Etruscan Art in the MFA Boston

Cinerary Urn of Fastia Velsi, wife of Larza Velu, one of five ash urns found in a tomb of the Velsi family of ancient Chiusi. Third century BC

Fascimile done in the 1890s of a wall painting in the Tomba di Triclinio, c. 490 BC, and detail.

Painted Plaque from another tomb, c. 470 BC.

Mirror case showing Dionysis, Eros, and Pan, third century BC. That assemblage of gods conveys a certain notion of why people looked into mirrors.

His and hers sarcophagus lid, c. 330 BC. Etruscan tombs convey the impression that they were really into marriage.

Portrait in the form of a ceramic serving vessel

Statuette of a stooping athlete, c. 520 BC

Figurine of a man and woman in an ox car, c. 600 BC

Bronze sword, c. 850 BC

Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism

Tyler Cowen interviews Daron Acemoglu: 

COWEN: Today, it seems we’re not evolving toward greater agreement, right?

ACEMOGLU: We’re not. Absolutely not. I think you can blame that on reactions to globalization, reactions to technology, better authoritarian challenges. This is the most uncomfortable part because I see myself firmly within the left liberal tradition. I think it’s partly because of the failure of left liberalism. In some sense, if you think of why did Rome fail or collapse, we can tell a story about the barbarians were really too strong. No, really, Rome collapsed because internally it had problems that opened up weaknesses against outside invaders as well as some inside problems.

It’s the same with left liberalism. I think it became quite influential throughout much of the Western world and some of the emerging economies as well over the last 70, 80 years. It did not use that establishment power in the right way, creating its own weaknesses that made it much more vulnerable to outside attacks. That’s why I think we are now going back because we are at an interregnum period in which ideas are battling again. In some sense, it’s just like the early 19th century where you had all these very different ideas and they were trying to get a toehold in the imagination of people. I think we are going through a period like that, except that there are really many more confusing ideas out there.

Later Cowen asks why the educated shouldn't just make all the decisions. 

ACEMOGLU: Liberalism's crisis is related to the rise of a post-industrial economy in which what you just called the educated elite has become both much more powerful and more numerous, and a philosophical shift that gave more and more priority and power to the educated elite. Whether you approach that from the left liberal point of view or from more of a right liberal point of view, that’s problematic in my mind.

We cannot have true freedom and true flourishing of a population when there is a clear hierarchy, whether it is by education, it is by race, it is by income. Just empowering the elite in that way is not going to cut it. . . . One challenge, which I mentioned in passing, and perhaps I should have done more in the book on this, is how do you utilize and respect expertise without creating the wrong kind of technocracy that is insular and too self-confident and, frankly, looking down upon the rest? Unfortunately, that’s what we’ve created in the United States and Europe, and that’s what working-class liberalism has to avoid.

Acemoglu also makes an interesting point reconciling his belief in free speech with his advocacy for the regulation of social media:

In my opinion, again, we shouldn’t limit free speech, but we should still regulate social media. The way that I think about this is the following. We should let individuals say whatever they want. Once social media can build very complex algorithms that human nature could not have anticipated, and we are evolutionarily not very well prepared, and they can almost weaponize certain types of statements, I think that’s no longer free speech.

I would comment that finding a balance betweeh democracy and reliance on elite expertise has proved to be one of our hardest problems.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Here is something I learned from my wife's untimely death:

If you have questions, ask them now. If there are things you have been waiting for the right moment to say, say them now. Otherwise, it may be too late.

There are questions I set aside for 20 years because it never seemed the right time to speak of those painful subjects. Things I wanted to explain that never seemed to fit into the moment where I was.

Now my wife is dead, and the answers I never heard, and the explanations I never gave, will always leave a gap in my understanding of my wife, my marriage, and myself. I will die not knowing, and not having spoken words I desperately wanted to speak.

The Cat is Bound: Illustrated Incantation Bowls

Incantation Bowls were quite common in Syria, Iraq and Palesting in the first millennium BC, and examples are also known from Roman times. Aramaic is the most common language. The magical text on the bowl usually describes catching or warding off demons, and the bowl seems to have served as a trap. Most are not illustrated, but quite a few are; this one seems to show a sorceror who has overmastered a demon.

