Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann in American Sociological Review:

[T]he atheist emerges as a culturally powerful “other” in part because the category is multivalent (Turner 1974), loaded with multiple meanings. For all these respondents, atheists represent a general lack of morality, but for some, this lack was associated with criminality and its dangers to safety and public order, while for others the absence of morality was that of people whose resources or positions place them above the common standards of mainstream American life. To put it somewhat differently, atheists can be symbolically placed at either end of the American status hierarchy. What holds these seemingly contradictory views together is that the problem of the atheist was perceived to be a problem of self-interest, an excessive individualism that undermines trust and the public good. In this, our respondents draw the same link between religion and the taming of self-interest that Tocqueville wrote about over a century ago (Tocqueville [1992] 2000, see especially volume 2, parts I and II). It is important to note that our respondents did not refer to particular atheists whom they had encountered. Rather they used the atheist as a symbolic figure to represent their fears about those trends in American life—increasing criminality, rampant self-interest, an unaccountable elite—that they believe undermine trust and a common sense of purpose.

In recent public discourse, atheists take on a similar symbolic role. We found that the figure of the atheist is invoked rhetorically to discuss the links—or tensions—among religion, morality, civic responsibility, and patriotism. In particular, the association of the atheist with a kind of unaccountable elitism has surfaced in recent public debates. The civically engaged atheists’ awareness of the negative stereotypes of atheists has led to the coining of a new term, “Brights,” around which to identify and organize and thus, according to one prominent Bright, to challenge the association between atheism, immorality, and lack of civic commitment.

Natalie Angier in the NYT:

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.

When Dave Goldberg, a physicist at Drexel University who has written about her work, recently took a little “Noether poll” of several dozen colleagues, students and online followers, he was taken aback by the results. “Surprisingly few could say exactly who she was or why she was important,” he said. “A few others knew her name but couldn’t recall what she’d done, and the majority had never heard of her.”

Noether (pronounced NER-ter) was born in Erlangen, Germany, 130 years ago this month. So it’s a fine time to counter the chronic neglect and celebrate the life and work of a brilliant theorist whose unshakable number love and irrationally robust sense of humor helped her overcome severe handicaps — first, being female in Germany at a time when most German universities didn’t accept female students or hire female professors, and then being a Jewish pacifist in the midst of the Nazis’ rise to power.

From The Guardian:

The award-winning poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who was one of America's most powerful writers, has died aged 82. Her daughter-in-law Diana Horowitz said Rich died at home in Santa Cruz, California, following complications from the rheumatoid arthritis from which she had suffered for many years. Described as “one of America's foremost public intellectuals” by the Poetry Foundation, and as “a poet of towering reputation and towering rage [who] brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century” by the New York Times, Rich's career spanned seven decades, numerous prizes and more than 20 collections of poetry as well as acclaimed essays, articles and lectures.

When she was just 21, WH Auden chose her as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Auden went on to write a preface for her first collection, A Change of World. “The typical danger for poets in our age is, perhaps, the desire to be 'original',” he wrote. “Miss Rich, who is, I understand, 21 years old, displays a modesty not so common with that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and a love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, not be shoddily made.” By the 60s and early 70s, however, with collections such as Diving into the Wreck and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Rich was writing radical free verse full of her feminist ideals and leftwing convictions, exploring sexuality and identity, motherhood and politics. Her transformation, said the critic Ruth Whitman in 2002, has been “astonishing to watch … In one woman the history of women in the 20th century, from careful traditional obedience to cosmic awareness, defying the mode of our time.”

More here.

Janet Maslin in The New York Times:

A squabble is a noisy quarrel over a trivial matter. A polemic is an aggressive attack on the opinions and principles of others. A screaming match is a contest in which contradictory points are stubbornly reiterated, with no regard for whatever else has been said. A political talk show is a gladiatorial contest in which squabbles, polemics and screaming matches are exploited for their entertainment value. A book by the host of a political talk show is often an ancillary product or marketing tool. But “Drift,” by Rachel Maddow, whose show is on MSNBC, is much more. It is an argument — a sustained, lucid case in which points are made logically and backed by evidence and reason. What’s more, it follows one main idea through nearly a half-century. The subtitle, “The Unmooring of American Military Power,” explains exactly what “Drift” is about. Ms. Maddow’s point is that the way we go to war has changed: that there has been an expansion of presidential power, a corresponding collapse of Congressional backbone and a diminution of public attention. She does not see this in conspiratorial terms, but she has an explanation for the step-by-step way it evolved. She thinks the transformation began with a question asked by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 as he prepared to more than double the ground forces in Vietnam: “You don’t think I oughta have a joint session, do you?” Did he need authorization from Congress, he asked the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, to make a troop deployment like that?

