SCIENCE RAPPERS:  A rap performance summarizes findings in my NYT science column on the changing perceptions of “mate value.” One of the excellent rhymes: “We live in a world with mating that’s assortative / People care a lot about education and how short he is.”

WHO NEEDS SHAKESPEARE? A high-school English teacher caught flak for bragging in the Washington Post that she refuses to teach Shakespeare and believes he doesn’t belong in the curriculum. But Mark Bauerlein says her critics are wrong to focus on her. She’s merely following the principles she learned in teacher training programs:

• Students need “representation”—black students need to see black authors and black characters (humanely portrayed), and it’s best if they are presented by a black teacher.
• The past is irrelevant or worse—history evolves and mankind improves (if steered in the right social-justice directions); to emphasize the past is to preserve all the injustices and misconceptions of former times.
• Contemporary literature is better—it’s more diverse and more real.
• Classics are authoritarian—they deny teachers and students the freedom to chart their own curriculum and take ownership of their learning.

“Shakespeare can’t survive hack teachers, and he can’t survive progressive principles, either,” Bauerlein writes.

Shakespeare endures in the classroom on aesthetic and cultural grounds that progressivism refuses.  It casts aesthetic excellence as a political tool, the imposition of one group’s tastes upon everyone else.  And it marks the culture at whose pinnacle Shakespeare stands (the English literary-historical canon) as an outdated authority.

To say that Shakespeare is central to our cultural inheritance—beloved by audiences in the 19th-century American west, quoted by presidents, source of countless American idioms—is to dispel the multiculturalist breakthrough of the mid-20th century.  If progressivism reigns in secondary and higher education, Shakespeare, Pope, and Wordsworth are doomed.

Yeah, but we’ll still have The Joy Luck Club and The House on Mango Street. 

SMART PARKING: Cities could dramatically ease traffic congestion, free up parking spots, and make money in the process if they made their parking meters smarter. City Journal’s Emily Washington says they just need to adopt the sort of congestion pricing that has successfully guaranteed drivers a fast commute on roads with tolls that vary according to the demand. The technology exists thanks to the electronic parking meters that are already being used. On the streets of central business districts, up to 30 percent of the drivers at any time aren’t actually going anywhere — they’re just looking for a parking space. Smarter meters would cost more at peak times, but by guaranteeing that spaces would be readily available, they’d unclog the streets and save valuable time for everyone.

AT LONG LAST, AN EXPLANATION OF SETH ROGEN’S SEX APPEAL: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight? A lot of people, it turns out. As I discuss in my NYT column on changing perceptions of “mate value,” psychologists and anthropologists can finally explain how someone who looks like Seth Rogen can wind up with someone who looks like Katherine Heigl, and why Mr. Darcy eventually falls in love with Elizabeth Bennet. The process may not come as a surprise to readers of Jane Austen novels or to viewers of Adam Sandler’s schlub-gets-babe movies, but at least we now have the data to back up our fantasies.

POLITICAL THREATS TO SCIENCE:  I earlier linked to Matt Ridley’s essay on how the Left has politicized climate science, and that’s hardly the only discipline that’s been corrupted. Democrats like to style themselves as the pro-science party, and a lot of reporters accept that assumption, but I see it as a highly debatable proposition. In fact, I’ve discussed that question with Intelligence Squared U.S.,  the sponsor of the great series of Oxford-style debates on public policy. It’s considering a debate next spring on the question of which side, the Left or Right, poses a greater threat to science.

Liberals have an easy time mocking creationist conservatives, whose impact on the practice of science I consider to be nil. But I wonder who on the Left would be willing to defend its overall record, which includes the promotion of so many unscientific fears (of genetically modified foods, fracking, nuclear power, etc.) and the ostracism of researchers who pursue taboo topics (like the effects of single-parent families, or innate differences between the sexes). I know of conservatives and libertarians who could debate their side of the question (John Stossel, David Harsanyi and Ronald Bailey have recently criticized the Left’s unscientific beliefs). But I’m not sure who would make a good case for the Left. Any suggestions?

THE LEFT-RIGHT GAP IN LANGUAGE: Liberals and conservatives use much different sets of words, according to an extensive textual analysis of chat rooms, news websites and State of the Union speeches. The analysis, published in the current Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a psychological distinction between the basic needs for “affiliation” and “power.” Liberals manifest their yearning for social connectedness by using words like care, help, kind, neighbor and volunteer more often than conservatives do.  Conservatives more frequently use power words like boss, coerce, hero, strong and victory. 

The team of German and American researchers say this is the first study to reveal this difference. And, as usual in social science, the difference is presented in a way that looks bad for conservatives. Citing previous research, the authors write:

These results, although novel, seem intuitive in capturing a fundamental difference by political ideology.
For example, the policies more greatly favored by liberals include social welfare programs and affirmative action, both of which appear affiliation-oriented from a broader perspective. By contrast, the policies more greatly favored by conservatives include increased defense spending and the death penalty, both of which are consistent with a desire to be powerful. Indeed, conservatives are often more invested in the trappings of power such as wealth and status.

