Hefei's Gamble and Other Misreadings · Morning Gist
Monday, October 125 stories · 16 min
Hefei's Gamble and Other Misreadings
Five essays on explanations that go wrong or go unheard: China's real engine, religion as practice, misread trauma, an ignored doctor, and Leibniz taken to the limit.
Picked from 24 new articles across 14 sources · arrow keys for other days
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China's growth comes from competing city governments: Hefei bet a tenth of its 2008 revenue on a now-dominant screen maker. story 1 ↓
Leibniz's principle that everything has a reason leads toward panpsychism, Sam Kimpton-Nye argues, then asks whether total intelligibility is worth wanting. story 2 ↓
Mary Wollstonecraft died of childbed fever in 1797; fifty years later Semmelweis found the cause but couldn't persuade anyone. story 3 ↓
Religion is mostly something people do, not believe, says scholar Andrew Henry; the belief-first view came from Protestant academics. story 4 ↓
Psychologist Yamonte Cooper argues Black men's vigilance, anger and withdrawal often adapt to chronic racial threat, yet clinicians read them as pathology. story 5 ↓
1/5Works in Progress· Oct 12
China's growth comes from thousands of competing city governments, not Beijing
A Works in Progress essay argues that China's industrial rise comes from local officials who invest like venture capitalists, get promoted for growth and keep the land and tax gains. The postwar United States once ran the same way.
Why it matters · It reverses the usual Western reading of China, from central planning to decentralized competition, and points to America's own past as the model to copy.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · Who governs China's economy
China has a central government in Beijing and thousands of local governments: provinces, cities, counties, towns and villages. All are run by Communist Party officials, called cadres, who are appointed and promoted from above. None are elected.
2 · What an industrial cluster is
A cluster is a place where many firms in one industry, plus their suppliers and skilled workers, sit close together. Short supply chains and shared know-how let products be made and improved faster and more cheaply.
3 · Land in China
Urban land in China belongs to the state. Local governments sell or lease land-use rights rather than the land itself. That lets cities collect the gain when land rises in value as an area develops.
2/5Aeon· Sam Kimpton-Nye· Oct 12
Three routes from "everything has a reason" to "everything is conscious"
In an Aeon essay, philosopher Sam Kimpton-Nye shows how the demand that everything have an explanation leads, by three separate arguments, to panpsychism: the view that all matter is conscious. He then questions that demand itself.
Why it matters · The essay shows how one innocent-looking principle about explanation can decide your view of consciousness, free will and the purpose of philosophy itself.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 28 sec
1 · The principle of sufficient reason
An old philosophical principle, given its classic form by Leibniz around 1700: nothing is so without a reason why it is so and not otherwise. In its strongest form the reason makes the fact necessary.
2 · The hard problem
David Chalmers' 1995 name for the puzzle of why physical processes in a brain are accompanied by felt experience at all. Explaining what a brain does seems to leave out what it is like to be it.
3 · What panpsychism claims
Panpsychism holds that consciousness, or something like it, is a basic feature of matter. Electrons have some very simple experiential aspect, not thoughts. Philip Goff and others have revived the view in recent decades.
3/5The Marginalian (Maria Popova)· Maria Popova· Oct 11
How a surgeon's unwashed hands link Frankenstein's mother to the handwashing pioneer
Maria Popova pairs Mary Wollstonecraft's death after childbirth with Ignaz Semmelweis's later discovery that doctors' hands spread the fever that killed her. Her argument: Semmelweis was right, but shaming people kept the cure from spreading.
Why it matters · Being right is not enough to change minds. The essay is a case study in how the way an idea is argued can decide whether it survives.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 25 sec
1 · Childbed fever
Puerperal fever is an infection of the uterus after childbirth, usually caused by streptococcus bacteria. Before anyone knew about germs, it killed huge numbers of new mothers, especially in hospitals.
2 · Before germ theory
Until the 1860s–80s, doctors didn't know that microbes cause disease. Pasteur's work, building on earlier research, established it. Before then, the idea that invisible particles on hands could kill someone sounded absurd to most physicians.
3 · Who Wollstonecraft was
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) was an English writer whose 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman founded modern feminist political thought. Her daughter was Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein.
4/5Big Think· Jonny Thomson· Oct 12
Is religion something you believe or something you do?
Jonny Thomson talks with religion scholar Andrew Henry, who argues that religion is defined by what people do, not what they believe. If that's right, nobody, not even the Pope, gets to decide who counts.
Why it matters · It questions an assumption most Western readers never notice: that being religious mainly means believing things. That changes how we read surveys, history and other cultures.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 19 sec
1 · Orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy
From Greek: orthodoxy means "right belief", orthopraxy means "right practice". Religions differ in which they stress. Judaism and Confucianism are often called practice-centred. Protestant Christianity is the textbook belief-centred case.
2 · Where 'religion' came from
The modern idea of "religion" as a separate area of life, made up of doctrines you sign up to, was formalised by mostly Protestant European scholars in the 19th century. Since then, critics have argued it doesn't fit many non-Western traditions.
Image: Big Think
5/5Psyche· Yamonte Cooper· Oct 11
A psychologist argues Black men's trauma responses get misread as threat
Counsellor and researcher Yamonte Cooper argues that ongoing, gendered racism causes chronic psychological injury in Black men. Because stereotypes already cast them as dangerous, clinicians and the public tend to see that injury as aggression or pathology.
Why it matters · The essay shows how a stereotype can hide a harm: the reaction to an injury gets treated as proof of the danger that caused it.
Know this first
Context from the editor, not the article · 27 sec
1 · How PTSD is usually framed
Post-traumatic stress disorder is classically tied to a specific event, such as combat, assault or a disaster. A diagnosis needs exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence, followed by symptoms like hypervigilance and avoidance.
