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January 01, 2025

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Happy New Year! (which is finally arrived even here on the West Coast)

In Kiribati for an hour one could switch between 3 different dates with little movement.
If humans were more practically minded, they would float and relocate all those islands, sorting them out properly, thus avoiding such confusion.
Also the Aleutians should be turned by about 90° letting them run straight North-South. It's simply absurd that Alaska is both (throth?) the most Western, Eastern and Northern US state.

Btw, would Greenland become a US territory, part of an existing state, part of the future 51st or a state of its own? If the latter, will there be enough MAGAts to resettle there to make it reliably red? Greenlanders are rather on the religious conservative side iirc but they are still dirty natives despite their German surnames (due to all those horny missionaries).
Would solve at least the Q shortage, a leading provider for Is has yet to be found though.

My guess would be that Greenland would be kept as a territory. On the entirely valid grounds of too small a population -- less than a tenth of even Wyoming. Besides, the population is nearly 90% urban; which would make those who distrust cities all twitchy.

A more interesting (if utterly hypothetical) question is whether Trump's fantasy of taking over Canada would make each of their provinces into states. My guess is that his ignorance makes him think of it as a single state.

It would have to be a single state. Othwerwise there'd be numerous new Dem senators totally toppling the party balance in the senate.
Either that or most of it would be distributed among the bordering states to dilute the liberal poison.
Or all of it could be added to Washington DC to avoid that problem completely.

---
New Orleans is causing the usual Pawlowian reflexes.
So, everything normal so far[retch!]

Trying to picture the Quebecers' reaction to being lumped together with the people in Ontario. Even before their right to do everything in French fetches up against the all-English-and-nothing-but-English vibe of the xenophobic MAGAts.

Also, the prairie provinces would have the same reaction to being lumped with the more numerous folks from Toronto and Vancouver as our plains states do to the "coastal elites." And insist that their American soul mates save them from that awful fate.

But thinking things thru has never been a core competency (or even a passing acquaintance) of Trump and the MAGAts.

Well, they are experts in tapping into resentment and professional gerrymandering, so they would see that as an opportunity. And cities can be put under 'emergency managers'.

Biden wants to go out the door cementing his legacy as a genocide supporter. No one can take that away from him. Nobody should.

https://www.axios.com/2025/01/04/biden-arms-deal-israel-8-billion

I don't know where to put this, but David Lodge died, RIP. I'm not sure how big he was in the US, but over here he was a prominent postwar writer, critic and academic.

I liked him because of his postmodern playfulness, erudition and melancholia (similar to Julian Barnes). His Campus Trilogy is both hilarious, heartfelt and sharply observed.

Here's a nice (old) article / interview:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/20/fiction.davidlodge

I loved Lodge's Campus Trilogy when I read it decades ago. I'm not sure how much of his other stuff I read, but after reading the obits I am tempted to go back and check, and make up the deficits.

Apart from that, but still on the subject of reading, I thought this from Ian Leslie today might be of interest:

How - and Why - To Read...
...in a World That's Giving Up On It
Ian Leslie
Jan 4

Literacy’s rise was fast and its fall may be even faster. People have been setting down squiggles on pages, and deciphering them, for five thousand years or so: a relatively brief span in human terms. Societies in which most people could read and write only arrived in the last 150-200 years. But now, having gone to the trouble of teaching ourselves this difficult skill, we seem to be concluding that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

In a column for the Financial Times, Sarah O’Connor draws our attention to a new report from the OECD on global literacy and numeracy, based on a survey of 160,000 adults in 31 countries. Nearly all countries experienced declines in literary proficiency among adults without higher education. Among more educated adults, literary proficiency fell in 13 countries. Thirty per cent of Americans read at a level you would expect from a ten-year-old child, according to the survey’s director, who attributes the deterioration to social media.

We probably blame too much on social media, but in this case it does seem a likely culprit, along with gaming and other digital activity. While it started off as text-based, social media is increasingly a realm of video and audio. We can expect the same direction of travel when it comes to AI; our text-based chatbots will soon just be voices and pictures, for most users.

What does it mean to call a society literate or post-literate? It refers not just to the skills of reading and writing, but to the centrality of the written word - to the extent to which it shapes our culture, politics, and leisure, and, most fundamentally, our minds. Neil Postman’s 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death, a brilliantly written polemic, argued that literacy was crucial to the rise of secular democracy. It raised the collective intelligence of society by making the citizenry better at thinking and arguing.

Literacy inculcates particular habits of thought and discourse that orality does not. Sentence by sentence, a written text makes it easier to see how one proposition follows from another - or fails to. It shows you the workings of an argument rather than just conveying its effect. (That’s why writing is such a powerful tool of thinking. I’ve often started with a thought - or the feeling of a thought - and realised, through the act of trying to make it make sense, that I actually believe something different).

Without this discipline, intuitions and feelings reign supreme. In a society where literacy is marginalised, the vibe is king. Public discourse devolves into the marijuana-smoke haze of a Joe Rogan podcast and the cocaine snort of a TikTok video. We become more easily gulled by specious claims and less patient with argument and complexity. Superficial explanations prevail, clichés go unchallenged. (Postman points out that in pre-literate societies, legal disputes are settled by sayings like “possession is nine tenths of the law”.) Politicians lose their ability to analyse policy in depth and become obsessed by how things look.

