La Marmotta, a Wonderful Neolithic Site near Rome

La Marmotta is a Neolithic settlement under the waters of Lake Bracciano north of Rome. It has produced a wonderful array of artifacts made of wood, fiber, and bone that give us an amazing look at the Italian Neolithic.

Lake Bracciano has been a key source of water for Rome since the time of Trajan, who ordered the construction of a (mostly underground) aqueduct carrying water to the city. That aqueduct was damaged during the Gothic Wars of the 500s, but it was repaired under Pope Paul V in 1612 and has been carrying water ever since. In the 20th century the old aqueduct was finally found to be no longer adequate and a new aqueduct was planned. But as soon as constructed started for the intake in the lake, in 1989, workers turned up potsherds and other artifacts. The intake had to be moved and the archaeological investigation began.

La Marmotta was a lake village, with dwellings standing on piles driven into the lake floor. A plan of the excavation as of 2000 is above, showing at least 13 structures; this is estimated to be about a quarter of the site. These dwellings were 8 to 10m long and approximately 6m wide (30 by 20 feet). They had interior partition walls and stone central hearths. The site dates to 5690-5250 BC.

Here's an old reconstruction of a Neolithic village in a Swiss lake, to convey the flavor. The residents of la Marmotta raised sheep, goats, cattle and pigs and hunted deer, as well as fishing. They farmed mainly wheat and beans and also ate plums, figs, and numerous sorts of berries. One of the most common plant remains was seeds of Carthamus lanatus, distaff thistle, which can be pressed for oil, but which dropped out of cultivation when the more prolific safflower arrived in Europe in the Bronze Age.

But the glory of the excavation is the artifacts. There are a lot; the village seems to have been abandoned in a hurry, people leaving almost all of their belongings behind. I especially love the sickles, which are wooden (oak) with a cutting edge made of stone flakes.

It is a bit disappointing to find only small stone flakes, rather than spearpoints, but just finding flakes doesn't mean you didn't find tools. A great many tools were made this way. These sickles have been minutely studied by Italian archaeologists,  They are rather small, between 24 and 36 cm, with a cutting edge between 18 and 16 cm long. Microscopic study of the wear on the stone flakes suggests that they were used to cut grain, and probably near the base of the stalk rather than near the head. (That last from the angle of the wear on the edge.) 

This is a handle type I have never seen before on a Stone Age tool.

Some clay pots, filled with modern grain to duplicate the badly decayed spelt that was found in them.

A great deal of attention have been paid to the textiles and basketry. All of the fabrics above were made with plant fibers, including flax but probably other, unidentified species as well.

Basket, with the remains of what appears to be bread pressed into the bottom. The basket is made of two components, a fairly rigid woody plant around which thinner, more flexible fibers have been woven; neither plant has yet been identified.

Cordage.

A ton of evidence of weaving has been found, starting with the usual, loom weights.

Spindles.

A tool for working with threads on the loom. This exact type of tool was still used in modern Italy with the name draghetto.

A real boat, a dugout, 11m long and 1.2m wide. Looks like all other European log boats of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.

And a unique toy boat.

Plus a very not-unique find, a 7.5-cm tall soapstone carving known as the Venus of la Marmotta.

What a wonderful site, and what a joy to me to have discovered it today.

Georgi Gospudonov, "Time Shelter"

Time Shelter just won the International Booker Prize, given to the best novel that has been translated into English. It didn't deserve it. The people who gave it the award seem to have believed that it strikes a blow against reactionary populism, which it absolutely does not. In fact it might be the strongest argument in favor of reactionary populism I have ever read. Otherwise the novel is okay, sometimes interesting and sometimes not.

Georgi Gospudonov is a veteran novelist and poet from Bulgaria. As with the Romanian novel I recently reviewed, it struck me that having grown up in the Eastern Bloc is an advantage for a contemporary writer. If things get slow you can always just toss in a few outlandish memories from your youth, all those things about communism that satirize themselves: the chanting of absurd slogans, the bitter jokes, the mandatory school visits to see the preserved body of the founding dictator, the way secret police files fill up with pointless trivia from the lives of those under suspicion.

