Links 12 December 2025

Oviraptor fossil from North Dakota, recently auctioned at Christie's

Two more chapters of The Voice from the Darkness are up at Royal Road.

Scott Siskind on the "vibecession": why do people feel so poor when economists insist we are richer than ever?

Claire Lehmann demolishes the argument that public hangings deter crime; historical evidence shows that all forms of violence track each other, so cultures that revel in brutal punishments will have more violent crime.

Joel Mokyr's Nobel Prize lecture, on what led to technological innovation in the past and whether those conditions still exist. He says they do, so innovation will continue. He identifies conflict between nations and populism as the two biggest threats to future growth. All three prize speeches are at the link but Mokyr's is the first 30 minutes.

Major ceremonial site of the Neolithic to Bronze Age discovered near Dijon in France. In French, but Google translate is good at French.

Major French study finds (like all other major studies) that the Covid vaccine greatly reduced mortality during the pandemic.

Politico: "How Chiropractors Became the Backbone of MAHA"

Ozy Brennan: "Sometimes you have a problem, and you observe that other people don’t have this problem. The natural conclusion is that they have some kind of special skill or technique that they used to solve the problem. But, in reality, often people aren’t better than you at solving problems. They just never had the problem in the first place." Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post.

The Victorian Cult of Mourning, 13-minute video from the Victoria & Albert.

Reddit occasionally sends me links to popular posts, and the latest was titled "Should we be worried about this too?"  I didn't click on it; no subject matter could make it a more perfect summation of the current mood.

Fascinating analysis of how Nick Fuentes was algorithmically boosted on Twitter/X, possibly by foreign actors. (Twitter/X)

A claim that ads created entirely by AI get 19% more clicks than ads created by human ad designers or humans using AI assistance.

Interesting interview with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who wants to use ranked choice voting to end gerrymandering. In theory, sure, but how many Marylanders could even name eight people in Congress? How can you expect them to pick eight candidates? And what about states with dozens of representatives? I suppose you can set up multi-member districts, but we have some of those in Maryland (for the state senate) and that seems to allow even more creative gerrymandering.

Rubio makes a true conservative move, announces that the State Department is returning to Times New Roman after the Biden administration's woke experiment with a sans serif font. (NY Times)

Tyler Cowen attacks Australia's new law limiting the access of under-16s to many internet sites, including YouTube.

On the subject of writers knowing things, interesting obsevation about Joseph Conrad, who had read "every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians' memoirs." Via Tyler Cowen.

Fabulous summary of an episode of Candace Owens' podcast. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith, Europe is Under Siege, with thoughts on why MAGA has no interest in defending Europe as it is.

Cremieux on Japanese birth rates: "In the future, you'll have to explain to your kids that anime was an art form made by an extinct race of serene beings that excelled at art and manufacturing and always took pride in their work. And then they just decided to disappear."

A note that one of the biggest AI conferences has for 25 years offered both a Best Paper Award and a Test of Time Award for work that still looks great ten years later. There is zero overlap between the two categories. (Twitter/X) Predicting the future is hard.

Clamart is another Parisian suburb the has been redeveloped according to new urbanist principles, lovely and dense at the same time. (Twitter/X, article) The mottos is, "dare to ask people what they want." (You will find that it is NOT modernism.)

The moon in medieval art and thought.

Interview with a guy who wants a public social media platform so this important space isn't all controlled by corporations. Seems to me he just wants to be the one who decides what can be posted.

British archaeologists claim that their 400,000-year-old evidence of humans making fire is the oldest in the world. Maybe, but there is still a raging debate over whether Home erectus controlled fire a million years ago.

The Russian MOD is claiming a successful attack by ground drones on a Ukrainian position. (Twitter/X) And from the Ukrainian side, what they claim is the first case of one of their ground drones destroying a Russian armored vehicle.

Thought from Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's top drone units: "The essential skill in this war is camouflage. You must be able to hide everything: bunkers, equipment, and exposed parts of your body. You need to be highly proficient if you want to survive." The same unit says they are killing 100 Russians a day.

Video of a Russian motorcyclist who got stuck in the tangle of fiber optic drone cables near the front.

Matt Yglesias on the (Non) Purpose of Higher Education

Matt Yglesias nails the problem with the public debate over American universities: we don't know what they're for. When we fight about, say, police forces, we at least agree on what a police force is for: to promote a safe and orderly community. We still fight about them, but at least those fights are anchored in a common view of what we're trying to achieve.

Many of our debates about academia go nowhere because we have no such agreement on what universities are supposed to accomplish. In particular, we do not know what a university education should be. Here Yglesias responds to the Atlantic article I linked last week on the soaring number of students with "disabilities":

Maya Sen from the Kennedy School, who I generally think has good takes, reacted to this story by saying that abuse of accommodations is “far from a pressing national policy problem.” And I can see where she’s coming from there. But I think it’s just one manifestation of something that really is a pressing national policy problem, which is that the stakeholders in the American higher-education system can’t really articulate what it is they’re trying to do. So as various controversies pop up — about disability accommodations or viewpoint discrimination or admissions — there’s not a coherent response because there are no guiding principles to refer back to.

