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A new paper argues:
Workplace technological changes were instrumental in creating new tasks for women over the last century. This paper studies the adoption of the typewriter into US workplaces. Exploiting exogenous variation in typist demand across sectors, I document that the typewriter increased women’s labor force participation, leading to lower rates of marriage and fertility. These developments stemmed from a transition of White women from households into office work and an indirect crowding-in effect drawing Black women into household services. Acting as a “meeting technology,” the typewriter reshaped social interactions, enabling White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.
The mission to save NASA's Swift satellite.
Crazy story in the Washington Post claiming that Tulsi Gabbard was a cult member whose whole career has been directed by cult leader Chris Butler (article, summary on Twitter/X)
Mineralogist Louis Pope Gratacap's foray into Lost Worlds fiction, a popular genre in 1880 to 1930.
How endangered is American democracy? Scott Siskind on the Metaculus Threat to Democracy Index.
Analysis of a cyberattack on an important Russian military system, Groza.
US infant mortality at an all-time low.
Sabine Hossenfelder reports that many fusion startups are giving up (7-minute video).
Against rolling pizza cutters. And Noah Smith.
The UN says that 1.7 million Syrians returned home after Assad's fall. In a weird way this is an argument for keeping refugees in nearby camps, since those are the ones who have gone home. From what I can tell, not many have returned from Europe.
A pair of ravens is nesting amidst the Gothic sculptures of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC. (Twitter/X 1; Twitter/2)
From Dezeen, Ten Examples of Oddly Satisfying Architecture.
Boston has liberalized its outdoor drinking laws for the World Cup; why not make it permanent?
Softening brutalist architecture with plants.
Ethan Mollick makes short video clips of sci-fi cities using Midjourney.
The weird story of a seldom seen painting.
How the Himalayan blackberry took over the Pacific northwest.
Fasting during Ramadan doesn't seem to hurt the performance of Muslim chess players.
Dwarkesh Patel interviews Ada Palmer about Machiavelli, 2-hour video.
Young Americans seems to be having dire difficulty forming relationships, having sex, or getting married. They are also unhappy. Since the one thing happiness research has shown with absolute certainty is that a good marriage contributes a lot to happiness — more than all the money in the world, most studies find — these things may be related.
This problem fascinates and baffles many of us older folks, and I am seeing more and more older men wade into the world of dating advice. I am considering doing this myself, perhaps via a Tiktok called The Old Man's Dating Advice for Young Men. Sample piece of advice: "you do not date women, or hang out with them, or chat with them; you romance them."
One of the weird facets of this problem is the rise of what I will call the Incel Mindset. I don't say "incels," because I think it is wrong to think that some young men are incels and others are not. Incelism is a kind of thinking that any man can fall into on a bad day. Here's a basic definition, via Noah Smith:
Essentially, the incels believe that women are only attracted to a very small number of men — guys who are extremely handsome, extremely high-status, extremely rich, etc. This, they believe, naturally shuts almost all men out of the dating market and condemns them to involuntary celibacy. All the girls go for the top few guys (the “Chads”), leaving all the other guys out frustrated and alone.
Which is of course absurd; there has never been a society in which most people do not marry and have children. The men attracted to incel memes presumably look much like their parents, who (one imagines) had sex with each other. If anything about human life is truly democratic, that would be sex and reproduction.
What got me to write this post was something from Freddie de Boer about what he calls the "incel's veto".
The incel’s veto is the specific prohibition against men ever frankly discussing sex in any positive way that directly reflects the fact that they have sexual experience and thus have earned the consent of women. The incel’s veto weaponizes the natural and healthy inclination to stigmatize actual male bragging about sexual promiscuity (“I get so many girls, bro”) by spreading that stigma to any admission by any man that they have a sexual and romantic life. It’s also, more generally, the idea that in the 2020s we live in a weird discursive space where our perceptions of romantic and sexual behavior are constantly being filtered through the lens of the people who have experienced very little of either. The incel’s veto helps spread the ubiquitous online assumption that nobody is getting laid, anywhere, ever, and that it’s inherently pathological to treat sex and romance as not just healthy aspects of human life but as mundane and achievable.
This is one of the banes of life in the internet age: the dominance of the discourse by people who think everything is terrible. That storm of darkness, that fire of rage, is always there, within reach, ready to echo our own worst thoughts and feelings, to mire us deeper in our worst thoughts and bleakest fantasies.
Look away from it. Look toward the real world around you, toward people getting on with life, people meeting and getting married and having babies.
Stop doomscrolling and go meet somebody.
RIP David Hockney. My post on his art is here.
Happy Juneteenth! My post on the history of the holiday is here.
Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.
Noah Smith argues that 1) the US lost the Iran war, and 2) this may be "Trump's Katrina".
Alex Tabarrok on Montana's initiative to allow the use of early-stage pharmaceuticals.
Fascinating medieval bookmark.
Invasion fiction in 19th-century Britain.
Does the Russian Oreshnik missile have a fatal flaw that renders it inaccurate? Article, summary on Twitter/X.
Scott Siskind is not impressed by the Midjourney Scanner.
The Genovese crime family and the gay bar scene in 1960s New York. They owned the Stonewall Inn.
A new study asks, how much do teens regret social media use? Not so much.
Roman curse tablet from the Netherlands.
For the upscale pickleball player, artist-designed paddles. How better to impress the people you met on Match.com?
If you need something soothing, here's a lovely 45-minute video of lush Japanese gardens, with meditative music.
How the Catholic Church came to support usury.
Archaeologists find a wooden alignment near Stonehenge, more evidence that the locality had a long history as a sacred site tied to the sun.
Victim of violence found in a neolithic pottery kiln.
Ukraine blitzes the Moscow oil refinery with a major drone attack, just two days after another, smaller attack (Twitter/X 1, Twitter/X 2, AP, Fox News, Guardian)
Moderately interesting skyscraper design. And fitting new British houses into older neighborhoods in ways that do not copy the older designs but reflect them in interesting ways.
The die would have been used to produce rectangular Pressblech foils, probably to decorate helmets or other high-status military equipment. The Lynsted die is very close in size to some of the decorative rectangular panels on the Sutton Hoo helmet, though its design differs from those on that artefact.
This dancing warrior with the horned helmet has several parallels in Scandinavian art.
What a terrific find.
Karl Owe Knausgaard:
The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar. When I was sixteen, I thought life was without end, the number of people in it inexhaustible. . . . But what I didn’t know, or rather had absolutely no conception of, was that every step I took was defining me, every person I encountered leaving their mark on me, and that the life I was living at that particular time, boundlessly arbitrary as it seemed, was in fact my life. That one day I would look back on my life, and this would be what I looked back on.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
1889
