Thijs Niks on Twitter/X:
Once the logic of land acknowledgements and "decolonisation" is followed, it leads very quickly to some very dark futures. Assigning each person a homeland based on their ethnic ancestry, and then declaring that that homeland is the only place they or their descendants can ever truly belong, would not be an act of justice, it would be a global nightmare made real, surpassing even the horrors of previous centuries.
I had thought that the Syrian civil war was pretty much over, a frozen conflict that left the Assad government ruling most of the country. But suddenly that has changed, as rebel forces have retaken most of Aleppo and the surrounding district in what it is fair to call a "lightning campaign." There are videos online of rebels seizing Aleppo police headquarters, dancing in the main square, and occupying a notorious prison, releasing all the prisoners. (More videos here, here, here.) To summarize,
It took the Assad regime 4+ years to conquer Aleppo, with the assistance of Iranian, Iraqi and Lebanese Shia militias, and Russian aerial domination. If this offensive continues at this pace, Assad could well lose Aleppo in 4 days.
Actually it only took three days.
As to how much farther they might go,
If you want to know where we are right now, nearly all the Syria analysts I know are trying to remain conservative on how far they think this offensive will go, because they're in a state of disbelief at how quickly regime lines are collapsing.The context for this advance has to be that all the groups that aided the Assad regime before are now crippled (Hezbollah) or distracted (Russia, Iran). Russia withdrew most of its aircraft and air defense assets last year, along with all its regular army infantry. Russia's remaining airplanes have been active but their base is under drone attack and they don't seem to have had much impact; online Russian sources are worried about the rebels taking their naval base at Tartus.
Preparations for the battle began two years ago when Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham began raiding along the front lines. Then all the factions formed training camps where serious preparations were made. Military manufacturing developed to the level of drones with a range of at least 120 km, based on those used in the Ukrainian war, and the factions calmed down their differences and Tahrir al-Sham, as the largest and most organized faction, sought to accommodate everyone.
The Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, played a pivotal role in shaping modern Russian foreign policy and military doctrine, marking the resurgence of Russia as a global power in conflict zones. For Russia, Syria was a testing ground for new strategies and military technologies, such as precision airstrikes, electronic warfare, and the integration of hybrid warfare tactics. Moscow’s intervention, which officially began in 2015, was framed as a response to the perceived instability caused by Western involvement in the Middle East, particularly U.S. and NATO actions. The war allowed Russia to assert itself as a key player in the region, bolstering its influence in the Middle East and challenging the U.S.-led order. Through its support for the Assad regime, Russia not only preserved a strategic ally but also demonstrated its ability to project military power far from its borders. This marked the beginning of a more assertive Russian doctrine, focusing on exploiting regional conflicts to reassert influence, undermine Western alliances, and promote its vision of a multipolar world order. . . .
Following its intervention in Syria, Russia's military and diplomatic strategies expanded to other conflict zones, notably Libya and Ukraine, further solidifying its doctrine of using hybrid warfare and military influence to assert power on the global stage. In Libya, Russia has supported General Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army in a bid to challenge the UN-backed Government of National Unity, using mercenaries, arms shipments, and covert support. . . .
Russia's ongoing support for separatist movements in Eastern Ukraine, along with its full-scale invasion in 2022, demonstrated its commitment to challenging the post-Cold War European security order and reasserting its influence over former Soviet states. . . . These interventions across multiple fronts have reinforced Russia's doctrine of employing military force, proxy wars, and strategic alliances to assert its dominance and challenge the West's global influence, marking a significant shift in its foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Thus, what is happening today in Syria with the rebels taking over large areas of land is directly undermining Russia’s future plans in the Middle East.
I am not sure what to make of this. On one level one has to agree with US representative Joe Wilson (Rep-SC):
Millions of Syrians have suffered unthinkable atrocities under a regime that survived only because of war criminal Putin and terrorist Khamenei. They do not want to be refugees, they want their homes and communities that butcher Assad has stolen. May God be with them.
But on the other, the Syrian opposition includes a dozen different armed groups with very different agendas, including the remnants of ISIS and Kurds who want to leave the country altogether. When a similar coalition overthrew the Gaddafi regime in Libya, the results were not pretty.
At the moment I do not think this offensive is a serious threat to the Assad regime; the rebels seem to have astonished themselves just by taking the closest city, and it's a long way to Damascus. I am interested to see where the lines stabilize, and to see what sort of government is set up in Aleppo.
But it may turn out that October 7 has reshaped regional politics in very big and far-reaching ways.
UPDATE 1
The rebel offensive is led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). HTS was once an arm of al Qaeda but turned against them, allied with Turkey, and defeated ISIS and another al Qaeda faction in tough battles. Here's a 2021 article on the group. From the abstract:
In pursuit of local dominance and ultimately survival, HTS has broken one jihadi taboo after another, including turning against al-Qa`ida and the Islamic State and dealing crippling defeats to both in Syria’s northwest. The implications and consequences of these developments are manifold. On the one hand, not only does HTS no longer represent the international terrorism threat that its predecessor once had, it has also almost entirely squashed the global threat posed by its more extreme rivals and played a role in maintaining the longest ceasefire in a decade of war in Syria. On the other hand, however, HTS’ de facto rule of northwestern Syria threatens to ‘mainstream’ a local jihadi model that looks set to experience a substantial boost by the Taliban’s surge to power in Afghanistan. Should conditions dramatically change, it could also come to represent a strategically significant terrorist safe haven once again—on Europe’s doorstep.
Statement from HTS here saying they don't really want to fight Russia, just overthrow Assad.
UPDATE 8 PM EST
Reports that the Syrian government and its forces have abandoned Aleppo and withdrawn to al Safrah 10 miles to the southeast.
UPDATE 8 AM EST
The statue of Bassel el-Assad, the dictator's brother, is toppled in Aleppo.
Revolt has broken out in Daraa in Syria's southwest, at the other end of the country from Aleppo. Seems disorganized and chaotic for now; observers are waiting to see if former rebels who accepted Assad's rule back in 2018 will join this revolt. Defense analyst Michael Horowitz says, "In southern Syria, a low-level insurgency never disappeared, and could escalate."
Online sources say the rebels have taken Maarat, 50 miles southwest of Aleppo, another place that was fought over for years but now may have changed hands in hours. Here is the announcement from the rebels. And several smaller places in this area.
Shashank Joshi of the Economist has more on HTS, drawn from this article.
Russian sources (Rybar, Rusich) are scathing about the Syrian army, calling them cowards, etc. They say this about the fighting:
Everyone noted the sudden panic that overtook the Syrian army, so there may be something to this. If so, all well-organized armies attacking less effective forces should take note and make good use of social media to create and spread panic.
