Drink

Some time Monday, after days in the ICU drinking only water, my nurse brought me a cup of ginger ale over ice. It tasted like heaven, the first real physical pleasure I had experinced since my surgery three days before.

And this set me thinking on what a huge part of human culture is devoted to making good things to drink. We have enormous global cultures built around tea and coffee, Europe's passionate attachment to wine and beer, and in the modern world a riotous explosion of drinks, from sophisticate cocktails to sweet sodas; Coca-Cola is the largest private employer in Africa. 

We humans love a tasty drink.

Links 11 September 2026

Friedrich Kunath, “Storms Never Last”, 2023

Some strange Iron Age carved symbols may be early Norse runes.

A serious paper estimating the economic impact of AI over the next five years.

Remains of a huge Roman wall mosaic found under Trajan's Baths in Rome.

Norwegian archaeology: the Baglers, the Birchlegs, and the body in the well.

Why robotics is hard.

Tyler Cowen interviews Jared Diamond.

Sales of nonfiction books are way down.

An illustrated history of women's underwear.

Some eerily contemporary complaints about San Francisco, from the nineteenth century. People, housing in thriving cities is always expensive. This has probably been true since ancient Uruk.

Ethan Molick asks a couple of AIs to "make a game about imminence."

JD Vance did not like the discussion in the White House about the upcoming Iran war, so he devoted a lot of time and energy to asking military officers, CIA agents, and others about their views. This NY Times story paints Vance as someone who at least understands that war is a serious business.

From Scott Siskind's book review contest, what may actually be the best review I have read of The Tale of Genji, brings home how weird it is.

Meditation seems to help some people, but for others it can be a gateway into a dark realm of brooding and self-torture.

Johns Hopkins, William Osler, and the Founding of Modern American Medicine

Johns Hopkins (1795–1873) was a Maryland-born Quaker from a business family. He got early into the wholesaling business, moving manufactured goods to farm country in western Maryland and Virginia and buying the products of those regions in return. He built up enough capital to be an early investor in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, serving for a while as its Treasurer, and ran a bank that invested in manufacturing companies. By 1847 he had retired.

Then he did something quite remarkable. He bought thirteen acres of land east of Baltimore and set aside his whole fortune of about $7 million to found three new institutions: "Johns Hopkins University", "The Johns Hopkins Hospital", and "Johns Hopkins Colored Orphan Asylum." At the time this was the largest charitable bequest in US history. Never one to leave things to chance, Hopkins recruited twelve prominent Maryland men to serve as trustees of the new institutions and wrote detailed instructions for them to follow.

For our purposes the most important instructions governed the hospital. It should "in construction and arrangement, compare favorably with any other institution of like character in this country or in Europe." The trustees should "secure for the service of the Hospital, physicians and surgeons of the highest character and greatest skill." And they should "bear constantly in mind that it is my wish and purpose that the hospital shall ultimately form a part of the Medical School of that university for which I have made ample provision in my will."

And thus was born the modern teaching hospital. I can't find out much about the trustees, but they must have been capable fellows, because they brought Hopkins' vision to life. They recruited those top surgeons by the simple expedient of offering the highest salaries ever paid to doctors, anywhere. One of those who accepted was Canadian physician William Osler (1849-1919).

Osler was another remarkable man, one of the generation of doctors who turned medicine from a mishmash of quackery, Galenism, folk wisdom, and surgical speed into a scientific discipline. He was also, apparently, a great teacher, a man who could take something everyone sort of knew and express it in an unforgettable phrase. Like, "Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis."

Before this time, medical school consisted almost entirely of lectures and demonstrations. But Osler thought a more practical approach was needed, and he created one:

Osler, the first chief of the Department of Medicine, is credited with originating the idea of a residency, in which recently graduated physicians receive advanced training in their specialty while treating patients under supervision; then, as now, residents comprise most of the medical staff of the hospital. He also introduced the idea of bringing medical students into actual patient care early in their training; at the time medical school consisted almost entirely of lectures. Osler's contribution to practical education extends to the creation of "grand rounds", the practice of leading physicians discussing the most difficult cases in front of assembled medical students, for the benefit of patients and students. The term "rounds" derives from the circular ward where bedside teaching occurred. He once said he hoped his tombstone would say only, "He brought medical students into the wards for bedside teaching."

