Going to the source

When we read history written by Candice Millard, it is easy to imagine we're watching a movie. Whether she is telling about Theodore Roosevelt nearly dying while exploring the Amazon (The River of Doubt) or the death of President Garfield (Destiny of the Republic), her details are so vivid that we picture them as if on a giant screen.

This happens again in River of the Gods (2022), her book about the attempts by Richard Burton and John Speke to find the source of the Nile. How could someone not want to make a movie about this?

Now it seems hard to imagine that finding the source of the Nile River was considered so important to mid-19th century explorers. As Millard tells, it was mostly an excuse to explore the interior of Africa, which was then still largely a mystery to those in Western Europe. Europeans went to the coast of Africa to buy slaves, but they didn't know what they might find in the interior of this huge continent.

Burton and Speke began as allies, turned into rivals and eventually became enemies. This was more Speke's doing, than Burton's. Burton was easy going and quick to forgive. Not so Speke.

Burton was a restless British intellectual who spent little time in Britain. He learned languages easily and made most of his money translating dirty books from other cultures. He considered the Nile a worthy challenge, and hired Speke, a dedicated hunter, to go with him on his underfunded expedition in 1856.

Both men were sick from one illness or injury or another for most of the journey. They discovered Lake Tanganyika, which seemed like a good candidate for the source, but Speke alone was healthy enough to make it to Nyanza, which he renamed for Queen Victoria, and decided that was the true source. Burton remained unconvinced, but Speke beat Burton back to London and took all the credit, even though Burton had headed the expedition.

Speke later returned to Africa to better explore Lake Victoria. Back in London, although Speke had the advantage of seeing Lake Victoria and of having more friends and more money, he was a terrible writer and a terrible speaker, skills that Burton possessed in spades. On the night before they were scheduled to debate the subject, Speke, the experienced hunter, "accidentally" killed himself with a shotgun.

There is much more to the story, of course, and Millard tells it well. Even now the question of the source of the Nile may not be entirely answered. After all, there are rivers feeding into Lake Victoria. So where is the true source of the Nile?

Still Popular after all these years

I happened to acquire an April 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine at the same time I had a May/June 2024 issue. So how much has this long-surviving magazine changed in 75 years?

The first obvious change is the size. The magazine has become both larger and smaller. Once 6 1/2 by 9 1/2 inches, Popular Mechanics has grown to 7 by 10. Yet the magazine that had 336 pages in the 1949 edition now has just 76 pages. And this is a magazine that now publishes just six times a year, rather than 12.

The price has jumped from 35 cents to $5.99. Compared to other magazine prices, $5.99 still seems like a bargain.

The difference in pages clearly stems from the fact that the older magazine contains significantly more advertising. It also contains numerous short articles, rather than just a few longer ones.

The covers are strikingly different. The earlier issue shows a man pointing toward a new house and telling a woman, "We built this cabin for $300." The more recent issue shows a circle of moons from our solar system. In the middle are the words "Every. Single. Moon. Ranked." This is Popular Mechanics? It looks more like Popular Science.

Articles in the older issue cover such subjects as how to swing a golf club, fly casting, handmade paper, how debris is removed from New York harbor and, of course, building that $300 cabin.

Other than the main article about moons, which I found to be the most interesting article in either magazine, the contents of the 2024 version of Popular Mechanics are not that unexpected. There are articles about California freeways, a female participant in the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb and the best way to fix foundation cracks.

Popular Mechanics magazine has always covered a lot of ground, something for everybody.  And now it even covers the stars. Or at least the moons.

Second chances

In Carla Buckley's intriguing 2019 novel The Liar's Child, there is so much lying going on that it is never quite clear to whom the title refers. And this proves to be a good thing when truth eventually wins out.

Sara Lennox gets a new life as part of the witness protection program, though she has no intention of staying around to testify. Her father taught her never to cooperate with the authorities. In the meantime she lives in an apartment near North Carolina's Outer Banks and works in a dreary job cleaning places rented by tourists.

Her neighbors are a troubled family. The beautiful wife accidentally left Boon, their preschool son, in a hot car for hours. The child survived, but now a child welfare worker checks up on them frequently. Whit, the husband, seems out of his depth, especially after his wife disappears. Cassie, their daughter just entering her teens, has become rebellious and dependent. She frequently escapes her homelife by dangerously leaping from one balcony to another and exiting through Sara's apartment.

Then comes a hurricane. With their mother missing and their father busy elsewhere, the kids look to Sara as their reluctant rescuer. She can think only of ditching the kids so that she can disappear into another new life.

But then, of course, things happen, and she finds a new life she never expected.

Buckley keeps things moving and the suspense building. Her novel is never quite a thriller and never quite a mystery, although there are elements of each. Mostly it is a novel of second chances and unexpected saviors.

Misery plus poetry

Her father was bigger than the world and a lot less wonderful.

Anne Enright, The Wren, the Wren

Beauty and ugliness often seem to come together, as if in a package. That is true in the world we live in, in the people we know, in our own lives and even in the novels we read. That may be the message in The Wren, the Wren by Anne Enright (2023).

The novel tells of the broken lives of three women in the family of Phil McDaragh, an admired Irish poet whose poems are sprinkled throughout the novel. McDaragh writes poetry about romantic love, and for inspiration he thinks he needs a succession of young lovers. He abandons his wife when she becomes seriously ill. His daughter, Carmel, and his granddaughter, Nell, feel the same abandonment as they lead their confused, often aimless lives. Their own love affairs are no more meaningful or lasting than McDaragh's. They just lack the poetry, which may be why they return again and again to his.

Enright does not deny us the ugly details of these relationships in language that is sometimes beautiful and often vulgar. The contrast seems to be important.

