Links 17 April 2026

Moche disk, gilded copper, 200 BC to 600 AD. The animals are deer.

The Moche hunted deer by driving them into nets, and this net design

may symbolize a deer hunt.

Magawa, the world's most famous landmine-sniffing rat, got a big statue. (NPR, BBC, YouTube)

Excellent Tyler Cowen interview with archaeologist Kim Bowles about the Roman economy, good corrective to lots of nonsense economists have spouted about it.

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

According to US government data, American women aged 40-44 now have a higher birth rate than women 15-19. The most fertile age group is now 30-34. (Twitter/X)

An economist takes a serious look at theories that say the exploitation of African slaves caused the industrial revolution.

Ukraine captures a Russian position using only air and ground drones.

Nigeria's religious censors ban most erotic writing, so local women have turned to publishing their erotic work on WhatsAp. (NY Times)

A vast gray market has emerged in GLP-1 drugs, with people using them to treat everything from addiction to concussions. (NY Times)

Being around babies makes people want babies. (Twitter/X) I suppose this is one reason why fertility decline seems to accelerate once it gets going.

Great Scott Siskind piece on Viktor Orban and the sliding scale from democracy to dictatorship. A sample: "I spent the first half of my writing career calling out biased left-wing experts, the flood swept all those people away, and now we’re ruled by germ-theory-denialists and Waffle-House-teleporters. Not a day goes by that I don’t want the old biased experts back. To paraphrase Cormac McCarthy, you never know what worse institutions your bad institutions have saved you from."

A claim that AI is causing the collapse of online communities for writers.

Unique circular temple of the Hellenistic period found in Egypt.

"Mirror towns" as a partial solution to Britain's housing crisis, short video on Twitter/X.

Noah Smith says it is our consumer choices that define us as individuals: "on a personal level, it seems clear to me that the standard story we grow up hearing — that your job is what makes you you, while what you consume is dictated by corporations — has it exactly backwards. Consumption shapes you into a unique individual, while your job exists at the whim of the collective." And this mighgt become even more important after AI takes your job.

The Yale Report and the State of Higher Education

Yale commissioned its own report on why trust in American higher education has declined so much. I want to emphasize, first, that trust in EVERY American institution has declined, and some polls find that higher education is not doing worse than average. But other find that universities are drawing an unusual degree of scorn. From the report:

Just a decade ago, 57 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that number had dropped to a historic low of 36 percent. While trust improved slightly in 2025, seventy percent of Americans still say that higher education is heading in the wrong direction. . . .

Our committee identified three immediate factors behind the rise of public distrust. The first involves the soaring price of higher education in the United States, along with the perception that college, graduate, and professional school are no longer worth the money and sacrifice they demand. The second focuses on the college admissions system—specifically, the question of who gets in and why. The third includes an array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship. We also found important problems related to trust within the university itself, including concerns that grade inflation, new technologies, and bureaucratic expansion have undermined the university’s academic mission.

And here is an important point that bears repeating: complicated, opaque schemes bread distrust. From the NY Times:

For example, Yale and many other schools now rely on a model that regularly dilutes high tuition prices with generous aid packages. Although many students pay nowhere near sticker prices, the committee wrote that the approach had exacted “a disastrous impact on public trust.”

“By its nature, the system is complicated, unpredictable, secretive and highly variable,” the report said. “These factors tend to reduce trust rather than increase it.”

The same thing has happened in American health care, with the crazy-quilt system of charges and costs driving the overall lack of trust in medicine.

Here's an interesting paragraph on the issue of free speech:

Yale’s data suggests that self-censorship is a real problem. In a 2025 survey by the university, nearly a third of undergraduate respondents disagreed with the statement that “I feel free to express my political beliefs on campus,” up from 17 percent in 2015. Students who selfidentified as conservative reported lower rates of comfort, but discomfort appears to be rising across the spectrum. A recent Buckley Institute survey suggested that more than half of college students nationwide feel “intimidated in sharing their opinions, ideas, or beliefs in class.” Meanwhile, post-doctoral fellows and international students at Yale report that they now hesitate to speak out, even about their own research, for fear of government retaliation.

I think this is a hard problem because here the university only reflects the broader society. We just have fewer consensus beliefs and more issues of intense political disagreement than we had when I was in college. Many professors try to create a space for disagreement within their classrooms, but on the other hand most subscribe to some limits, and where to draw the line is just hard; given the ambiguity, many students might feel silenced even when their beliefs would be widely accepted. But it never hurts to try!

