The 710 versus the more than four thousand!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

Statistical dumbness is Us: Just as the experts have said, we simply aren't up to the task of conducting the most basic journalism.

Consider the statistical shakiness which starts to appear in this passage from this morning's New York Times news report:

ROBERTSON (9/23/21): [Gwen] Ifill, who died in 2016 after a distinguished career that included stints at The Washington Post, The Times and NBC News before she became co-anchor of “PBS NewsHour,” raised the issue of what she called “missing white woman syndrome” at a journalism conference in 2004. “If there’s a missing white woman, we are going to cover that, every day,” she noted wryly.

In the years since, national news outlets have continued to deliver frequent, detailed reports that made young, white women such as Natalee Holloway, who disappeared in 2005 while vacationing in Aruba, into household names.

To what "statistical shakiness" do we refer? We refer to this statistical shakiness:

In that passage, the Times reporter, Katie Robertson, quotes Gwen Ifill seeming to say that the mainstream media covers every case in which a there's a missing white woman. Indeed, Ifill seems to say that every such case gets a lot of coverage.

Robertson proceeds to offer an example. She cites a case which did get a lot of attention—back in 2005!

Can you think of a more recent case? The Times report seems to say that there are many such cases, but we'll admit that we can't think of examples, and it almost looks like the Times couldn't do so either..

With that in mind, can you see the shakiness which may be lurking there? We ask that question because the editors at the New York Times 1) couldn't see the shakiness, or 2) just didn't prefer to.

Now, let's consider a case of statistical illiteracy. It comes from that same New York Times report, but it also appeared in the Washington Post, and it's being widely copied as the day proceeds:

ROBERTSON: The demographic makeup of major news organizations is another factor in the emphasis on narratives of white women who go missing or are murdered, said Martin G. Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

[...]

The disappearances of people of color tend not to generate the same volume of media interest, despite their occurring at a higher rate. A report from the University of Wyoming found that 710 Indigenous people were reported missing from 2011 to 2020 in that state, which is where Ms. Petito’s remains were found.

Can you see the statistical illiteracy lurking there? The breakdown goes like this:

Robertson links to this report from the University of Wyoming. Making a long story short, the Wyoming report includes this passage:

These records  represent 4,884 unique individuals, 710 of whom were Indigenous. Law  enforcement agencies in Wyoming enter nearly 900 missing person records into NCIC annually. Each year, approximately 13% (n = 120) are records of Indigenous people.

In that passage, we learn that there were 4,884 missing persons in Wyoming during the decade in question. Performing the math, the numbers break down like this:

Missing persons in Wyoming:
Total number of missing persons: 4,884
Missing persons who were Indigenous: 710
Missing persons who weren't Indigenous: 4,174

It's true! You never heard about the 710 missing persons. But duh! You never heard about the 4,174 missing persons either.

Putting it a different way, you never heard about any of those missing persons in the way you've heard about the late Gabby Petito this week. In fact, you never heard about any of those missing persons at all.

For starters, that's because, Ifill's pleasing statement to the contrary,  the mainstream media doesn't cover the cases of "every missing white woman." In fact, the media almost never covers such cases. Almost no missing persons get covered this way, including the blonde and the blue-eyed.

The statistical dumbness of this morning's Times report rises to the level of undisguised, flat-out Stupid. That said, it's very typical of the way our high-end journalists work when confronted with any sort of statistical or pseudo-statistical statement.

In this case, the Times was eager to push Storyline, and so it ran with that absurdly irrelevant statistic. For whatever reason, its unnamed editors didn't remove that irrelevant passage from the report. For all we know, it may be the editors who stuck the passage in.

Increasingly, our journalism is Storyline all the way down. Along with that, our Storyline selection is tribal. 

In this instance, these factors led the Times to pretend that oversized coverage occurs all the time with missing white women, even as they couldn't seem to come up with a recent example—and even as they failed to note one of the obvious reasons why the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito has received so much coverage.

In part, this case has received an outsized amount of coverage because Petito was a travel blogger who had posted tons of footage of her cross-country trip. It has also received outsized coverage because the ludicrous behavior of her  fiancé comes straight out of a cable-friendly, Sleeping With the Enemy-style movie.

That said, also this:

This case has received a lot of coverage because, by conventional norms, Petito was stunningly telegenic. Cable loves to run video footage of conventionally attractive young women, just as it loves to hire such women to appear on the air.

Obviously, race and color play major roles in judgments concerning who is and isn't attractive; this fact is extremely unfortunate. But, as judged by conventional norms, Petito was stunningly telegenic. 

That fact played an obvious role in this week's unusual amount of coverage. As part of its general vapidity, CNN loves to air footage like that, along with equally exciting footage of hurricanes, fires and floods.

That said, gaze upon the statistical dumbness of upper-end newspapers like the Washington Post and the Times. 

In this report, the Post subjects that statistic from Wyoming to even dumber use. This dumbness runs through the coverage of almost every matter our upper-end press corps pursues. 

That dumbness is in the saddle and it rules our journalistic humankind. And no, a modern nation can't hope to survive when its tribunes are so vapid and so incompetent, and so ruled by Storyline.

Concerning Ifill's wry remark, we'll only say this—at least she wasn't covering for her warmongering friend, Condi Rice, on that particular day.

Concerning that astoundingly silly pseudo-statistic, it's a case of the 710 versus the more than four thousand! None of those stories got covered this way—in fact, none of those stories got covered at all. That's because what Ifill said was, and is, transparently bogus.

When we saw the figure 710, we wondered about the other figure, as any competent person would. When we looked at the Wyoming report, we were able to cipher it out—4,174!

This sort of thing is beyond the reach of our upper-end mainstream journalists. Many went to the finest schools, but they rarely show the slightest sign of being able or inclined to handle such questions as this.

Our brains aren't wired for this sort of thing. They're wired to pimp tribal Storyline, or so the top experts all tell us!

The earlier missing white woman: As of 2004, the earlier missing white woman was Chandra Levy. Her case received blanket coverage in 2001 because the crackpot conservative world was using it to push the "Democrats chase after interns" line, with the mainstream press corps politely playing along.

In other words, it was part of the ongoing MSM war against Clinton, Clinton and Gore, the war which  put Bush and Trump in the White House—the inexcusable, brain-damaged war which remains undiscussed.

CNN ran with it, night after night, all through the summer of 2001. (As summertime fare, it was even better than shark attacks!) On September 11, al Qaeda hit, and this much adored, important topic was never mentioned again.

This is the way this guild has functioned over the course of the past many years. Within a year, they were savaging Gore for saying, in a major speech, we should stay out of Iraq. Frank Rich was never more angry than he was with the phony, dishonest Gore! Katie Couric went after him too!

This is who and what we are. Simply put, we're wired this way, disconsolate experts insist.

WE CALL IT READING A BOOK: The logicians probably couldn't have helped!

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 23, 2021

The transparent Dumbness, it burns: Robert Woodward's new book, co-written with Robert Costa, bears a one-word title: 

Peril

Following its 72 chapters, its epilogue ends with a two-word paragraph:

"Peril remains."

The authors refer to the peril facing our democracy in these (ongoing) days of Trump. More expansively, the epilogue ends as shown:

Could Trump work his will again? Were [sic] there any limits to what he and his supporters might do to bring him back to power?

Peril remains.

Even in fuller context, the word "were" doesn't make sense there. But as the book ends, Woodward and Costa are most specifically saying that peril remains if Donald J. Trump seeks the White House again.

Our democracy remains in peril, the authors say in their book. But according to the experts with whom we consult, we've moved past the point of peril. The die has already been cast.

Could the logicians have helped us with this? Most likely, they couldn't have. That said, the logicians—indeed, the "philosophers" and philosophy professors in general—walked off their posts so long ago that the question is hard to assess.

(Could it be they were never on their posts? Yes, that's possible too! It's a point we expect to explore.)

Tomorrow, we'll return to a discussion we introduced last week. We'll return to the preface to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, "the most important philosophy book of the 20th century."

It was rated the most important such book, but no one has the slightest idea what its author might have said! So it goes within a culture where academic elites, as a group, have walked away from their posts—have ceased to function as a "guardian" class. 

In our view, Philosophical Investigations could have served as a highly instructive guide to what might be called "daily logic." Hard to parse though its text may be, a great deal of instruction can be teased from its bewildering numbered passages.

No such effort has ever been undertaken. That said, we'll plow ahead with an attempt to define the gains which could have been made. Tomorrow, we'll return to Wittgenstein's attempts, in his preface, to describe his intentions in writing the book, and we'll discuss his attempts to describe his book's shortcomings.

