In a forthcoming Netflix series, the actress Sandra Oh plays a starring role as a new department chair taking the reins in a time of crisis.
Yesterday, the streaming service released a trailer (see video above) for The Chair, which premieres on Friday, August 20. In the show, Oh plays Ji-Yoon Kim, who has just been named chair of the English department at the fictional Pembroke University. In the series, Kim is not only the first woman to chair the English department, but also one of the few faculty members of color at Pembroke.
This series should appeal to the professoriate, but I am not so sure about the rest of the Netflix audience although Woodrow Wilson, a former president of Princeton University, was once quoted as saying: “So far as the colleges go, the sideshows are swallowing up the circus.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, leveled Senator Rand Paul at a Senate hearing yesterday. Fauci angrily confronted Paul in testimony on Capitol Hill, rejecting Paul’s insinuation that the U.S. helped fund research at a Chinese lab that could have sparked the COVID-19 outbreak.
Paul suggested that Fauci had lied before Congress when in May he denied that the National Institutes of Health funded so-called “gain of function” research — the practice of enhancing a virus in a lab to study its potential impact in the real world — at a Wuhan virology lab. U.S. intelligence agencies are currently exploring theories that an accidental leak from that lab could have led to the global pandemic.
“I have not lied before Congress. I have never lied. Certainly not before Congress. Case closed,” Fauci told Paul before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, saying a study the senator mentioned referenced a different sort of virus entirely from the one responsible for the coronavirus outbreak.
“Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly,” Fauci said. “And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you’re talking about.”
He added, “If anybody is lying here, senator, it is you.”
It was the latest in a series of clashes between Paul and Fauci over the origins of the virus that caused the global pandemic.
As the Delta variant of COVID-19 ravages the unvaccinated, Fox News and other conservative media have been sending mixed messages about the efficacy of the vaccines (see video above). This was especially true of the Fox primetime trio of Carlson, Hannity, and Igraham. However in recent weeks, this has begun to change a bit with several prominent Fox personalities cautioning viewers that they should get vaccinated. Sean Hannity said earlier this year he was “beginning to have doubts” about whether he would take a vaccine. But on Monday night, he told “Hannity” viewers, “I believe in science, I believe in the science of vaccination. I can’t say it enough. Enough people have died. We don’t need any more deaths.”
Fox New hosts Steve Doocy and Bill Hemmer also urged people on Monday to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
Below is an analysis, courtesy of the Associated Press.
Bottom line – GET YOUR SHOTS!
Tony
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“NEW YORK (AP)
— By David Bauder
When Dr. Alexa Mieses Malchuk talks to patients about the COVID-19 vaccine, she tries to feel out where they get their information from.
“Sometimes I feel like the education I have to provide depends on what news channel that they watch,” the doctor in Durham, North Carolina, said.
The mixed messaging can come from the same media outlet — and even the same source. On Fox News Channel on Monday, host Sean Hannity looked straight into the camera to deliver a clear message: “It absolutely makes sense for many Americans to get vaccinated. I believe in science. I believe in the science of vaccinations.”
Yet Hannity followed up his statement by interviewing a woman protesting her college’s requirement that students be vaccinated, a segment appealing to people skeptical of the immunization push. His prime-time colleagues, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, opened their own programs by questioning vaccination efforts.
Skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccination is a common theme in media appealing to conservatives, despite assurances from doctors and scientists that the vaccine is safe and effective. Some medical experts worry that conflicting takes and outright distrust of the vaccine shown by influential media personalities contribute to a failure to meet inoculation goals aimed at arresting the pandemic.
Two recent exchanges in recent days on Fox News Channel’s popular morning show, “Fox & Friends,” illustrated the mixed messaging.
During a discussion of Los Angeles County’s decision to reinstate mandates to wear masks indoors, even if people are vaccinated, guest host Lawrence Jones said, “People are saying, ‘Why get the vaccine if you’re not going to return to normal? What’s the use of doing it? Why?’”
“Well, you won’t die,” colleague Steve Doocy replied. “That’s a good reason.”
Doocy, arguably Fox’s most influential figure arguing in favor of vaccinations, also took on co-host Brian Kilmeade on Monday when he said people should not be judged if they decide not to get the shot. Doocy responded that the vast majority of people who are dying of COVID-19 are unvaccinated.
