Health Care in America

Baltimore, this week

The RFK Regime is Censoring Researchers Who Agree with Their Agenda

Kevin Hall:

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology. Lately, I’ve focused on unravelling the reasons why diets high in ultra-processed food are linked to epidemic proportions of chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Our research leads the world on this topic.

Given recent bipartisan goals to prevent diet-related chronic diseases, and new agency leadership professing to prioritize scientific investigation of ultra-processed foods, I had hoped to expand our research program with ambitious plans to more rapidly and efficiently determine how our food is likely making Americans chronically sick.

Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science. Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.

I was hoping this was an aberration. So, weeks ago I wrote to my agency’s leadership expressing my concerns and requested time to discuss these issues, but I never received a response. Without any reassurance there wouldn’t be continued censorship or meddling in our research, I felt compelled to accept early retirement to preserve health insurance for my family. (Resigning later in protest of any future meddling or censorship would result in losing that benefit.) Due to very tight deadlines to make this decision, I don’t yet have plans for my future career.

Celtic Sword

From a necropolis at Creuzier-le-Neuf, central France, c. 400-300 BC.

Detail of the Scabbard. Via The History Blog.

Harvard Defies Trump

Letter from President Alan Graber:

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.

We have made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism. . . .

These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate. The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community. Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.

Empathy and Tarriffs

Balaji on Twitter/X, via Marginal Revolution:

Basically, American wokes weaponized shame and empathy. You were supposed to feel shame simply for being a man. To feel empathy for violent criminals. And so on.

So, the American right stopped listening. And stopped feeling shame or empathy. Especially for those outside the tribe.

But that was an overreaction too. Because most non-Americans are really not enemies. They're just neutral or even friendly business partners.

And without empathy for their position, for the very real costs these sudden random illogical tariffs imposed on them, the American right won't understand what comes next.

For example, they won't understand why the 190+ countries attacked via the tariffs aren't going to leap to America's side vs China. Quite the contrary.

And they won't understand why the tariffs are more like lose/lose than win/lose let alone win/win, because the US will face shortages of machine tools, medical supplies, and perhaps even food if they continue.

Anyway. Without understanding another man's negotiating position, without walking a mile in his shoes and thinking about how he can benefit too, you can't get to a win/win deal. That's why empathy is valuable even for cold-blooded capitalists.

The Ongoing Mystery of ADHD and its Treatment

Good NY Times piece today by Paul Tough on the controversy surrouding ADHD and its treatment with stimulants. It begins with James Swanson, one of the early experts on the problem and one of the first to experiment with giving stimulants to patients. In the mid 1990s, he was part of a major, NIH-funded study:

Swanson was in charge of the site in Orange County, Calif. He recruited and selected about 100 children with A.D.H.D. symptoms, all from 7 to 9 years old. They were divided into treatment groups — some were given regular doses of Ritalin, some were given high-quality behavioral training, some were given a combination and the remainder, a comparison group, were left alone to figure out their own treatment. The same thing happened at five other sites across the continent. Known as the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or M.T.A., it was one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.

The initial results of the M.T.A. study, published in 1999, underscored the case for stimulant medication. After 14 months of treatment, the children who took Ritalin every day had significantly fewer symptoms than the ones who received only behavioral training. Word went out to clinics and pediatricians’ offices around the country: Ritalin worked. . . .

Though Swanson had welcomed that initial increase in the diagnosis rate, he expected it to plateau at 3 percent. Instead, it kept rising, hitting 5.5 percent of American children in 1997, then 6.6 percent in 2000. As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the M.T.A. study, and by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different — and less hopeful — story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. “There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, “that just are definitely wrong.”

This exactly matches our experience in this house. Our eldest son is a classic ADHD case – and since we have two other sons, we know the difference between that and normal boyishness. We put him on Ritalin for a while, and he showed immediate changes: he did better in school, started reading books, bothered his siblings less. At first he was excited about this, but after some time – a couple of months, maybe? – he started to complain that he didn't like the way the meds made him feel, so we took him off them. After that we left the decision about taking them entirely up to him, and he used them on and off over the next few years, we think taking them when he got anxious about his grades. 

As I have written here many times, I think the human quest for drugs that change how we feel is ancient and unending, and that this says something important about how evolution has shaped us. It presumably also says something important about our society, in which the ability to sit still and concentrate on demanding work is very highly valued. So in principle I see nothing wrong with drugs that help some people sit still and concentrate. But I do not think we really understand what we are doing, or what the long-term consequences might be. So I very much appreciated this, from British neuroscientist Edmund Sonuga-Barke, who says that so far as he can tell "people with ADHD" is not a real category with definable boundaries:

I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started. We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.

Tough's piece covers many of the current controversies including whether ADHD patients should be sorted into different groups that are treated differently, whether the medications have unpleasant side effects, and whether the real answer is to let kids study what interests them. I recommend it. For me it strongly reinforced my basic assumption about all psychological issues, that you should never trust anyone who claims to have the answers.

Who Wants to Work in a Factory?

NY Times reporter Eduardo Medina went to South Carolina to get some straight talk about manufacturing in America:

In the 1970s, when the Upstate region of South Carolina was known as the textile capital of the world, Adolphus Jones would clock in for grueling summer shifts at one of the many mills in Union, his hometown.

Trains roared around him, transporting materials around the country. Chimney stacks on the red brick mills stretched dozens of feet high, like flag poles. This was textile country, and the cities of Union, Spartanburg and Greenville were at the heart of it.

By the end of the 1990s, automation and cheaper labor overseas took the industry away from the state. Union’s economy cratered, as did most of the region’s. But leaving Sunday church service on a recent afternoon, Mr. Jones, now 71 and retired, scoffed at President Trump’s vision of an American manufacturing revival through tariffs. The mill work had paid little, Mr. Jones recalled, and upward mobility was nonexistent.

“The textile industry is dead,” he said, buttoning his wool suit made in Italy. “Why would you want to bring it back here? Truthfully, why would the younger generation want to work there?”

