Saturday Links
The new Tom Wolfe documentary, how statistics are made, early American English, a history of NYC’s radiation-proof building, and more.
Good morning! If you happen to live in New York City and are looking for something to do this weekend, why not wander down to the IFC Center and catch the new Tom Wolfe documentary, Radical Wolfe. John Tierney reviews the film for City Journal and talks to the film’s director, Richard Dewey. Watch the trailer.
American weather was a mystery for colonialists and early American settlers. Alyson Foster writes about the nineteenth-century scientists who tried to make sense of it:
To fully appreciate the modern-day marvel that is the National Weather Service, it’s useful to start with numbers. There’s 6.3 billion. (The number of observations the agency collects and analyzes every day.) There’s 1.5 million. (The number of forecasts it issues each year.) There’s 184 and 100,000. (The number of weather balloons NWS releases every day, including on weekends and holidays, and the number of feet said balloons can rise into the atmosphere.) And there’s 90 percent. (The average accuracy of a five-day forecast.)
There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The ubiquitousness of those updates, the fact that we don’t consider them at all, is a testament to just how much modern meteorology has spoiled us and—probably more than anything else—a tribute to the National Weather Service’s success.
This blasé attitude would have astounded the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish. They sent letters home describing the climate in apocalyptic terms. When it rained, wrote one colonist in New Sweden, on the Delaware River, “the whole sky seems to be on fire, and nothing can be seen but smoke and flames.” “Intemperate” was how a missionary from Rhode Island described it. “Excessive heat and cold, sudden violent changes of weather, terrible and mischievous thunder and lightning, and unwholesome air” created an environment that was “destructive to human bodies.”
The harshness of the weather—with its extreme seasons and severe storms—wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude. By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat.
How close are we to creating artificial wombs for human beings? Probably closer than you think. “Most scientists in the field,” Christine Rosen writes in a review of two books on the ethics of giving birth, “think it not unlikely that we will have some successful form of artificial-womb technology for humans within five to ten years.” What does it mean to be born?
How the numbers are made: John Lanchester reviews several new books on statistics for the London Review of Books. “At a dinner with the American ambassador in 2007, Li Keqiang, future premier of China, said that when he wanted to know what was happening to the country’s economy, he looked at the numbers for electricity use, rail cargo and bank lending. There was no point using the official GDP statistics, Li said, because they are ‘man-made’. That remark, which we know about thanks to WikiLeaks, is fascinating for two reasons. First, because it shows a sly, subtle, worldly humour – a rare glimpse of the sort of thing Chinese Communist Party leaders say in private. Second, because it’s true. A whole strand in contemporary thinking about the production of knowledge is summed up there: data and statistics, all of them, are man-made.
Poem: A.M. Juster, “For Bayara Manusevitch”
Zach Mortice visits the radiation-proof AT&T Long Lines Building: “When it was completed in Lower Manhattan in 1974, 33 Thomas Street, formerly known as the AT&T Long Lines Building, was intended as the world’s largest facility for connecting long-distance telephone calls. Standing 532 feet — roughly equivalent to a 45-story building — it’s a mugshot for Brutalism, windowless and nearly featureless. Its only apertures are a series of ventilation hoods meant to hide microwave-satellite arrays, which communicate with ground-based relay stations and satellites in space. One of several long lines buildings designed by John Carl Warnecke for the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, 33 Thomas Street is perhaps the most visually striking project in the architect’s long and influential career. Embodying postwar American economic and military hegemony, the tower broadcasts inscrutability and imperviousness. It was conceived, according to the architect, to be a ‘skyscraper inhabited by machines.’”
The early days of American English:
Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. Plants and animals were similarly named, for instance, fox grape, live oak, bluegrass, timothy grass, bullfrog, catfish, copperhead, lightning bug, garter snake, and katydid (a grasshopper named for the sound it makes). All were part of the vocabulary by the mid-eighteenth century. Other descriptive landscape names included clearing, rapids, and bluff.
Bluff has the distinction of being the first word with a changed meaning to be noticed and criticized by a visiting Englishman. Writing about Savannah, he reported, “It stands upon the flat of a hill; the bank of the river (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep and about forty-five feet perpendicular.” A bluff in England denoted a high but rounded shoreline, while in America it was used to describe steep cliffs.
Felix James Miller writes about a new exhibit on the work of E.P. Jacobs at the Comics Art Museum in Brussels: “Curated by Eric Dubois, this exhibit holds a looking glass up to the earliest works of E.P. Jacobs, the author of Blake and Mortimer, portraying him as a modern-day Homeric storyteller. It is well worth a visit for both fans of Jacobs’ work and newcomers alike.”
Peter Hitchens visits the Low Countries: “There is a special joy in reading history where it happened, at the time of year when it happened. And I have been relishing a second journey through Barbara Tuchman’s wonderful book The Guns of August while rambling round what we used to call the Low Countries, Belgium and the Netherlands. For reasons I will come to, this is fascinating in itself. The state border between these two nations no longer exists in practice. Sometimes the only way to know which one you are in is to check which company is supplying the signal for your cell phone. Between northern Belgium and the Netherlands there are no customs or passport checks. An ordinary train runs hourly between Brussels and Amsterdam, though they do not advertise it much, perhaps hoping that foreigners will instead use a much more expensive superfast express. The money is the same and it is hard for an outsider to spot the differences between Netherlands Dutch and Belgian Flemish. All of it is full of glorious cathedrals and their towers, superb pinnacled town halls and stately squares. And there is some of the finest art ever painted, providing a powerful religious and historical education at the hands of Rembrandt, Van Eyck, and Rogier van der Weyden, among others.”
Forthcoming: Tom Holland, Pax: War and Peace in Rome’s Golden Age (Basic Books, September 26): “Pax is a captivating narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland shows ancient Rome in all its glory: Nero’s downfall, the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii, the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, the conquests of Trajan. Vividly sketching the lives of Romans both ordinary and spectacular, from slaves to emperors, Holland shows that Roman peace was the fruit of unprecedented military violence.”