“That’s their choice,” Kilmeade replied.
Several personalities on Fox News Channel — including Bill Hemmer, Dana Perino, Bret Baier, Greg Gutfeld and the three-member “Fox & Friends” morning team — have been vaccinated and publicized their status. Rupert Murdoch, the network’s founder, has been jabbed, too.
The prime-time hosts, who consistently have the biggest audience, keep their status to themselves, although Hannity has said he was going to get vaccinated. Carlson, when asked directly by two journalists whether he’s been vaccinated, responded by asking their favorite sex position — his way of saying it’s too personal a question.
Even casual consumers of media targeting conservatives over the past few months absorb a deep skepticism about the vaccines.
Malchuk says some patients who are happy to take her advice on, say, diabetes medication, have resisted her encouragement that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective in warding off serious illness.
“I see people polarized in terms of where they get their information, from whom they get it and, yes, it is politically charged,” she said.
Dr. Laura Morris, who works in an area of Missouri that has seen a surge in COVID-19 infections, said that she had hoped for less polarization and that more people would have responded to seeing the positive effect of vaccines.
“There are a lot of things out there that are harmful to public health right now,” she said. “Anything out there that says vaccines are not good for you, that is false.”
Social media and the internet are major factors in what U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warned last week was an alarming flow of disinformation about the vaccines.
Doctors like Malchuk and Morris, who regularly sees patients in Fulton, Missouri, suspect the internet is behind the more outlandish theories that they dispel — that the vaccines cause cancer, damage fertility or contain microchips.
Most themes on talk radio or television networks like Fox, Newsmax or One America News are more subtle or philosophical.
The vaccine is experimental, still not fully approved, is one line of attack. Wait and see. There’s no reason for young people to get it. Natural immunity is better. It’s none of your business what I do. Government — the Biden administration especially — is intruding upon your life, trying to take control of your body.
“The advice they are giving you is not designed to help,” Carlson said Monday on his show, the most popular on cable news. “It is designed to make you comply.”
Two hours later, Ingraham said that it was President Joe Biden and his allies, not conservative media figures, who are “superspreaders” of COVID-19 misinformation.
The cumulative effect of the stories is to raise doubt in the minds of people who may already be looking for a way to avoid the jab of a needle and syringe full of chemicals going into their bodies, said Kristin Urquiza, who started the organization Marked By COVID after her father died of the virus.
“They do not come out and say, ‘Do not get the vaccine,’” Urquiza said. “Their strategy is to create a culture of confusion.”
Carlson and Ingraham have been the most aggressive in questioning vaccinations. Carlson has said “the idea that you could force people to take medicine they don’t want or need” is scandalous. But he also told viewers on Monday: “We’re not saying there is no benefit to the vaccine. There may well be profound benefits to the vaccine. Our mind is open and has been from the first day. We never encouraged anyone to take or not to take the vaccine. Obviously, we’re not doctors.”
Ingraham has suggested viewers “hide your kids” from “Biden’s vaccine pushers.” She also said Monday that “we want everyone to be healthy and safe and have their risk assessment done properly.”
On conservative media, resisters are depicted as heroes. Fox’s Pete Hegseth hailed a woman who filmed herself confronting two health care workers who were urging residents of a Los Angeles housing complex to get vaccinated and told them to leave the building. Dan Bell, a One America News network host, invited a Republican congressman on as a guest because he admired the way the politician refused to answer an “activist journalist” who had asked about his vaccination status.
A Newsmax anchor, Rob Schmitt, on July 9 questioned whether vaccinations go against nature.
“If there’s some disease out there, maybe there’s just an ebb and flow to life where something’s supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people, and that’s just the way evolution goes,” he said. “Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.”
Since then, Newsmax and its founder, Chris Ruddy, have said he and the network strongly support Biden’s efforts to widely distribute the vaccine.
The impact of this messaging is difficult to measure. A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken at the end of June revealed that 86% of Democrats said they had received at least one shot, compared to 45% of Republicans.
Prolonged exposure to media messages about vaccines has an impact on attitudes, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, which has studied the issue. But viewers also come predisposed to certain beliefs, and television producers are attuned to what their viewers want to hear.
Urquiza said she believes that many vaccine segments on outlets that try to reach conservatives have less to do with medicine than with fostering a sense of grievance, that government needs to get off your back.
