Category: Books

The “Silly, Elitist,” and “Venal” in Modern Art

(p. A26) Suzi Gablik, an art critic, author and theorist who once championed modernism — and was once an artist of that persuasion — but found fame when she turned against it, died on May 7 [2022] at her home in Blacksburg, Va.

. . .

At the invitation of the United States government, she began to lecture about American art around the world, an experience that altered her thinking about contemporary art. It was not just daunting but embarrassing, as she wrote later, to try to describe “some of the aggressively absurd forms of art that dominated the decade of the 1970s in America: Vito Acconci putting a match to his breast and burning the hair of his chest; Chris Burden crawling half-naked across broken glass.”

She began to feel that modernism — her religion — had reached its limits. Its provocations were no longer transgressive but silly, elitist and even venal, having been co-opted by corporate sponsors and the growing art market. Her salvo of a book, “Has Modernism Failed?,” arrived with a bang in 1984, and all of a sudden she was a sought-after speaker in her own country, a dissident voice pilloried by some critics but welcomed by others.

. . .

Decrying the pointlessness and commercialism of contemporary art was hardly a new position — Tom Wolfe had gleefully staked it out in “The Painted Word,” in 1975 — but Ms. Gablik’s book nonetheless struck a chord.

For the full obituary, see:

Penelope Green. “Suzi Gablik, Art Critic and Author Who Took Modernism to Task, Dies at 87.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 21, 2022): A26.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 20, 2022, and has the title “Suzi Gablik, Art Critic Who Took Modernism to Task, Dies at 87.”)

Gablik’s “salvo” against modern art is:

Gablik, Suzi. Has Modernism Failed? Revised 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004 [1984].

As a student, I greatly annoyed one of my philosophy professors when I favorably quoted:

Wolfe, Tom. The Painted Word. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., 1975.

“The Car Emancipated the Masses”

(p. 11) Ear-shredding noise, toxic air, interminable traffic jams, chaos and death — all the result of untrammeled population expansion. Is this a description of a contemporary urban nightmare? Not quite: We’re talking about 19th-century London, although the situation in Paris and other major cities wasn’t much better. And the cause of all this misery was … the horse.

As recounted by Bryan Appleyard in his compelling new book, “The Car,” by 1900 the 50,000 horses required to meet London’s transportation needs deposited 500 tons of excrement daily. Hooves and carriage wheels threw up curtains of fetid muck. Accidents caused by mechanical failures and spooked animals were often fatal to passengers, drivers and the horses themselves. New York City employed 130,000 horses and predictions were made that by 1930 that city’s streets would be piled three stories high with dung. Yet another dire prophecy fallen victim to the continuity fallacy — the belief that a current trend will endure forever.

Things change because when problems arise, people work at solving them, and sometimes they arrive at solutions. The answer to the psychosocial and physical degradation brought on by too many people employing too many horses in the burgeoning Industrial Age was, of course, the development of the motor vehicle. Specifically, one powered by the internal combustion engine.

. . .

For all the carping and finger-pointing leveled at traditional automobiles — much of which Appleyard acknowledges as valid — he is unabashed about his appreciation for the most important machine in human history. As he points out, “The car emancipated the masses far more effectively than any political ideology; that it did so at a cost should not obliterate the importance of that freedom.”

Well said. Vroom.

For the full review, see:

Jonathan Kellerman. “Auto Erotica.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, September 25, 2022): 11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Sept. 23, 2022, and has the title “How the Car Created the Modern World.”)

The book under review is:

Appleyard, Bryan. The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine That Made the Modern World. New York: Pegasus Books, 2022.

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier Is Melting at Only Half the Peak Rate of the Past 200 Years

Barbara Rush’s honest acknowledgement that the scientific evidence suggests slower glacial melting than the popular doomsday predictions claim, is especially powerful and credible coming from the author of an earlier book praised by environmentalists for its sensitive portrayal of the harms of rising sea levels.

(p. 7) If Antarctica is going to lose a lot of ice this century, it will likely come from Thwaites. If it disintegrated, it would be responsible for over two feet of sea level rise, and its collapse could destabilize the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet, causing global sea levels to jump 10 feet or more. In terms of the fate of our coastal communities, this particular glacier is the biggest wild card, the largest known unknown, the pile of coins that could tip the scales one way or another. Will Miami even exist in 100 years? Thwaites will decide.

