Lithium Mines and Flowers

by Leanne Ogasawara

Tiehm’s buckwheat

1.

In the high desert of Nevada, a little wildflower is seen clinging precariously to barren rock. We learn that this is the only place in the world where you can find Tiehm’s buckwheat. And like all rare and understated things, it can pull at a person’s heart strings. Like buttercups or fiddleheads, to see them is to love them. And not surprising in that desolate place, the bees and spiders depend on them.

Because these flowers only exist in this one spot, they were not discovered until relatively recently— and as bad luck would have it, they sit atop one of the largest lithium deposits in the world.

And so begins The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives. Written by former Reuters journalist Ernest Scheyder, this book was a surprising pick to be longlisted for the National Book Award. Neither literary in style, nor employing the novelistic narrative techniques usually favored by award-winning authors, it is written as straight, solid journalism. Interesting that it was even included on the long-list, I thought—and even more surprising was that liberal media has not paid it much attention. The only real reviews I found were in conservative papers like the WSJ and Forbes.

Intrigued I picked up a copy. Read more »



On Burnout: ‘Can’ is the New ‘Should’

by Marie Snyder

I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. Their wellness lunch-and-learns didn’t help me, and I soon discovered I’m not alone.

An article published in JAMA last June looked at rising rates of burnout in healthcare, where 40% of physicians surveyed intended to leave their practice. They suggest, “To prevent a health care worker exodus, experts argue that the emphasis needs to shift from individual resilience to broader system-level improvements.” They are looking for standardized methods to affect organizational management with “evidence-based interventions.”  

Over 25 years ago, Michael Leiter and Christina Maslach came to the same conclusion. They identified six areas of worklife affecting burnout and created a specific assessment for educators. They determined the cause to be a “mismatch” between employee expectations and employer behaviours leading workers to be closer to the bleak end of a continuum from burned out to engaged. They suggest that “the task for organizations and individuals is to achieve a resolution.” This is not just a matter of throwing wellness initiatives or resilience-speak into the mix, but addressing any reasonable expectations of employees with appropriate employer interventions in all six interrelating areas. 

Feels vindicating, right?!

One problem with this solution and possibly a reason why it’s not widespread, however, is that it’s often the employees that hold the highest standards and care for the workplace who are the most affected by burnout, and they might make up a small minority of workers. People who show up to learn the right buzzwords and put in the least effort required to hit their hours without concern for the process and product of the company can feel unscathed, and those employees can make up enough of the workforce to provoke organizations to continue the micromanaging and questionable reward schemes for the many.  Read more »

Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Palpable Knowledge Of Things: A Meditation

by Mark R. DeLong

Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge)

Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned electronic devices—“an assist,” he said, that helps tuners. Eugene’s wife Natalie felt otherwise, saying at one point in their conversation, “It’s an electronic thing now. Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it. You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.”

Eugene mixed elements of beauty and delight with the technical complexity of piano tuning, recalling how he would “hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today” and that he would come home and say, “I just heard a diminished chord today!” Once he was tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom during “a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Someday we’re going to get your job.’ I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.”

The piano tuner feels and practices the tune, which is hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not unambiguously achieved. At best, tuning a piano is a compromise: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.” Read more »

Who’s Taking Out the Ashes?

by Monte Davis

12+16+16 = 44. We can all agree on that.

44/12 = 3 2/3. Good so far?

That’s all the math needed to ask some  pointed questions about CCS. That stands for carbon capture and storage (or “sequestration”), a technology discussed and explored at pilot-project scale for decades. Its goal is to separate and collect the carbon dioxide from combustion, before it is released into the atmosphere, then put it in very long term storage so it doesn’t contribute to further climate change. So CCS is really CO2 capture and storage – and the difference between carbon and carbon dioxide is where the arithmetic above comes in.

