. This is a terrible misconception.

Five years ago, exasperated by the male dominance of walking and nature writing, I began researching women walkers of the past for my latest book Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women. It seemed to me that while women had made great progress in public, urban life, the myth of Male Wilderness was harder to shift. The wilds endured as a place for well-heeled white men to prove their masculinity.

But women have always walked. And not merely to carry water and firewood. Like men, women hiked for pleasure, solitude, creativity, and catharsis. During the 19th-century, numerous women hiked solo over mountains and across plains, beside rivers and through forests. Many of them published accounts of their walks—gripping memoirs that have languished in archives or been entirely forgotten.

. . . .

Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews

The first nonfiction book to excavate lost women walker-writers of the past and return them to the literary stage. Andrews spent over a decade researching women from as far back as the 18th-century in a scholarly bid to prove that women have always hiked in wild landscapes. From Elizabeth Carter to Dorothy Wordsworth to Cheryl Strayed, Andrews argues for a re-evaluation of the genre now known as literature of the leg.

A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom One Step at a Time by Antonia Malchik

A Walking Life is a series of meanders through the many facets of walking. Malchik is one of the empathetic few to write about walking while attending to those who cannot walk. She makes a compelling case for better public transport, for greater access to wild landscapes, and for more power to the pedestrian, while lambasting the highways that have gobbled up vast tracts of American wilderness. For Malchik walking is a political act—and as someone who grew up car-less, I lapped up her impassioned prose.  

. . . .

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd

The Living Mountain is quite possibly the most remarkable account of hill-walking ever written. The Scottish poet and novelist, Nan Shepherd, recounts a life spent walking in the Scottish highlands. Her prose is now considered some of the best “nature-writing” ever penned, as Shepherd shows us how to walk into the heart of a mountain using all of our senses. This slim volume was out of print for decades but is now lauded as a masterpiece.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From Electric Lit:

This is how the story goes: Jake and I were having a playdate. We were at his house. I have no memory of where his parents were. My parents were at work, miles away in the city. Jake and I were young enough to both unabashedly adore Barney and I hadn’t yet been taught what could happen when girls and boys played alone together. My legs were scrawny and my cheeks were chubby. Jake was much, much taller than me. At some point, Jake led me into a bedroom—the bedroom belonging to his parents—and locked the door. Then he grabbed my tiny shoulders and forced a kiss on my mouth.

My parents like to tell this story because it never fails to entertain at a dinner party. People laugh and sometimes blush and almost always raise a glass to what they call: ‘Jake’s gumption’.

After all, we were children.  

I recently watched Miranda July’s Kajillionaire. The film ends with what I interpret as the protagonist’s first consensual kiss. That kiss feels transformative because it’s the first time this emotionally stunted twenty-six year-old allows herself pleasure. It’s the first time she acknowledges her sexuality without feeling like it’s wrong.  

Days later, the intensity of my feelings hadn’t waned. I felt confident that the protagonist, Old Dolio was the victim of sexual abuse. My certainty was guttural. There was something in the way she held herself that was familiar. Watching her felt like looking into a mirror.  

Kajillionaire explicitly depicts the psychological abuse Old Dolio experiences, but the presence of sexual abuse is left up to the audience. Early in the film, Old Dolio attempts to return a one-hour massage certificate for cash and instead reluctantly accepts a twenty-minute massage. Before the masseuse’s hands even make contact with her baggy top, Old Dolio’s whole body flinches, recoiling at the prospect of touch. The masseuse makes the tiniest impact and Old Dolio yells out that it’s too much. The scene ends with the masseuse holding her hands above Old Dolio’s back, keeping them there, suspended in the air, giving Old Dolio the only amount of intimacy she can bear.  

I flinched the first time I let someone kiss me. He was thirteen and his eyes were the color of ice. I said yes. And yet I was terrified. My body was already programmed to anticipate violence. My mother says that as a baby I couldn’t be soothed. That I cried and cried and cried and nothing she did could end my sobbing. She went back to work soon after my birth and shortly after that, was diagnosed with breast cancer. In every photograph we have from that time, she and I cling to each other. On some visceral level, we understood how little control we had—that safety is imaginary. When you’re deprived of comfort, your body accommodates. Old Dolio’s shoulders slouch throughout Kajillionaire. Her hair hangs almost over her face. She’s trying to make herself disappear. She’s trying to protect herself.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve hunched. Sometimes I tell myself it’s because I want to make myself smaller, other times I acknowledge what feels truer: there is safety in invisibility.

When Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Girlhood, showed up in my mailbox, I hid the book under my couch cushion for a week. It was too hot for my skin. I’d read her second book, Abandon Me, the year I blew up my life, the year I left a six year relationship that was headed toward marriage so I could travel around the country. That book forced me to acknowledge that I was horribly unhappy. The prospect of Girlhood dislodging another piece of my certainty terrified me.   

Since the #MeToo movement began, I’ve licked my wounds quietly, unsure of how to engage with the cloudy intrusions that haunt my body. I didn’t have the language to name what happened to me. I didn’t know whether my experiences counted for anything. What I did know was that every time I entered a new space, I sought the exit; anytime I got stuck on a crowded subway car, I panicked; most nights, if I fell asleep, I’d wake from nightmares shaking; even with partners I trusted, a surprise touch unraveled me.  

When I finally read Girlhood, I learned I was right to be worried. Febos holds a mirror up to the violence of being twelve years old and having “a body like those women in the magazines.” She recounts the many men who were compelled by her because of what they wanted to take from her. “Eventually, I understood the strength that was no strength, that was a punishment no matter what I did or did not do. So I let my friend’s older brother close the closet door.” 

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

From The Paris Review:

In the run-up to Thanksgiving last year, you learned a whitewashed story at school about how the first peoples of this land were happy to give their sacred spaces to the consumptive force of European men in the name of civilization and progress. You came home from school and unzipped your backpack, revealing with artistic pride a picture book you had colored and stapled yourself. Your kindergarten teacher had asked you to color in a little Native American girl, then a Native American boy, followed by a pilgrim girl and boy, each one garbed in their traditional attire. I admired the craft of your book, a swell of parental pride coursing through me as I witnessed the evidence of my progeny doing and making things in the world beyond me. And I relished that you had colored all four children Brown like you.

As you flipped through the pages of your book, you narrated a sad story about how much the pilgrims had suffered when they arrived on this land. I felt a surge in my body, an immediate, unstoppable need to explain the other forms of suffering elided by this disturbingly singular narrative. I described some of the impacts of this arrival on Indigenous peoples—the European theft of their autonomies, cultures, languages, and lands. I explained that colonial practices dramatically changed how humans live in relation to this land. And I told you that this historical moment of colonial contact was crucial to understanding how we arrived at the global ecological crisis we face today. I will never forget the way you looked at me then, your head slightly tilted to one side, your eyes wide in bewilderment. We were sitting on the landing at the top of the apartment stairs, the contents of your backpack scattered around us. “This is not what my teacher told us,” you said with unmistakable agitation. I knew that for the first time you were confronting the existence of conflicting worldviews, a vital gulf between your formal education and your maternal one. “That’s okay,” I said. “My job as your mother is to tell you these stories differently, and to tell you other stories that don’t get told at school.” I pressed on to explain that history is a story based on a version of the past. “Can you hear the word story in history?” I asked. You nodded slowly, a little body in deep rumination. “These stories need to be told from the perspectives of those who have been most damaged by history. These other stories,” I said, “can teach us how to keep living.”

From the onset of your public education, you have been learning what it means to be American through a manicured version of history that keeps European whiteness at its center. This form of education willfully forgets the lives that were destroyed, the bodies that were brutalized, and the cultures and traditions that were abolished or displaced to establish that center space. It tells you a singular and continuous narrative of Western capitalist expansion, obscuring the bleak fact that much of what we call “progress” has been a direct and unrelenting line to the wholesale destruction of the earth. Against this obliterating narrative, I glean from the fragments in an attempt to teach us otherwise. I scramble to harvest alternative histories omitted by the textbooks, the histories of those who have faced annihilation and lived toward survival. Learning to mother at the end of the world is an infinite toggle between wanting to make you feel safe and needing you to know that the earth and its inhabitants are facing a catastrophic crisis. This morning, you went off to school to learn discipline, to hone your reading and writing skills, to study official state history. I am at my desk sipping tea, turning over words. The birds are chirping outside my window. You, me, the birds. We are all creatures living as though we have a future, as though tomorrow will continue to resemble today. Meanwhile, plans are being devised to drive the marketplace forward when the earth’s nonrenewable resources are exhausted. Scientists and businessmen are plotting to colonize the moon in a relentless drive to create an alternative human habitat when this one can no longer foster us. There is no consideration of ceasing extraction, only a maniacal mission to discover other worlds to plunder.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

PG notes that he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he posts on TPV.

He also notes that “the lives that were destroyed, the bodies that were brutalized, and the cultures and traditions that were abolished or displaced to establish” Western civilization in the United States and Canada could be said about every continent and sub-continent in the world and every race in the world during all of known history.

It is absolutely true that the US enslaved African-Americans. It is also true that Native Americans killed and enslaved each other long before any European face appeared in North, Central and South America. The Aztec and Inca empires were built on the backs of Native American slaves.

William the Conqueror was not particularly kind to native Anglo-Saxons. The Golden Horde was an equal-opportunity conqueror of both Europeans and Asians. The Ottoman Empire wasn’t regarded as particularly gentle by its subjects. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur AKA Tamerlane were not regarded as pacifists in their time.

Mansa Musa, an African, the 14th century emperor of The Mali Empire, is regarded by some as the wealthiest individual the earth has ever seen. In addition to Mali, Musa’s empire included present day Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Mauritania. The Mali Empire grew to that size through the military conquest of a variety of other African tribes and their hereditary homelands.

When Musa decided to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, he was accompanied by tens of thousands of his subjects and servants. The procession included hundreds of camels just to carry the gold to finance his travel expenses. Musa gave gifts of gold to a great many people that pleased him during his pilgrimage. He was vastly more wealthy than any of his subjects.

These encounters sometimes resulted in unintended consequences, however. Musa’s gifts of gold were so large that they depreciated the value of the metal in Egypt, and the economy took a major hit. It took 12 years for the community to recover.

From Public Books:

My father called me the other day to ask if I was in a good mood. The Mets were in first place, having triumphed in their season opener. These days Mets fan cherish even the briefest of moments on top. During the brighter era of the mid-eighties, my father, a trial lawyer, childhood Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and recent convert to the Mets, developed a new philosophy. He decided that the outcomes of his cases were directly tied to the Mets results. If they were winning games then he would win his case, and if they lost then it did not bode well. He did not harbor this belief in secret; he strongly encouraged his clients to root for them. And this philosophy stood him in surprisingly good stead through the late eighties. As the Mets slid downhill in the following decade, pragmatics forced him to put this philosophy, if not his allegiance, aside.

