Lev Davidovich

1. MIT
2. Harvard
3. Cambridge
4. University College London
5. Imperial
6. Oxford
7. Stanford
8. Yale
9. Chicago
10. Caltech

Via the BBC.

Several ideas about using financial instruments and a for-profit approach in the world of nonprofits are now taking hold.

Edward Sharp-Paul's An Opinion Piece On A Controversial Topic is some pretty awesome meta ("I was inspired to write this piece by Currently Fashionable Polemicist, who summarised the Issue better than I could when they said 'oversimplification that makes me feel smart'. I have a strong opinion on this Issue, and my sharing it with you at this time is in no way attributable to opportunism on my part."). But it really leaps into full-flight when you hit the comments ("Do not understand why you wrote about this Issue, when this other Issue exists.").

In case you think that I have taken a knee-jerk stance without giving the Issue due consideration, I used The Google to do some research while I was writing this Opinion Piece. I’m sure you’ll agree that a single reference to the findings of Ideologically-Driven, Ethically-Dubious Lobby Group With Questionable Funding Practices is very interesting, and adds a veneer of rigour to this whole piece. Furthermore, when you take those findings and draw wild conclusions, you will understand why I’m shoehorning in a reference to a bitter media spat from quite a while ago that I’m quite clearly still upset about.

I also have a deeply personal and sad experience, which I will bring up here to invalidate your objections — even though it doesn’t inform my argument or actually have anything much to do with the Issue at all. This deeply personal and sad experience of mine means that you are a horrible person if you raise any objections. If you too have a deeply personal and sad experience pertaining to the Issue, I will adopt a tone of sympathy. If you disagree with me, I will affect sympathy while implying that you are feeble-minded for allowing your feelings to cloud your judgement.

An Opinion Piece On A Controversial Topic (via Dan Hon)

Canada's Conservative government has become notorious for muzzling government scientists, requiring them to speak through political minders (often callow twentysomethings with no science background who received government jobs in exchange for their work on election campaigns). Government scientists are not allowed to speak to the press alone no matter how trivial the subject, and the default position when reporters seek interviews is to turn them down. (Much of Canada's state-funded science pertains to the climate and the environment; Canada's Tories were elected with strong backing from the dirty tar sands and other polluting industries)

A group of University of British Columbia students decided to measure just how extraordinarily secretive science has become in Stephen Harper's Canada. Dave Ng writes:

What if there was a non-political research project that involved a collaboration between NASA scientists and Environment Canada scientists? How easy would it be for a journalist to talk to the scientists involved? It turns out it would take only 15 minutes for something to be arranged with NASA. With Environment Canada, however, it would take the activities of 11 media relations people, sending over 50 pages of internal emails, before a list of irrelevant information was finally sent back - all of this long after the deadline had passed. This is what happened to journalist Tom Spears in April 2012. With this, this Terry Podcast episode asks a simple question: If it was this difficult to get interviews for a positive science story, what would happen if a journalist needed to actually ask some tough questions? Please take a listen as this episode of the Terry Podcast examines the relationship between media and Canadian Government scientists, and questions whether the Harper government has politicized science.

The Terry Project on CiTR #27: Silencing the Scientists

Podcast feed

MP3 link

(Image: Talal Al Salem/Terry Project)

The election of Bill de Blasio to New York City mayor on Tuesday was read as a rejection of outgoing mayor Michael Bloomberg. In a meeting between the two today, Bloomberg looked none too happy about it. 

WNYC politics reporter Brigid Bergin snapped the photo of a less-than excited Bloomberg speaking to de Blasio at the "Bull Pen," the mayor's main city hall office. With his arms crossed, head turned away, and slumped shoulders, Bloomberg's didn't seem to be taking kindly to talking to his soon-to-be successor. What's making Bloomberg look so unhappy? Could it be de Blasio's choice of a can of soda for the meeting, as The Wire's Allie Jones noted? Or perhaps Bloomberg felt intimidated by the ten-inch height difference between the two?

As the Internet does, Photoshop wizards quickly took to the scene. The New York Times' Dave Itzkoff likened Bloomberg to the unimpressed face of McKayla Maroney, and designer Eric Gordon dropped an appropriate Grumpy Cat onto the scene.

For his part, de Blasio certainly relished in Bloomberg's discomfort, as the AP photo of the meeting shows. And to be fair, Bloomberg is not the most effusive dude around, even when he's not talking to his predecessor. 

De Blasio shouldn't rub it in too much, though; Bloomberg is still mayor through the end of 2013.

(Top image: Brigid Bergin via Twitter)

Usually depicted as a champion of the rich, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg also started a bold antipoverty program.

Trans fats may not be much longer for this country -- and, like many other public health initiatives, we have outgoing New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, at least in part, to thank.

Trans fat is the stuff created when hydrogen gets added to vegetable oil through a process called “hydrogenation,” which has the benefit of making oil less likely to spoil, but also more likely to raise harmful cholesterol levels.

The Food and Drug Administration announced earlier today that it will take steps to eliminate trans fats from the American food supply by no longer describing the heart-clogging ingredient as "generally recognized as safe," a label that allows food companies to use trans fat without specific FDA approval.

"FDA can act when it believes an ingredient is, in fact, not GRAS [generally recognized as safe]," the FDA announced Thursday. "And that's what the agency's preliminary determination is doing now with partially hydrogenated oils. A Federal Register notice was published on Nov. 7, 2013 announcing the preliminary determination that PHOs are not GRAS."

Behind the national push to eliminate trans fat -- as is true with many public health initiatives of late -- is Bloomberg's effort to drive them out of the country's largest city in 2006.

In 2006, Bloomberg made “trans fat” the new public health enemy No. 1. New York City’s ban on “trans fat” barred restaurants from using hydrogenated vegetable oil in cooking. It took full effect in 2008. Thirteen cities followed suit afterward.

This is at least the third Bloomberg public health policy to go national, following bans on smoking in public places and calorie count listings in chain restaurants.

In a heartfelt and personal blog-post, Google security engineer Brandon Downey discusses his feelings on the discovery that the NSA had tapped Google's private fiber links. In three words: "Fuck these guys." But you should read the rest, too.