“They’re chipping away at confidence in lifesaving measures,” she said. “It’s terrifying to watch.”
I have just finished reading Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler (2014) by Philip Ball, an editor for Nature. It is an interesting read and goes deeply into the state of physics research and specifically into the lives of three researchers under the Nazi regime. While some scientists embraced the Nazi directives, others made compromises and concessions during the 1930s and World War II. Ball specifically examines the situations of Nobel laureates Max Plank, Peter Debye, and Werner Heisenberg. As described by one reviewer, “it is a gripping exploration of moral choices under a totalitarian regime..and three lives caught between the idealistic goals of science and tyranny.” Here is an excerpt:
“Plank was always acutely conscious of doing the right thing – his difficulty was in resolving conflicting notions of what was “right.” One can’t help but feel sympathy for this man, inculcated with a deep sense of duty towards the German state and culture, when suddenly faced with a government of such criminal depravity….He was paralyzed by a predicament for which his conservative education had never prepared him. He is a genuinely tragic figure.”
Below is a review that appeared in Physics Today.
If you are interested in the period or subject matter, give it a read but prepared for slow and careful reflection as Ball goes about trying to explain the choices and decisions these physicists made under Hitler.
Tony
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Physics Today
Book: Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler by Philip Ball!
reviewed by Michael Eckert
Several books have been written about the German scientists who worked under the Nazi regime. One early classic was Alan Beyerchen’s Scientists Under Hitler: Politics and the Physics Community in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1977). Other examples are Mark Walker’s Nazi Science: Myth, Truth, and the German Atomic Bomb (Plenum Press, 1995) and the more recent monograph edited by Walker and Dieter Hoffmann, The German Physical Society in the Third Reich: Physicists Between Autonomy and Accommodation (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Most of that literature is motivated by such underlying questions as the following: How could men like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and other pioneers of modern physics proceed with their work while Adolf Hitler ruled their country? Did they display moral qualms? Philip Ball, a freelance writer with 20 years of experience as an editor for Nature, attempts to answer those questions in Serving the Reich: The Struggle for the Soul of Physics Under Hitler. Has he anything new to add to this oft-debated topic?
The notes and bibliography show that Ball is aware of the most pertinent literature, including a good deal of the extensive German-language contributions and some archival sources, such as the Rockefeller Foundation Archives and the Samuel A. Goudsmit Papers at the American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today). In addition to Planck and Heisenberg, Ball focuses in particular on Peter Debye, who in 1938 signed an infamous letter requesting the resignation of Jews who had remained members of the German Physical Society.
In his introduction, Ball writes that the case histories of Planck, Heisenberg, and Debye display “the grey zone between complicity and resistance adjusted to Nazi rule.” With regard to Planck, he adopts, without further probing, the conclusion of biographer John Heilbron, who summarized Planck’s case with the title of his book The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science (University of California Press, 1986). Heisenberg’s case is more controversial, but here, too, Ball adds little new information; mostly he relies on David Cassidy’s authoritative biography, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (W. H. Freeman, 1991).
Among historians, Debye’s case is most controversial. It turned into a scandal when science writer Sybe Rispens portrayed him as a Nazi sympathizer; others regarded him as a victim. Ball’s analysis of those diverging historical accounts deserves attention. In some details the narrative violates its stated goal to avoid black-and-white interpretations. For example, Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark, the spokesmen for the Aryan Physics movement, appear from the beginning of the book as outspoken villains. Lenard, however, only became an aggressive enemy of Albert Einstein in 1920; in 1913 he revealed in a letter to Arnold Sommerfeld how much he appreciated Einstein. Stark, too, was one of Einstein’s early admirers.
Both Lenard’s and Stark’s conversion to fanatic enemies of “Jewish“ physics was largely a result of German nationalism resulting from World War I—right-wing Germans associated the Jews with the defeat of Germany and the rise of communism. Also, Stark did not have to defend himself before the Nuremberg court, as Ball suggests on page 254, but before a Spruchkammer, a local denazification court.
Another deficiency concerns the annotation. In most places, Ball pulls quotes from the secondary literature without reference to the original archival sources. Furthermore, he only references direct quotes, which makes it difficult for the reader to discern the source of other, unquoted material. This critique may sound like historical pettiness, but a narrative concerned with controversial interpretations should avoid any doubts about the sources from which its conclusions are derived.
