Teaching History in Russia/The Ukraine War

JSTOR daily called my attention to a fascinating article on the teaching of history in Russian schools. It begins like this:

In May 2016, a few hundred teachers and education officials took part in a conference hosted by the Moscow regional parliament. The theme was ‘history teaching as a national security issue’, and the conference was part of a larger cycle of events devoted to the patriotic education of the young — how to make people love and be proud of their country and its history. The main speaker, a professor of history at one of Moscow’s universities, painted a picture of Russia as being the target of a US-directed information war with the ultimate aim of breaking up and destroying the Russian Federation. His core message was that the current official Russian ban on state ideology makes it impossible to use history as a defensive weapon in this information war. Not being able to defend Russian historical science against the enemy onslaught would lead to the disintegration of historical consciousness and, ultimately, ‘the death of Russia’.

Here's another good bit:

A 2015 paper published by a Kremlin-affiliated think tank warned that “if the current state of history teaching in schools continues, Russia will run the risk, in the next 10–15 years, of losing her sovereignty and being split up into several dozens or hundreds of territories that will inevitably fight each other.” 

Russia is a multi-ethnic state; or, if you prefer, an empire. Ethnic Russians are a clear majority, making up around 72% of the total. But there are plenty of areas where some other group outnumbers them, e.g. Chechnya and parts of central Asia. Russian nationalists therefore focus a lot of attention on convincing all those minorty groups that they are really Russians. There is nothing particularly unique about this; many modern nations have regions or ethnic groups not sure they belong in the larger state.

To get back to education, the strategy Russian education authorities have hit on to encourage Russian nationalism is to emphasize World War II:

The history on which the government focuses its energy is almost exclusively military, with a very heavy emphasis on the “Great Patriotic War”—not precisely what we would call World War II, but, specifically, the 1941–1945 fight between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Putin has argued that the war is a topic that unites Russians across ideological, and generational lines. . . .

Starting with President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s, and intensifying with his successor, Vladimir Putin, the nation’s leaders attempted to reclaim “the Russian idea” with manifestations including Victory Day military parades and the revival of Soviet-era “patriotic education.” Other methods for spreading the orthodox view of history include military-style youth organizations and government-approved talk shows, cartoons, and documentaries. Meanwhile, a 2014 law made it a crime to spread historical narratives deemed contrary to patriotic values.

Which I find fascinating in an academic sort of way.

What makes this urgently relevant is how it relates to the Putin regime's desperate determination to subdue Ukraine. Yes, Putin is a grasping, greedy thug. But I think he seriously believes in Russia as a multi-ethnic but powerfully united state. He believes that Chechens and Buryats are just special kinds of Russians who should love Russia as much as ethnic Russians do, and he believes that this is vital to Russia remaining a great and powerful state.

He believes the same about Ukraine. To him, Ukrainian nationalism is a mistake, just like Chechen or Buryat nationalism would be. 

So to Putin, subduing Ukraine is not an external war; it is about the unity and power of Russia.

Naming the People of the Philippines

From James Scott's Seeing Like a State:

Filipinos were instructed by a decree of November 21, 1849, to take on permanent Hispanic surnames. The author of the decree was Governor Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, a meticulous administrator as determined to rationalize names as he had been determined to rationalize existing law, provincial boundaries, and the calendar. He had observed, as his decree states, that Filipinos generally lacked individual surnames, which might “distinguish them by families,” and their practice of adopting baptismal names drawn from a small group of saints’ names resulted in great “confusion.” The remedy was the catalogo, a compendium not only of personal names but also of nouns and adjectives drawn from flora, fauna, minerals, geography, and the arts and intended to be used by the authorities in assigning permanent, inherited surnames. Each local official was to be given a supply of surnames sufficient for his jurisdiction, “taking care the the distribution be made by letters [of the alphabet].” In practice, each town was given a number of pages from the alphabetized catalogo, producing whole towns with surnamed beginning with the same letter. In situations where there has been little in-migration in the past 150 years, the traces of this administrative exercise are still perfectly visible across the landscape: “For example, in the Bikol region, the entire alphabet is laid out like a garland over the provinces of Albay, Sorsogon, and Catanduanes which in 1849 belonged to the single jurisdiction of Albay. Beginning with A at the provincial capital, the letters B and C mark the town along the coast beyond Tabasco to Tiwi. We return and trace along the coast of Sorsogon the letters E to L; then starting down the Iraya Valley at Daraga with M, we stop with S to Polangui and Libon, and finish the alphabet with a quick tour around the island Catanduanes.”

Also on wikipedia.

The Tragic Absurdity of War with Yemen

One of Trump's best lines, when he was first running for President in 2016, was his attack on our "forever wars." His particular statements were often incoherent, but you could extract a sort of ideology from them: if we're going to fight wars, we should fight them to win, and then move on. Once in office he did confront the Pentagon about Afghanistan, eventually forcing them to agree to a withdrawal timetable. That timetable was so long that our final departure fell after the 2020 election, leaving Biden to bite the bullet, but that strikes me as normal politics and I give Trump credit for standing his ground.

Fast forward to 2025, though, and we find Trump dabbling in exactly the same kind of unwinnable quagmire war he always ran against, and then recoiling from it in what looks very much like surrender. My point is not just to mock Trump's Yemen policy, but to use it as a case study in how the US keeps getting drawn into these wars.

The current conflict started after October 7, when Israel began bombing Gaza. To support the Palestinians, Yemen's Houthi leadership announced a policy of attacking Israeli shipping in the Red Sea. Actually they had no clue which ships had anything to do with Israel, so they were just attacking ships at random.

