From The Atlantic:

My Atlantic colleague John McWhorter and I must have received the same high-frequency language-nerd alert, audible only to the types of people whose idea of fun is Esperanto grammar. We both recently learned that Princeton’s classics department had ceased requiring its students to study Latin and Greek, and we reacted in predictable horror. A classics department without Latin and Greek is like a math department without multiplication and division, or an art department without paint. More than a thousand years ago, the monk Ælfric prefaced his Latin Grammar by saying it was “the key that unlocks the understanding of books.” I had a vision of a new generation of Princeton classicists, sniffing and thwacking at padlocked volumes of Thucydides or Cicero with looks of total incomprehension, like Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson trying to get the files “in the computer” in Zoolander.

. . . .

But then I remembered my own language training, and I’ve come around to Princeton’s point of view. My classical education started, oddly enough, just like Owen Wilson’s. We attended the same private school about a decade apart, and like all students, we were subjected to a mandatory year of Latin. (After that requirement was abolished, Wilson and his co-screenwriter Wes Anderson made the film Rushmore, in which the nixing of Latin from a prep-school curriculum is a plot point.) We had the same teacher, who told me that Wilson was one of the worst students he’d ever taught. I took another five years of Latin, plus four of Greek, while Wilson went off to find his fortune in Hollywood. I think even Ælfric would agree he got the better end of that deal.

I never met Wilson, but I clearly remember many classmates squirming in their seats, struggling to give a damn about whether nauta was masculine or feminine, or how to turn it into a dative plural, or what the hell a dative plural was anyway. They off-loaded all knowledge of Latin seemingly seconds after handing in their final exam. Some of us did give a damn, however, and after a couple of years of Latin-grammar boot camp, we could read erotic poetry from 2,000 years ago and be genuinely, uh, moved. I remembered that difference years later when I met linguists who were recruited as spies by the United States government. To assess their abilities, the government would invent complicated languages and give them tests to figure out who would catch on. The best candidates were the ones who liked the process so much that they asked if they could please have more tests to take home—you know, just for fun.

Princeton’s deliberation about Greek and Latin requirements amounts to asking: Should our classics department, which is devoted to all aspects of the study of antiquity, introduce the subject with a sequence of classes most hospitable to the oddly built minds of language fanatics? The classical world appeals to philosophers, archaeologists, historians, poets, rhetoricians, and others. To study the history or mythology of Greece and Rome in a state of total ignorance of those civilizations’ language sounds to me like a sad imitation of a classical education. But if a student becomes initially interested in classics by reading a Greek myth, it is not obvious to me that requiring her to chant the principal parts of the verb βαινω for a semester will tend the flame of her curiosity rather than snuff it out. Is she more like me, or more like Wilson?

A classicist at Princeton told me that his department expects to teach just as much Greek and Latin as it ever did. No classes will be cut. But instead of making these courses a gateway to the classics, they’ll be an option the majority of majors will take—without the implication that philology is the best or only way to get into the subject. If that hypothesis is correct, he said, and classics attracts more undergraduate majors and most of them take Greek and Latin, Princeton will have more students proficient in these languages after dropping the requirement. (Con artists and drug dealers will recognize the move here, enticing the customer with a harmless product, only to hook them later on the harder stuff.) Conversely, students may begin to regard Greek and Latin the way English majors regard Middle and Old English: as antique curiosities that only the strangest of their fellow students spend much time on.

The classicist I spoke with is more optimistic. Those who do not take Latin and Greek would, he supposes, be from the minority of undergraduates with niche interests relatively remote from Latin or Greek grammar. “We have students who are using computational and CGI modeling of ancient Greek architecture,” he told me. “We want those students to be in classics.”

But will those students really be in classics—or just in the classics department? To be classically educated, as I understood it, meant taking one’s place in a line of students stretching back two or three thousand years. Each of those students learned many of the same things, and learned them roughly the same way, so that if you were to travel back in time (either by DeLorean or by library card), you could converse with anyone in that line and have access to that person’s knowledge. That access is Ælfric’s key, and if you skip the philology and substitute in CGI classes, the key doesn’t fit anymore, and the culture traced by that line of students, from Hesiod to Derek Walcott, is locked away.

. . . .

