Interview With Cultural Historian William Grange (6-21-21)

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

Professor William Grange, 74, published the following books:

* The Business of American Theatre (2020)
* Cabaret (Forms of Drama) (2021)
* Historical Dictionary of German Theater (2015)
* A Primer in Theatre History: From the Greeks to the Spanish Golden Age (2012)
* Historical Dictionary of German Literature to 1945 (2010)
* The A to Z of Postwar German Literature (2010)
* The A to Z of German Theater (2010)
* Historical Dictionary of Postwar German Literature (2009)
* Cultural Chronicle of the Weimar Republic (2008)
* Historical Dictionary of German Theater (2006)
* Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich (2005)
* Comedy in the Weimar Republic: A Chronicle of Incongruous Laughter (1996)
* Partnership in the German Theatre: Zuckmayer and Hilpert, 1925-1961 (1991)

I first interviewed Mr. Grange in 2007.

Luke: “How did you discover the Alexander Technique?”

William: “I discovered it when I was a graduate student at Columbia. When I was working in Florida, I spent a weekend with Marjorie Barstow and 30 other students, and I came away feeling two inches taller. When I got to Lincoln, I met Robert Rickover… I had sciatica bad in New York, but after taking Alexander Technique, I’ve never had a problem. It’s the key to health and voice and organ function… With Alexander Technique, you are working with gravity.”

Luke: “Do you notice any cognitive changes from aging?”

William: “Yes. I’ll think, I need to go downstairs to get something, and by the time I get downstairs, I’ve forgotten what I was supposed to get. I have trouble with names. If I don’t stay close to my outline in a lecture, I’ll wander. I use to use an outline in lectures to guide me, now I use it to restrict me. For some reason, I always remember the name William Shakespeare, but sometimes I’ll forget John Dryden.”

Luke: I’ll give you five significant events in your lifetime — Kennedy, assassination, American involvement in Vietnam, 1965 Civil Riots bill, Nixon resignation, Reagan presidency. Which has the most significance?

William: “The civil rights legislation. We have two constitutions at war with each other — the original constitution and the civil rights constitution.”

“Angels in America by Tony Kushner was a huge hit but nobody does it anymore unlike the work of Tennessee Williams, because there’s more than politics in Tennessee Williams. Bertholt Brecht‘s poetry is out of this world and people still do his plays.”

Luke: “How did Brecht produce great plays under communism?”

William: “He didn’t produce them under communism. He produced them on the run.”

In 1941, Brecht moved from Finland through the Soviet Union to Santa Monica, California, where his daughter Barbara became a cheerleader at Santa Monica High School.

According to Wikipedia:

In 1949 he moved to East Berlin and established his theatre company there, the Berliner Ensemble. He retained his Austrian nationality (granted in 1950) and overseas bank accounts from which he received valuable hard currency remittances. The copyrights on his writings were held by a Swiss company.[63] At the time he drove a pre-war DKW car—a rare luxury in the austere divided capital.

Though he was never a member of the Communist Party, Brecht had been schooled in Marxism by the dissident communist Karl Korsch. Korsch’s version of the Marxist dialectic influenced Brecht greatly, both his aesthetic theory and theatrical practice. Brecht received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1954.[64]

Brecht wrote very few plays in his final years in East Berlin, none of them as famous as his previous works. He dedicated himself to directing plays and developing the talents of the next generation of young directors and dramaturgs, such as Manfred Wekwerth, Benno Besson and Carl Weber. At this time he wrote some of his most famous poems, including the “Buckow Elegies”.

At first Brecht apparently supported the measures taken by the East German government against the uprising of 1953 in East Germany, which included the use of Soviet military force. In a letter from the day of the uprising to SED First Secretary Walter Ulbricht, Brecht wrote that: “History will pay its respects to the revolutionary impatience of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. The great discussion [exchange] with the masses about the speed of socialist construction will lead to a viewing and safeguarding of the socialist achievements. At this moment I must assure you of my allegiance to the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.”[65]

Brecht’s subsequent commentary on those events, however, offered a very different assessment—in one of the poems in the Elegies, “Die Lösung” (The Solution), a disillusioned Brecht writes a few months later:

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.

Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?[66]

Brecht’s involvement in agitprop and lack of clear condemnation of purges resulted in criticism from many contemporaries who became disillusioned in communism earlier. Fritz Raddatz who knew Brecht for a long time described his attitude as “broken”, “escaping the problem of Stalinism”, ignoring his friends being murdered in the USSR, keeping silence during show trials such as Slánský trial.

Luke: “Who were the most underrated and overrated playwrights of the 20th Century?”

William: “Lillian Hellman should be completely forgotten. I’m not fond of Edward Albee. France’s Jean Giraudoux. Elfriede Jelinek is terrible. Harold Pinter is terrible. His plays are completely forgotten and yet he won the Nobel prize. You can’t go by the acclaim people get. Only history can do that.Thomas Bernhard is unintelligible. Unsung: Ödön von Horváth. Peter Handke. Irish playwright Sean O’Caseydidn’t win anything. He wrote Juno and the Paycock. Playwrights have comebacks but they don’t last too long. That’s the nature of theater. It is a topical, immediate art form. It only lasts during the performance. It’s not like sculpture or a painting.”

Luke: “How would you describe the modernist movement in theater?”