2 · The 'concept creep' debate
Psychologists have argued that words like 'trauma' have stretched to cover everyday adversity, which could blur their meaning. Anyone claiming a new kind of trauma now has to say where its boundaries are.
3 · Racial trauma as an idea
Researchers have proposed for years that repeated racism can cause trauma-like stress. Diagnostic manuals don't list it as a formal diagnosis, so whether it gets recognised depends a lot on the individual clinician.
Graphic placed beside the essay's examples of Chinese towns that dominate world output of single products.1 / 2
A Works in Progress essay rejects the usual Western story of China's industrial rise. That story says a powerful central state picked the winners. The essay argues that the real engine is thousands of local governments competing with each other. Beijing mostly sets the rules and keeps order.
Cities that invest like venture funds
According to the 1 (International Monetary Fund), local governments carry out about 85% of China's public spending. The essay notes that Huawei, BYD, DJI and Geely were all started without Beijing's involvement.
Hefei is the clearest example. In 2008 it was an unremarkable city with no display industry. It put $500 million, almost a tenth of that year's revenue, into a new 2 line with BOE Technology, then the ninth-largest panel maker. BOE now makes about a quarter of the world's smartphone screens. Hefei kept reinvesting: it put about $25 billion into firms such as the carmaker NIO and the memory-chip maker CXMT, and reported nearly $9 billion in earnings. Wuhu built the carmaker Chery and still owns 21% of it. Ningde backed CATL, now the world's largest battery maker.
Why officials act this way
The essay names two incentives:
Promotion. Officials are scored on local growth. In the 2000s, those whose growth beat their predecessors' by 3.3 percentage points were 40–50% more likely to be promoted. Unwritten age limits add pressure.
Revenue. By 1990, provinces kept nearly 90% of each extra yuan they raised. Cities also keep almost all the money from selling 3.
Because the city is effectively the landlord, it captures the gains from growth. It rents industrial land cheaply around an 4 and recovers the cost by selling land for housing. That is how specialized towns arose. Kunshan made half the world's laptops by the late 2000s, and Danyang makes half its spectacle lenses.
The costs
Capped deposit rates and limits on moving money abroad push cheap savings to companies. The result is overbuilding. China's car industry uses only about half its capacity, and the US gets almost twice as much output per dollar invested. Officials up for promotion also inflated their growth figures by about 3.4 points. Night-time lights and electricity use did not support the claims.
The argument
The essay argues that none of this is uniquely Chinese. In the 1950s and 60s, US cities raised about 70% of their own money and were run by growth-minded leaders such as Chicago's Richard Daley. In its view, the West needs its old model back, not a new one. The essay does not explain how Western cities would get those incentives back.
An essay in Works in Progress, a magazine about progress and economic growth, rejects the usual Western account of China's industrial rise. That account says a strong central state picked winners. The essay says the work was done by thousands of local governments competing with one another. In its framing, Beijing acts as the referee of a tournament. The players are provinces, cities and towns.
The essay opens with an analogy: imagine if Y Combinator, the startup investor, owned and ran San Francisco. Highways would get stacked decks, skyscrapers would cover the peninsula, and taxes would be cut to bring in founders. The essay calls this "only a slight caricature" of a Chinese city.
Where the money is actually spent
According to the 1 (International Monetary Fund), subnational governments carry out about 85% of China's public spending, and most of that happens at city level. The essay's best-known examples show little central direction. Huawei, BYD and DJI grew up in Shenzhen's Special Economic Zone, where city officials could write their own rules. Zhejiang province quietly backed Geely when only state-designated companies were supposed to make cars. Beijing did name strategic sectors such as batteries and electric vehicles, and it gave them subsidies and tax breaks. But it did not choose which firms or regions would win.
Cities run like venture funds
Hefei is the central example. In 2008 it was an ordinary inland city with no display industry. It put $500 million into a new 2 production line with BOE Technology, then the world's ninth-largest LCD maker, and took an 81% stake in the joint venture. The money was almost a tenth of the city's revenue that year. BOE is now the world's largest display-panel maker and produces about a quarter of all smartphone screens.
Hefei kept reinvesting. Its 2020 stake in the electric carmaker NIO returned more than 30% a year. It owns about 24% of CXMT, which has 7% of the world market for 3, the short-term memory chips used in phones and data centres. Over the decade to 2023 the city invested about $25 billion and reported earnings of nearly $9 billion.
Other cities followed:
Wuhu built Chery from a secondhand Ford engine line, engineers recruited from the state carmaker FAW, and a copied Volkswagen design. The city still holds a 21% stake, worth about $3.7 billion.
Ningde committed land, infrastructure and tax support to the battery maker CATL from its founding in 2011. CATL's Ningde plants can now produce 330 gigawatt-hours of batteries a year, close to half of global EV battery demand in 2023.
Why officials behave like investors
The essay names two causes.
Careers. Every 4 has a secret file scored by superiors, and economic results count for a large share of the score. In Shaoxing's 2008 assessment, 54 of 100 points were for economic development. Across China in the 2000s, officials whose growth beat their predecessors' by 3.3 percentage points were 40–50% more likely to be promoted. Unwritten age limits add urgency. A cadre who has not reached prefecture level by their mid-forties stays at a lower tier for life.
Money. Local governments keep much of what they raise. By 1990 provinces kept nearly 90% of each extra yuan of revenue. Reforms in 1994 cut their share of 5 (value-added tax), which left them short of revenue. They could, however, keep the profits of state-owned firms and almost all income from selling 6.
