Otherworldly evening

At Splice Today, I report on my recent evening with the SETI Institute, and a memory of Lou Dobbs: "Encountering the Extraterrestrial."

Poached review

I review Rachel Nuwer's Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Tracking at Splice Today.

Family history

Alexei Bayer has written about my family's (father side) history for a Russian Jewish publication. It's in Russian but can be read with Google Translate; but note that the machine translation is not always on target.

An afternoon on the water

At Splice Today, I offer "A View from New York Harbor."

Some other pics from that day:

Max Boot and me

And the non-future of the Republican Party. My latest at Splice Today.

Fake news delivery

My review of LikeWar is here, complete with an Election 2016 anecdote from my own driveway.

Two books that aren't about Trump

I review them here.

In Splice Today today

Science “knows not party politics,” wrote physician and botanist David Hosack in 1811. Hosack took his neutrality seriously. He avoided not only aligning with a political party but also taking sides in the political rivalry between his friends Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. He was the doctor who attended to Hamilton at the site of the 1804 duel and at Hamilton’s deathbed a day later. Though stricken by Hamilton’s loss, Hosack maintained his friendship with Burr.

The rest is here, including about Hosack's friendship with DeWitt Clinton.

Spartan story

Reflections on ancient Greece and Rick Wilson's new book here.

Venezuela memories

At Splice Today, a bit of memoir: "The Venezuela I Once Knew." Excerpt:

Venezuela in the 1980s was not much of a tourist destination, though its troubles would get far worse. I was there three times, accompanying my father on business trips for the New York-based import-export firm where he traded what in Venezuela were frijoles; in Puerto Rico, habichuelas; back home, beans. 

Recent news that “Trump pressed aides about invading Venezuela” suggests a serious deficiency in the president’s judgment. For me, it also stirs memories.

The roots of mendacity

Over at Splice Today, I review Michiko Kakutani's new book The Death of Truth.

In DeWitt's Footsteps

For info on my book, In DeWitt's Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal, see eriecanalbook.com. Or buy it on Amazon. Also, see its Twitter and FB pages.

Review: David Frum's Trumpocracy

I read David Frum's new book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic in just a couple of sittings, and highly recommend it to people across the political spectrum, including current Trump supporters, as it is a valuable, cogent analysis that will provoke thinking and rethinking.

First, some context and disclosure: David is a friend of mine. I was a regular contributor to his onetime website FrumForum; among the articles I wrote there were ones on early American history that turned out to be early stages of research for my book about DeWitt Clinton and the Erie Canal. I broadly share Frum's desire for, to quote a passage in Trumpocracy, "a conservatism that is culturally modern, economically inclusive, and environmentally responsible, that upholds markets at home and US leadership internationally." We have some differences, of course, one being my more favorable view of immigration (watching the Trump administration's actions in this area has firmed up this opinion). David remains a member of the Republican Party, whereas I switched to independent the day after Trump clinched the nomination.

A formidable strength of David's, manifest throughout Trumpocracy, is his capacity to follow arguments where they lead, regardless of whether the results are pleasing to any particular political faction. He is known as a "Never Trump" Republican, but unlike some such he has no illusion that all was well with the GOP before Trump came along. (By contrast, see this Jay Nordlinger piece about leaving a party that had been suddenly--inexplicably--disfigured by Trump.) Democrats eager to plunge into a book about Trump's authoritarianism may be discombobulated, early on, to read about how President Barack Obama stated that circumventing Congress on immigration was beyond the rightful powers of his office--and then did so anyway when that became politically expedient.

My statement above that I hope Trump supporters will read Trumpocracy is in earnest. In this era, we have become cynical about the ability of facts and logic to change minds, and I suspect we have gone too far in discounting such possibilities. There are, I imagine, some Trump-supporting Americans who will be alarmed at seeing evidence of the widening chasms between Trumpism's sales pitch and its reality: a nationalism determinedly oblivious to the machinations of hostile foreign governments; a populism intensely focused on benefitting wealthy donors and enriching those in power; a proclamation of American strength while weakening alliances and values that have been crucial to America's position in the world; a religiosity in defense of a man who pays blackmail to porn stars.

Readers of various political stripes may be surprised by the optimism of the book's final chapter. Frum notes some quite unintended benefits that Trump has brought to the American political scene, such as: a greater awareness of the importance of truth, precisely because the president is so grossly untruthful; on the left, a growing concern about national security, in contrast to a onetime dismissal of the idea that Russia is any kind of a threat; and for the right, an opportunity to look beyond stale ideological orthodoxy--albeit perhaps at the price of an impending political catastrophe.

In a telling anecdote, Frum recounts how an attendee viewing a panel discussion complained along these lines: "We can't stop Donald Trump by going soft. If we want to stop him, we have to imitate him." To which David answered: "But if you imitate him, you won't stop him. You'll only replace him." Trumpocracy is a powerful argument for a post-Trump era that truly leaves the man's legacy behind.

