Stanford University Press Blog

On Leadership and Contribution

John Hennessy’s ongoing lessons in leading people as service, and shaping the future.

by STEVE CATALANO

 

On March 21^st, 2018 it was announced that former Stanford President John Hennessy was to be the recipient, along with David Patterson, of the A.M. Turing Award. This is “the most prestigious technical award, given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.” Their work at MIPS Computer Systems in the development of microprocessors that operate at a faster speed while using less energy was certainly transformational in the field. While the technology itself that resulted is ubiquitous—its form appears in almost all smartphones, tablets, and computers today—it is the development process that is of even greater note. John and David pioneered a quantitative approach to design and evaluation that provided repeatable principles for computer architecture. This methodology is now used by generations of engineers and scientists.

By sheer coincidence, March 21 happened to be the day I met John. Stanford University Press had just signed his new book, Leading Matters: Lessons from My Journey, and SUP Director Alan Harvey and I were meeting him for lunch to discuss the book. Before we even sat down, his colleagues at the Faculty Club were congratulating him; we thought it was because he had just been named Chairman of Alphabet (the parent company of Google). He quietly mentioned that it was announced that day that he’d just received the Turing Award for 2018.

Bedeviled by Neoliberalism

Adam Kotsko, author of The Prince of This World, on why we are less free than we think we are.

By ADAM KOTSKO

Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic Party's nomination for President, July 28, 2016. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Ever since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, neoliberalism has been an object of increasing debate and critique. Since the late 1970s, neoliberalism has reshaped public policy and arguably every area of life on the model of market competition, which it presents as the most authentic expression of human freedom. But the term itself has largely been the province of academic analysts, and it was arguably only in the wake of the contentious Democratic presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders that it entered the mainstream political lexicon. Still, the debate over neoliberalism has in many ways been a missed encounter. On the one hand, left-wing critics of neoliberalism have used the term, with varying degrees of precision, to characterize everything that is wrong and unjust in the political-economic system. On the other hand, mainstream liberals, far from defending neoliberalism, insist that it simply does not exist. We are faced with a bizarre situation wherein the ruling ideology of our age is either viewed as destructive or completely disavowed.

            This strange phenomenon points to the core question that drove my research in Neoliberalism’s Demons: if everyone either hates neoliberalism or denies that it exists, then why do people go along with it? I presuppose that the neoliberal order has been dominant for at least a generation (roughly since Thatcher and Reagan) and that it has had the destructive effects that its critics attribute to it—of which the Global Financial Crisis is only the most spectacular example—and ask how such a system could be regarded as legitimate and binding upon populations that have for the most part grown more materially insecure and politically disempowered under its sway.

A Reflection on Necessary Resistance

A letter from James M. Omura to Professor Roger Daniels, April 12, 1983

By JAMES MATSUMOTO OMURA, Edited by ARTHUR A. HANSEN

Ronald Reagan signing Japanese reparations bill on August 10, 1988. Public domain photo via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 we present an excerpt from our forthcoming book Nisei Naysayer: The Memoir of Militant Japanese American Journalist Jimmie Omura. The Civil Liberties Act granted long overdue amends to Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated by the U.S. government in WWII. Omura, a vehement and dauntless opponent of the incarceration, was among the first to seek governmental redress and reparations for wartime violations of civil liberties and human rights. This excerpt, a letter from James M. Omura to the historian Roger Daniels, exemplifies both his conviction and his commitment to justice.

 

Dear Prof. Daniels:

I did not return to Denver until evening of March 26th, having been routed to Seattle for a two-day meeting on request and remaining a full week for additional research.

Now that I have caught up with the most pressing portion of three weeks of neglected mail and have put my annual tax duties to bed, I shall endeavor to respond to the question you posed.

It would seem to me that the appearance I made before the Tolan Committee in San Francisco in 1942 has received greater recognition than it ordinarily should deserve. Of course, it cannot be said that I am not flattered by the attention it has received in the literature of the Evacuation. I thought then and I believe today that this was a monumental tragedy that was unnecessary to the security of the Pacific Coast and the action violated our fundamental concepts of constitutional government.

Raising Global Families across the Pacific

Parenting anxieties abound for Asian immigrants at the intersection of cultural transformation and persistent inequality.

by PEI-CHIA LAN

Photo by Jerry Lin.

Immigrant parents embrace the American dream that their children can achieve a brighter future in the promised land. Asian immigrants, however, feel increasingly anxious about the fierce competition of college admission shadowed by the dubious existence of “Asian quota.” Recently, a dozen rejected Asian American applicants sued Harvard for discrimination against Asian Americans by penalizing their higher achievement as a group. According to court documents, Harvard consistently rated Asian applicants lower than other races on traits like likability and kindness. The debates around the lawsuit reveal widely shared stereotypes that associate Asian families with tiger parenting and exam-obsessed culture.

