David Reich Speculates

Fascinating podcast interview with paleogeneticist David Reich. The intereviewer asks Reich a lot of questions that elicit the answer, "I don't know" or "this isn't my area of expertise." But Reich must have been in an expansive mood, because after making his qualifiers he goes on to speculate, sometimes wildly, about what might be.

The most interesting theme concerns the role that comparatively small groups have played in human evolution. On the one hand, it seems that modern Eurasians and Native Americans are mostly descended from 1,000 to 10,000 people who left Africa around 55,000 to 60,000 years ago. These people, the model says, outcompeted not only the Neanderthals and the Denisovans but other groups of fully modern humans who had been in Eurasia for 50,000 years. On the other hand, 21st century humans have Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA, and DNA from other groups of modern humans, and, as Reich says about twenty times, the story of our past is always the story of movement and mixing. So what does it mean that we are "descended" from some group or other? Reich makes it clear that he does not understand this at all. The interviewer asks if we know where the group from which we mainly descend was at any point in time, and Reich basically answers no. Nobody knows how to model a past in which we always lived in small groups but somehow shared genes around the world.

He even says at one point that from one perspective you might say that nobody from outside Africa is really a fully modern human. Instead, he says, you could model our past as Neanderthals who are genetically overwhelmed by one wave of modern humans after another, gradually evolving to the point that they became 98% modern human without ever ceasing to be Neanderthals. In support of this view he mentions that while our genome is only 2% Neanderthal, if you go back 50,000 years ago our ancestors are 10-20% Neanderthal. It turned out, though, that Neanderthals had built up a lot of bad mutations over 500,000 years of living in small groups and those variants were quickly selected out.

Reich clearly feels that we do not understand human evolution.

Some other points:

Over the past 10,000 years, our genetic changes have been mostly related to disease resistance and metabolism. Lactose tolerance would be a great example of a metabolic change, but Reich uses another one: we have gotten less efficient at storing fat. This is presumably because farmers have diets that vary less over the course of the year. This was in response to a question about the argument that farming was a big mistake that has made life worse, and Reich basically says there is no evidence for increased dietary stress. In the course of this Reich mentions that there is very little evidence for any recent genetic changes related to cognition; people of 50,000 years ago seem to have had modern brains.

The relationship between culture and genetics is very complex. Reich describes cases in which cultures have been taken over genetically by people from outside, who can be detected only genetically, not because of any cultural or linguistic changes. One is the Polynesians. They came from Taiwan and were genetically East Asian. Then the Melanesian islands they settled were infiltrated by people from New Guinea, who took up Polynesian sailing and so on, leaving a massive genetic imprint on what remained a Polynesian culture.

The evidence seems to show that at the end of the Neolithic, around the time of the steppes invasion, plague was causing more than a quarter of all deaths in Europe. Reich says nobody will say this out loud because it seems so crazy, but it is what the data says.

In India, as in Europe, the population was changed by the steppes invaders who brought Indo-European languages and left a strong genetic signature. But whereas in Europe that percentage is about the same in every modern person, in India there are huge variations, based on caste, because the resistance to marriages between people of different castes has been strong enough to block most interbreeding for 2,000 years.

It is very weird that farming appeared all over the world within about 4,000 years of the end of the last Ice Age, and nobody can explain this. One theory is that the current interglacial era is a uniquely beneficial environment, which to me implies that we are riding a climate lucky streak that can't last too much longer.

There is no chance that there were Sumer-level civilizations before the end of the last Ice Age.

But the weirdest thing concerned attempts to study past epigenetics. Genomes are in practice always being modified by other molecules that shut down some genes and pump up others. Reich says there is some evidence of epigenetics from very old genomes, and the biggest difference anyone has noted is that in us, the genes for language are much more active. It seems that DNA evolution has not been fast enough to give us the language skills we need for our lives, so our bodies have resorted to other tricks 

Links 30 August 2024

Pia Lehti, In the Shelter of the Mother Tree

Tweet explaining that there are three kinds of prisons in Russia. There are red prisons, controlled by the state, and black prisons, controlled by mobsters. Both of these types go back to Soviet times. Now there are also green prisons, controlled by Islamists.

The Linothorax Project, an attempt to recreate classical linen armor.

Greg Palast, "I was on the phone with RFK Jr. when he lost his mind."

Total fertility in Ireland has fallen to 1.5, lower than Britain's for the first time since the beginning of modern statistics. The transformation of Ireland over the past 30 years has been stunning.

Seeking the origin of The Game of 58 Holes, as we call a board game attested across the Bronze Age Middle East. The Egyptian version is sometimes called "hounds and jackals."

Poster, based on interviews with people in QAnon, about how they "fell down the rabbit hole." The main conclusion seems to be "personal trauma + distrust in authority = conspiracism."

Why did Telegram founder Pavel Durov fly to France just in time to be arrested? Lots of chatter that he arranged this with the French police for dark and deep reasons.

Transforming a WW II flak tower in Hamburg into "The Green Bunker."

Ancient people in Taiwan yanked out healthy teeth for mysterious reasons.

Trying to exterminate the mice that are ravaging the albatross population on a remote island.

Tyler Cowen on why massively overhauling the Federal bureaucracy in the manner called for in Project 2025 would be terrible for business.

Roman military camp found in the Swiss Alps, dates to the conquest of that region under Augustus and Tiberius, I mean, if you thought high mountains would deter the Romans. . . .

Podcast on the gay rights movement in the Caribbean, argues it is stalled because activists tried to jump straight to a situation like the US or western European without essential preparatory work.

The Surgeon General says that American parents are "at their wits' end" from stress but Kevin Drum checks the numbers and finds that depending on which measure you use, stress in the US is either down or up just a little. Raising children is definitely stressful and always has been, so if you are really stress-averse maybe you shouldn't do it.

New Mexico's oil boom: it's now the second leading US state in oil production, and most of the production growth over the past few years has been in just two NM counties. Bloomberg; Reuters; NY Times. This has led to legislative efforts to limit the environmental and social damage, besides a lot of lawsuits from environmentalists. And note that while the first decade of the fracking boom was mostly a money-losing proposition, better drilling technologies and higher global prices mean companies are now earning big profits. (According to the NY Times article, fracking companies lost $140 billion in the 2010s but over the past four years have cleared more than $400 billion.)

More on Obama as an anti-socialist: his administration helped launch the private space business.

An argument that hunter-gatherers move around so much not just to find food but so they can have larger social networks.

Crazy little video of a modified swing that delivers what many children have fantasized about.

Scientists trying to use bacteria to extract valuable metals from old batteries and other tech gear. A decade ago I was bullish on the future of manufacturing with genetically-modified bacteria, which I expected would soon be making drugs and other chemicals on a vast scale, but it seems to be developing very slowly.

