Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Well, the benefits of woo may not be the paper’s editorial stand, but it sure appears a lot in the columns (viz., Tish Harrison Warren) and in the op-ed. This op-ed had the pride of place on the digital NYT front page today—the upper right-hand corner. It’s a long piece, too: over 1800
It’s by writer Mya Guarnieri, a journalist who now writes for the Deseret News, owned by the Mormon Church and featuring stories about Utah. Well, that makes two forms of woo. In this latest piece, Guarnieri recounts an odyssey she took to Alaska on the advice of her astrologer.
Guarnieri’s life wasn’t going smoothly so, as rational folks do, she consulted an astrologer, who told her to make a “solar return”:
And then I ask myself: Why did I come all the way to Alaska on the advice of a total stranger, to chase something I’m not even sure I believe in — an astrological event called a solar return?
Tilting the Stars in Your Favor
A solar return takes place at the moment when the sun returns to exactly the same location in the sky where it was at the time of your birth, explained Julia Mihas, a San Francisco-based astrologer. This usually takes place every year on or near your birthday.
The thinking behind solar return trips is that just as the place where you’re born has an impact on your birth chart — which supposedly reveals major themes in your life story — so can the place where you spend your solar return affect the year ahead. In essence, an astrologer, using your yearly chart, searches for the place where the stars will be most auspicious at the moment of your solar return, and then you travel to that location. It’s like hacking your horoscope.
These trips, known as aimed solar returns, or A.S.R.s, are central to an approach called active astrology, which holds that you can intervene in your fate.
Let me confess that I’m a little woo-woo. I recently bought a small piece of Libyan desert glass — which is supposed to work with chakras or vibrations or whatever — and hung it over my desk. But solar return trips — which I’d heard about from a friend — seemed out there; I considered one only after my marriage fell apart. That friend connected me to Katia Novikova, a Ukrainian astrologer who lives in Rome.
A LITTLE woo-woo? Who with two neurons to rub together would think that returning to some place that corresponds to the Sun’s position at the moment you were born would help you accurately predict your next year? (If you’re puzzled by now, it’s all explained here.) After paying 100 euros for a WhatsApp consultation, and chatting a bit with the astrologer in LA, (Safie Dirie_, she was told where she had to go to get the best outcome. (Yes, where you are at the moment of the “solar return” affects the next year.
After I contacted her via email — just a month after I’d filed for divorce — and paid 100 euros, about $110, she had me answer questions about my hopes for the coming year. Then she did her magic and we got on a Whatsapp video chat to discuss the results.
Ms. Novikova started with the chart for my previous birthday. “Miserable,” she said. It was all there — the rise in expenses, the unwanted move to a cramped apartment, the endless arguments with my husband.
My forecast for 2023 would be best, Ms. Novikova said, if I went to Prince Rupert, British Columbia, at 5:12 a.m. local time on Nov. 13. I Googled the place: Beautiful but remote; the logistics were daunting.
Second: Juneau, Alaska. My stomach turned. Far away. Cold. A dark, foreboding landscape that could swallow me up. There’s the Alaska triangle, a vast area of wilderness bounded by the cities of Juneau, Anchorage and Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), where many people have gone missing. The state is also surprisingly dangerous, with one of the highest violent crime rates in the country.
So off to Juneau went Guarnieri. She decided to join an 8K run on the day before her Big Solar Return, and, lagging behind the other runners, got lost. She thought she was gonna die! But a kindly stranger found her and guided her back to the highway.
What does this have to do with astrology?, you ask. Well, apparently her journey made her luck turn and her dreams come true:
That night, at 4 a.m., I woke up — sans alarm — just a few minutes ahead of my solar return. Lying there in the dark, I listened for, then heard, the raven’s call, which I’d grown to love while in Juneau. I looked at the phone again, and the time had passed. My solar return was over.
After returning to Florida, I framed and hung the yellow race bib on the wall as a talisman, like the Libyan desert stone I’d bought before the trip, as a reminder of how far I’d traveled and how far I’d come. And three weeks later, just like that, my divorce was final. I had faced my fear of being alone.
Oh, and a couple of months after that, an editor — from a university press — made me an offer for my book.
None of this, of course, would have happened if she hadn’t gone to Juneau for her Solar Return. And if the efficacy of astrology isn’t the point of this article, what is?
It’s Wednesday, a Hump Day (or “კეხის დღე” in Georgian), April 26, 2023, and National Pretzel Day. The only acceptable form is the big soft German-style pretzels, liberally dipped into mustard and preferably accompanied with a liter of beer. The Catholic Review says these are good for Lent!
I’m still a bit under the weather, and will probably have to put off a podcast I was scheduled to do Friday. I should be okay by Monday, but I’ll start “Readers’ Wildlife” as soon as I can. (Doing it always makes me nervous: it has to come out looking perfect.)
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the April 26 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first: The great Harry Belafonte has died at the ripe old age of 96. He was a singer, an actor, and a civil rights activist, though I first became acquainted with him from my parents’ LP album of his calypso songs, which included this classic (“a beautiful bunch of ripe banana/hides the deadly black tarantula” is not one of music’s better rhymes). It’s a traditional Jamaican folk song.
Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.
At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a few years no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.
Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.
. . .Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Mr. Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Mr. Belafonte, who became the first bona fide Black matinee idol.
But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.
Both Belafonte and Tony Bennett participated in Dr. King’s famous Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights in 1965. Here they are discussing it:
President Biden formally announced on Tuesday that he would seek a second term, arguing that American democracy still faces a profound threat from former President Donald J. Trump as he set up the possibility of a climactic rematch between the two next year.
In a video that opens with images of a mob of Trump supporters storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the president said that the “fight for our democracy” has “been the work of my first term” but is incomplete while his predecessor mounts a comeback campaign for his old office that Mr. Biden suggested would endanger fundamental rights.
“Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on those bedrock freedoms,” Mr. Biden said, using Mr. Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan to describe the former president’s allies. “Cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy. Dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.
“When I ran for president four years ago,” he added, “I said we were in a battle for the soul of America. And we still are.”
