Links July 31 2020

Little dragons in a Book of Hours from Flanders, c. 1350-1390

Since I have been linking regularly to articles on liberal cancel culture, it's only fair that I link to Max Boot's essay on conservative cancel culture, which might be summarized as "love Trump or get lost." Indeed many conservatives, perhaps most outrageously Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, have been driven out of government or journalism for daring to criticize Trump.

The iPhone Photography Awards

The Netflix show "Indian Matchmaking" is a huge hit with people of Indian origin around the world, but it has also raised a storm of protest. Because, so far as I can tell, it depicts the arrangement of marriages as it is actually done and does not criticize the more problematic aspects of the process. 

According to the Times, New York's tailors are now spending all their time letting out the clothes of people who gained weight during the lockdown. I think I gained 5 pounds during the first two months so I've had to put myself on a rigorous diet to keep this from spiraling out of control. 

Borowitz Report: Fauci Urges Trump to Remain on Golf Course Until Pandemic Is Over.

NY Times story on the head trauma caused by bobsledding and skeleton, which may be causing a rash of suicides. Yet more evidence that while exercise is good for you, pursuing almost any sport at a very high level is usually not.

Reason wonders why the new US Space Force has horses.

In Japan, building a dam with robots

Hand-cranked miniature moving figures by Federico Tobon, quite charming.

Something different to collect: vintage gas station signs.

The disappearing vegetables of South India: reviewing a cookbook from 1951, a local chef finds 20 different varieties no longer available. He blames the Green Revolution and monoculture.

Could you outrun a Tyrannosaurus Rex?

More trials using Anglo-Saxon remedies to treat antibiotic-resistant infections.

Microsoft's plan to not only reduce its current carbon emissions to zero, by the most comprehensive measure, but to offset all the carbon emissions it has ever been responsible for.

The origin of the large Sarsen Stones that make up most of Stonehenge has been narrowed down to an area called the West Woods about 10 miles (15 km) from the site. This precision is possible because scientists got hold of a core drilled out of one of the stones in the 1950s and therefore not weathered; weathering changes the chemical composition of rocks too much to make exact sourcing possible using a chip from the outside of a stone.

In the US, Women have been Voting for 100 Years

Interesting essay by Gail Collins in the Times pondering what has been changed by women voting:

What better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage than by discussing the way it turned out to be a big flop?

The great champions of the 19th Amendment thought that when America’s women got the right to vote, they’d immediately start to change the nation. Promote women’s issues, like better health care and education. Refocus politics from special interests to the general good.

Then in 1920, for the first time, they went to polls across the nation with their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons and elected — President Warren Harding.

As Collins notes, the first national issue on which voting women really formed a potent political bloc was prohibition, much more popular with women than men.

A "gender gap" did not really appear in national elections until 1980, when women barely supported Reagan but men preferred him 60% to 36%. Since then the gender gap in presidential elections has regularly been around 10%, for example 10% in 2000 and 11% in 2016. (It was smaller in 2004, when foreign war and fear of terrorism generated a "safety first" vote for Bush.)

But most women still sit comfortably within the political mainstream. The notion, once common, that bringing women into any world (politics, medicine, science) would have a transformative effect by itself has turned out to be completely wrong. In medicine it turns out that the setup of the whole medical system so strongly controls what doctors actually do that differences between men and women are minimal, and hopes that female doctors would be better listeners or more caring have not been realized. In politics it has turned out just as one would expect from observing women and men in any other context: we are different, but not so very much different.

Saving Louisiana, or Destroying It?

Long article by Nathaniel Rich in the Times about the $50 billion effort to keep southern Louisiana from washing away. Rich writes a fair amount about climate change but that really isn't the issue; the issue is that since we confined the Mississippi within levees all the way down it no longer dumps silt into the marshes with every flood, which is how the marshes came to be in the first place. Without fresh silt, they are disappearing at a stupendous rate.

