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Listen to the Ideas Podcast with Lorna Gibb and New Books Network and Enjoy a fascinating discussion about when language vanish.

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Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, is best known for calling out the hype surrounding artificial intelligence in his Substack, AI Snake Oil, written with PhD candidate Sayash Kapoor. The two authors recently released a book based on their popular newsletter about AI’s shortcomings.

But don’t get it twisted—they aren’t against using new technology. “It's easy to misconstrue our message as saying that all of AI is harmful or dubious,” Narayanan says. He makes clear, during a conversation with WIRED, that his rebuke is not aimed at the software per say, but rather the culprits who continue to spread misleading claims about artificial intelligence.

In AI Snake Oil, those guilty of perpetuating the current hype cycle are divided into three core groups: the companies selling AI, researchers studying AI, and journalists covering AI.

Hype Super-Spreaders

Companies claiming to predict the future using algorithms are positioned as potentially the most fraudulent. “When predictive AI systems are deployed, the first people they harm are often minorities and those already in poverty,” Narayanan and Kapoor write in the book. For example, an algorithm previously used in the Netherlands by a local government to predict who may commit welfare fraud wrongly targeted women and immigrants who didn’t speak Dutch.

The authors turn a skeptical eye as well toward companies mainly focused on existential risks, like artificial general intelligence, the concept of a super-powerful algorithm better than humans at performing labor. Though, they don’t scoff at the idea of AGI. “When I decided to become a computer scientist, the ability to contribute to AGI was a big part of my own identity and motivation,” says Narayanan. The misalignment comes from companies prioritizing long-term risk factors above the impact AI tools have on people right now, a common refrain I’ve heard from researchers.

Much of the hype and misunderstandings can also be blamed on shoddy, non-reproducible research, the authors claim. “We found that in a large number of fields, the issue of data leakage leads to overoptimistic claims about how well AI works,” says Kapoor. Data leakage is essentially when AI is tested using part of the model’s training data—similar to handing out the answers to students before conducting an exam.

While academics are portrayed in AI Snake Oil as making “textbook errors,” journalists are more maliciously motivated and knowingly in the wrong, according to the Princeton researchers: “Many articles are just reworded press releases laundered as news.” Reporters who sidestep honest reporting in favor of maintaining their relationships with big tech companies and protecting their access to the companies’ executives are noted as especially toxic.

I think the criticisms about access journalism are fair. In retrospect, I could have asked tougher or more savvy questions during some interviews with the stakeholders at the most important companies in AI. But the authors might be oversimplifying the matter here. The fact that big AI companies let me in the door doesn’t prevent me from writing skeptical articles about their technology, or working on investigative pieces I know will piss them off. (Yes, even if they make business deals, like OpenAI did, with the parent company of WIRED.)

And sensational news stories can be misleading about AI’s true capabilities. Narayanan and Kapoor highlight New York Times columnist Kevin Roose’s 2023 chatbot transcript interacting with Microsoft's tool headlined “Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’” as an example of journalists sowing public confusion about sentient algorithms. “Roose was one of the people who wrote these articles,” says Kapoor. “But I think when you see headline after headline that's talking about chatbots wanting to come to life, it can be pretty impactful on the public psyche.” Kapoor mentions the ELIZA chatbot from the 1960s, whose users quickly anthropomorphized a crude AI tool, as a prime example of the lasting urge to project human qualities onto mere algorithms.

Roose declined to comment when reached via email and instead pointed me to a passage from his related column, published separately from the extensive chatbot transcript, where he explicitly states that he knows the AI is not sentient. The introduction to his chatbot transcript focuses on “its secret desire to be human” as well as “thoughts about its creators,” and the comment section is strewn with readers anxious about the chatbot’s power.

Images accompanying news articles are also called into question in AI Snake Oil. Publications often use clichéd visual metaphors, like photos of robots, at the top of a story to represent artificial intelligence features. Another common trope, an illustration of an altered human brain brimming with computer circuitry used to represent the AI’s neural network, irritates the authors. “We're not huge fans of circuit brain,” says Narayanan. “I think that metaphor is so problematic. It just comes out of this idea that intelligence is all about computation.” He suggests images of AI chips or graphics processing units should be used to visually represent reported pieces about artificial intelligence.

