Pergamon and the Hellenistic World

Pergamon – now Bergama, Turkey – was one of the great cities of the Hellenistic world. It was an ancient place, but it was of no particular note until it became the capital of the Attalid Dynasty in 281 BCE. The Attalids were one of those Hellenitic dynasties that sprang from Alexander the Great's generals, like the Ptolemy's and the Seleucids. They were of no great importance until they chose to ally themselves with the rising power of Rome.

In the second century BCE, enriched and strengthened by the Roman alliance, the Attalids made their capital into an imposing showplace of classical architecture and art. Above, panoramas of the acropolis as it exists today, and as it might have looked in 129 BCE.

Pergamon was excavated by German archaeologists between 1878 and 1886. Their most famous discovery was the great altar, which they disassembled and took back to Berlin, where it still resides. This was built by King Eumenes II after some notable victory – which one is disputed – perhaps in 184 or 166 BCE.

Sculptures from the altar. The friezes mostly depict battles between gods and giants.

Right now the Metropolitan Museum is hosting a major exhibit on Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms, which includes some of the sculptures from Berlin. These are some of the pieces on display.

The "Hellenistic Kingdoms" bit gives the curators license to include stuff that has nothing to do with Pergamon, like gold wreaths and this famous figurine of a veiled dancer.

Here's an amazing item, a gold diadem from Kerch on the Crimean Bosporus. More of the amazing Graeco-Scythian art from that kingdom here.

I have always been fascinated by the Hellenistic world, because of the boundless curiosity and far-ranging cosmopolitanism of its intellectuals; one of my several unwritten novels is set in Hellenistic Rhodes. I wish I were on my way to New York this weekend to see these wonders.

Money and Happiness, Continued

Interesting graph showing the relationship between income and happiness using various definitions of happiness. The two most common measures of "happiness" are "life satisfaction," which means how you feel about your life when you reflect on it, and "affect," which means your mood at the moment. Notice that this whole graph is contained between 5 and 7.5 on a 10-point scale, which shows you that the effect of money is not all that dramatic whatever scale you use. Rising income is correlated with life satisfaction, and the effect does not go away no matter how high an income you have. But money has little effect on your mood from moment to moment.

To me the new and surprising thing about this graph is money has hardly any impact on how stressed people feel; in fact people with very high incomes are slightly more likely to feel stressed than people around the median. Not even a very low income does much to increase your level of stress.

I got this from the career advice at 80,000 Hours. which is quite interesting so far. I especially like their take-down of "following your passion," which includes the graph below:

Dave Hopkins Doubts Bernie Sanders is the Democrats' Future

Like a lot of other people, I have been very impressed by the way Bernie Sanders has energized the left wing of the Democratic Party, and I have assumed that the next Democratic nominee will be someone to the left of Hillary and Obama. Political scientist Dave Hopkins disagrees:

There's a temptation to assume that everything new in politics is a harbinger of the future. But lots of things are dead ends: They rise, and they go away. There's no reason to believe just definitionally that Sanders represents the future of the Democratic Party more than anybody else.

Hopkins points out that Barrack Obama is still much more popular among Democrats than Sanders is, and he thinks the Democrats' future is still with the Obama coalition of minorities and college-educated whites:

I think the key for understanding the future of Democratic politics is still Obama. Obama has shown you can win nationally as a Democrat not as a liberal crusader, but not as someone who takes on the left of the party to prove to the swing voters that you're not a liberal, either.

It seems like Obama will go down in history as the key figure in current Democratic Party politics — he showed how the party's new demographic coalition could come together. If you want to talk about the future of the Democratic Party, that's where it is.

I have previously noted that when you poll them about the issues, Sanders' supporters are not measurably more liberal than Hillary's. Sanders' supporters seem motivated at least as much by anger at the status quo, and an allied sense that Hillary is a crook, as they are by socialism. After all, Sanders consistently polled better among independents who vote in Democratic primaries than among registered Democrats. Right now his supporters seem more focused on the alleged "rigging" of the nomination process than on any policy issue.

I guess my feeling now is that the course of the Democratic Party over the next decade is still very much up in the air. I feel certain that tough regulation of Wall Street will remain a key Democratic issue, and I expect more moves toward alleviating the problem of student debt. But it may be that Sanders' rise over the past ten months has had more to do with Hillary's particular weaknesses than with the issues Sanders is championing.

Cape Sounion

Motivation

When you're one of the best athletes in the world and have already won a championship, what motivates you? For two stars with the NBA's Golden State Warriors, it's remembering all the people who were drafted ahead of you:

Klay Thompson holds a semi-tongue-in-cheek grudge against the Kings for daring to draft another shooter, Jimmer Fredette, over him. "I considered myself the best shooter in that draft, so when someone took another shooter over me, it was a slap in the face," Thompson told ESPN.com after Game 1 of the Finals.