William: “It’s elitist. Modernism is nothing if not elitist. It’s the culture of the insider. When you see plays, for example, expressionism which embraces abstraction, and difficulty understanding telegraphed dialogue where they’re not talking to each other but at each other, this begins with Frank Wedekind, who didn’t have an agenda. He was a bohemian, the Bob Dylan of Germany if Bob Dylan had written plays. He was a great singer, guitar player and a modernist, these Lulu plays he wrote are really modernist plays, a lot of abstraction and dissonance but they’re still really interesting. They’re still doing Spring’s Awakening, though it’s now a musical. Most of his characters are half-educated, which he satirizes. Modernism is so catastrophic, particularly in the pictorial arts. If somebody could explain to me how Piet Mondrian is a great painter, or [Mark] Rothko… There’s no painting there, it’s just paint. Rothko said painting is nothing more than pigment on canvas. We’ve lost the 19th Century idea that art is a demonstration of skill. That had a huge effect on theater, because acting in the 20th Century became a psychoanalytic thing where you get deeply into the character, and you stay in the moment. It’s all bullshit from Stanislavski, the Sovietization of Stanislavski. There may be benefits there for beginning actors, but essentially, as an actor you are demonstrating skill, and the Stanislavski method fit into this modernist thing. The best example is Marlon Brando, who only did one play because he got sick and tired of memorizing plays. He did all these movies which are deep psychological characters, he was very talented at that, but as far as doing a show eight days a week and being able to repeat it night after night and project it night after night, he wasn’t interested in that. There’s more of an emphasis on improvisation and authenticity. What’s less authentic than acting on a stage? Here you are in a totally phony world with phony lighting and phony doorknobs and phony everything, and now it is supposed to be authentic? It’s supposed to be art.”

“The Method is the Americanization of the Stanislavski method. Lee Strasberg was one of these true believers. He was in the Group Theatre. They wanted to see the capitalist system overthrown and the Soviet system installed. Actors like having a regular salary, not being tied to commercial values, being able to call yourself an artist. That’s what the Soviet Union did. They fell into disrepute during the McCarthy era because they all had been members of the Communist party… Elia Kazan named names [of communists]. He was one of the founders of the Actors Studio. Lee Strasberg came later… Method acting is still very alive and now there are all these shows that make fun of it, including The Kominsky Method and Barry. These are wonderful shows that make fun of acting teachers like Lee Strasberg, and you see them on college campuses everywhere. The Method has been in fashion since the 1950s… Daniel Day-Lewis goes from the inside out. American actors go from the inside out. Faye Dunaway. None of the great stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood did. If you had suggested to Bette Davis, why don’t you try the Stanislavski method, she would have looked at you like a frog. It was a post World War II era adoption of Soviet standards of production.”

According to StudioBinder.com:

Method acting is a technique or type of acting in which an actor aspires to encourage sincere and emotionally expressive performances by fully inhabiting the role of the character. It is an emotion-oriented technique instead of classical acting that is primarily action-based. It was further developed and brought to American acting studios in the 1930s by Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.

However, Konstantin Stanislavski, a Russian actor and theatre director invented the technique in the early 1900s. Stanislavski did not call it method acting back then, but his ideas created a model to help actors build believable characters. Stanislavski’s approach was to encourage the actors to draw from personal experiences and memories in order to garner real emotions, and to connect with the characters. This stood in stark contrast to the more traditional, theatrical and classical acting of that time…

Lee Strasberg further developed the technique effectively creating “method acting.” His operating theory is that the actor should live the character he or she is playing even when not on stage or in front of the camera. This is why many method actors refuse to break character until filming is over. The lengths they go to embody the role often become obsessive involving serious weight loss, a change in sleeping habits and dietary norms, and more.

William: “Intellectual theater has never made any money and it never will make any money.”

Luke: “What’s the difference between modernist and post-modernist theater?”

William: “Modernism still believed in truth. Post-modernism does not believe in truth. There are only competing narratives. Everybody has a right to their own narrative. Post-modernism is fueled by the civil rights movement and civil rights legislation, in that it fuels identity politics, and your identity provides you with a narrative that is different from someone else’s narrative, and you have a right to have your narrative portrayed and represented in fiction and the arts.”

Luke: “Who are the great Christian playwrights?”

William: “You’d have to go back to the Middle Ages. There have been some modern playwrights who brought a Christian viewpoint. The Tidings Brought To Mary by Paul Claudel. American Channing Pollock was a great Christian playwright. He believed in plays that were didactic. He said preachers preach and plays should teach. He was popular in the 1920s. There were plays in the 1930s and 1940s that called for decency and cogency and that the world wasn’t going to hell in a hand basket. There was a sense that the world could make sense. Modernism drove that off the boards because there was just too much absurdity around to make it viable. Theater of the Absurd is a proto-post-modernist thing where nothing makes sense, nobody believes in anything, and nothing is worth believing in.”

Luke: “What can theater give people that they can’t get from TV?”

William: “Theater is a communal experience. Aristotle says something happens at a theater performance, catharsis, if it is a good performance, and we are united for that performance. You see this among people at a party when two people discover they saw the same movie and found things in the movie that they both agreed were important or interesting or amusing. The theater has started calling itself a story-telling medium and it is not. It engages actors with audiences in a process of identification. Theater is mimetic energy while a novel invites you into its world and embeds you as a character. Is the story in Romeo & Juliet what’s important? What makes the play is the poetry and the characters. Plays have to have tight characters to make sense. Sam Shepard and David Mamet are great playwrights.”

“Laughter is contagious. The best demonstration of this is Neil Simon. As he writes the play, he divides up the audience. He writes something and he knows that Part A will find this funny, and then the next line, Part G will find it funny, and then Part C will find it funny, and the laughter goes through the theater. Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks and Woody Allen recognized that laughter is contagious and it spreads throughout the theater. That sense of identifying with the character, or the irony or contra-distinction is important for the communal experience. Laughter can be cathartic.”

Luke: “You’d want to be selective with whom you’d see a play?”

William: “Yes. That’s why no two theater performances are the same because they depend on the audience. The audience comes to the theater hoping that there will be theater that night. That there will be this exchange. It happens in movies to a lesser extent. You have more of a narrative focus.”

Luke: “What are the most exciting developments in theater in the past two decades?”

William: “There’s very little to shout about as far as artistic activity. The financial health of the theater is probably the most important development.”

Luke: “How much does having nude scenes help the bottom line?”

William: “It used to, but it doesn’t help at all anymore because it is seen as exploitative.”

