Category Archives: Essays

Culture, Essays, Ideas, Medicine

Ideas & Society: ‘Medical Benchmarks And The Myth Of The Universal Patient’


THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE:

When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which UNICEF describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine and a half, she was below the fifth.

By revealing how our variable bodies respond to a wide range of environments, it challenges us to rethink universal health benchmarks. These standards inform everything from how we define malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies to how we estimate the risks of growth abnormalities, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular dysfunction.

Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.

————————————-

Maybe in a decade, the one-size-fits-all curves will give way to standards that recognize the different shapes of different populations, and the advice will shift to match. But, for now, we live in the space between two realities—the numbers on a spreadsheet and the child in our arms. ♦

READ MORE

Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, has written for The New Yorker since 2022 on topics including evolution, cognitive science, and cultural diversity. He is the author of “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.”

Essays, Intelligence, Philosophy

‘Suffused With Causality’

AEON MAGAZINE (March 22, 2025) by Mariel Goddu:

Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.

In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.

The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door. We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.

READ MORE

Mariel Goddu is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stanford University in California. From 2012-22, she was a practising cognitive scientist, focusing on causal reasoning in early childhood. She earned her first PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Her philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, biology, and mind.

Education, Essays, Profiles

Education: ‘The Rise And Fall Of The Campus Left’

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION By Robert S. Huddleston March 21, 2025

“And a soul / if it is to know itself / must look / into its own soul:
The stranger and the enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.”
—George Seferis, Mythistorema

The crackup of the liberal-left progressive coalition became  undeniable after the 2024 election. But it was a long time coming. Although pro-Palestinian campus protests were at the center of political debate during a pivotal election year, they reflected tensions that predated the dramatic rise in left-wing activism spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Some progressives have blamed former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel for the Democrats’ woes.

But the left’s ambivalent response to October 7 only widened rifts that had already begun to show—not just on Israel–Palestine but a host of issues including “wokeness,” gender identity, and the burgeoning of DEI programs on campuses and elsewhere. Clashes over the war in Gaza reflected the fracturing of the left’s broader coalitional project. To quote Ernest Hemingway, the longstanding post-civil-rights consensus over whose interests should prevail in the eyes of the liberal establishment fell apart in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

READ MORE

Robert S. Huddleston teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.

Essays, Technology

Technology Essay: ‘The Unbelievable Scale Of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem’

THE ATLANTIC (March 20, 2025):

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

‘…generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate.”

————————————–

One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?

READ MORE

Alex Reisner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Essays, Literature

The Unbearable Weight Of The Literary Canon

THE NEW STATESMAN MAGAZINE (March 19, 2025):

Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the elite while desperate to be one of them. He has just graduated from Oxford with a first in English literature, and finds himself in the private library of Lord Kessler for a glittering moment of mid-bourgeois insecurity. Feeling “disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and aesthetic prejudice” Nick muses on his literary horizons: “Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten.”

I haven’t pretended to have read something since I got caught out at college by a teacher over Aristotle’s Physics, Volume II. (Extraordinarily hard to blag your way through that one.) Still, I am sympathetic to Nick’s instincts. He is well read, and mildly anxious to admit to Kessler that he doesn’t know so much about the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. In the centuries-deep Western literary canon, Trollope might be a defensible blind spot for a 21-year-old. But in a universe in which Nick cannot signal aristocratic insideriness (he is from a run-of-the-mill market town) nor impress with wealth (his father is an antiques salesman), the literary realm has to suffice as his key-card to the British elite. The sound you hear is me cracking the spine of The Way We Live Now with studied determination.

———————————–

 But there are more antagonists than ever to contend with: the internet, performative anti-intellectualism, suspicion of intellectual ambition. I suspect the solution is to accept these forces exist and to carry on anyway, as though the ghost of Harold Bloom is haunting me: come on, young lady, Ulysses will not read itself!  

READ MORE

Finn McRedmond is a commissioning editor and writer at the New Statesman.

Essays, Ideas

Ideas: ‘Buy, Borrow, Die’

THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (March 17, 2025):

America’s superrich have always found ways to avoid paying taxes, but in recent years, they’ve discovered what might be the mother of all loopholes. It’s a three-step process called “Buy, Borrow, Die,” and it allows people to amass a huge fortune, spend as much of it as they want, and pass the rest—untaxed—on to their heirs. The technique is so cleverly designed that the standard wish list of progressive tax reforms would leave it completely intact.

Step one: buy. The average American derives most of their disposable income from the wages they earn working a job, but the superrich are different. They amass their fortune by buying and owning assets that appreciate. Elon Musk hasn’t taken a traditional salary as CEO of Tesla since 2019; Warren Buffett, the chair of Berkshire Hathaway, has famously kept his salary at $100,000 for more than 40 years. Their wealth consists almost entirely of stock in the companies they’ve built or invested in. The tax-law scholars Edward Fox and Zachary Liscow found that even when you exclude the 400 wealthiest individuals in America, the remaining members of the top 1 percent hold $23 trillion in assets.

__________________________________

In theory, a democratic system, operating on behalf of the majority, should be able to respond by making adjustments that force the rich to pay their fair share. But in a world where money readily translates to political power, voice, and influence, the superrich have virtually endless resources at their disposal to make sure that doesn’t happen. To make society more equal, you need to tax the rich. But to tax the rich, it helps for society to be more equal.

