"
Go Back
Print this page
The New Yorker
Skip to content
Subscribe to The New Yorker
Subscribe to The New Yorker
A Critic at Large
Finest Hours: The making of Winston Churchill. by Adam Gopnik August 30, 2010
Churchill inspecting American troops in England in March, 1944.
Churchill inspecting American troops in England in March, 1944. "We shall go on to the end," he had said defiantly, four years earlier, when all seemed lost. "We shall never surrender."
*
*
* Share
* Print
* E-Mail
* Single Page
Keywords
Winston Churchill;
"Churchill" (Viking; $24.95);
Paul Johnson;
"Churchill by Himself" (Public Affairs; $29.95);
"Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945" (Knopf; $35);
Max Hastings;
"Churchill's Bunker" (Yale; $27.50)
Seventy years ago this summer, in June of 1940, an aging British politician, who for the previous twenty years had seemed to his countrymen to be one of those entertaining, eccentric, essentially literary figures littering the margins of political life, got up to make a speech in the House of Commons. The British Expeditionary Forces had just been evacuated from France, fleeing a conquering German Army—evacuated successfully, but, as the speaker said, wars aren't won that way—and Britain itself seemed sure to be invaded, and soon. Many of the most powerful people in his own party believed it was time to settle for the best deal you could get from the Germans.
At that moment when all seemed lost, something was found, as Winston Churchill pronounced some of the most famous lines of the past century. "We shall go on to the end," he said defiantly, in tones plummy and, on the surviving recordings, surprisingly thick-tongued. "We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Churchill's words did all that words can do in the world. They said what had to be done; they announced why it had to be done then; they inspired those who had to do it.
That fatal summer and those fateful words continue to resonate. Revisionism, the itch of historians to say something new about something already known, has nicked Churchill without really drawing blood. In American conservative circles, he is still El Cid with a cigar, hoisted up on his horse to confront the latest existential threat to Western civilization (though his admirers tend to censor out the champagne or cognac glass that this ferocious Francophile kept clamped there, too). In Britain, it's a little different. Just as J.F.K. is adored abroad and admired at home—where by now he's seen as half liberal martyr, half libertine satyr—Churchill in Britain is revered but quarantined, his reputation held to the five years of his wartime rule. The Labour grandees Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey treat Churchill in their memoirs as a historical figure deserving of affection and respect but not really part of the story of modern Britain. (Jenkins eventually wrote a life of him, and ended up surprised by his own high opinion.) The revisionism from Churchill's own side is more marked; some on the British right even see him as the man who helped lose the Empire in a self-intoxicated excess of oratory that was the sort of thing only Americans would take seriously. It is typical of what his American fans can miss that a writer for the Wall Street Journal recently quoted Gore Vidal calling Evelyn Waugh a kind of prose Churchill, and thought this flattering to Waugh. In fact, Waugh disliked Churchill, prose and politics alike—his alter ego, Guy Crouchback, calls him "a professional politician, a master of sham-Augustan prose, a Zionist, an advocate of the popular front in Europe, an associate of the press-lords and of Lloyd George"—and his dry-eyed, limpid, every-pebble-in-its-place language was utterly remote from Churchill's sonorous, neo-Latinate sentences, and meant to be so.
But book after book about Churchill still comes: in the past few years a life by the omnivorous biographer Paul Johnson, "Churchill" (Viking; $24.95); a complete collection of Churchill's quotations, "Churchill by Himself " (Public Affairs; $29.95); and new and more specialized studies of Churchill at war, Churchill at Yalta, and Churchill in the memory of his countrymen. All these supplement the standard biographies, which include Martin Gilbert's official multivolume history, published in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Jenkins's single-volume life, from 2001, and John Keegan's crisp and authoritative life, from the year after. Meanwhile, the American historian John Lukacs's decades' worth of books about Churchill—slicing fine tranches of the crucial months and weeks and even days—remain the most insightful studies of Churchill's psychology and political practice. Reading all these, one finds a Churchill who is a good deal more compelling than the eternal iron man. Goethe wrote that Hamlet was a man who was asked to do something that seemed impossible for that man to do. Churchill is a kind of Hamlet in reverse, a man who was called on, late in life, to do the one thing he was uniquely able to do, and did it.
Churchill's life is so complex that he would have justified a biography or two had he died in 1931, when he was hit by a car on a New York street. The American connection was anything but incidental. He had an American mother, a loyal American audience, and, twice in his life, a determination to bring America into a war. (The editor Maxwell Perkins once said that he seemed to be "much more like an American than an Englishman.") During a period when Britain was to the world what America is now, the No. 1 nation with a widely admired élan, Churchill always kept a friendly, steady eye on the oncoming American chariot.
At the same time, Churchill was never entirely trusted by the upper crust to which he belonged, and certainly never by its organized voice, the Conservative Party. To be born both at the top of the tree and out on a limb is an odd combination, and that double heritage accounts for a lot of what happened to him later. Some of this oddity he owed to his mother, the New York heiress Jennie Jerome. But he owed more to his father, Randolph, who had been a meteor across the sky in British politics in the eighteen-seventies and eighties.
Randolph came from an old family—Churchill could never get enough of his descent from the first Duke of Marlborough, who defeated French and Bavarian troops at the Battle of Blenheim—but he belonged to a new generation of British politicians. After the golden age of the gentleman-gladiator, the eighteen-sixties and seventies of Disraeli and Gladstone, came a time of professional politics played as a blood sport. Randolph Churchill and his close collaborator (and, later, competitor) Joseph Chamberlain, who made his fortune as an industrialist in Birmingham, represented a new brutality: both were ambitious, driven, and ruthless, with an imperial turn of mind that Winston absorbed as second nature. Randolph, as Secretary of State for India in a Tory government, presented Burma as a "New Year's present" to the Queen. The imperialism of the older Churchill and Chamberlain appealed to tribal honor in military conquest, cutting right across class lines and limitations.
It may seem mysterious that jingoism should appeal so overwhelmingly to the working classes, easily trumping apparently obvious differences in interests between them and the economic imperialists. Why should conquering Burma be of significance to a Cockney? But imperialism is the cosmopolitanism of the people, the lever by which the unempowered come to believe that their acts have world-historical meaning. This understanding was the spine and bone of the younger Winston's politics. In his mind, British modernization and progress—and throughout the first part of his career he was seen, above all, as a progressive—were always tied up with the cult and religion of Empire. For Churchill, imperialism and progressivism were parts of the same package. You kept the Empire together by making sure that its very different peoples felt cared for by a benevolent overseer at home. (This faith in government as the essential caretaker led him later to support the creation of a national health service, "in order to ensure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available.")
Lord Randolph resigned in 1886, at his moment of maximum influence, apparently thinking that he could get a chunk of Parliament to follow him. He was wrong, and it is a sign of the changing mood that, where Gladstone resigned and returned as regularly as a soprano, Churchill's resignation was a death sentence to his hopes. In the spring of 1894, he became mentally unstable. The old story that his sudden decline was due to progressive syphilis now seems untrue—he is thought to have had a brain tumor—but the son must surely have suspected that his father died from venereal disease.
Winston recalled only a few intimate conversations with his father, and one of these, though couched as an apology, stayed with him: "Do remember things do not always go right with me. My every action is misjudged and every word distorted. . . . So make some allowances." Winston's own life had, up until the summer of 1940, the same shape of overreach and frustrated hopes. Something subtler came to him as a legacy, though. Having his father's work to finish, he also belonged emotionally with him in the nineteenth century, in a world of giants of the grand gesture, like Disraeli and Gladstone, who had the self-confidence to let the slightly loony inner man shine through the public mask.
After attending Sandhurst, in the eighteen-nineties, Churchill set out to make a reputation as an imperial warrior. He went adventuring, in South Africa and elsewhere, in a very "Ripping Yarns" spirit, and wrote very "Ripping Yarns" journalism about it. "The British army had never fired on white troops since the Crimea, and now that the world was growing so sensible and pacific—and so democratic too—the great days were over," he wrote of this period in his life. "Luckily, however, there were still savages and barbarous peoples. There were Zulus and Afghans, also the Dervishes of the Soudan. Some of these might, if they were well-disposed, 'put up a show.' "
He entered politics in 1902, on the strength of his imperial adventures and his family name. If no man is a hero to his valet, every man can be best judged by his personal assistant, and Winston's longest-serving private secretary, from the time he was elected to Parliament, was the remarkable and ever-admiring man of letters Edward Marsh. It was Marsh who recorded Churchill, on a visit to a poor neighborhood in Manchester, saying, with his odd and signature mixture of real empathy and inherited condescension, "Fancy living in one of these streets—never seeing anything beautiful—never eating anything savoury—never saying anything clever! "
Churchill earned his way forward by means of his vibrant skills as a debater and a phrasemaker. ("If you want to make a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships," he said in Parliament, "you must not think of it as if it were two men in armour striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two egg-shells striking each other with hammers.") As First Lord of the Admiralty at the start of the Great War, he believed that the slugging match on the Western Front showed a lack of imagination, and his pet project became the doomed invasion of the hinterland of the Turkish Empire, summed up in the name Gallipoli. The idea was to make an amphibious assault on the Gallipoli peninsula, on the European side of Turkey, and, though one official rationale was to open a route to Russia, then an ally, Churchill plainly saw it as a coup de théâtre that would take Constantinople, break the logjam of the war, and astonish the world—a brave imperial coup, another Burma at a still bigger moment.
On the night, the ill-prepared British and Allied troops met grimly resistant Turkish troops, got bogged down and bloodied, and had to be withdrawn. It is an article of faith in Australia and New Zealand that their troops were used by Churchill as cannon fodder, just as it is in Canada that the Canadians were taken by the Brits to serve a similar role at Dieppe, nearly three decades later. This seems on the whole unfair—the incompetent mass destruction of helpless infantrymen was a déformation professionelle of the entire British leadership, playing no favorites. Yet it burned into Churchill's reputation the idea that he was indifferent to the welfare of the ordinary soldier, and that his theatrical instincts were a mortal danger to privates and political parties alike.
Those who considered him an eccentric rider of hobbyhorses were confirmed in their view when, in the early nineteen-thirties, he routinely denounced Gandhi and Indian nationalism, breaking with the Conservative Party over it. "A seditious Middle Temple lawyer now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East" was among the milder things he said. One of the reasons that well-intentioned people didn't take seriously what he soon was saying about Hitler was that he had recently been saying the same kind of thing about Gandhi.
Only when Hitler came to power, in 1933, did Churchill's great moment begin. Magnanimity in victory was a core principle for Churchill, and he had been generous about Hitler in the beginning, recognizing that a defeated people need a defiant leader. But he soon caught on: "In the German view, which Herr Hitler shares, a peaceful Germany and Austria were fallen upon in 1914 by a gang of wicked designing nations, headed by Belgium and Serbia, and would have defended herself successfully if only she had not been stabbed in the back by the Jews. Against such opinions it is vain to argue."
People sometimes say that Churchill was quick to spot what Hitler was about because he was a student of history. But everyone in England had a historical line on Hitler: he was a second Mussolini, three parts bluster to one part opportunism; he was, at worst, another Napoleon, with continental ambitions but hardly a monster. Churchill saw that he was a fierce nationalist who had found a way of resurrecting and winning the obedience of the great engine of recent European history, the German Army. "You must never underrate the power of the German machine," he said, "this tremendous association of people who think about nothing but war." And then Churchill understood in his bones that Hitler was an apocalyptic romantic, who genuinely wanted a war. Churchill had always been perfectly willing to negotiate with bad guys, even with people he thought of as terrorists: one of the high points of his political career was the agreement for Irish independence that, as Colonial Secretary in the Lloyd George government after the war, he arrived at with the I.R.A. leader Michael Collins, a man who, in Churchill's mind, was simply a murderer. Churchill not only negotiated with Collins but came to admire his character and dash. Churchill's point, in the thirties, was not that bad guys should never be placated but that Germans possessed by a big idea and a reformed military are extremely dangerous to their neighbors.
