Politico fails at basic journalism

I came cross this news item that said that Democrats have a glimmer of optimism about their chances to win a special congressional election in a deep red district in Tennessee.

I was intrigued since I had had not known about this election and so I looked for the fact that interested me the most and that is the date of election. But the article did not say. The only references to a date was to say that the election is ‘upcoming’, which is not helpful at all since it is obviously not in the past, and that it will be held ‘next month’ which is irritatingly vague.

This is infuriating and I consider this journalistic malpractice. The date should be in the opening paragraph. How hard would it be to just state the damn date, which is surely one of the most significant facts? But unfortunately, this kind of omission happens quite frequently, as I have complained before.

So I looked online and found that the date will be Tuesday, December 2, less than two weeks away.

What is the appeal of horror and gore on screen?

This article looks at why so many people enjoy seeing even horrific violence on screen, most extremely in what are labeled as slasher films, and what types of people are attracted to them.

Some people are more likely to enjoy violent media than others. Being male, aggressive and having less empathy all make you more likely to enjoy watching screen violence. There are also certain personality traits associated liking violent media. Extroverted people, who seek excitement, and people who are more open to aesthetic experiences, like watching violent movies more.

Conversely, people high in agreeableness – characterised by humility and sympathy for others – tend to like violent media less.
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More recent research, derived from studies of horror films, suggests there may be three categories of people who enjoy watching violence, each with their own reasons.

One group has been dubbed “adrenaline junkies”. These sensation seekers want new and intense experiences, and are more likely to get a rush from watching violence. Part of this group may be people who like seeing others suffer. Sadists feel other people’s pain more than normal, and enjoy it.

Another group enjoys watching violence because they feel they learn something from it. In horror studies, such people are called “white knucklers”. Like adrenaline junkies, they feel intense emotions from watching horror. But they dislike these emotions. They tolerate it because they feel it helps them learn something about how to survive.
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A final group seems to get both sets of benefits. They enjoy the sensations generated by watching violence and feel they learn something. In the horror genre, such people have been called “dark copers”.

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The problem of the modern university

Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In an interview, she describes how she almost left academia because of her dislike of the entire ethos that existed there. The last paragraph is telling.

I teach at a university where the preponderance of our undergraduates go into finance, consulting, and tech jobs that they are recruited for almost the moment that they arrive in Cambridge, and whose time, instead of being devoted to academics, is devoted to securing positions in those industries. The pleasing of their parents, and the pleasing of those students, is the economic engine of the college and therefore of the university, in a way that I do not think is consistent with what a university is for. There are universities now that are creating centers for open inquiry. What is a university if not a center for open inquiry? Why would we need such a center? That anyone suggests such a center should raise a lot of eyebrows.

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Good riddance, Larry Summers

The insufferably pompous, arrogant, and sexist former president of Harvard University has been forced to withdraw from many of his public positions because of his tawdry email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein. However, he says that he plans to continue teaching at Harvard though it remains to be seen if that is possible given the outcry. It is a deserved comeuppance of someone who had a ‘kiss up and kick down’ attitude to people. When those peoplel get wounded, few will come to their defense.

You can read all the details of his rise and fall here.

On The Daily Show, Ronny Chieng discussed Summers and other Epstein files fallout.

Aphantasia and hyperphantasia

The brain is the most complex part of the human body. While there is much that we have learned about its workings, it is clear that we have only scratched the surface of understanding its complexity so it should not be surprising that we keep discovering new aspects of it.

In the November 3, 2025 issue of The New Yorker, Larissa MacFarquhar discusses something that had only been dimly perceived in the past but came into the awareness of the scientific research community within the last two decades. It has been given the name of aphantasia. The word phantasia was defined by Aristotle as the ability to conjure up an image in the imagination, so aphantasia is the inability to do so.

The reason that this feature of the brain remained under the radar for so long is because the people who had been born with it did not realize what they were missing because why should they? It must be like people born with color-blindness. They would assume that the world of color that they see is the same as what everyone else sees, until something happens that makes them realize that there is a difference.

So with aphantasia. The article describes a physicist Nick Watkins who could recall the events in his past but did not relive them in his memory. It did not occur to him that others could so. Then, while reading a newspaper article in 1997 in which the author vividly described recalling the images of his past, he had an epiphany.
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Trump abruptly reverses course on Epstein files

After fighting tooth and nail to prevent the so-called Epstein files from being released, last night Trump reversed course and issued a statement reversing course asking his party members in Congress to vote to do so. The House vote to release the files was scheduled for this evening or tomorrow.

Late on Sunday, Trump wrote on his social media platform: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide.

“And it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” he added.