He delights in reminding teammates and coaches behind closed doors that two Cavaliers, Kyrie Irving and Tristan Thompson, went ahead of him in the same draft; he quips that the Cavs took "the wrong Thompson," team officials say. "He definitely remembers Kyrie went before him," assistant GM Kirk Lacob told ESPN.com. "I can say that for sure."

And Draymond Green:

Green has memorized the names and teams of the 34 picks before him in the 2012 NBA Draft and without looking at a sheet of paper, he can accurately recite them.

"First was Anthony Davis to New Orleans," he says. "Then Charlotte took (Michael) Kidd-Gilchrist. Then Washington took Bradley Beal. Fourth was Cleveland: Dion Waiters.
"Eight was Toronto: Terrence Ross ...
"Sixteen was Houston: Royce White ..."
By the time he's done, Green has reeled off the names of all 34 players selected ahead of him and the corresponding team.
In order.
...
"I will never forget that night," he said. "I had to wait all that time. I'm not saying I'm cocky or anything, but I felt like I had to wait behind guys I was better than. And I think I've proven it."

The Feminist Candidate

Hillary's enemies have always said that she doesn't really believe in anything but her own success. Certainly she is extremely ambitious, and she has shifted her positions on a lot of issues over the years. But one thing she has never wavered on is her feminism. She believes in the importance of power for women, and she has worked her whole life for feminist causes. Above, video from Hillary's campaign putting her race for president in the feminist context; below, her victory tweet from last night.

Now Hillary gets to run for president against America's leading sexist jerk, which must be awfully close to her favorite dreams.

Friedman Unloads on the GOP

Tom Friedman wants a new conservative party:

We know just how little they are attached to any principles, because today’s Republican Party’s elders have told us so by (with a few notable exceptions) being so willing to throw their support behind a presidential candidate whom they know is utterly ignorant of policy, has done no homework, has engaged in racist attacks on a sitting judge, has mocked a disabled reporter, has impugned an entire religious community, and has tossed off ignorant proposals for walls, for letting allies go it alone and go nuclear and for overturning trade treaties, rules of war and nuclear agreements in ways that would be wildly destabilizing if he took office.

Despite that, all top G.O.P. leaders say they will still support Donald Trump — even if he’s dabbled in a “textbook definition” of racism, as House Speaker Paul Ryan described it — because he will sign off on their agenda and can do only limited damage given our checks and balances.

Really? Mr. Speaker, your agenda is a mess, Trump will pay even less attention to you if he is president and, as Senator Lindsey Graham rightly put it, there has to be a time “when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.”

Will it ever be that time with this version of the G.O.P.?

Et tu, John McCain? You didn’t break under torture from the North Vietnamese, but your hunger for re-election is so great that you don’t dare raise your voice against Trump? I hope you lose. You deserve to. Marco Rubio? You called Trump “a con man,” he insults your very being and you still endorse him? Good riddance.

Chris Christie, have you not an ounce of self-respect? You’re serving as the valet to a man who claimed, falsely, that on 9/11, in Jersey City, home to many Arab-Americans, “thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” Christie is backing a man who made up a baldfaced lie about residents of his own state so that maybe he can be his vice president. Contemptible.

This is exactly why so many Republican voters opted for Trump in the first place. They intuited that the only thing these G.O.P. politicians were interested in was holding onto their seats in office — and they were right. It made voters so utterly cynical that many figured, Why not inflict Trump on them? It’s all just a con game anyway. And at least Trump sticks it to all of those politically correct liberals. And anyway, governing doesn’t matter — only attitude.

And who taught them that?

Friedman may by right in a lot of ways here, and so far I am hearing from my own Republican friends that many will vote for Hillary or sit this election out.

But Friedman has never understood American democracy. He is a policy guy, and an internationalist, somebody who cares deeply about the details of trade deals and infrastructure finance plans. Most people are not like that. Most people pay no attention to that sort of wonkery. Most people vote their identities; they vote for the party and the politician who seems most firmly on their side. This goes for both parties; the Democrats have voters who are progressives because they think it's cool to be trans or eat organic. Obama didn't get such amazing turnout from black voters because of his health care plan. And most American conservatives aren't really much invested in trade policy or Wall Street deregulation. I often think about Rick Perry in this connection, a man who got into conservative politics because he loved the Boy Scouts so much, just they way they were in the Texas town where he grew up.

No political party can win a majority just from voters who support their policies. To win a majority you need the votes of millions who couldn't tell you a thing about what laws their party plans to pass. You need to appeal to their emotions. Tom Friedman wants a coldly technocratic Republican party dedicated to regulatory reform and "market based solutions." Fine, that's his choice. But a party like that could never get more than 25 percent of the vote. Many professional politicians are supporting Trump because they understand this. They know that half of their own votes come from people who don't much care about tax reform or defense policy and just want to keep liberal ideas out of their towns. You can't win elections by refusing to accept the support of jerks, losers, sexist pigs, racists, stoners, effete snobs, and every other sort of fool, because collectively they make up a big part of the electorate.

