"You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German or a Turk or a Japanese. But anyone from any corner of the earth can come to live in America and become an American."
Video here.
As I have said, I am willing to debate the practicalities of immigration, what number and what sort of people we should accept, but fundamentally I love this about my country.
Surveys lately have found that many Americans don't want to be promoted. It's a hard thing to measure, since nobody tracks how many people were offered promotion but turned it down, but I have seen several different results showing that around half of people would refuse promotion if they were offered it. We also had a couple of accidential experiments done when companies tried to bribe people to come back to the office:
Take Dell, whose executives thought they came up with an ingenious plan to get everyone back into the office. If employees didn't come in at least three days a week, the company announced in February, they would be ineligible for a promotion. The response from Dell's workforce was a collective shrug. Months after the directive, nearly half of employees were still remote, apparently happy to remain in their current roles as long as they could keep working from home. It was a clear sign that in 2024, promotions just aren't the incentive they used to be.
I'm certainly in that situation; I never had any interest in further promotion once I became a principal investigator, that is, the lead scientist on my projects. When I have accepted management roles it was basically because there wasn't anyone else to do them. I tried for a couple of years to refuse raises – because in my business the more money you make, the less time you have to do technical work and the more you have to focus on management – but my boss waived off my objections, because she was worried that if we had a slowdown somebody would look around, see that this Bedell guy had been denied raises two years in a row, and decide to lay me off first.
But the desire to climb the corporate ladder isn't exactly ancient:
The original work ethic in America — the Protestant one, espoused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin — dates from a time when most Americans were self-employed as farmers and artisans. It was rooted in a rugged individualism that was skeptical of authority and hierarchies, fitting for a country founded on the idea of freedom from tyranny.
That became a problem when the Industrial Revolution arrived. Companies exploded in size, and more and more Americans found themselves working for someone else. In 1820, 80% of the workforce was self-employed. By 1870, that share had shrunk to 33%. By 1940, it was 20%.
"The moral vision of American society had been based upon the image of the independent, self-employed person," writes Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School who has studied the history of work. "Many social critics feared that people would be less likely to work hard under the wage system and, even worse, that something in their very natures might change." America was facing an identity crisis.
The solution was to forge a whole new work ethic.
That is, the ethic of climbing the ladder. Which is also, of course, related to the decline in hereditary class distinctions and the rise of meritocracy, and to the growth of huge bureaucracies like those in the Federal and state governments and mega-corporations.
None of the articles I have seen mention this, but I have to think that our ever-growing wealth also plays a role. In our society people like nurses and archaeologists can lead quite nice lives, with houses and yards and the internet and hundreds of tv channels. If you feel financially ok, why seek out a more stressful job?
Like millions of my contemporaries, I think medium chill is the happiest kind of life.
In the NY Times this week, Alexandra Alter has a very interesting profile of Susannah Clarke. Clarke gets my vote for the most creative fantasy writer of the 21st century, and, yep, she's pretty crazy.
Clarke burst onto the scene with Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004), which sold 4 million copies and was widely proclaimed a truly great work of fantasy. I was ambivalent. On the one hand, it is full of wonders; one of my favorite bits describes ancient fairy roads that still run across northern England, now mostly abandoned and choked with trees and brush, never mentioned by the people who live nearby. The British tradition includes many stories about people who join fairy balls and don't return for a century; Clarke describes such a ball, conveying both the beauty of it and the unspeakable weariness of a party that never ends. I devoured these details, and transcribed half a dozen passages into my commonplace book. On the other hand, I disliked the plot and found one of the two main characters (Norrell) to be one of the most irritating people in the history of fiction. So I didn't love it like many others did, but I did recognize it as a remarkable achievement.
From the moment it appeared there were rumors that Clarke was working on a sequel, but somehow it never emerged. Most fans only learned years later what had happened:
Not long after the novel’s release, Clarke and her husband were having dinner with friends near their home in Derbyshire, England. In the middle of the meal, she felt nauseated and wobbly, got up from the table, and collapsed.
In the years that followed, she struggled to write. Her symptoms — migraines, exhaustion, sensitivity to light and fogginess — made working for sustained periods impossible. She wrote scattered fragments that never cohered; sometimes she couldn’t finish a single sentence. At a low point, she was bed-bound and mired in depression.
Clarke stopped thinking of herself as a writer.
“It became a problem of just not believing that I could write anymore. I just didn’t think it was possible,” said Clarke, who was later diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. “I just thought of myself as this ill woman.”
Clarke eventually recovered enough to write seriously again, but she abandoned her first world and wrote something completely different instead. Piranesi (2020) is the story of a man trapped in a labyrinth with no end. Part of what traps him is the weak state of his own memory, his inability to recall who he used to be and how he became what he is. I loved it, read it straight through from beginning to end. But when you think about it, the story transparently springs from Clarke's experience with her mysterious illness, and Alter confirms this:
The philosophical puzzle at the story’s center reflected some of Clarke’s preoccupations: The narrator, Piranesi, lives largely alone with seabirds and stone figures, but instead of feeling lost or lonely, he sees the halls as a place of infinite wonders.
