Links 5 June 2026

Necklace of Gold Turtles from ancient Colchis,
eastern shore of the Black Sea, c. 450 BC

Good primer on ways to limit property tax growth; the best way is called a levy limit.

Sam Harsimony on the technologies that do not impress him, including space manufacturing.

14,000-word essay attempting to explain a new model of how spiral galaxies formed, without much math.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Sabine Hossenfelder on a new model of how the universe began, 6-minute video.

Reviewing foreign chain restaurants in NYC.

Interesting NY Times article on linguistic changes among the young and internet native.

Asking Grok if what the Pope said about AI is true (Twitter/X).

The Trump administration's program of violently interdicting drug boats has had no impact on the availability of cocaine in the US. (NY Times)

PBS video on Sanxingdui, the amazing Bronze Age site in Sichuan that I wrote about here, lots of good information, 55 minutes.

Tyler Cowen hates marijuana but opposes making it illegal again.

The EU publishes a "road map" to phase out animal testing for chemical safety research. About time, considering how useless those tests are for many purposes.

Report on immigrants who found companies in the US: "Immigrants have founded or cofounded 59% (455 of 775) of America’s privately held startup companies valued at $1 billion or more, according to a new National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) analysis."

In Roman York, two infants were buried in imperial purple; nobody knows who they were.

The complicated social science of remote work and forcing people back to the office. I am amazed at the reluctance of some people to say that people are different and no system is best for everyone.

Categorizing anti-woke intellectuals. Tendentious but interesting.

Strange but intriguing article on "anti-humanism" one the queer left, AI, and other matters: "The remarkable implication of this is that pervasive pollution can be recast as a vector of queer liberation."

Ukraine Links

Fairly long and detailed article on Ukraine's "Mid-Range Strike Campaign."

An explanation for Ukraine's recent "good three months" on the battlefield, 16-minute video.

More from Twitter/X on Ukraine's "Logistics Lockdown" initiative along the front.

Grim short video on Twitter/X showing a Russian infantryman's journey to the front line along a path littered with corpses. 

Ukraine strikes a modern Russian corvette at drydock in Kronstadt on the Baltic. (Twitter/X)

Francesco Borromini and Baroque Rome

Baroque churches used to give me the creeps, but in my maturity I have come to appreciate them. Rome of course contains many, several of them designed by Francesco Borromini (1599-1667).

At the top and above, San Carlo alla Quattro Fontane, Borromini's first major commission, constructed in 1638-1641.

Interior.

Dome.

Courtyard. Even if this is not your thing, you have to admire the completeness of this composition, every piece thought out to fit with every other.

Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza

Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori, an amazing interior hidden behind the plain facade of an older nunnery.

Oratorio dei Filippini

Interior views of the Oratorio. Lovely library, and a truly remarkable fireplace.

Borromini in his youth. Quite the dashing man, and an amazing architect.

W.T. Sherman on R.E. Lee and U.S. Grant

In 1887 William Tecumseh Sherman published an article in a British magazine responding to an earlier piece in which a British officer held up Robert E. Lee as a military paragon, equal to George Washington as a soldier and a man. Sherman begged to differ. Excerpts:

Lee's sphere of action was, however, local. He never rose to the grand problem which involved a continent and future generations. His Virginia was to him the world. Though familiar with the geography of the interior of this great continent, he stood like a stone wall to defend Virginia against the “Huns and Goths” of the North, and he did it like a valiant knight as he was. He stood at the front porch battling with the flames whilst the kitchen and house were burning, sure in the end to consume the whole. Only twice, at Antietam and Gettysburg, did he venture outside on the “offensive defensive.” In the first instance he knew personally his antagonist, and that a large fraction of his force would be held in reserve; in the last he assumed the bold “offensive,” was badly beaten by Meade, and forced to retreat back to Virginia. As an aggressive soldier Lee was not a success, and in war that is the true and proper test. In defending Virginia and Richmond he did all a man could, but to him Virginia seemed the “Confederacy,” and he stayed there whilst the Northern armies at the West were gaining the Mississippi, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, Georgia, South and North Carolina, yea, the Roanoke, after which his military acumen taught him that further tarrying in Richmond was absolute suicide. . . .