Anyone can experience "belonging uncertainty" – the sense that you don't belong in a particular community or situation and don't understand what is going on – and most people of every social and ethnic group have.

Interesting NY Times piece on volcano science in Iceland.

Khaled Hassan, an Egyptian dissident who lives in Britain, is impressed that Israel rescued an Israeli Arab hostage, brought him to a hospital, and then took him home, where he received a phone call from the Prime Minister. Says no Arab country, except possibly the UAE, would ever do as much for one of its citizens. "I wish every Arab lived in the state of Israel."

Poland just received its first F-35, and promotional images like this are everywhere.

Dmitri Medvedev says Russia's war in the Donbas is all about seizing mineral resources worth $7 trillion.

Russians are starting to feel like their recent advances in Donbas are too easy, and Ukraine must be saving its reserves for another surprise attack. Possibly in the south.

Short video showing how Ukrainian troops breached Russian minefields in Kursk.

More "new age of war beginning" talk from the French chief of staff.

Video showing 115 air-to-air drone kills, large Russian drones knocked down by Ukrainian quadcopters.

Meanwhile, in Chechnya: "Kadyrov awarded Kadyrov with the Order of Kadyrov."

Hating on Capitalism

This tweet perfectly sums up how many left-wing Americans feel about capitalism:

Because, I mean, how is that any different from life under socialism? (If you're going to tell me that Europeans get longer vacations, that's true, but all European societies are capitalist.)

Loved this response:

It really seems to me that many people say "capitalism" when they mean "life." What kind of system wouldn't involve most people going to school and getting jobs and going on vacations and dying? Anarchists die, too, and if they want to eat and have roofs over their heads, they have to work. Without even getting into smart phones and the Internet and streaming and lattes and avocado toast.

I remember during the weird riots in Portland some people tried to take over a city park to plant a food forest, saying that once we had free food we wouldn't have to work any more. Sigh.

A Story about Knowledge

Paul Seabright:

In the Languedoc there is a vineyard that teaches us an important lesson about textbook learning and its application to the world. In the early Seventies it was bought by a wealthy couple, who consulted professors Emile Peynaud and Henri Enjalbert, the world’s leading academic oenologist and oenological geologist respectively. Between them these men convinced the couple that their new vineyard had a theoretically ideal microclimate for wine-making. When planted with theoretically ideal vines whose fruits would be processed in the optimal way according to the up-to-date science of oenology, this vineyard had the potential to produce wine to match the great first growths of Bordeaux. The received wisdom that great wine was the product of an inscrutable (and untransferable) tradition was quite mistaken, the professors said: it could be done with hard work and a fanatical attention to detail. The couple, who had no experience of wine-making but much faith in professorial expertise, took a deep breath and went ahead.

If life were reliably like novels, their experiment would have been a disaster. In fact Aimé and Véronique Guibert have met with a success so unsullied that it would make a stupefying novel (it has already been the subject of a comatogenic work of non-fiction). The first vintage they declared (in 1978) was described by Gault Millau as ‘Château Lafite du Languedoc’; others have been praised to the heights by the likes of Hugh Johnson and Robert Parker. The wine is now on the list at the Tour d’Argent and the 1986 vintage retails at the vineyard for £65 a bottle. The sole shadow on the lives of these millionaires is cast by the odd hailstorm.

No one to whom I have begun recounting the story believes it will end well. Most people are extremely unwilling to grant that faith in textbook knowledge should ever be crowned with success. We have a very strong narrative bias against such stories. It is a bias we forget once our children fall sick or we have to travel in an aeroplane, but so long as we are in storytelling mode we simply deny that systematic textbook reasoning can make headway against whimsy and serendipity. Apart from anything else, it is deeply unfair that it should.

From a 1999 review of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

Apollo Lord of Hounds

Near the wonderfully named village of Nettleton Shrub in Wiltshire, England, sit the remains of a Romano-British temple. This is actually a rarer sort of thing than you might imagine; only 150 temples are known from all of Roman Britain, when medieval England and Wales had about 10,000 parish churches. Like most such constructions it had a small temple building holding the cella, or sacred sanctuary, surrounded by a bank and ditch. The Fosse Way, one of Roman Britain's most important roads, ran through the enclosure. The temple seems to have been built where the road crossed a pleasant stream.

This category of temple is known to archaeologists as a "Temple of Local Pilgrimage." That's because the main thing we find at them is offerings made by people who travelled there for some specific religious purpose. Sometimes they were offering thanks, and sometimes they were asking the god to smite somebody.

This temple seems to have been dedicated to a deity known as Apollo Cunomaglus, who is named on this altar and on other artifacts from the site. That would mean something like "Apollo Lord of Dogs," although Ronald Hutton renders it "Apollo Dog Lover."

There is also a faction that insists on translating the name as "Apollo Lord of Wolves" and tying the site to an (imagined) ancient Celtic wolf cult. Given that the people of Roman Britain raised a lot of sheep I doubt they venerated wolves, so I am going with the dog people on this one. But even if we settle on dogs we still have not ended the argument, because one faction of dog people says this means dogs as the best friends of men and sheep and another faction wants to talk about dogs as guardians of the underworld. 

The most famous artifact from the site is a curse tablet that says

I give to the god Maglus him who did wrong from the slave-quarters; I give him who (did) theft from the slave-quarters; who stole the cloak of Servandus. . . . I give (that the god Maglus) before the ninth day take away him who stole the cloak of Servandus.

The inscription includes a list of twenty possibly culprits, one of which was later crossed out, so the god had a little help here.

Given that the temple straddled a much-used road, some historians think it likely served as a sort of inn, offering accommodations and food to travelers in exchange for "offerings." But there isn't any physical evidence of this, beyond the location.

Here is a quick history of the site from the National Heritage List:

The temple itself was situated on the south bank of the Broadmead Brook. In its first phase, built soon after AD 69, it comprised a simple circular shrine. In about AD 230 the shrine was surrounded by an octagonal podium and precinct wall with a gatehouse but 20 years later the whole structure was burnt. It was replaced with an octagonal temple incorporating the remains of the podium. The new temple was more elaborate and comprised an inner chamber or cella surrounded by eight chambers and enclosed by a covered walkway. This coincides with the most prolific building period within the complex and reflects a growing interest in the temple. 

Here is a nice little artifact from the temple's glory days.

But eventually the empire ran down and the legions left and everything went to hell:

By the early fourth century the temple had fallen into a state of disrepair and was adapted and repaired. Alternate chambers were blocked and the plan of the building took on a cruciform aspect, possibly reflecting the conversion of Rome to Christianity. At a slightly later date, the building was once again used for pagan worship. A makeshift altar was constructed of reused columns. After AD 370 a build up of straw, manure, animal bones and household rubbish imply that the building was being used as a homestead or animal byre. Disarticulated human bones at the top of the sequence displayed cut marks particularly to the neck, implying a massacre at the hands of raiders.