The essay uses Li Qiang, now China's second-ranking leader, to show how this works. As party secretary of Wenzhou he oversaw growth of 14.8% and 14.1% in his first two years. As governor of Zhejiang he scrapped 8,000 government powers, including more than 700 approval requirements. In Shanghai he launched the STAR stock exchange. He also brought in Tesla with $289 million in grants, $2.2 billion in cheap loans, a ten-point cut in corporate income tax and land at half price. The Shanghai factory went from groundbreaking to production in under a year. Tesla's Berlin factory took almost three times as long.
The landlord mechanism
The essay argues that China goes further than American capitalism. In the US, every investor plays for itself, and nobody looks after the game as a whole. A Chinese city is effectively the landlord, so it collects the spillovers of growth through land values and taxes. It therefore has a reason to build public goods for every firm in town.
The working pattern is this. The city zones large areas for industry and rents them cheaply around an 7. It covers the discount by selling land to developers who house the workers and entrepreneurs that follow.
Kunshan shows the pattern. It was once a poor town known as the "little sixth". It set up an industrial zone in secret, without Beijing's approval. It then courted Taiwanese firms with Taiwanese schools, restaurants and 40 Taiwanese TV channels. By the late 2000s Kunshan made half the world's laptops. Other towns now dominate single products: Shaodong makes 70% of the world's disposable lighters and Danyang half of its spectacle lenses.
New firms have driven much of the gain. Almost three-quarters of manufacturing productivity growth from 1998 to 2007 came from new entrants. China now has 4.1 million manufacturing firms, almost twenty times as many as the US, and 96% are private.
The fuel, and the costs
Beijing supplies cheap capital. Capital controls, such as a $50,000 annual limit on moving money abroad, and capped deposit rates (0.15% on a typical current account) push household savings into banks. Deposits now equal 122% of GDP. In effect, savers subsidize companies. Corporate debt is about 138% of GDP, yet interest and other finance costs are under 1% of industrial firms' sales. In the US, debt is 72% of GDP and interest is 5.3% of sales.
The essay is frank about the costs. China's car industry uses only about half its capacity of 55.5 million vehicles a year, against 80% or more at typical Western plants. The US gets almost twice as much output per dollar of investment as China. Beijing has to step in to clean up gluts: steel output grew from 419 to 804 million tons between 2006 and 2015 before cuts were ordered. It also has to stop provinces from blocking each other's goods. And the incentives encouraged faked numbers. Mayors young enough to be promoted reported growth 3.4 points higher than mayors past the age cutoff, but night-time lights and electricity use did not back it up. The essay claims that corruption mostly sped deals up rather than draining the economy, but it offers little evidence for this.
The American precedent
The essay's conclusion is that this is not a uniquely Chinese model. In the 1950s and 60s, US cities raised about 70% of their own revenue, mostly from property taxes. Leaders such as Richard Daley in Chicago and Robert Moses in New York built airports and roads. Between 1940 and 1975 the US housing stock doubled. The essay argues that the West does not need a new model. It needs to bring back its old one.
Two questions are left open. The essay does not explain how Western cities would get the same incentives without China's land ownership or career tournament. It also does not say whether China's low 8 means its machine is close to its limits.
Remember
In China's system, officials are scored on local growth and cities keep most of the money that growth brings in.
Because cities own the land, they recoup cheap industrial rents through land sales, which lets them pay for whole clusters.
The cost is waste: half-idle car plants, inflated growth figures, and about half the US output per dollar invested.
Millet's The Cat at the Window (c1857-58), placed beside the essay's argument that great art welcomes ambiguity.
Sam Kimpton-Nye's Aeon essay makes two arguments. First, one old demand, that everything have an explanation, leads by three different paths to 1, the view that consciousness is a basic property of all matter, electrons included. Second, he doubts the demand is worth meeting.
A reason for everything
The demand is the 2. Leibniz put it this way: no fact holds without "a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise." Versions run from Parmenides through Aquinas and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) to present-day philosophers. Its appeal is that every "why?" assumes an answer exists.
The PSR has a price. If every fact has a sufficient reason, every fact may be necessary: you could not be doing anything other than reading this. Philosophers in David Hume's tradition, such as David Lewis, reject that and treat the world as "just one little thing and then another."
Three routes to panpsychism
The explanatory gap. Science can explain a mill completely, part by part. Leibniz pictured a brain enlarged to the size of a mill. You could walk through it and never find an experience. David Chalmers calls this the 3: why physical states feel like anything at all. If it can never be solved, the PSR is broken. Make experience a basic feature of matter and no gap needs bridging, though explaining how tiny experiences combine into a human mind remains open.
What matter is. Hedda Hassel Mørch notes that physics defines charge or mass only by how they make particles behave. It never explains why they produce that behaviour. Pain is different: by its nature it makes you avoid its source, and it is hard to imagine it doing anything else. Mørch argues that experiences are the only properties whose nature fixes the behaviour they produce. So the basic properties of matter should be experiential.
Spinoza's one substance. For the PSR, two distinct things need some difference between them. But if things depend on their properties to be distinct, properties become more basic than things, which Spinoza rejects. He concludes there is no reason for many things, so only one exists. It has every attribute, both spatial extent and thought, and he calls it "God or nature". Thought is then fundamental and everywhere.
Kimpton-Nye's turn
He frames the result as a choice. Reject panpsychism and you probably have to reject the PSR. Hold on to the PSR and panpsychism may follow.
Then he questions the goal. We criticise art whose meaning is too obvious, and a better job doesn't settle what life is for. In the same way, "an explanation of everything" may explain nothing. Following Camus's happy Sisyphus, he argues that philosophical theories offer perspectives on mysteries rather than solve them. On this view, philosophers' lasting disagreements are a strength, not a failure.
Sam Kimpton-Nye, a philosopher of science and metaphysics, has written an Aeon essay arguing two things. The first is that a single, old and plausible demand, that everything has an explanation, gives three separate routes to 1, the view that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. The second is that this demand may not be worth satisfying.