My new book, Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration, and Class in Taiwan and the US, dispels the myth of tiger mom by revealing divergent childrearing practices among ethnic Chinese families across the social class spectrum and geographic locations. I interviewed over a hundred parents in Taiwan and the US, including middle-class and working-class Taiwanese, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston Area. This unique research illuminates that ethnic culture is neither static nor uniform but rather is constantly shifting across borders. Each group of parents faced context-specific predicaments and employed class-specific strategies to cope with uncertainties and insecurities in the changing society and globalized world.

Immigrants Make America Great

Immigrants and native-born citizens equally benefit or suffer from a nation's policies.

By ERNESTO CASTAÑEDA

Photo by Ernesto Castañeda

In another instance of anti-immigrant rhetoric, John Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, stated that while not all immigrants are criminals, many immigrants have a hard time assimilating into American society:

[T]he vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They're not criminals. They're not MS-13. ... But they're also not people that would easily assimilate into the United States, into our modern society. They're overwhelmingly rural people. In the countries they come from, fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade educations are kind of the norm. They don't speak English; obviously that's a big thing. ... They don't integrate well; they don't have skills. They're not bad people. They're coming here for a reason. And I sympathize with the reason. But the laws are the laws. ... The big point is they elected to come illegally into the United States, and this is a technique that no one hopes will be used extensively or for very long (NPR, May 10, 2018).

These types of statements have been commonplace since the 1990’s anti-immigrant ideological campaigns and policies such as California’s Proposition 187, barring undocumented immigrants from receiving social services and rights. There are also historical precedents for these types of arguments being directed to German, Swedish, Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. Today as well as in the past, these arguments are less about facts and more about xenophobia and racial superiority complexes.

The administration of “illegality”

“Illegal” immigrants are universally demonized, but it is exclusionary immigration laws that produce “illegality.”

By ANNA TUCKETT

Matteo Salvini, 2018. Photo by Presidenza della Repubblica, via Wikimedia Commons.

Illiberal immigration policies and the xenophobic rhetoric that accompanies them are on the rise in the Western world. In Trump’s America, children are being prised away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border, making even the President’s Republican colleagues express discomfort. In the U.K., the unlawful detention and deportation of British-Caribbean citizens – the so-called “Windrush scandal” – has revealed the deeply pernicious consequences of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy for migrants. In mainland Europe, meanwhile, the anti-immigrant nationalist leader Victor Orban achieved a resounding victory in the Hungarian national election in April, while in Italy the formation of a new coalition government has catapulted the anti-immigrant Lega (League) party into the heart of political power. The appointment of Matteo Salvini, the Lega’s leader, as Interior Minister means that a far-right politician is now in charge of Italy’s border control, its policing, and its immigration policy. This has rightly caused alarm: during the recent election campaign, Salvini pledged to deport hundreds of thousands of “illegal” migrants should his party win, and this rhetoric has continued following the Lega’s positive election results. Just weeks after coming into office, the newly appointed minister left 629 migrants stranded when he refused to allow a rescue ship to dock in Italy.

Politicians such as Salvini and Trump revel in whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment with a dramatic focus on the supposed threats to nation-states’ borders, but as my book Rules, Paper, Status shows, they consistently overlook a crucial part of the immigration picture: “illegal” immigration is actually produced inside borders through the implementation of harsh and exclusionary policies that create the very categories which parties like the Lega then rail against. As migration scholars have consistently pointed out, “illegal” immigrants are not merely comprised of those who arrive on the rickety boats that cross the Mediterranean. In fact, the number of migrants who attempt to arrive in Europe “clandestinely” makes up only a tiny fraction of the continent’s migrant population. Many more arrive “legally” on some kind of visa for tourism, work, study, or family purposes.

Is Kanye West an Uncle Tom?

The Complicated Origins of a Racial Slur.

By ADENA SPINGARN

Scene from an early twentieth-century stage production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Kanye West’s splashy recent political turn to the right—posing in a “Make America Great Again” hat, then defending that action and claiming that 400 years of slavery must have been a “choice”—disappointed many of his friends and fans. Some, like musician John Legend, gently urged West to rethink his political support of a president who has emboldened white supremacists. Others, including rapper Snoop Dogg and English former footballer Stan Collymore, have publicly castigated him as an Uncle Tom who has used his fame and power to promote people and ideologies that hurt the black community.