“People are very sensitive about tradition right now,” the Princeton classicist told me. (He asked not to be named, because of the incessant trolling his department has received for its decision.) “And these changes can look to an ungenerous eye like they are not giving due respect to tradition.” That would be the case, he said, if Princeton were trying to persuade students to learn less Latin and Greek, rather than more, while recruiting students with other original interests and backgrounds. Various fields have already made this shift. After all, you can now study English without knowing much about the history of English; at Princeton and many peer institutions, a single course on Shakespeare is enough to satisfy one’s requirement for pre-1700 study of the English language. You can write a senior thesis on Thomas Pynchon, and no one will make you start your education by learning when the dual dropped out of English grammar, or by deciphering Chaucer. Princeton students can still learn about these things, and I think they should. But the grammarians and Chaucerians are not posted like riddling bridge-keepers outside the department.

Link to the rest at The Atlantic

1. PG agrees with the “Dumb Down” headline.
2. The quotes from the various Princeton professors in the OP demonstrate (for PG) one of the reasons that professors et al should teach and competent administrative minds should be recruited to actually operate the various academic departments.
3. PG suspects this change will not be looked back upon as the beginning of the rebirth of Classics at Princeton.
4. PG predicts that, absent the Atlantic article (which was a decision by an Atlantic editor that puzzles PG), no one other than a few classicists at other institutions would have noticed this change.
5. Yes, PG did take Latin in college, but quit without completing the first year. That makes him an expert on this topic.

From Writers in the Storm:

This week on June 8 was Women’s Fiction Day, celebrating strong female protagonists. More and more stories these days are bringing us great female characters. In thrillers and military fiction, one challenge is to write those strong women as authentic, well-rounded female personalities rather than alpha males with lady parts.

One good way to address this challenge is to study the real-life heroines of the past, who used wits, wiles, cunning, determination, and subterfuge to stay alive and conquer their foes. Today, we’ll take a look at the life of a real-life heroine who was feared by the Nazis as “the most dangerous spy in all of France,” Virginia Hall Goillot.

. . . .

Say the name “Virginia Hall” to anyone in the Clandestine Services, and they may well get choked up with reverence. Being a woman with no special physical ability and lacking one leg, no recruiter then or now would entertain thoughts of Virginia being capable of military service, especially behind enemy lines.

Nevertheless, she was determined to serve an active role in the battle against Nazi Germany, and serve she did, becoming one of the most revered 20th-century icons in the Intelligence Community. Altogether remarkable, she is a breathtaking example of selflessness, courage, and commitment and a true role model for both the Intelligence Community, and for fiction writers.

Virginia Hall was born on April 6, 1906, to a wealthy family in Baltimore, Maryland. Having a gift for languages, she studied French, German, and Italian at Radcliffe College and Barnard College. She then traveled to Europe to continue her education in Austria, France, and Germany. Her goal was to enter the US Foreign Service.

After finishing her studies in 1931, she worked as a Consular Service clerk at the US Embassy in Warsaw. From there, she was assigned to a consulate office in Izmir, Turkey, where a hunting accident forced her to have her lower left leg amputated. She obtained a wooden prosthetic leg, which she named “Cuthbert.” She was then assigned to the US consulate in Venice.

When Virginia requested permission to take the US Foreign Service Exam, she was informed that, due to her injury, she could not apply for a position as a diplomat. She returned to the United States and attended graduate school at American University in Washington, DC.

. . . .

Virginia was visiting Paris when Germany invaded France in 1940. She immediately volunteered with the French Ambulance Corps and drove ambulances to evacuate wounded French soldiers from the front. When France surrendered to Germany, Virginia escaped to Spain and then on to England.

In London, Virginia applied for service in the British Special Operations Executive (“SOE”) and was accepted. With the SOE, Virginia trained in weapons, communications, and as a resistance organizer for occupied France, and in August of 1941, she infiltrated Vichy in France. Some sources state that she was the first female SOE agent to do so.

The United States was not yet directly involved in the war, so Virginia posed as a news correspondent for the New York Post. Once the United States did enter the war in December of 1941, the sensible thing for her to do would have been to hustle back to England. Fortunately for the Allied effort, she declined to escape and went underground.

At the time Virginia infiltrated Vichy in 1941, operating there under the Pétain government was more dangerous for an SOE agent than operating in the Nazi-occupied region of France. The Vichy government had command of the French police departments, and with so many reliable local assets, it could more easily discover infiltrators and resistors. Most SOE agents sent into Vichy in 1941 and 1942 were killed or captured within days.

. . . .