This lack of any sense of mission explains why so many education debates are empty. Yglesias:

As another example, I’ve seen a lot of conservatives crowing about the success of Southern universities in attracting more students away from the Northeast because the “frats and football” package has obviously more right-wing vibes than the Ivy League.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But the underlying dynamic here of schools competing for students on the basis of catering to teenagers’ whims actually just replicates a lot of stuff that conservatives claim not to like about higher education. Are these schools going to crack down on grade inflation? Make kids study worthwhile stuff instead of puppetry? The University of Alabama lazy river and water slide seem fun, but are they a good use of our student loan dollars?

Another good example concerns "grade inflation." If universities just exist to help people get jobs, and good grades help them get jobs, why not give everyone doing the basic work an A? If you think an A should be a signal of some kind of excellence, why do you think that? And what purpose does it serve? I have never personally given an A to a student I didn't think deserved it, but I would be hard-pressed to articulate a coherent defense of my policy. I just think that's how things should be.

There is no reason why universities can't pursue several goals at once: preparing students for careers, helping the most ambitious expand their minds, supporting research, providing a safe place for young people to mature. But the lack of any vision of what "education" means leaves universities adrift on the currents of culture and politics, vulnerable to every sort of political attack from either the right or the left.

AI and Political Persuasion

Abstract of a new article in Science:

Many fear that we are on the precipice of unprecedented manipulation by large language models (LLMs), but techniques driving their persuasiveness are poorly understood. In the initial “pretrained” phase, LLMs may exhibit flawed reasoning. Their power unlocks during vital “posttraining,” when developers refine pretrained LLMs to sharpen their reasoning and align with users’ needs. Posttraining also enables LLMs to maintain logical, sophisticated conversations. Hackenburg et al. examined which techniques made diverse, conversational LLMs most persuasive across 707 British political issues (see the Perspective by Argyle). LLMs were most persuasive after posttraining, especially when prompted to use facts and evidence (information) to argue. However, information-dense LLMs produced the most inaccurate claims, raising concerns about the spread of misinformation during rollouts.

This seems alarming but also promising. If people are willing to be persuaded by AI, and AI works best by loading its arguments with factual claims, that's awesome, but only if the facts are real facts. If we could force LLMs to be honest, this might be great for the world.

Sam Kriss on AI Writing

Wonderful essay at the NY Times. Excerpts:

I remember encountering a particularly telling example [of overfitting] shortly after ChatGPT launched. One of the tasks I gave the machine was to write a screenplay for a classic episode of “The Simpsons.” I wanted to see if it could be funny; it could not. (Still can’t.) So I specified: I wanted an extremely funny episode of “The Simpsons,” with lots of jokes. It did not deliver jokes. Instead, its screenplay consisted of the Simpsons tickling one another. First Homer tickles Bart, and Bart laughs, and then Bart tickles Lisa, and Lisa laughs, and then Lisa tickles Marge.

It’s not hard to work out what probably happened here. Somewhere in its web of associations, the machine had made a connection: Jokes are what make people laugh, tickling makes people laugh, therefore talking about tickling is the equivalent of telling a joke. That was an early model; they don’t do this anymore. But the same basic structure governs essentially everything they write.

On AI word choice:

A.I.s do not have the same vocabulary as humans. There are words they use a lot more than we do. If you ask any A.I. to write a science-fiction story for you, it has an uncanny habit of naming the protagonist Elara Voss. Male characters are, more often than not, called Kael. There are now hundreds of self-published books on Amazon featuring Elara Voss or Elena Voss; before 2023, there was not a single one. What most people have noticed, though, is “delve.”

A.I.s really do like the verb “delve.” This one is mathematically measurable: Researchers have looked at which words started appearing more frequently in abstracts on PubMed, a database of papers in the biomedical sciences, ever since we turned over a good chunk of all writing to the machines.  . . .  According to the data, post-ChatGPT papers lean more on words like “underscore,” “highlight” and “showcase” than pre-ChatGPT papers do. There have been multiple studies like this, and they’ve found that A.I.s like gesturing at complexity (“intricate” and “tapestry” have surged since 2022), as well as precision and speed: “swift,” “meticulous,” “adept.” But “delve” — in particular the conjugation “delves” — is an extreme case. In 2022, the word appeared in roughly one in every 10,000 abstracts collected in PubMed. By 2024, usage had shot up by 2,700 percent.

Amazing. I suppose I am the odd human here, because I like to write. I would never use an AI to write for me, because for me choosing my own words is the point.

But it certainly is fascinating that without anybody intending it ChatBots have all ended up sharing the same tics and word choices.

Social Media, Big Tobacco, Freedom, and Happiness

The latest wave of attacks on social media have come in the form of comparing it to tobacco addiction and recommending the same remedy: making it much more expensive.

This is Utah governor Spencer Cox, speaking to Ezra Klein:

The social graphs that they use, which know us better than we know ourselves, that allow us, as you so eloquently stated and better than I could, to understand what makes us emotional and what keeps our eyeballs on there — so that when a kid is somehow, even if they don’t want to be, on TikTok at 3 a.m., just going from video to video, and they’ve given up their free will — that is unbelievably dangerous.

