In the spring of 1940 the telephone rang in the graduate residence at Princeton, and Richard Feynman, then a doctoral student, picked it up to hear the voice of his advisor, John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler skipped the greeting. He had solved a mystery no one else had thought to name, he said, and he knew why every electron in the universe carries exactly the same mass and exactly the same charge. The answer was that they are all the same electron.
Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.
Continue reading → The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink
I came to 137 the way most people come to it, by hearing it called a magic number and wanting to know whether the word was earned. My instinct with a claim like that is suspicion, because a working life spent around language and persuasion teaches you how easily a large word gets draped over a small thing. This time the suspicion did not survive the facts. The number turned out to be real in a way I had not expected, and the people most gripped by it have been some of the hardest-headed physicists who ever lived.
Continue reading → The Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
My beloved friend, mentor, and Columbia University Professor Howard Stein, was fond of saying, “The Enemy of the Arts is the Humanities.” That insight, and advice, has stuck with me over the past 35 years. Now, that phrase is not the glib provocation it may seem. It is a precise diagnosis of an institutional disease, a declaration of war against a century of academic drift that has created a schism between the act of creation and the act of analysis, and we’re here to discuss this with you today. The Arts, in their purest form, are the domain of creation itself, of non-verbal expression, of performance, and of the direct, visceral encounter with an aesthetic object.1 They are a primary, generative impulse. The Humanities, by contrast, have become the domain of secondary analysis, of verbal codification, of research, and, most critically, of the theory of the arts.1 The relationship is not symbiotic; it is parasitic. Over the past half‑century, many university humanities programs, eager to claim scientific gravitas yet wary of prescriptive taste, have privileged metacritical theory over direct aesthetic encounter, often at the expense of studio practice. They have replaced the artwork with the interpretation, the artist with the critic, and beauty with politics. The evidence for this enmity is overwhelming, found in the testimony of artists, the language of critics, and the desperation of shrinking university budgets.
Continue reading → Critic as Censor: How the Humanities Sacrificed Art at the Altar of Theory
Many years ago I was considering getting an advanced degree in screenwriting at UCLA.
I was invited to sit in on a class and I was glad I did because it was during that visit I realized UCLA was not the right place for me.
Continue reading → The Lesson of the UCLA Screenwriting Gnome
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