U.S. Grant, by contrast

moved in co-operation with the gun-boat fleet up the Tennessee to Fort Henry, which was captured; to Fort Donelson, where a fortified place with its entire garrison of 17,000 men surrendered without conditions; then on to Shiloh, where one of the bloodiest and most successful battles of the war was fought, which first convinced our Southern brethren, who had been taught that one Southern man was equal to five Yankees, that man to man was all they wanted—then Vicksburg, Chattanooga, everywhere victorious, everywhere successful, fulfilling the wise conclusion of Mr. Lincoln that he wanted “military success.” Then he was called for the first time in his life to Washington to command an army of perfect strangers, under new conditions, and in a strange country. Casting his thoughts over a continent, giving minute instructions for several distinct armies from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, himself assuming the hardest share, he began a campaign equal in strategy, in logistics, and in tactics to any of Napoleon, and grander than any ever contemplated by England. His personal action in crossing the Rapidan in the face of Lee’s army, fighting him in the Wilderness, “forward by the left flank,” to Spottsylvania, to Richmond, and Petersburg, was the sublimity of heroism. Of course, he had a superiority of numbers and resources, but nothing like the disproportion stated by General Wolseley. At Vicksburg he began in May, 1863, the movement with less numbers than Pemberton surrendered to him along with Vicksburg in July. At Chattanooga he attacked his enemy in the strongest position possible; so strong, indeed, that Bragg, a most thorough and intelligent soldier, regarded it as unassailable, and had detached Longstreet’s corps to Knoxville, of which mistake Grant took prompt advantage, and I never heard before that Bragg thought the pursuit after his defeat was not quick and good enough to suit him; and, finally, when Lee was forced to flee from his intrenchments at Richmond and Petersburg by Sheridan’s bold and skillful action at Five Forks, I believe it is conceded that the pursuit by Sheridan and Grant was so rapid that Lee was compelled to surrender his whole army. Grant’s “strategy” embraced a continent, Lee’s a small State; Grant’s “logistics” were to supply and transport armies thousands of miles, where Lee was limited to hundreds. Grant had to conquer natural obstacles as well as hostile armies, and a hostile people; his “tactics” were to fight wherever and whenever he could capture or cripple his adversary and his resources; and when Lee laid down his arms and surrendered, Grant, by the stroke of his pen, on the instant gave him and his men terms so liberal as to disarm all criticism. Between these two men as generals I will not institute a comparison, for the mere statement of the case establishes a contrast.

Civil War buffs have a habit of thinking locally, of focusing on battles and skirmishes. But the Union won the war because of a grand strategy that Grant helped to formulate and put into action.

What's Slowing the Russian Army

Jack Watling at Foreign Affairs, from an article titled Ukraine Turns the Tide:

Russian recruitment has kept pace with losses in large part because of the strong financial incentives offered by the Kremlin, including significant pay and debt forgiveness. Although this approach has proved to be an effective way of drawing unskilled new soldiers, it has not attracted a corresponding body of technical specialists who can command reasonable salaries in the civilian or military-industrial economy. The Russian army, for example, is far below its recruitment targets for drone operators.

Pay as the primary motive for service has also created an accumulation of personnel in Russian units who are eager to avoid combat. Officers accept bribes from soldiers who don’t want to be part of an assault. Meanwhile, soldiers who break the Russian military’s growing array of contradictory standing orders are punished by being thrown into assaults. This uncompromising approach often sweeps up important support troops, such as those responsible for logistics, who have run afoul of regulations. In a force in which logistics is overwhelmingly coordinated through the social media app Telegram, but in which Telegram is banned, a conscientious logistician is at high risk of finding himself stopped by the military police and either being shaken down for money or reassigned to assault units.

The result over time has been a buildup of connected and fee-extracting soldiers at intermediate echelons, such as the regiment, and a hollowing out of personnel with any professional experience in subordinate units as they are killed or wounded in attempted assaults. The lack of quality at lower levels has seen a deterioration in performance and an inability to execute plans or orders. Many officers have received their promotions in the field, without having gone through extensive officer training, and their foremost task has been to psychologically prepare their soldiers for attacks rather than to plan and execute competent attacks in the first place.

In previous years, the devastating effect of Russian artillery, drone strikes, and glide bombs compensated for the poor performance of Russian infantry. But the battlefield now looks and functions very differently from how Russian military planners are used to imagining it. Today, the battlefield does not consist so much of opposing frontlines as it does a belt of contested territory some 18 miles wide in which both sides are intermingled. The cartographic tools that Russian planners use are not well suited to accurately reflect how forces are fighting. The result is a divergence in what Russian planners map, and what orders are actually possible to carry out. That has led to growing inefficiency in the coordination of strikes.