For today, one particular news report filled us with instant despair. The statistical dumbness, how it burned! We'll describe that hurtful report in today's afternoon post.

As it turns out, we the people weren't designed to run something like a democracy. Our brains were wired for Storyline, and as it turns out, we're pretty much tribal pretty much all the way down.

Regarding the preface to which we've referred, we briefly discussed it last Wednesday. To review that discussion, click here.

We'll resume that discussion tomorrow. Next week, we'll move on to the start of the most important philosophy book's unexplored text.

Could a different approach to this book have helped? Alas! Even as we continue to work in the garden, we're going to stick with a no.

Tomorrow:  "I should have liked to produce a good book. That has not come about."

Did Quayle call Pence, or did Pence call Quayle?

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

As performed on Morning Joe: Yesterday morning, we made a point of watching Morning Joe. Woodward and Costa were going to be there to discuss their under-sourced new book.

Seven minutes into the segment, Woodward mentioned former Vice President Pence. Was he perhaps a bit too kind in what he said about Pence? 

WOODWARD (9/21/21): [As January 6 approaches], Pence is really working hard to see if he can do something to stay on the good side of Trump. At the same time, as Bob [Costa] pointed out, amidst Dan Quayle, who calls him and reads him the Constitution and the law and says, You are not an actor is this. You simply mechanically count the votes. And Pence is under lots of pressure from Trump, and his lawyers and confidantes are just saying, You cannot do this, and in the end Pence stood up and did the constitutional right thing. At the same time, when he's there and they're voting to certify, if he'd just said, "Oh, I'm confused" and walked off, we would have had worse than a constitutional crisis, because it would have undermined the legitimacy of the presidency.

In Woodward's account, Quayle called Pence and told him that he had to do the right thing. On January 6, Woodward says that Pence did exactly that, despite lots of pressure from Trump. 

This may not have been negative enough concerning Pence. Also, did Quayle call Pence or did Pence call Quayle? Continuing directly, Willie got the overall story back on track, while performing an unannounced correction:

GEIST (continuing directly): But Bob Costa, as you report in the book, Bob, it's, you know—he was fishing around, Vice President Pence, for a reason to get this done for President Trump, calling Vice President Quayle, who shut him down pretty quickly...

That was more like it! Willie stressed the way Pence was fishing around for a way to get the election undone. 

Also, in Willie's account, it was Pence who called Quayle, not the way Woodward had it. Heroically, Quayle shut him down!

How about it? Did Pence call Quayle, or did Quayle call Pence? Assuming that any of this occurred, it wouldn't exactly matter.

That said, when Maddow read from the book last Tuesday night, it was Pence who telephoned Quayle, and that is what it says in the book. ("In late December, Pence phoned former vice president Dan Quayle.") 

Yesterday morning, Woodward had that fact turned around. Willie simply plowed ahead, blowing past Woodward's apparent misstatement and getting the overall story back on track.

Did Pence call Quayle, or did Quayle call Pence? More importantly, what happened when the two men spoke, assuming they actually did? And on what basis can Woodward and Costa report what the two fellows said? 

On what basis should we assume that their account of this alleged call is actually accurate? Who or what is the source of their account, in which they literally quote substantial parts of this conversation?

As widely presented on liberal cable, this new book launched a pleasingly unflattering story about Pence. But on what basis should anyone think that Woodward and Costa's account of this matter is accurate? (It certainly may be, of course.)

These are the obvious questions to ask. But given the clownish way our upper-end corporate discourse works, none of the millionaires of "cable news" are ever going to ask them. Our discourse is Storyline all the way down, and the big players all know this.

You'd almost think that our logicians (or our "epistemologists") might speak up at some point. As it turns out, they have better things to do:

Revisionists versus Unitarians, they're debating the (unreadable) Theaetetus!

WE CALL IT READING A BOOK: Did Pence call Quayle, or did Quayle call Pence?

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22, 2021

We call it reading a transcript: Yesterday morning, we made a point of watching the segment in question.

The bodacious Bobcats, Woodward and Costa, were scheduled to appear on Morning Joe. Their new book was extremely hot—and as with many of Woodward's books, it may have been perhaps a bit  and somewhat shakily sourced.

An irony lurks in that possibility. Back in the day, Woodward and Bernstein became iconic journalistic figures due to their Watergate reporting for the Washington Post.

Out of that iconic episode, an iconic story emerged. They'd managed to get (almost) everything right because their editor, the iconic Ben Bradlee, had required two (2) sources for their factual claims.

That was then, but this is now. Yesterday, over at Slate, Fred Kaplan described an alleged problem with Woodward's current techniques:

KAPLAN (9/21/21): [Woodward's books] follow a pattern, so consistent, over the past few decades, that it might be dubbed “Woodwardian.” The author amasses vast quantities of scoops, some of them extraordinary. He subjects them to little, if any, analysis. Instead, he channels his anecdotes through the viewpoints of well-known characters, who tend to be either heroes (who often coincide with sources who have told him a lot) or villains (who usually haven’t).

Thar she blows! If you cooperate with Woodward, you get treated as a hero in his subsequent book. If you refuse to be interviewed, you find yourself cast as a goat. So runs one of the allegations about Woodward's allegedly shaky methods over the past many years.

We never discuss our conversations with high-ranking federal officials. But way back in the 1990s, one such high-ranking federal official voiced this very complaint to us, explaining why he had turned out to be one of the goats in Woodward's latest Clinton-era book.

(For the record, we have no way of knowing if what we were told was accurate.)

This allegation about Woodward's technique has been somewhat widely voiced in recent decades. As he continued, Kaplan expanded on his theme:

KAPLAN (continuing directly): This last trait is common among Washington journalists who rely too much on insider sources, but Woodward takes the practice to extremes. The main hero in Peril, as many have noted, is Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is portrayed as the warrior-savior who kept the world at peace during Donald Trump’s most turbulent outbursts. Milley exaggerates, and Woodward lets him...

Woodward’s credulity of his favored sources taints his own credibility on matters large and small. For instance, there’s a passage describing the events of June 1, 2020, as protests are erupting, some violent, in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd. News footage that day revealed Milley strutting through the streets of downtown Washington, D.C., in combat fatigues, as if he were inspecting the troops in wartime. He was much criticized for this and, 10 days later, apologized. But Woodward treats the general’s wardrobe as innocuous, writing, “Milley left the White House and headed downtown to visit the FBI command post monitoring the demonstrations. Expecting a late night, he changed into his uniform of camouflage fatigues to be more comfortable.”

I have no doubt this is the explanation Milley fed him. I am stunned that, after 45 years of high-level journalism, Woodward still lacks a functioning bullshit detector.

Kaplan goes on to explain why he says that Woodward has taken "bullshit" from General Milley and presented it as fact. These complaints about Woodward's methods never go away.

In this instance, Woodward has told readers what Milley was "expecting" on the day in question. He has also told readers why Milley changed into his camouflage fatigues, but he's done these things without reporting his sources—without explaining how he can know that what he has written is true.

Woodward rose to fame on the strength of requiring two sources. Today, traditional sourcing of any kind rarely exists in his books.

In Woodward's easy-reader books, we're offered highly novelized easy-reader tales. We're supposed to assume that his statements are accurate, with zero questions asked.

General Milley was the hero of the passages in this book which were released for promotional purposes. At the same time, a pleasing villain was offered—former Vice President Pence.

Last Tuesday night, Rachel Maddow pleased us rubes with the standard account of Pence's supposed behavior. Concerning Pence, this was her nugget presentation:

MADDOW (9/14/21): In this new book, one of the things that [Woodward and Costa] report is that Mike Pence, in their telling, was far more reluctant to do his job, far more reluctant to do his constitutional duty than the public narrative has suggested. Bottom line, Vice President Pence didn't ultimately accede to Trump's wishes to block the certification of the election, to overturn the election results, to leave Trump in power or to render the election results unknowable. But it was not, apparently, for a lack of him trying to find a way to do that.

Thus spake the bulk of the liberal world's Cablethustra! Tomorrow, we'll show you more of what Maddow said that night—but as always, her account was tribally pleasing in the ultimate way.

Question:

How does Maddow know that Woodward's account is accurate? Even if she's interpreting the book's presentation correctly—we're not assuming that she is—how does she know that Woodward's account isn't just the latest version of bullshit? The latest punishment of a possible source who refused to come across?

As she pleased us flunkies that night, Maddow read at length from the pleasing new book. At some points, Woodward is explicitly quoting what Quayle and Pence are said to have said to each other during the phone call in question.

Question: 

How is it possible for Woodward to quote the exact words these two fellows said? Did he have a tape? Did he have a transcript? What's the source for those quoted remarks?