He hasn’t been a bad President (certainly far, far better than Trump!) but he hasn’t been able to convert his acomplishments into figures that would guarantee him re-electon. And he’s pretty much tied with Trump in terms of approval:
One challenge for Biden is that his presidency has arguably been quite successful — his wins just haven’t been enough to save his approval rating. Despite only barely having majority support in the U.S. Senate for all of his time in office so far, the post-honeymoon phase of Biden’s presidency was surprisingly productive: He was able to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, a bipartisan infrastructure bill and another bipartisan gun-safety bill. In addition, almost half of Americans gave the Biden administration decently high marks for its initial handling of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. The president also received praise after he announced a popular plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student loan debt (though that’s currently tangled up with the Supreme Court).
But none of those victories really helped Biden in the court of public opinion. Even Democrats’ strong performance in last year’s midterm races failed to move the needle for him, and now that Republicans control the U.S. House, it’s unlikely that Biden will be able to usher through meaty legislative priorities. Compared to past presidents, though, Biden actually starts his reelection bid as somewhat of an underdog. In fact, as of April 24, only 42.5 percent of Americans approved of his job as president. That’s actually not far off from Trump (41.3 percent) and former President Barack Obama’s (45.1 percent) approval numbers on April 24 the year before they sought reelection. But, perhaps worryingly for Biden, he’s still on lower end compared to recent presidents.
. . .Voters currently say that they don’t want a redux of the 2020 election — but they might get one anyway. Biden and Trump, who is currently leading the Republican primary field, are currently favored to win their respective party’s nominations. And according to Lichtman, Biden’s run for a second term already gives Democrats an edge in 2024 since they avoid both an internal party battle and have the power of incumbency on their side.
But that doesn’t mean Biden will skate into a second term unscathed — far from it. In fact, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Biden’s age could be a liability in a general election, especially if he faces someone like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (currently polling second after Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s 2024 Republican primary polling average) who, at 44, is just over half Biden’s age, making for an easy generational contrast.
I just heard NBC News report that 70% of Americans (including more than half of Democrats) don’t want Biden to run again, while 60% of Americans don’t want Trump to run again. That may well be, but I for one cannot bear to think that we’ll have to put up with a mentally ill Republican President again.
The conclusion? We don’t know enough yet, and might not until Election Day is over, but we do know that this is going to be close. The Washington Post has a rundown of potential candidates, but those willing to challenge Biden are few, and include the crystal gazer Marianne Williamson and the anti-vaxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It’s gonna be a grim year.
There are more than a dozen apps promising to help you identify the natural world, many of them paid. Don’t bother. Four apps, designed and managed by scientists with world-class data, meet all your ID needs free of charge. And every observation will advance our scientific understanding of the natural world.
The easiest to use is Seek. The app, an offshoot of iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you shoot live video. It automatically grabs frames and analyzes them. The augmented reality experience is like downloading a foreign language into your brain. The app identifies the taxonomy of plants and animals instantly as you shoot. If it can’t figure out the species, it will give you its best guess.
In less than an hour, I had racked up dozens of plants and insects near my house from Bombus vosnesenskii, a native yellow-faced bumblebee, to the purple-flowered bush lupine it was buzzing around. The only drawback? The app doesn’t include deeper context about the species it identifies.
And it keeps learning as more people use it. For more context, try
. . . iNaturalist and Pl@ntNet. Both offer sophisticated, if slightly less user-friendly, apps that upload and analyze photographs of flora. In seconds, they typically return a ranked list ofpotential candidates with rich descriptions of each. The identification of the most common species is a slam dunk
And here’s one I MUST get NOW:
Finally, there’s Merlin Bird ID, a project of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Merlin feels like magic. The app uses a phone’s sensitive microphone to identify bird vocalizations in the sonic landscape around you, painting a visual representation or sonogram analogous to a musical score.
*The East Coast uses a groundhog to test the beginning of spring: whether or not Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow on February 2. (If he doesn’t Spring will be early.) In Las Vegas, though, they use a tortoise, Mojave Max, whose emergence from hibernation (called “brumation” in these reptiles) signals the onset of Spring. And he just came out:
A desert tortoise that is the focus of schoolchild predictions and local lore about the start of spring has emerged from its winter burrow at a nature preserve in Las Vegas, officials said Tuesday.
Mojave Max’s appearance above ground with a burrow-mate at 3:40 p.m. Monday at the Springs Preserve marked the latest date since an annual watch contest began in 2000 for the critter compared locally with Punxsutawney Phil in Pennsylvania. Phil’s handlers said Feb. 2 that their groundhog predicted their spring wouldn’t arrive until April.
In Las Vegas, where the threatened species’ reptilian winter rest is called brumation, the earliest a Mojave Max has emerged since 2000 was a little before noon on Feb. 14, 2005. The latest had been April 17, 2012.
Three male tortoises have borne the moniker Mojave Max. Today’s Max is marked with a radio transmitting device attached to his shell. The tortoise seen with Mojave Max on Monday does not have a name.
Here’s his appearance:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili faces down The Ball (“Kulka” is Polish for “ball”). But nobody was hurt.
Two from Masih. First, a Rosa Parks-like moment in Iran:
The Islamic Republic ordered that public services not to be provided to women without hijab. That is why this bus driver tells the girl who has taken off her headscarf in protest of the mandatory hijab to obey the law, otherwise the bus will not move. The girl refuses.… pic.twitter.com/WCPKCny6kN
And they’re still attacking schoolgirls with chemicals:
Again Iranians are witnessing series of chemical attacks taking place across Iran where students are being poisoned. This is a revenge by the Islamic Republic to push girls back from the street protests. The world should hear the voice of Iranian girls and not leave them alone. pic.twitter.com/S0eyAS34Pl
Tweets from Matthew. The Google translation of this one is:
What a wonderful image of Deimos, the smaller of the 2 moons of #Mars. The Emirati probe Hope approached it at 100km, the closest flyby ever made of this moon, observing its surface at an unprecedented resolution. Images were also acquired in IR and UV
It looks a bit like buttocks. . . .
