Gothic Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich, The Abbey in the Oakwood (1809-10), and detail

J.M.W Turner, Tintern Abbey, 1794

Philip De Loutherbourg, Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard (1790). When I was younger I wanted to be this guy.

William Blake, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun, c. 1803–1805

Goya. Witches' Sabbath, 1821–1823, detail

An Illustration of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” by Gustave Doré

Serafino Macchiati, The Visionary, 1904

Does Politics Matter, Vaccine Edition

Sometimes it seems that politics has no impact, and people just go on believing what they believe and doing what they want regardless of what their "leaders" say. For example, study after study has found that pro-natal government campaigns have very little impact on fertility. Which makes this case particularly dramatic.

I have to think that millions of people have always hated and feared injections –with what does Darth Vader threaten Princess Leia? – and RFK pseudoscience has given them an excuse to indulge those fears.

Data is from Gallup.

American Politics and the Boston Pope-Destroying Game

In colonial Boston they played a game every year. This game was the local version of those old European games that lie at the roots of football, rugby, and so on, essentially organized brawls with a few rules to limit the mayhem. The Boston game was played on the Common. The two teams represented north and south Boston, although from the beginning there were accusations of ringers from out of town. At either end of the Common a sort of scarecrow was set up that represented the Pope. These were of course hard-core Protestants who were not fans of the Papacy, so one supposes these were mocking images.

The goal of the game was to break through the other team's wall, reach the other end of the Common and tear down the other side's image of the Pope.

And this is American politics in this moment. Two sides, who call each other Right and Left, although those words no longer have any meaning to the rest of us, have made our public discourse into a field where they can fight a battle with very few rules, aiming to defeat the other side and tear down their idols.

The rest of us need to put an end to this riot before the participants burn down the whole city.

Molon Labe

Via Matt Yglesias

Links 26 September 2025

Cat by ShouXin. More here.

Astronomy photo of the year contest winners.

Moving the Oseberg ship.

The journal of an ocean-going stewardess in 1892.

Is that really a primordial black hole?

I went looking for numbers on church attendance in the US and found that the most up-to-date statistics are published by companies that offer to help churches raise their memberships. Data from entites like Pew and Gallup seems to lag years behind, at least in so far at they publish it in time series. What I can find confirms that church attendance is rising among Millennials.

Late Neolithic tomb (dolmen) discovered in Spain, largely intact, lots of grave goods but not many pictures yet. (The History Blog, Spanish press release with more pictures)

One problem with studying Alzheimer's is that mice don't get dementia. But cats do, and some researchers are studying demented cats for clues.

What is the key military technology right now? Noah Smith opts for the Electric Tech Stack.

I was in Meridian Hill Park in Washington, DC this week. I discovered that the park was the end point of The Longest Walk, when 24 Indians walked from San Francisco to DC to issue a list of political demands, some of which they achieved. More than 2,000 people attended the Meridian Hill rally.

Freddie de Boer, "Things are Really Bad"

If you could stop MAGA, but only by turning back the arrow of progress, would you? Partially paywalled, but you don't need to read the whole thing to get the point: what issues would you (a Democrat) surrender to save democracy? For example, would you give up on trans rights, or fighting climate change?

Swedish study finds that while the number of children diagnosed with autism has increased, the average severity of their symptoms has declined. I consider this strong evidence that the recent increase is largely driven by changing diagnostic criteria.

Orange and grapefruit production in Florida has fallen 90% since the early 2000s, largely due to a bacterial disease called "Greening."

A claim: "From 1990 to 2010, rising numbers of H-1B holders caused 30–50 percent of all productivity growth in the US economy."

Printer Tracking Dots: does each laser printer have a unique signature that it prints on every page? Wikipedia, BBC, short video on Twitter/X.

Technical analysis of a Bronze Age hoard from Scotland has been published, interesting summary.

Russia and China both say they want a new gas pipeline from Siberia to China, but the Chinese are haggling hard over the price contract, knowing Russia has nowhere else to turn.

Using endophytes – smaller organisms that live on and within plants, like the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in legumes – to increase disease resistance and other crops.

Curtis Yarvin confirms his historical ignorance by tweeting that the Confederacy lost because "it had no theory of victory." In fact political entities like "the Confederacy" never have theories about anything, but Jefferson Davis absolutely did have a plan for winning the war: make the price of reconquest so high that northerners would opt not to pay it. Another theory of victory common in the South was foreign intervention. People who make arguments based on history ought to know something about it. (My thoughts on this topic are here.)

Reading Orwell in Moscow: After Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, readers in Moscow began to show much more interest in books focusing on the crimes of dictators, especially the Nazis. Via Marginal Revolution.

India finally retires its MIG-21 fighters.

The UN reports that more than one million Syrian refugees have returned to their homes since the fall of Assad.

Robin Hanson's TED Talk on "The Elephant in the Brain," aruging that your real motives are not what you think they are.

Thread explaining why the availability of AI systems that read x-rays better than humans has not yet led to a decline in the number of radiologists.

