After a long battle with cancer that he regularly blogged about, Kevin Drum has died.
Other people sometimes get emotional about the deaths of actors, but I have never felt much about that. I do mourn Kevin Drum. He has been a presence in my life for decades, someone whose thinking I have come to know very well, and I miss him already.
Matt Yglesias, who has never had any job that didn't involve being online all the time, has been trying to recenter himself by reading old books. One of the things he learned from nineteenth-century novels is that rich people used to think it was ok to do nothing.
Yglesias is writing about Victorian England, and even in that case there were plenty of rich people who did a lot; for every Mr. Darcy enjoying his garden there was a Henry Layard traveling the world and excavating Nineveh. In other societies the demands on the rich and prominent were much greater.
But one thing aristocrats did not do across much of European history was hold jobs. Some did, mainly in the military or the high reaches of government, but plenty of others cultivated their leisure as best they could.
So it does strike me as interesting that in our era the aristocrats one hears about all have careers. Like, the Princess von Thurn und Taxis who was an editor at Vogue, or the Earl and Countess of Sandwich, who own one of England's most famous private houses and have spent their lives being busy as an executive in international development (the Earl) and a journalist (the Countess).
I have noted several times on this blog that the only prize our society can think up to give people for hard work and good behavior is a "rewarding career." When Covid created severe labor shortages in some industries many firms reacted, not by raising pay, but by touting "opportunities for advancement." The "American Dream," insofar as I understand it, was always about earning money, not inheriting it. Money you don't earn by hard work makes us suspicious, and we love sharing stories about people ruined by lottery riches, or professional athletes bankrupt within five years of leaving the league.
It seems to me that as a society we put a huge emphasis of work; work as identity, work as virtue, work as psychological stimulus. I wonder how many of our social pathologies can be traced back to our obsession with work and career success. On the other hand, I have no idea what we would do without work, which is one reason I am worried about the post-AI future.
The Mediterranean grass Carl Linnaeus dubbed Poa annua is one of the world's great colonizers, even spreading to Antarctica.
Matt Levine explains the company bidding to buy the remains of InfoWars by issuing memecoins.
South Korea's birthrate ticked up a little last year, from 0.72 to 0.75, which is nice but no reason for some of the triumphant crowing coming from South Korean officials. They have not solved their problem.
The "truth" about the "Epstein files." The various prosecutions and civil lawsuits concerning Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell generated tens of thousands of pages of material, much of which has already been made public. News organizations have put some of this online in searchable formats, including Epstein's address book and the flight logs to the island. Much of the rest has not yet been made public because nobody has had the time to cleanse it of the names of victims and other parties who have not been accused of a crime (like Donald Trump, who appears plenty but was turned into "Doe 174"). The idea that there are bombshell revelations yet to come from this material is silly.
Japan looks to robots to take over caring for its aging population.
The cuisine of ancient Egypt, at Atlas Obscura. Interesting that there are a lot of pig bones in Egyptian archaeological sites but no pigs in tomb paintings. Anothing interesting note is that the workers building the great pyramids ate a lot of cow and pig feet, which struck sparks in my brain because cow feet figured prominently in the diet of the inmates in the Bruin Slave Jail. I guess cow feet have a long history of serving as cheap, high-protein food for poor workers.
Fixing social science using "replay review" for famous articles, on the model of professional sports. The argument is that we don't have the resources to do real reviews of all research before publication, so we should have a separate, better-funded process for research that has become important.
More weird details from the administration's DEI purge, including censoring documents about the Enola Gay and scientists named Gay.
This fall the Metropolitan Opera performed Grounded, an opera by Jeanine Tesori about an American drone pilot. Trailer here. Ninety seconds of "Blue," the first aria, here, review here that calls it a "triumph."
Tyler Cowen interviews science writer Carl Zimmer, much about airborne diseases and the possibility of life on other worlds.
And a review of Zimmer's new book on life in the air.
Denmark's postal service will no longer deliver letters after the end of the year; other European postal services are drastically cutting back.
Sabine Hossenfelder reads a study that was cited by a lot of US media arguing that human-induced climate change made the recent Los Angeles fires more likely and worse, notices that they actually found no statistically significant relationship but made their assertions anyway. 7-minute video.
I Used to Teach Students. Now I Catch ChatGPT Cheats.
Melting permafrost exposes whaling-era graves on Svalbard.
Foucault and Neoliberalism, interesting essay.
Spitalfields Life has a photoset of old churches in the City of London.
Tyler Cowen on the importance of card games in his childhood, which was also true in my family.
Retirements of coal-fired power plants in the US will increase in 2025.
Taking off from the notion that Trump's victory will somehow revitalize an elite culture that has been ruined by leftist politics and distrust of greatness, Becca Rothfeld ponders the connections between art and politics in the Romantic age.