But as I always say, the root of the problem is the lack of any agreement on what universities are supposed to teach, and what a university degree is supposed to mean. The range of topics taken up in the report, the authors say,

revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do—and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

Is it ever.

First Seedlings

After a hot day yesterday and a thunderstorm last night, little baby zinnias are popping up all over the garden.

Build More Statues

US Grant statue, DC

Matt Yglesias launches a campaign I am 100% behind:

Recent revelations about Cesar Chavez have led to some of the statues erected in his honor getting torn down. This is, of course, understandable, but it also reminds me of something I think about whenever anyone’s statue gets torn down: America could use more statues.

And when I say statues, I mean traditional statues. I don’t hate the Martin Luther King “Embrace” statue in Boston the way some people do, but the contemporary arts community needs to chill out a bit when it comes to public art.

Everyone understands what a cool statue looks like. Whether it’s Admiral Nelson on his column in London or Ulysses Grant on a horse in Chicago, a statue is a statue. Did you know there’s a Grant Circle in Washington, DC, but while Thomas Circle has a statue of General Thomas and Logan Circle has a statue of General Logan, there’s no statue of Grant in Grant Circle? That’s because it was moved long ago to the grounds of the United States Capitol, which is great! But it fails to manifest what I think is the necessary abundance mindset with regard to statues.

We have the technology and natural resources required to create another Grant statue and put it in Grant Circle. There’s also no statue of General Sherman in Sherman Circle, not because it was moved but because at the time it was named there was already a Sherman statue near the White House. But so what? Build another damn statue!

There should be plenty of figurative, heroic-looking statues of King and other civil rights leaders, too.

But I would also encourage city leaders to lean into more obscure, hipster historical figures to make statues of. DC should have a statue honoring Walter Washington, the first mayor of the Home Rule era. And there’s another guy who, under an older governance regime, held the title Mayor of the City of Washington from 1868 to 1870 who was tossed out of office after one term in a backlash to his aggressive promotion of school integration. Get that guy a statue!

One thing I have learned in my career is that ordinary people much prefer figural sculpture to abstractions, and they really appreciate depictions of their heroes. Let's build more.

Planting Day

With the danger of frost behind us and hot weather coming, this was seed planting weekend for my flower gardens. Some of the flower beds are above, with the soil all tilled.

Meanwhile spring charges on, now with ornamental cherries and my own crabapple tree.

A Painting of Medieval Galley Combat

It might surprise you to learn that historians know very little about pre-cannon naval combat. One supposes that triremes, galleys, or longships tried to ram each other but otherwise came together and the crews fought. But how did they do that? Did they have some way of coming together without breaking all their oars, or did they just accept that battles meant breaking lots of oars? Were there special troops who stood in the bow and started the fighting, as certain Viking poems suggest?

Sadly, nobody bothered to write any of this down, so we are mostly reduced to guesswork.

Which brings to a fresco that resides in Palazzo Pubblico of Siena. It was painted by Spinello Aretino in 1407-1408. It depicts the naval battle of Punta San Salvatore, supposed to have been fought in 1177 between Venice and the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. There is no remotely contemporary evidence that this battle was ever fought, and the consensus seems to be that it was made up by some Venetian "historian." But for our purposes that is neither hear nor there, because what we are looking for is a depiction of galley combat in the age before artillery.

And here we have one. What does it show?

Well, for one thing we see that much of the fighting is done by soldiers who are clearly marked out from the oarsmen by their armor, shields and weapons. The soldiers include swordsmen and archers. The ships are depicted lying alongside each other, which may just have been to fit them into the painting, but anyway the are not shown meeting bow to bow. No ramming or fancy maneuvers, just coming together and fighting it out.

 It is not the best evidence, but given how little we have, it counts.

Links 10 April 2026

Beth Moon, Heart of the Dragon, 2010

More Beth Moon here and here.

More and more fossils from the Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) expose the history of complex life before the Cambrian explosion.

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

Sabine Hossenfelder on the photographic evidence of "UAPs" in earth orbit, 7-minute video.

New science about consciousness in birds, 18-minute video.

Annals of madness: the Renaissance men who thought they were made of glass.

The idealism of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Peebles Hoard, a wonderful hoard of Bronze Age objects found a few years ago in Scotland.

And from the same museum, eleven Scottish Posy Rings.

Does the internet thing about "back rooms" tell us anything about our society?

Funding new scientific instruments as a way to move 20th-century science forward.

