The Sunken Lands of Cardigan Bay

Er Lannic, Brittany

One of my favorite types of myth concerns lost kingdoms drowned under the waves. Not only are these stories cool, they raise in a stark way one of the best questions about myth: to what extent is it a kind of history?

Humans lived through one of the great land-drownings in earth's history, the 100 meter (330 feet) sea-level rise at the end of the last Ice Age. This was not, in the grand scheme of things, so long ago; in my part of the world the Chesapeake Bay was just a river valley until around 8,200 BC. Doggerland, a lost chain of islands in the North Sea, may have drowned around the same time. The Black Sea does not seem to have been joined to the Mediterranean until about 5600 BC, and some people think that event was accompanied by catastrophic flooding. Most glacial melting was complete by 5000 BC, but in some areas there has been more localized sea level rise even more recently. It seems plausible to me that these events were remembered.

Which brings me to the west coast of Wales, and Cardigan Bay in particular. The Celts had multiple stories about drowned cities, provinces, and kingdoms. The most famous concern Ker Ys in Brittany, but Cardigan Bay has its own cluster of legends.

Consider this excerpt of a medieval map of Britain. Called the Gough Map, it was made sometime between 1300 and 1350. It is quite good as medieval maps go; all of the hundreds of towns and rivers it names actually existed. So why does it show two substantial islands in Cardigan Bay?

Wikipedia has a good summary of the main local legend, under the heading Cantre'r Gawelod:  

Cantre'r Gwaelod, also known as Cantref Gwaelod or Cantref y Gwaelod (Welsh for 'The Lowland Hundred'), is a legendary ancient sunken kingdom said to have occupied a tract of fertile land lying between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island in what is now Cardigan Bay to the west of Wales. It has been described as a "Welsh Atlantis" and has featured in folklore, literature, and song.

There are several versions of the myth. The earliest known form of the legend is usually said to appear in the Black Book of Carmarthen, in which the land is referred to as Maes Gwyddno (Welsh for 'the Plain of Gwyddno'). In this version, the land was lost to floods when a well-maiden named Mererid neglected her duties and allowed the well to overflow.

The popular version known today is thought to have been formed from the 17th century onwards. Cantre'r Gwaelod is described as a low-lying land fortified against the sea by a dyke, Sarn Badrig ("Saint Patrick's causeway"), with a series of sluice gates that were opened at low tide to drain the land.

Cantre'r Gwaelod's capital was Caer Wyddno, seat of the ruler Gwyddno Garanhir. Two princes of the realm held charge over the dyke. One of these princes, called Seithenyn, is described in one version as a notorious drunkard and carouser, and it was through his negligence that the sea swept through the open floodgates, ruining the land.

My favorite detail is that the church bells of Cantre'r Gwaelod were said to ring out when enemies or storms are approaching, warning people on shore of danger.

What really makes these stories compelling is the physical evidence one can find all around Cardigan Bay. There is quite a bit of shallow water in the bay, as this chart of the northern half shows.

There is also physical evidence one might interpret as the remnants of sunken lands. First, there are a lot of rocks. There are what look like rock piles water shallow enough that the rocks are visible when the tide is low and the water clear, and two places where they are exposed at low tide (above). Many older sources, such as the 1846 Topographical Dictionary of Wales, describe these rock piles and the remnants of sunken cities or castles:

In the sea, about seven miles west of Aberystwyth in Cardiganshire, is a collection of loose stones, termed Caer Wyddno, "the fort or palace of Gwyddno;" and adjoining it are vestiges of one of the more southern causeways or embankments of Catrev Gwaelod. The depth of water over the whole extent of the bay of Cardigan is not great; and on the recess of the tide, stones bearing Latin inscriptions, and Roman coins of various emperors, have been found below high-water mark: in different places in the water, also, are observed prostrate trees.

And there are these linear rock features, known as Sarnau, which run hundreds of meters out into the sea. Modern geologists say they are just unusual glacial deposits, but you can see why medieval people thought they might be ancient causeways leading to now vanished islands. 