At least that is what many scientists think, which is why Rolling Stone called Thwaites the “doomsday glacier” in 2017. But many of our predictions about just how much ice will enter the ocean from Thwaites and just how quickly this will occur are just that: predictions. That’s because before our mission, we had next to no observational data from this part of the planet, very few bits of raw information on which to base models.

When I read about the collapse of Antarctica’s great glaciers, I feel I am being encouraged to jump to a conclusion: that no matter what we do now, what lies ahead is bound to be worse than what came before.

This kind of thinking not only undermines our ability to imagine a climate-changed world that is more equitable than the one we currently live in; it also turns Antarctica into a passive symbol of the coming apocalypse.

. . .

This week Nature Geoscience published a paper analyzing the data from that submarine. The authors, many of whom were on board the vessel with me, suggest that sometime over the past couple hundred years, Thwaites retreated at two to three times the rate we see today. Put another way: At the cold nadir of the planet, one of the world’s largest glaciers is stepping farther outside the script we imagined for it, likely defying even our most detailed projections of what is to come.

For the full story, see:

Elizabeth Rush. “What Antarctica’s Disintegration Asks of Us.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, September 11, 2022): 7.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 8, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The academic article published in Nature Geoscience, and mentioned above, is:

Graham, Alastair G. C., Anna Wåhlin, Kelly A. Hogan, Frank O. Nitsche, Karen J. Heywood, Rebecca L. Totten, James A. Smith, Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand, Lauren M. Simkins, John B. Anderson, Julia S. Wellner, and Robert D. Larter. “Rapid Retreat of Thwaites Glacier in the Pre-Satellite Era.” Nature Geoscience (Sept. 5, 2022), DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01019-9.

Rush’s book mentioned above is:

Rush, Elizabeth. Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2018.

Both Insourcing and Outsourcing Can Be Successful Strategies

(p. A13) In “Profit From the Source,” four Europe-based partners at Boston Consulting Group—Christian Schuh, Wolfgang Schnellbächer, Alenka Triplat and Daniel Weise—make the case for drastic change. Procurement, they assert, has been badly neglected: “When the boss offers someone a job in procurement, they know they’re on the fast track to nowhere.” Top executives, they claim, spend far too little time with suppliers, even though purchasing swallows more than half of the average company’s budget. “That’s a mismatch with potentially existential consequences,” they write. Instead, they insist, companies should put procurement at the center of corporate strategy.

. . .

Serving up familiar stories about the likes of Apple and Tesla, the authors write admiringly: “The world’s most successful companies . . . make virtually nothing themselves. They are, in effect, the consumer-facing, brand-owning centripetal force at the core of a business ecosystem.” But many companies have been moving in the opposite direction. In recent years, Facebook (now Meta) began designing chips for the servers in its data centers; Costco built a slaughterhouse to ensure its stores’ supply of chickens; and Cleveland-Cliffs bought steel mills to supply from its iron mines. Much of the business world seems to think that outsourcing has gone too far. Should the chief procurement officer help identify ways to bring parts of the supply chain back in house? The authors don’t say.

For the full review, see:

Marc Levinson. “BOOKSHELF; Consider The Supplier.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 29, 2022): A13.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis within paragraph, in original.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 28, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Profit From the Source’ Review: Consider the Supplier.”)

The book under review is:

Schuh, Christian, Wolfgang Schnellbacher, Alenka Triplat, and Daniel Weise. Profit from the Source: Transforming Your Business by Putting Suppliers at the Core. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2022.

Claremont Censors Professor for Quoting Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn

The courageous and decent hero of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is the black slave Jim. To censor this work because of its vocabulary, spectacularly misses Mark Twain’s point. How many of those who censor Huckleberry Finn have actually read Huckleberry Finn?

(p. A15) Claremont, Calif.

I teach at Claremont McKenna College, the No. 1-ranked liberal-arts college for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE may need to consider its ratings.

On Oct. 4, 2021, my class discussed Plato’s “Republic” and his views about censorship. A student objected that Plato was mistaken about its necessity. Here in the U.S., she said, there is none. Someone brought up “Huckleberry Finn.” She replied, correctly, that removing a book from curriculums doesn’t constitute censorship. I pointed out that the case was more complicated. The book had also been removed from libraries and published in expurgated editions.

An international student asked me why. I told her, quoting Mark Twain’s precise language, which meant speaking the N-word.

. . .

. . ., the dean enlisted the help of both the department chairman and a co-director of the college’s Open Academy program—a resource center that describes its purpose as “to counter the forces that are pulling us apart with educational strategies that bring us together”—to ban me from teaching any required courses in the future, seemingly into perpetuity.

