Foucault is - _really_ - one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. This is not an audience for "critical theory" or "continental philosophy" or what-have-you, but everyone owes it to themselves to learn about Foucault's work, just as much as they owe it to themselves to learn about the work of say Ludwig Wittgenstein or Claude Shannon. There are continental philosophers who are not very impressive in my opinion (Louis Althusser comes to mind), but Foucault is not one of them.
Foucault's work is usually focused on trying to discern what things we take as natural, known, and unquestionable are actually constructed claims which can be questioned. I think Discipline & Punish is his most accessible writing; it is a history of judicial systems from the 17th century to the 20th century.
This article is not a great introduction to Foucault, and assumes a familiarity. I do not know why it is on Hacker News except that the author has recently passed.
There are some interesting ideas buried in his writing (panopticon) but Foucault's ideas aren't consistent and it isn't even clear that he takes them seriously himself. Discipline & Punish is also pretty elevated nonsense.
The book makes sense as a history of penal reform, and Foucault is right to point out that changes often served to better punish prisoners rather than reform them as the rhetoric of the day demanded. But pointing out public hypocrisy is hardly a sophisticated observation for a historian to make. And it is a weak base from which to launch the sweeping attack Foucault attempts on the idea that morality matters, or to insist that man's "soul" is nothing more than his position in power networks or that "power" itself is "knowledge" (not vice versa).
In order to support these points, Foucault is dishonest on so many basic historical points that it calls the honesty of his actual historical research into question. I have a ton of underlined passages in my copy of D&P which I made with increasing frequency as his claims started to contradict each other. In the interest of just picking one, look at Foucault's insistence that democratization had absolutely nothing to do with efforts to remove the death penalty. Really? And Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."
Well which is it? Are we truly to believe that the horrific demonstrations of torture which Foucault spends entire chapters chronicling (salaciously, like pornography) did not frighten anyone? Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion? And doesn't his own claim about the ineffectiveness of the punishment now contradict his earlier statements about the nature of knowledge, to say nothing of his earlier chapters which actually documented how people were, in practice, quite terrorized.
A lot of the dishonesty slides by in the sheer minutiae of death. And it all gives the impression that Foucault must be right, if only because he is able to a picture of humanity that would repulse most honest people and do so unflinchingly (the virtue of facing unpleasant truths!). But at a certain point, the discerning reader recognizes his sophistry for what it is and stops trying to make sense of it all. I'd encourage anyone on HN to go directly to Plato if they want real philosophy, or at least jump back to Nietzsche (Schopenhauer as Educator) if they want an entertaining and tongue-in-cheek iconoclast whose ideas merit real thought.
I'm an early modern historian of science so I'm sympathetic to arguments about Foucault's ahistorical tendencies. My biggest gripe with him is that he tends to conflate "the world" or "the West" with what often seems to be Paris and its environs, when you look at what he's actually citing. But then again, that's a complaint you can lob against many 20th century French historians.
On the other hand, he really is an excellent historian of ideas and of early modern science; maybe a little less empirically grounded than historians from the "Anglo-Saxon" world like me might prefer, but you can't deny the usefulness of his ideas. He's also quite a good prose stylist in many passages, much more lively and original than the other names (like Derrida, who I find opaque and boring) with whom he's often lumped together. His opening description of Las Meninas by Velazquez in The Order of Things is one of the passages that made me want to study what I do.
To get a little pedantic though (because I'm enjoying this discussion), more recent historians of violence and executions basically support the specific claim you call into question (that executions typically didn't frighten early modern audiences). People like Edward Muir at Northwestern have done great original work in Italian archives to show just how different attitudes toward public violence were in the premodern world. [1] An execution was literally something you'd take your kids to and buy refreshments at, like a play. I don't see the conflict between that claim, which is quite robust on an empirical level, and Foucault describing gory details that shock his modern audience - just because we find it frightening doesn't mean our great-great-great-great-grandparents did.
And just because people took their kids doesn't mean they didn't find it frightening. The two claims have literally nothing to do with each other. It's like saying people pay good money to see horror movies so they aren't scared of being hacked to bits by psychopaths.
Native peoples in the Great Lakes region mostly enjoyed torturing prisoners of war to death in variously fairly horrible ways, often over days. The whole tribe participated and it had something of the carnivalesque atmosphere the link you provide mentions. Yet there is also evidence that fear of capture loomed very large in the minds of warriors because of the fate that awaited them.