That last seems to have been one of his favorite lines, since it exists in several slightly different versions of different dates. And since I just witnessed my own doctors bringing students or "fellows" with them on their own rounds, I can confirm that it remains central to the teaching experience of Hopkins. (Sadly I never got to be the subject of discussion; I think I was too boring and simple a case. But the unfortunate person in the shadowed ICU room two doors down got at least two long discussions that I witnessed.)

Johns Hopkins went on to be one of the great institutions of modern medicine, launching whole branches of surgery and being the first place in the Americas to train female doctors, This, you know, is the thing that distinguishes the modern world from all that came before. In our day a man can get filthy rich in business and decide to invest his profits in creating an entirely new class of institution to solve a problem that past ages regarded as just an inevitable part of life.

I believe in a dynamic world where we try to make things better, not a bitter one in which everyone idiotically moans on about how much better things were in the old days. So I celebrate men like Johns Hopkins and William Osler who glimpsed the future and worked in concrete ways to make it real.

Heart Surgery, or, We Live in a Future Utopia

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Well, that was something.

On Friday I arrived at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore at 5 AM and made my way in. By 7:30 I was on the operating table, and by 1:30 I was the proud owner of a new aortic valve and a repaired aorta.

The first 36 hours after surgery were basically torture, the next 36 utter misery. I remember thinking at some point that if I were presented with this choice again I might just buy a gun and end it. I hurt all over, I felt nauseated, I had to contemplate the 11 separate lines, tubes, and wires sprouting from my body, all of which had to be removed over the next few days, each one an experience. Sleep came at me like waves on a beach, dragging me under and then leaving me stranded on wakeful shores at 2 AM or 4 AM. It sucked.

After that improvement was remarkably fast, and by Tuesday I was bored and longing to go home.

I did have some medical hiccoughs. My blood pressure spike a couple of times, and one night my heart kept going into atrial fibrillation. But it nothing the team at Hopkins couldn't handle using the vast armada of powerful drugs that have at their fingertips.

By dinner time Thursday I was home. I am still profoundly weak and looking at a months-long healing process, but I am home, and safe, and ready to write.

And I think, what an incredible miracle. What an age of wonders I live in, what a thousand-times blessed life I lead, and what is wrong with humanity that even this cornucopia cannot satisfy us?

I am no kind of special person, just a middle class, middle manager with a regular suburban house and ordinary American health insurance. But when my heart was failing I was whisked away to a temple of science where I received a level of care that did not exist 20 years ago.

Think what a miracle a place like Johns Hopkins is, thousands of people of every ethnicity come together from across the globe to care for other humans. My doctors had names like Aziz, Shibaz, Ta Jung, and Richardson. My nurses were born on three continents. Not long ago a hospital was a monument to gender roles, but now no one bats an eye at a male nurse and doctors will soon be majority female. Everyone I saw was polite, friendly, efficient and, I think, devoted to helping me. 

All of this is only possible because of things about our world that millions of us hate. I see complaints every day from people who hate capitalism because it forces us to work, but if nobody worked, who would have cared for me? (All of you miserable young folks out there, think about becoming a nurse; it's just a two-year degree and if you are smart and unsqueamish you can earn $100,000 a year actually helping other people.) People complain about competition, but it is competition between scientists, surgeons, and medical companies that has produced all these wonders. People complain about inequality, but I don't begrudge my surgical team what they earn; I know the level of effort and ambition it takes to become a heart surgeon at a place like Hopkins, and if paying them a lot gets the top people to pursue those jobs, why not? Yes, our world is unequal, but as I just wrote, that means an ordinary man like me can get surgical care past kings and emperors could not dream of. Is that not a powerful kind of democracy?

All the things we are really good at, from heart surgery to video games to pop music, are that way because those fields are savagely competitive. Because people work at them from a combination of personal ambition, a desire to get rich, and a desire to be where the action is. That means many people fail. So? Is there some system in which we all get to do what we want that doesn't end up a wallow of medicrity?

The model of a better world is right in front of us, in hospitals like Johns Hopkins. The key is to focus, not on who people are, but on what they can do.

And now to get on with the rest of my life.

My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year

In February, my wife Lisa died after 34 years of marriage.

And now in September I am facing open heart surgery for aortic valve replacement. I go in tomorrow, September 4.

These things compound, because my wife was a nurse who was always wonderful at taking care of her family when we were sick, and to be facing this without her at my side feels cruel and wrong. I have been missing her lately with the same brutally painful intensity I felt in the weeks after her death.

