A Better, Shorter Review of "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony"

Europa and the Bull, c. 200 BC

One of the entries in Scott Siskind's book review contest this year was a review of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, a famously strange book about the Greek myths. The review is not bad, but it is 8,600 words long and for all its length fails to grapple at all with the questions that I think are at the heart of Calasso's work: what does it mean to say that the modern world is disenchanted? What is enchantment, anyway? Why do ancient myths still fascinate us? and are we rational moderns too different from ancient peoples to understand what they believed, how they felt when they looked at the night sky and saw dots of light that bore the names of gods?

One thing our for-now anonymous reviewer gets right: this book is a carefully constructed work of literature, not a scholarly tome. In form Calasso's book is a retelling of various myths, often giving us two or three different versions of the same story in sequence, or mingling them together. Some of the stories Calasso tells may be unknown to most readers, even those who know something about Greek myth. That's because Calasso's favorite source is the Dionysiaca by Nonnus, a Christian writer who lived in the 400s AD. Some scholars consider Nonnus too late and otherwise suspect to tell us much about the Greek myths as they were known in the time of Herodotus or Plato, let alone Homer. But Calasso simply ignores that and treats Nonnus as an authentic ancient source.

Why does Calasso do that? Does he not understand that stories, even very traditional ones, can change across a thousand years? He does. He just doesn't care. He does not understand myth as something that undergoes historical change in response to economic or political or whatever other factors. To Calasso myth is something so fundamental to humanity that it might as well be outside of history altogether.

One of the things that fascinates Calasso about the Greek myths is their focus on transformation. In the stories, things are always changing into something else. He is hardly the first intellectual to have noticed this theme; Ovid gave us the Metamorphoses more than 2,000 years ago. Just as things in the myths are always changing, transforming, so the myths themselves are always changing and transforming. To freeze them is to destroy them.

Calasso begins with the famous tale of Europa and the bull, in which a Phoenician girl was carried off by Zeus in the form of beautiful bull, then used and abandoned in the new world of Europe. Is this not a very strange tale? Why would a god spend his time seducing and abandoning girls, and why would he have to transform into a bull to do so? Why do all of the women in these early tales end up as abandoned suicides, hanging themselves in the desolate spaces where god or hero abandoned them? The stories do not tell us, and neither does Calasso. Not directly, anyway.

Instead he takes us on a tour of things he finds fascinating about the Greek myths. For example, what is the salient characteristic of the Greek gods?

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. . . . When something undefined and powerful shakes mind and fiber and trembles the cage of our bones, when the person who only a moment before was dull and agnostic is suddenly rocked by laughter and homicidal frenzy, or by the pangs of love, or by the hallucination of form, or finds his face streaming with tears, then the Greek realizes he is not alone. Somebody else stands beside him, and that somebody is a god. (243)

The Gods are life at its fullest, life overflowing. (Nietsche, of course, picked up on this and made it central to his philosophy.)

The Homeric world is not one with much in the way of human agency; instead, it is the operation of the gods that drives the story. And yet the gods were not the ultimate power in the Greek universe. Above and beyond them lay the power that we sometimes call fate:

Whenever the dullness of the profane was left behind, whenever life grew more intense in whatever way, through honor or death, victory or sacrifice, marriage or prayer, initiation or possession, purification or mourning, anything everything that stirred a person and demanded a meaning, the Greeks would celebrate with fluttering strips of wool, white or red for the most part, which they tied around their heads, or arms, or to a branch, the prow of a ship, a statue, an ax, a stone, a cooking pot. The modern eye encounters these woolen strips everywhere in the fragments that have come down to us but doesn’t see them, removes them from the center of attention as mere decorative details, and hence insignificant. To the Greek eye, the opposite was the case; it was those light, fluttering strips of wool that generated meaning, gave it its boundaries, celebrated in. Everything that took place in the soft frame of those woolen strips was different and separate from the rest. What was it those woolen strips, those tassels represented? An excess, a flowing wake that attached itself to a being or thing. And at the same time a tether that bound that being or thing.

Isidore of Seville (c. 600 AD) could still write, “The woolen ties are so called because they bind.” But what was this bond? It was the momentary surfacing of a link in that invisible net which enfolds the world, which descends from heaven to earth, binding the two together and swaying in the breeze. (283-284)

Here is one of Calasso's great themes, the net of destiny that the Greeks called Ananke. Things sometimes happen because the gods will them, but even the gods are caught in the snares of necessity. What happens is what must happen.

Priam, standing with Helen on the walls of Troy, says to her, "It was not your fault; it was the gods."

No psychology since has ever gone beyond this; all we have done is invent, for those powers that act upon us, longer, more numerous, more awkward names, which are less effective, less closely aligned to the pattern of our experience, whether that be pleasure or terror. The moderns are proud above all of their responsibility, but in being so they presume to respond with a voice that they are not even sure is theirs. The Homeric heroes knew nothing of that cumbersome word responsibility, nor would they have believed in it if they had. For them, it was as if every crime were committed in a state of mental infirmity. But such infirmity meant that a god was present and at work. What we consider infirmity they saw as “divine infatuation” – átē. They knew that this invisible incursion often brough ruin: so much so that the word átē would gradually come to mean “ruin.” But they also knew, and it was Sophocles who said it, that “mortal life can never have anything great about it except through átē.” (93-94)

And one more point:

Socrates himself cleared up this point shortly before his death: we enter the mythical when we enter the realm of risk, and myth is the enchantment we generate in ourselves at such moments. More than a belief, it is a magical bond that tightens around us. It is a spell the soul cast on itself. “This risk is fine indeed, and what we must somehow do with these things is enchant ourselves.” . . . “These things,” as Socrates casually puts it, are the fables, the myths. (278-279)

So what was the enchanted world of the Homeric heroes? It was a world in which humans were weak creatures at the mercy of divine whims, whether than meant Zeus carrying off princesses or heroes forced to battle each other so the gods could be entertained. It was a world governed by destiny's grim dictates, symbolized by the streamers of wool that decorated every significant occasion, and by the long list of abandoned, dying heroines. A world in which humans experienced wonder only in the grip of divine madness that also brought them very near to death.

What happened to that world? In a word, responsibility. When humans decided that we could and should be captains of our own destiny, the world ceased to be the playground of gods and monsters and became the mundane place that we inhabit.

Calasso finds signs of this shift in the classicial world, and sometimes implies that the 5th century Greece was the first place where at least some humans disenchanted themselves in pursuit of rationality, success, and self-control. But with Calasso linear, historical time is never simple or absolute. To him, the shift from a universe ruled by destiny and divine power to one where men believe themselves to be masters of their own fate has happened and has not happened and is happening in every moment, in every person. These are two sides of a golden coin spinning through time.

That is my interpretation of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. But, really, that is not the point of this book. The point is to be led through the Greek myths by a writer who is an expert of the highest order, yet who cares about getting the myths right only as a doorway through which he shows us glimpses of the deepest human things. If you have any interest in myth and what it means, read this book, because it is wonderful.

My review of Calasso's most famous book, The Ruin of Kasch, is here.

Help from Outside Can Damage Local Institutions

From a review of Breakdown in Pakistan by Masooda Bano, part of Scott Siskind's book review contest:

Since Pakistan’s government is of limited use to much of its population, “a vibrant network of [non-state groups] emerged to meet the collective needs of the community and those of the poor.” They weren’t founded in response to availability of external funds, but as a response to disasters or a perceived need among some target population. Bano cites the example of Anjuman-Faizul-Islam, one of Pakistan’s oldest voluntary organizations (VOs), “set up in response to a famine in Bengal that left many children orphaned,” or the All Pakistan Women’s Association, created in 1948 to promote women’s rights, literacy, and economic opportunities.