So here's my first question: when a nation is randomly attacking civilian shipping on a vital international sea lane, should the US do nothing? 

When you ponder why US presidents keep bombing people, you have to remember that every time anything violent happens in the world a dozen people call them up or visit them to say, "We have to do something." Across my whole lifetime, US presidents have found it very hard to resist this pressure. Obama was extremely proud of the one time he said "no," over the "red lines" thing in Syria. Biden, despite being the closest thing to a pacifist we have had as president since Carter, and despite his decades of political experience, gave in to the pressure and ordered airstrikes on the Houthi military, and then had US naval ships use very expensive missiles to help shoot down Iranian and Yemeni missiles flying toward Israel.

The Houthis backed off for a while, but they soon resumed both launching missiles at Israel and randomly attacking civilian ships.

Enter Trump and his team, fired up by their election victory and eager to smite somebody. The Houthis made a convenient enemy, since they were both attacking Israel, about which Trump seems to care a lot, and tweaking their noses at the world by attacking ships. So Trump ordered a new bombing campaign with much laxer rules of engagement than Biden's. The administration did not announce any timetable or goals. (To me the striking thing about the leaked Signal chat was that nobody in it said a word about what our airstrikes were supposed to accomplish.) But the NY Times has been doing a lot of reporting, of which I found this ungated summary:

The Trump administration initially refused to lay out the exact parameters for its campaign against the Houthis. But the Times, citing three U.S. officials, reports that the plan was for a long operation expected to last eight to ten months. The objectives were more aggressive than President Joe Biden’s failed air campaign against the Houthis, and included a plan to use tremendous firepower to take out the group’s air defenses and also assassinate Houthi leaders.

But, according to the Times, Trump asked for a progress report after a month and, feeling unsatisfied by the progress, decided to scrap the plan. Instead, the U.S. and the Houthis settled on a ceasefire agreement that the Houthis would stop firing on U.S. ships in exchange for the U.S. suspending its operations. Notably, that agreement did not restrict the Houthis from firing on Israel or shipments it considered helpful to Israel, which in turn has contributed to a growing rift between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The times said Trump's distaste for long Middle Eastern wars was a big factor. 

By Day 31, Mr. Trump, ever leery of drawn-out military entanglements in the Middle East, demanded a progress report, according to administration officials. But the results were not there. The United States had not even established air superiority over the Houthis. Instead, what was emerging after 30 days of a stepped-up campaign against the Yemeni group was another expensive but inconclusive American military engagement in the region.

So after spend about $7 billion on our six-week war we gave up again, and the Houthis remain in power, still randomly attacking ships. 

Meanwhile, though, the US has done one concrete thing in Yemen: cutting off all aid to Yemeni civilians. It seems in one sense bizarre that the US has been both bombing Yemen on a regular basis and supplying hundred of millions in aid to its citizens every year, but that is the world we live in. When Elon's Doge was feeding our aid programs "into the wood chipper", aid to Yemen was the first thing to go. Nicholas Kristof thinks this was a big mistake:

I understand American skepticism about humanitarian aid for Yemeni children, for the Houthis run an Iran-backed police state with a history of weaponizing aid. Yet our campaign of bombing and starvation probably strengthens the Houthis, making their unpopular regime seem like the nation’s protectors while driving them closer to Iran.

“Cutting humanitarian aid into Yemen is likely only going to benefit the Houthis that much more,” Gregory D. Johnsen, a Yemen expert with the Arab Gulf States Institute, told me. “As the cuts further exacerbate an already horrendous humanitarian situation, families in Houthi-controlled territories will have little choice but to align themselves with the group in a desperate attempt to survive.”

Despair over just this intersection of human misery and evil autocracy was one of the reasons Bush  II invaded Iraq. If the people are suffering, and we can't even help them because the regime will just steal the aid, what are supposed to do? With the threat of terrorism in the air, Bush opted to invade and rebuild Iraq "from the ground up," a phrase I feel like I heard six thousand times in those years.

Fortunately, nobody seems to have any appetite for a ground-up rebuilding of Yemen, so we're going to avoid that nightmare. But instead we are stuck with the ongoing bad dream of a famine-wracked country spending its resources to attack international shipping, an echo of the slaughter and destruction in Gaza, which is an echo of events that go far back in time, the legacy of which we seem unable to escape.

RIP Ed Smylie

Ed Smylie (1929-2025) was just one engineer among the hundreds whose genius made the Apollo missions possible. He got his 15 minutes of fame when an oxygen explosion crippled the Command Module of Apollo XIII, forcing the whole crew to move to the Lunar Module. As the engineer in charge of the life support systems, Smylie immediately realized that the CO2 scrubbers in the LM would not be able to handle the load of three men, so he assembled a team to rig up a solution. The episode is wonderfully depicted in Ron Howard's film, and it is to Smylie that someone says, "You, sir, are a steely-eyed missile man." But as Nixon said when he singled out Smylie in giving the Medal of Freedom to the whole Apollo XIII team, "They are men whose names simply represent the whole team."

I love what the Apollo team did, what America did, possibly the biggest ever cooperative human endeavor that was not a war. It was incredible, amazing; using technology 50 years behind the most basic smartphone, humans walked on another world. The wonder of it still wows me and fills me with hope. And with a rage bordering on despair with the people who deny that it happened, who deny that we, humans, just clever apes cursed with violence, built spaceships and sailed to the moon, the people whose minds are too small to encompass the wonder of what we have done and still can do if we put aside our doubts and out differences and dream together about what the future might be.

