Charles Seife knows how to spot a bad number. “Certain obviously wrong mathematical ideas were floated by politicians or even by scientists, and the press swallowed them up without thinking,” said Seife, an NYU associate professor of journalism and author of Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception. Seife was particularly surprised at numbers that quickly fell apart with the slightest questioning, such as a recent National Institutes of Health-backed HIV vaccine trial in Thailand. “This trial – which they said was a success – was nothing of the sort and in fact was a dud,” he said. “There are entire industries devoted to making numerical mountains out of molehills, making drugs look like they’re performing better than they are.” Below, Seife chats with Zócalo about why we tend to trust numbers, what makes a number bad or good, and how errors can disenfranchise voters or swing an election.

Q. Why do we regard numbers as having this veneer of truth?

A. Numbers in the abstract are about as pure a concept as you can get. They represent absolute truth in a way we rarely get to access. The truths of mathematicians, the proofs they provide, are absolutely correct. There is no argument once the proof has been verified; it simply enters the realm of truth. When mathematicians study numbers, they’re looking at these platonic ideals.

In some ways this idea of purity of numbers has filtered down to the public. But for people who are not mathematicians, numbers as pure forms don’t really have any interest. The only reason we care about numbers is because they’re attached to something in the real world. The moment these numbers get attached to something in the real world, they lose their purity. Real world numbers have lost their purity, but they’re still imbued with that feeling. And that’s why we get deceived. We still think of math as having absolute truth, but the numbers we’re dealing with are admixed with dirty reality.

Q. What makes a good number and what makes a bad number?

A. It’s hard to say there are absolutely good or absolutely bad numbers in the real world. We can say that some numbers are better than others. A number is trustworthy if the measurement that it is based upon is an easy one to make, and easily replicable. If you want to figure out how long an object is, you pull out your tape measure. You come up with a number. Many other people measure it and they’ll come up with pretty much the same figure. That’s a reasonably good number – as are measurements of length, time, weight. They’re reliable and easy to talk about.

But then you get to measurements that are more and more difficult to make – like counting the number of people in the U.S. You can make a pretty good estimate, but there are problems. And then you get to measurements that are dubious. You see an ad for a shampoo that claims to double the silkiness of your hair. How do you measure that? It’s not so obvious.

Then there are numbers that are made up entirely. One that comes to mind is Glenn Beck’s rally on the National Mall. He claimed that 500,000 people showed up, but other counts came to 90,000. That’s a lie by a factor of five or six. Louis Farrakhan did this almost two decades earlier, when he claimed there were a million men at his Million Man March, but there were in fact fewer than half a million. These are what I call Potemkin numbers – made-up to try to fool people who don’t look closely.

Q. Where do these bad numbers get harmful – how are they used in policy?

A. The census I brought up earlier, for instance. It’s not so easy to count the population. The Census Bureau has to use some sophisticated statistical techniques to count people who don’t answer the mail, who disappear when Census workers knock on their door, who move, who don’t speak English. To get a good number, the Census has to figure out whom they’re missing and correct their raw count. Statistical sampling is the best technique for doing that. But the Census was actually barred by the Supreme Court from using the sampling-corrected numbers for apportionment. They’re forced to report two numbers to Congress, one which is pretty accurate and one that is demonstrably inaccurate. The one used to determine who gets power and who doesn’t is the inaccurate one. As a result, there are populations in the U.S. that are undercounted, that do not have the power of representation they are entitled to under the Constitution – these tend to be minorities, immigrants, poor people who rent, and these people tend to vote Democratic. I don’t think there’s anything really ideological going on here – I think if the situation were reversed, and the undercounted were Republicans, Republicans would be trying to get the Census Bureau to count better and Democrats wouldn’t be. But as it is, the Republicans have steadfastly tried to stop any attempt by the Census Bureau to use statistical sampling.

Q. So even the Supreme Court isn’t immune to using bad numbers?

A. The Supreme Court uses hazy numbers all the time. The case in question is United States Department of Commerce v. United States House of Representatives. Republicans in the House sued to stop the Census from using statistical sampling. The winning argument – and it was a five-to-four decision – was that the language in the Constitution, the phrase “actual enumeration” that must be performed every 10 years, does not include statistical correction. That it includes a headcount and nothing else. It was specious reasoning and it became obvious how specious it was in a later case, when Justice Clarence Thomas said that Thomas Jefferson was well aware of all these statistical techniques. But those techniques were invented in the 20th century.