With the dawn of the NGO era of aid in the 1980s, Western donors and charities began combing Pakistan for local nonprofit partners to implement their projects, and discovered this rich base of small-scale organizations already acting as an informal safety net. The way ahead seemed clear: train Pakistani VOs in grant management and project implementation, so they could tap into larger donor funds and take their good work to scale.

Grants were won; aid projects implemented; success declared. But as Bano relates, Oxfam soon discovered an unexpected dark side to its “capacity-building” work in Sindh province. It had trained six locally prominent welfare organizations in strategic planning and proposal writing, and got them started on implementation by giving them $1000 to work with. The VOs largely met their explicit project targets, and seemed ready to engage with international development funds on a scale much greater than they’d handled before.

Yet all six organisations were visibly more dysfunctional at the end of the project than they had been at the beginning. They were consumed by factionalism, accusations of favoritism, legal battles over control of funds. And they had lost virtually all of their volunteers—notably including the members whose monthly donations and contributions of time had for decades been the backbone of their work. An Oxfam official observed about one group: “From thirty active members, the size of the team shrank to three or four people who had become workshopias,” i.e. those who had gone to every training workshop and built the strongest relationships with the foreign donor. The kind of welfare work the VOs had previously done, based on mobilizing communities for mutual support, was now beyond their capacity.

Western aid to poor countries may have saved many lives, but the unintended costs have been very high. 

Peak Summer Flowers

We had some damage from fierce storms last week, but this week we have a riot of flowers, butterflies, and goldfinches.

Two Visions of History

A professor muses on the students he is teaching in the late 1960s and their notion that we are entering the Age of Aquarius, and realizes that Virgil had also referenced the procession of the equinoxes in his praise of imperial Rome:

Redeunt Saturnia Regna: the old gold age that once was is come again. Walking home through the illuminated streets, in bed with Julie, at breakfast, standing abstracted before his students, Pierce came to feel often, like a clutch in his throat or a hum in his ears, that sense of collision he had first felt at Earl's; as though he had come upon some kind of crossroads, no, as though he were himself a crossroads, a place where caravans met, freighted with heavy goods, come from far places, colliding there with others come from far places, headed elsewhere: pack-trains, merchants carrying jewels sewn into their clothing, dark nomads from nowhere carrying nothing, imperial couriers, spies, lost children. The history he thought he knew, the path called History that he walked every walking day, that path that led backwards through a maze of battles, migrations, conquests, bankruptcies, revolutions, one damn thing after another, men and women doing and saying, dreaming and playing, till it coiled finally and unknowably upon itself at the side of a cold campfire on some vast and silent veldt —from that path, it seemed, there forked another, just as long and just as mazy, only long since lost; and for some reason now, just now, it had suddenly become visible again, in him as to others, dawn winds rising as night turned pale. 

Down that road, the past did not grow darker with distance, but brighter; that way lay the morning lands, wise forefathers, who knew what we have forgotten, radiant cities built by arts now lost.

Nor did that road go curling off to an ending lost amid the beasts: no, though far shorter than the road Pierce called History, it was infinite, because just as its furthest age rolled back to its first days, the whole road completed a circle; the serpent took in its mouth the fast-dwindling tip of its tail. Nowadays history is made of time; but once it was made of something else.

Now that would be a story to tell his kids, wouldn't it, he thought. The story of that history not made of time; that history which is as different from History yet as symmetrical to it as dream is to waking.

As dream is to waking.

He pulled himself from his new armchair with some difficulty and went to the window; he turned out his lights and stood looking out into the never dark city.

There had been a morning once, when he was a child, when he had awakened from frightening dreams, labyrinthine pursuit and loss, and his mother had tried to explain to him the nature of dreams, and why it is that, though you seem in them to be in mortal danger, you can't be hurt, not really. Dreams, she said, are only stories: except they aren't stories outside, like the ones in books. Dreams are your own stories, inside. 

Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to the beginning whenever that is or was. Stories are what the history not made of time is made of.

