On Medical Research Gone Wrong

At the NY Times, Ari Schulman on Jay Bhattacharya, the new head of the NIH. Bhattacharya got the job because he was a strident critic of Covid lockdowns, but he is a real scientist with an agenda:

Take Alzheimer’s research. Nearly every scientific research reformer will cite the fact that the N.I.H. funded vast amounts of research based on a single theory of the disease that largely turned out to be wrong.

Dr. Bhattacharya argues that this happened because science is structured around authority. “You have, in field after field after field, a kind of set of dogmatic ideas held by the people who are at the top of the field. And if you don’t share those ideas, you have no chance of advancing within those fields,” he told me.

He told Congress that he believes there are promising ways to prevent Alzheimer’s that haven’t received support because they don’t align with the “dominant narrative,” as he called it. “This is why I’m so interested in replication,” he told me, referring to the need for researchers to repeat each other’s findings, because it “turns over the determination of what’s true to nature rather than authority.”

Which is interesting, and perhaps explains why MAGA types like Bhattacharya. But it is, I think, far from sufficient to understand the problems with our scientific establishment. Schulman agrees:

It’s a plausible diagnosis and a good prescription. Science can’t answer questions if it’s conformist. But there’s another way to think about the problem.

Dr. Susan M. Fitzpatrick, a former biochemist, has pointed not to ideology but the mechanics of research. Large-scale medical studies rely on standardized methods, one of which is testing theories on mice. But mice don’t get Alzheimer’s, only humans do. So studying them might be useless. Yet, she wrote, this approach “dominates federal funding and academic science” on Alzheimer’s research because it easily produces the publications and citations that careers depend on.

From this angle, the N.I.H. looks like a big factory that churns out research papers. Dr. Bhattacharya is like a new manager trying to figure out why sales are down and proposing more diversity in the product line.

For the sharpest reformers, like Dr. Cook-Deegan and Dr. Fitzpatrick, the issue isn’t which group of scientists’ ideas win out. It’s that when countless jobs and storied institutions depend on the mills to keep churning, it stops mattering what comes out on the other end. The question is not whether the factory’s settings are wrong but whether it should be a paper factory in the first place.

Here is the fundamental point that science reformers keep screaming about: the system can't be reformed until we have some other way, besides publication counts, of  judging researchers and research. Since nobody has any idea what that might be, real reform seems unlikely.

There seem to be whole fields of research that exist mainly because scientists can publish about them and thus keep their jobs. But what else are scientists supposed to do? They, like everybody else, want to keep their jobs. Many of them would probably rather do weird, cutting-edge stuff that will most likely fail; others would rather switch to a completely different area of science, but our system makes that extremely difficult.

In his conclusion, Schulman comes back to the weirdness of Bhattacharya talking scientific reform in a department headed by RFK, in an adminstration headed by Trump. True, those are big hurdles, but until we have a workable model for reforming science it almost doesn't matter who the president is.

Fantastic Language: Lord Dunsany and Catherynne Valente

A fantasy writer can summon magic through story and setting and things that happen, or through the power of words. Many writers try to do both; Tolkien is the most obvious example. Most writers, however, do not possess these two powers in anything like the same degree. Today I take up books by two writers who try to bespell us mainly with their words. 

Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was born in 1878 and to me his writing feels deeply Edwardian. He lived for much of his life in Dunsany Castle, near Dublin. Although he wrote a bunch of books – I have seen numbers varying from "more than 50" to "more than 90" – he is famous these days for The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924.

The story is very simple. A mortal king sends his son to woo and wed the daughter of the King of Elfland. With some help, he succeeds. They have a child. Eventually, the elf princess misses her home and goes back. The hero quests for her again, while their son grows into a different sort of hero. Eventually, all is resolved by magic. 

But that is not the point. The point is the evocation of the eldritch, the magical, the strange, and the wonderful by the deployment of prose that drips with paradox, archaism, and the highest extremes of extravagance. Some examples:

Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. . . .

Then Alveric strode away and came to the field he knew, which he remembered to be divided by the nebulous border of twilight. And indeed he had no sooner come to the field than he saw all the toadstools leaning over one way, and that the way he was going; for just as thorn trees all lean away from the sea, so toadstools and every plant that has any touch of mystery, such as foxgloves, mulleins and certain kinds of orchis, all lean toward Elfland. By this one may know before one has heard a murmur of waves, or before one has guessed an influence of magical things, that one comes, as the case may be, to the sea or the border of Elfland. . . .

He stood there with the cries of Earth faint in the late evening, behind him, and the mellow glow of the soft earthly twilight; and before him, close to his face, the utter silence of Elfland, and the barrier that made that silence, gleaming with its strange beauty. And now he thought no more of earthly things, but only gazed into that wall of twilight, as phrophets tampering with forbidden lore gaze into cloudy crystals. The little cries of the earthly evening behind him he heeded no more nor heard. And with all these little cries were lost to him also the ways and the needs of men, the things they plan, the things they toil for and hope for, and all the little things their patience achieves. . . .

The Elf King stirred not, nor changed; but held to that moment in which he had found content; and laid its influence over all his dominions, for the good and welfare of Elfland; for he had what all our troubled world with all its changes seeks, and finds so rarely and must at once cast it away. He had found content and held it.

