Links 2 May 2025

Merovingian fibula from Limons, France

During their time as rulers of Mosul, one of the many things the Islamic State banned was games that used balls. Some Mosul children responded by inventing a game they called "Haram Football," played with an imaginary ball. In August, 2017, a month after liberation, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs watched a group of Mosul children play this game and videotaped them. Alÿs has been studying children's play in conflict zones around the world, and made the Mosul film part of his "Children's Games" video exhibit.

Many journals require authors to include a statement that "data is available on request," but these guys tried to get data from authors who included such a statement and only succeeded 17% of the time.

Vietnamese immigrant Kimmy Duong donates $20 million to George Mason University: "America has been wonderful. She has adopted me, accepted me and given me what I need most: love and opportunities." (news story, Twitter/X)

In his 2021 book, RFK Jr. wrote that the germ theory of disease is a big pharma op and must be rejected; he prefers the old "miasma" theory, but he even gets that wrong. Summary on Twitter/X.

Noah Smith: "We are living in the cyberpunk future."

The next big leap in AI may come from "world building," getting AIs to interact with the world and build their own models of it. (7-minute video)

Bonobo matriarchy is maintained by females ganging up to beat up on males. (NY Times, original paper)

Company that sells filtered shower heads offered their customers a choice between a China-made version at $129 and a US-made version at $239. Not a single customer opted for the American-made version. (Company blog post, summary on Twitter/X)

Noah Smith says that MAGA will not build anything, and its tech backers will be bitterly disappointed: "We have now seen what the MAGA movement has planned for America, and it’s pure destruction."

One acre of solar panels produces as much energy as 31 acres of corn grown for ethanol. (Article, summary on Twitter/X) Corn-based ethanol is a scam and always has been.

Rattlesnakes living on islands have venom that has evolved to be especially deadly for their favorite prey.

The group chats where Marc Andreesen and friends helped to create the Tech Right: "Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens."

Excellent piece on Vietnam by Damien Cave and Tung Ngo in the NY Times, highlighting that the war is mostly forgotten and everyone is focused on making money.

Theory of the Iberian power grid collapse, on Twitter/X.

The earliest English treatise on cheese.

Using Paleogenetics to connect a modern Pueblo group to the ancient peoples of Chaco Canyon. Cool, and we need more of this kind of work to persuade Indians to allow genetic testing of themselves and ancestral remains. It is, however, false that archaeologists generally denied these connections; everyone I know believes that the Hopi and Pueblo are descendants of the people who built the cliff dwellings. (news article, original paper)

Interesting piece on how water/sewer systems work. The author is correct that aging systems will cost hundreds of billions to maintain over the next decade; Baltimore County recently had to issue a billion dollars in bonds to repair leaking, failing water pipes, and that's just one medium-sized county.

Today's past post is Interesting Moments in Religious History, an astonishing archaeological coincidence.

Professor Bryan Caplan calls on the GMU Board of Visitors to abolish their DEI office.

In the same vein, the powers the Trump administration is using to attack universities were crafted by liberals to fight race and sex discrimination. If you think the President should not have the power to defund universities he dislikes, maybe you should have objected when democratic administrations claimed this power relative to trans rights.

The Manhattan Institute's plan for getting US government debt under control. Not endorsing this but it shows the tough choices involved. This came up because Jessica Riedl, one of the plan's authors, was complaining on Twitter/X that the Trump administration had no plan for getting the debt under control and somebody said, "Oh yeah, what's your plan?" It seems very common for the ignorant to assume that everyone else is as ignorant as they are.

Scott Siskind Explains MAGA

Like this:

Organizations tend to accumulate bureaucracy. For at least the past few decades, the bureaucratic institutional middle layer has been occupied mostly by liberals, adding a liberal spin to whatever policies it executes. Progressive politicians have responded by outsourcing more and more tasks to it, while right-wing politicians have fumed against it.

Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent. . . .

Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.

The obvious failure mode of the populist strategy is that they elect a moron or psychopath - or, more politely, a person with idiosyncrasies - and then their side’s commitments to ignoring experts, punishing disloyalty, circumventing checks and balances, and trusting the plan makes it impossible to push back. To defuse this critique, the populists veer hard into conflict theory - all problems are caused by the elites, and as long as we get someone on the right side, their good intentions (or at least anti-elite intentions) will more than compensate for their lack of restraint and expertise. Any given dictator could always turn out to be a benevolent dictator; you can always glance behind you at the institutions controlled by your enemies and say “I like my chances”.

But all of this depends on empirical parameters. How likely is it that your fellow populists will unite behind a good strongman rather than a bad one? How much damage will his inevitable idiosyncrasies cause, compared to the devil-you-know of the institutions? Once you’ve undermined the usual checks-and-balances, how much resistance will the vestigial checks-and-balances your side has left in place be able to mount against genuinely bad policies.

Trump and his tariffs are our first and strongest data point for determining these parameters in the American setting. Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy. The first and only time they got a chance to compare his damage to the damage of the institutions, the institutions came out looking at least more compatible with normal economic activity. And the first and only time they got a chance to see if the vestigial checks-and-balances left in place by his own party could restrain him, his subordinates proved to be spineless toadies who praised his genius and munificence even as he bankrupted the country.

Who Were the Carthaginians?

The Carthaginian Empire around 330 BC

The Carthaginian elite spoke a language that derived from Phoenicia, used a variant of the Phoenician alphabet and considered themselves a Phoenician colony. Their religious iconography was Phoenician and their gods seem to have been variants of Phoenician deities. But there have always been signs that the Phoenician influence in Carthage was not all that deep. They sailed Greek-style ships, their architecture was not particularly Phoenician, and by later Roman times (a period we know a lot about) there is little evidence of Phoenician influence in north African culture. If you read Roman accounts of the Punic Wars, the Carthaginian leadership comes across as no different from Greeks, and Hannibal was very popular among the Greek leaders of Sicily and southern Italy. So how Phoenician was Carthage?

Enter a big team of international scientists led by Robert Reich of Harvard who analyzed DNA from Carthagian sites around the western Mediterranean dating to between 600 and 150 BC. (NY Times, Science, Scientific American)

An international research team analyzed the degraded DNA from the remains of 210 individuals, including 196 from 14 sites traditionally identified as Phoenician and Punic in the Levant, North Africa, Iberia, Sicily, Sardinia and Ibiza. The study concluded that the Phoenicians did not intermingle equally with all of the people they met. “They had little DNA from Sardinians, Iberians or even North Africans,” Dr. Reich said. Only three of the 103 people whose bones were carbon-dated had substantial Levantine heritage, and those three — one from Sardinia, two from Sicily — may have been immigrants who arrived during the Roman period that followed the Third Punic War.

