Recently closed tabs

These are ideas that I have believed to be true for myself at the time of composition. They are not immutable truths about The Universe, and I am open to changing my mind about any of them at any time.

This report concludes that low shares of university graduates in lagging regions are no longer a constraint. Nor is a generalised lack of finance. More plausible constraints are weak transport infrastructure, failure to support innovation clusters outside the South East and constraints on migration to London and the South East, due to costly housing.

The new ugliness is defined in part by an abandonment of function and form: buildings afraid to look like buildings, cars that look like renderings, restaurants that look like the apps that control them. New York City is a city increasingly in quotation marks, a detailed facsimile of a place.

In Woody Allen’s films and perhaps most clearly in Seinfeld, Jewish alienation became mainstream. In Seinfeld, alienation from WASP social mores and practices bleeds into an everyday alienation from society itself. George Costanza’s myriad paranoid anxieties about navigating work, romance, and consumerism are relatable (if exaggerated) not just to Jews but to any American urbanite. (As Lenny Bruce put it, “If you live in New York, you’re Jewish.”) The show’s cleverness defangs not anti-Semitism, but a fundamental anxiety of American-style individualism: namely, that we’ve become unmoored from any genuine communal context. The show constantly cuts that anxiety down to size by generating clever jokes out of the mundane dilemmas faced daily by disconnected operators in such a culture, especially around their inability to form and maintain genuine romantic relationships.

For paradoxically there exists an agreed-upon and specific answer to the single best way to educate children, a way that has clear, obvious, and strong effects. The problem is that this answer is unacceptable. The superior method of education is deeply unfair and privileges those at the very top of the socioeconomic ladder. It’s an answer that was well-known historically, and is also observed by education researchers today: tutoring.

In “Maus,” Art Spiegelman strives to understand his overbearing father, a Holocaust survivor. “I used to think the war made him that way,” he says. His stepmother, Mala, replies, “Fah! I went through the camp. All our friends went through the camps. Nobody is like him!” Mala won’t cede her knowledge of her husband or of life to the coercive tidiness of the trauma plot. There are other doubting Malas. I start seeing them everywhere, even lurking inside the conventional trauma story with designs of their own, unravelling it from within.

A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

No models are [true] — not even the Newtonian laws. When you construct a model you leave out all the details which you, with the knowledge at your disposal, consider inessential.... Models should not be true, but it is important that they are applicable, and whether they are applicable for any given purpose must of course be investigated. This also means that a model is never accepted finally, only on trial.

There will be no extemporising with the Queen. The newsreaders will wear black suits and black ties. Category one was made for her. Programmes will stop. Networks will merge. BBC 1, 2 and 4 will be interrupted and revert silently to their respective idents – an exercise class in a village hall, a swan waiting on a pond – before coming together for the news. Listeners to Radio 4 and Radio 5 live will hear a specific formulation of words, “This is the BBC from London,” which, intentionally or not, will summon a spirit of national emergency. […] The royal standard will appear on the screen. The national anthem will play. You will remember where you were. […] More overwhelming than any of this, though, there will be an almighty psychological reckoning for the kingdom that she leaves behind. The Queen is Britain’s last living link with our former greatness – the nation’s id, its problematic self-regard – which is still defined by our victory in the second world war. One leading historian, who like most people I interviewed for this article declined to be named, stressed that the farewell for this country’s longest-serving monarch will be magnificent. “Oh, she will get everything,” he said. “We were all told that the funeral of Churchill was the requiem for Britain as a great power. But actually it will really be over when she goes.”

Today, Italy has a large government with a dazzling number of laws—more than ten times as many as Germany—and the country is full of bright, industrious people who spend an enormous amount of time and energy creatively breaking them.

Classical tolerance does not mean approval, it does not mean affirmation, it does not mean acceptance — it just means tolerating something. [...] Tolerance as acceptance, however, is placing a much greater demand on people. It says “It’s not enough that you leave me to live my life in peace. You must also approve of how I live my life. I have a right to require that your personal thoughts, feeling, and convictions be favorably disposed towards me – if they are not, you have failed in your obligations to me.” This is too much. People don’t have a right to prevent you from living as you wish, but they do have a right to be wrong.