Why do cancer rates seem to be rising in the young? (Science News, National Cancer Institute, Yale Medicine) So far as I can tell, nobody knows, but many serious people are worried. On the other hand this seems to be largely colo-rectal cancer, one of the kinds we are best at treating.

More Denisovan (Homo longi) skulls found in China. Very cool, but the story of genus Homo in the Middle Pleistocene is a tangled mess and the ideas in the most recent Chinese publications are highly speculative.

Today's random observation:

Talked with a friend about what’s important to us in a man and the first thing she said was "he must have an appealing metaphysics"!? 

Apparently she meant not a strict materialist. Anyway, single men out there, start working on a good way to describe your metaphysics.

The Flying Deer of the Ancient Steppes

Artists on the Iron Age steppes loved animals; indeed, their work is sometimes called the Animal Style. One of the animals they most loved depict was the deer.

In many cases, they greatly exaggerated the size and flamboyance of the antlers.

This may mean something. Consider this cup, which comes from Thrace but is fully within the steppes animal style. Before we talk about the antlers, consider the overall layout of the design. Many people looking at this cup see three bands, which they think represent the sea, the earth, and the sky.

Detail. According to the three realms theory, the antlers extend up into the sky or air. Plus, they are sprouting birds' heads.

Here's a very clear example of antlers sprouting birds from one of the frozen Pazyryk Tombs.

Drawing of a tattoo from Pazyryk. Some people think these deer with birds on their antlers are flying.

The deer on this Mongolian "Deer Stone" are also thought to be flying upward.

Why flying deer? Well, we don't really know, but many people think they are flying, not into the sky, but into the other worlds, the combination of birds and antlers representing their ability to travel between worlds. That is, these are shamanistic images.

But rather than putting too much emphasis on any particular interpretation, I would just say that these beasts are wonderful, magical, and seem to soar through the universe.

The Global Retreat from Climate Change Politics

David Wallace-Wells in the NY Times:

The retreat from climate politics has been widespread, even in the midst of a global green-energy boom. . . .

To our north, the former central banker Mark Carney — whose 2015 warnings about the financial risks from climate change helped set the stage for Paris by alarming the world’s banking elite — became prime minister of Canada in March and as his very first act in office struck down the country’s carbon tax, before storming to a landslide victory in the April election. To our south, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico, a former climate scientist, has invoked the principle of “energy sovereignty” and boasted of booming oil and gas production in her country — and enjoys one of the highest approval ratings of any elected leader anywhere in the world. Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed Paris has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference. “You can’t walk more than two feet at any global conference today without ‘pragmatism’ and ‘realism’ being thrown around as the order of the day,” says Jason Bordoff, a former Obama energy adviser who now runs Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “But it’s not clear to me that anyone knows what those words mean other than this whole climate thing is just too hard.”

This:

Climate activists were once venerated as moral authorities by heads of state and a broadly liberal mass media; now they are being given jail sentences stretching multiple years for the crime of merely planning protests that might block up commuter traffic or for throwing paint against plexiglass they knew would protect the artwork hung behind it — a victimless publicity stunt if ever there was one.

Wallace-Wells objects to this, but I think it is vital for the promotion of environmental causes. All this paint-throwing crap hurts the cause, and the sooner we end it, the better. People hate attention-seeking, know-it-all jerks. But I would point to something deeper as the real point of conflict: the alliance of climate change activists with people determined to make the world poorer.

To me this has always been the Achilles heal of environmentalism, the nagging, hectoring attitude toward anybody who wants air conditioning or a big truck. This is just never going to work; nobody is signing on to environmental causes if it means giving up materialism.

And it doesn't have to! Solar power is booming worldwide, the price still falling every year. Electric cars are not taking over as quickly as some people predicted, because of issues with their batteries and overall reliability. But they will keep getting better; battery technology is also progressing very fast, and when batteries get as convenient as fuel tanks electric cars will dominate, because electric engines are just far superior to internal combustion or diesel engines. Electric cars already dominate new vehicle sales in China. Here is a nice anecdote:

Consider Pakistan. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it threw the world’s energy markets into crisis, sending already-high prices soaring and redirecting fossil fuels headed to markets in the developing world instead to energy-starved Europe, where each shipment could fetch a still-higher price. In Pakistan as elsewhere in South Asia, the result was rolling blackouts and widespread political discontent. And then, something miraculous happened: Without any coordination or planning, millions of frustrated Pakistanis began buying and importing rooftop solar panels manufactured in China, which had grown so inexpensive that in some global markets they were cheaper to buy than the wood for a fence.

Solar power is also taking off in Africa, for the same reason and in the same populist way, individuals and business buying their own Chinese solar panels. This is what we need: bottom up, demand-driven change. So long as environmental measures are imposed by distant governments on people who don't want them, they will lose politically.

Anyone who worries about climate change needs to stop focusing on Paris-style global plans or government mandates and join in the things already happening around us. The best thing many Americans could do to promote electrification is to go to planning meetings and speak against the NIMBYs trying to keep solar farms out of your county.