To me the most interesting part of Time Shelter was the relationship between the narrator and a man named Gaustine. Sometimes Gaustine appears as a fully functioning person with a peculiar habit of wandering around in time, but other times the narrator admits that he invented Gaustine and has full control over what he does. When he thinks up a shocking aphorism, he attributes it to one of Gaustine's publications, or to his notebooks. Some of the aphorisms are indeed quite striking, and Gaustine has a weird outsider perspective on Europe and its history. This made me ponder where our ideas come from and whether the range of our thought is limited by our fear of saying outrageous things that might somehow be held against us. Would having a secret mouthpiece who would never be associated with us do anything to unlock our minds? In the relationship between the author and his alger ego was the seed of an actually interesting book, which sadly never gets the chance to grow.

The plot of Time Shelter, such as it is, concerns attempts to recreate the past. This takes off from a scheme by Gaustine, appearing in the guise of a geriatric psychiatrist, to create clinics in which people with Alzheimer's are treated by surrounding them with the world of their youth. And for many, this seems to work, soothing them and making their last months or weeks more pleasant. At first Gaustine sets up single rooms decorated to a particular decade, then wings, then whole small villages where everything looks like 1955 or 1967.

And then, in a way that goes completely unexplained, this mania for recreating the past escapes the clinics and spreads across Europe. You see crowds of people on the street, dressed in the clothes of past epochs, listening to old music; political parties are formed with the aim of bringing back particular decades. Eventually a convulsed Europe stages a great referendum, each nation voting on which decade it wants to go back to.

The longest and most detailed section of the book describes the narrator's return to Bulgaria on the eve of the referendum. In Bulgaria the vote will be a choice between two eras, each backed by an organized political party. On one side are the nostalgists for communism who want to go back to the 1960s, when the state took care of everyone and people believed in the future. On the other are Bulgarian nationalists who want to return to the years around 1900 and recreate the national wars of independence against the Ottomans. They grow huge mustaches, wear embroidered vests, carry scimitars and pistols. The narrator attends the rallies held in Sophia by both parties on the day before the vote, observing the passion and absurdity of it all.

And indeed it is all absurd. Both nationalism and communism have been tried as solutions to the problems of human life and found wanting, and their trappings are simply ludicrous to anyone who has not surrendered to their ideological mind control.

But as a criticism of that kind of politics, Time Shelter falls on its face in the mud. Because you have to ask yourself: what, exactly, is the narrator, as he observes all of this? Where does he stand, and what does he believe in?

He is nowhere. He believes nothing. He is nothing.

He is divorced, childless, with no close friends other than the one he invented, living abroad (rather than in any particular foreign place), earning his living as a consultant to dubious psychiatric clinics. He never gives voice to a single sentiment about politics or society beyond a visceral reaction against nostaligia. Ok, fine, as a political practice, nostaligia is stupid. But what is the alternative? In the Europe of Time Shelter, the alternative is nothingness. To be nobody, to believe nothing, to wander around from place to place and decade to decade in search of fleeting pleasures. In one of the few moving scenes, the narrator muses on returning to the Italy of the 1950s, exploring an Italian town, emerging from a narrow street into a small square where his friends are gathered around an outdoor table, drinking and laughing. Asked where paradise is, he points to his friends.

That is an important kind of happiness, and one can imagine a novel in which this is effectively juxtaposed to absurd ideological programs. But by bringing elections and politics into the novel, Gospudonov forces us to ask other sorts of questions. Like, what is the alternative to reactionary politics? Because you have to have an alternative. You can't simply say, that's bad. What is good? If our narrator actually has any faith in future life under the EU, with a mixed economy and contentious politics, he never says so. 

Is our rootless cosmopolitan narrator any happier than the people marching under reactionary banners? So far as I can tell, he is less happy, and he is certainly more alone. In fact he spends the last section of the book hiding out in a monastery, cut off from everything. He is a walking advertisement for throwing yourself into some kind of absurd political movement, so you would belong to something and have some people to call your own. So you would have something, anything, to believe in.

The Hofburg

The Hofburg in Vienna was the winter palace of the Austro-Hungarian emperors; in the summer they decamped to the country, and higher altitudes. 

It is a pastiche of building from different periods, the oldest sections built in the 13th century and the last just before World War I.

A rendering of the palace around 1575.

The St. Augustine chapel, late 17th century.