For Churchill always thought in terms not of national interest but of a national character that could trump interest. The Germans "combine in the most deadly manner the qualities of the warrior and the slave," he said firmly. "They do not value freedom themselves and the spectacle of it in others is hateful to them." Or, as he put it more succinctly, "They are carnivorous sheep." We do not think this way anymore. (Except during the World Cup, when we do.) As an intellectual exercise, defining Germans seems perilously close to defaming Jews. Churchill did not see it this way. Germans for him are disciplined, servile, and dangerous when their servility meets a character out of Wagner; Russians are sloppy, sentimental, and brutally effective in the long haul; the French are brilliant, gallant, but prone to quick collapses through an excess of imagination and blind, vindictive self-assertion—these are the clichés of European history, but they are Churchill's touchstones. The Germans were trouble because they needed a nanny and they had got a nihilist. "This war would never have come," he said, after it was under way, "unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Hapsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer on to the vacant thrones."
This habit of thinking about peoples and their fate in collective historical cycles, however archaic it might seem, gave him special insight into Hitler, who, in a Black Mass distortion, pictured the world in the same way. Both Churchill and Hitler were nineteenth-century Romantics, who believed in race and nation—in the Volksgeist, the folk spirit—as the guiding principle of history, filtered through the destinies of great men. (It is startling to think that, even in the darkest depths of the Second World War, J. R. R. Tolkien was writing the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which contains, with the weird applicability available only to poetry and myth, the essential notion that the good gray wizard can understand the evil magi precisely because he is just enough like them to grasp their minds and motives in ways that they cannot grasp his.) Of course, Churchill and Hitler were, in the most vital respects, opposites. Churchill was, as Lukacs insists, a patriot, imbued with a love of place and people, while Hitler was a nationalist, infuriated by a hatred of aliens and imaginary enemies. But Churchill knew where Hitler was insecure and where he was strong, and knew how to goad him, too.
When war began at last, Churchill was ready. In September, 1939, he joined the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, but there was nothing automatic about his rise to the premiership. In May of 1940, Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was open to negotiations with Hitler, by way of Mussolini, to see what terms were available, and he had the confidence of the Conservative Party, and of the British establishment, in a way that Churchill never would. "If we got to the point of discussing the terms of a general settlement, and found we could obtain terms which did not postulate the destruction of our independence, we should be foolish if we did not accept them," Halifax said bluntly. Churchill grasped the sort of terms that would likely be on offer from the Germans: the same sort of terms offered to and accepted by Vichy France in June. He could even name those whom Hitler would surely have picked to be the Pétains and Lavals of England: the Fascist Oswald Mosley as Prime Minister; King Edward called home from abroad; and Lloyd George brought out of retirement. The list of internees already existed.
The usual explanation for Churchill's advancement is that Halifax, as a peer, would have had to lead the government from the House of Lords, an implausible situation. But Lukacs argues persuasively for the importance of Churchill's genuine magnanimity to the defeated and ailing Neville Chamberlain—an ancient rivalry of fathers brought forward into a new generation and healed—which kept Chamberlain from opposing his old rival Churchill. And the Labour ministers who had been brought into the coalition in the War Cabinet were thoroughgoing anti-Hitlerians; Churchill ascended with the crucial support of the socialists.
So, with nothing else to be done, Churchill began to speak. He gave six major speeches, in Parliament or on the radio, in the next four and a half months, and much of his reputation rests on those. His admirers, including Isaiah Berlin, who wrote a study of Churchill's diction soon after the war, point to his several stylistic sources: the suave ironies of Gibbon in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," the portentous periods of Macaulay, Dr. Johnson's Latinate constructions. Gibbon, in particular, is present everywhere—in the urge to balance every clause at the beginning of a sentence with a companion clause at the end, and in the paragraph play of slow build and snappy payoff—and not the least of modern ironies is that Gibbon's style, invented for a book whose implicit point was that the entire thousand-plus-year adventure of "Christian civilization" had been a comedown from the pagan past, got invoked to save it.
Reading the speeches today, you see the power of the elevated, "artificial" rhetoric that offended the ear of avant-garde taste in the nineteen-twenties, when Churchill was mocked for old-fashioned pomposity; the critic Herbert Read criticized his stale images, violent metaphors, and melodramatic atmosphere. Churchill could sometimes achieve a monosyllabic simplicity that brings tears to the eyes with its force and defiance:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind.
We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.
You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us, to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word:
Victory.
Victory at all costs—Victory in spite of all terror—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival.
Even at such moments, though, the language is remarkably abstract and impersonal. There is more loft than lucidity. ("Victory at all costs": but how, exactly?) "We shall fight" is also a fine slogan—and yet a slogan is what it is. Churchill's greatest passages are exhortations before they are explanations, exercises in elemental morale building rather than in explanatory eloquence.
In the "We Shall Fight" speech of June 4th, the exhortation is grounded in a slow buildup of blankly reported fact that includes a report to the nation, sparing none of the gruesome details of a defeat: "Our losses in matériel are enormous. We have perhaps lost one-third of the men we lost in the opening days of the battle of 21st March, 1918, but we have lost nearly as many guns—nearly one thousand—and all our transport, all the armored vehicles that were with the Army in the north." Even the repeated use of the verb "fight" obscures the real nature of the battle ahead. Fighting implies a fist cocked and a banner waved. But that wasn't the task at hand. The task at hand was standing and dying in a bombing attack, or waiting to be burned alive on the ground, or just doing without. Fighting was the action, but not the act.
It is not merely mischievous to point out that Churchill's language in 1940 employs almost all the elements that Orwell, in his fetishized essay on politics and language, from later in the decade, condemns: Churchill's rhetoric is dense with "dying metaphors" ("The light of history will shine on all your helmets" was his farewell to his War Cabinet), sentimental archaisms, and "pretentious diction." "A monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime"—this was exactly the sort of grandiosity that Orwell deplored. Yet it works. Words make sense only in context, and sentences find meaning only in circumstances. Churchill ought to sound absurdly archaic—"Every morn brought forth a noble chance /And every chance brought forth a noble knight," he says, quoting Tennyson in the middle of the June 4th speech. Instead, summoning up a bygone rhetoric, he places the day's horrors in a nation's history. The "monstrous tyranny" and the "lamentable catalogue" add to Churchill's trumpet a ground bass of memory—the history of the rhetoric of his own people.
Compare a typical, often praised speech by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin:
Very little, if anything has been said today about one of the greatest difficulties which we find facing us in dealing with this question, and that is that fighting instinct which is part of human nature. I propose to say a few words about that first, with a view to explaining how, in my view, we have to attempt to eradicate it, or, at least, to combat it, so as to produce that will to peace without which all efforts by legislation, arbitration, rule or otherwise, must be vain. . . . We find it even among men whose political views can be classed as pacifist, and that is the reason why we have often found in history that men of pacifist views were advocating policies which must end, if carried to their logical conclusion, in war.
This has Orwellian virtues. It is lucid, clear, intelligent, and even subtle. It is also flat, fatuous, and commonplace, three things Churchill never is. Churchill was a cavalier statesman who could never survive roundhead strictures on ornament and theatrical excess in speaking. That's why he could supply what everyone needed in 1940: a style that would mark emphatic ends (there is no good news), conventional ideas (we are an ancient nation), and old-fashioned emphasis (we will fight). Perhaps the style never suited the time. It suited the moment. The archaic poetic allusions in the June 4th speech—the reference to King Arthur's knights, the echoes of Shakespeare and John of Gaunt's oration on England—are there to say, "What's to fear? We've been here before." The images are stale, the metaphors are violent, the atmosphere is dramatic—and the moment justifies them all. (And, when the instant was past, the speaking stopped; Churchill's important public oratory ceased even before the Battle of Britain was over.)
Churchill's telepathic sense of Hitler also allowed him to grasp that shaking a rhetorical fist in his face might make the dictator act with self-destructive rage. Peter Fleming, Ian's more gifted older brother, summed it up well in the decade after the war ended:
It required no profound knowledge of the British character to realise that threats would strengthen rather than weaken their will to resist; but it did require more imagination than Hitler possessed to see what immense advantages might have been gained if in June 1940 he had turned his back on England instead of shaking his fist at her.
Churchill, understanding that Hitler wanted not just to conquer but to be recognized by the British Empire he admired, knew that he could provoke in Hitler the rage of a spurned suitor. When, in late August, a German bomber hit London, perhaps by accident, Churchill shrewdly retaliated, though to no particular harm, against Berlin—but the insult to Hitler's pride was so intense that he discarded the strategic plan to take out airfields and aircraft factories, and began the terror bombing of London, just to show them. This killed a lot of people, and let the R.A.F. regroup. The worst was over, and the war, though hardly won, would surely not be lost. "The forces that he has long been preparing he is now setting in motion, sooner than he intended," Gandalf says of his enemy, Sauron, after he has panicked him into acting too soon. "Wise fool." Wise fool, indeed.
Churchill, asked once what year he would like to relive, answered, "1940, every time, every time." It really was his finest hour. After that, the great speeches decline into a handful of brilliantly ironic remarks, and the battle-making became more dubious, to American eyes, anyway. Churchill's controversial leadership in the rest of the war is the main subject of Max Hastings's "Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945" (Knopf; $35) and of Richard Holmes's "Churchill's Bunker" (Yale; $27.50). On the whole, Hastings, whose father was a well-known British wartime correspondent, is more sympathetic to Churchill's strategic outlook than most Americans were then or have been since. The central issue was simple: the Americans, from the time of their entry into the war, in 1941, wanted a decisive pitched land battle in which an Allied Army, designed to outnumber the Germans, would destroy them on a battlefield in Europe.
Hastings repeatedly makes the grim point that the British Army was, throughout the war, largely exhausted and unhappy with its leadership (as it demonstrated by throwing for Labour when it had the chance), and that Churchill knew it. He didn't want his soldiers or generals fighting big pitched battles, because he wasn't sure they had it in them. Instead, why not descend through Norway, or rise up through Sicily, or charge up on a knife edge through the Balkans, the "soft underbelly of the Axis," as Churchill called them? He always insisted that a brilliant stroke somewhere or other would produce a victory that he blanched to imagine in a pitched battle with the Wehrmacht. (Since Hitler had a similar love of the grand coup, he shared Churchill's Norwegian fantasy, and stationed many troops there, to little point, throughout the war.) The Americans believed that such gambits, though they might produce front-page "victories," would do little to advance the real task of destroying the German Army.
Hastings ascribes Churchill's military preferences to his temperament—"He wanted war, like life, to be fun"—but surely the mystic chords of national memory played as large a role. British military history between Waterloo and the Great War was mostly peripheral, in the sense that relatively few pitched battles and lots and lots of opportunistic skirmishes, raids, and bluffs had made an empire. On the other hand, the strategy that the Americans believed in rhymed and chimed with the strategies of Sherman and Grant: find the enemy, attack him as directly, and stupidly, as necessary, lose men, make the enemy lose more, and then try to do it again the next day. Neither army was eager to waste lives. But the American theory of keeping men alive meant not throwing them away in sideshows; the British, not inserting them in meat grinders.
There is also the reality that war-making, which ought to be the most brutally empirical of studies, is as likely to be caught up in theoretical moonshine as any department of English. Both Roosevelt and Churchill were convinced that sea power was decisive, even though, as Hitler had grasped, the combustion engine had made the old calculations moot. Churchill invested far too much emotion and money in special forces. And yet his fancies were not entirely foolish. He stubbornly supported the development of Hobart's Funnies, weird military contraptions. These included swimming tanks that would float on inflatable canvas water wings as they were unleashed from the landing craft, and then make their way ashore. (Other specialized tanks were equipped with flails for mine clearing.) Some Americans dismissed this as another piece of pointless Churchillian cleverness. Yet the tanks' presence helped explain why the British and Canadian advances on the morning of D Day went more smoothly than that of the Americans.
