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It’s possible to understand the different sides of the Southern scribe through his choice of drinks:

Kay Boyle wrote in The New Republic in 1938 that there were two Faulkners, “the one who stayed down south and the one who went to war in France and mixed with foreigners and aviators.” The former was elegant, a bit rambly, and “almost ludicrously authentic”; while the latter, inspired by the modernism of Joyce, Eliot, and Stein, was dense, allusive, Guernica-contorted and Guernica-grim, but always (Boyle remarked sharply) “a little awed, a little unsure, provincially aware of the chances he is taking.”

I like to think of these two Faulkners as embodied in his two favorite cocktails: the toddy and the mint julep. The julep is High Faulknerian. Taking in the dense, lush language in his most lauded works—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!—is precisely like burying one’s nose in a tangle of fresh mint and sipping a strong bourbon. But the other Faulkner, the one who stayed down south, exemplified by the Snopes trilogy and Sanctuary and Light in August, is more like a cold toddy: light, citrusy, superficially graceful, yet deceptively complex.

Faulkner occasionally worked the specific recipes into his fiction:

The key to a toddy, according to Faulkner, is that the sugar must be dissolved into a small amount of water before the whiskey is added, otherwise it “lies in a little intact swirl like sand at the bottom of the glass.” (One of Faulkner’s short stories, “An Error in Chemistry,” hinges on this point: a northern murderer, pretending to be a Southern gentleman, mistakenly mixes sugar with “raw whiskey”; the Southerners recognize his faux pas and immediately pounce on him.) Once the sugar is dissolved, the whiskey is poured over it. Top it off, to taste, with the remaining water—preferably “rainwater from a cistern.”

Previous Dish on Faulkner here, here and here. More on drinking and writing here, here, here and here.

Hannah Gersen praises Claudia Roth Pierpont’s Roth Unbound, which is both a study of Philip Roth’s work and a kind of literary biography. Pierpont contends that “for a portrait of what occupied the majority of his time and thoughts — his fiction — I doubt there will be anything more revealing than this volume”:

[O]ne thing that makes Roth Unbound interesting is that Pierpont was able to interview Roth in the first years of his retirement. You can feel Roth’s reflective, relaxed state of mind as he looks back on his career, cataloging his regrets and triumphs. His regrets mostly fall in the realm of his personal life, most significantly his first marriage, which he believes held him back, emotionally and artistically, for most of his late twenties and early thirties, years Roth now views as lost. Another low point occurred in the late nineties, when his ex-wife, Claire Bloom, wrote a memoir that included a scathing account of her marriage to Roth. The memoir had, in Pierpont’s words, “a tremendous effect on Roth’s personal reputation — perhaps more than anything since Portnoy’s Complaint.”

Heller McAlpin notes the costs and benefits of a critique written by a declared admirer:

Pierpont dutifully — and defensively — addresses the accusations of anti-Semitism and misogyny that have shadowed Roth throughout his career, the latter amplified after the 1996 publication of his second wife Claire Bloom’s furious post-divorce memoir, Leaving the Doll’s House.

“It should be clear by now,” she comments, “that Roth, when attacked, prefers to goad rather than retreat: to make mischief, to get adrenaline flowing.” It often seems that he’s fueled by what Mickey Sabbath, his “deliberately abrasive and insanely funny” misanthropic character in Sabbath’s Theater, called the male hormone: “preposterone.”

In her enthusiasm, Pierpont occasionally goes over the top with “not since” pronouncements. “It’s possible that not since Proust has a writer so nearly captured Time,” she writes of Sabbath’s Theater. Or, more broadly: “Not since Henry James, it seems to me, has an American novelist worked at such a sustained pitch of concentration and achievement, book after book after book.” Which leaves me wondering: What about John Updike and Saul Bellow (both of whose relationships with Roth she considers at length)? Not to mention Joyce Carol Oates and E.L. Doctorow.

