Recent links of note:
“Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole”
Theodore P. Hill, Quillette
Although its topic was controversial, the mathematics professor and scholar Theodore Hill knew his research was well founded. His project focused on the logical viability of the “Greater Male Variability Hypothesis,” an area of evolutionary research that suggests males are more likely than females to be extraordinary, in both the positive and negative sense (more Nobel laureates and more prison inmates). Don’t shoot the mathematician; that’s just science for you, Hill thought. But he didn’t expect his paper to be spiked in such unceremonious fashion—not once, but twice, after some colleagues found it challenged their beliefs about women’s success rates in the hard-sciences workforce. In his essay for Quillette, Hill reports unprecedented levels of unprofessionalism by those who found scientific research threatening their views about gender.
“The Village Voice Goes Silent, Finally”
Telly Davidson, The American Conservative
The Village Voice gave its last gasp on August 31, after struggling along on online life support for the past year. Once considered the gadfly of the New York news establishment, the Village Voice covered the stories that the more “respectable” publications—The New York Times, The New Yorker—wouldn’t. In its prime, the alt-weekly was unashamedly (and sometimes shamefully) radical and nonconformist, but it found itself in a downward spiral as the paper’s views were adopted by the mainstream. Tom Carsion, a Voice veteran, in his Baffler eulogy for the paper, goes so far as to say that the paper “folded simply because its work here was done.” Depending on one’s opinion of the Voice’s influence on the Times, Carson’s claim could be an epitaph that lives on in fame—or in ignominy.
“A Personal Tribute to Richard Timperio, a Beloved Figure of the Brooklyn Art Scene”
James Kalm, Hyperallergic
Brooklyn’s Williamsburg was a rising New York art hub when the artist and dealer Richard Timperio opened the Sideshow Gallery there in 1999. In the years following, his patronage helped make the neighborhood and many of its artists major players in the New York art scene, especially through his famous, and ever more inclusive, Christmas and New Year’s exhibitions. James Kalm writes about the ’Burg’s debt to Timperio, who died on Sunday. Read more on the annual exhibition at Sideshow here and here in reviews by our own James Panero.
“Friendly shade”
Andrew Motion, The Times Literary Supplement
A new edition of Philip Larkin’s biography was released last week. In this excerpt, Andrew Motion unearths the roots of the poet’s famous grimness as not “grumpiness,” but as a fearless honesty about life coupled with a gripping terror of death. Read to the end for a visit from Larkin beyond the grave, then read some New Criterion criticism of his work in Christopher Carduff’s blistering review of the first edition of Motion’s biography, along with essays on Larkin by the late U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall and William Logan.
From our pages:
Washington’s many faces
Mario Naves