Good morning. In Aeon, Jonathan Rowson writes about how chess prepares us for life: “The challenge of chess – learning how to hold complexity in mind and still make good decisions – is also the challenge of life.”

Notre Dame “not saved yet”: “The cathedral’s rector, Monseigneur Patrick Chauvet, said a fortnight ago the cathedral was so fragile there was a ‘50% chance’ the structure may not be saved if the scaffolding fell on stone vaults weakened by the inferno. ‘It will be out of danger when we take out the remaining scaffolding,’ Chauvet said. ‘Today we can say there is maybe a 50% chance that it will be saved. There is also a 50% chance of the scaffolding falling on the three vaults, so as you can see the building is still very fragile.’”

Eli Kintisch writes about one artist’s struggle to create iridescent paint in Nautilus.

William Atkins revisits Jim Corbett’s Goatwalking: “During the drought summer of 1980, Jim Corbett was hiking with a herd of goats in California’s Baja desert when one of the bucks started pursuing a feral doe. Corbett knew he was in danger of losing the whole herd and thus his means of survival. After sprinting for miles and finally bringing the goats under control, he was exhausted, overheated and dehydrated. The only water source was a rancid pool, its surrounding rocks coated in vulture droppings. ‘The greenish water smelled of carrion and seethed with putrefactive bacteria,’ he recalled. Knowing that it was all that lay between him and death, he drank and drank, regaining enough energy to lead the goats to a fresh spring. ‘I spent the night drinking water that took just a few seconds to go through me, but nightlong diarrhoea was much better than being dead.’ The book in which he describes this episode, Goatwalking (1991), is one of the most thrillingly awkward books I know: an ornery, inspiring encyclopaedia of radical theology, politics and goat husbandry, written with an almost pained tenderness towards all things living.”

Obsession with avoiding “cultural appropriate” impoverishes rather than enriches our understanding of other cultures: “In Salem, Massachusetts, the Peabody Essex Museum offers a case study in the mainstreaming of cultural appropriation. Cross-cultural appreciation has sustained the museum for centuries. America’s oldest continuously operating museum, PEM has long displayed exotic artifacts associated with the maritime trade—but patrons must now read a guilt-ridden disclaimer when visiting the museum’s exhibits. ‘Cultural appreciation and exchange are vital parts of any society, but appropriation is complicated and tied up with complex power dynamics and histories of oppression,’ the message reads. ‘Cultural appropriation occurs when “appreciation” becomes theft, when “exchange” is one-sided, or when marginalized cultures are reduced to stereotypes.’ As with other definitions of cultural appropriation, the PEM statement does not offer any guidelines on how to know when ‘appreciation becomes theft’ or when ‘exchange is one-sided.’ The best it can offer is a statement from Jezebel founder Anna Holmes: ‘You can’t always prove appropriation. But you usually know it when you see it.’ No well-intentioned person favors ‘marginalized cultures’ being ‘reduced to stereotypes,’ but cultural-appropriation watchdogs see these offenses everywhere, even in instances where harm was clearly not intended.”

Norimitsu Onishi reports on the longtime defense of pedophilia by France’s literati like Gabriel Matzneff and a new book by one of Matzneff’s victims.

Wilfred McClay writes in praise of “mere” rightly used: “Like a lover of endangered species, the lover of endangered words jumps for joy when he sees a word being rescued, and is grateful when a writer restores to currency a semantic possibility that had fallen into desuetude.”

Essay of the Day:

In Commentary, Christine Rosen writes about what we’ve learned about social media in the last ten years:

“In the years when social media was still bright, shiny, and relatively new—which is to say, a decade or so ago—Facebook and its ilk were the subjects of feel-good articles that collectively suggested Aldous Huxley had gotten it wrong: We weren’t moving into a dystopian Brave New World but rather a utopian Nice New World. There was the one about the NASA astronaut who sent the first tweet from the International Space Station, and the New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg that unironically repeated his claim that Facebook was ‘trying to make the world a more open place.’

“Twitter users could thrill to pieces praising the platform for aiding the democratic ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, and other parts of the Arab world. ‘Twitter and other social-media outlets have become the soft weapons of democracy,’ gushed former George W. Bush national-security staffer Mark Pfeifle in the Christian Science Monitor as he argued that Twitter should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Social media’s progressive credentials were impeccable. Countless trend stories praised the skill with which Barack Obama’s presidential campaign had used data and social-media platforms. U.S. News & World Report called 2008 the ‘Facebook election’ in part because one of the digital strategists working for the Obama campaign was Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. ‘Obama is a new-generation politician who shrewdly understands the electoral power of the Web,’ the story noted. Four years later, when Obama won reelection, MIT Technology Review explained that ‘Big Data Will Save Politics’ . . . But by 2019, even Obama the ‘social-media president’ was chastising Donald Trump for spending too much time on Twitter.”

* * *

“What happened to our love affair with social media? Contrary to much of what has been written, the story of the last decade of social media isn’t a tale of Russian-driven misinformation but of a misunderstanding of human nature. We have not taken the full measure of the kinds of problematic behaviors we know these platforms reward. We are confused about how to respond to their power to amplify and accelerate scandals and call-out culture. And we are at a loss about how to address their parlous effects not only on citizens but on the politicians we expect to lead us.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Osprey catches fish

Poem: Reagan Upshaw, “A Bestiary”

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.