In The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession, Eric Simons attempts—earnestly and enthusiastically—to explain such irrational behavior. He starts with his own. The book opens with a blow-by-blow account of Simons watching his alma mater football team, the University of California, play Oregon State. Cal is down three with seconds to go. A win would make them the top team in the nation and give them a spot in the Rose Bowl for the first time in over fifty years. The rookie quarterback needs to throw the ball away to set up the tying field goal and a chance to win in overtime. But, inexplicably, he chooses to scramble for the win, and he fails. After describing his sweat-stained, devastated ride home, Simons declares: “this sports experience was one of the most emotionally complicated moments of my life.” His surprise at himself—at the intensity of his reaction to something that is “just a game”—drives the inquiry of the book. Sports are precisely not matters of life and death. So why do we invest so much energy and emotion in the apparently unimportant and irrational endeavor of sport fandom? Why do humans watch sports? Why do we feel the way we feel when we watch? How can a game generate such intense and complex emotional and physical responses in us? Shouldn’t these responses be reserved for the things in life that “really matter”?

Sports are precisely not matters of life and death.  So why do we invest so much energy and emotion in the apparently unimportant and irrational endeavor of sport fandom?

The underlying premise of the book is that watching ourselves watch sports can help reveal something fundamental about ourselves as contradictory human creatures.  Simons gathers material from scholars, sports fans, and at-home experiments. He reviews a stunning range of research—in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology—on topics running from the hormone system, emotion, and motivation, to cultural cognition, schadenfreude, and theories of self deception. He hangs out with fans of Cleveland’s perennially losing teams, embeds himself in the up-at-dawn San Francisco branch of Arsenal’s international fan club, and trails after the fanatic fans at the heart of Raider Nation in order to find out how sports fans understand their own fandom. And he performs pseudo-scientific experiments on himself and his friends, such as monitoring testosterone levels through saliva samples before, during, and after watching hockey games. Spectatorship, in Simons’s hands, is not a topic for which there is a single explanation but a field for understanding how we come to care and invest value in apparently “unnecessary” activities.

Art history and cinema studies have long examined and theorized questions of spectatorship, but sports generally falls outside of this tradition’s scope. One exception is a glancing mention by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, when he uses the example of “a group of newspaper boys, leaning on their bikes, discussing the results of a cycle race” to claim common ground between cinematographic and sporting technologies, arguing that in the cases of both film and sport, “everyone watches the performances displayed as a semi-expert.” For Benjamin, the sports fan, in occupying the position of a semi-expert, gains a degree of authorship; the race, match, or game, then, is always the product of multiple authors. It is common property—a collective creation—and one generated from within common conditions of relations at a particular historical and technological moment. As the title indicates, Simons, on the other hand, is after “the science of sports obsession,” and the majority of the book rests on work from biology and psychology. His writing displays an evolutionary, universalizing cast. The book slowly scales up from the physiological to the psychological to the social. I found it delightful to read Simons’s synthesis of the research being done on the effects of winning and losing on brain chemistry, models of social dominance, kinesthetic empathy, and mirror neurons.

We learn about a fish boxing ring complete with spectator fish. Researchers collect urine from the spectator fish after each bout to determine if merely watching other fish fighting has an impact on the spectators’ testosterone levels.

We also learn about experiments that test which parts of the brain fire in athletes, fans, and novices as they watch sports. The motor cortex (the part of the brain that directs movement) activates in both athletes and serious fans (experts and expert watchers) when they watch.

Athletes’ brains go particularly nuts when a shot is missed—when early anticipation of the ball’s movement is the biggest advantage. But although the biology is entrancing, applied psychology and neuroscience do not—as of yet—provide truly satisfactory explanations for why people care about sports. While a test can prove that watching competitions impacts testosterone levels, we do not know enough about what a rise or fall in testosterone level means to understand definitively what we know from the test. Simons reminds us, “You can’t generalize behavior or hormonal changes onto one person, you can’t predict the way a person will respond to a game without understanding all the ways the game matters to them.”

So how do we explain something like the commitment to almost guaranteed misery on the part of those fans who root for perennially losing teams? Simons chooses Cleveland fans as his example, but it could be any team, really. Team sports are organized around an inescapable fact: at the end of every season, every team loses except one. And that winning team will most likely lose the following year. Being a sports fan would seem to be a regular practice in heartbreak. Which is to say, being a sports fan has something to do with love. Simons reaches back to Socrates to unearth an old but still useful definition of love, one with parallels in contemporary research. The notion of a “social prosthetic system,” as advanced by behavioral scientist Stephen Rosslyn, is this:  individuals build up their identities by placing pieces of themselves into people and things that they care about, “à la Voldemort.” These practices of self-expansion are our bid for immortality. We care about sports teams, then, because (or when) we choose to lodge key parts of ourselves in them and to build core pieces of our identity around them. Humans are motivated to expand themselves, this causal logic goes, and watching sports is one way we can do this. We cannot understand sports fandom by measuring win/loss ratios, because most of the value and the pleasure lie in the risks and rewards of the ongoing relationship. And, as in addiction and romantic love, this relationship requires relinquishing control. In watching, we choose to put ourselves in situations that are out of our hands. We choose to be swept away by feeling.

Link to the rest at Public Books

From The Wall Street Journal:

It was, even for those two historical giants, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, a remarkable action. On Aug. 7, 1941, without letting the still-neutral American nation know what was going on, the unorthodox and purposeful president had arrived in the quiet harbor of Placentia Bay on the Newfoundland coast, after traveling there via train and warship. Two days later the equally resourceful Prime Minister of Britain arrived in the same port on the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, just repaired from its encounter with the Bismarck.

For three full days, these two leaders and their top advisers shared their views about how the United States and the British Empire should carry out a combined policy against the Axis powers “in the event” of America’s joining the war. This meeting turned out to be the first of 11 that the “Big Two” would have during the world conflict—the last being with Stalin, at Yalta in February 1945. Their colloquy established a pattern for the hammering-out of the shared Anglo-American grand strategy.

In addition to discussing their military intentions, the two governments also worked together to produce one of the most important political documents in the West’s canon of statements about human rights, trade, the freedom of peoples and democratic purpose. The statement, soon termed “The Atlantic Charter” in the press, was issued after the two leaders had secretly departed for home, the better to avoid possible enemy interruption.

The Atlantic Charter was never actually signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, but was later viewed by historians as a grand step toward the coming of the United Nations. The lineage of the document’s ideas ran back, via Wilson’s Fourteen Points, to 19th-century thought about the comity of nations and an international order. And when this greatest conflict in human history was over—to be followed shortly after by the rise of the Cold War—the permanent peacetime agreements that formed the NATO alliance (1949) could also be seen as the natural successor to the ideas and decisions that arose from Roosevelt and Churchill’s meeting.

It is not surprising, then, that whenever the cohesiveness and common purposes of the Western Alliance appears to be splintering, whenever America and Europe seem to be drifting apart in today’s world, the calls to halt that danger almost always begin by referring back to this historic 1941 encounter. A fine new Brookings Institution policy book by David McKean and Bart Szewczyk, “Partners of First Resort: America, Europe and the Future of the West,” is not a work of history, unless one thinks of it being what scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School call “Applied History.” The two authors are scholar-practitioners (both being former members of the Policy Planning Staff of the Department of State) and their account begins with the Atlantic Charter, the United Nation and NATO, then gallops forward swiftly to the coming of the Obama and Trump presidencies, both of which in their different ways (the latter especially) exposed irresolution and fissures in the Atlantic partnership.

This book can be seen as a liberal-internationalist act of special pleading, but it is no less interesting for being so. “Partners of First Resort” is quite good in describing the American-European differences of viewpoint in recent times, and on the dangers posed by Chinese authoritarianism—as well as by Vladimir Putin’s frequent efforts to undermine Western ideas and unity. The book concludes with a long chapter (“Toward a New Atlantic Charter”) that contains a serious and detailed agenda of all of the areas that any and all American policy makers, Republican or Democratic, now have to grapple with: climate change; cyber conflict; technological disruption; trade; public health. “Partners of First Resort” comes across, then, as a bold attempt to set out a grand strategy for the West, perhaps timed to catch the attention of President Biden and his team of advisers.

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

From Electric Lit:

Lineage is complicated in Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Set in Washington, D.C., and Chicasetta—a fictitious town based on Eatonton, Georgia, the birthplace of Jeffers’ mother—the novel relies on historical “songs” to trace Ailey Pearl Garfield’s lineage from the arrival of her first African ancestor on American soil and her Creek ancestors’ early encounters with Caucasians in America. The songs serve as a narrative of the land and what happens throughout the years to the inhabitants of that land.

Given the period, the novel touches on large issues—slavery, the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands, colorism, race relations—but for Jeffers, the heart of the novel is the growth of the messy, chubby, loud, and imperfect Ailey.

When we first meet Ailey, she is a preschooler, traveling with her mother and sisters to spend the summer months in Chicasetta. The coming of age novel follows Ailey through her teenage and college years. As Ailey grows older, the annual pilgrimage and her relationship with her elders take on a different meaning. Ailey’s Uncle Root introduces her to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and gifts her a first edition of The Souls of Black Folk. Later, when Ailey attends university, Du Bois serves as a guide leading her to discover her life’s calling and forge a path distinct from that of her parents and sisters.

. . . .

Donna Hemans: Where does your fascination with history come from?

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers: When I first learned about slavery, I didn’t learn about it in a history book. I am a child of the ’70s. Even though I went to primarily African American schools up until junior high school, we didn’t get a lot of that in school. You had to learn it elsewhere. 

My grandmother’s father was born in slavery. And he was a little bitty boy—a toddler—and my great-grandmother Mandy was a teenager when freedom came. One of her first memories is of her father being sold down the river to Mississippi or where ever, sold deeper south. That was a very traumatic experience for her. She told that story to my mother. She was an old woman and my mother was maybe five and Momma would always despair that she hadn’t spent enough time when Great-Grandma Mandy tried to tell these stories. The kids wouldn’t listen; they wanted to go out and play. Great-Grandma Mandy would say “You got to hear this.” And then Momma would always say “I wish I had paid more attention.” 

That made an impression on me. But you know when you are a child, you don’t have these sorts of critical thinking skills. But as an adult, I think there was something about that grief that Momma had had if she had paid more attention to her great-grandmother that made me pay attention to the older folks. So that’s how I first learned about slavery through family stories. 

Later, when I first began reading the classic slave narratives—Frederick Douglas’ narratives, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl—things began to click about the stories I had heard in Eatonton and then the history that was on the page. And that’s when the fascination really began. 

The first time I was in graduate school, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, had a big archive called the Southern Historical Collection. That’s where I first encountered the archives and I still have photocopies of letters written by enslaved Black people that I found in the Southern Historical Collection. Once I saw those letters I was just hooked. I couldn’t get those people out of my mind.

DH: I think of the focus of the book as building lineage. Ailey says to her white classmate that for white descendants of the Pinchard family “paternity is an a priori assumption.” But that’s not the case for Black Americans. Lineage of Black people in the Americas is such a complicated thing. Why did you want to write about the complexity of lineage? Is it tied to the fact that it is so difficult for Black folks to trace who we are and where we came from? And do you think the complexity of lineage is widely understood outside of Black communities? 

