If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Who’s Afraid of the Placebo Effect?: New research into the healing power of placebos could upend our understanding of medicine, if the medical industry is willing to listen (Josh Sims, July 26, 2024, Inside Hook)
The placebo effect involves the release of feel-good neurotransmitters, plus increased activity in parts of the brain related to mood and emotions. It appears to be the product of our positive expectations and some Pavlovian conditioning.
Philosophical Film: Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (Robert Pippin, 2010, New Literary Theory) [PDF]
[T]here is wide agreement that there were many stylistic conventions common to the new treatment of crime dramas prominent in the 1940s: grim urban settings, often very cramped interiors, predominantly night time scenes, and so-called “low key” lighting and unusual camera angles. But there were also important thematic elements in common. Two are especially interesting. First, noirs were almost always about crime, usually murder, often cold-blooded, well-thought-out murder. Even more surprisingly, the larger social context for such deeds, the historical American world in which they take place, was itself just as bleak, amoral, and ugly as the individual deeds and the characters themselves. Secondly, and perhaps most distinctively, many films challenged, in sometimes startling ways, many of our most familiar assumptions about psychological explanation. In ways that seemed both mysterious and credible, characters who had been righteous, stable, and paragons of responsibility all their adult lives were seamlessly and quite believably transformed in a few seconds into reckless, dangerous, and even murderous types, all suggesting that anyone, in the right (or wrong) circumstances, was capable of almost anything, and that one’s own sincere avowals of basic principles could be ludicrously self-deceived.
That’s pretty nearly our most familiar assumption, illustrated from The Fall of Man to Cain and Abel and onwards. And, as in the case of Adam and Eve, it’s nearly always a case of woman tempting man into sin. Meanwhile, thanks to the film code, the choice of evil always ends in self-destruction. This is all a reflection of how quintessentially American noir is.
How Culture Got Stupid: ‘Despite the strange takeover of culture by tasteless scolds, I still believe there’s nothing better than a story that grabs you and won’t let go.’ Kat Rosenfield joins The Free Press. (Kat Rosenfield, July 13, 2024, Free Press)
Critics used to agree that the purpose of art is to explore what is true, not to model what is proper. But around the time Flynn’s breakout novel was breathing new life into the domestic thriller genre, a new breed of cultural commentator was gestating—one for whom art was understood less as a truth-seeking enterprise than as a vehicle for moral instruction.
In the early 2010s, Tumblr gave birth to an accusatory and highly influential blog titled Your Fave Is Problematic, which studiously cataloged the offenses that artists, authors, and celebrities had committed against social justice. A hallmark of YFIP was its utter collapse of the distinction between art and artist: one representative post from 2013, about YA author John Green, lists allegedly offensive comments made by Green next to quotes uttered by his fictional characters, as though they were one and the same.
Years later, in 2021, the author of YFIP revealed herself in the pages of The New York Times, admitting she was an angsty teenager when she started the blog, and had canceled people to feel better about herself. But by then, the notion that cultural criticism should be first and foremost an exercise in taking offense had taken gangrenous root—not just on social media but in the legacy press, propagated by a new generation of young, hungry, underpaid opinion writers who survived by making you hate-click.
The tenets of the new cultural criticism were as follows:
All art was political, and always had been;
Art with the wrong politics caused harm, especially to women and people of color;
And all art must be analyzed through the lens of power, privilege, and progressive pieties.
The whole thing had a frantically performative vibe that bordered on the evangelical—with journalists in the role of the youth pastor palpably desperate to keep you going to church. “It’s fun to think about this stuff,” pleaded one representative essay at the viral trend site Uproxx, begging readers to devote themselves to woke critique with the same enthusiasm with which they once debated the bloodlines of the Targaryen dynasty. “Are you telling me that it’s cool to argue for hours about who Azor Ahai is, but a ten-minute discussion of race, gender, and shifting sensibilities before rewatching an ’80s classic is somehow wasted time? Get out of here.”
It was inevitable that a rift would emerge between the enlightened critics and the unwashed masses who, as it turned out, would rather not undergo mandatory DEI training every time they turn on the television.
