Jordan Ellenberg's Blog

I have nothing to say about this, I just think it’s cool that Ohio State is hosting an International Conference on Ancient Magic this weekend. Open to the public! Go to this if you’re in Columbus and feeling eldritch!

A good line by Lauren Oyler, in a Harper’s article about the Goop Cruise:

“A favorite tactic of the self-identified iconoclast is to argue that things that have already happened need, still, to happen.”

I like the placement of “still” and the commas a lot. Is “self-identified” one notch too sneery? Would “would-be” be better? Or even no adjective at all? Maybe the second part of the sentence does enough to establish that the title of iconoclast has not been firmly earned by its claimer.

The 2025 MacArthur Fellows have been announced, and I’m very pleased that two of the 22 awardees are my : congratulations to Ángel F. Adames Corraliza from atmospheric and oceanic sciences, and Sébastien Phillippe from nuclear engineering and engineering physics. The only mathematician to win the award this year was Lauren Williams, who true devotees of this blog will remember as the person who gave the best talk I’ve ever seen about cluster algebras. Congratulations to all the winners!

This condition of ill-training is intensified considerably in an institution like the state university, because of the large number of technical students in attendance, many of whom are more interested in acquiring information than getting a real education, and who look upon time as wasted unless it is put in in the acquiring of cold facts which may later be put to use in the earning of money.

That’s Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men at UIUC, writing in 1921 in his book Discipline and the Derelict. He also writes that 70% of students in his anonymous survey admitted to cheating (“cribbing,” as it was then called.) He is pretty high on the student-athlete, who he says subscribes to ideals that were less-well known in his own time as an Illinois undergrad, back in the ’80s:

The athlete was not always so worthy of emulation as he is at present. I do not have to go back farther than my own college days nor even so far as that to recall instances of men who found their way into colleges for the sole purpose of developing or exhibiting their physical powers, of making an athletic team, and without any intention of adding to their intellectual strength.

It’s Taylor Swift album day! We listened to it last night at 11pm central when it went live. Snap reaction from AB, for whom 1989 is apex Swift and the last two albums have been too moody and murky, is — this is a winner. She’s happy to have Max Martin (per AB: “that Norwegian guy”) back.

Friend of the blog Stephanie Burt is probably the world’s foremost academic expert on Taylor Swift. She teaches a class on Swift (which is really a class on how songs work, how poems work, how reputations work, how fandoms work, and Swift) at Harvard. And in the kind of publicity no publisher can plan for, her big Swift book, Taylor’s Version, comes out on Monday, in the middle of a global Taylor Swift media blitz. So thoughtful of Tay to drop the album just in time for Stephanie’s pub date!

I, as a trusted friend of Stephanie, already have a copy. I finished reading it yesterday, just in time for the Life of a Showgirl release. It is good, people, really good. If you are interested in how songs work, how poems work, how reputations work, how fandoms work, or Taylor Swift, I implore you to buy a copy at Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store.

(This blog’s favorite TS songs: “Shake it Off,” “Getaway Car,” “Invisible String,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Welcome to New York.” AB asked me when I first became aware of Taylor Swift. She’s one of the rare acts for whom I can tell you exactly when. Driving east on Mineral Point Rd., “WANEGBT” came on the radio, and it was a “WHAT IS THIS” moment for me — the two other times I remember this happening were the first time I heard Green Day (“Longview”) and the first time I heard New Pornographers (“The Slow Descent into Alcoholism.”) The time David Carlton explained the functor of points to me in the Beacon St. Star Market in Somerville, MA was actually a very similar experience.)

Claudia Prieto is a Venezuelan singer-songwriter about whom I know next to nothing except that she recorded this gorgeous song, “Tus Ojos,” in 2018.

By the way, I found out about this song because it was playing in a restaurant in Mexico and it was great and I Shazammed it. Nobody ever talks about Shazam anymore, but it’s one of the unequivocal little goods that smartphones do. You hear an amazing song playing on somebody else’s radio, and you can find out what it is and add it to your list of songs forever instead of spending your life wondering. This is also how I found out about Eddie Meduza and “Elevator Operator” and Cymande.

