Kay Sage

Kay Sage (1898-1963) was an American surrealist painter. I started reading about her yesterday because my two eldest children took a one-day art-viewing trip to New York last week, and when I asked the son what he had liked that was new to him he mentioned Kay Sage. He was especially taken by the picture above, Tomorrow is Never (1955).

Sage was born into a wealthy trans-Atlantic family and grew up mostly in Europe. There she met and married Italian aristocrat Prince Ranieri di San Faustino, which seems more like part of a Hollywood movie or a Henry James novel that a true story, but there it is. She found, though, that the demands of being a princess kept her from her art, and in 1937 she divorced Prince Ranieri and moved to Paris. This is Danger, Construction Ahead (1940).

In Paris she attended a major show of Surrealism and was entranced by what she saw. She was particularly taken by the works of a certain Yves Tanguy, of whom she had never heard. Her favorite work of his was titled I'm Waiting for You. He, meanwhile, was also taken by her work when he saw it; he later recalled, “Kay Sage — man or woman? I didn’t know. I just knew the paintings were very good.” At the Appointed Time (1942).

They met in 1938 and were soon a couple. With war looming they moved to the US and in 1940 they were married in Reno, Nevada. By the end of the war they had settled in Connecticut, buying an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Woodbury and turning the barn into his and hers studios. I Saw Three Cities (1944).

Sage and Tanguy were both Surrealists and they kept it after Surrealism went out of style, replaced atop the art world by Abstract Expressionism. They tried to keep their careers separate, exhibiting in separate galleries and so on, but of course everyone came to think of them as the Surrealist Couple. He is held to have had a major impact on her work, not so much the other way around. But on the other hand she ended up more successful and these days she is much more popular. The Fourteen Daggers (1942).

Art historian Whitney Chadwick found in Sage “a sense of motionlessness and impending doom found nowhere else in Surrealism.” Ring of Iron, Ring of Wood (1947)

In 1955 Tanguy died of a sudden stroke. Sage was devastated and rarely left her home again. She continued painting for a few years in the same bleak style, but some critics see more personal grief in these late paintings, and less vague dread. The Passage, 1956.

This is her last work, painted in 1958, titled The Answer is No. The landscape of blank canvases seems to represent the paintings she would never complete. Five years later she shot herself in the heart, leaving a note that read:

The first painting by Yves that I saw, before I knew him, was called ‘I’m Waiting for You.’ I’ve come. Now he’s waiting for me again — I’m on my way.

Solar Power at the Coal Museum

In the Department of Consequential Irony, I give you the solar panels recently installed on the roof of the Coal Museum in Harlan County, Kentucky:

The Kentucky Coal Mining Museum is located in Benham, in the southeast corner of the Bluegrass State. Housed in what was originally an International Harvester commissary, the museum opened in 1994 and contains tributes to the industry for which the area is best known.

The installation of solar panels by Bluegrass Solar began this week. . . .

The museum is owned by Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, and Brandon Robinson, the communications director for the college, sees the irony in the situation.

“It is a little ironic,” said Robinson in an interview with EKB-TV, “but you know, coal and solar and all the different energy sources work together hand in hand. Of course, coal is still king around here, but when you talk about using other sources to start power, it’s always good to have more than one.

“We believe that this project will help save at least $8,000 to $10,000 off the energy costs on this building alone, so it’s a very worthy effort, and it’s going to save the college money in the long run,” added Robinson in an interview with WYMT.

The perfect symbol of our strange nation.

Trump and the Limits of Power

How much difference has Trump made? Scott Sumner considers the question:

Back in February, I did an Econlog post predicting that not much would change. Let’s look at some recent events:

1. Healthcare reform failed—we are sticking with Obamacare.

2. Early (conservative) enthusiasm about the economy has faded, as job growth for the first three months has been slower than under Obama’s last few years in office. The Great Stagnation will continue.

3. Alt-right enthusiasm for a US exit from the Middle East and a bromance with Putin seems to be fading.

4. There has been some deregulation of coal, but most utilities are not expected to go back to coal (with natural gas prices so low.)