Clarke had nearly finished the novel before she saw the parallels between the fictional labyrinth and her illness.
“I was subliminally aware that I was writing about someone in a fairly isolated position, but who was able to find a huge amount of meaning in that,” she said.
Which is an amazing example of making lemonade from lemons. It also connects back to what may the second oldest trope about art, that it has roots in pain and suffering: the sadness of life is the joy of art. If Susannah Clarke's illness birthed Piranesi, doesn't that raise the question of whether her suffering was ultimately a bad thing?
Should artists have to suffer so the rest of us can read books like Piranesi, or enjoy paintings like the ones Van Gogh did in Arles?
But I want to get even broader than that. Alter finds that Clarke seems to be recovering from her illness, but she remains a strange person:
In her lap she held a stuffed pig, with a stuffed fox nestled beside her; both creatures play a role in “The Wood at Midwinter.” She likes to hold her stuffed animals when she’s working, to help her think, and as a talisman “to ward off, I don’t know what, something or other.”
“Some people do things as a child, and then when they grow up, they put off childish things,” she said. “I’m not very good at that.”
Glancing down at the pig, she added, “I don’t really see the point of growing up.”
Which gets us back to where we started. What if it is true that to be a great artist one must be crazy, or at least strange?
Or, to get more personal, have I generally failed as a fantasy writer because I am simply too sane, too happy, too rooted in this world?
Clarke's troubles don't seem to have broken her spirit, and she is forging ahead with new plans:
Along with the new novel set in the world of “Strange and Norrell,” Clarke is also working on another book, set partly during the Industrial Revolution in 1840s Bradford, where she lived as a child. Clarke described it as an “anti-horror” novel, with a fantastical premise that reflects her belief that something sublime is hidden within the mundane.
Clarke is still drawn to the idea of magic. For her, magic isn’t something otherworldly and distant, it’s “the idea of something elemental, something transcendent” that exists all around us.
“I feel very strongly that if you could see the world as it really is, if you could get further beyond your ego and the sorts of ways in which we trap ourselves, if you could just see the world beyond, every moment would be miraculous,” she said.
She’s come to believe that the limitations imposed by her illness haven’t made her any less of a writer. She’s a different writer now, but no less ambitious or inventive.
“Somebody said to me, pray the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to, and I think it’s the same for writing: Write the way you can and not the way you think you’re supposed to,” Clarke said. “I’ve only ever had any success by doing my own weird thing, following the path that’s in front of me.”
Review of Richard Dawkins' new, very speculative book, The Genetic Book of the Dead.
List of the best posts from rationalist Robin Hanson's years of blogging.
The folks planning to build a new town called Esmerelda in wine country 90 minutes north of San Francisco; they say they are inspired by the nineteenth-century Chataqua movement. Summary on Twitter/X.
New nasal spray vaccines for flu and Covid are performing better than injections in current trials.
More development proposed along DC's Anacostia waterfront; I have had a small part in transforming this area from urban wasteland to thriving community.
Good NY Times article on why Roman concrete has proved so durable. One of the theories discussed is the same one I linked to last year, that the nodules of lime in the mix make the resulting concrete self-healing, and so the presence of those undissolved lumps was intentional. But there are other theories, including some that focus on chemical reactions involving volcanic ash.
Kevin Drum looks into Elon Musks' compaints about environmental regulators.
It is possible to die from being impaled by a swordfish.
Production of Shakespeare's plays is declining in America. But is that really news, or is it more remarkable that in an environment generally hostile to European history, and particularly hostile to some of Shakespeare's themes, there were still 40 professional productions of his plays over the past year?
Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to the people who designed AI systems for understanding protein folding and devising new proteins with a desired shape. (Press Release, New York Times, 12-minute video)
Ben Pentreath sells his old country house in Dorset, with the amazing garden I have featured here several times over the years, and moves to a historic house in Orkney with "so much potential." Farewell tea at his old house here.
Sabine Hossenfelder takes a look at computer scientist Stephen Wolfram's attempt to create a "theory of everything" using hypergraphs, finds it intriguing, 10-minute video.
Lidar mapping of two medieval cities in Uzbekistan. Both on mountaintops, because central Asia was a dangerous place back then.
A small but lavishly decorated house uncovered in Pompeii. To me one of the most important things we learn from Pompeii is how brightly colored the ancient world was, not just temples and villas but streetcorner restaurants and ordinary homes.
Paul Bloom says you should only believe findings in social science when they contradict the ideology of the people doing or publishing the study.
Investigating the fruit in Renaissance paintings, with an eye toward recovering lost or nearly lost varieties.
The essay as a work of architecture, which needs an impressive entrance to draw you in.
Scott Siskind at the Progress Studies Conference.
Kevin Drum is puzzled by the conflicting stories about shoplifting in the US. How bad a problem is it? and is it getting worse or better?
Michael Horowitz in Foreign Affairs: "One report suggests the [Iranian] strike [on Israel] cost about $80 million to launch but $1 billion to defend against. A wealthy country and its allies could afford that sort of expense a few times—but maybe not 20 times, 30 times, or 100 times." Twitter/X
Via Kevin Drum, here's a fairly large study of teenagers who received "gender affirming" care and mostly felt good about it; of 220 subjects, only 9 expressed regret.