That very question indicates that Johnson understood the importance of Congressional authority. But it is Ms. Maddow’s contention that subsequent presidents have even more deliberately sought to avoid dragging Congress into the conversation, because Congressional debates and military allocations upset the public. So does the calling up of troops. As the waging of war has grown increasingly secretive and privatized, presidents have built on precedent. They have seen less and less advantage in letting Congress weigh in on these decisions. “Drift” says this slide was not inevitable. “And it wasn’t inexorable either,” Ms. Maddow writes. “You can trace it to specific decisions, made for specific, logical reasons.”

More here.

Liza Gross in PLoS Blogs:

Gross: What are some of the seminal experiments that revealed similarities in cognitive or behavioral traits between apes and humans, suggesting we’re not in fact unique, as many like to think?

De Waal: There are many. For example, tool use used to be considered uniquely human. And then when it was found in captivity by Köhler, this is in the 1920s, people would say, “Well, but at least in the wild they never do it.” And then it was found in the wild, and then they would say, “Well, at least they don’t make tools.” And then it was found that they actually also make tools.

So tool use was one of those dividing lines. Mirror self-recognition is a key experiment that was first conducted on the apes. The language experiments, even though we now doubt what the apes do is actually what we would call “language,” they certainly put a dent in that whole claim that symbolic communication is uniquely human.

My own studies on, let’s call it “politics,” and reconciliation behavior and pro-social behavior have put a dent in things. And so I think over the years every postulate of difference between humans and apes has been at least questioned, if not knocked over. As a result, we are now in a situation that most of the differences are considered gradual rather than qualitative.

And the same is true, let’s say, between a chimp and a monkey. There are many differences between chimps and monkeys in cognitive capacities, but we consider them mostly gradual differences.

The more we look at it, even if you take the difference between, let’s say, a human and a snake or a fish, yes, between those species the differences are very radical and huge, but even these species rely on some of the learning processes and reactions that we also know of in humans.

More here.

“Here where there was law there is now
extrajudicial rendition and other conveniences.”

What Kind of Times Are These

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
.

by Adrienne Rich
from The Fact of a Doorframe
– Selected Poems 1950-2001
publisher W.W. Norton

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson in Project Syndicate:

There is a simple way to deal with a debt overhang: reduce payments by restructuring the debt. Many firms are able to renegotiate financing terms with their creditors – typically extending the maturity of their liabilities, which enables them to borrow more to finance new, better projects. If such negotiation cannot be achieved voluntarily, US firms can use Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code, under which a court supervises and approves the reorganization of liabilities. So you would think the same would be true for US households and embattled European governments. But the restructuring of debt has been too little and has come too late. Why?

In both cases, the main argument for not removing the debt overhang came from bankers, who claimed that it would create havoc in financial markets for two reasons. First, banks were the primary creditors, and the large losses that they would face in any restructuring was bound to trigger a domino effect, with waves of pessimism driving up interest rates and ruining other borrowers’ prospects. Second, banks would also suffer because they had sold insurance against default – in the form of credit-default swaps. When these swaps were activated, the banks would incur potentially further crippling losses.

In the case of Greece, international bankers argued long and hard that debt restructuring would generate contagion far and wide within the eurozone – and perhaps more broadly. And yet, in the end, Greece had little choice but to restructure its debt, cutting the value of private claims by about 75% relative to their face value (although even this is probably not enough to make the country’s debt burden sustainable). This was deemed a “credit event,” so credit-default swaps were exercised: anyone who insured against default had to pay out.

Did all hell break loose? No. Banks have not failed, and there is no sign of tumbling dominoes. But that is not because banks prepared themselves by raising more capital. On the contrary, compared to their likely future losses, European banks have raised relatively little capital recently – and much of this has been creative accounting, rather than truly loss-absorbing shareholder equity.

Perhaps the risk that a Greek debt restructuring would cause a financial meltdown was always minimal, and quiescent markets were to be expected. But, in that case, why all the fuss?

The answer should be clear by now: interest-group politics and policy elites’ worldview.

John Gray in Five Books:

Let’s talk about Freud then. Tell us what he says about human nature and society in Civilisation and Its Discontents.