On the subject on possible dissension among the rebels, this:
While we are ultimately happy to see Assad go, we also don't want Jolani's radicalism, or any faction that does not look out for the rights of Syrians. The real test is now; no revenge, no corruption, no religious ideologies being imposed overs others. Our mandate is freedom.
The same source says Erdogan is not Syria's friend and his power must be resisted.
UPDATE Noon EST
You can follow the fighting at the Live Syria Map.
Additional places said to have fallen to the rebels: Hama and the nearby air base, Halfaya, Aleppo International Airport.
Rebels claim to have shot down a Russian or Syrian jet over Aleppo. They were earlier seen posing with recently captured MANPADS systems.
Reports that Syrian officers have started evacuating their families from Homs to Damascus.
The Syrians abandoned lots of valuable equipment like tanks and air defense systems along their retreat routes, apparently because they ran out of gas. It's a sign of complete panic when soldiers flee without first gassing up their vehicles.
Video of crowds celebrating the liberation of Hama.
First, Ritually bent sword from Bronze Age/Iron Age transition found in Denmark. The sword is above.
Ritual deposits including a ritually bent sword have been discovered in a bog near Veksø northwest of Copenhagen, Denmark. The small cache of objects date to the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, around 500 B.C., and the sword actually incarnates the transition, being made of bronze with iron rivets.
They were discovered by Claus Falsby on his first outing with a metal detector. He contacted museum organization ROMU which manages archaeological responsibilities for central and western Zealand. ROMU archaeologists immediately went to the site and excavated it, discovering additional objects. In total, the cache now consisted of the bronze sword with iron rivets in the handle sinuously bent into a s-curve, two small bronze axes (known as celts), two or three large ankle bangles called vulrings, a fragment of a large fibula and an object of unknown purpose.
A late Bronze Age (ca. 950–780/740 B.C.) hoard of national importance found near Gryfino in Poland’s West Pomeranian Voivodeship has been rescued by authorities after it was illegally excavated. Anonymous individuals sent pictures of the objects to each other before they were emailed to the Provincial Conservator of Monuments in Szczecin who then called the police. . . .
The hoard contains more than 100 objects, 73 of them remarkably large. It includes more than 30 bronze neck rings, weapons, shield bosses, jewelry, phalerae (metal discs) from horse harnesses, silver spikes, the handle of a vessel, sickles and spearheads. Three of the objects are of national importance, unique on the archaeological record of Poland: a brooch made of circular hoops with decorated sheet-metal domes, a long pin and the axe which were not locally made and came to Gryfino from southcentral Europe, probably the Alpine region. The axe socket contains remnants of wood from the haft, which will give archaeologists the opportunity to radiocarbon date the axe head and determine what kind of wood it was mounted to.
The finder or finders used a metal detector but Polish law regulates their use to prevent exactly this kind of shenanigan, and the looters obviously did not have the necessary permits to conduct a metal detector search. That in itself is an indictable offense, but to add insult to injury, it’s clear from the photographs that they destroyed at least one clay container in which the treasure had been buried 3,000 or so years ago and ran roughshod over the archaeological context, acts punishably by a term of up to eight years in prison.
What is the difference between the collegial enterprise described for Denmark and the illegal "shenanigans" in Poland? National law.
The remains of historian Marc Bloch, who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944, will be interred in the French Pantheon. Macron called him "a man of the Enlightenment in the Army of Shadows."
Excellent Scott Siskind piece looking into whether longer prison sentences reduce crime. His conclusion is that they do, but probably not as much as spending the same amount of money in other ways, such as on more police or more court resources so we could try more people.
The seclusion of women in Muslim-ruled India, as shown in architecture, and the possible impacts of that history in the present day.
The web site of British painter Jadé Fadojutimi, who has just broken into the top ranks with multiple million-dollar sales. Pretty colors, anyway.
How bad are economic statistics in the developing world? Very bad. Via Marginal Revolution.
The Smithfield meat market in London is closing. (NY Times, BBC, Guardian) The current building dates to 1868, but there has been a market on the site since at least 1174. The city government of London began operating the market in 1327. Online sources, including the market web site, say the grant to the city was made by Edward III. But Edware III was a boy in 1327, so the grant was really made by his mother Queen Isabella (aka the Shewolf) and her lover Roger Mortimer, one of several actions they took to insure the loyalty of the city of London to their regime.
This week Ezra Klein interviewed some people upset about government mismanagement, effectively blaming government dysfunction for the poor performance of Democrats. As Kevin Drum explains here, this ignores the fact that bureaucrats mainly do annoying things because legislators have ordered them to. Klein and his colleagues also lump together problem projects with others that are working very well, which is just dumb because it keeps us from looking at the successful projects to see what they are doing right.
Machiavelli and the rise of the private study in the Renaissance. The early modern world, say 1400 to 1800, saw a huge change in how domestic space was organized, with a rise of private rooms for sleeping, reading, etc. for all who could afford them. One of the early signs of this change was bookish aristocrats installing privates rooms for reading and contemplation.
Whalefall, 12-minute video.
Depressing NY Times article arguing that highly drug-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi are arising and spreading partly because they infect war wounds, especially in places like Iraq or Libya where the wounded don't get the best care.
Richard Hanania: "Really weird how Democrats were able to steal the election when Trump was president but not when Biden was."
In this 2018 Harpers article, T.M. Luhrmann notes that thousands of people hear voices despite having none of the other symptoms of psychosis. Is this the same phenomenon that schizophrenics experience, or something very different? Also some material on the "Hearing Voices" movement.
Meanwhile, in the Philippines: "Philippine security agencies stepped up safety protocols on Saturday after Vice President Sara Duterte said she would have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr assassinated if she herself were killed." We're in Dark Star Trek territory: "I remind you that if I am killed, my operatives will avenge me, and some of them are Vulcans."
Excellent black and white landscape photography by Gary Wagner. Lots more at his web site.
Kevin Drum checks the data and finds that since 1976 the percentage of Americans saying they feel financially satisfied or dissatisfied has changed very little despite huge economic growth.
Aztec skull whistles, relatively common artifacts around temples and other sacred spaces, sound like people screaming.
Sabine Hossenfelder looks into claims that AI systems (like the protein-folding system AlphaFold) will render quantum computing useless for many purposes. Very interesting 7-minute video arguing that the tricks making this possible may have wide ramifications.
Most biologists think that bacteria and archaea have a common ancestor, since they share so many biochemical systems. A recent genetic study says the most likely date for that Last Universal Common Ancestor is around 4.2 billion years ago. That does not leave a lot of time for the evolution of DNA, RNA, ribosomes, and all the other stuff that life on earth shares, since the first evidence of liquid water on the planet only goes back to 4.4 bya. It is evidence like this, pushing the origins of life ever closer to the first livable days on our planet, that has driven some to speculate that life must have arrived on earth from somewhere else.
