What am I up to now?
December 30, 2024
September, 2024
Contents
Updates
I’m in Oxford for September; as always, please say hi if you’re passing through!
The first week of August was Olympic obsessed. My overall highlight was the mountain and road cycling, but the final days of track and field were classical Olympic fun, especially narrated by my sister’s commentary. Breakdancing was interesting; I’m glad it was included, but not sad to see it go.I watched all six hours of the women’s competition, and don’t remember the Australian at all. The memes went over my head. Flag football will replace it at the 2028 LA games, which I expect I’ll watch with the same amount of enthusiasm.
Eras Tour
Mid-August brought another spectacle: my sisters visited, bribed by tickets to Taylor Swift at Wembley. This was their third time at the Eras tour, and I got a guided tour.
Everything that can be written about Taylor Swift has been written. My experience was sur-real. She is a post-modern trickster goddess. Opening with a Lady Gaga’s song (“I live for the applause”), and early on making er power explicit by making the whole crowd cheer when she points, transitioning to The Man. What we see on the screen is a facade.I have never been to a stadium show before, and didn’t feel in sync with the crowd. I was trying to watch her, but at these distances, she doesn’t show up well on your phone camera, so most attention was directed to the jumbotrons. Also a privilege of height. Stadium-sized expressions to show better on the jumbotron, long pauses. There’s a character working under the facade, but it’s an alien one. The character delights in the attention (“I live for the applause”), and gives back attention.
The height of this comes after Champagne Problems, somewhere just past the halfway mark. My sister Olivia told me that, at the first shows in Arizona, the crowd had cheered for seven minutes. That was 18 months ago, and crowds since have competed for who can hold the ovation longer. The camera stays tight on Taylor Swift the entire time. At Wembley, she only basked in the noise for about four minutes before cutting the crowd off.
The performance of capricious fae nature is, like everything else, orchestrated. She performs a silent skit with two dancers before launching into I Can Do It With a Broken Heart. The dancers attempt to coerce a listless Taylor Swift into dressing in a sparkly two-piece and heels, and physically shove her towards the audience. This is all so she can sing “I’m so depressed, I act like it’s my birthday every day” in C major.Which, honestly, was like going to a Britney Spears concert and hearing Lucky. How am I supposed to feel after this? Do you want me to cheer?
A friend here in Oxford, JW, called The Eras Tour the largest cultural wave of our generation. On those subjective criteria, I can’t think of many competitors.The MCU, or the rise of K-pop, maybe. Game of Thrones and Hamilton might have competed, but didn’t have staying power. I know people in their 60s and 70s who devour academic and critical books about The Beatles and other bands of their youth. I left Wembely wondering if I, or my sisters, will be so interested in Taylor Swift in our time.
Norway
I spent the last ten days of the month with a friend and MWG in Arctic Norway. Senja was spectacularly beautiful; we climbed sharp peaks and worked in cozy cottages on rainy days.
The prolific grocery stores were constantly stocked with high-quality produce, which must have traveled on at least three boats to get there. Despite this, we had no great meals in restaurants. Infrastructure was a highlight; the sovereign wealth fund was evident. We took an hour-long car ferry which was free; bridges and tunnels went to villages of less then 50 people.
The superlative beauty is worth a visit. It has never easy to get deep into the culture or history of the region, and my post-trip Norway reading list is very short.
Links
Nathan Goldwag reads a lot , and writes about some of it on his blog. Two blog posts which stood up and yelled at me: first, this dark and useful and philosophical review of a children’s book series, The Dark is Rising, and second, an essay about the Antarctic expeditions of the early 20th century.
To Goldwag, “the Antarctic adventures of the 1890s-1910s represent a sort of “last hurrah” of the Old World, a final stage for the Imperial pageant to play out.” In this telling, the Great War beats “the quest for knowledge, the bravery, the belief in progress” out of the last Victorian gentlemen. He’s right about the second point, but neglects the stubborness of the last generation of British colonialists. I date the death of the Old World to 8 June, 1924: the final attempt on Mount Everest until 1952.I wrote about the centenary a few months ago.
Antarctic exploration peaked just before the Great War, and many of those explorers died in France. But another cohort of explorers survived the war, and threw themselves at Everest repeatedly in the early 1920s. Into the Silence by Wade Davis is one of my favorite reads of the year, and addresses with the psychological toll of the war on the British climbers in Nepal. It was only once this generation met failure that this generation waved its white flag. The history of Antarctic and Himalayan attempts bookend the Great War, and provide the final two chapters of the history of Victorian exceptionalism through exploration.
Something I came across separately, and only afterwards learned was written by Goldwag, are these fictional lectures notes from a Starfleet Academy seminar series called “Reconstructing the Crisis of the 21st Century (1992-2083).” This is exactly my kind of fanf iction. Not technically a work of sci-fi, the divergence point from our history is the end of the cold war and the arrival of Khan Noonian Singh. Eminently plausible, except for the Vulcans showing up. The outline of the world portrayed in the lectures notes was written by the writers of TOS and TNG in the 1960s and 80s, and it shows. We’re lucky genetics is a hard problem. We’re lucky for peace. Really lucky — almost all of the 80 year period covered is warfare. Two tidbits:
However, in the most famous incident, a Vulcan atmospheric shuttle en route from Shanghai to Mumbai in 2094 went down in a Himalayan valley uncontacted since the end of the war. The Indian military scrambled Search & Rescue teams, but when their helicopters finally tracked down the crash site, they discovered the Vulcan engineer eight hours into a debate with the local Buddhist priest over the nature of consciousness. History does not record who won.
and
The Crisis of the 21st Century lasted ninety-one years, and resulted in the deaths of approximately 2.4 billion people, 30% of the human population of the time. In much of the world, life expectancy did not return to the level it had been in 1990 until the 2150s, and even with Vulcan aid, the ecological damage continues to be felt to this day. The global order collapsed more than once, and by the time it was over, large portions of the planet had reverted to barbarism and anarchy.
Last month I wrote about another alternate history, the Ring of Fire series, taking place during the Thirty Years’ War. The main characters are mostly fictional, but some figures show up: King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden and Cardinal Richelieu are particularly important. It’s not until book 15 or so of the series that Oliver Cromwell playes a role, and many of his chapters are about something that hadn’t happened yet: his 1649 campaign in Ireland. This was a charming article about a man from the town of Drogheda, the site of Cromwell’s most famous atrocity, who is advancing a new and sympathetic historiography of Cromwell.
There’s a paper in the new JEP called “On the Economics of Extinction and Possible Mass Extinctions”, by two people I’ve never heard of. It’s not about the thing we’re into — rather, “Why do extinctions occur? And is the rate of human-caused extinction likely to increase over time?” Still, a cool model and a good read.
Norway seems to be the first rich country studied so far in which sexual frequency has not declined over recent decades. I have no insights.
The American Foreign Service Association gives a series of awards to FSOs who provide constructive dissent to US policy. I learned about this reading an interview with Archer Blood. This article is also when I learned that the Blood telegram was named after a man named Blood, not about the topic. I can’t find a convenient list of Dissent award winners; any pointers would be handy.
Being a Nobel Laureate doubles the chance your economics paper gets published. This effect size is smaller than I expect, but still larger than it should be. Peer review is not broken: it never worked in the first place.
Here’s a great Admiral Cloudber about an Air Maroc flight which bounced twice on the ocean and then no one said anything. The captain just like, got away with it. Thanks to Ozy Brennan for linking this one.
And here’s one which went uncovered by the Admiral: the time a crocodile crashed a plane.
The only survivor of the crash stated to the investigators that a crocodile smuggled in a duffel bag by one of the passengers had escaped shortly before landing, sparking panic among the passengers. The flight attendant rushed towards the cockpit, followed by all passengers, and the resulting shift in the aircraft’s centre of gravity led to an irrecoverable loss of control. The crocodile reportedly survived the crash, only to be killed with a machete by authorities.
The pitch meeting for Animaniacs , now Olivia’s second favorite piece of internet writing.
In 1980, there were only 206,000 Indian immigrants in the US. The parents of Kamala Harris, Usha Vance, Bobby Jindal, and Jhumpa LahiriOK, you probably haven’t heard of her. Lahiri is one of my favorite modern writers, and provides really good context and insight to her class and generation. Start with Unaccustomed Earth. were among these. Here’s one article about the question: “How did the children of Indian immigrants reach the top of US establishments in just one generation?” We should read more about the experience of this generation of Indian Americans. Almost everyone who wants to understand American politics should know a little bit more about caste.
Usha’s last name is typically associated with the Telugu Kamma caste. But she and her family are vegetarians and, as one friend said, “sound” like Telugu Brahmins. Various message boards and Twitter litigated her family’s origin story.
Why didn’t Rome have an industrial revolution https://www.maximum-progress.com/p/romae-industriae)? Max says no printing press. My quick take is that slavery distorts labor markets too much: human capital accumulation is misdirected away from labor saving innovation.
This is an article about sharks . Katherine Rundell is the world’s greatest writer about fauna. I don’t think there’s any way to transfer her skill to television, but if she’s down, someone should fund it. In the meanwhile, read The Golden Mole.
Unsourced Twitter claim: “In WWI, the US government sent a cheque as a payment for airplane manufacturing to Ettore Buggati so fast that he took it to his local bank to ask if it was valid because he’d never received payment from a government so promptly before.” Verifications welcome.
I mentioned this article to Olivia and was immediately gifted with a dozen facts about the Mormon farming influencer Ballerina Farm. I live in a bubble of my own making. This article also taught me that Mormons believe that Eve was right and wise to eat the forbidden fruit in Eden:
By making Juilliard part of the Ballerina Farm story, the life she’s living now is framed as the one she chose over the life she could have had as a professional ballerina. SHE TOOK A BITE OF THE FORBIDDEN (BIG) APPLE BUT THEN DECIDED TO GO BACK INTO THE GARDEN. Can you hear me yelling, “ARE YOU SEEING THIS?!”
That article was written by Anne Helen Petersen, and I spent a few hours down her archives before finding this one about her ex-boyfriend who died in the Iraq war. She’s a really great writer; I wish her books (about millenial angst and working from home) were more up my alley.
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