Bernard Cornwell, "The Last Kingdom"

The known facts of history can only get you so far toward understanding it. If you are interested in, say, the Vikings in Britain, what evidence can you find? You have contemporary writtern sources like saints' lives and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and a small body of Old English poetry. You have a larger body of Norse verse and prose that purports to describe this period, but most of it was written down centuries later. You have artifacts like swords, cooking pots, and jeweled reliquaries. But for me, at least, these words and things do not build a complete picture. For that, you must imagine. You must leap beyond the words and things to create in your mind a vanished world, calling up all that you know of this time and other times and what you think you know about humanity and the world, filling in the outlines drawn by what you can learn with what you feel must be true.

Which is why I believe there is a role for historical fiction in understanding history. If you ask me what was life like at the court of Henry VIII, my first recommendation would be Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies. If you want to understand the strange Viking colony on Greenland, I suggest starting with Jane Smiley's The Greenlanders. And if you want to understand Viking Britain, my new choice is Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom (2004). Cornwell is not factually perfect, but to me this book both conveys the life of a noble warrior in that age better than any non-fiction work I know, and it offers a clear explanation of both why the Danes were victorious in so many battles and why they ultimately failed to hold onto what they conquered.

(The Last Kingdom has been adapted for television, but I have never seen it.)

The Last Kingdom has some problems as a novel: the plot feels contrived, some of the characters are unconvincing, and it might be the most masculine book I have ever read, with women appearing only as sex objects or strange, fey creatures beyond masculine ken. But some things about it are wonderful. The battle scenes are among the best I have read, drawing on the vocabulary of Norse and Old English poetry to convey the horror of the shield wall and the feelings of the men who stood face to face with their enemies and died or killed. On the model of Homer, Cornwell uses familiar imagery drawn from nature or home life to invoke the strange, brutal world of battle. And as I just hinted, Cornwell has delved deep into the lore of war to explain the Vikings, who were so often triumphant in battle against enemies with more men and more money but ultimately failed to hold onto their conquests.

The narrator of The Last Kingdom is a Saxon nobleman whose father was killed by the Danes when he was young, and so ended up being taken in by a Danish warlord and raised as a cross between a hostage and a foster son. He comes to admire the Danes and to love their company; they are brave and free, taking what they want by force, loyal to their friends and lords but deadly to their enemies. They seek joy in life and feel no shame in loving sex, drink, and war. Their great enemy King Alfred of Wessex, on the other hand, is surrounded by monks and prays for hours every day to be freed of sin, and Christmas at his court is a dismal affair of fasting and prayer, nothing like the drunken revelry of Danish Yule. But as the narrator passes back and forth between the two sides of this war, he comes to understand that while the Danes are close to invincible in battle, they have no plan for winning this war and completing their conquest. It is pious, sickly Alfred who has a plan, and the resources to back it up.

If you are interested in this period, or in how warriors felt and thought about war in a warrior age, I highly recommend this book. It might not be right, but to get to the heart of most things you must make a leap across the chasm of what we do not and maybe cannot know. This leap lands very well indeed.

Glory in battle!
The fight was near, the time had come
when men who were fated should fall on the field.
A great warcry arose, the ravens wheeled,
the eagle was eager for corpses; there was clamor on the earth.

– The Battle of Maldon, c. AD 991

The best summary of my thoughts on the Viking phenomenon is probably this post on the Berserks.

Beaver Ponds and Other Things in the Woods

Very impressive beaver complex in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, near a spot we were working. You can see the lodge to the left.

Closer view of the lodge.

Views of the dam. This is an old dam; you can see it on aerial photos from 15 years ago, and notice the willow trees growing out of it. So several generations of beavers have lived here.

Startled ducks flying up from the pond.

Plastron of a huge snapping turtle lying in the woods near the pond. 

Artifacts, just little fragments of stone and ceramic. We found some evidence of Indian camp sites in this area, dated by the pottery to 500-1500 AD. This probably means that these streams have been repeatedly dammed by beavers for thousands of years, creating wetlands that were then populated by plants and animals of interest to foragers, since the streams are too small to have been very interesting on their own. The pottery likely indicates the presence of women harvesting and processing plants.

And some photos I took on a very roundabout walk back from the beaver ponds to my car. Here is an old house with its oak tree; these big, lonely oaks are a great marker of old house sites. This interests me partly because I am not aware of any written accounts describing the American habit of planting (or maybe not cutting down) one oak tree near a house. Where did this idea come from?  How did it spread? What did it mean to the people who did it?

Remains of a substantial, pre-Civil War house, possibly the homeof a plantation overseer.

Stone chimney base from a cabin that was part of a plantation slave quarter, the home of field hands in the 1820-1865 period.

One of the cool things about my job is that occasionally I can get paid to walk around in the woods and notice things, one of my favorite activities.

Links 31 January, 2025

Classical statue built into a later wall at Phillipi, northern Greece

Tyler Cowen likes to ask British economists, "why is northern England poor?" Tom Forth has an answer for him. 

Big push among MAGA folks right now to out universities and non-profits for blatantly pushing to hire minorities. Remember that under past Supreme Court rulings it was ok to make minority status a factor in hiring, but except when past discrimination had been proved it was illegal to set quotas or set aside certain positions for minority candidates. I see lots of lawsuits and big money settlements coming.

Large language models are mostly moderate democrats. (Twitter/X) Moderate Democrat Matt Yglesias says this proves they are already smarter than most people.

Oz Katerji, "Hope Won in Syria," free for now at Foreign Affairs. Katerji: "As a war journalist, I have never reported on a good news story in my entire 15 year career, until now." Thinking it over, the wars of the past 15 years have mostly been dismal and inconclusive.