Carbon’s atomic mass is 12; oxygen’s is 16. (Never mind isotopes.) So combining a carbon atom and two oxygen atoms – combustion — yields a molecular mass for CO2 of 44… or 3 2/3 times that of the “unburnt” carbon atom. These numbers are ratios, so the math is the same  for any units: completely burn 12 grams of pure carbon, and get 44 grams of CO2; burn 12 million tons, get 44 million tons of CO2. Fossil fuels aren’t pure carbon, of course, and combustion rarely burns every bit of what there is, so the emission ratio varies. Coal typically yields 2.1 times its mass in CO2; firewood, 1.6 to 1.8 times; gasoline, 2.3 times; natural gas, about 2.8 times.

Pause here, because this is deeply counterintuitive – so deeply that we don’t realize it. We’ve had chemistry for a few centuries, arithmetic for millennia. But we’ve been using fire deliberately for a million or two years, seeing the aftermath of wildfire for much longer. All that experience taught us in our bones that the ashes always weigh less than the fuel did. As for the smoke – why, just look at it! Any hominid can see that it weighs nothing at all!

Because CO2 swirls invisibly away with that smoke, and soon mixes with the air and dissipates, we’ve learned only in the latest eyeblink of time to account for all the combustion products. It takes an effort to grasp that CO2 is as much “ash” as the gray powder in the fireplace – ash that weighs more than the logs we burned. The 15 gallons of gasoline in your car’s tank weigh about 100 pounds. When it’s gone, you’ve made a present to the world of about 230 pounds of carbon dioxide, along with much smaller quantities of carbon monoxide, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, etc. Read more »

Monday, October 7, 2024

Imperfect Solutions, Imperfect Men—Revisiting JFK’s Profiles In Courage

by Michael Liss

We are now on opposite sides of the moral universe. —Joseph Buckingham, journalist and Massachusetts State Senator, speaking of his once esteemed friend, Daniel Webster.

Daniel Webster, by George Peter Alexander Healy, 1846. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

What a wonderful quote. Thirty years of amicable relations destroyed in the course of a three-hour speech. March 7, 1850. Senator Daniel Webster taking his leave of old friends and older ideals as he seeks the higher ground of political peacemaking. 

Webster’s story is one of eight Senators’ featured in John F. Kennedy’s 1956 Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles In Courage. This is as good a time as any to acknowledge what everyone knows: The book is the story of political integrity, but JFK really didn’t author most of it. The bulk of the research and writing was done by his long-time speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. Let’s also acknowledge that JFK’s dad, Joseph P. Kennedy, might have “assisted” in nailing down the prestigious award.  

Such is politics, and such is the process of image creation and image burnishing. Profiles In Courage was the end product of a JFK idea inspired by the actions of then-Senator John Quincy Adams, who, in 1807, opposed his Federalist Party’s foreign policy and was denied renomination as a result. Kennedy took the story to Sorensen, asked him to do further research, and Profiles is the result. 

The book serves a real political purpose. The Kennedys (father and son) have their eyes on the future and don’t have a lot of time to waste. JFK was under 30 when he was elected to the House in 1946; 35 when elected Senator in 1952. He’s 39 in 1956, surely old enough to set his sights higher. JFK has a great political name, charisma to burn, and even a personal history of physical courage (PT-109), but, still, at that age, the resume is clearly incomplete. A book, especially a well-received one that shows some  gravitas, might lead to a VP slot on the 1956 ticket with presumptive nominee Adlai Stevenson. A man could dream and a man could plan, and Profiles was part of the plan. 

Is it worth a Pulitzer, Dad intervention or not? Read more »

Georgia on My Mind

by William Benzon

“Georgia on My Mind” was composed and recorded by Hoagy Carmichael (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) in 1930. Born in 1899 and dying in 1981, Carmichael composed several hundred songs, many of which became hits, including “Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and Soul,” “Skylark,” and “In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening.” These songs are important contributions to an amorphous and sprawling body of popular song sometimes called “the American Songbook.” The composers of these songs are said to be denizens of “Tin Pan Alley,” at the center of which we find the Brill Building, just north of Times Square at Broadway and 49th Street. For a while Carmichael worked for Southern Music, which had its office in the Brill Building.