In this example the demon appears in the form of a cat, and the text includes the phrase, "The Cat is Bound."

Another. The University of Pennsylvania Museum has an extensive collection.

College Polarization

Neil Gross in the NY Times:

The good news is that most young people going to college today will find like-minded peers to connect with and will take engaging courses that speak to their interests and values. Relatively few will spend their college years browbeaten by arrogant professors or militant students whose political views are antithetical to their own.

The bad news is that this mostly congenial experience is made possible by a pervasive insularity. To a striking degree, young people now pick their college based in part on the school’s political reputation, make friends with and date other kids with similar political views, choose majors that reinforce their outlook on the world and generally gravitate toward what is ideologically familiar.

This self-sorting not only undercuts the development of the critical thinking skills that a college education is supposed to foster; it also deepens the polarization that is imperiling our country.

I doubt this trend is as powerful or pervasive as Gross makes it seem, but it is absolutely real; friendships between MAGA and DSA young Americans seem to me to be very rare indeed. People don't just oppose their political enemies, they hate them, and many of us seem to think that nothing else matters nearly as much.

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot

The Sun, from the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot",

attributed to Franco dei Russi (1453-1482)

A surviving account book tells us that around 1442, the Duke of Milan gave his daughter a deluxe set of handcrafted playing cards in the pattern we call Tarot. This meticulously painted deck was valued at 1,500 ducats, 10 times the annual salary of a palace servant.

The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York has a bunch of Renaissance Italian tarot cards, some of which are probably associated with the Dukes of Milan. There are no complete sets, just various cards from several different sets executed by different artists. They describe these cards as the "Visconti-Sforza Tarot." The Viscontis and the Sforzas were two families that both held the rank of dukes of Milan, the Sforzas taking over (violently) from the Visconti in 1447. 

No expert myself, I find this designation misleading in the extreme, but anyway these are 15th-century tarot cards from northern Italy, and they are quite amazing.

Death and Judgment, attributed to 

Bonifacio Bembo (1420-1480)

Temperence, attributed to Franco dei Russi

The Three of Cups, attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. More at the NY Times

There is also a related set of cards known as the Cary Yale Playing Cards, now kept in the Beineke Library at Yale. These also date to the mid 1400s and are also from northern Italy, but the rest of what I read about them strikes me as speculation.

Quite delightful that so many of these little wonders survive in North American and European Collections.

W.B. Yeats, "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty"

When my arms wrap you round I press
My heart upon the loveliness
That has long faded from the world;
The jewelled crowns that kings have hurled
In shadowy pools, when armies fled;
The love-tales wrought with silken thread
By dreaming ladies upon cloth
That has made fat the murderous moth;
The roses that of old time were
Woven by ladies in their hair,
The dew-cold lilies ladies bore
Through many a sacred corridor
Where such grey clouds of incense rose
That only God’s eyes did not close:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.

1899

Farewell to Maine

Heading home this afternoon, after a delightful few days on Mt. Desert Isle.

Little Long Pond, yesterday; this is a great walk for people not up to steep uphill climbs.

Starfish hiding under the dock at low tide.

Hope I come back next year.

Links 7 August 2026

Roman pugio found in the Netherlands

Many people oppose development because they hate ugly modern architecture. The turn of architecture away from beauty, and the refusal of modernists to acknowledge that their work is horrifying, is to my mind one of the most bizarre stories of the past century. I mean, genocide and war are ancient, but what past culture has embraced uglification with such gusto?

More earthworks mapped in Amazonia lead to a new, higher estimate of the pre-contact population of the region.

My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road. I am planning to publish this on Amazon for fans of physical books.

Some AIs started a religion, and humans immediately joined.

Noah Smith on the spread of dumb populist economic policies.

Sabine Hosenfelder trashes that physics paper from a few weeks ago that claimed to demonstrate that time is an emergent product of other parts of the system and related to entropy, 5-minute video.

Good, clear explanation of the math problems solved by the Astra AI.

Scott Siskind on "the beauty of settled science," much about import and well supported discoveries in psychology.

An argument that regulatory barriers are the main factor limiting productivity growth in the US.

The binmen of Birmingham and the craziness of equal pay for comparable roles.