Make Sunsets is a private venture dedicated to cooling the earth by spreading sulfur dioxide in the upper atmosphere: company web site, news story.

Here's an academic paper that seems related in key ways to the current American situation: Falling racial inequality and rising educational inequality in US prison admissions for drug, violent, and property crimes. The paper claims that educational inequality (the gap between the college educated and others) is now much greater than racial inequality. If you wanted to put a positive spin on Steve Bannon-style populist nationalism, you could say that they are desperately worried about the collapse of morals, self-discipline, and economic prospects among working class Americans and they believe that importing foreigners to keep the economy booming is just going to shove those people farther out onto the margins.

Italian archaeologists uncover the footprints of people who were fleeing a volcanic eruption ca. 2000 BC.

In eastern Kentucky, there's a plan to move people from flood-prone valleys to the only other flat ground available: old mountain-top removal coal mines. (NY Times)

A weird argument that advice has become useless to us because we are too wrapped up in our own thought worlds. The piece takes off from Walter Benjamin's statement that characters in novels are "sealed off from society and tradition." The protaganist is "the individual who can no longer speak of his concerns in exemplary fashion, who himself lacks counsel and can give none." I don't think modern people are "sealed off from society and tradition," but I agree that many modern people seem to think they are.

CNN has some new results on the bead-covered Copper Age burials from Montelirio; most post on these finds is here.

A claim that the parts of Germany conquered by the Romans are still different from the parts that weren't. A counter argument might be that they are basically talking about the Rhine valley, and maybe that is just geographically more international and outward-looking than Saxony or Prussia.

A Roman miniature lock made of gold and iron found in Germany, with a detailed view of the mechanism. The Renaissance surge in clock-making is often cited as an important precursor to the industrial revolution, because it created a class of people with mechanical skills that could be applied to making other machines. But it seems to me that the Romans also had a lot of people with mechanical skills; locks and keys were very common in the Empire, and there are occasional hints in the written sources of much more elaborate devices. (Plus the Antikythera mechanism)

The people who have gone "AI Native" and make AI a constant companion of their research, business, and even their pleasure reading. Via Marginal Revolution.

The Indian state of Tamil Nadu has offered a $1 million prize for deciphering the Indus Valley script.

Agnes Callard, who has lately been on a crusade against contemporary parenting, now writing against encouraging children to be weird. I agree that this is imposing our own, adult fantasies on children, but then again maybe some degree of weirdness will be essential to success in the AI age.

More on the lost civilizations of the Amazon basin, this time evidence of elablorate irrigation systems for year-round maize cultivation. The long-running argument over whether the pre-Columbian Amazon supported large human populations is now pretty much over, with the "lots of people" faction winning in a rout.

A note on Twitter/X that the current MAGA crowd are praising RFK Jr. for wanting to make school lunches healthier, which is exactly what Michele Obama said back in 2010 only to get savaged by conservatives for being "anti-American." Puzzling world.

The history of Devil's Island.

Auguste Comte

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) was a French philosopher who founded a school of thought he called Positivism. He has been mostly ignored over the past century, but in the later 1800s he was hugely influential. This was especially true around the periphery of European civilization, such as in Latin America (Brazil has a Positivist motto on their flag) and in Turkey, where the "Young Turks" who created the new, secular state after World War I were big fans.

Comte was a mathematician and something of a scientist, but Positivism is not a philosophy of science. It purports to be a philosophy of everything. Comte laid out the stages of human civilization and the corresponding stages of human understanding, (animism = primitive, monotheism = medieval, etc.), provided a biological basic for morality, developed lists of the things needed for human happiness, even tried to produce a scientifc model of romance.

But mainly Positivism is a philosophy of society and governance. Comte was obsessed with the question of how societies could be run, since the Revolution had swept away everything that depended on God or inherent respect for royal or aristocratic authority. Comte posited that: 1) science (broadly defined) is the sum total of human knowledge; 2) therefore, society and government should be remade along scientific lines. His major work was called the Plan for the Scientific Work Necessary to Reorganize Society, otherwise the First System of Positive Polity. He coined the world "sociology" for this new discipline of applying scientific principles to social questions. He thought he had proved that sociology was the culmination of all human thought – since the scientific is the highest stage of knowledge, and human society the most complex and important thing to which we can apply science – and that applying his principles to social questions would lead to human perfection.

Later in life Comte changed gears and decided that his newly remade society needed religion. Since all god-based religions had been smashed by science, the new religion had to be based on real things, in particular science and human nature. Many people who had admired Comte's early work (such as John Stuart Mill) thought he had gone mad and denounced this turn toward scientific spiritualism, but the new humanistic faith did gain tens of thousands of followers. Later in life he really did go mad, and he died before he turned 60, leaving behind notes for several unfinished books.

It is hard for a 21st-century person to take Comte seriously, but it is also hard for us to refute his basic principles. If you agree that science is our most impressive system of knowledge, and that we should organize our society along the lines that will most promote human happiness, what's not to like?

Yet the grandiosity of it all strikes us a ridiculous. Oui, Monsieur Comte, tell us how you have systematized all knowledge and developed this magnificent "sociology" that will restructure our politics and economy to make us all happier. What could possibly go wrong?

Here is philosopher Michael Sugrue on Comte:

He does not seem to me a malicious man, but he does seem to have lost a sense of proportion. Yet that is perhaps a tragic result of making a Faustian bargain. Those people in the western tradition who are really under the misapprehension that they have the capacity to unify all of knowledge and to account for all previous logical and historical developments leading up to them have made a pact with the devil. It is literally insane to believe that you can do that. And to attempt to do it is in some ways noble and heroic in the Greek sense, in the sense that it is full of hubris and there is a certain sort of sin or pride in that, and at the same kind there is a kind of tragic nobility to it. He is trying to do more than anyone could possibly do. He has constructed a cold and austere and harsh Cartesian universe, and at the same time he longs for a sort of Pascalian moral order, and the problem is that the human mind just isn’t big enough to do that. So you see him in a kind of tug of war between his desire for moral order and his desire for logical clarity and the problem is that he pulls so hard in this tug of war that the rope snaps, and alas we have here a tragic, Faustian figure who might have been a great man intellectually but never realized his tremendous potential because of his unfortunate lapse into madness.

