Cultureplaces

Published on  February 13, 2020 Yale against Western Art written by  Heather Mac Donald For decades, Yale offered a two-semester introductory sequence on the history of Western art. The fall semester spanned the ancient Middle East to the early Renaissance; the spring semester picked up from the High Renaissance through the present. Many Yale students were fortunate enough to take one or both of these classes while the late Vincent Scully was still teaching them; I was among those lucky students. Scully was a titanic, galvanizing presence, combining charismatic enthusiasm with encyclopedic knowledge. When the lights went down in the lecture hall, the large screen behind him, on which slides were projected, became the stage on which the mesmerizing saga of stylistic evolution played out. How did the austere geometry of Cycladic icons bloom into the full-bodied grandeur of the Acropolis’s Caryatids? Why were the rational symmetries of the Greek temple, blazin...

Knowledge of which DNA strand does what will make it easier to judge which policies are effective . By Charles Murray Almost all human traits are partly heritable. That’s been known for decades. But until a few years ago, no one knew what specific bits of DNA code determine any given trait. Now, however, geneticists have identified at least a few hundred variants in the DNA code that are statistically associated with important traits such as intelligence, depression and risk tolerance. Over the next decade, they are on track to identify thousands of variants associated with dozens of traits. That achievement will open up the ability to score genetic potential on those traits and thereby revolutionize the social sciences. The methods of scoring are improving almost monthly, but the essence is simple. Each variant has a version (more precisely, one of the alleles in a single nucleotide polymorphism) associated with a small boost to the trait in question. If you...