More links.

Interesting—is the pandemic revealing that Americans don’t need as much health care as we’ve been getting? 

Here is an essay arguing that Jim Bouton’s Ball Four is the best “Baseball memoir” ever written.  Maybe so.  But the best baseball book is still, for me, Nine Innings by Daniel Okrent.  Baseball is a cerebral sport, records are kept on everything and everyone in it has a history that comes into things, and it lends itself incredibly well to the structure of a book-length analysis.  Here is a podcast about that book, with the author.  It’s totally worth it—though not as worth it as the book.

An interesting story on “moral rebels,” seen from the perspective of social psychology.  Hmm, to me they sound like jackasses—super-confident of themselves, unafraid to insult or offend those around them, indifferent to others’ feelings, etc..  Then again, perhaps those are also the marks of moral courage at certain points?  Something to think about.

Why are there so many of us?  An evolutionary anthropologist proposes a partial answer: unlike other primates, or really other animals, we are good at “intergenerational cooperation,” both young helping old and old helping young.

A study that argues there could be many ocean planets in the universe: “Through a mathematical analysis of several dozen exoplanets, including planets in the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system, Quick and her colleagues learned something significant: More than a quarter of the exoplanets they studied could be ocean worlds, with a majority possibly harboring oceans beneath layers of surface ice, similar to Europa and Enceladus. Additionally, many of these planets could be releasing more energy than Europa and Enceladus.”  Note, however, they don’t say what the oceans would be composed of.  

Rather grumpy and apocalyptic review (by a pretty grump-prone scholar) of a set of books on the fate of reading in coming years.  Much of it is annoying but there’s some meaty stuff too, like this:

Wolf sounds like the kind of alarmist digital enthusiasts often deride. After all, they say, reading is not dying; it’s thriving. Wolf herself quotes a study from the University of California, San Diego, showing that an average user consumes 34 gigabytes of data per day—the equivalent of nearly 100,000 words.

Wolf’s answer comes, once again, from neuroscientific studies revealing significant cognitive and affective differences between print and screen reading, and between “deep reading” and fast reading—differences that show up in brain activity. In one study, researchers “were frankly surprised that just by asking their literature graduate students either to read closely or to read for entertainment, different regions of the brain became activated, including multiple areas involved in motion and touch.” In another, after one group read a story on paper, another on screens, the first reconstructed the plot more accurately than the second—for a book, unlike a virtual text, gives the brain a concrete spatial arrangement for the action. In sum, Wolf says, the paper reading brain has better memory, more imagination, immersion, and patience, and more knowledge than the screen reading brain. The physiology proves it.

Wash your hands, everybody!  Keep good social distancing.  And wear your masks.