Literacy, which makes us stop and think, goes against the grain of human nature. The same is true of democracy itself, with its tiresome requirement to acknowledge the reality of other minds (a task that was facilitated by the novel).¹ Postman believed television was destroying our minds. We can only imagine how appalled he would have been by social media. He certainly wouldn’t have been surprised to see that its heaviest users have the least faith in democracy:

But what of it? I’m pretty sure you agree with me that these trends are regrettable. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t like and respect the written word. You’re probably what we might call a ‘deep reader’ - someone who regularly reads books and longer articles.² You’re also, if I might make an impertinent guess, at least mildly contrarian. If society is giving up on reading, that only makes you want to read more.

I’m with you. There’s another question here, however. In brute economic terms, are we deep readers just stubborn, backward-looking losers? Or does being highly skilled at reading and writing become more valuable in a post-literate society? I can see a good case for the latter. After all, increasing scarcity often leads to higher prices.

“Cognitive endurance” is the ability to sustain effortful thinking over a continuous period of time. It’s a crucial skill. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics points out that richer people tend to have it more than poorer people; it’s one of those self-reinforcing effects that make inequality so hard to fix. The researchers provide strong evidence that good schools don’t just teach specific academic skills but instil this all-purpose ability, by getting students to practice effortful thinking for long stretches.

Building cognitive endurance doesn’t cease to be important after you leave education. In our ADHD, chatbot-served world, those who work hard at cultivating it will be at an increasing advantage. Reading is one way to do so. When you’re reading a book, you aren’t just absorbing the contents of the book, you’re exercising those slow-twitch mental muscles that enable you to absorb complex information more generally. I suspect that when you give up on deep reading, this capacity atrophies fairly quickly.

You might have noticed that some of the people doing best in voice-based media are voracious readers. The Rest Is History is successful because its presenters have read and continue to read a remarkable number of books. Holland and Sandbrook share a vast capacity for effortful cognitive work, which enables them to make podcasting sound like effortless fun. Similarly, the most productive users of AI will be those who already have, and who cultivate, specialised knowledge and cognitive skills. It’s all about the prompt. The GIGO principle and its inverse (‘Genius In, Genius Out’?) have never been more pertinent.

In a society where people are reading less, you need to read more. But knowing you should read more and doing it are two different things.

How To Read More

Even among my deep-reading friends I increasingly hear it said, with a sense of passive resignation, “I just don’t read as much as I used to”. Our glittering devices have certainly improved our non-reading options. But if I’m right and reading is more important and more valuable than ever, then it’s surely worth putting extra effort into. Look, I won’t pretend to have cracked this problem. As I said in my post on my favourite books of 2024, I didn’t have a good reading year, and what follows is advice to me as much as it is to you. But here are three principles that, if adhered to, will make a big difference to your reading life. ...

I didn't go on (you had to claim your free article), but for anyone who wants to, he is on Substack.

Re: "I just don't read as much as I used to."

I find that I don't have the attention span that I used to have when it comes to reading. My mind skitters away after a page or two.
I don't know if this is age-related or the effect of too much social media consumption. Or maybe after a lifetime of reading A LOT, nothing seems new or interesting to me. Everything is same old, same old.
I really am having a hard time finding a book that interests me enough to finish--even if the book is well-written. I just don't care if the mystery gets solved or if the protagonists survive to the end of the epic fantasy and I have never been a fan of the angst about daily life fiction of the white-woman-has-the-blues school of literature. Or white male has the blues.
I have burned through two police procedurals set in Thailand by John Burdett so it is still possible for me to read an entire book. I like the writing style, the descriptions of Thailand, and the exploration of cultural differences.
So I guess this is a bit off topic.

With several of my favorite authors of novels dead, my consumption of written fiction has significantly decreased. I am thinking about getting some Harris novels (his Cicero trilogy is the last fictional literature currently on my mind I read). My reading almost completely consists of non fiction these days (although some is about fiction e.g. currently The Nature of Middle-Earth, an annotated collection of micellaneous shorter texts by Tolkien edited after the death of Christopher Tolkien, his son and lifelong literary executor).
But I admit to spend a lot of time on youtube that in the past I would have spent reading. I now mostly read (books) on public transport, e.g. moving to and from work and in the bathtub or sitting on the toilet (OK, that's TMI).
I spend a lot of money on books, in particular art exhibition catalogues but for the most part they go into storage on the overflowing bookshelves in the (futile?) expectation that one day they will be read and not just leafed through. So, I keep the industry alive but increasingly that amounts to subsidies. Same is true for my extensive and still growing DVD collection. No idea what will happen with all the stuff when I am gone.

I guess I'm not the only one. I have been reading about Neanderthals as escapism. I also got a beautiful book of Hubble photos for doses of spirituality.

“Cognitive endurance” is the ability to sustain effortful thinking over a continuous period of time. It’s a crucial skill. A new study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics points out that richer people tend to have it more than poorer people; it’s one of those self-reinforcing effects that make inequality so hard to fix. The researchers provide strong evidence that good schools don’t just teach specific academic skills but instil this all-purpose ability, by getting students to practice effortful thinking for long stretches.