Quelle magnifique image de Deimos, la plus petite des 2 lunes de #Mars 🤩🤩🤩 La sonde émiratie Hope 🇦🇪 s'en est approchée à 100km, le + proche survol jamais effectué de cette lune, observant sa surface à une résolution inédite. Des images ont aussi été acquises dans l'IR et l'UV pic.twitter.com/MFRc6GGs0n
Here’s the first in Matthew’s 23-tweet series on Rosalind Franklin and DNA:
70 years ago, 3 papers appeared in @Nature under the title ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids’. In an article in Nature today (link at end) @nccomfort and I shed new light on ‘what Watson and Crick really took from Rosalind Franklin’. This thread summarises our findings. 1/23 pic.twitter.com/efIG0bf1BA
Today, as I’ve said, is the 70th anniversary of the publication of the structure of DNA, which began a scientific revolution via three papers published in Nature‘s April 25, 1953 issue: one by Watson and Crick, one by Wilkins, Stokes, and Wilson, and the third by Franklin and Gosling. As you know, Watson and Crick, who worked at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 along with Wilkins, who had worked with Franklin at King’s College London. (I’ve always been amazed that it took them 9 years to make the award.)
As Matthew has mentioned on this site before, Rosalind Franklin certainly deserved a Prize as well (probably sharing the Chemistry Prize with Wilkins since only three awards can be given in one category). Sadly, though, Franklin died in 1958 of ovarian cancer before the Prizes were awarded. She was only 37. Here are two photos of her:
Due largely to the hyperbole of Watson’s bestseller The Double Helix, a legend arose that Franklin had been cheated of the credit that was due her. As the story goes, Watson and Crick were shown one of her X-ray crystallography photos of DNA, the famous “photo 51”, which gave them key data needed to construct their double-helix model. Franklin, many say, was robbed by the duplicity of Watson and Crick.
This story is false, as Matthew Cobb from Manchester and Nathaniel Comfort, a historian of science at Johns Hopkins, reveal in a long piece in today’s Nature (click on screenshot below). In fact, Crick never even saw photograph 51 before it was published, and although there was some rivalry between the King’s and Cavendish teams, there was also a lot of cooperation. The key to Watson and Crick’s successful model-building didn’t come from their snitching photograph 51, but in fact from a report by Max Perutz (who got the Nobel for Chemistry in 1962). As head of the Cambridge Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit, he participated, along with other MRC heads, in a scientific inspection of King’s College as a kind of informal analysis of the science going on there.
Perutz got the final report because he was on the inspection committee. And that report included details, with data, of what King’s was doing vis-à-vis DNA work Further, Franklin knew that Perutz—at Cambridge (where Watson and Crick were working)—had access to all the data in the report, and she more or less invited Crick to have a look at Perutz’s report. It was that report that gave Watson and Crick the critical data that put them on the right track to build their double-helical model of DNA, with the struts of the helix running in opposite direction and with Gs pairing with Cs and As with Ts. The article below paints a very different picture of Franklin and her relations with Watson and Crick than the one that has become lore due to what Cobb and Comfort call Watson’s “semi-fictional” portrayal in The Double Helix.. Yes, the teams were in some sense competing, but they also were collaborating, and kept track of each other’s work.
The piece was jointly written by Matthew, who’s writing a biography of Crick, and Nathaniel Comfort, who’s writing a bio of Watson. Together they ransacked the scientific archives and reached the conclusion that Franklin was in every sense a crucial collaborator in the DNA work, not somebody spurned and sidelined as “the dark lady of DNA.” Indeed, Franklin became friends with both Watson and Crick after she left King’s for Birkbeck College, and even recuperated at the Cricks’ home after her cancer operation. Here’s a bit of the Nature paper that sums up Cobb’s and Comfort’s take:
In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”. They also noted that the King’s researchers “suggest that the sugar-phosphate backbone forms the outside of the helix and that each chain repeats itself after one revolution in 34 Å”.
This clear acknowledgement of both the nature and the source of the information Watson and Crick had used has been overlooked in previous accounts of the discovery of the structure of DNA. As well as showing the Cambridge duo finally trying to do the right thing, It strengthens our case that Franklin was an equal member in a group of four scientists working on the structure of DNA. She was recognized by her colleagues as such, although that acknowledgement was both belated and understated. All this helps to explain one of the lasting enigmas of the affair — why neither Franklin nor Wilkins ever questioned how the structure had been discovered. They knew the answer, because they expected that Perutz would share his knowledge and because they had read Watson and Crick’s 1954 article.
Click below to read the article (it’s free):
I asked Matthew to write me a few lines about how this piece came to be, and he was more than generous: he wrote the following.
I’m writing a biography of Crick, Nathaniel Comfort is writing a biography of Watson. We first met in March 2022 and got on well together – we have been sharing information and insights ever since. This is a terrific experience as it enables us to chat about minor details and also explore interpretations. In August 2022, Nathaniel came to the UK. I encouraged him to visit Cambridge, to try and get the feel of what Watson must have felt when he went there in 1951. I decided to go down to meet him, and we agreed we would go to the Churchill College archives to see Franklin’s papers. All that material is available online (https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ka25u4ft), and we didn’t expect to find anything new. We both had our understanding of what happened in 1953, and we didn;t expect to change this. Our visit was more a kind of homage or pilgrimage – the fetishistic fun of actually touching the documents!
To our surprise, we made two discoveries, going through the material together, discussing what they meant.
– We realised why Franklin was so keen on the A form of DNA which she was studying. Not only did it provide very sharp images, it also represented the *crystalline* form of DNA – she wasn’t interested in the paracrystalline B form, which was found at higher humidity, because it seemed to her to represent the loss of order – “the stuff just dissolves” she wrote in her notes.
– We also came across a draft article for Time magazine about the discovery, which had been sent to Franklin by the journalist Joan Bruce. This was known to have existed – it was the article for which the famous photos of Watson, Crick and the DNA model were taken – but it was never published and had never been noticed, as far as we are aware. The science content of the article is confused, but it strikingly presented the discovery as the joint work of King’s and Cambridge, which, of course, it was. This was very different to the Watson and Crick centred view you get from reading Watson’s semi-fictional account in The Double Helix.
