More Roman Genetics

The blogger at Eurogenes took the data from the Antonio et al. study of 127 genomes from Roman history and created these cool maps. The hotter the color the greater the similarity to the genes of that period in Rome. Above, the Imperial Period, 27 BC to 300 AD. Notice the strong similarity to Syria, Palestine, and Cyprus, indicating migration from the eastern Mediterranean.

Late Antiquity, 300-700 AD. Shifting back toward western Europe, indicating barbarian invaders or other migrants from the west.

And medieval, 700-1600 AD.

Fear of Accelerationism

At Vox, Zack Beauchamp goes all in on fear of the white nationalist doctrine of "Accelerationism."

Bernstein’s 2018 slaying marked the beginning of an extraordinary period of white supremacist violence — a spate of murders and mass shootings that has continued through this year.

The October 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue was the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in American history. The March 2019 Islamophobic attack on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history. It was followed in April by another attack on an American synagogue (this time in Poway, California), and an August 2019 shooting at an El Paso Walmart that was one of the most brutal attacks targeting Hispanics in US history. . . .

These killings were often linked to the alt-right, described as an outgrowth of the movement’s rise in the Trump era. But many of these suspected killers, from Atomwaffen thugs to the New Zealand mosque shooter to the Poway synagogue attacker, are more tightly connected to a newer and more radical white supremacist ideology, one that dismisses the alt-right as cowards unwilling to take matters into their own hands.

It’s called “accelerationism,” and it rests on the idea that Western governments are irreparably corrupt. As a result, the best thing white supremacists can do is accelerate their demise by sowing chaos and creating political tension. Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms.

Accelerationists reject any effort to seize political power through the ballot box, dismissing the alt-right’s attempts to engage in mass politics as pointless. If one votes, one should vote for the most extreme candidate, left or right, to intensify points of political and social conflict within Western societies. Their preferred tactic for heightening these contradictions, however, is not voting, but violence — attacking racial minorities and Jews as a way of bringing us closer to a race war, and using firearms to spark divisive fights over gun control. The ultimate goal is to collapse the government itself; they hope for a white-dominated future after that.

Two things about this alarmism. First, as Beauchamp, admits, violence has become more attractive to white nationalist extremists because they have realized they have no hope in democratic politics. Donald Trump seems to be the farthest American politics can go in that direction, and his departure in 2020 or 2024 is likely to bring in a major rebound.

Second, none of this is new. Beauchamp does a weird bit of signaling when he calls these tactics "heightening contradictions." That is what Lenin called it, drawing on a tradition of revolutionary thought going back to the mid 1800s. So Beauchamp lets sophisticates like me know that he knows these ideas are all 150 years old. Yet that doesn't keep him from going on as if this were some new and terrifying threat. He never says, oh, by the way, 19th-century anarchists said the same thing, and somehow civilization survived.

I think knowing that "accelerationism" is just the contemporary version of 150-year-old rhetoric is important for understanding what is happening. Modern civilization has had a radical fringe for as long as it has existed. The fringe has taken different forms, from the Anarchists to the Red Brigades to the Monkey Wrench Gang, but it has never gone away. It is a problem, yes, but the risk that any of us will die from it is tiny. The police killed ten times as many Americans last year as terrorists and school shooters combined, and opiate overdose killed fifty times more than that.

Which is not to say that terrorism is not a concern. We should take it seriously. Maybe the FBI was slow to take white supremacists seriously as a threat, but it seems clear that they do now, and based on past experience we can predict that given time the FBI and other police forces will roll up any violent networks that form. They eventually got the anarchists and the Weathermen, after all. There is a price to be paid in terms of privacy and civil liberties, but most Americans seem to think the protection provided is worth it. I can't see any way that a few hundred or a few thousands violent right wingers are our threat to our way of life.

Of all the things to worry about in our world, I think neo-Nazi terrorism is far down the list.

On the Apparent Failure of Burmese Democracy

From a review of a new book by Thant Myint-U, grandson of UN General Secretary U Thant:

He tries to nudge readers away from getting too fixated on messianic solutions. Democracy was a preoccupation among the junta’s critics, but the country wasn’t quite prepared for how a competitive political system might work — especially one where the peace process itself entrenched a belief in the existence of fixed ethnic groups. Protecting minority rights, such as those of the Rohingya Muslims, has proved to be an unpopular proposition among the Buddhist majority; it’s been much easier to rile up voters with rank appeals to identity. As Thant Myint-U puts it, “fear and intolerance” offer convenient cover for opportunists seeking to hide a “failure of the imagination.”