I don't trust Leslie's gloss on this study. It was a study of Indian and Pakistani primary school students, and I am not entirely sure if the "school quality" measures that he's taking in here actually reflect a difference between the rich and the poor more generally. I didn't put a lot of time into making sense of the data, but it seems that some of that "quality" measure may have to do with how many years of primary education the students have access to. So I'm not sure how we go from that to a generalization about rich v. poor. Seems like a stretch or a personal bias to me, or at the very least there is a lack of sufficient explanation if there is more here than just that single study.

You might have noticed that some of the people doing best in voice-based media are voracious readers. The Rest Is History is successful because its presenters have read and continue to read a remarkable number of books. Holland and Sandbrook share a vast capacity for effortful cognitive work, which enables them to make podcasting sound like effortless fun. Similarly, the most productive users of AI will be those who already have, and who cultivate, specialised knowledge and cognitive skills. It’s all about the prompt. The GIGO principle and its inverse (‘Genius In, Genius Out’?) have never been more pertinent.

I think here he is generalizing too broadly again. Voracious reading is not the thing that gives cognitive endurance, it's the practice of active, critical reading that does this. I have several students who read a lot of content, but have never really stopped to think about anything other than the events of the plot and their engagement with the characters. It's just as much a form of diversion as consumption of YouTube videos - it occupies for the time that it is being consumed, but does not persist.

What develops cognitive endurance is reading (or intellectual engagement more broadly) that requires the reader/listener to do work with the content, to retain it and hold onto the pieces and then build something further for themselves with those pieces - analysis and synthesis. I remember this process quite vividly from my early time in college in a Great Books program, working to manage a reading schedule that loaded us all down with hundreds of pages of difficult reading every week that we then had to turn into sustained discussion that engaged with not just the reading du jour, but also with all the previous readings. That experience, more than any other, made grad school survivable for me.

I also don't think that the secret sauce here is entirely about reading and literacy. We had similar fears in the transition from oral to literary culture in the past, with educators complaining that students who had recourse to the written word were losing their capacity to memorize the information being presented to them in an efficient manner. Rather than making this about reading, I'd say that it's more a function of how much information an individual has to internalize and hold in their thoughts in order to be able to function in their world. The more access we have to easy information that is sufficient to meet our immediate situation, the less we need to hold in our own heads, and the less we have sort of running in parallel with whatever other information we are navigating through in our lives. Lacking that robust parallel cognition, we are reduced to living at the mercy of our external information feeds, and those feeds do not serve us well. They are built for convenience and for the enrichment of the people in charge of the feeds.

(Side note: as I was writing my long comment, I had a sort of long meditation on Fahrenheit 451 playing out in my thinking as well. I think Bradbury was very much concerned with the loss of cognitive endurance in that novel, but he was also getting that entangled with all of the high/low culture distinctions and biases that we often fall into where questions of literacy are concerned. My pushback against Leslie's too-breezy link between literacy and financial rewards is colored by this meditation.)

My reading has dropped off preciptiously since my detached retina, which I wrote about here

https://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2024/04/the-eyes-have-it.html

PSA: after the age of 50, you should get your eyes checked once a year.

I find that I don't have the attention span that I used to have when it comes to reading. My mind skitters away after a page or two.
I don't know if this is age-related or the effect of too much social media consumption.

Interesting. I don't find I have any trouble disappearing into a book. But I have noticed that, when watching TV (or podcasts, which my wife frequently has running on the TV) I will also have a sudoku game or something happening at the same time.

I wonder what Leslie makes of the richer examples of oral culture, some of which are remarkable to the point of being astounding.

The Homeric epics began as oral stories. The Mahabarata, apparently, likewise. The Australian aborigines maintain oral histories spanning thousands of years. African griots, indigenous American creation stories - all likewise.

Some of these stories take days to recount, and are (or have been) recited from memory.

It does call for a very different set of mental skills, and no doubt has a very different cultural role and influence. But I think Leslie disparages the "slow-twitch mental muscle" capacity of oral cultures.

None of which is to say that reading and literacy generally are not beneficial, or that our current culture of passive consumption of social media and other mindless, fragmented sources isn't harmful.

I'm just not sure he has an appreciation for the richness and sophistication of traditional oral culture.

But I think Leslie disparages the "slow-twitch mental muscle" capacity of oral cultures.

Perhaps. But in those oral cultures, people not only listen but remember and repeat their stories and their histories. Those latter exercise mental muscles which merely listening does not. Which means that, even if he is wrong about oral cultures, the reduction in literacy is still problematic.

I was always a "voracious reader" who was quite capable of, and enjoyed, cognitive endurance and intellectual engagement as defined by nous (and not that different from Leslie's definition in the first sentence quoted by nous above).

I have several students who read a lot of content, but have never really stopped to think about anything other than the events of the plot and their engagement with the characters. It's just as much a form of diversion as consumption of YouTube videos - it occupies for the time that it is being consumed, but does not persist.

Alas, these days this is (usually) a much more accurate description of the way I read (except when reading newspapers, good blogs etc). Whether this is because of age, the increased burden of life events, or too much screen time, I cannot say. But I am aware of it, and I regret it.

Regarding oral cultures, I do think that they belong(ed) to a much more communal existence, which we can barely imagine ourselves into, let alone replicate. If literacy is failing, it is hard to see what will replace it, and what the consequences will be. I hope Leslie is wrong, but now that I think more about it, I may go back and claim my free article to see what his three suggestions are for improving one's ability to do "deep reading"...