The demand for intelligibility
Kimpton-Nye starts with what a good explanation does. Once you understand arithmetic, "1 + 1 = 2" no longer looks like a brute fact. It looks unavoidable, and you can't coherently imagine it being false. Much of philosophy, he says, tries to give other basic features of reality the same feel of inevitability.
Philosophers call this demand the 2. Leibniz put it this way: no fact holds "without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise." Spinoza went further and asked for a reason both for each thing's existence and for its non-existence. Kimpton-Nye traces versions of the idea back through Parmenides, the Stoics, Aquinas and Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna), who used it to argue that anything that exists contingently, without having to, needs an outside cause. It has modern defenders too. Shamik Dasgupta argues that every substantive fact has a metaphysical grounding that makes it necessary. Eddy Keming Chen has built a physical model in which the laws of nature entail every fact, from the electron's mass to the number of hairs on your head at 2pm.
The appeal is that inquiry itself, down to a child's first "why?", assumes there is an answer. If the PSR is false, the world and our curiosity don't fit each other.
The cost: everything becomes necessary
The PSR's main problem is 3, the view that nothing could have been otherwise. Suppose there is a sufficient reason why you are reading this right now. Then you could not have been doing anything else, and free will looks threatened. Humeans, philosophers in the tradition of David Hume, reject that conclusion. David Lewis described the world as "a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another." Bas van Fraassen argues that science gets along fine without laws that make events necessary.
There are ways to soften the cost. Leibniz said some explanations take infinitely many steps. Only God's infinite mind can follow them, and our inability to see the necessity is enough for things to count as contingent. Spinoza simply accepted necessity as one more sign of how connected everything is.
Route one: closing the explanatory gap
The 4, David Chalmers' term, asks why physical states come with felt experience at all. Science explains a mill fully: water turns a wheel, gears drive millstones, wheat becomes flour. Leibniz asked his readers to imagine a brain enlarged to the size of a mill. You could walk through it and inspect every part, and you would never see an experience. If consciousness can't be explained even in principle, that is a serious breach of the PSR.
One response is 5, Descartes' view that mind and matter are two separate substances. Kimpton-Nye notes that Descartes couldn't say why there should be two substances rather than one, so dualism breaks the PSR as well. The other response is to give up the assumption that basic matter has no experience. If consciousness is there "all the way down", no gap from non-conscious matter to mind needs bridging. A hard task remains, often called the combination problem: explaining how micro-level experiences add up to a human mind. Still, the violation of the PSR that looked fatal is gone.
Route two: what makes matter behave
This argument comes from the Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch. Physics describes an electron only by what it does: its mass, charge and spin are defined by how they dispose it to behave. Physics never says what those properties are in themselves, or why they produce that behaviour. Negative charge could, for all we can tell, have produced entirely different behaviour.
Mental properties are different. Pain disposes you to avoid its source. You touch a hot radiator and pull your hand back, and it is close to inconceivable that pain would make you do anything else. Part of what pain is is a push to get away. Mørch argues that experiences tied to motivation and agency are the only properties we can conceive of whose nature guarantees how they make things behave. So if the PSR requires matter's behaviour to make sense, charge, mass and spin should themselves be experiential properties.
Route three: Spinoza's single substance
Spinoza asks why there should be many things instead of one. If two things are distinct, the PSR requires some difference between them, which means a difference in their properties. But then the things depend on their properties for being distinct, which would make properties more fundamental than things. Spinoza rejects that: a substance is by definition what depends on nothing else. Distinguishing substances by their essential attributes, thought for minds and extension in space for matter, fails too. Explaining why thinking substance can't be extended makes the two substances depend on each other. With no reason for substances to differ, Spinoza concludes there is only one. It has every attribute, so it both occupies space and thinks. He calls it "God or nature".
The same reasoning supports 6, the identification of God with nature, and panpsychism, because thought turns out to be fundamental and everywhere. Kimpton-Nye flags a scholarly dispute: in Spinoza's system not all thought may be conscious thought. Even so, Martin Lin states flatly: "Spinoza is a panpsychist."
The author's turn
Kimpton-Nye frames the result as a choice. If panpsychism seems absurd to you, doubt the PSR. If the PSR seems indispensable, panpsychism may follow.
Then he argues against the whole project. Art, he points out, does well with ambiguity, and we criticise works whose message is "too on the nose". A better-paid job gives you a reason to get up in the morning but doesn't settle what life is for. In the same way, an explanation of everything risks explaining nothing. He ends with Camus, who said "one must imagine Sisyphus happy", the king condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever. Philosophical systems, Kimpton-Nye argues, offer perspectives on a world that may never fully make sense, not final solutions. On this view, the long-running disagreement between dualism, physicalism and panpsychism shows philosophy is doing well, not failing. The essay doesn't settle whether panpsychism is true, and it says almost nothing about the combination problem. It is clearer about the logic connecting the PSR to panpsychism than about whether we should accept either.
Remember
If you reject panpsychism, the essay suggests you likely must also reject the idea that everything has a reason.
Mørch's argument turns on pain: a property whose nature dictates the behaviour it causes, unlike charge or mass.
Kimpton-Nye treats lasting philosophical disagreement as a source of perspectives rather than evidence of failure.
The now-established idea that many diseases are caused by microorganisms, developed by Pasteur and others from the 1860s.
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the two critics of marriage who married in 17971 / 4
Maria Popova's new essay, adapted from her book Traversal, links two stories set fifty years apart. One is a love story that ended with a death in childbirth. The other is the discovery of what caused that death.