Virginia quickly earned a reputation as a great recruiter and resistance organizer in France. She was instrumental in the rescue of hundreds of downed Allied aviators, and she arranged their safe return to England. She also organized a network of safe houses and coordinated numerous air drops of weapons and supplies to the French Resistance at a time when most drops were being intercepted by the Vichy police and the Gestapo.

Virginia’s successes did not go completely unnoticed by the Vichy government and the Nazis. The Gestapo branded her as the most dangerous spy in all of France, and they made her capture a priority. When the Germans took over Vichy in November of 1942, infamous Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie demanded that “the woman with the limp,” as Virginia was known, be captured and brought directly to him so that he could personally strangle her.

Virginia used her one good leg to stay one step ahead of the Gestapo, and that November, she escaped on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain. Some convincing sources say she was alone on this trip. Some other convincing sources say she was not alone on this trip. It is possible that she made more than one trip over the Pyrenees.

. . . .

Once in Spain, Virginia had no identification papers at a time when such documents were crucial. The Spanish arrested her and incarcerated her for several weeks. When the US consulate in Barcelona learned of this, they claimed Virginia as a legitimate US citizen and demanded her release.

After four months working undercover in Spain, Virginia returned to England in 1943 in the hope of doing more “useful” work. Once there, Virginia left the SOE to join the fledgling American OSS and volunteered to return to occupied France.

Virginia dyed her hair gray and disguised herself as an elderly farmer. Since her wooden leg made a nighttime parachute drop too dangerous for her, she was infiltrated back to Bretagne, France, on a British torpedo boat. Using the alias “Marcelle Montagne” and the code name “Diane,” she made her way to central France, where she set up radio communications with London.

In addition to transmitting intelligence back to London, Virginia again organized successful supply drops for the French Resistance, established safe houses, helped train three battalions of Free French guerrilla forces, and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the Allied invasion. In spite of Klaus Barbie’s personal vendetta against her, Virginia avoided capture and continued operating until the Allies liberated central France in 1944.

Link to the rest at Writers in the Storm

The OP draws from the following book, Key Figures in Espionage:

From The Wall Street Journal:

To use all the old metaphors, Tris Dixon’s “Damage: The Untold Story of Brain Trauma in Boxing” is a slap in the face, a punch in the gut, a kick in the groin. Given that this remarkable, long-overdue treatise on the mental and physical ravages of boxing doesn’t hold anything back, it’s fitting that Mr. Dixon’s book lands with power and precision. For boxing fans, it’s a wake-up call. To remain a fan of the sport—to cheer on the punishment that takes place in the ring, then choose to ignore its consequences—constitutes a cruel form of enabling.

Even for readers who are not aficionados of the sweet science, “Damage” hits hard. At its core is the public adoration of athletes as modern-day gladiators—or, at least, icons of physical prowess—and what we demand of them: the courage and sacrifice that we celebrate from the peanut gallery. “This is a sport in which bravery can be measured by the amount of punishment one can withstand,” Mr. Dixon tells us. Meanwhile, in the ring, “bravery” is a surefire prescription for chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a deterioration of the brain caused by repeated head trauma.

A veteran boxing journalist in the U.S. and England, Mr. Dixon tackles his subject with great compassion. He interviews neurologists, psychologists and overseers of the sport—managers, trainers and commissioners—but mostly he spends time with the fighters. Some are remarkably sanguine about the physical and mental toll they can see coming. “I’m on the back end, I know what it’s like,” says former World Boxing Organization heavyweight champion Shannon Briggs, who is still fighting as he nears his 50thbirthday. “I know I’ve got something wrong with me, I know all these punches are going to eventually catch upto me, so I’m reading about CTE and I started taking CBD,” Mr. Briggs tells the author, referring to cannabidiol, the cannabis-derived compound. “I poured the [antidepressant] pills down the toilet the day I tried cannabis.”

Like lambs to the slaughter, boxers trudge on, only to wind up on “queer street.” The most notable example is Muhammad Ali. In his prime, Ali was known for his ability to slip punches and avoid punishment, but his career was long and brutal. He fought the best and toughest fighters. And, like nearly all boxers, he stayed in the ring too long. “Age thirty is the cusp,” Ferdie Pacheco, Ali’s onetime fight doctor, is quoted saying. “Thirty-five is over the line. I don’t care how good you are, after age thirty-five you’re getting brain damage.” Ali had six fights after the age of 35; he lost three of them. The result may well have been Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s and other maladies—dementia; memory loss; the rapid deterioration of verbal skills and motor functions such as bowel control, breathing and walking—are all common results of CTE.

