Victoria McNally in The Mary Sue (via Jennifer Ouellette ):

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast released a set of free-to-download “basic rules” for the upcoming fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons, with the idea of putting this new version of D&D into “as many hands as possible.” This in itself is pretty rad, but the actual text of the rules are surprisingly inclusive to non-binary players and characters in a way that hasn’t shown up in an official guide before.

According to the website, the basic rules PDF “runs from levels 1 to 20 and covers the cleric, fighter, rogue, and wizard, presenting what we view as the essential subclass for each. It also provides the dwarf, elf, halfling, and human as race options; in addition, the rules contain 120 spells, 5 backgrounds, and character sheets.” Which is awesome, but we’re interested in particular with Chapter 4: Personality and Background (about 33 pages into the PDF), where the rules have this to say about the role that gender identity and sexual orientation might play for your character:

More here.

Deborah Solomon at The New York Times:

Of all the American artists of the 19th century, James Abbott McNeill Whistler was probably the talkiest. In the 1870s, when he painted his famous portrait of his mother, he was living in London, a high-strung expatriate who saw fit to issue mission statements on what seemed like an hourly basis. “Art should be independent of all claptrap,” he declared, believing he had stripped painting of sentimentality and moral uplift and the other trademarks of Victorian culture.

Yet “Whistler’s Mother” — or “Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1” as the painting is actually titled — would come to be celebrated as just the opposite. Today, it is viewed less as an audacious art-for-art’s-sake experiment than as an apotheosis of American motherhood. As most everyone is aware, it portrays Anna Whistler in stark profile, sitting on a hardwood chair in her long black dress. Her face appears somber and a little tense beneath her white lace bonnet.

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David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

What makes the best alternate histories effective is how plausible they are. Just look at Philip K. Dick’s 1962 masterpiece “The Man in the High Castle,” with its vision of America divided after having lost World War II to Germany and Japan. Or Norman Spinrad’s “Russian Spring” (1991), in which a know-nothing politician becomes president on a platform of jingoism and foreign intervention (sound familiar?) when an anti-American mob in Paris riots at the U.S. Embassy.

The key, Philip Roth once suggested of his own “The Plot Against America” — which posits the slow drift of a particularly nativist fascism after Charles Lindbergh wins the 1940 presidential election — is to keep the focus realistic.

“I told myself,” Roth explained, “the simplest thing to do — and perhaps the best thing to do — was to change just one thing: that is, the result of the 1940 election. Have Lindbergh run and win. But leave everything else in place.”

As a result, his imagined America, much like Dick’s or Spinrad’s, is one we recognize despite (or even because of) the differences, a place where the World Series is still played and certain constitutional safeguards, albeit diluted, remain.

more here.

Melissa Harrison at the Financial Times:

To be a feminist seems so natural to me now that it’s hardly worth mentioning: the logical end point for everyone, surely, who wants to live a just, compassionate and moral life. But it doesn’t seem very long ago that I was going to striptease classes, working for a magazine with scantily clad women on the cover and attending lap-dancing clubs with my then boyfriend. Had you asked, I would probably have said I was a feminist then, too.

My understanding of the world, and of myself, has changed a great deal since I was in my twenties – and so has feminism. Those years came for me at the intersection of two things: my own, incomplete journey towards maturity, and a brief period in which liberation seemed to mean aping the freedoms of men.

Things are very different now. Much of the west is experiencing what’s been dubbed the “fourth wave” of feminism – following the first, which secured the vote and changes to property rights a century ago, the second, in the 1960s and 1970s, and third, in the early 1990s. Perhaps each generation must reinvent feminism for itself, for while some things have improved for some women, new pressures and injustices have taken their place – and new voices, new heroines, must be found to counter them.

more here.

Benjamin Moser in The New York Times:

A religion whose followers believe that the Earth was created somewhere in the neighborhood of the planet Kolob, and that the Garden of Eden was created somewhere in the neighborhood of Kansas City, Mo., would seem to have so fortified itself against mockery that there’s no sport in scorning it. In this respect, Mormonism is an honest reflection of its founder, a man who offers such an easy target that providing even a partial list of his myriad and exotic transgressions feels too easy, like a distasteful piling on. That founder was Joseph Smith, a teenager who grew up in western New York. In the 1820s, Smith began to “translate,” from tablets he kept wrapped in a tablecloth, a series of visions that became the Book of Mormon, a turgid sci-fi novel that nonetheless managed to sway a nucleus of converts. Unfurling a vision of a restored Christianity that placed America at the center of the world, and offering the possibility of a perfected soul both here on Earth and, after death, in a multitude of heavens, Smith also managed to be so provocative that he and his followers found themselves hounded, in a series of increasingly dramatic upheavals, from New York to Ohio to Missouri to Illinois.