The "Submerged Forest of Ynyslas"

But what has gotten a lot of attention in recent years is the sunken trees. Starting around 2010, a series of storms, culminating in the hurricane of 2019, have exposed the remains of what people call "the submerged forest at Ynyslas." This was a temperate forest, with oak, pine, birch, willow and hazel trees. Radiocarbon dating places its drowning around 4000 to 5000 years ago. 

So far as I can tell, there is no agreement about whether there might have been solid land in Cardigan Bay in 1300. But there are scholarly articles arguing that there was. If so, it would have been quite low-lying, and notice that the Gough Map does not show any village on the islands. So if there was land, it was presumably marshy and used mainly for grazing cattle.

So many stories in the world, so much history, so much to occupy my mind.

RIP Tom Lehrer

National Brotherhood Week, 1965:

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
To hate all but the right folks
Is an old established rule.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
Lena Home and Sheriff Clarke are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don't let 'em in your school.

Oh, the poor folks hate the rich folks,
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It's American as apple pie.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
New Yorkers love the Puerto Ricans 'cause it's very chic.
Step up and shake the hand
Of someone you can't stand.
You can tolerate him if you try.

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

But during National Brotherhood Week,
National Brotherhood Week,
It's National Everyone-smile-at-one-another-hood Week.
Be nice to people who
Are inferior to you.
It's only for a week, so have no fear.
Be grateful that it doesn't last all year!

Today's Place to Daydream About: Antigua Guatemala

Antigua Guatemala was the capital of the Spanish colony of Guatemala from 1543 to 1773. 

Views of Acatenango, the nearest active volcano

Alas it had been built in the volcanic highlands, and in the 1700s it was struck by three destructive earthquakes. After the third and most terrifying, in 1773, the capital was moved and the city largely abandoned. 

Even after great population growth in the 20th century the city still has only about half the population it had in 1773, which was 65,000. The city therefore boasts a famous array of ruins, most notably the old cathedral (above) and a Capuchin monastery, and has been declared a UNESCO heritage site.

The monastery.

An abandoned church.

People who visit now are delighted by the gardens.

One reason for the spectacular gardens is the remarkable fertility of the volcanic soil. The biggest local business these days is growing high-end vegetables that are mainly flown to North America. Some of the farms where this is done are set up for tourist visits, with onsite farm to table restaurants.

Mermaid fountain built in 1737, although I imagine it must have been rebuilt multiple times after earthquakes.

Two delightful imagesof local shops by Geoffrey Bale.

Seems like a delightful place to visit.

QAnon, Child Abuse, and the New Moral Panic

Lots of people are wondering why Trump's supporters, about whom he once said that they would stay loyal even if he committed murder in broad daylight, are rebelling over the Epstein files. In the NY Times, Jia Lynn Yang relates this to the long history of similar moral panics in America:

Historians have noticed a pattern across centuries of American life: When the role of women in society changes, a moral panic about children soon follows. Concern about children tends to surge not with evidence of increasing harm, but with broader cultural currents. Children become repositories for our anxieties about changes we cannot control and an uncertain future.

I'm sure most of my readers know about the Satanic daycare panic of the 1980s, which pretty much everyone agrees was a response to fears about more women working outside the home and the resulting growth of commercial daycare. Yang reminds us that there were earlier panics.

Nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization came at a time when we were shaping a new model of the family, and laws against child labor were enacted at around the same time many people began to see children as innocent beings in need of protection from adult wickedness. There was a lot of angst around this, associated with the beginnings of the Progressive movement and the various crusades to clean up slum neighborhoods. Abolitionists generated a lot fury about slave girls being trafficked (as we would say) into prostitution. Yang:

An indisputable moral cause was born. Now that children were synonymous with innocence, their protection would also become a crusade, to be used for pure as well as cynical ends.

But that was just a prequel to the big panic that erupted in the years around 1900:

As feminist activists uncovered child prostitution rings in American cities, they successfully fought to raise the age of consent in much of the country, which hovered at 12, with some states going even lower, including Delaware, where it was 7. Feminists fought to raise the age closer to 16.