Cancel Culture being so reactionary it couldn’t help but provoke the counter-reaction. And since the counters so outnumbered the correct it wasn’t much of a fight.
Looking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design (SARA TALPOS, 07.25.2024, UnDark)
Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The best data, they say, suggest that most people recover from the disorder and that long Covid rates will decline as people develop immunity. (A July study by the VA St. Louis team also found that rates of long Covid declined over the course of the pandemic.)
The work produced by Al-Aly and his colleagues, which relies on electronic health records of U.S. veterans, is also a key point of contention. In interviews, several experts questioned the VA St. Louis’ methods. At the request of Undark, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch reviewed the group’s first long Covid study and raised a range of concerns. Many of them related to the handling of negative controls, a statistical technique that, when deployed properly, can help researchers detect problems in the analysis of their dataset. Some of the negative controls “are simply misused in the paper,” Lipsitch wrote in an email to Undark.Additionally, some experts suggested that the VA St. Louis studies are not truly measuring long Covid. “They’re not studying post-viral illness, in my opinion, in these VA studies,” said Anders Hviid, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Department of Epidemiology Research at the Statens Serum Institut. Post-viral syndromes, said Hviid, are relatively rare and are usually characterized by fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Al-Aly’s research, meanwhile, looks at what Hviid described as a gamut of outcomes: dementia, thromboembolisms, psychiatric diseases, kidney diseases — “everything under the sun,” he said.
At best, the studies are detecting health problems known to occur when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said Hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias in the study design, and are picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all. “It’s a disappointment that not more U.S. scientists have spoken up about this,” said Hviid.
Heck, they still pretend fibromyalgia is a thing.
JD Vance dismisses the American idea (Jeff Jacoby, July 23, 2024, Pundicity)
[M]uch of what makes the United States so extraordinary is that for more than two centuries it has also been the homeland of millions of people — immigrants and the children of immigrants — with no lengthy family or property ties in America. At the heart of Americanness is not blood or soil but the embrace of fundamental principles and beliefs. Vance is wrong. America’s greatness is rooted precisely in the ideas that he regards as secondary. His wife’s American identity does not inhere in the burial plot of the family she married into. It is bound up, rather, in the worldview her parents adopted when they left their native India and put down roots in America.
This was a point that Ronald Reagan made frequently, including in his very last speech as president.
On Jan. 19, 1989, in a final ceremony to present the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Reagan said he wanted to make “an observation about a country which I love.” That observation, simply stated yet profound, isolated a key truth about the United States. “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman,” Reagan said, quoting a letter from a correspondent. “You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
How does a person become an American? By taking on American principles, above all those enshrined in the Declaration of Independence — that we are created equal and endowed from birth with the rights to life and liberty. At the heart of “American exceptionalism” is the recognition that full-fledged membership in our nation — unlike in France, Germany, Turkey, or Japan — is not a matter of birth, blood, ancestry, or soil. America is the embodiment of certain ideas, and to be fully American one need only pledge allegiance to those principles.
The Republican Party used to celebrate American exceptionalism. But Trump explicitly rejects the concept, so it stands to reason that his running mate, having jettisoned so many of his principles to refashion himself as the MAGA heir apparent, would turn his back on this one too.
The placebo effect unlocked: How the brain tricks itself into pain relief (Bronwyn Thompson, July 25, 2024, New Atlas)
The findings do more than just solve a puzzle for neuroscientists and put to bed any thought that the placebo effect was ‘all in your head’ (even though, quite literally, it is).
A Comedian of Order (Titus Techera, 7/23/24, Law & Liberty)
The moral authority of the decent American is the running theme of Bob’s first big show, in which he plays Robert Hartley, a psychologist. On the one hand, it’s as normal as you could want—he plays a Midwesterner, he works in Chicago. On the other hand, life is crazy and psychology isn’t going to fix it, all it can really do is foster forbearance and even that is difficult. Freedom is hard to deal with, because everyone else is also free. […]
The comedy show as a whole suggests that there is something that endures in America, despite social transformations. Put otherwise, what’s funny about people is the variety of ways in which they fail to be solid. You want to think the best of people, in part because it helps you can go on with a sense of your own dignity; comedy suggests that’s much harder to do once the difficulties of life set in—in fact, you might go mad. In this sense, the show is all about a sound man confronting reality.