With an infusion of $4 billion from the BP oil spill settlement, the first stages of the rescue plan are under way. Rich considers the program from two points of view: the high level question of whether Louisiana will survive, and the low-level point of view of a fishing captain named Kindra Arnesen he met at a public meeting:

“We have to be present, or they can say there’s ‘no opposition,’” Arnesen said. “I see this as doomsday. This will end us.”

This was the centerpiece of the master plan: the construction of new, man-made diversions in Plaquemines Parish [south of New Orleans]. The state would cut open the federal levee, creating powerful new distributaries of the Mississippi River that will flush sediment into the marsh, building land. These engineered floods would simulate the geological process that created the Mississippi Delta in the first place. The initial two incisions are to be made in the levees about 25 and 35 river miles south of New Orleans. Construction on the mid-Barataria Diversion on the west bank, could begin as soon as the end of 2022, followed by the mid-Breton Diversion on the east bank. Once running at full capacity, the diversions would themselves rank among the nation’s largest rivers. Both will flow at more than two times the volume of the Hudson River. Over the course of years and decades, it is hoped, the gargantuan volume of sediment borne by the diversions will patch the holes in the marsh’s moth-eaten fabric. Lost species will return and biological diversity will increase. The local fisheries might ultimately become even more productive.

In the short term, however, the diversions will transform the delicate estuarine ecosystems. They would likely massacre giant populations of oysters, brown shrimp, blue crab and dozens of species of fish. Areas of brackish water will turn fresh, and saltwater vegetation will die. Plaquemines Parish has the largest commercial fishing fleet in the continental United States. Arnesen worried that the diversions would destroy it.

And she is right to worry. But what is the alternative? Do nothing and Plaquemines Parish will cease to exist in 50 years. This can't be done on a small scale; immense amounts of water and silt have to be rerouted, or nothing will be gained.

Rich gives us another lesson in how quickly circumstances can come to seem normal, and for people to begin depending on them. Arnesen grew up harvesting oysters in salt marshes, and everyone in Plaquemines Parish thinks of this as the old way, now threatened by the diversions. But until the levees went up in the 1950s, those marshes were drowned in silt every year or two, so oysters must have been few and far between. Rich quotes one local as saying that his neighborhood "never" had high water during hurricanes until after the post-Katrina floodwalls went up around New Orleans, but that is absurd; again, the whole parish is built of silt deposited by the river in its floods. Nobody seems to even remember life before the levees.

And this is just stage one, politically the easiest lift; future plans for the area west of New Orleans call for drowning entire towns. 

Personally I do not think we know how these ecosystems will change after the diversions, so it will be years before we know how fishermen will have to adapt. I hope we are generous in helping them do so. But I don't see that we can afford to put off the whole effort because of what the impact on a few thousand people might be. Arnesen sees it differently:

“I don’t just do this because it’s my living,” Arnesen said as she left the meeting, trailing an entourage of well-wishers. “They’ve made our community feel like we’re the trade-off and we don’t matter. It’s easy for the state to say they’re going to come up with an adaptation plan. But what’s the point of an adaptation plan if the end goal isn’t the survival of the people you’re trying to save?”

It's a hard question, but holding to the status quo is simply impossible; Louisiana is losing an acre of land an hour and has lost 2,000 square miles since 1930. Like several US states, Louisiana's signs for state roads feature the state's outline, and one group of activists has been driving the point home by repainting the signs to show how the state will look in 2050 if nothing is done.

If the land disappears, they people will have to move on anyway, so we might as well save the land even if the people's livelihoods are ruined in the process.

Building a New City for Hong Kong Refugees

Tyler Cowen posted something on his blog about investors from Hong Kong seeking to build a "charter city" in Ireland and got this response from Mark Lutter:

Thanks for sharing the article about the Victoria Harbor Group. We, me being Chief Strategy Officer, are in discussions with Ireland. However, it is important to note that the information mentioned is dated. As any early stage company, our ideas have rapidly evolved. While the term we are using is ‘International Charter City’, we are not pursuing full scale autonomy. Our priority is to acquire land and build political support in the host country to build a city for the Hong Kong people with the target population being 50% HKers and 50% citizens of the host country.

