Violent Raids in Iraq and Virginia

Alex Horton was an infantryman in Iraq, where he participated in his share of violent raids on Iraqi homes. Many of which, he is now convinced, did more harm than good.

In one instance in Baghdad, a stray round landed in a compound that our unit was building. An overzealous officer decided that we were under attack and ordered machine guns and grenade launchers to shoot at distant rooftops. A row of buildings caught fire, and we left our compound on foot, seeking to capture any injured fighters by entering structures choked with flames.

Instead, we found a man frantically pulling his furniture out of his house. “Thank you for your security!” he yelled in perfect English. He pointed to the billowing smoke. “This is what you call security?”

We didn’t find any insurgents. There weren’t any. But it was easy to imagine that we forged some in that fire.

Now Horton lives in Virginia, where police burst into his apartment one morning, guns pointed at his head. It was a simple mix-up; emergency repairs were being made to his apartment, so the superintendent put him in a vacant unit, without telling the neighbors, who then reported a squatter to the police.

When I later visited the Fairfax County police station to gather details about what went wrong, I met the shift commander, Lt. Erik Rhoads. I asked why his officers hadn’t contacted management before they raided the apartment. Why did they classify the incident as a forced entry, when the information they had suggested something innocuous? Why not evaluate the situation before escalating it?

Rhoads defended the procedure, calling the officers’ actions “on point.” It’s not standard to conduct investigations beforehand because that delays the apprehension of suspects, he told me.

I noted that the officers could have sought information from the apartment complex’s security guard that would have resolved the matter without violence. But he played down the importance of such information: “It doesn’t matter whatsoever what was said or not said at the security booth.”

This is where Rhoads is wrong. We’ve seen this troubling approach to law enforcement nationwide, in militarized police responses to nonviolent protesters and in fatal police shootings of unarmed citizens. The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers’ personal security. That approach has caused public trust in law enforcement to deteriorate.

Yes. Shoot first, ask questions later is exactly the wrong response for police to take, no matter where they are. Ignorant violence is never the right response to anything.

Castelnaud

Today's castle is Castelnaud in the Dordogne region of France, once on the eastern border of the great Duchy of Aquitaine.

The first castle was built here in the 12th century. In 1214 it belonged to Bernard de Casnac, one of the most outspoken Cathar nobles of France. After the Albigensian Crusade was declared, the crusading army under Simon de Montfort made this one of its first targets, and the castle was taken and destroyed. Only foundations survive from that early fortress.

After 1259 new castle was built on the site by the Duke of Aquitaine, that is, King Henry III of England, and entrusted to an allied knightly family who adopted the name Castelnaud. In 1368 an heiress of that family married Nompar de Caumont, and the Caumonts held the place down to the Revolution.

Castelnaud sits almost directly across the river from another famous castle, Beynac. During the Hundred Years War the Dordogne River was the boundary between English-held Aquitaine and France; Castelnaud was on the English side, while Beynac was held by the French. Although there were no great battles or sieges here, there must have been constant low-level fighting for years at a time. Both castles were much enlarged and improved during those years.

Plan of the castle. You can see the lower part of the keep and some surrounding walls date to the 13th century, with much of the rest dating to the 14th and 15th. The French crown finally took the castle in 1442, but the Caumonts switched sides and got their castle back.

During the 16th-century Wars of Religion there was again much fighting in this area, and the fortifications of the castle were strengthened with bastions and canon. The castle was held by a Protestant captain named Geoffrey Vivans who comes down to us as Geoffrey the Batteler; not surprisingly, the Catholics never managed to take it.

In the 17th century the Caumonts moved to a more modern home, and the castle was largely unoccupied; after the Revolution it fell into ruins and was used as a stone quarry.

Today the castle belongs to the Rossillon family, who have restored much of it and operate it as a museum of medieval warfare. Above, some of the trebuchets on display.

Sixteenth-century archer's wristguard, ivory, on display in the museum.

Oh to see it like this, with the modern world hidden in the fog.

Proto-Farming, 23,000 Years Ago

Interesting news from the Sea of Galilee, where archaeologists are investigating the origins of farming by investigating the origin of weeds.