Paper arguing that South Asians achieve more leadership positions in the US than East Asians because South Asians are "more assertive." The authors weirdly do not address the question of caste, since it is overwhelmingly high-caste South Asians who get those leadership slots and we have enormous worldwide evidence that people raised to think they belong to a special, elite group are more assertive than anyone else. Via Marginal Revolution.
Fascinating exchange on Twitter/X about reforming the NIH. E.g., if the complaint is that the NIH funds too much fraudulent research, then one response would be for the NIH to set up a new office to audit the work it funds. But, everyone also complains that the NIH already already has too much cumbersome oversight and should step back and let researchers get on with their research. "These grievances bounce back and forth between the NIH being too permissive with its funds and not being permissive enough."
Lots of countries around the world have imposed tariffs on China's tech exports. India has a 125% tariff on Chinese cars.
Archaic hunter-gatherers in Belize constructed big networks of canals and weirs in wetland areas to catch fish. The first canals date back at least 6,000 years, and the system remained in use into Maya times. (Original paper, news story)
Plymouth colony was founded as a commune, with all farming done collectively and all food shared equally. After they nearly starved, governor William Bradford ended that experiment and switched to each family raising and keeping its own grain. Alex Tabarrok explains.
British philosopher Derek Parfit was a very strange man. How strange can you be before that starts to impact the quality of your intellectual work?
An essay noting that, "decolonisation talk has become more and more attenuated from the historical events of decolonisation."
The Room Where it Happens: "There must be another room, somewhere down the hall, where the real meeting is happening, where the real experts are, making the real decisions ... because it can’t just be us. It can’t just be this." – Jake Sullivan, 2013, when he was Chief of Staff to the US Secretary of State.
A classic exchange on 4chan for your Thanksgiving amusement, still anonymous:
Anonymous1: What makes Diamond the hardest metal?
Anonymous2: The fact that it's not a metal.
Anonymous3:
Due to extensive research done by the University of Pittsburgh, diamond has been confirmed as the hardest metal known to man. The research is as follows. Pocket-protected scientists built a wall of iron and crashed a diamond car into it at 400 miles per hour, and the car was unharmed. Then they built a wall out of diamond and crashed a car made of iron moving at 400 miles per hour into the wall, and the wall came out fine. They then crashed a diamond car made of 400 miles per hour into a wall, and there were no survivors. They crashed 400 miles per hour into a diamond traveling at iron car. Western New York was powerless for hours. They rammed a wall of metal into a 400 miles per hour made of diamond, and the resulting explosion shifted the earth's orbit 400 million miles away from the sun, saving the earth from a meteor the size of a small Washington suburb that was hurling towards mid-western Prussia at 400 billion miles per hour. They shot a diamond made of iron at a car moving at 400 walls per hour, and as a result caused over 9000 wayward airplanes to lose track of their bearings and crash into 9000 buildings in downtown New York. They spun 400 miles at diamond into iron per wall. The results were inconclusive. Finally, they placed 400 diamonds per hour in front of a car made of wall traveling at miles per iron, and the result proved without a doubt that diamonds were the hardest metal of all time, if not just the hardest metal known to man.
Just stumbled across this:
We built our government to have a lot of surface area for objection from those outside it, for obvious reasons. If you believe someone is going to object to the decisions you make, you try not to make them. A culture emerges in which the goal is to have decisions be the outcomes of processes, not people. You want to be able to defend any decision from criticism by demonstrating strict adherence to a process in which no judgment can be questioned because no judgment was used.
The passage appears to come from a book by Jennifer Pahlka called Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better.
Pahlka is very astute. This is exactly how the regulations I work under are supposed to work, notably NEPA and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. These regulations do not specify outcomes, they only lay out who has to be consulted and what information has to be considered. (Also, that more than one alternative has to be considered, including the option of doing nothing.) In a typical Section 106 consultation process there will be "consulting parties," some of whom are legally obligated to participate (federal and state agencies), some of whom have a legal right to participate (Indian tribes, certain local governments), and some of whom have just asked to participate (local historical associations, preservation groups, self-proclaimed representatives of ethnic groups). Those last are usually allowed a seat at the table because 1) letting them have their say smooths acceptance of the final result, and 2) if they are unreasonable you can just ignore them.
So a lot of time and money is spent holding meetings and producing reports and briefings for the consulting parties.
The thing is, regardless of what anybody says in the meetings, the lead federal agency has the absolute right to do whatever they want. I have seen cases in which they just say "forget all of you" and go ahead. I have in fact urged this course on my clients from time to time, although generally without success, because the agency leads almost always try to reach consensus in the meetings. This makes everyone's lives nicer, and they can feel better about what they are doing. But also, as Pahlka says, because the real decision makers like to hide their power behind the process. That is how the best and most effective bureaucrats operate, guiding things toward the outcome they want without making anyone mad or drawing attention to their own ambition.
But what I would ask is, what would be better? Just going ahead with every idea anyone ever came up with for a new road or what have you?
I have seen cases in which bad ideas were halted by this process. Every instructor who teaches people how this stuff works has a long roster of projects that went badly because the process was not taken seriously, in particular the requirement to weigh different alternatives. I have also seen cases in which political decision-makers used the process to overcome objections from the public to a development they wanted; NEPA and Section 106 give them a way to fire back at people who claim (someone always does) that this project would destroy uniquely important environmental or historic resources.
I get it that the process is expensive and time-consuming. But one of the most corrosive problems in our world is that millions of people think big changes happen without their having any say, or any chance to voice their objections. These laws give them that chance, as do all other laws requiring public hearings before actions are taken.
If it were up to me I would make a lot of changes to this process, since in some ways I think it has gotten absurd. But I would not abolish it, because in a democracy we really should let the people have a chance to speak.
Not that anyone should read too much meaning into Donald Trump's slapdash appointment process, but I agree with M. Anthony Mills (NY Times) that one theme is a rejection of science:
The leader of the Republican Party and our country’s next president has tapped a pro-choice scion of the country’s most famous Democratic dynasty to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. In keeping with the bewildering dynamics of today’s negative partisanship, conservative groups such as the Heritage Foundation have cheered the selection of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while liberals have near categorically denounced him.
Mr. Kennedy’s transformation from left-wing vaccine skeptic to potential Republican cabinet member overseeing America’s vast health apparatus represents a profound shift not only in the character of the American right but also in the politics of science more generally. The emergent MAGA science policy agenda, driven by skepticism and anti-elitism, blends familiar conservative and libertarian ideas with a suspicion of expert power once more associated with the left. The result is a uniquely American brand of populism that has the potential to fundamentally reshape national politics.
