Links 13 March 2026

Church of Sainte Pierre in Chauvigny, France

CAR-T therapy shows remarkable promise in treating lupus and other autoimmune diseases: New Yorker, Nature, NIH, short video. Unfortunately it is, for now, very expensive.

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

The 2026 British Wildlife Photography Awards.

Terry Tempest Williams, "An American Prophet of the Natural World". Emerson updated.

Freddie deBeor against Incels and LooksMaxxers: sex is a normal thing that normal people can have.

Profile of Stewart Brand at 87: a 60s counter-culture icon who created the Whole Earth Catalog, he went on to be an advisor to governor Jerry Brown, leader of tech libertarians, and now a prophet of making things that will last a very long time.

Polling of American voters shows that "The Trans Backlash is Real." The author of this piece got savagely attacked on BlueSky for publishing it, even though it merely reports polls done by others.

Matt Yglesias writes that people involved in political discourse need to toughen up: "Everyone gets canceled sooner or later. You may as well just stir the pot."

Prototaxites, the largest living things on land in the Devonian period, have long been considered giant fungi, but new evidence suggests they were an entirely new branch of life. (12-minute video, Scientific American, wikipedia)

Glowing, color-coded map of all the lighthouses in the northern seas, which Ethan Mollick got Claude Code to make.

Breaking Bad: some Danish data shows that people commit more crimes in the years after a cancer diagnosis. (Twitter/X)

Roman lead ingots found in Wales, cast in 87 AD.

Microsoft announces a data storage system they say should preserve information for 10,000 years. Let's hope; a few years ago I tried to retrieve data from a 10-year-old "archival" cd and it was hopelessly corrupted.

Summary of what's in the ROAD to Housing Act, from Alex Tabarrok.

Derek Thompson, On Being a Dad. Parenthood is truly one of the most wonderful of all experiences, a pedestal it shares, for me, only with being in love and having a true friend.

Very depressing look at American governance through the lens of the tiff between the Pentagon and Anthropic. (Twitter/X)

Statistician Cremieux on the horror of RFK's directive to medical schools about nutrition and other topics. (Twitter/X)

The Danish women who knit clothes for naked statues. (NY Times)

A meditation on individual and collective emotion.

Trying to distinguish what people actually want in a romantic partner vs. what they say they want. (Twitter/X)

Big year for wildflowers in Death Valley (NY Times, BBC, USA Today, Smithsonian)

This year's Asian Art Week at Christie's includes a ton of anime and other Japanese pop culture.

Coffins and sealed Papyri, 1000-700 BC, found in Egypt.

Interesting photographs taken in the 1970s in the crypt of St. Botolph's Church in London, which the priest opened to all homeless people.

Excellent, lovely, meditative 80-minute video on Rumi and Sufism. Just what I needed now.

Asian Art at Christie's

Large (15 inches) floral scroll dish, 1403-1425 AD

Dragon Moon flask, 1736-1795 (20 inches tall)

Bronze dragon head finial, Han Dynasty or Six Dynasties Period, 206 BC to 589 AD

Figurine of a noblewoman, Han Dynasty, 12 inches tall

Ming Dynasty Horsemen

Striding dragon, gilt bronze, Tang Dynasty

Silvered bronze  mirror with a rabbit doing – well, what?

Pounding something with a mortar and pestle, apparently. A toad watches.

So this lovely being must be Chang'e, the moon goddess, and that must be the rabbit who was the great friend of Chang'e and mixed the elixir of immortality for her when she ascended to the Moon Palace.

The rather late story that Chang'e (an old goddess) ascended from earth to the Moon Palace, there to live forever but with only a rabbit and a toad for company, inspired many poets of the Tang and later periods. Here, via wikipedia, is an example:

Now that a candle-shadow stands on the screen of carven marble
And the River of Heaven slants and the morning stars are low,
Are you sorry for having stolen the potion that has set you
Over purple seas and blue skies, to brood through the long nights?

Vanity vs. Love

The NY Times today is running a long article about the women who are irritated with the photographs their husbands and boyfriends take of them, because said photographs do not meet their aesthetic standards. I mentioned this to one of my sons who said, oh, yeah, people complain about this online all the time.

You people are sick.

Signs of Spring

First daffodils, morning and afternoon. Below, frog eggs down in the mill race.

Matt Yglesias on the Iran War

Intelligent take:

They say that defeat is an orphan while victory has a thousand fathers.

So even though the invasion of Iraq was extremely popular in 2003, you rarely meet someone who’ll own up to having supported it at the time. Both that war and the one in Afghanistan shook out so badly that their architects have been retrospectively cast as a team of buffoons.

