The Mumpsimus

One of the most interesting discussions I saw at the AWP conference was one sponsored by VIDA , with editors and writers talking about the results of VIDA's 2013 count of female and male writers in various publications. This year, they were able to offer a particularly revealing set of graphs showing three year trends in book reviewing at major magazines and journals. The only report of the discussion I've seen so far is that of VIDA volunteer Erin Hoover at The Nervous Breakdown  (although I'm sure it was covered by Twitter when it happened). Hoover gives a good overview of the panel and the issues. I took lots of notes, so will here add some more detail to try to show how the discussion went. After introductory remarks by moderator Jennine Capó Crucet, the first responses were made alphabetically by last name, and so two men began: Don Bogen , poetry editor of The Cincinnati Review , and Stephen Corey , editor of The Georgia Review . Bogen noted that, ins...

Maria Konnikova, from "Humanities aren’t a science. Stop treating them like one" at Scientific American's Literally Psyched blog: Every softer discipline these days seems to feel inadequate unless it becomes  harder , more  quantifiable , more  scientific , more  precise . That, it seems, would confer some sort of missing legitimacy in our computerized, digitized, number-happy world. But does it really? Or is it actually undermining the very heart of each discipline that falls into the trap of data, numbers, statistics, and charts? Because here’s the truth: most of these disciplines  aren’t  quantifiable, scientific, or precise. They are messy and complicated. And when you try to straighten out the tangle, you may find that you lose far more than you gain.  It’s one of the things that irked me about political science and that irks me about psychology—the reliance, insistence, even, on increasingly fancy statistics and data sets to prove any gi...