Constraints on supply have made houses into scarce assets, more like bonds, fine art or precious metals than durable goods like refrigerators or cars. This only feels normal because we’re used to it, and does not happen in places where developers can easily add more homes to an area, such as Tokyo, Seoul, or New York City before the 1920s. In places like these, rising demand leads to more supply, not just higher prices.

Figs are high in calcium, easy to chew and digest, and, unlike plants that fruit seasonally, can be found year-round. This is the fig plant’s accommodation of the fig wasp. A fig wasp departs a ripe fig to find an unripe fig, which means that there must always be figs at different stages. As a result, an animal can usually fall back on a fig when a mango or a lychee is not in season. Sometimes figs are the only things between an animal and starvation. According to a 2003 study of Uganda’s Budongo Forest, for instance, figs are the sole source of fruit for chimpanzees at certain times of year. Our pre-human ancestors probably filled up on figs, too. The plants are what is known as a keystone species: yank them from the jungle and the whole ecosystem would collapse.

Walter Bagehot once wrote that monarchy “acts as a disguise” allowing a nation “to change without heedless people knowing it”. By living so long, Elizabeth offered the illusion of stability to a nation that was in truth changing markedly.

A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure. This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability.

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything topsy-turvy. […] When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit.

All groups create informal structures as a result of interaction patterns among the members of the group. Such informal structures can do very useful things But only Unstructured groups are totally governed by them. When informal elites are combined with a myth of "structurelessness," there can be no attempt to put limits on the use of power. It becomes capricious.

The 21-metre rule is, according to the Stirling prize-winning architect Annalie Riches, a bizarre hangover from 1902, originally intended to protect the modesty of Edwardian women. The urban designers Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker walked apart in a field until they could no longer see each other’s nipples through their shirts. The two men measured the distance between them to be 70ft (21 metres), and this became the distance that is still used today, 120 years later, to dictate how far apart many British homes should be built.

The popularity of the idea of primitive communism, especially in the face of contradictory evidence, tells us something important about why narratives succeed. Primitive communism may misrepresent forager societies. But it is simple, and it accords with widespread beliefs about the arc of human history. If we assume that societies went from small to big, or from egalitarian to despotic, then it makes sense that they transitioned from property-less harmony to selfish competition, too. Even if the facts of primitive communism are off, the story feels right.

To tolerate, as Williams stresses, is to be conflicted. Toleration involves putting up with something that you would rather not be the case.

In other words, there’s no third-person view of the world. There is one world per observer, and no more than one at a time.

Everyone will be reasonable. Everyone expects everyone else to be reasonable. No one is special. Do not be offended if someone suggests you are not being reasonable.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

“Freedom is the possibility of isolation,” he writes in the final entry. “If you cannot live alone, then you were born a slave.”

The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally impossible, would only crowd and ultimately cramp one’s mind. “I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding,” Montaigne wrote, “but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so… . From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honorable pastime; or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well.” What Montaigne sought in his reading, as does anyone who has thought at all about it, is “to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent.

The little things you do for others that remind you both of who you are, matter. They’re what define the thread count of the human experience. It’s micro gestures like small smiles, arm squeezes, and “hey you”s that root us in our sense of self without committing to the relationship’s definition beyond momentary shared space.

The problem with their argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. What we have today in Russia is not some kind of surprise. It’s not some kind of deviation from a historical pattern. Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. There are internal processes in Russia that account for where we are today.

Questa crisi era però nascosta allora da un trionfo innegabile quanto illusorio, e dalle facili denunce di un pensiero unico e di un’ideologia della “fine della storia” di cui in realtà partecipavano quasi tutti. Lo testimoniavano il fatto che l’idea prevalente (nella nostra Costituzione come nei documenti della costruzione europea o in molti testi statunitensi) era quella del “miglioramento continuo”; il continuo, cieco riferimento a diritti in perenne ampliamento e per sempre acquisiti; alla pace perpetua; o a una fratellanza universale che solo la malvagità di alcuni impedisce di raggiungere. Le reazioni di tanti giovani amici e tanti allievi che mi ripetono “ma come”, “non ce lo saremmo mai aspettato”, “è impossibile” mi hanno più volte ultimamente confermato la forza di questa “buonismo ingenuo”, il cui vero limite sta nella incapacità di vedere oltre che di ascoltare la realtà, e in specie il Male, che esiste.

