Monthly Archives: November 2023

Former governor-general, Labor leader and architect of universal healthcare Bill Hayden is set to be farewelled at a state funeral.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Governor-General David Hurley will be among the dignitaries, diplomats and political figures at the Ipswich service on Friday.

Mr Albanese described Mr Hayden as a great contributor to the nation who was notable for his humility and quiet strength.

The state funeral will be held at St Mary's Church, Ipswich, from 12 noon AEDT and broadcast on the ABC.

Family, friends and members of the public are welcome to attend.

Born in 1933, Mr Hayden grew up in Queensland where he worked in the public service and police force.

He was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1961 for the seat of Oxley, before being appointed as social security minister and treasurer under former prime minister Gough Whitlam.

When Labor came to power in 1972, Mr Hayden championed and built the foundations for Medibank, the precursor to Medicare.

After the infamous dismissal, he filled Mr Whitlam's shoes, serving as leader of the Labor Party until 1983 when he became foreign affairs minister under Bob Hawke before retiring from parliamentary service in 1988.

He went on to become Australia's 21st governor-general, holding the office from 1989 until 1996.

Mr Hayden died aged 90 in late October, exactly nine years after the death of Mr Whitlam.

Former prime minister Paul Keating said Mr Hayden had created the foundations for Australia's "economic rationalism" and prosperity.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said Mr Hayden, a fellow Queenslander and former police officer, put his party and the nation before personal ambition.

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers said in a statement Mr Hayden was a "selfless servant of the Australian people and our party".

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Labor icon Bill Hayden to be honoured at state funeral - Yahoo News Australia

Anti-science has arisen from the corridors of the academy.

Thom Workman, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswicks Fredericton campus, is also the author of If Youre in My Way, Im Walking: The Assault on Working People since 1970 (2009) and other books.

Workmans public talk on October 24 was hosted by the UNBs SCI Club, a student group that provides an opportunity for university community members to present research and debate current scientific conclusions.

For the professor, the recent so-called stop-woke agenda takes a run at progressive scholars and intellectuals. However, the same intellectuals that are at the forefront of these attacks often use anti-science methods.

According to Workman, there are three broad sources of anti-science discourse.

Religious aspects of the movement harken back to the Monkey Trial (1925) that tried to ban the teaching of evolution in the Deep South of the United States. Biblical truths are more important than science and Workman cautioned the audience: There are schools in New Brunswick that teach creation science.

The corporate attack on science is that it creates inconvenient truths for industries such as extractive industries. Because of climate change, there have been repeated attacks on scientists, like Dr. Anthony Faucci, who make this known to the public or do this type of research. This assumes many forms including attacks on funding agencies, direct discrediting of scientists, and funding new research centres and/or studies.

For Workman, the most peculiar source of anti-science comes from within the Western academy. The secular nature of these largely arms-length institutions should provide them with some autonomy. They have some commitment to enlightenment rationalism and the academys foundation parallels the rise in science.

Still, the fossil fuel industry, for example, has something to say about any efforts to cut into its profit margins. Its capacity to do this is legion, declared Workman. It is one of the primary pushers of the anti-science agenda, when its convenient. Workman calls this suppression of scientific research illegal thuggery, and considers these criticisms now entrenched.

Anti-science ideas have become a wedge issue in politics, building on the demagogues work making people angry and enflames situations. These ideas divide people on subjects that are not necessarily essential to life but are important, for example the debate about critical race theory in the United States or 2SPLGBTQIA+ issues in New Brunswick. This is a distraction technique, as governments erode other services like health or education.

Demagogues preoccupations channel working class grievances into a way to get into power, according to Workman. New Brunswick is not exempt of these types of tactics. As a strategy, it uses anti-science rhetoric.

Social media doesnt help solve the problem but is not the cause of the problem, for Workman. The popular misconception that anyone can do research, contributes to this idea.

