Tyler Cowen likes to ask British economists, "why is northern England poor?" Tom Forth has an answer for him.
Big push among MAGA folks right now to out universities and non-profits for blatantly pushing to hire minorities. Remember that under past Supreme Court rulings it was ok to make minority status a factor in hiring, but except when past discrimination had been proved it was illegal to set quotas or set aside certain positions for minority candidates. I see lots of lawsuits and big money settlements coming.
Large language models are mostly moderate democrats. (Twitter/X) Moderate Democrat Matt Yglesias says this proves they are already smarter than most people.
Oz Katerji, "Hope Won in Syria," free for now at Foreign Affairs. Katerji: "As a war journalist, I have never reported on a good news story in my entire 15 year career, until now." Thinking it over, the wars of the past 15 years have mostly been dismal and inconclusive.
Make Sunsets is a private venture dedicated to cooling the earth by spreading sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: company web site, news story.
Here's an academic paper that seems related in key ways to the current American situation: Falling racial inequality and rising educational inequality in US prison admissions for drug, violent, and property crimes. The paper claims that educational inequality (the gap between the college educated and others) is now much greater than racial inequality. If you wanted to put a positive spin on Steve Bannon-style populist nationalism, you could say that they are desperately worried about the collapse of morals, self-discipline, and economic prospects among working class Americans and they believe that importing foreigners to keep the economy booming is just going to shove those people farther out onto the margins.
Italian archaeologists uncover the footprints of people who were fleeing a volcanic eruption ca. 2000 BC.
In eastern Kentucky, there's a plan to move people from flood-prone valleys to the only other flat ground available: old mountain-top removal coal mines. (NY Times)
A weird argument that advice has become useless to us because we are too wrapped up in our own thought worlds. The piece takes off from Walter Benjamin's statement that characters in novels are "sealed off from society and tradition." The protaganist is "the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none." I don't think modern people are "sealed off from society and tradition," but I agree that many modern people seem to think they are.
CNN has some new results on the bead-covered Copper Age burials from Montelirio; most post on these finds is here.
A claim that the parts of Germany conquered by the Romans are still different from the parts that weren't. A counter argument might be that they are basically talking about the Rhine valley, and maybe that is just geographically more international and outward-looking than Saxony or Prussia.
A Roman miniature lock made of gold and iron found in Germany, with a detailed view of the mechanism. The Renaissance surge in clock-making is often cited as an important precursor to the industrial revolution, because it created a class of people with mechanical skills that could be applied to making other machines. But it seems to me that the Romans also had a lot of people with mechanical skills; locks and keys were very common in the Empire, and there are occasional hints in the written sources of much more elaborate devices. (Plus the Antikythera mechanism)
The people who have gone "AI Native" and make AI a constant query of their research, business, and even their pleasure reading. Via Marginal Revolution.
The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has offered a $1 million prize for deciphering the Indus Valley script.
Agnes Callard, who has lately been on a crusade against contemporary parenting, now writing against encouraging children to be weird. I agree that this is imposing our own, adult fantasies on children, but then again maybe some degree of weirdness will be essential to success in the AI age.
More on the lost civilizations of the Amazon basin, this time evidence of elablorate irrigation systems for year-round maize cultivation. The long-running argument over whether the pre-Columbian Amazon supported large human populations is now pretty much over, with the "lots of people" faction winning in a rout.
A note on Twitter/X that the current MAGA crowd are praising RFK Jr. for wanting to make school lunches healthier, which is exactly what Michele Obama said back in 2010 only to get savaged by conservatives for being "anti-American." Puzzling world.
The history of Devil's Island.
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