Apart from those few criticisms, Serving the Reich is a remarkable achievement—not only for its popularization of historical debates but also for the depth of its analysis. Both the layperson interested in the moral dilemma of physicists under Hitler and the historian familiar with the controversial debates will find Ball’s account highly instructive.
In a case watched closely by colleges and universities mandating vaccinations of students and employees, a federal judge ruled on Sunday against a legal challenge to the Indiana University system’s vaccine mandate, effectively upholding the requirement that all students must be vaccinated from Covid before returning to the campus in the fall unless they qualify for an exemption. The ruling sends a strong signal that the lawsuits filed in response to colleges’ vaccine requirements may face steep odds in court.
Eight undergraduate and graduate students at Indiana filed a lawsuit against the university in June, arguing the mandate — which also applies to employees — was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. But Judge Damon R. Leichty of the U.S. District Court for Northern Indiana denied the request in favor of the university’s “discretion to act reasonably in protecting the public’s health.”
“Recognizing the students’ significant liberty to refuse unwanted medical treatment, the Fourteenth Amendment permits Indiana University to pursue a reasonable and due process of vaccination in the legitimate interest of public health for its students, faculty, and staff,” said the court’s ruling. “Today, on this preliminary record, the university has done so for its campus communities.”
“This university policy isn’t forced vaccination,” wrote the judge. “The students have options — taking the vaccine, applying for a religious exemption, applying for a medical exemption, applying for a medical deferral, taking a semester off, or attending another university.”
“Today’s ruling does not end the students’ fight — we plan to immediately appeal the judge’s decision,” states James Bopp, a conservative activist attorney who represented the students.
COVID-19 vaccines have become a U.S. political flashpoint and the country has fallen short of President Joe Biden’s vaccine goals, raising concerns that life may not return to normal as the number of infections are beginning to rise.
Leichty, appointed by former President Donald Trump, said had the students shown a likelihood that the university was infringing unreasonably on constitutional rights, blocking the policy would have been in the public interest. But he said the students “have a low likelihood of success” of proving that.
More than 500 colleges and universities have mandated the COVID-19 vaccine and Leichty’s ruling appears to be the first in a case challenging such a policy.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz appeared on CNN Newsroom With Pamela Brown yesterday, where she blamed Gov. Ron DeSantis for the recent surge in COVID-19 cases in the state. Florida currently accounts for roughly 20 percent of new cases in the U.S.
“What I think explains high infection rates is that we have a governor who has not taken COVID seriously from the very beginning,” Wasserman Schultz said. “You know, he’s essentially right now treating it like a joke.”
DeSantis recently passed a law prohibiting local jurisdictions from imposing new COVID restrictions, and is selling anti-vaccine merchandise, like t-shirts that read “Don’t Fauci My Florida.”
“I would rather see us Fauci our Florida than have people go through death by DeSantis, and that’s what we’re facing now,” Wasserman Schultz said. “He actually had a law passed in Florida to prohibit local governments from being able to enact measures like mask requirements and social distancing to keep people safe. You just can’t make this stuff up. So that’s where the blame lies, at his feet.”
Wasserman Schultz also pointed the finger at Facebook for vaccine misinformation, and Fox News, where the primetime hosts regularly denigrate the vaccines and discourage their audience from getting vaccinated.
“We have to make sure that we’re stopping the spread of misinformation,” Wasserman Schultz said, “like is spreading rampant on Facebook, some of which is propagated by Ron DeSantis himself, and Fox News, which he spends a lot of time on.”
Wasserman Schultz went on to remind viewers that, despite his public posturing, DeSantis has been vaccinated.
“All he has to do is exercise his leadership and use his bully pulpit to encourage people to get vaccinated,” Wasserman Schultz said. “He’s been vaccinated.”
Death by DeSantis, Fox News, and the right-wing media indeed!
The Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a poll at the start of the year and asked American adults whether they planned to get vaccinated, 23 percent said no.
But a significant portion of that group — about one quarter of it — has since decided to receive a shot. The Kaiser pollsters recently followed up and asked these converts what led them to change their minds. The answers are important, because they offer insight into how the millions of still unvaccinated Americans might be persuaded to get their vaccines. As reported in The New York Times.
First, a little background: A few weeks ago, it seemed plausible that Covid-19 might be in permanent retreat, at least in communities with high vaccination rates. But the Delta variant has changed the situation. The number of cases is rising in all 50 states.
