Note: This includes only the letters that were published, or referred to. I also wrote other letters that were not selected for publication.
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Times Literary Supplement July 2024 Regina Rini writes, "A thousand years from now, the Battle of Omaha Beach might still be known to a handful of nerdy historians." That seems overly pessimistic. The Battle of Hastings 958 years ago, is still remembered; on its 900th anniversary in 1966, there was a pageant and a re-enactment on the site. The anniversary of the battle of Karbala (1344 years ago) is a day of mourning among Shia Muslims. The Sack of Rome (1614 years ago), the Battle of Actium (2057 years ago) and the Battle of Cannae (2240 years ago) are still famous. The battle of Thermopylae (2504 years ago) was the subject of a recent feature film. The siege of Jerusalem, the breach of its walls, and the destruction of Solomon's Temple by Nebuchadnezzar are fast days among observant Jews 2610 years later. Even the destruction of Troy (about 3100 years ago) is remembered vividly, though in that case little but myth survives.
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Times Literary Supplement March 2023.
In the NB column of March 3, 2023, M.C. wrote:
It is that "stout officer" Sir Michael O'Dowd — surely you know
the chap? A military man d'un certain age — who is said, in
Vanity Fair, to be "sleeping the sleep of the just" one night.
If Thackeray didn't invent that phrase, he's not saying where he got it
from; but the relevant chapter of his novel was published in 1848, and
so that is the date genearlly given for the sleeping just's first
appearance in print.
My answer: Letter sent March 6, 2023
In the NB column of March 3, 2023, M.C. suggests that Thackeray coined the
phrase "the sleep of the just" in Vanity Fair in 1848.
In French, the phrase
goes back at least to Jean Racine's Abrégé de l'histoire de Port Royal
"elle s'endormit du sommeil des justes". Roger Ekrich, in an article, "Sleep
We Have Lost: Pre-Industrial Slumber in the British Isles" refers to "sleep
of the just" as a "medieval concept" but does not give any specific
quotations. In any case, it long predates Thackeray.
Ernest Davis
My letter was not printed in the Letters column; however, M.C. responded in
in the NB column, March 17, 2023
One of Madeleine Kripke's fellow New Yorkers, Ernest Davis, accuses us of
saying that Thackeray coined the familiar phrase about sleeping the
sleep of the just in Vanity Fair (March 3). We neight
thought nor claimed as much, but we are grateful for the information that
the phrase long predates 1848 — if you bother to look it up in French.
Jean Racine uses it in his Abrégé de l'histoire de Port Royal (1648)
"elle s'endormit du sommeil des justes" — although some have also
claimed, without giving the necessary citations, that it has medieval origins.
Was Thackeray an innovator in importing the phrase into the English language,
as the dictionaries suggest? Confirmation or contradiction would be equally
welcome to us.
I responded in an email sent March 17, 2023:
It had seemed too uninteresting to include in my first letter on the subject,
but since M.C. specifically welcomes it in the NB column of March 17: A
search using Google NGram retrieves several uses of the phrase "sleep of the
just" prior to 1848. For instance an article entitled "Corporation and Church
Property" in
"The Jurist: Or, Quarterly Journal of Jurisprudence Legislation
Volume 4, from 1833, includes the following sentence:
"When we have done our duty to all these, we feel easy in our minds, and
sleep with an untroubled conscience the sleep of the just; a sleep which the
groans of no plundered abstractions are loud enough to disturb."
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Times Literary Supplement February 2022
I am really tired of seeing Oscar Wilde's cheap wisecrack, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing" quoted favorably (Becca Rothfield's review of "To Paradise", Feb. 11). Wilde's own stories like "The Selfish Giant" and "The Happy Prince" are as risible as anything in Dickens in terms of sheer maudlin sentimentality.
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Times Literary Supplement, November 12, 2021
Kurt Gödel's Logic
In Cheryl Misak's fine review of Steven Budiansky's new biography of Kurt Gödel (Nov. 5), there are a couple of misstatements. Misak writes, "if a statement in first-order logic is well-formed ... then there is a formal proof of it." That is not right. The correct statement of Godel's completeness theorem is that, in first-order logic, if a statement is a necessary consequence of a set of axioms, then the statement can be proved from the axioms. Second, she writes that Godel "assigned every symbol a prime number". In Godel's original encoding scheme, every symbol is assigned a number, but some of those are composite; the primes are used to fix the sequence of symbols.
Ernest Davis
New York University
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The Nik of Time
The New York Review of Books September 26, 2019.
To the Editors:
James Gleick writes in "Moon Fever" [NYR, August 15] "If it wasn't for Sputnik, we wouldn't have had 'beatniks', 'peaceniks', or 'no-goodniks.'" He is mistaken. The OED shows that S.J. Perelman used "nogoodnik" in The New Yorker in 1936: "A parasite, a leech, a bloodscuker—altogether a five-star nogoodnick!" H.L. Mencken's American Language (1919) has an entry for the general suffix "-nick": "The suffix -nick, signifying agency is ... freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an offensive boaster ... consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis."