Maddow, of course, didn't raise any such point. As he she performed her tribal services, Our Rhodes Scholar didn't ask.

Maddow's account was the first we saw of this exciting new book. As we watched her discuss Pence and Quayle, we were struck by her gullibility, or perhaps by her lack of something resembling honesty, as she performed in precisely the way a tribal bullshitter should.

Maddow recently scored a $30 million contract as a result of such faithful service. Tomorrow, we'll continue exploring this particular topic, the one involving what Pence and Quayle allegedly said and did, and what Pence allegedly wanted.

As for the service we've rendered today, we call it "reading a transcript." We also call it "an education," much as Tara Westover did.

Woodward's latest book has put pleasing stories in play. But to what extent should we believe that the stories are actually accurate?

None of our nation's vaunted logicians have managed to offer a word on this basic matter of Daily Logic. That said, our logicians walked off their posts long ago, Wittgenstein maybe among them.

Final question:

Did Pence call Quayle, or did Quayle call Pence? To see the comical way our discourse works, come back for this afternoon's compost.

We'll be quoting from Morning Joe. We made a point of watching.

Tomorrow: Back to Wittgenstein's Preface

The standards which govern our public discourse!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

Speaking quite frankly, there are none: Consider the standards which now control the making of journalistic claims.

More specifically, consider the lack of such standards. Consider a claim by the New York Times' Charles Blow. Also, consider the links supplied by Blow in alleged support of his claim.

In fairness, Blow's claim is supported by our one extant rule of journalism. According to that one rule, any claim is accepted as true if it supports a sweeping denunciation of some group of Others.

In the case of Blow's most recent column, The Others are fingered in his headline: "White Evangelicals Shun Morality for Power." After a string of  pleasing non sequiturs concerning Franklin Graham, Blow moves on to the claim which is implied by the highlighted passage:

BLOW (9/20/21): I had grown up hearing from pulpits that it was the world that changed, not God’s word. The word was like a rock. A lie was a lie, yesterday, today and tomorrow, no matter who told it.

I had hoped that there were more white evangelicals who embraced the same teachings, who would not abide by the message the Grahams of the world were advancing, who would stand on principle.

But I was wrong. A report for the Pew Research Center published last week found that, contrary to an onslaught of press coverage about evangelicals who had left the church, disgusted by its embrace of the president, “There is solid evidence that white Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than white Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”

Our question: 

At some point along the way, was there really "an onslaught of press coverage about evangelicals who had left the church, disgusted by its embrace of the president?"

We can't recall any such onslaught, though that doesn't settle the question. Meanwhile, the Pew report to which Blow refers doesn't describe any such onslaught of coverage. 

That said, Blow offers one link in support of the claim that some such "onslaught of press coverage" actually took place at some point. He links to an April 2019 first-person report at Religion & Politics, a relatively little-known online news journal.

In that first-person report, Bradley Oinishi, an  associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, describes what happened when he himself left evangelical movement for political reasons—when he left the evangelical movement back in 2005.

In the course of his report, Oinishi does refer to “Deconstructing My Religion,” a 26-minute CBS documentary "centered on the stories of the figures who started and have worked to sustain" people who have left the evangelical faith. 

The CBS program aired in December 2018, generating little discussion. As best we can tell, it wasn't focused on evangelicals who abandoned their faith due to Trump.

Did that "onslaught" ever take place? Was there ever "an onslaught of press coverage about evangelicals who had left the church, disgusted by its embrace of the president?" 

We don't know if any such onslaught ever took place. We do know these two things:

First, no one at the New York Times made Blow offer support for his claim. Also, this is the way our clownish discourse works at the highest levels.

Blow's column is a pastiche of non sequiturs and unsupported claims. This is the way a certain former president plays the game. It's also the way of our greatest journalists at the top of our clownish discourse.

Meanwhile, here's Fred Kaplan at Slate, discussing Robert Woodward's standards of evidence and proof. We may touch on that topic tomorrow—but our national culture, such as it is, is clownish all the way down.

Can a modern nation function this way? As Bruce Springsteen once advised, "Son, take a good look around."

WE CALL IT READING A BOOK: What could be gained from reading this book?

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2021

Absolutely nothing: Full and complete disclosure! Nothing will be gained, at this point, from anyone's attempt to read this (most important) book.

It's much too late for some such outcome. The culture is too far gone at this point; most likely, it always was. Also, you have to consider the raw material out of which the culture was formed, or so anthropologists say.

We refer to Philosophical Investigations, the 1953 book which was chosen as "the most important philosophy book of the 20th century" in a 1999 survey of philosophy professors. 

It was the most important such book of the century, but no one has the slightest idea what its author, Ludwig Wittgenstein, demonstrated, claimed, alleged, suggested or even attempted to say. 

In part for that reason, the book has had zero effect on the western world's discourse. Nor is that going to change.

If we were going to teach this book, we'd start by advancing such gloomy points to a roomful of eager readers. These gloomy thoughts came to mind early today when we perused the New York Times, alighting on the latest "great repartee" between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.

The new weekly feature in question is called The Conversation. In today's print editions, it eats three-fifths of page A20, filling the space which would otherwise belong to this newspaper's editorials.

"Great repartee," the first commenter said. Where once the culture had Tracy and Hepburn, or possibly Ozzie and Harriett, the Times now gives us Gail and Bret, with such sparkling repartee as that shown below.

Below, you see the repartee which opened today's Conversation. In a hundred words or less, the bon vivants tell us how to feel about last weekend's major D.C. event, The Capitol Rally Which Failed:

Bret Stephens: I can’t say I’m surprised that the rally fizzled: Donald Trump wasn’t there to light a fire, and Mike Pence wasn’t there to get burned by it. Plus, all of the arrests and guilty pleas from Jan. 6 are probably having a deterrent effect.

On the other hand, the fact that Trump is publicly supporting the Jan. 6 rioters who, he says, are “being persecuted so unfairly relating to the Jan. 6 protest concerning the Rigged Presidential Election” is a bad sign. The movement may be in remission, but it isn’t going away. It’s like knowing that a deadly virus, capable of infecting millions of people and wrecking the country, is being handled by a mad scientist at an unsafe facility. You might even call it the “Mar-a-Lago virus.”

Gail [Collins]: I do kind of like the idea of D.J.T. surrounded by beakers of deadly bacteria, with wild frizzy hair, laughing maniacally. But only for about 30 seconds. Let’s move on to a cheerier topic. Any further thoughts about the pandemic? Vaccine musings?

"You might even call it the Mar-a-Lago virus," Bret says, showcasing the failed attempts at wit with which he litters these conversations.

In response, Gail says she does "kind of like" a certain image, an image drawn straight out of The Simpsons and other cartoon fare. With that, it's on to a (tongue in cheek) "cheerier topic," as the Times gives readers one last way to pretend that the journalistic vapidity of the past several decades can still, somehow, be maintained as the world falls apart around us—that this can still be fun.

Stephens would do a whole lot better if he'd stop trying to showcase his wit. There's no reason why a journalist has to feel that he has to possess some such skill.

In our view, Collins defined herself for all time with her endless attempts to convey the impression that Mitt Romney, as a young parent, once drove hundreds of miles to a summer vacation with Seamus, his family's Irish setter, "strapped to the roof of his car." That's how vapid our upper-end discourse can get, and Collins seemed eager to prove it.

During the 2012 campaign, Collins inserted that grossly misleading claim into more than fifty (50) of her columns.  Her editors allowed this nonsense to unspool; overwhelmingly, commenters loved it. 

This is the world in which reading that book will do no good at all.

By the way, if Philosophical Investigations was the most important philosophy book of the 20th century, why haven't philosophy professors made its contents better known?

On its face, you're asking a very good question! In fact, those professors walked away from the real events of the actual world a very long time ago.

That history is directly connected to the contents of this most important book. But before we tried to approach its text, we'd also tell readers this:

The book in question is so peculiar that the reader, no matter how determined, shouldn't expect to "understand" it in any conventional sense. 

Do the professors understand the book? We wouldn't assume that they do. But new readers, no matter how hard they may try, aren't going to understand it in the way they might "understand" some other valuable book. 

That doesn't mean that its contents, jumbled and puzzling as they may be, can't be highly instructive.

In theory, the book can be highly instructive. For our money, Professor Horwich was pointing us in the right direction when he offered this, in the pixels of the New York Times no less:

HORWICH (3/3/13): Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any just society, and so on — and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t that why we are so fascinated by it?

If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress—by an embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues.

Say what? (Academic) philosophy's (traditional) "problems" have always been "mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking?" 

College freshmen have always suspected as much. But can it really be true?