Many retirees still remember what it was like to work in the textile mills. It had a negative connotation, said Rosemary Rice, 70, with some workers derogatively called “lint heads” because they would come home covered in cotton shreds. Many developed “brown lung disease,” or byssinosis, a respiratory condition caused by ingesting dust particles from fabric materials.

“I wouldn’t want my son working there,” said Ms. Rice, who lives in Union.

Actually, there is one group of Americans who might want tough, badly-paid factory work: recent immigrants. Let's look back to the cat-eating Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, about whom the factory owner said, 

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So, you know, if Trump is serious about bringing back textile and other low-end manufacturing, he should open the borders. I imagine the irony of this would be lost on him.

Not, of course, that manufacturing is disappearing from America. Most of it is kind that doesn't use many workers, like chemicals, but some of it does. Like assembling cars:

Today, companies like BMW and Michelin — from Germany and France — are the economic engines of the region. Since BMW opened its plant in Spartanburg County in the early ’90s, it has invested more than $14.8 billion into its South Carolina operations. The plant has more than 11,000 jobs, its largest single production facility in the world, according to the company. And it is the country’s largest car exporter by value, with $10 billion in shipments last year.

So the local business community was stunned when the White House’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, attacked BMW’s manufacturing process in an interview this week. He told CNBC on Monday that “this business model where BMW and Mercedes come into Spartanburg, S.C., and have us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions — that doesn’t work for America. It’s bad for our economics. It’s bad for our national security.”

“There was widespread bewilderment in our community about that,” said Carlos Phillips, the president and chief executive of the Greenville Chamber of Commerce.

In response to Mr. Navarro’s comments, South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, told reporters this week that ever since BMW arrived in the state with well-paying jobs, other companies had followed suit and “sent the word out around the world that this is a great manufacturing state.”

So the Trump team wants manufacturing, except not the kind that actually takes place in the US.

Speaking of which, Trump has also launched a savage assault on a big category of successful American exporters: defense firms. Spooked by Trump's erratic, pro-Putin stance, European countries have already cancelled billions of dollars worth of orders for US fighter jets and other weapons and launched a major initiative to produce more of their weaponry in Europe.

Which pretty much sums up the problem with MAGA politics: the denial that there is a world out there, full of people and nations with their own agendas who will not simply roll over and do whatever it is that Trump & Co. fantasize they should do. The world is complicated, and all the evidence to date is  that MAGA is too simple-minded a movement to grapple with it successfully.

Heather Fawcett, "Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries"

I listened to this book on my way home from my latest round of fieldwork, and it brightened a long, weary drive through rain and heavy traffic. It is 1910, more or less, and Emily Wilde is a Cambridge scholar of faerie lore in a world where faeries are real. She falls into faeryland adventures, as she must, and emerges intact largely because her great knowledge of faerie stories tells her how to handle every situation.

This ties into what is of course an old fantasy of mine, that if I were somehow transported to a world with magic based on the traditions of old Europe, I would be a force to be reckoned with.

Also, of course, our heroine acquires a faerie lover, because for a certain sort of (mostly female) author, romance with a faerie lord/vampire/werewolf/dragon/generic magical being is an essential part of the fantasy. This gives me a chance to wonder why this is not true for me.

I commented on this when I reviewed E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales, that in the story where the main character chooses the daughter of the King of Salamanders over a mortal woman, I found the mortal woman more appealing. The mountain of superlatives heaped on the beauty and charm of the otherwordly woman did not move me. 

I have considered various complex and arcane explanations for this, but I think it actually simple: for me the erotic is not about escaping from earthly, physical, bodily life, but reveling in it. And I don't mean just sexually; the most romantic thing I have ever done is have babies, which is as profoundly earthly and physical an experience as one can have.

Dream/Metaphor

Last week I had a dream from which I woke trembling. I was playing a big table-top strategy game with three other people. I was pretending to be much more expert at this game than I actually was. I moved a stack of counters across the board and placed them on a city hex to lay siege to it. Then I reached for the small laminated card that had the die roll results for sieges.

When I reached for it, the card was only a little larger than a standard playing card. But as I searched it for the table I needed, it grew. First it grew to an 8.5x11 sheet. Then to 11x17. Then there was more writing on the back. As I continued frantically searching the card for the right table I was aware that everyone was watching me and noting my inability to find this simple thing. But the thing in my hands kept growing until it was a like an old-fashioned folded road map, and I kept unfolding it and turning it over, growing ever more desperate, until I woke in panic.

Obviously this is a metaphor for something, but I am not sure it if is life in general or just the crazy stuff I have been going through at work lately.

Links 11 April 2025

Puppy Sculpture from the House of the Faun, Pompeii

Daily Beast: "Elon Musk rage quit a livestream of the video game Path of Exile 2 on Saturday night after repeatedly dying while also being ruthlessly cyberbullied in the chat." Love the guy who just typed "What's the deal with the tariffs?" over and over and over.

Pico Iyer has striven all his live to both live a successful public life and cultivate inner stillness, leading to oscillation between busyness and withdrawal.

Scott Siskind on lapis lazuli and the color ultramarine, which was so expensive in medieval Europe that it was almost exclusively used for one purpose.

And more Siskind, a takedown of the phrase, "the purpose of a system is what it does," which has become the launching pad for all maner of conspiratorial takes.

Richard Hanania: "The two most disastrous decisions taken by world leaders over the last few years are Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s tariffs. Toxic masculinity works as a framework for understanding fantasies of both conquest and factory jobs. Feminists may have been on to something."

Gaulish curse tablet from a Roman-period necropolis.

B.D. McClay on genre fiction: "I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake."

The story of "Ashley's Sack," a sadly wonderful memento of slavery. (NY Times, Smithsonian, wikipedia)

Obama's complete remarks at Hamilton College on democracy and rule of law are on Medium. News story; summary on Twitter/X.

Sea turtle tears and animals that may or may not sense earth's magnetic field.

Considering jealousy, taking off from an assertion that some of today's college students don't understand what it is.

