Reviews and News:

Why have university administrators allied themselves with progressive campus activists? They have found common ground in the safe space of intellectual mediocrity through consumer sensitivity. This alliance is unlikely to collapse any time soon. Administrators and campus activists have much to gain from supporting one another. And both can rely on a phalanx of Title IX regulations by the Department of Education to stifle any faculty or student dissent that might arise. Critics can easily find themselves charged with some trumped-up Title IX violation certain to upend their lives for months.

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How a French juggler and unicyclist helped create the Information Age: The great Russian mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov put it like this in 1963: In our age, when human knowledge is becoming more and more specialized, Claude Shannon is an exceptional example of a scientist who combines deep abstract mathematical thought with a broad and at the same time very concrete understanding of vital problems of technology.

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Ian Tuttle reviews Theodore Dalrymples The Proper Procedure and Other Stories: The volume is filled with lousy neighbors. They play music loud and all night; they deal drugs; they urinate in the stairwells. The women seduce the men, and the men beat the women. The police visit occasionally but are loath to insinuate themselves. Everyone is, as the unhappy Miss Falkenhagen says, a predatory beast.

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The Rand Corporations art: It's not as though the hallways of the Rand building, located a couple of blocks from the beach on Main Street, are teeming with boisterous researchers and pontificating analysts gesturing at various artworks. The corridors are frequently quiet; conversations are conducted in indoor voices. But some of those conversations are about or inspired by the art they encounter every day in the 310,000-square-foot building.

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A new theory of ball lightning: Ball lightning comes in most colors of the rainbow and ranges in sizefrom a typical toy marble, to those extra large exercise balls some people sit on instead of office chairs. It can form inside closed spaces and move down chimneys and horizontally through closed windows. In addition to producing light, ball lightning can give off sparks and is associated with hissing or buzzing noises and a strong, irritating odor. It typically lasts for only seconds, glowing with the intensity of a bright household light bulb. The unpredictable and variable nature of ball lightning has made it difficult to develop a conclusive theory explaining how it works, but accounts of its strangeness are numerous and have been published for centuries.

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Essay of the Day:

Why is free speech suppressed on university campuses? In Modern Age, Roger Scruton argues it is fear: Why protect a belief that stands on its own two feet?

In universities today...studentsand certainly the most politically active among themtend to resist the idea of exclusive groups. They are particularly insistent that distinctions associated with their inherited culturebetween sexes, classes, and races; between genders and orientations; between religions and lifestylesshould be rejected, in the interests of an all-comprehending equality that leaves each person to be who she really is. A great negation sign has been placed in front of all the old distinctions, and an ethos of non-discrimination adopted in their stead. And yet this seeming open-mindedness inspires its proponents to silence those who offend against it. Certain opinionsnamely, those that make the forbidden distinctionsbecome heretical. By a move that Michael Polanyi described as moral inversion, an old form of moral censure is renewed, by turning it against its erstwhile proponents. Thus, when a visiting speaker is diagnosed as someone who makes invidious distinctions, he or she is very likely to be subjected to intimidation for being a supporter of old forms of intimidation.

There may be no knowing in advance how the new heresies might be committed, or what exactly they are, since the ethic of nondiscrimination is constantly evolving to undo distinctions that were only yesterday part of the fabric of reality. When Germaine Greer made the passing remark that, in her opinion, women who regarded themselves as men were not, in the absence of a penis, actually members of the male sex, the remark was judged to be so offensive that a campaign was mounted to prevent her speaking at the University of Cardiff. The campaign was not successful, partly because Germaine Greer is the person she is. But the fact that she had committed a heresy was unknown to her at the time, and probably only dawned on her accusers in the course of practicing that mornings Two Minutes Hate.

More successful was the campaign in Britain to punish Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prizewinning biologist, for making a tactless remark about the difference between men and women in the laboratory. A media-wide witch hunt began, leading Sir Tim to resign from his professorship at University College London; the Royal Society (of which he is a fellow) went public with a denunciation, and he was pushed aside by the scientific community. A lifetime of distinguished creative work ended in ruin. That is not censorship, so much as the collective punishment of heresy, and we should try to understand it in those terms.

The ethic of nondiscrimination tells us that we must not make any distinctions between the sexes and that women are as adapted to a scientific career as men are. That view is unquestionable in any territory claimed by the radical feminists. I dont know whether it is true, but I doubt that it is, and Sir Tims tactless remark suggested that he does not believe it either. How would I find out who is right? Surely, by considering the arguments, by weighing the competing opinions in the balance of reasoned discussion, and by encouraging the free expression of heretical views. Truth arises by an invisible hand from our many errors, and both error and truth must be permitted if the process is to work. Heresy arises, however, when someone questions a belief that must not be questioned from within a groups favored territory. The favored territory of radical feminism is the academic world, the place where careers can be made and alliances formed through the attack on male privilege. A dissident within the academic community must therefore be exposed, like Sir Tim, to public intimidation and abuse, and in the age of the Internet this punishment can be amplified without cost to those who inflict it. This process of intimidation casts doubt, in the minds of reasonable people, on the doctrine that inspires it. Why protect a belief that stands on its own two feet? The intellectual frailty of the feminist orthodoxy is there for all to see in the fate of Sir Tim.

Read the rest.

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Photos: Earliest crossing of the Northwest Passage

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Poem: Heinrich Heine, The Devil Take Your Mother

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Originally posted here:

Prufrock: Free Speech on Campus, Why Academics Love Jargon, and Ball Lightning - The Weekly Standard