We would suspect that it can be true, and that some such understanding can be wrung from the general incoherence of Philosophical Investigations. For our own less lofty purposes, we'll suggest that something else is true:

This book can be used as a brilliant primer in clearer thinking. The dumbness of the public discourse is the sea in which we've all been swimming. Maddening though it may be, Philosophical Investigations points to ways to avoid our ocean of muddled thinking—but given the ways we humans are wired, are we really inclined to long for any such service?

We'd start by telling the new reader that she probably won't understand this book in any conventional sense. We'd also note that it's much too late for the book to do any good.

In that case, why proceed with our effort at all? Borrowing from Tara Westover, we call our effort "reading a book," but also "an education."

Tomorrow: Back to Wittgenstein's preface

One of Cooper's reading preferences...

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

...struck us as possibly odd: Back in March, the New York Times profiled Don Lemon's reading habits.

This profile appeared in the Sunday's magazine's weekly "By The Book" feature. The headline on the feature said this:

Don Lemon Organizes His Books by Color

Yesterday, it was Anderson Cooper's turn.

Cooper is very involved in the history of his family. (There's no reason why he shouldn't be.) The family is very famous on his mother's side.

Yesterday's feature was tied to the publication of his latest book on this general topic, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, written with Katherine Howe.

How deeply is Cooper tied to his ancestry? This was yesterday's initial Q-and-A:

NEW YORK TIMES (9/19/21): What books are on your night stand?

On my night stand are two small, very fragile books that belonged to my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt, who died in 1925. One is a Book of Common Prayer. The other is “The Gate to Caesar,” written in Latin by William C. Collar. My grandfather was 14 when he got the books. He wrote his name in them and the year 1894. He also doodled in them (he was not exactly a great student). They sit on top of a biography of Napoleon by Emil Ludwig published in 1926. It belonged to my mom’s maternal grandmother, Laura Kilpatrick Morgan, who was, in my mom’s words, “really kind of crazy.” She worshiped Napoleon and patterned herself after him. She always kept this biography by her bedside and underlined passages that were important to her. I didn’t know her or my grandfather but having these books, with their notes and scribbles, makes me feel connected to them and to all those in my family who came before me.

There's nothing "wrong" with any of that, though that isn't what the Times is typically looking for when it asks that question. 

Four other questions produced responses involving family members. One such exchange is shown here:

NEW YORK TIMES: You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

COOPER: I would ask my mom and dad and my brother, Carter. I know it’s not a very clever answer, but it’s the truth. Carter was an editor at American Heritage magazine and wrote book reviews for Commentary, and I think he would have become a writer full time if he had lived. It would just be us four for dinner, and it would be a long one. Maybe at some point I would invite Truman Capote to stop by. Truman and my parents were once very close, and I remember him very well, but they stopped speaking to him after he wrote some pretty cruel stuff about my mom in a story published in Esquire in 1975. I wouldn’t want Truman to stay very long though, and he couldn’t have any alcohol. Actually let’s make it Truman circa 1966, not the bloated Truman of 1975.

We humans tend to be strongly connected to our family histories. There's nothing "wrong" with any of Cooper's answers along these lines, though they're unusual by the norms of this weekly feature.

One of Cooper's statements did strike us as possibly odd. Here's the full exchange:

NEW YORK TIMES: Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

COOPER: I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, except if it’s something someone has recommended to me, but when I find a great novel I love nothing more than just losing myself in it.

In theory, Cooper discusses national and world news for an hour or two on CNN every weekday night. Wouldn't you think that a person like that might be partial to works of nonfiction, seeing them as possible sources of wider comprehension?  (There's no "correct" answer to that.)

For ourselves, we lost confidence in Cooper's work some time ago, though we'd say that others can be much, much worse. That said, it's almost impossible to capture the intellectual squalor which pervades the work of our upper-end press corps as it delivers "the news."

Shaky data, shakily construed in support of preferred Storyline? Sweeping generalizations about the undesirable qualities of The Others?

If it weren't for analyses of these types, would we have any analyses in our discourse at all? We'll try to give you samples this week, but we'll start by admitting defeat:

It's hard to convey the relentless D-minus performance of our upper-end press corps. On average, the group's skill levels are stunningly low. Storyline tends to be all.

We'll plan to offer examples this week, but such examples rarely undermine the general assumption of competence. Deference to authority tends to keep us from seeing this sorry situation as it actually is, or so major experts keep telling us, tearing their hair as they do.

Full disclosure: Until we read that first Q-and-A, it had never occurred to us:

One of Jackie Gleason's comic characters, Reginald Van Gleason III, may have been patterned on the grandfather of one of our cable news stars!

WE CALL IT READING A BOOK: First approaches to Wittgenstein!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2021

We call it an education: Last Friday, in his New York Times column, David Brooks explored part of the varied terrain of a certain "philosophical problem."

The problem in question might be called "the problem of free will." It was one of the six "philosophical problems" with which we were confronted in the fall semester of 1965, when we took our philosophy department's introductory course.

"Phil 3: Problems in Philosophy." That was the name of the course.

During that course, we beginners were exposed to six philosophical problems. One of the problems was this:

How do you know that 7 + 5 = 12?

We can't recall the identity of four of the other problems. But one of the other philosophical problems was "the problem of free will."

What is the philosophical problem of free will? That question could be answered various ways. 

That said, we were flung back to the fall of '65 at the start of Brooks' column. His column started like this:

BROOKS (9/17/21): One of the most unsettling findings of modern psychology is that we often don’t know why we do what we do. You can ask somebody: Why’d you choose that house? Or why’d you marry that person? Or why’d you go to graduate school? People will concoct some plausible story, but often they really have no idea why they chose what they did.

We have a conscious self, of course, the voice in our head, but this conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain that are the actual sources of judgment, problem-solving and emotion. We know what we’re feeling, just not how and why we got there.

But we also don’t want to admit how little we know about ourselves, so we make up some story, or confabulation...

Hmm. If we don't know why we do the things we do—if our conscious self has little access to the parts of the brain which control our feelings and our assessments—can we really be held accountable for the decisions we make—for the things we do in circumstances where no external force stopped us from doing something else?

No one stopped you from doing X! On the other hand, you had no access to the parts of the brain which led you to do Y instead. 

Given these circumstances, can you be blamed (or praised) for having done Y? Also, to what extent can it be said that you did Y "of your own free will?"

Can you be blamed for having done Y? At this point, we're fumbling with something which might be seen as part of "the problem of free will."

We don't recall how this "problem" was defined, explained or presented to us rubes in that introductory course. But if memory serves, this was the one problem of philosophy, out of the six, which seemed to be a genuine intellectual problem, not an exercise in a pointless type of academic complexification.

In later years, we sometimes said, on the comedy stage, that we weren't sure who those "problems in philosophy" were supposed to be problems for. 

For whom did knowledge of 7 + 5 constitute a philosophical problem? Even in 1965, inquiring minds wanted to know.

In fairness, the answer was partially clear at the time. These problems were serious problems for Mr. X (NOT REAL INITIAL), the graduate student teaching assistant with whom our section of the class met on a weekly basis.

Mr. X was a perfectly decent person. On the other hand, he would not infrequently stare out the third-story window in Emerson Hall, running his fingers through his hair as he struggled with the maddening difficulty of these philosophical problems.

"Don't jump, Mr. X!" we wanted to shout. Mr. X was taking these philosophical quandaries disturbingly hard.

(For the record, how can you know—how can you be sure—that 7 + 5 = 12? Our advice would be this: Simplify the philosophical problem by changing the example to 1 + 1 = 2. Then, proceed from there.)

Full disclosure: Mr. X didn't jump! He received his doctorate in the street-fighting year of 1969, as was completely appropriate. Today, he's a professor emeritus at a major university. 

Here's something else that happened in the wake of Phil 3. A bunch of us freshmen decided to switch to different majors. Entering college, we hadn't known what academic philosophy is like.

After sophomore year, we skillfully switched back. In the spring semester of our junior year, we took the undergraduate Wittgenstein course, which focused entirely on Philosophical Investigations (1953), the puzzling text which defines the work of the so-called "later Wittgenstein."

The book is almost absurdly opaque. That said, we think it can be read in ways which are highly instructive. Along the way, we've mentioned an oddity concerning this book:

In 1999, a survey of philosophy professors named Philosophical Investigations the most important philosophy book of the 20th century. That said, no one has the slightest idea what Wittgenstein said, suggested, proved or claimed in the jumbled and puzzling book. 

Perhaps for that reason, this most important philosophy book of the 20th century has had exactly zero effect on the bankrupt, clownish public discourse of the 21st century. It's the most important philosophy book, and it lies in the village graveyard, never consulted or used.

