Alan Jacobs

Jeannie Suk Gersen:

If, in the face of scientific findings, one lets go of the view that trigger warnings foster mental health or facilitate learning, what reasons might remain for using them? It may well be that, at this point, trigger warnings have developed a spinoff cultural meaning that departs from the aim of providing psychological aid to those who suffer from trauma. A trigger warning might really function as a signal to the subset of students who are looking for it that the teacher is sensitive to their concerns — or at least compliant with their requests — regardless of psychological benefit or harm. The choice to send such a signal is of course part of a teacher’s academic freedom. But it is important to undertake it with the understanding that signalling compassion for students and trauma survivors in this particular way may be at cross purposes with helping them, whether psychologically or pedagogically. 

Yep. 

Nicholas Orme:

Looking at the rows and rows of seats in an English church, some of them dating back to the 15th century, invites questions. Why so many? Were they ever all filled, apart from an occasional wedding or funeral? The assumption is that they were full on Sundays, at least up to 1689, while parish-church attendance was compulsory. We tend to visualise an age of faith, especially up to the Reformation: a “world we have lost.”

There were, indeed, larger medieval congregations than today. Churchgoing was a valued social occasion when, especially in the countryside, there were few others. But the rows of seats are also misleading. They were put in so that people would have their own seats rather than take whatever was available. The congregation was laid out in an order of social precedence: gentry or merchants in the chancel or side chapels, yeomanry or citizens in the front of the nave, and lesser folk behind them.

They were almost all there on Easter Day, which, up to 1549, was a compulsory day of attendance to receive one’s single annual communion. Christmas and Whit Sunday were also obligatory days, although their congregations seem to have been a little smaller.

Attendance on an ordinary Sunday in medieval England was another matter, however. Contemporaries were clear that many people were absent. A succession of archbishops and bishops raged about the fact. The poet Alexander Barclay wrote in 1508: “the stalls of the tavern are stuffed with drinkers when in the church stalls [you] shall see few or none.”

Matt Taibbi:

Surveys found a third of Republicans think the asymptomatic don’t transmit Covid-19, or that the disease kills fewer people than the flu or car crashes. But Democrats also test out atrociously, with 41% thinking Covid-19 patients end up hospitalized over half the time — the real number is 1%-5% — while also wildly overestimating dangers to children, the percentage of Covid deaths under the age of 65, the efficacy of masks, and other issues.

This is the result of narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time. 

I know I have been banging this drum for a long time — here, here, and in greatest detail here — but I think it’s better to consider these systems of beliefs as myths, as emerging from what Kołakowski calls “the mythical core of culture,” rather than religion. 

UPDATE: This from Sally Satel is relevant: 

An ambitious new study ... by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues ... proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld — with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.” 

But before conservatives start up the “the left is worse” chorus, note this: 

I asked Costello whether left-wing and right-wing authoritarians exist in equal proportions. “It is hard to know the ratio,” he said, making clear that a subject’s receptivity to authoritarianism falls on a continuum, like other personality characteristics or even height, so using hard-and-fast categories (authoritarian versus nonauthoritarian) can be tricky. “Still, some preliminary work shows the ratio is about the same if you average across the globe,” he said. In the U.S., though, Costello hypothesizes that right-wing authoritarians outnumber left-wing ones by roughly three to one. Other researchers have concluded that the number of strident conservatives in the U.S. far exceeds the number of strident progressives and that American conservatives express more authoritarian attitudes than their counterparts in Britain, Australia, or Canada.

Lots of enjoyable coverage of Dennis Duncan’s new and wonderfully titled Index, A History of the. (You may find a brief excerpt from it as a work-in-progress here.)

The best thing I’ve seen is (unsurprisingly) by Anthony Grafton in the LRB. Here’s a noteworthy passage:

Indexing flowered at a time when readers saw books as great mosaics of useful tags and examples that they could collect and organise for themselves. The chief tool they used to do this job was not the index but the commonplace book: a notebook, preferably organised by subject headings known as loci communes (common places), which provided both a material space in which to store material and a set of designators to help retrieve it. Like indexes, commonplace books were wildly popular. John Foxe, a corrector of the press during his exile years in Switzerland, printed two editions of a blank commonplace book designed to be filled in by users under Foxe’s various headings. One such user, Sir Julius Caesar, crammed his copy so full of notes and excerpts that the British Library classifies it as a manuscript. In his preface to the first edition, Foxe made clear that he knew he was riding a wave. He worked for Johannes Oporinus, the Basel printer who brought out the Magdeburg Centuries, a vast Protestant history built on commonplace books compiled by students. Foxe pointed out, with relish, that everyone who was anyone was making commonplace books and telling others how to do so. Humanists commonplaced to ready themselves for effective speech and writing, medical men, lawyers and theologians to prepare for their professions. Foxe argued that the commonplace book was vastly superior to the index. The index might point you to the materials you need, but the commonplace book actually provided them, handily organised. Holmes, like his contemporary Aby Warburg (another dab hand with scissors and paste), was a late master of the commonplace book, even if he called it an index. If printing made indexes easy to compile, commonplacing made them indispensable to printers and readers alike. 