Which is interesting, and this looks like a pretty good study. But:
The sample in the present work was unique in a few ways that are notable for interpretation of these results. Most showed signs of their transgender identity by 4 years of age. On average, they socially transitioned at age 6.7 years, and most were fairly binary in their gender identities and gender expressions throughout childhood. Early-identifying youth who are especially insistent about their identities are also more likely to socially transition in childhood and identify as transgender or continue to show gender dysphoria in adolescence and early adulthood.
Right. This study says nothing about the strange recent surge in "sudden onset gender dysphoria", those teenagers who suddenly have doubts about their genders as puberty kicks in, and who have remarkable levels of other mental health problems. It also only concerns strict gender switchers and says nothing about the non-binary or the gender-fluid.
I mention this partly because I keep meeting older liberals who think they are pro-trans but whose model only concerns people like the subjects of this study, those who have identified strongly since childhood with the gender that doesn't match their biology. When I say to them, ok, but that's not what most trans discourse is about these days, now we have people who think they can change their minds about their genders at any point and should be able to switch back and forth whenever they feel like it, they often react by saying, "That's not trans!"
As I have said here several times, I try not to care about what other adults do; none of my business, really, and I am perfectly willing to be respectful to anyone who is respectful to me. And I don't have any real issues with the kind of children covered by this study. But that doesn't mean there are no questions to ask about the trans movement as currently constructed, particulary on the subject of teenagers with mental health issues, quite a few of whom have sued the people who, as they now see it, responded to their adolescent mental health crises by encouraging them to transition.
But my real beef with trans activists is their habit of insisting "you should think X," to which my response is always, "no." What I think is nobody else's business, and I refuse to engage with anyone who says otherwise.
Many Ukrainians fear not just a long war, but a potentially ‘endless’ war. As the Russian historian Sergei Medvedev has observed, Russia finally found its ultimate national idea after a search lasting three decades – since the collapse of the USSR – and that idea is war.
For today’s Russian authorities, war is a tool for preserving the cohesion of society and ensuring the legitimacy of their rule even if this requires increased repression. However, although the Putin regime is brittle like most personal autocracies that lack reliable mechanisms for succession, the country appears far from a situation comparable to 1917 when war weakened Tsar Nicolas II’s grip on power and made revolution unstoppable. On the surface, Russia appears both equipped and motivated to continue the war for several years if necessary. . . .
While Vladimir Putin controls the levers of power, it is difficult to see a recalibration of Moscow’s strategic goals in Ukraine. He has committed Russia to expanding its territorial gains in Donbas, ‘demilitarizing’ Ukraine, changing the country’s leadership (denazification) and forcing it to accept neutrality. The goal is the full abolition of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Ukraine is not Finland in 1939. On the contrary, it is viewed by wide sections of Russian society as an inalienable part of the country’s identity as a European power and, therefore, as synonymous with Russia. For the Russian elites as well as the public, settling for less than Ukraine’s surrender would not amount to victory and could call into question the huge price paid by the country in terms of human and economic losses and the damage to its reputation.
I share this outlook. It is difficult to imagine any peace amounting to more than a cease fire as long as Putin is in power. He has committed everything – his personal power and prestige, and the resources and even the identity of Russia – to conquering Ukraine. All we can do is surrender to this evil or help Ukraine fight.
So YouTube randomly offered me a French pop song, "Désenchantée" by Mylène Farmer. Curious, I listened. It's an ok song, and Farmer is obviously a star-level performer. The choreographer of the dancers, is, alas, truly horrendous, some real Eurovision-level tripe.
The video is shot in a stadium full of screaming fans. Farmer sings the song once, then walks out into the audience and has them sing it back to her; thousands of these people know the song by heart.
I can read French, sort of, but my oral comprehension is terrible. So I looked up the lyrics. As you would expect from a song called "Disenchanted," they are pretty grim.
Swimming in the troubled waters of tomorrowsThere is a second verse, then he chorus again, and then
Waiting here for the end
Floating in the air too heavy
Of almost nothing
Who can I reach out to?
If I have to fall from a great height
May my fall be slow
I have found no rest
Except in indifference
However, I would like to find innocence again
But nothing makes sense, and nothing is going well
Everything is chaos next to it
All my ideals: damaged words
I am looking for a soul who can help me
I am from a disenchanted, disenchanted generation
Chaos, chaos, chaos
Chaos, chaos, chaos
But, look around the stadium at the people belting out these words; does anybody look sad? No, they look like this is at least the best day of the month for them, if not the whole year.
It struck that this one of the themes of modern culture: nothing makes people feel as good as singing along with up tempo songs about the collapse of civilization and the misery of existence.
Recruiting bank robbers on Instagram turned out to be a bad idea.
Supreme Court wades into the case of a man arrested for "being an asshole."
Bonkers experiment shows that bumblebee queens prefer to dig their winter burrows in soil contaminated with pesticides. (NY Times, original paper)
This week's past post is Questioning Everything, from 2017.
Asahi Shinbun says there is a shortage of animators in Japan, for which the main cause is low wages, for which the main cause is that the company doing the animation can get as little as 6 percent of the income from a film or tv series.