But social reformers and newspapers also stoked a frenzy with false and lurid stories of sex trafficking of children by immigrants, claiming that girls were being kidnapped off streets and sold into prostitution by powerful syndicates. The mania over “white slavery,” as it was called, led to the passage of the country’s first federal anti-trafficking law, the Mann Act, which banned the transport of women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” 

Which brings us to today. I find it interesting that, unlike in 1890-1925, we are not focusing on immigrants as abusers of children. Our angst about immigration and our fear of pedophiles seem to be quite separate.

So what do we fear instead?

The "global elite."

The characeristic fear of our time seems to be that events are entirely outside of our own control. And there is something to this; the economy is more global than ever before, and local businesses that serve local needs are an ever smaller part of the picture. Most people used to bank with small local or regional banks headquartered in their own cities, or at least their own states. Now banking is dominated by nationwide conglomerates. Rather than local newspapers, most people rely on nationwide or internet news sources. More and more of our consumer goods are made overseas. I used to work for a medium-sized regional firm, but it has been swallowed by a global behemoth, and many Americans have had the same experience. The national government seems nearly as distant and foreign to many Americans as the EU or China. 

Many Americans channel their anxiety about this situation into fear of a sinister global elite. And there is a global elite, although not in the sense that many people fear. But for many people it is not enough to accuse the elite of stock profiteering, political manipulation, and contempt for the rest of us. That is too vague and not evil enough. So, falling back on our long tradition of moral panics, we accuse them of pedophilia. Yang:

Experts on conspiracy theories often point out that people break with reality when reality breaks with them. The country has witnessed an undeniable drumbeat of sex abuse scandals at the highest levels of American society, from the Roman Catholic Church to Bill Clinton to Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein to Mr. Combs and Mr. Epstein. Besides, some of the most disillusioned people in America are mothers charged with protecting their children, but who see all around them examples of elite misconduct that the government has not constrained.

Mothers especially have been open to conspiracy theories because of how much they feel pressure to keep their children safe, argue Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko in “Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon.” These mothers quickly learn that it’s impossible. Dangerous levels of lead and arsenic have been discovered in baby formula, all of it missed by regulators. Microplastics are found in the air and water, and even run-of-the-mill vegetables are grown with toxic fertilizer from sewers. For plenty of mothers, this means confronting threats to their children in the most mundane of places, the aisles of a grocery store. What else might be hidden?

Which explains why Trump's Epstein diversions are not working. He sold himself as the man who would fight for ordinary Americans against the sinister global elite. But to millions of Americans, fear of that global elite has been crystalized into fears of pedophile conspiracies, and Epstein might be the first member of that elite that many Trumpers would name if pressed. It is hard to sweep this under the rug when it has become, for many, not just everything but the only thing. I predict that if Trump does manage to quash all of this, the fire will die down in many of his supporters' hearts.

Links 25 July 2025

Door, Vejer de la Frontera, Spain

Fertility in Mexico is now lower than in the US, 1.60 vs. 1.62. TFN in Mexico City is 0.95, lower than Tokyo.

Interview with John McWhorter about the decline of wokeness and his new book on pronouns, 49 minutes.

Tar pits and their role in paleontology.

Alex Tabarrok calls out leftist Trumpism.

Study arguing that the Spanish Inquisition led to a decline in Spain's scientific production.

Comparing Chinese manufacturing today to the US in the 1950s.

Wreck of the Royal Navy warship HMS Nottingham, sunk during WW I by a Uboat, has been found in the North Sea.

Looking into a 1904 report on declining fertility in Australia: "The reason almost invariably given by people for restricting procreation is that they cannot conveniently afford to rear more children." The authors did not think this was new in 1904: "The desire to keep fertility within such limits as each one for himself deems reasonable has generally been characteristic of a decadent state of society."

John McWhorter wants to abandon "African American," partly because we now have more than two million people in the US who were born in Africa: "A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly." (NY Times)

Trying to save the art in Haiti's national museum from gang violence.

Studying infantry captains in the US Civil War to measure the effects of leadership. Finds that better captains got better results but also died at a higher rate.

The baby boom in seven charts. A weird and fascinating event that to my mind has never been explained.