At the time, though, Colin Powell was the most popular public figure in the United States. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were old policy hands with long and wide-ranging track records. Their actions were widely embraced by knowledgeable elites, including top former officials from the Bill Clinton administration.

Which is not to say that the ideas of these members of the George W. Bush administration were good or that their policies worked (clearly they were not and did not), just that it’s not right to think of what happened in the early aughts as “a bunch of clowns took over and wrecked things with their clowning.”

The danger of this line of thought is made clear, I think, by the way that Donald Trump seems to have talked himself into a new round of military adventurism in the Middle East. If the problem with the Bushies was that a bunch of morons got the United States sucked into “forever wars” through their obsession with nation-building, then the solution is to build a team that’s not made up of morons, a team that is relentlessly focused on lethality. They put their ideas to the test with a smaller-scale strike on Iran last year. Then again in Venezuela. And it worked, so why not try it again?

What all this misses is that this is exactly what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush denounced nation-building and peacekeeping missions as a waste of time. His team contained many believers in a Revolution in Military Affairs involving (to quote a 2002 article) the “use of smart machines that allow networked, integrated forces to become more lethal at the same time they become more agile.”

Which is just to say that they didn’t intend to get bogged down in simultaneous counterinsurgency missions. It’s not like someone was sitting around the Pentagon saying that it would be a good idea to engineer a situation where, years after the invasion, Marines were engaged in intense house-to-house fighting in Anbar province, and years after that, isolated garrisons were trying to secure American interests in a country whose politics are dominated by pro-Iranian political parties.

Quagmires happen by mistake. 

I was thinking this just the other day: Trump and Hegseth keep saying that their war will go better because they are not idiots, but whatever label you want to give to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington et al. they were not stupid.

What they shared with Trump and Hegseth was the belief that violence can be used to reshape the world as we would wish. This belief may sometimes be true, but it is always very dangerous.

Gerard Trignac

French artist and printmaker born 1955. Above, The Defile of Fools.

The Archives

Waiting

The Temple of Doubt

Station Brobourg

The City of a Thousand Towers. More here.

First Flowers of Spring

I don't know these folks manage to grow crocuses; deer eat mine down to the ground as fast as they come up, and I never see a flower. But I was thrilled to see these today.

A Strange Iron Age Ritual

Interesting find on top of a rocky hill in northern Germany: The hill, known as Feldstein, if made of porphyry shot through with veins of quartz. Last year a metal detectorist found two iron axes lying in a cleft in the rock. Beneath them was a hollow that had been cut into the rock, then filled.

The analysis of these materials has allowed specialists to reconstruct the sequence of actions that took place at that point more than two millennia ago, sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. According to Dr. Zeiler, the sequence began with the opening of a small cavity in the rock to extract the quartz embedded within it, a task that required considerable effort given the hardness of the material and the exposure of the location to harsh weather conditions.

Once the quartz had been obtained, it was processed immediately on the stone slab itself, using the crusher to reduce it to fragments only a few millimeters in diameter. Once this operation was completed, the cavity was refilled with the crushed quartz and with the very tools used in the process, that is, the slab and the crusher. Finally, on the leveled surface of the sealed pit, the two iron axes were deposited in the arrangement that the detectorist was able to observe millennia later.

But wht does it mean? Is the quartz being interpreted as some kind of magical substanced? By extracting and crushing it, did the performer of the rite hope to release and use its power? Were the quartz veins, maybe, the blood of the earth? So that the earth's power is being invoked?

Honestly this is one of the weirder rites I have come across in my career.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.

Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara

Chaturmukha Dharana Vihara is an extraordinary Jain temple in the hills of Rajastan. It was constructed in the 1400s to honor Adinath, the first Tirthankar – great master, exalted teacher, or some such epithet – of the present descending half-cycle. So, in case you were wondering why things are so rough these days, it might just be that we are in the descending half of the cosmic cycle. 

And yet what a building! Pretty good for people in a world doomed to decline and decay.

The richness of the carving is simply astonishing.

Each of the hundreds of pillars is unique.

Sculptural details. The being with five bodies represents the five elements. (Earth, fire, water, air, and ether or heaven)

Famous rendering of the Kalpavriksha, a mythical wish-granting tree that my sources say symbolized divine abundance.

Elephant.

Truly an amazing place.

Links 6 March 2026

Etruscan funerary urn, alabaster, c. 400 BC

Wonderful Aztec offering uncovered at the Templo Mayor in Mexico City.

The savagery and guilt of being a surgeon.

Geologists are learning more about the climate of the earth during the Snowball Earth phase, c. 717-658 million years ago.