I think it depends on how much 'traction' the book requires. The more effort it takes, the deeper the average reading will be (provided it is not so difficult that one can't penetrate in the first place). "Easy" reading will leave far less of a lasting impression.
Of course that does not cover double-layered literature as some of the best books for children are. Those can be read superficially without too much background knowledge and still some gain and can then be reread years later discovering the deeper meaning (or just the allusions, clever puns etc.). Kipling was a master of that.

in those oral cultures, people not only listen but remember and repeat their stories and their histories

they belong(ed) to a much more communal existence, which we can barely imagine ourselves into, let alone replicate

Thoroughly agree on both points.

I guess my point in commenting was more or less to expand on this, from Leslie:

Literacy inculcates particular habits of thought and discourse that orality does not.

To which I would add, "and vice versa". My sense is that oral culture cultivated habits of mind and practices that were profound, and which are largely lost to us now. I'm not making any claims about better or worse, just different. I'd extend that to pre-industrial culture in general, and some 10,000 years prior to that, to pre-agrarian cultures.

If I were to try to characterize it, I'd say that folks used to live with a greater awareness of, and a greater empathy for and sense of connection to, the natural given world. And possibly with aspects of consciousness that we don't really remember anymore.

So, in Leslie's words, "intuition and feelings" hold greater importance than they do, to us.

What I object to is his implication that that necessarily leads to something like Joe Rogan and/or a lack of cognitive endurance. A culture that can achieve things like reciting something like the Mahabarata from memory seems, to me, capable of significant cognitive endurance.

Not better, not worse, just profoundly different. And probably not capable of re-creation. We are where we are, for good or ill. And very much of it is for good, he said while sitting in his house with central heating and conversing with people from around the world via instant transmission of written words. But something that I am very curious about.

Joe Rogan and the kind of meatheaded thought process he traffics in is our own creation and our own problem. Not really fair to project that back into societies we no longer understand.

Those can be read superficially without too much background knowledge and still some gain and can then be reread years later discovering the deeper meaning (or just the allusions, clever puns etc.). Kipling was a master of that.

L. Frank Baum wasn't half bad at it either.

I don't disagree with you russell, FWIW. I just thought that he was seeing something like Joe Rogan as one of the undesirable end points of a long process which started millennia ago, led to universal (or at least very widespread) literacy, and now its decline and loss, leaving us without the advantages of literacy but (and I agree this is not what he says but to me is implied) also without any of the skills or practices which preceded it.

Well, I have now subscribed to Leslie's substack, and one of the commenters to the piece I copied above links this - a review by Arnold Kling (of whom of course I have never heard) about something by Andrey Mir (ditto):

https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2024/klingmcluhan.html

It's not long, but this is an extract:

Consider the changes that took place as humans went from having only face-to-face oral communication to having the ability to read and write. Writing gives us a powerful form of social memory, reducing our need to rely on individual memory. Preliterate man lives in a multi-sensory present. For literate people, a more introverted existence becomes possible. As we read, we tune out the world in order to focus on input from our visual sense. We can detach from the present to dwell in the past and the future. Instead of relying on our instant reactions, we stop to reflect and think about what we read. We relate to descriptions of people and events that are outside of our personal experience.

Reading requires us to think abstractly. This is particularly true of alphabetic writing. The meaning of the symbols on a page is not self-explanatory. We have to interpret and calculate meaning.

When only oral communication is available, collective memory must be in the form of received wisdom. We value the person who can repeat with high fidelity the sacred stories. With writing, there is room for thinking. We can value the person who asks questions or who criticizes.

Writing allowed for the codification of laws, eventually leading to impersonal concepts of justice. Printing, which came after Gutenberg, allowed wide reproduction of thought, which in turn made possible the scientific method of testing for reproducibility of results.

As always, I am simply bringing stuff I find interesting and hope others will too.

Reading requires us to think abstractly. This is particularly true of alphabetic writing. The meaning of the symbols on a page is not self-explanatory. We have to interpret and calculate meaning.

The idea that Chinese characters are somehow self-explanatory certainly goes a long way to telling us why it is so easy to learn Chinese...
[/snark]

I do think that reading and processing alphabetic script is different from dealing with ideographic scripts. Recently, there has been a big thing here with dealing with 'neurodiverse' students, which seems to be the term to avoid the pejorative shades all the other words have. I'm supportive of it, but with so many people jumping on the bandwagon, there are some problems that get folded in. Over here, there are some people who are really insistent that fonts need to be adapted for people suffering from dyslexia. There has been a mistaken idea that Japanese don't have dyslexia, because of the nature of the writing system, but that is being replaced with an assumption that Japanese can't learn English because there is a huge undiagnosed population of dyslexics (bearing in mind that there is no diagnostic tool in Japanese for dyslexia and that the only way to diagnose dyslexia in English is through a series of interviews and a review of history) This translates into people using fonts (which have never been proven to impact positively in native speaking populations) that somehow alleviate the issue. The cherry on top is the existence of fonts you have to pay for that are supposed to be good.

Anyway, apologies for the rant, it's all interesting stuff.

The idea that Chinese characters are somehow self-explanatory certainly goes a long way to telling us why it is so easy to learn Chinese...

And here I always thought it was the musicality of a tonal language which made it so easy...
[/double snark]

The reduction in reading by people younger than us may be partly due to how reading is taught in K-12 in recent decades.

