Remember that article a few weeks ago about drug resistant-bacteria found in hospitals across America? Well, thank goodness for the Norwegians, who are currently sailing around the North Pole looking for compounds that could be used to kill them. “ Helmer Hanssen is their home during annual, and sometimes biannual, trips in search of undiscovered organisms. The group is looking for compounds that have novel effects on other living substances, hoping that some of their finds will lead to new, lifesaving treatments for cancer and drug-resistant infections in humans. Their type of mission—traveling deep into rain forests, or to the top of the world, to look for rare, microscopic life—is called bioprospecting.”

Freeman Dyson’s life in letters. Kai Bird reviews the English-born physicist’s revealing letters to his parents: “As an 18-year-old, Dyson had once asked his Cambridge mathematics professor, Godfrey Hardy, then aged 65, why he was writing books instead of working with numbers. ‘Young men should prove theorems,’ Hardy replied. ‘Old men should write books.’ Born an Englishman in 1923, Dyson worked for the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command during World War II, but in 1947 he moved to Cornell University to study physics under Hans Bethe. He never earned his doctoral degree, but soon found himself at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he flourished. The institute’s director, Oppenheimer, was so impressed by Dyson’s work on quantum electrodynamics that in 1953 he offered the 30-year-old physicist a rare lifetime appointment. Dyson became an American citizen in 1957 — and has lived in Princeton for well over half a century. He knew Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger and, well, just about anyone worth knowing in the scientific universe of the last six decades. But he is also no doubt today one of the world’s best-known theoretical physicists precisely because, like Oppenheimer, he has always been a polymath, a literary man of science who could explain the physical world to us in plain old English.”

How Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed Liberty from a school riddled by debt into a billion-dollar university with a state-of-the-art campus.

The misleading New York Times best-seller list: “ The Rational Bible: Exodus, the first volume of a five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible (the Torah), was No. 2 in nonfiction on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list; No. 2 on the Publishers Weekly nonfiction best-seller list; No. 1 on Ingram, the largest book wholesaler in the country; and, according to Nielsen BookScan, the organization that tracks 75 to 85 percent of book sales, No. 2 in hardcover nonfiction. In fact, according to BookScan, it outsold 14 of the 15 books on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list. But it is…not listed on the New York Times best-seller list…the No. 1 hardcover nonfiction book on the Wall Street Journaland Publishers Weekly lists, 12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson, is also not listed on the New York Times best-seller list.”

Lionel Shriver, “self-confessed catastrophiser”: “The idea that the end of the world is nigh is invigorating. A dark horizon makes the foreground more vivid, and life seems more precious when it’s imperilled. Complacency about how delightfully matters are puttering along feels passive and soporific. For those of us addicted to shooting up gloom and collapsing in an ecstasy of inexorable Armageddon, optimism appears pallid, nay, repulsive — not an opiate, but a disgusting mug of warm milk.”

Essay of the Day:

Scholars have been critiquing critical theory for nearly 50 years now. The responses to these critiques have been either derision or ad hominem attacks. That makes sense, Neema Parvini writes in Quilette, since one thing critical theory fails to do is teach students how to think:

“What is interesting to me from a philosophical point of view is that all of them are hermetically sealed, which is to say that if you accept the eight premises I outlined above, there is no way to attack them. We are all ‘always already’ in ideology, in the patriarchy, under power, which is implicitly white supremacist and heteronormative. And there’s no way out of this except to recognise it and to do our best to mitigate it. This is not a scientific hypothesis that can be falsified or a philosophical argument that can be countered with other philosophical arguments, it is more of a theological proposition.”

Read the rest. (HT: A. M. Juster)

Photo: Alpe di Siusi

Poem: Kevin Young, “Rumble in the Jungle”

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