Author: Claire Lehmann

Feast and Drink For Our Community’s Health

Published by Claire Lehmann

Earlier this year, for the first time in history, the government of Britain appointed a minister for loneliness. Although not a medical condition, loneliness is starting to be described in such language, with descriptors such as “epidemic” and “public health crisis” bracketing the term. Large-scale studies have found that around ten percent of adults in Western nations experience chronic loneliness. In a letter published this year in The Lancet, two neurologists from the University of Chicago asked readers to “imagine a condition that makes a person irritable, depressed, and self-centred, and is associated with a 26% increase in the risk of premature mortality.” They went on to explain that it is not a condition that only affects those with poor social skills, or those who are highly sheltered or introverted. Loneliness is not necessarily about being alone, either—we can feel isolated when surrounded by other people. Somewhat counter-intuitively, social skills training, social support and social contact have all been found to be ineffective as interventions for social disconnection. * * * Drawing on the work …

Camille Paglia: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World

Published by Claire Lehmann

I discovered Camille Paglia’s work when I was pursuing my undergraduate arts education at The University of Adelaide, South Australia, in the early 2000s. I was deeply disillusioned with the courses in my arts degree and their monomaniacal focus on social constructionism, and was looking for criticism of Michel Foucault on the internet. I stumbled across a 1991 op-ed written by Paglia for The New York Times, in which she described the followers of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault, as “fossilized reactionaries,” and “the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality.” I was hooked. It wasn’t long before I discovered that my university’s library contained each of her books, including the essay collections Vamps and Tramps and Sex, Art and American Culture. For the final year of my arts degree, (before pursuing my studies in psychology) I spent the bulk of my time at the university reading Paglia in the library. She was like a revelation. Her work was subversive but erudite, and she synthesized insights made in the realm of the arts, ancient history and folk biology—something that no other scholar …

Redefining Sexual Harassment

Published by Claire Lehmann

Since the 1960s, women have made sweeping inroads across professions and academic fields, achieving not just excellence but pre-eminence in a wide range of areas. These include medicine, psychology, veterinary science, biology, the law, journalism, and education. This year, the Nobel prize in physics was jointly awarded to Donna Strickland, a Canadian physics professor, for the invention of chirped pulse amplification, and her doctoral adviser Gerard Mourou. Despite these massive gains, however, women have not made sweeping inroads in every field. Some remain stubborn outposts of male dominance. Such fields include mathematics, computer science, and, bringing up the rear, engineering, in which women only make up about 12 percent of the workforce. For advocates of gender equality in the workplace, women’s persistent low representation in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is a particular concern. Some have sought to blame it on the prevalence of sexual harassment in these fields, in spite of the fact that sexual harassment across all fields is declining. In 1997, the United States’ Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received 16,000 complaints …

From the Editor

Published by Claire Lehmann

Another week, another defenestration. This time it’s Ian Buruma, forced to resign his post as editor of the New York Review of Books after publishing an essay written by Jian Ghomeshi – a disgraced Canadian radio journalist who was acquitted on several charges of sexual assault back in 2016. Buruma said in Slate: I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation. How can I be? All I know is that in a court of law he was acquitted, and there is no proof he committed a crime. The exact nature of his behaviour — how much consent was involved — I have no idea, nor is it really my concern. My concern is what happens to somebody who has not been found guilty in any criminal sense but who perhaps deserves social opprobrium, but how long should that last, what form it should take, etc. The rate at which such purges are happening now is disquieting. Ghomeshi’s piece was published online just last Friday and Buruma is out the door before the …

From the Editor

Published by Claire Lehmann

Quillette was created with the intention of giving non-journalists — in particular scientists and scholars — a platform to share ideas without unnecessary editorial interference. I used the tagline “a platform for free thought” when the site launched because I wanted to encourage a wide range of contributions, no matter who and where they came from. Since Quillette launched in November 2015, free thought has definitely shown itself to be alive and well. The platform has not only become popular across the English-speaking world, but we receive insightful and bold contributions almost every day. It’s as if, somehow, a dam has burst. Why did I chose the name Quillette? In French, a synonym for quillette is bouture d’osier, which is a type of wood off-cutting used to grow new trees. An off-cutting planted in the ground that grows into a tree — this seemed to me a great metaphor for an essay. An off-cutting just needs the right conditions to thrive. Give it sunlight, water, and fertile soil and it will grow into something majestic, lasting generations. …

