Robert Reich channels George Lakoff.
Robert Reich, 4 May 2025: Sunday thought subtitled “President as abusive parent”
According to psychological research, we respond to presidents much as we did to parents when we were kids.
Paul Krugman, 2 May 2025: MAGA’s War on Science, subtitled “Why do these people believe that ignorance is strength?”
I’ve seen this same Pew survey cited elsewhere (e.g. here). And the observation is a familiar one.
Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, 2 May 2025: White evangelicals still see Trump as ethical and honest, but atheists know better, subtitled “A new survey shows that atheists are far more critical of Trump’s lies, corruption, and incompetence than white evangelicals”
In complete contrast to the brilliant men (and a few women) throughout history who have helped humanity understand its place in a vast, ancient universe that perhaps had no beginning at all (as recounted in the book I just summarized last post), are the politicians and their cronies that Americans keep electing to national office. Some of them anyway.
Plenty of people noticed that absurd claim by attorney general Pam Bondi that Trump has somehow saved 258 million lives, just in the first 100 days of his office, by seizing fentanyl laced pills. How to demonstrate credulity and innumeracy.
Slate, Jim Newell, 1 May 2025: The DOJ Says Trump Has Saved 258 Million Lives. I Asked Them What That’s Based On., subtitled “‘Are you ready for this, media?’ No, actually!”
(Morrow, 1988, 495pp, including 107pp of appendices (a glossary and a timeline history of the universe), notes, bibliography, and index)
This is the first big substantial nonfiction book I’ve read in a while, especially one specifically about science. Ferris is a science writer who began with THE RED LIMIT (1977) which I read years ago, a couple coffee table books of astronomical photos, GALAXIES and SPACE SHOTS, in the early 1980s, before this book in 1988. And I have three of his later books that also look substantial, and that I’ll get to eventually.
This book speaks to one of my key interests: how humanity came to understand how big, and how old, the universe is. The ancients (like those who wrote the holy books) knew a world only as big as the far horizon, and as old as their oldest stories. I’m already familiar with many of the steps between then and now, through accounts in any number of books about basic science, but here the whole story, along axes of space, time, and creation, is summarized, with a particular emphasis on both the techniques that revealed humanity’s increased understanding of the real world and on the individuals who made these discoveries. There’s much more about the personalities of famous names from history here than in those other books.
And I particularly appreciate the theme represented by the title. Continue reading
Today is one of those occasions when seeing the front page of the actual print paper is much more dramatic than seeing the same content, spread out over several days, on a website.
Click for larger image.
(Liveright, 2013, 244pp, including 4pp of acknowledgements and photo credits)
This is one of Wilson’s later, perhaps lesser books, compared to his earlier tomes like ON HUMAN NATURE and CONSILIENCE. It’s more like THE ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY and GENESIS (both reviewed on this blog): a little meandering, repeating points he’s made elsewhere, and semi-autobiographical. Those are not problems if you haven’t read many of his books; there is still enough wisdom in this book to make it worth reading.
Many such pieces today.
Washington Post, 29 Apr 2025: Trump’s first 100 days, in 10 charts, subtitled “Executive orders are up, while the S&P 500 and Trump’s approval rating are down.”
Continue reading
(Basic Books, 2005, 342pp, including 86pp of interview credits, other credits, notes, and index.)
This is journalist Mooney’s first book, from 20 years ago, and it’s especially apropos to look back at now given the hostility to and/or misunderstanding of science by the current administration. Back in 2015 — 10 years ago! — I read the author’s 2012 book, THE REPUBLICAN BRAIN, and reviewed it here. Very broadly, this first book documents the extent Republicans were hostile to science, from the 1960s through the early 2000s, while the second book sought to understand why. (And that entailed how variations in human personality traits have lead to different takes on the world, especially in a present society that is so different than the ancestral environment where our minds evolved.)
Gist
The 10,000 foot view: Republicans’ increased hostility toward science came, beginning in the late 1950s, from its incursions into religious and business interests. Thus the antipathy toward regulations. (In parallel, not discussed in the book, is the right’s antipathy toward civil rights and the 1960s “counter-culture.”)
Continue reading
I’ve seen cautionary notes about this World Happiness Report on the grounds that the results are self-reported and based on only a single question (how happy are you?) on a scale of 1 to 10. At the same time, the report (at the link) seems exhaustive, in that the results are correlated with variables about GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, generosity, and the absence of corruption. And there do seem to be strong correlations between happiness and lack of religious belief.