Interesting use of an LLM: have it read thousands of reports from physicians who diagnosed the patient as autistic and identify the key variables being used in the diagnosis.

More evidence of contact between the Indus Valley civilization and the Middle East.

DNA studies show that 43 medieval manuscripts at Clairvaux Abbey were bound in sealskin.

Most economists are committed free-traders, and we all know what they think. So here are two pieces from economists who do worry about US trade deficits and think tarriffs are sometimes useful but are outraged by Trump's actions: Matthew Klein, "How to Think about the Tarriffs", and "The End of Exorbitant Privilege as We Know It" by Nina Quinn Eichacker.

And here is Alex Tabarrok with "Why Domestic Prices Rise with Tarriffs." (Because almost by definition they move production to less efficient producers.)

Why is Modernism Still Cool?

There is a web site called The Cool Hunter. They feature a variety of different styles in art and design, but only one kind of architecture: modernism. The modernist tree house above was on their front page just a minute ago when I went to check.

Is the music of the 1950s cool? the clothes? the movies? No.

So why is architecture of the 1950s still cool?

For at least the past 400 years, the styles favored by the elite have varied. Many critics have said that they change because of a cycle of innovation and immitation. The rich, stylish people on the cutting edge adopt a new style because it sets them apart. But then everyone else starts to immitate them, and within a few years what once distinguished the rich and stylish is now being worn by everyone. The rich and stylish therefore move onto something else, and look with horror on what they enjoyed a few years ago.

Then the rich and stylish fell for modern architecture. One might expect that soon everyone else would fall for it and then the rich and stylish would move on to something else. That didn't happen, because everyone not in the narrow world of the rich and stylish hated modern architecture and still hates it. So a fondness for it never spread. The rich and stylish found that in this one area they did not need to keep adopting new styles to distinguish themselves from the masses. They could just keep extolling modernism, because everybody else hated it so much.

Seen this way, it is not mysterious that elite architects and the billionaires who hire them stick with modernism. The more the masses hate it, the easier it is to signal that your are not a peasant by building something modern, preferable with at least a hint of brutalism. So we have ended up in this weird place where the famous architects are all modernists and the public rages against their awful creations, but the rich keep hiring them precisely because the masses hate their creations so much. Q.E.D.

Rand Paul Takes on the Tyrant

Rand Paul on the Senate floor:

Taxation without representation is tyranny, bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks leading up to the American Revolution. This became the rallying cry of American patriots. . . . Our founding fathers believed so strongly in this that they embodied in our Constitution. Our Constitution doesn't allow any one man or woman to raise taxes. It must be the body of Congress. And this wasn't new; it was part of maybe a thousand-year tradition from Magna Carta on. . . . This principle was long-standing, it was non-negotiable; this was what sparked the Revolution.

And yet today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. This is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The constitution forbids it. . . . Forty, fifty years before our Constitution, Montesquieu wrote, "when the executive and legislative powers are united in one person, there can be no liberty." Our founding fathers took this to heart. They said, we must separate the powers, we must at all costs limit the powers of the presidency. This isn't about political parties. I voted for and supported President Trump, but I don't support the rule of one person. We are set to have a 25% tax on goods coming from Canada and Mexico. This is a tax on the American people, plain and simple. One person can't do that. Our founding fathers said no, that would be illegal. It can't come from one person. It has to come to Congress.

You can't simply declare an emergency and say, well, the Constitutional Republic was great but gosh we've got an emergency, our times are dire. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said, there are no exemptions for emergencies. There was no exemption for a pandemic. The taxation clause stands. . . .

[after trashing the excuse of fentanyl as an "emergency," Rand said]

Even if the problem is valid, even if that is something that we all agree on, you can't have a country ruled by emergency. You can't have a country without a separation of powers, without checks and balances. . . . Part of the problem we face today with this emergency is that Congress has abdicated their power. Not just recently, not just for this president. This is a bipartisan problem. . . . I am a Republican, I am a supporter of Donald Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem. I don't care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat; I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me.

One person can make a mistake; and guess what, tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work, they will lead to higher prices, they are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy. But even if this was something magic and it was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a constitutional republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left. If one person rules, that person could make a horrible mistake. . . .

The emergency declaration we are considering today is unprecedented. By declaring an emergency, the president invoked the Internation Emergency Economic Powers Act. . .  It's a law that has been used to put sanctions on like Iran. That's what it was intended for. It was never intended for tariffs and the word tariff doesn't appear in the law. Using this bill to impose tariffs is attractive to a president. He doesn't have to work with the messiness of democracy, the messiness of Congress. But you know what; that messiness is a check and a balance on power. . . . Expedience is not the same as legality. 

This is not a partisan question. To me it makes no difference if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. This is about the distribution of power. This is about the separation of powers. This is about the admonition that Montesquieu gave us, that when the executive power and the legislative power are united in one person, there can be no liberty. Our founding fathers all believed that. They so feared the power of taxation that they gave it only to Congress. . . . This goes against the traditions of our country.

I stand to speak against these tariffs. I stand to speak against these emergencies. I stand against the idea of skipping democracy, of skipping the constitutional republic, of rejecting our founding principles. Not because I have any animus toward the president. I do this because I love my country and I want to see it protected from the amalgamation of power into one person so that it can be abused.

Another name for emergency rule is martial law. Who would want to live under the rule of one person? The thing we object to in all the countries around the world that we dislike is that they don't have democratic rule. We should vote. This is a tax, plain and simple, and taxes should not be enacted by one person. I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote to day to try to reclaim the power of taxation to where the constution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.

Dire Wolves?

Colossal Biosciences, which spent years trying and failing to bring back the woolly mammoth, now claims to have brought back the dire wolf. (NY Times, Time, company post on Twitter/X with wolf pup howls)

Sort of. What they did was find some dire wolf DNA, identify 22 places on the genome where they differed from modern gray wolves, alter those locations to be like their dire wolves, insert that DNA in a gray wolf egg cell and have it carried to term by a wolf.

The offspring are different from modern wolves, bigger and with paler, thicker fur. So they are something different from modern wolves. But I am not willing to call them dire wolves.

