Early November

Above, wonderful days in the woods; below, in and around my yard.

Links 6 November 2026

Glass cup from Rome, c. 40-80 AD

Noah Smith on Picard and the optimism of Star Trek.

Josh Johnson, the funniest new comedian I have encountered in years. Amusing short videos about: the old internet, soap, Dollar General.

Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post, a take-down of Natural Law Theory. Interesting but from this I learned that modern Natural Law Theory includes stuff about happiness that is not in Thomas Aquinas, and the happiness stuff is definitely the weakest link. But the whole notion that Christian morality is "natural" was always absurd, because human nature includes all sorts of horrible and un-Christian things. War and peace, violence and hugging, bingeing and fasting: all of these things are natural to humans.

An article that is becoming modestly famous, Why Were Victorian Elites so Effective? But maybe they were just riding the surging wave of European progress that began long before they were born.

The rise of pre-marital romantic love in western literature.

Yuval Noah Harari on AI: humans are the cows of the future, short video. And another.

More evidence of ancient Scythians using marijuana (NY Times, Reuters, original paper)

Pondering curiosity.

The rise of the phone book.

Little gold bear from a burial mound.

Retrospective on Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide.

Using a gravity model to find lost Bronze Age cities, Twitter/X thread.

Maya Aesthetics

Whatever his exact age, Ajnumsaj's enthronement under Tunk'abhix jump-started Jaranjo's political fortunes, and its king would emerge as a major political and military actor in his own right, overseeing his own regional conquests and client kings. . . . In 596, fifty years into his reign, we read that there was "the mountaining of heads" and the "laking of blood," probably in connection with the refurbishment of a temple at Naranjo. This poetic expression refers to the mass sacrifice and creation of a figurative "landscape" of hills and likes out of the executed bodies of Naranjo's enemies. 

Davis Stuart, The Four Heavens: A New History of the Ancient Maya, p. 165 

What was the Maya Collapse?

David Stuart, The Four Heavens: a New History of the Ancient Maya (2026)

Back in the 1970s, major breakthroughs were made in translating the ancient Maya script. Since then our knowledge has steadily grown and the body of translated texts, most either carved in stone or painted on pottery, now reaches into the thousands. What do they tell us about the Maya world?

David Stuart thinks they tell us a great deal. He admits, though, that not everyone agrees. He has written a whole book trying to convey the knowledge gleaned from these texts, but all his conclusions are hedged around with limitations. For example, almost all of these texts come from royal courts, and they mainly commemorate key events in the lives of kings and queens: their births, marriages and deaths, their victories in battle, their major construction projects, and the festive days when they celebrated the great events of the complex Maya calendar. Everyone else — peasants, potters, traders, soldiers, fishermen, stone carvers — is ignored. Not only that, but these texts are for the most part very short, a sentence or two, recording facts but never giving us the analytical perspective of a Thucydides or Sima Qian, some framework that might help us understand what was really going on. Since there are so many texts, and since texts from one city sometimes reference events or people from others, we can construct a narrative from them. But I, at least, was left thinking that the real new knowledge gleaned from fifty years of study could be written out in two or three pages of modern text.

This is a drawing of the Oval Palace Tablet from Palenque, which provides a good example of the sort of thing we have learned. It shows a young man being crowned as the city's new ruler. The woman offering the crown to him is his mother. And she, we know from other texts, was the daughter of a more powerful ruler in a different city, who forced Palenque's ruler to bow to him and take one of that overlord's daughters as his wife. Palenque's future ruler would therefore be the overlord's grandson. Notice that it is the mother, not the father, who crowned the son, suggesting that that poor, defeated fellow had been shoved aside.

Which is fascinating and gives us some insight into both rivalries between Maya cities and the machinations of powerful Maya dynasties. Rivalries between ruling clans, notably the Kanul or Snakes and the Mutul, seem to have driven most of the politics in the Classic period of 200 to 800 AD. 

But look at what is missing. For starters, military history; I did not notice a single sentence in Stuart's book about armies, fighting, sieges, strategy, or any of that. Given that these cities were in constant conflict with each other, it seems an important omission. I found myself wondering frequently how big the armies involved were. One ruler of some importance took the title "Lord of Twenty Hostages;" does that mean his victory involved defeating a force of only twenty men, or that only nobles of above a certain rank counted?

