Reviews and News:
Nathan Heller explains why Kirkus’s decision to change a review of a book because of political pressure is a big deal: “Kirkus says that the reviewer merely updated her assessment in a way that was ‘listening’ to public complaint. Yet the controversy rattles on, especially because the emendation touches on a broader change, from late 2015, in how the magazine writes about children’s and young-adult fiction. Reviews now explicitly note major characters’ skin colors. Reviewers of books for young readers are given special training to help ‘identify problematic tropes and representations,’ and the reviews themselves are assigned to what Kirkus calls ‘own voices’ reviewers—that is, writers who share an affinity of ‘lived experience’ with characters in the book.” With these decisions, “Kirkus…has somehow managed to misapprehend both the nature of reviewing and the nature of books. As I’ve written in this magazine, criticism exists in different flavors, but its defining feature is an individualism of response. That response can be wise or unwise, popular or unpopular. A reviewer can squander authority by seeming too often at odds with good judgment. But, without critical autonomy, the enterprise falls apart.”
Jazz and classical musicians respond differently to unexpected events, researchers find: “The researchers used EEG to compare the electrical brain activity of 12 Jazz musicians (with improvisation training), 12 Classical musicians (without improvisation training), and 12 non-musicians while they listened to a series of chord progressions. Some of the chords followed a progression that was typical of Western music, while others had an unexpected progression. Louie and her colleagues found that Jazz musicians had a significantly different electrophysiological response to the unexpected progression, which indicated they had an increased perceptual sensitivity to unexpected stimuli along with an increased engagement with unexpected events.” (HT: Ted Gioia)
Every year, about 95 pounds of gold and 6,600 pounds of silver pass through Swiss sewer lines.
Amazon is hiring PhDs: “The retail behemoth has hired nearly 500 PhDs, former professors among them, since the beginning of this year to work in its applied-science and research-science units, according to company figures. The pace and scale of that hiring are far greater than those of any college or university in the country.”
Billionaires can help struggling newspapers, but within limits: “Ever since Donald Graham, the heir to the Washington Post, decided to sell the family’s newspaper for two hundred and fifty million dollars, in 2013, to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest men, the preferred solution for a financially struggling publication has been to find a deep-pocketed billionaire, with other sources of income, to buy it and run it more or less as a philanthropic endeavor. That seemed to be what the Wenners—Jann, the father, and Gus, the son—had in mind, too, when they put Rolling Stone, the iconic magazine founded by the elder Wenner, fifty years ago, up for sale recently. He told the Times that he hoped to find a buyer who understood the magazine’s mission and who had ‘lots of money.’ But the story of Alice Rogoff and the Alaska Dispatch News is a cautionary tale that shows the limits of what a wealthy owner is willing, or able, to do for a struggling newspaper in the digital era.”
The man who photographed Lincoln’s ghost: “In The Apparitionists, Peter Manseau takes us on an expedition through the beginnings of photography and its deceptions. No sooner had people invented a way of creating photographic images (whether it was a daguerreotype, an ambrotype or a hallotype) than people found ways of altering the images — and, even more relevantly, of lying about their contents and how they were obtained. A photograph, as we well know, can’t talk back. It’s like a piece of taxidermy. It can’t say to us, ‘No, I’m not a picture of Abraham Lincoln.’ And often the provenance of a photograph, its causal connection to the world, is hidden.”
A history of purple: “The most prized and expensive dye was called Tyrian purple, which came from small mollusks called murex snails. The natural historian Pliny remarked on the rather unpleasant smell of the murex conchylium — one of the marine gastropods often used to produce the prized purplish-red dye. A number of mollusks in fact contained hypo-branchial glands whose secretions could be used to turn fabrics various shades of purple. Pliny and Aristotle note that it wasn’t until the snails died that it was secreted. Consequently, for the production of the pigment, we should imagine thousands of rotting shellfish laid out in purple dye workshops along the coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Early twentieth century experimentations in trying to recreate the purple dye in fact led to the conclusion that eight thousand mollusks produced a single gram of the substance.”
Essay of the Day:
Did you watch the Dodgers-Astros game last night? It was a “pitcher’s duel” in which all four runs were the result of home runs. The many points of tension the game offers, its symmetry and wisdom, make it, according to more than one 20th-century thinker, the most philosophical sport:
“The great John Rawls, who revolutionized political philosophy, believed that “baseball is the best of all games” and once recounted reasons why. In 1982, Chicago philosopher Ted Cohen expressed his love for the game by claiming to have found a contradiction in the rules. He petitioned the league to resolve the matter, without immediate success. But the rules were silently changed, removing the apparent inconsistency, in 2010. Mark Halfon, who teaches philosophy at Nassau Community College, has written two books about baseball, Can A Dead Man Strike Out? and Tales from the Deadball Era. And now Mark Kingwell, a philosopher at the University of Toronto, has published Fail Better, which concludes, ‘Baseball is […] the most philosophical of games.’ Finding improbable depths in the game of baseball has become an intellectual performance art.” Read the rest.
Images: Ernst Haeckel’s nature drawings
Poem: Mary-Patrice Woehling, “Ember Days”
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