Fuck these guys.

I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces.

I've seen armies of machines DOS-ing Google. I've seen worms DOS'ing Google to find vulnerabilities in other people's software. I've seen criminal gangs figure out malware. I've seen spyware masquerading as toolbars so thick it breaks computers because it interferes with the other spyware.

I've even seen oppressive governments use state sponsored hacking to target dissidents.

But even though we suspected this was happening, it still makes me terribly sad. It makes me sad because I believe in America. Not in that flag-waving bullshit we've-got-our-big-trucks-and-bigger-tanks sort of way, but in the way that you can looked a good friend who has a lot of flaws, but every time you meet him, you think, "That guy still has some good ideas going on".

This is the big story in tech today

Kenneth Roth

How should we make sense of the enforcement of a “red line” prohibiting one horrible weapon that has killed relatively few but leaving untouched the conventional weapons that the Syrian military has used to kill tens of thousands? It is easy to disparage a chemical weapons deal that aims to stop the method of slaughter responsible for fewer than 2 percent of Syria’s estimated 115,000 deaths resulting from the conflict over the past two-and-a-half years while leaving unimpeded the means used to slaughter more than 98 percent. “Red light for chemical weapons, green light for conventional weapons” would fairly summarize the approach. Yet it would be wrong to belittle September’s last-minute diplomatic breakthrough.

Saudi Arabia is threatening to break with the United States and pursue a more robust role in supporting the rebellion against the Syrian government. But officials worry about alienating a friend and helping jihadists.

A spectacular PSA from the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls on Americans to join in a rally against mass surveillance on Oct 26, featuring everyone from Phil Donahue and John Cusak to Molly Crabapple and David Segal, as well as Congressmen like John Conyers, prominent whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg, Mark Klein, Thomas Drake, and a many others, making the case for limiting government surveillance. It's a spectacular video, and I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd tell your friends about it and show it around.

A Rally Against Mass Surveillance

President Obama’s effort to reconcile his conflicting impulses on Syria has been reflected in a far more contentious debate among his advisers than previously known.

Some day in the near future, cars will drive themselves. Traffic jams and deadly accidents will become obsolete. Morning commutes will evolve into less-stressful affairs, as riders can sit back with their coffee and let computers handle the trip.

That's the dream of many a transportation visionary, at least. And it's not totally implausible. Google is developing "autonomous vehicles" that are improving rapidly each year — Sergey Brin thinks they could hit the road within five years. Nissan and Volvo are planning to add a few self-driving features to their cars by 2020 to help minimize accidents. A future of completely self-driving vehicles doesn't seem too far off.

And yet, as a new report (pdf) from the Eno Center for Transportation details, there are all sorts of obstacles that still need to be overcome before self-driving cars ever take over our highways.

The costs remain high and the technology has encountered some unexpected sticking points. What's more, state and federal regulations, as well as fights over liability and data privacy, could impede widespread adoption of self-driving cars.

"Self-driving cars have the potential to monumentally transform transport as we know it," explained report co-author Daniel Fagnant — and bring billions of dollars worth of benefits. But getting to that point won't be easy.

The case for self-driving cars

It's easy to rattle off various benefits of a world packed with self-driving vehicles. Safety is the biggest. Right now, more than 30,000 people die each year in the United States from automobile crashes. And roughly 40 percent of fatal accidents are caused by alcohol, distraction, drugs or fatigue. Letting robots take the wheel would save lives.

Or take congestion. Cars driven by robots could travel closer together at steadier speeds. They wouldn't bunch up in traffic jams caused by a ripple of brake lights. More cars could squeeze onto the road and move more quickly. The savings in time and fuel would be enormous.

The authors of the Eno report, Daniel Fagnant and Kara Kockelman of the University of Texas, tried to tally up some of these benefits:

If just 10 percent of the vehicles on the road were self-driving cars, the authors estimate, the country could save more than $37 billion a year — fewer deaths, less fuel, more free time. If we reached a point where self-driving vehicles constituted 90 percent of the cars on the road, the benefits would rise to some $447.1 billion a year.

Now, as Fagnant pointed out in a presentation Wednesday, these are "ballpark, rough estimates ... prognostications, really." So don't get too fixated on the numbers. They're meant to be illustrative, not definitive.

The authors also didn't try to quantify any of the costs of self-driving vehicles. What's the price tag on these gadgets? How does that compare to the benefits?

And what about unforeseen consequences? Researchers can't predict how, exactly, self-driving cars might reshape society. Maybe the vehicles will induce even more travel and congestion will get worse. Or maybe they'll lead to a fresh wave of suburban sprawl and increase air pollution. It's impossible to know at this point. Still, the upside is tantalizing.

What's standing in the way of self-driving vehicles?

Even if the benefits are massive, though, self-driving vehicles have a lot of hoops to leap through. First, the technology is still very pricey. By one estimate, the first wave of autonomous vehicles could cost over $100,000 — five times the cost of the average new vehicle. Even that might be an underestimate: The 3-D sensors alone on Google's autonomous car cost about $70,000.

Those costs would presumably come down over time, but no one knows how rapidly. And that's a big hurdle. One survey by JD Power and Associates found that only 20 percent of Americans would "definitely" or "probably" buy a car with self-driving capabilities even if the price dropped to $30,000. (The figure rose to 37 percent when price wasn't mentioned at all.)

What's more, while the technology is making major strides, it's far from perfect. Google's self-driving cars have now traveled more than 435,000 miles in California, but the cars have yet to be fully tested in urban environments.

Most likely, self-driving technology will emerge gradually, piece by piece. Automakers are already installing features like adaptive cruise control or systems that warn drivers when their cars stray out of their lanes. Volvo is developing technology to allow cars to interact with each other over wireless spectrum and alert each other when they inch too close.

But even intermediate features pose unique challenges. As Will Knight reports in MIT Technology Review, early autonomous cars will likely require their human drivers to take the wheel during especially complicated situations. But as BMW is discovering, it's difficult to get people to drift in and out of attention while driving — and the process of switching back and forth between robot and human could well make these cars less safe, at first.