One of the things the post-structuralists (especially Derida, who is really nothing but a troll) are good at is distraction and indirection. Foucault's bloodthirsty descriptions of torture in D&P have no scholarly value and could easily be replaced by a one-or-two-line sketch of the reality without loss of utility... except that people would then read the rest of the book in a less aroused state of mind, and would be more calmly critical of his unsupported and frequently implausible claims.
It seems to me that you're conflating too different manifestations of fear - the fear of the crowd that watched executions and a larger societal fear of governmental or judicial violence. No one who has read primary sources from the period we're talking about would argue that the latter didn't exist; as for the former, like Muir points out, it could manifest many different ways, from howls of fear to laughter and jokes. In the end we can never say definitively what was running through the heads of everyone in a crowd 400 years ago, but it's not just Foucault making stuff up or trying to trick his audience when he writes about attitudes toward early modern executions. It really is there in the original sources. Here's just one case in point, from the dairy of Samuel Pepys:
Saturday 13 October 1660
To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy.
* who exactly is the subject of terror, the person executed or the crowd? At the start of his book Foucault seems to claim that the subject is the person being executed. But then he shifts to talking about the attitude of the crowd.
* we are probably meant to view them as equivalents because of class consciousness and the Marxist digressions about man having no "soul" except for his position in power networks. But... but... surely it was quite common that the crowd and the person executed had quite different attitudes towards the event.
* also, if capital punishment was really ineffective at inducing terror (in whom?), why were 19th century French penal reformers the first ones to notice? isn't it weird that this enlightenment corresponded with a public debate over morality if the two events are unrelated?
* more substantively, if Foucault is right and French penal reformers were the first ones to notice for whatever reason, doesn't his pointing this out imply the existence of an objective standard of knowledge that undermines Foucault his claims elsewhere about power being wisdom and truth being subjective?
Uggg... I could go on for a while. Enough Foucault.
>But pointing out public hypocrisy is hardly a sophisticated observation for a historian to make.
Actually it's a very useful role for a philosopher, one cherished from the time of Socrates down to Nietchze, Adorno, Christopher Lasch, and almost everybody else in between.
>Well which is it? Are we truly to believe that the horrific demonstrations of torture which Foucault spends entire chapters chronicling (salaciously, like pornography) did not frighten anyone?
Yes. And in fact you can find tons of sources stating that they were kind of public spectacles, with women, children and others participating -- even until down to the early 20th century.
>Why if so does he describe them in such detailed fashion?
This question does not follow from anything. You essentially ask "if they didn't frighten anything, why does he describe them in such detailed fashion" -- as if how detailed their descriptions are, is supposed to be affected by whether they frightened people. I, for one, fail to see any mystery or contradiction. You can describe in minute detail also stuff that doesn't frighten people.
The point has nothing to do with anyone's sexuality. It is that Foucault writes in a way designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader (distress at the graphic depiction of human suffering), and yet denies the existence of the same emotional reaction when it comes to attributing motives for penal reform.
As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
>* It is that Foucault writes in a way designed to elicit an emotional reaction from the reader (distress at the graphic depiction of human suffering), and yet denies the existence of the same emotional reaction when it comes to attributing motives for penal reform.*
He writes to elicit that emotion to readers many decades (or centuries, depending on the specific practice) removed from those practices. Doesn't mean the people back then had the same emotions or those were the ones that brought the reform.
Reading about the treatment of slaves in the South today will get a huge emotional response too, but that was not how slavery was abolished then -- it took a whole civil war (and decades of struggles with prejudice, Jim Crow laws, KKK and segregation).
>As for his flatly contradicting himself, opening his own book a practically random page brings up the following quote from a contemporary (Damhoudere) complaining that Foucault's executioners exercise "every cruelty with regard to the evil-doing patients, treating them, buffeting and killing them as if they had a beast in their hands." The fact that executions were public spectacles did not mean that people approached them with expectations of justice.
Where's the contradiction? What some public figures and intellectuals said of the executions is not the same as what the public sentiment about them.
To continue with the same exampke, that's in the same way that there were several prominents pro-abolitionists in the South, but that was not the prevalent sentiment of the people there.
> Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."
That quote is the concluding sentence of a paragraph which cites at least three documents:
* Argenson, 241
* Hardy IV, 56
* Richet, 118-19
Does your copy have the parenthetical citations removed?
None of those references are relevant to the quote in question, which attributes very specific and cynical beliefs to 19th penal reformers in ways which explicitly conflict with their own writings.
Do you care to cite those conflicts? Are 18th century reformers beyond a mote of cynicism? That sentence isn't claiming to describe the entire world view of the reformers, but to specifically note that they would have been aware of the number of examples where the masses were not deterred by the spectacle of executions. (You seem to take offense with specificity in a claim?)
