Antietam Iron Works

Took a fun trip to Antietam today, first the iron works and then the battlefield. This is the Antietam furnace as it was rebuilt around 1845. It was probably established in the 1760s and it was used down to about 1880. However, the history of the iron industry in this region is an almost unbelievable tangle of competing ventures, rapid failures, furnaces that kept the same name even after they had been moved several miles, and so on; the pages about this site at both wikipedia and the C&O Canal Trust are wrong. (E.g., it was never called the Frederick Forge.) We spent a lot of time trying to sort this out when we worked up there in 2008-2010, but I would say we were still only about 80 percent certain we had it right.

View into one of the furnaces. In a furnace like this, the iron ore and charcoal were stacked in alternating layers, and when the charcoal burned the molten iron drained out the bottom of the stack and pooled in molds.

View down into a furnace from above.

Sample of the ore kept at the site. The iron ore along the Potomac River here was noted by one of the first European settlers, Finnish/Swedish frontiersman and Indian trader Israel Friend, and the first mining was in a spot called Friend's Ore Bank. The ore was not of high quality but it was plentiful, and it was easy to dig it out of the river bluffs and load into onto boats for transport.

Moss on a retaining wall.

Across the road from the furnace is a complex of mill foundations. These included the mill where waterpower was used to crush the ore before it was loaded into the furnace.

The nearby Antietam Aqueduct, which carried the C&O Canal across Antietam Creek.

A place I never get tired of.

The Giant Filaments in the Galactic Core

MeerKAT radio map of the Milky Way's core. Notice the "vertical" filaments (perpendicular to the galactic plane), which are a couple of light years across and hundreds of light years long. What an image!

Another view.

The filaments seem to be made of synchrotron radiation, which is produced by particles moving at nearly the speed of light through a magnetic field. Nobody knows, though, what gave those particles their energy, since the don't seem to be streaming away from anything.

MeerKAT has also observed these filaments in other galaxies, and more recently other filaments have been discovered that are roughly parallel to the galatic plane ("horizontal").

More: Scientific American, LiveScience.

You Could Afford a Tradwife

Matthew Yglesias takes up one of my favorite topics, the people who think the decline of housewives means we have gotten dramatically poorer:

One of the most persistent confusions about the economy, one that ricochets through the internet over and over again, is the notion that the decline of the two-parent, one-income household represents a decline in American living standards.

The claim pops up in various forms, and it’s central to Michael Green’s recent viral article contending that the “real” poverty line in the United States is in some sense $140,000. Green’s piece is full of errors, which its fans seem to have largely conceded, but they feel that he’s right on the level of vibes, and I think this bit about dual-earner families is the core of that.

He writes that between 1963 and 2024 “everything changed” and that today a family needs two incomes to maintain the standard of living that used to be provided by one.

This is just silly. You absolutely could maintain a 1960s standard of living on one income in America, which I know because I have good friend who did it. She didn't want to work when her children were young, so she didn't. Instead she lived in an inexpensive area, sent her kids to public schools with iffy reputations, got deeply into frugality, and became an expert on free things to do with children. She was, by American standards, poor. Honestly, though, being poor in America is not so bad. Nobody in her family ever went hungry or didn't have (used) clothes to wear. Her house was small and run-down and had no air conditioning, but it kep out the rain and the cold. They found cheap ways to take vacations. They ate a lot of cheap vegetarian meals. The worst part was that she drove crappy old cars and worried a lot about them breaking down. (Cars are important in semi-rural areas.) Her children't don't seem to have suffered; one has an Ivy League Ph.D.

We work so hard because we consume so much: bigger houses, nicer cars, eating out a lot, computers, internet hookups, fancy televisions and multiple streaming services, etc. One of my favorite examples of how rich we are now concerns coffee. A few years ago, after an hour of walking around in the rain, I stopped at a questionable convenience store and got a coffee poured from a pot that had been sitting on a burner all day. I was shocked by how bad it tasted; it had probably been a decade since I had tasted really bad coffee. But in 1965, most coffee in America was like that, or worse. Now what you get at 7-11 is better than what most expensive restaurants served in 1965.

The main reason we have fewer housewives is, not that we are poorer, but that we are richer. Think about how much more it would cost now to hire a full-time, live-in servant than it did a century ago. The same logic applies to housewives; the more women can earn outside the home, the more they give up by not working, so the less attractive staying home becomes.

The persistent belief that we are poorer than we were 60 years ago makes me throw up my hands. People who believe this are either completely ignorant about life in the 1960s or just stuck in a nostalgia doom loop.

We are rich. Deal with it.

Links 5 December 2025

Roman intaglio showing a grasshopper driving a chariot, 100 BC to 100 AD

AI can steal Crypto.

Scott Siskind, Against The Omnipresent Advantage Argument For Trans Sports.

Hilarious Guardian piece on English Christmas wonderlands gone horribly wrong: "Nana, have we been bad?"

Interesting isolated human population identified in stone age southern Africa, extreme genetic outliers. (News piece, article in Nature)

Article on the Romantasy genre, with statistics and some good observations about the style.

Japanese parliament debates a tax increase to fund more defense spending.

And more Japanese news, protests shut down a developer's plan to build condominiums for foreigners.

New research explores how the bacterial toxin colibactin modifies human DNA, leading to cancer. (Science News, technical article)

One of my minor obsessions is the Battle of Pygmies and Cranes, a very ancient and mysterious bit of Eurasian lore. I just discovered that there is a modern mock epic poem about it by some other enthusiast: "The pygmy-people, and the feather'd train, Mingling in mortal combat on the plain, I sing."

Cartis Yarvin says he was inspired to become a political philosopher by watching YouTube clips that contrasted Nazis in uniform with western "decadence" and "filth." (Twitter/X) Finally, we understand.

Lots in the news about a major study of trait heritability that seems to find that most traits are less heritable than many thought; Scott Siskind goes through it in detail and finds it doesn't convincingly show anything.

The building that houses the Wayback Machine.