Combined with this whipping up of virulent nativist sentiment has been a headlong plunge into free markets, as Burma lurched from being one of the poorest and most isolated countries in Asia to another aspirant on the capitalist world stage. Thant Myint-U acknowledges the real economic gains that have been made over the past decade — a growing middle class, a new kind of self-made entrepreneur unconnected to the cronyism of the old regime — but he also notes that Burma is still a very poor country where extreme inequality and attendant anxieties have flourished. A population buffetted by economic upheaval and climate change is especially prone to paranoia. He’s skeptical of what neoliberalism offers, even in a best-case scenario: “Relentless environmental destruction and congested cities, compensated for only by the opportunity for lots of shopping. Is this really the only future possible?”

Egon Schiele, Towns, 1915-1917

More Gray Days in Manassas

Old, broken tree.

Lane that once led to a grand plantation. Now it reminds me of the Faerie Roads from Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

 Bull Run

The Oldest Written Recipes are for Lamb Stew and Onion Soup

Amusing little video from the Yale and Harvard ancient studies departments showing the recreation of three recipes from a Babylonian text dating to around 1750 BC. Above, a lamb-milk-grain concoction.

This one is largely beets, flavored with lamb.

And this one is vegetarian. The name, "the unwinding," is a mystery, but one of the cooks suggests it comes from letting little grain cakes dissolve in the broth. Another suggests it just means food for relaxing.

The recipes do not give quantities or clear directions, so there is a lot of guesswork involved. But still impressive that the oldest known written recipes can even be approximated in a modern kitchen.

Does Online Dating Empower Women?

Interesting hypothesis:

With the advent of online dating, women in prime reproductive age are in the dominant position in the dating market for the first time in human history. This comes with huge social ramifications. Setting aside local and recent context, dating has historically been drastically riskier for women than men (and it still is, but less so). Physical safety has been an ever-present issue for women in meeting potential dates, not to mention after agreeing to be alone with them on a date. In the era of online dating, women are at significantly less risk simply by not being in the immediate proximity of their prospects, and rejecting a prospect has no downside risk. Women globally also have more upside potential because they can draw from larger prospect pools than ever before. Due to the significantly higher biological risks associated with reproduction, women are intrinsically far more selective when evaluating potential mates than males. In an online dating context, this selectivity is more apparent than ever, with significant knock-on effects for the rest of the culture. There is less pressure to "settle" than at any other time in modern history because of the availability of alternatives and the speed of interactions.

Is this what is ultimately driving the dissatisfaction and radicalism among young men?

Personally I think this all goes back to economic changes that make it easier for women to support themselves; online dating wouldn't matter if women still needed a husband to support them.

But I suspect it is true that 1) women are in the best position ever to be picky about mating, and 2) many young men are just not what most women are looking for.

William Beckford and Fonthill Abbey

William Thomas Beckford (1760-1844) is sometimes said to have been the greatest eccentric in the whole long history of English eccentricity, which you will have to admit is quite a claim. Perhaps he was not, but on the other hand he was so rich that his eccentricity marked the world in a more dramatic way than a poorer man's. Consider as Exhibit A his house, which was called Fonthill Abbey.

Yes, this is a private house, built for a widower who lived with no family and rarely entertained guests. Above is the great hall.

Beckford was said to be the richest commoner in England, and one modern historian has speculated that he was in fact the richest commoner in the world. He was the heir to a great Jamaican sugar fortune, although he never personally set foot in Jamaica or saw the slaves whose labor provided his income. His father, another William, had spent part of the family fortune buying political influence and was twice Lord Mayor of London, but he still had enough left to bequeath his son a million pounds in cash, besides the two great Jamaican plantations and various English properties. That happened when the younger Beckford was only 10, which may explain some of the bizarre childishness of his adult life.

One of the Beckford family properties was Fonthill near Salisbury, a place where one could take a hike of 22 miles without leaving the grounds. In the 1750s our William's father had built thereon a great house known as Fonthill Splendens. Just the thing for a political magnate of the Age of Reason.

However the son was a Romantic and he hated the neoclassical pile he had inherited, so he tore it down. He brought in architect James Wyatt to help him realize his dream, and in 1796 they began constructing Fonthill Abbey.