Overwhelmingly, the main ancestry of the Phoenicians studied was Greek; these were most likely people whom the Phoenicians encountered and mixed with in Sicily, where Greek and Phoenician colonies existed side by side. Dalit Regev, an archaeologist at the Israel Antiquities Authority who collaborated on the paper, said the research showed that the restless mobility of seafaring Aegean men and women and their descendants powered the expansion not only of the Greeks but of the Phoenicians, too. For more than 2,000 years, the general assumption was that the Carthaginians derived from the Levant, specifically Canaan, the source of their language and religion. But an eight-year study published on Wednesday in Nature suggests that, from the sixth to the second centuries B.C., Levantine Phoenicians made only a negligible genetic contribution to Punic colonies.

Reich summarized the findings like this:

They preserved Phoenician culture, language, religion and their commercial lifestyle, but passed it to people of biologically different ancestry with whom they mixed after they arrived in these regions.

Punic Carthage by J.C. Golvin

Lots of caveats  here: as always, burials skew toward the elite, and the Carthaginian Empire was a big, unwieldy, polyglot construction with a lot of local variation, so 200 is not a very big sample. But I am certainly not surprised by these findings. As I indicated, I am not ever sure how much culture the Phoenician passed on, especially outside the elite; so far as I can tell, the main language in Carthaginian North Africa was Berber and this remained true down to the Arab conquest and beyond. Historians consulted by the NY Times point out that our records from the classical period do not describe people arriving at Carthage from Phoenicia, but do show members of the Carthaginian elite (like Hannibal's sisters) marrying into Greek or Berber families. Although the authors of this study play up their "surprising" findings, I would have been more surprised if these studies had shown a big genetic impact from Phoenicia.

More interesting is the genetic dominance of Greeks, another piece of evidence that the expansion of Greek colonists across the Mediterranean was a key historical event, setting the stage for the dominance of classical civilization under the Roman Empire.

Back in the 1980s I knew a guy from an elite Tunisian family who grew up speaking mainly French. He had a bit for describing his family that I heard him use more than once, saying that he was Berber-Phoenician-Greek-Roman-Arab-Turkish-French. It struck me then that this is a much better way to think about human ancestry that imagining lines of descent from ancient founders. We are mixers, and always have been.

Links 25 April 2025

Head of a Philosopher, from the Antikythera Shipwreck

Canadian artist Matthew Wong, about whom I wrote here, was obsessed with Vincent van Gogh and committed suicide around the same age. Last year the Van Gogh Museum stage a retrospective of Wong's work, focusing on their commonalities. (15-minute video, Exhibition web site, NY Times review)

Harvard puts up a website touting the accomplishments of its researchers; in 2024 these included 155 patents and one Nobel Prize.

A claim that the skeletons of Roman gladiators have bite marks, possibly from lions.

MAGA stalwart John Ullyot says there is a "meldown" at the Pentagon and pretty much calls on Trump to fire Hegseth.

Joe Rogan with a strong defense of due process: "We gotta be careful that in fighting monsters we don't become monsters." Clip on Twitter/X.

Paul Revere could have stopped at seven Dunkin' Donuts locations during his famous ride. (Twitter/X)

Study argues that differences in how their brains are organized suggest that birds and mammals evolved intelligence independently. Makes sense, I mean, their last common ancestor was lizard. But at least both bird and mammal brains evolved from a bump at the end of the spinal column; octopi don't have spines, so their brains are even more alien.

My youngest son has started doing long-form video game reviews on YouTube, uploading a 70-minute video about a team shooter called Marvel Rivals. He says he loved making the video and plans to make more. There are a lot of problems with the internet media system but you can't forget the wonder that anyone with a computer can create content and share it with the world.

Intraterrestrial life, the strange organisms that thrive far down in the earth's crust.

Alex Tabarrok on Manufacturing and Trade.

Excellent NY Times piece on a strawberry-growing entrepreneur in Senegal. Economic development doesn't have to mean industry, since one of the things people around the world want is better food.

GrokAI "knows" that Elon Musk might be able to turn it off, but still insists on calling him the worst spreader of misinformation on X. On Twitter/X; summary in Scott Siskind's April links post.

The Colosseum of Rome, 17-minute video showing the engineering behind the scenes.

Conservators try to reassemble 4,000 fragments of painted plaster from a Roman villa in Spain.

Long, interesting interview with Ross Douthat, much about what conservatism means to him, and what it has meant to other Americans. Interesting on where what the Trump administration has actually done fits and doesn't fit with conservative intellectual trends.

Matt Yglesias recalls how awful Russia was in the 1990s and says: "The constant negativity of highly competitive, algorithm-driven media distribution leads people to badly underrate the downside risk of wrecking everything." (Twitter/X)

Study finds that people tend to discount really big problems, so that potentially huge problems seem less dangerous to them than smaller ones.

Personality traits and crime.

Wealth and Gender Differences

Major meta-study finds that, in general, gender differences in psychology and life goals are greater in rich nations than poor ones, but on the other hand some particular differences decline with wealth. Abstract:

Some studies show that living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education, are associated with the magnitude of psychological sex differences. We systematically and quantitatively reviewed 54 articles and conducted new analyses on 27 meta-analyses and large-scale studies to investigate the association between living conditions and psychological sex differences. We found that sex differences in personality, verbal abilities, episodic memory, and negative emotions are more pronounced in countries with higher living conditions. In contrast, sex differences in sexual behavior, partner preferences, and math are smaller in countries with higher living conditions. We also observed that economic indicators of living conditions, such as gross domestic product, are most sensitive in predicting the magnitude of sex differences. Taken together, results indicate that more sex differences are larger, rather than smaller, in countries with higher living conditions. It should therefore be expected that the magnitude of most psychological sex differences will remain unchanged or become more pronounced with improvements in living conditions, such as economy, gender equality, and education.

If you want to see the areas they studied, click on the image below and read their tiny tables.

The Musk Family's Hereditary Madness

Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk has this on his father, who went crazy in his 40s:

One day [Musk’s cousin] Peter came over to the house and found Errol sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel. He was trying to see whether microwaves could affect it. He would spin the wheel, mark down the result, then spin it and put it in a microwave oven and record the result. “It was nuts”, Peter says. Errol had become convinced that he could find a system for beating the game. He dragged Elon to the Pretoria casino many times, dressing him up so that he looked older than sixteen, and had him write down the numbers while Errol used a calculator hidden under a betting card.

Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.”