The other great question about Churchill involves his role at Yalta in 1945, the conference that divided Europe. Though it was anathematized as a betrayal by generations of Eastern Europeans, S. M. Plokhy's new book, "Yalta: The Price of Peace" (Viking; $29.95), makes a persuasive case that, given the Russian troops already in Poland and elsewhere, there was really nothing else to be done, and that Churchill actually played a pitifully weak hand rather well—keeping Greece, for instance, out of the Russian orbit simply on a handshake. "Decades after the conference, with the benefit of hindsight, new archival findings, and tons of research, it is still very difficult to suggest any practical alternative to the course that they took," Plokhy says of Churchill and F.D.R. There was a fine difference between Stalin and Satan, and Churchill grasped it. In Antony Beevor's history of the Battle of Stalingrad, the brutality and waste of the Stalinist regime—prisoners left to die in the snow, political commissars ordering the execution of innocents, the dead of the great purges haunting the whole—is sickening. But the murderousness of the Nazi invaders—children killed en masse and buried in common graves—is satanic. It is the tragedy of modern existence that we have to make such distinctions. Yet that does not mean that such distinctions cannot be made, or that Churchill did not make them. His moral instincts were uncanny. In 1944, after the deportation of the Jews from Hungary, when the specifics of the extermination camps were still largely unknown, he wrote that the Nazis' war on the Jews would turn out to be "probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world."
In 1945, just as the war was ending, Churchill was ejected by the British people, in an overwhelming victory for Labour. David Kynaston's "Austerity Britain: 1945-1951" (Walker; $45) tells the story of that defeat, and of the new Britain, largely indifferent to Churchill and his values, that emerged afterward. Yet there remains a central question: Why did the war exhaust the English economy while it energized the American one? Britain had worn itself out by fighting, spending its "treasure," the story goes—but there is no fixed sum of treasure in a country apart from its productivity, and Britain was building planes, too. Though Britain had to borrow the money from us, we had to borrow it from ourselves in the form of bonds and deficits.
Perhaps the question itself is misleading. Britain's statist approach took as its fundamental goal not the expansion of a consumer economy but the provision of health, education, and housing to a population long denied it. In Kynaston, one finds stories of cold homes and rationed butter—but also heady stories of boys and girls emerging from generations of endurance into new landscapes of opportunity. What was felt as austerity by some was felt as possibility by many more. Certainly, in every working-class memoir one reads—in Harold Evans's, in Keith Waterhouse's—the period is described as a long history of endurance met by a sudden explosion of ambition. While people who had been at Mrs. Dalloway's party before the war had a harder time buying the flowers and managing the servants, their sense of diminishment was the last thing that working-class boys evoke. Most American stories from the Depression are of interrupted good fortune: we lost the department store, the business, the farm, endured with F.D.R., and swelled again with Ike. The British stories tell of hanging on grimly through it all, just as we'd done as long as we could remember, until the war was over, and then our Alf got to go to university and Granny got false teeth from the National Health.
Yet in an odd way the Tory defeat in 1945 sealed Churchill's historical place: there and then gone. He did do more. Barbara Leaming, in her new biography of the older Churchill, "Churchill Defiant: Fighting On, 1945-1955" (HarperCollins; $26.99), italicizes what Lukacs has already established: that, in the early fifties, Churchill was desperate to make a "supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds" and seek some kind of European understanding with Stalin and then with his successors. He was defeated by the rigid anti-Communist ideology of Eisenhower and, particularly, his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. "This fellow preaches like a Methodist Minister," Churchill said of Dulles, in despair, "and his bloody text is always the same: That nothing but evil can come out of meeting with Malenkov"—the post-Stalin Russian leader. It was, it turns out, the iron-clad Churchill who wanted to talk peace, and pragmatic Ike who was caught in a narrow ideological blinder.
What is Churchill's true legacy? Surely not that one should stand foursquare on all occasions and at all moments against something called appeasement. "The word 'appeasement' is not popular, but appeasement has its place in all policy," he said in 1950. "Make sure you put it in the right place. Appease the weak, defy the strong." He argued that "appeasement from strength is magnanimous and noble and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace." And he remarked on the painful irony: "When nations or individuals get strong they are often truculent and bullying, but when they are weak they become better-mannered. But this is the reverse of what is healthy and wise." Churchill's simplest aphorism, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war," was the essence of his position, as it was of any sane statesman raised in nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics. In the long history of the British Empire, there were endless people to make deals with and endless deals to be made, often with yesterday's terrorist or last week's enemy.
Churchill's real legacy lies elsewhere. He is, with de Gaulle, the greatest instance in modern times of the romantic-conservative temperament in power. The curious thing is that this temperament can at moments be more practical than its liberal opposite, or than its pragmatic-conservative twin, since it rightly concedes the primacy of ideas and passions, rather than interests and practicalities, in men's minds. Churchill was a student of history, but one whose reading allowed him to grasp when a new thing in history happened.
What is most impressive about his legacy, perhaps, is that he is one of the rare charismatic moderns who seem to have never toyed with extra-parliamentary movements or anti-liberal ideals. During all the years, and despite all the difficulties—in decades when the idea of Parliament as a fraud and a folly, a slow-footed relic of a dying age, was a standard faith of intellectuals on left and right alike—he remained a creature of rules and traditions who happily kissed the Queen's hand and accepted the people's verdict without complaint. Throughout the war, as Hitler retreated into his many bunkers and Stalin stormed and even Roosevelt concentrated power more and more in his single hand, Churchill accepted votes of confidence, endured fatuous parliamentary criticism, and meekly left office after triumphing in the most improbable of victories. A romantic visionary in constitutional spectacles can often see things as they are. ♦
PHOTOGRAPH: AP
To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe now
"
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/08/30/100830crat_atlarge_gopnik?printable=true
http://snipurl.com/1rcda2
Showing posts with label NewYorker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NewYorker. Show all posts
Monday, December 27, 2010
The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method? by Jonah Lehrer
"
Go Back
Print this page
The New Yorker
Skip to content
Subscribe to The New Yorker
Subscribe to The New Yorker
Annals of Science
The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method? by Jonah Lehrer
December 13, 2010
Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
*
*
* Share
* Print
* E-Mail
* Single Page
Keywords
Scientific Experiments;
Decline Effect;
Replicability;
Scientists;
Statistics;
Jonathan Schooler;
Scientific Theories
On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.
Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to "put nature to the question." But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
Jonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon "verbal overshadowing."
The study turned him into an academic star. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.
But while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. "I'd often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn't be as strong," he told me. "It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker." At first, he assumed that he'd made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn't find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) "It wasn't a very satisfying explanation," Schooler says. "One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment."
Schooler tried to put the problem out of his mind; his colleagues assured him that such things happened all the time. Over the next few years, he found new research questions, got married and had kids. But his replication problem kept on getting worse. His first attempt at replicating the 1990 study, in 1995, resulted in an effect that was thirty per cent smaller. The next year, the size of the effect shrank another thirty per cent. When other labs repeated Schooler's experiments, they got a similar spread of data, with a distinct downward trend. "This was profoundly frustrating," he says. "It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back." In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as "cosmic habituation," by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. "Habituation is why you don't notice the stuff that's always there," Schooler says. "It's an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement. I started joking that it was like the cosmos was habituating to my ideas. I took it very personally."
Schooler is now a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has curly black hair, pale-green eyes, and the relaxed demeanor of someone who lives five minutes away from his favorite beach. When he speaks, he tends to get distracted by his own digressions. He might begin with a point about memory, which reminds him of a favorite William James quote, which inspires a long soliloquy on the importance of introspection. Before long, we're looking at pictures from Burning Man on his iPhone, which leads us back to the fragile nature of memory.
Although verbal overshadowing remains a widely accepted theory—it's often invoked in the context of eyewitness testimony, for instance—Schooler is still a little peeved at the cosmos. "I know I should just move on already," he says. "I really should stop talking about this. But I can't." That's because he is convinced that he has stumbled on a serious problem, one that afflicts many of the most exciting new ideas in psychology.
One of the first demonstrations of this mysterious phenomenon came in the early nineteen-thirties. Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring Zener cards, a special deck of twenty-five cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. Most of Rhine's subjects guessed about twenty per cent of the cards correctly, as you'd expect, but an undergraduate named Adam Linzmayer averaged nearly fifty per cent during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million. Linzmayer did it three times.
Rhine documented these stunning results in his notebook and prepared several papers for publication. But then, just as he began to believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception, the student lost his spooky talent. Between 1931 and 1933, Linzmayer guessed at the identity of another several thousand cards, but his success rate was now barely above chance. Rhine was forced to conclude that the student's "extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline." And Linzmayer wasn't the only subject to experience such a drop-off: in nearly every case in which Rhine and others documented E.S.P. the effect dramatically diminished over time. Rhine called this trend the "decline effect."
Schooler was fascinated by Rhine's experimental struggles. Here was a scientist who had repeatedly documented the decline of his data; he seemed to have a talent for finding results that fell apart. In 2004, Schooler embarked on an ironic imitation of Rhine's research: he tried to replicate this failure to replicate. In homage to Rhine's interests, he decided to test for a parapsychological phenomenon known as precognition. The experiment itself was straightforward: he flashed a set of images to a subject and asked him or her to identify each one. Most of the time, the response was negative—the images were displayed too quickly to register. Then Schooler randomly selected half of the images to be shown again. What he wanted to know was whether the images that got a second showing were more likely to have been identified the first time around. Could subsequent exposure have somehow influenced the initial results? Could the effect become the cause?
The craziness of the hypothesis was the point: Schooler knows that precognition lacks a scientific explanation. But he wasn't testing extrasensory powers; he was testing the decline effect. "At first, the data looked amazing, just as we'd expected," Schooler says. "I couldn't believe the amount of precognition we were finding. But then, as we kept on running subjects, the effect size"—a standard statistical measure—"kept on getting smaller and smaller." The scientists eventually tested more than two thousand undergraduates. "In the end, our results looked just like Rhine's," Schooler said. "We found this strong paranormal effect, but it disappeared on us."
The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler's subjects didn't decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time. And yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn't be dramatic. "These are the results that pass all the tests," he says. "The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time! Hell, it's happened to me multiple times." And this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics. "Whenever I start talking about this, scientists get very nervous," he says. "But I still want to know what happened to my results. Like most scientists, I assumed that it would get easier to document my effect over time. I'd get better at doing the experiments, at zeroing in on the conditions that produce verbal overshadowing. So why did the opposite happen? I'm convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this out. First, though, we have to admit that we've got a problem."
In 1991, the Danish zoologist Anders Møller, at Uppsala University, in Sweden, made a remarkable discovery about sex, barn swallows, and symmetry. It had long been known that the asymmetrical appearance of a creature was directly linked to the amount of mutation in its genome, so that more mutations led to more "fluctuating asymmetry." (An easy way to measure asymmetry in humans is to compare the length of the fingers on each hand.) What Møller discovered is that female barn swallows were far more likely to mate with male birds that had long, symmetrical feathers. This suggested that the picky females were using symmetry as a proxy for the quality of male genes. Møller's paper, which was published in Nature, set off a frenzy of research. Here was an easily measured, widely applicable indicator of genetic quality, and females could be shown to gravitate toward it. Aesthetics was really about genetics.
In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn't matter if scientists were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies—females seemed to prefer males with mirrored halves. Before long, the theory was applied to humans. Researchers found, for instance, that women preferred the smell of symmetrical men, but only during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Other studies claimed that females had more orgasms when their partners were symmetrical, while a paper by anthropologists at Rutgers analyzed forty Jamaican dance routines and discovered that symmetrical men were consistently rated as better dancers.
Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.
