It's late in the day and I've said nothing on here. We're self-quarantining, which is nice--we stay in our house--but begins to feel like we're in a bubble out of time in general. Actually, that's nice too.
Is it the higher ed apocalypse? Maybe not. Gonna be thinking about this. Some of you may find it interesting, too.
As a follow-up to yesterday's piece about anthropology, here’s a nice survey of three recent books on Franz Boas, pretty much the founder of post-Romantic (non-essentialist) anthropology, which is fine but ends with a sad shake of the head towards a certain kind of Maoist attack on our ancestors for not thinking just like us. I liked this sentence among others: “What we all want, and cannot have, is the ideological equivalent of a Forever stamp, the assurance that our version of enlightenment will withstand the passage of years, without requiring ungainly supplementation.”
A nice piece about Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which highlights the tension in the book between “higher truth” and “literal accuracy.” In situations of extreme experience, these sorts of tensions come out more and more, especially when the attempt is made to communicate the experience to people who weren’t there. I think of Tim O’Brien’s “How To Tell a True War Story” as another piece that really tries to engage this.
A pretty gripping account of an artist who decided that he needed to spend some time in the dark. So he eventually spent 28 days in complete black-out. Several months ago I would have found this bewildering; now I kind of get the attraction of it.
I believe this is the common sense in political science. I also think it makes a lot of sense.
Another story about a strategy to revive the American chestnut – – a tree that I continue to think is a magisterial missing piece of the American arboreal puzzle. In short: A number of scientists are trying to genetically modified American chestnut to withstand the blight that has all but annihilated them over the past century. They face not only scientific challenges, but understandable suspicion from environmental activists about modifying the genomes of natural creatures.
Emily St James, author of Station Eleven and a new novel, gives a nice shout-out to Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz as her “favorite dystopian novel” in this interview, and in general it’s worth reading.
An article about how a company that uses AI to search old scientific articles for interesting connections that no one noticed, has managed to repurpose its work to identify one possible drug long in use that may be of value for the Coronavirus. What’s interesting about this is not centrally the short-term value of this finding (though that’s nice, of course), but the idea that what computers may be able to do for us, that human minds are bad at, is a steady attention at things. Our minds tend to hop around, flitting from thing to thing; a computer does not seem so susceptible to that problem. Perhaps its steadiness can be more fully exploited.
Everybody's playlist of music is personal to them. This essay explains some thing of the connection between one man and Billy Joel. (Weirdly, the author likes The Stranger more than The Nylon Curtain, which I thought everyone and the UN agreed was peak Joel. But to each their own; he's definitely right that "Stiletto" is a great song.) I found it oddly affecting; maybe you will too. (And bonus track: here's a nice list of "Billy Joel deep cuts" which I think will maybe be of interest only to me, several of my cousins and some bros I went to college with.)
A bit of levity: Susan Orlean’s drunk twitter is pretty good.