Alex Beam’s “American Crucifixion” recounts the peregrination of these pariahs. Before they finally evacuated to the Great Salt Lake Valley, which was then part of Mexico, they thought they had found a safe haven in Nauvoo, Ill., the most elaborate of Smith’s foundations. Thence, from all over the United States, Canada and the British Isles, the Mormons flocked. At one point, the city’s population may have surpassed Chicago’s. But Smith’s gift for outrageousness prevailed, and in June 1844 a mob lynched him and his brother. Smith was 38 years old. It is understandable that Mormons saw the grisly murder of their prophet as a crucifixion. But in Beam’s telling, Smith emerges as a flamboyant frontier L. Ron Hubbard, which is far from being entirely Beam’s fault. This was a man who was not only considered by his followers “president pro tem of the world” but also had himself crowned “King, Priest and Ruler over Israel on the Earth”; who pranced around Nauvoo in a “cerulean officer’s tailcoat,” as Beam puts it, “dripping with weighty gold braid and epaulets, topped off with a black cockade chapeau that was adorned with a black ostrich feather”; and who added 14 chapters to the Book of Genesis.

People hated him.

More here.

Fawzia Afzal-Khan in Counterpunch:

Ayad Akhtar’s The Who and the What: A Feminist Reclamation of Islam?

“Absolutely fantastic!” is what Ingrid, a young Puerto-Rican woman sitting next to me ….said of Akhtar’s latest work, his second play to be performed at Lincoln Center’s Claire Tow Theatre in New York City, which I saw June 27^th 2014 during a sold-out 4-week run. “What makes it so?” I probed further. “Well,” she obligingly smiled, “it’s so realistic in its portrayal of these characters, and the actors are so convincing.” A young Pakistani-American friend of her’s sitting on the next seat over chimed in, “Yes, but I think what makes it a really important play for me is that it raises issues we Muslims need to confront and discuss.”

The title of the play points to the limitations in our own questioning to “get at” texts by asking “who” and “what” types of questions of them. Asking, as Muslims generally do (or Christians, or Jews for that matter)—“what does the text[in this case, the Quran] actually say”—is to go down a literalist dead end. Orthodox Muslims attempt to delimit and “authenticate” the “what” (the meaning) of the Holy Book, by trying to establish its veracity through a chain of the “who”—i.e by establishing the “truth” or “authenticity” of the interpreter/translator of the Prophet’s words and thus, of the Quranic text itself. Such a “dead-end” is what even culturalist, liberal Muslims are guilty of when we choose some hadith as true and discard others based on some factitious chain of command and dissemination over centuries, as though there was a way of “getting at” the “truth” of what the Prophet said or didn’t say, and which verses of the Quran thus seem authentic revelations of God or not. Instead, Akhtar is suggesting a different approach to Islam beyond a reductive exegetical one, which is unfortunately the kind held on to in the play by the central character, a Pakistani immigrant to the USA named Afzal, who has made a success of his life here by going from being a cabbie to owning a cab company, bringing up his two daughters after his wife passes away, in material comfort and raising them as “good “Muslims.

More here.

Emma Green in The Atlantic:

“Nothing is more annoying in the ordinary intercourse of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans,” wrote a grumpy Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America after he visited the United States from France during the 1830s. He described a phenomenon he might have called hashtag patriotism, had he been on Instagram:

There is a patriotism which mainly springs from the disinterested, undefinable, and unpondered feeling that ties a man's heart to the place where he was born. This instinctive love is mingled with a taste for old habits, respect for ancestors, and memories of the past; those who feel it love their country as one loves one's father's house. … It is itself a sort of religion; it does not reason, but believes, feels, and acts. Some nations have in a sense personified their country…

This is a helpful way to understand American spirit in the era of the meme: Everyday things, like beer, take on vague symbolic meaning that is almost apolitical—it's comfort in the familiar, a symbol of a place where you instinctively know you belong, regardless of any reservations you might have about it. Flaws and all, this is our nation to claim, our country to mock; it's a meme all of our own, even if it would have annoyed dead, French political philosophers.