A bunch of recent studies have not found that economic inequality has much effect on people's lives: no effect on crime, little effect on subjective well being, etc. (Twitter/X)

Noah Smith: "LatinoIslamophobia vs Islamoleftism is the future of American political discourse."

British film about hedgelaying from 1942, 9 minutes. Why was this made in 1942? To get women to do agricultural work? And did you know that in Britain, hedgelaying is a competitive sport?

A short history of zoning. (Twitter/X, Substack)

Very interesting conversation between conservative Catholic Ross Douthat and trans activist Chase Strangio, who has litigated trans cases before the Supreme Court. (NY Times)

Free article from The Atlantic on how many college students are now considered to have "disabilities" that get them perks like special low-distraction testing sites, and extra time.

And another Atlantic "gift article", Jonathan Chait on The Intellectual Vacuity of the National Conservatives.

Nature retracts a study that predicted huge economic impacts from climate change. (NY Times, Retraction Watch, Nature) Ideology and science do not mix well.

From old line conservative George Will, a piece titled A Sickening Moral Swamp of an Administration. With this: "Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement."

Do western nations owe African nations reparations because of the slave trade? I got this via John McWhorter.

Is this little video about a Chinese guy with a fleet of sword-shaped drones real?

Via Tyler Cowen, advice for men on how to get laid. You're going to see more of this as old fuddy-duddies get increasingly worried that young people aren't having enough sex.

Why did the US Navy cancel its Constellation frigate program? (20-minute video, Newsweeek, Defense News) Many American naval officers are in a state of perpetual rage about the mess in our shipbuilding program.

European militaries are throwing together new anti-drone systems from off-the-shelf components to provide a bridge until projected new high-tech systems become available.

Mental Illness and Crime, Afghan Immigrant Edition

Trump of course wants the shooting of two National Guardsmen by an Afghan immigrant to be about immigration, but all the signs are that it is another sad story about failing mental health. The NY Times:

The emailed plea was urgent and direct: “Rahmanullah needs help.”

The warning came nearly two years before Rahmanullah Lakanwal would be named as a suspect in the gunning down of two National Guard troops near the White House on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was enshrined in writing by a volunteer helping to give Mr. Lakanwal a fresh start in America who had become convinced he was unraveling. . . .

In the months after, he sequestered himself inside his darkened bedroom, refused to answer his phone, and even failed to bathe or dress his sons when his wife left to take short breaks from him. He dropped out of the English classes he was supposed to take, did not seek work and stopped paying rent. His family received an eviction notice.

“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year,” the volunteer wrote in a January 2024 email.

The one way I know of that immigrants create more trouble than the native born is that they have a higher rate of serious mental illness. Nobody really knows why; it could be the shock of moving to such a different place, or it could be that the boldness needed to migrate has some connection to mental troubles. Plus, many mental health organizations have reported a big increas in mental problems among immigrants since Trump began his crackdown; to Trump that is probably a feature, not a bug, but it leaves the rest of us struggling with the fallout.

America is simply not capable of helping or monitoring all the crazy people in our midst who might end up posing a threat. I don't see any solution that wouldn't involve spending a lot of money, and I very much doubt that such money could be found in the current political climate.

The Grid and the Future

Tim Latimer:

The biggest threat to American global competitiveness, and it does not matter if your priorities are climate change, affordability, the AI race, national security or all of the above, is our country’s complete inability to build and upgrade transmission at any meaningful scale.

I agree that this is a huge problem. We are rapidly building new electrical generation capacity in the US, mainly in the form of utility-scale solar arrays. But that does no good if the power can't get to users. We have dozens of solar projects that are built but producing no power because they cannot get hooked to the grid, and they can't get hooked to the grid because the utilities are far behind in making the necessary adjustments. This is why some major power users, like Microsoft, are talking about building their own nuclear reactors. 

Building long-distance power lines is just hard. People hate having them built near their houses, and for good reason: they dramatically depress property values. There is also some evidence that they can contribute to cancer; I think this evidence is bad, but it is better than a lot of other medical evidence many people believe in, e.g. harm from vaccines.

I had a small part in the last major US effort to upgrade our transmission network, the new Appalachian backbone that was necessary to stablilize the east coast grid, built in roughly 1995-2015. That took a lot of political capital, including a handshake between Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, but is showed that we can do it if we put our minds to it. Right now, though, politicians seem to be distracted by other issues.

The technology exists now to bury long-distance power lines, but it is expensive and so far as I know, none have yet been built in the US. But we may have to go that route to reach the grid we need.

"The Raven and the Crown" on Audible

Available here. 

I have long wanted to produce an audio version of The Raven and the Crown, to my mind by far the best thing I have written. Over the years various people have suggested to me that I record it myself. But in my mind I always it heard it read by a woman with a British accent; a man from Virginia would sound all wrong. Last year I explored some of the AI voices available, but they just weren't good enough. 

But then, thanks to the generosity of my family and friends, I was able to hire a professional to make the recording. 

I went into Audible and discovered an amazing system for putting writers and voice actors in touch with each other. You initiate this process by posting a description of your project and a few pages of text for auditioners to read. I did this, went to bed, and woke up to find that 16 people had already posted 4-minute auditions. By the end of the day I had 30 auditions to listen to. I began working my way through them. Most were mediocre, like most of everything. After listening to the same passage 30 times and assigning most of them 2 or 3 stars I was starting to get numb. 

Then I listenened to two wonderful readings by professional English actresses. I assumed that I would not be able to afford them, but I figured I might as well start at the top. So I reached out to the reader I rated the highest, Sarah Kempton, and was astonished that we were able to reach an agreement. As my children told me, voice acting is a brutal business.

The process works like this: you agree on a price, then create a contract within the Audible system. The system specifies all the terms and so on; the enforcement mechanism is that nobody in the audio book business can afford to be blacklisted by Audible. The reader produces a 15-minute segment. If you accept it, you pay half the agreed price in advance. Then the reader begins uploading chapters, which you listen to. 