I don’t think that’s the worst misuse of statistics and numbers of the Supreme Court. I think that goes to a death penalty case, Kansas v. Marsh. There was an argument over whether innocent people were getting sent to their death. As you can guess, the liberal justices were on one side and the conservatives on the other. The proofiness there, the really bad number, came from Justice Antonin Scalia. He pulled out an argument that said that juries almost never sent an innocent person to their death. He claimed they were beyond 99 percent accurate – that just a few in a thousand would get wrongly convicted. But if you look at the math behind that number, it falls apart. It ignores that we have to count some felonies differently, that not all people who are guilty of a crime actually go to jury trial – most cases come from a guilty plea, which messes up the statistic. If you do the calculation right, you find that between three and five percent are wrongly convicted. That’s what you expect for human nature and human fallibility. People aren’t perfect, they’re swayed by evidence they shouldn’t be swayed by. They put undue weight on eyewitness testimony, which is unreliable. People do get things wrong.

Q. Is it harder to understand numbers today because they’ve grown more complex, as have the ways to count?

A. It’s a much harder task to count when you have a population that’s so dense and moving around. We’ve got 300 million people, obviously much greater than the Founding Fathers had to deal with. Votes are tough to count, too. When you’re dealing with counts of millions of votes, it’s much harder than the traditional old precincts had to do. You’re more likely to make mistakes. When you’ve got large numbers of votes, small errors that are only a few  fractions of a percent of the vote total start adding up to large blocks of votes. If you look at Bush v. Gore or more recently Franken v. Coleman, these are votes of millions of people – six million in Florida and three million in Minnesota – that were decided by a few hundred ballots, a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of a percent of the votes cast. These errors, which might throw 20 or 40 or 100 votes this way or that, wound up swamping the elections so much that you really could not tell who won. As a result, the more people you have to count, the more complex the election, the more likely you’ll have errors, and the more likely you’ll end with a really bad situation.

Q. How do we get smarter about numbers – is it about learning math better?

A. Mathematical literacy can help to some extent. People have to be taught that numbers aren’t pure. They can’t be afraid to question a number. The moment they’re able to do that, everything they’re presented with a number, they can think, is this number correct? Do I believe it? Does it make sense? I think most people are scared of numbers. They’re afraid to question them. As a result, I think the influence of bad numbers is very large and growing. You see it everywhere. Every big story seems to have a bogus number in it. In the late spring and over the summer, for instance, the BP oil leak story started with bogus numbers. BP lied about how much oil leaked into the Gulf, while scientists said the number was much larger. BP and even the Coast Guard low-balled – it was a propaganda issue. The smaller the number, the less damaging the leak looked to the public, regardless of what was happening on the ground. That number had a tremendous effect. I think the recognition that numbers are a powerful form of propaganda means they’re going to be used more and more often until people recognize that numbers can be bad.

*Photo of Charles Seife by Sigrid Estrada. Photo of numbers courtesy mollycakes.

The post Why We Shouldn’t Always Trust The Numbers appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Jennifer Ouellette was an English major who long “avoided all math,” as she put it. Today, the science writer and author of The Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse recalled asking her math teacher what every student wants to know: why does math matter in every day life? “He gave the usual stock answers,” she said. “But when you start to see where calculus is in the real world, that’s when you start to see where it’s useful.” Ouellette dropped by Zocalo’s offices to chat about how calculus can help you win in Vegas, anticipate the next dip or turn of a roller coaster, and why we should all aim for mathematical literacy to give us a richer view of the world around us.

*Photo courtesy Joe Penniston.

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Democratic Vistas: Reflections on the Life of American Democracy

–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher

The political scientist Adam Przeworski’s minimalist defense of democracy is that it is the best system for changing government without bloodshed – power changes hands by election, and the losers can take solace in knowing they will survive to fight another contest. But for Democratic Vistas, a collection of essays based on the DeVane lectures at Yale University, such narrowness will not do.