It is sometimes lovely and sometimes frankly tedious. When it works, it evokes the longing one might feel standing by the ruin of an ancient castle, wishing fervently that a gate into wonder might open in the gray stone. When it doesn't work, it makes you wish the story were more compelling or the characters at least halfway plausible. 

Lord Dunsany's words are like the notes of an elvish music, calling us away to a more beautiful place; Catherynne Valente's are like the spears picadors thrust into the bull to drive it mad. Valente is a contemporary writer, born in 1979. I first discovered her through a novel for older children, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Boat of her Own Making (2011). As I said when I reviewed it, I was immediately captured by her language, which seemed to me to evoke perfectly the feel of a fairy tale.

I have now read two more of her books, most recently her first, Labyrinth (2004). The point of Labyrinth is also to take our minds away to someplace else, but this Labyrinth is nothing like Elfland. It is an absurd, grotesque dreamscape. The language is like a psychedelic drug, destroying our normal sense of reality and replacing it with an incomprehensible vision. I was reminded of the visions of Carl Jung and Philip K. Dick, absurd on the face but hinting at mysterious depths. But if there are any mysterious depths, I confess that I did not find them.

Our narrator is a nameless female being of unknown origin:

I am the Walker. The Seeker-After. I am the Compass-Eater and the Wall-Climber. I am the Woman of the Maze.

An entirely typical passage goes like this: 

A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless – Each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming or going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban.

Our narrator wanders, feeling her mind slip away, meeting various spirit guides that don't seem to be much help, seeing strange wonders, speaking strange words. Another snippet:

And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman's hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder.

I find this sort of writing very impressive, and also tempting; it might be fun to try to write like this, to spin out dreams and visions without worrying over whether anything makes sense, to let the sound of the words guide my mind rather than the dictates of the story. But, ultimately, I find books like this very hard to read. I finished The King of Elfland's Daughter mainly because it is a classic near the roots of modern fantasy, and The Labyrinth only because I had already decided to write this post.

I want the books I read to have stories, and characters. I want them to make sense. I have never been tempted by vision, in the form of drugs or any other way. I prefer to see clearly. I wonder if this is a limitation. Are there, perhaps, truths that I cannot see because I am so wedded to the mundane, too earthbound to hear the call of the woodpecker who would be my spirit guide?

Lord Dunsany was a friend of W.B. Yeats, whose poetry I love but whose philosophy sounds to me like gibberish. Thinking over these two books, I have a sense that their language is more suited to short poems than to novels. That way, the way of the quick insight and the tremor of feeling, they can hint at meaning, can seize us for a moment from this world. Stretched out to 180 pages, they cease to charm or  to summon, and their lack of any truth to tell us beyond the hints of another world begins to drag and grate.

Links 19 September 2025

Harness plate from Santon, England, 1st Century BC

Today's sentence: "There are conflict entrepreneurs out there who benefit from radicalizing us. . . We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes. We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse." - Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. More here. How about he runs for President?

Robin Hanson reviews Eliezer Yudkowsky's book about AI, If Anyone Builds It, We All Die. Hanson is not impressed.

Scott Siskind against the argument that "unelected" judges should not contradict elected officials.

Fascinating long tweet summarizing the views and impact of the Irish Enlightenment: Swift, Berkeley, Hutcheson (hugely influential in America), Burke, etc.

Can organ recipients acquire personality traits and even memories from their donors? Some very weird stuff here. (Psychology Today, technical article titled "Personality Changes Associated with Organ Transplants." ) This is from very long entry in Siskind's "review anything" contest about theories of how memories are stored..

The tale of an Anasazi/Ancestral Pueblo skull with an embedded stone arrowhead.

Conor Friedersdorf, an opponent of the Trump administration, says they are right to raise the alarm about threats to free speech in Europe.

Ethan Mollick asks Claude, "Please create the PowerPoint shared by the high powered management consultants hired by Hamlet after seeing his fathers ghost."

The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey goes back 50 years. For most of that time the sentiment of the young (18-34) was more positive than that of older people, usually much more positive. This started to change in 2018, and now it has been worse than the average for 9 of the past 11 quarters.

Tyler Cowen, "Stop Blaming Them"

Britain announces plan to build 12 modular nuclear reactors in Hartepool, in the northeast. They will replace the existing nuclear plant there, due to be decomissioned in 2028. They should produce much more power but I can't find any numbers.

Poll of Rhode Island voters finds that most support building more housing in the state, as long as it is not in their own neighborhood. (Twitter/X)

Drug addiction is usually not lifelong.

Disco Elysium is a cool game, but its makers seem to be childish jerks and lawsuits have blocked any move toward a sequel. (NY Times, IGN, TheGamer)

A Canadian company called First Atlantic Nickel is touting a deposit of Awaruite (Ni3Fe) in Newfoundland containing a lot of cobalt, which they say will challenge the Chinese dominance of nickel and cobalt production.  (Company web site, promotional video) I have yet to find any outside analysis of their claims and would appreciate a link. Interest in Awaruite is high because processing the most common Nickel ore, Nickel sulfide, is such an environmental disaster that it basically can't be done in the US or Europe; Awaruite can be processed using electromagnets in a way likely to be less damaging.

Inscription records that Emperor Qing Shih Huang Ti's quest for immortality extended to Tibet.