Anthropic's new AI is very good at finding vulnerabilities in software systems.

The history of the cucumber.

Researching in the Stephen King archive.

Weapons of Bronze Age Scotland

The Scottish National Museum is putting on an exhibit called Scotland's First Warriors featuring weapons and shields from the Bronze Age. Personally I think there was already war in the Neolithic, if not earlier, but this stuff is cool so we'll let that slide. Above is a sword from the Carnoustie Hoard.

Sword from the same hoard. This stuff was deliberately buried just outside a large wooden hall. A fragmentary wooden scabbard was found with the sword, radiocarbon dated to around 1000 BC.

But the best thing in the exhibit is these six shields. Wow.

With a curator for scale. Twenty-two similar shields are known, all but one found in Britain. The metal is quite thin, so they were probably for show rather than combat. Most of them were found in bogs, so they were ritually deposited; I wonder if they were made specifically for an elaborate ritual that ended with their being offered to the gods.

Was there a Big Drop in Happiness in 2020?

Sam Peltzman: 

I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurred during 2020, the year of the Covid pandemic, and mainly persists through 2024. This happiness crash spread across nearly all typical demographics and geographies. The happiest groups pre-Covid (e.g., whites, high income, well-educated and politically/ideologically right-leaning) tend to show the largest happiness reductions. The glaring exception is marital status, which has consistently been an important marker for happiness. The already wide happiness premium for marriage has, if anything, become slightly wider. With both married and unmarried reporting large declines in happiness the country has become segregated: slightly over half-the married adults-remain happy on balance; the unmarried, nearly half, are now distinctly unhappy. I also show that across a number of aspects of personal and social capital post-Covid deterioration is the norm, including a collapse of belief in the fairness of others and of trust in the US Supreme Court.

Full paper here.

Links 3 April 2026

Nicolaas Van Der Waay, Amsterdam Orphan Girls, 1903

Excellent, interesting interview with Ada Palmer about Renaissance Italy.

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

Archaeologists have been arguing for a century over when dogs were domesticated, with some holding for more than 30,000 years ago and others for c. 15,000 years ago. Two major new studies point toward a date of c, 16,000 years ago, and they also show that genetically very similar dogs were kept by diverse human societies across Europe and the Middle East. That would imply that dogs were spread by trade or gift, which is a fascinating thing to imagine. (NY Times, original papers, ScienceNews)

More replication failures in social science: it appears not to be true that smarter people are more influenced by ideology. (Twitter/X)

Murderous Masonic conspiracy in France.

Toltec altar of human sacrifice found.

Major Australian study: no evidence medical cannabis is effective for depression, anxiety, or PTSD.

CNN: Trump keeps saying ‘nobody’ knew or expected things lots of people knew or expected.

Social scientists are lazy.

Afrom the same source, Seed Oils are not bad for you.

There is just so much Roman stuff within their empire that you can hardly dig anywhere without finding something. This is about some suburban buildings unearthed in France.

The British Museum has a coin of the Zanj Rebellion, a massive rising of African slaves in 9th-century Mesopotamia.

Sometimes only satirical publications stand up to dictatorships.

Major British Museum exhibit on Hawaii.

Amazing drawings of plant root systems.

More evidence that Covid-19 originated in the Wuhan wet market. (Twitter/X)

Saudi Arabia's insane Neom linear city plan is flailing, and multiple construction contracts were just cancelled.

Lego plans to mark the completion of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona with its largest ever set.

Summary of the evidence that glycophosphates do not cause cancer. (Twitter/X)

The history and impact of the spreadsheet.

Bizarre story about cartoons for children and Iranian spying in Russia.

Age gap relationships: Aragorn was 87 and Arwen was 2778 when they married. Disgusting!

Need a boost to your diet plan? Consider Orthodox Lent.

Long piece on the economic growth of Scotland in the 1700s, focusing on the availability of capital and credit.

The great Trump library scam.

Interesting review of S.Q. Visser’s On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All, much about "pedant on pedant rhetorical violence."

Syracuse University cancels a bunch of degree programs, including Classics. (NY Times, Daily Orange)

Long thread on Russian aims for this year of the war and how they are going (very slowly). (Twitter/X)

Arthur Brooks on Happiness

Interesting interview with Tyler Cowen.

COWEN: What do you think of the pretty common view, it often comes from twin studies, that well over 50 percent of happiness is simply genetic? Assuming you’re not living in a war zone or dying of terminal cancer. You grow up a certain way, you were born a certain way, and there you go, you play your cards.