Policy problems with driverless cars

That's just the technology. But as the Eno report details, there are also plenty of legal and policy obstacles.

For starters, self-driving cars will almost certainly have to meet more rigorous standards than regular cars. "The first accident that's caused by a computer malfunction will freak everyone out far beyond the thousands of car accidents caused by humans," explained ENO Director Joshua Schank. That makes regulations and litigation much trickier.

So far, only California and Nevada have passed laws allowing licensing of self-driving vehicles — and standards in those two states are different. If states aren't consistent in what sorts of licensing and safety standard they require, it will be extremely difficult for manufacturers to figure out how to comply with the rules. That's why Fagnant argues that the federal government should get involved here, to set uniform standards.

But even that's not as easy as it sounds. "You still need to understand what the safety requirements actually are before you can determine licensing," said Mary Lynn Tischer of the Federal Highway Administration. No one's even begun to develop a framework for what that might look like.

Lawsuits raise another challenge. Even if self-driving vehicles are safer, they'll likely never be crash-free. What happens if a deer or pedestrian suddenly jumps out in front of a car? Who would be at fault if the self-driving vehicle hits something? The manufacturer? The person behind the wheel? Fagnant notes that self-driving cars are likely to be held to a higher liability standard than regular cars, though if the standard is "grossly higher," that could make the vehicles prohibitively expensive.

There are also all sorts of privacy issues raised by autonomous vehicles. Most of the benefits from self-driving cars come from the vehicles being able to communicate and share data with each other. Similarly, crash data will almost certainly be stored for use by manufacturers and to sort out liability (California's laws require this). But how much data will be stored? And how will it be shared?

Driverless cars could also cause serious disruptions in the labor market — particularly if they start displacing the nation's 240,000 taxi drivers or its 1.6 million truck drivers. "Any time you're looking to replace a human job with an automated job," Fagnant says, "there's going to be opposition."

The Eno report also notes that that there's still a ton of research yet to be done about the prospect of self-driving cars. How secure will the systems be against cybertattacks? What sort of timeline are we talking about for adoption? What sorts of changes might need to be made to our roads or transit systems?

"As long as these and other crucial questions go unanswered," the report concludes, "the nation will be hampered in its ability to successfully plan for and introduce [autonomous vehicles] into the transportation system."

Further reading:

— The weird, counterintuitive science of traffic jams

— Will driverless cars solve energy problems — or create brand new ones?

The U.S.- and Russia-brokered deal to have Syria surrender its chemical weapons is proceeding on schedule.

I haven't written much about the new IPCC report here, largely because it doesn't say much you don't already know: The Earth is getting warmer and human activities are to blame for a good chunk of that warming. So what are we still arguing about? In a new column for Ensia magazine, I talk to climate scientists who make the case that the debate is less about science and more about individual values that affect how different people want to tackle the problems that the science exposes. (And, even, how big different people think those problems really are.) While the fact of climate change is difficult to refute, there's plenty of room for legitimate disagreement (and reasonable discussion) about values and the political policies that they shape.

David Cain's 2010 essay "Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed" -- occasioned by his return to full-time employment -- has a sharp-edged rumination on the modern, 40-hour work-week and what it does to us. In Cain's view, the 40-hour office week leaves us "tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have."

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.

Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?

The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (via Seanan)

(Image: New cubicles, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from plutor's photostream)

No one possibly expected Kanye West's intensely anticipated Yeezus tour to shy away from controversy, but so far it's the accessories that are threatening to overshadow the sprawling, 27-track performance.

Over the weekend, fans in Seattle were treated to a white-robed Jesus impersonator, who joined West onstage just before the rapper performed "Jesus Walks." Now, via creative director Virgil Abloh's Instagram, the Internet has caught a glimpse of what's being sold at the tour's provocative merchandise table. The shirts, tote bags, and sweatshirts aren't emblazoned with the routine concert photos or tour dates you see in high school cafeterias. Complementing Yeezus's uncompromising aesthetics and socially charged commentary, they alternately feature a skeleton in a headdress and a skull draped in the confederate flag, with captions that blare "GOD WANTS YOU" and "I AIN'T COMING DOWN."

Here, have a look at one of the shirts:

Obviously, West's use of the confederate flag isn't a show of solidarity with the guy waving one outside the White House last week. It seems to be his means of co-opting the racist emblem in the context of tracks like "New Slaves" and "Blood on the Leaves," which draws its title and primary sample from chilling lynching imagery in Nina Simone's "Strange Fruit": 

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

The caption beneath Abloh's image of the flag headdress, meanwhile, quotes the opening line of "New Slaves," Yeezus's furious anti-racism manifesto: "Our mamas were raised in an era when / Clean water was only served to the fairer skin." The track goes on to blast "rich nigga racism" and declare that "we the new slaves"; fittingly, West's merchandise graphically alludes to the South's own ugly racial history.

But not everyone's convinced it's a smart move. Given West's massive stature, the worry is a familiar and troubling one: are all of West's fans—many of them young and white—going to pick up on what he's trying to do here? And whose problem is it if they don't, or if they see the confederate flag as an acceptable symbol to wave around on its own?

I have no doubt in my mind that those Confederate flag Yeezus merchandise will sell like hot cakes Dec. 6th in Dallas.

— Do-Z (@SouthernRam24) October 20, 2013

Kanye's team selling confederate flags on merch to White kids is not art or irony, it's just plain old stupid. That's just me though.

— NRCY / The Narcicyst (@TheNarcicyst) October 21, 2013

But of course, in recent weeks it hasn't just been kids misappropriating West's means of getting his point across. And the rapper, to his credit, hasn't been shy about setting things straight.

All images by Virgil Abloh via Instagram.

Data points for modelling an end to the Syrian conflict. Civil wars don’t end quickly: average length since 1945 is ten years. The greater the number of factions, the longer a civil war tends to last. Most civil wars end in decisive military victories, not negotiated settlements. The ones that do end with negotiated settlements divide political power amongst the combatants based on their position on the battlefield

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Seven humanitarian volunteers were abducted in northern Syria on Sunday by a group of unknown gunman, raising concerns about the area's relative safety for those, with the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross already calling for their release. 