Interesting arrangement of small idols around a Bronze Age hearth hints at domestic rituals.

Phil Christman's journey through Christianity, chronicled in two earlier books, has now led to the belief that Christians should become activists for socialism.

Collection of short interviews with young, hip female writers, with some interesting questions, including about the place of the novel in a world of very rapid change. 

Stop Dividing People

My proposal for easing the awful political situation in the US is simple: stop dividing people into "Right" and "Left." Every time you do that you are 1) wrong, since the actual world is vastly more complex than that, and 2) promoting political division and rancor. Just stop.

What beliefs define the Right in America today? Certainly not capitalistic economics, since MAGA is full of people far more socialist than I am. Certainly not reducing regulation of business, since Trump seems intent on micromanaging the whole economy. Certainly not the preservation of old American traditions; for every one you can name that MAGA people defend (hunting, church going) I can name another that they despise (neighborliness, fair elections, decency, open competition, respect for the Constitution). 

I know some people want to say "the cult of Trump," but that is not right either, since I know many people who despise Trump while identifying firmly as conservatives.

Fear of crime has long been a right-wing point of emphasis, and Trump tries to talk this up out of one side of his mouth while pardoning violent criminals with the other. 

I can't see any coherence here.

What beliefs define the Left? This is one of much personal importance to me, since the internet is full of "leftists" who believe long lists of things I find abhorrent. My idea of the Left tends toward peace, fairness, equality, and especially freedom; the idea that getting people fired for their beliefs could ever be a left-wing idea still shocks and disgusts me, and despite all of Trump's horrors I have not forgiven the petty tyrants of wokeness. But I have other, equally important ideas that I have trouble placing on any kind of left-right spectrum: respect for expertise; belief that good institutions are very hard to build, so we should be careful with the ones we have; an abhorrence of political violence; a desire for dialogue and compromise.

For about 130 years after the words were invented, right and left had fairly stable meanings: the right meant tradition plus capitalism, and the left was the people who rejected those things and thought we needed to make radical changes in pursuit of a better world. But the rise of Fascism smashed that neat equation, giving us self-proclaimed rightists bent on radical change. The situation has only gotten weirder over the past 25 years. 

We can all imagine a rightist or a leftist, but this cartoon would not be based on anybody's actual beliefs, and especially not any beliefs that might impact government policy. It would be all about attitudes and style.

I am left thinking that the main function of the "right" vs. "left" distinction in America is to divide us into two teams so the people who want to fight have somebody to fight against.

My formula for bringing peace to America is this: Stop saying that anybody is on the right or the left. Stop caring about it. Debundle political questions and take them up one at a time, without caring whether the ideas proposed are "right-wing" or "left-wing." According to the polls I have seen, opinions on many actual issues correlate only weakly with whether people identify as Democrats or Republicans. So lets skip the team nonsense and talk real problems and real solutions.

Because here is something else I believe: our civilization is an amazing thing. We are rich beyond the dreams of our ancestors, possessed of knowledge far beyond their ken, with technologies that routinely do things they regarded as miracles. One piece of this civilization I especially treasure is democracy, which despite all its foibles gives the people a say in how they are governed.

We could lose this, all of this. None of it is given; none of it should be taken for granted. And if we do lose it, it will be because in pursuit of hatred toward our neighbors we lost sight of the incredible treasure of our inheritance, and the amazing future we might build if we worked together.

RIP John McQueen

RIP John McQueen, quirky artist who worked mostly with sticks, vines, leaves, and other found trifles. He lived for years in a stone house he built himself, with no electricity or running water, his hands always on fiber, wood, or stone. Above, Same Difference, 2013. NY Times, Arttextstyle, American Craft Council.

Untitled 192, 1989

Touch, 1987

Happenstance, 2011

How About Really Honoring Charlie Kirk?

Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.

And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.

Keep America free. 

– Charlie Kirk

The Waldalgesheim Chariot Burial and the Origins of Celtic Art

The chariot burial at Waldalgesheim in the German Rhineland was excavated in 1869. It dates to around 330 BC. It is famous partly because it seems to represent the early stages of the high Celtic tradition, what we call the La Tène style.

The grave was quite weird, plus it was damaged by the plow that uncovered it, plus this was all in 1869:

Investigations and recoveries of material took place over two years in a way that is now hard to reconstruct in detail. . . . It has been thought that the burial was under a barrow, which is reasonable, but without any clear evidence. We do know that the grave pit was surrounded by rough stones at the top and that there was a layer of stones part way down in the grave fill, above which were found the gold items, which the bronze ones below. Broadly speaking, three sets of material were found: an extensive set in bronze and deriving from a chariot and horse gear, including a yoke and its fittings and decorations, rein rings, wheel rims and fasteners; secondly, a set of personal forms of decoration including a neckring, arm, bracelet and leg rings, beads and the metal decorations of clothing (fascinating and hard to reconstruct); thirdly, a flagon and a bucket presumably used originally to hold liquids (wine?). (Chris Gosden, Art in the Eurasian Iron Age, 16)

We do not know if a whole chariot was buried, or just some of the fittings. Because no weapons were found, most authorities think this was a woman's grave.

The artistic style of the objects varies a good deal. This bucket has classical detailing and is thought to have been imported from Italy.