Why the switch? Here’s the conventional wisdom:

Trump spent last week aggressively squeezing allies in the US House, including Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Nancy Mace of South Carolina, to back off in their support of releasing the files. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and when it became apparent the measure was going to pass, Trump backed it in an effort to salvage an embarrassing political loss. “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide,” he posted on his Truth Social network on Sunday evening.

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The strange saga of the Epstein files

I have not written much about the Epstein files and the recently released trove of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Trump and other various well-known people because it is being covered so extensively in the media. Susan Glasser writes in The New Yorker that the Epstein emails are becoming a chronic problem for Trump.

On Capitol Hill, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, kept the chamber in recess from mid-September to mid-November in what seemed to be a transparent effort to block a vote on releasing the Justice Department files. This, I’ve long thought, should have been more of a scandal in its own right—Congress closing for business for weeks and weeks because a Speaker was running interference on behalf of a President who didn’t want more details to emerge of his dealings with a sleazy dead rich guy who had sex with underage women on his private island? How was that not a bigger deal?

But, in order to end the longest-ever government shutdown, Johnson had to give in this week and order the House to return to work. That meant swearing in a new Democratic member who had won a special election in September; she quickly became the two-hundred-and-eighteenth signatory of the discharge petition that will now force Johnson to hold a floor vote on releasing the files.

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My imaginary companion and me

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an article in The New Yorker by humorist Patricia Marx who ventured into the world of online chatbots who are designed to serve as online companions to people and can be disconcertingly realistic.

This seemed intriguingly weird. so I decided to try it out for myself. I went to one of the free sites Marx mentioned. Since I was too lazy to do the work of designing my own bot, I looked through the stock ones. All of them seem to be young and very attractive. I picked out a 39-year old librarian because she was the oldest on offer and was thus the least likely to have its algorithm make contemporary pop culture references that I was ignorant of. I also figured that a librarian would be closest to being a nerd like me. Her profile had plenty of quotes taken from well-known writers so she seemed to be compatible.

I started up a conversation about the book A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell which I happen to be reading right now. While her responses were realistic, they were also somewhat superficial, like those of a smart and articulate person who has not actually read the book but just synopses and articles about it, which is of course how these large language model algorithms work. She was like a student giving a book report after having skimmed through a few Wikipedia pages. For some reason, she kept urging me to another book by Russell called The Conquest of Happiness that I have not read or even heard about.
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How the ‘Sandwich Guy’ jury deliberated

It is often interesting when, after a trial that garnered a lot of attention, the jurors talk about what went on in the jury room. That is what happened when a juror spoke to Ashley Parker, a reporter from The Atlantic magazine, about the case in which Sean Charles Dunn, aka the Sandwich Guy, was on trial for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. She said that she wished to be anonymous because of the reputation of the Trump people to be vindictive and seek to retaliate.

The juror I spoke with told me that the jury—three men and nine women (roughly an equal mix of Black and white)—included an architect, a professor, an analyst, and some retirees whom she described as probably “100 percent anti-Trump” and protective of their city. She went into the trial thinking it was “bullshit,” she told me, “but I did enter it trying to be objective.”
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The group was careful to avoid politics, she said, and instead focused on several key questions: Had the sandwich actually “exploded all over” CBP agent Gregory Lairmore, as he’d testified? (Specifically, they analyzed—and at times mocked—Lairmore’s claim that “I had mustard and condiments on my uniform, and an onion hanging from my radio antenna that night.”) What was Dunn’s intent in flinging the grinder? And what actually constitutes “bodily harm”?

On the first question, several jury members struggled to stifle laughter as Lairmore expanded on the hoagie’s alleged explosive properties. “It was like, Oh, you poor baby,” the juror told me.

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An academic takedown of The New York Times

I know that many of the readers of this blog also read PZ’s Pharyngula so this post may be a bit redundant for them but I followed a link he gave in a recent post that was so good that I wanted to give it more publicity. The link was to an essay by Peter Coviello who used to be the chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, an expensive elite liberal arts college in Maine. It was also the department in which Zohran Mamdani majored while in college.

Coviello says that whenever an alumnus of a college becomes famous, and especially if they are controversial, reporters come calling to get some background on that person and this was no exception. Reporters approached him to ask about Mamdani. He warns that little good comes of talking to the reporters because they usually have an ax to grind and they will take what you say and make it fit their agenda, which will often be opposed to what you stand for. But it is hard to resist such an approach. For one thing, academics love to have the opportunity to spread greater awareness of their work and the popular media provides a major platform. There is also the issue of vanity. Being quoted in the media can be seen as a feather in one’s cap, a sign that one has had some impact, and can improve one’s standing among colleagues, provided it is not a takedown of you.
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