“When you go on the stage, you’re selling yourself and a lot of people say that’s undignified… When men fake emotions on stage, that’s ok, but when a woman does it, it used be thought that she was prostituting herself.”

“In France, an actor couldn’t get a decent burial until the Revolution. In America, we didn’t have that problem because they were seen as business people. They often owned theaters.”

Luke: “What are the characteristics of a play that makes money?”

William: “It’s a musical. Musicals make five times what straight plays make. A straight play makes money if it is topical and has good actors. Usually straight plays have a dilemma of some kind. It’s usually an acting showcase. Comedies don’t need to be topical though it helps. Neil Simon knew the formula. There’s a central character, usually a man, who’s boxed in by a certain dilemma. That’s what makes comedy more lucrative than straight dramas because there’s a formula that’s easier to follow.”

Posted in Modernism, Post-Modernism, Theater | Comments Off on Interview With Cultural Historian William Grange (6-21-21)

NYT: Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Luke Ford

Zeynep Tufekci writes:

There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t.

But how on earth had it remained so steady genetically, since viruses continually mutate? Scientists guessed that it had been frozen in a lab. It was often found to be sensitive to temperature, something expected for viruses used in vaccine research.

It was only in 2004 that a prominent virologist, Peter Palese, wrote that Chi-Ming Chu, a respected virologist and a former member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told him that “the introduction of this 1977 H1N1 virus” was indeed thought to be due to vaccine trials involving “the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”

For the first time, science itself seemed to have caused a pandemic while trying to prepare for it.

Now, for the second time in 50 years, there are questions about whether we are dealing with a pandemic caused by scientific research.

While the Chinese government’s obstruction may keep us from knowing for sure whether the virus, SARS-CoV-2, came from the wild directly or through a lab in Wuhan or if genetic experimentation was involved, what we know already is troubling.

Years of research on the dangers of coronaviruses, and the broader history of lab accidents and errors around the world, provided scientists with plenty of reasons to proceed with caution as they investigated this class of pathogens. But troubling safety practices persisted.

Worse, researchers’ success at uncovering new threats did not always translate into preparedness.

Even if the coronavirus jumped from animal to human without the involvement of research activities, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

Posted in Corona Virus | Comments Off on NYT: Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Author Jon Entine Of The Genetic Literacy Project

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

Jon published these books:

* Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, 2000
* Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing, 2005
* Scared to Death: How Chemophobia Threatens Public Health, 2011
* Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics is Undermining the Genetic Revolution, 2006
* Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, 2008
* No Crime But Prejudice: Fischer Homes, the Immigration Fiasco, and Extrajudicial Prosecution, 2009
* Crop Chemophobia: Will Precaution Kill the Green Revolution? 2011

Jon’s archive at GLP.

In 2011, Jon launched the Genetic Literacy Project. In my eyes, Jon is a giant. I think his books, talks, and website only do good. He strikes me as scrupulously fair. I spoke to him Tuesday afternoon, June 22, 2021. Though I had about 25 planned questions, I got to almost none of them. Instead, I asked things on the fly.

I planned to begin by asking Jon to describe the through-line of his work, but once the show started and music played, I went off on a new direction.

This is a partial transcript, lightly edited.

Luke: “Your first book grew out of a documentary you made with Tom Brokaw (Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction, 1989).”

Jon: “I was a TV producer for NBC news, including a long stint as Tom Brokaw’s producer, and one day he and I were in a friendly argument about why so many sports were dominated, increasingly, by African-American athletes. The world’s track and field scene had almost been taken over by black Africans and blacks of African descent. I was saying it was genetics. He was saying, no, it’s escaping the ghetto. They’re trying to overcome cultural and financial issues. After much discussion, he got management to overcome their reluctance, to make Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction. It was a huge success. It touched off an international debate, hundreds of articles. It got us into some hot water because we dared to suggest that there were genetic, hard-wired differences between populations. Out of that came a book contract for Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It. I like to take on controversial subject where I think political correctness is putting a cap on what we’re allowed to say. The genetics of human differences is so important because so many diseases affect one population more than another.”

Luke: “People who make TV aren’t morons.”

Jon: “Some news people are among the smartest people I’ve come across. It’s not just showmanship. To be a good TV news journalist at the highest level, you have to go through a winnowing out process where the lower IQs as you call it get phased out.”

“News producers are the journalists who work the beat, do the gumshoe investigations. I was in longer-form pieces. We did the background work, the interviewing and the writing. Talking heads [pundits] are the blow-hard section. It’s a different discipline than the hard news section I grew out of.”

Luke: “There’s groupthink in every profession, including journalism.”

Jon: “There’s a lot of conformity even when journalists believe that they are asking out of the box questions… I’m liberal-minded. I believe climate change is one of the most pressing problems of our time… I certainly reject Trumpism, which is really frightening, autocratic and totalitarian. There is a political correctness that dominates journalism. It’s a liberal bias. It’s a reason mainstream journalists did not anticipate Trump winning the election in 2016. They were out of touch with the majority of America… There’s not enough room for heterodoxy. I think I’m a heterodox by nature. I used to have a column for Forbes magazine called The Contrarian. I’m a believer of a Greek way of thinking, Epoche, framing. You try to look at every new idea and frame it, see it devoid of as many prejudicial inputs as you can. And when you do that, you come up with new views and sometimes your views even disconcert you. Sometimes I’m uncomfortable with what the facts tell me.”

With regard to Covid, Jon says: “Opening up earlier and focusing only on higher-risk populations would have served our country better than the way that the liberal intelligentsia thought…”

Luke: “How many people did you meet in the MSM who regarded abortion as murder?”

Jon: “I’m not sure I can say anyone.”

Luke: “Zero. I’ve talked to all sorts of journalists who can’t name one person in their profession who hold a view held by about 40% of the population.”