It is possible to declare the system of executions a travesty, while also observing that the lower classes are willing to phsyically intervene in them. Perhaps it is even possible that the reformers were made aware of the injustices by the lack of respect the lower classes demonstrated for them.
Perhaps a reformer with the goal of abolishing executions would pen a treatise that was justified in the moral terms of the ruling class, rather than based on the emotional state of the working class. One would look to address your audience after all. I'm not familiar with the cited reformers you claim are conflicting but it sounds more like aristocracy convincing aristocracy, rather than an aristocrat attempting to sway the masses with pamphlets.
I question whether you read this text in good faith, or are simply searching for bits you can pick out to summarize on a message board and construe as contradictions.
> I question whether you read this text in good faith...
What is good faith? You're picking a small (although perfectly valid -- re-read Part II for whatever quotes you need on the self-professed motives of penal reformers) objection pulled pretty much at random from my marginalia rather than addressing the more substantive complaints in my original post.
And even here your defense is speculative ("perhaps") and offered in a non-committal way that ironically conflicts with Foucault's own viewpoint by subsuming the problem in a moral framework ("travesty") rather than contextualizing it as a power struggle in an amoral Marxist context. So even if your defense is correct then Foucault's sweeping ontological statements are inappropriate and overbearing, which is part of my complaint.
If you want to focus on bigger ideas, I've posted four more major complaints in a post above. If you are able to explain what Foucault means without making his position sound absurd and/or contradicting his own writing, you'll have done a better job explaining his ideas than he did.
My favourite account of Plato involves one of his alleged interactions with Diogenes. As told by wikipedia:
> "When Plato gave Socrates' definition of man as "featherless bipeds" and was much praised for the definition, Diogenes plucked a chicken and brought it into Plato's Academy, saying, "Behold! I've brought you a man." After this incident, "with broad flat nails" was added to Plato's definition."
For me, coming to understand Foucault was like coming to understand metaprogramming. It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances. It is so disappointing that there are people who think of themselves as "hackers" being dismissive of Foucault (and associated thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari).
(This is not so much a response to you as my desire to wax more about Foucault.)
Yes, I would urge all people with great curiosity, observation skills and desire to experiment and improve to take part in reading philosophy.
I only caution people to be careful about rockstar-ifying any single philosopher or group thereof. The more you read, the more you learn the shape of philosophy. While any one philosopher might have a lot to say, it's really only the summary of them that makes it truly useful.
It's easy to have your mind blown by one revealing thought from a paragraph or a book, like watching a one-line program execute. It's when all of the thoughts are put together and exercised that philosophy acts like a well-architectured object being designed in a well-architected program running on a well-architected operating system running on well-architected hardware which was developed using a well-architected program running on a ...
And as this article points out, various groups of political interest in reframing any single philosopher's viewpoint.
I like what you've said. Here's the connection I made between my technical knowledge and Foucault's school.
A C.S. professor of mine, when lecturing on semantics, i.e. the interpretation of texts, be they intended for computers or humans, remarked that "means" is a three-place relation:
R(a,b,c) === a means b to c
That is, a tuple is in the relation if the text "a" means "b" to an interpreter "c".
Typically, the "c" part is left out. But introducing it allows one to model subjectivity and interpretation, which is one way to think about what the poststructuralist intellectuals were getting at.
This is a common technique in conceptual analysis. It reminds me of Castelfranchi's theory of trust. While trust was often modeled as a two place relation (X trusts Y) he turned it into a five place relation (X trusts Y for task T useful for goal G in context C).
Thank you so much for the pointer. I had not considered the connection of explicitly accounting for subjectivity in interpretation (for semantics) to (as in your example) the theories of agents and trust.
And I've got to say, really taking this in (the importance of subjectivity and context) can help in real-world situations as well.
I came into CS later than Silicon Valley would like me to have, and so I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition; I can't find the quote now, but I recall Foucault calling Deleuze the first philosopher who was really of this period (the 'information age' or whatever) & he was right.
Knowing your political inclinations, I was wondering: are you familiar with Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" or the more recent stuff on the same subject by Invisible Committee?
> I was already familiar with poststructuralism when I was reading about information theory. Much of it was just a rehash of Difference & Repetition;
Claude Shannon's foundational work was published 20 years before Difference and Repetition. And even if the reverse were true, I don't see how you can make a claim like this when one is a rigorous mathematical treatise, and the other is, frankly, bullshit math.