Still, this is pretty cool, the biggest step yet in the de-extinction program. But note that dire wolves were so closely related to gray wolves that they seem to have interbred with them in the past. Nothing about this success says we might be close to bringing back animals without such a close living relative.

Fernanda Melchor, "Hurricane Season"

The amazing thing about Hurricane Season (2017, English translation 2020) is its frantic energy, an electrical storm of words, images and emotions. In a poor part of rural Mexico, a strange character known only as The Witch is murdered. The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, two male and two female, all with their own passions and their own hatreds, their own vocabularies of abuse that they direct at the world around them. In particularly they despise and abuse the opposite sex. The crimes here are all sex crimes, in a broad sense: they are about gender relations, male attempts to control women, female attempts to get something from men, straight scorn for homosexuality, and the rage of men whose machismo is threatened. In one sense it is an indictment of male misdeeds, but it is not preachy; it just turns its electric gaze on awful things, lighting up the horror and the pain of those acts like it lights up everything about its characters' worlds.

I don't recommend it for everyone. It is obscene, profane, confusing, and sometimes grim, but it is the least boring book I have listened to in years.

Links 4 April 2025

Karl Cauer, Strega (Witch), 1874

Wonderful Scott Siskind piece on the evil Atlantean dwarves that populated Amazing Stories in the 1940s, and the widespread myths that seem related.

A writer in the Harvard Crimson trashes land acknowledgements, saying the university should "Either return the land that it occupies to whichever Native American tribe that it stole it from, or spare us the hollow, meaningless acknowledgements."

Meta-analysis of studies on people who have tried to give up social media, or take a break from it, finds that it does not make them happier.

The house mothers who ran boarding houses for working girls in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Mass grave of Roman soldiers found in Austria.

On Twitter/X, Nabeel Qureshi asked his followers to rate four translations of a passage from the Odyssey, one by GPT4 and three by humans. GPT4 won. I thought parts of the AI version were good, but it had a glaring modernism that rang harshly in my ears, so it wasn't my favorite. Via Marginal Revolution.

South Korea's Supreme Court finally removes their president from office for his bizarre coup attempt.

Using AI to find new uses for old drugs: NY Times, summary at Marginal Revolution.

Review of a new book about the Turkish siege of Malta in 1565.

The rain forest tree that thrives on being struck by lightning. (NY Times, Scientific American)

Should AIs hold financial resources, so they can be sued for bad behavior? (Marginal Revolution)

Review of the new volume of W.G. Sebald's essays: "Melancholy, far from being defeatist, is itself a kind of political resistance, a way of pushing back against the machinations of fascism by preserving the past against erasure."

NPR's Books We Love, 2024 edition.

Data on Russian recent casualties in Ukraine, via tire guy Trent Trelenko on Twitter/X: 

75% are caused by drones;
20% by artillery;
4% by small arms fire.

The Decline of the Book, and What Might Replace it.

Interesting musings from Sam Kahn about the decline of the book as a form, and what might replace it. After referencing the various doomsters who say that today's college students are functionally illiterate and so on, he notes that while books may be in trouble, "writing is undergoing a renaissance."

But if print can survive the flood — through articles, short-form writing, etc — books may still find themselves a casualty. In part, what the doomsaying articles are saying about students is not necessarily that they can’t read but that they can’t read long-form work. And to some extent the kids may have a point. It is a crowded marketplace out there; the more time you spend with one person means time taken away from others. And, by the same token, if so many people are so adept at saying what they have to say in short-form writing, why the need for a doorstop? Part of what the kids may be intuiting is that a book needs to be of a certain length in order to justify the cost of the binding — and writers writing books tend, even at the conceptual level, to pad out, trying in their minds to be worthy of the majesty in the implicit idea of a book. But readers’ behavior in the digital era is very different. They are not looking to fill out a train ride or long winter’s evening with a book. They are reading looking for an idea, for something interesting, and what that implies is that writers can use readers’ attention spans, rather than the imagined length of a book, in order to give shape to their ideas. A text should be as long as it takes to express the idea.

I agree with this completely. The world is full of books that should have been articles or short stories, padded out to 250 pages because that is what the publishing world requires. Even writers as well known as Kazuo Ishiguro do this, turning interesting little ideas into bloated "books."

What I would expect that means in the realm of serious writing is, over the next years, a good deal of structural innovation in text. Even in a domain like biography or history, where the book seems especially sturdy as a form, I notice writers chafing under its inherent limits. Why should biographers have to devote the precious real estate at the beginning of their book to discussing their subject’s grandparents while the subject’s main accomplishments often come somewhere towards the end when reader and writer are both exhausted? The ‘archipelago’ may be a more simpatico structure for history than the straight line. One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project. In fiction, I would imagine writers gravitating towards the novella (an excellent form that fell into disuse because it didn’t quite fit the exigencies of the publishing industry) and maybe on the more innovative, ambitious side we can imagine writers using the resources of the web to produce sprawling fictive worlds that don’t necessarily have to be connected by a throughline.

Reading this I imagined turning my old gaming world into a sort of hypertext story in which you could switch between cities and region and follow different characters and see both how the main events transpire or are reflected in every region, plus the local concerns of each. Imagine this for LOTR, an edifice within which the sort of nerds who write posts about "what was really happening in Umbar" can go read about it. George R.R. Martin might have loved this.

I like reading novels; it is a form I enjoy. I have also enjoyed writing them. But I do suspect that they are not the future of storytelling. I suspect that while novels will endure for a long time, writing may evolve in diverse directions. Many stories will be shorter. Writers with longer stories to tell may split them into pieces; this already happens in collections of linked short stories, and we may get more of it. I can also imagine stories told like The Princess Bride, with the "good parts" narrated in detail and much of the rest just sketched out in little text or video interludes.