Here, as Jedediah Purdy explains in his brilliant introduction, the goal is to “sort out” democracy in America. Purdy starts with the inherent contradiction of the democratic ideal, which Anthony Kronman addresses in detail in his essay on Plato, and which is explored throughout the collection: a deep commitment to both the idea of individuality and to “tearing down distinctions.” Purdy continues with a succinct overview of how this contradiction appears across the diverse themes addressed in the remaining twelve essays, which range from the baseline question of what democratic values are to the roles of family and religion in our democracy to examinations of education, capitalism, inequality, foreign policy, science and technology.

Walt Whitman, from whose work of social criticism comes the title of this collection, identified individuality and “adhesiveness” as essentials of democracy. According to David Bromwich’s essay, Whitman, along with Abraham Lincoln, “enlarged our idea of the discipline and the imagination of democracy.” Making their contributions during the national argument over slavery, they each articulated the moral basis of democracy as grounded in the notion of the supremacy of the individual – over himself, but not over others. Or, as Whitman put it, with kings beneath us, “every man a knight.”

But from there arises the paradox of democracy that Purdy identifies – that individual freedom to achieve can lead to the inequality that democracy promises to eradicate. It’s particularly noticeable in this country’s education system, and particularly in regard to institutions like Yale. As Richard Brodhead, Dean of Yale at the time of his lecture, points out, higher education has expanded access beyond the privileged few to the striving many. Of course, as Brodhead notes, selectivity means there will be discrimination; the real question is what kind. As for Yale, Brodhead says, the school seeks students with “quick, inquiring minds,” which “rewards differences of gift and accomplishment” but provides opportunity “without regard to family background or ability to pay.” Money, however, is the real issue. Merit-based aid distributes more advantages to those who already have much, and yet schools with smaller endowments might feel competitive pressure to offer relatively less need-based aid in order to attract top students. Brodhead does not claim to have a solution, though he thinks figuring out how to resolve them is the key question for the future of democratic education.

While Brodhead embraces the difficulties of the many and the few, Richard Levin and Ian Shapiro, in their essays on markets and democracy, are less sanguine. Levin, president of Yale, starts with a premise implicitly similar to Brodhead’s: competition inevitably leaves some people behind. Markets are liberating and therefore tend to reinforce democratic freedom and create opportunity. But they also engender inequality. Levin invites democratic government to “remedy the deficiencies of market outcomes” and he is optimistic that we can indeed create the right policies to do so.

Shapiro more explicitly looks at distribution of wealth and the struggle to get Americans on board with broadly redistributive policies. He admits that for many Americans, redistribution means from “us to the government” rather than from rich to poor. Shapiro blames this sentiment on “anectodal distractions.” Granted, it isn’t surprising that there was no room in this visionary volume for public choice theory, but there is certainly some substantive basis for the notion that government redistribution is effectively of, by and for the connected.  Shapiro’s wish to “push redistributive politics in the desired direction” seems about as viable as admitting everybody into Yale.

Though the lectures on which these essays are based are not necessarily very new, they address timeless questions about how we govern ourselves. Or, as Purdy eloquently puts it, they are “contributions to a national project – the project of the nation itself.” And yet in a country founded on and still dedicated to forward movement, the national project “cannot be completed unless by an unhappy ending.”  In other words, American democracy is committed to the perpetual promise that tomorrow is another day.

Excerpt: For Whitman, and for us, the belief that diversity has value and that the highest purpose of the state is to promote its exuberant expression and joyful appreciation – beliefs so commonplace in our contemporary culture that we scarcely even recognize them as such – are the secular by-products of that radical revaluation of individuality entailed by the religious doctrine of creation from nothing, a teaching whose implications could never be absorbed within the limits of Greek thought.  For once it is granted that the absolute distinctness of every individual is something real in its own right – a proposition foreign to the whole spirit of Platonic philosophy but required by the doctrine of creation ex nihilo – the way is open to the celebration of diversity as something divine, as the revelation of the Creator in His creatures, and to a view of the state as a union of individuals gathered for the purpose of enjoying their own diversity.

Further Reading: Democracy’s Values by Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón and Democracy: A History by John Dunn

Adam Fleisher is a law student at the University of Virginia.

*Photo courtesy Adam Solomon.

The post How Does Democracy Work? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Ben Wildavsky is a senior fellow in research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was education editor of U.S. News & World Report, where he was the top editor of America’s Best Colleges and America’s Best Graduate Schools. Below, Wildavsky, author of The Great Brain Race, tells us more about himself.

Q. What’s the last habit you tried to kick?

A. Eating dessert.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A newscaster.

Q. Where would we find you at 10 a.m. on a typical Saturday?

A. On my way to synagogue.

Q. What do you do to clear your mind?

A. I like to walk, and I like to watch TV shows like “Glee.”

Q. What do you wish you had the nerve to do?

A. Things like bungee-jumping or skydiving, but also speaking extemporaneously more.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. I listened to some great music coming over from my hotel – it was a British folk trio. They come out of a long folk tradition, but they’re doing very modern things with it. My mother was a folkie and I inherited some of that.

Q. What is your favorite word?

A. Onomatopoeia.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. Israel.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. I’m happy with what I do now.

Q. What teacher or professor changed your life?

A. I was fortunate to have some wonderful English teachers in my teens – a woman in England named Ilid Landry, and Rebecca Lawrence, in California.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. My parents have both been dead for many years. I’d like to meet them for dinner.

To read about Wildavsky’s talk on globalization and higher education, click here.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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Richard Whitmire, a longtime education reporter, often focused his work on the idea that girls were being shortchanged in schools. “I had two daughters and I thought this was an outrage,” he said. “I wrote these articles uncritically, and it wasn’t long afterward that I realized it was a big mistake.” He found that boys — from his extended family, his local schools, and from national data — were falling behind in school. Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind discussed why boys weren’t faring well, why women and video games aren’t to blame, and what it means for grown-ups.

Q. What are some of the usual explanations about why boys fall behind in schools?

A. The dominant one came from conservatives, who were the first to reveal and publicize that boys were in trouble. Christina Hoff Sommers’ book, The War Against Boys, was serialized in The Atlantic and had a huge following. She spent half of her book explaining why boys are in trouble – she was one of the first on the scene – and then the other half of the book she spent blaming feminism. It was a follow-up to a previous book she had written criticizing feminism. She was right about the boys, but feminists are pretty much blameless here, as far as my research goes.

This created an unusual political dynamic. Women’s advocacy groups stepped forward and defended themselves. Unfortunately, they defended themselves by saying boys aren’t having trouble. They might have just said, hey, we weren’t at fault. It was understandable that they wanted to defend themselves, but in doing it that way, they’ve helped create a political standoff, if you will, in this country. Studying the issue of boys is politically charged – you’re thought to be a conservative. But this is an international phenomenon in developed Western countries. And in other countries, where they haven’t had so much political turmoil, they’ve taken steps to see what’s going on.

Q. Do the experiences of other countries shed light on what’s happening here and why it’s happening?

A. This is happening in England, Australia, to a lesser extent New Zealand. Australia is where the gender gap is as steep as it is in the U.S. In Canada, they’re just beginning to discover the gap, and they don’t seem to have the political problems we’ve had confronting it. Australia is the only country that I know of that has had an official federal investigation into the causes. They’ve concluded the same thing I’ve concluded – that the world has gotten more verbal and boys haven’t. The reason for this happening is different in each country. But here, you can see that 20 years ago, the country’s governors met at the University of Virginia and launched what we know of today as the modern school reform movement. Its intent was to prepare more students to be ready to take on college work. The governors foresaw correctly that college would become the new high school – that nearly everyone would need post high school work. It was the right thing to do. But the currency of any college curriculum is verbal skill. It doesn’t matter what you’re studying. You have to be able to read and write quickly and clearly.

To prepare students for this, states pushed more sophisticated verbal skills requirements into the lowest grades. Through that 20 year period, you have kindergartners doing what second graders were doing. What the states didn’t foresee was that girls would adapt to this easily. And boys have not. I’m not a neurologist, so I won’t try to explain why, but parents or teachers can tell you that girls pick up verbal skills very quickly. When boys are asked to pick up these skills, it’s baffling, it’s confusing, it’s demoralizing, and they conclude that school is for girls. Boys look elsewhere for fulfillment, for positive experience. They find it in places like video games. And then video games get blamed, rap music gets blamed. There is a long list.