Weeds are currently present in a wide range of ecosystems worldwide. Although the beginning of their evolution is largely unknown, researchers assumed that they developed in tandem with cultivation since the appearance of agricultural habitats some 12,000 years ago. These rapidly-evolving plants invaded the human disturbed areas and thrived in the new habitat. Here we present unprecedented new findings of the presence of “proto-weeds” and small-scale trial cultivation in Ohalo II, a 23,000-year-old hunter-gatherers' sedentary camp on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Israel. We examined the plant remains retrieved from the site (ca. 150,000 specimens), placing particular emphasis on the search for evidence of plant cultivation by Ohalo II people and the presence of weed species. The archaeobotanically-rich plant assemblage demonstrates extensive human gathering of over 140 plant species and food preparation by grinding wild wheat and barley. Among these, we identified 13 well-known current weeds mixed with numerous seeds of wild emmer, barley, and oat. This collection provides the earliest evidence of a human-disturbed environment—at least 11 millennia before the onset of agriculture—that provided the conditions for the development of "proto-weeds", a prerequisite for weed evolution. Finally, we suggest that their presence indicates the earliest, small-scale attempt to cultivate wild cereals seen in the archaeological record.

The argument is not that this site represents "the origin of farming" or anything so dramatic. Rather, the idea is that occasional experiments with sowing seeds in disturbed ground went on for thousands of years before this evolved in agriculture.

One interesting detail is that the next period of this site did not produce any evidence for farming of any sort. So if these people were farming, their descendants gave it up.

We suggest that the Ohalo II archaeobotanical remains indicate that the locals practiced small-scale cultivation, with no evidence for its continuation in the following period. Similar failed trials with new techniques are known from the history of technology.

But I am also fascinated by the notion that weeds have co-evolved with agriculture. Many weeds are species that populate river floodplains, colonizing ground disturbed by annual floods. How much did they have to change to become efficient colonists of plowed fields? The systematic plowing of a large part of the world's surface is one of the most profound changes humans have wrought on the earth.

Children are Not All the Same

Woodrow Wilson -- future president of Princeton, author of numerous best-selling books, and possibly the greatest pedant ever to reach the heights of power in the U.S. -- did not read at all until he was 9, and could not read well until he was 11.

On the other hand Terry Tao, mathematics prodigy who went on to win the Fields Medal, taught himself to read at 2.

How to design a school system to accommodate the diverse abilities of millions of children is a problem of enormous magnitude, quite possibly beyond our ability to solve. But it seems to me that we need more flexibility, not more bureaucracy, no matter how well intentioned. The premise of No Child Left Behind and similar laws, that all children can learn the same things at the same ages, is simply wrong.

The Chicken Church of Indonesia

Marvelously weird church built in 1990 by Indonesian preacher Daniel Alamsjah, who says he received a vision from God to build a church in the shape of a dove.

But nobody thinks the result looks like a dove. Sadly it is rapidly decaying, and within another decade it will likely be a pile of plaster. From This is Colossal.

Pluto's Atmosphere

Shot by New Horizons, looking back toward the sun.

Porringers from Colonial Delaware

Two porringers (handled bowls) we excavated two years ago from a tenant farm site in Delaware, circa 1740 to 1760. The one on the left is coarse red earthenware, possibly American, the on the right Staffordshire slipware from England. I was just reviewing the figures for our final report and I was struck by this image. Porringers were a very traditional part of northern European culture, used for eating porridge or soup while sitting in front of the fire rather than at a table. When eating meals at a table became the norm in the Victorian age, these were largely phased out. Now my children use large coffee cups the same way, although around the television instead of the fire.

John Kasich Isn't Scared

John Kasich is setting himself up to be the thinking man's candidate for the Republican nomination. Everyone else in the race seems to think the country is facing dire threats from every direction, but Kasich said this in his announcement speech:

We pick up the paper, it's Chattanooga, it's Fort Hood, it's ISIS. Are we safe? Are we going to be safe to go to the mall or safe to leave our homes?

These are the worries that many Americans have, but I have to tell you as serious as these are—and they are very serious—we've had a lot worse, much worse in this country. Think about it. The Civil War, do you remember reading about it? It's not just neighbors fighting against neighbors, but it was even family members—kin fighting against one another and killing one another on a battlefield right in America.