Tom Friedman doesn't have to run for office, so he doesn't need the support of the average conservative-leaning voter. If people who do need that support are grudgingly taking sides with Trump, maybe Friedman should rethink what is is that ordinary people really want, and what sort of politics are possible in a democracy.

Hillary!

I'm very glad Hillary closed out the primary season with big wins in New Jersey and California, instead of limping into the nomination on the basis of past performance. That would have seemed weak, and no doubt Trump would have mocked her about it.

But she won, pretty much fair and square. Even Bernie will have to admit that eventually.

The Times previews the election:

Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Trump signaled in their victory speeches how they plan to campaign in the general election: not on narrow promises or practical disagreements about shared goals, but on sweeping and stark themes about the country’s basic character.

Mr. Trump pledged to be an “America first” president, a guardian of the nation’s traditional interests against foreign forces, and a warrior against “a corrupt system” in Washington. Mrs. Clinton, in contrast, vowed to stand up for the United States as a “big-hearted, fair-minded country” open to immigration and diversity and, she said, under grave threat from Mr. Trump.

The election, Mrs. Clinton said, would be “about millions of Americans coming together to say: We are better than this. We won’t let this happen in America.”

Should be interesting.

That's the place to kill them

During the Battle of Champion Hill, part of the Vicksburg campaign of 1863, Union general John "Black Jack" Logan found some of his men trying to withdraw from the field. Logan sought out the superior officer on the spot and said to him,

"Adjutant, get your men together and prepare to advance."
"General, the rebels are awful thick up there," replied the Adjutant.
"Damn, it! That's the place to kill them – where they are thick!" shouted the general.

–private J.B. Harris, 34th Indiana

Siberian Wolf

Wooden, 11 cm (4 1/2 inches) tall. Iron Age, 500-200 BCE. In the Cleveland Museum.

Violent Protests, This Time with Science

Matt Yglesias:

Princeton professor Omar Wasow has a relevant paper that examined county-level voting patterns in the 1960s. What he found is that exposure to nonviolent protests pushed people to vote for the more liberal presidential candidate, while exposure to violent ones pushed people to vote for the more conservative candidate.

The effect is large enough, according to Wasow, that the series of riots in 1968 swung the election to Richard Nixon.

It's just one study, and it probably proves what Wasow wanted to prove, but still. Violent protests are anti-democratic and wrong, and they probably hurt your cause anyway. Just don't.

For Some People, Keynes was Right

Tyler Cowen:

John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, prophesied that by 2030 people in wealthy nations would work no more than 15 hours a week. It isn’t turning out that way.

The average workweek for full-time American workers isn’t anywhere close to Keynes’s predictions. Current estimates are 34 to 47 hours, depending on what exactly is being measured and how part-time labor is treated.

So Americans between 19 and 65 are working a lot more than Keynes thought. And one group in particular is working a lot more: mothers.

But maybe he wasn't completely wrong:

If Keynes had been talking just about older people, he would have been closer to the mark, because older people do work much less than they did decades ago. Certainly, they work much less than younger people. According to one estimate, men over the age of 65 spend almost 43 percent more time on recreation than do men of prime working age. Over all, older men spend far more time than younger ones on reading, watching television and taking cruises, among other fun activities. Fewer than 20 percent of men over 65 are in the work force today. We tend to take this for granted, but it’s a radical contrast with 1880, when that figure was about 75 percent. . . .

Teenagers are also ahead of Keynes’s workplace predictions. Several decades ago, about 55 percent of teenagers had jobs, but lately only about 35 percent do.

This is interesting. Keynes was right that our leisure would increase, but it is increasing at the beginning and end of our lives, not in the middle.

Is that the best way to distribute the work? If you were designing a society from scratch, would you set it up so that mothers with young children would work full time so that everybody could retire at 65 and teenagers could spend their weekends playing video games?

Seems rather puzzling to me.

On Violent Protests against Donald Trump

Martin Luther King:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Via Charles Blow.

Post Apocalyptic Doll House Scenes

By Lori Nix and Kathleen Gerber. More at This is Colossal.

Seasteading Sinks

In 2008 billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel co-founded the Seasteading Institute, devoted to building floating islands where inventors and entrepreneurs could thrive free from all interference by governments. This year Thiel has become a delegate for Donald Trump and financed Hulk Hogan's $100-million libel suit against Gawker. Thiel's turn toward authoritarianism puts me in a mind to reflect on the absurdity of the Seasteading project and all the other boyish fantasies of tech world libertarianism.

The Seasteading Institute's web site lays out their project like this:

Seasteaders bring a startup sensibility to the problem of government monopolies that don’t innovate sufficiently. Obsolete political systems conceived in previous centuries are ill-equipped to unleash the enormous opportunities in twenty-first century innovation. Seasteaders envision a vibrant startup sector for governance, with many small groups testing out innovative ideas as they compete to better serve their residents’ needs.

Currently, it is very difficult to experiment with alternative social systems on a small scale; countries are so enormous that it is hard for an individual to make much difference. The world needs a place where those who wish to experiment with building new societies can go to test out their ideas. All land on Earth is already claimed, making the oceans humanity’s next frontier.