My favorite line in the novel comes early: "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." How true. We see different things even when looking at the same thing. How we perceive what we see depends upon our different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of thinking. Carmel and Nell may walk down the same streets as those next to them, yet as the offspring of this famous poet they see different streets.

How can stories be bad?

Before I leave the book The Last Unknowns, edited by John Brockman, I must comment on what, to me, seems like the oddest question posed in this book of questions:

Jonathan Gottschall

"Are stories bad for us?" This question is posed by Jonathan Gottschall, who teaches in the English department at Washington & Jefferson College.

How could stories be bad for us? And how could someone who teaches stories for a living suggest such a thing? I would be interested in hearing Gottschall's argument. I'll bet there's a story there.

Everyone tells stories. Some are true. Some are embellished. Some are entirely fiction. Yet we all tell stories. And we all listen to them or read them or even dream them, usually with pleasure, which is itself a good.

When you experience a funny incident or perhaps have a near-collision on the highway or an unexpected surgery, one of your first impulses is the tell your story to someone. Somehow you don't feel fulfilled until you can tell your story. The better the story, the more often you will tell it.

We learn from stories. That is why literature is taught at Washington & Jefferson and most other colleges. Stories teach us how other people live and how other people think. They teach us about good decisions and bad ones. They help us practice empathy. They excite our imaginations.

History, at its best, is a series of stories. And so we learn history through stories. In fact, a good many disciplines, from art to zoology, are taught, in part, through stories.

Our entertainment, whether we read novels, watch movies or listen to popular songs, is often story-based. Even a TV reality show usually takes the form of a story. A baseball game tells a story. We stick around to the ninth inning to see how it turns out.

Religions are also usually story-based. The Bible is a collection of stories.

The articles we read in magazines and newspapers are often called stories.

There are bad stories, certainly, but stories are vital and basic to human existence. How can that be bad?

Challenging questions

John Brockman

In my last post I wrote about some of the lame questions I found in the book edited by John Brockman, The Last Unknowns. Now I want to give equal time to some of the questions I consider more challenging.

"Why is the world so beautiful?" If there is no God and no purpose to the universe, how does one explain sunsets and rainbows and spring mornings?

"Where were the laws of physics written before the universe was born?" asks a physicist. Because the laws of physics are themselves beautiful, this sounds very much like the last question.

"Why do we experience feelings of meaning in a universe without purpose?" Here we go again. Aren't "feelings of meaning" also beautiful? So maybe there is a purpose after all.

"Are people who cheat vital to driving progress in human societies?" That may seem like an odd question, but it is an interesting one. Consider that the Jewish people trace their origins back to Jacob, who cheated his brother out of his rightful inheritance. We have a system of justice, a good thing, in part to protect people from those who cheat. How many advanced human societies are built on land won by cheating native peoples? I'm sure we could find many other examples.

"What will be the use of 99 percent of humanity for the 1 percent?" This frightening question is rapidly coming close to a frightening answer. As artificial intelligence makes human workers obsolete, what good are they? Increasingly the masses just become a burden and a danger for the few who are in charge.

Talking about scary questions, how about this one: "Will we pass our audition as planetary managers?" And if we don't pass the audition, who is going to say so? Those who rush us toward global government surely must realize that dictatorship is the only possible result. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that.

"Is the brain a computer or an antenna?" I don't know what that means, but it sounds profound.

"Is scientific knowledge the most valuable possession of humanity?" I like the fact that this question was posed by a philosopher, not a scientist. That suggests what the questioner believes.

No such thing as a stupid question?

John Brockman invited many of the best minds in the world to pose questions for his book The Last Unknowns. So why do so many of their questions seem stupid to me?

Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand, best known for Whole Earth Catalog, asks, "Can wild animals that are large and dangerous be made averse to threatening humans?" Does he want to tame lions and alligators? Or does he want to drug them or kill them? Can humans be made averse to threatening wild animals?

Someone else asks, "Will scientific advances about the causes of sexual conflict help to end the 'battle of the sexes'"? Understanding the battle of the sexes is one thing, but do we really want science to end it? Wouldn't that mean ending the differences between men and women?

"How do I describe the achievements, meanings, and power of Beethoven's piano sonata Appassionata?" Yes, how do you describe it, and how is that more important than how any other music lover describes it? And is this really the last question humanity should be asking?

"How can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question, including this one?" Some questions have answers, but some don't. There are rhetorical questions, for example. There are questions like, "How are you feeling today?" that can have imprecise answers or different answers depending upon circumstances. Why would we even want a machine to answer all questions?

"How will we know if we achieve universal happiness?" Maybe when everyone is happy. I wonder, has this scientist ever read 1984 or Brave New World?

"Can we create new senses for humans — not just touch, taste, vision, hearing, smell, but totally novel qualia for which we don't have words?" No comment necessary.

"Will civilization collapse before I die?" According to people on both sides of the political spectrum, it could happen soon after the next election.

"Has consciousness done more good or bad for humanity?" Is this professor suggesting that we might be better off if we were all unconscious?

"Will questioning be replaced by answering without questions?" This comes from a physicist, in whose field I am sure answers sometimes come before anyone thinks to ask the questions. But on the whole, a world without questions seems neither desirable nor possible.

A journalist named Carl Zimmer asks, "How does the past give rise to the the future?" The answer, I believe, is that thin dividing line known as the present.

"How can the process of science be improved?" Someone else asks a similar question. The answer seems obvious to me — stick to science. Forget about politics and political correctness. When scientists no longer feel free to express dissenting findings in such areas as climate change, the treatment of Covid, gender transition and evolution, real science is no longer being practiced.