Best New Yorker Profiles of Scholars
The New Yorker ungated its archive. Here are three excellent longform pieces about scholars worth attention.
- How to be Good, Larissa MacFarquhar
A profile of the philosopher Derek Parfit timed to the release of his book about the objectivity of morality, On What Matters.
There is something not-there about him, an unphysical, slightly androgynous quality. He lacks the normal anti-social emotions—envy, malice, dominance, desire for revenge. He doesn’t believe that his conscious mind is responsible for the important parts of his work. He pictures his thinking self as a government minister sitting behind a large desk, who writes a question on a piece of paper and puts it in his out-tray. The minister then sits idly at the desk, twiddling his thumbs, while in some back room civil servants labor furiously, come up with the answer, and place it in his in-tray. Parfit is less aware than most of the boundaries of his self—less conscious of them and less protective. He is helplessly, sometimes unwillingly, empathetic: he will find himself overcome by the mood of the person he is with, especially if that person is unhappy.
2. Embrace the Irony, Evan Osnos
A profile of Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law Professor, co-founder of Creative Commons, and his current quest to stem the corrupting influence of money in politics by creating a SuperPAC to end all SuperPACs.
Lessig is an unlikely politico. He is averse to schmoozing and phones and e-mail. His notes are rarely more than a sentence long. “It’s like having one of your closest friends be a telex machine,” his friend Davis Guggenheim, a filmmaker, told me. On Twitter, where brevity is a virtue, Lessig has three hundred thousand followers. On his Web site, he gives an apologetic explanation for not always replying: “I have three young kids, I have a demanding job, and I am trying to do as much as I possibly can to reform a corrupted political system.”
3. Two Heads, Larissa MacFarquhar
Profile of Paul and Patricia Churchland, philosophers at the University of California, San Diego.
Paul and Pat, realizing that the revolutionary neuroscience they dream of is still in its infancy, are nonetheless already preparing themselves for this future, making the appropriate adjustments in their everyday conversation. One afternoon recently, Paul says, he was home making dinner when Pat burst in the door, having come straight from a frustrating faculty meeting. “She said, ‘Paul, don’t speak to me, my serotonin levels have hit bottom, my brain is awash in glucocorticoids, my blood vessels are full of adrenaline, and if it weren’t for my endogenous opiates I’d have driven the car into a tree on the way home. My dopamine levels need lifting. Pour me a Chardonnay, and I’ll be down in a minute.’ ” Paul and Pat have noticed that it is not just they who talk this way — their students now talk of psychopharmacology as comfortably as of food.
Additions welcome as responses.