HFJ: I definitely do not think that many people who are not African American understand that most of us have European ancestry, no matter what we look like. I am a cocoa-brown woman with coily hair and I have white ancestors on both sides, paternal and maternal. I don’t think people understand the violence behind white lineage in Black communities. I do think the half has not been told about Native American lineage in Black communities. 

One of the reasons is that there is so much missing from the historical archives. In the United States, no one bothered to keep these sort of impeccable records. When you go to 1860, that’s basically where you’re going to hit a wall for Black lineage to be able to trace names, to be able to trace where people lived. If you don’t have bills of sale, if somebody wasn’t sold, typically you’re not going to have a paper trail. So lineage was very important. 

But also I think that only within Black communities are we really aware of the way that skin color has been used as a hierarchy. Skin color, hair texture, all of that. But also only within Black communities are we aware that in one family with the same mother and father, you can have several different skin colors, several different hair textures. So within the family, you may be treated the same or you may not, but when you go out people will respond based upon phenotype. 

The reason I found that to be fascinating to talk about is that we have always heard this sort of story about the house and the field slave, and that enslaved Africans who worked in the house were close in color to the master and many of them were related to the master. And so they had an easier time than people who worked the fields. What I hadn’t seen a lot of in fiction is an examination of what those people who lived in closer proximity with the master had to deal with in terms of sexual harassment and sexual abuse.

Link to the rest at Electric Lit

PG isn’t very impressed with accounts of kind masters and happy slaves. It’s difficult for him to believe there wasn’t a continuing anxiety arising from the knowledge that a life and an environment could change in an instant. The death of one owner then a new owner who had inherited the slaves. A relatively stable owner who traveled to Europe who was replaced by an overseer who showed one face to the boss and another to the slaves. A good owner who went bankrupt, leaving the fate of the slaves in the hands of a banker in New York or Atlanta.

On the other hand, PG has identified his ancestry with enough precision to be fully satisfied that neither he nor any of his ancestors benefitted financially from slaves or slavery. Even if one or more of them had, PG doesn’t believe that the sins of the fathers are the moral responsibility of their descendants any more than he believes that descendants of slaves who have lived in freedom all of their lives are entitled to any special benefits by virtue of the suffering of their ancestors.

PG realizes that this attitude places him in opposition to the opinions of more than a few in the United States. Such individuals are entirely free to have whatever opinions they think best about slavery or anything else.

One of the problems with extending past wrongs, even horrible atrocities, beyond the lives of those who were the perpetrators or victims of those wrongs is that this is, unfortunately, a very good way to create a forever war, one that can never end because no one is in a position to say that justice has been served and the war can end.

PG remembers meeting more than a few veterans of World War II when he was a child. Some were still physically impaired by the wounds they had received fighting the Japanese or Germans. A subset of this group still bore a grudge, not just against those they fought, but all Japanese and Germans, including those who had lived in the United States before the war and their descendants and played no part in it.

PG has read that the Taliban and some other middle-eastern groups refer to American or European soldiers as “crusaders” although the last crusade ended over 700 years ago. For PG, that’s a forever war.

Definitely not about writing directly, but quite possibly a wonderful story about human nature, which forms the basis of many works of fiction and is present at all times, everywhere.

From The Economist:

IF YOU WRITE a book called “The Honest Truth About Dishonesty”, the last thing you want to be associated with is fraud. Yet this is where Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University, finds himself, along with his four co-authors of an influential study about lying.

In 2012 Mr Ariely, along with Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Nina Mazar and Lisa Shu, published a study on how to nudge people to be more honest. They concluded that when asked to affirm that information is truthful before they give it, rather than afterwards, people are more likely to be honest. The results stemmed from three experiments: two conducted in a laboratory (led by Mr Bazerman, Ms Gino and Ms Shu), and a third based on data from a car-insurance company (led by Mr Ariely and Ms Mazar).

Several researchers have tried and failed to replicate the results from the laboratory tests. But it is the car insurance study which is driving the most serious doubts. It asked policyholders to self-report the number of miles they had driven. Customers were asked to sign a statement on the reporting form which said, “I promise that the information I am providing is true”; half of the forms had this declaration at the top, half had it at the bottom. All of the car-owners had previously reported their odometer readings to the insurance company, giving a baseline for the data (the time elapsed between the baseline readings and the experiment varied for each customer). Mr Ariely and Ms Mazar found that when customers were asked to sign the statement at the top of the form, there was a 10.25% increase in the number of self-reported miles, compared with the miles reported on forms where the statement was signed at the bottom. The more miles a car has driven, the more expensive the insurance will be. The researchers concluded that signing the truthfulness statement at the top of the form resulted in people being more honest (and thus on the hook for higher insurance premiums).

With over 400 citations on Google Scholar, these findings have spread far and wide. But on August 17th Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons and Uri Simonsohn, who run a blog called Data Colada, published an article, based on the work of a group of anonymous researchers, dissecting what they believe to be evidence of fraud. There are several eyebrow-raising concerns, although two in particular stand out: the number of miles reported by the policyholders, and the way in which the numbers were supposedly recorded.

In a random sample of cars, one would expect the number of miles driven by each vehicle to follow a bell-shaped curve (such as a “normal distribution”). Some cars are driven a lot, some are barely driven, but most fall somewhere in between these extremes. But in the experiment from 2012, the number of miles driven follows a uniform distribution: just as many cars drove under 10,000 miles as drove between 40,000 and 50,000 miles, and not a single car drove more than 50,000 miles. Messrs Nelson, Simmons and Simonsohn suggest that a random number generator was used to add between zero and 50,000 to original readings submitted by the customers.

The random number generator theory is backed by the second problem with the data. Many people, when asked to write down big numbers, round to the nearest ten, hundred or thousand. This can be seen in the data for the original odometer readings: nearly 25% of the mileages end in a zero. But in the experiment, each digit between zero and nine is equally represented in the final digit of the mileage reports. Humans tend to round numbers, but random generators don’t.

All five members of the original research group admit that the data in their study were fabricated. But all say they were duped rather than dishonest. “We began our collaboration from a place of assumed trust⁠—rather than earned trust,” said Ms Shu, on Twitter. However, she declined to comment further to The Economist. Mr Ariely’s name is listed as the creator of the Excel spreadsheet containing the original data. But he says he has no recollection of the format of the data he received, speculating that he might have copied and pasted data sent to him into the spreadsheet. One explanation is that the insurance company, or a third party that collected data on its behalf, falsified the numbers. The Hartford, the Connecticut-based insurance company that allegedly provided data for the experiment, could not be reached for comment. Mr Ariely has requested that the study be retracted, as have some of his co-authors. And he is steadfast that his mistake was honest. “I did not fabricate the data,” he insists. “I am willing to do a lie detection test on that.”

Link to the rest at The Economist

From Buzzfeed News:

The paper also bolstered the reputations of two of its authors — Max Bazerman, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, a psychologist and behavioral economist at Duke University — as leaders in the study of decision-making, irrationality, and unethical behavior. Ariely, a frequent TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist, cited the study in lectures and in his New York Times bestseller The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone — Especially Ourselves.

Years later, he and his coauthors found that follow-up experiments did not show the same reduction in dishonest behavior. But more recently, a group of outside sleuths scrutinized the original paper’s underlying data and stumbled upon a bigger problem: One of its main experiments was faked “beyond any shadow of a doubt,” three academics wrote in a post on their blog, Data Colada, on Tuesday.

The researchers who published the study all agree that its data appear to be fraudulent and have requested that the journal, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retract it. But it’s still unclear who made up the data or why — and four of the five authors said they played no part in collecting the data for the test in question.

That leaves Ariely, who confirmed that he alone was in touch with the insurance company that ran the test with its customers and provided him with the data. But he insisted that he was innocent, implying it was the company that was responsible. “I can see why it is tempting to think that I had something to do with creating the data in a fraudulent way,” he told BuzzFeed News. “I can see why it would be tempting to jump to that conclusion, but I didn’t.”

. . . .

But Ariely gave conflicting answers about the origins of the data file that was the basis for the analysis. Citing confidentiality agreements, he also declined to name the insurer that he partnered with. And he said that all his contacts at the insurer had left and that none of them remembered what happened, either.

According to correspondence reviewed by BuzzFeed News, Ariely has said that the company he partnered with was the Hartford, a car insurance company based in Hartford, Connecticut. Two people familiar with the study, who requested anonymity due to fear of retribution, confirmed that Ariely has referred to the Hartford as the research partner.

The Hartford did not respond to multiple requests for comment from BuzzFeed News. Ariely also did not return a request for comment about the insurer.

. . . .

The imploded finding is the latest blow to the buzzy field of behavioral economics. Several high-profile, supposedly science-backed strategies to subtly influence people’s psychology and decision-making have failed to hold up under scrutiny, spurring what’s been dubbed a “replication crisis.” But it’s rarer that data is faked altogether.

And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.

Link to the rest at Buzzfeed News

PG picked an online random number generator at random.

Somewhere in his brain, he remembered reading that random numbers generated by a computer are not truly random numbers, but are pseudo random numbers – he is not certain of the difference, but expects picking an online random number generator by entering “Random Number Generator” into Google and picking one of the first listings to appear is a pseudo random number generator search. Or something.

At any rate, here is a list of ten random numbers that PG created with the online random number generator – pseudo or non-pseudo, he can’t tell the difference:

12654
36023
23996
13888
33367
23237
18197
18197
17624
23718

If, as the OP’s suggested, the main culprit is a TED Talk speaker and a Wall Street Journal advice columnist who used a random number generator to create the mileage figures upon which the whole ground-breaking study was based, it makes PG question the expertise of TED Talk speakers and Wall Street Journal advice columnists.

Additionally, is there a reason why none of these heavy-duty university mathematics and data science experts never noticed that none of the numbers in the original data was rounded off?

From Publishers Weekly:

When Ellen Bass and I published The Courage to Heal, a book that helped launch the incest survivor empowerment movement, it was 1988 and I was 31 years old. I was shocked when the book became a grassroots bestseller, catapulting me to fame for the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

During the years Ellen and I were writing the book, I was terrified about how my family would react. My fears were justified. When I outed my grandfather as my perpetrator, my already volatile relationship with my mother exploded, and I became estranged from her side of the family. Holidays and Mother’s Day became painful reminders of the price I’d paid for writing the truth.

But my fierce, dramatic mother and I shared something in common: a stubborn insistence on working our way back into each other’s lives. It took years, but we ultimately succeeded, in part by agreeing to disagree about the hot-button issue that had driven us apart. Grandchildren helped bring us together, and I rewove threads of connection with estranged relatives. I wrote books about other things.

Over the next two decades, I built a career as a writing teacher, and my own writing faded into the shadows. I never stopped writing, but I didn’t publish. To keep the peace, I had to avoid writing and publishing about the subjects closest to my heart. I didn’t want to lose my family again.