A MAGA classic from somebody called Insurrection Barbie on Twitter/X:
In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.So is NBC not part of "the media"?
That’s in 2022.
Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why…
The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is a famous and famously weird novel by Gabriel García Márquez about the old age of a Latin American Dictator. It is written like a fever dream, an endless series of bizarre anecdotes told in extremely long sentences that randomly shift in tense, person, point of view, and style. The main subjects seem to be the loneliness of power, the absurdity of dictatorship, and the inevitability of decay, but honestly cows, birds, and whores may get as many words as any of the deeper themes.
I tried to read it a long time ago but bogged down and never finished. During my recent fieldwork I decided to listen to it, and this went wonderfully. I liked it much better read aloud that I did when I tried to read it to myself, lettering the mad words just flow over me rather than my trying to disentangle them. I highly recommend this way of appreciating García Márquez, and he now joins my list of authors (Dickens, J.K. Rowling) who are better to listen to than to read.
Just a note that friend-of-the-blog David and I saw Eivor in Silver Spring on the 23rd, and she was fabulous. Some of her music sounds more like casting a spell than anything else I know. Sadly that was the last stop on her North American tour, so it will be a while until we can see her again on this side of the Atlantic.
Major quantum computing announcement from Microsoft: press release, news story, 6-minute video from Sabine Hosenfelder, who says this is "good news, but not remotely as important as they try to make it appear."
The release of Andrew Tate divides Trump's supporters. Wasn't QAnon supposed to be about fighting sex trafficking?
Interesting essay on the thought of Harold Innis (1894-1952), a key thinker in media studies venerated by Marshall McLuhan, James Carey, and others in the field.
A new kind of artifact for your consideration, the "divination spoon;" this example comes from the Isle of Man, c. 400 to 100 BC.
Tweet summarizing the argument that James K. Polk was America's most successful president; since he had accomplished all his goals in one term he didn't even run for a second.
The headless female body found in an Irish bog, c. 350-1 BC. I'm wondering why they speak of DNA as something that may be done in the future, since these days a DNA test can be done in a couple of days.
Russell Vought's "radical constitutionalism" and the Trump agenda.
Tyler Cowen on the rate of AI adoption and why it may not have as much economic impact as you might hope. Under the "O-Ring model" it is often the weakest link that determines success, and "Soon enough, at least in the settings where AI is supposed to shine, the worst performer will be the humans." In some areas AI may soon not only be smarter than humans, but too smart for us to recognize how smart it is.
The landscape of Inca pilgrimages to mountain peaks.
Bronze Age timber circle ("Woodhenge") found in Denmark.
On Twitter/X, Richard Hanania compares the careers of Elon Musk before and after social media addiction.
Fascinating gold seal found by British metal detectorist.
The worst volume control contest, very amusing.
Against relevance mongering.
Important progress in treating pancreatic cancer using mRNA vaccines, the very technology RFK Jr. wants to ban. (Original paper, news story, Sloan-Kettering accouncement)
Not to mention that the whole "what we need is to leave healthier, more organic lives, not use drugs or vaccines" thing would make more sense if the Trump administration weren't rolling back Biden's bans on cancer-causing chemicals.
New frescoes showing the mysteries of Dionysus found in Pompeii.
Following in a long political tradition, Elon Musk promises that his actions will raise economic growth in the US to 3%, exactly the average of the last two Biden years.
Alex Tabarrok says the Trump's attack on wokeness in the universities will misfire because they are mostly cutting science funding and woke scientists aren't the problem.
New drug to extend the lives of dogs approved by the FDA. How many who get prescriptions will give the drug to their dogs and how many will keep it for themselves?
Immigration is surely a factor in the rise of German's AfD party, but the NY Times finds that a better predictor is out migration: the more people a district has lost in the past 25 years, the more likely it was to support AfD. A party for those left behind.
Feudalism as a contested concept. This debate has been going on among historians for a century without having any impact on the word's use by others, including economists and political scientists. My view is that the word "feudalism" is dubious in implying a coherent body of policy or ideas, but we need some word to describe the privatization of government power that was so widespread in medieval Europe. During my dissertation research I encountered a bizarre variety of people who claimed the right to beat people up and imprison them on behalf of the king, including two peasants who said they were the hereditary guardians of an irrigation ditch. In many traditional societies wealthy, important people wield a lot of power that is sort of theirs and sort of delegated from the king or emperor, but my impression is that medieval western Europe was a leader in this sort of thing.
Animal life in Florida storm sewers, including alligators. (NY Times, original paper) In my neighborhood, foxes and raccoons regularly use the sewers to get around.
Good Vox article on the advances in brain-to-text technology recently announced by Meta.
