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, 2014 

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.

Religion, Art, and Hilma af Klint

Hilma af Klint, c. 1890

When I wrote about Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) back in 2019, I noted that while today she is a famous artist, she did not see herself that way. She was a spirtualist who saw her paintings as religious acts. A Swedish foundation tried to set up a museum of her work during her lifetime, but she refused to cooperate. Her inner voices, she said, urged her to avoid any such entanglement. As a result, her paintings ended up under the control of her family. 

Beginning in 1984, Klint's descendants began allowing museums to borrow Klint's works and exhibit them as art. She quickly became quite famous as a pioneer of abstractionism, with accompanying rhetoric about ignored female artists and the like. Her fame has continued to grow ever since. The big retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain, which closed last month, was one of their most successful shows ever.

But now some members of her family are saying that this may stop, because it is too far from Klint's personal vision:

On Monday, speaking to the Swedish publication Dagens Nyheter, Erik af Klint, the artist’s great-grandnephew and the chairman of her foundation, suggested that exhibitions like the Guggenheim Bilbao one may soon cease altogether. “When a religion ends up in a museum, it is dead,” he said. “This is not meant to be public.”

He instead claimed that her art should really be shown in a place enterable only by “spiritual seekers,” since that was what af Klint would’ve wanted. “It is a message from the spirit world,” Erik said. “Period.”

I feel like Erik af Klint has just stepped into a very deep and dark theoretical forest. Is there a real difference between art and spirituality? For some people, like me, appreciating art is as close as we get to real spiritual experiences. Somebody else who understood this was Rudolf Steiner, one of modern Europe's most important spiritual thinkers. Steiner wrote books and gave lots of lectures, but he also worked with artists to create visual expressions of spiritual ideas.

Among Hilda af Klint's surviving papers are some sketches for a "temple", apparently described to her by one of her spirit guides. Erik af Klint, I have read, thinks that such a temple would be a better home for his ancestress' works than an art museum. But what, really, would be the difference? Lots of people have said that art museums are the cathedrals of the modern age.

I can certainly understand some concerns about how af Klint's paintings might be used, especially if they were sold. But it seems to me that a properly constructed and run museum could do justice to them as both art and spirit. If there is any difference between those things.

Links 14 March 2025

Degas, Two Women Draped in a Blanket

Interesting visualization of the earth's ocean currents.

Noah Smith takes on the notion that MAGA will somehow help restore things like community and faith in America: "Trump's movement has been around for a decade now, and it has built absolutely nothing."

Jewish ritual bath of the Roman period found in Ostia.

Mind-expanding 33-minute video from Veritasium on some weird things that happen when you combine quantum mechanics with the principle of least action.

Scott Siskind ponders declining reading scores for American 4th graders: was it the pandemic?

Some violence in Syria, but nothing critical yet.

Larry Summers rips Trump's tarriff policies.

Memoirs of madness, quite interesting.

The Lapedo Child, a human fossil from Portugal, always bothered paleoanthropologists because of its mix of modern human and Neanderthal characteristics. DNA testing has confirmed that there were human/Neanderthal hybrids, which inspired new interest in this specimen. Now radiocarbon dating says this fossil is 28,000 years old, 10,000 years after most authorities think Neanderthals went extinct, which raises a lot of questions. (Scientific paper, news story)

Interesting NY Times piece on migration to Dubai, where only one in ten people is a citizen.

Fascinating thread (Twitter/X) explaining the difference between the total fertility rate and something called completed cohort fertility, which often yield different numbers. If the average age at which women are having children is changing, then CCF is a more accurate measure. Unfortunately you can't measure it until a cohort of women are too old to have many more babies. In the US the cohort aging out now had 2 children per woman.

The "cat meat men" of Victorian London.

Clothes and empire: "The Mughal emperors in India faced a sartorial quandary: continue wearing their traditional Central Asian attire, or adopt the lighter cotton clothing of this warmer clime?" Great pictures.

Filming Nanook of the North.

Why Doge will not meaningfully reform government or reduce spending, from a conservative thinker.

Weird discourse in Congress, where lawmakers and experts were discussing "how to beat China back to the Moon." Considering that two Americans walked on the Moon in 1969, it seems bizarre to me that anyone cares who gets there next.

Demographers worried about population collapse are focusing on very religious families, hoping that they can fill some of the future birth void: "The only sure way United States can get back to 1.8 TFR in my estimation is if 10% of women have 5+ children. This is because it is becoming increasingly likely that 30% of women in coming years will have zero & another 10% just 1. So lot falls on the 60% to have more children." To judge from their salience in the demographic discourse you would think that Finland's famously fertile Laestadians were an important group, but really there are only about 110,00 of them. But, hey, my wife and I raised five children without belonging to a cult.

Amazing images and new science from Juno at Jupiter, 20-minute video.

Review of a book subtitled A Cultural History of Hypochondria, interesting.