Officials with the ICRC told the BBC six workers and one Red Crescent volunteer were kidnapped in Saraqeb, Idlib after a group of gunmen stopped their convoy, which was heading for Damascus. Syrian state TV said the gunmen opened fire on the four ICRC vehicles before capturing the volunteers and blamed terrorists, the same term the government uses for the rebels, according to the Guardian. The ICRC has no idea who kidnapped their employees. "We don't know who took them. It was unidentified armed men," ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told the AFP. The group of volunteers were returning to the capital after delivering medical supplies to difficult to reach areas in the northern part of the country. 

The northern part of Syria is mostly controlled by rebel groups, but there are allegedly extremists among the factions that operate there. Al-Jazeera reports the area where the kidnapping took place has a dangerous reputation: 

The road on which the members were travelling is notorious for kidnappings, Al Jazeera’s Omar Al Saleh reported. “We understand from talking to activists in that area there are a number of armed groups.”  

"Hardline Islamist rebels are known to operate in the area," the BBC's Jim Muir reports.

Magne Barth, the head of the ICRC's Syrian delegation, wasted no time calling for their worker's safe release on Sunday. "We call for the immediate and unconditional release of the seven colleagues abducted this morning," Barth said in a statement. "Both the ICRC and the SARC work tirelessly to provide impartial humanitarian assistance for those most in need across Syria on both sides of the front lines, and incidents such as these potentially undermine our capacity to assist those who need us most."

Gro Harlem Brundtland and Elizaveta Glinka

The conflict in Syria has led to what is arguably one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises since the end of the Cold War. An estimated 115,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians, and many more have been wounded, tortured, or abused. Millions have been driven from their homes, families have been divided, and entire communities torn apart; we must not let considerations of military intervention destroy our ability to focus on getting them help. As doctors and medical professionals from around the world, the scale of this emergency leaves us horrified. We are appalled by the lack of access to health care for affected civilians, and by the deliberate targeting of medical facilities and personnel. It is our professional, ethical, and moral duty to provide treatment and care to anyone in need. When we cannot do so personally, we are obliged to speak out in support of those risking their lives to provide life-saving assistance.

Popcorn really took off in North America in the mid-1880s, but it would take 50 years for it to become a favorite food at movie theaters. According to Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn, "movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn’t want popcorn being ground into it.” Then the Great Depression happened and movies took off as popular cheap entertainment. Popcorn vendors set up outside to provide an equally cheap snack. By the early 1930s, a Kansas City entrepreneur named Julia Braden convinced theaters to allow her to bring her popcorn kiosk into the theater. Of course, eventually the theaters established their own concession stands. This week, both Smithsonian and the New York Times looked at the history of movie popcorn.

"Why Do We Eat Popcorn at the Movies?" (Smithsonian)

Who Made Movie Popcorn? (NYT)

It is dangerous for any country, including America, to see itself as exceptional, whatever its motivation.

“I wish the president had said what he told Lindsey Graham and me in the Oval Office,” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said at a Wall Street Journal breakfast this morning. “That he would support efforts to help the Free Syrian Army change the momentum and that would lead to negotiations that would lead to the departure of Bashar al-Assad.”

But Obama didn’t mention helping the Free Syrian Army, and he’s currently involved in negotiations that would probably make it impossible for him to really help the Free Syrian Army.

McCain’s comments are a reminder that President Obama has articulated two strategic objectives on Syria — and those objectives are now coming into direct conflict.

The first objective, which formed the core of Tuesday’s presidential address and most of the administration’s public strategy, is to reinforce the international ban on chemical weapons. The second — which, as McCain notes, is emphasized more often behind closed doors and less often in public — is to hurt Assad badly enough that he decides to negotiate some kind of power transition, but not so badly that his regime collapses.

It’s never been clear exactly how the United States weights these two objectives. It has occasionally seemed that the proposed strikes to punish Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons were cover for strikes that were actually designed to weaken him militarily. At other times, it’s seemed that the administration’s interest in undermining Assad is simply a lure to win the support of hawks like McCain for limited strikes that would reinforce the prohibition on chemical weapons but leave Assad’s position largely unchanged.

This ambiguity provides a clue to why Russia and Syria are proposing a disarmament plan in the first place: They’re forcing the Obama administration to actually choose between these two objectives — and to choose the one that poses far less of a long-term threat to Assad’s and Putin’s interests.

McCain noted that even as negotiations over the disarmament proposal ramp up, Assad has “resumed air attacks on the Free Syrian Army and stepped up ground attacks against the rebels. He basically feels he has kind of a free ride, at least for a period of time.”

The reasoning is simple, and probably correct: The United States isn’t going to bomb Syria so long as there’s an ongoing process to destroy Assad’s chemical weapons. And any resolution that Russia and Syria would agree to will, at the very least, require the United States to forswear the use of force against Assad so long as he’s fulfilling the terms of the agreement on chemical weapons.

“If you’re sitting in Putin’s seat, I think you’re feeling pretty good today,”  McCain said. “You’ve delayed the strikes on your ally who you’ve been supplying. You’ve played a major role in designing whatever agreement will be sold. And you’ve made it clear you’ll continue to support Bashar al-Assad with weapons and whatever else you can provide him with.”

And, though McCain didn’t say this, you might be about to get the United States to sign onto a deal that basically guarantees they won’t seriously step up their support for Assad’s opposition. From the perspective of Russia and Syria, that’s the upside of the deal: They give the United States what it wants on chemical weapons, but in return, they get the assurance that Washington won’t act to turn the war’s momentum against Assad.

Bashing the U.N.'s response to the chemical weapons attack in Syria as "shameful," National Security Adviser Susan Rice and her deputy made the case for action on Syria in remarkable synchronicity.

As in: literal synchronicity. Here are Rice, right, and deputy adviser Tony Blinken, left, speaking simultaneously on the issue on Tuesday afternoon.

