In the following passage, Coyne et al. (2010) repeatedly cite Authentic Happiness, by positive psychology co-founder and past APA president Martin Seligman, as an example of what they’re saying is wrong with positive psychology:

Critical discussions of the potential contributions of a positive psychology have been hampered by the sloganeering of the leaders of the movement and their labeling of the alternative as a “negative psychology”…

The ridiculing of pessimists as losers in positive psycholgy self-help books, money back guarantees on websites offering personal coaches and self-help techniques claiming to promote happiness, and the presentation of pseudoscientific happiness regression equations [Happines = Set range + Circumstances + Factors under voluntary control] all… suggest that, while the leaders of positive psychology claim it to be science based, they feel free to deliver platonic noble lies to the unwashed masses…

…support for such victim blaming can come not only from the fringe, but from mainstream positive psychology. Anyone who doubts this need only to Google “positive psychology” and “coaching” and experiment by adding some names of proponents of mainstream positive psychology. They will soon be brought to websites with claims that retaining a personal coach or engaging in web-based exercises for a substantial fee is guaranteed to instill happines that lasts and that happiness is related to health. More efficiently, the skeptical reader can reach websites with similar claims by simply joining the American Psychological Association listserv Friends of Positive Psychology… and by double clicking on the web links provided in the signatures of posters there.

From Epic Measures:

Of the 2 billion deaths since 1970 the new Global Burden would ultimately cover, only about 25 percent had been recorded in a vital registration system accessible to researchers… [Christopher Murray’s] proposal to the Gates Foundation had said the entire project would take three years to complete, giving a deadline of July 2010. Three years to gather and analyze all available details about the health of every person on Earth…

Different countries brought a varied set of challenges. In China, regulations forbade almost all core health data from leaving the country, so Chinese partners had to do analyses and share the results with Seattle. U.S. states, by contrast, sold annual databases of their in-patient hospital users to anyone in the world, for prices ranging from $35 to $2,000. In Ghana, almost the exact equivalent records were available free.

In Nigeria, Africa’s largest country by population, the data indexers surveyed hospitals, police stations, health clinics, libraries, colonial archives, and even cemetery plot records. In Libya, the latest census and civil registries turned out to be available online, but only after clicking through seven Web pages written in Arabic. In Iraq, during the end of the American-led occupation, months of spadework revealed the existence of two recent government household surveys. These would help estimate how many Iraqis were being killed or injured by war, as opposed to other causes, a hugely disputed topic. Trying e-mail, Skype, and phone, Speyer finally managed to reach the Iraqi official in charge of statistics and information technology. “She said they’d be happy to share the survey microdata with us, and I said, ‘Can you e-mail it or upload it to a website?’” he recalls. “She said no. She burned it onto a CD and told me I had to pick that up in the Baghdad Green Zone.”

…Another completely separate stream of information, and a big one, came from others’ published scientific studies. About what? About “health.” There were ten thousand articles a month published with a reference to epidemiology. To the maximum degree possible, Murray wanted all of those results pulled, digitized, and entered into Global Burden, too. Put another way, a fraction of a fraction of the data supplied to the study’s scientists was to be everything everyone else had ever discovered.

Apparently Gene Glass invented meta-analysis because he wanted to prove someone wrong:

…in the summer of 1974, I set about to do battle with Hans Eysenck and prove that psychotherapy – my psychotherapy – was an effective treatment. I joined the battle with Eysenck’s (1965) review of the psychotherapy outcome literature. Eysenck began his famous reviews by eliminating from consideration all theses, dissertations, project reports or other contemptible items not published in peer-reviewed journals. This arbitrary exclusion of literally hundreds of evaluations of therapy outcomes was indefensible to my mind. It’s one thing to believe that peer review guarantees truth; it is quite another to believe that all truth appears in peer-reviewed journals.