Board and pieces of an ancient board game found in Russian burial mound.

At London's fan museum. (The kind you use to fan yourself, or make eyes across the theater.)

Dream incubation – using cues of setting, ritual, and so on to produce targeted dreams – is ancient. But now we were moving on to newer methods for guiding the sleeping mind.

I've seen another raft of posts lately about people feeling invisible, so this week's past post is Not Being Seen from 2022.

Thread on Twitter/X with some data showing that as people get better off they grow MORE frustrated with their conditions.

Studying residues in ceramic pots used by some European hunter-gatherers – they learned this from Neolithic farmers – to learn about the use of food plants in ancient Europe (article, news story)

How liberal are you? Quiz from 1964. I scored 69%, "mostly liberal." My negative answers were mostly about rights to things that cost money. It struck me that in the age of social media free speech debates are so different that the language here doesn't fit contemporary issues very well. Does your right to free speech mean that a private company like Meta or X has to publish your weird ideas?

Fascinating interview with psychoanalyst Adam Phillips about big themes in life, very meaningful to me right now.

Lovely little house with a garden terrace in Tokyo.

An argument that by testing people's sense of smell we could identify some neurological and other conditions.

Interview with Mary Gaitskill. Like many fiction writers of mine or earlier generations, she is baffled by the moralism of young Americans.

LLMs are so far failing at creating interesting D&D puzzles or scenarios. (Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X) Well, that's one way I am still their superior. 

The plan of a pro-housing candidate running for governor of California. Vague on some key points but then I guess most voters don't want a detailed description of building code reform. But I do!

Tracing the origin of a Roman erotic mosaic looted from Italy by a Nazi officer.

US officials say Russia is providing Iran with targeting data to help them strike American assets. (Twitter/X). Could this finally sour Trump on Putin?

Some of my Favorite Historical Names

Shakkanakku, Akkadian governor of Mari, c. 2250 BC

Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon

Demosthenes, Greek orator; it means "strength of the people"

Marcus Valerius Corvus, Roman general; he was awarded the cognomen Corvus (="Raven") after his first great victory

Vercingetorix, Gaulic leader who opposed Julius Caesar; it is a nomme de guerre that means something like "Captain of Heroes."

Maximus Thrax, late Roman Emperor

Ingvar Far-Traveller, Swedish Viking who led a mercenary army to the Caspian Sea

Un the Deep-Minded, noted Viking matriarch

Athelstan the Glorious, Anglo-Saxon king

Nell Ruemonger, obscure Englishwoman of the 1300s who appeared in a legal case I happened to read; I stole this name for The Raven and the Crown.

Hup the Fiddler, another name from a medieval English court roll.

Buzzleswat, likewise

Chagatai, son of Genghis Khan

Semiramide degli Appiani, Florentine noblewoman who marred a Medici in 1482

Desiderius Erasmus, Christian humanist

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, the alchemist and natural philosopher better known as Paracelsus

Safely-On-High Snat, Puritan settler in Massachusetts

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Crazy Horse, Sioux spiritual leader.

Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, Louisiana politican and Confederate general

Themistocles Zammit, Greek archaeologist

Others? Have to be real people, not fictional.

Young and Single

Chrstine Emba in the NY Times:

Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute. 

I have observed despair about "dating efficacy" in some of the younger people I know. I hear, "why bother, it doesn't work, the other sex just isn't interested in relationships."

Strange days, when many people seem to view dating or sex as an impossible moral and logistical quandary, but endless porn is always seconds away.

A Classical Anglerfish

This small terracotta statue (12 cm long) depicts a deep sea anglerfish. Its provenance is obscure; it can only be traced back to about 2000, when it was listed in a private collection. The seller dates it to the 4th century BC, not sure on what basis. If so it most likely came from southern Italy, where they had a thing for the anglerfish motif, painting it onto pottery "fish plates" and so on.

Classical Art in the MFA, Boston

Diadem with a Hercules Knot, c. 200 to 150 BC

Oil flask (lekythos) with the hunter Kephalos and his dog, attributed to the Pan Painter, about 470 B.C. 

Bust of a bearded man, c. 170 AD

Mourner, Boeotia, c. 575 BC

Five litra-piece of Syracuse with head of Philistis, struck under Hieron II, 274–216 B.C.

Tiny gold plaque showing a woman-bee hybrid, c. 650 BC

Amphora showing a departing warrior, 5th century BC

Ring and oval bezel with two bulls flanking a tree Early Aegean, HelladicBronze Age, Late Helladic IIB–IIIA Periodabout 1600–1300 B.C.