Links for May 2026
Congo, Algo, Evo, Saxon Gospel, Books, Babies, Bidness
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Gumbo, Bwana
Have you seen my latest piece in Quillette? “Dangerous Losers” discusses vertical mobility and rising inequality as causes of violence.
How much influence does California have on sociology? I never realized that “41% of all sociology bachelor’s degrees are produced in California.” (h/t Age of Infovores). The original post claims that California’s progressive culture has created conditions for the field to “flourish.” I disagree that progressive influence helps sociology flourish. And the long-term effect of that influence might be programs getting axed by public officials who see no need to fund activism by another name.
Speaking of academic ideologues: Malcom Caldwell was a Marxist professor in the UK who dismissed stories of the Cambodian democide as capitalist propaganda. He travelled there and was overjoyed to meet dictator Pol Pot in person. But the overenthusiastic professor went a little too far in sharing his ideas for improving the Marxist utopia, so Pol Pot had him executed. Mark Manson cites this as one of several examples of intellectuals being idiots.
In 1836, a Commanche raiding party massacred a Texas pioneer family and took some of their surviving women as slaves. One later recorded a narrative of her experience: See Y’allology on “The Capture of Rachel Parker Plummer.” It’s pretty dark. She lost one kid in the raid, and a kid born during her captivity was killed because her master wasn’t happy with the hit to her productivity.
I would often expostulate with my mistress to advise me what to do to save my child; but all in vain. My child was some six or seven weeks old, when I suppose my master thought it too much trouble, as I was not able to go through as much labor as before. One cold morning, five or six large Indians came where I was suckling my infant. As soon as they came in I felt my heart sick; my fears agitated my whole frame to a complete state of convulsion; my body shook with fear indeed.
Speaking of dark: I’m giving a talk on suicide at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul next week and so have been refreshing myself on the latest empirical literature. Along those lines, here’s a piece in PNAS on “A Century of Suicide: Insights from Long-term Data in the United States.” (h/t Rob Sica).
Here’s the text of a talk I gave in Daegu and Ulsan three years ago. The next talk will be similar in the first half, but in the second half I’m going to pilot some new ideas about liability for suicide.
Completely tangential: Here’s a video tutorial on replacing Korean-style round doorknobs. And here’s one on repairing leaning doors. Guess what I’m up to today?
And in darkest Africa: Here’s the account of a Belgian couple who spent a month travelling through the DR Congo on hard mode by vowing to never pay bribes.
First thing to do is to remain calm and - politely - deny that you are under arrest. This may sound strange, but it is a simple test and always worked for me. If they are serious they will just take you to a police station. If they start discussing you know you'll be allright and they are trying to discriminate you but the goal is just to get a bribe.
There’s also a lot about life in the ruins of colonial civilization.
Shylock Holmes writes of the difficulty of fostering quality content online when the logic of algorithmic feeds always leads toward the basest slop.
You give people some measure of what they keep clicking on – unregretted user seconds, as measured by how long you linger on a post, and don’t either unsubscribe, or mute, or block. But where does your attention go?
The algorithms are sneaky demons good at exploiting your weaknesses. You pause slightly longer when there’s an attractive woman on your screen? Your feed will gradually devolve into a parade of e-girls. If you’re not careful, it’s eventually just porn.
Suppose I gave you a fridge of food, and it started out with things you bought trying to be healthy – steak, eggs, salads, kombucha, fruit, cheese, yoghurt. But every now and again, the yoghurt would turn from plain to vanilla, then if you ate slightly more, to strawberry. The kombucha would turn into iced tea, then if you sipped it slightly faster, an Arnold Palmer. The strawberries would one day be chocolate covered, then they would wind up as M&Ms. How long could you reasonably stick to your diet under such circumstances?
Shylock thinks people interested in quality will inevitably retreat to group chats and other small forums with bounded membership and content curated by friends rather than feeds. Though I imagine it will be a continual retreat, falling back to new spaces as the feed breaks in. After all, wasn’t Facebook once upon a time a platform where you saw what your friends posted?
Patrick McKenzie gives the skinny on how the SPLC got indicted for bank fraud. The irony is that the SPLC itself had evolved into a de facto financial regulator, able to have people debanked on its say-so. The fraud in question involved setting up fake accounts to pay members of hate groups—supposedly “informants,” though one wonders if this is an example of Kai Erikson’s claim that agents of social control create the very deviance they’re meant to combat. After all, when your business model involves using fear of the KKK to keep donations flowing, it’s in your interest to keep some KKK around.
An article claims that the new White House ballroom “Is a Fortress in Disguise” with six underground floors and drone storage. h/t St. Rev, who calls it “pretty cyberpunk.”
There’s a lot of ruin in a culture: Robin Hanson tells a bunch of libertarians about cultural drift. I’m still processing his argument but I suspect it’s an important idea. Trigger warning to those with a fear of bearded white guys.
Last but not least, Adorable and Harmless Kitten has a post on losing and recovering faith over the life course. Key sentence: “My children led me back to God.” Many such cases. Speaking of faith . . .