Next, Eysenck eliminated any experiment that did not include an untreated control group. This makes no sense whatever, because head-to-head comparisons of two different types of psychotherapy contribute a great deal to our knowledge of psychotherapy effects…

Having winnowed a huge literature down to 11 studies (!) by whim and prejudice, Eysenck proceeded to describe their findings solely in terms of whether or not statistical significance was reached at the .05 level…

Finally, Eysenck did something truly staggering in its illogic. If a study showed significant differences favoring therapy over control on what he regarded as a ‘subjective’ measure of outcome (e.g., the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperception Test), he discounted the findings entirely. So be it; he may be a tough judge, but that’s his right. But then, when encountering a study that showed differences on an ‘objective’ outcome measure (e.g., grade-point average) but no differences on a subjective measure (such as the Thematic Apperception Test), Eysenck discounted the entire study because the outcome differences were ‘inconsistent’.

Looking back on it, I can almost credit Eysenck with the invention of meta-analysis by anti-thesis. By doing everything in the opposite way that he did, one would have been led straight to meta-analysis. Adopt an a posteriori attitude toward including studies in a synthesis, replace statistical significance by measures of strength of relationship or effect, and view the entire task of integration as a problem in data analysis where ‘studies’ are quantified and the resulting database subjected to statistical analysis, and meta-analysis assumes its first formulation. Thank you, Professor Eysenck.

…[Our] first meta-analysis of the psychotherapy outcome research finished in 1974-1975 found that the typical therapy trial raised the treatment group to a level about two-thirds of a standard deviation on average above the average of untreated controls…

…[Researchers’] reactions [to the meta-analysis] foreshadowed the eventual reception of the work among psychologists. Some said that the work was revolutionary and proved what they had known all along; others said it was wrongheaded and meaningless. The widest publication of the work came in 1977, in an article by Mary Lee Smith and myself in the American Psychologist. Eysenck responded to the article by calling it ‘mega-silliness’…

From Other Classical Musics: Fifteen Great Traditions, on what the book means by “classical musics” and why jazz is one of them:

The term ‘art music’ is too broad… ‘Court music’ would have worked for some traditions, but not for all; ‘classical’ is the adjective best capable of covering what every society regards as its own Great Tradition…

According to our rule-of-thumb, a classical music will have evolved in a political-economic environment with built-in continuity… where a wealthy class of connoisseurs has stimulated its creation by a quasi-priesthood of professionals; it will have enjoyed high social esteem. It will also have had the time and space to develop rules of composition and performance, and to allow the evolution of a canon of works, or forms… almost all classical music has vernacular roots, and periodically renews itself from them;

…As a newish nation whose dominant culture is essentially European, America has – like Australasia – imported Europe’s classical music, but in jazz it has its own indigenous classical form. Those in doubt as to whether jazz belongs in this book should bear in mind that its controlled-improvisatory nature aligns it with almost all other classical musics. Doubters might also consider how closely jazz’s historical trajectory mirrors that of European music, if telescoped into a much shorter time. It too has vernacular roots, and was raised by a series of master-musicians to the status of an art-music; it too has evolved via a ‘classical’ period through a succession of modernist phases, and has become every bit as esoteric as European classical modernism. Since the 1950s jazz has had its own early-music revivalists (from trad bands to Wynton Marsalis) and, again like Western classical music, it too seems unsure where to go next. And now that it’s gone native on every continent, jazz is as global as Beethoven.

More Chomsky, from Understanding Power (footnotes also reproduced):

So take a significant question you never hear asked despite this supposed “Drug War” which has been going on for years and years: how many bankers and chemical corporation executives are in prison in the United States for drug-related offenses? Well, there was recently an O.E.C.D. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development] study of the international drug racket, and they estimated that about a half-trillion dollars of drug money gets laundered internationally every year—more than half of it through American banks. I mean, everybody talks about Colombia as the center of drug-money laundering, but they’re a small player: they have about $10 billion going through, U.S. banks have about $260 billion.

Okay, that’s serious crime—it’s not like robbing a grocery store. So American bankers are laundering huge amounts of drug money, everybody knows it: how many bankers are in jail? None. But if a black kid gets caught with a joint, he goes to jail.

…Or why not ask another question — how many U.S. chemical corporation executives are in jail? Well, in the 1980s, the C.I.A. was asked to do a study on chemical exports to Latin America, and what they estimated was that more than 90 percent of them are not being used for industrial production at all — and if you look at the kinds of chemicals they are, it’s obvious that what they’re really being used for is drug production. Okay, how many chemical corporation executives are in jail in the United States? Again, none — because social policy is not directed against the rich, it’s directed against the poor.