Cornel Bonca senses Roth hovering over the author’s shoulder, and suggests the book is “part of his attempt to preempt the rough treatment that his controversial career is likely to attract from future biographers”:

Most critical biographies of American writers don’t have the luxury to surge in appreciation toward the end: How many Americans, other than James (and maybe Pynchon?) have such great late periods to celebrate? Even the late novellas — certainly “Everyman” and “Exit Ghost” — have a distilled mastery that show none of the fall-off that’s apparent in, say, Bellow’s late novellas. The reason that Roth stuck with short forms in his last books and then decided to stop writing altogether is suggested in “Exit Ghost” — there [character Nathan] Zuckerman’s memory is so bad that he finds it increasingly tough to keep the details of a fictional narrative in his head, and Roth underlines this with Pierpont. Speaking of his disappointment with Bellow’s “Ravelstein,” he says “It’s hard to write a book at 84. It’s hard to remember from day to day what you’ve done.”

But having stopped writing doesn’t mean Roth is through. As terrific and independent a literary critic as Pierpont is, Roth has got his prints all over this book: In the end it feels like a joint effort to navigate the stormy seas of literary reputation and bring Roth home to the port of The American Canon. It certainly convinces me.

Previous Dish on Roth here, here, and here.

James Somers profiles Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive scientist and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, “the bible of artificial intelligence.” Though Hofstadter seemed poised to become a leading figure in AI research after the publication of GEB in 1979, Somers observes that “then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared”:

He would increasingly find himself out of a mainstream that had embraced a new imperative: to make machines perform in any way possible, with little regard for psychological plausibility. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,” Hofstadter says. “That’s what we’re interested in—what is thinking?” Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force. For each legal move it could make at a given point in the game, it would consider its opponent’s responses, its own responses to those responses, and so on for six or more steps down the line. With a fast evaluation function, it would calculate a score for each possible position, and then make the move that led to the best score. What allowed Deep Blue to beat the world’s best humans was raw computational power. It could evaluate up to 330 million positions a second, while Kasparov could evaluate only a few dozen before having to make a decision.

Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory?

“Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?” A brand of AI that didn’t try to answer such questions—however impressive it might have been—was, in Hofstadter’s mind, a diversion. He distanced himself from the field almost as soon as he became a part of it. “To me, as a fledgling AI person,” he says, “it was self-evident that I did not want to get involved in that trickery. It was obvious: I don’t want to be involved in passing off some fancy program’s behavior for intelligence when I know that it has nothing to do with intelligence. And I don’t know why more people aren’t that way.”

Previous Dish on artificial intelligence here, here, and here.

While reading Darrin M. McMahon’s Divine Fury: A History of Genius, Popova tracks the evolution of the notion of uncommon brilliance:

This construction of genius as “a figure of extraordinary privilege and power,” McMahon argues, began in ancient Greece, where the era’s luminaries — poets, philosophers, politicians — first pondered the question of what makes a great man. (For, as McMahon explores in a later chapter, the original concept of genius was an exercise in cultural hegemony excluding women and various “others.”) The Romans picked up the inquiry where the Greeks had left off, seeking to understand what lent Julius Caesar his military might and why Homer could enchant as he did. This quest continued through Christianity, which attempted to answer it with the image of the God-man Christ, the ultimate genius. During the Renaissance, da Vinci and Michelangelo bent this fascination with Godlike genius through the lens of art, attempting both to capture it and to further illuminate its elusive nature.

And so we get to the modern genius. McMahon writes:

The modern genius was born in the eighteenth century—conceived, in keeping with long-standing prejudices, almost exclusively as a man. There were precedents for this birth, stretching all the way back to antiquity. But that the birth itself occurred in the bright place of deliverance we call “the Enlightenment” is clear. Scholars have long recognized the genius’s emergence in this period as the highest human type, a new paragon of human excellence who was the focus of extensive contemporary comment and observation.

What remains a mystery, however, is why the genius emerged in the first place, and why it did under those specific circumstances of time and place. Tracing scholars’ attempts to answer these questions, McMahon points to several factors, ranging from the rise of capitalism to the evolution of aesthetics to new models of authorship and selfhood. But his own explanation has to do with something else entirely: The religious change described as the “withdrawal from God” — a collective pulling back from spiritual companions, which opened up a space for humans to embrace self-reliance as we came to entrust ourselves with the fate of our civilization and our individual lives. That, in turn, catalyzed the birth of the modern genius — at once a stand-in for God and a testament to the human spirit at its highest potential.