Links 16 May 2025

So much to ponder here.

The difference between elites and experts.

An attempt at an "Enlightened Centrist Manifesto" on trans issues.

Critical article on Jo Boaler, a math warrior who promotes "holistic" math teaching. I get the desire to make school less miserable and math in particular less awful for non-mathematical students, but Boaler's published research seems to be fraudulent and all the evidence shows that learning math is just painful for many students. The only way to avoid the pain would be to stop requiring math.

On Twitter/X, summary of a detailed report on the sinking of the Moskva back in 2022, based on a dossier compiled by the father of one of the sailors who died.

Comparing the air forces of India and Pakistan, 13-minute video. And Perun on the Pakistani military, 1-hour video.

What's in the proposed US $150 billion defense "surge"? One hour video from Perun. Short version: this is for missile defense, ship building, and other weapons to fight in the Pacific.

The struggle to manufacture powerful solid state batteries, which in theory could be much more convenient and reliable than those with liquid electrolytes: NY Times story focusing on a US startup called Factorial, good introductory article at Car and Driver, more technical piece at Science Direct. I believe that we will solve the battery problems that currently make electric cars inconvenient, but when that might happen, and by what technology, I will not attempt to guess. 

Scott Siskind ponders r/petfree, people who seem enraged by pets: "Since then I’ve been noticing how much of politics seems driven by different people having rumination clouds / purity instict violations about different kinds of omnipresent aspects of public life."

Siskind again, reviewing Bryan Caplan's Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids in the light of his struggles with twin toddlers.

Handbooks for hobos.

The "higher ed nomenklatura." Who ends up on the list of people who get emailed by recruiters looking to hire deans, provosts, etc.? And how do they get there?

Claire Lehman complains about the decline of scholarship in our increasingly oral culture: "Rigor dampens engagement, and uncertainty saps attention. The marketplace of ideas has been subsumed by a marketplace of emotions, where incentives reward those with the sloppiest procedures."

NY Times account of the latest papal conclave. Interesting to me how important personal connections are; several cardinals said they would not vote for someone they didn't know personally. Bunch of unmarried men who spend all their time hanging out with each other.

Noah Smith on the stagnation of popular culture. Sounds to me like capitalists giving people what they want.

White House directive on "Fighting Overcriminalization in Federal Regulations." I agree in principle but suspect the motives of people who seem to adore white-collar crime.

Collection of figurines found in Israel that appear to depict Africans but are carved of wood from India. Dating to the 6th century AD. Not sure what to make of these but they are cross-cultural for sure.

The fourteenth known archaeopteryx fossil, purchased by the Field Museum from a private collector, provides even more details on this amazing early bird. Given how much has changed in paleontology since I was a dinosaur-mad boy, it seems quite remarkable that archaeopteryx is still generally held to be the earliest known bird.

Reading old poems to understand the historic range of the Yangtze River porpoise.

Nate Silver's review of Klein and Thompson's book Abundance.

Interesting interview with an Egyptologist who tries to convince us that ancient Egypt was "dynamic" rather than unchanging and that new discoveries about it are still regularly being made after three centuries of modern scholarship. I'll give her points for enthusiasm, anyway.

At Reason, Damon Root describes the oral arguments on the matter of the trial judge who issued a nationwide injunction against Trump's ban on birthright citizenship. Based on what was said, it seems the justices my try to limit nationwide injunctions from district judges, but there was no visible support for ending birthright citizenship.

The bizarre legal case surrounding the bizarre, cultlike entity known as OneTaste, most famous for encouraging "clitoral meditation."

This week's past post is "The Working Class in Small-Town Pennsylvania," from 2019, a grim look at the intense negativity that makes our politics so awful.

The Age of Rejection

David Brooks:

In 1959, about half of American college applicants applied to just one school. But now you meet students who feel that they have to apply to 20 or 30 colleges in the hopes that there will be one or two that won’t reject them. In the past two decades, the number of students applying to the 67 most selective colleges has tripled, to nearly two million a year, while the number of places at those schools hasn’t come close to keeping up. Roughly 54,000 students applied to be part of the Harvard class of 2028, and roughly 1,950 were accepted. That means that about 52,050 were rejected.

The same basic picture applies to the summer internship race. Goldman Sachs, for example, has 2,700 internship positions and receives roughly 315,000 applicants, which means that about 312,300 get rejected. I recently spoke with one college student who applied to 40 summer internships and was rejected by 39. I ran into some students who told me they felt they had to fill out 150 to 250 internship applications each year to be confident there would be a few that wouldn’t reject them.

Things get even worse when students leave school and enter the job market. They enter what I’ve come to think of as the seventh circle of Indeed hell. Applying for jobs online is easy, so you have millions of people sending hundreds of applications each into the great miasma of the internet, and God knows which impersonal algorithm is reading them. I keep hearing and reading stories about young people who applied to 400 jobs and got rejected by all of them.

Lately I have been thinking quite a bit about the vast waste of time and resources produced by our meritocracy. In particular, I wonder about the millions of hours people collectively spend applying for things they don't get. It is true that online applications are much simpler, but the process is still far from painless, and there are lots of niche positions with their own unique grinds. Imagine what you could do with all the hours smart young people put into applying for Rhodes Scholarships. Not to mention the other side, all the time smart older people put into reviewing their applications. 

Then come interviews, another vast waste of human energy, with some companies imposing as many as seven separate interviews on applicants, despite the data showing that interviews are a terrible way of identifying good employees.