Good introduction to the philosophy of Martha Nussbaum. And an interesting essay by Nussbaum herself, "Beyond Anger."

Quantum computer boosters keep claiming their devices have performed feats non-quantum computers could not perform in a million years, but then somebody finds a way to do the same calculation on a regular supercomputer.

Plans for a big regulatory rollback at the EPA focused on CO2 rules. (NY Times, CNN, Guardian) As I said before on this subject, I don't think this matters much. Solar power is not replacing coal because of wokeness; it is simply less expensive. Geothermal power has been a fantasy of the eco-left for 50 years, but it is now taking off, not because of wokeness, but because deep drilling has gotten two orders of magnitude more efficient. My company works on every kind of energy project and I have not heard of a plan for a new coal-fired plant in 25 years. MAGA cannot save coal unless they outright force utilities to burn it.

Sea otters are pretty good at controlling invasive green crabs.

NPR has an update on the shortage of doctors in rural America, which they say has gotten worse since the pandemic.

A glimpse of the Roman baths in Baden Baden.

Pondering the vaginal microbiome.

Review of a biography of the Brothers Grimm, written as a refutation of the idea that folk tales "come from nowhere and belong to everyone," which nobody in folklore studies has believed in more than a century. The older I get, the less tolerance I have for these inane straw men.

This week's random past post is Tony Judt and the Anticommunist Left, from 2013.

The Crystal Palace Exhibition

The Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, officially known as The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, was the first of the extravaganzas that later came to be called World's Fairs. It was organized by Prince Albert and other members of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. The main point was to celebrate modern industrial technology and show Britain's leadership in engineering and manufactures.

To house this exhibition the organizers built an extraordinary edifice dubbed The Great Shalimar, an iron-framed greenhouse measuring 1848 feet long by 454 feet wide (about 563 metres by 138 metres). This colossal and highly innovative structure went from the first sketch to its public opening in nine months. Its size was emphasized by leaving some mature trees standing inside it. The popular name came to be the Crystal Palace.

The Exhibition was one of the wonders of the age. Six million people attended, more than 30% of the population of Britain. The admission price varied according to the day and time and gradually decreased over time, so that by the end one could get in for a shilling. Just about every famous Briton of the day attended, from Charles Darwin and Karl Marx to Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens.

All the technical creativity of the century was on display. Visitors could watch the whole process of making cloth, from spinning the thread to weaving on a numerically-programmable Jacquard Loom. There were voting machines, change-counting machines, brick-making machines, gem-carving machines, electric telegraphs, even a prototype fax machine. Samuel Colt showed off his latest revolvers; Matthew Brady won a medal for his improved photographic process. 

But if you weren't into technology, there was plenty of other stuff to see, including lots of European art and a great deal of imperial loot: the Koh-i-Noor diamond and hundreds of other gems, an Egyptian temple, Tipu Sultan's campaign tent, art objects from fifty different cultures. 

The exhibition turned a profit of £186,000, which was spent building three new museums: the Victoria and Albert, the Natural History Museum, and the Science Museum. After the Exhibition ended the building was moved to a new location in South London. In its new home it acquired various new adornment, including, in 1854, the first publicly exhibited life-sized models of dinosaurs. 

The building burned in 1936. But it leaves behind a memory, a half-remembered dream of a time when many people thought they were building a world far more wonderful and exciting than anything humans had seen before.

Jonathan Spence, "God's Chinese Son"

Map of Ching China showing the areas
ruled at one time or another by the Taiping.

Jonathan Spence (1936-1921) was my teacher for modern Chinese history at Yale, one of the many fabulous gifts I received from my alma mater. If you want an introduction to Chinese history from 1600 to 1989, his The Search for Modern China (1990) is the best thing I know; and if you want a short introduction to how traditional Chinese governance worked in practice, The Death of Woman Wang (1978) is terrific.

God's Chinese Son (1996) is partly a narrative of the event we call the Taiping Rebellion and partly a biography of Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan. But like all of Spence's books it really part of his grappling with China, his lifelong attempt to understand its history, culture, and likely future fate. I thought it was great.

Hong Xiuquan was from a class of people one meets over and over in Chinese history, a failed candidate in the imperial civil service exams. As with many others, his aspiring family had made a huge investment in his preparation, so his failure was a major blow to them and thus a double burden on Hong.

While traveling to Canton for his repeated exam failures, at a time when his mental state may not have been very good, Hong met Christian missionaries and became interested in their teachings. In 1837 he had a vision in which he ascended to heaven, where God, dressed in a dragon robe and seated on an imperial throne, called Hong his son and introduced him to his elder brother, Jesus. Hong began to tell his close friends and relations about his vision, and some immediately became his followers. He embarked on years of wandering southern China in which he sought to learn more about Christianity and to draw more followers to his cult of the "God Believers."

