The popular series Stranger Things is meticulous about getting details right, but it’s a Frankenstein world, built of spare parts from earlier movies; there is nothing genuinely real or living about it. Indeed, the entire premise of the series (a premise that has paid off handsomely) is that audiences would love to participate in a festival of pure nostalgia that isn’t at all about life, but entirely about how life was represented. The fantasy being sold is less of living in the 1980s than of watching 1980s-era movies.
Some lovely photos of the recent Laity Lodge retreat with Sara Hendren and Claire Holley.
Continuing a theme….
I love how my buddy Austin Kleon uses his newsletter to riff on and extend some stuff I wrote.
That really was a wonderful meal at Milo last night. Corey’s cooking gets more and more interesting. (See these blue-crab hushpuppies – to die for.)
workspace
A woman loving her dessert. A lovely woman who has been married for forty-two years – to me!
incentives
Consider this an addendum to my recent post on an influential study of Alzheimer’s that looks to have featured manipulated data. Retraction Watch has been in business for quite some time now, and is likely to get busier because of the extra opportunities for dishonesty available through machine learning. This situation will continue to get worse until science — and academia more generally — begins to get serious about correcting its perverse incentives. Every scientist knows that certain kinds of results get (a) attention and (b) citations, resulting in (c) prestige for the researchers’ institutions and (d) promotions and raises and maybe better jobs elsewhere for the researchers.
Again, this is a problem for all of academia: as I have written elsewhere, “the academic enterprise is not a Weberian ‘iron cage,’ it’s a cage made from a bundle of thin sticks of perverse incentives held together with a putty of bullshit.” But when the bullshit takes over the sciences, especially the health sciences, people die. The incentive structure has to change.
All forms of privilege — including the ones I benefit from — are morally dangerous, but I think the form of privilege that does the greatest social and political damage is that of never having to live among or even talk to people who disagree with you about the Good.