And it's not just fluctuating asymmetry. In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze "temporal trends" across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. In fact, even when numerous variables were controlled for—Jennions knew, for instance, that the same author might publish several critical papers, which could distort his analysis—there was still a significant decrease in the validity of the hypothesis, often within a year of publication. Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly. "This is a very sensitive issue for scientists," he says. "You know, we're supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that's supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things."
What happened? Leigh Simmons, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, suggested one explanation when he told me about his initial enthusiasm for the theory: "I was really excited by fluctuating asymmetry. The early studies made the effect look very robust." He decided to conduct a few experiments of his own, investigating symmetry in male horned beetles. "Unfortunately, I couldn't find the effect," he said. "But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data. It was too exciting an idea to disprove, at least back then." For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for. A "significant" result is defined as any data point that would be produced by chance less than five per cent of the time. This ubiquitous test was invented in 1922 by the English mathematician Ronald Fisher, who picked five per cent as the boundary line, somewhat arbitrarily, because it made pencil and slide-rule calculations easier. Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren't favorable. But it's becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.
While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts. Richard Palmer, a biologist at the University of Alberta, who has studied the problems surrounding fluctuating asymmetry, suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer's most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they're subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn't random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. "Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed," Palmer told me. "As a researcher, you're always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is." In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: "We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated."
Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the "shoehorning" process. "A lot of scientific measurement is really hard," Simmons told me. "If you're talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it's a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It's millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he's measuring a good male"—an animal that has successfully mated—"and he knows that it's supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That's not a cynical statement. That's just the way human beings work."
One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don't want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. "These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common," he says. "It'd be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don't. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading." In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the "gold standard" of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable. In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. "This doesn't mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true," he says. "But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn't hold my breath."
According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls "significance chasing," or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. "The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy," Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. "It feels good to validate a hypothesis," Ioannidis said. "It feels even better when you've got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that's why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven"—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—"you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it's true."
That's why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. "We're wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments," he says. The current "obsession" with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design. He notes that nobody even tries to replicate most science papers—there are simply too many. (According to Nature, a third of all studies never even get cited, let alone repeated.) "I've learned the hard way to be exceedingly careful," Schooler says. "Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they're going to use, and what exactly they're testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments."
In a forthcoming paper, Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. "I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment," Schooler says. "It would help us finally deal with all these issues that the decline effect is exposing."
Although such reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn't erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can't be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn't encouraging.
In the late nineteen-nineties, John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, conducted an experiment that showed how unknowable chance events can skew tests of replicability. He performed a series of experiments on mouse behavior in three different science labs: in Albany, New York; Edmonton, Alberta; and Portland, Oregon. Before he conducted the experiments, he tried to standardize every variable he could think of. The same strains of mice were used in each lab, shipped on the same day from the same supplier. The animals were raised in the same kind of enclosure, with the same brand of sawdust bedding. They had been exposed to the same amount of incandescent light, were living with the same number of littermates, and were fed the exact same type of chow pellets. When the mice were handled, it was with the same kind of surgical glove, and when they were tested it was on the same equipment, at the same time in the morning.
The premise of this test of replicability, of course, is that each of the labs should have generated the same pattern of results. "If any set of experiments should have passed the test, it should have been ours," Crabbe says. "But that's not the way it turned out." In one experiment, Crabbe injected a particular strain of mouse with cocaine. In Portland the mice given the drug moved, on average, six hundred centimetres more than they normally did; in Albany they moved seven hundred and one additional centimetres. But in the Edmonton lab they moved more than five thousand additional centimetres. Similar deviations were observed in a test of anxiety. Furthermore, these inconsistencies didn't follow any detectable pattern. In Portland one strain of mouse proved most anxious, while in Albany another strain won that distinction.
The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn't an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don't understand. The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.
This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn't always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn't changed. The law of gravity remains the same.
Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can't bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: LAURENT CILLUFFO
To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe now
"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?printable=true
http://snipurl.com/1rcbb0
Go Back
Print this page
The New Yorker
Skip to content
Subscribe to The New Yorker
Subscribe to The New Yorker
Annals of Science
The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method? by Jonah Lehrer
December 13, 2010
Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
Many results that are rigorously proved and accepted start shrinking in later studies.
*
*
* Share
* Single Page
Keywords
Scientific Experiments;
Decline Effect;
Replicability;
Scientists;
Statistics;
Jonathan Schooler;
Scientific Theories
On September 18, 2007, a few dozen neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and drug-company executives gathered in a hotel conference room in Brussels to hear some startling news. It had to do with a class of drugs known as atypical or second-generation antipsychotics, which came on the market in the early nineties. The drugs, sold under brand names such as Abilify, Seroquel, and Zyprexa, had been tested on schizophrenics in several large clinical trials, all of which had demonstrated a dramatic decrease in the subjects' psychiatric symptoms. As a result, second-generation antipsychotics had become one of the fastest-growing and most profitable pharmaceutical classes. By 2001, Eli Lilly's Zyprexa was generating more revenue than Prozac. It remains the company's top-selling drug.
But the data presented at the Brussels meeting made it clear that something strange was happening: the therapeutic power of the drugs appeared to be steadily waning. A recent study showed an effect that was less than half of that documented in the first trials, in the early nineteen-nineties. Many researchers began to argue that the expensive pharmaceuticals weren't any better than first-generation antipsychotics, which have been in use since the fifties. "In fact, sometimes they now look even worse," John Davis, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me.
Before the effectiveness of a drug can be confirmed, it must be tested and tested again. Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their results. The test of replicability, as it's known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It's a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology. In the field of medicine, the phenomenon seems extremely widespread, affecting not only antipsychotics but also therapies ranging from cardiac stents to Vitamin E and antidepressants: Davis has a forthcoming analysis demonstrating that the efficacy of antidepressants has gone down as much as threefold in recent decades.
For many scientists, the effect is especially troubling because of what it exposes about the scientific process. If replication is what separates the rigor of science from the squishiness of pseudoscience, where do we put all these rigorously validated findings that can no longer be proved? Which results should we believe? Francis Bacon, the early-modern philosopher and pioneer of the scientific method, once declared that experiments were essential, because they allowed us to "put nature to the question." But it appears that nature often gives us different answers.
Jonathan Schooler was a young graduate student at the University of Washington in the nineteen-eighties when he discovered a surprising new fact about language and memory. At the time, it was widely believed that the act of describing our memories improved them. But, in a series of clever experiments, Schooler demonstrated that subjects shown a face and asked to describe it were much less likely to recognize the face when shown it later than those who had simply looked at it. Schooler called the phenomenon "verbal overshadowing."
The study turned him into an academic star. Since its initial publication, in 1990, it has been cited more than four hundred times. Before long, Schooler had extended the model to a variety of other tasks, such as remembering the taste of a wine, identifying the best strawberry jam, and solving difficult creative puzzles. In each instance, asking people to put their perceptions into words led to dramatic decreases in performance.
But while Schooler was publishing these results in highly reputable journals, a secret worry gnawed at him: it was proving difficult to replicate his earlier findings. "I'd often still see an effect, but the effect just wouldn't be as strong," he told me. "It was as if verbal overshadowing, my big new idea, was getting weaker." At first, he assumed that he'd made an error in experimental design or a statistical miscalculation. But he couldn't find anything wrong with his research. He then concluded that his initial batch of research subjects must have been unusually susceptible to verbal overshadowing. (John Davis, similarly, has speculated that part of the drop-off in the effectiveness of antipsychotics can be attributed to using subjects who suffer from milder forms of psychosis which are less likely to show dramatic improvement.) "It wasn't a very satisfying explanation," Schooler says. "One of my mentors told me that my real mistake was trying to replicate my work. He told me doing that was just setting myself up for disappointment."
Schooler tried to put the problem out of his mind; his colleagues assured him that such things happened all the time. Over the next few years, he found new research questions, got married and had kids. But his replication problem kept on getting worse. His first attempt at replicating the 1990 study, in 1995, resulted in an effect that was thirty per cent smaller. The next year, the size of the effect shrank another thirty per cent. When other labs repeated Schooler's experiments, they got a similar spread of data, with a distinct downward trend. "This was profoundly frustrating," he says. "It was as if nature gave me this great result and then tried to take it back." In private, Schooler began referring to the problem as "cosmic habituation," by analogy to the decrease in response that occurs when individuals habituate to particular stimuli. "Habituation is why you don't notice the stuff that's always there," Schooler says. "It's an inevitable process of adjustment, a ratcheting down of excitement. I started joking that it was like the cosmos was habituating to my ideas. I took it very personally."
Schooler is now a tenured professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He has curly black hair, pale-green eyes, and the relaxed demeanor of someone who lives five minutes away from his favorite beach. When he speaks, he tends to get distracted by his own digressions. He might begin with a point about memory, which reminds him of a favorite William James quote, which inspires a long soliloquy on the importance of introspection. Before long, we're looking at pictures from Burning Man on his iPhone, which leads us back to the fragile nature of memory.
Although verbal overshadowing remains a widely accepted theory—it's often invoked in the context of eyewitness testimony, for instance—Schooler is still a little peeved at the cosmos. "I know I should just move on already," he says. "I really should stop talking about this. But I can't." That's because he is convinced that he has stumbled on a serious problem, one that afflicts many of the most exciting new ideas in psychology.
One of the first demonstrations of this mysterious phenomenon came in the early nineteen-thirties. Joseph Banks Rhine, a psychologist at Duke, had developed an interest in the possibility of extrasensory perception, or E.S.P. Rhine devised an experiment featuring Zener cards, a special deck of twenty-five cards printed with one of five different symbols: a card was drawn from the deck and the subject was asked to guess the symbol. Most of Rhine's subjects guessed about twenty per cent of the cards correctly, as you'd expect, but an undergraduate named Adam Linzmayer averaged nearly fifty per cent during his initial sessions, and pulled off several uncanny streaks, such as guessing nine cards in a row. The odds of this happening by chance are about one in two million. Linzmayer did it three times.
Rhine documented these stunning results in his notebook and prepared several papers for publication. But then, just as he began to believe in the possibility of extrasensory perception, the student lost his spooky talent. Between 1931 and 1933, Linzmayer guessed at the identity of another several thousand cards, but his success rate was now barely above chance. Rhine was forced to conclude that the student's "extra-sensory perception ability has gone through a marked decline." And Linzmayer wasn't the only subject to experience such a drop-off: in nearly every case in which Rhine and others documented E.S.P. the effect dramatically diminished over time. Rhine called this trend the "decline effect."
Schooler was fascinated by Rhine's experimental struggles. Here was a scientist who had repeatedly documented the decline of his data; he seemed to have a talent for finding results that fell apart. In 2004, Schooler embarked on an ironic imitation of Rhine's research: he tried to replicate this failure to replicate. In homage to Rhine's interests, he decided to test for a parapsychological phenomenon known as precognition. The experiment itself was straightforward: he flashed a set of images to a subject and asked him or her to identify each one. Most of the time, the response was negative—the images were displayed too quickly to register. Then Schooler randomly selected half of the images to be shown again. What he wanted to know was whether the images that got a second showing were more likely to have been identified the first time around. Could subsequent exposure have somehow influenced the initial results? Could the effect become the cause?
The craziness of the hypothesis was the point: Schooler knows that precognition lacks a scientific explanation. But he wasn't testing extrasensory powers; he was testing the decline effect. "At first, the data looked amazing, just as we'd expected," Schooler says. "I couldn't believe the amount of precognition we were finding. But then, as we kept on running subjects, the effect size"—a standard statistical measure—"kept on getting smaller and smaller." The scientists eventually tested more than two thousand undergraduates. "In the end, our results looked just like Rhine's," Schooler said. "We found this strong paranormal effect, but it disappeared on us."
