Category: book reviews

New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent

February 13, 2025 • 11:00 am

I have a friend with Alzheimer’s so I was especially depressed to read Jesse Singal’s discussion of a new book, Doctored, claiming that research on both Alzheimer’s disease and drugs that purport to ameliorate is all badly flawed, even fraudulent. You can read Singal’s discussion below (free access by clicking on the headline), and access the book on Amazon by clicking on the cover below.

An excerpt from Singal:

In his book, Piller, an investigative reporter at Science magazine, presents copious evidence of severe fraud, negligence, and buck-passing in Alzheimer’s research. From fabricated images published in major research journals (many of them still unretracted) to data manipulation conducted by pharmaceutical companies to the complete negligence of federal watchdogs, Piller’s reporting demonstrates indisputably that the field of Alzheimer’s research is in sorry shape.

Things are so bad, in fact, that the dominant theory that has guided researchers’ efforts this century — that Alzheimer’s symptoms are caused by the buildup of proteins called “amyloid plaques” in the brain — is now in serious question. That might explain why, as Piller notes, a recent meta-analysis of the available research found no evidence that any of the available Alzheimer’s drugs cause noticeable improvements in the cognition or daily functioning of patients. We’re two decades and many billions of dollars into the modern era of Alzheimer’s research, and we have precious little to show for it — a particularly dire state of affairs given that this dread condition is only going to hit us harder as America’s population continues to age. Piller’s book, which was released February 4, tells the story of a wild and heartbreaking goose-chase.

While Doctored is gripping in its own right, it also serves as a warning about the collapse of trust in expert authority. Thanks to the capacious new markets for crankery carved out by social and “alternative” media — not to mention a worldwide populist revolt against “the establishment” in general — there’s more grifting and science-denial than ever before, and the worst purveyors of pseudoscientific sludge rake in millions precisely by positioning themselves in opposition to mainstream science.

The lesson for scientists is to clean up their act and to stop misleading people about their work. I mean, I never had any doubt whatever that Alzheimer’s was caused by plaques in the brain.  Now that is not at all certain; the plaques could be a byproduct or a correlate and not a cause. If there’s that much uncertainty about it, why haven’t I heard about it.  Of course, journalists are responsible for this, too, but good scientific journalism is a species going extinct.

I believe that Singal has already been demonized on BlueHairSky, though he hasn’t been banned. The reason: the place is full of immigrants from Twitter who are “progressive” liberals and couldn’t stand the free speech on X. Singal described his apostasy: 

The background here is that a subset of users on Bluesky disagree with my reporting on youth gender medicine—a subject I’ve been investigating for almost a decade, and have written about frequently, including in The Atlantic and TheEconomist. (I’m currently working on a book about it, commissioned by an imprint of Penguin Random House.) I’m not going to go deep here, but I’d argue that my reporting is in line with what is now the mainstream liberal position: See this Washington Post editorial highlighting “scientists’ failure to study these treatments slowly and systematically as they developed them.”

But perhaps because I wrote about this controversy earlier than most journalists, and have done so in major outlets, I’ve become a symbol of bigotry and hatred to a group of activists and online trolls as well as advocacy orgs like GLAAD that push misinformation about the purported safety and efficacy of these treatments, and attempt to punish journalists like Abigail Shrier for covering the controversy at all.

Bluesky appears to have attracted a particularly high number of these trolls, and even before I arrived on the platform, some of them were making sure I wouldn’t feel welcome there. Nora Reed, an online influencer and cultural critic, wrote in November that “I think we need a plan for if Jesse Singal shows up here in advance.”

Back to his own Substack, though; Singal won’t win many friends by arguing that both scientists and liberals have exacerbated the problem, the former by acting precipitously or even duplicitously (the attempt to dismiss a lab-leak theory for the covid virus by scientific officials in the Biden ambit is a good example), while the left-wing public by always saying “trust the science” without realizing that a. scientists are human, with all the good and bad behavior that implies and b. science like investigating covid moves quickly, and what is true today could be false tomorrow.

But I shouldn’t exculpate the Right as well. After all, that’s the side of the political spectrum that still pushes creationism as well as quacks like RFK Jr. And Trump and his cronies are busy slashing scientific research almost willy-nilly. Singal, though, concentrates on the Left, perhaps because that’s where he resides:

At a time of such uncertainty and such dangerous overcorrection, it can feel awkward or difficult to point out, as Piller does in Doctored, just how broken some of our cherished mainstream scientific institutions are. Isn’t that playing right into Trump’s hands?

I don’t think so. The strategy adopted by many mainstream liberals in response to the populist surge — effectively, plugging our ears and chanting “trust the science” over and over — might be comforting, in that it offers a Manichaean worldview in which improving the world is a relatively straightforward matter of convincing people of their own ignorance so that they will board the science train with the rest of us.

But this effort has clearly failed. Some populist distrust of mainstream science is unwarranted and harmful, such as most strains of vaccine skepticism, but in plenty of instances, they are more or less correct not to automatically trust mainstream scientists, even if they arrive at that conclusion for reasons some of us might find uncouth. (Update: I added ‘automatically’ post-publication because I think it’s an important modifier here.)

In other words, while it’s easy to accuse those red-staters out there of exhibiting an alarming lack of faith in science, especially now that their wrecking-ball avatar is in power, it’s harder — and arguably just as important — to ask whether perhaps we have too much faith in it. The scientific establishment hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory in recent decades, given the replication crises that have roiled multiple fields, the data-fraud scandals popping up everywhere from cancer research to business-school psychology, and the frequently overconfident proclamations experts made about thorny Covid-era issues like mask mandates and school closures. And yet liberals tend to continue to reflexively trust many institutions that haven’t earned it, to the point where some of us have turned this sentiment into a mantra: “Science is real,” you will see on signs planted in front of many liberal homes.