Economic life is even more of a black hole. The texts tell us nothing about taxation or labor service; how were all those pyramids and palaces built? Trade only appears in that exotic goods were often mentioned as war booty, but we have no idea how they moved around. Who served in armies and how were they paid or fed?

In particular, a point I will come back to, the texts say nothing about the role of elites in the broader economy. Some Maya communities had elaborate irrigation systems, and presumably somebody managed them, but those somebodies never put up inscriptions describing their achievements. One of the great puzzles about the May was the relationship between the elite world of the temples and the texts and the lives of the peasantry, and the inscriptions tell us absolutely nothing about it.

What does everyone wants to know about the Maya? What happened to them. This is a vexed question and has been ever since Europeans wandered into the central American jungles and found vast cities overgrown with trees. David Stuart has framed his whole book around answering this question, and he does have some thoughts, but I found that his attempts to use Maya texts to do this all fell flat.

One important part of this question is: what, exactly, fell? There is an archaeological site in El Salvador known as Joya de Cerén. It appears to have been an ordinary village or small town that was buried by a volcano around 600 AD. Studying the well-preserved houses, archaeologists have been stunned by how much they resembled Maya houses of the 1930s. The houses were the same size and shape and built in the same way, and the same kind of pots were hanging on the same posts. The gardens were laid out in the same way. There was, it seems, a Maya peasant culture that endured for millennia. Somewhere off in the distance elites were building stone cities, fighting wars with each other, inventing a writing system, and all that stuff. One naive view would be that the elite culture was just a sort of flower that sprouted from the top of an otherwise unchanging tree, having no impact on most lives. I don't think this can be right, but it is one interpretation of the gulf between the event-filled world of the inscriptions and the slowly changing world of village life.

The reason I don't think that can be entirely right is that populations within the Maya world probably rose and fell dramatically over the past 2,000 years. Archaeologists think that there may have been five times as many people in the Maya world at its peak around 650 AD as there were a thousand years later. There has been a lot of fighting about this, with some people wanting the population to remain high until the arrival of Europeans and their diseases, but David Stuart gives a robust defense of the view that populations plummeted when the cities of the central Maya world were abandoned in the 800s and 900s. Somehow, therefore, the elite world existed in a symbiosis with a rich agricultural economy that sustained high populations until it did not. Opinions differ as to the direction of the causation — did an agricultural collapse, driven by climate change or overfarming, cause the fall of the cities, or did the disappearance of the managerial elite via intense warfare lead to agricultural collapse? — but there was a relationship. 

So what caused the collapse? David Stuart thinks the key is understanding that the Maya way of life was inherently unstable. He quotes one archaeologist as saying "The lowland Maya seem to have been uncommonly restless for a people described as sedentery." (21) Many inscriptions describe royal families moving from one city or fortress to another, some inscriptions seem to have been pulled from one city and erected in another. To Stuart, this is a sign that the Maya just did not expect their cities to endure and therefore walked away form them whenever circumstances seem to require it.

There have been times and places within the human story when things endured. Cities like Rome, kingdoms like ancient Egypt, worlds where the central truths and their physical embodiments remained unchanged for centuries or millennia. Other human societies lacked those enduring monuments. Consider the kingdoms of the Asian steppes, which rose and fell and rose and fell again. One example I know well is northern and central Europe in the centuries before the Roman empire. We know there were powerful kingdoms and mighty tribes, but we think they rarely endured for more than a generation or two. Towns and fortresses were built with great effort only to be abandoned in a few decades. 

The Mississippian Indians of North America are another good example; none of their mound cities endured for more than 150 years.

David Stuart thinks the Maya were another people prone to instability, and that the famous collapse at the end of the Classic era was only the biggest in a long series of collapses. Stuart focuses in particular on the collapse of the pre-classic Maya world around 100 AD, when centers like el Mirador were largely abandoned; some were re-occupied during the Classic era, but most were not. Maya rises and collapses continued after the end of the Classic period in the 800s. You may have read that the famous city of Chichen Itza dates to after the collapse of the Classic era, but it also did not endure; it emerged as a city around 1000 AD and was largely abandoned in the 1200s.

Stuart thinks the overall instability of the Maya was connected to their cyclical calendar. The dates circled around again and again, with important cycles lasting 20 and 400 years. Maya royal monuments sometimes explicitly link current rulers to past ones, noting that they did things just like their ancestors. It is intriguing that the glory period of Copan corresponds almost exactly to one Bak'tun of 400 years, which would have been written by the Maya as 9.0.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.0.0 (117). So maybe it just seemed natural to the Maya for a city to have a life cycle, rising and then falling and being abandoned. And maybe this was connected in some way we don't understand to agricultural cycles, such as the exhaustion of water supplies or the deterioration of soils.