We also came across a draft article for Time magazine about the discovery, which had been sent to Franklin by the journalist Joan Bruce. This was known to have existed – it was the article for which the famous photos of Watson, Crick and the DNA model were taken – but it was never published and had never been noticed, as far as we are aware. The science content of the article is confused, but it strikingly presented the discovery as the joint work of King’s and Cambridge, which, of course, it was. This was very different to the Watson and Crick centred view you get from reading Watson’s semi-fictional account in The Double Helix.On the basis of these two discoveries, we decided to write an article for Nature, to be published on the 70th anniversary of the publication of the three articles. Our aim was to introduce these new elements and to argue (again) that the story in Watson’s account of him seeing Photograph 51 and gaining a decisive insight into the structure was hokum (this point has been made several times, with no consequence on what the general public believes!) – much more significant was a report written in December 1952, which contained data from Franklin and Wilkins and had been given to Max Perutz, the head of the Cambridge research group.After the article had been edited and was at the proof stage, we made two more discoveries:
– We found a letter from a PhD student at King’s to Crick which suggests that Franklin knew that Perutz had the relevant information and that she almost invited Crick to ask Perutz about it. This letter is very different from the competitive race that Watson portrays the discovery as. It also fits in with Franklin’s later friendship and collaboration with both Watson and Crick. We have found no evidence she felt robbed (nor was she).
– We noticed that at the Royal Society Conversazione (a kind of science fair) held in June 1953, Franklin presented the double helix as a collective work – exactly as the draft Time article suggested – with all seven authors of the Nature papers given credit.
We had to add these findings, which reinforced our argument, as best we could. Had we stumbled upon these facts earlier the article might have been a bit different, but there was only so much rewriting we could do.
We did not set out to discover anything new about an affair we thought was done and dusted, nor were we looking to exculpate Watson and Crick (nor have we done so). It has been quite a ride, but I for one will be glad to move on from 1953!
Thanks to Matthew for that. He also wrote a 23-part Twitter thread, beginning here, summarizing their views and giving lots of cool pictures. Here’s the first tweet, and just follow it down:
70 years ago, 3 papers appeared in @Nature under the title ‘Molecular structure of nucleic acids’. In an article in Nature today (link at end) @nccomfort and I shed new light on ‘what Watson and Crick really took from Rosalind Franklin’. This thread summarises our findings. 1/23 pic.twitter.com/efIG0bf1BA
A few photos. First, the infamous “photo 51”, taken by Raymond Gosling under Frankin’s supervision:
Here’s the cover of the report given to Perutz that served as a prime impetus for Watson and Crick’s construction of the DNA model:
Crick’s acknowledgment (in his lecture notes) of the importance of the MRC report in giving the dimensions of DNA (my box). Caption is Matthew’s. Note Crick’s sentence (I’ve put it in a red box), “MRC mimeographed report gave unit cell dimensions. A,B forms.” These were crucial for the model.
A letter implying that Franklin knew that Watson and Crick would see the King’s data, and wasn’t worried about it (Caption by Matthew):
We found a 1953 letter to Crick from a student at King’s, implying that Franklin knew her MRC report data would be shared with Watson and Crick, and was relaxed about this. We found no evidence that she felt robbed—and this letter suggests that she did not feel this way.
Crick lauds Franklin when he was n0minated for the Nobel (and she was dead). Caption is from Matthew:
Franklin was a brilliant scientist. Her work was an essential part of the discovery of the double helix. She did not discover the structure, but did come very close. As Crick explained when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize.
Below: Rosalind Franklin’s gravestone (she was Jewish). Note that it mentions her work on viruses but not on DNA. The grave is at “The Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery, usually known as Willesden Jewish Cemetery. . . at Beaconsfield Road, Willesden, in the London Borough of Brent, England.” Note the stones placed on the marker, a sign of respect in Jewish culture.
Finally, Matthew produced an AI-generated photo (using the My Heritage website). of Franklin showing how she might have looked and moved in real life.
Good morning on Tuesday, the Cruelest Day: it’s April 25, 2023 and National Zucchini Bread Day: the most odious pastry in existence. It exists because zucchini grows like wildfire, people always have more than they want (which isn’t much as the vegetable is basically inedible), and so they make zucchini breads to give to unlucky friends.
I’m still quite ill, hoarse as the dickens and coughing. Fortunately, I tested a second time for covid and was still negative. I’ll do one more test tomorrow. It’s almost surely a dreadful cold picked up from the crowds on the airplane or the Paris Métro, and I’m taking Robitussin with codeine at night and benzonatate (a non drowsy cough supressant) during the day. But be warned: posting may be light until I’m better, which may take a few days. There will be no readers’ wildlife until that happens, but by all means keep sending your contributions, which I save in a special folder. As always, I do my best, like dragging my tuchas into work at 5 a.m.
Finally, it’s DNA Day, the day in 1953 when Watson, Crick, Franklin, and Wilkins published their epochal papers in Nature elucidating the structure of DNA. We’re having a very special feature on today’s 70th anniversary, but I can’t put it up till 11 a.m. Chicago time. Come back then!
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this by consulting the April 25 Wikipedia page.
The network made the announcement less than a week after it agreed to pay $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit in which Mr. Carlson’s show, one of the highest rated on Fox, figured prominently for its role in spreading misinformation after the 2020 election.
In making its announcement, Fox offered a terse statement of gratitude. “Fox News Media and Tucker Carlson have agreed to part ways. We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” it said.
His last program was on Friday, Fox said.
Mr. Carlson is also facing a lawsuit from a former Fox News producer, Abby Grossberg, who claims that he presided over a misogynistic and discriminatory workplace culture. Ms. Grossberg said in the lawsuit, which was filed in March, that on her first day working for Mr. Carlson, she discovered the work space was decorated with large pictures of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wearing a swimsuit.
WHAT? Did Carlson put that up? If so, why? Well, I can’t say I’ll miss the old miscreant, but somehow I think he’ll land on his feet. As for letting him go, well, Fox could hardly keep him on after his antics cost them so much money, and even Fox has to worry a bit about its credibility.
CNN on Monday fired veteran host and anchor Don Lemon, he said, in a surprise move announced only minutes after Fox News parted ways with its star host, Tucker Carlson.
Lemon announced his departure from CNN in a tweet. “I was informed this morning by my agent that I have been terminated by CNN,” he wrote. “I am stunned. After 17 years at CNN I would have thought that someone in management would have had the decency to tell me directly. At no time was I ever given any indication that I would not be able to continue to do the work I have loved at the network. It is clear that there are some larger issues at work.”