The causes are also mixed up together. My wife slipped into renewed drug addiction before my eyes, but I did not notice because I was depressed myself and, I think, ignored plain evidence because I did not have the strength to deal with the consequences of calling her out. My doctor first detected my heart murmur two years ago and suggested I see a cardiologist, but I did nothing. Partly this was because I felt fine – still feel mostly, fine, actually – and partly because I did not want to deal with it. If I had gone to a cardiologist two years ago I would have gone into surgery with Lisa at my side, and maybe that would have given her a reason to go on living at least a little longer.

But I did nothing, and now I face surgery and recovery without Lisa, wondering if the kind of life I can have without her is worth the effort and suffering of going through this.

There is one possible bright side, which is that I have had this problem all my life. I was born with a bicuspid (two flaps instead of the usual three) aortic valve, and this may have limited me physically. As the valve grew more stenotic (=calcified), a process that takes years, it may have limited blood flow in ways that messed with my brain. Some people who have had this surgery report feeling healthier afterwards than they have in decades.

Maybe I will be one of them. But I fear the regrets that haunt me will keep the remainder of my life from ever having the depth and breadth of joy that I knew in my good years with Lisa.

Still, there is this, from Wendell Berry:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have come to our real journey.

Odds are that I will be back in about two weeks. Thanks to all of you who have supported me and enjoyed my work, and to my many friends. I hope to hear from you again soon.

Links 4 September 2026

Martin Gerlach, Abduction by a Lake Monster, 1900

Noah Smith, Why You Won't Get a Flying Car

William Spaniel says Russia's rumored plan to attack the Baltics, which led the CIA chief to fly to Moscow this week, is the most serious crisis facing NATO since the end of the Cold War. 13-minute video.

Claims about quantum gravity.

Study finds that Google's AI is reducing traffic to wikipedia by about 5 percent.

Ben Pentreath wandering the Orkneys.

DNA study finds that the Upton Lovell Shaman, a goldworker of c. 2000 BC, was female.

My new fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is now for sale on Amazon. And still on Royal Road for free.

Long tweet on the Hugging Face incident, somewhat technical but anti-alarmist.

Remaining, largely ruined structures from California's back-to-the-land movement. I am old enough to remember when this was in full swing and these houses were new.

The ceilings of Iranian mosques.

Here's a distraction for you: twenty of my best art and image posts.

An interesting take on Edgar Allen Poe.

Virginia Mom Gets 6-Month Suspended Jail Sentence for Letting 5-Year-Old Walk to the Pond

Despite the cancellation of some datacenters, we are still poised for a datacenter boom.

USDA approves genetically-engineered, blight-resistant chestnut trees for widespread planting, but there are doubts about how well they will survive in the wild.

Americans love stories about art heists.

Slipping through Death's Door

This statue of Carlotta Rota, widow of Federico Dossi, is part of the marble funerary monument of the Dossi-Rampinelli-Spalenza family, located in the Monumental cemetery in Brescia, Italy. The date is usually given as 1856 but there's no way this was finished in one year. The chief sculptor was Giovanni Battista Lombardi.

Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. 

Qin Hui, Nationalism, and the Endurance of Hate

Qin Hui (1091-1155) was a government minister and important political figure of the Southern Song Dynasty. The "Southern Song" is what we call the ongoing Song Dynasty after they had lost northern China to a tribe of steppes nomads called the Jurchen. The leaders of the Jurchen, called in China the Jin Dynasty, were bent on subjugating all of China to their rule, leading to a long conflict we call the Jin-Song Wars.

(Incidentally the need of the technologically more sophisticated Song to fight off the more martial Jin led to major advances in gunpowder weapons, especially rocketry.)

Anyway there was a long period in which China was divided between a Han-ruled half and a barbarian-ruled half. The leadership of the Han-led Song realm was divided between a faction that sought accommodation with the Jurchens, for example by paying tribute, and a faction that wanted to fight to the death.

Qin Hui

Enter Qin Hui. According to a long, nearly contemporary narrative of suspect neutrality, he was captured by the Jin but later returned to the Song court, claiming a miraculous escape. There he became a leader of the peace party, which led his enemies to insist that he was a traitor and that the Jin had allowed his escape.

Yue Fei, from a Song Dynasty Scroll

One of his opponents was a general named Yue Fei, who was, wikipedia informs us, a "national heroic person."  Qin Hui outmaneuvered Yue Fei and negotiated a peace treaty with the Jin that required the Song emperor to accept a subservient status toward the Jurchens.

