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The BUMPER CHRISTMAS EDITION of the irregular review of reviews, XIV

Did Ben Jonson invent Father Christmas?

According to one scholar, this is the earliest depiction anywhere of a jocular, paternal figure embodying the season’s spirit of feasting, fellowship and community.That’s not quite the same as claiming that Jonson invented Father Christmas, but he probably had a hand, at least, in solidifying the concept. (For my American readers, perhaps it’s worth saying that ‘Father Christmas’ is still the standard term in the UK.)

Do I hate science?

A criticism of my recent piece about whether fiction can improve you. Often speculative and rude, but with some useful discussion of the studies involved. Everything he says about me and my attitude to science is wrong and his generalisations about literary people are speculative. This propensity to large generalisation from thin premises ought to give you some pause about the bigger claims made here. More generally, the idea that you can “prove” that value of reading Shakespeare and Plato by running tests in a lab whereby people read a few passages and then describes the emotions in photographs of faces is hugely speculative, however good the results! Most published studies simply aren’t as reliable as Ian thinks. Just remember, plenty of ideas that had a meta-study to support them later turned out to be untrue.

But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis – can still be bullshit.

Remember that finding that moral philosophers are no more moral than the non-philosophers? Sometimes the value available to us from such things isn’t very easily available, and cannot be tested in abstract conditions. It’s not like taking asprin.

Naomi Kanakia reviews Context Collapse.

this book is largely a rhetorical exercise, meant to demonstrate the author’s own dizzying erudition. And…I kind of enjoyed it. The book is like a Markson novel—just a collage of disparate facts. You remember some of the facts. You forget most of them. And through the profusion of facts, you hopefully glean some kind of point.

There is clearly a mind at work here. The stuff in this book is way beyond what you can get from just googling or Wikipedia. I envy the breadth of Ruby’s reading.

But…