Lemon didn’t spell out what “larger issues” may have been involved, but the longtime host was chastised in February for on-air comments about the “prime” age of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley and other women.
If you want a dramatization of how toxic Fox was not long ago, watch the 2019 movie “Bombshell,” recounting how Fox boss Roger Ailes was brought down by the toxic and misogynistic environment he created. It stars Charlize Theron as Megyn Kelly, Nicole Kidman as Gretchen Carlson, and Margo Robbie as a fictitious and beleaguered wannabee anchor. It gets a decent but not outstanding rating at Rotten Tomatoes; I watched it on the plane coming back from Paris (the choice was pretty limited!)
Here’s the trailer:
*Ukraine is apparently preparing for a spring offensive, despite the Discord documents that seem to show that the country is not as well buttressed by the U.S. as we thought. As the AP reports, they launched a (failed ) drone strike on Crimea, but also one that made it to Moscow—a long way from Ukraine:
Russian-appointed authorities in Crimea said the military fended off a Ukrainian strike on a main naval base on Monday, while an exploding drone was also reportedly found in a forest near Moscow — attacks that come as Ukraine is believed to be preparing for a major counteroffensive.
The Moscow-appointed head of the port city of Sevastopol in Crimea, Mikhail Razvozhayev, said the military destroyed a Ukrainian sea drone that attempted to attack the harbor in the early hours and another one blew up. He said the powerful explosions shattered windows in several apartment buildings but didn’t inflict any other damage.
The attack was the latest in a series of attempted strikes on Sevastopol, the main naval base in Crimea that Russia illegally annexed in 2014.
. . . Russian news reports also claimed Monday that a Ukrainian exploding drone was found in a forest in a forest about 30 kilometers (about 19 miles) east of the Russian capital.
While it didn’t explode, the incident again underscored Ukraine’s capability to reach deep inside Russia as the Ukrainian military is thought to be preparing for a spring counteroffensive to reclaim occupied areas.
Observers believe that the counteroffensive’s most likely target would be the Russian-held parts of the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. If the push is successful, it would allow Ukraine to cut the land corridor between Russia and Crimea.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if Ukraine got Crimea back? After all, that was also stolen land. None of us know what’s going to happen (my first guess was that Russia would win quickly, which was also Putin’s idea), but the plucky Ukrainians have held off a huge (if incompetent) army for a year. Meanwhile, there’s Bakhmut, more of propagandistic than strategic value:
The Russian forces, meanwhile, have continued their nearly nine-month effort to capture the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region.
Zelenskyy emphasized the importance of defending Bakhmut in last month’s interview with The Associated Press. saying that its fall could allow Russia to rally international support for a deal that might require Kyiv to make unacceptable compromises.
Ukraine and Russia both have described the fighting for Bakhmut, the war’s longest battle, as key to exhausting enemy forces and preventing them from pressing attacks elsewhere along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line.
Fingers crossed for Zelensky, his soldiers, and his people!
*The WSJ recounts the story of how Mayer Richard J. Daley decided that charging a dime to use the toilet stalls at Chicago’s airports was an imposition to visitors and residents. As a man with absolute power, he nixed that fee, and within three weeks all the toilets in Chicago’s public places were free.
The existence of pay toilets nationwide had seldom been seriously questioned. In 1970 four Dayton, Ohio, high-school students had founded a semi-whimsical organization called the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. The group was met mostly with smiles.
Daley, the most powerful mayor in the U.S., heard about the group and understood immediately that the Ohio kids were right. Charge people money to go to the bathroom—something everyone needed to do multiple times each day? What kind of welcome was that to visitors to Chicago? What kind of send-off was that to Chicagoans on their way out of town? Every dime dropped into every toilet-stall slot was lousy public relations for the city.
So, as a man holding all but absolute power locally, he decreed that the pay toilets in the airports would henceforth be free. He even managed to make it a women’s-rights issue: Because men weren’t charged to use the urinals, the pay toilets were an example of sex discrimination. Daley, never known as a feminist, nonetheless announced: “I did it for women’s lib.”
The company that manufactured and installed the lock mechanisms—Nik-O-Lok, of Indianapolis—was understandably displeased. Daley didn’t care. He ordered Nik-O-Lok to remove those locks: “Do it at once, if not sooner.” Within three weeks, the locks were gone. Chicago’s City Council, on Daley’s command, soon expanded the no-pay-toilet edict to all “places which serve and accommodate the public.”
Around the country, it was if a lightbulb had switched on above the heads of mayors and governors. Of course—why anger citizens by constantly charging them for something as personal and necessary as using a bathroom? Other municipalities from coast to coast began to follow the Daley example. Reporters and editorial writers couldn’t help themselves: They described the victorious no-pay-toilet proponents as “flushed with triumph.”
An inconsequential issue? Daley was smart enough to understand that it’s never a good idea for a city to make its residents and visitors resentful. A dime was only a dime, but it felt like a constant and intrusive tax. Cities, then and now, always need income. But even in 2023’s America, where public restrooms can seem hard to find, a savvy mayor knows better than to pick the pockets of people in a hurry to get behind a certain door.
And so, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, and comrades, many times I have availed myself of Chicago’s free public restrooms. Besides, who has a dime these days?
More than 2,500 individual titles fell under scrutiny in 2022, the majority of which focused on or were written by LGBT individuals and people of color.
The efforts have reached communities across the U.S. Voters in a rural western Michigan town defunded a library over a dispute related to LGBT content. A Texas county considered closing its public libraries after a federal judge ordered more than a dozen recently removed books to be returned to shelves.
Lessa Kanani’opua Pelayo-Lozada, president of the American Library Association, said creating a list of the most-challenged books in 2022 could help identify the communities, stories and subjects most often targeted by book-banning campaigns. The group said common reasons for attempting to censor these books included allegations they were sexually explicit or included LGBT content and profanity.