Yue was imprisoned, but even there his recognized status as a heroic fighter made him dangerous to his enemies, so Qin Hui arranged for his trial and execution on charges of treason. Love this detail:

When asked by General Han Shizhong what crime Yue had committed, Qin Hui replied, "Though it isn't sure whether there is something that he did to betray the dynasty, maybe there is.” The phrase "maybe there is" (simplified Chinese: 莫须有; traditional Chinese: 莫須有; pinyin: mò xū yǒu) has entered the Chinese language as an expression to refer to fabricated charges.

Qin Hui died not long afterward, still in power.

When a new emperor came to the throne he pardoned his predeccssor's enemies, including Yue Fei, and the general was rapidly enshrined as a Chinese hero. A grand tomb was built for him, and iron statues of Yue Fei, his wife, and two of his subordinates were made to grovel before the tomb. It became traditional for people to spit on the statues and slap their faces.

And there they still are, more or less, since the statues have been stolen and replaced many times; most recently they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, and new ones were installed in 1979. And to this day people still slap them and spit on them.

I find all of this fascinating because of the enduring patterns it represents. Nationalists always see those who compromise with outsiders as traitors and honor those who fought to the death; you see this, for example, in Poland, where noblemen who cooperated with the Russians are today villified, even if they were working effectively within the imperial system to make conditions better in Poland. Stalwart military men are usually the heroes, their enemies backstairs schemers who do them in via slanderous rumor, preferably in alliance with wicked women.

(And in another ancient trope, the emperor who lost northern China to the Jurchens is remembered as having "excessive interest in the arts.")

There is a strain within humanity that prefers brave defeat to effective compromise, that wants things to be clear and simple and hates those who work with subtlety and caution, that villifies softness and venerates bold killers. We deserve to be bold and free and strong and victorious, and we should fight to force others to honor us; those who accept subordination over destruction are traitors and deserve to be spit on for eternity.

Charles de la Fosse, Drawings

Sacrifice of Iphigenia

Charles de la Fosse (1636-1716) was a French artist born in Paris. After studying in Italy he did a lot work at Versailles. His paintings never grabbed be but these drawings are wonderful.

Saint John the Evangelist

Design for a celing

Apollo and Python

Seventeenth-Century English was Great at Insults

A snippet from Scottish nobleman Thomas Urquhart's translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rebelais. Here the cake-bakers of Lerne fulminate against the shepherds in Gargantua’s kingdom: 

prattling gabblers, lickorous gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts, cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks, scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons, turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets.

Theft of the Villena Treasure

The Villena Treasure, one of the most famous hoards from Bronze Age Europe, has been stolen.

The hoard was uncovered by archaeologists in 1963. The style of the bowls in particular was common across Europe in that era, and these look just like bowls bound in Germany. As often happens when amazing archaeological discoveries turn up in out-of-the-way places, local people wanted the collection to remain close to them. So a new museum was built to display the collection and other finds from the area.

But these local museums don't have the security arrangements of a great museum, so they get robbed all the time.

Object of meteoric iron

And now it has happened again. Of course, the Louvre also got robbed recently in a similar smash-and-grab style, so big museums are not entirely safe. But they are much safer than small musuems are.

Links 28 August 2026

Gwen Raverat, "The Magicians Chariot" 1939

Matt Yglesias' history of the "Great Awokening".

On Twitter/X, a story about potential issues with US Treasury bonds. Via Marginal Revolution.

Seventeenth-century papercuts found under the floorboards.

Does the universe evolve in a way analogous to how life on earth evolves?

Sabine Hossenfelder buries commercial quantum computing, 5-minute video.

Short article on the transformation of the Ukrainian military between 2014 and 2022, by Mark Hertling.

People fighting change: "In Tillman's case, neighborhood activists were able to block his project [75 apartments] for years by demanding he perform studies on the historic significance of his laundromat (turns out there wasn't any) and ensure the shadows cast by his project wouldn't stunt the growth of children at a nearby school (they'll be fine)."

Article on an archive of interviews with Black participants in the great migration out of the South, with sample interviews.

Outsiders love the pink dolphins of the Amazon, but some natives hate and fear them.

Dragon and phoenix symbols in ancient Chinese tomb.

Relics of London's St. Paul's from before the Great Fire.

The mad blogger at Old European Culture takes on the snakes of Göbekli Tepe. I think this guy is a monomaniac, but he knows a lot and I often find his takes intriguing.

Polling on people's public vs. private feelings about capitalism. (Marginal Revolution)

Luke Burgis interviews Luke Collison about aesthetics and why our own art is so discouraging. (Twitter/X)

How wyrd, and Anglo-Saxon word for "fate," became our word "weird."