Good article on Comte at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Links 24 January 2025

Fresco detail from the newly discovered

 luxurious bathhouse in Pompeii

Emvolon, a new company founded by two MIT grads, says their technology can affordably convert methane from dispersed sources such as dumps, farms, and sewage treatment plants into methanol for industrial use. (Company web site, Engine Ventures, news story)

AI can predict human brain states five seconds into the future (Twitter/X) Tyler Cowen says this makes determinism more likely, but I think almost everyone agrees that human behavior is usually predictable.

Mass sacrifice of animals within the Pyramid of the Moon at Teotihuacan.

The amazing enameled chest of Cardinal Guala Bicchieri (ca. 1160-1227).

A report that Vietnam is pursuing radical reforms aimed at greatly shrinking the government.

Suicide note of AI leader Felix Hill, who took Ketamine to deal with minor mental health issues, went psychotic, had to be hospitalized, and emerged with a horrible depression he was unable to shake. "Ketamine, and the consequent psychosis, converted me from someone who has learned to live with depression on-the-whole pretty successfully to someone who is dead." Summary from Scott Siskind in his monthly links post. One of the weaknesses of the Rationalist movement is that their emphasis on thinking for themselves leaves these guys feeling qualified to prescribe drugs based on their own research. Like Felix Hill. In the same post, Siskind wonders if Elon Musk's personality change has to do with his own Ketamine use, or else steroids.

Tyler Cowen takes an economic approach to The Odyssey.

A tour of Mansion House, the home of the Lord Mayor of London, constructed in 1739.

From the geography blog at the Library of Congress, maps and other documents from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.

As they marched from Boston to Yorktown, the cartographers of Rochambeau's French legion made a map of every camp, including the ones at Philadelphia and Baltimore, giving us a set of 46 wonderful maps of America in 1781. Description here.

The fastest-growing major metropolitian area in the Americas is Toronto.

Alex Tabarrok attacks Curtis Yarvin's authoritarianism from a different angle than I did, emphasizing that capitalism works because of the market, not because individual firms have strong leaders. And it only works because we let firms fail, which is not how we usually treat nations.

The DOGE account on Twitter/X complains about the cost of pennies. If Musk can abolish the penny, that would be an achievement worth celebrating.

Richard Hanania reviews Trump's Day 1 Executive Orders. I may write something soon on Trump's ambition to end NEPA review of energy projects, a topic I know something about. I agree that NEPA is now being implemented in ways the people who voted for the law did not imagine, and I would like to see it cut back. Also, I think it is crazy that solar energy projects are regularly delayed so their environmental impact can be assessed; if climate change is a real concern, as everyone I know involved in the NEPA process agrees, then the environmental benefit of solar projects is always going to be positive and requiring them to go through NEPA is stupid.

The current vogue for online influencers reading classic novels. Via Marginal Revolution. As I said a while back, I think in some ways we have reached peak internet and we are going to see a lot more of people turning away from the social media whirl, at least in small doses.

Biologists think they know why mantas and other rays have such long tails: they are sensory organs. (NY Times, phys.org, original paper)

Noah Smith on the Trump and Melania memecoins.

At the Millersville Normal School, the (female) students who broke the rules had to produce hand-written notes to the administrators explaining their sins. JSTOR Daily has a collection.

Classical scrap yard full of statue fragments excavated in Turkey.

How one German intellectual thought about the Little Ice Age, a mixture of Christian apolalypticism and hermetic philosophy.

Curtis Yarvin, Still Wrapped Up in Monarchist Fantasies

The NY Times interviews Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, who thinks democracy has "failed." 

He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.

He sees his role as "demystifying," by which he means that most people have an irrational reverence for democracy that they would shed if they thought harder. He defends his view like this:

It’s not even that democracy is bad; it’s just that it’s very weak. And the fact that it’s very weak is easily seen by the fact that very unpopular policies like mass immigration persist despite strong majorities being against them. So the question of “Is democracy good or bad?” is, I think, a secondary question to “Is it what we actually have?” When you say to a New York Times reader, “Democracy is bad,” they’re a little bit shocked. But when you say to them, “Politics is bad” or even “Populism is bad,” they’re like, Of course, these are horrible things. So when you want to say democracy is not a good system of government, just bridge that immediately to saying populism is not a good system of government, and then you’ll be like, Yes, of course, actually policy and laws should be set by wise experts and people in the courts and lawyers and professors. Then you’ll realize that what you’re actually endorsing is aristocracy rather than democracy.

No, you're not. I was going to write a response, but I discovered that "Hadur," a commenter on Marginal Revolution, already did it for me:

I was democracy-pilled by reading biographies of Franco and Salazar. The Iberian countries in the 1930's were what every right-wing authoritarian fantasizes about: vigorous young conservative dictators firmly in charge of a country, liberals totally defeated and out of power. Both were able to stay in power for decades.

The result? For a while they owned the libs but eventually their countries just stagnated. Badly. To stay in power, Franco and Salazar had to systematically defang any organization that could in theory threaten their rule. Yes this meant left-wing universities and pro-democracy groups, but it also meant the church, the military, etc. Salazar in particular tried to strip these of power and resources so they could never threaten his rule. A damning incident in the Franco biography was that near the end of Franco's rule his Prime Minister was assassinated by Basques and Franco couldn't find a replacement for him. A country of tens of millions of people and nobody qualified to be PM. That's what decades of suppressing the production of new elites does. To a dictator, any young ambitious person is a potential threat and must not be allowed to blossom too much.