Ignoring your pithy insult of Deleuze's work (which is not math), I did not mean to imply that Deleuze preceded Shannon but that my understanding of Deleuze's work maps well to my understanding of information theory. It was a rehash _for me_.
Difference and Repetition, specifically, is concerned with absolute bullshit explanations and generalizations of the mathematical concepts of the derivative and integral, so I think it's fair to call it bullshit math.
I would also say that there is a zero percent chance that someone could use what is there to develop a mathematical basis for information theory which could actually be used to do anything useful, like data compression or error correcting codes.
Note that I am not saying philosophy needs to be useful to justify itself. Far from it. I'm just strongly disagreeing with your assertions that Difference and Repetition has any relevance or relation to information theory whatsoever.
The exact quote is "Perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian." Amusingly enough, Deleuze responded that it was "a joke meant to make people who like us laugh, and make everyone else livid."
It mostly makes me smile. :)
> Tiqqun's "the cybernetic hypothesis" ... Invisible Committee
I haven't actually read it, but this is a good reminder to toss it on the list. To be honest, I've been taking a bit of a break from philosophy stuff, in order to focus on shipping Rust. So I'm a bit out of the loop. Can't wait to return, though, I'd like to eventually publish a paper...
> It punched down to a lower level of thought: the idea that our discourse and our notions of truth are themselves constituted and shaped by our society and circumstances.
I know nothing about Foucault, but considering the praise he's getting on this thread, there must be a heck of a lot more to it than this, right?
Well obviously you cannot sum up the work of any thinker in 1 sentence. But Foucault is actually more of an historian than a philosopher & he provides excellent histories of how many notions that we usually hold to be natural or inevitable are circumstantial and were constructed surprisingly recently, and how the construction of these notions corresponds to the activities of power in our society.
Also probably some portion of his work has been itself naturalized and will seem less novel now that we all live in a world where many people have read Foucault.
D&P is good, but I'd suggest as a first read the first volume of the History of Sexuality. It's a more concise introduction to his thought on the role of power in formation of subjectivity, rather than as something that is top-down. I've seen too many beginners in Foucault get wrapped up in notions like the panopticon in D&P and miss more substantial elements of his thought.
I'd also recommend his essays such as "What is Enlightenment?" for beginners (online: http://foucault.info/documents/whatisenlightenment/foucault....). Even though it may require a few reads, it helps to consider his thought in relationship to thinkers like Kant (who heavily influence linguists such as Chomsky, and Chomsky's view of human nature), and perhaps more importantly it indicates the important role that he considers power to have in the formation of knowledge and subjectivity.
Yeah, the History is a very common introduction too. And the first part of D&P can be... distracting, as one of your siblings mentions.
I also think you're right about What is Enlightenment?, which is a favorite too. You're right that it's important to situate him in history, which this does do well. But then requires that you read some Kant...
I also associate Foucault most strongly with Discipline and Punish.
But the reason, I confess, is the simply astonishing first pages of the book. For people who have not read it, I recommend it very highly as an example of forceful writing style: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~felluga/punish.html . (It's not for the squeamish, and not good while eating.)
Aha my private motive in recommending D&P is uncovered. I don't think it is possible to find a more memorable and convincing display of the radical shift in the conception of sovereignty than in the comparison of those two passages.
How does this differ from Karl Popper's Critical Rationalism (or the later variants of Pan Critical Rationalism)? Seems to me that the idea that there are no unquestionable authorities or axioms that can be used to justify truth and everything can be held up to critique is a much saner, and clearer version than some of the gobble-dy-gook in post modernism.
I don't know about Discipline and Punish specifically, but you can read Chomsky for a critique in general of Foucault, Lacan, etc In general I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible. Like I said, Popper's concept of critical rationalism predates Foucault and makes the argument far more straightforward and clearly.
Here's what Chomsky had to say, who can say it far better than I:
"Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.
Again, I've lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called "philosophy" and "science," as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won't spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of "theory" and "philosophy" to justify their claims --- to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn't already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can't be met, then I'd suggest recourse to Hume's advice in similar circumstances: to the flames. "
No one will deny that there are charlatans and poets posing as philosophers in the continental tradition. Tatterdemalion's post even prefaces with that. There are also straight up falsifiers and a endemic of p-value smudgers in the hard sciences. A good rebuttal to this Chomsky quote are the lovely debates he had with Foucault himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8
There is a plethora of writings of substance in the continental tradition. Writings that we should not ignore. 'Discipline and Punish' is one of them. I recommend 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' by Adorno as your complement to Popper's writings.
