Once Cambridge Analytica and SCL had won contracts with the State Department and were pitching to the Pentagon, the whistleblower Christopher Wylie became alarmed that this illegally-obtained data had ended up at the heart of government, along with the contractors who might abuse it. This apparently bizarre intersection of research on topics like love and kindness with defense and intelligence interests is not, in fact, particularly unusual. It is typical of the kind of dual-use research that has shaped the field of social psychology in the US since World War II.
Books
Desexing the Kinsey Institute
Over the past three years, the Kinsey Institute has quietly become a shell of its former self. Perhaps tellingly, its new director Sue Carter’s own research on vole monogamy has been cited by pro-abstinence and anti-pornography organizations to justify their positions. Carter was an unusual choice to lead the institute. Although she is the first biologist to head up the institute since Kinsey himself, her career has focused on rodents—in particular, on the prairie vole, one of the few mammals that pair-bonds and is monogamous.
Desolation Row
Lorca’s early poems are filled with elemental things, like a Miró painting—night, star, moon, bird—but they come with edges of strangeness and menace, like a Dalí painting—clock, knife, death, dream. He is never interested in just describing a scene. Instead, he begins to work on a set of associations, using echoes in the patterns of sound and sometimes a strict metrical form as undercurrent, thus suggesting a sort of ease or comfort at the root of the poem so that the branches can grow in any direction, with much grafting and sudden shifts, as his mind, in free flow, throws up phrases that, however unlikely, he allows in, thus extending the reach of the poem, or at other times pruning it briskly back.
As If!
Kwame Anthony Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range. He began his academic career as an analytic philosopher of language, but soon branched out to become one of the most prominent and respected philosophical voices addressing a wide public on topics of moral and political importance such as race, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, codes of honor, and moral psychology. Two years ago he even took on the “Ethicist” column in The New York Times Magazine, and it is easy to become addicted to his incisive answers to the extraordinary variety of real-life moral questions posed by readers. Appiah’s latest book, As If: Idealization and Ideals, is in part a return to his earlier, more abstract and technical interests.
Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism
It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual. Peterson rails against “softness,” arguing that men have been “pushed too hard to feminize,” like other hyper-masculinist thinkers before him who saw compassion as a vice and urged insecure men to harden their hearts against the weak (women and minorities) on the grounds that the latter were biologically and culturally inferior. Peterson’s ageless insights are, in fact, a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.
In the Review Archives: 1966–1968
Fifty-five years ago, The New York Review published its first issue. To celebrate the magazine’s emerald anniversary, in 2018 we will be going through the archives year by year, featuring some of the notable, important, and sometimes forgotten pieces that appeared in its pages. That first issue included a short note, addressed To the Reader: “The hope of the editors,” they wrote, “is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.”
Grown Men Reading ‘Nancy’
The appeal of Nancy to the art comic crowd might seem counter-intuitive, but while Nancy was never particularly clever, it was always cleverly constructed. In fact, the accomplishment of Nancy, with its refined, reduced lines and preoccupation with plungers and faucets, might primarily be a matter of form. The beauty of cartooning may be difficult to appreciate, especially for those who have not been versed in cartooning for years. By dissecting this gag strip so systematically, How to Read Nancy is important for people working in the form, and also for the cartooning medium as a whole to be understood and recognized as the unique art form that it is.
Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism
Writing for White Russian émigrés in the 1920s and 1930s, Ivan Ilyin provided a metaphysical and moral justification for political totalitarianism, which he expressed in practical outlines for a fascist state. But his ideas have now been revived and celebrated by Putin: because Ilyin found ways to present the failure of the rule of law as Russian virtue, Russian kleptocrats use his ideas to portray economic inequality as national innocence. And by transforming international politics into a discussion of “spiritual threats,” Ilyin’s works have helped Russian elites to portray the Ukraine, Europe, and the United States as existential dangers to Russia.
Why Irish America Is Not Evergreen
At this St. Patrick’s Day, one could be fooled into thinking that the Irish-American community is as robust as ever. But changes to US immigration rules have largely closed the door to new entries, leading inexorably to a “graying” of Irish America. I didn’t realize when I came here in the late 1990s that thanks to multiple failed attempts at immigration reform, the conveyor belt of Irish immigration would more or less stop with my generation. What that means for Irish-American identity in general, and the New York Irish in particular, is becoming a pressing issue.
Beware the Big Five
Only in recent months, with the news of the Russian hacks and trolls, have Americans begun to wonder whether the platforms they previously assumed to have facilitated free inquiry and communication are being used to manipulate them. The fact that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were successfully hijacked by Russian trolls and bots (fake accounts disguised as genuine users) to distribute disinformation intended to affect the US presidential election has finally raised questions in the public mind about whether these companies might compromise national security.
Sig Nordal 