Both Rice and Blinken were in sync with what they said, too. At Washington, D.C.'s, New America Foundation, Rice argued that the administration had already done everything short of taking military action in response to the "largest chemical weapons attack in a quarter century." Recognizing that Americans are more likely to support strikes if taken in concert with allies, she said:

"The reason president Obama decided to pursue limited strikes is that we and other have already exhausted a host of other measures aimed at changing Assad's calculus and his willingness to use chemical weapons."

"Assad would discover that chemical weapons offer no strategic advantage compared to the cost of their use," Rice predicted, without an "endless spiral of escalatory actions." Assad and his allies would be "more than foolish" to take on the United States.

It is up to the U.S., the former ambassador to the United Nations argued, because the international body would continue to see any response vetoed by Russia and China at the Security Council. "I was there for all of those U.N. debates and negotiations on Syria," she said. "I lived it — and it was shameful."

"There aren't many nonpartisan issues left in Washington," Rice said. "This is one is one of them. Or, at least, it should be."

While Rice concluded her remarks, Blinken answered questions at the White House's daily press briefing. His most interesting response came after being asked about the prospect of deferring attacks in favor of Syria giving up its chemical weapons. "We'll obviously discuss the proposal with the Russians," Blinken said. "But it's clear that this proposal comes in the context of the threat of American action. It's important we not take the pressure off." Here is our full story on that.

Just a few days after the announcement that Dr. Seuss's oeuvre will make its e-book debut, another canonical author—this one also bearded—is moving into the 21st century full force. The entire completed works of Leo Tolstoy, author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace, have been posted online and are available to all—free of charge.

That's 90 volumes and tens of thousands of pages in Tolstoy's native Russian—no beach read, as any literary minded college kid can tell you. Nevertheless, the collection of all of Count Leo's works in a single digital archive does represent a triumph of sorts. The archive came about thanks to the efforts of the late novelist's descendants, the Russian news network RIA Novosti reports:

The Tolstoy.ru website will feature the 90-volume edition that was scanned and proofread three times by more than 3,000 volunteers from 49 countries, Tolstaya said.

All of his novels, short stories, fairy tales, essays and personal letters will be available online for free and be downloadable in PDF, FB2 and EPUB formats, recognized by most e-book readers and computers, she said.

Of course, that list includes some texts and letters that would be quite difficult to hunt down in print editions. It also includes Tolstoy's most famous novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which in many editions amount to more than 2,000 pages combined. You won't have trouble finding those at pretty much any bookstore anywhere. But as the college semester picks up, isn't it nice to find them online without a $19.99 price tag?

That's assuming, again, that you read Russian—a major roadblock for some potential users of the archive.

But if you're not in college, it could be even better news. Yesterday, on the subject of the Kindle Single, we discussed how the advent of digital reading devices has and has not changed what people are reading:

[Salon's Laura] Miller pointed to friends of hers who are indeed reading more fiction thanks to technological shifts, but they weren't lapping up short selections from, say, the Antioch Review. They were instead sinking into long classics like Middlemarch, "because for the first time they can carry around a 900-page tome in their shirt pocket." That's a tremendous convenience for those of us who read during our daily commute.

Anna Karenina regards 19th-century technological shifts with suspicion at best and moral despair at worst. But modern developments like this one only make it easier to read Tolstoy's lengthiest works while waiting for the F train. 

William Saletan in Slate on misperception in the Trayvon Martin case Depending on your perspective, George Zimmerman's acquittal was due to societal racism, or Florida's Stand Your Ground law, or gun rights, or whatever. Those are all wrong, Saletan writes. "The problem at the core of this case wasn’t race or guns. The problem was assumption, misperception, and overreaction. And that cycle hasn’t ended with the verdict. It has escalated." The entire tragedy could have been avoided, Saletan writes, except that "two people—their minds clouded by stereotypes that went well beyond race—assumed the worst about one another and acted in haste." Saletan's piece has since been lauded from both sides of the ideological aisle. Huffington Post columnist J.J. McCullough tweets that Saletan's piece is a "Fantastic, thoughtful article on the Zimmerman trial," and The American Conservative's Rod Dreher writes, quite simply, "That makes a lot of sense."

David Rothkopf in Foreign Policy on Obama's lack of a policy on Latin America "It is sometimes thought that the failure to pay much attention to a region at least has the advantage of doing no harm," Rothkopf writes. "Not true. ... Sometimes you own a problem not because you 'broke it' but because your neglect has exacerbated it or made it possible." American foreign policy toward Latin America has failed to address any of a number of important issues: the support of a long-since failed Cuba embargo, aggressive NSA spying on Brazil, the extralegal grounding of the Bolivian president's plane, and a lack of collaboration with Mexico on stopping drugs and guns and increasing free trade. "But mostly what has resonated in the hemisphere during the past four years is a general lack of any U.S. interest or material activity in the region." His take is a "Comprehensive critique on lack of US policy towards Latin America," writes NPR's Senior International Editor Edith Chapin. In addition, Julia Sweig, the director for Latin America Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, tweets (translated from Spanish) that Rothkopf is "one of the few who understands the U.S.-Latino foreign policy of Obama's second term."

Michael Specter in The New Yorker on Jenny McCarthy's faulty and dangerous platform ABC executives should be "ashamed of themselves" for selecting McCarthy—the former Playboy model turned anti-vaccine crusader—to become a regular host on ABC's daytime talk show The View. McCarthy is the most prominent face of the widely-debunked and dangerous anti-vaccine movement, which erroneously claims that vaccines cause autism. "By preaching her message of scientific illiteracy from one end of this country to the other, she has helped make it possible for people to turn away from rational thought. And that is deadly." The New Yorker writer and award-winning author Philip Gourevitch tweets "dead right: @Specterm rips @ABCNews hire of science denier Jenny McCarthy, shill for murderous anti-vaccine agenda," and Politico media critic Dylan Byers notes that, "Many other progressive outlets have also objected to ABC's decision to hire McCarthy."

