I remember the day in 1982 when I read Jonathan Schell’s first chapter of “The Fate of the Earth,” which ran in the New Yorker, depicting events as an 80-kiloton nuclear bomb exploded 500 feet above the Empire State Building.

Immediately, my mind went to the idea that the President would know about it as soon as the Soviet missiles were launched, and that he would have to address a nation that might not still be alive minutes after his broadcast.  The President would have to be serious, comforting, dignified.

I do not want my last minutes of life on this earth to be spent listening to Donald Trump whine from his Doomsday Plane.

I don’t know if you’ve seen this opinion piece from the nether regions, but the NSA wants US business to develop its technology, build its infrastructure, and staff its projects. There is actually a compelling reason for this, which I will get to shortly. The given reason is that the clear and present dangers facing the intelligence community, and, by extension, the world, warrant it. These dangers also warrant weakening the Fourth Amendment in order to save it, a point of NSA argument which one could see coming a mile away.

Here is the actual reason the NSA wants US business to hand over its technology, infrastructure, and staff. It is one of the worst places to work in the tech industry. It couldn’t keep talent if it tripled its pay and brought in massage chairs and free dry cleaning. The word from my friends in Silicon Valley is that they are besieged by NSA workers longing for freedom (and higher pay). This means not just the hot young talent who can field offers from Facebook and Google, but the “lifers,” the people who crafted the MS-DOS exploits of the 1980s in hand-tuned 8086 assembler. They all want out. First of all, management has done for creative hacking what the TSA has done for air travel. They were stung by Snowden, so they are consumed by making sure the exact same thing never happens again. That means an environment of complete distrust by management, insertion of cumbersome steps into processes to make them “more secure,” and interrogations of harmless workers to make sure they feel the heat. I cannot think of a worse place for people who have to be supremely creative and imaginative. Second, I cannot imagine what the NSA is being asked to do under the Trump administration. I cannot see the bottom of it, and probably most of the remaining employees can’t, either.

So, the NSA wants US businesses to do its recruitment, training, and retention. This means that no one has to work at the NSA. They will work at the Big Five, or perhaps as defense contractors. But NSA HR, government pay scales, and the puppet masters themselves are not supposed to be visibly part of the deal. It’s the kinder, gentler way of getting to know everything about everybody; Facebook has collected this information from citizens voluntarily for more than a decade. As for the clear and present dangers, it’s between them and climate change. Simon and Garfunkel wrote, “When you’ve got to choose/Every way you look at this you lose.” Cold-War-style “We’ve got to keep up before they do to us what we want to do to them” has no traction compared to implacable climate change. By the time the NSA achieves its goal of total information hegemony, Fort Meade will be underwater.

We’ve just purged our user database of bot/one-shot logins, and there have been quite a few of them. If you’re not an agent working for one of the nation-states we’ve crossed over the years, or a running dog of dictators, feel free to create a new login and comment.

National Weather Service
1325 East West Highway
Silver Spring, MD 20910

Dear Sir or Madam:

Your cowardice under fire from a tweet will make you the laughingstock of every downstream consumer of your data and products, many of whom have both your data and your algorithms. I daresay that you have also earned the derision of every doctoral program in meteorology in this country.

Subordinating empirical data to political dictates is never a good idea – look at the biologist Lysenko in the Soviet Union. There are people on this planet who have undergone the keenest hardship to maintain the integrity of scientific theories and information. The greatest example of this has to be the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was forced to recant and spend the rest of his life imprisoned in his house because of his idea, derived from that of Copernicus, that the earth revolved around the sun. Privately, he did not recant, saying “Eppur si muove.” History does not make much of that Pope and his Inquisitors; it has made Galileo both a secular martyr and one of the first true scientists.

The next time you get a nastygram on Twitter, trust in your data and your algorithms, and forecast accordingly. I realize that you have spouses and children, and have to eat, but there are many jobs you can do, out of the sphere of the public trust, that will feed you adequately.

Remember Galileo!

Yours, jkcohen

I happened to be reading the Federal Register and came across this choice gem. The Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services is poised to modify Obamacare in a curiously Trumpian way. It is withdrawing health care facilities’ mandate to serve people who speak little or no English. No more multilingual placards. No more mail in a patient’s native language. No more translators to tell staff what a patient is saying and vice versa. This will make it much harder for people who know little English to find appropriate and safe health care, to be informed about the care that they are getting, and to give informed consent to that care.

The draft legislation, which is about 400 pages, can be found here:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/14/2019-11512/nondiscrimination-in-health-and-health-education-programs-or-activities

At the top of the document is a big green button saying “SUBMIT FORMAL COMMENT.” Do it. Push that button, and write your heart out about about the inequity of treating people with limited English as pariahs, the false economies given as support for such treatment, and the consequences of letting someone into the ER who has Ebola who can’t tell you because he only speaks French and there’s no interpreter.