David Wallace-Wells published Mar. 15, 2021 in New York magazine:

Sridhar is pointing her finger at British authorities, but in her diatribe you could comfortably substitute for the U.K. almost any nation in Europe. In its broad strokes, the picture has been the same in Belgium and France and Italy and the Czech Republic, too, in Portugal and Poland, Sweden and Switzerland and Spain, even Germany and the Netherlands, and dozens of other countries across the Continent. From the spring panic through the fall surge, pandemic policy differed nation to nation, but failure was general all across Europe. Aside from the three Nordic outliers of Finland, Norway, and Iceland, no European state has managed the coronavirus well by global standards — or by their own much higher ones.

For decades, the richest nations of the world had told themselves a story in which wealth and medical superiority offered, if not total immunity from disease, then certainly a guarantee against pandemics, regarded as a premodern residue of the underdeveloped world. That arrogance has made the coronavirus not just a staggering but an ironic plague. Invulnerability was a myth, of course, but what the pandemic revealed was much worse than just average levels of susceptibility and weakness. It was these countries that suffered most, died most, flailed most. Gave up most easily, too, acquiescing to so much more disease that they might have been fighting a different virus entirely. For nearly the entire year, the COVID epicenter was not in China, where the pathogen originated, or in corners of South Asia or sub-Saharan Africa, where limited state capacity and medical infrastructure seemed, at the outset, especially concerning, but either in Europe or the United States — places that were rated just one year ago the best prepared in the world to combat infectious disease.

This fact, though not unknown, is probably the most salient and profound feature of what has been a tremendously uneven pandemic with the world’s longtime “winners” becoming by far its biggest losers. The gold-standard responses were those in East Asia and Oceania, by countries like South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia — countries that saw clearly the gravest infection threat the world had encountered in a century and endeavored to simply eradicate it within their borders. Mostly, they succeeded. When it mattered most, no nation in what was once grandly called “the West” even really bothered to try.

The virus is the virus,” says Gregg Gonsalves, the former AIDS activist turned epidemiologist, now a MacArthur “genius” with a public-health position at Yale. “There’s ways to stop it, and then there’s …” He pauses for a moment. “It has its own logic and its own trajectory.”

In the U.S., the story of the pandemic year has been dominated by the character of the president who presided over it so ineptly, often with such indifference it seemed he was rooting for the disease. But the problem with assigning Donald Trump all, or even most of, the blame for America’s suffering is that the country’s failure isn’t unique. In fact, before the arrival of vaccines, the American experience of the coronavirus was not exceptional but typical — at least among those European nations it typically considers its peers. And as the New Year has brought a new administration, experts in fields from public health to economics have grown more comfortable acknowledging that catastrophe was much bigger and deeper than the denier-in-chief and indeed much more “normal” than Americans outraged or mourning are likely to understand.

The metric of deaths per capita is crude, obscuring issues of demography and comorbidity, but by this basic standard the U.S. has suffered less than the U.K., Portugal, and the Czech Republic. It sits clustered with a number of other European nations — Italy, Spain, France — near the E.U. average. The South American average is just below.

Jon: “Covid should humble anyone. It was something nobody could control… This disease confounded everyone. The narrative that emerged is heavily skewed…”

Luke: “How did you realize that the reason certain athletes dominates certain sports [has a genetic component]?”

Jon: “When I was about 19, Sports Illustrated had a cover story [Jan. 18, 1971] on why blacks are coming to dominate certain sports. In ten years, the NBA had gone from 10% black to 80%, the NFL had gone from 10% black to 60%, in baseball from 10% to 30% if you count black latinos… I was prized at NBC because I was considered an out of the box thinker and I had the trust of Tom Brokaw and upper management. Sometimes they were surprised because I would have an unpredictable take on things. One thing that became clear [regarding sports], is that it was not a black white thing, but it had to do with body types and ancestry. Running is the ultimate laboratory for seeing differences among populations… The top 200 or so athletes in 100 meter to 400 meter events has West African ancestry, but there is not one person of West African ancestry who is an elite 800 meter runner [or longer]. These longer events are dominated by East Africans. The best East African 100 meter runner is like 4,600.”

“This issues go far beyond sports… Sports become an emblem for discussing human differences… If you are black and you need a bone marrow transplant and you go to a hospital and they tell you we can’t give you a bone marrow transplant because the only bone marrow we have is from whites and if we give it to you, it’s going to be rejected by your body… That fascinated me that we are willing to deny the nose in front of our face [aka human differences].”

Luke: “How did you pull off being heterodox and working well with other people at elite levels?”

Jon: “The liberal magazine Slate ran a positive review of my book and its general theme was how is Jon Entine able to write a book like this, not lose his career, and not get threaten with death. They compared it with Jimmy the Greek Snyder getting fired for saying black and white differences result from the slave trade… I was lucky. I think it was because I was an honest broker. I have sections that talk about intelligence differences. I talk about what the data says.

“I was giving a talk in Seattle or Portland once and this white guy gets up and says you’re really racist if you suggest that there are black white hard-wired differences. Two blacks got up together and said, ‘What is this white guy telling me as a black person what I should think? I’ve read his book. It’s honest, enlightened. It provoked deep thinking. You’re the racist for trying to squelch this discussion. He laid his cards on the table and invited a discussion.'”

“I did over 500 TV and radio interviews and over 400 print interviews. It was the most heavily reviewed book over a two year period when it came out. There was a chance to discuss these things. We have now regressed in talking about human differences so I don’t think I could get that book published today, even though it was widely endorsed by everything from Scientific American to Human Biology magazine to the American Journal of Physical Anthropology…to Ebony magazine.”

“I was willing to face the world of hard knocks. I was willing to take fire. And people appreciated that.”

“My agent said you should write a follow-up book on genetics. You know how to write about inflammatory subjects that allows the flame to burn but it doesn’t consume you. You should do a book on Jews. Jews buy books and they also get genetic diseases. It’s the perfect match.

“My sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer. It turned out she had a genetic version of breast cancer that traces back to her Ashkenazi ancestry… She ultimately died of pancreatic cancer linked to her Ashkenazi ancestry.”

