Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. How to Understand the War in Ukraine

Harvard history professor Serhii Plokhy suggests the best five books to understand history of Ukraine and its complex relationship with Russia. He also provides context for the current crisis:

Putin wrote an article on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” How many presidents going into war write that kind of article, and make those arguments? It’s an attempt to delegitimize the Ukrainian claim for statehood. If we are historically the same people, what right do you have to have a state? You have none! That normally doesn’t happen with the disintegration of empires. The British never claimed that they somehow came from Delhi, or vice versa. But you do see that with Russia and Ukraine.

2. The Problem with the Short Sentence

There’s a long history of people complaining about the decline in writing. Charles Schifano goes a different way. On his blog, he argues that the problem is how writing is taught. Current teaching robs writing of its imagination and playfulness:

Take a close look at the advice offered by most contemporary style guides and you will find the words cut and trim and delete and avoid and skipand remove and shorten. If you can write a sentence in four words, why not three? After you’ve mastered the three-word pithy phrase of eternal wisdom, can you spin a bon mot in two words? What about if you suppress all words and lift an eyebrow while grunting – would that be best?

“An entire generation of writers,” he concludes, “has been taught to write with one eye on the delete key."

3. The Movies Are Back – So Are Bad Reviews

Americans are going back to movie theaters – and movie reviewers have cheerfully returned to the tradition of excoriating the worst films. Witness David Fear’s treatment of Moonfall:

In space, no one can hear you scream. In cavernous, half-empty IMAX theaters, however, you can definitely hear other people laughing at the unintentional comedy of a truly bad movie set in space, which is as close as we can get to saying that you may want to see Moonfall with an audience, should you feel compelled to see this at all. Covid has robbed filmgoers of so many different pleasures, including the opportunity to collectively gaze in wonder when a truly awful, incoherent mess presents itself for our pleasure, and in such oversized portions.

4. Somebody Didn’t Believe in Me

The Ringer identifies one of the most irritating trends in sports coverage: the obligatory focus on everyone who doubted that a star had the right stuff. “These days, just about every sports profile and documentary includes a doubter or two.” The article advises treating these stories with skepticism:

I’ve never heard Rams wide receiver Cooper Kupp rip the recruiters who banished him to Eastern Washington University. But TV commentators have turned Kupp’s road to the Super Bowl into a long-shot story. Often, they forget to mention that Kupp’s father and grandfather were NFL players.

5. Machine Learning

Can AI teach surgery to medical students better than humans? A new study published by the Journal of American Medical Associationnetwork suggests so. The AI tutor, known as Virtual Operative Assistant, may also improve efficiency:

VOA’s learning platform is flexible and allows learners with different levels of expertise to practice and receive personalized formative feedback based on interest and time availability. This AI intervention saved approximately 53 hours of expert supervision and formative assessment over 13 weeks compared with the instructor group while resulting in comparable [technical] scores.

6. Machine Judging

Blogger Brad Templeton’s takeaway from the Winter Olympics: relying on judges is bad for viewers. For sports like ski jump, figure skating, and the snowboard half-pipe, should judges be replaced with computers?

I think there could be merit in moving towards computer judging – i.e., like the clock – for many of them. We are now at the point that computers can track everything about the body and know not just how many rotations somebody did but how close to ideal forms they did them. They can also report it instantly. We might be surprised at how well they could even do at judging "artistic impression," even though we think that's a human thing.

Websites Worth Reading

What's on Weibo: Tracking Chinese Social Media

Summers vs. Krugman on Inflation: Zelensky’s September Speech at Stanford

FT's Live Maps of Russian Invasion: A visual guide as Moscow mounts ground and air offensive

Feeds We Follow

@SpencerGuard: Advice on civilian resistance

@LHSummers: Lawrence Summers’s attack on Modern Monetary Theory

@joshtpm: Josh Marshall’s list of whom to follow on Ukraine crisis