Calling someone an Uncle Tom is perhaps the ultimate black-on-black insult, but the reference originated with a character very different from the conniving race traitor it invokes today. In Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Uncle Tom is a heroic martyr, humble before God but confident in himself and the rightness of his moral convictions. When the brutal slave owner Simon Legree commands Tom to whip an enslaved woman, Tom knows that he will be beaten if he refuses to do so, but he declines anyway, insisting that whipping the woman would not be right. Later, in a chapter entitled “The Martyr,” Legree commands Tom to reveal the whereabouts of two recently escaped slaves. Tom knows their escape plan, but he once again refuses. This time, his punishment is being beaten to death. 

SCIENCE FAKE AND REAL

On Enlightenment scientists and the forgotten role of imagination.

by TITA CHICO

March for Science in San Francisco. Photo by Steve Rapport, CCBY2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Headlines today pop with accusations that traditional sources of knowledge and even experts are biased, ideological, and unreliable. Accusations of “fake science” have become particularly commonplace. The Heritage Foundation think tank reports on the pervasiveness of fake science, laying the blame on scientists themselves. In their view, climate change isn’t caused by humans, and scientists are mere lackeys for a liberal political agenda. In response, practicing scientists and advocates have responded vociferously: the 2017 earth Day “March for Science” took place not only in Washington DC, but in more than 600 cities worldwide. The Union of Concerned Scientists has reached out through panels, such as the one on “Defending Science and Scientific Integrity ” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual conference.

As long as there has been modern science, there have been hoaxes. In 1726, Mary Toft, an illiterate English servant in Surrey, claimed to have given birth to dead animal parts and scores of rabbits, a wonder made all the more persuasive by the authorization of the royal anatomist, Nathaniel St. André. She was brought to London and revealed as a fraud. A year earlier, the physician Johann Beringer, Chair of Natural History at the University of Würzburg and chief physician to the city’s Prince Bishop, was duped into believing that 2000 pieces of limestone in the shape of animals, some engraved with the name of God, were fossils or were of divine origin fossils. They were really the prank of a jealous colleague.

The New Primitives

Ben Etherington, author of Literary Primitivism, on the historical and contemporary notions of primitivism. Excerpt courtesy of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

by BEN ETHERINGTON

 

George Catlin by William Fisk, 1849.

The idea for the Na’vi, the made-up humanoid species indigenous to the planet Pandora in James Cameron’s 2009 primitivist blockbuster Avatar, came to the director via his mother. In the 1970s, she told her son about a dream of a 12-foot blue woman, and this formed the basis for the brief he would deliver to his designers 30 years later. The Na’vi were to be blue, tall, muscular, sleek, and feline. They had to be alien enough to be plausibly otherworldly, but take a form, the concept artist Jordu Schell recalled Cameron stipulating, that “the audience has to want to fuck.” Among other things, this meant that the film’s female Na’vi lead, Neytiri, had “to have tits” even though, Cameron freely admitted to Playboy, the Na’vi are not placental mammals. As he developed prototypes, Schell pinned up pictures of “beautiful ethnic women” to ensure that his feline aliens would reflect the ids of the teenage boys who made up the film’s key demographics.

The plot of the film follows the tested formula of primitivist transformation. A man of civilization, in this case the paraplegic US marine Jake Sully, is sent to colonize the primitive lands beyond civilization’s perimeter only himself to “go primitive” after learning of their innocent beauty and recognizing the barbarism of his own destructive civilization. It’s a structure that underlies other blockbusters like Dances with Wolves, its sci-fi equivalents, and numerous journey-into-the-interior classics (especially the work of Joseph Conrad). Eros is built into this formula. Coition marks the point at which the civilized man gives himself over to the primitive tribe and discovers, or recovers, his primitive self. Primitivist utopias, in short, are fuckable utopias.

The Book of Radiance

An old Jew reflects on what the Zohar illuminates about the nature of the Jewish tradition.

by RABBI YEHIEL E. POUPKO

Photo by Kalie Caetano.

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

Until the Zohar was written down, or emerged and erupted, or was composed, sometime in the late-thirteenth to early-fourteenth century, a Mitzvah, a Commandment, was just that: It was God’s instruction. If anyone wanted to know why the Jews obeyed the Mitzvot, or if anyone were curious as to the purpose of the Commandments, the answer was very simple: The purpose is to obey God. The reason why the Commandments are obeyed, followed, and observed is because God commanded them. Thou shalt not steal…; Remember the Sabbath Day…; Do not eat everything available out there…; and on, and on, and on. Any time a Jewish person asked that question from the first century onward (and even earlier), the given answer was the same. The reason for the Commandments is that God has commanded them.