Joe Nocera in The New York Times on the case against Twitter "So much on Twitter is frivolous or self-promotional. It can bury you in information," writes Nocera, who, despite his refusal to get his own account, understands the platform fairly well. "With its 140-character limit, Twitter exacerbates our society-wide attention deficit disorder ... Once, popes wrote encyclicals; now they tweet." Twitter aficionados quickly piled on the story as another cranky old man column: "Love you, Joe—but trashing Twitter b/c some people are mean is like avoiding politics b/c some people hold dumb signs," writes The New York Times national reporter John Schwartz. However, Buzzfeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith tweets that for someone not on Twitter, Nocera understands its true ethos of sparking conversation: "Joe Nocera claims not to be into twitter, is expert twitter troll."

Justine Sharrock in BuzzFeed on visiting the NSA's data collection center Using a strangely simple method—"I had put 'Utah Data Center' in my GPS"—Sharrock drops in on the NSA's data center through which the agency collects American and foreign communications, only to be confronted by security. "I didn’t realize where I was going," Sharrock tells a suspicious guard. "I think you know exactly where you are," the guard (correctly) responds. Sharrock's experience is notable and oddly compelling for the sheer mundane nature of the NSA's building compared with what we know is happening inside it. "With our ability to see these walls but not beyond them, though, and the agency’s increasingly unlikely denials of surveillance overreach, it makes the game feel stacked." During the experience, Sharrock "found out first hand that the last thing you want to do is drive headlong onto Camp Williams," tweets former State Department consultant Robert Caruso, and Defense News correspondent Aaron Mehta notes that "security was nicer than I'd expect."

Guns serve two purposes: they function not only as weapons against the enemy but also as a potential means of helping rebels the United States favors enforce command and control within their ranks.

Google Reader will die tonight. And I’m going to miss it terribly. But I’m not going to replace it. I’m going back to plain old bookmarks.

I subscribe to 157 Web sites on Google Reader. Over the last 30 days, I’ve read 510 posts from those sites. Since Sept. 14, 2009 — the date I joined — I’ve read 84,137 posts. That’s a lot of blog posts.

But it’s not nearly as many blogs. Google Reader’s “Trends” feature tells me I’m excellent at keeping up with Matthew Yglesias, Marginal Revolution, Kevin Drum, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire, James Fallows, and a handful of others. But I’m crap at keeping up with the other 135 sites in my feed. Most never get a click.

Still, after reading and editing Wonkbook in the morning (you’re subscribed, right?), Google Reader and Twitter are often the main ways I get my news for the rest of the day. And I want to rely less on both of them. So though I could port my feeds over to Feedly or Digg or any of the half-dozen RSS readers that have upped their game to benefit from Google Reader’s demise, but I’m not sure I want to.

I have three nagging worries about my reliance on RSS feeds.

First, it pushes me toward reading blogs and away from reading, well, everything else. Oh, I subscribe to some news outlets and magazines, but the truth is that I don’t bother with anything that doesn’t show up as full text, and I can’t keep up with feeds that publish too frequently. So in practice, I really just read blogs on Google Reader. And since I find Reader more convenient than I find anything else, that means, in practice, that blogs make up a very large part of my information stream.

Now, I love blogs. Some of my best friends are bloggers. Blogging pays my mortgage. But blogs — at least the ones I read most often — trend toward commentary rather than news  and short posts rather than longer articles. They’re part of a healthy media diet. They shouldn’t be the only thing on the plate.

Second, it reinforces my filter bubble. Never heard of a “filter bubble”? Eli Pariser, author of — you guessed it — ‘The Filter Bubble‘, defines it as “the unique universe of information that you live in online.” Pariser’s main concern is with algorithmic filters, like the one Google applies to your search results (if you’re worried about that, then Duck Duck Go has you covered). But Reader and Twitter are even worse than that. Rather than an algorithm filtering what I read, I’m filtering what I read.

In certain ways, I make a great curator for myself. I  know what I already like. But that’s also the problem. I’m terrible at knowing what I don’t already like. And so too are the people I follow. After all, I’m following them because I already like and know their work. By now, I’m pretty familiar with the sources they read, too.

There’s nothing wrong with RSS feeds, or with Twitter. But they both bias my information diet in the same ways: Toward quick reads rather than long ones, toward writers and outlets I know rather than ones I don’t, toward blogs rather than other kinds of articles, and toward information I curated rather than information that someone else curated.

Those biases are dangerous for me. After all, my job is to keep coming up with new and interesting things things to report and write about. The more I read the same things over and over, and the more I read the same things that other writers read, the worse I’ll be at my job.

So I’m taking the death of Google Reader as an opportunity to make some changes. I won’t be leaving another RSS reader open in my browser, and I’ve already been working to check Twitter less frequently.

Instead, I’m going back to bookmarks — and other people’s curation. I’m bookmarking a few of my favorite blogs, and then bookmarking a few news outlets and magazines, and a few socially curated sites (like Digg and Reddit), and a few more idiosyncratically curated sites (like LongReads.com and Byliner). My hope is to combine enough different forms of curation that I break out of my habits and regularly see content I wouldn’t have known to look for. And since a lot of that content will be longer and less convenient to read, the spot in my browser that used to be reserved for Reader will now play host to my Pocket oage, so it’s easy for me to work through articles I’ve saved when I have a few minutes.

Google Reader, you’ve been great. I’ve loved our time together. But maybe this is for the best.

Last night, Kanye West organized a last-minute Yeezus listening party for a small collection of models, rappers, industry heavyweights, and journalists at New York City's Milk Studios in the Meatpacking District. Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip, and the record-saving producer Rick Rubin were all there. Your favorite rap bloggers were all there. You weren't there. Far from your average record-release event, this was an "instantaneous" gathering of West's invite-only inner circle. (Which, really, was still plenty of people.) Here's everything we learned, gleaned from the few reports to trickle out late last night and throughout the morning, about Kanye's apparently finished new album. 

On the Album Title

"West was my slave name and #Yeezus is my god name." ~ @kanyewest

— Brian A. Hernandez (@BAHjournalist) June 11, 2013

On Rick Rubin Joining as Executive Producer

From Yeezy himself:

Last, but not least that came and helped bring this whole shit together, that executive produced the album with me and the family, is Rick Rubin coming in and like finishing up the whole shit for us, which is legendary because everything we did on this project, everything I did, like when we released ‘Numbers on the Board,” from the video, to the no artwork, to the style of the song and everything, I was like ‘what would Rick Rubin do.’