–John Crowley, The Solitudes

Links 24 July 2026

Hours of Louis de Laval, c. 1480

Amazing wedding gift AI video.

My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road.

Here's an article that brings together, Russia, Nazi ideology, a kidnapping, multiple high-ranking German politicians, fake war videos, Chechens, a two-year prison sentence, and a right-wing populist German party.

A claim that trial lawyers are lobbying against autonomous vehicles because fewer accidents means less business for them.

Scott Siskind's July links post, some good stuff.

And Siskind on some recent AI jailbreak events.

Noah Smith on the rise and decline of the American university.

Hoard of coins from Republican Rome found in Germany.

Monumental Assyrian stele found at Nineveh; cool that the eastern gate of Nineveh was called the Sun Gate.

Life inside Icelandic turf houses.

The world's largest popup book.

Not bad for a contemporary art museum.

The history of going out and having fun.

Richard Hanania against gerontocracy in America.

Laura Loomer Changes What Passes for Her Mind

After years of supporting Russia, Laura Loomer changes her tune about the Ukraine war:

I did say these things about Ukraine and Zelensky and I am not deleting my posts because I’ve realized, I was wrong.

I was living in a media echo chamber and I was propagandized by Russian media on social media to believe those things.

So I came to Ukraine to see the country for myself. I am going to try to find evidence for the propaganda I’ve been fed, and if I don’t find it, I will let everyone know so they too can come to see the light.

On day one, I’ve already seen photos of dead priests in Bucha murdered by Russia and I saw the mass grave where the bodies of murdered Christians were placed after Russia sent forces from Chechnya to massacre innocent people.

I spoke with officials who rescue POWs and they showed me photos of Ukrainian POWs who had swastikas engraved into their forehead by Russians.

Who are the Nazis? 🤔 I was lied to for years.

Ok, great that she has gone to Ukraine to check things out for herself. But this:

Russia is very good at information warfare. 

No! Russia is terrible at information warfare; they have not fooled a single person who was even remotely paying attention.

The only reason anyone ever believed Russia's lies about the war was that they reflexively supported any nation that seemed to oppose the western liberal consensus. Putin was anti-trans and anti EU, and that was enough for some people to think he must be right about everything. Only that kind of disgraceful tabloid thinking can explain anyone's belief that Russia's cause in Ukraine is just.

One of the worst habits of humanity is dividing the world into two sides and believing that one side is right about everything, or at any rate most things.

Every "side" commits crimes, and it is the responsibility of every thinking person to look beyond team spirit.

More of this, please:

I am my own person. I think for myself because I am not a Russian bot.

Drones and Economic Warfare

Daniel Miessler on Twitter/X:

Something that the Ukraine and Iran wars have taught me is that for a lot of countries, including very big countries, there are a small number of buildings and infrastructure components that are required for their economy to function. . . .

You can just make a list of oil refineries and production plants and the infrastructure around their main exports, and you can just attack them and destroy them and take them off the list.

4 years ago I would have thought there are too many of these components and they're too easy to recreate, but both of these collisions have taught me that there are far fewer and that many of them will take years, if not over a decade, to rebuild.

It's very strange to me that drones can now effectively harm the economy of a country. 

According to the Kyiv Post, Russia's capacity to refine oil has fallen by 43 percent, and I have seen other serious estimates as high as 58%. This hurts, as the long lines at gas stations show.

And now attacks on Wildberries warehouses; Wildberries is sort of the Amazon of Russia, and these warehouses hold billions of dollars worth of stuff. Forbes estimates the losses in three warehouse attacks like this.

• Seller inventory losses in the Moscow region: at least 150 billion rubles ($1.91 billion) and warehouse restoration cost: up to 33 billion rubles ($420 million).
• Seller inventory losses in Krasnodar and Nevinnomyssk: 100–120 billion rubles ($1.27–1.53 billion).
• Total estimated damage: 283–303 billion rubles ($3.60–3.86 billion).