Nor do officers at lower levels necessarily know how to execute the orders they receive. Intermediate level officers, moreover, are encouraged to report success up the chain. These factors have brought about a growing discrepancy between where senior Russian commanders think their troops are, and the reality on the ground. As a result, the Russian military routinely makes mistakes in assigning artillery and drone assets and issues an array of orders, premised on bad information, that cannot be carried out. In short, Russian forces are increasingly unable to turn plans into military operations, with a corresponding weakening in their attacks.

Much more at the link, unpaywalled for now.

Happiness and Time

At tne NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviews happiness expert Laurie Santos:

Garcia-Navarro: I also spoke to Robert Putnam, and his prescription was, to put it succinctly, “Join a club.” But I think a lot of people feel that they don’t have time for that, in between work and caretaking. 

Santos: This is something that social scientists are also really clued into. One of the coolest bits of work coming out of modern-day social science is on this concept of what’s called “time affluence.” This is lovely work by Ashley Whillans at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy in time. It’s not how much objective time you have, but it’s the subjective sense that you have free time for yourself. It’s the opposite of what so many people are experiencing, which is what’s called time famine, where you’re literally starving for time. This term “famine” works physiologically, because when we feel like we don’t have enough time, it’s almost like famine. It increases inflammation. It does all these bad things to our body. But there’s lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. And this time crisis is worse for marginalized people and people who don’t have enough income and are worried about putting food on the table. That crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis.

Garcia-Navarro: But is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time. It’s watching a Netflix show, sitting on my sofa, or bed rotting, as it’s called on social media, as a way to “relax,” when it’s really not that relaxing at all. So is our time crisis manufactured by our bad choices?

Santos: I’m going to say yes and no on that one. Yes in the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence — the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia — they have a 35-hour work week. So people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge. They’re joiners, in part because they have time. I think that does matter. If we set things up structurally to have more time in the United States, maybe with a four-day workweek, it’s happiness-inducing, good for companies and so on. I think we could get there. So there’s something about the time crisis that is real. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. It doesn’t feel like it.

I love the concept of "time affluence". Time truly is the most valuable resource, the thing that you need to use most carefully in your life.

My personal experience is that I actually have a lot of time, I just need to make the effort to use it well. That sometimes requires advance planning, like arranging to see a friend or finding something fun to do, but it is always worth it to use your time well.

Claude Code and the Problem of Utilizing Any New Technology

Back in the 1970s, people began making personal computers. Everyone thought they were really cool but nobody really knew what to do with them, beyond playing primitive games. Then we got the internet and useful software like spreadsheets and word processors, and they became indispensable tools for work and life.

It took a while for people to figure out how to use the new technology.

Now we have AI, or LLMs to be precise. They are amazing, but what are they good for? Writing essays for lazy students? Generating shlock internet posts?

So for a while serious analysts were looking at the AI companies and thinking that they might end up being economic failures.

And then Anthropic created Claude Code, an "agent" that writes software. Suddenly the money started pouring in from tech companies who never thought they had enough programmers or could write code fast enough. Profits at Anthropic and OpenAI soared, and people started to say that AI had finally found the "killer ap" that would justify all the money invested in it.

But as Noah Smith explains, it isn't that simple:

Now AI had found its killer app — the equivalent of e-commerce and search for the internet, or spreadsheets and word processing for computers. Suddenly, everyone in the world was “tokenmaxxing” — trying to use coding agents as much as humanly possible.

An entrepreneur breathlessly told me that he ordered his employees to “spend their salary in tokens” — that is, to create so much code with Claude Code and Codex that it cost as much as their entire paycheck. I remember asking him: “What are they using all those tokens to create?” I don’t think I got a straight answer; I’m not sure he knew.

He wasn’t alone, though. Plenty of companies encouraged their employees to use AI coding agents as much as possible. Meta even briefly had a leaderboard for who could use the most tokens. One company reportedly spent half a billion dollars on Claude Code — equal to one percent of Claude’s annualized revenue!

Reading these reports, I just kept wondering: What are all these tokens actually producing? There never seemed to be a clear answer. 