Anybody want your own small New England college for $5.5 million? What a fantasy.
Burial site in France used for 800 years provides more evidence that Neolithic Europeans were patrilineal and patrilocal, since these 37 majority male skeletons are mostly from the same male lineage.
Clay seals from Bronze Age Iran.
Exploring a 3D scan of Shackleton's ship Endurance.
Major study from Apple on the reasoning probems of LLMs. (Study, summary article, shorter summary on Twitter/X) "There is just no way you can build reliable agents on this foundation, where changing a word or two in irrelevant ways or adding a few bit of irrelevant info can give you a different answer."
More discourse today around the subject of felons voting, with the idea that letting felons vote helps Democrats. But that is false; a majority of felons are white men, and like other white men they generally vote Republican. That's in a normal year; I bet Trump gets a higher than usual share of the felon vote.
Why kids should read obituaries. Via Marginal Revolution.
Sabine Hossenfelder on the status of quantum computing, 7-minute video.
Political polarization in Silicon Valley. (Twitter/X) After giving most of the political contributions to Democrats in 2004-2020, they now split pretty evenly between the parties. I think this is entirely a reaction against woke excesses.
Matt Yglesias: "Every faction of MAGA leverages the fact that their champion is a notorious liar to convince themselves that he is secretly on their side about everything when all he’s ever done across his career is betray people and enrich himself."
A claim that hominids called Homo naledi buried their dead 200,000 years ago, but note that this project is controversial and many anthropologists don't even accept Homo naledi as a distinct species.
Kevin Drum on why the inflation of recent years has felt worse to consumers than the data suggests.
Australian study of "critical technologies": "These new results reveal the stunning shift in research leadership over the past two decades towards large economies in the Indo-Pacific, led by China’s exceptional gains. The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023, increasing its lead from our rankings last year (2018–2022), where it was leading in 52 technologies."
The most famous book from 16th-century Mexico, La Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España, compiled by Bernardino de Sahagún and a bunch of Native assistants, has now been put online by the Getty in an amazing, searchable version.
The global "wind phone" movement.
Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Party, says he would give Russia at 24 hour ultimatum to stop bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine. If it does not stop, he would provide Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine with no restrictions on targeting. Quotes Montaigne: "fear is the mother of all cruelty."
Matt Yglesias explains what's wrong with the conservative reaction to wokeness. A few years ago in the George Floyd era leftists attacked Hamilton for glorifying our racist found fathers. Lin Manuel Miranda responded with a comment something like, "They have a point." And now to this week:
Hamilton was killed in the woke fervor of the George Floyd and 1619 Project era. Nothing that painted the American Founding as flawed-but-ultimately-good was allowed to survive.
But, as Yglesias says:
No, this is what’s so crazy about this discourse — Hamilton is currently playing on Broadway and in London, their North America tour is in Denver right now and opening Philadelphia soon, international tours are playing Sydney & Dublin.
Conservatives vastly overrate the power of woke culture outside its academic home, which causes them to embrace all sorts of wickedness so long as it is anti-woke, and to think of politicians who oppose it as heroes, when every Republican politican in America only gains votes from such a stand.
The real problem in America is hysteria: hysterical beliefs about economic and social collapse, hysterical fear of the other party, hysterical fear of immigrants, hysterical fear of censorship, hysterical fear of the government. What I long for right now is for a conservative leader to come forward and proclaim, like Taft, a return to normalcy.
Interesting personal narrative by Nabeel Qureshia, a very ambitious young man who went to work for Palantir. (I was able to access this via Marginal Revolution.) He makes it seem cool, people working extreme hours partly because they find what they are doing fascinating and important. "These were seriously intense, competitive people who wanted to win, true believers; weird, fascinating people who read philosophy in their spare time, went on weird diets, and did 100-mile bike rides for fun." One of the people who interviewed him had the temperature in his office set to 60 degrees and constantly chewed ice, because of some theory that this improves cognitive function.
The combo of intellectual grandiosity and intense competitiveness was a perfect fit for me. It’s still hard to find today, in fact – many people have copied the ‘hardcore’ working culture and the ‘this is the Marines’ vibe, but few have the intellectual atmosphere, the sense of being involved in a rich set of ideas. This is hard to LARP – your founders and early employees have to be genuinely interesting intellectual thinkers. The main companies that come to mind which have nailed this combination today are OpenAI and Anthropic. It’s no surprise they’re talent magnets. . . .
The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d. As a rationalist-brained philosophy graduate, this particular point was deeply important to me – I wasn’t interested in joining an uncritical cult. But a cult of skeptical people who cared deeply and wanted to argue about where the world was going and how software fit into it – existentially – that was interesting to me.