When tobacco companies addicted us, we figured out a way out of that. When opioid companies did that to us — we’re figuring our way out of that. And I’m just here to say that I believe these tech companies, with trillion-dollar market caps combined, are doing the same thing — the same thing that tobacco companies did, the same thing that the opioid companies did. And I think we have a moral responsibility to stand up, to hold them accountable and to take back our free will.

Klein himself has been saying that the next really popular presidential candidate may be somebody who takes on the social media companies:

And I think that, at some point, you are going to see a candidate come up who is going to weaponize this feeling. They are going to run not against Facebook or Meta as a big company that needs to be broken up. They’re going to run against all of it — that society and modernity and politics shouldn’t feel like this.

And some of that will be banning phones in schools. It’ll have a dimension that is policy. But some of it is going to be absolutely radiating a disgust for what it is doing to us and to ourselves. I mean, your book has a lot of this in it. I think that political space is weirdly open, but it seems very clear to me somebody is going to grab it.

Massachusetts Congressman Jake Auchincloss has been talking about introducing some kind of social media "sin tax."

I am of two minds about this.

I do agree that in some sense social media is a problem; at a minimum, it consumes a ton of our attention while not making us any happier or better off in any other way I can think of. But on the other hand, people now have many options for amusing or informing themselves, and social media is what millions of us choose. Isn't that what freedom means?

To me, this isn't just about social media. What if it is true that, given real freedom, many or even most people will make lousy choices? Where does that leave us?

Could it be that we are unhappy and frustrated, despite our great wealth and freedom, because we spend our time and money on things that make us worse off?

If so, what can we do about it?

Consider marriage. A good marriage always shows up in surveys as providing a huge boost for happiness, more than all the money in the world. But marriage rates are now falling, and the reason most sociologists give is that we just don't feel like we have to do it any more. Are we paying a tax in happiness for exercising that freedom? On the other hand, lots of people entered or stayed in bad marriages because they felt they had to, and that is miserable. Where is the balance point between the freedom that allows us to escape abusive relationships and the freedom that leaves us adrift and alone?

Sometimes, looking around America, I imagine a vast movement back toward restrictive social norms, backed up with strong social sanctions. But then I think about what Americans are like, and I feel certain that we would fight like hell against any really powerful neo-Victorianism. So I think we are basically stuck with our freedom, and the costs we pay for it.

Why Americans Feel Poor: Because $300,000 is Not Enough???

Some completely crazy claims flying around Twitter about how much money it takes to live decently in America.

First there was the $140,000/year is the real poverty line nonsense, launched by Mike Green based on some dubious arithmetic. Noah Smith has a bunch of similar claims at the link.

But it only gets worse from there. Goldman Sachs recently said that 40% of those making $300,000 a year are living paycheck to paycheck. Which inspired this insane tweet:

A lot of people don't understand this, but it's 100% true, depending on where you live.

From 300k to 1mm, the precarity is the same as being poor - paycheck to paycheck. It's just that the numbers are bigger.

- Most people in the aspirational class live in more expensive cities where the hobbies are costlier. Rich people in Texas enjoy backyard barbecues and drive F150s, but in Greenwich, you need a Range Rover, and in Hong Kong, you need bottle service every Friday just to fit in.

- It's expensive having rich friends. Nothing is worse than seeing a billionaire grab the wine list at dinner, because they never expect to pay the tab.

- If you're in the aspirational class, and trying to keep up, when someone invites you to their house in the Hamptons or on their plane, you have to reciprocate.

- You always think that next year's bonus will be bigger. So it'll be easier to save $10 in the future than it is to worry about $1 today.

The lesson is this: if your "aspirations" require you to spend every penny your earn, you will always feel financially stressed no matter how big your salary.

Aspirational spending isn't limited to the rich; it's why many poor people buy name brand products (detergent, soap, cereal) rather than the store brand, and why many Americans of all classes drive cars they can't afford.

If you don't want to feel stressed about money, live within your means.

After the Fall

My latest fiction project is a genre fantasy novel set in my old gaming world. I have been creating adventures in this world since 1982, so I know a huge amount about it, and I think that shows in the richness of the setting. I have plans for this to become a series, and I had already written about 50 pages of the second volume before I got distracted by my audiobook project.

For me the story is about people born in hard times who refuse to surrender to them. While many around them fall into despair or actively go over to the dark side, our characters keep fighting for the world they love. In writing this I had in mind people from history who have lived through disastrous eras: Europeans in the 1930s, watching the content drift into tyranny and world war; Romans as the borders crumbled to the barbarians; Chinese of the Tang dynasty as their empire fell apart. Or how some people feel about our own time.

The book is also an experiment in a new way of thinking about magic that I derived from ancient Chinese shamanism, hints of which made it into early Daoist texts. (I wrote about my discovery of this material here.) From the blurb I wrote so literary agents could ignore it:

The story is set in the lands around the Middle Sea a generation after the collapse of a great empire, a cataclysmic event known as the Fall. In the aftermath of an event that destroyed many cities, killed millions, and (it seems) removed magic from the world, some people have given up hope, worshipping dark gods while they wait for the end. Others, including our characters, are determined to fight on as the world collapses around them. The key characters include: Bernicia Reliquay, sister of the young Viscount of Calyxia; the Viscount, Mercutio Reliquay; various of their friends; two soldiers, one a native of Calyxia and one from a desert land far to the south; a monkish wanderer searching for lost magic; and two teenage girls who join a band of wandering performers. The city of Calyxia is also a sort of character, divided by a rubble wall between a human city and another overrun by monsters.