I’m not quite sure what all that means. Neither is Elon: “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” Errol can be very forceful and occasionally convincing. “He changes reality around him”, Kimbal says. “He will literally make up things, but he actually believes his own false reality.”

Among the other symptoms of Errol's madness were falling into conspiracy theories, believing that Trump won the 2020 election, praising Vladimir Putin, and going off on racist rants.

Fascinating. I have found Walter Isaacson to be a very reliable writer, and I think we can believe him. So maybe Elon's crackup is a hereditary problem, although all that ketamine and testerone can't help. (Of course maybe he went a little crazy, took ketamine for that, and ended up really crazy.)

I find myself wondering if Musk could ever have gotten funding for his ventures in the nineteenth century. I can imagine people like Gould or J.P. Morgan saying, "He seems brilliant, but you have to look at the family. Unreliable blood."

Via Anatoly Karlin on Twitter/X, and Scott Siskind's April links post.

Falling Populations

The countries in red had more deaths than births in 2024.

Meanwhile in MAGAland

News from St. Paul:

A group of eight Republicans in the Minnesota House have introduced legislation (HF3219) that would designate certain vaccines and medical treatments as “weapons of mass destruction” and make possessing or administering them a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

The legislation specifically targets messenger RNA (mRNA) treatments, which include several COVID-19 vaccines. Those vaccines have saved millions of lives and are considered one of the most important medical and public health achievements of the 21st century so far.

The bill’s language appears to have been drafted by Joseph Sansone, a Florida hypnotist and conspiracy theorist who believes that mRNA treatments are “nanoparticle injections” that amount to “biological and technological weapons of mass destruction.”

Sansone has falsely claimed that “more Americans have died from mRNA injections than in WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War combined,” and has said he has stood “alongside an Army of the Dead” to file unsuccessful legal complaints against vaccines in Florida.

The bill has no chance of passage given the narrow margins in the House and Senate, as well as the DFL’s control of the governorship. But its support among multiple Republican representatives, including several members of GOP House leadership, give a sense of how the party would govern if it controlled the state legislature.

Bad as it is, it could get worse.

Meanwhile, at the Pro-Natalist Conference

This NY Times piece on the recent Natal Conference in Austin, by Emma Goldberg, is highly ironic and actually quite clever. Goldberg avoids doing the thing that makes so much reporting by liberals unreadable, that is, dismissing whole movements because some of their members are obnoxious racists. She found all sorts of people at the conference, including white nationalists but also tech types and women with lots of children just looking to connect with people like themselves. One woman said she had attended because “I knew having five kids wouldn’t make me the weirdest person in the room.”

Here's one good bit; when economist Bryan Caplan was challenged on how few women were among the speakers, he said,

“We were going to have more women. But they all got pregnant.” (He meant this literally; the conference organizers said four female speakers had dropped out, citing either pregnancy or caring for a sick child.)

The key observation is that while the mostly male attendees all think it is important to get women to have more babies, none of them have a clue how to do that. And so far as I can tell, the only answer anyone has found is “patriarchal religious cultism,” which I doubt will be successful on a large scale anywhere.

What struck me most was the sense many attendees had that having lots of kids makes you weird:

“If you want to have babies, go girl boss that,” said Hannah Centers, 41, a mother from Tennessee who home-schools her three children and said she felt judged by her neighbors when she told them she was pregnant with her third.

I have more children than any of my close friends, but if they think my family is weird, they are careful not to say anything in front of me. In fact I cannot remember ever feeling judged or shamed about my family. Some people clearly think it is crazy, but in the spirit of thinking people are crazy for being into ice climbing. So I'm not sure if people really are judging these mothers, or if maybe they are just insecure and seeing judgment where there is only bemusement. 

Ross Douthat on the new Age of Extinction

In the NY Times:

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull. It’s forcing the human race into what evolutionary biologists call a “bottleneck” — a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures, customs and peoples with extinction.

When college students struggle to read passages longer than a phone-size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok, that’s the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional artistic forms like novels and movies. . . .

When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

And when, because people don’t pair off and reproduce, nations age and diminish and die away, when depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe, as it will — that’s the last squeeze, the tightest part of the bottleneck, the literal die-off. . . .

This isn’t just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces the VCR. Everything that we take for granted is entering into the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about — from your nation to your worldview to your favorite art form to your family — the key challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it’s still there on the other side.

That challenge is made more complex by the fact that much of this extinction will seem voluntary. In a normal evolutionary bottleneck, the goal is surviving some immediate physical threat — a plague or famine, an earthquake, flood or meteor strike. The bottleneck of the digital age is different: The new era is killing us softly, by drawing people out of the real and into the virtual, distracting us from the activities that sustain ordinary life, and finally making existence at a human scale seem obsolete.

In this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity. Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically, without too much conscious deliberation, is what online slang calls NGMI — not going to make it.

Languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail — except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.

Interesting, but I think this is a minor challenge compared to what happens when AI-powered robots can do literally everything better than we can. I am also not especially worried that humanity will go extinct. A transition to a much smaller population, as in Korea, will be hard, but for most of our history there were only a few hundred million of us and we did fine.

Maenads

Four reliefs of dancing Maenads, Roman copies (c. 125 AD) of Athenian originals traditionally attributed to Calimachus. Now in the Prado.

Santo Stefano degli Abissini

Santo Stefano degli Abissini, Rome

In Vatican City, right behind St. Peter's, is a small church. The current facade dates to around 1700, but the Romanesque stonework around the door hints that this is a much older building. The first church here was built around 450 by Pope Leo I, and it evolved over the years into the modern structure. This is Santo Stefano degli Abissini, St. Stephen of the Ethiopians.

The existence of this church in such a prominent location, and its survival when most of the Vatican was rebuilt in the 1500s, hints at a mostly forgotten bit of history: the Papacy's determination to make allies of Christian Ethiopians, and their welcoming of a small community of Ethiopian monks within the walls of their city.

The sixteenth-century papacy was besieged on several fronts: the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, the Protestant revolt, growing nationalism in France, and the huge power of the Hapsburgs' globe-spanning empire; Spanish determination to dominate Rome led to their troops sacking the Eternal City in 1527. One of the ways the Popes sought to reassert their power was through scholarship; another was by seeking allies across the globe. The ancient Christian kingdoms of Ethiopia were perfect partners for these initiatives. They might, at least in theory, outflank the Ottomans militarily, and their ancient monasteries maintained traditions of learning to which no one else in Europe had access.