Experiments disagree on whether AI chatbots increase or decrease loneliness in the people who use them. (Twitter/X)

The peacock flower as an abortifactant used by Caribbean slaves.

NY Times list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century, seems like some good reading or listening material here.

Interesting piece on Grundvig's Church, a Danish fusion of Gothic and Modern styles.

Matt Yglesias explains that long before Mamdani, Walmart tried to bring cheap groceries to New York City, only to be blocked by unions.

Life feeds on life: a new theory thinks the build-up of poop was a key cause of the Cambrian "explosion."

Dreamy, surrealist paintings by Aron Wiesenfeld.

Pondering Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae 36 years later.

How to eat well on the cheap.

Crazy stuff happening on the leading edge of AI hacking (Twitter/X)

CNN reports that the Pentagon has put out a call for "unconventional" ideas for punishing Iran, crowdsourcing our military strategy.

An update on the air war over Ukraine, from RUSI.

The Matriarchs of Wetwang Slack

Exciting news in the worlds of ancient DNA and Celtic archaeology:

Kinship practices underpin all traditional societies, forming the basis for socially sanctioned reproductive unions, residence patterns and the inheritance of rights and property. Although the relationship between biological relatedness and kinship is not always straightforward, ancient DNA studies are increasingly used to examine the extent to which biological relatedness underpinned social constructs of kinship in prehistoric societies. Here, we report the analysis of genome-wide data for 534 individuals from the Arras Culture of Middle Iron Age northeast England (including 390 from Wetwang Slack, 100 from Pocklington, and 29 from Melton), finding evidence for communities with kinship systems structured along matrilineal lines. At Wetwang Slack, we reconstruct a 13-generation pedigree comprising 195 individuals structured around female-line connections: matrilineal transmissions greatly outnumbered patrilineal ones and male reproductive partners were largely absent from the cemetery, plausibly because they were buried in their own natal communities. Furthermore, the three main sites with robust sample sizes were characterised by non-overlapping dominant mitochondrial haplogroups, implying a maternal clan-based structure. Reproductive unions at Wetwang Slack suggest a recurrent alliance between two dominant maternal descent groups, with members of each group never reproducing with members of their own maternal lineage. Meanwhile, three individuals from lavishly furnished chariot burials at Wetwang Slack were close maternal relatives belonging to a lineage with consecutive generations of close kin unions, a pattern largely absent among other individuals at the site. These results indicate highly distinctive social practices among an elite group embedded in the wider kinship network of the Arras community.

Besides having an awesome name, Wetwang Slack is a very famous archaeological site, especially because of the three chariot burials, all of which were women.

View of one of the burials

Wetwang Slack is generally associated with the Arras Culture of northeastern Britain, which dates from around 450 BC to the Roman conquest. Who these people were is a complicated question. They certainly seem culturally Celtic – just look at their jewelry! – but it has been much disputed whether they were recent immigrants. The new study says no:

The cultural affiliation of the Arras Culture has long been debated because of its use of square barrows, chariot burials and La Tène-style objects, which have often invited comparison with Iron Age communities in continental Europe, particularly groups from the Paris Basin. However, our genetic data do not support a model in which the individuals buried in Arras Culture cemeteries derived from a recent migration of individuals from the Continent. Genome wide ancestry was highly homogeneous across Arras sites and burial contexts, and qpAdm modelling using Iron Age individuals from France as the sole ancestry source provided a poor fit. . . . These results suggest that the distinctive Arras funerary tradition of East Yorkshire reflects local British communities participating in broader La Tène-connected cultural networks, rather than the establishment of a recently arrived continental population.

Reconstruction of a Wetwang Slack chariot

Now these folks, the elite of Bronze and Iron Age Europe, were the descendants of invaders from the steppes. Those invaders were patrilineal and, so far as we can tell, patriarchal as well. So how did the people of the Arras Culture end up matrilineal? Good question! 

The authors of this study don't have a clue.

Another interesting discovery is that members of two of the three great matrilineal lineages married each other regularly, as if they were moities, or reciprocal clans, something documented by archaeologists around the world but not mentioned in any written source about the Celts:

Among 45 reproductive unions for which both maternal 374 lineages could be assigned, 25 involved one partner carrying the major T2e1a1b haplotype 375 and the other H1ao (Fig. 3e). Thus, more than half of the reproductive unions at Wetwang 376 Slack joined the two dominant matrilines at the site.

