Our Books in Dark Times series offered John this 2021 chance to speak with Lorraine Daston of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her list of publications outstrips our capacity to mention here; John particularly admires her analysis of “epistemic virtues” such as truth to nature and objectivity in her 2007 Objectivity (coauthored with Peter Galison).

Although she “came of age in an era of extreme contextualism” Daston is anything but time-bound. She starts things off in John’s wheelhouse with Henry James, before moving on to Pliny the Younger–no, not the scientist, the administrator! Then she makes a startling flanking maneuver to finish with contemporary Polish poetry. John puffs to keep up…

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41 RTB Books in Dark Times 13: Lorraine Daston, Historian of Science

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Historian of science Lorraine Daston's wonderful new book, Rules: A Short History of What We Live by (Princeton UP, 2022). is just out. Daston's earlier pathbreaking works include Against Nature, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment and many co-authored books, including Objectivity (with Peter Galison) which introduced the idea of historically changeable "epistemic virtues."

In this Recall this Book conversation, Daston--Raine to her friends--shows that rules are never as thin (as abstract and context-free) as they pretend to be. True, we love a rule that seems to brook no exceptions: by the Renaissance, even God is no longer allowed to make exceptions in the form of miracles. Yet throughout history, Raine shows, islands of standardized stability are less stable than they seem. What may feel like oppressively general norms and standards are actually highly protected ecotopes within which thin rules can arise. Look for instance at the history of sidewalks (Raine has)!

Raine, Elizabeth and John dive into the details. Implicit and explicit rules are distinguished in the case of e.g. cookbooks and monasteries--and then the gray areas in-between are explored. When students unconsciously ape their teachers, that is a tricky form of emulation--is it even possible to "follow but not ape"? Perhaps genres do this work: The Aeneid is not the Iliad and yet older writers are somehow internalized in the later ones.

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Recallable Books

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Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. But lately it is The Ministry for the Future, his "science fiction nonfiction novel" (Jonathan Lethem) that has politicians, Eurocrats and the rest of us pondering how policy might fight climate change.

In this Books in Dark Times conversation from the RTB vaults (you can also read a longer version that appeared as an article in our partner Public Books) Stan and John start out with Stan’s emerging from the Grand Canyon into the pandemic moment of late March, 2020. Then they discuss Stan’s sense that SF is the realism of the day and his take on “cognitive estrangement.” Finally, they happen upon a shared admiration for the great epic SF poet, Frederick Turner. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick.

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How should humans respond to our ongoing human-made climate catastrophe? To answer that question, Recall this Book turned to prize-winning climate reporter Elizabeth Kolbert, who visited Brandeis this Fall. The topic was Under a White Sky, her recent book that documents the responses to the climate crisis ranging from a form of climate engineering that shoots reflective particles into the air to cool the atmosphere, to negative emission technologies that capture and inject carbon dioxide underground.

"You'd have to be pretty hard-hearted not to feel called to some kind of action when you see what we humans have done." But Elizabeth wonders what the best alternatives are. Should we set aside half the earth for biodiversity? Why is it that genetic engineering has become the cultural flashpoint for fear of unintended consequences? There are no easy answers at this point. Elizabeth thinks that if you're not frightened by what's going right now, including American politics around vaccination refusal, you're not paying attention.

Because this episode is associated with the annual Brandeis New Student Book Forum, first-year students Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman (who also goes by Nidhi) jump in with some thoughts.

Noticing repeated mentions of Henry David Thoreau in the book, Nidhi inquires about his role in inspiring Elizabeth's writing. Hedy's question about environmental justice and the comparative agency of rich and poor countries moves Elizabeth to talk about the staggering inequities in consumption and the goal of convergence in carbon emissions. What is the mechanism by which this happens, though? Do humans have the right to implement these technologies? Is the solution to issues created by human control really more control?

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Special credit and thanks for this episode goes to Hedy Yang and Srinidhi Sriraman, who took part in the audio editing and the preparation of the show notes, respectively.

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What’s the relationship between immigration, globalization and demographics? And what is woke particularism?

John and Elizabeth turn for answers to Quinn Slobodian, professor of history at Wellesley College and author, most recently, of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.

In a 2019 discussion that proves eerily prescient of politics in 2022, first discuss Jean Raspail‘s racist 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, a book whose popularity in certain quarters since its publication might explain how Europe has gone from Thatcher to Brexit, from Vaclav Havel to Viktor Orban. How is this xenophobic screed related to science fiction of the same period–and to John Locke? Pat Buchanan, American early adapter of Raspail’s hate-mongering, figures prominently.