“I decided to do the same [genetics] issue. Jews were defined as a race, and they defined themselves as a race up until WWII. The whole experience with the Holocaust and genocide linked to race identity, for the first time ever separated the connection between Jews and race. I thought this was fascinating. There are so many benefits from understanding this. There are so many disorders linked to our race, our population ancestry…”

“What distinguished Christianity and Islam from Judaism is that they unmoored religion from ancestry. Blood in the New Testament means faith. Blood in the Old Testament means blood [and ancestry]. All religions were tribal religions until Jesus. The only tribal religions today of note are Judaism and Zoroastrianism… I’m an atheist but I was raised Jewish. I majored in Religion at Trinity College… I thought the genetics entre into talking about religion was a uniquely interesting way to talk about the same issues I raised in Taboo.”

Luke: “Part of the reason for your success in talking about human differences in a way that hasn’t got you canceled is that you have mastered the rhetoric of the elite. I don’t know anyone who is not elite who uses the word ‘problematic.'”

Jon: “Nothing pleases me more than sticking my finger in the eyes of liberal elitists. I’ve spent a lot of my time over the past ten years about human modified crops. We’re empowering the developing world to deal with the effects of climate change and less arable land and giving them control over their food destiny, and who’s opposed to it? Crazy liberals who have swallowed the myth of naturalism… I try to look at each situation and be fearless where the facts take me.”

Luke: “What is your IQ?”

Jon: “I don’t know. I think I was in the low 130s based on my SATs (1520, much higher in math than verbal).”

Luke: “What was your college GPA?”

Jon: “In Philosophy, I was 4.0. In other classes, I didn’t mind getting a B.”

“I’m good friends with Charles Murray [and Steve Sailer]. I work with the Aspen Institute, a Left organization. What they all share? They’re willing to think out of the box.”

“I had no intention of becoming a writer. I had no confidence in my writing abilities and then I went through a transformation. I dropped out of college to work for George McGovern. I went through a transformative spiritual awakening that didn’t draw me to religion but it drew me to question how I view the world. I became attracted to philosophy and to the philosophy of religion. It changed the structure of my brain. I became a lover of Socrates and Plato. I was disdainful of Aristotle but in my old age I’ve become much more Aristotelian because I want to get things done, not just debate them. That inquisitiveness is missing in journalism today. They start out with a conclusion and find the facts to reinforce that conclusion.”

“I dropped out of college in my sophomore year. I had done a little acid dropping, about five or six times, and smoked a little marijuana. I did not take pills. I read every book that Freud wrote. I got into Psychiatry graduate school never having taken a Psychology course because I thought Psychology as it was taught was a gutter subject. I thought Sociology was the bottom of the heap.”

“It opened my mind to think in different ways. One week, I was more Freudian. Another week I applied Hegelian philosophy to psychological issues. From my sophomore year into my junior year that began a change in the way I look at the world. I’ve found there’s a whole community of heterodox thinkers. There’s a website called Quillette. That’s my community. I love that place. People willing to go where the evidence takes them.”

After dropping out of college in December of 1971, Jon worked in construction after the campaign, and then he took a job as a helper at the Lyme Inn in New Hampshire. “I got the top floor. I had about 60 books. I read every one of them. I read a book or three a week. That summer is when I had the experience that I think differently about the world. It changed my college experience. I was a mediocre student, and suddenly, whenever I wanted an A, I got an A. My mind was different. I absorbed information like a sponge. Before, I was in hand to hand combat with information.”

“I hadn’t taken drugs in a year. The drugs I took were in my freshman year. Drugs began to fracture, I was an unreflective person. I realized I didn’t have a worldview. I didn’t need a worldview where everything fits together. I needed a worldview about dialogue. I needed a dialogue with ideas. I needed to always be open to learning, even from people I didn’t agree with. The year before, when I was coming down from an acid trip, I was in a park in Denver, it was a weird disassociated period and I got challenged by a Jesus Freak. I was a Jewish kid who rejected religion. The idea of adopting Christianity as a religion was anathema to me, but I thought, I need to open up to new ways of thinking. This turned me into being a religion major. I decided to explore Christianity in a respectful way. It set me on a path of challenging my deepest prejudices.”

“I took a semester off, took summer classes at Dartmouth, caught up, [returned to Smith College in September of 1972), and graduated on time.”

Luke: “Did the experience of sex have a transformative effect?”

Jon: “No. I was fairly conservative. I don’t think I had intercourse until my second year, I was well behind others.”

After his spiritual transformation, Jon returned to college feeling confident in his own skin for the first time and developed “a ton more friends… Within a month of coming back, I developed an amazing relationship with a woman who became my college girlfriend. That was profound.”

“I worked 20 hours a week writing, editing and producing the local 11pm news for the NBC station in my freshman year.”

“I’m a little uncomfortable with some of the directions we are going in because I’m not that special.”

“I respect conservatism. Trumpism is a disease. I’m a free thinker. Ronald Reagan was a great president. He pushed back against excesses.”

“I’m pro-fracking and pro nuclear energy because I am concerned about climate change. I support solar, but I am not foolish enough to believe that we can abandon fossil fuels.”

“What I hate about Trumpers is that they are illiberal in the same way a lot of liberals are illiberal.”

Regarding Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People, Jon says: “I had no problem finding heterodoxical thinkers about the religious world, among ethicists, in other areas… You will understand multiple sides of an issue, no matter where I go. It’s not an ideological treatise.”

Luke: “Is one way of understanding your work is that you are a translator of abstract academic work and you make it understandable for ordinary people?”

Jon: “That’s perfect. And contrarian out of the box thinking about things that many people think are settled.”

Luke: “To most people, ‘organic’ means good, but academics will say it has no meaning.”

Jon: “It has no meaning and it has ideological meaning. Is a telegraph machine the best way to communicate? We are far beyond that. In communications, we have evolved, but we embrace as superior technology in agriculture that is a hundred years old? Some ideas in organics might be of interest such as soil health, but its practice are harebrained from a 2021 perspective. Buzzwords like ‘organic’ and ‘sustainability’ is often about imposing standards formulated a hundred years ago.”