In the 1840s the Ching imperial state began the decline that ended with its overthrow in 1911. Defeat by foreigners in the First Opium War (1839-1842) had damaged the prestige of the state and its ruling Manchu dynasty, and revolts broke out in many regions against Manchu rule. Secret societies called the Triads spread, mixing banditry with ethno-nationalist rebellion, using the slogan "Destroy the Ching, Restore the Ming." Banditry was a particular problem in the region of southern China where Hong and his followers lived. For his part, Hong hated the Manchus as much as anyone, and he preached that the Manchu emperors were demons who needed to be destroyed. It was against this background of spreading chaos and anti-Manchu anger that the Imperial authorities decided, in 1851, that Hong and his roughly 30,000 followers needed to be suppressed.

This did not go according to plan.

Instead of the police action the authorities expected, they got a 14-year war in which at least 10 million people died, some say 30 million. Hong and his followers marched more than a thousand miles across southern China, driven from one place after another by imperial forces, but always regrouping and gaining more followers from among China's millions of disaffected people. Eventually the God Believers conquered the great city of Nanjing and established it as the capital of their kingdom of Perfect Peace (Taiping).

Here is a poem of Hong's, written in 1937, that may give a hint at his mental state when he launched his rebellion:

Poem on Executing the Evil and Preserving the Righteous

In my hand I wield the Universe and the power to attack and kill,
I slay the evil, preserve the righteous, and relieve the people's suffering.
My eyes see through beyond the west, the north, the rivers, and the mountains,
My voice shakes the east, the south, the Sun, and the Moon.
The glorious sword of authority was given by the Lord,
Poems and books are evidences that praise Yahweh in front of Him.
Taiping [Perfect Peace] unifies the World of Light,
The domineering air will be joyous for myriads of millennia.

I don't personally see Hong's theology as especially important to his movement. In times of uncertainty and rapid change many people are drawn to cults, and it sometimes seems to me that the content of the teachings matters little compared to just offering an alternative to the status quo, especially if it is mixed with a bit of apocalypticism. But if you are interested, Spence has a detailed account, much of it drawn from the writings of westerners who were curious about this native Chinese version of their faith.

What really struck me about the story of the Taiping is the shear scale of events in China. In nineteenth-century China, a bandit chief could command 100,000 men, a rebel cult leader like Hong 250,000. These huge armies were raised, fed, equipped, and transported thanks to the astonishing productivity of southern China's wet rice agriculture and the bustling commercial society is supported. It astonished me that both sides were able to lose whole armies in campaigns and then just raise more men to replace them, along with fleets of boats, arsenals of weapons, and so on.

Another interesting insight concerns the conspicuous competence of China's civil servants. Their education consisted entirely of reading Chinese classics and learning to write something called an "eight-legged essay" that was never used for anything except answering question on the exam. Yet once in office they did things like manage irrigations systems, build roads, negotiate with foreigners, and battle bandits. They were not perfect, of course, but they kept the empire together through nearly a century of strife. They eventually put down the Taipings, who at their peak led a state with 30 million inhabitants. One incident that lodged in my brain concerns a local official who was particularly successful at putting down banditry in his district. His superiors asked for a report on his methods. He explained that it was too crude to divide villagers into those who were "for" or "against" the bandits; instead, one had to divide people into "those who know," "those who are afraid," and "those who want things to happen."

One of the Taiping's problems was that early on they accepted a couple of people as legitimate mouthpieces for God and Jesus, in addition to Hong. The difficulties created by the sometimes conflicting pronouncements of these men were smoothed over by Hong until after they took Nanjing. In their new capital one of these prophets began to proclaim himself the equal of Hong, indeed to be another younger brother of Jesus. Hong eventually had him assassinated, and 6,000 of his followered massacred.

Tricky business, prophecy.

Some accounts of the final days of Taiping have a sort of Jonestown feel, but Spence does not see it that way. In his telling the Taiping were basically ok socially and religiously, they just lost the war against the forces of the Ching state. There was some meddling by western powers, at first in favor of the Taiping (who seemed to be a sort of Christians, however weird), and then in favor of the empire, but this was essentially a Chinese civil conflict. I think this is an important point. While some left-wing westerners have lately been blaming all of China's problems in this era as on western imperialism, most Chinese do not see it that way. They have a 2,000-year tradition of regarding meddling by foreigners as something that happens when the Chinese state is weak, along with civil wars, banditry, and revolts. In the Chinese version of Chinese history, it is always the Chinese who are the main actors, and whether things go well or ill is up to the Chinese themselves. While westerners often argue that adapting to western technology and influence is a major theme of nineteenth-century Chinese history, Chinese historians generally see it as a side issue compared to their usually problems with the decay of an old imperial dynasty. Today there is a monument to Hong Xiuquan in Nanjing with text that makes no mention of his interest in Christianity or anything else about foreigners; he is simply a man who rose up against a corrupt Chinese regime on behalf of the suffering common people.