Yet the epic story of my mother and me still thrummed inside. When the reconciliation I thought we’d achieved was challenged a dozen years later by her sudden announcement that she was moving across the country to my town for the rest of her life, I was faced with caring for an 80-year-old woman whose developing dementia pushed every button I had. Could I possibly rise to the challenge of becoming the daughter she needed me to be?

Millions of people are in this position, caring for parents who in one way or another betrayed them; this story needed to be told. So, as I sat with my mother in doctor’s offices and hospital rooms. As we played 500 rummy in her tidy mobile home, I scrawled bits of dialogue on random scraps of paper. Late at night, I wrote the truth about being a caregiver for a parent whose proximity had never equaled safety.

As the pages piled up, I told myself, “I’m just writing this for myself. I don’t have to publish it.” That was the safe container I had to create for myself, because lurking on the edge of my consciousness were the relatives who’d rejected me the first time I’d entered this territory. How could I tell our mother-daughter story without once again writing about the sexual abuse, the conflict that had sundered us the most?

It wasn’t until my mother and the rest of her generation died that I seriously considered publishing The Burning Light of Two Stars. 

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Washington Post:

Of the making of books about Napoleon Bonaparte, there seems to be no end. Two hundred years after the emperor’s death in 1821 on the island of St. Helena, he continues to be the subject of new biographies and speculations. His name and iconic image — the bicorne hat worn sideways, the army greatcoat, the hand inserted in the vest — are instantly recognizable the world over.

Even though ours is an age of billionaire boy wonders, Napoleon’s sheer precocity still dazzles: On Nov. 9, 1799, shortly after his 30th birthday, the former artillery officer from Corsica assumed dictatorial powers over all of France. Five years later, he crowned himself Emperor of the French. At 40, “the man on horseback”— Edmund Burke’s prophetic phrase — had conquered all of Western Europe. When Napoleon’s armies fought and lost the make-or-break Battle of Waterloo, he was all of 45. Imprisoned afterward on St. Helena, the deposed emperor eventually died of stomach cancer — or, possibly, arsenic poisoning if you’re conspiracy-minded — at a still-young 51.

What did Napoleon do during his six-year confinement on that tiny South Atlantic island? He grew flowers (the roses died), planted trees, constructed an aviary and harvested peas and beans. An engraving shows him wearing a straw peasant’s hat and leaning on a spade. In fact, contends Ruth Scurr in “Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows,” this world-shaking military genius had always turned to the natural world — and to two- or three-hour long baths — for succor from the ills of the spirit or the burdens of power.

In her book, Scurr tracks Napoleon’s rise and fall with hardly a glance at his battles, political maneuverings and mistresses (there were at least 21). Instead, we learn about the vegetable patch young Bonaparte kept while at school, his later attention to green spaces when undertaking urban renewal in Egypt, Italy and France, his enjoyment of reflective walks in the woods and his penchant for neoclassical landscape design. Straight lines, notes Scurr, along with “precision and order were central to his aesthetic.” In contrast, Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine, insisted on natural, parklike surroundings — the English style — for Malmaison, their private residence. As empress, she obsessively collected plants and animals from around the world and was apparently the first person to breed black swans in captivity.

. . . .

(The author0 prefers to devote greater attention to André Thouin, head gardener at the Jardin des Plantes. Thouin was among the 167 members of the Commission for Arts and Sciences that accompanied Napoleon’s army during his largely unsuccessful Egyptian campaign. Stationed in Cairo, the group soon created a 30-acre walled garden and research center, eventually producing an encyclopedic record of their labors in the landmark catalogue “Description of Egypt.” Later, many of the botanical and zoological specimens brought back from France’s scientific expeditions ended up in Thouin’s care.

. . . .

There’s just one battle in Thomas E. Crocker’s “Empire’s Eagles: The Fate of the Napoleonic Elite in America” and that’s Waterloo. After Napoleon’s defeat — “a near-run thing,” as his adversary Wellington admitted — the emperor’s family and his generals all realized they would soon be facing prison sentences or firing squads. Where should they flee? To many of them, America seemed a land of refuge and, perhaps, of renewed opportunity.

A scholar of early American history, Crocker opens with a riveting day-by-day account of Napoleon in the port city of Rochefort, waiting to escape from France, perhaps to Baltimore, where his younger brother Jerome had once been married to a local belle named Elizabeth Patterson. Revealing an uncharacteristic lack of decision, the emperor dillydallied, then trusted the English to be honorable and soon found himself en route to St. Helena. More fortunate, his elder brother Joseph made it to our shores, where he established himself in regal comfort at a vast estate near Philadelphia.

After other Napoleonic loyalists reached the United States they founded clubs and support groups, tried to establish a Utopian community devoted to viniculture in Alabama swampland and even planned a military operation to install Joseph as emperor of Mexico. All these activities Crocker relates in meticulous detail before devoting the second half of his book to a long-standing legend — that Marshal Ney, Napoleon’s “Bravest of the Brave,” faked his death before a French firing squad, then escaped to South Carolina, where he resurfaced as a schoolteacher named P.S. Ney. Could this possibly be true? Crocker, trained as a lawyer, lays out the evidence both for and against.

. . . .

In the end, the most tantalizing question about Napoleon remains open: Would the world have been better off had the man never been born (or born at a different time, as in Stephen Vincent Benét’s little classic of alternative history, “The Curfew Tolls”)? It’s a hard call. Napoleon led millions to their deaths, yet he also instituted laws and reforms comparable in importance to those of the U.S. Constitution.

Link to the rest at The Washington Post

From The Paris Review:

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been an uneasy time of rupture and anxiety, filled with historic challenges and opportunities. In that close to twenty-five-year span, the United States witnessed the ominous opening shot of September 11, followed by the seemingly unending Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the effort to control HIV/AIDS, the 2008 recession, the election of the first African American president, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the contentious reign of Donald Trump, the stepped-up restriction of immigrants, the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, and the coronavirus pandemic, just to name a few major events. Intriguingly, the essay has blossomed during this time, in what many would deem an exceptionally good period for literary nonfiction—if not a golden one, then at least a silver: I think we can agree that there has been a remarkable outpouring of new and older voices responding to this perplexing moment in a form uniquely amenable to the processing of uncertainty.

When the century began, essays were considered box office poison; editors would sometimes disguise collections of the stuff by packaging them as theme-driven memoirs. All that has changed: a generation of younger readers has embraced the essay form and made their favorite authors into best sellers. We could speculate on the reasons for this growing popularity—the hunger for humane, authentic voices trying to get at least a partial grip on the truth in the face of so much political mendacity and information overload; the convenient, bite-size nature of essays that require no excessive time commitment; the rise of identity politics and its promotion of eloquent spokespersons. Rather than trying to figure out why it’s happening, what’s important is to chart the high points of this resurgence, and to account for the range of styles, subgenres, experimental approaches, and moral positions that characterize the contemporary American essay.

Of course, roping off a period like the year 2000 to the present and calling it “contemporary” is somewhat arbitrary, but one has to start somewhere. At least this artificial chronological box allows for the inclusion of older authors who made their mark in the twentieth century and had the temerity to keep producing significant work in the twenty-first (such as John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch). Just as set designers of period films make a mistake in choosing only articles of clothing or furnishings that were produced in that era, forgetting that we always live with the layered material objects of previous decades, so it would be wrong to restrict the literary flavor of an era to writers under forty. Indeed, what makes this period so interesting is the mélange of clashing generations and points of view. There are still tightly reasoned sequential essays being written in the classical mode, side by side with ones that resist that tidiness.

The essay has always been an adaptable, plastic, shape-shifting form: it may take the form of meditation, reportage, blog, humor piece, eulogy, autobiographical slice, diatribe, list, collage, mosaic, lecture, or letter. Contemporary practitioners seem bent on further testing its limits. For instance, Lia Purpura, Eula Biss, and Mary Cappello are drawn to the lyric essay, which stresses the essay’s associational rather than narrative or argumentative properties. Cappello has shrewdly spoken about essay writing—“that non-genre that allows for untoward movement, apposition, and assemblage, that is one part conundrum, one part accident, and that fosters a taste for discontinuity.” In line with Modernist aesthetics, a mosaic essay with “a taste for discontinuity” may be constructed from fragments, numbered or not, with white space breaks between pieces that connect intuitively or emotionally if not logically. It is up to the reader to figure it out. The list essay, which is highly generative of disparate materials, by its very nature evades an argumentative through line, and can seem initially as random as a poetic inventory by Whitman, though it may deepen subtly and organically. (For example, Nicholson Baker’s charming “One Summer,” which crisscrosses periods of his life, nevertheless builds to a revealing self-portrait.)

While the influence of poetic technique on the lyric essay has been largely acknowledged, less recognized is the short story’s impact on the contemporary essay. Many memoir essays exist in a kind of fictive space, progressing through scene and dialogue and a sensory-laden mood that stays tied to the moment by moment. The piece itself may be entirely factual, but the sentences give off a Minimalist frisson that shows the influence of short story writers such as Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, and Lorrie Moore.

Nonfiction has been agitated in recent years by certain ethical questions, such as, “How legitimate is it to insert fictional details in nonfiction?” or “Is it proper to appropriate the voice of some- one of a different ethnicity, sex, or social class?” That both can be done successfully can be seen in Hilton Als’s “I Am the Happiness of This World,” which channels the silent film star Louise Brooks’s ruminations, as though Brooks herself were dictating an essay to Als from the grave.

The role of technology—the internet and social media—in altering our rhetorical lives may even affect the typography of an essay (as evidenced in Ander Monson’s unshackled “Failure: A Meditation”). “Are we merging with our computers and turning into ‘spiritual machines’?” wondered the essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn. The blog, once viewed as a debasement or poor relation of the essay, has proven itself a useful invitation to free-flowing, self-surprising displays of consciousness (see Ross Gay, Eileen Myles). Some feminist essayists have expressed a desire to arrive at a “post-patriarchal essay,” implying that the very structure of linear argumentation is authoritarian and reinforces status quo sexist power relations. (Maggie Nelson’s influential Bluets and The Argonauts offer clues for shaking up the old model.) Yet all these ways to challenge and subvert the classic essay are in the tradition of the essay itself, whose very name bespeaks an attempt, an experimentation, a stab in the dark. All this is to suggest that the essay remains the most open-ended of forms. (It has even spilled out into other media, as witness the essay film and the graphic essay, subjects for another day.)

