Alan Jacobs

Sir Hardy Amies was for decades Dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, and also, in his spare time, designed costumes for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. But during World War II he had overseen the exposure of double agents and Nazi collaborators in Belgium — and, later, directed the assassination program called Operation Ratweek. Lord only knows how many deaths Hardy Amies was responsible for; perhaps his ruthless efficiency stood him in good stead when, to the subsequent horror of his superiors, he staged a Vogue photo shoot in Belgium just after D-Day. This is what Phantom Thread should’ve been about. 

Eboo Patel:

When I was in college in the mid-1990s—an era that feels quite similar to today—a lot of my activism was around diversity issues. It wasn't called “wokeness” then, but there was a very heightened consciousness around race and gender and sexuality. I think there is a very positive story to tell about bell hooks and Cornel West being read everywhere. But towards the end of college, I realized that religious diversity is never a part of the conversation. I had become, at this point, more inspired by faith-based activists, particularly Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. The way I put it is that they loved people more than they hated the system. And it seemed to me that a lot of activists I knew hated the system more than they loved people. 

I started going to interfaith conferences looking for the next generation of these great faith-based activists like Bayard Rustin, Dorothy Day, Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr. What I found instead was old theologians talking. So I did what I was taught to do as an activist in college: I stood up, I raised my fist, and I called them out. This was June of 1988. I was probably 22, the firebrand young person on the floor, shouting people down. And a striking thing happened. This woman named Yolanda Trevino walked up to me, and she said, “What you're talking about — a movement of young people from diverse religious traditions, engaging in social action together — is powerful. You should build that.” The scales fell from my eyes. She presented to me two paths: one was to continue yelling at other people for what they were doing wrong; the other was to build what I thought looked right.

Patel, who runs an interfaith organization, reminds us just how often people from various faith traditions have done just that — have built what they thought looked right and needed to be built. “If every institution founded by a faith community in your city disappeared overnight, preschools, hospitals, and universities would be gone. YMCAs would be gone, places where AA groups meet would be gone. Half of your social services would probably be gone. It feels to me that religious identity diversity should be at the center of our national conversation, and I'm curious as to why it’s not.” 

In those first three tries, I guessed one letter correctly and twelve incorrectly.

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜
🟨⬜⬜⬜⬜
⬜⬜🟩⬜⬜
⬜🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Not really where I thought Christopher Fry would take that libretto, but I guess that’s why he’s a famous playwright and I’m not. 

"Charge of the Phone Brigade," by Adam Roberts:

Is there a text from Nan?
What’s up on instagram?
Has aught retweeted them?
Anxiously scrolling.
Stormed at with news updates,
Whom which TV-star dates
Into the clicks of Death,
Onto the Site of Hell
Online logrolling.

My colleagues Byron Johnson and Jeff Levin:

According to the 2018 General Social Survey, 6.4% of self-described atheists and 27.2% of agnostics attended religious services monthly or more; 12.8% and 58.1%, respectively, prayed at least weekly; 19.2% and 75% believed in life after death; and 7.3% and 23.3% reported having had a religious experience. 

Americans are weird. 

I’m trying to decide how much I agree with this, from the film scholar David Thomson, in the Mizoguchi entry in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film: 

Despite all its advantages for research and preservation, video is unkind to any movie and cruel to any great movie. Mizoguchi worked with scale, space, and movement, and movement on a TV set is like a fish moving across a tank, whereas movement on a real screen is that of a great fish passing us in the water. 

Let’s suppose you have a big modern flatscreen TV, a good sound system, a high-quality Blu-ray Disc and player, and a dark room in which to watch … is that environment dramatically different from watching a movie in a theater? 

The Verge:

“I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function,” says Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. But among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up.” She added, “They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.” […]

To a point, the new mindset may reflect a natural — and expected — technological progression. Plavchan recalls having similar disconnects with his own professors. “When I was a student, I’m sure there was a professor that said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t understand how this person doesn’t know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,’” he says. “This kind of generational issue has always been around.” And though directory structures exist on every computer (as well as in environments like Google Drive), today’s iterations of macOS and Windows do an excellent job of hiding them. (Your Steam games all live in a folder called “steamapps” — when was the last time you clicked on that?) Today’s virtual world is largely a searchable one; people in many modern professions have little need to interact with nested hierarchies.