Previous Dish on genius here.

John Ganiard defends the the much-maligned teenagers of Selfies At Funerals:

Inevitably, a funeral does make you think about yourself, about being alive and about being dead. … [I]sn’t vanity a defense against death? And isn’t dismissing a selfie as purely “vain” also dismissing this form of nascent inquiry and self-preservation? In the New York Times, Jenna Wortham wrote, “Rather than dismissing the trend as a side effect of digital culture or a sad form of exhibitionism, maybe we’re better off seeing selfies for what they are at their best – a kind of visual diary, a way to mark our short existence and hold it up to others as proof that we were here. The rest, of course, is open to interpretation.”

The face you send out from a funeral is just your face again, and still, a reminder to others of our self’s current aliveness is – somehow, no matter the circumstances, and perhaps at a funeral, uniquely so – a denial of the inescapable, a refraction of the dark light of death. At the least it’s a way of saying, “If I have to see this, then everybody else has to see it too.”

PJ Vogt scolds the blogosphere for jumping on the story:

It’s obvious how you’re supposed to feel about this. You’re supposed to laugh at the kids. The joke is that they’re so relentlessly narcissistic that even the death of a loved one is just another chance to post their pictures online. Gawker published a clickbait piece grabbing the photos and appending commentary:

Selfies at Funerals is the last tumblr you see before you die because your body will simply shut down once it realizes it’s being forced to share the same plane of existence with the kind of people who think it’s completely normal to snap selfies at funerals and upload them to social media sites with the caption ‘love my hair today, hate why I’m dressed up’ and the hashtag “#funeral.”

I’m exhausted by the practice of mining social networks for supposedly ignorant or narcissistic utterances by children and then publishing them online for adults to judge. Yes, the kids are speaking publicly, and in doing so they’ve somewhat disavowed their right to privacy. But is this the kind of adult you wanted to be? A person who is completely astounded that the younger generation doesn’t share their values. A person who has no curiosity about why young people might do things in a new or different way from you.

It’s one thing to write under the influence, but Nick Richardson admires a writer who can labor while hungover:

Joyce would rise late, after an inebriated evening spent belting out songs at the local boozer, and get his writing done in the early afternoon ‘when the mind is at its best’. Cheever did much the same, but got out of bed earlier. Hemingway would stay up boozing but be at his typewriter by six the following morning. He famously wrote standing up: because his leg had been injured in the war, he said, but also to stop himself drifting off. Francis Bacon used to paint hungover, though not because his mind was sufficiently numb to be able to concentrate, but because it was revved up: ‘I often like working with a hangover,’ he said, ‘because my mind is crackling with energy and I can think very clearly.’ …

At the tamest end of the revver spectrum are the dozens of maestri who couldn’t get going without a cup of coffee. There are so many variations of ‘x got up, had a cup of coffee and sat down at his desk to work’ in Daily Rituals that it can feel, at times, a bit like Queneau’s Exercices de style as reimagined by a breakfast fetishist. At the more extreme end are people like Stravinsky, who used to pull handstands to get the blood to his head; Benjamin Franklin, who used to sit naked in his room for half an hour or so each morning, taking his bracing ‘air bath’; and Sartre, who would, every day, consume twenty Corydane, a mix of amphetamine and aspirin fashionable in 1950s Paris, now banned.

Previous Dish on drinking and writing here, here and here.

