(lower right) looked a lot different from ours.
Does dark energy radiate from black holes? Beats me. If anyone has seen a good explanation of this theory I would appreciate a link.
Singapore's "Pan Pacific Orchard," the latest plant-covered skyscraper. (My Modern Met, Dezeen)
Thread on Twitter/X listing 50 ways the world is getting better: weather forecasting; improvements in treating cataracts, cystic fibrosis, and snake venom; better drilling making geothermal energy affordable; extreme poverty falling worldwide; less violence is US schools; etc.
This week's music is "Lord Franklin" (aka "Lady Franklin's Lament"), sung by Sinead O'Connor.
A tiny Polish radio station's experiment with using all AI hosts and interviewees made people really angry. (NY Times, Kevin Drum)
Kevin Drum on water fluoridation. There is some evidence of harm.
Emily Oster's data-driven parenting advice.
Review of a new biography of the Brothers Grimm.
Political theorist Richard Tuck and the problem of how to balance human rights with democracy.
Review of a bunch of books on fertility. Notes that the main cause of fertility decline is not fewer people having children, a number that has hardly budged. What is different is the number of children parents choose to have. The demographers I follow on Twitter/X understand this and much of their attention is focused on why people stop having children after one or two. It is commonly observed that the "norm of the two-child family" dooms a nation to population decline, because of that unchanging number who have none, so what nations need to sustain their populations is more big families.
Anti-Trump libertarians are in mourning and worried that their movement is dead: "The modern libertarian movement spent most of its history attuned to the threat of socialism; it has failed to adapt to the autocratic threat from the American right. . . . For practical purposes we’re just liberals now."
Burial of a Merovingian noble woman with amazing glass beads.
Trump won big in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of NYC (Twitter/X)
Kevin Drum notes the remarkable decline of medical inflation; it wasn't that long ago that medical inflation seemed to promise a future budget catastrophe.
2 comments:
Trump won big in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of NYC
Not surprising - any friend of Bibi's is a friend of theirs, after all. They will happily support whoever will most readily turn a blind eye to the genocide in Palestine.
Richard Tuck sounds like an interesting guy, and I'm tempted to put his oeuvre on my already gargantuan TBR list. Moyn's reivew, however, has almost nothing to say about the problem of human rights vs. democracy--which I take to mean "what do you do when voters vote freely to take away human rights (from some group, from everyone, etc.)"? There's a brief mention of Sieyes' concern that voters might do just that, and his devising of the undemocratic "active/passive" system in response, but after that, for Moyn the issue of how to protect human rights from democratic majorities that may want to take away those rights vanishes, and it becomes a straight matter of insolent elites trying to control the masses. Not clear if this replicates Tuck's view or is just Moyn's.
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