Q. Is the increasing emphasis on math and science education giving boys the advantage again?

A. No, because, take math for example. Twenty-five years ago, math was a list of calculations on a piece of paper. Now it’s word problems. And correctly so. Colleges and companies want people with real-world problem-solving abilities, which will always require verbal context, the ability to describe and solve a problem. Verbal questions are more difficult than the math problem itself. If you’re not a good and quick reader, you will be perplexed by the math problem as well. It really doesn’t matter, the emphasis on math and science today, because it has all become more verbal.

Q. You mentioned that the curriculum shifted to emphasize verbal skills 20 years ago. How is the first generation of boys who grew up under this change doing?

A. It’s hard to measure perfectly in time. As close as you can get are these surveys that the U.S. Department of Education takes of high school seniors. They ask them about their college aspirations – do you anticipate going to two year college, four year college, graduate school, that kind of thing. Roughly 20 years ago on this, boys and girls were tied. Boys were slightly ahead in aspiration. But since then – and you can see this as a line graph over the years – girls’ aspirations have skyrocketed, it’s a really steep climb. Boys haven’t flat-lined, exactly, but it’s nothing like what has happened with the girls. Something starts sapping boys of their academic aspirations. They don’t feel good about school.

Q. How does boys’ falling behind in education impact the workforce?

A. As I mentioned, the state governors wisely anticipated that college would become the new high school – for machine-shop jobs you need one or two years of college-level education, and police departments require at least two years. So the place to measure this is college. There we find that those earning associate degrees are 62% female. Those earning bachelor’s degrees are 57% female. That is who is entering the workforce. You are seeing more and more women going into the workforce, though that trend is not always obvious. They go in different directions, they have different interests. You’ll see Wall Street loaded with men and you’ll see that broadcast television, though they still have a male anchor up front, is all female behind the scenes. Women are the better educated, but they pursue different fields, and that does matter for the economy.

But I think the bigger impact, frankly, is the social impact. Pew Research Center a couple of weeks ago came out with their big report showing that there has been a startling change in families. Women are having to take over the chief breadwinner role, which is creating huge adjustments. Unmarried women face the option of what’s crudely dubbed marrying down, marrying someone who doesn’t have the same education level that they do. That is a big change.

Q. What is the impact of that change in family life?

A. The example here is in the African American community. Twice as many African American women as African American men earn bachelor’s degrees. The Washington Post had an article recently about African American women having to “date out,” is the term they used, that is, consider marrying non-black males because there just aren’t enough. In an urban area like Washington DC, there are three times as many educated black women as men. So how have college-educated black women reacted to this so-called marriage dilemma? If you look at the numbers, you’ll see a high rate of out-of-wedlock births and low marriage rates – because there’s nothing in it for them. Why would they get married? The incentives to do so are low. The question is, will white women do the same as black women? Will they marry someone who isn’t as educated? Perhaps they will, but we don’t know this yet. It has yet to play out.

Q. Have these trends led people to look and see where boys are falling behind and why?

A. No, as far as I can tell. The U.S. Department of Education has yet to launch one study into this. The major foundations that pursue educational goals also avoid it. And this isn’t provable, but, I attribute this to the original controversy, the claim that feminists are to blame for this. Any look at this issue turns into a food fight. No one wants to touch it, and yet it they don’t touch it, if President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan continue to avoid it, there is no way they’re going to meet their goal of regaining the top position in the world as far as having an educated workforce. The numbers they are using to measure the goal are OECD numbers, which count those who have two-year degrees. That’s where it’s currently 62 percent women.

I think what will have an impact is the so-called great recession, also dubbed the mancession. Nearly 80 percent of layoffs have been male. There is a bucket of cold water being dumped on men. A couple of weeks ago, Inside Higher Education published a piece – anecdotal but very thorough – on a boost in the number of men going to community college. At least at that level there has been an awakening. At the bachelor’s level it’s too soon to tell.

