By MORGAN MEIS [The Smart Set] – Titanic is not only a grave for the men and a few women (the women-and-children-first rule was rather admirably followed in the boarding of the lifeboats) who went down with her; she is a grave for big ideas. Indeed, with the passing of each decade, the scale of Titanic’s alleged hubris is progressively diminished. The outrageous greed and inhumanity that was supposed to have doomed her looks more and more like a series of petty and understandable mistakes. The fact that she went down seems more and more like something that just happened, rather than something that had to happen or that happened as a warning and cautionary tale. It happened. Improbably, incredibly, Titanic sank beneath the waves.

The Austrian philosopher and member of the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath, once came up with a metaphor for human knowledge that is, perhaps, his single greatest contribution to intellectual history. It is a ship metaphor. Thinking about how knowledge works, Neurath proposed, “We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismount it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from the best components.”

It is a great metaphor, partly because it is so easy to envision. There is human kind, adrift on the open sea, busily patching away at the rickety ship even as the next storm approaches. It is heroic and pathetic at the same time. But there is never opportunity for anyone on the boat to get a bird’s eye view. They are always working with the old scraps of wood, an outdated steering system, flotsam and jetsam from all the past sailings.

That’s how Titanic likes it, too. She doesn’t want to be the vehicle for someone else’s big story.

Continued at The Smart Set.

Someone else’s big story, with a bird’s eye view.

By JADA YUAN [New York Magazine] – So, we asked New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. at last night’s benefit for The News Literacy Project, what advice did he have for young people who want to go into journalism these days, you know, given the job market? “Why don’t we not go there?” he laughed. Then he went there anyway. “Um, what I would tell them is the industry is in the midst of a massive transition,” he said. “But the core of the fundamental job is critical. We have to re-create ourselves, but the heart of what we’re going to re-create is still journalism. The way people get information is changing, but the need for information will remain constant.”

He thinks that physical newspapers will stick around as well. “The best analogy I can think of is — have you ever heard of the Titanic Fallacy?” he asked. We hadn’t. “What was the critical flaw to the Titanic?” We tried to answer: Poor construction? Not enough life boats? Crashing into stuff? “A captain trying to set a world speed record through an iceberg field?” he said, shaking his head. “Even if the Titanic came in safely to New York Harbor, it was still doomed,” he said. “Twelve years earlier, two brothers invented the airplane.”

Continued at New York Magazine | More Chronicle & Notices.