Saturday Links
Women in the ancient world, dark matter and black holes, Supreme Court book advances, a misleading misinformation expert, and more.
Good morning! Daisy Dunn argues in The Missing Thread: A Women’s History of the Ancient World that women “shaped the course of ancient history” in “tangible ways.” Hogwash, says Sarah Ruden in The American Scholar: “If we look back honestly, even someone as able and important as Cleopatra appears rather pathetic, her treatment at men’s hands leading to a choice between public abasement and suicide. She was excluded from critical, male-led deliberations and deals and betrayed by her sexual and childbearing maneuvers.” More:
In her insistence that women were shapers of the course of history, Dunn sometimes plays fast and loose with evidence. Of the purely legendary Lucretia, for example, she writes, “It could even be argued that, without [her], there would have been no Roman Republic at all.” What is more troubling, Dunn depicts Lucretia as an epochal champion of rape survivors. In doing so, whether purposely or by mistake, she switches around crucial dialogue in Livy’s From the Founding of the City. In Livy’s account, it is Lucretia’s husband and his friends, not she, who urge that guilt comes only from intention: the men say that the fact a woman was raped—and Lucretia is the pitiable example before them—exempts her from punishment. Also in Livy, it is Lucretia, not the men, who declares (using the lofty third person) that “no unchaste woman shall live by Lucretia’s example.” The men try to prevent her suicide, but she goes through with it on the principle that it is better for an innocent woman to die after a rape than to plead her powerlessness. Otherwise, Lucretia implies, hordes of sluts would be able to avoid the capital punishment they deserve by lying that they were raped; the rare good woman like herself should be willing to die in the cause of terrorizing bad women. Dunn gives to the men the decree of suicide for all raped women, and to Lucretia the high-minded consideration of intention.
How fragile and grandiose would women be to need fabricated role models hovering far above any imaginable historical circumstances, like an angel mobile above a baby’s crib? Wouldn’t we be better off aiming for an equal share of the ordinary human condition? And without the truth, what hope is there for that aim?
The man who couldn’t stop going to college:
Benjamin B. Bolger has been to Harvard and Stanford and Yale. He has been to Columbia and Dartmouth and Oxford, and Cambridge, Brandeis and Brown. Over all, Bolger has 14 advanced degrees, plus an associate’s and a bachelor’s. Some of Bolger’s degrees took many years to complete, such as a doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Others have required rather less commitment: low-residency M.F.A.s from Ashland University and the University of Tampa, for example.
Some produced microscopically specific research, like Bolger’s Harvard dissertation, “Deliberative Democratic Design: Participants’ Perception of Strategy Used for Deliberative Public Participation and the Types of Participant Satisfaction Generated From Deliberative Public Participation in the Design Process.” Others have been more of a grab bag, such as a 2004 master’s from Dartmouth, for which Bolger studied Iranian sociology and the poetry of Robert Frost.
Hannah Rowan goes to Fat Con: “‘Good morning, fatties!’ I hear as I enter the second-floor veranda of a glassy hotel in downtown Seattle. A large woman in a green tulle skirt and tank top is waving me into the ballroom behind her. ‘The opening ceremony is about to start,’ she says, ‘if you would like to join us.’ A number of other heavy women are floating near a registration table set up outside the double doors of the main event, collecting their swag bags and eyeing the products on offer in the vendor booths: Chub Rub, the Plus Bus, bubblegum-pink T-shirts with ‘Fattie’ printed in the Barbie film font. This is Fat Con, where we are promised a respite from the January sleet with a long weekend of ‘fat joy’ and ‘fat liberation.’ I duck inside and take a seat at the back, shuffling my purple merch bag and media pass.”
The misinformation of the world’s leading misinformation expert: Joan Donovan claimed that interference from donors with ties to Meta killed her job at Harvard. According to Stephanie M. Lee’s report in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Donovan’s allegation boiled down to . . . [a] series of events in a suspicious order.” More:
During that meeting with the dean, Donovan’s declaration says, Elmendorf told her that Harvard would “exercise its ownership of my book,” Meme Wars, because, unlike faculty, “all staff’s research was owned by the University.” Late last year, over dinner in Boston, she told me, “It is what it is: Someone can own my shit. I still know how to work a copy machine.” And in December, she tweeted, “The truth is H took everything from me,” including “my book,” and added, “I truly have nothing left to lose.”
But Harvard does not own the copyright to Meme Wars. By March of last year, the three authors and the provost had signed an agreement that “Harvard hereby irrevocably transfers and assigns to the Authors, in perpetuity and throughout the world, all of its right, title, and interest in the copyright” to Meme Wars, according to documents I obtained. (One exception: Harvard got a royalty-free license to use it “for Harvard’s research, educational, and other scholarly purposes.”) In Donovan’s declaration, the only reference to this agreement is a vague mention of the book being “settled.”
Elmendorf told me that transferring the copyright “seemed the fair thing to do.” And when I asked Donovan if it was misleading to not mention the agreement, she insisted that it was irrelevant because “to me, it is still very true that Harvard laid claim to my book.” Meme Wars isn’t the only thing Donovan says Harvard took. She has made a series of accusations — at times ambiguous — that her ex-employer is “holding on to my intellectual property,” which the university broadly disputes.