Over the years I’ve gotten a lot of grief for my claim that Gore would have gotten us into Iraq, because that’s what the establishment wanted after 9/11. He foreign policy czar was expected to be (the pro-Iraq War) Richard Holbrooke. I’ve always believed that Presidents are less influential than most people assume–they mostly do what they are told, and today I believe that more strongly than ever.

One thing that I did not anticipate was just how incompetent Trump would be, and that this incompetence would turn out to have silver lining. Trump is not even capable of doing the bare minimum, staffing an administration. His ignorance is so deep that he must almost entirely rely on experts. (Today he tweeted that discouraged workers who have given up looking for work are counted as “employed”. So why do people complain when I call him an idiot?) Trump is like one of those kings/sultans/emperors in the history books who assumed power as a child and had various ministers conduct governance while they spent time in their harem or engaged in falconry.

Since the first George Bush, Washington has settled into a system that makes any sort of major change very difficult. The parties are closely balanced in power, with neither ever getting more than 54% of the vote, and also internally divided between radical and moderate wings in a way that makes concerted action difficult. This has amplified the power of the permanent bureaucracy. Really, who sets the priorities for big agencies like the Navy or the National Park Service? Certainly not the president, or Congress.

The two counter-examples I can think of are Bush's invasion of Iraq and the accompanying shift toward policies of torture, preventative war, and so on, and the passing of Obamacare. Both were brought about by major outside shocks: 9-11, which unleashed the brutish side of the whole nation, and the 2008 Wall Street collapse, which gave the Democrats a brief window of power. But even with unified control and 60 senate seats the Democrats could not enact some of their priorities and chose to focus on health care, bringing to fruition ideas they had been working on since the 70s.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Trump fails to accomplish anything of note, unless it is something like tax cuts or FDA reform that has been part of the Republican program for a generation. What then? For a mild-mannered centrist like me it is reassuring to think that things will go on much as they have been. After all, my life is pretty nice.

But – and I think this is the key question in American politics for the next generation – is the status quo good enough? Can the same old same old deliver real improvement for communities devastated by industrial decline and drugs? Or does it mean accepting big pockets of white society will just be like some Indian reservations and certain black ghettos, places where the "American dream" is a bitter joke? Or that the threat of ongoing stagnation across much of the country will eventually build up into a real political explosion? Could the no-compromise blocs on the left and right get powerful enough to block all compromise, making it impossible to pass a budget?

I think Obamacare, for all the good it has done, is both a symbol and an example of all that is wrong with our politics. Nobody really likes it, and it maintains the horrible inefficiencies that make our health care system so expensive and mediocre. But it's the best our divided system, hemmed in on every side by entrenched interests, can do. Real change in some areas requires radicalism that our system seems incapable of delivering, whether we're talking about single-payer health care, a serious attack on offshoring and dark money, or a major change in our foreign policy. It seems inevitable to me that ongoing progress in artificial intelligence and robots is going to eliminate millions of jobs over the next twenty years; is our system capable of dealing with that challenge?

In other words, if the most radical shakeup our system can deliver is Donald Trump, can we change enough to keep up with the changing world?

Iven Kawi's Terrarium Cakes

Remarkable. Via This is Colossal.

Trump's Normalization Continues with Cruise Missile Barrage

The President:

Tonight, I ordered a targeted military strike on the airfield in Syria from where the chemical attack was launched. It is in the vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread of chemical weapons.

I'm having a hard time feeling anything about this at all, because it seems so normal. It's what American presidents have been doing since Bill Clinton's time. I'm glad this was defended as a specific response to the use of chemical weapons – a resurrection of the "red line" that Obama invented and then ignored – rather than as a grand scheme to restore civilization in Syria.

To me the most important thing about the decision is its very normality. It is exactly what any ordinary Republican president would do, or many moderate Democrats; both Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio praised the attack.