Luke: “I have a lot of friends who think that that which is natural is good, that which is artificial is bad, and I don’t know how to respond.”

Jon: “Corona viruses are good and vaccines are bad? If they are locked into that thinking, there’s no way out. I’d say, Oh good, I’m going to make you a lysteria burger and you tell me how good it is. I’ll make you an e-coli salad and you tell me how good it is.”

“Every year, according to Wikipedia, over 200 people die in the United States from food poisoning from natural and organic products. How many people have died in the history of the world from bio-technology in agriculture? Zero. Naturalism is the pagan religion of our times.”

“The anti-vaccine movement was primarily a liberal movement and a Jewish Orthodox community. They’re both rigid thinking people. Everything should be natural and vaccines are not natural… The moment that Trump became a symbol of vaccine rejection, you rarely hear a peep from the liberal anti-vaxx movement. If you are pro vaccine, you are pro bio-engineering. Insulin is bio-tech created. The same way you create a bio-tech crop is the same way you create a bio-tech vaccine.”

“We allow any comments on GLP if people are linking to real sources, but if they’re linking to junk science, we’ll delete it. If they’re linking to Joseph Mercola, an anti-vaxxer, we won’t allow that on our site.”

Luke: “What are the standards for getting on GLP?”

Jon: “Good journalism.”

Luke: “Have modern agricultural practices increased or decreased the nutritional value of food?”

Jon: “Both… Fresh frozen food is often better than fresh because you freeze in nutrients and they don’t deteriorate, even though frozen vegetables are considered processed food, they often have more nutritional value than fresh vegetables.”

Luke: “What is science?”

Jon: “Science is not a set of answers. Science is a set of questions. Science is how you approach things. People use ‘science’ to mean ‘facts’, when it should be used to describe a process of evaluating things. It’s a methodology of inquiry, evidence-based thinking.”

“‘Follow the science’ means follow what I’m telling you. The phrase has no scientific meaning.”

Luke: “Should Big Tech try to squash anti-vaccine opinions?”

Jon: “That’s a tough one.”

Posted in Blacks, Corona Virus, Genetics, Jews, Jon Entine, Sports | Comments Off on Author Jon Entine Of The Genetic Literacy Project

Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from Charles Murray’s new book:

* From the first census in 1790 through the 1850 census, the population within America’s settled regions was 82–84 percent European and the rest was African. Subsequent tides of immigration increased the proportion of Europeans. As of the 1960 census, America was about 87 percent European, 11 percent African, something more than 1 percent Latin, and something less than 1 percent Asian.

* America’s big cities have been transformed by immigration over the past several decades. In 1960, New York was the most cosmopolitan city in America but its population was still more than three-quarters European. New York City went from 77 percent European in 1960 to 32 percent in 2019. That’s a transformation by any definition.
Other major cities changed even more than New York did. From 1960 to 2019, Los Angeles went from 85 percent European to 29 percent; Chicago went from 82 to 34 percent; Houston went from 77 to 23 percent. All the rhetoric about the racial diversity of America is true – for big cities.
I am defining big-city America as urban areas with populations of 500,000 or more in a contiguous urban environment (which often does not correspond to the legal boundaries of the city). There are fifty-two of them, all located in the Lower Forty-Eight. The fifty-two urban areas take up only 1 percent of the Lower Forty-Eight’s land mass, but they contain 70 percent of its Asians, 54 percent of its Latins, and 52 percent of its Africans. No race has a majority of big-city America’s population. Europeans amount to 45 percent, followed by Latins at 25 percent, Africans at 17 percent, and Asians of all varieties at 9 percent.
The total population of big-city America is 127 million, representing 39 percent of the total population of the Lower Forty-Eight. That’s a lot, but it also means that a majority of Americans live in rural areas, towns, or cities with urban populations of fewer than 500,000. They live in the other 99 percent of the Lower Forty-Eight’s land area.

* For homicides nationwide from 2010 through 2019, 76 percent of alleged perpetrators knew the victim, as a family member or an acquaintance. Virtually all of those homicides were what criminologists call “expressive” murders: the result of arguments, brawls, jealousy, and other interpersonal conflicts. An extremely high proportion of the alleged perpetrators of these crimes were in fact guilty – expressive murders are usually impulsive and occur without precautions against getting caught; they are often witnessed; and the forensic evidence is often abundant.

* Now let’s look at the 24 percent of homicides in which the victim was a stranger to the arrested suspect. About 13 percent of all murders are gang-related.

* Africans and Latins are arrested for property crimes at higher rates than Europeans – modestly so for Latins, with a mean ratio of 1.5, and much more so for Africans, with a mean ratio of 5.0. These ratios are smaller than the ones for violent crime.

Across thirteen American cities, including four of the nation’s most important ones, the African arrest rate for violent crime was usually around 9 to 11 times the European rate and the Latin arrest rate for violent crime was usually around 2 to 3 times the European rate. Asian arrest rates for violent crime ranged from minuscule to small. These are huge differences. Triangulating data indicates that the arrest rates reflect, and perhaps understate, race differences in violent criminal activity.

* Universities do their best to hide what’s going on. They refuse to reveal mean SAT scores by race, proclaiming that “everyone we admit can do the work.” What they don’t acknowledge is that the admitted African and Latin students, as groups, will be concentrated in the bottom of their classes – and that the people making the admissions decisions know it in advance.
Occasionally, sunlight penetrates the darkness. The biggest leak occurred in late February 1993, when Richard Herrnstein, a professor at Harvard and my coauthor on The Bell Curve , arrived at his office one morning to find that someone had anonymously left a copy of the “Red Book” on his desk. At that time, the Red Book was produced annually by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, which consisted of 16 out of the top 20 universities and 5 of the top 10 small colleges as ranked by US News for 1993. It was the university equivalent of leaking a Top Secret CIA document. The Red Book contained the mean SAT scores by race for each of the schools.
The median edge given to African applicants at those elite schools was about 180 points on the combined SAT, equivalent to approximately 1.3 standard deviations at the time – a larger gap than separated Africans and Europeans in the general population. Someone with an SAT score 1.3 standard deviations below the mean is at the 10th percentile of the distribution at those colleges. We published the school-by-school information in The Bell Curve .
Nothing seems to have changed since then. We don’t have a current version of the Red Book to work with, but testimony in the recent case charging Harvard with discrimination against Asian applicants included evidence that the same profile of test scores, GPA, and extracurricular activities that gave an Asian applicant a 25 percent chance of admission gave an African applicant a 95 percent chance and a Latin a 77 percent chance.