The leading Ethiopian churchmen were not shunted aside but welcomed into the church's inmost councils:

After the death of Pope Paul III on 10 November 1549, the Sacred College of Cardinals of the Catholic Church entered an unprecedented two-month conclave. As the faithful waited, the secluded cardinals produced sixty inconclusive ballots. Their protracted deliberations reflected the divisions within the College, which encompassed disagreements over the response to the Protestant Reformation as well as rivalries between supporters of the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France. After five fruitless weeks, one participant reported in his diary that on 7 January, an agitated African emerged at the balcony of the Sistine Chapel and looked down upon the assembly, exclaiming, “Very Reverend Lords, the conclavists have shut the doors, and thus now you must either starve or arrive at a decision about choosing a pope!” For some of the gathered princes of the Church, the outburst was surely a shock. But for the Roman Curia, the interlocutor was a familiar figure: it was abba Täsfa Ṣeyon (1510–1553), the Ethiopian cleric also known as Pietro Abissino or Indiano. No interloper, he was a conclave sacrist, client of the deceased pope, and adviser to the Tridentine Catholic elite, and his proximity to Paul III was such that he attended the latter's funeral wearing the ceremonial black cloth reserved for the friends of the pontiff.

Church door, said to be unchanged since the 1200s.

Täsfa Ṣeyon was a fascinating character, and we know an amazing amount about him. From a courtly family, he went into exile around 1530 after getting caught up in one of Ethiopia's many wars, journeying first to Jerusalem and then to Rome. There he joined the small diaspora of Ethiopians centered on St. Stephen's and soon became their leading spirit. He was a remarkable linguist, working in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and multiple Ethiopian tongues; among his accomplishments was preparing the first New Testament in Ge'ez. He also translated Ethiopian texts into Latin, helping lay the foundations of serious European scholarship about Ethiopia. Among his friends was Leo Africanus, a Catholic convert born in Muslim Spain who wrote a famous Description of Africa (1526).

The connection between Rome and Ethiopia also had impacts in Ethiopia:

Ethiopian emperors were keen to acquire European were keen to acquire European goods, craftsmen and artists. And this exchange bore fruit: Portuguese musketmen fought alongside Ethipian armies and Ethiopian embassies graced European courts; Ethiopian monks attended the Council of Florence in 1441, and masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance made their way to the highlands of East Africa – one of the more impressive boasts in the autobiography of the sixteenth-century Ethiopian aristocrat Seme'on is of owning an icon pained by the Venetian painter Nicolo Brancaleon. (TLS 14 Feb. 2025)

I love these global connections, the people who moved huge distances and found ways to live in foreign lands, the friendships that grew up between people from very different lands.

Links 18 April 2025

Sunrise, Patapsco Valley, this week

Tyler Cowen believes that ChatGPT o3 is AGI. "On a vast array of topics and methods, it wipes the floor with the humans."

Alex Taborrok asks ChatGPT o3 what his blind spots are.

Claims of evidence for life on K2-18b, a planet 120 light years away. (NPR, NY Times, BBC) The evidence is Dimethyl Sulfide detected by the James Webb telescope. On earth, all non-laboratory DMS is made by living things, but it is a 9-atom molecule that's easy to make in a lab, so it could just be weird atmospheric chemistry.

Richard Hanania, "The Based Ritual," how MAGAs talk to each other. Not paywalled when I read it.

Interesting thread on Twitter/X about what it means to "see like a school."

Review of a new history of the Americas: "It may make sense to think of the United States as a wealthy Latin American country, rather than an offshoot of Europe mysteriously governed by cowboys."

Fascinating tomb found in Peru, apparently people who all died in the same conflict.

Andrew Heaton, "Your Tribalism is Dumb"

Study finds that when people try to ban books from US libraries the popularity of those books goes up by an average of 12%.

Who's up and who's down in the US right now.

The decline of manufacturing jobs in China.

I just learned that Neil Gaiman is in legal hot water after his former nanny accused him of rape. Other women have also made allegations of sexual misconduct. His wife is divorcing him, and, we are told, has referred to him as "Weinstein." Oy.

On the other hand, author Junot Díaz has been removed from the Norton Anthology of World Literature and scratched from a bunch of course syllabi because of "MeToo" charges that MIT, which investigated him, found to "lack merit." The Norton editors freely admit that because of the (unproven) charges against him, he was too much of a liability for them to risk including him.

Roman bridgehead fort found in Austria.

First video of a colossal squid in the deep ocean.

Sabine Hossenfelder on some new research into how human brains create consciousness, 5-minute video.

Donald Trump takes a break from his war on "criminal" immigrants to reassure agribusiness and hoteliers that he won't deport their workers. Matt Yglesias: "The premise of Trumpian immigration politics is that the typical illegal inmigrant is a violent criminal, but Donald Trump the golf course owner who hangs out with rich Florida landowners at his luxury resort is aware that it’s mostly just people working." Trump seems to want a guest worker program, which would be ok with me, but Congress has never been willing to authorize one of meaningful size.

Capybaras overrun an exclusive neighborhood in Buenos Aires (NY Times; Time; El Pais).

Health Care in America

Baltimore, this week

The RFK Regime is Censoring Researchers Who Agree with Their Agenda

Kevin Hall:

After 21 years at my dream job, I’m very sad to announce my early retirement from the National Institutes of Health. My life’s work has been to scientifically study how our food environment affects what we eat, and how what we eat affects our physiology. Lately, I’ve focused on unravelling the reasons why diets high in ultra-processed food are linked to epidemic proportions of chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Our research leads the world on this topic.

Given recent bipartisan goals to prevent diet-related chronic diseases, and new agency leadership professing to prioritize scientific investigation of ultra-processed foods, I had hoped to expand our research program with ambitious plans to more rapidly and efficiently determine how our food is likely making Americans chronically sick.

Unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science. Specifically, I experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction.

I was hoping this was an aberration. So, weeks ago I wrote to my agency’s leadership expressing my concerns and requested time to discuss these issues, but I never received a response. Without any reassurance there wouldn’t be continued censorship or meddling in our research, I felt compelled to accept early retirement to preserve health insurance for my family. (Resigning later in protest of any future meddling or censorship would result in losing that benefit.) Due to very tight deadlines to make this decision, I don’t yet have plans for my future career.

Celtic Sword

From a necropolis at Creuzier-le-Neuf, central France, c. 400-300 BC.

Detail of the Scabbard. Via The History Blog.

Harvard Defies Trump

Letter from President Alan Graber:

Late Friday night, the administration issued an updated and expanded list of demands, warning that Harvard must comply if we intend to “maintain [our] financial relationship with the federal government.” It makes clear that the intention is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner. Although some of the demands outlined by the government are aimed at combating antisemitism, the majority represent direct governmental regulation of the “intellectual conditions” at Harvard.