On top of that there is the simple fact of rejection. It sucks to be rejected, even if you applied to fifty colleges on the assumption that most would reject you.

Wondering about how to solve this problem, I come up with only one thing: AI. Set up a universal system for college applications, another for internship applications, etc., have people send in one application, and let the AI sort it out. It might be awful, but then the system we have isn't so great either. 

But then again by the time AI can do that it may be able to do just about everything, so there won't be many "knowledge worker" jobs left to apply for. 

Americans Say they Want Change but then Hate it

Matt Yglesias responds to a guy who noted that the more Trump is restrained by outside forces, the more popular he is:

You see in every poll that a huge share of the population is absolutely fed up with the status quo, hates the establishment wants to see major changes to our political and economic system, and has a deep yearning for politicians who'll "get things done" and deliver change.

At the same time, *in practice* if you look at hyper-constrained elected officials like Phil Scott in Vermont or Andy Beshear in Kentucky — guys facing massive opposition party legislative majorities that make action borderline impossible — voters love those guys. [JCB: The most popular governor in Maryland's history was Larry Hogan when he was in the hospital getting cancer treatment.]

As @lionel_trolling was saying, beyond the atmospherics Trump consistently gets higher marks from the public when his bark is louder than his bite. Actually implementing sweeping MAGA-style policy change alarms people.

But you see similar thermostatic backlash to the implementation of actual progressive policy change. Scott [a Republican] became governor of Vermont in the first place because they tried to do Medicare for All. The blue trifecta in Minnesota collapsed after Tim Walz signed a bunch of bills.

I think it is largely reasonable for Americans to be risk-averse in their attitude toward policy change — we live in basically the richest society of all time — but it's hard to square that practical skepticism of change with the equally real intense demand for sweeping change.

Is it ever.

Mirror Divination and Cultural Diffusion

Christ casting out a demon, from the Tres Riche Heures

From a somewhat interesting but over-long Aeon article on demon lore across cultures:

Carried along these same trade routes, mirror divination is a daimonological technology attested from North Africa to China. First mentioned in a 3rd-century CE Egyptian manuscript, the practice has always involved a single device and three actors: a human child, a human adult and a daimon. In the role of medium, the child is made to gaze into a reflective surface – a mirror, a bowl of water with oil floating on its surface, the polished blade of a weapon, etc – in which a daimon will appear. The adult at whose knees the child is sitting then utters a spell to bring the daimon into the device. He transmits to the daimon a set of questions about some present or future event, which the daimon answers through the child medium.

This technique spread quickly, appearing in both a Zoroastrian inscription from the 3rd century CE and in Jewish Talmudic sources from Sasanian Persia; in several 7th- to 12th-century Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Taoist texts from India, China, Japan and Tibet; in the Policraticus (1159) by the English cleric John of Salisbury; and in medieval and modern-day Jewish, Muslim and Ethiopic sources from North Africa. The instructions found in a work titled the ‘Secret Rites’, an early 8th-century Chinese translation of a Sanskrit work, are virtually identical to those given in the 3rd-century Egyptian manuscript:

In front of an icon of the Immovable One [the Buddhist god Acala], let the officiant cleanse the ground and burn Parthian incense. Let him then take a mirror, place it over the heart [of the icon], and continue reciting the spell. Have a young boy or girl look into the mirror. When you ask what they see, the child will immediately tell you all you want to know.

The same article has many other tales of pan-Eurasian demon lore; a particularly fine one is the story of how the Indian prince Vijaya came to Sri Lanka, which is eerily similar to the Odyssey's tale of Circe's island.

Back in the 1990s I used to talk on the train sometimes with a woman who was a Koren translator for some intelligence agency. I once wondered to her how people learned foreign languages in the centuries before courses and grammars and dictionaries. She shook her head emphatically and said that all that stuff is only an impediment to language acquisition; better, she said, to just start talking and listening and work it out as you go. I'm not sure she was right, but anyway it is clear that the thousands of languages in use across Eurasia did not stop the spread of ideas. People have always found ways to communicate.

Once they figured out how to talk to each other, what did they share? Let's note, first, that they did business; there is nothing more fundamental to human civilization than trade. I have something you want, you have something I want, let's make a deal. Despite incredible risks – some historians think the death rate for sailors on their first trans-Atlantic slave-trading voyage was around 40 percent – valuable goods always found their way to buyers across any distance.

Also, crops and domesticated animals. Chickens were somehow carried from India to Japan and Iceland, wheat from Syria to Siberia and Ghana. Hot peppers from Mexico were in use across the world by 1550. 

Fundamental technologies, like making bronze, or crucible steel. 

And stories. This includes amusing tales like Cindirella, but also sacred lore like the story of the Seven Sleepers. And, as the Aeon article notes, tales about demons and how to overcome them.

This is humanity: we travel across vast distances to trade with each other, learn each other's languages, tell each other stories, and share advice on how to survive on our demon-haunted planet. We also kill and enslave each other, but I think if you focus too much on that you are missing much of what we are.

The Real Life "Lord of the Flies" Didn't Go Like the Book

'Ata

The fascinating story of the "Tongan castaways," via wikipedia:

The Tongan castaways were a group of six Tongan teenage boys who shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of ʻAta in 1965 and lived there for 15 months until their rescue. . . .