Kevin Drum summarizes the current House and Senate budget proposals, which are very far apart. And the radical differences between the House and Senate defense budgets and the ideas floated by Peter Hegseth.
Sabine Hossenfelder describes a new paper that applies mathematical rigor to the notion that the laws of our universe can evolve over time, 6-minute video. And here she again attacks the state of contemporary physics.
For the third year in a row, the winner of the NBA dunk content is a 6'2" white guy, Mac MacClung. Watch him dunk while jumping over a car. The biggest stars don't enter the contest any more because there are these dunk specialists who would beat them.
The NY Times runs a piece on why people don't dress up to go out for dinner any more which somehow fails to mention the world "class," even though it cites a self-proclaimed "expert" who wrote a book on the topic. People used to care a lot about their dress because how you dressed signified your social class, which was supremely important. Class is less important now, so how you dress is less important. There may be other factors but the class question is by far the main one.
Long-studied tomb in Egypt identified as that of Thutmose II, which all the news sites describe as the tomb being "discovered."
Kevin Bryan's Fifty Takes on world affairs (Twitter/X, Marginal Revolution)
Also at Marginal Revolution, more on Germany's industrial decline.
This Smithsonian article on Canyon de Chelly is interesting mainly because of the complexity of modern Native connections to the cliff dwellings, which are much contested among the Hopi (who consider themselves the descendants of the builders) and the Navajo, who may have killed the builders but were once besieged in the canyon by the US government. Also some information on what archaeologists are still trying to learn about these much-studied sites.
Scott Siskind, Lives of the Rationalist Saints, amusing.
The development of political thought and writing under the Ottoman Empire, summary at JSTOR with a free link to the academic article behind it.
Economic historian Gregory Clarke has been studying social mobility over the long term. He believes that it is very stable over time and across nations: "if we even go back to medieval England, rates of social mobility were just as high as they are now."
One of the things he talked about in his interview with Tyler Cowen was assortative mating, that is, the tendency of people to marry those of their own social and educational status. He notes that in the US and Europe, husbands and wives resemble each other as much as siblings do.
But it does produce more inequality, so if you’re worried about inequality in society, you don’t want assortative mating. The one way to correct a lot of inequality would just be to have much more random matching.
One of the remarkable things about Denmark is, education is essentially free until you’re age 24. They give you subsidies for your living expenses, for childcare provision — it’s all available. They’ve compressed the income distribution quite sharply.
There is this periodic survey of how well students do, the PISA measures. Nordic countries have not reduced the inequality of PISA measures compared to much more unequal societies like the United States. Again, it’s just interesting that a high degree of inequality is still found within these societies. It turns out that in Nordic societies, people are mating again very strongly assortatively even now. That is the thing that you would worry more about, that there is going to be this trade-off between assortative mating and the degree of inequality in a society.
The major disagreement between Clarke and Cowen is about how much this matters. Cowen thinks relative inequality is less important than everybody's rising income, but Clarke thinks people mainly care about relative differences:
People are just as divided in terms of the types of groups that they meet with as they would be 500 years ago. So, I really want to stick with this idea that in a society like England, we have not in any way improved rates of social mobility in the last 300 years.
Which is an interesting question: could it be that Americans think the economy is terrible because they are comparing themselves to the rich, so we would be happier if we were all poorer but more equal? Does social media increase our dissatisfaction by constantly showing people happier and more beautiful than we are?
According to Scott Siskind, people on the Internet are once again debating proofs of the existence of God. He calls our attention to an alternative explanation, Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, which posits that all possible mathematical objects exist. I do not find this any more interesting than most proposals in this field. Siskind lists these various arguments for god's existence:
All of these, it seems to me, boil down to saying that the universe cannot be explained by its own laws; therefore, something outside the universe, or not bound by its laws, is required to explain it. To that I would say, first, that we do not understand the laws of the universe well enough to make that claim, and second, so what? If we cannot understand that thing outside our universe in any way, or know anything about its purposes or whatever, what difference does it make what we call it? What is the point in talking about it?
The universe is a mystery; we do not know why it is here or why it is the way it is or whether we have some special role in it. What does the word "god" add to that basic insight? If by "god" you mean, "whatever explains what we can't explain," I can't really object. I simply don't get why taking the old notion of "god" as a superpowerful sort of being and using it in this abstract way is helpful.
Rather than toward Max Tegmark, I would direct those concerned with this problem to David Hume. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion he created a dialogue between Philo, a skeptic, and Demea, a deist:
Philo the skeptic says that we cannot understand or know anything about a transcendent reality that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature, while theists such as Demea say that we cannot understand or know anything about the transcendent reality, which is God, that explains or sustains the ongoing order of nature. Since the inserted clause does not help us in the least, the difference between them is merely verbal. And this is Hume's conclusion.
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