How Alan Sokal Won the Battle but Lost the ‘Science Wars’: James B. Meigs, Commentary, November 2021 — It was the greatest emperor’s-new-clothes gag in modern intellectual history. Physicist Alan Sokal’s famous hoax article—a putative attack on the legitimacy of science and even on the notion of “objectivity” itself—appeared in the trendy academic journal Social Text in the spring of 1996. With its precise mimicry of postmodern language and ideas, Sokal’s parody worked like a laser scalpel, mercilessly exposing the movement’s incoherence and foolishness. Even the paper’s title—“Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”—perfectly captured the Olympian pretentiousness of the field. And the journal’s editors fell for it. Hard. … [To read the full article, click here or here – Ed.]
Is There a Future for American Jews?: Bret Stephens, Sapir Journal, Vol. 3, Autumn 2021, Sept. 21, 2021
When Your Body Is Someone Else’s Haunted House: Bari Weiss, Common Sense with Bari Weiss, Oct. 26, 2021
The Crucial Gift of Being ‘A People Apart’: Melanie Phillips, Melanie Phillips Substack, Oct. 29, 2021
New York State vs. the Yeshivas: Eli Spitzer, Mosaic Magazine, Oct. 25, 2021
For Further Reference:
NYT’s Bret Stephens is Editing New Jewish Journal: Asaf Salev, The Times of Israel, Mar. 25, 2021 — New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens has taken on a side gig as the editor of a new limited-run journal of essays about Jewish issues.
Family Matters: Leslie Camhi, Tablet, Oct. 29, 2021 — Just days before the opening of “Family Matters,” Gillian Laub’s solo exhibition at Manhattan’s International Center for Photography—a multimedia presentation including text messages, voice mail recordings and 20 years’ worth of Laub’s photographs of her wealthy, over-the-top, in-your-face, loving, generous, and exceedingly expressive, suburban Jewish family, whose sudden turn Trumpward, in 2016, rocked her world—I went to visit the photographer in the Tribeca loft that serves as both her studio and the home she shares with her husband, an Israeli writer, and their two young daughters.
Hard Times Are Here For Hard Sciences: Barbara Kay, National Post, Oct. 23, 2021 — Humour and woke culture cannot coexist in harmony. In January 2020, the pitch-perfect satirical site, Babylon Bee, ran a story joking that Democrats had called for the American flag to be flown at halfmast after a Donald Trump-ordered strike killed notoriously bloodthirsty Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani.
FAIR Counters Kendi on ABC News‘ Tamron Hall: Colin Wright, FAIR, Oct. 27, 2021 — Last month FAIR Founder Bion Bartning appeared on Tamron Hall alongside Ibram X. Kendi to discuss his views regarding “anti-racist” curriculum in schools.