I loved this. Sarah Kempton's voice is exactly what I imagined when I told people I wanted to hear the story read by a British woman. I was immediately carried away into the world I had made. It took me eight years to write this book, but somehow listening to it in Kempton's voice made it more powerful for me than it ever had been before. I have rarely in my life felt so swept up into a story, and the time I spent listening to each chapter as it came in was by far the best part of many recent days. There were glitches – lines skipped, words misread or mispronounced, etc. But this turned out to be no problem; I just sent Kempton the exact time of the error and she edited the file to fix them. Usually I could  not detect any issue with the audio after amendment, and I am willing to be that no other listener will be able to tell where the changes were made.

My wife asked me if I were following along in the text, and I was at first puzzled by this question. I did not need to. I know what my writing sounds like, and every error jarred in my mind. That, incidentally, is why I am such a bad editor of my own work; I hear too clearly what I meant to write.

Then it was done. I felt sad, because I had loved this process so much. But the end of this process means I can share it with the world.

Kurt Gödel and the Pardon Loophole

Matt Yglesias:

Kurt Gödel, the great logician and philosopher, claimed that a loophole exists in the US constitution that would allow the president to establish himself as dictator. The story goes that he was about to expound on this theory at his hearing to obtain US citizenship but was cut off by Albert Einstein, lest his speculations ruin what should have been a routine proceeding.

I’ve been interested in this question since I first heard the story in college.

And to me it seems that Gödel must have been thinking of the pardon power. . . .  Nothing particularly terrible has ever occurred due to presidential pardons. And yet, it is an extraordinarily broad power with no real checks or limiting principles.

Suppose Kash Patel shows up at FBI headquarters and says he wants to identify the most hardcore MAGA special agents and recruit them to a small elite team. What’s their job? To do illegal wiretaps against Trump’s political enemies in order to blackmail them. Someone on the team says, “Director that’s illegal! I’m all for egregious abuses of power, but I also don’t want to get in trouble.” And he says,” don’t worry, POTUS has you covered with pardons.”

Meanwhile, DC is not a state, which means that we technically don’t have any state laws or state court system. . . and all our local prosecutions are handled by a US attorney rather than an elected district attorney. And this means the president could pardon people for random muggings or assaults or murders in DC. Which is to say that if one of the president’s aides were to shoot an opposition member of Congress (or just an intra-party critic) on the street, the president could pardon him. It’s not just that the country could become a dictatorship in this way (any country can become a dictatorship), but it would be perfectly within the bounds of the constitution. 

Food Banks and Market Methods

Caroline Sutton of Slow Boring explains that an infusion of market methods revitalized how Feeding America distributed donated food to food banks across the nation: 

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1. 

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Prices are information signals, and it is very hard to run an economy without that information. My favorite story about this problem concerns the attempts of the early Soviets to set up a socialist economy. Their economists kept searching for ways to encode and transmit this vital information, including, at one point, a sort of imaginary money much like Feeding America's "shares," but they never did solve the problem and as a result Soviet citizens were a lot poorer than they needed to be.

Alistair Moffat, "The Sea Peoples: the History of Celtic Britain and Ireland"

Medieval Monastery on Skellig Michael, Ireland

From my old web site:

“This is a history,” Alistair Moffat tells us, “of whispers and forgetfulness, a story of how the memories and understandings of the Celtic peoples of Britain and Ireland almost faded into inconsequence.” Right away Moffat impresses us with the beauty of his language, the power of his love for his homeland, and the imprecision of his thinking. What is a history of forgetfulness, anyway? But it is a lovely phrase and it serves as well as any other to introduce Moffat’s delightful and unusual little book. Not really a history, The Sea Peoples (2002) might be better described as an exploration across time and space. Moffat wanders the Celtic lands of Britain and Ireland, especially Wales, Cornwall, the Hebrides, and the Isle of Man, talking to people, describing what he sees, and relating the odd historical anecdote. The historical stories come without concern for chronology, touching on whatever catches Moffat’s interest. We get a little on the pre-Roman Britons and the pagan Irish, a little more on medieval monks, a nice chapter on the arrival of the Vikings and the formation of the half Scottish, half Viking Kingdom of the Isles, and a fair amount on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The stories are fascinating and Moffat tells them well. I learned much, especially about the revival of the Welsh language in the nineteenth century, based on dissenting chapels and hymn singing, and the history of the Scottish borders. I enjoyed almost every page, and I heartily recommend Moffat’s book.

Moffat occasionally goes in for what strikes me as excessive anti-English ranting, but without ever lying or exaggerating – given how many horrible things the English have done to the Welsh and the Irish, he hardly has to – and he also describes a few of the atrocities the Welsh and Irish have inflicted in return. He dwells in particular on the many ways lowland Scots brutalized their highland countrymen, and King James VI and I is one of the story’s worst villains. Among other sundry oppressions he punished a few rebellious clans by banning their surnames. It became a capital crime to use the name MacGregor, and several MacGregors were executed for the offense of going by their own name. Mainly, though, Moffat celebrates the land and people of Britain’s western shores. He visits a builder of traditional Irish boats, hikes the Welsh mountains while reliving the struggle against Edward I, peruses ancient crosses on the Isle of Man. He goes to Padstow to see the famous ‘Obby ‘Oss, where drunk Cornishmen tell him to get the fuck out of their town. Moffat, not the least daunted, regards this behavior as typically Celtic, and he seems pleased that the Padstow men are determined to keep their ancient festival their own.

Moffat is himself a lowland Scot with roots in the border country, and he makes his living as a producer for Scottish television. By way of a midlife crisis he has thrown himelf into Celtic nationalism, learning Gaelic and producing a series of documentaries about the Celtic lands. The book is, as I said, delightful, but I find this sort of small-country nationalism to be a deeply puzzling thing. Alistair Moffat is a citizen of the world, a resident of multi-cultural metropolis, a master of high technology and contemporary art. What, exactly, is he doing in the Hebrides, mucking around in tweed and learning a language that none of his ancestors spoke? (The Celtic element of border culture was Welsh, not Gaelic, as Moffat himself explains.) Why is he associating himself with a history of defeat and oppression, instead of celebrating the Scottish Enlightenment or the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo? I don’t get it. I realize, though, that many of my fellow humans feel this sort of pull toward a small world that they can claim as their own. So I read books like Moffat’s with interest, and wonder what his obsession means.

