At the New Yorker, a fabulous piece from Daniel Immerwahr comparing Franz Fanon and Ian Fleming, two misogynistic lovers of violence who viewed the end of European empire from opposite sides.
Lovely post on the Clickimin Broch on Shetland, from The Smell of Water (aka Teeside Psychogeography)
NASA report says beaming power to earth from space-based solar arrays will not be feasible until after 2050, and even then the enormous emissions from rocket launches will keep it from being very green.
Optimistic take on Japan's economic future, partly due to immigration.
Via Scott Siskind, a genealogy showing the descent of Joe Biden from Odin.
Taylor Swift is a Pentagon/Biden Administration asset, mobilizing a "childless unmarried abortion army" for nefarious Democrat/regime purposes. Or so sources say.
Tyler Cowen has a few thoughts on the future of AI in education.
A new Roman docecahedron found in England. Interesting that more than a hundred have been found, but there is not a single mention of them in any known classical text, or depiction of one in ancient art. I don't find them especially mysterious, though; I think they must be oracles.
Kevin Drum points us to an almost unbelievable screed by Matthew Crawford on the rage felt by the "spirited man" when confronted with a motion sensitive bathroom faucet. How emasculating to have no handle.
Interesting short article on the Wa, an ethnic group who have established an autonomous zone on the Burma/China border using the profits of their enormous heroin trade.
Freakonomics podcast (and transcript) on why there is so much academic fraud: "If you were just a rational agent acting in the most self-interested way possible, as a researcher in academia, I think you would cheat."
Thomas Edsall on what it means that some evangelical Christians see Trump as a "savior"; the most common comparison is to the Persian king Cyrus, who was sent by God to free the Jews from captivity in Babylon despite being a pagan idolater.
Interesting NY Times story by Alexandra Stevenson and Zixu Wang arguing that clumsy Chinese government efforts to promote marriage and child-bearing are only driving the marriage rate lower by making many women feel that marriage is a government-sponsored scheme to control them.
I have been reading worrying articles for years about the rising maternal death rate in the US, but apparently (Noah Smith, Kevin Drum) this is entirely a statistical artifact of a new method for counting maternal deaths; using the old measure, the rate has not changed at all in 25 years. (The new method is almost certainly more accurate,)
Every year NASA doles out a modest sum of money, this year a total of $175,000, to help develop various wild ideas in space science; this year's 13 winners including a plan to reach Proxima Centauri with a swarm of small, light-sail propelled ships.
Remarkable mirror and huge sword found in Japanese tomb dating to the 4th century AD.
Via Alex Tabarrok, an excellent article dispelling one American myth: "No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend." Convincing, but I do wonder about names not generally written in the Latin alphabet; who made the transcription?
No specifics, but US Navy spokesmen are talking up all they are learning from shooting down Houthi drones and missiles; plus, the sailors are really enjoying it. Nothing like a bit of low-risk violence to fire up young men.
The new University of Austin, committed to "the fearless pursuit of the truth," plans to take in its first students in the Fall; glimpse of their undergraduate program here. I may have more to say about this when I have digested it.
Depressing statistics on how many missiles and artillery shells Russia can make or buy each month. It is increasingly clear that Russia can sustain the war in Ukraine for years.
Thread on X arguing that the re-opening of Black Sea shipping is Ukraine's most important strategic success since the liberation of Kherson; shipping is approaching pre-war levels, and insurance costs are down to 1.25% per voyage. This was achieved by making the western Black Sea a no-go zone for Russian surface vessels.
4 comments:
Re: correction wrt counting maternal deaths it reminded me a lot of alarming articles I read about rise of teenage suicide in Poland. Only after a year or so I read an explanation similar to the one given - it was not so much sucides rising, but they were better counted by the police, as before, because of stigma of suicide in a catholic country, teenage suicides were recorded as accidents etc. Another reminder that it's hard to compare the data between now and data from the past.
Far be it from me to defend a (or yet another) machismo-obsessed right-winger, but it has to be said: "he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elicit a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras" is a brilliant line. And accurate. Now, I think doin' them mudras is hilarious, not enraging, but then I would: I'm a flabby liberal.
