Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
Ben Pentreath, solstice in Tuscany, wonderful photographs, plus more from the Orkneys.
The top post of the year at Marginal Revolution was "Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy," in which Tyler Cowen argued that everything Trump does should be considered first as a move in the culture wars. The rest of the top ten are here, much interesting stuff.
Pew finds that there is no mass conversion of young Americans to Catholicism or Orthodoxy; some are joining but an equal number are leaving. The headline of their article is, "Religion Holds Steady in America."
Ethan Mollick asks Claude to generate a fake witty Churchill quote. (Twitter/X)
Outstanding three part series on Turkish history from Austrian YouTuber Kraut: Hittites to Atatürk (1 hour 45 minutes), Atatürk to Abdullah Gül (1 hour 30 minutes), Erdogan and the Future (1 hour). One of the best works of history I have consumed this year.
CDC allows researchers to release data which includes both the number of Americans diagnosed with autism and the severity of their symptoms, and it shows that all the increase is in the sufferers with mild impairment, or no impairment at all. (Twitter/X, paper) Very strong evidence that the "rise" in autism is all about expanding the definition.
Photographer Rolfe Horn, featured here back in 2009, now has a web site with lots of images. Now he seems to work in color, but I still like his older, black and white stuff better, so that's what I linked to.
Manhattan's steam tunnels, which still heat a majority of the island's buildings, article that won one of David Brooks' Sidney Awards.
Large-scale study of isotopic ratios in bones from English skeletons finds, not separate Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions, but a continuous influx of foreigners throughout the early Middle Ages, with roughly 40% of burials in eastern England showing evidence of foreign birth from 400 to 1200 AD. This is a very weird finding and I am not sure what to make of it.
And another from Brooks, Adam Mastroianni on "Why Aren't Smart People Happier?"
Amazing blog post on the Roman mosaics of southern Spain.
Interesting essay on movies, monster-fucking, contemporary gender differenes, and the general messed-upedness of human sexuality.
One eight-year-old made the perfect Christmas gift for his economist father. (Twitter/X)
Wes Cecil on Daoism for the stressful modern world., 45-minute video.
The challenges of coding in the AI world (Twitter/X).
Another fabulous gift from Big Pharma: Trikafta, a drug mixture that promises many cystic fibrosis sufferers a normal lifespan. (Twitter/X, wikipedia, Pharmacy Times)
Annual letter from Dan Wang, whose two obsessions are computer tech and China. Very interesting on what the SF tech world is like and why he prefers finance guys to tech bros.
Annual NY Times piece on the year's best sentences, most of which are actually short paragraphs. Two examples. A.O. Scott: "Occam’s razor, the venerable philosophical principle that the truest explanation is likely to be the simplest, has been thrown away. We’re living in the age of Occam’s chain saw, when the preferred answer is the one that makes the loudest noise and generates the most debris." David Brooks: "One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia."
This paper calculates large gains for students admitted to Texas universities at the bottom of their class, compared to similar students who were not admitted.
2025 LLM Year in Review (Twitter/X)
To get reliable electricity, Africans are turning more and more to Chinese solar panels. (NY Times) Cheap solar power will likely end up having a huge impact on the whole continent.
Austrian YouTuber Kraut, "Why Noam Chomsky is Garbage," focusing on Chomsky's denial of the Bosnian genocide, 40-minute video. I agree that when the US does something good, Chomsky's brain glitches and he begins to sputter with ever more disturbing lies. What a weird man.
For my usual ideosynchratic reasons I checked the wikipedia article on the Battle of the Tollense Valley, c. 1250 BC, a truly remarkable Bronze Age site in northern Germany near the Baltic Sea. But the article hasn't been updated since 2017, and I had thought excavations were still ongoing. So I looked a little further and found this recent publication, which says that some of the Bronze arrowheads likely came from Bohemia, so this was some kind of inter-regional conflict. This article also has a good map showing how the finds are distributed along the river.
Brief year-in-review article about the space industry. Hundreds of companies compete in the launch and satellite business and new ones are founded every week.
To get people to adopt the pit bull mixes they have so many of, some shelters are branding them "Labrador Retrivers" or other innocuous breeds. (Twitter/X; some academic backup) And here on pit bull owners who promote intentional inbreeding. The author, a stats guy, started a monstrous thread about all of this when he was mauled by a pit bull that "just snapped" after never attacking anyone before. Happens every day in America. I get why gangsters like pit bulls, but the affection of what appear to be normal, middle-class women for the dogs they call "house hippos" mystifies me. Dog breeding matters: retrievers retrieve without being taught, pointers point without being taught, and fighting dogs fight whether you teach them to or not.
Russian horse cavalry vs. Ukrainian drones. (Twitter/X)
A Russian infantryman throws snowballs at a drone. (Twitter/X)
1 comment:
Large-scale study of isotopic ratios in bones from English skeletons finds, not separate Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions, but a continuous influx of foreigners throughout the early Middle Ages, with roughly 40% of burials in eastern England showing evidence of foreign birth from 400 to 1200 AD. This is a very weird finding and I am not sure what to make of it.
The English Channel isn't a terribly huge barrier to travel. What's so surprising about the idea that mainlanders went to England at a fairly steady pace, even outside of notable periods like the Danelaw, etc?
Boat travel wasn't just restricted to armies and rulers. Ordinary people had boats, and could just... sail to England if they wanted to, either for trade, or to find work, or because they had family there who settled in prior generations, or whatever else.
Your local fishing village in Frisia keeps getting caught up in local military squabbles or raids? As a fisherman, you might decide to relocate to the other side of the channel and live in East Anglia for a few seasons, until local conflicts died down. But maybe by that time, you get married, start a family, and have a better life, so why go back?
Or perhaps you're a farmer whose home was destroyed, so you flee across the channel. Or perhaps you're a criminal looking to escape the law. Or perhaps you're a merchant sailor from the Baltic looking to retire and your kinsman has invited you to come live with him. Or perhaps... etc...
You could have sailed reliably from Stockholm to London with relative ease, following coastlines the entire way and avoiding deep water sailing entirely. As long as you had a decent boat, even a very small one, you could simply sail when the weather was good, and stop more or less whenever you needed to at any of the countless coastal settlements along the way.
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