The most likely explanation for the decline is an obvious one: regression to the mean. As the experiment is repeated, that is, an early statistical fluke gets cancelled out. The extrasensory powers of Schooler's subjects didn't decline—they were simply an illusion that vanished over time. And yet Schooler has noticed that many of the data sets that end up declining seem statistically solid—that is, they contain enough data that any regression to the mean shouldn't be dramatic. "These are the results that pass all the tests," he says. "The odds of them being random are typically quite remote, like one in a million. This means that the decline effect should almost never happen. But it happens all the time! Hell, it's happened to me multiple times." And this is why Schooler believes that the decline effect deserves more attention: its ubiquity seems to violate the laws of statistics. "Whenever I start talking about this, scientists get very nervous," he says. "But I still want to know what happened to my results. Like most scientists, I assumed that it would get easier to document my effect over time. I'd get better at doing the experiments, at zeroing in on the conditions that produce verbal overshadowing. So why did the opposite happen? I'm convinced that we can use the tools of science to figure this out. First, though, we have to admit that we've got a problem."
In 1991, the Danish zoologist Anders Møller, at Uppsala University, in Sweden, made a remarkable discovery about sex, barn swallows, and symmetry. It had long been known that the asymmetrical appearance of a creature was directly linked to the amount of mutation in its genome, so that more mutations led to more "fluctuating asymmetry." (An easy way to measure asymmetry in humans is to compare the length of the fingers on each hand.) What Møller discovered is that female barn swallows were far more likely to mate with male birds that had long, symmetrical feathers. This suggested that the picky females were using symmetry as a proxy for the quality of male genes. Møller's paper, which was published in Nature, set off a frenzy of research. Here was an easily measured, widely applicable indicator of genetic quality, and females could be shown to gravitate toward it. Aesthetics was really about genetics.
In the three years following, there were ten independent tests of the role of fluctuating asymmetry in sexual selection, and nine of them found a relationship between symmetry and male reproductive success. It didn't matter if scientists were looking at the hairs on fruit flies or replicating the swallow studies—females seemed to prefer males with mirrored halves. Before long, the theory was applied to humans. Researchers found, for instance, that women preferred the smell of symmetrical men, but only during the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle. Other studies claimed that females had more orgasms when their partners were symmetrical, while a paper by anthropologists at Rutgers analyzed forty Jamaican dance routines and discovered that symmetrical men were consistently rated as better dancers.
Then the theory started to fall apart. In 1994, there were fourteen published tests of symmetry and sexual selection, and only eight found a correlation. In 1995, there were eight papers on the subject, and only four got a positive result. By 1998, when there were twelve additional investigations of fluctuating asymmetry, only a third of them confirmed the theory. Worse still, even the studies that yielded some positive result showed a steadily declining effect size. Between 1992 and 1997, the average effect size shrank by eighty per cent.
And it's not just fluctuating asymmetry. In 2001, Michael Jennions, a biologist at the Australian National University, set out to analyze "temporal trends" across a wide range of subjects in ecology and evolutionary biology. He looked at hundreds of papers and forty-four meta-analyses (that is, statistical syntheses of related studies), and discovered a consistent decline effect over time, as many of the theories seemed to fade into irrelevance. In fact, even when numerous variables were controlled for—Jennions knew, for instance, that the same author might publish several critical papers, which could distort his analysis—there was still a significant decrease in the validity of the hypothesis, often within a year of publication. Jennions admits that his findings are troubling, but expresses a reluctance to talk about them publicly. "This is a very sensitive issue for scientists," he says. "You know, we're supposed to be dealing with hard facts, the stuff that's supposed to stand the test of time. But when you see these trends you become a little more skeptical of things."
What happened? Leigh Simmons, a biologist at the University of Western Australia, suggested one explanation when he told me about his initial enthusiasm for the theory: "I was really excited by fluctuating asymmetry. The early studies made the effect look very robust." He decided to conduct a few experiments of his own, investigating symmetry in male horned beetles. "Unfortunately, I couldn't find the effect," he said. "But the worst part was that when I submitted these null results I had difficulty getting them published. The journals only wanted confirming data. It was too exciting an idea to disprove, at least back then." For Simmons, the steep rise and slow fall of fluctuating asymmetry is a clear example of a scientific paradigm, one of those intellectual fads that both guide and constrain research: after a new paradigm is proposed, the peer-review process is tilted toward positive results. But then, after a few years, the academic incentives shift—the paradigm has become entrenched—so that the most notable results are now those that disprove the theory.
Jennions, similarly, argues that the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found. The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for. A "significant" result is defined as any data point that would be produced by chance less than five per cent of the time. This ubiquitous test was invented in 1922 by the English mathematician Ronald Fisher, who picked five per cent as the boundary line, somewhat arbitrarily, because it made pencil and slide-rule calculations easier. Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments. In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren't favorable. But it's becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.
While publication bias almost certainly plays a role in the decline effect, it remains an incomplete explanation. For one thing, it fails to account for the initial prevalence of positive results among studies that never even get submitted to journals. It also fails to explain the experience of people like Schooler, who have been unable to replicate their initial data despite their best efforts. Richard Palmer, a biologist at the University of Alberta, who has studied the problems surrounding fluctuating asymmetry, suspects that an equally significant issue is the selective reporting of results—the data that scientists choose to document in the first place. Palmer's most convincing evidence relies on a statistical tool known as a funnel graph. When a large number of studies have been done on a single subject, the data should follow a pattern: studies with a large sample size should all cluster around a common value—the true result—whereas those with a smaller sample size should exhibit a random scattering, since they're subject to greater sampling error. This pattern gives the graph its name, since the distribution resembles a funnel.
The funnel graph visually captures the distortions of selective reporting. For instance, after Palmer plotted every study of fluctuating asymmetry, he noticed that the distribution of results with smaller sample sizes wasn't random at all but instead skewed heavily toward positive results. Palmer has since documented a similar problem in several other contested subject areas. "Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed," Palmer told me. "As a researcher, you're always aware that there might be some nonrandom patterns, but I had no idea how widespread it is." In a recent review article, Palmer summarized the impact of selective reporting on his field: "We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many—cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori beliefs often repeated."
Palmer emphasizes that selective reporting is not the same as scientific fraud. Rather, the problem seems to be one of subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions, as researchers struggle to make sense of their results. Stephen Jay Gould referred to this as the "shoehorning" process. "A lot of scientific measurement is really hard," Simmons told me. "If you're talking about fluctuating asymmetry, then it's a matter of minuscule differences between the right and left sides of an animal. It's millimetres of a tail feather. And so maybe a researcher knows that he's measuring a good male"—an animal that has successfully mated—"and he knows that it's supposed to be symmetrical. Well, that act of measurement is going to be vulnerable to all sorts of perception biases. That's not a cynical statement. That's just the way human beings work."
One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don't want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness.
John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, argues that such distortions are a serious issue in biomedical research. "These exaggerations are why the decline has become so common," he says. "It'd be really great if the initial studies gave us an accurate summary of things. But they don't. And so what happens is we waste a lot of money treating millions of patients and doing lots of follow-up studies on other themes based on results that are misleading." In 2005, Ioannidis published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective. Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the "gold standard" of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Nevertheless, the data Ioannidis found were disturbing: of the thirty-four claims that had been subject to replication, forty-one per cent had either been directly contradicted or had their effect sizes significantly downgraded.
The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable. In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension. Ioannidis and his colleagues looked at four hundred and thirty-two of these claims. They quickly discovered that the vast majority had serious flaws. But the most troubling fact emerged when he looked at the test of replication: out of four hundred and thirty-two claims, only a single one was consistently replicable. "This doesn't mean that none of these claims will turn out to be true," he says. "But, given that most of them were done badly, I wouldn't hold my breath."
According to Ioannidis, the main problem is that too many researchers engage in what he calls "significance chasing," or finding ways to interpret the data so that it passes the statistical test of significance—the ninety-five-per-cent boundary invented by Ronald Fisher. "The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy," Ioannidis says. In recent years, Ioannidis has become increasingly blunt about the pervasiveness of the problem. One of his most cited papers has a deliberately provocative title: "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False."
The problem of selective reporting is rooted in a fundamental cognitive flaw, which is that we like proving ourselves right and hate being wrong. "It feels good to validate a hypothesis," Ioannidis said. "It feels even better when you've got a financial interest in the idea or your career depends upon it. And that's why, even after a claim has been systematically disproven"—he cites, for instance, the early work on hormone replacement therapy, or claims involving various vitamins—"you still see some stubborn researchers citing the first few studies that show a strong effect. They really want to believe that it's true."
That's why Schooler argues that scientists need to become more rigorous about data collection before they publish. "We're wasting too much time chasing after bad studies and underpowered experiments," he says. The current "obsession" with replicability distracts from the real problem, which is faulty design. He notes that nobody even tries to replicate most science papers—there are simply too many. (According to Nature, a third of all studies never even get cited, let alone repeated.) "I've learned the hard way to be exceedingly careful," Schooler says. "Every researcher should have to spell out, in advance, how many subjects they're going to use, and what exactly they're testing, and what constitutes a sufficient level of proof. We have the tools to be much more transparent about our experiments."
In a forthcoming paper, Schooler recommends the establishment of an open-source database, in which researchers are required to outline their planned investigations and document all their results. "I think this would provide a huge increase in access to scientific work and give us a much better way to judge the quality of an experiment," Schooler says. "It would help us finally deal with all these issues that the decline effect is exposing."
Although such reforms would mitigate the dangers of publication bias and selective reporting, they still wouldn't erase the decline effect. This is largely because scientific research will always be shadowed by a force that can't be curbed, only contained: sheer randomness. Although little research has been done on the experimental dangers of chance and happenstance, the research that exists isn't encouraging.
In the late nineteen-nineties, John Crabbe, a neuroscientist at the Oregon Health and Science University, conducted an experiment that showed how unknowable chance events can skew tests of replicability. He performed a series of experiments on mouse behavior in three different science labs: in Albany, New York; Edmonton, Alberta; and Portland, Oregon. Before he conducted the experiments, he tried to standardize every variable he could think of. The same strains of mice were used in each lab, shipped on the same day from the same supplier. The animals were raised in the same kind of enclosure, with the same brand of sawdust bedding. They had been exposed to the same amount of incandescent light, were living with the same number of littermates, and were fed the exact same type of chow pellets. When the mice were handled, it was with the same kind of surgical glove, and when they were tested it was on the same equipment, at the same time in the morning.
The premise of this test of replicability, of course, is that each of the labs should have generated the same pattern of results. "If any set of experiments should have passed the test, it should have been ours," Crabbe says. "But that's not the way it turned out." In one experiment, Crabbe injected a particular strain of mouse with cocaine. In Portland the mice given the drug moved, on average, six hundred centimetres more than they normally did; in Albany they moved seven hundred and one additional centimetres. But in the Edmonton lab they moved more than five thousand additional centimetres. Similar deviations were observed in a test of anxiety. Furthermore, these inconsistencies didn't follow any detectable pattern. In Portland one strain of mouse proved most anxious, while in Albany another strain won that distinction.
The disturbing implication of the Crabbe study is that a lot of extraordinary scientific data are nothing but noise. The hyperactivity of those coked-up Edmonton mice wasn't an interesting new fact—it was a meaningless outlier, a by-product of invisible variables we don't understand. The problem, of course, is that such dramatic findings are also the most likely to get published in prestigious journals, since the data are both statistically significant and entirely unexpected. Grants get written, follow-up studies are conducted. The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.
This suggests that the decline effect is actually a decline of illusion. While Karl Popper imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment—Galileo refuted Aristotelian mechanics in an afternoon—the process turns out to be much messier than that. Many scientific theories continue to be considered true even after failing numerous experimental tests. Verbal overshadowing might exhibit the decline effect, but it remains extensively relied upon within the field. The same holds for any number of phenomena, from the disappearing benefits of second-generation antipsychotics to the weak coupling ratio exhibited by decaying neutrons, which appears to have fallen by more than ten standard deviations between 1969 and 2001. Even the law of gravity hasn't always been perfect at predicting real-world phenomena. (In one test, physicists measuring gravity by means of deep boreholes in the Nevada desert found a two-and-a-half-per-cent discrepancy between the theoretical predictions and the actual data.) Despite these findings, second-generation antipsychotics are still widely prescribed, and our model of the neutron hasn't changed. The law of gravity remains the same.
Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism. Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice. Why? Because these ideas seem true. Because they make sense. Because we can't bear to let them go. And this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe. ♦
ILLUSTRATION: LAURENT CILLUFFO
To get more of The New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe now
"
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?printable=true
http://snipurl.com/1rcbb0
Friday, December 18, 2009
Goings On About Town's Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009 Posted by Shauna Lyon
December 18, 2009
Goings On About Town's Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009 Posted by Shauna Lyon
25_opt(2).jpg
This year, Off Broadway (and Off Off Broadway) theatre yielded myriad pleasures, as well as some pain, from reconceived classics to star-driven spectacles to truly heart-wrenching dramas to elaborately offbeat displays of inventiveness. The bar was set high by several up-and-coming companies, and more than a few lesser-known writers and directors broke out with remarkable work. We culled the favorites of several Goings On About Town contributors; some shows, such as "Our Town," "Telephone," "This Beautiful City," and "Circle Mirror Transformation," got several votes. In no particular order, here are our top twelve.
Ruined
In Lynn Nottage's incandescent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, a group of physically and spiritually wounded Congolese women survive the ravages of their country's civil war by working at the tough Mama Nadi's brothel. Partly based on interviews with women who endured similar horrors in the Congo, Kate Whoriskey's production (for Manhattan Theatre Club) exhibited truth, compassion, and pathos in paying tribute to those who have suffered—thanks in no small part to the brave, standout performances of Portia, Russell Jones, and Condola Rashad. (Shauna Lyon)
Telephone
The Foundry Theatre staged this feverish, visually searing piece, by the poet Ariana Reines, about Alexander Graham Bell and the distorting effects of the telephone. Birgit Huppuch won an Obie for her role as a mad seamstress who delivers a long, nonsensical, completely unforgettable soliloquy. (Michael Schulman)
This Beautiful City
Basically, whenever the Civilians do something, see it. The documentary-theatre troupe's investigation into Ted Haggard and the underpinnings of faith was shrewd, funny, and humane. Next up: an exploration of the porn industry. (M.S.)
Our Town
The director David Cromer turned Thornton Wilder's chestnut into something breathtakingly new, thanks in part to a bacon-assisted coup de théâtre. The production is still running at the Barrow Street Theatre, although Cromer is no longer starring as the Stage Manager. Go! (M.S.)
Circle Mirror Transformation
An under-enrolled community-center drama class was the ingenious setting for Annie Baker's clever and endearing sophomore outing. Add a stellar cast of New York theatre all-stars—Reed Birney, Heidi Schreck, Deirdre O'Connell, Peter Friedman, and Tracee Chimo—and Sam Gold's virtuosically detailed direction, and what you have is the word-of-mouth hit of the season. In fact, it's already being revived: Playwrights Horizons has brought it back for a virtually unheard of return engagement, through Jan. 17. (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins)
The Lily's Revenge
Taylor Mac's extravaganza—five hours long! a cast of forty!—was about a lovelorn lily (played by Mac) on a quest for self-acceptance (at HERE Arts Center). You don't often see downtown theatre this ambitious, either in size or in spirit. And the flower costumes were fierce. (M.S.)
Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines
The most inventive thing I saw all year (at HERE Arts Center), and one of the giddiest. Quinn Bauriedel, Trey Lyford, and Geoff Sobelle wrote and starred in this clown fantasia, which featured incredible Rube Goldberg-inspired contraptions. Probably the most animated set since "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." (M.S.)
Twelfth Night
Seeing almost anything at the Delacorte on a warm summer night is a pleasure, but Daniel Sullivan's Shakespeare in the Park production, which featured Hamish Linklater, Julie White, and Anne Hathaway (the movie star, not Shakespeare's wife), was one of the best in years—even in the rain. (M.S.)
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
In April, Banana Bag & Bodice brought us a staging of the Beowulf legend that featured a propulsive, oompah-inflected score (by Dave Malloy), sets reminiscent of "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," and, improbably, fresh insight into Grendel (he's a lovable dope). They also wisely handed out soundtrack CDs to critics, insuring that brilliant tunes like "Heorot," "Hrothgar," and "Beowulf Arrives" would be stuck in their heads for the duration of 2009. "Beowulf" had a limited run, but the company's "A Very Sandwich Christmas" is playing at Abrons Arts Center, through Dec. 19. (Sarah Larson)
Angela's Mixtape
It's lucky for us that Eisa Davis grew up to be an actor and a playwright (and a singer and a dancer) rather than a radical like her aunt Angela; otherwise we wouldn't have been so thoroughly entertained by her play (presented by New Georges at the Ohio in April), a wacky depiction of growing up an innocent around sixties revolutionaries. (Trish Deitch)
CHAUTAUQUA!
There is no theatre company in New York quite like the National Theatre of the United States of America, and there was no other show this past season quite like this one. Modelled on the historical lecture circuit of the late nineteenth century, "CHAUTAUQUA!" (which played at P.S. 122) was part history pageant, part public service, part farce, and part Pirandellian theatrical experiment that earnestly sought to engage its local audiences not just with its past but with its present—a slick, ambitious, rigorous, and big-hearted celebration of all things theatrical and democratic. If you missed it the first time, don't fret: it returns in January as part of the Public's "Under the Radar" festival. (B.J.J.)
The Winter's Tale / The Cherry Orchard
The first year of the Bridge Project, Sam Mendes's globetrotting brainchild, had an extraordinary cast (Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall, Ethan Hawke, Richard Easton) and alternated between Chekhov and Shakespeare at BAM. Both were ravishingly elegant and sad. Mendes's Bridge Project returns to BAM in January with a new cast to perform "As You Like It" and "The Tempest." (M.S.)
Honorable Mention: Willem Dafoe's astute idiot in Richard Foreman's "Idiot Savant," at the Public; and Mamie Gummer's delicately lovelorn Sonya in "Uncle Vanya," at Classic Stage Company.
Goings On About Town’s Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/goings-on-about-town-best-off-broadway-theatre-shows-of-2009.html
http://snipurl.com/tv52r
Goings On About Town's Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009 Posted by Shauna Lyon
25_opt(2).jpg
This year, Off Broadway (and Off Off Broadway) theatre yielded myriad pleasures, as well as some pain, from reconceived classics to star-driven spectacles to truly heart-wrenching dramas to elaborately offbeat displays of inventiveness. The bar was set high by several up-and-coming companies, and more than a few lesser-known writers and directors broke out with remarkable work. We culled the favorites of several Goings On About Town contributors; some shows, such as "Our Town," "Telephone," "This Beautiful City," and "Circle Mirror Transformation," got several votes. In no particular order, here are our top twelve.
Ruined
In Lynn Nottage's incandescent Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, a group of physically and spiritually wounded Congolese women survive the ravages of their country's civil war by working at the tough Mama Nadi's brothel. Partly based on interviews with women who endured similar horrors in the Congo, Kate Whoriskey's production (for Manhattan Theatre Club) exhibited truth, compassion, and pathos in paying tribute to those who have suffered—thanks in no small part to the brave, standout performances of Portia, Russell Jones, and Condola Rashad. (Shauna Lyon)
Telephone
The Foundry Theatre staged this feverish, visually searing piece, by the poet Ariana Reines, about Alexander Graham Bell and the distorting effects of the telephone. Birgit Huppuch won an Obie for her role as a mad seamstress who delivers a long, nonsensical, completely unforgettable soliloquy. (Michael Schulman)
This Beautiful City
Basically, whenever the Civilians do something, see it. The documentary-theatre troupe's investigation into Ted Haggard and the underpinnings of faith was shrewd, funny, and humane. Next up: an exploration of the porn industry. (M.S.)
Our Town
The director David Cromer turned Thornton Wilder's chestnut into something breathtakingly new, thanks in part to a bacon-assisted coup de théâtre. The production is still running at the Barrow Street Theatre, although Cromer is no longer starring as the Stage Manager. Go! (M.S.)
Circle Mirror Transformation
An under-enrolled community-center drama class was the ingenious setting for Annie Baker's clever and endearing sophomore outing. Add a stellar cast of New York theatre all-stars—Reed Birney, Heidi Schreck, Deirdre O'Connell, Peter Friedman, and Tracee Chimo—and Sam Gold's virtuosically detailed direction, and what you have is the word-of-mouth hit of the season. In fact, it's already being revived: Playwrights Horizons has brought it back for a virtually unheard of return engagement, through Jan. 17. (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins)
The Lily's Revenge
Taylor Mac's extravaganza—five hours long! a cast of forty!—was about a lovelorn lily (played by Mac) on a quest for self-acceptance (at HERE Arts Center). You don't often see downtown theatre this ambitious, either in size or in spirit. And the flower costumes were fierce. (M.S.)
Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines Machines
The most inventive thing I saw all year (at HERE Arts Center), and one of the giddiest. Quinn Bauriedel, Trey Lyford, and Geoff Sobelle wrote and starred in this clown fantasia, which featured incredible Rube Goldberg-inspired contraptions. Probably the most animated set since "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." (M.S.)
Twelfth Night
Seeing almost anything at the Delacorte on a warm summer night is a pleasure, but Daniel Sullivan's Shakespeare in the Park production, which featured Hamish Linklater, Julie White, and Anne Hathaway (the movie star, not Shakespeare's wife), was one of the best in years—even in the rain. (M.S.)
Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage
In April, Banana Bag & Bodice brought us a staging of the Beowulf legend that featured a propulsive, oompah-inflected score (by Dave Malloy), sets reminiscent of "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome," and, improbably, fresh insight into Grendel (he's a lovable dope). They also wisely handed out soundtrack CDs to critics, insuring that brilliant tunes like "Heorot," "Hrothgar," and "Beowulf Arrives" would be stuck in their heads for the duration of 2009. "Beowulf" had a limited run, but the company's "A Very Sandwich Christmas" is playing at Abrons Arts Center, through Dec. 19. (Sarah Larson)
Angela's Mixtape
It's lucky for us that Eisa Davis grew up to be an actor and a playwright (and a singer and a dancer) rather than a radical like her aunt Angela; otherwise we wouldn't have been so thoroughly entertained by her play (presented by New Georges at the Ohio in April), a wacky depiction of growing up an innocent around sixties revolutionaries. (Trish Deitch)
CHAUTAUQUA!
There is no theatre company in New York quite like the National Theatre of the United States of America, and there was no other show this past season quite like this one. Modelled on the historical lecture circuit of the late nineteenth century, "CHAUTAUQUA!" (which played at P.S. 122) was part history pageant, part public service, part farce, and part Pirandellian theatrical experiment that earnestly sought to engage its local audiences not just with its past but with its present—a slick, ambitious, rigorous, and big-hearted celebration of all things theatrical and democratic. If you missed it the first time, don't fret: it returns in January as part of the Public's "Under the Radar" festival. (B.J.J.)
The Winter's Tale / The Cherry Orchard
The first year of the Bridge Project, Sam Mendes's globetrotting brainchild, had an extraordinary cast (Simon Russell Beale, Rebecca Hall, Ethan Hawke, Richard Easton) and alternated between Chekhov and Shakespeare at BAM. Both were ravishingly elegant and sad. Mendes's Bridge Project returns to BAM in January with a new cast to perform "As You Like It" and "The Tempest." (M.S.)
Honorable Mention: Willem Dafoe's astute idiot in Richard Foreman's "Idiot Savant," at the Public; and Mamie Gummer's delicately lovelorn Sonya in "Uncle Vanya," at Classic Stage Company.