From The Storm of Style:

What Mozart might have done next [if he hadn’t died young] is no one’s guess. The pieces that emerged from the suddenly productive year 1791 — The Magic Flute, the ultimate Leopoldian synthesis of high and low; La Clemenza di Tito, a robust revival of the aging art of opera seria; the silken lyricism of the Clarinet Concerto; the Requiem, at once cerebral and raw — form a garden of forking paths. Mozart was still a young man, discovering what he could do. In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity — The Tempest, Hamlet, the two-part Faust — but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, Don Giovanni.”

And, on a totally different topic, from Listen to This:

Picture music as a map, and musical genres as continents— classical music as Europe, jazz as America, rock as Asia. Each genre has its distinct culture of playing and listening. Between the genres are the cold oceans of taste, which can be cruel to musicians who try to cross over. There are always brave souls willing to make the attempt: Aretha Franklin sings “Nessun dorma” at the Grammys; Paul McCartney writes a symphony; violinists perform on British TV in punk regalia or lingerie. Such exploits get the kind of giddy attention that used to greet early aeronautical feats like Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight and the maiden voyage of the Hindenburg. There is another route between genres.

It’s the avant-garde path— a kind of icy Northern Passage that you can traverse on foot. Practitioners of free jazz, underground rock, and avant-garde classical music are, in fact, closer to one another than they are to their less radical colleagues. Listeners, too, can make unexpected connections in this territory. As I discovered in my college years, it is easy to go from the orchestral hurly-burly of Xenakis and Penderecki to the free-jazz piano of Cecil Taylor and the dissonant rock of Sonic Youth. For lack of a better term, call it the art of noise.

“Noise” is a tricky word that quickly slides into the pejorative. Often, it’s the word we use to describe a new kind of music that we don’t understand. Variations on the put-down “That’s just noise” were heard at the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, during Dylan’s first tours with a band, and on street corners when kids started blasting rap. But “noise” can also accurately describe an acoustical phenomenon, and it needn’t be negative. Human ears are attracted to certain euphonious chords based on the overtone series; when musicians pile on too many extraneous tones, the ear “maxes out.” This is the reason that free jazz, experimental rock, and experimental classical music seem to be speaking the same language: from the perspective of the panicking ear, they are. It’s a question not of volume but of density. There is, however, pleasure to be had in the kind of harmonic density that shatters into noise. The pleasure comes in the control of chaos, in the movement back and forth across the border of what is comprehensible.

Academic writing on music is often pretty amusing and interesting, especially when it discusses popular artists.

For example, here is Brad Osborn on Radiohead, from a recent issue of Perspectives of New Music:

The British rock group Radiohead has carved out a unique place in the post-millennial rock milieu by tempering their highly experimental idiolect with structures more commonly heard in Top Forty rock styles. In what I describe as a Goldilocks principle, much of their music after OK Computer (1997) inhabits a space between banal convention and sheer experimentation — a dichotomy which I have elsewhere dubbed the ‘Spears–Stockhausen Continuum.’ In the timbral domain, the band often introduces sounds rather foreign to rock music such as the ondes Martenot and highly processed lead vocals within textures otherwise dominated by guitar, bass, and drums (e.g., ‘The National Anthem,’ 2000), and song forms that begin with paradigmatic verse–chorus structures often end with new material instead of a recapitulated chorus (e.g., ‘All I Need,’ 2007). In this article I will demonstrate a particular rhythmic manifestation of this Goldilocks principle known as Euclidean rhythms. Euclidean rhythms inhabit a space between two rhythmic extremes, namely binary metrical structures with regular beat divisions and irregular, unpredictable groupings at multiple levels of structure.

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Wish I could get my hands on this:

Doug knows that when people read for pleasure they naturally gravitate to the like-minded. So he created a database containing hundreds of information sources—from the New York Times to obscure blogs—that are tagged by their ideological orientation, subject matter, and geographical origin, then wrote a program that selects what he should read next using criteria that emphasize diversity. Thanks to Doug’s simple invention, he is sure to constantly encounter different perspectives.

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