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When you think about it, most of what we know comes at a remove — many removes often. Most of what we know in science comes not from going through the experiments ourselves and pondering the results, but from the successive compressions, reevaluations, analyses and reductions of scientists and textbooks....
Lately I’ve been reading more intellectual histories. For those unaware of the genre, it’s a type of (usually scholarly) book that hunts down the origin of the concept we use, and how they were thought about and framed across time. Reading a few of these, a curious pattern emerged: there...
> I shall ask, then, why is it really worth while to make a serious study of mathematics? What is the proper justification of a mathematician’s life? And my answers will be, for the most part, such as are expected from a mathematician: I think that it is worth while,...
A few weeks ago, I read “The Egg of a Sea-bird” on Casey Dué’s substack, and got really interested in the work of Milman Parry and his assistant and successor Albert Lord. We’ll dig into the details, but broadly, Parry realized that the Homeric epics (both The Illiad and The...
As I ease out into a short sabbatical, I find myself turning back to dig the seeds of my repeated cycle of exhaustion and burnout in the last few years. Many factors were at play, some more personal that I’m comfortable discussing here. But I have unearthed at least one...
As promised in the previous instalment on meter, let’s explore rhyming from a methodological perspective. The first difference between meter and rhyme lies in their opposite obviousness: the first one is subtle, requiring a learned and attuned ear; the second is so sonorous and clear that children hear it as...
I have an embarrassing secret: I genuinely believe that Pierre Bourdieu, the famous french sociologist, had deep insights worth digging for. It's embarrassing for a host of reasons. First, I haven't read or studied much Bourdieu. So this is not even the deep pronouncement of an expert, just the confused...