On another note, I don't generally see the value in antagonisms between paradigms or presentation forms. I find value from the analytical perspective and from critical theory, and being able to dance both dances is illuminating. I don't think the empirical process can reveal the entirety of the human experience. Steadfastly stumping for one paradigm over the other is no more useful than being a vim/emacs zealot.
If Deleuze or Foucault don't grok for you, it doesn't mean the authors are _wrong_ or lying to readers to obtain mystic status. Just like someone not caring to study Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shouldn't write off the entirety of mathematics.
I don't find that a convincing analogy. A more convincing analogy would be something like the theoretical treatise put forward by Shinichi Mochizuki to solve the ABC conjecture. He invented entirely new fields of mathematics so obscure, that no one can really be able to fully evaluate his theory yet, and it resists simple explanation even by experts in the field, or Shinichi himself.
Peer review relies on peers being able to predictably understand the terminology in a clear manner without ambiguity. You get this in traditional Western philosophy, even as people define new terminology, that adorn axioms and logical rules to buttress its meaning. But if you invent an entirely new terminology that most people don't understand, which is hard for any two people to come away with the same meaning, I'd argue you have not put forward a theory, you've put forward ideas dressed up in technical jargon giving the aura of precision.
This isn't a C programmer refusing to learn Haskell. This is a C programmer refusing to learn Brainfuck or INTERCAL.
Yet no one doubts Brainfuck's Turing completeness, and it can be easily demonstrated to anyone with a passing familiarity with the langauge.
The post-structuralists, on the other hand, are trolls. They claim grandiose results that fail Chomsky's simple personal test, and similar personal tests of many others, myself included, who have a demonstrated capacity to understand ideas across many fields, including in my case epistemology with a knowing subject, which comes close to some important post-structuralist or post-modernist ideas regarding subjectivity.
But the "critical theoretic" political program is so important to post-modernist program they they deliberatly distort their accounts and ideas for the sake of goals that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, and results in the whole body of their work being incoherent nonsense with a few gems embedded in it. There are well-meaning people who see the gems and argue passionately that the rest of the mass simply must be meaningful and important, and there are people who correctly observe the incoherence of the mass and miss the gems.
These two groups then spend a great deal of time fighting with each other, while those of us who have picked up the gems and moved on are ignored by all.
But it does render its usefulness or utility lower than a simpler construct which offers all of the same benefits, but with lower logical depth.
I'm not saying Foucault's wrong, I'm saying that there are other philosophers who have put forward similar ideas in a much more straightforward fashion without the Brainfuck.
Holding philosophy to the standard of utility brings a lot of assumptions to bear on your reading. Conciseness is a virtue that one can overindulge.
Many philosophers aren't concerned with providing readers with ideas in the system of efficient exchange of language and labor hours. For many in critical theory the project is the opposite: to show how the systems of exchange and efficiency dominate our meaning-making.
I don't find that argument convincing. Chomsky makes it clear that if he was interested in understanding something, in this case C, he would make an honest effort at finding the people and resources necessary to reach that goal.
Continental philosophy and postmodern thought fall reasonably within the domain of Chomsky's interests. If a man of his knowledge and reputation cannot parse the arguments being made then really what is the utility of those arguments.
It would be one thing if Chomsky was rejecting the arguments being made. Instead he is basically saying there is no argument.
As a side note, there is definitely a trend in certain French academic circles consisting of using a hard-to-digest style (needlessly complex sentence structures, semi-obscure words where a more common one would have been just as good or better) to express not particularly complex. I suspect that they have a running "most over-the-top sentence" [1] contest.
1: technically known in French as "phrase la plus ampoulée", which "over-the-top" doesn't really translate correctly
>I find much of the writing to be obscurantism around simple ideas, or just generally incomprehensible.
bingo. That pretty much describes Kant for me (or may be only Russian translation of him? Will let you know when/if i learn German). Just compare him with simple and practical Hegel or Nietzsche for example! :)
It's just the same in German. Kant maintains that his only aim is to express the subject matter as precise as possible, without regard of accessibility (as stated in the Prolegomena). Personally, I cannot decide whether that claim has merits or not.
Foucault's work is usually focused on trying to discern what things we take as natural, known, and unquestionable are actually constructed claims which can be questioned. I think Discipline & Punish is his most accessible writing; it is a history of judicial systems from the 17th century to the 20th century.
This article is not a great introduction to Foucault, and assumes a familiarity. I do not know why it is on Hacker News except that the author has recently passed.