I will be posting this as a web serial on Royal Road. The first two chapters are up, and you can peruse them here. The book has 55 chapters in its current format, and I will be posting them in groups of two or three over the next six months.

This is still a sort of beta text, so comments are welcome.

Indians, Backwoods Rebels, and the American Revolution

Most successful revolutions are made by coalitions. It is rare for any one group to be able to overthrow the existing order, so you often have groups joined in revolution who have only one thing in common: hatred of the current regime. The Iranian revolution, for example, included not just religious fundamentalists but liberals, socialists, communists, and some regional groups who hated rule from Tehran. Which is why there is often so much strife among the winners after the revolution succeeds.

The American Revolution was no exception. Our national narrative mainly focuses on east coast elites who saw British rule as tyrannous and complained about violations of their rights. Many of these people were plugged into political debates going on in Britain, and some in Britain supported their cause.

But there was at least one more important group in the rebel coalition: backwoods farmers who were mainly mad that the British were, as they saw it, supporting Indians against them. Notice the vast area marked Lands Reserved for the Indians in the map at the top, made in 1767 for British General Thomas Gage.

I'm reading Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America (2023), which narrates North American history from a Native point of view. It's is a pretty good book despite some overblown rhetoric about how people have ignored the Indian part in hitorical events. (Almost all of Blackhawk's sources are books by white men.) Anyway Blackhawk has an excellent section on events on the Pennsylvania frontier in 1765-1766, which presaged the revolution in many ways. 

This is right after the Seven Years War and then Pontiac's War had led to great violence all along the Appalachian frontier, and many settlers were mad about that. The British plan for controlling this violence was to rebuild the situation that had existed before war broke out in 1754, which included guaranteeing Indians their rights to land and trading with them extensively. The goods that British traders carried west included guns and ammunition.

It was this last that triggered the revolt of the "Black Boys" along the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontiers. They began stopping the caravans of merchants heading west and searching them for weapons. Sometimes they just seized any weapons they found, but other times they seized or burned all the other goods as well. In March, 1765, six of their number were arrested by the British and imprisoned in Fort Loudoun. Several hundred Black Boys then besieged the fort, demanding the release of their comrades. The British tried to negotiate with them, but one of their leaders, James Smith, threatened to kill everyone in the fort if the men were not released. Eventually they captured some British scouts and forced the British to make an exchange of prisoners. 

These border ruffians kept up their violence right down to 1776, whereupon many of them joined the Revolution. Black Boy leader James Smith was elected to the special assembly that wrote Pennsylvania's new, post-independence constitution.

As I have written here before, I do not believe that questions around slavery had any part in the American Revolution. But questions around Indians absolutely did. Some of the most ardent revolutionaries mainly wanted to get the British out of the way so they could seize more Indian land and respond with unlimited violence to any threat of danger from Indians. Of course the Revolutionary coalition also included men like Benjiman Franklin and John Adams who wanted to respect Indian rights, but Indian-hating backwoodsmen made up a good part of the fighting force.

Antietam Iron Works

Took a fun trip to Antietam today, first the iron works and then the battlefield. This is the Antietam furnace as it was rebuilt around 1845. It was probably established in the 1760s and it was used down to about 1880. However, the history of the iron industry in this region is an almost unbelievable tangle of competing ventures, rapid failures, furnaces that kept the same name even after they had been moved several miles, and so on; the pages about this site at both wikipedia and the C&O Canal Trust are wrong. (E.g., it was never called the Frederick Forge.) We spent a lot of time trying to sort this out when we worked up there in 2008-2010, but I would say we were still only about 80 percent certain we had it right.

View into one of the furnaces. In a furnace like this, the iron ore and charcoal were stacked in alternating layers, and when the charcoal burned the molten iron drained out the bottom of the stack and pooled in molds.

View down into a furnace from above.

Sample of the ore kept at the site. The iron ore along the Potomac River here was noted by one of the first European settlers, Finnish/Swedish frontiersman and Indian trader Israel Friend, and the first mining was in a spot called Friend's Ore Bank. The ore was not of high quality but it was plentiful, and it was easy to dig it out of the river bluffs and load into onto boats for transport.

Moss on a retaining wall.

Across the road from the furnace is a complex of mill foundations. These included the mill where waterpower was used to crush the ore before it was loaded into the furnace.

The nearby Antietam Aqueduct, which carried the C&O Canal across Antietam Creek.

A place I never get tired of.

The Giant Filaments in the Galactic Core

MeerKAT radio map of the Milky Way's core. Notice the "vertical" filaments (perpendicular to the galactic plane), which are a couple of light years across and hundreds of light years long. What an image!

Another view.

The filaments seem to be made of synchrotron radiation, which is produced by particles moving at nearly the speed of light through a magnetic field. Nobody knows, though, what gave those particles their energy, since the don't seem to be streaming away from anything.

MeerKAT has also observed these filaments in other galaxies, and more recently other filaments have been discovered that are roughly parallel to the galatic plane ("horizontal").