Q. How do we keep boys from following behind?

A. I’m a reporter, not a literacy expert or professional educator. I tend to look at what’s happening elsewhere. I go back to Australia. They released a report that came out about seven years ago, and to greatly oversimplify a 200-page report, the conclusion was, the world is getting verbal and boys aren’t. The Australian government designed some interventions that they thought would work with boys and tried them out on an experimental basis. They concluded which were most effective and then offered those to schools in the form of a grant opportunity. I went to an Australian school following one of the models, and it worked very well. It was a series of small adjustments that seemed to have a big impact and dealt with boys’ verbal and organizational skills. I’m not going to say that Austarlia solved the problem – because frankly not a lot of schools took the government up on its offer. But based on what I’ve seen, that’s the right way to go. It has to start with the federal government saying, we have a problem here. Right now, when we look at school accountability models, we only measure race and income level. They keep numbers by gender, but they are not required to make sure boys and girls are making the same progress, so they ignore it.

Q. Is there a role for same-sex education?

A. More than three years ago, the Bush administration gave a legal green light to public schools to experiment with single sex education. There has been a huge rush to do it. I think 550 schools now offer some kind of single sex program. But the U.S. Department of Education has offered no research into how to do this. It is astonishing. They just said, go ahead, you can do it, you’re on your own. It was one of these classic gold-rush moments – it was the new thing, and so everyone did it. I’m not convinced these programs are set up to succeed. In the book, I profile schools that do as well by boys as they do by girls, and only one was single sex. I’m not saying it’s bad or unhelpful, but you don’t have to have single-sex education. You just have to adjust the way you teach boys to read.

*Photo courtesy Dr John2005.

The post Why Are Boys Falling Behind? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Andre Perry is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education at the University of New Orleans, Associate Dean of the College of Education and Human Development, and CEO of the UNO Charter Schools. Dr. Perry writes a newspaper column for the Louisiana Weekly on K-16 leadership and governance in Louisiana. His primary research interests are immigrant educational rights and migrant education. Read below to learn more about him.

Q. What music have you listened to today?

A. The Roots’ live CD. I’m a big Roots fan. I’ve also listened to some jazz, specifically some Coltrane and Wynton Marsalis and Terence Blanchard.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?

A. A teacher.

Q. What is your favorite cocktail?

A. Caipirinha.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?

A. It sounds crazy but, one of the Senate offices in DC.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?

A. I honestly can’t see myself as anything other than a professor. Even if I became an athlete, I would study the kinesthetics of it. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?

A. I grew up with a bunch of kids who came from all areas of the neighborhood. I always remember us playing in the backyard-playing basketball, football, hide-and-go-seek.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?

A. I could say my wedding ring. That would be good for print. But I want to say my camera. I love my camera.

Q. Who is the one person living or dead you would most like to meet for dinner?

A. The person who raised me.

*Photo by Andy Levin.

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Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

-Reviewed by Monica Barra

When fringe opinions are louder than reasonable ones, and seem ready to overwhelm Americans’ ability to understand what’s happening in the world, consider it a cost of free speech.

Charles Pierce makes precisely this case in his Idiot America, exploring with a keen eye and sense of humor how to understand and cope with the effect extremism has on society. Pierce offers a part historical, part elaborately critical take on idiocy in America. Tracing the history of stupidity back to its roots, Pierce’s book is a concerned, wry, and at times biting foray into the people – whom he calls “cranks” – in American history who have led to our contemporary state of ignorance.

Pierce credits the oft-overlooked Founding Father, James Madison, otherwise known as the “diminutive hypochondriac from Virginia,” with recognizing that liberty could have negative consequences. The founders unleashed upon a fairly trusting and compliant public the freedom to express new ideas, whether good or bad. Americans were the perfect audience for the crank. Cranks, as Pierce describes them, reside on the outskirts of the population, and care quite a lot more about having their voices heard and gaining popularity than educating the public. But they have shaped the country’s history, pursuing their role, to work in the “realm of the national imagination… to wander out of its borders and map its frontiers.” Whether or not they brought about good with their explorations, however, is still debatable.

The founding prince of cranks, Pierce says, was one Ignatius Donnelly. Beginning in the early 1800s, Donnelly invested his time in numerous, mostly failed, endeavors: real estate speculation in Minnesota; a political career during which he periodically changed parties to whatever benefitted him the most; and historical studies, his greatest triumph, culminating in a quasi-historical book on the lost city of Atlantis. His repeated failure to gain respect and success from his work only fueled his belief that “he was a genius for whom the world was not yet ready.” If one idea failed, he would try another. He was constantly at odds with a fickle public that wavered between admiration and criticism of his works.