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Atlantic Magazine, April 2019: The Big Question
In answer to the question, "What Was the Best Sequel in History?
Einstein's special theory of relativity, which was revolutionary, was followed a decade later by his general theory of relativity, which was mind-boggling.
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Times Literary Supplement, September 7, 2018
Sir -- In his article "Modern Family" (August 24 & 31) Stephen March writes, "In Shakespeare, the theme [of incest] was repressed, only peeking out occasionally from behind the curtain." In the Prologue and Act 1, scene 1 of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, incest is centre-stage.
Ernest Davis
New York, NY
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Atlantic Magazine,January/February 2017: The Big Question
In answer to the question, "What Was the Most Influential Photograph in History?
Rosalind Franklin and Raymond Gosling’s diffraction photographs of DNA (1952) were crucial to James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of its structure.
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Times Literary Supplement, August 18, 2017
Sir -- Since Barton Swaim disapproves of the phrase "intellectual honesty", he may be pleased to learn that, according to Google NGrams, its popularity peaked in 1938 (in that "low, dishonest decade", the issue was much on people's minds) and is now used about a third as frequently as it was then.
Ernest Davis
New York, NY
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Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 2016
Sir -- A small correction to Ian Thomson's fine review of "The Complete Works of Primo Levi." Thomson writes of Levi's "The Periodic Table", published in 1975, "Long before Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and others, Levi had sought to make science accessible to the layperson." In fact, Dawkins' first book of popular science, "The Selfish Gene" was published in 1976, and Gould's "Ever Since Darwin" was published in 1977; so "long before" should be "slightly before."
Ernest Davis
New York, NY 10012
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Atlantic Magazine, May 2016, The Big Question
In answer to the question, "What is the greatest prank of all time?"
The Piltdown man. The combination of a human cranium and an orangutan jaw confused paleontologists from its "discovery" in 1912 until the hoax's exposure 41 years later
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New York Times Book Review, Sunday, August 18, 2013
To the Editor:
Robert D. Kaplan, in his review of Balance: The Economics of Great Powers From Ancient Rome to Modern America (Aug. 4) writes that Diocletian "set a precedent by voluntarily abdicating the throne several years before his death." It was not a precedent that was much followed. Diocletian's partner Maximian abdicated with him, and then regretted it and made two unsuccessful attempts to regain the throne. Vetranio, who ruled for nine months, abdicated in favor of Constantius. Otherwise the Roman emperors after Diocletian, like those before him, died in office or were forcibly overthrown.
Diocletian's abdication itself had a precedent in the abdication of Sulla from the position of dictator in the last century of the Roman Republic 400 years earlier.
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Peter Thonemann in "Miracles of survival" (March 30) underestimates the degree to which the works of the great Greek mathematicians are remembered and honored in current mathematics. It is certainly not correct to say that they "live on anonymously". In mathematical research papers and textbooks written yesterday, you can find references to the Euclidean metric, Euclidean spaces, the Euclidean algorithm, the Pythagorean theorem, the Archimedean property, Archimedean solids, Platonic solids, Diophantine equations, the circles of Appolonius, Ptolemy's theorem, and Pappus' theorem.
Ernest Davis
Professor of Computer Science
New York University
New York, NY 10012
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J.C. (NB, November 4) objects to the saying "Like a fence, a character cannot be strengthened by whitewash," on the grounds that a fence is strengthened by whitewash. But the saying is correct. Whitewash preserves or protects a fence, but certainly does not make it stronger.
Ernest Davis
1 Washington Sq. Village
New York, NY 10012
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New York Times Book Review, Sunday, August 7, 2011
To the Editor:
Oscar Wilde's jail sentence was catastrophic for his writing, and it is almost obscene to suggest otherwise, as Tony Perrottet does in his essay of July 24 ("Serving the Sentence"). It is true that in the three years of imprisonment he wrote De Profundis, but in a comparable period before his arrest, he wrote Salome, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.
Ernest Davis
New York
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Times Literary Supplement, October 1, 2010.
Sir --- Stephen Hennigan writes ``the most famous fictional creation of Robertson Davies is Dunstan Ramsay, not `Dunstable' " correcting a supposed error in The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (September 17). Hennigan's correction is mistaken. Ramsay's given name is Dunstable; he changes it to Dunstan in mid-life.
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The statistic quoted in Paul Bloom's review of "The Invisible Gorilla", that 63% of Americans consider themselves more intelligent than the average American, is remarkably unimpressive. First, assuming that few people made the mistake in the opposite direction, this means that 87% of respondents got the answer right, and only 13% got it wrong, which is not too bad. Second, the 37th percentile on IQ scores is 95 and the 50th is 100, so this corresponds to a misjudgment of one's IQ score by 5 points; a pretty small error. Third, even when a person's answer is wrong, it could well be a reasonable judgment. People's experiences of themselves and of other people is subject to all kinds of sampling biases that would be difficult to correct for, even if (hypothetically) their thinking was perfectly unbiased and entirely realistic. Fourth, intelligence is a vague quality with many aspects, and people undoubtedly tend to value those forms of intelligence that they themselves possess. So it is probably literally true that most people are more intelligent, and more ethical, and have a better sense of humor, and so on, than the majority of other people, on the scale in which they themselves evaluate those qualities.