I will read this book, as I’m particularly interested in how “fraud” was involved in Alzheimer’s research. Here’s one bit from Singal:

Piller’s book provides numerous damning examples of the difference between science as we idealize it and science as it is practiced by real-life human beings. For example, much of the data fraud in Alzheimer’s research, alleged and proven, involves doctored images. This fraud was uncovered not by journal editors or peer-reviewers — the individuals supposedly responsible for such quality-control — but by unpaid sleuths “who use pseudonyms to post comments” online, as he writes, in the hopes of someone who matters noticing and acting. (One notable exception is Elizabeth Bik, a Dutch microbiologist and legendary image sleuth who has taken on Alzheimer’s fraud.)

Who would have thought that we’d be catching so much fraudulent work by analysis of published images. One might conclude that reviewers of manuscripts aren’t doing their work, but I suspect that a lot of the fraud involves the same images repeated in different papers, and no reviewer has time to compare images in a submitted manuscript to other images by the same authors, but in different journals.

Doctored was released February 4 of this year.

To avoid making this post too long, I’ve put the book-publisher’s (Simon and Schuster’s) description below the fold. Click “read more” to see it:

Continue reading “New book argues that Alzheimer’s research is flawed, fraudulent, and incompetent” →

Another wonky critique of determinism in a review of Sapolsky’s book “Determined”

January 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

I’ve read Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, and it’s pretty good, making a material—in his view, neurological—case for determinism, though the book is a bit long and can be tedious in parts if you don’t want to plow through a lot of neurobiology. But I think that in the end he makes his case (of course, I’m a hardcore determinist so I’d agree!). If you don’t want to read 528 pages, there’s also Sam Harris’s Free Will or Gregg Caruso’s books on free will (he’s a determinist).

But Sapolsky’s book has gotten some negative reviews, and I should have realized that writing about determinism will immediately get people’s hackles up, because their feeling of having free will (and I’ll be talking here about libertarian “you-could-have-chosen-otherwise” free will) is so strong that they can brook no determinism. I’ve already recounted how I was menaced by a a jazz musician for intimating that is “extemporaneous” solos were determined before he ever played them, and was also kicked out of a friend’s house simply for calmly espousing and explaining determinism. As I always say, it’s harder for me to convince a creationist that evolution is true than to convince a “free willer” that determinism is true. And there are a lot more of the latter than the former!

But of all the reviews I’ve read of Sapolsky’s book, by far the worst just appeared in what was once a great venue, the New York Review of Books. (It went downhill fast when its wonderful editor Robert B. Silvers died in 2017.)  The review is free to access (also archived here), and you can read by clicking on the headline below.  It shows no understanding of the free-will controversy, or of science itself, and offers no alternative to determinism (it has to be some magical nonphysical agent that can affect material objects), though I suspect the author, because of her frequent references to God and theology, might believe that free will has a goddy supernatural origin. (Even if it doesn’t, libertarian free will has to rely on something supernatural.) Here’s the description of the author from the NYRB:

Jessica Riskin is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford. She is currently writing a book about the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and the history of evolutionary theory. (February 2025)

Although I’m usually loath to dwell on credentials, a historian, even of biology, is not the person to review Sapolsky’s book. Perhaps a philosopher or a neurologist, but I can explain the pervasive awfulness of Riskin’s review only by appealing to massive ignorance of the topic.

I really don’t want to go through this long review bit by bit, but I’ll highlight a few weird things.

Ignorance of science.  Riskin doesn’t realize that getting evidence for phenomena (e.g., evolution) is very often a step-by step-process: you have an initial hypothesis, and then you either reinforce or reduce the likelihood of its being true with new data. This is a Bayesian approach, though often it’s implicit rather than specified using Bayes’s theorem.  You don’t “prove” determinism or free will, you simply gather evidence that makes one of them more likely. I would note that determinism should have high priors simply because our brains and bodies and environments, the source of our behaviors, affect our behaviors materially–usually through neuronal wiring.  (That’s why Sapolsky concentrates so much on neurons.) And material objects universally obey the laws of physics.

Riskin WANTS determinism to be proved, and says that Sapolsky doesn’t do it. But I say she’s put the bar too high, that Sapolsky makes a good case and that, combined with the presupposition that true libertarian free will must involve forces that we don’t know about—while the laws of physics appear to apply universally—should put Riskin on the defensive (which she is).

Not only are we “not captains of our ships,” he writes, “our ships never had captains. Fuck. That really blows.” (This gives a taste of Sapolsky’s late-night-dorm-room literary style.) [JAC: it’s not ALL like that, so her comment is inaccurate.]

How does he know? Because of science. Sapolsky tells us that “the science of human behavior shows” it to be deterministic. But none of the scientific evidence he offers turns out to demonstrate this. He describes psychological studies revealing changes in people’s electroencephalograms (EEGs) taking place milliseconds before they were aware of making a decision, but he dismisses these—reasonably enough—as “irrelevant.” He presents other studies demonstrating that people can be subconsciously manipulated; that hormones, cultural beliefs, and moral values influence behavior; and that maturation, aging, and experience induce alterations in people’s brains and bodies with corresponding behavioral changes. After each discussion he asks, “Does this disprove free will?” and responds—again reasonably—with “nah,” “nope,” “certainly not,” and “obviously not.” Readers might wonder, equally reasonably, why they’ve slogged through all this irrelevant nonevidence.