This week, we're returning to a daily attempt to draw utility from this most important philosophy text. By all accounts, the book is quite hard to understand. As we noted last Wednesday, its structure is rather unique. 

How should a reader approach this allegedly important book? Returning to where we were last week, we plan to offer possible guidance, though at this point we'll offer a warning:

We plan to move through the text extremely slowly, even with care. 

We call this "reading a book." Borrowing from the closing line of Tara Westover's recent best-seller, we're also going to call it a (possible) education.

In her mammoth best-seller, Educated: A Memoir, Westover described the  unusual way she and her siblings were raised by their semi-survivalist parents. She also describes the ways she developed her own "selfhood"—the ways she instructed herself. We admire the way Westover ended her book:

The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones [my earlier self] would have made. They were the decisions of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

We like the fact that Westover knows that a certain state of affairs can be viewed in various ways—can be called many things. It seems to us that the game is rarely played this way at the present time.

In truth, there are zero serious discussions within our failing discourse. We plan to discuss Wittgenstein's text quite slowly, possibly even with care.

We expect to move at a slow rate of speed. We're inclined to call that process "reading a book."

Tomorrow: Important book's first paragraph

The ways we reason in our own blue towns!

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2021

No Crazy Claim Left Behind: Jason Johnson is a "cable news" professor serving our own blue tribe.

He also has his own podcast at Slate. Yesterday, in a new edition, he spoke about the frequent casting of interracial couples in current TV ads.

Those TV ads are a somewhat surprising manifestation. We've never seen a discussion of the marketing strategy behind these ads.

That said, those ads are also a manifestation which lets kids with parents of different "races" see similar couples on TV. In theory, this could also be instructive for kids who aren't personally familiar with interracial couples. It could let those children begin to see that love and romance and even marriage can work this new, different way too.

At any rate, President Biden has frequently commented on these TV ads. Below, you see what Professor Johnson had to say about this offensive phenomenon. 

Move to the 15-minute mark. He spoke with Khalil Muhammad:

PROFESSOR JOHNSON (9/17/21): Biden has said more than once, he's cited interracial couples in commercials as signs of progress on race. I’m going to tell you this, Khalil, because this is a key thing for me. Not only did I find that offensive. Not only did I write a piece about it in The Grio, but I have actually found the spate of interracial relationships in both commercials and television to actually be kind of an act of violence...

The professor has actually found those TV ads to be "kind of an act of violence." As he continued, he "explained" his peculiar remark:

PROFESSOR JOHNSON (continuing directly): And the reason why is because they are not reflective of actual demographic changes in this country. And second, the relationships still seem to be, they're sort of mock progress. You know, 86 percent of African-American men who are married in this country are married to black women; 92 percent of black women in this country who are married are married to black men. And yet, and I’ve done my own research on this, over 70 percent of interracial couples on television, it's always a white guy and a black woman. 

Yes, that was the "explanation." Let's consider what the professor said. 

(For an error-riddled Slate transcript, you can just click here.)

First, the professor said that these TV ads "are not reflective of actual demographic changes in this country." Presumably, he meant that, on a proportional basis, there are more interracial couples on TV than there are in the general population.

That may or may not be true; let's assume it is. Would that even begin to explain why those ads should be seen as "an act of violence?" 

Tribal loyalty will instruct you to cast about for a way to say that it does. Simple rationality, however construed, will tell you that it doesn't.

The professor's explanation continued from there. He now seemed to say that the interracial relationships which exist in real life "still seem to be, they're sort of mock progress." 

Or he might have meant that about the interracial relationships seen on TV. By the time he got through talking, it wasn't clear what he meant.

Whatever it was he actually meant, he turned to statistics to prove his point. Saying he'd done his own research, he ended with this mangled claim:

"Over 70 percent of interracial couples on television, it's always a white guy and a black woman."

Over 70 percent of the time, it's always a white guy and a white woman! Aside from the comical non sequitur involved in that statement, it's unclear how that statistic (if accurate) relates to his previous statistics (if accurate). And none of this begins to explain why those TV ads can be seen as "an act of violence," the statement we rode in on.

Here in Our Town, it's easy to see the craziness which is being widely displayed by quite a few of The Others. But our own blue towns increasingly run on a sad rule of thumb, especially when our cable professors start talking.

Increasingly, our blue towns run on this sad rocket fuel:

No Absurd Statement Left Behind!

Increasingly, this is the way we live Over Here, within our blue tribe, especially when we talk about matters of gender and race. Disconsolate anthropologists insist that our human brains are wired to produce such tribalized claims and have been all along.

We humans are the tribal animal! That's what the experts all say. 

On Fox, they play the tape of our cable professors and tell The Others how crazy We are.  When they make such moves on Fox, it's hard to say that they're totally wrong.

BLUE SKILL LEVELS VERY LOW: Blow explains why he writes...

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

...but also, his dinner near Hef: Will Casey Parks' lengthy report generate a discussion?

Actually no, it won't. You've seen it mentioned nowhere but here, and you're going to see it mentioned nowhere ever again.

Her report connects to no prior discussion. The fact is, nobody cares about the topic Parks explored in last Sunday's lengthy, detailed report.

No one has cared about that topic for a good long time. More specifically, no one has cared about that topic here in our own blue towns. 

Within our blue political tribe, our journalists care about which kids will go to Stuyvesant High (or to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia), with a chance to advance to Yale. There's no other part of this topic to which our tribe is known to respond.

Charles Blow's son does (or did) go to Yale. Stating the obvious, there's no reason why he shouldn't. 

Blow himself doesn't write about the general topic addressed by Parks' visit to the Holmes County schools in the Mississippi Delta. That said, this Monday he offered an inspiring column under the headline, "Why I Write."

The column was filled with words of self-praise. Headline included, the column started like this:

BLOW (9/13/21): Why I Write 

One of my favorite aunts was desperately poor, like many people I knew in rural north Louisiana. I don’t know how much money she had or made. I only know the shadow of need that stalked her. She seemed, like many members of my family, one paycheck or severe injury away from insolvency.

Blow described the desperate poverty of the rural South. Eventually, he fell to the task of explaining why he writes. 

Blow described the conditions he found when he visited his aunt "when my [his] children were young." The poverty he described was extreme. In the passage, he described his thoughts and his reactions:

BLOW: I sat there thinking about the great divide among us, about how far removed I now was from this life, but also about how very connected I was, spiritually, to it.

And I was conflicted. How much could I or should I help? I have had long talks with my mother about this. Other than a little money in greeting cards, there wasn’t much that I could do for all the people I knew in need.

The problem was not about personal generosity, but rather public policy and indifference. The best thing I could do was to advocate for all.

When I visited my aunt, I was working at The New York Times. I had been poor, but I no longer was. And yet, it was important to me then, and remains important to me now, that I remained connected to that poverty, so that I could write about it from a genuine place.

Already, Blow was working for the Times. He was no longer poor, but he wanted to remain connected to that desperate poverty, so that he could write about it from a genuine place. 

According to Blow's column, this is why he writes. As he continued, the song of self became more explicit and perhaps a tiny bit maudlin. 

BLOW: There were two bits of advice I remember receiving when I first became a columnist, although I don’t recall from whom they came.

One was to write what you know. Write about some of your most intimate experiences, the things that you can’t stop thinking about no matter how hard you try.

The other was that columnists should be like an orchestra, each playing a different instrument, but together making music.

I decided that in that orchestra I was going to play the banjo. I was not a big-city writer. I was a small-town country boy from the South. I had not grown up with wealth and privilege. I had struggled, and at times, my family had barely scraped by. I had not gone to fancy prep schools or Ivy League colleges, but a small high school that had served Black students since the late 1800s and to a historically Black college, Grambling State University, the closest university to my hometown.

Others can be all fancy and such. He has decided to play the banjo! That's who he is and was.

Apparently, if there's one person who hates the wealth and the privilege, it has to be Charles Blow. In the closing paragraph of his column, he links himself to Maya Angelou, so great is his devotion to these heartfelt themes:

BLOW: Maya Angelou once said that whenever she embarked on a project, she brought everyone who had ever been kind to her with her, not physically, but spiritually. In the same way, whenever I sit down to write, everyone who has ever struggled as I have sits down with me.

As with Steinbeck's Preacher Casey—no known relation—so too here!

For the record, it may well be that Blow does "hate the wealth and the privilege" in some manner or other. We'll only say that he doesn't seem to write about institutional disasters like those which Journalist Casey described in the Holmes County schools. 

Nor does he write about the kids who attend low-income schools right there in New York City. In fairness, no one in the upper-class press corps writes about such topics either. 

In reality, no one cares about those kids here within our self-impressed tribe, and this fact has been apparent for a very long time.

