Eugenics

Friday

Liv Hagye

The new eugenics dilemma

What comes to mind when you think about the maximum amount of love a parent can have for their child?For me, I think of Dick Hoyt pushing his son Rick, who had cerebral palsy, in a wheelchair through the Ironman World Championship course. I think of the parents of Nick Vujicic, born without arms or legs, raising Nick with confidence, and cheering him on as he became an international motivational speaker. I think of the mother of a child with Down Syndrome, choosing each day to recognize the absolute gift of their child. I think of the parent at the dinner table comforting a child upset by a ‘C’ on their report card.Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid Biosciences, sees things differently.

Eugenics

Monday

Peter Wood

The virtue-signaling behind the renaming of the Middlebury College chapel

Early on the morning of September 27, 2021, Middlebury College president Laurie Patton had a stone bearing the name of the campus chapel removed from the building. It was done deftly. I don’t imagine she showed up with her own hammer and chisel, but the campus groundsmen executed her orders. Later that day, Patton and the chairman of the board of trustees sent out a message to the community announcing that they had de-named Mead Memorial Chapel, which henceforth would be known simply as Middlebury Chapel. The de-naming was a stealth operation. Outside of a small circle, no one knew it was coming.  Picture a small liberal arts college tucked away in the American hinterland. Picture on the crest of a hill a white marble church with an impressive spire flanked by academic halls.

middlebury college chapel

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

When did brothers and sisters become ‘siblings’?

I've never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the “inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the same parent.” So he reintroduced “a good Anglo-Saxon word,” and it stuck. It’s not quite that simple, for cultural anthropologists had, a decade earlier, adopted sib for a kindred group, apparently from the parallel German word Sippe. My aversion to sibling was merely its artificiality. We never used to use it in speech, but would say brother or sister.

sibling

Saturday

Bill Zeiser

The abortion debate turns brutal

Not too long ago, pro-choice activists wished for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare.” Their argument was that no one was really pro-abortion but that the procedure was a morally complicated but regrettable necessity. In fact, they would have been insulted by the label “pro-abortion." The reaction to the leak of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade shows those days are long past. Take, for example, a tweet from a rabbi scolding those who claim that “nobody is PRO-abortion!” Comparing abortion to an appendectomy, she answers her imagined interlocutor: “Both are life saving medical procedures Why wouldn’t I be ‘pro’ a life-saving medical procedure?

Thursday

J. Scott Turner

Too many scientists spoil the job market

In January, the American Association for the Advancement of Science released its 2021 annual report on diversity equity and inclusion, Nurturing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Scientific Enterprise. The message? Those who are non-white, non-male, non-straight, etc., are apparently being barred from exploring science’s “endless frontier.” Such a thing could only come about if the sciences were governed by a kind of Jim Crow. For the good of science, this needs urgent correction. The AAAS will point the way. The claim seems odd.

Saturday

Dominic Green

Want to know the secret of ‘Jewish genius’?

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times.

jewish genius