More: Scientific American, LiveScience.

You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kep out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.

Links 5 December 2025

Roman intaglio showing a grasshopper driving a chariot, 100 BC to 100 AD

AI can steal Crypto.

Scott Siskind, Against The Omnipresent Advantage Argument For Trans Sports.

Hilarious Guardian piece on English Christmas wonderlands gone horribly wrong: "Nana, have we been bad?"

Interesting isolated human population identified in stone age southern Africa, extreme genetic outliers. (News piece, article in Nature)

Article on the Romantasy genre, with statistics and some good observations about the style.

Japanese parliament debates a tax increase to fund more defense spending.

And more Japanese news, protests shut down a developer's plan to build condominiums for foreigners.

New research explores how the bacterial toxin colibactin modifies human DNA, leading to cancer. (Science News, technical article)

One of my minor obsessions is the Battle of Pygmies and Cranes, a very ancient and mysterious bit of Eurasian lore. I just discovered that there is a modern mock epic poem about it by some other enthusiast: "The pygmy-people, and the feather'd train, Mingling in mortal combat on the plain, I sing."

Cartis Yarvin says he was inspired to become a political philosopher by watching YouTube clips that contrasted Nazis in uniform with western "decadence" and "filth." (Twitter/X) Finally, we understand.

Lots in the news about a major study of trait heritability that seems to find that most traits are less heritable than many thought; Scott Siskind goes through it in detail and finds it doesn't convincingly show anything.

The building that houses the Wayback Machine.

A bunch of recent studies have not found that economic inequality has much effect on people's lives: no effect on crime, little effect on subjective well being, etc. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith: "LatinoIslamophobia vs Islamoleftism is the future of American political discourse."

British film about hedgelaying from 1942, 9 minutes. Why was this made in 1942? To get women to do agricultural work? And did you know that in Britain, hedgelaying is a competitive sport?

A short history of zoning. (Twitter/X, Substack)

Very interesting conversation between conservative Catholic Ross Douthat and trans activist Chase Strangio, who has litigated trans cases before the Supreme Court. (NY Times)

Free article from The Atlantic on how many college students are now considered to have "disabilities" that get them perks like special low-distraction testing sites, and extra time.

And another Atlantic "gift article", Jonathan Chait on The Intellectual Vacuity of the National Conservatives.

Nature retracts a study that predicted huge economic impacts from climate change. (NY Times, Retraction Watch, Nature) Ideology and science do not mix well.

From old line conservative George Will, a piece titled A Sickening Moral Swamp of an Administration. With this: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement."

Do western nations owe African nations reparations because of the slave trade? I got this via John McWhorter.

Is this little video about a Chinese guy with a fleet of sword-shaped drones real?

Via Tyler Cowen, advice for men on how to get laid. You're going to see more of this as old fuddy-duddies get increasingly worried that young people aren't having enough sex.

Why did the US Navy cancel its Constellation frigate program? (20-minute video, Newsweeek, Defense News) Many American naval officers are in a state of perpetual rage about the mess in our shipbuilding program.

European militaries are throwing together new anti-drone systems from off-the-shelf components to provide a bridge until projected new high-tech systems become available.

Mental Illness and Crime, Afghan Immigrant Edition

Trump of course wants the shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan immigrant to be about immigration, but all the signs are that it is another sad story about failing mental health. The NY Times:

The emailed plea was urgent and direct: “Rahmanullah needs help.”

The warning came nearly two years before Rahmanullah Lakanwal would be named as a suspect in the gunning down of two National Guard troops near the White House on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was enshrined in writing by a volunteer helping to give Mr. Lakanwal a fresh start in America who had become convinced he was unraveling. . . .

In the months after, he sequestered himself inside his darkened bedroom, refused to answer his phone, and even failed to bathe or dress his sons when his wife left to take short breaks from him. He dropped out of the English classes he was supposed to take, did not seek work and stopped paying rent. His family received an eviction notice.

“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year,” the volunteer wrote in a January 2024 email.

The one way I know of that immigrants create more trouble than the native born is that they have a higher rate of serious mental illness. Nobody really knows why; it could be the shock of moving to such a different place, or it could be that the boldness needed to migrate has some connection to mental troubles. Plus, many mental health organizations have reported a big increase in mental problems among immigrants since Trump began his crackdown; to Trump that is probably a feature, not a bug, but it leaves the rest of us struggling with the fallout.

America is simply not capable of helping or monitoring all the crazy people in our midst who might end up posing a threat. I don't see any solution that wouldn't involve spending a lot of money, and I very much doubt that such money could be found in the current political climate.

The Grid and the Future

Tim Latimer:

The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale.

I agree that this is a huge problem. We are rapidly building new electrical generation capacity in the US, mainly in the form of utility-scale solar arrays. But that does no good if the power can't get to users. We have dozens of solar projects that are built but producing no power because they cannot get hooked to the grid, and they can't get hooked to the grid because the utilities are far behind in making the necessary adjustments. This is why some major power users, like Microsoft, are talking about building their own nuclear reactors. 

Building long-distance power lines is just hard. People hate having them built near their houses, and for good reason: they dramatically depress property values. There is also some evidence that they can contribute to cancer; I think this evidence is bad, but it is better than a lot of other medical evidence many people believe in, e.g. harm from vaccines.

