Horse Armor

A suit of horse armor known as "the Burgundian bard" that belonged to King Henry VIII. "Bard" was the general term for horse armor, and this set was given to Henry in 1510 by Maximilian I whose family hailed from Burgundy, hence the name. It was made by Guillem Margot in 1510 and decorated by Paul van Vreland.

Circa 1580–90, made in Milan and Bresica. In the Met.

Horse Armor Made for Johann Ernst, Duke of Saxony-Coburg, in 1548. By Kunz Lochner.

Famous suit now in the Royal Armouries, Leeds, made in Germany in the late 1400s.

Mamluk armor from Egypt, 1400s.

Horse armor by Wilhelm von Worms the Elder, and knight's armor by Matthes Deutsch; belonged to  Duke Ulrich of Wurttemberg. In the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Display of Turkish horse armor in the Stibbert Museum in Florence.

Suit of late medieval Turkish armor in the Stibbert.

And European armor in the same museum.

And finally the royal armor of Charles X of Sweden, 17th century.

Panjurli

A headdress for the Bhuta Kola dance representing Panjurli, the boar spirit. From South Canara, India, 18th century.

Should You Go to More Parties?

Alice Goffman:

Reviving classical attention to gathering times as sites of transformation and building on more recent microsociological work, this paper uses qualitative data to show how social occasions open up unexpected bursts of change in the lives of those attending. They do this by pulling people into a special realm apart from normal life, generating collective effervescence and emotional energy, bringing usually disparate people together, forcing public rankings, and requiring complex choreography, all of which combine to make occasions sites of inspiration and connection as well as sites of offense and violation. Rather than a time out from “real” life, social occasions hold an outsized potential to unexpectedly shift the course that real life takes. Implications for microsociology, social inequality, and the life course are considered.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Is there anybody out there who has had such an experience at a party?

Korolev Crater and Stalin's Weirdly Successful Tyranny

This is Korolev Crater on Mars in a recent composite image from the Mars Express spacecraft. The crater is about 51 miles (82 km) across and more than a mile deep, and it is often full of ice; here it gleams white because of a recent fall of snow.

The crater is named for Sergei Korolev, who is generally identified as "the architect of the Soviet space program," or sometimes "the Russian Werner von Braun." I realized I knew nothing more than that about the man and decided to look around.

Korolev was born in 1906 and grew up in Odessa, where he fell in love with aviation and attended a special technical high school. His teachers recognized his ability and in 1924 he moved to Moscow to study engineering. There he became a protege of Andrei Tupolev, the famous Soviet aircraft designer. After 1930 he changed directions and got interested in rockets, co-founding Russia's first rocket institute. In 1933 the institute launched the USSR's first liquid-fueled rocket, and soon after that the whole institute was drafted into the Soviet military. Then things got weird:

RNII developed a series of rocket-propelled missiles and gliders, including, in 1936, Korolev's RP-318, Russia's first rocket propelled aircraft. Before the aircraft made a rocket propelled flight, however, Korolev and other aerospace engineers were thrown into the Soviet prison system after he was falsely denounced to the NKVD, the USSR's secret police, on June 22, 1938. Korolev spent months on the Trans-Siberian railway and in a prison vessel at Magadan. This was followed by a year in the Kolyma gold mines in Siberia, probably the most dreaded part of the Gulag. Soviet leader Josef Stalin recognized the importance of aeronautical engineers in preparing for a possible war with Nazi Germany, and retrieved Korolev and other technical personnel that could help the Red Army by developing new weapons. A system of sharashkas (prison design bureaus) was set up to exploit the jailed "talent." Korolev and coworkers from the RNII thus continued their rocket design activities for several years.

Sergei Korolev was paroled by Stalin on July 27, 1944, primarily by the intervention of senior aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev, himself a prisoner, who requested Korolev's services in his own sharashka. Following the end of World War II, Korolev was released from prison and sent to Germany to study the Nazi's V-2 rocket and other technology. In August 1946, he was appointed Chief Constructor for development of a long-range ballistic missile and the next year promoted to Chief Designer. After Stalin's death in 1953, Korolev joined the Communist Party and soon won the support of communist leader and fellow Ukrainian Nikita Khrushchev, who saw the propaganda and military potential of a strong rocket program. On April 1, 1953, Korolev received approval from the Council of Ministers to develop the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the R-7. The next year his proposal to launch artificial satellites into Earth orbit was also approved.

