bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Navigating The Journey
Authors: Ellis Michael
Published: November 2020

Following the recommendations and using the knowledge in this book will help you to navigate your journey successfully. Your child will make progress and you will value and enjoy every new milestone. You will experience unconditional love and patience. You will have great joy in your life. You will love your child for his or her unique personality and perspective on life. Your child is different, but not “less.” Embracing your child’s differences will open your heart and mind to new possibilities and pathways. If your child has not been diagnosed officially yet, you must have your child evaluated as soon as possible. Early diagnosis and treatment will help to significantly improve your child’s prognosis and future. You must understand the negative effects of your child’s autism on your whole family and how to avoid them as much as possible. Surround yourself with people who “get you” and your family. You need support. Fight the urge to isolate yourself and your family. Create and maintain a healthy marriage. Explore all treatment avenues, such as medications, therapies, and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) treatments as appropriate. Do not be afraid to consider medications. Find a provider you trust who is an expert with ASD. For your child to be successful, you need to become very familiar with the educational system and be an advocate for your child at school. You also need to be adept with legal issues of guardianship and other long-term planning issues such as the special needs trust. Lastly, you need to find acceptance and may need to explore issues of spirituality and religion. Since my daughter’s diagnosis 10 years ago, I have found great joy in raising her. I appreciate and love her for who she is every day. My family would not be complete without her. Not a day goes by that she does not make me laugh. She has given my life great purpose and fulfillment, and I have no doubt that you feel the same about your child. I am amazed at the progress she has made.
Little Ice Age: Europe, China, and Beyond
Authors: McMichael Anthony
Published: November 2020

Pictures of Winter Ice- Fairs on Frozen rivers in seventeenth- century central and northern Europe are familiar. Less well known are the many other consequences— social, environmental, military, po­litical— of the unusually cold period throughout Eurasia that lasted from around 1300 to 1850 C.E. For many it was a time of social in­stability, food shortages, epidemic outbreaks, impoverishment, and miserable or violent deaths. Climate- related crises helped foment persecutions, armed conflicts, and the overthrow of dynastic rulers. This was the “Little Ice Age,” the name coined by American glaci­ologist François Matthes in 1939. The cooler conditions that emerged in western Europe from late in the thirteenth century followed a dip of around 1oC in global temperature after a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1257 that disrupted harvests and caused an increase in epidemic outbreaks throughout Europe. Both the earlier Medieval Warm Period (around 950 to 1250 C.E.) and the Little Ice Age were influenced by multicentury changes in solar ac­tivity, reflecting the 2,300- year solar Hallstatt Cycle. During the first 200 years of the Little Ice Age, temperatures fluctuated, with a warm respite of six decades around 1400 C.E., after which cooling prevailed until 1500. The cooler conditions then receded until 1560, after which the climate plunged into a longer, colder second phase. Figure 8.1 Variations in European temperature (relative to twentieth- century average) and in solar activity during 900– 2000 C.E. Several major historical events are shown, as are the two phases of the cooling. Temperature graph adapted from Büntgen et al., “2500 years of European Climate Variability and Human Susceptibility,” Solar activity graph: “Solar cycle,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_ variation. Permission received from AAAS. There is no consensus on when the Little Ice Age began or ended, but most scholars place it between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cooling was not confined to Europe; it occurred throughout much of middle- and higher- latitude Eurasia and North America, while in eastern China the temperature fell by around 2°C during 1250– 1350. The climatic changes associated with the Little Ice Age in the northern hemisphere may have been global in scope.
Uninformed Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It
Authors: Lupia Arthur
Published: November 2020

Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance. Some experts even think that less informed citizens should stay out of politics altogether. As Arthur Lupia shows in Uninformed, this is not constructive. At root, critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem. Many experts believe that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters. However, these experts fail to understand how most people learn, and hence don't really know what types of information are even relevant to voters. Feeding them information they don't find relevant does not address the problem. In other words, before educating the public, we need to educate the educators. Lupia offers not just a critique, though; he also has solutions. Drawing from a variety of areas of research on topics like attention span and political psychology, he shows how we can actually increase issue competence among voters in areas ranging from gun regulation to climate change. To attack the problem, he develops an arsenal of techniques to effectively convey to people information they actually care about. Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don't care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to and knowing how to best convey it to them.
Unfolding the Periodic Table
Authors: McFarland Ben
Published: November 2020