Freud is a very relevant figure to this discussion. The limits of progress are in the flaws and divisions of human nature, which are integral to being human. The way Freud represents this in a number of his works, including Civilisation and Its Discontents, is to say that there are a variety of instincts – a very unpopular term now which may not be scientifically valid – from benevolence and love on the one hand to violence and aggression on the other, which are equally part of the human animal.

Civilisation, as Freud understands it, begins with the restraint of violence – although of course it doesn’t end there. A civilised state is one which controls violence. Freud’s key point is that because humans are self-divided in the way I’ve described, civilisation always carries with it a degree of repression of instinctual satisfaction, which in turn means that the civilisational condition will always be one of discontent. In other words, it’s not possible to imagine – and dangerous to experiment with – any conception of a civilisation emptied of its discontent, in which all desires are satisfied and society doesn’t exact a price for the repression of violent impulses.

Freud thought that civilisation is inestimably valuable – unlike some other writers in central Europe, he was never tempted by barbarism. But he also recognised that civilisation is inherently flawed, not because of political repression and corruption or economic inequality, but because of the nature of the human animal. That is why civilisation can never be rid of its faults, can never be entirely benign. I think that is true. In the language of religion, it might be called original sin. In other religions such as Buddhism, it is called original ignorance. However one wants to put it, it is a truth that humans are ineradicably flawed, and that is a commonplace in pretty much any religious tradition. It’s only recently, in the last 150 years, that the idea which Freud presented in a secular form is considered to be shocking.

The NYT's Adrienne Rich obituary, by Margalit Fox:

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich’s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for “Diving Into the Wreck.” That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women’s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. …
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. “Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.”

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Justin Clarke-Doane in Ethics (via the NYT):

It is commonly suggested that evolutionary considerations generate an epistemological challenge for moral realism. At first approximation, the challenge for the moral realist is to explain our having many true moral beliefs, given that those beliefs are the products of evolutionary forces that would be indifferent to the moral truth. An important question surrounding this challenge is the extent to which it generalizes. In particular, it is of interest whether the Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism is equally a challenge for mathematical realism. It is widely thought not to be. For example, Richard Joyce, one of the most prominent advocates of the Evolutionary Challenge, goes so far as to write, “the dialectic within which I am working here assumes that if an argument that moral beliefs are unjustified or false would by the same logic show that believing that 1 + 1 = 2 is unjustified or false, this would count as a reductio ad absurdum.”1 He assures the reader, “There is … evidence that the distinct genealogy of [mathematical] beliefs can be pushed right back into evolutionary history. Would the fact that we have such a genealogical explanation of … ‘1 + 1 = 2’ serve to demonstrate that we are unjustified in holding it? Surely not, for we have no grasp of how this belief might have enhanced reproductive fitness independent of assuming its truth.”2 Similarly, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong writes, “The evolutionary explanations [of our having the moral beliefs that we have] work even if there are no moral facts at all. The same point could not be made about mathematical beliefs. People evolved to believe that 2 + 3 = 5, because they would not have survived if they had believed that 2 + 3 = 4, but the reason why they would not have survived then is that it is true that 2 + 3 = 5.”3 Finally, Roger Crisp writes, “In the case of mathematics, what is central is the contrast between practices or beliefs which develop because that is the way things are, and those that do not. The calculating rules developed as they did because [they] reflect mathematical truth. The functions of … morality, however, are to be understood in terms of well-being, and there seems no reason to think that had human nature involved, say, different motivations then different practices would not have emerged.”4

In this article, I argue that such sentiments are mistaken. I argue that the Evolutionary Challenge for moral realism is equally a challenge for mathematical realism.

Alan Boyle in MSNBC's Cosmic Log:

Gauchat cross-referenced attitudes toward the scientific community with various demographic categories, and found that two categories showed a significant erosion of trust in science: conservatives and frequent churchgoers. People who identified themselves as conservatives voiced more confidence in science than moderates or liberals in 1974, but by 2010, that level had fallen by more than 25 percent.

This graph shows the unadjusted mean values for public trust in science, classified by self-reported political ideology between 1974 and 2010. The figures are derived from the General Social Survey.

Why the drop? Gauchat suggested that the character of the conservative movement has changed over the past three and a half decades — and so has the character of the scientific establishment.