Understanding Victimhood Culture: An Interview with Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning

Published by Claire Lehmann

Bradley Campbell, Associate Professor of Sociology at California State University, and Jason Manning, Associate Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University, have been described as “prophets of the academic world” by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, and their new collaborative work The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, “a book of revelations,” by the sociologist Donald Black. The two sociologists have aimed to supply us with an empirical sociological analysis of the recent moral conflicts that have erupted on U.S. college campuses—and the extent to which these conflicts are spreading outwards into mainstream society. After reading the book, I reached out to the American sociologists to interview them about some of the key themes of their book, and also to gain insight into some recent cultural trends that were not covered. What follows is a transcript of our interview conducted via email. I. Three Moral Cultures Claire Lehmann: Just briefly for our readers who have not read your book, can you explain the main differences between the dignity, honor and victimhood cultures which you …

The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer

Published by Claire Lehmann

Michael Shermer is the founder of The Skeptics Society, and its associated magazine Skeptic. He is a science writer with a monthly column in Scientific American and the author of many books including The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom, and, most recently, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. I contacted Dr Shermer for an interview with Quillette: what follows is a transcript of our conversation, conducted via email. * * * Q: Thank you for taking the time to talk to Quillette. You recently published Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, can you briefly describe what your new book is about, and the research you did for it? Michael Shermer: Since I just finished my book tour I can now do this while standing on one foot! Here are some take-home points: It’s a myth that people live twice as long today as in centuries past. People lived into their 80s and 90s historically, just not very many of them. What modern science, technology, medicine, and public health have done …

The Autistic Buddha—An Interview

Published by Claire Lehmann

The UK writer Thomas Clements recently published a book titled The Autistic Buddha. I wanted to find out more about the book, so I contacted Thomas who agreed to be interviewed for Quillette. What follows is a summary of our interview conducted over email. Thanks for agreeing to talk to Quillette. Tell us about The Autistic Buddha, what is the book about? The Autistic Buddha is a memoir detailing the extraordinary inner and outer journeys I have had to undertake in my life in order to make sense of the world as a man on the autism spectrum. Because of my disability, I have struggled throughout most of my life to fit into polite society, and like many autistic people, I’m quite blind to the finer nuances of social interaction which are often so crucial for getting on in the world. Autistic people like me are also characterized by their intense and sometimes excessive level of focus on one particular theme which in my case happened to be the culture of East Asia. This particular obsession was an alternate universe into which I …

The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer

Published by Claire Lehmann

Last year I was working on an article about the tech industry when I decided to interview a software engineer who writes for Quillette under the pseudonym “Gideon Scopes”. Gideon had mentioned to me in passing that he had Asperger’s Syndrome (a mild variant of autism spectrum disorder) and I wanted to find out more about the industry from the point of view of someone who is not neurotypical. I first asked him when it was that he knew he wanted to work in technology. He told me that he first knew it when he was five. His family got their first home computer and he was transfixed. Later, he would come across a brief introduction to the BASIC programming language in a book and proceed to teach himself his first programming language. He was only seven. As a child he taught himself programming out of books, mostly alone at home. He told me that his family were not particularly supportive of his hobby. His mother was not happy to see him focus so intently on one …

The Neuroscience of Intelligence: An Interview with Richard Haier

Published by Claire Lehmann

Richard Haier is a Professor Emeritus at the University of California Irvine and is the author of the Neuroscience of Intelligence published by Cambridge University Press. Over his career he has used neuroimaging to study how brain function and structure relate to intelligence, and the ways in which “smart” brains work. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Intelligence and the past president of the International Society for Intelligence Research. I reached out to him earlier this year to ask about his new book. What follows is an interview conducted with Quillette via email. Thank you for taking the time to talk to Quillette Professor Haier. You’ve spent forty years studying intelligence and have compiled your knowledge into a new book accessible to the general reader called The Neuroscience of Intelligence, which looks fascinating from its précis. Firstly, can you tell us how you became interested in intelligence research, and how you came about studying intelligence through neuroimaging? When I started graduate school at Johns Hopkins in 1971, I was interested in social psychology and personality …