Alan Jacobs

I find myself focusing inward, drawn back to the moment when I returned to my adversary’s text for replenishment. I did so instinctively because I knew subconsciously that it would sharpen my mind, energize my body, strengthen my will — in short, that it would restore vigor and momentum to my argument. In order to go on, I needed to feel again the moment when the villains go too far, the moment of righteous wrath which sweeps everything else away. At that precise instant, something inside says “charge.” It is an experience of tremendous empowerment. You feel, temporarily, invincible. All the faculties are galvanized, perfectly aligned, ready to do to your will. It’s the moment to look out for, the moment whose content and whose consequences need to be examined.

These remarks have a moralistic tendency, to say the least, and at this juncture, it would seem I ought to say something like, “and so the cowboys and the farmers should be friends,” or “do unto other critics as you would have other critics do unto you.” I believe in peace and I believe in the Golden Rule, but I don’t believe I’ve earned the right to such pronouncements. At least not yet. It’s difficult to unlearn the habits of a lifetime, and this very essay has been fueled by a good deal of the righteousness it is in the business of questioning. So instead of offering you a moral, I call your attention to a moment: the moment of righteous ecstasy, the moment when you know you have the moral advantage of your adversary, the moment of murderousness. It’s a moment when there’s still time to stop, there’s still time to reflect, there’s still time to recall what happened in High Noon, there’s still time to say: “I don’t care who’s right or who’s wrong. There has to be some better way for people to live.”

In this light, she refers to the work of the controversial physicist Paul Davies, who views science’s refusal to question the origin of physical laws as an article of faith much like religion.

“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.”

Given her nebulous gratitude, I wonder why she rejected religion. “I didn’t exactly reject it,” she says. “I couldn’t make it work. I would try to pray and it didn’t seem to get me anywhere so I stopped after a while. But I think it’s a perfectly sensible world view. It caused my parents and people like them often to make what I think were good choices. And I notice this particularly with Buddhists, the notion that there is some kind of force that makes for righteousness, as Matthew Arnold said, is on the whole a helpful one.”

There have been times in which men of letters looked, not to the public, but to the government, or to a few great men, for the reward of their exertions. It was thus in the time of Maecenas and Pollio at Rome, of the Medici at Florence, of Louis, the Fourteenth in France, of Lord Halifax and Lord Oxford in this country. Now, Sir, I well know that there are cases in which it is fit and graceful, nay, in which it is a sacred duty to reward the merits or to relieve the distresses of men of genius by the exercise of this species of liberality. But these cases are exceptions. I can conceive no system more fatal to the integrity and independence of literary men than one under which they should be taught to look for their daily bread to the favour of ministers and nobles. I can conceive no system more certain to turn those minds which are formed by nature to be the blessings and ornaments of our species into public scandals and pests.

We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly…. Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

Brendan, I grew up in a very conservative religious home and many of the people I love the most can still be described as very religious and very conservative. I think your views on this issue are wrong, and that your actions have done harm, but I can no more caricature you as a terrible person driven by homophobia and hatred than I can break off relations with my cherished family members because they take actions similar to yours.

If you stay on as CEO, I look forward to seeing you act with the clearly demonstrated commitment to equality that your posts have affirmed.

And more personally, whatever it is that makes you feel that the institution of marriage is threatened by the desire for equal legal rights of people like me, I hope that sense of threat eventually lessens. I don’t wish this for myself—the tide of our culture is already turning and I do believe that history is bending toward justice. I hope it for you and for your family, sincerely and with love.

Now I’m going to get to work.

The sense of festivity, which corresponds to pity in tragedy, is always present at the end of a romantic comedy. This takes the part of a party, usually a wedding, in which we feel, to some degree, participants. We are invited to the festivity and we put the best face we can on whatever feelings we may still have about the recent behavior of some of the characters, often including the bridegroom. In Shakespeare the new society is remarkably catholic in its tolerance; but there is always a part of us that remains a spectator, detached and observant, aware of other nuances and values. This sense of alienation, which in tragedy is terror, is almost bound to be represented by somebody or something in the play, and even if, like Shylock, he disappears in the fourth act, we never quite forget him. We seldom consciously feel identified with him, for he himself wants no such identification: we may even hate or despise him, but he is there, the eternal questioning Satan who is still not quite silenced by the vindication of Job…. Participation and detachment, sympathy and ridicule, sociability and isolation, are inseparable in the complex we call comedy, a complex that is begotten by the paradox of life itself, in which merely to exist is both to be part of something else and yet never to be a part of it, and in which all freedom and joy are inseparably a belonging and an escape.

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William James in Brazil after the attack of small-pox : portrait photograph, 1865.

MS Am 1092 (1185)

Houghton Library, Harvard University

Stupid hipster.

The contested life of one of Britain’s best-loved poets has erupted into controversy once more, as the estate of Ted Hughes has stopped cooperating with his latest biographer.

The Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who began working on a biography of the former poet laureate in 2010, said he was surprised that the estate has barred him from private archives, asked that he return photocopies of privately held documents, and withdrawn his right to quote extensively from the poet’s work – described by the professor as “an essential aspect of serious scholarship”.

According to Bate, the decision to withdraw support came “completely out of the blue”, though the estate was becoming “impatient” to see more of his work.

Four years after the original Nature paper was published, Nature News had sad tidings to convey: the latest flu outbreak had claimed an unexpected victim: Google Flu Trends. After reliably providing a swift and accurate account of flu outbreaks for several winters, the theory-free, data-rich model had lost its nose for where flu was going. Google’s model pointed to a severe outbreak but when the slow-and-steady data from the CDC arrived, they showed that Google’s estimates of the spread of flu-like illnesses were overstated by almost a factor of two.

The problem was that Google did not know – could not begin to know – what linked the search terms with the spread of flu. Google’s engineers weren’t trying to figure out what caused what. They were merely finding statistical patterns in the data. They cared about ­correlation rather than causation. This is common in big data analysis. Figuring out what causes what is hard (impossible, some say). Figuring out what is correlated with what is much cheaper and easier. That is why, according to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier’s book, Big Data, “causality won’t be discarded, but it is being knocked off its pedestal as the primary fountain of meaning”.

But a theory-free analysis of mere correlations is inevitably fragile. If you have no idea what is behind a correlation, you have no idea what might cause that correlation to break down. One explanation of the Flu Trends failure is that the news was full of scary stories about flu in December 2012 and that these stories provoked internet searches by people who were healthy. Another possible explanation is that Google’s own search algorithm moved the goalposts when it began automatically suggesting diagnoses when people entered medical symptoms.

Google Flu Trends will bounce back, recalibrated with fresh data – and rightly so. There are many reasons to be excited about the broader opportunities offered to us by the ease with which we can gather and analyse vast data sets. But unless we learn the lessons of this episode, we will find ourselves repeating it.

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poetsorg: What did Auden check out from the library? (via http://www.nysoclib.org/)

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Auden’s handwritten draft of “Musee des Beaux Arts”. He rarely wrote nearly this legibly.