And so it passed into history, until archaeologists showed up to poke around its ruins and bring its story back into the world. 

Ronald Hutton and the Checklist of Egyptian Magic

Stela Depicting Tutu, a Protective Spirit often Evoked in Roman Egypt

Ronald Hutton is a historian of British religion who has written books about everything from the Druids to Oliver Cromwell. I don't really recommend his books because he is the kind of historian who thinks that telling cool stories might call his scholarly credentials into question. "The sources do not really sustian. . ."

Which makes him, in a way, the perfect historian to take on his topic in this one-hour lecture: the western magical tradition. The western tradition of learned magic really is just a long string of books mainly composed of pieces of other books, without any very cool stories, and Hutton is the man to give us that.

Like every other authority I know, he traces the tradition to Egypt. But not to the Old Kingdom; he focuses on the Greco-Roman period. See, in ancient Egypt there was no distinction between religion and magic. What look to us like spells or other magical acts were used to compel gods, and nobody found this strange. Enter the Greeks, who were strongly prejudiced against using magic to force the gods. The gods, they thought, should be approached in an attitude of humble prayer. So they began driving magical practice out of the temples, and the Romans finished the job. This left Egypt's magician-priests without employment or income. They found, though, that there was still a big public appetite for the services they used to render as priests, so they went into private practice. It with these men, the private magicians of Greco-Roman Egypt, that our magical tradition really begins. They mixed old Egyptian lore with bits and pieces of other religions and styles of magic, always with an eye toward pleasing the customer. The continuity from our oldest papyrus fragments to 16th-century grimoires is amazingly strong, with long sentences surviving word-for-word across 1500 years. Hutton mentions that the Egyptians describe how to make pens from papyrus, how to achieve various effects with olive oil lamps, and how to make potions from the hearts of hoopoes, and these same formulae appear in books written in Scotland or Sweden by men who had never seen any of these things.

Image from a Greek Magical Papyrus, Roman Period

I was moved to write about this lecture for two reasons. The first was Hutton's insistence that our distinction between religion, which is good, and magic, which is at least suspect and probably sinister, goes back to Roman Egypt. The basic idea that religious people beseech the gods while magicians try to manipulate them is found in Roman legal texts. In the second century AD there were even pogroms against magicians that may have been bigger than any carried out in Renaissance Europe. But magic was, he says, like the drugs of the ancient world, in that it may have been illegal but everyone knew where to find it.

The second reason was Hutton's Checklist of Egyptian Magic. When you see all of this stuff, he says, you are in the magical tradition of imperial Egypt:

Emphasis on the physical and moral purity of the practitioner.
A willingness to command and personify deities.
The importation of foreign, exotic deities and spirits.
The employment of animal, vegetable and mineral substances.
The use of images, especially statues.
A belief in the power of the spoken word and knowing true names.
Use of obscure, ancient, or made-up languages – “gobbledygook.”
The use of human mediums.
The gathering of spells in books.

And this does strike me as a useful primer on the stuff learned magicians have done throughout the past 2,000 years.

Hutton identifies three major additions to the tradition, one coming from each of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Jewish contribution is the invocation of angels and the power of the one true name of God. Medieval Christian magi pioneered a focus on mathematical and especially geometrical manipulations – magic squares, pentagrams, magic circles. Medieval Islamic magi emphasized what Hutton calls Astral magic, that is, tying magical operations to the sun, the moon, and the stars. (Which, he adds, probably came from ancient Mesopotamia, but it was in medieval Islam that this was fused to the Egyptian tradition.)

Since this is the thing I write about, I note again the complete lack of any theoretical underpinnings for these practices. Not once in his hour of talking does Hutton say a single word about why any of this was supposed to work. In his telling it developed through the interaction of magicians with their clients, and those practices survived that sold the best to the kind of people who consulted magicians. It was then preserved because it was old and presumably authoritative.

End of Summer Coming

Drove my youngest daughter back to college yesterday for her sophomore year. Standing here in front of the door to her suite. I have always loved transporting my children because that is when we have the best conversations. This time we talked a lot about college and dorm life, and I told stories about how I met my friends at Yale, filling me with nostalgia.

On the way she remembered that she was supposed to bring a broom and dustpan for her suite. So we stopped at a Target along the way. Getting back in the car I said, "Mission accomplished." She said, "Dad, this was just a side quest."

The dog has been injured, so instead of running in the woods he has just been getting little walks around the neighborhood. Which has not been without its excitement, because there is a whole herd of deer that hangs out in the woods that border on the condominium complex down the street. Here Kidu tries to break the leash to get off after this fawn.

Does standing about twenty yards from us in a little strip of woods between the condos and a townhouse development. I think they stand there boldly like this, sometimes as little as 15 feet away, because they want to make sure the dog sees them and, should he break free, chases them instead of their fawns. They have no fear that one suburban dog is going to catch them.

And then one afternoon we saw the whole herd together, buck, two does, and two sets of twin fawns. If this buck is the father then he really hit the jackpot this year. Deer are one of the mammal species that control the number of offspring based on how well fed they are early in pregnancy, so it must have been a very good winter for deer. There are fawns everywhere, at least three sets of twins just within our walking radius. Lousy picture because we were a long way off. I had my camera out to get a better shot when Kidu starting barking, something I have never seem him do around deer. This many at once just overwhelmed him.

Meanwhile, in the garden. It was cool last week, and the flowers came back nicely after wilting in the heat of the two weeks before the hurricane.

The Obscene Bird of Night

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

― Henry James Sr., letter to his sons Henry and William

Links 23 August 2024

Perseid Meteor Shower over Stonehenge by Josh Dury.

Lots more cool stuff at his web site.

Italian researchers claim to have found a description of the exact location of Plato's tomb in one of the charred papyri from Herculaneum. The text is a history of the Academy, which might turn out to be a valuable source on ancient philosophy if enough can be read.

The world's biggest renewable/storage electrical project has just been approved for northern Australia. The plan is that much of the power will be transmitted to Singapore along an undersea cable 4300 km (2700 miles) long.

Interesting carved stone found in Poland, in a Viking style but seems to depict a Christian priest or bishop.

New regulations promulgated by the Department of Interior under the Native American Graves Protection Act are so confusing that nobody seems to know what they require, and some museums are removing their Native American exhibits and cutting off access to their collections until the dust settles and they know what's what. Some archaeologists are afraid this will mean the loss of collections for decades, if not forever.

Scientists can buy citations on the black market to up the citation count of their publications.

Sabine Hossenfelder on recycling nuclear waste, and getting more energy from it, 5-minute video.

Kevin Drum reports that California's big tech companies are giving up on DEI initiatives. Not only do they irritate people, they have had no impact on the number of female employees, which continues to decline.

Photos and video from the annual Bosch parade in the Netherlands.

Rock layers found on uninhabited Scottish islands seem to preserve a geological record spanning the beginning of the massive ice age known as Snowball Earth, c. 720 million years ago. 

Wreck of the HMS Hawke, a cruiser sunk by a German torpedo in 1914, has been found off the coast of Scotland in "remarkable" condition.

Alex Tabarrok on the intellectual roots of modern YIMBYism.

Russians using video games – in this case Hearts of Iron mods – to spread the message that Russia is helping Africans fight western imperialists.

Bonkers profile of Palmer Luckey, who invented the Oculus Rift, got fired from Meta for hanging out in right-wing chat rooms and supporting Trump, and then founded defense AI company Anduril. I'm irritated that Google won't find me a photograph of his Henry VIII costume.

Video of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov driving a Cybertruck with mounted machine gun. Interesting times.

I hear from a friend who teaches at a local community college that of the 3257 students who tried to sign up this spring and summer, 2124 were spam bots. They had to implement a new, much slower, manual sign-up process to fight the plague.

Beavers have been reintroduced to northern England and seem to be thriving. Mark my words, in a decade they're going to have so many beavers they're going to be fighting about killing them.

Speaking of which, a fatal brown bear attack in Romania led the country to dramatically raise its hunting quota. It's been a long time since European countries had problems with wildlife running amok, but now there are tense debates about the killing of boar, deer, bears, wolves, and soon (I'm sure) beavers.

From this little story about a dead oarfish washing up in California I discover that dead oarfish are considered a terrible omen in Japan, possibly predicting earthquakes. For some reason I am seeing a lot of chatter about big earthquakes in the near future. Are there oarfish washing up, or is there some more serious evidence?

Weirdly fascinating NY Times piece by Rowena Chiu, who was Harvey Weinstein's personal assistant, about the quandary faced by Matthew Perry's personal assistant. Celebrities expect their assistants to do whatever they are told, including lie for them or procure drugs for them. How much blame should fall on these assistants? Should we expect them to resign rather than buy ketamine?

The organism that made the mysterious fossilized burrows known as bifungites has been identified: a small, segmented worm. (NY Times, original paper)

Via Tyler Cowen, a list of what are said to be the most widely read books in Silicon Valley. 

Interesting comment from Belarusian dictator Lukashenko on why Belarus won't join the war: "They [the Ukrainians] have constantly told us, and the Westerners, that they don't need a war with Belarus. We understand this and say that we are not going to fight with you. And not because you are good. But because we are not ready to increase the front by 1200 kilometers. Here is the entire border - 1200 km. Now the "SMO" front is 1000 km. Are we ready to close 1200 kilometers? No. And Kursk has shown this."

In the midst of Ukraine's offensive into Kursk there's a fight over bridges over the Seym River. Ukraine has blown up all the old bridges, so the Russians have been setting up pontoon bridges. Turns out, though, that pontoon bridges are highly vulnerable to drone attacks, and so are engineers trying to build them.

Statistics on how many of the various kinds of Russian missiles Ukraine has been shooting down.

People counting Russian prisoners from Kursk in Ukrainian videos are up to 507 as of August 20. Some have no doubt been missed, but experience shows that we see imagery of most Russian group surrenders. Rumors of thousands of prisoners taken during Ukraine's 2022 offensive turned out to be false, and the people who said "If there were that many prisoners, we would have seen pictures" turned out to be right.

Hilarious bid for the F-bomb world record by a Russian watching a drone attack on an airbase.

Chatter that the US is moving away from its very ambitious NGAD program toward a plane that would be smaller, cheaper, and built for easy upgrades.

Thread arguing that Ukraine's Kursk offensive is slowing down because they don't have enough trucks to supply the 30 or so battalions already deployed.

Dmitri of War Translated: "Every morning in Russia now is a Groundhog Day: drones are flying, an oil depot is burning somewhere, another military convoy was destroyed, Putin visited places that have nothing to do with the war. Every single morning. The special operation is going according to plan."

MIT Admissions after the End of Affirmative Action

Asian: up from 40% to 47%

White: down from 38% to 37%

Black: down from 15% to 5%

Hispanic: down from to 16% to 11%

American Indian and Native Hawaiian: down, but still 1%

Note that all ethnicities are self-reported by students, and they could check more than one box.

Sources: last year, this year

Having or Not Having Children

Interesting interview with two philosophers, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, who wrote a book around the question of whether to have children. To start with, this:

Anastasia Berg: When people think about the way in which the role of children in human life, especially in the West, has changed, they often think in terms of children no longer conferring the same advantages. They’re not useful in the same way that they used to be, say, economically. And people talk about the rising cost or sacrifices that they demand. On this model, having children is a possible choice that was more advantageous before and has become less so now. But we think there’s been a far more radical shift in the role of children in our lives. In the past, children were understood as an essential part of a well-lived human life. Human life was understood, essentially, to be intergenerational. It wasn’t just that an individual happened to be related to people, it was essential to who you were. What’s new is not that people find kids are less advantageous, but that they’re considered one possible project among many that one can choose. And once they’ve taken on this framing, compared to the other things one can pursue in life, and considering the costs and sacrifices and risks that, historically, children almost always implied, it’s not surprising that people are finding it hard to justify.

I think this is exactly right. All the stuff about affordability is nonsense; my wife and I have raised five children as nurse and an archaeologist. Some people don't have children because they never find a partner, but married people who don't have children have just decided to do something else.

The interviewer asks:

You speak specifically about a societal evolution that you call the end of “the motherhood mandate.” And you quote a pair of sociologists who say that the “oughtness” that used to be associated with parenthood has been removed for a substantial number of people. 

To which Berg, again, responds with a little discourse about how the argument among feminists over whether motherhood enslaved or empowered women ended with a sort of truce: every woman gets to choose.

In their book Berg and Wiseman note that anti-natalist arguments are ancient. Asked about this point, Berg says:

From the early days, when people asked any philosophical questions, they asked whether human life is so miserable and so full of harm and tribulation that perhaps it is better not to perpetuate it. This argument took two guises. The first is the argument from suffering: human life is full of unhappiness, whether actual or potential, and of so many risks that from the standpoint of the individual, it’s better to never have been born. And from the standpoint of a prospective parent, it is outright irresponsible, maybe morally negligent, to subject another human being to such a fate. There is also the argument from evil. This starts not with the premise of human suffering, but of human character: human beings are bad and evil and harmful. In a theological register, we talk about fallenness and essential corruption of the human heart. And from this, we’re led to the conclusion that it would be morally irresponsible to have more of these beings—whether because we’re perpetuating evil in the world or, in the environmental register of today, because we’re harming the planet.

