Category: books

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” →

Dawkins on the binary nature of sex, the kerFFRFle, and more

February 5, 2025 • 10:25 am

Lawrence Krauss has edited a volume of essays and articles by 39 scientists writing about current threats to science, including censorship, ideological corruption, and so on. It also includes a revision of my paper with Luana Maroja on the ideological subversion of biology. The volume will be out this year, and that’s all I can say about it except that Richard Dawkins has published part of his contribution on his Substack “The Poetry of Reality”. You can read this part for free by clicking on the headline below.  You can guess what the answer to his title question is, and it’s correct.

The essay begins by recounting what prompted its publication online: the kerFFRFLE with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) that led them to cancel my article on their website Freethought Now! discussing the binary nature of sex, an article that took issue with another piece on that site by an FFRF employee maintaining that “A woman is whoever she says she is.” (The original article is still there; my own critique was removed by the FFRF but you can read it here, here, here or here).  This act of censorship—I wasn’t even informed about it in advance—led me to resign from the FFRF’s Honorary Board, followed by the resignations of Richard and Steve Pinker, and then the dissolving of the entire Honorary Board by the FFRF. Freethought Now indeed!

As Richard notes at the outset:

It makes me particularly sad that [Annie Laurie Gaylor and Dan Barker, co-Presidents of the FFRF] have chosen to stray so far from their stated mission of promoting freedom from religion and the separation of church and state. They seem to think that opposition to militant trans ideology is necessarily associate with the religious Right. That is false. If it were true, it would be an indictment of the rest of us for neglecting our duty to uphold scientific truth. In fact there is strong opposition from feminists concerned for the welfare of women and girls.1 Also from within the gay and especially lesbian communities2, giving the lie to the myth of  a monolithic “LGBT.” “LGB” represents a coherent constituency within which “T” is regarded by many as an interloper. Most relevant here, cogent opposition comes from biological science – and that, after all, was the whole point of Professor Coyne’s censored article.

FFRF does not lack support. Indeed, among the secular / atheist / agnostic / sceptical / humanist communities of America, the  Center for Inquiry (CFI), with which is incorporated the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (RDFRS), is now the only major organization still standing unequivocally for scientific truth.

This lamentable affair is what has provoked me into posting the following critique on my Substack. It is an abbreviated extract from my article called Scientific Truth Sands Above Human Feelings and Politics, commissioned by Lawrence Krauss for a multi-authored volume on The War on Science, to be published in 2025 by Posthill Press3.  The full article makes a comparison with the debauching of science by TD Lysenko in Soviet Russia in the 1940s..

He then gives a long and very clear explanation, in classic Dawkinsian prose, of why biologists say that sex is binary and how the binary-ness evolved.I’ll give three short extracts, but do read the whole thing (for me, at least, it’s a pleasure to read anything Dawkins writes, not just for clarity but as a model of popular scientific writing). Below you can read about as clear an explanation that a human can produce. Sadly, clarity and truth do not lead to enlightenment among a certain ideologically recalcitrant moiety of Anglophones.  The piece also has sections on “transracialism” and “the theology of woke.”

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.6” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme. I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.

. . . It is no idle whim, no mere personal preference, that leads biologists to define the sexes by the UBD. It is rooted deep in evolutionary history. The instability of isogamy, leading to extreme anisogamy, is what brought males and females into the world in the first place. Anisogamy has dominated reproduction, mating systems, social systems, for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexes fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through evolutionary time. Profligate gamete-spewing into the sea gives over to paired-off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the aeons go by, or as we jump from phylum to phylum across the animal kingdom. Sometimes one sex exclusively cares for the young, seldom the other, often both, often neither. Harem systems change places with faithful monogamy or rampant promiscuity. Psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. Amid a rainbow of sexual habits, parental practices, and role reversals, the one thing that remains steadfastly constant is anisogamy. One sex produces gametes that are much smaller, and much more numerous, than the other. That is all ye know of sex differences and all ye need to know, as Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he’d been an evolutionary biologist.

