Links 25 June 2021

John Ruskin, Lauffenburg on the Rhine, 1863

Ingenuity, the Mars helicopter, has now made eight successful flights. Reading the mission web site it almost seems like things are going so smoothly the controllers are a little bored and not sure what to do next. After all the main point of this was to prove that it was possible.

Aerobics in the 1980s as a metaphor for the troubled intersection of feminism with individualism. (New York Times)

Brad East compares Wendell Berry's "small is good" localism to George Scialabba's revolutionary Marxism as ways to think about making the world better.

After medieval people began wearing pointed shoes in the 1300s, they started to suffer from bunions and in-pointed big toes, a condition called hallux valgus. The things we endure for fashion.

Study of metal objects from Bronze Age Scandinavia shows that they imported copper from both the British Isles and Slovakia.

Implanted electrodes and deep brain stimulation as a possible cure for drug addiction. (Washington Post)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame: how did Disney sneak "Hellfire," a song about lust and the fear of damnation, into a G-Rated movie? Partly by changing the story's ending and featuring lots of talking gargoyles, but mostly by the power of their reputation. Incidentally the word that most troubled the ratings board was not "hellfire" but "sin." (New York Times)

Meta-study and statistical manipulation suggest that if we all wore masks, the R (number of people each infected person infects) of Covid-19 would fall about 25%. Which is significant but by itself not nearly enough to prevent a pandemic.

Publishers are listing a whole bunch of books about social epistemology coming out this year, some by big writers like Steven Pinker and Daniel Kahneman. Titles include Eyes Wide Shut, Think Again, and Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't. The intelligentsia are getting very worried about irrational beliefs.

Thomas Edsall asks why we are getting better educated – the high school graduation rate for African Americans is up from 73.5% in 1976 to 92.2% – but this is not decreasing economic inequality. He considers preschool, parenting styles, training in self-discipline, and more, but none of it strikes me as very interesting or persuasive. For one thing the sociologists he cites seem to think that parents can influence their children's educational and career choices. Ha! (New York Times)

In a case we discussed here in April, the Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 that a school cannot discipline a cheerleader for a profane rant posted to Snapchat over the weekend.

The blogger at Secretum Secretorum says the formation of new cults peaked in the early 1970s and has been declining ever sense. Some issues with the data set but at least he tried to find numbers.

Long, discouraging article by a CDC researcher who says rival scientists mounted a social media and whispering campaign against her for arguing that obesity is less associated with early death that some other studies had found.

Checking in on the people who would rather quit their jobs than go back to the office; this study found twice as many people wanting to stay home as wanting to go back.

Crazy politics in Michigan, where protests against the 2020 election results go on and threats of violence increase, mainly against the Republicans who control the legislature and most county governments. (Washington Post)

Exaggerated metadehumanization.

Did mammals replace reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous because hot-blooded animals resist fungal infection?

Berkeley's Roots of Structural Racism project may be politically tendentious but it is full of good data. Since 1990, residential segregation has increased in most US cities, and they have maps that show you the details. Here are some striking numbers for you: black children raised in mostly white neighborhoods end up earning $4,000 more per year than those who grow up in segregated minority neighborhoods; for Hispanics, it's $5,000.

Pagan Folk Rock: Garmarna, Herr Mannelig; Loreena McKennit, The Bonny Swans (the most druidical song you will ever hear); Faun, Egil Saga, Federkleid; Eivor, Silvitni.

Another Survivor Passes: RIP David Wisnia

A Polish Jew arrested in 1942, David Wisnia survived the camps and lived a long life, returning to Auschwitz at the very end to sing for fellow survivors: 

In Auschwitz, Mr. Wisnia became a privileged prisoner when his Nazi captors discovered his talent and forced him to sing for them. In spite of the horrors of the death camp, Mr. Wisnia found clandestine moments of love with another privileged prisoner, an older woman known as Zippi. This was Helen Spitzer, a graphic designer from Bratislava, Slovakia, who he would learn decades later had saved his life on numerous occasions. In hidden nooks where she arranged for them to meet, the two sang to each other and found moments of humanity. 

As the Allies drove the Nazis into retreat, Mr. Wisnia and Zippi were forced apart: She was ordered on a death march north to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and he marched south to Dachau. He soon escaped and stumbled upon a regiment of American soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division who adopted him, using him as an interpreter. By the time Mr. Wisnia and Zippi (who escaped from the Nazis in May 1945) reunited 72 years later in Manhattan, the two had lived long, diverging lives filled with marriages, families and travel. . . .

(This spawned a Times headline: Lovers in Auschwitz, Reunited 72 Years Later)

Mr. Wisnia wanted to put his life in Europe behind him. For the most part, he did. It took him years to talk to his family about what he’d been through. But once the floodgates opened, he couldn’t stop. In 2015, he published a memoir, One Voice, Two Lives: From Auschwitz Prisoner to 101st Airborne Trooper. He began to speak about his experience, and with his grandson, a musician, he performed songs he’d composed as a prisoner.

He was first taken to Auschwitz, in December 1942, in a sealed cattle car with dozens of other prisoners and a bucket that served as their communal latrine. In January 2020 he arrived on a first-class ticket, flown in by a delegation who had invited him to perform to fellow survivors. With him were family members, second-and third-generation Wisnias.

Never one to talk about feelings, Mr. Wisnia let his singing voice carry his emotions. But in Auschwitz, as his grandson helped him prepare for his performance, Mr. Wisnia abruptly turned to him and said, “You’re the proof that Hitler did not win.”

