Alan Jacobs

I haven’t met a single person who uses social media heavily who isn’t struggling to define what the constant, low-level publicness does to him or her. Even those who are supremely comfortable with the medium ponder if they need to get away from Twitter and Facebook now and again. No one is quite sure what it does to them to have ‘friends’ instead of friends or to 'like’ things instead of liking things. Maybe nothing, maybe a lot. So, I looked on with interest when University of Maryland graduate student Nathan Jurgenson tweeted about a frame that got his students talking. I like it because it’s not an all or nothing question. It’s only about what social media amplifies and restrains. Jurgenson asked his students to consider whether using Facebook emphasized the 'me’ or the 'I,’ a distinction made by social thinker George Herbert Mead.

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects. Robert Moses, the great builder of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s, or Oscar Niemeyer, the great architect of Brasilia, belong to a past when people still had concrete ideas about the future. Voters today prefer Victorian houses. Science fiction has collapsed as a literary genre. Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today’s aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse. I wonder whether the endless fake cultural wars around identity politics are the main reason we have been able to ignore the tech slowdown for so long. However that may be, after 40 years of wandering, it is not easy to find a path back to the future. If there is to be a future, we would do well to reflect about it more. The first and the hardest step is to see that we now find ourselves in a desert, and not in an enchanted forest.

The average height of native-born American males has not significantly changed since the middle of the twentieth century. This plateau contrasts with the trends in Europe, where growth increases have continued, dramatically in countries like the Netherlands, which now has on average the tallest European men. Factors that have been considered by way of explanation of static American growth are social inequality, an inferior health care system, and fewer welfare safety nets compared to western and northern Europe, despite our high per capita income. Although our health care system and its long-standing lack of universal coverage is often blamed as a primary factor, we should not jump to this conclusion. For example, infant mortality rates in 2005, which some consider to be indicators of the success or failure of a nation’s health care system, were 2.4 deaths per 1,000 births in Sweden and 6.8 deaths per 1,000 births in the US.11 This would seem to support the difference between universal coverage in Sweden and millions of uninsured in the US. But in Canada, which has long had a national single-payer system, the infant mortality rate was 5.3 deaths per 1,000 births, more than twice that in Sweden. Social and cultural factors beyond universal health care coverage clearly are relevant to rates of infant mortality.

Aside from a yearly ceremonial peek inside its vault, which can be unlocked only with three keys held by three different officials, the [kilogram] prototype goes unmolested for decades. Yet every 40 years or so, protocol requires that it be washed with alcohol, dried with a chamois cloth, given a steam bath, allowed to air dry, and then weighed against the freshly scrubbed national standards, all transported to France. It is also compared to six témoins (witnesses), nominally identical cylinders that are stored in the vault alongside the prototype. The instruments used to make these comparisons are phenomenally precise, capable of measuring differences of 0.0000001 percent, or one part in 1 billion. But comparisons since the 1940s have revealed a troublesome drift. Relative to the témoins and to the national standards, Le Grand K has been losing weight — or, by the definition of mass under the metric system, the rest of the universe has been getting fatter. The most recent comparison, in 1988, found a discrepancy as large as five-hundredths of a milligram, a bit less than the weight of a dust speck, between Le Grand K and its official underlings.

“I’ve always felt, with The Iliad, a real frustration that it’s read wrong,” Oswald says. “That it’s turned into this public school poem, which I don’t think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes – it’s become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. Every translation you pick up is so romantically involved with the main story that the ordinariness of Homer, which I love so much – the poem’s amazing background of peculiar, real people, just being themselves – is almost invisible.” In her version, the absence of the monolithic main characters leaves the histories of the footsoldiers who died in their shadows exposed and gleaming, like rocks at low tide.

I deeply deplore the equation of popular writing with pap and distortion for two main reasons. First, such a designation imposes a crushing professional burden on scientists (particularly young scientists without tenure) who might like to try their hand at this expansive style. Second, it denigrates the intelligence of millions of Americans eager for intellectual stimulation without patronization. If we writers assume a crushing mean of mediocrity and incomprehension, then not only do we have contempt for our neighbors, but we also extinguish the light of excellence. The “perceptive and intelligent” layperson is no myth. They exist in millions—a low percentage of Americans perhaps, but a high absolute number with influence beyond their proportion in the population.

eden ahbez in the 1940s

The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his bombed-out house

Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. Their internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

True, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the reluctant leader whom Mr. Shuttlesworth virtually goaded into joining him in Birmingham, got the credit — and the Nobel Peace Prize — for their accomplishment. But that’s partly because Mr. Shuttlesworth was the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham. As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches. …

A few years ago, after Mr. Shuttlesworth had survived a house fire, I teased him about his continuing record of close calls, saying that even though the segregationists hadn’t done him in, somebody was going to get him one way or the other. “Yeah, and when they do,” he replied, “God’s going to say, ‘They got a man.’ ”

Neal Stephenson’s new novel begins with a family reunion in the Idaho panhandle, near the Canadian border, during which the “reserved, even hardbitten” men of the extended Forthrast clan engage in shooting practice with an impressive assortment of firearms.