In the past, the image of the punch-drunk fighter was a source of humor and playful ridicule, on stage and on screen. Mr. Dixon cites the example of “Slapsie” Maxie Rosenbloom, a light-heavyweight from the 1930s who had 298 professional fights. Following his boxing career, he became a comic actor in movies and on television, where he lampooned the tortured speech patterns and lumbering mannerisms of a late-career palooka. But after generations of concussions, cerebral hemorrhaging and deaths in the ring, by the early 21st century the image of a brain-damaged boxer was no longer funny. Unlike Rosenbloom, most wound up in asylums, hospitals and sanitariums.

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

PG would not normally post an item that indicates by its title that it relies on “Science” but will make an exception in this case.

From Medium:

If I were to ask you what you find attractive, what would you say? Would you date someone shorter/much taller than you? Do you think you could fall in love with someone who is not your type?

I decided to look for meaningful connections with people instead of falling for looks, and it’s the best decision I ever made. The first message I received from my boyfriend on the online dating app was not the best introduction of all times. However, we did have a great conversation, and I liked his profile pictures. When we first met, I felt happy instantly. We had arranged to meet at a park on a beautiful sunny Sunday. He stood there with his bicycle and grinned at me. I liked his charisma, which radiated pure optimism and joy, which blew me away. After the first awkward seconds of saying hello, we had such a ball, laughing, giggling, and talking for five hours straight. In short: We hit it off right away.

Today, I love our conversations and his opinion on the many things I write about. Truth be told, he influences much of what I write and is an avid critic of my work. Also, I think he is the most handsome guy on this planet — seriously, he is awesome in any way imaginable. Just recently, I asked him what he thought when he saw me for the first time. His answer: I think I thought you were hot and easy to talk to.

Easy communication influences attractiveness

Although we had sent each other several messages beforehand, I couldn’t tell for sure from the photos whether I found him truly attractive. How could I? I didn’t know how old or new the photos were, whether he still had his hair like that, or whether he had gained or lost weight in the meantime. And, more importantly, I wanted to get to know the person behind the profile.

A study found that after a good in-person meeting, people find their future dates more attractive. With online dating platforms such as Tinder, users try to manage the vast number of profiles by picking the seemingly most attractive people. However, rating someone’s attractiveness by judging pictures is not the best way to find a partner. We can overlook crucial aspects such as what makes for a good conversation. The qualities of a good conversational partner influence how attractive they are in our eyes.

But not only smooth communication impact the attractiveness of our date, but also whether the person radiates certain security and commitment. While dating and throughout relationships, we want to know how our partner feels about us and know their intentions. This is why uncertainty, at least to some extent, is a relationship killer.

Being uncertain about love interests is devastating

Before we met for the first time, he told me that he could definitely commit to a relationship. Therefore, we both knew what we were getting into and what our intentions were. For me, it was not like additional pressure, but a kind of security, which I liked very much. So I knew that I was going to meet someone who cared about getting to know me. That was very important to me at that moment.

It’s exactly that sense of security we need, according to several studies. Furthermore, being unsure of a potential romantic partner’s interest in you could cause you to view them as less sexually appealing. Basically, since we are afraid of disappointment, we deceive ourselves into thinking that someone is less desirable. Because we want to know how much our date likes us — if someone doesn’t let us know how they feel, we are inclined to see that person as less attractive.

But it’s not just our fear of possible rejection that influences whether or not we find someone attractive, but also how often we see a person. Or, to put it another way: Proximity plays an integral role in who we find attractive.

Link to the rest at Medium

The OP includes several links to a website called Futurity, which PG had not encountered before. Futurity appears to cite at least some of its articles to individuals who say they are related to one university or another, e.g. “Algorithm Takes the Grunt Work Out of Quilting” – “Stanford” by a person who is apparently writing a doctoral dissertation for the Computer Science Department in the vicinity of Palo Alto.

PG has enough experience in his field to judge articles written by lawyers about legal issues, but claims no expertise with respect to quilting or computer science (although he’s not diametrically opposed or non-diametrically opposed to either field of endeavor (whatever winds your clock)).

Whenever PG reads an article like the OP, he is very grateful to have been married to Mrs. PG for a long time and hopes to remain in that state for a much longer time in the future.

