Sorry for the hiatus. Just moved. And as you know, that requires a rather large amount of time.
4 stars
Everyone in Stephenville Thought They Knew Who Killed Susan Woods | Texas Monthly
That left the real culprit free to prey on others, including one victim who was ignored for two decades.
3 stars
May The Factory Farms Burn | Bentham’s Newsletter
Maybe this should be four stars. I don’t know. For well over a decade, I’ve tried (mostly with success) to not think about how much I enjoy eating meat. Meanwhile, I’ve known that eating meat — especially in the amounts I eat — is very indefensible; I have no arguments against pieces like this. This excerpt is only a small part of the argument, but it’s rather memorable:
Imagine someone was paying for pigs to be put in gas chambers because they liked the way their squeals sounded. We would be outraged—animal abuse isn’t worth enjoying particular sounds. What if they were gassed because we liked the way they smelled? A cry of outrage would erupt throughout the public—surely a pleasant smell wouldn’t be worth horrific torture. What about one who enjoyed the way that tortured corpses of animals looked? We’d be outraged—looks don’t justify horrific torture. How about taste? We’d be similarly outraged. Oh wait, that’s literally what we do. We pay for animals to be brutally tortured and killed because we like the taste of their tortured corpse. Surely there’s no morally relevant difference between a pleasant smell and a pleasant taste.
Your Book Review: The Educated Mind | Astral Codex Ten
If the author had tightened this up a bit, it might also be a four-star link. It has some very insightful parts. As it is, it is extremely long. I still think it’s worth reading:
But — could a new kind of school make the world rational?
I discovered the work of Kieran Egan in a dreary academic library. The book I happened to find — Getting it Wrong from the Beginning — was an evisceration of progressive schools. As I worked at one at the time, I got a kick out of this. […]
Egan’s approach seemed different.
I began to systematically experiment with it — using it to teach science, math, history, world religions, philosophy, to students from elementary school to college. I was astounded by how easy it made it for me to communicate the most important ideas to kids of different ability levels. This, I realized, was what I had gotten into teaching for. […]
This is a review of his 1997 book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding. It’s his opus, the one book in which he most systematically laid out his paradigm. It’s not an especially easy read — Egan’s theory knits together evolutionary history, anthropology, cultural history, and cognitive psychology, and tells a new big history of humanity to make sense of how education has worked in the past, and how we might make it work now.
But at the root of his paradigm is a novel theory about why schools, as they are now, don’t work.
The Romance Scammer On My Sofa | Atavist
A writer’s quest to find the con artist in Nigeria who duped his mother.
Why Japanese Calligraphy Ink Is So Expensive | Business Insider [YouTube]
Traditional Japanese calligraphy ink, referred to as sumi ink, comes in a solid form. It takes at least four years of production before these ink sticks can be sold, and even longer for the most expensive ones.
A 200-gram high-grade ink stick from a producer like Kobaien costs over $1,000. And at some other retailers, prices can reach almost $2,000. Meanwhile, almost double the amount of commercial India ink can go for as little as $9.
The Man Who Broke Bowling | GQ
Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever.
Obituary for a Quiet Life | Bitter Southerner
A man passes away without a word in the mountains of North Carolina, and his grandson sets out to write about the importance of a seemingly unimportant life.
2 stars
Inside North Korea: “We are stuck, waiting to die” | BBC
The daughter who fled North Korea to find her mother | BBC
For months, the BBC has been communicating in secret with three North Koreans living in the country. They expose, for the first time, the disaster unfolding there since the government sealed the borders more than three years ago.
Starvation, brutal crackdowns, and no chance to escape.
We have changed their names to protect them.
Escaping North Korea is a dangerous and difficult feat. In recent years Kim Jong Un has clamped down harder on those trying to flee. Then, at the outset of the pandemic, he sealed the country's borders, making Songmi, then 17, one of the last known people to make it out.
This was the second time Songmi had crossed the Yalu River, which separates North Korea from China, providing escapees with their easiest route out.