In response to the TLS’s review, my dear friend Tim Larsen wrote in with the following: 

I can confirm that one does indeed need a human indexer with a decent knowledge of the topic at hand. I thought I could safely ignore the index for my Oxford Handbook of Christmas (2020), but when it came back with an entry on “Joseph, father of Jesus,” I knew I had to step in. Mercifully, it went to press as “Joseph, husband of Mary.” As to humour in indexes, one of my favourites is E. P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). Its index has an entry for “Truth, ultimate.” The three pages listed under it lead one to the blank pages that divide the book’s parts. 

Let me register a vote for My Favorite Indexer: Hugh Kenner. In some of his books he not only tabulated references to key figures, he offered memorable single-word descriptions of many of them. A few examples from his book on Irish writers, A Colder Eye: 

Of course, the delight here is turning to the appropriate pages to find out just how Kenner settled on the identifications he chose.  

What a great cover. 

Adam, I have a story to tell you. It concerns strawberries.

When I was a boy in Birmingham, Alabama, one of my great-aunts lived in the countryside about forty miles north, and we would visit her regularly. I had maybe a dozen great-aunts, most of them formidable Southern ladies schooled in poverty, but this one was an iron-willed widow farmer who rejoiced in the name Bethalee Basenberg. She mainly grew sweet corn and tomatoes, but had a sideline in a few other things, including strawberries and sugar cane.

Now, like all civilized people with a decent palate, I loved strawberries -- but perhaps I carried it to an extreme. I loved strawberries more than any other food. On one visit, when I was ten or eleven years old, Aunt Bethalee allowed me to pick a bag of ripe strawberries and a few canes to take back to the city, and I was absolutely in heaven.

When we got home I put the strawberries in a bowl and squeezed the nectar from the canes over them, then took the bowl to my room and plopped down on the bed with a new book I had just begun: Dune. I ate and read, ate and red.

But I overdid the eating. (One cannot, of course overdo the reading.) I became violently ill and vomited red vomit, over and over again. I had never been that miserable before, and rarely have since.

Afterwards, I became nauseated when I looked at, or even just thought about, ... Dune.

Apparently some executive decision-making region of my brain knew that I loved strawberries too much to be nauseated by them, so it shifted the nausea-induction to Frank Herbert’s innocent book. I continued to eat strawberries whenever they were presented to me, and did so with delight, but I set DUNE aside -- I was maybe a hundred pages in -- for decades. Even as an adult I got queasy when I looked at it. I was in my forties before I worked up the resolve to go back and finish it.

Vive les fraises!

The Washington Post: “The metaverse, to Sweeney, would be an expansive, digitized communal space where users can mingle freely with brands and one another in ways that permit self-expression and spark joy.” Users mingling freely with brands — if that’s not Paradise Regained I don’t know what is.

• There was absolutely no reason to believe, at any point in the development of this series, that it would be related in a significant way to Asimov’s books, so people complaining about its deviations from them are just being silly. 
• The major driver of the plot so far is an event that Asimov never thought of but that Kim Stanley Robinson did — it’s stolen straight from Red Mars. 
• I really hope Jared Harris is trying to make Hari Seldon pompous — an obscure academic finding himself in the spotlight and enjoying it overmuch. If it’s purposeful it’s a nice touch. (I don’t buy the whole scene of Hari basking in the glow of the laundry workers’ adoration. If only we had seen a few of them rolling their eyes….) 
• Someone clearly told Lee Pace that he needed to chew some scenery; and no scenery remains unchewed. 
• That said, the floor-length sleeveless evening gown he wears for most of the first two episodes, even though it gives him a chance to display his guns, tends to have a pretty powerful anti-gravitas effect. 
• There are two main threads of plot here, with two sets of characters: the Foundation mission and the imperial court. So far every character in the Foundation thread remains underdeveloped — it’s hard to tell what motivates anyone. I think the writers want to convey the complexity of character, but what they’re mainly conveying, at this point, is confusion. 
• Despite Lee Pace’s overacting, the court environment is better-developed and more interesting, at least at this point. The idea of the Imperial Trinity — three clones of an ancient emperor at three different ages, the young Brother Dawn, the mature Brother Day (Pace), the elderly Brother Dusk — seemed at first like a gimmick, but I’ve come to like it. It’s an intriguing way to represent psychodynamics. 
• The best thing about the show so far is Laura Birn. 
• Nice to get a little plot twist at the end of the second episode, because before that things were ploddingly expositional.