Feminism, Motherhood, Mental Health, Ideology, Politics, Celebrity

In today's NY Times, another one of those stories. This one concerns Lauren Southern, who became a minor right-wing celebrity at 19 by posting anti-immigrant, anti-feminist rants, tried to become a tradwife, hated it, fled from her creepy husband, fell into depression, and then wrote a memoir about it.

I have been around long enough to have seen this story dozens of times, and most of them give me the same thought: that in our world ideology and psychological issues form an explosive mixture that regularly blows up and destroys people.

I think most celebrities are crazy. I have an intense suspicion of ideology. I also think that life is just hard, and that only the very lucky slide easily into happy marriages and happy lives. 

I think many people throw themselves into ideology as a way to cope with inner turmoil. As it happens, some of the most salient ideological disputes in our age concern family life and the roles of husbands and wives. The partial shift from a patriarchal model in which women work around the home to more equal relationships and more women working outside the home has been wrenching and confusing, and many conservatives hate it and think it is at the root of our current problems. So, some women attracted to retro ideologies try to reverse the trend and disappear back into what they imagine is a better past.

But ideology is, fundamentally, fantasy, and never more so than when it gets involved in family life. Very few women like Lauren Southern – raised feminists, and with their own careers at 19 – are ever going to be happy as tradwives, and I am intensely suspicious of any man who would try to turn such a woman into a tradwife. Of course there was an explosion with harm all around.

I hate what extreme ideologies do to people's minds.

Tragedy

The modern temperment is anti-Tragic. We believe that problems have solutions, that things can be worked out. If the economy is bad, we just need to elect a new government that will fix whatever is wrong and get people back to work. If tax cuts won't fix things, it will be tariffs, or subsidies, or something. 

If we are sick, that must be because of some fixable problem: poisons in the air, chemicals in the water, bad food, bat attitudes. 

We are reluctant to admit that problems are unsolvable and that sometimes life just sucks.

We also love good guys and bad guys, and rebel when we can't find one side in a story to root for.

Tragedy, as both the ancient Greeks and the early modern Europeans understood it, was about people confronting impossible situations. Like all of us, the characters in Tragedy are doomed. Sometimes they make things worse by their foolish actions, but if one is left thinking that if only the hero had done this or that obvious thing, everything would have worked out, then the tragedy is not successful. Tragedy only works if the audience believes that sometimes people are destroyed by events completely beyond their control.

Here is the chorus from Agamemnon:

Where is right and wrong
In this nightmare?
Each becomes the ghost of the other.
Each is driven mad
By the ghost of the other.
Who can reason it out?

Elektra:

By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these. . . .

But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be.

Here is King Lear, accepting his defeat and failure:

Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

As Teju Cole once put it, "Tragedy finds us where reasons end."

So here's the question: is this good or bad?

Does our belief in solutions motivate us to make the world better? and was the traditional belief in hopeless cases an excuse to leave bad practices as they were?

Or does our aversion to tragedy weaken us in the face of unsolvable problems, leading to grievance mongering and blame games? I feel like after every natural disaster in the US somebody is blaming the other political party. Do the horrible politics of the moment flow from our need to blame somebody for every bad thing in our lives? From our refusal to accept that sometimes the only choice is bad or worse, and that sometimes there are no choices at all?

I wonder.

It Sucks to be Trans in Denmark

Part I: Transition and Teenage Mental Health

Many people, including me, have the general impression that trans people are kind of crazy. Trans teenagers seem to be particularly mad. It is, however, hard to find good statistics on the problem. In most countries nobody official is tracking how many people consider themselves transsexual or transgender, so most of the numbers you might see are dubious. But the Danish government tracks its citizens with a true teutonic thoroughness, and they do have such a list. Which allowed researchers to discover the following:

• 43% of trans people have a diagnosed mental illness, compared to 7% of the general population;
• the rate of suicide attempts among trans people is 7.7 times the average;
• the rate of death by suicide is 3.5 times the average;
• even excluding violence the overall death rate for trans people is twice the average.

The numbers are small, so this is not a great data set, but it is the best one we have, and trans advocates in the US have long claimed that their suicide rate is high. The other studies I have found are much less comprehensive, but they point in the same direction. Kaiser Permanente recently did a study of its policy-holders in California, and they found the following:

We looked at mental health in transgender and gender-nonconforming youth retrospectively between 2006 and 2014 and found that these youths had 3 to 13 times the mental health conditions of their cisgender counterparts. . . . Among these young people, the most prevalent diagnoses were attention deficit disorders in children, 3 to 9 years of age, and depressive disorders in adolescents, 10 to 17 years of age.

The pro-trans Trevor Project found that "46% of transgender and nonbinary young people had considered suicide within the past year."

Equally bad data shows that trans people have high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. I do not find this at all surprising; consider that one of the most basic tests of mental health is to ask, "Do you feel comfortable in your own skin?"

