confusing velocity with bacon

Suppose you get a value for totalOwed that doesn’t seem right. You can’t ask the JavaScript version “how did you arrive at that number?” because those intermediate values have already been discarded. Imperative programs are generally debugged by adding log statements or stepping through with a debugger, pausing to check each value. This works fine when the number of intermediate values is small; it does not scale at all for the US Tax Code, where the final value is calculated based on hundreds upon hundreds of calculations of intermediate values.

Habermas’s political interests became more sharply engaged with the debate, beginning in 1986, over West German revisionist historians’ account of the Nazi period. In this public political debate, carried out in the pages of Die Zeit and Die Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung, Habermas argued that his conservative opponents had minimized German responsibility for the Holocaust. Against the conservative alternative of “national pride,” Habermas began to develop the idea of “constitutional patriotism” as the only form of national attachment that could do justice to universalistic principles of morality and political democracy. This idea of constitutional patriotism has remained important in Habermas’s recent work, emerging as his idea of responsible political attachment in increasingly multicultural societies.

And in that secular semiquiet, Edmundson insists, even the godless can find God—or, more accurately, “god-terms,” for words themselves are Edmundson’s secular deities. There might not be an ultimate center, a final Truth or God, he suggests, but there are brave, brilliant, compassionate individuals (like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman) who have used words to put forth a vision of a life worth living. Students must encounter “the best which has been said and thought” (in Matthew Arnold’s famous words) so they can understand themselves and have some say in the direction of their lives. By seeking out writers who can help them articulate what Edmundson calls, in The Heart of the Humanities, their “defining beliefs,” their god-terms, students begin the process of a “real education.”

I have come to think of this in terms of Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Fancy is the mechanically associative energy that weaves collages out of existent materials; Imagination the creative power that disassembles and reintegrates reality into new and powerful unities.

Being a reader means cultivating a relationship with the world that, by most standards, can seem pointless and counterproductive. Reading is not profitable; it doesn’t teach you any transferable skills or offer any networking opportunities. On the contrary, it is an antisocial activity in the most concrete sense: To do it you have to be alone, or else pretend you’re alone by tuning out other people. Reading teaches you to be more interested in what’s going on inside your head than in the real world.

The pleasures of academic life are few and far between, and increasingly dwindling, but there is nothing quite like getting a positive blurb from someone that you admire or respect, or seeing yourself cited in a great book.

But in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx makes an interesting point. Because money is a universal equivalent, it can be exchanged for anything — but this means that to take its specific form as money, it has to negate everything else it could be. “The less you eat, drink, and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc, the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital.” This is the capitalist principle of thrift; what money wants, more than anything, is to expand itself. You don’t fritter it away on stupid pleasures. You annihilate your own life to let it swell. As JR learned in the executive bathroom, “the only damn time you spend money’s to make money.” When young people say that the only thing they care about is making as much money as possible, what they really mean is that they want nothing, nothing at all, a blank and empty world.

In 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also published The Phenomenology of Perception, in which he put forward an even simpler argument: to draw any distinction between consciousness and body is nonsensical. For Merleau-Ponty, the body was not a mere vessel for the mind but a repertoire of skills built and refined through contact with the world, an inescapable part of all human thought. His thinking directly shaped the “Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition,” a five-stage framework for how adults progress from novice to expert, still taught everywhere from NHS wards to U.S. Air Force flight schools. I do, therefore I am.

It was Ryle who, in 1945, formulated the distinction that runs through Cruise’s films: that between knowledge of and knowledge how. The former was propositional, the sort you can articulate in neat, explicit statements. The latter was practical aptitude, the kind only revealed by competent action. Crucially, you can possess the latter without the former; knowing how does not entail being able to explain it.

In a bid to alleviate this problem, the German government passed the Academic Fixed-Term Contract Act in 2007 (also known as the Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz, or WissZeitVG; see go.nature.com/48kzoyl). This law limits the time that early-career researchers can be placed on fixed-term contracts to, in most cases, six years pre-PhD and six years post-PhD (nine years after medicine PhDs), with the intention of encouraging universities to hire these researchers permanently, rather than keeping them temporarily employed indefinitely. However, critics of the WissZeitVG argue that it backfired because it failed to lead to a growth in permanent positions. They say that it instead forces researchers out of academia — leading to knock-on effects such as lower-quality research and a loss of qualified personnel. “What universities do in most cases is say, ‘We cannot employ you temporarily any more, so we won’t employ you,’” says Mathias Kuhnt, a sociology postdoc at the Dresden University of Technology.

This, I think, is another thing that makes Darnielle a rarity—his ability to have a steadfast belief system and still understand and even adopt systems that appear antithetical to it. He seems to find in Satan, retribution, or darkness at large something akin to what he finds in professional wrestling, life as a goth, or any of the Jamaican reggae stars or horror and crime novelists he’s written about in so many of his songs. These are different windows into glimpsing the world’s possibilities, of understanding how you and your problems and joys might yet fit into it. It is all, turns out, a wonder.

I ask him, maybe, if that’s what has made his work so meaningful, or its maker, I dare say, special—that he’s still here and willing to tell us about it. He pauses before answering, a rarity for a man rarely at a loss for lots and lots of words. “I haven’t really thought about it, but yeah, I think so?” he finally offers. “But most of these songs don’t exist if I’m not here—I didn’t write them until I was long out of the woods.”

In a statement on Tuesday, the Interior Department, which manages federal land, said that, as of Jan. 1, it would more than triple the price of an annual park pass for nonresidents, from $80 to $250. Foreign tourists without an annual pass will also be charged $100 on top of the standard entrance fee to visit each of the 11 most popular national parks, including Yosemite, Yellowstone, Rocky Mountain and the Grand Canyon.

Set in Kakania, a stand-in for Austro-Hungary, in the months before World War I, Musil’s novel hits on a paradox of modern life. The liberalization of politics and culture, together with the possibilities for work and leisure opened up by new technologies, have greatly expanded individual rights and freedoms. At the same time, though, the scope of private life itself seems to be shrinking. Our experiences are flattened by the mass culture that everyone consumes, regurgitates, remixes (and that AI is now beginning to remix for us). [...]

Biker jackets are meant to imply an edge that the wearer seldom has, because the wearer is anybody who buys one. The other night, I was at an avant-garde music performance whose audience was filled with people from CalArts, where the biker jacket is still au courant. The man next to me kept his on for the entire program, and each time he moved it squeaked loudly, making the biker jacket not just a pose but a theatrical disturbance.

So it makes perfect sense that fascism and colonialism and billionairism would oppose the collective accumulation of human knowledge, because to accept it is to admit to the collective nature of human society, and fascism and colonialsm billionairism see human society and all the humans in it not as a collective, but as something to dominate and own; if humans will not agree to be dominated, if they resist being used as property, then they must be punished or killed. Shared reality interferes with that project, which is why fascism and colonialism and billionairism always seek to destroy it.

In 2004, after one of the site’s critics, Amanda Petrusich, panned an album by the alt-country singer-songwriter Ryan Adams (“one-dimensional, vain, and entirely lifeless”: 2.9), Adams asked to be interviewed by her. The conversation that ensued was strikingly friendly, given the circumstances: Petrusich, who is now my colleague at this magazine, amicably but firmly declined to recant her opinion, and Adams concluded that “records don’t really hurt anybody, and neither do reviews.”