How about the about the racial violence that we experienced in this country? The early days of television when they put the dogs and the gas and the batons on people of another color.

Or the world wars? Where many in our families never came home, leaving widows and children without a dad.

Or the depression? The depression. Ask your grandfather, ask your mom and dad about that depression. My father used to say that he'd go down to the store and get some food for the family and the guy would say, "We'll put it on your bill." There was no bill. That's what it took for America to get through the depression.

And you all remember that crystal clear morning and the horror we felt on 9/11. But guess what? We've always gotten through it because the testing is what makes you stronger. It's the challenges that make you better. I have lived through them and I have become stronger for them and America has become stronger for them and here is how we've done it—by staying together. Not by dividing each other, but by staying together with our eyes on the horizon, with our eyes on the horizon about the future.

Of course, we all know what happens to calm, thoughtful candidates for the Republican nomination.

Justin Logan of the Cato Institute was puzzled; why would Kasich say such things, given that they won't appeal to any definable element of the party?

I can't explain what Kasich was up to here. Maybe he's already harbored these views. Maybe he thinks in a field this size he needs to differentiate himself. Maybe his speechwriter got a little frisky and Kasich wasn't really paying attention because he knows he can't win.

As if telling the truth were something that needed justification.

What Universities Are

Interesting essay by Kevin Carey on what a university is: not a "unified teaching organization" but a bunch of separate departments and courses held together by school colors and a football team. It is, says Carey, folly to evaluate the quality of a whole university, because departments and professors vary so much even on the same campus. And this explains, he says, why studies consistently fail to find that what college they go to makes much difference in how much students learn: that depends much more on their own initiative in seeking out the best courses than their school mascot. The reason students at top schools do better, Carey argues, has more to do strict admissions requirements than anything that happens once the students arrive on campus.

Two thoughts: first, universities have been like this for as long as there have been universities. Medieval universities seem to have held both great scholars and a mob who spent most of their time drinking and whoring. Just now I'm listening to a biography of Woodrow Wilson, and it struck me that Princeton during his tenure was two separate institutions, one for ambitious scholars and one for social climbers obsessed with getting into the right fraternity. When Wilson tried to ban the fraternities and get the whole school to focus on academics, he was blocked by wealthy alumni and then kicked upstairs to the governor's mansion, replaced by a genial president who understood the college's social role.

Second, Carey's argument isn't entirely right. I do believe that a motivated young person can learn a lot at almost any American university; at a less selective school a young prodigy might get personal attention from professors that would more than make up for the lack of broad opportunities. But a school like Harvard or Berkeley does offer opportunities than a less prestigious school does not, including the opportunity to make friends with the equally ambitious. For me the great thing about Yale was that for the first time in my life I did not feel like my thirst for knowledge made me unusual; I went from being a weirdo brain to fairly average, and I loved it. Also, the most demanding courses at Yale were demanding at a very high level, with reading lists that went well beyond anything I have ever had the nerve to assign, and an expectation (met or not) that the students would read these books and understand them.

Education, as I often say, is mysterious and hard, and there is probably no way to design a university that would work for everyone. But we have many that offer students amazing opportunities, if they choose to take them.

Iraq and Iran

Peter Beinart supported the invasion of Iraq, and regrets it; partly for that reason he now supports the deal with Iran. He wonders why others who supported the war aren't asked about it when they pontificate about Iran:

The Iraq War was one of the most important, and damaging, episodes in the history of U.S. foreign policy. The debate preceding it pitted people who believed Saddam Hussein was malevolent but rational against people who believed he might well nuke the United States. It pitted people who trusted that International Atomic Energy Agency inspections could contain Saddam’s nuclear program against people who thought he would build a nuke under the IAEA’s nose. Most fundamentally, it pitted people who believed that the only way to keep America safe was to force Iraq’s utter capitulation, via regime change, against people who preferred an imperfect accommodation that did not risk war. Sound familiar? . . .

