Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how he would go about deciding whether to go to grad school in a discipline like English or comparative literature. He dealt immediately with the sample bias problem by turning toward statistics. His first step, he said, would be to ignore the stories of individual grad students, both good and bad. Their experiences are too variable and path-dependent, and their stories are too likely to assume an unwarranted weight in our minds. Instead, he said, he would focus on the “base rates”: that is, on the numbers that give you a broad statistical picture of outcomes from graduate school in the humanities. What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) To make a rational decision, he told me, you have to see the big picture, because your experience is likely to be typical, rather than exceptional. “If you take a broader view of the profession,” he told me, “it seems like a terrible idea to go to graduate school.”Perhaps that’s the rational conclusion, but, if so, it’s beset on all sides by confounding little puzzles; they act like streams that divert and weaken the river of rational thought. Graduate school, for example, is a one-time-only offer. Very few people start doctoral programs later in life. If you pass it up, you pass it up forever. Given that, isn’t walking away actually the rash decision? (This kind of thinking is a subspecies of the habit of mind psychologists call loss aversion: once you have something, it’s very hard to give it up; if you get into grad school, it’s very hard not to go.) And then there’s the fact that graduate school, no matter how bad an idea it might be in the long term, is almost always fulfilling and worthwhile in the short term. As our conversation continued, my friend was struck by this. “How many people get paid to read what they want to read,” he asked, “and study what they want to study?” He paused. ”If I got into a really good program, I would probably go.”
Experience has taught me that the less satisfying the narrative of the day has been, the more likely I am to be unable to let it go. My body keeps me awake until my mind has sculpted something more shapely from the day or I am able to distract it with a more engaging narrative borrowed from the pages of a book. The vigilance of the waking hours is over but so is the magic lantern of event. No matter how glad I am to sink into unconsciousness, this always feels like a loss. Children, who are in so many ways more fully alive than us, understand this intuitively, I think. It’s a rare child who volunteers to go to bed: they too need stories, borrowed narratives to persuade them away from the thrills and puzzles of their own day.
Two boys pose on a balcony with the Tenerife port in the background in Puerto Orotava, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, May 1930.Photograph by Wilhelm Tobien, National Geographic
Religious organizations are asking for permission to use this photo by Marac Andrev Kolodzinski
Hand-lettering by Edward Gorey, Anchor’s first art director, 1953-1960.
roof-streets of Masuleh, Iran
The interior of La Compania Church in Quito, Ecuador, January 1929.Photograph by Jacob J. Gayer, National Geographic
Treasures of Faith Preview
Here’s a 1593 edition of Thomas Aquinas’s complete works. This engraved title page features an ornate pediment with Christ at its center. Corinthian columns double as frames, bolstered by female figures (anthropomorphic renderings of Theology and Philosophy). Beneath the title is a portrait medallion of St. Thomas, who stands amongst the cameos of four Church Fathers.
This beautiful piece—a shining example of early modern theological writings—belongs to Treasures of Faith: Twenty Years of Acquisitions, a spotlight exhibition that’ll open on Wednesday. It’s one of several extraordinary items, selected from the 8,000 religious volumes that the Newberry has acquired in recent years. Highlights include a critical edition of Augustine’s Works; the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX (1227-1241), which are a fundamental compilation of canon law; and a stunning 1648 King James Bible, bound in elegant silver.
Treasures of Faith would not have been possible without the Sister Ann Ida Gannon Initiative. Launched in 2010, this massive project—named for Sister Ann Ida Gannon, former president of Mundelein College—was designed to conserve and catalog more than 8,000 volumes. In 1991, Gannon transferred the Mundelein rare book collection to the Newberry. Her generosity inspired subsequent gifts from Chicago-area religious institutions.
It’s not quite relevant, but we couldn’t resist: In honor of Earth Day (April 22), here’s an issue of Mother Earth, printed in August of 1914. On its cover is a drawing by Man Ray, the famed Dada artist. The image offers a bleak portrayal of humanity, torn asunder by capitalism and government.
Mother Earth was an early twentieth-century journal, edited by known anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It was, in its own words, “devoted to social science and literature.” Mother Earth’s pages contained articles on labor practices, education, literature, state and government control, and women’s emancipation. Its subscribers and supporters were a “who’s who” of the radical left, including Ben Hecht, Leo Tolstoy, Margaret Sanger, and Eugene O’Neill.
The machine’s interface—its outward representation of the numeric self—is no longer the cold, bureaucratic punchcard. It’s the avatar, the selfie: the lovingly curated, intangible image of the I. The cloud, and particularly its social-networking mechanism, personalizes depersonalization. It allows us to design our own representation of the numeric self. Behind the scenes, it’s still all ones and zeroes, but whereas the punchcard brought the binary code into clear view, the avatarial image hides it. The apparatus of control wears a new face, and that face is our own.