Saxon Gospel
I came across this article by Jonathan Machnee, “Autism & Christianity: A Square Peg in a Round Hole?” The most interesting part for me was a link to The Heliand, a 9th century version of the Gospels written for pagan Saxons in the style of a Germanic epic poem. Here’s the description of Herod:
Herod was chosen King of Jerusalem, over the Jew-folk
Caesar in Rome’s city, the might ruler
Had set him there ‘mid his thanes, verily though
He was not kin to the clanships of Israel, not come
From their best born; but his bounty he had
Through the grace of Caesar, straight from the Rome-burg
Reading The Heliand is an odd experience of seeing the familiar in a new light. It’s based on a harmonization of the Gospels rather than a single one. For the most part it tracks them closely, though with language and concepts of heroic epics. One exception has to do with the humble origins of Jesus. I suppose a pagan warrior people couldn’t quite get their head around The All-Wielder’s son being born in a manger and reared by a carpenter, so we get:
Came Joseph, the good man, as God the Almighty
The Wielder had willed it; with his family he came
Sought his shining castle, his lordly seat
The bastion at Bethlehem, where they both did dwell
Hero and holy maid, Mary the good.
Nowadays, one doesn’t usually see a nativity scene set in Joseph’s ancestral fortress. Also, the apostles get described in terms of a heroic war band. But, oddly enough, the beatitudes are still there:
He spoke to them soothly; and said those were blessed
The men on the mid-earth, who in their minds
Their hearts, were poor for humility’s sake
. . . . that blessed too, were the gentle and mild
When it comes to the Christ’s arrest in the garden, the narrative needs to make it clear that His loyal thanes were ride-or-die fighters:
“Were it thy will,” quoth they, “My Wielder, My Liege
That they shall slay us with the spear-point here
Shall wound us with weapons, then would nought be one
whit as good But that we might die here for our Lord”
Simon-Peter’s swordplay then gets a loving description. But later, after he denies knowing Jesus, we get this little lesson:
Therefore is a man’s boasting of but little avail—
The pride of his youth: if then God’s help doth forsake him,
Because of his sins, then is that man straightaway
Fearful of thought, though he first uttered threats.
Take heed, mighty thanes! Sin can cost you your courage.
A Dying Race
The baby bust keeps on busting. According to survey data from China, “the share reporting no desire for children increased from approximately 5% in 2012 to 32% in 2023, accompanied by a pronounced gender gap: by 2023, nearly half of young women reported zero fertility desire.”
h/t More Births, who also argue that it’s foolish for East Asian nations to be “Banning Faith Groups Amid Falling Birth Rates.” They single out Korea’s recent raids on some religious organizations, including the Moonies. I don’t know: Korea has a severe fertility problem, but also seems susceptible to cults and scams. A case of pick your poison?
I haven’t had time to listen to all of it, but here’s a 4-hour “Birth Rate Debate” featuring Lyman Stone, Simone Collins, and Stephen J. Shaw.
Gene Geni
Lorzeno Warby goes into the evolutionary roots of male teamwork:
The development of farming and then animal herding greatly increased the number of humans—which continued to have evolutionary consequences for our species—and created productive assets (farms and animal herds) worth fighting over. Successful male teams (typically organised as clans) wiped out unsuccessful male teams and took their women as spoils.
Hence, there is a dramatic bottleneck in male lineages but not in female lineages.
It’s a counterpoint to the “Young Male Syndrome” idea that more intense intrasexual competition makes males more prone to competitive risk taking and violent character contests. A lot of high stakes competition was collective, so there was also a strong selection pressure on cooperation in fairly large groups.
This is why young schoolboy sporting teams regularly crush adult women’s national teams in team sports such as soccer. It is not that schoolboys have the strength advantage over women associated with adult men (they are often not particularly advantaged around age 14-15). It’s simply that human males are much more likely to “get” teamwork at a visceral level.
I think the strength advantage still has something to do with it—lot of boys are taller than mom by 15, and I knew guys who shaved in middle school, so puberty can work fast. Still, there’s probably something to the idea that males are geared toward larger group endeavors, and so sufficiently large institutions depend on some male-typical traits. Thus, echoing Helen Andrews’ argument, Warby spends most of the piece talking about this regarding issues like free speech and moralized conformity.
What I call feminism is the participation of women in roles that were otherwise reserved for men. What I call feminization is the institutional shift away from tolerance, overt competition, and formal regulation. I am in favor of feminism. I am disturbed by feminization.
Razib Khan interviews Greg Cochrane on how the latest ancient DNA study confirms or challenges the claims of his 10,000 Year Explosion. Cochrane is his acerbic self, sniping at researchers who seem blind to the logic of natural selection. One interesting idea that came up in the conversation: the finding that Europeans underwent strong and recent selection against schizophrenia suggests that ancient people had much higher rates of it. Does a larger share of people hearing voices explain anything about the Axial Age? Is part of what we’re seeing in The Iliad a record of a time when Greeks were genetically dimmer, crazier, and more impulsive?