NT Times obituary 

RIP John McAfee

John McAfee's suicide in a Spanish prison gives us another opportunity to ponder the interconnections of family life, psychology, and creativity:

Mr. McAfee grew up in Roanoke, Va., the son of a road surveyor and a bank teller in an unhappy marriage. He said in press reports that his father was a severe alcoholic who beat him and his mother, and who fatally shot himself when Mr. McAfee was 15.

“Every day I wake up with him,” Mr. McAfee told a reporter for Wired magazine in 2012. “Every relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust.”

McAfee Associates, the software company he founded, was once a household name in computer security. He started it in 1987 in his small house in Santa Clara, Calif., in response to the news of a Pakistani computer virus called Brain, thought to be the first to attack personal computers. Mr. McAfee said that, at the time, it reminded him of the way his father would suddenly attack him.

Once the company grew past the startup phase, McAfee no longer felt comfortable there, so he sold out for $80 million. Most of which he proceeded to lose in a series of bad investments. Then he got involved in promoting cryptocurrency – in ways the SEC and the IRS say were illegal, which is why he was arrested – and got shabbier and sleazier until nobody was surprised by the way he died.

How much of our progress, our art, our creativity do we owe to people like John McAfee? How much does our civilization depend on a legion of sad, crazy artists, inventors, scientists, and more? How much of the energy that drives life forward comes from the darkness, from places most of us would rather not look into or even know about?

Peer Review

 Via Scott Siskind, an interesting study of peer review:

Peer-review is widely used throughout academia, most notably in the publication of journal articles and the allocation of research grants. Yet peer-review has been subject to much criticism, including being slow, unreliable, subjective and potentially prone to bias. This paper contributes to this literature by investigating the consistency of peer-reviews and the impact they have upon a high-stakes outcome (whether a research grant is funded). Analysing data from 4,000 social science grant proposals and 15,000 reviews, this paper illustrates how the peer-review scores assigned by different reviewers have only low levels of consistency (a correlation between reviewer scores of only 0.2).

These authors also found that a single negative review has a major impact on whether studies are accepted. I imagine this is because editors know that some reviews are just back scratching among friends, so they are prone to disregard positive reviews.

Of course this raises the question: if peer review is slow, unreliable, and prone to bias, what would be better?

Chinese Anti-US Propaganda

Crime and Politics in New York City

In the New York mayoral primaries yesterday, former police captain Eric Adams had the lead on the Democratic side, after running the post-George Floyd version of a "tough on crime" campaign. Meanwhile the Republicans nominated Curtis Silwa. founder of the Guardian Angels.

Americans showed this year that they are not happy with police violence and won't necessarily back the cops in every situation like they used to, but they still hate and fear crime. With violent crime rising in most major cities, it is the number one issue again, and "defunding the police" is off the agenda.

Note that preliminary numbers show Adams did best in the parts of the city with lots of working class and minority voters, while his more radical opponents did better with rich white people.

A Tiny Spanish Church Becomes a Stunning Home

In 2016, Venezuelan photographer Tas Careaga purchased this abandoned 16th-century church in northwestern Spain and spent three years transforming it into a magnificent dwelling. He had help from an old friend, architect Carlos Garmendia de Garmendia Cordero. Lots more pictures at his web site and a description of the project at Architectural Digest.

In Ethiopia, Democracy and Civil War

Ethiopia is holding what some say will be its freest ever national election, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's party is expected to win. Meanwhile, government forces in the Tigray region are murdering, raping, and displacing thousands of people that they say are secessionists.

As in Myanmar/Burma, democracy is no guarantee that minorities will be tolerated or old ethnic tensions defused. (Washington Post, New York Times, Al Jazeera)

Opening Graves in the Early Middle Ages

Plan of a Re-Opened Grave in Regensburg, Germany

In our world, we bury dead bodies in the ground and are then (we hope) finished with them. But other people have acted very differently. Many societies have led corpses through a series of events and locations that map out a long route from life to death. For example, some cultures have buried bodies until the flesh is gone, then dug up the skeletons and displayed them in charnel houses. Others have done the reverse, exposing the remains above ground until the flesh is gone and then burying the bones. There are many, many permutations.

In light of this, I am interested in a new paper in Antiquity from Alison Klevnäs et al. titled Reopening graves in the early Middle Ages: from local practice to European phenomenon.

Across Europe early medieval archaeologists have long recognised significant numbers of graves displaying evidence for the intentional post-burial disturbance of skeletons and artefacts. The practice of reopening and manipulating graves soon after burial, traditionally described—and dismissed—as ‘robbing’, is documented at cemeteries from Transylvania to southern England. . . . In some cemeteries just one or two graves are affected, but in others almost all are reported as having been reopened, often so soon after burial that coffins and occasionally even bodies had not yet decomposed. Skeletons and grave goods are found incomplete or disordered, often within intrusive cuts, while missing artefacts are sometimes indicated by the presence of small fragments or residual metallic staining. Thus, disturbed burials are usually labelled in cemetery reports as having been ‘robbed’.

Map of Disturbed Cemeteries, 6th-7th Centuries AD

One of the problems with trying to do European archaeology it that it was traditionally a very local science, performed by local museums or amateur groups, the publications buried in the journals of regional antiquarian societies. None of the data these scholars cite is new, and much of it comes from the nineteenth century. The service they have performed is to assemble all that data into a single narrative covering a wide swathe of Europe.

The authors date this phenomenon to between 500 and 700 AD, mostly after 575. It was centered in the Frankish homeland, with extensions to southeastern England and Hungary, both areas of Frankish influence. They argue that this was not simple "robbing", because certain items were removed while others that seem equally valuable were left behind. They say that the three items removed most often were swords, seaxes – special Frankish knives – and brooches, and they argue that these were perhaps the objects most closely associated with the power and status of the deceased. (These are all elite people we are talking about, although some of them were not really aristocrats.) Were these objects sometimes only loaned to the dead, and then reclaimed by the living after a suitable interval? Could this be because the living felt a need to reestablish their claim to that inheritance by displaying or possessing the objects? Did it sometimes happen in cases of disputed legacy?

