Most “forgotten” books are forgotten for a reason, Stefan Beck writes. They’re bad. “Rehabilitating a ‘forgotten’ writer is a trickier matter. The point of publishing a book is to sell it, and books that people want to read tend not to disappear. There are exceptions to this rule. Charles Portis’s novels, for instance, fell out of print a while until the journalist Ron Rosenbaum successfully [pleaded] the case for their brilliance. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), by John Rollin Ridge, is no such exception. If you’ve never heard of it, rest assured that there’s a very good reason for that.”
Serious pun: “The best puns have more to do with philosophy than with being funny. Playing with words is playing with ideas, and a likeness between two different terms suggests a likeness between their referents, too. Puns are therefore not mere linguistic coincidences but evidence and expression of a hidden connection—between mind and material, ideas and things, knowing and nomenclature.”
At Quartz, Thu-Huong Ha argues that Amazon could use algorithms to transform literature. I’m skeptical, but if you want to know what data Amazon is collecting, give Ha’s piece a read.
The facts and fiction of piracy. Who was the greatest pirate? “Ching Shih. With more than 1,500 ships, she controlled more of the South China sea than the PRC does now.”
In praise of libraries.
Do we need more leaders like Charles de Gaulle? Samuel Gregg thinks so and explains why in Public Discourse: “Charles de Gaulle had many flaws. Indeed, as Jackson demonstrates, they were legion. But de Gaulle was also a cultured and patriotic man with a powerful intellect, a deep religious faith, a profound grasp of history, and a resolute will to act. People with this combination of qualities are always hard to find. In an age when supranational technocrats, utopian globalists, leftists contemptuous of patriotism, and tribal populists seem locked in relentless struggle with each other, we need such individuals more than ever.”
Essay of the Day
In Reason, Katherine Mangu-Ward writes about the problem of bad but “useful” data:
“At a time when #MeToo and Title IX are dominating the headlines, for instance, it can seem like sexual assault is everywhere. But one of the central statistics responsible for that perception rests on an astonishingly weak foundation. You’ve probably heard this shocking figure: One in five women has been sexually assaulted while in college.
“One of the sources of support for that number is a 2002 study by David Lisak, who concluded that what had previously been referred to as ‘date rape’ was actually the result of repeated infractions by serial campus predators. Lisak urged administrators to view every accusation ‘as an opportunity to identify a serial rapist,’ a way of thinking that in turn validates harsh treatment for accused students and justifies funding a massive bureaucracy for adjudication. The Obama White House cited Lisak in memoranda, anti-rape activists promoted his work in movies and books, and university administrators invited him to give lectures and sit on panels.
“But as Davidson College administrator Linda M. LeFauve explained in our pages three years ago, Lisak’s study was based on survey data cobbled together from his students’ dissertations and masters’ theses. The central data set drew from interviews with just 76 nontraditional, nonresidential students whose offenses ‘may or may not have happened on or near a college campus, may or may not have been perpetrated on other students, and may have happened at any time in the survey respondents’ adult lives.’ Despite all these problems, the figure is still widely used and widely believed.
“The more horrific and serious-seeming the problem, the less likely anyone is to challenge the data that support calls for action. And no problem seems more dire than human slavery.”
Photo: Panlong Cliff
Poem: Brian Brodeur, “Homeland Security”