Although vaccinated people remain almost guaranteed to avoid serious symptoms, Delta has put the unvaccinated at greater risk of contracting the virus — and, by extension, of hospitalization and death. The Covid death rate in recent days has been significantly higher in states with low vaccination rates than in those with higher rates.
Nationwide, more than 99 percent of recent deaths have occurred among unvaccinated people, and more than 97 percent of recent hospitalizations have occurred among the unvaccinated, according to the C.D.C. “Look,” President Biden said on Friday, “the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated.”
The three themes
What helps move people from vaccine skeptical to vaccinated? The Kaiser polls point to three main themes.
(The themes apply to both the 23 percent of people who said they would not get a shot, as well as to the 28 percent who described their attitude in January as “wait and see.” About half of the “wait and see” group has since gotten a shot.)
1. Seeing that millions of other Americans have been safely vaccinated.
“It was clearly safe. No one was dying.” — a 32-year-old white Republican man in South Carolina
“I went to visit my family members in another state and everyone there had been vaccinated with no problems.” — a 63-year-old Black independent man in Texas
“Almost all of my friends were vaccinated with no side effects.” — a 64-year-old Black Democratic woman in Tennessee
The above suggest that emphasizing the safety of the vaccines — rather than just the danger of Covid, as many experts typically do — may help persuade more people to get a shot.
A poll of vaccine skeptics by Echelon Insights, a Republican firm, points to a similar conclusion. One of the most persuasive messages, the skeptics said, was hearing that people have been getting the vaccine for months and it is “working very well without any major issues.”
2. Hearing pro-vaccine messages from doctors, friends and relatives.
For many people who got vaccinated, messages from politicians, national experts and the mass media were persuasive. But many other Americans — especially those without a college degree — don’t trust mainstream institutions. For them, hearing directly from people they know can have a bigger impact. “Hearing from experts,” as Mollyann Brodie, who oversees the Kaiser polls, said “isn’t the same as watching those around you or in your house actually go through the vaccination process.”
“My daughter is a doctor and she got vaccinated, which was reassuring that it was OK to get vaccinated.” — a 64-year-old Asian Democratic woman in Texas
“Friends and family talked me into it, as did my place of employment.” — a 28-year-old white independent man in Virginia
“My husband bugged me to get it and I gave in.” — a 42-year-old white Republican woman in Indiana
“I was told by my doctor that she strongly recommend I get the vaccine because I have diabetes.” — a 47-year-old white Republican woman in Florida
These comments suggest that continued grass-roots campaigns may have a bigger effect at this stage than public-service ad campaigns. The one exception to that may be prominent figures from groups that still have higher vaccine skepticism, like Republican politicians and Black community leaders.
3. Learning that not being vaccinated will prevent people from doing some things.
There is now a roiling debate over vaccine mandates, with some hospitals, colleges, cruise-ship companies and others implementing them — and some state legislators trying to ban mandates. The Kaiser poll suggests that these requirements can influence a meaningful number of skeptics to get shots, sometimes just for logistical reasons.
“Hearing that the travel quarantine restrictions would be lifted for those people that are vaccinated was a major reason for my change of thought.” — a 43-year-old Black Democratic man in Virginia
“To see events or visit some restaurants, it was easier to be vaccinated.” — a 39-year-old white independent man in New Jersey
“Bahamas trip required a COVID shot.” — a 43-year-old Hispanic independent man in Pennsylvania
This is an interesting study that our policymakers should review and consider as they try to encourage the unvaccinated to get their shots.
The New York Times has a featured article this morning entitled, Historically Black Colleges Finally Get the Spotlight, that examines recent developments at H.B.C.U.s and lauding star hirings and substantial new donations. However, it also notes that not all of these institutions are “sharing in the bounty, and some are still struggling to survive.” Here is an excerpt.
“Historically Black colleges and universities are having a moment, one that many educators say is more than a century overdue.
It may have started with the new vice president, Kamala Harris, who has celebrated her roots at Howard University, calling it “a place that shaped her.” Howard, in Washington, also recently announced a string of high-profile hirings, including the writers Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones and the actor Phylicia Rashad, who was appointed dean of the fine arts program.