These days the palace is largely a museum, but one wing serves as the residence of the Austrian president.

The Austrian emperors were very rich, and their filled their palace with wonders.

There are lots of hidden courtyards and other spaces.

One of the most wonderful is the library, which preserves much of its 17th-century decoration.

One of the best parts for tourists is the imperial treasury, which preserves the crown jewels and the solid gold basin that was used for imperial baptisms.

I love this painting of a royal wedding held in the Hofburg in 1763. Most of the people seem to be there to watch the most royal guests eat dinner.

I have been there, but I find that Vienna all blends together for me, so the Hofburg doesn't stand out in my memory. But Vienna does, as the cleanest and most glittering city I have ever seen, with the most public sculpture and the the most fantastically decorated buildings.

Ada Palmer on the Absolute Victory of the Enlightenment

Ada Palmer has read too many student papers on Plato's Republic:

“Totalitarianism!” is an accusation that appears in almost every student Plato paper, “Dystopia! Oppression! It would be unendurable! evil! for people to have their jobs dictated to them by the state! Assigned to fixed ranks for their whole lives! With no say in government unless they’re one of these supposed philosopher kings!” It’s a reaction which always makes a wave of awe wash over me at the absolute victory of Enlightenment concepts of equality. Because such students genuinely and reflexively think of equality and self-determination as the human default. People. Are. Equal. And. Free. (is the thought process), and if Plato’s “ideal” city imposes assigned jobs and class differences, those impositions are tyrannical. This gut reaction completely misses the fact that Plato’s city, which extends equal education to all and then assigns tasks and ranks based on exams and personal disposition, is radically more free than the reality Plato lived in. . . . 

Now, the students who write these papers accusing Plato of “totalitarianism” are perfectly aware that the pre-modern world was full of rigid class systems, feudalism, and slavery. They know that Plato lived in a culture with far less self-determination than his Republic, but there are different levels of knowing a fact. You can know perfectly well that the water is off in your apartment for plumbing repairs, but, after unthinkingly turning the tap on five occasions, you still find yourself turning it a sixth time, because instinct hasn’t caught up with intellectual knowledge. The tap makes water come out! Just so, human beings have self-determination, and my students know that on a more basic level than they know that legal and social equality are modern innovations. One level of knowing is engrained, reflexive; the other requires conscious awareness. And this is how my students can know intellectually that Plato’s world was full of unfreedom, but still feel instinctively that a Republic which offers universal, equal education to all children, of all parents, all races, and both sexes, then gives you an exam to determine the job that will make you most happy in life, is a step toward totalitarianism. So, well done, Enlightenment, you made a society of young people who really think with freedom and equality as defaults.

Andy Warhol, Art, and Originality at the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court recently held, 7-2, that Andy Warhol violated Lynn Goldsmith's copyright when he re-used her photograph of Prince to make one of his famous silk screen portraits. (Sotomayor wrote the decision; Kagan and Roberts dissented) The ruling is very narrow, emphasizing that Warhol sold his image to magazine, when the original was also sold to a magazine, which was just too much like duplicating for the court.

But this is just one of an endless series of similar dilemmas that Warhol left behind. To the extent that his career was about anything other than self-promotion, it was about attacking the very notion of artistic originality and integrity. He loved the idea of selling works as his that he had never physically touched, everything done by assistants or machines. He loved asking other people for ideas, then selling them as his own. What, he once asked, is the difference between asking someone to suggest a subject and finding it in an old book? He deliberately blurred any boundary between original works and copies. It amuses me to no end that the art world simply cannot absord his attack on their core values, leading to lawsuits over which works are or are not "authentic" Warhols. He would have found that hilarious. 

In the NY Times, Richard Meyer argues that the Court was wrong: "Throughout his career, the artist was concerned not with copyright but with the right to copy, which he saw both as a creative method and a design for living." Warhol even once tried to duplicate himself:

When he tired of being himself, Warhol sometimes asked others to step into the role. In 1967, he hired the actor Allen Midgette to appear as Warhol on a national lecture tour. When, after the first few lectures, the ruse was exposed, Warhol responded, “He was better at it than I am.” From the artist’s perspective, Midgette was not only better at delivering remarks and answering questions from a public audience. He was better at being Warhol.