Our starting point is not hidden, nor is it far off. It is not an extreme place like Mono Lake or Freswick Castle, but it is a central concept expressed on a single page. The periodic table is the center of chemistry, and therefore of this book. You can spot it at a distance from its vaguely cathedral-like shape. You can see the chemical symbols that it contains on magnets and T-shirts and restaurant signs. Its regular columns are not quite symmetric, but that is because it has been twisted out of its natural shape by the contingencies of history. Rearrange it just a little and a simple mathematical pattern appears. To see this pattern, imagine that the periodic table is made out of beads on an abacus, arranged in the familiar U shape. Then push all the beads to the left: … Row 1 = H- He Row 2 = Li- Be- B- C- N- O- F- Ne Row 3 = Na- Mg- Al- Si- P- S- Cl- Ar Row 4 = K- Ca- Sc- Ti- V- Cr- Mn- Fe- Co- Ni- Cu- Zn- Ga- Ge- As- Se- Br- Kr Row 5 = Rb- Sr- Y- Zr- Nb- Mo- Tc- Ru- Rh- Pd- Ag- Cd- In- Sn- Sb- Te- I- Xe … By row, there are 2, 8, 8, 18, and 18 elements. The pattern continues in the rows below, but it is obscured by the fact that on most tables 14 elements have been moved out of the sixth and seventh rows. On the table here I have put them where they belong. These rows have 32 elements each. This can be simplified even more. The rows increase, first by 2, then by 6 more (2 + 6 = 8), then by 10 more (2 + 6 + 10 = 18), then by 14 (2 + 6 + 10 + 18 = 32). The series 2, 6, 10, 14 is the doubles of counting up by odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7. Put another way, each row is equal to 2n + 1 with n = integers from 0.
Wheels within Wheels
Authors: McFarland Ben
Published: November 2020

Something strange and old lurks under the ice in Antarctica, at a place called Blood Falls. It is an echo of the early Earth. Blood Falls is hard to reach and easy to find. Look through the seas of blue ice, white snow, and gray rocks for the bright-red frozen waterfall, spilling out of the ice around it in a gory cascade five stories tall. This is a red flag made from chemistry, telling that even the coldest environment on Earth is not completely dead. Liquid water can be found there, and in the water is life eking out an existence from the water around it and the dirt under it, just like it did a few billion years ago. The “blood” at Blood Falls spills out of life, but it’s not blood. Like blood, this substance is a form of iron bound to oxygen. In your blood, the protein hemoglobin hosts the iron, but Blood Falls is straight-up iron oxide, similar to rust. I saw some of this chemical last August near Mount Rainier. As we hiked up to Goat Lake, the frozen water looked dirty. The pure white ice was dusted with bright-red powder blown around from the iron-rich rocks surrounding it. The land was red as blood. That was geological, but Blood Falls is biological. It shows that life in an extreme environment eats some pretty strange food—like John the Baptist eating locusts and honey in the wilderness—and outputs blood- red iron as waste. A pocket of liquid water hides behind Blood Falls, sealed under the ice so tightly that air cannot penetrate. Even in solitude, away from the sun and oxygen, liquid water supports life. The microbes under the glacier get energy from adding oxygen to carbon to make stable CO2, just like us. The subglacial lake is sealed off from the air, so the oxygen must come from a solid or liquid source. These bacteria eat sulfate, pulling one of the four oxygens off it and producing the three-oxygen chemical sulfite.
Cracked Open and Knit Together by Oxygen
Authors: McFarland Ben
Published: November 2020

The happy insight that biology and geology meet through chemistry has been seen throughout this book when life and rocks interact. A chemical called water transformed this planet’s rocks and opened them to give life its elemental building blocks. The energy in the Earth became the energy in simple cells through chemical wheels. Sunlight split the water with the help of dissolved rocks, and the oxygen from that reaction brought yet more elements out of the rocks and into life. That insight addresses a long-standing mystery here. Long ago, the biggest biologi­cal change in the history of the planet created plant and animal life. What caused the seas to teem with weird new life? I think the periodic table connects that biological event to a previous global geological change. If so, then once again, chemical reactions opened up geology to provide new possibilities for biological complexity. Chemistry shaped the flow of geology and biology at once. The evidence for this connection is like something that happened with the ekko sculpture in northwest Scotland from Chapter 2 (Figure 2.1). After the sculpture had been built, an archaeologist dropped by and found incisions in ekko’s rocks. The archaeologist read the shape and depth of the incisions and concluded that the stones were older than everyone thought, and must have been used for a structure now lost. Like in ekko, there are “incisions” on the Earth made by massive geological processes. Geologists have read these and have concluded that a worldwide event altered the planet’s surface. This geological event was also a chemical event. Soon after, a profusion of fossils filled the rocks. This biological event was also a chemical event. The common denominator of chemistry connects the geology to the biology. The geological event provided chemicals that life used in new ways: especially oxygen, phosphorous, and calcium, resulting in new energy, shells, and signals for life. This hypothesis is that chemical availability drove the evolution of life, and that the periodic table shaped the timing of life’s greatest expansion.
The Evolving Archery Endeavors
Authors: Leopold Estella B.
Published: November 2020