Our key assumptions are as follows

1. The next 10-15 years will see 1m to 2m Hong Kongers migrate, the first mass migration of high skilled labor in the last 40 or so years.

2. There is value from coordinating this migration, keeping network effects, ensuring housing supply, etc

3. We see this as an opportunity to build the city of the future, cutting edge urban design, welcoming of new technology, self-driving cars, drone delivery, etc.

4. We are in discussions with several countries, not just Ireland, which we will make public when possible. We prefer English speaking countries with common law traditions, but are open to considering others.

5. Our goal is to acquire 50,000+ acres within 2 hours of an airport to build a new city for several hundred thousand residents. Obviously this depends on the political support in the host country. Smaller countries like Ireland would have smaller developments.

6. Political support from the host country is crucial. We are not asking for independence or autonomy. Of course, we wouldn’t say no to tax and regulatory relief, but that is less important than land availability and domestic buy in.

7. The city will fit in the national plans of the host country. The Hong Kongers excel in finance and manufacturing, as well as education and healthcare. While little manufacturing is done in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers own many factories in the Guangdong province. Any country looking to revive their manufacturing base could do so by attracting a bunch of talented HKers. Additionally, a good location could become a top 10 global financial center in 10 years by attracting HK financial talent.

8. We believe this is a great opportunity for any country which wants to attract a talented, hardworking, entrepreneurial population.

9. I have seen a lot of charter city projects and this is the first one I wanted to become part of the leadership team of.

There's a fascinating possibility, but count me as skeptical that this will really come off.

It did set me wondering what countries might be interested in this project. I  have rejected most of the places that came to mind because they already have racial tensions between Chinese and others: the Phillippines, Malaya, Australia, South Africa. New Zealanders are too eco-conscious to want a million more people of any sort. I have a hard time seeing the Irish accepting this; they like being Irish and are comfortable enough not being rich to be hard to bribe.

Canada? The Canadian west coast already has a big Chinese population and it seems like a natural destination. People have already suggested this in the comments to Cowen's post, so the idea has occurred to others. It seems to me British Columbia could have this if they wanted it.

Jamaica? They could use the money, and they are not much concerned about race. But I guess that would mean clearing the locals off 50,000 acres, since the island is already densely populated.

What about some parts of the US? All those business boosters in Texas might like the idea, and the race problem they worry about is Mexicans. An old rust belt state, like Michigan? One of my favorite offbeat ideas has always been to let a few hundred thousand extra refugees into the country on the condition that they settle in Detroit. I can't see California finding the room, since they have trouble finding the room for new apartment buildings. On the other hand a new thriving city in the Central Valley might take some of the pressure off the Bay Area, and people from Hong Kong are already used to conserving water.

Anyway for anyone interested in geography and city building it's a fabulous thing to daydream about.

Mars Jars and Nazi Science

Fascinating article by Sarah Scoles in the Times about the secret history of 'Mars Jars.' These are small terrariums set up to mimic conditions on Mars, which are used to see whether Earth life could survive there. They were popularized by Carl Sagan and many people assumed that he invented them.

Not so! A bit of sleuthing by a young post-doc named Jordan Bimm turned up old films from the 1950s depicting what were called even then 'Mars Jars.' Their inventor, it turns out, was a government scientist named Dr. Hubertus Strughold. Strughold worked for the US Air Force on issues related to biology and high altitude or space conditions, and he his work on Mars was sort of a side line. But he eventually did enough to publish the first scientific paper using the word 'astrobiology' and also organize the world's first astrobiology conference.

Besides having the perfect name for an evil mad scientist, Dr. Strughold turns out to have been an actual Nazi. He started his experiments on high altitudes physiology while working for the Luftwaffe. At the end of the war he was swept up by the US Army as part of Operation Paperclip and brought to America along with Werner von Braun and about 1600 other scientists and engineers.

What, exactly, did Strughold do?

Dr. Bimm studies the Cold Warriors who researched survival in the harsh environment of space. It’s what led him to the Mars Jars: He was diving into Dr. Strughold’s work on astronaut physiology and aviation medicine in the U.S. — work he had started in Nazi Germany for the Luftwaffe, and which was tangled up in inhumane experiments.

