If you ask a scientist a question about the philosophy of science, there’s a good chance the answer will feature just one or two philosophers. The name of the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) will likely arise in the context of his principle of falsifiability, the ‘demarcation criterion’ that many scientists still use to distinguish science from non-science. A theory is considered scientific only if it makes predictions that can – in principle – be proved wrong. So astrology is not a science because its predictions are typically so vague that they can’t be falsified: they are irrefutable. This is the basis for Popper’s take on the scientific method. Scientists make a series of creative conjectures which they then attempt to refute. They make progress by refining their hypotheses in light of these refutations, and the process begins again.
Meanwhile, the name of the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) will likely be mentioned in the context of his theory of scientific revolutions. In the normal science of every day, puzzles are solved and discoveries are made within a network of accepted foundational theories, or what Kuhn called a paradigm, which is accepted to be irrefutable. Logically, if scientists stopped what they were doing every five minutes, and sought to falsify the basis on which they make their predictions and devise and perform tests, then they wouldn’t get much done. Contrast this with revolutionary science, in which all bets are off and paradigms shift, in a process that Kuhn likened to religious conversion or political revolution. Kuhn argued that such revolutionary scientific change involves not just a change in laws, entities and their mathematical descriptions, but also in the standards by which scientists judge the adequacy of theoretical explanations.
Before the coronavirus crisis, the drive-through had been fast losing status, often deployed as a symbol of obesity and the worst of car-dependent urban design. In many cities, it had been subject to outright bans. The drive-in, meanwhile, is nearly extinct, with just a few still operating in Southern California.
But during the pandemic, drive-throughs have become a weird sort of societal glue. And the drive-in has been reconsidered. Cities that have shut down bars, dine-in restaurants and indoor movie theaters have allowed drive-throughs and some drive-ins to continue to operate.
Their architectural standoffish-ness, in which vendor and client interact largely via speaker and remain in their own environments during an entire transaction, is designed to prioritize efficiency and minimize human exchange. They are the socially distant design we’ve been living with all along.
In the center of the gritty South, Witherow’s making gritty chocolate, literally. Chocolate nibs, salt crystals, and coarse-ground pepper are used to achieve a rough texture beloved by many Music City tongues.
While making his signature bars—67% Dark; 75% Dark; Salt & Pepper; Sea Salted; Double Chocolate Nibs; Coffee; and one-off special-edition roasts—Witherow winnows, grinds, conches, holds, tempers, molds, trims, hand-finishes (last sprinklings of salt, nibs, or pepper), and hand-wraps about five hundred bars a day.
“I’m one of the few, if not the only, ‘beans-to-bar’ artisan chocolate makers in the South,” states Witherow. And who else is making chocolate-covered dried corn? And talking to the folks who stone-grind grits to figure out new ways to stone-grind in his factory?
In his inaugural food column, Beowulf Thorne included recipes for gingerbread pudding, Thai chicken curry, and vanilla poached pears, plus a photo of a naked blond man spread-eagled in a pan of paella. Eat your cereal with whipping cream, he advised readers, and ladle extra gravy onto your dinner plate. “Not only does being undernourished reduce your chances of getting lucky at that next orgy, it can make you much more susceptible to illness, and we’ll have none of that,” Wulf wrote.
“Get Fat, Don’t Die,” the first cooking column for people with AIDS, ran in every issue of Diseased Pariah News, the AIDS humor zine that Wulf started and edited from 1990 to 1999. Under the byline “Biffy Mae,” he passed along reader recipes, mocked nutritional supplements marketed to people with AIDS, and leaned into Bisquick, his tastes alternately cosmopolitan and straight-from-the-box comforting.
Through intricate interweavings of plot delivered in lean yet powerful, often poetic prose, “Only the River” ponders what the Germans call “the unanswerable questions . . . about the difference between courage and cowardice, weakness and strength” — the moving riddles of human confrontation with atrocity and possible redemption. It offers, with open hands, a complicated feast: irreconcilable impasses of character and event; what we can and cannot control. Epic and cinematic, wrought and soulful, it is a deeply serious novel, yet full of tenderness. In one lovely sequence, Pepa and Oskar dance on the Brooklyn Bridge, as Pepa sings. In fact, the novel makes its own soft, steady music, and its traces will haunt a reader’s heart and mind.
There was a moment
when shooting egrets for feathers became wrong.