Scott Alexander's New Blog

Scott Alexander is back to blogging, at Substack, under his real name. Free so far. He says the new blog is about rta, and old Indo-European root word:

The dictionary defines ṛta as "order", "truth", or "rule", but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?

In practice, articles here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics. The political posts sometimes stray into choppy waters, and I have immense sympathy for people who are sick of that and prefer to pass. 

But consider this picture:

The top and bottom chess sets in this picture are exactly the same color. Download it and check on Paint or Photoshop if you don't believe me. We use "as different as black and white" to mean obviously, undeniably different. But in fact a slightly different context can confuse our brains so completely that we mistake white for black and vice versa. I believe the same laws of thought apply in the frontal lobe as in the visual cortex. The same forces that transform gray chess sets to white or black, outside our conscious control or comprehension, influence how we think about policies, coalitions, and principles, making them appear self-evidently good or viciously evil. I think this is the century where we'll either learn to understand and deal with our cognitive biases, or else all kill each other.

Leonardo's To Do Lists

From Walter Isaacson's biography of Leonardo da Vinci:

My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to-do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn. ‘The measurement of Milan and its suburbs,’ is the first entry. This has a practical purpose, as revealed by an item later in the list: ‘Draw Milan.’ Others show him relentlessly seeking out people whose brains he could pick: ‘Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle… Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled… Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders… Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner… Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.’ He is insatiable.

Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do. ‘Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.’ Others involve why-is-the-sky-blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. ‘Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?’

Best of all are the questions that seem completely random. ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,’ he instructs himself. Who on earth would decide one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like? How would you even find out? It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture or even to understand the flight of birds. But there it is, and, as we shall see, there are fascinating things to learn about the tongue of the woodpecker. The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.”

The Myth of the Unread Masterpiece

Once upon a time we believed in the Great Man Theory of History, which had a corollary in intellectual history I will dub the Great Book Theory: the genius scientist or philosopher published his Leviathan or Origin of Species and suddenly Everything Changed.

Then we got modern skeptics who said that's silly, intellectual change involves thousands of people talking to each other, making minor modifications, etc., and the so-called great men were not nearly so influential or original as we had been led to believe.

Which I think is true in a lot of cases; for example, I'm convinced Watson and Crick were only months ahead of several others in deciphering the structure of DNA.

But along with the dismissal of the Great Men came the argument, which I have seen dozens of times, that Great Books were not really so important or influential because actually hardly anyone read them. Two of the books of which this has often been said are De Revolutionibus, in which Copernicus argued that the earth goes around the sun, and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Back in 2004 a historian of science named Owen Gingerich wrote a book called The Book Nobody Read in which he showed that in fact De Revolutionibus was widely read in Europe, including by almost every practicing astronomer on the continent, and most of the surviving copies are full of annotations that show somebody read the text very carefully. There are even manuscript copies written out by hand by people who couldn't afford a printed book. It was hugely influential and converted hundreds of people to heliocentrism.

Now Caleb Scharf does the same thing for Newton, showing that Principia Mathematica's first edition sold more than 600 copies, and that most of Europe's top scientific and mathematical thinkers found a way to read one.

One thing I have seen in several dismissals of the Principia Mathematica is that it wasn't widely read because it was written in Latin, which is an absurd imposition of modern views on the 17th century. Schooling in the 17th century consisted almost entirely of Latin, and letters between scientists were usually written in Latin. By writing it in Latin Newton got a larger audience, not a smaller one.

I suppose the argument is partly about who you think was influenced by Copernicus or Newton. The average Enlightenment politician or writer (Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith) had probably not read Newton. It was a technical book, intended for scientists and mathematicians. But a book can have a lot of influence among people who have never read it; one example that comes to mind is Sigmund Freud. Newton completely convinced all the scientists, and the other thinkers, even if they were not scientists themselves, had friends who were, and thus Newton's clockwork universe entered the zeitgeist.

Which brings me to a skeptical exercise we might all employ more often. When somebody tells you, say, Newton wasn't really very influential, nobody read his book, ask yourself, "How can that possibly be true? Doesn't it require something vastly more complicated and unlikely than just assuming that everybody has heard of Newton because somebody read his book and admired it?"

Walking around Verona

Verona is a small city in northern Italy, where the foothills of the Alps tumble down onto the alluvial plain of the Po Valley. It was founded in ancient times within a bend of the Adige River. It had two periods of glory that left it full of monuments: under imperial Rome, and in the 13th and 14th centuries under the rule of the Scaligeri or della Scala family.  This photograph, making the rounds on Tumblr, got me thinking about the city again.

We begin our tour at the Porta San Zeno, a gate through the (mostly demolished) city walls built in the 1540s. 

From the gate is it just a short walk to the first of many spectacular buildings we will see today, the 11th-century Basilica of San Zeno. 

The great wonder of this building is its 11-century bronze door; for detailed views of the amazing Biblical scenes see this post I put up in 2012. The basilica also has an attached cloister with wonderful Romanesque details.

From there we walk a block down the Via Barberini Beto, lined with houses and shops, to the river.

We'll stroll along for a couple of blocks through the waterfront park.

Enjoying the views.

Until we reach our next historical monument, the Ponte Castelvecchio, built by the Scaligeri in the 14th century.

The bridge is attached to Castelvecchio, built by the Scaligeri as a residence and fortress – as much against their own people as against outsiders, you understand. After the city lost its independence in 1405 the various rulers, mostly Venice but at times Milan or Austria, often quartered their governor here.

These days the castle houses the city's museum, which has a fabulous collection of everything from Neolithic pottery to 19th-century painting.

Verona was a prominent place under the Lombard kings in the 7th century, and excavations around the city have produced a lot of Lombard jewelry, weapons, and so on.

The museum is particular noted for its collection of medieval paintings, such as this early 14th-century work showing St. Michael weighing souls.

I could spend all day in such a place, but we must move on. It's just two short blocks from the Castelvecchio to the city's most famous monument, the Roman amphitheater, built in the 1st century AD. 

The building is wonderfully preserved, and operas have been staged there every summer since 1850. Others have also performed there, such as Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen. There is a museum across the street full of bits of Roman statuary and stone carving.

One more block and we reach the Porta Borsari, the city's main gate in Roman times.

From there we'll make our way down more charming streets

To the Piazza delle Erbe, the heart of the medieval town, and in the summer the site of an outdoor market. Historic structures are all around us: the town hall, guild halls, churches.

Adjacent is the Piazza Dei Signori, where the lords of the city lived before they built their castle.

Medieval statue of the city's most famous ruler, Cangrande I della Scala.

The tombs of the Scaligeri are around the corner; these were the subject of famous drawings by Ruskin that helped launch the Neogothic movement.

From there we walk three more short blocks to the cathedral, built in the 12th century.

And two blocks beyond that is another of the city's famous monuments, the Ponte Pietra. This was a Roman bridge, but as you can see one pillar fell into disrepair and was restored. But this is Italy, so the new, restored part of the bridge dates to 1298. Also, since this is Italy, World War II happened, and two arches were blown up by retreating German soldiers. It was rebuilt in the 1950s using the original stones.

This short walk, less than 2 miles (3.5 km), barely scratches the surface of Verona. We have missed more Roman gates, more churches and museums, and we haven't even started on the whole Romeo and Juliet thing. Or on food, for which the city is famous. The world may be full of woes, but it also holds more wonders than one could ever see.

The Raven and the Crown

I have now posted my book to Amazon, where it is for sale as a paperback ($20) and for Kindle ($9.99). Sorry the paperback costs so much, but it's 550 pages and they charge a lot to print something that big on demand. My share is the same as for the Kindle version.

The Raven and the Crown is a historical fantasy, medieval history plus magic. Not fireballs, just the kinds of magic that people in European history have believed were possible, or liked to use in their own tales: shamanic journeys to the other lands, visions, healing, curses that made people weak and afraid. One of my aims was to capture what I love about the European past, both the picaresque reality of medieval life and the shattered remains ancient myths that animated their stories.

It began like this: in October 1990 I was sitting in the Public Record Office in London, reading court rolls from the reign of Edward II (1307-1327). At that time I was still getting the hang of the handwriting, the many abbreviations, and the other quirks of courtroom Latin. Most of the entries were brief and formulaic. So to improve my skill I sometimes worked my way through long cases that seemed interesting, even when they had nothing to do with my research. I found one of those cases and started in. I quickly found a word that took me several minutes to decipher; it turned out to mean "potions." Intrigued, I read the whole case, which I discovered was the trial of the guards in the Tower of London for allowing the escape of Roger Mortimer. Mortimer was one of Edward's great enemies, and he eventually overthrew Edward and took Queen Isabella as his lover. Of course this case had long ago been printed and translated, but I didn't know that; for me it was my discovery, the first great story I unearthed from beneath barriers of language and paleography. In his lifetime Mortimer had a sinister reputation and some thought he had sold his soul to the devil for power. The guards were acquitted, which I found fascinating; I don't see how their story of sleeping potions could have been true, but for whatever reason the King's justices decided to accept their excuse that Mortimer had magicked them to sleep from inside his own cell. 

I thought, somebody should write a novel in which Mortimer is a real sorcerer.

Around 2010 I started to write it. I had already written one book, my mystery, and I was ready to try something more ambitious. I was inspired to think I could successfully fuse fantasy with history by The Wandering Unicorn, a wonderful book by Manuel Mujica Lainez, an Argentine writer of "magical realism." The basic spine of my plot was taken directly from the tumultuous reign of Edward II, full of violence and intrigue.

But while the king and queen appear as characters, I focused the story on two ordinary people. My regular readers will recognize here both my politics and the contours of my imagination, which loves to dwell on the small and strange details of life rather than the bright center. The lead characters are Eleanor Rushmere, a recently widowed midwife, heir to shamanic powers passed down through the women of her family but haunted by the ghosts of her dead children, and Thomas of Penrith, a clerk of the King's household with a gift for song and story. 

In writing the story of Eleanor I tried to do something that I have rarely seen done well: to make a woman an epic hero without having her put on armor or otherwise act like a man. I wanted her to be a hero while being, in traditional terms, a woman. Magic provides a straightforward way to do this; to make simple virtues as powerful as swords. (One book I think does this well is Lois McMaster Bujold's Paladin of Souls, which won the Hugo. I did not read that until a couple of years ago, after the first draft of my book was finished, but I was cheered to see another writer try the same thing.) Much of what I wrote about Eleanor's magic springs from the other great theme of my life, parenthood. I helped my wife through four natural births, and then we adopted a fifth child, and taken together that was the most emotionally powerful experience of my life. In the European tradition, much magic springs ultimately from emotion: cursing, for example, is the power of hatred made manifest. So I mined my emotions of having and raising children, and my fears of losing them, to create a magic powerful enough to save the world.

I also tried, in a serious way, to imagine the cosmos of a medieval "cunning woman." What sort of world did they travel in, built half from Christianity and half from old pagan myths? In doing this I read about contemporary Peruvian shamans, who mix Catholicism with their own ancient myths, and other odd corners of modern life. It struck me that the Other Lands can be built from anything, can contain anything, so long as it resonates with our emotions. We find there what we need to find, or what we most fear.

I am of course disappointed that no one in the publishing world wanted to bring out my book, but I have no regrets about writing it. It has been my companion for 10 years, the repository of my imaginings, the inspiration of my dreams. In creating it I have learned things I never knew I did not know: about creation, art, inspiration, about how to stay true to a vision while shaping something others might enjoy. 

I offer my heartfelt thanks to all my friends who read and commented on early drafts, who have been my companions along this journey. Without your help and support I could never have come so far.

I hope others may find some joy in my creation; I know it gives me great joy to offer it to you.

Jenny of Oldstones

High in the halls of the kings who are gone
Jenny would dance with her ghosts
The ones she had lost and the ones she had found
And the ones who had loved her the most
The ones who'd been gone for so very long
She couldn't remember their names
They spun her around on the damp old stones
Spun away all her sorrow and pain
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
Never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave
They danced through the day
And into the night through the snow that swept through the hall
From winter to summer then winter again
'Til the walls did crumble and fall
And she never wanted to leave, never wanted to leave.

The song was imagined and mentioned by George R.R. Martin in one of the Song of Ice and Fire books. The producers of the Game of Thrones TV series had Ramin Djawadi, who wrote a lot of the show's music, write a tune, and they expanded the lyrical hints provided by Martin into this song.

Version sung by Podrick Payne in the episode "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," which simplifies the tune.

Florence and the Machine version, closer to the way Djawadi wrote it.

William de Leftwich Dodge

William de Leftwich Dodge grew up in interesting circumstances. His artistic mother married an insurance executive, then decided that was a terrible mistake and took her children to Europe, where she bounced around around the continent in a Bohemian way before settling in Paris. (Guinevere, 1910)

Young William studied art at various Paris schools but had to take the entrance exam for the École des Beaux-Arts six times before he was finally admitted in 1885. (Ceiling in the State Capitol, Albany, New York.)

Dodge tried to make it as a painter in Paris but failed and returned to the US in 1889. Out of work and low on money, Dodge rode a train out to Chicago in 1891, hoping to get work painting murals for the 1893 World's Fair. He walked into the office of the architect in charge of the administration building just when that put-upon fellow was desperately seeking a muralist. Dodge executed a dome mural, the fair was a gigantic success, and his career as a muralist and decorator of public buildings was launched.

Ceiling in the Surrogate's Court House, New York, 1905.

City Hall. Buffalo.

Jefferson Building, Library of Congress. I don't love any of these except Guinivere and the Surrogate's Courthouse, but the world was more beautiful when art like this was considered a standard part of any public building project.

Revisiting the Flight 93 Election

 Back in 2016, a conservative speechwriter named Michael Anton wrote a famous essay:

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

As Rich Lowry just pointed out, this ended up right where any sane person would have expected, with Trump crashing the plane.

Kevin Drum was moved to re-read Anton's essay and consider what it said. Anton, it seems, really believed that America was going to hell, so close to complete collapse that the election of Hillary Clinton really might finish off the republic. I think this a very interesting exercise, because I often find that people panic about our political future based on strange or flimsy fears.

Here is Drum's list of the things that, Anton said, showed America was on the verge of collapse:

1. Illegitimacy
2. Crime
3. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government
4. Politically correct McCarthyism
5. Ever-higher taxes
6. Ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure
7. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes
8. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, And, at the higher levels, saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege.
9. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.

But much of this is downright silly. Taxes in the US have been declining since 1960. Illegitimacy went up a lot from 1970 to around 2000 but has since gone down and is certainly not getting worse. Crime is down by half since the late 1980s. Our infrastructure may not have kept up with our population growth but it has not gotten worse. 

Our schools have not gotten worse, and violence is schools is actually down a lot, paralleling the decline in violent crime. We do struggle to teach poor kids, but what does the president have to do with that?

Immigration has indeed changed America quite a bit since 1965, but all the evidence suggests this has made our economy more vibrant. The social ills people like Anton complain about are concentrated, not among immigrants, but among long-resident whites and blacks in pockets of rural and urban poverty. All the cities that are reducing poverty are full of immigrants.

Pulling out of wars in Afghanistan and Syria is one of the things I always agreed with Trump about, but his record in this regard is not so great. Despite his promise, there are still American soldiers in Afghanistan.

The rise of left-wing speech policing is something I have written about, and that moderates like Obama speak about regularly, but I just can't see how college students chasing the occasional speaker off campus is going to destroy the nation.

Plus, the relationship of any of this to which party holds the White House is weak. Crime peaked under Reagan, illegitimacy under George W. Bush. The growth of government has been pretty steady, and anyway as I keep saying the most annoying bureaucracies in America are now run by corporations. 

Politics is about feelings. Many people feel, in their bones or wherever, that the country is going to hell, and the other party is to blame. But the evidence that the country is going to hell is, I think, weak, and the problems I worry about don't track very well with party control. 

Looking around right now, it seems to me that the  biggest source of violence and chaos in America is the fear that we are sliding into violence and chaos. It's the people rushing the cockpit that are doing the real damage.

Links 22January 2021

What Is Essential, photograph of New York graffiti by Russ Rowland

Luke Mogelson's first-hand account of the escalating violence among Trump's hard right supporters that culminated in the Capitol Riot, at the New Yorker.

The Uffizi Gallery has put online 88 illustrations for Dante's Inferno by 16th-century artist Federico Zuccari, quite fascinating

Using lava lamps to generate truly random numbers.

Interesting Vox piece on Baked Alaska, aka Tim Gionet, a internet troll who seemed to believe in nothing but his own drive for fame. He ended up in the Capitol riot and now seems on his way to prison. Gizmodo once asked of him, "Is there a magic number of times people get to 'jokingly' say they’re a Nazi before we take them at their word?"

Why Sea Shanties are having a cultural moment.

Analysis by two MIT scientists says "hypersonic" weapons are being overhyped and won't really be any more dangerous or stealthy than the weapons we already have. (NY Times) Of course, the weapons we have are already plenty bad.

Dostoevsky in Love: the crazy romantic history of a man who thought only suffering gave meaning to life.