Richard Vedder warns that American universities are on a “tax-exempt debt binge” that will only end in disaster. “A decade ago, no one seriously predicted cities would go bankrupt, forcing municipal bondholders to absorb large losses,” he writes. “In a few years, we will probably be hearing similar stories about some universities”:

Schools are exuberantly borrowing, in some cases issuing 100-year (century) bonds. Some bond offerings are justified, even wise, as schools are taking advantage of low interest rates to reduce future debt-service obligations. But a lot of this activity is financing construction of high-end student housing, faddish “centers” and stadiums. … Ohio State University borrowed $500 million for 100 years, mostly to build new dormitories. Will the buildings last as long as the debt used to pay for them? Not likely. The University of California issued $860 million in century bonds last year and, as an encore, an additional $2.39 billion in conventional debt recently. (If that sounds like a huge amount, consider that Harvard University, which has about 22,000 students compared with the UC system’s more than 225,000, is more than $6 billion in debt – about $300,000 for every student.) These debt-financed building sprees are increasingly troublesome at a time of unsustainably rising college costs.

Update from a reader:

I got super excited when I saw that post. Then I realized it was just about universities that couldn’t pay their bills. Yawn. Update me when I can attend Marianas Trench Tech.

Roberto A. Ferdman passes along Morgan Stanley research claiming that we are in the middle of a global wine shortage. Felix Salmon spots numerous errors with it:

The Morgan Stanley report paints a picture of a long-term secular downward trend in area under vine, which is running straight into a long-term secular upward trend in global demand for wine. But reality is more complicated than that: thanks to a combination of technology and global warming, an acre of vines can reliably produce more wine, and better wine, than it ever did in the 1970s. And of course if demand for wine really does start consistently exceeding supply, then there’s no reason why area under vine can’t stop going down and start going up.

But never mind all that: the Morgan Stanley report has numbers and charts, and journalists are very bad at being skeptical when faced with such things. Even Finz’s Chronicle article, which sensibly poured cold water on the report, ends with a “Wine by the numbers” box which simply reproduces all of Morgan Stanley’s flawed figures. And besides, the debunkings are never going to go viral in the way that the original “wine shortage!” articles did.

Update from a reader:

“then there’s no reason why area under vine can’t stop going down and start going up.” Yep, the Spaniards brought wine grapes to California hundreds of years before what seems like half the state was growing grapes. And apples. My cousins live in western Sonoma county, have since the ’70s. It used to be covered in apple orchards. It’s now covered in grape vines. Making small batches, 50 dollar a bottle wine. Which probably makes them more money than sending apples to the apple processing plant in Sebastopol.

Ohio used to be famous for its Champagne. Then Prohibition came along and they stopped making Champagne. The big apple orchard just west of here has begun experimenting with making apple wine, as opposed to hard cider, and even has varietals. Apple wine goes much better with turkey than a Chardonnay. But then I’m of the opinion that Chardonnay doesn’t go with much of anything, Just like I’m of the opinion that most of the time the inky red stuff in a 5 liter bottle is better with whatever going on the table compared to 50 dollar bottles of stuff that’s been thought about too much from where the apple orchard used to be on the drive to my cousin’s house. One of them proudly poured a small glass of the supposedly really good stuff for us. We were polite and said it was interesting and couldn’t think of what it would pair with … because it would pair with refinishing your floors in a spilled wine stain color. I’m didn’t ask how they got that particular balance of turpentine, rusty nails and a undertone of kerosene. The flavor of oak sawdust muted it all. I’m sure the vintner thought it was great. It was overwrought.

Most people most of the time swill stuff from boxes. There’s always going to be enough grapes around to make stuff to fill those boxes. Even if they have to chop down the apple orchards and grow grapes instead. Or stop growing corn and soybeans and grow grapes instead. There’s decent stuff coming from the Finger Lakes, from land that would be good for apples but not for corn or soybeans. It’s too steep… there might be some shortages of some things in the short term but it’s not going to be a long term problem. Unless we are stupid enough to let the world population grow and grow and grow. Then we have other more pressing problems than if there’s a shortage of Pinot Noir.