Stop railing against humanity and start celebrating our future.

The Ultimate Game Show

It turns out that the CIA can grant citizenship to 100 people per year; I suppose this has to do with spies and Soviet defectors.

But imagine the possibilities! We could have a televised draft like they have for the NFL or the NBA, with CEOs or governors choosing their top prospects.

We could have a game show! or multiple game shows, a quiz show for would-be tech stars, a Ninja warrior competition, and a sort of likeability contest in which charming schlubs from all over the world try to get the audience to vote them in.

Other ideas?

More Researcher Trouble at Harvard

Sad to say, the evidence the Trump administration is using to blame autism on Tylenol comes from a Harvard dean. The Crimson:

Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli received at least $150,000 to testify against Tylenol’s manufacturer in 2023 — two years before he published research used by the Trump administration to link the drug to autism, a connection experts say is tenuous at best.

Baccarelli served as an expert witness on behalf of parents and guardians of children suing Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of Tylenol at the time. U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote dismissed the case last year due to a lack of scientific evidence, throwing out Baccarelli’s testimony in the process.

“He cherry-picked and misrepresented study results and refused to acknowledge the role of genetics in the etiology” of autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, Cote wrote in her decision, which the plaintiffs have since appealed.

Something about autism seems to make a lot of people crazy. 

Autism is really weird, and I get why a strange condition that destroys young minds in a largely random way freaks people out. But we absolutely do not know what causes it or even what it is, so at present all claims about causes are just sound and fury.

The Philosopher as Hero

Costica Bradatan:

Central to philosophy as a way of life is the practice of self-examination. The virtues of self-examination can hardly be over-estimated. Yet there can be something dark, unsettling, even dangerous about performing it. Self-examination can sometimes be a curse and the self-examiner a doomed person. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life can be unlivable. Philosophers gladly proclaim "know thyself", but usually forget to mention the high price that comes with such knowledge: self-doubt, disorientation, groundlessness. Indeed, this is no comfortable learning but knowledge of one's limits and limitations: quite often what you face is not some beautiful vista, but your own abyss. To the extent that any serious quest for wisdom starts in self-examination, the one who embarks on it frequently navigates through a world of anguish, inner conflicts, even provocation to disaster.

Life-threatening as the journey may be, however, the final destination makes it worth taking. From a letter that Nietzsche sent to his doctor, Osso Eiser, in January 1880, we get a glimpse of both the journey's difficulties and the unique joy that overcoming them causes in the self-examiner:

My existence is an awful burden – I would have dispensed with it long ago, were it not for the most illuminating tests and experiments I have been conducting in matters of mind and morality even in my state of suffering and almost absolute renunciation – the pleasure I take in my thirst for knowledge brings me to heights from which I triumph over all torment and despondency.

No matter how unbearable life can be, Nietzsche suggests, its self-examination comes with a precious reward: the renewed dignity of the act of living. Life examined is thus life transformed. Your life changes in the very process of looking at it; if it doesn't, it only means you are not examining it properly. Philosophy, then, is indeed performative; it is not just something you talk about, it is above all something you do.

– Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. 2015. pp. 29-30

For myself, I would make no such grand claims. I do find, though, that my unexamined state is subject to wild and strange swings of emotion that reflection reveals to be pointless and useless. Thinking about my life, reflecting on my unearned advantages and the long-term goals I have set for myself, the things that matter to me, the commitments I have made, the needs of those who depend on me; all of this brings be back to more solid ground.

Too Much

Interesting story in the NY Times today about the latest buzzword in Chinese economics: involution. Involution, neijuan in Mandarin, is an old word for a sort of doom loop created by the failure of an economy or society to reform itself, with bad outputs serving as bad inputs for a system that therefore gets ever worse.

The problem? Too many companies making too much stuff:

Competition in China is often far more cutthroat than in the United States. America has a handful of carmakers; China has more than 100 electric vehicle makers struggling for market share. China has so many solar panel makers that they produce 50 percent more than global demand. About 100 Chinese lithium battery producers churn out 25 percent more batteries than anyone wants to buy. This forces Chinese manufacturers to innovate, but it also leads to price wars, losses and bad debt — and that’s becoming a problem.

I think about this all the time in the context of global trade competition. Economists like to talk about competitive advantage, but it seems to me that advanced economies all want to make the same stuff – cars, electronic gadgets, computers, airplanes – and we regularly run into problems because we could easily make more of any of them than anybody could buy. One constant theme in trade disputes is accusations of "dumping," that is, nations selling products for less than they cost to make so as to keep their own assembly lines humming. That this is not just a myth is proved by China's current crisis. Many manufacturers are selling at a loss, with the financial shortfall made up by bank loans and government subsidies to a degree that makes people worry about a collapse. 

There is so much clothing in the world that the number of times a garment is worn keeps falling, and Africa's textile industry has been wrecked by donated foreign clothes.