Goings On About Town’s Best Off Broadway Theatre Shows of 2009: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/goings-on-about-town-best-off-broadway-theatre-shows-of-2009.html
http://snipurl.com/tv52r
The Best Theatre of 2009 Posted by Hilton Als
December 18, 2009
The Best Theatre of 2009 Posted by Hilton Als
When Frank Capra adapted playwright Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 Broadway hit, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” for the screen in 1944, Cary Grant took over the role of Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who’s as famous for his views on marriage—he’s very anti—as he is for the cruelty of his reviews. But when the movie begins, Mortimer’s in the process of contradicting his public image; he’s in love with, and marries, a sweet girl he grew up near in Brooklyn. One feels for Mortimer. Love rattles his cool nearly as much as his dotty aunts’ penchant for poisoning lonely old bachelors. Six years after Capra’s movie was produced, the film director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz presented his masterwork, “All About Eve.” In it, one meets a variety of theatre folk; among them is the waspish, aptly named theatre critic Addison De Witt. Cold, removed, and glittering like an icicle, De Witt doesn’t restrict his venom to the stage; through various machinations, he ends up controlling the movie’s titular anti-heroine. About himself, Addison says: “My native habitat is the theatre. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theatre.”
In actual fact, critics are more interesting to meet in the movies than they are in what we call real life; they rarely think of themselves as central to anything, let alone the life of the theatre: it’s the theatre that feeds us. While Brewster and De Witt are film’s most famous writers, one suspects they’d be still more interesting on the page, which is where most writers belong. (The possible exception is Gore Vidal.) While movies and novels generally characterize theatre critics as angry bottom feeders in a sea of creativity, the theatre critic’s real job is to articulate love and humility and a sense of wonder whenever the curtain rises—no matter how unpromising the enterprise under review turns out to be. While there was precious little to unequivocally love in 2009, there were sensational moments that reminded one of why looking and articulating what one saw onstage remains such a powerful experience, leaving the critic happily vulnerable to all that any number of actors, producers, designers, and directors mean to say. Or should.
1. Isabelle Huppert in Robert Wilson’s “Quartett.” Huppert’s glorious Gallic face, that turned-down mouth that hints at her perpetual disapproval and, if pushed, contempt, was beautifully utilized by Wilson in the late German playwright Heiner Müller’s masterful re-imaging of the Choderlos de Laclos classic “Dangerous Liaisons.” Huppert’s self-control—over her costuming, the rush of words, not to mention body—was without question the theatrical event of the season. For what Huppert managed to do, first through her mere presence, and then by using her laser-like intelligence and hunger to know more about the world and show it, was to remind audiences of theatre’s basic ineffability, and why it’s a tragic medium, akin to jazz: no one performance is or should be the same. And then the moment passes, only to be reclaimed in memory.
2. Alenka Kraigher in Richard Foreman’s “Idiot Savant.” Kraigher, who is also a filmmaker, was born in Slovenia, and she knows perfectly well how faces look on stage and in front of the camera. She’s a postmodern Lillian Gish, capable of melding two genres into one and coming out on the other side with something utterly new. Taking her cue from Foreman—he cramps his stage with obstacles—Kraigher uses her body minimally while throwing shade with a flicker of her eyelids. Kraigher could become a great new star if she can keep working with directors like Foreman, who gets at a performer’s soul by throwing out a character’s psychology.
3. Diane Keaton at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As dinner guests of mutual friends, it was fascinating to watch her bits of pantomime while the waiter took someone else’s order. She talked in one breath about what to eat and who she meant to be, while simultaneously laughing at her ability and inability to commit to either “persona.” A brilliant performance in real time.
4. Pablo Schneider in “Desire Under the Elms.” American men are not supposed to be aware of their sexual power onstage or off; that would make them less “masculine.” But part of what made Marlon Brando so great—and so singular in his effects—was his awareness that, as an actor, he liked being looked at, by men and women alike. Generally, if we like an American male onstage, it’s because he’s playing some version of the stolid, non-verbal, sports-loving Dad we all grew up with, or wish we had. But Schneider broke that mold with his deeply erotic and engaged portrayal of a love-sick, sensitive boy who becomes a man by seeking mother-love from a conniving older woman. He’s as much in love with her rot as he is with the maternal female flesh that crawls out from underneath it.
5. Justin Bond at Joe’s Pub, and at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center with The Pixie Harlots. Speaking of masculinity! The gender-bending performer told stories about pagan faerie rituals, the new economy, drugs in San Francisco, love, sex, and falling down the stairs in a haunted house, sometimes supported by incomparable “Our” Lady Jay on piano. His heartbreaking rendition of Radiohead’s “Little Fishes,” was all about the power and mystery and ultimate demise of the body, a performance that helped italicize one of the primary reasons we go to the theatre: to watch bodies, and thus truth, unfold as they tell stories.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/the-best-theatre-of-2009.html#ixzz0apxpKI76
The Best Theatre of 2009 Posted by Hilton Als
When Frank Capra adapted playwright Joseph Kesselring’s 1939 Broadway hit, “Arsenic and Old Lace,” for the screen in 1944, Cary Grant took over the role of Mortimer Brewster, a theatre critic who’s as famous for his views on marriage—he’s very anti—as he is for the cruelty of his reviews. But when the movie begins, Mortimer’s in the process of contradicting his public image; he’s in love with, and marries, a sweet girl he grew up near in Brooklyn. One feels for Mortimer. Love rattles his cool nearly as much as his dotty aunts’ penchant for poisoning lonely old bachelors. Six years after Capra’s movie was produced, the film director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz presented his masterwork, “All About Eve.” In it, one meets a variety of theatre folk; among them is the waspish, aptly named theatre critic Addison De Witt. Cold, removed, and glittering like an icicle, De Witt doesn’t restrict his venom to the stage; through various machinations, he ends up controlling the movie’s titular anti-heroine. About himself, Addison says: “My native habitat is the theatre. In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator. I am essential to the theatre.”
In actual fact, critics are more interesting to meet in the movies than they are in what we call real life; they rarely think of themselves as central to anything, let alone the life of the theatre: it’s the theatre that feeds us. While Brewster and De Witt are film’s most famous writers, one suspects they’d be still more interesting on the page, which is where most writers belong. (The possible exception is Gore Vidal.) While movies and novels generally characterize theatre critics as angry bottom feeders in a sea of creativity, the theatre critic’s real job is to articulate love and humility and a sense of wonder whenever the curtain rises—no matter how unpromising the enterprise under review turns out to be. While there was precious little to unequivocally love in 2009, there were sensational moments that reminded one of why looking and articulating what one saw onstage remains such a powerful experience, leaving the critic happily vulnerable to all that any number of actors, producers, designers, and directors mean to say. Or should.
1. Isabelle Huppert in Robert Wilson’s “Quartett.” Huppert’s glorious Gallic face, that turned-down mouth that hints at her perpetual disapproval and, if pushed, contempt, was beautifully utilized by Wilson in the late German playwright Heiner Müller’s masterful re-imaging of the Choderlos de Laclos classic “Dangerous Liaisons.” Huppert’s self-control—over her costuming, the rush of words, not to mention body—was without question the theatrical event of the season. For what Huppert managed to do, first through her mere presence, and then by using her laser-like intelligence and hunger to know more about the world and show it, was to remind audiences of theatre’s basic ineffability, and why it’s a tragic medium, akin to jazz: no one performance is or should be the same. And then the moment passes, only to be reclaimed in memory.
2. Alenka Kraigher in Richard Foreman’s “Idiot Savant.” Kraigher, who is also a filmmaker, was born in Slovenia, and she knows perfectly well how faces look on stage and in front of the camera. She’s a postmodern Lillian Gish, capable of melding two genres into one and coming out on the other side with something utterly new. Taking her cue from Foreman—he cramps his stage with obstacles—Kraigher uses her body minimally while throwing shade with a flicker of her eyelids. Kraigher could become a great new star if she can keep working with directors like Foreman, who gets at a performer’s soul by throwing out a character’s psychology.
3. Diane Keaton at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. As dinner guests of mutual friends, it was fascinating to watch her bits of pantomime while the waiter took someone else’s order. She talked in one breath about what to eat and who she meant to be, while simultaneously laughing at her ability and inability to commit to either “persona.” A brilliant performance in real time.
4. Pablo Schneider in “Desire Under the Elms.” American men are not supposed to be aware of their sexual power onstage or off; that would make them less “masculine.” But part of what made Marlon Brando so great—and so singular in his effects—was his awareness that, as an actor, he liked being looked at, by men and women alike. Generally, if we like an American male onstage, it’s because he’s playing some version of the stolid, non-verbal, sports-loving Dad we all grew up with, or wish we had. But Schneider broke that mold with his deeply erotic and engaged portrayal of a love-sick, sensitive boy who becomes a man by seeking mother-love from a conniving older woman. He’s as much in love with her rot as he is with the maternal female flesh that crawls out from underneath it.
5. Justin Bond at Joe’s Pub, and at the Henry Street Settlement’s Abrons Arts Center with The Pixie Harlots. Speaking of masculinity! The gender-bending performer told stories about pagan faerie rituals, the new economy, drugs in San Francisco, love, sex, and falling down the stairs in a haunted house, sometimes supported by incomparable “Our” Lady Jay on piano. His heartbreaking rendition of Radiohead’s “Little Fishes,” was all about the power and mystery and ultimate demise of the body, a performance that helped italicize one of the primary reasons we go to the theatre: to watch bodies, and thus truth, unfold as they tell stories.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/the-best-theatre-of-2009.html#ixzz0apxpKI76
Ten Great Photographs, 2009 Posted by Vince Aletti
December 18, 2009
Ten Great Photographs, 2009 Posted by Vince Aletti
* Roger Ballen: “Sliced” (2007), at Gagosian.
Ballen, an American-born photographer now living in South Africa, made the pictures in his latest show in collaboration with squatters at an abandoned warehouse outside of Johannesburg. The results are bizarre, alarming, and often wildly comic—drawing more from outsider art, Jean Dubuffet, and Mike Kelley than any photographic tradition. This image of a salamander with its tail freshly cut off can only begin to suggest the odd and obsessive nature of the work.
Ballen_Sliced_400.jpg© ROGER BALLEN. COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY
* Tracey Baran: “Of My Dreams” (2007), at Leslie Tonkonow.
Baran was only thirty-three when she died, in 2008, but she’d been making exceptional and audaciously personal work for a decade. Much of it focussed on her immediate family, but some of her best pictures and wittiest self-portraits were about sex or, in the case of this Edenic image of a nude boyfriend, love.
TraceyBaran-Of My Dreams_opt.jpg
COPYRIGHT ESTATE OF TRACEY BARAN, COURTESY OF LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS, NEW YORK
* Alan Chin: “Taliban Prisoners, Afghanistan” (2001), at Sasha Wolf.
Chin’s exhibition, “Dispatches: 1998-2008,” included photographs from Kosovo, Iraq, China after the Sichuan earthquake, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York City on September 11, 2001. But, like all fine photojournalists, Chin is not just delivering the news, and this image of Taliban fighters in an overcrowded prison reverberates beyond the moment it was made. His frieze of faces recalls crowds in Biblical illustrations—gawkers at Gethsemane, perhaps.
SashaWolf_Taliban Prisoners, Afghanistan, 2001_opt.jpg
* Bruce Davidson: “Brooklyn Gang (Mike’s Tattooing)” (1959), at Bryce Wolkowitz.
Davidson, a great photographer we too often take for granted, was the subject of two New York gallery shows this season. The retrospective at Wolkowitz touched down on many of his most significant projects, from early work in the South with the Freedom Riders to the New York subways in the graffiti-bombed eighties. This image is one of the less familiar ones from a series he made in 1959, when he hung out with the Jokers, a gang of Brooklyn teenagers. A moment of intense male bonding outside a tattoo parlor, it includes almost no faces, but the hairdos are pretty damn eloquent.
BruceDavidson_MikesTattooing_opt.jpgIMAGE COURTESY MAGNUM PHOTOS
* Leonard Freed: “Black in White America, Brooklyn, New York” (1963), at Bruce Silverstein.