In U.S. politics, there is an agenda to deregulate everything, but there is push-back -even from industries- against this anti-science.

However, the main anti-science drive comes from arts and humanities faculties pushed by what calls effete criticisms emerging from the academy. The main reason it catches fire in the academy is that it is able to undercut sociological research that directly attacks socialism.

Workman says that if you undercut the intellectual foundations, the rest falls. There cannot just be feel-good criticisms of capitalism, there needs to be a more scientific analysis of capitalism. The academy exists so that this scientific criticism can exist.

However, the dissing of science in the arts and humanities faculties is systematic. For example, Bruno Latour, a French social scientist, tried to establish the meaning of the fact; he was exploring the relationship between words and reality. There have been many clashes in the field of philosophy of science about reality, truth, and language that challenge the validity of the field of science. These criticisms congeal to form an anti-science sentiment in the academy.

These types of disputes try to hide the one intellectual perspective that is critical of science, according to Workman. In fact, the Western Academy is here to make sure that the prevailing social relations are upheld. It is anti-Marxist: universities are dens of social rest, according to Workman.

Universities often purport to say, were radical and were progressive, but in fact there was an embracing of neoliberal ideas. Workman cited the example of the treatment the Sodexho workers received in 2023 when the University of New Brunswicks Fredericton campus changed food service providers. Despite a few angry outbursts upon the announcement, faculty members were largely absent from the debate.

Sophie M. Lavoie is a member of the NB Media Co-ops editorial board.

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Thom Workman explores the roots of the war on science - NB Media Co-op

The Enlightenments values of reason, progress, and autonomy are still championed by many in the West. But as Aviva Chomsky argues in this interview with the IAI, the way the Enlightenment project intersected with European colonialism meant that these values were used, and continue to be used, for the exploitation of natural resources and the Global South, animating todays climate crisis.

Aviva Chomsky will be giving a talk on The Specter of the Enlightenment, as part in this months IAI Live, November 6, on The Spirit of West: Promise and Peril, featuring a debate between Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer on The Enlightenment and its Alternatives.

Youve argued that the climate crisis has deeper roots than we usually acknowledge, going all the way back hundreds of years, to the Enlightenment or even earlier. How can events that happened hundreds of years ago, long before the industrial revolution and the rise of CO2 emissions, have affected the climate crisis of today?

Rather than tracing the climate crisis specifically to the Enlightenment, Id place it in the 500-year context of European global expansion, which intersected with the Enlightenment in various ways.

Of course, the use of fossil fuels and the problem of greenhouse gas emissions is more recentdating to the Industrial Revolution, and with the sharpest increase after World War II. But the patterns of European expansion that began 500 years ago led directly to Europes industrial revolution and the use of fossil fuels, along with capitalism and its commitment to economic growth based on ever-increasing production and consumption.

Even as todays fossil fuel over-consumers talk about an energy transition, they seem to remain committed to a global order in which the global South (the former colonies) is going to provide the resources and pay the price for flagrant overconsumption in the global North. Meanwhile the global South is the region most affected by climate change itself, and with fewest resources to manage the impacts.

I see this divide very clearly in La Guajira, the region of Colombia where Ive been working for the past 20 years. After Exxon, a US company, established what became the continents largest open-pit coal mine there in the 1980s, exporting coal to power plants in the United States, Europe, and Japan, foreign companies like it are now swooping down to blanket the region with copper mines and wind farms, in the name of energy transition in the global North. The companies will pocket the profits and export so-called clean energy and inputs. All this while 65% of the population is illiterate, and has little access to schools, health services, or basic sanitation, much less electricity. The local population, poor and powerless, will continue to be displaced and dispossessed. This is the latest phase of climate colonialism.

SUGGESTED READING Does the Enlightenment Need Defending? By Steven Pinker

Enlightenment philosophers, like Kant, saw themselves as putting forward a universal moral framework for all of humanity, but the criticism is that in fact the Enlightenment was deeplyEurocentric in its biases. How are those biases reflected in how the West understands global problems like climate change?

