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.

Any topic, any research

 When he was 23, Edward O. Wilson was named a Junior Fellow in Harvard University’s Society of Fellows. 

The Society, patterned after the prize Fellows of Trinity College in Cambridge University, gave three years of unrestricted financial support to young men (and, in later years, young women) who demonstrated exceptional scholarship potential. Junior Fellows were encouraged to study any subject, conduct any form of research, go anywhere in the world their world their interests directed them.

 

The Society had 24 Junior Fellows. Eight new ones were appointed each year to replace those departing. The Society had nine Senior Fellows — professors who were mentors.

The appointment was a watershed, and Wilson said two things about it. First, it was a gift, an opportunity of a lifetime. Second, the effect on him was that it raised expectations. What he had expected to be able to do with his life changed.

I don’t think that our public schools can compete with Harvard. But I do wish we could encourage children to think about what they would do if they could choose any subject and do any form of research.

• Source: Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist; Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1994, p. 144.

'The Country Newspaper'

 I read William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” to remind myself that the way we Americans look at news has changed. It’s not just my imagination.

What we consider news has changed. The ways we think about news has changed. The reasons we subscribe — or don’t — to the local paper have changed. And the biggest changes occurred before the Internet.

White, the editor of The Emporia Gazette, was writing before the United States entered World War I. Metropolitan dailies had a combined circulation of 11 million. Weekly papers, creatures of small towns, had 22 million.

White pointed out that people read the papers differently. The readers of a weekly paper knew the man in jail. They knew he’d been in jail before. They’d ridden in his hack. 

If a weekly ran a story of a wedding, it would include a list of the guests because readers would want to know which poor relations were remembered and which were not.

Readers of those papers brought something with them when they opened the paper. I suppose we’d call it a sense of community. White called it “the neighborly feeling that breeds the real democracy.” 

• Source: William Allen White’s essay “The Country Newspaper” appeared in Harper’s in May 1916. It was collected in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 235-45. I’ve mentioned this essay before: “The choices that news organizations make,” Sept. 13, 2022, and “What newspapers are like,” Sept. 14, 2022.

E.B. White and the other stories

 E.B. White helped The New Yorker remember the other stories. If you work in print, you are tempted to think that the story is about politics, economics or perhaps high society. This is particularly true if you think that you live in the center of the world and that the people you are writing about are the most important people in the world.

And then there was White, who insisted on covering the dog show or writing a piece about a waiter who was celebrating a perfect spring day while grieving that the forecast called for snow.

It seems to me that American journalism could use a few more characters like White, especially now, when we are tempted to see every facet of American life in terms of what the Current Occupant of the White House is doing. It’s possible to think that the news of the Current Occupant and his disastrous influence on the democracy is vital while still thinking he’s overexposed.

The problem with linking every aspect of American life to any personality is that it inflates the significance of that personality.

The United States and its neighbors are hosts of the World Cup. We would be watching soccer with or without the Current Occupant.

Citizens would be reflecting over the country’s 250^th anniversary, with or without the Current Occupant staging celebratory cage fights on the White House lawn.

White was the kind of fellow who kept up with the big news but never lost sight of the other stories.

His granddaughter Martha White pointed out that he covered the doings at the Bronx Zoo and the “fabulous ice extravaganza at the Garden,” but never spent much time with the Algonquin Round Table. He noticed the juncos that live in the great city in winter.

If you haven’t guessed, I’m marking a birthday. E.B. White was born July 7, 1899. His granddaughter said he considered it to be a lucky day.

• Source: Martha White: “‘Small But Unforgettable Moments.’ What E.B. White Loved About New York City”; Lit Hub, Nov. 25, 2024. It’s here:

https://lithub.com/small-but-unforgettable-moments-what-e-b-white-loved-about-new-york-city/

Bound to the earth by stories

 I think this is right about our sense of place: Some people believe that wisdom comes from above, from an authoritative voice in the heavens. Others believe that there is an order within the cosmos, and that wisdom is living wisely within that order, right now, right here, on the Earth.

And if you take that view from the level of humanity to the individual that is me, wisdom means finding a way to live within the order of the place I live.

We humans carry that wisdom in stories.

In his essay “Telling the Holy,” Scott Russell Sanders argues that we catch glimpses of the way to live in ways that better reflect the natural order and capture those insights in sacred stories, or myths. We humans tell all kinds of stories — stories that convey information and statistics and news about everything from politics to baseball. But it’s those stories about how to live that hold us.

I think a sense of place is essential. I think these lines from Sanders’s essay are wonderful:

 

I am bound to the earth by a web of stories, just as I am bound to creation by the very substance and rhythms of my flesh. By keeping the stories fresh, I keep the places themselves alive in my imagination. Living in me, borne in mind, these places make up the landscape on which I stand with familiarity and pleasure, the landscape over which I walk even when my feet are still.

 

• Source: Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put; Boston: Beacon Press, 1993, p. 150.

A voice of nature

 If you are of a certain disposition, you think that plants and animals speak to you in a certain way, telling you about the place you call home. I thought the big scarab beetle was telling me that there were plenty of muscadines in the woodlot.

Experts say Pelidnota punctata is called the grapevine beetle, although I’ve never heard that common name. These beetles love grapevines, wild and cultivated. They eat foliage and grapes.

The one that accosted me was light tan and about an inch long. He had four dark spots down each side, as if its top and bottom had been fastened together with tiny rivets.

The beetle spent its larval period in the woodlot, eating decaying vegetation. Adults emerge in July.

I’d love to tell you that the beetle spoke to me because it recognized my remarkable powers of observations. But it crashed into me while flying across the garden.

Places and stories

 Colm Tóibín says that minor impressions sometimes stay in notebooks for decades until he understands what he’s seen. Often, the story gets energy from the memories of a place where he stayed, a room he lived in. That place becomes part of the story.

Tóibín, who teaches at Columbia University, said it would take a while for him to be able to write about the room he was living and working in when Trump was elected to a second term. When he does write, the room will be framed in a way — part of a completed story.

 

This is the room where I learned first‑hand not only what evil is like but how evil is tolerated. What is strange about being in America in the time of Trump is how ordinary it is, how what was unimaginable just over a year ago is suddenly, shockingly no longer a surprise.

 

I like that idea. You could say, as people do, that a place is just where a story is set. But I think that place is where a story is understood.

• Source: Colm Tóibín, “‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump”; The Guardian, March 21, 2026. It’s here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/mar/21/ive-learned-first-hand-how-evil-is-tolerated-colm-toibin-on-living-in-the-us-under-trump

Tóibín wrote this when his new collection of short stories, The News from Dublin, was published. I’m late to the party.