* The numbers of test takers with a combined verbal and math score of 1500+ were around 900 for Africans and around 3,300 for Latins. Meanwhile, the numbers for Europeans and Asians with scores in that range were about 27,500 and 20,000 respectively.

* In terms of percentiles, Africans are in the bottom quartile of test scores for all the admissions tests except for those heading to business school or graduate school in education. The Latin scores are all in the second quartile.

* I turn now to an issue that involves only a tiny proportion of the workforce but has high visibility: the rarity of Africans and Latins in the most prestigious jobs in the private sector. That rarity is often used as undeniable evidence of systemic racism in the job market.
Many of those high-prestige jobs are filled by people not merely in the top few percentiles of cognitive ability, but well into the top percentile. Recall the discussion of the “width” of the top percentile of a bell curve in Chapter 3 – LeBron James is in the same percentile as starting players on ordinary college teams. The same phenomenon applies to an oncologist in an ordinary practice and the chief of oncology at a major research hospital. The former may be an excellent oncologist, but the latter has undergone a severe winnowing process that among other things has selected specifically for evidence of intellectual brilliance. Other examples of positions that select for extremely high cognitive ability are:
* A full professorship at an elite university
* A senior position in the financial industry
* A senior position in the IT industry
* Law partner in a major firm in a major city
* CEO of a major corporation
This is not to say that intellectually brilliant people typically have important jobs in a society – on the contrary, few do – but that a characteristic of people who rise to the top in every cognitively demanding profession in elite academia and elite organizations in the private sector is exceptionally high cognitive ability. I will operationalize exceptionally high as a minimum IQ of 135. High-prestige jobs in government and the nonprofit sector are also sometimes filled by exceptionally able people, but the rigor of the screening process varies a lot by job and organization.

* Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults [25-29yo, IQ above 135] were choosing from a pool that contained only about 2,800 Africans and 9,500 Latins compared to 50,700 Asians and 160,100 Europeans.

* a large majority of U.S. employers that seek out new hires with 135 + IQs had no entry-level Africans or Latins among those hires. Zero, no matter how eagerly the employers solicited minority candidates. There weren’t enough to meet the demand.

* Let’s say that an elite IT company in Silicon Valley snags 100 new hires from the 135+ pool in the racial proportions of the pool as a whole. That means 70 are European, 22 are Asian, 4 are Latin, 1 is African, and 3 are a mixture of races or “other.” What percent of new hires of any race in any company rise to senior positions? It depends on the organization, and the definition of senior, but in any case the four Latins are competing against 96 others and the one African is competing against 99 others to become one of the chosen few. Those are daunting odds.

* The 2014–2018 American Community Survey found that Africans, at 13 percent of the population, accounted for only 3.6 percent of CEOs, 3.7 percent of physical scientists, 4.4 percent of civil engineers, 5.1 percent of physicians, and 5.2 percent of lawyers. Latin percentages in those prestigious occupations ranged from 5.3 to 7.6 percent, but Latins are almost 18 percent of the population, so their underrepresentation was nearly the same.
The picture flips when race differences in cognitive ability and job performance are taken into account. Africans and Latins get through the educational pipeline with preferential treatment in admissions to colleges and to professional programs. Their mean IQs in occupations across the range from unskilled to those requiring advanced degrees are substantially lower than the mean IQs for Europeans in the same occupations. Race differences in measures of on-the-job performance are commensurate with the differences in cognitive ability.
I think it is fair to conclude that the American job market is indeed racially biased. A detached observer might even call it systemic racism. The American job market systemically discriminates in favor of racial minorities other than Asians.

* In big-city America, disproportionate minority crime rates cause Europeans and Asians to avoid going into minority neighborhoods. Crime rates and socioeconomic status both vary widely across zip codes in minority neighborhoods in big-city America. These areas contain middle-class zip codes and impoverished ones; zip codes with low crime rates and others with high crime rates. But that makes no difference to the perception held by most Europeans and Asians. Unfamiliar with these variations, they typically see the entire minority part of town as potentially dangerous. It’s not a matter of simple racism. The same Europeans and Asians who avoid going to the minority part of town may have minority colleagues at work with whom they get along fine. They may have minority neighbors with whom they are friends. But they won’t go to the minority part of town to shop, stay at a hotel, buy a car, or send their children to school. They don’t drive into it unless it is the shortest route to someplace they need to go.

* Widespread and voluntary residential segregation by race seems to be a fact of life around the world, no matter what the races are or what the country’s economic and political system is.

