Hope I come back next year.
Friday, August 7, 2026
Farewell to Maine
Links 7 August 2026
Roman puglio found in the Netherlands
Many people oppose development because they hate ugly modern architecture. The turn of architecture away from beauty, and the refusal of modernists to acknowledge that their work is horrifying, is to my mind one of the most bizarre stories of the past century. I mean, genocide and war are ancient, but what past culture has embraced uglification with such gusto?
More earthworks mapped in Amazonia lead to a new, higher estimate of the pre-contact population of the region.
My entire fantasy novel, The Voice from the Darkness, is available now on Royal Road. I am planning to publish this on Amazon for fans of physical books.
Some AIs started a religion, and humans immediately joined.
Noah Smith on the spread of dumb populist economic policies.
Sabine Hosenfelder trashes that physics paper from a few weeks ago that claimed to demonstrate that time is an emergent product of other parts of the system and related to entropy, 5-minute video.
Good, clear explanation of the math problems solved by the Astra AI.
Scott Siskind on "the beauty of settled science," much about import and well supported discoveries in psychology.
An argument that regulatory barriers are the main factor limiting productivity growth in the US.
The binmen of Birmingham and the craziness of equal pay for comparable roles.
Experiments disagree on whether AI chatbots increase or decrease loneliness in the people who use them. (Twitter/X)
NY Times list of the 50 best thrillers of the 21st century, seems like some good reading or listening material here.
Interesting piece on Grundvig's Church, a Danish fusion of Gothic and Modern styles.
Matt Yglesias explains that long before Mamdani, Walmart tried to bring cheap groceries to New York City, only to be blocked by unions.
Life feeds on life: a new theory thinks the build-up of poop was a key cause of the Cambrian "explosion."
Dreamy, surrealist paintings by Aron Wiesenfeld.
Pondering Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae 36 years later.
Crazy stuff happening on the leading edge of AI hacking (Twitter/X)
CNN reports that the Pentagon has put out a call for "unconventional" ideas for punishing Iran, crowdsourcing our military strategy.
An update on the air war over Ukraine, from RUSI.
Thursday, August 6, 2026
The Matriarchs of Wetwang Slack
Kinship practices underpin all traditional societies, forming the basis for socially sanctioned reproductive unions, residence patterns and the inheritance of rights and property. Although the relationship between biological relatedness and kinship is not always straightforward, ancient DNA studies are increasingly used to examine the extent to which biological relatedness underpinned social constructs of kinship in prehistoric societies. Here, we report the analysis of genome-wide data for 534 individuals from the Arras Culture of Middle Iron Age northeast England (including 390 from Wetwang Slack, 100 from Pocklington, and 29 from Melton), finding evidence for communities with kinship systems structured along matrilineal lines. At Wetwang Slack, we reconstruct a 13-generation pedigree comprising 195 individuals structured around female-line connections: matrilineal transmissions greatly outnumbered patrilineal ones and male reproductive partners were largely absent from the cemetery, plausibly because they were buried in their own natal communities. Furthermore, the three main sites with robust sample sizes were characterised by non-overlapping dominant mitochondrial haplogroups, implying a maternal clan-based structure. Reproductive unions at Wetwang Slack suggest a recurrent alliance between two dominant maternal descent groups, with members of each group never reproducing with members of their own maternal lineage. Meanwhile, three individuals from lavishly furnished chariot burials at Wetwang Slack were close maternal relatives belonging to a lineage with consecutive generations of close kin unions, a pattern largely absent among other individuals at the site. These results indicate highly distinctive social practices among an elite group embedded in the wider kinship network of the Arras community.
Besides having an awesome name, Wetwang Slack is a very famous archaeological site, especially because of the three chariot burials, all of which were women.
View of one of the burials
Wetwang Slack is generally associated with the Arras Culture of northeastern Britain, which dates from around 450 BC to the Roman conquest. Who these people were is a complicated question. They certainly seem culturally Celtic – just look at their jewelry! – but it has been much disputed whether they were recent immigrants. The new study says no:
The cultural affiliation of the Arras Culture has long been debated because of its use of square barrows, chariot burials and La Tène-style objects, which have often invited comparison with Iron Age communities in continental Europe, particularly groups from the Paris Basin. However, our genetic data do not support a model in which the individuals buried in Arras Culture cemeteries derived from a recent migration of individuals from the Continent. Genome wide ancestry was highly homogeneous across Arras sites and burial contexts, and qpAdm modelling using Iron Age individuals from France as the sole ancestry source provided a poor fit. . . . These results suggest that the distinctive Arras funerary tradition of East Yorkshire reflects local British communities participating in broader La Tène-connected cultural networks, rather than the establishment of a recently arrived continental population.