It’s as if there are no relevant precedents (except, perhaps, Munich). Again and again, pundits who championed the invasion of Iraq—people like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer—appear on television advocating the same worldview they advocated in 2002 and 2003, and get to pretend that nothing has happened over the last 15 years to throw that worldview into question. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which championed the invasion of Iraq, can mount a mammoth lobbying campaign against the Iran deal without being asked why, given its track record, anyone should listen to it this time. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who in 2002 told Congress that “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is … advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons” and that “If you take out … Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” can appear on Sunday show after Sunday show smugly lecturing the host about the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the Iran deal’s implications for the Middle East without having his earlier comments read back to him.

As Obama has long said, ending the war was a small thing compared to ending the attitudes that led to the war.

Those Radical Drug Chemists at the NIST

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has the reputation of being the government's most boring scientific arm, the sort of place where people measure constants to the 11th decimal place and worry about inserting the correct number of leap seconds per decade. I once knew two graduate students in physics who used to threaten each other with “if you keep this up you'll end up at the NIST.” But maybe it was all a facade:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) appears to have been the unwitting victim of a real-life Walter White, the meth-cooking chemistry teacher in the hit television show Breaking Bad. A weekend explosion at the federal laboratory’s Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus was linked yesterday to the production of methamphetamine, an illegal stimulant often “cooked” in home laboratories. Federal and local law enforcement agencies are now investigating how the explosion happened and whether a NIST security guard injured in the blast might have been involved. . . .

On Saturday, 18 July, an explosion rocked the NIST campus around 6:45 p.m., injuring the security guard and sending the institute’s fire and police forces flocking to the scene. The explosion happened at “special projects” Building 236, a smaller facility with laboratories reserved for particularly hazardous research. According to NIST spokeswoman Gail Porter, the lab in question was not in use at the time of the incident, but was transitioning from combustion research to a new project.

The guard, who suffered non–life-threatening burns, resigned on 19 July, Porter said.

The Associated Press has reported that Epsom salts and other materials associated with meth production were found in the lab, whereas one local television news station quoted federal law enforcement sources saying that pseudoephedrine, drain opener, and a recipe for meth were also found.

Fascinating.

More on the Resurgence of U.S. Grant

Huffington Post has a little feature on the rising reputation of U.S. Grant as both a general and a president. A new generation of historians blames his bad reputation squarely on southern racists:

Grant's critics were "determined the Civil War would be interpreted from the point of view of the Confederacy," said John F. Marszalek, a historian and executive director of the Ulysses S. Grant Association. "The idea that Grant would do things that would ensure citizenship rights for blacks was just awful and so he had to be knocked down."

Grant's "presidency was basically seen as corrupt, and it took place during Reconstruction, which was seen as basically the lowest point of American history," said Eric Foner, a civil war historian at Columbia University. "Whatever Grant did to protect former slaves was naïveté or worse." . . .

"We now view Reconstruction ... as something that should have succeeded in securing equality for African-Americans, and we see Grant as supportive of that effort and doing as much as any person could do to try to secure that within realm of political reality," said Brooks Simpson, a historian at Arizona State University. "We see him as on the right side of history."

Between 2000 and 2009 Grant jumped 10 places in C-SPAN's ranking of U.S. presidents, which is based on a survey of historians; he now sits at 23rd.

Nalanda

Nalanda was a Buddhist monastery in northeastern India that became a great center of learning and is sometimes now called the world's first university. William Dalrymple called it "the greatest repository of learning east of Alexandria." It has legendary roots going back to the time of Buddha, but its history begins in the fifth century CE under the Gupta Empire. According to Amartya Sen,

By the seventh century Nalanda had ten thousand students, receiving instruction not only in Buddhist philosophy and religious practice, but also in a variety of secular subjects, including languages and literatures, astronomy and other sciences, architecture and sculpture, as well as medicine and public health. . . .

Nalanda drew students not only from all over India, but also from China, Japan, Korea, Sumatra, and other Asian lands with Buddhist connections, and a few from elsewhere, including Turkey. It was the only institution of higher learning outside China to which any Chinese in the ancient world ever went for education.

