Links for June, 2026
Korea, rediscovered works, DNA, social forces, new books, old internet
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한국린그스
I’ve been staying with my in-laws in South Korea for a month. We managed a few side-trips, including a vacation to Yeosu, a city on the southern tip of the peninsula. I knew nothing about the place before going there and wanted to learn more after returning. I found the Grokipedia article far more extensive than the Wikipedia article, which says little about developments after 1960, including the big petrochemical plants we saw there.
One pre-1960 development was the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, which started in 1948 and wasn’t fully stamped out until 1957. It involved a mutiny of soldiers angered over the Syngman Rhee regime’s brutal suppression of the communist insurgency on the island province of Jeju. The latter resulted in over 14,000 civilian deaths.
Yeosu also served as a port for admiral Yi Sun Sin during the Imjin War (a Japanese invasion in 1592). One can still see a replica of one of his armored “turtle ships” at a plaza near the harbor. I have a brief review of Sun Sin’s war diary, The Nanjung Ilgi, in my “Links for February, 2025.”
This isn’t the kind of stuff you pick up in Korean language courses in the states, which are geared toward young women who like K-Pop. Middle-aged nerd dads have to find their own way.
While in Korea, I gave a talk on suicide at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. The university began in 1398 as a Confucian academy, and I was greatly pleased to make the acquaintance of my host, sociologist Jong-Hyung Jung. He’s done a lot of work in sociology of religion, as well as some papers on well-being and health outcomes among the elderly.
I’m afraid there isn’t much good news about suicide in Korea. Rates have edged up in recent years, though they’re still below their 2011 peak. And among adolescents, “self-harm and suicide attempts stemming from depression and conflicts with family and friends surged by 553.1% in 2023 compared to 2014.”
In Seoul I also had a pleasant visit with anthropologist Bradley Tatar, who has done work on Mexican corrido (ballads) and the culture around whaling in Ulsan, South Korea.
One of the joys of being an American is not having to care about soccer. But Koreans are pretty excited about the World Cup. Which partly explains the brew-ha-ha that occurred when some reporters got caught on mic throwing shade at team captain Son Heung-min about his getting an exemption from military service.
A bigger scandal came when Starbucks tried to come up with a promotion tailored to its Korean stores, and inadvertently wound up celebrating the killing of pro-democracy activists by police:
The coffee chain sparked public outrage when it attempted to promote a large size of tumbler it calls a “tank” by declaring May 18 to be “Tank Day.” That’s the anniversary of a democratic uprising in the southern city of Gwangju that was brutally suppressed by troops, tanks and helicopters, killing or injuring hundreds.
The campaign compounded outrage by using the slogan “Thwack it on the table!,” which many read as a reference to a notorious 1987 police statement that attempted to cover up the torture death of student activist Park Jong-chol. Police claimed that Park died suddenly after investigators “hit the desk with a thwack.”
It’s not clear just how the goof happened, but one imagines AI and laziness were involved.
Winter Isn’t Coming
Fans of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire have now been waiting for 15 years for the next installment, The Winds of Winter. In that time, the world has seen a number of posthumously released or rediscovered works from long dead creators, leading to the social media meme format “we got new [dead creator name] before The Winds of Winter.” Here’s a partial list:
Sappho, an archaic Greek poet, died around 730 BC.
HisHer “Brothers Poem” was rediscovered in 2014.Saint Augustine of Hippo, the North African theologian, died in 430 A.D. Two lost sermons were discovered in 2024 with translations announced in 2026.
Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in 1791. His “Very Little Night Music” or “Serenade in C” was rediscovered in 2024.
H.G. Wells, English science-fiction writer, died in 1946. His previously unpublished short story “The Haunted Ceiling” appeared in The Strand in 2016.
American horror writer Shirley Jackson died in 1965. Her collection of previously unpublished short stories appeared in 2015.
John Coltrane, American jazz musician, died in 1967, but dropped a new album of previously unreleased material in 2018. He’s also got a new live album out this year.