That might be a fair criticism of Sapolsky’s style, but I don’t remember him saying that this evidence is irrelevant (it’s been a while since I read the book). But I do think that predicting behaviors before one is conscious of performing them raises the priors of determinism, as do the many, many ways that you can trick people into thinking they have agency when they don’t (brain stimulation, effects of drugs, computer experiments) or thinking they are not doing something consciously when they are (Ouija boards). Sean Carroll’s essay “On Determinism” (with extensive quotes by Massimo Pigliucci) makes a good case that the universality of the laws of physics leaves no room for libertarian free will. (Sean is a compatibilist and, although a determinist, says we have “free will” in a different sense. Dan Dennett used to say the same thing.)

More waving away of the notion of  proof:

Science can’t prove there’s no free will because the question of free will is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. To misrepresent it as a scientific question is a prime example of scientism—extending the claims of science beyond its bounds. Here’s another from Sapolsky’s final chapter: “What the science in this book ultimately teaches is that there is no meaning.” This might sound like the opposite of saying that science shows there’s a divine intelligence behind the world-machine, but it’s the direct descendant of that earlier claim, and comes to the same evacuation of meaning and agency from the mortal world. This isn’t a scientific proposition. It remains what it has been from the beginning: a theology.

This is wrong. One can gather data for and against determinism. If, for example, we found out that people could move objects by thinking about them, that would suggest that there is some nonmaterial brain force that can actually influence events, buttressing (but not “proving”) the case for free will. And saying that determinism is “a theology” is also wrong, for theology in the West is involved in exegesis of the Bible and beliefs in a supernatural being.

What’s the alternative to determinism?  Here Riskin is silent, though it looks from her frequent references to God and theology that she sees divine action as a possible counter to determinism and a buttressing of free will. (I can’t be sure of this, though, as Riskin doesn’t lay out what she sees as a viable alternative to determinism.) Riskin has described herself as a “Jewish atheist”, and given that she herself doesn’t see divine provenance out there, the onus on her is to admit that she is invoking some kind of supernatural but non-Goddy action.

Her only argument seem to be that because people look like they have “agency” (and they do in the trivial sense of being able to do things), this is evidence for free will. For example, this part seems deeply confused:

It’s because the many factors influencing behavior, Sapolsky thinks, place the burden of proof on defenders of human agency. It’s they who need to show that neurons are “completely uninfluenced” by any external factors and that “some behavior just happened out of thin air.” But why must human behavior be either deterministic or impervious to any influence? Sapolsky doesn’t explain; he takes as given that to show any influence at all is to show a determining influence. Similarly, he writes that we have “no control” over our biology, culture, or environment. Sure, we don’t control these things, but there’s an important difference between not controlling something and having no effect on it, or at least so anyone with teenagers is inclined to hope. Biology isn’t insulated from behavior any more than behavior is from biology. As Sapolsky himself points out, virtually everything a person does has an effect on their physiology. And a wealth of empirical evidence from Aristotle to Oprah suggests that people can indeed have cultural influence.

What is the sweating reviewer trying to say here? That there is some free will? I cannot tell. In fact, her own confusion and incoherent arguments seem to be imputed to Sapolsky, as if he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I’ve read the book, and I disagree. And “cultural influence” my tuchas! What does that have to do with refuting determinism?

Is there a god in this argument? The author makes the old “why is there something instead of nothing” argument:

Sapolsky’s turtles are of course metaphorical; they stand for deterministic causes, and by “a turtle floating in the air” he means a magical event. We must accept a strictly causal chain extending back to the beginning of time or acknowledge that we believe in miracles. But why are these our only choices? And are they really so different? Wouldn’t a chain of deterministic causes imply a miracle of some sort at the beginning—the old infinite regress problem rearing its domed shell again?

Yes, and we don’t know why there is something instead of nothing, though there have been some scientific suggestions that do NOT involve miracles. And obviously since Riskin is an atheist, she doesn’t believe in miracles. So what is her answer. She doesn’t tell us.

More touting of “agency:

Sapolsky tells the story of Phineas Gage, who suffered a metal rod through the brain while working on a construction site in Vermont in 1848 and was never quite the same afterward. He offers Gage as evidence that people’s personalities depend on their “material brains,” which he thinks poses a challenge to anyone who wants to defend the idea of free will. But why should the fact that humans and their brains are made of material parts mean there’s no such thing as human agency? There’s a good answer, but it’s historical rather than scientific: because determinism retains crucial elements of the theology from which it arose, according to which the material world was a passive artifact lacking any agency of its own.

It would be nice if Riskin would tell us what she means by “agency”.  Real “I could have made either choice” agency or simply the appearance of agency? The intimation that determinism is a form of theology again arises, but denial of free will in the world is simply not theology. It’s analogous to denial of a supernatural being, which Riskin presumably does in her atheism. Is this atheism theological?

I won’t go on here, as I don’t want to waste my time. I will simply say that Riskin sounds like she’s trying to be clever, but in so doing fails to confect a consistent argument against determinism. Her sniping at Sapolsky may occasionally hit home, but she comes nowhere close to dispelling determinism, simply because she doesn’t engage in the necessarily arguments. Read for yourself how she throws in lots of historical figures like Darwin and Paley and Laplace to show her erudition, but doesn’t deal with what libertarian free will would really entail. 

This egregious review also goes to show how far the mighty New York Review of Books has fallen. Yes, it likes cleverness and erudition, but in the old days it also liked substantive arguments in its reviews. Riskin doesn’t provide any. But don’t take my word for it; if you’re interested in the topic, read the review and see if you can find any structure or coherence in it.

 

h/t: Barry

Books I read and am reading

December 18, 2024 • 11:45 am

It’s time to tell each other what we’re reading and what we think of the books. The object, of course, is to give all of us hints about what we might want to read.

