Rebuilding the wooden roof of Notre Dame de Paris.
More about the MAGA vs. Big Tech split over Indian immigrants, from Kevin Drum and Noah Smith.
How an obscure 1915 change in immigration law led to a huge boom in Chinese restaurants in America.
Great side gig for Utahans who look like Jesus. Or how Mormons imagine Jesus.
Medieval people healing themselves by eating images of the saints.
Amazing Hellenistic tomb excavated in western Greece, lots of gold.
Jennifer Pahlka wants to "bring Elon to a knife fight;" can he reform the government where so many others have failed? Would you root for or against that? Interesting essay that won one of David Brooks Sydney Awards.
At Slate, Molly Oldstead argues that the drone/alien craze happened because people have traded old-fashioned religion for a grab-bag of random paranormal beliefs. The number of people who regularly attend religious services has plummeted, but the number of atheists is still small.
The story of the endangered Bechtel's Bat and Britain's HS-2 train; it seems that there may not have been any bats along the train's route until scientists went looking for them using hi-tech lures. I have similar issues with bat preservation in the US, where "endangered" bat species have a habit of showing up everywhere anybody looks hard for them. On Twitter/X.
Interesting 11-minute video on South Korea, which connects the low birth rate to widespread resentful misery: "People are finding it easier to opt out of the system and just get angry instead."
Since 2000, immigrants, who make up 14% of US residents, have won 40% of the Nobel Prizes granted to Americans. Some MAGA guy on Twitter yesterday said that we don't need imported scientists because "we built the bomb and got to the moon on our own," which inspired a lot of chuckling.
Kitchen efficiency in 1899: the Hoosier Cabinet.
In the cities where they have trained, Waymo driverless cars have about one tenth as many accidents as cars driven by people.
Interesting French post on an old tidal mill on the southwest coast, an area where saltworks, developed in the Middle Ages, were later turned in to fishponds, oyster nurseries, and water channels for the tide mill.
Revisiting San Francisco's recently ended experiment in "de-tracking" high school math. Like almost all discussions of the subject it fails by not asking, "What is school for"? Or, more specifically, "Why do we care if anyone learns algebra?"
The decline of stay-at home-mothers has more to do with high wages than ecomonic distress.
Interesting NY Times article on crime and homelessness in New Mexico, free for now. Includes the famous line, the killer "had been prescribed medication for schizophrenia but often refused to take it."
Video emerges of a new, large Chinese fighter jet with no tail and three engines; some people are call ing it "sixth generation." Certainly drove aviation Twitter/X into a frenzy.
Asked what transportation success story he wants to talk up in his final days on the job, Pete Buttigieg says, "fish culverts."
Wooden shoe and other well-preserved objects from a 15th-century privy.
Bronze statues and coins found at the San Casciano dei Bagni hot springs in Tuscany.
Wars get uglier the longer they last. Here is a tweet saying that of the 147 confirmed Russian executions of Ukrainian POWs, 127 have been in 2024. And here is Haaretz, Israel is Losing its Humanity in Gaza.
2 comments:
Impressed by how much play the dispute between Big Tech and the "Little America" wing of MAGA is getting. With so many top guns directly involved, it bids fair turn into something bigger than I thought. I'm finding the whole thing spitefully enjoyable, since neither side is a genuine friend to things I care about. Possibly tangential, but also possibly significant for the larger quarrel, is the pathetic tone of this supposedly private communication from Trump to Musk: "“Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.” (Quoted on HCR's substack, a comfort zone for liberals; "x" in the message is said to refer to Musk's son, not Twitter.)
I wonder if it is particularly true that wars get uglier the longer they last. It's possible some truly new achievement in atrocity hides behind the paywall I encounter at Haaretz, but it would have to be very horrendous indeed to be worse than the calculated savagery of the Hamas attack that began the war, or of Israel's broad, quite officialized loosening of restrictions on aerial targeting that led to the famous rain of unguided 2000-lb bombs, and the widely agreed calculation that the large bulk of Palestinian casualties took place in the war's first three months or so. In any case, overall reporting (the secrets hidden behind the Haaretz paywall aside) seems to indicate the war is getting less, not more intense--though that could change once Trump is in office.
The world wars, of course, did get uglier as time went on, and some of that, such as the introduction of poison gas and unrestricted submarine warfare, does seem closely related to the brutalizing effects of war over time (and, related to that, the leadership's increasingly desperate gambles that breaking rules would provide them victory). But some of it was dependent on the sheer time it took for production and technology to catch up with tactics the leadership had desired from early on. This seems especially the case with aerial bombing of cities. But then one runs into something like Barbarossa, whose peculiar brutality started from ideologically-based planning at the top, not from the fact that the Wehrmacht had already been at war for two years.
There obviously is, as I said, such as thing as brutalization over time. I guess my point is that one should be cautious about saying that any given instance of brutality, or brutality in general, is "the result of" time at war. And maybe, in fact, my real, ultimate point is my discomfort with clear schemes of causation in general. I have come to hold strongly that human phenomena are never, ever simple, but always already complex and overdetermined.
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