woodblock - Monday Morning Memo

Barry Moser is another
famous carver of woodblocks.

“I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they’re devout Christians they can’t separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can’t see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don’t have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children? I think that some of the images in this Bible will be disturbing to a lot of people. The Bible is a very disturbing book.”

– Barry Moser, illustrator

“Within two weeks of the book’s release last October — about the time it took for the first printing of fifty thousand to sell out — it became clear that this was a work of art of genuine importance: an unmistakably serious work which nevertheless had a wide appeal, and which bridged the usual gaps of sympathy between Christians and Jews, black and white, popular culture and high culture, right-wing and liberal Christians. No artist since Rembrandt has handled biblical subjects with such intimate confidence and such trust in the unbeautified human face; no illustrated Bible has so rooted itself in the modern sensibility.”

– Catherine Madsen

A Terrible Beauty: Moser’s Bible

“University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock made a 20-year study that tested the ability of experts to make accurate predictions about geopolitical events. The results showed that the average expert in a given subject was also, on average, a horrific forecaster. Some of the most narrowly specialized experts actually performed worse as they accumulated credentials. It seemed that the more vested they were in a worldview, the more easily they could always find information to fit it.

There was, however, one subgroup of scholars that did markedly better: those who were not intellectually anchored to a narrow area of expertise. They did not hide from contrary and apparently contradictory views, but rather crossed disciplines and political boundaries to seek them out.

Tetlock gave the forecasters nicknames, borrowed from a well-known philosophy essay: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who ‘know one big thing’ (and are terrible forecasters), and the broad-minded foxes, who ‘know many little things’ (and make better predictions). The latter group’s hunt for information was a bit like a real fox’s hunt for prey: They roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously.

Eventually, Tetlock and his collaborator, Barbara Mellers, assembled a team of foxy volunteers, drawn from the general public, to compete in a forecasting tournament. Their volunteers trounced a group of intelligence analysts who had access to classified information. As Tetlock observed of the best forecasters, it is not what they think but how they think. They argue differently; foxes frequently used the word ‘however’ in assessing ideas, while hedgehogs tended toward ‘moreover.’ Foxes also looked far beyond the bounds of the problem at hand for clues from other, similar situations.”

- David Epstein, The Washington Post, July 20, 2019