Education Is All You Need

The adamant admonishment of the AI hype cycle comes from the authors’ belief that large language models will actually continue to have a significant influence on society and should be discussed with more accuracy. “It's hard to overstate the impact LLMs might have in the next few decades,” says Kapoor. Even if an AI bubble does eventually pop, I agree that aspects of generative tools will be sticky enough to stay around in some form. And the proliferation of generative AI tools, which developers are currently pushing out to the public through smartphone apps and even formatting devices around it, just heightens the necessity for better education on what AI even is and its limitations.

The first step to understanding AI better is coming to terms with the vagueness of the term, which flattens an array of tools and areas of research, like natural language processing, into a tidy, marketable package. AI Snake Oil divides artificial intelligence into two subcategories: predictive AI, which uses data to assess future outcomes; and generative AI, which crafts probable answers to prompts based on past data.

It’s worth it for anyone who encounters AI tools, willingly or not, to spend at least a little time trying to better grasp key concepts, like machine learning and neural networks, to further demystify the technology and inoculate themselves from the bombardment of AI hype.

During my time covering AI for the past two years, I’ve learned that even if readers grasp a few of the limitations of generative tools, like inaccurate outputs or biased answers, many people are still hazy about all of its weaknesses. For example, in the upcoming season of AI Unlocked, my newsletter designed to help readers experiment with AI and understand it better, we included a whole lesson dedicated to examining whether ChatGPT can be trusted to dispense medical advice based on questions submitted by readers. (And whether it will keep your prompts about that weird toenail fungus private.)

A user may approach the AI’s outputs with more skepticism when they have a better understanding of where the model’s training data came from—often the depths of the internet or Reddit threads—and it may hamper their misplaced trust in the software.

Narayanan believes so strongly in the importance of quality education that he began teaching his children about the benefits and downsides of AI at a very young age. “I think it should start from elementary school,” he says. “As a parent, but also based on my understanding of the research, my approach to this is very tech-forward.”

Generative AI may now be able to write half-decent emails and help you communicate sometimes, but only well-informed humans have the power to correct breakdowns in understanding around this technology and craft a more accurate narrative moving forward.

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NEW BOOK!

'The Lives of Bees: A Natural History of Our Planet's Bee Life'

by Christina Grozinger and Harland Patch

Blending stunning photographs and illustrations with illuminating profiles of selected species, this incisive guide takes readers inside the world of these marvelous insects, exploring their physiology, behavior, ecology, evolution, and much more.

Princeton University Press

Preorder Now: https://tinyurl.com/4app7cmb

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My 25 years of palaeoart chronology…

My 2023 illustration of the huge seabird Dasornis (5-6m wingspan), from DINOSAUR BEHAVIOUR, by Prof Michael Benton (published by Princeton University Press). 50% off this book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691244297/dinosaur-behavior?srsltid=AfmBOoqDTMigjCRkDT6SNi1Q3xHAeaiWCZ-HR5pQY1rFAsKpMNNS1IEk

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AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, Princeton University Press, 2024

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Robert Lücking and Toby Spribille, The Lives of Lichens. A Natural History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2024

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The use of medicinal drugs is often viewed as a uniquely human exercise. In Doctors by Nature, however, Jaap de Roode shows that many non-human animals also practice medicine. Building on his own research on monarch butterflies, and taking us on a tour around the globe, de Roode introduces us to a whole menagerie of medicating animals, from apes to ants, from bees to baboons, and from cats to caterpillars. Studying how animals use medicine is not only fascinating, but also useful. By learning how animals use drugs, we can improve the livestock industry, save pollinators, and even find new drugs to treat human diseases.

What is Doctors by Nature about?