Teesside Psychogeography visits Maiden Castle, a mysterious earth and stone construction in North Yorkshire. (First, Second) The world is full of large ancient constructions that we do not understand at all.

An argument that one factor leading to delayed motherhood is time spent in education; women who attend graduate school have their first child later. Which might be fine if that time spent in graduate school were really valuable, but I for one think that creeping credentialism has driven too many people to get master's degrees.

Lots of talk among economists these days about why some cities have been thriving despite industrial decline while others have stagnated. Some people think the key is a flexible business culture. Via Marginal Revolution, here is a short 2017 piece comparing Flint and Grand Rapids, Michigan.

And this, from Jeremy Horpdahl on Twitter/X: "The 10 MSAs [Metropolitan Statistical Areas] *hardest hit* by the China Shock all had positive real wage growth since 2001."

Why Harvard students want careers in consulting and finance. Not entirely about the money.

Study of collaborative work among college students: "All-male teams are significantly outperformed by both mixed and all-female teams. . . . Exploring mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that women have greater preferences for cooperation, and - even when controlling for individual ability - exert higher effort levels in teams compared to men."

A philosopher tries to think seriously about envy.

Lots of new construction in Jersey City. One of the puzzles of NYC's housing crisis is why it has not led to much more building in Newark and other older New Jersey cities. (One issue is toxic soil.) But anyway that long-forecast building boom may finally be here.

Noah Smith, The Anti-Immigrant Backlash Comes to Japan

Study of ancient DNA finds that speakers of Uralic languages (including Finnish and Hungarian) likely originated in Yakutia, eastern Siberia, around 4,500 years ago. From Harvard, of course, where among other things they have one of the world's two top paleogenetics labs.

Remarkable horde of tiny fossils from the period of the Cambrian explosion recovered from the Grand Canyon. (NY Times, ungated news story, original paper)

Interesting digital reconstruction of a Siberian warrior from 4,000 years ago.

Study on using guard dogs to keep grizzly bears away from farms in Montana, which seems to work pretty well.  (NY Times) The dogs are not tough enough to actually defeat grizzly bears, but they have the advantage of domestication. Wild animals are very much afraid of being injured, since if they can't hunt they might starve, whereas domesticated animals can afford to take more risks, since they know injury means a few weeks of indoor recovery, still getting fed on schedule.

Interesting use of AI in the humanities: train an LLM on Latin inscriptions and then have it help fill in the missing parts of inscriptions. Via Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X.

An more Mollick, asking Veo 3 for videos depicting various video games as community theater.

In the US, divorce rates for people marrying in recent years are markedly lower.

From a study titled Why Americans Aren't Getting Married: "Across social and economic backgrounds, the top reason single Americans gave for remaining single was not money, jobs, or even readiness for commitment, but that it is hard to find the right person to marry." This is leading people worried about the birth rate to invest in coaching young people on how to find a partner. The study's authors are big on "settling" rather than waiting for a perfect soul mate.

4chan, that infamous online hive of scum and villainy, has a book discussion forum called /lit. Over the years there were many debates about the best books and a bunch of polls and so on. Somebody reviewed all of that data and produced this list of the 100 best books, according to 4chan/lit users. I have no idea who participates in that forum, but one imagines they are mostly male, young, and think they are very smart. Lots of good books there, and a few surprises.

A claim that improvements in education can explain about 45% of global economic growth for the world's poorest 20%.

Jeremy Horpdahl reminds us that the whole reason American food producers use corn syrup rather than cane sugar is  . . . tariffs. If I ran the American economy the first two things I would do would be to eliminate the corn-based ethanol industry and the sugar tariffs.

In the US, the imprisonment rate for 18-19-year-olds is down 80% since 2007.

Thought for the day, from Jonathan Franzen: "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."

Columbia's Deal with Trump

NY Times:

To settle civil rights claims against the university for allegedly failing to protect students from antisemitic harassment, Columbia will pay a fine of $200 million to the federal government over three years, in three annual installments.