Warhol did not just copy, he attacked the notion that there was any difference between copying and creating. Our legal system, it turns out, cannot absord this any more than the art market can.

But it is a real issue: how original does any work of art have to be to qualify as an artist's own work? Take music; most of it is made within genres that set very narrow limits on the sounds and progressions and instruments that a composer can employ, and on the topics a lyricist can take up. To what extent is any pop song "original"? How many notes in a row can it share with some other song before that counts as copying? There is an old joke post about the Blues that goes around the internet, including a list of the names that women can and cannot have (Sadie, yes; Kimberly, no), the places the singer can be (prison, yes; golf course, no), and so on. It's funny because it's true, because all genres of art depend on very restricted sets of ideas and images.

In the 21st century, a vast amount of art relies on "sampling." Rappers sample beats and phrases; collage artists include iconic photos; comedians make jokes about each other's jokes. Meyer argues that Warhol was a prophet of this vision of art in a world absolutely inundated with images; not creation, but plucking something from the flood and calling it one's own.

We're going to see a new version of this confusion over art made by AI. Suppose I sit down with MidJourney and have it make illustrations for one of my new novels, and it copies the style of some well-known digital artist, or samples buildings and items of clothing from several artists. Who owns what? Do I get any credit for designing the scenario and specifying, say, "great wizard city with towers and flying boats about to be overwhelmed by a giant wave"? But then that was hardly original, was it? Suppose somebody finds that MidJourney copied an outfit from a video game character. But then suppose that outfit was basically just a doublet from a Botticelli painting and a sword from a 1970s book cover; does combining those in one character count as original?

And so on.

It may be that the trouble spawned by AI will be insoluble, and ruin art as a way to make a living. I doubt it; I think we will just continue to have the same fights we have had ever since copyright was invented, and the same struggles over what is original and what is just the same old thing.

The Potters of Horezu

Wonderful piece in the NY Times by Chantel Tattoli, about the Romanian town of Horezu and its traditional potters. Horezu is a town of about 6,000 in the foothills of the Carpathians where about 50 people carry on a craft that UNESCO has declared an "Intanglible Cultural Heritage." The piece has little videos so you can see how some of this is done; the image above comes from one of them.

The potting industry in Horezu goes back, various internet sources say, 200 to 300 years. That seems right to me because the style of ceramic made there looks very much like what was made across Europe in the 1600s and early 1700s. Part of what makes this wonderful to me is because I have been finding sherds like these for 30 years but have never seen anyone make some of these designs.

The Horezu potteries are family affairs. Most of the potting is done by men, the decorating by women, and the most common arrangement is husband and wife teams. The men also dig the clay, which has come from the same area for the whole history of the industry.

This is very much a folk thing. Most of the pieces are sold at markets in nearby Romanian towns.

A few western galleries have started selling Horezu pieces, but you can buy dishes like these on Etsy for $35 to $50. The pattern above is made by placing thick rings of glaze on the plate and then drawing a tool across them.

A range of vessels.

Wood-fired kiln.

One thing I love about the world is the range of skills that people have, the amazing numbers of people who can do remarkable things. I love it that people learn these skills and practice them and then pass them on to others. To watch someone lay out a perfect spiral of glaze on a spinning pot makes me happy, and I hope these potteries long endure.

Hațeg Island's Mini Dinosaurs

I can't believe that I just yesterday learned about Hațeg Island and its small dinosaurs.

Hațeg Island was a large offshore island in the Tethys Sea, that is, the ancient sea betwen Europe, Asia, and Africa, more or less where the Mediterranean and Black Seas are today. It existed during the Late Cretaceous period, probably from around 100 to 66 million years ago. Rocks from this island were discovered near modern-day Hațeg, Romania. The island was lifted by the same mountain-building episode that gave us the Balkans and the Anatolian highlands. Wikipedia suggests that Hainan Island, off the southern coast of China, is a good comparison in terms of size, topography, and climate.

The fascinating thing about Hațeg Island is that the patterns of animal life we know from modern islands were present there in distorted, dinosaur-age form. For example, most terrestrial animals were smaller than their mainland forms. Above are a skeleton of an Inguanadon of the genus Zalmoxes, named after a Thracian god about whom Herodotus told stories of human sacrifice, and a diagram showing how much smaller it was (in purple) than most other Iguanadons. The diagram at the top of the post compares Zalmoxes robustus, from Hațeg, to the next smallest known species.

