Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

Michelle Obama told CNN that she and Barack were going to support whoever wins the Democratic Primary, and that trying to choose a winner now is like trying to predict the World Series champion after the first few games of the regular season. It's about time somebody said something sensible. I'm still refusing to back anyone for 2020 until at least the beginning of 2020, but I'm getting a better idea what what I'm looking for. I didn't watch the first Democratic debates, and I avoided most of the noise surrounding it, but I caught enough of it to see that the 2020 Presidential Election will be a contest between three powerful mass emotional forces. The first one we know about it. Republicans have anointed Donald Trump as their messiah, and nothing is going to convince them otherwise. Democrats can't do anything about it - and that's a good thing, because they have to deal with the other two. Progressives look at the big problems that have been re...

It's been a while since I've posted anything here. I'm full speed ahead on my books, and the rest of my life has taken up everything else. But today seems like a good time to make a point or two. The Mueller Report is out, and I think the moral of the story is that we should never have been expecting a superhero to swoop in and rescue us from the Trumpocalypse. I understand the temptation. I've felt it myself. With each new national embarrassment and each new attack on our democracy, it's been tempting to think that Robert Mueller had uncovered something so devastating that when he released it, the whole Trump empire would collapse. But that turned out to be magical thinking. Perhaps it always was. And perhaps it's just as well. The FOX propaganda machine had already done a good job of numbing its followers to the whole Russia situation. Mueller could have turned up video of Trump and Putin sneaking into a polling place together and tampering with...

For most of my childhood, I lived right next door to Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, a lush, sprawling campus that used to be the Eli Lilly family's apple orchard and country retreat. My parents both taught there. As far as I was concerned, that meant we owned the place. My friends and I made up a Frisbee golf course around the campus. We went sledding on the hills in winter. We launched model rockets off the athletic fields. It was our back yard and playground for years. One time, my brother and I were invited to join a game of Capture the Flag some friends were planning to play on the campus after dark. The thought that such a game might not be a good idea never occurred to us. It was our back yard and our playground. Why couldn't we do it? Well, the police officers who showed up after about half an hour didn't see it that way. And they weren't impressed when I tried to tell them my parents worked there, so everything was all right. Imagine that! Th...

You don't have to watch anime for long before you encounter stories about yokai (also known as ayakashi ), the various ghosts and otherworldly creatures said to inhabit the Japanese islands, just beyond the range of normal human sight. Some of my all-time favorites feature them, including the long-running GeGeGe no Kitaro , currently in its sixth incarnation. A common feature in these shows is that the main characters often get into trouble and have to turn to some elder-figure - a grandparent or grandparent stand-in, usually - who knows the old stories about the creatures who lived with humans during the old times, before science and technology came along and drove magic away. That trope isn't unique to Japan, of course. It's been a regular feature in European stories too, and I expect it's in stories from Africa and other parts of Asia as well. Here in America, though, we have a problem. Here in America, any magical creatures from the old times wouldn't...

African-American mathematician David Blackwell's first teaching job was at Southern University, in Louisiana. When he arrived there in 1942, it was his first time living in the Old South, and his first time experiencing the Old South's Jim Crow laws. The first time he got on a New Orleans streetcar, he was fascinated by the little signs that plugged into the top of the seats, reading "White" on one side and "Colored" on the other. The idea was that the signs could be moved back and forth, depending on how many white people there were who needed seats. If, like me, you've never seen one before, just watch the episode "Rosa" from this year's Doctor Who season. Blackwell had never seen one before, either, and it amused him. When he got off the streetcar, he took it with him. In the oral history interviews he did for the University of California, Blackwell said, "I, of course, accepted segregation but I didn't take it very ...

I've lost count of the number of books on my shelves that have bookmarks in them, marking where I left off reading them as I juggle and flit from one to the next. One that I've picked up again recently is Secondhand Time , the massive oral history from Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexeivich, chronicling the time between the end of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin. One thing that's struck me is how similar the people Alexeivich interviewed are to the people supporting Trump here in the US. It's no wonder the Putin playbook has worked so well on them. The older Russian generation, the one that remembered Soviet times, felt lost and adrift in the new Russia, and that made them long for the Soviet past. One interviewee recounted the year he spent in prison, being interrogated and beaten because his wife had been caught up in one of Stalin's purges. Despite all he went through - including the loss of that wife, who didn't survive her own impri...

I first sat down to write this entry the other day, but before I could get a word out, I was interrupted by a day-job crisis that put my entire premise to the test. Fortunately, I got through it in one piece. As I've pointed out before, the news media's business model depends on keeping your attention, so you'll stay tuned through all their commercials. One way they do that is by trying to convince you that something you value is about to be taken away. At the most basic level, they try to make you think your life is in jeopardy. That's where all those local TV news stories come from - "Can your pet hamster kill you? Details at eleven!" You see it in sports, too. As a lifelong fan of the Indy 500, I've been reading articles explaining why IndyCar racing is on death's door ever since the split between the Indy Racing League and CART - twenty-two years ago. You'd think surviving a decade would be long enough to get off the critical list, l...