On the one hand, yes, it is impressive how much damage Ukraine is doing to Russia's economy, especially when you consider that Russia has enormous air defense resources compared to most other nations. On the other, the war goes on, and neither side seems interested in peace, after many months of attacks employing tens of thousands of drones. It may be possible to seriously damage a nation's economy, but it is not easy.

Scarabs

Here is the Met's explantion for why ancient Egyptians were obsessed with dung beetles:

The scarab was shaped like a dung beetle, scarabaeus sacer, which is also the source of its modern name. The dung beetle was "kheperer" in ancient Egyptian. Having watched the small creatures push huge balls of dung, the ancient Egyptians compared the sun being pushed into the sky at dawn to the beetle, and they referred to the rising sun as "Kheperi." The word for "to become" or "come into being" was "kheper," and the beetle hieroglyph was used to spell all of these words. As such, the scarab became a powerful amulet for rejuvenation in this life and reincarnation in the next. 

This is the sema-tawy, the symbol of the unification of Egypt. These are all images of the under sides; the tops are all shaped like beetles. I love them because they can be almost anything.

Here we have Ramesses IV riding a chariot and trampling an enemy.

Here's one the Met doesn't attempt to explain.

Two goddesses with lions' heads

Wonderful little things.

Historical Knowledge

I'm just trying to stay awake so I can pick up a friend at the airport whose arrival has been delayed until midnight, reading Twitter/X and finding gems like this:

Ethan Molick on AIs and Porting

People are using AI coding to port old games to new platforms. Mollick:

It should be the golden age of porting. Maybe iPad will finally get some good games. (More boringly, but financially important, it is also the golden age of data & code migration from old computer systems to new ones) 

Lots of tasks that were just too tedious for humans to do, like rewriting all that old Fortran and COBOL code in legacy computer systems can now be done easily with AI.

Orientalism at the Met

I guess Orientalism is out of the doghouse, since the Met is staging a major exhibition. Above is a famous work in this vein, Prayer in the Mosque by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1874

Something I never saw before, An Egyptian Woman by John Singer Sargent, 1890

A bit of pseudo Islamic decoration by Léon Parvillée and Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1874

Architectural Model Based on the Alhambra by Rafael Contreras, which is obscurely date to between 1847 and 1890

Turkish girdle clasp that ended up in the private collection of a rich nineteenth-century American. Worth clicking on the see the detail.

Another famous Gerome, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868. French painters loved this theme, painting "Bashi-Bazouks" as highly exotic, highly paid, very well dressed soldiers. But really Bashi-Bazouks were unpaid irregulars who tagged along with Turkish armies in the hope of plunder, so the poorest and worst dressed men in the army.

The Met tried to redeem their interest in colonially suspect art by featuring Turkish artist Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910). I can't see any difference between his depictions of these scenes and the work of the French artists whose style he was copying. (At the Mosque Door, 1874)

Looks like a wonderful exhibit.

Moscow, Today

Smoke from a burning warehouse after a Ukrainian drone attack.

Sherman Alexie Against Literary Mobsters

 On his blog:

Dear Members of the Political Left, there are literary mobsters who share our politics. You’ll see them rail against the censorship of their thoughts while organizing to censor other writers because of their politics. They do this underground. They get readings shut down. They get publishers to rescind the publication of books. They serve on award juries where certain books are automatically eliminated for consideration for major awards. It’s easy to spot the mobsters. They’re the ones who only talk about the censorship of their words. You’ll never hear them defend the rights of writers with different politics. Some of your favorite writers are mobsters. A few of you Substackers are running with these mobsters. I’ve read your posts. And here’s a distressing thing: Some of you don’t realize that you have become a mobster.

Links 17 July 2026

Johannes van Bronchorst, The Musicians, c1650, detail 

Kwame Anthony Appiah on how AI may change us.

My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road.

Perun on North Korea's strange decision to construct a blue water navy, one-hour video.

Entries from the International Aerial Photographer of the Year contest.

Life in an Icelandic turf house. Sounds miserable.