This same bad data also shows that there are a lot more trans people in recent generations than there used to be. For my generation the number was 1 in 1,000 or less; recent data on young Americans finds 2 to 3 percent identifying as trans, and up to 5 percent identifying as curious about it.

Which brings us to the question that I am going to write about, despite the risk to my personal reputation. I have tried to raise this topic with friends recently only to be shut down with some version of, "Only cranky conservatives talk about trans people and mental health, and you don't want to go there." The subject makes everybody mad, so no doubt somebody will soon be mad at me, but I have a very strong sense that it needs to be discussed as rationally as we can manage. I need to ask: how should we feel about the fact that the rates of mental illness, suicide, and early death are so high among trans people? And what should we do about it?

One response, which has been the general progressive response in the US and Europe, has been to say that what trans people need is what everyone needs: acceptance, support, compassion. This is what motivates people to do things that strike me as very strange, like giving double mastectomies to teenagers. They see young people in pain, and try to help. They see troubled people who believe that changing gender would help them, so they try to assist them along a path that everyone hopes we be a journey of healing. They believe the mental health struggles of trans people stem from lack of acceptance, from being condemned and attacked and bullied for just trying to be who they are. The way to fight suicide among trans people is with celebration and love.

There certainly is data showing that transgender young people report much more bullying than non-trans people. However, after years of reading all I can find about bullying I can tell you that being bullied is to some degree a matter of self-definition and all such numbers have a lot of problems. In terms of my personal experience, the two young trans people I have known best do not claim to have been bullied, and they both have serious mental health problems. So my position is that while bullying probably makes all of this worse, it is not the root cause.

The desire to offer acceptance is also what motivates people to push for trans-inclusive language like "pregnant people;" trans people, the argument would go, have suffered more than enough and shouldn't regularly be confronted with denials of their identity built into the fabric of our speech.

On the other side we have conservatives who seem to think that transgender is a stupid fad, the latest thing dreamed up by bored teenagers to tweak their parents. Something they learned from Tiktok or Instagram. Various Republicans in the US have denied that trans teenagers have an elevated suicide rate. When I first encountered this line of reasoning I was puzzled, because it absolutely does not match the intense seriousness I have seen in the young trans people I have known. (I should say that I have only known young trans people.) Maybe there are teenagers who declare themselves trans in a flip way, because it seems cool, but, if so, who cares? They will get over it. I am going to wave all of that off for now and focus on a different conservative argument: given that transsexuality is so strongly associated with mental illness, is it maybe something we should discourage rather than celebrate?

Imagine a 14-year-old of your acquaintance comes out to you as trans. Should you say, "How exciting that you are discovering who you really are! What can I do to help you along your journey?" Or should you say, "You should think really hard about that, because transition is a hell road littered with dead bodies and ruined lives. If there is any way you can live with the body and identity you have, you should cling to it, because it is your best chance for a halfway normal and happy life. Have you considered therapy?"

The question gains complexity from the parallel to being gay. Gay people used to ask this question of themselves all the time, and despite the much greater acceptance of homosexuality in our century, they still ask it. What many trans advocates want is what we have done a much better job of offering to gay people: a road that is neither self-denial nor darkness. After all, young gay people also seem to have higher rates of suicide and mental illness, although so far as I can tell the rates are not as high as the ones we are seeing for trans people.

There is also the issue of age. Transsexuality is rooted in a discomfort with our adult bodies, and those bodies take form long before legal adulthood. If you want to prevent a boy who identifies as female from developing a man's body, you have to intervene in middle school. Now, my attitude toward middle schoolers is that they don't have a single frickin' clue about life, so letting them choose anything important about their futures is an invitation to disaster. A certain amount of discomfort with changing bodies is also perfectly normal, and many teenagers are unhappy with the prospect of becoming a man or a woman with all that implies. This suggests to me that we should maybe wait and see if the discomfort goes away, as it eventually did for me. Besides, it is an old principle of psychoanalysis, going back to Freud himself, that people in the midst of a psychological crisis should not make important life decisions. But the hormones don't wait for the age of reason; progressive people have said to me that waiting until people are 18 before intervening condemns them to a false life in the wrong body, so the cost of waiting is too high. It is also, the (bad) data shows, as teenagers that trans people are at the highest risk of suicide.

Against that one might set the growing movement for "de-transition." Some people who transition in adolescence later decide that it was a mistake and return to the gender identity they were assigned at birth. The data here is even worse than the rest, but what I have seen suggests that about one tenth of people who transitioned over the past decade are trying to go back. Some of them have even sued the doctors who helped them transition. One of these people, the one who received a double mastectomy, said when she later sued her doctors that "all I needed was for someone to tell me I was fine the way I was." I would not say that the existence of de-transitioners refutes in any fundamental way the concept of transition; even if one tenth of trans people regret it, for anything to be 90 percent successful is pretty good. But for me it again brings the focus back to the age of the people we are talking about, as well as their shaky mental stability. Not transitioning may haves lifelong consequences, but so does transitioning.

(You may be thinking that I am leaving out something important by not making a distinction between sex and gender. Like, say, gender is how you present yourself in society, whereas sex is biological, and so we should not make a big deal about people changing gender. But there is no consistency at all among trans advocates about this, and so far as I can tell most use these words promiscuously. Trans is about who you are, not just how others see you. The subject of surgical transition is also much debated among trans people, with some saying that if you don't have surgery you are a fraud, while others recoil from it.)

I work hard to avoid coming to any conclusion that requires telling other people what to do. If adults want to change gender, why should that matter to me? I am also not much concerned about transition for people who have identified with the other sex since they were young children. But I am troubled by the nexus of teenage depression, teenage suicide, and teenage transition. The Danish numbers confirm that what we are doing is not working very well. I have no firm conclusions about what we should do here, but I think anyone who is celebrating teenage transition as a great and good thing is blind to a very painful reality. Many trans kids are severely depressed and there is no data I know of that says transition is a good way to help them. 

Part II: Metamorphoses

But as important as the dilemmas of teenage transition are, my thinking about transition is fundamentally about something else. I am a theoretical sort of person, so I want to ask a different question: what is real? Don't worry, I will get back to mental health at the end.

What was classical philosophy about? Part was about ethics, but the biggest and oldest part was what we call ontology. The philosophers at the root of the western tradition asked the questions, what is most real? And can what is most real change? They had every sort of answer to these questions, from Heraclitus saying that you cannot step twice in the same river to Parmenides saying that change cannot happen at all. Zeno's famous paradoxes were all about showing that change is not logically possible, so it must be an illusion. Plato became one of philosophy's gods by developing a system that allowed ordinary, everyday things to change without altering the underlying reality of the universe, where important things do not change. 

Nor was this limited to the Greeks. The philosophy of the ancient druids seems to have been built around a model of a world in constant flux, in which all things were constantly changing into other things. Much classical Hindu thought is taken up with these same questions, the relationship between the constantly shifting veil of experience and the other, deeper, truer levels of reality.

Consider Ovid's Metamorphoses, a long poem recounting all the many Greek myths in which people changed into trees, stags, grasshoppers, or strange things. It seems very clear to me that intellectually-minded people in the ancient world loved to talk about what could change and in what sense, and what if anything was permanent and unchangeable; I can imagine many of them leaping into a dinner party conversation about whether humans can change their sex and what that would mean.

Which is to say that the question of sex or gender change is not just about teenage mental health, but about the oldest questions of philosophy. Those questions are fundamental to our thought because they are basic to our lived experience. We all exist in a sort of dance with change, longing for some things to change while clinging to other things that we hope will never change. We wonder if we are the same people we were a decade ago, or somehow fundamentally different. We wonder the same about those close to us. One of our most persistent fantasies is a love that "lasts forever."

Especially in the modern world of fantastically rapid change people cling, for deep psychological reasons, to what they hope are permanent realities. One North Carolina grad wrote a whole book about hating Duke, which had been the only real constant in his life and therefore a rock to cling to when everything else was threatened. Many, many people want for male and female to be rocks where they can find stability.

There is no perfect alignment between people who dislike change and political conservatives, but there is certainly a connection. I would say that conservatives certainly seek out islands of stability toward which they can offer allegiance, and around which they can build their identies: God, nation, the "traditional family," and so on. So it is no surprise that many conservative people are deeply unhappy about the trans movement. 

Trans is a project of self-transformation. Which explains, I think, both its connection to mental health and its explosive political ramifications. Who needs self-transformation more than the mentally ill? And wouldn't any project devoted to undermining the certainties of family life and personal identity anger conservatives?

Part III: Pregnant People, Feminism, and Female Identity

Changing sex is not the only kind of self-transformation one can imagine. You might, for example, change your ethnicity instead. Except that in our world this is forbidden. We have been treated over the past few years to a parade of "Native American" professors unmasked as white people who tried to self-transform into Indians. (1, 2, 3) We consider this offensive, and in certain contexts it is even illegal. Many black and Indian people absolutely hate this, considering it a new and sinister form of theft: you already took our land and our power, and now you want to take our identities, too? On the other side people who "pass for white" are often said to be "denying who they are." 

I find this puzzling, because genetically the difference between ethnic groups is a rounding error compared to the enormous and very real genetic difference between men and women. "Race", so far as I can tell, is a modern invention, but sex has been the fundamental division of most animal species for 500 million years. So why can you change one but not the other? The answer I usually get is that while sex may have more biological importance, race has so much recent political importance that it cannot simply be waved away. For many progressives, the grievances of oppressed ethnic groups are the most fundamental and important issues of our time.

But it seems very weird to me to forget that sex is also a political issue and to wave away the oppression of women as something we shouldn't care about any more.