Yet the Zohar changed the answer to that question in a fundamental way. One obeys the Mitzvot. One fulfills the Commandments. One integrates the Mitzvot-Commandments into one’s life not only because God commanded it but because the Mitzvot have far-reaching cosmic power. They can in fact have an effect, as if one can imagine it or even say it, on God’s very Self.

A New-Ancient Zohar

On translating the Zohar’s poetic and unruly Aramaic, while staying true to the text’s original ambiguity.

by DANIEL C. MATT

 

 The Zohar Collector's Set

In 2002, Stanford University Press embarked on the ambitious initiative of publishing a 12-volume translation of the foundational work of Jewish mysticism, The Zohar. This monumental, 20-year translation project, generously underwritten by Margot Pritzker, was undertaken by Daniel Matt with assistance on the final three volumes from Nathan Wolski and Joel Hecker. I am honored to have supervised this program at the Press from the beginning, and have had the sincere pleasure of working with both Daniel Matt and Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, who has overseen and managed the work on behalf of the Zohar Education Project, Inc (ZEPI). In two companion blog posts, Daniel Matt and Rabbi Poupko reflect on their experiences. While the translation was completed in 2016, and the final volume was published in 2017, SUP will continue to develop the work and help it to reach new audiences. The beautiful, limited run Collector's Edition was released at the end of 2017, and we plan to release ebook editions of all twelve volumes in the summer of 2018, while at the same time re-releasing native HTML editions of the Aramaic source texts. Watch out for future new works on the Zohar web page.

—Alan Harvey, Director, Stanford University Press

It has been an adventure to spend eighteen years translating the Zohar. This mystical commentary on the Torah is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah, but also a gem of world literature that has remained mostly hidden ever since it was composed in Spain in the thirteenth century.

When the project was first proposed to me, back in 1995, I was simultaneously thrilled and frightened. How could I hope to complete such a vast undertaking, translating and explicating some 1,600 pages of dense, intentionally cryptic Aramaic? Yet, how could I turn down this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? After thinking about it for a couple of weeks, and then a couple of months, I decided to try it before committing myself to the project; but this experiment drained me so much that I decided to decline the offer, amazing though it was. Then, however, I met Margot Pritzker, who had first proposed the idea to me. She said that she understood my hesitation, and then she asked how long such a project might take. “Twelve to fifteen years,” I replied, to which she responded simply, “You’re not scaring me.” When I heard that, something inside of me flipped. Maybe it was that I heard her words as a challenge: “I’m not scared. Why are you?” In any case, in that moment I changed my mind and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

The Zohar is not only the masterpiece of Kabbalah but also a gem of world literature.

Contested Foundations

How 20th-century debates reveal enduring tensions at the core of the human rights project.

by MARK GOODALE

Excerpt from a letter from W.H. Auden to Julian Huxley.

In 1947 and 1948, the bold and controversial first Director-General of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Julian Huxley, together with Jacques Havet, the young first head of UNESCO’s philosophy sub-section, took steps that were intended to shape the conceptual framework of what became the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. During these years, UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based. This process—which involved soliciting opinions on the question of human rights by notables such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Gandhi—took place independently of the much more public one that unfolded somewhat later under the auspices of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights (CHR), which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt.

UNESCO put in motion an extraordinary process that was meant to reveal a cross-cultural consensus on the basic philosophical and ethical principles upon which a new global social contract should be based.

The work of UNESCO on human rights during this period, the debates surrounding its conflicts with the CHR, the specific results of the cross-cultural survey it undertook, and the broader implications of this survey for the meanings and legitimacy of human rights, were all lost to a history that was dominated by the geopolitical logics of the Cold War. Nevertheless, new research has revisited the UNESCO human rights survey in light of ongoing debates over what a recent volume by Hopgood, Snyder, and Vinjamuri has described as “human rights futures”: the possibilities for and limitations to human rights among the contemporary disorder and violence that Samuel Moyn calls the “neoliberal maelstrom.”

Why Cavemen Needed No Braces

Crooked teeth are a modern phenomenon and a telltale sign of an underlying epidemic.

by SANDRA KAHN and PAUL R. EHRLICH

A 1,000-year-old skull of a Philistine woman excavated in Israel reveals how pre-industrial people did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent we do today. Photo by Jim Hollander/EPA.

Modern industrialized societies are plagued by crowded, ill-aligned teeth, a condition that the dental profession refers to as “malocclusion”—which translates literally to “bad bite.” Survey data from 1998 suggests that as much as a fifth of the U.S. population has significant malocclusion, over half of which require at least some degree of orthodontic intervention. Braces, tooth extractions, and retainers are the bread and butter for all the dentists and orthodontists tasked with setting straight our dental deviations. Having braces as a child has become so common in the Western world that it can seem a rite of passage—today, an estimated 50 to 70 percent of U.S. children will wear braces before adulthood. But what did humans do to fix their teeth before modern dentistry, before Novocain, gauze, and rubber spacers?