Here's a Titanosaur from Hațeg called Magyarosaurus. Most Titanosaurs were gigantic beasts, but this one was horse-sized. (The grid is 1-meter squares).

But while many species shrank on the island, the opposite also happened. Just as some islands came to be inhabited by huge flightless birds, Hațeg was home to gigantic pterosaurs. This is Hatzegopteryx, probably the dominant predator on the island. Only very partial fossil remains have been found, so it is unclear whether Hatzegopteryx could fly. But it certainly didn't need to.

Something Important about Politics

Ross Douthat:

Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”

If you hadn’t followed American politics across the last few decades, this would seem like a peculiar statement: What kind of House speaker wouldn’t want the job?

But part of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. Congress, especially, has been overtaken by what Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute describes as a “platform” mentality, where ambitious House members and senators treat their offices as places to stand and be seen — as talking heads, movement leaders, future presidents — rather than as roles to inhabit and opportunities to serve.

I agree with this completely. One of the weirdest things about American politics since Gingrich has been the number of Senators and Congressmen who openly despise Congress and show no particular interest in the work it does. John Boehner found it almost impossible to lead his Republican troops because so many of them simply did not care if bills or budgets got passed. But McCarthy and Biden do seem to be different:

The platform mentality seemed likely to imprison McCarthy as well, but he’s found a different way of dealing with it: He’s invited some of the bomb throwers into the legislative process, trying to turn them from platform-seekers into legislators by giving them a stake in governance, and so far he’s been rewarded with crucial support from figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, the quirky Kentucky libertarian. And it’s clear that part of what makes this possible is McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the actual vote-counting, handholding work required of his position, and his lack of both Gingrichian egomania and get-me-out-of-here impatience.

But McCarthy isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Biden era has been good for institutionalism generally, because the president himself seems to understand and appreciate the nature of his office more than Barack Obama ever did. As my colleague Carlos Lozada noted on our podcast this week, in both the Senate and the White House, Obama was filled with palpable impatience at all the limitations on his actions. . . . Whereas Biden, who actually liked being a senator, is clearly comfortable with quiet negotiation on any reasonable grounds, which is crucial to keeping the other side invested in a deal. And he’s comfortable, as well, with letting the spin machine run on both sides of the aisle, rather than constantly imposing his own rhetorical narrative on whatever bargain Republicans might strike.

In my lifetime there have two major types of American politician: grandstanders with big ideas who don't trouble much over details like passing budgets, who tend to be loved by their fans and hated by their enemies, and sausage-making brokers around whom an aura of corruption has often hung. We need big ideas and soaring speeches, but we also need people willing to take on the enormous work of governing. Like Douthat, I find it cheering that Kevin McCarthy has turned out to be an effective dealmaker, and that new populist Senator J.D. Vance has been working both sides of the aisle to get support for railroad safety reform. As for Biden, of course, this was always pretty much his only selling point: that he was a reliable mainstream Democrat who could do the work of legislation and budgeting without too much drama. He may end like the first George Bush, not much admired while in office but inspiring nostalgia the next time we fall into angry partisan gridlock.

Seth Godin on Art and Writing

Excellent Tyler Cowen interview with Seth Godin. The first section is about marketing, not my thing, but from there they go on to all sorts of interesting stuff. Loved this exchange on modern art.

GODIN: As I mentioned, I grew up in Buffalo. My mom was the first woman on the board of the Albright-Knox. The Albright-Knox is a —

COWEN: A great museum.

GODIN: Great museum, one of the most important contemporary art museums in the country. You walk into the Clyfford Still room, and you see magic. You see Jasper Johns or Andy Warhol. You see what happened when we started to separate craft from art in the post-photography world. All of that is real.

What is not real is how much paintings cost at auction. How much paintings cost at auction is a by-product of half money laundering and half speculation. It is a by-product of what do you think is going to go up in value tomorrow, not what is good art. People who love art tend to understand the difference between the two, the same way a company can still be a good company and their stock price might not go up.