Narodnost means submission, sacrifice and passivity: the Tsar cannot make mistakes. He is Just. Around him are Princes who will rise to become Tsar one day. But when mistakes are made they are made by a class of people under the Princes in the hierarchy, the Boyars. The Boyars are the ones who make mistakes and are blamed. These are those supperrich oligarchs and governors in league with Putin who frequently go missing, have boating accidents, or hang themselves in their garages. [...] It is important to note core Russian beliefs that Democracy is equal to Chaos, and Autocracy is superior to Chaos and Mayhem. Russia has consistently been under authoritarian rule since the Mongols.

Putin has spent the last two decades showing us how manly he was—shirtless on horseback, working out in this home gym, shooting whales with a crossbow. But now that he has started a war, he has not left the Kremin. He meets with the ministers carrying out his orders in giant rooms, across comically long tables. He is scared of them, scared of Covid, scared of a palace coup. He has barely deigned to address his people. He has yet to visit the field of battle. The nice Jewish boy, however, is there, in a flak jacket and helmet. He’s in the trenches, having tea and sausage with his soldiers; he is in the streets, addressing his people every day, sometimes several times a day, always wearing the same military green. He has not run or hidden, despite the assassination squad sent to kill him. He has not sent his family away. He is making fierce demands of the West and the West is listening. He, not the K.G.B. judo master, has become the hero of this war, the manliest of men, the revenge of every good Soviet Jewish boy who was once told by that tough Russian street kid that he was weak.

Ours is an era of rising ideological fervor, moving toward something like the Chinese cultural revolution, with elements of both religious revival and witch hunt repression. While good things may come of this, we risk exaggeration races, wherein people try to outdo themselves to show loyalty via ever more extreme and implausible claims, policies, and witch indicators. One robust check on such exaggeration races could be a healthy community of intellectual generalists. Smart thoughtful people who are widely respected on many topics, who can clearly see the exaggerations, see that others of their calibre also see them, and who crave such associates’ respect enough to then call out those exaggerations. Like the child who said the emperor wore no clothes.

Onfim was a boy who lived in Novgorod (present-day Russia) in the 13th century, some time around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark.

Ognuno dei coinvolti era mosso dall’affermazione di sé, dall’intolleranza delle rispettive umiliazioni e frustrazioni, dall’insofferenza per alcuni dei presenti, dall’indisponibilità ad “accettare lezioni“, e ricondurre il modo in cui si stava comportando e le cose che stava dicendo al loro senso originario avrebbe avuto probabilmente bisogno di qualche secondo di elaborazione.

There are many social-media-savvy people who are choking on sanctimony and lacking in compassion, who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness. People whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity. People for whom friendship, and its expectations of loyalty and compassion and support, no longer matter. People who claim to love literature – the messy stories of our humanity – but are also monomaniacally obsessed with whatever is the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. People who demand that you denounce your friends for flimsy reasons in order to remain a member of the chosen puritan class. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who do not recognize that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy – sophistication in this case being a showing-off of how au fait they are on the current version of ideological orthodoxy.

One of my rules in life is that every person added to a group subtracts two percent from the collective intelligence of that group. A group of ten is operating at 80 percent capability; a group of twenty is only 60 percent smart.

Welcome to The DreamBank, a collection of over 20,000 dream reports

Scholarly estimates of the size of Xinjiang’s internment drive fall in the neighborhood of a million extrajudicially detained people, a figure disputed by the Chinese government. An internal report by Xinjiang’s agriculture department, taken at the height of the internment drive, lamented that “all that’s left in the homes are the elderly, weak women, and children.” It is likely the largest internment of ethnic and religious minorities since the Second World War. After leaving the camps, some detainees are forcibly transferred to farms and factories, or kept under house arrest. [...] More than a million civil servants have been placed into the homes of minority families in Xinjiang in order to “Visit the People, Benefit the People, and Bring Together the Hearts of the People,” according to one government slogan. The cadres are Party members, usually ethnic Han, sent to monitor and assess Turkic and Muslim families, instructing them in political ideology and Han cultural norms. Muslim men and women are pressured to drink and smoke.

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump — like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia — is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true. [...] America will not survive the big lie just because a liar is separated from power. It will need a thoughtful repluralization of media and a commitment to facts as a public good.