JdR: The book tells a story of how animals use drugs to prevent or treat infectious diseases, how scientists study animal medication, and what we can learn from animals. Many of us have long thought that medicine is a uniquely human thing; that we are the only species clever enough to develop drug treatments to treat all sorts of ailments. But it turns out this is completely wrong! Back in the 1980’s, scientists turned started describing how chimpanzees use toxic chemicals from plants and rough “velcro-like” leaves to expel parasitic worms from their guts. And while chimpanzees are our closest living relatives, we now know that many animals use medicine, including insects.

Can you give some examples of animals that use drugs?

JdR: Of course! Goats and sheep like to eat plants with tannins to kill intestinal parasitic worms. Woolly bear caterpillars eat alkaloids to kill parasitic flies. My own research has shown that monarch butterflies can use toxic milkweed chemicals as medicine. Monarch caterpillars are specialized on feeding on milkweeds, but milkweed species vary in their concentrations of these toxins. When infected female monarchs lay eggs on milkweed, they unintentionally transfer some of their parasites to those eggs. But by laying their eggs on more toxic milkweed, they ensure that their offspring caterpillars are less likely to become infected, and that they will suffer less disease. A fine example of “mother knows best”.

So, is all animal medicine based on swallowing drugs?

JdR: No. Cats coat themselves with mosquito repellents when rolling around on catnip, and orangutans mix their saliva with the chemicals from medicinal lianas to treat skin wounds. Starlings add aromatic plants to their nests that protect their chicks against mites. And ants and bees add resin, the sticky stuff that trees produce, to their colonies, which fights off viruses, bacteria and fungal pathogens.

How do animals know what to do?

JdR: Many cases of animal medication probably depend on innate mechanisms. When woolly bear caterpillars are infected with parasitoid flies, their taste receptors that detect alkaloids start firing at higher rates, making the caterpillars eat more of the chemicals. But animals can also learn from their experiences. Sheep and goats are really good at making associations between foods they eat and relief from worm infections. So, the next time they are infected, they specifically eat medicinal plants. Animals can also learn from each other. When chimpanzees swallow whole leaves to expel worms, they first fold them before putting them in their mouths. Chimpanzees can use different ways to fold the leaves, and in each social group, they copy how to from each other.

What was most surprising to you when writing this book?

JdR: Although scientists have only studied animal medication for a few decades, traditional healers and shamans have known that animals use medicine for thousands of years. In fact, healers have developed many treatments for humans by copying the behaviors of animals. Take Native Americans: many of the tribes in North America have at least one treatment that is referred to as “bear medicine”, because healers discovered them by observing bears. Oshá root is a well-known medicinal herb, but it looks like even aspirin was first discovered by bears. Following their hibernation, bears tend to eat the bark of willow trees to reduce inflammation. Scientists later extracted salicylic acid from willows and changed it chemically to make the super drug.

Are there other examples of drugs that were first discovered by animals?

JdR: Oh, yeah. In Tanzania, healers credit elephants, chimpanzees and porcupines with the discovery of drugs to treat stomach upset, intestinal worms, and bloody diarrhea. Ethiopian goats, dancing around after eating coffee berries, taught us about the stimulatory effects of caffeine. In South America, people first learned about the stamina-increasing properties of cocaine by looking at Peruvian llamas. Maybe you have heard about horny goat weed? This weed is used for erectile dysfunction, and a Chinese goat herder discovered it when he noticed that his goats got frisky when eating it.

What inspired you to write the book?

JdR: I have always wanted to write a book, and I was so happy to be able to write about this topic. I want people to recognize just how clever animals are, and how amazing nature is. I have always had a love for animals, and recognizing that animals have all these fantastic ways of treating themselves and each other is just fascinating. But I also want readers to realize that the study of animal medication is not restricted to a few select scientists, but that it really is for everyone. I describe how an American primatology professor worked with a traditional healer in Tanzania to discover chimpanzee medication. But I also show how undergraduate students in Mexico and Japan discovered that birds use cigarette butts to clear their nests of blood-sucking parasites, and that cats love catnip because it prevents mosquito bites; and how volunteer researchers in the Democratic Republic of Congo are studying primates to discover new anti-malarial drugs.

What would you like for people to take away from the book?