This passage, from Dad’s essay “Man’s Leisure Time,” seems to sum up why Dad had turned to bow-and-arrow making as a favorite hobby in the late 1920s. Archery became a family enterprise. Dad loved to hunt, and we all grew up participating in hunting and archery practice at or near the Shack as well as further afield. And it turned out that Mother particularly had an extraordinary talent and skill for tournament archery. My father was a skilled carpenter, and probably learned from his father, Carl Leopold, who was skilled with hand tools. Dad’s father was the president of the Leopold Desk Company of Burlington, Iowa, and all of Dad’s siblings became expert in woodworking. Dad started making bows and arrows in 1926, when someone gave him a bow stave of yew wood. In Madison he began to shape this stave, and later ones of Osage orange or yew, into beautiful bows. In the basement he kept his giant toolbox of carpenter tools, which he had transported from Albuquerque. We still have that great box and some of his tools—planes, squares, chisels, files, saws, and such. In the basement he also set up a German-style workbench, with a wood vise on the right side, a metal quick-release vise on the left, and a series of peg holes down the middle to hold a block in place for using a plane. Dad placed his giant staves of Osage orange or yew in the vice and shaped the bow with a sharp drawknife and a wood file. The midsection, where the grip was located, was carefully shaped and made oval to fit the hand securely. To gauge the symmetry of his sculpturing of the bow stave, he hung up a large sheet of brown paper on the wall and placed a hook high at the top, hung up the bow, and, with the bowstring attached to the sculptured bow tips, pulled the string downward so the bow bent, and so he could see if the curve of the drawn bow was evenly symmetrical.
The Shack Idea
Authors: Leopold Estella B.
Published: November 2020

As each of us siblings—Starker, Luna, Carl, Nina, and i— matured and entered our professional lives in different parts of the country, we carried with us a hankering to have a place in the country, a Shack of our own. It is not merely real estate, of course. Instead, it is a camping place for feeling close to the land, a place to work with the land and to observe the ecosystem and its fauna. To “own,” or as the first peoples saw it, to “belong” on a piece of land is exciting and special—a chance to become acquainted with a few favorite species, then to watch them grow. But of course it is way more than that. As Dad said, he chose his land for its backwardness, but it flourished in splendid isolation under our care. Shack land, as we conceived of it, had the potential of being inhabited by a vast number of native bird species, plus a diverse fauna of mammals, which got richer with time. We were excited that the Shack landscape itself had such physical variety; it had hills and dales, a grand river, a series of tributaries animated by spring and fall floods, a standing bottomland forest coursed by those floods and occupied by lively muskrats, with ducks flying in and out of the sloughs, as well as kingfishers and jays. Even though it was “degraded” agricultural land, Dad and Mother saw it as a land of opportunities for the family. While it had a “reduced level of complexity,” the soil was still there, and we could help improve it, which actually means that the right plants could make it better. Prairie is the perfect model for this kind of restoration and recovery. Dad described the upward flow of energy from soils through the plant community as a kind of circuit. After major disruption and loss of native species, the energy circuit is slowed and altered. He asked, “Can the land adjust itself to the new order?” He was sure it could if we reintroduced the native plant species on that cornfield, on that terrace, on that hill, in order for a genuine prairie, with its very efficient energy-flow, to become reestablished.
Evaluation Before Publication
Authors: Gross Alan G. , Harmon Joseph E.
Published: November 2020

In the midst of the controversy over the Nemesis affair—over whether a hidden star was the cause of periodic extinctions on Earth—David Raup and Jack Sepkoski were faced with a dilemma peer review had deliberately created: . . . The Tremaine analysis was technically hearsay, because it did not exist in the conventional sense of a scientific publication. To be sure, he sent us a copy of the manuscript shortly before submitting it for publication in a special volume based on the Tucson meeting. We were working on a response but could not say anything substantive about it publically, for fear of having our own paper on the subject disqualified by prior publication in the press. Besides, we had nothing to rebut until Tremaine’s paper was reviewed, revised, and finally published. . . . Precisely: Only peer review followed by publication gave them something to rebut. A survivor after a half-century of criticism concerning its efficacy, peer review remains the best guarantee that published manuscripts and funded grant proposals conform closely to community standards. Moreover, in both the sciences and the humanities, the review criteria are the same: originality, significance to the discipline, argumenta­tive competence, and clarity of expression. When we examine the ways the Internet is transforming peer review, we will see that the transparency and interactivity of the new medium make possible sounder judgments according to these criteria. Interactivity gives practitioners a firmer sense of the disciplinary-specific meanings of the standards on which their judgments are based; transparency broadcasts this firmer sense to the discipline as a whole. Under any form of peer review, knowledge is what it has always been, an agonistic system in flux, the site of a constant struggle for survival in the realm of ideas. But it is a system that cannot function properly unless each component—each bundle of claims, evidence, and argument—exhibits provisional stability. To confer this stability is the task of peer review.
Social Un- Darwinism
Authors: Allchin Douglas
Published: November 2020