Happy birthday, America.

More here.

Caleb Crain at The New Yorker:

In “The Red Badge of Courage,” the novel that made Crane famous, at the age of twenty-three, the nonhero Henry Fleming desperately wants to be perceived as brave, even though he deserts in a moment of cowardice, and doesn’t really seem to believe in bravery except as a perception. When, after his flight from the front lines, he manages to return to his regiment unexposed, he adopts a virile attitude: “He had performed his mistakes in the dark, so he was still a man.” And that’s only the outermost shell of his hypocrisy. A friend has entrusted Fleming with letters to his family, to be delivered in case of the man’s death. Fleming, desperate to keep his lapse secret, sees that these personal letters make the man vulnerable. He decides to taunt his friend about them if he gets too curious about Fleming’s absence. As it happens, the friend doesn’t get curious. When he asks for the letters back, Fleming tries to come up with a cutting remark but can’t, and hands them over without comment. “And for this he took unto himself considerable credit,” Crane writes, as Fleming’s self-serving consciousness turns a final pirouette. “It was a generous thing.

Even when performing a small act of self-restraint, Fleming is, to the narrator’s eye, a cad. Crane writes of Fleming at one point that “his capacity for self-hate was multiplied,” and one senses that he saw himself in the character, and was correspondingly hard on him.

more here.

Benjamin Morris at FiveThirtyEight:

It’s not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It’s not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It’s not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It’s not possible to lead the world’s forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it’s certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins.

But Messi does all of this and more.

I think it’s fair to say that goals mean more in soccer than points do in most sports. And Messi scores a lot of them. Since the end of the 2010 World Cup, Messi has been responsible for 291 goals and assists in the 201 of his games in club and national team play tracked by the sports analytics company Opta.

more here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Innocence is often thought of as a quality projected outward. It means, literally, ‘not harm’. If a person is innocent, they aren’t going to harm you. But another way to consider the idea of harmlessness is that which is unharmed. It is a place within our own self, untouched by harm.

Hans Christian Andersen believed in an untouched innocence at the core of every person. “She cannot receive any power from me greater than she now has,” says the Finn woman of Gerda in The Snow Queen, “which consists in her own purity and innocence of heart.” Children had special access to this innocence – animals and grandmothers did as well – but the innocence was inside everyone. Innocence could be hidden and emerge, or it could be apparent and then corrupted. See, for example, the devil’s mirror in The Snow Queen, which had the peculiar power to make everything good and beautiful seem like nothing. The loveliest landscapes looked like boiled spinach and the very best people became hideous or stood on their heads and had no stomachs.

To be wholly innocent was rare. To be wholly innocent, for Andersen, meant to be wholly yourself. It meant that you were free from the distorted reality of the devil’s mirror.

more here.

In the Secular Night

In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.

Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.

There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
.

by Margaret Atwood
from Morning in the Burned House
McClelland & Stewart, Houghton Mifflin, Virago, 1995.

John Steele in Nautilus:

Gross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that activity, economic or otherwise.

Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta has long argued for a broader measure of a country’s wealth, and has worked on some of the most difficult challenges involved: How do you assign a dollar value to a forest? To human capital? How do humans understand long-term planning, and the effects of their actions on fellow citizens?

Dasgupta and I met in the Vatican Gardens in Rome, where we were both attending a symposium organized by the Pontifical Academy of Science and the Pontifical Academy of Social Science. Among the most lively and engaged of the symposium participants, Dasgupta challenges us to cast a critical eye onto how we assign value, and how we make decisions…

What should economists be most concerned with measuring?

[PG] Ultimately we social scientists should be concerned with human wellbeing, the quality of lives people lead. That sounds very metaphysical or perhaps repugnant to the hard-nosed social scientist, a policy maker. But at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, otherwise we should just call it a halt, call our enterprise a halt. The question is not how to measure human wellbeing, because that’s an impossible thing, but whether you can find some metric which more or less approximately corresponds to it. So two things can move in the same way, even though they are not the same thing. The metric which best, and it can be proved to be so, mimics movements of human wellbeing, no matter how you define human wellbeing, is the measure of wealth. Wealth was originally a word used to define wellbeing, but that’s not how I want to use it. The result I’m quoting, the metric that you were asking for, is a value of all the assets an economy has inherited from the past. And the assets include not just buildings, machinery, roads, and equipment, the stuff that we typically think of as being capital goods, but also our health and education, which now economists all agree consist of asset, which we call the human capital. But a third category, and that’s the one we are discussing here at the Pontifical Academy, is natural capital, nature, which comes in abundance and in various forms and sizes.