I recently read an interesting piece about global shipbuilding which argued that only three countries bother to build ships any more (Japan, Korea, China) because shipbuilding requires enormous capital investment but earns essentially no money.

George Orwell saw this coming, and he imagined that his future mega-states would fight unending but carefully controlled wars against each other to soak up the productive surplus.

And it isn't just goods; there also seems to be more money in the world than anybody knows what to do with. All the western states have enormous debts, but there is never any shortage of buyers for government bonds. Twenty-five years ago when the US flirted with running a surplus, there were people worrying that this might be economically harmful, given the vital role of US bonds in the world financial system. (Thank God for W and his plan to wage war, cut taxes and expand Medicare at the same time.) It baffles me that we just pased a Big, Beautiful budget that vastly expands our debt, and nothing happened. Compared to the titanic flows of money in the world, an extra trillion or two seems to make very little difference.

Yet, somehow, we feel poor. 

Yes, I know there are billions of poor people in the world. Some of the mountains of money generated by our global capitalist technocratic bureaucratic consumerist system has trickled down to them, leading to a great reduction in the number of truly immiserated people. And that's great. But those of us who were never in any danger of starving keep getting more and more and feeling no better for it. No matter how many times economists point out that we are far richer than our ancestors, now matter how many charts and graphs they produce showing that even people in the bottom 10% are getting richer, many people refuse to believe it. They insist that their generation has it harder than any before, that things used to be better in the 1970s or 1950s or 1890s.

This worries me, because I no longer believe that our dissatisfaction is about economics, or about constraints on our freedom. I say this, not because things are perfect now, but because we are unquestionably wealthier and more free than anybody ever was before, and yet seem to be no happier and may actually be worse off. The line ought to be pointing up, but it does not.

It seems to me that 1) we are fundamentally unsatisfied in a way that no amount of material wealth can touch, and 2) although the causes of this seem to me to be in ourselves, we insist on blaming outside forces, either economic or political, which leads to awful politics and a weird determination to throw away our amazing world because it just is not good enough.

And this might be on the verge of getting much worse, if AI lives up to its promise of both making our economies more productive and taking away much of our work.

There are strange spiritual longings in the air that manifest in peculiar ways: the Occupy movement, the explosion of wokeness, weird militias whose stated goal is to cause a chaotic civil war because even that seems better than our current situation. The Trump Prophecy.

This is not new; I would say it goes back at least to Roman Palestine. In the nineteenth-century some parts of America were referred to as the "burned over districts" because they had thrown themselves into wave after wave of religious revivalism. Some peopel sense another wave of religious enthusiasm mounting in America right now, but I can't see it going far enough to change our national mood.

I don't know what is coming, but it worries me more than ever before in my life.

On Medical Research Gone Wrong

At the NY Times, Ari Schulman on Jay Bhattacharya, the new head of the NIH. Bhattacharya got the job because he was a strident critic of Covid lockdowns, but he is a real scientist with an agenda:

Take Alzheimer’s research. Nearly every scientific research reformer will cite the fact that the N.I.H. funded vast amounts of research based on a single theory of the disease that largely turned out to be wrong.

Dr. Bhattacharya argues that this happened because science is structured around authority. “You have, in field after field after field, a kind of set of dogmatic ideas held by the people who are at the top of the field. And if you don’t share those ideas, you have no chance of advancing within those fields,” he told me.

He told Congress that he believes there are promising ways to prevent Alzheimer’s that haven’t received support because they don’t align with the “dominant narrative,” as he called it. “This is why I’m so interested in replication,” he told me, referring to the need for researchers to repeat each other’s findings, because it “turns over the determination of what’s true to nature rather than authority.”

Which is interesting, and perhaps explains why MAGA types like Bhattacharya. But it is, I think, far from sufficient to understand the problems with our scientific establishment. Schulman agrees:

It’s a plausible diagnosis and a good prescription. Science can’t answer questions if it’s conformist. But there’s another way to think about the problem.

Dr. Susan M. Fitzpatrick, a former biochemist, has pointed not to ideology but the mechanics of research. Large-scale medical studies rely on standardized methods, one of which is testing theories on mice. But mice don’t get Alzheimer’s, only humans do. So studying them might be useless. Yet, she wrote, this approach “dominates federal funding and academic science” on Alzheimer’s research because it easily produces the publications and citations that careers depend on.

From this angle, the N.I.H. looks like a big factory that churns out research papers. Dr. Bhattacharya is like a new manager trying to figure out why sales are down and proposing more diversity in the product line.

For the sharpest reformers, like Dr. Cook-Deegan and Dr. Fitzpatrick, the issue isn’t which group of scientists’ ideas win out. It’s that when countless jobs and storied institutions depend on the mills to keep churning, it stops mattering what comes out on the other end. The question is not whether the factory’s settings are wrong but whether it should be a paper factory in the first place.

Here is the fundamental point that science reformers keep screaming about: the system can't be reformed until we have some other way, besides publication counts, of  judging researchers and research. Since nobody has any idea what that might be, real reform seems unlikely.