It is time to rescue Darwinism from the dismal shadow of Social Darwinism. According to this now widely discredited doctrine, human society is governed by “the survival of the fittest.” Competition reigns unchecked. Individualism erodes any effort to cooperate. Ethics and morality become irrelevant. Some contend that social competition is the very engine of human “progress,” and hence any effort to regulate it cannot be justified. Others accept competition as inevitable, even though they do not like it or endorse it. They seem persuaded that we cannot escape its presumed reality. Natural selection, many reason, is … well, “natural.” Natural, hence inevitable: what recourse could humans possibly have against the laws of nature? Thus even people from divergent backgrounds seem to agree that this view of society unavoidably follows from evolution. Creationists, not surprisingly, parade it as reason to reject Darwinism outright. By contrast, as resolute an evolutionist as Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” invoked similar implications even while he urged his audience to transcend them morally. Yet the core assumptions of so-called Social Darwinism are unwarranted. Why does it continue to haunt us? The time has come to dislodge this entrenched belief, this sacred bovine: that nature somehow dictates a fundamentally individualistic and competitive society. Unraveling the flawed argument behind Social Darwinism also yields a more general and much more important lesson about the nature of science. The historical argument seems to enlist science to portray certain cultural perspectives as “facts” of nature. Naturalizing cultural ideas in this way is all too easy. Cultural contexts seem to remain invisible to those within the culture itself, sometimes scientists too. The case of Social Darwinism—not Darwinism at all—illustrates vividly how appeals to science can go awry. We might thus learn how to notice, and to remedy or guard against, such errors in other cases. Ironically, the basic doctrine now labeled “Social Darwinism” did not originate with Darwin at all. Darwin was no Social Darwinist. Quite the contrary: Darwin opened the way for understanding how a moral society can evolve (essay 6).
Scientific Realism and Chemistry
Authors: Chang Hasok
Published: November 2020

SCIENTIFIC REALISM Is a philosophical issue with relevance to all sciences, but there are some particularly interesting and distinctive ways in which it has manifested itself in chemistry. Paying proper attention to such aspects will deliver two types of benefits: First, it will aid the philosophical understanding of the nature of chemical knowledge; second, it will throw some fresh light on the realism debate in places where it has developed without much attention to chemical practices and chemical concepts. In the following discussion I will attempt to make a reasonably comprehensive survey of relevant literature, while also advancing some original points and viewpoints. Recall Bas van Fraassen’s now-classic formulation of the realism debate as an argument about whether we can know about unobservable entities featuring in scientific theories, and whether we should try to know about them (van Fraassen 1980). If this is how we understand realism, and if we take the long view of the history of science, chemistry is the most important science to consider in the realism debate. Until the development of atomic, nuclear, and elementary-particle physics starting in the early twentieth century, chemistry was the science in which debates about the epistemic and ontological status of unobservable theoretical entities took place with most ferocity and most relevance to practice. An interesting contrast is astronomy, in which the Copernican Revolution brought in a long and secure phase of realism about astronomical objects far out of reach of any human senses (including those that do not even register as tiny specks of light to our eyes). In contrast, the achievements of chemistry up to the early nineteenth century only deepened the sense of inaccessibility and unobservability concerning the putative fundamental entities postulated in chemical theories. Unobservability in relation to chemical theories is not only an issue about atomism, though surely the problem was clearly present with the atomistic particles imagined by a wide range of thinkers from Democritus and Leucippus of ancient times to Descartes and other early-modern mechanical philosophers.
Introduction
Authors: Fox Raymond
Published: November 2020

While certainly a mystery, as Palmer suggests, a teacher’s mission, as well as reward, is educating, drawing out from students what lies dormant while proposing the new, the exhilarating, the as-yet undiscovered. Professors, especially those new to academe, frequently find themselves in the classroom with little preparation, guidance, or direction about how to convey the knowledge and skill set of the profession. The prevailing assumption is that advanced knowledge of subject matter itself is sufficient preparation to teach the subject. The unofficial credential for teaching is completion of a research doctorate in a particular discipline. This narrow position is reinforced by the belief that students will learn from a one-way transmission of information. Many of us have learned to teach the hard way, by the seat of our pants, by circumstance, or by necessity. We often teach unaware of how we teach, both at the surface level of recognizing and identifying what we do in the classroom, and at the philosophical level of considering why we do what we do. Theoretical frameworks and findings from research studies provide only limited assistance in mastering the art and craft of teaching. Between the ideas that research provides and the kinds of direction and decisions you, the teacher, must make, there is a gulf. Teachers, both new and experienced, seek practical yet innovative suggestions for creatively working with students. They need help with difficult questions. How do I divide my focus between establishing a relationship, developing a learning contract, and plunging into content? How can I enhance the learning process without actually getting in the way? How do I best connect with students? How can I make learning active? In what ways can I personalize the teaching/learning environment? How do I adapt the method of teaching to students’ differing learning styles? How do I keep content fresh for them and for me? How do I create a climate that is calming while challenging? How do I build a secure place to invite learning and change? Themes in this book resemble those in my other books that concentrate on clinical practice. They are heartfelt and basic.
Lesson Architecture
Authors: Fox Raymond
Published: November 2020