The longtime Wisconsin Public Radio show To The Best of Our Knowledge airs its last episode this weekend. You can listen to the stream at that link or you can listen to it over the airwaves tomorrow with an FM receiver, the way God intended. Either way, there’s more than 1000 archived episodes for you to enjoy at your leisure.

I don’t know the story of why this show was cancelled, whether it had particular enemies, or whether it was the victim of budget cuts driven by hostility to public radio more generally. I’ve been on this show several times. Anne Strainchamps is one of the best interviewers I’ve ever heard. She listens, she goes wherever the thing wants to go (even when I the interviewee have no idea where it’s going to go), she’s funny in a way that works with, not in competition with, the person she’s talking to. Radio sounds old-fashioned, but it still has an sneaky, immense reach. Every time I did this show, people came up to me afterwards, people who would probably never pick up one of my books, to say, Hey, I heard you. The radio is there for everyone, everywhere, to find. It is public.

Public In the same way a public park in a small town is public, or the public schools I went to and my parents and kids went to are public, or a public highway is public. It’s not there to sell something, or to make you feel mad or angry or worried on the way to selling you something. It’s just a group of people doing some work to put something good out there for people to use. So little of our world is like this now. We should appreciate the parts that are, and mourn a little whenever one more public thing gets scraped away.

I, too, spoke at the CMSA Big Data conference where this cool math bio talk took place. If you’ve seen me give a talk about math and machine learning lately, you’ve seen some of the slides in this talk, but if not, here’s me talking for an hour, a bit impressionistically, about generating interesting mathematical material using machine learning. Also, you can hear Sébastien Racanière from DeepMind correct me about the difference between AlphaGo and AlphaZero in real time!

Some of the material the talk is about this paper I wrote recently with Kit Fraser-Taliente, Karan Srivastava, and Drew Sutherland. I should blog about it! Also, you should hire Karan!

I’m not sure whether readers of this blog have noticed, but I’m off social media — no Facebook, no Twitter, no Bluesky, I’ve dropped off my message boards, etc. A few thoughts on this, about a year in:

It was actually not very hard. I thought it would be a lot harder; I was a pretty heavy social media user. But this stuff is not nicotine. You stop doing it, you don’t really miss it.On the other hand, I would not say the hiatus has been dramatically life-changing. I don’t feel like I suddenly have unlimited time to accomplish my real goals. Maybe I wasn’t such a heavy social media user! Gallup says the median teen is on five hours a day. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t doing nearly that much.I won’t do this forever, because in 2027 I’ll have a new book to promote, and social media is actually useful for that. But if I didn’t have a book to sell, I think I’d stay off for good. For one thing, what would have been a tweet now becomes a blog post, and I’m happy to be back to blogging. I like blogging better. Sure, some tweets — most tweets — don’t have the substance to become blog posts. And those just stay thoughts. But that’s OK! It’s probably slightly damaging to my weak social ties; there’s some large set of acquaintances whose existence I am no longer periodically reminded of, and with whom I now have zero contact instead of commenting on a post of theirs every couple of months. Is this bad? It’s how social life worked for most of my youth, and that seemed all right. I would encourage people to try this! Even if you don’t intend to stop using social media for good, it’s useful information to know you can quit any time you want. At some point in grad school I didn’t drink coffee for a month because I was overdoing it and having some stomach problems. I think that was the last time I ever went two days in a row without drinking coffee. But I like knowing that if I ever need to decaffeinate, I can, without much suffering.

Shana Tova to all my fellow Jews. We are about to ask God, repeatedly, to “chadeish yameinu k’kedem” — make our days new, the way they used to be.

What does this mean? I take it to be a reminder — echoed at Kol Nidrei — that nothing is really determined and every moment is a moment where you can change paths. If you are having a day that you don’t like, or that God doesn’t like, or that neither of you likes, it isn’t determined that the next day is going to be the same, even though it might feel like tomorrow has to be like today. We are not asking God to make the year good. We’re just asking for the strength to pick what year we have. The rest is up to us.

But why k’kedem? I think the verse reminds us here that it’s not just that the future isn’t determined — it’s that the future was never determined, which means the present, the way you are, the person you are, might have been something other than what it is. That is unsettling. But prayer is supposed to be unsettling! Especially when an old year ends and a new year begins. Have a happy and unsettled 5786, everybody.