COWEN: How has immersing yourself in the visual arts improved the other things you do, other than the obvious, “Oh, I try to have my work look nice”?

GODIN: Oh, it has nothing to do with making my work look nice. It’s about the liminal space between here and there. The best audiobook ever recorded is Just Kids by Patti Smith. It’s not about Patti Smith the rockstar; it’s about Patti Smith on a journey from someplace that’s sort of safe to someplace that’s important. When I see artists — whether it’s Miles Davis or Herbie Hancock or Shepard Fairey — do that, that’s what I want. That is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

I am not trying to build companies and make a profit. I’m trying to feel that feeling again of, “Did I do something generative where I explored a liminal space between here and there?” The coolest thing about contemporary art is you can feel that feeling in three seconds if you’re in the right place at the right time, whereas it takes much longer when you’re reading a book. 

And this on writing:

The short version is, publishing is not a business; publishing is an organized hobby.

And there are things in book publishing that are metrics that appear real that aren’t actually useful. So, the first step is to ignore the useless metrics. The New York Times Best Seller List is a fraud. It is not based on actual fact. Don’t bend your life out of proportion to show up on a list that doesn’t make any sense.

But beyond that, why are you writing the book? Who are you writing the book for? What change do you seek to make? Writing a book is a magical thing. It will make you better. Everyone should write one.

Publishing a book is a totally different project, and most people shouldn’t publish their book. Maybe they should just give it away. The shortest version of the advice is — particularly if it’s a novel — take your first novel, post it on the internet for free, send it to 50 friends. If it spreads, if other people want to read it, your second novel will get published, but if your first novel doesn’t spread when it’s free, you probably need to write a better novel.

At this point I think I should just have given The Raven and the Crown away online. Still angling for a way to do that with an audiobook. I would record it myself but it really needs a woman with some kind of British accent. Perhaps AI will be able to do that for me soon.

Links 2 June 2023

Bronze figurine of a scribe riding a wyvern, from Germany, 12th century

Two Chinese shipwrecks full of porcelain found in the South China Sea, dating to the early 1500s. Amazing piles of valuable dishes.

Woman wins cheese-rolling race after being knocked unconscious.

Something very weird is happening in the US economy, where overall GDP is down even though employment is up, which means productivity must have gone down a lot. Nobody seems to understand what is happening. (Kevin Drum, Tyler Cowen)

NASA's UFO task force holds its first public meeting, says 98% of cases have obvious explanations, and "better data" is needed on the rest.

Indonesian boats found in Australian rock art, more evidence of trade between Indonesia and Australia before European contact.

Why George Orwell did not believe in progress.

Heavy rains expose carvings at a Roman fort in Spain.

Freddie deBoer responds to people who attacked him for saying that Jordan Neely should have been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. His opponents, he says, keep refusing to wrestle with the reality of mental illness, saying things like "All Jordan Neely needed was a home." (If you don't know deBoer, he has written very publicly about his own struggles with severe mental illness, which included being involuntarily committed.) 

A Twitter account for your amusement, Ugly Belgian Houses.

David French says the American right wing is all into promoting "traditional masculinity" these days but seems to have missed that one of the main themes of traditional masculinity is not being hysterical: not moaning that the world is about to end, not thinking the election of Hillary Clinton would have "destroyed America", not shrieking on Twitter about "groomers." (NY Times)

Kevin Drum explains 40 years of the US economy in one chart.

List of bills passed by Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislature. Being passed around in horror by conservatives; actually an interesting look at Democratic priorities, especially as regards abortion. The 40% increase in state spending figure is disputed but this budget summary does show total outlays growing from $43 billion in 2022 to $60 billion in 2024. More official list of bills here.

When the pulp detective magazines of the 1920s took on the KKK.

Theodore Dalrymple reviews a new translation of Kafka's diaries.

I have mentioned here before that the reputation of US Grant as general and president has soared over the past 25 years; just now I noticed a Twitter account called Grant Was the Greatest.

The NY Times remembers Sybil 50 years after its publication launched the madness of "multiple personality disorder." The horror that resulted when first the talk show circuit and then the APA embraced this nonsense still hangs silently over an America where people are outraged about far lesser harms. Not to mention that there are still people in prison after convictions that relied on "recovered memories."