After saying a bit about how powerful he has found the experience of writing novels, Kahn notes that what writers find meaningful for themselves is not necessarily what the world wants:

I would say the intelligent thing to do here is is to try to change up our values system for the digital age. Good writing can be done in short chunks — articles, short stories, novellas, whatever — just as good running can be done at any length. Novels should probably be treated as what they are — something like a marathon, a sort of circus freak event for those who for some reason or other are determined to pursue that — as opposed to what they are now, which is like a badge of entry for writing. In other words, novels seem singularly unsuited to the digital era. That’s unfortunate but should be clarifying for those who write novels: that they are doing it more as a spiritual exercise than to reach an audience.

For now, this is still not true; there are still many millions of novel readers out there. But we are aging, and I consider it an open question how many of us there will be in future generations. Storytelling will always be with us, but the novel is an invention of certain cultures, and most of humanity always did perfectly well without it. 

Anti-Bullying and the Rise of MAGA

I have long been interested both in the phenomenon of bullying and the role of the anti-bullying movement in the modern left. (Just type "bullying" into the search bar on this blog and you'll see what I mean.) I think anti-bullying movement is a great way to understand modern left-liberals and the ways they want to change the world.

On the one hand, bullying is bad; there is now a lot of data showing that bullying scars many people for life, leading to their having shorter lives, lower incomes, and so on, plus it just sucks to be bullied. We have seen many organizations torn apart by accusations of bullying and mistreatment. So doing what we can to limit bullying seems to me like a good idea.

On the other hand, this can be taken too far, leading to absurdities like not letting children play games in which one side wins, and bans on using words like "fat" or "stupid." At the far end of this we have seen some adults trying to keep children from forming close friendship pairs, because this might leave somebody out.

Watching MAGA in power, I keep wondering if this is the key to the contemporary political landscape. People sometimes say that Trump's appeal is "just racism," but to me that leaves a huge amount unexplained (including his appeal to non-white voters). Does it maybe make more sense to see MAGA as a defense of bullying? Or, less radically, as an attack on the apparatus liberals have put into place to prevent it? Or as a celebration of the tough characters who shove everyone else down on their way to the top?

The first point to notice is that from Trump on down, MAGA's leadership is full of bullies: Hegseth, Musk, Stephen Miller, etc. One of their battle cries seems to be, "Yes, we're assholes, and there's nothing you can do about it." In that sense MAGA is a direct reaction against the anti-bullying movement from people who think that we have too many weak pansies in the country and not enough toughness.

Consider "free speech." Some of the points where conservatives have shouted the loudest have to do with liberal attempts to ban speech we consider harmful, like sexist jokes. Against the sort of sweet liberal schoolmarm ethic of "we're nice all the time and nobody says anything bad to anybody," MAGA sets "real men need to be able to both dish it out and take it."

Anti-bullying is about being careful. Having been trained in this multiple times, I can tell you that the program is largely about thinking before you speak. Don't speak in anger. Limit your sarcasm. Tone down your criticism. Try to see every situation from everyone's point of view. Is that not the opposite of MAGA?

True, some MAGA people also seem to be thin-skinned and whiny when anybody criticizes them, but it is hardly news that many bullies are like that.

I don't want to seem cavalier about this; "MAGA is for bullies" may be true, but if so that simple statement may be short hand for a deeper sort of human division. MAGA people don't care about Ukraine because they don't want to hear from weaklings who can't defend themselves. Part of the appeal of RFK and his wacky medicine to MAGA is his insistence that being healthy is all up to you; you don't need doctors and hospitals and vaccine factories. MAGA people don't want to talk about complexity; their solutions are always simple and direct. Build a wall. Fire the bureaucrats.

One might define liberalism, in this context, as the belief that, no, actually, you don't stand alone, your whole exitence depends on unbelievably complicated systems and crazily huge bureaucracies, and taking care of those systems is a big part of why we have governments.

You don't have to tell me how hypocritical this is; I see it, too. But I do believe that the contrast between a sweet elementary school teacher who wants everyone to be kind and Donald Trump mocking female reporters for being fat and ugly says something important about the US today.

AI and the Future of Warfare

Long but very interesting interview with US defense official Michael Horowitz and Shashank Joshi, who is The Economist's defense reporter, about military AI. Here is Joshi on the range of possible applications:

We could split the applications of that general-purpose technology up a million different ways. The way I have tended to do it in my head is thinking about insight, autonomy, and decision support.

Insight is the intelligence application. Can you churn your way through satellite images? Can you use AI to spot all the Russian tanks?

Autonomy is, can you navigate from A to B? Can this platform do something itself with less or no human supervision or intervention? The paradigmatic case today, which is highly impactful, is terminal guidance using AI object recognition to circumvent electronic warfare in Ukraine.

The third interesting thing is decision support. This includes things that nobody really understands in the normal world, like command and control. It’s the ability of AI to organize, coordinate, and synchronize the business of warfare, whether that’s a kind of sensor-shooter network at the tactical level for a company or a battalion, or whether it’s a full theater-scale system of the kind that European Command, 18th Corps, and EUCOM has been assisting Ukraine with for the last three years.

This involves looking across the battlescape, fusing Russian phone records, overhead, radio frequency, satellite, IM satellite returns, synthetic aperture radar images, and all kinds of other things into a coherent picture that’s then used to guide commanders to act more quickly and effectively than the other side. That’s difficult to define. But if we’re talking about transformative applications, that is really where we need to be looking carefully.

Here is Horowitz on drone swarms:

If the question is “Where are the swarms we were promised?” and what we end up with is a world where one person is overseeing maybe 50 strike weapons that are autonomously piloting the last two kilometers toward a target, there may be actually military reasons why we don’t want them to communicate with each other. If they communicated with each other, that would be a signal that could be hacked or jammed, which then gets you back into the EW issue that you’re trying to avoid.

So maybe drone swarms as they exist now are not militarily relevant.

Planting Day

It's early for me, but it has been 80 degrees for two days on Thursday I'm heading back down to Danville for a week. So I started planting seeds today. It was a perfect day, warm, dry, overcast.

Our plum trees is blooming.

Nature is doing some work for me: self-seeded larkspurs coming up in one of the annual beds.