The closing date and time for comments is August 13th at 5:00 PM EDT. As of this writing, you have 16 days to submit a comment.

The shortest Yiddish curse I know, excluding epithets, is “Geh’ in drerd!” It’s the equivalent of “Drop dead!,” but if we expand it a little, it means “Go into the earth! Die and be buried!” And that is what I wish for George Herbert Walker Bush. “Go into the earth!” He will not get a week of mourning, a month of mourning, or eleven months of mourning. All he gets is this day, which is nearly over. Tomorrow, the mail comes.

I’ve been thinking about the Sokol² hoax, in which various conspirators sent improbable manuscripts to twenty journals of “ethnic/identity studies.” Seven journals went ahead and published the manuscripts even though the manuscripts’ contents were avowedly nonsense. This builds on the work of Alan Sokol, who tried the same thing with literary theory journals, “showing” that their discourse was likewise nonsensical. Both of these moves attempt to discredit an entire class of journals by targeted attacks on a small sample of journals; the intended principle is contamination. This principle may not be applicable; there are those of us who have taken a brown spot out of an apple and eaten the rest.

I am helping a faculty member with a paper in an ethnic studies journal; there are four pages of painstaking comments from the editor, along with the mostly positive comments from two reviewers. I disagree with the editor, but I don’t think anything got by him; he had the extraordinary virtue of finding everything that was wrong or could be construed as wrong. I find it completely impossible that a nonsense article could have gotten by him. He would have rejected it, period, and it probably wouldn’t have gotten through peer review, either. The peer reviewers were pretty sharp, and one pointed out a legitimate hole in the argument that needed patching.

What was lacking from the ethnic/identity studies journals that published the Sokol² papers? One guess is that they didn’t have enough money to hire a good editor with subject matter expertise and relied on an overtaxed board member to vet the article. But I have another guess.

Peter Elbow spoke of a reader who might play one of two games: the Doubting Game and the Believing Game. The editor whose commentary I was looking at was playing the Doubting Game at grandmaster scale – characterizing writing by what you can find wrong with it. This will induce fear and shame in the author, and the author will revise the paper ruing how bad it was. The faculty member whom I was working with had resubmitted the paper four times, and each time had gotten back pages and pages of withering “advice.” So, that’s one game. In the Believing Game, you focus on what’s right with someone’s writing. You err on the side of charity. You see what the author is getting at, and you help the author to get there. I am guessing that with some of these journals, one of the principles is to get the thoughts of underrepresented voices out in the world, and charitable principles mean a greater chance for the author to be heard. Sokol² exploited this charity and used it as a weapon to attack the credibility of the journals and the views they stood for.

So, do we have to worry about Sokol³ perpetrators gaming more journals to disparage them? Yes. Should the journals spend an extra $90K a year on a master editor? (There aren’t that many of them around.) Should they play the Doubting Game to make themselves impregnable? Do they want to strike fear and shame into their authors, so that the authors regret having written anything at all? Or do we simply say that the Sokol² perpetrators are like WWI German submarines: very effective at sinking ships, with very advanced torpedos, but sinking ships is in no one’s interest but theirs. No one is going to claim that the Lusitania was a legitimate target because she presented a very broad attack surface underwater.

Alas, there are no metaphorical depth charges that can be dropped on the perpetrators, and neither can the Humanities declare war against them. Probably the most solid defense against the perpetrators is PR — some kind of damage control operation, as used by rich people and corporations to mop up the consequences of their dirty business. Perhaps the MLA can put them on retainer. Nullify the PR explosion by investigating the perpetrators and publicly making clear what they have to gain. Explain the principles by which the journals stand. The perpetrators’ fraud will vanish into the dustbin of history. That is where fraudsters go; quick, without a Google search, who was Yi-Fen Chou?

I just read Sven Birkert’s meditation on his top-flight literary magazine,  AGNI, casting its lot ever more definitively with online over print. The one thing that sticks out is online’s lack of concern for the future. When you send out print issues, you are lodging them all over the world. They are seeds. A central server, on the other hand, can go down. Its contents may not be able to be restored, even when there are backups. (Printculture is a case in point.) An organization may close, or go bankrupt, or decide that it is not worth transcoding old material to ever-newer media. At that point, all of what has been produced dies. The Wayback Machine shows almost no evidence that any of the websites I produced in the 1990s ever existed. If “the center will not hold,” there is nothing. So I look at Sven Birkert’s guardedly self-congratulatory message, and think that the words have a SELL BY date and that afterwards, the electrons will disband and go back to their chaotic realms in the universe. This is not a way to record our literary history.

