Sunday, December 14, 2025
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Indeed it is …
… 100 years on, T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is a poem for our populist moment
This is an insightful commentary.
Friday, December 12, 2025
In case you wondered …
… The Economic Roots of Grade Inflation
At the Jesuit college I attended in the early 1960s there no grade inflation.
Tuesday, December 09, 2025
Monday, December 08, 2025
Sunday, December 07, 2025
Benjamin Labatut
At its core, When We Cease to Understand the World is a work of fiction. Its author, Benjamin Labatut, dramatizes a set of mathematical discoveries, imagining himself into the lives of the figures whose research and eccentricities led to those discoveries. Cease to Understand functions as a novel, but it is one which straddles a very fine line. And it does this magnificently.
When Labatut introduces the impact, say, of Heisenberg, he does this not only by way of discoveries and theories, but through a set of relationships and events. Labatut claims that the amount of 'fiction' in this book increases over time, and that the early stories are more faithful to documented events than those later in the collection. But that does not really account for what's going on here: because, in all cases, in all stories, Labatut introduces a fictional arc; he traces relationships, personalities, families. He adds to this with periodic dialogue -- even with descriptions of the weather, of the geography.
The result is a book reminiscent in its the style and orientation of W. G. Sebald, whose own novels sit in that unusual space between the real and the imagined, between history and fiction. When Labatut presents the discoveries of Haber or Schrödinger, for instance, he does so as a novelist might: it is the events which lead to the discovery that matter; it is the isolation, the struggle, the malnourishment which, in some sense, become the discovery, the revelation. Had Labatut included pictures, his book would have veered even closer, say, to Sebald's Rings of Saturn.
Part of the most upsetting and lasting aspects of Cease to Understand is its emphasis on destruction. There is no doubt, sadly, that the theories unearthed by Labatut's cadre of mathematicians unlocked the violence wrought during the world wars. That correlation in itself is unnerving. But worse than that, according to Labatut, is a second sort of destruction: the one in which science, for all its advancements, ceases to present a basic understanding of the world. When this happens, it's a short distance to something more disorienting: humans lose the capacity to understand what it means to be human. We take recourse to forms of science and technology which can no longer present -- with Newtonian certainty -- the world around us.
Whether this is fiction, history, or philosophy seems beside the point: Cease to Understand is a warning: about how much we've accomplished, and about how little we actually know. The distance between the two erupted in the violence of the last century.
Tracking the decline …
… in this case, of Britain: Assault Victim Becomes Criminal While Attacker Walks Free
Saturday, December 06, 2025
Friday, December 05, 2025
Thursday, December 04, 2025
Tuesday, December 02, 2025
Monday, December 01, 2025
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