Back in 1970 Republicans were much more pro-science than Democrats, and the hippie, whole earth, split wood not atoms, make love not bombs thing was launched mainly from the left. Now things have largely switched, and that strikes me as quite important.
Why did this happen?
Fights over teaching evolution in the schools.
Fights over climate change. You will never understand America until you grasp the intense devotion of many men to their gasoline-powered machines, and more broadly to the old manly economy of mining, logging, and making things in fire-filled factories.
Environmentalism more generally; some of you probably would not believe me if I explained to you the arcana of wetlands law, bat preservation, and other regulations that genuinely hamstring building in this country.
Covid-19. As all my readers know, I do not forgive the tergivisations of government pandemic policy – e.g., saying that masking is ineffective, then requiring it, or saying that closing schools was not needed and then closing them – or the attitude of leftists toward all of this, e.g. demanding that churches close but insisting that racial injustice is so important that mass protests had to go ahead.
One could sum all of this up in a more general point, The alliance of science with bureaucrats who tell people what they can and cannot do.
Others:
Health and diet advice more broadly. This one is complex because in many ways medicine has gotten a lot better over the past 25 years, thanks largely to drugs created by Big Pharma and getting doctors to take actual science more seriously. On the other hand that process involved rejecting a lot of what was established medicine 25 years ago, like heart bypass surgery; the weary cry of many science skeptics these days is "they keep changing their minds about everything."
The end of physics. As I regularly post here, I have been convinced by a group of skeptical scientists that sub-atomic physics is at a complete dead end, and astrophysics also seems radically stuck; spending on these things keeps going up and the number of papers published keeps rising, but fundamental progress seems to have halted. Plus there's the phantasm of fusion power, still 15-25 years away. Don't get me started on string theory. None of this inspires confidence in science.
The instututionalization of science. Lots of cutting-edge science used to be done by smart people in tiny labs. Now science is funded at vast expense by huge government agencies and mega-corporations. The scientists themselves are constantly complaining about the process involved in competing for, administering, and accounting for grants, and you don't have to be anti-science to suspect the agendas of the people involved. It strikes me as possible that absolutely nobody understands either the overall nature of this process or its impact on the world, and certainly the average voter has no clue. So if your biggest complaint about the modern world is excess bureaucracy, you're probably going to be suspicious of modern science.
Speaking only for myself here, I understand the frustrations of many people with our science establishment. I would do a lot of wholesale reform if I could, starting by slashing the budgets of sub-atomic physics and manned space flight. I would also radically reform my own field and drastically reduce the number of archaeological sites dubbed "significant."
But we need science. It is the root of everything good about the modern world, and the only possibly solution to many of our problems. We can't survive without it.
So the turn of a whole political party against the foundation of our world is a bit concerning. Part of me thinks that science is so fundamental that we can't really do much to get rid of it or even change it, but certainly there could be cases where we cast it aside and a lot of people end up dying as a result.
Ireland's economy is the envy of much of the world. Thanks to massive investment by US-based multinationals, unemployment is low and corporate taxes have made the government so flush that they have been able to cut taxes, raise social spending, and reduce the debt at the same time.
But as in the US, the big numbers don't seem to be reflected in the lives of many Irish people:
Envious readers might wonder why Ireland needs to have an election at all. Can’t the politicians who have delivered these wonders simply be returned to office by acclamation? But the truth is that Ireland does not feel like a very happy place. Part of this is the frustration of fulfilled desires. Ireland has the two things its patriots dreamed of for centuries: political independence and economic prosperity. For a long time, we were an “if only” society — if only the English had not colonized us, if only we were not so poor, if only the church had not become so overweeningly powerful. Those six little letters covered a multitude of failings. They don’t anymore. Ireland’s problems today stem from the collective choices it has freely made for itself.
For just as the country acts as a showpiece for the upsides of extreme globalization, it also demonstrates the downsides. Ireland’s public services and infrastructure significantly lag its warp-speed economy, creating a place that feels somehow both overdeveloped and underdeveloped. And on its own, the globalized market economy does not produce the public goods necessary for a decent quality of life. Ireland may be awash with money, but its young people can no longer afford to buy homes; sky-high rents are making it impossible for many to live in the main cities of Dublin, Cork and Galway; homelessness and child poverty have risen; access to health care is uneven and uncertain; public transport and public schools are often overcrowded; physical infrastructure is seriously inadequate; and the pace of transition to a carbon-free economy has been painfully slow.
Then there is the issue of immigration; long an exporter of people, Ireland has become a migrant destination, notably for people from Ukraine.
For years the handling of this immigration — especially of a large influx of refugees from Ukraine and asylum seekers from Asia and Africa — has been somewhat chaotic. The failure of successive governments to adequately expand housing, infrastructure and public services has created a political opening for the far right and allowed the slogan “Ireland is full,” to seem both absurd and credible. This is still one of the least densely populated countries in Western Europe, but it can seem badly congested.
Two things: for one, again as in the US, people are looking not at the overall economic situation but at their own issues, and if you can't afford an apartment in the city where you want to live you don't enjoy lectures on GDP growth.
But for another, it seems ever more clear to me that we can't buy our way to happiness. Our political discourse is focused on the economy. This is partly because we believe that the government has a lot of power there, but maybe it is partly because our problems feel economic even when they are not. For example, in the widespread claims that people "can't afford" to have children.
Every social change that many people longed for and celebrate – viz., breaking the power of the Irish church – is mourned by others.
Is is even possible for a society to be, on the whole, happy?
I have my doubts.
I was put in mind of them again because there is an exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, one of my favorite small museums, written up in the NY Times.
Lots of chatter in literary circles about a story by Vincenzo Barney in Vanity Fair. The story is about Augusta Britt, who was novelist Cormac McCarthy's lover when she was 17 to 18 and his friend for years afterward. According to her story, they met at a hotel pool because Britt was using the shower; she felt unsafe showering in the foster home where she was living at the time. They liked each other immediately and soon McCarthy was having one of his low-life friends doctor Britt's birth certificate so she could get a visa and they could run off to Mexico together:
He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.
“I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good,” she tells me. “I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.”
Not only does Britt come across as mature in her recollection, she actually had the sense to break off the sexual part of her relationships with McCarthy a few years later, showing that she was much wiser than the two grown women who married him. I mean, for anyone who knows anything about McCarthy, hearing that he once ran off to Mexico with an underage girl will elicit only a shrug.