I had a small part in the last major US effort to upgrade our transmission network, the new Appalachian backbone that was necessary to stablilize the east coast grid, built in roughly 1995-2015. That took a lot of political capital, including a handshake between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but is showed that we can do it if we put our minds to it. Right now, though, politicians seem to be distracted by other issues.

The technology exists now to bury long-distance power lines, but it is expensive and so far as I know, none have yet been built in the US. But we may have to go that route to reach the grid we need.

"The Raven and the Crown" on Audible

Available here. 

I have long wanted to produce an audio version of The Raven and the Crown, to my mind by far the best thing I have written. Over the years various people have suggested to me that I record it myself. But in my mind I always it heard it read by a woman with a British accent; a man from Virginia would sound all wrong. Last year I explored some of the AI voices available, but they just weren't good enough. 

But then, thanks to the generosity of my family and friends, I was able to hire a professional to make the recording. 

I went into Audible and discovered an amazing system for putting writers and voice actors in touch with each other. You initiate this process by posting a description of your project and a few pages of text for auditioners to read. I did this, went to bed, and woke up to find that 16 people had already posted 4-minute auditions. By the end of the day I had 30 auditions to listen to. I began working my way through them. Most were mediocre, like most of everything. After listening to the same passage 30 times and assigning most of them 2 or 3 stars I was starting to get numb. 

Then I listenened to two wonderful readings by professional English actresses. I assumed that I would not be able to afford them, but I figured I might as well start at the top. So I reached out to the reader I rated the highest, Sarah Kempton, and was astonished that we were able to reach an agreement. As my children told me, voice acting is a brutal business.

The process works like this: you agree on a price, then create a contract within the Audible system. The system specifies all the terms and so on; the enforcement mechanism is that nobody in the audio book business can afford to be blacklisted by Audible. The reader produces a 15-minute segment. If you accept it, you pay half the agreed price in advance. Then the reader begins uploading chapters, which you listen to. 

I loved this. Sarah Kempton's voice is exactly what I imagined when I told people I wanted to hear the story read by a British woman. I was immediately carried away into the world I had made. It took me eight years to write this book, but somehow listening to it in Kempton's voice made it more powerful for me than it ever had been before. I have rarely in my life felt so swept up into a story, and the time I spent listening to each chapter as it came in was by far the best part of many recent days. There were glitches – lines skipped, words misread or mispronounced, etc. But this turned out to be no problem; I just sent Kempton the exact time of the error and she edited the file to fix them. Usually I could  not detect any issue with the audio after amendment, and I am willing to bet that no other listener will be able to tell where the changes were made.

My wife asked me if I were following along in the text, and I was at first puzzled by this question. I did not need to. I know what my writing sounds like, and every error jarred in my mind. That, incidentally, is why I am such a bad editor of my own work; I hear too clearly what I meant to write.

Then it was done. I felt sad, because I had loved this process so much. But the end of this process means I can share it with the world.

Kurt Gödel and the Pardon Loophole

Matt Yglesias:

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. . . .  Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. . . and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution. 

Food Banks and Market Methods

Caroline Sutton of Slow Boring explains that an infusion of market methods revitalized how Feeding America distributed donated food to food banks across the nation: 

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1. 

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Prices are information signals, and it is very hard to run an economy without that information. My favorite story about this problem concerns the attempts of the early Soviets to set up a socialist economy. Their economists kept searching for ways to encode and transmit this vital information, including, at one point, a sort of imaginary money much like Feeding America's "shares," but they never did solve the problem and as a result Soviet citizens were a lot poorer than they needed to be.

Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

When Did the United States Have a "Common Culture"?

The big complaint right now across the anti-immigrant right is that the US has lost its "common culture."

So let me ask: when did the US have a common culture?

During the Indian Wars, or the Trail of Tears? Indians used to make up a much larger share of the people in the US than they do now, speaking a vast array of languages and practicing many different religions.

During the mass Catholic immigration of the 1800s, which spawned the Know-Nothings and other anti-Catholic movements, with millions of Protestants saying Catholics had no place in America?

When Mormons were driven out of Missouri and Illinois?

During the Civil War? We lost at least 600,000 men in a fight over whether or not slavery was part of our common culture.

During Reconstruction, when white terrorists fought against Federal troops to seize power in one southern state after another?

In the 1890s, when sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta shared the nation with the first New York City millionaires?

During the coal field wars, when miners took up arms against the bosses, who responded with machine gun fire?

During the fights over votes for women, or birth control? 

During the 1960s, when hippie values swept the country and thousands of families broke up over fights about haircuts and torn jeans? When millions marched against the Vietnam War?

When white policemen let their dogs loose on peaceful marchers for Civil Rights?

Moving on to recent decades, what is our common culture's position on abortion? Gay rights? Marijuana? Are Italian food, Chinese food, and tacos parts of our common culture, or not? What about Indian food, which we have for a majority of family birthdays in this house?

The "common culture" discourse is racist nonsense.

To me, recently arrived immigrants are the most American people. Instead of whining about unfair competition and a world rigged against them, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. They believe in working hard and saving money and getting ahead, an old American faith that has been lost by millions of the native born. They send their kids to public schools. They love democracy. They believe in the future.