My first-year seminar on Race and Racism in the Americas recently debated the question are borders racist? One of my students wrote Borders are inherently racist. In a vacuum it is maybe possible for borders to not be racist however we do not live in a vacuum. I wish that more academics would acknowledge that we do not live in a vacuum! In this context, I think we need to explore how Enlightenment ideas, and the historical events they contributed to, did not occur in a vacuum.

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Confidence in their own enlightenment helped Europeans to justify what the French called their mission civilisatrice of colonizing in the interests of progress.

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The Enlightenment coincided withand played a role inEuropes emerging consciousness of itself as a distinct entity. In fact it coincided with a major transition in this identity, from a belief in its unique historical role as Christendom to an ideology that asserted European superiority on the basis of race, along with the expansion of racial slavery and racial science. Enlightenment ideals of freedom, rationalism, progress, etc., did not emerge in a vacuum but rather through and with European colonialism.

As you mentioned, the Enlightenment had a profound impact on colonialism. How did Enlightenment ideas intersect with the expansion of European empires, and what has been the legacy of this intersection in the politics of the region of the world you study, Latin America?

Confidence in their own enlightenment helped Europeans to justify what the French called their mission civilisatrice of colonizing in the interests of progress. But the belief that Christian, white, or European superiority required Europeans to conquer and dominate non-European peoples for their own good wasnt restricted to the era of the Enlightenment. From the Crusades to Christopher Columbus through the 1600s it was done in the name of religion; in Vietnam it was done to save the population from communism; today its done in the name of nation-building, the war on terror, or even womens rights. Somehow, in the eyes of Europeans, non-European peoples remain stubbornly un-Enlightened and unable to govern themselves.

These ideas were deeply intertwined with Europes role in an evolving global political economy. Andre Gunder Frank wrote in Re-Orient that Europe was a global backwater until it was able to use looted American silver to buy a third-class seat on the Asian economic train. (p. 37) American sugar and silver, and colonial financial and labor institutions, helped to spur the rise of capitalismwhich in turn brought new ideologies and furthered the race for resources.

Latin America is of course extremely diverse in its politics as well as in other ways. Its revolutions in the 1700s and 1800s were in many ways far more revolutionary than those in Europe and British North America, challenging colonial rule over Indigenous and African/Afro-descended peoples as well as over the white colonial elite. The second American revolution, the Haitian Revolution, overthrew not just the technicalities of French rule but the entire colonial slave plantation system. Everywhere in Latin America the thought, voices, and actions of the victims of colonialism play a major role in politics, in contrast to Europe which keeps the victims at arms length. And even elite Latin Americans are familiar with the underside of todays neocolonial world system.

SUGGESTED VIEWING Forests, hypocrisy and the West With Linda Yueh, Vince Cable, Aviva Chomsky, Virgilio Viana

In the context of colonialism, European nations often imposed their own systems of land ownership and resource management on colonized lands. Has this historical legacy contributed to contemporary environmental and climate justice issues?

European colonialism, starting with Spain and Portugal in the 1500s, continuing through the New Imperialism of the 1800s, and still present the global economic system of the 21st century, was and is an extractive project intimately woven into the rise of capitalism and industrialization. Colonial mines and sugar plantations destroyed stable subsistence economies in Africa and Latin America and forced free peoples into labor extracting resources for the benefit of others. Europes (and the US) industrial revolution grew out of these extractive systems, along with its ideas about perennial economic growth and progress.

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I think its the Eurocentrism of what we call the Enlightenment, rather than its emphasis on reason and science, that is the problem.

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Economic growth and progress have brought untold material wealth to many But they have also brought environmental and social catastrophe. Fundamentally, industrial growth requires ever-expanding extraction of resources and production of toxic waste. (Toxic waste includes, but is not limited to, the greenhouse gases that are heating the planet.) But we live on a finite planet, which can sustain neither. Those who have benefitted the most from this global process are scrambling to keep it going and to continue displacing the costs onto the global majority.