But this pitcher probably comes from Gaul and is decorated in a quite different style.

It is the detailing on the gold torcs that points toward the swirling, abstract style of La Tène.

It is interesting to note that the people who developed the La Tène style were very familiar with the classical style of the Mediterranean world; many of the patrons probably owned Mediterranean objects like the Waldalgesheim bucket or the Vix Crater. Art of this period often mixes motifs from the Mediterranean with other motifs that may come from Persia or the steppes, along with hints of the new northern style.

Like the Agris helmet, found in central France, dating to c. 350 BC. This piece has a sort of barbaric splendour, but the design elements come from the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Many sources call this a "masterpiece of Celtic Art" (e.g. wikipedia), but it is certainly not Celtic in the way that the Desborough Mirror (below) is.

But even at the height of La Tène, when all the wonderful works were made that define this amazing style, you can still see lots of Classical or Persian elements in the designs. 

Chariot ornament from Roissy, France;
You'll have to zoom in to see that it is all made of disassembled dragons

Some modern interpretations of northern European art in this period emphasize the lack of any stable artistic style, with particular objects showing various mixtures of Mediterranean, Persian, Steppes, and local "Celtic" elements. This matches, in a sense, what we know about the political and broader cultural situation. The people of northern Europe were very much on the move, invading Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor besides fighting a great deal against each other. Archaeologists have a terrible time sorting out who was a Celt, a German, a Sarmatian, or something else. Many of the large fortified sites of this period were occupied for a few decades before being abandoned. There do not seem to have been any large, stable kingdoms. We do not know if the druidical religious tradition encountered by the Romans in Gaul and Britain was particularly old or widespread, and there is a case to be made that it was a new development of the first century BC. So it makes sense that the artistic style of these people is hard to pin down.

But it certainly is wonderful.

My thoughts on the La Tene style and Druidism are here.

"Celtic" Scabbards

Scabbards from the European Iron Age. Above, from Hungary; below, Ireland and then Britain. From D.W. Harding, The Archaeology of Celtic Art (2004).

Nietzsche, Against History

Only to the extent that history serves life will we serve it.

Some of My Favorite Poems

By request, my favorite lyric poems composed in modern English:

Tennyson, "Ulysses"

Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben", "A Prayer for my Daughter,"  "The Wild Swans at Coole"

T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Emily Dickinson, "I Dwell in Possibility"

W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

Edward FitzGerald, "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam"; my favorite quatrains are here.

Simon Ó Faoláin, "Winnowing"

Dylan Thomas, "And Death Shall Have No Dominion"

Kahlil Gibran, "On Children"

Jane Hirshfield, "Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World"

W.S. Merwin, "A Black Kite"

Traci Brimhall, "Come Trembling"

Rudyard Kipling, "Danny Deever"

William Blake, "The Tyger"

Links 12 September 2025

Roman glass bead found in Poland, 1st century AD

This week's news: Ezra Klein, "Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics the Right Way." Richard Hanania, "'The Left" Did Not Kill Charlie Kirk." Noah Smith, "Civil War is for Idiots and  Losers"

Here's something to cheer you up: "Afghanistan reports the lowest well-being in recorded history. . . . Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living." Life under the Taliban doesn't just suck, it sucks at a world record level. Via Scott Siskind.

Chinese censorship around the anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

Short science fiction story about AI and the future, Knockout Mouse by Louis Evans.

The pomegranate in history and myth.

Pretty good essay on how modern anthropologists view "shamanism," with notes on how the practice is changing in the modern world: "One veteran shaman, returning from his first experience performing at a top-dollar eco-lodge, asked the ayahuasca researcher Stephan Beyer why these people had come halfway round the world to see him when they weren’t sick. And why do they all hate their parents?"

I've fallen in love with a Bach Cantata I can't remember ever hearing until this week, Christ lag in Todesbanden.

Crazy multimedia installations by Song Dong.

Rebuilding Kowloon Walled City in Minecraft. (On the original Kowloon here.)

If you have any curiosity about the Frankfurt School and their critique of post-WW II capitalism, I found this 45-minute lecture on Jürgen Habermas quite interesting, emphasizing his ties to Kant.

Famous 1964 interview with Tolkien about LOTR is on YouTube. As a fantasy writer I was struck by his assertion that it would have been too silly to have his characters worship pagan gods. In some of my writing I have used the classical formulation and had my characters swear by "the gods" or "all the gods," which feels un-silly to me. I have also used the now widespread fantasy convention of having people worship a generic pantheon consisting of The Mother, The Father, The Warrior, and so on, but this convention did not exist in the 1940s. 

Discussion on Twitter/X of the weird fact that immigration to Britain, the US, Canada, and Australia all surged in 2021. People in each country blame local political decisions but does that make sense?

Avocado ripeness scanners.

Creating AI reviewers to speed up the process of peer review.

A call to unbundle the university. Many European universities don't have campuses or any kind of exracurricular activities, and people often ask why American and British schools need all that rigamarole. But studies of US universities have found that graduation rates for urban schools without campuses are dramatically lower, so I am not sure the model will transfer.

Study asking whether it is better to be over- or underqualified for your first job with an organization: "Combined, these patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but still outperform others in their same job." The over-qualified get promoted much faster.