You only have to reach the next paragraph to discover that the seasteaders have already given up – for now, anyway – their plan to build on the open ocean. Open oceans have big waves a lot of the time, rather inconveniently for city life, and they are regularly tossed by gigantic storms that would smash the city shown on the SI's web site (above) to smithereens. So for now they are hoping for something a little less free:

Our first stride to the seas will be the Floating City Project, through which we are crafting practical plans for the world’s first floating community with significant political autonomy located within a host nation’s protected waters.

The idea is to find a country that would be willing to let the SI build a city in some protected bay. This would help with storms and also with the other obvious problem of such a scheme, which is who would defend the city against pirates. There might even be countries willing to try this. But in return the host country would surely insist on enforcement of some of its laws, for example against drug trading, smuggling, tax evasion, harboring of fugitives, and the like. Which means that the floating city will have to have law enforcement. The host country would no doubt also insist on some payment for the services they provide (such as protection from pirates), which means the floating city will have to collect taxes, so it will have to have tax laws and tax collectors.

This is already starting to sound a lot like government. And we haven't even gotten to all the stuff the floating city will have to provide for itself, from maintenance to drinking water to electricity. Who will decide what to charge for these things and what to do with people who fall behind on their bills? Some of the people saddest about the non-appearance of floating cities are not libertarians but anti-libertarians, who were hoping somebody would try a libertarian paradise so as to demonstrate that it won't work:

Of all Mr. Thiel’s social-engineering enthusiasms, one I would have most loved to see play out is Seasteading, an initiative to create libertarian utopias on artificial islands in the middle of oceans. . . . Recently Mr. Thiel suggested that he’d gone cold on Seasteading, because of cost and practicality. Unmentioned was the possibility that the experiment would have come to an ideologically inconvenient conclusion: that a small island — whether created by nature or man — would be an astonishingly bad place to live without rules.

The innovations created by brilliant inventors and entrepreneurs are great. But they do not appear in a social vacuum. Consider the career of Thiel's old Paypal partner Elon Musk. Musk has become one of the tech world's biggest heroes, and he, like the rest of them, regularly complains about regulatory interference in his companies. But the businesses he has chosen to focus on, space and electric cars, depend absolutely on the government. In the short term the government is the main market for space launch services, and the work being done by Space-X draws on decades of pioneering work by the U.S. and Russian governments. Musk's electric cars receive a large subsidy from the government. More broadly people drive cars in large part because governments have acted over the decades to create standards in everything from turn signals to stop signs that make driving safe.

I understand why brilliant innovators chafe against the regulations of our highly bureaucratic society. I work in regulation, and as I have said many times sometimes even I am astonished at the number of hoops that a major project has to pass through. But that is not because regulators are evil; it is because balancing the needs of business with the demands of neighbors and other citizens is just a hard problem. Alex Tabarrok recently argued that the first step in making it easier to repair our crumbling infrastructure should be repealing all historic preservation laws. This would eliminate my job and those of half my friends, so perhaps I am not the best person to make a fair evaluation of this proposal. But I think it would do a lot less than he thinks to speed up bridge replacement and the like. The main reason the Historic Preservation Act was passed in 1966 was that government agencies found it to burdensome to keep dealing with calls to preserve historic buildings and neighborhoods on a case-by-case basis, and they needed a regular process to evaluate claims that this or that place was "historic". It was Interior Secretary Mo Udall who called for the bill, after he had spent dozens of hours in meetings about a single historic house in Virginia. Repealing the laws won't silence the demands of preservationists, it will just move those demands to other parts of the development process that won't be as well qualified to deal with them.

People will disagree, and that means there have to be measures in place to adjudicate these disagreements, which means that government and bureaucracy are inevitable. Even for Seasteaders.

Bacteria, Viruses, and Gene Editing

The CRISPR technology that is revolutionizing gene editing was evolved by bacteria to defend themselves against viruses. But it turns out that bacteria have a lot of difference defenses against viruses, any number of which can be used to edit human genes:

Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses. Microbes make thousands of forms of Crispr, most of which are just starting to be investigated by scientists. If they can be harnessed, some may bring changes to medicine that we can barely imagine.

On Thursday, in the journal Science, researchers demonstrated just how much is left to discover. They found that an ordinary mouth bacterium makes a form of Crispr that breaks apart not DNA, but RNA — the molecular messenger used by cells to turn genes into proteins.

If scientists can get this process to work in human cells, they may open up a new front in gene engineering. . . .

Previously discovered Crispr molecules are very good at whacking apart DNA but don’t protect bacteria from an RNA virus. Dr. Zhang and his colleagues discovered that bacteria with C2c2 make molecules that can attack RNA and chop it up, destroying the invaders.

The researchers also found that they could tailor these genes to cut any RNA molecule they wanted. Now they are tinkering with the process to try to get it to work in human cells.

