Medieval Keys

Modern Social Media

Reported cases of plague in Irkutsk, Russia have produced the predictable response: massive sales of plague doctor masks and an explosion of plague-related memes.

John McWhorter on White Women Passing as Black

In the NY Times:

Rachel Dolezal never surprised me in the slightest. A white woman who masqueraded as Black while leading an N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State about 12 years ago, she was an almost inevitable sign of our times.

So Hannah Gann needn’t surprise us either. Gann is a 34-year-old public-school teacher and activist in Philadelphia who grew up white, Jewish and affluent but for years has falsely claimed to be of Black (Tunisian) and Palestinian descent. She was a prominent advocate of the Palestinian cause, so forceful as to have been accused of antisemitism. Fellow activists outed her last month, and she has acknowledged lying.

Gann is an ideological descendant of Dolezal, who grew up white in Montana in the 1980s and ’90s and started “identifying” as Black some years after completing a master’s degree at Howard University, a historically Black school. Wearing her hair in Black American styles and sporting a spray tan or using bronzer, she claimed to have a Black father. Her parents outed her as white in 2015, but she dug in her heels. She now goes by the name Nkechi Diallo and has said that she is “not white” but “transracial.”

There have been other such cases . . . 

These cases suggest a subtype of modern white identity. For this person, the commitment to contesting the evil of whiteness is all-consuming, an ideological North Star that orients her entire worldview. It is an extreme expression of the outlook that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called “Woke 1,” in which the world is always neatly divided into wicked white oppressors and virtuous nonwhite victims. For a white person with these beliefs, it is a short step to wanting not to be white, to escape the original sin of that privilege.

To be the victim is to be not just innocent but also more interesting. It also can provide a sense of meaning in a modern world that no longer gives ready answers to the question of life’s purpose. “Who am I? What am I for? I’m … Black!” The decision may be eccentric — skin darkening as part of your morning routine? — but it is hardly counterintuitive.

I am also struck by this phenomenon: for a certain sort of American, to be white is to besome combination of "agent of colonialism and oppression" and "just plain boring." Both are horrible to a certain sort of person; hence, these frauds.

These cases also brings me back to one of my favorite questions: if people can change their sex, why can't they change their race? Is it is really absurd to be "transracial"? I mean, the genetic difference between the races is a rounding error compared to the enormous genetic difference between men and women. I have been asking this question for a decade now and nobody has ever given me an answer that is even halfway convincing.

Wooden Plates Painted with Scenes from Aesop's Fables

English, c. 1600. In the Art Institute of Chicago. For an archaeologist it is always a bit disconcerting to contemplate how much of European material culture was made of wood and leather.

Baroque Bronze Sculpture

Stefano Moderno, Sampson and Two Philistines, 1624

The Kimbell Art Museum recently acquired this work, and reading the announcement on their web site put me in a mood to look at more bronzes from what I consider to be the greatest period of sculpture.

Bernini, Christ Crucified, 1659, detail. I could do Bernini all day, but I already have three posts on him.

Giambologna, Triton, c. 1600

Fulvio Signorini, St. Catherine of Siena, 1590s

Camillo Mariani, Siren, c. 1600

Camillo Mariani, Mother Barbary Ape, 1595

Girolamo Campagna, Bust of Onofrio Panvinio,  early 1600s

Unknown Venetian artist, Fusilier, 1600s

Francesco Fanelli, Mercury and Cupid, 1630s, detail

Annibale Fontana, Dragon, 1582

Giambologna, Fountain of Neptune, 1570

Ok, one more Bernini, Statue of Philip IV

Meritocracy vs. Anti-Indian Racism

Conservative stalwart Christopher Rufo used to be all for meritocracy:

The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind. . . . Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.

But that was back when the big issue was woke attempts to carve out special treatment for minorities. Today the issue is the stunning success of immigrants from India (and to a lesser extent the rest of Asia). These days Rufo sounds very different.

Recently, however, Rufo has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin. More to the point, a lot of Republicans resent those brown-skinned Americans. Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable. 

This is from Rufo's appearance of the podcast of Jonathan Keeperman:

Indian Americans, Rufo argued, are “going to grind on spelling-bee words like unlimited hours,” whereas American culture says, “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee.” Keeperman agreed: “What actually makes America so dynamic—it’s not the kid who studies all night for the spelling-bee test. It’s the kid who is the fullback on the high-school football team, who puts his head down and is willing to run through a freaking wall on behalf of his teammates and then spends the night drinking beers at the kegger and wakes up in the morning and gets a 1500 on his SATs, okay?” . . .