So: from 1936 until after the end of World War II, many of the USSR's top aeronautical engineers, including the famous Tupolev, were in prison. They did some of their best work under Gulag conditions, facing (like all Gulag prisoners) immediate execution if they tried to escape or even to establish contact with their families. Even after Stalin's death Korolev and other key scientists were treated as something like prisoners, their every movement and communication constantly monitored, their identities treated as state secrets.

Nor was there anything unusual about Korolev's fate in the world of Soviet science. The Soviet political elite had never trusted scientists, and they had been jailing them by the hundreds since the 1920s. You can read a fascinating short history of the sharashka phenomenon at the Russian History blog. A snippet:

For the most part, the wartime NKVD prison science system was successful in generating innovations to support the war effort. Extremely tight control, narrowly focused goals, and high levels of funding led engineers to achieve their targeted goals. Judging by a summary issued in 1944, the NKVD believed that the results were overwhelmingly positive. In the report, the NKVD agents listed twenty major weapons systems or processes—including bombers, engines, propellant production processes, radio systems, and a host of artillery guns and cannons—developed by prisoners. Of these, at least twelve were introduced into mass production, a relatively high percentage in comparison to the prewar record of military R&D. Nearly all the projects reached the certification-testing stage. Some of the successes of the sharashka system were noteworthy. Designer Vladimir Petliakov’s group, for example, developed the Pe-2 bomber, one of the most successful Soviet weapons of the war, of which eleven thousand were produced during the war. Similarly, Tupolev’s team produced the Tu-2 bomber, which was an important asset to the Red Air Force and remained in service until the 1950s.

It is part of my own worldview that if you want people to do good work for you, you should treat them with respect. But the success of the USSR during World War II shows that this is not necessarily so, and that the threat of being sent back to Kolyma can work just as well.

Greek Helmets

In the Olympia Museum storeroom.

Six Questions to Ask Before We Start Another War

Micah Zenko at Foreign Policy:

1. Are there national interests at stake that are best achieved through the use of combat arms, and which are worth the costs and consequences?
2. What, if any, is the domestic and international legal justification?
3. What allies or partners are signing up, and what exactly are they contributing to the intervention?
4. What are the intervention’s political and military objectives?
5. Are those objectives obtainable with the American and partner military resources committed, and apparent domestic political will?
6. Can officials define what a successful end state looks like?

I would also ask,

How many people are going to die, be maimed, lose their homes, or otherwise suffer terribly, and what justifies this mayhem?

I suppose this might be covered under number one, but Zenko's formulation seems awfully bloodless to me. Before we blow people up we should think hard about the bodies and the mourning.

Happy Sunreturn

May the sun's turn in the sky change all your curses to blessings. Or some of them, anyway.

Amazon Lawyers

Weirdly fascinating story about “lawyers” who help sellers who have been banned from the Amazon marketplace. Apparently the process of appealing a ban is so convoluted that you need a $2500 expert to help you, and so many sellers depend absolutely on access to Amazon that they support a whole industry of such consultants. A sample:

In a way, Plansky had it easy. He at least knew what he had to confess to, even if he hadn’t done it. Many sellers can’t even figure out what Amazon is accusing them of. A suspension message will typically list an item along with a broad and tangentially related category of an infraction, like “used sold as new.” Understandably, sellers respond by sending invoices that show that the items are, in fact, new. Actually, Stine says, the suspension usually has nothing to do with the item being used, but with something like a peeling label on the box. “The thing Amazon wants you to fix is the buyer perception,” Stine says. “Just proving to Amazon that your goods are new is not good enough because Amazon wants you to address why the buyers thought they were used.” One seller described the typical process as Amazon saying, “I’m putting you in jail but not telling you what you did, now give me a justification for why I should let you out and you won’t do it again.”

Paper Cranes by Cristian Marianciuc

Via My Modern Met.

The Goddess of Balachulish

National Museums of Scotland:

The mysterious Ballachulish figure is a roughly life-sized figure of a girl or goddess, carved from a single piece of alder, with pebbles for eyes. It was found during building work in November 1880, under deep peat. It was lying face down on the gravel of an old raised beach, around 120 metres from the shore of Loch Leven. It might originally have stood beside a pool. The figure has been radiocarbon-dated to around 600 BC, making it over 2,500 years old, and belonging to a period when iron was beginning to be used in Scotland.

