Things that endure

 Ernest Hemingway’s “The End of Something” doesn’t say exactly what the something was. This is a Nick Adams story, and Nick and Marjorie were going out. We’d probably say this is about the end of their relationship, although that word is vague. Nick was a war-damaged veteran, and it’s to say what was in his heart.

I’d read the story without seeing another relationship. The story begins:

 

In the old days Hortons Bay was a lumbering town. No one who lived in it was out of sound of the big saws in the mill by the lake. Then one year there were no more logs to make lumber. 

 

When the loggers cut all the trees, workers came and carried off the machinery that made the mill, and without the mill Horton’s Bay ceased to be a town.

It takes something to have something that endures. You can’t have a long-lasting mill town if your idea of a relationship with the forest is exploitive. You could say something similar about relationships with other people.

• Source: “The End of Something” is in Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926; Library of America, 2020, pp. 173–76. It’s here:

https://www.loa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Hemingway-End-of-Somethingl.pdf

I’m thinking about it because it was The Library of America’s “Story of the Week.”

Robotic tanks and campaign ads

 Georgia is a swing state, so my neighbors and I are bombarded by political ads. The ads are rehashing the culture wars. I’m baffled that anyone would think I might care.

Instead, I’d like to see ads — pro and con — about the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle Program.

The Army’s main battle tank, the Abrams, was introduced in 1980. Its main armored infantry carrier, the Bradley, followed three years later. Both vehicles have been upgraded. But putting new gear into ancient designs is a bit like putting a new sound system in an ’58 Edsel and expecting consumers to be enchanted. The Army has said bluntly that its equipment is outdated.

After the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Army changed the way it was organized. It shifted to smaller, more mobile units that could respond quickly threats from guerrilla forces fielded by quasi-governments. The threat was ISIS, not China, not Russia, not states that might have the capacity to wage a world war.

Rhe world has changed. As China, especially, came to be seen as greater threat, the U.S. Army started to reorganize to regain the capacity to fight against an economic peer. The Robotic Combat Vehicle Program was part of that shift in thinking. Instead of armored vehicles dating from the Cold War, the Army wanted a manned armored vehicle that could command a herd of drone tanks and missile launchers.

The Army went through a competitive process for defense contractors. Textron won. You can see videos on the Internet of the company’s prototypes running around the testing grounds.

The technology was developed and tested. Then, a few months into the new administration, the program was canceled.

I am not an expert on weapons systems. Perhaps drone tanks are not the way of the future. Perhaps the military analysts who think we ought to be prepared for a war against China are so far off base they should be fired. Maybe the Army just has a better idea.

But it’s also possible that the program was canceled because it didn’t benefit the right companies, owned by the right stockholders and the right donors. Whatever else this administration stands for, it’s unapologetically for personal enrichment.

I’ve watched the news to get a sense of how this administration is addressing the threats that military analysts are talking about, and I’ve come to this: I don’t trust it.

I don’t think this administration is capable of developing anything as complex as a weapons system.

But there are two sides to most stories and I would like to hear what the opposing candidates have to say about the canceled program and similar contracts. I’d like to hear whether candidates think that we face the same threats we did in 2001 or whether we ought to be preparing for something else.

I also want to know if anyone thinks that the people we have in power are competent and should be trusted to ensure the nation’s defense.

Those are the kinds of things I’d like to hear about. I’m told that millions in ads are coming my way. With that kind of money, you’d think someone might go out on a limb and talk about something interesting.

Old forgeries

 Forgeries are despised today. In 1800, they were common in journalism. You might have been disappointed if your newspaper or magazine didn’t produce one occasionally.

Some of Charles Lamb’s earliest journalism was in the forgery genre. 

Lamb turned to journalism when he was young and needed cash. He was working as a junior bookkeeper in a great trading house by day and was supporting a family of elderly invalids and a sister with mental health problems.

Forgeries were a different thing when Lamb, 26, got his first freelance job at a newspaper in 1801.

A friend had made some money with a sample of the alleged letters of Falstaff, Shakespeare’s character. The objection to forgeries is the deception, of course, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being deceived. A forgery was like TV wrestling today. Of course it’s fake. Everyone knows that. It’s just entertainment — and not exactly high-brow.

When Lamb tried it, he imitated the letters of Robert Burton, whose Anatomy of Melancholy he admired. Lamb’s efforts didn’t set the publishing world on fire, but he found that he liked writing in the voice of another person. He liked pretending to be someone else.

Lamb wrote his great essays in the voice of another character, Elia. “Elia” is pronounced “a liar,” with the Runpronounced, as is the way of people who live in quaint places like England and Georgia.

A scholar could point out that literature designed to deceive people is a bit like literature designed to scare people. Scaring readers might be nice, but horror is still a viable genre.

But I’m not the person to write a defense of forgeries. Deception is such a destructive part of American life, especially political and economic life, that I became an unlikable puritan railing against it.

I do see the value of teaching students to write in a different voice. In an earlier day, children were taught to write in the voices of other people. Schoolboys had to write in the voices of mature women. Children had to imagine what it was like to be a person of another sex, another culture, another income bracket.

Some of the results might be appalling. Some might be funny. But I don’t know how else anyone might teach empathy — or give a student a glimpse of it.

• Sources and notes: Eric G. Wilson, Dream-Child: A Life of Charles Lamb; Yale University Press, 2022. Several posts mention Wilson’s book. The first was “A new biography of Charles Lamb,” Aug. 20, 2022.

Scott Newstok  argues that requiring students to write in other voices was once common and the practice helped playwrights develop characters. His book How to Think like Shakespeare; Princeton University Press, 2020, is excellent. For more, see “Thinking about The Progymnasmata,” June 24, 2024. It’s here:

https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2022/06/thinking-about-progymnasmata.html

60,000 surveillance cameras

 Atlanta has 60,000 surveillance cameras linked to the police department’s network.

That’s 124 cameras per 1,000 people — more than any city in the country.

It’s not close. In second place is Washington, D.C., with 55. In third is Philadelphia with 31.

To find a city that could match Atlanta’s numbers, you’d have to go to China.

People here are waking up to the reality that they are the most surveilled people in what was once called the free world.

How did this place — diverse, liberal, relatively affluent — get to that place?

Part of it is trust. When the police department asked institutions, businesses and property owners to link their cameras to its network, a lot said yes.

But people have begun to worry that the system could be misused. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some companies that manufacture these systems offer auditing features. The software allows supervisors to tell, for example, whether a police officer is using the system for legitimate reasons or to stalk acquaintances, such as former romantic partners.

When the city of Albany ran the audit, it fired five officers. I wasn’t clear on whether other officers were disciplined for lesser infractions.

In Atlanta, the police department, which apparently had been enjoying the public’s trust, undercut itself by fighting requests for information about the system. The requests were filed under Georgia’s open records laws.

The best light on the problem comes from a source in academia. Dr. Taylor Shelton, an associate professor in the Geosciences Department at Georgia State University, has found some interesting things while simply trying to map the city.

• Sources: Taylor Shelton, “Mapping Atlanta’s camera network and surveillance strategy”; Atlanta Community Press Collective, June 10, 2025. It’s here:
https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/06/10/atlanta-surveillance-camera-network/

Dr. Shelton’s website his here:

https://mappingatlanta.org

The farm report

 A line from Scott Russell Sanders, on a person’s attachment to place: 

Most of us do not have forty acres to care for, but that should not keep us from sowing and tending local crops.

 

We’re enjoying cucumbers this week from the Wise Woman’s garden. We’ve got so many chilis that I’m going to have to make hot sauce.

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 118.

Science and discipline

 People, if they think of biology at all, usually think of it as a science. It’s interesting if you look at biology as a discipline — meaning that you consider how biology is to be taken as a science and what kinds of questions count as scientifically worthwhile.

The discipline underwent revolutions in our lifetime. Edward O. Wilson tells about one of the revolutions that occurred after Francis Crick and James Watson were credited with discovering the structure of DNA in 1953. The discovery changed our understanding of the universe — but it also ignited a debate about what biology — the discipline — should be about.

Traditionally, biology departments taught a lot of courses organized around groups of animals and plants. Students took entomology for an introduction to insects, ichthyology for fish and ornithology for birds.

But there is another way of looking at living beings. You can look at them through different levels of organization. You can study life at the molecular level or cellular level, for example. At the other end of the scale, you can look at population levels.

You can look at the discipline of biology in different ways.

Crick and Watson’s work was so sensational all the research money went into molecular biology for a while. It seemed to be an investment in an enormous field that had hardly been touched. This emphasis showed up in the kinds of biologists universities hired and in the kinds of research that was funded. It showed up in the kinds of prizes offered.

The chemical and physical properties of living beings should be studied, of course. But those are not the only properties that living beings have.

If you get outside of the laboratory and into the field, you come across different kinds of properties that raise different questions. Wilson was interested in ants. Some ants live in small colonies with perhaps 100 workers. Other ants build nests that might include 15 million workers. The megacolonies, networks of connected nests, are so big it’s hard to fathom.

Why such differences among ants? And why do some kinds of ants live in some places and not others?

An analysis of proteins and enzymes is unlikely to tell you why certain kinds of animals are solitary creatures while others are highly social. If you are the kind of scientist that thinks real science limits itself to chemistry and physics, you’re going to ignore questions about how different plants and animals adapt to different habitats. You’re going to miss at least some of the questions about environmental damage.

Biology as a science seeks to find answers to questions about life. But biology as a discipline gets into a question of which questions are more important.

The scientists who try to answer the questions almost live different kinds of lives. Molecular biologists live in labs with increasingly sophisticated imaging technology. Wilson did most of his work with a hand lens.

If you are studying ecological relationships, you have to be able to identify plants and animals and at least have a basic understanding of the geology. If you’re studying the growth rates of cancer cells you need a different set of skills.

It sometimes seems miraculous to me that biologists try to talk to each other.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994.

Research and support for it

 Edward O. Wilson was lucky. Institutions with money supported his research. He got to study the questions that fascinated him.

The questions about support seem secondary to me. The important thing was that Wilson found his interests — he found the questions that absorbed him when he was a teenager.

Wilson, backed by Harvard University, studied ants in Mexico and the South Pacific. That kind of travel was possible only because of generous funding. The travel was essential to the work that Wilson wanted to do. But other scientists and naturalists have done interesting work while staying at home. The Rev. Gilbert White, author of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, is an example of what a naturalist can do without a research budget.

Without Harvard’s support, Wilson would have had to settle for less. But I think he would have done interesting work if his scientific expeditions had been walks through the neighborhood.

Incidentally, while Wilson needed money for travel, his budget for scientific equipment was modest. He used a hand lens and collecting jars. Scientists in elementary school might be familiar with the gear.

I am no educational reformer. But if I have an ambition for our public schools, it would be that they were  focused on helping each student to find his or her interests.

The question of support for research and researchers is important. I live a few miles from the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The word “disrupted” doesn’t cover what’s happened to the research and researchers.

Questions about who gets what in terms of public support often have nothing to do with fairness or the importance of the work.

If I were young again, I would want to find the questions that interested me. Then I’d take my chances, with or without support.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994.