Why, we must ask ourselves, have individuals of unquestionably great powers chosen to play with their minds like captive monkeys with their genitalia?

Rats, Lice and History, Hans Zinsser

A professor in my department had a nervous breakdown of some kind and abruptly left last year; he did not clear out his office. This was among the books he left that were otherwise probably just going to be tossed. I picked it up because of the title and because of the incredible author bio included in the front which featured this perfection-adjacent sentence:

Behind the history-making accomplishments was what Time described as an "affectionate, voluble, energetic, terrier-like man," a man who made friends all over the world with his chronic courage and unfailing wit.

(Affectionate! Voluble! Terrier-like!)

The sentence I've selected at the top is Zinsser being really cranky about modernist literature (he simply does not know what to make of Gertrude Stein or T.S. Eliot) but it's very funny, and it made me think about how much Hans Zinsser would hate Online. Also, it's hard to imagine anyone letting a science writer be this fucking weird and tangential in a popular trade book even today. Don't be so hard on the modernists my guy, they're one reason your silly little "biography of typhus" can have digressions into definitions of art and the origins of life in the universe! (Also, a fun fact about Zinsser is he famously did not let women work in his lab so maybe grow up on that front.)

Democratic ideals and the exigencies of professional expertise form an unstable compound.

Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer

I suspect that the next few months of this newsletter will accidentally become a little blog of me being in a history of science class; apologies in advance.

Whereas if your s**t is mellifluous and precise and elegant and surprising and snappy?

"Getting dressed is like telling a joke. Are you doing hack material??", Blackbird Spyplane

Actually the first couple of paragraphs of this newsletter entry were submitted by Maya. This sentence loses style points for censoring the word "shit", but regains them with the use of "whereas."

There is nothing we regret more than watching the Left eat the Left, surely one of the sorriest spectacles of the twentieth century.

"Mystery Science Theater", Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross for Lingua Franca

At the risk of some cringe name-dropping: It is very funny to learn about the Sokal hoax in a grad seminar and realize I know someone who was embroiled in it. I met Andrew Ross at an Occupy Wall Street working group meeting in 2011. Between 2011 and maybe early 2014 we were involved in some of the same collective actions and campaigns; it’s only in the last few years that I actually understood what a big deal he is in his pocket of academia. For years I knew him primarily as the academic with the great Scottish accent who sometimes arranged meeting space at NYU for weirdo OWS offshoot groups and who was remarkably kind and generous for a guy who probably was a lot smarter than me. We're only sporadically in touch, but he was and is an important intellectual influence on me—not initially through his publications but through his praxis and through the respect he afforded an un-credentialed 24-year-old idiot like me, subsequently introducing the possibility I might not be an idiot. (I had far fewer interactions with David Graeber during Occupy because by then he was mostly living in London, but he had a similar impact for which I will be forever grateful.)

The point here is: I now have zero chill about this stupid academic journal hoax story from the 1990s because it took advantage of the generosity of a person who, twenty-some years after the fact, low-key changed my life by being patient and making space for me in much the same way he patiently made space for this Sokal guy! But I love this sentence from the letter Andrew and his fellow pranked Social Text editor wrote about the whole brouhaha because it also indicates some understanding that at the end of the day the stakes of the whole Sokal hoax thing are quite silly and embarrassing.

Often when authors use words like "complex", "contradictory", and "contentious", they are just preparing an alibi to excuse themselves from subsequently writing anything meaningful or consequential—everything is relative, the world much too complicated for precise characterization or sentiment, nothing much to be done.

Theories of Development: Contentions, Arguments, Alternatives, third edition, Elaine Hardwick and Richard Peet

It's nice when an academic text on ostensibly a policy topic acknowledges an annoying aspect of policy-oriented prose. Also, it's very funny to me that someone decided the title of this book should include the word contentions and also this sentence calls out sloppy uses of contentious.