Il y a quelque trente ans, pendant que je faisais la queue devant Louis’s Lunch, le stand à hamburgers célèbre de New Haven, j’ai entendu deux chercheurs en langues antiques se plaindre de ce que le glyphe qui revenait le plus souvent dans la tablette qu’ils étaient en train de lire ce jour-là était “hépatoscopie.” Apparemment, les Hittites, ou c’était peut-être les Akkadiens, pratiquaient l’art de l’aruspice à tout bout de champ.

Le procédé consistait à ouvrir le corps d’un petit oiseau ou d’un animal pour étudier la conformation de l’un de ses organes. Ce soir, je me suis soudainement rendu compte que ces Hittites, au lieu d’être simplement superstitieux, étaient angoissés par l’avenir, et qu’ils l’étaient toujours en dépit du nombre de prédictions qu’ils faisaient faire. Pour eux la conscience de ce que nous appellerions des “événements au niveau d’extinction” persistait malgré tous leurs efforts.

Nous autres Modernes, nous nous occupons de notre temps, et nous n’avons plus d’aruspices. Pendant un temps nous disposions de sondages et de têtes pensantes, mais désormais nous nous débattons dans le noir. Nos dieux étant à usage privé, il est difficile de les voir à l’oeuvre dans le monde. Nous avons la capacité de faire ce que les Hittites n’auraient pas pu faire: détruire le monde, rompre son mécanisme. Aucune civilisation future ne prendra la relève de la nôtre pour déchiffrer nos disques, nos rouleaux et nos bandes sonores, pour se pencher sur l’énigme représenté par ce glyphe qui revient sans cesse, “Tr*mp.”

Tr. H.Saussy

I will never make another self-referential MacArthur Foundation grant joke again.

From 1993 until last week, I interviewed high school students for admission to Yale, under the aegis of a branch of the Admissions department called the Alumni Schools Committee (ASC). For the first twenty years, it was a rewarding experience, one where I saw immense possibilities for some students and hoped that Yale could help make those possibilities happen. I worked hard in my interview reports to convey who and what the students were. About five or six years ago, I got a Lucite paperweight and a certificate from the ASC, indicating that I had done better than expected.

In the year or two after, the students took on a different character. There were many fewer given to me, and those were most often students who had been programmed with activities and spurred to excel by well-meaning but desperate parents. I saw only one student from that time who actually seemed capable of changing the world. The competitive world of college admissions meant that many were now provisionally admitted, through a little bit of legalistic chicanery, before an interviewer ever came on the scene, rendering my role almost superfluous. And I had a shock when, after many years, I was put into the same room as my fellow interviewers and discovered that all the stereotypes of Yalies had instantly come true. Representative was one jowly man, slightly older than me, wearing a tailored navy-blue Brioni suit, who worked for UBS, and who was very concerned lest he and his colleagues be held responsible for the financial collapse of the country. “She’s going after our people!” he said of Elizabeth Warren, with no small outrage. As the prophet Hosea put it, “You are not my people.”

The final thing that made me think about leaving interviewing was that, due to new rules, quite sensible, I could not interview in my home. I am an independent contractor, and have no office of my own. The ASC local director was kind enough to ask a fellow interviewer, a very high-powered lawyer in an international firm, whether I could use some of the lawyer’s office space. It was palatial, taking up the top floor of a skyscraper. There were huge, marble walls, enormous volumes of space, marble topped conference tables, and a conference room looking out fifty miles to the mountains to the east. The office manager offered me food, soda, and water whenever I came in. I felt like an imposter whenever, at home, I put on my one acceptable suit, knotted my bulldog tie, and, a half hour later, ushered a student into the panoramic conference room. I felt as though I was conveying a rather Mephistophelean message: cast your lot with Yale, and all earthly success shall be yours. Given that I was a glaring example of that not happening, I felt completely out of place, especially given how deferential the students were after they gaped at the panoramic conference room.

Last year, I had to do something I had never had to do before: ask ASC to reassign a student. Foolishly, I had forgotten that the AAAS conference was at the same time as the crunch interviewing week. I was upset about it, but that turned to relief in a very short time. This year, I had one student reassigned due to my being sick, and realized I didn’t want to interview anymore. I got a nice note from the ASC director, but now I am free.

I am not sure how to give back to Yale anymore—I surely cannot do so financially. The Yale of today seems fundamentally different from 25 years ago. Perhaps Yale needs more interviewers from younger generations. Perhaps Admissions will rely more on computers to home in on the precise data that determine a successful applicant, and fewer interviews will be needed. For now, I can take off the wolf’s mantle of “success,” and try to be more consistently who I am.