JdR: Hopefully, the book will show just how much we can gain from studying animal medication. By giving animals the opportunity to be their own doctors, we can improve the welfare of our livestock and pets, reduce the overuse of antibiotics, and save honey bees from dying. I also hope to give people yet another reason to protect and restore nature. By realizing that the world’s ecosystems are a goldmine of yet to be discovered drugs, we will hopefully add a little more urgency to preserving nature.

About the Author

Jaap de Roode is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Biology at Emory University, where he studies monarch butterflies, teaches biology, and trains graduate students in infectious disease biology. He is also on the board of directors of the Rosalynn Carter Butterfly Trail, with the aim to recreate pollinator habitat.

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Exploring Black Experiences

Please enjoy our reading list and 30% off with code PUP30.

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Hollywood meets Bob Dylan at Newport

By Timothy Hampton

This week's edition of Ideas features an essay by Timothy Hampton on the movie The Complete Unknown and a reflection on the artistry, politics and relevance of Bob Dylan’s songwriting. #BobDylan

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60% off FLASH Sale

Enjoy 60% off on this month’s selected titles with code FLASH. This offer applies only to specific editions and to purchases made on our website. For more information see our FAQ page.   Check back on the 15th of each month for a new featured collection!

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On the misuse of legacy: The Struggle for the People’s King

By Hajar Yazdiha

This is an adapted excerpt from The Struggle for the People’s King: How Politics Transforms the Memory of the Civil Rights Movement

On a humid day in late August 2010, the right-wing Tea Party activist and Fox News television host Glenn Beck held a rally to “Restore Honor” at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It was the 47th anniversary of the Civil Rights March on Washington, and Beck stood on the steps where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech nearly five decades prior. In the months leading up to the rally, Beck used his television show to drive home the undeniable connection between the historic backdrop of the rally and the Tea Party’s mission to safeguard American values, threatened by minority claims to “special rights.” In this view, white Americans were the new victims under the Obama presidency, an idea Beck repeatedly espoused as when he warned viewers, “This president [Obama] I think has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people and the white culture…this guy is, I believe, a racist.”[i]

Earlier that spring Beck had proclaimed to his viewers, “We are the people of the Civil Rights Movement. We are the ones that must stand for civil and equal rights. Equal rights. Justice. Equal justice. Not special justice, not social justice, but equal justice. We are the inheritors and the protectors of the Civil Rights Movement.”[ii] Several days later, Beck warned viewers that King’s vision had been “perverted,” but he assured his audience that he planned to “pick up Martin Luther King’s dream” and to “restore it and to finish it.” He went on to declare, “We are on the right side of history. We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and damn it, we will reclaim the Civil Rights Movement. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”[iii]

Beck’s appropriation of the memory of the Civil Rights Movement for the Tea Party’s cause did not go unnoticed. Publics erupted in protest. Jon Stewart called the Beck’s rally “I Have a Scheme,” satirizing its strategic connection to the “I Have a Dream” speech. Robert Greenwald, an activist and film maker protesting Beck’s rally, created a website and video titled “Glenn Beck is Not Martin Luther King Jr” with a petition receiving over 30,000 signatures. In the video, Greenwald juxtaposed “shock jock”-style sound bites from Beck with Dr. King’s spiritual oratory in his “Dream” speech, highlighting the absurdity of Beck’s claim to Dr. King’s legacy. At its conclusion, a message read, “Don’t let Beck distort Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Sign your name to virtually stand with Dr. King’s vision on August 28th.”[iv] Civil rights activist, Reverend Al Sharpton, called Beck’s event an “outright attempt to flip the imagery of Dr. King.”[v] The day before the rally, political commentator Chris Matthews said on his MSNBC show, Hardball With Chris Matthews:

Can we imagine if King were physically here tomorrow…were he to reappear tomorrow on the very steps of the Lincoln Memorial? I have a nightmare that one day a right wing talk show host will come to this spot, his people’s lips dripping with the words ‘interposition’ and ‘nullification.’ Little right wing boys and little right wing girls joining hands and singing their praise for Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. I have a nightmare.

