Month: July 2019

After Wounded Knee

After Wounded Knee Adam Spry   In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer has set himself an almost impossible task. To capture the whole scope of Native American history since 1890 is ambitious, to say the least. Not only did this period see massive shifts in federal Indian policy (ranging from outright genocidal violence to mind-numbing bureaucratic gridlock), but those shifts were experienced by hundreds of different tribal nations who weathered them in a variety of ways. For someone familiar with the topic, the idea of recounting this complex history in a scant 450 pages would inevitably mean...

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Why Pay Attention to the So-Called Science Wars?

Why Pay Attention to the So-Called Science Wars? Michael Harris You might expect mathematics, abstract as it is, to be immune to free speech controversy. But a particularly vicious one broke out in the fall of 2018, over the decision to retract a paper by mathematician Theodore Hill proposing a statistical model that aimed to explain why males of certain species show greater variability in various traits than females. The paper was controversial because — as Hill made clear on the very first page — he was particularly interested in mathematical ability among humans. Hill’s appendix consists of a...

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