Retrospective on the work of black American photographer Gordon Parks.

The Extraordinary Rise in the American Standard of Living Since 1970 (Twitter/X)

Time Magazine's list of the 100 most inluential online creators includes only four people I have heard of.

We may have identified an ancient Maya mathematician by name: Sak Tahn Waax, or White-chested Fox.

A claim that all blue-eyed humans have a single common ancestor on the order of 8,000 years ago.

Where did painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema get his ideas about ancient Rome?

Debating whether the Epstein Files are a "moral panic."

Imagined future stadiums.

Shrine burning in Noto, Japan.

The Ukrainians I follow on Twitter/X are not happy with the firing of Defense Mininister Mykhailo Fedorov; they think he was largely the architect of the recent rise in Ukraine's military fortunes. (Special Kherson Cat, Tatarigami, Ostap Yarysh, Illia Ponomarenko)

A Report on Politics and the Humanities

A group of eminent academics, led by Paul Boghossian and Kwame Anthony Appiah, recently issued a Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.  They did not like what they found. The authors are highly disturbed by politicization of scholarship, which, they find, often reaches the point of denying that there is any value in seeking the truth:

For example, in a 2021 presidential address to the American Anthropological Association, UCLA anthropology professor Akhil Gupta declared that “anthropology is an outlier among the social sciences ... because its political project is to challenge the culturally dominant commonsense of capitalist consumerism”.

In a reply published in American Anthropologist, University of Colorado Boulder population geneticist Fernando Villanea emphasised the point that “the value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective,” but rather to “serve the interests” of people who have been harmed by anthropologists in the past. Two years later, in the same journal, José Santos argued that “all ethnographies”—the stock in trade of cultural anthropology—have as their goal “not voyeurism but advocacy”; as if the goal of describing the social world and making sense of it was not only not on the menu, but that it was to be disparaged as a kind of perversion. Taken literally, such remarks call, not for scholarship in the service of a social goal, but for a rejection of the core idea that scholarship aims at understanding. 

If anything this careful critique understakes what has happened in anthropology and sociology, where the very notion of truth has been completely discarded in favor of advocacy. There are many spaces – journals, conferences, private conversations – where “seeking the truth” is mentioned only as a concept held up to mockery, and questioning the assumption that scholarship exists to serve the marginalized draws either laughter or furor.

The authors have a different ideal in mind:

Part of the raison d’être of a university is that it should engage in disinterested inquiry — inquiry aimed at knowledge and understanding, both for their own sake and for the sake of further goods that require genuine knowledge and understanding, rather than ideologically informed opinion, for their promotion. This, at least in part, is what universities are for. Indeed, it might well be thought that one of the greatest contributions a university can make to society is to provide a model of what disinterested inquiry can be and how it might thereby be of value. If the pursuit of disinterested inquiry is compromised, it strikes at the very foundation on which a university should be based, just as the corrupt administration of justice strikes at the foundation upon which a system of justice should be based.

I agree.

Shorter, less bureaucratic version of the argument in Quillette.

The Faith of an Intellectual

For me, thinking is thanking. 

– Byung-Chul Han 

Why Young People Report So Much Mental Illness

Via Marginal Revolution:

Christoph Henking and Ben Baumberg Geiger found that while there has been a steep rise in the share of young Britons reporting a mental illness, the share of people who say a mental health problem limits their day-to-day functioning has barely budged.

…when asked if they would consider someone experiencing typical fluctuations in mood (described as broad happiness but occasional moments of worry, frustration or loss of confidence) as having a mental illness, more than half of young Americans say yes, up from just a fifth 15 years ago. Older people’s views show no such change. 

Lilies

Class in America

In this essay, Noah Smith articulates an important part of my own experience:

I grew up in the 1980s in a small house with only one bathroom shared between four people. The floor was linoleum. There was a carport instead of a garage, and we had one beat-up used Toyota Tercel hatchback. I don’t remember when we got our first color TV, but when I was young we had a black-and-white one that my grandmother gave us. Our furniture was all second-hand and we kept the couches covered up with worn old blankets.