These, I suspect, are coming mostly from the Right. Here is the ALA’s list of the 13 most-challenged books last year:
1. “Gender Queer,” by Maia Kobabe
2. “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” by George M. Johnson
3. “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison
4. “Flamer,” by Mike Curato
5. (tie) “Looking for Alaska,” by John Green
5. (tie) “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” by Stephen Chbosky
7. “Lawn Boy,” by Jonathan Evison
8. “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie
9. “Out of Darkness,” by Ashley Hope Pérez
10. (tie) “A Court of Mist and Fury,” by Sarah J. Maas
10. (tie) “Crank,” by Ellen Hopkins
10. (tie) “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl,” by Jesse Andrews
10. (tie) “This Book is Gay,” by Juno Dawson
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Kulka goes after Hili! OMG!
Kulka: Got you.
Hili: This will end badly.
(Photo: Paulina)
In Polish:
Kulka: Mam cię.
Hili: To się źle skończy.
(Zdjęcie: Paulina)
********************
From Stephen via America’s Cultural Decline into Idiocy. What a pair of loons! When they starting thinking about doing it, they mist themselves or eat a raw potato!
Here’s one of a big batch of misspelled signs that reader David sent me. There will be a lot more to come! (Maybe they used air freshener. . . )
A government supporter harasses two women who are not wearing hijab. In response, people throw her out of the restaurant. This is the continuation of the fight of Iranian women against the mandatory hijab.#WomanLifeFreedompic.twitter.com/5503hcn3n6
From Luana: Colin Wright, whose work I discussed yesterday, gave a talk in Davis, CA on sex and gender, and here’s who came out to greet him. The second para reads, in full,
“But bugs are designated male and female for the same exact reasons humans are designated male or female. They would have learned this if they actually came inside and listened to my talk!
His speech, they aver is killing kids!
Here are some of the protesters at my recent talk, claiming my speech "kills kids," and that I can't talk about sex in humans because I studied "bugs" for my PhD.
But bugs are designated male and female for the same exact reasons humans are designated male or female. They would… pic.twitter.com/uvXNrIeuHY
Our CEO, Professor Alan Jamieson has just broken the previous record for the deepest-ever fish, with this recent observation of a snailfish in the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, near Japan.
The book below (click on the cover to go to it) is one of the best piecces of nonfiction I’ve read in a year. It details the story of the Sackler family, in which three Jewish brothers, the sons of immigrants, worked together to push opioids for pain relief, and not in an ethical way. They eventually devised Oxycontin and Oxycodone, marketing them (via the company Purdue Pharma) to doctors as a kind of safe cure-all for pain, in the meantime completely ignoring reports of widespread addiction and deaths. (They also covered their tracks but not going public about what they really did and by becoming philanthropists, always insisting that the name “Sackler” be prominently associated with their buildings and galleries.)
The lawsuits eventually began, detailed by Wikipedia;
By 2017, a series of articles linking the Sacklers to Oxycodone as well as a public campaign by photographer Nan Goldin to link the Sacklers to the opioid crisis, led to stigmatization of the Sackler name with many museums and universities refusing financial gifts from the Sacklers.
While the family was eventually sued, the Sacklers used their company to declare bankruptcy, link their personal finances to the fortunes of Purdue Frederick, and ultimately managed to escape any financial consequences at all. The family continued to maintain that they knew nothing about the abusive and deceptive marketing practices of the company and maintained the lie that their opioids were not addictive and that the few people who abused their drugs were already addicts to begin with.
Eventually, the Justice Department settled with Purdue Pharma for an $8 billion criminal and civil settlement and another $225 million from the Sacklers themselves. Nobody in the family has faced criminal charges, and they’re still living like kings.
The book is a page turner, and well worth reading, but it doesn’t paint a flattering portrait of the Sacklers, who come across as an affable but nefarious family determined to get as rich as possible no matter how much damage they did to humans in pain.
Imagine my surprise, then, to see this long article in yesterday’s New York Times. It details how the National Academies of Science (NAS), a private organization (but partly funded by the government) took millions from the Sacklers at the same time it was producing reports on opioid policy in America. The NAS exists as a body of elite elected scientists and doctors whose job is to produce definitive reports to help steer U.S. government policy. Even if the NAS said it wasn’t swayed by the donations to come up with favorable takes on opioids, this is one of the most arrant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in science. The NAS didn’t even divulge in its reports that there was a “potential conflict of interest.” This has really made me depressed about the NAS, which is supposed to be free of commercial taint.
Click to read the article. And remember, even if the Sacklers didn’t influence policies recommended by the NAS, scientists are still required to disclose potential conflicts of interest no matter what. And why, I wonder, did the Sacklers give so much money to the NAS?
Some excerpts:
For the past decade, the White House and Congress have relied on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, a renowned advisory group, to help shape the federal response to the opioid crisis, whether by convening expert panels or delivering policy recommendations and reports.
Yet officials with the National Academies have kept quiet about one thing: their decision to accept roughly $19 million in donations from members of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug OxyContin that is notorious for fueling the opioid epidemic.
The opioid crisis has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, spawned lawsuits and forced other institutions to publicly distance themselves from Sackler money or to acknowledge potential conflicts of interest from ties to Purdue Pharma. The National Academies has largely avoided such scrutiny as it continues to advise the government on painkillers.
“I didn’t know they were taking private money,” Michael Von Korff, a prominent pain care researcher, said. “It sounds like insanity to take money from principals of drug companies and then do reports related to opioids. I am really shocked.”
Unlike the World Health Organization, which was accused of being manipulated by Purdue and later retracted two opioid policy reports, the National Academies has not conducted a public review to determine if the Sackler donations influenced its policymaking, despite issuing two major reports that influenced national opioid policy.
One of those reports, released in 2011 and now largely discredited, claimed that 100 million Americans suffered from chronic pain — an estimate that proved to be highly inflated. Still, it gave drugmakers another talking point for aggressive sales campaigns, primed doctors to prescribe opioids at an accelerating rate and influenced the Food and Drug Administration to approve at least one highly potent opioid.
Another problem arose in 2016, months after the National Academies received a $10 million Sackler family donation. The F.D.A. had tapped the institution to form a committee to issue new recommendations on opioids. But one senator took exception to some of the members selected by the Academies, complaining they had “substantial ties” to opioid makers, including Purdue. Before work began, four people were removed from the panel.
It’s a total disaster, and the NAS hasn’t even investigated whether there may have been a real conflict of interest, even though the organization took at least $31 million from the opioid-pushers and issued two reports about opioids, one of which has already been discredited.