There seem to be whole fields of research that exist mainly because scientists can publish about them and thus keep their jobs. But what else are scientists supposed to do? They, like everybody else, want to keep their jobs. Many of them would probably rather do weird, cutting-edge stuff that will most likely fail; others would rather switch to a completely different area of science, but our system makes that extremely difficult.

In his conclusion, Schulman comes back to the weirdness of Bhattacharya talking scientific reform in a department headed by RFK, in an adminstration headed by Trump. True, those are big hurdles, but until we have a workable model for reforming science it almost doesn't matter who the president is.

Fantastic Language: Lord Dunsany and Catherynne Valente

A fantasy writer can summon magic through story and setting and things that happen, or through the power of words. Many writers try to do both; Tolkien is the most obvious example. Most writers, however, do not possess these two powers in anything like the same degree. Today I take up books by two writers who try to bespell us mainly with their words. 

Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was born in 1878 and to me his writing feels deeply Edwardian. He lived for much of his life in Dunsany Castle, near Dublin. Although he wrote a bunch of books – I have seen numbers varying from "more than 50" to "more than 90" – he is famous these days for The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924.

The story is very simple. A mortal king sends his son to woo and wed the daughter of the King of Elfland. With some help, he succeeds. They have a child. Eventually, the elf princess misses her home and goes back. The hero quests for her again, while their son grows into a different sort of hero. Eventually, all is resolved by magic. 

But that is not the point. The point is the evocation of the eldritch, the magical, the strange, and the wonderful by the deployment of prose that drips with paradox, archaism, and the highest extremes of extravagance. Some examples:

Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. . . .

Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, all lean toward Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. . . .

He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twilight; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty. And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as phrophets tampering with forbidden lore gaze into cloudy crystals. The little cries of the earthly evening behind him he heeded no more nor heard. And with all these little cries were lost to him also the ways and the needs of men, the things they plan, the things they toil for and hope for, and all the little things their patience achieves. . . .

The Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions, for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it.

It is sometimes lovely and sometimes frankly tedious. When it works, it evokes the longing one might feel standing by the ruin of an ancient castle, wishing fervently that a gate into wonder might open in the gray stone. When it doesn't work, it makes you wish the story were more compelling or the characters at least halfway plausible. 

Lord Dunsany's words are like the notes of an elvish music, calling us away to a more beautiful place; Catherynne Valente's are like the spears picadors thrust into the bull to drive it mad. Valente is a contemporary writer, born in 1979. I first discovered her through a novel for older children, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making (2011). As I said when I reviewed it, I was immediately captured by her language, which seemed to me to evoke perfectly the feel of a fairy tale.

I have now read two more of her books, most recently her first, Labyrinth (2004). The point of Labyrinth is also to take our minds away to someplace else, but this Labyrinth is nothing like Elfland. It is an absurd, grotesque dreamscape. The language is like a psychedelic drug, destroying our normal sense of reality and replacing it with an incomprehensible vision. I was reminded of the visions of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick, absurd on the face but hinting at mysterious depths. But if there are any mysterious depths, I confess that I did not find them.

Our narrator is a nameless female being of unknown origin:

I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze.

An entirely typical passage goes like this: 

A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless – Each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming or going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban.

Our narrator wanders, feeling her mind slip away, meeting various spirit guides that don't seem to be much help, seeing strange wonders, speaking strange words. Another snippet:

And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman's hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder.

I find this sort of writing very impressive, and also tempting; it might be fun to try to write like this, to spin out dreams and visions without worrying over whether anything makes sense, to let the sound of the words guide my mind rather than the dictates of the story. But, ultimately, I find books like this very hard to read. I finished The King of Elfland's Daughter mainly because it is a classic near the roots of modern fantasy, and The Labyrinth only because I had already decided to write this post.

I want the books I read to have stories, and characters. I want them to make sense. I have never been tempted by vision, in the form of drugs or any other way. I prefer to see clearly. I wonder if this is a limitation. Are there, perhaps, truths that I cannot see because I am so wedded to the mundane, too earthbound to hear the call of the woodpecker who would be my spirit guide?

Lord Dunsany was a friend of W.B. Yeats, whose poetry I love but whose philosophy sounds to me like gibberish. Thinking over these two books, I have a sense that their language is more suited to short poems than to novels. That way, the way of the quick insight and the tremor of feeling, they can hint at meaning, can seize us for a moment from this world. Stretched out to 180 pages, they cease to charm or  to summon, and their lack of any truth to tell us beyond the hints of another world begins to drag and grate.

Links 19 September 2025

Harness plate from Santon, England, 1st Century BC

Today's sentence: "There are conflict entrepreneurs out there who benefit from radicalizing us. . . We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes. We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse." - Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. More here. How about he runs for President?

Robin Hanson reviews Eliezer Yudkowsky's book about AI, If Anyone Builds It, We All Die. Hanson is not impressed.