As it turns out, our ancestors did not suffer from crooked teeth to the same extent that we do today. Our species’ fossil record reveals a telling story: the epidemic of crooked teeth developed in humans over time. Evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman, notes the pattern in his book, The Story of the Human Body:

The museum I work in has thousands of ancient skulls from all over the world. Most of the skulls from the last few hundred years are a dentist’s nightmare: they are filled with cavities and infections, the teeth are crowded into the jaw, and about one-quarter of them have impacted teeth. The skulls of preindustrial farmers are also riddled with cavities and painful-looking abscesses, but less than 5 percent of them have impacted wisdom teeth. In contrast, most of the hunter-gatherers had nearly perfect dental health. Apparently, orthodontists and dentists were rarely necessary in the Stone Age.

Ample evidence abounds in support of Lieberman’s observations. A comparison of 146 medieval skulls from abandoned Norwegian graveyards with modern skulls indicated a trend toward bad bite in our more recent forebears. The skulls of people scored as being in “great” or “obvious” need of orthodontic treatment made up 36 percent of the medieval sample and 65 percent of the modern sample. And evidence of malocclusion in still earlier human fossils is vanishingly rare. The jaws of hunter-gatherers nearly uniformly reveal roomy, perfect arches of well aligned teeth, with no impacted wisdom teeth—a movie star’s dream smile, 15,000 years before the movies!

Plastic Pollution and Poetry

How American poets contend with the downstream consequences of today’s ecological crises.

by MARGARET RONDA

CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Earlier this week, the world marked Earth Day, the theme of which was plastic pollution. Environmental organizers around the globe are calling for increased awareness of plastic consumption and its protracted environmental effects, and hope to achieve a dramatic reduction in plastic pollution by Earth Day 2020. Contemporary poets, too, have been calling attention to the impacts of plastic on ecosystems and biospheric processes in their writings. In “The Age of Plastic,” a piece published in a recent anthology on the poetry of climate change, Chamorro eco-poet Craig Santos Perez catalogs the innumerable ways plastics are embedded in contemporary life. Found in household goods and medical products, technological, military, and transportation networks, bodily interiors and industrial processes, this synthetic material plays an enabling role in virtually all spheres of human activity. Perez highlights some of its beneficial, life-sustaining applications:

plastic keeps food fresh—
delivers medication and clean water—
forms cable and clothes—
ropes and nets—even
stops bullets—
“plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies”—

In other sections, Perez explores how plastics facilitate the prenatal development, birth, and newborn care of his infant daughter, pointing to the birth tub in which his wife labors, the Ziploc bag holding the placenta, the plastic nipple that feeds his baby milk. Drawing together this personal description of plastic’s role in his own family’s reproductive dynamics with the larger imbrications of plastic in everyday existence, Perez portrays plastic as an intimate container for and enabler of bodily experience. He wryly contrasts this synthetic substance against the delicate, vulnerable bodies of new baby and mother, calling attention to the uncanny endurance of the “perfect creation” of plastic.

The rise of plastics and their deleterious ecological effects is one key story of the Great Acceleration.

The Creator’s Journey

The creative process is about much more than the “aha!” moment.

by MATTHEW A. CRONIN

Public domain via Pixnio.

If there is a part of the creative process that captures people’s imagination, it is the moment of inspiration. Stories of creativity via a sudden spark of inspiration abound; I am sure you, dear reader, can think of some as you are reading this. These stories trace the emergence of some fabulous invention or discovery back to a single fundamental insight—some breakthrough idea that grows out of a serendipitous, revelatory moment that others could not imagine. Not to be a killjoy (for we so love these stories), but it turns out that this fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality. But on the positive side, there is a better alternative—one that may be more useful if you actually want to take the creator’s journey.

Kepler—a case study in creativity

An example that illustrates the journey, and how it can be overlooked, was astronomer Johannes Kepler’s seventeenth-century “insight” about planetary motion. At the time, the universe was all about circles, which were both perfect and heavenly. Orbital paths were modeled as “circles-within-circles.” Once Kepler had had his say, however, he had literally changed the universe, or at least how people saw it. His insight could be summed up in a single idea: planets moved in elliptical orbits at a varying speed, not in circular orbits at a constant speed. But while Kepler’s journey may have ended at an idea, it did not start there.

The fabled “aha!” moment is more reality TV than reality.