Two philosophers who didn't believe in marriage
In 1791 Mary Wollstonecraft finished 1, which demanded equal education for girls. Soon after, at a publisher's dinner for Thomas Paine, she met William Godwin, a radical philosopher who had called marriage "the worst of monopolies." Both had built their reputations attacking it. Godwin was awkward and wary of emotion. Wollstonecraft was magnetic and prone to deep despair. Their love grew slowly out of respect, and Godwin called it "friendship melting into love." In 1797, four months pregnant, she married him. They kept separate studies.
On August 30 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary. The placenta wouldn't come out, so a surgeon came in from the street and pulled it out by hand. Within hours she had a fever. She died ten days later. That day Godwin's diary holds only "20 minutes before 8" and then a long row of dashes.
The mystery in Vienna
In 1847, at the Vienna General Hospital, the maternity ward run by doctors and medical students lost about ten times as many mothers to 2 (childbed fever) as the ward run by midwives. Retraining the students didn't help. Neither did stopping a priest's bell rounds, which some blamed for frightening patients to death. Then the mentor of Ignaz Semmelweis, a young assistant professor, was nicked by a scalpel during an autopsy and died the same way the mothers did. Semmelweis saw the link. Doctors went straight from dissecting corpses to examining women in labor, and midwives did no dissections. He blamed "cadaver particles" on their hands. He chose 3 as a wash because it got rid of the corpse smell. After he brought it in, deaths fell to the midwives' level.
Right, and ignored
Popova's main point is about persuasion. Wollstonecraft argued by "painting a passionate portrait of possibility." Semmelweis wrote angry letters calling doctors who didn't wash murderers. He was dismissed, and he grew more bitter. In his forties he was tricked into entering an asylum, beaten by the guards, and died two weeks later of an infection from the beating. The bacterium was later identified as 4. In the end it was Florence Nightingale's data and advocacy that made hospital cleanliness standard.
The infant Mary learned to read by tracing her mother's gravestone. Semmelweis was born in 1818, the year her Frankenstein came out.
Maria Popova's latest essay on The Marginalian, adapted from her book Traversal, puts two stories side by side. One is the romance between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, which ended in 1797 when Wollstonecraft died after giving birth. The other is the effort, half a century later, by the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis to explain why so many new mothers died that way. What connects them is a pair of unwashed hands. Popova also draws a lesson about how ideas spread, or don't.
A vindication, and a dinner
In late 1791, while the United States was ratifying its Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was finishing 1, written partly in response to Thomas Paine. She called for girls to get the same education as boys and to be valued for their minds and morals rather than their looks and manners. Popova notes that this now seems "banal… almost embarrassing," and argues that "the luxury of being embarrassed by it" is the measure of progress. Wollstonecraft's views came from her childhood. Her father beat and raped her mother, and as a girl she stood guard at her mother's door. Popova writes that in her England only four women won a divorce in an entire century.
Her publisher held a dinner for Paine, and William Godwin was there too. His An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice attacked government, religion and marriage, which he called "a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies." The first meeting went badly. Godwin was reserved, awkward and so wary of emotion that he never cared for music, and he found Wollstonecraft too eager to dominate the conversation with Paine. He admitted that he often "appear[ed] rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention." Wollstonecraft was outgoing and quick. She also had bouts of deep despair and called herself "a strange compound of weakness and resolution."
Their love grew slowly, from respect to friendship to love. Godwin described it plainly: "It grew with equal advances in the minds of each… There was no period of throes and resolute explanations… It was friendship melting into love." In spring 1797, when she was four months pregnant, the two critics of marriage married at St. Pancras. They shared a bed but kept separate studies. Godwin's mother replied that his "broken resolution in regard to matrimony" gave her hope he would soon "embrace the Gospel."
Sure the baby would be a boy, they named it William. "William" was born on August 30, 1797, and turned out to be a Mary. After nine hours of labor the placenta stayed in the uterus. A surgeon rushed in from the street and pulled it out by hand. Within hours Wollstonecraft had a violent fever.
Two wards, one mystery
Popova then moves to 1847 and the Vienna General Hospital, one of the world's leading teaching hospitals. It had two maternity wards. Obstetricians and medical students staffed one, and midwives staffed the other, because universities were closed to women. Ten times as many mothers died of 2, an infection after childbirth, in the doctors' ward.
The hospital's explanations didn't hold up. Senior staff thought the students were too rough, but retraining changed nothing. A priest walked through the doctors' ward ringing a bell for each death, and some suggested the sound was frightening mothers to death. The rounds stopped and the deaths continued. Semmelweis, in his first year as an assistant professor, wrote that the bell was "a painful exhortation to me to search for this unknown cause." He tabulated every variable he could see, but the data pointed nowhere.
The answer came by accident, which Popova presents as typical of how discovery works. Semmelweis's mentor (the essay doesn't name him) was cut by a student's scalpel during an autopsy and died within days, in the same way the mothers died. Semmelweis saw the pattern. Doctors and students dissected corpses in the morgue and then went straight to the maternity ward to examine women. The midwives did no dissections.
He decided that "cadaver particles" were riding on the doctors' hands. His method for removing them was crude by modern standards. He tried different washing solutions and judged them by smell, checking whether the stench of the corpse was gone. He settled on 3, a bleach mild enough not to burn skin and strong enough to kill the smell, and presumably the particles too. When his ward adopted it, deaths fell to the level of the midwives' ward. To put that concretely (an illustration, not a figure from the essay): if the doctors' ward lost ten mothers for every one in the midwives' ward, the gap essentially disappeared.
Why the right answer lost
This is where Popova makes her argument. Germ theory didn't exist yet; Pasteur was only starting the crystallography work that would lead to it more than a decade later. The idea that invisible matter could destroy a body was "still inconceivable." Even so, Popova places the main failure in how Semmelweis communicated. She contrasts him with Wollstonecraft, who won people over with a vision of what was possible rather than by blaming them. Semmelweis wrote furious letters to hospitals and medical schools, called doctors who didn't wash murderers, and told students they would be accomplices to a historic crime. Popova calls shaming the "least effective of all behavioral change strategies."