Review of a new biography of 20th-century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, made me curious about him.

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

Hecate, Goddess of Many Guises

Maximilian Pirner, Hecate, 1901

Since Shakespeare's time we have mostly associated Hecate with magic, witchcraft, and the moon. But one of the striking things about ancient paganism, once you delve into it, is how many different powers a goddess might have. Hecate was associated, at various times, with household economy, dogs, keys, doorways, weasels, torchlit processions, crossroads, ghosts, wealth, childbirth, maidenhood, good fortune, the entrance to the underworld, and victory in battle.

So far as I can tell, Hecate *was* strongly associated with magic and the moon in western Europe by late Roman times, and it was certainly how Europeans saw Hecate in the Renaissance. But farther east, and further back in time, she seems to have been seen quite differently.

Temple of Hecate in Lagina, Turkey

Hesiod's Theogony (c. 700 BC) includes a long passage called The Hymn to Hecate. This begins with a description of her lineage among the titans

And Asteria conceived and bare Hecate whom Zeus the son of Cronos honoured above all. He gave her splendid gifts, to have a share of the earth and the unfruitful sea. She received honour also in starry heaven, and is honoured exceedingly by the deathless gods. For to this day, whenever any one of men on earth offers rich sacrifices and prays for favour according to custom, he calls upon Hecate. Great honour comes full easily to him whose prayers the goddess receives favourably, and she bestows wealth upon him; for the power surely is with her. For as many as were born of Earth and Ocean amongst all these she has her due portion. The son of Cronos did her no wrong nor took anything away of all that was her portion among the former Titan gods: but she holds, as the division was at the first from the beginning, privilege both in earth, and in heaven, and in sea. Also, because she is an only child, the goddess receives not less honour, but much more still, for Zeus honours her. Whom she will she greatly aids and advances: she sits by worshipful kings in judgement, and in the assembly whom she will is distinguished among the people. And when men arm themselves for the battle that destroys men, then the goddess is at hand to give victory and grant glory readily to whom she will.  . . .

Which makes Hecate seem like something much more than the shady goddess of crossroads and sorcery we read of later. Everything about Hesiod is disputed, but he may have been born east of the Aegean in Anatolia, and as I already suggested, Hecate's cult may have been different in the Greek east than the Roman west. In classical Athens Hecate still seems to have been an impeccably respectable deity, listed as one of the four protectors of the household and supplied with a small triangular temple adjacent to the Agora.

Enodia, relief from Macedon

One theory is that Hecate's identity gradually shifted because she merged with a Thessalian goddess called Enodia (meaning "traveller"), who wandered the earth with a retinue of ghosts and could be met at remote crossroads. Some things about Hecate's iconography, such as carrying two torches, seem to derive from older images of Enodia, so there certainly could be a connection. Enodia was associated with the Moon, and Hecate was often invoked alongside Artemis, another Lunar deity, so it is hardly surprising that Hecate was increasingly invoked via the Moon.

Hecate escorting Persephone from Hades, with her two torches; this scene appears in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.

Hecate was often depicted with three bodies, or three heads. We don't know why; Pausanius didn't either, merely noting in his ancient travelogue that some images showed her singly and others tripled. There is speculation that this represents her dominion, alluded to by Thesiod, over the three realms of earth, sea, and sky. But I can't find that this is mentioned in any ancient source. So maybe we should just attribute it to the ancient Indo-European habit of tripling goddesses, as in the three fates or the nine muses.

This image, from the Pergamon Altar, shows Hecate battling a giant. She has three bodies, equipped with torch, sword, and spear.

The Roman satirist Lucan (1st century AD) gives us our first look at Hecate's future career. His sinister witch calls on Hecate as "the goddess we witches revere" and describes her as a "pallid decaying body," so foul that she must wear a mask when she visits Olympus.

The magical papyri from Egypt and Syria invoke her often, usually for black magic but also sometimes as a protectress. Here is one, from the first century AD:

Lady Hekate of the heavens, Hekate of the underworld, Hekate of the crossroads, Hekate of the triple-face, Hekate of the single-face, cut the hearts of the thief or the thieves who took the items contained in this deposition. And let the earth not be walkable, the sea not sailable; let there be no enjoyment of life, no increase of children, but may utter destruction visit them or him.