Still, on August 28th Beck stood, like King, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and gave an impassioned speech to a crowd of roughly 87,000 Tea Party supporters, declaring their work had “everything to do with God…turning our faith back to the values and the principles that made us great.” He went on to describe an America at a crossroads, not unlike the country Lincoln faced during the Civil War. Referring to the Tea Party’s struggle, he said, “It’s the same story throughout history, all of mankind’s history. Man finds himself in slavery and then someone appears to wake America up.”[vi] Through religious and historical imagery, Beck emphasized the power of American individualism in the face of oppression which he described as a sort of “slavery,” driving home the analogy between conservative Americans’ plight under multicultural democracy and Black Americans’ past enslavement.

Further down the National Mall, Al Sharpton and Dr. King’s eldest son, Martin Luther King III, were leading a rival rally at the planned site for the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial: the “Reclaim the Dream” commemorative march. Executive director of the National Council of Negro Women, Avis Jones DeWeever, pleaded with the audience, “Don’t let anyone tell you that they have the right to take their country back. It’s our country, too. We will reclaim the dream. It was ours from the beginning.”[vii] With Dr. King’s son in tow as a living symbol, a gatekeeper of collective memory, the Tea Party’s claims to King’s legacy appeared illegitimate.

How did the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement, of Dr. King, become a ready-made political strategy for mobilization by groups with divergent, even antithetical aims?

Yet the Tea Party organizers had prepared for this dilemma. Glenn Beck had arranged for another symbolic figure to speak. Alveda King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece and an outspoken right-wing activist proceeded to take the stage at the Rally to Restore Honor. Alveda King called on the audience to:

​ … focus not on elections or on political causes but on honor, on character…not the color of our skin. Yes, I too have a dream….That America will pray and God will forgive us our sins and revive us our land…My daddy, Reverend A. D. King, my granddaddy, Martin Luther King, Senior – we are a family of faith, hope and love. And that’s why I’m here today. Glenn says there is one human race; I agree with him. We are not here to divide. I’m about unity. That’s why I’m here, and I want to honor my uncle today. [viii]

Here was another living inheritor of Dr. King, of the Civil Rights Movement, lending credence to the Tea Party vision of colorblind individualism, where the acknowledgment of race, of racism, of racial inequality, could be named anti-white reverse racism.

From beyond the audience of the rally’s conservative followers, there were vocal critics who worked to discredit the Tea Party’s misuses of Dr. King. Yet Beck and the skilled Tea Party organizers had looked back on the political battles of the decades prior and they had come to anticipate these critiques. In the months leading up to the rally, they had worked tirelessly to thwart progressive activists’ critiques by using Dr. King’s own language, the imagery of the historic setting, and now with Alveda King, the living progeny of the symbolic figure.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that social movements “[back] their innovations by reference to a ‘people’s past,’…to traditions of revolution…and to [their] own heroes and martyrs.”[ix] Yet Dr. King was not always a “hero and martyr” for conservatives. Just 30 years prior, there were spirited congressional battles around designating Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday as a national holiday. Conservatives denounced King as a ‘communist traitor,’ made public his extramarital affairs to sully his reputation and question his morality. They declared King an unworthy figure for national celebration and commemoration. Although President Reagan signed the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday into existence in 1983, state-wide battles over the King holiday lasted into the 1990’s. In many states like Alabama and Mississippi, the concession towards the King holiday arrived only with an agreement to merge the holiday with confederate ‘heroes’ like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. South Carolina was the last state to approve a paid King holiday in the year 2000. Yet just ten years later, Glenn Beck, a brazenly radical conservative, would stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to “reclaim” King’s dream for the Tea Party. The next month, Tea Party activists would sweep primary elections, and over the next few years, they would move the Republican party irrevocably to the right.

How did the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement, of Dr. King, become a ready-made political strategy for mobilization by groups with divergent, even antithetical aims? More importantly, what are the consequences of these (mis)uses of collective memory? How does misremembering the past matter for contemporary politics, and how does it shape the direction of our collective future?