In keeping with the Anne Frank uproar described in the post immediately below this one.

From Above the Law:

Cops like cheap field drug tests. They don’t like them because they’re accurate. They like them because they’re cheap. And since you get what you pay for, they’re way cheaper (in the long run) then sending for a drug dog.

Field drug tests are probable cause at $2 a pop. They’re even more unreliable than drug dogs when it comes to correctly identifying drugs. That’s why some prosecutors — the nominal best friends of law enforcement — are refusing to accept plea deals for drug charges stemming solely from field drug tests.

Field drug tests have said donut crumbs, cotton candy, and honey are methamphetamines. They’ve said bird poop on a car’s hood (!!) and bog standard aspirin are cocaine. Whatever a cop imagines to be drugs can usually be “confirmed” by the test kits they carry with them. Once the vial says it’s drugs, the cops are free to search, seize, and arrest.

Cops don’t need to be this wrong about drugs. But there’s no penalty for being this wrong. So, it continues. Prosecutors may have to drop a few cases when the drug lab says the supposed drugs aren’t actual drugs, but plea deals tend to go into place before labs get around to testing the evidence. And that’s if the evidence even makes its way to a lab. Cops aren’t the best at paperwork, which is convenient when it’s their word against yours. Even if a cop gets sued for turning non-contraband into contraband and drug charges, they’re usually indemnified by the city they work for or granted qualified immunity for relying on what they thought was actual science.

. . . .

Newschannel 20 and FOX Illinois obtained new body camera video of the incident sparking Dartavius Barnes to sue the City of Springfield.

In the suit, Barnes claims his vehicle was unlawfully searched on April 6, 2020 when he was pulled over near Laurel and 16th Streets in Springfield.

He says officers placed him in handcuffs while they searched his vehicle without consent, valid warrant, or probable cause.

During the search, Barnes says officers took a sealed urn of his daughter’s ashes, unsealed it, opened it without consent, and spilled out the ashes.

If you think that’s terrible, just wait for the backstory. Barnes’ daughter Ta’Naja Jones was only two when she died. And she may have been killed. The girl’s mother and her current boyfriend were both arrested on murder charges.

The ultimate insult to Ta’Naja Jones and her father happened here. Ta’Naja Jones’ final resting place wasn’t in the urn Barnes kept in his car. It was in a field drug test that officers performed because they just couldn’t bring themselves to believe it might be the last remains of a loved one.

According to law enforcement’s favorite faulty test equipment, the ashes of Ta’Naja Jones were possibly ecstasy. And that conclusion was reached after the ashes failed to test positive for cocaine.

An officer presented the officer whose body camera was rolling with a narcotics test kit.

“I checked for cocaine, but it looks like it’s probably molly,” the officer said.

“X pills,” the other added, citing the street name for ecstasy.

In the end, the cops decided the ashes were a combination of meth and ecstasy because that’s how drug users carry their drugs: all mixed together in a single container. 

. . . .

Field drug tests allow cops to work backwards from their conclusions. If it doesn’t test positive for one drug, it’s probably some other drug. And if it doesn’t test positive for anything, it might still be drugs because sometimes drugs are carried in containers.

Link to the rest at Above the Law

From CrimeReads:

Con men flourish in two diametrically opposite times—when the people have nothing and are desperate for anything that will raise them out of poverty; and when there is boundless plenty for the vast majority, when countries are newly awash with easy money, and there are countless newly rich men and women who can just as easily be separated from their money as they acquired it.

My book How To Kidnap The Rich is set in India, a country which is in both of these moments at once. For hundreds of millions of its very poorest, very lowest caste people, many former agricultural workers newly urbanised, every day can be a pitfall in being separated from their hard earned pittance of a salary by the army of hustlers, petty politicians, policemen, middle-men, holy men that prey on their hopes and dreams, and their precarious existence on the edge of poverty. For the few tens of millions of the upper middle class, India is the latter, where their incomes have grown tenfold since the 90s, and they fight now for the intangibles, for status, for culture, for art and experiences, and for that most important status good of all—their children’s educations.

Con men do very well in this newly rich India, and are often men from the first India looking to strike out a path in the second in search of their own wealth and escape from the strictures of a society that enforces social status with an iron fist.

