Producer of “The Godfather” to Make Six Hour TV Version of Atlas Shrugged

(p. D1) LOS ANGELES — It took a while — more than 40 years, actually.
But Albert S. Ruddy, a movie and television producer who does not like to quit, has landed rights to make his passion project: a screen version of “Atlas Shrugged,” Ayn Rand’s Objectivist bible.
Mr. Ruddy, whose canon includes films as varied as “The Godfather” and “The Cannonball Run,” almost had a deal back in the early 1970s, when he wooed Ms. Rand personally while sitting on a small couch in New York.
But Ms. Rand, who had left the Soviet Union in the 1920s and feared the Russians might acquire Paramount Pictures to subvert the project, wanted script approval; Mr. Ruddy, as adamant as she was, declined. “Then I’ll put in my will, the one person who can’t get it is you,” Mr. Ruddy recalls being told by Ms. Rand, who died in 1982.
. . .
The main thing, Mr. Ruddy said, is to honor Ms. Rand’s insistence on making a film for the future. That means redrawing its capitalists and creators, who go on strike against creeping collectivism, as figures more familiar than the railroad heiress and industrial titans who figured in a book that was first published in 1957.
“When you look at guys like Jeff Bezos, he’s not only doing Amazon, he wants to colonize Mars,” Mr. Ruddy said. He spoke by telephone last week of his plan for a mini-series in which an Internet blackout led by Bezos-like figures might shut down cellphones, banks and almost everything else.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL CIEPLY. “Film Producer Lands Rights to ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Novel.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 2, 2015): B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 1, 2015, and has the title “Producer of ‘The Godfather’ Lands Rights to ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Novel.”)

Climate Change Likely to Be Slower and Less Harmful than Feared

(p. A11) . . . , we are often told by journalists that the science is “settled” and there is no debate. But scientists disagree: They say there is great uncertainty, and they reflected this uncertainty in their fifth and latest assessment for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It projects that temperatures are likely to be anything from 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer by the latter part of the century–that is, anything from mildly beneficial to significantly harmful.
As for the impact of that future warming, a new study by a leading climate economist, Richard Tol of the University of Sussex, concludes that warming may well bring gains, because carbon dioxide causes crops and wild ecosystems to grow greener and more drought-resistant. In the long run, the negatives may outweigh these benefits, says Mr. Tol, but “the impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5°C warming.”
Mr. Tol’s study summarizes the effect we are to expect during this century: “The welfare change caused by climate change is equivalent to the welfare change caused by an income change of a few percent. That is, a century of climate change is about as good/bad for welfare as a year of economic growth. Statements that climate change is the biggest problem of humankind are unfounded: We can readily think of bigger problems.” No justification for prioritizing climate change over terrorism there.
. . .
To put it bluntly, climate change and its likely impact are proving slower and less harmful than we feared, while decarbonization of the economy is proving more painful and costly than we hoped. The mood in Paris will be one of furious pessimism among the well-funded NGOs that will attend the summit in large numbers: Decarbonization, on which they have set their hearts, is not happening, and they dare not mention the reassuring news from science lest it threaten their budgets.
Casting around for somebody to blame, they have fastened on foot-dragging fossil-fuel companies and those who make skeptical observations, however well-founded, about the likelihood of dangerous climate change. Scientific skeptics are now routinely censored, or threatened with prosecution. One recent survey by Rasmussen Reports shows that 27% of Democrats in the U.S. are in favor of prosecuting climate skeptics. This is the mentality of religious fanaticism, not scientific debate.

For the full commentary, see:
MATT RIDLEY And BENNY PEISER. “Your Complete Guide to the Climate Debate; At the Paris conference, expect an agreement that is sufficiently vague and noncommittal for all countries to claim victory.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Nov. 28, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 27, 2015.)

The Tol working paper mentioned above, is:
Tol, Richard S. J. “Economic Impacts of Climate Change.” University of Sussex Economics Working Paper No. 75-2015.

Transistors Did Not Completely Destroy the Vacuum Tube

(p. D11) . . . , just as nothing quite matches the ambience created by an incandescent bulb dimmed low, nothing quite sounds like a good tube amp. Audiophiles will argue about whether a solid-state or tube amp is superior. However, it’s best to think of tubes as an aesthetic choice–akin to applying a vintage filter to a pristine snapshot.
Tubes are well suited for musical passages that can sound grating over modern equipment–for example, a classical violinist digging into her instrument during a dramatic passage. Although its overall sound may not be as crisp, a good tube amp will take that shrill edge off.
More and more music lovers are downsizing their sound systems these days, and some tube-amp makers are following suit. Miniature models, like the ones shown here, use a combination of tubes and solid-state technology to minimize bulk. A few are also surprisingly affordable and versatile. You can hook them up to pretty much any audio source, like a smartphone, computer or CD player. Then just add a pair of headphones or speakers.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL HSU. “Groove Tube.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 24, 2015): D11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated Oct. 21, 2015, and has the title “The Miracle of a $150 (or Less) Tube Amplifier.”)

