Welcome to the 21st edition of the Sidney Awards. Every year, I give out extremely nonlucrative prizes, in honor of the philosopher Sidney Hook, celebrating some of the best nonfiction essays of the year, especially the ones published in medium-size and small magazines. I figure this is a good time to take a step back from the Trump circus and read some broader reflections on life. The Sidneys are here to help.
The first Sidney goes to Aaron Parsley’s “The River House Broke. We Rushed in the River” in the Texas Monthly. It’s an account of the July 4 flood of the Guadalupe River that killed all those children at Camp Mystic. His extended family had gathered at their house on the Guadalupe, and he describes what happened minute by minute, as the waters rise, as they seek to escape and as they get dumped into the surging river as the house disintegrates. Here’s Parsley’s description of one moment:
I latched onto a tree with branches large enough to support me and pulled myself out of the water. My breathing was frantic but my mind was focused. I considered the possibility of death. I thought, If I survive, I’ll be the only one. I contemplated life without my husband, my dad, my sister, her family. How could the kids survive what I’d just endured? I felt fear, of course, but it wasn’t as intense as the terror I’d felt inside the house. In the kitchen, I had feared the unknown, what might happen if we were swept away. Now I experienced a moment when acceptance somehow repressed the fear of dying, of losing the people I love the most, of whatever else this catastrophe had in store.
In “The Brother I Lost” for The Dispatch, Megan McArdle notes that the abortion debate goes round and round, like a bad carnival ride. But McArdle’s perspective deepened when her mother confessed on her deathbed that she had had a child out of wedlock and had given the boy up for adoption. The unplanned pregnancy derailed her mother’s entire life and made her fervently in favor of abortion rights.
McArdle sought out the brother she never knew, finding only that he had died and learning nothing about his life. She wondered: If she had a button that would magically erase her brother’s life so her mother could have lived a more fulfilling one, would she push it? This essay won’t change your mind on abortion, but it will ground the philosophic issues in the context of real lives and real choices.
I used to play Little League next to the ConEd power plant off 14th Street in Manhattan. I knew nothing about the technological marvel I was making throwing errors in front of. Jamie Rumbelow’s essay “Steam Networks” in Works in Progress magazine is a fascinating tour through the steam heating system that keeps many New Yorkers warm. Before centralized steam, many New Yorkers burned wood. But 85 percent of the heat generated this way is wasted up the chimney. Wood produces so many pollutants that every hour that you sit in a room with wood burning in the fireplace shortens your life span by 18 minutes. Today New York’s system consumes nearly two Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water per hour to produce enough steam. Moscow’s system extends over 10,000 miles of pipes.
Ronald W. Dworkin is an anesthesiologist who went on a vacation, and when he got back in the operating room, he found he could no longer make snap decisions. In “When I Lost My Intuition” in Aeon he describes suddenly being plagued by self-doubt when forced to make judgments that he once could navigate with agility. The essay reveals how many of the decisions we like to think are based on expertise and pure reason really depend on going with our gut. He quotes the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who also once lost his intuition: “When we are faced with 10 different factors, all acting upon each other and among them creating some astronomical total of variables, reason is defeated and only intuition can cope.” Dworkin’s patients will be happy to know he eventually got his intuition back.
In Experimental History, his Substack, Adam Mastroianni asks a basic question in an essay called “Why Aren’t Smart People Happier?” Intelligence helps people solve problems and understand situations, so smart people should be leading happier lives, but they are not. He says it’s because we too narrowly define intelligence. We give people multiple choice tests in reading, math, history and language, and we think we are identifying people who have general intelligence that helps them think through a wide array of domains.
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But in reality, all these different tests are measuring only one ability: the ability to think through defined problems. These are problems with stable relationships among the variables, there’s no disagreement about when the problems have been solved, and the correct answers are the same for all people. But life, he continues, is largely about undefined problems. How do I get my kid to stop crying? Should I be a dancer or a dentist? How should I live? In these problems there is no stable set of rules to find the right answer. One person’s right answer might be another person’s wrong answer. We need a word for people who are really good at solving undefined problems.
Charles C. Mann’s essay “We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It” from The New Atlantis reminds us that Thomas Jefferson “was rich and sophisticated, but his life was closer to the lives of people in the Iron Age than it was to ours.” Jefferson lived in a world of horse-drawn carriages, yellow fever and high infant mortality, but the big difference, Mann argues, is that while Jefferson didn’t even have a reliable water source for his house, most Americans get to live within systems that provide us with abundant food, water, energy and health care. Mann wrote a series for The New Atlantis on how these systems work, which will make you feel grateful for the things you may take for granted.
The Yale poet Christian Wiman is one of my favorite essayists. His essay “The Tune of Things” in Harper’s Magazine walks us through some spooky phenomena. “Trees can anticipate, cooperate and remember, in the ordinary sense of those terms,” he writes. He continues: “Some people revived from apparent death report confirmable details they could not possibly have observed, at times far from their bodies. Cut a flatworm’s head off and it will not only regrow a new one but remember things only the lopped-off head had learned.”
Across the essay he mentions some more: Ninety-five percent of the past century’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists believed in God. If no one is watching, a photon behaves as a wave, but if someone is watching, it behaves as a particle. When scientists in the Canary Islands shot one entangled photon, it behaved as a wave. Then they went to a different island and shot another entangled photon, and it behaved as a particle. When they returned to check on the first photon, they found it had gone back in time and acted as a particle.
Wiman is saying the world is a lot more mystical and more fluid than we think. When you acknowledge that fluidity, some of our inherited dualisms don’t make sense — between reason and imagination, mind and body, belief and unbelief, consciousness and unconsciousness, even past and future. The kind of thinking you need to understand the ineffable flow of spooky reality is not contained in the linear, logical, machinelike process we call rationalism. Perhaps the kind of thinking we need to understand a fluid world is radically different, a kind of thinking artificial intelligence will never master.
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