Many feminists feel the same way about trans men as Native American activists feel about white people "playing Indian."  I think this has two sides, the political and the personal. On the political side they see this as an invasion of their world by agents of their oppressors, who now seek to appropriate whatever they have of value that men haven't managed to take in other ways. 

But I want to focus on the personal side, because that is where I think the real issues lie. There are many women who have not taken any kind of feminist stand against transition but are made uncomfortable by trans women, and this includes many liberals and progressives. 

Consider "pregnant people."

When it comes to humans, you all know, everything is about identity. Everybody identifies as something. I, for example, identify as a cool-headed intellectual who wants to explore difficult and important questions regardless of who is upset about it or bored by this kind of analytical excursus. 

Many, many women identify first and foremost as women or mothers or grandmothers. NOT as people or parents or grandparents. 

The point of this long philosophical detour is this: arguing that you can change your gender or sex is not a trivial matter, but touches on the deepest regions of biology, philosophy, and language. In asking people to recognize that you can change your gender, you are asking a lot; in asking them to recognize that you have changed your sex, you are launching a broadside against the way many and maybe most people understand reality.

Part III: Feminism

I am all for freedom. I generally think people have the right, as John Stuart Mill put it, to pursue their own good in their own way. I think people should be allowed to define their own identities and decide for themselves who they are.

But we are not alone. Everything I do affects other people somehow, even if only by leaving footprints. Freedom is never, therefore, any kind of absolute, but must always be negotiated with others. Your freedom does not extend to punching me in the face, or smashing the windows of my house.

I have a strong sense that if you want to be free, you should support everyone's freedom and never use your own quest for freedom as an excuse to tell other people what to do and say. 

And this is what bothers me about the trans movement as it now exists: it is too much about defining an identity by forcing other people to recognize it. Claims of identity seem to function mainly as weapons in the culture wars, as a way to force our society to accept a certain view of human life and even of the universe. The trans movement sets the claims of their own self-understanding above all other claims. 

But cis people have identities, too, and no more than trans people do they feel fully supported in them. What it means to be a woman, for example, is a hard social and psychological problem, and many assigned-female-at-birth people struggle for a sense of womanhood. And then along come trans people saying that the way most women use the word is wrong, because it excludes them. "Pregnant people" is a particular flash point, because there are women who struggled their whole lives with a sense that they were failing at being women until they had babies, and to be told that they can't make motherhood the center of their female identites really pisses them off. 

There is a tendency among progressives to say that the claims of trans people must take precedence over those of cis women, because trans people are suffering far more. Which is, the Danish study shows, true. But everybody suffers, and in our world most people struggle to define and feel good about their identities. My gut reaction to trans people complaining about words like motherhood, is, "stuff it." Your pursuit of your own identity is no reason to attack other people where their own identities are most vulnerable. I follow the Buddha in this: the master virtue is compassion, and whenever you act without it, you fail in a fundamental way.

If you're thinking, John, how can you demand compassion from people who are depressed and bullied to the point of suicide? And I answer, because I demand compassion from everyone.

But compassion does not mean always supporting teenagers in whatever they want to do. If there is any consistent finding in mental health, it is that children who grow up without parents suffer horribly. It is the duty of the older and wiser to guide the young as best we can.

But what guidance should we give? Beats me. Because I think we are dealing with issues we don't understand at all, I have no particular stand on all the political questions being debated in the US. But I do have a very firm stand on this: since we do not understand teenage transition, and because the stakes here are obviously very high, shutting down rational discussion and debate is the absolute worst thing we can do. A world in which progressives are all required to defend trans teenagers in everything they do, while MAGA folks feel required to mock and abuse everything about them, is not one that will ever arrive at a helpful view. When people are suffering, it never helps to shut down conversation about why, and what should be done.

Ceasing Fire

Via the NY Times:

The Ceasefire Project, a research initiative that tracked outcomes of 2,202 cease-fires from 1989 to 2020, found that 68 percent of those were never formally written down. Its data showed that failed cease-fires typically last from 65 to 193 days and that humanitarian cease-fires have historically been “the most likely to be followed quickly by renewed violence.” Most peace processes require at least three cease-fires along the way.

Outsiders calling for a cease-fire in Ukraine always struck me as a little odd, since both sides think the other side would just use the pause to re-arm. I appreciates this:

“People tend to reach for cease-fires when they do not know what else to do,” said Valerie Sticher, a senior researcher at ETH Zurich.

Links 8 August 2025

Flask, Egypt, 1200 to 1000 BC

Survey by Nature finds that physicists disagree wildly about how to interpret quantum mechanics.

Ian Leslie's Notes on Growing Older, interesting and full of truth but not light reading.

Cambrian Chronicles searches for the lost Welsh kingdom of Pengwern, a deep dive through the fragmentary and mostly bad sources of Welsh history, 36-minute video. Also at wikipedia. 

Tracking various uses of the word "diversity" in English-language books since 1960.

Ben Pentreath photographs summer in Orkney.