Dr. Strughold didn’t do these experiments himself, and he wasn’t a member of the Nazi party. But on his watch, researchers locked prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp in low-pressure chambers, to show what might happen to fliers at high altitude, and dressed them in fighter-pilot uniforms only to submerge them in freezing water.

“You don’t get to hold that job for 10 years unless you are 100 percent in lock step with the leadership,” Dr. Bimm said.

So Strughold was part of an organization that did awful experiments on concentration camp inmates, but there is no evidence that he participated in them. He did not join the Nazi Party but as Bimm says he would not have lasted in that job if he had not been considered politically reliable.

Scoles tosses around vague talk about "reassessing" the use of Strughold's research, but I find it hard to get upset about this. The Space Medicine Institute used to give out a Strughold Award, and when Strughold's Nazi past first came to light in 2013 they retired the award. Perfectly appropriate. But so far as I can see from this evidence Strughold was not Mengele, and whatever he did in Germany he developed Mars Jars in the US, torturing nobody but lichens and bacteria. I see no reason to stop messing with Mars Jars just because of their inventor's past.

Incidentally what these experiments show is that most of the time, earth life dies in Martian conditions, but sometimes lichens endure, and sometimes bacteria mutate and adapt.

Today's Place to Daydream about: Dubrovnik

Today my thoughts wander back to the Mediterranean, to the tourist mecca of Dubrovnik in Croatia.

All the tour guides warn of terrible crowds in the summer and recommend visiting in spring or fall. But judging from the photographs I have seen online many of the cultured types who spend their vacations gazing at medieval building details visit at Christmastime. It's too hot out for me to think about beaches or summer sun, so let's imagine we're there in October, on a pleasant day when shading clouds alternate with sun that will brighten up our own photographs.

The town is a small place today, with 40,000 people, because it hugs an inaccessible site on a rocky coast with no good routes inland. It was founded by refugees who fled less secure places during the chaos of the collapsing Roman Empire, according to one chronicle in AD 620.

The medieval feel of the town led to its being used for King's Landing in the Game of Thrones TV series, and if you are so inclined you can walk the exact route of Cersei's walk of shame. The old city is car-free, so there's no chance you'll get run over.

The old city is surrounded by walls, which are also among the oldest authentic monuments in the place. The town was first fortified the 9th century but the core of the stone you see was laid in the 1200s and added to in the 1400s. 

The town belonged to the Byzantines, then various Slavic overlords, and then in the 13th century it became essentially independent as the Republic of Ragusa. It was then Italian-speaking and had close ties to Venice, which was sometimes its suzerain. Ragusa was always a mixed place, though, which many Slavs, Jews, Turks, and others. Many Jews came to Ragusa from Spain after the forced conversion of 1492. By that time Ragusa was dominated by the Turks, but they pretty much left the place alone so long as their tribute was paid on time. Ragusa's reputation for tolerance led to a burst of American scholarship about its past in the 1980s and 1990s.

The city was devastated by an earthquake in 1667, with the loss of 5,000 lives and most of its churches and other public buildings. One that survived was the Palazzo Sponza, built as a private house in the early 1500s but pressed into service as a town hall after the disaster. Now it houses the rich public archives, another reason so many American historians went there.

Also the nearby Rector's Palace, for which various sources give construction dates like "1420 to 1808."

The most famous church is St. Blaise's, dedicated to the town's patron, but as you can see completely rebuilt after 1667.

So Dubrovnik is short on famous buildings, but it has its own glories. What drew me to the place today was the thousands of photographs posted all over the internet of details like these, little bits of history or whimsy that bring the place to life in my mind.

Someone named Donald Judge posted a huge set to wikimedia, from which these are drawn.

It seems like in the right season this would be a wonderful place to explore.

The Mosaics of Yavru

These mosaics were excavated from a Roman villa in Yavru, Turkey, that was discovered by looters and then investigated by archaeologists. The dig took place in 2013 but the restored mosaics have just gone on display at the museum in Amasya. Via The History Blog.

