Wednesday Links
Mary McCarthy’s Catholic upbringing, academic envy, the last living relative of Bruno Schulz, Antonin Scalia’s early years, and more.
Good morning! The academic James Redfield shares a name with the author of the novel The Celestine Prophecy and is often mistaken for him. How does one deal with the constant reminder that, despite one’s accomplishments, another person’s work is far more popular:
At some point I began to get a certain amount of mail—invitations to take part in book fairs, letters from Germany, Japan and elsewhere asking me for my autograph, fan mail. I came to know what the other James Redfield looked like because I got a picture of him with a request that I sign it. One woman sent him a long letter telling him the difference he had made to her; when I sent my more-or-less standard explanatory reply, with apologies that I had no idea where she could find the James Redfield she was looking for, she responded with an even longer letter saying that I sounded like a nice person and telling me more about her life. I realized that being another James Redfield could become a career in itself.
This fantasy became a reality in March of 1997, when I received a letter from Mikhail Gorbachev. As president of the Scientific Committee of something called the Fondazione Pio Manzù he invited me to come to Rimini in October to a conference on the Daimon of Well-Being; I was to give a talk on Medicine in the 21st Century. It was accompanied by another letter from Giandomenico Picco, the vice president of the Scientific Committee, asking me to receive on live television a medal from the Italian government. These letters came with a box of publications in full color with many photographs of previous conferences organized by the Fondazione Manzù, featuring Gorbachev, George Bush and Princess Diana. I observed that their Scientific Committee, very international, included Christiaan Barnard, the first surgeon to successfully perform a human heart transplant; Senator Gary Hart; and both Tofflers, people who like to talk about the future. I was promised a first-class ticket to Rome, air-taxi transport to Rimini, lodging in the Grand Hotel there and good security arrangements. There was a leaflet about the Grand Hotel, and a list of all the people who had been invited to the Daimon of Well-Being, including Hillary Clinton.
A surge in scientific papers has some researchers concerned about quality: “Up to four times more researchers pump out more than 60 papers a year than less than a decade ago. Saudi Arabia and Thailand saw the sharpest uptick in the number of such scientists over the past few years, according to a preprint posted on bioRxiv on 24 November. The increase in these ‘extremely productive’ authors raises concerns that some researchers are resorting to dubious methods to publish extra papers. ‘I suspect that questionable research practices and fraud may underlie some of the most extreme behaviours,’ says study co-author John Ioannidis, a physician specializing in metascience at Stanford University in California.”
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