Athletic programs are landing top recruits, and making big-name hires. Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Fla., recently announced that Reggie Theus, the former Chicago Bulls guard, has become its athletic director.
And money is pouring in. The philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has given more than $500 million to more than 20 historically Black colleges in the past year. Google, TikTok and Reed Hastings, the co-chief executive of Netflix, have given $180 million more. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill delivered more than $5 billion in pandemic rescue funding, which included erasing $1.6 billion in debt for 45 institutions.
The donations, hirings and government money seem to signal a belated epiphany, a sudden recognition of the importance of the nation’s 100 historically Black colleges, which have educated Black Americans when other institutions openly, or subtly, would not.
“We’ve been here since 1865,” said George T. French Jr., president of Clark Atlanta University. But it is only now, he said, that he can reel off the names of donors who have contacted him.
He often asks donors, “Why am I just getting a call from you right now?”
Their answer, he said: “‘We were disturbed by what happened with George Floyd and other atrocities. And we want to do our part — to say we’re sorry.’”
But for some historically Black colleges, the future remains worrisome. Although the better-known institutions — including Howard, Morehouse and Spelman — are not in danger, other colleges, many of them small and rural, have been hit by declining enrollments and budgets. At least six have closed in the past 20 years and by several metrics, more than a handful of Black colleges are regarded as endangered.
The issues are partly demographic: There are fewer high school graduates, and Black students have been lured to other institutions with larger endowments and financial aid budgets. Even before the pandemic, enrollment at historically Black institutions had dropped to its lowest point since 2001, a rate of decline recently estimated at 1.4 percent a year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
John S. Wilson Jr., who has served as the president of Morehouse College and as a White House adviser on historically Black colleges, said that the institutions, known collectively as H.B.C.U.s, must seize this moment.
“Is this a sustainable moment that constitutes a new era?” said Dr. Wilson, whose forthcoming book, “Up From Uncertainty,” focuses on the future of historically Black colleges. “I think that answer could be ‘yes’ for a lot of H.B.C.U.s. Unfortunately, I think it’s also going to be ‘no’ to some institutions.”
The entire article reviews well the plight and future of these institutions. A good read!
The New York Timeshas a featured article this morning examining artificial intelligence and spirituality. It examines the conflicts of living in an A.I. world while maintaining a spiritual self that considers whether centuries of values, traditions, and texts will be lost. It specifically considers the work of artificial intelligence researcher, Shanen Boettcher, a former Microsoft general manager who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence and spirituality at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Here is an excerpt.
“Whether pursued via faithfulness, tradition or sheer exploration, is a way of connecting with something larger than oneself. It is perhaps no surprise that tech companies have discovered that they can be that “something” for their employees. Who needs God when we’ve got Google?
The rise of pseudo-sacred industry practices stems in large part from a greater sense of awareness, among tech workers, of the harms and dangers of artificial intelligence, and the growing public appetite to hold Silicon Valley to account for its creations. Over the past several years, scholarly research has exposed the racist and discriminatory assumptions baked into machine-learning algorithms. The 2016 presidential election — and the political cycles that have followed — showed how social media algorithms can be easily exploited. Advances in artificial intelligence are transforming labor, politics, land, language and space. Rising demand for computing power means more lithium mining, more data centers and more carbon emissions; sharper image classification algorithms mean stronger surveillance capabilities — which can lead to intrusions of privacy and false arrests based on faulty face recognition — and a wider variety of military applications.
A.I. is already embedded in our everyday lives: It influences which streets we walk down, which clothes we buy, which articles we read, who we date and where and how we choose to live. It is ubiquitous, yet it remains obscured, invoked all too often as an otherworldly, almost godlike invention, rather than the product of an iterative series of mathematical equations.
“At the end of the day, A.I. is just a lot of math. It’s just a lot, a lot of math,” one tech worker stated. It is intelligence by brute force, and yet it is spoken of as if it were semidivine. “A.I. systems are seen as enchanted, beyond the known world, yet deterministic in that they discover patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to everyday life,” Kate Crawford, a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote in her recent book “Atlas of AI.”
These systems sort the world and all its wonders into an endless series of codable categories. In this sense, machine learning and religion might be said to operate according to similarly dogmatic logics: “One of the fundamental functions of A.I. is to create groups and to create categories, and then to do things with those categories,” Mr. Boettcher told me. Traditionally, religions have worked the same way. “You’re either in the group or you’re out of the group,” he said. You are either saved or damned, #BlessedByTheAlgorithm or #Cursed by it.