Books and Critics
About a year ago I gave a positive review of the comic Bloodruth #1, by Jen and Sylvia Soska and artist Michael Montenat. I recently read Bloodruth #2 and found it just as good. If anything, it continues to elevate the weird genre concepts with heart. I mean, there’s a scene where someone hugs a dreadlocked werewolf and as goofy as that sounds it actually hits a serious emotional note.
The only other new book I’ve had time for of late is the sci-fi novel I just reviewed. Well, that and a sixty-year-old tree pruning guide that one my Homeschool Hub colleagues found when she was cleaning out the library. But I’m happy for criminologist Brendan Dooley, who along with Sean Goodison recently published an intellectual history of theoretical criminologist Travis Hirshi.
From other people’s reading lists:
Drea posts some thoughts on C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score, which seems to be reinventing a few wheels.
Ben Sixsmith offers reflections on Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy. I agree with him that the film was a terrible adaptation of the radio play/book, even if Adams himself was involved in writing it.
For an even older classic, see Graham Bradley of Trucker Man Reads on his slow reread of The Iliad.
Speaking of Homer: I don’t want to wade into the discourse surrounding Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation, but check out this observation from Roman Helmet Guy:
The most fascinating part of the Odyssey to me is the Cretan Lie. When you think of the Odyssey, the first thing you picture is probably Odysseus’s run-ins with famous monsters. The Cyclopes, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, etc. But there’s a reading of the Odyssey in which none of these events took place, and a far more historically intriguing sequence of events emerges.
For one, we don’t actually ‘see’ the run-ins with the monsters take place in the poem. Instead, these details all come from Odysseus’s own narration to the Phaeacians…
The problem is, Odysseus is a liar. He lies constantly, any time he pops up in Greek mythology….
To me, the most intriguing version of events he tells is to his loyal swine herd. While still in disguise pretending to be a Cretan, Odysseus says that after the sacking of Troy, he led his men on an expedition against the Egyptians. But his expedition failed. His men were all killed or enslaved by the Egyptians….
We know the Trojan War would’ve taken place during the same period that the Sea People were sacking their way down the coast of Anatolia (where Troy was) to Egypt, where Ramses III ultimately defeats them. This matches up perfectly with Odysseus’s ‘lie.’
Here’s a book idea: The “real” Odyssey that focuses on soldiers navigating the Bronze Age Collapse, with the invention of the tall tale that will become “our” Odyssey as something like Frodo inventing “Hey Diddle Diddle” in Lord of the Rings.
Bidness
Scott Sumner writes about the forgotten lessons of development history, arguing that we can settle on some ideas about what makes countries richer. The rapid growth of Korea, for instance, fits in with a pattern where Confucian cultures that aren’t saddled with communist governments tend to do well in modern economies. And Korea’s meteoric rise began when it liberalized its trade policies.
Markets make people wealthier, but that’s a hard lesson to sell in many circles. Adam Omary argues the problem is that human brains still have the economic intuitions of stone age foragers.
Modern markets, however, often reward individuals precisely when they discover new ways to produce value—whether by inventing technologies, improving logistics, or coordinating complex networks of production. Because these gains arise in impersonal systems where the beneficiaries are distant strangers rather than known partners, the profits they generate can appear less like the rewards of innovation and more like evidence of exploitation. Our evolved moral intuitions struggle to track value creation in dispersed and opaque market economies.
(h/t Maarten Boudry)
On the specifics of the comic industry, Brian Niemeier describes how the overreliance on comic shops killed American comic publishing. Once upon a time, comic books were sold at newsstands, bookstores, and on spinner racks at grocery stores and pharmacies. This made it easy for new readers to pick up their first issue, or for casual readers to dip in and out. Then the business model shifted toward selling directly to comic shops and doubling down on hardcore fans and collectors. It led to short-term gains at the expense of bringing in new readers. Thus, as the old nerds and collectors age out or die off, American comic sales plummet. Manga is eating their lunch.
This sad history is something that comic writer Chuck Dixon often discusses on his podcast. To that he adds another bit of self-inflicted insularity. Midcentury comic sales were driven by a diversity of genres — including war stories, westerns, comedy, romance, and horror — and half or more of all sales were to female readers. That all fell by the wayside when geeky boys who loved superheroes grew up to become editors who only catered to geeky boys who loved superheroes.
But at least those editors catered to some readers—my guess is modern editors are mostly just signaling to their PMC class peers and hoping to jump into a better job at the IP farm.
But even as Marvel and DC fade from the publishing scene, indie comics are flourishing. On the indie comic business and related cultural matters, here’s Michael Malice interviewing Rippaverse Comics founder Eric D. July.
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Substacks cited above: Drea; Kitten ; Mark Manson ; Derrick Jeter (Y’allology); Arnold Kling ; Lorenzo Warby (with Helen Dale at Not On Your Team But Always Fair) ; Adam Omary (writing at Human Progress: Doomslayer); Brian Niemeier ; Razib Khan ; Graham Bradley