Here is a list of my favourite books about hucksters, hustlers, con men big and small, desperate for their own piece of the action. You’ll notice how many of the books are set in mid-twentieth century America, a country which was the richest place that had ever existed in the history of the world, filled with newly rich citizens ripe for exploitation, ripe for crime, ripe for the taking, as well as an underclass, outlaws of wealth, race, gender, sexuality, who were cut off from social protections, social advancement, even social existence.

Huey Long, by T. Harry Williams

One of the quintessential political biographies, dazzlingly researched and written, about a figure who’d do as well in India today as he did in the America of the 1930s. A consummate liar, an abuser of mass media politics and showmanship, a political machine embezzler who used populism to break the old interests and replace them with his own. Long would tell diametrically opposed stories of his childhood to different audiences on the same day, and walk away with their votes. A genius at vote bank politics who produced a political machine that survived his death by 50 years. Williams shows that the best grifts are always the ones blessed outwardly by legality, inwardly by emotion, so much so that many Americans revere Long as a socialist genius long after all of his various tricks have been long exposed.

. . . .

The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

The quintessential American novel. Everything that can be said about it has—gender, class, sexuality, the meeting of the worlds Old and New. I’ve always read it with a nod to modern India—how does a person break out of a rigid social, educational and class system when every exit is barred? By stealing someone else’s life, it turns out, and being handsomely rewarded all the way. Many modern millennial novels, post-crash, post-2008, post-meritocracy, post-Obama, are clearly deeply influenced by it, but lack the playful and delightful immorality of Tom Ripley, as well as Highsmith’s trademark lack of judgement.

Link to the rest at CrimeReads

From Publishers Weekly:

Can we talk?

In last week’s Publishers Weekly, I summarized the principles of “The Freedom to Read,” a statement essential to the ethical foundation of the library and publishing community since 1953. The statement did more than expound principles: It committed the signatories to fight for them.

Today this commitment is being questioned by people within the library and publishing communities. Many do not believe that publishers should release books that express dangerous ideas or books that are written by bad people. They reject the idea that the best answer to a bad book is a good one.

How are we to resolve these differences? So far, there have been Twitter debates. Petitions have been circulated. There has been a lot of talk about harmful books, but much less about how demands for suppression conflict with the commitment to publish a broad range of ideas. There has been little dialogue and almost no give-and-take. Yet there is strong evidence that conversation works, if not to fully resolve differences at least to build greater interpersonal understanding and lower the temperature of conflict, opening the way to further communication.

The National Coalition Against Censorship has some experience in this area. In 2017, building on groundwork by the American Booksellers Association, we launched a pilot program, the Open Discussion Project, that sought to bring liberals and conservatives together in independent bookstores to discuss the issues that divide them. This seems even more foolhardy today than it was four years ago, but we did our homework. We learned that political polarization was not new. Researchers had identified the problem in the 1970s, and nonprofits have been trying to find a solution ever since.

There were some encouraging results from experiments with groups that were small enough to let the members get to know one another. They developed empathy, making it possible for them to discuss their differences.

. . . .

(T)wo of the stores continue to hold meetings and others are considering restarting their groups. The Bipartisan Book Club, which began at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., includes liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Now operated by its members, the club meets every six weeks to discuss books that present different perspectives. The topics include policing, gender identity, social cohesion, capitalism, antifa, and diversity.

More evidence of success is the response to Nadine Strossen’s book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. As the president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008 and a prominent defender of civil liberties, Strossen has always had a busy speaking schedule. But between the publication of her book in May 2018 and the beginning of the pandemic, she made more than 300 appearances, mostly to talk about hate speech.

Though Strossen often speaks to junior high and high school students, many of her events were on college campuses where activists were organizing against racism. Instead of fearing the wrath of students, she urged those who had invited her to actively reach out to students who disagree with her. Many did attend speeches and rejected her argument that restrictions on hate speech are ineffective, but other students were convinced by her argument that the best way to fight hate is to continue to organize and protest against it.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

PG agrees that social media certainly has its benefits and many people enjoy using it, he will observe that Twitter debates are but one evidence that this form of communication has its limits.

Human nature plays a role as well. One can demonize an effectively anonymous opponent online with much less concern about the consequences of a backlash than if one seriously antagonizes a next-door neighbor with verbal abuse. Drive-by verbal violence works much better online than in meatspace.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In Voltaire’s “Candide,” the protagonist’s servant asks his master to explain the meaning of optimism. To which his master replies: “It is the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well.” There is perhaps no more perfect description of the human condition, as all is manifestly not well. How could it be? From the moment of our inception, a silent biological clock begins the countdown to the end of our existence. Our genome contrives to mutate itself into a smorgasbord of potential pathologies, each capable of corrupting and unraveling us. We respond with attempts to medicate and therapize ourselves, to correct the built-in flaws and shining imperfections that make us so irresistibly human.

