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 researcher also say that it may be harder for bacteria to evolve resistance to those old herbal mixtures than to moder, 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.

At the Times, Gloating about the Tradwife Backlash

In the NY Times, Amanda Hess covers some recent blowups in the Tradwife social media sphere:

The first time Bernadine Barber saw the word “tradwife,” it was being used to describe her. She was not yet 30, she had three children, and her Instagram content promoting traditional gender roles was gaining a following. She had started going by Bernadine Bluntly online, a name to reflect how plainly she spoke her truth. . . . 

Onstage and online, Bluntly argued the tradwife’s cause with passionate intensity. But privately, “I was already going back and forth about leaving my marriage,” she told me recently. Soon she would have six children, 141,000 YouTube subscribers, friends at Evie Magazine and Turning Point USA, and a commitment to an ideology that she now says made her suffer. “You’re told that if you really love God, then you submit to your husband, you fight for your marriage, you forgive no matter what, and you stay for the kids,” she said. “It’s honestly a miracle of God that I woke up and got out.”

Last year, Bluntly left her husband and got a restraining order against him.

I already wrote about this phenomenon last year, so I won't elaborate my position here; suffice to say that I think most influencers are narcissists of questionable sanity, and ideology and family life make for a really bad combination.

Amanda Hess is one of several feminists I have seen who are downright gloating about this development. See? See? If you don't fight the patriarchy, next the know your trapped at home with five kids and an abusive husband. Well, sure, but two things. First, if you find yourself gloating about this failure of "traditional" family life, you might also ask why thousands of smart women are attracted to the Tradwife ideal. Life is hard for everyone, no matter how free and feminist you are. And second, if you are relying on these women, who are least high strung and possibly mentally ill, to discredit partriarchy, I don't see how that's much better than relying on them to model an ideal of patriarchal marriage.

But the new thing I learned from Amanda Hess is that there is now a whole constellation of Ex-Tradwife influencers who go on making videos no matter what happens in their lives. 

Enitza Templeton, a 43-year-old Colorado mother of four, identifies as a “former tradwife” and “current baddie” to her 247,000 TikTok followers. When she became disillusioned with her own tradlife, Templeton created an Instagram account called Sweet by the Slice.

What a world.

Maggie Nelson on Avant-Garde Cruelty

The most interesting of this work—past, present, or future—is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde’s long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence—be it in art or in political action—might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings. For as Arendt puts it succinctly in On Violence, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

—Maggie Nelson, from The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

Here is my principle, stated here many times: violence begets violence. If you want a kinder, more peaceful, more equal world, you must start by renouncing violence.

What Academic Censorship Really Looks Like

Richard Hanania wrote a piece this week attacking what sounds like a stupid article about Korean adoptees in the US. The study's authors found that while most adopted children in Sweden do worse academically, those adopted from Korea in the 1960s and 1970s do better. Refusing to consider genetics, they speculate that the cause must be that Korean orphanages gave these kids some kind of miraculous start on life. Um, sure.

Hanania on Twitter/X:

After I published my article on Korean adoptees today, a professor at an R1 university wrote to me: "It's a pity I can't assign this in one of my quantitative methods classes."

I got his point, but asked what exactly was stopping him. He wrote the following:

"In one sense, nothing. I have tenure and academic freedom and I don't think I would face the kind of Amy Wax style retaliation that FIRE could sue over. But there would be consequences. The most immediate would be that I would no longer teach or advise grad students – and not because the department chair was punishing me but because students would refuse to take my classes or have me on their dissertation committees. But the more important thing is reserving my credibility for when it is most likely to be effective. You want people to take you seriously when you speak in a faculty meeting or advocate a policy at your university or in your discipline. This isn't careerism, it's about strategic understanding of picking battles to have the most impact, especially given that I am not teaching about inequality and there are other ways to teach the auxiliary hypothesis problem that would be much more effective because they wouldn't make students too upset to appreciate the methodological point."

Good demonstration of how academic pressure comes from below. You can have all the free speech protections you want, and maybe you won't be disciplined or fired, but no law or regulation can stop students from refusing to take your classes, other academics from not wanting to write papers with you, etc.

Whimsical Sculptures by Albert Langlois

Pinterest offered me this image as an ancient sculpture, but I immediately thought, that is not ancient at all. A bit of searching led me to the web site of French sculptor Albert Langlois.

I don't know that I love these, but they are certainly charming, or even delightful. This one is titled, Légende de la Mer.

Taureau Roi

Rooster

Blue Bull

An image that shows the scale, and the artist.

Links 25 September 2026

Carl Mydans, Life Saving Tamales, 1939

Revolutionary leftism vs. actually doing good, partly as seen through the life of Anton Chekhov: "Chekhov believed in the transformational power of tiny acts of compassion divested of ideological abstraction."

Teeside Psychogeography visits the church and ruined abbey of Easby, Yorkshire.

Desert art by Alfredo de Stefano.

New calculations about the exact mechanism by which that asteroid killed the last dinosaurs, 6-minute video.