How to deal with a small alligator in your driveway (Twitter/X)

Freddie de Boer thinks our culture is now defined by a rejection of adulthood.

This week's past post is "Opening Fire," a 2017 meditation on the results of extreme rhetoric.

The Włocławek cup, a remarkable 10th-century AD artifact now in Poland.

Hannah Cairo produced an important mathematical result at 17. Since she was already doing graduate-level math, working with Berkeley professors through their concurrent enrollment program, she decided to skip college and apply directly to graduate school. Of the ten schools she applied to, only two admitted her. In two cases the math department wanted to admit her but this was overruled by someone higher in the administration.

Sabine Hossenfelder's ten favorite paradoxes and unanswered questions in physics, 10-minute video.

Home ownership among 30-year-olds is down, but home ownership within each marital category (married, never married, divorced) is up. The overall downward trend is driven by the decline in the marriage rate. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith wonders whether the current boom in building data centers presages a collapse that might crash the economy.

Estonian theater puts on Romeo and Juliet using construction machinery.

Sacrificial pits at a neolithic village site in Germany.

The Aalborg Zoo in Denmark is asking pet owners to donate their elderly animal companions (guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and even small horses) to feed to its predators. (NY Times, CNN) This was weirder and more intriguing before I discovered that they euthanize the pets first.

The parents convicted of felony child abuse aftter their son was killed crossing a busy road with his brother on his way to the grocery store. (NY Times)

Back in 2022, Sri Lanka had a financial crisis so severe the government tried to forcibly convert all farming in the country to organic, to save money on fertilizer and fuel imports. (Wikipedia has details on the crisis if your are curious.) But with IMF help and a $4 billion loan from India, the government has been able to stave off the crisis. Tax increases and spending cuts have brought the budget into surplus, and some people are feeling optimistic.

We have long known that left-wing violence increases the vote share of right-wing parties. Now a new study finds that in Germany, right-wing violence also increases the vote share of right-wing parties. But creating a crisis and then benefiting from the sense of crisis is an old political ploy, used at times by fascists, communists, and others.

Comparing Ötzi the Iceman's DNA to those of his Alpine neighbors. Or on YouTube.

Life in Pompeii after the eruption.

Debate rages on over "shaken baby syndrome," which some people deny and others defend vociferously.

"Algorithmic collusion": what happens when firms use AI agents to set online prices?

Study comparing democracy, institutional authoritarianism, and personal authoritarianism (dominated by one man or a small clique) finds that personal authoritarianism gets the worst economic results.

The paintings once used to guide the souls of executed men toward heaven.

Crazy Russian turtle tank (Twitter/X).

According to the people who spend their time staring at satellite photos of Russian tank storage facilities, not many tanks are left; at the attrition rate of 2024, all the storage facilities would be depleted early in 2026. So Russia has cut their attrition rate by using very few tanks this year. This means they are not running out of tanks, but, as a commenter on this post noted, not having tanks and not using them mean pretty much the same thing on the front line.

Ukrainian reserve officer Tatarigami doesn't see how either Ukraine or Russia can keep fighting for "nearly another decade," as some seem to expect: "Ukraine struggles with desertions and AWOLs. Russia, meanwhile, faces not only constantly declining troop quality but also growing resistance among its soldiers to continue fighting. This has led to an increasing reliance on punitive measures to enforce discipline." Says that the brutal methods Wagner used to handle prisoner soldiers have spread throughout the Russian military.

Oppenheimer and Statues

In an interview shortly before his death, J. Robert Oppenheimer said, "There is no meaningful responsibility without power."

I, of course, immediately interpreted this in the light of our debate over who deserves a statue or whose name can be given to a school. These days the people we think are worthy of a statue are overwhelmingly those who never held any political office. Only they can meet our standards of purity, because they never had the responsibility that comes with wielding power. Holding office means compromising your principles, because only the vaguest principles can survive contact with the messiness of the world. Furthermore, it means doing, most of the time, what your constituents want, and you can hardly count on the voters of any period to meet the moral standards of the future.

Our current moral standards therefore exclude the powerful from celebration, and therefore many of those who have done the most good for humanity.

An Ancient Restaurant: the Thermopolium at Ostica

One of the best preserved buildings in Ostica is known as The House of the Wine Bar. This building was near the forum, a prime location for a business of this kind.

When you're dealing with archaeology in Italy, you sometimes have to look a long way back: this structure was excvated in 1802 to 1804. These days, the homes of the people who did this excavation would themselves by archaeological sites. The house was re-investigated in 1914-1915, resulting in a thick report, from which this reconstruction of the building comes. The height was estimated from the thickness of the walls and the amount of rubble, and it is likely correct, although of course not certain. The building was constructed between 100 and 150 AD, but it was very much modified over the three centuries of its occupation.