Even before this supposed bombshell landed, McCarthy's known catalog of issues includes years lost to heavy drinking, extended periods of extreme, intentional poverty, carrying his favorite light bulb around with him from motel to motel because he couldn't write without it, giving money to Republicans and lying about it to his liberal friends, forging documents, buying stolen property, two brief marriages to women who later hated him, estrangement from his son, and writing Blood Meridien, described by the NY Times as "the most violent book since the Iliad."
Count me unsurprised about the 17-year-old lover.
More interesting is Barney's claim that Britt was McCarthy's "muse" and the inspiration for numerous characters in his novels. She certainly thought so; she told Barney that she drew back from her relationship with McCarthy because he kept putting characters based on her into his books and then killing them off. The NY Times put this question to several self-proclaimed experts on McCarthy's work, and they were unimpressed. One said,
From my standpoint, there are some real stretchers in there, It doesn't really sound true to the way that an artist’s imagination works. More than likely, a major character is a pastiche of people.
Which is certainly true for me, but, with a madman like McCarthy you can never tell.
What I want to say is this: McCarthy was a deeply troubled, dubiously sane person whose books are fascinating partly because they are written from a point of view outside normal bourgeois existence. If you value work like that, you need to overlook a lot of sins, because all the writers I can think of who fit that description had overflowing closets of them.
I dreamed that I submitted a workplan for an upcoming project and received the comment that we should be employing Advanced Super Techniques (AST). Then there was a call about the project in which I was again urged to use Advanced Super Techniques. I pretended to know what this meant and made what I hoped were some appropriate remarks about what we might learn using AST, meanwhile frantically googling to find out what it meant; but my screen filled up with a solid block of random letters and symbols.
Then I somehow heard about an expert in AST and went to consult him. His lab was in an old brick factory building. When I entered the building I discovered that the lower floors had been made into artists' spaces, studios with a shop in the center. Everyone looked at me strangely. The geometry of the building was an Escherian impossibility and I was completely lost, but I pretended to know where I was going and fumbled my way around, getting increasingly hostile looks. I eventually made my way up a mad staircase to the Fourth Floor, where I pushed open a door and entered a forest of trees growing in complete darkness. Feeling like I was finally getting somewhere I pulled out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and entered the forest, where I saw strange instrumets and old smartphones hanging from wires around the trees. Then I woke.
American anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann's whole career has been about trying to refine the notion of "belief." In her studies of British Wiccans, American evangelicals, and others, she has shown that people's statements about what they "believe" vary dramatically from day to day and situation to situation. What is core to religion, in her view, is experience, and belief is often secondary or even irrelevent to religion.
For as long as it has existed, anthropology has been partly about describing other societies and partly about critiquing the anthropologist's own society. Consider Tacitus using the supposed marital fidelity of German tribesmen to attack the morals of Rome, or Margaret Meade using Samoan practices to question the sexual repression of the early twentieth-century west. In this fascinating essay, Luhrmann asks how that works when it comes to religion. We often see anthropologists praising the child-rearing practices of those they study with the idea that westerners should copy them, but not so much when it comes to religion. Published anthropological studies almost all take a view that might be called methodological atheism, that is, one simply does not get into whether religious beliefs are true or false, or good or bad.
Yet god is the most radically other of radical otherness. One might think that exploring this otherness might be the greatest challenge any anthropologist could bring to the everyday expectations of the world back home. Why have we not done so?
A group of anthropologists sometimes called "ontological" have indeed done this to some extent:
The ontological turn might seem to be the place anthropologists have risen to this challenge of confronting radical otherness. The early ontological writings certainly seemed as if they would. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Morten Pederson, and Martin Holbraad wrote fiery texts about the ways that most anthropologists examined the belief commitments of people like those in Amazonia, Cuba, and Siberia. These ontologists argued that most anthropologists treated such beliefs with scorn.
They argued that most anthropological observers presumed that such beliefs must be wrong, or that we needed to provide an account of why people held false understandings—and that view, the ontologists argued, was driven by deep-seated colonialist impulses or a kind of scientific imperialism. The point of the ontological turn was to insist that we should abandon these presumptions and decolonize anthropological thought. Willerslev and Suhr quote Viveiros de Castro: “Anthropologists must allow that ‘visions’ are not beliefs, nor consensual views, but rather worlds seen objectively; not world views, but worlds of vision” (2011: 133).
But these ontological anthropologists have not brought back observations from these local worlds in order to reimagine their own. One strongly doubts that Viveiros de Castro himself believes that women can become jaguars (to borrow the famous example). Neither Martin Holbraad nor Morten Pedersen has argued for an ontological understanding of his own world that seems different from the one he held before setting out to do fieldwork. Instead, in the recent (and admirably clear) summary of their position, they both appear to have pulled back from the claim that these other beliefs are veridical accounts of reality. To the extent that Holbraad and Pedersen (2017) accept these non-European belief commitments (the woman became a jaguar), they simply insist that these beliefs are veridical to others—and that, as James Laidlaw (2012) so articulately points out, leads us not into ontological confrontation but into epistemological relativism, the position that anthropologists have always held.
The anthropologists who are interested in how westerners might be changed by the encounter with others often focus on their own experience in a radically individual way:
Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr make a different intellectual move. They focus on moments that are intellectually inexplicable from within an anthropologist’s secular worldview, and yet common in the lives of many fieldworkers.But since Luhrmann's study is focused on experience rather than belief, she sees the question differently:
Willerslev and Suhr draw from these moments a disciplinary epistemology of uncertainty and openness. They take the lesson that these events are the way that anthropological insights are made—that it is the shock of such moments that leads people trained into a certain worldview to break open into a different way of seeing. Anthropology grows, they say, with the ability to doubt what one knows, and through doubt, to change what one imagines. “This personal commitment to existential transformation of the self is as essential to the anthropological project as it was to Socrates” (73)
To my mind, the powerful insight that arises out of the encounter with an alien god—alien to the anthropologist, that is—is that the purpose of life itself can be imagined differently as a result. We secular observers focus on the concept of “god” as a claim to a kind of stuffness— a real immateriality, a nature beyond ordinary nature (a supernature); perhaps, as George Eliot put it, the sound on the other side of silence. We often miss the important social fact that those of faith also take god to be radically other, too, and as a result, are often more committed to moral purpose than to supernatural reality. As an observer of the faithful, I want to point out that the most fundamental observation about faith is not that divine stuff exists, but that moral purpose in the face of uncertainty will change the world as we know it.
