Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. What’s in a Name?

At the fall graduation of St. Andrew’s University in Scotland, the author Margaret Atwood admonishes students to “use your words of power. But use them with care. Use them precisely, to say what you actually mean.” And she emphasizes how naming is one of history’s most powerful tools:

At times of revolution, regime change, and swift vacillations in public opinion, there is so much re-naming. Statues are pulled down, histories are re-written, and the names of countries, cities, and streets are replaced. That’s been going on at least since Ancient Egypt. More recently: the U.S.S.R. dissolved, and Leningrad went back to being St. Petersburg; the First World War broke out and the Canadian city of Berlin changed its German name to the safer one of Kitchener; during the burn-it-all-down high times of the French Revolution, the months of the year were renamed.

2. Now Hiring: The World’s Worst Job

In the current environment, who would want to be a college president? Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, explains that the job is horrible “because the primary task of any dean or president is to deal with the most spoiled, entitled, pigheaded interest groups imaginable.” He elaborates:

First, there are the students — yeah, I said it. As tuition prices have increased far faster than inflation, they view themselves (not entirely unjustifiably) less as apprentices in knowledge and more as customers demanding platinum-level service. Students possess a volatile mix of knowledge and ignorance…They have zero idea of how large organizations are run. Most students are super-confident about how they think the world should be run and woefully uninformed about how the world is actually run. Good luck to the college dean or president tasked with explaining any of this to them — because what students want the most is to have their thoughts validated rather than challenged.

3. The British Library Has Become a Zombie

Caroline Denver, an historian of the Victorian era, is accustomed to working in the reading rooms of the British Library. But since a cyber-attack this fall, the library’s online collection has been inaccessible. Denver describes what it’s like in the library’s manuscript room as the cybergang responsible for the theft auctions the content on the dark web for £600,000:

I am the only reader present in what’s typically a bustling space. The library’s readings rooms are now zombies. As public service announcements have brightly reported, the rooms are still open for “personal study.” That said, visitors cannot request, retrieve, or use materials (for the most part), from the library’s vast collections. Those collections are safe nearby. Yet as far as the digital world is concerned, they… do not exist.

4. Jotting Things Down

Roland Allen’s A History of Thinking on Paper examines the rich tradition of scribbling in notebooks. Sukhdev Sandu, reviewing Allen’s book in The Guardian, takes note of how important it has been to write things down – from early mercantilist accounting ledgers to Leonardo’s doodles. Sandu then asks: are we at risk of losing this centuries-old habit?

Many school curriculums downplay cursive these days. Shame. Allen points to evidence that maintaining a notebook with pen and paper is best for processing and retaining information. It can stave off depression and act as ballast to those struggling with ADHD. It is tactile, a form of “embodied cognition”, another example of the superiority of slowness.

5. It All Adds Up

These days, we are told to “follow the science.” Bo and Hannes Malmberg, two population researchers, argue that mathematics, not science, has been the far more consequential force in human affairs. Their history is fascinating:

The introduction of mathematics in human affairs led to advancements in accounting, finance, fiscal affairs, demography, and economics – a kind of social mathematics. All reflect an underlying ‘calculating paradigm’ – the idea that measurement, calculation, and mathematics can be successfully applied to virtually every domain. This paradigm spread across Europe through education, which we can observe by the proliferation of mathematics textbooks and schools. It was this paradigm, more than science itself, that drove progress. It was this mathematical revolution that created modernity.

The Malmbergs think the celebration of Newton’s Scientific Revolution is overdone: “Most of the significant inventions of the Industrial Revolution,” they write, “were not undergirded by a deep scientific understanding, and their inventors were not scientists.”

6. High Lantern Group Reads

At the end of each year, everyone at High Lantern Group shares a book or two that made an impact on them during the last year. All of us can then choose one of these as a holiday present. This year’s list of recommended reading is our gift to our loyal readers of The Notebook.

Websites Worth Reading

Year In Search 2023: What People Googled

52 Snippets from 2023: Finance Observations and Insights 

Top Apps from 2023: Most Popular Free Apps via Apple

Feeds We Follow

@TheFP: Best Online Publication of 2023

@stats_feed: World of Statistics

@JagmansM: Cool Cars