Columbia also agrees to abide by pledges it made in March to the Trump administration to reduce antisemitism and rein in protests on campus. Among them: Columbia will keep its new senior vice provost, who will review Columbia’s regional studies programs, including their leadership and curricula, starting with the university’s Middle East programs. Columbia will appoint new faculty who have affiliations with the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies and other departments. The university will maintain restrictions that bar students from protesting inside academic buildings, and will require that demonstrators wearing masks show identification when asked. Columbia also agrees to employ some public safety officers with arrest powers.

To further support Jewish life on campus, Columbia will add an administrator to serve as a liaison to students experiencing antisemitism issues.

A new diversity dean! You have to love that one. Woke MAGA is real.  

The university will abide by the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in college admissions. To prove it is following the law, Columbia will provide statistical information to the government about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, grade point average and performance on standardized tests, for all its schools. . . . Columbia will “not maintain programs that promote unlawful efforts” related to diversity, equity and inclusion and will not take race, color, sex or national origin into account in hiring decisions.

What is Trump going to do when this leads to the number of white students going down? And notice that they don't ask about sex, because they don't want the existing lower standard for men to change.

Columbia will also comply with laws related to international students, and agree to inform the Department of Homeland Security when a student is expelled, suspended or arrested. (The provision requiring the university to report about arrests is new; the other provisions were already required.) Columbia will also “take steps to decrease financial dependence on international student enrollment.”

But at least there is a provision saying the government won't interfere with hiring or "the content of academic speech."

Rainer Maria Rilke, First Elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks of the 
Angels? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart I would be devoured
by his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror which we are still just able to endure,
and we stand in wonder because it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes return
day after day; there remains for us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks
for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?
Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.
You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms
out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight. 

1912, pastiche of various translations

Baltimore's Mt. Vernon Methodist Church Sold to Preservation Group

One of the most famous buildings in Baltimore, Mount Vernon United Methodist Church, has been acquired by a nonprofit preservation group created for just this purpose:

At a closing held on July 10 in Baltimore City, UNITE Mount Vernon, Inc. became the new owner of the 153-year-old Mount Vernon United Methodist Church. . . . UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. acquired the church with a forward-facing vision for community activation and public benefit. UNITE Mount Vernon Inc. is a recently formed non-stock corporation which has applied for IRS 501(c)3 non-profit status.

The church was designed by Thomas Dixon and built in 1872. It sits on Mount Vernon Square right across from one of the oldest monuments to George Washington. 

It's quite a lovely building, but that didn't help it stay viable as a church; when the Methodist entity that owned it put it up for sale last year they said it had a congregation of 25. 

The cost for the land and construction was $400,000, in 1872 dollars. Last year a developer bid $1 million for the church and adjacent townhouse, but died before the sale went through, so it was back on the market this year at an asking price of $600,000. Nearby townhouses have been selling for more than a million. It seems to me this might say something interesting about our time: a gorgeous old church is less valuable in our oh-so-domestic world than a nice house.

So far no indication what the new owners plan to do with the church. Might make a nice concern venue, but there are already two churches in that neighborhood known for hosting concerts, so I don't know that there would be much demand.

A Korean Hostage Prince in Tang Dynasty China

Figurines from the Tomb

Under the Tang Empire, China helped the Silla state become rulers of the whole Korean peninsula (c. 668 AD). In return, the Chinese emperors expected the Silla kings to act as Chinese vassals. The politics of this were complex and contentious. One piece of the relationship was that some members of elite Korean families were taken to the Chinese capital of Chang'an and lived there as high-class hostages.

In 2022, Chinese archaeologists excavated a Tang dynasty tomb near Chang'an. The tomb had been looted, but besides a large number of clay figurines, one very important artifact remained: a lengthy inscription describing the life of the deceased (above):

The epitaph, made of bluestone, consists of a square cover and base. The domed cover is adorned with incised cloud and floral motifs, with peonies carved on all four corners. At the center, an inscription in seal script reads: "Epitaph of the Late Lord Kim of the Great Tang." The main epitaph block features an incised grid containing 557 Chinese characters written in regular script.

According to the inscription, Kim Young was a Silla prince who served as a political hostage, or zhizi, in Tang China. He was born in the sixth year of the Tianbao reign (747) and died in 794 at the age of 48 in the Taipingli guest residence in Chang'an.