Another critique of the Enlightenment is that its emphasis on reason and science contributed to the marginalization of Indigenous and non-European knowledge systems. What are the consequences of that loss of other ways of knowing, and the continuing dominance of science as the main authority over knowledge?

Really, I think its the Eurocentrism of what we call the Enlightenment, rather than its emphasis on reason and science, that is the problem. Indigenous and non-European knowledge systems are not irrational and anti-scientific. Its when Europeans use rationality and science to justify violence, war, racism, exploitation, and destruction of the earth, that Indigenous and non-European people object!

As you already mentioned, the regions of the world that are the most affected by climate change arent central Europe and the United States, but the Global South. Can a better understanding of this deep historical relationship between the Enlightenment, colonialism, and climate change inform contemporary efforts for global environmental justice?

I think two of the most useful projects for understanding what a just global economy would look like come from the A good life for all within planetary boundaries project and the Donut Economy proposal that is based on this concept. The goal of the economy, these argue, should not be to mindlessly produce more and more (i.e., economic growth), but rather to recognize the physical limits of our planetwhat they call the ecological ceilingand also basic human needs and rightswhat they call the social floor. The goal of the economy should be to fulfill human needs without exceeding the ecological ceiling. Right now, the authors point out, our global economy is failing dismally on both counts. We need fundamental global economic restructuring and redistribution of our planets resources.

SUGGESTED READING Pinker on the power of irrationality By Steven Pinker

Is it possible to retain some of the positive aspects of the Enlightenment's legacy, for example scepticism towards religious authority and tradition, and an emphasis on the value of freedom, without smuggling in all of the negatives you have pointed to?

I think we could start by recognizing that Enlightenment values were never uniquely European. Europeans developed their particular philosophies that we call the Enlightenment in part because they started to learn that peoples around the world had very different forms of religion, social structure, and government, and critique their own realities in light of these new perspectives. Rousseau stereotyped--but also idealized--the "noble savage." Europeans read descriptions of the Inca empire by El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539-1616) and Guamn Poma de Ayala (1534-1615). David Graeber and David Wengrow argue(in The Dawn of Everything) that Native North American critiques of European society were a major source of Enlightenment thought. Africans enslaved in Europes colonies had their own ideas about what freedom meantchallenging colonizers insistence that it must mean proletarianization and free labor.

A key factor in the negatives of Enlightenment thought is the notion that these are somehow inherently European ideas that Europeans must spread to others. We should understand, instead, that there is nothing particularly European about scepticism and freedom Its the racism and colonial expansion that are specifically European.

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Did the Enlightenment lead to the climate crisis? | Aviva Chomsky - IAI

The University of Exeter has announced they are launching a masters degree focusing on the history of magic and the occult. The University of Exeter says the degree, which is officially called MA Magic and Occult Science, will help students Build interdisciplinary expertise whilst exploring your specific interests within the long and diverse history of esotericism, witchcraft, ritual magic, occult science, and related topics.

The masters course will not include any practical use of magic, but modules on the course include Philosophy and Psychedelics, and The Western Dragon in Lore, Literature and Art.

The core module, Esotericism and the Magical Tradition, will explore topics like magic in Greece and Rome, occult texts in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the history of witchcraft, magic in literature and folklore, deception and illusion, and the history of science and medicine. Students will also be expected to complete a dissertation, which can be taken in the theatre department.

A recent surge in interest in magic and the occult inside and outside of academia lies at the heart of the most urgent questions of our society, Professor Emily Selove, course leader, told the BBC.

Decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism and anti-racism are at the core of this programme.

This MA will allow people to re-examine the assumption that the West is the place of rationalism and science, while the rest of the world is a place of magic and superstition.

Decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism and anti-racism are at the core of this programme

The programme will be taught within the University of Exeters Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, which the university explains places place the Arabo-Islamic cultural heritage back where it belongs in the centre of these studies and in the history of the West. Decolonisation, the exploration of alternative epistemologies, feminism, and anti-racism are at the core of this programme.

The University of Exeter also says This MA can lead you to a diverse range of careers, examples include: teaching, counselling, mentoring, heritage and museum work, work in libraries, tourism, arts organisations, the publishing industry, social justice and environmental think tanks, spiritual and wellbeing guidance, writing and media, the arts, and further research.

This MA can lead you to a diverse range of careers

The degree will take one year to complete for full time students, or two years for those studying part time. The first cohort will begin in September 2024.

Students hoping to study Magic and Occult Sciences will need at least a 2:1 in a social science or humanities subject. Unfortunately, relevant professional experience will not be accepted as a substitute for these qualifications.

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Exeter University to Offer Degree in Magic - Redbrick

Pre-modern, Modern and Anti-modern Interpretations of "Zen"The debate over Zen has roots dating back to the early 20th century. One of the most famous debates on Zen took place between Hu Shi and D.T. Suzuki. Using philological methods, Hu compared records in the existing ancient book Master Caoxi's Record in Japan with the purported history of Zen Buddhism transmission as derived from the Altar Sutra. He found that the assertion that Saich, the founder of the Tendai sect of Japanese Buddhism, visited the Tang Dynasty in 803, the 19th year of the Zhenyuan reign, appeared incongruent with various other historical records which indicate that it was impossible for Saich to have access to Master Caoxi's Record at that time. Consequently, Hu Shi criticized Zen Buddhism for being rife with "forgery and fraud." The cross-temporal comparison of philology and the unearthing of Buddhist documents in Dunhuang debunked many beliefs about Buddhism at that time. Based on this empirical approach to literature research, it is not difficult to understand why Hu Shi expressed disappointment with D.T. Suzuki's characterization of Zen Buddhism is "irrational and illogical." This debate constitutes an important historical backdrop for D.T. Suzuki's Zen studies in the 20th century.

In fact, the fundamental disagreement between Hu Shi and D.T. Suzuki in their approach to Zen research stems from their differing attitudes towards Buddhism and religion as a whole. They still appreciated each other's efforts with regards to collating, collecting, and integrating literature, which manifested in their mutual assessments of each other. Hu Shi criticized that Suzuki's research ignored the methods of documentary and historical criticism, viewing his work more as "preaching" than research; Suzuki believed that Hu did not distinguish between "matters related to Zen" and "Zen itself. He argued that even thorough research into documentary materials only clarified matters related to Zen and not Zen itself. This indicates that the disagreement between the two is not in the use of documentary materials, but whether to give these materials a primary status.

During that time, disagreements and confrontations did not occur only in the East. Another important historical backdrop to D.T. Suzuki's Zen studies was the research paradigm of Western Buddhist scholars at that time. Influenced by traditional philology and comparative linguistic approaches, the European academic community in the 19th century had already formed a research paradigm centered on Sanskrit, Pali and Tibetan sutras, focusing on the study of classical Buddhism. They advocated for returning to original Buddhism to genuinely study the Buddhist philosophy, and claimed that Mahayana Buddhism, and even East Asian Buddhism as a whole, was considered heterodox or marginal within Buddhism. This was a significant challenge to East Asian researchers who were accustomed to centering their studies around Mahayana Buddhism.

This challenge explains the approach D.T. Suzuki took towards his Buddhist studies in the 20th century. Although Suzuki's fame is now often associated with Zen Buddhism, Zen was not the original subject of his research. His early writings and translations focused on Mahayana Buddhism. He translated Mahynaraddhotpda-astra (Treatise on the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana), a classic of East Asias Mahayana Buddhism, into English. Subsequently, he wrote the Outline of Mahynaraddhotpda-astra, in an effort to introduce this classic into the field of Western classical Buddhist studies. Suzuki aimed to demonstrate to the Western academic community, which had downplayed and even criticized Mahayana Buddhism at that time, that East Asias Mahayana Buddhism was another pinnacle in the development of Buddhism.

