Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I'd like to congratulate the Wall Street Journal for running a recent opinion/analysis piece on the mysteries of yawning. In particular, the big one: "why is yawning contagious." People say, "the power of suggestion" but that sounds like a merely verbal answer, a bit like the claim that sleeping pills work because of their dormitive efficacy. A better approach, says the WSJ, is to think about survival effects. Yawning may have evolved as a way in which an organism maintains its alertness. It doesn't merely mean you're tired, it means that you are tired and recognize that you should be awake (in some non-moralistic sense of the word "should" of course.) This in turn suggests that the urge to yawn could well be triggered by the yawn of someone nearby. After all, alertness is a trait that small groups in close proximity often need to maintain together. They have common predators, or common prey, about.

A recent issue of The Wall Street Journal included a review of a new book by historian Gerard Magliocca, pictured here. Magliocca is the author of American Founding Son , a biography of John Bingham, apparently the leading figure in the creation of the 14th amendment. The reviewer is Allen Guelzo. I'll simply offer what I regard as a candidate for the title "money quote": "Even so, as the author concedes, it is hard to peg Bingham as a radical. He opposed secession, but he also rejected radical abolitionist Rep. Thaddeus Stevens's campaign to 'territorialize' the Confederate states. Bingham designed the 14th amendment to clarify the constitutional meaning of U.S. citizenship and allow that meaning to include the newly freed slaves, but he waffled on whether this should include voting rights. And he drew a shade over the close of  his congressional career with his anti-Catholicism and his involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal, in which a du...

Much of the world knows that in 1959, two drifters murdered four members of the Clutter family at the Clutters' home in Holcomb, Kansas. The reason much of the world knows this is that Truman Capote fixed upon and immortalized that crime in his 1966 "non-fiction novel," In Cold Blood. The phrase I quoted above is Capote's own. There have long been critics, both of the idea that forcing those two words together in that way makes any sense and of the presumption specifically that Capote was scrupulous about the "non-fiction" part. There is a new source of light on this now, and it comes from an unlikely source. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the late Harold Nye, a one-time agent for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, brought a cache of records on the Clutter investigation home with him at some point. The Journal report is a bit vague on when and the circumstances in which this occurred, but it says the son of Mr. Nye has the papers ...

Two stories in the Wall Street Journal on December 27, 2012 reminded me of an issue I had avoided in the course of my last book, an issue I mean to address in my next one. Near the end of GAMBLING WITH BORROWED CHIPS I wrote, "There are many fascinating and important matters that I have not even had the opportunity to mention....There is, for example, the question of bank financing versus exchange-based financing." I then mentioned the theory of Joseph Studwell, expressed in his book ASIAN GODFATHERS, that the economies of southeast Asia suffer from an exclusive reliance on bank financing. Corporations report consistently disappointing earnings, due to the "perverse curse of high savings rates and bloated banks." But then I moved on, to a final "confession of inconclusiveness" and a technical appendix. In a future book, I will have to address Studwell's point. Two stories in today's WSJ will help.I'll just give the bibliographic dat...

WSJ story Tuesday, vaguely sourced by plausible, tells us that the London Whale, Bruno Iksil, "once confided" to a certain colleague, "that when he wanted to avoid questions from supervisors about his trades, he sometimes would start discussing a mathematical term, equation, or other technical jargon, to confuse and end the conversation." He'd get free rein/reign because his bosses were afraid of hearing his explanation of  the analytical expression of a Lévy distribution one more time? Aaaaah.