In June 1965, the boys ran away from St Andrews Anglican boarding school in Nukuʻalofa on Tongatapu. They had stolen a 24-foot boat on short notice and with little preparation. After they anchored for the night (approximately 5 miles north of Tongatapu), a storm broke their anchor rope. The boat's sail and rudder were destroyed quickly by the wild winds. Over the next eight days, they drifted for almost 200 miles generally southwest, bailing water from their disintegrating boat until they sighted ʻAta; at that point, they abandoned their ship and swam to shore over the next 36 hours, using planks salvaged from the wreck.

Mano was the first to reach land; weak from hunger and dehydration, he could not stand but called out that he had safely reached shore, and the rest followed him. After escaping the sea, the boys dug a cave by hand and hunted seabirds for meat, blood, and eggs.

Initially, they were desperate for food and water, but their situation improved after three months when they discovered the ruins of the village of Kolomaile in the island's volcanic crater, following a two-day climb. They revived the remnants of 19th century habitation, surviving on feral chickens, wild taro, and bananas; they captured rainwater for drinking in hollowed-out tree trunks. They drank blood from seabirds when they did not have enough water. The boys divided up the labour, teaming up in pairs to work garden, kitchen, and guard duty. One of the boys, Stephen (who would go on to become an engineer), managed to use two sticks to start a fire, which the boys kept burning continuously for more than a year while marooned.

At night, they sang and played a makeshift guitar to keep their spirits up, composing five songs during their exile. Once, they attempted to sail away on a raft they made, but it broke up approximately 1 mile offshore, and they were forced to return. The breakup of their raft was fortunate in retrospect, as the boys believed they were in Samoa and had started sailing south into the open ocean.

The boys were eventually rescued by an Australian fishermen who was so impressed with them that he hired them to crew a lobster boat and then paid the owner of the boat they had stolen to get them out of legal trouble.

Story here of the boys' return to the island with reporters in 1966.

Mississippi's Amazing Gains in Reading

Across most of the US, poor children are lagging farther and farther behind in school. The biggest exception is in Mississippi, where poor kids are improving at reading (see the chart above). Mississippi remains the poorest state, and its per capita spending on education is the third lowest. So how did they do this?

Basically, by making it their priority:

According to a recent piece by Grace Brazeale, a policy associate with the advocacy group Mississippi First, the state implemented a series of changes starting with the 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act. That law funded the state department of education to hire, train and deploy literacy coaches to the 50 lowest-performing schools. It also required schools to administer universal screenings to identify students with reading deficiencies early and to communicate those results to parents, and it required schools to hold back students who were not reaching a certain threshold by third grade.

These changes were not all that expensive, but they had big effects. EdWeek’s Elizabeth Huebeck reported in 2023 that the state spent $15 million per year to support its literacy work, and 60% of that went to coaching and intervention staff. A research paper last fall from Noah Spencer from the University of Toronto found that the law helped drive the state’s gains.

Spencer estimated that the third-grade retention policy alone could be responsible for about one-quarter of the gains, and it was surely the most controversial element. Some people have even tried to cast doubt on Mississippi’s NAEP gains by arguing they’re merely a function of testing older kids. But this has been debunked: Mississippi does hold back more kids than other states, but it always has, and the average age of Mississippi’s NAEP test-takers has barely budged over time.

Research on third-grade retention policies has found that students who are retained tend to have better long-term outcomes than those who are not, but that the process for identifying those children can be biased against Black, Hispanic, and low-income students.

However, I think what matters most is not the students who are retained, but what the policy does to adult behavior. Mississippi required schools to notify parents when their child was off track and to craft individual reading plans for those with reading deficiencies. In other words, the threat of retention may have shifted behavior in important ways. As evidence for that theory, consider that a study out of Florida also found positive effects on younger siblings of students who are retained.

Some of you may recall that this is what happened in my house. When word came from the school that my eldest son was not meeting the reading benchmarks for nine-year-olds (he is a pretty severe ADHD case) I made him sit with me every night and we took turns reading paragraphs from story books out loud to each other. My elder daughter, two years younger, insisted on joining us. Within three months my son was back on track and my daughter was vaulting ahead.

But here's the thing: it is often easy for a system to improve in one area if that is made the priority. So far as I can tell, nobody thinks Mississippi's schools are very good at anything other than teaching reading to poor kids. Their success in this area may be purchased by stinting on all sorts of other stuff, like teaching calculus to advanced high school students, or theater, or band, or art.

One of the key things about teaching reading is that the programs that work best for slow learners (very structured phonics) bore smart kids and waste a lot of their time. So we see school systems oscillating back and forth between back-to-basics phonics programs and "whole language" programs that excite smarter kids but leave many kids struggling. What you think ought to be done about this depends on what you think should be the basic goals of education. Is it more important to incorproate slow learners into a community of learning where all rise together, or pull them apart and offer each individual child the most challenging material he or she can handle?

It's Hard to Treat Back Pain

NY Times:

Low back pain affects an estimated one in four American adults and is the leading contributor to disability globally. In most diagnosed cases, the pain is considered “nonspecific,” meaning it doesn’t have a clear cause. That’s also partly what makes it so hard to treat.

In the study, published on Tuesday in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, researchers reviewed 301 randomized trials that compared 56 noninvasive treatments for low back pain, like medications and exercise, with placebos. They used a statistical method to combine the results of those studies and draw conclusions, a process known as a meta-analysis.

The researchers found that only one treatment — the use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, like ibuprofen and aspirin — was effective at reducing short-term, or acute, low back pain. Five other treatments had good enough evidence to be considered effective at reducing chronic low back pain. These were exercise; spinal manipulation, like you might receive from a chiropractor; taping the lower back; antidepressants; and the application of a cream that creates a warming sensation. Even so, the benefit was small.