(...)

So I had to go to the god Rick Rubin and play him my shit, ask him questions and allow him to take this project to an entirely new level. And he made a lot of great decisions at the end and pulled it to a new level.

The Strangest Collaboration on the Record? 

Kanye has become known for making some strange musical connections. Just think, before 2007 it would have been ridiculous for Daft Punk to appear on a hip-hop song. On Yeezus, West brings together this strange mixture: fellow Chicago rapper Chief Keef appears on the same song as Bon Iver — a song that's called "Can't Hold My Liquor" and samples the semi-obscure electronic band Boards of Canada. 

Speaking of Daft Punk...

They produced "three or four joints" on the new album, West revealed. "The first joint, 'Onsite,' 'I Am a God,' 'Black Skinhead,'" all feature traces of Daft Punk. The first joint being, presumably, "New Slaves," the song that was projected on buildings across the world. 

Did He Go on a Wild, Insane, Entertaining Rant?

Of course.

So, Is It Any Good?

Here's the thing: the listening party came together so quickly — and was on such a hardcore lockdown — that there's actually very little new information and opinion out there today. Few people have offered their judgment about the album, partly because of the insane amount of secrecy around next week's release, but mostly because nobody in said large inner circle wants to anger Mr. West by saying the wrong thing. The only person who has said much of anything, really, is Hot 97 DJ Miss Info: "Without over-analyzing the songs, the music was right at home in tonight’s post-internet Warhol Gif Factory atmosphere. Frenetic electro beats, mash-up culture references, and digitized choruses," she says. So make of that what you will. 

You'll have to wait for Yeezus to drop on Tuesday, or when it inevitably leaks before then.

So, here's a new writing nightmare. What do you do if, after your book is published, and the reviews start to come in, it slowly dawns on you that you've accidentally written the wrong book ... a book which you would not actually agree with?

Apparently, this is what is happening to Curtis White, author of The Science Delusion — a book that has been widely reviewed as containing some good points, buried under a lot of angry rants and straw men. According to White, however, those reviews have all completely missed what he was trying to do and trying to say.

All the invective? White thought he was just being funny and satirical, like Jonathan Swift. The over-generalizing about what all scientists believe and what the culture of science is like? He thought it was clear that he just meant the subset of scientists who don't think there's any value other than entertainment in art, that philosophy is dead, and that culture has no affect on how we interpret science or what we do with it. The weird, pseudo-Deism? He thought he was explaining that science is part of culture, that the questions being asked and the way answers are interpreted are culturally bound and and we have to take that into account. The humanities triumphalism and points where he totally dismisses science and acts like he doesn't understand why somebody would find meaning in being curious about how the mind works? Not what he meant at all, apparently. He just wants to make the case for us needing both science and the humanities to properly understand the world. And White is deeply confused about why reviews of his book keep getting all of this wrong.

I recently had a chance to interview White — both live and in some email follow-up after the live event — and I've come to the conclusion that I can't properly review this book without including that information. There's just too big a gap, from my perspective, between how the book reads and what White wanted you to take away from it.

Reading The Science Delusion was an intensely frustrating experience for me. Much in the same way that reading some of the commentary written by White's least-favorite people, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, has always been frustrating for me. With all these authors, I see an undercurrent of an argument I'm happy to agree with. But that reasonable position is bogged down with layer upon layer of cheap jokes, "gotcha" quotes removed from their context, critiques of cultures and communities they clearly haven't taken the time to understand, caricatures, and the sort of comic rant style that looks very good on Lewis Black and fits sort of awkwardly (at best) on most other people. In this case, the result is a book that carries a message it clearly believes science needs to hear, but which is written in such a way as to nearly ensure that it will quickly alienate anybody who identifies with science as their community, their career, or their passion.

And that's a shame, because, as I say, White makes some good points in the book and he makes those points somewhat better when he's just talking to you.

For instance, nearly half the book is dedicated to a critique of pop-culture, self-help neuroscience — the sort of stuff that is the once and future bread-and-butter of Jonah Lehrer. It is absolutely ridiculous, as White says, to look at an fMRI scan and declare that we are seeing a thought, let alone an emotion. It is problematic when we extrapolate the findings of fMRI studies to suggest that they can help fix your marriage, give you a leg up in business, or really do much at all beyond supplying a rudimentary understanding of what happens in certain parts of the brain in response to certain stimuli. We are learning the basics of brain function here, not discovering the secrets that will help you make yourself more creative. (Unfortunately, in the book, much of White's argument against this hinges on framing pop-neurobollocks as a problem created by and supported by scientists, and a problem that very few people have spoken out about. Neither of which is true. If you want to read more about why this type of neuroscience is wrong and how it distorts our understanding of ourselves, I'd recommend reading Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience , instead. Or just spend some quality time with The Neurobollocks blog.)

White also has something important to say about the way cultural context influences science. Science is a tool for understanding the world. But while that tool can produce very good data, it can't really tell us exactly what we should do with that data, or how we should think about it. More importantly, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that culture helps decide which questions about the world we investigate, to begin with.

Culture explains why anthropology was once a field pretty much dedicated to proving the superiority of white, Western colonial powers over their brown subjects. The societal context shaped the questions those early anthropologists were asking, it shaped how they chose to study the world, and it shaped how they chose to interpret the data they came back with. The fact that, by the time I got to anthropology school in 1999, the field had been drastically realigned as a challenge to its former self also says something about the influence of culture and the importance of questioning ourselves and our values in ways that are not purely scientific.

Another example: There's not technically any reason, from a simplified rational perspective, why it should bother a woman to be invited back to a man's room late at night while the two are riding alone in a hotel elevator. But if you take into account the metric crap-ton of cultural context and subjective experience at play, that same scenario becomes something entirely different and more threatening. One of Richard Dawkins' biggest problems (as far as I have seen) is his tendency to look at situations like this and refuse to see the cultural context.