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Aeneas Carrying Anchises from Burning Troy, once part of Beckford's collection

More on the house later. Meanwhile the young Beckford had created serial scandals with his bisexuality, including an affair he started at 18 with a 10-year-old boy. He was interested in music, so his tutors sent him to study with Mozart; he was interested in architecture, so he hung around for a while with architect Sir William Chambers. In 1781-82 he took a grand tour of Europe, after which he wrote a book about Italy. In 1786 he wrote a Gothick novel, Valthek, about a Caliph of Baghdad whose thirst for knowledge leads him to black magic. Some fan summarized the truly bizarre plot on wikipedia in a way that drew a reprimand from the editors: This article's plot summary may be too long or excessively detailed. I invite the curious to take a look, but meanwhile here is one paragraph:

Vathek then develops an insatiable thirst and often goes to a place near a high mountain to drink from one of four fountains there, kneeling at the edge of the fountain to drink. One day he hears a voice telling him to "not assimilate [him]self to a dog". It was the voice of the merchant who had sold him the swords, a mysterious man whom Vathek calls "Giaour", an Islamic term used for non-believers. The Giaour cures his thirst with a potion and the two men return to Samarah. Vathek returns to immersing himself in the pleasures of the flesh, and begins to fear that The Giaour, who is now popular at Court, will seduce one of his wives. Vathek makes a fool of himself trying to out-drink The Giaour, and to out-eat him; when he sits upon the throne to administer justice, he does so haphazardly. His prime vizier rescues him from disgrace by whispering that Carathis had read a message in the stars foretelling a great evil to befall Vathek and his vizir Morakanabad; the vizier informs Vathek that Carathis advises him to ask The Giaour about the drugs he used in the potion, lest that be a poison. When Vathek confronts him, The Giaour only laughs, so Vathek gets angry and kicks him. The Giaour is transformed into a ball and Vathek compels everyone in the palace to kick it, even the resistant Carathis and Morakanabad. Then Vathek has the whole town kick the ball-shaped merchant into a remote valley. Vathek stays in the area and eventually hears Giaour's voice telling him that if he will worship The Giaour and the jinns of the earth, and renounce the teachings of Islam, he will bring Vathek to "the palace of the subterrain fire" where Soliman Ben Daoud controls the talismans that rule over the world.

Got that?

Beckford was a great collector in the way of so many rich men at the time. But, as you might imagine, he had rather distinctive taste. When he went bankrupt and had to sell off his collection – consider what a feat that was, for the richest commoner in the world to run out of money – one wag commented:

Mr. Beckford has undoubtedly shown himself an industrious bijoutier, a prodigious virtuoso, an accomplished patron of unproductive labour, an enthusiastic collector of expensive trifles – the only proof of taste (to our thinking) he has shown in this collection is his getting rid of it.

Modern opinion is more charitable, at least toward Beckford's taste in painting; that Bellini portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan now hangs prominently in the English National Gallery, and Beckford was an early English collector of the Brueghels.

Mostly, though, Beckford liked to collect small objects, of which this vase (now in the Walters in Baltimore) is the most famous. He had hundreds of Japanese tea bowls, myriad small inlaid boxes from all over the world, coins, medals, gems, cups made from ostrich eggs, cups made from nautilus shells, figurines, and so on.

But back to the house, which was intended in part to serve as a museum for the great collection. Hence the many galleries, one of which was 330 feet (100 m) long.

The design evolved over time, but the great tower was always part of it; in fact the first design was just the tower, perfect for the misanthrope Beckford had become to keep his distance from the world.

The house divided Beckford's contemporaries. The Duke of Wellington said it was the "most splendid of all structures", and one poetic admirer was moved to write,

The mighty master waved his wand, and, lo!
On the astonished eye the glorious show
Burst like a vision! Spirit of the place!
Has the Arabian wizard with his mace
Smitten the barren downs, far onward spread,
And bade the enchanted palace rise instead?

Etc.

But there were also critics, like William Hazlitt:

It is, in a word, a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy-shop, an immense Museum of all that is most curious and costly, and, at the same time, most worthless, in the productions of art and nature.

Beckford was not a patient man, and he was notorious for making unreasonable demands of those who worked for him. One acquaintance wrote,

The orders which he issued were as peremptory and almost as extraordinary as those given by Aladdin to the slave of the lamp. 

Faced with a Beckfordian demand that the Tower be built by Christmas, the builders stopped using stone and built it with a wooden frame covered in cement. It collapsed.