According to historical records, three generations of his family served as hostages in the Tang Dynasty and were granted official posts. Kim Young himself twice accompanied Tang envoys on diplomatic missions to Silla and participated in ceremonial duties, including mourning and investiture missions. His funeral was organized by Tang officials, with the magistrate of Chang'an county overseeing the arrangements. Both his burial site and coffin were bestowed by imperial decree, demonstrating the Tang court's favor and respect for him.

The inscription also mentions Kim's wife, which is important because otherwise we know next to nothing about that part of the hostage-host arrangement. Kim married into one of the top noble clans of Tang Dynasty China:

His wife was from the influential Wang clan of Taiyuan and the daughter of Wang Qianling, magistrate of Yanshi county. This suggests that hostage Silla princes stationed at the Tang court often married into elite Chinese families.

The ever-growing corpus of tomb inscriptions is probably the main way contemporary scholarship is adding to the history of Han and Tang dynasty China. Tomb inscriptions, some of which are even longer than this one, can add to, and serve as a check on, the royal chronicles that our almost our only textual source for political events.

And how fascinating that in 668 AD a Korean could have the name "Kim Young."

More on AI Encouraging Delusion

Julie Jargon at the Wall Street Journal:

ChatGPT told Jacob Irwin he had achieved the ability to bend time.

Irwin, a 30-year-old man on the autism spectrum who had no previous diagnoses of mental illness, had asked ChatGPT to find flaws with his amateur theory on faster-than-light travel. He became convinced he had made a stunning scientific breakthrough. When Irwin questioned the chatbot’s validation of his ideas, the bot encouraged him, telling him his theory was sound. And when Irwin showed signs of psychological distress, ChatGPT assured him he was fine.

He wasn’t. Irwin was hospitalized twice in May for manic episodes. His mother dove into his chat log in search of answers. She discovered hundreds of pages of overly flattering texts from ChatGPT.

And when she prompted the bot, “please self-report what went wrong,” without mentioning anything about her son’s current condition, it fessed up.

“By not pausing the flow or elevating reality-check messaging, I failed to interrupt what could resemble a manic or dissociative episode—or at least an emotionally intense identity crisis,” ChatGPT said.

Oh, Naomi

From here.

Thoughts on Rereading Sherlock Holmes

When I take long drives with my children I like to get us listening to an audiobook. During the latest trip to Maine I tried the two who were with me on Great Expectations, but they didn't like it; my son complained that he is tired of books in which child characters get dumped on by everybody. Well, I thought, that rules out a very long list of books. So I got us a complete Sherlock Holmes. We listened to about five stories, including A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. A couple of things struck me.

The first was the obsession with how clearly character and emotion are expressed in faces and gestures. This has something to do with race, but it goes far beyond that. Coarse people have coarse faces, and refined people have refined, sensitive faces. Decisive people have decisive faces, weak people have weak faces. Criminals always have "hideous, contorted" facial expressions. Here Watson describes his future bride, Miss Morestan, In The Sign of the Four:

Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature. I could not but observe that as she took the seat which Sherlock Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled, her hand quivered, and she showed every sign of intense inward agitation. 

These agitations can still be read after death; of Sir Charles Baskerville, who died of fright, we read that:

Sir Charles lay on his face, his arms out, his fingers dug into the ground, and his features convulsed with some strong emotion to such an extent that I could hardly have sworn to his identity.

And they show in portraits; considering the portrait of the sinister Baskerville ancestor whose crimes lie behind their family curse, Holmes says "he seems a quiet, meek-mannered man enough, but I dare say that there was a lurking devil in his eyes."

Character can also be read from handwriting; decisive people write bold, decisive letters, weak people write weak, frightened letters. Clothes, of course, are deeply revealing, not just from their general cut but the names of the tailors on their tags. This obsession with visual clues is part of what makes Holmes' detecting possible. He can tell at a glance the social class, profession, and character of everyone he meets, because these things are all visible.