The former peace negotiators who have given up on a two-state solution for Israel/Palestine, but without any real alternative. (NY Times)

People are thirsting so hard for signs of alien life that we have news stories because the Webb telescope "has not ruled out" a nitrogen-rich atmospher around Trappist-1e. (NY Times, Space.com)

Robin Hanson wants middle-aged activist movements to counter dumb youth activists.

A former leader of New College in Florida realizes that the plan to make it a conservative bastion is insecure so long as the school depends so heavily on state funding, so he is floating a plan to take the college private. Has that ever been done before in America?

Big plans for seawater desalination in Morocco, powered by renewable energy: Reuters, company brag sheet, longer article laying out the long-range plan.

The British War on Slavery.

The complications of "free speech" from the 1600s to the present. The nearly absolute doctrine defended by American liberals is rare in the world and has been contested throughout its history by people who think that lying, slander, blasphemy, instigation to hatred, and so on should not be protected.

Interesting translation by Simon Armitrage of "Deor", the Anglo-Saxon poem from which half of my online avatars are taken. If you run into somebody online who calls himself "Deor(something)", it might well be me. Wēlund him be wurman, wræces cunnade. . .

New York Times piece on parents using their children in their art, taking off from the new wave of memoirs by people who grew up starring in their parents' vlogs. I regard that as a truly heinous thing to do to a child.

The Trump administration forces US Steel to keep paying workers to show up at an idled steel plant.

Getting Richer

Real median family income in the US, adjusted for inflation. And note that families have gotten smaller.

Jeremiah Johnson, "What is the Purpose of Liberalism?"

Written after the assassination attempt on Trump last year:

The biggest shame in all this is that it happened in America, a country that is doing pretty damn well in almost every way. We’re rich. We have abundant natural resources, space, and technology. We enjoy strong political freedoms. Our economy is growing and has grown regularly for decades. We are not suffering from famines or depressions or major political repression. America certainly isn’t perfect, but it’s doing fine.

That’s the backdrop for this horrible act of political violence. It’s the background for Trump’s rise in the first place, which has featured its own calls to violence. There’s no material reason any of this should be happening. Instead, we’ve driven ourselves insane due to political hysteria and polarization. And chief among the reasons we’ve gone insane is social media, with its algorithmic promotion of the most divisive messages possible.

As much as you can, resist the hysteria. Refuse to participate in it, refuse to make the polarization worse. The purpose of liberalism is to allow us to disagree with someone without discriminating against them, without harassing them, without killing them. It’s a precious thing, perhaps the most precious thing our civilization has achieved. Every time you break bread in peace with an outsider, every time a Catholic and Protestant shake hands, it’s a miracle. Don’t take it for granted.

Costică Brădățan, "In Praise of Failure"

I was delighted by this little book, which aims to reorient our attitude toward failure and thus to the whole universe and our place in it.

When it occurs, failure puts a distance between us and the world, and between ourselves and others. That distance gives us the distinct feeling that we don't fit in, that we are out of sync with world and others, and that there is something amiss. All of this makes us seriously question our place under the sun. And that may be the best thing to happen to us: this existential awakening is exactly what we need if we are to realize who we are. No healing come unless preceded by it.

Should you experience failure and be visited by such feelings of inadequacy and out-of-placeness, don't resist them – follow them. They will tell you that you are on the right track. (4)

Brădățan, a Romanian-American philosopher born in 1971, could have given this 2023 book several other titles. From the starting point of failure he goes on to say interesting things about humility, spiritual emptiness, the ups and downs of careers, and the old idea of the good death. The tone is conversational but serious, the weight of the intellectual content never killing the mood of a great argument with an old friend. 

There are four chapters, each focusing on a kind of failure: spiritual desolation, political ruin, personal failure, and biological failure, that is, death. Each section takes up a series of historical figures who experienced and reflected on that kind of failure, with one in particular usually serving as the main focus. We start with the French mystic/anarchist/self-starver Simone Weil, who seems to be something of an obsession with Brădățan. Besides her near inability to function as an adult (e.g., feed herself) and her experiments with giving up all of her class privileges, Weil was a gnostic whose most profound belief was that this world is a mistake and we do not belong in it. In the realm of politics Brădățan chooses to focus on Gandhi, which might surprise anyone who has not tried to read his autobiography. If you have, you already know that it is self-flagellation from one end to the other, nothing but an extended meditation on how he had failed at everything from parenthood to teaching nonviolence. His assassination in the midst of the horrific violence that accompanied India's partition did not surprise him in the least. Brădățan's examplar of personal failure is another Romanian exile, the nihilist E.M. Cioran (1911-1995), who refused ever to hold a job and so endured a sort of couch-surfing existence, feeding himself by being charming enough to get invited to a lot of dinner parties, crowing about how badly his books sold. Three figures share the chapter on dying: Socrates, Seneca –who had some sort of asthma so severe that he regularly came close to fatal asphyxiation – and the Japanese writer and neo-Samurai Yukio Mishima (1925-1970).