As a general matter, columnists don't bare their souls in heartfelt columns like the one Blow wrote. To our ear, it didn't necessarily ring entirely true.

In general, though, blue commenters loved it. The first two offered these remarks:

COMMENTER FROM YONKERS: A beautifully expressed and written tour-de-soul. I am reminded of the words of Invictus ... [quotation deleted]

COMMENTER FROM WASHINGTON STATE: ...You write for me.  And for all of us who hunt for your columns and re-read most of them.  You write for the voiceless, and for the marginalized and for those who need to listen to your stories because their lived experience is so far removed from yours.  You write to be certain the banjo is heard in the great orchestra of opinions and reporting.  You write to bring compassion and reason and balance and perspective to counterbalance the noise of right-wing media and ignorant pundits.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Some commenters did offer dissents, including some from a conservative direction. But one blue reader after another thanked Blow, a national treasure, for baring his soul in this way.

Why did Blow write this somewhat unusual column that day? We can't answer your question. 

We did think of his previous column, and of some pushback he had received. In print editions, it had been published two days before and it stirred unrest in the ranks.

Blow's previous column was a rumination on 9/11. Many liberal commenters were puzzled by the column, which bore this slightly odd headline:

Our Children Will Never Know the Innocence We Knew

Blow's thesis was that the 9/11 attacks "changed us, fundamentally," removing our previous innocence. He closed by saying this:

BLOW (9/11/21): People of my generation will never know again what my children’s generation only tasted: an innocence and obliviousness about threat and danger. I am—we all are—covered forever with a bit of the ash from those towers.

His children's generation had "tasted an innocence and obliviousness about threat and danger," an innocence and obliviousness which was blown away that day? His own generation had apparently known that innocence over a much longer period.

Taken literally, this struck us as a peculiar statement. In part, it seemed to contradict a prevailing tribal theme about racial danger—a tribal theme which has the advantage of being largely accurate. Many readers took it that way and roasted Blow in comments.

Two day later, Blow was out with "Why I Write." As we read it, we thought of another possible oddity in the 9/11 column—a possible oddity which fewer commenters mentioned.

We had been struck by the point at the time. The passage in question was this:

BLOW: A couple of weeks after the attack, I went to dinner at a restaurant in the Meatpacking District, just a mile or two from ground zero, where the massive mound of rubble where the twin towers once stood was still simmering. You could smell the metal in the air.

Hugh Hefner was also at the restaurant that night, surrounded by a group of women who looked remarkably similar. Other women occasionally made their way from their tables to his, smiling and laughing and posing for pictures.

I thought for a moment: Could there be a shoulder shrug any more symbolic and uniquely American than Hefner hamming it up in a banquette full of blondes? Was this what “not letting the terrorists win” looked like?

No, it wasn’t. This whole battle of optics was a fiction. Of course the terrorists had achieved their goal of forever altering us. I, like most Americans, would have to admit that I, too, was irrevocably changed.

We were surprised by that passage. In some ways, it surprised us to think that Blow was dining out within weeks of 9/11 at all. Mainly, though, it surprised us to learn that, as far back as 2001, he was dining in a restaurant which sounded a bit like an upper-end Manhattan celebrity joint.

Several commenters mentioned that very point. Two days later, to the applause of the crowd, Blow explained who he actually is, but also why he writes.

One blue commenter after another swallowed that second column whole. Anthropologists say that we humans tend to be like that—that we tend to believe the things our anointed tribal leaders tell us, especially at times of partisan war.

(According those same experts, we shouldn't reflexively trust tribal leaders. Red and blue alike, however, we humans tend to underperform with respect to this very key skill.)

At any rate, no one has written about Parks' report, and no one ever will. Manifestly, no one cares about the kids who attend those horrific Holmes County schools, or about their parents and aunts, some of whom, to this day, are struggling with rural deep poverty.

Your lizard may say that our assessment is wrong. But Parks' essay connects to no ongoing discussion, and you will never see her essay mentioned ever again.

You'll never see it mentioned! At the Times, they worry about who might get to go to Yale, and they worry about no one else. These are blindingly obvious facts, except to the tribally blinded. 

In closing, two disclosures:

"Hef" may have been dining at Arby's that night!  We don't know where Blow chose to dine that night, or who else might have chosen to dine there.

Also, we don't know the state of Charles Blow's soul. We assume he's a good, decent person, but he mainly produces tribal stock about loathing The Very Bad Others, and he never writes about the type of deep rural poverty which afflicts the Holmes County schools.

In fairness, neither does anyone else. Here in our tribe, as everyone knows, we simply don't care about topics like that, except as a matter of theory.

Also this: As David Brooks notes today, Orwell wrote a famous essay entitled, "Why I Write." 

Blow is aligned with Angelou. Is he aligned with Orwell too?

BLUE SKILL LEVELS VERY LOW: Is Holmes County the typical rural school district?

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 16, 2021

Charles Blow, in love with the poor: We were sorry to read this photo caption in today's New York Times:

Amanda Gorman, poet and co-chair of the gala, wore a bright blue dress designed by Vera Wang. She carried a clutch that looked like a book titled “Give Us Your Tired.”

The gala in question was the Met Gala, We were sorry to read that Gorman was there, along with so many others.

Most simply put, the Met Gala is Manhattan's annual Sturges Rally for the rich, dumb and influential. The inanity is fully celebrated in this morning's New York Times, all through the Thursday Styles section. 

The gala accompanies New York Fashion Week. In this morning's print edition alone, the featured headlines are these:

Lorde, Tom Ford and Kacey Musgraves Party During Fashion Week
Despite the Delta variant, the fashion tribe found lots of reason to celebrate.

New York Fashion Week Returns. Here’s the Cliffs Notes Version.
In case you missed it, a tour through our coverage of the shows.

How New York Is New York Fashion?
An infusion of out-of-town talent brings a jolt of energy to Men’s Day at New York Fashion Week.

Red Carpet Radicals: The Met Gala Really Wanted to Make a Statement
This year’s theme was American Independence. Patriotism, pop culture and politics were in fashion, but to what end?

‘Stick It to the Man’ and Other Lessons From the Met Gala Cocktails
Guests found many moments to reflect on contemporary American life.

For the record, four more reports appeared beneath a single "The Stories Behind the Looks" heading. We'll spare you the names and the details, other than to report that Billie Eilish has apparently made a daring choice:

She's decided to deep-six the fur!

Malala Yousafzai wasn't there. Neither was Greta Thunberg. These absences would possibly signal hope for the future, if any such hope for the future could rationally exist.

AOC was at the Gala, as you've undoubtedly heard. Most simply put, wealth / power / celebrity never don't win, or at least they never fail to win within our own failing, extremely dumb culture. 

Remembering Norm Macdonald, the moths are constantly drawn to that flame! The rewards are simply too damn high. (So is the good-natured gullibility, though more on that tomorrow.)

According to that one report, guests at Met Gala cocktail soirees "found many moments to reflect on contemporary American life." We feel sure we we can guarantee this:

No one reflected on the Holmes County Consolidated School District, a small, badly underfunded rural district in the high-poverty Mississippi Delta region. Also, no one reflected on the life situation of  Harvey Ellington, age 17, an admirable senior at Holmes County Central High, the district's only high school.

No one reflected on any of that, and no one ever will. Holmes County is far off the beaten track, and nobody cares about people like Ellington or about his horrific school.

The track record on this matter is plain. The history on this has been established over a great many years.

Having said that, we'll say this:

This past weekend, the New York Times featured the woes of this rural school district in its Sunday magazine. The lengthy report by Casey Parks was part of the magazine's Education Issue, an effort designed to let Times readers think that the newspaper actually cares.

That said, you've seen the report mentioned nowhere but here. The lengthy, admirably detailed report will generate no wider discussion.

Those predictions can be made with quiet confidence. The Met Gala generates oodles of splash. Kids like Ellington don't.

As we noted yesterday, Parks should be complimented for the depth of  her reporting about the plight of kids in that underfunded district. We'll also say this:

It seemed to us that Parks possibly doesn't know a whole lot about the problems involved in low-income schooling in general. That should come as no surprise. 

Newspapers like the New York Times conduct no such ongoing discussion. Even the most well-intentioned observers are left with little awareness of the basics concerning this general field of play.

Having said that, let us also say this about Parks' detailed, depressing report. More specifically, let us say this about a false impression her piece rather plainly conveyed.

Parks' very lengthy report appeared beneath these headlines:

The Tragedy of America’s Rural Schools
Outdated textbooks, not enough teachers, no ventilation—for millions of kids like Harvey Ellington, the public-education system has failed them their whole lives.