Here is Carmichael’s 1930 recording of “Georgia on My Mind.” Many, though by no means all, standards, as they are sometimes called, have the same general form: AABA. Each letter stands for phrase eight measures, or bars, long. The A sections have the same melody and harmony which the B section has a different, and often contrasting, melody (along with its underlying harmony).

This recording begins with a short introduction featuring violinist Joe Venuti, followed by Carmichael coming in on the vocal (c. 0:15). We hit the B section at about 0:51. The B section is often called the “bridge,” presumably because it connects two A sections. Carmichael repeats the A-strain 1:08 starting at 1:08 and ending with a short violin phrase from Venti. Starting at about 1:26 the performance becomes purely instrument. First, we have what sounds like a muted trombone solo, which pretty much sticks to the melody. At 2:01 Venuti plays a violin solo on the bridge. At 2:21 we return to the A-strain with Jack Teagarden on trombone improvising a solo. That ends with the full band playing a chord at 2:39 followed by an 8-bar cornet solo played by Bix Beiderbecke (his last). Venuti, Teagarden and especially Beiderbecke were important musicians in their own right.

Notice Carmichael’s voice. It’s dry, and not particularly mellifluous. His style is relaxed, verging on conversational. It’s a style made possible by technology, a style that would be all but hopeless in live performance without a microphone and amplification. By the same token, it’s a style well-suited to recording, which was still a relatively new medium at the time. It’s a style that owes a lot to Louis Armstrong. Carmichael and Armstrong knew one another and Armstrong performed some of his song’s, e.g. “Rockin’ Chair.Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Death of Star HD 62166 & It’s Nebula

Although you are distant

………….. distant                  distant                      distant

death-of-2440

I can see by your past aura
against a black further distance,
the most distant distance

I can see by your billowing
halo of expanding gasses
fluffed like God’s pillow
that you are ruled by laws
that also rule terrestrial things

I see the colors of your vast radiant shedding
and realize the force behind that shedding
is a predicate for everything that’s blown apart,
comes apart, falls apart, dissipates, uncomplicates,
is broken down, pulled down, unspun—

it’s hard to wrap a mind around
the truth that this is where all things,
every brilliance built and done,
fought and won, are heading,
except in tiny human scope
which mounts a persistent
counterforce of hope

Jim Culleny
11/13/16

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Sunday, October 6, 2024

Taste, Representation, and the Art of Cuisine

by Dwight Furrow

In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and significance of an aesthetic object such as a painting or musical work. Part of that appreciation is the apprehension of the work’s form or structure—it is often the form of the object that we find beautiful or otherwise compelling. Although we get pleasure from consuming good food and drink, if smell and taste give us no structured representation of reality there is no form to apprehend or meaning to analyze, so the argument goes. The enjoyment of cuisine then would be akin to that of basking in the sun. It is pleasant to be sure but there is nothing to apprehend or analyze beyond an immediate sensation.

Those who are skeptical of food and drink as serious aesthetic objects base their arguments on the claim that taste and smell are inferior to vision and audition in providing us with representations of reality. Those who defend the aesthetic potential of food and drink attempt to show that food and drink do provide us with structured representations of the world.

A representation is a mental state, such as a belief, that stands for, refers to, or depicts something else, such as an object in the world. In perceptual experience, a representation specifies the way the world appears to a subject having the experience. Vision is the perceptual modality that arguably gives us the richest representation of reality. To see an apple is to locate it in space individuated from but in relation to other objects in our visual field. And that ability to locate objects is facilitated by assigning properties such as roundness and redness to the apple which appear, not as free-floating properties, but as properties bound to the object. The representation is veridical when the world is in fact as it appears in the representation.

Thus, vision does not present us with a heterogeneous heap of properties; rather properties are part of structured wholes with objects appearing as solid, individuated entities. Vision then is enormously helpful to us as we navigate through the world because it represents the spatial relations between things as well as their boundaries.