What, exactly, is Celtic about the western fringe of Britain? Moffat devotes a lot of attention to language, and learning Gaelic has been part of his personal quest. But, as he explains, Gaelic is dying out, and he believes Irish is not far behind it on the road to extinction. Moffat spends a lot of time in Cornwall and on the Isle of Man, where the ancient languages have no more native speakers and are maintained only by a few hobbyists. Only in Wales, he says, does the native language have real strength. So while Celtic is a linguistic term, it is hard to see how language defines the culture of the region. There is history, to be sure, but what do these regions have in common historically but opposition to, and oppression by, English-speaking lowlanders? Moffat has a go at defining a Celtic view of the world, but the only things he comes up with are a love of heavy drinking, a delight in music, a fondness for flowery oratory, a tolerance for bland food, and greater-than-normal interest in sex. On such things we found our personal identities. Over them we fight wars and stage revolutions.

Everything else Moffat finds to say about “Celtic” culture seems to me to be more about pre-modern, peasant culture than anything particularly Celtic. Take, for example, Moffat’s words on how the Celts measured time:

The Celtic way of reckoning time was very different from our modern method of dividing the year into months, days, and hours. The Celtic year was arranged around four quarter-day festivals which took their cue not from the date on the calendar, but from the weather, the landscape and the behavior of animals. (31) 

Which is pretty much the way everyone in pre-modern Europe reckoned time. All Moffat says about how much the Celts love the landscape of their homes, how strongly they have clung to their tiny farms in the face of huge pressure to leave, how deeply they distrust city-based power, and so on, applies equally well to peasants just about everywhere else in the world. I often observe this about nationalists of various kinds. When pressed to name the special characteristics of their homelands, they can do no better than to describe humanity. Small country nationalism is an assertion of difference. I am not like everyone else, says the proud Welshman, Breton, Basque, or Quebecois. But the differences they point to strike me as insignificant, especially compared to the gulf that separates a modern man like Moffat from any of his ancestors born before 1850. In what sense is Alistair Moffat more like Owen Glendower than he is like me?

I think the interest of modern metropolitans in the rural nations of their ancestors grows out of dissatisfaction with the lives we live. Even for successful TV producers, the planet-wide sameness of modern society, the sterility of air-conditioned towers that separate us from the soil and the weather, and the pointlessness of so much that we do batter our souls and full us with emptiness. We are safe from disease and hunger, even tooth pain, but instead of contentment we feel loss. Surrounded by people, we feel alone. We have trouble feeling that any of the greatness around us is our own. We are strangers in the metropolis and our most pressing question is, who am I? The response of many people is to turn their backs on the broader world and immerse themselves in something small. The very smallness of these identities, their hopelessness backwardness, their legacies of defeats and conquests, makes them beacons of meaning in a world that values only celebrity and success. I am a Celt, Alistiar Moffat says to the mirror, and this answer gives him a place to stand amidst the whirl of post-industrial civilization. It is not place I can belong to, or much want to belong to, but his marvelous book gives an outsider some idea of why so many people place their hearts in this quasi-imaginary land.

October 24, 2009 

When Did the United States Have a "Common Culture"?

The big complaint right now across the anti-immigrant right is that the US has lost its "common culture."

So let me ask: when did the US have a common culture?

During the Indian Wars, or the Trail of Tears? Indians used to make up a much larger share of the people in the US than they do now, speaking a vast array of languages and practicing many different religions.

During the mass Catholic immigration of the 1800s, which spawned the Know-Nothings and other anti-Catholic movements, with millions of Protestants saying Catholics had no place in America?

When Mormons were driven out of Missouri and Illinois?

During the Civil War? We lost at least 600,000 men in a fight over whether or not slavery was part of our common culture.

During Reconstruction, when white terrorists fought against Federal troops to seize power in one southern state after another?

In the 1890s, when sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta shared the nation with the first New York City millionaires?

During the coal field wars, when miners took up arms against the bosses, who responded with machine gun fire?

During the fights over votes for women, or birth control? 

During the 1960s, when hippie values swept the country and thousands of families broke up over fights about haircuts and torn jeans? When millions marched against the Vietnam War?

When white policemen let their dogs loose on peaceful marchers for Civil Rights?

Moving on to recent decades, what is our common culture's position on abortion? Gay rights? Marijuana? Are Italian food, Chinese food, and tacos parts of our common culture, or not? What about Indian food, which we have for a majority of family birthdays in this house?

The "common culture" discourse is racist nonsense.

To me, recently arrived immigrants are the most American people. Instead of whining about unfair competition and a world rigged against them, they roll up their sleeves and get to work. They believe in working hard and saving money and getting ahead, an old American faith that has been lost by millions of the native born. They send their kids to public schools. They love democracy. They believe in the future.

To the extent that Americans have any common culture, immigrants embody it.

Dutch Art at Christie's

Jan Josefsz Van Goyen, Brussels, c. 1650 

Peter Paul Rubens, preparatory study for The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, detail, 1550s

David Teniers the Younger, The Temptation of St. Anthony, c. 1635, one of at least twenty versions he painted. Love that temptress.

Gerrit Dou, The Flute Player, 1620s. Dou was Rembrant's pupil.

Links 28 November 2025

Ross Bleckner, Untitled, 1984

Cambrian Chronicles ponders all the stories of drowned lands surrounding the Irish Sea, 20-minute video. There are serious scholars who think these are 9,000-year-old memories of sea level rise. I wrote about some of these stories here.

FIRE takes the case of a man who spent 37 days in jail for a Charlie Kirk-related post.

Drone video of polar bears noodling around the old human settlement on Kolyuchin Island, 3-minute video.

Recoding America announces a pilot project for "outcomes review" in California, testing whether bills passed by the legislature really do what they are supposed to. Could be expanded to reviewing bills before they are passed.

The history of making cheap urban housing illegal.

