It's Tuesday, time for some links.

Some good advice on public writing for academics.

Danielle Allen—a convo with her at the Library of Congress, and a convo between her and Ezra Klein.  

It seems to me that what Jamelle Bouie has been trying to do for a while now, in his pieces for the New York Times, is to contextualize the issues of this moment within the larger arc American history, and that requires attention to issues of economics and belonging and racial identity and much more. It seems to me he has been trying to give us the larger historical frame within which to see what the point of a lot of our struggles is, or what the point of the struggles should be.  In this piece he does this even more than usual, and I find it really helpful and illuminating.

Jessica Riskin on Stephen Pinker, from December.  I’ve seen a lot of people citing this piece recently, but when I sat down to read it, I found it not much more serious than the evidence Pinker gathers.  In fact, it’s kind of lazy, I think, replacing argument with sneering (Riskin is better than this in her own non-reactive writing, btw).  That’s understandable, of course, because Pinker’s m.o. is mostly yelling, so it’s hard to see how to reply.  But here’s the thing: I think there are multiple better cases than Pinker makes, for a moral assessment of our world as improving in interesting ways; and I think there is a better case for skepticism about that argument than Riskin provides.  But we have to have a kind of cold-blooded maturity that I think we don’t really very readily have access to right now.  Not sure when we will.  

A review of a book on the “art of solitude”.  I think this is really interesting.  But so many of us, in families, need to think about what it is to be solitary at times, yet in a context where we’re continually around other people.  How do we do that?  The book’s author is named Batchelor, and though he is married he apparently has no children; so I wonder about their imagination for family.  That said, this quote from Montaigne is wonderful, and deeply right for today:

…it is not enough to remove oneself from people, not enough to go somewhere else. We have to remove ourselves from the habits of the populace that are within us. We have to isolate our own self and return it to our possession. We carry our chains with us; we are not entirely free. We keep returning our gaze to the things we have left behind.

Anyway, it looks promising, and probably my bigoted defensiveness is little more than that.  So I will get a copy of the book, I think.

More on contemplation and solitude, this time about learning from monastics, by a scholar of medieval Christian monasticism.  It has some good tips.  Makes it sound like exercise, or writing.

Toni Morrison took time to become Toni Morrison.  This is more generally true than we recognize, but each case is different and valuable.  (And for anyone who wants to know, yes I am thinking about Galenson’s Old Masters and Young Geniuses.)

A very contemporary reason for why basic research matters, at the end of this useful Q&A: 

This test for the virus depends on technology developed from very basic research conducted decades ago on strange bacteria from the hot springs of Yellowstone National Park, just because they were unusual and interesting.

I’m sure a lot of people at the time would have thought it was a waste of money to fund some scruffy microbiologist who was investigating a microorganism able to live in the extreme environment of a hot spring. It was pure research. But if that work hadn’t been done, we would not have a test for this coronavirus today, or for so many other diseases. What is obscure now could be essential in the future for curing disease.

Basic research--you never know when it'll be important.  That's why it's basic, and yet one more reason why we need to support it. 

As all the scientists say: wash those hands, keep social distance, wear a mask.  Be well, be safe.