The first time she left she was strapped to her mother's back as a child. Those memories are still as piercing as if they were yesterday .
Is There An Illusion Of Moral Decline? | Astral Codex Ten
This is the big question in the paper du jour, The Illusion Of Moral Decline, by Mastroianni and Gilbert (from here on: MG).
It goes like this: people say that morality is declining. We know this because one million polls have asked people “do you think morality is declining?” and people always answer yes. MG go over these one million polls, do statistics to them, and find that people definitely think that morality is declining. People have thought this since at least 1949, when the first good polls were run - but realistically much longer.
This could be (they say) either because morality is actually declining, or because of a bias. They argue that morality is not actually declining. […]
Speaking of biases, I’ll be honest - I’m biased against this study.
I’m biased against the introduction, where they pull the old trick of starting with a quote on how society is falling apart, then revealing it was from Livy writing in the first-century Roman Empire. They expect us to be shocked, as if every essay on moral decline hasn’t used the same flourish since - well, since the first-century Roman Empire. […]
But I’m especially biased because I’ve been reading the biases and heuristics literature for fifteen years now, and developed the following heuristic: if a researcher finds that ordinary people are biased about how many marshmallows to take in a rigged experiment, this is probably an interesting and productive line of research. But if a researcher finds that ordinary people are biased about their most foundational real-life beliefs, probably those ordinary people are being completely sensible, and it’s the researcher who’s trying to shoehorn their reasoning into some mode it was never intended to address. And this study addresses some pretty foundational beliefs!
When Men Behave Badly—A Review | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
A lot of this won’t be new to you, but there were some findings I hadn’t seen before:
Even in the most egalitarian countries, men prefer more sexual partners compared to women. In Norway, researchers asked people how many sex partners they would prefer over the next 30 years. On average, women preferred five, men preferred 25. Even the desire to kiss before intercourse differs between the sexes. About 53 percent of men report that they would have sex without kissing, while only 14.6 percent of women would have sex without kissing. These different preferences can give rise to sexual conflict. […]
The book reports chilling research about predatory males. Researchers videotaped individuals walking down the same block in New York City. The tapes were shown to 53 prison inmates convicted of violent crimes. Inmates showed strong consensus on who they would victimize. They chose individuals who moved in an uncoordinated manner, with a stride that was too short or too long for their height. In another set of studies, researchers found an association between men’s chosen targets and women’s self-reported frequency of having been sexually victimized in the past. This suggests that women suffering from unwanted sexual encounters inadvertently emit cues that predatory males can detect. […]
Because of the possibility of cheating, people engage in “mate guarding”—vigilant behaviors that are enacted to deter others from seeking a sexual encounter with their partner. This is more common than many think—87 percent of men and 75 percent of women report that they have attempted to lure someone out of their existing relationship for a short-term sexual encounter.
The horrors of Pompeii | Aeon
The name ‘Eutychis’ was etched into a wall 2,000 years ago. Finding out who she was illuminates the dark side of Rome
The Last 96 Hours of the Titan Tragedy | Wired
OceanGate’s lost sub sparked a frantic rescue effort—and resurfaced safety questions that had been raised years earlier.
Heat pumps, heat pumps, heat pumps!! | Noahpinion
A simple but incredibly useful machine is quietly transforming our buildings.
How bad does it need to get? | Comment is Freed
Back in January, at the peak of the 2022/23 winter crisis, I wrote a post asking “whether the NHS is in a death spiral”? It was gloomy. I didn’t see much evidence that the government had grasped the severity of the situation or were focusing on the right levers.
I’m not feeling any less gloomy now. If anything this year is going worse than I expected. We are now in the summer, when things should be quiet, and from the lack of media coverage you might think they were, but sadly not. In May over half a million people waited more than 4 hours in A&E. Not much more than a decade ago that number was negligible. Tens of thousands are waiting 12 hours or more. There can be no doubt this is killing many thousands of people. Excess mortality in 2023 is running above the 5 year average, which includes the pandemic years.