Much of the behavior we see from billionaires comes from what I’ve come to call “the bifurcated philosophy of accumulation and distribution.” Or, less obnoxiously: it’s okay to be a sociopath when you’re getting the stuff so long as you’re a saint after you’ve got it. The idea is that the world of business is dog-eat-dog and you can be as Machiavellian as you like and don’t need to think about the consequences for anybody’s lives. But then you have to do philanthropy afterwards, because greed is bad. [...] Their justifications for their success crumble when touched. It’s interesting that the ruling class, with all of its resources, cannot mount any kind of persuasive defense of its own position. But to anyone who is secretly insecure, and wonders whether perhaps the people at the top are smarter and better and more hardworking, you will be reassured to know that they are not. You don’t have to take my word for it. It’s right there in their books.

Often dismissed as 'greasy spoons', Classic Cafes are actually little gems of British vernacular high street design. This site celebrates their ambience and architecture with over 130 vintage London Formica caffs (and many others around Britain) reviewed, revealed & reappraised. But as Time Out Restaurant Guide noted, the site isn't simply: "a set of recommendations... it's a whole aesthetic!"; an immersive re-exploration of a cultural phenomenon that is fading all too fast.

They thought things would go as protests outside the Capitol usually go, and as their rallies usually go. The crowd would serve as a loud prop. The really dangerous people would be diluted by the rank and file and kept out by the Capitol Police in any case. There would be a great deal of immediate drama and a great deal immediately at stake. Trump loves his crowd, but he has no tolerance at all for the individuals who make it up. As soon as they got inside the building and resolved once more into identifiable individuals, Trump was reportedly and unsurprisingly grossed out by all the “low class” stuff he was seeing. What he envisioned, I think, was a mass of adoring supporters at the very gates of the Capitol, expressing their love and loyalty for him, and together, they would make Congress capitulate to their will.

Recently, however, I had an epiphany that has forced me to rethink why I love living things so much and reexamine what life is, really. For as long as people have studied life they have struggled to define it. Even today, scientists have no satisfactory or universally accepted definition of life. While pondering this problem, I remembered my brother’s devotion to K’Nex roller coasters and my curiosity about the family cat. Why do we think of the former as inanimate and the latter as alive? In the end, aren’t they both machines? Granted, a cat is an incredibly complex machine capable of amazing behaviors that a K’Nex set could probably never mimic. But on the most fundamental level, what is the difference between an inanimate machine and a living one? Do people, cats, plants and other creatures belong in one category and K’Nex, computers, stars and rocks in another? My conclusion: No. In fact, I decided, life does not actually exist. [...] Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.

Their mere presence in our minds may reveal something about how we live: “Unled lives are a largely modern preoccupation,” Miller writes. It used to be that, for the most part, people lived the life their parents had, or the one that the fates decreed. Today, we try to chart our own courses. The difference is reflected in the stories we tell ourselves. In the Iliad, Achilles chooses between two clearly defined fates, designed by the gods and foretold in advance: he can either fight and die at Troy or live a long, boring life. (In the end, he chooses to fight.) But the world in which we live isn’t so neatly organized. Achilles didn’t have to wonder if he should have been pre-med or pre-law; we make such decisions knowing that they might shape our lives.

Identify any food purely by the location of structural starch.

Importantly, though, these taxonomies are all useful in different places. Most people, remember, will use the Pornographic Razor. If they ask you for a sandwich, and you give them vanilla pudding between two tortilla chips, you are a madman.

Explaining the idea of a steering wheel and pedals to rats was probably too difficult, so the controls were three copper wires stretched across an opening cut out of the front of the bodywork and an aluminum plate on the floor.

Nevertheless, we get this hopelessly naïve version of centrism, of the idea that if we’re nicer to the other side there will be no other side, just one big happy family. This inanity is also applied to the questions of belief and fact and principle, with some muddled cocktail of moral relativism and therapists’ “everyone’s feelings are valid” applied to everything. But the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?

Americans have never been especially good at vacation. Before Covid-19, they were leaving unused hundreds of millions of paid days off. They even created a work-vacation hybrid — the workation. The idea: Travel to a nice place, work during the day and then, in theory, enjoy the scenery in the off hours. In pandemic times, the digital nomads have simply made workation a permanent state.