Fascinating.

You Can't Spot a Liar

A very important sort of skepticism:

Police thought that 17-year-old Marty Tankleff seemed too calm after finding his mother stabbed to death and his father mortally bludgeoned in the family’s sprawling Long Island home. Authorities didn’t believe his claims of innocence, and he spent 17 years in prison for the murders.

Yet in another case, detectives thought that 16-year-old Jeffrey Deskovic seemed too distraught and too eager to help detectives after his high school classmate was found strangled. He, too, was judged to be lying and served nearly 16 years for the crime.

One man was not upset enough. The other was too upset. How can such opposite feelings both be telltale clues of hidden guilt?

They’re not, says psychologist Maria Hartwig, a deception researcher at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The men, both later exonerated, were victims of a pervasive misconception: that you can spot a liar by the way they act. Across cultures, people believe that behaviors such as averted gaze, fidgeting and stuttering betray deceivers.

In fact, researchers have found little evidence to support this belief despite decades of searching. “One of the problems we face as scholars of lying is that everybody thinks they know how lying works,” says Hartwig, who coauthored a study of nonverbal cues to lying in the Annual Review of Psychology. Such overconfidence has led to serious miscarriages of justice, as Tankleff and Deskovic know all too well. “The mistakes of lie detection are costly to society and people victimized by misjudgments,” says Hartwig. “The stakes are really high.”

The biggest study I've seen of human lie detection found that people were right 54% of the time, which was statistically significant but not exactly proof beyond reasonable doubt. Studies in which police detectives are shown videotapes of actual criminal suspects under interrogation, and asked to judge which statements are true or false, come in somewhere between 64% correct and no better than chance.

The belief that some people are good at detecting liars, or that certain techniques ("microexpressions") will allow anyone to do so, is ancient, and constantly being updated with new types of pseudoscience. But it is wrong.

Happy Father's Day to Me

From my daughter Clara. The dodo bird is a reference to a story my son Ben and I have been working on together, about a boy who becomes a sort of shaman or druid with a dodo bird familiar and has to clear the woods near his house of some evil presence. I think it would be a fun amateur RPG computer game.

Late Capitalism

As I discovered at the Home Depot last week, you can either get your brightly colored cacti by buying grafted plants like these.

Or, if you are having trouble keeping the grafted ones alive, which I hear is a problem, you can buy them with brightly colored plastic hats that last for decades. Who says we don't live in an amazing world?

Migsihi Kōtarō

Migsihi Kōtarō (1903-1934) was a Japanese artist who painted in a European style, much influenced by French avant garde art; he even staged one exhibit in Paris before he died young. His most famous painting these days is Butterflies above Clouds, which was also one of his last, dated 1934.

Red Town

Emerging Light

Loneliness on a Journey, 1934

Links 18 June 2021

Guido Strazza, Light Blue Aura, 1991

Can you be a gay Orthodox Jew? I would have said "no," but this essay argues that the idea is spreading. (New York Times)

Housing prices aren't rising because of institutional investors like Black Rock, as some have claimed, but because there is a shortage of houses in the places people want to live. The straightforward solution is to build more housing.

The US Navy is ending its railgun program and will focus on missiles instead.

Smithsonian article on Dan Sayers and his archaeology in the Great Dismal Swamp, where he insists he has found the remains of Maroon settlements. But even this very positive article shows you how little evidence of settlement by escaped slaves has actually been found.

What promotes income inequality? These economists say, "democracy and high state capacity." According to their numbers, the better governed your nation is, the worse your inequality. The article is paywalled so I can't judge it, but North America and western Europe have both seen soaring inequality, so democracy and a strong government certainly don't prevent it. This gets us back to Piketty and r>g; it may be that in a stable economic and social situation you have to work very, very hard to keep inequality from rising, and democracies are finding that impossible.

Giant macramé hangings by Agnes Hansella. And small ones.

Arguing about how bad Emperor Nero really was is an old sport. The historians cited in this New Yorker article say all the scandalous stuff in Suetonius and Tacitus was made up, but they don't offer any actual evidence for their view that Nero was an ok guy. 

Long review of George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, with extensive quotation, a good introduction to Orwell's period of intentional poverty.

According to a new book about the Lincolns' marriage, Mary Todd made Abraham's home life, as one of Abraham's friends put it, "a burning, scorching hell." I have always wondered how much Lincoln's mind was dominated by his awful marriage and the deaths of two of his children, crowding out the war and the end of slavery. Maybe he spent all those nights at the telegraph office, waiting for news of battles, partly to get out of the house? (New York Times, Kirkus Reviews)

The collapse of a new elevated track on the Mexico City Metro killed 26; investigation by the Times says the cause was poor welding, part of a pattern of rushed work to meet an unreasonable, politically motivated deadline. I suppose it's worth noting that back when it was cheap to build infrastructure, accidents like that happened all the time; part of what we are paying for is greater safety.

Long essay by historian Matthew Karp at Harper's examining the 1619 Project and other essentialist views of US history. In Karp's view the argument that racism is unchanged and "fundamental" removes all possibility of change in either the future or the past. Abolitionism gets scant mention in the 1619 project; Frederick Douglas appears only twice, both in an essay about music, M.L. King only once. There is only eternal, unchanging racism.