But that's just another variant of the CRISPR gene editing process that is becoming familiar. Another group of scientists have discovered a completely different bacterial gene editing mechanism, based on proteins called Argonautes.

Given that there are probably thousands of such mechanisms in the bacterial world, it seems highly unlikely that CRISPR-CAS9, the system currently being used to edit human genes, is that best one for our species, and it already works spectacularly well compared to everything else that has been tried. Our skill at gene editing is getting better by leaps and bounds and it won't be long before it revolutionizes our world.

Who Will Alan Jacobs Vote For?

Conservative journalist Alan Jacobs sets out (at The American Conservative) his thoughts on the election:

If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, “Goodbye cruel world.” But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.

What Problem Could be Solved for $100 Million?

Today in philanthropy:

The MacArthur Foundation, known for bestowing “genius” grants on artists, actors and other creative people, introduced a new competition on Thursday that would award $100 million to an organization with the best proposal to solve a global problem.

The competition, called 100&Change, is open to organizations in any field, anywhere in the world, as long as the proposal identifies a problem affecting people, a place, or the entire planet and comes up with a way to fix it.

The foundation said in a statement it was “placing a few big bets” that significant progress could be made on social challenges like incarceration, climate change and nuclear risk. It did not place limits on what kind of problems should be addressed to be eligible for the award, which will be given every three years.

“Solving society’s most pressing problems isn’t easy, but we believe it can be done,” said Julia Stasch, the president of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “Potential solutions may go unnoticed or under-resourced and are waiting to be brought to scale.”

This is kind of intriguing, but count me as a skeptic. Which of “society’s most pressing problems” could be solved for $100 million? We have thrown billions at problems like child abuse, and we are gearing up to spend hundreds of billions fighting climate change.

Suggestions?

Frederic Leighton

The memory of Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) is dominated by this one famous image, Flaming June, painted at the end of his life in 1895.

To judge from this, Leighton ought to have been one of those painters whose career was a series of torrid affairs with various beautiful models.

But actually there isn't much evidence that Leighton was anything like that. He was a lifetime bachelor, one of those vigorous Victorian man's men who preferred his all male clubs to female company. There were rumors that he had an illegitimate child with one of his models, but no proof has ever been found and it remains a rumor. (Self Portrait of 1880)

Among men Leighton was a great networker who knew just about everyone, from Ingres and Corot to Robert Browning to William Gladstone. When the artists of southern England formed a militia company in 1860, Leighton was elected their Captain, and thereafter it was an artists' in-joke to refer to him as "The Colonel." These days of course it is common to speculate that he was gay, and his intense friendships with men are adduced as evidence. But that was just how some Victorian men were, and surely if there had even been a rumor of such scandal around Leighton he would never have been the first British artist elevated to the peerage. This is the famous 1875 portrait of Sir Richard Francis Burton, the great Victorian explorer and linguist, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London; Burton was of course another one of Leighton's friends.

Leighton was born into a wealthy merchant family in Scarborough and attended the University College school in London. From his teenage years he was determined to be a painter, and as soon as he left school he traveled to the continent to study with painters in Paris and Florence. It was at Florence, in 1853 to 1855, that he painted his first famous work, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence.

Details. This is very much in the style of the high Renaissance, and some of the heads might have been copied from similar scenes by Botticelli, but I love it; I mean, if you're going to copy something, the art of Renaissance Florence seems to me like a good way to go.

A Roman man, c. 1855.

Back in England, Leighton was elected to the Royal Academy in 1864, and of course he eventually became its president. (The Painter's Honeymoon, 1864)

Perseus and Andromeda, 1891.

Phoebe, 1890s. The model is Dorothy Dene, an actress who also modeled for Flaming June.

A great favorite of the establishment, Leighton was knighted in 1878 and created Baron Leighton of Stretton on 24 January 1896. He dropped dead of a heart attack the next day, and the peerage was immediately revoked, making it the shortest-lived noble title in British history. The Tragic Poetess, 1890.

Solitude, 1890s. Cropped a little. I have learned to appreciate many sorts of art, but nineteenth-century academic painting remains closest to my heart.

Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle

My Struggle – Min Kamp in Norwegian – is Karl Ove Knausgård's six volume, 4,000-page autobiographical novel about his very ordinary Norwegian life. People who like this book love it; the Guardian's reviewer called it "the most important literary project of our time." Other reviewers have written that it is like crack, compulsively addictive and impossible to put down. It is by far the best-selling novel in Norwegian history, selling 450,000 copies in a nation of 5 million people.