Another:

Be bound before Hermes of the underworld and Hekate of the underworld… and just as this lead is worthless and cold, so let that man and his property be worthless and cold. And those who are with him who have spoken and counselled concerning me.

Hecate's prominence in the magical papyri confirms her transformation into a goddess mainly associated with sorcery. As this account has it, from being a goddess of great general power,

She became a goddess of ghosts, of necromancy, and the moon; Her torchlight no longer a symbol of life alone, but of traversal between life and death. 

In modern times of course, Hecate has changed again and she is now the patroness of many Wiccans. Her three faces are often interpreted as representing three stages in a woman's life, youth, mother, and crone, and her canine friends have lost their sinister associations with the underworld and become labradoodles. 

But she lives on, always changing to meet her worshippers' needs.

Mausoleum of Constantina

The Mausoleum of Constantina was built in the 4th century AD for Constantina, the daughter of the emperor Constantine I. It later became a church known as Santa Costanza. It is one of the best preserved buildings from Late Antiquity left in Rome. Not much on the outside, as you can see.

Although it looks somewhat better in this view.

Interior

The glory of the place is the wonderful mosaics, especially those in the ceiling of the ambulatory.

Lovely.

More in the niches.

This disputed object, now in the Vatican Museum, is thought to be the sarcophagus of Constantina. Many stories are told of it. According to official Italian tourism promoters,

During the 17th century, the Mausoleo is the meeting place of a bizarre association of Dutch and Flemish artists called Bent-vogels (birds of the band). Every time the group was enriched by a new member, a baptism party was celebrated with abundant libations, in a tavern on the Via Nomentana. After a night of debauchery the Bent-vogels made a last solemn toast in the temple of Bacchus in front of the porphyry sarcophagus, considered the sepulchre of the god. The feast could last up to three days and three nights. In 1720, Pope Clemente XI forbade this custom because it profaned the ancient Mausoleo. The names of some of these Bent-vogels, engraved in the niches of the ambulatory, are still visible today.

Cool.

Noah Smith: Are Our Problems Really Economic?

As my readers know, I have always maintained that we are not unhappy because of anything to do with economics. We are the richest people in history by a wide margin, and if money could make us happy, we would be drowning in happiness. It must be something else.

I go back and forth in my own mind between thinking that it must be something else about our society that saddens and angers us – mass media, rigid schedules, the decline of religion, living in huge, diverse cities, what have you – and thinking that we are just not wired for happiness.

Here is Noah Smith on this subject:

Every time a policy wonk thinks about some measure that would increase GDP by 0.4%, or create 200,000 jobs, or lower inflation by 40 basis points, they need to think about the unpleasant reality that Americans may simply not care very much. That doesn’t mean it’s bad to help people economically, but it means that economics may ultimately not be the lever we need to pull if we’re going to make the people of this country happy and satisfied again.

We should therefore think about whether our primary social problems are actually about material scarcity. The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago. It seems plausible to think that a great many Americans have climbed to the higher rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs — that instead of where to get their next meal or how to save for retirement, they’re thinking about how to feel like they belong in their society, or how to get more status and respect.

A large contingent of Americans may now simply care less about adding to their bank accounts than about questions like “Who are the real Americans?”, or “Does one race deserve special treatment in the eyes of the law?”, or “Why do some of the people I went to college with have 10,000 times as much wealth as I do?”. As long as those questions remain unanswered, boosting Americans’ economic fortunes could have little effect on their happiness. . . .

Neither the discipline of economics nor our typical policy discourse is set up to deal with issues like belonging, social status, or respect. There’s no market for these things; people with wealth might be more respected, but you can’t buy respect on Amazon. And some of these psychological needs are positional goods — for the status of one person or group to be higher, someone else’s status often has to be diminished. . . .

And yet like it or not, this may now be the world in which we find ourselves. Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.

I am sometimes baffled by the tendency of Americans to see all problems in terms of economics, when it seems obvious to me that money is the least of our worries.

Basilica di Saccargia, Sardinia

The Basilica della Santissima Trinità di Saccargia is a Romanesque church in the comune of Codrongianos, in the northern part of Sardinia. 

The church was completed in 1116. The style is Romanesque, specifically that of Pisa. This site had long been the location of a monastery, and bits of its ruins poke out around the church.

The stone is black basalt and white limestone, taken from two nearby quarries.

View of the setting.

Not many photos online of the interior; the date of these frescoes is disputed, but some sources say they go back to the 12th century.

The church was abandoned in the 16th century, but was restored and reopened in the early 20th century.

Wonderful.