Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company Building, Chicago, by Louis Sullivan

Louis Sullivan designed this retail building in fits and starts over the course of the 1890s, as various combinations of clients kept changing their minds about what they wanted. In 1898, two retailers called Schlesinger and Mayer finally agreed on a plan with Sullivan, and the building was constructed by 1902. But then the clients changed their minds and insisted the building be enlarged. And then in 1903, as soon as it was finished to their satisfaction, they sold it to Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, so it is by their name that the building is generally known. These days it is office space known as the Sullivan Center.

The building has a steel frame with an outer skin of terra cotta, glass, and wrought iron. Above, the building in 1909 during the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth.

One of the distinctive features is the wrought iron entrance, designed to be visible down both streets and to draw shoppers inside.

Details.

View of the terra cotta window treatments.

Corniche. This was actually removed at one point but has been reconstructed.

Interior staircase. Photo from the Historic American Building Survey.

Scandola Marine Reserve

Underwater cave off the coast of Corsica. More at National Geographic.

Not Experiencing the Same Reality

David Brooks can't see how Trump can survive a whole term in office. On the other hand,

I have trouble seeing exactly how this administration ends. Many of the institutions that would normally ease out or remove a failing president no longer exist.

There are no longer moral arbiters in Congress like Howard Baker and Sam Ervin to lead a resignation or impeachment process. There is no longer a single media establishment that shapes how the country sees the president. This is no longer a country in which everybody experiences the same reality.

Everything about Trump that appalls 65 percent of America strengthens him with the other 35 percent, and he can ride that group for a while. Even after these horrible four weeks, Republicans on Capitol Hill are not close to abandoning their man.

The likelihood is this: We’re going to have an administration that has morally and politically collapsed, without actually going away.

I also think this is the most likely scenario. The most dangerous scenario is that this chaos leads us to a terrible war, either because we just drift into it or because Bannon engineers it to save his job, and his crusade for western civilization. But I think a flailing drift into irrelevance remains most likely.

Woman with a Raven at the Abyss

By Caspar David Friedrich, 1803. There has never been a title better calculated to appeal to me.

What Rabbis, and Maybe Others, Should Learn

Tyler Cowen interviews Rabbi David Wolpe:

COWEN: How would you alter or improve rabbinical training?

WOLPE: I’ve given this a lot of thought. Let me just mention one area. When I speak to rabbinical students, I tell them all the time that the single most valuable commodity you have as a rabbi . . . you can answer that yourself, and then I’ll tell you what I think: your voice. Most people are going to come in contact with you when you speak to them. Not all of them, but most. There’ll be more people who come to your services than the number of people at whose bedside you will sit as they die.

And yet, most rabbis — most people — don’t know how to speak.

This remains my single piece of career advice, should there actually be any young people reading this blog. Learn to speak.

North Korea's Game of Thrones

While you were celebrating Valentine's Day you might not have noticed a strange story out of Malaysia. In the Kuala Lumpur airport, a man whose passport identified him as Kim Chol was killed by two women, who (reports vary) either stabbed him with poisoned needles or sprayed poison in his face. He made it to a ticket counter to ask for help but died en route to the hospital.

South Korean media then revealed that Kim Chol is actually Kim Jong-nam, the older half brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un has killed scores of enemies or imagined enemies since taking power in 2011, so everyone is assuming he was behind his half brother's death.

I love the detail that Kim Jong-nam was purged from his post as heir-apparent in 2001 after trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland with a fake visa. I mean, some people want ultimate power, and some just want to visit Disneyland with their kids. It sucks when the ruthless ones end up murdering the slackers, but it is an old theme in human history.

War I can understand: open violence, open hatred. But the murkiness that surrounds murderous dictators and kings is a complete mystery to me. How can anyone live like that? And why would anyone want to?

I guess that puts me in the Disneyland faction.

A Quilt with a Burden

Ann Sloan Lowrie Knox, quilt, 1861 to 1865. Now in the North Carolina Museum of History, where I saw it yesterday. Mrs. Knox made this quilt with scraps of fabric from clothes she sewed for her seven sons, five of whom died in the Civil War.

A Whirlwind Trip to Raleigh

I seem to have reached a stage of my career in which I am expected to zoom around the country for meetings with clients and the like. So Monday evening I zoomed down to Raleigh, North Carolina for a meeting with folks in the Department of Transportation. The trigger for this trip was that I just took over our contract with them from a colleague who died of a sudden heart attack; American business etiquette requires a face-to-face meeting in such situations to smooth the transition. My children all said, "Why don't you just Skype?" But people of my generation, at least, still think that meeting in person is important. I wonder if theirs will act differently when they rule the world?

My meeting was in the morning and I didn't have to return until the late afternoon, so I spent some time exploring Raleigh. The DOT is actually housed in two giant suburban office office warehouses, vast spaces divided into hundreds of cubicles by muted gray barriers. You are given directions by pillar number, as in, "my office is near Pillar G-2." But it was just a short drive from there to the old downtown. It was a lovely warm day, so I had a splendid walk. Above and top, the State Capitol, built around 1840.

Here's an interesting 19th-century motto for you, from a monument on the grounds.

Striking nearby building for the Education Department.

Neogothic Baptist church, 1850s.

I went through the state historical museum, which was fine as such things go. I was impressed by this exhibit on the textile industry. There is actually only one of each machine, turned into a whole hall by mirrors.

Who could resist pushing this button?

Governor's Mansion.

Since this is North Carolina, it has a basketball hoop in the driveway.

Some views of a lovely neighborhood just east of downtown.

It's spring in Raleigh.

Two views of the craziest house in town.

And now I'm already back home, getting ready to face my office tomorrow.

Damping Down Fear about Back Pain

By some ways of looking at the problem, back pain is a crisis in America. There are millions of sufferers, and some of them have had to stop working because of debilitating pain. Back pain is one of the most common reasons doctors prescribe opiate painkillers, which have become a crisis of their own.

But all of this is really rather puzzling. Many people with back pain have no obvious injuries that show up on an MRI, while MRIs of some pain-free people show what look like serious problems. Problems like extruded disks that used to get you whisked into surgery are now known to be common in healthy people. Big studies of surgery for spinal disk issues show that on average it is no better than a week in bed and some physical therapy. On the other hand I know two people who swear up and down that back surgery transformed their lives, and there are many thousands of such people in America.

So I never know what to make of all this. But I feel sure that one of the biggest problems with back pain is that it is scary. Partly this is physical, because it hurts and feels fundamental in a way that an injured hand or foot does not. It can make your legs go so stiff or wobbly that it is like a pseudo paralysis. Plus there is the background noise, all the people around us crippled by it.

New guidelines from the American College of Physicians recognize the importance of fear in back pain patients:

The new guidelines said that doctors should avoid prescribing opioid painkillers for relief of back pain and suggested that before patients try anti-inflammatories or muscle relaxants, they should try alternative therapies like exercise, acupuncture, massage therapy or yoga. Doctors should reassure their patients that they will get better no matter what treatment they try, the group said. The guidelines also said that steroid injections were not helpful, and neither was acetaminophen, like Tylenol, although other over-the-counter pain relievers like aspirin, naproxen or ibuprofen could provide some relief.

Dr. Weinstein, who was not an author of the guidelines, said patients have to stay active and wait it out. “Back pain has a natural course that does not require intervention,” he said.

In fact, for most of the people with acute back pain — defined as present for four weeks or less that does not radiate down the leg — there is no need to see a doctor at all, said Dr. Rick Deyo, a spine researcher and professor at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, Ore., and an author of the new guidelines.

“For acute back pain, the analogy is to the common cold,” Dr. Deyo said. “It is very common and very annoying when it happens. But most of the time it will not result in anything major or serious. ”

We are witnessing a major move away from heroic medicine. Many kinds of surgery are falling out of favor – cardiac bypass, arthroscopic surgery for knee cartilage tears, back surgery for extruded disks – because studies have shown that on average they do little good. Drugs introduced with great fanfare now seem to be only a little better than placebos. Maybe, just maybe, we are acquiring a little medical wisdom, and we will start to cut back on expensive medicine that does little good to focus on what we can achieve.

Some Good News from Washington

First, Michael Flynn is out as National Security Adviser. I always thought he was the most dangerous member of Trump's administration, combining a combative militarism with a weak relationship to the facts. His two hand-picked deputies are also said to be on the way out. Of course his replacement may turn out to be bad, too, but it will be hard to find anyone as dangerous as Flynn.

That Flynn fell because he lied about unauthorized back-channel talks with the Putin regime is also gratifying; it's nice to know that there are limits to how much schmoozing with dictators Trump will tolerate.

Second, Republicans in Congress are backpedaling hard from Obamacare repeal. Some are openly talking about "repair" instead of "repeal," and many others are insisting that a new plan be in place before the Affordable Care Act is undone. Let's hope they step up here and do some serious work on a new plan. The ACA is far from a perfect law and there are other ways to do what it does, some of which might work better. People who know Paul Ryan say he is a serious policy guy, and now is his chance to prove it. Honestly right now it looks like nothing will happen at all this year.

Pranu Mutteddu

Pranu Mutteddu is a complex of  Neolithic monuments in Sardinia, including tombs and numerous standing stones. They were built between 3200 and 2800 BCE; use may have continued down to about 2500 BCE.

Overhead views of the two main tombs. These were once covered with earthen mounds, but between the tomb robbers and the archaeologists all the dirt has been removed.

Tomb 2, the largest. Love the carved boulder entrance.

The roughly 60 standing stones include groups of two and three and this one long alignment. Many others have been removed over the centuries to build the island's ubiquitous stone walls.

More views of the tombs. I've been reading some recent scholarship about these Neolithic monuments, and the new thinking is that many were built in areas of low population density. It's as if people living in a scattered fashion felt a strong need for some sort of community focus, so they invested a huge amount of effort in building tombs and cult centers. Another discovery is that some of these centers began with a single burial, apparently of an important person; perhaps he was the founder of the clan or lineage that came together at the complex.

Haunted to the End by Student Debts

You may not know this, but if you have ever defaulted on a student loan, the government will take it out of your Social Security payments. Today's awful article in the Times is about retired people whose SS checks are being garnished for old student loans, pushing their incomes below the poverty line.

A report issued last month by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau shows that the number of Americans aged 60 and older with student loan debt has grown fourfold over the last decade, to 2.8 million in 2015 from about 700,000 in 2005. The average amount owed by these borrowers has nearly doubled, to $23,500.

Some older borrowers are carrying their own education loans, but most fell into debt helping their children or grandchildren, either by borrowing directly or co-signing loans.

Asking people to finance their educations with loans is just a slow-rolling social disaster, and we need a new system.

Human-Headed Owl

Small, baked-clay plaque with human-headed owl, Mesopotamia or Syria, 19th-18th century BCE.

But why a human-headed owl? Well, the demon known to Babylonians as Lilītu and Hebrews as Lilith was called The Queen of the Night, and we was sometimes depicted with an owl's wings and feet. So this might be her, although honestly it doesn't look female to me. But some sort of night demon for sure. From Timeline Auctions.

Calhoun College will become Hopper College

At Yale, a major focus of last year's angry student protests at Yale was the name of Calhoun College, which honors prominent 19th-century politician and racist John Calhoun. Yesterday it was announced that the name will be changed to honor Grace Hopper. Hopper (1906-1992) was a pioneering computer scientist (said to be the author of the first compiler) and ended up as a Navy rear admiral.

To me, this unfolded in exactly the right way. In the heat of the protest season the university stalled, announcing the formation of a study committee. Old institutions shouldn't make big decisions like that in a casual way. But once they had had time to reflect and to feel out the professors, the alumni, and the non-protesting students, they acted.

I also think it was the right decision. Calhoun College was opened in 1933 and there were protests over the name even then. Calhoun (1782-1850) wasn't just a typical man of the 19th century, but one who was notable for his racism at the time, and whose arguments helped advance the movement for southern secession. Yale is also adding two new colleges, and one of them will be named for Benjamin Franklin. Students also protested that designation, since Franklin at one point owned slaves and carried advertisements for slave sales in his newspapers. Besides which he is the author of numerous slurs against German immigrants, women, and probably others. To me, that is going too far, because for his time Franklin was notably liberal. Throughout his career he was a strong defender of American Indian rights, and toward the end of his life he became one of the new nation's loudest advocates for the abolition of slavery. If a college can't be named after him, then nobody who lived before 1960 is safe.