Women who Voted for Trump

Sarah Longwell has spent much of the past three years holding focus groups with women who voted for Turmp – sometimes all college-educated, sometimes all non-college educated, sometimes a mix. She writes,

Many observers were doubly confused because they had expected Hillary Clinton, as the first major party female nominee, to be especially strong with women. And she wasn’t. Trump did poorly with African-American and Hispanic women, because he did poorly with all African-Americans and Hispanics. But he managed to actually win a narrow plurality among white women.

But that mystery has been easy to solve. Over the last three years I conducted dozens of focus groups with both college-educated and non-college-educated female Trump voters. And the answer given most commonly for why they voted for Donald Trump is “I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I voted against Hillary Clinton.”

In 2016, Democrats understood that Hillary Clinton was a deeply polarizing candidate. But even they didn’t grasp the full magnitude of it. Right-leaning and Republican female voters had spent more than a decade hating both Clintons, and they didn’t stop just because Hillary’s opponent was an unrepentant misogynist.

In fact, Bill Clinton’s legacy of similarly disgusting behavior with women—and Hillary Clinton’s defense of her husband—had the effect of blunting Trump’s own execrable track record. These women voters decided that either way, there’d be a guy with a long history of sexual malfeasance living in the White House.

According to Longwell, Trump's support in her groups started to fall right after the election, as reflected in the Democratic surge in 2018. But Republican women stayed loyal to him, citing the strong economy; after all, many of them supported him in the first place because they believed that as a successful businessman he would handle the economy well.

Then things started to get weird:

Since March, I have conducted the focus groups virtually and watched Trump’s position with women weaken in real time.

Interestingly, in the early days of the pandemic the women in the focus groups were frustrated with Trump, but didn’t necessarily hold him responsible for everything that was happening. He hadn’t done great, they said, but it was a tough situation for any president to handle.

It wasn’t until the killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests that the bottom started to drop out.

Two weeks after Floyd’s death I ran a focus group with seven women from swing states—all of whom voted for Trump but currently rated him as doing a “very bad” job.

Only one was leaning toward voting for him again. Three were definitely going to vote for Biden. The other three were still making up their minds. But even these undecideds were unequivocal in their distaste for Trump’s posture on race and his handling of the protests. They actively recoiled.

One of the Trump voters who had decided to vote for Biden said, “The stakes are too high now. It’s a matter of life and death.”

That’s a pretty a good distillation of why Trump has been shedding support from women over the last few months. The multiple crises laid bare the fact that Donald Trump isn’t the savvy businessman these women voted for. Instead, they see him as a divisive president who’s in over his head. . . .

Donald Trump and his campaign think they can stop the bleeding with women by leaning into the culture wars and highlighting looters, rioters, and vandals pulling down statues. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of these voters. They don’t see Trump as someone who can protect them from the chaos—they think he’s the source of it.

The Strangeness of Writing

Here is Joe Moran, reviewing a book by Nicholas Delbanco that purports to examine "why writing matters."

He never gets to the nub of why writing – this lonely, artificial act by which we try to bridge the chasm between human minds with just words, syntax, punctuation and typography – matters so much. Or why such a cumbersome and energy-consuming activity has easily survived all the technologies that have promised quicker and easier ways to communicate. Delbanco’s breeziness fails to convey the surpassing strangeness of writing, the way it stores and spreads information in the writer’s absence and speaks to distant, unknown others.

After Craft Beer, Craft Flour Milling

What industries are modeling a more equal, less bureaucratic future? Tim Wu asks us to consider flour milling:

By sheer volume, the flour industry is dominated by firms like Ardent Mills, North America’s largest miller, with annual sales of $3.5 billion. The dominant retail flour brand, Gold Medal Flour, belongs to General Mills, a conglomerate with some $17 billion in annual revenue. Most of the flour sold today is for commercial use and ends up in premade or processed food products.