Our best descriptions of the monastery at its height come, as is often the way, from foreign visitors. The most detailed is by the Chinese scholar Xuanzang, who spent nearly two years at Nalanda in 637 and 642:

Moreover, the whole establishment is surrounded by a brick wall, which encloses the entire convent from without. One gate opens into the great college, from which are separated eight other halls standing in the middle (of the Sangharama). The richly adorned towers, and the fairy-like turrets, like pointed hill-tops are congregated together. The observatories seem to be lost in the vapours (of the morning), and the upper rooms tower above the clouds.

Xuanzang tells us that various emperors had assigned the revenues of 200 villages to support Nalanda.

I was interested to read that just as in medieval Europe, a great emphasis was placed on disputation:

The school regularly arranged debates between people—teachers, students, and visitors—who held different points of view. The method of teaching included arguments between teachers and students. Indeed, as one of Nalanda’s most distinguished Chinese students, Xuan Zang (602–664 AD) noted, education in Nalanda was not primarily offered through the “bestowing” of knowledge by lecturers, but through extensive debates—between students and teachers and among the students themselves—on all the subjects that were taught.

Did that spread from India to Europe, or was it natural in a world with few books and many divergent opinions?

After 1000 CE, Nalanda began to decline, parallel to the decline of Buddhism in India. The final blow was delivered in 1200 by a Muslim captain named Bakhtiyar Khilji, who sacked the place and left it in ruins.

Archaeologists have been poking around the ruins since 1811, and modern work confirms the importance of the site. The plan above shows the center of the complex. To the left are the remains of four great temples, one of which is shown in the photograph at the top of the post. To the right of the main thoroughfare are ten monasteries all built to similar plans.

Nalanda has been in the news lately because of an ongoing effort to refound it as a pan-Asian university, recreating the ties between Asian countries that characterized the era of Buddhism's spread. From the time of Buddha until the 12th century, India exercised a great influence across Asia. Indian-style Buddhas can be seen everywhere from desert outposts on the Silk Road to Indonesia and Japan. Across the whole, vast region, home to half the world's people, scholars and monks looked to India for guidance, and hundreds of Buddhist scholars and seekers traveled to India to study.

After Buddhism declined in India, losing both popular support and royal patronage, those links were broken. Now many Asians are looking to bring them back. For the past 300 years or so Asians looking beyond their own borders have looked to Europe or North America rather than to other Asian states, and many Asian intellectuals think it is time to abandon this colonial attitude. So the refounding of Nalanda has drawn support across Asia, notably in Singapore and Korea. Most of the money has come from the Indian government, but the board of visitors includes several members from other countries. Although the campus is still mostly under construction, the first classes at Nalanda have now been held.

The first Chancellor of the university was Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize-winning economist and possibly the Indian academic best known in the west. Sen is a champion of secularism and internationalism, and he guided the university in that direction. When the new Hindu nationalist government took power in India -- led by a man Sen had said was unsuitable to be Prime Minister -- tension was probably inevitable. Now Sen has stepped down as Chancellor, leaving it open to question whether the new Nalanda will continue in the direction of international, pan-Asian studies, or whether the Hindu government will impose its own vision.

I learned all of this over the past two days, and I continue to marvel at the vastness of the world, and the amount of human history about which I know nothing.

Waddesdon Manor

Looking through art and architecture blogs on tumblr this weekend I saw this picture posted on several sites, identified as Charlecote Park. But Charlecote Park is a rather severe Tudor construction, and this looks nothing like it. Curious, since I like this building so much, I started searching around, at first hitting a bunch of dead ends. I eventually traced it back to the travel blog of the man who took it, and from there identified it as Waddesdon Manor.

Waddesdon Manor comes up when you search for "Tudor Manor," but it is not. It was built for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild (1839–1898) in the style of a French Renaissance château. The architect was Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, who had previously worked on restoring a couple of original French Renaissance châteaux. It was built between 1874 and 1889.

What an astonishing house. Sad to think that our current generation of robber barons will leave no legacies like this, since our architecture is so ghastly.

Details.

Nineteenth-century interior views. Although the outside had a Renaissance look, the house was in some ways very modern, with a steel frame and electric lights -- it was here that Queen Victoria first encountered electric lighting, and according to Rothschild family lore she spent ten minutes turning a chandelier on and off.