“Over the last several decades, there's been an effort among those who define themselves as conservatives to clearly identify what it means to be a conservative,” he said. “For whatever reason, this appears to involve opposing science and universities, and what is perceived as the 'liberal culture.' So, self-identified conservatives seem to lump these groups together and rally around the notion that what makes 'us' conservatives is that we don't agree with 'them.'”

Meanwhile, the perception of science's role in society has shifted as well.

“In the past, the scientific community was viewed as concerned primarily with macro structural matters such as winning the space race,” Gauchat said. “Today, conservatives perceive the scientific community as more focused on regulatory matters such as stopping industry from producing too much carbon dioxide.”

In Cultural Anthropology:

McGrail: I’d like to start by asking if you could give us an overview of the term “subaltern studies” and explain how it has evolved in the past few decades.

Chatterjee: When the Subaltern Studies Collective began, our initial move was a reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, which had just been published in English. We were compelled by the fact that Gramsci used the term “subaltern” instead of “proletariat.” Now, he used this term because he was writing in prison under condition of extreme censorship; therefore, he didn’t want to use standard Marxist term and coined the term “subaltern.” But as a result, Gramsci was fundamentally altering the core definition of classes in the orthodox version of Marxism at the time. By simply renaming the proletarian class to the subaltern, he was suggesting that classical Marxist division of European industrial society into classes was not entirely adequate. The classical understanding of class didn’t quite work in a country like Italy, where in the North there was a large industrial structure, while most parts of the South were agrarian and most exploited people were peasants. Gramsci was suggesting that the classical understanding of the “proletariat” didn’t fit the political situation in Italy. So in using a term like subaltern, he was trying to incorporate this very large, pre-industrial formation in to the understanding of political strategies for the Left or the Communist movement.

We found this extremely relevant in trying to understand the situation in countries like India, for instance, which in the early 80s was more-or-less in exactly the same situation: there was an important and developing industrial section with industrial working classes, but a very large part of the country essentially consisted of agrarian formations. Therefore most Indians were in fact still peasants. So it was in trying to reorient or reformulate the problem of what it is to write the history of the “people” in a country like India that we found the idea of using “subaltern classes”—rather than the orthodox formulation of classes in Marxism—much more useful and, in a sense, full of new possibilities. That’s how it began; we actually began by using the term “subaltern classes.”

Initially in our thinking, subalternity still referred to a certain class structure that was perhaps not entirely frozen or well-defined—i.e., it was often indeterminant, fuzzy and so on—but the term still referred to a certain structure of class relations. It’s work that happened later on—particularly with Gayatri Spivak’s interventions—that allowed for a different inflection to be given to the term subaltern.

From The Telegraph:

From Nature:

Two compendiums of data unite genetic profiling with drug testing to create the most complete picture yet of how mutations can shape a cancer’s response to therapy. The results, published today in Nature^{1, 2}, suggest that the effectiveness of most anticancer agents depends on the genetic make-up of the cancer against which they are used. One study found a link between drug sensitivity and at least one mutation in a cancer-related gene for 90% of the compounds tested.

Lab-grown cancer cells are a mainstay of research into the disease. The two projects catalogue the genetic features of hundreds of such cell lines, including mutations in cancer-associated genes and patterns of gene activation. They then match these features with how the cells respond to approved and potential drugs. “This is a very powerful finding,” says Tom Hudson, president of the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research in Toronto, Canada, who was not affiliated with the work. “It could provide valuable information for designing clinical trials, and lead to more focused and less expensive approaches to drug development.”

More here.

Line

She is standing, here, in a grocery store,
Under the fluorescent light suspended,
Above her head, and from the ceiling,
Standing in front of the refrigerated meat,
That is laid out in front of her, butchered,
A thigh, a breast, a leg,
Or chopped and ground,
Pieces of meat wrapped tightly in plastic that is
Stretching over them, like skin, and she forgets,
Forgets what she is looking for, because she is,
Remembering what he said on the telephone,
His voice in Afghanistan and, here, in her ear,
About what happened, there, in Kandahar, or
How an American soldier, how he lost his mind,
Went and killed sixteen Afghans, nine children,
A massacre, her husband whispers over it, this
Telephone line, and she is here, now, in America,
Moving down aisles of a grocery store, moving
Through the months, because she is still waiting,
Waiting for him to come home again, waiting
In a checkout line, and thinking about lines,
Lines she draws through the days on a calendar,
Bodies shot dead, lined up on the side of a road,
Or the lines of war,
Lines soldiers cross and lines they don’t,
And the imaginary lines that divide countries,
Our country from theirs,
Or how different he will be,
Her husband,
When he crosses over again, and comes home.