When she first came out of the peat, she looked like this.

One suggestion is that she represents the goddess who protected travelers passing through the narrow strait between Loch Leven and the sea.

How to Live

“I want to raise up the magic world all round me and live strongly and quietly there.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. February 1934

Ross Douthat on our Political Impasse

Ross Douthat has been reading Michael Young's 1958 novel The Rise of Meritocracy, which introduced the word and imagined a future in which the meritocrats have become a ruling elite even more intolerable than the old aristocrats had been. Populist revolts keep breaking out against them, but they always fail because all the smart people are in the elite. Douthat thinks this is a good parable for our own time:

In this situation, which is ours, the meritocrats have no mandate and no sense of why the public hates them — believing that their governance was wise and just and there’s nothing wrong with meritocracy that can’t be fixed with more of it. But the populists have no competence and no coherent program, and so all their revolt can win is stalemate.

Different versions of this impasse exist in Britain, France and the United States. In the British version the forces of populism won a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum but lacked real leaders (save hacks and opportunists) and a clear plan for pushing forward (save implausible promises). The result is Theresa May’s shambolic attempt to deliver the impossible, a job she’s graced with because nobody else wants it — save Jeremy Corbyn, whose left-populism seems entirely unready for power in its own way.

In France the “gilets jaunes” protests have brought populist fury from France’s peripheries into the heart of Paris and wrecked Macron’s centrist-technocratic plans. But as a political force the protest movement remains essentially inchoate, now pulled toward the far left and now toward the far right, awaiting leadership and vision. Which, judging by the equally dismal approval ratings of Macron’s rivals, is something that French politics is unlikely to supply.

In the United States the populists theoretically hold the White House, under a president who promised to be a traitor to his class. Except that these promises were mostly just a con job, the Trump inner circle is a parliament of opportunists, and his administration’s policy agenda has been steered by the Republican Party’s business elite rather than by the voters who elected him.

Each case is a variation on the same theme, a slightly different intimation of the meritocratic endgame that Michael Young foresaw 60 years ago. A governing class that has vaulting self-confidence and dwindling credibility, locked in stalemate with populist movements that are easily grifted upon and offer more grievances than plans.

I think this is interesting but only partially right. For one thing, as I keep pointing out, one reason every rich nation in the world has some version of neoliberal economics is that we simply can't imagine any real alternative. It isn't just the greed of elites that keeps things as they are, but our inability to come up with a system that could deliver the dynamism of the current economy without its massive unfairness. For another, elites vs. populists is only one of our impasses. We have an equally intractable conflict between liberal and conservative worldviews that prevents the forces of populism with ever forming a stable political bloc; whatever Berniebros and Tea Partiers agree on, they hate each other too much to ever work together.

Maybe one day super-intelligent AI will work out a better economic system for us, but until then I think we are stuck with the conflicts and systems we have.

Wahtye's Tomb

The Egyptian government announced the discovery of a spectacular tomb from the Old Kingdom. Imagine the thrill of pushing past the rubble in the entrance shaft and emerging into this room.

This was the resting place of Wahtye, royal purification priest, royal supervisor, and inspector of the sacred boat under Pharaoh Neferirkare Kakai (reigned ca. 2446–2438 B.C.), the third king of the 5th Dynasty.

Wahtye and his wife, Nin-Winit-Ptah.

Amazing that after more than 200 years of archaeology there are still discoveries being made in Egypt. And this was just the first of five sealed shafts that have been discovered in this locations, so there are at least four more tombs to be opened.

The Problem with Ideology

Will Wilkinson used to be a fairly rigid libertarian, but several years ago he decided that his ideology was blinding him to reality and stopped calling himself by that label. I just discovered an essay he published in October 2017 in which he argues that any "ideal theory" of politics – libertarianism, communism – is a fantasy:

Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next?

The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. This sort of political ideal actually can’t help us find our way through the thicket of real-world politics into the clearing of justice.