A wee bit more from Lisa Bero, “chief scientist at the University of Colorado Center for Bioethics and Humanities”:
Accepting millions of dollars from the Sackler family while advising the federal government on pain policy “would be considered a conflict of interest under almost any conflict-of-interest policy I’ve ever seen,” Dr. Bero said.
Indeed. So what does the NAS say when caught with its pants down? They simply equivocate. This is NOT the NAS I know of:
Megan Lowry, a spokeswoman for the National Academies, said in a statement that the Sackler donations “were never used to support any advisory activities on the use of opioids or on efforts to counter the opioid crisis.” Ms. Lowry added that the organization had been prevented from returning the Sackler money because of legal restrictions and “donor unwillingness to accept returned funds.” The Academies declined to make senior officials available for interviews.
And there’s more:
Soon after the National Academies report was issued, Dr. Andrew Kolodny, president of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, emailed the institution and asked whether it would disclose that Ms. Christopher’s organization [Myra Christopher was an NAS panelist whose own group took Purdue money] had received funds from Purdue.
This is another conflict of interest, for panelists have to disclose their own conflicts.
“No, sorry, can’t do that,” Clyde Behney, an official with the Academies, replied in an email in August 2011 reviewed by The New York Times. “Keep in mind that the report is done and released, so the future is more important than the past.”
Seriously?? What kind of bullshit answer is that?
In its reports, some involving panelists who took money from Purdue, the NAS never disclosed any potential conflicts of interest.
In the end, the NAS now has millions of Pharma/Sackler money that it can’t use. As the paper suggests, perhaps the NAS should emulate Brown and Tufts, who used their Sackler money to help alleviate drug addiction:
Given the devastation of the opioid crisis, Michael West, senior vice president of the New York Council of Nonprofits, said that it would be worth the effort for the Academies to follow their lead.
“This would be a way,” he said, “of trying to make it right.”
Never in my life would I have expected the august NAS to be so sleazy. It’s not just that they took the money and didn’t disclose it, but also that they’re now pretending they didn’t do anything wrong.
104 years after its founding, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is no longer going to be called that; it’s changed its name to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Africa & North Africa (ISAC). Founded in 1919 with the approval (and funding) of John D. Rockefeller, it has a venerable history of research, and its museum, which I pass every day on my way home, is well worth visiting if you come here. (It’s “donate what you want” to get in.) Here are a few photos I took in 2018, especially of ducks and cats.
This is my favorite: it’s a “Human-Headed Winged Bull (lamassu), Palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II (721–705 BCE), Dur-Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad), excavated by ISAC’s Iraq Expedition (A7369). One of approximately 350,000 objects available in the collections search.” It’s HUGE, going from floor to ceiling (this photo is not mine but from the ISAC site). Imagine moving this from Iraq to Chicago (I hope the acquisition was kosher):
It’s a great place, no matter what it’s called, but, as Wikipedia notes, beginning with Edward Said the noun and adjective “Oriental” began to be seen as pejorative: reducing Asians to some exotic, mysterious aspect of their character—in other words, stereotyping them. As Wikipedia notes,
In the 2010s, multiple organizations within the U.S. began reconsidering the use of the word “Oriental,” as some scholars felt the word was alienating and that it had changed in popular meaning. In March 2023, University of Chicago administrators announced they would be changing the name of the Oriental Institute. Interim director Theo van den Hout said, “Our current name has caused confusion, often contributing to the perception that our work is focused on East Asia, rather than West Asia and North Africa. Additionally, the word “oriental” has developed a pejorative connotation in modern English.” In April 2023, the organization’s name changed to the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa, abbreviated as ISAC. The institute’s new logo features a lotus flower, which is found in ancient Assyrian, Mesopotamian, and Egyptian art, as well as being a decorative motif on the ISAC building.
Well, I guess the confusion lasted over a hundred years, but we all know that the name was changed because “Oriental” began to be seen as either racist or “othering”. In reality, I think, the Institute was named simply because “Oriental” meant “east of the Mediterranean”, which pretty much reflected the work going on there. It surely did NOT refer to people, but to an area. So I’m a bit sad to see that concise and venerable name changed to something that’s a big mouthful. On the other hand, I can’t get too worked up about it because the connotation of words changes. I’ll just refer you to three articles on the Museum, and recommend that you come see it if you’re on campus. It’s well worth it, and right across the street from the main Quad.
From the University of Chicago News site:
From the Hyde Park Herald (local paper):
The Chicago Maroon (student paper):
Here’s the new lotus-flower symbol that the institution has adopted, and they’re busy now effacing “Oriental institute” from the building and its signs.
Here’s a short segment from Glenn Loury’s Substack site showing him and John McWhorter discussing the claim that minorities are made uncomfortable by going to institutions, like colleges, where people “don’t look like them.” (This refers, of course, to superficial traits associated with race, though those traits are often taken to be tightly associated with ideological and political views.) If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to Loury’s site, which has a transcript, but you can also listen to the 13-minute video embedded below the title. The YouTube notes say this:
In this excerpt from a live event in New York sponsored by the University of Austin’s Mill Institute and moderated by Ilana Redstone, Glenn Loury and John McWhorter discuss why seeking out “people who look like you” undermines what college—and indeed the world—has to offer.
Redstone, as expected for someone who encourages this kind of discussion, does have heterodox credentials:
Voilà: the meat of the discussion. Here’s the question posed by Redstone:
One of the questions around affirmative action or one of the arguments has to do with this idea of, well, I guess two things. One is diversity being a good on its own and having a value on its own. And the other idea with representation is that there’s a benefit to people seeing other people in positions of power and authority that look like they do.
And so I’m wondering if you can speak to that idea that people need to see people who look like them in order to feel inspired or accepted or motivated or whatever. How do you think about that?
Loury first takes up the question of “what does ‘looks like me’ really mean?” He suggests several answers: people of your ethnicity, privileged college students, Americans, and so on. But he gets what the question really means: it’s about race. Both he and McWhorter are, frankly, baffled at the notion that to be comfortable you must be among people of your own race, or see people of your own race. I’m baffled that they’re baffled, as this notion is so common, and later Loury tries to take it apart and explain it. But in the end both men agree that he notion is harmful to students and harmful even to racial progress.