Here's a picture I took to  show the difference between the soil in my garden beds,  after twenty years of work, and what lies under the grass in the rest of the yard.

My perennil poppies are multiplying!

It brings me joy to get my hands back in the dirt, with life sprouting all around me.

Never Satisfied

Augustus the Strong (1670-1733) was the Elector of Saxony, a nice enough position, effectively the independent ruler of a pleasant little kingdom. But it was not enough for him, so he accepted the throne of Poland-Lithuania. This embroiled him in no end of trouble. A French noble woman commented,

That the Elector of Saxony could not be satisifed with being an Elector only goes to show what I have long observed, that no one can be really happy in this world and everyone foolishly sets about throwing away his happiness, for this Elector would have been a thousand times happier if he had gone on enjoying a quiet and peaceful life as Elector of Saxony instead of becoming King of such a fractious nation. 

Via Larry Wolff in the TLS, November 1, 2024 

Links 28 March 2025

Fossil Psittacosaurus nest from Yixian Formation,

China, c. 125 million years old

The F-47, the new US 6th generation fighter. (8-minute video from Binkov, article at Defense News)

Very interesting essay on British traveller and writer Bruce Chatwin: "My whole life has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavor of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific.”

I wish to endorse this Scott Siskind essay positing psychological explanations for political positions. Conflict over resources is real, but in our world it simply does not explain most of our politics. Conflict over status explains more, but I think Siskind's psychological framing better captures what is actually happening.

Despite everything, there is still a punk scene in China.

23andMe declares bankruptcy. (NY Times,  Reuters) These DNA testing companies did well at first, and their stocks soared, but I always thought that once the backlog of interested people had their data their sales would fall off, and so it has happened. Issues with the security of the data they hold haven't helped, but the main thing is that most of the people who want this kind of genetic information already have it.

Remarkable hoard of Iron Age objects found in Yorkshire, including cauldrons.

Richard Hanania: "Before long, I expect Trump administration officials to start reading out the license plate numbers of Teslas that have been damaged the way that liberals used to repeat the names of black people killed in encounters with police."

Essay by Sherman Alexie, "the greatest Kiss lipsync tribute band in Native American history." Partly about the subject indicated in the title and partly about the fallibility of memory.

The science and politics of using mRNA vaccines to fight cancer.

New findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which has surveyed 15 million galaxies and quasars, suggest that the cosmological "constant", aka "dark energy," must have been much stronger in the past, which might mean that the expansion of the universe will eventually stop and reverse. (good article from Berkeley Labs, 7-minute video from Sabine Hossenfelder.)

J. Russell Smith (1874-1966) and the cultivation of trees. He thought vast areas of hills should be converted from plow agriculture to growing trees that had been specially bred to provide food or whatever else humans need. His book Tree Crops (1929) still has a huge following, including among science fiction writers, several of whom have filled the future with forests of food-producing trees.

Ninety-minute interview with Manu Meel, co-founder of BridgeUSA, an organization dedicated to promoting constructive political dialogue on college campuses. Bridge USA web site.

Alex Tabarrok reminds us of America and Canada in better times.

Giving AIs personality traits, and seeing how this impacts their collaboration with humans.

Fascinating NY Times article on the Volksbund, the German organization that recovers German bodies scattered across Europe during the World Wars and gives them decent burial, no matter who they were. A Russian archaeologist I knew in the 90s told me that he had spent much of his career recovering the bodies that regularly turned up during construction in Russia, especially in cities where they were just buried in the rubble and forgotten.

Kerala, an Indian state with 35 million inhabitants, has done well economically in the past 30 years despite uninterrupted rule by socialists, helped by ties to the global economy. Widespread knowledge of English also helps.

Designing better light sails for interstellar travel.

Topical

Michael Derrick Hudson, Yi-Fen Chou, and the Problem of Authenticity

Michael Derrick Hudson is a very minor American poet. In 2015 he had 15 minutes in the spotlight because of an interesting little exercise in ethnic inauthenticity.

Wikipedia has the story:

Hudson wrote a poem titled "The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve" and claimed to have submitted it to 40 literary magazines under his own name. Hudson also claimed that after nine rejections, it was accepted for publication in Fall 2014 with four other poems by "Yi-Fen Chou" by Prairie Schooner, a literary journal affiliated with the University of Nebraska. . . . Hudson used the name of a Taiwanese immigrant who attended the same high school as him and had been working as a nuclear engineer in Chicago at the time of publication.

Hudson's poem, under the pseudonym, was considered for inclusion in the 2015 edition of the Best American Poetry anthology series to be guest-edited by Native American poet and novelist Sherman Alexie. Alexie selected the poem among the 75 poems published in the anthology. 

But this is where my favorite part starts. Because when he learned about the selection, Hudson immediately wrote to Alexie and told him about his use of the pseudonym. If you know anything about Sherman Alexie, you will not be surprised to learn that rather than changing his mind about the poem, he published it together with his correspondence with Hudson, making the whole thing public.

Sherman Alexie is an American Indian (with multiple tribal ancestries) whose writing is distinguished – in my mind, anyway – by a heavily ironic attitude toward all American pieties, including all Native American pieties. He is particularly effective when he mocks white stereotypes about Indians and Indian pieties about themselves at the same time, as in "How to Write to Great American Indian Novel." Even when he writes what seems like an angry demand for Native restoration, as in "The Powwow at the End of the World," you have a sense that he feels ironically detached from this as well.

Wikipedia again:

In a blog post Alexie discussed his criteria in selecting poems, stating that he would "carefully look for great poems by women and people of color" who had been "underrepresented in the past," After learning of Hudson's pseudonym, Alexie admitted that he "paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet's identity." Instead of removing the poem from the anthology, which he stated would primarily be "because of my own sense of embarrassment", Alexie said he kept it rather than to expose himself to a lie that "would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity." He emphasized that "In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them."

Not to set my own literary taste above Sherman Alexie's, but I think the poem is terrible. Anyway.