The man who helped the United States win two world wars: Barbara Spindel reviews The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall:
Marshall had hoped to command troops in battle, but his organizational skills, focus, and discipline meant that his commanding officers preferred to have him on their staffs. “I seemed to be getting farther and farther away from the fight, and it was particularly hard to work on a plan and then not attend to its execution,” he later wrote of his World War I service. He was a key planner of the decisive 1918 Meuse-Argonne campaign. Its success in the face of the daunting logistical challenge of moving 600,000 troops solidified Marshall’s reputation as, in the author’s words, “a paragon of almost inhuman efficiency.”
After World War I, Marshall turned down a lucrative job offer from J.P. Morgan & Co., instead spending five years as aide-de-camp to General Pershing, who, after the war, became chief of staff of the Army. (Marshall would hold the same position during World War II.) General Pershing, who disliked administrative tasks, leaned heavily on his aide. As Bunting tells it, he marked requests with the same notation: “Major M, take care of it.”
A new Hunger Games book will be published next year: “The new book, Sunrise on the Reaping, will be the fifth installment in the popular dystopian series. Scholastic is set to publish the novel on March 18, 2025.” It will, of course, be followed by another film.
Poem: Mark Kraushaar, “I Fly Too, Or in My Mind I Do…”
Supreme Court justices disclose book advances: “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported she received an $893,750 advance last year for a memoir she plans to write called Lovely One. Her publisher said the book will be out later this year and tells of ‘her family’s ascent from segregation to her confirmation on America’s highest court within the span of one generation’ . . . Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh reported receiving a $340,000 advance for what was described as a ‘legal memoir’ that he is working on . . . Justice Sonia Sotomayor has earned about $4 million in advances and royalties for several books, including My Beloved World, a memoir she agreed to write a year after joining the court in 2009.”
On dark matter and black holes: “For more than fifty years, physicists have been stumped by dark matter. Careful measurement of a range of phenomena, from the motion of enormous clusters of galaxies to the rate at which individual galaxies spin, have indicated that all the stuff astronomers can see – the trillions of stars dotted across the night sky – contributes just a fraction of the total mass of the universe. The observations suggest that ‘missing mass’ exerts a gravitational pull on visible matter, altering the paths of the objects that we can see. The mysterious matter doesn’t light up on its own; it remains dark. And there is a lot of it: for every kilogram of matter visible throughout the cosmos, more than five kilograms of dark matter seem to lurk unseen . . . What if dark matter is just ordinary matter locked inside black holes – from which, after all, light cannot escape. Such massive, dark objects would trundle around the cosmos, nudging the motion of visible matter while themselves evading direct detection. No need to speculate about hypothetical particles with exotic properties; no need to wreck the rules of relativity. The idea, in outline, is not new, but it has attracted increasing attention in the scientific community over the past decade.”
Charles F. McElwee reviews Griffin Dunne’s memoir The Friday Afternoon Club: “The black comedic vignettes of Dunne’s memoir, befitting a Nathanael West novel, feature the ascendant, fallen, and broken stars of an era when celluloid was still currency. Dunne was ‘raised in the land of make-believe,’ he writes—first in New York, where Elizabeth Montgomery, a struggling actress before she played Samantha in Bewitched, was his babysitter, and then in Los Angeles, where Sean Connery saved him from drowning in a pool. (‘A wee bit early for the deep end, sonny,’ said James Bond.)”
A “fake” Degàs turns out to be real: “An unnamed buyer from Barcelona entered into a bidding war on the auction website Todocolección. Originally listed for just €1 ($1), he won the work for €926 ($1,000). At the time, this must have seemed like a windfall to the previous owner, from Sabadell in Catalonia, who had inherited the painting. Though it bore the signature ‘Degàs,’ he didn’t believe it could be genuine so listed the work alongside some provenance documents showing that it had been bought in 1940 by his ancestor Joan Llonch Salas, a collector and former president of the local Banco Sabadell.”
On Wednesday, I reported on the decision by the Hay Literary Festival and the Edinburgh International Book Festival to drop the investment firm Baillie Gifford as a sponsor. Unsurprisingly, Baillie Gifford has decided to end all of its remaining literary festival sponsorships: “Baillie Gifford has cancelled all of its remaining sponsorship deals with literary festivals after protests over its links to Israel and fossil fuel companies. The investment management firm refused to confirm that it had taken the decision, but the Guardian has heard from Cambridge, Stratford, Wigtown and Henley literary festivals that the company had decided not to continue its partnership with them.” In case you missed it, Nils Pratley explains why the targeting of Baillie Gifford is so dumb.
Also in Prufrock this week, John Wilson has filed his last fiction column before a short summer break. It’s on summer reading, Stephen King, and Ross Macdonald.
New Release: Daniel McInerny, Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (Word on Fire, June 3): “Drawing upon the thought of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, McInerny argues for the unfashionable yet philosophically compelling view that art is essentially ‘mimetic,’ imitative of human action. But what does it mean for art to imitate human action? It means that art imitates the way human beings by nature quest for fulfillment, or happiness. In questing for fulfillment, human life takes the form of a story, and so the arts—all the arts, from painting to music, from fiction to film—are storytelling arts whose beauty reveals the truth about human happiness.”
I loved the poem by Mark Kraushaar. Thanks, Micah!
This Baillie Gifford story is wild. The activists are protesting their way into irrelevance.