But cranks haven’t been the same since Donnelly, Pierce notes. Cranks of that era might have raged against their dismissive audiences, but they were ultimately content to retreat to the periphery and conjure new schemes. The cranks imagined that while everyone was crazy and unstable, they resided on intellectually higher ground. Today, Pierce shows that cranks have a more intimate and playful relationship with the public. Using media and mass communication, and thanks to easy and cheap access to the web, cranks now have almost limitless freedom to infiltrate the public imagination. Feigning expertise, Pierce notes, has become easier and more marketable.

With relatively unchecked access to the public, cranks have paved the way for stupidity to flourish in America. Giving an ear to individuals and groups on the fringe, Pierce argues, has little by little taken us away from rational and sound thinking, with a real impact on the way the country works. Pierce considers the fallout from a lone man’s attack on the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. After deciding on a design, following months of public meetings and a far-ranging competition, one blogger claimed that the memorial had been deliberately designed in the shape of a crescent, pointing towards Mecca, and counted the terrorists among those memorialized in the design. With a hat-tip to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, he mounted a campaign attacking the memorial’s architects, claiming that they had built a memorial to Islam and not the flight victims. Public outcry eventually forced the architect to straighten out the crescent into a semicircle, appeasing the vocal minority.

Pierce unleashes story after story to drive home his conviction that Americans, swayed by various fringe groups and individuals, have dug themselves too deep into idiocy to find a way out. Even the 2008 election, which saw both candidates, and, Pierce argues, particularly Barack Obama, distancing themselves from and criticizing cranks, didn’t lead to a moment of clarity: “Obama’s rise to the Democratic nomination on a nebulous concept of ‘change’ seemed to be based, at least in part, on the idea that we would all stop conning ourselves. But no.”

Pierce’s book is, as he puts it, a tirade, the result of spending years as a journalist watching, he says, intelligence unravel in the United States. As Pierce observes, “the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of the Church of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida.” It’s the American way.

Excerpt: Human beings are storytelling creatures. We structure reality in terms of narratives. In other words, we start at Point A and get to Point B, and everything in between is called hope. If you’re a human, you’re a storyteller, a story believer, and that’s just the way it is.

Further Reading: The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion and The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals

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In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language

by Arika Okrent

The English language may be packed with irregularities, but at least its curse words are easy.

The same cannot be said of many of the made-up languages Arika Okrent examines in her history of the eccentric and often erratic dreamers who sought to improve on all our spoken tongues by inventing their own. Okrent, drawn to the “faded plastic flowers” among the “lush orchid garden of languages,” explores some ambitious languages and their inventors. The languages might be mostly dire failures, but Okrent’s study is fascinating, accessible, and offers interesting insights into what we say and how we say it.

Between earning a certification in Klingon and attending global Esperanto conferences, Okrent tries mightily to find the word for “shit” in one of the earliest and most comprehensive invented languages. John Wilkins created the Philosophical Language in the 17th century, when it seemed that “any self-respecting gentleman of the day could be expected to have some sort of universal language up his sleeve.” The wholly logical universal language fad compelled Wilkins to create “a sort of arithmetic of letters,” by which everything in the universe was classified and numbered, and each word was composed of letters assigned to classifications. A word, then, would convey Wilkins’ assigned meaning with absolutely no ambiguity. After an exhaustive search of Wilkins’ 600-plus-page dictionary (organized by category, not alphabet), Okrent finds “shit”: “Cepuhws. A serous and watery purgative motion from the consistent and gross parts (from the guts downward).” (Okrent includes a diagram of all “purgation,” which she calls “the seven-year-old boy’s dream catalog of bodily function.”)

Through all the bull-cepuhws of navigating these invented tongues Okrent manages to translate, so to speak, these languages’ “logic” and their often radical notions of what, why, and how we should communicate. She explains languages like the Chinese-character-inspired Blissymbolics, sometimes used for developmentally disabled children, and Basic English, an 850-word version of the language advocated by Winston Churchill. (Though, as Franklin Roosevelt told him, “blood, work, eye water and face water” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”) She finds the word for “to menstruate joyfully” in the female-oriented Láadan, and discovers the closest thing the higher-purpose-free Klingon has to “hello” is “What do you want?” Okrent, a linguist, writes the clean, elegant English of someone who has studied language until it seems to lose all meaning, and come back around to clarity.