John Loeber:

The stuff I’m hearing is just insane. People are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on tokens? Guys, what are you shipping?…I am seeing people fully enraptured by illusions of productivity. They have swarms of agents coordinated by Byzantine Octopus harnesses. They’re munging thousands of tokens a second. They’re doing all this stuff, churning unfinished marginalia faster than ever before. Spinning their wheels and shipping absolutely jack shit for their customers…[W]e’re getting a lot of utility from AI for engineering at our company. I think we would really struggle to burn more than $5K per engineer per month.

Smith again:

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said it wasn’t yet possible to draw a link between raw AI usage and useful products actually being shipped: “That link is not there yet, right?” 

Microsoft and several other tech firms have begun canceling Claude Code licenses and placing limits on how much can be spent. 

What's going on? 

As I see it, the price of coding just fell by a lot, but nobody knows yet how to productively use all that new coding power. Tech executives felt that they were being held back by a lack of coders, and maybe they were, but their overall process was adapted to the speed of what their people could actually produce, and they really had no idea what to do with this additional capacity. So much of it was just wasted.

And what use will we make of all this coding power and the new software it will create? I don't know, but I imagine people will find lots of uses. I curse every day about some stupid web site that doesn't work how it is supposed to, some process that is way more complex than it needs to be, games with too many glitches, and so on.

But it will likely to take years for all of this to really translate into better products for us, and more profits for tech firms.

Were there Wild Lions in Ancient Greece?

Greek myths tell us about several lions: Herakles and the Nemean lion, etc. There were no lions in Greece in classical times and have been none since, but, on the other hand, there certainly were at some point in the distant Ice Age past. So when did they die out? Do the appearances of lions in Greek legends record memories of real lions in Archaic times, or were those stories transplanted from Asia?

Though such theories were long dismissed by other researchers, in 1978, two prominent German zooarchaeologists made a startling discovery. During an excavation of Tiryns—the same city whose legendary king dared Hercules into action—they chanced upon a feline heel bone near a human skeleton. It was unmistakably from a lion, they concluded, and possibly of the same species that inhabits parts of the African continent today.

The bone was only the first of dozens to surface in Tiryns and elsewhere over the following decades. Though some details remain unclear, many archaeologists and historians now use this evidence to conclude that modern lions once lived alongside people in parts of what is today Europe, including Greece, for hundreds of years. Today lion bones offer a rare glimpse into the Bronze Age world and the fraught relationship humans had with these fierce predators, animals that inspired legends and creative works for centuries.

“Now it’s possible to say that some [lion images] could have been recalled from real experiences on the [Greek] mainland,” says art historian Nancy Thomas. The finds, she adds, cast “a whole different light on the art … and how hunting real lions could have played into the elite structure development that was going on in Greece at the time.”

Reported finds of post-Ice Age lions

The number of bones reported from across southeastern Europe is somewhat convincing, but I don't know anything about how the bones were dated (lots of older radiocarbon dates on bone are wrong). The many representations of lions in art don't help the case much, because many are obviously copies from renderings of lions in the art of Mesopotamia or Egypt. 

Anyway it is fun to imagine that a tale like Heracles and the Nemean Lion represents one of the last wild lions in Greece, a time when they still existed but were so rare as to be truly remarkable.

Links 29 May 2026

Roman cavalry mask found on the Swedish island of Gotland

Perun on the Ukrainian long-range strike campaign in Russia, one-hour video.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Recreating a dress found in a 17th-century shipwreck.

Scott Siskind uses AI to help him vote in the California primaries.

And a very different Siskind piece, an excellent summary of what the Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism were all about.

An awesome tweet for refuting the bizarre negativity in America.

Ethan Mollick on what tasks humans should still be doing.

Why can't FPV drones be stopped? 22-minute video.

Strange French dual grave from the 5th century BC (History Blog, French original at INRAP)

The remarkable engravings and religious faith of Fritz Eichenberg.

Some remarkable Baroque cameos.

Another great tweet about actual water use in America: the waste is mostly farming, not data centers.

The constitution working as it should: public employees fired over Charlie Kirk posts keep winning big settlements against the people who fired them (Twitter/X, news story)

Ukraine note: with the fighting turning in their favor, Ukraine has focused its drones on a major effort to disrupt Russian front-line logistics, one supposes because they hope this will help them reclaim even more territory this summer. (Some tweets: one, two, three, four, five) I find it interesting that the Ukrainian military has announced this, given it a name ("Logistics Lockdown"), and launched a coordinated campaign of video releases. To make Russian soldiers nervous? To draw attention away from something else?