We bring this up not just to historicize our present moment. We want to show that what is experienced as a contemporary concern is, in fact, pointing to a deep philosophical question: that of the value of human life in the present and future. We also want to point to what is unique about our moment today. While this question was raised historically, it was raised theoretically, abstractly, as an intellectual exercise. What’s different today is that people feel they need to justify that choice in the face of these arguments.

I generally think of childbearing as a personal choice and I wouldn't judge anyone for not having children. But when I think about the universe, I absolutely do see a positive role for humanity in the future. We are the ones who know. Other species are in amazing in their own ways, but we are the ones who have mapped the galaxy, parsed the atom, and walked on the Moon; we are the ones who write epics and build cathedrals and come up with theories about how everything came to be. It may be that we will eventually hand this role over to others, to conscious machines or human/machine hybrids. But it seems very sad to me to imagine a universe with no inhabitants that can appreciate its scale, its intricacy, and its wonder. I think we belong here.

Free Speech and Riots in Britain

The prosecution of people who made inflamatory posts during Britain's recent anti-immigrant riots has led to a lot of anger and angst over speech. Some people – notably Elon Musk, but he is far from alone – have accused the British government of setting up an oppressive police state for things like this:

Some people have also objected to a 15-month prison term for Julie Sweeney, 53, of Cheshire. After seeing a photo on Facebook of people helping repair a mosque that was attacked during a riot in Southport, Ms. Sweeney posted: “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” She pleaded guilty to a charge of sending a communication threatening death or serious harm. Her lawyer argued for leniency, saying she was her husband’s primary caregiver. But the judge, Steven Everett, said, “Even people like you need to go to prison.”

As I see it, many people treat the internet as a sort of fantasy world where they can say anything because there are no consequences. They want Twitter/X to be just like sitting with their mates in the pub, with freedom to say whatever pops into their heads. And, indeed, the internet is where many, many people have most of their conversations.

On the other side, government spokesmen say things like:

I don’t see why the internet should be regarded as any different than when someone stands on a soap box and addresses a raging crowd.

That is, a place and situation where words matter a lot.

The liberal establishment has a deep fear that bad things are happening on the internet, that dangerous ideas are circulating and getting into the heads of impressionable young men, and that this will somehow lead to a civil war or right-wing takeover. My sons, who spent a lot of time in online swamps as teenagers, are frankly baffled by this attitude. They think the whole business is a grand joke, just kids experimenting with their freedom to say shocking things. The notion that anyone would take it seriously is just weird to them, like thinking that Dungeons and Dragons is training kids to become sword-wielding assassins.

And then the riots broke out in Britain, fueled by false rumors that a knife-wileding killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, riots in which people were hurt and property destroyed. On the one hand it was a farce, a bunch of grouches larping at revolution, easily crushed by the government. On the other hand, a hotel full of asylum seekers was surrounded by an angry mob that threatened to burn them alive and beat up the cops who tried to stop them, and that doesn't strike me as something we ought to tolerate.

But I have to say that new PM Keith Starmer's comments make me nervous:

“We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder.” He also applauded the courts for sentencing people for their online behavior, not just for taking part in the riots. “That’s a reminder to everyone that whether you’re directly involved or whether you’re remotely involved, you’re culpable, and you will be put before the courts if you’ve broken the law.”

What does "remotely involved" mean? You can just glance at Russia or China to see how far certain governments have stretched the definition of "remotely involved" in lawbreaking.

The case that has drawn the most attention is that of the woman accused of starting the furor, Bernadette Spofforth, 55, described by the NY Times as "an online influencer and mother of three." She was arrested and released on bail but has not been charged. The Times:

Disinformation researchers say she appears to have been the first to falsely claim on X that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker, in a post suggesting that his name was Ali-Al-Shakati. By the time she deleted the post later that day, it had been viewed almost 1.5 million times and reposted by prominent conspiracy theorists. Ms. Spofforth, who has previously spread misinformation about Covid-19 and climate change, told The Sun, a London newspaper, that she had copied and pasted the post, and “fell into the trap of sharing misinformation.”

Love that little gloss about Covid-19, because so far as I can tell spreading false information about the pandemic is a charge that could be leveled against almost everyone on the planet, starting with the CDC and all the people who said we had to close the schools.

I'm not posting about this because I think I know the answer. In a situation like the British riots, the line between free speech and incitement to riot is both hard to draw and important. But I want to put myself down as being very suspicious of any plan to arrest people for "remote involvement" in violent acts they had nothing to do with planning or committing.

Chirs Murphy and the Weird Malaise

The statistics, and most economists, say that the US economy is doing great. But many Americans disagree. In one NY Times poll from a few months ago, only 3 percent said the state of the economy is "excellent," while 51 percent opted for "poor." The most interesting question asked how much change people want to see in the "political and economic system in America":

2%    The system does not need changes
27%  The system needs minor changes
55%  The system needs major changes
14%   The system needs to be torn down entirely

Trump's lead in that poll was, I think, mostly explained by the finding that 45% of voters thought he would make major changes if elected, vs. 11% for Biden. 

Which brings me to this NY Times piece on Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy. Murphy has ben getting a lot of attention lately for saying things like this:

The signs are clear, and we shouldn’t be afraid to see them. The postwar neoliberal economic project is nearing its end, and the survival of American democracy relies on how we respond.

Not because of simple economics; like anyone who can read a graph, Murphy understands that in basic numerical terms the economy is fine:

The challenges America faces aren’t really logistical. They are metaphysical. And the sooner we understand the unspooling of identity and meaning that is happening in America today, the sooner we can come up with practical policies to address this crisis.

Ok, fine, if there is such a thing as a metaphysical crisis, maybe America is having one. But how, exactly, does one address a metaphysical crisis with "practical policies'?

Murphy's plan for fighting the crisis seems to be, as near as I can tell, the same as those of Trump and J.D. Vance: "A pro-family, pro-community program of economic nationalism," coupled with an attack on "massive concentrations of corporate power." Come to think of it, that is pretty much Biden's plan, too. I mean, whatever else you may think of Biden, he has made the support of union factory workers the centerpiece of his politics for 50 years.

Why don't we do this? It is within the power of the US government to adopt a program of economic nationalism: higher tariffs, subsidies for domestic manufacturing, more training in skilled trades and less for college academics, etc. We could bring more manufacturing back to the US. The thing is, the first impact of such a policy would be much higher prices for goods. It just costs more to have things made by Americans earning middle class incomes than buying them from China or Bangladesh. And as recent events reminded us, there is nothing Americans hate more than inflation. Rant about neoliberalism all you want, it is world trade that makes things like furnature and clothes affordable for working class people. If people really want both a return of industry to America and continued low prices – which is what polls say – they are in la la land.