However, his struggle did not achieve the desired results. From the traditional perspective of classical Buddhist studies in Europe at that time, Suzuki's linguistic and textual critical ability was debatable, and his translation of the Sanskrit version of Mahynaraddhotpda-astra was considered subpar. Suzuki's efforts in this phase thus ended in failure.

By the 1920s, Suzuki turned to Zen studies, which arguably marked his second attempt to contend with the mainstream discourse of Western Buddhist studies. He realized that in order for studies of Mahayana Buddhism to have impact in the European academic community, he had to turn to another Buddhist tradition with East Asian characteristicsthe Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism. He began introducing Zen ideas to the West, which in turn earned him acclaim, and Western scholars widely regard Suzuki as the first person to bring Eastern Zen to the West.

One of the reasons why D.T. Suzuki's second phase of research generated wide resonance was that he drew from existing Western knowledge concepts. Unlike the earlier studies of Mahayana Buddhism, his interpretation of Zen in the second phase was highly strategic. He no longer simply translated and introduced the Buddhist classics and Buddhist studies of the East to the West; instead, he focused on highlighting the anti-logical and irrational characteristics of Zen, positioning Zen on the opposite side of traditional Western rationalism. This garnered immediate interest from Western researchers. D.T. Suzuki went beyond the domain of "experience" in the Eastern sense, leveraging on the experiential concept of religion from the American pragmatic philosophy trend at that time. He also invoked the mystical aspects of ancient Western philosophy and Christianity to explain Zen. By doing so, he successfully transformed Eastern Buddhism, which Western scholars had previously regarded with skepticism, an accessible source of counter-thought. His way of interpreting "experience" also profoundly influenced later generations understanding of Zen.

The Western academias response to D.T. Suzuki's Zen studies can also be broadly divided into two phases, with the 1970s and 1980s as the boundary. The first phase mainly consists of follow-up responses to Suzukis studies by many writers and researchers, such as Alan W. Watts, who authored The Way of Zen. For a time, Suzuki became an indispensible figure in Western Buddhist research, and whenever Zen was discussed, Suzukis name would inevitably be mentioned, making him an idol in the intellectual world. His influence even extended beyond the academic circles, and even the popularity of Zen in the early American hippie movement owed a debt to Suzuki's influence.

However, after the 1980s, a new paradigm of Zen history research emerged in Western academia, leading to a significant shift in the attitude towards D.T. Suzukis work. This shift was characterized by criticism and reflection, essentially marking the twilight of Suzukis idol status. Interestingly, one of the main drivers of this wave of critical reflection can be traced back to the debate between Hu Shi and Suzuki. Their debates and the subsequent discovery of Buddhist scriptures in Dunhuang greatly influenced Japanese scholar Seizan Yanagida. Later, Yanagida reorganized and critiqued early historical documents of Zen Buddhism using modern methodologies. Along with further research on the disputes between Northern Buddhism and Southern Buddhism and the rising doubts about the mystical narratives in the history of Zen Buddhism, these studies greatly prompted this philosophical shift in Western Zen scholars.

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Rupture and Reconstruction: A Koan About Zen Itself Berggruen ... - Berggruen Institute

Lots of books are declared unfilmable. There are the big, tentacular genre epics, where the problem is scale and expense, like Sandman or Dune. There are your high-literary properties, whose tone feels too elusive (most of Don DeLillo, though people keep trying) or whose form is too baroque (Infinite Jest) to carry well into another medium. Then theres the stuff thats just too bleak to be commercially viable, at least in theory (The Road).