Democracy has many flaws but having rival teams of elites is something you don't appreciate until you lose it.

It's the "rival teams of elites" that Yarvin misses. I agree that populist democracy, which I would define as the belief that elites have no special knowledge and "expertise" is a pretext for taking power from the people, is a disaster. But that is not what we have; our system has a huge role for elites and experts. 

Yarvin calls himself a "historian," but as I already complained on this blog he knows nothing about history. He grabs the odd fact or statement, cites them entirely out of context, and then pretends to have done history. He might have noticed that all his questions about democracy vs. elite rule were fought over throughout the 1700s and 1800s by people who did not have any kind of special reverence for democracy. Including the founders of the American Republic; I suggest the Federalist Papers as a good place to start reading some serious discussion of how to set up a government that respects both popular will and elite expertise. But there were similar debates in Britain and France at least, and I assume other European countries. These are hard problems. But so far as I can see, Yarvin has nothing to say about them.

Here is the question I would ask Yarvin: "Can you name a dictatorship where life is better than in the US or the European democracies?"

I can't. I certainly don't think that representative democracy in either the Parliamentary or Presidential form is always the best system for everyone. In some parts of the world it has failed disastrously. Some Asian countries, such as Singapore and post-WW II Japan, got good results using a one-party pseudo-democracy. But on the whole the record of modern democracy is just far better than anything else, and only a deluded fool could believe otherwise.

Imaginary Architecture of the Revolutionary Age

Delightful essay by Hugh Aldersen-Williams on the unbuilt fantasies of French architecture in the revolutionary period, at Public Domain Review. Aldersen-Williams focuses on the work of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, two dreamers who must have been very frustrated that the work they actually built fell so far short of what they imagined. Above, exterior and cross-section of Boullée’s famous design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784. This would have been enormous; those are mature trees growing on othe terraces.

Many architectus of the time were fascinated by spheres; here is Ledoux’s design for a public mausoleum, from his book L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation, 1804.

Perspectival view of  Ledoux’s design for the forge at Chaux, France, from the same book. Pyramids!

Boullée’s design for a coliseum, ca. 1781–1793. For these architects, decoration was the past, and the future was bold geometry.

More Ledoux, design for a bridge held up by stone classical ships.

And Ledoux's home for a "charpentier de la graduation," an expression beyond either my French, or Google's; master carpenter?

The Almost Unbelievable Weirdness of Life with Alice Munro

When Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013, the committe wrote,

You, dear Alice Munro, like few others, have come close to solving the greatest mystery of them all: the human heart.

Munro became a famous author because of her relentless interrogation of emotion, and especially the ambivalence of emotion. In her stories there is no pure feeling. Every emotion is undercut by contrary emotions, every pleasant moment shadowed by dark thoughts. Munro was often considered a sort of hero by other female writers, and some felt that Munro's Nobel was a validation of their own work, because their obsessions were the same as Munro's. One said,

We had won something, too, because of the generosity, the frank respect for the smallest and largest aspects of the female experience that she bequeathed to us all in her stories.

To Munro's biggest admirers, she captured better than any other writer the experience of women's lives in our age. Or, at least, sensitive, educated, middle-class women's lives. Which are, an outsider must suppose, all on fire with emotional ambivalence and weighed down with the toll it takes. Motherhood, in particular, came often into the range of Munro's artillery, and her mothers always resent their children nearly as much as they love them. She was equally ambivalent about romance. The men in her stories always pose a threat to the women, sometimes a direct physical threat but more often a more metaphorical one, to their emotional independence or their sense that they are capable of living alone. A man who does not pose some kind of emotional threat, it seems, was of no interest to Munro or the fictional women she imagined. Other fodder included the attitudes of children toward their parents at every stage of their lives, of friends toward each other, of people toward their home towns, and so on.

Lots of people wrote about Munro's family when the news broke last year that she had stuck with her second husband, Gerry, after learning that he abused her younger daughter, Andrea. Those stories were all rushed and vague and not very interesting, and I mostly ignored them. But now Rachel Aviv has written (for The New Yorker) a chronicle of Alice Munro's family life that is among the most amazing things I have ever read. The Munro clan, it turns out, were a whole tribe of over-thinking, over-analyzing people who wrote and talked constantly about their weird family. Aviv also makes plain how much of Munro's fiction was drawn directly from her family life. Between the stories, the letters, the interviews, and everything else we have a breathtakingly detailed record of their lives.

To me the strangest part of the story is that Munro's children and husbands all understood perfectly well that she constantly translated her every experience to fiction. Anything they said or did was likely to end up in a story, sometimes altered but often not changed at all. As one of the daughters put in (in one of those many interviews), her mother was "putting every difficulty in her life through that machine that turned things into gold." Once she read her daughter's private journal and put those thoughts into a character's head – typical of the family that the daughter said, in another interview, "I thought my version was better." One of the children once described being on a family outing and noticing that her mother's lips were moving as she composed a story about their day.

When Alice introduced Gerry to the family, she noticed that her daughters responded differently to him. Of course, she put this in a story; "Roberta" stands in for Alice and "George" for Gerry:

Although Roberta's older daughter can't stand George, the younger one – "an acrobat, a parodist, an optimist, a disturber" – seems to have a special connection with him. "I know how be jokey," she says. "I understand him." Roberta shivers at this remark: "It seems to her that she has instructed them, by example, that he is to be accommodated, his silences respected, his joking responded to. What if he should turn, within this safety, and deal them a memorable blow? If it happened, it would be she who would have betrayed them."