Brădățan focuses on individual thinkers partly because he is unimpressed by big solutions to human problems. He regards democracy as a great thing but so opposed to human nature that it will never endure anywhere for long: "The urge to rule over others, even to annihilate them if need be, has defined Homo sapiens. We certainly collaborate with others, but in most instances only to assert ourselves more efficaciously." (66) In particular he has no confidence that education can improve the mass of humanity:

Twenty-five centures after Socrates's death by democracy, we seem to have learned at last that conversions through humanist education are next to impossible. Paideia (defined as a rigorous and comprehensive training in the liberal arts) is one of the finest things one can experience in life, and does involve a radical transofrmation when done properly. . . . But by its nature this form of education is an individual exercise; it works only in limited numbers, and – when successful – creates highly individualized people. The transformation brought about by paideia takes place within the individual, and only indirectly, in severely diminshed form, in society. Statistically, whatever the thinkers of the Renaissance and revolutionary period may have hoped, it's just not possible to cause, by education alone, a radical transformation in society at large. (77)

If there answers, we must find them for ourselves. And to Brădățan, those answers will be more truthful, more beautiful, and more profound if we root them in an honest appraisal of ourselves, our societies, and our fate.

I did not agree with everything in In Praise of Failure,  but that is not the point of a book like this. The point is that it sets one thinking. The point is the dialogue between the writer and the reader, the answers and objections one can't help formulating as one reads. I was launched, to take one example, on a long train of musings about people who somehow became famous for their humility. Like, say, St. Francis, or Gandhi. How humble were they? In writing about Gandhi, Orwell was mostly positive but found himself wondering to what extent Gandhi was motivated by vanity, that is, by a sense of himself as a scrawny, nearly naked man shaking empires with his spiritual force. Surely there is some truth in that. Surely if these people had been were truly humble, we would never have heard of them. Brădățan mentions Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote a book called The Ladder of Humility while founding a new religious order, intervening decisively in a papal schism, writing a bunch of other books, and generally serving as one of the church's leaders. Would any truly humble man have done as much? Cioran talked all the time about doing nothing, and he did do a lot of nothing, but he also published several books, one of them a volume of aphorisms many of which are about how one should avoid doing things like publishing books. 

Humility, I think, is a much more troublesome concept than Brădățan makes it seem.

But I would love to talk to him about it.

Americans are Afraid of the World

The spectacle of US immigration police handcuffing more than 300 Koreans at a Hyundai plant in Georgia was yet another reminder of America's bewilderingly two-faced attitude toward the rest of the world. 

State governments across the US have offices dedicated to bringing in foreign investment, and you can bet the state of Georgia did a ton of work to land that battery plant. But setting up a factory in a foreign country is no easy task, so companies that do this need to send lots of people into the US. They complain that the US is extremely stingy with the visas they need to do this, so, it seems, they regularly break US law in the course of trying to invest in the US. (According to Hyundai, most of the people detained were in fact complying with US law, but that's just the idiocy of Trump's ICE in action; people quoted in many news stories admit that technical violations happen regularly.)

The problem is that what many Americans seem to want, a vibrant economy with lots of manufacturing jobs but no foreigners, is simply impossible. Pushed by their voters to "create jobs," states court foreign companies, only to be attacked on the other side for bringing in foreigners. It's ludicrous, or would be if it weren't so harmful.

We could, if we really wanted to, greatly decrease our contact with the outside world. But we would pay a very high price in vitality. We would have a poorer, aging, lagging, sagging country. Many things would soar in price, starting with fresh vegetables. Our tech industry would lose its global lead. Social Security will be bankrupt in a decade. Etc.

And yet millions of Americans don't seem to care; they are just in a rage over the number of Koreans and Indians they see around them and seem ready to burn their own house down to drive them out. Polls show that voters are turning against Trump's immigration policies, and the number saying immigration is a good thing is rising, so maybe things will be better in a few years. But the underlying forces that brought us to this sorry state – racism, nativism, fear of globalization, a deep suspicion that the arrival of foreigners is somehow an elite plot against the rest of us – are still out there and will come back.

English Majors Trying to Read "Bleak House"

Somebody who calls herself (I suppose) "Kitten" nicely summarizes an experiment in which some college English majors were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Dickens' Bleak House (1853). The methodology was to ask the students to read these paragraphs out loud, allowing them the use of a dictionary and their phones to look up unfamiliar words. They then discussed the passages with an experimenter, who asked them to express the sentences in their own words. Many did abysmally, which is why the study has gotten somewhat famous. (College students can't read!) But I think the study actually raises a much deeper question about what education is for and why anyone should pursue it.

Here is the first paragraph of Bleak House:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Here is a sample interview:

[Pause.] [Laughs.] So it’s like, um, [Pause.] the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no . . . [Pause.] so everything’s been like kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he’s says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill.

The general conclusion of the study was as follows:

• 58% of students understood very little of the passages they read
• 38% could understand about half of the sentences
• 5% could understand all seven paragraphs

Ok, that's pretty bad.

But why should we care if anyone can read this passage? One of the students looked up "Michaelmas Term" on her phone and found only references to education, which led her to think that this was set in a school; what American would ever think that law courts had terms just like universities?

How about the seventh paragraph:

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar’s red table and the silk gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters’ reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man’s acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, “Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!”

Anbody out there without an advanced degree in history or literature who does understand what this is about? I dislike the writing, which is why I bounced off Bleak House the first few times I tried to read it and did not finish it until a few years ago, and the Court of Chancery is pretty obscure even to modern Brits, not to mention that much of what Dickens said about it was wrong. The mingling of a Noah's flood reference with a muddy Megalosaurus is (I would say) a lousy metaphor, and to really understand it you need some knowledge of how educated Britons of 1853 might think about those two subjects.