When I was young, I mowed lawns for money. As a high school kid, I signed up to pick cotton by hand (!!) for an agricultural research project at Texas A&M University, for minimum wage. I have also worked as a cashier. Twice in my life, I have been a member of a labor union, and I have marched in a strike.

I have never once considered myself part of the working class.

Why not? Because I have never thought of class as being defined by a present snapshot of someone’s lifestyle or material circumstances. Instead, I always thought of class as being about someone’s potential. And I grew up always knowing that my economic potential went far beyond the rather humble circumstances of my early childhood.

Like Smith, I have at times been quite poor in my life: for the first three years after my parents divorced, when I left college and moved to Williamsburg, Virginia with no job prospects, during graduate school. But I was never a poor person; I was a middle class person who happened to have no money. I knew I would one day have a lot more, and eventually I did. 

Foucault, Authorship, and AI

Emily Eakin in the NY Times:

The A.I. revolution was still more than 50 years off when Michel Foucault published his lecture “What Is an Author?” in 1969. But he seemed to sense it coming. “We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author,” he wrote. In such a world, writing “would unfold in a pervasive anonymity.”

Foucault was evidently excited by the idea. For him, language was not a neutral tool that we use to communicate or represent the world but something more sinister: the means through which power shapes how we think and act, and even what we can know. What he called the “author-function” was a legal ruse serving a strategic political purpose. It was a device for social control, a way of stanching the free flow of meaning, of tracing language back to a particular human being — “the author” — who could then be held accountable, even punished, for dangerous or objectionable ideas.

Now, of course, with the spread of generative A.I., language without an author is everywhere. But this new era of authorless discourse is hardly proving to be the liberation for people that Foucault fantasized about. Instead, it is dominated by a handful of chatbots produced by secretive, billionaire-owned corporations and vulnerable to manipulation for political ends.

Still, Foucault would not have been entirely surprised. Power, in his view, was inescapable. This is his double-edged legacy to us: a vision of the world that in its concrete details seems eerily to anticipate our own but in which progress and freedom often turn out to be illusions, at the mercy of power. 

Links 10 July 2026

Merovingian gilded silver brooch, c. 600 AD

So I was working down in Danville, Virginia this week, and then on my way home I hit a deer on US 29 (I'm fine, car is bad, deer is worse), which launched me into a long saga phone calls with insurance people, tow truck guys, a garage, and a rental car company, followed by long drives, maddening delays, and two highly competent women at the garage who saved me from being stranded overnight, and anyway my day was shot and this post was late. Blame the deer.

Do older leaders start more wars? Turns out to be a hard question without a clear answer. (18-minute video)

London maker of custom glass eyes.

Hoard of medieval jewelry found in Saudi Arabia.

My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road.

Scott Sumner reviews Richard Hanania's new book on populism, Kakistocracy.

Wonderful collection of ancient figurines found in Peru.

Ukraine strikes Russia's largest oil refinery, in Omsk, more than 2,000 km from Ukrainian-held territory. (Twitter/X, Kyiv Post) Allegedly the flight path of the drones was about 3,400 km, or 2,100 miles. Russian social media is full of videos of fights breaking out in the long lines at gas stations.

Good explanation of a recent physics experiment which suggests that time is an emergent property of systems, related to entropy. (14-minute video) From the same source, recent data on the outer solar system makes the Planet 9 hypothesis much less likely.

Progress against dementia.

The American Atlas of 1776.

Speculations about Neanderthal babies.

Three intellectuals try to imagine the AI future.

How "medical privacy" has harmed research.

A New Russian Joke is an Old Soviet One

A Russian man is in line at the gas station. "I've had enough," he says to his wife. "You take the wheel, I'm going to shoot Putin."

After two hours he returns and gets back behind the wheel.

His wife asks him, "Did you shoot him?"

