Renata Adler Rips The New York Times a New One

A few years ago Renata Adler wrote a book about the decline of The New Yorker at the departure of its long term editor, William Shawn, and happened to quote a letter she had written Shawn declining to review a book about Judge John Sirica, famous from the Watergate scandal. "Contrary to his reputation as a hero," Adler wrote, "Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime."

This single sentence led to a firestorm, mostly in The New York Times. It published no less than eight pieces critical of Adler and her book and mostly critical of the single sentence quoted above. It also refused to print a letter from Adler defending it. Harpers, however, did publish an essay by Adler. There she discusses the sentence and lays out her substantial support for it and, in the process, demolishes the Times's approach, as well as Sirica. Adler's essay is a masterwork of rhetoric and careful thought.

Upcoming Posts at Galileo Feynman

When I began this blog I imagined a mix of posts on art and politics, music and culture, science and society interspersed with short essays on a variety of more philosophical subjects. I haven't had much chance to focus on the essay side -- which I'd normally post under the tag Blah blah blah, among others -- but I thought I'd mention what's in the hopper. It's all pretty nerdy, so abandon all hope if you're looking for something else. A lengthy list follows bellow the break.

John Quijada, Ithkuil, and Clarity in Language

At The New Yorker an article by Joshua Foer describes the development of Ithkuil, a language invented by John Quijada that is highly concise while seeking to be precise, explicit, and logical. In doing so Foer's article tells some of the interesting story of Quijada's "outsider" life while describing the invented language community (which is extensive and in which I have an interest), the limitations of "natural" languages, and historical efforts to overcome them. To let the article speak for itself:

Languages are something of a mess. They evolve over centuries through an unplanned, democratic process that leaves them teeming with irregularities, quirks, and words like “knight.” No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

“Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn’t mean they’re optimal,” John Quijada, a fifty-four-year-old former employee of the California State Department of Motor Vehicles, told me. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled “Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.” Written like a linguistics textbook, the fourteen-page Web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words. It documented the grammar, syntax, and lexicon of a language that Quijada had spent three decades inventing in his spare time. Ithkuil had never been spoken by anyone other than Quijada, and he assumed that it never would be.

Positive Law and Natural Law

In this blog I'll use the phrase positive law to mean "law that derives from human expression" and I'll use the phrase natural law to mean "law that does not derive from human expression."  So, that's simple.

Lamentably, those aren't quite the uses that lawyers (or philosophers) often have for the terms; their uses frequently are ambiguous, poorly reasoned, and inconsistent. What may not seem to be a big deal does turn out to be a big deal. It leaves their analysis often clotted and wrong, and betrays a larger failure to understand how humans and our rules relate to the world we inhabit.  So, it's time for a somewhat esoteric discussion of these terms -- that may not be your "thing"  -- feel free to go. But there is a reason (besides its interest to me): it has important legal, political, and ontological ramifications.