The attack was not praised by either the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, people like Rand Paul and Justin  Amash, or by many on the Alt-Right. "Trump joins the neocons" was a typical reaction from that quarter. After all this was an attack on a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

This reinforces the sense for me that Trump, without the ideas, energy, or know-how to chart his own political path, is drifting toward being an ordinary Republican. Except for the short attention span and atmosphere of chaos, everything that made him distinctive is falling away: the talk of more generous healthcare, the trillion dollar infrastructure plan, the nods toward raising taxes on hedge fund billionaires, etc. All that remains is Bushism or Ryanism with a wagonload of scandals.

The Toaster Streak

Professional athletes sometimes have signings, usually because the owner of some store or sponsor of some event pays them to spend an hour or so signing whatever people bring in. Usually people bring in jerseys or programs from big games or other sports-related memorabilia. A few weeks ago Klay Thompson of the NBA's Golden State Warriors was at one of these signings when someone presented him with a toaster. After puzzling over this for a moment, he went ahead and signed it.

The Warriors had just lost three in a row, but after that fateful act they proceeded to go on an amazing win streak. The Toaster Streak, as fans call it, currently stands at 13 in a row, and fans of other teams have started presenting toasters for their own stars to sign.

A meme is born.

Chaucer's Temple of Mars

I've been listening to the Canterbury Tales in a modernized version and enjoying it very much. Just today I was struck by the description of a temple of Mars from the Knight's Tale:

And down a hill, beneath a sharp descent,
The temple stood of Mars armipotent,
Wrought all of burnished steel, whereof the gate
Was grim like death to see, and long, and strait.
And therefrom raged a wind that seemed to shake
The very ground, and made the great doors quake.
The northern light in at those same doors shone,
For window in that massive wall was none
Through which a man might any light discern.
The doors were all of adamant eterne,
Rivetted on both sides, and all along,
With toughest iron; and to make it strong,
Each pillar that sustained this temple grim
Was thick as tun, of iron bright and trim.

There saw I first the dark imagining
Of felony, and all the compassing;
And cruel anger, red as burning coal;
Pickpurses, and the dread that eats the soul;
The smiling villain, hiding knife in cloak;
The farm barns burning, and the thick black smoke;
The treachery of murder done in bed;
The open battle, with the wounds that bled;
Contest, with bloody knife and sharp menace;
And loud with creaking was that dismal place.
The slayer of himself, too, saw I there,
His very heart's blood matted in his hair;
The nail that's driven in the skull by night;
The cold plague-corpse, with gaping mouth upright
In middle of the temple sat Mischance,
With gloomy, grimly woeful countenance.
And saw I Madness laughing in his rage;
Armed risings, and outcries, and fierce outrage;
The carrion in the bush, with throat wide carved;
A thousand slain, nor one by plague, nor starved.
The tyrant, with the spoils of violent theft;
The town destroyed, in ruins, nothing left.
And saw I burnt the ships that dance by phares,
The hunter strangled by the fierce wild bears;
The sow chewing the child right in the cradle;
The cook well scalded, spite of his long ladle.
Nothing was lacking of Mars' evil part:
The carter over-driven by his cart,
Under a wheel he lay low in the dust.
There were likewise in Mars' house, as needs must,
The surgeon, and the butcher, and the smith
Who forges sharp swords and great ills therewith.
And over all, depicted in a tower,
Sat Conquest, high in honour and in power,
Yet with a sharp sword hanging o'er his head
But by the tenuous twisting of a thread. . . .

Mars' image stood upon a chariot,
Armed, and so grim that he seemed mad;
And o'er his head two constellations shone
Of stars that have been named in writings known.
One being Puella, and one Rubeus.
This god of armies was companioned thus:
A wolf there was before him, at his feet,
Red-eyed, and of a dead man he did eat.

Listening to this I thought, if there were really such an ancient temple, even in badly ruined state, they could scarce protect it from the hordes of eager tourists who would come to revel in its horrors.

Image is Rodin's Gates of Hell

Tulip Season in Georgetown

All taken this week.