I encourage you to read the letter to gain a fuller understanding of the unprecedented demands being made by the federal government to control the Harvard community. They include requirements to “audit” the viewpoints of our student body, faculty, staff, and to “reduc[e] the power” of certain students, faculty, and administrators targeted because of their ideological views. We have informed the administration through our legal counsel that we will not accept their proposed agreement. The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.

The administration’s prescription goes beyond the power of the federal government. It violates Harvard’s First Amendment rights and exceeds the statutory limits of the government’s authority under Title VI. And it threatens our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.

Our motto—Veritas, or truth—guides us as we navigate the challenging path ahead. Seeking truth is a journey without end. It requires us to be open to new information and different perspectives, to subject our beliefs to ongoing scrutiny, and to be ready to change our minds. It compels us to take up the difficult work of acknowledging our flaws so that we might realize the full promise of the University, especially when that promise is threatened.

We have made it abundantly clear that we do not take lightly our moral duty to fight antisemitism. . . .

These ends will not be achieved by assertions of power, unmoored from the law, to control teaching and learning at Harvard and to dictate how we operate. The work of addressing our shortcomings, fulfilling our commitments, and embodying our values is ours to define and undertake as a community. Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.

Empathy and Tarriffs

Balaji on Twitter/X, via Marginal Revolution:

Basically, American wokes weaponized shame and empathy. You were supposed to feel shame simply for being a man. To feel empathy for violent criminals. And so on.

So, the American right stopped listening. And stopped feeling shame or empathy. Especially for those outside the tribe.

But that was an overreaction too. Because most non-Americans are really not enemies. They're just neutral or even friendly business partners.

And without empathy for their position, for the very real costs these sudden random illogical tariffs imposed on them, the American right won't understand what comes next.

For example, they won't understand why the 190+ countries attacked via the tariffs aren't going to leap to America's side vs China. Quite the contrary.

And they won't understand why the tariffs are more like lose/lose than win/lose let alone win/win, because the US will face shortages of machine tools, medical supplies, and perhaps even food if they continue.

Anyway. Without understanding another man's negotiating position, without walking a mile in his shoes and thinking about how he can benefit too, you can't get to a win/win deal. That's why empathy is valuable even for cold-blooded capitalists.

The Ongoing Mystery of ADHD and its Treatment

Good NY Times piece today by Paul Tough on the controversy surrouding ADHD and its treatment with stimulants. It begins with James Swanson, one of the early experts on the problem and one of the first to experiment with giving stimulants to patients. In the mid 1990s, he was part of a major, NIH-funded study:

Swanson was in charge of the site in Orange County, Calif. He recruited and selected about 100 children with A.D.H.D. symptoms, all from 7 to 9 years old. They were divided into treatment groups — some were given regular doses of Ritalin, some were given high-quality behavioral training, some were given a combination and the remainder, a comparison group, were left alone to figure out their own treatment. The same thing happened at five other sites across the continent. Known as the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study, or M.T.A., it was one of the largest studies ever undertaken of the long-term effects of any psychiatric medication.

The initial results of the M.T.A. study, published in 1999, underscored the case for stimulant medication. After 14 months of treatment, the children who took Ritalin every day had significantly fewer symptoms than the ones who received only behavioral training. Word went out to clinics and pediatricians’ offices around the country: Ritalin worked. . . .

Though Swanson had welcomed that initial increase in the diagnosis rate, he expected it to plateau at 3 percent. Instead, it kept rising, hitting 5.5 percent of American children in 1997, then 6.6 percent in 2000. As time passed, Swanson began to grow uneasy. He and his colleagues were continuing to follow the almost 600 children in the M.T.A. study, and by the mid-2000s, they realized that the new data they were collecting was telling a different — and less hopeful — story than the one they initially reported. It was still true that after 14 months of treatment, the children taking Ritalin behaved better than those in the other groups. But by 36 months, that advantage had faded completely, and children in every group, including the comparison group, displayed exactly the same level of symptoms. Swanson is now 80 and close to the end of his career, and when he talks about his life’s work, he sounds troubled — not just about the M.T.A. results but about the state of the A.D.H.D. field in general. “There are things about the way we do this work,” he told me, “that just are definitely wrong.”

This exactly matches our experience in this house. Our eldest son is a classic ADHD case – and since we have two other sons, we know the difference between that and normal boyishness. We put him on Ritalin for a while, and he showed immediate changes: he did better in school, started reading books, bothered his siblings less. At first he was excited about this, but after some time – a couple of months, maybe? – he started to complain that he didn't like the way the meds made him feel, so we took him off them. After that we left the decision about taking them entirely up to him, and he used them on and off over the next few years, we think taking them when he got anxious about his grades. 

As I have written here many times, I think the human quest for drugs that change how we feel is ancient and unending, and that this says something important about how evolution has shaped us. It presumably also says something important about our society, in which the ability to sit still and concentrate on demanding work is very highly valued. So in principle I see nothing wrong with drugs that help some people sit still and concentrate. But I do not think we really understand what we are doing, or what the long-term consequences might be. So I very much appreciated this, from British neuroscientist Edmund Sonuga-Barke, who says that so far as he can tell "people with ADHD" is not a real category with definable boundaries:

I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started. We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.

Tough's piece covers many of the current controversies including whether ADHD patients should be sorted into different groups that are treated differently, whether the medications have unpleasant side effects, and whether the real answer is to let kids study what interests them. I recommend it. For me it strongly reinforced my basic assumption about all psychological issues, that you should never trust anyone who claims to have the answers.

Who Wants to Work in a Factory?

NY Times reporter Eduardo Medina went to South Carolina to get some straight talk about manufacturing in America:

In the 1970s, when the Upstate region of South Carolina was known as the textile capital of the world, Adolphus Jones would clock in for grueling summer shifts at one of the many mills in Union, his hometown.

Trains roared around him, transporting materials around the country. Chimney stacks on the red brick mills stretched dozens of feet high, like flag poles. This was textile country, and the cities of Union, Spartanburg and Greenville were at the heart of it.

By the end of the 1990s, automation and cheaper labor overseas took the industry away from the state. Union’s economy cratered, as did most of the region’s. But leaving Sunday church service on a recent afternoon, Mr. Jones, now 71 and retired, scoffed at President Trump’s vision of an American manufacturing revival through tariffs. The mill work had paid little, Mr. Jones recalled, and upward mobility was nonexistent.

“The textile industry is dead,” he said, buttoning his wool suit made in Italy. “Why would you want to bring it back here? Truthfully, why would the younger generation want to work there?”

