Door, Vejer de la Frontera, Spain
Fertility in Mexico is now lower than in the US, 1.60 vs. 1.62. TFN in Mexico City is 0.95, lower than Tokyo.
Interview with John McWhorter about the decline of wokeness and his new book on pronouns, 49 minutes.
Tar pits and their role in paleontology.
Alex Tabarrok calls out leftist Trumpism.
Study arguing that the Spanish Inquisition led to a decline in Spain's scientific production.
Comparing Chinese manufacturing today to the US in the 1950s.
Wreck of the Royal Navy warship HMS Nottingham, sunk during WW I by a Uboat, has been found in the North Sea.
Looking into a 1904 report on declining fertility in Australia: "The reason almost invariably given by people for restricting procreation is that they cannot conveniently afford to rear more children." The authors did not think this was new in 1904: "The desire to keep fertility within such limits as each one for himself deems reasonable has generally been characteristic of a decadent state of society."
John McWhorter wants to abandon "African American," partly because we now have more than two million people in the US who were born in Africa: "A term that is meant to be descriptive but that can refer to Cedric the Entertainer, Trevor Noah, Elon Musk and Zohran Mamdani is a little silly." (NY Times)
Trying to save the art in Haiti's national museum from gang violence.
Studying infantry captains in the US Civil War to measure the effects of leadership. Finds that better captains got better results but also died at a higher rate.
The baby boom in seven charts. A weird and fascinating event that to my mind has never been explained.
Teesside Psychogeography visits Maiden Castle, a mysterious earth and stone construction in North Yorkshire. (First, Second) The world is full of large ancient constructions that we do not understand at all.
An argument that one factor leading to delayed motherhood is time spent in education; women who attend graduate school have their first child later. Which might be fine if that time spent in graduate school were really valuable, but I for one think that creeping credentialism has driven too many people to get master's degrees.
Lots of talk among economists these days about why some cities have been thriving despite industrial decline while others have stagnated. Some people think the key is a flexible business culture. Via Marginal Revolution, here is a short 2017 piece comparing Flint and Grand Rapids, Michigan.
And this, from Jeremy Horpdahl on Twitter/X: "The 10 MSAs [Metropolitan Statistical Areas] *hardest hit* by the China Shock all had positive real wage growth since 2001."
Why Harvard students want careers in consulting and finance. Not entirely about the money.
Study of collaborative work among college students: "All-male teams are
significantly outperformed by both mixed and all-female teams. . . . Exploring mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that
women have greater preferences for cooperation, and - even when controlling for individual ability - exert higher effort levels in teams compared to men."
A philosopher tries to think seriously about envy.
Lots of new construction in Jersey City. One of the puzzles of NYC's housing crisis is why it has not led to much more building in Newark and other older New Jersey cities. (One issue is toxic soil.) But anyway that long-forecast building boom may finally be here.
Noah Smith, The Anti-Immigrant Backlash Comes to Japan
Study of ancient DNA finds that speakers of Uralic languages (including Finnish and Hungarian) likely originated in Yakutia, eastern Siberia, around 4,500 years ago. From Harvard, of course, where among other things they have one of the world's two top paleogenetics labs.
Remarkable horde of tiny fossils from the period of the Cambrian explosion recovered from the Grand Canyon. (NY Times, ungated news story, original paper)
Interesting digital reconstruction of a Siberian warrior from 4,000 years ago.
Study on using guard dogs to keep grizzly bears away from farms in Montana, which seems to work pretty well. (NY Times) The dogs are not tough enough to actually defeat grizzly bears, but they have the advantage of domestication. Wild animals are very much afraid of being injured, since if they can't hunt they might starve, whereas domesticated animals can afford to take more risks, since they know injury means a few weeks of indoor recovery, still getting fed on schedule.
Interesting use of AI in the humanities: train an LLM on Latin inscriptions and then have it help fill in the missing parts of inscriptions. Via Ethan Mollick on Twitter/X.
An more Mollick, asking Veo 3 for videos depicting various video games as community theater.
In the US, divorce rates for people marrying in recent years are markedly lower.
From a study titled Why Americans Aren't Getting Married: "Across social and economic backgrounds, the top reason single Americans gave for remaining single was not money, jobs, or even readiness for commitment, but that it is hard to find the right person to marry." This is leading people worried about the birth rate to invest in coaching young people on how to find a partner. The study's authors are big on "settling" rather than waiting for a perfect soul mate.
4chan, that infamous online hive of scum and villainy, has a book discussion forum called /lit. Over the years there were many debates about the best books and a bunch of polls and so on. Somebody reviewed all of that data and produced this list of the 100 best books, according to 4chan/lit users. I have no idea who participates in that forum, but one imagines they are mostly male, young, and think they are very smart. Lots of good books there, and a few surprises.
A claim that improvements in education can explain about 45% of global economic growth for the world's poorest 20%.
Jeremy Horpdahl reminds us that the whole reason American food producers use corn syrup rather than cane sugar is . . . tariffs. If I ran the American economy the first two things I would do would be to eliminate the corn-based ethanol industry and the sugar tariffs.
In the US, the imprisonment rate for 18-19-year-olds is down 80% since 2007.
Thought for the day, from Jonathan Franzen: "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage."