As you may know, Freeman Dyson passed away on February 28. In the MIT Technology Review, his friends and colleagues remember his varied contributions to science and mathematics, and in The New York Times, Siobhan Roberts writes about having lunch with Dyson at Princeton: “Lunch with Dr. Dyson was never short of fascinating, fun or lengthy. He was a slow eater, and he did nearly all the talking. Listening, while trying to capture the last few peas of my salad, I’d realize that my lunch mate had made little progress with his meal; it was work, cutting and chewing the meat.”

Strangely, Jeremy Bernstein takes the opportunity of Dyson’s death to tells us about the two times he corrected Dyson when Dyson was wrong rather than gives us a few of the many examples of Dyson correcting him. Boo, Mr. Bernstein! When you die, your obituarists will tell us about your moments of glory. Now, let us hear from Dyson.

At National Review, Robert Bryce writes about Dyson’s opposition to “the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models.” And in Town Topics, Dyson is remembered by family and friends: “With all of his academic accomplishments, Dyson was also a loving father who took great joy in his six children. ‘It was just his interest in whatever it was we were thinking about, and what we spent our time doing, and what interested us,’ said Mia Dyson, the second youngest of the siblings. ‘I did a lot of theater, and he was passionate about that.’ Mia Dyson remembers sitting on her father’s lap as he read the book Le Petit Prince to her. ‘I was very little. I was tucked into his lap, and I could hear his voice rumbling into my bones as he read,’ she recalled. ‘All of a sudden there was this enormous quaking and I turned around to look. He blew his nose into his handkerchief because he was weeping at the beauty of it. He wept at beautiful stories and poetry. He had an enormously warm heart, and I appreciated that so much.’”

Some news from my neck of the woods: An original Salvador Dalí has been discovered in a thrift store in the Outer Banks.

Simon & Schuster is up for sale.

You remember the George Washington High School mural fiasco, right? Some people now want to remove murals from Chicago public schools, too.

Stephen Greenblatt writes about the literature of pandemics in Rome under the threat of the coronavirus: “in situations of stress, it is, as usual, literature that offers the most powerful ways of grasping what is happening or may come to pass, not in the precise biological sense but in its narrative unfolding. So our conversations turned to Saramago’s Blindness, Camus’s The Plague, Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, Manzoni’s The Betrothed, and, above all—the greatest of these fictional depictions—the opening chapter of Boccaccio’s Decameron. The problem is that, as brilliant as these accounts are, they depict cultures in the grip of epidemic disease as collapsing into chaos, violence, and the rupturing of social bonds. But this is not at all what we were reading about in the newspapers or experiencing for ourselves. In China, if the accounts are accurate, there is something like the opposite: an extraordinary intensification of social order, figured in the software with which the government tracks many citizens’ health and movement. In Italy, there has been no comparable intensification—quite apart from the technology, such control is quite alien to the national character—but instead the marked presence of the warmth and kindness that make ordinary life here so agreeable, notwithstanding the country’s notorious political dysfunction.”

PSA: The more “authentic” you feel, the more you are simply conforming to social norms. There is no authentic you.

Essay of the Day:

In Aeon, Allen Frances argues that to understand people as mere brains is to fail to understand them at all:

“There has never been a problem facing mankind more complex than understanding our own human nature. And no shortage of neat, plausible and wrong answers purporting to plumb its depths.

“Having treated many thousands of psychiatric patients in my career, and having worked on the American Psychiatric Association’s efforts to classify psychiatric symptoms (published as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV and DSM-5), I can affirm confidently that there are no neat answers in psychiatry. The best we can do is embrace an ecumenical four-dimensional model that includes all possible contributors to human functioning: the biological, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual. Reducing people to just one element – their brain functioning, or their psychological tendencies, or their social context, or their struggle for meaning – results in a flat, distorted image that leaves out more than it can capture.

“The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was established in 1949 by the federal government in the United States with the practical goal of providing ‘an objective, thorough, nationwide analysis and reevaluation of the human and economic problems of mental health’. Until 30 years ago, the NIMH appreciated the need for this well-rounded approach, and maintained a balanced research budget that covered an extraordinarily wide range of topics and techniques.

“But in 1990, the NIMH suddenly and radically switched course, embarking on what it tellingly named the ‘Decade of the Brain’. Ever since, the NIMH has increasingly narrowed its focus almost exclusively to brain biology – leaving out everything else that makes us human, both in sickness and in health. Having largely lost interest in the plight of real people, the NIMH could now more accurately be renamed the ‘National Institute of Brain Research’.

“This misplaced reductionism arose from the availability of spectacular research tools (eg, the Human Genome Project, functional magnetic resonance imaging, molecular biology and machine learning) combined with the naive belief that brain biology could eventually explain all aspects of mental functioning. The results have been a grand intellectual adventure, but a colossal clinical flop. We have acquired a fantastic window into gene and brain functioning, but little to help clinical practice.

“The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more impossibly complicated both reveal themselves to be.”

Read the rest.

Photos: NYC

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