At first glance, perhaps the Tea Party Movement’s invocations of Dr. King do not seem all that surprising. After all, scholars have shown that since the civil rights era of the 1960’s, all sorts of groups including women, Latinos, Asians, the disabled, and LGBTQ coalitions have used memories of the Civil Rights Movement to make claims to inclusion and equality. This period of widespread collective action by minoritized groups has been coined “the minority rights revolution,”[x] the “movement of movements,”[xi] and the rise of the “civil rights society.”[xii] For historically excluded groups, strategic invocations of the Civil Rights Movement seem like a natural mobilization strategy with a ready-made set of what social movement scholars call repertoires of contention- the tactics, frames, and actions for mobilization against injustice.[xiii] More generally, the memory of the Civil Rights Movement has moved to the mainstream of American collective memory. The memory of Black Americans joining with kindhearted white Americans, mobilizing for and achieving legal recognition, is central to the story of “who we are” as Americans, a shining beacon of the promise of American democracy. Dr. King is mythologized as the moral compass of American identity reminding us of an unrelenting march forward, where “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

However, increasingly since the 1980’s, right-wing, majority-white social movements from the Gun Rights and Family Values coalitions to nativist, White-Supremacist movements have reshaped and deployed the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement to claim they are the new minorities fighting for their rights. In these invocations, gun rights activists are the new Rosa Parks, anti-abortion activists are freedom riders, and anti-gay groups are protecting Dr. King’s Christian vision. These misuses of the past are not merely rhetorical. These strategies have powerful effects. As mobilizing groups remake a collective memory toward competing political ends, they generate new interpretations of the past which take on a life of their own. The proliferation of these interpretations of history, over time, changes the collective memory itself, shaping the way we make sense of the present and the way we direct action toward the future.

The danger of a sanitized reading of the past is that this selective memory evades social reality and enables the maintenance of white supremacy.

As social historians have shown, the domesticated memory of the Civil Rights Movement has transformed into a vacated, sanitized collective memory celebrating colorblindness and individualism, as if racism is a figment of the past.[xiv] In the popular imagination, Dr. King was a widely beloved moral leader, preaching peace and nonviolence at all costs, invested in the dream of American exceptionalism. Rosa Parks was an accidental activist, a tired old lady who did not want to stand up that day. These whitewashed memories are not only bound in the national holiday we celebrate once a year. These memories are also narrativized in children’s textbooks, Oscar-winning films, political speeches, and popular media. These representations amplify selective representations of particular figures – Dr. King, Rosa Parks, John Lewis - rendering other pivotal civil rights activists and their rich stories, their struggles, their power, invisible.[xv] These flattened, “defanged”[xvi] memories are commemorated by rosy images of Black and white Americans joining, arms linked, in a quest for racial justice, through a particular conception of racism and violence as existing specifically in the south and – notably – as existing in the distant past.[xvii] These representations are juxtaposed against memories of “radical,” “threatening” activists like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers as “divisive” separatists, “a disruptive force to a beloved community.”[xviii] These meanings are bound in commemorative structures and remain at the center of American collective memory. Why does it matter that the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement is remembered in this selective way? After all, collective memories generate a shared identity, they connect us in a common narrative of our collective past, so is it so bad that the Civil Rights Movement be remembered through ideals of unity, peace, and colorblindness?

The danger of a sanitized reading of the past is that this selective memory evades social reality and enables the maintenance of white supremacy. While the story of racial progress can be a palatable one, the evidence tells a different story. The vestiges of a nation founded on the genocide of Native Americans and the violent enslavement of Black people live on in our institutions and our culture through systemic racism,[xix] what Joe Feagin describes as the “complex array of white anti-other (e.g., anti-black) practices, the unjustly gained economic/political power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines (unjust enrichment/unjust impoverishment), and the racial framing created by whites to rationalize privilege and power.”

Hajar Yazdiha is assistant professor of sociology and a faculty affiliate of the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California.

Notes

[i] Calderone, “Fox’s Beck.”

[ii] Zernike, “Where Dr. King Stood, Tea Party Claims His Mantle.”

[iii] Beck, The Glenn Beck Program.