I’ve just finished two books, both of them good  (of course both were recommended by a friend who knows good writing), and I recommend both, but especially this first one, which is superb. Click on the cover to go to the Amazon site:

There’s a Wikipedia article about this 1999 novel here, but don’t read it if you don’t want to see the whole plot. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s about a Japanese-Korean man, Franklin Hata, who has moved to a small suburban town in New York, running a pharmacy-supplies store. He’s done well and has, in fact, become his town’s model citizen, eventually giving up his store and living a happy and prosperous retirement, having adopted, as a single man, a Korean girl named Sunny.

The one unhappy aspect of his life is that he can’t seem to form stable love relationships, not with Sunny nor with any of the several women he fancies. The reason involves a series of flashbacks to when Hata was serving in the Japanese Army in World War II (there are flashbacks involving nearly every relationship in the book), and a relationship he developed at that time, which haunts his whole existence. I will say no more, except that the prose is beautiful (a sine qua non for novels I like). HIGHLY recommended, and it should have won more awards than it did. I don’t think it was made into a movie, but it really should have been.

Here’s the book I just finished (click to go to Amazon site):

That one, from 2005, also has a Wikipedia page. Nathan Glass, stricken with cancer, moves to Brooklyn to live out his days in a pleasant urban environment (he’s the opposite of Franklin Hata, who hated cities). He meets his nephew, and then ensues series of random and unpredictable episodes involving an antique bookstore, long-lost relatives, and fractious relationships with other people.  It’s a good read, and a short one, so it’s a good book to take along on a trip or the beach (if you happen to live in a warm place). I would recommend it, but not nearly as highly as I would A Gesture Life.

I’m not going to read the other three essays in the Ta-Nehisi Coates book The Message, for his Israel-essay debacle put me off him for a while. Instead, I have two books in line. I started the first one, below, last night. It’s from 2001 and I have found but not read its Wikipedia page. (Click to go to the Amazon site.)

After that one, I’ll attack this monster, which I’ve requested on interlibrary loan (I have no more room to put any books I buy, so I get them all from the University Library). Click to go to the Amazon page. At 864 pages, this one is a monster, but, unlike the kids, I like long books. It was published in 2004, is highly regarded, and has its own Wikipedia page that I refuse to read.

It seems that I’m on a fiction kick lately, which isn’t usual for me, but the books that my literary advisor recommends, which have all been good, are guaranteed not to contain a clunker. As for nonfiction, I’m still waiting for Robert Caro to produce his fifth volume of the LBJ biography that I love so much (I think it’s the best biography ever written, at least that I’ve read), but Caro is now 89 and it’s a race against time.  The previous bio that I thought was the best, William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, was abruptly truncated after volume 1 because Manchester died. I’d still recommend reading the first volume, even though it ends right as Winnie becomes Prime Minister and things would be getting even more interesting.

Your turn. Which books have you read lately, and which do you recommend (or not recommend)?

Ta-Nehisi Coates and his ignorant demonization of Israel

December 15, 2024 • 9:30 am

A year before last September, I spent three weeks in Israel, visiting Tel Aviv for a week and Jerusalem for two weeks. I also got two one-day tours, one to Masada and the Dead Sea for sightseeing, and the other a “security tour” of the defensive environs of Jerusalem given by the head of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). While there, I deliberately looked for signs of apartheid within Israel: signs of Israeli Arabs being treated as inferiors by Israeli Jews. I didn’t see any: Arabs and Jews seemed to mix completely in restaurants, trains, and trams. But of course my visit was short, superficial, and there might have been discrimination that I simply didn’t see. In light of that, all I can say is that “I didn’t see any apartheid, but my visit to Israel was short and superficial.”

Unfortunately, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose visit to Israel and Palestine was much shorter than mine (10 days total) does not refrain from making sweeping pronouncements. And that is because he clearly went to the area (sponsored and guided by anti-Israeli groups) with a preconception: he wanted to show that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is closely analogous to American’s treatment of blacks, even during slavery.  His visit was thus tendentious and what he wrote about it (the last of four essays in the book below) is incomplete, misguided, and, to be honest, shameful.

Below is Coates’s new the book of essays; click on it to go to the Amazon site.  I read only the last (but most talked-about) essay, “The Gigantic Dream,” 117 pages long.  If you know anything about the situation in Israel and Palestine, and the history thereof, you will spot immediately how tendentious, erroneous, and damaging to Israel Coates’s essay is. And some reviewers have called him out for it, though of course the Israel-haters defend him.

Using the four categories of lies that Francis Collins lays out in his own new book The Road to Wisdom, I would say that Coates’s dilations on Israel fall between “delusions” and “bullshit.” That is, he is not intentionally lying, but I think his view is warped by his immersion in American racism, and I believe he knows that there is far more to the story than he’s telling. In fact, he has been corrected by both interviewers and reviewers about his distortions, but he hasn’t changed his mind.

The theme of his book could be summarized by saying, à la Orwell, “Israel bad, Palestine good.”  To arrive at this theme, he has to completely neglect anything bad ever done by the Palestinians and anything good ever done by Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself:

There are the usual accusations of genocide and apartheid on Israel’s part (the apartheid is supposed to occur within Israel, with Jews oppressing Israeli Arabs), but the most obvious omissions are those of Palestinian terrorism and of Israel’s repeated offers of a state to Palestine.

What, for example, do you make of Coates’s repeated beefing about having to wait for long periods at checkpoints, or about Israeli soldiers at those checkpoints glaring at him?  Could the plethora of checkpoints have something to do with Palestinian terrorism and an attempt to keep murderers out of Israel? You won’t hear that from Coates. Nor does he mention the First and Second Intifada.  Will you hear that Palestine won’t allow a single Jew to live in Gaza or the Palestinian-controlled parts of the West Bank (areas A and B)? Isn’t that apartheid? If not, why not? Remember that fully 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, like the one in the first video below.