And modern views.

Two views of the Smoking Room in the Bachelor Wing, a whole wing of the house set aside for all-male gatherings. Much of the famous Rothschild collection of Renaissance arms and armor was displayed here.

The last member of the Rothschild family to own Waddesdon was James de Rothschild (1878-1957). He bequeathed the house and its contents to the National Trust, and he also set aside a trust to maintain it. So it is still in marvelous condition, and visited by more than 300,000 people a year.

More Genetic Data on the Anglo-Saxon Invasion of Britain

The latest genetic study:

British population history has been shaped by a series of immigrations and internal movements, including the early Anglo-Saxon migrations following the breakdown of the Roman administration after 410 CE. It remains an open question how these events affected the genetic composition of the current British population. Here, we present whole-genome sequences generated from ten ancient individuals found in archaeological excavations close to Cambridge in the East of England, ranging from 2,300 until 1,200 years before present (Iron Age to Anglo-Saxon period). We use present-day genetic data to characterize the relationship of these ancient individuals to contemporary British and other European populations. By analyzing the distribution of shared rare variants across ancient and modern individuals, we find that today’s British are more similar to the Iron Age individuals than to most of the Anglo-Saxon individuals, and estimate that the contemporary East English population derives 30% of its ancestry from Anglo-Saxon migrations, with a lower fraction in Wales and Scotland. We gain further insight with a new method, rarecoal, which fits a demographic model to the distribution of shared rare variants across a large number of samples, enabling fine scale analysis of subtle genetic differences and yielding explicit estimates of population sizes and split times. Using rarecoal we find that the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon samples are closest to modern Danish and Dutch populations, while the Iron Age samples share ancestors with multiple Northern European populations including Britain.

This is based on only ten skeletons, so don't take it too seriously. But other studies have come up with similar numbers, so I think there is a good chance this is about right. If it is, then the Anglo-Saxons did have a major impact on Britain, because thirty percent is a substantial contribution from invaders; by comparison the population of Turkey seems to be less than 10% Turkish (genetically) and maybe no more than 2%.

The Unending Crisis of Psychiatry

Just noting another article by another psychiatrist bemoaning that his field is "in crisis." I have been reading about this crisis in identical terms for most of the past twenty years. The crisis can be described in several different ways, viz: is psychiatry about the physiology of the brain or the state of the soul? is it another branch of pharmacology, or is treating mental problems different from treating infections? should we be finding ways to make therapy work better, or discarding it as mumbo-jumbo and looking to do everything with drugs and electric currents? are psychiatrists scientists or humanists, or perhaps priests?

Has anyone read a book or article lately by a psychiatrist who loves his or her work and thinks the field is in great shape?

Thirty years ago there was a raft of books by people very excited about the potential of new drugs like Prozac and lithium, certain that our growing knowledge of the brain would soon lead to miracle cures of mental problems. I'm not hearing very much along those lines these days. ("Anyone who thinks otherwise should remember the Decade of the Brain, which ended 15 years ago without yielding a significant clue about the underlying causes of psychiatric illnesses.") Certain drugs do help some people, but in my experience only those patients whose problems originate from simple physical causes -- e.g., a severe deficit  of some pituitary hormone -- are ever cured by drugs.

Therapy also seems to help some people, but sometimes at the cost of making them insufferable bores who talk constantly about themselves. The whole point of therapy is to pay very close attention, at an almost obsessive level, to your own mind and how it works; but a humanistic psychologist might say instead that what people really need in life is to stop obsessing about their own minds and involve themselves more fully in the world. Anthropologists will tell you that this obsession with the mind of the individual is a western, modern thing, and that in most of the world people think about themselves much more as units in a family, a village, and a society. And that, furthermore, many of our psychological problems may be caused precisely by focusing too much on our own minds; why else would more Americans suffer from crippling anxiety than people living in war-torn states like Lebanon or Ukraine? Toss our ongoing fight about who should pay for health care into the mix, and you get a lot of misery and confusion. Because of  doubts about the efficacy of therapy and fights over who should pay for it, the number of Americans receiving it has declined greatly in recent years.