BROOKS: Yes. I think that those studies are very robust. . . . 

That might seem like it obviates or vitiates this whole idea that happiness is something worth pursuing. Actually, it doesn’t because the same studies show that about 50 percent of your tendency toward alcohol abuse is also genetic. Tyler, if you said, “Hey, Arthur, I got a big problem. Both my parents were drunks, and all four of my grandparents were bootleggers, and I guess I’m doomed to alcoholism,” I’d say, “Tyler, I have a new whiz-bang technology for turning the genetic proclivity from 50 percent to 0 percent. It’s called not drinking.” In other words, when you understand your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits. That’s a beautiful thing. Now, one side note, 50 percent, approximately, between 42 percent or 58 percent, depending on the studies that you’re looking at, is genetic.

Another 25 percent is circumstantial, which is the war zone effect, et cetera, or falling in love, whatever it happens to be. That’s evanescent as well. That’s temporary because our moods and our circumstances, they necessarily change. The last 25 percent are habits, which allow us to tailor our circumstances, in other words, to get better luck and to manage our genetics. That’s why habits, even though they’re only 25 percent directly, more or less, that’s why they matter the most.

What are the best habits? Brooks:

What are the happiest people, which is to say the people who are most abundant in their self-evaluation or a third-person evaluation of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, what do they do every day?

The answer is they pay attention fundamentally to four big things. Their faith or life philosophy. They think deeply about the why questions. Also, they stand in awe of something bigger than themselves, so they’re not stuck looking in the mirror. They have strong family relationships. They have close friendships. They have real friends, not just deal friends. They’re certainly not isolated and lonely and spending all day on the internet. Last but not least, they’re doing something productive where they feel like they’re earning their success through their merit and hard work, and they’re serving other people. That’s what it comes down to.

Coming to Believe

How do people come to believe in things that are esoteric, unprovable, and not widespread in the culture? The best book I know on this question is anthropologist T.M. Luhrman's Persuasions of the Witch's Craft (1989). I used this book way back in graduate school, but one of the drawbacks of that kind of scholarship is that I was just diving into it for use in one particular argument and never read it cover to cover until now.

Luhrman investigated the world of British magical practitioners, both Wiccans and the neo-Hermeticists who follow the "Western Rite." She did a staggering amount of work. She somehow got invited into the meetings of a dozen different schools and covens, participated in many rituals, interviewed hundreds of people, and read a library's worth of books. She found that the people who were drawn to magical practice were not crazy or poor, but were on the contrary educated, middle class folks, many of them from the computer world. How did they come to believe in the efficacy of magic?

Luhrman introduces a concept she calls "interpretive drift", a

slow shift in someone's manner of interpreting events, making sense of experiences, and responding to the world. People do not enter magic with a set of clear-cut beliefs which they take to their rituals and test with detachment. . .  Rather, there seems to be a slow, mutual evolution of interpretation and experience, rationalized in a manner which allows the practitioner to practice. Magicians did not deliberately change the way they thought about the world. Becoming involved in magic is exciting, and as the neophyte read about the practice and talked to other practitioners he picked up intellectual habits which made the magic seem sensible and realistic. He acquired new ways of identifying events as significant, of drawing connections between events, with new, complex knowledge in which events could be put into context. (12)

Luhrman also noted that the vast bulk of accummulated magical lore and the difficulty of mastering certain techniques gave adepts a sense of being real experts.

I would argue that the rift between magician and non-practitioner is carved out by the very process of becoming a specialist in a particular kind of activity. Becoming a specialist often makes an activity seem sensible. The specialist learns a new way of paying attention to, making sense of and commenting upon her world. The important point is that the significant features of becoming a specialist can be identified. There are new ways to define evidence which offer grounds to the expert that the non-specialist cannot see, and ways to order event so that the specialist sees coherence where the non-specialist sees only chaos; there is a body of specialist knowledge which given discrimination and depth to the specialist's interpretations; there is a semi-explicit philosophy which creates the assumptions which frame most conversations. . . .

The striking observation is that in the course of practising magic the magic comes to seem eminently reasonable to the magicians, and that rather than realizing that their intellectual habits have changed they feel that they have discovered that the ideas behind magic are objectively true. (114)

I think this model explains a great deal of human belief. 

Links 27 March 2026

Stockings, 1830, made of cotton and silk

Meditation on the double-slit experiment and the strangeness of quantum physics (Twitter/X)

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

T.M. Luhrman reviews Michael Pollan's new book on consciousness.