[iv] Greenwald, “Glenn Beck Is Not Martin Luther King Jr. | The Huffington Post.”

[v] Sisk, “Glenn Beck.”

[vi] Beck, Glenn Beck: Keynote Address at the Restoring Honor Rally.

[vii] Harris and Thompson, “Sharpton’s ‘Reclaim the Dream’ Event Brings Thousands to Honor MLK.”

[viii] Dolak, “Alveda King Speaks at Glenn Beck’s D.C. Rally.”

[ix] Hobsbawm, The Invention of Tradition.

[x] Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution.

[xi] Fraser and Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980.

[xii] Bumiller, The Civil Rights Society.

[xiii] Snow and Benford, “Master Frames and Cycles of Protest”; Tarrow, Power in Movement; Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.

[xiv] Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past”; Hill, “Sanitizing the Struggle”; Romano and Raiford, The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory; Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History; Terry, “MLK Now.”

[xv] Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement”; Robnett, “African-American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965”; Collier-Thomas, Franklin, and Franklin, Sisters in the Struggle; Glasrud and Pitre, Southern Black Women in the Modern Civil Rights Movement; Greene, Our Separate Ways.

[xvi] Cobb, “William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump.”

[xvii] Morris, The Scholar Denied; Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History; Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.”

[xviii] Bell, The Black Power Movement and American Social Work.

[xix] Baker, “The Historical Racial Regime and Racial Inequality in Poverty in the American South.”

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https://press.princeton.edu/autumn-sale

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There is no better time to understand why free speech is the lifeblood of colleges and universities and to save 50% during our annual sale. Take a look inside Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech by Keith E. Whittington.

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Princeton University Press 50% off Sitewide Sale is here!

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Molds, Mushrooms, and Medicines

This is the story of the human relationship with the fungi, from the billions of yeasts that live in the digestive system and cover our skin, to the fungi that we use as food and to produce medicines, and our dependence on mushroom colonies that sustain forests. Nicholas Money takes readers on a guided tour of a marvelous unseen realm, describing the continuous conversation between our immune systems and the teeming mycobiome inside the body, and how we can fall prey to life-threatening infections when this peaceful coexistence is disrupted. He also explores our complicated relationship with fungi outside the body, from wild mushrooms and cultivated molds that have been staples of the human diet for millennia to the controversial experimentation with magic mushrooms in the treatment of depression.

What is the big idea behind your book?

NPM: The big idea is that we are affected by fungi throughout our lives, from our fetal life in the womb, to birth, childhood, adulthood, and at the end of life. Fungi affect our bodies after death too, when their colonies participate in the decomposition of the solid tissues in the soil. The fungi are with us at every moment, in an intimate fashion as they reproduce on the skin and in the digestive system, and in an extended way when we use them as a source of food and medicines. This is an ancient relationship that has changed during our evolutionary history and intensified when we developed agricultural practices and, most recently, as we have adopted fungi in biotechnology. Our interactions with the fungi go even further when we think about our dependence on their ecological activities, including the roles of the fungi in fertilizing soils, purifying water, and supporting plants by forming mycorrhizas with their roots. I wanted to tell the whole story in this book, which has captivated me since I began working on the fungi as a graduate student in the 1980s. It is easy to dismiss the fungi as the stuff of fairy tales, but there is so much more to the deep relationship between humans and fungi. 

What is one of the features of the book that you think will surprise readers?

NPM: The fast pace of discovery in medical mycology is really inspiring. Earlier generations of mycologists misunderstood the fungi that they found on the body, regarding most of them as germs that damaged hospital patients and overlooking the significance of the yeasts growing peacefully on everyone else. Even when molecular genetic techniques began to reveal the incredible diversity and number of microbes in the gut, the fungi were missed because the methods were limited to identifying the DNA sequences of bacteria. This picture is changing at last, and new investigative methods are exposing the yeasts and molds multiplying from scalp to toes on the outside of the body and from mouth to anus on the inside. As this examination of the fungi has proceeded, the vision of the microbiome as a mostly bacterial territory has shifted to an appreciation of the diverse communities of fungi that fight and cooperate with bacteria through webs of chemical interactions to make a living on the body.  Through these innovations we are beginning to fathom the extraordinary influence of the mycobiome on our health and well-being.