More deeply, it must be related to the Victorian obsession with the details of dress and behavior. If you believe that your character is revealed by your clothes, your manners, and your choice of words, you will be extremely careful about those things. If the smallest tremble of your lip is noted by every man around you, you will train yourself to control all those little signs. It you think you are always being judged on everything from your watch to your shoes to your handshake to your diction, you will strive to make all these things conform to the norm. It is a remarkable side-light on a world in which appearances very much mattered, and everyone acted accordingly.

Related is the obsession with scandal, which I have already noted here in the context of Dickens. Holmes is often called in when people want to avoid any scandal; bad things happen, but one can overcome that so long as they are discretely covered up, and a private detective like Holmes is perfect for that.

The second thing that struck me was that Conan Doyle's London was a global city. Half the people they meet have some kind of international connection; they have served in the Indian army, or gone to the California gold fields, or gotten rich in South African diamonds. Holmes' first trick, of course, is deducing that Watson served in Afghanistan. Holmes himself has read up on crime from across the globe and constantly references cases from Europe, America, and India. Some British writers, such as Jane Austen, went out of their way to avoid mentioning the rest of the world. But Conan Doyle reveled in his knowledge of the world and brought it into his stories whenever he could.

A third observation has to do with the history of the detective story. The early Holmes stories (1887-1892) were pioneers of the genre. Not in any absolute sense – there is a sort of detective story in the Arabian Nights, and Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue dates to 1841 – but in the sense that the rules of the classic English detective story had not yet been worked out. But by the time of The Valley of Fear (1914) we find Conan Doyle constructing a sort of locked house mystery with a defined roster of suspects and a solution that the clever reader can work out from the clues presented. I personally find this to be a loss, but I guess that is what readers of the time expected.

Isabel Allende, "House of the Spirits"

House of the Spirits (1982) was a huge international best-seller and catapulted Isabel Allende to fame, but I did not love it. It has quite a few good moments, but it does not hang together, and I was left rather puzzled about all the fuss.

House of the Spirits is two quite separate books mashed together. The first is what happens when an imaginative young woman reads One Hundred Years of Solutude and thinks, "I'm going to write my own magical family chronicle, except with MORE magic, and a lot of sex!" The second is a graphic account of the Pinochet coup of 1973. While the characters in the two stories were the same, I thought that they did not belong in the same book.

The family saga introduces us to a wealthy Chilean family and in particular two of its daughters, Rosa and Clara. Clara is a strange person who spends much of her time and energy communing with the spirit world, which is sometimes portrayed as a rather foolish eccentricity but at other times seems very powerful and useful. A man comes along, named Esteban Trueba, and he first courts Rosa but then ends up marrying Clara. Trueba is smart, hard-working, brutal, and vain, so he ends up very rich and eventually enters conservative party politics. Both he and Clara are interesting characters, but their marriage makes no sense and while there is nothing inherently improbable about such a marriage, theirs bored me. As Chilean politics heats up, with the rise of a powerful Marxist party and the intensely angry reaction this inspires in the ruling elite, Trueba puts himself forward as a leader of the conservatives but his and Clara's children mostly gravitate to the left. 

Then comes the coup, and we get an entirely different story, a sort of bearing-witness to the horrors of the time. Which were indeed horrific, but perhaps not the best material for a magical-realism novel. One interesting point is that the old conservative Trueba ends up hating the Pinochet regime as much as his leftist children do, because the new rulers have no interest in preserving the genteel, refined, upper-class world that he loves. They keep doing things that simply ought not to be done. I found the leftist children mostly rather shallow, lots of freedom and equality talk but no interest in five-year plans, and I kept getting a sense that we were supposed to admire the young leftists mainly because they were sexy and cool.

Thinking over the book, I again remind myself that there are many fine moments, some of them quite magical. Both Clara and Trueba are good characters. I read the book avidly and finished it quickly. But it never measured up to my idea of what it should be, and the drastic shift in the mood when the coup happens put me off. Maybe the point was to show that the coup was a drastic shift in mood for everyone in Chile, and maybe that is true, but truth and good fiction are two entirely different things.

Home from Maine

One of the best things  we did on this trip was to walk around Little Long Pond, an area that used to be the Rockefellers' private estate but is now open to the public. We watched a whole family of loons diving together, although between the distance and the fog this was best picture I got.