Cool photographs of the WW II bunkers of South Tyrol.

Noah Smith: no, you are not on indigenous land. I think this attack on the whole notion of ethnic groups owning land is one of my own most fervent beliefs, and one I think has the most import for the human future.

Fascism on the American Right.

Among the groups singled out for genocide by the Khmer Rouge was musicians; here's a piece on how Cambodian pop music survived and revived.

The people trying to bring back Latin as Europe's common language.

In a piece titled "The Age of Wonders and Terrors," Scott Aaronson offers this take on AI: "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA."

New rail stations for Auckland, New Zealand, "informed by Maori values." Better than brutalism, anyway.

An argument that the Czech Republic's plan to give $50,000 to couples who have a second child will not budge the birth rate. (Twitter/X)

Ethan Mollick: "the infamous Milgram Experiment is actually quite weak because most people suspected the shocks were fake (kind of obvious in retrospect) & thus went along with shocking people, not out of obedience to authority, but because it didn’t matter."

Modern bamboo architecture.

Khatia Buniatishvili's wonderful performance of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, said by some to be the definitive work of Romantic music. You know the second movement even if you have never heard of Rachmaninoff.

An old post of mine that has gotten a bunch of views lately: Gold Signet Rings of the Minoan and Mycenaean Worlds.

Sixteenth-century soldier found under a Latvian Lake, near the remains of an old bridge. From 2020. If anyone can find a report on the analysis of this find, which ought to have taken place by now, please send it my way.

First intact burials found at Göbeklitepe; one of the many puzzles about the site has been the discovery of numerous human bone fragments scattered about.

Large hoard of Roman silver coins found in Germany.

Salmon seem to be thriving in the Klamath River after dam removals. (NY Times, scientific paper)

The evolution of Russian "Turtle Tanks" in Ukraine.

The former mayor of Belgorod in Russia was convicted of corruption in 2024, but rather than going to prison he signed up for the "special military operation." He has now been killed at the front.

Emissions test cheating, diesel prices, and Ukraine's attacks on Russian refineries, 16-minute video.

Vicious Orcas and our Love of Predators

I found myself wondering today when the steady stream of discoveries about orca violence will chllenge our society's love of them, and of other wild predators. Consider:

• orcas like to use young sea lions as playthings, among other things tossing them high into the air
• in the North Pacific, "Two groups of killer whales are engaging in a terrifying, bloody cannibalistic war beneath the ocean's surface, where gangs of the colossal creatures are attacking and eating each other."
• drone footage has confirmed that packs of orcas regularly hunt and kill larger whales
• orcas rob human fishermen, sometimes on a massive scale
• orcas ram and sometimes sink boats, apparently for fun

But this remains the age of "The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig," when we want to admire and love wild predators.

Among much of the modern population, human violence of any sort is increasingly unacceptable. So why do some vegetarian, pacifist-leaning, football-hating leftists love orcas, wolves, and tigers?

Is this maybe an outlet for the darker impulses of people who cannot cheer any human violence? Of an admiration of strength in people who cannot admire boxers or dictators?

An expression of longing for complete freedom?

Just a sign of human complexity, and the unfathomable ways of our minds?

I wonder.

DEI at the National Book Awards

Bret Stephens contemplates the ten finalists for the National Book Award in fiction:

Hannah Lillith Assadi’s novel, Paradiso 17, is “inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father.” Kimberly Blaeser, a poet, is the “founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets.” Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American writer whose novel Dèy reflects on “the many forms of mourning experienced through immigration, gentrification and diasporic identity.” Julián Delgado Lopera’s novel Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You, set in 1990s Bogotá, “explores Colombia’s queer underground community.” Louise Erdrich, the highly acclaimed author of Python’s Kiss, is identified in her N.B.F. biography as “a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.” Marlon James’s novel The Disappearers is a “queer epic” set in Kingston, Jamaica. Valeria Luiselli is a writer born in Mexico whose Beginning Middle End spans “continents, languages and four generations.” Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer; his first novel, The Renovation, is a story about a family migrating from Istanbul to Italy. Morgan Thomas’s book Mad Eden is about “a trans health care worker” who has been diagnosed with autism.

Oh, there’s also Alexander Maksik’s novel Passengers, a father-daughter story set in an airport. Maksik, who is Jewish, is, to my knowledge, white, male and straight — details that, in a sane world, should have no bearing on whether his book deserves to make the longlist. In this world, sadly, it makes him the lucky token.

My reaction to this is ambivalent. On one hand, I am myself far more likely to read a serious novel or memoir by someone who is not an ordinary white American. I am frankly bored by the world I inhabit and get more insight into it than I want just by skimming the news. Unless the story is set in some other world, as in science fiction or fantasy, I would rather read work by someone with a very different perspective. Marlon James is one of my favorite contemporary writers, and two of his novels (A Brief History of Seven Killings and The Book of the Night Women)  would be on my list of the fifty best post WW II books. I have probably about as many serious novels by Asians like Haruki Murakami and Arundhati Roy than white North Americans. I have no particular attraction to gay fiction, but James Baldwin was amazing and I like Marlon James so much that I may give This Disappearers a try.