"This reminded me that Reading Recovery is quite possibly the most damaging program implemented in American schools

It teaches children not to sound out words but to guess at the word based on the first few letters, surrounding context, and visual cues

It has caused massive permanent damage to millions of children..."
PoIiMath

from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_Recovery

Reading Recovery is a short-term intervention approach designed for English-speaking children aged five or six, who are the lowest achieving in literacy after their first year of school. [...] The intervention involves intensive one-to-one lessons for 30 minutes a day with a teacher trained in the Reading Recovery method, for between 12 and 20 weeks.

I don't know anything about Reading Recovery, and I'm not defending it, but regardless of how the program works, but if your source gets 'millions' out of short term one on one program, god knows what other kind of false assumptions they make.

The Reading Recovery web site says the method incorporates phonics into every lesson, but is not exclusively phonics.

As anecdata, a friend once told me that part of the problem is you can't get a PhD in reading education out of phonics. So some other theory gets "hot", and when it doesn't work out, it's back to phonics. Granddaughter #1 took to reading without any problems and has always read well above grade level. Granddaughter #2 wasn't so quick. I noticed that when her mom worked with her, using school-supplied materials, it was phonics plus other stuff. Part of it appeared to me to be teaching her to pattern-match a large number of short words automatically.

I am wondering what cultural changes we are going to experience when the stories that form our understanding come from AIs or actual people in the form of a visual snippet with a sound bite.

Education seems prone to fads. It seems like schools are always looking for the magic bullet, perhaps because schools are mass production for results that really can't be produced at a high quality level in large quantities, particularly when the students arrive less and less equipped to learn each year--or it seems that way. It may be that the students aren't different, but the expectations for schools are. One hundred years ago there was no attempt to educate everyone's children.

It may be worth noting that this has been a problem for quite a while. When I was learning to read, the fad was called the "word unit" method. Which, if you think about it, resembles teaching an alphabetic script like it was a character based script (e.g. Chinese)**. My Mom found a book called Reading with Phonics (pretty sure it was the original, 1948, version) and made sure we all learned it that way.

As anecdata, a friend once told me that part of the problem is you can't get a PhD in reading education out of phonics.

Perhaps the solution is to treat reading education like auto mechanics. There's lots to learn, but nobody pretends a degree in it is sensible.

** It does occur to me that this might be a useful way to learn to read French. Where my personal approach, for words more than a half dozen letters long, is to pronounce every third letter in the first half of the word, and none of the letters in the second half. Far from perfect, but it's amazing how often it gets close.

English: badly pronounced French with German grammar.

Y'all are looking in the wrong places for the challenges to literacy. I'm not arguing that we haven't had a few literacy learning fads that have resulted in a less productive system of teaching young children to read. We have. But there are a lot of other factors that have nothing to do with pedagogical methods that have made learning to read more difficult whatever method the teachers are employing.

Our media landscape is part of the problem. There is too much content aimed at particular age groups and developmental stages, driven largely by toy marketing - ads disguised as education. These programs are meant to be highly stimulating and fast moving, so the children who watch them settle into a very fast paced mode of attention that never really builds their attention spans. These programs have greater social status among children than do books, so they dominate their playground lives. Children's media isn't interested in sending kids to their local library, it's interested in getting them to beg their parents for more of the toys and games featured in their media, and to play within the bounds of those franchises.

Furthermore...

Standardized testing has reduced language arts classes to exercises in reading comprehension - doing book reports and being able to summarize the readings accurately. I'm consistently amazed that my students (who have gotten into a top ten public university) are surprised when I ask them to try to extend and apply what they have read, and to speculate about ambiguities. They have literally never been asked to say anything about a reading that does not either have a factual answer or
come from interpretational notes that have been supplied to them by a teacher. No standardized test is ever going to ask them to give a creative answer or to speculate. The multiple choice questions are all factual, and the essay questions have more to do with how they organize and express commonplaces about the texts than they do with critical engagement.

I also think a lot fewer parents read to their young children today than did so in the past, and that a lot of that reading modeling has been offloaded onto commercial media - more short-attention gamified vocab builders and virtual babysitters and less stretching of children's abilities as parents get bored of reading the same books over and over and try to introduce new, more challenging material in an effort to save their own sanity.

If the kids don't have a core of good literacy practices and vocabulary by the time that they are six, it's going to be an uphill battle for them to really become proficient. Unfortunately, their lives are too crowded with competitors to engaging and progressive literacy practice for them to get to the level that will get them past the Matthew Principle.

A lot of exams also require fast superficial reading over depth. If one takes the time to thoroughly read through the provided material one lacks the time to put the results in writing. That together with lack of patience and attention span works against developing a mindset of 'deeper' reading and analysis. It seems to get actively punished that way.
It may be a too narrow example but over here Latin at school has changed from 1 book from 1 author per semester to 1 theme with snippets from numerous authors per semester. Imo that means no real depth and actually makes it more difficult because the kids don't get the time to adjust to the specific writing style of an author. In my experience that takes several pages, especially, if one switches from e.g. Cicero to Sallust (whom one of my teachers at university called a deliberate anti-Ciceronian) or Livy to Tacitus. Now the kids get maybe a single page from each. And since they also lack the background on the theme that connects those snippets (instead are expected to work it out for themselves or - worse - get it from rather superficial supplementary material), they end up with neither a thorough understanding of the contents nor the language.
Well, apart from that most of the texts that could actually catch their interest can't really be read at school at all because they are too difficult language-wise. Shakespeare and Milton are probably not the best authors for beginners in English, Kant and Heidegger not for German (OK the latter are not considered easy reading even for native speakers) and Latin is worse in that regard. So, alas, no original Apuleius before university but instead back to the collector of synonyms for 'to kill violently'.