Let me give you an example of why wealth, which is the value of these assets, could be going down even when GDP goes up. Imagine now, just to take a simple example, suppose you convert a huge swathe of wetlands and construct shopping malls, just as an illustration. Now, in national accounting, from which you can estimate GDP, the shopping mall will be an investment; the amount that you’ve spent will be counted as investment. But the fact that you have lost the wetlands, the republic property out there, will not be costed, it will not be seen as a depreciation of your assets, because the wetland is lost and the wetland was supplying lots and lots of services, birds and bees, and water. There’s a huge amount of services that a wetland does and I needn’t innumerate that here. But that loss will not be counted against the project.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Thomas Sattig in 3:AM Magazine [Photo: Tuomas Tahko]:

3:AM: In your book about language and reality you study them together rather than separately. Why put them together?

TS: Metaphysicians often begin with prephilosophically accessible phenomena and then go deep by asking what the phenomena are like fundamentally. Given that the phenomena are familiar, we have common-sense beliefs and intuitions about them. What role does common sense play in the metaphysical enterprise? I believe that foundational metaphysical analysis should aim to preserve our common-sense conception. The task is a difficult one. Soon tensions between our metaphysical principles and our ordinary thought and talk start appearing. But we should resist giving up our prephilosophical beliefs too easily. For they are prima facie guides to how things are and to how they could be. So I recommend searching for an equilibrium between the metaphysical analysis of the deep structure of the world and our ordinary, linguistic and mental, representation of the latter. The way in which I recommend establishing such an equilibrium is by giving a semantical account of ordinary discourse, which links familiar linguistic behaviour with deep metaphysics. To be sure, this is a type of semantics geared to the demands of metaphysicians. Semantics as done in linguistics and philosophy of language doesn’t share the aim of uncovering the metaphysical basis of ordinary thought and talk.

3:AM: You begin with what you call temporal supervenience. Can you explain what you mean by this term?

TS: The problem of temporal supervenience is an equilibrium problem of the sort I just mentioned. There are different conceptions of time. While ordinary space is three-dimensional, ordinary time is one-dimensional—it can be represented by a line—and consists of past, present, and future. This is the ordinary conception of time, in virtue of being the conception to which we are committed by our ordinary temporal discourse. When we describe the world in ordinary time, we describe it from the perspective of the present time—we use tensed language.

Modern physics, by contrast, offers a different conception: there is only a four-dimensional spacetime of which time is merely an aspect. In its most general form, the problem concerns the metaphysical status of our ordinary conception of time.

One instance of the problem concerns the status of tense. Is temporal perspective an aspect of the reality represented by ordinary thought and talk—are there fundamentally present-directed, past-directed and future-directed facts—or do we merely represent a fundamentally tenseless reality in a tensed way? Another instance concerns the relationship between ordinary time and spacetime. How is what goes on in ordinary time related to what goes on in spacetime?

More here.

Linda Marsa in Aeon (Picasso at home in his villa in villa at Notre-Dame de Vie in Mougins in 1967 surrounded by his latest paintings. He was 85 at the time. Photo by Gjon Mili/Time Life/Getty):

The life expectancy gap between the affluent and the poor and working class in the US, for instance, now clocks in at 12.2 years. College-educated white men can expect to live to age 80, while counterparts without a high-school diploma die by age 67. White women with a college degree have a life expectancy of nearly 84, compared with uneducated women, who live to 73.

And these disparities are widening. The lives of white, female high-school dropouts are now five years shorter than those of previous generations of women without a high-school degree, while white men without a high-school diploma live three years fewer than their counterparts did 18 years ago, according to a 2012 study from Health Affairs.

This is just a harbinger of things to come. What will happen when new scientific discoveries extend potential human lifespan and intensify these inequities on a more massive scale? It looks like the ultimate war between the haves and have-nots won’t be fought over the issue of money, per se, but over living to age 60 versus living to 120 or more. Will anyone just accept that the haves get two lives while the have-nots barely get one?

We should discuss the issue now, because we are close to delivering a true fountain of youth that could potentially extend our productive lifespan into our hundreds – it’s no longer the stuff of science fiction. ‘In just the last five years, there have been so many breakthroughs,’ says the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair. ‘There are now a number of compounds being tested in the lab that greatly slow down the ageing process and delay the onset of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.’