Those headlines conveyed a fairly obvious impression. They convey the impression that the appalling conditions in the Holmes County Schools are typical of America's rural school districts in general.

That same impression was conveyed in this passage early in Parks' report:

PARKS (9/12/21): While researchers and activists have spent decades detailing the ways urban schools have failed children, students like Ellington are learning in more dire conditions. Most of the country’s poorest counties are rural, and two years ago, leaders at the Rural School and Community Trust, a national nonprofit group, found that decades of population loss and divestment by state governments has left many rural communities facing “nothing less than an emergency” when it comes to educating children.

Nationwide, more than 9.3 million children—nearly a fifth of the country’s public-school students—attend a rural school. That’s more than attend the nation’s 85 largest school districts combined. And yet their plight has largely remained off the radars of policymakers. John White, the deputy assistant secretary for rural outreach at the U.S. Department of Education during the Obama administration, says that every time the nation or individual states roll out an education program, he searches for the word “rural.” “You either find one or two words or none at all,” he said.

"Most of the country’s poorest counties are rural?" That could even be true, but that doesn't mean that it's relevant.

"Nearly a fifth of the country's public school students attend a rural school?" Now the rubber is hitting the road, with a statistical statement that's almost surely grossly misleading.

We're told that a fifth of our public school students attend a rural school. As our own specific example, we're then shown Harvey Ellington's school, where the kids are all black kids, where the region is among the nation's poorest, and where the hallways flood every time it rains.

Almost surely, that admirable youngster's gruesome school isn't typical of the schools attended by those other nine million kids. For one thing, the Holmes County schools are overwhelmingly black (twelve white kids out of 3,000, Parks writes), while America's rural schools, as a group, are predominantly white.

Also this:

Holmes County lies in the Mississippi Delta, in the heart of our nation's deep poverty. Beyond that, their situation is part of that state's ongoing racial history—the students are almost all black because the white kids are all attending private schools opened in the aftermath of court-ordered school integration.

Beyond that, Mississippi's racial politics affect the finding of those schools in ways Parks describes. As described, the situation in the Holmes County Schools is appalling and depressing, but it almost surely isn't typical or rural schools across the breadth of the nation.

We blue tribal types! Once in awhile, our greatest newspaper pretends that it cares about such matters as this. When it does, it tends to pretend that it cares all the way, suggesting that Amerikan schools are like this from coast to coast.

They publish an article to show us they care, and then the subject is dropped. In the one article they're willing to run, they push Storyline all the way. 

Here in Amerika, 9.3 million schoolkids are up to their knees in water. So we readers are led to believe. In comments, we readers  respond by saying how deeply we are,

At that point, the subject is gone till the next special Issue  Meanwhile, Vanessa Fieldman and her ship of ghouls swarm the Met Gala cocktail events, offering a type of fashion / celebrity / rich folks reporting which goes on year round.

The woods are lovey, dark and deep, but wealth and celebrity constantly in. We the readers are quick to believe the things our anointed leaders have said.

They strike a pose and we applaud. This occurred again this past week in the case of the heartfelt Charles Blow.

Tomorrow: When Charles Blow met Hugh Hefner

So what the heck is the book about?

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

As we start, we'll let Wittgenstein give you a list: Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953, two years after Wittgenstein's death from cancer at age 62.

Its preface was written in 1945, but Wittgenstein decided to withhold publication until after his death. At the start of the preface, he listed some of the topics he said he would investigate in the book. As you yourself can see, the preface starts like this:

PREFACE 

The thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, of which there is sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject, while I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another.—It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks.

"I sometimes make a sudden change, jumping from one topic to another," he said. This is part of the difficulty a reader will encounter in trying to read this book.

The title of the book is wholly generic. Basically, it tells us that we aren't reading a biology text, or a book on auto mechanics.

There are no chapters within the book, and therefore no chapter titles. Instead, the book is simply a series of numbered passages. Some of these numbered passages are one paragraph long. Others are longer.

Even for a specialist, it's isn't necessarily all that easy to say what the book "is about."  In the paragraph we've posted, Wittgenstein lists some of the "many subjects" touched upon in the somewhat disjointed text.

The thoughts which he has published "concern many subjects," he says. Those subjects include "the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things." 

So the gentleman says, but will that list, such as it is, help the non-specialist much? Are we sure that we understand what it means to publish thoughts on "the concept of meaning," or on "the concept of understanding?" 

Do we know what it means to publish thoughts on "the concept of a proposition," if that's an accurate account of the third subject he lists? We may feel we know, in a general way,  what it means to publish thoughts about logic, or about some aspect of logic. But do we know what it means to publish thoughts on "the concept of logic," if that's an accurate account of Wittgenstein's language there?

Readers approaching their first encounter aren't getting much help from that list.  That said, Philosophical Investigations was rated the most important philosophy book of the 20th century in a survey of philosophy professors in late 1999. (Tomorrow, we'll add a note about what Professor Horwich later said.)

We think the book, though highly opaque, can be quite instructive. The entire text can be perused here. We'll try to help readers puzzle it out as our notes on this most important book continue down through the long years.

BLUE SKILL LEVELS VERY LOW: A detailed, depressing report in the Times!

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 2021

Then too, that statistical howler: Where the feelings are very strong, the head may lead us astray.  

This can even happen within our blue tribe! Consider a detailed, deeply depressing report in the New York Times Sunday magazine.

The lengthy report was written by Casey Parks; her report was deeply depressing. It concerned the appalling conditions which obtain in the Holmes County Consolidated School District, a badly underfunded rural school district in the heart of Mississippi's high-poverty Delta region.

Assuming her reporting is accurate—we know of no reason to doubt that it is—Parks' detailed reporting is deeply depressing and highly admirable. Her report appeared as part of the magazine's Education Issue, the king of periodic publication designed to lead subscribers to think that the New York Times actually cares about the kids in our low-income schools.

One such person is Harvey Ellington, age 17, a senior at Holmes County Central High, the only high school in this lightly-populated rural district. 

According to Parks, Holmes County is "the poorest county in the [nation's] poorest state." That helps explain the horrific conditions she describes in her deeply depressing report, but it's also part of a major problem with her journalistic method.

How bad are conditions in the Holmes County schools? How depressing is this report?

Conditions are very bad; the report is deeply depressing. Near the start of the lengthy piece, Parks offers a quick overview:

PARKS (9/12/21): Ellington was 7 the first time someone told him the state of Mississippi considered Holmes a failing district. Holmes had earned a D or an F almost every year since then, and Ellington felt hollowed out with embarrassment every time someone rattled off the ranking. Technically, the grade measured how well, or how poorly, Ellington and his classmates performed on the state’s standardized tests, but he knew it could have applied to any number of assessments. His school didn’t have clubs, and even before the pandemic, they hardly went on field trips. Every year, teaching positions sat unfilled for months at a time. The football team often made the playoffs, but the field at the high school was inadequate, and so the squad had to travel 10 miles west to play outside an elementary school.

Based upon the reporting which followed, the lack of field trips and clubs is the least of this school district's problems. In the following passage, James Henderson, a newly-arrived (and first-time) superintendent, conducts a meeting with some teachers at one of the district's grade schools:

PARKS: The teachers remained quiet as they waited for someone else to speak. Finally, a language-arts teacher said that most classrooms didn’t have textbooks. No one had science books, another teacher said, and the few reading materials instructors had were so outdated they didn’t even cover the skills kids would need to demonstrate on state tests. A music teacher who taught reading had grown so frustrated that he started bringing his own printer from home each week to run off scans of another instructor’s book.

The teachers nodded. Most said they were paying for basic supplies themselves, though they earn less than teachers elsewhere do. The average teacher in Holmes made $44,000. Statewide, teachers earned an average of $47,000.

[...]

A kindergarten teacher explained that the county still didn’t have enough buses or drivers to operate them and so they picked up kids in shifts. Half the school’s students didn’t arrive until the first period was nearly over. The school didn’t have enough teachers either. Half the instructors were uncertified, and almost all of second grade was being taught by substitutes, meaning kids showed up for third-grade multiplication lessons not knowing how to add.

Under the circumstances, and making certain assumptions about the local cost of living, that $44,000 salary doesn't strike us as shockingly low.

A great deal else in this report should in fact border on shocking. Here's a description of the high school Ellington attends:

PARKS: Every weekday, Henderson explained, 800 of the county’s teenagers crammed into a 61-year-old high school that had no air-conditioning, no heat and, some days, no running water. Most of the classrooms smelled like mold, and the hallways flooded when it rained. The outside was so antiquated that prospective teachers sometimes took one look, then peeled out of the parking lot.