If you didn’t know about the Palestinian terrorism that’s killed Israelis ever since the seventh century (with two big pogroms in 1929 and 1936), you wouldn’t realize the context of much of Coates’s complaints. But he has a point to make: the treatment of Israel towards Palestinians—or, indeed, of its own Arab citizens—is precisely analogous to Americans’ treatment of slaves and the subsequent Jim Crow laws.  But you’d have to squint pretty hard to see Israel doing anything in Israeli that resembles even slightly the purchase and use of slaves, or of forcing Israeli Arabs to bow and kowtow to Israeli Jews.

Coates mentions the two-state solution, floated by one person he met, but he doesn’t mention that such a solution has been offered to the Israelis four or five times, and every time it has been rejected—by the Palestinians.  If there is apartheid and genocide to be seen, simply look at the first charter of Hamas, as well as its behavior and the statements of Iran, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and many other Arab groups sworn to extirpate Israel. There is of course no mention of the events of October 7, 2023, but the book came out on October 1, 2024, and perhaps, given that there’s about a year’s lead time on publishing many books, Coates couldn’t fit that event in. But I don’t believe Coates would have mentioned it anyway (not even one inserted footnote?), for the butchery of that day spoils his narrative. Would Coates admit now the truth that Hamas, proud of that day, has sworn to repeat it over and over again? Remember, Coates says not one word about Palestinian terrorism.

Coates dwells heavily on the nakba, or “catastrophe,” originally seen as the humiliation suffered by five Arab armies (and volunteers from two other Arab states) who invaded Israel right after independence but was routed by a lowly army of Jews.  The nakba was subsequently reconceived by Arafat to mean the “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel” after the invasion.  Coates implies repeatedly that, without provocation, the Jewish military simply slaughtered Arabs wholesale after their invasion.  This is not the case: many Arabs fled because they were frightened, many other because Arab countries ordered them to leave so the Jews could be destroyed before Arabs could return, and some fled because they started trying to kill Jews and were driven out militarily or destroyed.

The Arab invasion of Israel, beginning on its day of independence in 1948, was certainly not a genocide of Palestinians. Coates discusses the “massacre” by Israeli soldiers of the Arab village of Deir Yassin (an event badly distorted by Wikipedia, which repeatedly mentions rapes that never happened), but he doesn’t note that the attack was prompted by the infiltration of the village by Arabs who fired on Israelis. About hundred people died and, unfortunately, some non-combatants were bystanders in the line of fire.

To see another view of this battle (one that Coates, not interested in hearing all sides, neglects), read The Massacre That Never Was: The Myth of Deir Yassin and the Creation of the Palestinian Refugee Problem (and a review of that book in the Middle East Quarterly).

As for Coates’s writing, one petulant reviewer (the reviews are mixed) called Coates a “narcissist”. When I saw that after reading the essay myself, I said, “Precisely right.” Not only is there Coates’s hubris of assessing a messy, complex, and historically convoluted conflict after only a ten-day visit, but his writing is deeply self-absorbed. Coates is far more interested in his own reactions than in talking to people on both sides. A soldier glares at him, and he’s off to the races.

But Coates’s mission is not to talk to Israelis and Palestinians, but to show that Israel’s racism parallels that of America’s. It’s as if he needs to fill in a jigsaw puzzle, and is looking for just the right pieces to unite Israel and American segregationism.  I won’t dwell on the folly of such comparisons, except to say that Coates has a bill to sell. He seems to have been prompted in this solipsism by the success of his famous Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations”—a good piece of writing—an article that he brings up repeatedly.

And since Coates is tendentious, let me just give the other side, but in the words of other people.  First, how is Israel enacting apartheid against its own people? (I am construing this accusation as one of intra-Israel apartheid, not the endless conflict between Israel and Palestine.) I have tried to find laws in which Arab Israelis are discriminated against by Jewish Israelis. I could find only one discriminatory law, and it discriminates in favor of Arabs: they are not required to serve three years in the IDF unless they want to. There are also laws that discriminate among Jews themselves, with—until recently—Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews being exempt from military service as well, though that is supposed to end in a few years.  It is curious that those who level accusations of apartheid against Israel Israeli Arabs never come up with tangible examples.

If you want to dig deeper into the apartheid accusation, here are two videos, one long and one short. In the first short one (ten minutes), an Israeli Arab who served in the IDF fields a number of hard questions about whether he experienced discrimination. The answer was “no”:

. . . and here is the stupendous Natasha Hausdorff discussing the “apartheid” accusation with an American professor Professor Orde Kittrie from Arizona State. Kittrie is a specialist in international and criminal law, and, as I’m presenting this as a palliative to the ignorance of Coates. You will hear Kittrie’s opinion that the apartheid accusation is baseless. (At 31 minutes in, Natasha gives some viewers’ questions—and some of her own—that Kittrie answers.)

Here are the YouTube notes:

Chair: Natasha Hausdorff

A new UN Commission of Inquiry of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is poised to accuse Israel of apartheid.

Professor Kittrie discusses this Inquiry and its mandate, and the potential relationship with prosecutions by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The mandate’s reference to apartheid was apparently inspired by a lengthy report, accusing Israel of committing the crime of apartheid, published by Human Rights Watch (HRW). However this report is based on a definition of “apartheid” which is not found in the ICC’s Statute or the International Convention on Apartheid. Professor Kittrie discusses the different definitions of apartheid, reasons why the apartheid charge is wrong even under HRW’s definition, and options for responding.

Finally, here’s an article from Fathom taking apart Amnesty International’s 2022 accusation that Israel was an “apartheid state.”   Click to read:

Read, watch, and judge for yourself. In my view, Coates, while his writings on American racism may be good (I’ve read only the Atlantic article), his piece on Israel and Palestine is reprehensible, misguided, full of distortions, and, in the end, is pretty much racist, if not antisemitic. If you read it, please do so with some knowledge of the politics and history of the region.

h/t: Malgorzata

I have landed (and tout a book).

November 1, 2024 • 8:32 am

All day yesterday I was making my way back to Chicago from Ivins, Utah: first, a two-hour drive to Las Vegas, then a two-hour wait in the airport, with the flashing and music of slot machines IN THE WAITING AREA, and finally a four-hour flight back home. I am exhausted. Which is to say: posting will be very light today—if there is any.

But on the way home I read Salman Rushdie’s latest book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, which came out in April. Click the screenshot below to go to the Amazon site. I have to say that the cover is wonderfully designed given the contents:

It’s a short (200-page) account of the attempted murder of Rushdie on August 12, 2022 by accused perp Hadi Matar, a Lebanese-American likely trying to fulfill the fatwa issued on Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini.  The Ayatollah considered Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim blasphemy, and called for the author’s assassination. A $3 million bounty accompanied the fatwa. Rushdie went into hiding, but several people connected with the book were killed.

Finally, after 33 years, the fatwa was fulfilled when Matar ran at Rushdie as the author was about to address a Chautauqua, New York audience about the need for a “safe space” for politically demonized writers.  Matar apparently stabbed Rushdie 15 times in the neck, eye, chest, and hand, blinding him in one eye and rendering his left hand largely useless. For several days Rushdie hovered between life and death, but thanks to expert trauma care, he survived. His eye remains but its sightless, and his hand is only minimally useful. But, Rushdie avers, he was largely saved by the love of his (fifth) wife, the African-American poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. In many ways the book is a paean to Griffiths, who was by his side the whole way, and the description of their mutual love is quite moving.

Rushdie, as you see from this book, is back in action, and on to another novel. I have read only one of his, but it was a corker: Midnight’s Children, which I picked up for a pittance in a used-book stall in New Delhi. I was mesmerized by the novel, which won not only a Booker Prize, but the “Booker of the Bookers“, an award for the 25th anniversary of the Prize. In other words, it was judged the best of the 25 Booker winners.  I’ve read a fair number of Booker-Prize winners, and think Rushdie’s award was well deserved. Midnight’s Children is a great classic, a magical-realism account centered on the partition of India in 1947. PLEASE read it if you haven’t.

Sad to say, that is the only novel of Rushdie’s I’ve read, and I must catch up. He’s written about 20 of them, apparently of varying quality, including an earlier autobiography called Joseph Anton, dealing with his post-fatwa journey. But I hear some of the novels are gems, and I must get to them.  He’s a likely future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which I think has been delayed only because Stockholm fears Muslim backlash if Rushdie wins.

As for Knife, it’s a gripping short read and the details of Rushdie’s assault and subsequent recovery make the book one that’s hard to put down. I recommend it highly for a short read and for those interested in Rushdie.  A fair amount of the last part of the book is a fictionalized dialogue between Rushdie and his assailant, which changes the pace of the book substantially. At first I didn’t like this bit, but the more I read it, the more I enjoyed it. It is, I suppose, a way for Rushdie to come to terms with Matar and his attack, trying to suss out why a New Jersey resident would knife the writer after so many years.

Below is a Wikipedia photo of the post-attack Rushdie. He decided not to have his eye removed but rather to hide it with a dark lens in his glasses. He does have macular degeneration in his other eye, and fears above all that he will go blind. But it looks as though they’ve stabilized his condition:

Elena Ternovaja, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Matar, by the way, is still awaiting trial. They delayed it because his public defender argued that Rushdie’s published account was essential for Matar’s defense.

Abigail Shrier’s new book on the malign effects of child therapy

October 4, 2024 • 9:45 am

Last night I finished Abigail Shrier‘s new book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up.  In an earlier post I reported that Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, reviewed the book on his Substack site, but the review largely neglected the book’s thesis in favor of reprising Lukianoff’s own ideas published earlier. But he did call Shrier’s book a “masterpiece.”

While I wouldn’t go quite that far—I reserve that word for books like Anna Karenina, the book is, in my view, superb, and should be read by every literate adult, whether or not you have children.  For it offers not only guidelines for parenting, but also explains why young people in society (as well as adolescents, college students, and young adults) are showing higher rates of anxiety, depression, and mental illness. They are emotionally stuck at about age twelve. And that, says Shrier, is due to “bad therapy”: the rise of an American therapy culture in which every child is constantly assessed, supervised, and psychologized by parents, their schools, and doctors.  (It is the schools and doctors, which include therapists, that have convinced parents that their children have psychological problems and need treatment.) The result is that we have one generation (I’d say two or more) that has grown up fragile, solipsistic, afraid to engage with the world, and socially inept.

In Lukianoff and Haidt’s earlier book, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2018), the authors proposed their own explanation for why college students were fragile and ridden with anxiety, producing the current university culture of “safetyism”, in which students’ emotions are prioritized, ensuring that they never feel “unsafe”.  This in turn gave rise to the campus culture we all know: woke, opposed to “hate speech” (i.e., offensive speech), and imbued with a DEI mentality that itself rests on a presumed hierarchy of oppression in which those seen as the most oppressed are the most coddled.

This is no doubt one of the inspirations for Shrier’s book, but, pinning the blame for student dysfunction on well-intentioned parents, Coddling doesn’t really explain why the parents have become that way.  In contrast, Shrier’s book lays some blame on parents, but says that parents themselves been heavily influenced by others, namely school teachers and administrators, doctors, and therapists (amateur and professional), to believe that normal childhood behavior can often be seen as having some dysfunction that requires therapy. And that, in turn, gives rise to schools’ monitoring children’s emotions using “social-emotional learning methods” and to children being sent to therapists who, not knowing what to do, simply affix a diagnostic label to children and often medicate them.  Once “diagnosed,” children carry that label with them for years, in effect becoming their disease.  We thus have a generation replete with kids who believe they have fixable mental issues, and a generation of parents who reinforce this with “gentle parenting” that defers to the children at the same time robbing them of independence.