Nothing daunted, Beckford demanded that they try again. But the second tower also collapsed, taking much of the nearly completed house down with it. That was around the time that Beckford lost his Jamaican plantations in a legal action and ran out of money, so the house was never rebuilt, and it was completely demolished in 1845.

Beckford has a lot of modern admirers, besides the fellow who wrote the five-page summary of Valthek for wikipedia. The images and documents posted here all come from Beckfordiana, a web site devoted to Beckford's life and works. It strikes me that you know you have really made it when "iana" gets attached to your name; until today I had only encountered Shakesperiana and Burtoniana, so Beckford is in elite company.

And what a strange man he was.

The Rise of "Met Online"

Data from here on how heterosexual couples met. As Tyler Cowen notes, this helps to explain the rise of loneliness, since we are meeting fewer people in any other way than online dating.

Mortuary Temple of Ramesses II, Thebes, Egypt

The watch tower at the Mortuary Temple of Ramesses III, 12th century BC. Medinet Habu, West Thebes. Tour guides call this the Migdal Tower, using a word from the Old Testament.

Egypt Museum:

View of the Holy of Holies depicting four seated statues of: Ra, Ptah, Amun and Ramesses II. Inside the Great Temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, Lower Nubia.

When the scarab rolls the sun, God Ra will deliver its first rays on the statue of the god Amun-Re the greatest of all gods and the statue of Ramesses II the god king of Egypt, and the rays leave the god Ptah in the darkness, to announce the start of the harvest season and the sitting of god king Ramesses on the throne.

Seven Months Ago

Amazing photograph taken April 15, 2019, showing molten lead raining down from the about-to-collapse roof of Notre Dame.

Kandadu

Kandadu is the house of Jean-François Lesage, a Frenchman who has been a successful entrepreneur in south India. (He founded Vastrakala, which orders custom embroidery from local women and resells their work across the world.)

Lesage has lots of Indian friends and one of them called him "the most Indian Frenchman, the most French Indian." And this house is truly an amazing fusion of Europe and India.

You, Darkness

You, darkness, from which I come
I love you more than the flames
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes for each a circle of light
outside of which you cannot be known.

But the darkness contains everything–
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how it gathers them,
powers and people–

and perhaps a great presence is moving past.

I have faith in the night.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

Rod Stewart's Model Railroad

Of all the confounding things. And he insists that except for "some help with the electric" he built the whole thing himself. I guess retired rock stars have to do something with their time.

Coaches are Bullies

Marathoner Alberto Salazar is the latest coach to be exposed as a sadistic bully:

For Amy Yoder Begley, an Olympic middle-distance runner, four tumultuous years with Alberto Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project came to an abrupt end in September 2011.

“Alberto told me he was kicking me off the team for having ‘the biggest butt on the start line,’” Yoder Begley said.

Salazar’s critical assessments of her body, how she socialized with her teammates, even the sound of her laugh, had finally reached a breaking point. She was out of the Oregon Project, the elite training group Nike bankrolled to develop mostly American runners it hoped would become the world’s best.

Yoder Begley is the latest former Oregon Project member to publicly accuse Salazar of manipulating and verbally abusing the athletes who trained under him. The other runners include Kara Goucher, a two-time Olympian, and Mary Cain, a prodigy who skipped collegiate running to train with Salazar but quit the team within a few years, her body and her spirit broken by overtraining and verbal abuse.

Mary Cain quit after years of being told she was too fat.

Maybe Salazar was meaner than he should have been, and he didn't have the success that Nike, his main sponsor, hoped. But this sort of thing is very common in sports because it works. Very few people can train at the level needed to become a world champion without intense pressure, and for some people that means being screamed at for failing and mocked when they slack off.

Bullying is among the tricks that successful coaches deploy every day all across the world. One example I have looked into is San Antonio Spurs basketball coach Gregg Popovich, who has a great record and a trail of bullying allegations; when he was once asked why his teams played such good defense, he said, "fear." Some players have fled San Antonio, but others have thrived there and ended up with a profound loyalty to Popovich. He screamed at them and humiliated them, but he made them champions, and for that they respected him.

In sports, bullying works. Not always, and it is not the only way, but it is a very successful way to motivate extreme performance.

Other sorts of motivation can be just as brutal, for example the extreme hazing of recruits performed by some teams and some elite military units, which helps to create intense loyalty to the team.

The same can be said of other sorts of education. George Orwell has a moving description in one of his essays of his realization, at the age of about 15, that as much as he hated the regime of beatings and humiliations in his Public School it did "work," in the sense that it motivated adolescent boys to learn Latin and Greek. In fact, he said, it is probably impossible to teach boys ancient languages without beatings.

