SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING

I had the odd good luck about a week ago (reminder: this is a slow blog) to have a conversation with Chris Thile -- the extraordinary mandolinist and composer -- about musical transcriptions.  In January 2010, I had had the even greater good fortune to hear Thile play -- on the Mandolin -- Bach's Partita No. 2 in D minor.  It was a revelatory experience; indeed, I'd say that listening to that performance was one of a small handful of the most compelling musical experiences I have had over my lifetime. Thile's comment about transcriptions last week was that he found that a succesful transcription of a musical work exposed the "music" of a source piece more clearly or fully than did different "performances" of the piece on the instrument the piece had been written for.  What for me was helpful in Thile's comment was the idea that our sense of the "music" of a piece was heightened when the comparison we had was between versio...

It is worth listening to what commentators are saying about Steve Jobs today, upon his death, for the sake of thinking about "Steve Jobs," the mythology. According to Matt Bai, "Mr. Jobs understood, intuitively, that Americans were breaking away from the last era’s large institutions and centralized decision-making..."  Really, Matt Bai?  Are Americans really breaking away from large institutions and centralized decision-making?  The last time I looked, for example, the U.S. military was an institution that has remained frighteningly large.  So too, the decisions to torture people (by the Bush-Cheney administration) and the decisions to use high tech drones to kill people (by the Obama administration)--I think those are very much cases of "centralized decision-making."  What am I missing?  And to give one more example: when oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for three months in 2010, BP (formerly Brit...

A recent news story that has gotten too little attention is that in September, Mitt Romney's campaign announced that Professor Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University had signed on to lead candidate Mitt Romney's economic policy team.   Hubbard is one of the "anti-stars" of Charles Ferguson's searing polemic, Inside Job .  The most surprising section of that movie is its revelation that disciplinary economics has a problem akin to that of medical school faculty who have take unacknowledged payments from Big Pharma for medical "research" they publish.  In his interview in the film, Hubbard stands out for his resistance to transparency about his financial connections to the financial service industry, despite the fact that he was a prominent academic advocate of the deregulation of derivitives, and other highly complex financial products, prior to the Great Recession that began in 2008.  Now Hubb...

The killing last week of Anwar al-Awlaki by a high-tech drone makes abundantly clear what was not, in fact, stated clearly enough when President Obama ran for president in 2008--which is that the Obama alternative to the type of wars waged, with gusto, by G. W. Bush is to greatly expand the use of drones to kill persons identified as US "enemies."  In this context, I do not find myself overly moved by the idea that the rightness or wrongness of such a killing hinges on the citizenship of the person killed.  I get that there is some value in holding up the ideal of the rule of law, but there is also a risk that this concern with the rule of law will take the place of--rather than bolster--a commitment to act ethically (and not merely "legally"). One point that does seem crucial to me is to note just how willing both the Obama administration and the media have been to replace asking whether such ...

In "Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration" (published on September 22), Nicholas Wade of the NY Times once again treats his personal judgment that races are biological phenomena as if this understanding of race is an established scientific fact, even though the overwhelming judgment of anthropologists is that human races are solely social constructions.  Wade writes, for example, that Australian "Aborigines are without any genetic mixture from other races."  This phrasing assumes, and conveys to the reader, that there are distinct human races as a matter of genetic (rather than social) fact.  Wade thus abandons his role of journalist by inserting his personal commitment to race and racial distinctions into his reporting. This is a violation of journalistic principles that the Times should not permit. In the same story, Wade provides a striking illustration of his biological understanding of human races: "Europeans and Asians," he ...

The headline on September 12 read: “Fatherhood Cuts Testosterone, Study Finds, for Good of the Family.”   The article – on the front page of the NY Times – told of a recent study that found that becoming a father and engaging in childcare decreases a man’s testosterone levels. For the scientists who produced the study, and for the newspaper’s science reporter alike, there is but a single, inevitable (and thus extra-cultural) consequence of this reported drop in testosterone levels: it makes men, on their view, less likely to seek multiple sex partners and more likely to be monogamous.  The decrease in testosterone is thus “adaptive” to parenting, by virtue of it leading a man to be more anchored to a child’s mother—with the presumption (in the study and news report alike) being that the child in question is indeed the father’s genetic child (as well as the mother’s). What these scientists and the NY Times's science journalist are entirely blind to is the possibi...

Back on May 7th, the headline in the NY Times read: "Pitzer College in California Adds Major in Secularism." The problem is that this headline was simply false.  No major was proposed; and none was approved. The NY Times article also reported the founding of a "department of secular studies" at Pitzer College (along with the major).  The truth or falsity of this second claim is more complex than the claim about the major--but this claim too is largely misleading.   To start, Pitzer prides itself on not having any "departments."  The closest analog to "departments" at Pitzer are odd beasts known as "Field Groups," and these "Field Groups" come in two kinds at the College.  The kind that is most like a department at other colleges are known as "Type A" field groups; there are also "Type B" field groups (which I will explain in a moment).  And the grain of truth in the NY Times story was that Pitzer Colle...