Reviews and News:
Jeffrey M. Zacks explains the follies of quick-fix “intelligence-enhancers” and the value of doing the hard work of using your mind: “Is it just me, or is everybody out there looking for a quick fix? There is something highly compelling about the idea that there is a secret switch we can flip to become suddenly smarter, to reveal cognitive abilities hidden inside each of us. It is a notion that certainly has commercial appeal. Over just seven years, the games-maker Lumosity rocketed from zero to 50 million users, promising rapid improvements in general intelligence by playing brain-training video games for just a few weeks. (Lumosity recently settled with the United States Federal Trade Commission for making unsupported claims that its product was scientifically validated.) ‘Memory health’ nutritional supplements have sales of more than $1.5 billion, and ‘smart drugs’ – pills to enhance cognitive performance – have become prevalent on college campuses. Purveyors of products based on subliminal messages promise to teach us foreign languages and cure our addictions while we sleep. And makers of headgear that attaches electrodes to our scalps promise to rev up our brains to improve gaming performance and other cognitive activities.”
* *
Kate Havard says St. John’s isn’t going p.c.
* *
Mean girls with PhDs: “As an academic in public health, I teach hundreds of students every year, and publish mostly in scholarly journals and books. My work is semipublic, so I am used to scrutiny from people who do not know me as a person. I’ve been brutally criticized by journal reviewers, attacked by trolls in the popular media, and insulted in course evaluations – all anonymously, of course. It’s never fun, but I’ve found ways to cope. It helps to commiserate with other professors about bad reviews, and to realize that even my very best and most lauded colleagues also receive intensely negative evaluations on occasion from students.”
**
Anthony Esolen on a new translation of The Iliad: “All translators must choose what they will have at all costs, what they will strive hard to attain if it is possible, what they will concede, and what they will take as the gift of a capricious Muse. Green’s lines are mighty and sonorous …. They are mainly cast in an accentual English hexameter, which can roll along swiftly enough, but which sometimes suffers the logjam of a series of English monosyllables. They are one to one with the Greek, preserving Homer’s word-order and his emphasis, beginning and ending lines where Homer began and ended them. If Homer uses a figure of speech, Green wants that figure, come what may.”
**
Bourgeois Equality: “What accounts for the wealth and prosperity of the developed nations of the world? How did we get so rich, and how might others join the fold? Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished economist and historian, has a clarion answer: ideas. It was ideas, she insists – about commerce, innovation and the virtues that support them – that account for the ‘Great Enrichment’ that has transformed much of the world since 1800.”
* *
Marcus Berkmann on Britain’s least glamorous sport: darts.
* *
Leah Libresco compares modern Christian pop music, with its fixation upbeat happiness, with traditional hymns. The difference is wide and instructive.
* *
Essay of the Day:
Modern medicine, for all its powers, tends to assume that we are merely and exclusively physical beings. In The New Atlantis, Joseph E. Davis wonders: What if we’re not?
“Criticism of medicine as centered in molecular biology and technology, and prone to neglect the personal and social dimensions of health and illness, has a long history. Already in the 1880s, at the very moment in which medicine was being reconstituted by discoveries from laboratory science, there was pushback. Puck, the famous American magazine of humor and political satire, ran a panel of cartoons about medicine in 1886, one with the caption ‘No Time for Common Sick Folks.’ The drawing shows a doctor in a lab coat leaving the bedside of a patient, hat in hand and rabbit in pocket, with the apology, ‘Excuse me, but I have an experiment to make.’ A few years later, neurologist James J. Putnam, in an address to the Massachusetts Medical Society, observed that a concern to treat ‘not the disease only, but also the man’ was a ‘familiar sentiment that often falls so solemnly from the lips of older members of the profession.’
“Ever since, medicine has been hailed for its extraordinary explanatory and technical successes while at the same time generating considerable discontent. Against a narrow biologism and procedure-orientation, critics have argued for more socially oriented and humanistic approaches.”
* *
Image of the Day: Fishing platform in Ba Chi Men, China.
* *
Poem: Midge Goldberg, “Harpsichord”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