Things Look Different When the Responsibility is Yours

NY Times:

Trump administration officials, confronted by overlapping outbreaks of Ebola and the hantavirus, have taken a more aggressive approach to locking down potentially exposed people than in past outbreaks, surprising many public health experts.

The instructions from President Trump’s top health appointees, some of whom were vocal opponents of Covid-era public health restrictions, go well beyond tactics that were used to successfully contain previous outbreaks of the diseases.

They include instructing more than a dozen people to remain in home confinement with twice-daily checks; quarantining 18 passengers from a hantavirus-infected cruise ship at a federal facility in Nebraska for 21 days; and keeping American doctors exposed to Ebola at foreign hospitals, rather than repatriating them to specially designed U.S. treatment centers.

Notice that these outbreaks began in very different populations. You could chalk up the fear of Ebola to racism and disgust at the Third World, but not hantavirus on a cruise ship.

Ye Olde Office Bulletin Board

Once upon a time, in the distant past of corporate America, office workers had personal spaces known as "offices" or "cubicles" where they worked every day. Workers were allowed – shocking, I know – to decorate these spaces as they wished. It may be hard for some of you to remember those halcyon days before the open plan office, or to believe that we once had such freedom, but trust this old man, it was so.

Poking around my home office yesterday I found a real treasure: a small cardboard box containing the stuff that once decorated a series of bulletin boards and cloth cubicle walls in the offices I occupied between 1995 and 2022. This stuff was not all displayed at once, since the collection rotated over the years. But I believe everything here was on my wall at some point.

Museum postcards, personal photographs, photographs of my most interesting excavations, book marks, buttons, cartoons, all sorts of stuff; I used to think that this display gave anyone who cared to look a clear view of my character and what matters to me.

A few treasures. There are of course many photographs of my late wife Lisa, who was and remains the center of my universe. I took this one not long after we started dating, in 1989.

Lisa with our first baby, taken in my hotel in Renovo, Pennsylvania, a weird little town that made such an impression on me that I set my first book there.

Some mementos of my elder daughter, including a note she wrote in kindergarten.

My sons in 2003.

Me with my younger daughter on a boat in Maine, 2007.

Bookmark celebrating the 200th anniversary of one of my favorite things, the Library of Congress.

Me on Rhodes, 1991.

Me at the very beginning of my archaeological career, 1984. That's a trash pit from the 1680s in the garden of Bacon's Castle, Virginia.

Lisa and me in 2001, appropriately smiling, because that was a wonderful time in our marriage.

With my brother and sister at my college graduation, 1984.

Things are fading into the past for me: my little childeren, my marriage, those lost days when I had an office and a bulletin board that I covered with signs of who I was and what I cared about.

Art Deco Mourners

Sculptures by Luis Perlotti in the entrance to the Municipal Cemetery, Lujan, Argentina. c. 1930. 

More here.

Links 22 May 2026

The Aldborough She Wolf, c. 300 AD

Richard Hanania does an experiment, finds many of his regular readers cannot distinguish between essays he wrote and others written by Claude in his style. (Twitter/X)

Still uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

Using satellite imagery, archaeologists identify hundreds of stone circles in the desert of Sudan.

All warfare is drone warfare: Noah Smith, Carnegie Endowment, montage of drones killing soldiers from Twitter/X, 2-hour interview with a Ukrainian drone manufacturer.

Scott Siskind on the very numerous candidates in the California governor's race, amusing.

Lumbee Indians vs. the KKK: the Battle of Hayes Pond, 1958.

Berlin during World War II: raucous parties between bombing raids.

William Hodges and the art of the British Empire.

Major new mathematical proof from an AI.

An interesting note on education and marriage market competition.

Miniature pots from an Iron Age Spanish tomb.

Interesting settlement of the 3rd to 5th centuries AD unearthed in Germany.

New vaccine for Lyme disease doing well in trials.

Sabine Hossenfelder on the "unbearable blandness of the 2020s", 7-minute video.

William Spaniel on the drones Russia has supplied to Cuba, 15-minute video.

Harvard's faculty approves a plan to cap the number of A grades at 20% plus 4 of the students in most courses. (NY Times, Inside Higher Ed)

Amazing microscopic photographs from a new contest.

Anniversary of note: on May 22, 1980, Pac Man was introduced in the US.

The Hatreds of the Mosque Shooters

Rod Dreher:

What kind of hatred motivated the teenage San Diego mosque shooters, who killed three men and died in a murder-suicide before capture? Well, take your pick.