Faith is about seeing the world as it is and experiencing it—to some extent—as the world as it should be. Faith is about having trust that the world is good, safe, and beautiful. The blunt fact that these commitments are held in a world that is often brutal and unfair tells us that faith is hard and requires effort. Belief in a just, fair, good world is not some kind of mistake, not a deluded misconception that observers need to explain, but the fundamental point of the faith commitment—regardless of the supernatural nature of the divine. Faith is about holding certain commitments front and center in your understanding of reality even when the empirical facts seem to contradict them. That is why faith takes work and why faith changes the faithful. It is also why the encounter with the radical otherness of divinity should be central to anthropology, because it encourages the anthropologist to imagine how his or her own world and own life could be fundamentally different. . . .
The anthropological problem with god is that we treat the belief in the supernatural stuff as the heart of the matter. It is not. Far more central is the concept of radical otherness and its concomitant commitment that a sense of moral purpose can change the world as it is into the world as it should be whether anything empirical about that world changes at all.
Luhrmann, along with Weston La Barre, changed my own view of religion. I used to be a naive young atheist who always wanted to ask, "how can anyone believe that?" Now I see belief as a secondary phenomenon, something that arises from a commitment to a certain way of living and a strong desire to see meaning in the world, and I no longer wonder how smart people can immerse themeselves in it.
But I also find that I personally can't get away from belief. The problem, for me, with church services and the like is that people are always referencing beliefs that I don't share. Even a phrase like "Jesus said" launches me into questions about what we actually know about Jesus. I have met atheists who love divine music, but at least when it is sung in English I always get caught up in the theology. I am by nature an overthinking intellectual whose musings about divinity always start from facts, like those two trillion galaxies I like to reference. Regardless of what I feel, I can never shove the facts as we know them from the center of my mind long enough to experience the world in any other way.
The Aztecs once sacrificed 42 children in an attempt to appease the rain god and end a drought.
Wonderful Etruscan sarcophagi seized from looters.
More exit polls, showing the shift of various groups of men vs. 2020:
Non-white non-college men: Trump +21
White non-college men: Trump +9
Non-white college men: Trump +9
White college men: Harris +2
Some largely Asian precincts in major cities shifted 15-30% toward Trump; "The injustice of being labeled as privileged, selfish, cheaters, overrepresented, white adjacent, and resource hoarders hurt very deeply."
Trump beat Harris among pre-trail detainees at the Cook County Jail.
Interview with author John Green about his crusade to make the world "suck less."
Saber-tooth kitten mummy found in Siberia, 35,000 years old.
SpaceX has has recently launched 17 rockets in 31 days, bringing their total to 114 so far in 2024. They are dominating the launch industry.
The history and modern business of olive oil, with a focus on the bogus organic cachet of "extra virgin," actually a product of modern industrial methods.
Possible explanation for the "Wow signal" of 1977, no aliens involved. Original paper here.
Cass Sunstein on what is exactly involved in making the government more efficient.
More work on estimating the number of deaths in the US Civil War, with a best guess of 698,000. (NY Times, original paper)
If all the big art shows only display works by supposedly marginalized artists, who is marginalized? "There was a new answer to the question of what art should do: it should amplify the voices of the historically marginalized. What it shouldn’t do, it seemed, is be inventive or interesting."
Medieval mass grave found in Leicester, England. One minute video here.
Interesting review of Jordan Peterson's new book on the Bible, mainly asking the question of whether Peterson's faith in a therapeutic, symbolicized God can really protect us from nihilism.
Scott Siskind reveals which art works in his quiz are human vs. AI.
Codes and secret secretaries in Renaissance Venice.
The Pentagon's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) figures out that one of its most famous UFOs, known as GOFAST because it appeared to be skimming the sea surface at fantastic speed, was not actually going very fast. Using the advanced technology known as trigonometry they worked out that it was at an altitude of 13,000 feet and traveling at a perfectly normal speed.
Former Republican Senator Ben Sasse was hired to be President of the University of Florida on a 5-year, $10 million contract, but left after 17 months. According to the NY Times, the biggest issue was that the Board of Trustees is obsessed with raising the school's US News & World Report rankings, and Sasse didn't care. When the school slipped from 5 to 6 among public universities, the board demanded to know what he was going to do about it, he said, "nothing," and out he went. This local Florida story agrees that the rankings issue was important but also cites financial scandals and personality conflicts with the head of the board. It strikes me that many conservatives are feeling like they left higher education to liberals for too long and now want to increase their involvement, but that can mean very different things, from withdrawing into "classical education" to a business-style, "results oriented" push like we have seen at Texas A&M, Florida, and (for a while) Virginia.
The Leonidas microwave weapon is intended to nullify the threat of small, cheap drones; basically it uses a precise EMP to disable electronics, so it would in theory work on autonomous drones. It is designed to be modular and easily updated to keep up with any countermeasures. Now being tested by US forces in Syria. Ad from the manufacturer, 18-minute video, article from Army Technology.
First video of a western tank (Leopard 2A4) knocking out a Russian tank in combat.
Video of Russia's IRBM strike on Ukraine: Twitter/X, YouTube.
From the abstract to a new, paywalled paper titled The Misery of Diversity:
Evolutionary accounts assert that while diversity may lower subjective well-being (SWB) by creating an evolutionary mismatch between evolved psychological tendencies and the current social environment, human societies can adapt to diversity via intergroup contact under appropriate conditions. Exploiting a novel natural experiment in history, we examine the impact of the social environment, captured by population diversity, on SWB. We find that diversity lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB. Diversity-induced deteriorations in the quality of the macrosocial environment, captured by reduced social cohesion, retarded state capacity, and increased inequality in economic opportunities, emerge as mechanisms explaining our findings. The analysis of first- and second-generation immigrants in Europe and the USA reveals that the misery of home country diversity persists even after neutralizing the role of the social environment. However, these effects diminish among the second generation, suggesting that long-term improvements in the social environment can alleviate the burden of diversity.
Somewhere on this site I discuss a paper about a corporation that had 4-6 person offices all over the world; the researchers found that people were happier and more productive when the office was all male or all female. All the studies I have ever seen find that most people are happiest around others like themselves and want to live that way most of the time.
Not that this is the whole story; after all, if immigrants had been happy in their home countries they presumably would never have left. Village life has its own miseries, and people have been leaving their birth villages for the big city for about 5,000 years now. As I have said many times, I personally prefer mixed-sex gatherings to all male ones, although I am finding that men over 50 are less obnoxious in groups than they were when we were younger.
But, anyway, when you are pondering why our vast wealth and long lives have not made us happy, you have to consider the price we pay for having to live and work with people who feel to us like strangers.
(That can apply to distinctions other than ethnicity and sex; I mean, think about how miserable every presidential election makes tens of millions of Americans on the losing side.)