Reconstruction of a Wetwang Slack chariot
Now these folks, the elite of Bronze and Iron Age Europe, were the descendants of invaders from the steppes. Those invaders were patrilineal and, so far as we can tell, patriarchal as well. So how did the people of the Arras Culture end up matrilineal? Good question!
Another interesting discovery is that members of two of the three great matrilineal lineages married each other regularly, as if they were moities, or reciprocal clans, something documented by archaeologists around the world but not mentioned in any written source about the Celts:
Among 45 reproductive unions for which both maternal 374 lineages could be assigned, 25 involved one partner carrying the major T2e1a1b haplotype 375 and the other H1ao (Fig. 3e). Thus, more than half of the reproductive unions at Wetwang 376 Slack joined the two dominant matrilines at the site.
My overall take is that the Arras Culture was a unique thing, obviously influenced by continental Celts but preserving many aspects of local Bronze Age culture, including, perhaps, matrilineal descent and prominent political roles for women.
Fascinating.Olalde et al., Ancient DNA reveals matrilineal organisation and recurrent unions between dominant matrilines in Iron Age Britain, bioRxiv preprint
The Future of American Politics Looks Bad
On the Republican side, MAGA is morphing from a personality cult into an ideology focused on hating immigrants and rejecting free markets, and the Democrats rising up to challenge them are often socialists, people who lie constantly about the "harm" wrecked by data centers and blame hedge funds for high housing costs, veterans of wokeness who hate George Washington and Thanksgiving, or worse. What is to me the obvious response, sane moderation is nowhere in sight.
Politico on the young Republicans:
“Everyone knows what the problem is: The organizations that bring young staffers to Washington, D.C. have spent the last decade prioritizing blind ideological loyalty instead of competence or intelligence,” said a senior GOP congressional staffer, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive personnel issues. “We have a generation of rabid, incompetent idiots.”
Of specific concern are those labeled groypers — technically, followers of the self-described “White Identitarian” Gen Z streamer Nick Fuentes, though it’s also used as a catch-all term of abuse for young, anti-establishment right-wingers, akin to the usage of “neocon” in the other direction. Fuentes, who has millions of viewers and a deeply antisemitic and misogynistic worldview, gained celebrity among young conservatives as a pro-Trump internet personality and far-right campus agitator. He has since turned on the president for his handling of the Epstein files and his support of Israel and the war in Iran.
Prominent conservative commentators have alleged that groyperism is spreading among younger members of the GOP, including in government — a view seemingly backed by examples like the young Trump administration lawyer who admitted to a “Nazi streak” in text messages revealed by POLITICO. Others point to social-media posts from official government accounts that echo the language or memes of the online far right.
Noah Smith on the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) who seem to be taking over the Democratic Party:
The Republicans have never been this bad before. But in the past, when they got bad, the solution was always pretty simple: Vote for the Democrats. Democracy isn’t perfect, but it does have a natural release valve; you can always just “throw the bums out.” And that’s exactly what we used to do. . . .
And we should elect Democrats, this November. There is no ambiguity here; a Congress that challenges Trump’s lawlessness, investigates his unbridled corruption, and takes a more forceful stand in favor of Ukraine will be unambiguously better than the supine GOP Congress that can do nothing except worship at the man’s feet.
But at the same time, looking at the way the Democratic Party is headed, I think we should be asking how much better things will be under Democrats, including if they win the White House in 2028.
Let’s look at the type of candidates who are winning Democratic primaries. Francesca Hong, a DSA member who is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, tweeted in 2020 that we should “cancel Thanksgiving”. When asked in a recent interview if she had recanted that position, Hong refused, talking about how Thanksgiving was “incredibly painful” for many people. As if that weren’t tone-deaf enough, she appeared to criticize herself for marrying a white man (saying “assimilation…took over”), and talked about having a half-white son as “proximity to whiteness”. . . .
Some had hoped that the Democrats’ socialist faction would be able to escape some of the baggage of “woke 1”, because of their focus on class politics, and because the Palestine issue might be able to muscle aside a whole bunch of unpopular 2010s-era culture-war stances. But Hong shows that this hope will be in vain; the DSA types are the wokest of the woke.
To me, all of this is rooted in a belief that things in America are bad. Against all evidence, tens of millions of us, including, it seems, most of those going into politics, think our system is so rotten it needs radical change.
It may turn out that the inability of people to be satisfied, no matter how good things get, is what eventually dooms our civilization.
Wednesday, August 5, 2026
More From Maine
Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Some Maine Pics
Saturday, August 1, 2026
Classical Sargent
John Singer Sargent, Atlas and the Hesperides, 1922
Detail
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has several John Singer Sargent paintings in classical modes, including both oil paintings like the one above, and frescoes executed in the rotunda in the 1920s.