Perhaps nothing has so shaped the contemporary practice of essay writing as the rise of the personal essay. It scarcely matters whether the subject be illness (Floyd Skloot), loitering (Charles D’Ambrosio), or prisons (Joyce Carol Oates): some insertion of authorial character is likely to invade the text. Much the way journalism has increasingly surrendered its claims of objective neutrality and allowed reporters room for subjective voice, so the essay has come to rely more and more on an “I.” With that has come an infusion of raw honesty, vulnerability, and awkward admission such as would scarcely have been seen in earlier essays. Younger essayists are often willing to acknowledge confusion, psychological distress, thralldom to contradictory drives and uncontrollable desires. There is often a trade-off: more heat, urgency, diaristic excitement, less perspective. Younger essayists might struggle to resolve questions about their authentic nature and perplexing disparities, while older essayists might feel more at ease with the self’s mutable, impure, self-betraying nature. Those who are entering middle age will often situate their “I” characters on a moving platform that begins in childhood or adolescence and transitions into adulthood and sometimes even parenthood. The personal essayist can accommodate these chronological shifts between life’s passages more easily than the short story writer (unless you’re Alice Munro). As the essayists age, they are less likely to be writing from the midst of distressed confusion and more from a place of wry self-mockery and detachment. The younger the essayist—not all, of course—the more likely an identification with a generational perspective. Popular culture, rock music, or TV programs may be convenient markers for that shared membership. The sense of being part of a generation tends to fade as one grows older: one sees one’s unshakable limits and singularities, for better or worse.

It has long been the province of the personal essayist to turn one’s narrator into a character by asserting defining autobiographical facts, eccentric or contrarian notions, odd tastes, behavioral tics, and so on. Having done so, the essayist might then wish to parry that Crusoe-like separateness by analyzing to what extent he or she belongs to a larger group or tribe. Ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, physical or mental disability, national origin, generational awareness, social class, and political alignment are some of the categories increasingly tempting contemporary essayists to situate themselves in the midst of a group or at an ambivalent angle from it. This is especially true when the minority to which you belong is asserting its rights or finds itself under attack—when the question becomes unavoidably topical.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From a purely sentimental and personal standpoint, PG would like the essay to regain the stature and prominence it once held.

That said, he’s not optimistic about commercial success. He would be happy to be proven wrong on this point, however.

From Publishers Weekly:

In September 2021, our book, Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, will be published by MIT Press. We’re two design historians, and between us we’ve had babies and books before. But DM, as our most recent offspring is affectionately known, has had the longest gestation of them all. This book sprung from our shared curiosity about why the material culture that defines our reproductive lives was so hidden, and also what it might take to change that. We write about the objects and systems that we came to call “design for the arc of human reproduction”: contraceptives, breast pumps, labor and delivery wards, and at-home abortion kits, to name just a few.

Such objects, spaces, and ideas should be among the most well-considered design solutions; designers should aspire to work on them. Yet these tools, techniques, systems, and speculations are treated as afterthoughts. They receive no attention in design studios or classrooms, and likewise are never present in design collections within cultural institutions. Instead, the subject is treated furtively or as unimportant—as something beneath debate or lacking in intellectual content. This gap inspired our book.

We were tired of society looking away. We wanted to make an image-rich book that could hold these designs to the light. If we told their wildly different—and sometimes totally contradictory—histories, then perhaps they could become part of the canon and, in doing so, could recalibrate it.

In 2017 we embarked on the journey of pitching Designing Motherhood as a public reckoning. We sent out the proposal to directors and decision makers at various presses, and waited with glee, ready to fend off multiple offers.

When the replies did trickle in, they were polite rejections: “Not sure there’s an audience for this….”

A constant refrain: “A women’s issue. We don’t really publish in that area.”

Though we were positive the audience for such a book would be far-reaching, no one seemed to see this topic with the same fervor and potential as we did. In our evenings and weekends, in times when children were napping or on lunch breaks from work, we began to write. We knew we’d need money for image permissions and so we started to think about applying for a Pew grant. The only problem was that we were individuals and we needed an institutional partner—and none of the institutions we knew or worked for were remotely interested.

At the 11th hour, we were introduced to Maternity Care Coalition. MCC has been working since 1980 to support pregnant people and their families with direct services, like doulas and lactation support, as well as advocating for policy change at the city and national level. It is an organization that envisions an equitable future, grounded in racial and social justice. They understood our project right away, because it was their project too. It took folks outside the museum and art and design worlds to “get it”—probably because that’s where the real work usually happens.

When we passed the first stage of the Pew application, we cowrote a proposal for a book, two exhibitions, and a set of public programs that would center the expertise of MCC’s staff. To our disbelief, we were awarded the grant, and MIT Press came on board as the publication partner.

We began writing, mainly during the pandemic. We had a lot to say and more to show—in the 350-plus images we chose to illustrate our writing, and with the 50-plus contributing artists, writers, and interviewees we spotlighted, we wanted to make sure we were as polyvocal as 344 pages would allow. All throughout the book, we cast a critical eye on designs that ultimately shape every living person. We partnered with the Mütter Museum and the Center for Architecture and Design to devise the two exhibitions.

Bringing Designing Motherhood into the world was not easy or painless. But it was a good birth.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

Trigger Warning – PG spent way too long researching and preparing this post and is posting it too late at night.

At this point, he thinks there may some interesting observations, but isn’t sure

From Publishing Perspectives:

Disturbing news from PEN America, which has issued a notice to the media this afternoon (July 22) saying that the Belarusian justice ministry has sent a letter to PEN Belarus, informing the organization that it’s to be closed.

The news follows government raids on offices of cultural and rights organizations and of media outlets, as described in our article from Friday (July 16).

. . . .

Early this week, Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was in Washington for meetings with the Joe Biden administration’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan, congressional lawmakers, the US Agency for International Development’s Samantha Power and US Agency for Global Media’s acting CEO, Kelu Chao.

One point she made to CNN’s Jim Sciutto–an international affairs specialist [book plug for Jim’s book omitted as irrelevant – PG] –is that she thinks of herself not as the opposition leader but as a figure in the majority.

Her reference was to the August 9 election, claimed by longtime strongman Alexander Lukashenko as a victory but said by Tsikhanouskaya and her voters to have been a travesty. Tsikhanouskaya lives in Lithuania for safety at this point.

. . . .

The action reported by the PEN network of international chapters today coincides with the US-funded Radio Free Europe/RadioLiberty report on Minsk’s justice ministry also asking the country’s supreme court to shut down the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAZh) for what the regime calls “repeated violations of the law”.

. . . .

It’s reported that the message from the ministry was received at PEN Centre Belarus on the same day that the organization released one of its detailed reports on cultural rights violations.

This new report from PEN Belarus is a first-half 2021 update on issues encountered and cites 621 violations between January and June. Like the first-quarter report we looked at at the time of Roman Protasevich’s arrest, six-month report pulls together what’s known of state actions taken against the community PEN represents and lists instances of censorship, “persecution for dissent,” and more.

In a section on literature, the PEN Belarus staff writes, “Starting from January of this year, non-state publishing houses, publishers, book distributors, independent press, including those with content on cultural topics, authors, and often readers themselves, have come under pressure.”

Interference and suppressive action against elements of the country’s publishing community include instances of detention; interrogation; raids; confiscations of computers, telephones, books; frozen finances; blocked book exports; and censorship.

As the PEN team writes in its report, “This is a tragic time for freedom of expression, freedom of creativity, freedom of opinion. The sociopolitical crisis is characterized by the violation of fundamental human rights and freedoms, persecution for dissent, censorship, an atmosphere of fear, and the expulsion of proponents of change.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

For those who seem to find dictators and autocrats behind every bush in a country governed by democratically-elected officials, this is what a real dictatorship looks like.

With respect to that general subject, PG is reading an excellent history focused on what happened in Eastern Europe after World War II, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum.

It is a well-written, highly-detailed and densely-footnoted account of the take-over of governments of all sorts, including democratically-elected ones, by Russian-backed Communists during the last days and the decade following the end of World War II in Europe.

If you have ever had a fancy to live in a Communist dictatorship, this book will put you off of that idea forever.

If you describe any Western democratically-elected government official a “dictator,” this book will help you understand you are using the term as a metaphor. (Yes, that includes Donald Trump.)

This goes down on PG’s highly-recommended list and he doesn’t believe the book falls in the literary equivalent of, “Eat your spinach! It’s good for you!”

When PG made this post, this heavy-duty book (over 1,000 pages) had 771 reviews with an average star rating of 4.6.

Sometimes, PG checks the one-star reviews to catch a flavor of the readers who didn’t like the book.

Here’s the first one-star review that appeared on the Amazon-USA site (paragraph breaks and spacing in the original):

(PG commentary – Comparison of the Nazis to the Soviets and finding that the Soviets are the better of the two is the ultimate race-to-the-bottom.)

But PG hasn’t fully delivered on the headline for this post!

Meet Alex, the World’s Most Successful Elected Official!

Here’s a link to a nine-minute PBS News Hour segment about Belarus dated July 20, 2021

Embedded Belarus video follows:

End of Belarus Update

The Point

It’s easy to consign the Belarus actions as isolated or archaic or otherwise something that real people would never take seriously.

However the tactics Comrade Lukashenko is ordering in Minsk are precisely those that were used during the the post-WWII period described in Ms. Appelbaum’s book. The dictators come and go, but the means of gaining and holding power in this part of the world haven’t changed in 100 years.

More to the point, Ms. Appelbaum sees hints of those same strategies and tactics in some Western Nations, as described in her latest book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (which PG hasn’t read, but intends to after finishing the current Appelbaum book he is reading – remember, it’s over 1,000 printed pages, and his Kindle says he’s about 30% finished.)

More than President Trump, PG is concerned about Cancel Culture, Critical Race Theory and similar movements arising as part of the backlash that lead to Trump’s narrow defeat in the last election. When PG first read much about these and other political concepts driving many activists during the last election cycle (before he started Ms. Appelbaum’s post WWII book mentioned at the top of this post), he was reminded of things he had learned from other reading concerning Soviet/Stalinist/Bolshevik strategies for taking and keeping power.

PG suggests that those who claim that western civilizations have somehow reached the end of history or that there is no chance of history repeating itself, that the arrow of progress inevitably points in the direction of greater freedom and cannot be reversed are simply incorrect. PG recalls reading that, at the beginning of the 21st century, about one-third of the nations of the world were democracies. Certainly, nondemocratic systems seem to regularly fail, but they are often followed by another nondemocratic system.

PG will point to the relatively widespread fears among certain groups that President Trump was going to be a dictator are some evidence that, even in large and longstanding democracies, there is no guarantee of continued democracy. Remember, Comrade Lukashenko began his rule by winning what was, by contemporary and local geographical standards, a reasonably open election. Around the turn of the 20th Century, China went through a period during which it appeared to be moving toward at least a type of democratically-elected government before gaining its latest Supreme Leader for Life. There were a few rulers that continued in power for a shorter period than Mao had.

Here’s Amazon’s product description for Ms. Appelbaum’s new book:

From the United States and Britain to continental Europe and beyond, liberal democracy is under siege, while authoritarianism is on the rise. In Twilight of Democracy, Anne Applebaum, an award-winning historian of Soviet atrocities who was one of the first American journalists to raise an alarm about antidemocratic trends in the West, explains the lure of nationalism and autocracy. In this captivating essay, she contends that political systems with radically simple beliefs are inherently appealing, especially when they benefit the loyal to the exclusion of everyone else. Elegantly written and urgently argued, Twilight of Democracy is a brilliant dissection of a world-shaking shift and a stirring glimpse of the road back to democratic values.

Minutiae

In the minutiae category, PG has concluded that, for him, reading a heavily-footnoted book in ebook form is a better overall experience than reading a paper version of the same. In an ebook (at least as read on a Kindle Paperwhite), the footnote numbers linking to the note are shown in the text and the notes are easily accessible, but you only see the text of the footnote if you tap the footnote number. Unless he taps, PG’s reading experience is similar to a book without footnotes.

When PG is reading a densely-footnoted printed book, many pages show only a few lines of text and a gaggle of footnotes visually dominate the page. For easily-distractible PG, the footnotes are a distinct temptation to examine and it’s not difficult for him to become involve in the fascinating details and lose track of the continuity of the text during that process.

Sometimes, his progress through such a paper book is:

1. Read the text
2. Examine any footnotes that include comments, quotes, etc.
3. Go back and read the text again so he can pick up on the flow of ideas when he turns the page (odd-numbered pages are the worst, but even-numbered pages are not without the occasional speed-bump).
4. Repeat this process for a thousand pages or so.

That said, despite being hip-deep in material filled rigid and beyond-argument doctrine, PG will not be doctrinaire regarding the ebook-vs.-print-and-footnotes question.

Comrades won’t lose their TPV Party Cards if they find fault with PG’s dictates.

(Promotional note – With your TPV Party Card, you get free delivery of Amazon ebooks to your local reading device! No more annoying shipping fees, Comrade!)

From The Paris Review:

I am puzzled by the mournfulness of cities. I suppose I mean American cities mostly—dense and vertical and relatively sudden. All piled up in fullest possible distinction from surroundings, from our flat and grassy origins, the migratory blur from which the self, itself, would seem to have emerged into the emptiness, the kindergarten-landscape gap between the earth and sky. I’m puzzled, especially, by what seems to me the ease of it, the automatic, fundamental, even corny quality of mournfulness in cities, so built into us, so preadapted for somehow, that even camped out there on the savannah, long before we dreamed of cities, I imagine we should probably have had a premonition, dreamed the sound of lonely saxophones on fire escapes. What’s mourned is hard to say. Not that the mourner needs to know. It seems so basic. One refers to certain Edward Hopper paintings—people gazing out of windows right at sunset or late at night. They’ve no idea. I don’t suppose that sort of gaze is even possible except within the city. You can hear the lonely saxophone-on-fire-escape (in principle, the instrument may vary) cry through Gershwin. Aaron Copland. You remember Sonny Rollins on the bridge (the structure varies, too, of course). So what in the world is that about? That there should be a characteristic thread of melody, a certain sort of mood to sound its way through all that lofty, sooty jumble to convey so clear and, as it seems, eternal a sense of loss and resignation. How in the world do you get “eternal” out of “saxophone” and “fire escape”? It doesn’t make much sense. That it should get to you—to me at least—more sharply, deeply, sadly than the ancient, naturally mournful, not to say eternal, sound of breath through reed or bamboo flute.

Not too many years ago, as I began to wonder about the mournfulness of cities—its expression in this way—I brought a recording of Aaron Copland’s Quiet City concert piece to my then-girlfriend Nancy’s house on a chilly winter evening. She had friends or family staying, so we slept in the front bedroom, which, because of its exposure or some problem with the heater, was quite cold. So I remember all the quilts and blankets and huddling up together as if desperate in some Lower East Side tenement and listening to this music break our hearts about ourselves, our struggling immigrant immersion and confusion in this terrible complexity. The lonely verticality of life. And why should sadness sound so sweet? I guess the sweetness is the resignation part.

I’d like to set up an experiment to chart the sadness—try to find out where it comes from, where it goes—to trace it, in that melody (whichever variation) as it threads across Manhattan from the Lower East Side straight across the river, more or less west, into the suburbs of New Jersey and whatever lies beyond. This would require, I’m guessing, maybe a hundred saxophonists stationed along the route on tops of buildings, water towers, farther out on people’s porches (with permission), empty parking lots, at intervals determined by the limits of their mutual audibility under variable conditions in the middle of the night, so each would strain a bit to pick it up and pass it on in step until they’re going all at once and all strung out along this fraying thread of melody for hours, with relievers in reserve. There’s bound to be some drifting in and out of phase, attenuation of the tempo, of the sadness for that matter, of the waveform, what I think of as the waveform of the whole thing as it comes across the river losing amplitude and sharpness, rounding, flattening, and diffusing into neighborhoods where maybe it just sort of washes over people staying up to hear it or, awakened, wondering what is that out there so faint and faintly echoed, faintly sad but not so sad that you can’t close your eyes again and drift right back to sleep.

It isn’t possible to hear it all at once. You have to track the propagation. All those saxophones receiving and repeating and coordinating, maybe, for an interval or two before the melody escapes itself to separate into these brief, discrete, coherent moments out of sync with one another, coming and going, reconnecting, fading out and in again along the line in ways that someone from an upper-story window at a distance might be able to appreciate, able to pick up, who knows, ten or twenty instruments way out there faintly gathering, shifting in and out of phase along a one- or two-mile stretch. And I imagine it would be all up and down like that—that long, sad train of thought disintegrating, recomposing here and there all night in waves and waves of waves until the players, one by one, begin to give it up toward dawn like crickets gradually flickering out.

In order to chart the whole thing as intended, though, we will need a car, someone to drive it slowly along the route with the windows down while someone else—me, I suppose—deflects a pen along some sort of moving scroll, perhaps a foot wide and a hundred feet long, that has been prepared with a single complex line of reference along the top, a kind of open silhouette, a structural cross section through the route, with key points noted, from the seismic verticalities of Manhattan through the quieter inflections of New Jersey and those ancient tract-house neighborhoods and finally going flat (as I imagine, having no idea what’s out there) into what? Savannah, maybe? Or some open field with the final saxophonist all alone out there in the grass.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

PG’s in a distinctly contrary mood today. The title of the OP, The Mournfulness of Cities (which the first line narrowed to American cities) suggests sadness is embedded in their general character.

Then, the rest of the OP talks about New York City and New Jersey.

You got cold one night in Manhattan? Try Minneapolis in January!

Minnesota dogs stick to the sidewalks in January.

People plug in their gasoline-powered cars so electric engine block heaters will help to make sure their engines aren’t a solid block of frozen metal in the morning.

Minneapolis people go to Manhattan in January to warm up.

(I’m not forgetting you in January, Winnipeg. I know you go to Minneapolis to work on your tans when the Minneapolis people are all in Manhattan and hotel rooms are really cheap.)

Setting aside the weather, what about all of the other cities – Chicago, Denver, San Diego? All the same as Manhattan?

Au contraire tu es fou!!

PG has spent a lot of time in New York City, lived in Chicago, and spent lots and lots of time in many other large American cities.

He has to work hard to identify a city that is truly mournful. The only one that comes immediately to mind is Gary, Indiana. PG hasn’t been back to Gary for a long time, but it was pretty mournful when he last passed through.

You can certainly be downcast anywhere, including New York City, but PG’s memories of Manhattan (he’ll not speak to the Bronx) are filled with how much energy he picked up walking down the streets at all hours of the day and night.

He named Chicago (terrific city!), Denver and San Diego, but could have named dozens more that have an upbeat, unique vibe that isn’t really replicated anywhere else.

Outside the United States, he loves London and Paris. Oxford feels like he was born in one of the colleges. If heaven looks anything like Florence, PG can’t wait to get there. No mournfulness in Florence for PG.

Contrary and upbeat! That’s PG for the next ten minutes, maybe more!

From Foreign Policy:

The idea of a lab leak has gone, well, viral. As a political scientist, I cannot assess whether the evidence shows that COVID-19 emerged naturally or from laboratory procedures (although many experts strenuously disagree). Yet as a political scientist, I do think that my discipline can learn something from thinking seriously about our own “lab leaks” and the damage they could cause.

A political science lab leak might seem as much of a punchline as the concept of a mad social scientist. Nevertheless, the notion that scholarly ideas and findings can escape the nuanced, cautious world of the academic seminar and transform into new forms, even becoming threats, becomes more of a compelling metaphor if you think of academics as professional crafters of ideas intended to survive in a hostile environment. Given the importance of what we study, from nuclear war to international economics to democratization and genocide, the escape of a faulty idea could have—and has had—dangerous consequences for the world.

Academic settings provide an evolutionarily challenging environment in which ideas adapt to survive. The process of developing and testing academic theories provides metaphorical gain-of-function accelerations of these dynamics. To survive peer review, an idea has to be extremely lucky or, more likely, crafted to evade the antibodies of academia (reviewers’ objections). By that point, an idea is either so clunky it cannot survive on its own—or it is optimized to thrive in a less hostile environment.

Think tanks and magazines like the Atlantic (or Foreign Policy) serve as metaphorical wet markets where wild ideas are introduced into new and vulnerable populations. Although some authors lament a putative decline of social science’s influence, the spread of formerly academic ideas like intersectionality and the use of quantitative social science to reshape electioneering suggest that ideas not only move from the academy but can flourish once transplanted. This is hardly new: Terms from disciplines including psychoanalysis (“ego”), evolution (“survival of the fittest”), and economics (the “free market” and Marxism both) have escaped from the confines of academic work before.

The “clash of civilizations” hypothesis is a good candidate for one of the more disruptive lab leaks in political science’s history. When the Harvard University scholar Samuel P. Huntington released his article “The Clash of Civilizations?” (note the question mark, which disappeared in later versions) in Foreign Affairs in 1993, he spread a bold and simple hypothesis about the course of the post-Cold War world: “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. … The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

Huntington’s thesis was not a conjecture based on careful empirical study—it was a speculation looking forward based on some cherry-picked contemporaneous examples. Many academic articles that sought to rebut Huntington by testing his hypothesis fell into this trap, attempting to show him wrong with sometimes quite impressive tests. But Huntington could not be disproved by mere facts. His idea was primed to thrive in the wild, free from the confines of empirical reality.

Facts, indeed, often appeared secondary to Huntington’s larger political project. In his follow-up book on the subject, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, he illustrated his argument by sketching what he considered a plausible scenario: a Sino-U.S. conflict over Vietnam leading to a racialized third world war that ends with the destruction of Europe and the United States while India attempts to “reshape the world along Hindu lines.”

This writing led not to Huntington being ostracized but enhanced his reputation, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks made his claim that “Islam has bloody borders” seem plausible to mainstream audiences. As late as 2011, the New York Times columnist David Brooks praised Huntington as “one of America’s greatest political scientists”—and even though that column ultimately judged Huntington as having gotten the “clash” hypothesis wrong, it did so with kid gloves: “I write all this not to denigrate the great Huntington. He may still be proved right.”

Another contender is the idea of managing great-power competition through game theory. During the 1950s and 1960s, political scientists and their counterparts in economics and elsewhere sought to understand the Cold War by using then-novel tools of game theory to model relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In their earliest forms, these attempts reduced the negotiations and confrontations between the two sides to simple matrices of outcomes and strategies with names like the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Chicken, and the Stag Hunt.