Good Reason piece on the uproar at conservative think tanks over Tucker Carlson, anti-semitism, etc.

Drawings of London from 1873.

A Roman distance marker from Britain.

An argument against essayists using the word "we." 

A professor makes great claims for "close reading."

Three large coin hoards from the late Roman world.

Some analysis of the proposed Ukraine peace deal. (Twitter/X)

Ukrainian missile strike destroys two valuable Russian aircraft and damages a factory at the Taganrog Yuzhny Air Base. (Twitter/X, news story)

Where do Gnomes Come From?

Gnomus (lower left) in a 1555 Illustration of Mining

Word origins are a common subject of discussion in my house, and this morning we puzzled over "gnome." It sounds Greek, but I can't remember any gnomes in classical literature.

So I looked it up. Oxford has this:

Mid 17th century: from French, from modern Latin gnomus, a word used by Paracelsus as a synonym of Pygmaeus, denoting a mythical race of very small people said to inhabit parts of Ethiopia and India.

So the first use of the word gnomus is by Paracelsus (1493-1541), the famous alchemist? Interesting. As to where gnomus might come from, there are two theories: it may be related to 

gnōmē ‘thought, opinion’ (related to gignōskein ‘know’)

or to 

genomos, which could mean ‘earth-dweller’

Since some Renaissance writers used gnomus to mean a sort of earth elemental (see top), a derivation from genomos makes more sense to me.

Again via Oxford, it was a very rare word until the 1910s, when its use shot up; I imagine this was about the ‘gnomes of Zurich’, who were big for a while in communist propaganda and other conspiratorial views. Then it was a rare word again until the 1960s, when there was a blip – was that more gnomes of Zurich? – then it surged in the 1980s, which was probably some combination of garden gnomes and Dungeons & Dragons.

Anyway I find it interesting that the origins of gnome trace back to Renaissance magi, vs. dwarves, who come from very old Germanic legends; I think Dungeons & Dragons preserves this distinction pretty well.

William Dalrymple, "White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India."

Another book review from my old web site, written in 2012.

 

James Kirkpatrick

I have learned more from William Dalrymple's fascinating White Mughals (2002) than anything else I have read in years. This is partly because it is set in a time and place I knew almost nothing about, but there is more. The story Dalrymple tells is one of those in which romance and family life collide with historical change, personalizing great events and casting new light on human life amidst the whirl of cultural conflict. Dalrymple draws many characters and events into his narrative, and almost always the additions add richness to his tale rather than simple heft. The book is quite long, 400 substantial pages, and it seemed even longer because of the confusing thicket of Indian and Persian names, Mughal titles, and unfamiliar institutions. But the length allows Dalrymple to depict a whole world. We see the courts of the dying Mughal empire, the lives of noble women enclosed in the zenana but still wielding great influence, the pageantry of Indian Islam, the adventure of young men come out to work for the mighty East India Company, most of them doomed to early death but the lucky survivors more likely to get very, very rich than almost any group of ambitious merchants in history.

The center of the tale is the marriage of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British Resident (ambassador) at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad from 1798 to 1805, to Khair un-Nissa, a Mughal woman of very aristocratic family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been routine for British men in India to marry Indian women, and indeed to assimilate themselves to Indian culture in other ways. We have many depictions of Englishmen in this period smoking hookahs in native costume while they watch performances of dancing girls or join the hunts of Rajahs and Mughals. Around 1800, though, this was changing. The more puritanical, nationalist, and racist attitudes of the Victorian age were taking hold among the agents of Imperial Britain, and to "go native" was seen more and more as a betrayal of Englishness and the white race. James's marriage caused a great scandal and was the subject of three formal investigations. It is largely as a result of this scandal that we know so much about James and Khair; the many English-Indian marriages of earlier times excited little comment, and so passed mostly beneath the notice of history.

Khair-un-Nissa

James Kirkpatrick had the mindset of the earlier generation. He was a great admirer of Indian culture and of Islam. When he attended the Nizam's court, he dressed as a Mughal nobleman, and he became an expert both in the languages of the court (Persian and Urdu) and in its rituals. It is hardly surprising that when he fell in love, it was with a native woman. James tried at first to keep his marriage from his English superiors, but he had arrived in India too late for his actions to avoid attracting attention. Word spread, and not in pleasant forms. The first rumors that reached Calcutta said that James had raped Khair and then bullied her family into handing her over to him. Since the Nizam of Hyderabad was a crucial English ally in their struggle to control India and keep the French out, this naturally caused great alarm. As the inquests showed, though, it was not true. Rather, it seems that James was at first the victim of a plot hatched by Khair's mother and grandmother, who allowed him to meet their beautiful young daughter and then encouraged the feelings of the two lovers, even allowing them to sleep together before they were formally wed. Why they did this is somewhat obscure, although there was no shortage of rumors. As Dalrymple reconstructs the tale, it seems that they wanted, first, to abort a match proposed for Khair by her uncle and guardian, to a man that the women thought completely unsuitable. They considered the powerful, wealthy, much-admired British resident a much better match, and so they engineered the affair. Or perhaps, as other sources have it, it was driven by Khair herself (above), who fell in love with Kirkpatrick after observing him from behind a curtain, and then as a spoiled favorite child induced her relatives to grant her will. The result of this conniving was that Khair become pregnant, and Kirkpatrick "did the right thing" by formally marrying her.

However the relationship began, it blossomed into a great love. James repeatedly risked his career by determined loyalty to Khair, and she risked her life by fidelity to him. They had two children together, and seemed to have shared much happiness before a series of tragic events got under way that I will not spoil. It is a lovely tale.

The Kirkpatrick Children

The two children were sent to be educated in England, and one of them grew up to be a famous beauty who knew Thomas Carlyle and served as the inspiration for one of his characters. George Chinnery painted the two children just as they were leaving for Britain, a famous image that now hangs in the board room of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (above). This was their last week as Indians, dressed in Mughal court finery. As soon as they boarded the ship for England they became George and Kitty Kirkpatrick and were brought up to be English, deprived of all contact with their Indian relatives and their early lives.