I have this knowledge, since my dissertation was largely based on English legal records, European intellectual history and Victorian Britain are two of my hobbies, and I like Dickens. (Go me!) But why should anyone else know any of this? Wouldn't it be a lot more useful to assign students contemporary novels that deal with worlds they understand and the legal system they might one day get caught up in? The authors of the original study admit that they chose a challenging passage, but I would say they chose a ridiculous one. What definition of "reading comprehension" includes the 19th-century British court system?

I know very smart people with Ph.D.s who think reading novels is an utter waste of time and would no doubt scoff at these paragraphs. Ok, they're weren't English majors, but they have a point: nobody needs to be able to do this. 

What do we want educated people to know? And what place does Bleak House have in that system?

Links 5 September 2025

Conjoined clay toads fro Vichama, Peru

If you're curious about the Bhagavad Gita and its place in Hinduism, this 30-minute Alan Watts lecture seems like a good starting place.

A philosopher argues for immortality, summary and link at Marginal Revolution. My only deep thought on this topic is that we don't really understand time, and if the universe is a sort of 4-dimensional construction, every life, and everything else, is around forever anyway.

Military expert describes all 76 weapons shown in the Chinese parade, 25-minute video.

Thread on the sex recession in America, with some interesting comments as well.

Interesting month coming up for Congress.

Dystopian drawings of people in boxes by Ben Tolman.

Interesting NY Times article on women having doubts about birth control pills. The article's focus is on social media but I have known many smart women who refused to take the pill, going back to the 1970s, so qualms about messing with your body's hormonal cycles are not new.

The weird debate over vaccinating newborns against Hepatitis B, with many accusations of wokeness and tyranny. This piece doesn't even mention that we long ago had a similar debate over treating newborns for gonorrhea, which can cause blindness. The authorities decided back then, and have decided again now, that you simply can't trust parents to say if they have engaged in risky sex. 

Robin Hanson talks to ChatGPT about past cultural conflicts between the young and the old. ChatGPT says the young almost always win. I agree in general but I would say that not all of these examples are actually the young vs. the old. Alcohol prohibition in the US was not young drinkers vs. old fogeys. 

Manhood, this author argues, is socially constructed rather than biological, because men naturally do as little as possible: "manhood exists to push against the default setting: self-indulgence and avoidance of responsibility."

One-hour video on the SR-71 Blackbird. It has nearly nine million views and gets huge praise from aviation buffs and engineers.

What did the Voyager spacecraft find at the heliopause?

The US population may fall in 2025 (Twitter/X, Substack), because negative immigration my cancel out the small surplus of births over deaths.

Interesting article on the Romanian educational system, which may be the most stratified in the world; the result is great performance on the International Math Olympiad and other elite venues, but overall mediocrity.

Alex Tabarrok on the simple mathematics of Chinese innovation: "In the 20th century the world’s most populous countries were poor but that was neither the case historically nor will it be true in the 21st century."

Autism "fast facts" by a stats wonk. (Twitter/X) Here's a good one: "When financial incentives for schools to diagnose autism are enacted, rates rise sharply, by an average of 25% in a single year." Longer article from the same source.

Long essay on the generally mediocre economic returns for biotech startups, and the hope that AI will radically improve the process of discovering new drugs and other useful molecules.

Paywalled psychology paper arguing that political extremists of both the left and the right have similar brain activity patterns that emphasize emotional reaction.

Immigration and government finances in Britain. The claim is that immigrants are a net positive.

From the same author, the impact of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, which brought 125,000 Cubans to Miami in one month. 

Ethan Mollick asks the LLMs to create "the most annoying CAPTCHA in the world." Very amusing. (Twitter/X)

Review of Agnes Callard's new book, subtitled "The Case for a Philosophical Life."

Remains of a wooden Roman bridge found in Switzerland.

An argument that liberal democracy cannot be defended without a realistic view of human nature.

Matt Yglesias explains how dislike of immigrants drives stupid economics: "I don't like seeing immigrants from India at my local Costco is, IMO, not a great political principle but everyone is entitled to their preferences. But the danger metastasizes when people build a whole crank economic theory around their arbitrary preference." (Twitter/X)

On Twitter/X, an economist responds to all the talking points used to defend Trump's tariffs, so he doesn't have to keep doing it over and over again.

Orkney

I've just finished a long, moderately interesting book about Orkney, and now my thoughts take me to those islands where Britain ends and the North Sea meets the Atlantic.

Kirkwall, with the Cathedral of St. Magnus.

I almost went there, when I was in Britain, but my now wife and I decided on Paris instead. Glad I've seen Paris but hope I get to Orkney some day.

This 1654 map is good enough to show you the basic layout: Mainland is the big island in the middle, with the North Islands to the north and the South Islands to the south. The harbor of Scapa Flow is between Mainland and the South Islands.

For reasons I have never understood, Orkney has an amazing collection of Neolithic monuments. This is the famous buried village of Skara Brae.

Stone Circle known as the Ring of Brodgar.

Maeshowe. The medieval Saga of the Earls of Orkney tells how Vikings broke into the mound but found that it had already been looted long before. They left graffiti inside.