An interesting related article on close reading:

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/literature/literary-criticism/on-close-reading-john-guillory-book-review-christy-edwall

Funny quote: "As I was reading On Close Reading, Jonathan Bate was being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today about the decline of competence in English undergraduate students at elite institutions. Where once they could be counted on to read three Dickens novels a week, he lamented, now they couldn’t manage to read one Dickens novel in three weeks."

Seriously? 3 novels a week? They weren't doing close reading for sure...

Beinart on Blinken’s NYT interview.

I don’t know if nonsubscribers can watch or read this. If you can,scroll down a bit to see the transcript.

https://peterbeinart.substack.com/p/antony-blinkens-mental-prison

I keep getting pushed by the Atlantic to renew my subscription, and when I am able to cancel one to the NYT or WaPo in Spring, I will probably do so. In the meantime, I saw this both on hilzoy's feed retweeting someone's guest link, and was sent it by someone else who knew this is a subject extremely close to my heart - and not just the "enabling autocracy" aspect, but the general malign effects of living in a post truth society/age:

The New Rasputins
Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.
By Anne Applebaum
January 7, 2025, 7:30 AM ET
Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. “I don’t need Facebook; I don’t need the internet; I don’t need anybody. I just need my heart,” he says. As he swims across the lake, seemingly unbothered by the cold, he continues: “I trust my immune system because I have complete trust and faith in its creator, in God. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.”
This is Călin Georgescu, the man who shocked his countrymen when he won the first round of the Romanian presidential election on November 24, despite hardly registering in opinion polls and conducting his campaign almost entirely on TikTok, where the platform’s rules, ostensibly designed to limit or regulate political messages, appear not to have constrained him. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. Sometimes he added soft, melancholic piano music, imploring people to “vote with your souls.” Sometimes he used pop-up subtitles, harsh lighting, fluorescent colors, and electronic music, calling for a “national renaissance” and criticizing the secret forces that have allegedly sought to harm Romanians. “The order to destroy our jobs came from the outside,” he says in one video. In another, he speaks of “subliminal messages” and thought control, his voice accompanied by images of a hand holding puppet strings. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views.
Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust. He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes. He twice met with Alexander Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue, who posted on X a (subsequently deleted) statement that “Romania will be part of Russia.” And at the same time, Georgescu praises the spiritual qualities of water. “We don’t know what water is,” he has said; “H₂O means nothing.” Also, “Water has a memory, and we destroy its soul through pollution,” and “Water is alive and sends us messages, but we don’t know how to listen to them.” He believes that carbonated drinks contain nanochips that “enter into you like a laptop.” His wife, Cristela, produces YouTube videos on healing, using terms such as lymphatic acidosis and calcium metabolism to make her points.
In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
Both of them also promote “peace,” a vague goal that seems to mean that Romania, which borders Ukraine and Moldova, should stop helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invaders. “War cannot be won by war,” Cristela Georgescu wrote on Instagram a few weeks before voting began. “War destroys not only physically, it destroys HEARTS.” Neither she nor her husband mentions the security threats to Romania that would grow exponentially following a Russian victory in Ukraine, nor the economic costs, refugee crisis, and political instability that would follow. It is noteworthy that although Călin Georgescu claimed to have spent no money on this campaign, the Romanian government says someone illegally paid TikTok users hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote Georgescu and that unknown outsiders coordinated the activity of tens of thousands of fake accounts, including some impersonating state institutions, that supported him. Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85,000 cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. On December 6, in response to the Romanian government’s findings about “aggressive” Russian attacks and violations of Romanian electoral law, Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the election and annulled the results of the first round.
Given this strange combination—Iron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrow—who exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them? Tempting though it is to describe them as “far right,” this old-fashioned terminology doesn’t quite capture whom or what they represent. The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions. In its new incarnation, the far right began to resemble the old far left. In some places, the two began to merge.
When conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.
When I first wrote about the need for new political terminology, in 2017, I struggled to come up with better terms. But now the outlines of a popular political movement are becoming clearer, and this movement has no relation at all to the right or the left as we know them. The philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose belief in the possibility of law-based democratic states gave us both the American and French Revolutions, railed against what they called obscurantism: darkness, obfuscation, irrationality. But the prophets of what we might now call the New Obscurantism offer exactly those things: magical solutions, an aura of spirituality, superstition, and the cultivation of fear. Among their number are health quacks and influencers who have developed political ambitions; fans of the quasi-religious QAnon movement and its Pizzagate-esque spin-offs; and members of various political parties, all over Europe, that are pro-Russia and anti-vaccine and, in some cases, promoters of mystical nationalism as well. Strange overlaps are everywhere. Both the left-wing German politician Sahra Wagenknecht and the right-wing Alternative for Germany party promote vaccine and climate-change skepticism, blood-and-soil nationalism, and withdrawal of German support for Ukraine. All across Central Europe, a fascination with runes and folk magic aligns with both right-wing xenophobia and left-wing paganism. Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have
veered into the occult. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who has become an apologist for Russian aggression, has claimed that he was attacked by a demon that left “claw marks” on his body.