The Alt-Right for Socialized Medicine

Interesting piece by Dylan Matthews at Vox noting how many Alt-Right or otherwise pro-Trump voices favor single-payer health care. Consider the inverview with pro-Trump internet troll Mike Cernovich on 60 Minutes:

"I believe in some form of universal basic income," he told CBS’s Scott Pelley, citing concerns about technological unemployment. "I’m pro-single-payer health care. Is that right-wing or is that left-wing anymore? Well, if you have a lot of people, a large swath of the company, or country, are suffering, then I think that we owe it to all Americans to do right by them and to help them out." . . .

Cernovich is less a traditional conservative than he is a Trumpist — and Trumpism in its purest, alt-right variety cares more about white working-class identity politics than traditional conservatism. More and more, Trump fans are seeing single-payer as part of that.

Alt-rightists and other Trump-loyal conservatives — Richard Spencer, VDARE writer and ex–National Review staffer John Derbyshire, Newsmax CEO and Trump friend Christopher Ruddy, and onetime Donald Trump Jr. speechwriter and Scholars & Writers for Trump head F.H. Buckley — all endorsed various models of single-payer in recent months and years.

This is F.H. Buckley:

Steve Bannon has said the Republicans will become a party of ‘economic nationalism.’ No one has bothered to define this, but here’s one thing it must mean: We’re going to treat Americans better than non-Americans. We’re going to see that Americans have jobs, medical care and an enviable safety net.

Sets up some interesting tests for liberals: would you work with the Steve Bannons of the world to achieve single-payer healthcare? I would.

It remains to be seen whether the Alt-Right has any actual power in Washington; so far the Ryans and McConnells remain firmly in control of the Republican Party. But I wonder if maybe the rigid ideological standoff of the past 40 years might be in for a shakeup in a few years.

Ideology and Science Books

Interesting:

Taking advantage of the ‘customers who bought this item also bought’ feature of online commerce, the researchers constructed a co-purchase network of political books and science books. And they found a clear division, which they label “partisan differences in the consumption of science”.

Both groups bought science books — more than 400,000 between them. But it was relatively unusual to find books that appealed to both liberals and conservatives. Members of each group — and their good friends — had different ideas about what made a good book. Buyers of “blue books” (the liberals) tended to pick from basic science topics, including physics, astronomy and zoology. “Red” customers preferred books that discussed applied and commercial science, such as medicine, criminology and geophysics. And whereas liberal choices tended to reflect mainstream thinking, “red books” tended to be co-purchased with a narrower subset of science books on the fringes of each subject.

This makes some sense to me. Many popular physics books are pretty close to religion for atheists, that is, they are mainly about the wonder, majesty and weirdness of the (godless) universe. It seems predictable that they would have more appeal to liberals. Much popular biology is suffused with environmentalist politics, and climate science even more so. It also does not surprise me at all that a substantial fraction of American conservatives has a thing for fringe science – we have all encountered cranks like that. So this study would be another piece of evidence that right and left among the book-buying class is today as much a matter of personal style and taste as anything else.

Here is one of the few figures in this study than made any sense to me. (Partly because many of them are color-coded and all the colors look the same to me. Discrimination against the color vision challenged!) The vertical axis shows political affiliation, with conservative at the top and liberal at the bottom. The horizontal axis shows how applied or theoretical the discipline is, measured in part by the ratio of patents to article citations. Applied is to the right,  theoretical to the left. How pleasing that books on explosives skew conservative, those on fungi liberal.

I would note, though, that the study was designed to exaggerate the differences between red and blue book buyers, by focusing on the most partisan titles:

From 3,530 politically relevant titles, two independent coders (with a third as tie-breaker) identified 673 conservative (‘red’) books, 583 liberal (‘blue’) books, and discarded 2,274 indeterminate books.

And if you look carefully at that graph you note that most disciplines fall between 0.2 and 0.8, which means that people from both parties read most science books (or at least books on most topics). Biochemistry falls in the 0.4 to 0.6 center zone, so everybody follows the master science of our era. I wonder if the slight conservative skew results from a handful of books pushing something close to genetic determinism. But then why would metallurgy skew slightly liberal?

I also wonder more about the crank phenomenon. Is there a class of books on subjects like cold fusion that appeals to fringe people on both the right and the left? That is, could a study like this provide any evidence for an argument that the extremes meet around the other side of the diagram? But perhaps people of that sort worry that the government is tracking their reading habits and don't buy as many books online.

Jonathan Lethem, "Motherless Brooklyn"

I just finished reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, which won a bunch of awards back in 1999, and I loved it. It's a sort of post-modern cross between a 40s tough guy detective novel and an 80s wise guy movie, California Noir retold with a Brooklyn accent.

Our narrator is Lionel Essrog, who grows up in a Brooklyn orphanage and then with three orphanage friends joins the crew of a small-time gangster named Frank Minna. Essrog has tourette's syndrome, and growing up they call him Freakshow. He tries all the available drugs but they make him feel terrible and he decides he'd rather be Freakshow than feel like that. So he goes through life ticcing and touching and bursting out with pet sayings like "Eatmebailey!" at exactly the wrong time. Sometimes he gets going on rolls of echolalia: Lexluthor, Lunchylooper, Laughyluck, Loopylip, Lockystuff. At first this is cute, and then it gets annoying, and just when it was getting so annoying I thought I might have to stop reading Lethem dials it back to an acceptable level. Point made, I guess. Essrog is basically a sweetheart, which given a flavor to the tale different from what a more hard-boiled detective would give us.

The plot is classic tough guy, right out of Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald. It drags a bit early on because Lethem sets the stage very carefully, but once it gets going it's terrific. Highly recommended if you're into that sort of thing.

Gender Reveal Cakes

So what, really, is America about? I call to your attention a new source for investigating this old question, the Gender Reveal Cake.

A Gender Reveal Party is held by expectant parents after the ultrasound has shown them the sex of their baby. I had heard of these, but I just learned that at some of these parties the Big News is revealed by cutting into a cake. Somehow the inside is dyed either blue or pink; generally this is just the frosting between the layers, but some people go beyond.

I think these cakes are about the most American thing I've ever seen. I mean, just look at them. Buck or Doe!

Guns or Glitter!

Touchdowns or Tutus!

Cupcake or Stud Muffin!

Bows or Arrows!

Prince or Princess!

I feel like I made a wrong turn and blundered straight into the Discourse. Looking at these, you get a sense of why progressive ideas about gender touch so many American nerves. For the people who make and serve these cakes, biological gender is not an arbitrary little DNA accident, but the bedrock of identity. These are not children, but Boys and Girls. Boyhood and Girlhood are things to be celebrated, not glossed over. These parents get their results and think, a girl! Dresses, make-up, ballet, cheerleading! A boy! balls, sports, guns!

On the other side are people who worry that they'll permanently damage the next generation if they so much as use gendered pronouns before the child has had a chance to choose an identity for themself.

Somewhere off to the side are people like me who mostly just don't want to offend anyone. I mean, I think the difference between men and women is pretty much the grandest thing in the universe, but I'm not trying to impose my views on anyone else, or judge anyone who feels differently.

So here we are.

The Authoritarian Allure

Tyler Cowen:

If I look back at the 20th century, I am struck by the pull exerted by powerful governing ideologies, even when those systems were evil or failing. Thousands of intellectuals endorsed Stalinism, even after many of its worst practices came to light. Marxism in its broader forms had more adherents yet. Extreme right-wing ideologies exercised a strong pull as well, at least until they became America’s outright enemies as the Second World War approached. Mussolini’s fascism was quite popular with many Americans, including New Deal intellectuals and leaders.

You can scold the sympathizers for their naivete or illiberal tendencies, but there is a deeper truth. Individuals have a mimetic desire to copy or praise or affiliate what is perceived as successful, and a lot of our metrics of success have to do with power rather than freedom or prosperity. So if there is a powerful system on the world stage, many of us will be drawn to it and seek to emulate it, without always being conscious of the reasons for those attractions.

As Cowen notes, this admiration for success explains both the unchallenged dominance of capitalist democracy in the 1990s and its decline since then relative to both socialism and authoritarian government. Since the invasion of Iraq, the Wall Street collapse, and the Great Recession, America and its imitators have looked weak, their values questionable. This is true both for people within western nations and in developing nations such as China and Vietnam.

On the other hand there is always Venezuela to remind people that anti-westernism and anti-capitalism don't necessarily lead to a better outcome.

Mosaics of Ancient Ucetia

The southern French town of Uzès sits on the ruins of ancient Ucetia. Ucetia was a Gallo-Roman oppidum (fortified town) founded in the 1st century BCE, known to have been a significant community through the whole of the Roman and early medieval periods. However, until recently very few archaeological traces of its ancient past had been uncovered.

But recent excavations on the grounds of a boarding school have uncovered several buildings dating from the 1st century CE to the 7th.

The most spectacular finds are these mosaics, which were part of a colonnaded building of uncertain function built not long before 100 CE. Some say a house, others a public building, or maybe a public building later converted to a private residence.

Charming owl.

More.

This one amuses me because it looks so much like the logo of my employers. More at the History Blog. Original French article at INRAP.

Raj Golawar, Golden Gate in the Fog

From National Geographic.

Work in Progress

Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.

– Daniel Gilbert

Hercules Segers: 17th-Century Landscapes

The Met is mounting a big exhibit of the etchings of Dutch artist Hercules Segers (c 1590-1638). The New Yorker's reviewer called it "thrillingly complete," which struck me as the nerdiest sentence I have read in months. Mossy Tree, c. 1628

Some of these images are really hard to make out, at least in the small files that are all they uploaded, but they are still interesting. The Met says,

The great experimental printmaker Hercules Segers, one of the most fertile artistic minds of his time, created otherworldly landscapes of astonishing originality. With a unique array of techniques whose identification still puzzles scholars, he etched extraordinary, colorful landscapes and still lifes. Rejecting the idea that prints from a single plate should all look the same in black and white, he produced impressions in varied color schemes—painting them, then adding lines or cutting down the plate. Segers turned each impression of his evocative landscapes into unique miniature paintings that seem out of their time. He was a favorite artist of Rembrandt, who owned eight paintings and one printing plate by Segers.

Road and City, c. 1622.

Alder and Ash, c. 1628.

Wooded Landscape, c. 1620. I certainly think these are interesting, and indeed they have a very distinctive style.

Dueling Statements at Middlebury

At Middlebury College the fallout from the violent attack on Charles Murray continues. More than a hundred members of the faculty signed a statement supporting free speech on campus, which contained the following points:

• Genuine higher learning is possible only where free, reasoned, and civil speech and discussion are respected.
• Only through the contest of clashing viewpoints do we have any hope of replacing mere opinion with knowledge.
• The impossibility of attaining a perfectly egalitarian sphere of free discourse can never justify efforts to silence speech and debate.
• Exposure to controversial points of view does not constitute violence.
• Students have the right to challenge and to protest non-disruptively the views of their professors and guest speakers.
• A protest that prevents campus speakers from communicating with their audience is a coercive act.
• No group of professors or students has the right to act as final arbiter of the opinions that students may entertain.
• No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion.
• The purpose of college is not to make faculty or students comfortable in their opinions and prejudices.
• The purpose of education is not the promotion of any particular political or social agenda.
• The primary purpose of higher education is the cultivation of the mind, thus allowing for intelligence to do the hard work of assimilating and sorting information and drawing rational conclusions.
• A good education produces modesty with respect to our own intellectual powers and opinions as well as openness to considering contrary views.
• We are steadfast in our purpose to provide all current and future students an education on this model, and we encourage our colleagues at colleges across the country to do the same.

The students behind the protest responded with a point by point rebuttal, which includes some cogent arguments. A sample:

Genuine higher learning is possible only where free, reasoned, and civil speech and discussion are respected.

Many who chose to disrupt the events of March 2 did so with this principle in mind. We contend that free, reasoned, and civil discussion are certainly necessary for genuine higher learning, but that the speaker in question denies the basic equality of those invited to engage in such discourse, and therefore undermines the foundation of such discourse. By protesting the characterization of the speaker’s research as worthwhile of academic inquiry, students did more to defend the integrity of reasoned and civil discourse at Middlebury than did the administration and co-sponsors of this event.

We hope that Middlebury College would not allow a classroom debate in which a white student argued that the black students in the class, due to inferior intellectual inheritance, did not belong. We ask the undersigned professors to consider the historical and societal context for such a debate, and to consider what base assumptions make the inverse argument, that white students are genetically inferior to black students, so far outside of our collective imagination or dialogue.

A protest that prevents campus speakers from communicating with their audience is a coercive act.

In his oft-quoted Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr warned of a white moderate “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’”

No group of professors or students has the right to determine for the entire community that a question is closed for discussion.

What is the point of enumerating “unassailable” core values if not to signal that certain questions are closed for discussion? When professors say “the impossibility of attaining a perfectly egalitarian sphere of free discourse can never justify efforts to silence speech and debate,” does that not signal to student protesters that they are unwilling to listen to or discuss alternative perspectives on the matter?

Amen to that last. The notion of completely free and open debate is a mirage, certainly on any university campus. There are always limits to what we will admit into civilized discussion. In admitting that they are setting limits to the sort of debate they will tolerate, the students are being more honest than the high-minded professors. The debate is not over whether to have completely free debate, which nobody truly wants; it is over what the limits should be.

I actually find this exchange of manifestos encouraging. It represents the kind of argument over fundamental principles that we all agree ought to be a key part of university education. And thus in a roundabout way it upholds the wisdom of inviting Charles Murray to the campus in the first place: it has forced both sides to make the best arguments they can for their positions. This, right here, is education as I understand it.

Here is how a cynical university administrator might sum up the whole affair: In America, there are racists. If we never let our students confront racism, they will never learn how to argue against it; in fact they might simply be so astonished by it that they might not know how to respond. Obviously we can't bring David Duke to campus, so what we need to do is to find a racist – or a man who can plausibly be portrayed as one – with sufficient academic credibility to make the invitation believable. We'll invite him to speak and then watch the students who rebel against this really get to work, first organizing their opposition and then having to defend it against the withering assaults we know they will get from the Free Inquiry crowd. Plus they will get to see themselves attacked by big-name columnists in the Times and dragged through the mud on Fox News, things that anyone who wants to change the world will have to put up with sooner or later. Think what a learning experience it will be. They'll hate us, of course, but why should we care about that? It's our job to shake them out of the safe cocoons they grew up in and prod them into life; the last thing they need is more warmth and cuddles. Welcome to the real world of politics and the intellect, kiddos.

Pocklington Iron Age Cemetery

It was recently announced that archaeologists working in an Iron Age cemetery near Pocklington, Yorkshire, had unearthed this chariot burial. It's one of about twenty that have been found in Britain, and one of the few to have been completely excavated by professionals. Note that the wooden wheel in the image above had completely dissolved, leaving just the iron rim and a stain where the other parts had been. The other wheel had been higher up and was probably destroyed by plowing.

The horses. The burial has not yet been dated but the cemetery as a whole dates to between 800 and 100 BCE.

Excavations at Pocklington have been going on for a couple of years now. The current estimate is that 142 people were buried here. 

A burial in the ground, and another in the lab. The bones are fairly well preserved, and a major campaign of forensic study and DNA analysis is planned. But if you take a close look at those bones in the lab, you'll see that one part that is not well preserved is the pelvis. This is a very common problem, and explains why archaeologists argue so much about the sex of skeletons. (No, the spine didn't extend down past this child's feet; it's just laid out strangely.)

Quite a few weapons have been found, such as spear heads, daggers, and one longsword.

A glass bead with gold inlay.

Other jewelry. It's an amazing find, especially when you consider that it was made randomly, when archaeologists were called in to survey the site of a planned housing development.

What's a Conservative in the Trump Era? A Moderate?