Hunter-Gatherers Use Division of Labor

(p. D4) The division of labor in hunter-gatherer communities is complex and sophisticated, and crucial to their economic success, researchers report.
A paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions B looks at two hunter-gatherer groups: the Tsimane game hunters of lowland Bolivia, and the Jenu Kuruba honey collectors of South India.
“In contrast to the simple cave man view of a hunter-gatherer, we found that it requires a tremendous amount of skill, knowledge and training,” said Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University and one of the study’s authors.
. . .
When Jenu Kuruba men go in search of honey, Dr. Hooper said, “there’s one man who specializes in making smoke to subdue the bees, another that climbs the trees, and others that act as support staff to lower combs.”

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “Observatory; Nothing Simple About Hunter-Gatherer Societies.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 27, 2015): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 26, 2015.)

The academic article mentioned in the passage quoted above, is:
Hooper, Paul L., Kathryn Demps, Michael Gurven, Drew Gerkey, and Hillard S. Kaplan. “Skills, Division of Labour and Economies of Scale among Amazonian Hunters and South Indian Honey Collectors.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 370, no. 1683 (Oct. 2015), DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0008.

“Racist” Woodrow Wilson Adopted “White Supremacy as Government Policy”

(p. A25) In 1882, soon after graduating from high school, the young John Davis secured a job at the Government Printing Office.

Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary — for an African-American — of $1,400 per year.
But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.
By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.
Many black men and women suffered similar fates under Wilson. As the historian Eric S. Yellin of the University of Richmond documents in his powerful book “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” my grandfather’s demotion was part of a systematic purge of the federal government; with Wilson’s approval, in a few short years virtually all blacks had been removed from management responsibilities, moved to menial jobs or simply dismissed.
My grandfather died before I was born, but I have learned much about his struggle — and that of other black civil servants in the federal government — from his personnel file.
. . .
Consider a letter he wrote on May 16, 1913, barely a month after his demotion. “The reputation which I have been able to acquire and maintain at considerable sacrifice,” he wrote, “is to me (foolish as it may appear to those in higher stations of life) a source of personal pride, a possession of which I am very jealous and which is possessed at a value in my estimation ranking above the loss of salary — though the last, to a man having a family of small children to rear, is serious enough.”
And the reply he received? His supervisor said, simply, that my grandfather was unable to “properly perform the duties required (he is too slow).” Yet there had never been any indication of this in his personnel file.
Wilson was not just a racist. He believed in white supremacy as government policy, so much so that he reversed decades of racial progress. But we would be wrong to see this as a mere policy change; in doing so, he ruined the lives of countless talented African-Americans and their families.

For the full commentary, see:
GORDON J. DAVIS. “Wilson, Princeton and Race.” The New York Times (Tues., NOV. 24, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather.”)

The Yellin book praised in the passage quoted above, is:
Yellin, Eric S. Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

See also:
Patler, Nicholas. Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2004.

While Woodrow Wilson Was President of Princeton, “No Blacks Were Admitted”

(p. A1) PRINCETON, N.J. — Few figures loom as large in the life of an Ivy League university as Woodrow Wilson does at Princeton.

. . .
But until posters started appearing around campus in September, one aspect of Wilson’s legacy was seldom discussed: his racist views, and the ways he acted on them as president of the United States.
The posters, put up by a year-old student group called the Black Justice League, featured some of Wilson’s more offensive quotes, including his comment to an African-American leader that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you,” and led to a remarkable two days at this genteel (p. A17) campus last week.
. . .
Perhaps best known for leading the United States during World War I and for trying to start the League of Nations, Wilson as president rolled back gains blacks had made since Reconstruction, removing black officials from the federal government and overseeing the segregation of rank-and-file workers.
Raised in the South, he wrote of “a great Ku Klux Klan” that rose up to rid whites of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes.”
During Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton, no blacks were admitted — “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied,” he wrote — though Harvard and Yale had admitted blacks decades earlier. Princeton admitted its first black student in the 1940s.

For the full story, see:
ANDY NEWMAN. “At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, a Heralded Alum, Is Recast as an Intolerant One.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 23, 2015): A1 & A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 22, 2015.)