The predictable sort of people said predictable things about this. NPR found a self-proclaimed spokeman for Asian American writers who said this:

At the Asian American Writers' Workshop, if you are a person of color, we believe you have a story only you can tell. But if you're a person of color, you may have at one point felt that you were not normal. You aren't white.

And you all know how I feel about this. First, the utter lack of basic empathy; if there are living people who have never felt like they were "not normal," then I have never met them. Oh, you white people, you never suffer or feel you don't belong. Blech.

But, really, who cares?

Sherman Alexie isn't an interesting writer because he is an Indian; he's just interesting. I radically do not care about the ethnicity of the people whose books I read. I thought Invisible Man was tedious, but I love Notes of a Native Son and Song of Solomon, because James Baldwin and Toni Morrison are straight out great writers. 

It makes no difference at all to me who wrote "The Bees," I just don't like it.

I do not believe in ethnic writing. Modern poetry, novels, and memoirs are highly stylized creations that make sense only within a particular literary tradition that mainly comes from England and France. When you join that tradition and learn to write according to its rules, you pretty much leave the rest of your identity behind. If you are Toni Morrison or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you can use your awesome powers to bend the tradition a little toward different ways of speaking and thinking, producing something that is both beautiful and a little strange. But I mean it when I say "a little." 

First Weekend of Spring

It was a lovely spring weekend here, and I spent a lot of it out in the garden.

Star magnolias are open all over the neighborhood.

My hyacinths and early daffodils are all open.

These little blue flowers came from the house where my wife grew up.

Kidu wanted to know what the fuss was about.

Garden beds, all ready for planting in two weeks or so.

Links 21 March 2025

The Valþjófsstaður door, from an Icelandic church, c. 1200 AD. It has an old Norse feel but the upper image depicts "The Knight of the Lion," a popular chivalric tale most famous as Yvain by Chretien de Troyes (c. 1185).

Update on the technologies that are extending female fertility.

Scott Siskind on misphonia, from which he suffers.

The head of this Cambodian statue was found in 1924, the body not until this year.

Interesting essay about prehistoric violence, argues that among hunter-gatherers most violence is not tribal wars but murders by individual psychopaths.

What are the most dangerous questions people might ask a LLM? These guys decided to have an LLM figure that out.

Irritating but still interesting article arguing that the most important early human invention was not the spear but the carrying bag, specifically bags for carrying babies. The main problem is that the author's idea of the anthropological mainstream is fixed in the 1970s, and a lot has changed since then; these days even traditionalists like me write about the importance of bags and backpacks for Stone Age people. Plus the annoying habit of treating men and women as separate species, so that one or the other had to be creating language, and the mistake of thinking that language must have developed as part of resource gathering rather than for broader social purposes.

Iron shackles found at a 3rd century BC gold mine in the Egyptian desert. A reminder that in the classical world slaves laboring in the mines were considered the most pitiable sort of humans.

Four planets found orbiting Barnard's Star, a red dwarf just six light years away. All the planets are too hot for life as we know it.

Married people are much happier, on average, than single people, and this applies to both men and women. (Marginal Revolution, original paper) Of course the causality might not be simple; happy, norm-seeking people probably get married at a higher rate than sad weirdos. Schizophrenic people are much less likely to be married. But even when we correct for whatever we can correct for, married people are still happier. In fact the effect is bigger for some groups that are less happy than the norm, including high school dropouts. Based on some weird data points from the 20th century, this author speculates that gay people in heterosexual marriages must have reported being happier than unmarried gay people.

Speaking of marriage and happiness, here's a piece taking off from a dichotomy found in the old TV series "Girls," that you can either be happy or have experiences. Are there really people who model their lives on characters in fiction?

Remarkably well-preserved section of 18th-century canal found during Madrid subway construction.

The history of technology since 1500 in one massive graphic.

At Wellesley College, non-tenured faculty are getting ready to go on strike. Among their demands: a 2/2 course load, pay that starts at $90,000 a year and goes up in annual increments to $180,000 for the most experienced instructors, a $5,000 child care allowance. better insurance, sabbaticals, research assistance, and more. Their rhetoric is all about what their work is "worth," while ignoring the sad reality that there are about five willing applicants for every position like the ones they hold.

Short video showing the explosion of the world's largest firework, said to have weighed 300 kg.

The Willandra Lakes fossils, among the most intriguing specimens of early Homo Sapiens from all of Asia, have been handed over to Aboriginal tribes for reburial, ending their scientific study.

The exciting career of Ingenuity, the Mars flyer, 30-minute video from Veritasium.

This week's past post is Lessons of the Brexit Vote, featuring some words from Yoni Appelbaum that still perfectly describe the MAGA phenomenon.

The Abundance Agenda

Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and some other modern Democrats I follow have lately been touting something they call the "abundance agenda," which is the title of a forthcoming book from Klein and Derek Thompson. In this podcast, Klein lays out the basic argument. He starts out by asking why people are moving by the millions from Blue states to Red ones; the overwhelming answer people give is that housing is more affordable.

There is a policy failure haunting blue States: it has become too hard to build and too expensive to live in the places where Democrats govern. Our politics is split right now between a left that defends government even when it doesn't work and a right that wants to destroy government even when it is working. What we need is a political party that actually makes government work. Democrats can be that party. They should be that party. But it requires them to confront what they have done to make government fail.

Klein then spends a few minutes on California's high speed rail disaster, noting that environmental review began in 2012 and is still not finished. Plus:

California has the worst housing problem in the country. In 2022 the state had 12% of the country's population, but it had 30% of the country's homeless population and 50% of its unsheltered homeless population. Has this unfathomable failure led to California building more homes than it was building a decade ago? No, it hasn't. . . .

In the last few decades Democrats took a wrong turn they became the party that believes in government, that defends government, not the party that forces government to work.

I refuse to accept that this is our choice, a Democratic party that will not make government work and a Republican party that wants to make government fail. What those two parties have created over decades is scarcity, scarcity of homes, of good infrastructure, of clean energy, of public goods.

I want to put myself down as being for this, in principle. But that is the problem; a lot of people will support this agenda in the abstract, but they will rebel when their own special interests are attacked.

