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.

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.