The other influence on Shrier’s new book is her first one,  Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, a controversial work that attributed the rapid rise the desire of young women to change gender to “social contagion”.  Shrier endorsed a new form of emotional dysfunction, “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD), that, she said, was promoted by social media. And this led doctors, bent on “affirmative therapy” to affirm children’s desire (mostly young women)  to change gender, leading first to hormone therapy via puberty blockers, and later to full transitioning with more hormones and, perhaps, surgery.

While Shrier’s first book had mixed reviews, with the bad ones coming largely from those sympathetic to gender activism, in the end I think she’ll be proven right.  Her idea of ROGD, the most controversial part of the book, may not become a formal psychiatric diagnosis in the DSM, but it’s clear that something happened in the last 15 years to boost the desire of young women to change gender. And I don’t think this is simply that society suddenly allowed those with gender dysphoria to go public.  Rather, the possibility of social contagion, caused by the rapid rise of social media, must partly explain the desire to change gender. There’s no doubt that this has happened in some cases, for I’ve heard testimony to that effect.  But regardless of a formal psychiatric diagnosis, Shrier was certainly correct that the rise of affirmative therapy has been damaging to young people. One need only look at the Cass Review, or the increasing recognition that affirmative therapy is bad therapy, to see that. Further a huge proportion (~80%) of gender-dysphoric adolescents who aren’t treated with that therapy will have their symptoms resolve, most of the children becoming gay (no surgery or meds required) or reverting to heterosexuality.

You can see how the idea of professionals influencing parents to think that their kids are ill has led naturally to the new book, which avoids gender issues in favor of describing how our “therapy culture” is ruining modern parenting. The book is heavily researched, and you’ll be horrified by examples of, for example, how schools have largely put aside their mission of teaching in favor of monitoring the emotional well being of kids.  (Often the parents have no idea what’s actually going on in schools.) Likewise, Shrier interviews therapists of all stripes, showing that many of them simply pathologize kids, dispensing medications after only one or two visits.  Even if only talk therapy is used, this can turn kids into solipsistic ruminators, constantly monitoring their own emotions. And that impedes their growing up.

If this is why are kids “aren’t growing up,” then what is the cure? Shrier advocates a form of old-fashioned parenting, curiously combining authoritative parenting that, at the same time, allows kids a lot more independence.  Instead of parents engaging in intensive discussion with kids who disagree with them, they should simply set up sensible rules for kids to follow (giving them chores, encouraging them to get jobs, and so on), and make the kids adhere to those rules. Shrier’s view is that children really want parental authority (this is why our universities are in loco parentis), and if they don’t get it then they don’t grow up (perhaps this is why one-parent familites produce dysfunctional kids more often.) She makes a strong case for severely limiting kids’ access to “devices” and social media, including banning the use of cellphones during the school day.

At the same time, kids need less safety and more independence. When I was a kid, when I got home from elementary school I hopped on my bike and rode off to see my friends. We had no parental supervision at these times. No longer! This kind of freedom and independence is now seen as parental neglect, and can even be illegal. Yet the lack of parental monitoring, and the need of kids to interact with only their peers, free from adult supervision, is essential, says Shrier, for learning how to negotiate life and with its inevitable burden of sporadic unhappiness and disagreement with others.

I am not a parent, and can vouch only for how much I enjoyed my own freedom as a kid (and yes, I had chores and rules, too).  But Shrier makes a convincing case that the “therapization” of kids is proceeding apace, and that schools are largely to blame (they are ofteb the gateway to professional therapy). In other countries like Japan and India, for instance, kids are sent off to school or to the store on their own at ages as young as five. And kids treated that way grow up fine.  American parents who feel deficient will find considerable solace in this book, as well as finding their own freedom from emotional distress around parenting as well as from obligations to constantly monitor their kids.

As I said, I don’t have kids, but I do recommend the book to parents as a palliative to the many volumes on “gentle parenting”. And, as I said, everyone should read it, really, because it explains what’s happening not only with this generation, but with the one before it: the high-ability but overemotional kids who now write for the New York Times and are the future “progressives” in Congress.

I have but two plaints about Bad Therapy, and they are absolutely trivial. First, Shrier made the decision to use the jargon of the new generation of kids to spice up her writing. The writing is generally engaging and excellent (one of the best features of the book), but sometimes the jargon is grating (I don’t have the book before me, so can’t give an example).  Second, Shrier, who is Jewish, keeps religion out of the discussion, but it slips in at the very end when she claims that hearing her young son’s first piano recital was the moment in her life when she felt “closest to God”, and avers that the sound of her three children’s first cries after birth could be explained only by a miracle (I’m pretty sure she means a divine miracle here).  But who except for a petulant atheist would beef about this stuff?

Child psychologists or schoolteachers may kvetch about this book, but its thesis, documented with over 40 pages of notes and references, makes considerable sense. Get this book and read it.

 

(Image below links to Amazon site):

Here’s Shrier talking about the malign influence of schools on kids’ well-being:

 

 

 

Greg Lukianoff reviews Abigail Shrier’s new book

September 19, 2024 • 10:30 am

Abigail Shrier has a new book out, and it’s doing quite well despite the vitriol she received for her first book, Irreversible Damage, the Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters. I read the latter one, and thought it was quite good—not nearly as inflammatory as the gender activists deemed it. But of course the topic—that social media was contributing to a desire of young women to identify as men, a
“rapid-onset” change that was unnecessary and generally harmful—was tailor-made to anger gender activists. Remember this tweet by ACLU LAWYER Chase Strangio about that book?