I am fascinated by the kind of intellect represented here. On the one hand, these people are really smart, and they get rich by building cool things. But I always come away thinking that something is lacking. Here is another insight that feeds into my disquiet:
One of my favorite insights from Tyler Cowen’s book Talent is that the most talented people tend to develop their own vocabularies and memes, and these serve as entry points to a whole intellectual world constructed by that person. Tyler himself is of course a great example of this. Any MR reader can name 10+ Tylerisms instantly - ‘model this’, ‘context is that which is scarce’, ‘solve for the equilibrium’, ‘the great stagnation’ are all examples. You can find others who are great at this. Thiel is one. Elon is another (“multiplanetary species”, “preserving the light of consciousness”, etc. are all memes). Trump, Yudkowsky, gwern, SSC, Paul Graham, all of them regularly coin memes. It turns out that this is a good proxy for impact.
Maybe that's true. Mulling over some other major thinkers, it seems to me that Jesus and Confucius both had this talent for generating impressive "memes." So did Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson. But is it enough?
Enough for what?
Enough for human flourishing.
I have mentioned here several times that brilliant scientists have a terrible record when it comes to politics. Elon Musk's public self-humiliation seems to me only the latest example of what happens when a person who is brilliant in some technical ways tries to pontificate about something really complex and important, e.g., free speech, or politics. And I don't just mean because he supports Trump, I mean his descent into utter incoherence. To maintain a political position that has ideological content but also deals with reality is, it seems, very difficult, and being smart is not enough to get your there.
But there is more to the rationalist tech-bro thing that one might worry about. For example, the weakness for dumb fads in diet and medicine; the constant search for nootropic drugs that would make them smarter or harder working; the insistence on condensing a thinker like Nietzsche into a meme like "good things are good."
Sometimes, being smart is enough; sometimes great knowledge of the past can be an impediment rather than an advantage. Mathematicians and poets often do their best work before they turn 30.
But in other circumstances shallow brilliance is at best inadequate and perhaps destructive. Sometimes a mind racing forward in a nootropic haze leaves behind all that vague stuff that goes by names like roots and meaning and connection. Hi tech success may be all that some people want or need, but I see the world differently and want a different kind of life.
By some measures, the University of Michigan has the most comprehensive program for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the US. But even though the school has spent, by its own reckoning, $250 million on DEI efforts, NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore found that nobody is satisfied.
Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”
Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.
Professors and administrators who spoke critically of the program insisted on anonymity, because, as one administrator (a “woman of color”) put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”
The one measurable outcome of the program has been a rise in disputes:
The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)
Then came October 7 and campus disputes in which both sides accused the other of racism and the DEI bureaucracy did exactly nothing to smooth things over or promote dialogue.
It's a sad tale of bureaucratic overreach and the deep truth that sometimes “fighting” what you hate is pointless or worse.
Via Kevin Drum, a great article by Jack Herrera in Texas Monthly about the US southern border and why current policies will never stop the flow of migrants:
The current border crisis is a symptom of a much deeper transformation in the U.S. and across much of the Western Hemisphere. It won’t be solved by tough-talking politicians posing next to coils of razor wire. There are greater forces at play.
One of those forces is the worsening economic and political calamity across much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Violence committed by gangs and corrupt cops in Marco’s native Honduras—and in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Venezuela—has also driven tens of thousands northward. But arguably the most important factor—one too rarely considered—is the interplay of supply and demand. In 2021, as the pandemic began to ease, “We’re Hiring” signs started to appear in the windows of businesses across the U.S. Acute labor shortages hobbled entire industries, interrupting supply chains and fueling inflation. In response, a record number of workers crossed the southern border.
Many industries have slowly recovered from the COVID-era labor crisis. Economists generally agree that the surge in immigration played a huge role in that recovery. But across the country, employers still say they can’t fill vacancies, even as some have increased wages to varying degrees. “America is facing a worker shortage crisis: There are too many open jobs without people to fill them,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in September. According to the chamber, Texas has just eighty workers for every hundred open jobs.
The deficit in construction is historic, by some measures. Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association, reported that in 2022 the industry averaged more job openings per month than it had ever recorded. Texas building executives are speaking in apocalyptic terms about the labor shortage they’re still facing. Behind closed doors, they bluntly acknowledge that countless new projects won’t get off the ground unless they hire workers who are in the country illegally.
Of course the construction industry could raise wages and hope to recruit more of the native born, but that would not be a simple fix. They have gotten used to relying on cheap migrant labor and have been setting their prices accordingly; having to raise wages suddenly would pinch them hard when they are often tied into multi-year contracts. Also, fewer and fewer native born Americans are going into construction. I remember discussing this with my sons. My brother and I both did some construction in our youths, but none of my sons have. When I asked them about it, they waved off the idea; they simply don't regard it as work people like them do. Herrera says that across the rich nations of the world, "the children of accountants and schoolteachers don’t seem to want to lay bricks, even if laying bricks were to pay better than accounting and teaching." So for the construction industry,
Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber. Far fewer homes and businesses would be built in the next few decades. It would push up the prices paid by those who buy homes and office buildings. So an inviolable relationship has developed between new construction and migrants: If you build, they will come.
Whenever Texas politicians threaten to pass laws that would make it harder for businesses to employ undocumented workers, phones in the Capitol start ringing. Stuck with the need to show their base that they’re cracking down on migrants, politicians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state’s interior.
The Texas economy is booming largely because of affordable housing, and new housing is being built in Texas at a remarkable rate thanks largely to the state's 1.6 million undocumented workers; one recent survey of construction sites in the state found that 50 percent of workers were undocumented.