Sinclair, for instance, led a Harvard team that recently uncovered a chemical that reverses the ageing process in cells. The scientists fed mice NAD, a naturally occurring compound that enhances mitochondria – the cell’s energy factories – leading to a more efficient metabolism and less toxic waste. After just a week, tissue from older mice resembled that of six-month-old mice, an ‘amazingly rapid’ rate of reversal that astonished scientists. In human years, this would be like a 60-year-old converting to a 20-year-old practically before our eyes, delivering the tantalising dream of combining the maturity and wisdom of age with the robust vitality of youth. Researchers hope to launch human trials soon.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in The Nation (Photo: AP/Bernat Armangu):

The opening call of the BDS movement, by a group of Palestinian intellectuals in 2005, demanded that Israel fully comply with international law by “(1) Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall; (2) Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) Respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.”

This call received considerable attention, and deservedly so. But if we’re concerned about the fate of the victims, BD and other tactics have to be carefully thought through and evaluated in terms of their likely consequences. The pursuit of (1) in the above list makes good sense: it has a clear objective and is readily understood by its target audience in the West, which is why the many initiatives guided by (1) have been quite successful—not only in “punishing” Israel, but also in stimulating other forms of opposition to the occupation and US support for it.

However, this is not the case for (3). While there is near-universal international support for (1), there is virtually no meaningful support for (3) beyond the BDS movement itself. Nor is (3) dictated by international law. The text of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 is conditional, and in any event it is a recommendation, without the legal force of the Security Council resolutions that Israel regularly violates. Insistence on (3) is a virtual guarantee of failure.

The only slim hope for realizing (3) in more than token numbers is if longer-term developments lead to the erosion of the imperial borders imposed by France and Britain after World War I, which, like similar borders, have no legitimacy. This could lead to a “no-state solution”—the optimal one, in my view, and in the real world no less plausible than the “one-state solution” that is commonly, but mistakenly, discussed as an alternative to the international consensus.

The case for (2) is more ambiguous. There are “prohibitions against discrimination” in international law, as HRW observes. But pursuit of (2) at once opens the door to the standard “glass house” reaction: for example, if we boycott Tel Aviv University because Israel violates human rights at home, then why not boycott Harvard because of far greater violations by the United States? Predictably, initiatives focusing on (2) have been a near-uniform failure, and will continue to be unless educational efforts reach the point of laying much more groundwork in the public understanding for them, as was done in the case of South Africa.

Failed initiatives harm the victims doubly—by shifting attention from their plight to irrelevant issues (anti-Semitism at Harvard, academic freedom, etc.), and by wasting current opportunities to do something meaningful.

More here.

Roderick Conway Morris at The Spectator:

An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent 60 years studying staircases; and Inuit soapstone carvings of a Cold War early-warning station and of an airport terminal are among the surprises offered by the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale.

The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is this year’s artistic director. With his team of researchers, he has not only composed a fascinating show — Elements of Architecture in the Central Pavilion at the Biennale Gardens — but by insisting on the announcement further in advance than usual of the theme to be tackled by the national pavilions (Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014) he has also shaped a more co-ordinated overall view of the chosen subject than ever before. The theme has given rise to a variety of thought-provoking reflections on both Architectural Modernism and its impact on those who have lived with the results.

more here.

Charles Simic at the New York Review of Books:

I haven’t done a thing in three weeks except watch soccer. Mowing the lawn, paying bills, working on an essay and a lecture whose deadlines are fast approaching, writing overdue letters of recommendation and one of condolences, answering dozens of urgent emails and writing an angry letter to The New York Times pointing out the many historical inaccuracies in John Burns’s recent piece on the hundredth anniversary of the 1914 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria—all these have had to wait. With sixty-four games to watch, it’s a wonder I find time to brush my teeth or tie my shoelaces. The only phone calls I let through these days are those from other junkies who want to discuss some game we are watching. Should an unexpected visitor come to the door, I would emulate the example of soccer players and fake an injury, dropping on the floor and writhing in agony until the person left.

Consequently, I was astonished last Sunday when my wife marched into our TV room, where I was making myself comfortable in my chair to watch the Netherlands play Mexico, and asked me if I wanted to go picking strawberries with her and our little granddaughter. My mouth fell open. I was about to ask her to repeat what she said, but then I remembered how it is with soccer and the women in my family.

more here.

Ben Sobel in Harvard Magazine:

I took this past semester, my junior spring, off from Harvard. What was I trying to accomplish? It took a few months to realize it, but the truest answer I can give is “nothing, really.” What kind of a Harvard student spends a few months he could have spent in Cambridge traveling aimlessly through Western Europe, the Balkans, and North Africa—trying to accomplish nothing? At Harvard, I had developed an obsession with ensuring that every instant of my time could be justified in terms of tangible accomplishments. “Productiveness” is a buzzword around here—as qualifier, quantifier, boast, and complaint—and the concept hovers spectrally alongside a disconcerting amount of on-campus dialogue. Most undergraduates have likely been on one or both sides of an exchange like this:

“How was your weekend?”

“Productive.”

Because the word is used constantly in this sort of context, productivity becomes a universal validator, and, more disturbingly, an end in itself. In these conversations, it doesn’t matter whether the weekend was good or bad, as long as it was productive. On campus, what I was achieving didn’t matter, as long as I was achieving. In this way, my productivity fetish allowed me, paradoxically, to move through my life in a monumentally lazy way. As long as I was productive, “good” and “bad” and “happy” and “sad” were all subordinate considerations. The constant noise of commitments, which I had sincerely convinced myself were important and substantial, let me tune out larger uncertainties. These larger uncertainties—about goodness and badness and happiness and sadness; about who I am, what I like to do, how I want to relate to others; and most importantly, about what I’m trying to achieve through all this achievement in the first place—were and are far more difficult to confront than any number of innocuous, “productive” obligations.

So I buried my unsettling concerns in piles of schoolwork, term-time jobs, and extracurricular organizations. In some ways, this was one of the best things that could have happened to me. My fixation on generating tangible achievements helped me write the best papers I’ve written and think the most stimulating academic thoughts I’ve thought. Each of my productivity-chasing pursuits introduced me to wonderful people I wished I had time to get to know better and wonderful ideas I wished I had time to understand better. Indeed, I produced good things—but these products often felt secondary to the feeling of productiveness they gave me. Rare were my moments of unproductivity, but rarer still were my moments of genuine, uncompromising self-reflection. I never spent any time alone with myself, in part because I had conditioned myself to view such activity as a shameful waste of time, and in part because I was profoundly unsettled by the “larger uncertainties” that surfaced whenever I spent time inside my own head. This is why it is necessary for me to frame my semester off in terms that sound unconscionable to my Harvard-honed sensibilities. “Accomplishing nothing” is exactly what I had trained myself to abhor in order to fight off the bugaboo of meaningful personal scrutiny. With the goal of “accomplishing nothing” in mind, the worst that could have happened is also, conveniently, the best that could have happened.

More here.

Patricia Fara in Nature:

In the early twentieth century, female scientists felt beleaguered. It is “as though my work wore petticoats”, cries Ursula, the fictionalized version of distinguished physicist Hertha Ayrton in the 1924 novel The Call. The real-life Ayrton was denied entry to the Royal Society in 1902 because she was married; later she struggled to make the British government's War Office consider her design for a wooden fan to protect soldiers against gas attacks. Pre-war, alongside fellow suffragettes, Ayrton had marched behind banners embroidered with scientific figureheads including Marie Curie and Florence Nightingale, but such protests often aroused contempt rather than support.

“I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all,” declared Ayrton. “Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.” Ringing words — so have we yet achieved the ideal she was fighting for a century ago? Overt discrimination is now illegal — equality of opportunity is firmly entrenched. But all over the world, traditional attitudes linger on. Glass ceilings and leaky pipelines still present tough challenges for ambitious women in science, especially at higher levels. Exposing prejudice is the first step to eliminating it. By examining the past, we can understand how we have arrived at the present — and how to improve the future. In Britain, where the suffragists and violent demonstrations had failed, the First World War persuaded the government that women belonged in the polling booth as well as the parlour. “Oh! This War! How it is tearing down walls and barriers, and battering in fast shut doors,” enthused a female journalist in 1915 in the Women's Liberal Review. By 1918, women had helped Britain to victory by making drugs, explosives, insecticides, alloys, electrical instruments and other essential laboratory products, and by carrying out research, running hospitals and teaching students. Yet after the war, it was almost universally assumed that female workers should give up their jobs and slip back into their previous roles as wives and mothers. Only much later did the authorities recognize the twin follies of converting highly educated men into cannon fodder and of failing to deploy female brains effectively.

More here.