A few excerpts:
Loury: And I think the reflexive answer [is], it’s a bean count. “I’ve seen enough black lesbian women that I know, as a black lesbian woman, that I’m in a place of belonging” trivializes the great questions of, who are we? Which is what you come to a university to learn how to explore.
McWhorter: I never understood that line. I never got it. That you need to see teachers who look like you, you need to have other students who look like you. I had to be taught that that was the way I was supposed to feel. I know what I look like. I can look in the mirror. I had parents. They were black, too. Had a family, had friends, mostly when I was a kid, black friends. I didn’t need to see black people in my books. You looked at TV and by the 70s there were enough black people. Probably not as many as now. Definitely not. But I didn’t miss it, because if I look somewhere, I don’t wanna see me. I wanna see the world. I wanna see something else. I don’t go on a walk in the woods in order to see blackness. I go in order to see a squirrel or a creek or something. I don’t look at TV thinking I want to see people doing things that I’ve seen my relatives do it. You want to see something else.
. . .Of course, it’s better to have the representation that we have now. But that idea that you’re being deprived by not seeing yourself in your education, in your popular culture.
I’m reading a book right now where there’s this wonderful chapter on Du Bois. He would’ve been horrified. He’s learning German, he’s talking about Kant, et cetera. Nobody told him that he wasn’t black enough. That didn’t come up. The only people who said that to him, frankly, were white people. And yet here in our post-1966 age, you have that line.
. . . Or if we’re that afraid of white people, we can’t be comfortable until we see one of our own? Again, nobody was told to think that way until 1966. Here, Glenn, I think it’s a pose that we’re encouraged to take. “White people make me nervous. I need to see black people.” No white people don’t make you that nervous. In 2023, you’re told that you’re supposed to say that they do, because it gives you a sense of identity. But it’s an act, and it’s a dangerous one because it stanches curiosity, and curiosity is what makes a human being human.
Loury gives one explanation for the “look like me” trope: if you’ve been a victim of mistreatment at the hands of other groups, then seeing people who belong to your group (he uses black lesbian as his example), makes you relax more, makes you more comfortable and able to enjoy college. That can’t, of course, be rejected out of hand.
McWhorter doesn’t pull any punches in his response: if you’re that freaked out by those “who don’t look like you,” , he says, you need “compassionate help”, i.e., therapy of the cognitive behavioral sort:
McWhorter: But if you really are balling up your fist, if you’re really that uncomfortable when you don’t see people like you around you—in our times, as opposed to a distant day—if you’re that uncomfortable, then there’s something dysfunctional going on, and you need to find some kind of compassionate help.
Now these days, we’re supposed to feel that when it comes to race and identity issues, I’m not supposed to say that. I’m not supposed to say that you need to be trained out of that reflexive crouch. But no, I see no exception at all in the twenty-first century, given the sorts of things that you are likely to face, or I should really say not face, I don’t see that you need to be that nervous about not seeing yourself in this setting. And given that you’re going to go out into the world and find that people like you are rare in many settings that you’re going to go into, I think you should be prepared. Life is not always comfortable, and that’s part of what college is for.
So with all compassion, I say, if you’re that nervous, then you need cognitive behavioral therapy that will make you happier. Because you’re not always gonna be surrounded by people like you.
I can imagine how well that will go down with the nervous people! “Upset by not seeing enough people of your ethnicity? You need therapy.” But, you know, he might be right, at least in extreme cases where a person’s function is inhibited by feeling left out. This is the claim, which I most often reject, that people are “harmed” by not seeing enough people who look like them.
And Loury distills the issue to this:
In other words, bottom line, suppose your goal is to advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you. You inhibit yourself from realizing fully your potential to advance that goal by restricting your attention to the doings of people who look like you.
But they both agree that restricting yourself to associating with those of your race, or concentrating on reading or studying only works by those of your race, is a form of intellectual constriction. Yes, that activity might reduce your ability to “advance the wellbeing of the race of people who look like you,” but is that the main point? This kind of constriction prevents you from apprehending the whole of the human condition, reducing that experience only to the “condition” encountered by people who look like you. Even if advancing your race is your goal, don’t you want to know your enemy—your presumed enemy?
McWhorter give his distillation:
McWhorter: And so a modern black person is supposed to only read Alice Walker and Walter Mosley, even though they read Tolstoy. They were old fashioned.
That doesn’t cohere. That doesn’t make sense. The only way that would make sense is if racism is worse. Now, what is it that we know now that Ralph Ellison didn’t? I think only a serious partisan would deny racism is not as bad now as it was in 1950, so we can afford even more than them to read Joyce Carol Oates as well as Gayl Jones, et cetera, not less. And so if W.E.B. Du Bois read all over the place, we can even more. Lynching was legal in the prime of his life. We live in very different times. So we can’t reject those people because the photos are black and white. It’s better now. We have a widened opportunity.
There are those like Kendi who claim that racism now is worse than it’s ever been, but I don’t think you can find any metric showing that.
By all means we should ensure equal opportunity for all Americans, a hard task that will take decades—if it can be done at all—but in the meantime the claim that you’re “harmed” if there aren’t enough people who look like you in your environment doesn’t sit well with most, for it’s an unconvincing claim of victimhood. The harm is not palpable, and is said to be psychological—which is why McWhorter recommends therapy for those crippled by this syndrome.
And of course, the statement can also be taken to mean that you want to be around people who think like you, for people of a given group are supposed to share a homogeneous set of ideas. (McWhorter and Loury are often criticized for not thinking is the way black people are supposed to think.) But how can you learn, or grow as a person, if you surround yourself or seek out only those people who think like you?
One issue that neither man addresses, but I’d love to see addressed, is that of historically black universities (HBUs) like Howard or Spelman College. Back in the old days, they existed because black students simply couldn’t get into white colleges. Now, however, there’s a land rush in nearly all colleges to snap up qualified minorities, and the rationale for HBUs must now be that these entities are self-segregating because they increase the comfort level of students, as nearly everyone “looks like them,” (I’m just guessing here.) But isn’t that exactly the attitude that McWhorter and Loury find harmful?