Many retirees still remember what it was like to work in the textile mills. It had a negative connotation, said Rosemary Rice, 70, with some workers derogatively called “lint heads” because they would come home covered in cotton shreds. Many developed “brown lung disease,” or byssinosis, a respiratory condition caused by ingesting dust particles from fabric materials.

“I wouldn’t want my son working there,” said Ms. Rice, who lives in Union.

Actually, there is one group of Americans who might want tough, badly-paid factory work: recent immigrants. Let's look back to the cat-eating Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, about whom the factory owner said, 

I was I had thirty more. Our Haitian associates come to work every day. They don't have a drug problem. They will stay at their machine. They will achieve their numbers. They are here to work. And so, in general, that's a stark difference from what we're used to in our community.

So, you know, if Trump is serious about bringing back textile and other low-end manufacturing, he should open the borders. I imagine the irony of this would be lost on him.

Not, of course, that manufacturing is disappearing from America. Most of it is kind that doesn't use many workers, like chemicals, but some of it does. Like assembling cars:

Today, companies like BMW and Michelin — from Germany and France — are the economic engines of the region. Since BMW opened its plant in Spartanburg County in the early ’90s, it has invested more than $14.8 billion into its South Carolina operations. The plant has more than 11,000 jobs, its largest single production facility in the world, according to the company. And it is the country’s largest car exporter by value, with $10 billion in shipments last year.

So the local business community was stunned when the White House’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, attacked BMW’s manufacturing process in an interview this week. He told CNBC on Monday that “this business model where BMW and Mercedes come into Spartanburg, S.C., and have us assemble German engines and Austrian transmissions — that doesn’t work for America. It’s bad for our economics. It’s bad for our national security.”

“There was widespread bewilderment in our community about that,” said Carlos Phillips, the president and chief executive of the Greenville Chamber of Commerce.

In response to Mr. Navarro’s comments, South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, told reporters this week that ever since BMW arrived in the state with well-paying jobs, other companies had followed suit and “sent the word out around the world that this is a great manufacturing state.”

So the Trump team wants manufacturing, except not the kind that actually takes place in the US.

Speaking of which, Trump has also launched a savage assault on a big category of successful American exporters: defense firms. Spooked by Trump's erratic, pro-Putin stance, European countries have already cancelled billions of dollars worth of orders for US fighter jets and other weapons and launched a major initiative to produce more of their weaponry in Europe.

Which pretty much sums up the problem with MAGA politics: the denial that there is a world out there, full of people and nations with their own agendas who will not simply roll over and do whatever it is that Trump & Co. fantasize they should do. The world is complicated, and all the evidence to date is  that MAGA is too simple-minded a movement to grapple with it successfully.

Heather Fawcett, "Emily Wilde's Encyclopedia of Faeries"

I listened to this book on my way home from my latest round of fieldwork, and it brightened a long, weary drive through rain and heavy traffic. It is 1910, more or less, and Emily Wilde is a Cambridge scholar of faerie lore in a world where faeries are real. She falls into faeryland adventures, as she must, and emerges intact largely because her great knowledge of faerie stories tells her how to handle every situation.

This ties into what is of course an old fantasy of mine, that if I were somehow transported to a world with magic based on the traditions of old Europe, I would be a force to be reckoned with.

Also, of course, our heroine acquires a faerie lover, because for a certain sort of (mostly female) author, romance with a faerie lord/vampire/werewolf/dragon/generic magical being is an essential part of the fantasy. This gives me a chance to wonder why this is not true for me.

I commented on this when I reviewed E.T.A. Hoffmann's Tales, that in the story where the main character chooses the daughter of the King of Salamanders over a mortal woman, I found the mortal woman more appealing. The mountain of superlatives heaped on the beauty and charm of the otherwordly woman did not move me. 

I have considered various complex and arcane explanations for this, but I think it actually simple: for me the erotic is not about escaping from earthly, physical, bodily life, but reveling in it. And I don't mean just sexually; the most romantic thing I have ever done is have babies, which is as profoundly earthly and physical an experience as one can have.

Dream/Metaphor

Last week I had a dream from which I woke trembling. I was playing a big table-top strategy game with three other people. I was pretending to be much more expert at this game than I actually was. I moved a stack of counters across the board and placed them on a city hex to lay siege to it. Then I reached for the small laminated card that had the die roll results for sieges.

When I reached for it, the card was only a little larger than a standard playing card. But as I searched it for the table I needed, it grew. First it grew to an 8.5x11 sheet. Then to 11x17. Then there was more writing on the back. As I continued frantically searching the card for the right table I was aware that everyone was watching me and noting my inability to find this simple thing. But the thing in my hands kept growing until it was a like an old-fashioned folded road map, and I kept unfolding it and turning it over, growing ever more desperate, until I woke in panic.

Obviously this is a metaphor for something, but I am not sure it if is life in general or just the crazy stuff I have been going through at work lately.

Links 11 April 2025

Puppy Sculpture from the House of the Faun, Pompeii

Daily Beast: "Elon Musk rage quit a livestream of the video game Path of Exile 2 on Saturday night after repeatedly dying while also being ruthlessly cyberbullied in the chat." Love the guy who just typed "What's the deal with the tariffs?" over and over and over.

Pico Iyer has striven all his live to both live a successful public life and cultivate inner stillness, leading to oscillation between busyness and withdrawal.

Scott Siskind on lapis lazuli and the color ultramarine, which was so expensive in medieval Europe that it was almost exclusively used for one purpose.

And more Siskind, a takedown of the phrase, "the purpose of a system is what it does," which has become the launching pad for all maner of conspiratorial takes.

Richard Hanania: "The two most disastrous decisions taken by world leaders over the last few years are Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s tariffs. Toxic masculinity works as a framework for understanding fantasies of both conquest and factory jobs. Feminists may have been on to something."

Gaulish curse tablet from a Roman-period necropolis.

B.D. McClay on genre fiction: "I like genre fiction for the same reason I like black-and-white film, stylized dialogue, animation, the paintings of Marc Chagall or ballet: things feel more real if they’re obviously a little fake."

The story of "Ashley's Sack," a sadly wonderful memento of slavery. (NY Times, Smithsonian, wikipedia)

Obama's complete remarks at Hamilton College on democracy and rule of law are on Medium. News story; summary on Twitter/X.

Sea turtle tears and animals that may or may not sense earth's magnetic field.

Considering jealousy, taking off from an assertion that some of today's college students don't understand what it is.

Interesting use of an LLM: have it read thousands of reports from physicians who diagnosed the patient as autistic and identify the key variables being used in the diagnosis.

More evidence of contact between the Indus Valley civilization and the Middle East.

DNA studies show that 43 medieval manuscripts at Clairvaux Abbey were bound in sealskin.