Many philosophers have argued that tastes and aromas lack essential elements of a representation. Read more »

Friday, October 4, 2024

Identities, Partly Relational Concepts

by David J. Lobina

An apparently non-negotiable assumption of modern identity politics, though this was not always the case (see this regarding a certain non-philosopher), is that the individuation of personal characteristics is an intrinsic affair – that is, it is down to an individual to determine and state what they are, this often following from lived experience, and thereby constituting an exclusively internal matter. In a loose sense, this is unexceptional; it is common for one to simply assume the truth of what others say about themselves. After all, one doesn’t expect people to lie about where they are from, their background or what they believe in.

Granted that, the individuation of some personal characteristics does not appear to be entirely and absolutely an intrinsic matter: some identities seemingly depend upon the implicit (and sometimes explicit!) recognition of peers – an extrinsic and relational affair. In such cases, individuation would be partly determined by one’s environment, and thus not too dissimilar to what philosophers call “extensional conditions” (see here for an application to the debate around mental content). This specific point is not usually spelled out in discussions of personal identities, but it does turn up here and there. Something along these lines is implicitly assumed, uncontroversially so, I believe, to the individuation of national identities, the case I shall focus on here – and the argument is likely to generalise. Read more »

Thursday, October 3, 2024

The Banality of Armageddon

by Laurence Peterson

Typhon missile launcher

I am writing this on Sunday afternoon, the 29th of September, 2024.  The Guardian (UK version) informs me that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) have confirmed that dozens of Israeli aircraft are attacking what they say to be “military targets belonging to the Houthi terrorist regime” in Yemen, and may be preparing for a ground invasion of Lebanon. This is after a week of bombing in Lebanon that has resulted in at least 650 deaths (500 in one day, about a third of the number slaughtered on October the 7th of last year) and the assassination of the leader of  Hezbollah, a major political party in Lebanon that has deep roots in the wider Lebanese society. Israel also assassinated a number of other key members of Hezbollah, as well as a senior Iranian official in Lebanon. And this after the remote detonation of pagers and other hand-held devices attached to bombs by Israel that killed maybe a score of people, but wounded thousands, and set much of the country into panic at the thought that any nearby electronic device might blow up and kill or seriously maim simple bystanders. And all this after months of unprecedented carnage and destruction in Gaza and the West Bank.

Not long ago, the incidence of one of these events, or maybe two concurrently, would be enough for me to become very concerned about the possibility of the outbreak of wider war that might just cascade into some kind of confrontation between powers possessing nuclear weapons. Now, though I firmly believe the international situation is as grave as any I have lived through in my 63 years on planet Earth, the constant succession and routinization of these kinds of events these days is taking a kind of toll on me: I am coming, emotionally speaking, to expect that these kinds of happenings that seem to demand immediate and thorough resolution to any sane person will simply pile up, like the bodies of the victims of the tragedies associated with those events. Maybe this is a kind of defense mechanism, like a sort of geopolitical learned-helplessness. Whatever it is, it is disconcerting, disorienting and highly disagreeable. Read more »

The KPI Μachine

by Eleni Petrakou

Decorative artwork. Various types that look related to academia, industry, science and the church with ominous and cartoonish appearances. Art deco and dystopian undertones.
From the webcomic Dresden Codak

Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence.

*

The first-year student is asking me what to do about the courses by those lecturers who don’t know how to answer her questions.

Five minutes later she’s asking the same thing again.

In the meantime she explained that she’s aware many students lack the background necessary for higher education and of the reasons why. And that yes, she knows she can find lectures from elsewhere online.

*

The senior lecturer is showing me photos of past exam answer sheets. It is clear that some science students don’t know lower high school math.

All of them passed the exams thanks to their marks for the other half of the questions, graded by his co-teaching colleague.

*

Minor detail in Guardian article a few months ago. A seasoned professor says that the quality of studies is going down and for the first time ever she had to fail more than 10% of students.

*

The friend who quit academia is listening to me being concerned about grade inflation. She comforts me by adding that at one university, on her first day at work, she was made to sign an agreement that she wouldn’t ever fail more than 15% of students. Read more »

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

Bridging Innovation and Empathy: Bill Gates’s “What’s Next?”