Yet it is not these huge companies but the smaller sellers of flour that are flourishing. Consider King Arthur, founded in 1790 in Boston and now based in Vermont. It experienced a tripling of sales over the spring, buoyed by legions of new bakers in quarantine. (Sales at Gold Medal also went up, but not nearly as much.) Among consumers, King Arthur is probably best known for connecting with people who are learning to bake. Its website introduces them to new challenges, like building a sourdough starter and folding dough for baguettes, and the company has a hotline for bakers in distress.

But King Arthur is most distinguished by its corporate structure. It is a private company, owned entirely by its employees (it has about 350) and run by two chief executives. It is also a benefit corporation, which means that having a positive social impact is part of its legal corporate mission. Ralph Carlton, one of the company’s chief executives, says that its different structure leads it to act differently from other companies. “Being accountable to our employee-owners means we have to take them into account,” he told me. “We don’t believe in growth for growth’s sake. We are not under external requirements” from stock owners or market analysts. . . . 

The commodity industry takes flour as flour — just an ingredient, the cheaper the better. But baking is also an emotional experience, an act of creation in its beauty and intensity, a longstanding symbol of the home. And it provokes, in some, a yearning to connect with local soil and local land. That’s the appeal of a company like Maine Grains, which operates out of a repurposed jailhouse, and a new generation of regional grain companies, like Cairnspring Mills in Washington State and Castle Valley Mill in Pennsylvania. These mills produce not only whole wheat flours but also distinctive grains, such as yecora rojo, heritage red fife and spelt. Amy Halloran, the author of “The New Bread Basket,” about the local grain industry, told me these companies are making an effort to deliberately ignore the single-minded approach of the commodity market in favor of “best practices” for their regions. . . .

The flour industry might seem an unlikely arena for business innovation. There was once a time, in the 1990s and 2000s, when it was widely thought that Silicon Valley would show us the way to a better, fairer economy, creating entire ecosystems of companies with distinctive offerings. Yet that was before the emergence and eventual dominance of Amazon, Facebook and Google. Instead of high-tech, it is low-tech businesses like craft beer and community supported agriculture that seem to stand at the forefront of economic transformation.

I think this whole essay is important in many ways. First, if we really want to move away from economic dominance by a handful of giant corporations, we must  be willing to pay more for things. But, you know, most of us could; in our world food is so cheap that the choice to support local brewers,  millers, and vegetable growers is within our grasp. Shifting all our low-tech consumption to smaller, more local, more equitably-run firms would require some re-adjustment of our budgets, but we could do it if we cared enough.

Second, to take advantage of this companies have to go for emotional appeal, above all the appeal of caring: of caring about their product, their employees, their communities, the environment. "They don't care" is the universal plaint of the cynic, and to get past that cynicism requires some real work.

Capitalism is better than any other system at giving people what they want. If the world is to be different, that will have to start with people changing what they want, with choosing a less affluent but more connected and less cynical path. Many people on the left know this, of course, which is why they belong to food co-ops and frequent farmer's markets.

We don't need a revolution to create a more caring world. We need to change ourselves.

Links 24 July 2020

Max Ernst, The Sea and the Sun, 1926

What to do with fallen monuments? Russia has a park devoted to them.

Wonderful photographs of trees by Mikko Lagerstedt.

Good Washington Post article on superspreader events, and free like all their coronavirus coverage.

Inside Higher Ed reports on a study that found the biggest barriers to adults entering higher education are 1) time, and 2) self doubt. Cost is third. Tyler Cowen calls the salience of self doubt a "trivial" finding, in that everybody already knows it to be true, but it is nonetheless highly important.

Meanwhile in Libya, "As many as 2,500 Russian mercenaries from the shadowy Wagner Group have faced off against 3,500 Syrian civil war veterans recruited by Turkey in the proxy battle for control in Libya." Not to be outdone, the Russians have also started recruiting their own unit of Syrians. I guess if your country is a shambles and all you've done for five years is fight, mercenary work starts to look appealing.

The Silicon Tribesman photographs the Fairy Steps in Cumbria. If you like old British stuff – Roman forts, standing stones, hut circles – spend some time perusing the site.