Brexit and British Football

My sons and I just watched a video called Top Fifty Goals Premier League 2016, highlights from last year in English professional soccer. Just your basic sports highlight film, but I was struck by the names. Here are the names of the goal-scorers who appear in the video:

Philippe Coutinho (3 times)
Alam Lallana (2)
Dele Alli (2)
Dmitri Payet (2)
Eden Hazard (2)
Fabio Borini
Roberto Pereyra
Wahbi Khazri
Jose Holebras
Junior Stanislas
Sergio Aguero
Connor Wickham
Stefano Okaka
Anthony Martial
Roberto Firmino
Riyao Mahrez
Abel Hernandez
Steve Cook
Pedro
Collum Wilson
Shinzi Okazaki
Xherdan Shaqiri
Jesse Lingard
Harry Kane
Andros Townsend
Christian Fuchs
Aaron Cresswell
Aaron Ramsey
Zlatan Ibrahimovic
Wayne Rooney
Mesut Ozil
Charles Gril
Laurent Koscielny
Granit Xhaka
Gaston Ramirez
DeMaray Gray
Sadio Mane
Son Heung-Min
Paul Pogha
Jordan Henderson
Christian Stuani
John Terry
Jamie Vadry
Henrikh Mkhitaryan

As you can see, old-fashioned English names are a distinct minority. Over the past 25 years the English Premier League has become a completely international organization. When I first watched English football in the 70s foreign players were a rarity, but this year only a third of starters are English in the legal sense ("qualified to play for England" is the usual formula). This is the lowest percentage of native players in any of the major European leagues. And while the Spanish league has always had lots of foreign players, they have traditionally been drawn from Latin America (Maradona, Messi), so they mostly speak Spanish and have Spanish names.

Perhaps a more important point is that the names don't necessarily tell you anyone's nationality. Delle Alli was born in Milton Keynes and plays for the English national team; Zlatan Ibrahimovic is Swedish; some of the men with Turkish names are German. Eden Hazard looks like it might be an English name, but he is from Belgium.

Many Europeans worry that their nations are disappearing, absorbed into the culture and economy of Europe. Others celebrate this disappearance, so long as it doesn't effect local cheeses and the like. But it is happening at an amazing rate.

So anyway here is my late-night insight into the Brexit vote: maybe thousands of Englishmen were just pissed off that their stars of the football team they have rooted for their whole life all have foreign names.

Ludwig Munthe

Born Norway, Ludwig Munthe (1841 – 1896) spent most of his career in Germany. Winter, c 1888.

Sunset over a Lake. He was quite good at bleak.

Ice Fishing.

Dutch Fishermen, c. 1890.

Spicy Food and Bad Science

The latest science "news":

Our objective was to analyze the association between consumption of hot red chili peppers and mortality, using a population-based prospective cohort from the National Health and Nutritional Examination Survey (NHANES) III, a representative sample of US noninstitutionalized adults, in which participants were surveyed from 1988 to 1994. The frequency of hot red chili pepper consumption was measured in 16,179 participants at least 18 years of age. Total and cause-specific mortality were the main outcome measures. During 273,877 person-years of follow-up (median 18.9 years), a total of 4,946 deaths were observed. Total mortality for participants who consumed hot red chili peppers was 21.6% compared to 33.6% for those who did not (absolute risk reduction of 12%; relative risk of 0.64). Adjusted for demographic, lifestyle, and clinical characteristics, the hazard ratio was 0.87 (P = 0.01; 95% Confidence Interval 0.77, 0.97). Consumption of hot red chili peppers was associated with a 13% reduction in the instantaneous hazard of death.

Does this show that eating chili peppers will make you healthier? No. What is shows is that healthier people eat more chili peppers.

Sick people don't like spicy food. Some of them are so sick that they soon die. As a result, the numbers show that people eating chili peppers live longer. This is really not complicated. But we have professional dietary "scientists" claiming the reverse and getting their results into peer-reviewed publications, complete with P values and confidence intervals.

Maybe I'm wrong and they are right, but I would bet on my interpretation because literally dozens of claims like this have been made for the health effects of various foods, and hardly any of them have been verified.

And you wonder why so many people have no respect for science.

Great Wisdom from America's Business Class

The LA Times:

Christopher Ranch, which grows garlic on 5,000 acres in Gilroy, Calif., announced recently that it would hike pay for farmworkers from $11 an hour to $13 hour this year, or 18%, and then to $15 in 2018. At the end of last year, the farm was short 50 workers needed to help peel, package and roast garlic. Within two weeks of upping wages in January, applications flooded in. Now the company has a wait-list 150 people long.

“I knew it would help a little bit, but I had no idea that it would solve our labor problem,” Christopher said. He said the farm has been trying, without success, to draw new workers since 2014. Human resources frantically advertised open farm-labor positions, posting help-wanted ads online and urging employees to ply their networks for potential recruits. Nothing came of it.

Wow, could it be that something as simple as raising wages could solve a labor shortage? Who could imagine such a thing?

But then the LA Times is also reporting that some California farmers are surprised that Trump is actually trying to limit immigration, which they are worried will keep them from being able to hire enough workers at harvest. Kevin Drum:

Trump literally spent his entire campaign making immigration his first priority and trade his second. But all these conservative farmers in the San Joaquin Valley voted for him anyway because, you know, he was going to lower their taxes and Make America Great Again. Now they're shocked that his top priorities are...immigration and trade.

I'm beginning to think that maybe California's farmers aren't too bright.

Republicans for a Carbon Tax

One thing about which I agree with the Republican platform is that using complex regulations to achieve public goals can be a miserable drag, and we should always be looking for simpler alternatives. And there is actually a better, simpler alternative to Obama's Clean Power Plan and other regulatory attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions: a carbon tax. Various right-of-center columnists have been making this argument for years, but very few Republican politicians have signed on, because of the party's aversion to any sort of new tax.

So I was thrilled to read that a bunch of retired Republican office-holders have come out in favor of a carbon tax:

The group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former secretary of the Treasury, says that taxing carbon pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is “a conservative climate solution” based on free-market principles. . . .

A carbon tax, which depends on rising prices of fossil fuels to reduce consumption, is supported in general by many Democrats, including Al Gore. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have come out in favor of the concept as well.

The Baker proposal would substitute the carbon tax for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a complex set of rules to regulate emissions which President Trump has pledged to repeal and which is tied up in court challenges, as well as other climate regulations. At an initial price of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced, the tax would raise an estimated $200 billion to $300 billion a year, with the rate scheduled to rise over time.

The tax would be collected where the fossil fuels enter the economy, such as the mine, well or port; the money raised would be returned to consumers in what the group calls a “carbon dividend” amounting to an estimated $2,000 a year for the average family of four.

Under the plan, a majority of families would actually come out ahead. But that probably won't make any difference to most elected Republicans, who have been putting themselves on record against carbon taxes for years.

Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani, Messina

The Church of the Annunciation, otherwise the Church of the Catalans, is a Byzantine remnant in the Sicilian city of Messina. Its current appearance dates to the Norman period in the 12th century, but its foundations and much of the fabric go back to the 7th century. Those foundations rest in part on those of an ancient temple of Neptune.

Some graffiti on the door posts suggests that it may have been a mosque during the period of Arab rule in the island.

In the fifteenth century it became the church of the Catalan merchants in the city, hence that part of its name. Fascinating interior architecture, Romanesque arches resting on actual Roman columns re-used from the Temple of Neptune.

One of the many medieval wonders in Messina.

A Meditation on Urban Wildlife

Sam Kriss remembers the foxes of London:

It used to happen a lot: Teetering home drunk and disconsolate late at night through the shadowy semi-suburbs of north London, I would turn a corner and find, staring placidly at me on the street, the silhouette of a fox. . . .

London foxes are smart, irreverent, and have little fear of humans; even when they do run away from us it’s slowly and mockingly, turning back to fix you with a sneer over their shoulders. Often they’d just simply watch, half-distracted, curious but not too interested in this strange creature briefly interrupting their territory. Foxes don’t care.

I was young, unhappy, and unfree, set half-adrift on a rolling and indifferent city, but the foxes were entirely at home. Humans build cities, shape and reshape them according to their wishes and fantasies, and then find themselves deeply alienated by the result; wild animals move in and are completely at ease with themselves.

Not every city has foxes. When I lived, briefly, in Los Angeles, people were astounded to hear that I used to share my streets with the creatures, but not as surprised as I was when I first saw a coyote padding insouciantly down Sunset Boulevard in the pink and bleary dawn. Crows are the same: While other birds preen and warble and beg for crumbs from our hands, crows don’t seem to care for us at all; they’re in the city to wait for us to all die out, and then they’ll take over. A city with wild animals in it is always one just on the conceptual edge of being without humans.

Did you know that the biggest population of wild leopards in the world is in Mumbai?

Words and Cultures

They say that the more a society cares about something; the more words it will have for that thing. Thus the Eskimos have 50 different words for snow – which my Googling shows may in fact be true.

And what does English have a lot of words for? According to the BBC, slang English has 3,000 words for being drunk.

The only things for which we have more slang terms are sex and money.