In Case You Missed It: Tibet Special, Part 3–Comments by Pico Iyer and Pankaj Mishra
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Continuing our series seeking to draw attention to overlooked readings on Tibet, we are happy to be able to provide comments by two long-time friends of the blog, Pico Iyer and Pankaj Mishra, talented and versatile writers whose most recent books are The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, respectively. It seemed particularly appropriate to ask Iyer and Mishra to suggest articles or books that they have found useful in thinking about Tibet but which might be under the radar of many of our readers. This is because six months ago, when we were covering the unrest in Tibet, we put up links to things that each of them had written for newspapers or magazines. We also pointed our readers to the latter’s New Yorker review of the former’s latest book. Iyer: Read John Avedon’s In Exile from the Land of Snows, already a quarter of a century old and, as a result, fresher, more full of wonder and outrage, with better access to the principal players than any subsequent book on Tibet and its recent history. Then, as a postscript, turn to The Story of Tibet, by Thomas Laird, from 2006, to see not just the larger frame into which Tibet’s recent history has to be put, but, more important, the way in which the world’s most celebrated living Tibetan would read that history, as parable, warning and instruction. Tibet, more than anywhere, is enfolded in myths, Western projections and wishful fantasies. The only books to read on the subject are the ones that take you deeper and more rigorously into real life. Mishra: Thanks to the wonderfully comprehensive China Beat site, I can’t think of any undernoticed book or article on China and Tibet in recent months.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.007 |
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".