This remark says it clearly: the best teaching sets learners on their own path to discovery. Appeal to students’ hearts as well as filling their heads; it is sustenance for their professional journey. Effective, engaging, and enjoyable lessons do not happen automatically. They take effort. They demand attention to striking the right balance between content and process, to meeting the requirements of the curriculum and the distinctive needs of students. Every course is different. Every class is organic. Every group of students is distinctive. A tightly framed lesson leaves room for the unexpected and exceptional—a corollary to the apparent paradox stated earlier—structure frees you to be spontaneous. It affords room for you to weave teachable moments into the overall fabric of the lesson. Curricula and syllabi are basically fixed, general, and inflexible. Without compromising the integrity of the prescribed content, a solidly designed lesson creatively customizes classes to reflect your particular expertise, preferences, and manner. At the same time it takes into account students’ experience, strengths, and styles. Pre-reflection lesson planning—pulling it all together, in other words—is a kind of mental rehearsal. It focuses on desired changes in students, envisions the optimal conditions for creating a context for learning, and generates a strategy to intertwine process and content into a vibrant tapestry. Weaving it together calls for a self-conscious and conscientious effort. The lesson plan takes stock of the characteristics and conditions associated with you (personality, knowledge, skills, experiences, style), with students (receptivity, motivation, attitude toward the subject, style), with classroom milieu (number of students, physical environment, room temperature, acoustics), and with varied modes of instruction. It increases the likelihood of achieving greater student participation and optimizing learning. It makes teaching more stimulating and gratifying for both students and you. A lesson plan arises from pre-reflection and buttresses both reflection-in- action, and reflection-on-action. It harnesses your ingenuity to coalesce a multitude of factors—goals, themes, patterns, assignments, exercises, and enhancement materials (e.g., handouts) into a coherent and unified presentation. The lesson plan plots a path through this complex terrain by synchronizing this panoply of variables.
Radiocasting Trauma
Authors: Pinchevski Amit
Published: November 2020

Two weeks into the Adolf Eichmann trial, toward the end of April 1961, the poet Haim Gouri, who chronicled the proceedings for a local Israeli newspaper, wrote in his column: “The country carries on as usual, day and night, and this trial accompanies it. The one goes on, the other alongside. Away from the courtroom, there is no outward sign of it. But it is in the air and the water, it is like dust on the trees.” Writing his impressions from Beit Ha’am, the Jerusalem theater venue converted to host the hearings, Gouri captured something of the sensation that paralleled the trial, that feeling of “something in the air,” gripping and haunting the everyday as the proceedings unfolded. What was in the air, or more precisely on the air, remains implicit in Gouri’s prose. As is often the case with media, their operation is likely to remain invisible or to be taken for granted, a tendency that sometimes occludes further understanding of certain historical episodes. Such is the case with the Eichmann trial, an event profoundly marked by what was then the principal mass medium in Israel—the radio. The Eichmann trial has recently received renewed attention from scholars in various fields. Indeed, some mention the role of radio during the time of the trial. To quote a few notable references: “Much of the trial was carried live on the radio; everywhere, people listened—in houses and offices, in cafés and stores and buses and factories.” “The trial, the full sessions of which were broadcast live on national radio, changed the face of Israel, psychologically binding the pastless young Israelis with their recent history and revolutionizing their selfperception.” “Broadcast live over the radio and passionately listened to, the trial was becoming the central event in the country’s life.” “The Eichmann trial was the most important media event in Israel prior to the Six Day War. . . . Young and old could be seen radio in hand everywhere—in constant earshot of the broadcast from Beit Ha’am.”
Conclusion: Wounding Transmissions
Authors: Pinchevski Amit
Published: November 2020

“Transmission” is a term used, curiously enough, in both technology and psychology. In the former, it denotes the transfer of messages from one point to another, a view that was principally theorized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Technologically speaking, transmission names the conveyance of information from sender to receiver through a designated channel by means of symbols or signals. This technical formulation of transmission constitutes the operational basis of numerous media technologies. In psychology, transmission is often used to describe the way behavior and symptoms of traumatized parents are transferred to their children, causing transgenerational trauma. Such transmission can be direct or indirect, overt or covert; indeed, transmission of trauma might be the result of either over-disclosure of knowledge and facts, or of under- disclosure, even of persistent silence, which “can often communicate traumatic messages as powerfully as words.” In both technological and psychological uses, transmission denotes a unilateral handing over across space and/ or time. But clearly psychological transmission implies more than the mere delivery of messages: it involves a delivery that exceeds that of meaning or information proper, a transmission taking place as though beyond words, on the affective rather than on the cognitive level. This book has posited media as linking the two senses of transmission above by virtue of the technological capability of effecting impact in excess of message, and contact in excess of content. And nowhere are the stakes in linking technological and psychological transmissions higher than in the mediation of trauma. In this book I have advanced an argument about the deep association of media and trauma. The media discussed here—radio, videotape, television, digital, and virtual—comprise different instantiations of the mediation of trauma: the ways media technologies sustain and convey the experience of unsettling experience. Media reach to the Real, and in so doing make available a register whose registration is of corporeality itself. Bodies find expression through media in the Real, revealing materiality as a common substratum.
Stephen Jay Gould’s Essays: Experiencing the Sublime
Authors: Gross Alan G.
Published: November 2020