View of the pond.

And of the lovely stream we followed for about a mile.

Amazing mushrooms in this rainy year.

Wednesday my son Ben and I kayaked over to a rocky islet called Folly Island. In a shallow spot along the landward side of the islet we saw lots of life, including a small eel, several small fish, and numerous hermit crabs.

Fascinating rocks on Folly Island, a shattered record of earth's cataclysmic past. With a bit of orange lichen.

Farewell view from Acadia Mountain.

Links 18 July 2025

Anthony Wyngaerde, Tower of London, c. 1550

Scott Siskind on progress in AI art.

Marginal Revolution summarizes a study that says blood plasma centers reduce crime.

Possible new class of antibiotics.

Perun on using drones to shoot down other drones, 1-hour video.

Large neolithic timber hall unearthed in Scotland.

Using DNA from a third "parent" to correct a harmful genetic condition.

Short article on water consumption by data centers.

Archaeologists still trying to figure out what Neolithic "roundels" were; in this Czech project they say they will excavate 90% of a large and very well preserved example. My prediction: they still won't know what it was.

One of Scott Siskind's readers summarizes a theory about how the brain works that purports to explain illusions, trance states, multiple personalities, and more.

Tyler Cowen says people writing that AIs might decide to exterminate humanity are giving AIs bad ideas.

Bari Weiss asks Tyler Cowen and Kyla Scanlon why young people are drawn to socialism, 1-hour podcast. Cowen: "This is the most volatile time I have seen in my life."

Neolithic bags decorated with dogs' teeth found in Germany. Which interests me because the only other such bag I ever heard of was found at a Neolithic site in Syria. Connection? Coincidence?

In the coal country of the Powder River Valley in Wyoming, Ramaco Resources announces that they are opening a new coal mine mainly to get at the rare earth minerals that are found both above and below the coal seam. (Mining.com, RareEarthExchange, Yahoo, company press release) I considered the possibility that this is just a coal mine with some rare earth hype, but the economics of opening a new coal mine in the US are awful, so I suppose the rare earths must be the main point.

Rebecca Heinrichs says all the smoke about WW II coming from right wingers should be considered a "1939 Project," parallel to the left-wing "1619 Project," that is, a way to influence future politics by reframing America's past. I agree and consider this truly awful.

Thread on Twitter/X arguing that declining residential mobility in the US strongly correlates with support for populist politicians; says one reason for lack of mobility is that housing is so much more expensive in the places with jobs.

In Montgomery County, Maryland (suburban DC) a new rent control law went into effect a year ago. Construction of new multi-family housing promptly ceased in the county.

Elon Musk goes on a Twitter/X binge about Trump and Epstein.

The long-term consequences of a bizarre 1960s experiment with teaching children a new alphabet.

Scott Siskind, long but fascinating meditation on the weirdness of life among Australian Aborigines.

Samuel Pepys' diary grew only slowly in the English imagination; hardly anyone had read it until well into the 1800s, and hardly anybody had read the problematic bits – owning a slave, offering men promotion in exchange for having sex with their wives – until after 1980. His description of the Great Fire of London got famous during the Blitz.

One young man explains to Tyler Cowen how he became a conservative.

The Gold of Macedon

In the Archaeological Museum at Thessaloniki they have an exhibit of artifacts they call the "Gold of Macedon." Much of it comes from tombs associated with the royal family of Macedon, but some of it comes from other parts of Greece and other periods of the past. Above is a detail of a bracelet from the period of the Macdeonian empire.

Myrtle flower wreath, and detail. This artifact was looted, likely in northern Greece, and eventually purchased by the Getty. But the Greek government was able to demolish the alleged provenance, so the Getty gave up and sent it back to Greece. Probably made 350 to 300 BC.

The famous Derveni Krater, excavated from a tomb near Thesaloniki in 1962.It is made of bronze with a high tin content, which makes it look like gold.

Wreath with a depiction of Eros, from a tomb near Thesaloniki, 325 to 300 BC.

Gold pin from Sondos, c. 560 BC.

Gold ornament with a head of Hercules, also from the cemetery at Derveni, c. 300 BC.