Ah, those good-hearted liberals, uninterested in status and money. (The Obamas and their fellow liberals vacation on Martha’s Vineyard only because the beaches are so pretty.) And those deadly power-crazed conservatives, reluctant to even utter nice words like volunteer. (Never mind the studies showing that conservatives actually do more volunteer work than liberals do.)

But here’s another way to look at the results. Liberals talk about politics in language that appeals to our primal socialist instincts, developed on the savanna when we belonged to small clans of hunter-gatherers who really did look out for their kin. Conservatives discuss politics in language that reflects modern reality: socialism doesn’t work in groups larger than a clan, because people do not behave selflessly when they belong to a large group of unrelated strangers. Liberals believe in what the economist Daniel Klein calls “The People’s Romance,” but that fallacy has been exposed by Adam Smith, de Toqueville and Darth Vader, among others.

When liberals say that “government is the word we give to the things we choose to do together,” they score high on affiliation, and some of them may even believe government is one big happy collaboration among equals. But conservatives know that philosophy just means giving one small group of people in the capital more power to boss and coerce the rest of us.

MUST WE TALK? A British campaign called JustATampon is urging men and women to post photos of  themselves with a tampon. The goal is “to start a conversation about periods,” which may seem too ambitious–perhaps beyond the ability of even Starbucks’ socially enlightened baristas. But there is one early success: a column in the Spectator by Rob Liddle, who explains why he has joined the campaign and posted his own photo.

For my part, I put a liberated tampon up each of my nostrils with the strings hanging down over my top lip: a touch of whimsy which I think will appeal to the feminists who run this campaign. Feminists are notoriously good-humoured and ‘game for a laugh’, perhaps especially in those few days leading up to their monthly cycles.

As I say, the point of all this is to demystify menstruation and to ‘break the stigma and taboo’, as one of the feminists put it, which surrounds this entirely natural function. For too long now menstruation and female sanitary wear has been the subject of male sniggering, disgust and — frankly — cruelty. I have not been immune to this in the past, I have to admit. Until relatively recently I locked my wife in the garden shed during her monthly cycle and if a third party ventured near the shed, I would scream ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and drag them away. I regret this behaviour in retrospect. These days Mrs Liddle is allowed in the main body of the house at all times (although obviously not in the kitchen) and permitted to see visitors, provided she is not in the same room as them.

Perhaps that wasn’t the conversation they had in mind.

A REAL ENVIRONMENTAL THREAT: The Climate Wars’ Damage to Science. Matt Ridley, the brilliant science writer, is losing faith in science’s ability to test hypotheses and correct mistakes. That would interfere with the agenda of activist scientists and their protectors in the media.

These scientists and their guardians of the flame repeatedly insist that there are only two ways of thinking about climate change—that it’s real, man-made and dangerous (the right way), or that it’s not happening (the wrong way). But this is a false dichotomy. There is a third possibility: that it’s real, partly man-made and not dangerous. This is the “lukewarmer” school, and I am happy to put myself in this category. Lukewarmers do not think dangerous climate change is impossible; but they think it is unlikely.

I find that very few people even know of this. Most ordinary people who do not follow climate debates assume that either it’s not happening or it’s dangerous. This suits those with vested interests in renewable energy, since it implies that the only way you would be against their boondoggles is if you “didn’t believe” in climate change.

They keep saying the science is settled, but consider Ridley’s summary of findings from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

The IPCC actually admits the possibility of lukewarming within its consensus, because it gives a range of possible future temperatures: it thinks the world will be between about 1.5 and four degrees [Celsius, or about 3 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit] warmer on average by the end of the century. That’s a huge range, from marginally beneficial to terrifyingly harmful, so it is hardly a consensus of danger, and if you look at the “probability density functions” of climate sensitivity, they always cluster towards the lower end.

What is more, in the small print describing the assumptions of the “representative concentration pathways”, it admits that the top of the range will only be reached if sensitivity to carbon dioxide is high (which is doubtful); if world population growth re-accelerates (which is unlikely); if carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans slows down (which is improbable); and if the world economy goes in a very odd direction, giving up gas but increasing coal use tenfold (which is implausible).

But the commentators ignore all these caveats and babble on about warming of “up to” four degrees (or even more), then castigate as a “denier” anybody who says, as I do, the lower end of the scale looks much more likely given the actual data. This is a deliberate tactic. Following what the psychologist Philip Tetlock called the “psychology of taboo”, there has been a systematic and thorough campaign to rule out the middle ground as heretical: not just wrong, but mistaken, immoral and beyond the pale. That’s what the word denier with its deliberate connotations of Holocaust denial is intended to do. For reasons I do not fully understand, journalists have been shamefully happy to go along with this fundamentally religious project.

Read the whole thing.