Humans will eventually reach the limits of their waste-generating capacity, according to three World Bank researchers. But you won’t be around to celebrate:

By 2000, the 2.9 billion people living in cities (49 percent of the world’s population) were creating more than 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day. By 2025 it will be twice that – enough to fill a line of rubbish trucks 5,000 kilometers long every day. … Although OECD countries will peak by 2050 and Asia-Pacific countries by 2075, waste will continue to rise in the fast-growing cities of sub-Saharan Africa. The urbanization trajectory of Africa will be the main determinant of the date and intensity of global peak waste. Using ‘business-as-usual’ projections, we predict that, by 2100, solid-waste generation rates will exceed 11 million tonnes per day – more than three times today’s rate.

Joseph Stromberg searches for solutions:

[T]here are cultural and policy dimensions to waste production. The average person in Japan, for example, creates about one-third less trash than an American, even though the two countries have similar levels of GDP per person.

This is partly because of higher-density living arrangements and higher prices for imported goods, but also because of norms surrounding consumption. In many Japanese municipalities, trash must be disposed in clear bags (to publicly show who isn’t bothering to recycle) and recyclables are routinely sorted into dozens of categories, policies driven by the limited amount of space for landfills in the small country.

Creating policies that give incentive to people to produce less waste elsewhere, therefore, could be a way of tackling the problem. But, because our garbage is just the end result of a host of industrial activities, some reduction measures will be less important than others. Designing recyclable packaging would be a much less useful solution, for instance, than designing products that don’t need to be replaced as often. Even better, as [researcher Daniel] Hoornweg and his coauthors argue in the article, would be accelerating ongoing increases in education and economic development in the developing world, especially Africa, which would cause urban population growth – and also the amount of trash produced per capita – to level off sooner.

The root of Rand Paul’s dystopic fears:

Ferris Jabr explores the ethical controversies of reproductive technologies such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which help prevent and treat diseases as well as predetermine the characteristics of children:

In a few cases, people have used PGD to guarantee that a child will have what many others would consider a disability, such as dwarfism or deafness. In the early 2000s, lesbian couple Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough—both deaf from birth—visited one sperm bank after another searching for a donor who was also congenitally deaf. All the banks declined their request or said they did not take sperm from deaf men, but the couple got what they were looking for from a family friend. Their son, Gauvin McCullough, was born in November 2001; he is mostly deaf but has some hearing in one ear. Deafness, the couple argued, is not a medical condition or defect—it is an identity, a culture. Many doctors and ethicists disagreed, berating Duchesneau and McCullough for deliberately depriving a child of one of his primary senses.

Much more commonly, hopeful parents in the past decade have been paying upwards of $18,000 to choose the sex of their child.

Sometimes the purpose of such sex selection is avoiding a disease caused by a mutation on the X chromosome: girls are much less likely to have these illnesses because they have two X chromosomes, so one typical copy of the relevant gene can compensate for its mutated counterpart. Like Marie and Antonio Freeman in Gattaca, however, many couples simply want a boy or a girl. Perhaps they have had three boys in a row and long for a girl. Or maybe their culture values sons far more than daughters.

Although the U.K., Canada and many other countries have prohibited non-medical sex selection through PGD, the practice is legal in the U.S. The official policy of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine is as follows: “Whereas preimplantation sex selection is appropriate to avoid the birth of children with genetic disorders, it is not acceptable when used solely for nonmedical reasons.” Yet in a 2006 survey of 186 U.S. fertility clinics, 58 allowed parents to choose sex as a matter of preference. And that was seven years ago. More recent statistics are scarce, but fertility experts confirm that sex selection is more prevalent now than ever.

From Hanna Rosin’s 2010 essay, “The End of Men“:

In the ’90s, when [biologist Ronald] Ericsson looked into the numbers for the two dozen or so clinics that use his [sex-selection] process, he discovered, to his surprise, that couples were requesting more girls than boys, a gap that has persisted, even though Ericsson advertises the method as more effective for producing boys. In some clinics, Ericsson has said, the ratio is now as high as 2 to 1. Polling data on American sex preference is sparse, and does not show a clear preference for girls. But the picture from the doctor’s office unambiguously does. A newer method for sperm selection, called MicroSort, is currently completing Food and Drug Administration clinical trials. The girl requests for that method run at about 75 percent.

Previous Dish on genomic and genetic testing here, here, and here.