I wonder if the sentence came first, and then Crawford came up with the rest around it.
Also note, he doesn't seem as upset about motion-sensor toilets. Anyone miss THOSE handles?
Via Alex Tabarrok, an excellent article dispelling one American myth: "No one’s family name was changed, altered, shortened, butchered, or “written down wrong” at Ellis Island or any American port. That idea is an urban legend." Convincing, but I do wonder about names not generally written in the Latin alphabet; who made the transcription?
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The charge against immigration officials, however, is provably false: no names were written down at Ellis Island, and thus no names were changed there. The names of arriving passengers were already written down on manifests required by the federal government, lists which crossed the ocean with the passengers.
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Here is a sampling of recent statements in an online forum asking people whether they believe that such a thing happened:1
My family name was probably shortened from something Eastern European to something German, certainly at Ellis Island.
My great-grandfather came through and the name was shortened and changed by the worker.
Some of my relatives’ surnames were recorded incorrectly on arrival.
My great-grandfather and his two brothers came over together from Lithuania and left Ellis Island with three different last names.
Our Italian surname was changed at Ellis Island when my great-grandparents came over.
If one is to believe these earnest posters, the surnames of immigrants to the United States were routinely treated in a shoddy, unprofessional manner by the government representatives at American ports.
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This seems to be mincing hairs somewhat. So what if the names were recorded on manifests that were made upon the immigrant's departure, rather than upon arrival? Some human being still had to fill out these manifests, even if they weren't necessarily a government employee! And such people could and surely did make mistakes - particularly since, logically, few of them would have been competent speakers of the languages of the immigrants!
If you were immigrating to America aboard one of the big steamships of the 1800s, and the US government required such immigrants to be listed in manifests... then we can safely assume those manifests were the responsibility of the ships carrying said immigrants, and the companies that ran them.
British companies overwhelmingly dominated the atlantic shipping trade - The White Star Line, The Blue Star Line, The Cunard Line, The Guion Line, The Royal Mail Line, The Allan Line, The Anchor Line, The Dominion Line, The Inman Line, et cetera, et cetera.
American companies were the primary competition - The Red Star Line, The Black Ball Line, The American Line, The Swallowtail Line, et cetera.
2/2
After that, there were a few German companies - North German Lloyd, The Hamburg-America Line, et cetera.
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And I do not remotely doubt that the exact situation mocked above - where a forum poster claimed their family name had been changed from an Eastern European name to a German one - was a real and routine occurrence for those traveling on one of these German steamship lines! This was a period of intense German nationalism and ethnic bias.
Do you doubt for a second that some German employee in charge of filling out passenger manifests would hesitate at all to Germanify some "unpronounceable" Polish or Hungarian or Ukrainian name? They might even do so out of a twisted sense of "kindness", thinking that they would be helping the would-be-Americans to fit in better with "a fine German name", rather than something less familiar from Eastern Europe.
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There were a few other lines, as well - the Dutch, the French, and the Italians all a small line or two. And I'm sure there were a decent number of immigrants from those countries which traveled on those lines, and so were processed by people who knew the languages and spellings of names.
But the fact remains - the vast majority of immigrants to America came in on ships operated by Anglophones, chiefly ignorant of other languages, who were often also quite racist and dismissive of the native cultures of these immigrants.
And this would have led to MANY people having their names changed "at Ellis Island", because that was where these modified and mangled manifests would be processed and accepted - and where those poor, maligned "government representatives at American ports" likely were either unwilling or unable to discover the discrepancies and correct them.
Do you imagine that some huddled family of Corsicans who barely speak a half dozen words of English are going to be able to explain to the person receiving them at Ellis Island that their surname was misspelled or even completely changed by the Frenchman who listed them on the manifest? Or some Slovaks who fled Europe through a German port? Or some Sicilians who came over on a British liner? Many of these people couldn't even read or write in their own language, much less English or French or German!
This "debunking" of a "myth" is at best barely technically correct - but it extrapolates FAR beyond what it should, and attempts to dismiss the entire possibility of names being changed. I find it deeply offensive that such lazy thinking should be accompanied by such smug self-satisfaction on the part of the authors. They should be ashamed of themselves.
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