He was largely ignored and grew more bitter. By his early forties he looked sixty, had violent outbursts and lost his train of thought mid-lecture. Popova lists possible causes as early-onset Alzheimer's or 4, and says no one knows. A colleague lured him to an asylum by pretending to show him a new facility. When he tried to get away, the guards beat him and put him in a straitjacket. He died two weeks later of an infection from the beating, the same kind of infection he had spent his career fighting.
Four years after his death, two French scientists described microbes en chainettes ("microbe chains"), and Pasteur later identified them as 5. What finally made hospital cleanliness standard was a nurse, Florence Nightingale, with her data diagrams and advocacy.
The dashes
Wollstonecraft died just before eight one morning, ten days after the birth. Godwin, a lifelong atheist whose diary read like a ship's log ("Call from Coleridge"), wrote "20 minutes before 8" and then a long row of dashes. That evening he wrote to a friend: "look at me, talk to me, but do not — if you can help it — exhort me, or console me." Their daughter learned to read by tracing the letters on her mother's gravestone, and as a teenager wrote Frankenstein. Semmelweis was born the year it came out.
The essay is not a medical history. The numbers are approximate, and Popova assumes rather than proves that the surgeon's hands killed Wollstonecraft. Still, the claim about persuasion stands out. Semmelweis had the evidence, and the way he made his case helped keep it from being accepted.
Remember
Semmelweis tested his hand-washing solutions by smell alone, a crude method that still found a real cause.
Popova argues Semmelweis lost because of his tactics. Calling colleagues murderers kept doctors from accepting what he had shown.
Hospital cleanliness became standard through Florence Nightingale's data diagrams, not through the doctor who discovered the problem.
Jonny Thomson opens by declaring that you're a Christian, whether or not you believe in God. You give to charity, look after your neighbour and swap gifts at Christmas, and that's enough. The provocation comes from his interview with Andrew Henry, a scholar of religion. Henry holds a view called 1 ("right practice"): religion is defined by what you do, not what you believe.
A Protestant habit of mind
In the West, religion usually means belief. Henry argues that this is local. The academic study of religion "was mostly invented by Protestant scholars back in the late 1800s and 1900s," he says, and they defined it in their own faith-centred image.
The split goes back to the word itself. The Roman philosopher Cicero traced "religion" to relegere, to go over something carefully, as in ritual. Around 300 AD, the Christian writer Lactantius said it came from religare, to bind: we are bound to God, or to a creed.
How people actually practise
Thomson argues that practice around the world leans toward Cicero:
In Confucianism and traditional Chinese religion, ancestor worship outweighs any creed.
Japan's saying is "born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist." Christian-style weddings there are often led by "priests" who aren't ordained.
A Jewish joke has Goldberg going to synagogue to talk to God, and Schwartz going to talk to Goldberg.
A 2012 poll of Britons who ticked "Christian" on the census found only about 30% believed its teachings. Three in four cited their baptism as the reason.
Can you be everything at once?
Thomson turns out to be an 2, someone who thinks a religion has core ingredients it can't do without. He objects: if a walk counts as meditation and makes him a Buddhist, it also makes him a Hindu and a Sufi, which can't all be true.
Henry is a 3: he cares about what a practice does. Reciting the 4 and chanting "USA!" in a stadium both bind a crowd together, so calling only one of them religion is "kind of artificial." As for incompatibility, "people aren't consistent." Roughly one in ten American evangelicals reportedly believe in reincarnation. Late Roman Christians burned incense to Apollo on Tuesday and took communion on Sunday. Incompatible according to whom, Henry asks? Usually a religious authority, and Catholics, Protestants, Sunnis, Shias and Mormons all disagree about the core.
The catch
Thomson concludes that this cuts both ways. If behaviour matters more than belief, his opening claim stands. But if religion has no core, nobody gets to hand out the labels: "not the Pope, not the scholar, and certainly not me."
The piece is a brief interview write-up. It doesn't tackle the obvious worry about functionalism: if stadium chants count as religion, the word may stop meaning anything in particular.
Jonny Thomson starts with a provocation. He will call you a Christian whether or not you believe in God, because you do Christian things. You give to charity, look after your neighbour, exchange gifts at Christmas and feel awe in a cathedral. The idea comes from his interview with Andrew Henry, a scholar of religion and YouTuber. Henry introduced him to 1, the view that religion is defined by what you do, not what you believe. If you behave like a member of a religion, on this view, you are one.
Why it sounds strange, and why that's local
To readers raised in a mostly Protestant culture, religion means belief. Henry argues that this is a local habit, not a universal truth. The academic study of religion, he says, "was mostly invented by Protestant scholars back in the late 1800s and 1900s," and they built the category in their own image. A tradition that centred on personal faith and assent to doctrine produced a definition of religion centred on personal faith and assent to doctrine. Henry's claim is that outside that frame, for most of history and much of the world today, religion was never mainly about belief.
A fight over the word itself
Even the word "religion" is disputed, and the dispute lines up with this debate. The Roman philosopher Cicero traced it to relegere, "to re-read, go over again." On that reading, the religiosi were people who attended to every detail of a text with ritual care. Around the year 300, the Christian writer Lactantius rejected Cicero's derivation in favour of religare, "to bind": we are bound to God, or more generally to a creed. Thomson maps the modern camps onto this split. The orthoprax descend from Cicero: religion is the rituals, repeated words and small everyday superstitions. The orthodox descend from Lactantius: religion requires assent, as in the 2's "I believe in one God, the Father almighty."
Philosophers and theologians still argue about which is right. Thomson notes that actual practice around the world leans orthoprax. Some of his examples:
China: in Confucianism and traditional Chinese religion, ancestor worship matters far more than any formal creed.
Japan: the saying goes "born Shinto, marry Christian, die Buddhist." Many Japanese people say they aren't religious, yet crowd shrines at New Year. Christian-style chapel weddings have been popular since the 1990s, often led by a hired "priest" who isn't ordained.
Judaism: an old joke has Goldberg going to synagogue to talk to God and Schwartz going to talk to Goldberg. The communal side is treated as part of what the religion is.
Britain: in 2012 the Richard Dawkins Foundation polled people who had ticked "Christian" on the 2011 census. Only about 30% actually believed Christianity's teachings. Three in four gave baptism as their reason for the label, and 60% had never freely chosen to read any part of the Bible.
Essentialists and 3
Thomson discovers in the interview that he is on the other side. He puts an objection to Henry. If going for a walk counts as meditation and so makes him a Buddhist, then by the same logic he is also a Hindu, a mystical Christian and a Sufi, and those traditions are incompatible.
Henry places this inside a long-running fight in religious studies:
Essentialists, who tend to side with orthodoxy, hold that a religion has core ingredients, such as belief in the supernatural or membership in the right community. Without them, it isn't the real thing.
Functionalists, like Henry, who tend to side with orthopraxy, care less about what a practice is and more about what it does.
Henry's example is the Nicene Creed. Millions of Christians recite it together every Sunday. Millions of people also chant "USA! USA!" in stadiums. Both are rituals, and both produce the same feeling of being in it together. For a functionalist, calling only one of them "religion" is, in Henry's words, "kind of artificial."
"People aren't consistent"
Henry answers the incompatibility objection with evidence that real believers mix freely. He cites surveys suggesting that roughly one in ten American evangelicals believe in reincarnation, which he calls "literal heresy" in a faith built on resurrection. In the late Roman world, he says, Christians "might go light some incense to Apollo at his temple on Tuesday and then go to the basilica and take the 4 on Sunday."
He then asks: incompatible according to whom? Usually the answer is a religious authority, and the authorities disagree among themselves. Catholics and Protestants dispute what lies at Christianity's heart. Sunnis and Shias dispute Islam's. Mormons insist they are Christians, and many other Christians say they aren't. Incompatibility is a judgment someone makes, not a fact built into the beliefs.
The twist
Thomson concludes that orthopraxy cuts against his opening move as much as it supports it. The good news for him is that behaviour may matter more than belief, so calling a charitable, Christmas-keeping atheist a Christian isn't absurd. The bad news is that if religion has no core, nobody holds the authority to hand out labels: "not the Pope, not the scholar, and certainly not me." You might be a Christian, he says, but not because he declared it.
What the piece leaves open
This is a short interview write-up, not a full argument, and several things go unexamined. Functionalism's obvious risk is that if the stadium chant is no less religious than the creed, the word "religion" may stop picking out anything in particular. Neither speaker addresses that. The statistics come without much detail: the Dawkins Foundation poll came from an advocacy group, and the evangelical reincarnation figure is described only as "something like" one in ten. The piece also doesn't settle whether self-identification counts for anything. If practice defines religion, what about the person who keeps Christmas and firmly says they are not a Christian? Thomson's closing point, that no one can hand out the labels, suggests the reader's own word should carry some weight. But the article stops there.
Remember
The belief-first definition of religion was shaped largely by 19th-century Protestant scholars, according to Henry.
In a 2012 poll, only about 30% of Britons who ticked "Christian" on the census believed its teachings.
If religion has no essential core, no authority can rule on who belongs, and that includes the scholar.
A Black man comes to therapy saying he sleeps badly, feels irritable and has pulled away from people he cares about. It sounds like ordinary stress. Then he describes a supervisor who keeps questioning his competence, coworkers who call his directness "aggressive", and a store employee who follows him down the aisles. He mentions a police stop, videos of Black men dying, and his fear for his son.
In a new Psyche essay, counsellor and researcher Yamonte Cooper says many clinicians would hear anxiety, anger or "poor engagement" in that account. He hears 1: a chronic psychological injury that the people around these men mostly misread.
A narrow claim
Cooper knows "trauma" is now applied to almost everything. He does not argue that every experience of racism is traumatic. His claim is narrower. Sustained exposure to racialised threat, dehumanisation and constraint across many parts of life can produce a lasting injury. Unlike 2 (post-traumatic stress disorder), which is usually tied to a single event, this injury comes from a threat that never stops and that a person has little control over.
He says the threat has a gendered form, and cites evidence:
In a 2020 Gallup survey, 27% of Black men said people acted afraid of them, against 11% of Black women.
Black men and boys have about a 1-in-1,000 lifetime risk of being killed by police, roughly 2.5 times the risk for white males.
Economist Raj Chetty's 2019 study found the Black/white income gap, among people with similar parental income, was driven by Black men's wages and employment. Black boys earned less as adults than white boys in 99% of 3.
The paradox
Cooper calls the result a paradox. The stereotypes that cause the harm also hide it. Princeton researchers found white respondents especially likely to see Black men as violent and least likely to see them as nurturing. Cooper says this works as a fast, often unconscious fear response. So guardedness is read as hostility, anger as danger and mistrust as paranoia. In therapy, 4 or reluctance to open up can be diagnosed as oppositional behaviour or pathology instead of being recognised as adaptation. A Black man, he writes, may have to make his suffering look "calm, reasonable and nonthreatening" before anyone treats it as suffering.
He rejects explanations based on "masculinity norms". In his account, the men are mainly asking for dignity, safety and to be recognised as fully human.
What he asks for
Cooper wants clinicians to stop asking "What is wrong with this person?" and ask "What conditions might have made their response necessary?" He asks everyone else to make the same shift. The essay makes its case with statistics and clinical experience. It doesn't present data on how often Black men are actually misdiagnosed.
Yamonte Cooper, a counsellor and researcher, starts his Psyche essay with a story he says he has heard many times. A Black man comes to therapy saying he sleeps poorly, feels irritable and has withdrawn from people he cares about. He is tired of explaining why ordinary situations leave him so tense. At first it sounds like everyday stress. Then the details come. A supervisor keeps questioning his competence. Coworkers call his tone aggressive when he speaks directly. A store employee follows him from aisle to aisle. He mentions a police stop years ago, watching another Black man's death replayed online, and his worry that his son will have to learn the same rules of self-protection.
Cooper argues that many clinicians would still hear generalised anxiety, anger, depression or "poor engagement". Those labels describe what is visible, but in his view they miss a chronic injury underneath. "What looks like emotional shutdown is often a survival strategy," he writes. "What looks like anger is often the surface of grief, shame or exhaustion." What looks like mistrust may be an accurate memory of institutions that were not safe.
Narrowing the claim
Cooper addresses the obvious objection directly. "Trauma" now covers everything from violence to ordinary stress, and critics worry that if everything is trauma, the word stops meaning anything. He agrees that not every painful or unjust experience is traumatic, and says he is not arguing that all experiences of racism are.
His claim is narrower. Sustained exposure to racialised threat, dehumanisation and constraint across several areas of life (work, public space, policing, healthcare) can produce a chronic psychological injury. He says this injury goes widely unrecognised, especially in Black men.
The key difference is from 1, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Diagnostic manuals classically anchor PTSD to a specific distressing event, such as combat, assault or a disaster. Cooper describes something without a single event. The threat environment is structural and ongoing, and the person has little control over it. It produces a steady strain, not one shock. The expected responses are vigilance, guardedness, anger, emotional withdrawal and exhaustion.
Why focus on men
Cooper says Black women also suffer deep and persistent racial harm, and that he is not ranking suffering. His point is that anti-Black stereotypes are not gender-neutral. They are often organised around Black maleness, through associations with threat, criminality and aggression. Black men therefore face what he calls a gendered anti-Blackness that marks them as "threatening, punishable and economically disposable." He cites three kinds of evidence:
Perception. In a 2020 Gallup survey, US Black men were more than twice as likely as Black women to say people acted afraid of them (27% versus 11%). They were also more likely to report being treated with less courtesy and seen as dishonest.
Violence. National mortality research puts the lifetime risk of being killed by police for Black men and boys at about 1 in 1,000, roughly 2.5 times the risk for white men and boys.
Economics. Raj Chetty and colleagues at Harvard studied nearly the entire US population in 2019. They found that among people with similar parental income, the Black/white income gap was driven by lower wages and employment among Black men. Black boys earned less as adults than white boys in 99% of 2.
Cooper adds that the pattern isn't only American. Matt Ashby of University College London found in 2022 that young Black men in London were 17 times more likely than the general population to be stopped and searched. The UK's 2017 3, a government inquiry into race in the criminal justice system, found Black men were 41% more likely than white men to get a prison sentence for comparable drug offences at Crown Court.
The mechanism of misrecognition
The core of the essay is about how a response to injury gets reread as a threat. Cooper cites Princeton political scientists Corrine McConnaughy and Ismail White. Their research on gendered racial stereotypes found white respondents especially likely to see Black men as violent and promiscuous, and least likely to see them as nurturing. Cooper argues these judgments form quickly and often below conscious awareness. They are less like dislike and more like a culturally conditioned fear response. Because people experience that fear as automatic self-protection, they rarely question it.
He calls the result 4, meaning hostility or contempt directed specifically at Black men. A small worked example of how it compounds:
A man is followed in shops, questioned at work and stopped by police. He learns to scan for danger (vigilance) and to hold back (guardedness).
Observers read the vigilance as paranoia and the guardedness as hostility. Because he is already stereotyped as dangerous, those readings feel obvious.
Being treated as hostile is one more threat, so the vigilance deepens.
In a clinic, the same traits can be diagnosed as 5, aggression or poor engagement. The coping strategy becomes the pathology.
Cooper's paradox is that the conditions that cause the injury also make it hard to see. Distress keeps being taken for threat, and coping keeps being taken for disorder. By the time the man in the opening story reaches therapy, Cooper writes, he may already be monitoring his voice, posture, facial expression and emotional range. A Black man may have to make his suffering appear "calm, reasonable and nonthreatening before it can be recognised as suffering at all."
Not a masculinity story
Cooper rejects the common explanation that these behaviours come from masculinity norms, such as men being reluctant to show vulnerability. He says Black men do not mainly describe their experience as performing masculinity. They describe claims to dignity, safety and full recognition as human beings. He frames the issue as manhood in an "existential" sense: the conditions under which a person is allowed to exist without being treated as a threat.
What he proposes, and what's missing
For clinicians, Cooper wants the question to change from "What is wrong with this person?" to "What conditions might have made their response necessary?" For everyone else, he asks for a similar change in attention. When a Black man seems guarded, angry, quiet or withdrawn, ask what he has had to carry, anticipate or survive.
This is an argument essay, not a study. Its statistics show different exposure to threat. They don't directly measure the essay's central claim, that clinicians misdiagnose Black men's trauma as pathology. That part rests on Cooper's clinical experience and on the stereotype research. The essay also doesn't say how to tell 6 apart from other conditions in practice, or whether it should become a formal diagnosis.
Remember
Cooper separates chronic, structural threat from the single-event trauma that classic PTSD diagnoses are built around.
The stereotype causes the harm and then hides it: coping looks like the danger the stereotype predicted.
He suggests clinicians ask what conditions made a response necessary, not what is wrong with the person.