Interestingly enough, “clear” is one of the words that gives her some trouble as she tries to translate a Jorge Luis Borges passage on the difficulty of a universal tongue. In Wilkins’ language, she finds 25 options for the word “clear” (unsurprisingly, Wilkins did inspire Roget, it seems, and the thesaurus). And it’s no easier in Loglan – invented by sociologist James Cooke Brown in an attempt to “make logical forms speakable,” to create a language completely free of culture-specific connotation. For her translation, Okrent had to grasp the complex grammar of Loglan (or rather, Lojban, sort of a Loglan 2.0 that Brown tried and failed to squash), and though she managed, Lojbanists told her she was slightly off.

Yes, they’re called Lojbanists, even though there are very few of them and their language is nearly impossible to speak or write. In fact, no matter how obscure and difficult the language, Okrent finds passionate adherents. While language inventors are often motivated by a quixotic search for clarity – to escape from “word magic,” the spell cast by metaphorical and idiomatic or even plain uses of language – language adopters often have different motives and methods, Okrent notes. They are “self-selecting,” they fall in love, and simply by participating in their chosen tongue, no matter its claim to fixed logic and universal applicability, they create a culture complete with customs, idioms, metaphors, and puns. We not only have a drive to invent language, Okrent shows, but also an urge to be inventive within languages. No matter how rigidly logical languages aim to be, communicating, it seems, is always an art.

Excerpt: The primary motivation for inventing a new language has been to improve upon natural language, to eliminate its design flaws, or rather the flaws it has developed for lack of conscious design. Looked at from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster. We have words that mean more than one thing, meanings that have more than one word for them, and some things we’d like to say that, no matter how hard we struggle, seem impossible to put into words. We have irregular verbs, idioms, and exceptions to every grammatical rule – all of which make languages unnecessarily hard to learn. We misunderstand each other all the time; our messages are ambiguous despite our best efforts to be clear. Most of us are content to live with these problems, but over the centuries a bold idea has bloomed again and again in the minds of those who think these problems can be solved: Why not build a better language?

Further Reading: The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe) and The Artificial Language Movement (Language Library)

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Q. What do you wake up to?
A. Darkness. I get up very early and open my eyes to my wonderful wife.

Q. What music have you listened to today?
A. I listened to pop music on 107.5. I do that to work on my Spanish. Basically I listen to news, public radio, and when I need a change of pace, I listen to KLOVE.

Q. What do you find beautiful?
A. Wonderful, giving people.

Q. How would you describe yourself in five words or fewer?
A. Nice guy.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A. An astronaut or a deep-sea diver.

Q. What is your greatest extravagance?
A. Probably this suit, which I got for about $70. My wife and I are into simple living.

Q. If you could take only one more journey, where would you go?
A. I’m really torn because there are lots of places I’d like to go….  My father was European-born and while he left at an early age, everyone else was scattered all over the world by World War II. I’m very close to my family, and if I had one more trip, I would have to come up with some way to see all of them in all those countries.

Q. What profession would you like to practice in your next life?
A. I love journalism. I also enjoy being in communications now, and being able to advocate for a program that I really care about, and for education generally….  But I have no regrets about spending most of my career in journalism, and if we were to turn back the clock I’d do it all over again. It’s a chance for adventure every day.

Q. What would be your death row meal?
A. My wife’s cornmeal pizza.

Q. What is your favorite holiday and why?
A. Thanksgiving and Passover because they’re both thank you holidays, and I’m really thankful for what I have.

Q. What is your fondest childhood memory?
A. Seeing how much people loved my father. He’s still alive, thankfully. He’s a very friendly, outgoing guy, and he always seemed to be able to warm a room. It was wonderful. We’d go somewhere and people would see my dad and call out to him. People were always happy to see him.

Q. What is your most prized material possession?
A. Both my father-in-law, may he rest in peace, and my mother are wonderful artists, so I treasure their paintings.

Q. What promise do you make to yourself that you break the most often?
A. That I’ll be on time.

*Photo by Aaron Salcido.

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