* In big-city America, disproportionate minority crime rates deter developers from building office space in minority neighborhoods unless gentrification is already well underway . Real estate is typically cheaper in African or Latin parts of town than elsewhere, a factor that would ordinarily attract developers to build office space for law firms, doctors’ offices, and other businesses that would like to escape the high rentals in the European midtown. But unless it is clear that the neighborhood is near a gentrification tipping point, those lucrative rentals won’t happen, and so the office buildings don’t get built.
In big-city America, disproportionate minority crime rates raise the costs of doing business for retailers of all kinds . It is often alleged that large commercial chains avoid putting stores in minority neighborhoods. The empirical part of the allegation is sometimes true, but the inference that racism is to blame does not follow. Shoplifting is far more common in many big-city minority neighborhoods than elsewhere. It often doesn’t make economic sense for big chain stores, which have business models based on low profit margins, to locate in such neighborhoods. Either they won’t make a profit or they will have to charge higher prices, leaving themselves open to accusations of racist price gouging. If they take measures to apprehend shoplifters, they risk charges of racism and financial shakedowns through the threat of lawsuits. Actions taken to prevent shoplifting can also put employees at risk of violent confrontations. It’s a no-win situation. Opening a store in a big-city minority neighborhood is often not economically rational. Racism need not have anything to do with the decision.
Meanwhile, the small locally owned retailers in a big city minority neighborhood also have a hard time making a profit because of shoplifting, the threat of robbery, high insurance costs, and banks’ reluctance to make high-risk loans. The locally owned stores tend to be poorly stocked, with few amenities, and overpriced relative to stores selling the same goods elsewhere.

* For every situation that a cop faces, let us say there is an optimal choice, as defined in the police training manuals or perhaps by an omniscient observer. As the environment in which police are working becomes more dangerous, that optimal choice moves along the distribution toward the use-more-force-and-defensive-precautions tail of the bell curve.
One result is that well-trained police exercising good judgment will, on average, take more steps to establish their authority, call for more backup, and respond with more force to provocations in high-crime parts of town than in low-crime areas, regardless of the race of the citizens they are dealing with.
Another result is that errors in judgment will be skewed toward the greater-force end of the distribution. If the error in the direction of greater force is perceived as reducing the downside risk, and the downside risk is one’s own death, then police officers, being human, will err on the side of protecting themselves. Added to that human reaction is the mental stress associated with combat – stress unlike anything that most of us (including me) have ever experienced. The physiological effects of the adrenaline surge are powerful, and they are in addition to the psychological effects of fear and anger. All of these factors mean that police use of force, including excessive use of force, will always and inevitably be higher in high-crime areas than in low-crime areas, and high-crime areas in the United States are overwhelmingly urban and African or Latin.

* James Q. Wilson wrote: A central problem – perhaps the central problem – in improving the relationship between white and black Americans is the difference in racial crime rates. No matter how innocent or guilty a stranger may be, he carries with him in public the burdens or benefits of his group identity….
… When whites walk down the street, they are more nervous when they encounter a black man than when they encounter a white one. When blacks walk down the street, they are more likely than whites to be stopped and questioned by a police officer. It is important, of course, for whites to know that a chance encounter with a black creates little risk and for police officers to know that they should have more criteria than just skin color to decide who is worth questioning. Many whites and many police officers know this, but in spite of what people know, the racial tension persists. Countless white pedestrians have been worried by the sight of a young black male, and countless innocent black men have had their cars stopped or their walk interrupted by a suspicious cop. White pedestrians may be embarrassed by their own caution; certainly black pedestrians are upset by unwarranted police intrusions….
… Whites are fearful of living amid large numbers of blacks and of sending their children to predominately black schools. Blacks interpret the way they are treated on the streets by white strangers and by police officers as a sign that they can never make much social progress. “No matter what I do, I can never be regarded as innocent,” many embittered black men will say. “I cannot hail a cab as easily as a white, and I will be stopped and questioned by the police more than any white. Integration is a joke.”

Joe* says:

Murray’s figures about the changes in racial composition of the cities, contradicts, at least on the municipal level, the assertion that there is no replacement of whites.

One of the things implied by Murray, but not directly expressed is how lower cognitive ability makes it more difficult to comply with regulations. Sometimes licensing requirements really bear little or no relationship to the occupations licensed. The classic example is cosmetic work (hair dressing, nails among unlicensed blacks) where the effect of the licensing requirements does discriminate against those with below average intelligence. But one of the reason minority professionals have problems is because they often lose track of the recordkeeping requirements. I don’t think that blacks are more larcenous than whites, but I think they are often times not aware if they are businessmen of the requirement to pay employee’s taxes.

Murray gives a chart which shows that the mean IQ among black teachers is 95. No wonder there is so much objection to proficiency tests. My belief is that many civil service jobs suffer from affirmative action, because the jobs can be better performed and more efficiently by a smarter person. Of course if IQ tests and merit based employment governed who would get civil service jobs and teaching jobs, you would wipe out the black middle class. That is the price we have to pay to maintain some modicum of economic stability.

Posted in America, Charles Murray, Crime, IQ | Comments Off on Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race in America

Borderline Personality Disorder

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Luke Ford

From Unherd.com:

…people with BPD are cognitively “lighter” than neurotypical people. That is: if you are heavy, it takes a lot to move you. So when something quite nice happens to a neurotypical person, it makes them slightly happier: the wind only moves them a little bit. When something quite unpleasant happens, it makes them slightly sadder.

But if you are cognitively light, then the same events will move you much further. A small victory will make you thrill with joy; a small problem can make you suicidal (and BPD patients have a tragically high suicide risk in their younger years). It also applies to people’s opinions of others: “Either a relationship is perfect and that person is wonderful, or the relationship is doomed and that person is terrible,” as the NHS page on BPD puts it. This is called “splitting”, and again, it’s easy to think of it as someone being light, rather than heavy: being blown on the wind of events.

People with these conditions feel emotions much more strongly. But they also have difficulty forming a strong self-image, and often take on very visible identities, such as being a Goth or a fan of a particular band, dyeing their hair or getting tattoos, in order to give themselves something solid to cling to.

This piece written by a BPD patient discusses how she would change her entire personality, and with it her wardrobe, with each new relationship or phase in her life: “In my ‘Premier League’ days, it’d be athletic and gym gear; when dating a hipster, I mimicked their use of rings and hats. My wardrobe was like the skin of a chameleon, physically embodying the changes in my personality.” This one talks about “waking up and trying to be a new person every day. Go vegan, go goth, go hipster, go glamour, cut your hair, change your makeup, gain weight, lose weight, and never feel quite there.”

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off on Borderline Personality Disorder