A Million Little Gods

It’s Thanksgiving. My heart is just a little more conspicuously on my sleeve at this time of the year, and childhood is somehow always on my mind. In that vain, I have something old and something new:

First, a reflection from Book 1, Episode 3 on letting your kids be themselves—whatever a self even is.

Second, I’m joined by my colleague Natalie Roxburgh to discuss Julie Beck’s recent article in the Atlantic, “Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Steve Metcalf seems to shed urbanity and passion like I shed dandruff. His off-the-cuff manner of speech is as trenchant as his writing, and he is able to say wise things about any subject.

Here he discusses with me the topic that launched an episode of this podcast and my three-part essay “Best Behavior” (part three coming soon): the weird fact that we all changed our entire outlook on Woody Allen’s film Manhattan to fit our changing moral priorities—how we cannot just bracket out the lechery on display and heap praise on an indisputably brilliant and entertaining movie, even though that’s exactly what we did for decades! Steve and I chew over this terribly troubled—and terribly interesting—question before digging deeper into where our moral judgements hail from.

In order to entice more people to become subscribers, here is our full interview (complimenting my three-part essay “The Razor Blade in the Apple,” which I released last month and you can read here) with two scholars who have much to say about the formation of the scientific consensus on race:

Nathaniel Comfort, historian of genetics and the relationship between modern genomics and 19th-century eugenics

Ayah Nuriddin, historian of the lived experience of black Americans over the past 100 years and how they’ve navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism

Part II of the essay “Best Behavior” will appear in inboxes next Thursday! Meanwhile, enjoy the interview.

To coincide with the three-part essay “The Razor Blade in the Apple” (Part 3 hits inboxes Thursday), here is an excerpt of our interview with two scholars who have much to say about the formation of the scientific consensus on race:

Nathaniel Comfort, historian of genetics and the relationship between modern genomics and 19th-century eugenics

Ayah Nuriddin, historian of the lived experience of black Americans over the past 100 years and how they’ve navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism

If you‘d like to hear the entire interview, become a paid subscriber to get access to that and much more material!

Continuing the theme from Episode 9, we closely examine:

1. how machine learning works,
2. how our subconsciouses—both individual and collective—learn from the past, making ad hoc categories based on contingencies,
3. how those categories are the origin of basically all of the things that populate the world,
4. how technologies that use augmented versions of our own rational capacities are quickly altering baseball, and rendering it nearly unrecognizable in the process!

Our guests are:

• Ben Lindbergh, staff writer at The Ringer, co-host of both Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast and the Ringer MLB Podcast
• Prof. Dr. Heiko Becher, director of the Institute of Medical Biometry and Epidemiology, Medical Faculty, University of Hamburg
• Adam Darowski, creator of the Hall of Stats, a website dedicated to repopulating the Hall of Fame using a statistical formula

Here is a link to Ben Shaver's intuitive medium.com article on MCMC methods which we reference in the episode.

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