There are also very basic problems with extending the village mentality to a nation. While it might be possible for a country like Norway to maintain ethnic unity, the US has been multi-ethnic and multi-cultural from its beginnings. It was probably Indians in the southeast who first divided North Americans into Red, Black and White, in the early 1700s, and we have been diverse ever since. Attempts to achieve ethnic purity in the US therefore all amount to Apartheid. While I'm on the subject, ethnic unity in many European states was achieved by some combination of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced assimilation. Our desire to live among others like us, while understandable and extremely ancient, always has a dark side that we need to monitor.
When one group has most of the money and power, their desire to hang out with each other can also amount to a severe barrier for others; it was for this reason that the men's clubs that used to be so important in the US (Elks, Kiwanis, etc.) were forced to admit women. (Is that part of why they have declined?)
When I write about immigration to the US, I always acknowledge that there are costs. It is simply true that having to deal with people who feel alien "lowers cognitive and hedonic measures of SWB." Many European ethno-nationalists also write about the bad effects this has on immigrants, torn away from what these writers see as their native homes and cultures, and this paper seems to support the notion that immigrants suffer from their status.
But I think the benefits are worth it. I think the US is more vibrant, more productive, and more interesting with millions of immigrants than it would be without them. Immigration also makes the cost of our aging population more sustainable; take away the contributions of recent immigrants and Social Security would already be bankrupt. I also think that in the US it would have always been hard for blacks to achieve equality in a country that was 85% white than it will be in a more diverse situation.
And I think we are much better off with women in public life, doubling our reservoir of talent and energy.
Sometimes when I read liberals going on about the wonders of diversity I cringe and think about the huge literature showing that diversity makes many of us unhappy. But when I consider that we are stuck with diversity, I think that maybe celebrating what we have is the way to go.
From Michael Sugrue's excellent lecture on Hegel's philosophy of history:
The big concern of the nineteenth century is history. Utopian socialists, people like Comte and Fourier, are people who are essentially interested in ending history. They said that previous centuries, previous societies, previous governments, the way they have treated human beings, have all be a scandal, a disgrace. We have now gotten to an enlightened state of consciousness where we can create a new society, where we can abolish that earlier society and have true human relations and a truly human world. Marx's philosophy is shot through with the idea that the industrial revolution makes possible a new epoch in human history, which is fundamentally different from all the other phases of human history.
Hegel saw himself as representing a key moment in human history, when the whole evolutionary process became aware of itself. His philosophy represented, therefore, a radical break, prehaps the very culmination of history, one might say the end of history. And people have been announcing the end of history ever since. Sugrue lists a bunch, including post-modernists and deconstructionists and so on who believed they had understood something about western thought that everyone had missed before, that texts actually have no meanings or communication is actually impossible or what have you:
Modern intellectual trends and practices are, with varying degrees of comprehension, the heirs of Hegel's end of history argument, that something fundamentally new and important is happening to us right now that makes us fundamentally different from all the other generations who have been stuck and enchained in earlier traditions. But this is nothing new; we have been doing this since Hegel. All of these crypto end of history arguments are homage to Hegel, homage to the idea that even if human history can no longer be seen as a necessary progression toward the final state of human existence, there is something fundamentally different about us that allows us to recognize that fact. The idea that we have fundamentally turned a corner sounds like it is new and exciting and it thrills undergraduates when you tell them stuff like that, but my point is that it is at least 150 years old.
My question is this: is the modernist belief in radical change dead? Have we stopped imagining that we have the power to enter an entirely different mode of human existence, when everything will be better? Are there any thinkers who see their ideas as marking a radical break with everything that came before?
The only contemporary school I can think of that fits this pattern is the AI guys with their "singularity." But nobody can agree on whether that will be good for us or terrible, so that seems a bit different. Thoughts?
The other day I went looking for information on Maya cosmology, and one of the first pages that came up was this old blog post that focuses on casting a Maya horoscope for Princess Diana.
American higher education is getting cheaper (Marginal Revolution).
US officials have pushed Qatar to expel the leaders of Hamas, with the argument that since they won't engage seriously with cease fire proposals, there doesn't seem to be much point in keeping them around. According to news reports, Qatar has agreed to toss them. This happened before the US election.
Raw exit poll data comparing how people voted to how much attention they pay to political news (Twitter/X):
-a great deal: harris +8
-a lot: harris +5
-a moderate amount: trump +1
-a little: trump +8
-none at all: trump +15
Tambalacoque (Sideroxylon grandiflorum) trees are not completely dependent on dodo birds and are in no danger of going extinct. Kicking myself for ever believing this when the truth was on wikipedia.
Summary of the career of anarchist anthropologist David Graeber: "David’s recurrent rallying cry as both a scholar and an activist was: It does not have to be this way." Unfortunately, I think that if you want a wealthy, technologically sophisticated civilization it really does have to be this way.
The NY Times reports on the 470,000 people who fled the Syrian civil war to Lebanon and are now fleeing Lebanon back to Syria. More Syrians would be returning if the Assad regime hadn't threatened to jail everyone who ever opposed them.
Neanderthal inbreeding; DNA of the 42,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton known as Thorin shows evidence of severe inbreeding, as if his people had been living for thousands of years in a small, isolated group. This might be an important part of the the history of our genus; was the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens caused in part by wider marriage networks? David Reich discussed Neanderthal inbreeding in the interview I linked to here.
Tyler Cowen against tarriffs.
Kevin Drum on a new study that says tax cuts for the rich don't help economic growth but do make the rich richer.
Smog in Pakistan is so bad you can see it from space. This week schools and "unessential" businesses in Karachi and Lahore were closed to reduce the health risk.
Meanwhile, in America: Megan Fox Announces Fourth Pregnancy with Grungy Nude Photo Shoot.
Zvi, a rationalist figure who is in many matters a pretty strict libertarian, has turned against sports gambling: "ubiquitous sports gambling on mobile phones, and media aggressively pushing wagering, is mostly predation on people who suffer from addictive behaviors." As someone who lightly follows basketball and soccer I am regularly shocked by the ubiquity of gambling talk and gambling ads.
The quest to make glass ever stonger, 23-minute video from Veritasium.
Evidence that a supernova 2.6 million year ago may have caused the mass extinction at the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary. (Scientific paper, news story) That's when the Megalodons died.
Manifesto for a future, moderate Democratic Party from Matt Yglesias on Twitter/X.
Speculation that cuneiform writing was influenced by design elements that appear on cylinder seals as far back as 4400 BC.
Police break up a cock-fighting "ring" in rural Virginia; names of the arrested are all Hispanic. You will be glad to learn that "All 80 chickens are currently being housed and cared for at the Stafford County Animal Shelter and are scheduled to be seen by a vet. The Stafford County Animal Shelter is currently exploring long-term solutions for their future."
Congress continues to hold hearings on UFO sitings and alleged government cover-ups.