I'm pretty sure this is the only time I'll ever quote Playboy magazine, so don't miss it. The January 1985 issue included an essay by James Baldwin, " Here Be Dragons ," in which he explored issues of sexuality and gender identity (decades before the current interest in non-binary identification) and related them to his own experiences. (If you want to check out the essay, please be aware that it contains pretty frank descriptions of adult situations. It was in Playboy , after all.) What struck me most was his assessment of what it means to be an American man: "The American ideal, then, of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This ideal has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden -- as an unpatriotic act -- that the American boy evolve into the complexity of ...

Back in ancient times, when I was married and trying to be an Evangelical - and not doing very well at either - I heard a lot of talk about "witnessing" . That is to say, essentially giving people a sales pitch inviting them to "accept Christ into their lives" (or "be washed in the blood of the lamb," for the more poetic types). Having been raised a properly low-key Episcopalian (not to mention being an introvert), that kind of thing was just too weird for me. But I remember this one "tract," one of the little pamphlets you could buy and hand out to people as part of your routine. It depicted God as this brilliant light that was too wonderful to take your eyes away from, and it depicted non-Christians as standing with their backs to the light, stubbornly refusing to turn around and look. How ironic, then, that I find myself thinking of this tract when it comes to the people who want to Make America Great Again, many of who are white Evang...

"Only a fool fights in a burning house." That pearl of wisdom came from Klingon Captain Kang in the closing episodes of Star Trek 's original series. These days, it's a standard part of the Trek fan's phrase book. You can even get a teddy bear that says it. As the Trumpocalypse grinds on, I've found myself thinking about that proverb a lot. It's foolish enough to fight in a burning house. How much worse is it when the person your fighting insists the house isn't even on fire? Or claims the fire is a good thing, not a bad thing? Or what if you don't want to fight at all, but instead want to put out the fire or at least save the other person from it? And what if that other person doesn't even want to do that? What if that person runs around setting more things on fire, and laughing when you try to put them out? These days, we are all in a burning house. In fact, you can take your pick of burning houses. The President is a Rus...

The fate of this country - perhaps the fate of the entire world - will be decided by white Americans. When the media talks about America being "deeply divided," they mean white America. Americans of color may not be unanimous on anything, but you can't say they're "deeply divided" when ninety percent or so are on the same side. The fate of the entire world ? Seriously? Yes, seriously. Most times, that would be hyperbole, but in this case one of the things at stake is control of enough nuclear firepower to blow up civilization several dozen times over. What's also at stake is control of an economy large enough for its energy choices to tip the global climate balance one way or another. So yes, the fate of the world. Seriously. My fellow white Americans, it's all on us. Again and again lately, I've been hearing and reading commentators saying that the people Red State Americans really don't like are... white Blue State America...

"In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over." So wrote British columnist Dan Hodges, in a 2015 tweet that has since been memed around the world. To which I reply, "Not the end. Just on hold until the children were old enough to speak - and vote - for themselves." The children of Parkland, Florida, are now showing us that. Red State America, the children have been listening. They heard you say that your guns are more important than their lives - and they don't like it. What do you suppose they'll hear you say next? That your tax cuts are more important than their education and healthcare? That your convenience is more important than the health of the planet you're leaving them? Maybe you should think more about what you're saying. And they're not the only ones. For years now, I've been hearing Republicans claim that Democrats want more i...

There's a moment in the climactic scene of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer , during the championship match where our hero, chess whiz kid Josh Waitzkin, realizes that his nemesis, the arrogant, scary, cutthroat chess whiz kid Jonathan Poe, has made a fatal mistake. Rather than going in for the kill, Josh extends his hand, offering Jonathan a draw. "You've lost," he tells Jonathan. "You just don't see it yet. Take the draw, and we'll share the championship." Jonathan will have none of it. At first glance, it looks like he's winning the game. "Are you crazy?" he scoffs. "Look at the board." "I have," Josh answers. " Take the draw ." Well, of course Jonathan refuses, and within a dozen or so moves, the sequence Josh saw plays out and he wins. The arrogant, scary, cutthroat chess whiz gets his comeuppance and skulks away. Josh gets his big trophy and also the satisfaction of knowing that...

During the years I spent trying (and failing) to be an Evangelical, I found a lot of stuff written about "The End Times," and the coming of the Antichrist. Everyone had a different idea about who the Antichrist was, where he would appear, and so on, but there's one thing everyone felt pretty confident about. The "real" Christians (assuming they hadn't all been carried away by the Rapture) would know who the Antichrist was. The Antichrist wouldn't be able to fool a "real" Christian - which is to say, of course, an Evangelical. So it strikes me as sadly ironic that the most anti-Christian figure we've seen in generations of American politics is so adored by the white Evangelical community. Note that I'm not saying Trump is the Antichrist. The Book of Revelation is a tricky thing, so I'm not even sure there will ever actually be someone who is the Antichrist. But Trump is close enough, if not because of his own moral bankr...