Among the vintage prints Silverstein exhibited from Freed’s 1968 book, “Black in White America,” was this picture of a handsomely dressed Brooklyn couple standing in a doorway. It could be a fashion photograph, but it’s one of many that Freed shot throughout the United States which attempted to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of African American life at a time when the ghettos were exploding.
LeonardFreed_BlackinWhiteAmerica_opt.jpg©
LEONARD FREED; COURTESY BRUCE SILVERSTEIN GALLERY
* Humphrey Lloyd Hime: “The Prairie Looking West” (1858), at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.
This connoisseur’s gallery celebrated its Silver Anniversary with a group of rare and unusual photographs, many from the medium’s earliest years. This strikingly modernist image of the Canadian plain, empty save for a human skull and animal bone, was the most memorable. The prairie, scorched by a brush fire some months before, is the frontier at its most forbidding, with the skull as a warning to the unprepared.
Hime_PrarieLookingWest_opt.jpgCOURTESY HANS KRAUS GALLERY
* Justine Kurland: “Like a Black Snake” (2008), at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Like so much of her work, “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” Kurland’s latest series of photographs, is concerned with people who have deliberately taken themselves off the grid. In this case, they’re hobos, runaways, and free spirits who hitch rides on passing trains. But Kurland has become more and more absorbed by the landscape her subjects travel through, and many of the best pictures in her show were stunning views that recall pioneering photographs of the American West, like this one of a distant train snaking through the plains.
Kurland_LikeaBlackSnake_opt.jpg
COURTESY JUSTINE KURLAND AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH NEW YORK
* Richard Learoyd: “Fish Heart” (2009), at McKee.
Learoyd, a British photographer making his New York début, showed unique, large-scale images that were among the most mesmerizing photographs I’d seen this year. Created with a new camera-obscura process he’d developed over the past few years, they have an uncanny sensation of depth. Learoyd’s human subjects (mostly young women) appear unsettlingly lifelike, but his still lifes are just as compelling. This image of a white fish heart suspended in a web of black string came back to mind at the Centre Pompidou’s knockout show of surrealism and photography, “La Subversion des Images,” where Man Ray’s 1920 image of trussed-up lumps in carpeting, “L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse,” looked like an early inspiration.
Richard Learoyd_fish#245B82_opt.jpg
COURTESY MCKEE GALLERY
* Elaine Mayes: “Sweet Pam and Commune Group, Clayton Street, September 1, 1968,” at Stephen Kasher.
Mayes’s portraits of young friends and neighbors in Haight-Ashbury record a heady but transitional moment in the counterculture. Made in 1968, just after the Summer of Love and the attendant media frenzy, they’re as casual and affectionate as snapshots, but they also have a sense of history. Like August Sander, Mayes knew she was documenting a group of people who were largely unaware that they were on the cusp of change.
StevenKasher_Sweet Pam and Group_opt.jpg
COURTESY STEVEN KASHER GALLERY
* Ryan McGinley’s “Go Forth” campaign for Levi’s.
In a year with few outstanding advertising images, McGinley’s spirited pictures for Levi’s stood out. Although now in his early thirties, McGinley is still tuned into all-American youthful energy, and his campaign is spun off from the exuberant photographs he’s been bringing back from the cross-country jaunts he’s made over the past few summers with a bus-load of post-adolescents. Trippy, upbeat, and seemingly spontaneous, McGinley’s billboards and print ads stand out in an environment that’s over-polished and over-calculated.
country_mcginley_opt.jpg
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/ten-great-photographs-2009.html?printable=true¤tPage=all#ixzz0apqrbZ62
Ten Great Photographs, 2009 Posted by Vince Aletti
* Roger Ballen: “Sliced” (2007), at Gagosian.
Ballen, an American-born photographer now living in South Africa, made the pictures in his latest show in collaboration with squatters at an abandoned warehouse outside of Johannesburg. The results are bizarre, alarming, and often wildly comic—drawing more from outsider art, Jean Dubuffet, and Mike Kelley than any photographic tradition. This image of a salamander with its tail freshly cut off can only begin to suggest the odd and obsessive nature of the work.
Ballen_Sliced_400.jpg© ROGER BALLEN. COURTESY GAGOSIAN GALLERY
* Tracey Baran: “Of My Dreams” (2007), at Leslie Tonkonow.
Baran was only thirty-three when she died, in 2008, but she’d been making exceptional and audaciously personal work for a decade. Much of it focussed on her immediate family, but some of her best pictures and wittiest self-portraits were about sex or, in the case of this Edenic image of a nude boyfriend, love.
TraceyBaran-Of My Dreams_opt.jpg
COPYRIGHT ESTATE OF TRACEY BARAN, COURTESY OF LESLIE TONKONOW ARTWORKS + PROJECTS, NEW YORK
* Alan Chin: “Taliban Prisoners, Afghanistan” (2001), at Sasha Wolf.
Chin’s exhibition, “Dispatches: 1998-2008,” included photographs from Kosovo, Iraq, China after the Sichuan earthquake, New Orleans after Katrina, and New York City on September 11, 2001. But, like all fine photojournalists, Chin is not just delivering the news, and this image of Taliban fighters in an overcrowded prison reverberates beyond the moment it was made. His frieze of faces recalls crowds in Biblical illustrations—gawkers at Gethsemane, perhaps.
SashaWolf_Taliban Prisoners, Afghanistan, 2001_opt.jpg
* Bruce Davidson: “Brooklyn Gang (Mike’s Tattooing)” (1959), at Bryce Wolkowitz.
Davidson, a great photographer we too often take for granted, was the subject of two New York gallery shows this season. The retrospective at Wolkowitz touched down on many of his most significant projects, from early work in the South with the Freedom Riders to the New York subways in the graffiti-bombed eighties. This image is one of the less familiar ones from a series he made in 1959, when he hung out with the Jokers, a gang of Brooklyn teenagers. A moment of intense male bonding outside a tattoo parlor, it includes almost no faces, but the hairdos are pretty damn eloquent.
BruceDavidson_MikesTattooing_opt.jpgIMAGE COURTESY MAGNUM PHOTOS
* Leonard Freed: “Black in White America, Brooklyn, New York” (1963), at Bruce Silverstein.
Among the vintage prints Silverstein exhibited from Freed’s 1968 book, “Black in White America,” was this picture of a handsomely dressed Brooklyn couple standing in a doorway. It could be a fashion photograph, but it’s one of many that Freed shot throughout the United States which attempted to provide a fuller and more nuanced picture of African American life at a time when the ghettos were exploding.
LeonardFreed_BlackinWhiteAmerica_opt.jpg©
LEONARD FREED; COURTESY BRUCE SILVERSTEIN GALLERY
* Humphrey Lloyd Hime: “The Prairie Looking West” (1858), at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.
This connoisseur’s gallery celebrated its Silver Anniversary with a group of rare and unusual photographs, many from the medium’s earliest years. This strikingly modernist image of the Canadian plain, empty save for a human skull and animal bone, was the most memorable. The prairie, scorched by a brush fire some months before, is the frontier at its most forbidding, with the skull as a warning to the unprepared.
Hime_PrarieLookingWest_opt.jpgCOURTESY HANS KRAUS GALLERY
* Justine Kurland: “Like a Black Snake” (2008), at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
Like so much of her work, “This Train Is Bound for Glory,” Kurland’s latest series of photographs, is concerned with people who have deliberately taken themselves off the grid. In this case, they’re hobos, runaways, and free spirits who hitch rides on passing trains. But Kurland has become more and more absorbed by the landscape her subjects travel through, and many of the best pictures in her show were stunning views that recall pioneering photographs of the American West, like this one of a distant train snaking through the plains.
Kurland_LikeaBlackSnake_opt.jpg
COURTESY JUSTINE KURLAND AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH NEW YORK
* Richard Learoyd: “Fish Heart” (2009), at McKee.
Learoyd, a British photographer making his New York début, showed unique, large-scale images that were among the most mesmerizing photographs I’d seen this year. Created with a new camera-obscura process he’d developed over the past few years, they have an uncanny sensation of depth. Learoyd’s human subjects (mostly young women) appear unsettlingly lifelike, but his still lifes are just as compelling. This image of a white fish heart suspended in a web of black string came back to mind at the Centre Pompidou’s knockout show of surrealism and photography, “La Subversion des Images,” where Man Ray’s 1920 image of trussed-up lumps in carpeting, “L’enigme d’Isidore Ducasse,” looked like an early inspiration.
Richard Learoyd_fish#245B82_opt.jpg
COURTESY MCKEE GALLERY
* Elaine Mayes: “Sweet Pam and Commune Group, Clayton Street, September 1, 1968,” at Stephen Kasher.
Mayes’s portraits of young friends and neighbors in Haight-Ashbury record a heady but transitional moment in the counterculture. Made in 1968, just after the Summer of Love and the attendant media frenzy, they’re as casual and affectionate as snapshots, but they also have a sense of history. Like August Sander, Mayes knew she was documenting a group of people who were largely unaware that they were on the cusp of change.
StevenKasher_Sweet Pam and Group_opt.jpg
COURTESY STEVEN KASHER GALLERY
* Ryan McGinley’s “Go Forth” campaign for Levi’s.
In a year with few outstanding advertising images, McGinley’s spirited pictures for Levi’s stood out. Although now in his early thirties, McGinley is still tuned into all-American youthful energy, and his campaign is spun off from the exuberant photographs he’s been bringing back from the cross-country jaunts he’s made over the past few summers with a bus-load of post-adolescents. Trippy, upbeat, and seemingly spontaneous, McGinley’s billboards and print ads stand out in an environment that’s over-polished and over-calculated.
country_mcginley_opt.jpg
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/ten-great-photographs-2009.html?printable=true¤tPage=all#ixzz0apqrbZ62
Thursday, December 17, 2009
The Year of the Songstress Posted by John Donohue
December 17, 2009
The Year of the Songstress Posted by John Donohue
Dozens upon dozens of albums cross my desk every day. A few from this year that stand out share a common trait—they each have female vocalists. Here's list of the ten that I found most enjoyable.
Amadou & Mariam "Welcome to Mali" (Nonesuch)
Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone" (Anti)
Rosanne Cash, "The List" (Manhattan Records)
Cesaria Evora, "Nha Sentimento" (Lusafrica)
PJ Harvey & John Parish, "A Woman A Man Walked By" (Island Records)
Lhasa, "Lhasa" (Nettwerk Records)
Eleni Mandell, "Artificial Fire" (Zedtone)
La Roux, "La Roux" (Cherrytree Records)
Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, "A Fish Hook An Open Eye" (Kepler Records)
Regina Spektor, "Far" (Warner)
Au Revoir Simone, "Still Night, Still Light" (Our Secret Records)
The Year of the Songstress: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/best-albums-of-the-year.html
http://snipurl.com/tv4ub
The Year of the Songstress Posted by John Donohue
Dozens upon dozens of albums cross my desk every day. A few from this year that stand out share a common trait—they each have female vocalists. Here's list of the ten that I found most enjoyable.
Amadou & Mariam "Welcome to Mali" (Nonesuch)
Neko Case, "Middle Cyclone" (Anti)
Rosanne Cash, "The List" (Manhattan Records)
Cesaria Evora, "Nha Sentimento" (Lusafrica)
PJ Harvey & John Parish, "A Woman A Man Walked By" (Island Records)
Lhasa, "Lhasa" (Nettwerk Records)
Eleni Mandell, "Artificial Fire" (Zedtone)
La Roux, "La Roux" (Cherrytree Records)
Shilpa Ray and Her Happy Hookers, "A Fish Hook An Open Eye" (Kepler Records)
Regina Spektor, "Far" (Warner)
Au Revoir Simone, "Still Night, Still Light" (Our Secret Records)
The Year of the Songstress: The New Yorker Blog : The New Yorker (26 December 2009)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/12/best-albums-of-the-year.html
http://snipurl.com/tv4ub
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)