Large language models can play Minecraft.

CNN: "Arizona officials announced Thursday the state will no longer grant certifications for new developments within the Phoenix area, as groundwater rapidly disappears amid years of water overuse and drought."

Brian Caplan, libertarian-leaning economist and anti-wokeness essayist, reviews Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution; despite being as opposed to hook-up culture as Perry, he finds the book shallow and irritating, because even though Perry thinks sexual freedom has been terrible for women she never really denounces sexual freedom or the feminists who promoted it. In the parts of the internet where I hang out a war against sexual liberation is in full swing.

Is there much gender bias in academia? No, says this study, which finds that women are equally successful by most metrics and actually have an advantage in hiring.

Vidya Krishnan on gang rape in India, a tool of caste oppression, religious strife, politics, and general mayhem (NY Times).

Ukraine Links

Claimed kills of this Ukrainian Gephard crew

According to Michael Warren Davis in the American Conservative, the West is supporting Ukraine because Russia is a Christian, anti-gay, anti-trans country and we can't stand that. The existence of people who think opposing homosexuality makes a country into torture, corruption, gangsterism and aggressive warfare "Christian" bewilders me.

Oryx is now showing that Russia has now lost more than 2,000 tanks in Ukraine. That includes 62 new T-90s. Also 3750 other armored vehicles, 405 self-propelled artillery pieces, 202 multiple rock launchers, 114 SAM systems, 32 radars, 37 electronic warfare systems, 82 jet aircraft, 90 helicopters, 2500 trucks, and sundry others to a total of 10,468 major systems.

Detailed instructions for Russian drone pilots.

Podcast on Russia's use of artillery in urban battles, notes that Russia has expended 7 to 14 million artillery shells for rather limited gains; pulverizing cities is not necessarily a good use of artillery. Summary tweet here.

Russian governor says there is no such thing as a man aged 25 to 55 left in Donbass. They have either fled or been killed in the war.

New US weapons shipment to Ukraine. Notable: "Mine clearing equipment and systems; Demolition munitions for obstacle clearing."

How Writers Work

The things we lack the courage to do are transformed into stories.

–Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

Tao Yuanming, "Substance, Shadow, and Spirit"

Tang Dynasty poem and quick primer on Chinese philosophy.

Substance speaks to Shadow:

Heaven and Earth exist for ever:
Mountains and rivers never change.
But herbs and trees in perpetual rotation
Grow and are withered by the dews and frosts:
And Man the wise, Man the divine—
Shall he alone escape this law?
Appearing by chance for a moment in the World
He suddenly departs, never to return.
How can he know that the friends he has left
Miss him and think of him?
Only the things that he used remain;
Friends look upon them and their tears flow.
Me no magical arts can save,
Though you may hope for a wizard’s aid.
I beg you listen to this advice—
When you can get wine, drink it.

Shadow replies:

There is no way to preserve life.
Drugs of Immortality are instruments of folly.
I would gladly wander in Paradise,
But it is far away and there is no road.
Since the day that I was joined to you
We have shared all our joys and pains.
While you rested in the shade, I left you a while:
But till the end we shall be together.
Our joint existence is impermanent:
Sadly together we shall slip away.
That when the body decays Fame should also go
Is a thought unendurable, burning the heart.
Let us strive and labour while yet we may
To do some deed that men will praise.
Wine may in truth dispel our sorrow,
But how compare it with lasting Fame?

Spirit expounds:

God can only set in motion:
He cannot control the things he has made.
Man, the second of the Three Orders,
Owes his precedence to Me.
Though I am different from you,
We were born involved in one another:
Nor by any means can we escape
The intimate sharing of good and ill.
The Three Emperors were saintly men,
Yet to-day—where are they?
P’ēng lived to a great age,
Yet he went at last, when he longed to stay.
And late or soon, all go:
Wise and simple have no reprieve.
Wine may bring forgetfulness,
But does it not hasten old-age?
If you set your hearts on noble deeds,
How do you know that any will praise you?
By all this thinking you do Me injury:
You had better go where Fate leads—
Drift on the Stream of Infinite Change,
Without joy, without fear:
When you must go—then go,
And make as little fuss as you can. 

– Tao Yuanming (c. 365-427). Translated by Arthur Whaley