The strange world of "Ships of the Northern Fleet," a TV show that does not exist but nonetheless has a robust fandom. (NY Times) I mean, if what you really want is to be part of a fan community, why wait for a show to appear that you want to talk  about? Why not just imagine one? I hear echoes of Borges and Umberto Eco, and it might be fun. But I wonder: will they eventually split into factions, each imagining that the story develops in the way that they want? Will they have to settle on a canonical story, and who will decide?

Conservative British thinker Roger Scruton (on this blog here and here) has many fans. Among them is Viktor Orban, Hungary's right-wing prime minister. Orban and his friends have launched a string of coffee houses named after Scruton and containing some of his memorabilia, provided by his widow. 

The Times finds that American birth rates are falling fastest in the places with the best economies, and even rising a little in the most depressed rural areas. Some of the women they interviewed cite cost and childcare concerns as reasons not to have children but many more emphasize their careers and "taking control over their lives."

Using bacteria to make vanilla flavoring from recycled plastic. I am convinced that this is the future of both recycling and chemistry; in 20 years we will have bacteria that feed on plastic waste and produce any compound we want.

In the Times, ambivalence among black Americans about sharing Juneteenth with white people. And more here.

Oregon's voters passed an initiative that decriminalized possession of small amounts of hard drugs, but failed to fund any expansion of addiction treatment, leaving a lot to work out.

The Supreme Court keeps dodging the big issues in cases pitting religious freedom vs. gay rights, always issuing the most minimal rulings. It seems like they don't know what to do about this any more than anyone else does.

The Silicon Tribesman visits the "Ancient Woodland of Puzzlewood," the perfect place for imagining yourself on a magical quest.

This week's music is the Pop Diva Playlist: Sarah McLachlan, Possession, I Will Remember You; Adele, Someone Like You, When We Were Young; Roberta Flack, Killing Me Softly with His Song; Cyndi Lauper, Time after Time; Dido, White Flag; Bonnie Raitt, I Can't Make You Love Me; Dusty Springfield, Son of a Preacher Man; Bette Midler, The Rose.

Juneteenth

Forming up for an Juneteenth parade in Charleston, South Carolina, 1877

Juneteenth is an African American holiday that began in Galveston, Texas. On June 19, 1865, Gen. Gordon Granger, the new military governor of Texas, issued his General Order No. 3: 

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.

The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of African American humanity – you're free, now buzz off and find a job – but it was the words "all slaves are free" and "absolute equality" that stuck with black listeners. They touched off a joyous celebration that lasted for days. Black churches in Texas began celebrating the anniversary the very next year. The event gradually spread around the South, some communities holding theirs on June 19 as in Texas, others choosing a locally important date.

Juneteenth Celebration, Austin, Texas, 1900

Some celebrations were held in public parks. When public officials, always alarmed by large groups of black people, tried to ban such events from parks, black people responded by pooling their money to buy parks of their own. In 1872 a group of black ministers bought ten acres of land that became Houston's Emancipation Park, which was the scene of Juneteenth celebrations, agricultural fairs, and other events for decades.

In the 20th century interest in Juneteenth declined. The big public celebrations faded away, although many churches continued to mark the day on their own calendars. Juneteenth had always been about the end of slavery, and that came to be less relevant as fewer people could remember it, and as the reality of life under segregation came to make it seem less wonderful. Focus shifted to the 20th-century Civil Rights movement, which is why the first Federal holiday celebrating the African American experience was M.L. King Day, not Juneteenth.

But now that people are talking a lot about slavery and its legacy again, Juneteenth is coming back into prominence. Big events have been staged in several cities in recent years. And now Congress has just voted to make June our newest Federal holiday.

Frank Bruni Ponders the Role of Columnists in the Nation's Poisonous Discourse

Columnist Frank Bruni, retiring from the Times, says his regrets are all about the times he took cheap, partisan shots:

I owe Ted Cruz an apology.

One day in 2015 when I had a column due in hours and couldn’t settle on a topic, I took the easy route of unloading on Cruz, who was one of many unappealing contenders for the Republican presidential nomination. He was fair game for rebuke, no question there. But did I illuminate his dark character, enlighten my readers or advance any worthwhile cause by comparing him — repeatedly — to the unstoppable entity in the horror movie “It Follows”?

No. I just swam with the snide tide.

I did that too often. Many columnists do.

Starting, well, now, I’m a columnist no more. . . . Ten years is a long haul in any assignment, and while this one has been amply challenging and deeply rewarding, I always had misgivings.

I worried, and continue to worry, about the degree to which I and other journalists — opinion writers, especially — have contributed to the dynamics we decry: the toxic tenor of American discourse, the furious pitch of American politics, the volume and vitriol of it all.

I worry, too, about how frequently we shove ambivalence and ambiguity aside. Ambivalence and ambiguity aren’t necessarily signs of weakness or sins of indecision. They can be apt responses to events that we don’t yet understand, with outcomes that we can’t predict.

But they don’t make for bold sentences or tidy talking points. So we pundits are merchants of certitude in a world where much is in doubt and many questions don’t have one right answer. As such, we may be encouraging arrogance and unyieldingness in our readers, viewers and listeners. And those attributes need no encouragement in America today.

I don't blame Bruni; it was his job to build the Times' readership, and readers like snide partisan attacks. But he is right that no one really benefits from that kind of discourse. 

Samuel Prout

Samuel Prout (1783-1852) was a British artist best known for his watercolors and drawings of buildings. 

One of his students was John Ruskin, and you can see Prout's influence in a lot of Ruskin's work.

Prout published several volumes of lithographs based on his drawings, but he was not a lithographer himself and I think the published prints vary a lot in quality. So the first image of Prout's work you stumble across might not give you a good idea of what his better stuff looks like. I'm sticking to the best reproductions here.

Here are two sketches of Norham in northern England, from a sketchbook now in the British Museum.