In telling this story Dalrymple is not interested primarily in just this one romance. Because both husband and wife were so politically important, their marriage became embroiled in the politics of the Nizam's court, and my favorite parts of the book were actually those that examined the rise and fall of ministers and the mix of ceremonial whirl and political tension that was court life in eighteenth-century India. Dalrymple wonderfully evokes the lost world of late Mughal India, with its poets, saints, warriors, sorcerers, ambitious courtiers, and powerful women who controlled events from behind the scenes. This age still had much of the flavor of medieval Persia, but it is copiously documented, so we can follow the lives of noble Hyderabadis in their own letters and proclamations, local chronicles, reports from British and French ambassadors, and many other sources. My favorite character was the wily minister Aristu Jah ("glory of Aristotle"), who guided Hyderabad through the violent storms of Indian politics at a time when many states disappeared. One of Aristu Jah's few serious mistakes was to convince his master to make war on the Maratha Confederacy, a powerful league of Hindu princes to his north. After Hyderabad was badly beaten in the war, the Maratha chief minister insisted that Aristu Jah be handed over as his prisoner. So Aristu Jah was packed off to prison in Pune, and Hyderabad had to give up much territory along the border and pay a huge indemnity. Did this stop Aristu Jah? No:

In the late summer of 1797 Aristu Jah, the former Prime Minister who had ben imprisoned in Pune for over two years, sent some extraordinary news to the Nizam: not only had he succeeded in negotiating his own release, he had managed to get the Marathas to agree to return almost all the land and fortresses that had been ceded to them after the Battle of Kharlda. They had even waived the enormous indemnity owed to them by the Nizam. So astounding was this news, and so remarkable was Aristu Jah's achievement in neogtiating it from confinement, that many of his contemporaries assumed that he could only have achieved this coup with the aid or sorcery.

Aristu Jah

Even more than the lost world of Mughal India, what Dalrymple most wants is to evoke the time when British and Indians interacted as equals, and the British were just as likely to copy native ways as to impose their own. He wants to dwell on this epoch of cooperation and mutual admiration, before the racism and rigidity of the nineteenth century divided the British and Indians from each other. Perhaps he is a bit naive about this time, and perhaps most people on both sides never felt the sort of warmth that James Kirkpatrick felt for his wife and friends. But in our multicultural age, the behavior of the eighteenth-century British in India is a better model than that of their Victorian successors.

For a historian, the story of Dalrymple's research is as fascinating as that of James and Khair. Dalrymple first heard of James and Khair from a tour guide in Hyderabad, and he learned the basics of their story from a scholar whose office was in a crumbling corner of the old British Residency, built by Kirkpatrick himself. He followed the tale through the records of the East India Company and the letters of the Kirkpatrick family. Some of the crucial letters were in a cipher that he could not break until he stumbled across a letter in which the recipient had written in the translation above the numerical code. With each discovery, his knowledge deepens and the story grows. It is a historians' romance as much as one for lovers. Let me reprint one part of the tale, as Dalrmple tells it, to give the flavor of this remarkable quest:

On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. I had forgotten to buy anything for my family, and with my eye on my watch, as the plane to Delhi was due to take off in only five hours' time, I frantically trailed from shop to shop, looking for someone who could sell me some of Hyderabad's great specialty: decorated Bidri metalwork. Eventually a boy offered to take me to a shop where he said I could find a Bidri box. He led me deep into the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid. There, down a small alley, lay a shop where promised I would find ‘booxies booxies.'

The shop did not in fact sell boxes, but books (or ‘booksies', as my guide had been trying to tell me). Or rather, not so much books as Urdu and Persian manuscripts and very rare printed chronicles. These the proprietor had bought up from private Hyderabadi libraries when the great aristrocratic city palaces were being stripped and bulldozed throughout the sixties and seventies. They now lay stacked from floor to ceiling in a dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom cupboard. More remarkably still, the bookseller knew exactly what he had. When I told him what I was writing, he produced from under a stack a huge, crumbling Persian book, the Kitab Tuhfat al-‘Alam, by Abdul Lateef Shushtari, a name I already knew well from James Kirkpatrick's letters. The book turnout to be a fascinating six-hundred-page autobiography by Khair un-Nissa's first cousin, written in Hyderabad in the immediate aftermath of the scandal of her marriage to James. There were other manuscripts, too, including a very rare Hyderabadi history of the period, the Gulzar i-Asafiya. I spent the rest of the afternoon haggling with the owner and left his shop £400 poorer, but with a trunkload of previously untranslated primary sources.

If only studying history were like that more often.

December 23, 2012

Sarah Maas, "A Court of Thorns and Roses"

So I finally did it, broke down and found a copy of the most famous work of modern "Romantasy." This was for two reasons: because an expert on fantasy ought to know something about what is now by far the most popular sub-genre, and because I imagined writing a mocking post about it.

But honestly it was ok. I've read many books that were far worse; in fact, in terms of fantasy novels I have read in the 2020s it might make the top ten. 

Everyone I've mentioned this project to has said something like, "Isn't that smut?" But it really isn't. There's no sex at all until page 300, and when we finally get to it, it is pretty decorous by the standards of contemporary romance. The writing is ok, with some good passages, and there are even some nice bits of fantasy. 

How to describe it?

One of the reviews quoted on the back of my recent copy says, "Sara Maas transcends the genre." But that is exactly wrong. This book wallows in its genre. Absolutely every piece of it is something you have encountered before, either in the ancient archetypes of heroism and romance, or in recent fantasy. Everything unfolds just as you know it should.

Out heroine becomes a bow hunter to feed her starving family. She is so tough and resourceful and perky that she might as well be named Katniss Everdeen. She semi-accidentally kills a faerie, and discovers that because of an ancient treaty between humans and faeries she must either die or go into faerie and replace the person she killed. So she goes into faerie. Her captor is a High Lord (of course) of vast powers and great wealth, with a fabulous mansion and a flower garden even nicer than Mr. Darcy's. When he goes into combat he transforms into a monster I could only imagine as looking exactly like the Beast from the Disney movie. When he gets aroused, he growls, and his claws show. He is amazing in every way, but of course he is under a curse. In fact the whole of Faerie is under a curse, and there is an Evil Queen mucking everything up. For dumb reasons – the weakest part of the plot, imo – the sexy High Lord cannot oppose the Evil Queen, so Katniss, I mean Feyre, has to do it for him, with the help of an ambiguous nobleman from the Night Court who is the best character.