Testerone levels are rising in American men, but nobody knows why. (Twitter/X) Sperm counts are also rising.

Henry Hobson Richardson and the American Romanesque, with links to an enormous collection of images.

Excellent, thoughtful review of Traversal by Maria Popova, a big book that examines the connections between scientific research and our broader search for meaning.

Steven Pinker on evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.

London history: the 1906 Hackney Yearbook.

No, Marc Andreessen, introspection is not a recent Viennese invention.

Thomas de Quincey as an essayist.

More ships from the 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan keep being found.

Will increasing computer prowess mean that humans no longer understand pioneering scientific research?

Open plan offices suck. (Twitter/X)

Woke, MAGA, and American higher education. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

The woman who paints whales.

Frank Relle in the swamps of Louisiana, interesting photographs.

Scientists capture detailed video of sperm whale birth (article at Science, news piece with video)

Ben Pentreath in New York, Charleston, and Chicago.

John McWhorter on the legacy of ML King, moving beyond race to justice.

Sorting through Oliver Sacks' possessons after his death, his partner discovered that he had filled hundreds of books with extensive marginal notes.

Robin Hanson on why we value authenticity.

Persistent Impermanance

From a review of David Stuart's big book on the Maya:

Yet Stuart views their history not as an arc but as a series “of numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments.” He tracks the building of Maya urban centers, their peak during a period of expansive power, and their sudden collapse and relinquishment. “Persistent impermanence,” he writes, characterized the Maya approach to life, which, at its core, they saw as ephemeral. This transitoriness expressed itself in their cyclical calendar, which established precise turning points defined by catastrophic pivots, occasions for renewal, and the intervals in between. In retrospect, the Maya’s desertion of cities likely owed to a combination of factors—among them, overpopulation, war and political polarization, drought and the changing weather patterns, the scarcity of water supplies, and unstable commercial structures. Of course, scores of other peoples—including in our time—have suffered similar bouts of inclemency. None gave up their habitations with such regularity.

This persistent impermanence also characterized the Mississippian societies of the US, towns like Cahokia and Mounville that rose to glory for a generation and were then abandoned and largely forgotten. 

In my philosophical moods I think about this regularly. What endures? Often that is the basics of the socio-technical system, for example the grain-growing village of western Europe, or the irrigated wet rice societies of east Asia, where peasants lived as their ancestors had for millennia. But other things that loom large in our imagination were fleeting experiments, taken up with enthusiasm but soon abandoned. Cities that rose to power under mighty rulers but faded away under their weak grandchildren are known around the world. If you follow the careers of artists or scholars in Renaissance Italy you see that they moved from place to place as particular courts were glorious for a while but then broke up or fell to conquerors. At a lesser level you often read about the wonders of some community in some particular era – Greenwich Village in the 70s, say – accompanied by mourning that it did not last.

Such, it seems, is human life.

H.H. Richardson and the American Romanesque

Henry Hobson Richardson (1834-1886) was one of America's great architects and the leading New World expositor of one of my favorite styles, neo-romanesque. So closely was he associated with the style that it is often called the Richardsonian Romanesque.

I'm focusing today on two buildings: Trinity Church in Boston and Austin Hall at Harvard. Trinity Church was built in 1872-1877.

Trinity details.

Austin Hall was built in 1882-1884. The overall form is pretty pedestrian. 

But the details are amazing.

Please, architects, bring this sort of thing back.

First Weekend of Spring

Daffodils in full flower.

Star magnolia.

And these little scilla, which came from the house where my wife grew up, bringing tears to my eyes.

Ogoh-Ogoh

Ogoh-ogoh is a delightful Balinese tradition, the building of temporary sculptures that are paraded during Pangrupukan, a holiday welcoming the new year. Although not very old in its current form – wikipedia says the 1980s – it draws on ancient traditions of appeasing underworld beings and a sort of scapegoating, loading the ills of the past year onto these demonic creatures, which are then burned.

Most of these are still burned at the end of the festival, but now there are museums that preserve some of the best specimens, I suppose for tourists who visit at other times of the year.

And who cares if this is not that old and perhaps now mainly functions as a prop for Bali's sole industry, tourism? It does have roots in Balinese tradition, and it's just cool.

I can't resist adding in Balinese ogoh-ogoh is written like this: ᬑᬕᭀᬄ​ᬳᭀᬕᭀᬄ