“Appreciating the fungi … can begin with something as simple as looking at a mushroom—this beautiful oddity of nature—or inhaling the wondrous scent of a handful of rotting pine needles. There is so much beauty in this orgy of decomposition.”

What did you find most surprising when you were researching the subject of the mycobiome (the fungal part of the microbiome)?

NPM: The size of fungal cells is an esoteric detail with huge consequences. Billions of fungi, mostly yeasts, live in the gut alongside trillions of bacteria. These gut fungi weigh no more than a raisin, but their combined surface area is equivalent to an eight-person dining table. This huge area of fungal cell wall material is moving through the digestive system all the time, which may explain how the fungi punch above their weight in their effects on our health. Recent research has shown that yeasts and molds are associated with a range of illnesses in the gut ranging from inflammatory bowel disease to colorectal cancer. Although it is difficult to distinguish between cause and effect when we find changes in the numbers and types of fungi in these illnesses, some specialists are convinced that the fungi are a missing link in medicine. 

What concerns you most about the future of our relationships with the fungi?

NPM: The ecological importance of the fungi, including their role in supporting plant growth and their efficiency as decomposers has led popularizers of mycology to suggest that fungi can restore logged forests, clean water polluted by oil spills, and even break down radioactive waste. These claims are unfounded, but they have convinced many young people that there are relatively simple remedies for the human impact on the biosphere. The actions of the fungi are amazing, but they will not save us from ourselves. In a similar vein, many of the assertions about the medicinal properties of mushrooms are absurd. Mycology is a field that has attracted a lot of wishful thinking, but I have always believed that the facts about the biology of the fungi are far more interesting than the fiction. This book sets the record straight.

Did anything make you laugh as you worked on this book project?

NPM: There is great humor in some of the pronouncements made by the more colorful figures who have promoted mycology in the last century. For example, Terence McKenna, who took “heroic doses” of drugs in the 1970s, declared that the psilocybin molecule found in magic mushrooms was so unusual that it must have originated elsewhere in the galaxy. He went on to postulate that psilocybin mushrooms were a higher form of intelligence that had arrived from outer space and shaped the evolution of the human brain. Although he faces some stiff competition, McKenna’s alien mushroom theory is one of the least enlightening things ever written about fungi. When you have made the scientific study of mycology your life’s work, as I have done, it impossible to treat anyone who takes an idea like this seriously as anything but a buffoon.

What is one of the questions that continues to puzzle researchers about the fungi?

NPM: Despite decades of research, we are a long way from understanding why only a few hundred of the hundreds of thousands of species of fungi damage our tissues. There are some clues. These include the way that some fungi can evade the body’s defenses by hiding inside the cells of the immune system until they find themselves inside the central nervous system. This is known as the Trojan Horse strategy and allows these microbes to reach the brain and cause mayhem. On the other hand, pathogenic fungi are not attacking us in any deliberate fashion, because the body is a dead end for them. Unlike viruses, fungi get stuck in our tissues and cannot get out. Some investigators are convinced that coping with the warmth of the body is a big part of the explanation for fungal virulence, but this mild thermotolerance is probably inconsequential. Tens of thousands of fungi that live in the soil can grow at our body temperature and never cause disease. The difference lies in the chemical conversations between the body and the microbes that cause problems, which explains why damage to the immune system makes us so vulnerable to fungal infections.     

“Life without fungi is impossible. There are as many of them living on the human body as there are stars in the Milky Way and, more importantly, they have a far greater influence on our lives than all but one of these galactic incinerators. They are everywhere and will outlive us by an eternity: in myco speramus.”

Nicholas P. Money is professor of biology at Miami University in Ohio and the author of many books on fungi and other microbes, including The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization, Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History, and Microbiology: A Very Short Introduction.  

[princetonuniversitypress]

It’s publication day for Claudia de Rham’s The Beauty of Falling! Listen to her conversation with @seanmcarroll for #mindscapepodcast: