Wasteland Wrap-up #52
A busy week around town, the changing seasons, and a new documentary about the Manson murders...
This last week was one of those weeks that felt like two weeks in one — last Monday feels almost like a month away!
First, the Nuclear Knowledges group at Sciences Po hosted my friend Benjamin Wilson, who gave a talk on his new book, Strange Stability: How Cold War Scientists Set Out to Control the Arms Race and Ended up Serving the Military-Industrial Complex (Harvard University Press, 2025). I will be doing something more with Ben and his book on here in the near future so I will hold off saying more about it right now, other than to say that it’s an impressive piece of scholarship with a somewhat scandalous thesis.
It was good to see and talk with Ben, and I got to walk around Paris a bit with him, and we saw the amazing rainbow that you see above, near Notre Dame. (Shortly after, it rained on us, which perhaps should have been predicted.)
I then had to hustle over immediately to the Sorbonne for a two-day workshop on the concept of “crisis” in the history of science, which was both a reference to the Kuhnian sense of the term, and the present crisis in science in the United States. Most of this was in French, which was a good listening exercise for me (although a remarkably draining one), and I got to make some nice connections with colleges in France, Spain, and Germany.
But there were a few English papers, including my own (which was about creating a taxonomy of various “crises” in 20th-century physics), a paper by the wonderful John Krige on attempts in the US (and elsewhere) to restrict access to academic work by Chinese graduate students, and a keynote paper by my friend Kathryn Olesko on the fraud that is “Gold Standard Science,” the Orwellian designation that is in the process of being used to allow decidedly non-scientific practices into federal regulations. If you are interested in keeping on top of such things, you should subscribe to her blog, Science in America:
A highlight of the event was a dinner reception at the end of it on the top floor of the Sorbonne’s Jussieu campus tower, which has a panoramic view of Paris:
Perhaps the most amazing thing about this picture, though, is that it was taken at only 6:30pm! I am only just recently beginning to appreciate what being this far north does to the light; the sun has been rising at 8am and setting at 5pm. So by 7pm or so it feels like it is the middle of the night. So that is taking some getting used to by itself.
The weather has largely been similar to that in New York, if not a little better, although this week we had a cold snap that meant that it snowed last night, which I take is a bit unusual for this time of the year. It was not that much snow, and it had melted by the time I got up.
As the French lack Thanksgiving (I would say “understandably” although their own colonial history would suggest that they could invent a heroic holiday about dining with native Americans with as much legitimacy as anyone else), the slide from Halloween to Christmas is even more unabated here than it has become in the United States. Remarkably, they even have “Black Friday” sales here, although what that is really understood to be in reference to, I do not know.
We are going to attempt an approximation of our normal Thanksgiving activities here this week (we don’t usually do turkey, which makes it easier), but I am not sure how you say “jellied cranberry sauce” in French (either linguistically or conceptually). Some years ago I had a Thanksgiving dinner with very recent immigrants to the United States, one from India and one from Afghanistan, and it was an amusing exercise in trying to explain specific ritualistic food customs to outsiders. “Is this something you would eat often?” “Never, other than this day.”
I had intended to post something to Doomsday Machines this week but what with everything else it did not quite come together by Friday, so I decided to put it off until next week. I have two posts essentially in the “hopper,” one of which is about an “end of the world” science fiction short story from 1903, the other is tracing the usage phrase “the living/survivors will envy the dead” with respect to nuclear war. The latter is the one that ended up taking more time than I had expected, as it is rather more involved than I had anticipated (diving into different translations of the Book of Jeremiah, if you can believe it). So one of those will be posted next week, to bring some cheer to your holiday, if you celebrate it.
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