“Search, don’t sort,” Google says, but increasingly I’m wondering whether I ought to spend more time sorting and less time searching. I’m always looking for ways to introduce constructive friction into my working practices — see this post for an example — and maybe going Old Skool with some kind of rational filing system would be more helpful than either (a) searching or (b) using the inconsistent and ad hoc system of folders I now have. If I designed a new system Hazel would help me implement it. 

Critical research on the causes of Alzheimer’s may have been falsified — and as a result, researchers may have concentrated too much on a hypothesis that was not as well-supported as they thought. Further investigation will tell whether that’s true, but in any event the story is a useful reminder that we shouldn’t assume that the fudging or outright falsification of scientific data is a victimless crime. In some cases — in this case, if falsified data inappropriately changed the direction of Alzheimer’s research — there could be very many victims indeed before the course of research gets corrected. 

UPDATE: David Robert Grimes: “Science may be self-correcting, but only in the long term.” 

Yes, Social Media Really Is Undermining Democracy - The Atlantic:

Social media may not be the primary cause of polarization, but it is an important cause, and one we can do something about. I believe it is also the primary cause of the epidemic of structural stupidity, as I called it, that has recently afflicted many of America’s key institutions.

Mary Midgley, in a late interview:

“The kind of thing that Paul Davies has dwelt on, about the improbability of all this order, seems to me to be sensible. So that one has to say that from the big bang onwards there's some sort of tendency towards the formation of order and in certain stages of order towards proceeding to life and to produce more and more perceptive life as it were. Well this talk about a life force seems to me highly suitable and I don't see anything superstitious about it. It's still very vague but of course that's getting you quite near to ‘well of course that means there's a God’. People talk about the origin of having gods was just that you wanted to explain things or have something to placate us, but it seems to me one important source of it is gratitude. You go out on a day like this and you're really grateful. I don't know who to.” 

What does my home town sound like? It sounds like Waxahatchee’s “Arkadelphia”. It sounds exactly like that.

Ross Douthat: “More Americans should live in the West, and more Americans assuredly will.” Yeah, they probably will, but they shouldn’t, because there’s not enough water. 

Mary Leng:

Indeed, armed with a new toolbox of Latin names for fallacies, eager students all too often delight in spotting fallacies in the wild, shouting out their Latin names (ad hominem!; secundum quid!) as if they were magic spells. This is what Scott Aikin and John Casey, in their delightful book Straw Man Arguments, call the Harry Potter fallacy: the “troublesome practice of invoking fallacy names in place of substantive discussion”. However, they note another, less wholesome reason why some may be interested in fallacy theory. If one’s aim is not so much discovering the truth as winning an argument at all costs, fallacy theory can provide a training in the dark arts of closing down a discussion prematurely, leaving the impression that it has been won.

This, for Aikin and Casey, is the essence of what makes the straw man a fallacy: if we successfully “straw man” our opponent by knocking down a misstated version of their argument, we give the mistaken impression that the issue is closed.

Paradoxically, the straw man works particularly well on people well trained in the norms of good argument (the authors call this the “Owl of Minerva problem”: “we, in making our practices more self-reflective … create new opportunities for second-order pathologies that arise out of our corrective reflection”)…. Observers are generally more likely to be taken in by shoddy reasoning if they are already sympathetic to one side, and straw-manning contributes to the polarization of political debate. In today’s political environment it is not uncommon for partisans intuitively to see themselves as being on the right side of history, with their rivals adding nothing of value to the conversation and deserving of intellectual – or even moral – contempt. The prevalence of this fallacy in democratic political debate is thus a matter of significant concern: as Aikin and Casey write, it is “a threat to a properly functioning system of self-government”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching the 2022 UEFA European Women’s Football Championship, AKA the women’s Euros, and it’s been enjoyable throughout. And as much as the generally high quality of play — most notably from Arsenal legend Beth Mead — I have enjoyed the complete absence of drama-queen nonsense. I’ve been watching women’s footy for a long time, but not so much in so brief a period, and I think perhaps it’s the condensed timeline that has made me so aware of what’s missing: the flinging yourself to the turf, the rolling around in mock agony, the clutching of your face when an elbow grazes your bicep — the constant bullshit that really, seriously defaces the men’s game. 

By contrast, these Euros have been all Chumbawamba: they get knocked down, they get back up again. They don’t get a call they want, they go on with the game. Sure, they let the ref know when they think a call has been missed, but essentially they just play footy. It’s been great.