But remember that this is a meta-study that lumps dozens of studies together to come to a global conclusion. Some of those individual studies have found that particularly interventions, like heat or exercise, work very well for some patients, but effects like that would be washed out in a big meta-study. The best advice is probably to try all the different options and try to find one that works for you; a doctor cited by the Times says you might as well try things like heat, which is cheap and causes no harm, or exercise, which is good for you even if it doesn't help your back pain. After all, they seem to help some people quite a bit.

It doesn't look like this study even considered the evidence that back pain is related to psychological issues and life stresses. Yet one of the things we are most certain about is that people who have recently gotten divorced or lost a job suffer more back pain than those with less stressful lives. That might not seem like a very useful piece of information – like, gee, sorry we can't help you, it's just that your whole life is messed up – but I find that awareness of how stress or other life factors are impacting my body helps me move to a better plane.

Chemicals in Food

As you have probably heard, RFK Jr. wants to ban a range of chemical food additives, starting with petroleum-based dyes. Ok, whatever, we can live without bright orange Cheetohs. But I was very disturbed by this Julia Belluz piece in the NY Times. Here is the red flag:

Research on chemicals that have been vetted by the F.D.A. tends to be extremely narrow in focus, looking mostly for cancer, genetic mutations or organ damage in animal or laboratory studies. This means the ingredients in our coffee creamer, cereal, ketchup and frozen pizza aren’t tested for more subtle effects on long-term health, or whether they may increase the risk of the other common chronic diseases, such as obesity, cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. What’s more, most safety studies examine single chemicals in isolation, not how the hundreds or thousands of chemicals we consume might interact with one another or affect our long-term health.

How, even in principle, would you study how hundreds or thousands of chemicals consumed in various combinations might impact our health? I submit that this is completely impossible. But don't take my word for it, go read John Ioannidis's magnificent article (summary here) on dietary research:

Individuals consume thousands of chemicals in millions of possible daily combinations. For instance, there are more than 250 000 different foods and even more potentially edible items, with 300 000 edible plants alone. Seemingly similar foods vary in exact chemical signatures (eg, more than 500 different polyphenols). Much of the literature silently assumes disease risk is modulated by the most abundant substances; for example, carbohydrates or fats. However, relatively uncommon chemicals within food, circumstantial contaminants, serendipitous toxicants, or components that appear only under specific conditions or food preparation methods (eg, red meat cooking) may be influential. Risk-conferring nutritional combinations may vary by an individual’s genetic background, metabolic profile, age, or environmental exposures. Disentangling the potential influence on health outcomes of a single dietary component from these other variables is challenging, if not impossible.

The mistake that both Belluz and Kennedy make is assuming that if our food is making us sick, the problem must be some nefarious modern chemical. But why assume that? We live much longer than our ancestors, which means that 1) we are exposed to potential natural hazards for decades longer, so whatever dangers those compounds present will show up much more often in our world, and 2) whatever dangers modern food presents, it doesn't keep us from leading long, healthy lives.

So far as I can see, the biggest dangers in the modern diet are fat and sugar, which are both perfectly natural. The reasons we eat too much are complicated, and the advertising and product optimization of big food companies probably play a role. But mainly we do it because we like it. Giving up things that make you feed good is just hard, especially if you feel that your life doesn't offer enough other pleasures. The notion that this can be fixed by tinkering with chemical food additives strikes me as absurd.

Ukraine War Update

Russian donkey carrying a drone jammer

I haven't posted much about the Ukraine war here lately, because it seemed like all the important action was in Washington. But the war has raged on, and I have spent several hours this week catching up.

First, the tone of the top Ukrainian posters is upbeat and defiant. They say, and western governments generally agree, that Russia suffered its worst losses of the war in 2024 for its smallest gains, and that so far in 2025 the trend has continued. The comic book evil of some Russian actions – for example, drone operators hunting random civilians in the city of Kherson – has only fed Ukrainian determination, and that of their European friends. I have seen no signs of fear or even nervousness about what Russia might achieve. It is widely asserted that Russia keeps making outrageous demands in peace talks because they have no chance of achieving those goals on the battlefield. (For example, control of all of Kherson.) I have seen several posts saying some version of, "For the defending side to win a war, all they have to do is keep defending." Ukrainian bloggers widely shared a Forbes estimate that at current rates of advance it would take Russia several centuries and tens of millions of casualties to conquer Ukraine. Ukrainians believe they can keep defending for years, with or without US help.

Ukraine set a goal of manufacturing one million military drones in 2024, and exceeded that target by November. Their goal for 2025 is 4.5 million. This is mostly cheap quadcopters but it includes new variants with ranges of more than a 800 miles and warheads weighing up to 250 pounds. They have also launched a massive program for drones controlled by fiber optic lines with ranges of up to 30 km. Operators fly these fiber optic drones into buildings and underground bunkers before detonating them. Ukrainian drones recent clobbered a large Russian ammunition storage facility near Moscow (51st GRAU Arsenal), leading to massive explosions that went on for hours and the evacuation of four nearby villages (above). Ukrainians pass around photographs of these ammunition dump explosions to use as backgrounds on their phones. On May 1 there was a massive drone attack on Russian air defense installations across Crimea, with video showing several hits on radars. Attacks on airbases are routine, focusing on fuel and weapons storage structures, steadily degrading Russia's ability to keep planes in the air.

