THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020 65
mothers reassurance about advances in
maternity care, food supplements, ad-
vice, and education. It was a great suc-
cess. Malnutrition went way down.
Satisfied that a remedy had been
found, the project team took the pro-
gram to Bangladesh, which was suffer-
ing from a similar problem: pregnant
women worried about childbirth restrict-
ing their diet before labor, resulting in
malnourished babies fighting to survive.
And yet in Bangladesh the intervention
made no meaningful difference to the
women or their children. Why? The two
settings were demographically similar,
but there were subtle cultural differences.
Part of the answer, as Michael Blastland
explains in his new book, “The Hidden
Half,” was that “in Bangladesh it was
not the mother who controlled the fam-
ily food. It was the mother-in-law.”
It’s tempting to look for laws of peo-
ple the way we look for the laws of grav-
ity. But science is hard, people are com-
plex, and generalizing can be problematic.
Although experiments might be the ul-
timate truthtellers, they can also lead us
astray in surprising ways.
That may be the most important point
to remember in this new age of ex-
periments. Science knows that it makes
mistakes. It’s why the Royal Society,
since its inception, has placed so much
emphasis on verifying claims and re-
producing results. It’s why Robert K.
Merton, the American sociologist who
laid out an “ethos of science” in the nine-
teen-forties, included skepticism as a
fundamental tenet. And it’s why he in-
sisted that science should be based on
a pillar of communality, recognizing
that every idea in science is built on the
ideas of others, and should therefore
belong to the scientific community.
Knowledge shouldn’t be owned by its
immediate discoverer.
There’s untold good that can be done
by experimentation in the digital age.
It can help us to understand the im-
pact of screen time or the Like button
on our well-being; to find and fix dis-
criminatory practices; to identify ways
of promoting healthier life styles. But
where these experiments are being done
away from public scrutiny, the ethos of
science is compromised. The Big Tech
companies can tell us their findings.
I’m just not sure it’s enough to take
their word for it.
BRIEFLY NOTED
Brother & Sister, by Diane Keaton (Knopf ). “Revisiting Randy’s
past feels like an investigation composed of hundreds of
clues, often leading nowhere,” Keaton writes in this mem-
oir about her younger brother, whose lifelong psychologi-
cal issues have defied easy diagnosis. As a child, Randy saw
ghosts; the sound of planes overhead would make him hide
under their parents’ bed. As an adult, he wrote poetry and
became increasingly isolated: he drank, lived in squalor, and
was tormented by sadistic fantasies. Keaton asks if she was
guilty of failing her brother—“Or rather, how guilty was I?”
There are no answers here, but this is a powerful account
of one family’s struggle with mental illness. Particularly poi-
gnant is Keaton’s depiction of their mother—a “once-in-a-
lifetime compassionate listener.”Driving While Black, by Gretchen Sorin (Liveright). For
African-Americans living under Jim Crow, public transpor-
tation was a ritual humiliation. This excellent history illu-
minates how car ownership provided a measure of safety and
independence and also played a vital role in the civil-rights
movement. (The Montgomery bus boycott, beginning in
1955, owed its success, in part, to a small fleet of privately
owned station wagons.) Black motorists faced unique dan-
gers and indignities on the road—racist law enforcement;
denial of service by hotels, restaurants, and gas stations; and
random acts of violence—but passed information and warn-
ings by word of mouth. And, from 1937 to 1966, many con-
sulted “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” which, at its peak,
had a circulation of more than two million copies.Show Them a Good Time, by Nicole Flattery (Bloomsbury). The
precarious lives of contemporary women animate this début
story collection. Flattery’s characters—a woman having an
affair with her boss, a woman who’s forgotten how to make
small talk—have tolerated their male partners and absurd
jobs for too long, and are caught between caring and a sense
that caring is pointless. The book’s centerpiece is a long story
in which two university students produce a satirical play about
abortion, defying anyone in their way. Flattery puts across
finely observed everyday details with an absurd sensibility
and has a talent for one-liners, as when one student confesses,
“I can’t explain exactly what my disorder is but it prevents
me from absorbing any knowledge into my brain.”Real Life, by Brandon Taylor (Riverhead). This début novel’s
protagonist, a biochemistry grad student, contemplates aban-
doning the stifling world of the lab—leaving behind the
structure that has guided him out of an emotionally dam-
aging childhood and also some relationships that kept him
spiritually afloat. His lab mates are nice enough—until he
gets in the way of their ambition, or reminds them of their
roles in his mental anguish. This tension constantly threat-
ens to flare into violence, whether physical or existential,
but conflicts resist easy resolution. Taylor’s prose brims with
interiority, and is dark and tender, like a bruise.