The Times ponders the intense burden we impose on promising young athletes:

We don’t typically hear from the casualties of these systems — the girls who tried to make their way in this system until their bodies broke down and they left the sport. It’s easier to focus on bright new stars, while forgetting about those who faded away. We fetishize the rising athletes, but we don’t protect them. And if they fail to pull off what we expect them to, we abandon them.

Exactly. The young stars who thrive under the intense pressure shine so brightly that they cast the grim suffering behind their succes into the shadows. Because, let's be honest, success in sports requires suffering, and success at the highest levels requires very intense suffering. It also requires that some people not succeed, that some who try to reach the heights not make it despite years of effort and sacrifice.

I used to think that a nicer world would be in every way a better world. I am still a fan of niceness but I now realize that not everyone feels the same way, and the many people believe harshness and cruelty are necessary to create some of the wonders that make our world an exciting place to live.

Links 15 November 2019

Sassanian coin showing a Zoroastrian fire altar

"I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling." If there is any writer I hate more than John Updike, I can't at the moment think of who that would be, and for a list of reasons that this particular hatchet job doesn't even get to.

The US Army was integrated during the Korean War. White soldiers who served in integrated units had lower rates of anti-black prejudice for decades after the war.

The political original of Pad Thai.

Did the US really win the Cold War?

This is America now: Man Charged in Slashing of 'Baby Trump' Balloon

One American tradition that many immigrants love is tailgating at sporting events. I have an immigrant neighbor who takes his giant RV loaded with food and cooking gear to Maryland lacrosse games; he told me "Mexicans love picnics." Here the Times writes about Kurdish tailgaters at football games in Tennessee.

"Nothing makes sense except in light of inter-individual variation."

"This paper uses US decennial censuses for the period 1850 to 1940 to show that the race gap in incarceration can be traced back to the abolition of slavery in 1865." Also, events like floods and boll weevil infestations that reduced the demand for black labor led to declines in incarceration rates.

Extract from a much praised new history of the Aztecs explains where the notion comes from that they mistook the Spaniards for gods. (Not from Cortez himself, whose letters say nothing of the kind, but from later writers and especially from later Native writers.)

Globalization has reduced global inequality. (Because the gains of poor people in China, India, Indonesia, etc. far more than outweigh the increase in inequality within wealthy nations.)

This black box algorithm can predict which cardiac patients will die within a year better than standard measures, but doctors can't figure out how the AI is doing it.

What it might feel like to touch the moon.

It's hard to train AIs to screen for child pornography when just possessing those images is a crime and sending them from one computer to another can get you ten years in prison.

Polls that are not weighted for education – which is many of them – massively overstate Democratic support.

Liberalism is Augustinianism, or, Politics and Models of Human Nature

Modern politics as ancient theology, or, liberal philosopher John Rawls was an Augustinian:

Nelson opens his book by placing Rawls’s recently discovered Princeton University senior thesis, written in 1942, in the long Augustinian tradition of Christianity that denied that sinful humans could save themselves. For Augustine and his followers, Pelagianism—named after a late-antique theologian who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic Church—overstated the extent to which human beings can earn their salvation. Such a belief verged on an ideology of self-redemption of individual sinners or of humanity itself that (as Rawls put it at age twenty) “rendered the Cross of Christ to no effect.” For Rawls, at the time a committed Christian who planned a career in the Episcopal priesthood before World War II service in the Pacific caused him to lose his faith, it followed that “no man can claim good deeds as his own.” To contend otherwise inflated human capacity and courted sacrilegious idolatry of humanity itself.

Nelson contends that this Augustinian response to Pelagianism lurked in Rawls’s defense of fair distributional justice long after he had moved on to secular philosophy. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls remarked that “no one deserves” their social ascendancy and the natural gifts—intelligence or industriousness—with which they achieved it. The fact that one person was endowed with them and another not was “morally arbitrary.” A theory of justice aiming at fairness rather than fortune would reject any sense that people deserved their class position. Some redistribution from the rich to the rest was therefore just.

In other words to Rawls the poor are not capable of making themselves rich without lots of help, just as sinful humans are not capable of reaching heaven on their own.

I find this fascinating, because in general belief in free will has been considered the "liberal" position, while predestination seems to us conservative. Obviously the ideologies of one age can never be mapped adequately onto those of another, but this does raise a question: what theory of human nature lies behind contemporary liberalism and conservatism, or any other ideology?