An ACLU lawyer advocating censorship! What has the world come to? Well, Strangio, a biological woman who identifies as male, deleted that tweet, but the Internet is forever.

Now Shrier has a somewhat related book, in that it’s about children’s psychological difficulties, but this one isn’t directly related to gender. Click on the icon to go to the Amazon link.

I haven’t yet read it, but have ordered it by interlibrary loan (I can no longer buy books because I have no space on my shelves), and will report my take forthwith.  But Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE and coauthor of two books (one a blockbuster bestseller), has reviewed Shrier’s new book on his website, The Eternally Radical Idea. He pronounces Bad Therapy a “masterpiece,” which is high praise. But he also takes up about 70% the review listing the varieties of opprobrium that Shrier will meet.  Click to read Lukianoff’s review; I’ll just give a couple of excerpts:

First, Lukianoff’s assessment and brief summary. Bolding is mine:

“Bad Therapy” is simply a masterpiece — easily the most important book of the year. Unfortunately, it most desperately needs to be read by the very people who are likely most hostile to Shrier’s work. The book focuses on the harms of the therapeutic approach to raising our children and how the generation treated with the most psychological therapy and psychiatric drugs has become the most miserable, anxious, and disempowered generation on record. (“Disempowered,” by the way, was the original title of the book I wrote with Jonathan Haidt, which became “The Coddling of The American Mind.”)

Shrier comes to many of the same conclusions that Haidt and I came to in “Coddling,” which I’d sum up like this: As a culture, we seem to be teaching young people the mental habits of anxious and depressed people — encouraging them, often through example, to engage in negative mental exaggerations called cognitive distortions. It’s a kind of reverse-cognitive behavioral therapy. I’ve talked about this problem for the last decade, beginning with Haidt’s and my original 2015 article for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” and most recently with my piece, “What’s behind the campus mental health crisis?” for UnHerd.

Shrier’s book also focuses on how parenting in the K-12 environment is informed by an ideology that completely undermines students’ sense of an internalized locus of control. Indeed, if you really want to make someone despondent, just persuade them that all important decisions are out of their hands and that they are essentially powerless in their own lives.

Haidt and I — and more recently a Substacker named Gurwinder Bhogal — have pointed out that the current campus left ideology inherently tells young women in particular that they are unavoidably simultaneously both oppressors and oppressed; that their life is determined by their immutable characteristics; that the planet is doomed; that fascists are everywhere; and that there’s not much that can be done about this other than consciousness-raising and feeling guilt, shame, and despair.

What I’ve been emphasizing more recently is that, in many cases, teaching people these cognitive distortions was largely done in the name of motivating them towards some positive social action. This is a terrible strategy, of course, because depressed and anxious people make terrible activists. Depression and anxiety more often result in fatalism and despair than an attitude capable of bringing about positive social change, so it’s a weird way to build a movement.

Here are the three conclusions from Haidt and Lukianoff’s best-selling and influential book:

1.)  We young people are fragile (“What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.”)

2.) We are prone to emotional reasoning and confirmation bias (“Always trust your feelings.”)

3.) We are prone to “dichotomous thinking and tribalism” (“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”)

So what’s the difference between Shrier’s book and the earlier one? I’m sure they are quite different, but Lukianoff says very little about this issue. In fact, he says nothing about what Shrier add’s to the Haidt and Lukianoff book:

But Shrier’s book goes far beyond what Haidt and I did in “Coddling,” and that is why every single parent and K-12 teacher must read it. Despite being steeped in this stuff for the better part of two decades, I still learned a great deal from it — including that the research behind the health harms of growing up with “adverse childhood experiences” is far weaker than I understood it to be.

The book is gorgeously written, thoughtful, compassionate, and has gobs of both research and common sense. It also features some of my favorite experts, including my friend Camilo Ortiz, a professor and clinical psychologist who specializes in CBT. Other friends who make an appearance include Jonathan Haidt, Lenore Skenazy, Rob Henderson, Richard J. McNally, Paul Bloom, and Peter Gray.

And that first paragraph is all you’ll get. The review and assessment of the book takes up only a third of Lukianoff’s piece. Now I don’t mind someone using a review as a platform to launch their own ideas into the ether (H. L. Mencken was famous for that), but Lukianoff uses the book as a way to list all the potential criticisms that Shrier’s book will face, criticisms that he outlined in another book with Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All—But There is a Solution. The review leaves me, at least, not knowing what Shrier’s book is really about.

The criticisms that Lukianoff says that Shrier will face fall into three categories: “The Obstacle Course” (“rhetorical doges and logical fallacies” like strawmanning and misrepresenting the book’s arguments); “The Minefield” (dissing the book by attacking the author, a tactic with which we’re quite familiar), and “The Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” (raising guilt by association, labeling people as bad because of their politics, and so on). If you read Shrier’s earlier book, you’ll see all of these tactics were indeed used to dismiss it. It turns out that Shrier had a good point, as we now know as European countries dismantle their use of “affirmative treatment” and puberty blockers for gender-dysphoric youth, most of whom would come out as gay (and not lose body parts nor get sterilized) if they were treated less “affirmatively” and they deep-sixed the hormones for adolescents. But now that Shrier has been labeled a Bad Person and guilty of Ideological Wrongthink, that label can be used to discredit everything she writes in the future.

At any rate, and despite the digressions by Lukianoff that are aimed at pushing his own platform, this is certainly a book worth investigating. I haven’t read any other reviews, but just found on on Slate that is quite critical.  We shall see if the author of that one, Anna Nordberg, engages in the bad-faith criticisms described by Lukianoff. (Nordberg does have expertise in the area of parenting and child psychology.)