That's not to say most people aren't aware of the way culture influences science (and vice versa). But it is something we could stand to have more conversations about. Ultimately, that's what made The Science Delusion disappointing for me. It feels like a wasted opportunity. Wasted, in that White's book seemed more concerned with scorning scientists and painting a picture of science as a would-be philosophy for cheerfully bourgeois, materialistic robots (and the people who aspire to be them) than with actually engaging anybody in a conversation about why we can't ignore the cultural context that science floats in.

Even more disappointingly, that was kind of White's intention.

Not that he was actually trying to say "Science sucks!" (although, the book does come across as saying that), but that he was specifically not trying to communicate with the scientific community or science fans. He was, instead, intending to really only talk to other people outside the sciences who already share his frustrations with the place science holds in our popular culture and who think that comes at the expense of the humanities. If you read the book and don't like it, chances are good that you weren't intended to read it, anyway. Despite the equally strong chance that the book was about you and things you feel strongly about.

And that brings me to the more interactive portion of this book review. I interviewed Curtis White on June 12, in a live event at Minneapolis' Magers & Quinn Bookstore. It was a great chat. Not at all what I expected from just having read the book. And it revealed White as somebody who does love science, who isn't particularly angry, and who could actually make me think past the tone of his book to talk about the stuff that needed talking about. You can listen to the whole thing via Soundcloud. (Quick note: There was an audience Q&A session that I cut out of this recording, on account of the fact that my microphone didn't pick up any of the questions, making White's answers kind of confusing, to say the least.)

After that interview, I sent White a few more questions via email, trying to better understand the apparent disconnect between the style of The Science Delusion (and its' apparent message) and the style of White's speaking presence (and his apparent message). You can read that exchange below.

Maggie Koerth-Baker: When we were talking before the interview, you mentioned that you don't really write your essays to convince anyone of anything, that you're instead writing to provide aid and comfort to people who already agree with you. Why do you think that's useful/important? How do you think it affects the way you write?

Curtis White: Writing to change your opponent’s position is a mostly hopeless task. I have written for Harper’s. Does anyone read that magazine who is not already convinced by its left/liberal point of view? Not many. Culture War is a permanent state of affairs. (Some neuroscientists have actually suggested that this is so because the liberal and conservative brains are structurally different!) I try to show those who are skeptical of radical materialism and mechanism and technophilia why they feel that way. Romanticism is not dead, it’s not even the past. Contemporary art countercultures, just like the counterculture of the ‘60s, are part of the living spirit of that epochal moment in Western history that we call Romanticism. But do the mostly young people who vote with their feet and move to Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, New York understand this old connection? It wouldn’t seem so. I try to aid in their self-understanding.

MKB: When we spoke, you talked about being really surprised by the response you're getting from critics. In particular, you said that you didn't mean to write an angry book, but a satirical one. And you also said that you meant to critique specific people in the sciences, rather than critiquing science and scientists in a more generalized way. I'm curious, now that you've had more time to think about it, what you think went wrong here. Honestly, as a writer, the idea of having accidentally written a book I didn't mean to write seems like a kind of nightmare, and I'm curious about how you're processing these reviews now and thinking about your own writing.

CW: I hope you won’t be entirely surprised if I say that I don’t think anything went wrong. The Science Delusion is much like my earlier work, especially The Middle Mind. One person’s “angry screed” is another person’s “passionate defense.” My native audience tends to be among artists, lefty intellectuals, humanists, and other species of the socially dispossessed. This particular book has generated a broader audience, much of which is sensitive to criticism of the sciences. I just received a review by Mark Kingwell, a Canadian philosopher, for the Globe and Mail. It’s a sympathetic review although he complains of the “bad jokes.” (At least he noticed there were jokes!) But the on-line comments about his review hacked him to pieces in the name of the superiority of the scientific worldview. Utter disdain. Baseless contempt. I have to say, the comments made me feel a little better about some of the treatment I’ve received.

MKB: I was really surprised that you came into this not very aware of the popular science writing being done by scientists and journalists online. To me, that makes up a huge part of the representation of science, and a huge force behind the culture of science. It felt a bit like you were writing a book about what/how scientists think while completely skipping over a major source of them telling you what/how they think. Do you feel like you missed something in your research by not looking at that? Or was this really just meant to be about Dawkins and Hitchens and Lehrer and wasn't intended to reflect on what is happening in science culture, as a whole?

CW: As a science journalist and blogger, you are no doubt rightly disappointed that I didn’t go there. I’ve read your work and I appreciate what it does and I don’t think there is anything in it that is socially suspect. What I am more concerned with is the broadest and most public representations of science, and for me that means these books. They are symptomatic of what I take to be a serious social and political problem. But then I’m old enough to still believe that books and not the Web are what is important. That may be a delusion on my part. But then most of the books that I cite, and a good many more that I don’t cite, are really good books. I love John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, but I don’t mention it. But McPhee is not in the business of using science to produce pernicious ideology.

MKB: Talking about this book with my husband, he brought up something I thought was kind of interesting. Back in high school, he used to be an Objectivist. And one of the big revelations for him, coming out of that, was the realization that a philosophy could be logically consistent and could make total sense, on paper, but could also be 100% wrong about people and wrong about the way the world actually works. For him, science is incredibly valuable because it focuses on “how this works” rather than well-constructed, logical arguments about how somebody thinks things ought to work. What do you think the limits of philosophy are when it comes to that dichotomy between what makes sense with internal, consistent logic and what makes sense when you study people?

CW: I’m not clear on how your husband has ceased to be an objectivist. As Friedrich Schelling (whom I discuss in the book) observed, empiricism has a fundamental dogma: there are objects. But in order to make this claim, empiricism must presuppose that there are subjects/selves to observe these objects. Empiricism tends to ignore the difficulty in saying what in the world a self is. Another way of putting this is that empiricism is insufficiently interested in the fact that all access to objects and all access to “how this works” is mediated by one kind of model or symbolic construct or another, whether that means language or math or instrumental experimentation. As Immanuel Kant argued, we have no access to the “thing itself,” it is forever unknowable. Our knowledge is never the thing. We are modelers, not knowers. We are condemned to life in the analogue, a glorious thing if it is looked at properly.

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers