BuiltLikeTaft

Please stop saying this. I have a PhD in medieval studies and am an English professor specializing in medieval literature, and as soon as that episode aired, all my friends on facebook were scratching their heads trying to come up with some source that contained an analogous instance of crucifixion. Nobody that I knew could think of any, and poking around on the internet suggests to me that nobody else has either. People keep asking you about this because you keep not providing any information about your source for this bit of history. If you can provide me a medieval source or a scholarly work providing material evidence for Christians performing a crucifixion in Anglo-Saxon England, I will gladly accept correction, but it is really unfortunate. Just own up to the fact that you thought it would be narratively interesting and stop trying to make up history to justify a creative decision.

Seriously, the rest of the first world just doesn't understand how any person who has emotions, empathy for others, or a soul could say single payer healthcare is a bad thing.

The PPACA isn't single payer healthcare, but that's because single payer health care is even more anathema to the right in this country.

The immediate reference is to the fact that he was denied tenure at Harvard early in his career and later on his nomination for the National Academy of Sciences was rejected.

As for the denial of tenure, it's actually kind of a tricky thing. Harvard is famous in academic circles for denying tenure as a standard operating practice. Even today, if you get an assistant professor job at Harvard and you seriously want to get tenure, the easiest path is to become renowned in your field, apply for and get an offer at an equally prestigious school, and then use that offer as leverage to negotiate your way into tenured position. In addition to this, there has long been a stigma at many elite schools against doing anything other than pure research. In a completely different field, Cornel West left Harvard for Princeton because of a dispute with Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, over his public outreach and popular books, which Summers felt were eclipsing serious academic work. And even now, many universities don't have any meaningful way to include public outreach in tenure and promotion files (and I know many people who have been explicitly told to not say anything about non-research writing on blogs, for instance, when going up for tenure). We should also remember that in 1968, Carl Sagan wasn't yet Carl Sagan, beloved popularizer of science. His only mainstream book was a cowritten Time-Life book on the planets. When people first start doing mainstream science writing, it is unlikely that they will establish anything like a major audience by the time the tenure-clock has run out, which means there are huge incentives for universities and professors (both well-meaning ones and not) to tell young academics to avoid mainstream writing until after they have received tenure. This then gets reinforced because people actively think of people who do popular work as less serious, and Carl Sagan, largely because of how famous he became in the decades after being denied tenure, became the poster boy for this phenomenon.

As for being denied entry to the National Academy of Sciences, he was nominated by the field of astronomers, who recognized the quality of both his popular work and his original research, but the final decision was by a vote of the entire academy, and many felt that he must not be a serious scientist simply because of his public outreach. The biggest irony here is that even though he was kept out of the academy, he still won its Public Welfare Medal for his popular work.

I think Zimmer's advice here about the Carl Sagan effect is really good. Some universities and departments would love to have someone who was interested in developing public outreach. Others wouldn't. Some, unfortunately, would say that they want those people, but then would end up denying them support. The challenging thing about public outreach is that it is generally pretty unimpressive when someone first starts out. Public outreach often begins with things like writing an academic blog or starting a column in a local newspaper (or writing letters to the editor about science issues) or developing a workshop for fifth graders interested in science. A well meaning department chair may say that those kinds of things are great as long as they don't distract from serious original research, and that's a dangerous sentiment. If universities are serious about encouraging public outreach, they have to recognize its value early on in the academic's career, long before they've published a best selling book or become the face of a popular documentary series.

Quick question: Did you have a source for the crucifixion episode that you were drawing on, or was it entirely your own invention? If so, what was the source?

Background: I'm a professor of early medieval literature, and after that episode a bunch of us on social media were scratching our heads, trying to figure out if there was any story even remotely like that, in Anglo-Saxon/Viking history, and to the best of our collective knowledge there isn't. I know that you try to have mostly historically realistic depictions, and it seemed like an odd break. I love the show, and actually showed the first episode to my Norse myth and legend class in the fall and they loved it too.

Nate Silver's 538 site was sold to ESPN in 2013 and hasn't been associated with the NYTimes since then. Also, Nate Silver isn't a pollster. His site, 538, is not a polling organization and has never run a poll, although people often mistakenly think that he is one. He creates statistical models based on the polls that other organizations conduct.