This was years before Gerry abused that younger daughter. Did Alice see it all unfolding in those first weeks? It would not surprise me that she at least imagined it, nor that if she had that would not have led her to renounce Gerry.

When she discovered that her husband had sexually abused her daughter, she did not throw him out; instead, she used the incident and the emotions it inspired as fodder for at least three stories:

When Andrea was about eleven, Alice told Jenny that she was troubled by an interaction she'd witnessed between Gerry and Andrea in the back yard. "She said that Gerry was using a hose, like he was pissing, and Andrea was laughing, and she would grab the hose and do it, too," Jenny said. "And it just seemed off. It seemed wrong."

In "Soon," published more than twenty years later, a woman named Juliet dreams that, when she looks out her window, she sees her father and a girl playing with a hose. She can see that her father "held the hose low, in front of his body, and that it was only the nozzle of it that he turned back and forth. The dream was suffused with a sticky horror. Not the kind of horror that jostles its shapes outside your skin, but the kind the curls through the narrowest paggages of your blood."

So Munro hoarded that troubling memory and, when she fully understood what was behind it, put it through the story machine. Around this time she conceived the notion that Gerry was responsible for an unsolved rape/murder case in their town, and wrote a story in which a man very much like her husband commits the killing. (The police say he can't have done it.)

(The abuse of Andrea, as recounted by Aviv, involved lots of inappropriate play, some exposure, and a bit of masturbation, but no penetration; when Andrea reported it to the police, years later, and Gerry confessed, the courts did not take it very seriously and Gerry got two years' probation. I didn't find it shocking. But of course one of the things about child abuse is that the impact on the child varies hugely and many have been undone by acts well short of rape.)

The tabloid version of these events is that Alice "stood with" her husband rather than her daughter. That seems to be how Andrea sees it. But others who knew Alice cut her some slack because by that point she was already ill and losing her memory. She and Gerry depended on each other for practical support. They also came from the generation that gave us "sexual liberation"; it was not at all uncommon in the 60s for people to defend sex between adults and children as part of that liberation. Between this moral confusion and the constant psychologizing, it seems to have been hard for Alice to draw any hard lines through the world. She started from the assumption that all men are dangerous, all commitments perilous, and those closest to us who hurt us the most; from that position, how does one decide which acts are unforgivable? Munro's characters struggle over whether to forgive their parents for how they were brought up; she was regularly beaten by her own father, and she wrote a story about a girl who is beaten by her father but then lured back out of her room by her mother offering cookies. Did she forgive her parents? I can't say. All I can say is that she put those beatings into the machine, and out came a story.

In one of her last stories, Munro wrote.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do — we do it all the time.

Links 17 January 2025

The "Tellus" panel from the Ara Pacis in Rome,

depicting a goddess whose exact identity is disputed.

Exhibit at the Morgan Library about their first librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, a fascinating character who was also born black but passed for white. (Morgan Library, The New Yorker, wikipedia) 

Alex Tabarrok reviews "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin," a documentary about a young man with muscular dystrophy who had an amazing life online.

Zvi takes a detailed look at the first week of congestion pricing in Manhattan.

Sometimes people in the Roman empire poured liquid gypsum over burials; one of these was recently excavated in England.

Documenting the hidden 13th-century murals in Angers Cathedral.

Sex education in the early nineteenth century.

Interview with a scholar of Theodore Adorno, much about why thinkers from the early 20th century were pessimistic (gee I wonder) and what sort of hope they nonetheless retained. I was struck by this: "The norms that we must invoke for the purposes of criticism are as damaged as the damaged world."

Sabine Hossenfelder on Jeff Bezos' space plans, 7 minute video.

Fascinating genetic findings from Britain, where one Iron Age Celtic community seems to have been dominated by a multi-generation female lineage.

The politics of declaring a species "invasive."

Is it true that men don't read?

A history of the concept of entropy, and doubts about it. Lots of big-time physicists don't accept the Second Law.

"Net neutrality" was fought over with millions of words, but Tyler Cowen says its disappearance in the US has hardly been noticed. On the other hand what people worried about was what internet providers  would do in secret, so it might be having impacts we can't see; the end of net neutrality could might be one of the reasons we are shown some things on the internet but not others.

Literary critic Joseph Epstein always said his life was too boring to ever write a memoir, but in the end he did write a memoir about his boring life.

Writer Kevin Killian wrote a lot of reviews on Amazon, and they have now been published as a 697-page book.

Lev Grossman, "The Bright Sword"

I enjoyed this book, and was at times delighted by it. Lev Grossman is best known for the "Magician" series, which I did not like at all, but this book is something very different and much more fun.

Imagine taking all the versions of the King Arthur story that you know – the high medieval knightly quests, the late medieval tragedy of Arthur's betrayal and fall, the "historical" Arthur defending post-Roman Britain against the Saxons, The Sword in the Stone, the feminist Arthurian books of the 1970s with Morgan le Fay as the protagonist, Monty Python and the Holy Grail – mashing them up together, and trying to set a story in that world. It's mad, but it worked well enough to hold my interest all the way through. 

I especially liked two things about it. First, Grossman has done enough reading to have a real familiarity wth all the Arthurian worlds he invokes, not just the names and narratives but something of the style and attitude, and I very much enjoyed recognizing where all the patches in this quilt came from. Second, I thought Grossman's tone was perfect for a book like this. Mainly it was light, but it was serious enough when it needed to be to convey the wonder and high stakes of the story. Most of the story takes place after Arthur's death, and I felt the characters' struggle to figure out what the new world would be like. Camelot had been, they all recognize, a very special place and time, and they would like to go back to it but know that they cannot.