Medieval church of St. Magnus, Eglisay.

Amazing photograph showing the local farmhouse type, which is of Norse origin.

Some of the local sheep, which have adapted to eat a lot of seaweed.

Windfarm. Orkney is thriving right now, partly because electricity is cheaper there than anywhere else in Britain. There are lots of windfarms, there is tidal power, and there are not enough powerlines to get that energy to places that need it. Bad planning but nice for Orcadians.

Below, two lovely photographs by Ben Pentreath.

Trump's New Hiring Plan

The Trump administration has announced a "merit hiring plan." Of course this is partly an attack in DEI, but there is much more to it. The "key elements" are stated as follows:

1. Reforming the Federal recruitment process to ensure that only the most talented, capable and patriotic Americans are hired to the Federal service;
2. Implementing skills-based hiring, eliminating unnecessary degree requirements, and requiring the use of rigorous, job-related assessments to ensure candidates are selected based on their merit and competence, not their skin color or academic pedigree;
3. Streamlining and improving the job application process; and
4. Reducing time-to-hire to under 80 days by emphasizing the use of talent pools and shared certificates and streamlining the background check process.

The push to reduce degree requirements has been around for more than a decade now, and states like Florida and Texas have also tried to "elminate unnecessary degree requirements." People who have studied those state policies say, though, that while degrees may not be required, they are still a decisive advantage in actual hiring choices.

People who claim insider knowledge say that in part this is a deliberate attack on any kind of "disparate impact" standard. That legal doctrine made it hard to employ a variety of tests, because black people scored lower on them; the intent here is to bring back IQ testing and civil service exams. Again, this is framed in part as an attack on education credentials, but people who have been to college score much higher on such tests, so that aim will not be achieved.

I think the assumption is that this process will help white people, but that is almost certainly not true; if they really hire by test results and patriotism, Hmong and Filipino immigrants will stomp all over white applicants.

The plan has goals, of course, which are mostly nebulous. But these two stand out:

1. Prioritize recruitment of individuals committed to improving the efficiency of the Federal government, passionate about the ideals of our American republic, and committed to upholding the rule of law and the United States Constitution;
2. Prevent the hiring of individuals based on their race, sex, or religion, and prevent the hiring of individuals who are unwilling to defend the Constitution or to faithfully serve the Executive Branch;

I would say that at present it is absolutely impossible to both "faithfully serve the Executive Branch" and "uphold the United States Constitution," and I think I know which the administration really cares about.

There still seem to be some DOGE folks around, giving us goals like:

Integrate modern technology to support the recruitment and selection process, including the use of data analytics to identify trends, gaps, and opportunities in hiring, as well as leveraging digital platforms to improve candidate engagement.

I am very much in favor of changing the Federal hiring process. It is woefully bureaucratic, intensely political, and otherwise broken. Many Federal jobs are advertised only for applicants already working for the agency in question – this is true for all National Park Service archaeology jobs beyond "Archaeology Intern" – but that isn't necessarily because they want to exclude outsiders. The process of advertising an "open" position and reviewing all the applicants it would draw is just so cumbersome that nobody has time for it. Even if the posting is limited to internal applicants jobs can still take a year to fill.

A shared background check process would also be a huge boon, especially if it were publicized so that job applicants would know what documentation they're going to need.

I think we can see here both the promise and the huge problem with the Trump administration. There is a willingness to make changes, and the government could use a lot of changes. There is a glee in tossing out racial preferences, which are highly unpopular with Americans. There is a lot of rhetoric about replacing political intrigue with the pursuit of excellence.

But who believes them? I don't. I think their motives are entirely political, and none of them give a damn about how the government actually works. Because of this, they have no incentive, and no ability, to work through the hard problem of government reform. Once they have achieved their basic goal of ending anything that smacks of anti-white bias, they will lose interest and move on to something else that will get more clicks and likes from their fans.

Helping Others

Studies show (!) that helping others is the best way to help yourself:

A growing body of literature suggests that prosocial behavior, or behavior intended to help others, benefits well-being. However, modern society often places a greater emphasis on self-focused acts in the pursuit of well-being. To understand the effects of these differing forms of kindness (to others or the self), we conducted a 2-week intervention study of a community sample during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Participants were randomly assigned to a prosocial (other-kindness), self-kindness, or control condition, and those in the active conditions were asked to perform three acts of kindness each week. Of those who completed the intervention (N = 777), we found that participants in the other-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, anxiety, and loneliness from pre- to postintervention, offering compelling evidence for the mental health benefits of prosocial behavior. Furthermore, we found that participants in the self-kindness (vs. control) group experienced significant decreases in depression, but no differences in anxiety and loneliness. While the self-kindness group reported experiencing more positive feelings during their acts of kindness, the other-kindness group felt more connected. Exploratory mediation analyses revealed that, for the prosocial group, the effect of condition on depression, anxiety, and loneliness was mediated by increases in feelings of social connection, whereas for the self-kindness group, the effect of condition on depression was mediated by increases in positive feelings. Overall, these findings reaffirm the benefits of prosocial behavior on well-being and suggest unique pathways to mental health benefits for these two forms of kindness.

I personally find that cultivating generosity and compassion puts me in a much better mood than thinking selfishly or indulging in rancor. The really nasty people I have known all seem very unhappy to me.