John McWhorter thinks Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling White Fragility is racist, offensive to black people, and "the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult." I have now read half a dozen reviews of this book by black intellectuals and while some of them like DiAngelo better than McWhorter does they all seem pissed off that her book is raking in all the sales instead of something by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, or just about any other actual black person.

The solitary dolphin who has been living in Dingle Harbor, Ireland, for 36 years.

In Wake of Continued Gun Violence, Prominent Members of Black Community Call on NYPD to Bring Back Anti-Crime Unit

The cliff villages of Bandiagara, Mali, some of which look eerily like cliff villages in the US southwest.

Architecture and the Americans with Disabilities Act (NY Times). I continue to think that the ADA is a good model of how to deal with conflicts over civil rights issues. I guess that's because the disabled come from all ethnic groups and political factions, keeping things from ever degenerating into rank partisanship. Plus the police rarely kill people in wheelchairs.

The collapse of the Lebanese economy, which seems to be largely driven by massive corruption and theft by insiders. Shocking.

Great NASA video made of rover images from the surface of Mars; conveys the feel of the landscape better than anything else I have seen.

Slate Star Codex is back online, for now anyway.

The Decline of Family Life

One of the striking things about our time is that compared to recent centuries many fewer people live in a family unit that includes a married couple and children. One reason is longevity; most people live past the time when they had children in the house, and thanks to Social Security etc. many fewer of them end up living with their grown children. But that isn't the only explanation; there is also a major shift among young people, with marriage happening later and later and fewer people marrying.

Why?

Tyler Cowen cites research from Rachel Sheffield and Scott Winship that shows this does not result from economic problems or from a lack of "marriageable men", for example because so many are in prison. The main reason people aren't marrying is that they don't feel the need to:

– Rather than economic problems causing the increase in family instability, we argue that rising affluence is a better explanation. Our story is about declining co-dependence, increasing individualism and self-fulfillment, technological advances, expanded opportunities, and the loosening of moral constraints. We discuss the paradox that associational and family life has been more resilient among the more affluent. It’s an argument we advance admittedly speculatively, but it has the virtue of being a consistent explanation for broader associational declines too. We hope it inspires research hypotheses that will garner the kind of attention that marriageability has received.

– The explanation section closes with a look at whether the expansion of the federal safety net has affected family instability. We acknowledge that the research on select safety net program generosity doesn’t really support a link. But we also show that focusing on this or that program (typically AFDC or TANF) misses the forest. We present new estimates showing that the increase in safety net generosity has been on the same order of magnitude as the increase in nonmarital birth rates.

Obviously this study isn't the last word on the issue but I think this is an important point. Marriage used to be very much about economic security. In peasant societies a family was an economic unit as much as a biological or emotional one, and much of this lingered into recent times. The modern model, developed by the Victorians, saw the family as a secure refuge from a tumultuous world. Now that single people can easily support themselves and draw on a raft of professional services for everything from laundry to pet sitting, there is simply less need to have partners. I think this economic reality has slowly fed back into the culture, leading to less of a felt need to marry and settle down, leading to later marriage and smaller families. 

I don't see anything wrong with this; after all many people entered or stayed in bad marriages because they felt they had no choice, and getting away from that is great. But living alone has its own dark side.

Tenth-Century Jewelry Mold from Switzerland

This stone jewelry mold was recently excavated in Chur, the capital of the Swiss canton of Grisons. The uneven square measures 9 x 8.3 x 3 centimeters (3.5 x 3.3 x 1.2 inches). These are very rare objects, and the 10th century was pretty much the nadir of economic activity in Europe, so quite cool. Although the buildings at the site were held up by wooden posts and thus rather primitive, there was much evidence of craft production, including waste pieces of glass, metal, horn, and bone. Via The History Blog.