. . . . Relative gamete size is the only way in which the male / female distinction is defined universally across all animal phyla. All other ways to define maleness versus femaleness are bedevilled by numerous exceptions. Especially those based on sex chromosomes, where you can’t even speak of a rule, let alone exceptions to it. In mammals, sex is determined by the XX XY chromosome system, the male sex having unequal sex chromosomes. Birds and Lepidoptera have the same system, but in the opposite direction and therefore presumably evolved independently. It’s the females who have unequal chromosomes. How do we know? Couldn’t you define males as the sex with unequal chromosomes? Well you could, but then you’d to have to say it’s the male bird that lays the eggs, the females that fight over males, etc. You’d lose every one of the 14 explanations I discussed earlier. Far better to stick with the UBD and say birds use sex chromosomes to determine sex, but it evolved independently of the mammal system. Birds are descended from dinosaur reptiles, and most modern reptiles don’t have sex chromosomes at all. Reptiles often determine sex by incubation temperature. In some cases higher temperatures favour males, in other cases, females. In yet other reptiles, extremes of temperature, high or low, favour females, males developing at intermediate temperatures. Many snakes, some lizards and a few terrapins use sex chromosomes, but they vary which sex has unequal sex chromosomes. Amidst all this variation, the only reliable discriminator is gamete size.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is, therefore, separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we in practice recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

And that is all ye need to know. You’ll have to wait for Richard’s full article, which I’ve read as I contributed to the book, as it has a nice section on censorship in biology as promoted by Lysenko and Stalin.

I still like my list of questions to ask people who claim that sex in humans (or other animals) is not binary but a spectrum. (The proportion of individuals who are exceptions to the gametic definition given above is minuscule, ranging from 1/5600 to 1/20,000):

  1. How many sexes are there in nonhuman animals likes cats, horses, hyenas, ducks, or sharks?
  2. If “two,” Is there a universal way to tell them apart? (the answer, of course, is “two” and “gamete type”)
  3. Now how many sexes are there in humans?
  4. If answer to #3 differs from that to question #1, Why is that the case, how many sexes are there in humans, then, and then how do you tell these more-than-two sexes apart?

Good luck getting an extreme gender ideologue to answer these questions!

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.

College students no longer want to read books

October 15, 2024 • 12:00 pm

If you’ve been teaching at the college level for a number of years, and your teaching involves reading books, you’ll have noticed the phenomenon discussed in this new Atlantic article (archived here). The phenomenon is that students just don’t want to read books any more: they seem to lack either the will or the attention span.

I noticed this years ago when teaching introductory evolution. I asked the students to read one book: On the Origin of Species by Darwin. Granted, it’s a large and sometimes tedious book, but it’s also the most important biology book ever written, and of course relevant to my topic.

The students hated it. They said it was too long and they didn’t cotton on to the Victorian prose.  So, after that failure, I found a condensed version (it might have been this one, about half the length of the original).  But that didn’t fly either. It turned out that the students just didn’t want to read any books, and I didn’t probe further to find out why. I simply gave up asking the students to read Darwin.

Now there aren’t many biology courses in which students have to read any books beyond the textbook (if even that), but when I was in college it was normal to read at least half a dozen books for a humanities course–sometimes one per week. As the article below says, however, they no longer even do that. They read fewer books or, more often, sections of books.

You can guess the most important reason!

Some excerpts:

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Oy!  But why have high schools stopped assigning books? This just pushes the problem back to earlier education.

 Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.
No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

14 lines—too much!  But we all know the reason: DEVICES!

Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

Those statistics are depressing.

So now students read excerpts instead of books, and there’s a price to pay for that (see below). Another problem is a growing disparity between students educated at fancy private high schools and “regular” high schools.

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

The article goes on like this, getting more and more depressing, and winding up with the consequences of not reading books:

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

. . . I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

If Horowitch is right in her conclusion—and I think the trend will continue because there is no end in sight of students glued to “devices”—people will lose their skills at relating to other people. I already see signs of this in young people texting instead of phoning. Actually talking to someone is a dying practice, and talking in real time surely leads to better understanding of and communication with other people. Texting is the ultimate condensed reading, even using abbreviations like “BRB” or “l8r”.

Perhaps I sound like an old curmudgeon, but blame it on Horowitch. I myself have gained infinitely from reading, though I won’t claim that it’s made me more empathic or understanding.  All I can say is that it’s made my world richer, with nonfiction being educational and fiction plucking the strings of emotion. It’s also helped teach me to write, for how can you learn to write well without seeing how others have done it. I simply can’t imagine a world built entirely on texting and reading devices.

Right now I’m reading a fiction book so full of emotion and pain that I can’t do more than thirty pages a night. It’s a masterpiece at depicting the human condition. If you’re up for 700 pages, try this one: (clink cover for Amazon link).

And now, I suppose, we should extol reading by telling each other what books we’re reading, or which ones we’ve especially liked.