Quite a few reviewers declared The Bright Sword to be one of the best books of 2024, and I understand why.

DEI is Power

All the leftists out there who thought DEI policies were a weapon for their side only should pay attention to some recent events. Columbia University fired law professor Katherine Franke, a longtime advocate for Palestinian rights among other causes, because of comments she made to a radio show that had nothing to do with the university. Officially, Franke was fired for "discriminatory harassment in violation of our policies." (NY Times, Inside Higher Ed) The most offensive of her comments seems to have been saying that she had doubts about taking Israeli students right out of military service because they often harassed Arab students.

Various people on Twitter/X have said that this wasn't the real reason, which was, depending on which questionable source you prefer, either desire to crack down on somebody, or second-hand reports of statements by Franke that sound a lot worse than the ones she made on the radio. But it was the alleged "discriminatory harassment" that provided the legal cover for the dismissal.

Columbia's policy in these matters is posted online, so we can consider it. The act is defined like this:

Treating individuals less favorably because of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class, or having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others, constitutes Discrimination. Discrimination includes treating an individual differently on the basis of their actual or perceived membership in, or association with, a Protected Class in the context of an educational program or activity without a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason so as to deny or limit the ability of the individual to participate in or benefit from Columbia’s services, activities, or privileges.

Discriminatory Harassment may include, but is not limited to, the following acts that denigrate or show hostility or aversion toward one or more actual or perceived members or associates of a Protected Class: verbal abuse; epithets or slurs; negative stereotyping (including, but not limited to, stereotypes about how an individual looks, including skin color, physical features, or style of dress that reflects ethnic traditions; a foreign accent; a foreign name, including names commonly associated with a particular shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics; or speaking a foreign language); threatening, intimidating, or hostile acts; denigrating jokes; insulting or obscene comments or gestures; calls for genocide and/or violence; and the display or circulation of written or graphic material in any form, including but not limited to social media.

Most of this is pretty standard legal verbiage, and some of the vague-sounding terms have been litigated. But Columbia's policy omits one of the standard items in US sexual harassment law, which is that there has to be a pattern of behavior and you have to request that it stop; only if it then does not stop do you have a harassment case. At Columbia, as happened to Franke, you can be dismissed for a single sentence from just about anywhere, including social media or text messages.

Here is an interesting wrinkle:

Speech or conduct expressing views regarding a particular country’s policies or practices does not necessarily constitute Discriminatory Harassment based on national origin. However, if harassing speech or conduct that otherwise appears to be based on views about a country’s policies or practices is directed at or infused with discriminatory comments about persons from, or associated with, that country or another country, then it may constitute Discriminatory Harassment.

Under this rule it would be ok to criticize the Israeli government so long as you make absolutely clear you are not attacking all Israelis. Which is just the kind of rule that gets broken all the time in angry confrontations like we just saw over Gaza. My Ukraine war feed is full of statements about "Russians" that I am sure violate this policy.

There is much language in the policy about creating a Hostile Environment, which  

can be created by unwelcome conduct that, considering the totality of the circumstances, is subjectively and objectively offensive and is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from any of the University’s educational programs or activities.

We have seen cases in recent years in which students claimed to have been made so upset that they couldn't study by a whole range of things, including, famously, the appearance at Brown of a speaker who denied the existence of "rape culture." If Jewish students say that the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus makes it impossible for them to study, do they have a case? Could a pro-Palestinian student make the same argument about a Jewish student wearing a provocative button or T-shirt? (Like, "Genesis 12:7")

Who decides which speech acts violate this policy? As the firing of Franke shows, the President and Board decide. Without any kind of public hearing or any of that weak stuff. If they decide to get rid of anyone who has ever waded into a political controversy, they can probably find a reason under the "discriminatory harassment" policy.

If you want freedom of speech, you need to stand for everyone's freedom to speak. Whatever limits you accept on your enemies will eventually be used on you.

Links 10 January 2025

New paper in Current Biology says that the famous snail darter, which was the subject of crucial lawsuits under the Endangered Species Act that delayed the Tellico Dam, is not a distinct species at all. Genetic testing shows that it is just an eastern population of the stargazing darter, a fairly common fish. (Paper, NY Times, Reason) The Endangered Species Act is a big temptation to environmentally-minded scientists, because declaring a population a distinct species (e.g., the red wolf) provides so many protective weapons and nobody agrees on what defines a species anyway.

Great Emily Oster piece on the problem of alcohol and health.

Ancient amulet against cancer.

At the international workshop for wildlife fertility control. Interesting but I radically disagree that "indigenous" interventions in nature should be put in a different category than ours.

Libertarian Richard Hanania on American politics: "We’re lucky as a country that one side has xenophobia/racism and the other economic statism. If there was a party that combined both they would win, as things stand they check one another."

Study finds that getting surgeons to warm up for five to ten minutes before they enter the OR improves outcomes. (NY Times, original paper)

Trump's immigration team is trying to find an epidemic disease they can use to close US borders.

CNN reports that the golden lion tamarin, once down to only about 200 in the wild, has recovered nicely thanks to conservation efforts.

New study argues that exposure to lead under the Roman empire was so high as to have significant impacts on health and intelligence. (Original paper, NY Times, ) But the impacts they are talking about are less than modern people endured from 1750 to recent times, so I am not convinced that any of this means much on a civilizational scale.

Former CEO who just sold his company now has no idea what to do with his life. Like Notch after selling Minecraft. It's the hoariest of cliches but life really is about the journey, not the destination. Forget finish lines.

Kevin Drum has a ton of data showing that we still build things in the US. Also, that the regulatory state has made us much safer.

Somewhat interesting study on the brains of people who have or have not recovered from PTSD.

Interesting tomb of a royal physician found in Egypt.