Scott Siskind against the argument that "unelected" judges should not contradict elected officials.

Fascinating long tweet summarizing the views and impact of the Irish Enlightenment: Swift, Berkeley, Hutcheson (hugely influential in America), Burke, etc.

Can organ recipients acquire personality traits and even memories from their donors? Some very weird stuff here. (Psychology Today, technical article titled "Personality Changes Associated with Organ Transplants." ) This is from very long entry in Siskind's "review anything" contest about theories of how memories are stored..

The tale of an Anasazi/Ancestral Pueblo skull with an embedded stone arrowhead.

Conor Friedersdorf, an opponent of the Trump administration, says they are right to raise the alarm about threats to free speech in Europe.

Ethan Mollick asks Claude, "Please create the PowerPoint shared by the high powered management consultants hired by Hamlet after seeing his fathers ghost."

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey goes back 50 years. For most of that time the sentiment of the young (18-34) was more positive than that of older people, usually much more positive. This started to change in 2018, and now it has been worse than the average for 9 of the past 11 quarters.

Tyler Cowen, "Stop Blaming Them"

Britain announces plan to build 12 modular nuclear reactors in Hartepool, in the northeast. They will replace the existing nuclear plant there, due to be decomissioned in 2028. They should produce much more power but I can't find any numbers.

Poll of Rhode Island voters finds that most support building more housing in the state, as long as it is not in their own neighborhood. (Twitter/X)

Drug addiction is usually not lifelong.

Disco Elysium is a cool game, but its makers seem to be childish jerks and lawsuits have blocked any move toward a sequel. (NY Times, IGN, TheGamer)

A Canadian company called First Atlantic Nickel is touting a deposit of Awaruite (Ni3Fe) in Newfoundland containing a lot of cobalt, which they say will challenge the Chinese dominance of nickel and cobalt production.  (Company web site, promotional video) I have yet to find any outside analysis of their claims and would appreciate a link. Interest in Awaruite is high because processing the most common Nickel ore, Nickel sulfide, is such an environmental disaster that it basically can't be done in the US or Europe; Awaruite can be processed using electromagnets in a way likely to be less damaging.

Inscription records that Emperor Qing Shih Huang Ti's quest for immortality extended to Tibet.

Interesting arrangement of small idols around a Bronze Age hearth hints at domestic rituals.

Phil Christman's journey through Christianity, chronicled in two earlier books, has now led to the belief that Christians should become activists for socialism.

Collection of short interviews with young, hip female writers, with some interesting questions, including about the place of the novel in a world of very rapid change. 

Stop Dividing People

My proposal for easing the awful political situation in the US is simple: stop dividing people into "Right" and "Left." Every time you do that you are 1) wrong, since the actual world is vastly more complex than that, and 2) promoting political division and rancor. Just stop.

What beliefs define the Right in America today? Certainly not capitalistic economics, since MAGA is full of people far more socialist than I am. Certainly not reducing regulation of business, since Trump seems intent on micromanaging the whole economy. Certainly not the preservation of old American traditions; for every one you can name that MAGA people defend (hunting, church going) I can name another that they despise (neighborliness, fair elections, decency, open competition, respect for the Constitution). 

I know some people want to say "the cult of Trump," but that is not right either, since I know many people who despise Trump while identifying firmly as conservatives.

Fear of crime has long been a right-wing point of emphasis, and Trump tries to talk this up out of one side of his mouth while pardoning violent criminals with the other. 

I can't see any coherence here.

What beliefs define the Left? This is one of much personal importance to me, since the internet is full of "leftists" who believe long lists of things I find abhorrent. My idea of the Left tends toward peace, fairness, equality, and especially freedom; the idea that getting people fired for their beliefs could ever be a left-wing idea still shocks and disgusts me, and despite all of Trump's horrors I have not forgiven the petty tyrants of wokeness. But I have other, equally important ideas that I have trouble placing on any kind of left-right spectrum: respect for expertise; belief that good institutions are very hard to build, so we should be careful with the ones we have; an abhorrence of political violence; a desire for dialogue and compromise.

For about 130 years after the words were invented, right and left had fairly stable meanings: the right meant tradition plus capitalism, and the left was the people who rejected those things and thought we needed to make radical changes in pursuit of a better world. But the rise of Fascism smashed that neat equation, giving us self-proclaimed rightists bent on radical change. The situation has only gotten weirder over the past 25 years. 

We can all imagine a rightist or a leftist, but this cartoon would not be based on anybody's actual beliefs, and especially not any beliefs that might impact government policy. It would be all about attitudes and style.

I am left thinking that the main function of the "right" vs. "left" distinction in America is to divide us into two teams so the people who want to fight have somebody to fight against.

My formula for bringing peace to America is this: Stop saying that anybody is on the right or the left. Stop caring about it. Debundle political questions and take them up one at a time, without caring whether the ideas proposed are "right-wing" or "left-wing." According to the polls I have seen, opinions on many actual issues correlate only weakly with whether people identify as Democrats or Republicans. So lets skip the team nonsense and talk real problems and real solutions.

