I was asked on Monday by a friend if I was going to write about the goings-on at Yale. I will at some point, but now's not the time.

A little more than two and a half years ago, our school spent a day on lockdown after a twenty-one-year-old shot a police officer at MIT and drove through our campus on his way to Watertown, where he would eventually be captured by police.

We stayed in our dorms, not knowing whether he was just outside the door. He probably wasn't anywhere near campus, the rumors went, but better to keep the doors locked, just to be sure. I lived just next door to my friends, but I didn't dare to step outside for the ten seconds it would have taken me to get from my door to theirs.

I've written before about the moment that we raised our voices together, after the campus had begun to open up again, but I haven't said much about the terror of that day we spent inside.

It seems illogical now, with the benefit of hindsight, but we were worried that we'd hear gunshots at any moment. Everyone tensed up when we heard another police siren go screaming passed. People offered couches to sleep on to strangers because no one wanted to go outside.

But I don't claim to know what it feels like to be black on Mizzou's campus right now. When we locked our doors in fear, we were afraid together. I don't know what it's like for a piece of my identity to be under attack, because when my school was locked down, we came together as Harvard students. I don't

Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death,—
  sat down and eaten with him, cool and bland,—
    pardoned his spilling mess-tins in our hand.

We’ve sniffed the green thick odour of his breath,—
          our eyes wept, but our courage didn’t writhe.

He’s spat at us with bullets and he’s coughed
                shrapnel. We chorussed when he sang aloft,
                  we whistled while he shaved us with his scythe.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
  We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.
    No soldier’s paid to kick against His powers.

We laughed,—knowing that better men would come,
          and greater wars: when each proud fighter brags
            he wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

— Wilfred Owen

As always, there's a lot more stuff that I enjoyed reading this month on Reading Feed. Do check it out!

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Leah Libresco is the single person who I believe has the best practical ideas about how to be a human being in this world.

(This video -- of her speaking about her new book -- isn't embeddable, but if you click, it will open in a new tab.)

It is something of an issue for me that certain significant bits of her deeply-considered epistemic beliefs disagree with my much-less-deeply-considered epistemic beliefs. When I put it that way, it sounds like there's an obvious, easy fix, and when you dereference what it is that I'm talking about, calling it "an obvious, easy fix" sounds...odd.

This was the beginning of a much longer post, but I realized that I have absolutely zero idea where that post is going, so instead: Here, have a great video by a math nerd explaining her experience converting to Catholicism. Even if you disagree with her metaphysical propositions, I think her approach to grappling with ideas larger than yourself is an incredibly lucid and useful framing-of-things. Maybe, hopefully, someday, I'll find the clarity to write about how I feel about the metaphysics, but in the mean time, do watch the video—it's excellent.

Elsewhere, she's been on fire all over the Internet this whole week:

• First Things | How to Strengthen Catholic Community
• Unequally Yoked | How Do You Lance a Festering Resentment?
• Fare Forward | Both/And Philanthropy (and Unequally Yoked | The People I Don't Learn to Love)

And again, even the parts which are ostensibly written for Catholics are thought-provoking reads for the

Aaronson:

I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either making serious sacrifices or engaging the real complexities of an issue. In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its merits: if we think of a previous crisis for civilization (say, in the late 1930s), then it seems obvious that even symbolic divestment gestures were better than nothing.

What made up my mind was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal to the world a scientific consensus that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil-fuel reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.

...

These realities [that averting more climate change requires extraordinary political will] have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better. Namely, if you share my desperation and terror about this crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern. Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up (fresh air and exercise and all). But I’d say the anti-environmentalists are right that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and will

...and now for some musings about exploration that doesn't involve wanton destruction, murder, theft, &c.

(1)

But as soon as somebody demonstrates the art of flying, settlers from our species of man will not be lacking. Who would once have thought that the crossing of the wide ocean was calmer and safer than of the narrow Adriatic Sea, Baltic Sea, or English Channel?

Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies—I shall do it for the moon, [and] you Galileo, for Jupiter.

h/t Abel Mendez at UPR; from an open letter from Kepler to Galileo (yes, those) in the Conversation with the Star Messenger, in 1610. Four hundred years later, space is far harder than ever expected, but the stars are now close indeed.

(2)

Flattened polar projection; logarithmic distance scale; systems with potentially habitable exoplanets highlighted in red. Click through for full-size, zoomable image.

(3)

Voting for the IAU's NameExoWorlds competition is open until October 31! Vote for the names of 20 exoplanets here.

I've got an op-ed in the Harvard Crimson today, expressing my concern that an important narrative is missing from the discussions of the AAU sexual assault climate survey. Excerpt:

When male survivors are invisible, they face stigma against seeking help. Though male and female survivors of sexual assault seek out institutional resources at roughly the same (low) rates, male survivors are 60 percent more likely than female survivors to speak to no one—not even a friend—after an assault. (31.2% versus 19.3% for assault by force; 38.1% versus 23.3% for assault by incapacitation.) And so male students make up more than a quarter of silent survivors, in large part because we so rarely acknowledge that they exist at all. (...)

Those numbers, by the way, come from tables 3.1a,c and 3.5a,b in the full report. Below, I've got few thoughts that didn't make it into the published version.

(1)

I've heard (and more or less believed) "one in three women" for longer than I can remember. And so the fact that the report basically confirms that number doesn't mean all that much to me. I suppose if you doubted that number but believe it now, then the report is big news, but otherwise, this isn't a new crisis because we already knew that it was a crisis, and hopefully, were already acting accordingly. Waiting until the evidence is undeniable before updating

You're a lieutenant colonel in a secure bunker buried in a secret location in the USSR. You are the night shift commander of the Soviet missile defense system. It's September 1983, so your government's stated policy is "launch on warning".

You have five warnings on your screen.

Each is tagged as an American Minuteman-III intercontinental ballistic missile, carrying three nuclear warheads of 500 kilotons each. Beyond a glimmer of a doubt, your job is to immediately escalate the matter to missile command. They will launch a counterattack, which might -- just might -- stop the second wave of American missiles before they ravage your homeland.

There are only five missiles, not the hundreds you'd expect. Five missiles will kill millions -- cities -- but not even close to everyone. The Americans could do so much more, and they've only launched five.

But if you don't pick up the phone to Moscow now and there are a hundred more that still can be stopped, and if anyone in your nation survives, you will be court-martialed for treason and sentenced to death.

Do you pick up the phone to Moscow?

Happy Stanislav Petrov Day.