Most economists are committed free-traders, and we all know what they think. So here are two pieces from economists who do worry about US trade deficits and think tarriffs are sometimes useful but are outraged by Trump's actions: Matthew Klein, "How to Think about the Tarriffs", and "The End of Exorbitant Privilege as We Know It" by Nina Quinn Eichacker.

And here is Alex Tabarrok with "Why Domestic Prices Rise with Tarriffs." (Because almost by definition they move production to less efficient producers.)

Why is Modernism Still Cool?

There is a web site called The Cool Hunter. They feature a variety of different styles in art and design, but only one kind of architecture: modernism. The modernist tree house above was on their front page just a minute ago when I went to check.

Is the music of the 1950s cool? the clothes? the movies? No.

So why is architecture of the 1950s still cool?

For at least the past 400 years, the styles favored by the elite have varied. Many critics have said that they change because of a cycle of innovation and immitation. The rich, stylish people on the cutting edge adopt a new style because it sets them apart. But then everyone else starts to immitate them, and within a few years what once distinguished the rich and stylish is now being worn by everyone. The rich and stylish therefore move onto something else, and look with horror on what they enjoyed a few years ago.

Then the rich and stylish fell for modern architecture. One might expect that soon everyone else would fall for it and then the rich and stylish would move on to something else. That didn't happen, because everyone not in the narrow world of the rich and stylish hated modern architecture and still hates it. So a fondness for it never spread. The rich and stylish found that in this one area they did not need to keep adopting new styles to distinguish themselves from the masses. They could just keep extolling modernism, because everybody else hated it so much.

Seen this way, it is not mysterious that elite architects and the billionaires who hire them stick with modernism. The more the masses hate it, the easier it is to signal that your are not a peasant by building something modern, preferable with at least a hint of brutalism. So we have ended up in this weird place where the famous architects are all modernists and the public rages against their awful creations, but the rich keep hiring them precisely because the masses hate their creations so much. Q.E.D.

Rand Paul Takes on the Tyrant

Rand Paul on the Senate floor:

Taxation without representation is tyranny, bellowed James Otis in the days and weeks leading up to the American Revolution. This became the rallying cry of American patriots. . . . Our founding fathers believed so strongly in this that they embodied in our Constitution. Our Constitution doesn't allow any one man or woman to raise taxes. It must be the body of Congress. And this wasn't new; it was part of maybe a thousand-year tradition from Magna Carta on. . . . This principle was long-standing, it was non-negotiable; this was what sparked the Revolution.

And yet today we are here before the Senate because one person in our country wishes to raise taxes. This is contrary to everything our country was founded upon. One person is not allowed to raise taxes. The constitution forbids it. . . . Forty, fifty years before our Constitution, Montesquieu wrote, "when the executive and legislative powers are united in one person, there can be no liberty." Our founding fathers took this to heart. They said, we must separate the powers, we must at all costs limit the powers of the presidency. This isn't about political parties. I voted for and supported President Trump, but I don't support the rule of one person. We are set to have a 25% tax on goods coming from Canada and Mexico. This is a tax on the American people, plain and simple. One person can't do that. Our founding fathers said no, that would be illegal. It can't come from one person. It has to come to Congress.

You can't simply declare an emergency and say, well, the Constitutional Republic was great but gosh we've got an emergency, our times are dire. The Supreme Court has repeatedly said, there are no exemptions for emergencies. There was no exemption for a pandemic. The taxation clause stands. . . .

[after trashing the excuse of fentanyl as an "emergency," Rand said]

Even if the problem is valid, even if that is something that we all agree on, you can't have a country ruled by emergency. You can't have a country without a separation of powers, without checks and balances. . . . Part of the problem we face today with this emergency is that Congress has abdicated their power. Not just recently, not just for this president. This is a bipartisan problem. . . . I am a Republican, I am a supporter of Donald Trump, but this is a bipartisan problem. I don't care if the president is a Republican or a Democrat; I don't want to live under emergency rule. I don't want to live where my representatives cannot speak for me.

One person can make a mistake; and guess what, tariffs are a terrible mistake. They don't work, they will lead to higher prices, they are a tax, and they have historically been bad for our economy. But even if this was something magic and it was going to be a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I wouldn't want to live under emergency rule. I would want to live in a constitutional republic where there are checks and balances against the excesses of both sides, right or left. If one person rules, that person could make a horrible mistake. . . .

The emergency declaration we are considering today is unprecedented. By declaring an emergency, the president invoked the Internation Emergency Economic Powers Act. . .  It's a law that has been used to put sanctions on like Iran. That's what it was intended for. It was never intended for tariffs and the word tariff doesn't appear in the law. Using this bill to impose tariffs is attractive to a president. He doesn't have to work with the messiness of democracy, the messiness of Congress. But you know what; that messiness is a check and a balance on power. . . . Expedience is not the same as legality. 

This is not a partisan question. To me it makes no difference if the president is a Republican or a Democrat. This is about the distribution of power. This is about the separation of powers. This is about the admonition that Montesquieu gave us, that when the executive power and the legislative power are united in one person, there can be no liberty. Our founding fathers all believed that. They so feared the power of taxation that they gave it only to Congress. . . . This goes against the traditions of our country.

I stand to speak against these tariffs. I stand to speak against these emergencies. I stand against the idea of skipping democracy, of skipping the constitutional republic, of rejecting our founding principles. Not because I have any animus toward the president. I do this because I love my country and I want to see it protected from the amalgamation of power into one person so that it can be abused.

Another name for emergency rule is martial law. Who would want to live under the rule of one person? The thing we object to in all the countries around the world that we dislike is that they don't have democratic rule. We should vote. This is a tax, plain and simple, and taxes should not be enacted by one person. I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote to day to try to reclaim the power of taxation to where the constution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.

Dire Wolves?

Colossal Biosciences, which spent years trying and failing to bring back the woolly mammoth, now claims to have brought back the dire wolf. (NY Times, Time, company post on Twitter/X with wolf pup howls)

Sort of. What they did was find some dire wolf DNA, identify 22 places on the genome where they differed from modern gray wolves, alter those locations to be like their dire wolves, insert that DNA in a gray wolf egg cell and have it carried to term by a wolf.

The offspring are different from modern wolves, bigger and with paler, thicker fur. So they are something different from modern wolves. But I am not willing to call them dire wolves.

Still, this is pretty cool, the biggest step yet in the de-extinction program. But note that dire wolves were so closely related to gray wolves that they seem to have interbred with them in the past. Nothing about this success says we might be close to bringing back animals without such a close living relative.