. . .

The administration’s behavior toward me and two similar cases in the literature department seem to show that CMC sets the bounds of faculty speech arbitrarily. This spring, a literature adjunct read aloud and asked students to discuss a passage from “The Color Purple” that contained the N-word. They complained. Ms. Antecol summoned the adjunct, who apologized and agreed to undergo recommended counseling. The professor submitted to re-education and training in critical race theory. Despite all this—and a glowing recommendation by the faculty member who observed her course—the class the adjunct was set to teach at CMC in the fall was abruptly canceled.

When a tenured literature professor, who is also well-connected to the board of trustees and the media, committed a similar offense, he received no penalty. Last fall the professor assigned Robert Lowell’s poem “For the Union Dead,” which contains the N-word. When he played in class a recording of Lowell reading the poem, a student exploded, excoriating both author and teacher as old white men. The associate vice president for diversity and inclusion informed the professor by telephone, not in writing, that he was in the clear because he hadn’t himself read the forbidden word aloud in class.

The effects of the administration’s actions are disastrous and lasting. Students, already fearful to speak their minds, become even more so when they see that certain peers can veto the content of courses and conduct of teachers arbitrarily.

. . .

My job as a teacher is to oppose ignorance wherever it manifests itself. If a dean promotes the work of Daniele da Volterra, Pope Paul IV’s painter of fig leaves, I have no choice but to stand for the original of Michelangelo. And so must I stand for the original works of Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass, exactly as written by their authors. They deserve that, as do my students.

For the full commentary see:

Christopher Nadon. “Censorship at a Top College for Free Speech.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 22, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

A thrifty edition of Mark Twain’s humane masterpiece is:

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1994 [1885].

Nobody Wanted to Buy Tony Fadell’s Early Inventions

(p. C7) Tony Fadell began his Silicon Valley career in 1991 at General Magic, which he calls “the most influential startup nobody has ever heard of.” He sketches his early persona as the all-too-typical engineering nerd dutifully donning an interview suit only to be told to ditch the jacket and tie before the meeting begins. He started at the bottom, building tools to check the work of others, many of whom just happened to be established legends from the original Apple Macintosh team.

General Magic failed at its ambitious goal: to create demand for its ingenious hand-held computer at a time when most people didn’t know they needed a computer at all. In other words, though the company had a great product, the product didn’t solve a pressing problem for consumers. Mr. Fadell offers candid reasons why such a smart group of people could have overlooked this basic market reality. Relaying the “gut punch of our failure,” he describes what it’s like “when you think you know everything (p. C8) then suddenly realize you have no idea what you’re doing.”

Four years later, Mr. Fadell landed as chief technology officer at Philips, the 300,000-employee Dutch electronics company, where he had a big title, a new team, a budget and a mission: The company was going to make a hand-held computer for now-seasoned desktop users who were beginning to see the need for a mobile device. Using Microsoft Windows CE as the operating system, it launched the Philips Velo in 1997. This was a $599.99 “personal digital assistant”—keyboard, email, docs, calendar, the works—in a friendly 14-ounce package. All the pieces were there, the author writes, except “a real sales and retail partnership.” No one—not Best Buy, not Circuit City, not Philips itself—knew how to sell the product, or whom to sell it to. So here was another “lesson learned via gut punch”: There is a lot more to a successful product than a good gadget, even an excellent one.

. . .

He uses his problem-solution-failure style to share stories about how he built the Nest thermostat and the Nest Labs company—from fundraising, building a retail channel and navigating patent litigation to marketing, packaging and customer support.

The best moments in this section, and perhaps the most difficult for Mr. Fadell to write, are about the acquisition of Nest by Google. He pulls no punches in describing what an outsider might call a botched venture integration. Google paid $3.2 billion for Nest in 2014 but within two years began to consider selling. “In utter frustration,” Mr. Fadell walked away. The lessons in these pages are as much for big companies acquiring startups as they are for the startups being acquired.

For the full review, see:

Steven Sinofsky. “Running The Tortuous ‘Idea Maze’.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 18, 2022): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 17, 2022, and has the title “‘Build’ Review: Failure Is the Mother of Invention.”)

The book under review is:

Fadell, Tony. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making. New York: Harper Business, 2022.

