Saturday Links
Stanford scientist says there’s no free will, the return of an album of frog noises, ancient wonders reconstructed, how Anne Boleyn was beheaded, and more.
Good morning! Frog noises are amazing. So amazing in fact that there once was an album entirely devoted to them. And now it’s back: “Decades before Spotify, a pair of music producers founded Folkways Records with the slightly ambitious goal of recording every sound in the world. The label, later acquired by the Smithsonian, marks its seventy-fifth anniversary this year, and continues the quest . . . On November 3, the label will . . . reprise the cult-favorite Sounds of North American Frogs, available on vinyl for the first time since 1958.”
Speaking of frogs, you know Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad, but do you know his Owl at Home? Michial Farmer reminds us of why this 1975 classic is worth reading to your kids this winter: “Whereas Frog and Toad are defined in relation to each other, Owl lives alone elsewhere in the forest and does not address another animal at any point in the book’s five chapters. It’s winter for much of the book, and presumably Frog and Toad are burrowed into the mud at the bottom of some pond, while Owl goes on with his life. Owl at Home is consequently an enormously lonely book—but it is a soft and shimmering loneliness, the sort of cozy loneliness that everyone with even a hint of introversion has felt at some point in their lives and enjoyed, on some level, at least.”
Ari Schulman takes stock of what went wrong with our relationship to science: “Beneath the lofty idealism of ‘follow the science’ lies something not just feckless but downright punitive. There was a war against Covid, we were told — rightly so — and it demanded wartime sacrifice. But now the logic of sacrifice was inverted. Science never owed us anything, yet constantly we heard of all the things we owed science. This story about science is not serving us well. Awful tradeoffs, blind stabs in the dark, grueling least-of-all-evils choices were inevitably going to define pandemic governance. The trouble is that our leaders so steadfastly refused to describe these choices as choices, and invoked ‘science’ as their universal get-out-of-jail-free card. Politics is where we decide, and then where we grapple with the fallout from what we decided. But our story about science is robbing politics of this vital function, and driving us all crazy in the process.”
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