Links
3 stars
Under Attila’s Gaze | Quillette
And so it is only thanks to glancing accounts from outsiders—Priscus foremost among them—that we know what little we do about the world governed by Attila.
For this instalment, I’ve compiled these scattered excerpts from Priscus’ work into a coherent narrative, presented in the form of a letter from Priscus to one of his fifth-century contemporaries. […] While the letter is a fictional device of my own invention, all of the information contained in it does faithfully reflect Priscus’ own documented observations. […]
Maximinus’ generosity did much to improve everyone’s spirits, until Bigilas allowed his poor manners to interfere. The Scythians raised a cup in toast to their King Attila, and Maximinus proposed that the toast should also be to our lord Theodosius. At this, Bigilas spoke out, saying that it was not right that a god and a man should be compared in such a way. By this, of course, he meant Theodosius as a god and Attila as merely a man. The barbarians became very agitated at this, as well they might, and were on the verge of withdrawing from the banquet. Maximinus, displaying the good humor that we both know so well, was able to brush the comment aside, and the Scythians were placated, but it was a near thing. Bigilas appeared very red in the face, having drunk much more deeply than was prudent so early in the evening. When he saw me staring at him, he returned my gaze with great insolence and haughtiness, and gave no sign of regretting his mistake.
Another curious incident followed the banquet. Maximinus and I were approached by Orestes, who complimented us on our tact. We thought he referred to Bigilas’ unpleasantness, but that was not what he referred to. It seemed that back in Constantinople, Edeko had dined privately with Chrysaphius the Eunuch [a powerful figure within Theodosius’ court], and Orestes was insulted to have received no invitation. Of course, we had no knowledge of this, having had nothing to do with the Scythians’ earlier meetings. We asked him to explain further, but he declined and took his leave. Maximinus and I were at a loss at this behavior, and inquired of Bigilas if he could give some insight. He said curtly that Orestes had no right to be offended, since Edeko, by his Scythian birth, would always be of higher rank within Hunnic society. He then took his own leave, rather hurriedly I thought.
Ant geopolitics | Aeon
It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive.
In the new places, the old limits are missing. As their population grows and their reach expands, the animals lay claim to more territories, reshaping the relationships in each new landscape by eliminating some species and nurturing others. Over time, they create the largest animal societies, in terms of numbers of individuals, that the planet has ever known. And at the borders of those societies, they fight the most destructive within-species conflicts, in terms of individual fatalities, that the planet has ever known.
This might sound like our story: the story of a hominin species, living in tropical Africa a few million years ago, becoming global. Instead, it is the story of a group of ant species, living in Central and South America a few hundred years ago, who spread across the planet by weaving themselves into European networks of exploration, trade, colonisation and war – some even stowed away on the 16th-century Spanish galleons that carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila. During the past four centuries, these animals have globalised their societies alongside our own.
Why Feathers Are One of Evolution’s Cleverest Inventions | Scientific American
In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record that few people outside the field of ornithology noticed. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world. During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world.
Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things. B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of some of the most easily recognized yet enigmatic structures in the biological world: feathers. Feathers kept B6 warm overnight while it flew above the Pacific Ocean. Feathers repelled rain along the way. Feathers formed the flight surfaces of the wings that kept B6 aloft and drove the bird forward for nearly 250 hours without failing.
One might expect that, considering all the time humans have spent admiring, using and studying feathers, we would know all their tricks by now. Yet insights into these marvelous structures continue to emerge. Over the past decade other researchers and I have been taking a fresh look at feathers. Collectively we have made surprising new discoveries about almost every aspect of their biology, from their evolutionary origins to their growth, development and aerodynamics.
2 stars
Men adrift | The Economist
Why young men and women are drifting apart | The Economist
For those at the top, James Brown’s observation that it is a man’s, man’s, man’s world still holds true. Some 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs are male, as are 98% of the self-made billionaires on the Forbes rich list and 93% of the world’s heads of government. In popular films fewer than a third of the characters who speak are women, and more than three-quarters of the protagonists are men. Yet the fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom. […]
Mr Redden has three children by three women. Mr Davis has two children by two. Neither man lives with any of the mothers or any of their children. Mr Davis supports both of his, he says: one, financially; the other, by visiting and helping around the home. He says he is still friendly with one mother, but “not in a committed relationship”.
