Reviews and News:
This won’t be news to anyone who teaches for a living, but recent research at the Reading Center of University of Stavanger in Norway shows that people who read words on paper remember them better than those who read words on a screen: “We found that those who had read the print pocketbook gave more correct responses to questions having to do with time, temporality, and chronology (e.g., when did something happen in the text? For how long did something last?) than those who had read on a Kindle.”
A short history of the ballpoint pen: “Invented by Hungarian Laszlo Jozsef Biro, the ballpoint first went into production in Argentina in 1943. Unlike the fountain pen, the ballpoint performed for months without refilling, used ink that dried almost instantly, and functioned at high altitudes without leaking. By the time the US Air Force got wind of it, various stateside companies were vying for the rights. Milton Reynolds found another way forward. Reynolds was one year Norman Bel Geddes’s senior and, like him, a Midwesterner, high school dropout, and inveterate risk-taker. He had already earned and lost three fortunes before the fateful day he spotted Biro’s pens in a Buenos Aires shop. Thinking ahead to the first post-war Christmas season and a populace hungry for novelties, Reynolds—who knew nothing about the pen business—quickly devised a way to get around Biro’s patent.”
Yesterday, I linked to an article on the rumbling Italian supervolcano Phlegraean Fields, but I missed this article on Yellowstone. Turns out, a recent study shows that it takes only a few decades (not centuries) for magma to fill its reservoirs after an explosion, “making the volcano potentially explosive in the geologic blink of an eye.” But don’t worry too much: “Yellowstone is one of the best monitored volcanoes in the world, notes Michael Poland, the current Scientist-in-Charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory for the U.S. Geological Survey. A variety of sensors and satellites are always looking for changes, and right now, the supervolcano does not seem to pose a threat.”
Are we all unconscious racists? “The implicit-bias idea burst onto the academic scene in 1998 with the rollout of a psychological instrument called the implicit association test (IAT). Created by social psychologists Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, with funding from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Mental Health, the IAT was announced as a breakthrough in prejudice studies: ‘The pervasiveness of prejudice, affecting 90 to 95 percent of people, was demonstrated today . . . by psychologists who developed a new tool that measures the unconscious roots of prejudice,’ read the press release.” The problem? “There is hardly an aspect of IAT doctrine that is not now under methodological challenge.”
The influence of Henry Green: “Welty probably put it best. His work was ever changing and yet always the same, his books ‘to an unusual degree unlike one another … yet there could be no mistaking the hand … [with its] power to feel both what can and what never can be said.’”
In the latest issue of National Affairs, Michael J. Petrilli asks: Is school choice enough?
Why you should read George Eliot: “George Eliot’s style is subtle because her theme is subtle. Take D.H. Lawrence’s favorite heroine, the adolescent Maggie Tulliver. The external event in The Mill on the Floss may be the girl’s impulsive cutting off her unruly hair to spite her nagging aunts, or the young woman’s drifting down the river with a superficially attractive but truly impossible boyfriend. But the real ‘action’ is Maggie’s internal self-blame and self-assertion. No Victorian novelist was better than George Eliot at tracing the psychological development of, say, a husband and wife who realize they married each other for shallow reasons, are unhappy, and now must deal with the ordinary necessities of balancing the domestic budget—Lydgate and Rosamund in Middlemarch—or, in the same novel, the religiously inclined Dorothea’s mistaken marriage to the old scholar Casaubon. That mistake precipitates not merely disenchantment and an unconscious longing for love with someone else, but (very finely) a quest for a religious explanation of and guide through her quandary.”
A hole the size of Maine has opened in the middle of the Antarctic ice: “Scientists call holes surrounded by sea ice ‘polynyas.’ National Geographic explains that polynyas are created when ocean currents push warm water toward the surface, melting the ice that lies on top. As the surface water comes into contact with the Antarctic atmosphere, it cools and sinks, then heats up again and rises back toward the surface. This particular polynya previously appeared for multiple seasons in the 1970s. The hole opened up again last year for the first time in four decades, and reappeared, even larger, last month.”
Essay of the Day:
In First Things, Russell Hittinger revisits the life and work of John Senior, founder of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas:
“The most important proponent of reform of undergraduate studies by way of the liberal arts was Mark Van Doren (1894–1972). Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Van Doren is remembered chiefly as an inspired teacher at Columbia, whose students included Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Merton, John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Lionel Trilling, and Whittaker Chambers. In the early 1940s he became known to a wider public through his book A Liberal Education (1943).
“Van Doren’s diagnosis of the problem of undergraduate education was elegantly simple. He believed that the intellectual oxygen of general education was being squeezed out by two institutional forces. Within the university, undergraduate learning had come under the sway of specialized, graduate research. In the broader culture, education was being reduced to a kind of vocational training. Millions of American youth, too, were being instructed in complacency by the routines of mobilization and military training, accompanied by mass propaganda. Van Doren’s proposal that undergraduates study the great books across disciplines and do so under the guidance of a truly educated mentor was motivated by a civic humanism that aimed to reform not only college curricula, but individuals who need to be shaped for lifelong learning and responsible citizenship.
“This was a bold diagnosis. But neither Van Doren nor the other proponents of humanistic reform, such as Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, grasped its implications. Great books programs and core curricula could not achieve their aims unless the university as a whole was reformed. This was not about to happen. In 1963 Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, Berkeley, wrote The Uses of the University, an ambivalent book about the way it had become impossible to reform American higher education. By the 1960s, universities had become drivers of American scientific, military, and economic progress. They were increasingly swollen with federal monies and made answerable to new and quite diverse social and political constituencies. At best, Kerr said, enlightened administrations might be able to trim some of the excesses and to give a light nudge in the direction of educational coherence. He saw something that the humanist reformers did not.
“This brings us to the remarkable career of John Senior (1923–1999). An undergraduate and doctoral student of Van Doren’s, Senior rarely appears on the celebrity list of his mentor’s students. His relative obscurity is due to the fact that he never published a book on education, and even today he is known chiefly through the report of his own students, whom he taught not in the limelight of New York or Chicago, but in the midland of the country at the University of Kansas. Yet Senior not only had his mentor’s gift of poetry, but also the irreplaceable know-how of teaching by example. Students need to be properly formed for the liberal arts. If they lack character, exposing students to dialectic, rhetoric, and great books was like putting ‘good champagne in plastic bottles.’ It ‘went flat.’”
Photo: The Castles
Poem: John Whitworth, “Going Out”
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