Many anarchists still subscribe to the old communist idea that the Revolution would change humanity; I have read several times that I only recoil from anarchist depictions of their utopia because I was raised under capitalism, and those growing up after all hierarchies have been abolished will feel differently. I say, no, everybody will always hate attending neighborhood meetings where consensus has to be reached over where to put sewers or power lines. I suppose this means I believe in a human nature that is not easily transformed by different conditions.

I share Rawls' view of natural gifts. If you ask me, some people work harder than others mostly because they were born hard workers. I accept that this is somewhat malleable and some people will work harder for the prospect of a great reward, or just because everyone around them is working hard. But like Rawls I consider differences of intellect and industriousness to be “morally arbitrary.” I do not think anyone deserves to be a billionaire no matter how much they achieve. And our system should, I think, work better for those who just show up and complete their tasks.

Against this I would set, not an argument that talent and effort should be rewarded, but a sense that attempts to level society all have prices, and any scheme that would lead to a truly equal world might have a cost completely not worth bearing.

As I see it modern conservatism is based on a skepticism that most people can build a good life on their own, without the guidance of tradition. This is a sentiment I share, I just think that the traditions we have inherited and the elites that want to maintain them are too bankrupt to be much use. (E.g., Catholic teaching on sexuality, or Trump-loving megachurch pastors denouncing corruption, or university professors against institutional hierarchies.) I therefore think what we need is new traditions, of which the best model so far is our much more equal practice of marriage.

What, I wonder, is the psychological model of the Woke? I am puzzled. It seems to me that the Progressive left is best explained theologically, by belief in Gnosticism. These folks seem to think that the mass of humanity suffers from a delusion that keeps them from understanding how grotesquely unfair our social, political, and economic arrangements are, and that once they have seen the light they will understand the tragic unfairness and – what, exactly? I'm not sure. Treat each other justly? And that, I suppose, implies that people's deep natures are tied to beliefs that we cling to, and that we can be transformed if we can be torn away from those beliefs and shown the truth. Hmm. I'm making this up as I go here, so help me out if you can.

Anyway the notion of John Rawls as a Puritan (they were big on predestination) has sent my brain in all sorts of directions.

The Curator Boyfriend

Elle thinks the coolest guy to date this year is an art curator:

Unlike archetypes of boyfriends past — the Investment Banker, the Silicon Valley Tech Guy, the Artist/Freelance Videographer/Professional Plant Owner — the Curator is a breath of fresh air, presenting a bounty of attractive qualities that challenge existing dating-pool stereotypes.

The Curator is endowed with qualities that include, but are not limited to: the business savvy to navigate the high-stakes art market, enough sensitivity to appreciate the latest Marina Abromovic performance piece, and the occasional invite to party on a boat with Stavros Niarchos. They’re well-read, worldly and engaged in shaping critical dialogues of our times. The kind of guy you can discuss post-humanism with over pizza, who comments on the decor while ordering you a cab but letting you split the bill.

We’re about to enter a new decade, and being self-aware and socially conscious has never been more attractive. Someone who can point to a favorite Louise Bourgeois sculpture or be brought to tears looking at an El Anatsui assemblage is not only in touch with his emotions but also cares about wider social, geopolitical and cultural issues. A Curator may still ghost you, but it’s probably because he’s doing something legitimately interesting with his time, like scouting in the foothills of the Himalayas. . . .

Ultimately, a Curator’s heightened attunement to art has a trickle down effect into what is the most differentiating and attractive quality of all— taste. Good taste is what most likely allowed a 21-year-old Vito Schnabel (the OG Cute Curator of the early ‘00s) to date the much older Demi Moore, later Heidi Klum, and most recently Amber Heard. Good taste doesn’t listen to Chris Brown, leave half-drunken six packs around your apartment or wear bad shoes. Sorry to that man, and every guy who does this.

Sorry folks I won't be posting much over the next week, I have to fly off to the Himalayas to find some art to cry over so I can date Heidi Klum.

The Silver-Backed Chevrotain Endures

The silver-backed chevrotain is a rare hoofed animal native to Vietnam. It was described by a French zoologist in 1910 based on four dead specimens, and the next scientific sighting did not occur until the 1990s, and some people thought it was extinct. But now it has been picked up in camera traps. Incidentally the locals in the forested region outside Nha Trang knew the animals were still around and helped the scientists set up their cameras in the right places to catch more than 200 images of these little wonders.