RIP Kevin Drum

After a long battle with cancer that he regularly blogged about, Kevin Drum has died.

Other people sometimes get emotional about the deaths of actors, but I have never felt much about that. I do mourn Kevin Drum. He has been a presence in my life for decades, someone whose thinking I have come to know very well, and I miss him already.

Abel Grimmer

This painting by Flemish master Abel Grimmer (c. 1570-1620) was recently rediscovered when the family that owned it, but had no idea what it was, put it up for auction. It is being called Landscape with Peasants near a Lakeside Castle, but that's just a description. I had never heard of Abel Grimmer, but I liked this castle, so I looked him up. 

He was born and died in Antwerp, and also spent most the years in between there. He learned to paint from his father, who got his own career started by painting small panels in the style of Pieter Breughel the Elder and selling them from a marketplace stall. Abel Grimmer's most famous painting is probably this one, The Tower of Babel (1595), now in Abu Dhabi.

One of the things I love about painting of this era is the little wonders in the background. This is Christ Carrying the Cross.

And these are the buildings in the background. Perfect. These glimpses of background cities are like little hidden worlds, and they entice me like doors into Faerie.

But Grimmer is most famous as a painter of ordinary life. The body one is a nice reminder of how much labor was involved in creating those famous geometric gardens.

This one, The Marketplace of Bergen op Zoom, is "attributed to" Grimmer, but it certainly looks very much like the others. Anyway a pleasant discovery for a weekend when Spring is making hints but not yet ready to arrive.

The Age of Busyness

Matt Yglesias, who has never had any job that didn't involve being online all the time, has been trying to recenter himself by reading old books. One of the things he learned from nineteenth-century novels is that rich people used to think it was ok to do nothing.

Yglesias is writing about Victorian England, and even in that case there were plenty of rich people who did a lot; for every Mr. Darcy enjoying his garden there was a Henry Layard traveling the world and excavating Nineveh. In other societies the demands on the rich and prominent were much greater.

But one thing aristocrats did not do across much of European history was hold jobs. Some did, mainly in the military or the high reaches of government, but plenty of others cultivated their leisure as best they could.

So it does strike me as interesting that in our era the aristocrats one hears about all have careers. Like, the Princess von Thurn und Taxis who was an editor at Vogue, or the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, who own one of England's most famous private houses and have spent their lives being busy as an executive in international development (the Earl) and a journalist (the Countess).

I have noted several times on this blog that the only prize our society can think up to give people for hard work and good behavior is a "rewarding career." When Covid created severe labor shortages in some industries many firms reacted, not by raising pay, but by touting "opportunities for advancement." The "American Dream," insofar as I understand it, was always about earning money, not inheriting it. Money you don't earn by hard work makes us suspicious, and we love sharing stories about people ruined by lottery riches, or professional athletes bankrupt within five years of leaving the league.

It seems to me that as a society we put a huge emphasis of work; work as identity, work as virtue, work as psychological stimulus. I wonder how many of our social pathologies can be traced back to our obsession with work and career success. On the other hand, I have no idea what we would do without work, which is one reason I am worried about the post-AI future.

Links 7 March 2025

Fragment of a La Tene torc, now in the British Museum

The Mediterranean grass Carl Linnaeus dubbed Poa annua is one of the world's great colonizers, even spreading to Antarctica.

Matt Levine explains the company bidding to buy the remains of InfoWars by issuing memecoins.

South Korea's birthrate ticked up a little last year, from 0.72 to 0.75, which is nice but no reason for some of the triumphant crowing coming from South Korean officials. They have not solved their problem.

The "truth" about the "Epstein files." The various prosecutions and civil lawsuits concerning Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell generated tens of thousands of pages of material, much of which has already been made public. News organizations have put some of this online in searchable formats, including Epstein's address book and the flight logs to the island. Much of the rest has not yet been made public because nobody has had the time to cleanse it of the names of victims and other parties who have not been accused of a crime (like Donald Trump, who appears plenty but was turned into "Doe 174"). The idea that there are bombshell revelations yet to come from this material is silly.

Japan looks to robots to take over caring for its aging population.

The cuisine of ancient Egypt, at Atlas Obscura. Interesting that there are a lot of pig bones in Egyptian archaeological sites but no pigs in tomb paintings. Anothing interesting note is that the workers building the great pyramids ate a lot of cow and pig feet, which struck sparks in my brain because cow feet figured prominently in the diet of the inmates in the Bruin Slave Jail. I guess cow feet have a long history of serving as cheap, high-protein food for poor workers.

Fixing social science using "replay review" for famous articles, on the model of professional sports. The argument is that we don't have the resources to do real reviews of all research before publication, so we should have a separate, better-funded process for research that has become important.

More weird details from the administration's DEI purge, including censoring documents about the Enola Gay and scientists named Gay.

This fall the Metropolitan Opera performed Grounded, an opera by Jeanine Tesori about an American drone pilot. Trailer here. Ninety seconds of "Blue," the first aria, here, review here that calls it a "triumph."

Tyler Cowen interviews science writer Carl Zimmer, much about airborne diseases and the possibility of life on other worlds.

And a review of Zimmer's new book on life in the air.

Denmark's postal service will no longer deliver letters after the end of the year; other European postal services are drastically cutting back.

Sabine Hossenfelder reads a study that was cited by a lot of US media arguing that human-induced climate change made the recent Los Angeles fires more likely and worse, notices that they actually found no statistically significant relationship but made their assertions anyway. 7-minute video.

I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats.

Melting permafrost exposes whaling-era graves on Svalbard.

Foucault and Neoliberalism, interesting essay.

Spitalfields Life has a photoset of old churches in the City of London.

Tyler Cowen on the importance of card games in his childhood, which was also true in my family.

Retirements of coal-fired power plants in the US will increase in 2025.

Taking off from the notion that Trump's victory will somehow revitalize an elite culture that has been ruined by leftist politics and distrust of greatness, Becca Rothfeld ponders the connections between art and politics in the Romantic age.

The Minds of People on Social Media

A MAGA classic from somebody called Insurrection Barbie on Twitter/X:

In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.

That’s in 2022.

Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why…

So is NBC not part of "the media"?

First Daffodils, and Others

First daffodils I have seen this year, at the old estate I mentioned last week.

Amazing meadow of snowdrops, like this across half an acre.

One-antlered buck.

Decorative concrete piece, probably a leg from a garden bench.

Listening to "The Autumn of the Patriarch"

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is a famous and famously weird novel by Gabriel García Márquez about the old age of a Latin American Dictator. It is written like a fever dream, an endless series of bizarre anecdotes told in extremely long sentences that randomly shift in tense, person, point of view, and style. The main subjects seem to be the loneliness of power, the absurdity of dictatorship, and the inevitability of decay, but honestly cows, birds, and whores may get as many words as any of the deeper themes.

I tried to read it a long time ago but bogged down and never finished. During my recent fieldwork I decided to listen to it, and this went wonderfully. I liked it much better read aloud that I did when I tried to read it to myself, lettering the mad words just flow over me rather than my trying to disentangle them. I highly recommend this way of appreciating García Márquez, and he now joins my list of authors (Dickens, J.K. Rowling) who are better to listen to than to read.