Thoughts on which traits will be more or less valuable in the world of AI.

Crowns and other treasure from Lithuanian royal burials within the Vilnius cathedral.

Russian blogger says their armored assaults never go anywhere and serve only to increase Ukrainian morale; all advance is made by infrantry.

Katherine Rundell

Katherine Rundell is the latest Brit to be both a high-end scholar and a successful author of children's books. If you're curious about her literary scholarship check out this Tyler Cowen interview, or a snippet on my blog here.

I recently read two of Rundell's children's books, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms (2011) and The Wolf Wilder (2015).

Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms tells the story of a young white girl who grows up on a farm in Zimbabwe – like Katherine Rundell, for a while. She loves her life. She spends it running around the farm her father owns and in the surrounding bush and playing with black boys. Her name is Wilhelmina but her father calls her Wildcat. She can ride a horse, manage baboons and hyenas, and roast bananas in a fire, but her book learning is severely limited and she has no inkling of bourgeois manners. Then her beloved father dies and her guardian marries an evil witch of a woman who insists that young Wildcat be sent to boarding school in England. She is terrified and humiliated by the routine there and her treatment by the other girls. So she rebels and runs away, spending one night in a monkey enclosure at the London Zoo, before eventually going back with a new determination to face down her persecutors and make something of herself.

Wolf wilders, we are told, are people who take the half-tamed wolves that Russian aristocrats used to sometimes keep as pets and return them to the wild. The Wolf Wilder concerns a girl name Feodora who lives with her mother in a house in the Russian woods, helping wolves who grew up in dachas learn how to survive in the forest. "Wolves," the narrator muses, "like children, are not meant to lead calm lives." Feo knows little about the world and does not care to. Until, that is, a sinister army officer named General Rakov shows up and threatens to kill her mother for keeping wolves. This leads to various adventures and dangers, in the course of which Feo meets a would-be peasant revolutionary who is trying to raise his neighbors to fight Rakov. So Feo's childhood rebellion gets mixed up with a bit of real rebellion, although in the end little comes of that.

Rundell's writing is fine, the stories are ok, and if I had any younglings around I would be happy to read these aloud to them.

The thing that struck me most about both of these stories was their reliance on the assumption, or maybe assertion, that children are wild things who naturally have more in common with monkeys or wolves than they do with grownups. The adult world of rules and manners and propriety is, we are to assume, horrific to any child with spirit. We come into the world wild, and if we must learn to fit in, we should never forget that we were once wild things who wanted only to live free.

This is utterly foreign to my own childhood, which was abolutely unwild. Nor is it the only way to construct an adventure for children; in many stories it is assumed that regular childhood is boring, and we must leave the safey and comfort of home to find adventure elsewhere. Bilbo left the Shire on the road to the Lonely Mountain; Wendy, John, and Michael flew out of the nursery with Peter Pan and Tinkerbell to have their adventures in Neverland.

So I wonder how actual children see this, and if they are more likely to relate to Wildcat and Feo or to see them as outlandish and alien.

I also wonder about Katherine Rundell; does part of her seethe at the confines of Cambridge and its rules? Or is she a mild-mannered person who likes her adventures safely within the pages of a book?

Letting the Data Speak for Itself

From Khoa Vu on Twitter/X.

Court Ladies and their Embroidery

Interesting NY Times review of The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens, by Nicola Clark. The position of these women is so strange to us that we have a hard time wrapping our minds around it. On the one hand, their positions and even their survival depended largely on the support of their male relatives, and they had to spend an immense amount of time and effort looking beautiful in the background of courts events. Were they oppressed? Frustrated? Thrilled to be so close to the center of it all? Bored out of their minds?

I personally have a hard time imagining any career I would hate more than to be a court lady, so confined by social rules, familial expectations, and cumbersome clothes, with so little freedom to make meaningful choices or get your hands dirty with real work. Ugh. But the evidence is that hundreds of women fought for these places; is that maybe evidence of how miserable every other kind of life was at the time?

Not that the women had no choices to make, or no power. They endlessly networked and used those connections to benefit their families and their friends. They also had their own kinds of art. I was struck by this: 

The Duchess of Norfolk was forced to abandon a “complex embroidery work” when her husband banished her so he could carry on an affair. The work, described in inventories as “a great pomegranate of gold,” had perhaps been her silent form of protest at the treatment of her queen, as the fruit was Catherine of Aragon’s symbol. 

This connects to what Laurel Thatcher wrote about women's cloth work in colonial North America, which was simultaneously practical, political, and self-expressive. Women said a lot without writing it down.

Afghan "Reconstruction" and the Perils of Politics

John F. Sopko has been the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction since 2012. He spent years trying to convince people in Washington that the war was failing and the Afghan government we supported was a sham, and in this NY Times op-ed he is still bitter about it: 

The collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2021, revealed what little American lives and money had purchased over 20 years there. It also laid bare a gaping disconnect between reality and what senior U.S. officials had been telling Americans for decades: that success was just around the corner.

As the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, my staff and I have audited and investigated U.S. programs and spending to rebuild Afghanistan — a mission that, it was hoped, would turn the theocratic, tribal-based “Graveyard of Empires” into a modern liberal democracy.

In hundreds of reports over the last 12 years, we have detailed a long list of systemic problems: The U.S. government struggled to carry out a coherent strategy, fostered overly ambitious expectations, started unsustainable projects and did not understand the country or its people. American agencies measured success not by what they accomplished, but by dollars spent or checklists of completed tasks. . . .

To win promotions and bigger salaries, military and civilian leaders felt they had to sell their tours of duty, deployments, programs and projects as successes — even when they were not. Leaders tended to report and highlight favorable information while obscuring that which pointed to failure. After all, failures do not lead to an ambassadorship or an elevation to general.