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Bill Gates has long been one of the world’s leading optimists, and his new documentary, “What’s Next,” serves as a testament to his hopeful vision of the future. But what makes Gates’s optimism particularly compelling is that it is grounded not in dewy-eyed hopes and prayers but in logic, data, and an unshakable belief in the power of science and technology. Over the years, Gates and his wife Melinda, through their foundation, have invested in a wide array of innovative technologies aimed at addressing some of the most pressing issues faced by humanity. Their work has had an especially transformative impact on underserved populations in regions like Africa, tackling fundamental challenges in healthcare, energy, and beyond. In this new, five-part Netflix series, Gates showcases his trademark pragmatism and curiosity as he engages with some of the most complex and important challenges of our time: artificial intelligence (AI), misinformation, inequality, climate change, and healthcare. His approach stands out especially for his willingness to have a dialogue with those with whom he might strongly disagree.

Episode 1: “What Can AI do for us?”

In the first episode, Gates delves into the world of artificial intelligence, a topic of both fascination and fear. He speaks with leading researchers at companies like OpenAI, exploring the transformative potential of AI, and even brings in science fiction luminaries like James Cameron to provide a broader cultural context. As Cameron wryly notes, the pace of AI development has made much of science fiction obsolete, an observation that underscores just how quickly this technology is evolving.

But the episode also raises important concerns about the ethical implications of AI. As Gates and the experts explore, AI has the potential to drastically reshape society—not just technologically but emotionally. For instance, the growing reliance on AI for decision-making and even companionship could have unforeseen consequences on human relationships and autonomy. The potential loss of huge slices of jobs to AI is another well-known concern. Ultimately, a recurring theme throughout the episode is the importance of ensuring that AI development keeps a “human-in-the-loop,” emphasizing the need for ethical guardrails as we push the boundaries of what this technology can achieve. Read more »

Learning English

by Azadeh Amirsadri

I lived in Philadelphia in 1977 and would go to the Gallery mall on Market Street, a walking distance from our river front apartment. One day, around lunch, I decided to get Chinese food at the food court and looking for a place to sit, I asked two older ladies if I could sit at their table, since the place was packed. As I was picking through the food, separating the celery and water chestnuts, one of the old ladies said It looks like you are digging for gold.” I not only didnt understand what she meant,I wasnt even sure she was talking to me. She pointed to her rings and then to my ring and enunciated looking for gold” with a smile. I had a game I played when I wasnt in the mood to speak English, so I said I didnt understand, which was true in this case. She pointed to my ring and said You are looking for gold” and again I smiled politely and went on separating the food and trying not to make eye contact and not to engage. She told her friend I wonder where she is from” and later I bet she is rich because she is wearing a lot of jewelry” and they went on talking about me and I went on pretending I didnt understand what they were saying.

Another time, I was at the window seat of a domestic flight and didnt want to speak to anyone. The couple next to me was anxious and they were catastrophizing about their luggage not arriving at their destination, about the drinks and snacks not being enough and were trying to reel me into their conversation. I looked at them, shook my head and smiled, and pretended I didnt understand them. I was trying to sleep anyway, but when the flight attendants came with the drinks cart, the couple got agitated and woke me up saying Coke? Coke? Then they talked about how I will miss getting a drink, and returned to all the bad things that were about to happen.

Learning English was rather easy for me; perhaps because my mother had told me from an early age that I was good with languages. Also, speaking two other languages made it easier to learn a new language. I attended classes in Falls Church, VA in a trailer behind an elementary school with other adults who were new to the country. Our group was made up of a lot of Vietnamese people who had arrived as boat people, Central Americans running from civil wars, and of course Iranians. Our teacher was Mrs. B and I was amazed at how cool it was to just have a letter for a last name. Of course, I had no idea that ESL teachers do this to simplify their longer names for their students who are already struggling with learning a new language. The Iranians in class were mostly kind to each other, respecting our social norms, yet also very competitive. Since we couldnt communicate with the other groups, we kept our dramas within our own. Read more »