According to the 75-page unfinished manifesto left behind by Caleb Vazquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, the pair hated Muslims, Jews, blacks, legal migrants, illegal migrants, Latinos, Asians, industrial society, gays, trans people, Donald Trump, “MAGAtard boomers,” liberals, conservatives, moderates, and women.

Oh boy, did they hate women. “After the Jew the most evil creature in this world is the woman,” wrote Vazquez, in his contribution to the two-part document. He identifies himself as a short man on the autism spectrum. This, he believed, is why women ignored him. . . .

The manifesto reads like what you might expect teenagers marinated 24/7 in intersecting currents of internet hate to produce: crude, stupid, self-pitying, and overflowing with rage at all the people these self-described National Socialist Ecofascists identify as the Enemy. Clark calls himself a Christian, but Vazquez, who is Latino, said, “my religion is the white race.” In fact, Vazquez acknowledges that some will consider him a Latino who pretends to be white, “but that’s honestly fine and I could care less.”

But above all the enemies hated by the duo sit the Jews, the summum malum of all the world’s wickedness. In fact, Vazquez calls racial minorities and Muslims “Bioweapons of the Kikes,” who control everything in the world. Wrote Clark, “Every problem in the modern world can be connected to the Jews.” . . .

The Nazis taught their followers that war and violence were sacred, purifying acts. “All violence is good violence,” said Vazquez. Clark believed this too, writing that the “upcoming Race War will be another type of war, it will be the most beautiful one yet, cleansing this earth of the disgusting filth walking all over it.” . . .

There is nothing abstract about the hatred and murderous actions of Clark and Vazquez, and the threats and slanders they heaped on their long list of racial, religious, and political enemies. They murdered three Muslim men in a mosque before killing themselves, and were equipped to kill many more had not one of the three—an armed guard who was killed in the attack—driven them back. Ultimately, though, these young murderers expressed overwhelming hatred of a world in which they found no roots, no connection, nothing but kinship in an imaginary white race (to which one of them didn’t even belong).

The Two-Faced Statue

Remarkable carved wooden statue by an unknown French artist, c. 1890. It depicts two characters from Goethe's Faust, Mephistopheles and Margaretta.

Carved from a single sycamore log.

Amazing

Would Bigger Representative Assemblies Lead to Better Government?

Some folks these days are arguing that what we need is smaller legislative districts, so that legislators would have closer ties to their constituents. I have seen calls for a US Congress with 50,000 members.

Two economists, Veda Narasimhan & Jeffrey Weaver, realized that India's thousands of local councils provided a way to test this theory, since those councils have widely varying memberships. They find that the size of the council has zero effect on anything:

Political inclusion is widely believed to improve governance, motivating the creation of elected representatives for highly localized constituencies. This paper studies 1.2 million "hyperlocal" representatives across 150,000 local governments in rural India. Exploiting discontinuities that determine the number and identity of these representatives, we assess how expanded representation affects governance outcomes. We find precisely estimated null effects on core functions, including public project management, intermediation in access to benefit programs, alignment of policy with citizen preferences, equity of benefit allocation, and oversight of public finances. These findings highlight the limits of expanding political representation if representative capacity is weak.

Layered Defense in Ukraine, with Some Thoughts on the Battle

Via Perun's new video on the battlefield situation in Ukraine, an example of Ukraine's new approach to defense. Many of the barriers are intended to slow or stop light troops on motorcycles and SUVs; hung up the wire, they become easy marks for drones.

The traditional way to breach such a line would involve heavy use of armored vehicles, but Russia is running low on those and is reluctant is expose them to drone attack. Russian artillery fires are also way down, partly due to the drone threat, partly due to ammunition shortages. So Russia relies on glide bombs to blast gaps in these defenses. That is going very slowly, which is why Russian progress is so slow this year.

Perun accepts the evidence that Russian progress has slowed to near zero, and he gives credence to the argument that Russia is now losing more troops than it is recruiting. He notes that this doesn't necessarily project into the future, but says there should be "cautious optimism" that things have shifted Ukraine's way.

A Weekend at My House

Saturday started with my son Thomas and I replacing the porch steps.

A friend took me to the Expo Titanic exhibit, which was fun, especially the room where they simulate you standing in the crow's nest and spotting the iceberg.

And I spent time in the garden, at its late spring roses and peonies peak. All in all, a very fine weekend.