When I first heard about My Struggle, I wasn't interested. It seemed narcissistic to me, a book for the sort of people who read memoirs about therapy and whatnot. What got me interested was a book review by Knausgård, I think in the TLS. Knausgård was asked to review a new Italian novel. He agreed, even though he had never read anything by this somewhat famous writer. He soon discovered that this was a reaction of sorts to famous Italian novel of a century or so ago, which he had also never read. So he went and read that, and he laid out in a marvelous way what that novel was about and why people are still interested in it. He then explained with remarkable clarity in what way the new novel was a retelling of the old, and what made it interesting. It was an astonishing performance. The prose was perfectly clear, perhaps the most lucid exposition of difficult literature I have ever read. The essay was absolutely devoid of pretension or cant. Knausgård came across as someone who just loves literature and wants to help you appreciate it, and not as a professor but as a friend; after all he begins by cheerfully admitting that he has not read any of the other books by this famous contemporary Italian or the older books that influenced him. But that's ok, he says, we can fix that, let's just start reading and see what we find out. I was entranced.

When Book V of My Struggle appeared on the new books shelf of my public library, I snapped it up, thinking I might as well give it a try. One reason I was not averse to starting in the middle was that I had vaguely heard that Knausgård wrote a lot about his childhood with an alcoholic, abusive father, not the sort of thing I like reading about. Actually, as I have now learned, it is Book III that focuses on Knausgård's childhood, but anyway Book V is where I began.

I started reading this 624-page tome last Wednesday, and I finished it today. There is, as people have said, something addictive about it. Once I had started I read it intensely until I was done. And yet after all that I am not at all sure how I feel about it.

This volume covers Knausgård between the ages of 20 and 33, from 1988 to 2001. On the basis of a single short story, he is admitted to a year-long writing program at the university in Bergen. He spends the next five years or so hanging around Bergen, going in and out of school and enjoying the student scene. He plays in a couple of bands, falls in and out of love with girls, tries to write and mostly fails, works as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital, works at a radio station, develops a drinking problem and starts waking up on roofs of strange buildings with no idea how he got there. Through all of this he struggles to become a writer. He describes himself as loving literature and having a facility with words, but completely lacking imagination. He can't think of stories. Although he was enough of a prodigy to be the youngest person in the literary seminar, two of his friends publish novels before he has written anything he thinks is worthwhile.

It feels very real. Nothing happens that is in any way unbelievable or even unusual. Knausgård is neither remarkably good nor remarkably bad, and he never comes up with the sort of perfect line that the hero of a novel might produce at some crucial moment. He says ordinary things, halting and bumbling as he says them. In fact after two hundred pages he does and says pretty much what you expect him to do and say. He observes the world in an intelligent way but has no remarkable insights. Nor does he ever do anything remarkable; the most unusual thing he does during this period, a trip to Africa, is not described at all.

Why do people read it? Why did I read it? For one thing there is the writing: clear, unpretentious, completely free of gimmicks. There is also the simple fact of seeing the contemporary world described in such an unsparingly honest way. Yes, I kept feeling, this is what life is like. I think to me the most compelling thing is the sense of really knowing and understanding another human being. I imagine that by the time I have finished all 3500 pages I will know Karl Ove Knausgård better than I know all but a very few other people.

I have thought, reading this, how a narrative of my own life would be different. If I told my own story, it would be as much about what I think about as what I do. If I try to recall a day from last week, I am much more likely to remember what I thought about while walking through Rose Park at lunchtime than what I did at work or at home. My story would first of all be very much taken up with the past, since I think about history as much as I think about the contemporary world. It would be full of things I have imagined, from the Dinosaur Planet of my childhood to the gaming worlds I created in high school to the novel I am writing now. It would be full of politics and science, of Mars missions and Hubble photos, of bog bodies and battles and tombs full of gold. There is very little of that sort of thing in My Struggle. Which makes me wonder: is Knausgård that different from me, or has he chosen to focus on the everyday details of his life, rather than his flights of fancy, because those things will be shared by more readers?

If you feel like getting to know a charming, bumbling Norwegian like you have never known any other stranger, or if you want to see how someone else experiences the world of our time, you might like My Struggle. But be careful, because if you start you might not be able to stop until you finish. Did I mention that I have already started reading Volume I?

Siltstone Figurine from Egypt

Siltstone figurine, inlaid with shell, from a grave at Naqada, Egypt. 8.2 cm tall (3.2 inches); c. 3600-3500 BC. Now in the Ashmolean.

Adult Coloring Books and the Disruption Economy

Who would have thought?

In 2015, three of the best selling books of the year were adult colouring books. In Canada it was 5 of the top 10 including the top 2.

Various people have offered various theories explaining this, but the fact is that nobody anticipated this, certainly not the publishers. This is from an article on the economic uncertainty created by unanticipated innovations. Some innovations are hi tech, but not all of them.

Via Marginal Revolution.

Obama Lets Republicans Have It

Obama fires away in Elkhart, Indiana yesterday:

Let me be as straight as I can be about the choice of economic policies that you are going to face. And I'm going to start with the story that...most Republican candidates up and down the ticket are telling....America’s working class, America's middle class — families like yours — have been victimized by a big, bloated federal government run by a bunch of left-wing elitists like me. And the government is taking your hard-earned tax dollars and it's giving them to freeloaders and welfare cheats. And we're strangling business with endless regulations. And this federal government is letting immigrants and foreigners steal whatever jobs Obamacare hasn’t killed yet. (Laughter.)