What's up with flooding when it rains? Later, Parks offered this account of one such rainy day:

PARKS: When the bell rang, a social-studies teacher passed out a quiz to six students. The test was supposed to assess their knowledge of World War II and the Harlem Renaissance, but the teenagers seemed distracted. It was raining. The rooms were musty, and the hallway outside had a thin layer of water covering the linoleum. The [students] could hear their classmates, laughing and splashing down the halls.

By midmorning, both the high school and the middle school were starting to flood. On his way to lunch, Ellington passed a woman who told him she was a new substitute English teacher.

“Nice to meet you,” Ellington said. “How would you feel if we could get a new school and school funds and new businesses here?”

The teacher laughed. “I would love that. Y’all definitely need a new school, especially with what’s going on in the bathrooms.”

“The bathroom’s still not working?” Ellington asked. “That’s against the law to have us here.”

Bathrooms had broken down the week before after a clay pipe deteriorated. Maintenance crews had replaced the pipe, but now, the teacher explained to Ellington, as the rain overwhelmed the building’s plumbing, several toilets had stopped functioning again.

By 12:30 p.m., the high school’s water fountains were running brown, and every bathroom at the middle school had stopped working, too, so Henderson decided to close both schools for the day. A bell rang, and Ellington ambled into the wet hallways. Water splashed against his khakis, and other boys yelled and pushed their way to the front of the school. When Ellington made it out, he searched for his bus, but he didn’t see it.

Eventually, after the teenagers milled around the parking lot for half an hour, the principal came through screaming. The district didn’t have enough buses to release both the middle and high school students at once, he explained. “Move back to your A-block class now,” the principal shouted. “Move. Let’s go.”

Ellington headed inside, but when he reached his classroom, no other students were there.

Throughout the report, such descriptions were juxtaposed with the hopefulness and determination of young Ellington, who understands that his unfortunate circumstances may have badly compromised his possibilities in future years. 

We don't remember when we found a report so depressing. Two bits of history came to mind:

In April 1967, at the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, Robert Kennedy toured this same Mississippi Delta region, conducting a fact-finding tour concerning deep poverty. He also toured impoverished regions in Appalachia that same year.

In those early days of the War on Poverty, Kennedy's journey was widely reported. Parks' report emerges from that same Delta region. While the poverty there today is almost surely less extreme, the conditions she described were horrifically bad.

We also thought of Jonathan Kozol's first book, Death at an Early Age. It appeared that same year, 1967, and it described horrific conditions in the Boston public schools—rather, in a horrible Boston school which enrolled mostly black kids, including the memorable Stephen. The book began, and begins, as shown:

Stephen is eight years old. A picture of him standing in front of the bulletin board on Arab bedouins shows a little light-brown person staring with unusual concentration at a chosen spot upon the floor. Stephen is tiny, desperate, unwell. Sometimes he talks to himself. He moves his mouth as if he were talking. At other times he laughs out loud in class for no apparent reason. He is also an indescribably mild and unmalicious child. He cannot do any of his school work very well. His math and reading are poor. In Third Grade he was in a class that had substitute teachers much of the year. Most of the year before that, he had a row of substitute teachers too. He is in the Fourth Grade now but his work is barely at the level of the Second. Nobody has complained about the things that have happened to Stephen because he does not have any mother or father.

Stephen was tiny, desperate, unwell. He was also an indescribably mild, unmalicious child.

That was then, but Parks is now. We found her report deeply depressing. We'd say that's the way her report should seem, though it's all over now for real discourse.

That said, a statistical claim at the start of Parks' report never should have been published. Tomorrow, we'll start with that statistical statement, and then we'll move on to Charles Blow.

For today, we'll close with a query:

Our blue tribe's skill levels are quite low. If it weren't for misleading statistical claims, would we humans ever make any such claims at all?

Tomorrow: Commenters buy Charles Blow

UPDATE: Update concerning soft butter report!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

Slides to number 5: This morning, at 6 A.M., it was the #1 MOST READ item in all of the Washington Post. 

We refer to the Post's softened butter report. For background, see our award-winning earlier report.

It's now 4:30 P.M., and the Post's soft butter report has slid to #5. That said, it remains the fifth MOST READ item at today's Washington Post! 

Linguists have coined the term "softbuttercore." There's nothing "wrong" with such manifestations, unless there secretly is.

Our logicians have nothing to say about this. They're debating the theory of forms.

Linguist consulted on goblincore!

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2021

The flight of the elite: In recent weeks, we've been referring to a state of affairs we regard as a bit of a paradox. 

That paradox starts like this:

In a survey of philosophy professors taken in late 1999, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was selected as the most important (academic) philosophy book of the 20th century

That's the first part of the paradox. The second part goes like this:

Aside from a handful of academic specialists, no one has the slightest idea what that book is about. (We aren't assuming that those specialists could speak to that point either.)

No one has any idea what this fellow Wittgenstein might have said in that most important book. This most important book of the century was published in 1953, but it has had exactly zero effect on the western world's public discourse.

It seems to us that we've described two parts of a serious paradox. If Philosophical Investigations was  the most important philosophy book of the 20th century, you'd almost think that word would have leaked as to what its author may have said by now. 

In the next few days, we expect to continue discussing that apparent paradox. It seems to us that this paradox involves "the flight of the logicians," or of our "philosophy" specialists in general—the complete detachment of that elite from the real affairs of the world.

Perhaps we're being a bit too harsh. Let's consider what one linguist has now said:

We start with an item we encountered in the Washington Post this morning. At 6 o'clock this very morning, this item was listed, on the Post's web site, as the MOST READ item in the entire newspaper. 

To be clear, the item was listed as MOST READ overall, not just as MOST READ LIFESTYLE.

You can peruse the item here. When the Post listed the item as MOST READ, here's how the paper described it:

How to soften butter quickly, and why it matters for your baking

Butter temperature and consistency are crucial in baking. Here are 5 methods to consider.

According to the Post's web site, that was the MOST READ item on the entire site. Below the listing, included IN a set of DON'T MISS reports, a different item was characterized as shown:

Cottagecore, cluttercore, goblincore—deep down, it’s about who we think we are

We had no idea what that could mean, so we decided to click and find out. As it turned out, the DON'T MISS item came from Style. This is the way it started:

JUDKIS (9/13/21): If you want to chart our slow pandemic descent into madness, just take a look at the aesthetics of our confinement.

The spring of 2020 seems quaint in retrospect: We learned to knit, baked sourdough bread, solved puzzles and sewed handmade masks. Some people moved out of cities to get away from people, and spend more time in nature. This, we decided, was called “cottagecore”—performative cozy nesting, dried flowers, vintage aprons, a sense of optimism.

That gave way to the realization that some of us were going to be stuck in our homes for much longer than we expected. Enter “cluttercore,” a rejection of pre-pandemic Scandi minimalism in favor of bright colors, bold patterns, and eclectic collections, all layered in the same space. If we’re going to be trapped in our houses, we might as well have something cool to look at, right? Messy world, messy us.

And now? It's still ramping up, but the new pandemic "core" is "goblincore." Because that's apparently where the summer surge has taken us. Goblincore is about pure fantasy and escaping humanity to live in the woods: Think homes filled with dark wood and plants, mossy colors, whimsical mushroom prints, earthen homes, tarot cards, extreme isolation, plenty of brown corduroy and tweed.

Not that there's anything wrong with it! That said, it did perhaps seem a bit odd when the essay continued as shown:

JUDKIS (continuing directly): “All three of these movements are about trying to create an ideal,” says Ruth Page, who teaches English and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England, “which is a way of comforting and alleviating the distress of the reality that is around us.”

So, yeah. That gets to the core of how well we’re coping lately.

How well have we been coping lately? As a nation, we haven't been coping especially well at all.

In fact, we haven't been coping especially well for decades. In our view, the decline has extended so far, and is so deeply entrenched, that it's hard to see a way to reverse the ongoing fall.

For ourselves, we didn't know why someone who teaches linguistics at a major university would be weighing in on the topic of goblincore. It did make us think of all the topics on which the logicians have maintained their total silence as the culture has continued to fail.

The woods are said to be lovely and deep, but no one has the slightest idea concerning the contents of the most important philosophy book of the 20th century. Similarly, you've never seen an academic logician comment on any part of our failing discourse, and you never will.

The logicians have walked off their posts. Arguably, they did so long ago.

Meanwhile, the linguists discuss goblincore. Putting it a different way, our culture is transparently stupid pretty much all the way down. 

It's hard to imagine that anyone has failed to notice this fact. It's very, very hard to imagine that this can go on forever, or that there's an obvious way to come back.  

Still coming:  Thoughts concerning first encounters with that most important book