Erik Baker
The Fortress University | Protesting and Policing on Campus
Erik Baker
On Monday, April 29, hours after students established the Popular University for Gaza on the lawn of the University of Chicago, President Paul Alivisatos sent a campus-wide email expressing his dismay. Alivisatos’s suggestion that the encampment was somehow violent because of the “etymological connections of the word to military origins” drew widespread scorn. But after that tendentious charge came a more revealing — and more ominous — complaint. “Disruption becomes...
Propaganda, Disinformation, Ideology | What the Fog of War Conceals
Erik Baker
The image of the “fog of war,” former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara explains in Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary of the same name, suggests that “war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables.” In this way war resembles the rest of reality — a fact that McNamara perceives dimly but often succeeds in putting out of mind. “Belief and seeing, they’re...
All in the Family | Amy’s Kitchen and America’s Shadow Workforce
Erik Baker
Santa Rosa, California is exactly the kind of place where you’d expect to find the heart of a natural foods empire. It is, in several senses, green. An hour’s drive north of San Francisco, the largest city in California’s Wine Country is surrounded by state parks in the Mayacamas Mountains that separate Sonoma from Napa Valley. Dating back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), generations of Hollywood filmmakers...
Other People’s Despair | Mending the Social Fabric Won't Fix the Suicide Crisis
Erik Baker
Last March, in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, Donald Trump issued a warning: in what would soon become an incessant refrain among opponents of lockdowns and mandatory social-distancing measures, he claimed that unless the country was swiftly opened back up, there would be “suicides by the thousands.” Trump’s particular prophecy was clearly ridiculous, and it became more so with each passing month. But it was by no means...
The Cure and the Disease | Social Darwinism from AIDS to Covid-19
Erik Baker
It was not how anyone expected Bill Hamilton to die. In 1999, Hamilton was celebrating his fifteenth year as a research professor in evolutionary biology at Oxford, where he had cultivated a reputation for unconventional, mathematically sophisticated theorizing. He had recently received both the Crafoord Prize and the Kyoto Prize, arguably the two most prestigious awards for scientists in fields not eligible for the Nobel. His wife had moved out,...