....I haven’t turned on Fox News or listened to conservative talk radio yet today, but I’ve turned them on enough over these past seven and a half years to know I’m not exaggerating in terms of their story....But it’s not supported by the facts. But they say it anyway. Now, why is that? It’s because it has worked to get them votes, at least at the congressional level.

Because — and here, look, I’m just being blunt with you — by telling hardworking, middle-class families that the reason they’re getting squeezed is because of some moochers at the bottom of the income ladder, because of minorities, or because of immigrants, or because of public employees, or because of feminists — (laughter) — because of poor folks who aren’t willing to work, they’ve been able to promote policies that protect powerful special interests and those who are at the very top of the economic pyramid. That’s just the truth. (Applause.)

I hope you don’t mind me being blunt about this, but I’ve been listening to this stuff for a while now. And I’m concerned when I watch the direction of our politics. I mean, we have been hearing this story for decades. Tales about welfare queens, talking about takers, talking about the “47 percent.” It’s the story that is broadcast every day on some cable news stations, on right-wing radio, it’s pumped into cars, and bars, and VFW halls all across America, and right here in Elkhart.

The statement that traditionally defines populism is "they're screwing us." The difference between right wing and left wing populism is who "they" are. Right-wing populism says "they" are poor people, immigrants, minorities, and the government. Left wing populism says "they" are the rich, the banks, and big business. (Foreign trade and lawyers slide around, depending.) Of late Republicans have had huge success running on the platform of right-wing populism, blaming everything on shiftless losers and big government. Obama is arguing – powerfully, I think – that they are wrong. He has not gone very far into left-wing populism, because his argument is that the economy is actually pretty good. He talks about the one percent, but mainly to say that his tax increases haven't hurt them. He doesn't blame them for the troubles ordinary workers face.

Which I also think is right. Making the economy work for everyone is just a hard problem. Reagan, Thatcher and their ilk thought they had an answer, to cut taxes and regulations and let business take care of itself. What we have learned over the past 35 years is that this leads to ever greater inequality, and ever greater concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires. So while our economy has been very dynamic over that period, the numbers for ordinary people have been blah. That means we need a different plan. Whether the moderate reforms of Obama and Hillary will work, or if perhaps we need to move much farther toward Social Democracy, I have no idea, and I am suspicious of anybody who claims certainty.

Trump Makes Constitutional Scholars Nervous

While Republican politicians and voters are now mostly reconciled to having Trump as their candidate, conservative legal scholars are not. Adam Liptak interviewed constitutional experts from across the political spectrum and found many of them worried about Trump's authoritarian impulses.

Donald J. Trump’s blustery attacks on the press, complaints about the judicial system and bold claims of presidential power collectively sketch out a constitutional worldview that shows contempt for the First Amendment, the separation of powers and the rule of law, legal experts across the political spectrum say.

Even as much of the Republican political establishment lines up behind its presumptive nominee, many conservative and libertarian legal scholars warn that electing Mr. Trump is a recipe for a constitutional crisis.

“Who knows what Donald Trump with a pen and phone would do?” asked Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute.

With five months to go before Election Day, Mr. Trump has already said he would “loosen” libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations. He has threatened to sic federal regulators on his critics. He has encouraged rough treatment of demonstrators.

His proposal to bar Muslims from entry into the country tests the Constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom, due process and equal protection.

I think this is the serious concern about the American political system going forward. Presidential political systems have across the world been less stable than Parliamentary systems, because of the conflicts that arise when the president and the legislature are controlled by opposite parties. In the United States this has mostly been elided by the mushy character of our political parties and a fondness for centrist deal making. But in the new era of disciplined, ideologically pure parties, compromise is often impossible. Faced with the gridlock this situation creates, Obama has often been tempted to order executive solutions to problems that range from technical glitches in his health care law to immigration. So who knows what a more ruthless and less cautious president might do?

But on the other hand I have to say that Trump strikes me as much more bluster than real danger, and I tend to agree with Republican politicians who say things like

I still believe we have the institutions of government that would restrain someone who seeks to exceed their constitutional obligations. We have a Congress. We have the Supreme Court. We’re not Romania. (John McCain)

So it struck me that what really upsets some legal scholars is Trump's recent attack on the judge overseeing lawsuits against Trump University:

Mr. Trump accused the judge of bias, falsely said he was Mexican and seemed to issue a threat.

“They ought to look into Judge Curiel, because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace,” Mr. Trump said. “O.K.? But we will come back in November. Wouldn’t that be wild if I am president and come back and do a civil case?”

David Post, a retired law professor who now writes for the Volokh Conspiracy, a conservative-leaning law blog, said those comments had crossed a line.

“This is how authoritarianism starts, with a president who does not respect the judiciary,” Mr. Post said. “You can criticize the judicial system, you can criticize individual cases, you can criticize individual judges. But the president has to be clear that the law is the law and that he enforces the law. That is his constitutional obligation.”