Plan. The restaurant/wine bar/thermopolium is rooms 5, 6, and 7. Room 13 was a small courtyard that was probably also used by patrons. The staircase you can see adjacent to the courtyard led down to a small underground room, once elaborately painted, that was probably a cult shrine. The space labeled 14 was a staircase leading directly from the street to apartments upstairs, which you can also see in the reconstruction of the facade. Rooms 1 and 2 were shops as were rooms 21 to 25 along the back of the structure.

View inside the Thermopolium, which means an establishment serving hot food. To the left is the counter where the food and drink were served. Most likely patrons did not sit at the counter, since the benches were all around the edges of the rooms, or in the courtyard. To the right is the built-in stove.

More views of the counter. The marble on the top, installed around 300 AD, is reused from some older building, and one of the pieces has an inscription likely a century old when the counter was built. Some of the fragmentary paintings depict food, but there is much disagreement of what food; eggs and olives seem to be the only things everyone agrees on. A large jar set into the floor almost certainly held wine.

The courtyard.

Surviving bits of decoration. The whole establishment was once plastered and painted, and the floor covered with mosaics. And this was not a restaurant for the elite, but for for people several steps down the social ladder. Not the poor, but not senators, either.

Truly a remarkable thing to survive.

Fawning

The NY Times informs us about a new psychological threat: excessive fawning.

With her new book, Are You Mad at Me? How to Stop Focusing on What Others Think and Start Living for You, Ms. Josephson hopes to help people who think that “I can’t feel OK unless the other person is OK,” she said.

I asked Ms. Josephson to explain three key takeaways from her book that can help people stop the urge to fawn.

Don’t automatically assume you did something wrong. You can challenge your perception that someone is mad at you, Ms. Josephson said, by asking these questions: Is this story I’m telling myself absolutely true? Is this person’s behavior unusual or just consistent with how he communicates? Could there be other reasons for the person’s perceived distance, such as work stress or a recent breakup? . . .

Check fawning behavior by starting small. For people who habitually fawn, it can feel intimidating to set boundaries and say no, Ms. Josephson said. So begin with low-stakes situations.

Notice when you’re using people-pleasing phrases that you don’t actually mean, such as “no problem” if something does present a problem, and “is this OK with you?” if it’s not OK with you. . . .

Why don't I know anybody like this? How come nobody is excessively fawning over me?

Instead of being surrounded by people who worry about offending me, I have “G.”

Sigh.

The Four Pests

Beginning in 1955, the Chinese government began calling for the extermination of the "four pests": rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. People have long claimed that the "smash sparrows campaign" in particular was a disaster, because sparrows controlled insect pests. Wikipedia: 

The eliminate sparrows campaign resulted in severe ecological imbalance, and was one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

According to the government, 2 billion sparrows were killed in 1958, and 1 billion in 1959. 

First hand account: 

It was fun to 'Wipe out the Four Pests'. The whole school went to kill sparrows. We made ladders to knock down their nests, and beat gongs in the evenings, when they were coming home to roost.

It seems to have worked, with very few sparrows reported in China by 1961. On the other hand, sparrows didn't just eat grain, and by 1960 ornithologists began sounding the alarm about multiplying insect pests.

But as I said, that is old news, and most of the articles I have found about it don't radiate objectivity. Lots of "look what happens when people mess with nature" sort of stuff. But now a new paper from Chinese researchers supports this claim and offers some serious estimates of the harm:

How do large disruptions to ecosystems affect human well-being? This paper tests the long-standing hypothesis that China's 1958 Four Pests Campaign, which exterminated sparrows despite scientists’ warnings about their pest-control role, exacerbated the Great Famine—the largest in human history. Combining newly digitized data on historical agricultural productivity in China with habitat suitability modeling methods in ecology, we find that, after sparrow eradication, a one-standard-deviation increase in sparrow suitability led to 5.3% larger rice and 8.7% larger wheat declines. State food procurement exacerbated these losses, resulting in a 9.6% higher mortality in high-suitability counties—implying nearly two million excess deaths. 

I suggest a new list of the four pests: tyrants, the lackeys of tyrants, ignorant ideologues, and people who venerate "action" over understanding. 

The History of Presidents Angry about Employment Statistics

 Judge Glock on Twitter/X:

This is a good time to remember one of the most egregious examples of politicized removal in US history, and it involves the Bureau of Labor Statistics too.

Angered by BLS official Howard Goldstein's congressional testimony, President Nixon privately said "There's a Jewish cabal, you know, running through this" and "They all only talk to Jews." After Nixon was assured that aide Fred Malek was not himself Jewish, Malek was tasked with creating a list of Democrats and people with "Jewish-sounding" last names in the bureau. Nixon later asked his aides again, "Did you ever get the number of Jews that were in BLS?” Malek submitted a list of Democrats in the BLS, 25, as well as a list of 13 people with the "demographic criterion" Nixon requested. BLS Commissioner Geoffrey Moore, who Nixon pressured regularly throughout his time in office, had Goldstein moved to another office, and then reorganized the bureau and had two other Jewish officials moved to different offices as well.