To illustrate why this is so Wilkinson compares two lists of countries, one the "Freedom Index" of the libertarian Cato Foundation, the other the Social Progress Index, which is based on progressive assumptions. It turns out that these two lists of the top twenty countries in the world, based on what purport to be radically different notions of the Good, are very similar. The top twelve countries on the Social Progress Index are:

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Iceland
4. Norway
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Netherlands
8. Sweden
9. Australia
10. New Zealand
11. Ireland
12. United Kingdom

Nine of those countries also rank in the top 12 of the Freedom Index, and Sweden and Norway rank 13 and 14; only tiny Iceland fails to make the Freedom Index top 20. So while libertarian theory predicts that a large social welfare state should limit freedom, the libertarians' own list shows that Social Democratic countries have more freedom.

The world is just far more complicated than your theory, whatever it is, can comprehend. And the farther your ideal world is from things as they are, the less you actually know about how it would work.

The crazy thing about the current political climate is that millions of people are losing faith in both democracy and mixed capitalism despite overwhelming evidence that this is the best system humans have ever devised. The distance that our world falls short of utopia seems to grate harder and harder on our psyches, and the longing for some kind of radical change swell.

All the evidence, though, argues that revolution is usually a disaster, and maintaining systems that have proved to work so well, with a bit of tinkering, is the best course.

RK's Japan

Tokyo-based photographer RK.

Alexa and the Parrot

The news from London:

A peckish parrot has been caught ordering strawberries, a watermelon and even a water boiler through his foster owner’s electronic personal assistant.

Rocco, an African Grey, requested the items through an Alexa device while his minder was out of the home. Luckily, due to a parental lock, none of his attempted purchases went through.

Rocco, who lives with Marion Wischnewski in Berkshire, U.K., has attempted to order everything from kites and lightbulbs through Alexa since moving to her home. He also gets the device to tell him jokes and play his favorite tunes.

“I’ve come home before and he has romantic music playing,” Wischnewski told The Times of London. “He loves to dance and has the sweetest personality.”

An Armenian Gospel, c 1435

In the Met. Above, the Nativity.

The Presentation in the Temple.

Baptism of Jesus.

Pentacost.

Roberto Benavidez

The artist's statement, in its entirety:

Half-breed, South Texan, queer, figurative sculptor specializing in the piñata form; playing on themes of race, sexuality, art, sin, humor and beauty.

These "piñatas" -- the quotes are because they aren't full of candy and you're not supposed to smash them, but anyway that's what Benavidez calls them -- are based on images from the Luttrell Psalter and Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights.

Provocation Sells

Interesting aside from Mark Zuckerberg as he rambled about possible changes in how Facebook polices its content:

He called this “borderline content”––content that doesn’t break Facebook’s rules, but that walks right up to the line without crossing it. “No matter where we draw the lines for what is allowed,” he wrote, “as a piece of content gets close to that line, people will engage with it more on average––even when they tell us afterwards they don’t like the content.”

Borderline content getting more engagement “applies not only to news but to almost every category of content,” he added. “For example, photos close to the line of nudity, as with revealing clothing or sexually suggestive positions, got more engagement on average before we changed the distribution curve to discourage this. The same goes for posts that don’t come within our definition of hate speech but are still offensive.”

People may be offended, but they still look.

Who do you Trust?

Or whom. Results of a poll from Georgetown University taken over the summer. The most trusted institution among Republicans in the military.

Among Democrats, it's . . .  Amazon.

Mosaics Looted from Zeugma

Bowling Green State University has agreed to repatriate 12 mosaics to Turkey after discovering they had been looted from the ancient site of Zeugma. The university bought them from an antiquities dealer in 1965 despite sketchy information on their origin and history.

In Roman times Zeugma was a wealthy and important city on the Euphrates River. It was extensively looted in the 1950s, and by comparing these pieces to surviving floors, experts hired by the university were able to pinpoint their exact points of origin.

On the other hand Zeugma recently disappeared under the waters of a lake rising behind a new Turkish dam, and I very much doubt the massive salvage excavation undertaken in the city was able to save everything, so the looters may have done some small service for culture despite themselves.

Wolfpack Territories

In Voyageurs National Park, biologists regularly attach GPS collars to at least one wolf in each pack to study where they go and what they eat. This image combines the tracks of several different wolves to show how seriously they take territory boundaries.

Incidentally the article from which that image comes says the wolves in the park have been eating a lot of beavers and blueberries.