When they talk about a man’s role in the home, though, both men sound like preachers from the 1950s. “Being a man means supporting your family,” says Mr Davis. “You’ve got to do whatever it takes so they eat, [or] you’re no man at all.” Being a man, says Mr Redden, means you “work hard, provide for your kids, have a car and [maybe] get your own house some day.” Mr Davis goes further: “If I have kids and my woman has to work, that’s not what a woman should do. She should be home with the kids.”
There is, to put it mildly, a disconnect between these ideas of a man’s role and the reality of life in Tallulah. The busy women of Tallulah are far from rich, but they are getting by, and they are doing so without much help from men.
In a trendy food market in Warsaw, Poland’s capital, two female engineers are discussing how hard it is to meet a nice, enlightened man. Paulina Nasilowska got a big pay rise a few years ago. Her boyfriend asked: “Did you have an affair with your boss?” He is now an ex-boyfriend.
Ms Nasilowska’s friend, Joanna Walczak, recalls a man she met on Tinder who revealed that he was a “red-pill” guy (a reference to “The Matrix”, a film, meaning someone who sees reality clearly. In the “manosphere”, a global online community of angry men, it means realising that men are oppressed.) He thought household chores and child care were women’s work, and that women could not be leaders. They didn’t have a second date.
Typically for young Polish women, Ms Nasilowska and Ms Walczak support parties of the liberal left, which take women’s issues seriously and promise to legalise abortion. Young Polish men, they complain, hew more to the right, or even to the far right. Consider last year’s election. Then the top choice for 18- to 29-year-old men was Confederation, a party that touts free-market economics and traditional social values. (“Against feminists. In defence of real women” is one of its slogans.) Some 26% of young men backed it; only 6% of their female peers did.
Young Polish men have their own set of complaints. Feminism has gone too far, say two firemen in their 20s in a small town. Lukasz says he used to be able to go to a village dance party and “the women there were wife material.” Nowadays “they’re all posting shameless pictures of themselves on social media,” he laments. The media are “all biased and pushing the culture to the left”, complains Mateusz (neither man would give a surname). People no longer admit that men and women often want to do different kinds of work.
Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war | Noahpinion
I’ve been worried about a major war between the U.S. and China since the late 2010s, when tensions started ratcheting up in the South China Sea. I wrote a post for Bloomberg in 2018 saying that the risk of war was being ignored. I felt like I was shouting into the void.
Since the pandemic, and especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza erupted, those worries have gone mainstream. To give just one example, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, probably the country’s most important banker, believes that the world is entering a period of geopolitical danger unrivaled since World War 2.
Whose welfare are we talking about anyways? | Regan’s Substack
When discussing ideal norms and laws, or whether a technology is “good” for society, I often find it helpful to ask: are we talking about the median, the average or the outlier individual (either victim or elite)? I’ve noticed that different political tribes tend to implicitly emphasize the potential effects for individuals at different points in the distribution.
Meta and Open | Stratechery
“Some updates on the metaverse today. We are releasing Meta Horizon OS, our operating system that powers Quest virtual and mixed reality headsets, and we are partnering with some of the best hardware companies out there to design new headsets that are optimized for all the different ways that people use this tech.” […]
It’s natural to view this announcement as a reaction to the Vision Pro, or perhaps to Google’s upcoming AR announcment at Google I/O, which is rumored to include a new Samsung headset. However, I think that this sells Zuckerberg and Meta’s strategic acumen short: this is an obvious next step, of a piece with the company’s recent AI announcements, and a clear missing piece in the overall metaverse puzzle.
No one buys books | The Elysian
The judge ultimately ruled that the merger would create a monopoly and blocked the $2.2 billion purchase. But during the trial, the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside. All of the transcripts from the trial were compiled into a book called The Trial. It took me a year to read, but I’ve finally summarized my findings and pulled out all the compelling highlights.
I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
TSMC’s debacle in the American desert | Rest of World
He wasn’t the only one disappointed with TSMC’s progress in Arizona — other U.S. workers who spoke to Rest of World echoed Bruce’s concerns. In the past two years, the company has relocated hundreds of Taiwanese workers and their families to Arizona. Instead of a gleaming new facility, these workers found an active construction site, and a company struggling to bridge Taiwanese and American professional and cultural norms.