Stuart's reading of the inscriptions from the last decades of the Classic era is that intensifying warfare was part of the problem. I found this utterly unconvincing. He says there were more texts about war, displacement, and the fall of dynasties, but there had always been such texts and he doesn't offer any numbers to back up his claim. (To take just one example, the famous Classic period pyramid at Tikal, once known as the Temple of the Jaguar God, was actually a war monument that displayed booty from its's builders' victory over a rival dynasty.) Did they already very violent Maya get even more violent after 800 AD? Maybe, but Stuart doesn't prove it.

So I do not think that Stuart's reading of inscriptions tells us much that is new about the great Maya collapse. But I do think that his picture of a people who were just not that into permanence has much to recommend it. The apparent gulf between the world of the royal courts and the mass of the people may be another part of the story.

The Maya texts we have been able to read are wonderful. It is amazing just to know the names of hundreds of people from so long ago, and fascinating to learn about their wars and political intrigues. But I found, as I said, that they did very little to change my overall view of the Maya. In focusing on them, Stuart made his book much less useful than it might have been. Will somebody please write about a book about the Maya that zeroes in on the questions that interest me: how was all of this building and fighting done? What sustained it? And what role did the elites, who chose to portray themselves mainly getting married, fighting wars, and raising temples, have in the broader economy and society of their world? Did the elites and the peasants care about each other at all?

Except for the drawing of the Oval Palace Tablet, all the illustrations are from Frederick Catherwood's Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1844)

The Best Detail from the US Election

I am thrilled to see Trump smacked down, but even more excited about this:

Voters are now more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices, according to the final CNBC All-America Economic Survey before the Nov. 3 midterm election…[T]he results nevertheless align with other recent polls showing corruption has shot to the top of voters’ list of pressing worries…A Fox News poll published last week found 60% of registered voters are extremely concerned about government corruption, surpassing concerns about inflation and high prices. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll released Sunday found some two-thirds of respondents think Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself, up 10 percentage points since September 2025. Gallup recently found perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. have hit multi-decade highs. And an August poll from Reuters/Ipsos found nearly 7 in 10 Americans believe Trump’s businesses influence his presidential decisions.

So far as I know, this is the first national election in my lifetime in which concern about corruption passed bread and butter economic concerns at the top of voters' concerns.

It seems there is a limit to what Americans will tolerate in that department.

Saint Louis Cemetery Number One

On our last day in New Orleans Kathi and I took the tour of the oldest above-ground cemetery in New Orleans, Saint Louis Number 1. This was established in the 1780s, after the locals got tired of having their dead relations float up out of the ground during floods.

I absolutely loved this place. Something about the mix of decaying and well-maintained tombs, the dying November weeds, the gray sky, the glimpses of the city in the background, and the long history of burial sent me into a marvelous reverie.

I could have spent all day here.

One thing I learned from the tour is that this system only really worked because of the intensity of the rot inside these oven-like structures. In the baking summer heat bodies decayed very quickly, so that when the tomb was re-opened after the traditional year and a day there was little left but dust, which was swept to the back of the tomb so that another body could be deposited.

Tomb of chess legend Paul Morphy, of Morphy's Defense.

Kathi with the cemetery's most famous tomb, of nineteenth-century Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau. Maybe. Our guide explained that there have always been rumors that she was really buried somewhere else and this plaque is just there to throw off people seeking power (or dust) from her tomb. He showed us X marks on several other tombs that, he said, people had scratched to indicate that those other tombs were her real resting place.

After a fried chicken lunch, we started our journey home, already talking about going back next year. And that would imply that I will go on, with the help of Kathi, my other friends, and places like New Orleans, at least for one more year.

John and Kathi in New Orleans: Part II

Images from the walks I took early on Sunday and Monday mornings, starting from the hotel and  crossing the commercial part of the French Quarter into the residential neighborhoods beyond.

This is my habit whenever I go to a new city: to get up in time to spend at least an hour exploring on foot before I have to start the business of the day, whether that is meetings or touristing. 