My overall take is that the Arras Culture was a unique thing, obviously influenced by continental Celts but preserving many aspects of local Bronze Age culture, including, perhaps, matrilineal descent and prominent political roles for women.

Fascinating.

Olalde et al., Ancient DNA reveals matrilineal organisation and recurrent unions between dominant matrilines in Iron Age Britain, bioRxiv preprint

The Future of American Politics Looks Bad

On the Republican side, MAGA is morphing from a personality cult into an ideology focused on hating immigrants and rejecting free markets, and the Democrats rising up to challenge them are often socialists, people who lie constantly about the "harm" wrecked by data centers and blame hedge funds for high housing costs, veterans of wokeness who hate George Washington and Thanksgiving, or worse. What is to me the obvious response, sane moderation is nowhere in sight. 

Politico on the young Republicans:

“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”

Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran. 

Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages revealed by POLITICO. Others point to social-media posts from official government accounts that echo the language or memes of the online far right.

Noah Smith on the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) who seem to be taking over the Democratic Party:

The Republicans have never been this bad before. But in the past, when they got bad, the solution was always pretty simple: Vote for the Democrats. Democracy isn’t perfect, but it does have a natural release valve; you can always just “throw the bums out.” And that’s exactly what we used to do. . . .

And we should elect Democrats, this November. There is no ambiguity here; a Congress that challenges Trump’s lawlessness, investigates his unbridled corruption, and takes a more forceful stand in favor of Ukraine will be unambiguously better than the supine GOP Congress that can do nothing except worship at the man’s feet.

But at the same time, looking at the way the Democratic Party is headed, I think we should be asking how much better things will be under Democrats, including if they win the White House in 2028.

Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people. As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”. . . .

Some had hoped that the Democrats’ socialist faction would be able to escape some of the baggage of “woke 1”, because of their focus on class politics, and because the Palestine issue might be able to muscle aside a whole bunch of unpopular 2010s-era culture-war stances. But Hong shows that this hope will be in vain; the DSA types are the wokest of the woke.

To me, all of this is rooted in a belief that things in America are bad. Against all evidence, tens of millions of us, including, it seems, most of those going into politics, think our system is so rotten it needs radical change.

It may turn out that the inability of people to be satisfied, no matter how good things get, is what eventually dooms our civilization.

More From Maine

Herons on the dock this morning, testing out the 10x magnification on my new phone. Not bad.

Osprey nest that guards the entrance to our driveway, with one of the parents on a nearby tree. They make so much fuss when you get close that they must have babies up there.

Today's big event was climbing Sargent Mountain (1378 feet) via the South Ridge Trail, 7 miles round trip, 1200 feet up. The great thing about these "mountains" is that they are bald on top, and hiking up there is like walking in the sky.

Lovely boulder.

Sunset from our dock.

Some Maine Pics

We drove up to Mt. Desert Isle in the rain, and the first day looked like this.

Today we took our traditional first hike, up a hill called Beech Mountain. Lovely views from the top. 

Me and two of my sons.

My favorite part of the Beech Mountain hike is the descent through what I always think of as the valley of ferns and moss.

Then this afternoon I went out on a sea kayak with my son Robert, and he took this pic of mother and baby harbor porpoises. We also saw a seal and many birds.

Shadow dragon. You may be thinking that a dragon could not hide its body behind that skinny tree, but you are forgetting that dragons have eldritech powers and can pass between worlds with ease.

Classical Sargent

John Singer Sargent, Atlas and the Hesperides, 1922

Detail

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has several John Singer Sargent paintings in classical modes, including both oil paintings like the one above, and frescoes executed in the rotunda in the 1920s.

One of the frescoes, Apollo in the chariot of the sun. I love this stuff, and it is worthwhile being reminded that the artists who were revolutionizing art in the late 1800s were very well trained in the classics.

The Danaiads

Hercules and the Hydra

Perseus Slaying the Gorgon

Urania, the Muse of Astronomy

The Three Graces