Surgery to replace aging hips, knees, etc. has gotten much better over the past decade and now results in much less post-operative pain; new robotic techniques are making it even easier. (New York Times)

Scholarly article shows, with lots of math, that French Protestants who migrated to Prussia after 1685 did materially help the Prussian textile industry. Welcoming high-skill immigrants is the one state act that has always been found to help national economies.

Russian avant-garde art from c. 1890-1925 is hugely popular and valuable, and a lot of it lost its provenance around the time of the Revolution, which is why there are so many fakes.

‘I have never written a plot-driven novel,’ Le Guin said. ‘I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t.’ Posted for the people who tell me they can't write because they can't think up plots.

Biden's team and its stated priorities show where the Democratic Party ended up after four years of Trump: left of Obama but right of Sanders and Warren.

QAnon supporters are sad:  "It's like being a kid and seeing the big gift under the tree thinking it is exactly what you want only to open it and find it is a lump of coal."

Sometimes it's the disease that kills you, but just as often it's your body's messed-up immune response. Including with Covid-19.

Ben Sasse on what Republicans need to do to recover from Trump and conspiracy mongering. (The Atlantic)

Every one of Trump's budgets zeroed out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, but the agency survived and its budget even grew a little.  (New York Times) An acquaintance of mine who used to work there told me that the key to their survival has been cultivating the wives of Republican legislators. I mean, their constituents may hate the NEA, but are they going to fight with their wives over an agency that only spends $167 million a year? And will the ever increasing number of female Republicans in Congress change the equation?

The Proud Boys Turn on Trump

Oh, the schadenfreude:

After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump. . . .

But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak.”

The Proud Boys staged several demonstrations in support of Trump's post-election lawsuits: 

But when Mr. Trump’s legal efforts failed, the Proud Boys called for him on social media to use his presidential powers to stay in office. Some urged him to declare martial law or take control by force. In the last two weeks of December, they pushed Mr. Trump in their protests and on social media to “Cross the Rubicon.”

“They wanted to arm themselves and start a second civil war and take down the government on Trump’s behalf,” said Marc-André Argentino, a researcher who studies the far right. “But ultimately, he couldn’t be the authoritarian they wanted him to be.” 

As most of us always thought about Trump, in the end he didn't have the stomach for a violent coup. What happened after the Capitol Riot has even more aggrieved the Proud Boys:

After the violence, the Proud Boys expected Mr. Trump — who had earlier told his supporters to “fight much harder” against “bad people” — to champion the mob, according to their social media messages. Instead, Mr. Trump began distancing himself from his remarks and released a video on Jan. 8 denouncing the violence.

The disappointment was immediately palpable. One Proud Boys Telegram channel posted: “It really is important for us all to see how much Trump betrayed his supporters this week. We are nationalists 1st and always. Trump was just a man and as it turns out an extraordinarily weak one at the end.”

Some Proud Boys became furious that Mr. Trump, who was impeached for inciting the insurrection, did not appear interested in issuing presidential pardons for their members who were arrested. In a Telegram post on Friday, they accused Mr. Trump of “instigating” the events at the Capitol, adding that he then “washed his hands of it.”

That Trump has arranged his whole career to leave someone else holding the bag seems to have escaped the notice of these fools. Maybe they have finally learned that lesson, if nothing else.

And the Unrest Goes On

NY Times:

Protesters in the Pacific Northwest smashed windows at a Democratic Party headquarters, marched through the streets and burned an American flag on Wednesday in a strident challenge by antifascist and racial-justice protesters to the new administration of President Biden, whose promised reforms, they declared, “won’t save us.”

In Portland, Ore., lines of federal agents in camouflage — now working under the Biden administration — blanketed streets with tear gas and unleashed volleys of welt-inducing pepper balls as they confronted a crowd that gathered outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement building near downtown. Some in the crowd later burned a Biden-for-President flag in the street.

Another tense protest in Seattle saw dozens of people push their way through the streets, with some breaking windows, spray-painting anarchist insignia and chanting not only about ICE, but the many other issues that roiled America’s streets last year under the administration of former President Donald J. Trump.

“No Cops, Prisons, Borders, Presidents,” said one banner, while another proclaimed that the conflict over racial justice, policing, immigration and corporate influence in the country was “not over” merely because a new president had been inaugurated in Washington, D.C.

“A Democratic administration is not a victory for oppressed people,” said a flier handed out during the demonstrations, during which protesters also smashed windows at a shop often described as the original Starbucks in downtown Seattle.

Of course these people are exactly right: Biden's election will do nothing to create the world they want. But that's because the world they want – “No Cops, Prisons, Borders, Presidents” – is impossible. 

Certain things they want, like abolishing ICE, are possible, but on the other hand are unlikely to get the necessary votes, partly because people like them keep smashing things.

Here's a question: do people like this, pushing for the impossible with low-level violence, have any sort of positive role to play in a democracy? Do they generate any momentum toward their causes, by raising awareness or what have you? Or this just a straight-out loss for the world?

Paper Samurai by Juho Könkkölä

Finish artist Juho Könkkölä folded this warrior from a single sheet of rice paper. Video here.

Reactions

Joe Biden:

This is democracy's day. A day of history and hope of renewal and resolve through a crucible for the ages. America has been tested anew and America has risen to the challenge. Today, we celebrate the triumph not of a candidate, but of a cause, the cause of democracy. The people, the will of the people, has been heard and the will of the people has been heeded. . . .

In another January, on New Year's Day in 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. When he put pen to paper, the president said, and I quote, “if my name ever goes down into history, it'll be for this act. And my whole soul is in it.”

On this January day, my whole soul is in this: Bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause.

Tom Friedman:

Folks, we just survived something really crazy awful: four years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a network without integrity, each pumping out conspiracy theories without truth, brought directly to our brains by social networks without ethics — all heated up by a pandemic without mercy.

It’s amazing that our whole system didn’t blow, because the country really had become like a giant overheated steam engine. What we saw in the Capitol last week were the bolts and hinges starting to come loose. The departure of Donald J. Trump from the White House and the depletion of his enablers’ power in the Senate aren’t happening a second too soon.

Julie Wronski:

When Americans are divided on simple facts, and live in two different realities, we are not a governable people. To put it another way, when two people playing a game cannot agree on the basic rules and layout of the game, they cannot play. When groups within American society believe in two different sets of rules on how to play the game of democracy, it cannot be played and we become ungovernable.

Harold James:

Biden is the anti-Trump, with a personality that is soothing, healing, not combative, but having said that, it is the reality of the performance, in the short run on combating the pandemic, in the longer perspective on building better access to resources rather than the benign nature of the personality that will dictate the character of the legacy.

Charles Blow:

Whenever I hear politicians appealing for unity, I am befuddled. What do they mean by “unity”? What does “unity” mean to America? . . . 

Many people frame the ideas of division and unity around political polarization, which has grown in recent years. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November:

“A month before the election, roughly eight in 10 registered voters in both camps said their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine in 10 — again in both camps — worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.”

But this seems understandable to me. . . . I don’t object to this form of division at all. I don’t want to be unified with anyone who could openly cheer my oppression or sit silently while I endure it.

Nicholas Kristoff:

Coverage of Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan has understandably focused on the $1,400 payments to individuals, the increased unemployment benefits, the assistance to local governments, the support for accelerated vaccine rollout and the investments to get children back in schools. But there is so much more: food assistance, policies to keep families from becoming homeless, child care support, a $15 federal minimum wage and an expansion of the earned-income tax credit to fight poverty.

To me, the single most exciting element of the Biden proposal is one that has garnered little attention: a pathbreaking plan that would drastically cut child poverty. . . . it’s exhilarating that Biden included in his plan a temporary expansion (I hope it will be made permanent) of the child tax credit in a way that would do more than any other single policy to reduce child poverty and make America more truly a land of opportunity. In effect, Biden is turning the child credit into something like the child allowances that are used around the world, from Canada to Australia, to reduce child poverty.

David Harsanyi:

Moment after Donald Trump was sworn it back in 2017, it started to rain. Moments after Joe Biden was sworn in today, the sky cleared and the sun came out.

Dan McLaughlin:

After Nixon's departure, some came to him for advice, none for endorsement. Trump will probably be the opposite.

And from the Bench:

A federal appellate court on Thursday scrapped a Trump administration rule that eased limits on carbon dioxide emissions from coal- and natural-gas-fired power plants, and it effectively revived the Obama administration’s tougher Clean Power Plan.

Praise the Lord He's Gone

Now what? I feel optimistic, but not entirely so.

Olbian Gold

Gold artifacts from the Greek colonies in the Crimea, dating to between 300 and 150 BC. This design element is known as a Herakles Knot.

Gold bracelet with onyx goats.

And a famous diadem, excavated near Kerch, now in Germany.