Interesting little article by McKay Coppins on how to think about divisions in the Republican Party, since nobody thinks conservatives vs. moderates makes any sense in the Trump era. Coppins spoke to Republicans about their ideas and put out a plea that generated dozens of emails, and he suggests these axes of division:

1) Libertarian vs. Authoritarian

2) Anti-Establishment vs. Establishment

(Coppins: The flaw in this formulation, it seems to me, is that virtually every Republican who has entered Congress over the past eight years started out on the anti-establishment end of the spectrum, and then slid—involuntarily, perhaps, but inevitably—toward the establishment end.)

3) Absolutists vs. Dealmakers

4) Open/Tolerant vs. Nativist/Racist

According to Coppins, nobody on the Trump side offered this division, but it was offered by many anti-Trumpists.

5) Grievance-Motivated vs. Philosophically-Motivated

I thought this last was the most interesting suggestion, a divide between "Fox News-a-holics driven by tribal grievance from people who have some kind of philosophically rooted belief system." Coppins quotes Republican strategist Liz Mair as saying,

I honestly think the split in conservatism comes more down to philosophy versus identity politics than anything. Are you opposed to things on philosophical or tribal grounds? Are you a believer of a member of our clan? (Said in the Scottish sense) ...

I bet if you polled Trump primary voters and asked them what was the bigger problem—insufficiently limited government or transgender Muslim feminists being celebrated at the Oscars, a big majority would say the latter.

We heard a lot of this back when Trump won the nomination, Republicans who thought their voters cared about conservative philosophy and were shocked to see how little truth there was to it.

But I think this is generally true of conservatism as a movement. The root of it is just a sense that the world is changing in bad ways, and there no reason to expect that all conservatives would be upset about the same changes or support the same responses. This is especially true when, as in America, conservatives are drawn from all social classes.

Of course all political parties are divided. But it may be that right now the Republicans are divided in ways that critically weaken their power. Maybe they will be able to work together better than they did on their health care bill, but so far the signs for their accomplishing very much this term are not good.

Quantum Thermodynamics

Interesting story at Nature on the physicists who study the messy intersection of classical thermodynamics with quantum mechanics:

Physicists have argued over the meaning of the three laws of thermodynamics since they were written in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The laws say that energy cannot be created or destroyed; that the amount of disorder, or entropy, in an isolated system can never decrease; and that it is impossible to cool an object to absolute zero. But thermo-dynamics is paradoxical. The second law, which also puts limits on how efficiently heat can be converted into work — as happens in a steam engine — is particularly controversial.

Physicists do not agree on what the three laws of thermodynamics mean or where they come from. Are they purely the statistical product of trillions of particles interacting, or are they a fundamental part of all physics at any scale? To answer that question you need to understand how they relate to quantum mechanics, which describes the operation of single particles. Consider:

The law says that the production of disorder is irreversible. But some physicists argue that at the microscopic level, this seems to conflict with the laws of mechanics — be they those of Newton or of quantum physics. Mechanical laws, say these researchers, prescribe that all processes can be reversed.

Researchers have come up with different approaches to solving this conundrum, but none has satisfied everyone. “This has always been a bit of a dirty business,” says Christian Gogolin, a physicist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels, Spain.

I bring this up because it shows again the limits of our physics. It is not just gravity that can't be reconciled with quantum mechanics, a problem that only matters when your are trying to understand black holes or other extreme situations. We cannot even reconcile ordinary thermodynamics, the kind we use to calculate the efficiency of engines, with quantum mechanics. In recent years there has been a great deal of work in this direction, and there have been reports of experiments that confirm our thermodynamic laws operate at the quantum scale. If we can figure this out, it may have all sort of useful applications:

Whatever the outcome of these debates, they may have implications for future technologies. Physicists have made ‘quantum heat engines’ — that can turn heat into work at the quantum level. Applications such as quantum computing are moving from the theoretical to the real world, so understanding thermodynamics on a tiny scale could be crucial. “You need to design algorithms that are not just faster,” says Renner, “but also thermodynamically optimized.”

Today in the Culture

Rocked by charges of sexual harassment and racial discrimination, Fox News has instituted mandatory sensitivity training for its employees.