And he replies, "No, the line to shoot Putin is longer than this one!" 

–source

Ilya Somin Defends the American Revolution

You know the arguments against the American Revolution: it retarded the end of slavery, led to worse treatment of Indians, we would have been better off with a Parliamentary system, etc. Ilya Somin responds:

1. Far from retarding the abolition of slavery, the Revolution actually accelerated it. Its triumph gave a big boost to Enlightenment liberalism, which inspired the First Emancipation in the US (the abolition of slavery in the North that became the first large-scale emancipation of slaves in modern history), and boosted antislavery movements in Europe, as well.

2. Had the Revolution been defeated, Enlightenment liberal ideology would have been dealt a setback in Britain and France, too. That would have set back antislavery movements there, as well. It is no accident that many antislavery leaders in Europe were also sympathizers with the American Revolution. The Marquis de Lafayette was just one of the most famous examples of European liberals who actively backed both.

3. The West Indian slaveowner lobby in Parliament was strong enough to block abolition of slavery until 1833. Had Britain also been saddled with the much larger proslavery lobby of the American South, it would have taken far longer. Especially when you combine the impact of the larger slavery lobby with the force of point 2 above.

4. A defeat for the American Revolution would have set back other liberal causes too, not just antislavery. That includes, among other things, universal suffrage, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and increased rights for women. Each of these reforms (and others, too) was given new impetus by American Revolution, which inspired European liberals to imitate them.

I agree with all of this. The end of slavery was not some kind of natural event that happened because it was just. It happened because of the progress of Enlightenment ideas and liberal politics. Until the Enlightenment, there had never been an organized movement to abolish slavery, and that was only one of the many, many extraordinary parts of that great movement: democracy, women's rights, children's rights, anti-racism, a global peace movement, and more. The American Revolution only happened as it did because of the spread of Enlightenment ideas through the European and American elites, and that spread was very much bound up with the success of the Revolution.

The Songbook of Zengeren van Male

One of the weirdest manuscripts you will ever see, chock full of bizarre images across hundreds of pages.

Americana

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

– Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

Links 3 July 2026

Kay Sage, Tomorrow is Never, 1955

Another charred scroll from Pompeii has been digitally "unrolled" and partially deciphered; more neo-Stoic philosophy.

I have finished uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road, so if you have been waiting for the whole thing to be up, it is. 

Scott Siskind, beautiful essay about parenting and inheritance.

Tyler Cowen on jobs in the AI future, 12 minute video.

The highest resolution photograph ever taken of the Milky Way.

Noah Smith on the insanity of European elites over air conditioning. It is especially rich to see French officials decrying air conditioning over climate change when most of their power is nuclear.

Sabine Hossenfelder on billionaires, state, power, and the AI future, 12-minute video.

Decent article on the records of the Assyrian merchant colony in Kanesh, our best look at Bronze Age trade.

Dean Ball on AI safety, regulation, the Trump administration, and what we should do.

The Dark Genius of Ukraine's Military Points System, 11-minute video.

Noah Smith on AI and the rise of single-person companies.

Will AI undo some of the damage done to our discourse by social media? (AI likes elite opinions and technical experts, so people relying on AI will hear more of that.)

Anton Petrov on new theories of the nature of time, 12-minute video.

Richard Hanania: "Conservatism became socialist when it went from complaining about blacks not working to immigrants being too good at work."

Mosaic floors of an early Christian basilica found in Italy.

The London photographer who has been recording the last days of things (tram lines, businesses, etc.) since 1952.

Excellent article on the distortions introduced by rent control. Summary at Marginal Revolution.

Thanks to Ukraine's ongoing strikes on Russian oil refineries and the resulting gasoline shortage, ordinary Russians are finally having to pay attention to Putin's war. (CNN, Aljazeera, NY Times)

Sixth-century BC chariot burial found in Italy.

How tall trees get water to their crowns in times of drought.

The artist who photographs places where deer have slept. I confess that I am so used to seeing these that the photos had no impact on me at all.