This New Obscurantism has now affected the highest levels of U.S. politics. Foreigners and Americans alike have been hard-pressed to explain the ideology represented by some of Donald Trump’s initial Cabinet nominations, and for good reason. Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated. Nor is there anything “conservative” about Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee for FBI director, who has suggested that he intends to target a long list of current and former government officials, including many who served in the first Trump administration. In keeping with the spirit of the New Obscurantists, Patel has also promoted Warrior Essentials, a business selling antidotes both to COVID and to COVID vaccines. But then, no one who took seriously the philosophy of Edmund Burke or William F. Buckley Jr. would put a conspiracy theorist like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—another Putin apologist, former Democrat (indeed, from the most famous Democratic family in America), and enemy of vaccines, as well as fluoride—in charge of American health care. No “conservative” defender of traditional family values would propose, as ambassador to France, a convicted felon who sent a prostitute to seduce his sister’s husband in order to create a compromising tape—especially if that convicted felon happened to be the father of the president’s son-in-law.
Rather than conservatism as conventionally understood, this crowd and its international counterparts represent the fusion of several trends that have been coalescing for some time. The hawkers of vitamin supplements and unproven COVID cures now mingle—not by accident—with open admirers of Putin’s Russia, especially those who mistakenly believe that Putin leads a “white Christian nation.” (In reality, Russia is multicultural, multiracial, and generally irreligious; its trolls promote vaccine skepticism as well as lies about Ukraine.) Fans of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán—a small-time autocrat who has impoverished his country, now one of the poorest in Europe, while enriching his family and friends—make common cause with Americans who have broken the law, gone to jail, stolen from their own charities, or harassed women. And no wonder: In a world where conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.
Among the followers of this new political movement are some of the least wealthy Americans. Among its backers are some of the most wealthy. George O’Neill Jr., a Rockefeller heir who is a board member of The American Conservative magazine, turned up at Mar-a-Lago after the election; O’Neill, who was a close contact of Maria Butina, the Russian agent deported in 2019, has promoted Gabbard since at least 2017, donating to her presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to Kennedy’s in 2024. Elon Musk, the billionaire inventor who has used his social-media platform, X, to give an algorithmic boost to stories he surely knows are false, has managed to carve out a government role for himself. Are O’Neill, Musk, and the cryptocurrency dealers who have flocked to Trump in this for the money? Or do they actually believe the conspiratorial and sometimes anti-American ideas they’re promulgating? Maybe one, maybe the other, possibly both. Whether their motivations are cynical or sincere matters less than their impact, not just in the U.S. but around the world. For better or for worse, America sets examples that others follow. Merely by announcing his intention to nominate Kennedy to his Cabinet, Trump has ensured that skepticism of childhood vaccines will spread around the world, possibly followed by the diseases themselves. And epidemics, as we’ve recently learned, tend to make people frightened, and more willing to embrace magical solutions.
Other civilizations have experienced moments like this one. As their empire began to decline in the 16th century, the Venetians began turning to magic and looking for fast ways to get rich. Mysticism and occultism spread rapidly in the dying days of the Russian empire. Peasant sects promoted exotic beliefs and practices, including anti-materialism, self-flagellation, and self-castration. Aristocrats in Moscow and St. Petersburg turned to theosophy, a mishmash of world religions whose Russian-born inventor, Helena Blavatsky, brought her Hindu-Buddhist-Christian-Neoplatonic creed to the United States. The same feverish, emotional atmosphere that produced these movements eventually propelled Rasputin, a peasant holy man who claimed that he had magical healing powers, into the imperial palace. After convincing Empress Alexandra that he could cure her son’s hemophilia, he eventually became a political adviser to the czar.
Rasputin’s influence produced, in turn, a kind of broader hysteria. By the time the First World War broke out, many Russians were convinced that dark forces—tyomnye sily—were secretly in control of the country. “They could be different things to different people—Jews, Germans, Freemasons, Alexandra, Rasputin, and the court camarilla,” writes Douglas Smith, one of Rasputin’s biographers. “But it was taken on faith that they were the true masters of Russia.” As one Russian theosophist put it, “Enemies really do exist who are poisoning Russia with negative emanations.”
Replace dark forces with the deep state, and how different is that story from ours? Like the Russians in 1917, we live in an era of rapid, sometimes unacknowledged, change: economic, political, demographic, educational, social, and, above all, informational. We, too, exist in a permanent cacophony, where conflicting messages, right and left, true and false, flash across our screens all the time. Traditional religions are in long-term decline. Trusted institutions seem to be failing. Techno-optimism has given way to techno-pessimism, a fear that technology now controls us in ways we can’t understand. And in the hands of the New Obscurantists—who actively promote fear of illness, fear of nuclear war, fear of death—dread and anxiety are powerful weapons.
For Americans, the merging of pseudo-spirituality with politics represents a departure from some of our deepest principles: that logic and reason lead to good government; that fact-based debate leads to good policy; that governance prospers in sunlight; and that the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes, not mystical charisma. The supporters of the New Obscurantism have also broken with the ideals of America’s Founders, all of whom considered themselves to be men of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin was not only a political thinker but a scientist and a brave advocate of smallpox inoculation. George Washington was fastidious about rejecting monarchy, restricting the power of the executive, and establishing the rule of law. Later American leaders—Lincoln, Roosevelt, King—quoted the Constitution and its authors to bolster their own arguments.
By contrast, this rising international elite is creating something very different: a society in which superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction. There are no checks and balances in a world where only charisma matters, no rule of law in a world where emotion defeats reason—only a void that anyone with a shocking and compelling story can fill.