2018

Greetings. Blogging is only occasional at this site currently. Please see my Twitter feed, my book website and related Twitter feed, and the Amazon page for my book In DeWitt's Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal.

Book event: Wyckoff Library, Nov. 16 [updated]

Nov. 16 at 7pm at the Wyckoff Free Public Library. Register here.

For more info, see my book website, and its page on book-related events.

UPDATE: Video of the event is here. The video has a few intermittent production issues, especially in the early minutes.

In DeWitt's Footsteps [updated]

My book In DeWitt's Footsteps: Seeing History on the Erie Canal has been published. Read more about it here, here and here. Buy it on Amazon here.

Update 10/8: A list of book-related events is here. And here's video of an appearance this weekend:

Event: PhACT 9/16 [updated]

Back in 2012, I did a talk on science and politics for the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking (PhACT). I'll be returning to take a new look at the subject on Sept. 16 (click to enlarge).

In the Philly area 9/16? Hear me talk on science & politics at the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking. https://t.co/2Q6QmBGZIE pic.twitter.com/f1qniFz9Kk

— Kenneth Silber (@kennethsilber) August 25, 2017

UPDATE: Video:

Slides.

UPDATE 10/16: Nice writeup in the October edition of Phactum. (Click below to enlarge.)

UPDATE 10/19: Chapman's Wave 4.

Erie Canal at 200: links

As July 4 is the 200th anniversary of the groundbreaking of the Erie Canal, a number of articles and posts have appeared lately about the canal's history and DeWitt Clinton. Some links are below. My book on the subject will be out later this year, mixing history with family history as DeWitt Clinton is a direct ancestor of my wife and son; and featuring extensive photos of what you see now as you travel the canal's historic and modern paths. More to come about the book in the next couple months.

News flash: Clinton Street was NOT named for Hillary Clinton (Chicago Sun Times)

200 Years on the Erie Canal (Commentary magazine)

200 Years Ago, Erie Canal Got Its Start as Just a ‘Ditch’ (NY Times)

New York's Erie Canal: How a 200-year-old ditch made the Empire State (NewYorkUpstate.com)

What Donald Trump said about the Erie Canal (Rochester Democrat and Chronicle)

Review: Into the Gray Zone

Adrian Owen's new book Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death is a fascinating and surprising book. I was surprised by the evidence discussed in it that some people who are deemed to be in a vegetative state actually experience the world around them, and can even communicate with the aid of advanced technologies and clever techniques. For example, Owen and his team asked seemingly unconscious patients to respond to questions yes or no by thinking about playing a game of tennis or walking through their own house, thoughts that generate distinct patterns of brain activity that can be scanned.

Such evidence of consciousness has both hopeful and disturbing implications--opening possibilities that people though to be irretrievably lost may not be so, and may have a heightened prospect of recovery; while also raising concerns about previously unsuspected suffering. Here we have both cutting-edge science and clinical ramifications that may profoundly impact people's lives. Owen tells a remarkably personal story about his work and the people he's met. A key figure in the book is Maureen, his onetime girlfriend, who pressed him to focus his science on helping people--and who later had an accident that left her in a vegetative state.

Into the Gray Zone also edges into philosophical and speculative territory, about the nature of consciousness and free will, and about how future technologies will peer into the brain or extend its powers. This book offers much to think about, and I expect it will get considerable attention.

Review: The Farthest

I saw The Farthest last night at the Tribeca Film Festival and highly recommend it. This is about the Voyager space probes and the people who sent them to the outer solar system and beyond. That mission not only opened vast new vistas of exploration but also marked an early example of the synergy of humans and robots in achieving unprecedented things (and, remarkably, doing it with 1970s computing technology now comparable to a key fob). The film does an adept job at interweaving science communication, striking imagery and personal recollections, with narration provided by numerous interviews with project scientists, engineers and other participants.

My lifelong interest in space exploration was sparked in considerable degree, I'm sure, by seeing the images of Jupiter and Saturn returned by the Voyagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Seeing the film's interview with Linda Morabito, the astronomer who first saw an image of a volcanic eruption on Jupiter's moon Io, reminded me that I saw her in a TV interview back at the time. It was also good to see Nick Sagan, my onetime Space.com colleague, discuss his parents' and his own involvement with the golden record, which includes his own voice saying immortally, "Hello from the children of planet Earth." A very funny bit of the movie recalls a press conference about that record that NASA, reluctant to emphasize the mission's "alien" aspect, relegated to a hotel banquet hall with a wedding in progress on the other side of a room divider.

I expect the film will find an audience among the sorts of people I've worked with in science- and space-focused journalism, and I hope it will find a broader audience as well. An interesting perspective from the filmmakers, who were present last night for a Q and A and who are from Ireland, is that this is a uniquely American story; no other country has done anything like this, on such a scale. At the same time (and as reflected in the multilingual, multicultural golden record) the mission was an achievement for humanity at large. And while this particular feat won't happen again (it hinged on a once-in-176-year planetary alignment) may the future have much more where that came from.