Gun Inventors Were “Inveterate Tinkerers”

(p. A17) Whenever I hear the name Smith & Wesson, I think of the scene in the film “Sudden Impact” when Clint Eastwood’s Inspector Harry Callahan confronts a group of would-be robbers. “We’re not just gonna let you walk out of here,” Callahan tells them. When one of the crooks asks, “Who’s we, sucker?” Callahan responds, in classic Dirty Harry fashion: “Smith, and Wesson, and me.”

In “Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them,” John Bainbridge Jr. chronicles the rise of America’s greatest gunmakers—among them Colt, Remington, Winchester and, yes, Smith and Wesson. Many of these American armorers began as inveterate tinkerers in small workshops along the Connecticut River during the mid-19th century, in a region that could be called early industrial America’s fertile crescent. While some of these inventors were focused on rifles and others on handguns, they all shared the same goal: to design a repeating firearm and a reliable, waterproof cartridge containing bullet, gunpowder and ignition device, making it possible to fire shot after shot without needing to reload.

. . .

. . . there was the Volition Repeater, invented in 1847 by Walter Hunt, the creator of the household safety pin. Hunt’s rifle, in theory, could be loaded with up to a dozen cartridges underneath its long barrel. But the complex loading mechanism “never worked quite right,” so Hunt sold his patent and left it to others to perfect his idea. “With this would-be firearm, Walter Hunt had made the nation’s future but not his own,” Mr. Bainbridge tells us. “Among those who benefited from Walter Hunt’s genius were Oliver Winchester, Horace Smith, and Daniel Baird Wesson. None of these gun barons possessed the broadly inventive mind of Walter Hunt, yet all would eclipse Hunt while taking advantage of his pioneering work in weaponry.”

For the full review, see:

Mark Yost. “BOOKSHELF; Repeat Inventors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 19, 2022): A17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date May 18, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Gun Barons’ Review: Repeat Inventors.”)

The book under review is:

Bainbridge, John, Jr. Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2022.

Anxiety Increases “Ability to Focus”

(p. C1) In a pair of studies published in the journal Emotion by Jeffrey Birk, myself and colleagues in 2011, we induced anxiety in young adults by asking them to vividly imagine being a passenger in a car accident and helping injured people in its aftermath. Compared with a second group who experienced a happy mood induction, the anxious group showed a greater ability to focus and control their attention during a computerized assessment.

Over the past decade, research has also shown something that many scientists didn’t expect: higher levels of dopamine, the “feel good” hormone, when we’re anxious. We have long known that dopamine spikes when an experience is pleasurable and also in anticipation of such rewards, activating brain areas that motivate and prepare us. The fact that anxiety also boosts dopamine levels points to its role in making positive possibilities into reality.

. . .

(p. C2) . . ., there are many ways to use anxiety to create a deeper sense of personal fulfillment. Beginning in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running and most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted, asked a fundamental question: What leads to a healthy and happy life? Following over 1,300 people from all walks of life over decades, the study has found that one of the best predictors—better than social class, IQ and genetic factors—is having a sense of purpose.

For the full essay, see:

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. “In Praise of Anxiety.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 7, 2022): C1-C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date May 6, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from:

Dennis-Tiwary, Tracy. Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad). New York: Harper Wave, 2022.

Freedom of Speech Matters “Above All Liberties”

(p. C14) Today, Milton is best known for “Paradise Lost.” Long before writing that epic poem about the fall of man, however, he was a polemicist who participated in the political controversies of his day.

. . .

A bill in Parliament demanded that printers receive government approval for their publications, in part to guard against the supposed heresies of Milton and his fellow authors. For Milton, this licensing scheme was an illiberal outrage—and he said so in “Areopagitica,” which is now widely regarded as the world’s first important essay in defense of free speech.

The 1644 treatise takes its peculiar name from the Areopagus, a rocky mount just below the Acropolis in Athens. The ancient Greeks gathered there for debates and trials. It’s also the site of Paul’s sermon in Acts 17. Milton presented his essay in the form of a speech, though he never delivered it. That’s probably just as well: At nearly 18,000 words, it would have taken about three hours.

“Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties,” wrote Milton, in a line that has echoed across centuries.

. . .

A minor curiosity of “Areopagitica” is Milton’s brief mention of visiting “the famous Galileo grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought.” This is the only record of a meeting between the era’s greatest scribe and its greatest scientist, and it would have happened when Milton traveled to Italy in 1638.

For the full review, see:

John J. Miller. “MASTERPIECE; A Ringing Defense of Free Speech.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 07, 2022): C14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 6, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

A recent edition of Milton’s book is:

Milton, John. Areopagitica and Other Writings. New York: Penguin, 2016.