The experiment that I would like to see done would be to ask university professors whether they consider themselves more intelligent than the average university professor. I fear that the figure would be considerably higher than 63%.
I found out 11 months later that the true figure for college professors is 94%! (To be precise, 94% consider themselves a better-than-average teacher among their colleagues.) See "Not can but will college teaching be improved,'' by K. Patricia Cross, New Directions for Higher Education, Spring 1977, 17:1-15; and Are You as Good a Teacher as You Think, Paul C. Price, Thought and Action, Fall 2006, 7-14. Thanks to Adrienne Morck Lisan for the references.
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[This is the version I wrote, not the edited version printed.]
To the editors:
Noam Scheiber (in TRB 10/24) makes the off-hand, casual recommendation that Democrats prove their bona-fides on the war on terrorism by endorsing a plan to bomb Iranian or North Korean nuclear plants if necessary. This is blood-chillingly irresponsible. Bombing North Korea might well provoke a response that would destroy Seoul or Tokyo. Bombing the nuclear sites of Iran, some of which are presumed to be located near large and ancient cities like Isfahan, could cause huge civilian casualtes; destroy works of art and architecture of immeasurable artistic and historic value; and unite the population of Iran behind its government and thus destroy any chance of internal reform. That a columnist for TNR would consider such criminal folly to be a central part of the "war on terrorism" shows how deeply Bush-think has infected political discourse.
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I entirely share in Hendrik Hertzberg's outrage at the administration's steady assaults on civil liberties and privacy, of which the proposed projects of the Information Awareness Office are the latest, though by no means, to my mind, the most serious. However, most of the phrases that Hertzberg cites as unwelcome, Orwellian (or PhilipDickian) "gifts to the language" are in fact well-established technical terms in the jargon of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In particular, "truth maintenance" is just a bookkeeping scheme in which, when a program calculates a results from some inputs, it records that the results depend on the inputs. "Biologically inspired algorithms for agent control" sounds like something out of Michael Crichton's "Prey". In actual fact, though, "biologically inspired algorithms" are a category of techniques for seeking solutions to complex problems; the connection to biology is always metaphorical, and generally a rather far-fetched metaphor. "Agent" in this context means little more than "computer program". The slogan "Knowledge is power" is a quote from Sir Francis Bacon: "Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est."
Twenty-five years ago, in an article entitled "Artificial Intelligence meets Natural Stupidity", my teacher Drew McDermott warned the AI community against its tendency to give grandiloquent names to simple ideas. Now that this kind of terminology is giving the creeps to the editors of the New Yorker, his warning becomes even more cogent.
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To the editors
Robert Wright (TRB, Dec. 18) cites a 1976 statistic that cases of fatal abuse were 100 times more likely for children not living with two natural parents, and uses this as evidence of the destructive effects of divorce. This argument confuses common cause with cause-and-effect. People who are evil enough to kill children are not generally the kind of people who have long-lasting marriages. But this does not prove that anyone would be better off if they were compelled, by law or societal pressure, to remain in their first marriage.
``The failure of modern liberalism to deal seriously with complex moral issues'' is a figment of Wright's imagination. A serious, engaged, and important debate goes on as to when it is better, for everyone involved, for partners in a troubled marriage to stay together or to divorce, and what their moral responsibilities are in this situation. It is not a sign of moral frivolity to decide that certain extreme solutions --- in particular, the legal prohibition of divorce and remarriage --- are not worth considering or debating.
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To the editors:
Jonathan Rauch's "The Hyperpluralism Trap" (June 6) may have a real point to make, but Rauch buries it under a mass of sloppy argumentation. First, the environmental laws that have led to the very substantial improvement in our air and water and the protection of many species over the past twenty years perfectly fit Rauch's principles for good governmental action. Their benefits are universal and long-term. Moreover, as is consistently shown in opinion polls, they are in general supported by a broad societal consensus. Rauch's sneer that they "reflect the priorities of people who buy BMW's and brie more than the priorities of people who buy used Chevies and hamburger" is an insult to the intelligence of the latter, and is way off the mark.
Second, hyperpluralism is not like hyperinflation. There is little evidence that the kind of positive feedback that drives inflation is operating in the growth of groups. Certainly, hyperpluralism cannot share the most striking feature of hyperinflation: its unboundedness. One can print quadrillion dollar bills, but there is a reasonable limit to the number of groups that any individual will join, and to the percentage of income that he will send them.
Third, lobbying is not necessarily bad. Lobbying for bad things is bad; lobbying for good things is good. If Rauch thinks that a balanced budget is a good thing, he can certainly find a lobbying group that will push his point of view. Lobbying for a clean environment and for civil rights has in general been a good thing. If not for the groups that lobbied hard for these goods, I very much doubt that we would have gotten them from the quiet wisdom of an undisturbed government, let alone from a Tammany Hall.