And last, a work I find weirdly magnificent, a drawing that reduces two ships to an outline of ropes and spars.

Achievement and Negative Emotions

Thinking over our discussion of John Holt's How Children Fail, I was struck by how often we invoke positive and negative emotions in our thoughts on education. Holt thought that school failed because it was all about negative motivation, that is, getting children to learn relied too much on making them afraid and upset. That, he thought, impeded learning. 

What everyone seems to want is a system in which people learn because of motivations that we see as positive: curiosity, community feeling, a sense of mastery. 

I wonder, is this realistic? Has anybody ever really mastered anything entirely from positive motivations? It seems to me that the biographies of successful people are full of dark feelings: fear of failure, hatred of losing, shame at underperforming, etc. Or just a grim obsession with their chosen path that dominates their lives.

To take the example closest to hand, I write this blog for fun, and yet I sometimes force myself to sit down and produce something because I feel bad about not having done more. I read over each post several times in a vain attempt to fix all the editorial mistakes, and I keep reading over recent posts for days, catching more and chastising myself for them. (If you hate typos, you should wait three days before reading anything I post.)

My books, likewise, were written partly from the joy of writing but also partly from fear of seeing myself as a boring, uncreative person who does nothing but work and sleep.

So is it realistic to think that children can learn without being made afraid? 

In his essay on his own school days, George Orwell wrote that you can only get boys to learn Latin and Greek by frequent beatings. Is the same true for algebra? Are there millions of young people who could only be motivated to learn math by fear of failing?

Nor does this end with graduation. A corporation, it seems to me, is an institution that motivates people to work hard by a combination of positive and negative reinforcement: praise, pay raises and the possibility of promotion for those who succeed, the threat of dismissal for those who fail.

The ruling theory of raising children used to be "spare the rod, spoil the child." Now it seems to be reducing suffering as much as we can. Can we make that a successful approach to education?

An Interesting Review of John Holt's "How Children Fail"

Many of the tech-savvy, internet-native people who frequent Scott Siskind's blog are convinced that school ruins children. Someone else who thought that was John Holt, whose Why Children Fail was based on letters, essays and notes he wrote while teaching at a private school in 1958. Holt asked himself why kids who seemed so smart outside school failed so badly in the classroom.

If you live at a small school, seeing students in class, in the dorms, in their private lives, at their recreations, sports, and manual work, you can't escape the conclusion that some people are much smarter part of the time than they are at other times. Why? Why should a boy or girl, who under some circumstances is witty, observant, imaginative, analytical, in a word, intelligent, come into the class-room and, as if by magic, turn into a complete dolt?

One of the entries is Siskind's book review contest (all anonymous at this point) takes on Holt's book. Our reviewer says that he hated school so much that he convinced his parents to let him drop out at 15, then home schooled himself for three years, then went to college, where he did quite well. He, like Holt, found school a miserable impediment to learning:

Why are all children so bad at learning in school?

Seriously, they’re terrible at it, and nobody ever calls them out as a group. We call out individual children as failing. We call out individual schools and school systems as bad. But the much more dramatic contrast is between learning in school and learning in any other context.

In their first five years, kids learn to understand 25,000 words, even if nobody is actively helping them, at the same time as they’re learning most of what they’ll ever know about physics, psychology, and how to pilot a human body. They then struggle to match this vocabulary acquisition rate over their next ten years, despite expert attention, a wealth of resources, personal encouragement, and even prizes.

After weeks of trying, my teacher gave up on getting me to correctly label the countries and capitals in a map of South America. Yet I quickly learned to navigate the New York City Subway.

Through involuntary cultural osmosis, I could probably pass a test on the characters, plot, and setting of Twilight, despite having never read any of the books or watched any of the movies. Yet there are books I read in school (good books, written to be enjoyed!) where I now couldn’t tell you the main character’s name.

As an adult, when I’m in the middle of researching something, and I get hungry, I get up, go to the kitchen, get a snack, come back, and keep researching. In most classrooms, children are absolutely forbidden from leaving to go get a snack because they would always claim to get hungry and they would never come back.

Which is not to say that children don’t try, or don’t care. They sweat and cry over tests. They care so deeply that they have nightmares about missing class that last well into adulthood. But by any standard other than comparing them to other schoolchildren, they universally fail. Why?

(I'm just guessing our author is male; Siskind's readership skews heavily male, as does this attitude toward school, so I would say there's at least an 80% chance.)

One thing that especially impressed Holt as a teacher was the role of fear in his students' approach to learning. He once asked a class what they felt when they did not know the answer to a question. They told him: terror. They feared nothing so much as being seen as stupid.

Where do they learn this? Even in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time. This is a hard fact of life to deal with. What can we do about it?

Nothing, he ended up thinking:

The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape. You can, as many skilled teachers do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, even a smile, the great reservoir of fear, shame, and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. Or you can simply let your own fears about what will happen to you if the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this goodwill is perishable and must be earned anew each day.

As my readers know, I am intensely ambivalent about all of this. I liked school and I am convinced that I personally learned much more from school than I could have on my own. Plus, my experience of trying to homeschool two of my sons has not gone very well. I suspect there are a lot more kids in the world like my sons than there are like the guys in Siskind's comment section who swear that after leaving school they taught themselves calculus in a few weeks, then mastered French or Russian. So I have no idea what should be done about any of this. I have no interest in making children afraid, but, like Holt, I think that nothing else will motivate many of them to learn, especially to learn things that repel them like algebra. As much as I dislike forcing children to suffer, I don't see how our society can survive without school.

John Donne, "Break of Day"

‘Tis true, ‘tis day, what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ‘tis light?
Did we lie down because ‘twas night?
Love, which in spite of darkness brought us hither,
Should in despite of light keep us together.