Because here is something else I believe: our civilization is an amazing thing. We are rich beyond the dreams of our ancestors, possessed of knowledge far beyond their ken, with technologies that routinely do things they regarded as miracles. One piece of this civilization I especially treasure is democracy, which despite all its foibles gives the people a say in how they are governed.

We could lose this, all of this. None of it is given; none of it should be taken for granted. And if we do lose it, it will be because in pursuit of hatred toward our neighbors we lost sight of the incredible treasure of our inheritance, and the amazing future we might build if we worked together.

RIP John McQueen

RIP John McQueen, quirky artist who worked mostly with sticks, vines, leaves, and other found trifles. He lived for years in a stone house he built himself, with no electricity or running water, his hands always on fiber, wood, or stone. Above, Same Difference, 2013. NY Times, Arttextstyle, American Craft Council.

Untitled 192, 1989

Touch, 1987

Happenstance, 2011

How About Really Honoring Charlie Kirk?

Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.

And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.

Keep America free. 

– Charlie Kirk

The Waldalgesheim Chariot Burial and the Origins of Celtic Art

The chariot burial at Waldalgesheim in the German Rhineland was excavated in 1869. It dates to around 330 BC. It is famous partly because it seems to represent the early stages of the high Celtic tradition, what we call the La Tène style.

The grave was quite weird, plus it was damaged by the plow that uncovered it, plus this was all in 1869:

Investigations and recoveries of material took place over two years in a way that is now hard to reconstruct in detail. . . . It has been thought that the burial was under a barrow, which is reasonable, but without any clear evidence. We do know that the grave pit was surrounded by rough stones at the top and that there was a layer of stones part way down in the grave fill, above which were found the gold items, which the bronze ones below. Broadly speaking, three sets of material were found: an extensive set in bronze and deriving from a chariot and horse gear, including a yoke and its fittings and decorations, rein rings, wheel rims and fasteners; secondly, a set of personal forms of decoration including a neckring, arm, bracelet and leg rings, beads and the metal decorations of clothing (fascinating and hard to reconstruct); thirdly, a flagon and a bucket presumably used originally to hold liquids (wine?). (Chris Gosden, Art in the Eurasian Iron Age, 16)

We do not know if a whole chariot was buried, or just some of the fittings. Because no weapons were found, most authorities think this was a woman's grave.

The artistic style of the objects varies a good deal. This bucket has classical detailing and is thought to have been imported from Italy.

But this pitcher probably comes from Gaul and is decorated in a quite different style.

It is the detailing on the gold torcs that points toward the swirling, abstract style of La Tène.

It is interesting to note that the people who developed the La Tène style were very familiar with the classical style of the Mediterranean world; many of the patrons probably owned Mediterranean objects like the Waldalgesheim bucket or the Vix Crater. Art of this period often mixes motifs from the Mediterranean with other motifs that may come from Persia or the steppes, along with hints of the new northern style.

Like the Agris helmet, found in central France, dating to c. 350 BC. This piece has a sort of barbaric splendour, but the design elements come from the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Many sources call this a "masterpiece of Celtic Art" (e.g. wikipedia), but it is certainly not Celtic in the way that the Desborough Mirror (below) is.

But even at the height of La Tène, when all the wonderful works were made that define this amazing style, you can still see lots of Classical or Persian elements in the designs. 

Chariot ornament from Roissy, France;
You'll have to zoom in to see that it is all made of disassembled dragons

Some modern interpretations of northern European art in this period emphasize the lack of any stable artistic style, with particular objects showing various mixtures of Mediterranean, Persian, Steppes, and local "Celtic" elements. This matches, in a sense, what we know about the political and broader cultural situation. The people of northern Europe were very much on the move, invading Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor besides fighting a great deal against each other. Archaeologists have a terrible time sorting out who was a Celt, a German, a Sarmatian, or something else. Many of the large fortified sites of this period were occupied for a few decades before being abandoned. There do not seem to have been any large, stable kingdoms. We do not know if the druidical religious tradition encountered by the Romans in Gaul and Britain was particularly old or widespread, and there is a case to be made that it was a new development of the first century BC. So it makes sense that the artistic style of these people is hard to pin down.

But it certainly is wonderful.

My thoughts on the La Tene style and Druidism are here.

"Celtic" Scabbards

Scabbards from the European Iron Age. Above, from Hungary; below, Ireland and then Britain. From D.W. Harding, The Archaeology of Celtic Art (2004).

Nietzsche, Against History

Only to the extent that history serves life will we serve it.

Some of My Favorite Poems

By request, my favorite lyric poems composed in modern English:

Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben", "A Prayer for my Daughter,"  "The Wild Swans at Coole"

T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Emily Dickinson, "I Dwell in Possibility"

W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

Edward FitzGerald, "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"; my favorite quatrains are here.