So the measures that would really end illegal migration – nationwide eVerify, and real penalties for employers who hire the undocumented – will never be put in place, and the migrant flows will continue, despite all the sound and fury of "border theater."
On the down side, those same electromagnetic fields would rapidly tear apart many of our key molecules, such as DNA and RNA. So Europan life would have to be quite different from ours. Which is, to me, part of the appeal: I tend to think that the first time we find alien life it will be so strange to us that we will have trouble deciding if it is alive or not.
The Europa Clipper won't drill down to that buried ocean. Instead it will repeatedly fly by the moon's surface, scanning it with a variety of instruments and scooping molecules out of its extremely thin atmosphere to study. We know that Saturn's moon Enceladus sometimes erupts with great jets of water from its subsurface ocean, and while we aren't certain that happens at Europa there is some evidence for it, and NASA is hoping to observe such a plume and fly the Clipper through it.
I am not optimistic that life will be found, but I think the search is worth trying; certainly the chance is higher than on Mars. And even if we don't find life, perhaps we will learn more about these strange worlds and their vast, dark oceans.
Aid to several communities impacted by Hurricane Helene was temporarily paused in parts of North Carolina over the weekend due to reports of threats against Federal Emergency Management Agency responders, amid a backdrop of misinformation about responses to recent storms.Strange times. Note that I am not assuming the threats are real, just noting level of paranoia, with recovery operations trapped between people who think FEMA is the enemy and people terrified of anti-government militias.
Some FEMA teams helping disaster survivors apply for assistance in rural North Carolina are currently working at secure disaster recovery centers in counties where federal workers are receiving threats, a FEMA spokesperson told CNN on Monday.
“For the safety of our dedicated staff and the disaster survivors we are helping, FEMA has made some operational adjustments,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “Disaster Recovery Centers will continue to be open as scheduled, survivors continue to register for assistance, and we continue to help the people of North Carolina with their recovery.”
On Saturday, FEMA workers had to halt their work in Rutherford County due to reports that National Guard troops saw “armed militia” threatening the workers, according to the Washington Post, which cited an email to federal agencies helping with the response, verified by unnamed federal officials. It’s not clear if the threat was credible.
Rutherford County is southeast of the hard-hit Asheville area, and part of the mountainous region that was slammed by deadly flooding and landslides as Helene carved a path of destruction through the Southeast after making landfall in Florida last month. More than 100 people were killed in North Carolina and thousands of others were left grappling with catastrophic damage.
Some FEMA operations were also paused Sunday in Ashe County, near the borders of Tennessee and Virginia, out of an abundance of caution, Sheriff B. Phil Howell said on Facebook. This included in-person applications for aid in at least two locations “due to threats occurring in some counties,” according to the county’s emergency management office. Those locations reopened Monday, the sheriff and emergency management office announced.
Fiction
Non-Fiction
It makes me a little sad that there no medieval history on this list; in fact I can't remember the last work of medieval history I read that excited me.
Interesting Terry Eagleton piece about the reign of literary theory, review of a book by Frederic Jameson. What was that about, anyway? Eagleton says it was at attempt to continue through other means a radical tradition that had failed politically.
The tomb of Idi, a high official's daughter of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.
Study finds that universal pre-K does not help children academically but it does raise their parents' income.
Painting Deng Xiaoping out of Chinese history (Twitter/X)
Spitalfields Life on The Doors of Old London.
Kevin Drum on the income level of the poorest 20% of Americans.
What one fifth-century Bavarian woman wore hanging from her belt. (Compare here)
Oliver Cromwell's pocket watch.
The oldest known example of a Scythian-style royal burial, in a mound surrounded by sacrificed horses, has now been found in Siberia, c. 800 BC. The discoverers say this proves Scythian culture originated in Siberia, but then those discoverers are Russians, and their country is at war with Ukraine where most people think the Scythians arose.
Politics and Hindu festival in Kolkata, where the murder of a female doctor has roiled the city.
Lostwave, the search for forgotten songs.
A conversation with Sally Rooney on loving the conventions of the novel. I liked this because I believe, as I have often said, that the novel is the formal expression of bourgeois life and bourgeois sentimentality and makes no sense in other cultural contexts.
Rah rah post from the president of a space firm on the great future for research and manufacturing in orbit. I don't believe it, but it might be true and if so it would be important.
2024 Epson International Pano Awards.
Construction Physics explains that port automation is complicated and it is not clear that more automation would make US ports better. Via Marginal Revolution.
Sabine Hossenfelder says using AI for coding is not working well so far, 7-minute video.
This weird little article says work will go forward on a 5th-century BC shipwreck off Sicily from which bars of orichalcum have been recovered. Ok, but what is orichalcum? This is not a simple problem. Many modern authorities think it was an alloy of copper and zinc, that is, a kind of brass, but the classical Greeks also had another word for brass, and Plato makes orichalcum out to be a particularly valuable metal, which brass is not. So other authorities think the word refers to platinum. Fortunately this much better article tells us that the metal bars from the shipwreck are "75-80% copper and 14-20% zinc, with traces of nickel, lead, and iron," which is an entirely normal composition for brass. Which makes me think the investigators just decided to call their bars "orichalcum" to get some free press coverage.