Russian composer Igor Stravinsky died in 1971. His long-lost “Funeral Song” was rediscovered in 2015 and performed for the first time in 108 years in 2016.
Pioneering filmmaker Orson Welles died in 1985, but his The Other Side of the Wind got a posthumous release on Netflix in 2018.
Children’s author Dr. Seuss died in 1991, but he’s had two posthumous releases since Martin’s last Ice and Fire book: 2015’s What Pet Should I Get? and 2026’s Sing the United States.
Harper Lee, famed for her book To Kill a Mockingbird, died in 2016. Eight new stories found in her apartment were published in 2025.
We’ll probably get some more ancient rediscoveries soon, as the Vesuvius Challenge announced some major achievements in their quest to read scrolls carbonized by a volcanic eruption. They’ve now read enough text to surmise that they might be sitting on a new Stoic treatise by the philosopher Chrysippus and confirm the names of previously unknown works by Epicurean philosopher Philodemus.
Prediction market Kalshi currently gives an 11% chance that Winds will get released this year. I think that’s generous.
Orality vs. Literacy vs. Scrolling
How is culture different when people cannot write things down? One entry in the review contest at Astral Codex Ten covers Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, which makes the case that written language really is a distinct thing from speech.
Claims include that oral cultures just produce different kinds of sentences—less abstract, more rhythmic. Storytelling—especially of epic poems—required lots of improvisation and reliance on cliché to fill in gaps in the storyteller’s memory. Stories that required very precise plotting, like mysteries, were practically impossible. And people’s conception of cleverness was much less heavily weighted toward working with abstractions, and more toward speaking well and thinking on your feet.
The most interesting part of the review is some pushback against the idea that the digital world is taking us back toward orality. The author instead posits that “scrolling” is something that differs from both oral and literate culture:
People who scroll do know how to read. They even like including text in their scroll-content. But the text they include is extremely oral. They write like they speak. Not only is there no analysis happening when they write, often the writing is nothing more than captioning.
The actual words people use are increasingly arranged in verbal, not written, patterns. Short words, short sentences, informal structures, repetition everywhere, and so on.
Digital orality is not a semi-retvrn, because it differs from purely oral cultures in one crucial aspect: it is not ephemeral. This is no small thing. Purely oral cultures spent huge amounts of manpower repeating and improvising and memorizing trying to make up for the fact that all their words were ephemeral.
I think what is going on here is more subtle than an orality-literacy continuum. We’re not dealing with a single axis, we’re dealing with two: a solitary-communal axis and an orthogonal ephemeral-persistent axis.
The communal-persistent quadrant is incredibly meaningless and incredibly addictive. It is demolishing both traditional orality and traditional literacy.
I suppose it’s suspicious that the newest form is the one the writer identifies as all horrible downside, though that doesn’t necessarily make the observation wrong.
I’ve never read Ong’s book, nor much research on general differences between literate and oral cultures. I imagine it’s hard to disentangle the effects of literacy as such from the effects of large-scale social organization, schooling, intelligence, and a bunch of other factors. I asked ChatGPT for an overview and got a lot of “well, little is well-established” and don’t have the time this week to wade through the literature myself. But see, for examples, “Literacy without Schooling: Testing for Intellectual Effects,” “Literacy versus formal schooling: Influence on working memory,” and “The Ability to Manipulate Speech Sounds Depends on Alphabetic Writing.”
DNA, Then and Now
A study of DNA recovered from Viking age graves reveals something about where different Norse populations went a-viking:
They found that Vikings from what is now Sweden moved east to the Baltics, Poland, and the rivers of Russia and Ukraine, whereas Danes were more likely to head west to what is today England. Norwegians were most likely to set sail for the North Atlantic Ocean, colonizing Ireland, Iceland, and eventually Greenland (see map, above). “This is detail one couldn’t do based just on archaeology,” Willerslev says.
To the team’s surprise, there was little evidence of genetic mixture within Scandinavia itself. Although a few coastal settlements and island trading hubs were hot spots of genetic diversity, Scandinavian populations farther inland stayed genetically stable—and separate—for centuries. “We can separate a Norwegian person from a Swedish person from a Danish person,” Sindbæk says.