Sam Harris election post-mortem, blames much of the Democratic defeat on identity politics. His main worry for the future is the culture of lies and the loss of faith in the media and other institutions.
I was just thinking that I hadn't heard much about Alaska lately. So when a video from Economics Explained popped up in my feed, I listened to it. I learned that oil production in Alaska has been declining since the 1980s and is now half of Oklahoma's. Payments from the state's wealth fund don't come close to covering the state's extra cost of living, so people are leaving and the population is falling.
Poaching and game laws in 19th-century England.
Kevin Drum has the data on how much drug use has declined among American teenagers
More on the fall in US drug overdose deaths.
The fake bear attacks on cars scam.
"Pearls of Wisdom" from Kevin Drum, 66 things he thinks are true and important.
East London in the 70s and 80s, cool photo collection.
The restoration of Bernini's Baldacchino in the Vatican.
Tyler Cowen interviews Neal Stephenson.
What is literature, and how should we relate to it?
What is life, and how should we relate to it?
Are these the same question, or not?
Your first response if probably that of course life and fiction are different, but Roberto Bolaño wants you to think a little harder. After all, most of what happens in the world is a long way from you and involves nobody that you know. Consider, for example, the murders of women that took place in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the 1990s. There were hundreds. Some of these crimes turned out to have been committed by husbands or lovers, and a few were women who had been mixed up with drug trafficking. But from early on there were rumors of a serial killer, or a series of copycat killers, or perhaps a conspiracy of wealthy men who raped and killed with impunity because they had bribed the police to look away. But whoever did it, at least 200 women seem to have been raped and murdered by strangers, their bodies dumped in the desert, without anyone ever being punished for the crime.
To you, in your comfortable house, what is the meaning of this story? Presumably you cannot do anything about it, any more than you could if it had happened entirely within the pages of a novel. You can only think, and feel; the only place your knowledge of these events could make any change to the world would be within your own head. And maybe a fictional story about the murders of women in an imaginary Mexican city called Santa Teresa might cause the same change in your head as news accounts might, or perhaps an even greater change.
2666, published a year after Bolaño's death in 2003, is a monstrous, perplexing, intentionally incomplete, intentionally chaotic 900-page book that got famous partly because many readers felt it had something urgent to say but none of them could agree on what that something might be. My own take is that Bolaño's main subject was fiction itself: how it is related to reality, and how our minds understand or do not understand the difference between the two. I would not recommend this book, unless you are both captivated by fiction and enjoy thinking about how it works; some of the most glowing reviews of the book come from novelists like Jonathan Lethem. I found it amazing and I will be thinking about it for a long time.
The first section of 2666 gives us four professors who are all experts on a German writer who signs his books Benno von Archimboldi. These academics are obsessed with Archimboldi: they read and reread his books, go to conferences where they present papers about his books, argue with other academics who have different interpretations of the books. They would love to know more about Archimboldi but cannot find out anything about him beyond his birth date, 1920, and the fact that he fought in World War II. So they waste their time traveling to yet more conferences and sleeping with each other. Let me tell you, I would rather read the manual for my old dishwasher than a novel about professors having affairs, so I found this part tough going, and if I had not been intrigued by what I had read about the book I would have stopped. It's all a big tease anyway, because we learn next to nothing about Archimboldi's books. Why are people fascinated by him? What is the source of his power over them? We are never told, so the bare fact of this obsession looms in front of us, confronting us with the question of how it is that people can care so much about stories.
Because of a rumor that Archimboldi has been seen there, three of the professors fly off to a city in northern Mexico called Santa Teresa, obviously modeled on Ciudad Juárez. Nothing happens there, but we are introduced to the city that is one of the main characters in the book. Once we finally get rid of the amorous professors, we hang around Santa Teresa with a different professor and his daughter, another section I didn't enjoy very much. But then we meet an African American reporter named Fate who gets sent to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match between an obscure Mexican fighter and a seasoned pro from el Norte. Here you see Bolaño's astonishing writing skill on display. He can give you an American black man from a younger generation, pitch perfect voice, believable thoughts, really a great character.
Then comes the longest section of the book, about the killings. Much of this is written in a dry, factual, police report style. Bodies are found, described, identified or not, a killer charged or not. It goes on for 400 pages, building a sick momentum of bland horror. Then in the midst of one of these endless crime reports we come on a gem of beautiful writing about sunset in the desert, or a wonderful little vignette about the family life of a victim. Considered as a general potrait of human existence, it is horrifying and a little too convincing.
In the last section we finally meet Archimboldi himself. After a glimpse at his childhood we follow him through his war years and into his postwar career as a writer. Still, though, we learn nothing about his books, although by this time it is clear why: if you want to know what sort of writing can fascinate people the way Archimboldi's is supposed to, just consider the book you are reading.
On his way from New York to Santa Teresa, our reporter Fate stops off in Detroit to interview a man who was once in the leadership of the Black Panthers. This is a side project of Fate's, nothing to do with the newspaper he works for, and it is just as it is irrelevent to the rest of this novel. But with Bolaño the answers are as likely to be in an eddy as in the main current. We listen as the old man gives a sort of sermon that carries us far away from the grimy world of working class Detroit:
He talked about the stars you see at night, say when you’re driving from Des Moines to Lincoln on Route 80 and the car breaks down, the way they do, maybe it’s the oil or the radiator, maybe it’s a flat tire, and you get out and get the jack and the spare tire out of the trunk and change the tire, maybe half an hour, at most, and when you’re done you look up and see the sky full of stars. The Milky Way. He talked about star athletes. That’s a different kind of star, he said, and he compared them to movie stars, though as he said, the life of an athlete is generally much shorter. A star athlete might last 15 years at best, whereas a movie star could go on for 40 or 50 years if he or she started young. Meanwhile, any star you could see from the side of Route 80 . . . might have been dead for millions of years, and the traveler who gazed up at it would never know. It might be a live star or it might be a dead star. Sometimes, depending on your point of view, he said, it doesn’t matter, since the stars you see at night exist in the realm of semblance. They are semblances, the same way dreams are semblances. So the traveler on Route 80 with a flat tire doesn't know whether what he's staring up at in the vast night are stars or whether they're dreams. In a way, he said, the traveler is also part of a dream, a dream that breaks away from another dream like one drop of water breaking away from a bigger drop of water that we call a wave.
It's perfectly in the character of the old man, but also perfectly Bolaño, and that is a trick very few writers can manage.
Like I said, I don't really recommend this book, unless you feel like immersing yourself in 900 pages of speculation about how a star is like a wave is like a corpse by the side of a road in the Mexican desert is like a mediocare professor's adoration of his favorite writer is like a bombed out city is like a story that goes on for 900 pages without resolving a single thing.
