Religion, Marx famously observed, is “the opiate of the masses”. And Americans are pretty heavy users: at any rate they seem to have religion the way dogs have fleas. But, as Scott Shane points out in a terrific piece, they are also addicted to another opiate — exceptionalism, the notion that the US is, somehow, better than anywhere else on the planet.

Imagine, he writes, “a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States trails its economic peers”.

What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only 28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the U.S. ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the U.S. trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.

How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Answer: Nowhere.

Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.

Candidates and presidents generally oblige them, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included. It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs. It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the U.S. leads the world.

And that, my friends, explain why US Presidential elections seem so puerile to the rest of us. Or at any rate to those of us who think that the US is really just another country, with some good points and an awful lot of lunatic downsides.

Thanks to Jon Crowcroft for the link to the chart.

A year after he died, a Dutch boatbuilder has launched Venus, the yacht he commissioned. More here.

Composing headlines that are both funny or striking AND accurate is a pretty difficult art. On the other hand, composing headlines that are funny and misleading is dead easy. This lead story from the Cambridge student newspaper is a textbook case of the latter. The peg for it is the fact that Cambridge University had a very successful 40-year bond issue yesterday to raise money for the next phase of the University’s development, which includes a massive new development in North-West Cambridge. The issue — which was for £350 million — was massively (four times) oversubscribed.

The Varsity story under the headline is actually reasonably accurate. But clearly the sub-editor who composed the headline hadn’t read it. A bond issue is not an asset sale, but a standard way used by governments, institutions and corporations to borrow money at favourable rates. The real story behind the bond issue is that the ratings agencies — and the pension funds that rely on them to assess creditworthiness — think that Cambridge University is a better bet than most of the governments in the Western world.

Still (to look on the bright side), the kid who wrote the headline may have a promising future — on the Daily Express, perhaps. Or perhaps the Star.

Fascinating piece by Freeman Dyson, who lived on the same staircase as Wittgenstein in Whewell’s Court across from Trinity Great Gate.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

The photograph shows Wittgenstein’s grave as it is now. Larger size here.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried one of these tiny Swiss Army knives, and scarcely a day goes by without it being called upon for some humdrum but vital purpose. It’s been such a constant companion that, on several occasions, I’ve had to sacrifice it to airport security when travelling with only cabin baggage (though on my last flight I asked the Airport Security if it was still verboten and they said “no” — so it travelled with me).

Its one drawback is that the scissors is too small for some tasks. So recently I looked for an alternative, and came up with this tiny Leatherman tool.

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It’s slightly heavier and more bulky, but it has a terrific pair of scissors.

All that remains now is to find if I can take it with me when I fly. And — since you ask — it doesn’t have a tool for taking stones out of horses’ hooves. But then, I sold my horse ages ago and bought a Toyota.

Conan O’Brien came to address the Philosophical Society at Trinity College, Dublin. The first ten minutes or so are unmissable IMHO. Thanks to Lorcan Dempsey for the (tweeted) link.

Lovely review in the New Yorker of by James Wood of Tom Wolfe’s new book.

Tom Wolfe writes Big and Tall Prose—big subjects, big people, and yards of flapping exaggeration. No one of average size emerges from his shop; in fact, no real human variety can be found in his fiction, because everyone has the same enormous excitability. So his new novel, “Back to Blood” (Little, Brown), is supposedly about Miami. But it is about Miami not as, say, “Dead Souls” is about Russia or “Seize the Day” is about New York but more as heavy metal is about noise: not a description of the property but a condition of its excess. If it is about Miami, then “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full” were also about Miami, not about New York and Atlanta, respectively. The content and the style haven’t changed much since “The Bonfire of the Vanities” was published, in 1987: select your city; presume it to be a site of simmering racial and ethnic civil war, always a headline away from a riot; throw a sensational news story into the fire; and watch the various interest groups immolate themselves.

Woods really nails the excesses of Wolfe’s style. For example:

The real writer, it is understood, must leave the enervating study and the filtered formalisms of postmodern prose, go out and hit the sidewalks (where the exclamation marks cluster in giant, swaying crowds!), and register the teeming ideological and racial realities.

Worth reading in full.

From Paul Krugman’s blog.

Hmm. A late thought about the discussion on This Week. I suggested that it was the job of the news media to check on and report falsehoods from politicians. The response of the other panelists was that the media can’t do that if the opposing candidates didn’t make an issue of it — which as far as I can tell makes no sense at all.

But even granted that, the fact is that the Obama campaign is making an issue of Romney’s falsehoods, or at least trying to. Yet this is apparently considered unworthy of attention, because Obama didn’t make a forceful attack right there on the spot.

So let’s see if I have this straight: it’s not the job of the press to take on political falsehoods unless the other side makes a forceful case in 30 seconds or less. Glad to see that this has been clarified.

Hmmm x 2. I saw the discussion in question and was appalled by the attitude of the other participants. What underpins it is the fatal flaw in American journalism — the ‘balance as bias’ syndrome. Krugman made the point many years ago in a talk to students at Harvard, as this report recounts:

Krugman was a riot on Big Media’s docility. “If Bush said the earth is flat, of course Fox News would say ‘yes, the earth is flat, and anyone who says different is unpatriotic.’ And mainstream media would have stories with the headline: ‘Shape of Earth: Views Differ.’…and would at most report that some Democrats say that it’s round.” There’s “something deeply dysfunctional,” he observed, with established media facing “something we’ve not seen before, an epidemic of lying about policy.”

Jim Al-Khalili has an interesting piece in today’s Guardian arguing that the Nobel prizes need a shakeup.

Of course one can argue that scientific progress has been taking place for hundreds of years and it is just that we are so much better now at reporting it. This is true. But one thing has changed: research disciplines previously unconnected are now starting to overlap and merge, with physicists, chemists, biologists, engineers, medics, computer scientists and mathematicians pooling their expertise to attack common problems. One such exciting field that is coming of age is quantum biology – where quantum physicists like me work alongside molecular biologists to attempt to explain a number of baffling phenomena in living cells.

He’s right. The rise of data-intensive science means that the original idea behind the Nobel prizes is beginning to look inadequate.