Earrings from southern Italy, gold and carnelian, 2nd century BC
Kevin Drum reviews the new Republican Party platform.
Tyler Cowen provides an excellent summary of why Trump is winning. And note that by marital status, the most pro-Trump group is divorced men.
Narco-pentacostalism in Brazil.
Alice Munro and the sad fact that many writers are lousy people.
The NY Times lists the 100 best books of the century. Top ten: 1) Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend; 2) Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (a history of black migration to the north); 3) Hillary Mantel, Wolf Hall (my personal number one by far), 4) Edward Jones, The Known World; 5) Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections; 6) Roberto Bolaño, 2666; 7) Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad; 8) W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; 9) Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; 10) Marilynne Robinson, Gilead. I'm already listening to one I got off this list and have plans to get to two more, which makes the exercise valuable to me at least.
No, really, stop with the "discovery" of "the labyrinth" on Crete. Just stop. The number of people who have embarassed themselves over this one makes me sad. Shut up about Atlantis, too.
The discovery and development of laughing gas.
Sabine Hossenfelder, Why I am Embarassed to be German, 11-minute video. (Because Germany is falling behind technologically, due to bad political choices.)
Three short posts from The Smell of Water, aka Teeside Psychogeography: Howl Moor on a rainy day, a little discourse inspired by finding a fossil of the type once called a "fairy loaf," and a black and white photoset from a trip to London.
Longish essay on attempts to create a logic machine, from Ramon Lull to LLMs.
Sports-based language imperialism: besides all the other reasons English has spread around the world, there is the fact that so many popular sports were invented in Britain or the US: soccer, rugby, cricket, basketball, volleyball, baseball. On my mind because I watched some of the highlights from the France vs. Germany basketball game, and among the English words used by the German commentators were: turnover, steal, and one, no look, staredown (mit dem staredown), NBA, rebound, high-low (das high-low spiel), possession, fast break, and line-up. Even when the words were German, the phrasing was American basketball: Gute hilfe ("good help"), Ballbewegung ("ball movement"), and so on.
Peter Gray trashes Joathan Haidt's book arguing that screen time and the internet are damaging teen mental health, says there is "very little evidence for such effects." Gray blames school.
Tyler Cowen's conversation with Brian Winter, mainly about South America.
Impessive baskets by Native American weaver Jeremy Frey.
DNA and other analysis of human bones found in an underground cistern at the Maya city of Chichén Itzá says the victims were mostly young boys aged 3 to 6. They came from the surrounding community, and the 64 identified individuals included two sets of identical twins. The twin sacrifices may represent the Hero Twins of Maya myth. (WSJ, Arizona Free Press)
On Christopher Marlowe: "The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told."
Ten years ago, the population of starfish on the west coast of the US collapsed due to a still mysterious condition known as sea star wasting disease. This led to an explosion of sea urchins, which eat kelp, and so to a decline in kelp. Vox describes the efforts biologists are making to bring the starfish back.
Depressing piece in the NY Times about elevators in the US, which due largely to regulation are much more expensive than in Europe, and therefore we have fewer of them. Kevin Drum has a summary.
Southeast England is one of the world's richest regions; why is the north so much poorer? Can anything be done about it?
Smithsonian covers Pablo Escobar's hippos from the "menace to the environment" angle.
This week's music is Cassandra Jenkins, a semi-ethereal folk-ish pop-ish singer, somewhere in between Emylou Harris and Enya. Petco, Delphinium Blue, Hard Drive.
Claim on Twitter/X that Russian organized crimed has metatastized since the war began, up 76% by official government figures and possibly much worse. The need to ramp up smuggling obviously helps them, as does the focus of the police on other issues.
Mediazona and the BBC, who publish the most widely respected estimates of Russian casualities, now say that 120,000 Russian military personnel haved died in the Ukraine war. That's more than twice as many deaths as the US suffered in Vietnam and eight times as many as the Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan. At least 20,000 of the Russian dead were criminals, but that still leaves a lot of others, including many officers. Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine has verified 6 major generals, 94 colonels, 244 lieutenant colonels, 473 majors, 716 captains, and more than 2,000 lieutenants.
And the 400,000 (so far) wounded Russian soldiers will be a major drain on the state and society for decades.