Lessons in Chemistry is none of those things. Well before Bonnie Garmuss debut landed on shelves, Apple TV+ gave the adaptation, starring Brie Larson, a straight-to-series order. The premise feels laser-targeted at the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel fandom. Its a pop-feminist period piece about a chemist, Elizabeth Zott, whose scientific career is tanked by 1960s sexism, leading her to become an unexpected celebrity by hosting a nerdy cooking show.

But the novel has a few defining quirks that, while charming millions of readers on the page, seem challenging to render on-screen. Heres a rundown of how the show handles them:

In the novel, Elizabeths daughter, Mad, is not your basic wise beyond her years type. She starts school at almost four and can read better than many sixth graders. (Many sixth graders: What follows is a running gag about her getting in trouble for requesting that the librarian acquire books by Norman Mailer and Vladimir Nabokov.) The trope of the adorably, disconcertingly advanced child has been a rom-com scourge since at least the 1990s so it was hard to picture the show pulling off incidents like Mad writing 3.1415 in the dirt with a stick when asked to make mud pies.

Some oddly adult locutions aside, the show dials this stuff way, way back though there is a bedtime scene where Mad pipes up, Did you know that the line between the numerator and the denominator is called the vinculum? In the final analysis, theres no avoiding her plot arc, in which she pluckily investigates her late fathers background, calling up various Catholic boys homes and marching to the library to obtain their records.

One of the books most divisive characters is Six-Thirty, Elizabeths loyal pup, who like her daughter is extraordinarily verbally advanced. To be clear, he doesnt exactly, literally talk out loud. But whole scenes are narrated from his perspective, which, like Mads, displays a mix of sophisticated rationalism and aww-inducing naivet. Its implied that he articulates his thoughts this way in part because Elizabeth was determined to teach him the English language, starting with picture books and then advancing to issues of Popular Mechanics. (At some point, he even reads a gravestone?)

In the show, Six-Thirty talks not literally but via first-person voice-over. In one of the early episodes, he recounts how he failed out of bomb-sniffing school I was a coward, and I hated myself for it and was eventually adopted by Elizabeth. The screenwriters wisely jettison the backstory explaining how he acquired his vocabulary, and he speaks simply and with more feeling than in the book. The character winds up feeling more plausibly dog-like but also more treacly. And weve already got a Dickensian orphan subplot to deal with.

The books Harriet Sloane, the gray-haired woman who takes care of Mad, is portrayed as kindly but simple, preferring Readers Digest to Darwins On the Origin of Species. Shes also saddled with a cartoonishly boorish husband, which ramps up her general saintliness.

The show makes her more of a peer to Elizabeth. Here shes a young Black mother and an activist against a freeway project that would destroy her neighborhood. When her husband, a surgeon, returns from the Korean War, they struggle to balance his work, her desire to resume her legal career and their parental obligations. So Harriet has a lot more to do but her subplot still feels schematic, not quite lived-in. It functions as a way to open up the seriess universe of concerns, so it can take in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and avoid seeming stiflingly oblivious to the events of the era. The freeway here is just one version of what theyre doing to communities like ours all over this country, Harriet explains to Elizabeth in a typical scene, drawing her into taking a public stand.

Given all of the above, Lessons in Chemistry might seem like pure escapism: Sure, Elizabeths swimming in casual misogyny, but she cuts through it with sheer will. So some readers were jarred by the novels vividly ugly moments: Online reviews frequently cite one within the first few pages, when a tenured professor in the chemistry department sexually assaults Elizabeth, a graduate student at the time. The show includes that graphic scene, then lurches away from the incident by cutting to the jazzy title sequence. Not dissimilar to the book, the seriess tonal swings never quite settle (theres also an off-screen suicide and on-screen police brutality). That sharp contrast works for some people: Laura Miller at Slate praised the source materials Campari-like balance of the bitter and the sugary. Others might want a narrative cocktail whose ingredients meld more smoothly.

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How Apple TV's 'Lessons in Chemistry' compares to the novel - The Spokesman Review