READ MORE

Rogé Karma is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Culture, Essays, Society

The Evils Of Rationalism

COMMENTARY MAGAZINE (March 14, 2025):

Late last year, when Luigi Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, something unexpected happened: A lot of people praised him for his actions, elevating Mangione to the status of secular saint for gunning down a man in cold blood. Both on social-media platforms, where he was hailed as a folk hero, and in person outside the New York City courthouse where dozens if not hundreds of supporters waved “Free Luigi” signs, a disturbingly large number of people seemed to be in agreement with Mangione’s claim, in the three-page manifesto found among his belongings, that “frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”

Mangione’s views aren’t simply run-of-the-mill anti-capitalist rantings. They are grounded in part in the principles of the so-called Rationalist movement. Like many Rationalist (also called Gray Tribe) enthusiasts, Mangione is from a wealthy family, has an advanced degree, and has worked in the tech industry. He shares with the Gray Tribe an obsession with AI and some of ideas that the progression of artificial intelligence has brought to the fore.

————————————

Similarly, a culture that embraces the idea that anything is fluid—even one’s own physical body or biological sex or even one’s reality—has a hard time making the case for limits. What comes to take the place of that case is an understanding of the world that says a man can become a hero for fatally shooting someone he doesn’t even know on a New York City street corner. Right now, it may go by the name of Rationalism, but it’s something older and deeper and more terrifying.

READ MORE

Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Essays, Society, Sociology

A New Scientific Field Is Recasting Who We Are And How We Got That Way

THE NEW YORK TIMES (March 13, 2025) By Dalton Conley

An illustration, in shades of brown and neon green, of a woman in a forest whose long flowing hair merges into the double helix of a DNA molecule.

Since Sir Francis Galton coined the phrase “nature versus nurture” 150 years ago, the debate about what makes us who we are has dominated the human sciences.

Do genes determine our destiny, as the hereditarians would say? Or do we enter the world as blank slates, formed only by what we encounter in our homes and beyond? What started as an intellectual debate quickly expanded to whatever anyone wanted it to mean, invoked in arguments about everything from free will to race to inequality to whether public policy can, or should, level the playing field.

Today, however, a new realm of science is poised to upend the debate — not by declaring victory for one side or the other, nor even by calling a tie, but rather by revealing they were never in opposition in the first place. Through this new vantage, nature and nurture are not even entirely distinguishable, because genes and environment don’t operate in isolation; they influence each other and to a very real degree even create each other.

The new field is called sociogenomics, a fusion of behavioral science and genetics that I have been closely involved with for over a decade. Though the field is still in its infancy, its philosophical implications are staggering. It has the potential to rewrite a great deal of what we think we know about who we are and how we got that way…

And my son’s future? It won’t be fated by a biological FICO score, even if it will be subtly guided by his genes as they shape his environmental path through life. It’ll be an unpredictable, surprising choose your own adventure — just as it should be.

READ MORE

Dr. Conley is the author of “The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture.”

Economics, Essays

Economics: It’s Time To Get Rid Of “Capitalism”

MODERN AGE – A CONSERVATIVE REVIEW (March 12, 2025):

The term “capitalism” is past its sell-by date. Why? It means too many things to too many different people to be useful. 

For some conservatives, capitalism is central to our American identity. This is despite the fact that none of the Founders had ever heard the term, which was not invented until 1850: James Madison, for example, advocated laws that “without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity.”  

For the followers of Karl Marx, capitalism is an economic system that, while having unleashed great productive forces, relies on the exploitation of workers by a class of capitalists, who capture all the workers’ “surplus value” and put it in their own pockets. For Ayn Rand and her followers, however, capitalism is an “unknown ideal,” which could possibly come about if the government completely refrained from economic interventions. 

The market is an engine of great economic efficiency, but it is fundamentally amoral: No demonstration of the economic efficacy of market transactions can tell us if there are things that should not be bought or sold because allowing mere private demand for them to determine their availability is destructive for society as a whole.

If we recognize that all the complex societies embody some combination of markets and governmental creation of conditions that permit, ban, or encourage some sorts of market transactions, we might be able to embark on a more serious discussion of these matters, instead of continuing to bloviate about “capitalism.” 

READ MORE

Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School and Oakeshott on Rome and America. He teaches computer science at NYU.

Culture, Essays, Social Media

Social Media: Instagram – Is Life Online Real?

YALE REVIEW (March 10, 2025)

Reality is a medium, and I’m thumbing through it. I’m on Instagram, where a video is a “Reel.” I land on an influencer who eats upsetting amounts of food and then runs until he has burned off all the calories. In this video, he eats eleven thousand calories of Taco Bell and then runs eighty-plus miles across thirteen-plus hours, posting a screenshot of his fitness tracker to prove it. He intersperses footage of himself on the toilet, audio included. He has posted dozens of videos using this formula. More than 140,000 people follow him.

What, exactly, is happening to me, my self, and my reality when I scroll on Instagram?

Without Instagram, I never would have seen something like this happen; in fact, it never would have happened at all. It’s a performance conducted by an individual but also the product of billions of human inputs. Our participation on social media as both creators and viewers trains the algorithms that organize their content, and these algorithms shape our tastes in turn. The influencers and the feeds they populate evolve together, recursively.

In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun.

We are not even two decades into a vast, largely unregulated experiment in human psychology. This blur of experience, a composite of varied partial glimpses, is not something I or any of us evolved to digest. All these people, all these loops. I think of my baby nephew. Even in our one-to-one conversations on FaceTime, we inevitably shape his expectations of the real, setting a baseline for his neuroplastic brain that’s so tremendously different than mine. In the digital, reality, like scroll, becomes more verb than noun. Reality doesn’t merely exist; reality reels. My nephew will never know otherwise.

I’m haunted by that video of the runner. I thumb back up to find it, pop over to his profile. I see that in his more recent videos, he has begun challenging friends and strangers to eat-offs: a new shape for the performance. I’m grossed out and keep watching. I should know better, but I can’t help myself.

Jesse Damiani is a writer, curator, and foresight strategist. He hosts the Urgent Futures podcast and writes the Reality Studies newsletter.