Is that really scary? I don't know. I'm hoping we'll never have to find out.

Sitio Roberto Burle Marx

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) was a Brazilian artist now best known as a designer of gardens. He was famous both for his modernist temper – his garden designs were collected and hung as abstract paintings – and his use of tropical plants unknown to the famous garden builders of Europe or Japan.

Perhaps his most beautiful garden is the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx, his former home in Rio, now a museum.

The grounds of this estate measure about 41 acres, most of it garden.

Looks like an amazing place.

Birth Rates Fall in India

Big news from the subcontinent:

Latest survey data suggest that Indian fertility has fallen sharply in recent years and is already at the ‘replacement level’ needed to keep the population stable. Urban fertility is now at levels seen in developed countries and in some places among the lowest in the world.

These readings suggest a big change in India’s demographic trajectory. It also adds to the likelihood that world population will peak a lot sooner than is widely believed.

According to recently released Sample Registration System data, the country’s total fertility rate (TFR) stood at 2.3 in 2013. TFR is the average number of children per woman if she lives to the end of her child-bearing years. In developed countries, a TFR of 2.1is required in order to keep the population stable (ignoring migration). In India, this is around 2.3 due to higher infant mortality and a skewed gender ratio. In other words, the country’s TFR is already at the ‘replacement rate’.

The TFR for rural areas stands at 2.5, but that for urban India is down at 1.8 — marginally below the readings for Britain and the US. An important implication of this is that India’s overall TFR will almost certainly fall below replacement as it rapidly urbanises over the next 20 years.

There continue to be wide variations in the fertility rates across the country. Readings for the southern states have been low for some time, but are now dropping sharply in many northern states. Tamil Nadu has a TFR of 1.7 but so do Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. Uttar Pradesh and Bihar continue to have the country’s highest TFR at 3.1 and 3.5 respectively, but these are also falling steadily.

The population will keep rising for the next twenty years because of the number of young people, and because Indians are living longer. But the end of Asian population growth is in sight.

Is this Image of Cernunnos Fake?

I found this artifact on a couple of blogs this week.. It's a gold disk, 5.7 cm (2.2 inches) in diameter, recently sold for 6,000 Euros by a Belgian antiquities dealer. If it is real it is an amazing thing, one of less than a dozen clear representations of the Celtic horned god.

But is it real? I've never seen it, of course, so I won't venture a firm opinion. It's just that I have been studying Celtic paganism for about 35 years now, and I've never seen any picture of it before. I have on my shelves a good 25 illustrated books about the ancient Celts or ancient European paganism, and none of them show it. In fact it is traditional to begin your discussion of the horned god by lamenting how bad the evidence is for anything about him, including how few depictions there are.

Check out, for example, this web site, which discusses six depictions of Cernunnos, only one of which (the one from the Gundestrup Cauldron, above) is as good as the one I am wondering about.

Plus, it was sold on EBay. Plus, the seller is named Nazzi. Ok, that wasn't fair. But EBay – is that where we would expect to see a major historical artifact, a crucial piece of evidence for ancient paganism? The only provenance given at the seller's web site is "ex private collection." It seems to me that if this were real, national museums would bid hundreds of thousands for it.

Until I see more, I'm leaving it out of my lectures.

Ambivalence about Brexit

As Britain prepares to vote on whether to leave the European Union, I find myself ambivalent to the point of indifference. On the one hand I despise nationalism and I agree that exit would probably hurt the British economy badly. I admire the call for Europeans to set aside the differences that have led to so many wars and work together for the common good.

On the other hand the EU is a rotten institution, run by political and business elites with little input from ordinary voters. I find the way the EU has stomped on the ordinary people of Greece and Span despicable – oh, well, too bad about the 25 percent unemployment, but you know there are rules about these things, and we can't have a few rowdy southerners upsetting our carefully loaded apple carts. Bosh.

I hope that over time the EU will evolve into something more democratic and equitable, but so far I see little sign that is happening. On the contrary nationalist reactions in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and other places have made it clear how little common feeling there is among "Europeans," and without common feeling democracy cannot work. Germans are happy to share a common currency with Greeks so long as Greeks don't ask them for help when things go bad, and that is an unworkable situation. Since the will is not there to create a United States of Europe, I think Europeans should reverse gears, restrain their ambitions, and move the EU back toward a looser affiliation of sovereign states.

That, however, is not up for vote in Britain; the only options are in or out. And I honestly don't know which way is best for the British. If they leave they lose all ability to nudge the EU in the looser direction most Britons seem to favor, and they may badly wound their financial sector and other businesses. Having kept their own currency, they have retained more real independence than other EU members. But perhaps leaving is really the democratic option, preserving a democratic government in Britain and serving notice that the EU cannot endure as an out-of-touch oligarchy.

The Morrigan

Celtic coin from the Balkans depicting the Great Queen (Morrigan) in bird form.

At one moment she was a broad-eyed, most beautiful queen,
And another time a beaked, white-grey crow. . . .