Meanwhile, a study of modern DNA finds that friends tend to be more genetically similar than strangers. Even outside of recognized kin, relational distance correlates with genetic distance. It might be at least partly a causal effect of the genes. Some of the genes involved deal with smell and metabolism, and people who like the same smells and foods would tend to wind up in the same places more often. h/t Sergio Ferrero
Social Forces
Social closeness predicts partisanship, America Civil War edition: A study in PNAS looks at how the composition of West Point classes effected whether individuals in them sided with the Union or the Confederacy during the Civil War.
Our primary finding is that there is a significant and large peer effect on cadet’s decisions. A higher proportion of classmates from Free-States significantly increased the likelihood that cadets from Slave States joined the Union Army. The effect is sizable: A one-SD increase in the proportion of peers from Free States (an increase of roughly 5 out of 40 peers) raised the probability of joining the Union by 5.4 percentage points, or 15% of the mean.
The effect was only seen among Southerners, since Northerners overwhelmingly joined the Union regardless.
Social gravitation and repulsion can induce selection effects. People often talk about the relative success of the US in assimilating immigrants during the late 19th to early 20th century. This article at Aporia reminds that this involved a huge amount of remigration:
A very large share of European immigrants didn’t assimilate at all. They went home.
Between roughly 1850 and 1920, return migration was a defining feature of transatlantic mobility. The return rate of European immigrants during this period was 25–40%. In some decades it reached 60–75% (Bandiera et al., 2013). Italians are the canonical case: between 1890 and 1920, more than half returned to Italy (Klein, 1983). This return migration was negatively selected — the poorer and less successful immigrants were the most likely to leave (Abramitzky et al., 2019). What we now remember as “successful assimilation” is partly explained by survivorship bias. America did not lift entire populations into the middle class. It retained those who were already capable of doing well and quietly shed the rest.
There weren’t any state funded Quality Learing Centers back then.
We’ve covered bonds and selection, now let’s look at incentives: Arnold Kling throws his hat in the “explaining fertility decline” ring: He attributes the decline to the rise of premarital sex, which drastically reduced the incentives for marriage, and thus led to less childbearing.
Miscellaneous
What was I linking to last year? Check out Links for June 2025, featuring Blackian sociology, Curtis Yarvin’s blunder, vertical mobility, and ethnic economic niches.
Ryan Burge goes over GSS data showing that Gen Z have exceedingly low levels of social trust compared to other generations:
That Gen Z line is pretty easy to figure out: trust started out low and has only slipped from there. It was slightly above 20% in 2018. Now, it’s in the single digits. Oof. There’s no generation that is less trusting of other people than Gen Z.
Lawrence Michael Eppard made a little stir with his address at the meeting of the North Central Sociological Association: “Rigor or Ruin: Sociology’s Reckoning has Arrived.” Many true observations that lunatics will deny.
Carrow Brown’s comic “Dirty Deeds” follows a ragtag, multispecies crew of smuggler-mercenaries on their adventures through space. Shades of Firefly, Farscape, and Guardians of the Galaxy, and I look forward to seeing where the story goes.
My kids and I enjoy Louie Giglio’s How Great is Our God: 100 Indescribable Devotions about God and Science. This is how I learned hippos have pink sweat.
I just finished Rob Kroese’s latest sci-fi book, Acceleration Clause. So far it’s not quite as epic and high concept as his time-travel books, but a solid read that I recommend.
(6/26, PS: Kroese went with my suggestion for adding “dorsal” and “ventral” as directions on a starship.)
Apropos of absolutely nothing, the live version of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Astronomy” is their most underrated track. All you people who only know the “cowbell” sketch from SNL should give it a try.
And do kids these days even know about Action Figure Therapy and the “Honeybadger Blood Orgy?” I’m so old that even my juvenile internet cult stuff is old. At least Action Figure Therapy is post-GWOT. The Wee Squirrel goes back to 2001. I’ve got Flash animations older than you, kid!
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