Light hath no tongue, but is all eye;
If it could speak as well as spy,
This were the worst that it could say,
That being well I fain would stay,
And that I loved my heart and honour so,
That I would not from him, that had them, go.

Must business thee from hence remove?
Oh, that’s the worst disease of love,
The poor, the foul, the false, love can
Admit, but not the busied man.
He which hath business, and makes love, doth do
Such wrong, as when a married man doth woo.

Explaining the Starbucks Phenomenon

Julie Creswell has a great article in the Times about Starbucks. The focus is on the shortages that are plaguing the firm this spring, as stores all over the country run out of everything from peach juice to lids. This is proving downright upsetting to some people, who are used to starting their days, or taking a key break, with the exact, specially constructed beverage treat they rely on:

The problem for Starbucks is that it was never just selling a simple cup of coffee. For many, the experience of visiting the chain is a self-indulgent treat.

Customers learn the language regarding sizes and special drinks and then share their customized, 12-ingredient drink orders on social media. Many look forward to seasonal specials, like this summer’s Unicorn Cake Pop and Strawberry Funnel Cake Frappuccino, which are available for a limited time.

Orders are not barked out by number as they are at other fast-food chains but rather are announced by name, suggesting customers are friends or part of the Starbucks club, said Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and author of “Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks.”

“Starbucks did something remarkable: taking a really ordinary product, coffee, and remaking it as an identifier of class, of culture, of discernment and of knowledge,” Mr. Simon said. “Starbucks is a way to communicate something about yourself to other people. While it has become more complicated over time, that drink still says: ‘I deserve a break in my life. I can afford to waste money on coffee.’”

This explains Starbucks to me better than anything else ever has.

I'm not really a Starbucks person myself, not being into knowing complicated in-group vocabulary and the like. From my perspective the most important thing about the Starbucks revolution has been to raise the overall quality of coffee in America. Once a year or two ago I stopped at a rural gas station on a cold, wet day and poured a cup of coffee from a pot that must have been sitting on the burner for hours. I was shocked by how bad it tasted. I had completely forgotten how vile convenience store and even much restaurant coffee used to be. It says something about our civilization that it had been years since I had drunk a really bad cup of coffee.

Links 11 June 2021

Apollo, Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, 1718

The history and cartography of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a Jewish colony on the Amur River in Siberia, Stalin's attempt to create a Soviet alternative to Zionism.

Conor Friedersdorf looks into the numbers on police killings of minors in the US.

The strange career of Isaac Wright, former paratrooper and "urban explorer" who says illegally climbing skyscrapers and bridges eased his PTSD. The police were not impressed by this therapeutic technique. (New York Times)

My college classmate Naomi Wolf is banned from Twitter over her Covid-19 posts. Wags say she was actually banned for being too stupid.

New meta-study of sperm counts says the famous study of their decline is flawed because nobody knows what the baseline human sperm count is. (Study, NY Times story) I'm not convinced by this argument, either, because it is often possible to detect a change in something without being able to fully describe what it is.

This week's listen: Areni Agbabian, ethereal contemporary music influenced by Armenian folk songs. Patience, Petal 2. 

Mesolithic people in Finland were buried with mysterious ornaments made of elk teeth. A new theory says these were sewn onto clothing, where their rattling made the rhythm for dancing.

Somebody in ancient Athens had a lot of enemies, tried to use a chicken sacrifice to curse 55 people at once. Seems ambitious for just one chicken.

Seventeen decapitated skeletons found in British cemetery dating to around 300 AD. They were most likely executed but since we know next to nothing about how justice was administered in Roman Britain it's hard to say if they were criminals, mutineers, rebels, or something else.

NY Times review of a new book about Otto Warburg, Nobel-winning German physiologist who studied cancer cells. Even though he was gay and had Jewish grandparents, he and his well-funded institute somehow survived Nazism, a mystery that this book does not resolve. Most likely Warburg was considered too important to liquidate by leading Nazis who were obsessed with cancer and the effects of diet on health. (Non-paywalled review here.)

In Elk Rapids, Michigan, one farm stand says "No Mask, No Service," while the other joined a lawsuit against the governor's mask mandate. Predictably, the county has now split into Friske Farm Market vs. King Orchards factions. (New York Times)

Scientists created a synthetic genome for a bacterium by stringing together building blocks of DNA — and the new genome made the microbe immune to viral infection. What could possibly go wrong?

Justin E.H. Smith thinks woke book critics are following in the steps of Stalin's literary bureaucrats.

Ndona Muboyayi is not on board with teaching Critical Race Theory to her children: "Showing up on time has nothing to do with being white. It’s something that you’re taught or not taught."

Hospital pharmacist pleads guilty to trying to spoil 50 doses of Covid-19 vaccine, believing that they were dangerous and could "change DNA."

Many Americans got used to cheap rides from Uber, subsidized meals from Grubhub, and other deals because venture capitalists were spending billions to get those companies established. Now the companies need to be profitable and as a result their prices are rising; the average Uber ride now costs 40% more than a year ago. (New York Times)

French writer Michel Houellebecq sees both Europe and Asia committing slow suicide via low birth rates. In Asia they keep out immigrants and so will simply disappear; in western Europe they are keeping up their numbers by admitting immigrants, so they will die by ethnic strife or cultural change. I think this is overblown, but the angst is real; one poll found that 45% of French people think civil war is imminent. It is a very common complaint in France that their politics have become just like America's, meaning all about race tensions.

The fight over India's new social media laws has tech companies crying censorship and invasion of privacy, while the Indian government complains of digital colonialism.

Huge collection of fabric swatches from Donald Brothers, Scottish maker of upholstery fabric, going back to 1896.