Another angle on the issue comes from Julius Krein, a new right figure who supports Trump. Krein and Murphy have

a common goal: to remake the incentive structure of our economy. “The core issue is that our economy became one based on extracting rents,” Mr. Krein told me, “rather than building things.” It rewards those who invent clever ways to squeeze money out of government and regular people. This is the simple explanation for why so many jobs feel soulless and so many Americans feel harried and troubled amid the vast material wealth our country produces.

What kind of "things," exactly, do we need more of? So far as I can tell, we are awash in things. I constantly fantasize about throwing half of mine away. People complain about infrastructure, like high speed rail, or a better power grid, but we don't have those because people fight hell to keep them away from where they live. I suppose more good housing is an option, but most of the country has plenty of housing, including almost all the counties that went for Trump in 2020. Housing shortages are only a thing in certain big cities where a lot of people want to live so they can earn a good money doing soulless jobs. And is there any category of people Americans hate more than "property developers"?

Again, Biden agrees with all of this, and this generation's biggest single government act designed to fight the shift from making stuff to extracting rents was his "CHIPS and Science act." Somehow, though, this actual attempt ("practical policy") to bring more middle class factory jobs to the US failed to resonate. It was too complicated, too abstruse, to high tech:

“Great leaders tell stories that fit within the cultural and religious contexts of nations,” the Bay Area representative Ro Khanna told me. He helped write the CHIPS and Science Act, but he thought that the Democrats had failed to explain what they wanted it to achieve. “Symbolically, politically and culturally, Biden announcing three new steel plants in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio might have done more than the entire CHIPs act combined, because it would have showed that we were listening,” Mr. Krein said.

“Politics is not just about policy,” he said. “It’s about the vision of a nation. It’s about signaling that we’re heading somewhere.”

So, I guess, Americans are only interested in industrial policy if it is stupid and counterproductive? WE DO NOT NEED MORE STEEL MILLS.

Or is this just more longing for the Great Leader who will somehow fulfill us and make us proud? Bah to that.

I think this is all baloney. This whole fantasy of bringing back American manufacturing is a silly attempt to explain our lousy mood. I don't think our malaise has anything to do with steel production; I don't think it has much to do with economics at all. If it did, we would be happier. 

I think the root of the problem is a pervasive sense that ordinary life is just not good enough. That a life of going to work and getting paid and buying things and having "fun" when we can is empty and pointless and just too hard.

I think this is a very widespread human problem, which is why we have never been a happy species. Certain modern Catholics seem to think that medieval people were happier because they know who they were and had a rich religious life, to which I say, plague-pogroms-riots-revolts-murder-suicide-misery. People like David Graeber seem to think life was better for hunter-gatherers or primitive farmers, but so far as I can tell they do a lot of bitching about their own lives, and when offered the chance to try "civilization" as an alternative, most of them took it.

As for our particular situation, I will list some factors I think contribute to our bad mood. None of these apply to all Americans, and some apply onto to a minority, but I think they all contribute:

1. Immigration and racial change; many Americans miss the days when all their neighbors looked the same. I think immigration is great because it makes this a more vibrant and exciting country, but I understand that many others disagree.
2. Declining religious faith and church membership.
3. Rapid social change, e.g., gay rights, the decline of the patriarchal family, trans identities, etc. Many, many people just hate change and want things to stay the way they were. Meanwhile people who support these changes often wish they would go further and hate it that other people oppose this.
4. Ecological doomsterism.
5. The absense of an obvious foreign enemy to hate.
6. The rewriting of history to bring out slavery, racism, and other crimes and evils, undermining a happy narrative of We Are the Good Guys.
7. Changes in the news media. The new motto of the news is "panic sells." And it isn't just Fox News or other right-wing sources; CNN's policy seems to be to lead broadcast with the Fear of the Day, whether it is "new, more deadly" strains of monkeypox, shoplifting flash mobs, microplastics, or what have you. (How would you adress this with "practical policies"? Mandate that 68% of news stories be positive?)
8. Economic inequality. This really does seem to bother many people, including many who oppose all the measures we know of that might reduce it, like higher taxes.
9. Constant exposure, via television and social media, to people whose lives seem to me much more exciting, fulfilling, and less of a druge than yours is.
10. Angry fights between political parties and figures that make people think half the country is their evil enemies.
11. Too many drugs.
12. We are social mammals, and for all social mammals, fights about status and struggles for material advantage are fundamental to existence.
13. Evolution shaped us to desire, not to be content.

So far as I can see, people are mainly unhappy with beds we have made for ourselves. Social media constantly teases us with a "better", more exciting life because they is what gets followers. Our political media are angry because they is what gets people to pay attention. There are moderate news sources and moderate bastions on social media, but you've never heard of them because nobody cares. There have been various attempts at creating "good news" web sites, but all have failed. We have conflict because, at some level, we love it.

Americans refuse to be satisfied. Maybe that is, in a way, our greatness. We have had such a big part in building the modern world because we can't sit still and enjoy what we have. The economy may be better than ever before, but it is still not enough. Having opted for one way of life, we keep looking around and wondering if some other path would have been better. Modern humans are the richest, safest, longest-lived people in history, but so far as we can tell, we are not any happier for it.

My program for addressing this malaise would be this: Stop hating. Don't lose sleep over what you cannot control, and focus on what you can. Don't waste energy being angry that somebody else has more. Learn to love what you have.

David Roberts in Palestine and Egypt

Sultan Kaitbey Mosque, Cairo

David Roberts (1796-1864) was a Scottish painter and engraver best known today for the works he produced during journyes to the Middle East in 1838-1843. I discovered these via Robert Irwin, who used them for illustrations to The Arabian Nightmare. Anyway I love them.

David's Tower and the Walls of Jerusalem

Hebron

Jerusalem. These images are actually lithographs by Louis Haghe based on Roberts' paintings. I like some of these better in black and white but can't find many good images.

Silk Merchants Bazaar, Cairo

Ruined Mosques in the desert west of the Cairo citadel.

Gateway of the Metwaleys, Cairo

Gate of Victory, Cairo. More here.

Robert Irwin, "The Arabian Nightmare"

David Roberts, Tombs of the Caliphs, Cairo, Detail

If you're looking for something fantastical and very weird, this might be the book for you.

Robert Irwin (1946-2024) was a British scholar of medieval Islam who in his twenties tried to become a Sufi saint and lived for a time in a Dervish monastery in Algeria. Among other things he was an expert on The Arabian Nights. So he knew Islamic culture very well, especially in its more fantastic versions.