Tuesday, October 1, 2024

A dated conspiracy theory rises again

by Jeroen van Baar

Marie Antoinette

In the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss key events from the past at great length and in sumptuous depth. I was listening to their fourth episode on the French Revolution when a detail caught my ear. Part of the reason the Revolution could occur, Tom and Dominic argued, is that a nasty opinion publique had taken hold in late-eighteenth-century Paris. Pamphlets filled with inflammatory rumors were sold by the tens of thousands and read aloud on street corners. Some of them spread fables about the alleged sexual escapades of the young queen Marie Antoinette, which eroded the authority of the monarchy and set the stage for its bloody demise.

It is all too reminiscent of public opinion today. In the recent Trump-Harris presidential debate, for instance, Trump alleged that Democrats were condoning post-birth abortions. “Her Vice-Presidential pick […] says execution after birth is OK,” Trump said. And later: The “former governor of Virginia said we put the baby aside and then we determine what we want to do with the baby.”

To those uninitiated in Republican propaganda, the comment must have sounded like yet another ridiculous falsehood made up on the fly by the former president. But as a political neuroscientist, I recognized it from five years ago. In 2019, I was a researcher at Brown University studying how the brains of political partisans color their perceptions (of an inauguration crowd, perhaps). 43 committed Democrats and Republicans watched political videos in our brain scanner. One of the videos we used was a PBS news segment on abortion, in which then-Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a pediatrician and a Democrat, described what happens in the tragic scenario when a fetus is not viable outside the womb: resuscitation is attempted if the parents so desire. Despite numerous clarifications from Northam, this was gleefully interpreted by Republicans to mean that Democrats condone “legal infanticide”. The fact that Trump is still touting this conspiracy theory five years later speaks to its effectiveness at riling his base.

In our study, we discovered that neural processing of the PBS video was more similar between two people who had the same political orientation than across the aisle. Why? Read more »

The Attack on Language

by Nils Peterson

Galway Kinnell said all good writing has a certain quality in common, “a tenderness toward existence.” I agree and feel that one of the great maladies of our age is the communal loss of this feeling. Wendell Berry says “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”

Here’s the first part of a poem of mine:

Rain steady on the roof. Far shore lost. Sea quiet, 
gray, introspective – like me, I think, entering 
from stage left. This is what we’ve made language for,
to enter the world’s drama as player, not just reflex 
towards food or away from the saber-tooth.

So now to the enemy, Word Loss.

Robert Bly in his great anthology News of the Universe recounts and comments on the dreams of Descartes as told by Karl Stern in Flight from Women:

In his third dream some terrifying things happened. A book disappeared from his hand. A book appeared at the end of the table, vanished, and appeared at the other end. And the dictionary, when he checked it, had fewer words in it than it had a few minutes before. I suspect that we are losing some of the words that inhabit the left side; our vocabulary is getting smaller. The disappearing words are probably words such as “mole,” “ocean,” “praise,” “whale,” “steeping,” “bat-ear,” “wooden tub,” “moist cave,” “seawind.”

I thought of this passage when I read this account of the new Oxford Junior Dictionary in a remarkable essay by Robert Macfarlane introducing his new book, Landmarks:

The same summer I was on Lewis [an island in the Hebrides], a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was published. A sharp-eyed reader noticed that there had been a culling of words concerning nature. Under pressure, Oxford University Press revealed a list of the entries it no longer felt to be relevant to a modern-day childhood. The deletions included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, and willow. The words taking their places in the new edition included attachment, block-graph, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail. As I had been entranced by the language preserved in the prose‑poem of the “Peat Glossary”, so I was dismayed by the language that had fallen (been pushed) from the dictionary. For blackberry, read Blackberry.

Macfarlane is a British naturalist whose book The Wild Places is a description of his hours and days spent in what is left of the wild. Sometimes the wild is closer than you think. Sometimes remote. It is a remarkable book that I can’t recommend too strongly. His book Landmarks is even more remarkable. It is about the loss of the language of the land that our ancestors who worked closely in it and with it had to describe it. Read more »