Reflecting on the publication of the Pentagon Papers, 50 years later. Ellsberg thought he was doing the people's will, but Nixon's landslide reelection after the Rand study was made public suggests that he was really opposing it. (New York Times)

And a piece by a Vietnamese writer pointing out that since the Vietnamese government still refuses to allow any access to its own records of the war, the Pentagon Papers dominate Vietnamese accounts of the war in 1954-1967. The records are not available to narrate the war from the Vietnamese perspective, so Vietnamese readers know much more about how American leaders viewed the war than how their own did. (New York Times)

Anti-Racist Math Instruction

This pamphlet, titled A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction/Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, is the weirdest thing I have read this year.

It contains, on the one hand, a lot of good advice about teaching. For example, one section asks teachers to consider how they were taught math and not just to replicate it, but to think seriously about what was good and what was bad and ask whether their students might need a different approach.

Another section encourages constant interaction with the students to find out how they are progressing. Which is great. 

But here is the weird part: this is framed in terms of dismantling systematic racism and avoiding "powerhoarding," which is a characteristic of white supremacy. Apparently asking your students every day how well you taught is a way to fight white supremacy. Like this:

White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
Students are tracked (into courses/pathways and within the classroom).

Provide students with opportunities to give feedback to teachers about the classroom and instruction.

• Verbal Example: Fist to five, How well do you understand what we talked about today? Fist to five, How well did I teach this today?

• Classroom Activity: Exit tickets or surveys that ask students to identify how well teachers taught, what helped them learn, what got in the way of their learning, etc.

My daughter had to tell me what "fist to five" means – turns out this is asking someone to give you a rating from zero to five by holding up fingers – but otherwise what we are doing here is to take a perfectly standard problem in pedagogy, how to figure out how your students are doing and respond to that, and insist that it is really about racism and antiracism.

I discovered this pamphlet because David Brooks mocked it for talking up ethnomathematics, a concept he finds absurd. The word "ethnomathematics" is used these days in two different, mutually exclusive senses. First, it means the mathematics of non-western peoples, like the Aztecs or the ancient Egyptians. The pamphlet makes only a small nod in that direction, asking teachers to let students know that cultures around the world have math. Fine. Second, it means making mathematics relevant to people who live in barrios or tough urban neighborhoods or any other non-white, non-suburban community. Our pamphlet thinks this is very important. But, and this is the thing I want to write about, the vision of what this might mean is wrapped up with old arguments about math instruction in ways that simply make no sense to me.

An entirely typical section goes like this:

White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
Independent practice is valued over teamwork or collaboration.

Instead...
While there is some value in students being able to complete work independently, when this is the only or most common avenue for learning or practicing, it reinforces individualism and the notion that I’m the only one. This does not give value to collectivism and community understanding, and fosters conditions for competition and individual success, which perpetuates the idea that if a student is failing it is because they are not trying hard enough or that they don’t care.
Co-construct knowledge in the classroom.

• Verbal Example: Let’s get into partners and do a thinkpair-share. We will incorporate everyone’s ideas and try to synthesize them.

• Classroom Activity: Have students create mathematical definitions in their own words in groups, and bring the groups together to coconstruct mathematical definitions as a class.

My response to this is that educators have been debating the relative merits of group vs. individual learning for 2500 years, give or take a few centuries. Why is individual learning racist, group learning anti-racist? It has become an article of belief in certain circles that white culture is individualistic, while African American and Hispanic culture places more emphasis on the community, and here we see that translated into classroom strategy. But does that really make any sense?

Personally I hated all group activities in school, which probably explains why I ended up such a monster.

Here's another interesting section:

White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
There is a greater focus on getting the "right" answer than understanding concepts and reasoning.

Instead...
Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate objectivity as well as fear of open conflict. Some math problems may have more than one right answer and some may not have a solution at all, depending on the content and the context. And when the focus is only on getting the right answer, the complexity.

How much attention math teachers should pay to getting the right answer vs. understanding the method is also an ancient argument. Math reformers have been trying over my whole lifetime to shift the focus from getting relatively simple answers correct to understanding mathematics on a deeper level. They have mostly failed. This has many causes, of which the two most important are that most US math teachers are not very good at teaching a deep conceptual understanding of math, and that students don't give a damn.

What does any of this have to do with racism and anti-racism?

White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
Rigor is expressed only in difficulty.

Instead...
Too often in math, we limit the definition of rigor to difficulty, rather than its full complexity including thoroughness; exhaustiveness; interdisciplinary; and balancing conceptual understanding, procedural skills and fluency, and application. This allows math teachers to shy away from complex problems and tasks and instead streamline teaching like we are spoon-feeding, in fear that students can’t do the work—and reinforcing right to comfort and quantity over quality. This discomfort with emotion and feelings (quantity over quality) leads to the sentiment “Math makes people feel stupid and it hurts to feel stupid,” and rather than addressing the implications behind that statement, we instead make the content easier so that students are more likely to understand. This is highly problematic because it assumes that students can’t rather than giving them the opportunity to engage with rigorous mathematics.

Start with more complex math problems and scaffold as necessary.

• Verbal Example: If we wanted to build a rocket, what are all the things we might need to know before we get started? Along the way, we decided that we want the rocket to reach the moon. What do we need to consider now?

• Classroom Activity: When solving equations, start with the most complex problem, generate ideas for how to solve it, and use the simpler equations as examples to support those ideas.

I studied math past calculus, and I have been a teacher for 30 years, and I am not at all sure what any of this means or what it would look like in practice.

But this is my favorite section:

How do I dismantle power structures in the classroom?

White supremacy culture shows up in math classrooms when...
Participation structures reinforce dominant ways of being.