All of this has left me, as my readers know, feeling detached and skeptical about psychiatry. I never know what advice to give anyone with psychological difficulties, since I am ambivalent about all the options. I have sometimes recommended therapy or drugs, although without any great conviction. In my heart I think that what would most help troubled people is more fulfilling lives, but that is of course a ridiculous thing to recommend to anyone, especially some one too depressed or anxious to take even a small step outside routine. I also think that our psychological difficulties point toward something very wrong with our society that I would like to fix. But since we evolved to live in small communities beset by shortages and threatened with violence, I am at a loss to suggest what sort of modern world might really be suitable for us. Except that we could all use more friends, stronger communities, more support in times of hardship, and a stronger sense that we are all in this together.

Nowhere

On the way home today my train stopped for about 10 minutes because of a signal problem. I was struck by the view out my window, a completely nothing sort of place, with that old rail spur leading off toward nowhere in particular and the Hopperesque shack in the background.

Meanwhile, in Saigon

In Saigon -- nobody outside the government calls it Ho Chi Minh City -- capitalism is roaring back:

The apartment building where evacuees clambered up an outdoor staircase to board a C.I.A. helicopter in a chaotic rooftop operation, a scene captured in an iconic photograph, is now at the heart of a neighborhood filled with luxury shops selling $1,000 Rimowa suitcases and $2,000 Burberry suits. . . . A statue of Ho Chi Minh, the Communist revolutionary leader, is sandwiched between a luxury hotel and a refurbished French colonial building that will soon house a Brooks Brothers store.

And of course, lots of stories like this:

Ms. Thuy Truong, the tech entrepreneur, did not have electricity in her home until she was 7. She now develops smartphone apps and commutes between Mountain View, Calif., and Ho Chi Minh City. She recently sold her software firm to Weeby, an American company, for more than a million dollars. (She will not say exactly how much.) She turns 30 in December.

We've all read stories like this one from each country that gets caught up in the firestorm of the new global economy -- first Taiwan and Korea, then China and Thailand, now Vietnam. These pieces are profoundly one-sided, based on what reporters see in the happening neighborhoods of thriving cities. A few miles away are villages where  peasants toil in the traditional way; sweatshops and slums may be just around the corner. And yet there is an energy about this process that is undeniable. Young people in Saigon are excited about the global future, sure that their lives will be better than their parents'. Materially, they certainly will be.

The new economy is radically unfair, but it does throw up opportunities by the thousand for the ambitious to grasp at. It excites people in the way that Revolution and Socialism once did, and it doesn't require throwing bombs or shooting the bourgeoisie. Instead of angry slogans, global capitalism gives us high-tech gadgets, nice suits, cools jobs in booming cities. To jaded old leftists it seems like a scam, but what else is there? This, right now, is what the world has to offer.

The Ancient Star Chart in the Kitora Tomb, Japan

The Kitora Tomb, located near the village of Asuka in Japan's Nara Prefecture, dates to the 7th or 8th century CE. It is known for its paintings of the four cardinal animals of Chinese lore. Above, the black tortoise of the north.

The white tiger of the west.

The red phoenix of the south.

And all that can be seen of the blue dragon of the east.

The ceiling of the tomb is decorated with a map of the night sky, charting 68 constellations, with the stars picked out in gold leaf. Three concentric circles are drawn in red, showing the movement of celestial objects, one of which is the sun. (click on this and you can see the stars)

After staring at this map for decades, Japanese researchers have concluded that it is an accurate star chart, possible the oldest in the world. But it was not based on observation of the sky above Japan. It seems to be centuries out of date, and it depicts the sky somewhere hundreds of miles to the west. Of the two most recent publications on the tomb, one puts the date at between 240 and 520 CE, the other between 120 and 40 BCE; both agree that it shows the sky above northern China, in the area of Xian and Loyang. A third Japanese researcher who lectured on the matter back in 1999 agreed with the 120 to 40 BCE date, but thought the location was in Korea.

Archaeology, as Belloq says, is not an exact science. But anyway the experts concur that whoever decorated this Japanese tomb was working from a manuscript centuries old and imported to the island from mainland Asia, a little glimpse into the cultural connections that brought Japan into the orbit of Chinese civilization.