The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse (WILLIAM FEAR, 7/22/24, Englesberg Ideas)
As one would expect, Jeeves has a rather more precise grip on philosophy than Bertie. He is a keen reader of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century rationalist philosopher. This is noteworthy because Spinoza was known for his ardent determinism and his denial of free will. Jeeves is also familiar with Marcus Aurelius. He offers a quote of his to Bertie in a time of difficulty:
Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.
Bertie responds by saying: ‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.’
In Wodehouse’s world, the ‘the great web’ doesn’t equate to the bleak, windswept attitude of a pessimistic fatalist. Instead, it represents a kind of optimistic determinism. In other words: there’s a certain degree of equanimity that comes with resigning oneself to the fact that the future is decided, one being unable to change its course.
Wodehouse’s stoical optimism doesn’t just appear in the Jeeves novels, but in Wodehouse’s earlier work. His 1909 school story Mike makes a similar observation:
When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says ‘All right,’ and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.
Wodehouse wasn’t merely a champion of the stiff upper-lip, but a true stoic. He believed in adapting the self to the world, rather than trying to change the world to fit around the self.
The Dark Protectionism of Trump and Vance: Goodbye to competition; hello, inflation (ROGER LOWENSTEIN, JUL 18, 2024, Intrinsic Value)
The policy that will mark the Trump era in the history books is protectionism—a 180-degree pivot from seven decades of postwar, bipartisan support for free trade.
Trump’s venom for trade, a staple of his naïve fantasy to remake America as he imagines it used to be, is a bedrock belief. It’s one of few issues on which he has been consistent (something that cannot be said for his views on abortion, entitlements, or any number of others).
And it’s emblematic of his larger nationalism—his wish to fence in America and make it, like Trump himself, suspicious, hostile, and defensive. It expresses his essential pessimism, which darkens his view even of market competition and private enterprise. Better to let the economic commissar in the red necktie decide which products Americans can buy from whom: Don’t leave it to private businesses or consumers, that is, to the American people.
J.D. Vance has Trump’s populist, neo-interventionist instincts. If Mike Pence’s nomination in 2016 represented a ransom check to evangelist Republicans, Vance signals the former President’s wish to solidify and extend tariff policy and his (similarly harmful) anti-immigrant nativism.
In some ways, Vance is more Trump than Trump. As an economic populist, he is openly skeptical of business and an admirer of Lina Khan, President Biden’s FTC chairwoman, known for creative theories of antitrust and, so far, mostly losing litigation.
But Vance is a newcomer to protectionism. In Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia, the book that made him known, he recounted the widespread unease of folks in Middletown, Ohio—Vance’s hometown—when Kawasaki, a Japanese firm, bought a controlling share of Armco, a steel company. After the furor abated, Vance’s grandfather, who had worked at the steel plant, told him, “The Japanese are our friends now.” As Vance wrote, “If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance.” In the interconnected global economy, cutting off capital from a foreign source would be self-destructive, as the Yale Law grad had come to understand.
Or had he?
No one can ever have expected Joe Biden to be an even mildly competent president, nevermind a thoughtful one, but his great tragedy is the degree to which he aped Trumpism on immigration and trade. Of course, the problem is that these are natural positions in his party while they are an alien infiltration of the GOP.
The Biggest Winners in the Stock Market (Ben Carlson, 7/21/24, A Wealth of Common Sense)
The stock market is hard to beat because picking the winning stocks is hard. Index funds own them regardless.
Winners > losers. Index funds also own the losers, of which there are many.
But the winners more than make up for the losers.
That’s the beauty of the stock market.
Compounding over decade-long periods is like magic. There are no stocks for the long run with crazy 20% or 30% annual returns over 8-9 decades.
From 1926-2023 the S&P 500 was up 10.3% per year so it’s not like the best-performing survivors crushed the market by leaps and bounds.
But those above-average returns compounded over 98 years added up to incredible growth over that time.
That compounding has been magic for the stock market.