by Amalie Flynn

To help keep the death of the poet from her poems…

Jeff Hudson in Full Stop:

Here is something I know: I feel better when I read — not just good, but better. Anxieties are assuaged, burdens lightened, relationships enriched. I feel part of something hopeful, a connection to the writer, the characters, other readers. I feel smart, if it is okay to say that. I am moved to act after reading — to write, to talk. I have new questions and fresh answers. And I am hardly alone. Anne Lamott knows that “when writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with the absurdity of life instead of being squashed by it over and over again.” After sharing stories, writer Barry Lopez feels exhilarated: “The mundane tasks which awaited me, I anticipated now with pleasure. The stories had renewed in me a sense of the purpose of my life.”

Here is something else I know: the power of literature to “renew a sense of purpose in our lives” gets killed in literature classrooms — unintentionally, no doubt, but killed nonetheless.

This isn’t an indictment. Writer Richard Ford found himself teaching literature as a graduate assistant in 1969 and realized, “What seemed worthwhile to teach was what I felt about literature . . . [literature] had mystery, denseness, authority, connectedness, closure, resolution, perception, variety, magnitude — value in other words . . . Literature appealed to me. But I had no idea how to teach its appealing qualities, how to find and impart the origins of what I felt.” This is a difficult question.

We here at 3QD have been long-time fans of signandsight. Their presence on the web will be missed. Anja Seeliger and Thierry Chervel:

After seven years we are shutting down signandsight.com. The site will remain online, but for now no new texts will be posted.

We still believe in the idea behind signandsight.com. We are convinced that Europe needs a public sphere, and we think that this public sphere is best achieved by combining the possibilities of the internet and traditional media. As before, we still love our motto “Let's Talk European”. Yes, English is now the lingua franca of contemporary Europe. However, when English is used to bring articles written in another language to an international readership, then it serves as a bridge to these others languages and helps create waves. Interestingly, the most lively reactions to signandsight.com came from the US, where there is an intellectual audience that wishes to escape its domestic borders.

Some of the most wonderful experiences with signandsight.com were when Harper's reprinted an interview with Thomas Bernhard, because it had been first translated into English by signandsight.com, when Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post and Paul Berman of the New Republic discussed texts or debates that had originated from signandsight.com and which had found echoes in Swedish, Hungarian, Spanish, Polish, and French newspapers. Signandsight.com never had a wide popular readership, but it was a catalyst for European public debate.

Also in the LRB, John Lanchester:

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

I, on the other hand, am an empiricist. That’s not so much because I think Marx was wrong about the distorting effect of underlying ideological pressures; it’s because I don’t think it’s possible to have a vantage point free of those pressures, so you have a duty to do the best with what you can see, and especially not to shirk from looking at data which are uncomfortable and/or contradictory. But this is a profound difference between Marx and my way of talking about Marx, which he would have regarded as being philosophically and politically entirely invalid.

Via Zite, there are two pieces on fact-checking this week. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in The New Inquiry:

Brides magazine has a fact-checker. She does things like verify the cost of honeymoons and makes sure that Vera Wang did, in fact, design that dress, and compares the captions on winter flower bouquet slideshows with pictures in botany reference books. It would be terrible to mistake a eucalyptus pod for a mere pussy willow.

Many American magazines, from trashy celebrity weeklies to highbrow general-interest journals, have fact-checkers of some sort. I worked as one in 2008, when, with three other Harper’s interns, I fact-checked the magazine’s Index from beginning to end. Being the primary speaker of foreign languages in the intern cubicle, I ended up doing a lot of the international checking for the magazine. Percentage of Russians who say one goal of U.S. foreign policy is “the complete destruction of Russia”: 43. Number of Iraqi stray dogs that Operation Baghdad Pups has helped emigrate to the United States since 2003: 66.

I quickly learned that fact-checking is a predominantly American phenomenon. The French don’t do much of it, most Russian papers certainly don’t either, and even the Swiss — possibly the most exacting and precise people on the planet — do not make use of fact-checkers in quite the same way as Americans do. Yet their presses keep rolling, and their readers keep reading, and their brides still buy roses, if by another name. People even trust the press in Switzerland much more than they do in the U.S.: 46 percent of Swiss people said they had confidence in their newspapers and magazines in 2010. Among Americans, it was only 25 percent.

Christian Lorentzen also has a piece in the LRB.