“The right always says”—here Rufo adopted a mocking tone—“Oh, meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy. You morons. Meritocracy, the origin of the term meritocracy, it’s pejorative. It’s satirical. It’s not good. You actually don’t want meritocracy, because it perverts these unspoken cultural assumptions in ways that aren’t always visible, aren’t always, say, rationally defensible or problematic, but they strike at an essential component of the national character.”

It's almost self satire: the problem with immigrants from India is that they study too hard and don't play football.

Twitter warrior Richard Hanania has been all over this issue for past two years, arguing the MAGA crowd were all for meritocracy and capitalism when they seemed to benefit white people but turned to racial privilege when open competition meant they were losing out to immigrants from India. Anti-Indian rhetoric, he wrote, is "the dumbest form of racism and socialism."

I believe that all policies based on dividing people into groups and calling one of those groups "us" are inherently corrupt. So of course a policy based on trying to advance "heritage Americans" is inevitably going to collapse from self-contradiction. It is simply hate, and deserves nothing but scorn from people who care about creating a thriving world.

Ancient Herbal Remedies and Bacterial Evolution

A Page from Bald's Leechbook

Human societies have built up a huge repertoire of ways to fight disease, many of them involving herbal remedies. But when these remedies were tested by scientific doctors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they proved to have no or very little benefit.

But bacteria evolve very rapidly, especially when it comes to resistance to antibiotics. Which raises the question: did those old remedies once work, before bacteria evolved resistance to them? Some studies have suggested that this might be true:

In 2015, Harrison and a team of microbiologists and historians brewed a remedy from the Leechbook, called Bald’s Eyesalve, in the lab. They mixed garlic, onion, bovine bile and wine in a brass vessel, then allowed it to stand for nine days. In laboratory tests, Bald’s eyesalve displayed surprisingly effective antimicrobial activity against both Staphylococcus aureus and its drug-resistant form, MRSA.

These researchers also say that it may be harder for bacteria to evolve resistance to those old herbal mixtures than to modern, single-compound drugs.

Learning and thinking about this completely changed my attitude toward ancient and medieval herbal medicine. I used to think about this entirely in psychological terms, wondering why people devoted so much effort to useless remedies, but not I wonder which compounds had real value, and when, and how much ancient and medieval people understood about their effects.

Links 2 October 2026

Salvador Dali, Two Dancers

Study of news sources finds, among other things, that left-leaning outlets are more likely to focus on institutions while right-leaning outlets focus more often on individuals.

Perun on Ukraine's recent offensive around Lyman and the problem of Russian false reporting, fascinating 1-hour video.

Comparing how men and women rate TV shows.

Six very short short stories by eminent writers, interesting collection.

Sarah Paine on the end of the Cold War, one hour lecture followed by another hour of interview.

Tyler Cowen reminds us what miracle West Germany was:  "At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever. Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever."

Biologists think complex cells formed when larger cells incorporated small bacteria into themselves as symbionts; those bacteria evolved into mitochondria and chloroplasts. One intriguing way to study this is using an organism known as Paulinella, which seems to have incorporated bacterial algae cells into its fabric less than 100 million years ago. (NY Times, wikipedia, scientific paper)

Interesting photographs of people and horses in the Sahara desert.

On twentieth-century revolutionaries in the West: some of their goals may have been noble, but "their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants."

Paolo Veronese's dogs.

Another fragment of the Treaty of Kadesh, signed between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1269 BC, has been found in Turkey.

A statistical argument that common estimates of death from medical errors are grossly exaggerated.

YouTube video of an interesting video installation by teamLab. More links here.

Justin Wolpers: My Libertarian Friends were Right.

What is in the Senate's regulatory reform bill: some significant changes to NEPA and the Historic Preservation Act, including limits on lawsuits under NEPA.

The invention of Islamic invention: the rogue wikipedia editor who inserted claims that medieval Islamic scholars invented or discovered everything from microscopes and microorganisms to relativity.

Richard Hanania on slut-shaming and the Cornell Seven. Summary on Twitter/X.