To the extent that Americans have any common culture, immigrants embody it.

Dutch Art at Christie's

Jan Josefsz Van Goyen, Brussels, c. 1650 

Peter Paul Rubens, preparatory study for The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, detail, 1550s

David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1635, one of at least twenty versions he painted. Love that temptress.

Gerrit Dou, The Flute Player, 1620s. Dou was Rembrant's pupil.

Links 28 November 2025

Ross Bleckner, Untitled, 1984

Cambrian Chronicles ponders all the stories of drowned lands surrounding the Irish Sea, 20-minute video. There are serious scholars who think these are 9,000-year-old memories of sea level rise. I wrote about some of these stories here.

FIRE takes the case of a man who spent 37 days in jail for a Charlie Kirk-related post.

Drone video of polar bears noodling around the old human settlement on Kolyuchin Island, 3-minute video.

Recoding America announces a pilot project for "outcomes review" in California, testing whether bills passed by the legislature really do what they are supposed to. Could be expanded to reviewing bills before they are passed.

The history of making cheap urban housing illegal.

Good Reason piece on the uproar at conservative think tanks over Tucker Carlson, anti-semitism, etc.

Drawings of London from 1873.

A Roman distance marker from Britain.

An argument against essayists using the word "we." 

A professor makes great claims for "close reading."

Three large coin hoards from the late Roman world.

Some analysis of the proposed Ukraine peace deal. (Twitter/X)

Ukrainian missile strike destroys two valuable Russian aircraft and damages a factory at the Taganrog Yuzhny Air Base. (Twitter/X, news story)

Where do Gnomes Come From?

Gnomus (lower left) in a 1555 Illustration of Mining

Word origins are a common subject of discussion in my house, and this morning we puzzled over "gnome." It sounds Greek, but I can't remember any gnomes in classical literature.

So I looked it up. Oxford has this:

Mid 17th century: from French, from modern Latin gnomus, a word used by Paracelsus as a synonym of Pygmaeus, denoting a mythical race of very small people said to inhabit parts of Ethiopia and India.

So the first use of the word gnomus is by Paracelsus (1493-1541), the famous alchemist? Interesting. As to where gnomus might come from, there are two theories: it may be related to 

gnōmē ‘thought, opinion’ (related to gignōskein ‘know’)

or to 

genomos, which could mean ‘earth-dweller’

Since some Renaissance writers used gnomus to mean a sort of earth elemental (see top), a derivation from genomos makes more sense to me.

Again via Oxford, it was a very rare word until the 1910s, when its use shot up; I imagine this was about the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, who were big for a while in communist propaganda and other conspiratorial views. Then it was a rare word again until the 1960s, when there was a blip – was that more gnomes of Zurich? – then it surged in the 1980s, which was probably some combination of garden gnomes and Dungeons & Dragons.

Anyway I find it interesting that the origins of gnome trace back to Renaissance magi, vs. dwarves, who come from very old Germanic legends; I think Dungeons & Dragons preserves this distinction pretty well.

William Dalrymple, "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India."

Another book review from my old web site, written in 2012.

 

James Kirkpatrick

I have learned more from William Dalrymple's fascinating White Mughals (2002) than anything else I have read in years. This is partly because it is set in a time and place I knew almost nothing about, but there is more. The story Dalrymple tells is one of those in which romance and family life collide with historical change, personalizing great events and casting new light on human life amidst the whirl of cultural conflict. Dalrymple draws many characters and events into his narrative, and almost always the additions add richness to his tale rather than simple heft. The book is quite long, 400 substantial pages, and it seemed even longer because of the confusing thicket of Indian and Persian names, Mughal titles, and unfamiliar institutions. But the length allows Dalrymple to depict a whole world. We see the courts of the dying Mughal empire, the lives of noble women enclosed in the zenana but still wielding great influence, the pageantry of Indian Islam, the adventure of young men come out to work for the mighty East India Company, most of them doomed to early death but the lucky survivors more likely to get very, very rich than almost any group of ambitious merchants in history.

The center of the tale is the marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident (ambassador) at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, to Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal woman of very aristocratic family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been routine for British men in India to marry Indian women, and indeed to assimilate themselves to Indian culture in other ways. We have many depictions of Englishmen in this period smoking hookahs in native costume while they watch performances of dancing girls or join the hunts of Rajahs and Mughals. Around 1800, though, this was changing. The more puritanical, nationalist, and racist attitudes of the Victorian age were taking hold among the agents of Imperial Britain, and to "go native" was seen more and more as a betrayal of Englishness and the white race. James's marriage caused a great scandal and was the subject of three formal investigations. It is largely as a result of this scandal that we know so much about James and Khair; the many English-Indian marriages of earlier times excited little comment, and so passed mostly beneath the notice of history.