Fernanda Melchor, "Hurricane Season"

The amazing thing about Hurricane Season (2017, English translation 2020) is its frantic energy, an electrical storm of words, images and emotions. In a poor part of rural Mexico, a strange character known only as The Witch is murdered. The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, two male and two female, all with their own passions and their own hatreds, their own vocabularies of abuse that they direct at the world around them. In particularly they despise and abuse the opposite sex. The crimes here are all sex crimes, in a broad sense: they are about gender relations, male attempts to control women, female attempts to get something from men, straight scorn for homosexuality, and the rage of men whose machismo is threatened. In one sense it is an indictment of male misdeeds, but it is not preachy; it just turns its electric gaze on awful things, lighting up the horror and the pain of those acts like it lights up everything about its characters' worlds.

I don't recommend it for everyone. It is obscene, profane, confusing, and sometimes grim, but it is the least boring book I have listened to in years.

Links 4 April 2025

Karl Cauer, Strega (Witch), 1874

Wonderful Scott Siskind piece on the evil Atlantean dwarves that populated Amazing Stories in the 1940s, and the widespread myths that seem related.

A writer in the Harvard Crimson trashes land acknowledgements, saying the university should "Either return the land that it occupies to whichever Native American tribe that it stole it from, or spare us the hollow, meaningless acknowledgements."

Meta-analysis of studies on people who have tried to give up social media, or take a break from it, finds that it does not make them happier.

The house mothers who ran boarding houses for working girls in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Mass grave of Roman soldiers found in Austria.

On Twitter/X, Nabeel Qureshi asked his followers to rate four translations of a passage from the Odyssey, one by GPT4 and three by humans. GPT4 won. I thought parts of the AI version were good, but it had a glaring modernism that rang harshly in my ears, so it wasn't my favorite. Via Marginal Revolution.

South Korea's Supreme Court finally removes their president from office for his bizarre coup attempt.

Using AI to find new uses for old drugs: NY Times, summary at Marginal Revolution.

Review of a new book about the Turkish siege of Malta in 1565.

The rain forest tree that thrives on being struck by lightning. (NY Times, Scientific American)

Should AIs hold financial resources, so they can be sued for bad behavior? (Marginal Revolution)

Review of the new volume of W.G. Sebald's essays: "Melancholy, far from being defeatist, is itself a kind of political resistance, a way of pushing back against the machinations of fascism by preserving the past against erasure."

NPR's Books We Love, 2024 edition.

Data on Russian recent casualties in Ukraine, via tire guy Trent Trelenko on Twitter/X: 

75% are caused by drones;
20% by artillery;
4% by small arms fire.

The Decline of the Book, and What Might Replace it.

Interesting musings from Sam Kahn about the decline of the book as a form, and what might replace it. After referencing the various doomsters who say that today's college students are functionally illiterate and so on, he notes that while books may be in trouble, "writing is undergoing a renaissance."

But if print can survive the flood — through articles, short-form writing, etc — books may still find themselves a casualty. In part, what the doomsaying articles are saying about students is not necessarily that they can’t read but that they can’t read long-form work. And to some extent the kids may have a point. It is a crowded marketplace out there; the more time you spend with one person means time taken away from others. And, by the same token, if so many people are so adept at saying what they have to say in short-form writing, why the need for a doorstop? Part of what the kids may be intuiting is that a book needs to be of a certain length in order to justify the cost of the binding — and writers writing books tend, even at the conceptual level, to pad out, trying in their minds to be worthy of the majesty in the implicit idea of a book. But readers’ behavior in the digital era is very different. They are not looking to fill out a train ride or long winter’s evening with a book. They are reading looking for an idea, for something interesting, and what that implies is that writers can use readers’ attention spans, rather than the imagined length of a book, in order to give shape to their ideas. A text should be as long as it takes to express the idea.

I agree with this completely. The world is full of books that should have been articles or short stories, padded out to 250 pages because that is what the publishing world requires. Even writers as well known as Kazuo Ishiguro do this, turning interesting little ideas into bloated "books."

What I would expect that means in the realm of serious writing is, over the next years, a good deal of structural innovation in text. Even in a domain like biography or history, where the book seems especially sturdy as a form, I notice writers chafing under its inherent limits. Why should biographers have to devote the precious real estate at the beginning of their book to discussing their subject’s grandparents while the subject’s main accomplishments often come somewhere towards the end when reader and writer are both exhausted? The ‘archipelago’ may be a more simpatico structure for history than the straight line. One can only imagine how much smoother poor Robert Caro’s life would have been if he could have started with the presidency of his subject as opposed to spending forty years chasing down the truth of Lyndon Johnson’s student council experiences and then waiting until his 80s to write down the meat of his project. In fiction, I would imagine writers gravitating towards the novella (an excellent form that fell into disuse because it didn’t quite fit the exigencies of the publishing industry) and maybe on the more innovative, ambitious side we can imagine writers using the resources of the web to produce sprawling fictive worlds that don’t necessarily have to be connected by a throughline.

Reading this I imagined turning my old gaming world into a sort of hypertext story in which you could switch between cities and region and follow different characters and see both how the main events transpire or are reflected in every region, plus the local concerns of each. Imagine this for LOTR, an edifice within which the sort of nerds who write posts about "what was really happening in Umbar" can go read about it. George R.R. Martin might have loved this.

I like reading novels; it is a form I enjoy. I have also enjoyed writing them. But I do suspect that they are not the future of storytelling. I suspect that while novels will endure for a long time, writing may evolve in diverse directions. Many stories will be shorter. Writers with longer stories to tell may split them into pieces; this already happens in collections of linked short stories, and we may get more of it. I can also imagine stories told like The Princess Bride, with the "good parts" narrated in detail and much of the rest just sketched out in little text or video interludes.

After saying a bit about how powerful he has found the experience of writing novels, Kahn notes that what writers find meaningful for themselves is not necessarily what the world wants:

I would say the intelligent thing to do here is is to try to change up our values system for the digital age. Good writing can be done in short chunks — articles, short stories, novellas, whatever — just as good running can be done at any length. Novels should probably be treated as what they are — something like a marathon, a sort of circus freak event for those who for some reason or other are determined to pursue that — as opposed to what they are now, which is like a badge of entry for writing. In other words, novels seem singularly unsuited to the digital era. That’s unfortunate but should be clarifying for those who write novels: that they are doing it more as a spiritual exercise than to reach an audience.

For now, this is still not true; there are still many millions of novel readers out there. But we are aging, and I consider it an open question how many of us there will be in future generations. Storytelling will always be with us, but the novel is an invention of certain cultures, and most of humanity always did perfectly well without it.