I fully support reforming the NEPA process, even if it means less work for people like me; in fact I regularly agitate against doing archaeology in some situations. But there are things I very much want to preserve – historic buildings and neighborhoods, battlefields, archaeological sites where the record of the deep past is well preserved. 

Let's think for a bit about housing in California. Sure, in the abstract I'm all for building more, but where? Fire experts have been warning for a century about the danger of building in the canyons above Los Angeles, but they were deemed annoying destractors from the abundance agenda and building went ahead. Water experts warned for decades about over-building in Phoenix, but they were ignored and now the Rio Grande dries up every winter and Phoenix has had to curtail development. 

Where does Klein stand on building on barrier islands? on wetlands? on battlefields? in western forests?

Back when it was much easier to build stuff in the US, we constructed the Interstate highways system. Most people I know are glad we did. But building highways into urban areas did a lot of damage, and many cities are now trying to find money to demolish old highways they wish had never been built. In fact those highways did a lot to create the anti-building coalition in America.

The devil is in the details, as usual.

Why Democrats Lost the Election

Fascinating episode of Ezra Klein's podcast with Democratic pollster David Shor. Lots of charts showing how much better Trump did among people not paying attention, because they mostly cared about the economy.

Klein notes that the most popular "moderate" politicians are not moderate on all issues but take positions across the spectrum on various issues, so in this sense Trump was seen as a "moderate."

This chart was probably the key, showing that many more people saw Harris as too liberal than saw Trump as too conservative.

Although it might also be important that 40% of young voters get their news from TikTok, and those folks were Trump +8.

I was of course struck by these:

We sure are miserable.

At the end, Shor has a lot of data on what Trump is doing now. Voters are turning against Trump but even more against Elon; people are more pissed at Elon making chaos than they are worried about threats to Social Security and Medicare. As Shor says, it takes a lot to make Americans care more about anything than they do about Social Security and Medicare.

Bananas, Turnips, World Trade, and Self-Imposed Poverty

Fabulous exchange unfolding on Twitter/X.

First, Alex Nowrasteh quotes this from some news article:

The banana is Britain's most popular supermarket item, a green and yellow embled of globalisation, cheap, tasty, nutritious and amusing to eat. It has quietly achieved dominance while traditional British crops have fallen by the wayside. Over the past fifty years, the average consumption of turnips has plummeted, while consumption of bananas has more than doubled.

And adds:

The banana is a powerful image of globalization, the turnip is the sad reality of nationalism.

To which John Carney says:

Okay. Let’s go.

The turnip sustained European civilizations for centuries. The banana wilts at the first sign of a supply chain disruption. Which one sounds more resilient?

It's bewildering, these people who are so determined to hate the world we live in that they insist on trashing things that seem to me to be obvious gains. Has John Carney ever eaten a turnip? Blech. And it isn't just John Carney, I've seen a lot of this lately, including an exchange that went like,

Twitter warrior A: All these tarriffs will make it hard to find fresh vegetables in the winter.

Twitter warrior B: We'll just go back to eating what's in season like nature intended.

Intentional poverty! What a fabulous idea, right-wing nationalism and left-wing eco-fanaticism get together to make life worse for everyone. Let's substitute chicory for coffee, pawpaws for pineapples, canned vegetables for fresh ones.

It makes me crazy, this desperate trashing of whatever we have and insistence that things must have been better at some other time or in some other place. I've lately seen both 1971 and 1957 held up as times when life was way better than now; yes, let's go back to life without air conditioning, ATMs, the internet, and 70 years of medical miracles.

Trump, meanwhile, has been talking up the 1890s as the time when America was richest, which is flat-out insane. Half the country didn't have running water.

Jeremy Horpedahl calls this "Returning to a pre-modern standard of living to own the libs" and posted this figure from a British government report on the diet of a typical urban working family in 1912:

Why is it so hard to admit that we have it good?

"Trump Gaza"

At the NY Times, Dan Brooks ponders the Trump Gaza video:

Right up front, and only once, let us acknowledge that everything about the “Trump Gaza” A.I. video is insane: the proposal on which it is based, to resettle the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip and turn the area into a resort property; its content, which includes bearded belly dancers, an Elon Musk look-alike dancing on the beach and a golden statue of President Trump; and the fact that the president posted it, without comment, on a website called Truth Social. It’s all absurd and awful. That is probably the point, if a concept as antiquated as intent applies to the new genre of computerized irony this video represents.

I doubt anyone involved in its production and dissemination believes it describes a viable plan for the future. Nevertheless, it expresses the perspective of a certain subset of Americans — not how they imagine the Gaza of tomorrow but how they understand the internet of today. What we have here is the MAGA aesthetic distilled: political expression not as a way to persuade people or even convey ideas but as social and cultural posturing.

There is also a song. Generated by A.I. in a style I would call in-flight techno, its lyrics begin, “Donald’s coming to set you free/bringing the light for all to see/no more troubles, no more fear/Trump Gaza is finally here.” This opening plays over shots of ruined city streets, where masked warriors with assault rifles alternately menace and care for children as civilians crouch in the rubble. GAZA 2025, the supertitles read. WHAT’S NEXT?

The rubble remains, but at this point the foggy skies clear up to reveal construction cranes in the distance. A shot of soldiers passing through an archway cuts to a woman and two children walking through the mouth of a cave toward a beach. Modern skyscrapers fill the horizon, followed by a drum break synced to a series of quick cuts: golden sands lapped by cerulean water, mixed-use retail on streets lined with late-model Teslas, more kids running out of another cave to another beach. . . .

Given how recently generative A.I. developed, it’s remarkable how fast its aesthetic hallmarks have become recognizable: high-contrast textures, perceptibly diffuse lighting, forced-perspective shots in which people walk down city streets or through arched openings. It’s not what dreams look like so much as a visual rendering of a dream’s description, complete with mild failures of object permanence and the sense that we have seen it all before, although it didn’t look like that. 

Truly our civilization is in peril.