Jeffrey Lewis ("arms control wonk" on Twitter/X) says the October 1 missile attack shows that Israel cannot afford to shoot down every Iranian missile and chose to prioritize other targets over defending air bases. Israel's Arrow missiles work but they cost about $4 million each and Israel has a limited supply. (Presumably the F-35s and other highly valuable planes scrambled away from the airfields when word of the attack came, which was hours in advance.) The twelve SM-3 missiles the US fired in support represent a whole year's production of that missile; the cost of various versions is $10 to $30 million.
Ramzan Kadyrov declares blood feud (really) against three other Russian politicians.
Twitter/X post about the crash of a new, large Russian drone, a Sukhoi S-70 Okhotnik-B. Claimed as a stealth platform but US military guys say, after looking at the rivets on the fuselage, it would not be very stealthy at all. It was shot down by a Russian fighter, perhaps because control had been lost; video of the shootdown here.
Between 1915 and 1970, about 6 million black Americans migrated out of the south to cities in the north or on the west coast. Demographers call this the Great Migration, and it was a big, powerful, and very important event. The Warmth of Other Suns (2010) is a wonderful book about it.
The Warmth of Other Suns has four interleaving elements. There is, first of all, a general narrative of the event, drawn from demographic, sociological and historical studies. That general narrative is made specific through the lives of three migrants who represent the three main flows that made up the movement: from Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas to the northeast, from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, and from Texas and Louisiana to the west coast. Ida Mae Gladney was a sharecropper's daughter who moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1937. George Starling moved from Florida to New York City in 1943, where he found a job working on the New York to Florida trains that had carried him north along with a million others. Robert Foster was a physician who left Louisiana for Los Angeles in 1953, where he eventually became a celebrity surgeon and big-time gambler who could stay and eat free at any casino in Las Vegas; after he repaired damaged tendons in Ray Charles' hand, Charles wrote a song about a doctor named Foster stealing his girlfriend that was a big hit in 1962.
The migration began during World War I, when manufacturers, cut off from immigrant flows – migration from Europe fell by 90% during the war – and needing to ramp up production sent agents to travel through the south recruting sharecroppers to come north and work. Southern planters were so alarmed by this threat to their labor supply that they passed crazy laws against the recruiters, some imposing fines of up to $10,000 for enticing laborers to leave the state and others requiring a recruiting license that would cost up to $75,000. But word spread anyway, and half a million blacks moved north between 1916 and 1920. Many people expected that the movement would die down after the war, but instead it accelerated, and it never really slackened until after the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the mechanization of agriculture gave southern blacks hope that their lives might improve at home.
Active recruiting by northern companies only happened during the World Wars. What kept the migration going the rest of the time was ties of kin and neighborhood between folks in the south and those already set up in the north. People kept moving to wherever the first people to leave their district had ended up; one sociologist noted that every person who had gone north from one South Carolina county went to Philadelphia. One Mississippi county sent hundreds of people to Beloit, Wisconsin. People in big cities like Chicago or Los Angeles formed clubs with people from their own towns or districts, like the Monroe, Louisiana club in LA that endured into the 1990s.
To me one of the most interesting themes of the book is the relationship between individual choice and social change. Wilkerson asked many migrants, starting with her own mother, if they were aware that they were part of a major national movement. Did knowing that millions of blacks were moving to the north influence their own choices? All said no, her mother quite indignantly. To them these were personal choices made for narrow, personal reasons. For Ida Mae it was bound up with her choice of husband, which fell on a man determined to move north over another suitor who stayed in Mississippi and was still a farmer in the 1970s. In 1943 George Starling had been organizing pickers in the orange groves to demand higher wages during the wartime labor shortage when a friend tipped him off that a group of growers might be planning to have him killed. To him, there was no choice, just a flight out of the county in the dark of the night. Robert Foster had the kind of dreams that drove millions of people from small towns to the big city, dreams of hitting the big time and being somebody, with a Cadillac and flashy clothes and capital R Respect from everybody around him.
And yet they added up to a mass movement.
How this happens is, I think, the key question of sociology. One of the causes of the Great Migration was certainly Jim Crow. Many, many people told interviewers that they went north to "breathe free" or "live like men," and plenty of others fled from assaults or threats. Sociologists think, although this has been hard to prove, that the departure rate increased whenever there was a lynching in the county. The promise of higher wages was certainly another cause.
One of the Wilkerson's themes is that the Great Migration was much like the migrations from Europe and Mexico to the US, and that migrants to the north lived through some of the same patterns as migrants from outside the US. But the migrants themselves, she discovered, hated this kind of thinking; they were Americans, and they resisted any comparison between themselves and Irish or Mexican migrants.