I just copied and pasted an Anne Applebaum piece from the Atlantic, and it seems to have vanished into the spam folder. If anyone can rescue it, I'd be grateful.

Or, it might have been too long? Maybe I should have split it into two? Or not copied it at all? Apologies for any or all of these....

Just retrieved from the spam bucket. There was also another comment about the alignment of the blog being strange, but I think that is an individual browser issue.

Just noting the title of the applebaum piece, a few days ago, I came across an story about the Dalai Lama observing someone fixing something, maybe a car, and, when something went wrong, angrily kicking it and he noted that this was rather strange, as the car had no feelings or awareness, so what the person was doing was meaningless. However, it got me on the train of thought that we still imbue inanimate objects with some kind of spirit or soul. A pair of scissors doesn't cut and we toss them down and say 'damn scissors won't cut'. We hit our head on a cabinet door and slam the door, maybe thinking 'That'll teach it'. With perhaps the exception of the Dalai Lama and a chosen few, I feel like we have all done that at one time or another.

This isn't to refute Applebaum's claim, it is just to suggest that the foundation of anti-science thinking lurks on the periphery all the time.

Be honest guys. Who of you has never shouted angrily at a computer or at least the monitor of the same?
Btw, many allegedly afterwards apologize to the device.
---
The kind of obscurantism Applebaum describes also was present in the 3rd Reich (Himmler was a great promoter as was Rudolf Hess). But Hitler had only mockery for that (but kept it to himself in Himmler's presence.).

Be honest guys. Who of you has never shouted angrily at a computer or at least the monitor of the same?

Don't know that I've told this story before. I don't tell it as well as the woman who was the witness, but she went on to do documentary films. Anyway, I didn't yell at the computers...

The Fortune 200 company was going through a major reorganization. The tech piece of one side was charged with doing demos for the new board of directors. The demo was to take place in the ballroom of a half-finished hotel in Manhattan. I was the demo-god, responsible for making it all work.

It wasn't all working when everyone else on the team left the ballroom about 10:00 the day before the demo, leaving me. One of the people noticed that I had stayed behind, so when she couldn't sleep she decided to see if I needed any help. As she told it, got up, got dressed, rode down the 10-12 floors to where the ballroom was, and walked around the multiple corners to get there.

I was sitting cross-legged on the floor, under a single spotlight that was the only lighting. In front of me were multiple beige-box computers (as was the style in those days). "Look," I said to one of the beige boxes, "You can do this the way I want it done, or I can take you apart for spares. Ask this guy," with a nod to one of the other computers, "Where its second hard disk came from."

The woman said that she didn't want to disturb me and my minions, so went back to her room. She said that she had no problem going to sleep at that point; the hardware and software was scared enough of me that it would all work for the new board. It did, although there's a second story that goes with the board's actual tour.

I did road show demos for two years. Every demo that I ran worked, despite all sorts of last-minute catastrophes. I used to have nightmares about answering the door at some point later in my life, and there being a round little redheaded Irishman, who would say, "Michael Cain? Me name's Murphy and you put up a magnificent performance flouting me Law for two years. Payback time."

Thanks for the rescue, lj. And yes, there has of course always been a deep ocean of superstition and fear lapping around humanity, no doubt since its beginnings. What a misfortune to be spectators as the waters rise and threaten to swamp the seawall.

a few days ago, I came across an story about the Dalai Lama observing someone fixing something, maybe a car, and, when something went wrong, angrily kicking it and he noted that this was rather strange, as the car had no feelings or awareness, so what the person was doing was meaningless.

Maybe meaningless. But not necessarily useless.

One of the things evolution has gifted us with is an adrenaline surge when we are struggling with something. Unfortunately, adrenaline is bad for fine motor control. The way you get your adrenaline levels back down so you can deal (assuming what you are struggling with doesn't come with claws, sharp teeth, or weapons) is to fire off some muscles. Preferably big ones. Kicking a car side, or a tire, can be surprisingly helpful.

That's also why you "feel shaky" after a sudden fright: unused adrenaline trying to find a useful muscle to fire. The best thing you can do, as soon as you safely can, is sit down, force yourself to relax, and just let yourself shake for 15-20 seconds. From experience, it's much faster than fighting it. Easier on your body, too.

The way you get your adrenaline levels back down so you can deal (assuming what you are struggling with doesn't come with claws, sharp teeth, or weapons) is to fire off some muscles.

Hmmm... I'm thinking about developing the Frustration Workout. Every time you get pissed like that, do pushups or jumping jacks until you're too tired to be angry. It wouldn't work for people who are especially chill, but probably would for a good percentage.

You'd have to be willing to look a little weird sometimes, though.

You'd have to be willing to look a little weird sometimes, though.

Doing the sit-a-moment-and-shake thing can get you a bunch of folks hovering because they are sure you're totally traumatized, too. Gotta be prepared to talk them down.

Michael Cain: your story @09.10 above is marvellous (sic). I bet she's never forgotten it.

I just keep hearing Murphy's words in the voice of Darby O'Gill.

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