I can't make up my mind about this persistent feminine fantasy. I suppose for most women it is harmless enough, no worse than men imagining themselves as James Bond. But, really, if you think all the time about immortal billionaire Faerie Lords so handsome they hurt your eyes, somehow both dangerous and sweet, violent and kind, serious and fun, perfect in every way except for one flaw or problem that only you the perky earth girl can resolve, can you be happy with actual existing men? I wonder.

Sarah Maas, one piece of advice: you should never make it a key element of your plot that your characters cannot solve a riddle I guessed in about a second. That just makes them look really stupid. As a veteran dungeon master I understand it is hard to create riddles that are hard to solve but still solvable, but you can do better than this.

ADDENDUM

I just flipped through the second volume of this series, A Court of Mist and Fury. The sex starts right at the beginning – Feyre and her Faerie Lord are newlyweds, after all – and is significantly more, um, throbbing. So maybe the series gets smuttier as it goes along.

Hungary's Pro-Natalism

Hungary has gone all-in on promoting births:

Since 2010, Hungary has implemented a variety of policies, including zero-interest “baby-expecting” loans and debt forgiveness for couples with children, personal income tax relief for mothers, and housing support for married couples, in an effort to reverse demographic decline. Hungary spends around 5 percent of GDP on family subsidies, and the OECD ranks Hungary among the top five OECD countries overall in public spending on family benefits.

But as you can see from the chart above, the results have been unimpressive, and they are nowhere near their goal of raising TFN back to the replacement level of 2.1. Last year Hungary recorded 127,500 deaths and 77,500 births.

On the other hand, most of those benefits are only available to married couples, and that has led to a decline in the number of children born to unwed mothers.

MAGA Macedonia

Renee Diresta:

The cleanest way to understand what’s happening on X is to go back in time to Veles, Macedonia in 2016.

A group of teenagers figured out they could make money by driving Americans to websites plastered with ads. They spun up WordPress sites, wrote clickbait headlines, and pushed links into Facebook groups and Pages.

At first they tried a mix of content: generic viral junk, memes, and politics. They worked on sensational stories about the Democrats fighting it out in the caustic 2016 primary: some Bernie things, some Hillary things.

Then they tried pro-Trump stories. The numbers went crazy.

They watched the metrics: Conservative users were more likely to click and share the links, and visit the sites. They A/B tested the headlines: Every time they made the stories a little more outrageous—“Pope Endorses Donald Trump —the engagement went up.

So they made more. Soon entire towns were getting rich.

The Macedonian teenagers didn’t care about the politics. The American right, especially the emerging MAGA ecosystem, was simply a dream customer: highly engaged, highly inflamed, and extremely willing to click through to garbage sites that paid out ad revenue. 

Happy Fibonacci Day

November 23 is Fibonacci Day, because 11/23 is the first four digits of the Fibonacci sequence.

Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1240–50; nobody can explain why we know him by a nickname attested in only one medieval source) was one of the learned men who hung around the court of Emperor Frederick II. Like the rest of that circle he translated Arabic manuscripts, debated philosophy, and argued over arcane questions like "Where is the throne of God?" Some sources say he was a student of the famous astrologer/magician/physiognomist Michael Scot.

An accomplished linguist, Bonacci interviewed merchants from around the Mediterranean about their how they used mathematics. He then wrote a book in which he extolled 1) the numbering system we call Arabic numerals, and 2) the use of the abacus for calculations. He wrote that Arabic numbers are better for accounting because you can keep the digits in columns for easier addition and subtraction. Not clear how important Bonacci's book was in spreading Arabic numerals, which took centuries to take over Europe, but it can't have hurt.

The famous sequence was introduced by Bonacci in his book on the abacus as a sort of thought experiment concerning rabbits. He probably learned about it from an Arabic source, since the sequence had been known in India since the 6th century, but no surviving Arabic manuscript of the period mentions it, so that is a guess.

I find the sequence interesting because it has little practical use. It's just cool. And that is an important introduction of medieval thought, much of which was taken up with ideas just because they were interesting, without anyone wondering if Aristotelian mechanics (say) had any real-world utility. Smart people like stretching their minds, and always have.

Semiyarka and the Bronze Age Steppes

Perusing old photographs taken by the American Corona spy satellites, British archaeologists spotted this interesting pattern in eastern Kazakhstan. I have already mentioned the Corona program here before; these images are not as clear as modern satellite photos, but since they were taken in the 1960s they show a lot of stuff that has since been covered over or destroyed by modern development.

This image appears to show a community made of up walled compounds, each about 50m across. But how old was it? And who lived there?

The Brits who made this discovered reached out to authorities in Kazakhstan and organized a joint expedition to explore the site; the results of their 2018 study have been leaking out for a while, but they have now published a formal article in Antiquity.

The site is called Semiyarka, the "City of Seven Ravines," and it dates to around 1600 B.C.  It measures about 345-acres, or 145-hectares, making it one of the largest Bronze Age sites of the region. It had actually been recorded in 2000, but the people who found it did not have access to aerial imagery and did not realize its scope.

Early reports associated the site with the Andronovo Culture, which is what archaeologists call the culture of the Indo-Iranian people of the steppes, before they invaded Iran and India. But now the excavators assign it to the "Adronoid Cherkaskul Culture," which they say represents a fusion of the Andronovo culture of the Indo-Iranian interlopers with local traditions.

Some artifacts from the site. One of the main things the archaeologists found was evidence of bronze working. This fits perfectly with the Indo-European tradition; in settlements of the slightly older Sintashta Culture, centered around the southern end of the Ural Mountains, every large house had its own hearth for smelting metals.