“This View of Life,” Stephen Jay Gould’s long-running essay series, forms a massive refutation of any charge that in popularized science truth and entertainment are incompatible. These essays invariably “follow two unbreakable rules,” Gould writes: “I never lie and I strive mightily not to bore you.” In the prologue to the collection Bully for Brontosaurus, Gould is more explicit concerning his first rule: “No compromises with conceptual richness; no bypassing of ambiguity or ignorance; removal of jargon, of course, but no dumbing down of ideas (any conceptual complexity can be conveyed in English).” Concerning the second rule, Gould is silent: he practices but does not reflect on his ability to shock us, to imitate in prose the last line of Muir’s “The Animals.” On the surface, a statement of biblical fact, its position at the poem’s end belies its factual status. We experience instead the shock of our existential state, burdened by history, by memory, by the apprehension of death. Muir has sprung a surprise, giv-ing us an experience Longinus long ago described, the literary sublime. By literary means as well, in his essays on science and its history, Gould can spring analogous surprises. In Gould, however, the literary sublime is always in the service of its scientific counterpart. I single out a group among his three hundred essays, each of which is so structured that we vicariously experience the process of discovery. Their twists and turns seem at first to lead nowhere; no picture emerges until, suddenly, one does, a surprise that evokes the experience of the scientific sublime. A very young Adam Smith—an Adam Smith well before The Wealth of Nations—tells us how us how surprise opens a path to this sublime: “When one accustomed object appears after another, which it does not usually follow, it first excites, by its unexpectedness, the sentiment properly called surprise, and afterwards, by the singularity of the succession, or order of its appearance, the sentiment properly called wonder.”
Richard Dawkins: The Mathematical Sublime
Authors: Gross Alan G.
Published: November 2020

In an episode of The Simpsons, “Black Eyed, Please,” Ned Flanders has a nightmare. He visits his “personal hell” where they “worship famous atheist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion,” a devilish figure in the process of “making Catholic-saint stew.” Irreverent enough to be attracted to the program’s irreverence, and enough of a celebrity to be asked to do the show’s voice-over, Dawkins is content to appear as a parody of himself. But his skepticism is no act. It is deep-seated, with roots in his early childhood. Concerning his 18-month-old self, Dawkins says: …At Christmas a man called Sam dressed up as Father Christmas and entertained a children’s party in Mrs. Walter’s house. He apparently fooled all the children, and finally took his departure amid much jovial waving and ho-ho-ho-ing. As soon as he left, I looked up and breezily remarked to general consternation, “Sam’s gone!”… This precocious skepticism blossoms in Dawkins’s later views, a set of convictions in which science does not so much supplement as substitute for religion: “a friend . . . persuaded me of the full force of Darwin’s brilliant idea and I shed my last vestige of theistic credulity probably about the age of sixteen.” To Dawkins, biology is no more—and no less—than a rigorous skepticism applied to the living world. No need for Father Christmas. Without question, Dawkins’s vision of biology, a living world ruled by mathematics, is a “grand conception,” readily comparable to the origin stories of Weinberg, Greene, Randall, and Hawking, a saga of “how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.” In his work, Dawkins has employed mathematics to create, as Adam Smith said of Copernicus, “another constitution of things, more natural indeed, and such as the imagination can more easily attend to, but more new, more contrary to common opinion and expectation, than any of those appearances themselves.”
Move Over, God
Authors: Gross Alan G.
Published: November 2020

In the last two hundred years, physics, biology, and linguistics have markedly increased our understanding of three mysteries that continue to pique human curiosity: How did the universe begin? What is the origin of life? What accounts for language, a capacity we share with no other creature? For helping us answer these questions, we have to thank linguists like Steven Pinker, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins, and theoretical physicists like Steven Weinberg. They each have a gift for translating important technical arguments in their respective disciplines into the ordinary English we all can understand. Accompanying this extraordinary achievement in popularization, however, there is an odd fellow traveler, a campaign against religion, against God, a concerted attack extraordinary in its persistence and its vehemence. In this final chapter, I would like to investigate the extent, source, and nature of this attack, this insistence on the part of so many scientists that they are not agnostics, properly skeptical of God’s existence, but atheists, firm believers in his nonexistence, that science, not God, is the only wellspring of the sublime. It is the firmness of their belief that is in question. When Wolfgang Pauli purportedly said of another scientist’s work that “it is not right; it is not even wrong,” he meant that this work violated the boundaries of the discipline Pauli so successfully inhabited, that the offending scientist was deluded when he thought he was doing physics. Of course, such professional judgments are far from perfect. Two eminent English mathematicians had already dismissed the work of Ramanujan when G. H. Hardy, having received it unsolicited in the morning mail, judged its author as on a par with Euler or Gauss. Still, this reversal of fortune is the exception, not the rule. When, however, even world-renowned scientists cross the border into a neighboring discipline in the humanities, say theology or biblical study, the exception is the rule: they dismiss what they do not trouble to understand.
Total Synthesis of C–O Natural Products
Authors: Lambert Tristan H.
Published: November 2020

Weiping Tang at the University of Wisconsin, Madison reported (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 12434) the total synthesis of the tropone-containing norditerpenes hain­anolidol 6 and harringtonolide 7 by making use of a strategic [5+2] oxidopyrylium cycloaddition. First, the known ketone 1 was converted through a number of steps to cycloaddition precursor 2. Treatment with DBU then effected the key cycloaddition to furnish the complex polycyclic compound 3. Additional manipulations revealed struc­ture 4 with the lactone ring in place. The tropone ring of the natural structures was con­structed by reaction of the cycloheptadiene moiety of 4 with singlet oxygen followed by Kornblum- DeLaMare rearrangement with DBU to afford ketone 5. Double elimination using TsOH then produced hainanolidol 6. The free hydroxyl of 6 was engaged in a C–H-functionalizing cyclization using Pd(OAc)₄ to yield harringtonolide 7 as well. Hanfeng Ding at Zhejiang University developed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 13256) a concise route to indoxamycin F 12 (as well as the related indoxamy­cins A and C). The complex intermediate 9 was accessed in only four steps from the bicyclic ketone 8, which in turn was prepared by a route involving an Ireland–Claisen rearrangement and a reductive 1,6-enyne cyclization (not shown). An impressive oxa-conjugate addition/methylenation reaction to produce 11 was accomplished by treat­ment of 9 with Grignard 10 followed by Eschenmoser’s salt. Some final decorative work then led to indoxamycin F 12. The strained polycyclophane natural product cavicularin 18 was synthesized in enantioenriched form by an innovative strategy reported (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 10472) by Keisuke Suzuki at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
C–O Natural Products: DihomoIsoF (Lee/Galano), Pyrenolide D (Gracza), Clavilactone A (Li), Psoracorylifol A (Tong), Bermudenynol (Kim), Aspercyclide C (Hirama)
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Dihomo-Isofurans, produced in vivo by oxidation of adrenic acid, are potential mark­ers of neuronal oxidative damage. Jetty Chung-Yung Lee of the University of Hong Kong and Jean-Marie Galano of Université de Montpellier I and II described (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 6249) the cyclization of 1 to 2, opening what should be a gen­eral route to these furans.
C–N Ring Construction: The Weinreb Synthesis of Myrioneurinol
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Terminal epoxides such as 1 are readily available in high enantiomeric excess. Christopher D. Bray of Queen Mary University of London observed (Tetrahedron Lett. 2014, 55, 5890) clean inversion in the conversion of 1 to the aziridine 3 with the reagent 2. Yong-Chun Luo and Peng-Fei Xu of Lanzhou University opened (Org. Lett. 2014, 16, 4896) the activated cyclopropane 4 with benzyl azide, then heated the adduct to expel N2, leading to the azetidine 5. Zhenming Du of Roche Shanghai and Michelangelo Scalone of Roche Basel devel­oped (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2014, 18, 1702) practical conditions for the asymmetric hydrogenation of 6 to the pyrrolidine 7. Young Ho Rhee of the Pohang University of Science and Technology showed (Chem. Eur. J. 2014, 20, 16391) that depending on the diol protecting group, addition of allyl silane to 8 could lead to either the cis product 9 or the trans diastereomer (not illustrated). Ohyun Kwon of UCLA used (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 11890) an organocatalyst to add the racemic allene 10 to 11 to give 12 in high ee. Tom Livinghouse of Montana State University cyclized (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 14352) the hydrazine 13 into an intermediate organozinc species that was then coupled with allyl bromide to give 14. Yonggang Chen of Merck Process and Xumu Zhang of Rutgers University devised (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 12761) practical conditions for the reduction of 15 to the piperidine 16. Teck-Peng Loh of the Nanyang Technological University and the University of Science and Technology of China effected (Chem. Commun. 2014, 50, 8324) asymmetric phenylation of biomass-derived 17 to give an intermediate that was oxidatively rearranged, then reduced to 18. Robert R. Knowles of Princeton University showed (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2014, 136, 12217) that the cyclization of 19 to 20 proceeded with high diastereoselectivity. Maria J. Alves of the Universidade do Minho osmylated (Synlett 2014, 25, 1751) the adduct from the Diels–Alder cycload­dition of 22 to 21 to give 23 in high ee.
Preparation of Benzene Derivatives: The Yu/Baran Synthesis of (+)-Hongoquercin A
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Lutz Ackermann of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen oxidized (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 3484) the anisole derivative 1 to the phenol 2. Melanie S. Sanford of the University of Michigan devised (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 5428) complementary condi­tions for either para acetoxylation of 3, illustrated, to give 4, or meta acetoxylation. Lukas J. Goossen of the Technische Universität Kaiserlautern developed (Synthesis 2013, 45, 2387) conditions for the cascade alkoxylation/decarboxylation of 5 to give 6. Cheol-Hong Cheon of Korea University showed (J. Org. Chem. 2013, 78, 12154) that the boronic acid of 7 could act as a blocking group during electrophilic aromatic substitution or, as illustrated, as an ortho directing group. It could then be removed by protodeboronation, leading to 8. Jun Wu of Zhejiang University coupled (Synlett 2013, 24, 1448) the phenol 9 with the bromo amide 10 to give an ether that, on exposure to KOH at elevated temperature, rearranged to the intermediate amide, that was then hydrolyzed to 11. Dong-Shoo Shin of Changwon National University reported (Tetrahedron Lett. 2013, 54, 5151) a similar protocol (not illustrated) to prepare unsubsti­tuted anilines. Guangbin Dong of the University of Texas, Austin used (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 18350) a variation on the Catellani reaction to add 13 to the ortho bromide 12 to give the meta amine 14. Kei Manabe of the University of Shizuoka found (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 8611) that the crystalline N-for­myl saccharin 16 was a suitable CO donor for the carbonylation of the bromide 15 to the aldehyde 17. John F. Hartwig of the University of California, Berkeley described (J. Org. Chem. 2013, 78, 8250) the coupling of the zinc enolate of an ester (Reformatsky reagent), either preformed or generated in situ, with an aryl bromide 18 to give 19. Olafs Daugulis of the University of Houston developed (Org. Lett. 2013, 15, 5842) conditions for the directed ortho phenoxylation of 20 with 21 to give 22. Yao Fu of the University of Science and Technology of China effected (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 10630) directed ortho cyanation of 23 with 24 to give 25.
Metal-Mediated C–C Ring Construction: The Lei Synthesis of (−)-Huperzine Q
Authors: Taber Douglass F.
Published: November 2020

Following the Szymoniak protocol, Morwenna S. M. Pearson-Long and Philippe Bertus of the Université du Maine added (Synthesis 2015, 47, 992) the Grignard rea­gent 2 to the nitrile 1 to give the cyclopropyl amine 3. Chen-Guo Feng of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry prepared (Chem. Commun. 2015, 51, 8773) the cyclobutane 6 by enantioselective conjugate addition of 5 to the unsaturated ester 4. Martin Kotora of Charles University showed (Eur. J. Org. Chem. 2015, 2868) that the zirconacycle from the eneyne 7 reacted with the aldehyde 8 to give, after iodina­tion, the alcohol 9. Xiaoming Feng of Sichuan University used (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, 54, 1608) a scandium catalyst to effect the intramolecular Roskamp cyclization of 10 to 11. Celia Dominguez of CHDI observed (Org. Lett. 2015, 17, 1401) that the double alkylation of the ester 12 with the dibromide 13 proceeded with high diaste­reoselectivity, to give 14. Hirokazu Tsukamoto of Tohoku University cyclized (Chem. Commun. 2015, 51, 8027) 15 to 16 in high ee. Daniel J. Weix of the University of Rochester found (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 3237) that under the influence of an enantiomerically-pure Ti catalyst, the organon­ickel species derived from 18 opened the prochiral epoxide 17 to give 19 in high ee. John F. Bower of the University of Bristol optimized (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2015, 137, 463) conditions for the highly diastereoselective Rh-mediated cyclocarbonylation of 20 to 21. Margaret A. Brimble of the University of Auckland initiated (J. Org. Chem. 2015, 80, 2231) the construction of the cyclohexenone 24 by the diastereoselective addition of 23 to the unsaturated ester 22. Olivier Baslé and Marc Maduit of ENSC Rennes devised (Chem. Eur. J. 2015, 21, 993) conditions for the preparation of 26 by enantioselective conjugate addition to the cyclohexenone 25. Yoshito Kishi of Harvard University demonstrated (Tetrahedron Lett. 2015, 56, 3220) that the carbenoid generated from the epoxide 27 cyclized to 28 with high dia­stereoselectivity. Wenjun Tang, also of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, developed (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2015, 54, 3033) a Pd catalyst for the diastereoselec­tive (because it is enantioselective) cyclization of 29 to 30.