Detailed look at how three works of art came to be made, from Adam Moss's new book, The Work of Art.
The 17th-century garden maze at Bufalini Castle in Italy re-opens after years of closure, looks amazing.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons closes a women's prison in California that was notorious for the sexual abuse of inmates; four new wardens in four years had been unable to halt the abuse. Sometimes organizations get so corrupt that there isn't anything to do but shut them down. (As with the Camden police.)
Interesting glimpse of a US Marine strategy called "Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations," involving drones, fighter jets, and small Pacific islands.
Update on the progress of 3D-printed houses; still not cheaper than balloon framing.
Via Marginal Revolutions, an article describing the astonishing gains in the production of strawberries via selective breeding and other techniques. Of course for a while they were kind of tasteless but I find that in recent years the strawberries in my grocery store have been pretty good. (I used to grow my own, so I know what they're supposed to taste like.)
How a sophisticated attempt to hack millions of computers was exposed almost by accident.
Murder rates are falling in US cities, back to the levels before the pandemic or even lower. Still puzzles me that the pandemic led to a surge in murders in the first place, especially since it was mainly concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods.
The crazy house of Isaiah Robertson, who called himself the second coming of the prophet Isaiah and said God guided his hands to make his art. The Kohler Foundation recently put up money for conservation.
Interesting NY Times feature on how argeli is grown in Nepal for use in Japanese banknotes; Japanese people love their paper money, and it is paper made from argeli bark that gives their bills their crisp heft. Shorter version at the Times of India, and a story on the same topic at Global Voices.
Solid, balanced review at Vox of the evidence on social media and teen mental health.
Just to show that obsessing about politicians' clothes isn't pure sexism, here's a NY Times feature on how Joe Biden – always a natty dresser – "dresses young." This presumably costs a lot, since the White House refuses to comment on where the president gets his clothes. And did you notice that the blue tone Biden favors for suits matches the blue in the American flag? Nerds like me think politics is about policy ideas, but pros like Biden know its really about how you look with flags behind you.
Interview with David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
More on those alleged mafia-style Neolithic human sacrifices.
Spitalfields Life visits the roof of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, amazing graffiti.
Historically Taiwan has recorded an increase in births of at least 10% in each Year of the Dragon, the most auspicious year to be born; but not even that helped this past year, when births still fell by 6.1%.
Maryland teenager, who has already spent time in a psychiatric facility, is arrested after writing a 129-page "fictional memoir" about his school shooting. The police called it a "plan."
During Iran's missile and drone attack on Israel, the US Navy finally got to use its 20-year-old anti-ballistic missile interceptor, the SM-3, and it worked fine. Relatively old-fashioned weapons like ballistic missiles and subsonic cruise missiles could only hurt a US carrier group if they were launched in overwhelming numbers. Which explains China's focus on hypersonic weapons. Honestly I have the impression that a lot of warfare in the near future is going to be countries throwing huged piles of money (in the form of attack missiles or interceptors) at each other to see who runs out or blinks first. The Navy recently said it has used a billion dollars worth of weapons this year shooting down missiles and drones in the Middle East.
Noah Smith admits he was wrong about missile defense, which he wrote many times was an expensive boondoggle. In a new essay he asks why he and so many others were wrong; basically, the people who knew how good the weapons were getting couldn't talk about them, leaving the field to loudmouth outside critics.
The Telegraph says our global conflicts are part of one "world war," very much like Tom Friedman's take here. (Brief summary of Friedman's position here.)
A drone pilot is the US Marines' "Aviator of the Year."
Article at Foreign Affairs (free when I checked) on the failed peace negotiations that took place early in the Ukraine war. Shashank Joshi summarizes: "Russia continued to make new & unacceptable demands that would have turned Ukraine into a weak & undefensible vassal state." Also, they discussed security guarantees from western states that had not ever been mentioned to those states.
2 comments:
Update on the progress of 3D-printed houses; still not cheaper than balloon framing.
Did you mean platform framing? Balloon framing went out of use in the 1950s.
Murder rates are falling in US cities, back to the levels before the pandemic or even lower. Still puzzles me that the pandemic led to a surge in murders in the first place, especially since it was mainly concentrated in certain urban neighborhoods.
I'm not surprised it caused murders. Aside from the obvious fact that it was a prolonged period of heightened stress for everyone from which there was no escape (which is a perfect recipe for promoting strife in society), there are other factors which seem like they would obviously lead to violence on top of that.
Many millions of people faced rent crises; lots of landlords squeezed their tenants, often resorting to coercive and even illegal methods; untold numbers of people were evicted or displaced, in the middle of being unable to work... even with government intervention via eviction moritoriums and rent forgiveness, it was still a BRUTAL period of time for poor people living paycheck-to-paycheck, and it created a lot of desperation among society's worst-off and most-vulnerable.
And if there's one lesson that always applies, it's that desperate people resort to desperate measures. If you're about to be evicted in the middle of a deadly pandemic and you can't work to make money to avoid that fate... well, then you're maybe going to seriously consider resorting to criminal activity to "find" that money and avoid that fate. And more crime means more crimes "gone wrong", which means more murders.
And also when the criminality instead "goes right", then you get people who decide to make a "career" out of it, and keep engaging in it even after the pandemic ends, because the payoffs outweigh the risk - up until they don't, and things finally go wrong, and someone winds up dead. Hence even a couple years after the pandemic, you might have murders being committed by people who never would have entered into criminality in the first place if not for the desperate times they faced previously.
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