Nixon's general attitude to the BLS was public knowledge at the time, even if the anti-Semitic animus behind it was not. The Washington Post editorialized that "The Nixon Administration is bringing hand-picked political appointees into the Bureau of Labor Statistics." Commissioner Moore later submitted his resignation, which was surprisingly accepted, and many at the time saw this as a clear example of how far Nixon was willing to go to politicize BLS. The full story of Nixon's anti-Semitic rage against the BLS would not be revealed until years later.

The original impetus for Nixon's ire? Goldstein's congressional testimony on employment figures.

Historians and the Courts

Interesting piece by Adam Liptak (NY Times) noting that as the Supreme Court has gotten more involved in "originalism," academic historians have been submitting more and more briefs to the court.

I find this intriguing. If you care about the original intent of the constitution, you really should throw yourself into the intellectual and political history of both the Revolutionary period and the end of the Civil War, when the vital 13th and 14th amendments were enacted. I have long thought that the approach to this question taken by e.g. the Federalist Society was rather shallow; their idea of "originalism" seems to me to focus too much on reining in certain liberal interpretations of the 1960s and 1970s, not actually understanding the past. To actually understand the past you have to do history.

A couple of thoughts:

Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the constitutional convention would have to immediately dismiss Trump's claim to be able to impose tariffs on his own authority. One of the major ideas of the whole revolutionary period was that kings should not be able to impose taxes without popular consent, so the framers very carefully and specifically limited this power to the House of Representatives. And since at that time tariffs were the Federal government's main source of revenue, and since grievances over tariffs had played a part in the Revolution, yes, they absolutely thought tariffs were taxes.

I think they would also be baffled by contemporary interpretations of the Second Amendment. They meant what they said about a "well-regulated militia," and understood the difference between such an organization and a mob like the Paxton Boys. No court over the whole nineteenth century ever struck down any of the many local gun control ordinances in America on Second Amendment grounds.

On the other hand, I cannot imagine any American of the nineteenth century thinking that the constitution protected a right to abortion. This is part of why I was always personally queasy about Roe v. Wade; you're telling me that ths Constution protects a practice that all the men who wrote it and voted for it found abhorent?

But that gets be to a broader question; is a document written in the 1780s really the best guide for politics in the 21st century? This is a question that much preoccupied the great pragmatist judges of early 20th century, men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Learned Hand. The cases that came before them often turned on matters that the constitution's authors had never even imagined, like industrial trusts and anarchist cells. It was no good, Hand wrote, looking to the framers for advice on how to handle such questions. They must be answered by people who know something about them, that is, us.

And yet, would casting aside the Constitution help us? I think not. In fact at the moment I find myself wishing for a lot more fidelity to the Constution, along with a Supreme Court that would do its constitutional job.

So we are left trying to find our way through these thickets as best we can, relying on our political heritage because we must, but reaching beyond it because sometimes we must also do that.

Naomi Novik, "Uprooted"

Fantasy novels by young women make me suspicious. There are so many bad ones, shelf upon shelf of sprightly books saturated with sentimentality, childish notions of romance, and utter ignorance about both the actual past and the grand traditions of myth. But I keep trying, driven by a hunger for wonder and a desire to give all these young, earnest writers a chance. So when I saw Uprooted  (2015) on a "Staff Recommendations" shelf in an old and beloved bookstore that I like to support, I took a look. The first few pages displayed a rather remarkable array of endorsements, including one from from Ursula LeGuin. So I bought it.

Somewhat to my surprise, I liked it. The plot begins in fairytale territory. A wizard lives in a tower, from which he defends the villagers of The Valley against the encroachments of The Wood. Every ten years he chooses a 17-year-old girl from the neighborhood to be his servant. She is freed after ten years, but all the women thus freed leave the valley and never come back. Our heroine, despite being of middling appearance and accomplishments, is chosen. Begin the adventure.

The remarkable thing about Uprooted – as LeGuin said in her blurb – is the magic. Probably 20 percent of the whole book is descriptions of spell-making. When magic first appears in the story, it irritated me, because our tower-dwelling wizard can do things like transform bland stew into excellent roast chicken with a wave of his hand. But we have to blow past little things like transforming kilograms of matter at the molecular level because we have to make much bigger magic. There is a world to save, after all.

Spells, it seems, are written in books where you can read them, but unless you are the right reader, nothing happens. That means you must have the basic talent for magic, but there is much more: the spell must be of the right style to match your own, and the performance must be done in the correct way, in the right circumstances, and so on. Sometimes it is done in pairs, which is described as extremely powerful and dangerously erotic. It is, I thought, something like music.

The story ends the only way a modern story about a  war against a corrupted wood can end, but the journey was well worth it to me.

Addendum: After writing this, I looked up Naomi Novik, and it turns out she is older than she looks in her book-back photo. She was born in 1973, so she was about 40 when she wrote this. Which explains a lot. Interesting to me that I almost put this back because I thought she was much younger than she is, so, ladies, consider that when pondering whether to use a photograph that makes you look young.