The Arabian Nightmare (1983) focuses on an Englishman who journeys to Cairo in 1486 in the company of several Venetians and other western travelers. It's hard to describe what happens next, except to say that he falls into madcap misadventures that involve sleep. Also hidden gardens, talking apes, magicians, athletes of self-harm, and so on, but especially sleep. He spends much of the book unsure whether he is asleep or awake, "waking" from one dream only to enter another, and so on and so on. He begins to wonder if he has something called The Arabian Nightmare, which, well, here is Irwin's description:

The Arabian Nightmare is obscene and terrible, monotonous and yet horrific. It comes to its victims every night, yet one of its properties is that it is never remembered in the morning. It is therefore the experiencing of infinite pain without the consciousness that one is doing so. Night after night of apparently endless torment and then in the morning the victim rises and goes about his daily business as if nothing had ever happened, and he looks forward to a good night's sleep at the end of a hard day's work. It is pure suffering, suffering that does not ennoble or teach, pointless suffering that changes nothing. The victim never knows that it is he, though he may well know the story and speculate on it, but there will be people in the marketplace who will know him by certain signs. There will be talk behind his back, for he has been marked — as a sort of idiot Messiah, perhaps. That is the Arabian Nightmare.

If nothing else, the book is an extraordinary feat of imagination. In its pages we meet the Knights of St. Lazarus, a crusading order who are all lepers; the craziest game of three wishes with a djinn ever played; "the gnostic escapologist who wriggles free from any body he may be entrapped in"; and many others.

The plot, alas, is utter nonsense. As things go along the reader starts to think that this or that scene is a pointless distriaction from the main story, but then wonders – wait, what was the main story anyway? At one point the tale dissolves into a tangential story, within which is another story, and another, and so on until you suspect that the goal is to set the world record for story nesting. 

But as I read, sometimes entertained and sometimes only baffled, one thing kept nagging at me: Robert Irwin was both a scholar of Sufi mysticism and, for a time, a practicing mystic. He later moved away from Sufism but this was his first novel, and I wonder if he had a lot of Sufi thoughts he needed to get off his chest. Is this book really some kind of exploration of Sufi theology, or maybe a riff on Sufi themes? The problem is, I know next to nothing about Sufism, and I can't find a review of this book by anyone who does, so I am left in the dark.

There is ceretainly much here that is at least vaguely philsophical. The theme of waking from one dream into another is a common one for Christian mystics, so it would not surprise me to hear that it is known to Sufis. One keeps coming across sentences like this:

It seemed that the friar must speak, that the friar himself must confess and admit there was no struggle between good and evil in the World, that there were not two parties to the struggle but only one, the party being of those who knew, and that those who did not know were their playthings. (172)

I did find one academic article about the book, but the authors either know less about Sufism than I do or consider that theme unimportant compared to obscure musings on "post-modern fantasy." (I am not surprised to encounter a scholarly discourse on modern fantasy, but after this taste I am resolved never to read a word of it again.) These professors do call The Arabian Nightmare a "mixture of popular fantasy with learned intertextuality," another hint that there might be something a little deeper going on. They also report that Irwin once said, "I am more interested in giving the English reader a taste of the authentic strangeness of the medieval Arab past, and its sheer alienness," which once again makes me think that he was trying to convey something about Sufism.

The theme of suffering may also have religious meaning. Irwin once said, "There may be ecstasy, but there is also a lot of suffering in Sufism." 

On the other hand, Irwin also once said that while some Sufis are religiously strict, others are "merely playing lateral-thinking-style mind games." "Lateral-thinking-style mind game" might be a perfect description of The Arabian Nightmare.

Another way to think about this book would be to consider it a mediation on dreaming, and the relationship of dreams to stories. I thought Irwin conveyed quite brilliantly the confusion and frustration that are central themes in my own dreaming. Of all the things people claim to be able to do, lucid dreaming might be to me the strangest. To me, a state of powerlessness is central to almost all my dreams. Dreams are something that happens to me, not something I do. I am sometimes able to do small things, but only with great effort, and usually not with any very good result. Also, I regularly find myself in stupid situations that are bad, but in ways that my waking self would immediately dismiss as preposterous. My dream self, alas, lacks the facility to identify the absurdity, leaving to experience real angst from nonsense like crashing my car by driving from the back seat with my eyes closed. 

The Arabian Nightmare is more like a dream than any other book I have ever read. It has the absurdity of a dream, the mystery, the sense of narrow constraints and shifting geography. It unfolds with the logic of dreams: rather than being causally or coming in temporarl order, one scene inspires the next by a sort of free association. This is an achievement of sorts, but it also brings out how different most dreams are from stories. Irwin has one of his characters, the storyteller who is supposed to be telling this story, comment on how weird everything is, and apologize for being so distracted.

As well he should. He has given us a collage of scenes from dreams and nightmares, richly enlivened with his knowledge of Islamic history and lore, but shapeless, senseless, and, so far as I can tell, ultimately pointless.

Viet Thanh Nguyen, "The Sympathizer"

The Sympathizer (2015) is the first of the half dozen novels I selected to read from the NY Times list of the 100 best books of the century so far. The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2016 and I remember being intrigued by it at the time. So when the list reminded me, I got an audio copy, very well read by François Chau.

I liked it. There were parts that irritated me, as I will explain, but on the whole it is a high-quality book about a fascinating topic: how a Vietnamese or Vietnamese American person in our day might think about the Vietnam war.

Our anonymous narrator seems to stand in for Vietnam. He is the bastard son of a French priest and and Vietnamese peasant woman; he worked in the South's military intelligence, but was a North Vietnamese spy. He is, he keeps saying, a "man of two minds," and he sees everything from both sides. He grew up poor, giving us flashbacks of rural poverty, but later served as the personal assistant to an important general, which shows us a bit of life among the southern elite. When Saigon falls in 1975, the narrator's controllers order him to join the exodus from the South so that he can spy on the Vietnamese community in the US.

It was the US part that I found rather irritating. Part of it was yet another immigrant saga that I felt like I had read ten times before, and rather less interesting than some. There is also some grousing about white people being racist against Asians, a phenomenon that may exist at some level but has had absolutely zero impact on the prospects of Asian Americans, who are thriving by every measure.  Nguyen's immigrants seemed to me to be doing really well, especially considering that they were just airlifted from a collapsing nation to a new continent. What is good about this section is the depiction of the listlessness that overtook many new arrivals; they were able to find jobs and apartments, but not purpose, so they spent a lot of time just hanging  around, drinking heavily and talking about the old country. Also interesting on the role of music in memory and nostalgia.

In the final section the narrator returns to Vietnam and ends up in a re-education camp. This was, to me, where the book really soars, and I forgave all its stumbles because of the powerful climax. The narrator is forced to meditate over and over on the famous saying of Ho Chi Minh, "Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence." But what does "nothing" mean? Is this perhaps a profoundly ambiguous statement, depending on how one reads it? And it is, after all, ultimately a slogan, and after being "civilized" by the French and "defended" by the Americans, Vietnamese people know better than anyone that slogans are merely "empty suits draped over the corpse of an idea." Why had so many died over these empty suits? What was it all for?

Highly recommended.