Instead...
Classrooms are often microcosms of the world around us and reinforce dominant (or white) ways of being. For example, small groups of students receive the teacher’s attention throughout instruction and a few students are typically called on to participate in class discussions, reinforcing notions of perfectionism. The patterns of students who fall into those categories often mirror societal norms. Another common participation structure is pairing students as helper and helpee. This reinforces paternalism and other power structures that identify students as either being good or bad at math (also either/or thinking). Also, requiring students to raise their hand before speaking can reinforce paternalism and powerhoarding, in addition to breaking the process of thinking, learning, and communicating. Create multiple ways of participating that honor myriad ways of thinking and being.

• Verbal Example: For this section, feel free to work alone, in pairs, trios, or quads (let them choose).

• Classroom Activity: Community circles or storytelling circles, incorporating dance, music, song, call and response, and other cultural ways of communicating.

Sure, storytelling circles, whatever. 

What if the kids all divide into groups in a way that leaves the class geek without any partner at all? If the teacher intervenes and forces him into a group, is that powerhoarding?

But here's the real question: why are we forcing students to study math at all? Did anybody ask the students if they wanted to study math? What if we did, and they said no? Wouldn't forcing them to take math anyway be powerhoarding? 

The assumptions behind this pamphlet – that education is important, schools are good, everyone should understand math, that we want minorities to be equally represented in STEM fields –are the assumptions of western, middle class society. They are the values of bourgeois discipline that have I have been writing about. In the terms of this pamphlet's authors, they are white supremacy. I think that is entirely the wrong framing, since there are millions of white people who hate all this as much as anyone with brown skin does. But in their terms, insisting that students learn math is exactly the thing they are protesting against.

On the one hand, our authors want minority students to get the best math instruction they can, and they seem to think (though they never say this) that right now many minority students do poorly in math because of bad instruction from racist teachers who don't care. I am entirely on board with that; let's have good teachers who care. But, their idea of good math instruction is not in any way neutral. It embraces several educational theories that are all controversial: that group exercises are better than individual learning, that it is better to understand math concepts than to get the problem "right," etc. They do not bother to defend their views except by saying that they are antiracist, and the other side racist. They offer absolutely no reason whatsoever why we should believe that. Nor do they offer any evidence that minority students taught this way do better, and it is not clear how they would, since they think standardized tests are white supremacy.

And to get back my main point: as a critique of western, bourgeois society – what they call white supremacy – this fails utterly because it is based in the most fundamental way on the exact assumptions of the society they want to critique.

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers. 

1921

Twitter and Nigeria's President

Nigeria is having a bad spring. Rebel groups are active in at least three regions, including the southern areas where people tried in the 1960s to create the separate state of Biafra. A week ago, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted this: 

Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us in the fields for 30 months, who went through the war, will treat them in the language they understand.

Twitter quickly deleted the post for violating its rules against fomenting violence.

Which makes me wonder; when you're the President of a country where rebels kill and kidnap your citizens every day, isn't threatening violence sometimes part of your job? Seems to me completely appropriate for the President to remind rebels and their supporters where their actions might lead. 

Twitter is of course a private company free to decide for themselves what messages they will ban, but this decision still seems very odd to me. Threats are part of the normal language of diplomacy. The President is known to be in contact with political leaders in the south, figuring out how to deal with rebels and work on the people's grievances. Who is Twitter to decide what threats are not acceptable in that situation?

The President responded by banning Twitter. Commentators say the removal of his tweet was just a pretext, and that he has wanted to do this for some time because political separatists are using Twitter to organize their movements. Which means that Twitter allows political grievances to be aired, so long as they don't openly threaten violence, even if they point much more directly toward civil war than anything the president said.

Very strange.

And let me take this opportunity to wonder about Nigeria. By some metrics Nigeria is thriving. The economy is growing, inflation is under control, and the country's arts scene is one of the most vibrant in the world. Whatever art interests you, from film to abstract painting to traditional sculpture to every sort of music, Nigerians are making tons of it. They have a democratic government and a rambunctious press. And yet they have terrible problems as well: corruption on a gigantic scale, criminal violence, terrorism, political turmoil. How do these things coexist? 

I suppose it is an old story; from Renaissance Italy to Southern Song China, the most artistically creative periods have often been eras of violence and turmoil. But I still find it very confusing.

Anting

Photographer Tony Austin stumbled across a murder of crows while out walking and got out his camera.

But then one of the birds started acting strangely. Austin started shooting — and he was astounded later, when he enlarged his photos: The crow had large black ants all over its body.

"I noticed there were like little bumps all over this bird that was flopping around," Austin says. "And sure enough, it was covered in ants."

Even stranger, the crow had seemed to purposefully put ants on itself. Austin had been confused; now he was mystified.

The birds were "anting", a behavior that has been documented in more than 200 species. It comes in two forms. In "active" anting, which is much more widespread, a bird picks up one or more ants in its beak and rubs them through its feathers. "Passive" anting means lying down or dust bathing on an anthill and letting the ants crawl over.

Nobody knows why birds do this. Birds have terrible problems with parasites; feathers are an incredible technology for everything from temperature regulation to flying, but they provide a whole world where fleas, lice, mites and other critters hide and thrive. So the most common theory is that the actively anting birds are trying to spread formic acid through their feathers to kill mites or lice, and passively anting birds are hoping the ants will feed on their parasites. The thing is, nobody has ever been able to show that this works. So some ornithologists have ended up arguing that birds do it because it feels good.

Another theory is that the birds' actual target is microscopic pests, but since people didn't even know we had microscopic parasites until 350 years ago, this seems unlikely to me.

So many weird and wonderful things in the world to learn about.