Meanwhile elective waiting lists continue to rise with over 7.4 million people now waiting for treatment, 220k more than when Rishi Sunak pledged to bring numbers down in January. What happens next winter will depend, in part, on how bad covid and flu seasons are, and whether they coincide. But there is no reason to believe 2023/24 will be any better than last year, and it could well be even worse.
Your Book Review: Public Citizens | Astral Codex Ten
Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.
Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget—or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.
Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.
But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”
There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain—he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.
That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.
You can't "solve" procrastination | Overthinking Everything
“Motivation is the opposite of procrastination” is probably the worst slogan for understanding this problem I’ve ever heard. If I were running a competition for ways to actively mislead people about how to engage with the problem with procrastination, I would award this one a gold medal with a bonus commendation for outstanding work. Motivation is not the opposite of procrastination, motivation is the very heart and soul of procrastination.
If you are procrastinating, that is very strong evidence that you are highly motivated. The problem is that you are motivated in two different directions: You are motivated to do the thing, and you are motivated to not do the thing, and currently the second one is winning.
How do you know this? Well, if you were motivated to do the thing and you weren’t motivated not to do the thing, you would be doing the thing rather than procrastinating. If you were motivated not to do the thing and you weren’t motivated to do the thing, you also wouldn’t be procrastinating because you wouldn’t be planning to do the thing at all.
Why rabbits? | Noahpinion
A rather touching piece:
People often ask me: “Why rabbits?” Usually my answer is just “They’re floofy.” And that is a perfectly fine and good answer. Rabbits are indeed floofy, and they’re also playful and affectionate and funny. They’re easy to litter train, you can let them run around your house (as long as you protect your power cords), they’re quiet, they don’t smell, and they’re much lower maintenance than a dog. Basically, you can sort of think of them as vegan cats. If you’re looking for a little fluffy friend, rabbits are a great option.
Yesterday I held a funeral ceremony for my first rabbit, Cinnamon (pictured on the left above, snuggling with her companion, Constable Giggles). There’s something special about the relationship you have with the first pet who’s yours and yours alone. I’ve had plenty of dogs, cats, and other animals throughout my life, but Cinnamon was the first who depended on me, and only me, for everything. That felt like a major test. It forced me to ask myself whether I had the power, the consistency, and the dedication required to ensure that another living being lived a good life. It forced me to demand those things of myself.
1 star
On Achieving Goals | Stay SaaSy
Yes, very business-y. Still good:
One of my favorite movie quote comes from Michael Clayton where the lead character tells his son “You’re not gonna be someone that goes through life wondering why shit keeps falling out of the sky around them.” That quote reminds me of all the times people wonder why goals aren’t getting done. Then you zoom in and see that the infrastructure for their goal (or lack thereof) destined it for failure from the beginning. Hopefully with this guide, you too can not go around wondering why shit keeps falling out of the sky around you.
She was 200 meters from the peak of Mount Everest, then turned back. Here's why | NPR
Kirstie Ennis has scaled plenty of incredible mountains before. Here's why she decided to call it a day on her last journey.
Who is she? Ennis is a retired U.S. Marine Corps sergeant who was injured in a helicopter accident in Afghanistan in 2012 and lost her left leg. Since then, she's taken on adventure sports like mountaineering and snowboarding as her new challenge in life.
Logo Factory | Kottke
Jigar Patel uses 3D modelling software to imagine factory production lines that "build" logos and app icons for brands like Instagram, Netflix, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and many others. He's also posted a bunch of behind-the-scenes videos about how he does it — love it when artists show their work.
150 Most Legendary Restaurants in the World & Their Iconic Dishes | TasteAtlas
I suppose this might be click-baity, but in my opinion, showcasing one dish per restaurant tips this into being an interesting read:
From small, family-run eateries to esteemed Michelin-starred establishments, these restaurants all share a commitment to culinary authenticity. Here, the focus is on real food with robust flavors, often using time-honored recipes passed down through generations.
Archaeologists Find 3,000-Year-Old Sword So Well Preserved It ‘Almost Still Shines’
The Bronze Age artifact was discovered in a grave during excavations in southern Germany