Links 16 August 2024

Flower preserved in Baltic amber, just over one inch

(28 mm) across, 40 million years old

Noah Smith thinks the horrible mood of Americans is finally improving, hopes the decade to come will be more optimistic, lauds the Harris campaign for latching onto this "good vibe."

Scott Siskind, Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? (Not really, but it seems to be effective against a bizarre variety of conditions.)

Crazy enormous drawing of one artist's cruise ship adventures.

Thread on Grok AI, which seems to have been released without any safety protocols and will happily make an image of Mickey Mouse slaughtering children or tell you how to stage a school shooting.

Tyler Cowen interviews Paul Bloom, psychologist and expert on child development, very interesting. Says young children don't care much about skin color but they are very sensitive to who speaks their own language in a familiar accent.

The people who were labeled "gifted" as kids and think this ruined their lives.

Discovery of two more victims at Pompeii; modern archaeology has provided an exact description of their last hours.

Matthew Perry's death amidst serious ketamine addiction reminds us that ALL psycho-active drugs are dangerous. (CBS, NY Times, BBC)

New Neanderthal site discovered in Spain, c. 70,000 years old, shows the residents were eating small animals like rabbits and turtles as well as the larger game found on most Neanderthal sites. This is presented as surprising but I don't know of any predator that won't eat smaller animals if that's all they can find. My dog happily chases anything from deer to houseflies, and its mainly the insects that he actually eats.

Sabine Hossenfelder on why science and scientists can't be trusted, 10-minute video. The problem of academics engaging with each other in insider games, rather than with the world, is deep, widespread and, I think, very damaging.

Delightful collection of mysterious personal ads from the 1860s and 1870s.

On Twitter/X, Shashank Joshi of The Economist has some passages from a recent book on antisemitism in Britain. The book says only about 5% of Brits are "hard core" antisemites, but that means there are about 11 hard core antisemites for each British Jew. The proportion of antisemites rises to 15% among British Muslims, but since British Muslims are a small minority, the large majority of British antisemites are natives of Christian background.

In Belgrade, Serbia, big protests against a proposed lithium mine. Decarbonization will not be easy.

And here is Matt Yglesias on the hard problem that sometimes decarbonizing means paying costs locally to have a very small impact on a global problem: paywalled article you could read with a trial subscription, summary on Twitter/X.

Big primary battle in Florida between Trump acolyte Matt Gaetz and a Republican challenger backed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Any hope for breaking Trump's hold on the party? Probably not in Florida's first district, but worth watching.

New street art from Bansky.

Sabine Hossenfelder on a another experiment that found no sign of dark matter, 5-minute video.

Steph Curry in slow motion, eight 3-pointers in the Olympic basketball final.

Claims that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were innocent victims of US anti-communist hysteria, or antisemitism, or both, are still all over the internet, even though Soviet records obtained in the 1990s confirmed that Julius was a spy and Ethel helped him. Some people can't let go of their grievances.

Tweet claiming that one of the most striking things about the recent Olympics was the "unprecedented unity of fans" from the former Soviet nations in central Asia. Something of a regional identity seems to be developing. This might seem obvious to you but the post-Soviet governments have actively opposed this and tried to develop their own nationalisms.

Many painters have been obsessed with color. But what did their colors look like when new? Does it matter that what we see is nothing like what they intended? What should we do about it?

Review of a new biography of Oliver Cromwell, interesting on the politics of the 1650s, when dissenting Protestants wielded a power all out of proportion to their numbers. The radicalism of the Civil War period faded very quickly because there were never very many radicals. As a naive undergraduate I thought the Diggers, Levellers, and so on represented "the people," but now we know they represented only themselves.

Ukraine using dog-shaped robots for scouting and delivering supplies to front-line positions. Said to have enough battery capacity for two hours of operation.

Poland's arms-buying spree continues with a reported deal to purchase 48 Patriot missile launchers and 644 PAC-3 missiles (the ones used for shooting down incoming missiles). The launchers will be assembled in Poland. Also more than 300 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, exact number unclear.

And German buys 600 Patriot PAC-3s for around $2.5 billion. Some Ukrainians have suggested that if Europeans are worried about Russia they should give these weapons to Ukraine instead of building their own stockpiles, and indeed finding this balance is an interesting problem for European nations.

Russian troops in Ukraine keep getting older: "The average age of Russians killed in Ukraine is nearing 38 and rising." Soldiers in their 70s have been captured. Opinions differ as to how bad a sign this is militarily; I am mainly impressed that tens of thousands of Russian men aged 40 to 70 have so few prospects that they choose to sign up for a bloody war to get a bonus that translates to around $25,000. Especially considering that many Russian businesses are desperate for workers and unemployment is very low.

Interesting interview with a former Russian officer about the Kursk incursion. Notes that Ukraine has staged several raids across the border using the "Freedom of Russia Legion." This was done, he says, to observe the Russian response and scout for the future offensive. Border guards tried to warn about this, but they were ignored and nothing was done to shore up defenses.

Ukraine captures 102 Russian soldiers at once. Ukrainian sources say Russia has lately been more eager to set up a prisoner exchange than ever before, presumably because many of the prisoners from Kursk are conscripts.

Because of the chaos of the Kursk front there have been multiple reports of Russian aviation attacking their own men. One poor group of Russians in two trucks were attacked by their own helicopter, and then Ukrainian dones swooped in to finish them off.

Thread on Twitter/X summarizing a Wall Street Journal story about Ukraine's destruction of the Nordstream Pipeline. Nobody seems very worried about hiding the details of this operation; does that make it real, or fake?

Reports that Ukrainian forces have surrounded the village of Korenovo with hundreds of Russian inside.

Pretty good article at Vox about how Columbia University President Minouche Shafik managed to make everyone mad over her handling of pro-Gaza protests, leading to her resignation this week.

Crazy little video of a Russian soldier who appears to head butt a drone, which explodes, but he then trots away as if unhurt. This reminds me of a weird article I read decades ago about all the crazy stuff that happened in explosions in WW II: people who had their clothes blown off but were completely unhurt, people who were thrown 30 feet through the air but landed unharmed, etc. The conclusion was that if you set off a few million explosions the really unlikely stuff starts to appear in the sample.

Review of a book about World War II by Philips O'Brien, a military historian who thinks battles are unimportant and wars are really about production and what the US calls "command and control." (Or, these days, "C2".) Among the claims is that US and British bombing of Germany was decisive in its defeat. Interesting, although I don't see how it refutes Richard Overy's argument that the bombing campaign used up more US and British resources than it destroyed German resources. Does make it clear that the US and Britain had a bigger part in defeating Germany than some accounts allow, since most of the Luftwaffe was devoted to fighting the bombers. I follow O'Brien on Twitter/X and so far his record on the Ukraine war has been lousy; he was claiming more than a year ago that Russian losses were "unsustainable" and they would "soon" have to give up.