Bike Helmet Regulations Hurt Health

(p. D1) . . . many cycling advocates have taken a surprising position: They are pushing back against mandatory bike-helmet laws in the U.S. and elsewhere. They say mandatory helmet laws, particularly for adults, make cycling less convenient and seem less safe, thus hindering the larger public-health gains of more people riding bikes.
All-ages helmet laws might actually make cycling more dangerous, some cyclists say, by decreasing ridership. Research shows that the more cyclists there are on the road, the fewer crashes there are. Academics theorize that as drivers become used to seeing bikes on a street, they watch more closely for them.
. . .
Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Sydney’s Macquarie University, actually calculated the trade-off of mandatory helmet laws. In a 2012 paper in the journal Risk Analysis, he weighed the reduction of head injuries against increased morbidity due to foregone exercise from reduced cycling.
Dr. de Jong concluded that mandatory bike-helmet laws “have a net negative health impact.” That is in part because many people cycle to work or for errands, experts say. People tend to replace that type of cycling not with another physical activity such as a trip to the gym, but with a ride in a car.

For the full story, see:
RACHEL BACHMAN. “The Helmet-Law Backlash.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Oct. 13, 2015): D1 & D4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated Oct. 12, 2015, and has the title “Do Bike Helmet Laws Do More Harm Than Good?”)

Humans Suffered from Plague by at Least 5,000 Years Ago

(p. D4) Historians and microbiologists alike have searched for decades for the origins of plague. Until now, the first clear evidence of Yersinia pestis infection was the Plague of Justinian in the 6th century, which severely weakened the Byzantine Empire.
But in a new study, published on Thursday [Oct. 22, 2015] in the journal Cell, researchers report that the bacterium was infecting people as long as 5,000 years ago.

For the full story, see:
“Archaeology: Plagues Said to Have Hit During Bronze Age.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 27, 2015): D4.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the much shorter online version of the story has the date OCT. 22 (sic), 2015, and has the title “In Ancient DNA, Evidence of Plague Much Earlier Than Previously Known.” The passage quoted above is from the online version.)

The academic article mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
Rasmussen, Simon, Morten Erik Allentoft, Kasper Nielsen, Ludovic Orlando, Martin Sikora, Karl-Göran Sjögren, Anders Gorm Pedersen, Mikkel Schubert, Alex Van Dam, Christian Moliin Outzen Kapel, Henrik Bjørn Nielsen, Søren Brunak, Pavel Avetisyan, Andrey Epimakhov, Mikhail Viktorovich Khalyapin, Artak Gnuni, Aivar Kriiska, Irena Lasak, Mait Metspalu, Vyacheslav Moiseyev, Andrei Gromov, Dalia Pokutta, Lehti Saag, Liivi Varul, Levon Yepiskoposyan, Thomas Sicheritz-Pontén, Robert A Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr, Rasmus Nielsen, Kristian Kristiansen, and Eske Willerslev. “Early Divergent Strains of Yersinia Pestis in Eurasia 5,000 Years Ago.” Cell 163, no. 3 (Oct. 2015): 571-82.

Only 5% of Gender Pay Differential Is Likely Due to Discrimination

(p. A17) Full-time employment is technically defined as more than 35 hours. This raises an obvious problem: A simple side-by-side comparison of all men and all women includes people who work 35 hours a week, and others who work 45. Men are significantly more likely than women to work longer hours, according to the BLS. And if we compare only people who work 40 hours a week, BLS data show that women then earn on average 90 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Career choice is another factor. Research in 2013 by Anthony Carnevale, a Georgetown University economist, shows that women flock to college majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Of the 10 lowest-paying majors–such as “drama and theater arts” and “counseling psychology”–only one, “theology and religious vocations,” is majority male.
Conversely, of the 10 highest-paying majors–including “mathematics and computer science” and “petroleum engineering”–only one, “pharmacy sciences and administration,” is majority female. Eight of the remaining nine are more than 70% male.
Other factors that account for earnings differences include marriage and children, both of which cause many women to leave the workforce for years. June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, concluded in a 2005 study that “there is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.”
. . .
Ms. O’Neill and her husband concluded in their 2012 book, “The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market,” that once all these factors are taken into account, very little of the pay differential between men and women is due to actual discrimination, which is “unlikely to account for a differential of more than 5 percent but may not be present at all.”

For the full commentary, see:
SARAH KETTERER. “The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die; You have to ignore many variables to think women are paid less than men. California is happy to try.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 1, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Sept. 30, 2015.)

The O’Neill book mentioned above, is:
O’Neill, June E., and Dave M. O’Neill. The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market: The Role of Employment Discrimination Policies. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2012.