Khair-un-Nissa

James Kirkpatrick had the mindset of the earlier generation. He was a great admirer of Indian culture and of Islam. When he attended the Nizam's court, he dressed as a Mughal nobleman, and he became an expert both in the languages of the court (Persian and Urdu) and in its rituals. It is hardly surprising that when he fell in love, it was with a native woman. James tried at first to keep his marriage from his English superiors, but he had arrived in India too late for his actions to avoid attracting attention. Word spread, and not in pleasant forms. The first rumors that reached Calcutta said that James had raped Khair and then bullied her family into handing her over to him. Since the Nizam of Hyderabad was a crucial English ally in their struggle to control India and keep the French out, this naturally caused great alarm. As the inquests showed, though, it was not true. Rather, it seems that James was at first the victim of a plot hatched by Khair's mother and grandmother, who allowed him to meet their beautiful young daughter and then encouraged the feelings of the two lovers, even allowing them to sleep together before they were formally wed. Why they did this is somewhat obscure, although there was no shortage of rumors. As Dalrymple reconstructs the tale, it seems that they wanted, first, to abort a match proposed for Khair by her uncle and guardian, to a man that the women thought completely unsuitable. They considered the powerful, wealthy, much-admired British resident a much better match, and so they engineered the affair. Or perhaps, as other sources have it, it was driven by Khair herself (above), who fell in love with Kirkpatrick after observing him from behind a curtain, and then as a spoiled favorite child induced her relatives to grant her will. The result of this conniving was that Khair become pregnant, and Kirkpatrick "did the right thing" by formally marrying her.

However the relationship began, it blossomed into a great love. James repeatedly risked his career by determined loyalty to Khair, and she risked her life by fidelity to him. They had two children together, and seemed to have shared much happiness before a series of tragic events got under way that I will not spoil. It is a lovely tale.

The Kirkpatrick Children

The two children were sent to be educated in England, and one of them grew up to be a famous beauty who knew Thomas Carlyle and served as the inspiration for one of his characters. George Chinnery painted the two children just as they were leaving for Britain, a famous image that now hangs in the board room of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (above). This was their last week as Indians, dressed in Mughal court finery. As soon as they boarded the ship for England they became George and Kitty Kirkpatrick and were brought up to be English, deprived of all contact with their Indian relatives and their early lives.

In telling this story Dalrymple is not interested primarily in just this one romance. Because both husband and wife were so politically important, their marriage became embroiled in the politics of the Nizam's court, and my favorite parts of the book were actually those that examined the rise and fall of ministers and the mix of ceremonial whirl and political tension that was court life in eighteenth-century India. Dalrymple wonderfully evokes the lost world of late Mughal India, with its poets, saints, warriors, sorcerers, ambitious courtiers, and powerful women who controlled events from behind the scenes. This age still had much of the flavor of medieval Persia, but it is copiously documented, so we can follow the lives of noble Hyderabadis in their own letters and proclamations, local chronicles, reports from British and French ambassadors, and many other sources. My favorite character was the wily minister Aristu Jah ("glory of Aristotle"), who guided Hyderabad through the violent storms of Indian politics at a time when many states disappeared. One of Aristu Jah's few serious mistakes was to convince his master to make war on the Maratha Confederacy, a powerful league of Hindu princes to his north. After Hyderabad was badly beaten in the war, the Maratha chief minister insisted that Aristu Jah be handed over as his prisoner. So Aristu Jah was packed off to prison in Pune, and Hyderabad had to give up much territory along the border and pay a huge indemnity. Did this stop Aristu Jah? No:

In the late summer of 1797 Aristu Jah, the former Prime Minister who had ben imprisoned in Pune for over two years, sent some extraordinary news to the Nizam: not only had he succeeded in negotiating his own release, he had managed to get the Marathas to agree to return almost all the land and fortresses that had been ceded to them after the Battle of Kharlda. They had even waived the enormous indemnity owed to them by the Nizam. So astounding was this news, and so remarkable was Aristu Jah's achievement in neogtiating it from confinement, that many of his contemporaries assumed that he could only have achieved this coup with the aid or sorcery.

Aristu Jah

Even more than the lost world of Mughal India, what Dalrymple most wants is to evoke the time when British and Indians interacted as equals, and the British were just as likely to copy native ways as to impose their own. He wants to dwell on this epoch of cooperation and mutual admiration, before the racism and rigidity of the nineteenth century divided the British and Indians from each other. Perhaps he is a bit naive about this time, and perhaps most people on both sides never felt the sort of warmth that James Kirkpatrick felt for his wife and friends. But in our multicultural age, the behavior of the eighteenth-century British in India is a better model than that of their Victorian successors.

For a historian, the story of Dalrymple's research is as fascinating as that of James and Khair. Dalrymple first heard of James and Khair from a tour guide in Hyderabad, and he learned the basics of their story from a scholar whose office was in a crumbling corner of the old British Residency, built by Kirkpatrick himself. He followed the tale through the records of the East India Company and the letters of the Kirkpatrick family. Some of the crucial letters were in a cipher that he could not break until he stumbled across a letter in which the recipient had written in the translation above the numerical code. With each discovery, his knowledge deepens and the story grows. It is a historians' romance as much as one for lovers. Let me reprint one part of the tale, as Dalrmple tells it, to give the flavor of this remarkable quest:

On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours' time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad's great specialty: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where promised I would find ‘booxies booxies.'

The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies', as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristrocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing, he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-‘Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick's letters. The book turnout to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa's first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts, too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources.

If only studying history were like that more often.

December 23, 2012