Over the past four months, Rest of World spoke with more than 20 current and former TSMC employees — from the U.S. and Taiwan — at the Arizona plant. All of them requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media or because they feared retaliation from the company. In February, Rest of World traveled to Phoenix to visit the growing TSMC complex and spend time with the nascent community of transplanted Taiwanese engineers.
The American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company; Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience they believe to be the foundation of their company’s world-leading success.
Beyond IQ: The consequences of ignoring talent | Aporia
It’s the start of a new school year. A thirteen-year-old boy with an ill-fitting blazer and a fuzzy top lip shuffles into my first philosophy class of the term. He has messy black hair and big, dark eyes. He’s by far the shortest in the class. Eyes down, he makes his way to a front desk without any attempt at human interaction. A nervous air hangs over him. Teenagers quickly pick up on oddballs, and I wonder, as he glides through like a ghost, if they already intuit that this boy is strange. Under his arm is a tattered book, the size catches my eye. This isn’t an academically selective school — my expectation is smartphones, not tomes. He takes a seat and places the book face down on the desk. I twist my neck to see its spine, then I begin with the usual question: what is philosophy? His hand shoots up: “The etymology is from the Greek philos, meaning love, and sophos, meaning wisdom, so love of wisdom.” In this first lesson, the boy will — literally squeaking with enthusiasm — raise his hand for every question. He does that thing eager kids do where they hover slightly above their chair, almost hyperextend their arm, and stare at you until you either relent or ask someone else. The boy's name is Georgios. A few weeks later, he will have locked himself in the bathroom. He will be crying and unable to say why. […]
The book he carried that first morning was a collection of Plato’s dialogues. There was a five-minute window between morning classes. After every lesson, Georgios would scuttle up to my desk to release an intellectual pressure valve, saying everything he hadn’t been able to in the lesson. He rattled off these pent-up observations until the bell rang. Then, with a slight bow of the head, he’d say, “Very well, thank you, sir”, before running off. Is it possible for a run to look anxious? At break and lunch, I would return to my classroom to find him either browsing the books on my shelf or reading the wall display of a hundred philosophers from antiquity to the present. I scrambled to accommodate his interests as best as possible, but it quickly became clear that an extra worksheet or two wouldn’t cut it. He needed the type of one-on-one tuition Aristotle had famously given Alexander the Great. […]
It became clear that gifted children have educational needs as precise as those with more recognisable conditions, such as Down’s syndrome and autism. We tend to think that gifted children cruise through school destined for university and successful careers, but this is merely what psychologists call survivorship bias — a tendency to focus on successful gifted people while overlooking the ones who didn’t make it or perhaps did so, but in spite of the system, rather than because of it. The weirdest discovery, however, was that much of this had been known for well over half a century.
China Doesn't Have the Balls to Invade Taiwan | Richard Hanania’s Newsletter
Noah Smith argues that Americans aren’t worried enough about the risk of World War III, and that Ukraine and Gaza might one day be seen as precursors to the next great global conflict. This argument mainly depends on the odds one gives of China invading Taiwan. […]
I would put the number closer to around 10-15% by 2035. The argument goes like this: invading, or even subduing, Taiwan would be extremely risky and hard. China may be a bit of a bully, but it is a risk averse one. There’s no way that they can’t know that trying to conquer Taiwan would pose all kinds of challenges and risks, so they likely won’t do it. Moreover, even if they did, the US and China would likely be able to manage escalation and keep it well short of any WWIII threshold, like superpowers have before in other conflicts.
Q: Who Found a Way to Crack the U.K.’s Premier Quiz Show? | New York Times [gift article]
Brandon Blackwell, a 30-year-old from Queens, helped turn London’s Imperial College into a “University Challenge” powerhouse.
What the evidence really says about social media’s impact on teens’ mental health | Vox
A reasonably balanced view on the debate:
The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame.
So argues the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Haidt insists that smartphones and social media are fueling a “surge of suffering” that’s inundating teens all across the Western world. […]
This dispute has generated reams of commentary as the media’s middle-aged social media users argue about whether their favorite apps are poisoning their kids. But few if any of these pieces have closely scrutinized how Haidt’s evidence stacks up against that of his detractors — and when one digs into these competing data points, the fundamental premises of the smartphone debate are thrown into question.