There is too much in The Warmth of Other Suns for any summary to do it justice. Wilkerson covers the real estate wars of the 1960s and 1970s – Ida Mae Gladney bought a house in a mostly white neighborhood of Chicago only to have all of her new white neighbors leave within a few months – the rise of drugs and crime in northern cities, the slow fading of Jim Crow barbarism in the south, and much more. The amount of research behind this book is simply staggering. Wilkerson says she interviewed 1200 people, and I believe her. Her interviews with her three main subjects must have added up to hundreds of hours; she lived with her subjects (by then all elderly), drove them to their medical appointments, met their families, attended their Thanksgiving dinners. She interviewed their friends and co-workers, went to their home towns to check on their recollections, verified every verifiable claim with newspaper stories, birth and death certificates, and whatever other records she could find.
I think the great acclaim this book has received (second on the NY Times best books of the century list) comes from the positive story it tells about the black migration. Much of this story will make black readers proud: the defiance of segregation, the determination to live free, the humanity and dignity of Wilkerson's subjects. But to me the most moving part of the book came at the end, where Wilkerson chronicles the final illnesses, deaths and funerals of the three people she had befriended. These were good deaths, people who were surrounded by friends and kin, who were members of churches where people gathered to mourn them with full ceremony. And yet they overwhelmed me with sadness. It seemed to me that in the face of death, the whole story shifted; does it matter where we live out our short times on earth? Whether we work in offices or cotton fields? Whether we can vote? I would say that it does matter, but I do not know how I would refute an argument that says it does not. The shadow of death is deep and dark, and the way decay slowly overwhelms our bodies, stripping from us one thing after another that we fought and struggled for, has an awesome and awful finality.
I give The Warmth of Other Suns my highest recommendation, but if you are uncomfortable with intimate recountings of death you might want to stop before the end.
The unintentional humor of the Eric Adams indictment. And Richard Hanania on the MAGA conspiracy theories that say Adams is a victim of the Deep State. On Twitter/X: "My view is corruption is bad and MAGA should stop defending it as a matter of principle."
Stem Cell Therapy Achieves First-Ever Cure for Type 2 Diabetes.
Some remarkably well-preserved Viking skeletons.
Broad-based tariffs don't necessarily help domestic manufacturers, since many American manufacturers use imported parts or materials.
Returning to college in modern America: I give you the "Hot Mom Dropoff" at Florida State University.
Kevin Drum reminds us that whatever problems young men have in America, they still earn more money than young women.
Jeremy Horpedahl goes after J.D. Vance on the price of refrigerators over the past 40 years (Twitter/X). The upshot is that fridges now cost way less in inflation-adjusted terms and use half as much electricity; the question of whether they last longer is complicated but it seems they may be a little less reliable.
Scott Sumner on greatness in art, mannerism, and opportunity: "The key is to understand the difference between artistic talent, which is not uncommon, and artistic greatness, which requires talent and a very special set of circumstances." This seems to be true, but I find the causality very mysterious. Why do artists need a certain, rare set of circumstances to create beautiful, powerful art? Why does catching the wave of a new style matter so much? Why do artists keep abandoning successful, beautiful styles in favor of the weird and ugly?
The man with 38 medieval graves in his basement.
Noah Smith explains once again that imports do not subtract from GDP. The number of people who think they know something about economics but don't grasp this simple equation is downright baffling.
What if a local government lies about a supposed "public use" when they seize land via eminent domain? Seizing black-owned land for "public parks" used to be a common dodge, although that would probably not pass judicial muster now. But what about seizing land for a "park" solely to prevent the construction of a business the mayor opposes?
Follow up to the bogus frenzy about thousands of unmarked graves at Indian schools in Canada: no human remains have been found. The eagerness of most liberals in the US and Canada to believe these lies is telling.
Contemplating a sloppy online poll that says young people are getting fired more, Kevin Drum wonders why we have no official data on firing.
Lots of new Nazca lines and figures discovered with the help of an AI system. Those people were busy.
Having attempted two different books on Edmund Burke and his thought and failed to make any headway with either, I recommend that others with an interest try this 44-minute lecture from Michael Sugrue of Princeton. In fact I recommend Sugrue on almost any western thinker; he covers about forty in lectures available on YouTube.
Complete 3D diagram of all 140,000 neurons in a fruit fly brain (NY Times, Guardian, one-minute video on YouTube, original article) Here is where I see a major role for AI in science: maybe a computer can make something of a pattern just too big and complex for a human brain to grasp.
Swedish firm makes steel at industrial scale without carbon emissions.
One of the many losses to Hurricane Helene was a monument to beloved pets. I continue to find pet-keeping to be one of humanity's weirdest evolutionary quirks.
Oz Katerji hopes Israel's weakening of Hezbollah might give the Lebanese state the chance to regain control of its own country, but doubts there is enough of Lebanon left to achieve that. (Twitter/X) And Lebanese Christians celebrating Nasrallah's death in the streets.
Longish essay on the institutional basis of Russian dictatorship.
Debating failures by western analysts at the start of the Ukraine war. Philips O'Brien and Eliot Cohen say people who thought Ukraine would fall quickly are idiots who should pay a price for their idiocy. (Atlantic article, which is free for now, and a report from the CSIS) Ok, O'Brien was right that Russia would fail to take Kyiv quickly, but on the other hand Russia has kept the war going for more than a year after he said they were "on the verge of collapse."
Crazy short video on Twitter/X of the ballistic missile engagement over Jordan on October 1.