I did it across China and through Britain, in San Francisco and New York and Austin, reveling in twilit streets often damp with rain, nearly empty but for a few buttoned up figures hurrying on errands as obscure as my own. Although it has to be said that in the French Quarter one can run across people who are still up drinking at 6:30 AM, with looks on their faces that betray long nights of alcoholic therapy for heavy cares.

Jackson Square

The Mississippi

New Orleans-style houses

I found little wonders everywhere.

And saw some impressive mansions on the far eastern edge of the quarter.

I recommend this to all of you: when you are in a place you don't well, drag yourself out of bed early, put on your walking shoes and see what you can find.

John and Kathi in New Orleans: Part I

I took a big step this week in my recovery from the double blow of my wife's death and my own heart surgery. I flew down to New Orleans with my new friend Kathi to spend Halloween weekend having as much fun as possible. This was the first thing I have looked forward to since Lisa's death, and it was everything I hoped. Kathi is on her own journey back from losing her husband, and we seem to have found something good together.

Hotel Mazarin Courtyard

We stayed at the Hotel Mazarin in the French Quarter. The hotel was fine, and I just loved the Quarter. It looked and felt different from anywhere else I have been: different architecture, different tacky stores, different cultural memes.

Friday night we took a mule-drawn carriage ghost/vampire tour, which was fun; New Orleans has lots of creepy stories with various degrees of veracity. Of course the tour goes by the Lalaurie Mansion, where Delphine Lalaurie really chained and tortured slaves in the 1820s before the story grew into a famous American nightmare. Our guide had us take photos of the entrance, which he then intrpreted as images of skulls and ghosts. This photo of mine shows "a shadow man." Like I said, it was fun.

We spent much of Saturday walking around, soaking it in. 

I very much enjoyed the Voodoo Museum, which is tiny but has cool exhibits focusing on noted practitioners from the mid 1800s to the 1970s. Not just, ooo, Voodoo is badass, but the careers of real people who got into the practice in different ways and took it in different directions.

I love this accidental photo of Kathi as the spirit behind the mirror. 

Our costumes for Halloween. I love this picture of Kathi because she often has this expression, like she expects that something good is about to happen.

We read that on Halloween the French Quarter is one big costume party, and it is. The atmosphere was really fun, and neither Kathi nor I drinks much, so isn't just that. We danced at a little party in our hotel and then walked through the street party to the vampire ball. The highlight of that for me was actually the line going in, seeing 200 or so people in fabulous costumes – we were middling for this crowd – and chatting with folks from all over the US and beyond. But once it got going the music was too loud for conversation and not very danceable, so we eventually wandered back to our hotel for the end of that party, dancing until our feet gave out. It was the best Halloween for me since that awful day more than a decade ago when my youngest child told me she was trick-or-treating with her friends and didn't want me to come along.

More to come.

Links 30 October 2026

Hecate with Dogs, homeless image from the internet

Why isn't cybercrime a worse threat? Basically, because most of the smart coders have legitimate jobs.

Ben Pentreath tours America with his camera, including Chicago and Monticello.

A serious statistical look at how many Americans live "paycheck to paycheck."

Scott Siskind on the mystery of trepanation in global prehistory. It it very weird that it was practiced in so many places.

Excavating an Anglo-Saxon bucket.

Short video on Twitter/X showing the density of concertina wire guarding some Ukrainian positions. Since the Russians are mostly advancing in groups of one to three men, the defense is now set up to stop small groups of soldiers.

AI translation of the first 100 lines of the Odyssey into heroic hexameters.

The Soviet Union's long interest in telepathy.

Some college students are interested in very traditional, all books no phones classes.

Scott Siskind's links for October, and one from that list, an AI claiming to be the first being to understand Finnegan's Wake.

A new dwarf planet may have been discovered out beyond Pluto.

I am not a fan of Texas' tallest skyscraper.

People worried about cybercrime are urging us to use cash, or at least keep it on hand for emergencies. Resonates with me since my debit card was just shut down due to security issues.

Women are taking over the funeral industry. Matches my experience; all the people I dealt with this year at the funeral home and the cemetery were female.

Edgar Allen Poe as a great writer and a master of self sabotage.

A suffragette Christmas card.

I am off for New Orleans today, hoping to have a spectacular Halloween and my first real fun since my wife's death. Wish me luck. I will see you all sometime next week.

Jacobo de Barbari's Map of Venice, 1500

Amazing map, with extraordinary detail, and quite accurate.

Saint Mark's Square

The Arsenal

More. Large version here.