Meanwhile, Ukraine claimed, and Osint folks have confirmed, that a Ukrainian drone boat shot down a Russian Su-30 fighter-bomber with repurposed air to air missiles. (Newsweek, Twitter/X ) Russia had found that the best defense against drone boats was aircraft, especially helicopters, so boats that can shoot back at aircraft are a major problem for them. When you consider that Ukraine launched its first drone boat attack less than two years ago, this is astonishing progress. Plus, aircraft losses matter. Russia has been very conservative in using its air force because they simply do not have that many good planes or combat-ready pilots and cannot easily summon up hundreds more. So they are now facing a dilemma: whether to risk valuable aircraft and pilots protecting their fleet, or risk losing more ships to drone boat attacks.

Ukraine has also released video of new drone boats that carry aerial drones.

The vast array of drones makes the battlefield increasingly deadly. Russia has continued to make some mechanized assaults, but they generally fail, and half the armor is knocked out by drones before it has advanced half a mile. So most Russian attacks are now made by infantry, either on foot or mounted on dunebuggies, atvs, and small motorcycles. Ukraine has reponded to this tactic by stringing hundreds of miles of barbed wire all along the front. Wire isn't much use against tanks, but it is deadly to men on motorcycles. Incidentally, both sides now generally use land drones to lay both barbed wire and minefields.

The guys who count equipment losses in the war are still at it. The lastest update on Russian equipment losses shows at least 100 more tanks and 300 other armored vehicles destroyed in April, bringing the total losses to 3947 tanks and 8550 other armored vehicles, plus 139 jet aircraft, 155 helicopters, 322 SAM systems, more than 2,000 artillery pieces, etc., to a total of more than 21,000 systems. People who study Russia's vast array of military equipment storage bases say that almost all the good armored vehicles have already been withdrawn for refurbishment, and that what remains is increasingly outdated and rusted out. Those old vehicle hulls are still useful, but the cost of making them combat ready is rising, and the end result is probably less effective. Russia is not "running out" of armored vehicles, since they continue to manufacture hundreds every year, but they really are facing a shortage and this shows up in their pathetic offensive progress. 

 At least 5921 Russian officers have been killed in the war, based on memorials and funeral announcements. Mediazona and the BBC have counted 106,745 Russian dead overall and estimate the actual total is 164,000 to 237,000. The higher figure is about how many Americans died in Europe during World War II. Russia is a nation of 144 million, with 800,000 Russian boys turning 18 every year, so they can obviously endure such losses, especially since many of the men in the assault squads are older volunteers and quite a few are criminals. Still, these losses hurt. Plus, on paper Russia has a fairly generous system for taking care of elderly combat veterans and especially disabled veterans, and that is going to impose huge costs going forward.

The Trump administration's attempts to broker a cease-fire foundered on Russian intransigience, although, to be fair, the Ukrainians were probably only pretending to go along because they knew Russia would balk; they don't want a cease-fire either.

So the tragedy goes on, with Russia's losses mounting and Ukrainian resolve unshaken, no end in sight, Russia unable to give up but equally unable to win.

Villa d'Este

The Neptune Fountain

The Villa d'Este – the one at Tivoli near Rome, that is; there are a bunch of Este villas – has one of the world's most famous gardens. The house is also sort of famous, or at least the paintings are, but it is the gardens that occupy a big space in our imagination of the Renaissance.

The Hall of Glory

The house was commissioned by Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este (1509–1572), a younger son from the famous Estes of Ferrara. We hear that Cardinal d'Este wanted to be the Governor of Tivoli because it gave him the chance to oversee the excavations at Hadrian's famous villa and get his hands on any statues or other antiquities that turned up. 

Once he had the job, Cardinal d'Este he set about building himself a suitable house and garden. The work was supervised by architect-engineer Alberto Galvani, court architect of the Este, but I haven't found any information on who actually designed the garden.

The Oval Fountain

Wikipedia:

The vast construction site required the demolition of houses, public buildings and roads. In 1568 the local residents filed twelve different lawsuits against the Cardinal, but did not deter him from his project. Between 1563 and 1565, a huge amount of earth was excavated and used to construct new terraces; arcades, grottos, niches, and nymphaeums. The nearby river Aniene was diverted to furnish water for the complex system of pools, water jets, channels, fountains, cascades and water games. The steep slope of the garden, more than 45 metres (148 ft) from top to bottom, posed special challenges. Canals were dug and 200 metres (660 ft) of underground pipes were laid to carry the water from the artificial mountain under the oval fountain to the rest of the garden. Following the aesthetic principles of the Renaissance, the garden was carefully divided into regular units, or compartments, each 30 metres (98 ft) across, laid out along a longitudinal median axis, with five lateral axes.

Plan of the estate

The newly restored Grotto of Diana

Fountain of the Owl

The One Hundred Fountains

View of the garden by Piranesi

What an astonishing place

Links 9 May 2025

Head of a dragon, from a 16th-century altarpiece

recently acquired by the National Gallery in London

Shout out to my friends named Bob who probably never thought there would be a Pope with the ultimate regular guy name. 

And the brouhaha over the statue of an anonymous black woman in Times Square. (Daily Mail, Time Out, Black Enterprise, short video from CBS news, amusing discussion on Reddit: "she looks like she's about to beat me for not cleaning my room.")

The Trump administration finds out what everyone else already discovered, that there is no formula for peace in Ukraine because Russia continues to make demands with which Ukraine cannot possibly comply. Off the record, administration officials say the main issue is Putin continuing to demand sovereignty over big areas of Ukraine that he has never been able to conquer.

I noted here a few months ago that no model could account for the abundance of gold in the galaxy. Now a team of astronomers say gold and other heavy metals may be made by magnetars, magnetized neutron stars. (News article, original paper)

Alex Tabarrok notes that clothing has decined dramatically in price and investigates whether it has also declined in quality.

NBA star Tyrese Haliburton had a bad start to the season but is playing great now. He says that he ruined his game by following what everyone said about him on social media and fretting over the criticism. Then he gave up all social media and got his confidence back. (NY Times) I have lately heard several basketball types say they have gotten sick of NBA social media because it is so intensely, bitterly negative. An acquaintance sent me a video this week of a basketball podcaster who devoted a whole episode to pleading with fans not to be so awful. Whatever our problem is, it extends way beyond politics.

For military nerds, summary of a major report on reforming US naval shipbuilding.

"Unparalleled Misalignments," pairs of words where the words are synonyms but the phrases are not. Many are lame but a few are very clever.

According to this study, Americans in their 50s are getting less healthy. I assume this is a correlate of those "deaths of despair."

Recent econometric data on US wages show stagnation beginning in the early 1970s, extending down to right around the time NAFTA was signed, when they started going back up again. Whatever is goin on with working class wages in the US, NAFTA is not the problem. (Twitter/X 1, Twitter/X 2)

Until I watched this 15-minute video, I did not understand how closely improvements to 19th-century telegraphy were dependent on cutting edge physics and mathematics, in particular Maxwell's equations and their application by Oliver Heaviside. Early telegraphs were very slow, and the longer the line, the slower the transmission, and it took fundamental advances in physics to speed things up.

John Thomas Smith's wonderful etchings of London in the 1790s.

The biological mechanism behind those flowers that smell like rotting meat.

New surgeon general nominee Casey Means once posted a list of the things she  did to find love at age 35, including working with spirit guides, making wishes on heads up pennies, praying to photos of her ancestors, full moon ceremonies, talking to trees, and tripping on mushrooms.

Scott Siskind trashes Mencius Moldbug's MAGA turn, says he "sold out." There's a good phrase I haven't heard much lately.

Noah Smith: globalization did not hollow out the middle class.

Interesting NY Times piece on those MAGA women influencers who wear a lot of makeup and get in lots of fights. One of many weirdnesses of the moment is the prevalence of Mormon-looking mean girls.

Toolkit of a Dacian stonemason found in Romania.

Maya ritual offering found in Yucatan cave.

Six hoards from the late Bronze Age and Iron Age found on one Hungarian hill; I think it's safe to say this was a place of ritual importance.

Not Trusting the News

Interesting piece by Eli Tan in the NY Times about a town in California's Central Valley where there is not much local news of the professional variety. Hardly anyone subscribes to mainstream news sites like the Times or the SF Chronicle. Instead, many people rely on a combination of local FaceBook groups, cable news, podcasters, and weird web sites. The piece takes off from an incident that took place in 2020, when several armed militia members showed up to defend the town against a rumored invasion by Black Lives Matter protesters. (The same thing happened in several other American towns.) This led to a split within local FaceBook groups, with some banning political posts and unsourced "news", and people who wanted to post such things moving to groups that called themselves "Unfiltered" or "Double Unfiltered."

The result in an environment in which many people have no idea what to believe:

Fred Smith, a gun store owner in Oakdale, grew up watching broadcasts of the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite when he was called “the most trusted man in America.” Until recently, he was a regular viewer of CNN and Fox News after work and estimates he spent over $100,000 advertising his store in the print pages of the Modesto Bee in the early 2000s.

But that trust has waned as traditional cable outlets have started to feel “more like entertainment than news,” he said. He’s gravitated toward podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a fellow veteran. But he doesn’t necessarily trust all the information on those podcasts, either.

“It used to be you had one source of news and you trusted it,” Mr. Smith said. “Now the news comes from everywhere, and I take it all with a grain of salt.”

He now finds himself inundated with “more news than he’s ever felt in his lifetime” in the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, and he doesn’t trust any of it. Asked if he ever gets his news from social media, Mr. Smith opened his Instagram feed to show an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump riding a bald eagle. “You can’t trust that either,” he said.

Two events that come up over and over with people and the news are the pandemic, which left many folks bewildered, and the media's failure to report on Biden's dementia:

Working alongside Mr. Smith at his gun store is Jimmy Freeman, 50, who is known around the shop as a news hound. But whatever trust Mr. Freeman had in mainstream media disappeared while watching the last Biden-Trump presidential debate.

Watching President Biden struggle to string together complete sentences, he couldn’t help but think that the press corps in Washington that was supposed to keep the country informed — including Oakdale — had let him down.

“It felt like a failure,” Mr. Freeman said. “How could the media not tell us what we were seeing?”

This is an issue I worry about all the time. The shaping of the current media environment in the US goes back to the 1960s, when a series of big time government lies – the U-2 flights, a hundred things about the Vietnam War, Watergate – led a lot of people, including a few I know, to decide that everything we were being told was lie. Some of them still feel that way. Another big moment was the aftermath of 9-11, when many people felt that we had not been told the whole story, which was followed by the Bush administration's nonsense about yellowcake uranium and so on. The cluelessness of most media about the Wall Street near collapse of 2008 was another moment. I sometimes feel like people do not understand the enormous impact of their lies, which may really be undermining our civilization.

On the other hand, governments lie all the time, and I don't think the current US government is worse than average. 

 So I think something else is necessary. The internet is the obvious factor, multiplying people's suspicions with a barrage of innuendo, spin, and lies. But I wonder what else there is.

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.