Simon Ó Faoláin, "Winnowing"

Dylan Thomas, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"

Kahlil Gibran, "On Children"

Jane Hirshfield, "Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World"

W.S. Merwin, "A Black Kite"

Traci Brimhall, "Come Trembling"

Rudyard Kipling, "Danny Deever"

William Blake, "The Tyger"

Links 12 September 2025

Roman glass bead found in Poland, 1st century AD

This week's news: Ezra Klein, "Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way." Richard Hanania, "'The Left" Did Not Kill Charlie Kirk." Noah Smith, "Civil War is for Idiots and  Losers"

Here's something to cheer you up: "Afghanistan reports the lowest well-being in recorded history. . . . Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living." Life under the Taliban doesn't just suck, it sucks at a world record level. Via Scott Siskind.

Chinese censorship around the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

Short science fiction story about AI and the future, Knockout Mouse by Louis Evans.

The pomegranate in history and myth.

Pretty good essay on how modern anthropologists view "shamanism," with notes on how the practice is changing in the modern world: "One veteran shaman, returning from his first experience performing at a top-dollar eco-lodge, asked the ayahuasca researcher Stephan Beyer why these people had come halfway round the world to see him when they weren’t sick. And why do they all hate their parents?"

I've fallen in love with a Bach Cantata I can't remember ever hearing until this week, Christ lag in Todesbanden.

Crazy multimedia installations by Song Dong.

Rebuilding Kowloon Walled City in Minecraft. (On the original Kowloon here.)

If you have any curiosity about the Frankfurt School and their critique of post-WW II capitalism, I found this 45-minute lecture on Jürgen Habermas quite interesting, emphasizing his ties to Kant.

Famous 1964 interview with Tolkien about LOTR is on YouTube. As a fantasy writer I was struck by his assertion that it would have been too silly to have his characters worship pagan gods. In some of my writing I have used the classical formulation and had my characters swear by "the gods" or "all the gods," which feels un-silly to me. I have also used the now widespread fantasy convention of having people worship a generic pantheon consisting of The Mother, The Father, The Warrior, and so on, but this convention did not exist in the 1940s. 

Discussion on Twitter/X of the weird fact that immigration to Britain, the US, Canada, and Australia all surged in 2021. People in each country blame local political decisions but does that make sense?

Avocado ripeness scanners.

Creating AI reviewers to speed up the process of peer review.

A call to unbundle the university. Many European universities don't have campuses or any kind of exracurricular activities, and people often ask why American and British schools need all that rigamarole. But studies of US universities have found that graduation rates for urban schools without campuses are dramatically lower, so I am not sure the model will transfer.

Study asking whether it is better to be over- or underqualified for your first job with an organization: "Combined, these patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but still outperform others in their same job." The over-qualified get promoted much faster.

The former peace negotiators who have given up on a two-state solution for Israel/Palestine, but without any real alternative. (NY Times)

People are thirsting so hard for signs of alien life that we have news stories because the Webb telescope "has not ruled out" a nitrogen-rich atmospher around Trappist-1e. (NY Times, Space.com)

Robin Hanson wants middle-aged activist movements to counter dumb youth activists.

A former leader of New College in Florida realizes that the plan to make it a conservative bastion is insecure so long as the school depends so heavily on state funding, so he is floating a plan to take the college private. Has that ever been done before in America?

Big plans for seawater desalination in Morocco, powered by renewable energy: Reuters, company brag sheet, longer article laying out the long-range plan.

The British War on Slavery.

The complications of "free speech" from the 1600s to the present. The nearly absolute doctrine defended by American liberals is rare in the world and has been contested throughout its history by people who think that lying, slander, blasphemy, instigation to hatred, and so on should not be protected.

Interesting translation by Simon Armitrage of "Deor", the Anglo-Saxon poem from which half of my online avatars are taken. If you run into somebody online who calls himself "Deor(something)", it might well be me. Wēlund him be wurman, wræces cunnade. . .

New York Times piece on parents using their children in their art, taking off from the new wave of memoirs by people who grew up starring in their parents' vlogs. I regard that as a truly heinous thing to do to a child.

The Trump administration forces US Steel to keep paying workers to show up at an idled steel plant.

Getting Richer

Real median family income in the US, adjusted for inflation. And note that families have gotten smaller.

Jeremiah Johnson, "What is the Purpose of Liberalism?"

Written after the assassination attempt on Trump last year:

The biggest shame in all this is that it happened in America, a country that is doing pretty damn well in almost every way. We’re rich. We have abundant natural resources, space, and technology. We enjoy strong political freedoms. Our economy is growing and has grown regularly for decades. We are not suffering from famines or depressions or major political repression. America certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s doing fine.

That’s the backdrop for this horrible act of political violence. It’s the background for Trump’s rise in the first place, which has featured its own calls to violence. There’s no material reason any of this should be happening. Instead, we’ve driven ourselves insane due to political hysteria and polarization. And chief among the reasons we’ve gone insane is social media, with its algorithmic promotion of the most divisive messages possible.

As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.