In Alex Bezzerides’s entertaining “Evolution Gone Wrong: The Curious Reasons Why Our Bodies Work (or Don’t),” the author’s quest is to determine the origins of the “aches and pains of the masses and why they happen”—not the mechanical causes of our maladies but the evolutionary ones. The explanation, Mr. Bezzerides concludes, may be found in our anatomical shortcomings—“trade-offs” made during our continuing evolutionary history. The result is that even healthy bodies operate at the edge of acceptable performance, while also being prone to fail in predictable ways.

The catalog of human fallibilities that Mr. Bezzerides assembles begins with an account of our suboptimal dentition. For many individuals, the textbook display of 32 neatly arrayed teeth, systematically configured to produce a perfect Hollywood smile, is at best hopeful and more frequently fictional. Reality more typically involves a procession of braces, extractions and eccentric protrusions. So why don’t our teeth fit into our mouths?

The answer, according to Mr. Bezzerides, is that four million years ago our ancestors transitioned from a fruit- and leaves-based diet to one of grasses and sedges. Their molars ballooned out to gargantuan proportions, which was not at first problematic, since their substantive jaws readily accommodated the newly enlarged teeth. But as humans controlled fire, learned to cook, became cooperative, and developed hunting techniques and an accompanying armamentarium of cutting implements, the requirement for robust dentition diminished. We were nevertheless stuck with the legacy of “a mouth full of large teeth.” Jaw and tooth size subsequently began to decrease, yet the distinct genetic programs controlling each led to a disconnect between their relative rates of reduction. While the human jaw enthusiastically embraced its “great shrink,” tooth-size reduction struggled to keep up. Hence the modern tooth-jaw mismatch.

Our imperfectly functioning eyes suffer similarly from constraints imposed by our distant evolutionary history. More than half of European adults have visual defects, while a quarter of U.S. children require visual correction. The problem, according to Mr. Bezzerides, is that the eyes of our vertebrate ancestors evolved to function underwater. When vertebrates first moved onto land 375 million years ago, their eyes had already existed for more than 100 million years. The reconfiguration of such established biological hardware was not trivial, leaving us with short-sightedness and a range of oddities, including the need to blink up to 14,000 times a day while deploying a Coke can full of lubricating tears.

Our evolutionary history may also have impacted our ability to perceive color. The nocturnal nature of the species predating the evolution of mammals may have led to a reduction in the number of photoreceptor types enabling human color perception. While many fish, reptiles and birds perceive color using four types of photoreceptors, we make do with three. As a result, the humble gecko perceives the world in up to a magnificent 100 million shades of technicolor, while we are limited to no more than one million.

Other aspects of visual performance also appear to have been affected by our evolutionary history. Unlike the eyes of the honeybee, the human eye filters out ultraviolet light—most likely to prevent DNA damage—making the bees’ nectar-guides invisible to us. Intriguingly, Mr. Bezzerides speculates that the late works of Claude Monet may have been influenced by the artist’s likely newfound ability to perceive ultraviolet light following cataract surgery at the age of 82.

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

While not an expert in evolutionary biology, PG suggests that evolution develops various capabilities of living things to a “good enough” standard.

While a perfect set of teeth by 21st century aesthetic standards in some cultures may require braces, etc., a less-aligned set of teeth that we receive at birth may do a perfectly fine job of their principal purpose in our lives, masticating our food so our bodies can properly digest it. In PG’s understanding, evolution tends to work to a “good enough” standard rather than some subjective standard established by groups of humans.

If future humans are unable to find mates due to a lack of cosmetically-preferred dentation, perhaps evolution will then step in and, over several centuries, put orthodontists out of business.

Likewise, if three types of photoreceptors allow humans to find where they need to go and avoid danger, they’re good enough to permit humans to survive and thrive. While being able to perceive 100 million shades of technicolor might be fun, is such perception necessary for human life to continue?

Additionally, what percentage of the gecko’s brain is devoted to processing these 99 million additional colors? Might that that be one reason why the Theory of Relativity was discovered by a human and not a lizard?