Photo set documenting 60 years of opposition to Fascism and racism in East London.

Roman-period shipwreck off Turkey was full of luxury ceramics probably bound for Italy.

Huge cuts in admissions to Ph.D. programs at major universities. At Harvard, "Departments in the arts and humanities will see their enrolment of doctoral candidates decrease by 60 per cent over the next two years, according to reports in October, with cuts in the social sciences estimated at between 50 and 70 per cent." Given how few jobs there are for university teachers in those fields, this is necessary. But it would be even better if half the universities ended their programs altogether, so graduate students in the remaining programs would have more peers to interact with. Many schools can't have graduate seminars because there just aren't enough students to fill them.

RFK Jr.'s cooking show.

Does being raised in adversity make people stronger?  A very old question considered by a new generation of researchers.

What studies of modern and ancient DNA says about when people entered the Americans, with a plea for much more data.

Piece about an infertile couple who achieved pregnancy after consulting ChatGPT.

Alchemy, Porcelain, and the Beginnings of Modernity

Medici Porcelain Dish in the Met

Here is something I did not know about until today but should have suspected: an 16th-century Florentine attempt to recreate Chinese porcelain:

The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.

On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”

Unable to find suitable clay, the Florentine craftsmen tried to make their own:

It is thought that the body of Medici porcelain consists of glass, powdered rock crystal, and sand, as well as clay from Vicenza and white earth from Faenza.

The first good examples of what would come to be known as “Medici Porcelain” were made in 1575. It is thought that about 350 vessels were eventually made, of which 60 survive. This was what we now call "soft-paste" porcelain, generally considered to be lower quality than the "hard paste" original. Because the process was so cumbersome, and the firing required so much fuel, it was far from economical, and the workshop was closed after Duke Francesco's death.

So, an economic failure of no great significance. But look closer and you get yet another glimpse of the wave of innovation that was sweeping across Renaissance Europe, building into a tsunami of growth and change. Everywhere you look you see people trying new ways of doing things: of building ships, of making glass and pottery, of printing books, of erecting buildings. People invented machines for making ceramic water pipes. It took a long time for all this innovation to transform Europe, but once this competition in innovation was launched it did not stop until everything was different than it had been.

Notice also the part played in this by Alchemy. Alchemy has a dubious reputation now because so much of it was devoted to turning lead into gold, and because some practitioners were more interested in spiritual transformation than chemistry. But alchemy always had a practical side, and even some men obsessed with making gold found that to fund their researches they had to use their chemical skill for more mundane purposes. The European ceramic and glass industries made huge advances between 1400 and 1760, and men trained in alchemy played a large part in that work.

Chemical skill built up slowly, but by 1700 every sort of chemical process, including making gunpowder and casting bronze, had been greatly improved.

This restlessness, this refusal to stick to the tried and true, this endless searching for more knowledge and better ways of doing things, is what gave us the modern world.

Dogs and Bears

As wild bear populations rebound in some areas, encounters between bears and dogs are increasingly common. The NY Times has a weird story about people trying to study these interactions, which are, of course, more complex and diverse than many people would suspect.

Anyway I was struck that the article fails to mention one of the most important and best understood facts about these interactions. Dogs, and even sometimes cats, regularly scare away wild predators because they have much less fear of being injured. An injured wild predator can't hunt and will likely starve. An injured domesticated animal can retreat to its comfortable home and be fed by its owner; if it is more seriously hurt it will get a trip to the vet for medical care.

This greater risk tolerance of domestic animals with a support system behind them underlies all those videos of pets chasing away bears and mountain lions.

Remembering Lisa on Our 35th Anniversary

The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.

–Wendell Berry

Models of Ancient Egyptian Life

People around the world have hit on the idea of placing models of daily life in tombs. The most common type is models of houses; of which this is the most common Egyptian version. This is called a "Soul House" and it is interptreted as a porch and garden.

In Egypt the making of wooden funerary models goes back into prehistory and lasted into Roman times, but it was at its height between about 2200 and 1200 BC. This is a procession of people bearing offerings.

This famous example, now in the Met, shows a high official named Meketre presiding over a census of his cattle.

Boats are a common topic, including both fishing boats and funerary barges.

Carpentry workshop.

And of course there is much agriculture and food preparation.

I love these little windows into life thouands of years ago.