Andronovo Bronze Axes

Andronovo Ceramics

Every piece of evidence we find on the steppes, either archaeological or genetic, further confirms the model of Indo-European migration.

Links 21 November 2025

Mosaic in the House of the Boar, Pompeii

Thirty-four years of Strandbeests, 22-minute video.

Jeremy Horpedahl, "Four charts to overcome your pessimism about how recent generations are doing economically."

Reuters says 600 Americans were fired for comments posted after Charlie Kirk's assassination.

The sea wolves of western Canada (see here) have been videotaped raiding traps set for invasive green crabs. (YouTube, CBC, NY Times) Lots of blaph about whether this means wolves "use tools," but I would put it under the category of general cleverness.

A pretentious intellectual visits Las Vegas, has a good time.

Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl of Boom Supersonic, lots of wild transportation talk.

People going against the status quo are more likely to be confidently wrong.

Moss spores that spent nine months in space germinated when they were brought back to earth.

Max Stirner's radical individualism, 53-minute lecture from Wes Cecil. You can think that Stirner was a narcissist but he was dead right about Marx and Engels and their worship of abstractions.

Piers Taylor celebrates "deeper and messier architecture," some interesting buildings.

A claim that the English may have gotten more intelligent, genetically, in modern times and that this explains the Industrial Revolution. Maybe people are getting smarter – there is other evidence of this – but any association with the Industrial Revolution is suspect because the authors present no comparative data from China, where a rich civilization full of smart people did not industrialize.

A strange Viking burial with scallop shells on her face. 

Study finds that Brexit reduced the GDP of the UK by 6-8%.

Sculpted reliefs of theatrical masks found at Roman site in Turkey.

New experiment shows that under one particular set of conditions, readers, including MFA students, prefer the literary output of ChatGPT over that of human authors.

Catalan artist Jaume Plensa's humanist scuptures.

Tyler Cowen on AI poetry. I find most contemporary poetry unreadable, so I would be happy to have more good stuff from any source.

Richard Hanania shreds Patrick Deneen's "post-liberal" philosophy.

New study: "Evidence that learned avoidance of a pathogenic bacterium can be transmitted to future generations in C. elegans is growing."

Somehow they have persuaded some Brits to run across the landscape while being hunted by baying hounds.

Nuts on the woke right copy nuts on the woke left, now with fake hate crimes (New Jersey Globe, Twitter/X)

A long past post that has gotten a bunch of views lately: Free Love, which used the catastrophic romantic experience of the Shelly/Byron circle to show that the traditional wisdom about marriage is correct.

Europe is not ready for war with Russia (Twitter/X). All this tweeter says is true, but I think he vastly overrates the threat. A force that can't take Pokrovsk is not storming into Warsaw. Yes, drones are awesome and Russia has a ton of them, but Israel just showed they're not much use against F-35s.

There are so many fiber optic lines lying across fields along the front line in Ukraine that Russian soldiers get tangled in them, in this case making the soldier unable to avoid an oncoming drone.

Lots of economists and foreign policy types are saying that the Russian economy is in terrible shape. Most do not think that it is likely to collapse, but Russia's ability to fund the war keeps decreasing and the long-term cost to the nation keeps mounting. On YouTube: Professor Gerdes, Jason Jay Smart, Nigel-Gould Davies, Perun. Text articles: Atlantic Council, Meduza. Summary from one of these speakers: "Time is no longer on Russia's side." And here is a claim from Russian media that half the nation's clothing shops have closed.

Short video showing 100 interceptions of Shahed-type drones by Wild Hornets interceptor drones.

The UC San Diego Math Scandal

Kelsey Piper at The Argument:

UCSD has offered remedial math for nearly a decade — but lately, the share of students requiring it has skyrocketed. In the fall of 2020, 32 students took Math 2. In the fall of 2025, fully 1,000 students had math placement scores so low they would need it.

In fact, many of the students didn’t just need remedial high school math — their scores indicated they needed remedial middle school or even elementary school math. Only 39% of the students in the remedial class knew how to “round the number 374518 to the nearest hundred.”

Reviewing test results like these, you would expect transcripts full of Cs, Ds, or even failing grades. But alarmingly, these students’ transcripts did not even reflect profound struggles in math. Mostly, they were students whose transcripts said they had taken advanced math courses and performed well.

“Of those who demonstrated math skills not meeting middle school levels,” the report found, 42% reported completing calculus or precalculus. “The pattern of high school math classes taken in many cases suggests much higher levels of math skill than the actual math skill the student often has.”

After reviewing the report on which this was based, Piper interviewed some high school math teachers about it:

“I have taught AP Calc in circumstances that produced this kind of result,” one public school high school math teacher told me. “No one can do fractions.”

The students are missing so many prerequisites that teaching them calculus is basically hopeless. And indeed, almost all of them fail the AP Calculus exam at the end of the year.

“My exam results when I was teaching it were mostly: One student (who actually has most of the prerequisite skills) gets a five and maybe one more ekes out a three and everyone else gets ones and twos,” the teacher told me. “I wasn’t allowed to grade in a way that would hold them accountable.”

“What would happen,” I asked, “if you did grade based on their actual mastery of calculus?”

“If I was failing all the kids who weren’t doing on-level work, that would be almost all,” she told me. “The kids would all be trying to drop the class to preserve their GPAs, because that is the set of kids that cares about class rank. And if all the kids drop, they just won’t run the class at all.”

A sense that something dire is happening in American public education is widespread across the political spectrum. As Piper says, the situation at the University of California is worsened by a combination of widespread grade inflation and their decision to stop requiring SAT or ACT scores for admission. But this is far from the only sign of trouble.

Somebody needs to hold students accountable and give them appropriate grades long before they get to high school math. Sadly, nobody in the American educational system has any incentive to do that.

Politically, I think this is a particular problem for Democrats. For the past 50 years voters have generally ranked Democrats as more trustworthy on education, but that is no longer true; the combination of woke fads, excessive "equity," and passing students who have learned nothing has depressed Americans' view of public schooling and the party most associated with it.