Sopko goes on to detail all the usual failures of American government in action: money spent simply to justify having a bigger budget next year, projects pushed through to completion even though the rationale for them had evaporated. We were supposed to be supporting the development of Afghan security forces, so rosy statistics on the number of soldiers etc. were reported, even though Sopko's office kept reporting that many Afghan soldiers were "ghosts" kept on the books so the officers could pocket their salaries, and so on.

It's worth thinking over how we managed to spend hundreds of billions on this disaster.

It began with the righteous fury that overtook the US after 9-11 and Bush II's war against "evil." I didn't bother to oppose our invasion of Afghanistan because I saw it as inevitable; they were harboring our enemies and we were  not going to stand for that. But I never thought it would end well. I recall posting somewhere the words of a 19th-century British Parliamentarian who said, "the first rule of politics is, don't invade Afghanistan."

Then our wars of retribution got mixed up with a grander set of ideas. The root cause of terrorism, many westerners believed, was the failure of governments across the Middle East to provide decent lives for their citizens. The region was dominated by two forces: vicious authoritarian thugs, and religious reactionaries. In that context, terrorism seemed inevitable and maybe even admirable. What was needed was to reshape these countries toward democracy, capitalism, and hope. So we embarked on our trillion-dollar crusade to reshape the Middle East. We invaded two countries and set up new governments, and various Washington types called for invading more.

There is a very limited sense in which this was successful; after a 15-year nightmare, Iraq has emerged as a better place than it was under Saddam. There is a real Arab movement for democracy and human rights, and some of its proponents have welcomed or defended US intervention. We can hope that maybe the final completion of the Syrian revolt will lead to something better than Assad, although for now it remains only a hope.

But the price has been very, very high: US politics has been corrupted, and the elites that supported the interventions discredited, leading to the rise of Trump and other angry outsiders. Across the region, hundreds of thousands of deaths. The Arab Spring began with high hopes but spawned mostly reaction and repression, with the Egyptian middle classes hurriedly abandoning their own call for democracy. 

After Bush we got Obama, who continued the Afghan war for other reasons. He campaigned as a moderate who opposed, not all wars, but only "dumb wars," so it was crucial to his positioning that while he withdrew from Iraq he supported trying to tame Afghanistan. It was his administration that saw most of the lies and rose-tinged forecasts that so annoy Sopko.

So it was not until Trump that we had a president willing to abandon Afghanistan, and it may be (opinions differ on this) that he accepted an absurdly long withdrawal timeline from the Pentagon because he wanted to put anything that smacked of defeat off until after the 2020 election. So it was left to Biden to bite the bullet.

Linsk 3 January 2024

Eye Idols from Bronze Age Syria

The Japanese myth of Amaterasu and the founding of the imperial dynasty is bonkers.

Kevin Drum has some data on AI progress in recent years: performance here, the cost of training here, and business use here. 

Retired GOP congressman expects a "shit show" in the next session.

Is the expansion of the universe really accelerating? Major new paper says no. (News article, 7-minute video, original paper)

Weird article about "the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at ~10^9 bits/s." Via Marginal Revolution.

A lot was made at the time over how much the "investors" in Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme lost, but in the end about 90% of the money was recovered. All the huge numbers about tens of billions is losses come from using as the baseline, not the amount paid in, but the amount that Madoff promised. About $1.7 billion of the recovered money came in a settlement paid by JPMorgan Chase, after a court found they knew about the scheme and did not alert authorities. I looked into this after reading a novel (The Glass Hotel by Emily Saint John Mandel) in which a clone of Madoff features prominently; until then Madoff had vanished from my consciousness.

Excellent Scott Siskind piece on H1N5 flu. His conclusion is that the chance of a dangerous pandemic in the next year is not much more than usual.

With the use of coins in decline, Britain's Royal Mint is shifting its focus to recycling circuit boards and other electronic parts, making the recovered gold into jewelry. (NY Times, Royal Mint, BBC) Awesome idea, but I wonder about the economics.

New paper estimates productivity growth in England was zero until 1600 but then averaged 2% across the 1600s and 1700s. A variety of studies are pointing to the 1600s – a great era of globalization and trade – as the period when modern economic growth began. Change was not as rapid as in the 1800s, when productivity growth averaged 4%, but it was real and significant. People noticed, and by the 1690s we had early "economists" writing about growth and rising wealth.

The real-life pet detective.

Americans can't stop fighting about the health effects of alcohol. Heavy drinking is bad for you. But light to moderate drinking has complex effects, apparently causing some cancers (although this all but impossible to prove) but reducing deaths from heart disease (although nobody knows if that is a chemical effect of alcohol or just because people who drink moderately have happier lives and more friends). Scolds who hate fun are determined to prove that drinking, like all vices, is inherently bad, and want the government to weigh in heavily against it, but the science does not support that. (NY Times)

Virginia man arrested with a cache of pipe bombs was into an online thing called "No Lives Matter," which seems to the the nihilist endpoint of ring-wing apocalypticism. (NY Times, Homeland Security bulletin) One of their most widely circulated posts says, "Societal standards should not exist. They are to be crushed by any means possible." But the song by Tom MacDonald gets a lot more Google hits.

The hard problem of long-term digital storage. I recently tried to recover something from a 15-year-old "archival" cd and it was hopelessly corrupted.

Daniel Defoe's Tour of Britain.

US military is worried that the intensity of battlefield drones will prevent helicopter evacuation of wounded soldiers and lead to more deaths in future wars.

Speaking of which, Ukraine claims its naval drones shot down two Russian helicopters.

Past post from 2013 that seems relevant, Nelson Mandela, George Washington, and Timothy McVeigh.