Bibliographic record
Abstract
It’s Not About Whales: Moby-Dick and Disinformation Ross Bullen (bio) Sonya larson’s 2017 short story “The Kindest” is not about whales. It is about a kidney donation, although whether it’s about a specific person’s real life kidney donation is a matter of debate and disinformation. In a 5 October 2021 story for the New York Times Magazine titled “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” Robert Kolker detailed the ongoing feud between Larson and another writer, Dawn Dorland, who claimed that Larson lifted details from her life and plagiarized portions of a letter, published on a private Facebook group, about Dorland’s experience as an anonymous kidney donor. In “The Kindest,” a Dorland-like character named Rose Rothario (originally Dawn Rothario) sends a letter to the story’s narrator, a Chinese American woman named Chuntao, who was the anonymous recipient of one of her kidneys. Larson, who is Asian American, depicts Rose Rothario as a cringe white saviour figure, who wants to meet Chuntao in order to extract emotional labour from her in the form of gratitude. Exactly how much of Larson’s story is lifted from Dorland’s experience as an altruistic kidney donor, including the letter she posted on Facebook, has become a matter of both legal and popular debate (indeed, literary Twitter debated little else in the days after Kolker’s story went online). For her part, Larson has tried to distance herself from Dorland’s story and claims that “The Kindest” isn’t really about a kidney donation at all. [End Page 7] Rather, in Larson’s view, the story is primarily about the racially charged power dynamic between Rose Rothario and Chuntao. In “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?,” Kolker writes, “When Larson discusses ‘The Kindest’ now, the idea that it’s about a kidney donation at all seems almost irrelevant. If that hadn’t formed the story’s pretext, she believes, it would have been something else. ‘It’s like saying that “Moby-Dick” is a book about whales,’ she said.” I think most readers know what Larson means: while on a literal level Moby-Dick is about a whaling voyage, on a literary level it’s about a host of Big Literary Themes like good versus evil, humanity versus nature, Ahab’s monomania versus Starbuck’s level-headed pragmatism, and so on. Along the same lines, Larson implies that “The Kindest” could have featured similar characters and themes while using a completely different “pretext” for bringing the characters together. Focusing on the kidney donation is “irrelevant” because, Larson suggests, that’s not what the story is actually about. What interests me about Larson’s comparison of her story with Moby-Dick is how it affirms that Melville’s novel has become, in the popular imagination, the example par excellence of a literary text whose ostensible subject matter must be set aside in order to discern what it is “really about.” Larson is hardly alone in her disavowal of whales in Moby-Dick. Allow me to cite another recent example from the Netflix show glow. In the penultimate episode of season 3, “The Libertines,” Ruth—an aspiring actress and the main heel of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling show—auditions for a Hollywood movie. The character she is reading for is a straight-shooting high school English teacher who delivers an impassioned speech to a student, Julie, who says that her problem isn’t that she doesn’t care about her grade. It’s just that she doesn’t care about whales: “Moby-Dick is not about whales, Julie. It’s about passion. Obsession. Finding the one thing that cuts through all the crap, that keeps on driving you, no matter what. And if you can find the thing you care about as much as Herman Melville cares about whale semen, then maybe you won’t totally fuck up your life.” Despite the writers of glow confusing spermaceti, the waxy liquid extracted from the heads of sperm whales, with whale semen, Ruth’s monologue does highlight the fact that, setting aside whatever else he might have been interested in, Herman Melville was really, really into whales. When he was...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".