The allure was obvious. Make some simplifying assumptions about what the players in these games want; specify the strategies they can employ to achieve them; assume that players know what the other players know; and calculate that they will choose their strategy based on the choice the other player will make to maximize their well-being. Voilà—a science of strategy.

It is easy to mock this approach—too easy, in fact. These simple assumptions perform pretty well within their theoretical boundaries. Every semester (when the world isn’t in a pandemic), I use in-person simulations of these basic games with my undergraduate students to show that changing the rules of the game can influence players’ willingness to cooperate, a finding well attested in generations of scholarly tests.

Yet there’s a huge leap in jumping from these general, aggregate findings to believing that such simple ideas can guide the behavior of complex states without an incredible amount of additional refinement. In international relations, the specific strategies that can be employed are vast (and new ones can be invented), the stakes of every contest are unknowable, actors have incentives to hide what they know from others, and, perhaps most important, players interact again and again and again. Even when playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a game concocted to make cooperation a fool’s strategy, simply changing from playing a game once to playing it repeatedly can make cooperation an equilibrium.

Nevertheless, the general tendency of a certain influential sect of social science was to embrace the idea that game theory (to be fair, in somewhat more sophisticated terms) could provide not only insights into general features of world affairs but specific foreign-policy recommendations to guide the United States through the Cold War. In influential books like The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence, the game theorist Thomas Schelling used those tools to make the Cold War seem easy to manage—an interaction in which cool head, logic, and a steely command of risk could make confrontations from the Taiwan Strait to the Berlin Wall explicable and winnable.

All of this would have been harmless if these ideas had stayed inside the lab.

Link to the rest at Foreign Policy

Exhibit #MXWT-94837 in support of the proposition that smart people are perfectly capable of believing and doing really dumb things.

Some might argue that the conceit of thinking one is really smart will likely lead to doing more dumb things on a far grander scale than than will occur in the life of someone who is reasonably intelligent and believes her/himself to be reasonably intelligent. The second person will, of course, make mistakes, but, not extraordinarily large and incredibly stupid mistakes.

Which brings us to Hubris and Nemesis

From Greek Mythology:

Nemesis was the goddess of divine retribution and revenge, who would show her wrath to any human being that would commit hubris, i.e. arrogance before the gods. She was considered a remorseless goddess.

. . . .

One myth concerning Nemesis is that of Narcissus. He was a young man who was very arrogant and disdained those who loved him. Nemesis led him to a pool, where he saw his reflection and fell in love with it. Unable to abandon his reflection, he died there.

Link to the rest at Greek Mythology

Examples of Hubris:

The Fall of Icarus

The story of Icarus was first written down in the first century AD in the Pseudo-Apollodorus, but the tale has a much older oral tradition. In the story, Icarus’s father made him a pair of wax wings and cautioned him not to fly too high with them. Becoming overconfident, Icarus flew as high as he wanted. The sun melted his wings, and he fell to his death.

Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

Oedipus Rex is a play by Sophocles, which was first performed about 429 BC. In this play, Kind Oedipus defies the gods’ prophecy that he will kill his father and murder his mother. Attempting to control and evade his own fate, he kills an old man who turns out to be his father. Later he marries the queen of Thebes, who turns out to be his mother. His attempt to defy the gods was considered hubris.

. . . .

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers another example of hubris. Written in the late 1300s AD, it includes the character of Chaunticleer, a rich and educated rooster. His pride in his wealth and accomplishments leads him to lose track of what is real, and he is easily duped by a fox that flatters his vocal ability. The fox eats him.

. . . .

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe

Written in the late 16th century, Doctor Faustus tells the story of a man who is so proud of his own academic accomplishments and intelligence that he sells his soul to the Devil for more knowledge and academic superiority. He receives eternal damnation as a result.

Link to the rest at Your Dictionary

From The Rand Corporation:

[The Hubris-Nemesis] complex involves a combination of hubris (a pretension toward an arrogant form of godliness) and nemesis (a vengeful desire to confront, defeat, humiliate, and punish an adversary, especially one that can be accused of hubris). The combination has strange dynamics that may lead to destructive, high-risk behavior. Attempts to deter, compel, or negotiate with a leader who has a hubris-nemesis complex can be ineffectual or even disastrously counterproductive when those attempts are based on concepts better suited to dealing with more normal leaders.

Link to the rest at The Rand Corporation

From The Washington Post:

A friend of mine was suffering such severe back pain that it was difficult for him to walk or stand. He consulted three doctors about the best course of treatment. The first was adamant that he needed surgery right away. The second advised my friend that he didn’t need surgery and that if he continued physical therapy, his condition would improve gradually over the coming months. The third prescribed strong steroids and recommended that, if his condition didn’t improve in a month, then he should have surgery. My friend followed the third doctor’s guidance, and it seems to be working. But he was mighty upset and confused by all those clashing perspectives. And he is still unsure whether that third doctor’s approach is the right one.

This undesirable variability in professional judgment is an example of noise, the ubiquitous and often-ignored human failing that is the focus of this well-researched, convincing and practical book. “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment” was written by the all-star team of psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, former McKinsey partner and management professor Olivier Sibony, and productive legal scholar and behavioral economist Cass Sunstein. Kahneman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his pathbreaking work with Amos Tversky on systematic biases in judgment. It prompted armies of psychologists and behavioral economists (including Sibony and Sunstein) to study the causes and remedies for many such faults, including overconfidence, stereotyping and confirmation bias — or seeking, remembering and placing excessive weight on information that supports our beliefs.

The authors kick things off by distinguishing between bias (systematic deviations) and noise (random scatter). The book then sustains a relentless focus on explaining and documenting the wallop packed by the simple and omnipresent error of noise — and what decision-makers can do about it. It blends stories, studies and statistics to make a compelling case that noise does at least as much damage as bias: undermining fairness and justice, wasting time and money, and damaging physical and mental health.

Kahneman and his colleagues show how unwanted variation in judgments (evaluations) and decisions (choices) creates “noisy systems” — which plague professionals including criminal judges, insurance underwriters, forensic scientists, futurists and physicians, who routinely make wildly varied judgments and decisions about similar cases. Systems are noisy, in part, because different professionals apply different standards. There is disturbing evidence, for example, that when multiple physicians evaluated identical cases for evidence of heart disease, tuberculosis, endometriosis, skin cancer and breast cancer, they agreed on diagnoses only about two-thirds of the time. In such noisy systems, errors add up rather than cancel each other out. As the authors put it, “If two felons who both should be sentenced to five years in prison receive sentences of three and seven years, justice has not, on average, been done.”

Systems are also noisy because, over time, the same professionals apply inconsistent standards. To illustrate, a study of 22 physicians who each examined the same 13 angiograms two times, several months apart, found that they disagreed with themselves between 63 percent and 92 percent of the time. To explain such swings, the authors use research on “occasion noise”: Fluctuations in a person’s mood, fatigue, physical environment and prior performance that are (objectively) irrelevant, yet shape judgments. Like the study titled “Clouds Make Nerds Look Good,” which examined 682 actual decisions by college admissions officers: They weighted applicants’ academic strengths more heavily on cloudier days and applicants’ nonacademic strengths more heavily on sunnier days.

Link to the rest at The Washington Post

PG will certainly second the notion of judges hearing criminal cases being subject to “noise” in the OP.
Search for “inconsistent sentencing” on Google. You will find that a great deal of research and scholarship devoted to studying why criminal defendants that are convicted of or plead guilty to seemingly similar crimes receive widely divergent sentences from judges who are acting under similar laws.

More severe sentences imposed on racial minorities than on white defendants are the hot button in this legal field. On average, racial minorities in a given jurisdiction receive harsher punishment than non-minorities for the same crimes.

However, female criminals of all races are treated much more leniently than male criminals of the same race who are convicted of the same crimes.

“In 2012 Sonja B. Starr from University of Michigan Law School found that, controlling for the crime, “men receive 63% longer sentences on average than women do,” and “[w]omen are…twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted”, also based on data from US federal court cases.” See SSRN

Having represented a judge in one case and a handful of attorneys in other cases in a past professional life, PG can assure you that going to law school or being elevated to the bench does not change a human into a machine.

Determining a suitable sentence for a criminal is anything but a precise process. There are zillions of factors that can come into play – far too many and far too subtle for any legislature to craft written legislation that addresses all of them.

Is the defendant remorseful or not? How remorseful or how not-remorseful? PG can attest that reading a defendant’s words as captured in a court transcript and watching and listening to the defendant as they speak is two different things.

Just as some people are better at fooling others when they are lying than other people, some people are better at conveying truthfulness than others, even when both tell the truth.

There are also different purposes for punishment. Simply punishing an individual for committing an evil deed is the most obvious. This is the simple application of the rule evil deeds must be penalized for fundamental justice in a society.

However, assuming that the defendant will be released from confinement at some future time, deterring that defendant from committing another crime is another purpose. Deterring other individuals from committing similar crimes is another purpose for punishment. Enforcing broad societal standards of behavior is another.

To take an extreme example, if everyone who exceeded the posted speed limit by five miles per hour or more were sent to prison for a minimum of 30 years, that would be quite a powerful deterrent. However, there is an inherent societal value that the punishment should fit the crime.

If our speeding driver received the same sentence as someone who killed another person with a knife, we would not feel that such a system was just and fair.

PG suggests that the “noise” described in the OP and what sounds like an interesting book is not the only reason why human judgment is complex to understand and assess fully.

From The Wall Street Journal:

On the hot afternoon of July 6, 1758, advance troops of a vast Anglo-American army probed through forest toward the French fortress of Ticonderoga, in what is now upstate New York. As skirmishing suddenly erupted, the woods crackled with gunfire. Casualties were minimal but momentous: Shot through the heart, and among the first to fall, was the army’s charismatic second-in-command, British Brig. Gen. George Augustus, Lord Howe.

Since arriving in America the previous summer, the dynamic and popular Lord Howe had galvanized hopes of reviving a flagging colonial war against the French. The calamity of his death was soon compounded by another: Two days later, the flustered Maj. Gen. James Abercromby authorized a frontal assault that was repulsed at a heavy cost in killed and wounded.

The loss of George Howe at age 33 was not simply a jarring setback in Britain’s struggle with France but a personal tragedy for the aristocratic family he headed. Back in England, his widowed mother, Charlotte, Lady Howe, led the official mourning. Despite her grief, she worked to ensure that the seat in Parliament left vacant by George’s sacrifice was filled by one of his surviving brothers rather than an outsider. It was an action that won widespread admiration, inviting comparisons with the stoical matrons of ancient Rome.

Yet as Julie Flavell reveals in “The Howe Dynasty,” it was just one example of the way in which extraordinary Howe women transcended their expected gender roles to enter spheres of influence dominated by men. Ms. Flavell, an independent scholar who specializes in British-American relations, traces the fortunes of Lady Howe and her extensive brood. Key characters include George’s younger brothers Richard and William, who likewise played prominent roles in Britain’s imperial conflicts, and their lesser-known—but no less remarkable—elder sister Caroline. During a long lifetime, Caroline Howe (1722-1814) was a dedicated correspondent, expressing opinions that not only provide a fresh perspective on her notoriously taciturn brothers but offer fascinating glimpses into the rarefied world of the English aristocracy.