Nighthawks from Start to Finish

An intriguing look at how Edward Hopper created one of his masterpieces, via No Brash Festivity

Strange Doings in Portland

Former FBI Director James Comey on Trump's deployment of federal agents to Portland:

Each day brings more images of dark-green-clad, helmeted figures striking and spraying unarmed protesters on the streets of Portland, Ore. The figures are federal officers, rejected by local leaders and embraced by President Trump, who speaks of spreading that federal presence to other troubled cities

It is not clear, says Comey, that this is illegal, but

What is clear is that they are acting stupidly, a mistake they may be about to repeat in other places, with lasting consequences for federal law enforcement.

With some protesters itching for street confrontations with officers in full tactical gear, federal officials are giving a small group of violent people what they want. And they are giving the citizens of Portland — and the rest of us, no matter our politics — what we don’t want: the specter of unconstrained and anonymous force from a central government authority. It has been the stuff of American nightmares since 1776.

Fairly or unfairly, visions of Department of Homeland Security officers in camo without apparent identifying insignia dragging people into unmarked vans are now seared into the collective memory. Federal law enforcement, like all parts of the justice system, depends upon the faith and confidence of the American people, a credibility now being spent, recklessly, by the Trump administration. And the Department of Homeland Security, a key element of this administration’s chaotic and often immoral immigration enforcement, had precious little credibility left to spend in the first place. Thanks to Portland, its cupboard is now empty.

And even if it weren’t behavior inconsistent with American values and self-defeating for the agencies involved, it is also just plain dumb to give protesters another sinister embodiment of the feds to rail against. . . .

So it’s dumb and self-defeating on many levels for the feds to engage the way they have in Portland. No sensible law enforcement leader would approach it this way. Which begs a question: Is televised conflict the goal?

You have to think, yes, that is the goal.

And what do I think people should do about this provocation? Well, exactly what one group of protesters is doing, the Portland Moms who have confronted federal agents by singing lullabies.

Now the images many people will remember from this fiasco will be lots of pleasant-looking women singing to scary-looking government thugs.

What will not defeat American authoritarianism is not antifa bros "fighting back," but regular people refusing to meet violence with violence.

And voting.

Designed to be Hard to Saw Through

The wonders of modern materials:

Researchers from the UK's Durham University and Germany's Fraunhofer Institute claim they've come up with the world's first manufactured non-cuttable material, just 15 percent the density of steel, which they say could make for indestructible bike locks and lightweight armor.

The material, named Proteus, uses ceramic spheres in a cellular aluminum structure to foil angle grinders, drills and the like by creating destructive vibrations that blunt any cutting tools used against it. The researchers took inspiration from the tough, cellular skin of grapefruit and the hard, fracture-resistant aragonite shells of molluscs in their creation of the Proteus design.

An angle grinder or drill bit will cut through the outer layer of a Proteus plate, but once it reaches the embedded ceramic spheres, the fun begins with vibrations that blunt the tool's sharp edges, and then fine particles of ceramic dust begin filling up gaps in the matrix-like structure of the metal. These cause it to become even harder the faster you grind or drill.

le parc national de pyrenees

It's damnably hot and humid in Catonsville, so my thoughts take me to the mountains, to someplace high, dry, and cool. To the Pyrenees, the rugged mountains that define the border between France and Spain. To the French department of Haute Pyrenees, and to the wonderful national park that occupies the highest reaches of the mountains.

We begin in the lower valleys where there are many charming villages, once devoted to wool and sheep's milk cheese but kept lively by 150 years of tourism.

Not that there isn't still plenty of cheese – this is France, after all.

There are a few medieval churches and many houses and mills dating to the 1600s, all built in the local stone.

From whichever village is our starting point we make our way higher up the valley, passing farms and pasture.

The mountains loom up around us.

We enter the high country, one of the wildest parts of Europe, home to brown bears, golden eagles, and the mountain goats called here Isards.

Small lakes abound, more than 200 just in the national park.

And streams, with waterfalls.

Most spectacularly in the Cirque de Gavarnie, one of Europe's most famous hikes, where the Grand Falls plunge more than 420 meters.

Around us now are the Pyrenean peaks, a whole chain of mountains topping 3,000 meters (10,000 ft).

Lovely.

And, I imagine, cool.