Wary, Subdued Infants Tend to Grow into “Anxious, Inhibited Adults”

(p. A21) Prof. Jerome Kagan, a Harvard psychologist whose research into temperament found that shy infants often grow up to be anxious and fearful adults because of their biological nature as well as the way they were nurtured, died on May 10 in Chapel Hill, N.C.

. . .

Professor Kagan argued in more than two dozen books, including the widely praised “The Nature of the Child” (1984), that some children were genetically wired to worry and that they proved to be more resilient than expected as they passed from one stage of maturity to another. He also contended that the specifics of parenting were often not as crucial to a child’s future as parents think, although the child’s natural predisposition to be shy or exuberant could be altered by experience.

. . .

Professor Kagan and his collaborators, including Howard A. Moss and Nancy C. Snidman, pioneered the reintroduction of physiology as a determinant of psychological characteristics that could be measured in the brain.

They derived their conclusions from lengthy studies that started with the videotaped reactions of toddlers and infants as young as 4 months to various stimuli — unfamiliar objects, people and situations — and correlated those reactions to their temperament as teenagers and beyond, as measured in interviews.

The wary ones who were subdued, shy and hovered around their mothers or who fussed, thrashed around and cried — about 15 percent of the total — tended to become anxious, inhibited adults. Another 15 percent who were ebullient as infants and embraced every new toy and interviewer tended to develop into fearless children and adolescents.

Professor Kagan acknowledged that as an ideological liberal he had originally believed that all individuals were capable of achieving similar goals if afforded the same opportunities. “I was so resistant to awarding biology much influence,” he wrote.

For the full obituary see:

Sam Roberts. “Jerome Kagan, 92, Psychologist Who Tied Temperament to Biology, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 22, 2021): A21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 21, 2021, and has the title “Jerome Kagan, Who Tied Temperament to Biology, Dies at 92.”

Kagan’s book, mentioned above, is:

Kagan, Jerome. The Nature of the Child (Tenth Anniversary Edition). New York: Basic Books, 1994.

“Overzealous Environmentalism” Hurts Poor Poaching “Misunderstood Outcasts”

(p. 17) In the journalist Lyndsie Bourgon’s telling, . . ., the poachers are not quite villains. Instead, they are responding — if not justifiably then at least predictably — to a lack of economic opportunities and the perception that the rules governing forests are arbitrary and heavy-handed.

Bourgon puts herself in the poacher’s shoes, and the result is a refreshing and compassionate warning about the perils of well-intentioned but overzealous environmentalism.

. . .

. . . she regards the history of the American conservation movement with something approaching scorn. It was hatched, she writes, to serve the whims of wealthy urban vacationers who wanted access to lands unspoiled by their longtime inhabitants. National parks were conceived as vehicles to resist “any attempt to turn to utilitarian purposes the resources represented by the forest,” as one booster put it.

At times, the motives were even less pure. Bourgon describes how ultrarich environmentalists in the early 1900s saw conservation — and in particular the protection of California’s redwoods — “as part of a mission to enshrine a white, masculine dominance over the wilderness.” Some conservationists, she notes, were “eugenicists who saw parallels between environmental destruction and the decline of Nordic supremacy.”

. . .

This is the backdrop for Bourgon’s depiction of “tree thieves” as misunderstood outcasts. “I have begun to see the act of timber poaching as not simply a dramatic environmental crime, but something deeper — an act to reclaim one’s place in a rapidly changing world,” she writes, tracing that desire back to 16th-century England, where poachers in royal forests were celebrated as folk heroes.

Bourgon immersed herself with a small handful of these men in the Northwest, and a picture emerges of a fractious band of down-on-their-luck crooks. A number abuse drugs. The poachers acknowledge that what they’re doing is illegal, but they frame it as principled, akin to stealing a loaf of bread to feed their families.

. . .

On the one hand, unemployed loggers and others who are suffering economically because of stringent enforcement of conservation laws are facing poverty. On the other hand, the damage that poachers are inflicting on forests appears to be, in the grand scheme of things, modest.

For the full review, see:

David Enrich. “No Clear-Cut Villains.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, July 24, 2022): 17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June [sic] 21, 2022, and has the title “When It Comes to Timber Theft, There Are No Clear-Cut Villains.” Where the online version has “misunderstood poacher’s” [sic], the print version quoted above has “misunderstood outcasts.”)

The book under review is:

Bourgon, Lyndsie. Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022.