But on the other hand, this list points to the fundamental problem with wokeness: the obsession with who people are rather than what they can do. It is, to me, demeaning to Louise Edrich to identify her as a Native American writer; I don't fundamentally care where she comes from. She usually writes about Native Americans, but she is a product of Dartmouth and various writing programs, thoroughly trained in the craft of modern fiction, besides being married to a white anthropologist who was one of her undergraduate professors and living in Minneapolis. As I have noted here several times, modern novel writing is a tradition about as far removed from Native American storytelling as it is possible to be. Edrich is very good at the kind of psychologically intense writing that this tradition values, and that gets attention from the National Book Awards.

Books are not good because their authors are marginalized. Most books by people from marginal communities are, in fact, bad. Just like most books by white New Yorkers are bad.

Writing talent is a rare and wonderful thing, and a brilliant novel is a treasure like any other magnificent work of art. That is what awards should celebrate, not anything to do with where the author happened to be born.

Albrecht Dürer's House

I did not know, until an acquaintance posted pictures on Facebook, that Albrecht Dürer's house in Nuremberg still survives. That's it above.

The house was built around 1420; Dürer purchased it in 1509. Since 1871, it has been a museum dedicated to Dürer's life and work.

It has, of course, been restored over the years, and it took substantial damage in WW II bombing that took five years to repair. But a remarkable amount of the fabric dates to Dürer's time. This is a recreated painter's workshop of the time.

And since we're on the subject, we might as well look at a few of the master's works. Self-portrait at the age of 13.

The famous self-portrait at the age of 28, 1500

Young Hare, 1502. Dürer's renderings of plants and animals achieved an unsurpassed perfection.

Emperor Maximilian I, 1519 detail.

And some woodcuts. Knight with Death and the Devil.

A personal favorite of mine, Melancholia.

Some people pass through the world leaving a mark only on those who knew and loved or hated them, while others send waves across the globe.

AI Generalization and Human Society

Fascinating piece from Scott Siskind:

In 2025, Owain Evans et al published a paper on “emergent misalignment”. They trained a previously-aligned AI to do one immoral thing: write insecure code full of vulnerabilities and backdoors. To their surprise, the AI became immoral in general. Its advice to a bored user was to try taking random expired medications and see what happened. Its money-making tips all involved theft and violence. When asked for its favorite historic figure, it chose Hitler.

Some co-authors followed up with additional weird discoveries. If you trained an AI to give the 19th-century names for birds (eg identify the American Pipit by its 19th-century name “Brown Titlark”), then the AI would behave like a 19th-century person in general (for example, assert that a woman’s proper place is in the home).

Siskind goes on the discuss AI alignment problems, and as I said the whole piece is fascinating.

But my thoughts go in a different direction: why do human preferences tend to form clusters that we identify as personality types, or political factions?

I would be willing to bet that all of the following are more common among ardent followers of Donald Trump than in the general population: American football fandom, driving large trucks or SUVs, watching "Yellowstone", interest in cryptocurrency, wanting to bomb Iran, not wanting to aid Ukraine, suspicion that the news fake and what really matters happens secretly among dubious people, cooking steaks on a backyard grill. Meanwhile followers of AOC are more likely to blame "capitalism" for their problems, listen to Chappell Roan, follow women's soccer, worry about monarch butterflies, support Hamas, use alternative pronouns, and do yoga.

You can, if you try hard enough, come up with semi-rational reasons for all of that, but I wave such rationalizations aside with the observations that while some of it makes sense, much of it does not.

I think a lot can be explained by that experiment with AI and old fashioned bird names: some things come to be associated in the culture by processes that are at least partly random, and once they are felt to go together, people of a certain sort will embrace the ones their friends share.

Jacques de l'Ange (Maybe)

Ecco Homo

Jacques de l'Ange is an extremely obscure Dutch painter of the 17th century. There were some paintings in European museums signed JAD, but before 1994 nobody knew what that stood for and the painter was known as "the Monogrammist JAD."

Allegory of Lust

Then in 1994 by the scholar Bernhard Schnackenburg linked those paintings to several others that seemed to be by the same hand, including one attributed to Jacques de l'Ange. Thus a new artist was born.

Martyrdom of Saints Dymphna and Gerebernus, and Detail

Wikipedia tells us:

Very little is known about the life of Jacques de l'Ange. It is not clear whether he can be identified with the genre and history painter Jacques (Jacob) de Langhe who was recorded in Antwerp in 1632–1633 and was a pupil of Jan Cossiers. It remains unclear whether he Ange could be the "J. de Langhe," who was active as a portraitist in 's-Hertogenbosch from 1644 to 1693.

So, yeah.

A Geographer

Whoever painted these, they are in the style known as Caravaggesque, because they copy the dramatic lighting and extreme facial features of Caravaggio.

I am of course skeptical of all these reconstructions based on style, but think some of these are terrific paintings, especially this one, Chained Promtheus.