from Akhzib, Israel
Two NY Times reporters walk the route of the proposed Outer Borough Express light rail line through Brooklyn and Queens. And then they rode the route in the engine of a freight train.
Three new examples of the rock-cut tombs known as "Domus de Janas" = "Fairy House" have been found in Sardinia.
Photographs and notes from pioneering sociologist Charles Booth's 1898 tour of east London, many pictures of children.
Scott Siskind looks into the latest claimed advances in embryo screening.
New US consulate in Mexico by Ennead Architects, interesting. And a nice house in India built of construction rubble. It's supposed to "critique modern construction" but that's not the sort of thing I care about.
Ever wonder where the information in obscure wikipedia articles really comes from? A Welsh YouTuber who calls his channel "Cambrian Chronicles" looks into a fight that broke out over whether "Lloegyr", a Welsh name for England, means "Lost Lands," tracing this misconception back to its origins. (37 minutes) And the same for the origin of the red dragon on the Welsh flag. Glad somebody is doing this work.
And something lighter from Cambrian Chronicles: the cat laws of medieval Wales, 14-minute video. They only had value if they could catch mice.
The Berners Street Hoax, a fascinating and very modern-seeming prank from 1810.
New archaeological finds at Pergamon.
Robin Hanson, This is the Dream Time: "our era is the most consistently and consequentially deluded and unadaptive of any era ever." I think he overrates past eras.
And, Robin Hanson asks a bunch of questions about the norms of academia, amusing.
A book that's been cited 10,000 times as evidence against ability grouping in schools ("tracking") cites as a major source a different book that actually argues for exactly the opposite. (Twitter/X) Check the sources!
Perun on the Russian economy in 2025, 1-hour video. Basic story is that Russia is hurting badly enough that Putin is talking in public about "tough choices," but they can keep fighting at this level of intensity for at least another year if they are willing to bear the cost.
If you have any interest in statistics, or the kind of social science that relies heavily on it, consider trying to read this essay on how hard it is to get right: "You Can't Just Control for Things." The clumsy or intentionally misleading use of statistics is one of the banes of our intellectual time, a constant theme of the Cochrane group, John Ioannids, Scott Siskind, and others actually trying to find out the truth.
Anthropomorphizing cute animals.
Big new retrospective on the paintings of Kerry James Marshall, a black, Chicago-based artist. More at his gallery.
Archaeologists in Israel find a large workshop for producing large flint blades; it dates to the Bronze Age.
"Sticky residue inside bronze vessels found in an underground shrine in Paestum, southern Italy [c. 500 BC], has been identified as honey."
Richard Hanania, summarizing this piece from Bentham's Bulldog: "We’ve learned that the free market of ideas rewards trash. I don’t think we knew how bad it could be before the internet and social media leveled the playing field. People should adjust their views accordingly."
"Ultimately, only those societies and communities that consciously place very high value on having children will have them in sufficient numbers." (Twitter/X) This writer wants to be optimistic about raising birth rates, but I say that if your plan requires intentionally changing the culture, good luck.
Also via Twitter/X, interview with a Korean population expert on the factors driving down fertility there: he points to the intense competition for any kind of good slot in the system, which leads to long work hours and a single-minded focus on getting ahead. Also interesting that all the ambitious people in South Korea live in Seoul, making it a very crowed place in a nation with lots of empty space.
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