They then turn to Garrett Hardin’s “Living on a Lifeboat” and John Lanchester’s recent novel The Wall to work out the ideas of forming a society beyond or beneath the state in less obviously racist terms than Raspail’s. What kind of hard choices need to be made in allocating resources? What claims about hard choices are just a screen for the powerful to make choices that, for them, aren’t actually that hard? Does gold make things more or less nationalized?

Finally, in Recallable Books, Quinn recommends Mutant Neoliberalism, edited by William Callison and Zachary Manfredi, for an attempt to really understand the politics of 2016 and beyond; Elizabeth recommends Douglas Holmes’s Economy of Words, an ethnography of central banks; and John recommends Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel of solitary solidarity.

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Read here: RTB Slobodian

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Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words."

The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing."

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What do children love most about books? Leaving their mark on inviting white spaces? Or that enchanting feeling when a book marks them as its own, taking them off to where the wild things are? Back in 2021, Elizabeth and John invited illustrious and illuminating book historian Leah Price to decode childhood reading past and present. The conversation explores the tactile and textual properties of great children’s books and debate adult fondness for juvenile literature. Leah asks if identifying with a literary character is a sign of virtuous imagination, or of craziness and laziness. She also schools John on what makes a good association copy, and reveals her son’s magic words when he wants her to tell a story: Read it!

For many years an English Professor at Harvard, Leah is founder and director of the Rutgers Initiative for the Book, and she tweets at @LeahAtWhatPrice. Her What We Talk About When We Talk About Books recently won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award.

Sometime around the turn of the millennium, the concern about distinguishing between juvenile and adult books seemed to shift from moral panic about speeding up sexual maturity to worry about turning back the clock on what we now call adulting through the mainstreaming of young adult literature.

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Recallable Books: what else should I read if I enjoyed this episode?

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Paul Roquet is an MIT associate professor in media studies and Japan studies; his earlier work includes Ambient Media. It was his recent mind-bending The Immersive Enclosure that prompted John and Elizabeth to invite him to discuss the history of "head-mounted media" and the perceptual implications of virtual reality.

Paul Elizabeth and John discuss the appeal of leaving actuality aside and how the desire to shut off immediate surroundings shapes VR's rollout in Japan. The discussion covers perceptual scale-change as part of VR's appeal--is that true of earlier artwork as well? They explore moral panic in Japan and America, recap the history of early VR headset adapters on trains and compare various Japanese words for "virtual" and their antonyms. Paul wonders if the ephemerality of the views glimpsed in a rock garden served as guiding paradigm for how VR is experienced.

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Recallable Books

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Charles Yu won the 2020 National Book Award for Interior Chinatown but some of us became fans a decade earlier, with How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010). That novel brilliantly uses SF conventions to uncover the kind of self-deceptive infilling that we all do every day, the little stories we tell ourselves to make our world seem predictable and safe when it’s anything but. In this crossover episode, which originally aired on Novel Dialogue, where critics and novelists sit down together in peace, He speaks with John and with science-fiction scholar Chris Fan, Assistant Professor at UC Irvine, senior editor and co-founder of Hyphen magazine.

The conversation gets quickly into intimate territory: the pockets of safe space and the “small feelings” that families can and cannot provide, and that science fiction can or cannot recreate. Graph paper and old math books get a star turn. Charlie’s time as a lawyer is scrutinized; so too is “acute impostor syndrome” and the everyday feeling of putting on a costume or a mask, as well as what Du Bois called “double-consciousness.”

Mentioned in this Episode:

--Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

--W. E. B. Du Bois on “double-consciousness” (and so much more): Souls of Black Folk (1903)

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Margaret Cohen joins John to discuss The Underwater Eye, which explores "How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy." Margaret's earlier prizewinning books include The Novel and the Sea and The Sentimental Education of the Novel, but this project brings her places even her frequent surfing forays hadn't yet reached. She charts the rise of "wet for wet" filming both in the ocean itself and in various surrogates, exploring the implications of entering a domain that humans can explore and come to know, but never master.

She and John discuss the rarity of professional divers in early 19th century (Henri Edwards 1843) and Natasha Adamowsky on the abiding fear of the depths. Conversation also pivots towards such SF classics as Stanislas Lem Solaris (1961), featuring a sentient underwater being which controls the planetary tides, though this wrinkle disappears in the 1971 Tarkovsky film. Margaret wittily labels the unintended consequences of human agency the "dialectic of the anthropocene."

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Recallable Books/Films

Margaret chose Creature from the Black Lagoon 1954 which inspired Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (a "dry for wet" film, shot in studio rather than underwater) and was in its turn inspired by Gabriel Figueora, cinematographer of The Pearl.

John favored a SF novel about space aliens who on landing seek out the oceanic depths, John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes (1953)

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