Dance

Members of Bodenwieser Ballet dancing at Centennial Park in Sydney, Australia. c. 1939-1941. Photographed by Max Dupain. 

Can Conspiracy Theories be Explained?

Ross Douthat, something of a conspiracy believer himself, offers this attempt at rationalizing conspiracy theories:

Scientists studying the cosmos often speculate about hypothetical forces that might explain peculiar data or results. For instance, some astronomers have suggested that our solar system has an extra planet, way beyond the demoted Pluto, whose effects explain certain other celestial movements. And modern cosmology assumes a vast invisible substance, so-called dark matter, whose hypothesized existence makes sense out of gravitational effects that would be otherwise mysterious.

Conspiracy theories, lately so influential in American debates, can be understood as the political equivalent of dark-matter theories. They emerge in situations where some movement or action seems unlikely or bizarre — unless you can posit some unseen element in the story, some hidden force exerting influence. “Something is missing from the data” is not just a researcher’s reaction to a scientific mystery. It’s also a citizen’s response to developments that don’t seem to quite make sense. 

Ok, fine. The events surrounding the Kennedy assassination were certainly weird. Epstein's friendship with so many of the rich and powerful was pretty bizarre, and his prison "suicide" adds another layer of intrigue. But it strikes me that some of the most powerful and persistent conspiracy beliefs are not rational at all. Many of them purport to explain things that have already been explained, and others take aim at what I would consider the basic facts of animal life.

In the category of "already explained," consider the widespread suspicion of the vapor trails left behind by jet aircraft. The explanation is simple chemistry, in the form of this equation for the combustion of gasoline:

2 C8H18 + 25 02 = 16 C02 + 18 H2O

All that water vapor emerges from the engine hot, hits the cool air of the upper atmosphere, and liquifies, giving us water droplets visible as a long stream of cloud.

And yet thousands of people feel threatened by those clouds, a fear they justify by claims of "chemtrails" or weather control. This has lately morphed into people being afraid of perfectly normal weather, like the guy who wrote a widely circulated tweet saying, "Half an hour ago the sky was clear, and now it's covered with clouds. You can't tell me that's natural."

This is not a "response to developments that don't quite make sense." It is a determination to see the normal operations of the world as sinister.

Let's consider one of the oldest conspiracy theories: the domination of the world by a sinister cabal of Jewish bankers. What is this supposed to explain? 

I would say that it explains why regular folks can work their whole lives and never feel like they are getting ahead, whereas certain smart/lucky financiers can become overnight millionaires. 

But that has already been explained, at least to my satisfaction, by: the Second Law of Thermodynamics (creating order requries work) plus the hierarchical tendency present in all human societies plus Malthusian demographics plus capitalism plus Parkinson's Second Law (expenditures rise to meet income) plus general human foolishness and short-sightedness, which leads most people to fritter away any windfalls that come their way.

We struggle because struggle is the reality of animal life. And we generally find that when people manage to escape economic struggle they find other things to struggle over, with the result that rich people are only marginally happier than the average struggling worker.

We were not put here to be happy and satisfied.

Which brings me to the oldest explanation for conspiracy theories, that they are a substitute for religion. For whatever reason, our species likes for things to have explanations. There must be a reason why a hail storm ruined your crop while leaving your neighbor's untouched. Lacking any clear understanding of weather – and we still can't answer that question about hail storms – you look to the spirit world. You might blame witches, but for most of our history most people have looked to God or the gods. Many people find "God's will" to be a much more satisfactory account of weird phenomena than "we have no idea." As religious belief has faded in the modern world, conspiracy theories have surged into the explanatory void left by the departing gods.

Marketing Self-Satire

Putting out the Halloween candy display in my local grocery store, July 31, 2025.

Links 1 August 2025

Figurine of a woman baking, Syria, 8th-6th century BC,
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.

An Animation 5,000 Years Old

This bowl from Shahr-e Sukhteh in Iran is dated to around 3200 BC. It is painted with what might be the world's oldest example of animation. It shows 5 images of a wild goat leaping, and if you spin the bowl the goat leaps and nips a leaf off a tree. Sort of like a flip book. Now in the Museum of Ancient Iran. See the animation here. What a wonderful thing.

Against Debate

Matt Yglesias thinks "debate" is a waste of time, because 1) debating is a skill that has little relationship to being right, and 2) it never changes anyone's mind. And this:

Most people who disagree with you have no idea what they’re talking about.

They’re generally pretty dumb and haven’t spent much time interrogating their own views, and they certainly haven’t bothered to form even a minimally coherent intellectual or moral approach to the world. They may invoke particular principles to defend their specific commitments, but those principles are so inconsistently applied that it almost feels like bad faith.

This is all completely true. But it’s easy to forget that it’s also true of people who agree with you.

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 in 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 as 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!