The Family Who Vanished Into the Bush | Slate
An abandoned truck appeared on a New Zealand beach. A father and three kids were missing. Then the story got darker—and stranger.
So you wanna de-bog yourself | Experimental History
Strangers sometimes ask me for advice, which is both flattering and alarming, because I only know about the things I write here, and sometimes not even those. […]
It's a new year, the annual Great De-bogging, when we all attempt to heave ourselves out of the muck and into a better life. So here, to aid you, is my compendium of bog phenomena, the myriad ways I get myself stuck, because unsticking myself always seems to be a matter of finding a name for the thing happening to me. May this catalog serve you well, and may your planes always be flown by people who never learned anything from me.
Life in a Luxury Hotel for New Moms and Babies | New Yorker
My month of rest, relaxation, and regret at a Taiwanese postpartum-care center.
What the Sports Culture War is About | House of Strauss
A few weeks ago, after emerging from my stomach virus cave, I began near the close of a controversy involving historically great pitcher Clayton Kershaw, his Los Angeles Dodgers, and a drag troupe called the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Only, when I finally tucked into the tale, it had since leapt from the baseball field and into the California State Assembly House.
A Time We Never Knew | After Babel
There is a beautiful and melancholic word I like called anemoia. It means nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known.
This is a sentiment I often sense from my generation, Gen Z—especially in recent years. I see it in the YouTube videos of old concerts that get millions of views. I see it in our fascination with polaroids, vinyls, vintage cameras, and VHS tapes. And I see it in our reaction to gut-wrenching videos about how life has changed, like this short movie about dating that recently went viral. […]
But perhaps the best example of anemoia is the popularity of ‘90s high school videos, like this one trending on TikTok. Or this one on YouTube, with millions of views, captioned “Phones? No. We had each other.”
Looking for AI use-cases | Benedict Evans
We’ve had ChatGPT for 18 months, but what’s it for? What are the use-cases? Why isn’t it useful for everyone, right now? Do Large Language Models become universal tools that can do ‘any’ task, or do we wrap them in single-purpose apps, and build thousands of new companies around that?
Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature | Stratechery
In case it isn’t clear, I think that this keynote was by far the most impressive presentation Google has made in the AI era, not least because the company knows exactly what its advantages are.
1 star
Things that don't work | Dynomight
Acupuncture. (link)
Phenylephrine. (link)
Multivitamins. (link)
Phosphoric acid. (for nausea; link)
Tree-based knowledge organization. […]
Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming | Marginal Revolution
A new paper by Talhelm and Dong in Nature Communications uses the craziness of China’s Cultural Revolution to provide causal evidence in favor of the rice and wheat farming theory of culture. After World War II ended, the communist government in China turned soldiers into farmers arbitrarily assigning them to newly created farms around the country–including two farms in Northern Ningxia province that were nearly identical in temperature, rainfall and acreage but one of the firms lay slightly above the river and one slightly below the river making the latter more suitable for rice farming and the former for wheat. During the Cultural Revolution, youth were shipped off to the farms “with very little preparation or forethought”. Thus, the two farms ended up in similar environments with similar people but different modes of production.
Vintage Japanese Train Tickets | Kottke
Oh, these old Japanese train tickets, sourced from this collector, are wonderful. So much design inspiration.
Vaccine breakthrough means no more chasing strains | UC Riverside News
Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.
Want to See This Film? Movie Studios Won’t Let You. | New York Times [gift article]
As in the case of ‘Coyote vs. Acme,’ sometimes an entertainment company sees more value in not selling you its products.
An Ode to Edey | kenpom’s thoughts
Zach Edey concluded his career on Monday, completing one of the most remarkable statistical seasons in recent decades. One that’s unlikely to be challenged anytime soon barring a major change to the way the game is played. Edey’s season has been oddly downplayed by critics who either charge he’s the beneficiary of a massive officiating conspiracy or his work should be dismissed because he’s 7-foot-4 (as if the scoreboard cares about a player’s height).
Seasonality and the Invention of Agriculture | Marginal Revolution
The Neolithic revolution saw the independent development of agriculture among at least seven unconnected hunter-gatherer populations. I propose that the rapid spread of agricultural techniques resulted from increased climatic seasonality causing hunter-gatherers to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and store food for the season of scarcity. Their newfound sedentary lifestyle and storage habits facilitated the invention of agriculture.