Pope Francis took a significant step toward putting the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgy solidly on the side of modernization on Friday by restricting the use of the old Latin Mass, and reversing a decision by his conservative predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI. The restrictions include where the old Latin Mass can be celebrated, who can celebrate it, and will require new permissions from local bishops. The move to restrict the use of the old Latin rite in celebrating Mass dealt a blow to conservatives, who have long complained that Pope Francis is diluting the traditions of the church. Here is an excerpt from a New York Times article.
“The Pope’s latest salvo in the church’s so-called liturgy wars came weeks after conservative American bishops, many of whom are attached to the old Latin Mass, essentially shrugged off the Vatican’s strong guidance to slow down a potential confrontation with President Biden over his support for abortion rights. In recent days, influential prelates in Rome have also argued that Francis had not followed through on his promises to modernize the church.
But Francis’ action on Friday was bold and concrete. He wrote that he believed champions of the old Latin Mass were exploiting it to oppose more recent church reforms and to divide the faithful. In the 1960s, the church sought to make the faith more accessible with liturgy in living languages that made use of modern idioms in its prayer books.
In subsequent decades, traditionalists recoiled and conservative pontiffs let the Latin Mass come back, which included priests facing the altar and not the congregation, saying older prayers and, most importantly, using solely the Latin language.
Francis’ predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had relaxed restrictions on the old Latin Mass, also called the Tridentine Mass, in 2007. It was a move seen as reflective of a shift toward traditionalism.
In statements released by the Vatican on Friday, Francis argued that the change, designed to bring unity to the church and its most traditionalist and schismatic corners back into the fold, had become a cause of division and a cudgel for conservative opponents of the Second Vatican Council, the major church meetings of the 1960s that ushered in many modernizing measures.
Francis cited those measures in explaining his law, called “Traditionis Custodes.” Many analysts see Francis’ pontificate as the restoration of engagement with the modern world after three decades of leadership by conservative popes.
Doubting the council, Francis wrote in a document explaining his motivations for the new law, is “to doubt the Holy Spirit himself who guides the Church,” and associating only the old rite with what traditionalists often call the “true Church” led only to division.
Francis argued that those traditionalists had essentially taken advantage of the kindness of his predecessors. The 16th-century Tridentine Mass was replaced after the Second Vatican Council with a new standard version approved in 1970. Nevertheless, some traditionalists insisted on celebrating it and rejected the new version as a corruption.
In 1983, Pope John Paul II sought to heal a rift with a schismatic, traditionalist movement by asking bishops to grant the request of the faithful who wished to use the old Latin Mass. But Francis said some traditionalists exploited that decision to effectively create a parallel liturgical universe.
Benedict clearly put his weight, and that of the whole church, on the side of the old rite in 2007 when he increased access to the traditional Latin Mass. He argued that, among other things, it appealed to young people and that the two forms, old and new, “would enrich one another.”
But Francis argued that things had shaken out differently.
The Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, once led by Benedict, conducted a survey of bishops that showed, Francis wrote, “a situation that preoccupies and saddens me, and persuades me of the need to intervene.”
He wrote that his bishops believed that a byproduct of Benedict’s 2007 decision had been division in the church.
Francis made it clear that bishops must make sure that groups celebrating the old Latin Mass “do not deny the validity and the legitimacy” of the standard liturgy.
He gave local bishops more flexibility in regulating liturgical celebrations and deciding whether and where the old Latin Mass could be used and that it shouldn’t be celebrated in newly established personal parishes “tied more to the desire and wishes of individual priests” than to the faithful.
Priests celebrating old Latin Masses now require authorization from their bishop, and in some cases bishops will need to consult with the Vatican before granting approval.”
I was brought up in a very observant Catholic home and studied Latin for three years in high school. When Pope Benedict resurrected the Latin Mass, my local parish occasionally would have a visiting priest celebrate it. I went to one of these services and enjoyed hearing the prayers in Latin. It brought back a lot of memories. However, when it came to the homily, the priest gave this diatribe on conservative issues including abortion, women’s place in the church, and priest celibacy. I almost walked out and have not been back to a Latin Mass since. Pope Francis was right in putting restrictions on its celebration.
Tony
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