Spanning almost a century of the Georgian era, “The Howe Dynasty” presents a richly detailed and lively saga of one of its most distinguished families. Challenging and insightful, it reflects impressive scholarship, grounded in exhaustive archival research on both sides of the Atlantic. An especially valuable source is the correspondence that Caroline Howe maintained over more than 50 years of friendship with Lady Georgiana Spencer, mother of the celebrated leader of fashion, Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire.

“The Howe Dynasty” shows how women whose supreme function in life was to produce male heirs could nonetheless find a voice through informal “networking,” establishing crucial contacts in the drawing room or on the hunting field that could be mobilized to secure favors and control opinion.

Charlotte von Kielmansegg was only 15 when she married Emanuel Scrope Howe, 2nd Viscount Howe, in 1719. At her husband’s death in 1735, Lady Howe had already borne him 10 children, eight of whom lived into adulthood. Her direction of family affairs was later aided by a redoubtable sister-in-law, Mary, Lady Pembroke. She dedicated herself to schooling Lady Charlotte and Caroline in the subtle arts of exercising influence at court and in the country. In Ms. Flavell’s assessment, mother and daughter alike became “apt pupils of their capable kinswoman.”

The Howes shared the same Hanoverian ancestry as their monarchs, and it was widely credited that Charlotte was the illegitimate offspring of King George I of Great Britain. Thanks to Lady Pembroke’s persistent lobbying, Charlotte became lady-in-waiting to Princess Augusta, the wife of Frederick, Prince of Wales. This was a vital conduit of patronage that proved pivotal for reviving the Howe fortunes. In her turn, Caroline established a rapport with the unconventional Princess Amelia—the aunt of George III—who shared her love of hunting, gossip and cards.

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:

Adolf Hitler gets the blame for lighting the fuse of World War II, and for good reason. Yet Germany had a partner in Soviet Russia, not only during the infamous Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 but well before, starting with the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922. Without his enablers in Moscow, it’s hard to imagine that Hitler would have dared go to war against the rest of Europe.

In “Faustian Bargain” (Oxford, 384 pages, $29.95), Ian Ona Johnson shows how extensive Russia’s help was. He begins the story at the end of World War I, which had left the world with two pariah states: Germany because it had begun hostilities, Russia because the Bolshevik Revolution had transformed the country from a wartime ally to a postwar menace. Hardly had the ink dried on the punitive peace treaty signed at Versailles in June 1919 than the two pariahs joined forces.

As Mr. Johnson chronicles, Russia offered a place for the German army to develop weapons and train men in violation of the treaty that its civilian government had just signed. In return, Russia would learn how to modernize the Red Army, huge in size but badly trained and poorly equipped. The agreement was formalized at Rapallo, Italy. “Poland must and will be wiped off the map,” wrote Gen. Hans von Seeckt, the man who established Sondergruppe Russland (Special Group Russia), the bureau that would manage military relations between Germany and Russia. Seeckt was referring, of course, to the country that Versailles had resurrected between them. (Poland had been divided between Germany, Russia and the now-vanished Austro-Hungarian Empire.) “It was not an unfair peace that motivated Seeckt and his fellow officers,” Mr. Johnson writes. “It was the far more ambitious aim of reversing Germany’s defeat in the First World War.”

Mr. Johnson, who teaches military history at Notre Dame, draws on American, British, German, Polish and Russian archives to describe a “secret school of war.” The resulting book has an academic flavor, but it’s consistently interesting and spiced by the occasional scandal, including one in which a German naval officer brings his Russian girlfriend home to Germany, supporting her through a movie studio he purchased with government money, planning to use it for military propaganda. When the studio goes bankrupt, damning details emerge, triggering high-level resignations and bringing to light “the breadth of Germany’s commitment to rearm.”

In the 1920s, without troubling the civilian government in Berlin, the Reichswehr (German defense force) set up a ring of bases south and east of Moscow. German companies like Junkers and Krupp contracted directly with the Soviet government to manufacture warplanes in Russia, deliver coveted German-built locomotives and train Red Army technicians. Versailles had banned all offensive weapons, but the “Black Reichswehr” in Russia included warplanes, battle tanks and poison gas. Russia, for its part, learned alongside the Germans. Stalin was so interested in Krupp’s tank designer Eduard Grotte that he ordered that the man be kept in Russia by “all measures up to arrest.”

It’s chilling to learn how much time and money Germany and Russia devoted to chemical warfare, hoping to develop gas bombs to be dropped from high altitude upon enemy cities. In the end, the effort failed. “The vision of cities obliterated by mustard gas was fading,” Mr. Johnson says of the situation in 1931, “with a war of machines—tanks and planes—rising in its place.”

Armored warfare seems to have been the most successful collaboration. The Reichswehr developed the doctrine: Heavy tanks with large guns were more valuable than speedy vehicles; they should be deployed in mass and accompanied by motorized infantry. Companies in Germany built the prototype Panzers, as they were called, and shipped them to Russia disguised as farm tractors.

. . . .

When Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933, his obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism” cooled the relationship with Moscow. Nor did he worry about adhering to the terms of Versailles. The official and “black” Reichswehrs merged into the wartime Wehrmacht, with conscription supporting a huge army with modern tanks and a fully fledged air force, all made possible by Soviet Russia.

Cooperation between the two countries began again in August 1939, when Hitler and Stalin agreed to a “nonaggression pact.” The Germans invaded Poland on Sept. 1, the Russians on the 17th, and the two armies met at Brest-Litovsk on the 22nd.

. . . .

Meanwhile, German machinery, weapons and technology flowed east, and Russian oil, grain and raw materials helped equip and feed the Wehrmacht that occupied most of Western Europe in 1940. More quietly, the Soviet Union absorbed half of Poland, the Baltic countries, and strategic pieces of Romania and Finland. The mutual exchange continued until the Sunday morning in June 1941 when Germany crashed into the Soviet Union. “Invading German forces,” Mr. Johnson tells us, “marched on rubber boots made with materiel shipped over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Their rations included Soviet grain, which had continued to arrive up to the very day of the invasion.”

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

PG has read a great deal of 20th century history, but the OP was the first time he had learned that extensive cooperation between Germany and Russia began in 1922 instead of 1939.

PG notes that the publisher of the book discussed in the OP, Oxford University Press, has elected to release the book in hardcover only, at least for the moment. PG may or may not check back later to see if an ebook is available or, more likely, put a hold on the book through his public library.

The author of the book, Ian Ona Johnson, is a an Assistant Professor of Military History at the University of Notre Dame who looks very young (which is a more revealing statement about PG than it is about Dr. Johnson). His author page does mention that he and his wife are the owners of a dog named Patton.

Speaking of his local public library, several years ago, PG and Mrs. PG culled their physical book collection to the tune of at least a couple of thousand books by donating them to that library. The librarian who accepted the donation glanced at the books and told PG that the library was likely to keep some of them instead of selling all of them off. Evidently, that was a compliment that the librarian did not customarily deliver when accepting book donations.

PG just checked and he still has nine oak bookcases (6 feet tall, except for one that is 7 feet tall, made to fit in a niche in a gone-but-not-forgotten law office and a bit tippy if not secured to the wall behind it, made by a former client of PG who owned a furniture factory in exchange for PG’s legal services).

Each of these bookcases is filled with physical books that will also make a trip to the local public library with the help of a couple of burly young men as and when Mrs. PG is willing to let them go.

From Publishers Weekly:

I was straight for part of my life. Most gay people were, at least when I was growing up. I kissed some boys and worried about finding a date to prom, all the while falling headlong for my friends who were girls. I thought everyone felt this way—at least until one of my crushes broke my heart so thoroughly that I had to reconsider my assumptions.

Then I read Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, and the scales fell from my eyes. Simply put, since I had never been exposed to an alternative, I had reversed the definitions of like and love in my mind. It was 1992 when I figured that out; I was 17, and I flipped through the card catalog at my local library in suburban Chicago, desperate to find books about me so I could wrap my brain around this change in circumstances and maybe figure out how to envision my own future.

In case you were wondering, the pickings at the Libertyville Public Library were slim.

Since then, there’s been a fairly miraculous change in the world around me—first in representation of the LGBT+ community on film and in print and then in authentic stories finding greater purchase in publishing through the #OwnVoices movement. What I love about #OwnVoices is that people are starting to catch up (admittedly, not without some backsliding) with the very true idea that minority stories of all different types are relevant to everyone. At their foundation, stories transport, educate, and cradle us. Storytelling has always been a critical part of being human, and diverse storytelling is a critical part of crafting a global society that works for everyone, not just a privileged few.

I believe there’s been wide benefit from the #OwnVoices movement—both for writers finding outlets for their work as well as for readers who now have a much richer selection of stories available to them. I find it interesting, then, that the We Need Diverse Books organization has decided to stop using the #OwnVoices term. In a recent blog post, WNDB says it sees #OwnVoices as having become a “ ‘catch all’ marketing term” and is moving to particularize (and personalize) authors more in its descriptions. Bitch Media also ran an extensive article about the problems with this approach to promoting diversity and authentic storytelling.

But have we, in our push for progress, fallen into an unexpected trap?

I’ve been resistant to categorization my entire life (which, believe me, has not been easy for my parents). I splash around in the deep end of gray areas and kind of love that I’ve left a long trail of confounded people in my wake. I’ve had a career in technology for a quarter century, very often as the only woman on my team. I wear men’s clothes, do most of the cooking in my house, have a well-used sewing machine that’s almost as old as I am, and, okay, I get man crushes sometimes. So, as much as I’ve appreciated (and benefited from) the #OwnVoices label, labels in general make me suspicious.

The beauty of fiction is that it has always gone beyond the lived experience of the author: that’s what research is for, what networks are for, and how sensitivity readers can help. I write literature that explores love, family, and friendship, and I’m committed to writing authentic characters with universal experiences. After a lifetime of living in a world that either wasn’t quite sure what to do with me or was downright hostile, I don’t want to be boxed in with my art. I also don’t want a stupid hashtag to provide cover for inauthentic, substandard writing acquired to fill quotas or facilitate marketing and sales.

I want diversity in storytelling to be celebrated and promoted no matter who is writing, which requires much more than a hashtag; it requires diversity within the ranks of people in power—the gatekeepers, the tastemakers. It requires us all to try hard to put ourselves into other people’s shoes and challenge ourselves to deeply understand and empathize with a variety of experiences. Frankly, it requires more (and more delicate and thoughtful) work than I suspect most people want to put in.

Publishing is a business, and business thrives on formula, efficiency, and succinct and compelling marketing. But publishing is also a conduit for art, which means that everyone in it, writers included, needs to be held to a higher, more exacting standard. There are important stories to tell—stories that can bring us together and illuminate dark corners.

Maybe #OwnVoices isn’t the best solution to this, but bringing diversity and authentic voices to a broader audience has never been an easy problem to solve, and I’ve learned to take what I can get without stopping my push for something better.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly