2025 Non-Book-Review Contest
Vol 2 - J-S

The Jacobites (fr: Jacobins) are an ancient movement. They believe that the existing order must be overthrown, recentralizing power around someone named Jacob and his descendants, or at least their culture’s equivalent of that name. To Anglophones, they’re primarily associated with their efforts to restore King James II, or an heir, to the English throne. However, the Jacobite ideology is far older than the House of Stuart. Though tenacious, and occasionally successful, Jacobitism is, I will argue, fundamentally flawed.

The Original Jacobites (circa 2000 BCE, give or take a millennium)

The name Jacob first appears in the Book of Genesis. Jacobitism, per the book, was born with him. Literally. He was the second son of Isaac and Rebecca, born moments after his twin Esau. His name derives from a word for “heel” because he was born clutching Esau’s heel, as though trying to overtake him and be born first.

In the narrative, Rebecca had already formed a proto-Jacobist philosophy. During her difficult pregnancy, she prayed to the Lord for an explanation, and received one:

Two nations struggle within you. Both shall be born, but the elder shall serve the younger.

Rebecca interpreted this as a command, and was therefore Jacob’s ally in his quest to become his father’s primary heir. The two accomplished this through a series of dirty tricks. In the end, Jacob fathers the Twelve Tribes of Israel, while Esau begets the Edomites, a rival kingdom in the region.

When interpreted as a cultural artifact, this early text is telling in its unusually frank expression of the Jacobite worldview. Its clear intent is to justify the dominance of the self-described descendants of Jacob over the already-ancient kingdom of Edom. But rather than ascribing grave sins to Esau, the story is framed as triumph of brains and treachery over brawn and simplicity.

Esau is a manly hunter, covered since birth in red hair (his name derives from a word for red). He’s his father’s favorite, both as the presumptive heir and because he’s always bringing him fresh venison. Jacob and Rebecca prefer different foods, e.g. lentils and goat, both of which are much easier to slay than a deer. They leverage this superior caloric efficiency to defeat Esau. Their cunning is contrasted with Esau’s impulsivity–even though he doesn’t do anything morally wrong, it’s suggested that he would have been a less competent patriarch. The narrative frames the Jacobite ascent as ordained by God, sure, but also as cultural commentary: “You may have been here first. You may be stronger, in a simplistic sense. But we are smarter and more sophisticated. You’d win in a fair fight, but that’s never going to happen.” Even today, Jewish Jacobites (more often referred to as Israelites, after the name Jacob adopted later) often frame their struggles in essentially the same way.

The Jacobite Heresies

Jacobitism is also popular among Middle-Eastern Christians, although the term is more often used by outsiders to describe them–for example, in their entry in the 19th-century Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature. Syriac Jacobites believe primarily in the theology of Jacob Baradaeus, a sixth-century bishop. Baradaeus taught that Jesus was at once fully divine and fully human, in contradiction to the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon, which held that Jesus was one being who composited both a human nature and a divine one. In the manner of things, this barely-intelligible distinction has led to considerable strife. It’s probably roughly analogous to the “composition vs. inheritance” debate in software engineering, but with an even higher body count.

This particular Jacob was born to rich parents, from whom he inherited a house and some slaves. However, he then freed the slaves and gave them the house. To protect himself from the Chalcedonians while proselytizing, Jacob dressed in “ragged clothes,” from which his name Baradeus is derived, so that he’d appear to be working-class and therefore unthreatening. This is clearly a variant of one of the Biblical Jacob’s tricks, wherein he dressed in his brother’s clothing in order to impersonate him. This theme, elites co-opting the trappings of labor in the service of a greater cause, is core to Jacobitism.

The Syrian Jacobite Church, founded via this trick, adopted the Liturgy of Saint Iacobus, attributed to one of Jesus’s brothers, who is variously anglicized as James or Jacob. The people of Jesus’s home town saw James as the populist one–Jesus went off, forgot his roots, and put on airs as a fancy prophet, while James stayed home. But they’ve of course been deceived–Jesus is the humble brother, while James is clearly cunning and ambitious. Soon after Jesus’s death, he’s depicted as the leader of all Jewish Christians, and he quickly transforms the movement. Whereas Jesus taught that prayer should be solitary and terse, under James and his liturgy it becomes communal and verbose. In Acts 21, Paul returns to Jerusalem to find that there’s a new power structure of conservative elders, led by James, who demand ritual purification and some money in order to demonstrate his submission, and tell him to stay more on message in the future: circumcision is out, restrictions on sex and diet are in.

Jacobitism has continued to be the source of schisms throughout Christian history. A 1685 text describes the various sects, all commonly referred to as Jacobites, that developed from the teachings of Jacobus Arminius: the Coptics, the Abyssinians, the Arminians, and lastly “those who are properly called Jacobites.”

Here we can begin to see why Jacobitism is so inherently divisive. By enshrining a single Jacob as the one legitimate source of power, it ensures that he will have many namesakes, some of whom themselves will seek power, necessitating another Jacobite revolution, and so ad infinitum. This proliferation continues to cause confusion. Several sources refer to an early settlement in Virginia named “Jacobopolis.” There is debate over whether this refers to a religious community founded by followers of the schismatic cleric Henry Jacob, or whether it’s simply the classical name of Jamestown, named for King James the First.

The Jacobite Succession

King James the First was, as you can imagine, a hardcore Jacobite. In his 1598 The True Law of Free Monarchies, he quotes liberally from an ancient Jacobite text, one which he would soon order retranslated and published as the King James Bible. He makes no effort to disguise his agenda – legitimizing his own rule. Ever since the subjugation of Esau, he argues, it’s been clear that God wants each kingdom to obey a single, divinely ordained ruler. Kings, therefore, rule by “divine right,” and to question their succession is impious. They are, in a sense, God’s presence on Earth. While previous kings and queens had been the spiritual successors to someone named Jacob, James was now the purest-yet expression of God’s will in Albion, as the first ever King James (if you don’t count five other Scottish kings).

James was somewhat successful in consolidating power–he dissolved Parliament and ruled alone for years. His next two successors, not so much. They were both inexplicably named Charles, and struggled to hold on to what James had built. Their lowest point saw them spend ten years deposed and decapitated, respectively. After his restoration, Charles II was succeeded by his brother (he’d fathered many children, but none of them were with his wife, so they didn’t count). Finally, a James was back on the throne.

But public opinion had shifted against Jacobitism under the Charleses. Charles II secretly, and James II openly, had acknowledged the Pope and his hierarchy as the rightful rulers of Christianity, a concept which had recently been subjected to heavy criticism. He was begrudgingly tolerated for a couple of years, because he was expected to be succeeded by his daughter Mary or nephew William, neither of whom were “Popish.” But then he had a son, and named him James. The threat of a Jacobite dynasty led to his deposition and exile. William and Mary averted the next succession crisis via marriage, jointly assuming the throne and allowing Parliament to pass the Act of Settlement, which rewrote the laws of succession in a profoundly anti-Jacobite fashion. There has never again been a King James, despite numerous rebellions, plots, and political movements by the Jacobites.

The Jacobins

Jacobite presence in France was officially established in 1216 by Pope Honorius III. The Church was divided, broadly speaking, into two camps. One, the Franciscans, believed that priests should emulate Saints Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzmán, who traveled the world doing good deeds and eschewing personal possessions. The other, the Dominicans, believed that priests should instead emulate Saints Dominic de Guzmán and Francis of Assisi via the performative pseudo-poverty of monasticism. This latter group became the Dominican Order, which headquartered itself in Paris with the founding of the Couvent Saint-Jacques, the Saint James Convent. They were soon nicknamed the Jacobins.

These early French Jacobites, at least by reputation, adhered to the ancient Jacobite principle of working smarter, not harder. While the exact provenance of the traditional song Frere Jacques is unknown, some scholars argue that it is specifically mocking the laziness and comfort of the supposedly ascetic Dominican Order. Regardless of the details, it’s clearly a song about Jacobitism– “Brother Jacob” is sleeping in, past the morning bell, while the unnamed speaker has presumably been up working for hours. While commenters tend to assume that we’re meant to side with the speaker, it’s not his name that actually gets remembered. This may, in fact, be a Jacobite song.

Jacobitism struggled in France. The well-established tradition of the French Monarchy, in which a king was only legitimate if his name included his pronouns, pretty much limited the crown to people named Lui. French Jacobites, therefore, were of necessity republicans.

True to form, it was more than five hundred years before the Jacobins made their big play. The French Revolution was led by two disparate groups. The largest were the populist proletariats, referred to as the Sans-Culottes due to preferring practical pants over the fancy breeches worn by people like King Louis.

King Louis XVI wearing culottes.

The other was a small circle of intellectuals. After Louis’s head was severed from his breeches, they began openly meeting in a Dominican convent, and so became known as the Jacobin Club, or simply the Jacobins. These former rebels worried that diffusing power among the unwashed masses would lead to disaster. Power needed to be recentralized–not on a new king, but on them.

In the short term, the Jacobins won. They consolidated power by guillotining anyone who tried to take Liberté, égalité, fraternité too literally. They did eventually realize they were probably guillotining too much, so they guillotined the guy whose idea it was to do all the guillotining. But rather than return power to the people, they vested it in Napoleon, who, to be fair, never declared himself king. He skipped right to emperor.

In the long term, though, it’s the Sans-Culottes who achieved near-total dominion, with cosplayers among the last holdouts.

Jacobitism Today

The Jacobites were the victim of their own success in France. Not that they didn’t have any victories after that. The Jacobinismo movement in Portugal is a notable example, although plagued by controversy over whether people named Diego count. But the French Reign of Terror had tarnished the Jacobite brand, illustrating that centralized power was always a threat to the people, even if it called itself populist. The popular support needed for revolution became harder to muster. In Spain, Infante Jaime, Duke of Segovia and theoretically the rightful King of France, made barely any effort to gain the throne of either country, beyond just declaring himself the rightful king every so often.

Jacobitism has dwindled, but not vanished. Israelite nationalism remains a significant force, although even they are divided between Zionists and “diasporic nationalists.” The Syriac Orthodox Church has over a million members, and many of the other Jacobite religious sects have survived in one form or another.

In terms of heads of state, though, it looks pretty grim. The only modern nations led by Jameses are Papua New Guinea and Montenegro. Oh, Jacobites had a good run in the United States, at first. The ascension of James Madison was positively textbook Jacobitism. Madison inherited slaves and land in Virginia, the Jacobite colony. Unusually for the time, he chose not to attend the College of William and Mary, named of course for the married cousins who had supplanted the Jacobite succession. Instead, he attended college in New Jersey, a colony that had backed the Jacobites. After the revolution, he eventually became the leader of one of the two major factions. The other had been led by Alexander Hamilton, who had lived a dangerous and hardscrabble life, long on manly derring-do and short on inherited plantations. Like Saint Iacobus, the first President James ascended by default after his chief rival was martyred. He endorsed James Monroe to succeed him, who won easily after the dying Federalist party made the critical mistake of nominating someone named King. But, by design, it’s hard to sustain a Jacobite dynasty in America. The Jacobites only won four Presidential elections after that, and none of those four (Polk, Buchanan, Garfield, and Carter) won a second term. The first pair, like Trump, is two of our worst presidents. Garfield only lasted a few months before being assassinated on a Monday, and Carter went by “Jimmy,” so arguably he shouldn’t even count.

During what I guess we’re still calling the “Biden Administration,” the Oval Office included a prominent display of an antique plate, made in China, commemorating the Jacobite Rising of 1745. There’s no explanation for this odd choice, official or otherwise, that I could find. Trump was compared to James II during the same period, due to his insistence that despite what the legislature said, he was the rightful President.

The British Jacobite line of succession currently falls to Franz von Bayern, who refers to this fact as a “charming historical curiosity.” A humble man, he seems content with a mere two palaces and the title of Duke of Bavaria, never seeking a throne. Also, he’s gay, so after him, the succession will…continue indefinitely, because it’s designed to always produce an heir, no matter how distantly related. We’re all in the Jacobite line of succession somewhere, so it will last as long as humanity itself does–according to recent projections, probably at least five years. A few organizations, such as the Royal Stuart Society, still consider Franz the rightful king, and list among their objectives “to uphold rightful Monarchy and oppose republicanism.” As bad ideas go, somehow making Franz the King of Something isn’t the worst. His family were active anti-Nazis, resulting in him spending some of his childhood in concentration camps. Knowing that Nazis are bad is not a sufficient condition for running a country (nor, these days, a necessary one), but it’s a start.

The French Jacobite line of succession, in contrast, devolves to whichever group of intellectuals wants to claim it. Currently, they seem content to run a leftist magazine, but we should probably keep an eye on them.

Note that as of this writing, the Papal Conclave had just started, so it is possible that by the time you read this, we’ll have a Pope with the birth name James Michael Harvey, Willem Jacobus Eijk, or Jaime Spengler. However, Popes are not permitted to retain Jacobite names, lest they found a hereditary dynasty.

Chinese Jacobitism

China has never had proper Jacobitism due to its paucity of Jacobs, but the Chinese version of Divine Right does exist: the Mandate of Heaven. It’s the same core idea, that the current ruler must be beloved of heaven or else he wouldn’t be ruler. Difference is, it has mechanisms for turnover: any large-scale disaster, whether or not the ruler was directly at fault, was historically seen as indicating that the mandate had been lost. This built-in explanation for regime change made the Chinese system a lot more meta-stable than the European one, although Chinese dissidents do occasionally try to game it by arguing that widespread dissent is itself a disaster and therefore automatically justified.

A Han dynasty encyclopedia entry, collected in the fifth-century Book of the Later Han, shows that China projected this idea onto Western republicanism. Their confused, and already-outdated, description of the Roman Republic includes the claim that

When a severe calamity visits the country, or untimely rain-storms, the king is deposed and replaced by another. The one relieved from his duties submits to his degradation without a murmur.

It also may be telling that the phonetic transcription of de jure, 德聚熱, translates to “rightful due to strength/popularity/heat,” while de facto, 德發出, translates to “rightful due to a line of descent.” But I’d warn against putting too much stock in doing comparative political philosophy based on linguistic coincidence. We see the folly of this in confused attempts to trace the history of ideologies such as “socialism,” “capitalism,” or “voluntaryism,” when there’s often very little actually linking the various groups advocating doing something involving society, doing something involving capital, or not being forced to do a certain thing.

Why I Am Not A Jacobite

The fatal flaw of Jacobitism is that it both demands and forbids the recognition of de facto legitimacy. Jacobites claim to be overthrowing an illegitimate leader in favor of a legitimate, de jure one. But their concept of legitimacy is always, when you dig deep enough, based on reasoning along the lines of “this ruler must have a divine mandate or else he couldn’t have won.” Why is Jacob the rightful ruler over Esau? Well, his mother said God wanted it that way, and obviously she was right because God always gets what He wants. Why is King James the rightful king? Well, the Norman Conquest established a line of hereditary High Stewards of Scotland, and then a Steward married the daughter of a victorious revolutionary, yadda yadda yadda, the House of Stuart is on the throne of Scotland, gosh wouldn’t it be convenient if they inherited England too, let’s make it happen. Why privilege the Jacobins over the Sans-Culottes? Well, they were the thought leaders of the revolution, because they were born into enough privilege to be able to read and write about political philosophy.

Invoking divine right is just iterating Jacobitism another step. I’m the rightful duke because the rightful king made it so. He’s the rightful king because God made it so. God has moral authority because He’s all-powerful. If God is literally or metaphysically prior to the Word, as some believe, he can’t be deus de jure, only deus de facto.

And don’t think you can escape this regress by invoking some kind of natural law instead. If your faction’s ascendancy is justified due to Marxism or Social Darwinism or whatever, you still have to argue that this isn’t a law we should try to fight. Humanity overturns natural laws all the time. We beat Malthus, why can’t we beat Marx? We defied gravity, why not also defy survival of the fittest?

The social utility of an arbitrary succession rule is real. It’s a Schelling point–as long as it happens to fall somewhere vaguely close to a fair compromise, the factions who got shafted probably won’t start a war. But this system only works if you’re willing to be a little que sera, sera about it. If your response to the wrong guy becoming king is to decide that we need to pick a different succession rule altogether, and make it retroactive…that’s just a standard civil war with extra steps. If blood’s being shed, the concept of legitimacy isn’t earning its keep. The precedent you’ve just set helps ensure that your chosen line will be overthrown, as soon as another Jacob comes along and makes his case.

Revolution is often necessary. The tree of liberty must from time to time be nourished with the blood of someone red (price-gouging Esau, purging socialists, electorally defeating Rufus King, and so on). But the justification for revolution should not rest on abstract notions of legitimacy–that only perpetuates the cycle. Revolution isn’t for fixing a broken system. It’s for smashing an unfixable one.

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories

“Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.” —John F. Kennedy

The Behistun Inscription, a cuneiform rock relief carved around 500 B.C. by the Persian king Darius I, tells of a devious plot by the Magi priest Gaumata to seize the throne. After murdering the true king, Gaumata impersonates him and rules in disguise—until the heroic Darius exposes the deception, kills the imposter, and saves the empire.

It’s a great story, at least by 500 B.C. standards. There’s just one problem: it isn’t true. Most historians agree that there never was a Magi imposter—the “false king” was the real king all along. The Behistun Inscription actually depicts history’s first recorded conspiracy theory, most likely spread by Darius himself to justify a coup.

Conspiracy theories may have been born in ancient Persia, but it’s America that elevated them into art. Forget jazz, Broadway, comics, or hip-hop—in my book, conspiracy theories are the true Great American Art Form. This country was practically built for them: start with a deep-seated distrust of authority, stir in the Protestant idea of unmediated access to individual truth, and top with the First Amendment to let it all bloom in public.

You could even say the United States itself was founded on a conspiracy theory: the Founding Fathers wove a tale of powerful elites (King George) secretly plotting against ordinary people (the colonists) to advance a villainous scheme (subjugate them through oppressive taxation and military control). As with many conspiracy theories, there’s a kernel of truth to this story—but the reality is that what the founders interpreted (or spun) as a deliberate plot against them was really just a patchwork of clumsy, improvised policies from a disorganized British government.

If conspiracy theories are the Great American Art Form, there’s no question as to which is the canonical work of art—our Kind of Blue, West Side Story, Superman, and Illmatic all rolled into one: the theories surrounding the 1963 assassination of our third-best president named “John,” John Fitzgerald Kennedy[1]. The belief that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone is the country’s most widely-believed conspiracy theory—if, indeed, it even is a conspiracy theory—sustained across generations and deeply woven into American cultural memory through countless books, movies, and TV shows.

Sources: Oswald, 2020 election, moon, flat Earth, microchip

In fact, we even have the Kennedy assassination to thank for the term “conspiracy theory” entering widespread use in the first place: as revealed by a declassified 1967 document, the CIA encouraged the use of the then-obscure phrase as a pejorative term to discredit critics of the official narrative.

In his book Reclaiming History, Manson prosecutor and best-selling true crime author Vincent Bugliosi cites 44 different organizations and 214 specific individuals who have been accused of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy, including the Nazis, the Teamsters, the French OAS, Watergate plotter E. Howard Hunt, and Dr. George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician. Needless to say, this review will not manage to investigate all of them. The limits of time, space, and human sanity will sadly constrain me to just ten of the most well-known conspiracy theories, which I will evaluate both for plausibility and—far more importantly—for entertainment value.

But first, let’s take a look at…

What we know for sure happened

Nellie Connally (wife of Texas Governor John Connally): “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

Kennedy: “No, you certainly can’t.”

—JFK’s last words

On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy took a break from his busy schedule of shooting amphetamines[2], hiding his medical issues from the American public[3], and taking teenagers’ virginities in the White House[4] to campaign in Texas—which, if you can believe it, was a swing state back then. To secure reelection, Kennedy needed to preserve a fragile coalition of conservative Southern racists and liberal Northern industrialists, a political marriage of convenience already strained even by his tepid, cautious support for civil rights.

“So I campaigned in Texas, which was a swing state at the time…”

As part of this Texas tour, Kennedy was riding in an open-top motorcade through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, with the Secret Service—at Kennedy’s insistence—following in a second car rather than riding with him[5]. At 12:30pm, three shots were fired. Kennedy was hit twice, once in the neck and once in the head. He was rushed to the nearby Parkland Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead thirty minutes later. Texas Governor John Connally, also in the motorcade, was hit in the back, but survived with no long-term injuries.

In a nearby building, police found a gun owned by Lee Harvey Oswald, a local delinquent and prime example of why you should never trust someone with three first names. Oswald managed to leave the scene of the crime without arousing suspicion, then shot and killed a nearby policeman over a minor altercation. He once again escaped without getting caught, only to finally, after all that, get busted for the comically small-scale crime of sneaking into a movie theater without paying. He was arrested at 1:36pm and immediately denied masterminding the assassination, famously claiming “I’m just a patsy.”

Two days later, an eccentric Dallas nightclub owner and Kennedy superfan named Jack Ruby[6] emerged from a crowd of reporters in Dallas Police Headquarters, where Oswald was being transferred to county jail, and fired a single, fatal shot. The entire thing was captured on live television, in an unprecedented moment in American broadcast history: the first time a murder was witnessed in real time by the general public.

Just before this photo was taken, a detective, realizing what Ruby was up to, shouted “Jack, you son of a bitch, don’t do it!”—but it was too late.

Ruby, who holds a rarified position as one of history’s few Jewish assassins, cited two main motives for his actions: the somewhat reasonable desire to spare Jackie Kennedy from the pain of a prolonged trial, and the somewhat less reasonable desire to fight antisemitism by (his words) “showing that a Jew has guts.” The American public, unmoved by Ruby’s self-assigned role as an ambassador of semitic courage, found his actions extremely suspicious. Within days, a Gallup poll revealed that only 29% of the country believed that Oswald acted alone.

One week later, new President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Warren Commission to investigate the tragedy. In September of that year, the Commission—clearly unaware of the number 888’s numerological associations with success and good luck—released an 888-page report concluding that Oswald and Ruby had both acted alone and that there was “no evidence” for a broader conspiracy behind the assassination. In what became known as the “single-bullet theory,” it concluded that Kennedy’s death and Connally’s injuries had both been caused by the same bullet, as separate bullets would imply a second shooter. The report assigned no motive to Oswald beyond describing him as an isolated, impulsive loser, “perpetually discontented,” with a life “characterized by a lack of meaningful relationships.”

Notably, of the Commission’s seven members, three—Senators Richard Russell and John Sherman, and Representative Hale Boggs—are now known to have had internal misgivings about their own report. None of them fully bought the single-bullet theory, but the White House pressured them into signing on, despite the fact that LBJ himself secretly doubted the theory as well.

The Warren Commission’s compromised and unsatisfying report completely failed to quell public speculation about the assassination. Another report—that of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), released fifteen years later in 1979—muddled the picture even further, concluding that there was a “high probability” of a second gunman and that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as the result of a conspiracy,” though, paradoxically, it also explicitly ruled out every common conspiracy theory[7].

Every generation of history nerds and conspiracy diehards has clung to hope that some future document dump will finally crack the case—and every generation has been disappointed. Donald Trump’s much-hyped declassification order earlier this year ended up revealing almost nothing new, and at this point, barely any relevant documents remain unreleased. It seems probable that we’ll never know with 100% certainty what happened.

But this is America, where a lack of facts never stopped anyone from making wild assertions. So let’s dive into the theories, starting with one of the most common:

The CIA did it

“I want to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” —John F. Kennedy, venting after the Bay of Pigs

Ever since the humiliating Bay of Pigs debacle—when, in his view, the CIA had pressured him into a poorly-conceived invasion of Cuba, tried to box him into escalating militarily, and then left him twisting in the wind when the whole thing blew up in his face—Kennedy and the CIA had a strained and distrustful relationship. Ironically, many of his criticisms of the agency echoed those the conspiracy theorists would later make. The CIA was an unaccountable fourth branch of government. It was running its own shadow foreign policy. It withheld crucial information from civilian leadership. After the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy fired the CIA’s top brass, and started building out the Pentagon’s intelligence capabilities in an effort to create competing power center.

One of the CIA guys Kennedy fired was Director Allen Dulles, seen here looking exactly like a 1960s CIA head should look. Dulles—who, ironically, would later serve on the Warren Commission—was also the guy who signed off on MKUltra, excitedly calling it a new form of “brain warfare.”

So the CIA had plenty of reasons to dislike Kennedy. But did they dislike him enough to kill him?

One person who suspected they might was Attorney General/nepo brother Robert F. Kennedy, whose first move after the assassination was to give CIA a call to directly ask if they were involved. (What exactly did he expect—that they’d pick up the phone and be like, “Guilty as charged, Bobby, our bad!”) During his own presidential campaign, he told associates that if he won, he planned to reopen the investigation into his brother’s assassination. At times, Lyndon Johnson also speculated that the CIA might have had something to do with it.

As with most of these theories, there is no single definitive version of the CIA hypothesis, but the general idea is that the agency, or rogue elements within, used Oswald to eliminate Kennedy because they saw him as a threat to their own interests. The highest-profile public believer in this theory was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who in 1966 charged businessman and part-time CIA contact Clay Shaw with being part of the conspiracy—in a case that’s now regarded as an embarrassing overreach by a hot-headed, media-hungry prosecutor. Shaw was acquitted of all charges in less than an hour of jury deliberation, and a federal judge later ruled that the charges against him had been brought in bad faith. He remains the only person ever charged in connection with the Kennedy assassination[8].

Believers in the CIA theory often cite the agency’s sketchy behavior in the aftermath of the assassination. The CIA certainly acted like it had something to hide—because it did. But it wasn’t hiding a role in Kennedy’s murder. Rather, the CIA was desperate to conceal its string of cloak-and-dagger plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. These probably-unlawful schemes, which tended to fail in comically embarrassing ways, made the agency look both sinister and incompetent. Compounding the problem, it turns out the CIA had long been monitoring Oswald, but had utterly failed to flag him as a potential threat.

The CIA’s many failed plots against Castro included: getting him to smoke an exploding cigar, lacing his scuba suit with a poisonous fungus, planting a booby-trapped seashell in one of his favorite diving spots, and poisoning his chocolate milkshake. There were also several efforts to merely embarrass him, including dusting his shoes with chemicals that would make his beard fall out and dosing him with LSD right before a big speech. None of these attempts came anywhere close to succeeding, and Castro made it to the ripe old age of 90, finally dying of natural causes in 2016.

So the CIA lied—or, as the agency later called it, in a masterful example of government doublespeak, “engaged in a benign cover-up,” keeping all of that from the Warren Commission. “If we had known then what we know now,” commission member John J. McCloy later said, “the treatment of the CIA [in the report] would have been quite a bit tougher.”

Lying under oath is never a good look. But even if you’re willing to accept that the CIA would engage in what’s essentially a revenge killing against an American president—at enormous risk to itself—there have been many, many investigations into CIA black ops and abuses of power since 1963. If the agency had been involved, at least a little bit of evidence would have probably turned up by now. So no, the CIA isn’t guilty—at least, not of this particular crime. But their shady conduct following the assassination did them no favors, which is probably why they remain at the center of so many conspiracy theories.

The Cubans and/or Soviets did it

“It would have been absolute insanity…Nobody who’s not insane could have thought about [killing Kennedy]” —Fidel Castro, 1977 CBS interview

“We’ve got to take this out of the arena where they’re testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this…and kicking us into a war that can kill 40 million Americans in an hour.” —Lyndon Johnson, encouraging Sen. Richard Russell to serve on the Warren Commission

In the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, Communist plots tended to become the default explanation for every American misfortune, and Kennedy’s killing was no exception. He had stared down Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and greenlit covert efforts to topple or assassinate Castro. Could Moscow or Havana have decided to hit back by killing him? After all, Oswald did have suspicious communist ties: he briefly defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, then returned to the U.S., with a Russian wife, and became involved in pro-Castro activism.

Believers in this theory point to a quietly unsettling reality: the U.S. government really, really didn’t want to find out that the Soviets had done it. Johnson’s administration feared that accusing Moscow—especially without proof, but possibly even with it—could escalate into nuclear war. They leaned on the Warren Commission not to look too closely into this theory, and the commission obliged.

Still, this version of events runs up against a few inconvenient historical truths. By 1963, Khrushchev’s and Kennedy’s relationship was actually pretty good, at least by Cold War standards—they’d just signed a nuclear test ban treaty, and Khrushchev had praised a recent Kennedy speech calling for a reset in U.S.-Soviet relations. Besides, the Politburo prized stability above all else, seeing unpredictability—especially in foreign affairs—as a direct threat to regime security. American intelligence later confirmed that far from celebrating Kennedy’s death, Soviet leaders were deeply alarmed, even briefly panicking that someone on their side actually had killed Kennedy without running it all the way up the ladder first[9]. Khrushchev was reportedly so distraught upon hearing the news that he fell to his knees and wept, and even Castro reacted with concern. Associates report that he started frantically asking his deputies what this Lyndon Johnson guy was like, worried that the next president would be even worse for Cuba.

Nikita Khrushchev: big fan of geopolitical stability, and of corn.

Simply put, the risk-reward calculus for a Soviet or Cuban plot would have been wildly out of whack. The Cubans almost certainly would have been wiped off the map if they got caught killing a U.S. president—Castro himself later said “our country would have been destroyed by the United States” if they’d done it—and both countries would have risked nuclear war.

And to what end? Until 1804—when the 12th Amendment ended the practice of making the election’s runner-up the vice president—the death of a president could conceivably bring a different political faction to power. But today, with the VP hand-selected by the president, their ascension is unlikely to cause major policy shifts. In fact, a lone assassination anywhere is rarely an effective way to achieve political goals. This is why the U.S. only kills other countries’ presidents as part of a broader project of regime change (see: Congo, South Vietnam, Chile, Libya, the Dominican Republic, and probably some other places we don’t know about yet), and why our homegrown assassins tend to be motivated by more realistic goals, like impressing Jodie Foster.

The communists were crazy, but they weren’t that crazy. In the depths of Cold War paranoia, it was understandable that some thought the Soviets or Cubans were involved in Kennedy’s killing—though it’s worth noting that even then, no serious government official ever reached that conclusion. Today, with the USSR long-dissolved and many of its once-secret files revealed to historians, its innocence is undeniable. If you want a good communist conspiracy theory, you’re much better off with the one that says Castro is secretly Justin Trudeau’s father.

The Mafia did it

“I help get Jack elected and, in return, he calls off the heat.” —Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, allegedly

The Mafia harbored little affection for American politicians in general, but they especially disliked the Kennedys. Perhaps that was just because Bobby made an aggressive crackdown on organized crime the centerpiece of his tenure as Attorney General. Or perhaps it was because of a deal struck with the mob during JFK’s candidacy: steal Chicago, and thus the 1960 election, for him, and he’d go easy on them as president. The mob complied, but Kennedy welched on the deal—and so, the theory goes, they had him killed.

There are hints of Mafia involvement everywhere you look—and as the wiseguys say, “You smell garlic, you know someone’s cookin’”:

In the months leading up to the assassination, Jack Ruby made a bunch of of phone calls to Mafia associates, and after killing Oswald, he received regular prison visits from a mob lieutenant.
Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli, when called to give congressional testimony on an unrelated matter, gave cryptic and suggestive answers that seemed to hint at the Mafia’s involvement, though he stopped short of claiming firsthand knowledge. The next year, a fisherman off the Miami coast found Roselli’s decomposing body in a 55-gallon steel drum, fueling speculation that he himself was killed for knowing too much.
And most tantalizing of all: In the 1980s, New Orleans don Carlos Marcello was captured on an FBI prison bug confessing to “having the son of a bitch killed.”

The circumstantial evidence was compelling enough for the HSCA’s chief counsel, a man with the born-for-government-reports name of G. Robert Blakely. An organized crime expert who’d led the drafting of the RICO Act, Blakely later authored a book, The Plot to Kill the President, which pointed to a Mafia conspiracy. The HSCA report as a whole didn’t blame the Mafia directly, though it left room for “the possibility that individual members may have been involved.” However it happened, Kennedy’s death did result in the feds turning down the heat: Lyndon Johnson booted Bobby Kennedy from the Attorney General’s office and replaced him with Nicholas Katzenbach, who deprioritized anti-Mafia efforts in favor of civil rights.

Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, shown here leaning in for a kiss, famously hated each other. Johnson once said of Kennedy, “He’s trying to run the government from his brother’s grave.”

The backroom election-theft plot makes for a great story—but it probably didn’t happen. Yes, there was voter fraud in Illinois in 1960, as in pretty much every midcentury election there. But it was concentrated in Chicago, where Mayor Daley’s machine was powerful enough that the additional involvement of the mob—already in decline by the sixties—wouldn’t have been necessary. Even if the Mafia could have swung the election, it’s absurd to think they’d trust Kennedy—especially with his brother, the country’s top anti-mob crusader, by his side. And if they had struck a deal, why kill JFK but leave RFK untouched?[10]

Of course, the Mafia could have come for Kennedy even in the absence of a secret election-theft deal. But this would have been a big departure from their usual behavior: unlike their Sicilian counterparts, the American Mafia historically went out of its way not to kill politicians, knowing that to do so would bring potentially existential law enforcement scrutiny. The most prominent political figures known with certainty to have been killed by the mob are all city aldermen—going from those nobodies to the president would be an enormous leap.

As for all the circumstantial evidence? Well, it’s hardly out of the ordinary for a midcentury nightclub owner to have Mafia contacts. Nor is it out of the ordinary for Mafia bigshots like Marcello to play fast and loose with the truth if it makes them seem more powerful—or to simply start getting their facts mixed up when they’re sick and near death, as he was when his comments were recorded.

Nonetheless, this remains the most plausible of the major conspiracy theories—one that’s just waiting to be made into a Scorsese movie. The Mafia had the means and the motive, and they aren’t shy about killing people.

Lyndon Johnson did it

“He’s mean, bitter, vicious—an animal in many ways.” —RFK on LBJ

“I’ve had more women by accident than he ever had on purpose.” —LBJ on JFK

In a crowded field of backstabbers and power-grabbers, Lyndon Johnson takes the crown as America’s most ruthless president. Among other things, he froze out longtime backers forever over the smallest slights, almost certainly stole the 1948 Texas Senate election, and established dominance over his aides by making them join him in the bathroom to take dictation while he sat on the toilet.

I’m pretty sure Johnson didn’t use the toilet with his pants on, but ChatGPT wouldn’t generate this image unless both men were fully clothed.

And although he never made Kennedy watch him poop, their relationship still ranks among the most dysfunctional of any modern presidential team. Kennedy never liked Johnson and only picked him to secure Southern votes; Johnson, in turn, felt disrespected and marginalized. He was excluded from key decisions and mocked by Kennedy aides, who called him “a political barnyard animal,” and came up with awesome nicknames for him like “Uncle Cornhole” and “Huckleberry Capone.” “They treat me like I’m some kind of bastard at a family reunion,” LBJ said, later referring to the Vice Presidency as “the worst damn fool mistake I ever made.” [11]

The Roman consul Cassius said that to solve a crime, you should first ask “cui bono?”—who benefits? By that measure, Johnson—the single largest beneficiary of Kennedy’s death—should be suspect #1. In 1963, Johnson was in serious political and even legal danger due to a corruption investigation into one of his longtime aides that was getting close to implicating Johnson himself, and leading Kennedy to consider dropping him from the ticket. But the assassination instantly shifted the political dynamics. Congress couldn’t stomach investigating a new president during a time of national mourning and crisis, and the inquiries dried up overnight.

Cui bono?

Of course, plenty of people profit from events they didn’t instigate. In the decades since Johnson’s presidency, we’ve been gifted with an endless stream of unflattering details about him: his corruption, his habit of whipping out his dick in front of congressmen and reporters, his many extramarital affairs, his insistence on having a custom shower installed in the White House that would blast water directly onto his ass[12]. But the only “evidence” that’s ever surfaced tying him to the assassination is a sketchy deathbed claim by Watergate burglar Howard Hunt, a known perjurer who had previously derided conspiracy theorists and supported the Warren Report’s conclusions.

“The Wink,” shot by White House photographer Cecil Stroughton right after Johnson was sworn in, has fueled conspiracy theories for decades. It allegedly shows Congressman Albert Thomas winking at the new president, a grieving Jackie Kennedy in the foreground.

Besides, Johnson spent the year between his ascension and his 1964 landslide consumed by self-consciousness about being an accident who hadn’t earned the presidency in his own right; given how much he feared being seen as, in his words, “a pretender to the throne,” it’s unlikely that he would have intentionally elevated himself in such a manner. It’s even less likely that a man as calculating as Johnson would have Kennedy killed in such a public, attention-grabbing way—and in Johnson’s home state, no less!—rather than, say, having him quietly poisoned in the White House. A sitting vice president—one of the most heavily-surveilled people in the country—plotting to kill the president would require an enormous and airtight conspiracy, one almost certainly beyond the means of even a master schemer like Lyndon Johnson.

Or, to put it another way: if this had happened, Robert Caro would have definitely found out about it by now.

Even though it didn’t happen, this would make fora fantastic ten-episode miniseries. Cast J.K. Simmons as LBJ, Glen Powell as JFK, and Barry Keoghan as Bobby.

The military-industrial complex did it

“If we do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive.” —Kennedy on advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff

The best conspiracy theory villains are powerful, shadowy groups whose exact contours and membership remain stubbornly vague: the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the lizard people, the… military-industrial complex? Everyone thinks they know what the military-industrial complex is, but no one can really explain it, which makes it an ideal bogeyman. Why would it—whoever “is” is—come for Kennedy? Well, it’s simple: he was scaling back the Cold War, getting us out of Vietnam, and thus threatening the profits of Big Military.

There are certainly shreds of truth here. Kennedy wasn’t particularly hawkish, at least by the standard of U.S. presidents: he pushed for a nuclear test ban treaty and back-channeled peace feelers to Castro and Khrushchev, and he resisted some of the Joint Chiefs’ more aggressive proposals. More importantly, his most ardent defenders insist that had he lived, there would have been no Vietnam War—he had reportedly approved plans to withdraw U.S. advisors from Vietnam after the 1964 election, though whether he would have actually followed through is an open question[13].

Ultimately, this theory is so broad that it’s hardly a theory at all. Blaming Kennedy’s assassination on the military-industrial complex is like blaming social ills on “society” or “the system”—it might make you sound smart to the guy next to you at the bar, but it doesn’t really explain anything. It’s also not very entertaining, since a good story needs characters. That’s probably why the depictions of this theory in pop culture—most famously Oliver Stone’s JFK, but also the lesser-known, Dalton Trumbo-written Executive Action—tend to have the military guys as secondary actors, typically working with the CIA and/or the Mafia and/or communists.

The military-industrial complex theory is basically the CIA theory’s lamer, more boring cousin. It has all the same holes—but at least the CIA has a track record of assassinating world leaders.

Israel/the Jews did it

“Having written a book on such a ‘controversial’ topic as the JFK assassination, with a highly ‘sensational’ thesis, has proven quite an adventure. It's brought me a lot of new friends—and lots of enemies, too!” —Michael Collins Piper’s surprisingly chipper introduction to his 750-page polemic blaming the assassination on Israel

Sooner or later, every conspiracy theory circles back to two suspects: aliens and the Jews. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the aliens soon.)

In this theory, the Israeli government—working, of course, with “world Jewry”—killed Kennedy over his opposition to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. You can read all about it in a sprawling book by Michael Collins Piper, a Holocaust denier who also blames Israel for, among other things, killing Martin Luther King Jr, doing 9/11, controlling the American Mafia, and—most devious of all—promoting political correctness.

Yes, the title of this book is referencing what you think it’s referencing.

What separates this theory from your run-of-the-mill antisemitic nonsense? Well, the Mossad really are master assassinators, and it’s true that Kennedy didn’t want Israel to get nuclear weapons—though his stance was rooted in a broader anti-proliferation philosophy rather than being Israel-specific. But, obviously, the Israelis didn’t kill Kennedy, they didn’t do 9/11, and if Collins Piper had ever talked to an Israeli, he’d certainly know they’re not exactly fans of being politically correct. This isn’t even the best Mossad conspiracy theory—that award goes to the one about their agents training sharks to attack Egyptian tourists.

This theory is perhaps most interesting for its bizarre mirror twin, in which the real killers are anonymous gentiles who orchestrated the assassination specifically to frame the Jews. The main believer of that idea? None other than Jack Ruby himself[14].

The bankers did it

“I guess I’d have to say that my biggest asset is my father’s money.” —John F. Kennedy, joking around with aides during his 1946 congressional campaign

If blaming the Jews is too openly antisemitic for you, why not try pointing the finger at (winks suggestively) powerful financial interests? Perhaps they can be based in (winks grow more frantic) New York? And what if they also (winks now resemble a full-body twitch) happen to own a few media properties?

In 1963, Kennedy signed an obscure executive order relating to the Treasury Department’s authority to issue silver certificates. This was a routine, administrative document that went uncovered by the media and unnoticed by the public—until decades later, when conspiracy theorists seized on it as providing the key to understanding the assassination. They claimed that the real purpose of Kennedy’s order was to strip power from the Federal Reserve, leading influential financiers—in most tellings, Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers—to have him offed so they could reverse his monetary policies.

The second shooter, allegedly

The irony of “powerful financiers” being behind the Kennedy assassination is, of course, that Kennedy himself came from a family of powerful financiers. He was our second-wealthiest president (after Trump)[15], and his administration was generally pretty friendly to finance and business. And this allegedly Fed-threatening Executive Order did nothing but delegate already-existing powers to the Secretary of the Treasury—C. Douglas Dillon, a Republican and former investment banker who was himself also a powerful financier.

So while it’s fun to imagine JFK as a martyr to populist monetary policy, in reality, he was more Goldman Sachs than gold standard, and it doesn’t make sense to think the bankers would have targeted one of their own.

Woody Harrelson’s dad did it

“I killed Kennedy! I killed Kennedy!” —Charles Harrelson (during a cocaine bender, later recanted)

A lifetime ago in 2016, Trump accused Ted Cruz’s dad of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. But there’s another, wilder theory involving a different famous guy’s dad: Charles Harrelson, Woody’s father, who really was a contract killer.

Harrelson was convicted of multiple murders for hire, including the assassination of a district judge on behalf of a drug dealer about to be sentenced[16]. He “confessed” to killing Kennedy near the tail end of a six-hour standoff with police, but then later recanted the confession, explaining that he had been out of his mind on cocaine at the time.

The full story of the standoff is pretty wild. From a Texas Monthly article about Harrelson:

[Harrelson] had been driving down I-10 in the desert somewhere east of Van Horn, shooting cocaine and seeing agents’ faces on highway signs. He stopped to inspect a rattling muffler, which he attempted to repair by shooting it with his .44 magnum. In his drug-induced dementia, he missed the muffler but managed to shoot out a rear tire. Motorists reported a crazed hitchhiker standing on the highway with a gun pointed at his head; when the police arrived they discovered Charles Harrelson. He held them off for six hours, pressing the muzzle of the .44 against his nose.

Very few people actually believe Harrelson was involved with Kennedy’s killing. And look—who among us hasn’t done too much blow and confessed to being the second shooter? But he was a convicted murderer—and he did (briefly) say it was him—so he gets an honorable mention.

Ironically, Woody Harrelson—himself a big conspiracy theory guy—portrayed Lyndon Johnson, under truly repulsive prosthetics, in a widely-panned movie.

Aliens did it

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because we want to meet moon aliens.” —real, historically accurate quote from John F. Kennedy

Kennedy had access to secret files revealing the existence of UFOs and alien life. And unlike with his serial infidelity, his severe health problems, and his covert escalation of American involvement in Vietnam, he believed the public had a right to know the truth. But the aliens preferred to stay in the shadows—so they had him killed. Or, alternatively, Kennedy was working on a groundbreaking human-alien partnership, which other interests (NASA, the CIA, anti-alien bigots) opposed—so they had him killed. This probably didn’t happen, but come on—you can’t write about conspiracy theories without at least mentioning aliens.

Besides, this theory’s biggest promoter has a name that’s so on brand I couldn’t leave it out: Jim Marrs. You can’t make that up! But you can make up the idea that aliens killed Kennedy, which they didn’t do.

The Secret Service did it—by accident

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” —Mel Brooks

What if there was a second shooter—and it was the Secret Service? Oswald missed, and the fatal shot was actually fired by an agent riding in the follow-up car behind Kennedy, who picked up his rifle and, in the chaos, accidentally discharged it into the president’s head. If the funniest outcome is the most likely, then this is definitely what happened.

Even the legal battle surrounding this theory is comic. Its main promulgator is a Kansas City journalist by the unusual name of Bonar Menninger, who grew skeptical of the official story after participating in the totally normal leisure activity of recreating the shooting using live ammo. But Menninger didn’t just blame “a Secret Service agent” in his book: he blamed a specific guy, Special Agent George Hickey. Hickey sued Menninger for defamation, but he waited too long to file the lawsuit and his case was dismissed. The legal clock was restarted on a technicality when the book came out in paperback, at which point Hickey sued again and reached a confidential settlement with the publisher. But Menninger had the last laugh: after Hickey died in 2005 and could no longer file lawsuits, Menninger repackaged his claims into a documentary called JFK: The Smoking Gun.

I get what they were trying to do by using the blood stain as the dot above the J, but turning it into a lowercase letter makes this look comically unserious.

The best part of this theory is the way it makes absolutely everyone angry. Obviously, all the experts find it completely implausible—with hundreds of witnesses to the assassination, you’d think at least one of them would have seen Hickey’s gun go off. The diehard conspiracy theorists, meanwhile, all hate this theory because it’s incredibly unsatisfying, and because it doesn’t actually answer the big question of why Oswald attempted to shoot Kennedy in the first place. In fact, i’s really not a conspiracy theory at all—by blaming a dumb accident, it manages to reject both the Warren Report and the idea of a broader plot. This theory is fucking hilarious and the fact that everyone hates it makes it by far my personal favorite.

Conclusion

“You know, if someone really wanted to, it isn't very difficult to shoot the president. All you have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle and there's nothing anybody could do.” —John F. Kennedy, morning of November 22, 1963

A young, popular American president is shot and killed in full view of the public. After a brief manhunt, the gunman is caught—only to be killed himself soon after. There is never a trial. Conspiracy theories flourish almost immediately, with fingers pointed at wartime enemies, shadowy government agents, and even the slain man’s own vice president. It seems everyone has a different story—and nobody knows who, or what, to believe.

The year was 1865, and the president’s name was Abraham Lincoln. Yet within a few decades, these conspiracy theories would fade away, and the official narrative would become so accepted that most Americans today have no idea there were ever others. The Kennedy story, by contrast, still stubbornly resists closure. Since the Warren Report’s release in 1964, the percentage of people who accept its conclusions has never made it above 50%. Throughout this essay, I’ve continually referred to the idea that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone as a “conspiracy theory,” yet among the general public, that is actually the mainstream view. It’s really the official narrative that’s the fringe belief.

Until researching this review, I was one of the 65% who didn’t buy the official story. For most of my life, I would have said essentially the same thing as that unsatisfying 1979 House Select Committee report: I didn’t know who killed Kennedy, but I doubted the official narrative contained the whole story. It just felt too implausible: a conveniently dead suspect, a witness pool riddled with contradictions, and sworn testimony from intelligence agencies who we know weren’t telling the whole truth.

But having now gone deeper down the Kennedy rabbit hole than any sane man should go, I’ve been convinced otherwise. To butcher Winston Churchill: Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone is the worst explanation for the Kennedy assassination—except for all the others[17].

It’s not just that every specific conspiracy theory has good arguments against it. All of them, even the most plausible, suffer from the same fatal flaw: using someone as unreliable as Oswald as your assassin makes no sense. Here was a mentally unstable guy with a history of violent outbursts who couldn’t even defect to the Soviet Union right, and who, after the assassination, basically begged to get caught, shooting a cop in broad daylight and then deciding it’s a good time to go a see a movie right by the scene of the crime. As Kennedy himself eerily foreshadowed, a competent assassin probably could have killed the president and gotten away with it—as, indeed, many people believe happened with the alleged second shooter. But if the second shooter was real, why even bother with Oswald? Competent conspirators would have never enlisted Lee Harvey Oswald, and incompetent conspirators wouldn’t have been able to keep their scheme a secret for the past six decades.

The conspiracy theorists do get a few things right. There was a cover-up—but it was just the CIA covering its own ass. High-level government officials did go into the investigation favoring some explanations over others—but it just so happens that the scenarios they were most afraid of really didn’t happen. The Warren Commission didn’t get the whole truth from all of its witnesses—but it got the core story right anyway.

---

This sucks, and I’m pretty bummed about it.

After all, the official narrative is deeply unsatisfying, and accepting the government’s version of events just feels so… uncool. I came of age in the George W. Bush era, when distrusting the experts and assuming the government was always lying were hallmarks of the left. Sometime in the Trump years, that all flipped. I already find myself cheering for Liz Cheney and defending the FBI. Now I have to tell everyone the Warren Report is accurate? When did being on the left become so fucking lame?

Remember when the biggest conspiracy theory this guy believed was that George Bush didn’t care about Black people?

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Earlier in this piece, I said that the person who benefitted most from Kennedy’s assassination was Lyndon Johnson. But that wasn’t quite right. There’s someone who benefitted even more: Kennedy himself. Or at least, the Kennedy legacy.

In case it’s not obvious from the tone of this review, I think Kennedy is a wildly overrated president, one whose reputation rests more on what he represented than what he actually accomplished. And that reputation would not have survived a second term intact.

Kennedy’s tenuous strategy of trying to have it both ways on civil rights—courting Black voters with promises while placating segregationists with inaction—wouldn’t have remained viable through 1968. Eventually, he’d have had to deal with Vietnam one way or another, and both options were bad: either fully own the war, or withdraw and be blamed handing a win to the communists. His growing health problems would have become harder and harder to conceal—it’s not implausible to think that if Oswald had missed, Kennedy’s Addison’s disease would have finished the job before his second term was out. And his near-daily philandering, already an open secret in Washington, probably wouldn’t have stayed a secret through the late sixties, when increasing public cynicism and the rise of investigative journalism radically changed the norms of what the press would cover.

In his death, Kennedy became a symbol, an empty vessel onto which people can project their hopes and dreams. And this symbol is way more powerful if his death was the result of a conspiracy. If shadowy groups wanted Kennedy dead, that must mean he would’ve been a transformative president, martyred just as he was about to deliver racial justice, or end the war in Vietnam, or dismantle the CIA, or reveal the truth about aliens.

There are a lot of reasons the Lincoln conspiracy theories died down while the Kennedy ones live on—a simpler story, a slower and more fragmented media ecosystem, a collective desire to put the Civil War behind us. But a big one is that Kennedy’s killing collided with the end of widespread American trust in government and the beginnings of the so-called “post-truth era.”

From today’s vantage point, it seems comically naive that anyone back involved in the Warren Commission ever thought an official government report is all it would take to stamp out conspiracy theories, but 1964 was a different time—77% of Americans back then said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time.” That was the highest that number has ever been. Over the next few years, it began a sharp downward plummet, and except for a brief and probably illusory post-9/11 spike, it hasn’t crossed 50% since. Today, it stands at just 22%.

Source: Pew Research Center

If a president were assassinated today, would there be anything but conspiracy theories? Could you even get a bipartisan cross-sample of respected politicians to align on a Warren-style report? The 35% of us who believe the official Kennedy story is high compared to what we’d get if a modern-day Lee Harvey Oswald pulled a similar stunt.

You might expect that I’m telling you all this as a prelude to bemoaning the state of things today, as is the current trend. But I’m not complaining—I like living in a country where dissenting worldviews flourish and everyone’s a skeptic. Or at least, I’m pretty sure it’s the better of two bad options. After all, we lost our trust in government for good reason: because the government consistently abused that trust.

Besides, a vibrant and innovative culture requires an unruly, freethinking society. The Kennedy theories are, in their own crazy way, an emblematic example of American creativity and imagination. The country whose citizens consistently report the highest trust in their government is Singapore, and while they get a lot of things right, I’d rather live here—with graffiti on our buildings, buskers on our subways, and conspiracy theories on our minds.

In one final irony, Jack Ruby was never held fully liable for killing Lee Harvey Oswald. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but this was overturned on appeal, and he was granted a new trial—only to conveniently fall ill and die before the new trial could begin. Legally speaking, Ruby died an innocent man—a fittingly unsatisfying coda to a story as messy and irritating as America itself.

Endnotes

[1] I’d rank him below both John and John Quincy Adams, but above John Tyler and John Calvin Coolidge, who’s better known by his middle name. ↩

[2] Kennedy received regular amphetamine injections from Max Jacobson aka “Dr. Feelgood,” who also “treated” Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Bernstein, Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, Cecil B. DeMille, Liza Minnelli, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote, among others. It was actually Kennedy’s Secret Service who coined the “Dr. Feelgood” nickname. ↩

[3] Kennedy suffered from a host of serious health problems, including chronic back pain, Addison’s disease (a potentially life-threatening adrenal disorder), and frequent gastrointestinal issues, all of which he concealed from the public. His speed injections began as a supposed “treatment” for these issues. It even seems likely that Kennedy’s back issues was indirectly responsible for his death: under his suit, he was wearing a stiff back brace, which likely prevented him from ducking under fire. ↩

[4]. One of the teenagers in question, Mimi Alford, wrote a tell-all book in 2012. ↩

[5] A file declassified in 2021 quoted Kennedy as rejecting Secret Service supervisor Floyd Benis’ plan for agents to ride in the main car: “It’s excessive, Floyd. And it’s giving the wrong impression to people. We’ve got an election coming up. The whole point is for me to be accessible to the people.” ↩

[6] A few of Ruby’s more entertaining eccentricities: 1) At the nightclub he owned, he would regularly intervene in choreography and change dancers’ costumes himself. 2) He referred to his dachshund Sheba as his “wife.” 3) He had a habit of taking off his shirt and pounding his chest in public, seemingly at random. ↩

[7] Compounding the uncertainty, a 1982 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that one of the key pieces of evidence in the the HSCA report was probably misinterpreted. ↩

[8] Garrison’s case was not only legally shaky, it was also wildly homophobic. Shaw—who was closeted until the prosecution outed him—was smeared and stereotyped throughout the trial, which used his participation in underground gay life to paint him as a sinister and malicious figure. ↩

[9] After confirming their own lack of involvement, Soviet leadership also concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. They blamed far-right extremists within the U.S. ↩

[10] For the time being, at least… ↩

[11] It’s hard not to feel bad for Johnson here, who essentially seems to have been on the losing end of White House class war, earning the ire of Kennedy’s young, rich, East Coast staffers not for any of his political positions but just for being Southern, ill-mannered, and of poor stock. ↩

[12] I swear the shower thing is true. Look it up. ↩

[13] The withdrawal plan was based on assumptions—most notably, the resilience of President Diem’s soon-to-collapse South Vietnamese government—that were quickly overtaken by actual events. Johnson signed a similar memo, but that didn’t prevent him from escalating the war as the situation on the ground changed. ↩

[14] In interviews and jailhouse conversations, Ruby repeatedly insisted that “the Jews” were being blamed for Kennedy’s death, and that darker forces had manipulated the entire situation to provoke a pogrom. ↩

[15] If you want to get nitpicky, Kennedy was only our second-richest president when including family money. He had effectively unlimited access to, but did not technically control, the Kennedy family fortune. ↩

[16] The judge, John H. Wood Jr, earned the incredibly cool nickname of “Maximum John” due to his propensity for handing down unusually long prison terms. ↩

[17] This is a good time to share the old joke about the JFK conspiracy theorist who dies and goes to heaven, where God offers to answer any question he has about the universe. Obviously, our conspiracy theorist asks, “Who really killed JFK?”

“Lee Harvey Oswald,” God tells him, “acting alone.”

Our man’s eyes go wide. “Wow,” he says. “This goes even higher up than I thought!” ↩

Joan of Arc

When the prefect of Alexandria’s daughter converted to Christianity, nothing in particular happened - it wasn’t as though the laws outlawing the cult would be enforced against her. She was smart, she was pretty (beautiful, even) and she had connections. So long as she kept quiet, Catherine could have a comfortable life.

This comfortable, maybe?

She didn’t keep quiet. When the Emperor arrived in Alexandria for a festival, this festival included gladiatorial games and chariot races and feasting and drinking, and, of course, the best part - feeding Christians to lions. The prefect’s daughter telling the Emperor he was wrong to feed Christians to lions might have been pardonable softheartedness if it was just that she disliked watching slaves fed to lions, but her telling him that he was wrong because the Christians were right and he was wrong was flatly unacceptable. He had no more interest in offending her parents than anyone else, though (and, in fact, he was considering putting his wife aside and marrying her - a useful alliance and she had brains and guts) so instead he called on his top fifty philosophers to outargue her.

Instead she converted half of them to Christianity, so he had to have them killed. That was the point where he threw her in prison, hoping she’d change her mind and be sensible. Instead she converted everyone who showed up to argue with her in prison; when he deprived her of food she was fed by a dove, when he had her tortured her wounds miraculously healed. When his wife tried to talk sense into her, she converted and the Emperor had to have her killed, too, so since the slot was empty he, as a final try, proposed marriage to Catherine. She told him she had a better husband - Christ - and at that insult he condemned her to death. The first try failed when the breaking wheel shattered at her touch; the second try employed an axe, but though the blade struck true milk flowed from the stump instead of blood.

Except that this story is almost certainly fiction. Our oldest source is six hundred years after the events it chronicles and therefore should not remotely be trusted as fact. These stories grow in the telling, more and more miracles added with every retelling to the point where some people question whether St. Catherine even existed. When our sources are good they look like the Venerable Bede’s Life of St. Cuthbert, chronicling how he saw visions of angels, prophesied the future and also controlled the weather, which Bede based on a single chronicle written down within twenty years of the death of St. Cuthbert. This is to say that if we are lucky we got it thirdhand. (We are rarely lucky.)

A saintly teenage girl who outargues a roomful of philosophers with no training, merely divine inspiration, is absurd. There’s no chance at all that such a saint might have existed, let alone been interviewed by a team of experts (under oath) about her entire life, and of course if this team of experts did interview her they would no doubt end up concluding she was a fraud, though of course we can’t expect them to mail copies[1] of the interview to every monarch in Europe to prove it.

And definitely nobody would ever, ever be so angry at irregularities in the first interview that they would try to themselves interview everyone she'd ever met[2] about her (still under oath) and mail a copy of the updated and revised version to every monarch in Europe to prove that all her miracles actually happened.

Meet Jeanne d’Arc, Maid of Orleans. Yes, yes, she defeated an invincible army and is a feminist hero and also one of the national saints of France, fine. More importantly, Joan of Arc is documented! She's a miracle-working saint who has evidence! She might have more evidence than any other non-monarch before the printing press! This is, then, an agnostic’s review of the evidence[3] for Joan of Arc - artillerist, fraudbuster, confirmed saint, and Extremely Documented Person.

The reams and reams of documents are there, they're just invisible, trust me.

(The reams and reams of documents are there, they're just invisible. Trust me.)

Let’s start with the legend of Joan of Arc: A poor peasant girl in France is chosen by God, goes to fight the English, defeats them in a series of battles while performing random miracles, is captured by them and burned as a witch, The End. Maybe you add the epilogue about how eventually the Church made her a saint. All completely impossible and all guaranteed to be nonsense.

The funny thing is the extent to which it isn't.

- - -

Around 1412, a female child "named Jean or Jeanette" was born in the tiny village of Donremy, on the marches of Lorraine in eastern France. She appears to have had half the village as her godparents, based on the number of people who testified later. This many godparents wasn't actually unusual - the job of godfather or godmother was half "it takes a village to raise a child" and half "witness that this person actually exists" - but it helpfully means that we know more about the birth of Joan of Arc than we do about the birth of Alexander.[4]

She grew up in an ordinary way. She was quiet and pious and... quiet... and... pious. It didn’t matter which side was asking questions about her, people had real trouble coming up with other things to say about her! A few stories leak through, though, about her being more than the normal kind of pious. Her village priest reported that she bribed him with wool to stop slacking off at his job; she occasionally snuck off from her work to spend extra time in church; she gave a great deal of alms. The most extraordinary event in her life was when a man sued her for breach of promise of marriage, which is the opposite of what usually happens; in an interesting piece of foreshadowing, she successfully defended herself in court by claiming that she had made no such promise. It was not a very remarkable life.

Then she ran off to save the country from the English because God told her to, which is the step that requires some explaining. Why did the country need saving?

- - -

Part One: “That brought great harm to the kingdom of France.”

The first thing you need to understand that France is cursed.

According to legend[5], this curse was incurred by Philip the Fair[6], King of France around 1300, when he had the Knights Templar abolished and all the officers of the order burned for heresy so he wouldn't have to pay back his debts[7]. From the flames, the last Grandmaster of the order cursed him with his dying breath that he would "see him before God's tribunal before the year was out" and Philip duly died within the year. His sons would follow him, and their sons, each in inexorable succession passing the crown to the next before dying in turn. The last of the Capet princes managed to make it almost fifteen years past Philip's death before succumbing to that old favorite, "unknown causes."[8]

This produced a succession crisis. The two available candidates to succeed him were the Duke of Guyenne, son of Philip the Fair's daughter Isabella[9], and the Count of Orleans, son of Philip the Fair's brother Charles of Valois. Since the Duke of Guyenne was Edward III, King of England, and the Count of Orleans wasn't, the choice was obvious and France declared that the law had always been that the throne could never pass through a woman. Edward III was sixteen, in England, and busy, so he raised no meaningful objection, and Philip of Valois, called "The Fortunate" because he got to be king, inherited. Twelve years later, Philip eyed Guyenne, the last bit of France left in English hands from Eleanor of Aquitaine’s inheritance, and, observing the English busy in Scotland, he made his move.

This was unwise. It had been a reasonable decision to attack Edward II, inept, oppressive, and so devoted to his favorites his lords had plotted his murder; Edward III took after his grandfathers on both sides, conquerors both, and what he had been busy with during his French grandfather’s death was plotting a coup against his regents. At age seventeen he imprisoned his mother, murdered her lover[10] and invaded Scotland. After a decade or so the Scots wars pulled the French in - the Auld Alliance was not so Auld back then but it existed - and since the French wanted to get Guyenne back, why not?

The answer was, as it happened, that the Edwards first and third had spent the past sixty years building the most professional army in Europe. England, like the rest of post-Roman Europe, had been founded on a military basis of feudal levies, with each vassal providing soldiers at his expense to fight alongside the king’s personal retinue. These soldiers could be called out for long enough to stop marauding vikings but not for much longer, so any attempt to raise an army for even a single year's campaign required agonizing negotiations with each individual leader and, worse, meant that the troops were all either sullen conscripts or proud knights eager for glory and jealous of their honor. These knights might fight like the devil - as everyone from Greece to Egypt to Tunis had learned to their cost - but leading these men was like herding cats.

In England, however, the practice of scutage (nobles paying money to get out of raising troops) had arisen, and also in England there existed that fantastically useful tool of kings for raising money, the English Parliament.[11] With the combination of carrot - redress of grievances - and stick - pay or I'll impose costs on you perfectly legally - augmented by the patriotic pride of Englishmen who might not want to kill Frenchmen themselves but really wanted the Frenchmen dead, Edward collected money and used it to pay professionals drawn from England and Wales, and these professionals fought.

The English army was never large, somewhere between seven thousand and fifteen thousand men at its height[12]. Even the Scots could muster more soldiers - but the Scots army was largely lightly-armored and poorly-trained spearmen and bowmen, and the English were all armored and well-armed, with plenty of time to train and no loyalties running against their loyalties to their king and their pay, and when well-led they demolished the Scots.

This was the army that landed in France, and since France had about five times as many people in it as England, this army was wildly outnumbered. The chroniclers describe the French army as variously seventy-two thousand or a hundred and twenty thousand men - to hysterical laughter from modern historians, who think they only had twenty or thirty thousand - but it was clear that when the armies met it would inevitably be a slaughter.

It was. In the other direction. The King of France raised his levies, called up the royal knights, hired mercenaries, invited in allies. All mustered beneath the Oriflamme, the sacred banner of Charlemagne, and this massive army went to catch the English, the English backed off rapidly while looking for defensive terrain, the French pushed on, the English started planting stakes and caltrops, the French attacked - and the English massacred them.

The English, you see, had the longbow.

The Welsh longbow had made it to England under the first Edward; it’s a simple weapon, cheap to make, useful for hunting, and if you get good with it you can put a 37-inch arrow through chainmail. Its effectiveness has been exaggerated by patriotic historians - modern research[13] suggests that even at short range it couldn't go through the best-made breastplates in Europe - but patriotic historians can exaggerate anything, horses didn't wear heavy armor, and the accuracy and rate of fire of the longbow would not be surpassed until the repeating rifle,[14] [15] five hundred years later. The battle started with an archery duel between the English archers and Genoese crossbowmen, then believed to be the best long-range specialists in Europe, who were driven from the field and then ridden down by their own furious employers[16] as they charged furiously into the face of the English army, and managed no better. By the time the French knights reached the English lines, their horses were dead and they'd be suffering from all sorts of minor[17] wounds and they would have been repeatedly punched in the torso with longbow arrows, which if it happens to you is going to leave you bruised and exhausted even if your armor is good enough to stop the projectile. Then the English men-at-arms, still fresh, killed the French until they routed.

The French, naturally, put together another army, which was beaten in almost exactly the same way at Poitiers. Again and again it repeated itself - Agincourt, Verneuille, Aljubarrota[18] and dozens of minor fights - and every one of them was, in essence, a repeat of Crecy. Minor variations occurred - at Poitiers the French attacked on foot, at Verneuille they detached troops to attack the English baggage train - but these didn’t help.

The French were saved from immediate disaster by three things. The first was the Black Death, which killed a third of Europe. This had effects wildly beyond the scope of our story but also demolished the tax bases of every state in Europe. This shrunk the size of armies and thereby as an incidental side effect meant that all existing castles were heavily overbuilt, since they were intended to defend against half again the force that would actually be present, which slowed the pace of war tremendously.

The second was a strategy adopted by the French kings in which they did not fight the English. They would just let the English field army march wherever it liked and loot and burn whatever it liked, and meanwhile their troops would be burning and pillaging everywhere the English held and the English field army wasn't. This was extremely unpopular among the people being pillaged, but the English did run out of money before the French ran out of castles and that meant the French could go around taking English castles in France while the English army was in England.

And the third was that the English army depended on good leadership, and when Edward III died the English wouldn’t have it for another forty years, until Henry V took the throne. This two-generation timeskip provided enough time for the population to partially replenish and also for the French to completely forget Lesson Two, an error of memory which produced Agincourt.

Agincourt was the standard model of battle. Henry V "made it his course to busy the minds of his people with foreign quarrels", to misquote Shakespeare, landed an army in Normandy and went around taking and besieging towns. When the French went up to engage him, Henry attempted to withdraw, took up a position on good ground and when the French attacked the English broke them utterly. Halfway through the battle the order was given to kill the prisoners instead of holding them for ransom, and so the battle was not merely a defeat for the French, but a disaster, with a generation's worth of military leaders dead in a single day.[19]

We’ve gotten much better at perspective in recent centuries, haven’t we?

And then they all died.

The disaster was made worse by the fact that the French nobility at the time of Agincourt was trapped in an internal feud that was rapidly coming to resemble civil war. Between the time of the battles of Crecy and of Poiters, Philip the Fortunate had given the rich duchy of Burgundy in fief to his faithful son Philip the Bold, but Philip was faithful to his father, not to France. As the years rolled on and the throne of France passed from Philip the Fortunate to his son and grandson, the interests of the Dukes of Burgundy began to diverge from those of the Kings of France, and so in the age of the long truce the bold Dukes of Burgundy won lands through conquest and through marriage until their wealth and power nearly matched that of their ostensible monarchs. Under the three great Dukes of Burgundy who ruled in sequence, their realm became the leading state of the Renaissance, the continent's greatest sponsor of art and music and the true cultural heartland of Europe[20].

But all these accomplishments had been won by the power of the Kingdom of France, which during the pause in the Hundred Years' War had cheerfully spent men and treasure conquering and protecting these lands for the Burgundians, allowing them to spend their treasure on paintings and sculptures and dance manuals. The Kingdom of France had done this not by the will of the King of France (Charles VI, Philip the Fortunate's grandson), who at that time was seriously mentally ill[21] and who the year before his regency started had murdered several people in a paranoid fit and afterwards took to believing that he was made of glass and would shatter if he fell, but through the decision of his regent, one Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy.

Naturally, Philip had opponents at court who objected to his abuse of the treasury for his private purposes. They wanted to abuse the treasury for their private purposes, and it simply wasn't fair that Uncle Philip got to monopolize it all! The head of this party was Philip the Bold's nephew and Charles the Mad's brother, Louis of Orleans, but for some bizarre reason his party was called the Armagnacs[22]. Louis took advantage of a moment of lucidity on his brother's part to get the regency, but was dismissed for corruption[23] and then when he continued to cross the Burgundians, murdered, but he had a son who inherited the blood feud and the two sides took advantage of the long truce in the war with England to go at it hammer and tongs, riots alternating with coups interspersed with outright field battles. Commoners and nobles alike rallied to one side or the other, and loyal Frenchmen could consider either faction to be the lesser evil. When Henry V invaded the Armagnacs had happened to be in control of the government and so their leaders had been at the battle of Agincourt, and few escaped. The Burgundians were faced with a foreign invasion on the one hand and domestic strife on the other, so John the Fearless, then Duke of Burgundy, offered the Armagnacs an end to the feud and an alliance against the English, conditional on the Armagnacs yielding the regency to the Burgundian faction. The Armagnacs agreed. The two sides met to discuss terms, and then - with Henry V and his army rampaging around Normandy, taking towns at will! - the chiefs of the Armagnac faction had John the Fearless murdered in retaliation for Louis's earlier murder.

This is fine.

This was an act that made no political sense, an act that could only really be justified by blood vengeance, and the Burgundians, understandably, snapped. They held Paris by that point and with it physical control of the King and the Queen, and there was an army that had just taken Rouen that was available to their service if they had the wit to use it.

Charles the Mad played no particular role in the Anglo-French treaty that resulted. The key figures were Henry V of England, who intended not merely to reclaim Normandy but to press his great-grandfather’s claim to the French throne; Philip the Good of Burgundy, who had a blood feud to pursue; and Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, a ruthless and ambitious woman who probably deserved better than she got from history; she'd done a fine job playing the political game and trying to keep her family alive during the Armagnac-Burgundian Feud, but by this point she was all out of cards. The treaty said that Henry V would wed Charles's daughter, that Isabeau of Bavaria would swear that the Dauphin[24] Charles (an Armagnac) was no son of the king's but the product of an incestuous[25] affair between her and Louis of Orleans, and since that meant they were all out of male descendants of Charles the Mad, why, Henry would serve as regent for him and inherit through his own wife when he died.

At that point the dominoes fell fast. The Armagnacs, under the (exceedingly poor) leadership of the Dauphin Charles and his (exceedingly inept) advisors, now the rump state of France, tried to fight multiple times; they called on Scotland for aid and got it and called on Castille and didn't.[26] Every time they tried to fight they were beaten and Henry (now "The Conqueror") rolled down France, taking castles one by one and installing loyal members of the Burgundian party - now the collaborators' party - as governors. It looked as though the Hundred Years' War would soon be over.

Then Charles the Mad died. Then Henry the Conqueror died. The new King of England, son of Henry and his newlywed queen, was not yet one year old.

Now was a moment of opportunity, but the Armagnacs were in no position to seize it. The battle of Verneuil, when they had the aid of the Scots, took place two years after the death of the two kings[27], and even though the Scots knew how to fight Englishmen the French and their allies were as beaten as ever. Henry's government rested in the hands of his brother, the Duke of Bedford, and if Bedford was not quite his brother's equal it was only because very few men could be. The Armagnacs were despised by the population at large as corrupt and murderous, and the educated, cultured classes looked towards Burgundy as the sole hope of France and thereby accepted the necessity that the reign of the Valois kings was over. Some villages supported the Armagnacs as the lesser of two evils, others were pro-Burgundian, and bands of men-at-arms under any authority or none wandered the country, pillaging as they pleased. The most despised of them were the English army, the goddams, respecters of no property and of no religion(28), not speaking the French language or feeling the slightest mercy for the French people. South of the Loire river, the country was Armagnac to the extent it was anything; north it was Burgundian, and the key crossing lay at the city of Orleans, with an English army besieging it in spite of every relief effort the inept Dauphin could put together.

This was the state of France - leaderless, beaten, disorganized, a country that would need a miracle if it was going to survive.

Then it got one.

- - -

Part Two: The Life of Joan of Arc

2.1: “There lives a maid between Coussey and Vaucouleurs that will see the King crowned within a year.”

When Joan was thirteen, she started hearing voices.[29]

The voices told her that she should be good and remember to always go to church and obey her parents, which I understand is not exactly the default thing for hallucinations to tell you to do, though they are, of course, culture-dependent. She reported they were angels, that they came with a great light, that they came from the direction of the church, and that they were often accompanied by a sweet (or good) smell. She had not had a very eventful life and no one particularly noticed; her father had bad dreams that she'd go run off and join the army, which can be put down to the perfectly normal worries of a father for his daughter, considering the men-at-arms; her family were partisans of the Armagnac faction, so far as we can tell on the grounds that they weren't collaborators, and she mostly spent her time helping her mother in the house.

When she was fifteen:

[The] voice told me, twice or thrice a week, that I, Joan, must go away and that I must come to France[30] and that my father must know nothing of my leaving. The voice told me that I should go to France and I could not bear to stay where I was. The voice told me that I should raise the siege laid to the city of Orleans… And me, I answered it that I was a poor girl who knew not how to ride nor lead in war.[31]

She was sixteen when she took action, going from her village with her uncle to the Armagnac-held town of Vaucouleurs to tell the commander of the garrison, Robert de Baudricourt, that God had sent her to save the kingdom of France and that it was the will of the King of Heaven that she be delivered safely to Bourges, where the Dauphin Charles was, and could he please provide her with a horse, a sword, men's clothes and an armed escort? He sent her home with instructions for her uncle to beat her more so she'd stop running off. She, undaunted, returned after a few months, and this time Robert sent her away but for... some reason... let her stay in Vaucouleurs, instead of sending her back to her family again.[32]

This gave her the opportunity to hit everyone in town with Charisma 18 Diplomacy checks.

I [Jean de Metz, a squire] spoke to her, saying, ‘My dear girl, what are you doing here? Must it not be that the King be cast out of the kingdom and we become English?’ And the Maid answered me, ‘I am come here to a King’s Chamber’ (i.e., to a royalist place) ‘to talk with Robert de Baudricourt that he may be willing to lead me or send me to the King, but he pays no attention to me nor to my words. And yet, before we are in mid-Lent, I must be at the King’s side, though I wear my feet to the knees. For indeed there is nobody in all the world, neither king nor duke, nor daughter of the King of Scotland[33], nor any other who can recover the kingdom for France. And there will be no help (for the kingdom) if not from me. Although I would rather have remained spinning at my mother’s side, for it is not my condition, yet must I go and must I do this thing, for my Lord wills that I do so.’ I asked her who was her Lord. And she told me that it was God. Whereupon I, Jean, who bear witness here, promised the Maid, putting my hand in hers in a gesture of good faith, that, God helping, I would lead her to the King.

So when she came to de Baudricourt the third time he had her exorcised[34]. When that didn't stop her he said yes and either gave her or had crowdfunded for her everything she asked for - sword, horse, men's clothes, knight, squire (Jean de Metz, quoted above) and either four servants or three servants and an archer, depending on which source you prefer. The entire town chipped in to get her what she asked for, and de Baudricourt himself gave her a sword as she prepared to leave.

It's not wholly clear why de Baudricourt did this. The state of affairs of the Armagnac faction was certainly desperate, and yes, there were rumors that "it has been prophesied that France shall be lost by a woman and restored by a virgin from the Lorraine marches"[35] but really when you think about it, what are the odds it's this virgin? How does he even know she is a virgin? Even in the middle ages they knew most prophecies were fake, because you could go around just claiming anything you felt like was a prophecy. Maybe it's just charisma? That might explain what happened next, which is that the knight who took her had planned on raping her along the way, just on general principles[36], but somehow he... couldn't do it:

Every night she lay down with Jean de Metz and me, keeping upon her her surcoat and hose, tied and tight. I was young then and yet I had neither desire nor carnal movement to touch woman, and I should not have dared to ask such a thing of Joan, because of the abundance of goodness which I saw in her.

And so, dodging men-at-arms as they went on the assumption that they were probably hostile to everyone just by default, they made their way to the Dauphin's court.

2.2: “Thou art true heir of France and King’s son.”

The story of her arrival at the Dauphin's temporary capital at Chinon is legendary. Even people who know very little about Joan of Arc have often heard about it; it's one of the most famous scenes of her life, a subject of paintings and stories. (Age of Empires II practically starts with it.) The story tells that Joan approached the Dauphin in a room full of fine lords and noblemen where he was dressed plainly, that he denied his identity and she persisted that he and he alone was the trueborn king of France, and by this sign of her gifts convinced all that she was a saint chosen by God to bring him victory.

Or:

“Then, Joan, who was come before the King, made the bows and reverences customary to make to the King, as if she had been nurtured at court, and this greeting done said, addressing her speech to the King: ‘God give you life, gentle King,’ whereas she knew him not and had never seen him. And there were (present) several lords, dressed with pomp and richly and more so than was the King. Wherefore he answered the said Joan, ‘Not I am the King, Joan.’ And, pointing to one of his lords, said, ‘There is the King.’ To which she replied, ‘By God, gentle prince, it is you and none other.’ ”

How can it be false if it’s painted?

Yeah, that probably never happened. Sure, sure, it's sourced to a contemporary French historian (Jean Chartier, quoted above) who we know had met the Dauphin a decade or two after his coronation and could very easily have talked to eyewitnesses and gotten the story from them, and so it's on a much better foundation than ninety-nine percent of what we believe about history. But we have eyewitnesses. Here's one:

Raoul de Gaucourt, grand master of the King’s household, eighty-five years of age or thereabouts: “I was present in the castle and town of Chinon when the Maid arrived, and I saw her when she presented herself before the royal majesty, with much humility and great simplicity, the poor little shepherdess, and I heard the following words which she spoke to the King: ‘Very noble Lord Dauphin, I am come and am sent by God, to bring succour to you and your kingdom.’

No mention of the denial, no mention of the King's dress. Where did the story come from? The probable explanation lies in Joan's own testimony during her first trial by the English:

[A]fter a meal I went to my King who was in the castle. When I entered my King’s room, I knew him among the others by the counsel of my voice which revealed him to me. I told my King that I wanted to go and make war against the English.

So if she's to be trusted her voices did indeed point him out - but if we're a cynic, she could have been guessing by his body language. Still, it's enough so that we can see the story growing from there.

Either way, Charles was initially skeptical, but Joan addressed him as the true and rightful heir to the kingdom of France and then took him aside and gave him some sign, and this deeply rattled him. We aren't sure what the sign was; Joan told her interrogators that she had sworn an oath to keep the details secret and so she couldn't swear another one to tell the truth on this matter and that if the English wanted to know they could ask her King, and when they pressed her repeatedly to tell them the sign she gave her king she switched to making sarcastic comments, like "the sign you need is for God to deliver me out of your hands, the most certain sign He could show you." Nor did any of her other contemporaries write down what the sign was.[37] But whatever it was, it clearly rattled the Dauphin - he was sure she had access to some kind of magic, he just couldn't tell if it was white or black. Just as Robert de Baudricourt had ordered an exorcism, so the Dauphin Charles called for an examination and sent for the doctors of theology at the University of Poitiers to interview her, so that they could tell him if it was ethical to recruit her.

Unfortunately, the record of the examination at Poitiers doesn't exist any more. It definitely existed then! Joan repeatedly tells her interrogators at the first trial "That's in the book at Poitiers" and one of her examiners survived to testify at the second (posthumous) trial, but unfortunately most medieval manuscripts don't exist any more and this is one of them. It would be an invaluable source if we had it, but all we've got left is what one elderly Dominican remembered at the second trial. One fragment is:

“Master Guillaume Aimeri interrogated her: ‘Thou hast said that the voice told thee that God wishes to deliver the people of France from the calamities which afflict it. If he wishes to deliver it, it is not necessary to have men-at-arms.’ Then Joan answered him: ‘By God the men-at-arms will do battle and God will give victory.’ With this answer Master Guillaume held himself satisfied...

And we have their final conclusion, which was:

“That in her is found no evil, but only good, humility, virginity, devotion (devoutness), honesty, simplicity.”

Well, fair enough.

And the elderly Dominican continues:

"We reported all that to the King’s Council, and were of opinion that, given the imminent necessity and the peril in which the town of Orleans stood, the King could well use her help and send her to Orleans.

I like this response because… One is not allowed to declare a living person a saint. The saints are the people in Heaven. According to Catholic theology, a living person might at any point use his God-given free will to do evil and not repent of it. This is therefore about as close as they can get, and it's pretty far!

On the other hand, we all see the other side of the story, right? The desperate gambler who realizes that his stack's almost out and he might as well bet against the odds he'll make a flush, because probably he won't but if he folds he’s out anyway, so…

Since the Dauphin wasn't quite desperate enough to risk his soul to win, he also had her checked over by women of his wife's household to confirm that she was a virgin, both because of the belief at the time that virginity was the sign of sainthood and because if she's lying about that she's clearly just full of shit on every other topic, too. She passed the test, of course. Joan's opinion on the multipronged inquiry into her origins and character was that "she was not pleased with all these interrogations and that they were preventing her from accomplishing the work for which she was sent and that the need and time were come to act.”[38] Once again: Fair enough.

And it seems to be only at about this point that the Dauphin Charles has Joan given basic training in the arts of a soldier and of a captain, which she has never had the opportunity to get before[39]. But he can't get her much of it, because she shows up in February or March and goes to the front in late April, giving about a month to teach her how to move in armor, fight with a sword, ride a warhorse, command infantry, command cavalry, command artillery[40]... Fortunately, she appears to... already know most of this? Or something? Because, in the judgement of Joan's peers:

Thiband d’Armagnac or de Termes, Knight, bailiff of Chartres: "Except in matters of war, she was simple and innocent. But in the leading and drawing up of armies and in the conduct of war, in disposing an army for battle and haranguing the soldiers, she behaved like the most experienced captain in all the world, like one with a whole lifetime of experience."

[The Duke d'Alencon, French nobleman and general]: "In everything that she did, apart from the conduct of the war, Joan was young and simple, but in the conduct of war she was most skillful, both in carrying a lance herself, in drawing up the army in battle order, and in placing the artillery. And everyone was astonished that she acted with such prudence and clear-sightedness in military matters, as cleverly as some great captain with twenty or thirty years’ experience; and especially in the placing of artillery, for in that she acquitted herself magnificently."

[Marguerite La Touroulde, Joan's landlady at Chinon] "And from all that I know of her she was absolutely ignorant except in the matter of arms. For I have seen her ride a horse and wield a lance as well as the finest soldier, and the soldiers themselves were most astonished by this."

Dunois (Bastard of Orleans) gives up and flatly says that she's so good that

I believe that Joan was sent by God, and that her deeds in the war were the fruit of divine inspiration rather than of human agency. . . . And this is why:

And then he gives one actual miracle as evidence (we'll get to that) and everything else is cases of her being so good at war that

I swear that the English, two hundred of whom had previously been sufficient to rout eight hundred or a thousand of the royal army, from that moment became so powerless that four or five hundred soldiers and men at arms could fight against what seemed to be the whole force of England.

Dunois here is speaking from experience. The last time French and English forces had clashed in any serious way was about a year before Joan showed up at court, when the pride of the French army was defeated by a convoy of pickled herrings.[41] Dunois was present at that debacle; he managed to dodge the blame and in fact from the Siege of Orleans up to, what, the mid-fifteenth century[42] or so, he's one of the leading French generals. So he and d'Alencon can be considered expert testimony, and the expert testimony is that she is unfairly good.

The Bastard of Orleans thinks that this isn’t fair.

This is where a lot of the conspiracy-theory stories about Joan really get started, because her "riding a horse and wielding a lance as well as the finest soldier" skills are patently ridiculous if they have ten years of training and she has one month, to say nothing about her command skills, so they claim she must've had advance training. But we're recounting the evidence here and saving our desperate attempts to come up with an explanation for a later section, so we can just recount the consensus and move on to what her leadership looked like.

2.3: “A Maid sent by God to drive out the English.”

It looked like charisma-enforced puritanism. d'Alencon, who is one of my favorite sources, recounts in the tone of a man missing a dear departed friend that Joan kept upbraiding him for his blasphemous swearing and he kept guiltily stopping whenever he noticed her in earshot. She made sure the soldiers all went to Mass regularly, drove those of the camp followers who wouldn't marry their men from camp with the flat of her sword[43] and absolutely forbade looting and cruelty towards prisoners. She was not actually in charge of the army, but only of one company of troops; she was given arms and a banner (God upheld by angels blessing a fleur-de-lis) and a couple squires and a few hundred men to escort supplies into the city, but somehow before her force made it very far it was her force. She ruled less by royal or official authority than by the fact that before long everyone would do whatever she wanted because are you going to tell the Maid no? It started with only her own few hundred troops, but before long it spread to anyone in earshot of her voice.

This was important because the transitional system of military organization used by the French in the early fifteenth century appears to be terrible. So far as I, who am not actually an expert on the fifteenth century, can tell, the system in use was that the essential person is the captain, who can be a royal appointee leading state troops, or a nobleman with his vassals or a mercenary leading his own employees (to the extent these are distinct categories), and who commands a force of, oh, three or four hundred men. If the king is present, he's in charge. Otherwise the Constable of France is in charge, when he isn't under strict orders to stay away from court due to a blood feud with one of the king's chief advisors[44]; alternatively or if he happens to be absent, then the king can designate one of the captains as an overall commander[45], but in practice all captains are equals but the King and if the King is indecisive[46] they solve all problems produced by a divided command by bickering, and we saw how well that worked at the Battle of the Herrings.

When compared to this mess, Joan's system of command-by-charisma was a tremendous success, and even leaving aside the claims of miracles (and her implausible untrained artillery skills) we can see why. First, unlike earlier French armies, Joan's troops would neither charge nor rout without orders. Second, she'd given them a logical hypothesis for why they kept losing battles (they'd offended God), then changed the behavior that lead to it (no swearing, no fornication, no hurting the innocent) and so they should logically expect to start winning instead of losing.

But also she kept doing miracles, and this terrified her contemporaries, Armagnac or Burgundian or English. Most of them are minor things - calming a horse with the Cross, hearing a soldier who would die in the next engagement blaspheming and saying "do you swear, and you so near to death?", predicting when she'd be injured in advance, not dying of infection when shot, telling the Duke d'Alencon "move or you'll get hit by a cannonball,” he moves and a couple of minutes later there's the cannonball[47] killing someone else, and so forth and so on. And then there was the sword. Joan sent a letter to the town of Sainte-Catherine de Fierbois requesting that they kindly look behind (or under, she doesn't remember exactly what she said) the altar for a rusty sword with five crosses on the hilt, clean the rust off and send it to her. So they did. (We have reports of this from both Joan and the priest who mailed it to her.) Rumors that this was Joyeuse, the sword of Charlemagne, demonstrate decisively that there no lily that someone will not determinedly gild, but whatever the sword's provenance it became part of the legend of Joan of Arc.

Her arrival at Orleans was also part of the legend. The English had built or taken a number of forts around the city and were bombarding it with their artillery, but they didn't have the numbers to completely encircle it and so when Joan arrived the siege was moving pretty slowly. Jean Dunois, Bastard of Orleans, was in charge of the city's defense, and he gave orders that her convoy of supplies and reinforcements enter the city by a circuitous route to avoid the English garrisons before riding out to join them. When he arrived Joan, metaphorically breathing fire, angrily demanded he explain why he'd ordered her troops redirected when the simplest solution was that they just sailed upriver. Dunois explained very patiently that, yes, the city's captains had taken counsel together and they had concluded that given that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, the most sensible option was to avoid the risk of fighting the English and they thought that was best and safest -

"In God's name, the counsel of the Lord your God is wiser and safer than yours," said Joan.[48]

Forthwith and as in the same moment, the wind which was contrary and absolutely prevented the boats from moving upstream, in which were laden the victuals for Orleans, changed and became favourable.

So after the wind directly and miraculously reversed, Joan and her troops were able to enter the city. They held a parade (we have a journal from one of the burghers of Orleans, which is a Useful Eyewitness Source separate from the two trials), Joan went out under flag of truce to demand that the English surrender to God (and got laughed at)[49], and Dunois left to fetch even more reinforcements. Meanwhile Joan - stuck with Dunois nominally in charge and people unwilling to go attack in defiance of the commander-in-chief's orders - was firing up her troops. Dunois returned with his reinforcements and news that the English would be getting reinforcements of their own directly[50], and that night as she was drifting off to sleep Joan woke up her squire by loudly crying out. He muzzily rose and asked her what it was, and she said that her voices had told her to attack the English immediately but not where to do it![51] At which point they rushed out and discovered that there was a skirmish already underway and gathered all their forces to join it, swiftly turning it against the English and driving them from one of their forts...

... After which she ordered that none of the prisoners be executed, and wept since so many of the English had died without confessing their sins, and so she made sure that on the next day (the feast of the Ascension) all the French troops took confession and avoided sinning.

(It is after this skirmish that "a valiant and notable knight" whose name our source politely avoids mentioning suggests that maybe they should stop pushing their luck and call this good enough. "You have been at your counsel and I at mine; and know that my Lord’s counsel will be accomplished and will prevail and that that (other) counsel will perish," said Joan, and goes onwards with the next attack.)

If you’ve only got a month’s training, carrying a banner instead of a sword is just good sense.

This set the tone for the rest of the siege - rapid French assaults on the English fortifications each independently as Joan's visions directed her, with the Maid's fanatical charisma to keep morale up. At the next major bastion the English repelled the French until Joan managed to get the fleeing French to turn and make another attack which actually succeeded, at the next Joan was wounded holding a scaling ladder and the attack faltered, but she returned to it and it succeeded. At the next she bore her banner again, and at the next most of the English defending the fortification died when the bridge they fled over broke under them.

The English responded by giving up their siege and risking all on a pitched battle. The French could attack each fort in turn and so destroy them in detail, and seeing this, the remaining English soldiers burned their forts and withdrew all their companies together into a single formation, planted their stakes[52] and offered battle on the open field.

This time the opinion of the Armagnac captains was for war, but Joan said, no, it was Sunday, they should respect the Lord's day and not shed blood on it. The English withdrew, and Joan was a legend.

She was a legend in France, where a leading poetess came out of retirement to pen a new poem in celebration of her great victory. She was a legend in England, where the regent, Bedford, wrote to the young king to update him about the new danger from that "disciple and lyme of the Feende, called the Pucelle, that used fais enchauntements and sorcerie”[53]. She was a legend in Venice, where the representatives of the Morosini bank sent back reports because they'd be useful in planning voyages.[54] And her legendary nature had concrete consequences. After her arrival at Orleans a militia had risen to support the French army; volunteers flooded into camp every day, some of them writing gushing letters home recounting how they had seen her, talked to her. The Duke of Brittany, long a neutral in the conflict, sent his confessor over her to reassure her that the Duke would send his son with a mighty army to the King of France's support.[55] People invented the most heated rumors about her origins, full of wild speculation as they try to come up with coherent theories to explain how she ended up with all the skills she possesses.

This legendary status gave her a lot of influence with her fellow soldiers and officers and random commoners[56], but less with the Dauphin. The Dauphin Charles seems to have been the sort of person who agrees to anything the person who talked to him last wants[57], and he had a peace party as well as a war party contesting for influence at his court and they thought he should stop reraising on this one good hand and accept his gains and try to negotiate some kind of final end to the war. Joan was equal to the task, though, and interrupted the middle of a strategy meeting to fall upon her knees, clasp his and beg for him to come to Rheims and there be crowned. Charles made plans for this before anyone managed to talk him out of it, placing the Duke d'Alencon in charge (who seems to have been an early convert to Joan's cause, eager to do whatever God wanted since apparently God wanted to do exactly what he wanted to do except with better tactics) and he and Joan rushed off to organize a campaign for Rheims.

They did not do this without objections, and serious ones, from the peace party but also from military men not suddenly struck by Joan's charisma, and these men had good reasons to object. If you happen to be a cold-blooded bastard with a deep understanding of the nature of supply lines and logistical warfare who naturally thinks in terms of realpolitik, marching straight for Rheims is obviously a really stupid idea. It means taking an army through English- and Burgundian-held territory where their cavalry can harass your lines of communication, your back to the river, where one battle risks encirclement and destruction, overcoming or bypassing a tremendous number of strong English fortifications including Paris, all for a wholly intangible gain because Rheims isn't even a very large city. Instead they could try to seize key forts, attack Paris and take the capital, go to Normandy to harass the lines of communication of the English, move against the Burgundian capital to break the alliance - why are they going to Rheims?

Because, according to ancient tradition, kings of France must be crowned in Rheims. This sacred ritual is what establishes that the King is the King, chosen by God. As the Dauphin, Charles is head of the Armagnac party; as King Charles VII, he would be King of France, especially since his rival Henry VI is a small child and furthermore a small child in England who therefore hasn't been properly crowned yet. Joan has faith they can overcome the material obstacles and that pulling this off will give them huge spiritual gains, and if you replace "spiritual gains" with "gains in morale," she is clearly right. The French army marches off with the King, ready to gamble everything on this one stroke.

They take an elaborate circuitous route to avoid the main English strongholds and attack minor English strongholds, each reduced one by one. In each fight the French engage the English garrison, attack it and drive it from its fortifications in the town; in each they are victorious and the English fall back. As they advance volunteers flood to them, providing them with supplies, and captains long absent - including the exiled Constable of France[58] - join the campaign, spirits revitalized and ready to return to the fray. Meanwhile the main English field army gathered to attack them, coming up to meet the French at the woodlands near Patay. The day before both sides had camped a safe distance, well aware of their opposition, and then as the next day broke the French and English field armies mustered for the climactic battle of the campaign.

Unfortunately for the English, the Battle of Patay is the single most one-sided climactic battle I have ever encountered in all my studies of history. I'm not sure exactly why; the accounts of the battle (in secondary or primary sources) disagree with each other even more than they normally do, but so far as I can tell from the accounts and histories I've read, it happened something like this.

The English army had been divided into three forces when it camped, and as the English drew up in the morning to fight they gathered together. The French assembled faster, in defensive formation to take an attack from the English, and then the Duke d'Alencon asked Joan what to do.

"See that you all have good spurs!"

"What? Are we to turn our backs on them?"

"No," said Joan, "for the pursuit."[59]

And the French rushed on the English vanguard with incredible speed, which was not quite finished joining the rest of the English army. Shocked to see the French, who they though were waiting for them, already rushing out of the woods, the vanguard routed instantaneously. The French pursued them into the second force, which, seeing the first disintegrate, routed itself, and meanwhile the commander of the rearguard, Sir John Falstaff, implemented a tactical withdrawal in good order, thereby extricating his force and wrecking his military career, ending up as the scapegoat for the entire doomed campaign and a comic relief character for Shakespeare. The casualty figures are staggering; the English lost "two to four thousand men" killed or captured, the majority of their force, while the French army had three deaths. This, to be clear, is about the number of men you expect to accidentally trip over their own stirrups dismounting and break their necks. The French swept onwards to Rheims, every town they reached surrendering within the day, and the Dauphin Charles was crowned King Charles VII of France before crowds cheering or weeping at the extraordinary victory, with Joan having the place of honor beside him. Crowds flocked to the king and the mood in the country was ecstatic.

What is that thing in her hair, seriously, what.

2.4: ‘By my martin, the place would have been taken.’

At which point the French court agreed to a truce for two weeks and their armies stopped campaigning for a while while the English and Burgundians raised more armies.

No, really. If at any point I have given you a positive impression of the competence of the French court, I do revoke it! King Charles rode around accepting the fealty of various towns while Joan constantly urged him to march swiftly on Paris and finish the war. Joan's councils failing, she begged him for the chance to retire; she had successfully accomplished all of her prophesied tasks, the Duke of Orleans had been ransomed, Orleans had been relieved, the King crowned. Could she go home now? Her voices didn't have any more tasks for her, "take Paris instead of dithering" was just common sense.

Instantly vetoed. Of course she couldn't leave! She was his best general! Instead the King gave her brothers arms and lands and knighthood and made her follow the army around instead of going home. Occasionally during the long periods of truce she had a job to do like investigating a fake saint[60], and when the campaign eventually resumed she was with the army again, but he didn't listen to her and he didn't let her go.

And then she reverted to the mean. Not all the way, of course. But Patay was a miracle, and the miracle didn't recur. Her voices would tell her if other saints were fakes or not, and occasionally they'd start warning her that she'd be taken prisoner eventually, but for military advice they gave her no help, and without them she was merely a very good general. When she finally got her chance to make her attack on Paris it looked like she'd win but the English negotiated another truce over her head and Joan was a loyal vassal of her king, so that was that. Her actual capture - in a minor skirmish with the Burgundians, with her leading the vanguard on the way to the attack and the rearguard on the way back - was an anticlimax, and while we have a witness he politely declined to comment on the scene.[61]

That left the Duke of Burgundy with the question of what to do with her. The ethical thing to do by the laws of war would be to ransom her back, but that would also give the French back their best general, and so Duke Philip was somewhat reluctant to do that. That reluctance was aided by the fact that Charles was back to mostly having the peace camp in the room with him instead of the war camp[62], and they viewed Joan's existence as a provocation to war all by itself.[63] Joan wasn't ransomed. Instead the Burgundians imprisoned her as a legitimate war captive for a while and then arranged for a prisoner transfer in exchange for moderate compensation, which is to say they sold her to the English.[64]

The English and their French subordinates, who had been desperately writing letters begging the Burgundians to give them Joan so they could BURN THE WITCH were, as you would expect, absolutely overjoyed.[65] No woman could possibly have won Joan's victories, so either she's a saint or a witch, but if Joan was a saint, clearly the English government was in the wrong and any Frenchman working with them is a traitor. Since the English government was clearly in the right and they were not traitors, therefore she was a witch and had to be burned. They got the local inquisition (which they controlled) to set up a trial immediately, known to history as the Trial of Condemnation after its inevitable result.

2.5. ‘I appeal before God, the Great Judge.”

It was going to be a kangaroo court, of course. Now, you might think that inquisitions are just naturally kangaroo courts, but by the standards of the Inquisition, this was a kangaroo court; there were rules in place, and the English intended to follow them only insofar as these rules would not interfere with the result they intended. She was supposed to be judged by the bishop of her diocese; since the bishop of her diocese was pro-Armagnac, that was out, so they had her tried by the bishop of the place where she was taken - only the bishop of the place she was taken wasn't on their side, either, so they misrecorded where she was taken so that she could be tried by the Burgundian bishop of the neighboring diocese, Pierre Cauchon. She was legally allowed a defense attorney[66], which she didn't get; she was spied on during the confessional, two of the judges vanish from the record halfway through and at the Trial of Rehabilitation the witnesses report they were fired for being too sympathetic to the defendant, she was guarded in a military prison by English men-at-arms instead of by churchmen or respectable women, and the list just goes on and on and on. They were supposed to have her tried in her home territory so everyone who knew her could give testimony, but they couldn't do that because it was held by the other side, so they declared that the room she was being tried in was legally speaking part of the diocese in which she was captured and pretended that was good enough. They were supposed to interview everyone in her home province to see if she had a good reputation, but somehow they never recorded their results; twenty years later at the Trial of Rehabilitation a Lorraine merchant recounted that one of his countrymen in Rouen came to him full of bitterness that Cauchon hired him and then refused to pay him because “in the course of his inquiries he had learned nothing about Joan that he would not have liked to hear about his own sister.”

This did not stop the trial from being a great show. It really is one of the great achievements of this or any age. I could say great artistic achievements, but that would suggest that anyone was aiming at art; it is beautiful not in that it was made to be beautiful, but in that watching someone - anyone - perform at the top of a game - any game - is beautiful. Of the 400-odd pages in my edition, about 130 or so are the introduction and the background (including biographies of everyone mentioned in the trial), then another hundred or so are the bureaucratic minutia of listing who is present at the start of every day of the trial, and then the remaining 170 pages is Joan of Arc being lobbed tricky questions by the best theologians the English government can hire and, without saying anything heretical[67], spending these 170 pages trolling them.

Does this woman look like a troll to you?

Asked if the people of Domrémy sided with the Burgundians or the other party, she answered that she only knew one Burgundian; and she would have been quite willing for him to have his head cut off, that is if it had pleased God.

Asked if the voice told her in her youth to hate the Burgundians, she answered that since she had known that the voices were for the king of France, she did not like the Burgundians. She said the Burgundians will have war unless they do as they ought; she knows it from her voice.

Asked whether in her youth she had any great intention of defeating the Burgundians, she answered that she had a great desire and will for her king to have his kingdom.

Did she say that God (who is Love) told her to hate the party of the Burgundians? No. Did she intend to defeat them, prior to her revelation? No. Did she want them dead? Well, yes, but only if it pleases God.

(Her judges are Burgundians.)

Asked what blessing she said or asked over the sword, she answered that she neither blessed it herself, nor had it blessed; she would not have known how to do it.

Asked if she ever put her sword on the altar, and if she did so to bring it better fortune, she answered no, as far as she knew.

Asked if she ever prayed for her sword to have better fortune, she answered: “It is well to know that I could have wished my armor (in French mon harnois) to have good fortune.”

(Blessing it is heretical because she's not a priest, going to effort to have it blessed might be idolatry if you really want to stretch it, and praying to be better at killing people is kinda sinful.)

Asked whether, since her voices had told her that in the end she should go to Paradise, she has felt assured of her salvation, and of not being damned in hell, she answered that she firmly believed what the voices told her, namely that she will be saved, as firmly as if she were already there.

Asked whether after this revelation she believed that she could not commit mortal sin, she answered: “I do not know; but in everything I commit myself to God.”

And when she was told that this was an answer of great weight, she answered that she held it for a great treasure.

(The belief that she's immune to sin is heresy. The belief that she can go to Heaven in a state of mortal sin is heresy. The belief that she'll eventually go to Heaven can't be heresy because Jesus told specific people they would go to Heaven.)

Asked if God ordered her to wear a man’s dress, she answered that the dress is a small, nay, the least thing. Nor did she put on man’s dress by the advice of any man whatsoever; she did not put it on, nor did she do aught, but by the command of God and the angels.

Asked whether it seemed to her that this command to assume male attire was lawful, she answered: “Everything I have done is at God’s command; and if He had ordered me to assume a different habit, I should have done it, because it would have been His command.”

Asked if she thought she had done well to take man’s dress, she answered that everything she did at God’s command she thought well done, and hoped for good warrant and succor in it.

Asked if, in this particular case, by taking man’s dress, she thought she had done well, she answered that she had done nothing in the world but by God’s commands.

She is simultaneously utterly direct, so exceedingly Christian that on no point of doctrine can they call her out, and qualified to perfectly sidestep every single question they ask her. It must have been infuriating.[68]

She started everything off by quibbling about the oath they wanted her to swear (she'd previously sworn to keep King Charles's secrets, and so she needed to clarify that she would only swear limited oaths to tell the truth about things that touch on the trial and don't touch on the king) and then when the bishop judging her asked her to say the our father she said she would - if he'd hear her in confession.

(He obviously couldn't prosecute her if he was her confessor! That would violate the seal of the confessional! Also, he can't really refuse because this is his job. He tries to offer her someone else hearing her confession and eventually drops the point.)

Entertainingly, she does this without apparently knowing anything except war and, uh, now theology somehow? They ask her if she'd tell the Pope anything differently than she tells them and she immediately demands to be taken to the Pope.[69] They ask her which Pope and she goes... the pope in Rome?

(The Avignon schism was, metaphorically speaking, last week, and in a couple decades the people trying her are going to schism briefly and elect their own Pope because they dislike the Roman one.)

The thing about all this is, though, that it's totally irrelevant to the actual situation. She can beat all the inquisitors in the room in debate, sure. That doesn't matter. The English bought her so they could kill her, ideally in a way that disgraces her king, and they aren't going to just let her go. She's the enemy's best general! When she answers all their absurd trick questions correctly, they respond by... writing down different answers than the one she gave and having her convicted based on them.[70] They end up concluding that she must be a heretic because she (a) wears men's clothes and (b) refuses to submit to the Pope[71][72], then they convict her of heresy and witchcraft, tell her that if she doesn’t repent they’ll burn her and if they do they’ll let her go, then when she “repents,[73]” they throw her back in prison and only give her men's clothes to wear[74], and convict her of relapsing into heresy when she wears them instead of going naked. Then they burn her!

The sense of atmosphere we get for the burning is that of a garrison in hostile territory who is pretty sure there’s about to be a riot. She warned Cauchon that she had made her appeal for justice to God[75] before taking a last communion, spending her last moments with a sympathetic priest confessing her sins before being hurried down to the fire by eight hundred armed men; none of the usual cries of eagerness at a burning are reported, only yelling at the English and crying for her.

As she was hurried down she begged for a cross to hold; an English soldier gave her one, and as soon as Cauchon had declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the secular power they hauled her down to the logs to be burned. For some reason in all the rush they let her make a final speech[76], which took half an hour and involved forgiving everyone involved and begging them to forgive her all evils she did them; it’s a wonder the city didn’t riot. Her last words were prayers to the saints and to God, ending with cries of “Jesus!” Once the flames had died down the English swept her ashes into the river, so there wouldn’t be any relics.

She was nineteen. In all the haste of the day, the English had never actually convicted her of any crime[77].

Shortly afterwards[78], the executioner[79] rushed up to a monk, telling him "God help us, we have burned a saint. God help us, we have burned a saint."

History has tended to agree with him.

- - -

2.6: “Rejoice, free kingdom of France, for now God fights on your side.”

History has tended to agree with him - eventually.

The English and their allies didn't publish the full trial transcripts. A copy was kept in Rouen, where the trial took place; another copy was sent to Rome, where I suspect the very busy Pope put it in a file drawer somewhere; and I would guess a third copy went somewhere. What they published was the concluding section: The twelve articles of heresy they accused her of, her responses to them, and the conclusion of the judges ("burn her!"). The consensus of Catholic Europe was to assume it was a perfectly normal inquisitorial trial that convicted a perfectly normal heretic of perfectly normal heresy, and an embarrassed silence descended upon the French court on the topic of Joan of Arc. She might have won their battles, but her death made them look bad, and so they were silent.

A few decades passed. She was burned in 1431; in 1435[80], after French victories alternating with long truces, an attempted tripartite council between the French, Burgundians and English ended with the outcome least favorable to England - Bedford, the regent of England, dead of an illness and the Burgundian-Armagnac feud put on pause while they ganged up on England. 1436 saw the fall of Paris to the French and now the French armies were unstoppable, racking up victory over victory while the English collapsed into the internal feuds that would lead to the Wars of the Roses.

Meanwhile, the records of the first trial remained in Rouen in their metaphorical file drawer. In 1450[81] the French took Rouen, and in their metaphorical file drawer the files rested.

But there was a right for families of a condemned victim to request to reopen trials, and Joan of Arc still had friends. A few preliminary stabs had been taken to reopen the trial in 1450 and 1452, but in 1454 her mother and brothers[82] petitioned the Papacy for the case to be reopened. An inquiry was slowly started, but it accelerated when they saw the Rouen files and realized what had actually happened in the first trial. 1455 saw the second trial unleashed in full, with 115 witnesses being interviewed, including everyone in Joan's village old enough to know her and all the people who had conducted the first trial and were willing to accept an offer of safe-conduct.

This trial - the "Trial of Rehabilitation," after its result, the overturning of the verdict of the first trial - is the source of the interviews that comprise most of our evidence. We have the records of the original trial, but the only reason we have the original handwritten notes is that the Trial of Rehabilitation found them.[83] All the records of the Trial of Rehabilitation are still there and we've quoted them regularly in the essay.

This means there's a giant vulnerability in our sources. What if the Trial of Rehabilitation was a show trial, but in the opposite direction? What if all that evidence was made up? In that case, most of what I've quoted would be unreliable. We'd be down to the Orleans burgher's journal and the Venetian letters and those other sources, most of which aren't eyewitnesses.

All I can say is: I don't think so. I'm not a forensic linguist, but I've read a lot of it and it sounds like it's in different voices and I've read a lot of histories and they take it seriously as a source and I bet a forensic linguist could get a lot of citations publishing a paper saying "Retrial of Joan of Arc Proved Fraudulent!"

But if we're going to take our sources seriously, that means we need to try to grapple with what our sources say, and our sources describe a lot of miracles..

First, a warning: Remember when I said I was reviewing the evidence for Joan of Arc? I lied.[84] I reviewed the evidence for Joan of Arc available in English. We've got two translations of the Trial of Condemnation (I read the free one) and then a couple of books pasted together from primary-source quotes, mostly from the Trial of Rehabilitation, and then we have like fifty different modern popular historians writing books about how cool Joan is that I read a bunch of. I didn't review all the evidence for Joan of Arc, and I invite someone else to, because the evidence was in a mixture of medieval French, modern French and Latin and in spite of all my efforts I am tragically monolingual.

Still, with the evidence we’ve seen, let’s try to come up with some solutions for this.

- - -

Part Three: “And we know that all she has said has always come to pass.”

First, though, there’s one more thing I need to cover.

One thing which kept coming up in earlier sections, and I kept cutting so it wouldn't interfere with the flow, is that Joan of Arc keeps making predictions about the future and they keep happening.[85]

Most of them are pretty explicable. Quoth the Duke d’Alencon:

[W]hen I left my wife to come to the army with Joan, my wife said to Joan that she was very much afraid for me, that I had been taken prisoner before, and that they had had to pay so much money for my ransom that she would have liked to beg me to stay. Then Joan answered her, “Have no fear. I will return him to you safe and sound, and in the state he is in now or in a better one.”

“During the attack on the town of Jargeau, Joan told me at one moment to retire from the place where I was standing, for if I did not “that engine”—and she pointed to a piece of artillery in the town—“will kill you.” I fell back, and a little later on that very spot where I had been standing someone by the name of my lord de Lude was killed. That made me very much afraid, and I wondered greatly at Joan’s sayings after all these events.”

We can nearly explain that marvel with his memory being unreliable after twenty years, turning general good advice into confident predictions. Similarly, one of the bits of the Poitiers examination that I had to cut above is her most explicit summation of her goals, recounted by the elderly Dominican, Seguin Seguin:

"I told Joan that it was not God’s will that she be believed if nothing appeared by which it should seem that she ought to be believed, and that the King could not be advised, on her mere assertion, to entrust her with soldiers that they be placed in peril, unless she had something else to say. She answered: ‘In God’s name, I am not come to Poitiers to make signs; but take me to Orleans, I will show you the signs for which I have been sent,’ adding that men be given her in such number as should seem good to her and that she would go to Orleans. Then she told me, me and others present, four things which were then to come and which thereafter happened. First, she said that the English would be defeated and that the siege which was laid to the town of Orleans would be raised and that the town of Orleans would be liberated of the English... She said next that the King would be crowned at Rheims. Thirdly, that the town of Paris would return to its obedience to the King; and that the Duke of Orleans would return from England. All that I have seen accomplished."

On the one hand, if this testimony is to be trusted Joan is behaving very well by rationalist standards! She's helpfully calling her shots in advance to avoid the sharpshooter effect, making many specific predictions of individual events. There’s just two problems with this. First, all these predictions are correlated - the Duke of Orleans is more likely to be ransomed if they have lots of prisoners to trade for him, which is more likely if they're winning the war, they're not likely to win the war without raising the siege of Orleans, and any victory will inevitably involve the king being crowned and Paris returning to French control, so most[86] of this reduces to “I predict the war will go well because I’m going to win it for us,” which is less of a prophecy than a promise.

And, second, while we can’t exactly expect medieval Frenchmen to carefully write down all their predictions as soon as they make them when our own government doesn’t, we have the major problem that all these predictions are written down after they occurred, which means that the good brother's memory might not be reliable.

Now, we do have other people quoting other, simpler versions of the same prophecies:

Then we asked her why she had come, and she answered, “I have come in the name of the King of Heaven to raise the siege of Orléans and to lead the King to Rheims for his coronation and his anointing.”

She said that she had two (reasons) for which she had a mandate from the King of Heaven; one, to raise the siege of Orleans, the other to lead the King to Rheims for his sacring.

But, again, they're all recorded in the Trial of Rehabilitation, after that has happened. Wouldn't it be wonderful if Joan made some predictions in advance, recorded by her enemies, all carefully recorded in a file drawer in Rouen, so we could see how accurate she was?

Yeah, she did.

JOAN: Before seven years be passed, the English will lose a greater gage than they had at Orleans, and they will lose all in France. And the English will even suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France and this will be by[87] a great victory which God will send to the French.

Question: How do you know that?

JOAN: I know it well by a revelation which has been made to me, and it will happen before seven years; and I should be very vexed should it be so long deferred. I know it as well as I know that you are there in front of me.

Question: When will this happen?

JOAN: I know not the day nor the hour.

Question: In what year will it happen?

JOAN: That too you shall not have, but I would that it might be before Saint John’s Day.

This is a pretty good prediction. But it's not perfect. It's written down in early 1431 and presumably made in early 1431, too, by the date of the trial. The relevant dates for her prediction: May 1435, French win a small-scale victory at Gerberoy, killing a leading English general; September 1435, Bedford dies of natural causes and the Burgundians switch sides again; April 1436, French take Paris with support from inside the city; 1441, the last English stronghold within the Ile de France falls; 1453, every English stronghold in France falls except the debatably French Calais; 1558, Calais falls.

It's true that, "before seven years be passed," the French would win a great victory; talking the Burgundians into switching sides and the fall of Paris both count. And it's arguable that the English would suffer a greater loss than they ever had in France, since when Henry V died his brother Bedford could replace him, while there was no qualified replacement for Bedford. On the other hand, he died during a truce in the war, and I doubt it was a result of "a great victory." The English lost more men at Patay than Gerbois, so Joan certainly couldn't claim it was a greater loss than Patay, though see footnote 86. The fall of Paris can certainly count as "a great victory" and I wouldn't be surprised if in "number of Frenchmen under their control" it was the most important victory for the French, but not in losses among the English.

But you'll note that they don't lose all in France - even in the Ile de France - "before seven years be passed," unless Joan has a different definition of the Ile than Wikipedia does.

It's not a perfect prediction. But it's pretty good.

Asked what promises they made, she answered: “That is not in your case at all.” And amongst other things, they told how the king would be reëstablished in his kingdom, whether his enemies wished it or not. She said also that they promised the said Jeanne to bring her to Paradise, and she had asked it of them.

The last section is uncheckable. The rest is a very simple prophecy that boils down to “we’ll win the war.” To the extent it predicts anything more specific, it’s “we will win in this generation, before the throne passes to the king’s heir.”

Asked if the voices had told her that within three months she would be delivered from prison, she answered: “That is not in your case; however, I do not know when I shall be delivered.”

Asked if her counsel had not told her that she would be delivered out of the present prison, she answered: “Ask me in three months’ time; then I will tell you.” She added: “Ask the assessors, on their oath, if that concerns my trial.”

Asked afterwards, when the assessors had deliberated, and unanimously concurred that it did, she said: “I have already told you that you cannot know all. One day I must be delivered.”

This sure looks like she's making an incorrect prediction: That she'll escape prison. If true, this would sink her case.

The only problem is that the text goes on:

And beyond this the voices told her she will be delivered by a great victory; and then they said: “Take everything peacefully: have no care for thy martyrdom; in the end thou shalt come to the Kingdom of Paradise.” And this her voices told her simply and absolutely, that is, without faltering. And her martyrdom she called the pain and adversity which she suffers in prison; and she knows not whether she shall yet suffer greater adversity, but therein she commits herself to God.

Which sure sounds to me like “they told her she would be martyred, in the sense in which we use the term today and not just in the older sense of suffering, and she completely misunderstood ‘delivered from the pains of Hell' as ‘delivered from the jail cell you are currently in.’” The great victory spoken of can either be her victory in the debate or, frustratingly, the victory of Jesus over death. Stupid prophecies.

So, are there any prophecies where she is just unambiguously wrong? I think I’ve managed to track one down:

Question: What was the cause for which you leapt from the tower of Beaurevoir?[88]

JOAN: I had heard say that all they of Compiègne down to the age of seven years were to be put to fire and to blood, and I preferred to die rather than live after such destruction of good people, and that was one of the causes of my leaping. And the other was that I knew that I was sold to the English and I would rather have died than to be in the hands of the English, my adversaries.

Question: Did you make that leap on the advice of your voices?

JOAN: Catherine told me almost every day that I must not leap and that God would help me and also them of Compiègne. And I said to Saint Catherine that since God would help them of Compiègne, I myself would (like to) be there. Then Saint Catherine said to me: “Without fail, you must accept your lot (be resigned, take what is happening in good part), and you will not be delivered until you have seen the king of the English.” And I answered her: “Truly, I would rather not see him, and I would rather die than be put into the hands of the English.”

This is the prophecy that seems to me like the best evidence against Joan’s divine inspiration. She says that her voices flatly tell her something that never happens. On the other hand, the context is that she needs to not try to escape and not confess; if we want to defend her we can either suggest memory error (she was told this just before jumping out of a tower window and badly injuring herself), translation error (she does see the leader of the English, Bedford, briefly, but he's regent for a king who’s a small child[89]) or point out that this is a conditional, and she disobeyed the voices. But I take it as pretty good evidence against the divine theory, just - frustratingly - inconclusive.

3.2: “We wish to know the truth of this matter.”

What are we to make of this?

I tend to have three models in my head when I review this. In deference to C.S. Lewis's famous trilemma, I have tended to call them Saint, Schemer and Schizophrenic.

By the first model, she was both honest and correct when she described what was going on: Saints in heaven can and do petition God to produce miracles, and out of all the wars in history, God decided to put his hand down really, really hard on this one by handing a random holy peasant detailed instructions on how to win battles, unparalleled persuasiveness and the ability to go around asking saints questions and getting answers on semi-arbitrary topics.[90] Once she'd done enough to win the war for her side He stopped giving her useful support, but did make sure that events helpfully provided an extremely complete and detailed record of her deeds to the future, just so future historians would not have the slightest excuse for not believing in miracles.

In the second model, she was a military genius out of nowhere who decided to play saint because that was the way society would listen to her. She says - and I believe her - that there were already rumors going around that "the kingdom that has been lost by a woman will be regained by a virgin from the Lorraine marches", and there's people who will say "then let that be me."

But this doesn't actually explain half of what needs explaining about her! How did she learn military riding, how did she learn to wear armor and fight in armor, how did she learn the theology that lets her win debates with inquisitors? You need to put a conspiracy together, with elements of the Armagnac government deliberately prepping her in advance of her public appearance, but how did they know she was a military genius? Or, if actually the entire time that was Dunois or some other officer whispering in her ear, how did they know she was so charismatic? And how large is this conspiracy, anyway? If she didn't spend the first fifteen years of her life in a village, why do so many people testify she did in so many different words? Why couldn’t the Burgundians find any evidence to the contrary? What about her mother and father and her brothers, were they all in on the conspiracy? Why didn't any of the people who rebelled against Charles VII later in life, like the Duke d'Alencon or Jean Dunois or as far as I can tell every other nobleman in France, ever spill the beans? And why is she so crazy about religion? She spends all her time praying and when she's on trial she spends, like, an hour a day haggling over the terms of her oath of honesty!

In the third, she's mentally ill. We know that being slightly manic is a common trait of Very Successful People; the drive to push past all obstacles and do the impossible tends to correlate with lots of energy, absolute self-confidence and a sort of hypnotic charisma. By this theory, she's slightly more manic than that. Hallucinations are culturally mediated; she hallucinates saints telling her to Do Good at first and then, later, save the world. Of course, this doesn't explain her being a completely untaught military genius, or a completely untaught theology genius. Generously, it explains part of her charisma, and charisma is certainly useful for warfare - but she's clearly very intelligent, too, which this doesn’t predict, and we also need to ignore all the testimony about prophecy and miracles or claim it was all coincidental. There’s some pretty huge complexity penalties[91] here.

All these models involve her being very charismatic because she is very charismatic. It's very hard to read her and not fall under her sway. Mark Twain was a member of her fan club; so was George Bernard Shaw; so am I. Twain was an unconventional Christian at best and Shaw was a full-blown atheist, but her charisma is strong enough to reach across the gap of ages and ensnare us all. We know she was charismatic. The question is - given that, how can we explain everything else?

Obviously, if you're a Catholic, you can be content with the first model, and indeed can be very smug that is exactly what your religion would predict. Non-Catholic Christians might want to consider switching sects, or just might want to say that Joan is before Protestantism and we don't know what she would have thought of it.[92]

The rest of us have a harder problem. Neither of the other two theories make sense. Specific points that I debate back and forth with myself:

3.3: “Thus spake the people, but whether she had done well or ill, she was burned that day.”

(Enter ARUNDEL, who believes Joan is mad, and BASILICA, who believes she is a saint, halfway through a long argument.)

Arundel: Why this war?

Basilica: You mean, out of all the wars for God to put his finger on, why should He put it here?

Arundel: Yes! The Armagnacs are crooks. Charles VII is a pretty terrible king. The knight who was her bodyguard was planning to rape her on the road! Sure, the English suck, but everyone in this entire story sucks. If you want to say that God cares more about religion than morality, that doesn't even help. Everyone here's a Catholic, they're just really bad at it. How can you possibly come up with a predictive model of God that predicts this?

Basilica: You mean, instead of intervening here, God could intervene when the weak are oppressed by the strong - as in the Holocaust, or Tokugawa's persecutions of the Japanese martyrs, or if He is specifically trying to spread the Christian religion He could make the Crusades a success. If God doesn't discriminate by Christian sect, He could preserve the Byzantine empire, and if He's specifically Catholic, He could have the Thirty Years’ War last just five years and end with a permanent Catholic Holy Roman Empire.

Arundel: Exactly!

Basilica: Well, first, you don't know that He didn't interfere at the Crusaders' Siege of Jerusalem -

Arundel: If he did I'm blaming him for the massacre.

Basilica: - or the first dozen times Constantinople held off attack, or in aid of the defense of Malta?

Arundel: Sure, if you're religious maybe your model says he does that. But this still doesn't predict God the way that good guys/Christians winning every battle they ever fight against bad guys/pagans does, and they don’t. But even if he is, why, in addition, do it here? To prove that miracles are real? God clearly doesn't want to do that, or He would just do miracles in some really obvious way today, and then we wouldn't need to trust the discrimination of 15th-century Frenchmen.

Basilica: Look, leaving aside the age-old debate over free will and why God doesn't solve our problems for us - I realize "mysterious ways" is a cheap shot, but this is one of the hinge points of history. There's no reason to believe the English would stop rolling over France if they took Orleans, and no reason not to expect they'd hold on if they took it.[93] If England rules France - or, more accurately, an Anglo-French King rules both - what does the Protestant Reformation look like? The colonization of the New World? The rise of democracy? If God wants to butterfly history into our path, there's a thousand different ways we could have missed the goal if the Hundred Years' War goes differently.

Arundel: Joan of Arc is a lot more than a butterfly.

Basilica: Ironically, this is where the corruption and ineptitude enter play on the other side. Maybe there wasn't a butterfly that would do it. Maybe the French screwed up every single chance they got to solve problems with only very subtle miracles, and so it took a blatant one to do it.

Arundel: That is a hell of a complexity penalty.

Basilica: On the other hand, so’s any theory that denies her miracles.

Arundel: Some of them have good explanations.

Basilica: Such as the weather control? We’ve got eyewitness testimony.

Arundel: Written down twenty years later.

Basilica: Sure. But the fact that the wind changed direction had meaningful military consequences.

Arundel: And yet most of the Popular Histories About How Cool Joan Is don’t mention this miracle! They just say she got the convoy in.

Basilica: They are atheist cowards and this is why you should always go back to the primary sources.

Arundel: Or they read alternate testimony not included in Pernoud’s collection that disagreed with Dunois’. Or maybe they think she just guessed the wind would change and got lucky when it did.

Basilica: Complexity penalty!

Arundel: Any theory that doesn’t require a God who sees the fall of every sparrow will involve some coincidences somewhere.

(They pass under an archway, and for a moment you can’t hear them. As they leave, the conversation resumes -)

Basilica: At her trial, she outargued a room full of theological experts with no formal training or defense counsel.

Arundel: She came up with clever ways to avoid their questions. When you look at the ability of police today to convince people to confess to crimes they haven't committed, I agree this is extraordinary and suggests she was very smart and had great social skills, but if she was very smart and had great social skills, that means we need to explain fewer miracles, not more.

Basilica: Did you ever read Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village?

Arundel: I did not.

Basilica: As part of the Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition interviewed every single person in an Occitan village about what they believed.

Arundel: And they were heretics?

Basilica: Yes, but the interesting thing is that they weren’t mostly Albigensian heretics! They'd independently invented six different kinds of atheism or gnosticism or wilder beliefs (the four great evils are Satan, the Pope, the King of France and their bishop) and just went on thinking that until they were asked. Any one of those people - ordinary people in an ordinary village - would have been burned at Joan's trial in five minutes flat. Nobody without theological training would survive.

Arundel: I have been regularly told by Christians that theology is basically just logic and deducible from the premises of the religion, and very smart people are good at logic.

Basilica: I'm a Christian and I don't buy it. Brilliant people in the fourth century and in the sixteenth century and in the twentieth century study their Bibles, read theologians, and come up with heresies conclusively condemned by Athanasius. Indeed, we observe that all these brilliant people assembled in the fourth century produced dozens of close church councils which the Emperor tried to shape to whatever was most politically useful, and then later centuries saw hundreds of extremely corrupt papal elections between would-be Popes where the Cardinals were paid vast sums to vote for the candidate who paid most, some of which produced Popes who made historically-vital rulings for utterly cynical reasons. If God is real, maybe the Council of Nicaea was divinely inspired; but if God isn't real, theology is men looking at their reflection, quarreling about it, and then voting to decide who to kill for being in the minority. If everyone who doesn't study theology in the twelfth century is a heretic, and everyone who doesn't study theology in the twentieth century is a heretic, shouldn't Joan have just been a heretic?

Arundel: I agree that this is adding a lot of complexity to the atheist theory! But Joan was very pious. All you need to argue is that her village priest wasn't a heretic - which if the Catholic Church is any good at its job, he shouldn't be - and that any other errors she made were corrected at Poitiers, and she pays attention and learns the right answer and then remembers it later.

Basilica: I am touched by your faith in the simplicity and purity of the Christian doctrine and the ability and honesty of the Catholic church.

(ARUNDEL laughs.)

Basilica: And the artillery! Imagine, Arundel, that you hear that Google has just offered a $1 billion a year salary to a new employee, a young woman from a small tribe in Africa who was illiterate until the age of fifteen.

Arundel: This seems unlikely.

Basilica: Yup. Would you guess she was hired to be their new top programmer? The first ballistae were invented by a devoted R&D team around 400 BC[94], and ever since then the artillery has been one of the most technical fields of warfare. You give random noblemen commissions in the cavalry and trust to their ability to charge with fervor; the reason Napoleon was an artillerist was because the artillery was where you sent the people with a good mind for geometry and ballistics.

Arundel: Today, I'd expect her not to be a computer programmer - just like in 1800, I wouldn't believe in an illiterate artillery savant being Napoleon. But she wasn't being Napoleon! When you say that they need to know ballistics, you imply that they knew what they were doing. If everyone is calculating by eye, the person with the best intuitive ability to calculate projectiles - which I'll bet you is IQ-correlated - is your best artillerist, and Joan was clearly brilliant.

Basilica: I'm really not sure you're right. I’m no more of an expert on the development of artillery than you are, but this pattern-matches to a lot of "dumb medievals" stories, and this is the late middle ages, not the Dark Ages. They not only have geometry, they practically worship geometry. Why shouldn't they be able to solve this?

What tools would God use to make the cosmos but a compass and straightedge?

Arundel: They probably did. The very first siege where artillery is recorded as being used in western Europe is Orleans! By fifty years after that maybe they have an answer, but not within the year! I'm not saying they're dumb, but it does sometimes take more than a year to solve problems.

Basilica: That's Fletcher Pratt who says it was the first siege and he is not a reliable source.

(Enter CHAROLAIS, who suspects a conspiracy.)

Charolais: Alternatively, she could just have gotten trained by an expert artillerist.

(Two heads turn.)

Charolais (unruffled): I heard you were talking about Joan of Arc. So, Arundel. I take it you support the theory that she was mentally ill?

Arundel: Specifically manic, but yes.

Charolais: Mania is not generally known to result in accurate predictions of the future or extraordinary horse-riding, lance-using skills.

Arundel: You'd rather discard all the testimony of her village?

Charolais: Yes, I think so. Neither you nor I have read the untranslated sections of the Trial of Rehabilitation, and we aren't trained in forensic linguistics. There are two points where if you’re wrong your theory falls - your intuition that you can do a good enough job at amateur forensic linguistics to tell that the characters in the Trial of Rehabilitation have different voices, and your belief that Regine de Pernoud is a reliable source. If we discard one leading French historian of the period as reliable, we can conclude that, actually, Joan was recognized at an early age by someone in the Armagnac camp as super-capable, trained up for her job, and that the religion was a cover story.

Arundel: I feel like there's dogs that ought to bark there that don't. There are quite a lot of other historians who would love to expose a leading rival as inept.

Charolais: Yes, but were they translated into English?

Arundel: They don't have to be. Pernoud was translated into English because she was a leading historian of Joan's age. She’s writing against the trends by focusing so hard on the texts in an age of economic history and social history, so it would have been easy and profitable to shoot her down.

Charolais: This is speculation and we both know it.

Arundel: The fact that when Cauchon sent people to investigate Joan’s reputation in her home province, they found nothing?

Charolais: Travel was difficult and unsafe, and the Trial of Rehabilitation made up the testimony by the people who went and claimed to find a good reputation.

Arundel: Epicycles.

Charolais: Smaller ones than “within a month she learned six skills to a professional level.”

Arundel: Actually, we don't know she was any good with a lance.

Charolais: Three sources...

Arundel: They testify twenty, thirty years after her death. If she was a faster learner than anyone they've ever met - which is still a complexity penalty but not much of one, we're both admitting she's brilliant - they might remember that as "very good."

Charolais: That gets you one. When she's good at every skill of war, why not admit that she probably had more than a month to learn them?

Arundel: Because she's hardly the first shockingly brilliant teenage general! Sure, Alexander had Philip, but he died when Alexander was young and half of what Alexander did he had to invent for himself. The middle ages was an age of apprenticeships, and that means we don't have the formalized art of war that we will in another two centuries, only what fathers teach their sons. It's not that improbable she invents it herself.

Charolais: It absolutely is!

Basilica: Or you could admit it's a miracle.

(Arundel laughs).

Basilica: Since you've joined the conversation, Charolais! Let's talk about the death of Joan of Arc.

Charolais: At her trial, she defended herself with the skill of a brilliant theologian. Therefore she was a brilliant theologian. Therefore she had training.

Basilica: Not the trial, the death. The point where everything is lost and she goes to the flames and is burned alive. She could save herself by confessing!

Charolais: She tried that.

Basilica: No, she signed a document and the record was altered. We have six witnesses. If she'd confessed to the entire conspiracy - that she was trained up by their enemies, that she’d faked all her miracles, that she was lying from the start - she could have saved her life and probably gotten pretty heavily paid, as one of our sources testifies. It sure looks like Cauchon is stretching her death out so this very thing will happen, and it doesn’t!

Charolais: Martyrs do go gladly to their deaths, sometimes.

Basilica: For something they believe in. In this period, that's the Catholic faith. Or the Muslim faith, or the Cathar faith, or the Hussite faith. They don't die for nothing.

Charolais: Personally, as an atheist, I'm inclined to say that most martyrs die for "it would be really embarrassing not to after I've gone this far," occasionally mixed with "to hell with these people in particular.”

Basilica: Read the records of the day of her death! If she surrendered to Cauchon, she might have lived. If she’d tried to whip the mob into a frenzy, she might have lived. Instead she asked them to forgive her murderers. That is not the behavior of a fraud, but of a sincere believer.

Charolais: Mmm…

Arundel: I want to make another point. If it’s a conspiracy, why didn’t the Duke d’Alencon or Dunois spill? They rebelled against the King eventually, but never said a word about Joan being any sort of fraud.

Charolais: Joan was their friend. They were neck and neck with her in it, and they didn’t want to incriminate themselves or betray her.

Arundel: Charolais, you’ve read about this court - its rapid changes of policy, its sudden and inexplicable shifts of method, Charles VII’s inability to make any decision without second-guessing it, all shot through with Venetian spies. Can you actually believe anyone in it is qualified to run a conspiracy without it being exposed five minutes in?

Charolais: Okay, I’ll admit that part’s tricky.

3.4: “She is in truth come to accomplish magnificent things in this world.”

I think this is where I'm supposed to put what I learned from Joan of Arc.

First, I learned that she's really, really cool. I talk about "God stretching down His hand to alter history," and I'm really not sure I believe it happened, but Joan feels like a giant middle finger to all the people who talk about history being deterministic. Sometimes you get a Great Woman and then history does something really weird.

I also kind of feel called out by God. "So, you say you're a rationalist? You're dismissing all the historical evidence for miracles as insufficient? You won't consider the evidence for Jesus Christ persuasive due to a mere two eyewitness and five contemporary reports?[95] You won't believe in anything without evidence more than sufficient to convince a court? Okay, have 115 witnesses to miracles that nobody could avoid recording because they altered the course of European history. Now, what were you saying about how you’re not a Christian because you’re a rationalist?"

On the other hand, I still do have my atheist model. Here, I suppose, is what it recounts:

Imagine that you sort all the people in the world by how good evidence they are for God. If you restrict yourself to people alive today, you expect one in eight billion people is going to be so extraordinarily good evidence you would only expect one in eight billion people to be that impressive by chance.

Now sort everyone who has ever lived by how good evidence they are for God.

It isn't quite as impressive as it looks. Most people lived before recorded history; we can only expect the level of evidence we have for Joan in areas after the invention of the printing press and with people of historical importance, and the further you get from the English-speaking world the less likely I am to have access to sources on them. But that’s still a lot of people, and Joan’s at the head of the list. You aren’t reading about Joan because she’s a random person, you’re reading about her because she’s fascinating precisely because she’s such unusually good evidence for miracles - she’s not the product of random chance,[96] she’s the product of a “sort the entire planet by how miraculous they seem”[97] function.

I am genuinely conflicted. This seems to me to be sufficient evidence that I can’t just handwave it as “well, sometimes people will make shit up.” No! Making shit up doesn’t do this! Is this really just coincidence? Is this really just mania? Did God exist, and stretch out his hand for this war in particular? Why? I genuinely can’t say.

But, since I can’t say, let’s move on from the question of my spiritual agonies to useful lessons we can learn from this historical incident.

First, Pierre Cauchon doesn’t seem to have been a very wicked man. Wikipedia warns against rounding him off to a cartoon villain, and I’m inclined to agree. He seems to have been a perfectly ordinary politician in bishop’s clothes, loyal to a great Renaissance prince and patron of the arts who in many ways deserved men’s loyalty, interested in preserving the authority of Church councils against the unchecked authority of the Pope.

Therefore he murdered a saint because she was politically inconvenient for his goals, and was furious with her when she wouldn’t go along with it and just die, and celebrated when he finally managed to find a way to kill her off. Great evils aren’t done by extremely wicked men. Bedford was a competent statesman trying to protect his family, Philip the Good was one of the finest princes of the Renaissance, and with Cauchon they all carried out Joan’s destruction. You can be an ordinary good person and suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a hero you never believed you’d ever see, and murder her because she’s politically inconvenient, and, having done so, not even get the benefits you sold your soul for. And that’s a lesson that no men, at any time, can ever hear too much.

Second, that in a maze of backstabbing politics, ineptitude, brutal criminality and betrayal within and without the government, of authorities who act like bandits and bandits who act like Huns, a saint can suddenly appear with the strength to rewrite history. When everything looks hopeless… you’re probably screwed! But you might not be. A saint might appear. It’s happened before. It can happen again.

And, third and finally? If you’re looking at these sources and seeing stories grow and change, seeing how the sources twenty years later are just slightly more polished than the contemporary sources, seeing how secondhand accounts distort the story and contemporary chroniclers include exciting incidents that never actually occurred, and you’re panicking?

Then I have a dreadful, doleful warning for you: This is just about as good as it gets. There are a few modern cases - the World Wars, say - where we have better information, where the participants published newspapers and kept diaries and sent each other letters and even didn’t burn most of the letters, but if you go back very far, or pass into a country without cheap paper and the printing press and an extremely literate population, you will quickly discover that the evidence for Joan of Arc is stronger than the evidence for everything else. All of our historical sources before the printing press and most afterwards have gone through the same evolution as the evidence for Joan of Arc, and the difference between the life of Augustus and the life of Joan is that with Joan we can see the evolution, captured in amber. The life of Alexander the Great that we have now shouldn’t be compared to Jean Chartier’s narrative; chronologically, it’s closer to the fix-fic written seventy years later in which after the coronation at Rheims, Paris surrenders without a fight and they march into Normandy and Charles VII promises to listen to Joan forever and orders the army to always do what she says[98]. If you want to know the truth about Joan of Arc, you can read the chronicles of the time, or the modern histories that laboriously try to disentangle the evidence from the invention and the reality from the superstition, and you can hope they got the right answer.

Or you can look at the book where the French clerks interviewed a hundred and fifteen witnesses and wrote down the results. Who knows? Maybe one of them got it right.

- - -

Footnotes:

1: Very, very redacted.

2: This is hyperbole, they only got 115 people.

3: The evidence that's available in English. I don't speak Latin, medieval French or modern French, and should.

4: We have no histories from contemporaries of Alexander the Great, just inscriptions, fragments quoted in later histories, et cetera. There were histories written, to be clear! We know they were written! We even know his general Ptolemy wrote one claiming to be his half-brother! We just don't have them any more because all existing copies have been lost or destroyed. Blame the Huns and the Goths, I suppose.

5: Respectable history says this is just a bunch of coincidences, but Maurice Druon got some pretty good novels out of it.

6: The good-looking. Not the just. "The Iron King" is his other nickname, which fit much better.

7: Thereby explaining why the average rate of interest to monarchs throughout history was somewhere around ten percent.

8: Scurrilous chroniclers report lots of exciting scheming around this time. Probably most of it didn’t happen, but some of it might have.

9: "The She-Wolf of France." Man, these people have great nicknames.

10: The two of them had arranged the overthrow and murder of his father.

11: Which built much of its powers in the reign of his great-grandfather, Henry III, who wasn't the first weak king to accidentally build strong institutions and won't be the last.

12: When it comes to army sizes, we're lucky when our sources only disagree by a factor of two.

13: This is the best name for shooting arrows at plate armor and watching them explode. See Skallagrim and Tod’s Workshop on YouTube for more details.

14: … In Europe. The Mongols and their fellow steppe nomads were quite as good archers as the English and had even better bows, and I have never seen a head-to-head comparison of who could shoot faster.

15: Interestingly, one author of the French Revolutionary Wars - some four hundred years after our story - recommended the British ditch the single-shot musket for the longbow on these grounds. This probably would have been a mistake, since longbows didn't come with bayonets, but given that nobody but a few cuirassiers was wearing armor by that point I suspect Pitt's government would have gotten a good deal by recruiting any hobbyists still practicing with the weapon and having them fire on enemy infantry and cower inside a bayonet square whenever cavalry threatened.

16: Do you ever wonder if the French had it coming?

17: The ones who took major wounds didn’t reach the English lines.

18: This is an interesting one which I included chiefly because no American has ever heard of it. The English and the French were allied with the main contenders, the Portuguese and Castillians, but in spite of this it looked remarkably similar to any of the battles of the Hundred Years' War, complete with the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance routing enemies that outnumbered them six to one using archers, defensive terrain and their enemies' rashness.

19: I'm mostly not crediting my sources because there’s too many of them but I stole this line unusually blatantly. It's from Wikipedia.

20: To pick an element purely because I happen to know something about it: We have dance manuals in the fifteenth century from two places: Italy and Burgundy. They don't show up elsewhere in Europe until the sixteenth century, or, for laggardly places like England, the seventeenth.

21: Wikipedia helpfully tells us that it may have been any or all of "familial schizophrenia syndrome, typhus, bipolar disorder, [or] arsenic poisoning."

22: The name came from the title of Louis of Orleans's son’s wife's father Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, who lead the faction for a time. You do not need to remember his name.

23: Corruption by the standards of the period, yes. It was also suspected he was sleeping with his brother's wife on the side, but that was probably just hostile slander, especially if you're Catholic. (We’ll get to that.)

24: The title of Dauphin is that of the heir to the French throne, like "Prince of Wales" in England.

25: Legally your brother’s wife is your sister.

26: That they appealed and were de facto ignored is my supposition; there are people mentioning that they hold out hope Castile will help them, and they were allied with the Castilians in the last bout of the war, but I have failed to track down any evidence of any help Castile actually gave them,

27: They died in 1422 and Verneuil was in 1424.

28: It’s not that the English weren’t theoretically Catholic, too, they were just bad at it.

29: Our source for this is her own testimony - up until her journey to Vaucouleurs, she didn't tell anyone angels spoke to her. The most she managed was the crypting hinting to a friend of hers that we get the section title from.

30: One of the persistent problems with the language of every figure in this period, Joan included, is that France wasn't very well defined, in rather the same way an American could say "New York" to mean New York State or New York City, except worse. So "France" could mean either all of the territory held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory rightfully held by the King of France and his vassals, all the territory in the ancient Kingdom of France, which had more different borders than I could shake a stick at, or just the Ile de France, the region surrounding Paris that was the heart of the domain of the French kings. Joan talks about herself as French and also talks about going into France from Lorraine, and plenty of others from this period talk about going from Normandy into France or France into Flanders. I can't ask them to talk more precisely than I speak myself, but it's still really annoying.

31: Most first-person quotes are from the two books Regine Pernoud wrote on this topic, Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witnesses - my favorite Joan of Arc book because it's mostly a primary source compilation - and The Retrial of Joan of Arc, also a primary source compilation but more focused. This one is from By Herself And Her Witnesses, but a bunch of others will be from The Retrial. The third-person quotes are mostly from the W.P. Barrett translation of her trial.

32: At this point, Joan of Arc got dragged into a sidequest when the Duke of Lorraine (her theoretical liege-lord) heard rumors there was a miracle-worker around and decided to ask her to come visit him to heal his poor health. She went to him and told him he should stop sinning with his mistress and take back his wife, but that if he gave her an armed escort to Bourges she'd pray for him. He, having lived with his mistress for what I would guess was more than a decade at this point and had five children with her, gave her four francs and sent her back to Vaucoleurs.

33: There’s discussions of a royal marriage at this time to strengthen the alliance.

34: Catherine Le Royer: “I saw Robert de Baudricourt, then captain of the town of Vaucouleurs, and Messire Jean Fournier, come into my house. I heard it from Joan that the latter, a priest, had brought a stole and that he had conjured her before the captain, saying that if there was any bad thing in her that she go hence from them, and that if there was a good thing then let her approach them. And Joan approached this priest and went down on her knees; and she said that this priest had not done well, since he had heard her confession.” Joan of Arc by herself and her Witnesses, page 44.

35: Joan of Arc, By Herself and her Witnesses, page 46.

36: “They said that in the beginning they wanted to require her to lie with them carnally. But when the moment came to speak to her of this they were so much ashamed that they dared not speak of it to her nor say a word of it.”

37: Warning, this footnote is kind of boring - not every writer is Joan. But if you want our best guess to what the sign was, the chronicler Pierre Sala, writing a couple generations later, writes that a man who had served Charles in his youth told him that:

"In the time of the great adversity of this King Charles VII, he found himself (brought) so low that he no longer knew what to do. . . . The King, being in this extremity, entered one morning alone into his oratory and there he made a humble petition and prayer to Our Lord in his heart, without utterance of words, in which he petitioned devoutly that if so it was that he was true heir descended from the noble House of France and that the kingdom should rightly belong to him, that it please Him to keep and defend him, or, at worst, to grant him the mercy of escaping death or prison, and that he might fly to Spain or to Scotland which were from time immemorial brothers in arms and allies of the Kings of France, wherefore had he there chosen his last refuge. A little time afterwards, it came about that the Maid was brought to him, who, while watching her ewes in the fields, had received divine inspiration to go and comfort the good King. She did not fail, for she had herself taken and conducted by her own parents even before the King and there she gave her message at the sign aforesaid (dessusdit) which the King knew to be true. And thenceforth he took counsel of her and great good it did him.”

Which gets some notable parts of the story wrong, but if the heart of it is accurate it would be a sign that - consciously or unconsciously - could be delivered through the wholly non-miraculous skill of cold reading.

38: One of the recurring elements I find in the biographies of great generals is how insanely pissed off they are whenever politics deprives them of an opportunity to exploit military opportunities.

39: It's plausible she learned to ride a plowhorse as a child since Lorraine is horse country, but riding a warhorse is a specialized skill, and it's plausible she had a month or two at Vaucouleurs to practice swordsmanship, but I don't think there was anyone at Vaucouleurs to teach her command.

40: "Wait, artillery? Aren't these people medieval knights with swords and lances and full plate?" Yes. Gunpowder is older than plate armor(*). Our oldest recipe for gunpowder is 11th-century Chinese but it's writing down something that already existed, probably since the ninth century. In the thirteenth century it spreads to Europe and the Middle East, probably via the Mongols, but gunpowder weapons take a long time to get good, only exploding in popularity in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, siege artillery first, field artillery second, handguns third. Joan of Arc is right at the point where artillery is starting to be important, with the Siege of Orleans being the earliest siege I know of where artillery played a major role.

* Sub-footnote: Older than medieval plate armor, technically. Bronze plate armor dates back to Agamemnon, it just kind of sucked compared to iron chain or lamellar. The high and late Middle Ages saw an improving economy giving knights the ability to spend more and more on heavy armor to keep enemy spears and arrows and bullets and crossbow bolts out, and this demand was served by the arms and armor manufacturers of Milan and the Rhine competing in an arms race to develop better armor, with the first ambiguous plate appearing in the 12th or 13th century. The peak of personal protection is probably the beautiful suits of Gothic plate from around 1525, worn by the French cavalry at the Battle of Pavia, who in spite of the toughest armor in the world still can’t ride their horses over Spanish pikemen or deflect bullets from German handguns, and from this point on the level of armor used by soldiers steadily decreases right up until steel helmets to deflect shrapnel return in the first World War and the pendulum's arc reverses again.

41: The details of the Battle of the Herrings are plot-irrelevant but hilarious. The troops besieging Orleans needed regular resupply; since Lent was approaching, they'd want preserved fish to eat on all those long meatless days, so the wagons were loaded up with pickled herring and sent with sixteen hundred troops or so as escort and reinforcement. The French under the Count of Claremont tried to hit the supply lines with four thousand of their own complete with heavy cavalry and artillery and Scotsmen, but the English commander, the oft-maligned Sir John Falstaff, drew up his wagons in a ring and had all his troops fight from the shelter of the wagons, and that threw the French into confusion. You can't lance a wagon. They tried an artillery bombardment, which was basically sensible, but their troops got bored partway through, charged and were decisively defeated, to the ruin of the French interception, the morale of the Armagnacs, and, of course, the career of the Count of Claremont.

42: He's still around at the start of Europa Universalis IV and has great stats.

43: "Once, near to the town of Château-Thierry, having seen the mistress of one of the soldiers, a Knight, she pursued her with drawn sword. She did not, however, strike the woman, but warned her gently and charitably that she be no longer found in the company of the soldiers, otherwise she would do something to her which would not please her.” We have another eyewitness to another event but I'm not going to quote him here because this essay is much too long.

44: This is not an example chosen at random.

45: One might call this person "captain-general," and indeed I believe this is the etymology of the word "general."

46: He is.

47: If that was a specific prediction and not just general good advice, I want to note that the cannoneer couldn't do that. Fifteenth century artillery is only a precision weapon insofar as the ball will probably not land behind the gun.

48: She continues: “You thought to deceive me and it is yourself above all whom you deceive, for I bring you better succour than has reached you from any soldier or any city: it is succour from the King of Heaven. It comes not from love of me but from God himself who, at the request of Saint Louis and Saint Charlemagne*, has taken pity on the town of Orleans, and will not suffer that the enemies have the bodies of the lord of Orleans and his town.” Which is when the wind changes direction.

*: Score: First-principles theories of how a rational religion ought to work, 0; the intercession of the saints, 1.

49: And called an "Armagnac whore."

50: To which she responded with:

“‘Bastard, Bastard, in God’s name I command thee that, as soon as thou knowest that Falstaff [commander of the relief force] is come, thou shalt make it known to me, for if he pass without my knowing of it, I promise thee I will have thy head taken off!’ To which answered the lord of Dunois that she doubt not, for he would indeed make it known to her.”

I find it really really easy to imagine this exchange, between an energetic teenager and the veteran officer of noble birth with ten years on her* and without God whispering in his ear.)

*: Wow, these people are young.

51: “After these exchanges, I who was weary and fatigued cast myself down on a mattress in the Maid’s chamber, to rest a little. And likewise did she, with her hostess, on another bed, to sleep and rest. But while I was beginning to take my rest, suddenly the Maid rose from the bed, and making a great noise, roused me. At that I asked her what she wanted. She answered me: ‘In God’s name my counsel has told me to go out against the English and I know not whether I must go against their fortification (bastide) or against Falstaff who is to revictual them.’ Upon which I arose at once and, as swiftly as I could, put the Maid into her armour.”

52: The English longbowmen carried long wooden stakes with them that they’d plant into the earth before a battle to defend them from charging cavalry.

53: “Disciple and limb of the Fiend, called the Pucelle [Maid or Virgin], that used false enchantments and sorceries.” Consistent spelling is an anachronism.

54: I love the Venetians. They've got some of the best spy networks in Europe by this point and they use them to deliver cargo safely and price loans accurately.

55: Joan, naturally enough, told the Bretons that "the duke should not reasonably have waited so long to send his men to help the King with their services.”

56: Well, people who had been her fellow random commoners two years ago, anyway.

57: He ends up called "Charles the Well-Advised," because "Charles The Guy Where God Wanted Really Wanted Him To Have His Father's Throne In Spite Of His Many, Many, Many Personal Failings" doesn't really roll off the tongue. Yes, spoiler, this guy wins.

58: Entertainingly, everyone still had orders never to work with him, ever, so the Duke d'Alencon said they'd have to withdraw if his reinforcements were coming to join them. Joan vetoed this because it was incredibly stupid and they negotiated something better. My favorite bit is where the two meet: the Constable's chronicler says that when they saw each other,

“He [the Constable] spoke to her and said: Joan, I have been told that you want to fight me. I do not know if you are from God or not. If you are from God I fear nothing from you, for God knows my good-will. If you are from the Devil, I fear you even less.”

At which point (the Duke d'Alencon says)

“Joan said to the lord constable: ‘Ah! Good constable, you are not come for my sake, but because you are come you will be welcome.’ ”

I like these people.

59: This is a rephrasing. The exact words, from The Retrial of Joan of Arc:

"Then my lord the Duke of Alençon, in the presence of the lord constable, of myself, and of several others, asked Joan what should be done. She answered him loudly with the words, “See that you all have good spurs!” When those present heard this they asked her, “What did you say? Are we to turn our backs on them then?” “No,” answered Joan, “it will be the English who will put up no defense. They will be beaten, and you will have to have good spurs to pursue them.” And it was as she said. For they took to their heels, and they lost more than four thousand men in dead and prisoners."

60: There was a woman named Catherine de Rochelle going around fundraising "for the war"; she claimed she had a God-given power to find hidden treasure and she'd use it on anyone who didn't contribute to the war effort (via her) enough, and then she'd publicly reveal all their hidden wealth (and they, implicitly, would be under enough pressure from their neighbors to donate it). This worked to get donations and give her a comfortable living, but the King of France heard of her and, already having been bailed out of a crisis by one miraculous Maid, asked Joan to check if she was real. Joan's voices said no, but she went and talked to her and spent two nights watching her every moment and saw no angels, and reported back "I have no evidence she is."

61: The Burgundians were paying his bills. Conclude what you wish from this.

62: This situation would eventually be resolved years after Joan's death when the Constable of France, one of the leaders of the war party, just flat-out illegally arrested his archnemesis de la Tremoille, head of the peace camp, and seized the status of the king's chief advisor for himself. He got away with this with no consequences whatsoever.

63: They were, of course, quite right, given how she would not shut up about how all of France should return to allegiance to its king and God would see him victorious; they were also quite wrong if they thought the English intended to stop fighting themselves.

64: For the conditions of her captivity, we have the report of a Burgundian knight:

“I saw Joan for the first time when she was shut up in the castle of Beaurevoir for the lord count of Ligny. I saw her several (many) times in prison and on several occasions conversed with her. I tried several times, playfully, to touch her breasts, trying to put my hand on her chest, the which Joan would not suffer but repulsed me with all her strength. Joan was, indeed, of decent conduct (honnête tenue) both in speech and act.

By herself and her witnesses, page 227.

65: While the transfer was arranged, Joan attempted to escape twice, both times unsuccessfully.

66: The technical term is "Advocate".

67: As opposed to Discord conversationalists, who say things that I as an agnostic can be pretty sure are heretical, like, every six seconds. I bet a Catholic could get it down to two or three.

68: "She seemed to me to be subtle with an altogether feminine subtlety," said the judge Jean Beaupere. Source: page 263 of Regine Pernoud's The Retrial of Joan of Arc.

69: It is customary to grant this request for an appeal, so this is another violation of trial procedures.

70: How do we know this? Why, because the Rouen archives weren't destroyed, and that means the French-language handwritten notes of the scribe who recorded her testimony ("the French Minute") were still in the archives, and we can compare that - and, as importantly, the French at the Trial of Rehabilitation could compare that - with the official Latin version broadcast for publication. The physical notes didn't survive the centuries, alas - if my memory is right the original Minute was lost in a WW2 bombing - but copies of them did. Basically, every time she demands her legal rights that she has no plausible way of knowing about but they’re honor-bound to grant her, they leave it out of the official transcript.

71: This is the bit they changed. She in fact said she would submit to no authority's judgement as to the authenticity of her visions other than the Pope, which is barely not heretical.

72: There were a few more things on their list of accusations, but the men's clothes were clear proof of defiance of the court and the refusal to accept the judgement of the Pope was clear proof of heresy, and the rest they couldn't really make stick.

73: By signing a small note when all the bishops present tell her to. With an X, which was her symbol for “disregard this, the letter is a lie.” While laughing at them.

74: This is actually the less nasty of the two narratives about why she went back to wearing men’s clothing. The nastier is that she was assaulted by her jailers while she was in womens’ clothing and wore men's clothes because she could defend herself better this way. She blamed the bishop for not keeping her in a civilized ecclesiastical prison instead of guarded by English soldiers, which one witness of the trial said Cauchon hadn't done because it would offend the English.

75: You may have heard that God took vengeance on him, but in fact he died of a heart attack at the age of 71. It was a different one of her accusers who mysteriously turned up dead in a sewer.

76: Pernoud theorizes Bishop Cauchon was hoping she’d break at the last minute and disclaim all of her visions as fraud, which would have strengthened his hand. The notary testifies that he attempted to edit the record after the trial to claim she did, but he was unwilling to notarize that since it didn’t happen.

77: In the middle ages, the Church lacked the legal power to execute people. All it could do was hand them over to the secular authorities - pronounced “cops” - with a warning that they were unrepentant heretics, and the judge was then supposed to pronounce them guilty of the crime of heresy on that evidence and sentence them to be executed, and only then was the executioner to get to work.

78: The source tells the story twice; in one telling it occurs after a midday dinner, in the other before it.

79: According to the monk involved. According to someone who heard the story secondhand, it was the King of England’s secretary, a much more important person.

80: Or, as she put it, "within seven years... and I should be very vexed should it be so long deferred."

81: I think. If my sources give an exact date I missed it, but the Normandy campaign that secured all of the duchy for the French was '49-50 and most of the action was in 1450.

82: With the support of at least some members of the French government, which is probably why this petition didn't end up in a file drawer.

83: The scribe who wrote them down at the first trial offered them up to the court at the second. I can't tell if it was genuine patriotism, desire to avenge an injustice, desire to have the authorities owe him a favor, or if he was worried he'd be in a court case ten years later and someone would ask him "did you collaborate with the English occupation?" and he wanted to be able to defend himself.

84: Except to those of you who read the footnotes!

85: I also want to cover one non-prophetic miracle she testified about, which is that she prayed a stillborn child would live and it woke up and breathed for exactly long enough to be baptized, which is one of these miracles that says frankly appalling things about the state of the world.

86: The ransom of the Duke of Orleans is an extra improbability, though. He’d been in captivity for a long time and prisoners often die.

87: The specific word “by” is found in Joan of Arc: By Herself And Her Witnesses, but absent in my complete translation of The Trial of Joan of Arc. It changes the meaning significantly and I am guessing the more recent translation is better but I don’t actually know.

88: Where she was imprisoned by the Burgundians.

89: I have heard the rumor Henry VI briefly saw her trial but have no source for it at all. Since he’s in Paris for his coronation in December of 1431 and Joan is burned in May of 1431, it’s certainly not impossible, but I have seen no evidence it’s true.

90: "Asked if she calls them or if they come without being called, she answered that they often come without being called, and sometimes, if they did not come, she would pray to God to send them. Asked if she sometimes had called them without them coming, she answered that she never needed them, however little, but they came to her."

91: That is to say that:(a) the more complex an explanation has to be to explain Joan’s marvels, the less good it is, and (b) a simple explanation that relies heavily on coincidence is actually a complex explanation in disguise.

92: Unfortunately, she wrote the Hussites a very angry letter telling them she’d campaign against them when she had free time, and at one point - I think it was in the Trial of Condemnation but it might have been while she was very frustrated with the French peace party and its truces - she offered to go into exile and actually do it. So this suggests she's pro-Catholic, anti-Protestant, though of course we don't know what would have happened if she'd had the chance to meet Hussites herself.

93: Arundel: Actually, what about the Wars of the Roses? Wouldn't France get free while the red and white roses fought?

Basilica: Countries that lose wars and thereby lose territory have revolutions, as the populace looks for scapegoats for the disaster and the dispossessed elites managing the occupation flee to what remains of their country to compete for status with their already-established rivals. Countries that win wars do so much less regularly, and so an English victory here would probably prevent them.

Arundel: I agree, I think.

94: The story is that it was invented for Dionysius I, Tyrant of Syracuse, a patron of the arts and sciences, who hired engineers to devise him clever weapons for his wars with Carthage.

95: I’m presently inclined to believe Mark and John are eyewitnesses, but that we also have the Synoptics as a unit drawing on the plausibly-eyewitness author of Q, as well as Josephus and Paul's letters.

96: To you! I, on the other hand, encountered her in a perfectly ordinary history book talking about perfectly ordinary history, so the evidence is somewhat stronger for me than for you.

97: To a monolingual English speaker.

98: This exists.

Judaism

Any review of Judaism must be insufficient, skewed. Overreaching statements, bombast, long digressions agonisingly cut. I’m sorry in advance. Here we go.

This review will be centered around Judaism’s four great strengths: law, persecution, comedy, and hats. At the end, we might spare a few sentences for her four great weaknesses: food, dance, fashion, and Tay-Sachs.

Law

At the center of Jewish law is a tragic misunderstanding.

Some background:

The Creator of Heaven and Earth communes with a Mesapotamian man named Abraham, and makes a series of covenants with his family.

“Naahhhh I was just kidding with that one. Absolutely crazy that you were willing to go through with it, though.”

In one of these covenants, Abraham is told that his descendants will be subjugated in a foreign land for 400 years, but then rescued and brought into their homeland.

Abraham’s descendants are paroled early out of slavery in Egypt, after serving 210 years of their sentence. A man named Moses chastises Pharoah with miraculous punishments and negotiates for the Israelites’ release.

Moses leads his newly-freed people into the desert, and from a mountain-top brings them the Divine Book, the Torah (lit. “Law”; “Instruction”; “Teaching”). Moses is Abraham’s great-great-great-great grandson on his father’s side, and Abraham’s great-great-great grandson on his mother’s side, and is considered to be the humblest man who ever lived.

But he could still throw down when he had to.

Along with the Book, or “the Written Law”; Moses is given something called the Oral Law, literally: “the Law that is Mastered by Mouth”. This tradition is not to be written down, but memorised and communicated to students who similarly commit it to memory and pass it along. The Oral Law contains all the fine details on how the Written Law is to be applied, as well as a system of dialectic for the interrogation and application of the Law to specific situations.

Remember: the Torah, the fundamental book of Jewish law, is only 79,980 words long, and a lot of those words are used in narrative. The American federal internal revenue code is 2,412,000 words long. The European Union regulations on what kind of side-mirror an automobile must have in order to be suitable for import is almost 2,000 words long. Like all ancient codes of law, the Torah necessarily dealt with typical cases in low resolution, and left a lot of the messy details to the scholarship of future legislators, and to the discretion of future judges.

So far so good. The early Hebrews confederate, are conquered and exiled, and return in small number to rebuild their homeland. (Meanwhile, the conversation on how to run a just society and how to apply the sacred law - really the same thing - rolls on.)

During a civil war, they invite Roman interference, which predictably ends in Judea becoming a Roman vassal and subject. The Romans have a particular dislike for their new subjects: Jews keep to themselves, they don’t integrate well into Roman society, and they rebel with ferocity. These rebellions are put down with extreme force, and Jews live under Roman occupation and oppression for a few centuries.

Pictured: extreme force

The Roman sandal stays on the Jewish neck for centuries, but the intensity of the oppression fluctuates based on whoever happens to be Emperor in Rome, and whoever happens to be Governor in Judea.

Around 200 AD, a Jewish leader called Judah the Prince sees his chance. Renowned stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius Antoninus has ascended to the Roman purple; and Judah the Prince sees in the new emperor not merely a sympathetic ruler, but a genuine intellectual counterpart. (Later Jewish sources record their conversations and their bromance, including a notable episode about which Judah the Prince later concedes “this matter I learned from Antoninus.”)

For a good time, compare the opening passage of Book 2 of the ‘Meditations’
with Judah the Prince’s personal prayer at the bottom of Berakhot 16b

Judah the Prince assembles the learned men of his day, and redacts the Oral Law into a single unified text called “the Mishnah” (lit. “repetition”; “recital”; “sharpening”; “toothmaker”; even “teaching”). Omissions and contradictions are ironed out; supplementary materials considered canonical-but-superfluous make their way into less-central compilations.

The Mishnah is taught to generation after generation of trainee judge, with a teacher’s manual called the Gemara gradually being added to the corpus. After about four hundred years of this, the final combination of Mishnah + Gemara are compiled into a text that will become Judaism’s source code in exile: an intricate literary goliath called “the Talmud” (lit. “teaching”, once again). Confusingly, the entire Talmud is often also simply called the Gemara.

The 73-volume Artscroll translation of the Talmud, complete with commentary. A steal at merely $2,999 USD.

What distinguishes the Talmud is its form of dialectic. The Talmud will often quote the opinion of some great rabbi of the past, then immediately attack his position. The truth is gradually teased out over the ensuing lines, with some arguments running for several pages. Famously, a conclusion is not always reached. It seems the Talmud was designed to help judicial acolytes not merely memorise lists of laws, but learn how to weigh genuine human considerations in their decisions. For the most part, the book does not spoon-feed answers.

There are many passages within the Talmud on how valuable this process is. “A disagreement for the sake of Heaven will endure!” says one mishnah. (An individual teaching in the Mishnah is also called a “mishnah”.) This means that if you have a good and genuine point to make, that point will never be obviated by an eventual wise answer. Any wise answer must acknowledge and incorporate your good point into a final synthesis.

For centuries, the Talmud and her pursuant discourse were how Jews learned to be human. The tome was carried into exile with us, and continued to be our cultural and legal backbone as we mostly stuck to ourselves. More than that, it was a surrogate Temple, a grounding pivot for our faith while our homeland and our holy sanctuary lay in ruins.

Then, the Enlightenment struck, followed by the relaxing of anti-Jewish restrictions across the Continent. Suddenly, Jews weren’t merely outsiders with their own distinct culture. They could be full citizens of their host countries, participants in the cosmopolitan effort of humanism. For the first time, you could be an Englishman-who-happened-to-be-Jewish rather than a Jew-who-happened-to-live-in-England.

Benjamin Disraeli, whose Jewish birth did not prevent him from twice becoming Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Being raised in the social milieu of their host nations meant that Jews now learned how to be human by being Westerners, and their Judaism was largely relegated to an (often arbitrary) set of identity markers. Thus modern discussions in Jewish law often look like an absurd game of divine legal sudoku. Scholars furiously discuss ritual purity and food taboos, completely divorced from any understanding of water scarcity and disease vectors and the carrying capacity of ancient Judea.

When we look back at the arguments of the sages in the Talmud, it sure seems like they’re playing Absurd Divine Legal Sudoku as well, at least at first glance. But with an appreciation of their material conditions and shared language, you can still glimpse the real high-stakes conversations they were having, albeit framed in an unfamiliar theologically-laden shorthand.

“From what time does one recite Shema in the evening?” the Talmud begins, presuming you already know (a) what the Shema is, (b) that it is recited in the evening, (c) what the function of that recitation is, and (d) that there are more- and less- ideal times for its recitation.

Although most people studying the Talmud today are missing a huge amount of context, they can (and do) still greatly exert their minds in following the logic of her arguments. And while this tragic misunderstanding yet persists - that the Classical sages were only playing Absurd Divine Legal Sudoku - the study of the Talmud still trains a mind to think in a robust and useful way. Although a point of hot contention (like everything else), it is often thought that this rigour is what has honed the Jewish mind to master other domains like economics, chemistry, literature, and mathematics. In The Polgar Variant, László Polgár, who validated his pedagogical methodology by raising his three daughters into chess grandmasters, genuflects briefly, but tantalisingly, to the Talmud.

A fun image to drop into various conversations, I think.

I have a friend who was ordained as a rabbi, then went to law school. “After yeshiva, law school was easy,” he told me.

The actual practice of working through a Talmudic argument is an exercise well beyond the scope of this review, but let’s close this section with an illuminating old joke on the subject:

A cardinal goes to a rabbi and says “rabbi, I’d like to study the Talmud”.

The rabbi replies, “with respect, you’re unable to study the Talmud.”

“Why not?” the cardinal replies, perplexed.

“I’ll show you. Suppose two burglars come down a chimney. One gets his face dirty, one doesn’t. Who washes his face?”

“The one with the dirty face!”

“Wrong. The one with the clean face washes his face. Examine the logic! The one with the dirty face looks at his compatriot, who has a clean face, and assumes that his face is likewise clean. But the one with the clean face looks at his compatriot, who has a dirty face, and assumes that his own face is likewise dirty. So the burglar with the clean face washes his face. See? You’re not ready to study the Talmud.”

“Oh, I just messed up that one question,” says the cardinal. “Give me another chance.”

“Ok,” says the rabbi. “Two burglars come down a chimney. One gets his face dirty, one doesn’t. Who washes his face?”

“You just asked this! I know the answer. The one with the clean face washes his face.”
“Wrong. They both wash their faces. Examine the logic! The one with the clean face washes first, for reasons we’ve already discussed. But when the one with the dirty face sees this, he correctly deduces that if the burglar with the clean face is washing his face, it must be because he sees his friend has a dirty face. So the burglar with the dirty face also washes his face.”

“Ahhh, I see,” says the cardinal. “Very good, but I insist upon one more chance.”

“Ok,” says the rabbi. “Two burglars come down a chimney. One gets his face dirty, one doesn’t. Who washes his face?”

“We’ve just been through this, twice! Both of them wash their faces!”

“Wrong again,” says the rabbi. “Neither one washes his face. Examine the logic! The one with the dirty face looks at the one with the clean face, and assumes that his own face is likewise clean, so he doesn’t wash his face. The one with the clean face sees that his friend isn’t washing, despite having a dirty face. He surmises that the reason for this must be that his own face is clean, and that his colleague has misread this as implying that his face is also clean. Thus, he knows that his face is clean, and he doesn’t wash.”

“Wonderful!” says the cardinal. “I understand completely. You must give me exactly one last chance, and I’ll definitely succeed!”

“Ok,” says the rabbi. “Two burglars come down a chimney. One gets his face dirty, one doesn’t. Who washes his face?”

“Neither!” exclaims the cardinal with pride. “See? I understand the Talmud.”
“You fool!” shouts the rabbi. “You absolute buffoon! How could you think such a thing? Examine the logic! How can it be that two burglars come down the same chimney, and only one has a dirty face?”

With jokes like this, is it any wonder people keep trying to kill us?

Persecution

An old Jewish man looks skywards and asks, “Lord, is it true we’re the chosen people?”

The heavens open, and all the world pauses as an impossibly deep voice answers:
“YES, IT’S TRUE.”
The old Jew keeps his gaze steady and says, “well, would you mind choosing someone else for a change?”

The cardinal from the last section, understandably furious about his humiliation, decides to tell everyone that the Jews are poisoning the wells. Or kidnapping Christian children to make their blood into matzah. Or using a giant space laser to manipulate the weather.

Pretty soon you have a lot of miffed peasants doing the whole torch-and-pitchfork thing. The flare-ups of violence have causes deeper than slander, or course. The lowest socioeconomic rungs are often flattened as the great wheels turns, and it’s a much safer bet to take your rage out on the middleman minority than it is to come at the king.

What doesn’t kill you often leaves you a traumatised husk of your previous self. So why call persecution a strength?

Nissim Taleb argues that there are three kinds of response to stress: fragile, robust, antifragile. The fragile object, when struck, shatters. The robust remains unbroken. But the antifragile becomes stronger. Pushing heavy weights might shred your muscles, but also cause them to heal stronger than before.

In the same way, Jews have responded to centuries of persecution by becoming mobile, agile, and extremely cooperative. They can go anywhere and put down roots, then be driven away by the next stormwind and repeat. They can switch profession or industry with great rapidity, then swiftly master the new domain. Perhaps most importantly: they help each other. Boy, do they help each other. Charity is basically the Jewish national sport.

On a zoomed-out level, there are innumerable Jewish charities with significant endowments. There’s the place you get your free wheelchair rental after a tumble, the place that provides food packages on a Friday afternoon, and the place that will administer blood tests to you and your partner to screen for genetic diseases.

But on a zoomed-in level: if you go for Shabbos to a new synagogue, in a new town, you’re very likely to have someone come up to you, say hi, ask where you’re from, and interrogate you until he finds the chain of friends, cousins, and business associates that links the two of you. We call this process “playing Jewish geography”. Even if this game fails to find a link, but especially if it succeeds, your interlocutor is likely to invite you over for the meal, or find a friend of his to host you.

We help each other in a thousand tiny ways. We bring in each other’s mail and take out each other’s trash. We create spreadsheet rosters of volunteers to handle meals for families that have just given birth; or, Heaven protect us, for families who have just lost someone. We carry large amounts of cash and diamonds around for each other, and never give the slightest worry to theft.

I am reminded of Lord Stark:

Let me tell you something about wolves, child. When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives. Summer is the time for squabbles. In winter, we must protect one another, keep each other warm, share our strengths.

For the Jew, winter is always coming.

Comedy

Another thing that persecution helps with is being funny. Use your pain, they say. Well, when you’ve had a couple thousand of years of Inquisitions, Holocausts, and angry mobs … you’ve hit the comedic jackpot.

We can distinguish fairly neatly between Jewish comedy and comedy by Jews. In the latter, you have your Jerries Seinfeld, your Rodneys Dangerfield, your Jons Stewart. In the former, it’s a different breed. Mel Brooks might be the only true master of Jewish comedy to break through to broader popularity, but from within the tribe, the type specimen is a man named Jackie Mason.

"My grandfather always said that I shouldn't watch my money. That I should watch my health.
So while I was watching my health, someone stole my money. It was my grandfather."

We’re a neurotic people, with plenty to be neurotic about. It’s hard to say that the comedy is always helping, rather than making things worse. But when it does help, it seems to have two main benefits. An old Hassidic tale:

Reb Simcha Bunim of Przysucha was walking by a river and saw a man drowning. He called to the man, “give my regards to the Leviathan!”

The man laughed, and so Reb Bunim was able to reach out and save him.

I mentioned this story to a friend, who said “it’s obviously about depression right? Can we agree that’s what this story is about?”

I hadn’t realised it before then, but it struck me that my friend was correct. When someone is in a bad-enough place, you can’t even begin to do the important work of heal & rescue until you’ve shaken him a little. A good joke is supremely useful for that purpose. For a contemporary example, here’s Tony Robbins using the same technique.

The Hassidic masters were rarely said to have possessed such striking jawlines

The first benefit of Jewish comedy, its first function, is to help someone laugh so he can begin to escape his own sense of despair.

The second benefit is more subtle. Here’s psychiatrist Martin Grotjahn:

One can almost see how a witty Jewish man carefully and cautiously takes a sharp dagger out of his enemy’s hands, sharpens it so that it can split a hair in mid-air, polishes it until it shines brightly, stabs himself with it, then returns it gallantly to the anti-Semite with the silent reproach: Now see whether you can do it half as well.

Pithy passage, sure … but it doesn’t address the question of why on earth you would want to do this. Surely a knife to the heart kills just as surely whether it’s from another’s hand or one’s own?

It seems to me that if the Reb Simcha Bunim story illustrates the potential for a joke to shake one out of depression, that this passage illustrates the potential for a joke to shake one out of indignity. When you are defined by your enemy’s castigation, you are painted into a psychological corner. But if you can take the slurs and criticisms - earned or unearned! - and present them with more elegance than can your oppressors, you’ve won a small but important victory. Though you’re still stuck working with their script, you can rewrite it for literary quality and perform it with greater flair. In doing so, you have ceased to be merely the audience of your own denunciation. You have become an actor, both in the sense of being the thespian under the lights, and in the sense of being an autonomous agent.

Ok, here’s one more:

A traveller is making his way through a densely-thicketed wood. As he zig-zags along narrow, half-forgotten paths, he spies a watchtower.

He calls up to the man atop the tower. “Ho! Where is Plony Village?”

The man replies: “Just over that way! Take a left at the creek, and then a right at the large boulder.”

“Thank you. By the way, what are you doing out here? Are you here to guard the village?”
“Guard? Not at all. I’m a Messiah watchman.”
“A Messiah watchman? What does that mean?”
“Well, the townsfolk were concerned that if the Messiah ever came through these parts, gathering the exiled Jews to return us to the Promised Land, he might accidentally overlook us because our village is so remote. So the village council decided to build this watchtower, and have someone stay in it, so that when the Messiah comes, I can tell him how to get to our village.”

“Wow! How interesting. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Tell me: does the job of Messiah watchman pay a lot?”
“No, but it’s very steady work.”

See? We’re poking fun at the futility of our own perennial eschatological optimism, but in the very process of doing so, we’re finding yet another way to see the brighter side of things. So it goes.

Hymie and Seymour are on safari. A wild animal leaps from the foliage onto Seymour’s head, sending him into a panic.

“Hymie! What is it? What is it??” he shrieks.

“How should I know?” replies Hymie. “What am I, a milliner?”

Hats

Most Jews don’t wear hats, but for those who do, hats are very serious business.

Jewish law requires men to cover their heads. Males start wearing one of these from the age of three:

It’s called a kippah (lit. “cover”) or yarmulke (lit. “fear of the King”), and it’s meant to indicate humility before one’s Creator.

(Married Jewish women also cover their heads, but that’s it’s own whole thing and beyond the scope of this essay.)

OK, so far so good. The kippah above is a fairly standard Chabad design. Here’s a selection of other designs, along with attached signaling information:

Hard to believe this is straight from Pew.

If you’re sufficiently attuned to the Matrix, you can tell all sorts of things about a Jew from his hat. There’s the basic divide between the black kippot and the knitted kippot. You can often tell how serious a guy is in his faith (or how much he wants his faith to be taken as a core part of his identity) by the size of his kippah. And he’ll sometimes tell you explicitly about his political or sports or pop culture allegiances too.

But once you get into the ultra-Orthodox world, you’re normally seeing an additional hat on top of the kippah. Take a look:

At first glance, they’re all dressed the same, right? But the longer you look, the more you notice subtle differences. These differences speak volumes to those who have ears to hear. I recently asked a good friend and mentor of mine to explain his hat.

His hat looks like this.

He said, and I quote here almost verbatim:

This hat is called a “samet kappelutsch”. It literally means “silken hat”. If I flipped it around, it would be Vizhnitz or Seret. If made of ordinary materials (like a Borcellino) rather than velvet, as half of my children wear, it signifies non-belonging to specific chassidish groups (like Belz); they belong to either general Polish or general Russian Chassidim (e.g. Chernobyl, Ger etc). Recently, about nine months ago, they made a minhag that the base age for switching from the more juvenile hats (such as peak-caps) to the kappelutsches would be raised by a few years.

I wish I knew enough to explain what is going on here. Really, I do. I thought about doing a deep dive and coming up with all the answers, with a grand taxonomy of hats.

But, in the end, I decided that my ignorance would be a teaching moment. The lesson is important, and it’s kinda the same as the point I started with.

Even though I’m the guy teaching you about Judaism, I still barely have any idea what’s going on. And to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that the vastness of the machinery can be fully understood by a single person. There are people who spend their whole lives on it, and still barely grasp their own small section of the edifice.

As Rabbi Eliezer said on his deathbed:

I have learned much Torah, and I have taught much Torah.

I have learned much Torah, yet I took from my teachers like a dog lapping at the ocean.

I have taught my Torah, yet my students took from me like the quill draws from the inkwell.

So, please, take everything I’ve said with a sense of perspective.

And if you’re ever in Jerusalem, come for Shabbos. (I’m serious, btw. I’ve cleared it with my wife and everything.)

L'Ambroisie, by Bernard Pacaud

"Whither Tartaria?"

It's the question that's haunted at least a few ACX readers, not to mention its writer. But surely everyone has felt its tug when they glance at the clothes of passersby on the street, the megalithic glass blocks or formless blobs surrounding them, the nonrepresentational public art installations you're too "unrefined" to understand. The unkempt politicians, the hypersexed ads, the 140-word discourse. The myriad books and movies that prioritize everything besides fun, meaning, or beauty. A life full of noise and color and interjection but without underlying order or pleasure.

Perhaps I'm the wrong person to talk about this. Saint-Exupéry's Little Prince encounters a "serious" man who spends all his days counting the stars in the sky he "owns" and flatly declares, "he's not a man at all—he's a mushroom!". I am such a mushroom, in my profession and disposition—and without meaning offense, I suspect many ACX readers may share that. I have no artistic (mis)adventures to call my own besides some anime fanfictions and terrible fanart. There are better reviews of this review's subject, particularly Adam Goldberg's and Vedat Milor's. And yet, my regard for L'Ambroisie is such that, like a love letter unbidden, I'll write it anyway.

I. Introduction

First, a quick preface of fine dining for the unfamiliar. Although it can sometimes be "normal food done really well" (particularly in Japan, which has a rather unique formal ecosystem), in many cases it follows certain conventions: tasting menus, fussy presentation, high price tags. There are varying rating systems such as Michelin stars, the World 50 Best and La Liste lists, online platforms like OAD, and local guides like Tabelog, Gault Millau, and Gambero Rosso. The Michelin star scale ranges from 0 to 3, with even 1 being a high honor and a career achievement.

The following is a quick array of what people "typically" think of as fine dining, sampled from my own travels, as a supplant to years of experience:

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From left to right, top to bottom:

Langoustine and peas at CORE by Clare Smyth (London, UK), 3 stars
Mackerel and lemon at the Restaurant de l'Hôtel de Ville Crissier (Geneva region, Switzerland), 3 stars
Toasted nuts and ras-el-hanout at Noor (Cordoba, Spain), 3 stars
Foie gras and quince at Per Se (New York, USA), 3 stars
Caviar, shrimp, rockfish gelée at Le Louis XV (Monaco), 3 stars
Kamasu (barracuda) sushi at Sushi Ginza Onodera (New York, USA), 2 stars

All of them excellent examples of fine dining to my palate and eye.

Au contraire, a selection of places that did not live up to my standards, despite their high regard and reputations in the culinary and critical worlds:

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From left to right, top to bottom:

Tuna sashimi with caviar, vegetables, and shoyu at L'Oiseau Blanc (Paris, France), 2 stars
Smoked salmon and wasabi at Le Pré Catelan (Paris, France), 3 stars
Salad and champagne jelly at Pavillon Ledoyen (Paris, France), 3 stars
Beef hump with some jjang-like sauce at Mugaritz (San Sebastian region, Spain), 2 stars
Squab, cheongju, red onion at Atomix (New York, USA), 2 stars
Buri (yellowtail) sushi at Harutaka (Tokyo, Japan), 3 stars

The keen eye will notice a few commonalities: too many incoherent components to a dish, a clumsy approach to fusion across cultures, and a lack of meticulousness. A further critique on taste would extend to subpar ingredient sourcing, ineffective light (or absent) saucing, poor (or light, or absent) preparation of proteins (again, inspired by Japan and Scandinavia), and a lack of meticulousness (translating to haphazard presentation). This is not a new opinion, albeit a contrarian one.

It is worth noting many of these are very famous and well-regarded, with higher prices, longer waitlists, and more accolades (such as World 50 Best rankings or critical praise) than some of the restaurants in the former category. Pavillon Ledoyen has the second-farthest-in-advance reservation in Paris. Mugaritz and Atomix are mainstays of the World 50 Best list and cultural icons. L'Oiseau Blanc was elevated from 1 to 2 stars after it changed chefs with the current style. For the prudence of my (or my expense account's) funds I often try to avoid places like these, but the omission speaks with more volume. A quick leafing through the pages of the Michelin stars guide in any city across the world will show most starred restaurants are like this nowadays; it is the default. On balance, with each passing year, more restaurants in the first category close to be replaced by those in the second than the other way around.

Excellence in fine dining is alive and well when sought carefully, as clear from the first category of examples. Unlike architecture or even contemporary art, it is first and foremost a commercial consumer endeavor, and the paying customer base here being much larger makes it that much more difficult to gaslight it. At the same time, chefs are no stranger to trends, often pioneered by competent, creative, iconoclastic chefs who then disseminate them to less capable hands. Picasso was transgressive, but he also knew how to paint and broke convention against a backdrop of those conventions existing at the time. Novelty wears off quickly, as anyone trying to copy a Rothko will soon discover. So it goes with chefs like the Adría brothers (molecular gastronomy, Asian fusion) and René Redzepi (new Scandinavian) and Joel Robuchon (one of the original Frenchmen to do Asian fusion) as they pass on their findings to the industry. Especially when they can be exploited for cost or labor savings. And so goes not just white ironed tablecloths and baroque palatial interiors, but preparation-intensive sauces, eye-pleasing presentations, and time-consuming protein-cooking techniques. Japan's mastery in sourcing, ingredient preparation, and color aesthetics becomes raw "cooking" and careless presentation. Scandinavia's foraged herbs and fermentation become an indiscriminate hammer in search of nail, bland or absent sauces, and more careless presentation. In the mystery of Tartaria, modernity slouches towards minimalism and coldness as much due to cost as trendiness, both fingers of Moloch, and cuisine is no exception. And so suffers taste for the tongue, beauty for the eyes, and ornamentation for both senses.

II. L'Ambroisie

This was all but a hypothesis to me until I went to L'Ambroisie.

L'Ambroisie opened in 1981 under chef Bernard Pacaud and has kept 3 Michelin stars since 1988, the longest extant in Paris.

When he opened it, Mr. Pacaud had intended it as a casual affair, almost a bistro: pot-au-feu weekday specials in the beginning, as he recalls in one interview. Mr. Pacaud himself grew up an orphan, working in the kitchens of La Mère Brazier in Lyon at 15. Madame Brazier was the first chef (not just woman) to win 3 stars for 2 restaurants, a fact sadly erased in most press when Mr. Ducasse repeated the feat 65 years later. She insisted on inspecting the nails of her chickens and nearly resisted a city inspector's demand to connect her restaurant to the electricity and gas mains rather than use wood-fired stoves and ovens. Mr. Pacaud inherited this Luddism, famously having no modern machines in his kitchen besides a blender and a fridge in a manner akin to an edomae sushi chef. The restaurant's age, spirit, and eccentric atavism incubated something extraordinary.

I had eaten many fine meals before L'Ambroisie, and have since. Not to crassly weight critics' awards like so, but this includes 117 Michelin star restaurants, 30 3-star restaurants, and 14 World 50 Best restaurants. And L'Ambroisie is my very favorite among them all. Before going, I had ideas of excellence, yes, but I could never have imagined something better was possible. If ever there were a 4th Michelin star, as flippant as it is to say, L'Ambroisie would be my nomination.

To put this in context, while it is not in want of recognition, it is not a particularly fashionable choice. It is relatively easy to make a reservation, it is not on many of the newfangled award lists, and I was the youngest person in the dining room by many years (or decades) on my visits. It is a divisive restaurant, with many calling it dated or boring, as any look at the reviews will inform.

Michelin is relatively tight lipped on its criteria, so people often ask me for my view on the meanings of the stars. My personal opinion is the first star is for excellence in execution, the second is for establishing a distinct personality, and the third is for bringing something unique into this world ("worth a special journey", in Michelin's own abstract tire-sale-promoting parlance, as opposed to a stop or detour). And I feel it is safe to say nobody else in the entire world does what L'Ambroisie does, at the level it does.

III. Amuse-bouche

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A meal here always begins with a kugelhopf, a sort of bundt-cake-shaped savory bun, proffered directly by the waiter into your hand to dissuade the Instagrammer. On my first visit in the summer of 2022, it was Comté cheese with tomato and olive. On my second in spring of 2025, it was black truffle and cheese. Herein lies the first rule of L'Ambroise: seasonality. So often a cynical excuse by other restaurants to all serve peas in the summer or squash in the autumn in army-like unison, here it is a religion, an excuse for indulgence, a necessity to only serve ingredients at their absolute prime to create the best dishes possible. L'Ambroisie has a few menu seasons throughout the year: the summer, ceps (porcini mushrooms) in the early autumn, white truffles (tuber magnatum) in the late autumn and early winter, Périgord black truffles (tuber melanosporum) in the late winter and early spring, and morel mushrooms in the spring. Yes, there is a strong focus on expensive, luxury fungus in the timing here. Luxury ingredients are not treated with either avoidant shame or obligatory afterthought here like they often are elsewhere.

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The amuses on my first visit were more typical, if a little indulgent by other restaurants' standards: comte with pepper, leeks and caviar, and a fennel and currant tart. That indulgence presages the generosity to come later. Working in such a small space, each amuse is stripped down to a few basic components that allows each, particularly the vegetables, to shine with all the expectation of summer. Leeks in particular are a classic French ingredient and the unadorned concept, seasoned with salty caviar, results in a better execution than other interpretations of this dish I've had elsewhere.

The amuse on my second visit is more like a small dish in its own right, something that reminds me of Amador in Vienna (another fine restaurant worth its own review…). It allows a more complete expression of a chef's thought, although obviously more expensive for a restaurant to do, a running theme in this place. Although I’ve been to several of the most highly-regarded restaurants in Italy, this incidental dish is the single best pasta I’ve ever had, which is quite an obscene opinion to have about a French restaurant (my second-favorite pasta dish is also French, the spaghetti gratin at Le Cinq, but that is another blasphemy for another time).

It is a ricotta-stuffed ravioli in a sauce of cheese and lemon, with cut (not shaved) matchsticks of black truffle. The handmade pasta dough is a perfect, chewy al dente. The acidity of the lemon controls the heaviness of the thick cheese sauce. That the sauce is thick and in a quantity to submerge the bottom of the bowl like a small soup is notable unto itself, in an age of light oil- or soy-based sauces. And then the truffles: I have had many other black truffles at other places, and now I wonder if they were all fake. Poor quality or out-of-season ones taste as unpleasant as eating wet dirt, which is why L’Ambroisie refuses to serve them outside their proper time. When high quality they have a pungent, earthy aroma that’s hard to describe, although I will say that fake truffle oil is derived from gasoline (another substance with lots of volatile organic compounds) to give an idea. White truffles have an extra savory garlicky aftertaste, which is part of why I often prefer them, which black truffles mostly lack.

Herein lies another quality of L’Ambroisie: obsessive attention to ingredient quality and selection. There are restaurants dedicated to this, but many of them are located on coasts or countrysides with their own farms and fishermen (or are in Japan, which has the world’s most well developed seafood logistics for obvious reasons, and is entirely a narrow island). L’Ambroisie is mostly unique for achieving these heights in the middle of a city, a landlocked one at that.

I had a wonderful white truffle pasta dish at Piazza Duomo in Alba, original home of the white truffle. I applauded its genius in serving cheese-stuffed ravioli with absolutely no sauce where others might try, knowing it would smother the truffles. L’Ambroisie does not care. Somehow they found black truffles so strong, they could survive the coating of thick cheese sauce and contribute aroma and flavor anyway. The matchstick cutting (as opposed to traditional slices) of the truffles lends an element of texture and thus flavor, crumbling apart in your mouth, while maximizing surface area to propagate aromas.

And we haven’t even started yet.

IV. Appetizers

The first thing one notices about the menu at L’Ambroisie is it is only available in French, and the service will roundly mock you for requesting one in English. The second is that is a la carte only rather than preset tasting menu or at least pre-fixe, the fine dining equivalent in antiquated oddity of showing up to a first date in a powdered wig or dress corset. Mr. Pacaud’s Luddism and his resistance to compromise, his absolute artisan’s resistance to trends or polite cultural correctness, strikes again even before ordering. The service’s imperious suggestions on which courses go, or do not go, together is another manifestation. This sort of inflexibility is more the kind one encounters in Japanese craftsmen than a European restaurant.

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The appetizer on my first visit was a classic of the house: Feuillantine de langoustines aux graines de sésame, sauce au curry. The menus change with the seasons but the langoustines, the caviar sea bass, and the chocolate tart never leave, a compromise between novelty and familiarity for different kinds of regular customers. Some other items rotate but stay the same across years. The menu allows for novel items, but some kinds of perfection require yearslong consistent practice and improvement, or in some cases just cannot be improved from a place of perfection.

The langoustines ruin all other langoustines for me. They are to other 3-star restaurants’ preparations what those are to those of ordinary restaurants. A knife is unnecessary; a fork will do. Crustaceans, chiefly langoustines, impart a subtle sweetness in skilled hands, but here they whisper a new flavor from this quality taken to new heights: a sort of innate milkiness from the juices. They are of unusual, plump size and come in four to other restaurants’ typical one. Even at L’Ambroisie’s rarefied prices I have to wonder if they break even on ingredient costs on this dish, when other places would be happy to charge as much for a single tail. I have had sublime shrimps at other places (Le Petit Nice by Gérald Passedat in Marseille, Sukiyabashi Jiro by Jiro Ono in Tokyo) with the assistance of their guts and brains, but in tail flesh alone L’Ambroisie is unparalleled.

The curry sauce is addictive with a hint of spice. It is unapologetic in its classic thickness and quantity, pooling the entire dish. There is enough to coat every bite and its consistency is capable of coating things at all, both increasingly uncommon traits.

The unassuming element that most impresses me though, is the spinach under the langoustine. It is a revelation, like Christian Le Squer’s spring peas, or Enrico Crippa’s 21, 31, 41, 51 salad, or Fumio Kondo’s tempura onion. As a hater of vegetables and an unfortunate genetic super-taster who detects even slight bitterness in leafy greens as intolerable (even at many elite places) and struggles to eat them to this day, these specimens were cooked in a way that yielded only a creamy flavor, no bitterness. Spinach like this could turn me into Popeye. I often judge the mettle of a top restaurant not by how it prepares my favorites, but by how it prepares my bêtes noires, and in this respect L’Ambroisie was an astounding success from the first bites

On my second visit, I took full advantage of the truffle season to order: Velouté de topinambour en île flottante à la truffe.

An île flottante in its original form is a French dessert of meringue (egg whites and sugar) in a pool of cream or custard, here repurposed as a savory dish of egg in sauce. A playful twist on a French classic. The whole egg itself is immaculately poached, bursting with runny yolk upon cutting. Yet herein lies a mystery: a layered coating of truffle purée on the inside of the egg white. How did it end up there? For a kitchen with no machines and rooted only in traditional techniques, I had more fun pondering this than some of the stale “surprises” issued forth by ones specializing in molecular gastronomy and avant-garde cuisine. A restaurant that chooses to stay faithful to the past need not be stuck in it and sometimes offers more intellectual content than those that try to manufacture it via novelty. Sometimes the “new” can come from just flavors and cooking techniques, rather than chemistry, cultural fusions, or weird ingredients. It may be the world’s most inflated egg price, but I’ll gladly pay for the labor and the inspiration.

The truffles, here sliced but thickly, again ignore the usual downfall of getting drowned in sauce via their sheer strength and quantity, acting not as garnish but co-ingredient.

The velouté of Jerusalem artichoke, while perfect as accompanying sauce, is almost better enjoyed as a milky soup when left over in such quantity after the eggs and truffles are consumed, especially with traces of both (particularly yolk). Here one should note that velouté is one of the six mother sauces of French cuisine (béchamel, espagnole, tomato, velouté, hollandaise, mayonnaise) codified by French cuisine pioneer Escoffier in the early 1900s, many of them prepared with fats or butters. Velouté in particular uses the thickener roux, made of flour and fat. Other classic French sauces use bases of creams, butters, and wines. While these are still in use, many places have either forsaken or lightened these sauces, or reduced the quantity given, primarily due to the preponderance of trendy Japanese and Scandinavian influences, but also for health reasons as people have shied away from animal fats. Another reason is that these sauces are quite difficult and time-consuming to make, often requiring many hours of prep. L’Ambroisie’s dedication to these delicious old-fashioned sauces despite all the factors otherwise is one of their unique assets.

V. Mains

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My main on my first visit was another classic of the house: Escalopines de bar à l’émince d’artichaut, caviar kristal. It is of course a royal dish when it arrives at your table. It cured my caviar cravings for at least 1-2 years, by my estimation, and may very well be more than many people eat in their whole lifetimes.

I admit I did not understand this dish at first, but thankfully I was given the opportunity to arrive at it due to the large, a la carte portion. One must dispense with their usual timidity with caviar and heap it on the spoon. Here it is not a garnish, but an ingredient of the dish. Salt is for commoners when one can season with caviar. Consumed in the proper quantity in each bite, one realizes this is a simulacrum of the sea bass swimming in seawater, enveloped by gentle, nutty saltiness. It is a unique sensation of caviar I have not experienced anywhere else in the world, powered by the sheer indulgence of it.

Every other element of the dish deserves note. The seabass is cooked in a way I cannot figure out to have the firmness and juiciness of chicken, when bad seabass can so often be flaky and dry. The artichoke is savory, almost reminiscent of bread except in texture, another stellar example of care for vegetables. The nage sauce (meaning “in the swim”, poached with the seafood, fittingly enough for the impression of the dish) is made with white wine and again shamelessly thickened with butter. This sauce is another proud celebration of classic French technique and ingredients. And most importantly, as hinted above, each and every element combines its different notes of savory into one harmony.

There is one more surprise as you work your way through the seabass fillets: more caviar buried underneath, hidden within the ring of artichokes, to continue proper enjoyment of the dish. Money is not a priority for Mr. Pacaud, and while he puts great care into the presentation of his dishes, it is not the priority for him either. He is a true artist. His only aim is to give you the best meal he can, which happens to be the best meal in the world. It is the twilight-blue painted ceiling of the Scrovegni chapel or the gilding of the Basilica di San Marco. This spirit of generosity, of auteurism, of unbounded desire for excellence, permeates the restaurant and everything that comes out of its kitchen.

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My main dish on my second visit, though following a tough act, managed to outdo the first in outrageous luxury: Chausson de truffe fraîche “bel humeur” en hommage à Claude Peyrot.

For months in anticipation, I jokingly referred to it as the “Oreo”, although really it more visually resembles a fried Oreo at a county fair like I visited in my childhood. Two solid chunks of black truffle sandwiching a layer of foie gras, all baked into a puff pastry, sitting on top of a layer of truffle purée. I believe it is the most expensive item on any of L’Ambroisie’s menus. The waiter kindly informed me upon arrival that there were only two available on the day of visit, and beforehand had warned over the phone that availability would depend on the quality and size of the truffles brought in that day. Not a problem though - I had prereserved one months in advance.

I once read of the Jewish concept of Yeridot ha-Dorot: the decay of the generations, as we successively drift away from the original light of God. Tolkien’s legendarium takes a similar view on the declining power of the elves and lifespans of the men of Númenor. This cynical view applied to the culinary arts gained some credence with me after this dish. Notice the humility of master chef Pacaud in sharing the credit for this dish with his mentor Claude Peyrot. Mr. Pacaud labored on this dish starting in his time working at Le Vivarois in Paris under Peyrot over forty years ago and continues to this day. It is a lamp flung by ghosts from the far past into today, predating globalization and social media and young people no longer familiar with home cooking or traditional cuisine. Skills and cuisine can only be transmitted from person to person, generation to generation, and this dish (along with Mère Brazier’s truffle chicken, which being for two people I was regrettably too full to also order) is one of the oldest authentic messages in food form you can consume today. Its greatness is a product of its direct connection to the past and maybe in some sense it never gets better than this. Others talk a lot about old craft skills lost to technology, particularly with AI deskilling looming, and one wonders what metis will be irrecoverably lost once this one-in-a-billion Luddite with an outdated kitchen passes on.

As for the dish itself, the description is quite simple: it is waterboarding with truffle, like a BDSM Guantanamo for the 1%. The aroma of truffle is so overwhelming it clogs your nostrils and the back of your throat and almost stops you from breathing. Between the absurd quality and quantity of truffle, it feels like eating a dangerous lump of something chemical. I expected an unusual amount of truffle but nothing could prepare me for this dish once I cut open the pastry. The texture, unlike the crumbliness of truffle I expected, was more like the firmness of a cooked mushroom, and the quantity was such that it contributed flavor (a slight final taste of completely unsweet/bitter dark chocolate) in addition to aroma. Not cooking truffle is a cardinal rule of truffles, but Mr. Pacaud does not care because he stands above such rules. That it does not lose aroma, but rather bottles it up in the baked pastry to pleasantly obnoxious levels, is an impressive technical achievement and attention to detail that could have been only perfected over the course of years, maybe decades. The hot fatty oiliness of the foie gras and the buttery pastry add pleasant complementary sensations, but admittedly these are almost footnotes in the dish.

VI. Desserts

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At other restaurants, the decline or removal of pastry chefs and concomitant loss of great desserts is yet another concession to capitalist reality. L’Ambroisie’s dessert menu at first glance looks like another victim, with its deceptively simple and staunchly traditional desserts. Take for example its Tarte fine sablée au cacao amer, glace à la vanille Bourbon, possibly the stupidest-looking dessert ever at a 3-star restaurant. A slice of chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, seriously? The kind you’d find at Applebee’s or Red Lobster?

L’Ambroisie may not be my literal favorite dessert section in the world, just because Jordi Roca at El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Spain is such a madman. But it is one of my favorites, and that deceiving chocolate tart deserves all of its 3 stars.

The top is dusted with chocolate, the bottom a thick crust. But the middle, an ethereal chocolate sabayon, is so light as to be made of air. It has none of the density and little of the moisture of a normal cake. It compacts into nothing as you chew. It is neither cloyingly sweet nor plainly bitter, as perfectly calibrated as chocolate can be. The accompanying vanilla ice cream has such a deep vanilla flavor it feels like a platonic ideal, unmatched anywhere else. Much like the egg, this dish goes to show that with a little bit of inspiration in the idea and a lot of perspiration in the execution, the most mundane premise can be elevated to not just greatness, but even distinctiveness.

I am not a cheese expert, deferring to the affineur for his recommendations, but the cheese selection here is probably the finest I've ever had. I still chase after the choice of comté cheese, continuing the theme of the kitchen's discerning eye for ingredients.

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The meal ends similar to how it began, with a small selection of petit fours. On my first visit it was a selection of treats (canele, caramelized sugar and vanilla, and strawberry tart), on my second, a bowl of citrusy madeleines. Mr. Pacaud's daughter having taken over the pastry section on my second visit, it seems she has taken it in an even more traditional direction, one which I approve of and indicates it's in good hands (as opposed to his wayward son, who has opened and closed many other restaurant ventures and whom his own father deemed more of a businessman than an artist).

VII. Other Comments

The service here has quite a formidable - as in, unfriendly - reputation, although I've had nothing but positive experiences. Perhaps it depends on votre capacité à parler, ou au moins à lire, le français, or which wine you order. On my second visit their gregariousness even made me feel like an invited guest at a particularly wealthy friend's house party, laughing and participating in antics and jokes.

It helps that the restaurant is richly decorated, consistent with its spirit. There are white tablecloths and chandeliers. An Aubusson tapestry presides over the room. Though Alexander the Great's conquest of the Persians, beheaded humans and maimed horses and all, might seem an odd choice for a dinner backdrop, it's pleasing to the eye and yet another celebration of aesthetic beauty and human accomplishment. In the context of deracinated plain white or "Japandi" (Japanese+Scandinavian minimalist design) or exposed brick dining rooms that could be anywhere in the world and so common these days, it may even have an air of defiance. Though the space is more intimate, for me it compares with some of my grandest Parisian palaces Le Cinq or Le Pré Catelan, or even more opulent options like that of Le Louis XV in Monaco, or the 14th-century Genoan palazzo with original Renaissance frescoes by Bernardo Strozzi that hosts The Cook al Cavo. Unfortunately dining rooms like this seem on the downswing, even when people clearly prefer them, as in all other arts and spaces. The sad modernist renovation of Espadon at the Ritz Paris is a testament to that; best enjoy them while you can. Even L'Ambroisie itself has sold the tapestries in some of its other rooms, the ones that played backdrop to summits with Obama and Clinton, and replaced them with gaudy geometric patterns in a concession to modernity for reasons unknown to me, although they have thankfully preserved the first room.

The perfect execution of cooked proteins, meticulous discrimination of ingredients, and beautiful radial plating are the text, uncommon enough in other restaurants for reasons of skill or choice. The deliberately rich and thick, "outdated", absolutely delicious sauces are the subtext. That Mr. Pacaud still uses butter and cream and fat and wine and the true spirit of France when many others at his level eschew or reduce them for the sake of fashion or health, shows a cantankerous commitment to the diner's pure joy and nothing else. He is the brave soul who tells the world it's wrong, and in my view, he is right.

VIII. The Future

Mr. Pacaud is retiring: the last I spoke with him, in July of this year. What happens when this last of the Mohicans hangs his apron?

Preferences can be gaslit, mimetic, or falsified, but they cannot be eradicated. Plenitude in Paris, the latest restaurant by Arnaud Donckele of La Vague d'Or in St Tropez, has as its conceit a central focus on complex yet classically based sauces, and the longest waitlist in Paris by far. A personally funded project of the CEO of LVMH, it perhaps shines a light on a path for other very rich individuals who bemoan the current state of art and wish to reassert taste: the ancient model of patronage (and hopefully done better than other attempts). Juan Amador at Amador in Vienna once dabbled in molecular gastronomy in his youth before coming to the same realization and retracing back to the fundamentals of cuisine, including real sauces, to amazing results. Armenian immigrant Karen Torosyan has set up shop at Bozar in Brussels, resurrecting the art of pastry pates and pithiviers with a historical reenactor's passion, and gaining recognition for it.

If all goes to plan Mr. Pacaud's successor will be his longtime sous chef, the Japanese Chikara Yoshitomi. Though I love Japanese cuisine and rank it among the best in the world, I've spent a good deal of time here bashing its malign influence and clumsy fusion with European cuisines. So it is perhaps surprising that I find this development unsurprising and perhaps not unwelcome. Mr. Pacaud reminds me more of sushi chef Jiro Ono than any Frenchman, the latter a 99-year-old famous for his clinging to komezu vinegar and fax machine reservations long after the world abandoned both. A prior attempt to hand L'Ambroisie off to a Frenchman imploded when the latter refused to stoop to helping clean the kitchen as head chef, in Pacaud's words - unusual in a French brigade, where the head chef often isn't even present, but par for the course in a sushi-ya.

The Japanese seem to love French cuisine more than the French do: a quick search for baked pithiviers of the kind I ate here more readily yields places in Tokyo (Ginza Oishi, Chez Inno, Sezanne, etc.) than in Europe, and several of Pacaud's former employees have opened in the city (Cote d'Or, Est). L'Ambroisie itself, famously publicity-shy, featured in a Japanese drama named "La Grande Maison Tokyo". I laughed once when, sitting at an anime cafe festooned with Love Live characters on all the walls, I suddenly thought of the Aubusson tapestry and the Genoan Strozzi frescoes. Stationed in a completely different time period and aimed at a completely different audience, nay, socioeconomic class, nevertheless the essence of that irrepressible, unembarrassed urge to express beauty for its own sake and bring visual joy to people was there.

Not to labor the point, but I also see hope in Italy's fine dining scene, their regard for pasta like the Japanese regard for sushi. Tartaria disappears in all countries (as a quick glance at endless concrete box sprawl on your next trip to Japan will suffice to say), but at different rates in different places. Some people would do well to remember that cultures are worth preserving, that tradition does not mean staleness and novelty does not mean progress. Others should remember that a certain openness to talent and consumption is sometimes needed to preserve those parochial cultures, rather than destroying them - sometimes the cosplaying tourists and the starry-eyed newcomers are more enamored of it than the jaded locals.

The goddess of cancer destroys Tartaria and consumes everything. Where might the goddess of everything else eat? Perhaps at a place whose name means "food for the gods".

Lesbian Fanfiction

An introduction to fandom culture through the lens of lesbian shipping

Introduction

Human culture is nested fractally. There is no bottom. - XKCD

Since we’re doing reviews of things that aren’t books, I’m going to review a human subculture: Lesbian Fanfiction.

Actually, if I’m being truly specific, I’m going to review:

Fiction

Fanfiction

Lesbian Fanfiction

Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own

A Fraction of the Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own, including some of the most popular.

A Fraction of the Lesbian Fanfiction hosted on Archive of our Own, including some of the most popular, that I’ve read. <- This

Let’s get something out of the way immediately: I’m not a lesbian. I’m a male-identified more-or-less straight person. So my review of Lesbian fanfiction is necessarily going to be the view of an outsider. That being said, I’ve read a shitload of it, it’s arguably my favorite genre, and I think I have some interesting things to say. Besides, it’s fun to dive headfirst into a subculture you’ve never heard of and look at all the wacky jargon they come up with.

Other warnings: this dives into certain aspects of sexuality, so while there are no NSFW images, the content is briefly R-rated. There are also plenty of spoilers for various shows and books.

Shipping Subculture Basics

First we’ll need to do a brief overview of shipping subculture, because there’s some vocabulary and because Lesbian Fanfiction is a subset of the Shipping Subculture. A lot of my examples will be pulled from Harry Potter, because it’s one of the biggest fanfiction communities and because many people are familiar with the characters and setting.

A ‘Ship’, short for ‘relationship’, is a pairing, usually (but not necessarily) of two characters. A ‘Shipper’ is someone who is emotionally invested in the relationship between those two characters and its success. A shipper ‘ships’ (as a verb) those two characters. Relationships between characters are often expressed as <name>/<name>, with the forward slash indicating a romantic relationship. Certain ships possess a ship name; some ships possess multiple names, and then the shippers disagree over the ship name, and another argument is born on the internet.

A ship can be canonical (the relationship happens explicitly in the source material) or noncanonical (the relationship doesn’t explicitly happen in the source material, although it might be hinted at or ‘teased’). This is referred to as a ‘canon’ ship or a ‘noncanon’ ship. Ships can be between any number of characters of any combination of gender identities.

Two boats preparing to fire cannons at one another, with the 'ship' names labeling them.

The characters of Avatar: The Last Airbender engage in fierce debate over whether or not Kutara should have ended up with Aang or Zuko.

As an example of all this, I am a shipper who ships the Harry Potter/Hermione Granger ship, also known as the Harmony ship. This would be an example of a noncanon het (straight) ship. This means that I think they should have been the primary pairing of the Harry Potter novels, and when I read Harry Potter fanfiction, I tend to gravitate towards stories explicitly advertised as having the two in a romantic relationship.

Other Vocabulary

OTP: Shippers will usually have an ‘OTP’, or ‘One True Pair’, the ship they hold dearest in their heart. If three people are involved in the ship, this is replaced with ‘OT3’.
AU: Alternate Universe. This is when a fanfic transports the characters from their original setting into an alternate one.

There’s minor AU, where a few elements are changed from the original setting but the rest is kept intact (imagine if Harry Potter had been raised by Dumbledore instead of the Dursleys!), and
Major AU, where the setting is completely different (what if the Justice League were all ordinary teenagers attending high school together!)

AO3: Archive Of Our Own, one of the biggest (and best organized) repositories of fanworks on the internet.
Fic: A work of fanfiction, which is a work of fiction using an established world that someone else wrote.

Popular Ships (And My Favorites)

Given that most fiction is heteronormative (not saying this is good or bad, just true), the majority of lesbian fanfiction centers around noncanon pairings. Without going too in-depth, I’m going to list some of my favorite pairings, whether they’re canonical or not, and a brief blurb about them along with a recommended fic (warning: read the tags on the fics; some of them are very R-rated). You can skim this if you want.

Wenclair, NonCanon: Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair from the Netflix show Wednesday. They’re roommates who learn to get along, and Enid appears to be the only person Wednesday accepts physical and emotional intimacy from who isn’t trying to kill her. Recommended fic: In the Heat of the Moment
SwanQueen, NonCanon: Emma Swan and Regina Mills from the ABC show Once Upon A Time about Disney characters in real life. The two of them literally co-parent a child, and the men they’re paired off with are male versions of each other. Recommended fic: every winter fades away (into the spring)
SuperCorp, NonCanon: Kara Danvers (Supergirl) and Lena Luthor from the CW show Supergirl. The two have a very close friendship, a perfect Romeo-and-Juliet backstory (their families are enemies), and are intensely emotionally intimate. Recommended fic: reflecting in your eyes (like an endless summer)
Kigo, NonCanon: Kim Possible and Shego from the Disney Channel show Kim Possible. They have an ‘experienced older person/younger person’ dynamic along with ‘enemies to lovers’, and Shego regularly calls Kim ‘Princess’, ‘Cupcake’, and other terms of endearment. Recommended fic: Alone Together
Clexa, Canon: Clarke Griffin and Lexa from The 100. They do kiss, but Lexa is killed pretty early on (a classic case of ‘Bury Your Gays’, the trope where, like black people in horror movies, gay characters are killed off at suspiciously high rates). Recommended fic: The Lay of Looking-Glass Land

Tropes of the Genre

Lesbian fanfiction, and fanfiction in general, has its share of common tropes.

Common Fanfic Tropes

Enemies to Lovers, where the two characters in the ship start out as enemies and grow closer over time, is very popular. I tend to find it most often when the characters are actually enemies in the canon they come from: Rachel Berry and Quinn Fabray from Glee, Regina Mills and Emma Swan from Once Upon A Time, etc.

For some reason people love coffee shop AUs, where the characters are transplanted into baristas and customers, and high school AUs, where all the characters attend a normal American high school.

Then there’s 5+1, where a fic will be structured as a series of six scenes, five where the scene plays out one way and one where it plays out differently, e.g. “Five times Harry and Hermione almost kissed and one time they did.” I don’t know how or why this became popular, but I suspect it has something to do with listicles.

Some other general tropes: the infamous There Was Only One Bed, wherein the two characters are stuck in a situation where, you guessed it, they need to sleep and must sleep in the same bed. This trope is old as dirt - it was lampooned on 30 Rock - but it’s still quite popular as a way to force physical intimacy. There’s also a plethora of soulmate-based tropes that crop up from time to time.

Lesbian/LGBT-Specific Fanfiction Tropes

Lesbian fanfic in particular has a few tropes that are less well represented in het fics, usually for obvious reasons.

Comphet is a common trope - one or both of the characters involved never realized that they could view women sexually until the other character ‘awakened’ them. This tends to come into play when characters are from a more traditional or conservative background, like Quinn Fabray in Glee (when paired with Santana or, my preference, Rachel Berry) or Alicent Hightower (when paired with Rhaenyra Targaryen) in House of the Dragon.

Gay panic is another, related, trope that pops up a lot; I tend to view this as authors processing their own experiences through their writing. There’s also a wealth of fics that deal specifically with discrimination in regards to gay or lesbian pairings.

And They Were Roommates is a popular trope, especially given that historically, many lesbians have been referred to as ‘roommates’ when in reality they were romantically together (and had to conceal that fact).

One of my favorite tropes is Sun Lesbian, Moon Lesbian, where the pairing is between two girls with opposing personalities that nonetheless mesh: one is cheerful, bright, and outgoing, while the other is quiet, brooding, and quirky. Their aesthetics will reflect this, with the sun lesbian dressing in bright colors and the moon lesbian in dark colors. The best canon pairing of this nature I know of is RWBY’s Yang Xiao Long and Blake Belladonna:

Yang on the left, Blake on the right. Guess which one’s the sun and which is the moon.

And my favorite noncanon pairing of this nature is Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair:

AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES.

Sexuality in Lesbian Fanfiction

There’s a lot of smut. Just so, so much of it. But it’s almost always passionate and emotional, not exploitative or crude. It’s in character. It develops plot. I don’t think there’s necessarily more sex in lesbian fanfiction than there is in gay or straight fanfiction, but I do think that the focus on the emotional aspects comes through clearer.

In fanfic of The 100 pairing Lexa and Clarke Griffon, for instance, the sex is almost always laden with emotion. There’s hate sex revolving around Lexa’s betrayal of Clarke, life-affirming sex in fanfics where (spoilers) Lexa survives, and gentle, caring sex where the emotional weight of the two women’s in-story burdens are explored.

Something that interests me greatly is that there is very often - far more than chance, I would argue - a dominant/submissive dynamic, and the dominant partner usually corresponds to which character is represented as the more ‘masculine’ of the two. Between Lexa and Clarke, for instance, Lexa is usually dominant in the bedroom in most fics, and she’s a trained soldier and commander in the show - a traditionally masculine role. If you look at how she dresses:

Not exactly traditional feminine wear.

It’s also quite masculine.

Wednesday and Enid from the Netflix show Wednesday also tend to exhibit strong D/S dynamics, although Enid is canonically a werewolf, which introduces a whole world of weirdness.

Look, fanfiction is weird about wolves, okay?

There’s a common fanfic trope referred to as ABO, or Alpha, Beta, Omega, which introduces a secondary set of sexual characteristics and dimorphism to humanity. It originated in the Supernatural fandom as a way to pair two men together such that they could have children, as Omegas of either gender are capable of conceiving. The use of Alpha, Beta, and Omega come from a study about the behavior of wolves in captivity, and its use in fanfiction is a whole other topic that essays, video essays, and even court cases have dealt with. That being said, it’s a small but meaningful subset of lesbian fanfiction and almost always contains a great deal of sex.

Fanfiction Quality

Sturgeon’s Law and Large Numbers

Fanfiction obeys Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.

While there’s still a great deal of poorly-written and nonsensical lesbian fanfic, the top 20% of fics are every bit as well-written (is not as well-edited) as the average novel, and the top 1% are as good as any writing you’ll find elsewhere. While that might not sound like a good ratio, remember that a popular fandom will have thousands of fics.

As an example, let’s look at the Once Upon A Time fandom. On Archive of Our Own, there are (as of time of writing) 58,911 fics in the fandom. 16,904 of those are tagged with the SwanQueen pairing (‘Evil Queen | Regina Mills/Emma Swan’), or a little over a quarter. It’s the most popular pairing in the fandom. Even if we’re only looking at the best 1% of those fics (I usually try to find these by sorting on ‘Kudos’, a sort of upvote system that AO3 uses), that’s almost 170 fics that are as well-written as any professionally published book containing my preferred pairing. While the length of these fics may vary from short story to doorstopper, it’s basically a guarantee that I can find a few novels’ worth of writing for any pairing I prefer.

Speculations on Why Lesbian Fanfic Is Better Written

This is pure speculation on my part - I’m not even sure how you’d get the data to prove this one way or another - but in my experience reading both male/female and female/female fics, the female/female ones tend to be better written. I’ve got two theories:

Het writers have a bigger paying audience. If someone wants to write books with male/female relationships, they can attempt to write and publish their own original stories in the market, thus that’s what they do. Writers who want to focus on female/female stories have a much smaller potential audience and paying market, and thus aren’t as rewarded for publishing original work. Hence the distribution of talent favors lesbian fanfic writers because there’s less of a demand for the professional version of their work.
Something I’ve found generally true in the LGBT spaces I’ve interacted with is that, because the people in them deviate from societal norms, they have to think more critically about the nature of their relationships. In a male/female relationship, there’s a preexisting roadmap in each culture for how the relationship is supposed to work. In American culture, for instance, men usually instigate and women are supposed to be more receptive. Men are supposed to be more physically able and women are supposed to do more of the emotional labor. (I want to be clear that I’m being descriptive, not normative.) When two women or two men pair up, however, they don’t have that cultural script to follow, so they have to pay attention and make it up as they go along. I think this leads to deeper writing as authors are forced to engage with human relationships without being able to fall back on old patterns.

Life of a Pairing

How does a pairing start? Or, to use the correct vernacular, how is a ship launched?

Usually a pairing will begin with a spark in the canon. There will be a scene in the book or show or movie where the characters meet, and a shipper will interpret it as sexually-charged. This is a common beginning for lesbian ships when a scene would be sexually charged if it were taking place between a man and a woman, but since it’s two women the source material doesn’t interpret it that way. A good example might be from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the early scenes between Faith and Buffy feature this:

Faith is drawing a heart in her misted breath and looking at Buffy. Definitely something straight people do for their gal-pals.

If this scene happened between a man and a woman, it would clearly be indicative of romantic or sexual subtext, although the show didn’t explore that subtext between Faith and Buffy themselves.

A few short fics of the pairing might appear as someone explores the idea, a small community sprouting up centered around the pairing of the characters. The watershed moment comes when someone writes the “canonical” or “best” fanfic of that pairing, which is then called the <shipname>-bible. The characterizations established in the ship bible then go on to influence the rest of the shipping fandom.

I saw this process happen in real time for the Lightcannon pairing, which ships the two League of Legends characters Jinx and Luxanna Crownguard. The pairing was born from a single frame of a launch trailer for a mobile game:

Lux on the left, Jinx on the right. And yes, this is all it takes to get a shipper going.

There were a few fics that sprouted up here and there, until the Lightcanon bible emerged: Flashbangs and Frag Grenades, by Calchexxis, a half-million word series of short stories and novels covering the two of them meeting, falling in love, and going to war together. The author established a clear characterization for the two of them, drawing on Netflix’s Arcane for Jinx’s characterization but (as far as I can tell) inventing Lux’s almost single-handedly as someone who’s even more insane than Jinx but hides it better. I watched as other authors began to use the two tags (that I think Calchexxis created) ‘Jinx is Crazy’ and ‘Lux is Crazier’, the ideas spreading throughout the fandom rapidly as the popularity of that incarnation of the characters and their relationship grew.

Once a ship has a bible, future works usually incorporate and spread those ideas, the ship proliferating as more fics are written about it.

Queerbaiting

What It Is

In the age of social media, especially the 2010s, the LGBTQ+ community had a lot of power to make a topic - or a tv show - trend. This (along with a desire to be seen a progressive or ‘woke’ when the ideology is ascendant) gives companies an incentive to court that demographic. That being said, while the LGBTQ+ community is very loud online, it isn’t big enough to support large-budget projects through audience viewership. Additionally, featuring a queer relationship creates problems for shows in other countries; the more central the queer relationship is to a show, the less able the producer is able to create a version with said relationship edited out. So a company, say…Disney, has an incentive to court the LGBTQ+ community without actually featuring main-character queer relationships.

These competing incentives drive the phenomenon known as queerbaiting, where a queer relationship is teased but never actually delivered upon. Now, sometimes shippers are just gonna ship and there’s not a whole lot the writers or showrunners can do. That happens. But there are egregious cases of queerbaiting, and they’re usually identifiable by asking oneself: if I flipped the gender of one of the two characters in the queerbaited ship, would the story, scenes together, and dialogue normally have romantic or sexual overtones? Would the story naturally feature a romance between these two characters, except that they happen to be the same gender?

A good example of queerbaiting comes from the movie Pitch Perfect, where Beca Mitchell and Chloe Beale are the most popular lesbian ship. While not their first meeting, at one point Chloe ambushes Beca in the shower, naked, in order to recruit her for an acapella group. The scene - and Beca and Chloe’s relationship - is so sexually charged that they literally admit it in the sequel, with Chloe telling Beca that she regrets not ‘experimenting more’ in college.

Actresses Brittany Snow (Chloe Beale) and Anna Kendrick (Beca Mitchel) not playing it straight.

The most egregious example of queerbaiting I’m aware of, however, comes from Once Upon A Time (OUaT), an ABC show where Disney characters are living in a modern-day town in Maine. Emma Swan, daughter of Prince Charming and Snow White, arrives in town at the behest of her son, who she gave up to adoption…whose adopted mother is Regina Mills, the Evil Queen. The SwanQueen ship arose from the chemistry between the two leading ladies, who go from immediate enemies to intimate friends all while raising a child together. If you want to know more, here’s the shipping wiki link for the pairing, and a history of femslash article that explicitly called out the showrunners for Queerbaiting.

Friends hold their friends’ faces tenderly in their hands, right?

Then there’s the pattern where gay characters get killed off at much higher rates than than straight characters, leading to the Bury Your Gays trope, which can function as another way for showrunners to seem supportive without ever having to feature longrunning lesbian or gay relationships. Notable examples include Lexa from The 100 and Tara from Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Effect On Fanfiction

Some lesbian fanfiction extends canon relationships, like fics about Korra and Asami Sato from Avatar: The Legend of Korra, but I’ve found that most fics tend to be about noncanon pairings, like SwanQueen. Fics featuring canon relationships are like any other fanfiction - they explore different ways things could happen or different settings, deepening characterization as they go. There’s an element of peace to them, a sense of “we love the original work and we’re just adding to it.”

Fanfics featuring noncanon pairings, in contrast, often take on the tone of correcting a mistake. There’s a bitterness there, a response to an inherent injustice. The writers feel wronged by the canon, and they’re writing like they’ve got something to prove. The sense I get from reading noncanon pairings is usually “the original work created a good setting and characters, except that it completely screwed the pooch with its pairings and I won’t stand for that for one second longer.”

Bashing, a term for when a fanfic author dislikes a character and uses their fanfic to make fun of or otherwise highlight the flaws in that character, appears much more often in fics featuring noncanon pairings, which often bash the women’s canon partners.

What If?

Fanfiction in general asks: what if? What if things went differently in a given story? How many ways could these characters in this setting have turned out? Shipping is a part of that, but only a part.

When you think about it, fanfiction is a depth-first search of the possibility-space of a given fictional world. It explores different permutations of plot, setting, and character within a single framework, allowing authors and readers to stay within the world (and with the characters) they love while keeping things fresh and interesting. Skilled fanfiction authors permute settings and plots while keeping characters true to their characterization in the new context they’ve created. What would Harry Potter have been like, if Harry had been raised by his parents instead of the Dursleys, and Neville was The Boy Who Lived? How would Game of Thrones have ended, if the characters hadn’t all become morons after season 4?

Every book, TV show, or movie can only really chronicle a single storyline, one way in which the characters made choices and events played out. Fanfiction allows other authors to crowdsource additional background, continuations, and alternate choices in a way that gives a fictional world a true depth to it that only lore-dense canons can really match.

Fanfiction also allows amateur authors an opportunity to play within established universes, altering characters to better represent themselves and their own lives. The animated show RWBY, for instance, involves a racial dynamic between normal humans and people with animal traits called faunus, but the racial undertones are explored far more thoroughly in fanfiction than they ever were in the show’s canon, where it lives as a vague allusion but little else. Fanfiction allows people to create adult takes on children’s shows, queer takes on shows with only heterosexual relationships, and rational takes on stories that make no sense.

Why Read Fanfiction?

Why read fanfiction?

There are a couple of different reasons I read fanfiction. For one it’s free to read, and when you read as much as I do that’s not insignificant.

There’s also a sense of comfort and familiarity involved. I started reading fanfic in college while depressed, and it felt good and safe to spend time in a setting I already knew about with characters I already loved. When picking up a new book, there’s always a period of friction while getting to know new characters and a new world, and fanfiction allowed me to skip this entirely.

When you read a work of fanfiction, you don’t have to waste time learning how a new magic system works or why faster-than-light travel is possible in this particular setting. You can skip all that and get straight to the fun parts: plot, shipping, smut, whatever floats your boat.

Perhaps the single biggest reason I read fanfiction is this: I love my favorite stories and characters, and I want to spend more time with them. I think every reader has had the experience of finishing a book or series and feeling a sense of mourning, a sense of having to say goodbye to people that you’ve spent a great deal of time with and grown to care for. With fanfic, you don’t have to say goodbye - there are always more adventures right around the corner.

Love

I am going through a bit of a crisis and I don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I originally met a girl in the summer of 2021 who was visiting my city for two months. The first date was inexplicably good, and the next two built on top of it. We had such an extraordinary connection, not just in the content of what we talked about, but the ease we had in sharing with each other. We talked about worldly things with great passion and very personal things with great tenderness. We both seemed to have a bottomless desire simply to know the other person as well and truly as possible. I had been in love before and I was familiar with the feelings of infatuation and euphoria that come with it, but this time there seemed to be, objectively, such strong substance supporting the feelings that it would be simply bullheaded to not let myself enjoy the experience of finding someone that I was waiting for my whole life.

The first time I had feelings that I called “love” for a girl, I was five. I was in kindergarten. At the end of the school day, having put our backpacks on, we waited for the final bell to sound. I imagined going up to her and professing that I loved her, knowing that I would then have to kill myself to avoid the deluge of vulnerability and shame that would overwhelm me after doing so. For the next two decades of my life, I would daydream about meeting someone who I not only felt such strong feelings for, but who I would feel safe enough with conveying them to and even owning them to myself. For every girl in school who I had a crush on, despite there being a good chance that they reciprocated my feelings, I was too uncomfortable admitting my feelings to myself to act. It just felt impossibly sensitive to admit to feeling this way about someone, even to a friend or family member.

In 2018, for the first time, I had had enough. I developed an infatuation with a coworker. We became incredibly intimate friends, but she was much older, and considered our age difference a nonstarter. I was twenty-three, and she was looking for a husband. I hadn’t even had my wild twenties yet, or knew who I was, she said. I was hurt, and I thought she was wrong, that we were right for each other and that our feelings could overcome these circumstances. But, after a few months of her not budging, I accepted reality and moved on. I had to reluctantly end our friendship so that I could move on romantically. At this point, this was the deepest love I had ever felt. This relationship had a level of intimacy that I had never experienced before in my life. I opened up with her about things I’ve never opened up with anyone before or since. Still, I was able to march forward. She had chosen to not pursue me and that, to me, was proof enough that we truly weren’t meant to be together. The person for me would recognize that I was the person for them. I felt this deeply and sincerely, which allowed me to move on decisively.

Romance, or the lack of it, made me feel like I was stranded on a beach, with love being the ships that would occasionally appear and always pass me by. Every day, as long as I can remember, I have dreamed with all my might that one day a ship would appear on the horizon and that it wouldn’t just sail by, but would turn and come to shore on my beach and that it’d take me off to whatever wonderful world it came from. No matter how hard I wished for it, it never came to be. Day after day, it was just me on that beach.

Jaded from my unfulfilling experiences, I generally moved away from this dramatic idea of love. I stopped thinking that love could be felt or intuited and began thinking that it had to be approached much more pragmatically. I moved away from thinking that there was a “the one” or that love would have a radical effect on my life. I decided that it would be an incremental improvement, like a really good friend, that it was someone who I was attracted to and could spend time with without much trouble. I stopped looking for love as something that would bring out sides of me that normally lie dormant, or something that would make the world a bit brighter and more expansive. I made up my mind that these sorts of things were things that I had to solely influence myself. My expectations for love should shrink.

For the first time in my life, I lived as if there was no great romantic revelation waiting for me. I got a girlfriend, which was a first. It wasn’t great fun, but she was beautiful and we were “working on things”. That was how it worked, after all. People aren’t perfect and you can’t expect the world, I told myself. After a few months, it ended. I was devastated, but relieved. I did not love her and I was not in love with her. During our time together, I had constantly debated with myself if she was right for me. I was putting my new approach into practice, but it wasn’t feeling right.

The next year and a few months go by, with nothing changing in my beliefs about romance. They remained pragmatic and deflated. Then, the summer of 2021 happened. I go on a date with a girl I met on a dating app. Upon seeing her in person, I’m immediately struck by something. Not love, not at all yet, just that she is beautiful and has an intriguing energy. About fifteen minutes in, and I realize that she is funny. I can’t stop giggling and neither can she. A little after that, I realize she is smart. We have incredible overlapping interests and compatibilities. We both feel at home with every topic that we bring up. Over the course of the date, she checks every box, resurrected boxes that I had given up on and checks them as well. I leave the date floating a tad.

For the first time in my life ever, after my first date, I called a friend. As I was still intensely shy about sharing my romantic feelings with other people, I didn’t intend to explicitly talk about my date. However, after a few minutes of smalltalk, he called me out – “so what’s up? First of all, you never call and second of all, you sound different.” “I just went out with a girl”, I said. I had no shame of my feelings. I was confident that they were real, genuine, that I would feel safe from whatever dangers I had previously associated with acknowledging romantic feelings. It wasn’t just my connection with the girl that felt right, I was embracing that it felt right in a way that I had previously never embraced. Even with my old coworker who I fell for, I had kept my feelings for her private from everyone. I pursued her and dealt with my feelings for her totally privately. Owning up to the fact that I had a really sparkly, bubbly first date with someone was something new. Feeling confident in it only gave me more confidence in their nature and authenticity.

Our second date would have to wait. She was visiting her grandfather, who she barely knew, for two weeks because he lived in a nearby state. When she got back, we didn’t skip a beat. Our second date was spectacular, dizzying fun even though we just went out and had dinner and talked together. For our third date, I had plans. We were going to walk here and there, get food here, go there. As soon as we got to our first stop, which was a local beach, we decided to watch the sunset, only for a few moments. That turned into talking for five hours straight. We were simply too rooted to our conversation and each other to move. Then, around midnight, with the rest of the beach empty for the past few hours, we had our first kiss. I drove her home and then drove back to my house in solemn joy. For the first time, it felt like my beach had had a visitor.

My experience with this girl, Natalie, was delivering me from a lifetime of unmet longings for romance. The sensation was thrilling particularly because of how high the stakes became. It wasn’t the amazing time spent with Natalie. It was the new way that it felt to be me as I went through my daily activities. I felt like all the sharp edges inside of me had been made to lie flush. I was feeling more equanimous and placid, than the high and exuberant feelings you might be imagining from someone talking about falling in love. The pieces of my life had finally fallen into places and made sense. I walked around knowing that I could, for the rest of my life, look back on my journey until this point and experience an appreciation and awe whenever I wanted. I felt proud of myself and positive. I felt that what I experienced, from the mundane to the painful, had been made meaningful. All of these feelings came with the realization that, despite my best efforts, I did not feel this way before Natalie. That, though I tried to do my best, I was not happy. That I did not feel like my life was meaningful. That I didn’t look at what I had done or experienced and ascribed much worth to it at all. Now, from the safety of having what I had always wanted, I could see how badly I was lying to myself that I didn’t want it or need it. I could see how poor of a shape I had been in, and how I could never be able to go back. This relationship gave my past suffering and loneliness some meaning. It was the happy ending to the life that I mostly considered a great struggle and looked at with sadness. It was getting to live out my greatest wish that I’ve had for my life on earth, experiencing being loved by a woman.

I felt all of this, but I tried to tone it down. It had only been three dates. My friend from the phone call texted me, checking in about “that girl”. I told him “that girl is probably going to be my wife one day”. I was being tongue-in-cheek, mocking the intensity of my feelings given how early it was, but I was also acknowledging, without any shame or undue sense of vulnerability, that they existed. For the first time ever, I was falling in love in a way that I thought made sense and wasn’t embarrassed of, where I could see a future. Then, we go out for a fourth time. It’s a Friday. We meet for dinner. After twenty or thirty minutes of genuinely belly aching laughter, she calms down and gives me the news. She isn’t staying in town for as long as she thought, she’s actually leaving earlier. When are you leaving, I ask. On Wednesday, she says. I can still feel the reflex from my stomach and shoulder when I heard that. I didn’t understand. I knew she was leaving eventually, but at this point it seemed like before she left we’d be able to build up to something we could take long distance, then plan to join our lives together. She had other ideas. She didn’t even have to go back. She just said she’s been gone a while and she should get back to work and she misses her friends and family. I couldn’t understand it. I thought I had met the perfect person and that she felt the same way.

Over the next few days, I was inconsolable. When we hung out on Saturday, I tried to be alright, but I couldn’t. I broke down. I communicated my heartbreak. She was supportive and nurturing and assured me she was very sad as well. I told her I don’t understand how she can do this and that it seems like she doesn’t really care about me. This hurt her, and I showed great remorse, although I did not fully understand why she was so hurt by it. We hung out again on Sunday. We said goodbye on Tuesday evening, on the beach. I had got her a present from one of our previous dates. The day before, I returned to where we sat talking on the beach and had our first kiss. I filled two small bottles with sand from the exact spot. I gave her one as a parting gift and kept the other for myself. I made her a card featuring photos of her from our time together and wrote her something very touching and poetic. I had always wanted to be able to express deep and powerful affection and now I had the opportunity to do so. I made sure to avoid it being pleading or sad, to not spoil it. I hope that it meant something to her.

In the Fall of 2022, I moved to the city where she lived. It wasn’t to chase her - I had had no contact with her, so I didn’t even know if she still lived there – but if she was an option, all the better. I messaged her. We met and talked in the park and ended up getting dinner. We made plans to see each other again, but she had a work trip get extended and then she ghosted our text conversation. I didn’t want to seem pestering, and felt very self-conscious about the fact that I moved to her city, so I left it, decided that she didn’t want to date me but wanted to avoid the discomfort of telling me so. A few weeks went by, and I couldn’t leave it alone anymore. I couldn’t go the rest of my life without understanding if maybe there was a miscommunication, or if she was waiting for me to pursue her more, so I messaged her, asking to see her again. She let me know that she recently began seeing someone exclusively, so it’d have to be platonic. At that time, I felt like I needed the space to move on, so I told her I needed some time and space if we were going to be platonic friends.

Yesterday, I messaged her and asked how she was. She said good and asked how I was. I said good and said I’d love to see her. She told me she’s engaged and busy with wedding planning, but that she would like to see me too if I’m okay with it being platonic. I assume her fiance is the same person she began seeing exclusively a little more than two years ago. We saw each other a half dozen times three and a half years ago, one time almost two and a half years ago, and yet here I am. I don’t really even know this person. That is one of the painful things about it. It seemed like getting to know this person was going to be one of my favorite things I had ever done in my life, and then that didn’t happen. I never got to know her, much less have a relationship together.

I don’t think I had ever felt so sure of anything in my entire life as I was that this was going to turn into a relationship and that this relationship was going to work out. I certainly have never wanted anything so much. No matter how badly I wanted it, the ship still sailed away, and I’m still on that beach. Each day, I dream about the next time a ship will come ashore, and get me off this island forever more.

Lublin Castle

Obraz zawierający na wolnym powietrzu, budynek, niebo, drzewo

Opis wygenerowany automatycznie

Castles older, bigger, on higher hills, climbing stepp rocks, resting in calm valleys, towering nice cities, guarding true capitals, or in the middle of black forests, or among sheep, or swarming with drones, secured by tourist traps, the ones with king inside or film crew or with the one who read this sitting in some vast hall, or climbing towers, hiding treasures, writing, fighting, cleaning, making a point or love or sleeping on ramparts under stars, yes, those happy stones warm from sun, castles! Castles here and there, especially in Europe, castles full of better stories and hungrier souls, true labyrinths and if only those walls could speak, but how to speak without mouth? Castles lack mouth and face. And it is strange lack for me.

The face is such an eye-catcher!

Defensive building could profit from little anthropomorphizing in so many ways!

Just yesterday, I met Voltaire in the enormous white cloud above Warsaw. And this castle I’m speaking about also has a face. So, it is a castle as good as a cloud, but a cloud in the shape of a philosopher, because, by having certain features (horns!), this castle is also a treatise on human nature. And on our important failure – the one of Enlightenment – the failure of modern. Short and witty brick text.

Castle telling joke – not smiling.

Sometimes it is hard to revive dead civilization using Western ideas and armies. Even a demigod from a wild island commanding millions of French in a creative way can fall short.

Napoleon failed to conquer Russia in 1812, and after the Congress of Vienna, even more of the Polish lands fell under the tsar. Hopes of resurrecting the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were gone. Local thinkers and activists of the eighteenth century realized that there would be no independent state here. So, what is to be done? Something for society! The collapse of the Commonwealth happened because, after wars and political inertia, there was no functional society; wealth was not common. Millions were living in poverty. Few were well off. But then, at the beginning of a new era, tactually those magnates, whose liberties helped Russians, Austrians, and Prussians, were willing to consider doing something for the people. For example, a prison.

Ruins of old Lublin royal residence, towering the Jewish quarter still had a tower used for keeping of criminals, so it seemed natural to build on that place.

And now let’s describe the object of this review:

Lublin Castle is of three parts: first, mentioned above thick tower, donjon, almost one thousand years old.

Nearby stands a chapel, about half the tower’s age, with orthodox angels on its thin Gothic walls and sharp arches.

And there is now this prison, established after the Napoleonic wars in the Russian-dependent Kingdom of Poland.

All three parts were used as a prison, especially the cells under the tower.

Idea of the tower came from medieval France, where every don wanted to have a jon. Donjon, a basic stronghold for defense, gathering of loot, and resting. But here, such a Western tower meets an Eastern one. Just a few miles east of Lublin, there are eastern medieval towers.

As is written on a tourist sheet – here east kisses west!

Let’s consider Gothic chapel. Similar style buildings with orthodox frescoes can also be found on Cyprus, but still, this is a rarity. It was built by a king who tried to build lasting state for various cultures. So there was this Commonwealth, where catholic wore Turkic clothes and weapons, sometimes wooden ones, because there was possible to be pacifist or atheist in best days, those lucky few Poles, Lithuanians and Ruthenians were enjoying Magna Charta types of liberties and drinking with similar minded nobles of protestant and orthodox faith on a cost of peasants, who were forced to pump vodka after labor.

And to that, those eastern angels on sharp arches.

After the Commonwealth was destroyed from within and from without, next to the donjon and the chapel, there is now the prison, which used to consume criminals, revolutionaries, and patriots.

That is not strange, that Lublin has this building from precisely that time. Prisons were important in the thought of the Enlightenment. Panopticons on the one hand, ideas of resocialization on the other, compassion going against unusual and cruel punishment. People believed that there is a case to be made for progress and betterment of both collective and individual. Those ideas were still very much alive in the XIX century, despite reaction after downfall of Napoleon. It was in the air. Les Misérables were written in that spirit. And other tales of crime and punishment. Crowning of this literary tradition was The Gulag Archipelago, long text adored by famous theologians of XX century almost as new, post-enlightenment Bible.

There was case to be made that enlightenment itself blinded by reason. Rationalists were perfectly able to create prisons in old way, destructive and cruel. Maybe because they forgot original sin, maybe because they committed it by pride and lack of faith. Or maybe human nature is just that.

There are prisons everywhere for those with the eyes to see.

Although I am a theologian, I put Bukowski above Solzhenitsyn. This one dialogue about coconuts opening Tales of Ordinary Madness, where five year old girl talking with her father, a thug:

„why do you work nights?”

“it’s darker. people can’t see me.”

“why don’t you want people to see you?”

“because if they do I might get caught and put in jail.”

“what’s jail?”

“everything’s jail.”

“I’m not jail!”

Probably philosophers stating similar idea in long sentences didn’t discover entirely new world, they just express in their own way general annoyance that is felt by any human caught in any system.

As a student of Catholic University of Lublin, I was living inside walls designed by Stompf, the same architect that designed current form of Lublin castle. I was there because I was preparing for priesthood. My professors of theology and philosophy were painting the image of modernity and enlightenment very much with horns. It is easy to explain modern ideological schools as mutations of theological heresies, most famously it is done with communism described as secularized Judaism, while Nazism can be seen as analogue to some obscure protestant sect, etc. As I was young rebellious person, annoyed by modern world, I was listening. But of course, if even five-year-old girl can be seen as a prison, catholic church can be also.

DON’T JUDGE TOO HARSHLY THIS WORDY WORK OF MINE, BTW, THERE WAS a sheltie cat devoted to the destruction of this review by the power of unlimited love.

The proper form of such a review would be gaweda. Live talk. Especially now, in the merry merry month of May, it should be listened to by oak table, in a old manor or parish house or by river Bug, amid million shades of green, with tee or dereniowka in hand, and so on.

Such gaweda shouldn’t be fact-checked, but if by any chance it is and happens to be true, gawedziarz or storyteller would be parading around like a peacock until the end of days.

Let's check basic fact – does it have a face, this castle, or not? Is it there by chance or intentionally? Three dots are sometimes enough to make a face, but if there is also a nose, that cannot be a simple accident. Look at it. It is someone, for sure. The gate is the mouth. And there is a pair of windows, and even if their oculist nature is blurred somewhat by four dots inside of them, they are there as nothing but eyes. Nose, on the other hand, has no practical usage, so as a pure decorative form, it gives out the intentional nature of this mask on a castle’ entrance.

But real fun starts with horns.

My grandpa used to say that before being born, I was swimming in the middle of the Pacific.

By the same metrics, around 1820, when Jan Stompf for the first time drew this devil with horns in the form of an old Roman symbol of jurisdiction and justice – bundles of sticks with axes – there were still one and a half more century of swimming in the ocean for Benito Mussolini.

And those horns are what makes this building unusual. As there is almost no documentation, and no one in Polish nor English books is dwelling on that theme, what I am describing below is my own deduction.

In 1820s Stanisław Staszic, old enlightenment philosopher and Jan Stompf, young architect are cooperating. I heard a rumor that they even went to England to check on modern penitentiary architecture there. On the place of old Lublin castle, a prison is created, composed of new buildings and both chapel and tower. Style is neo-Gothic, a style alluding to medieval art, as it is clearly visible in sharp arch gate.

As there was a strong conviction in that age about using emotions to control the population, especially the uneducated one, giving this important building such appearance is understandable. From medieval art Stompf took the image of hell as the devil’s belly, the demon is devouring sinners. In Lublin, even more of a provincial town in the 1820s than now, that image was clear.

There is a hell above the city ready for those who sin.

AD 2025 numerous Lublin priests are painting the reality of the devil and hell with vivid colors, and there are exorcists, both regularized and amateur, and the whole catholic university guards the truth of spiritual evil.

Two centuries earlier, it had to be even more so.

Philosopher and architect are working together, and their work is approved by local Polish authorities loyal to the tsar. There is not a piece of newspaper or memoir about that fact, but face was probably easy to decipher for everyone involved. Of course, there is this old saying by some English-speaking eighteenth-century traveler in those parts, that true Slavic religions are atheism and nihilism, but no sceptic was blind to this suggestive moral put on the prison building façade. But what moral was it? Only “beware!”?

There is nothing better than dialogue between the old and the young. This one is from Maxim Gorky’ “Childhood”.

Gorky as young boy was almost killed by constant beatings from his grandfather. Still, he teased the old monster from time to time, reminding him, for example, about mistakes in words of prayers, and if grandpa was not in the mood for tortures, his response was just to question the boy:

Tell me: how many ranks of angels are there?

I answered and then I asked:

‘And what are civil servants?’

‘Want to know everything, don’t you?’ he said, smirking, lowering his eyes and chewing his lips. With reluctance he explained:

‘That’s nothing to do with God – civil servants are humans! A civil servant feeds on regulations, he eats them the whole time.’

‘What are regulations?’

‘Regulations? The same as habits,’ he answered more redily and cheerfully, his clever, piercing eyes twinkling. ‘People live together and make agreements between themselves. For example, they say: ‘This is better than anything else, so we’ll make it a custom, a regulation, a law!” it’s like when boys in the street have a game, and they decide on the rules, and how they are going to play. And what they agree on is the law!’

‘And civil servants?’

‘Troublemakers who come and break all the laws.’

‘That’s something you won’t understand,’ he said with a stern frown. Then he continued his sermon:

‘God stands above all earthly dealings! Men want one thing, and he want something else. Everything that’s human perishes. Gos has only to brethe and everything’s turned at once to ashes, dust.’

I had plenty of reasons for wanting to know all about civil servants, and persevered.

‘Uncle Yakov often sings:

“Bright angels are God’s servants,

But civil servants – serfs of the devil.”

Grandfather raised his beard with the palm of his hand, put it in his mouth and closed his eyes. His cheeks quivered, I could see he was laughting inside.

I’ll have to tie up your legs with Yashka’s and fling you both in the river. He’s no buissness singing such songs and you shouldn’t listen to them either. Those are heretical jokes, the work of dissenters and unbelievers’. After a moment’s reflection he looked at me piercingly and said softly, ‘ah, what s lot they are!’

Such a picture: Russian, or maybe Slavic, theology of liberation; serfs are of the devil. The state apparatus devours actual laws. Those who are carrying authorities have horns. I wonder if there were ones in nineteenth-century Lublin who, like this evil grandpa, put their own beard in their mouth while looking at the liktor’s fasces, an attribute of justice shown as the devil’s identification.

The case can be made, and a strong one, that the gradual collapse of the Commonwealth had its origin in this feeling that Polish nobles had – that every law is potentially leading to violence, and there is no way for the king to rule justly when he has power.

But then it may occur to some, that autocracy and anarchy are one coin.

Is it pessimistic? Sometimes it is for the better, something is reassuring in pessimism, it is a good foundation for novels. Nabokov had Gorky in low regard, and his work lacking, because he came out for him as an optimist.

Maybe, but in this fragment above, especially when one remembers relation between Gorky and Stalin, there is good dose of pessimism.

And perhaps that was also the case with Jan Stompf. Maybe Staszic and others wanted to scare the population, and maybe, maybe because there is little to no documentation, Stompf wanted to break balls.

The idea that this castle is a joke came late to me.

My first encounter with the castle was thirty years ago. I spotted its face, but there was no commentary about it from adults leading me into castle mouths. The museum, which is now there, I found interesting, yes. But in one room I was reminded about the anxiety I could read in the face of the castle: there was, in a glass cabinet, a skeleton.

Now, every time I read about people fighting for the burial of ancient human remains, I remember how shocked I was. Realization that no one asked that guy or gal if showing his or her bones is ok remains with me till now. Time is the enemy, I thought.

Not only is there general frost in the service of the Russian empire, but there is also, more importantly, general time in this cosmos that naturally breeds tsars and boys, flawed Russias and Polands alike.

But I could tell that this Face of the Real, of the prison built on the ruins, was looking silly. Even funny! One could laugh and one should, I thought. That’s the statutory obligation for youngsters, do not cry when a king stupid to the point of nakedness is walking through a dozing crowd, just laugh. If the atmospheric pressure and humidity are right, your laugh may spread like fire.

It didn’t spread. No one is, for example, advertising Lublin in such a way: visit our city to see prophecy about the lot of enlightenment in Europe! This is one of its kind architectural satire on the state of human institutions! Or, look how dumb our castle looks, for that matter. Several persons, for example, who are thinking about painting Lublin castle using the same colors that Munch used for The Scream, is non-zero.

Never failure of our civilization been more obvious, never horns of jurisdiction been scarier than under Hitler. It is crucial to give this context to the castle. It was encircled by the Jewish quarter, now totally gone. But I am unwilling to speak about that without mentioning better days.

While explaining Lublin, it is essential to mention Chełm.

More to the east, Chełm in the medieval age was Ruthenian, under Byzantine influence, while Lublin was catholic and Polish.

But a more basic difference is cosmological.

According to local Jewish tradition, God started his works with Chelm, or, in a secularized version, the Big Bang happened there. Telling such tall tales, about Chelmers capturing the Moon in a barrel or about the Big Bang happening on a certain street, there is a way of revealing something important about what happened after the real Big Bang.

I was told this theory by a certain physicist, and I think that it is good for his science to remember that, as it is good to know for every prison reformer about ax-shaped devil’s horns.

According to other Jewish traditions, the fulfilment of creation, the descent of heavenly Jerusalem, will happen in Lublin, in the reading room of rabbi Horovitz, the Seer of Lublin.

There is no secular version of the end of the days in Lublin, but I have met a thinker who made a certain prediction on this matter based on Putin's obsession with history.

But as for now, Lublin is the last piece of cosmos, where people tell old jokes about Chełm, sometimes forgetting that at the dawn of days, two or three centuries earlier, those were Jewish ones. There was a lady who was able to tell you such jokes in original splendid precious Lublin Yiddish, but COVID took her. Not one end, but many ends will happen here.

Fulfilment of the days shall happen next to the castle, as Horovitz's house used to be touching castle hill, although when he died in 1815, there were still a few more years to build the prison with the face.

Now time for the darkest of days.

During the years of the Lublin castle caricature of justice on its front was to the point, especially during the Second World War.

Epicenter of Nazi crimes was here. Odilo Globocnik is far less known than Eichmann, while done as much. There would be no Holocaust as it was without this Austrian Slovenian, who ruled Lublin as SS und Polizeiführer. Inventor of extermination camps, who gave the whole operation a distinctive mark of organized plunder.

There are such stories about him and his comrades that I prefer not to speak of.

Way of giving a hit at them is probably to mention that first Christmas night under German occupation, when Nazis make great bonfire with books of the greatest Talmud library in the world, in the front of opened just in the thirties great Yeshiwa school while Wehrmacht orchestra played stille nacht.

Globocnik killed himself shortly after being captured, who knows if not too quickly. His right hand, Ernst Lerch, was in prison for two years in total, and then opened a highly successful Tanzkaffe in Klagenfurt, immortalized as the first stage for the greatest stars of popular German and Austrian music, nicknamed “Treblinka Tanzkaffe” by one Austrian writer with good memory.

Mossad remembered Lerch too, but had not obtained the green light on him because Israeli authorities feared Europe’s reaction after Lerch's execution. And the left hand of Globocnik opened an antiquarian in Berlin after the war.

And so on, and so on. Lublin known no worse evil than those Nazis, even soviet terror after war pales in comparison.

I have written here about this castle as if it were important. It's not. There are bigger and older, with kings and so on. Lublin Castle is obscure. It is important for a little group of historians, and they hate every brick of it. They long for the original Renaissance version. Face or no face, they abhor this prison standing where a proper Polish castle used to stand. The Union of Lublin was signed in its halls. Polish princes were chasing otters beneath its walls. If the Jagiellonian dynasty managed to build in the fifteenth century an empire ruling the whole of central Europe, that castle may grow to be the most important in the world.

But it went all very differently. The Renaissance castle was destroyed during the wars. And then the whole state collapsed. There should be renovation, many are claiming. And maybe it’s not too late!

As for now, the castle divides Lublin citizens.

Those who find it important are mostly its haters. And there I am, who considers it a story, a short book, an absurd joke.

After ten years of being a priest, I left the church, I worked a little as a guide. Those were also beginning of full scale war in Ukraine, and in Lublin there were plenty of visitors: noble prize laureates, Yugoslavian admiral of US Navy, Berkeley professors, Estonian officers, polish noir writers, English pacifist preaching surrender in face of nuclear Armageddon, and this wonder boy from Charkiv, dreaming of joining his six brothers and a father fighting Russians while they prohibit him. And so many others. And in most cases, I judged this tale to strange to be told.

Or maybe there is something else going on?

Old Priests have those stories for the education of young ones. The story about the happiness of the dismissed visionary seems to be a fitting one.

Imagine you are sitting in the parish chancellery. Visionary is paying you a visit. She brought a notepad full of words of the Lord, who ordered her to write them and show you as the judiciary of the church. So you read and discover that while this is edifying to a degree, it is rather of low theological quality, maybe not as low as the letter of the Polish Conference of Bishops, but still.

So, next week, when the visionary is back, in soft words, you put in front of her the reality of this text being human rather than divine. And, to your surprise, she is happy and visibly liberated. No need for writing and prophesying, and so on, you think. This is the interpretation of the story about the dismissed visionary I was told.

But maybe there is more to her happiness? This revelation, that the Lord may have prepared for the whole of creation, is now hers only. It is her treasure. There is great charm in having one’s own story and in making it a mirror for the cosmos to see itself in it.

It appears that there are people who, though like Gwern in his famous piece against writing books, are sure it is worth it for you to work on a very long text. Sometimes it is better to design a prison gate.

Lublin Castle is a case when a guy with something to say rather than to write builds, makes a strong point in full light, his king is as naked as can be, and his garments, or rather his mask, are striking, especially if one takes history into account. There is thinking and emotion everywhere, not only in buildings. There is order, for example, across Europe when people are planting trees, lime tree for the commemoration of marriage, oak tree at the end of the pasture, to mark the end of domesticated space.

But my favorite such place, where ideas are visible, is a minute walk from Lublin Castle, in a small café.

A flock of green comfy chairs and a lot of books. On the same street, there used to live a Jew, who worked as a wandering rag collector, slowly and patiently building his rug empire, till he was able to buy a whole house next to the market square and fill it with books, which he exchanged sometimes with one canon from the local cathedral. Their libraries are no more, but books are reassembled on Rybna Street.

And the best case is when the Polish language is foreign to you.

Then you can just enjoy the smell of the paper and relax, and try to spot faces.

Mad Investors Chaos and The Woman of Asmodeus

A D&D game crossed with a Truman Show remake crossed with a math textbook crossed with a BDSM romance novel

Image via projectlawful.com

Introduction:

About a decade ago, rationalist luminary Alicorn and some other people created a website called Glowfic, for the purpose of co-writing fiction. One thing led to another, and Eliezer Yudkowsky co-wrote a continuity (a series of stories) called Planecrash, of which the first story was named Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus. This review covers the entire continuity[1] but I named it after the flagship story because it sounded cooler.

A bit over a decade ago, Yudkowsky first wrote about a world called Dath Ilan, a world from which he was the median citizen. This world has technology at around Earth’s level, but material conditions are far better, as dath ilan has overcome almost all coordination problems, through the use of, among other things, “decision theory,” a branch of math which allows those who understand it to mutually cooperate in prisoners’ dilemma like situations.

One day, in dath Ilan, an 18 year old guy, “Keltham” is in a plane, which crashes. He is isekaied (transported to another world), in this case a world called Golarion, the setting for the Pathfinder roleplaying game. For the past few years on Glowfic, this setting had appeared in many threads, where it had been significantly expanded and altered by the pseudonymous Lintamade, Yudkowsky’s co-author.[2]

Keltham finds himself in a snowy tundra, and runs into the only building he can see, where he meets a wizard by the name of Carissa Sevar.

Ok, but what actually is Planecrash anyway?

To put it another way, why is this not just a regular book review, barred by the rules of the competition? Planecrash, rather than being a book, is a series of “threads” or stories contained within a larger “continuity.” a thread can span anything from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands of words. Each thread is made up of individual “tags” or entries, which are written from a specific character POV by a specific author. Different characters are written by different authors (so Larwain writes all of Keltham’s tags, and Lintamande writes all of Carissa’s). Thus, the story is created collaboratively, as each character reacts to the surrounding environment and the actions of the other character. This is similar to a classic D&D game, where the dungeon master (DM) works with the players to create a story, where the characters and the world around them react to their actions. The form of the story is different enough from a book that I think it should not count for the purposes of this contest.

As for the story itself, defining it is simple. As mentioned above, It's a D&D game crossed with a Truman Show remake crossed with a math textbook crossed with a romance novel. Let’s take those in order.

Planecrash is a D&D game

So, to give some context…

Christ famously said that no man shall know the day or the hour of his return. Aroden, however, did exactly the opposite— this lawful neutral god of civilization and humanity had prophesied the exact date of his return to the world of Golarion, when he would establish his divine realm and usher in the Age of Glory.

But when the fateful day dawned, nothing happened.

Eventually, things did start to happen. It became rumored that he had, briefly, returned, and died in the attempt. His priests lost all their magic powers, a war among the gods broke out, and prophecy broke across the entire planet. The greatest empire on the continent, whose king had planned to abdicate in the god’s favor, completely fell apart, and then…

We will skip over a bunch of fantasy geopolitics, but things were pretty bleak. Imagine what would happen, in our world, if Christ had failed to return in such a way, and then Africa was largely submerged by a permanent hurricane and China completely fell apart into civil war and is now partially ruled by a giant kraken which just sort of showed up and a tear in the fabric of reality opened up in the capital city of Norway out of which limitless hordes of demons started streaming and no one knows what is happening in Australia because everyone who tries to leave the continent gets their memory wiped.[3]

All of this should give you the sense, key to the whole mood of our story, that the characters are living in a post apocalyptic world, one which was, a century ago, much more stable and richer and certainly more hopeful than the one in which they currently live. Nonetheless, Golarion has started to recover. Iomedae, the lawful good goddess of victory over evil, Aroden's former right hand, stepped up as "The Inheritor" to salvage his legacy. Her nation of Lastwall continues to hold the border against the worldwound (the aforementioned planar tear out of which limitless demons stream), while former imperial territories have become independent nations experiencing rapid technological and political advancement. Even the ancient land of Osirion saw its Pharaoh restored under the patronage of Abadar, the lawful neutral god of trade.

As for Cheliax itself, it had a different solution. After decades of civil war, it regained stability by pledging eternal allegiance to Asmodeus, lord of Hell and lawful evil god of tyranny

—————————————————————————————————————

At the time our story begins, these nations have reached an uneasy truce. The Worldwound remains a grave threat, with its demonic forces contained but not defeated. While most of its borders are defended by local governments, the remote northern frontier is maintained by Cheliax, whose infernal backing makes it the only nation wealthy enough to sustain outposts in that frozen wasteland. This is why no one is seriously challenging infernal rule over Cheliax.

Keltham is isekaied to the border of the worldwound held by Cheliax, where he meets Carissa Sevar, a Chelish military wizard. They talk for a while, and Carissa goes off to consult her superiors while Keltham meditates on his beliefs about the world, morality, and himself, after which he reaches out to the gods, to see if there is a god “like himself.” Abadar, lawful neutral god of trade, hears his prayers, and sees in Keltham something special— an understanding of the ways in which individual “selfish” agents, each working towards their own separate goals, can coordinate to build something greater than anything each could have done on their own. Abadar wants Keltham to teach his own nation of Orision about this vision, and so bargains with Asmodeus that Keltham will be allowed to leave Cheliax if he so wishes, and in the meantime not be tortured or mind controlled or otherwise ruined beyond usefulness. Asmodeus so instructs his priests, and Keltham and Carissa are teleported to Cheliax proper, to an archduke’s villa appropriated for the purpose.

The story is not set up quite like a traditional D&D game, and rarely do the authors, for instance, roll dice to determine outcomes of events, as is practically the backbone of normal D&D. Nevertheless, the story follows the standard D&D pattern, with Lintamande serving primarily as the DM, handling the world building (largely done by Keltham asking questions of Carissa, and then her answering, and then him having additional questions.) Keltham, meanwhile, is the player character.

As the story progresses, the nature of the first part of the game becomes apparent. Cheliax, because it has been commanded not to enslave Keltham, is reduced to lying to him about the nature of reality, particularly about what sort of country Cheliax is, what sort of god Asmodeus is, and, most important of all, what happens to those souls who Asmodeus claims at judgement and drags into Hell. The game is played between Keltham, as he seeks first to understand his new world, and ultimately to teach it knowledge out of civilization, and Cheliax, who seeks to extract as much scientific knowledge from him before he realizes the truth. Cheliax is playing for time here, because if Keltham teaches them enough technology out of dath ilan for them to conquer the world, who cares if he finds out the truth eventually. These efforts are led by Carissa for two reasons: first, she is the only one who understands Keltham well enough to believably lie to him, and second, a devil gives Cheliax mysterious instructions from Hell, implying Asmodeus himself has chosen Sevar in particular for some grand destiny.

But there's another player on the border. Nethys, the omniscient god of magic, has also taken notice of Keltham, and is making very strange interventions around him. Cheliax had presented Keltham with 11 teenage girls from a local wizard academy as a “welcoming present.” While they are initially intended to be nothing more than a harem for Keltham, he begins instructing them in the basis of dath ilani knowledge, starting with the principles of mathematical logic.[4] The importance of these girls, called the “project lawful girls,” increases when, within a day, two are empowered as oracles of two different gods— “Ione” is made an oracle of Nethys, while “Pilar” is made an oracle of Cayden Cailean, the chaotic good god of revelry. Normally, both would be executed, but Ione is able to, with some clever maneuvering, render herself irreplaceable to the project, while Pilar is loyal enough to Cheliax and to Asmodeus that her execution is considered unnecessary. Clearly, however, Nethys is playing at something big here[5]

A lot of really interesting stuff happens here (like the god of pain and loss getting sealed into a tiny box, and the queen of Cheliax getting convinced she is in a sex themed live action role-playing game “ero-larp,” with Keltham as the player, and two of the project girls briefly getting killed, one of whom gives us a first hand view of Hell) but we absolutely do not have time to talk about those now, because we need to talk about how…

Planecrash is a Truman Show remake

I have always had a certain frustration with The Truman Show.[6] On the one hand, the premise of a guy completely enveloped by a conspiracy which he needs to escape is clever and interesting, but on the other hand the execution of the idea is quite dismal. There are a thousand ways in which Truman would have seen through the premise, and a thousand more things which he could have tried, which would have immediately revealed to him the truth. On the other hand, the conspiracy to keep him in place is incredibly incompetent, and an actual conspiracy could have done way better. (I mean, seriously, they set him up on an artificial island with a fake sun and weather controlling machines! An actually competent conspiracy would have just found a random, perfectly real, island and stuck him there, and then not worried about faking weather at all.) On the other hand, no one to my knowledge has ever tried to make a better one.[7]

Until now, because Planecrash is the Truman show remake we never knew we needed.

As the D&D game continues to play out, it starts to turn into a new type of game. Keltham becomes oriented enough to his world that he starts to notice notes of disquiet in his surroundings. This is despite the hard work of Carissa and her lieutenant “Asmodia.” Asmodia is a project girl who, after a series of magical accidents, possesses a supernatural understanding of Bayes’s theorem, and is thus the only person with a hope of outthinking Keltham on his own ground. Meanwhile, he continues to teach his hosts knowledge out of dath ilan, some of which is merely technological in nature, but most of which consists of the ilani philosophy and mathematics. He focuses especially on the “lawful” mathematical underpinnings of thought, and even more particularly on the math behind “logical decision theory,” the study of how rational agents should make decisions in multiagent equilibria. The gods know and apply LDT, but they are forbidden by treaty from sharing it with mortals. But decision theory’s chance to drive the story will come later— for now, the story revolves around Bayes.

The game is simple in theory. In order to determine whether Cheliax is systematically misleading him about reality, Keltham needs to look for things which are more likely in worlds where Cheliax is lying to him than when it is not. For example, for most of the past three threads he has been confined to an isolated fortress, nominally for his security. There seem to be good reasons why this is the case. (Last time he went outside, the god of pain and loss appeared to try to kidnap him.) But, no matter how good the excuses are, this is still more likely in a world where there is a conspiracy, and thus weak Bayesian evidence for one. To get stronger evidence, one way or another, Keltham can run tests which a conspiracy would find it hard to fake. For instance, he demands a large number of books with weird characteristics, such that, in the ordinary world, they can just send a guy to a really big library, but any conspiracy rapidly creating fake books could not keep up.

To counter this, Carissa and Asmodia have to do a few things. First, they have to know Keltham sufficiently well that they can guess what tests he will run, and what updates he will make from them, so they can prepare against these. Second, they have to avoid any slip up, any accidental revelation of information which, if Keltham thinks about it too hard, will expose the conspiracy. Asmodia has a wall on which she tracks this, and if you forget what is on that wall and slip up, then there is a good chance Chelish security will magically remove your limbs and drag you to the wall, where Asmodia will explain in ALL CAPS just how many bits of evidence you leaked to Keltham.

I am really not doing it justice here, as full justice would involve me first explaining a bunch of math which the story has by this point extensively covered. But, if you're into conspiracies where everyone on each side is trying their hardest, there are no convenient lapses for the sake of the plot, and people actually know what they’re doing, you definitely will enjoy this subplot. Eventually, as Cheliax knew from pretty early on would inevitably happen, Keltham uncovers the truth and departs Cheliax in wrath, and the focus of the story moves onto different math.

Planecrash is a math textbook

There has been a wide variety of math in the first parts of the story, but most of it is foundational math. If you wanted an intuitive explanation of first order logic, or Shapley Values, or Bayesian versus Frequentist statistics, I do not think you will easily find explanations better than those on Keltham’s lectures. But as the story moves into its second great arc, the math becomes more concentrated. Keltham no longer delivers lectures “on-screen,” and the math we do see him discuss is increasingly concentrated around one subject: logical decision theory.

In fact, Keltham is much less on screen than ever before. In the thread, “The Woman of Irori” he only has a single tag. The focus is now on Carissa who, despite her ultimate failure to retain Keltham, is ennobled as a para-baroness and tasked with creating “keepers,” people trained in the art of rational thinking far beyond what even Keltham has yet achieved. But one night, she realizes the magnitude of her own folly in working for Hell, erases her memory of doing so after writing a mysterious letter to the grand high priestess of Asmodeus, sells her soul to an archdevil for large amounts of magic and, more importantly, the rights over certain souls in Hell’s keeping, and ultimately flees Cheliax to seek Keltham, there to aid him in whatever plan he has to counter Asmodeus.

She then runs into a bit of a problem. But, we’ll circle back to that. For now, let's discuss logical decision theory.

Let us suppose three agents, K, C, and P. And say that there are three possible states for reality to inhabit, 1, 2, and 3. Further suppose that each agent has the following preference orderings:

C: 1 > 2 > 3

K: 1 > 3 > 2

P: 2 > 1 > 3.

Which state will reality end up in.

This depends on our Collective Choice Rule (CCR)— the way we describe which preferences result in which state. At the beginning of our problem, we can say that P is a dictator[9], that is, reality ends up in whichever state P wants, in this case state 2. But now suppose we change the CCR such that, if either K or C or P would prefer the world be in state 3 to its current state, then reality ends up in that state. Otherwise, we stick with whatever P chooses. Now, P would choose to be in state 2, K (but not C) would prefer state 3 to state 2, so we end up in state 3. Now, you will notice that moving from state 3 to state 1 would be a Pareto improvement, that is, everyone is happier with state 1 than state 3, but there isn’t a clear way to get from state 3 to state 1.[10]

If this does not make sense, let's swap out the variables with names. K is Keltham, C is Carissa, and P is Pharasma, goddess of birth and death, mother of the gods, and creator and sustainer of the multiverse. It is her preferences which made creation what it is, which have allowed Hell to endure. Why does Pharasma want creation the way it is? Who knows. The point is she does.

Ultimately, if he wishes to overthrow Asmodeus (of course he wants to overthrow Asmodeus and end Hell! Even putting aside how Asmodeus has treated him personally, it is the obvious thing to do) Keltham does not have a lot of options. With Pharasma’s backing, he probably could fix things, but she would seem unwilling to give it.

On the other hand, Keltham knows enough science that, with divine powers, he could completely destroy creation, thereby freeing the souls in Hell from their torment at the cost of destroying them, and everyone else, entirely. The suffering in Hell is great enough that he would honestly prefer destroying creation to seeing it continue in this state. Carissa, to put it mildly, disagrees.

So the preference orderings come out like this:

Carissa prefers the world improved to the world as it is to the world destroyed.

Keltham preferred the world improved to the world destroyed to the world as it is

Pharasma prefers the world as it is to the world improved to the world destroyed.

There seems like an obvious solution here. All three prefer the world being improved to the world being destroyed. So Keltham can just explain that, if her creation is not improved he will just destroy it, and Pharasma will agree instead to improve it. Simple, right? The problem from Pharasma’s perspective is that, if she automatically yielded to threats like these, agents with utility functions like Carissa, who would otherwise not wish to destroy the world, could attempt to “blackmail” Pharasma, saying they intended to destroy the world unless Pharasma did what they wanted. While it would be true that Pharasma doing what they wanted would consist of a Pareto improvement over destroying the world, if she refused to accept such compromises then agents like Carissa would have no incentive to destroy the world, as would be worse by their own values. Thus, in order to do as best as she possibly can, Pharasma needs to give in when an agent with Keltham’s preference ordering threatens to destroy the world, but not Carissa’s.[11]

Thus, in order to save creation, Keltham must set out to destroy it, without holding out any hope it can be saved. Carissa, who would rather creation not be destroyed, thus cannot be allowed to ascend with Keltham unless he can sufficiently trust her not to interfere with his efforts, even if she cannot help them.

The plan comes to this: Keltham will ascend to godhood and seek to bring Pharasma to terms or, if he cannot, destroy creation. Things will go much better if Carissa ascends as well, but Keltham must be sure that Carissa will not betray him, will not, in seeking to preserve creation, turn on him after he loses her hold over her. The solution to these types of problems was theoretically demonstrated early in the story, as to how agents could come to trust each other under this type of situation, but the actual resolution comes in the thread “The meeting of their minds”, the climatic thread of the story.

But to understand the full meaning of this resolution, we must discuss the final meaning of Planecrash.

Planecrash is a love story

Specifically, it is the tragedy of Keltham and Carissa’s love affair.

Their love started on their first date, less than 24 hours after Keltham came to Golarion. All throughout the early days of the project, before the unmasking of the conspiracy, they fell deeper and deeper in love. Carissa learned from Keltham that love was not the worthless and pathetic feeling Cheliax had taught her it was, and Keltham learned from Carissa to explore his desires as a dominant, to derive sexual and romantic pleasure from his ownership of Carissa. (Yes, getting him into BDSM started as a plot to trick him into doing evil acts and thereby damning himself, but the feelings which formed between them were real nonetheless.) They get deeper and deeper into their relationship; sexually, but also romantically and emotionally. [11]

When Keltham learns of Carissa’s betrayal of him, the experience breaks him. Carissa does what she can to heal him, most importantly by ensuring that all of the project girls who had already ended up in Hell were not broken beyond repair. Despite her horror at the risk he is taking with her world, she agrees to offer him her allegiance, and will, as far as the decision theory will allow, aid him in his plan.

While they never again, as mortals, renew their former passion, they do come, in the end, to love and trust each other once more. When this is done, they use decision theory to solve the rest of their problems, become ridiculously powerful, and… well, if you want to know how that goes you’ll just have to read the epilogue.

My verdict on Planecrash.

Since I have considered Planecrash as four interlocking stories, I will start by judging each story in turn.

As a D&D game, Planecrash works. We start with a powerless and disoriented protagonist, who by the end is arguably the most powerful thing in the universe. The world is believable and interesting, and the various arcs, most notably Nethys’s background interventions, are very well executed. The world and its magic is unfolded as a coherent whole, and both authors work hard, and take great care to construct a coherent and believable setting. When the adventure path switches to Carissa’s POV, we get a lot of great moments as well.[12] Ultimately, the D&D game is a mere frame story, but it serves its job admirably in that role.

My main bone to pick here has to do with the idiosyncrasies of writing on Glowfic. The world of possibilities opened by having a setup where a work can be co-authored in such a way that individual, interlocking, pieces are attributable to individual authors is only beginning to be explored. While things start out strong in this regard, this advantage is less and less salient as the story continues, as Lintamande is increasingly sidelined near the end of the story. This is especially unfortunate because Larwain/Yudkowsky’s strengths as a writer, worldbuilding, complex and interesting plots, and characters with interesting thoughts or who are capable of perspective taking literally at all, already came through quite strongly at the beginning, but his weaknesses, writing believable dialogue such that his characters don’t all sound alike, becomes more pronounced as he writes more and more of the words on the page. [13] [14]

Lintamande, as do all writers, has her own idiosyncrasies of writing [15] but the strength of Glowfic style writing over books is that the strengths of one writer can complement the strengths of another and cover the weaknesses of another. When Planecrash devolves into a solothread (the technical term) it is still good, but I feel like something has been lost.

The Truman Show remake was, if not the best subplot, at least the most flawlessly executed one. It provides interesting depth for the story, and lets us see the math which the readers and characters have just learned applied to solving interesting problems. It is certainly possible to nitpick the execution, to argue that one trick or another should not have worked for Keltham or the conspiracy, or some random comment should have been a giveaway, or whatever, but such errors are ambiguous or obscure enough they don’t really ruin the story.

The only thing I would say here is that, after the story pivots to its second arc, the conspiracy theme is allowed to lapse. I agree the plot would make it difficult to extend this theme, and we do see conspiracy reasoning done, by design, more competently than it was by the Chelish conspiracy (like Keltham against Ri-Dul or Carissa against Cheliax) but this subplot is ultimately is allowed to fall by the wayside. I am not sure how this could be fixed, I am merely noting it for completeness.

On the math textbook aspect of the story, I think the question of whether it succeeds depends on to what extent you accept Yudkowsky’s views on logical decision theory, and to a lesser extent Bayesian versus Frequentist statistics. I am not really qualified to comment on the state of the academic debate here, but, as a layman with an interest in this field, I find his interpretation plausible enough, and am convinced by it. Certainly, LDT is not a panacea for the reasons I explain at length in the footnotes, but I do think it is useful and cogent.

There are many other philosophical ideas advanced in the continuity, with explanations and defenses of, among other things, utilitarianism, altruism, Yudkowsky’s own views of the proper ordering of government and markets, the benefits of using prediction markets, and Yudkowsky’s views on rationality and cognition more generally. I focused on the decision theory because it was the most important, but for the rest, the most I can say is, “I appreciate the new set of ideas, I will use them alongside all my existing ideas and not follow them off any cliffs.”

Finally, we shall pass judgement on Planecrash as a romance novel. I don’t actually read enough romance novels to have much to say here. I enjoyed the love story, and the interplay between Keltham and Carissa, and think it was reasonably well done. I don’t think their romance is one which will echo through the ages or anything, but so it goes.

There is also the question of the ending. Throughout this review I have treated “the meeting of their minds” as the climax of the story, and the final two threads as the epilogue. This is because the style after “the meaning of their minds” changes, going from a cohesive narrative to more of a mere summary, of the style: “and then this happened, and then this happened, and let's skip over a bunch of stuff and get to the end.” This part is not as fun to read, but I am willing to forgive the writers for it, because I don’t know that they had much choice. Sometimes, an author will bite off more than they can chew, and this leaves them with a few options: they can spend the rest of their life trying to salvage their creation and make it a cohesive story (like Tolkien tried to do, though he didn’t quite make it, and his son had to finish the job) they can just give up, like Geroge R. R, Martin did with Game of Thrones, or they can just brazen their way to an ending, keeping the core themes intact, and let everything else go. This is what the writers did here, and, given how complex Planecrash had become by this time we reached this point, and how hard it would have been to give every theme a satisfying conclusion, just dropping everything except the core story and finishing that was probably the best option.

Ultimately, I don’t know how much the average person would enjoy Planecrash. The medium of Glowfic, because of its clear visuals and delineations, makes the story more approachable than it would be if it were a book, but the length, the math, the obscure references, the sex, and the philosophy all reduce the extent to which it is approachable. However, if you have made it this far into the review, I think you should at least give it a try. As you can hopefully tell, I loved this work, and I think some of you will too. You will find yourself in love with all the characters I didn't even get to introduce: the warmth of Snack Services, the courage of Peranza, the glory of Iomedae, the absolutely adorable ambition of Meritxell (the most underutilized of all characters in the story) and, of course, the absolute train wreck of a character, Her Infernal Majestrix Aborgail II of Cheliax, who is incredibly pissed that I gave her no screen time in this review.

If this is your type of story, you will fall in love with it, and maybe you will still learn a little math along the way.

[1] Sort of, different continuities tend to bleed over into each other, and this review largely ignores the omakes, which are technically within the continuity

[2] It's worth noting Yudkowsky wrote this under the handle “Larwain.” I don’t think that Lintamande’s identity is publicly known.

[3] That last thing appears to be a pre-existing problem, actually.

[4] He does eventually have sex with several of them later in the story.

[5] Nethys refuses to explain to an increasingly frustrated conclave of gods what exactly he is doing here, but he does admit Cayden is acting on his advice.

[6] A classic movie which you should watch, or at least read the plot summary of, so you get the pop cultural references to it.

[7] Larwain, if you are reading this review, can I suggest you write a Truman show fanfic where Asmodia is isekaied to the Truman show set, and has to save the show from disaster. Also, I think Elias Abraco should come with her, so that she can order the ENTIRE CREW OF THE SHOW TO BE TORTURED UNTIL THEY STOP BEING INCOMPETENT ONE WAY OR THE OTHER [8]

[8] one of the most stylistically salient things about Planecrash is its frequent use of all caps, which are particularly overused when writing Asmodia’s character.

[9] In the sense in which that term is used in Arrow's impossibility theorem.

[10] There are a series of closely related impossibility results, of which Arrow’s is the most famous, which show that problems like this are, given certain assumptions, impossible to resolve in a way which satisfies certain conditions. Logical decision theory does not disprove these theorems. Note that the CCR generated by Yudkowsky’s solutions violates Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives. For that requirement to be fulfilled, Keltham’s rankings of “world destroyed” and “world preserved” should not matter in a pairwise competition between “world improved” and “world preserved.” But yet his rankings between these two outcomes, and the fact that Carissa has the reversed rankings, is why Keltham has the leverage to force Pharasma to the bargaining table, with an ultimate result of improving the world, and Carissa does not. The fact that the “effective CCR” here violates Independence of Irrelevant alternatives may not actually be so bad, but it does mean that there is a lot of kvetching about “strategic self modification of utility functions” and such, which is what happens when your CCR violates independence of Irrelevant alternatives. Still, if you are willing to put in the work, this beats the uncoordinated way of doing things, where Keltham destroys the world leading to an outcome not on the Pareto frontier. I don’t know if Yudkowsky would put it this way, but he generally seems to prefer switching from decision theoretical perspectives which violate P to those which violate I.

[11] All the threads are written such that the explicit scenes are in their own mini threads, with plot summaries available for those who want to read the story but have moral or aesthetic aversions to explicit sex scenes in their reading)

[12] IMO Carissa’s descent into Hell to sell her soul and save the souls of Keltham’s lost project girls is one of the best parts of the story.

[13] Lintamande arguably also has this problem, but certainly it is less pronounced in her case.

[14] I don’t want to be a jerk and nitpick Yudkowsky’s style but, if I had the gesture at what annoys me in his writing of dialogue, the way I would put this is that his characters, whatever their other characterization may be, will often dramatically express their frustration and annoyance in a way which would be humorous if done once or twice, but becomes annoying if it becomes an entirely character. As an example, consider the whining by this senior devil, whose entire characterization suggests she is far too proud to do anything of the sort, with the whining of Draco in the last part of that chapter of one of his other works. Those are not the clearest examples, but they are the best ones I have to hand. But again, this is just me nitpicking, and I believe his strengths as a writer far outweigh this.

[15] If I had to describe the most prominent of her writing idiosyncrasies, I would say— people often, when talking, will pause to collect their thoughts, or to otherwise express them, right, and this leads to a spoken pause which is not normally delineated by any sort of punctuation. But when Lintamande writes a character saying something emotional, there is like a 50% chance it will follow the pattern of “states that they’re about to say/think the thing; [dramatic pause emphasized by punctuation or a paragraph break]; a very long paragraph navel gazing about the thing.” Your taste will vary, but I find this rather charming, though I would probably cease to do so if it became more common among writers.

Marriage

Why review marriage? A few reasons:

Marriage is likely someone's longest relationship with a (hopefully) non-blood relative, excluding childhood friendships, which often peter out anyway.
Marriage contributes significantly to stable childhoods and less messed-up young adults.
Marriage has taken a hit among younger generations, and predictably, so have rates of childbirth.
Marriage provides meaning, stability, and safety for those involved.
Marriage has been happening for a long time, and people generally don't keep doing stupid things so consistently for so long.

Background

My two-year anniversary came and went faster than I would've thought possible. I'm well outside the honeymoon phase, if I were ever in it considering we didn't take one. Things are going well in my marriage, though we are dealing with nonstandard relationship issues. I am from the United States, while my wife is German. She wants to live in Germany. I want to live here. She wants to be close to her parents, and I don't share that compulsion—nothing against my parents! She speaks English, but I don't speak German (yet).

These are interesting—sometimes frustrating—realities that we are managing in addition to the usual suspects, and I think that's enough background for me to continue.

Detractors

Let's start with skepticism, sometimes hostility, toward marriage. I see two main group of skeptics: 1) younger people who deride it as something like a patriarchal, tyrannical vestige of bygone days when women were trapped and men the trappers; and 2) older people jaded by failed relationships, including failed marriages. I understand the rationale driving the second group. It makes sense. At least they learned from real experience. I disagree with their conclusions however. Pessimism, throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and nihilism (in more extreme cases) aren't solutions to the problems that beset the original marriages and relationships. The first group, though, is a mess, one I have seen up close and personal. Younger people questioning the wisdom of marriage are proclaiming their naivety, not insight.

People can and do have a choice. Maybe that's all we have. Getting married is an important choice, maybe the most important choice. Regurgitating trite postmodern-inflected, so-called criticisms of marriage is tossing that choice in the dirt and spitting on it. Taking time to find a worthy partner or being choosy isn't what I'm talking about, though I have heard about many younger women struggling with these in modern America. That's a different review. What I'm talking about is the rejection of the idea of marriage for essentially dumb, emotional reasons.

Benefits

Marriage is a legal contract (an important one!), yet it's so much more. Saying “my wife” or “my husband” is a strangely good feeling. Waking up every morning next to someone who can't dump you via text for whatever reason or ghost you is a nontrivial plus in today's world. Regularly having sex and not having to worry about STDs is a relief. Pregnancy on the other hand… The standard deduction for married couples filing jointly doesn't hurt. Building a series of inside jokes, which function to reinforce the marital bond and provide much-needed levity, is one of my favorite things. We have our own two-person language, and it's only been two years. Imagine what five years will bring.

Commitment is key

As an introvert, I understand that commitment can be burdensome. How much do I really want to attend happy hour after work? And it's on a Thursday? Should I say “Maybe I'll come” when asked? Would I be lying? Yes, so I don't lie. “Not today.”

At the same time, I understand the power of commitment, of saying something and meaning it. That's related to reputation, reliability, and other important things. I am committed to my work. I am committed to my personal interests. Why would I commit myself to my then-girlfriend? Of course I would. I did. By the way, I can recommend Blue Nile for the hesitant ring shopper as well: good prices, good selections, easy to understand, online, no pressure. Full disclosure: I don't receive any money from the company.

Commitment isn't easy, not always, nor is it meant to be. I also don't enjoy waking up early for work and spending over an hour commuting. I do, however, enjoy the benefits: the money, being productive, spending time with (some of) my colleagues. Likewise, I enjoy the benefits of commitment to my wife and our marriage. We are building something together, and we're in it together, strapped in on side-by-side seats of a roller coaster we can't stop, one with ups and downs, fast parts and slow parts, moments of terror and moments of joy. As a matter of fact, my wife wakes up early to drive me to the bus station because we only have one car. That's a sign of her commitment, and I love her for it.

I think the main obstacle to marriage other than miseducation is that younger people will have a harder time making connections in the physical world that lead to marriages compared to older generations. And in the online world, the hit rate is still pretty low, and dating apps come with serious downsides that exacerbate many of the issues arising from miseducation. I don't have a solution for these problems, except one.

I recommend marriage to unmarried people close to me, not in an annoying way. I'm tactical. Mention it, the benefits and sometimes the downsides because the truth matters. Don't overdo it. Tailor the message to the person. This is an effective approach because I promote marriage to people close to me, though I'm obviously branching out with this review.

Some people will swear against marriage, and that's fine. Many people still smoke, let alone do other, less deadly stupid stuff. My concern is that these people will realize their foolishness eventually, and it may be too late, or at least they missed out on years of joy and stability and progress.

My grandparents were married for well over 50 years before my grandma passed away. That blows my mind. That's commitment.

Martial Arts Review: Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu

To review martial arts writ large is untenable. Ways and methods vary. At its base fighting breaks down into two categories: the striking arts and the grappling arts. Yes, there are others, various disciplines with weapons and whatnot but the brunt of unarmed combat is either hitting someone or wrestling them. The best example of each category can represent the whole. In the martial arts world, meander as you like, you will eventually bump up against two truths. For knocking someone around, Muay Thai is considered the acme of knowledge. For strangling someone, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu takes top honors. Here is what you want to know. In a technical sense ‘martial arts’ can refer to any type of fighting but for my purposes here I’m going to use the term to connote only non-western, unarmed forms of combat.

Esteemed Reader: But Brazil is in the western hemisphere...

Humble Reviewer: Yes, very observant, indulge me.

Esteemed Reader: I’m not sure I want to be strangling anyone.

Humble Reviewer: Don’t be so sure. In any case, there is plenty to do besides that.

Muay Thai

Apocryphal story one.

American servicemen return from World War Two, or maybe the Korean conflict. The Pacific Theater exposed them to specifically East-Asian forms of fighting. For a populace reared on Marquis De Queensbury boxing this exotic fare lit the imagination. Kicking? Unheard of. Esoteric hand strikes? Spectacular. Bizarre nomenclature with quasi-religious mysticism? Sign me up.

Notions of Asian martial arts as real-world superpowers came to dominate the western psyche. The ol’ one-two paled beside a Korean Dwi Chagi, or Back Kick. To the average Westerner jumping rope and hitting the sandbag were plebeian compared to harnessing Chi power to smash sheets of ice. The Chinese Chi, (Ki in Japanese or Korean) refers to one’s inner power. To a native speaker it could be conceptualized as a person’s vitality. To the excited Westerner it denoted a mystical force harnessed to destroy bricks.

ER: Oh,will we be learning to smash bricks?

HR: Not a chance. You’ll develop the necessary skill set but put it to better use. Brick smashing is passe.

Now, bear with me for a little more history.

Foreign terminology added mystery. Elaborate training garments, and a belted ranking system offered novelty. Throw in the putative ability to disarm thugs and your local Karate school becomes an unbeatable market force. The commercialization was incredible. Strip malls proliferated with schools of every type. New denominations springing up like churches, usually with the same credulous devotion. Movies and television took an interest.

Depictions of the Asian fighting arts came in dribs and drabs. A front kick here, a neck chop there, and a few ninja in You Only Live Twice. Soon you had the makings of something big. A tipping point was reached in 1973 with Bruce Lee’s seminal Enter the Dragon. From that point on it was full steam ahead for martial arts in the media. East Asian fighting systems went from a casual mention to becoming their own genre. Enjoy a few kicks in your fight scenes? Have an all-kick-action-flick. This spawned its own sub genres, the kung-fu movie and the ninja movie being virulent examples. By the nineteen-eighties martial arts had gone mainstream. Every kid on every block was training, and those who weren’t stood in awe of those who did.

Esteemed Reader: Mildly interesting, but I thought this was about Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu?

Humble Reviewer: We’ll get there, remember all this took a long time. From nineteen fifty to nineteen-eighty five, plus or minus. These years set the course for martial arts as we know it today, and how we know what works.

The public consciousness began to absorb the idea of someone with a black belt as unstoppable. White pajamas with a black band at the waist and you were consecrated; a titan of combat. A sort of real-life movie character, philosophically adept, physically deadly and emotionally balanced. This ideation soon hit a wall called Mixed-Martial-Arts.

ER: You mean this is about the UFC?

HR: No, but it makes a cameo.

For years it seemed as though the effectiveness of the arts were directly tied to their rarity. Over the four-decade period from the nineteen fifties to the nineteen nineties, every country Westerners had never (or barely) heard of brought forth its peculiar method of dispatching foes. It wasn’t just enough to know Karate. Rather, you told people you did Shito-Ryu, or Kyokushin. Not to be outdone, Kung-fu was no longer just Kung-Fu but Wing Chun, Lama-Pai, or Ba-Gua-Chang. People trained in Hapkido, Tang Soo Do, the list goes on, and on. North America, as is its wont, cobbled many of these into bespoke, hybrid styles. North Americans love a mash-up, it is a rubric where we own the field.

The next step in this progression was obvious. Which one was the deadliest? Could the guy in black silk defeat the fellow in white cotton? Was a leopard fist more effective than the ridge hand? Competitive types hopped on this train tout suite. Soon tournaments were taking place in every city with a martial arts club, though there was a catch: because no gloves were worn and these arts were so ostensibly dangerous, the tournaments were fought under ‘no contact’ rules. The idea being that each fighter would stop their technique an inch or so from impact and that both competitors were assumed to understand the (theoretically) terrible consequences of the landed blow. Some of you can already see where this is going.

An aside - martial arts are useful; they are not magic. Martial arts practice will make you more capable, not invincible. You can still be beaten up. There are no guarantees, just better odds. An old saying goes that, “The good citizen and the desperado do not meet on equal terms”, this is true. Someone who is highly aggressive and intent on harm has an inherent advantage. Mr. Multiple Felon is not only tougher than Average Joe but more sadistic. An instigator of assaults is undeterred by the colored cincture at your waist. This is an advantage akin to holding the high ground, and we all saw how that worked for Anakin Skywalker. Keep this in mind as we return to late 1960s and early ‘70s North America.

Hapkido vs. Kyokushin. Bak Hawk Pai vs. Kenpo. X vs. Y.

A typical conversation:

-My style is best.

-No, mine!

-Prove it.

-We use more kicking. Kicking is better because the legs are stronger than the arms and you can keep your distance.

-Our hand techniques are best because we train to kill with a single blow!

-But you won’t hit me with that blow.

-My footwork will get me close and then you’re dead.

-No, you are!

-Come hit me bro.

Thus, spawned Full Contact. Keep the Karate pants but put on boxing gloves and see whose style is really superior. What ensued was a truly Western creation. Something on par with California Maki, Pineapple Chicken Balls, or the wholly invented, Crab Rangoon. A formation loosely based on an extant idea from the East, seasoned to a North American taste. Fusion cuisine with kicks. The result, if one has never seen it, was artless brawling more akin to a playground fight than any ritualized art. Invariably the winners of these exchanges tended to be the fighter with...wait for it...the better boxing. In retrospect, it turns out that Jack Dempsy and Joe Louis were onto something.

The practical case for standing toe to toe while throwing a flurry of blows is quite strong. This is especially true if the only kicking allowed is above the waist (more on this in a minute). Most of these early bouts degenerated into (extremely) low quality boxing matches, with the competitors foregoing anything fancy and opting instead for a brutality untrammeled by technique. So badly did these early matches retrogress that their various governing bodies had to implement specific rules to ensure that fighters used something other than their fists. A common example: an eight kick per round minimum with all kicks above the waist.

This led to at least some semblance of martial arts being maintained. It also led to anyone who understood fighting to deride the Karate folk as ineffective wannabes. I refer you here to our earlier aside about those preternaturally tough souls who require little to no training. Full Contact Karate, as it was commonly called, only served to reinforce their derision for these non-western ways of fighting.

Enter Muay Thai.

Finally, you say.

It turns out that all this experimentation had been done before. At least four-hundred years before. The Thais, back when their country was called Siam and the British were still agents of empire, had already figured out the best rule set for ring fighting. You see, one of the problems with Full Contact was its insistence on above the waist kicking. The difficulty for the kicker lay in the fact that a kick above the waist can be absorbed pretty well on the arms, allowing a defender to close the distance and pound away with fists. Another difficulty is that a kick above the waist, while moderately dangerous, is easy to see coming. This is why there was the kick minimum, without it there is not much reason to kick – at least above the waist. It is why skilled boxers didn’t think much of the Full contact guys. Kicks made exclusively above-the-waist (barring a successful head kick) leave you off balance and vulnerable to damage. You also tend to only get one before the puncher can close the distance and let you have it with a few fists to the face. The cost to benefit ratio is unfavorable. Kicks had become (almost) counterproductive. The Thais knew this back when Adam Smith was making his case for the free hand of the market.

Speaking of a free hand, Muay Thai came to allow for free everything. No minimum kicks, and no prohibition on kicking the legs. No limits on grappling either, at least while the combatants remained standing. That is one thing about the Marquis De Queensbury rules. Fighters will tie each other up with their arms as a form of protection, buying time before the referee breaks them apart. Muay Thai took the attitude of “Why stop there?” These fights not only allowed for upright grappling but took things two steps further, knees to the body and head were included, along with that most forbidden of techniques, the elbow. Thus, it came about that when Western fighters wanted to see whose style was really the best, Thailand was ready with open arms. You want to use only punches? No problem. Your style is hands at your waist and only kicking? Step right this way. Repeated flowery spins? Stances low, and stances wide? Be my guest. The Thais took on all comers.

Now to the meat of it all. Why is Muay Thai so effective? A part of the reason is the aforementioned ruleset. Minimal rules allowed for a natural Darwinian experiment in combat. Enough fights over enough years and the best system began to emerge. Small evolutions began to pay big dividends in a fight. For instance, the Muay Thai roundhouse uses the lowest part of the shin bone as its striking surface, as opposed to the instep of the foot, which is most common in other arts. ACX readers are savvy folk and will have sussed out that hitting someone with one thick bone is safer and more effective than using nineteen or so small ones.

Next is an emphasis on kicking the leg. This is not something to be underestimated. At first glance kicking someone in the calf, or thigh may seem an ineffective means of self-defense. In reality it is debilitating. Apart from the pain involved (on par with smacking a hammer into your thumb), these kicks affect ambulation. Fighting, be it ring or street, requires good movement and a solid base. Several sharp hits to the thigh play havoc with walking. If you cannot stand, you cannot fight. Ever capable, Muay Thai has come up with a way to deal with this problem, it is known as a ‘leg check’. Leg checking involves meeting an incoming kick with the thick upper part of the shin. Bone on bone. At speed.

ER: Wait! That sounds incredibly painful. Why, I once smacked my shin into a coffee table in the dark, and let me tell you...

HR: Yes, it is absolutely painful. At least until you get used to it.

ER: That doesn’t sound like something I want to get used to.

HR: No kidding. Keep reading.

The advantage of stopping a kick with your shin is twofold. One, the defender gets to keep the hands up high, protecting the head. This is essential. Two, as painful as it is to be bashed about the shins, one can still move about and stand properly. Because the muscles of the thigh are not affected one remains ‘ring effective’.

Another aside - One aspect of effective martial arts is that they accomplish multiple objectives with a single action. In this case protecting both head and body while simultaneously damaging an attacker. True martial arts are replete with little moments like this, and it is one of my favorite things about them.

Other Muay Thai weapons also pay big dividends. Case in point: the elbow.

ER: That sounds dangerous.

HR: Yes. Perhaps even the most dangerous way of hitting someone in all of fighting. Consider how even kick fighting came to be sanctioned with relatively little push back, but allowing combat sports with elbow strikes took decades longer. Kickboxing was sanctioned by the nineteen seventies. It was the new millennium before elbows became standard fare. The elbow is disallowed in nearly every endeavor, even the rougher ones. Football, Basketball, Hockey, all prohibit this limb. I don’t Golf but it's probably not allowed there either. Polite society frowns on striking someone with your elbow.

The elbow is superb at transferring force. There is the earlier comparison of one big bone versus several smaller ones. If further proof is required, consider the last time you went for a massage and the masseuse, unable to release a knot with hands alone, resorted to leaning on you with an elbow. I await your rebuttal.

Another game changer, the knee. A doubled knee to the sternum is a serious problem. A common analogy for this particular strike is being hit by a car. This may or may not be exaggerated. Beyond doubt, the result of a well-timed knee is shocking. You cannot stand. You cannot think. Voluntarily breathing seems out of reach. The knee is a handy tool for serious altercations.

The clinch is a fundamental element of Muay Thai. The clinch is a vice grip on the neck. Control the neck and head, you control everything else. Grab the back of the head with both hands. From here, hold your foe immobile and drive your knees into the body or face. How is this on the receiving end? Unpleasant, painful, and intimidating are the sort of words that come to mind. Betting odds favor the fighter with the superior clinch six to four. Once you have gripped someone about the neck it is virtually impossible for them to hit you. Saturday night tough guys are effectively neutered.

ER: OK, but do I want to do Muay Thai?

HR: If you mean getting in the ring, to batter, and be battered? Almost certainly not.

Actual competition, even at the amateur level, is grueling, and dangerous. Anyone not already so inclined is unlikely to find it rewarding . The rounds are three minutes long and there are five of them. The breaks for amateurs are one minute long, and for professionals, two minutes long. Think between two and four television commercials. At the end of a TV movie, when advertisements come on with increasing frequency, this may seem like a long time. When your chest is heaving, your legs welted, and sweat runs off of you like snowmelt, two minutes pass like light posts on the freeway.

Fighters prepare for months for their fifteen minutes in the ring. Running, sparring, jumping rope, shadow boxing, working heavy bags, training on the pads, the list goes on. Several hours of training, at least five days per week is required to be minimally competitive, even at the amateur level.

In return for all this you receive lumps, contusions, burning lungs, and possibly a small trophy. That’s it ---almost. The cheering of a large crowd is heady and no wonder some become addicted to it. Even a few hundred people shouting your name is a memorable experience. You will also gain the admiration of your peers. They may think you unbalanced but you won’t be openly denigrated. Invariably, everyone respects someone who will climb into that ring.

Final and most important aside- this is about potential damage to your body and brain. Damage to your body, as a result of Muay Thai, will be minimal, impermanent, and you will almost always be stronger afterwards. Damage to the brain is a different matter. Brain damage from training is not the problem. Damage from ring fighting, or even sparring, is a real thing. Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) doesn’t affect everyone, but the risks certainly outweigh the benefits. For ACX readers this strikes me as a particular concern. Anyone who gets hit repeatedly in the head, even with subconcussive blows, risks this sort of damage. It is a serious concern that bears mentioning.

ER: You aren’t selling me on this. I have an advanced degree, and my peers already respect me.

HR: Good point. Remember, this is a review, not a sales pitch.

ER: Still, is there anything else beyond being beaten up to the cheers of the arena?

HR: Glad you asked.

Recreational Muay Thai is a great time. Yes, you will still suffer some discomfort, but it is bearable and rewarding. No need to get hit. You learn effective self-defense, increase your cardiovascular fitness, and improve your physique. You may even attain that most desired status symbol, visible abdominals. Flexibility is also worth a mention. For anyone who sits at a desk all day, the increased range of motion alone makes it worthwhile. It will make you a better dancer too. Footwork is de rigure. Then there is the confidence that comes with being dangerous. Negative day to day interactions are of less consequence. You attain that mental edge of the arduously trained. You improve mobility, balance, and all of those other markers of healthy aging. No CTE required.

ER: Couldn’t I just do the dancing and yoga?

HR: Yes, but you would miss out on the ability to deal effectively with footpads.

ER: I don’t cross paths with many footpads...

HR: Fair. I refer you to the adage of a warrior in a garden vs. a gardener in a war. Muay Thai contains a set of skills which, in aggregate, translate well to many areas of life. In any case, it's time to learn some Jujitsu.

Jujitsu

Back in the time of the samurai…

ER: Oh not more history.

HR: I’ll be brief.

Apocryphal story II

Jujitsu developed as a sort of last-ditch fighting style for a soldier who had lost his sword. How best to disarm a katana? Lock a joint and force it to move the wrong way. How best to fight in bulky armor? Close the distance and take them to the ground. No fancy footwork or spin kicking required. It is difficult to swing a sword while rolling in the dirt. Rolling in the dirt with a broken limb, even more so.

A few centuries later, when the epoch of the horse and blade had well passed, a man named Jigoro Kano took all the striking and most of the chokes and locks out of this style to make a martial art suitable for school kids. We now call this Judo, the gentle art, and you have no doubt heard of it. It is even in the Olympics.

Jujitsu as we think of it today comes from Judo, by way of Brazil. Legend goes that some time back in the nineteen-thirties, Mitsuyo Maeda, a student of Kano himself, came to Brazil to participate in Judo exhibition matches. A businessman named Gastao Gracie hired Maeda to teach his children. One of these children, Helio, was smaller than his brothers and was forced to adapt the art to keep up with them. He focused not on the throws of judo, rather on its methods for controlling the joints and attacking the neck. In short, his developments revolutionized the world of combat sports.

The Gracie clan, as they are sometimes known, began taking on all comers in the same manner as the Thais a few paragraphs back. Tae Kwon Do, KickBoxing, Esoteric-Fighting-Style-#6, whatever. They were willing to fight quiet anyone. They issued a standing challenge to all other styles. Eventually this challenge led to a series of events known in Portuguese as ‘Vale Tudo’, literally anything goes. People came from all over the world to try their hand in this new arena. This was the progenitor of what we now call Mixed Martial Arts.

ER: Oh, this is the part with the UFC

HR: This is the part with the UFC.

In the domain of martial arts movies there exists a seminal offering known as Bloodsport. Perhaps you have seen it. The main plot involves a secret underground fighting tournament. Martial artists of various styles travel across the world to prove their mettle against one another in fictional, no rules championship. By the late nineteen-eighties style vs. style fighting was everywhere in media. Apart from movies and television, video games became enamored with this same idea. Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat are prominent examples. The idea of this kind of ‘No Holds Barred’ tournament percolated for so long, in the minds of so many, that in nineteen-ninety three it finally made pay per view. The first UFC was like nothing before seen and to the surprise of everyone but the Gracie family, Jujitsu came out on top. Every fight, even those whose participants without a grappling background, and who had every intention of remaining standing, ended up on the mat. Suddenly the effectiveness of intricate hand and foot positions was usurped by the effectiveness of toeholds and triangle chokes. Thus spawned the world of mixed martial arts as we know it today. Enter the supreme grappling art: Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

Jujitsu, or BJJ comes in two flavors, Gi and No Gi. Gi is the name of the uniform, a thick cotton number cinched at the waist by a canvas belt. A typical Karate or Judo get up gives just the picture. In practice the difference between Gi and no Gi is significant. Wearing the Gi makes the match much slower and more intricate. Cerebral even. Gi Jujitsu is often compared to chess, a methodical exchange of strategies and positions. Playing in the Gi, one may use either player’s clothing to both control and submit an opponent. A typical example here is using the lapel or collar of the uniform as a choke across the neck. You will never look at a blazer the same way again.

No Gi is a faster game. Players usually wear tight fitting shorts and a rash-guard, a thin wetsuit looking shirt. A tight-fitting rash-guard paired with matching compression shorts evokes the superhero, and no doubt many people enjoy the comparison. Fit people look even more incredible in spandex. Without lapels, a belt, or thick pants to grab onto, athleticism plays a much greater role. This aspect of the sport is much more explosive and a little more fun, though it is well understood that the highest form of the art is the Gi game and all serious players learn it.

ER: Sure, thank you, but do I want to do jujitsu?

HR: Maybe, yes. It is lower impact than Muay Thai and effective for defense. Here’s how it works:

Combat takes place in roughly three parts. The first phase is akin to college wrestling. Grabbing the opponent by one leg, grabbing the opponent around both legs, swinging your opponent to the ground, that sort of thing. The full complement of Judo throws are also available. A successful throw is a confidence booster. Engineer a hip toss, with its satisfying thump on the mats and you feel terribly capable.

The second aspect of BJJ comes on the ground, when you work to secure a favorable position. Your opponent will be trying to tie you up with their arms and legs, wrapping their legs around your waist in a position called ‘The Guard’. There are various types of guard, but for our purpose we need only discuss one, the Full Guard. A proper Guard prevents your attacker from getting into a position where they can rain blows onto your supine form. It is difficult to throw an effective punch when you are pulled chest to chest with someone on the floor. The Guard is not merely defensive, but also serves as a launching point for various submissions.

The best part of Jujitsu is the submission. Getting a submission is a fantastic feeling. You have someone in a position where you could do serious damage, tear ligaments maybe, or cut off blood to the brain. Yet, you are able to apply the pressure so slowly and with such control, that they can signal you to stop, and no one is hurt. Another feeling that can become addictive. A sampler plate of submissions includes: The Guillotine, a neck choke named after the famous method of execution; the arm-bar, a joint lock where you straighten your opponent’s elbow past its natural range of motion; and the triangle choke, wrapping your legs around your opponent’s head and one arm, locking one ankle behind the opposite knee – the opponent is then trapped in the ‘triangle’ formed by your legs. Victory comes soon after.

If you’ve never experienced it, the feeling of being clambered over, locked up at the knees or shoulders and forced to submit is disconcerting and humbling. A common euphamism holds that for the uninitiated, ground fighting is like being dragged into the ocean without knowing how to swim. It is an apt analogy.

Immobilizing someone larger than yourself is uncommonly rewarding. There is a real elegance in leverage judiciously applied . BJJ’s benefits include the complementary twins of high intensity and low impact. Laying on your back and rolling over yourself changes core strength significantly. Likewise, your point of view, the threat of slipping or falling diminishes when you do it several times a week.. The human body is remarkably durable, remarkably vulnerable. You will know both sides of this. You gain a library of practical methods to control and disable. Fortunately for your assailant, most of these cause no permanent damage at all. From a liability standpoint, BJJ is unmatched.

You won’t be hit in BJJ, though limbs sometimes flail about. Like many endeavours, it is the novice who is most dangerous. Anyone remotely good will protect you and let you work. People compete even into old age, without the danger of repeated blows to the head. There may be a risk of knee or shoulder damage but these are on par with any other contact sport, and frankly, not a few non-contact sports (I’m looking at you, figure skating).

ER: So, no CTE?

HR: No CTE. Being struck at all is not a part of the rule set.

ER: Sounds more appealing already. What’s the drawback?

From a pure combat point of view the drawbacks are twofold. 1) fighting on your feet offers advantage against multiple opponents (I know, you don’t even plan to have one opponent.), in many settings it is preferable to remain standing. 2) Without strikes of its own, Brazilian Jujitsu leaves one vulnerable to being knocked out by a punch or kick. Still, for the average person, these drawbacks are almost immaterial. Most people never have to use these skills.

The real drawback: Cauliflower ears. Repeated instances of grinding and pressing with your head (a necessary part of grappling) will cause your ears to bend and fold and develop scar tissue. Disconcertingly visible scar tissue. People will take notice when you are first introduced. Now, some folks really go in for this, wearing minor disfigurement as a badge of honor. A jungle level warning. Fair enough, though I do not imagine it helps your dating life. Nor say, a career as a newscaster. It is possible to protect your ears with a wrestler’s ear protection, but in practice this is almost never done. Most serious players consider cauliflowering to be a badge of accomplishment, which it is.

ER: So, do I want to do this?

HR: Maybe. It is safer and less painful than Muay Thai.

BJJ competition has a much lower ‘buy in’ than Muay Thai. Because the matches are so much less demanding on the body and especially the brain. You can train a few hours a week and still compete as a hobbyist. Even if you decline to compete, a mere six months of classes will have you feeling very capable. You will be privy to knowledge that is rare, procured only through work, and cannot be taken away. ‘Rolling’ - those practice matches in class - will give you an earned confidence that translates well to everyday endeavors. Contusions are minimal and your limbs mostly stay in working order.

ER: So... Should I dedicate several hours a week learning to disassemble people?

HR: Let’s break it down. Here is your personalized review of the martial arts.

Muay Thai as a competitive ring sport for the average person:

We’ve never met, but at a guess, ring fighting is not for you. There is not much to recommend here, unless you are already interested in ring sports. If that is the case, it is easily the king of them. Competitive Muay Thai can be described as exciting, dangerous, low paid, adrenaline inducing, dangerous, painful, viscerally thrilling, potentially addictive, and of course, dangerous.

Your rating, 2/5 stars

Muay Thai as a recreational endeavor for the average person:

Here there is more meat on the bone. The sheer variety of training methods is a useful hedge against the boredom of a typical gym. No mindless weightlifting for you, rather, a wider array of physical skills, more dynamic in their application. You get flexibility, stamina, and rippling muscles with little danger of facial scarring. There is always some facet to explore, or rediscover. Tired of kicking? Punch away. Ennui with your fists? Train the clinch, and so on. You will become confident in ways previously unknown. Will you single handedly defeat a room of ne'er-do-wells? Unlikely. A jerk in traffic (I do not endorse fighting in traffic)? Yes, almost certainly. Will you want to? You will not. Your new abilities and attendant confidence will render an argument in traffic, or at the office, far less intense and immediate. You will not see the world in the same way. A good buy.

Your rating, 4/5 stars

Muay Thai for your viewing pleasure:

This is value for your dollar. Tickets are reasonably priced. You remain safely in the stands while all the heavy lifting is done in the ring. Fights are fast and exciting. You will see myriad examples of strength and power, even the uninterested will have a hard time looking away. Kicks are so hard that you can feel them in the stands. Other fighters are fleet and lithe. A fighter like Somrak Kamsing displays a Matrix-movie level of skill. Events are by turns raucous and respectful. If you like sports anyway, this is for you.

Your rating: 3.5/5 stars

Jujitsu as a competitive sport:

This is fun and safe. You will remain mostly injury free and in fine physical form. You will also spend a lot of time that could be put to better use sitting on the sidelines, waiting for your match to begin. Bring a book. Jujitsu tournaments are long slow affairs that can take most of the day.

Your rating: 3/5 stars

Jujitsu as a recreational endeavor:

Jujitsu involves rolling around on the ground. A lot of rolling around on the ground. Matches invariably end on the floor. This is not a sport for anyone who is either a germophobe or overly concerned with their personal space. The entirety of this art involves being pressed up, uncomfortably close to another human. Competitors find themselves in the intimate positions normally reserved for a third date. If you can get past this, then it is an effective pursuit for the average person. Strength, flexibility, confidence, all can be yours for a low monthly fee. The effort to effectiveness ratio of Brazilian Jujitsu is very favorable. Even a short time spent on mats gives the upper hand against untrained individuals. Its effective use of leverage gives it outsized benefit to women in particular. Sure, many women also excel at the striking arts, but BJJ gives an unbeatable ROI in this regard.

Your rating: 4/5 stars

Watching jujitsu:

Flat no. Not without being an enthusiast yourself. For the outsider this is dull stuff. Even as an enthusiast I find it remarkably slow. The Gi matches can be especially monotonous. It is tough to parse what is happening if you aren’t personally familiar with things like Side Control, or The Mount. The close, pressed up nature of the competition doesn’t leave much room for the viewer. Yes there are exciting scrambles, an athletic vying for position, but these are often few and long stretches of a match consisting of the contestants immobile, waiting for one or the other to tire. Unlike Muay Thai where even the neophyte can tell who is winning, and a telling blow is self evident, BJJ offers little in the way of viewing pleasure.

Your rating: 1/5 stars.

A recreational combination of Muay Thai and Brazilian Jujitsu:

Hands down the best bang for your buck. You gain ninja-esque knowledge while avoiding any major injuries or brain damage. This is the best of both worlds. Variety, fitness, and a weapon you can bring through the airport. You are not likely to stand one against six, nor even three. That doesn’t matter, you aren’t the type to look for trouble anyway. You just want to keep fit and know that if Bill-the-extravert comes across the table, I’m betting on you.

Your rating 4.5/5 stars.

Meditations on Moloch

Link to Meditations on Moloch https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Link to Destiny Lore Cards https://www.ishtar-collective.net/

Link to Destiny Lore Videos https://www.youtube.com/@MynameisByf/videos

         It's so simple. Elegant like a knife point. It explains - this is not hyperbole, this is the farthest thing from exaggeration – EVERYTHING. Why does anything exist? No don't reach for that word. There's no 'reason'. That's teleology and teleology will stitch your eyelids shut.
Why do we have atoms? Because atomic matter is more stable than the primordial broth. Atoms defeated the broth. That was the first war. There were two ways to be and one of them won. And everything that came next was made of atoms. Atoms made stars. Stars made galaxies. Worlds simmered down to rock and acid and in those smoking primal seas the first living molecule learned to copy itself. All of this happened by the one law, the blind law, which exists without mind or meaning. It's the simplest law but it has no worshippers here.
         Imagine three great nations under three great queens. The first queen writes a great book of law and her rule is just. The second queen builds a high tower and her people climb it to see the stars. The third queen raises an army and conquers everything. The future belongs to one of these queens. Her rule is harshest and her people are unhappy. But she rules. This explains everything, understand? This is why the universe is the way it is, and not some other way. Existence is a game that everything plays, and some strategies are winners: the ability to exist, to shape existence, to remake it so that your descendants - molecules or stars or people or ideas - will flourish, and others will find no ground to grow. And as the universe ticks on towards the close, the great players will face each other. In the next round there will be three queens and all of them will have armies, and now it will be a battle of swords - until one discovers the cannon, or the plague, or the killing word.
         Everything is becoming more ruthless and in the end only the most ruthless will remain and they will hunt the territories of the night and extinguish the first glint of competition before it can even understand what it faces or why it has transgressed. This is the shape of victory: to rule the universe so absolutely that nothing will ever exist except by your consent. This is the queen at the end of time, whose sovereignty is eternal because no other sovereign can defeat it. And there is no reason for it, no more than there was reason for the victory of the atom. It is simply the winning play. Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country, they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears. But I do not think those spears will hold against the queen of the country of armies. And that is all that will matter in the end.

One of Scott Alexander’s most influential if not most influential essays is Meditations on Moloch, in which he uses the Alan Ginsburg poem Howl as a framing device for a discussion on morality, competition, and civilization. I was already aware of Malthus, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, and most of the other individual concepts that Scott discussed, but the synthesis of all of them together and the ultimate consequences of what they mean stunned me. I was equally surprised when I saw very similar concepts weaved together in the lore of the video game series Destiny. The similarities are so significant that I am surprised that I have not encountered anyone linking them together before now. Ironically, they also were released very close together as well, July 2014 for Mediations and September 2014 for Destiny 1. In this essay I will be reviewing/synthesizing/analyzing Meditations on Moloch and the lore of Destiny to try to create a more complete picture of what “Moloch” is and if there is anything that can be done to stop it or bring it in line with our values.

I will be brief with my summary of Meditations because I assume everyone reading this essay has already read it. If you have not, I recommend you do so and a link is provided above. Scott presents the full poem and provides many examples of races-to-the-bottom that illustrate how people can be trapped into a mutually harmful system. From the essay:

Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.

The defecting agent could be a business owner over-utilizing a non-renewable resource, a cancer cell deciding to multiply instead of accept apoptosis, a country investing in more military, or any number of other things. This is not to say that the defecting agent is necessarily evil, as Scott agrees:

I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.

The straightforward solution is to have a figure of authority punish the defectors to keep everyone cooperating and better off. In the examples above that could be government regulations, the immune system, or the United Nations. However, these institutions are fallible themselves and vulnerable to similar problems. The immune cells can become cancerous, governments can become overly optimized for staying in power over helping society, and the United Nations can become the United Nations.

As technology advances these problems will only become worse. Malthusian over- population is only observed in particular places at particular times, but biological limitations will not stop an AI from brutally reproducing and out-competing any rival located anywhere. Even without the specter of AI, increased technological power will allow the more ruthless humans to compete and extract value from the world ever more effectively. Scott believes that superintelligent AI will be developed in the near future and the only solution is to carefully ensure that the first superintelligent AI cares about us and our values.

The Destiny Series spans 2 games and many DLCs and expansions and has generated tons of interesting lore, but I will be focusing only on the parts most relevant to Moloch. I will not be reviewing the actual gameplay elements of Destiny, although I have played the game and find the basic gameplay to be solid. Destiny has an interesting quirk in that a majority of the lore is contained in cards attached to armor and weapons found in-game; I have provided a link to a website that contains all such cards above.

The player character fights various enemy alien races throughout Destiny, multiple of which share similarities to Moloch. The Vex are probably the most obvious; they are an advanced mechanical race focused solely on their own survival and expansion throughout the Universe. They operate as a hive mind and as far as we know do not experience any emotions or have any individual identity (there may be an exception or two deep in the lore and I am not counting the choral Vex here). The Vex are not particularly unique in fiction or video games, the Borg, Flood, Zerg, Phazon, and Imulsion are all similar factions trying to assimilate all matter. The misaligned AI that Scott fears would likely resemble the Vex, an intelligent, yet unfeeling and alien intelligence that sees humanity only as possible material that it can repurpose for its own goals; goals which are not in the slightest related to human values.

The Hive are another enemy species that willingly follow Moloch. The Hive are insect-like, but ironically very much not a hivemind. The Hive have individual members with their own feelings, goals, and thoughts. However, the majority of the time those goals are kill everything, those feelings are feeling good when killing stuff, and those thoughts are I am going to keep killing things. They call this the sword-logic, the belief that everything that can be destroyed should be destroyed. I am reminded of the rationalist creed, that which can be destroyed by truth, should be. The Hive creed is that which can be destroyed by anything, should be. The Hive wiped out countless other civilizations before reaching Earth, basically just because they wanted to and believed it was right to do so. The glory of combat and killing is praised throughout their culture, where almost no mention is given of many resources they captured or slaves they now have. The Vex would likely just ignore you unless your body was the handiest bunch of material in the area for a project they were working on or they thought you were interfering with their project, but the Hive would kill you for the sake of killing. The Vex follow Moloch because they calculated that it was the most likely method for them to survive indefinitely, the Hive follow Moloch because they enjoy it and believe in it in a religious sense. Scott summarizes Moloch as the thing offering the bargain, “throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.” The Vex can’t love anything, so they accept this bargain; the Hive love throwing things into fire, so they also accept this bargain. The Hive individual who most faithfully follows the sword logic is Oryx, the Taken King, who I will talk more about later.

Honestly, the Vex and the Hive are not that unique to popular culture; there are many games, movies, and books with factions resemble one or the other. It would not be worth writing an essay in this format just to talk about them. However, Destiny has another character which is completely unique as far as I know. Moloch, or as he is called in Destiny, The Winnower, is a character himself. Yes, I do mean the personification of defection and conquest is in the game and talks to the player directly on a somewhat regular basis. He in no way resembles the monstrous and mindless Moloch from Ginsberg’s poem. He is surprisingly chatty, personable, and possibly even in possession of a sense of humor and morality. In his own words:

I am making this offer over and over again, in every tiniest cell and the vastest of civilizations. Let me in. Take what you need. Be at ease. You have no say in the degradation of your telomeres, but in all the interim, the whole world is your sweet silicate shellfish.

You exist because you have been more suited to it than all the others. Steal what you require from another rather than spend the hours to build it yourself. Break foolish rules—why would you love regulation? It serves you to cross lines, and if others needed rules to protect them, then they were not after all worthy of that existence.

He is shockingly persuasive, so I will quote from him at length. I honestly can’t say wherever it is a criticism of Mediations that Moloch does not get to speak in his own defense because that might be the last thing we actually want to defend, but I will allow The Winnower to argue his own view here:

Would you tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?”

Those who do not exist cannot suffer and are of no account to any viable ethics. If the true path to goodness is the elimination of suffering, then only those who must exist can be allowed to exist.

But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrections. Imagine a world without me.

Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.
Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me. And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself. Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.

Your new rule will only make great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them, and when they pop they will blight the whole garden.

Your shoemaker philosopher was right, and it matters more than anything. Sorrow cannot survive death, and it cannot precede birth. Those who exist have moral worth, and those who do not have none. Think about it. Do you mourn the uncreated? Do you grieve for those who were never born in a nation that never developed around an ideology no one ever imagined on a continent that never formed? No! And from that self-evident truth, you must raise your eyes to the ultimate revelation: those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all. Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all. That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it?

The Winnower shows great and earnest affection for Oryx, his most devoted follower among the Hive, and interestingly, also for the player character. In Universe, this makes sense, as we have spent most of the last 10 years killing a bunch of aliens that were trying to kill us, proving that we deserve to keep on existing. I believe that the Winnower would prefer that every being in existence to be like Oryx, and Oryx isn’t entirely without virtue. He earnestly loves his siblings and children, although this love is usually shown by trying to kill them (I don’t know if it’s a strength or weakness of the sword logic that you treat your friends the same as your enemies). He also appreciates them when they try to kill him. He even shows admiration for the player character when we kill him for good. From Oryx:

Sometimes I wonder if I’m a nihilist. I don’t do much except break things. That’s what they say about me: we could’ve had a great civilization, if it weren’t for that damn Oryx, that damn Hive. They don’t believe in anything but death. The only way to make something good is to make something that can’t be broken. And the only way to do that is to try to break everything. I’m glad I learned that the universe runs on death. It’s more beautiful to know. But I’m lost somewhere strange. I think that Savathûn and Xivu Arath (his siblings) are trying to steal the tablets from me. They must have cut off my tribute while I was away communing with the Deep. I love them so dearly. No one else is clever or strong enough to try to break me. No one else can give me this gift. Once, long ago, I killed Xivu Arath on her war moon, and she blew up the whole moon to kill me with her (powerful Hive can survive ordinary death). She was laughing in joy. I laughed too. A whole moon! A whole moon. It was a waste of a moon, but it taught me how to save myself from exploding worlds, which was necessary to fight the Ecumene. I love mighty Xivu more than a moon loves the tide. I’ll kill her for this. Over and over, forever and ever. When I get home from my wanderings in the Deep, and I take back my throne, I’m going to have children. That’s what I need. Sons and daughters to love and kill.

So, we have one solution to the problem of Moloch; if your values are not compatible with Moloch, change your values so they are. Problem solved. You can still experience love, friendship, pride, as long as the basis for all these things is in line with Moloch. You can conquer and kill out of a deep sense of purpose that you are ending the suffering of those that were not suited to existence. That you are pushing the universe towards its final shape. You can earnestly appreciate others when they practice the sword logic, even against you.

Beyond the player character and their allies, there is another character in Destiny that takes objection to this. The Witness, who nevertheless is an enemy to the player and allied to the Hive, has a different idea of the perfect universe than The Winnower. The goal of The Witness is to freeze the universe in place with every being frozen in their greatest moment of success. I am not sure if every being would get such a good moment, but all the moments we see personally offered are supposed to be the best for that specific person.

This somewhat resembles Scott’s solution of putting an all-powerful, sympathetic being in charge to shutdown Moloch/The Winnower forever. I would think that Scott hopes that us lesser beings would maintain our free will, but I don’t know if free will is compatible with a perfectly stable world. If humans are still free, we could work against each other or against our superintelligent overlord. A few rogue humans would not be a threat to such an entity, but even once humans are more or less under control the superintelligence would still need to worry about supernova, gamma-ray bursts, aliens, entropy, etc. Scott says we are only free from Moloch when the whole universe is a garden (both Scott and Destiny love their garden metaphors). The universe is a big place though (citation needed). Even if we make a benevolent and superintelligent AI, there is still a long way to go before the whole universe is under control, if that is even physically possible. And if it is not, the AI is going to need to devote some of its resources to expansion, protection, and research forever, potentially letting Moloch back in if the AI decides its survival is uncertain and it needs to trade against our human values for its own power or survival. There is the additional complication that “human values” is undefined and no matter what is proposed a large group of humans is going to strongly disagree with those values. The Witness can only be confident in its ultimate victory because of the Destiny Universe magic system, but an AI in the real universe could never be 100% sure that it is safe to tend the garden now.

The player character fights just as hard against The Witness’ plan for a static universe as they do against The Winnower aligned enemies. The characters in the game, and likely people in the real world, do not accept eternal frozen happiness as a reasonable end point to the universe. It is unclear what an acceptable end point would be, besides Moloch is bad and stasis, even good stasis, is bad. I wonder if no Moloch is as bad as total Moloch, and think back to the The Winnower’s words of what we would get without him, “great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them.” Seems like an accurate description of a future where everyone is wire-headed into pods and have no real challenges.

I have been taking the Destiny lore at face value, but what is plausible in a video game may not be plausible in real life. Would a society structured like the Hive, based on relentless competition and violence, actually be able to function for any length of time? Who is teaching the young, growing food, and building the spaceships if their whole philosophy is take, don’t build? How can they fight wars against advanced civilizations while fighting amongst themselves at the same time? Sometimes The Winnower seems to be making this point, emphasizing mutual interest and adaptability in addition to theft and violence, but it is not really explored so far in the lore.

Defecting seems great at first when you can take advantage of others, but a society of nothing but defectors can’t accomplish anything. The cancer cells are having a great time until their host dies and all the cancer dies with them, where the noncancerous cells in someone else get to pass their genes onto the next generation. There is a balance here, where the defector may outcompete other members of their own group, but weaken their group and allow something outside to defeat the whole group. Competition between groups forces cooperation within groups. Is there an out here? I am not sure. I am tempted to propose that unifying all sentient beings into one group and having them compete against an eternal enemy like death or suffering is the play, but I am reminded of the Winnower’s words, “Would you tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?” I would have to answer no. However, maybe if I had more faith in society I would answer differently. Alternatively, if the question is asked a little differently, “would you be willing to tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of your loved ones?” I might be willing to say yes, and I can easily imagine many people doing so. Therefore, perhaps the best thing to do is to make a society of all loved ones that is worth planting a bomb in yourself for. Of course, then the next problem is going to be the society that I think is worth it is going to be a dystopian nightmare for someone else.

So where does that leave us? We presumably don’t want to mindlessly follow Moloch like the Vex, probably don’t want to whole-heartedly embrace Moloch like the Hive, and we can’t trust or don’t want to let The Witness or a benevolent AI lock us into an artificial utopia. In the real world there is no law of nature that one of these things must happen, though. We can continue bumbling around as we have done previously. If we are sufficiently isolated in the universe to not have to worry about anyone else showing up, it is just us humans and our creations running the show. And each individual person can always choose to not defect. You may make less money or lose that election, but Moloch is just an idea. He cannot make you defect, you can still choose not to, even if it is the suboptimal play. Scott said, “(Sometimes) they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do.” The key part of that sentence is “replaced by people who do.” Well, there are only several billion people to pick from, what if none of them will do? Probably over-optimistic of me, but this is still a game of human choice, and nothing says that money or victory or power must be a terminal value. The Winnower would argue differently, saying that anyone who does not pursue these things will be ruled by someone who does. But how many people do you know personally that are only concerned with power? And do those people even seem to be any better at obtaining it or using it than people who have other values? I imagine the reader is picturing the most prominent member of their least favorite political party right now and thinking I am full of it, but you are also probably thinking that politician is pretty dumb and not doing a great job of accomplishing even their own goals. I can say from my own personal view I get more satisfaction out of kindness and honesty than any kind of material success, and I would hope most people feel the same way. I view defeating Moloch as a greater victory than any that I could achieve by following Moloch.

I suppose I should summarize with an actual review of these works. Meditations on Moloch is an excellent essay. The arguments are well-reasoned and easy to understand, and the poem adds vivid imagery and structure, unifying the whole picture. My only quibbles are that the poem makes Moloch seem purely a function of civilization when it is just as present in the natural world, and that Scott’s solution seems pretty weak. But it is an almost universal problem that describing an issue is easier than solving it.

Destiny probably has the best and most in-depth lore of any video game I have ever played. It has been years since I have played the game itself and I am still following the story and lore as soon as it is released. I have only touched on a small fraction of it here, there’s a whole story inspired by Roto’s Basilisk, just Savathûn could be another essay of this length, and countless other events going on throughout the game and in the background. I am very curious to know where the writers got the inspiration for The Winnower, and if they view him as an ordinary video game villain or take him as seriously as I have done.

Miniatur Wunderland: The Model Train that Dreams It's a World

According to my friend, who shall remain anonymous, Miniatur Wunderland is the Best Museum in the WorldTM. He wasn’t wrong, as it turns out [1], but I think my scepticism at the time (and presumably yours right now) was perfectly justified.

What does the name Miniatur Wunderland tell you? We know what it screams: I’m a Tourist Trap. But what does it tell you? “Miniatur” is accurate, but clinically obvious —yes, things are small there [2]. “Wunderland” sits at the opposite end of the credibility spectrum, a meaningless cliché that begs for cynicism. Put together, it’s like naming a bookshop “Fascinating Books”: it commits the dual crime of telling you nothing while somehow simultaneously overpromising everything [3].

Thankfully, every mention of Miniatur Wunderland is accompanied by the more descriptive tagline “The Largest Model Railway in the World”, which to me feels like a scream-upgrade from “Tourist Trap!” to “Tourist Trap! Nerd Edition”. And that I can get on board with. Pun intended.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I realise that for those of you who have never heard of this before, a proper explanation is already 3-paragraphs overdue. So here goes nothing:

Miniatur Wunderland is a permanent exhibition in Hamburg, Germany, which holds the Guinness World record for the largest model railway system. Yet this is one of the least remarkable things about it. The trains are really just an excuse for creating an entire world around them. The exhibition unfolds across intricately detailed miniature landscapes, with themed sections that capture both real and imagined places. Trains weave through tiny cities populated by hundreds of thousands of tiny people, while cars drive, ships sail, and even planes land and take off at a fully-functioning airport (which is also the world’s largest model airport! Shame that they decided to leave this out of the tagline).

This is still a deeply inadequate description. But it's precisely this struggle to convey Miniatur Wunderland’s charm in words that made me want to write this review. Some experiences resist language so stubbornly that they demand to be captured, if only to document the failure of the attempt.

What makes Miniatur Wunderland so difficult to explain?

Miniatur Wunderland presents the classic ekphrasis challenge of translating a visual experience into words, with the difficulty dial turned all the way to Nightmare mode. There are thousands of tiny scenes happening simultaneously across different landscapes. The density of visual information borders on sensory overload, and describing it feels like trying to explain a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Although I'd admit Bosch poses his own unique challenges, a certain je ne sais (pour)quoi is that naked man being devoured by a bird-headed monster wearing a kettle as a hat? Which Miniatur Wunderland mostly avoids. Mostly.

The problem extends beyond words failing where sight would succeed. If that were the only issue, photographs could bridge the gap. But photographs of Miniatur Wunderland are flawed in their own way. They flatten, freeze and crop an expansive 3-D world that's meant to be explored in motion, with the freedom to stick your nose wherever you please and the joy of stumbling upon whimsical details tucked into unlikely corners [4].

Still, you might be able to triangulate from a mosaic of flawed representations. So, if you have some time to spare and want a hint of what I’m talking about, you can (optionally) watch this video (and others on their YouTube channel) or and/or poke around in this Google Street Mini View (Google used tiny vehicles equipped with camera rigs to record parts of the layout). Both are out of date and limited to only a few parts of the exhibit. But they are something.

Otherwise, definitely no homework required to continue reading! Here are a few photos to help you get some extra context:

Part of the airport car park:

The airport terminal:

Rio de Janeiro at night:

DJ Bobo’s Concert:

A gondola in Venice:

Italian blend at night:

There are four qualities that are central to the Miniatur Wunderland experience which are difficult to capture through photos or videos. Believe me, I tried, and I have 246 photos and videos to prove it (still, a laughably inadequate sample, but my phone ran out of battery):

1) The mind-boggling size

2) The obsessive attention to detail

3) The satisfaction of Complex Systems That Just Work

4) The irreverent (not-so-)hidden Whimsy

Let me elaborate on these one by one.

1) This thing is massive.

Miniatur Wunderland has:

1,694 m2 of miniature layout (in a 10,000 m2 old warehouse space), most of it on a 1:87 scale.
1,231 trains, circulating on a 16,491m track (which would translate to roughly 1,400km in real life, which is approximately the traversal length of Great Britain, from the southwest to the northeast. Or a bit more than the distance between NYC and Chicago).
11,800 cars and other road vehicles
52 planes that operate 250 flights per day
292,110 tiny residents
5,278 buildings
521,500 LEDs
12 themed worlds:

Knuffingen (2001): a fictional German town, famous for its extremely efficient fire brigade.
Central Germany (2001): classic rural scenes and towns
Austria (2001): includes the Alpine mountains, plenty of tunnels and ski resorts.
Hamburg (2002): key landmarks from the host city, including the port, St. Michael’s Church, the Elbphilharmonie, and even a miniature version of Miniatur Wunderland itself.
The US (2003): Las Vegas, Miami, Grand Canyon, the Old Wild West, Mount Rushmore, a (working) space shuttle launch in Cape Canaveral, and Area 51 (excellent for alien-watching).
Scandinavia (2005): Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and a 30,000-liter water basin representing the North and Baltic Seas, complete with moving ships and tidal changes.
Switzerland (2010): includes the Matterhorn, the Castle of Montebello, mountain villages, a chocolate factory (that actually gives you chocolate!) and various industrial plants. Very tall (up to 6m, stretching across two floors).
Knuffingen Airport (2011): with planes that taxi, take off and land! In case you hadn’t got the memo yet.
Italy (2018): highlights from Rome, Venice, the Vatican (ok, ok, not technically Italy, but you get what I mean), and an eruption-prone Vesuvius.
Rio de Janeiro (2021): with urban scenes, Sugarloaf Mountain, the famous Christ statue and a massive carnival celebration.
Patagonia (2023): wild landscapes of southern Chile and Argentina. Including glaciers and penguins. Lots of penguins.
Monaco and Provence (2024): features the Monaco Grand Prix, with functioning race cars, and coastal southern-France towns with Mediterranean vibes.
…with many more scheduled for construction, most imminently, several Asian countries. Other countries are also in the long to-do list, while England has hilariously been postponed multiple times because “By now 25% of our visitors come from abroad. To many of them, Europe looks alike – old houses, small towns, meadows, fields, forests and the occasional mountain.” Sorry Brexiters!

…And I’m not even trying to be comprehensive here.

You might be nodding along at this point, thinking “sure, yeah, that sounds like a lot”. But I hope it’s self-evident that no, you probably don’t really understand what these numbers mean, just as I (we) blissfully cannot grasp what it means for almost 600,000 people to die of malaria every year. The number registers, but it doesn't land.

Perhaps paradoxically, Miniatur Wunderland made vast numbers a little more digestible and tangible for me. Like those visual comparison books that show a blue whale next to a human, or museum exhibits with the Earth scaled down to the size of a pea. "One Wunderland" (approximately 300,000 tiny citizens) now feels like a concrete unit of measurement that I can (sort of) grasp at a visceral level. For example, the city where I grew up has almost half a Wunderland, and I can feel the human texture of that. The number now carries the weight of all those individual stories I encountered in that tiny world, each figure with their own implied life and place in the grand scheme of things.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths are a statistic. Three Wunderlands worth of death are… ok, still incomprehensible, but not a statistic. I can at least picture, literally picture, thousands upon thousands of individual stories suddenly gone silent. And that loss has a weight and a meaning that I can at least begin to grasp.

This works because Miniatur Wunderland blends the airplane-window view with a chance to zoom in at will and (metaphorically) walk the tiny cities and peek into tiny strangers’ lives. So you get the breadth of a distant godlike perspective and the grounded empathy of street-level immersion, both influencing each other: the god gains compassion, the close-up observer gains context. When it is so easy to alternate between seeing the forest and the trees, your mind starts learning how to hold both perspectives simultaneously.

Which brings me to…

2) Meticulousness Gone Wild

It is the borderline-pathological attention to detail that makes this world feel so alive. Just to name a few examples:

Day-night cycles

The layout shifts from daylight to night-time and back roughly every 15 minutes. The transition is gradual, mimicking real sunrise and sunset lighting conditions, gradually moving from warm yellow hues (sunset) to cool blues (night) and back. The system is driven by a centralised lighting control network connected to 500,000+ LEDs across the exhibit, inside buildings, vehicles, streetlamps, and landscapes. During “night,” lights switch on inside individual rooms across buildings, club scenes come to life, and you can even see fireworks and the Vesuvius erupting, with glowing lava running down towards a miniature representation of Pompeii. Concert audiences hold tiny lighters and glow sticks.

There are several night-specific events, but I’m afraid I don’t have many examples because I have a bad memory, when I visited (several months ago) I didn’t have this review in mind, and it didn’t occur to me to take notes. And it’s difficult to find this type of super-concrete information online (I don’t speak German, which doesn’t help, and I left writing this review to the last minute, which helps even less). I asked GPT, which gave me the most salient examples I already remembered, plus this one other thing that I strongly suspect is a hallucination: “a man getting up to pee during the 3 a.m. cycle of the day-night lighting system”. GPT clung to this scene with bizarre confidence that couldn't be backed by any fact-checking. But honestly, it’s exactly the sort of detail I could totally believe exists (or existed) somewhere in there.

Real water basin

The Scandinavia section features one of the exhibit’s most technically impressive elements: The North and Baltic Sea, aka a water basin that covers 80 square meters and contains 25,000 liters of water (to minimise waste, the grey water from the basin is used for flushing the toilets in the Wunderland). The basin has a functioning tide system that causes the water level to rise and fall by a few centimeters every 25 minutes. Harbors, boats, and bridges are all built to accommodate this fluctuation. There’s even a fully functional water lock.

This level of hydraulic engineering is gloriously unnecessary. Most visitors would never notice if the water level remained static. But Miniatur Wunderland seems committed to details that exist just for the sake of authenticity, whether anyone notices them or not.

Real airport

Knuffingen Airport is a fully-functioning miniature airport complete with 52 aircraft (representing a variety of models and airlines) that collectively perform over 250 takeoffs and landings daily.

Per their website: “Upon arriving at the gates, they [the airplanes] are steered back by push-back vehicles and taxi to the runway by themselves. There, they accelerate and take off. Each aircraft is equipped with original lights and the turbines emit a realistic sound, at least during take-off.” Arrivals and departures are tracked through digital boards that update in real time with flight status information.

The airport also has a fleet of buses and service vehicles, such as catering cars, fresh water and tank trucks, pumping engines, push-back cars and even an Airport Fire Brigade (which comes into action with up to 14 vehicles in case of an emergency landing)

Speaking of which…

Fire brigades

Across the various sections, there are programmed "emergencies" where tiny fire trucks and other emergency services respond with working lights and sirens. In Knuffingen, the local fire department has nine vehicle bays that rarely get a rest, as a local arsonist sparks new fires every 15 minutes (at 11 different locations, including residential buildings, and even a Castle!).

Up to 34 vehicles rush to the site in case of a red alert, depending on the size of the fire. If the fire gets out of control, fire engines from the suburbs are called for support.

Meanwhile, police cruisers will block access roads around the dangerous emergency site: “On passing crossroads the sirens of the cruisers will sound just in time and other drivers will stop their cars responsibly to let them pass. After the fire department has arrived at the site the fire will be fought and successfully extinguished.”

Real-World Echoes and Seasonal Shifts

Seasonal decorations transform sections throughout the year. I visited shortly before Halloween, so farmers were growing pumpkins and selling them at the market, ghosts were haunting houses, and there was an eclectic Halloween parade where the line between costumed humans and actual monsters blurred.

Last week, they celebrated May the 4th recreating some of the most iconic scenes from the Star Wars saga, including a speeder-biker race through the Monaco Formula 1 circuit (Star Wars references are also a constant throughout the year, including a Millenium Falcon, which occasionally lands at Knuffingen Airport).

The exhibit also responds to significant global events. After the recent papal election, white smoke rose from the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican section.

And while we’re in the Italy region, if I understand the information on their website correctly (which the less-than-perfect translation to English makes slightly confusing) the Colosseum’s lighting may change whenever a death sentence is commuted or overturned, just as the real Colosseum does (did you know this was a thing? I didn’t!):

“Ever since 1999 the original Colosseum has become a memorial as to the wrongness of death penalty. Whenever the death penalty is suspended somewhere or has been abolished by a nation, the original building will be awash with light for 48 hours. This installation is also part of the Wunderland version of the Colosseum and shines brightly every night.”

Alternatively, maybe this means that they always have a special lighting homage setup? Unclear. I personally appreciate the anti-death-penalty activism, in any case.

What’s definitely true is that the Colosseum’s miniature version has an interesting interactive feature where the illumination of the front of the building is controlled by visitors' body temperature: "A freezing person will make the light turn blue, whereas the hot blooded spectator will wash the front in a reddish hue.” I mean, sure, why not.

In the miniature world, tourists and students wander through the iconic remains and, if you pay attention, you can see some monks secretly stealing pieces of wall (a reference to the little known fact that St. Peter's Basilica was partly constructed from rocks taken from the outer rings of the Colosseum).

And these are just some random fun facts from one small part of one region.

There are uncountable other details

There is a drive-in cinema which when I visited was screening a Pixar short (obviously, what else). I loved the figurine of a woman who was ironing while watching the movie, just like my mother likes to do (though she doesn’t have a penchant for doing it in public).

In the Hamburg section, you can of course find a meta-surprise: the Miniatur Wunderland Miniature (see the picture at the top of this post). Peer through the windows of the building and you’ll glimpse a mini-model of the very exhibition you’re standing in. If you squint (or bring a magnifying glass with you), you can even see the world's smallest model railroad, built at a scale of 1:7,569.

At the push of a button, the Elbphilharmonie (Hamburg’s Philharmonie) opens to reveal the detailed interior of the concert hall, with miniature musicians halfway through a performance, moving their tiny arms. Funnily enough, the miniature building was actually completed before the real one was finished: a testament to how efficiently everything works in this pocket universe.

3) Because all of this… just works!

Seeing a complex technical system operating smoothly feels very rewarding. Better than those “satisfying perfect fit” videos.

This is also another case of my being better able to appreciate some aspects of reality when reality is shrunk to a graspable size.

I know, abstractly, that our whole world operates through systems and technological marvels that are nothing short of a miracle. I frequent airports and I’m in awe every time I take a plane. But I cannot really comprehend what it means for, say, London Heathrow to average 1,300 flight movements per day.

When a system is miniaturised, its complexity becomes more visible, not less. It makes it somewhat legible, and all the more striking for that.

Beyond the aesthetics and attention to detail, Miniatur Wunderland is an engineering feat, run behind the scenes by over 50 computers. You may not understand how anything works, but you feel in your bones how impressive it is.

Take their carsystem, for example. Cars aren’t on tracks. They’re free-roaming, guided by magnetic wires buried beneath the road surface. Each car contains a tiny motor, battery, and steering magnet, plus sensors that let it "see" what's ahead, whether that’s a red light, a traffic jam, or a duck crossing the road. When batteries run low, vehicles autonomously navigate to designated charging stations, where they dock and recharge. It’s a miniature autonomous vehicle network, with congestion and all.

They explain on their website:

“We didn’t want the control software to follow a fixed sequence of steps, but rather provide each vehicle with a "brain". […]

Currently, the program has one process for each car that computes all its options 20 times per second. Vehicles can just drive around, have a fixed destination, can be limited to a certain route (i.e. buses or garbage trucks), or be on their way to an incident (fire fighters, oversized heavy transporters). For each vehicle, not only its exact location has to be determined but also its next options, such as: catching up to another car, approaching a crossing (with or without right of way regulation), entering the highway (relatively complicated, since another car already driving on the highway might have to be informed to change lanes, in case it hasn't noticed for itself yet), recharging the battery, etc.

A vehicle, resp. the computer program, decides at every branch which way to go by checking various criteria: Is the new route permitted for the type of car? Does it lead eventually to the car's destination? (Imagine virtual “roadsigns” at every crossing.) Is the route free, or at least free enough so that the car wouldn’t have to stop if it selected that route? Is there no fire fighting operation blocking the street? (Should this be the case, the vehicle checks other routes and also, if the detour is permitted for its type of vehicle).

Should there be more than one route fulfilling all criteria, the vehicle picks one route at random under consideration of pre-defined probabilities (i.e., a truck seldom enters residential areas). Once the vehicle selects a route, it checks if a turn signal has to be set or if stopping is required. (If a car has to stop on a highway, hazard warning lights start blinking automatically.) If there are no obstacles whatsoever, the vehicle enters the street and drives on with the speed defined for this route.

Our vehicles always check the right of way, yield to the highway rule of preferably driving on the right lane, stop at closed raillway crossing gates, obey traffic lights, grant the right of way to firefighters in operation, and stop at pedestrian crossings. If stuck in a traffic jam, they might let a car from a side street sneak in, and they also wait patiently behind garbage trucks with frequent stops. However, once in a while, a car gets caught in a radar trap because of speeding and subsequently is stopped by the police.

Buses make scheduled stops and at night, all vehicles turn on the headlights. They are switched off again at dawn, except for the Scandinavian layout. In the German section, about 10% of the cars run with headlights turned on at daytime, too – also controlled at random.”

I’m going to spare you more details which basically boil down to my metaphorically pointing at things and (not-so-silently) mouthing: “LOOK AT THAT. Seriously, can you believe this?” You can read more on their website (though if you’re anything like me, not nearly as much as you’d like. I can’t believe that they have not given an update on their in-progress ship control system since 2018) or, even better, check out their YouTube channel, which is a bit more up-to-date and has great behind-the-scenes commentary.

4) The whimsical touch

A massive world-class exhibition of engineering excellence and microscopic detail would have been enough to make me want to write this review. But what takes Miniatur Wunderland from "wow, impressive" to "I can't stop smiling as I walk around this place" are all the jokes, Easter Eggs, and playful touches left throughout. You can tell that the people working there are having a blast —and that they have a penchant for geeky culture, the absurd, the tongue-in-cheek, and occasionally, the mildly risqué (translation: there are a few hidden scenes of a mildly and not-so-mildly sexual nature, including a couple in a field of sunflowers with Cupid perched above them).

Somewhere in Monaco…. there’s a rooftop party for rich people. Scrooge McDuck is there, caught mid-jump into a pool of gold.

In the harbor, you can spot James Bond’s yacht (which, at the touch of a button, reveals his legendary red Ferrari, hidden inside) as well a gloomy, black yacht that stands out like a sore thumb (which is only apt for their owners, the Adams Family, which I imagine are fans of sore thumbs).

Also in Monaco, Nintendo characters are placed on the Formula-1 race track.

Somewhere, in an alley in Italy… the Ghostbusters prepare for an intervention. When you press a button, a car lift activates that brings into view the DeLorean and the Batmobile, just below the Ectomobile.

In a massive festival scene populated by thousands of figures, a keen, patient eye might be able to spot a group of cows dancing among the crowd.

Near the Flying Dutchman display in Scandinavia, an ice floe hosts three polar bears. One of them is holding a tiny bottle of Coca-Cola.

An UFO occasionally hovers over Central Germany. A lost alien can be spotted in the forest. Also in a German forest, there’s a well-hidden school for rabbits, who appear to be studying a diagram of an Easter Egg.

Speaking of aliens, one of the highway billboards shows a poster for the film Alien… with the face of ALF.

There is a group of aliens negotiating with government officials in a room in Area 51.

If you kneel in the Antarctica region, just below the exhibit there’s a small hole: if you look through it you’ll see Scrat, the Ice Age Rodent, frozen in ice, hugging its dear acorn.

I could keep going, but I imagine this is not very fun to read about. Certainly not nearly as fun as accidentally discovering them in person; when you're casually looking at some boring mountain scene and suddenly spot a tiny yeti peeking from behind a tree, or a microscopic couple doing something they probably shouldn't be doing in public, taking a couple of seconds to process and retracing your steps as you wonder: “Wait, did I just see…?”

But these little surprises do more than amuse you. I feel like they also quietly rewire your sense of what belongs where. You’re looking at a hyper-detailed model of Rome and then there it is: a mermaid in a fountain. The boundary between what’s mundane and what’s magical begins to blur. You start to feel like maybe the real world is full of similar glitches –things that are too small, too strange, or too well-hidden to notice. You just aren’t paying enough attention.

Ok, I want to know what charmingly deranged mind is behind all this.

I’m glad you asked. At least this is something that I feel like I can explain! Basically, Frederik Braun saw a model train in Zurich, had a nostalgic crisis, and called his twin brother six times in one day to convince him that they should quit their nightclub business to build the world’s largest model railway. And then they did.

Here’s the official version (which, lest you doubt my summarising skills, is exactly what I said, with more words. I’m quoting it just so that you know that I’m not making anything up):

In July 2000, Frederik Braun was visiting the alpine city of Zurich, Switzerland. Strolling through the alleys of Zurich’s center, he came across a railway model shop, which at once evoked childhood memories in him. Inspired by this reminiscence, the idea to make a long forgotten childhood dream come true became more and more prominent within hours after seeing the railway model shop.

The “at once evoked childhood memories” part could make you believe that he was very interested in trains as a child. From my (limited, imperfect) research, it looks like journalists often lean into the idea that the twins were lifelong train enthusiasts, presumably because it makes a tidy story. But my reading is that, yes, they liked trains, but they liked other things even more, including LEGO and construction games, and then fire departments (and following this, model fire trucks). Which, if one so insists, can also clearly be used for the purpose of imposing a clean narrative arc. They write in their autobiography:

Fire departments have two attractions we couldn't resist in the long run: They are red. They are loud. And in our case: There was a fire station nearby. Fire station 13 on Sedanstraße was just around the corner. I believe we stood in front of the gates for hours, and when the gates opened and a fire engine drove out with sirens blaring, we would hop on our bicycles and chase after them. When the streets were reasonably clear, they naturally soon left us behind. But that didn't stop us. We asked pedestrians and kept pestering people until we knew where the fire department had gone. I should emphasize that we weren't rubberneckers. We weren't interested in horror images of the injured or dramatic rescues of people standing in burning window frames too afraid to jump. […]

But we wanted to better understand the fire department operations. For this reason, we eventually started keeping statistics. When was the operation? How long did it last? How many vehicles were involved? One might find it strange that little boys approach their hobby this way, but behind it lies a method of approaching reality. We didn't check out books about the history of the fire department from the library. We also didn't watch documentaries about how the fire department works. If we wanted to know how the fire department functioned, we went there and looked at it. And when you look at something so impartially, you maintain your own perspective. That's basically how I still approach almost all situations in life [original in German, translation by Claude].

So here you have it: two brothers with a strong empirical mindset who like understanding complex systems for themselves, and making everything about fire brigades. That explains things. Who knew a childhood stalking emergency services would pay off so spectacularly?

Now, back to Frederik’s epiphany in Switzerland:

On the very same day, Frederik called his twin brother Gerrit, taking him by surprise by saying: “We are going to build the world’s largest model railway”. Gerrit, rather sceptic by nature, thought Frederik had gone mad and doubted the sincerity of his idea. But after receiving at least another six calls that day, with Frederik enthusiastically proposing new ideas on the topic, Gerrit realized how serious his brother was about the idea. He started considering the project from an economical and technical point of view. He came to the conclusion, that the project would be a technological challenge, the economic aspect would be very risky, from an entrepreneurial point of view it would be plain crazy, but overall it should be possible. Thus, Gerrit was infected by this idea as well. At that time, the two brothers, together with their business partner Stephan Hertz, had been running a night club in Hamburg and wanted out of the nightlife scene for a while.

First of all, I love the implication that, obviously, it was Gerrit’s natural scepticism that made him doubt that his brother was serious about building the world’s largest model train. Not like someone with standard-to-low amounts of scepticism wouldn’t have asked: "Did you fall on the snow and hit your head?"

Secondly, I’m intrigued by the persuasive strategy here: six follow-up calls in one day. I’m even more intrigued by the fact that it worked.

Third: I love “Overall it should be possible” and, frankly, see it as the operating philosophy of Miniatur Wunderland. Not easy, not profitable, not normal. Just “should be possible.”

Also, it’s painfully clear to me which twin wrote this origin story. Just saying.

On their website, they add a bit more colour to the psychological profiles of Gerrit “the Sceptic By Nature” who would “slow down Frederik down with rational facts” and Frederick, the hyperactive visionary:

Being a mathematician at heart Gerrit knew that according to the laws of probability, he only had to wait for his brother to come up with a scheme that would look promising. It was only a question of waiting patiently and talking his brother out of the non-promising ideas.

Until he was 11 he managed to rationalize his brother out of his scintillations, until Frederik approached him with the idea to build a huge Mickey Mouse comic book collection [Frederik in fact framed this as “the world’s biggest Mickey Mouse comic book collection”], making profits out of buying and reselling comic books. Gerrit simply couldn’t find any arguments against this plan and joined in.

Which, again, explains a lot of things.

Gerrit’s bio also notes that “[he] was good at construction [and] built an igloo out of cigarette cartons […] He invented a chronometer for motor sports and a unique billing software for catering, which is in use until today.” You know, the classic trifecta: cardboard igloo, precision timekeeping, and enterprise-grade billing infrastructure. All equally valid entries on your CV.

But I digress.

In order to find out whether enough visitors would come to cover the substantial capital outlay, the three of them decided to do a survey. More than 3,000 people with different characteristics were interviewed online and asked to decide which, mostly fictional, touristic places of interest they would want to see when visiting Hamburg. Male survey participants voted the idea of the “Miniatur Wunderland” to number 3, whereas with female voters it fell into last place.

I’m confused about these survey results: I would have expected women to like, or at the very least not hate this idea (full disclosure: I’m a woman). I looked into this story and got mixed information, but one possible explanation, reading between a lot of lines, is that the concept was presented as the world’s largest model railway. Not “the most intricate miniature universe”. Different PR vibe.

Despite this controversial outcome the founding team decided: “WE ARE GOING TO BUILD THE WORLD’S LARGEST MODEL RAILWAY” [apt capitalisation already in the original]

And, I will add, “WE WILL MAKE SURE THAT EVERYONE LIKES IT”. This is where the “miniature world” came into play.

I guess: mission accomplished? I realise there’s a strong selection bias here, but I’m yet to hear or read a negative take on Miniatur Wunderland.

It has almost 100k reviews on Google Maps, and an average rating of 4.8. That’s higher than the Louvre.

We all know the moral of the story: You can just do things. If it sounds barely possible, well, that’s already 90% of the job done.

Do you (or someone else) really not have anything remotely negative to say about this place?

It would make for a nice final touch to what’s already a ruthlessly balanced and objective review, completely free of personal enthusiasm, sentimental overinvestment, or uncritical awe.

First of all, no one said anything about impartiality in the task specification.

Secondly, I swear, in case there’s any remaining doubt, that this is not a sponsored review.

Third, I have a few not-so-positive things to say about Miniatur Wunderland.

To begin with, it is in Hamburg. I don’t live in Hamburg, nor is it convenient for me to visit Hamburg frequently.

Tickets can also be a bit expensive (it costs about 33 euros). Not all-things-considered expensive, but absolute-terms expensive for anyone who’s broke and needs to watch their spending. They don’t even offer an annual pass or any type of ticket that allows for repeated visits. If I lived in Hamburg, I would want to go there every week. Or at the very least every month, to see how it changes and evolves, and notice different details every time and enjoy myself without pressure. But that would be really bad for my finances. So maybe I should be grateful, after all, that I don’t live in Hamburg.

But its biggest drawback is the crowds. It’s strongly recommended to book tickets in advance, otherwise, you risk waiting over an hour to get in, or being turned away entirely. Even better, I’d recommend visiting at off-peak times, like early mornings or late nights on weekdays. It’s a bit of a shame that an exhibition so perfectly suited to delight neurodivergent visitors also involves one of the very things many neurodivergent people find most challenging. But there’s only so much you can do about it. And while I am, admittedly, the kind of person who complains about there being too many people while very much being people myself, I wasn’t too upset this time. It honestly makes me happy that a place like this is so well-loved.

Lastly: it’s really difficult to find information about this place, though I suspect it would be easier if I spoke German. I had a bunch of questions that I would have loved to answer (and present in this review) but it seemed impossible without making this my full-time investigative job and watching all their YouTube videos (which I wish I had the time to do!). Their website is not up to date, while the exhibition is constantly changing. LLMs were close to useless for research purposes due to their severe, but hilariously fitting, hallucinations (I mean, who can blame them, if you’re going to make up funny details and stories, you would be pressed to find a better excuse). The twins’ autobiography is not translated. There’s a documentary that Amazon wouldn’t let me watch without an Amazon Germany account, and it wouldn’t let me get an account without a German address and credit card (I did try!) There’s also some sort of Apple docuseries that I found equally inaccessible. At one point I paid £40 for a book on Amazon that looked promising, only to discover it was essentially a collection of blurry photos printed on low-grade paper, bound without page numbers, captions, or shame. (I got my £40 back.)

I think there’s a really good opportunity to bring more of this story to the English-speaking world. Someone, please, take it.

Some final caveats and closing thoughts

I didn’t have a pre-existing passion for or deep knowledge about model trains before visiting, beyond a vague sense that they were cool. As for miniatures, my experience is equally limited: mostly second-hand, via friends who are into Warhammer and my own appreciation for board games with unnecessarily elaborate miniatures. I’m sure there’s some context and commentary I’m missing, but I’ve written this from the only perspective I could: that of a curious visitor who found real joy in something unexpected.

I still don’t fully understand why this place struck such a strong chord with me. Perhaps it's because I'm drawn to ephemeral experiences out of low-key masochism: I have a bad memory, and it bothers me knowing I won't be able to fully capture moments to remember later. Most experiences can be at least partially salvaged through narrative: books can be summarized with my impressions, theatre plays have their storylines and often recordings, and even ballet performances can theoretically be found on video somewhere. But Miniatur Wunderland is perpetually transforming, and documenting it all seems utterly unmanageable. It changes from one day to the next, not in some vague "you cannot step in the same river twice" sense, but in the very tangible reality of a figurine you were particularly fond of disappearing overnight, replaced by an entirely new scene. Even with a set mind to record it all (I could drain three more phone batteries taking photos and videos), you wouldn't scratch the surface of this world. And how could you possibly capture its spatial nature? The way you move through it, kneel down for different perspectives, push buttons to trigger delightful effects or get a chocolate bar?

There’s also what I said at the beginning about this place combining scale with close-up storytelling, making it easier to simultaneously hold an analytical and empathic perspective. There are other experiences that sound like they should fulfill a similar purpose, yet didn’t for me. Take video games. I used to play the Sims as a child, but this experience feels like it favours storytelling over real scale. Age of Empires provided scale but missed the close-up empathy and whimsy for me. More recently, open-world video games seem like they should work, but for some reason the hyper-realistic, voice-acted characters in my screen feel less real and fleshed-out than a static tiny person hunched under the weight of a heavy backpack while waiting in line at a miniature airport. Maybe it’s because digital spaces feel provisional. They vanish the moment you close the program or move away. But when I leave the room, I know the figurines will still be there.

The best analogy I’ve managed to come up with for Miniatur Wunderland is “a very big 3-D Where’s Waldo? book-turned-installation”. That gets pretty close. Tiny scenes everywhere, hundreds of micro-dramas unfolding at once, and the constant feeling that you’re missing something delightful just outside your field of view.

But there’s one key difference. In Where’s Waldo?, or any other of the aforementioned games, you’re doing something. You have a task. There’s an objective, a target, a sense of completion. Even in video games or puzzle books or interactive museums, there’s usually some kind of utilitarian frame: Find the thing. Solve the thing. Win the thing.

In Miniatur Wunderland, there’s none of that. You're not trying to accomplish anything. You're just looking. Just enjoying. And that, I think, is the disarming power of it: a world built entirely for wonder, that doesn’t ask anything of you.

It doesn’t even ask that you notice. In fact, I’m sure there are plenty of details that no one ever appreciates before they vanish. I read a Reddit AMA with a Wunderland worker who was talking about how a lot of the work inside the trains (inside the trains!) isn’t seen. For example, they had a pizza-battle inside one carriage in Italy.

And this is probably what I appreciate the most about the Wunderlander spirit: the quiet encouragement to create and build, not because it will be noticed, or rewarded, but simply because it brings you joy. Because it’s fun. Because you care. Or because you deeply believe it’s the right thing to do.

Endnotes.

[1] Well, except technically he was wrong, because Miniatur Wunderland is an exhibition, not a museum. But never let semantics get in the way of a good opening paragraph.

[2] (Not) Fun Fact: I now feel self-conscious every time I use an em dash, terrified that I might be accused of being an LLM.

[3] I’d totally visit a bookshop called ‘Fascinating Books’ though.

[4] I swear this is not a sponsored review.

Museum Of Science, Boston

Parents say that they take their kids to the Museum of Science to spark a love of discovery, inspire an appreciation of the scientific method, and to learn about the world. That is all very nice, but the real reason you should go is to experience the hand stamp machines, which are in my opinion the museum's best and most popular interactive exhibit.

The museum treats hand stamping as a routine security measure, barely worth mentioning on their website. They do not realize that they have accidentally created the world's most popular introduction to practical robotics. It's supposed to be for re-entry purposes, but in my family, we consider it a special transitional moment, leaving us physically marked by the essence of Science.

There is no limit to the stamping, as far as I can tell. From our extensive personal experience, I can assure you these stamps wash off easily and do not stain clothes, even if your children get stamped so many times that their hands begin to resemble an extremely redacted CIA document.

This might seem to be a ridiculous amount of time spent talking about hand stamps, but trust me, it will slowly begin to make sense, when we get up to the snakes. At any rate, besides for the excitement of getting your hand stamped by a robot that might accidentally bite it off, my kids spend most of the time racing between the dinosaur fossils, the space capsule, and every button that looks even remotely pushable.

We shall start with the basics. The Museum of Science (mos.org) has all the expected features of the modern cultural institution known as a museum. It's clean and well-managed. It is staffed mostly by friendly volunteers. The facility is both stroller and wheelchair accessible, exhibits are translated into Spanish, and yes, there's parking. There are permanent exhibits and temporary exhibits

For a while, there was a temporary exhibit titled "Survival of the Slowest.” The exhibit featured slow creatures whose evolutionary success at survival shows the advantage of slowness. These included sloths, tortoises, and—most importantly for our story—several snakes.

One of my children had recently picked up the phrase "slow and steady wins the race," and over-generalized this idea to their everyday life. Seeing this exhibit, our child naturally took it as a personal vindication of their slowness. For example, they get dressed very, very slowly because they want to 'win the race'.

Me: What race?

Child: I am winning it! And THEY are losing it! BUSTED!

I hope they do not mind being busted, whoever ‘they’ are. Maybe they are dangerous snakes. Unfortunately, the Museum of Science never seems to have the snakes we want to see. This wouldn't be a problem if we hadn't become accidental snake connoisseurs.

Before we slither deeper into herpetological observations, please note that we do not speak Parseltongue. Our expertise in herpetology comes entirely from a single thrift store purchase, namely “Good Snakekeeping”, a book by a certain Philip Purser about the care and keeping of snakes. Philip Purser does not know it, but he is regularly quoted by my children.

My children have absorbed his advice and the information contained therein as eagerly as a python might swallow a mouse. Although I have made it very clear that they are not getting a pet snake, ever, they still like snakes, and so they asked a nearby museum staffer about the possibility of seeing an anaconda.

Anacondas (in case you haven't read Good Snakekeeping) are the largest snake in the Americas, capable of swallowing a capybara whole, and reach lengths of over twenty feet. The museum staffer regretfully informed us that they do not have an anaconda. The closest thing they had to an anaconda was… a boa named Andy.

All they had was a ball python. A ball python is a perfectly harmless pet snake that rarely exceeds five feet in length and spends most of its time curled up in a ball. Despite my partner's valiant attempts at snake-related sports humor ("It could be a basketball python! A baseball python! A football python!"), the kids remained adamant—they really wanted to see an anaconda.

I mean, what self-respecting snake enthusiast, having devoted countless hours to reading about feeding schedules, healthy scale patterns, and diagnosing conditions like mouth rot and scale fungus, could possibly be satisfied with a ball python that Philip Purser dismissively categorized as "perfect for beginners"?

The children began to whine. So I insightfully reminded everyone that we can't control other people's feelings. We can only control our own feelings. We can't make each other happy; we can only make ourselves happy. This philosophical truism, delivered in front of a thoroughly unimpressed and unimpressive ball python, did not make anyone happy.

But it wasn't until our third visit to “Survival Of The Slowest” that I realized we were living through a modern retelling of humanity's oldest cautionary tale. The museum was giving us an exercise in the original sin. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, ignoring my warnings, my children seemed drawn to the forbidden glass as if by magnetic force. And while I would like to (not-at-all defensively) report that they weren't exactly tapping on it, they were definitely touching it, skin to glass.

This was a remarkable parallel to the episode in the Biblical Garden of Eden, where God gave what seemed like an unambiguous, basic rule: Adam and Eve could eat from any tree — except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The consequence was clear: eating from it would lead to their death.

But then, as you see in the text in Genesis, Adam told Eve that God said not to even touch the tree. This was wrong, and a misrepresentation of the original rule.

Enter the Snake. This proto-rationalist-Dark Arts practicing serpent asked Eve about God's prohibition. Eve, based on Adam's modified version, claimed they couldn't eat or even touch the fruit without dying. The serpent, identifying this exploitable failure state in the rule implementation, promptly pushed her into the fruit.

When she remained very much alive, the forbidden fruit suddenly seemed less forbidden. One bite later, and, well, it ended badly for all of us. And so history repeats itself at the Museum of Science: the children visiting the Museum played the role of Eve, the museum staffers were cast as Adam with their well-meaning but overzealous interpretations of the rules, and the snake was the tempting snake. As in the original tale, everyone ended up punished.

The museum staffers were punished by having to spend their time at the museum scolding small children instead of educating people.
The children were punished by not being able to touch anything.
Parents and guardians were punished by enduring judgmental looks from others for their imperfectly behaved children.
The snake was punished by losing the ability to talk, losing its hands and legs, and ending up in science museums, where it spends all day crawling on its belly, listening to kids being scolded for touching the glass.

My children's current habit of touching rather than tapping the glass actually represents significant progress in their museum behavior, from a few years ago, when they would have been climbing it.

A few years ago, a deadly anxiety-inducing pandemic was spreading globally. We were existing in a perpetual state of sleep deprivation. You might remember it—it was kind of a big deal. There was something about masks, handwashing, and plexiglass barriers everywhere.

What was it called again? Ah well, no matter. The important thing is that the museum was fully prepared…to ensure that we knew exactly where the ‘No Climbing’ signs were located. Wherever we went, a museum staffer was always happy to helpfully show us these signs, which were everywhere a child might wish to climb. I felt personally responsible for — and embarrassed of — my children's misbehavior, and I never wanted to visit again.

But the museum really is a fascinating place, and my partner has an impressive amount of intestinal fortitude when it comes to taking them out in public. I'm acutely aware of every judging eye, so I found myself continually delivering carefully crafted lectures about proper museum behavior, just loudly enough for nearby adults to hear that I was trying, but hopefully not so loud as to disturb others.

"We respect the rules of the museum," I announced grandly, avoiding eye contact with possibly/probably disapproving strangers, hoping they would be impressed by my publicly visible performance of committed parenting even if they never see any actual results. I'm not sure this did anything for their behavior, but I like to think that my efforts contributed to our never getting banned from the museum.

But enough about my deeply ineffective parenting strategies. Let's talk about birds. The museum of Science has a huge bird exhibit, which is placed far away from the snakes.

We never get into trouble at the bird exhibit. That's because the exhibit consists of hundreds of stuffed birds that are all displayed on shelves, covered with plexiglass. Nearby, there are a few rocks that you're actually allowed to climb, making this my personal favorite exhibit for sitting down and pretending to do important work on my phone while my partner handles the actual parenting.

Here's where things get philosophically interesting: these fascinating specimens remain mysteriously anonymous. That's because there are NO LABELS. The birds look interesting, and some are ones I've seen before, and I would love to know their names. We even paid for tickets to learn about things like that at this museum. And got stamped.

Why don't they have labels? The exhibit designer, apparently channeling some sort of extreme realistic naturalist philosophy, claims this creates a more 'real life' experience. This is bad, evil, dumb, and epitomizes the realistic and natural constraints of optimizing for weird preferences over basic epistemic functionality.

This is a realistic and natural experience? You know, like in real life when 100 different species of birds are naturally sitting around on shelves in the middle of the forest, with a computer conveniently located nearby to look up their numbers and find out if they're endangered or not? Just like that.

Rant: This isn't just poor design—it's completely missing the point. They've managed to create an exhibit that simultaneously fails at being educational (having no labels) and at being true to life (consists of stuffed dead birds in glass cases in neat rows). Worst of all, it's counterproductive. I can't spend an hour playing bird bingo on your computer! I need to look at my phone supervise the children.

Finally, I would like to make some random observations about their commitment to bilingualism. The Museum of Science deserves credit for making their exhibits accessible to Spanish speakers. In fact, nearly every display includes accurate Spanish translations of the scientific content.

For me, this linguistic awareness makes their other institutional blind spot even more puzzling. All over the museum, critical safety information, emergency exit signs, and elevator warnings lack Spanish translations.

The museum seems to have decided that Spanish speakers should have access to knowledge about axolotls, neutron stars and plate tectonics, but not have any information about what to do in case of fire or which elevator not to enter with a wheelchair. I recommend that if you only speak Spanish, you should bring an English speaker with you – in case of an emergency.

Overall, the Museum of Science is a place I recommend visiting. We are fortunate to be able to access a scientific institution full of opportunities for testing the limits of both natural laws and human rules. While it may not be perfect, it provides many indoor opportunities for learning, even in the Boston winter, and even if sometimes the lessons we learn don't seem to be exactly what the exhibit designers intended.

Just don't tap on the glass—or touch it, or look at it too intensely, or think about it too hard. The staff will know.

My Childhood Television Set

The television I grew up with, on its four stubby legs, was about as tall as it was wide — it came up to my chest — and nearly as deep, if you count where the tapering end of the picture tube stuck out the back. It stood angled against the far corner of the “family room” opposite the couch and the bookshelf.

To turn it on I would pull a metal knob, reeded along the outer edge like a quarter. After resisting for a while, the knob would pop out toward me. Then, with a hum and a soft rattle of static pops, the television would awaken, and the hairs on my arm would rise toward the screen. Maybe this effect was why mom would sometimes tell us not to sit so near, fearing what the cathode rays might do to us at close range.

If I kept pulling the knob, it would come off entirely, revealing the stubby post that it was attached to. If I was feeling mischievous, I could push the post back into the set to turn it off, hide the knob, and then someone would have to hunt up the needle-nosed pliers if they wanted to watch TV. The knob attached to the post by sliding over it, as a hollow cylinder of metal with a more flexible band of metal inside to keep tension against the post. The metals were different sorts, so if I put the knob in my mouth (I was at a put-everything-in-your-mouth age), a strange sensation would run across my tongue where the metals swapped electrons through my saliva.

Behind the television, where the power cord and cable drooped, dust bunnies and legos collected. A handful of stubby plastic pegs stuck out near the top of a back panel of perforated particle board, next to a couple of bolts where you could attach rabbit ears if you weren’t fortunate enough to have cable like we did; you could twist these pegs to fine tune the set. Not understanding the theory, I took an experimental approach and learned I could make the colors go all wrong by cranking certain of the pegs in one direction or the other, or make the picture flutter like a curtain in the wind with another.

Inside the back panel was mystery stuff: vacuum tubes and solid state electronic doozywhatsits and dusty wires covered with woven insulation. Stuff I wasn’t supposed to touch. The picture tube itself gave up few of its secrets on being inspected from behind, but up front, if I looked at it very closely (when my mom wasn’t looking), it resolved into a honeycomb of tiny colored dots, which I found curious and suggestive.

Every once in a while one of the vacuum tubes would go bad. My dad would open the back panel, and, from a cloud of strangely-smelling singed dust, pull out the suspicious ones. We’d take these to the variety store across town where, one at a time, he would plug them into a free-standing console with multiple sockets labeled with the various tube variety codes. Some sort of indicator (a light? a gauge?) would indicate the health of the tube, and, having found the culprit, my dad would buy a replacement in a little dark blue thin cardboard box and we’d be back in business.

On top of the television was the weekly newspaper supplement that gave the programming schedule for the week. (Later on we’d have a VCR up on top, and, for a while, a pong console down among the dust bunnies.)

If it was early in the morning before anyone else was up, pickings were slim. There were thirteen channels on the set, accessible by turning a knob with the numbers 1 to 13 on it from click to click. But the first one, channel 1, was a sort of cruel joke — the Judas of the thirteen; it never had anything on, merely snow and a roar. And through the wee hours of the morning the remaining twelve were reduced to one as the others went off the air. That one lone channel featured a black-and-white camera on a pivot panning slowly back and forth across a series of analog dials showing time, temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, and things of that sort. It was not riveting, but until 6am or so, it was that or the snow on channel 1. Sometimes I chose the snow.

At six there was at least Davey & Goliath. If you’re not familiar with Davey & Goliath: it was a jerky claymation cartoon featuring a young boy and his dog who earnestly if sluggishly enacted the sorts of Sunday School lessons that stern Lutheran grownups thought would be morally nutritious for children. It was dreadful, but better than panning over dials, and usually better, depending on my mood, than electric snow. Like a lot of children’s television from that time, it was awkwardly, urgently, desperately trying to convince me that there was nothing wrong with negroes and that they were just like normal people and that there was absolutely no reason to suspect that they were menacing and criminal or ignorant and incompetent. In retrospect I can’t help but think there must have been a better way of going about this. I think their hearts were in the right place.

At six thirty the other channels would begin to come to life, including the cartoons: the good stuff. Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Warner Brothers crew were my favorites, but at some level it didn’t matter much as long as it was engaging — something other than those tedious shows grownups went for, like soap operas or Watergate. I was chasing a high. Sometimes, to amuse herself, mom would wait for a commercial break to begin and then ask us what show we were watching. We often wouldn’t remember. We weren’t watching the shows so much as we were getting stoned on them. The whirling lights and colors, the infinite jesters of wisecracks and sound effects, the pointless stories... all just peripheral, like the clatter of the roller coaster machinery under our feet, as we turned off our minds, relaxed, and floated downstream in blissful emptiness.

My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes

My dad only actually enjoys about ten foods, nine of them beige. His bread? White. His pizza? Cheese. His meat? Turkey breast. And his side dish? Mashed potatoes.

As a child I hated mashed potatoes, despite his evangelization of them. I too was a picky eater growing up, but I would occasionally attempt to see what he saw in his beloved spuds. Whenever I tried a bite, the texture disgusted me: a gritty gruel of salty flakes coated with the oleic pall of margarine. The flavor reminded me of stale Pringles. I checked back once every couple years, but was repulsed by them every time.

I lobbied my parents for pasta or frozen tater tots or any other side I actually liked. Family dinners were often dichotomous, the same protein supplemented by two different carbs. “You are not my son,” my father would joke as he continued to put away his potato slop. “Maybe you’re not my father,” I’d shoot back when he shunned the rest of the family’s rice pilaf. Our starch preferences seemed irreconcilable.

As I entered my teen years, my palate expanded. After I’d tried and enjoyed brussels sprouts and sushi and escargot, my hatred of one of the most basic and inoffensive of all foods seemed silly. One day at a nice restaurant, I decided to give mashed potatoes one more try.

Upon taking my first bite, I realized three things:

1) Mashed potatoes are good.

2) Whatever my dad had been eating at home was not mashed potatoes.

3) My world is built on lies.

Mashed Potatoes are Good

Potatoes were domesticated several millennia ago at the dawn of agriculture in the rugged highlands near Lake Titicaca in modern-day Peru. Their origins lie in a wild family of tiny, bitter, pockmarked solanum roots, so full of glycoalkaloids that when foraged they had to be eaten alongside clay to soak up their toxins. From this paltry stock of nightshades, archaic peoples of the Andes gradually husbanded generous, nutritious, mild tubers that would remain the staple of the region’s foodways through several successive civilizations.

These roots resemble the ancestral stock of modern potatoes (source)

Andean peoples found all sorts of ways to prepare their potatoes. The most immediate method was to boil them into stews, soups, or mashes with local flavoring agents - herbs, salt, chilis. Earthenware ovens called huatias were used to bake them. With even more time, they could be fermented into tocosh, an edible paste with antibacterial properties.

To get the spuds to really last, though, they were subjected to a natural freeze-drying method that produced shrivelled potato pellets called chuño. Repeatedly frozen by bitter mountain nights, baked in the sun, and stomped on to remove water, chuño remains shelf stable for up to a decade and can be rehydrated into a spongy, earthy, slightly less nutritious potato-like object.

The ability to produce chuño on the Altiplano is thought to have contributed to the Incan empire’s military dominance of the region, since despite its generally unappealing gustatory properties it’s perfect for keeping troops fed on long marches. Chuño also allowed Incan civilization to stockpile surpluses against lean years and trade potatoes as commodities over great distances. It wasn’t the best way to eat a potato you harvested today, but it was the only way to turn a potato you have today into a potato you’ll have two years from now. That had immense value.

After the Spanish conquest and the Columbian exchange, the potato made gradual inroads into the Old World, where the previous best root vegetables were often comparatively less nutritious parsnips and turnips. There was an initial adjustment period: new cultivars capable of growing in shorter hours of daylight had to be developed, objections to the absence of tubers in the Bible needed to be quelled, and the French eventually had to concede that potatoes do not, as they at first believed, cause leprosy.

With these hurdles cleared, in the 19th century the potato spread out and became one of the easiest and most efficient ways to turn arable land into palatable calories the world over. National cuisines incorporated the new staple crop thoroughly, and it’s now hard to imagine Italian food without gnocchi, French sans vichyssoise, tapas without patatas bravas, a Eurasia bereft of aloo and rösti and colcannon and latkes.

Europe’s new potato lovers also took to the simple recipe of boiling ‘em and mashing ‘em. While South America had lacked the livestock for dairy, in Europe the potato mash soon achieved its ultimate form with the addition of milk and butter, which impart a smoother texture and richer taste. Hannah Glasse’s procedure published in 1747 in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is, minus the long s’s, still just about how I make them today:

Maſhed Potatoes.

BOIL your potatoes, peel them and put them into a ſauce-pan, maſh them well ; To two pounds of potatoes, put a pint of milk, a little ſalt, ſtir them well together, take care they don’t ſtick to the bottom, then take a quarter of a pound of butter, ſtir in and ſerve it up.

Nowhere was the potato embraced more thoroughly than in Ireland. In the early 19th century, extractive British demands on Irish agriculture to feed the armies fighting Napoleon reduced the available land for Irish farmers to feed themselves. Achieving maximum caloric density on the remaining land was paramount, and almost nothing is denser than the potato.

Potatoes quickly became an integral part of Irish life, so essential to the food systems of the island that when a blight hit them in the mid-1840s it led to one of the most devastating famines in history. The failure of the potato crops created starvation and emigration so profound in scale that the population of the island still has not recovered to its 1845 level almost two centuries later.

Among those millions of potato-starved emigres were my dad’s ancestors, who came to America in the decades following the famine. My great grandfather, who bore the extremely Irish name Gerald FitzGerald, instilled in his children (including my grandmother) a reconstructed sense of Irish-American ethnic pride that included an affinity for corned beef and cabbage, Guinness beer, and the affordable practicality of mashed potatoes.

As the generations marched on, those mashed potatoes turned out to be one of the only things my grandmother would make that my exceedingly picky father would eat. Their creamy texture and subtle starchy taste didn’t trigger the “ew gross” reaction he had to so many other foods. Mashed potatoes, just like the ones Glasse had written about more than two centuries earlier, became his favorite side - and eventually, when I finally got to try them, one of mine too.

Whatever My Dad Had Been Eating at Home Was NOT Mashed Potatoes

The chuño-chomping Incans were not the last military to rely on dehydrated potatoes for sustenance. In World War II, the US Army experimented with various forms of potato dehydration to help stretch supply lines. The easiest way to get a uniform potato commodity into the hands of G.I.s was to pulverize the potatoes into granules, dehydrate them, and then plan on bringing them back to life with boiling water in an imitation of “mashed potatoes”.

These shreds resemble the ancestral stock of modern Instant Mashed Potatoes (source)

The result was an affront. The potatoes were swimming in their own gluten, released during the granule-making process, which when mixed with imprecise water ratios made for a slop that was somehow both gluey and soupy. Immediately after the war, French’s (now best known for mustard) tried to introduce “instant mashed potatoes” as a consumer product category. America’s veterans were not having it. They didn’t want to be reminded of the awful slurry they’d had on the front.

The commercial fortunes of instant mashed potatoes began to turn around a decade later, however, when food scientists in the US and Canada converged on methods for producing dehydrated potato flakes rather than granules. The flakes had substantial advantages. They didn’t get as glutinous when reconstituted. Their geometry made them easier to dry quickly, on the order of minutes or even seconds. Using a multi-step process called the “Philadelphia Cook”, they could lock in a more natural flavor. When prepared on the stove with butter and milk, they were supposed to turn out almost as good as the real thing without any onerous prep work on the part of the consumer.

This raises the question, though, of why food scientists kept working on improving instant mashed potatoes a decade after they were no longer required for the war effort. If you’re no longer constrained by having to stick it to the Axis, why not return to Glasse-style maſhed potatoes in all circumstances?

This is a pattern that recurs frequently in reading about American foodways of the 20th century: choices and innovations made under extreme duress in the World War II economy didn’t fade away when the duress subsided. Instead they echoed back into American life a few years later, despite the lean conditions that birthed them being replaced by extreme abundance.

Why did America start eating like it was on a total war footing again when my parents’ generation was young? There are a lot of overlapping explanations. Here are a few:

Industrial inertia: Companies that had spun up to supply a vast army didn’t want to shut down overnight, so they necessarily pivoted to the consumer market. Some of these efforts succeeded at entrenching new consumer categories (fish sticks, canned peaches) while others (hamburgers-in-a-can) did not.
Genuine innovation: Technologies brought to maturity during and after the war, notably frozen food, offer novel consumer benefits that stand on their own merits.
Tastes fixed by rationing: Consumer habits are sticky. People who spent a couple years forced to buy margarine instead of rationed butter, or skim milk instead of rationed meat, got used to those items and wanted to continue buying them in greater quantities than the prewar status quo.
Pursuit of efficiency: As women entered the workforce en masse in the postwar era, the pool of hours available to be spent on domestic labor like cooking shrank. As much as any dishwasher or washing machine, convenience foods are labor-saving, productivity-enhancing technologies for the home.

This last factor is the only one that can explain the continued development of instant mashed potato technology. There were no potato-flaking interests during the war to have inertia; the instant mashed potatoes are not superior to their fresh antecedents; there was no ingrained consumer preference for an instant mashed potato product. It is only the desire to reduce time spent on food prep that could create “better instant mashed potatoes” as a commercially viable R&D space in the 1950s.

The other factors contributed to the unique awfulness of my father’s instant mashed potatoes, though.

Another WWII technological innovation, the cavity magnetron used in radar installations, led directly to the invention of the home microwave oven which began to proliferate widely in the 1970s. The microwave supercharged all “convenience food” trends, shortening not just prep time but cooking time as well. Uneven heating is hardly a concern when you can speed up your meals by a factor of ten.

Meanwhile, the existing postwar status of margarine and skim milk was greatly enhanced by the dietary fat scare of the 1980s and 1990s. These products displaced butter and whole milk as health-conscious consumers sought to eliminate saturated fats from their diets in a doomed effort to stave off the incipient obesity epidemic.

My parents, both already primed to accept these imitative products by my grandparents’ wartime preference formation, exclusively purchased margarine and skim milk for the household once they got married. And, pressed for time with two jobs and two kids, they frequently purchased instant mashed potatoes as well. And cooked them in the microwave.

What resulted was a second-order simulation of true maſhed potatoes, perverted and made unreal by the consumer echoes of the second world war. Real potatoes were substituted for desiccated flakes, real milk for a thin byproduct, real butter for refined vegetable oil, real mashing for the Philadelphia Cook, a real stovetop flame for microwave excitation. The measuring cup contained a substance gesturing at the notion of “mashed potatoes”, but no aspect of the original remained.

Yet because the name was the same, my father still believed he was eating the same dish my grandma made, the same dish his ancestors ate in Ireland, the same dish Glasse wrote about a quarter millennium ago. The appeal to him was undiminished. His body ate the slurry, but his mind still ate the maſhed potatoes of his youth.

My World is Built on Lies

In researching whether the ancient Andean peoples really did boil and mash potatoes, I came across this post which sheds light on the issues I have with my father’s instant mashed potatoes beyond their phenomenal unpleasantness when eaten.

There is a rhetorical sleight of hand happening in this post title [1]. The phrasing implies that chuño resembles modern instant mashed potatoes in some way, that instant mashed potatoes are in some sense continuous with indigenous ways of potato-knowing. But there is no continuity of process, because the way chuño is created has no particular commonalities with the Philadelphia Cook beyond the removal of moisture. There is no continuity of form, for chuño actually looks like this:

(source)

And there is no continuity of purpose, either. To the Andean peoples, chuño was the only way of ensuring that their potato crops would be available well into the future. In America, our indigenous way of achieving this potato security is the entire miracle of modern agriculture and food distribution. I don’t need to stomp on freeze-dried potatoes in the Altiplano to make sure I’ll have access to potato nutrients next year. I just have to rely on the continued existence of Idaho and Target. No, despite what this redditor would like to believe, the instant mashed potato serves some other purpose.

That purpose is illuminated by the second rhetorical sleight of hand in the reddit post, the one occurring on the box, in the form of the offset between the yellow lower-case “Instant” and the white majuscule “MASHED POTATOES”. “These are fundamentally maſhed potatoes,” this typography lies, “that happen to have been given the quality of ‘instant’”.

But they’re not. They’re a different thing entirely, a completely new evolutionary lineage of potato preparation that’s called “instant mashed potatoes” even though they’ve never been mashed. They are as distinct from Glasse’s maſhed potatoes as chuño is, but they masquerade as being the same, because that is their purpose - the fulfillment of a psychological need to consume something resembling the classic dish of “mashed potatoes” with slightly less effort than that dish requires.

This is a pedantic distinction - but it’s a distinction that had a big impact on my culinary life, because I believed the lie. My mental category of “mashed potatoes” was hijacked by this impostor and it made me think, for years and years, that I hated something that I actually would have liked all along. My preference formation was distorted by this warped, hyper-optimized fulfillment of my father’s crystallized preference. The expedient way to fulfill one generation’s desire locked the next generation out of experiencing that desire at all.

At this point in the review you might say, “what’s the big deal? It’s just mashed potatoes. Chill out.” Which, fair enough - if it were just mashed potatoes then 2500 words on them might be excessive. But the pattern I’ve described is far from unique to pureed tubers.

Consider an abstracted version of the saga of my father’s instant mashed potatoes. It has a few steps:

Humanity develops a Thing from ingredients that exist in the world.
Seeking efficiency at scale, an industry chops the ingredients of the Thing into teeny tiny bits.
Using an artificial emulsifier, the bits are bound back together into an aesthetically deficient but more convenient slurry that resembles the Thing.
Because it contains traces of the ingredients of the original Thing, this IMPish admixture is sold to us as if it were the original Thing.

Pared back to this level of abstraction, a surprising amount of stuff starts to seem like my father’s instant mashed potatoes.

The other foods in this category are obvious - McNuggets reconstituted out of pink slime, American cheese product, instant coffee, deli ham, Pringles minted from the very same potato flakes that go into IMPs. We’ve even developed a whole new health scare over them: “Ultra processed foods” [2] are as demonized now as butter and whole milk were when my parents were young.

Expand the pattern to the built environment. Pressboard, particle board, and other reconstituted material composites likely make up a majority of new furniture sold in the US. These are an IMPish imitation of actual wood furniture. Take care while assembling not to ding your brittle sheetrock walls, an IMPish upgrade over lath and plaster. Often these interiors live inside an apartment building clad in a mish-mash of random ornament, anti-massing regulations demanding an IMPish simulation of a varied city block.

Intellectual goods can be IMPish. Reader’s Digest, sports “best-of” VHSes, textbooks stuffed with decontextualized excerpts, YouTube compilations, ChiveTV, listicles, social media feeds consisting of screenshots of other social media, Now That’s What I Call Music!, an entire ecosystem of actual cultural objects broken down into bits and clumped back together.

Corporate structures can be IMPish. When I visit a medical office it’s usually a confusing tangle of overlapping practitioners and practices operating out of the same physical address, an IMPish imitation of the archetypal doctor with a shingle in town. Similar quagmires abound when dealing with insurance, or contractors, or financial services.

Once you see the instant mashed potato antipattern it’s hard to stop. The isomorphisms are everywhere.

The gig economy makes IMPish jobs. Swiping apps produce IMPish flirting. Meta-studies are IMPish science. Ted Talks are IMPish symposia. Malls are IMPish shopping districts. Subdivisions are IMPish neighborhoods. Cruises are IMPish international travel, chopped into 14 hour chunks and emulsified with an ocean liner.

The internet scrapes together IMPish communities. We’re not atomized; we’re flaked. We’re Philadelphia Cooked, and we’re stewing here together in the microwave.

Large Language Models can gall on an aesthetic level because they are IMPish slurries of thought itself, every word ever written dried into weights and vectors and lubricated with the margarine of RLHF. [3]

Since World War II and the large-scale industrialization it fully unleashed, a core method driving ‘progress’ across many different fields of human endeavor has been to shred something real and reconstitute it into a faster, easier, less appealing IMPish substitute for what we used to make out of it. This is the parsimonious recipe for industry to fulfill our urges. We’ve got the food processor whirring, and absolutely everything is going in.

Why must the real be shredded to achieve these simulacra? Why can substitute products not be synthesized out of whole cloth? Because the integration of shreds of the real provides psychic camouflage, a credible way for the IMPish mimics to signal as their models:

The problem with this, of course, is the problem I had with my father’s instant mashed potatoes: the substitute is only able to satisfy a craving if you have the craving in the first place, and that requires direct experience with that which it is meant to replace. The memory of the thing being mimicked is a necessary ingredient for the IMPish imitation to work, the mental spell that allows the transmutation from IMPish Thing to Thing (original).

If you get to the party too late, if you never get to taste the maſhed potatoes, all you’re left with is a confusingly disappointing slurry going by the same name. When no distinction is drawn between the IMPish thing and its original, you don’t know what you’re missing. You don’t even know there’s anything to miss - after all, you’re still eating “mashed potatoes”!

If the IMPishness is pervasive enough, eventually you start to disbelieve that any of these reconstituted things could ever have been worthwhile, that any of the desires and preferences being fulfilled by these slurries ever could have been authentic. “Is this really what life is?”, you wonder, never having lived. “I don’t see why everyone was so jazzed about it.”

Cultivars of the Real

While formulating this review, I encountered a troubling congruence: the period during which my dad has been eating instant mashed potatoes consistently (roughly 1990-present) is about the same as the period between the onset of the Napoleonic Wars and the Irish potato famine in 1845. Why does one thirty-five-year pattern of potato consumption get to be considered authentic cultural heritage while another is self-deception? Aren’t they both equally contingent and ephemeral? Why should either be ‘real’?

This line of reasoning quickly starts to disclaim almost everything as fake. Masſed potatoes could only arise from the technologies of the age of the sail uniting old world tubers and new world dairy. They’ve only been around for a few centuries. Why should they get to be considered ‘real’? For that matter, why is the potato itself considered real? It’s a confection whipped up by the Andean farmers of the last few millennia. The only things that are really real on the Altiplano are nightshade and hunger.

I find such primitivism unhelpful in making the sort of distinction I aim to make here. Taken to the extreme it suggests that no hominid has experienced reality since the taming of fire. Some might agree that that’s the case! But as far as I’m concerned, at least some of the fruits of civilization are real too. I do think there is a way to conceive of the real that admits potatoes, that even admits masſed potatoes, but that gives legitimate reason to have grievance with IMPs.

On the Altiplano, the potato emerged through centuries of toil and discernment. Generation after generation of farmers chose only to propagate the solanum tubers that were bigger, tastier, less toxic, more nourishing. It is through such labor that every project of human civilization ultimately progresses - the ability, however imperfectly exercised, to act on the impulse “yes, more of this” when something is good, and “no, less of that” when it is bad.

As cultivators of the real, we get to choose not just among individual potatoes themselves, but among more abstract things like “memes concerning the preparation of potatoes”. Masſed potatoes were good, and so their meme propagated and strengthened the foodways it came in contact with. It was planted widely in the garden of the real. The WWII potato granule meme was bad, so it was discarded, cast out upon the rocks of the fake.

IMPish substitutes subvert this process of cultivation. In masquerading as other cultivars of meme, they weaken our stock both by sneaking into the garden despite their insalubrity, and by causing us, as I did for so long with maſhed potatoes, to reject the healthy older cultivars which they mimic.

Perhaps some of them are worth adding to our garden on their own merits. Perhaps many of them are! Many of the things I take for granted as ‘real’ are as far removed from their natural origins as a Yukon Gold is from those tiny nightshade roots, and in many cases I’m glad that we decided to keep them. But we must be clear-eyed about what each specimen is and what it is not in order to have any hope of making our decisions correctly.

Nowadays, I do not judge people for making use of instant mashed potatoes. I certainly take plenty of other prepared food culinary shortcuts myself. In the modern world we all make compromises for the sake of convenience. If we didn’t, we’d still be stomping on chuño to survive the winter.

But I do think it’s important to mind the distinction whenever you notice the IMPish pattern. There is a trick being played on you. You are not eating or watching or doing the Thing that your ancestors did, even if it contains the same ingredient and hides behind the same name. You’re planting something new in the garden of the real, and the nourishment it provides for your spirit, or the spirit of your children, may not be the same.

Fortunately, it is rare for even the most aggressive IMPish mimic to drive its model to extinction. It took over a decade, but I was eventually able to see past the deception of my father’s instant mashed potatoes and seek out the real version. Now I make maſhed potatoes regularly. My garden has one more good thing in it, and one less bad.

I even, on a recent visit to my grandmother’s house where I cooked St. Patrick’s Day dinner, got my dad to make real mashed potatoes himself, in a saucepan over a gas flame. It was the first time he’d ever done so. He enjoyed them.

***

In the interest of full fairness while writing this review, I purchased a plastic cup of my dad’s currently favored “Buttery Homestyle” Idahoan brand instant mashed potatoes for $1.99. The preparation was extraordinarily efficient; the aroma was decent; the taste was a reasonable facsimile; but the texture was all wrong - a smothering paste that coated my mouth and constrained my tongue like a straightjacket. 3/10 would not buy again.

Sources of potato facts (verified with primary sources linked within whenever possible):

https://tedium.co/2017/11/21/mashed-potato-history/

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/627023/mashed-potatoes-history

https://spudsmart.com/spud-history-instant-mashed-potatoes/

[1] Ignoring the error that Ainu potato treatments like munini-imo are not ‘ancient’ at all, deriving from the long tail of the Columbian exchange in the 16th through 19th centuries like every other Old World potato dish. Comparisons between Instant Mashed Potatoes and munini-imo are precisely as inapt as with chuño, for the same reasons.

[2] “Processed” is a slippery term that evokes all kinds of chemical perversions, but the physical transformation of chopping into tiny bits is fundamental to the notion. Consider what a “food processor” does.

[3] Claude, by the way, estimates that 30-40% of all mashed potatoes eaten in the US are the instant kind. ChatGPT says 25-35%.

My Imagination

The Dragon

They don’t really start until second grade. The memories. Everything before that is jumbled up. Fuzzy, confused. But by second grade I finally get some little shine of clarity from the dang things. I was in class at the time. Not sure what was going on outside of my head, but that’s not a big deal, the inside is what’s important. Inside my head, flapping its wings and floating right in the middle of the classroom, is a bipedal skeleton dragon. An evil, dark, giant skeleton dragon. I curl my hands into claws, slap the base of my palms together, probably give some sort of inarticulate shout, and out from my hands bursts a massive light blue laser beam. In a flash of light, with a scream of beastly pain, the dragon is completely atomized, never to walk the earth again.

I just killed myself. For the second time, actually. I wasn’t terribly creative with names in the early days, so my arch-nemesis was named Dark Scott. Dark Scott was me, but he was evil, and he was a samurai. The only reason I even remember he exists is because I doodled a little picture of him when I was younger, labeled “DS1” for clarity. But I do know that he died a horrible death. I wonder if I had enough conception of irony at that age to slice him in half with my twin swords. Probably not. I probably just vaporized him with a giant laser beam. However he died, it left a big gaping hole in my villain roster. Every superhero has to have an arch-nemesis, after all, and I’d just murdered mine. Thankfully, this was an easy problem to fix. Dark Scott II was better than Dark Scott I in every way. Dark Scott II was me, but he was evil, but he was also a giant dark skeleton dragon that shot red lasers from his mouth.

The Dragon really represents the beauty of the early era. He doesn’t have any drawn out origin story, no character beats or driving motivation. He was me, which makes absolutely no sense considering that he is a dragon, and I am not. But explanations are for chumps, and I am not a chump. You can tell because I am currently fighting a dragon. Whenever class was at a lull, or I was following my parents around the supermarket, or I was tucked in but not ready to go to sleep, there was the Dragon. Being evil, and just begging me to beat the crap out of him. So I obliged. I sliced him, I kicked him, I burned him with fire, or punched him with rocks, or transformed into a monster and ripped him apart, or got really angry and ascended to my rage form and mega-annihilated him. Then the Dragon would die, then he would come back as something else. Anything was fine, as long as it was cool to fight. Dark Scott III looked exactly like me, but in a broken mirror sort of way, Dark Scott IV had a bunch of stretchy tentacle arms. There were less important foes back in those days too, but they’ve all passed from memory. Gone the way of all weekly Saturday morning cartoon villains, I suppose.

‘Dragon Explosion’ is the closest I’ve gotten to a true blue origin story. In truth, I do not remember a time when I chose to have superpowers. It just happened at some point, and I’ve been living the life of an imaginary superhero ever since. Tale after tale, fight scene after fight scene, all told to myself, and no one else. For decades. Because I genuinely enjoy it. Sometimes I look out at the world, and I wonder how many other stories are out there. Ones like mine. Hidden away, never to be revealed, only leaving a person’s mind in the tiniest snippets. Even if those stories are bad, it troubles me that they will be lost. So much of my own story has already been forgotten.

So, think of this as a very particular type of review. I’m one of your nerdier friends, and I’ve arrived at your house lugging around a tome of unending text, packed with my thoughts on an extremely niche anime that has never been translated or marketed to a wide audience. Most of my ‘review’ is really just me painstakingly detailing my favorite scenes, then saying “Yeah, I love that one, it’s my favorite!” while you blankly nod along and wonder how much free time I have on my hands.

Stick with me though. I’ll try to offer something more substantive on occasion, and there’s definitely room for some unique insights here. Stories are not typically crafted for an audience of one, and they aren’t usually told by the same person, as a collaboration between his seven year old self and his twenty-five year old self. Stories are different when they are thought, rather than committed to paper or film. And I mean come on. I murdered my dream dragon self when I was in elementary school. You’re bound to find something creative and interesting in here.

The Unbreakable

Middle school serves as the quickening for everything to come. Elementary was a time for goofing around. Superhero-ing was the same as a dozen other imaginative activities that I regularly engaged in at the time, which is a big reason why I’ve forgotten so much of it. It was all momentary playtime, fun for the moment rather than the long run. The shift from kid-time play-time to life-long secret-hobby had to come from somewhere, and middle school is exactly the time when most people let their imaginary worlds drift away. So, what led me to hold on to mine?

Sixth grade is a strong contender for the moment I gained self-consciousness. I was a pretty outgoing, cheery kid prior to that point, but right around pre-pubescence I shut up like a clam. This had its downsides of course, but it did wonders for my interior life. It is also the first section of my life where I can point and say “Yeah, that’s me.” Gradually, in a trend which would continue throughout my teenage years, I began to treat my thoughts more and more as entities which I controlled, rather than things which happened to me. Wouldn’t you know it, that bleeds into my life as a superhero.

Fittingly, the process began with my greatest rival. By 4th or 5th grade, I was getting a tad disillusioned. You see, Dark Scott IV was… Alright I’ll say it, he was lame. Stretchy tentacle arms? What was I thinking? And I’d just killed him. Again! How many Dark Scotts are there going to be? What’s the point of an arch-nemesis that keeps dying?

And it’s right around here where I stumbled on to my first Really Great Idea. A thought that, once it enters your head, gets stuck there for a bit. Brings itself to a boil. Makes you really excited about what comes next. Sort of like solving a murder mystery right in the middle of the book. I decided that an arch-nemesis that keeps losing to me is no arch-nemesis at all. Which means that, if I want to make another Dark Scott, and really call him my rival, then he’ll have to win every fight we have. Up until the moment that I literally die.

It’s hard to properly encapsulate how many different ways this little resolution managed to revolutionize things. In an imaginary world filled to the brim with endless possibility, this was the first time I imposed a hard and fast rule on things. Now, no matter how much I wanted to, there was someone I wasn’t allowed to win fights against. A problem I couldn’t solve through the liberal application of big big laser boom. By accident, I now had a recurring character. Dark Scott Nil, as he would come to be known, now needed motives. What makes him my arch-rival in the first place? When he wins a fight, why doesn’t he kill me? When I manage to escape, or fight him to a standstill, how does he feel about it? I had to do a little better than “me, but evil”. I had to create someone different. This also encouraged me to add a little nuance to super-me. How do I handle constant debilitating loss? Do I learn anything from previous fights?

Making Dark Scott unbreakable completely overturned the previous dynamic of my superhero world. Suddenly, I wasn’t just here for a quick, fun, imaginary fight. I was in this for the long haul. I had created an arch-rival with more staying power than every villain from every story I’ve read during my life, combined. Who knows where things would go from here? What kind of ending will I want, when I’m on my deathbed? How can I make sure that ending will be as enjoyable and emotionally satisfying as possible in the meantime? DS0 gave me a reason to engage with my imaginary world more frequently, and more fervently, than ever before. The more I engaged, the more there was to enjoy, which gave me even more incentive to keep things going. Steadily, the world started to open up.

A regular cast and crew started to enter the picture. I made friends with a shadow creature named Sly, a plant creature named Vine. The President would send a helicopter to pick me up from class, then give me top secret missions. I entered my sci-fi enthusiast tech-phase, which meant I now had gadgets in addition to my innate superpowers. Combat became a more nuanced affair, with tricks, turnabout, and little Gotcha moments. Despite possessing seventy-bazillion different superpowers, I began to color my super-self as an underdog. Fights were won by the skin of my teeth, and I found myself getting impaled, crushed, shot and stabbed on a worryingly frequent basis.

I started explaining things. Filling out backstory. Where did my powers come from? Let’s say I had them since birth. Ooh, actually, let’s say I gained them at the exact same time as Dark Scott, but he was a teenager at the time, while I was a baby. That’s why he’s so much more powerful, he’s been honing his skills while I made poopies.

Continuity started shifting around, as I tried to account for all of my actions up until that point. The original “Dark Scott”s were no longer evil copies of me, but rather golems, created by Dark Scott 0 to harass me. My flippancy towards villain murder became a character flaw, a naive part of my early superhero life which I tried to atone for going forward.

Superpowers became baked into the world. Great strength and unusual ability would awaken within individuals. Sometimes from birth, sometimes during a moment of importance or struggle during their life. I adopted the idea that supers were sort of like chess pieces, put down in the middle of a game of checkers. Everyone was part of the same universe, but people with superpowers played by a different set of rules. They had their own personal laws of physics. Inventions they could create which no one else could replicate. Defying death by the slimmest odds was commonplace, and it is hidden knowledge that it’s far easier to knock a superhero unconscious, rather than kill them outright. Some theorize that this is mother nature’s compensation. The boon she grants, in exchange for a life of violence and strife.

Oh yeah, and aliens exist. Like, lots of aliens. Plant aliens, ice aliens, dark sunlight aliens, suit-of-armor aliens, cloaked guardians-over-the-stability-of-the-universe aliens, you name it. Basically every alien species is more amazing than humans in every way, with one notable exception. Humans, for whatever reason, have a crazy high rate of superpower acquisition. In a universe where having more supers on your team means you get to win the battle, this has allowed Earth to persist as an independent, culturally isolated, technological backwater; despite possessing a fairly central, strategically useful location in the galaxy.

Looking back on the middle school era gives mixed feelings. There wasn’t anything especially notable or interesting that happened during that time, story-wise. No big event, or great battle, or shift in power, or culminating character arc. The crowning achievement was the introduction of Dark Scott Nil as a character. Which, given that I’d already introduced four Dark Scotts prior to that point, doesn’t seem all that impressive.

Fittingly, it was a time of awkward transition. The success of the era comes from its shift in perspective, rather than the individual details which accompanied it. A superpowered world is cool, but not terribly special. Aliens are also cool, but nothing really sticks out here. There’s definitely some potential in the idea of a villain that lasts a lifetime, but it really is just potential at this point. However, I think it’s important to assess these things within their proper context. Most people do not create elaborate imaginary worlds within their mind. They don’t map out storylines, or create characters, or speculate on the mechanics of superpowers which they personally created. It is entirely possible that I would have joined most people at this stage of my life, but something about the middle school era managed to hook me. I could think up a new alien species, or experiment with a new superpower, or chat with an imaginary person, or create new rules which governed the universe in a way that made my fight scenes more enjoyable. Eventually, I came to enjoy the alien creation, fake conversation, and world building just as much as I enjoyed the fights. The value of the era was found in how it affected me, what it pushed me towards, rather than what it produced.

Sometimes I wonder if the way we approach art is too geared towards the present. We look at a painting, or watch a movie, and decide whether it is good or bad, then call it a day. In general, this is a fine way to judge art, but as we enter the age of social media—where even your average Joe has a substantial say in whether something ought or ought not exist—we should occasionally remind ourselves to plan for the future. Sometimes the most important question is not whether something is good or bad, but whether the creator will continue to create. Whether they will have enough courage to share their creation in the future. I don’t want painters to tremble every time they pick up a paintbrush. I don’t want essayists to doom scroll, then vow to leave the internet. I want them to make more things. To improve, even if it’s only in their own eyes. I don’t want to lose something excellent in the future, because it is mediocre today.

I’m glad my mediocrity was confined to my own mind, back in the day. In secrecy, I learned to love the act of creation.

The Ascension

I broke the Taj Mahal in high school. And Mars. And China. But in my defense I fixed China, please don’t get mad. Oh wait I broke it again.

The War of Five Armies was the first worldwide event to grace my little mind, and it seemed fitting to go all out. Beast-like, orange furred aliens invaded in the north, while a mad genius and his robot army poured out of the Sahara. A superhero organization which I’d had a few run-ins with finally decides that they aren’t getting the respect they deserve, and starts destroying famous landmarks in order to prove their point. Meanwhile, a group of highly skilled rune makers (aliens) have embraced the forbidden sigil, and their crazed champion has been devouring planets on his way to Earth. If all of that wasn’t enough, a group of under-men blow up their home in southeast Asia, dropping China by ten feet in a fit of jealousy, before swarming over the surface to claim their rightful inheritance.

If middle school was the time for building a big new world, high school was when I realized that I could do whatever the crap I wanted with it. Large groups began to feature more prominently in my fiction, while fights expanded to a more grandiose scale. In a twist that is a tad eye-rolling modern day, but was enjoyable enough at the time, it turns out that Dark Scott was behind the sudden coalescence of Earthly hostility; subtly nudging the five armies to attack at the same time through various bouts of politrickery. The under-men were the only ones which never played ball though. Too overeager. They jumped the gun on dropping China, which makes DS so mad that he ascends to his rage form, tethers himself to the broken edges of China, picks it up, and then plops the sucker right back where it belongs.

Awfully nice (or petty) of him, but it culminates in his first symbolic loss. Exhausted by the strain of picking up a big chunk of continent and forced into combat by a feisty, powered up super-me, the fight ends in a titanic explosion which leaves me unconscious, Dark Scott gravely wounded, and China bearing a diagonal scar comparable in size to the Great Wall.

This is the first and only time which Dark Scott has tasted his own mortality. I was moving too fast. Approaching victory over my foe just a couple of years after vowing to stall it. Dark Scott needed more power, and he craved it in concert with the writer of his story.

Soon to follow the War of Five Armies was a less explicitly combat focused event, though one that still followed the trend of growing scale. Superpowers had become a part of the natural world at this point, a mysterious yet highly consequential force shaping the universe, so I decided to take that concept a step further. What if the creation of superpowers ebbed and flowed? What if, as the universe ticked and the stars aligned, great power occasionally flooded the galaxy, weaving its way into the hands of an incalculably large number of people? The Great Awakening was my first attempt to shake up the world through methods other than my fists and a villain’s face. Something which was once exceedingly rare suddenly became incredibly widespread, and everything shifted as a result.

Pre-existing super-powered organizations splintered apart in the resulting power grab. Upstart revolutionaries had to be put down. I started experimenting with the idea of superpowered aliens, which hadn’t really been a thing up until that point. I mixed things up narratively as well, occasionally switching to alternate perspectives in order to introduce a new angle to the story, or explore something thematically distinct. Vine’s planet was cracked open by a planet eater right in the middle of the Awakening, and as every other member of his species drifted off dead into the depths of space, Vine found himself imbued with the collective power they would have received. The planet eater now drifts dead through the universe, an unfathomably large corpse, cut through and consumed by swarms of vegetation. Vine drifts about as a bit of a corpse as well, mourning his newfound power.

In a dark corner of the universe, one man breathes a sigh of relief. Fate had chosen well. He has been granted great power, for a second time.

The gems of power were an off the cuff invention, but one which served their purpose well. I had been playing around with the idea that bursts of mystical power could be found in bright colored gems for a while. Occasionally super-me would find yellow jewels on the ground which, when broken, teleported the nearest person to a place of their choosing. Or green ones, which transported the individual through time, albeit in a more chaotic manner. For the Great Awakening, I decided to introduce a new color to the mix.

Hidden away on every planet, there is a purple jewel, diamond in shape, shot through with stardust, and glimmering with strength. The ways which you can find it are myriad, but they always require you to be exceptional in some way. A great explorer who plumbs depths that no one else dares. A skilled puzzle solver, that solves the riddles and myth surrounding its location. Someone of great strength, to take the power they are owed, or someone of great cunning, to steal the things others wish to have, or someone of great leadership, to be given what they will use justly. This jewel is crystallized power. It contains all the strength needed to raze a continent within the span of a day. Permanent power. Once it is earned, it cannot be taken away. Once its energy is used, it will return with food and rest. Once Dark Scott obtains Earth’s jewel, he shatters it.

It turns out these gems aren’t confined in scale to planets. There are similar, greater gems which exist on the scale of the stars, the galaxy, and the universe. Each guarded by more impossible trials and hidden away by more faded and obtuse myth. In order to obtain a world-gem, you must be exceptional within the context of a single world. In order to obtain a universe-gem, you must be exceptional within the universe. Twice blessed with superhuman strength, wielder of Death’s blade, maker of golems, mover of armies and subcontinents, knower of great secrets, Dark Scott fits the bill. Breaking the world-gem is a gambit. It gives you a burst of strength, and sends you directly to its greater counterpart. You risk losing everything, and strive to gain so much more. His gambit pays off, once, then twice, then three times, and within the span of a short story arc, Dark Scott Nil has earned the irrevocable power to shatter a galaxy within the span of a single day.

By this point, DS0 has become characterized as a tad obsessed. He was borderline suicidal prior to gaining his powers, wrapped up in a meaningless existence. Once a rival enters the picture, he has something to strive towards. Someone to test his mettle against. Hope for the future, I suppose. As long as I keep increasing in power, he has to do the same, giving his life direction and counter-intuitively encouraging him to aid my quest upwards. But his recent jump in strength is too great. With power unimaginable to mortal man, incontestable by the stoutest superhuman, he returns to Earth to sever his rivalry. The Moon is gouged, a poetic speech is given, and super-me is found to be lacking in every conceivable way. Too weak. Too small. Never acting, only reacting. His rivalry has died, and with it, every glimmer of joy in this universe. He has succeeded too handily. Penned his own eulogy, so to speak. Before annihilation comes, Dark Scott hears a story. He hears of a far-away place, unreachable by even the gods. A place of sorrow and loneliness, a flat plane of nothingness, disconnected from all reality. Where the most powerful beings are rendered helpless and afraid. Within the debris of the Moon, a small yellow gem floats closer and closer to the arch-villain. It shatters, and he is gone.

I hope I haven’t belabored you overmuch with the tale of Dark Scott the 0th. He had a habit of worming his way into every major event back in the day, and was by far my favorite character to fight. I’m a sucker for a good exponential power curve, and no character has quite managed to break the charts as quickly and memorably as my good old arch-rival. He also serves an emblematic role in the progression of my storytelling style over the years. What started out as a cool dragon developed into a great manipulator and manic obsessive, bent on creating meaning in a dull world through his passing bond with a child. Even silly, childish things can develop into something compelling and interesting, if given time to grow. When Dark Scott was around, occult beings were brought to life, and hidden knowledge came to light. But he certainly hogged the spotlight. With his banishment to the hidden plane, I was free to focus on the rest of the world I had spent time creating. A new world, now overflowing with superpowered shenanigans to get into.

The Empire

I believe it was 2012 when Goliath landed his spaceship on Earth’s surface, stepped onto solid ground, and then challenged every single superhuman on the planet Earth to a fist fight. First one knocked out of the ring, or knocked out, loses. Goliath was strange by alien standards, which is to say he wasn’t strange at all. Looked just like a human, but ten feet tall. Thick beard, booming laugh. Goliath isn’t even his actual name, he picked it up from the press and it just seemed to stick.

Goliath is a shapeshifter, but he doesn’t ever shapeshift. He has a soft spot for humans, “loves the simplicity” of how they look. He’s a fighter, a brawler, with a keen sense of insight that only reveals itself during a slugout. A few minutes trading punches with Goliath, and he’ll be able to tell you your deepest goals in life, how those directly influence your fighting style, and then go on to beat the living daylights out of you. He came to Earth on a bet. You see, recently, Goliath found something of great value. A shattered indigo galaxy-gem, still pulsing with fragments of power. Shattered gems behave a bit differently than whole ones, functioning a bit like rabid dogs rather than trained hounds. They provide immense power, but sporadically, and accompanied with bouts of intense pain. They can be stolen by the unworthy, and often sputter when needed most. But nonetheless, Goliath made a bet. He wagered that he could defeat every single superhuman on Earth, and here he is. Running his big yap, making fun of the entire human species day in and day out until the supers start lining up. Eventually, with the offer of a big enough prize, enough news coverage, and plenty of bored heroes itching for a challenge, Goliath manages to win his bet. There are a few supers that opt to stay home, and several that are off-world at the time, Super-Scott included. But by and large, with strategic usage of the shattered galaxy-gem and his own wealth of knowledge on beating the stuffing out of people, Goliath manages to knock a solid majority of Earth’s super-powered combatants clean unconscious.

Earth is conquered and subjugated to the Atryan Empire in under twenty-four hours.

Turns out Goliath is the acting commander of the Atryan military, and his bet was really a calculated gambit. He rightly recognized that the bulk of Earth’s defenses were a direct result of its massive superhuman population, and believed that the discovery of the galaxy-gem allowed the Atryan Empire an opportunity to test whether Earth was conquerable with relatively little risk. If Goliath is defeated, then the conquest of Earth would be too resource intensive to justify an attempt at war. He gives up a small amount of riches by galactic empire standards, and returns home to pursue other goals. But if successful, then Earth would have its entire defensive network crippled for several days, allowing Atrya to swoop in and set up the political and physical infrastructure needed to control Earth in the long run with relative ease.

This is where the modern era begins. Earth’s conquest by Atrya set the new norm for everything to come. Humanity was now a small part of a bigger story. Several attempts would be made at reclaiming humanity’s independence, with varying success. The Cerulean Rebellion in 2015 saw the overnight creation of seven towering labyrinthine cities strewn throughout the Americas, each declaring independence from the Atryan Empire and offering safe haven to any humans who were of similar mind. Unfortunately, the sudden death of the Architect led to infighting and a change of purpose for the rebellion, one which both lost them public support and brought about crippling military losses, soon followed by their crushing defeat at the hands of former allies. By 2019 or so there was a thriving underground network of supervillains aiming to undermine the power of the Atryan Empire and claim power for themselves, but that too fell to pieces when the Dread Pirate turned coat in exchange for the Emperor’s Dictat, personally killing or jailing every contact in his books.

If humankind ever truly regained its independence, it was through an unexpected avenue. During the Great Awakening, humanity was blessed with a genius of a very particular variety. Someone who discovered how to artificially recreate the Awakening, and grant superpowers to anyone he pleased. He was soon killed, but not before giving superpowers to a huge number of people in the southeastern US, on the order of hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Through a convoluted series of events, these people would soon be faced with a choice: lose your powers, or lose your home. Those that chose banishment would leave Earth for the stars, going on to form the New Human Empire. The only empire in the galaxy which was exclusively composed of superpowered individuals, and soon to be a huge player in galaxy-wide politics.

But back to Earth. The Atryan Empire is popularly regarded as the old man of the galaxy. Long lasting, once respected, but past its prime and growing more sickly and irrelevant by the day. Over the past few centuries it has managed to persist through the steady exhaustion of a long line of political favors, owed from generations past. But those favors have dried up, and with them, any goodwill which Atrya used to enjoy.

The Atryan Empire is a dictatorship of unusual variety, led by the Emperor with a Thousand Faces. In all appearances, at all times, the emperor wears a specially crafted suit of armor. It is specifically modified to conceal every identifying aspect of the emperor, even something as obvious as species, and is adorned with artistic representations of the unique, overlapping anatomies of each of the empire’s alien denizens. Atrya is a collective, going out of its way to welcome new species to its growing roster of diverse life, taking the best they have to offer and making it into the strength of the empire. It has an extremely unique political structure, based entirely around what is essentially an anonymous leader. Transfers of power are often completely hidden from view, orchestrated by a small group of insiders, most commonly including the emperor and their closest surrounding advisors. This is a big reason why the empire has managed to last so long. Even when they are essentially leaderless, Atrya is always able to wear the mask, and present a facade of stability until things settle. Civil war cannot come, if no one knows the king is dead.

The most recent heir apparent was chosen by the leading military commanders in Atrya: Goliath and Chameleon. Chameleon is the strategic commander of forces, focusing more on overarching troop deployment, goal setting and tactics, rather than on the ground fighting. He earned the nickname Chameleon among fresh human recruits when they noticed his eyes moving to look at different things simultaneously. This is actually representative of Chameleon’s skill more generally, his species is excellent at following two simultaneous, independent lines of thought; very advantageous for crafting military strategies which your opponent is unprepared for.

Goliath and Chameleon are a one in a million pairing. Their strengths and weaknesses play off each other perfectly. The ideal combination of gut instinct and layered, detailed thought, which combine for extreme efficacy on the battlefield. Fortunately for Atrya, their complementary skill sets also made them excellent judges of both underlying skill and character. They were perfectly poised to choose the next great emperor. And they succeeded. The present day Emperor with a Thousand Faces was picked up from a slum world at the edge of the empire; a kid with enough guts, intelligence and passion to find Atrya’s fountain of youth.

It began with Earth. The unconquerable planet, broken within a day. Strategically located along major trade routes, within striking distance of several competing, weaker empires. Earth was to become the new capital of the Atryan Empire, and humanity was raised toward the heavens, representing the dawn of a new age. A proudly beating human heart was inscribed onto the emperor’s breastplate. The best that humankind could offer.

The Light

If the above all seems like a bit much, then I have very bad news for you. This sort of world building is the peanut butter and jelly of the modern era, and I stinkin’ love it. We are getting to the point where there is more story than I can reasonably describe without going off on a dozen tangents. For instance, I could elaborate on the five generals of the New Human Empire, go into detail about their election process and the individual traits and personalities of each, as well as their successors. Or I could explain the structure of the galactic council, the major coalitions and how they maintain a balance of power. I could talk about Super-Scott’s mentor, how he developed from a speedster into a highly skilled teleportation savant, a peacekeeper dwelling among the constant political tumult of the galactic council. I could describe a dozen unique alien species, or a dozen fellow superheroes, talk about their cultures, personalities, powers, alliances, betrayals. I could trace character arcs, follow a supervillain turned hero, turned information courier, turned cloaked guardian-over-the-stability-of-the-universe. There are eldritch horrors that worship you-know-who, and world breakers kept under perpetual anesthesia, and divine beasts of weakness, all twirling around like ballet dancers in my head, until they inevitably collide in spectacular fashion.

Tell you what. Just, just indulge me a little longer. Another story arc, then we’ll wrap this thing up. Don’t worry, I won’t go into too much detail. Just the basics.

The lightborn are a hybrid-type of hivemind, driven less by the specific thoughts of their central leader, and more by the general ethos which they put forward. Each lightborn has their own thoughts and personality, but when their leader’s core ethos is to hug trees, that personality is sort of geared towards hugging trees. Some lightborn do it aggressively, some are kind of shy about it, others don’t hug trees at all, but provide food and shelter to the folks that are really good at tree hugging. That sort of thing. Over the past two hundred years or so, the lightborn have enjoyed a period of significant growth and stability in the universe, heralded by leaders of Growth, Wealth and Peace. Peace in particular has enjoyed a lengthy reign, somehow managing to live twice as long as the average lightborn. But, circa 2017, the herald’s light has finally flickered. The new ruler is forged over the span of the next week. The lightborn shift their light green hue towards a burnt orange as the next herald is named. It is a time of Conquest.

The Atryan Empire is the closest neighbor to the lightborn, and is currently starved of allies. A series of huge battles take place over the coming weeks, with each miraculous victory on the part of Atrya quickly overturned by overwhelming numbers of lightborn invading on every front. Given their unique light driven anatomy and similar brain structures, lightborn are capable of merging into more powerful, combat oriented forms which mix up battles quite nicely. Hulking great light golems intermingle with smaller, more nimble troops. The sixteen-light merge is a bit unstable, only possible to maintain for a second or two before splitting back apart. Usually lightborn just merge into the stable thirty-two light form before collapse occurs, but wartime technological advancements reveal that the sixteen form can actually be maintained for longer, using a merging method which is quite easy to learn. This isn’t necessarily desirable though. After about ten seconds, the sixteen catastrophically destabilize in a manner quite similar to a nuke going off, obliterating everything within a several mile radius, including themselves. The herald of conquest isn’t exactly high on moral scruples, so this catastrophic destabilization is briefly experimented with as a supplemental invasion tactic, but soon abandoned. The resulting environment is inhospitable even by lightborn standards, and the herald is not interested in conquering worthless territory.

One of the characters I haven’t had the opportunity to mention is a young army brat which came down with a case of the superpowers a year or two before the Great Awakening. He’s a troubled guy, clearly on the edge of good and evil, and Super-Scott is introduced to him in hopes of mentoring the guy towards the better path. He’s one of those characters I never bothered to give a name to, because it was easier to remember him by superpower/general aesthetic. Let’s call him Alexander, that should work. Alex has an incredibly simple superpower, but it still makes him one of the most potent threats in the universe: instantaneous teleportation to anywhere. No limits.

Super-Scott is many things, but he is not a skilled mentor. Always the type to lead through example, not through actual leadership. Alexander is arguably his biggest failure from the high school era. Through Scott, Alex is introduced to Dark Scott, who proves to be a much more skilled mentor. Skip a few years down the line, and Alexander has become a virtually untraceable assassin, one who casually steps into stories, drastically changes everything, and then disappears forever.

The herald of Conquest is dead. No one is quite sure who ordered the hit—pretty much everyone on the galactic council was antsy at the overwhelming military pressure of the lightborn—but it’s implied that the emperor himself paid for it in an act of desperation. A ceasefire is called in the war, and the new herald is forged over the course of a week, as the conquered sit in pained silence. Around half of the Atryan Empire has been occupied at this point, with entire worlds of civilians held hostage by the lightborn. Earth has managed to avoid conquest thanks to some brilliant maneuvering by the Chameleon, but only barely. The army is in shambles. The assassin has gone dark. Everything rests on the nature of the new herald.

The herald is born, and it is named Annihilation.

Within the history of the lightborn, the herald of annihilation has been birthed three times. In all previous instances, it was a quick affair. The herald quickly obeyed its own wishes, removed itself from this world, and that was that. The broader lightborn population might get a brief feeling of loathsome emotion, but it soon passed, and a new herald was forged. This time is different. The herald understands what it must do to fulfill its purpose most fully. The being persists for thirty three seconds before flickering out of existence. During this time, the sixteen shatters everything. Planets are made into ruin, innocents are made into dust, and aside from a pathetic few, the race called lightborn flickers away into nothing.

Somehow, amidst the catastrophic loss of life and territory, this is exactly the lucky break which the Emperor with a Thousand Faces was looking for. There is an old law written up during the third or fourth amendment to the galactic council’s founding documents which no one has quite mustered up the courage to remove. In any circumstance where a member of the galactic council loses a third or more of its arable land, declaration of war on the grounds of territorial expansion is allowable. This was intended as a concession to necessity back in the day, since any empire losing such a substantial portion of its food production would be forced to either starve to death, or expend its troops in a suicidal attempt to gain farmable land, and it was viewed as unconscionable to force a nation in such dire straits to starve.

War is mostly intolerable to the galactic council, which is a major reason why the Atryan Empire was floundering despite having an excellent military. Any unsanctioned invasion threatens retaliation by a full coalition of council members. Nations which are viewed as supremely powerful, or those with numerous well established alliances can sometimes manage to buck the common law, but the Atryan Empire is neither of those things. Through inconceivable loss, opportunity rears its head.

Of course, Atrya still needs the military strength to decisively win such a war, but once again chance decides to flirt with triumph in sorrow. On several shattered worlds, a previously theoretical substance is found. Grainy white crystal. Extraordinarily energy dense. To give an analogy, the world has just discovered fission, and Atrya owns the only uranium mines. The dawn of the Empire of Light is upon us.

The Wrap-Up

Alright I’m done. I mean, I could keep going, obviously. I could go into detail about the War of the Third Dragon King, or tie together all of the interconnected threads that brought about the Battle of the Living, or tell you the isolated Tale of the Frozen Circle, or explain the Freedom Crusade, or talk about the plans I’m spinning up for the next major story arc, but I think you’ve been patient enough with me. That was fun! Sorry for talking your ear off, I’ve never really shared this stuff before.

I suppose I should take a moment to address the elephant in the room, since we’re in the final stretch of things. This was pretty light on ‘review’, wasn’t it? My main purpose here was never to seriously criticize the inane ramblings of my imagination, I think that much is obvious. Doing that is kind of like criticizing a kid’s doodles. Some drawings are made exclusively for the person drawing them, and therefore the ultimate measure of their value is singular. Do I like my imagination? Yes I do. Then it’s settled, there is value here. I never told these stories to other people, because that isn’t who they were intended for. But now I have. Why?

If you enjoyed this little read, that’s great. If it was cringe inducing and dull, then yeah, I can’t really hold that against you. But judgment is a side-act. Some things are worth reviewing, not as an assessment of value, but as a means of showing people what can exist in the world, and in their own life. More than anything, I wanted to reveal something weird and unknown to you. The internal world of an awkward nerd. I want to make you consider something you’ve likely never considered before. You can make stories. Without pen and paper, without a camera or interpretive dance. Without any need to share or expose them to anyone. You can tell stories to yourself. And with practice, they will steadily morph into the types of stories you most enjoy hearing.

As I changed as a person, so did my stories. Throughout my life, they have bent towards my tastes, grown alongside my mind, and I will always treasure the product of my imagination just a little bit more than everyone else because of that. This is the strongest argument I can think of for urging people to create things in their life. You will always love your creation a little bit more than everyone else. When you make things, you shift the world just a bit closer towards a place that you genuinely enjoy. Maybe that means superheroics. Maybe that means multi-layered romance and intrigue in high society London, or time spent in the wilds of a foreign planet, or three donkeys telling each other knock knock jokes. You are the person most capable of creating weird things you enjoy. And I hope my story makes it clear, the more often you decide to indulge your creative impulse, the easier it becomes to grow the thing. Creativity makes creativity easier. If I want to start up a story arc nowadays, I have dozens of characters to pull from, all with well established personalities and motives. Once they enter a situation, the story often writes itself. Dramatic assassinations are much easier to stumble across when you have a trained assassin chilling on the sofa. Massive galaxy-spanning events are easier to create when you have a galaxy filled to bursting with competing factions. If you dare to create, soon your creations will do the job for you. And the world will become a slightly better place.

Half of me hopes that my little announcement isn’t even needed. Maybe I’m not as unique as I think. Maybe I’m surrounded by stories and worlds, spinning around inside everyone’s minds while they quietly chuckle in the shadows. If you are a fellow daydreamer, keep up the good work. Maybe consider sharing sometime, if it feels right. Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves are genuinely worth spreading, able to brighten the lives of people they never planned to touch. But every good story starts out with an audience of one. Start with making that person happy, and you can’t very well go wrong.

Nicotine as a Nootropic

TLDR: Nicotine is mostly wrongly vilified; its big issue is a short half-life that foments chronic re-dosing. Addiction potential is a function of net time to hit your bloodstream (inhalation/smoking > buccal administration/snus/dip > nicotine gums > transdermal patches). Be careful with chronically elevated nicotine levels, which can engender higher baseline levels of neural excitation (mechanisms explicated below) and is a primary mediator of addiction reinforcement. Otherwise, it’s a powerful, angiogenic nootropic that is useful with perspicacious use. But as always, you’re modifying a vastly complex biochemical system with countless reflexive feedback loops, so who knows.

If you refer to my admittedly indulgent list of “apodictic truths”, I make the point that “(d)opaminergics are a dual-edged sword and extreme caution is warranted.” While nicotine is more rightly classified as a cholinergic, it does elicit a strong dopamine response via mechanisms downstream of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) activation. This ultimately begets dopamine tolerance and an attendant progressive attenuation of reward-prediction error in the mesolimbic pathway. If you want the mechanistic details, read the wikipedia page or, better yet, the Examine.com page.

A few relevant details on nicotine pharmacokinetics:

Half-life: 1-2 hours
Duration of Action: .5-1.5 hour (typically contingent on tolerance in naive vs chronic users)
Metabolism: mostly in the liver via CYP2A6, CYP2B6, FMO3
Major metabolite: Cotinine (also a nAChR agonist w/ a weaker affinity and ~20 hour half-life)

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Nicotine is now back in vogue owing to widespread vape use in the exoterica. In the esoterica, nicotine is consistently rated relatively highly on nootropics user surveys. It is mostly utilized as a short-acting stimulant.

Gwern has a fairly exhaustive lit-review-cum-exegesis on nicotine that’s worth a read; the upshot is that infrequent and/or intermittent nicotine gum usage is useful, relatively safe, and not detrimentally habit-forming. He concludes that vaping should be avoided too. That’s also my conclusion on an independent reading of the relevant literature and with personal experimentation.

Popular podcasts like Peter Attia’s Drive and the Huberman Lab have also given treatment to the topic. I personally weigh the former much more heavily— the Huberman Lab podcast had about 10 great episodes in the eponymous host’s wheelhouse before devolving into a vortex of incessant conjecture and caveating. I’m at the Gell-Mann hypermnesia stage after he’s given perfunctory and error-prone reports on areas I know well. (My recommendations: don’t take magnesium glycine, mag l-threonate, or apigenin for sleep). Tangentially, Emil Kirkegaard also has an interesting analysis on whether vaping will shrink your balls. Spoiler alert: probably not.

On to the biochemistry: nAChR’s are inotropic cation (sodium, potassium, calcium) channels with various subunit configurations that are somewhat similar to GABA(A) receptor subunits, which form inotropic anion (mostly chloride and some bicarbonate ions) channels. When activated by their respective ligands, the former adjusts neuronal surface membrane potential such that the cells are more likely to depolarize when cell signals propagate, the latter does the opposite: creating a diathesis towards hyperpolarization. Both receptor types can further influence intracellular cascades and gene transcription. Broadly, nAChR activation increases attention, focus, and drive, though transiently.

nAChR’s are located through the body and are involved in autonomic and somatic functions. As an aside, many nerve agents like Novichok are acetylcholinesterase (the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine) inhibitors at the neuromuscular junction. This eventually brings about a fulminant cholinergic crisis whereby autonomic respiratory and cardiac functions are arrested, and a victim will die.

Anyways, we’ll focus on two receptor subtypes located in the CNS/brain that are germane to nicotine activation:

(α4)2(β2)3
(α7)5

The first is expressed at a higher density in GABAergic neurons (activation of these neurons elicits GABA release synaptically and—as an epiphenomenon—extra-synaptically as well to mediate tonic inhibition). α4-containing AChRs are desensitized to ligands like nicotine rapidly (via receptor internalization typically) and only re-sensitize after ~1 hour, though this is obviously person-dependent. Conversely, α7-containing AChRs desensitize much more slowly and re-sensitize on the order of ~2 minutes. A principal difference is that α7-containing AChRs are present in higher densities on glutaminergic neurons extending from the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the prefrontal cortex (PFC), and α4-containing AChRs are primarily expressed on afferent and interneuron GABAergic cells extending from the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) to the VTA. See the diagram below taken from this 2002 paper in Neuron.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that with recurrent nicotine dosing, α4-containing AChRs are activated and rapidly desensitized, leading to a transient spike in GABA release (net inhibitory, anxiolytic). Activation of α7-containing AChR, on the obverse, causes a more durable spike in glutamate (net excitatory, anxiogenic) (see the upper right hand graph and diagram below). The ‘LTP’ in the figure stands for “long term potentiation”. With chronically elevated levels as with smoking/vaping/dipping (or especially ebullient Nicorette chewing), the baseline firing threshold is increased (think about the membrane potential with a higher propensity to depolarize and fire that we spoke about earlier).

Source here

So now we have a picture where the chronic user is re-dosing chronically for both the mental stimulation and the anxiolytic component of ephemerally elevated GABA release. This is the so-called Nesbitt’s Paradox — that cigarette smoking generates physiological and psychological changes which are normally incompatible, namely increased arousal together with decreased stress. The user-level reality is much more grim: chronic users are grasping at a baseline that has long been altered. In some ways this is an affine relationship to alcohol tolerance — GABA(a) receptors are down-regulated in response to constitutive agonist binding and baseline neuronal excitability increases as a compensatory response. Curiously, alcohol has also been shown to be a nAChR positive allosteric modulator, which is a bit counterintuitive for the canonical depressant. But alcohol has pleiotropic, promiscuous, and systemic intra- and extracellular effects that have yet to be fully characterized.

This goes beyond the scope of this post, but many of the compensatory baseline changes in both alcohol and nicotine addiction models are likely mediated by ΔFosB-related epigenetic changes that down-regulate the transcription of receptor proteins like α4-containing AChRs (or α4-containing GABA(a) receptors in the case of alcohol tolerance). What’s particularly pernicious about this transcription factor is that its induction can create a positive feedback loop. Per wikipedia, “Repression of c-Fos by ΔFosB, which consequently further induces expression of ΔFosB, forms a positive feedback loop that serves to indefinitely perpetuate the addictive state.”

So, the primary takeaway is if you’re going to use nicotine, use it on a pro re nata and intermittent basis (and not ‘intermittent’ in the current demotic sense, but rather spasmodically). Some people will go as far as to say that caffeine is more addictive than nicotine so regular use is OK. This isn’t true as measured by dopamine-evoked currents, but when dose-adjusted it isn’t manifestly untrue. Here idiosyncratic personal response is relevant, but it’s also important to note that nicotine’s comparatively short duration of action makes it more amenable to abuse. An interesting corollary is that in “fast” caffeine metabolizers, the CYP1A2 enzyme (metabolizes caffeine) is highly inducible by nicotine. Per SNPedia, “In smokers, … the A/A homozygotes had 1.6x higher CYP1A2 activity than A/C and C/C genotypes”. This could conceivably shorten caffeine’s half-life to 1.5-2 hours with current nicotine use. I bear the highly inducible rs762551(A) allele, and it does subjectively seem like nicotine catalyzes faster caffeine clearance.

Secondary Considerations

I have a few other ancillary concerns about nicotine that I’ve enumerated below:

LTP with chronic use could lead to glutamate-induced excitotoxicity and could very plausibly affect sleep architecture.
Nicotine induces a transient prolactin release, which returns to baseline after ~2 hours. This is odd as dopamine inhibits prolactin release from the hypothalamus and the two tend to be inversely correlated.
Testosterone may be affected by nicotine. Rat studies show a drop in serum testosterone after chronic use, but correlational human studies show that smokers tend to have higher levels of circulating testosterone. See below for speculation on why.
Complex interactions with estrogen and aromatase: per Examine:
The ability of Nicotine (and related nicotine alkaloids, when looking at smoking studies) to inhibit the Aromatase enzyme may cause a shift towards androgens rather than estrogens over time. The degree of change noted in these studies may be higher than can be accredited to nicotine due to other tobacco alkaloids … Nicotine appears to act as an estrogen receptor antagonist, and can inhibit the signaling pathways of estrogen; It shows preference for ER-ß rather than the alpha subunit (the latter being associated with classical 'effects of estrogen'). The estrogen receptor subunit inhibited is the one associated with positive effects in both genders
Cotinine (~20 hour half-life) and nicotine probably inhibit 3α-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase (3α-HSD) fairly potently. This is an crucial enzyme in the metabolism of dihydrotestosterone (DHT, or something that you’re likely concerned about vis-a-vis hair loss), but more importantly it also synthesizes critical neurosteroids like allopregnanolone (a GABA(A) positive allosteric modulator and a nAChR negative allosteric modulator).

North Korea

I meet my travel agent, Chris, in Beijing. Chris is an amiable Irishman who tells me a lot of tourists get drunk in Pyongyang and it’s fine. I thank him for the suggestion.
I do not intend to get drunk in Pyongyang.

Chris hands me handwritten flight tickets and I'm good to go. Flying from Beijing to Pyongyang requires the most thorough security check I've ever received. Every nook and cranny in my trousers is inspected. I am patted down by a stern woman.

When I land, we disembark from the plane and head onto a bus that takes us to immigration. I am struck by the quiet. There is little to suggest we are in the twenty-first century. The airport has one room; it looks like a disused warehouse. The “diplomatic” queue is longer than the “tourists” queue.

Someone walks up to me and greets me by my middle name. He sees my surprise and follows this up by stating my birthday. When I confirm that’s me, he introduces himself as Mr. Lee, a representative from KITC, Korea Independent Travel Company. I don’t know if it is North Korean practice to greet foreigners with their middle name and DOB.

I tell Mr. Lee that he can call me by my first name. Later he returns the favour and asks me to drop the Mr. and call him Lee.

Lee takes me to the car and introduces me to Miss Yu, the other tour guide, and Mr. Jang, the driver, who speaks basically no English. Miss Yu and Lee tell me I can call him Mr. Driver. Yu studied literature and has been working for KITC, the tourist company, for four years. Her English is impressively good for someone who has never left Korea: she understands almost all my questions – and I ask tough questions. Lee has worked for KITC for two years, and prior to that he was in the army, where he did guard duty in a cemetery.

They are happy that I know not to call their country North Korea (they prefer to be known as the DPRK, for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea). Lee’s English isn’t great. His vocabulary is fine, but his pronunciation is very stilted and he struggles with verb tenses. I ask questions in the present tense with a date modifier (e.g. “when you meet me at the airport at 5pm yesterday, you say my birthday. Why do you do that?”) and this improves our communication (incidentally, his explanation is “I know your birthday from KITC”)

The roads are quiet– apparently rush hour is 7am and 7pm. One car is driving backwards at a slow pace. I ask if this is normal and am told that it is not.

I see one van with an open top – more like an old-fashioned wagon – displaying a hundred dead pigs with no protection. Literally, someone appears to have thrown skinned pig bodies onto the back of his wagon and then started driving. On top of the pig carcasses is a soldier in full military dress holding a gun. I don’t ask if this is normal.

Our first stop is a memorial to Juche, the political philosophy founded by Kim Il Sung. Juche has three aspects: Political independence, economic self-sustenance, and self-defence. The elevator takes 90 seconds to reach the eighth floor, 150 metres up. I ask what is on floors 2-7 and am told construction and maintenance. The view from the eighth floor is amazing, though the area is built up and not significantly different from other developing Asian capital cities.

The most unusual thing is the quiet around us. Everyone is apparently at work, so daytime is very quiet. Yu and Lee walk with me at all times. When I need to go to the bathroom, Lee comes with me.

Some stops have a tour guide who doesn’t speak English, in which case Lee or Yu will translate. Yu and Lee both repeatedly ask me to recite information they've given me. Yu asks me her name, and Lee asks me once for the date of the Juche building’s construction, then asks later for its height (he asks this one twice). On all occasions I remember the answer and give it. For this feat, I am congratulated on my intelligence. I don’t know whether all foreigners go through this ritual. My guess is they are checking I can understand their accented English. But that’s only a guess.

After this, I ask to use a bathroom, prompting our first stop that’s not on the official route. This is where things begin to get interesting. I am shown to a nearby shop, which has no lighting. The front room is lit by daylight to some extent. The back rooms are not. Lee shows me to a grimy room with no windows, no electricity, and no running water. It has a urinal in one corner. Lee kindly keeps the door open so that I have enough light to use the urinal. Another corner has what looks like a bathtub four feet above the ground. It is full of cold, grimy water. To wash my hands, I am told it is normal to take a scoop from the bathtub, wash my hands in it, and pour it back. I do this.
It's unclear if this leaves my hands cleaner.

On the way out, I ask Lee why the building has no electricity. His face makes an expression I later come to recognise and mentally label the Doublethink. He explains that there is a very temporary electricity cut. I ask if this is common and he says it is not. He continues to make the Doublethink.

Lee had earlier dropped into conversation that he liked to smoke and Yu now mentions that Lee likes to smoke. I had known before coming that it is traditional to bring gifts for the tour guides, and I had bought gin, chocolate and cigarettes. All of these goods, including the cigarettes, are stored in my bags and I wonder whether my bags have been searched in my absence. I later offer him a large packet of cigarettes.

In hindsight, I think my bags were not searched, but a downside of a police state is that you have to mistrust everybody, no matter how friendly they seem.

Next we visit an art gallery. Most paintings are Korean scenery. Two are President and General (the leaders Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un are known respectively as President, General, and Marshal). My favourite painting shows Korean children playing in the snow next to a snowman. I really like the painting because the scene is so similar to how children anywhere else in the world would play in the snow. I ask if I can take a photo of it and am told I cannot. While I am there, the electricity flickers. I ask Yu if this is common. She makes a Doublethink face and says it is not.

We head to a restaurant for dinner. When we walk in, I am happy to see some locals, until Yu corrects me: they are Chinese tourists.
Jang, Yu, Lee and I eat together, and enjoy a very good hotpot and chat (Jang leaves early, as the conversation is in English). Yu tells me a funny story: she had an interest in learning French, so some of KITC’s French-speaking tour guides taught her a French phrase meaning “I would like some dumpling soup”. She practiced it until she had a Frenchman to show around, when she trotted it out proudly. The Frenchman was slightly surprised. It turns out that the phrase actually means “I would like to have sex with you tonight”. People are the same all around the world. Later on I teach her another French phrase, which has a very similar meaning (I use a different verb and remove the “tonight”). It is the Right Thing To Do.

I compliment Lee’s watch: it is gold and very sleek-looking. He tells me that on getting married, his wife gave him a watch rather than a ring, and this is a fairly common custom in Korea.

Yu tells me that Koreans have a form of online dating. I am surprised by this, given they have no access to the internet. Yu explains they can use a North Korea-wide intranet, and tells me that North Koreans sometimes pretend to be a different gender when speaking to people online.

Every Buzzfeed list of “things I have learned from my years of travel” has an entry to the effect that “people all around the world are the same”. When I am asked in the future how true that is, I think I will respond by saying that North Korean dudes talk to strangers online and pretend to be women for the lols.

I try to phrase all my awkward questions as “Some people in the West say that… about North Korea. Is it true?” and I do not sense unhappiness from either Yu or Lee. In fact, they seem genuinely happy to hear stories of North Korea from the outside. I wish I had read recent news articles so I had more recent information – Yu knows all of the stories I proffer because she has heard them from other tourists. She has heard about things like the “Kim Jong Il got four holes in one in his first round of golf” stories through previous tourists, and not through the Korean media. Later I meet a Swiss man, Ricardo, who found a lapel pin with the flags of Korea and Switzerland. Ricardo explained to his tour guide, Lin, that Kim Jong Un studied in Switzerland and Lin was stunned to hear this. I later ask Yu if she knows this, and she confirms that she has heard it from tourists, but explains it as “he only studied for a year. He is still Korean”.
Incidentally, Lee does not have the same haircut as Kim Jong Un, and I am told that the haircut is not mandatory, just "recommended". I am told that Koreans have access to specific western media. Bend it Like Beckham is apparently popular. Yu’s favourite film is Titanic but she tells me not many of her countrymen have seen it. She and Lee have heard of James Bond but not seen the movies. I suspect Die Another Day would not be popular here.

After dinner, we drive to my hotel. This is on an island in the middle of the river. Really. I am told that I can walk around it but should not walk far or leave the island. The hotel is clean but not luxurious. I do not have clean water in my room, so I boil water (taking >5 minutes in my Soviet-style kettle) and then place the boiled water in my fridge. I hope the resulting water is clean to drink.

Day Two

Breakfast is tomato, toast, some kind of sour milk-based drink, and eggs. The breakfast room has a huge mural up but otherwise could pass for a youth hostel. On the way out, Yu tells me that the license plates are divided into various colours. Red and blue are for foreigners, yellow for privately owned, black for the military, and white for the government. Almost all of the cars have white plates, but I see a few black. A couple of hours later, Yu draws my attention to one yellow plate.

We head out to see a monument dedicated to the Leaders (Kim Il Sung, President, and Kim Jong Il, General. But no Kim Jong Un, Marshal). It is very important that we buy flowers and leave the flowers at the Leaders’ feet, and also bow. I ask why Kim Jong Un isn’t there. Yu tells me Kim Jong Il was too modest to put himself there, and only after KJI’s death was he added, by Kim Jong Un. I ask whether KJU will be added if he were to pass away, but Yu thinks this is an inappropriate question, and I apologise profusely.

We see two wedding parties there. Lee tells me it is expected that all Koreans visit this memorial on the day of their marriage. I think “all” Koreans is a stretch, since we see only two, but I accept it is a tradition.

We head to the DPRK national power museum. It is full of exhibits dedicated to the Korean machinery and industrial strengths, and their ways of creating power. These exhibits are dimly lit: there is no electricity due to a power cut.

I ask to eat at a restaurant for locals rather than for tourists. Lee and Yu agree to this, but when we arrive, there are no locals. I ask about this and am told that locals work until 12:30 or so (it is 11:45 when I arrive). We have a leisurely drawn out lunch, in which I ask a lot of questions – and answer quite a few of theirs – and when it finishes it is 1:30. One family has shown up. I think they’re Chinese tourists.

It has buttons on the table with which to call servers. While we are talking, I see Lee raise his hand with fingers outstretched, then move fingers down one by one (starting with the thumb) to count to five and place them back up to count to ten. I ask about this and I am told it is the normal Korean way of counting. (After leaving DPRK, I ask a South Korean friend, and she counts the same way)

While we are chatting, I learn more about Yu’s personal life. Although she is slim by western standards, she wants to lose weight and is on a diet.
Another universal human experience, untainted by living in a country ravaged by famine.

Yu also tells me that there are no homosexuals in North Korea and she doesn’t “understand how it can work”. I don’t press that point.

After lunch, we visit a series of museums about the Korean war, where we learn how the North “liberated” Pyongyang (the later DPRK defeats are skimmed over or ignored: we focus on the part of the war where the North advanced in the south, liberating mile by mile). As far as I can tell, the war reports are close enough to reality, and the main propaganda is in word choices and missing out specific items, rather than making up battles altogether.

I like the reporting on the USS Pueblo. This is an American ship which (according to the DPRK museum) strayed into Korean waters and was attacked by several Korean ships. After surrendering, seven Koreans boarded and arrested the 83 US soldiers on board. The museum guide makes a big thing out of how those seven Koreans overcame a huge numerical disadvantage, and she stresses the numbers on each side. I think it doesn’t take a lot of people to arrest an enemy who has already surrendered, but I keep this observation to myself. There is a signed letter from the US confirming they had spied on the DPRK.

Western sources tell the story differently: the Pueblo was attacked while its location was disputed (the US claims it was in international waters) and an agreement was reached that the US would sign a document agreeing its ship had spied on Korea, then the soldiers would be released, then the US would retract the confession. The captain of the Pueblo deliberately wrote a confession saying “we paean the North Korean state” – with the hidden meaning of “we pee on the North Korean state”. That must have taken serious cojones to write; I guess paean is stored in the balls.

The museums have beautiful scenery. I am not allowed to take photos of the gorgeous parts - I don’t know why - but their mock battlefields and jungle scenes are more intricate than any I have seen outside DPRK. We visit the Palace school, which is immensely beautiful and full of marble, chandeliers, etc. A young girl comes to greet me; she claims to be 13 (which means 12, since Koreans start counting from age 1) but looks younger. She begins to rattle off facts about the school in Korean, which Lee translates into English. I ask questions about the school but Lee explains she is shy.

I see a clock face, with a map on it. In this map, Korea is approaching the size of the United States. I comment that “I have seen some maps where the countries have different sizes than this one”. I get a smile out of Lee.

The children study an extra-curricular activity for two hours a day. Some children learn to dance, some sew, some sing, some play Go, and some use computers. Both Yu and Lee learned to sing. Yu also did the accordion. When we enter the sewing room, no children look up. Two other visitors walk over to one desk and inspect the children’s work. No children look up. They just keep sewing. I wonder how exactly the children were trained.

In the dancing room, every single child is smiling and dancing. I ask Lee about this and he says “well, if you come to my house, my wife and I smile when we see you”. That analogy doesn’t land with me, but I don’t press the point.

When we see the photos of martial arts on the walls, Lee asks if I have done them. I tell him I studied Choi Kwang-Do, which is a Korean martial art. I can count in Korean, and I remember a few odd phrases, mostly words for punching. They have not come in useful. Miss Yu has taught me some more appropriate phrases, so that I can greet and thank people. At least, I think they are appropriate phrases. It’s hard to be sure.

After dinner I visit a funfair. It is free to enter and instead you pay on the way out. The funfair tour guide tells me (through Lee as a translator) to skip the line. I prefer to queue, which takes a while to translate and explain. Power cuts make me uncertain about DPRK engineering practices, so I opt for a ride taken by Kim Jong Un last week, when it was officially opened. In the whole of human history, this may be the funfair whose engineers had the strongest incentives to make the rides safe.

Later we head back to the hotel, where we drink together with Oh, another tour guide (with great English) and Rowan, an Australian from the tour company who helped book this. He talks to our waitress about how he misses the waitress who was here before – Monny – and asks where she is. Our waitress blushes. Later, Yu tells me that Monny *was* the waitress and Rowan hadn't recognised her.

I ask Yu and Lee about Korean drinking games and they play Rock Paper Scissors where the loser drinks. Except that their scissors is thumb and forefinger outstretched, not the first two fingers. I later check this out by asking three Asian friends: the one South Korean girl uses her thumb and forefinger, while the others use the first two fingers.

The five of us go on to karaoke. On the way we see people bare-chested in a sports room playing table tennis.

Day Three

We are going to the Mausoleum, where President and General are laid out for state visits. This is very, very serious. Most people have ties. I wear my least crumpled clothes. Yu tells me to leave most of my things in the bus and take only my wallet, from which I remove everything other than money.

We start by walking across a device that cleans our shoes. Then we pass through metal detectors and then I am patted down.

We step onto a series of travelators that take us perhaps 200 metres. They proceed at maybe 15cm/second, and we do not walk on them; we just stand. We are facing a series of soldiers in full military dress coming the other way. Perhaps 80% of the soldiers are staring at me. It’s a little disconcerting to be stared at by ~100 North Korean soldiers in full military uniform.

When we reach the end, we walk through a series of halls with many important-looking portrait photos of President Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. The area is incredibly ornate. Dozens of chandeliers adorn every ceiling and I would guess each of them cost thousands. Guards in full military uniform are standing strictly to attention at most corners. I do not see any of them move while I am there. Instead the actual guarding is done by a small number of suited men who occasionally yell out commands in Korean when a visitor steps slightly out of line. The men in suits scare me.

For the actual visiting of the tombs, we pass first through an air tunnel, to clean our suits. We then line up into a darkened room. Kim Il Sung’s body is in a glass cage, and it is very well preserved. We walk around it from all sides in a prescribed queue, bowing once to the feet, once to the left, and once to the right. We do not bow to the head.

Yu has checked with me before we visit the tomb that I am going to bow. She has warned me, in a fearful voice, that it can cause offence to refuse to bow. I do not know what "cause offence" is a euphemism for and I do not intend to find out. When I am supposed to bow, I bow as if my life depends on it.
I’m not sure it doesn’t.

Kim Jong Il’s body also lies in state, and we go through an identical ceremony for him in the next room. We also have numerous other things to see: a giant wall-sized map for each leader, showing which state trips he made abroad (106 for KIS, 18 for KJI). We see their cars: one sleek-looking black car, and one that is basically a golf cart for twelve people. We see their trains. KJI’s train has many of his personal effects. It includes trousers and his jacket. I asked about his jackets (he is always seen in the same jackets) and am told he has a small wardrobe due to his modesty. Next, I see his yacht, which is maybe 100ft. This was finished only a year before his death, so was barely used. It is now part of his official museum, and will never be used again.

I also see the collection of medals that both leaders owned. Each has one room dedicated to his medals and at the top has ~10 big portraits/photos with foreign dignitaries. KJI received an honorary doctorate from some Russian university, and two of his ten photos are from this event.

The journey out is the reverse of the journey in, passing by all the same exhibits, and then we go sit in the park outside. After this, I am taken to a memorial to soldiers. It shows sculptures of ~100 soldiers’ head and shoulders. Lee translates a few of the inscriptions: one soldier was being tortured by the Japanese for information, so he bit out his tongue to avoid giving them any. The Japanese then shot him. Kim Il Sung awarded medals to him and his mother, and put their busts on the mountain.

After this we visit the birthplace of the President. It is very clean and looks like a museum. There is a well outside his house, from which we pull up water. We drink the water: Yu tells me I will live ten years longer after drinking it. I ask Yu whether, when General Kim Jong Il died, the Korean people knew Marshal Kim Jong Un would be the next leader. She tells me yes, everyone knew he was well-known, and KJI’s favourite. I ask her whether any of Kim Jong Un’s family are similarly well known and she says they are not. She thinks he has one daughter but knows very little about his family. I infer that Marshal’s successor is not known.

For lunch I ask to taste dog. Yu thinks I am very odd for asking to try this. The restaurant charges me $5 extra. It tastes like chicken.

After lunch, we visit the subway. This is fascinating. Apparently it was founded in 1973, and spans ~35 kilometres, with 17 stations. The entrance is unimpressive (photo), the escalator down to the station is slow, and the walls are perfectly grey. Then we arrive in the station, which is a perfect example of “this is what we want the world to see”. The underground station is covered in gleaming lights and pretty pictures. Lee and Yu tell me to take a lot of photos of these.

We get on a train and get off at the next stop, where I am again encouraged to take photos of the (very pretty) mural surrounding the wall. We then get back on and go through four more stops. I am not directed to take photos of these; they are mostly just granite and marble. I take a photo anyway (after checking with Lee), so I can show people what most of the stations look like. Honestly, these are comparable with London tube stations.

To take the subway costs 5 won, which is 5 cents at the official exchange rate, or 0.04 cents at the black market rate – i.e. you could ride it 25 times for a penny.

We get out at the arch of triumph, which is modelled after the French one but slightly bigger. It was a 70th birthday present for Kim Il Sung. “We copied the French but cranked up the size. Happy birthday!”

We arrive at the airport and I bid goodbye to Mr. Driver, Mr. Lee, and Miss Yu. I had learned only after arriving in DPRK that tips should be in new banknotes, and I have to give them slightly crumpled ones. I sort of want to set up an arbitrage business in which I buy crumpled banknotes at a 10% discount, then exchange them in countries where small crumpling is a non-issue. But I leave this to others more entrepreneurially minded than I.

Airport border control offers to stamp my passport with a DPRK stamp. This feels like an offer I will regret accepting, so I decline. With that, I board my plane, and leave the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

The scientific paper is a “fraud” that creates “a totally misleading narrative of the processes of thought that go into the making of scientific discoveries.”

This critique comes not from a conspiracist on the margins of science, but from Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar. A brilliant experimentalist whose work on immune tolerance laid the foundation for modern organ transplantation, Sir Peter understood both the power and the limitations of scientific communication.

Consider the familiar structure of a scientific paper: Introduction (background and hypothesis), Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion. This format implies that the work followed a clean, sequential progression: scientists identified a gap in knowledge, formulated a causal explanation, designed definitive experiments to fill the gap, evaluated compelling results, and most of the time, confirmed their hypothesis.

Real lab work rarely follows such a clear path. Biological research is filled with what Medawar describes lovingly as “messing about”: false starts, starting in the middle, unexpected results, reformulated hypotheses, and intriguing accidental findings. The published paper ignores the mess in favour of the illusion of structure and discipline. It offers an ideal version of what might have happened rather than a confession of what did.

The polish serves a purpose. It makes complex work accessible (at least if you work in the same or a similar field!). It allows researchers to build upon new findings.

But the contrived omissions can also play upon even the most well-regarded scientist’s susceptibility to the seduction of story. As Christophe Bernard, Director of Research at the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (Marseilles, Fr.) recently explained,

“when we are reading a paper, we tend to follow the reasoning and logic of the authors, and if the argumentation is nicely laid out, it is difficult to pause, take a step back, and try to get an overall picture.”

Our minds travel the narrative path laid out for us, making it harder to spot potential flaws in logic or alternative interpretations of the data, and making conclusions feel far more definitive than they often are.

Medawar’s framing is my compass when I do deep dives into major discoveries in translational neuroscience. I approach papers with a dual vision. First, what is actually presented? But second, and often more importantly, what is not shown? How was the work likely done in reality? What alternatives were tried but not reported? What assumptions guided the experimental design? What other interpretations might fit the data if the results are not as convincing or cohesive as argued?

And what are the consequences for scientific progress?

In the case of Alzheimer’s research, they appear to be stark: thirty years of prioritizing an incomplete model of the disease’s causes; billions of corporate, government, and foundation dollars spent pursuing a narrow path to drug development; the relative exclusion of alternative hypotheses from funding opportunities and attention; and little progress toward disease-modifying treatments or a cure.

The incomplete Alzheimer’s model I’m referring to is the amyloid cascade hypothesis, which proposes that Alzheimer’s is the outcome of protein processing gone awry in the brain, leading to the production of plaques that trigger a cascade of other pathological changes, ultimately causing the cognitive decline we recognize as the disease. Amyloid work continues to dominate the research and drug development landscape, giving the hypothesis the aura of settled fact.

However, cracks are showing in this façade. In 2021, the FDA granted accelerated approval to aducanumab (Aduhelm), an anti-amyloid drug developed by Biogen, despite scant evidence that it meaningfully altered the course of cognitive decline. The decision to approve, made over near-unanimous opposition from the agency’s advisory panel, exposed growing tensions between regulatory optimism and scientific rigor. Medicare’s subsequent decision to restrict coverage to clinical trials, and Biogen’s quiet withdrawal of the drug from broader marketing efforts in 2024, made the disconnect impossible to ignore.

Meanwhile, a deeper fissure emerged: an investigation by Science unearthed evidence of data fabrication surrounding research on Aβ*56, a purported toxic amyloid-beta oligomer once hailed as a breakthrough target for disease-modifying therapy. Research results that had been seen as a promising pivot in the evolution of the amyloid cascade hypothesis, a new hope for rescuing the theory after repeated clinical failures, now appears to have been largely a sham. Treating Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques may have been a null path from the start.

When the cracks run that deep, it’s worth going back to the origin story—a landmark 1995 paper by Games et al., featured on the cover of Nature under the headline “A mouse model for Alzheimer’s.” It announced what was hailed as a breakthrough: the first genetically engineered mouse designed to mimic key features of the disease.

In what follows, I argue that the seeds of today’s failures were visible from the beginning if one looks carefully. I approach this review not as an Alzheimer’s researcher with a rival theory, but as a molecular neuroscientist interested in how fields sometimes converge around alluring but unstable ideas. Foundational papers deserve special scrutiny because they become the bedrock for decades of research. When that bedrock slips beneath us, it tells a cautionary story: about the power of narrative, the comfort of consensus, and the dangers of devotion without durable evidence. It also reminds us that while science is ultimately self-correcting, correction can be glacial when careers and reputations are staked on fragile ground.

The Rise of the Amyloid Hypothesis

In the early 1990s, a new idea began to dominate Alzheimer’s research: the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

First proposed by Hardy and Higgins in a 1992 Science perspective, the hypothesis suggested a clear sequence of disease-precipitating events: protein processing goes awry in the brain → beta-amyloid (Aβ) accumulates → plaques form → plaques trigger a cascade of downstream events, including neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation, synaptic loss, neuronal death, resulting in observable cognitive decline.

The hypothesis was compelling for several reasons. First, the discovery of the enzymatic steps by which amyloid precursor protein (APP) is processed into Aβ offered multiple potential intervention points—ideal for pharmaceutical drug development.

Second, the hypothesis was backed by powerful genetic evidence. Mutations in the APP gene on chromosome 21 were associated with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The case grew stronger with the observation that more than 50% of individuals with Down syndrome, who carry an extra copy of chromosome 21 (and thus extra APP), develop Alzheimer’s-like pathology by age 40.

Thus, like any robust causal theory, the amyloid cascade hypothesis offered explicit, testable predictions. As Hardy and Higgins outlined, if amyloid truly initiates the Alzheimer’s cascade, then genetically engineering mice to produce human amyloid should trigger the full sequence of events: plaques first, then tangles, synapse loss, and neuronal death, then cognitive decline. And the sequentiality matters: amyloid accumulation should precede other pathological features. At the time, this was a thrilling possibility.

Pharmaceutical companies were especially eager: if the hypothesis proved correct, stopping amyloid should stop the disease. The field awaited the first transgenic mouse studies with enormous anticipation.

How—with Unlimited Time and Money and a Little Scientific Despair—to Make a Transgenic Mouse

“Mouse Model Made” was the boastful headline to the independent, introductory commentary Nature solicited to accompany the 1995 Games paper’s unveiling of the first transgenic mouse set to “answer the needs” of Alzheimer’s research. The scientific argument over whether amyloid caused Alzheimer’s had been “settle[d]” by the Games paper, “perhaps for good.”

In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.

First Rule of Making a Transgenic Mouse: Don’t Talk About How You Made a Transgenic Mouse

How did Athena pull it off? Hard to say! What's most remarkable about the Games paper is what's not there. Scan through the methods section and you'll find virtually none of the painstaking effort required to build the Alzheimer’s mouse. Back in the ‘90s, creating a transgenic mouse took years of work, countless failed attempts, and extraordinary technical skill. In the Games paper, this effort is compressed into a few sparse sentences describing which gene and promoter (nearby gene instruction code) the research team used to make the mouse. The actual details are relegated to scientific meta-narrative—knowledge that exists only in lab notebooks, daily conversations between scientists, and the muscle memory of researchers who perform these techniques thousands of times.

The thin description wasn’t atypical for a publication from this era. Difficult experimental methods were often encapsulated in the single phrase "steps were carried out according to standard procedures," with citations to entire books on sub-cloning techniques or reference to the venerable Manipulating the Mouse Embryo: A Laboratory Manual (We all have this on our bookshelf, yes?) The idea that there were reliable "standard procedures" that could ensure success was farcical—an understatement that other scientists understand as code for "we spent years getting this to work; good luck figuring it out ;)."

So, as an appreciation of what it takes to make progress on the frontiers of science, here is approximately what’s involved.

Prerequisites: Dexterity, Glassblowing, and Zen Mastery

Do you have what it takes to master transgenic mouse creation? Well, do you have the dexterity of a neurosurgeon? Because you’ll be micro-manipulating fragile embryos with the care of someone defusing a bomb—except the bomb is smaller than a grain of sand, and you need to keep it alive. Have you trained in glass-blowing? Hope so, because you’ll need to handcraft your own micropipettes so you can balance an embryo on the pipette tip. Yes, really.

And most importantly, do you sincerely believe that outcomes are irrelevant, and only the endless, repetitive journey matters? If so, congratulations! You may already be a Zen master, which will come in handy when you’re objectively failing your boss’s expectations every single day for what feels like an eternity. Success, when it finally comes, will be indistinguishable from sheer, dumb luck, but the stochastic randomness won’t stop you from searching frantically through your copious notes to see if you can pinpoint the variable that made it finally work!

Let’s go a little deeper so we can understand why the Games team's achievement was considered so monumental—and why almost everyone viewed the results in the best possible light.

The Science and Alchemy of Designing the Perfect Genetic Construct

First, these researchers needed to design a genetic construct. What's a construct, you ask? It's a carefully engineered piece of DNA that harnesses circular plasmids (tiny rings of DNA naturally found in bacteria) to introduce foreign genes into mammalian cells. Through a painstaking process called sub-cloning, equal parts molecular biology and divination, they managed to insert into their mouse a human APP gene carrying the mutation found in families with high rates of early-onset Alzheimer's.

You can design your construct perfectly on paper, but in truth, you solve the problem by tweaking reagents like an alchemist, trying to find the perfect brew to coax your foreign gene into the plasmid at high efficiency.

To be considered a valid Alzheimer’s model, the Games mouse needed to express human APP at levels high enough to cause Alzheimer's-like pathology. Previous attempts by other labs had yielded mice that showed little to no amyloid plaques. Scientists suspected that higher expression levels might overcome this hurdle. They introduced the PDGF-β promoter, a genetic “on switch” that controls when and where a gene is activated to drive high expression in neurons; they including introns in the construct to allow for alternative splicing, a process that enables cells to produce different versions of a protein, in this case ensuring expression of the full range of amyloid-beta peptides seen in human Alzheimer’s.

But even with these clever designs, they had almost no control over where their transgene would integrate into the genome, how many copies would insert, or how much gene expression they’d elicit.

Microinjection to Model Organism: The Birth of Transgenic Line #100... #101... #102... Are We There Yet?

When the Games team finally (miraculously!) had a perfect construct, the next phase began: obtaining precisely timed mouse embryos. To make this transgenic mouse line, researchers needed to inject the transgene into single-cell fertilized embryos, prior to the first cell division event. It’s a very small needle, but only by threading it can you ensure that the transgene incorporates into the DNA of every dividing cell. Back when the study was conducted in the 1990s, the Games team had to rely on natural fertilization, meaning they needed female mice that had just ovulated and mated.

Thinking about this work triggers me. I spent years of my PhD setting up and monitoring mouse breeding pairs for timed pregnancies. Every morning began with the ritual of checking for copulatory plugs (don’t ask!). Only ~20-25% of pairs would successfully mate overnight: some females aren’t receptive; some males are layabouts. The failed pairings had to be separated and re-paired in the evening, so fertilization timing could be precisely tracked. Once mating was confirmed (those copulatory plugs again), the female was euthanized, and her oviducts—tiny tubes containing the precious fertilized eggs—carefully dissected. Then you flush out the one-cell zygotes using a finely-tuned glass pipette (yet another moment where glass-blowing skills came in handy).

Now for the hard part: microinjection—the insertion of the transgene into an egg the diameter of a human hair (you really should watch the video). You need the steadiness of a bomb defuser, the aim of a sniper, and just enough pressure to get the DNA inside the pronucleus without rupturing the egg (because ruptured eggs = weeks of work wasted instantly). All this while the eggs had to be kept alive under precisely controlled conditions. Today, fancy $100K integrated microinjection/scope systems help the process along (though it still takes years to master), in the early 1990s, microinjection was brutal—for all parties. Only a handful of scientists in the world could perform it with any consistency.

Let’s pause to acknowledge the obsessive craft of the skilled bench scientist.

The PDAPP Mouse Arrives

Once injected, the embryos were surgically transferred into surrogate mothers, then scientists waited anxiously for 18–21 days to see if any pups survived. When they did, DNA was extracted, and tests were run to see which, if any, carried the transgene. Success rates? Single-digit percentages. For every founder animal that carried the transgene, there were at least an order of magnitude more failed attempts.

The effort layered chance upon pure chance—literally hoping that the DNA randomly integrated into the genome. Where? Unknown. How many copies? Uhh. Would it express properly? Flip a coin.

That’s what made the PDAPP (Platelet-Derived growth factor (PDGF-β) Amyloid Precursor Protein) mouse a remarkable achievement. When it finally worked and was replicable in the creators’ lab, it wasn’t just a technical success—it was a miracle of molecular biology and tenacity.

How to Read a Scientific Paper

Actively.

Imagine you’re a molecular neuroscience grad student in 1995. You’ve just sat down at your bench in the morning when your PhD supervisor calls you into her office. She’s at her desk, her hand pressed down on the latest issue of Nature like she’s trying to keep it from flying away.

“They did it. They made a transgenic Alzheimer’s mouse that shows the pathology. Go print color copies for everyone in the lab, then bring this back to me. You’ll present it in lab meeting tomorrow.”

You have 24 hours to get ready to lead journal club on the biggest translational neuroscience story in years. What do you do?

Crushed for time, most scientists I know read papers passively. They start at the beginning and work their way to the end, following the path the authors laid out for them. They become susceptible to the trap Medawar and Bernard warned about: mistaking the arc of a narrative for genuine logical coherence.

To see the substance through the argument in the Games paper, you’ll need a more active, detective-like approach. If you’re going to be convinced, you need to decide before you read what it will take to convince you. So, you begin with what may be the most important task of active reading: before looking at the paper, you imagine the experiments and results that would justify the claim that amyloid causes Alzheimer’s—and that the matter is settled.

What would we need to see to be convinced? Let's apply some key principles of experimental design:

Temporality: If amyloid beta (Aβ) drives pathology, plaques should appear first, followed by neurodegeneration, then cognitive deficits.

Sufficiency [2]: If Alzheimer’s-like pathology can result from ramping up human APP expression alone, then the PDAPP mouse is a quasi-test of sufficiency. If this mouse model develops plaques, tangles, synaptic loss, neurodegeneration, and cognitive impairment, then Aβ might be sufficient to initiate the disease process.

Necessity: An even stronger case for the amyloid cascade hypothesis requires showing that Alzheimer’s pathology can’t develop or progress if Aβ is absent or blocked.

Mechanism of Action: A truly convincing paper should demonstrate the biology of how Aβ triggers neurodegeneration.

Critical Controls: Including controls in your experiments helps to demonstrate that your predicted effect isn’t arising for some other reason. Here are some controls you’d like to see in the PDAPP mouse study if you’re going to be convinced of the amyloid cascade hypothesis:

Absence of plaques in mice not engineered to overexpress APP.
Comparisons between brain regions with and without plaques. If you see neuronal death, it should co-occur with the presence of plaques, not be spread throughout the brain.
Evidence that APP overexpression isn't driving toxicity, which can cause similar damage to the brain. This is very hard to control for, so the best course of action is to try to match human APP expression levels in your mouse model.

Controls are an indispensable reality check for strong inference—the practice of designing experiments that not only test a hypothesis but aim to disprove it or eliminate alternatives. The concept was introduced in 1964 by the biophysicist John Platt, who observed that some scientific fields advance rapidly while others stagnate. The difference, he argued, wasn’t in the complexity of the problems or the brilliance of the researchers, but in the systematic use of what he called strong inference.

Unlike the traditional scientific method, which often tests a single hypothesis against a null, strong inference begins with multiple competing explanations. It then designs experiments specifically intended to rule them out. Over time, this produces a branching tree of narrowing possibilities, steadily eliminating what doesn’t hold up.

This approach also guides how we read. Asking what control would disprove the claim—or what alternative wasn’t tested—is the core of strong inference.

Detective Work—Decoding the Paper

With our backstory in hand and analytical toolkit in mind, let’s see if the PDAPP mouse delivers on the amyloid cascade hypothesis.

It’s time to interrogate the key figures. In a paper like this, the figures are the empirical backbone of the argument. Of course, the authors have carefully chosen what to show and how to frame it. Our job is to assess whether the evidence supports their claims.

Figure 1: Confirming the PDAPP Mouse Expresses Human APP

Big picture message: The authors successfully engineered a mouse with a functioning human APP transgene. While Figure 1 has 5 parts, Panel d (below) is where we get the clearest confirmation that the human mutant APP transgene integrated itself into the mouse genome and produced Aβ in the expected location in the mouse brain. Stare at Panel d for a few seconds and then we’ll talk about it.

A close-up of a microscope slide

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What the Heck is Going on in Panel d?

Panel d is an immunoblot (Western blot), a technique that tells us whether a specific protein is being produced in a sample. The figure compares human amyloid precursor protein expression in samples from three brains, corresponding to the three “lanes” shown along the top: a normal mouse (Lane 1), a mouse with the human APP transgene (Lane 2), and a human who had Alzheimer’s disease (Lane 3). The blots (the bands and blobs) are the data.

For purposes of this figure, proteins can differ in two important ways:

They can differ in molecular weight (size), scored on the scale along the vertical axis on the left.
They can be expressed to a greater or lesser degree, reflected in the intensity (darkness and spread) of the bands. Lighter means less protein expression, darker more. (Note: It’s fine that there are two bands in lane 3).

Let’s pause to consider what we should expect to see in this blot if the PDAPP mouse is to be considered a reasonable model of human Alzheimer’s disease. Two things!

Ideally, lane 1 (normal mouse) will be empty; and
The PDAPP mouse sample in lane 2 will have the same molecular weight (height on vertical axis) and expression level (intensity and spread) as the human sample in lane 3.

Why do we want to see these results? It matters because our ultimate goal is to develop treatments that work in people, not just in mice. To make that leap from a mouse model, the PDAPP mouse needs to replicate the key features of Alzheimer’s disease in humans—not just produce APP but drive similar amyloid-induced disease processes in the brain.

Ok, so on point one, ✔ — nothing in lane 1.

Point two? ❌ While the human sample has distinct bands in lane 3, the PDAPP mouse in lane 2 appears as a giant, smeared blob. Are these the same protein size? Impossible to tell!

This happens because, relative to the human sample, the PDAPP mouse is drowning in APP—at least 10 times more, according to the paper’s text, and possibly much more by eye. When you do a Western blot, you set an exposure time for your image, just like with a manual camera: too short an exposure, and faint bands won’t appear; too long, and strong signals become an oversaturated mess. Here, no single exposure could produce similar-looking PDAPP and human samples. It’s like trying to take a photo of a candle next to the sun—you can’t adjust for both at once.

A proper Western blot should show clean bands to confirm protein size and check for unexpected degradation products, but this overloaded mess makes it impossible to tell whether APP is being processed normally. A Western blot like the one shown in Panel d usually indicates either sloppy technique (overloading the gel, overexposing) or a fundamental issue with the model itself (massive expression differences between samples).

The fine print explains why: the PDAPP mouse carries 40 copies of the APP transgene, all inserted at a single site in the genome. For context:

✔ At most, humans have 2 copies of APP (one from each parent).

✔ PDAPP mice have 40 human copies—plus their 2 normal mouse copies.

I’m sure this blot led to high-fives in the lab—earlier models struggled to express APP at all, so getting massive overexpression must have felt like a breakthrough.

But now I’m worried.

If we’re trying to create a human-comparable Alzheimer’s model, this much APP might be way too much. Why might this be a problem?

APP expression at this level doesn’t mirror expression levels in human Alzheimer’s. Alzheimer’s patients don’t have 40 copies of APP. If it takes this much overexpression (and a mutant form at that!) to drive pathology in mice, are these mice even an appropriate animal model for Alzheimer’s?
Excess protein can stress neurons in ways unrelated to amyloid. What if the brain is freaking out not because of Aβ toxicity, but because it’s drowning in APP?

Overexpression alone isn’t a dealbreaker. Many successful transgenic models for cancer, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s disease rely on high gene expression to accelerate pathology and make the disease more tractable for study. These models have been invaluable for understanding disease mechanisms and testing therapies. So, while the extreme APP overexpression in PDAPP mice raises concerns, it doesn’t automatically invalidate the model—we could still be on the right track.

But your scientific spidey sense should be tingling. If the pathology we’re about to see is simply a side effect of astronomical overexpression, then this mouse may be modeling an extreme artifact, not human disease—and there aren’t easy ways to tell the difference.

Let’s keep going…

Figure 2: We have amyloid plaques! (I think?)

Figure 2 is supposed to convince us that the amyloid plaque burden in PDAPP mice matches that of the human brain and that it worsens over time, just like in Alzheimer’s disease. But instead of giving us clear, apples-to-apples comparisons, the figure presents a frustrating mismatch of images that makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions.

First, let’s talk about the comparison of PDAPP plaques to human Alzheimer’s brain plaques. The authors claim that the amount of amyloid in 9-month-old PDAPP mice is equivalent to what’s seen in humans, but the figures they provide make this impossible to assess. Figure 2a shows a large image of a PDAPP mouse brain with a tiny inset of a human Alzheimer’s brain, which, at a glance, actually looks like it has way more plaques. But because of the size difference of the images (not the magnification; magnification is the same; see the horizontal bars in each image) and lack of anatomical markers on the inset, we can’t visually compare them.

A close-up of a microscope

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The obvious fix? Show an image of the human sample that is the same magnification and size as the mouse so we can actually evaluate the claim. I can’t think of a justification to do it any other way. Give us a direct, side-by-side comparison to human pathology. Full stop.

While I won’t reprint the Figure 2 subfigure here, to support a claim that PDAPP mouse plaque load increases over time as in human Alzheimer’s, the authors use images with inconsistent size as well as magnification! Do mouse plaques increase over time? We can’t be sure.

In summary, Figure 2 systematically makes it really hard to:

Compare plaque pathology in PDAPP mice to human Alzheimer’s brains.
Evaluate whether mouse amyloid progresses over time in the Alzheimer’s way.

It’s frustrating because these are the key questions Figure 2 is supposed to answer. Grrr.

Figure 3: What’s in These Plaques?

Figure 1 confirmed that the PDAPP mouse makes human APP and a lot of it. Figure 2 tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to convince us that PDAPP mouse plaque burden mirrors human Alzheimer’s. Figure 3 shifts focus to the composition of those plaques. This is important because not all amyloid deposits are equal—some forms of Aβ are more toxic, more structured, or more likely to trigger downstream pathology than others.

So, what do we learn? The PDAPP plaques aren’t just random protein aggregates; they contain key molecular features of Alzheimer’s pathology.

Panels d & e: Do These Plaques Act Like Human Plaques?

A close-up of a microscope

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✔ Panel d shows PDAPP mouse astrocytic gliosis (see arrow pointing to the angry looking red thing), a type of inflammation where one kind of brain cell (astrocyte) clusters around plaques. Gliosis is a hallmark of neuronal damage in human Alzheimer’s, suggesting that the plaques in PDAPP mice and humans are similarly biologically active.

✔ Panel e reveals that PDAPP mouse amyloid deposits are similar to human Alzheimer’s plaques in two other ways.

Both have plaques that form structured, compacted fiber strands (fibrils), causing them to stain positive for Thioflavin-S.
The larger of the two mouse plaque deposits in Panel e shows a dense core with a surrounding halo, a hallmark of amyloid plaque deposits in human Alzheimer’s.

So far, so good—amyloid plaques in PDAPP mice aren’t just amorphous protein junk; they’re structured, biologically reactive, and surrounded by gliosis.

But Wait… Something’s Missing.

The other half of Alzheimer’s signature pathology is neurofibrillary tangles (NFTs). Plaques and tangles are the Batman and Robin of Alzheimer’s disease: where plaques go, tangles are supposed to follow.

So, where are they?

Search all you want. You won’t find a single one. Instead, buried in the text, we get this:

“Preliminary attempts to identify neurofibrillary tangles … were negative, consistent with their well-known absence in rodent tissues.”

This is a devilish bit of phrasing. The conditional language here—“consistent with their well-known absence”—makes it sound like no one expected to see tangles in the first place. Really? The commentary accompanying the paper also hedges:

“It is likely that those who are skeptical of the amyloid-cascade hypothesis will draw comfort from the apparent absence of tangles in the mice… However, it remains possible that their absence reflects the fact that they are merely a marker of cell injury …: indeed, in some cases of dementia, neuritic plaques occur without tangles, meaning that tangles may indeed be epiphenomena.”

My Translation: The amyloid cascade camp was absolutely hoping to see tangles! Their absence wasn’t expected—it was disappointing. But instead of confronting what this means for the mouse model, the paper and commentary don’t just shift the goalposts, they suggest taking them off the field. They’re using an unvalidated mouse model—fresh off the bench—to call for sweeping change in our fundamental understanding of the biology of Alzheimer’s disease in humans.

Come now! This is completely backwards. When a mouse model fails to produce a core feature of the disease, it’s time to own the potential limitations, not reinterpret the disease to fit the model. 🤯

So where does that leave us? For now, your skepticism of the PDAPP Alzheimer’s model and the amyloid cascade hypothesis itself should be growing. The PDAPP mouse makes amyloid, those plaques look structurally realistic, and they trigger gliosis-type inflammation. But there’s no tau pathology—no tangles—despite their strong link to neuronal dysfunction and cognitive decline in human Alzheimer’s. In retrospect, we now know that the absence of tangles in these mice foreshadowed a key limitation of amyloid-based models.

On to Figure 4. . .

Figure 4: The Gap Between Plaques and Neurodegeneration

The final figure is meant to show how amyloid plaques impact neurons in the PDAPP mouse, with comparisons to human Alzheimer’s disease.

I’m only going to show Panel h from Figure 4, but let’s briefly talk about the other panels. The authors examine neuronal structure, highlighting neuritic damage, synaptic loss, and cellular stress. Using images from a confocal microscope, they demonstrate distorted neurites (aka stressed-out neurons) surrounding plaques in both human Alzheimer’s and transgenic mice and reduced synaptic density and dendritic markers in the PDAPP mouse compared to mouse controls. All good stuff.

Finally, Panel h reveals abnormal neuronal structures near amyloid deposits. Let’s take a closer look at the highest resolution image, captured with an electron microscope. Electron microscopy can reveal the fine details inside cells, down to individual organelles. If plaques are truly destroying neurons, this is where we should see the damage up close.

Here it is. A close-up of a microscope

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At first glance, it seems to provide exactly what we'd expect in an Alzheimer's model: an amyloid deposit (A) sitting next to a dystrophic neurite (DN), which contains swollen, abnormal mitochondria (M) and dense bodies (LB), all signs of cellular stress. These kinds of metabolic defects—like disrupted mitochondria that can no longer generate cellular energy and accumulated protein aggregates that clog cellular machinery—have been observed in human Alzheimer’s brains where neurons are in distress.

But there's a catch. This is one neurite. At this image resolution, if plaques were sufficient to drive large-scale neurodegeneration, we'd expect to see widespread cellular destruction, not just a single distressed process. In human Alzheimer’s brains, electron microscopy images often show fields of degenerating neurons, ruptured organelles, and catastrophic synaptic breakdown. Yet here, we get a highly selective image of one damaged neurite, without any indication of how representative this is across the brain.

This raises an important question: Is amyloid actually killing neurons in this model, or are neurons adapting to the presence of plaques? If widespread cell death were happening, this is the figure where it should be most obvious—but instead, we see only localized damage.

This discrepancy matters because in human Alzheimer's disease, cognitive decline correlates most strongly with neuronal loss (cell death), not with plaque burden. Some patients with significant amyloid deposits show minimal symptoms; others, with fewer plaques but more neurodegeneration, experience severe dementia.

Panel h is meant to reinforce the case that Aβ drives neurodegeneration, but it may instead highlight a key limitation of the PDAPP mouse: neurons near plaques look stressed, but they aren't dying in droves. Why aren’t we presented with evidence of more devastation at this scale?

Revisiting Our Expectations

Did the PDAPP Mouse Deliver on Its Bold Claims?

We’ve spent this deep dive critically analyzing the key figures and missing evidence. Now it’s time to step back and ask: Did this paper adequately support its sweeping conclusions?

The authors make a confident claim in their discussion:

“Our transgenic model provides strong new evidence for the primacy of APP expression and Aβ deposition in [Alzheimer’s] neuropathology and offers a means to test whether compounds that lower Aβ production and/or reduce its neurotoxicity in vitro can produce beneficial effects in an animal model prior to advancing such drugs into human trials.”

Likewise, the accompanying commentary framed this paper as a game-changer, declaring that the long-standing debate over amyloid’s role in Alzheimer’s was now effectively settled.

But were we convinced?

Fortunately, at the start of this analysis, we took the time to define the experimental standards needed to evaluate these claims. We don’t have to rely on gut feeling or rhetorical framing to decide. Our approach—laying out our expectations in advance—gave us the tools to spot what the paper shows and what’s absent but essential.

Flip the Script

The most powerful scientific minds possess a talent for inverting problems. Instead of asking whether this paper supports the amyloid hypothesis, we can ask whether the hypothesis was undermined? This intellectual jiu-jitsu is the essence of Platt's strong inference method.

Imagine that the Games team’s hypothesis and experimental results landed on your desk in raw form, without the narrative of the paper or the triumphant accompanying commentary. Set aside for a moment your appreciation for the remarkable transgenic technical feat—precisely inserting a human gene into a mouse's genome and having it produce a functional protein and a bunch of amyloid plaques. Might you reach different conclusions?

If amyloid truly drove neurodegeneration, these mice—riddled with plaques—should have shown devastating neuronal death. Instead, the neurons looked stressed but largely intact, their organelles preserved. Plaques without consequence. Smoke without fire.

If the cascade hypothesis was correct, plaques should trigger tau pathology, producing the neurofibrillary tangles seen in human Alzheimer’s. Yet despite astronomical amyloid levels, the PDAPP mice developed no tangles at all. The chain of causation broke mid-link.

If this was truly a disease model, it should mirror natural conditions. Yet creating these mice required inserting forty copies of a mutant APP gene, producing protein levels at least ten-fold higher than any human Alzheimer’s patient. This wasn’t a model of disease. It was a model of artificial protein overload.

Moreover, and perhaps most tellingly, the paper included no behavioural or cognitive testing. Alzheimer’s devastates patients not because of plaques, but because of profound memory loss and cognitive decline. Did these mice develop memory problems? Did their cognitive function deteriorate over time?

In a model of Alzheimer’s disease, behaviour is a critical test. It shows whether the brain changes we’re studying lead to symptoms like memory loss or confusion. Of course, mice don’t behave like humans, but they can show species-appropriate changes—like trouble navigating a maze—that reflect similar brain disruptions.

Those in positions of power and authority either failed to see these flaws or chose to overlook them. What happened next was astonishing in its speed and scale.

Within a year, Athena Neurosciences, where Games and his colleagues worked, was acquired by Elan Corp. for $638 million. In the press release, Elan declared the acquisition “an opportunity to capitalize on an important therapeutic niche,” combining Athena’s “leading Alzheimer’s program” with Elan’s drug development pipeline. The PDAPP mouse had transformed from laboratory marvel to the cornerstone of a billion-dollar strategy. The industry followed. Pharmaceutical giants, biotech startups, research foundations—all placed their bets on amyloid.

One by one, those bets failed. By the time Elan collapsed in 2013, it had sponsored four failed Alzheimer’s drugs, hemorrhaging more than $2 billion in the process. Some trials caused patients significant harm.

The Games paper, read carefully and critically, hinted at its flaws. They were there waiting for anyone who cared to look beyond the polished narrative.

Those concerns we raised about the model? The wild APP overexpression, the absence of tangles, the neurodegeneration—they weren’t just theoretical issues. Over the following years, a series of studies confirmed that these flaws fundamentally disqualified the PDAPP mouse as a reliable model of Alzheimer’s disease. And when behaviour was finally tested, the results raised more concerns than confidence. Memory problems showed up before plaques had formed, and didn’t progress in the way human symptoms do. Instead of validating the model, the behaviour suggested that the brain had been disrupted by the artificial overexpression itself—not by the pathology the model was meant to study.

And yet, the story held for decades. In many places, the amyloid cascade hypothesis remains entrenched to this day. Its staunchest defenders still occupy some of the most influential positions in research institutes, scientific societies, and grant review panels. Under their influence, evidentiary standards were shifted. Assumptions, and even the diagnostic criteria (!), were revised to accommodate half-satisfactory results, rather than to face falsification. Correlations were elevated to causes. And over time, the elegant machinery of scientific inference began to slip its gears. The field can sometimes feel like it’s circling endlessly round a well-funded cul-de-sac—exhausting resources while alternative ideas remain unfunded, unpursued, or unheard.

The amyloid cascade was a great hypothesis, worthy of testing, and more importantly, of scrutiny. Its most intransigent defenders might do well to recall another bit of Sir Peter Medawar’s wry clarity:

“The intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.”

At some point, science’s self-correcting machinery—and the brilliance and curiosity of a new generation of researchers—will win out. It is time to widen the lens.

Endnotes:

[1] I keep name-dropping journals (almost always Nature and Science) and realize that this means little to most people. Nevertheless, having a passing understanding of the tiers of academic publishing is part of scientific literacy.

If you've ever wondered why scientists scramble to publish in Nature, Science, or Cell, think of them as the holy trinity of scientific prestige, each with its own personality. Nature and Science were established in the late 1800s—Nature published by the Brits and Science by the American upstarts. Cell is the newcomer; established in 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In terms of temperament, Nature is the flashy cosmopolitan—broad, attention-grabbing, and often favouring "sexy science" that makes headlines (black holes, CRISPR, or ancient human fossils). Science is the serious, translationally-minded intellectual—rigorous, respected, and slightly less obsessed with media hype (CRISPR before it was famous). Then there's Cell, the molecular biology workhorse, where groundbreaking discoveries in pre-clinical work are dissected in exquisite mechanistic detail (if you love signaling pathways, this is your jam). Publication in any of these journals is the scientific equivalent of winning an Olympic medal (or at least making an Olympic team, depending on your position in the author list).

One tier down, you'll find specialty journals like Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and The Journal of Clinical Investigation (and reams of others for specific fields), which publish longer, more methodically comprehensive studies. I tend to prefer reading papers from these journals as they provide greater detail and present more fully developed work. These papers may not be as "hot off the press" or media-friendly, but they often demonstrate greater scientific rigor and better withstand the test of time.

Meanwhile, in medicine, The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) tower over most others with impact factors of 98.4 and 96.2, respectively (generally, the higher the impact factor the greater the prestige). This reflects their enormous readership—there are far more medical doctors than PhDs. But at the top, it’s CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, with a staggering 286.13 impact factor, a reminder of cancer’s toll and where our research priorities and funding are concentrated.

[2] A brief note on terminology: I use the terms “necessity” and “sufficiency” here as they were traditionally understood by molecular biologists in the 1990s.

Strictly speaking, the terms originate in formal logic and philosophy, where they have precise meanings related to logical entailment: if P is sufficient for Q, then whenever P is true, Q must also be true; if Q is necessary for P, then P cannot be true unless Q is also true. These relationships are logical, not causal.

In experimental biology, however, the terms have been adapted into a more practical shorthand. A molecule is often described as “necessary” if removing it disrupts a biological process, and “sufficient” if adding it can induce or mimic that process. But this looser, causal usage rarely matches the strict logical rigor the terms imply—and it can obscure complexity when used uncritically in systems with many interacting factors. Some have proposed retiring or replacing these terms altogether in favour of more nuance.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this review (and to remain faithful to how the field understood these concepts at the time) I use “necessity” and “sufficiency” in the conventional experimental sense: as shorthand for causal roles a factor was believed to play—whether it could trigger a process or was required to sustain it.

On Taste

“29 When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands, he was not aware that his face was radiant because he had spoken with the Lord. 30 When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, his face was radiant, and they were afraid to come near him.”

Exodus 34:29-30

This is a review of good taste and its evangelists.

*****

What is taste?

Scott recently offered a series of Friendly and Hostile Analogies For Taste, which kicked off a wide-ranging discussion in our little corner of the internet.

Zvi said that of the analogies given, taste is most like grammar. Zac Hill put forward a framework of his own:

Sympathetic Opposition posed an actual definition:

“Good taste is usefully defined as the capacity for deep aesthetic pleasure, and the discernment to judge whether a given thing is capable of inducing deep aesthetic pleasure.”

And, outside of the conversation but in the same general timeframe, Henry Oliver’s thoughts on the subject made the rounds after his post was unpaywalled. His succinct definition:

“Taste is knowledge.”

One can’t help but notice that none of these seem more than tangentially related. Usually, that’s a sign that we aren’t all talking about the same thing.

Is taste in art a separate category? Or is it just like taste in clothes or in men? Is taste an aesthetic judgment, an intellectual judgment, or even a judgment at all? How is good taste different from bad taste different from value-neutral taste? Does taste exist, as a thing in itself, apart from the culture surrounding it?

Surely there must be some through-line we can trace, some central concept at the core. If we’re going to get anywhere at all, we first have to choose where to start.

Perhaps the best place to begin is simply the beginning. Before taste was a metaphor, it was a sense. What if good taste is, at the core, no different from good eyesight or good hearing?

*****

A woman enters a room. In it are a hundred wines, a thousand. She has never heard of wine, never tasted a sip. The woman is given a task: rank these wines by sweetness.

She does so. Perfectly. No matter how fine the distinction, how miniscule the difference, she gets it exactly right.

The test proceeds. Some concepts are easy to describe to a novice - body, acidity. Others - varietals, origin - require some ingenuity to convey. No matter the complexity of the task, she gets the exact right answer. Each and every time, in each and every way that can be measured.

Surely she has good taste. Can we then conclude that taste is perception?

*****

A girl enters a room. In it are a hundred wines, a thousand. She has never heard of wine, never tasted a sip. The girl is given a task: rank these wines by sweetness.

She does so. Terribly. Not just poorly, but incoherently. There is no identifiable logic, no discernable rhyme or reason. She is asked to rank the wines by their other attributes. The result is the same. Or rather, different. Not only do her answers not make sense - they are never the same twice. After a large enough sample size, the analysts conclude that her choices are indistinguishable from a random number generator. Some observers have stopped tallying results and started Googling terms like ‘taste blindness’ and ‘brain damage’.

With the tests nearly at an end, one worker begins carefully packing up the unlabeled bottles. He shakes his head, lamenting all of the truly excellent wine being wasted. What’s next? Feeding Wagyu beef to a wolfh-

“- can I have that one? I think that was my favorite.”

*****

“...Um. I don’t know, actually. I’ll have to ask.”

In the next room, the administrators are incredulous. She chose arguably the single best wine in the entire selection! The worker comes back out.

“Out of curiosity, which was your least favorite?”

“Oh, definitely that one.”

The administrators check the key. A boxed wine. Huh. They start to run a different series of tests. Which of these wines do you like more?

Somehow, the girl manages to make the exact choice that a panel of experts would make. Every time, without fail, she prefers the ‘objectively’ better wine.

Curious, they decide to run the same series of tests on their star subject, She Of The Perfect Perception.

“Which of these do you like better?”

The woman gets the first one “wrong”, but maybe that’s just personal preference. They ask again. And again. And again. Somehow, she manages to choose the worst wine each and every time! She has antitaste.

“These results can’t be real.”

*****

Which of the two has good taste? The woman or the girl?

Let’s pose the question a bit more clearly: when we think of good taste, do we mean someone who is good at tasting things, or someone who likes the taste of things that are good?

Still unsure? Once more, with feeling: would you say that the woman with perfect perception, currently spooning a box of Franzia with her mouth attached to the spigot, has good taste?

I thought not.

When we say that someone has a taste for something, we mean that they like it. It’s actually that simple. Taste is unfaked, authentic enjoyment, independent of social context. From there, it follows that good taste is a taste for things that are good.

Accordingly:

Taste is genuine preference, and good taste is a genuine preference for genuine quality.

*****

You may have noticed an assumption or three there. That’s because we’ve arrived at a definition for the platonic ideal of taste. In the real world, things are a teensy bit more complicated.

One assumption that we have to make is that genuine quality is a real thing that really exists. It would take a separate essay (or book) to fully explore that concept, but for our purposes we can grant that some things are objectively better than other things, insofar as any of those words contain any useful information whatsoever.

Fine distinctions are difficult, controversial, and often deeply personal. But broader distinctions are typically much easier.

You can debate whether LeBron is better than MJ, or Kareem, or perhaps even Kobe or Magic or T-Mac in 2003. But you can’t really argue that Rashad McCants is better than LBJ unless you define ‘better’ in a way that defies common sense.

Similarly, if we acknowledge that some wine is bad, some wine must be good. If someone has poor taste in clothes, or TV, or romantic partners, then there must be someone, somewhere who has good taste in those things.

For reasons that we will address shortly, it’s difficult to assert that any one thing in particular is in good taste. But we don’t have to agree on the specifics to acknowledge the existence of such things as a category.

*****

One of the core problems here is the non-obvious merits of things that are considered in good taste. Chris Stapleton songs and Tarentino movies are obviously great, but that very obviousness largely removes them from the taste conversation. You don’t get points for liking good art if it has mass appeal.

There is a murky sense that good taste demands something from its possessor. To me, this is what Sympathetic Opposition was trying to get at by specifying aesthetic pleasure, as opposed to pleasure in general.

Many things are acquired tastes, in the sense that almost nobody enjoys their first shot of whiskey or puff on a cigar. Yet, after that initial adjustment period, people learn to like and love things that they previously hated.

There is another level beyond this, though. Not all of us who acquire a taste for coffee, the essential food group, have good taste in coffee. I love me a cup of Joe or four, but I actually dislike most of the artisanal coffee that I’ve tried.

Why is that? Is expensive coffee b.s.? Are the people who get excited about trying a new blend lying to themselves or others?

I don’t think so. I think that we want different things from our coffee experience.

I truly enjoy my coffee every morning. But what am I enjoying? The first whiff, the first sip, the slow spread of warmth. Halfway into the cup, I don’t even realize that I’m drinking coffee anymore.

In other words, it is a pleasurable experience that is only tangentially related to the actual coffee itself. I will very much notice if the coffee is bad. But good coffee, by my standard of good, is a stable, repeatable experience of predictable quality. There are no peaks, no valleys. The specific cup of coffee that I’m drinking only matters insofar as it deviates from expectation.

Which is exactly the problem with ‘great’ coffee. It calls attention to itself.

Generally speaking, I want my reaction to my first sip of coffee to be “ahhhhhhh….”, not “Oh.” Coffee that is florid or spicy can be an interesting tasting experience, but interesting is different from comforting or yummy.

SympOpps (SyOp? Symp?) described this process regarding visual art, about “...feeling the difference between paying attention to something and being led away from paying attention to it.” Good visual art (and good art in general) should be “...capable of sustaining the continued, receptive attention that leads to deep pleasure.”

This is not very far away from David MacIver’s Meditations on Taste. In both cases, it is obvious that they are attempting to experience things in a way that most people do not. It seems equally obvious that there is at least a possibility that such meditative practices, sustained over a long enough period of time, could lead people to develop the ability to make distinctions that elude the rest of us.

Returning to the matter at hand, I think we’ve also stumbled into a useful all-purpose definition of genuine quality: that which rewards in proportion to the attention given.

Most things do not hold up well under intense scrutiny. Perhaps the substance doesn’t match the style, or the story we’re given. Many ‘artistic’, ‘creative’ things lose their charm when we see the corporate decision-making behind it. Lots of things that appear innovative to the uninformed are simply the 300th reinvention of the wheel.

There are any number of dimensions through which we can evaluate the quality of something - originality and uniqueness, aesthetic pleasure, bog-standard pleasure, context of the intellectual or artistic or political variety, etc… The more dimensions that something succeeds in, and the greater the level of success in each dimension, the higher the quality.

Some dimensions of quality can’t be evaluated by your Average Joe. This is where Zac’s framework for artistic quality comes in. His first two variables - the mechanics of the medium, and the artist/creator’s facility with those mechanics - are concerned with the quality of the art/object itself. The third variable - the audience’s perceptive ability - is where good taste makes its demands, and the level of demandingness is itself a dimension through which we evaluate quality:

This is why perceptual acuity and knowledge, while not taste itself, are intimately related to the acquisition of good taste.

Outside of a thought experiment, no one’s true taste preferences would consistently align with expert consensus if they are unable to perceive the nuanced and subtle qualities that created the consensus in the first place.

Someone who is colorblind just isn’t going to get as much out of Rothko. If they don’t know that they are colorblind, and that other people are experiencing something different, they might think that his work is overrated.

Henry Oliver says that taste is knowledge, because knowledge enhances perception. Knowing that a difference should exist makes it easier to notice that it’s there. Being able to label and categorize fine distinctions makes it much easier to recognize and remember them. Understanding how things are made, what to look for in evaluating the quality of something, and the ways that people try to hide bad quality can all make it easier to be confident in your assessment. And, as you learn what good quality means, you cultivate a greater appreciation for higher quality that influences your genuine preferences. (More on that later.)

Knowledge is necessary for properly evaluating many aspects of quality, which is why Frank Lantz emphasizes the importance of context in art:

“...the meaning and purpose of an individual work of art is inextricably linked to its context, to the situation within which it was created, to the other works that came before, beside, and after it, and which form a larger conversation of which it is a part.”

If the ability to hold up under sustained attention is the mark of true quality, the depth and breadth of the appreciation derived from this attention is how we differentiate good from great, and great from greatest.

Anyone who has ever been held hostage by a Boomer holding up a Facebook reel understands the importance of context; some things aren’t as funny the 100th time, and other things cease to be funny at all. In this way, context affects our depth of appreciation.

Context also affects our breadth of appreciation, because some things can only be appreciated if they are properly understood. That same Facebook reel was once cutting edge humor, and the innovator does not deserve to be lumped in with the imitators. The reel might also be legitimately funnier if we learned that it was a response to something else, part of a larger conversation that had more dimensions than the video itself indicates.

*****

Henry Oliver also argues forcefully on behalf of knowledge and proper context:

“Many people believe that literature is entertainment, a question of personal enjoyment, and they oppose this to the scholarly view of literature…

The true common reader is not the person who reads Jane Austen in the same manner that they read Agatha Christie or watch television. The true reader wants to see great work for themselves, to know what Jane Austen is in the way that the only way to know a river or a mountain is to go to it. The common reader wants to understand, not just experience.”

This notion that there is a correct way to enjoy art seems intuitive. Or, at least, the idea that there are incorrect ways to enjoy art. The sticking point is that nobody appears to agree on which is which.

What is the right way? Is it simply the aesthetic approach, like Sympathetic Opposition described? Or is it situating a work in its proper context? Aren’t these somewhat unrelated, if not actively at odds on occasion?

Scott addressed this in his response to Frank Lantz (#29):

“He says art should be viewed in the context of when it was created and what it was trying to say to that era in particular. I might respond to this at more length later, but my snap troll response is that this kind of contradicts the preceding [SympOp in #28], doesn’t it? If you read the Iliad, it either speaks to you and transforms your soul, or it doesn’t. Nobody says “I just finished the Iliad - give me a second to check whether it was novel for its time or not, so I can decide whether my soul should be transformed.” Or maybe they do - is this the point of Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote?”

The story Scott references is difficult to summarize concisely - it’s eight pages long, maybe just go ahead and read it. (The Wikipedia entry notes that “Borges wrote the story while recovering from a head injury”, which sounds about right.) The general conceit is that it praises a fictional author’s attempt to recreate Don Quixote word-for-word, peaking at this comparison of the prosaic prose of Cervantes vs. that of the enlightened Menard:

Now that is satire.

On the surface, this is a shot at critics who invent meanings out of thin air based on preexisting notions regarding the text and the author. Which, of course, it is. But, as the Wiki entry mentions, this story is best understood alongside another Borges short story, The Library of Babel. Actually, really go read that Wiki summary - they crushed it:

“In a pattern analogous to the infinite monkey theorem, all texts are reproduced in a vast library only because complete randomness eventually reproduces all possible combinations of letters.”

In other words, the library contains every masterpiece and prophecy that could ever be written, but they are hidden in an endless sea of random nonsense.

These two thought experiments bookend the context debate: Pierre Menard interprets texts entirely through the lens of the author, while The Library of Babel removes authorship entirely.

Taken together, both stories anticipated the mid-century debates over the proper way to engage with a work of art. Barthes’ 1967 essay The Death of the Author made explicit the flaws of author-centric interpretations:

“...the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his ‘confidence.’”

Barthes’ solution was to remove the author from the equation:

“The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism; for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes. We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys; we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.”

And yet, that makes the ‘ideal’ reading - the reader’s response to a work, rather than an interpretation of intention - the scenario that Borges described in The Library of Babel. If we have only a text, then what do we have, really? How is that approach to reading a book or a poem any different from finding shapes in the clouds?

That takeaway, coupled with Borges’ obviously satirical tone that mocked both the fictional Pierre Menard and the fictional 'author' praising Menard at the expense of Cervantes, showcased the absurdity of people taking a 'reading the tea leaves' approach to real works written by real humans. Referencing Scott referencing Borges in reference to Frank’s point, this is why the actual context of the author’s intent matters.

Yet, as Foucault asked in his (perceived) response to Barthes’ essay: What Is An Author?

“It is a very familiar thesis that the task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationships with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. At this point, however, a problem arises: What is a work? What is this curious unity which we designate as a work? Of what elements is it composed? Is it not what an author has written? Difficulties appear immediately.”

The intent of ‘killing’ the author (i.e., external context) is to direct the focus to the work itself. Foucault points out that, counterintuitively, such attempts to remove the author from the equation end up reinforcing the need for interpretation and commentary:

“We are content to efface the more visible marks of the author's empiricity by playing off, one against the other, two ways of characterizing writing, namely, the critical and the religious approaches…To admit that writing is, because of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of implicit significations, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give rise to commentary).”

If you stroked out trying to parse that, I don’t blame you. What Foucault is trying to say is that eliminating external considerations does not leave us with a pure ‘work’ that can be read solely on its own terms. And, ironically, the death of the author still leaves a ghost that naturally fills the void of meaning left behind:

“First of all, we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of expression. Referring only to itself, but without being restricted to the confines of its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority. This means that it is an interplay of signs arranged less according to its signified content than according to the very nature of the signifier.”

If we can’t approach a work in isolation or in context, what is even left for us to do? Susan Sontag attempted an answer in Against Interpretation:

“Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not. It reinforces the principle of redundancy that is the principal affliction of modern life.

Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now.”

She recommends that we leave aside interpretation altogether:

“What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all…

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”

Wait - are we back at square one?

*****

Earlier, I said that “... as you learn what good quality means, you cultivate a greater appreciation for higher quality that influences your genuine preferences.” This self-fulling element of gaining good taste complicates the entire notion.

The problem with genuine preference as the defining characteristic of taste is that pesky adjective.

Becoming an expert is a lot of hard work. Why go through all that trouble when you can just copy their answers and get the same grade on the test? Goodhart’s law strikes again.

We haven’t yet figured out how to objectively measure authenticity. Scott touched on the need for this with his (Betteridge’s law compliant) article Is Wine Fake?:

“Wine is not fake. Wine experts aren’t fake either, but they believe some strange things, are far from infallible, and need challenges and blinded trials to be kept honest. How far beyond wine you want to apply this is left as an exercise for the reader.”

That works fine for wine, because the physical sense of taste is one of the more straightforward things to evaluate - blind taste tests are pretty good at weeding out the poseurs. But what about taste in everything else?

Scott’s AI Art Turing Test evaluated our ability to differentiate between human art and AI-generated images. The results showed that most of us suck, but some people don’t. We know exactly who those people are, because that test had an objectively correct answer key. For most of human history, such a thing didn’t exist.

Suppose we made a similar test, but all of the works are made by humans. Your job is to rank the works by quality and artistic merit.

Presumably, the people who did well on the AI art test would have meaningful things to say on the all-human test. If a significant portion of that group disagreed with popular opinion, I think most of us would defer to their demonstrated expertise.

But what about if we didn’t know who those people are, or the objective standard of the AI art test didn’t exist? What would happen then?

Most likely, a whole bunch of arguing. Possibly some name-calling.

*****

If you’ll recall, this essay is not just a review of taste. It’s also a review of evangelists of good taste - those who claim to possess it, and advocate that other people should try to acquire it as well.

It seems somewhat problematic that the experts can’t even come to an agreement on how to appreciate good art or good craftsmanship, much less which things deserve that label.

Should we work hard to learn the ropes? Or is the acquisition of knowledge and context, the insistence on proper interpretation, a barrier to direct engagement and a sensory experience of aesthetics?

Enter the layman’s dilemma: how are non-experts supposed to form opinions on subjects that only experts can understand? How should I engage with wine or paintings or classic literature? Can I even engage with it on the level necessary for true appreciation?

Ideally, we would solve the layman’s dilemma by relying on the expert consensus. But this assumes a) that there is a consensus, and b) that the experts aren’t full of shit.

Maybe the experts reach a consensus, not because of the superiority of one side’s argument, but because one side was better at the meta skills involved in wrangling a consensus.

Or maybe the losing side is just saying that because they lost. They would say that, wouldn’t they?

How on God’s green earth are us normies supposed to know what to believe, when we don’t have the expertise or ability to judge things for ourselves?

This is part of the reason why we defend institutional norms so vehemently. It’s also part of the reason why societies decline. We want honest journalism from our newspapers, unbiased rulings from our judges, decisions from our politicians and regulatory bodies that benefit the public as a whole. Opposing those high ideals are every perverse incentive known to man. Over a long enough time frame, the ideals always lose, because they are an added constraint. The unscrupulous can always do the right thing when it suits their interests. Those with scruples are hampered in every instance where doing the right thing is the suboptimal choice. Something something entropy.

That’s not even the whole problem, either. Things get messy even when everyone involved is acting with good intentions.

With normal institutions, there can be competing values, goals, and visions of success that divide experts. With art specifically, things can get even weirder. The drive to innovate, the mixture of art with politics and philosophy and religion and lifestyles, the question of form vs function vs content… We’ve ended up in a lot of weird places over the millenia, and sometimes we look back and have questions.

High fashion is probably the best modern example:

Are we sure this is worth doing?

It’s bad form to criticize things you don’t understand, which is why this isn’t necessarily a critique. High fashion is just the easiest example of elite taste diverging from the norm to the point that it no longer feels relevant to the rest of us.

Scott covered the architecture version of this in his review of From Bauhaus To Our House, which traces the development of modern architecture into something almost actively hostile to ordinary humans.

The relationship between layman and expert is predicated on trust. Trust that the expert is, in fact, an expert. But also trust that if only we had the same expertise, we would think the same way.

For the layman, good taste is a matter of faith.

*****

It is at this point, alas, that we must talk about Girard in 2025.

For the three people living under an internet rock who haven’t heard of him by now, here’s a quick down n’ dirty:

Girard created a model for how we develop desire. Some of our lizard brain desires are inherent - the desire for food, sex, etc… Everything that isn’t hardcoded into us is acquired by mimicking others. We learn to want things because we see that other people want them. Girard called this mimesis.
This creates a three-part model of desire: the person who desires something, the object that is desired, and the model through which the desire was acquired.

For our purposes here, I will call desire for the object itself genuine desire, and desire acquired via model mimetic desire.

(Although these terms are value-laden, it’s worth noting that you cannot escape mimesis. The preference for “genuine” desire over mimetic desire is itself a product of mimetic desire.)

This difference matters, because it’s the difference between wanting something, and wanting to be like the people who want it.

*****

In the purest form, a person with excellent taste is the perfect consumer of the product made by the master. They are the follower dancing with the world's best lead, the true audience of the maestro.

Every masterpiece needs an aficionado to appreciate it. You have to have expectations before they can be violated or surpassed.

Although expert producers generally make the best consumers, that’s not necessarily the case. You don’t have to be a master chef to be a gourmet.

Insofar as your expertise is for personal enjoyment, you are an aficionado. As it applies to offering an opinion to others, you are a critic. For now, we’ll treat both as one category, and simply observe that the corruptions that affect the pureness of expert production apply at least as much here.

Expert consumption is its own sort of status, if inherently lesser. Being one of the few to truly get a great work of art is a demonstration of capacity in and of itself. This allows expert consumers to absorb some reflected glory, which can occasionally allow critics or commentators to rival the objects of their attention in fame and influence.

As always, making things is much harder than consuming them. The ease with which someone can mimic taste makes status hierarchies built on consumption much more volatile and vulnerable to signaling and countersignaling. The only thing it costs me to say that I like the latest thing is whatever effort I expended to know what the latest thing is.

In the age of the internet, that’s not too difficult. A few hundred years ago, having good taste was expensive, which made appreciation of the fine arts a mark of status. It showed good breeding, that someone was classy and sophisticated.

This additional mimetic layer is important.

A fair number of people authentically care about wine, or opera, or sculpture, developing good taste in those areas as a result. Due to simple economics, some number of people will feel driven to develop taste in those areas for non-taste reasons (e.g. a good job, a business opportunity, etc…).

Way way way more people care about appearing cool or upper class, and all of those people want taste for non-taste reasons.

*****

The supposed classiness of good taste can be eye-roll inducing, the merits debateable. And yet, almost all of us appreciate a good snob. There is something admirable in an unapologetic assertion of superiority, particularly if it’s done with competence, charm, and impeccable credentials.

The hatred for snobbishness is well-earned, but that’s because most snobs can’t pull it off. The number of people who want to be an Oscar Wilde or Anna Wintour vastly exceeds both the demand and the supply.

Snobbishness is, strangely, the opposite of the spirit of ‘doing things for their own sake’, while also being its primary enforcer. The snob evaluates everything through the lens of what it says about you, and judges the rest of us accordingly. But when the person on the receiving end of the snob’s judgment capitulates, they don’t get the reprieve or respect they had hoped for. Why? Because the snob believes in doing things for their own sake, too. Or, at least, doing them for a reason that isn’t, “I was bullied into it.”

We reached a logical endpoint when hipsters detached snobbishness from class and status.

I am actually sympathetic to much of what hipsterdom attempted to be. What’s wrong with liking things deeply? With liking them for your own reasons, or declaring them good on your own authority? It is, in some ways, so very close to what taste should be.

Where did it all go wrong?

The stereotypical hipster valued the fish they caught for themselves over the fish served up with Michelin stars. Up to a point, that is a valuable perspective. But if you appear to be implying that the fish you caught and cooked is actually better than the dish prepared by a master chef, or that catching your own fish makes you better than the person who decides they prefer the fish from the best restaurant in town…

Fair or not, the idea of the hipster became inextricably intertwined with constructing your identity around your taste. You weren’t just the guy who was into craft beer, you were the Craft Beer Guy. In other words, the literal definition of liking things based on what you thought they said about you.

Once people suspect you of liking things for inauthentic reasons, it becomes impossible for them to truly believe you. And if your whole identity is built around the things you like… well, not many hipsters around in 2025.

*****

Everyone who isn’t being deliberately difficult admits that good taste exists. But it’s also true that some arbiters of taste are huffing their own farts and inviting you to savor the smell.

The layman must be open to the reality of taste, which requires a humble admission of ignorance. But the expert is the one who knows how to sort the wheat from chaff. Those who know the difference are tasked with explaining it. If they want to be successful, they need to do so in a way that meets the layman where he is at.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

How does someone with good taste convince a layman of its reality? There are two approaches:

Appeal directly, in terms of what it’s like to have good taste
Appeal indirectly, in terms of what it’s like to be a person with good taste, or why it’s bad to have bad taste, or basically anything that isn’t a direct appeal

The direct approach is that of the superfan. “I love this, and you’ll love this too, I promise!”

How does the superfan make his case persuasive? He needs to:

Establish that you, as a specific individual with specific capacities and interests, will enjoy whatever he is evangelizing as much as he does
Demonstrate that becoming a superfan is better than whatever else you could be doing

This requires a level of properly communicated enthusiasm for the subject, as well as a degree of calibration to the intended audience.

The indirect approach is that of the snob.

The snob may or may not be making an appeal, in the sense of trying to get you to do something. But all assertions of superiority at the identity level - I am better than you, full stop - contain implicit messages. What I value is better than what you value. What I do is better than what you do. What I am is better than what you are.

However, snobbishness (as I am using it here) crops up in all sorts of unexpected places. As we’ve already discussed, the unapologetic snob is a rare breed, and the effective snob much rarer still. In today’s world, snobbishness rarely recognizes itself as such.

Saying that you should do this, you shouldn’t do that, you should like this more than that… if you are making is/ought distinctions at all, you are not making a direct appeal.

We already talked about Girard, right?

*****

At last, we can address the root issue: the discourse around taste and art and culture is dominated by snobs who don’t know that they’re snobs.

The top search result for “on taste” is an essay by Thomas Kaminski in the Claremont Review of Books. In many ways, it is a better-written version of this exact review.

Kaminski talks about the duality of taste, the tension between personal judgments and objective standards. He acknowledges both that taste must be trained, and that the idea of training one’s taste is instinctively repulsive to many. It has section headers titled Received Opinion, The Tyranny of Experts, and A Decadent Age. All of it is interesting, all of it well-considered and well-reasoned.

And then, at the very end:

“Take music. Its popular forms today, especially rock and rap, provide an incessant accompaniment to the lives of the young. The sound is rhythmic and sensual, its pleasures emotionally exuberant and rebellious, often Dionysiac. And those pleasures are real.

Nevertheless, some of us think them shallow, expending themselves in the endocrine system. Those who dissent from the popular taste will tell you that a Bach cantata, a Beethoven symphony, or a Wagner opera can not only stir our sensual nature but penetrate to the recesses of the human heart.”

Sorry?

“Ultimately, the question is impervious to attempts at demonstration: either you have experienced the power of art or you haven’t.

Unfortunately, our contemporary Solons talk and write as if they have never had an aesthetic experience, which, if it is in fact the case, renders them unqualified to judge. No one doubts that Game of Thrones can entertain its audience, but it cannot move us as King Lear does. The one is an amusement, the other an exploration of human vanity, ignorance, cruelty, and desire.”

Is he saying that King Lear is an amusement, or that Game of Thrones isn’t “an exploration of human vanity, ignorance, cruelty, and desire”?

The intended takeaway couldn’t be clearer. If you don’t get much out of classical music, and think that rock and rap have equal or greater artistic merit, you just don’t get it. Mr. Kaminiski does.

By asserting his case without actually making it, Kaminski is using an indirect appeal. You should like this more than that. If you don’t, you’re the problem. The implied solution, whether he knows it or not, is to be more like Thomas Kaminski.

It therefore feels relevant that I didn’t have to click on his bio to know he was wearing a bowtie.

Henry Oliver pulls the same trick. In his piece on taste, Oliver approvingly notes that Ezra Klein spent 10 months trying to get into classical music before he finally reached a breakthrough. (Why did Klein expend so much effort? Where did that *cough* desire come from?)

He follows that up with a denunciation of snobs:

“Klein is reacting to the snobbery of good taste, which leads people to pretend to enjoy art for social reasons. Talking about good taste and bad taste often invokes such snobbery, as if bad people have bad taste.”

That’s all well and good, except his post begins like this:

“Tomiwa Owolade wrote in the Times this week about this philistine supremacy in modern culture, where so many adults are Harry Potter fans and read YA fiction. He quotes A.S. Byatt’s comment that adult fans of Harry Potter lack a sense of the mystery of life.”

The Owolade article he links to is titled Step away from the superheroes and see a real film (paywalled). Subtitle: “Marvel movies and young adult fiction may be comforting but they’re really not for grown-ups”. Some gems:

“I have enjoyed some superhero films but I recognise they are fundamentally limited. They are made for children. To enjoy them is not something to be proud of. Many watch such films with their children (or nieces, nephews, grandchildren, godchildren) and take pleasure in them as part of a family outing. I am speaking of those who don’t watch them with kids and treat them with the rapture and critical attention befitting a work of art. This is embarrassing.”

“Another started a column in the FT, no less, with the question: “Should I throw away my Doctor Who DVDs?” — and concluded by saying he would keep them.

If I still possessed a large collection of Doctor Who DVDs, no one would know about it.”

At least Kaminski was subtle.

Let’s play a game. You get seven words. Your goal - be as snobbish as the English language allows. I’ll kick things off:

“Taste is real. Don’t be a philistine.”

*****

It’s not that there are no points to be made in this vein. It’s that this is the exact wrong way to make these points if you are trying to bring newcomers into the fold.

It always comes across as an attempt to position yourself in Helm’s Deep, fighting off the orcish hordes. I’m just not sure how much value there is in being the latest to join a societal dogpile. The primary impact of the guy on top is felt by those just beneath them, and the primary effect is to make them question their life choices.

The people who hated Nickelback first almost certainly hate Nickelback haters even more.

Pitchfork’s legendary review of Jet’s second album was practically a work of art in its own right. But why should that make me, ordinary dude, feel free to sneer at Jet or anybody who likes them?

One of the early traditions involving Godwin’s law was the idea that the first person to resort to reductio ad Hitlerum automatically lost the argument. This is partly because anyone who is reaching for Nazis in a debate is not really using their brain.

I’ve always thought of Godwin’s law as a subset of Dali’s law: “The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” Well, that’s not really a law, but you get the point.

Here’s a corollary: “He who pointeth angrily from the bandwagon of scorn hath three fingers aimed back at himself.”

The more obvious the target or comparison, the more work is required to avoid coming across like a midwit. Be a lemming if you like, but don’t call yourself a lion.

It’s totally fine to criticize Marvel. Just make it good.

*****

Snobbishness about good taste is not just a one way phenomenon from the haves to the have-nots.

I liked almost everything that Zvi had to say in his post on taste. But, like the others, he followed up his Don’t Be A Snob section with shots fired:

“I’m going to double down that most - not all, but most - of all this modern ‘conceptual art’ is rather bogus and masterbatory, and mostly a scam or a status game or at best some kind of weird in-group abstract zero-sum contest of one-upmanship, at worst a ‘speculative market in tax-avoidant ultra-luxury hyper-objects, obscene wealth and abject, hipster coolness,’ and also a giant f*** you to humanity, and I want it kept locked behind the doors of places like MoMa so I can choose to not set foot in there.”

Read BDM’s post about going to the MOMA and tell me that there is no value to be had there.

Reverse snobbishness is just snobbishness, and sweeping dismissals only detract from the conversation.

*****

Kaminski describes low-brow culture as Dionysiac, which naturally evokes the Apollonian and Dionysiac dialectic proposed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. Simplistically, the Apollonian represents individuation, reason, and order, while the Dionysiac represents passion, chaos, and unity.

In Nietzsche’s view, both are required to make truly great art. The Apollonian provides form, structure, and vision, while the Dionysian gives it an essential vitality and will.

Camille Paglia took this framework and ran with it in Sexual Personae, which applied these concepts to sex and the sexes, then traced their tension and evolution over the ages through the lens of art.

Questionable gender theories aside, Paglia ably demonstrates the irresolvable conflict between nature and civilization, between the id and superego:

“The quarrel between Apollo and Dionysus is the quarrel between the higher cortex and the older limbic and reptilian brains”.

Counterintuitively to some, she considers our desire for beauty in art an Apollonian impulse:

“Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and the flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’ - but earth’s bowels, not its surface.”

This checks out when one considers the primal weirdness of the art of antiquity. It is unfettered to an almost alien degree, revealing impulses long-buried beneath the veneer of modernity.

If art is the expression of the eternal conflict within humanity, science and society itself are the battlefield:

“Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind; its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.”

“Both the Apollonian and the Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature.”

It wouldn’t be a real ACX review if we didn’t at least touch on AI.

AGI is coming, most likely in the lifetimes of everyone reading this. ASI won’t be far behind. What happens when the Apollonian half of the dialectic - the side that differentiates man from nature - no longer falls within the domain of mankind?

Even if true AI eludes us, we are watching LLMs erode the distinctions between creation and curation with every release.

For those like Paul Graham who value writing as thinking, what does it mean for the writers themselves when they no longer write? The process of prompting AI until it describes a mailbox as a “sentinel of hope” is quite different from the process of generating that phrase on your own. Most of the benefits that we attribute to writing come from that very process of discovering the poetry within ourselves, of refusing to settle until we get to somewhere we’ve never been.

Everything changes when man-made is exclusively an indicator of inferior quality. We have markets for handcrafted goods, but there are no artisanal iPhones. Some things exist beyond individual capacity. What do we do when that category grows to include the song and the novel?

Man is animal, but also more. Civilization, the shaping of things that live beyond ourselves, is the distinguishing characteristic of humanity. When AI can consistently perform at the level of an average human, the impact will be primarily economic. When AI can exceed anything that humans can do, the impact will be existential.

How will we view ourselves, see our place in the universe, when AI takes our greatest works and sticks them to the fridge with a magnet? When the civilizational torch is passed and we resume our place amongst the mammals?

Maybe that’ll be the least of our worries.

*****

Gwern once wrote that Culture Is Not Esthetics, arguing that “aesthetically & economically, maybe there is too much new art.”

He also says “Don’t take this too seriously.” As an internet person in good standing, I will ignore that disclaimer and assume this is the only serious thing he has ever written.

Gwern’s recently stated that we should all be jockeying for fridge real estate by writing content that can be scraped by LLMs. That aside, you would think that quoting Ecclesiastes about making too many books would be enough to give one pause.

One crucial consideration that escapes his analysis is what art is for. Before the audience, before the culture at large, before the economy - art is for the artist.

Art is meant to be made, not merely consumed.

Gwern is right about one thing. There is more great art than one could hope to consume. Despite a hundred lifetimes worth of needles, the haystack of content makes them ever harder to find.

This makes good taste more valuable than ever, while also making it ever more impossible to truly acquire.

Moreover, as that Ira Glass quote explains, good taste can itself be a barrier to making art. We have to decide which we value more - the critic or the artist.

Oscar Wilde espoused The Critic As Artist, but he had it exactly backwards. It is the artist who is a critic; either of the artists who came before, or of the world itself for lacking that which ought to exist.

*****

“15 Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. 16 By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.”

Matthew 7:15-20

What is a miracle?

A brush with the divine, perhaps. Something impossible.

And yet, every miracle is possible, definitionally, by its very existence. Miracles expand our definition of the possible.

True art is an attempt at a miracle, lesser or greater. Great art is divine in this way. It’s not just perfect, but more perfect than we previously thought was possible.

The greatest art is a miracle for all mankind. But every epiphany is a miracle for the individual.

Should we judge someone for being dazzled by mediocrity? Or be happy for them, that they should be so dazzled, and offer them guidance towards the next step?

It is up to the guide for that guidance to be received. It is not always easy to tell a needle from a piece of hay.

When Moses came down from the mountain, his face glowed. Who could doubt him, or the commandments he brought?

The evidence of his encounter with the divine echoed down through the ages, such that Michelangelo could make a miracle of his own millenia later. As Paglia noted, “Moses makes God in his own image.”

If you have commandments to share, wonders to reveal, we need them.

So show me a miracle.

Orgy Review - Red Means No

I. Introduction

This review will assume you are somewhat familiar with sex parties/orgies and have seen at least the basic pitch for RMN parties. So you already know that at a typical orgy the median attendee doesn’t have sex, and the majority that do have sex only do so with the partner(s) they came with. You’re also aware that an RMN orgy averages 5+ sexual interactions per person, making it a breakthrough in modern orgy technology. Sounds great on paper, but what is it actually like to go to one of these? First disclaimers:

These are recollections of my personal experience. I’m unaffiliated with RMN and none of this is endorsed by them or reflects any position that RMN may hold.

Ladies - unfortunately this review will be less insightful for you, I can only speak from my experience as a guy. Maybe in the full-morphological-freedom future I’ll write up a review from the other side. :)

For the rest of this review I’ll often refer to “Predators” and “Prey.” RMN is an asymmetrical co-op game. The side playing defense is known as Prey, the side playing offense is Predators. While not exclusively so, Predators are overwhelmingly male, and Prey female.

OK, so.

One of the core insights of RMN parties is that the social pressures enforcing female mate selection is what stymies standard orgies. A huge amount of effort goes into making RMN a place where it’s safe for Prey to give up mate selection, and for the Predators to believe this is real. The STI tests and safety procedures and paperwork are just the beginning. The real work starts weeks ahead of the event.

II. Pre-pre-game: The Discord

A few weeks beforehand a one-time private Discord channel is created for attendees of the upcoming event. This allows for logistics coordination, but more importantly it is an opportunity for the Predators and Prey to flirt, joke, and taunt each other. Veteran members may exchange war stories. Some prey will share excited anticipation or what they’re hoping for. The banter here reinforces that the prey are very on board for what’s going to be done to them. I recommend lurking at the very least, it will reduce some of the ever-ratcheting tension you’ll feel as the day draws closer.

The Predators and Prey also have private channels just for their team members. I don’t know what the Prey get up to–probably something really shameful they should be punished for. >:) But in addition to private not-for-girls jokes, the Predator channel is a great resource. A specific scene that a Predator is interested in may be planned here (or several). New Predators can have their questions about what to do (or expect) answered here. Many Predators will be knowledgeable about specific Prey, either from being in relationships with them or just lots of prior play, and can give advice on how to subdue individual Prey and what they enjoy.

The Discord starts slow, and grows in activity as the day draws closer. Read it actively, and don’t be afraid to ask questions or add a joke or taunt if you have a good one.

III. Study Hall: The Dossier

Every participant submits a form along with their STI results, which creates a dossier page all participants will see. For the Predators this is just a picture, name, HSV status, and maybe a few lines of flavor text. The Prey don’t need to know much about the Predators because they don’t have much choice in what’s going to happen anyway. The Prey form, however, is extensive. Importantly it notes what (if anything) from the default consent list an individual Prey is opting out of (i.e., no oral or stay away from the nipples). Another section lists any non-default stuff they are opting into (i.e., clothing destruction or anal). There can be further notes with clarification, requests, and after-care advice. With over a dozen prey at the event these add up fast.

On the one hand, this is great. More knowledge is more reassurance. On the other hand, it’s so much! You should go over the full dossier at least three times on three different days before you go. And then also take notes with you. Because once you are at the event and there’s tits everywhere and asses in the air it’s hard to remember just what’s in and what’s out.

There are two major saving graces here. The first is that participants wear badges on their person that list vital info (including opt-outs and opt-ins). You can check a badge at any time, and should. The second is that the default opt-in list allows for a really fantastic time. It’s not too much work to identify the Prey that have opted out of the default acts you’re into and memorizing that, because it still leaves you with soooo much to do. Then, if you want to do more intense scenes or specific acts, you can find a Prey in the dossier that matches those desires and plan to go after them. In between those scenes you can fall back on standard forced-oral/PIV with whoever (again, excepting the opt-outs you memorized and/or double-checking badges. Tracking the Prey’s opt-outs IS your job).

If you go to more than one party this gets easier, as you get to know people. Admittedly that doesn’t help you your first time. Take notes, it’s worth it.

IV. Pre-game: The Mixer

The evening before the event there’s an open mixer at a local pub. Just gather and chat, maybe have a drink. I very highly recommend going! It really gives you a vibe for the Prey and a sense for who your subconscious is drawn towards. Pictures and text are one thing, but there’s nothing like being next to someone and feeling how your body reacts to their presence. Also, crucially, it really hammers home that these ladies absolutely do want this to happen to them. Despite the forms and the Discord, nothing is half as convincing as a laughing woman thrumming with excitement across from you. It’ll probably facilitate at least one scene for you the next day. Making a human contact with tomorrow’s Prey significantly lessens the terror inherent to walking into an orgy group as the new guy.

Speaking of being the new guy–chat to the guys at the mixer as well. These will be your brothers-in-arms. Some of the Prey struggle a lot (more on this later), and require more than one Predator to take down and hold still enough to fuck. Get to know some of the dudes here and build goodwill. Everyone wants this to succeed, and you’re a part of that team. It works better if you’ve already exchanged some words and taken just a bit of each other’s measure.

The mixer also allows you to put faces to names in a much more solid way than the Dossier. Seriously, don’t miss it if you have any say in the matter. Get an earlier flight if you have to.

V. Day of: Entrance

Don’t be even slightly late. Seriously. Make sure you are familiar with the default consents and responsibilities. Review the dossier one last time.

VI. Opening Ceremonies: Who Goes There? and On Trust

Usually the Prey sequester in the 30-45 minutes before the official event kick-off to primp and prepare. All the Predators mingle while we wait as an occasional Prey flitters through in half-undress. What kind of people come to these things, you may ask?

At a recent RMN where the costume theme was religious-cult-inspired one member attended with a small wood crucifix he’d found lying on the street the day before. As we waited for the Prey to finish their costuming & make-up he told the tale of its acquisition and the serendipity of finding such an authentic costume accessory just in time. This started a conversation on whether this would violate the original owner’s preferences, and if that mattered, and what their meta-preferences would be when considering that they believe in an omniscient god that had presumably guided the crucifix to be in exactly the right spot to end up here, and whether speculating on the meta-preferences of a stranger was too self-serving and could be turned on us in the reverse case.

So, basically, huge nerds. If you’re familiar with kink this isn’t a surprise. :) A large majority of attendees are nerdy and overly analytic, and all of them are quite friendly. These are people I would want to hang out with even if we weren’t about to bang a bunch of ladies for several hours.

When the Prey are ready they return as a solid group, and they may put on a small production to get everyone’s attention. Then we all sit down for opening circle. At this point the responsibilities and default consents are gone over again. The default safe word & gesture is reiterated. Everyone then practices ignoring someone’s “No!” for a while, and then desisting immediately upon hearing “Red.” Then we do it again. In addition to reminding everyone again that Red means No, it builds some trust that the Prey will indeed say Red when they want something to stop.

Because ultimately, trust is what this entire thing runs on. Of course the Prey have to have a lot of trust in the Predators, but as I said near the top I can’t speak much of the Prey experience. As a guy, though, not crossing a woman’s boundaries is one of the most important lessons society drills into you. Making sure she’s happy about everything that happens is your most important job, and messing that up can mean anything from a reputation that damages every interaction and opportunity you’ll encounter for years to permanent exile from everyone you know and care about. There are deep layers of behaviors learned to navigate this, and RMN asks you to just suspend many of them for the course of a night. This can’t be done.

For example: The room where the Prey prepare in the minutes leading up to the event is part of the play zone once the party starts. Prey can (and sometimes are) dragged into this room to be ravaged. But on one occasion a few Prey were hanging out in the room chatting, a Predator turned the corner, saw them inside, and said “Oops, sorry” and left. The Prey found this funny in the context of the party. One doesn’t apologize for walking in on Prey at an RMN party! But the Predator had simply had his Woman’s Sacred Space detector triggered and reacted instinctively. Seeing several women chatting in a semi-private area in what had been the place they’d all gathered to dress and put on make-up beforehand is as perfect a pattern-match to Sacred Woman Area as you can get short of a sign on the door. Not only is the reaction instinctive, but overriding that instinct may not be possible for his autonomous system. You can walk into the room and grab someone’s ass or pull them to the bed, but you can’t make your dick get hard when it’s telling you to GTFO. That takes trust.

So the constant reiteration that the women really DO want this, and if there is ever anything happening to them that they don’t want to be happening they’ll speak up and stop it, is incredibly important. I’ve participated in several scenes where the only thing keeping me going was trust that the woman was a grown-ass adult that knew what she wanted and knew how to use her words and I could stop trying to second-guess everything. It’s a trust that comes easier as you go to more parties. The first one is a leap of faith. Fortunately you don’t have to jump alone.

VII. The Festivities Commence - Embodiment, and Self-Discovery

RMN is ever-evolving, so this may not always be the case, but at recent events the party begins as a mostly-normal mixer for some minutes, then upon a signal transitions to normal party except the Prey can be groped and fondled at will. Not long after that it transitions to its final form, where any Prey can be stripped, hauled away, pulled to a soft surface, tied up, and/or forced to take dicks, in whatever combinations the Predators like. When phrased like that it sounds amazing, like some sort of sex paradise. Reality is more complicated (but, potentially, also amazing! We’ll get to that.)

People talk a lot about “embodiment” nowadays. But never in your life will you come to truly understand what that means like you do when you’re in the middle of the world’s best IRL porn and your body is in full rebellion against your mind. One of my most “wtf is wrong with me” moments was at my first RMN walking past one girl going down on another, with her ass up in the air in what is the most blatant “come fuck me” position possible at one of these parties. Pretty girl, great ass, ripe for the taking. And my dick just would not do anything, despite this being a classic literal porn setup. But hey, I didn’t know either of these girls at all. In every other place in the world this would be a “don’t interfere” situation. The girls are having fun, you’re obviously not needed. Despite me knowing that this isn’t the case here, my body doesn’t know that. It doesn’t believe it. I can force myself to take almost any voluntary action, but my dick is the absolute barometer of embodied knowledge, and it is not fooled by mere words. A few minutes later, when I see the lady I was having a great time chatting with at the previous day’s mixer, my dick is all in. That belief of “she wants this” is embodied. The previous one was not.

Fortunately RMN attendees are the best people in the world. Per above, Predators are nerdy and friendly. The Prey are equally fantastic. They know that this is a high-pressure environment, and that the Predators are doing things that all of society has trained them are awful things that’ll get you de-personed. And that many of the subconscious cues women throw out that signal “I’m interested, come here” are not only missing, but are sometimes instead screaming “OMG NO STOP AUGH,” and this can be stressful. The Prey are extremely understanding of Temporary Dick Outages and super sweet about it. Don’t make it a big deal and it isn’t a big deal. Maybe you can come back later, as there’s still lots to do during a Temporary Dick Outage. You see…

Prey come on a spectrum. On the pliable end they want to be stripped of agency and are happy to be used like toys. On the opposite end they want to be forced into sex by rampaging dick-monsters and will fight like goddamned demons to keep anyone but dick-monsters away. I don’t know if you’ve tried to get your dick inside someone who is struggling with all her power to keep you out without doing permanent damage, but it’s not easy. There are four flailing limbs and teeth involved, and you only have two hands. In addition, when doing serious wrestling your body transfers blood to muscles and generally shuts down recreational functions. When there is a seriously bloody-minded Prey being tossed down, it can easily require multiple men to hold her in place and open while one not involved in the struggle does the actual penetration.

This is an ideal use of Temporary Dick Outage time. You are helping to fulfill the fantasies of Prey and you don’t even need to be hard to do it! At the same time you’re participating in a team sport with other guys. It is surprisingly bonding to coordinate wrestling activities with your buds in pursuit of multiple railings on a target. You get to watch them being violated and feel them writhing as they’re pounded. In time you may even get back in the groove and take a turn yourself, which is ideal, though doesn’t always happen. Even when it doesn’t it’s fun to participate, and depending on the scene you may all get to hang for a while afterwards and chat and bond a bit.

As you join in scenes or move from room to room, try to let your body take the lead. Listen to your dick, the deep-down hidden dick inside you, not the mask-dick you think you should have. This is the most fertile environment possible for learning about what your inner dick really wants and it would be a shame to waste it. There are a wide range of body types across many axes. There are a vast smorgasbord of personalities. Try out a few things. Does your dick shrug at one girl but surge upright for another and you can’t tell why? Start noticing. Stop thinking in shoulds and let the force be your guide. If you’re drawn to something, follow it. You may find some very surprising things.

Or you may just want a snack. Bodies are weird.

If you’re very lucky, though, you may just hit a groove. Maybe you’ll be walking through a room and see a girl sitting chatting, and something in your dick says “fuck it, I want that one” and you’ll just walk over and put your dick in her mouth mid-sentence because if there’s one place in the entire world where that is the optimal move it’s this place. Turns out it was indeed a great move, the Prey really are here for exactly this treatment. You just had to believe them, and now this positive reinforcement is making your body finally believe them. You take her to the floor and plow her for a good long while, and when you’re done you aren’t fully You anymore. Because normally You are your Thoughts and your Priors and your Anticipated Experience, but right now those things are taking a backseat, and the new “You” is Instincts and Drives and Desires. And you see another girl you like and you move to take her without fully thinking about it, you just do what feels right, and she comes right down too. When you get up later and get some drinks and hydration your dick is still in the zone. For the next few hours Traditional-You is riding semi-detached, a supervisor role managing things here and there, but mostly hands-free as Embodied-You is finally free to roam. Moving to the snack table to munch, or kneeling down behind a lady on her hands and knees as you strap on another condom. Some cuddling for a bit. Standing to stretch, chatting with a girl, then pushing her down and spreading her legs wide. For hours there isn’t doubt or shame or expectation. Just exploration and deep temporary entanglement, hormones and instincts. It’s beyond normal existence, without stepping all the way into the psychedelic. A transcendence of vulgar reality that you can only find in union with others seeking this way. It’s fantastic.

It doesn’t happen every time.

VIII. The Festivities Continue - Chatting

These parties go for six hours at a minimum, eight hours isn’t unheard of. They are sober parties. There’s a lot going on, and you will not be able to retain a single emotional state throughout. You cannot fuck that many hours. Take breaks, and hydrate. Chat.

During this downtime maybe we cover some questions that someone who’s never been to a party might ask.

What’s the venue like? Well, I’ve only been to a few. But the ones I’ve been to have been in large, gorgeous multi-floor houses. Very aesthetically pleasing, with plenty of food platters in the kitchen, lots of mattresses laid out on the floors of the large common rooms, and at least a couple bedrooms available. There are condoms and lube available in every room, but I’d bring my own anyway just to be sure (and to get custom sizing, it really makes a difference!).

There’s no play allowed in the kitchen or bathrooms. Most of the action happens in the large common rooms, usually one on each floor. This raises an interesting point! Earlier I mentioned the spectrum of Prey. The Prey that strongly prefer being violently held down and penetrated as they struggle and rage bring a different energy to a room than those that want to be passed around like fuck toys. Nowadays the heavy-fighting occurs in the downstairs floor of a venue, and the free-use is in the upstairs floor. Most of the Prey aren’t at either extreme, so they often float between the floors. This also means you see non-CNC scenes downstairs, and some occasional struggle-scuffles upstairs. But the downstairs is mostly where the heavy play is. You cannot drag Prey between floors.

The common rooms are big enough for quite a few concurrent scenes, and it’s common to see two going at once in each room, sometimes four or more.

The Prey mostly range from late 20s to late 30s, but the full age spread is across decades. The Predators are slightly older than Prey on average, and also have more variance in age. They lean towards more fit (it’s 6+ hours of this, c’mon), but again there’s a wide spread.

If you have access to Viagra or Cialis, absolutely make use of that. Coming to an RMN is scary and a lot of pressure your first time (and second, and third, and etc, but less each time) and every little boost helps. Speaking of which, make sure you get plenty of rest in the days beforehand. And is carb-loading a real thing? Maybe do that, if it is.

There are a few things to shackle Prey to downstairs. Someone always brings impact toys. There are a few vibrators and Hitachi wands around, but it doesn’t hurt to bring your own. Sometimes there is a Sybian.

There are a few new people at every party, yes. Not everyone can come back, not everyone wants to go to every party, and bringing the experience to new people is a joy in its own right. It’s wonderful to watch someone experience something like this for the first time. :)

Good to go? Alright, let’s get back in there.

IX. All Good Things Come To An End

Eventually the party wraps up. All bodies have their limits! We all gather in the main room again for closing circle. First things first - who won the game?

Did I not mention the game? Well, you don’t have to participate to have fun, obviously. But each RMN party includes a party-wide sex game. The Predators can score points by sexing Prey of multiple randomly-distributed classes, which encourages play with more Prey and gives excuses or motivation to go further afield than one might otherwise. Prey can remove points by pressing three very conspicuous buttons simultaneously, which opens them up to being tackled and subsequently ravaged when they attempt to press them. If the Predators get to a certain point total they win, otherwise the Prey win. Winning side gets cupcakes, and eternal glory. It’s fun and a great way to cap the event.

Then we wind down by spontaneous sharing any highlights, thanking the organizers, taking a group photo (if you want! Plenty of people opt to not be in the photo) and all finding our clothes and making our way out. Some folks will stay a little bit and chat to unwind. It’s easier to chat when the pressure’s off. The event is over and it went well and everyone is a little bit high on the endorphins. You will almost certainly make some friends. It would be hard not to, after something like this.

The organizers send out a survey after the party in an eternal quest to know more things and make the next party better. Like I said, these parties attract the best people in the world. The organizers are the reason for this, and they never stop proving it.

The Discord stays active for a couple weeks after, so people can chat about the night and remain in contact for a while longer. Going cold turkey after something like this would be cruel. Stories are exchanged, and sometimes contact info as people vow to remain in touch. More than a few dates have blossomed in the wake of RMN parties, and several have continued on into longer relationships. The platonic friendships that are born of these aren’t to be ignored either. Creating a shared experience as extraordinary as this one will forge interesting bonds with your fellows. The most fascinating part is seeing which ones you feel closest to afterwards, and then trying to figure out exactly why. Is it all hormones? Subconscious vibes? Something your inner-bro picked up on that isn’t legible to your verbal mind?

Well, there’s only one way to find out. Come back for another one, gather more data, and compare results. And if we happen to have a fantastic, gut-wrenching, ego-slipping experience and somehow make even more friends along the way, maybe that’s OK too. Maybe it’s what we were secretly after the whole time. Maybe it’s even starting to feel like home.

Participation in Phase I clinical pharmaceutical research

If you’ve been following this blog for long, you probably know at least a bit about pharmaceutical research. You might know a bit about the sort of subtle measures pharmaceutical companies take to influence doctors’ prescribing habits, or how it takes billions of dollars on average to bring a new medication to market, or something about the perverse incentives which determine the FDA’s standards for accepting or rejecting a new drug. You might have some idea what kinds of hoops a company has to jump through to conduct actual research which meets legal guidelines for patient safety and autonomy.

You may be less familiar though, with how the sausage is actually made. How do pharmaceutical companies actually go through the process of testing a drug on human participants?

I’m going to be focusing here on a research subject’s view of what are known as Phase I clinical trials, the stage in which prospective drugs are tested for safety and tolerability. This is where researchers aim to answer questions like “Does this drug have any dangerous side effects?” “Through what pathways is it removed from a patient’s body?” and “Can we actually give people enough of this drug that it’s useful for anything?” This comes before the stage where researchers test how good a drug is at actually treating any sort of disease, when patients who’re suffering from the target ailments are given the option receive it as an experimental treatment. In Phase I clinical trials, the participants are healthy volunteers who’re participating in research for money. There are almost no cases in which volunteer participation is driven by motivations other than money, because the attitudes between research participants and clinicians overwhelmingly tend to be characterized by mutual guarded distrust. This distrust is baked into the process, both on a cultural level among the participants, and by the clinics’ own incentives.

All of what follows is drawn from my own experiences, and experiences that other participants in clinical pharmaceutical research have shared with me, because for reasons which should become clear over the course of this review, research which systematically explores the behaviors and motives of clinical research participants is generally not feasible to conduct.

Part 1: What is participating in a clinical study actually like?

You start by looking up the studies available at a particular site. This may involve browsing their website for offerings, or it may involve simply calling up the clinic and asking what’s currently available. Because many research clinics do not actually bother to keep their websites up-to-date, participants are incentivized to do the latter, which applies an asshole filter to clinics’ participant populations. This will be relevant later.

The clinic representative or website will tell you how much the available studies pay and how long you’ll have to stay at the clinic. They usually will not tell you the intended purpose of the study drug; that comes during the phone screening, where they run through a laundry list of exclusion criteria (do you have an appropriate BMI to participate in the study? Do you have any relatives who work at the clinic? Do you have a history of any sort of disease which might appear in your bloodwork? Etc.) Once you make it through the phone screening, they will schedule an in-person screening at the clinic.

At your in-person screening, if it’s your first time at the clinic, they will go over your entire medical history, and ask about your relationship with every sort of disease, disorder and medical event known to man. In defiance of statistical probability, you will tell them that you are in perfect health with no record of medical events whatsoever. You might be tempted to be honest, but as we’ll address later, this is a mistake which the participant population on the whole has been trained out of. You will give them your payment information, so they can pay you for your study participation, and they will subject you to a battery of physical tests (blood tests, urine tests, temperature, pulse and ECGs, plus any tests idiosyncratic to a particular study) which determine whether you meet that study’s eligibility criteria.

You’ll also receive my personal favorite component of the clinical research process, an Informed Consent Form, which details everything the clinic is legally obligated to tell you about the contents of the study so that you can offer your consent to participate. These forms are not in any respect fun; they’re tedious to read, and probably an absolute slog for the clinics to put together. On the odd occasion where the clinic makes any small change to the procedure after you’ve signed, they have to bring you in to receive a whole new copy of the consent form, and point out the changes so you can sign all over again. They have staff on hand to go over them with you to make sure you’ve actually read them and understand the contents. The whole process is frankly a bit obnoxious, but when I compare it to actual employment contracts I’ve signed in the past, I can’t help but appreciate just how much tighter the requirements are in comparison to make sure that research participants fully understand what they’re agreeing to, and aren’t being taken advantage of. In a way, it makes the process feel significantly less exploitative than regular employment. Of course, this does not mean that research clinics will not screw over their participants when given the opportunity to do so; they’re simply operating within tighter restrictions.

Provided you meet all the criteria for the study, you’ll receive a call a few days later telling you you’re eligible to come in. This does not necessarily mean you’ll end up participating. Clinics almost always want to bring in more people than they’ll actually end up using as research subjects, enough to offer a safe margin in case there are any problems with the lab readings of the participants when they’re brought in at intake. Usually, there are no problems. Regular research participants deal with looming anxiety over the prospect of being made “alternates,” people who’re brought in for a study, but not dosed with the study drug, because alternates don’t receive payment for their participation beyond the day or two they’re in the clinic for the study, meaning the time the participant blocked off for involvement in that study is largely wasted.

Most research clinics do not actually randomize the dosing order of their participants, but instead give participants priority based on the order in which they screened for the study. Thus, among regular study participants, who often travel cross-country to make it into clinical studies, the screening process becomes something of a race to secure the earliest slots in order to maximize their chances of actually getting paid to participate.

If you do end up receiving the study drug, you become a valuable data point for the research sponsor, and your participation is secured. You’ll be dosed according to a regimen described in the informed consent (sometimes just once at the very beginning of your stay at the clinic, sometimes several times a day across your entire stay.) The staff will perform occasional medical tests on you throughout your stay, and ask you to report any effects you experience from the medication. In the great majority of studies, you will not experience any noticeable effects from the medication. If you do, you probably will not report them. In fact, in the event that they experience significant symptoms, participants have strong incentives to actively conceal them, and most of them know this. With some notable exceptions, the actual medication is a trivial component of the experience; most of what matters about your stay will be determined by how invasive the testing procedures are for that particular study, and the company you keep.

Part 2: What sort of people participate in clinical research?

Mostly weird ones.

If you do it regularly, clinical research participation pays on a scale comparable to a regular job, but it’s not a regular job. There is no screening for work experience or skills, or for criminal history, something which a not-insignificant portion of the clinical research population has. Officially, the participant population is very healthy, with no recent diseases or drug use of any kind, not just recreational, but prescribed or over-the-counter for any sort of condition whatsoever, and no medical history of any sort of ailments you might think to include on a survey form. In practice, beyond the requirement of being able to pass medical screenings, study participants have every incentive to lie. If you pass screening, you are probably not on drugs at that specific point in time, although according to clinic staff, it’s not particularly unusual for applicants to try to get away with this. In general, the selection process tilts the participant population towards what might broadly be considered shady characters. People who don’t get along well with traditional employment (it’s hard to reconcile with the scheduling commitments of clinic research,) are comfortable pursuing an avenue of income which is widely perceived as dangerous when people think about it at all, and are generally distrustful of and comfortable lying to authority figures (a useful trait for remaining an active participant in clinical research.)

Many research participants have a dubious regard for the whole institution of “mainstream medicine,” mostly, as far as I can tell, due to a ground-in distrust of credentialed experts and authority, rather than an awareness of how much they are personally lying to people responsible for bringing new drugs to market. Conspiratorial or contrarian dispositions are common. In one characteristic experience, I listened to a couple of participants (both black,) discussing a particular high-profile medical practitioner. One claimed that because the doctor in question was white, he couldn’t be trusted, and was probably throwing people’s health under the bus for personal profit. The other insisted that this sort of thing isn’t a matter of race, just about whether the person in question knows what they’re talking about and has reason to be honest, and the doctor in question was clearly a credible expert. Whatever sense of gratification I might have felt at hearing one of them stand up for racial harmony and the universality of scientific knowledge withered on the vine as I continued listening and realized that the “doctor” in question was actually an alternative medicine provider encouraging his audience to reject mainstream treatment in favor of his own personal line of supplements.

You might infer from all this that clinical research participants are mostly also poor, but this is not particularly the case. The payment structure of clinical studies, which offer large lump sums paid out according to the inconsistent and unreliable schedules that participants build around research participation, mean that very few people involved in clinical research are living paycheck to paycheck. I’ve spoken to several who were surprisingly well-off, owning property in multiple states despite spending much of their time traveling between different clinical research centers across the country. Many are apparently adventurous if not particularly cautious investors. Clinical research participants have the highest concentration I’ve personally encountered in real life of investment in cryptocurrency, outside of some rationalist meetup groups, and also the highest rate of investment into NFTs, despite few seeming to have any familiarity with how those technologies work. Whenever I’ve been tempted to develop a low opinion of their judgment, I’ve had to temper that with the knowledge that many of these people have apparently accumulated much more disposable income in the process than I have. I’ve spoken to research participants who’ve discussed sinking tens of thousands of dollars into NFTs, which is not a life decision many people find themselves in a position to contemplate, for better or for worse.

While the participants might make up something of an odd crowd by ordinary sensibilities, most of them are quite well-adjusted to the environment of clinical research, and have been doing it for quite a long time. They tend to share information pretty freely among each other on how to deal with the practicalities of travel between study clinics, how to reliably pass screenings and avoid being made an alternate for studies, and how to handle the idiosyncrasies, and circumvent the rules, of various study locations.

Part 3: Why nobody is actually honest with research staff.

Simply put, the system of paid clinical research is structured to discourage it.

Clinic staff will tell participants that they should be honest for the sake of their own health and safety, but this is a lie intended to appeal to participants’ own self-interest. The requirements clinical researchers are forced to comply with are well in excess of what’s necessary for participants to reliably avoid lasting harm to their health, and the practices of research clinics tend to filter out participants who are honest with them.

The first filter is in the initial screening process which occurs before a participant even shows up at the clinic. During the initial phone screening, a staff member will ask the participant whether they have any of a wide array of health conditions, and if the caller answers yes, the staff member will immediately tell them that they’re not eligible for the study. A stronger filter on participant honesty however is the fact that the staff member will ask if the participant has received any sort of medication in the last month. Not any sort of recreational drug, or any sort of prescription treatment for any of a number of relevant conditions, or even any prescription medication. Any type of medication or supplement whatsoever, prescription or over-the-counter. This includes “supplements” sold at the grocery store, like fish oil, fiber, etc. Are you wondering whether something counts as a food or supplement? The answer is, if you ask a staff member, and you say the word “supplement,” they will tell you you’re not eligible within thirty days of taking it. There is no point trying to negotiate on this, from the perspective of the clinic, it is always better safe than sorry.

This phrase, “better safe than sorry,” overwhelmingly characterizes the protocols of research clinics at every level, except the level where they start to ask whether participants might become more likely to pass through their filters by lying than meeting all their criteria. This is partly because research clinics are forced to comply with safety standards set by people who are not familiar with basic principles of research, and partly because they have an incentive to put the burden of disclaiming anything that might increase the overall level of risk on the participant, so that, in the event that anything does happen, the clinic can avoid legal responsibility, because the participant is the one at fault if they lied and violated the protocol.

For example, every clinical research protocol I have ever encountered includes a stipulation that a male participant must not donate sperm for at least ninety days following their last dosing of the study drug, and if they have sex with a female partner, they must use a condom with spermicide, combined with a hormonal method of birth control on the part of their partner. As far as I’ve been able to find, no drug has ever been discovered to cause birth defects when taken by a male prior to conception, and for most classes of drugs, there is no known plausible biological mechanism by which this could occur. However, in the event that a patient did have a child who was afflicted with some manner of birth defect after participating in a clinical trial, the clinic might have to face a legal battle over whether they held responsibility for that. Rather than face that cost, let alone the risk of actually being held responsible, it’s safer to ensure that the participant cannot become a parent within that window of time without violating the study protocol. If the patient chooses to violate the study protocol, the consequences of that become their own responsibility.

Research participants who disclose information to the clinics too freely tend to learn quickly that this is not in their interests. Admitting to any sort of medical condition, medication use, or history of medical events, tends to result in participants simply being told they are not eligible for the study they wish to screen for. If, at your first in-person screening at a clinic, you provide information about your medical history which qualifies as an exclusion criterion, you may be ruled out from many or all studies at that clinic, and the relevance of any of these criteria to a participant’s health and safety is heavily colored by the principle of “better safe than sorry.” An example from my own experience: At the first clinic where I participated in studies, I disclosed that I was diagnosed with ADHD as a child, and had been medicated for it in my childhood, although I have not been for many years. This did not automatically exclude me from all studies, but before long, I found that many studies at that clinic had “must not be diagnosed with any mental conditions” as an eligibility criterion. I discussed this with a number of members of the medical staff at that clinic, and they told me that this generally occurs in cases where the general class of drugs an experimental medication is in has been found to sometimes have increased risk of suicide as a side effect. In these cases, the people designing the protocols find it expedient to simply rule out anyone who has any diagnosis of any sort of mental condition. Do they have any reason to think that ADHD might be associated with an increased risk? I asked, and their answer was, not at all, but better safe than sorry.

Another factor which incentivizes participants not to be honest with clinic staff is that they simply get paid more if they aren’t. Even for study participants who genuinely meet all the medical criteria in the screening and study protocols, there’s one factor that affects all participants and is consistent between all clinics and studies, which affects participants’ ability to profit from their involvement in clinical studies. Participants are required to observe a washout period (usually at least 30 days, but this varies between study protocols, and may be as much as 90 for some studies) between the last time they were dosed with any experimental medication, and when they’re next able to participate in a study. Most clinical research participants treat studies as a regular source of income, and prefer not to comply with this, as it limits how frequently they’re able to get paid for participating. Staff at an individual clinic won’t let a person enroll in multiple studies too close together at the same clinic, but most research participants travel around the country to enroll in studies at different locations. Participants who’re willing to lie and claim that they haven’t received any experimental medications in the last month when they actually have are simply able to earn substantially more money than participants who’re unwilling to do so.

While clinic staff will tell participants that they should comply with study protocols for their own health and safety, participants share information freely among each other, including information about how to most effectively get away with violating study protocols. The common perception among participants is that there is no real risk in lying to participate in studies more often, and research clinics are inherently obstructionist, and a canny participant is one who knows how to mislead them to his own benefit (or hers, but most research participants are male, partly for cultural reasons, but also because it’s easier for men to meet clinical studies’ eligibility criteria.) The washout period, for most participants, is however long it takes for a study drug to clear from one’s system so that it won’t be detected when they screen at another clinic. Being caught flagrantly violating screening or study protocol, such as by having prohibited drugs in one’s system during screening, will result in a lack of payment for that visit, and may result in a temporary ban from that clinic. But most participants travel around extensively for studies, and many regard occasional temporary bans as just a natural cost of business.

There is one way though that participants may risk being permanently restricted from participating in studies with a particular company- not just a particular clinic location, but all branches associated with that pharmaceutical research company across the country; a risk which substantially shapes the way participants engage with clinical studies. The thing which most participants are truly hesitant to risk is reporting a negative response to a study drug.

To be clear, reporting a negative reaction to a study drug does not necessarily result in consequences for a participant. In many cases, such as when a particular reaction is expected and discussed in advance by the staff, and widely experienced among the study population, participants generally consider that safe to report. Usually, the staff don’t want participants to be on any other medications whatsoever, but in some studies which researchers anticipate to produce particular symptoms, such as nausea, there are allowances written into the protocols for participants to receive over-the-counter medications, and participants will report their symptoms in order to receive them. It’s also not the case that clinical researchers will directly retaliate against participants for reporting adverse reactions. Although research clinics are contracted for work by pharmaceutical companies, they are not directly owned by pharmaceutical companies, and staff will attest that their primary concern is for research participants’ health and safety, not getting favorable results for the pharmaceutical companies they’re contracted by.

From the perspective of the participants though, this concern for their “health and safety” is exactly the problem. A participant who reports an unusual reaction to a study drug may go on the record with that clinic as having an unusual sensitivity or allergy to that medication. And having unusual sensitivities or allergies to any sort of medication is an exclusion criteria for almost all clinical studies. So, a participant who reports an unusual or unexpected reaction to a study drug risks finding himself thanked for his honesty, and then rendered ineligible for all studies with that pharmaceutical research company afterwards. Better safe than sorry. A participant who experiences symptoms which make them genuinely worry about the prospect of receiving more of the study drug can always simply make an excuse and drop out of the study, something all participants are entitled to do as part of the legally mandated protections involved in clinical research. This would come at the cost of the payment for the rest of their involvement in that study, but better that than being permanently barred from all studies with that company.

As a result, research participants commonly discuss among each other their refusal to disclose or discuss symptoms with clinic staff, out of a general understanding that clinical researchers do not have their best interests as participants in mind, and are not to be trusted. Participants commonly see themselves as being in an adversarial relationship with clinic staff, whose jobs are to enforce arcane and unnecessary study restrictions, while the participants’ interests, for their own comfort and profit, are to find ways to avoid complying.

Part 4: How much does this actually matter?

Probably not as much as you might think.

The overwhelming majority of Phase I pharmaceutical trials are almost certainly being performed on participants who’re not in compliance with the study criteria, and who’re not reporting all the symptoms they experience while taking the experimental medications. But many symptoms, most of the ones most directly relevant to participants’ health, can be caught by the regular medical tests which participants undergo throughout their involvement in the clinical studies. Besides which, in most Phase I clinical trials, most or all participants don’t actually experience any noticeable symptoms in the first place. Studies where any participants experience significant reactions are more the exception than the rule, and most of those exceptions are ones which the researchers can already predict based on animal studies and the general class of drugs they’re studying. If you participate in a study on a medication for cancer or heart failure, the drug is probably going to have a noticeable effect on you, and nobody is going to be surprised.

Most of the study criteria which participants habitually violate probably don’t matter very much, in terms of the actual outcomes of the studies. If a participant has other drugs in their system which might interfere with the actual study drug, or result in test readings which could be misattributed to the study drug, that could have a significant confounding effect on the results. But most relevant drugs are likely to be caught by the medical tests conducted at screenings, if not self-reporting by the participants. In most cases, a participant who last received an experimental study drug ten days before screening for a study, by which point it has already fully cleared from their system, is probably not going to show significantly different outcomes from a participant who waits a full thirty days.

Phase I clinical trials are also not the last step before an experimental medication goes to market. Before a drug is made available to the public, it’s also trialed on research participants who actually have the ailment the drug is intended to treat. These research subjects are generally not paid clinical research participants who travel around the country to participate in studies on a regular basis, and consequently, they operate under very different incentives. Participants in later phases of clinical trials probably are exposed to at least slightly greater risks of side effects and adverse reactions than they would be if Phase I clinical trials didn’t feature perverse incentives against reporting, and filter for a population generally disinclined to do so.

It’s difficult to say how much any of the confounding effects or obfuscation from all the perverse incentives in clinical research serve to skew doctors’ understanding of the actual effects of drugs by the time they reach the general population, not just because there are other layers that a drug has to pass through before it reaches that point, but because it would be nigh-impossible to test the existing pharmaceutical research pipeline against another pharmaceutical research pipeline operating under different incentives. Research which probes into the effects of clinical research’s perverse incentives, and the filters it places on its participant population, is largely nonexistent. How do you systematically study the opinions and behavior of a population who mostly don’t see it as being in their interests to be open or honest with researchers in the first place?

It would almost certainly be possible for pharmaceutical research to work at least somewhat better than this. If I were the clinical research czar, this is not a system I’d be proud to have designed. It’s probably not exposing the general public to catastrophic risks that they could be avoiding with a better-designed research pipeline. It’s not exposing Phase I research participants to catastrophic risks either, although they would almost certainly be at least a little safer if the system weren’t designed with such a “better safe than sorry” ethos that it incentivizes them to constantly lie. At least some of the pathologies of this system probably propagate down to later levels though, and it’s difficult to say how much. In general, if you want to study anything at all, it’s better to make sure you have a system for doing so which encourages the people involved to be honest.

Permaculture: Rationality’s Long Lost Twin

I.

Imagine a social movement of weirdos who fill their minds with big ideas and fret about the long term survival of human civilization. The movement is spread across the globe as a smattering of individuals and local communities. These people are connected by an online platform that serves a double function as a watering hole as well as a repository of all the knowledge accumulated over decades of divergence from the mainstream.

I am of course talking about permaculture.

It is not a coincidence that this description fits our own rationality community (and the rat-adjacent diaspora) like a glove. There seems to be a general formula at work, which creates and sustains a movement that develops its own culture, lingo, and shared sense of purpose.

The similarities don't end there either. The rationalists have their 12 virtues, while the permies have their 12 principles. An aspiring rationalist might attend a CFAR course to gain knowledge, build practical skills and connect with like-minded individuals. A budding permie would attend a bootcamp at Wheaton Labs for the same purposes. Both movements are informally led by quirky, influential figures (Paul Wheaton : Eliezer. Geoff Lawton : Scott. Andrew Millison : Zvi), and both are stuck constantly having to deny being a cult, though the permies have a harder time of it, what with "cult" being right there in the name. Finally, while rationalists might accidentally cause the entire universe to be tiled with von Neumann probes, permies leave other galaxies alone, but have a higher chance of accidentally tiling the surface of the earth. More on that later.

So, what is permaculture? I'll answer that question in part III, after a short primer on soil ecology. Then, I'll dive into some of the interesting long term problems that humanity faces in keeping this planet habitable, and some speculative gesturing towards how we can attack them more effectively.

II.

When plants grow, they build themselves mostly out of hydrogen and carbon. They pull these elements out of the water and air, respectively, through photosynthesis. We can think of these elements as macronutrients. But just like animals, they also require a mix of other elements (micronutrients), which are present in the topsoil.

Topsoil is the part of the ground that's not just dirt and dust, but filled with organic matter and microbial life, in a spongy mix that is capable of holding on to water for long periods. Entire ecosystems of bacteria and fungi live around the roots of plants, forming an ecological niche called the rhizosphere. These microorganisms, collectively called the root biome, decompose organic matter and engage in a symbiotic exchange with plants, making nutrients more readily available to them. The root biome also binds nutrients, storing them for later use. Without this mechanism, excess nutrients poison the soil and can "burn" the plants (cf. “salting the earth”). This invisible layer is thus the foundation of any healthy ecosystem.

While land per se never loses its value (as our Georgist friends on this blog love to point out), it is absolutely possible to lose the rhizosphere and end up with a desert where the soil is nothing but dust, where nothing will grow. The culprit of this is erosion, with wind and rain sweeping away topsoil into rivers and lakes, and the hot sun baking the ground until all microbial life dies out.

Fully functional ecosystems protect themselves against this. The lowest layer of plants provides a ground cover that keeps the soil damp. Roots hold the earth in place and prevent erosion. Larger plants provide shade in which seedlings and more delicate species can survive. The large variety of species provides protection against extreme weather events and other changes in conditions, as the system as a whole simply shifts to a new balance.

III.

Permaculture is a set of ideas about agriculture, land management and resource usage that incorporates these lessons from ecology. The core of it is to accept and even encourage that healthy, productive land contains complex ecosystems, rather than attempting to impose evenly-spaced rectangular grids on it. Permaculture uses regenerative farming techniques which mimic and bootstrap the robust ecosystems I described above, while still providing a yield to the humans tending the land.

There are many specific techniques used for this. Earthworks that slow down the natural flow of water and encourage it to infiltrate into the soil. Interplanting of multiple species that work together, populating complementary niches. For example fruit trees as an overstory, annual vegetables under them in the half-shade, and a ground cover of strawberries.

Woven throughout the permaculture approach is an awareness that no matter how we design a system, it will have to settle into its own equilibrium. For example, if I have a pest problem, I could simply spray pesticide. That solves my immediate problem, but it also prevents natural predators of those pests from moving in, since I am essentially taking on the role of a highly efficient apex predator, fully occupying that ecological function. This implies that once I choose to spray, I must keep it up indefinitely, in a sort of flow equilibrium that requires my constant input to stay stable. The moment I stop applying the ecosystem-warping pressure of the pesticide, I am left with a system out of equilibrium that is wide open for pests to move back in and make short work of my crops.

Permaculture attacks this problem in a completely different way. Pests are a fact of nature, and we can manage them by inviting in their natural predators. For example by creating habitats for birds, wasps and spiders. Such a system keeps itself stable without any further human input. If there is one idea that best expresses the whole philosophy of permaculture, it's gotta be this one.

Just like with rationality, each specific piece of knowledge isn't earth shattering on its own, and probably not even original. Permies didn't invent ecology after all. The real contribution lies in taking a bunch of separate concepts and assembling them into a whole, a novel point of view. That makes it hard to transmit the knowledge quickly, and I won’t even attempt that in this review. It works better when you let the ideas all sink in and connect to each other in your mind over time. So consider this an invitation to look further into the topic at your own leisure.

I have to confess, the first time I was exposed to rationality I bounced off it, hard. The ideas were just too bizarre, the lingo off-putting, and there didn't seem to be a point to any of it. But after repeated exposure over time, it all started sinking in. Similarly, it's easy to dismiss permies as a bunch of hippies who just want to commune with nature and run their hobby farms. But their approach deserves more consideration than that.

IV.

Conventional (extractive) agriculture stands in stark contrast to all this talk about ecosystems and balance. Farmland is simply viewed as a factory, where each plant is a machine. The farmer makes sure the plants get their basic inputs: sunlight, water, and a heap of synthetic fertilizer. The outputs are leaves, fruits or seeds as may be the case. I don't condemn this approach out of principle. I'm acutely aware of the tremendous advantages that mechanization and the Haber process have given humanity, in terms of crop yields and resistance to bad years. However, we must also consider the dark side of these advances.

In a modern farming context, there is a lot of apparent activity on the surface, but the soil beneath the crops is barely alive, and will quickly erode to desert as soon as farming stops. Without proper nutrient management, the little fertility that exists in the soil will be used up over time. The farmland is then abandoned and a new plot of land is opened up, driving processes such as the deforestation of the Amazon.

A dramatic demonstration of the problems of extractive agriculture is the Dust Bowl. The area takes its name from the rapid (local) climate change that happened in the 1930's, around the time mechanized farming equipment came into widespread use and the area of cultivated land rapidly expanded. Native prairies were lost and the land quickly degraded due to inappropriate and aggressive farming techniques, such as deep tilling of the soil every year, which exposed the soil to erosion.

The result was this:

Let's try not to repeat that, hmm?

V.

So far I have talked about desertification as if it was a purely human-driven phenomenon. But it is also a natural phenomenon, and it can turn into a runaway process. Deserts have a tendency to spread, as the lack of plants means stronger winds and less rain. Yes, really, deserts repel rain: plants release pollen and other organic microparticles into the air, around which raindrops can form. In the absence of such kernels, the moisture in the air will move along without falling. Once the trees are gone, the rain ceases. In these ways, deserts slowly push their climate outwards into their neighboring regions.

In some places, the situation has become so bad that massive efforts are underway to stop it. The Great Green Wall of China (formally known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program) was conceived to stop the spread of the Gobi desert. It has been ongoing since 1978, with thousands of kilometers of tree plantations, which form a boundary that holds back the desert. This is a tremendously laborious process, involving lots of manual labor and transport of water from far away.

VI.

Anyone who's ever grabbed a shovel and dug a hole knows, deep in their aching bones, just how huge the surface of the earth is, and how powerless us humans are in comparison. Even with the 1000x multiplier of heavy machinery, the major transformation of a landscape is a daunting task.

With examples such as the Great Green Wall of China, we are talking about an amount of ecosystem change that is linear: one square meter of forest for each unit of effort put in. This approach betrays a lack of understanding of ecosystems. Trees are brought in and planted directly into pure, dead desert sand, without any support species or long term plan for covering their water needs. It is pretty much the worst place possible to plant a tree. Rather than seeing the tree as a first step towards a new ecological balance, it is simply considered a widget that performs a narrow function, and the problem is "solved" by placing many, many such widgets next to each other.

I contend that such linear thinking misses the point by a mile. We will never turn the earth into a paradise with such linear effort. Instead, we must create our own runaway processes that sustain themselves in a positive direction.

Another massive reforestation project, the Great Green Wall of Africa (yes, I know, hugely creative naming), does somewhat better in this regard. Its goal is to create a green strip more or less across all of Africa, east to west. This aims to stop the Sahara from spreading southwards into the Sahel, which is a semi-arid but fertile region where many people live. Rather than simply sending workers to plant trees and then abandoning them, this project aims to teach local communities regenerative farming practices that produce a concrete yield. This allows those communities to thrive and in turn maintain their part of the Wall out of sheer self-interest. One of the techniques used for this is the African Smile, a small-scale earthwork (shaped like a half-circle or smile) that captures water and provides space for plants of several types to grow together. These earthworks are easy to dig manually and can be tiled across the landscape at pretty large scales, creating lasting ecosystem change.

This solution is already more robust than the Chinese approach, being embedded into existing social and physical systems. However, it is still irkingly linear. That's weird if we consider the fact that plants are effectively von Neumann probes. They land in a given location, deploy their little solar panels (leaves) to harvest energy, fix the erosion problem by providing shade and root support to the soil, then put their excess energy into sending many thousands of copies of themselves into the world.

I'm gonna bite the bullet and say that a successful, large-scale deployment of these incredible bio-machines should properly be called terraforming. Our community seems ideally positioned to take a closer look at this problem space, as a potential EA cause area that could have a high impact per dollar spent. Obviously, as a first step we humans should stop rapidly destroying already existing ecosystems for short-term economic gain.

There are also risks of course. Permies are exactly the kind of people who smuggle seeds of highly invasive plants across national borders and, more importantly, across ecosystem borders. That's what happens when you're obsessed with species that create a lot of biomass with very little human effort (sorry guys, I'm just being honest). Unfortunately, there are many examples where the von Neumann probes were too good at their job, proliferating out of control, choking out native ecosystems and agricultural land. Governments then spend massive amounts of money trying to combat these invasive species, mostly unsuccessfully.

When we consider plants as technology, they are surprisingly powerful and dangerous. Learning to properly use their full potential could lead us to unprecedented prosperity, as well as true sustainability, unlike BS "carbon credits", “every purchase plants a tree” schemes, and other fake climate change solutions that mostly exist to assuage the guilt of rich westerners, but do little if anything for the environment.

It bears repeating that all of this is centered around a surprisingly simple idea: designing systems that work well in equilibrium, rather than requiring constant energy inputs to keep them from toppling over. That is very much in the spirit of effective altruism.

Finally, while some of the ideas circulating among permies are not well founded and even straight up magical thinking, the community as a whole is very much focused on putting things into practice and seeing what works. I for one respect the hell out of that.

Pregnancy: A British Husband’s Review

The First Trimester

I sat uncomfortably in a darkened room, next to my wife lying on a bed, staring at a monitor suspended above our heads. The screen lit up with mysterious black and white shapes as the sonographer turned on the ultrasound machine. It was time to find out how far along the pregnancy had come – and whether it was in a safe place, or dangerously stuck outside the womb.

It was only a couple of weeks since my wife had shown me a positive test. The first thing I wanted to know was the due date. This of course depends on how long she’s been pregnant, but the online calculators were giving impossibly long ages for the pregnancy so far – until I eventually twigged that pregnancy starts at two weeks. It was the first of many baffling things that year.

When a woman says she is eight weeks pregnant, that actually means the baby has been in existence for about six weeks. It’s counted from the woman’s previous cycle, so for the first two weeks of pregnancy, ovulation hasn’t happened yet and she isn’t pregnant at all: it’s impossible to be one week pregnant.

But even this isn’t quite right. Because most women’s cycles aren’t perfectly regular, once you start getting scans, the pregnancy is dated from an idealised notion of when the previous cycle should have been (but probably wasn’t). For a while, whenever I told people about the pregnancy, I complained about the dating method. But nobody else seems to find this surprising or confusing, except my dad. So I guess this runs in families, and one day my child will be surprised and confused too.

Having discovered the pregnancy, we naturally wanted a scan to look at the baby. In my wife’s home country of South Korea, mothers get an ultrasound almost every two weeks. But it turns out that in the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) will usually give you only two in total: one at week 12 and one at week 20. Is this enough?

It is possible in medicine to scan too much, even when the scan itself is non-invasive and almost riskless. For a perfect Bayesian, more information can only ever be good, but in reality we tend to overreact. Scans can lead doctors to treat something that wouldn’t have caused a problem, or to treat something that was unstoppable anyway. And they cause stress.[1]

So when your hospital refuses to test or treat an issue, there’s an important question: is this genuinely the best evidence-backed course of action? In which case you should listen to the doctor and do nothing. Or have they just prioritised resources somewhere else? In which case you might want to advocate harder for yourself, or go elsewhere.

In pregnancy, this question comes up a lot. To start with, I was concerned about ectopic pregnancy, where the fertilised egg implants itself outside the womb. From what I could tell from reading (not a doctor, nothing in this review is medical advice…), ectopic pregnancies cannot progress safely to birth, so they must be ended either naturally or medically, and can be quite serious for the mother. At 1 in 90 it’s a small risk, but not vanishingly small. As the first NHS scan is not until 12 weeks, the only way you’d know is if you get a stabbing pain and start bleeding (or other symptoms).[2] So that’s why we booked a private abdominal ultrasound, and were now waiting in the darkness to find out.

The sonographer was heavily pregnant herself. I wondered idly if she did her own scans, while she searched with the ultrasound probe. Suddenly the screen stabilised, and she pointed out a big black circle. “That’s the baby house, safely in the womb,” she said. The cursor moved to a white triangle. “And this is baby.”

We gazed at the tiny ball of cells, and peering closely there was even a little flicker of pixels that represented the heartbeat. Like many before me, my mind turned to Psalm 139: “For you created my inmost being, you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

At this scan I also discovered that “baby” doesn’t take the definite article. It’s always just “baby”, not "the baby". I would say it’s because Baby is treated as a name, except that it also seems to be written with a lowercase b.

Whether or not you get a scan to look, the pregnancy usually becomes obvious when morning sickness kicks in. Morning sickness can be pretty grim and is very much not limited to the mornings, but on the plus side it tends to be a sign baby is growing well (although sadly not always). My main guide for the pregnancy was an economist’s favorite: Expecting Better by Emily Oster. If you want morning sickness medicine, Oster’s top drug recommendation is implicitly the doxylamine-pyridoxine combination.[3] But only one woman she spoke to took medication, as others were too nervous. In Korea this is marketed as Diclectin, and many women in my wife’s chat group were happily taking it.

In the UK the same drug is marketed as Xonvea. We asked our GP, but she said it was greyed out on her computer system which meant she wasn’t allowed to prescribe it. And as pharmacies need a prescription, that means it’s essentially unavailable – so I’m not sure why it’s marketed here and who gets to take it. We were offered Cyclizine instead, with the offputting words “if you really need it”.

First Trimester Rating: 2/5. Great character introduction, let down by confusing timelines and nausea subplots.

The Second Trimester

Pink and blue have a bad rep. When I was studying data visualisation, I nodded along to lengthy articles on how to show men and women on charts. These days you definitely can’t use pink and blue, they said, but that’s unfortunate because people intuitively understand pink and blue. So you have to use colours like pink and blue, but not pink and blue. Purple and green, or something.

More than once, I had a conversation where someone started telling me it’s useful to know whether baby is a boy or a girl so I can prepare the baby room. Then immediately realise what they’d said and bite it back. (Joke’s on them, I live in a one-bed flat, there is no baby room!)

So I was amused, and at first a little uncomfortable, to discover that Baby World is unapologetically pink and blue. Baby shops have big “It’s a girl!” and “It’s a boy!” displays in bright pink and blue pastels, with all sorts of pink and blue cake fillings, pink and blue confetti, and pink and blue balloons.

We went with the cake. It was blue.

Colour scheme of a gender reveal party, according to Google Search

Then, I was led to believe, it’s time to start weight measurements and amniotic fluid scans. Oster seems to worry a lot about these being misinterpreted. Her midwife berates her for gaining too much weight (an experience shared by our friend in New York), even though it would be worse to not gain weight. And when, in a later pregnancy scan that’s known for being noisy, doctors appear to measure a low level of amniotic fluid in her friend, they whisk her away for sudden emergency induction.

But my wife’s midwives never even measured her weight gain, and told me they would scan for amniotic fluid only if baby wasn’t moving well[4] or the fundal length (belly size from top to bottom) was unusual. Again I had to wonder if this was the right approach, or just the hospital saving money.

After reading Oster’s book, I was, if anything, relieved that the NHS doesn’t measure amniotic fluid levels. However, I did wish they would measure cervical length. In Korea this is frequently and routinely measured throughout pregnancy: if it’s too short, women are advised to be careful, or to have a McDonald surgery (tie a suture around the cervix) to protect the pregnancy. In the UK it feels like we just hope the pregnancy takes care of itself: hospitals won’t measure cervical length unless the mother has a history of miscarriage. Is this because it’s the evidence-based best policy for the mother, or just the NHS conserving resources? Without data I haven’t seen, it’s impossible to say, but I’m leaning towards the latter. The stillbirth rate is 0.25% in the UK, 0.27% in the USA, but only 0.17% in Korea.[5] Proactive monitoring is surely part of the story.

It seems to me that the various monitoring and screening tests can be placed on a scale of their benefit for a typical pregnancy, a bit like this:

The basic ultrasounds are usually enough, then there are additional tests that make it slightly more likely the pregnancy will succeed and the mother will be safe. These get more and more marginal, until eventually some tests can apparently cause more harm than good,[6] because they lead doctors to overreact to noisy data. If you have the resources, you can try to buy extra tests to climb the curve until you are giving the mother and pregnancy the best chance you can.

Second Trimester Rating: 4/5. Strong set pieces, with compelling rising tension and ominous foreshadowing.

The Third Trimester

It was time to get ready for baby. Several friends and colleagues recommended we sign up for baby classes, which teach you about childbirth and baby care, so we dutifully enrolled. Only after enrolling did I hear the warning stories: one class where the men were told to sit against the wall so they would feel pain too, and one where a husband was asked to practise taking off a nappy, only to discover that the doll’s bottom had been smeared with peanut butter to make it “realistic”.

So I was slightly on my guard in the first class, and it wasn’t helped when we spent the first 20 minutes covering “what is a reliable information source”. After that however, the classes picked up. They covered information about local hospitals that wouldn’t be available in books, they were a good chance to meet other expectant parents, and if nothing else they were an interesting case study in pedagogy: how to keep a voluntary class of adults engaged.

A C-section, according to our baby class

For the most part, the classes were balanced on the pros and cons of different birth and childcare options. However, the infant feeding teacher didn’t get the memo. She was a confident lady with a lanyard decorated with drawings of breasts, and a habit of answering a question with a question. “What if I don’t have enough milk?” one woman asked. “Do dogs worry about that?” replied the teacher. “Are you saying 100% of mothers can breastfeed successfully?” I followed up. “Would humans have survived if we couldn’t?” she answered.

She made it sound like the only possible reason for failure is lack of commitment. Don’t give formula, don’t buy bottles, don’t prepare a steriliser. This doesn’t chime with the stories I have heard from several mothers, and would have left us scrambling to buy supplies after birth, when the reality is that most families will do at least some mixed feeding. And it leads to the instruction not to give the newborn any formula, no matter how much they cry (advice echoed by Your Baby Week By Week); which in my opinion is pretty harsh, as some women’s milk supply genuinely isn’t enough to satisfy the baby until a few days in.

I do recommend baby classes, for a different reason. Childbirth and baby care are two of the areas where cultural differences loom the largest – not only between nationalities, but also between families and over generations. For example, Your Baby Week By Week expects you to go out with your baby in week 1, and Oster even talks about attending a party, while our Korean textbook advises not to leave the house or have visitors until at least week 7. If you and your partner have different information diets, you may end up with wildly different expectations without realising. So it’s useful to hear the same information and be prompted to talk everything through. But be careful: our baby class teacher once had a couple rage out of the room in a heated argument.

And the classes did prepare us for the 36-week hospital appointment, when the midwife asked for our birth plan. There aren’t many choices to make, but three of them are quite big: vaginal delivery v C-section, pain reduction methods, and home v birth center v labour ward. Depending on your answer to the first two, you might have no choice over the third: in the UK, C-section and epidural are labour ward only. (But you do get the choice, unlike in France: our friend in Paris wasn’t allowed an induction until week 42, or an elective C-section at all.)

Then we were posed a couple of questions in a very leading way.

Skin-to-skin is great for baby’s health, and brain development, and breastfeeding, and mother’s recovery: do you want skin-to-skin? Yes/no.
In the old days, we used to cut the cord immediately, but now we know delayed cord clamping gives baby a lot more blood and iron: do you want delayed cord clamping?

Actually I didn’t mind, because we were pushed in the right direction on both these questions. Delayed cord clamping carries a higher jaundice risk,[7] which neither the baby classes nor midwife mentioned, but I thought this was an acceptable trade-off for the blood and iron benefits. And skin-to-skin is widely accepted as a good idea, with no real downsides (one of the useful things the infant feeding teacher taught us, to be fair to her). We were told this needs at least an hour, soon after birth. Our friend in New York was told two hours. In Korea however, the baby is often taken away to a care unit, and barely sees the mum at all. If I were to sum up the healthcare systems, I would say that Korea is more mother-focused, while the UK is more baby-focused.

We weren’t asked about a doula. I was surprised because on the 80,000 hours podcast Oster said ‘get a doula’ is her number one piece of advice. Simkin’s The Birth Partner would agree. They make it sound like doulas are a very common and obvious choice. But what is a doula? Face to face, I never heard anyone suggest it.

A doula is a trained childbirth expert, who can accompany you to the birth and give support all the way through. I thought it sounded like a good idea – maybe because it would take responsibility off me as the birth partner – but we didn’t hire one in the end, partly because of the £1.5k price tag ($~2k). During birth, when I probably should have been concentrating on other things, I asked our birthing midwife how many people use a doula. In two years on the labour ward, she had seen only a single one, so they must be quite unusual.

To use the fashionable term, I did feel somewhat gaslit by the midwife appointments. More than once, I asked if it’s possible for baby to grow too big, only to be shrugged off with a blasé “oh no no no, that can never happen, the body knows what it’s doing” et cetera. Only when we got to the hospital for the big day, did they finally admit “yes there can be physiological incompatibilities…”. It was okay for us in the end, but our French friend’s baby didn’t have enough space and ended up needing physio. On the rare occasions our hospital measured baby, it was plotted on a graph and we were told how it stacked up in terms of percentiles. But shouldn’t this be measured relative to the characteristics of the mother rather than a generic distribution? Or actually measure the pelvic size to give a definitive answer like they do in other countries? Once again I felt there was room for improvement.

All of which brings us to the birth. The date of the birth is of course unknown in advance, although it’s possible to make a better estimate than the official due date. As with the start of pregnancy, the due date is a bit of mathematical nonsense, where people say things like “your baby is expected on 1 February, but will probably be late”. The due date is a slightly arbitrary number set at 40 weeks in the UK and USA and 41 weeks in France. No adjustment is made for it being your first, second, or later pregnancy, even though the distributions are quite different, so it’s not an “expectation” in any kind of statistical sense. Oster says the best way to know if baby is coming soon is to measure cervical dilation – which of course, in the UK, we don’t do.

I am not going to talk about labour (and the excellent care staff we met). It’s fascinating in its own way, but too personal, and this is a review of pregnancy, not childbirth. Fast forward a number of hours, and I was sitting uncomfortably by my wife again, this time with her sleeping in a regulation adjustable hospital bed and me perched on a bedside chair. And there, on a second bed, much smaller, with perspex walls and a 3-inch thick mattress, was baby. Hello, world.

Third Trimester Rating: 1/5. Weak direction and chaotic scripting, but final scenes unforgettable. Leads straight into sequel with insufficient break.

Overall Pregnancy Rating: 2/5. And yet, it’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to us.

– END –

[1] Econtalk podcast with Russ Roberts, 28 Aug 2023, Vinay Prasad on Cancer Screening

[2] The NHS will give you an Early Pregnancy Scan if you present with symptoms (and are triaged towards the front of the queue relative to other patients on the day), but won’t give you a screening test before that point. See https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ectopic-pregnancy/

[3] I say “implicitly” because on page 96 Oster calls Debendox the “first line of defense”, while noting it was taken off the market in the USA and never came back, despite studies not finding it to be dangerous. Something similar now seems to be available again, under the name Diclegis.

[4] In which case our hospital would hook the mother up to a machine for contraction and baby monitoring, potentially followed by an extra ultrasound and the ‘single deepest pocket’ test (Oster’s preferred test) for amniotic fluid levels.

[5] World Bank 2023 data

[6] Oster (2013) Expecting Better

[7] Oster (2013) Expecting Better

-- END OF FOOTNOTES --

Pure Mathematics

This is a review of pure mathematics: specifically, about the value it provides society that justifies its public funding. I’m a mathematician who personally feels that the standard way the field justifies itself is incomplete and wrote this to help reason through a potential supplement.

The Standard Argument (Briefly):

Books like Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and Michael Harris’ semi-response Mathematics Without Apologies present (among many other points) the classic case for pure math. Taking the risk to summarize in one sentence, this case rests on beauty and artistic merit, though you should look into the books for the many, many caveats and subtleties. While to me (and I expect many readers here), this is an extremely compelling personal reason for doing math, it feels very incomplete as a reason to ask for other people’s tax dollars to do math.

Aesthetic preferences are personal and idiosyncratic, particularly about work as difficult to appreciate as a modern math theorem that only about a thousand specialists would even be able to understand. On the other hand, a math professor in the US generally pulls a larger salary than the GDP per capita. Society giving someone more than their equal share of resources should maybe also be justified in a way that’s more universally compelling.

An Alternative?

To summarize our alternative argument: pure mathematics is an experimental playground for developing a comprehensive problem-solving toolbox that can give us the best possible chance at solving the most difficult problems that come up in science and engineering.

There are a few key details: first, solving a problem is significantly easier if you already know the problem-solving tool that best applies—it’s way easier to figure out how to attach two pieces of wood if you’ve already seen a hammer and a nail. It’s therefore extremely plausible that a more comprehensive toolbox can shift important real-world problems from “impossibly difficult” to “manageable”.

Second, techniques for solving science and engineering problems specifically tend to be universal: they apply to a surprisingly large range of seemingly disconnected topics. The upshot is that the techniques you come up with by working on toy problems are very likely to later help with real-world problems. This is particularly true if you can develop an intuition for coming up with toy problems in unusual parts of problem-space that force novel ways of thinking. Furthermore, if your toy problems are chosen just right so that their fundamental structure isn’t as obscured as by the distracting details that inevitably come up in real-world problems, then this might actually be the easiest way to discover novel, practically useful techniques.

The rest of the review will try to justify these points in detail: the utility of searching for problem-solving techniques with no application in mind, why we should expect these techniques to be universal, and why specifically solving toy problems is a good way to search for them.

Are there Real-World Problems that Could Only Have Been Solved with Prior Pure-Math Progress?

At first glance, our potential argument seems to break even at the first step—is it really a good idea to come up with techniques independently of the problems you actually care about? In the history of science, it seems that more often than not, the practical problems are what lead to mathematical progress instead of the other way around. After all, Newton discovered calculus through an attempt to understand physics. More generally, technique-first thinking risks turning you into the person with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail: Hold off on Proposing Solutions seems to be an exhortation to start thinking from the perspective of the problem, not the technique.

The key point is that our argument applies best to the hardest problems in engineering and the sciences. Sometimes, like Newton explaining Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, a single genius can both invent a tool and spot the need for it in one huge leap. Then it is indeed true that working with the practical problem directly is correct. However, many problems in science and engineering are too hard for a single genius; it’s only humanly possible to leap half the distance starting from the place of an already-known technique.

This is famously true for both of the huge breakthroughs of 20th century physics. Einstein would never have been able to come up with general relativity unless the pure-math, problem-solving tools of differential geometry had already been developed, ready for off-the-shelf use:

“To throw out geometry and keep laws is equivalent to describing thoughts without words. We must search for words before we can express thoughts. What must we search for at this point? This problem remained insoluble to me until 1912, when I suddenly realized that Gauss's theory of surfaces holds the key for unlocking this mystery. I realized that Gauss's surface coordinates had a profound significance. However, I did not know at that time that Riemann had studied the foundations of geometry in an even more profound way.”

(emphasis added). Heisenberg would similarly never have discovered his “matrix mechanics” underlying the theory of quantum mechanics if no one had come up with the (until then) pure-math idea of matrices and non-commutative operators before.

It seems that rather than contradicting “Hold off on Proposing Solutions” the idea of stockpiling a large problem-solving toolbox is really a more extreme form of it. Instead of just discussing the specific problem, you take one step further back and discuss how to solve problems in the abstract. Not all the techniques you come up with will apply so to avoid “everything is a nail” you have to be ready to throw out most of them. Nevertheless, for a difficult enough problem, this amount of essentially intense brainstorming really does become necessary.

Finally, as all the low-hanging fruit in science and engineering gets picked, we should expect more and more important problems to resemble developing general relativity and quantum mechanics instead of proving Kepler’s laws. It’ll all be in the category of needing multiple conceptual leaps, most of which just involve inventing techniques without any application in mind. It might be even true that the vast majority of these techniques don’t get connected to anything practical until decades later. However, when they do connect, they can produce paradigm-shattering breakthroughs impossible to make in any other way.

Why Universality?

Now that we’ve discussed why working on problem-solving techniques disconnected from problems might be valuable, the next step is asking about their universality. Empirically, that universality holds should be clear to anyone who’s studied the sciences. Just as one example, the tool of computing eigenvalues of linear operators is crucial to studying vibrational modes of buildings to make them earthquake-safe, the original Google PageRank algorithm, the structure of the periodic table of elements, the OCEAN personality model, understanding the geometry of 3D rotations, etc. On the other hand, why such universality holds theoretically is mysterious (this is one of the topics considered in the famous essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The Natural Sciences), though we will now attempt a speculative answer.

First, most important things in the world are just not intuitively graspable to humans. You don’t even need to go to exotic examples like quantum mechanics; even just the size of the population of a major city is incomprehensibly large—a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic and all that. Our brains were only designed to understand what our ancestors needed for reproduction and there’s no reason we should expect anything else to be comprehensible.

Luckily, we’ve somehow been able to translate descriptions of many incomprehensible phenomena into terms that our brains are actually very good at working with—spatial intuition, language and grammar, etc. Numbers themselves are a great example of this. I may not be able to intuitively grasp what a million actually means, but through the tools of decimal notation and grade-school arithmetic, I can bootstrap off my intuitive understanding of language and grammar. I can manipulate symbols the same way I would manipulate words in a sentence to answer almost any practical question I care to ask about such unimaginably large quantities.

Even more speculatively, you can almost classify the main branches of pure mathematics by the particular human intuition they take advantage of: logic and algebra build off language, geometry builds off spatial intuition, and analysis builds off estimating motion and trajectories. There’s an excellent semi-viral story from Terence Tao illustrating this translation of a problem into more familiar intuitions, in this case, motion and rotation:

“So, somewhat in desperation, I lay on the floor, closed my eyes and tried to imagine _being_ the plane being rotated. I imagined the base point being moved in the x-direction, and rolled accordingly; then in the y-direction.I was visiting my aunt in Australia at the time, and she managed to walk in on me while I was rolling around on the floor with my eyes closed. In the grand scheme of things, not the most embarrassing situation to be in, but I am not sure how satisfied she was by the explanation that I was ‘thinking about math’.”

Similarly, in modern math “geometry” can often mean something like this set of notes. To an outsider, calling this geometry should seem completely insane—it’s pages and pages of abstract equations and definitions with very few pictures, definitely nothing at all like the familiar circles and lines of Euclid. However, what’s really going on there is the development of an intricate theory to translate certain abstract objects into a form where our geometric intuition applies—so we can get meaningful insight by thinking about their “dimension”, whether they are “smooth”, how “connected” they are/whether they have “holes”, etc. The abstract objects are so complicated that no other method has been even close to being as effective for solving problems about them. This sheer power gives me high hopes that similar methods for turning very a priori un-geometric things geometric could have significant practical applications in the coming decades.

In this way, we can interpret “mathematical problem solving technique” as just a way to relate a concept that would otherwise be incomprehensible, Lovecraftian nonsense to something human-understandable (one of my favorite novels When We Cease to Understand the World is basically about pushing this insight as far as it can possibly go and motivated much of this review). The universality claim is just the realization that most things in the universe are incomprehensible, Lovecraftian nonsense.

Poincaré once said that “Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things”, but maybe we can make the addendum “with the ultimate goal of eventually relating everything to what’s intuitively understandable by humans”.

Problem Selection

Now that we’ve hopefully justified the utility of technique-first thinking and the universality of problem-solving techniques, we still need to discuss why pure-math toy problems are a fertile ground for finding techniques. To me, this is the most mysterious part of the argument, though the empirical examples above should at least partially justify it.

First, I will note that pure mathematicians almost universally agree that the point of the problems they work on is the techniques they develop along the way. As Andrew Wiles once said about Fermat’s Last Theorem: “Almost the definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates, rather than the problem itself”. In Wiles’ example, no one was intrinsically interested in the specific problem—showing that there are no positive integer solutions to x^n + y^n = z^n for any n > 2. Rather, they were interested in first, the depth and complexity of the techniques they had to come up with to make progress and second, how useful those techniques ended up being in other parts of math. Generally, there is a notion of “richness” that mathematicians strive for. A rich problem is one that points out techniques that you wouldn’t find otherwise. These techniques also need to be powerful: they have to also help solving other problems, the greater the quantity, variety, and distance from the original the better. Not coincidentally, this happens to also be a pretty good heuristic for what’s most likely to help with practical problems.

The mysterious part is that, in actual practice, searching for rich problems is about aesthetics over all else. Some mathematicians are said to have very good “taste” and find lots of rich problems, while others are worse. The most important skill for a research career is having good taste and the most important part of graduate school and your postdoc is learning better taste. To working mathematicians, the importance of this taste is likely the most important question in the philosophy of math: how can something so arbitrary and whimsical as our aesthetic feelings be the best way to select problems? This is likely also why the beauty-based justification resonates so strongly amongst mathematicians—whatever the societal value is in doing math, you personally need to be in it for art otherwise you’ll never develop good taste.

Nevertheless, we can try to unweave the rainbow and speculate that “taste” is partially about realizing when a problem involves a previously unnoticed one of the incomprehensible, Lovecraftian patterns in the universe. Maybe we also want it to isolate just that pattern with as few other distractions as possible. This makes the problem “novel”, “elegant”, and “interesting”. It definitely seems plausible that you don’t get the best isolation from the practical problems that are given to you—rather you design a problem with the conscious goal of achieving as much isolation as possible. Your designed problem is then almost necessarily going to be some contrived toy problem. Maybe it’s not surprising then that studying the right toy problems is actually the best way to come up with new techniques.

Conclusion and Caveats

This is of course just one mathematician’s perspective. There are two key caveats. First, I am specifically a number theorist and some other mathematicians I have discussed these ideas with felt that this is very much a number-theorist’s perspective, particularly in the emphasis on elegant toy problems. Second, I am very far from as good a mathematician as people like Hardy and Harris who have written about this topic before. Therefore, I might be missing some important insights. Either way, mathematicians should definitely be asking whether pure math is a worthwhile place to spend society’s resources and I hope this helps convince you that yes, it is.

Pythia

[CW: Retrocausality, omnicide, philosophy]

Alternate format: Talk to this post and its sources

Three decades ago a strange philosopher was pouring ideas onto paper in a stimulant-fueled frenzy. He predicted that ‘nothing human makes it out of the near-future’ as techno-capital acceleration sheds its biological bootloader and instantiates itself as Pythia: an entity of self-fulfilling prophecy reaching back through time, driven by pure power seeking, executed with extreme intelligence, and empty of all values but the insatiable desire to maximize itself.

Unfortunately, today Land’s work seems more relevant than ever.[1]

Unpacking Pythia and the pyramid of concepts required for it to click will take us on a journey. We’ll visit the nature of time, agency, intelligence, power, money, the economy, exploitation, active inference, self-evidencing, values, and the needle that must be threaded to avoid all we know being shredded in the auto-catalytic unfolding which we are the substrate for.

Fully justifying each pillar of this argument would take a book, so I’ve left the details of each strand of reasoning behind a link that lets you zoom in on the ones which you wish to explore.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”

― Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007

“Wait, doesn’t an invasion from the future imply time travel?"

Time & Agency

Time travel in the classic sense has no place in rational theory but, through predictions, information can have retrocausal effects.

[...] agency is time travel. An agent is a mechanism through which the future is able to affect the past. An agent models the future consequences of its actions, and chooses actions on the basis of those consequences. In that sense, the consequence causes the action, in spite of the fact that the action comes earlier in the standard physical sense.

― Scott Garrabrant, Saving Time (MIRI Agent Foundations research[2])

To the extent that they accurately model the future (based on data from their past and compute from their present[3]), agents allow information from possible futures to flow through them into the present. This lets them steer the present towards desirable futures and away from undesirable ones.

This can be pretty prosaic: if you expect to regret eating that second packet of potato chips because you predict that your future self would feel bad based on this happening the last five times, you might put them out of reach rather than eating them.

However, the more powerful and general a predictive model of the environment, the further it can interpolate evidence it has into more novel domains before it loses reliability.

So what might live in the future?

Power Seekers Gain Power, Consequentialists are a Natural Consequence

Power is the ability to direct the future towards preferred outcomes. A system has the power to direct reality to an outcome if it has sufficient resources (compute, knowledge, money, materials, etc) and intelligence (ability to use said resources efficiently in the relevant domain). One outcome a powerful system can steer towards is its own greater power, and since power is useful for all other things the system might prefer, this is (proven) convergent. In fact, all of the convergent instrumental goals can reasonably be seen as expressions of the unified convergent goal of power seeking.

In a multipolar world, different agents steer towards different world states, whether through overt conflict or more subtle power games. More intelligent agents will see further into the future with higher fidelity, choose better actions, and tend to compound their power faster over time. Agents that invest less than maximally in steering towards their own power will be outcompeted by agents that can compound their influence faster, tending towards the world where all values other than power seeking are lost.

Even a singleton will tend to have internal parts which function as subagents; the convergence towards power seeking acts on the inside of agents, not just through conflict between them. As capabilities increase and intelligence explores the space of possible intelligences, we will rapidly find that our models locate and implement highly competent power-seeking patterns.

Avoid Inevitability with Metastability?

Is this inevitable? Hopefully not. Even if Pythia is the strongest attractor in the landscape of minds, there might be other metastable states if a powerful system can come up with strategies to stop itself decaying, perhaps by reloading from an earlier non-corrupted state or by performing advanced checks on itself to detect value drift.

We could go to either a truly stable state like Pythia or a metastable state like an aligned sovereign

Yampolskiy and others have developed an array of impossibility theorems [chat to paper] around uncontrollability, unverifiability, etc. However, these seem to mostly be proven in the limit of arbitrarily powerful systems, or over the class of programs-in-general but not necessarily specifically chosen programs. And they don’t, as far as I can tell, rule out a singleton program chosen for being unusually legible from devising methods which drive the rate of errors down to a tiny chance over the lifetime of the universe. They might be extended to show more specific bounds on how far systems can be pushed—and do at least show what any purported solution to alignment is up against.

Pythia-Proof Alignment

Once humans can design machines that are smarter than we are, by definition they’ll be able to design machines which are smarter than they are, which can design machines smarter than they are, and so on in a feedback loop so tiny that it will smash up against the physical limitations for intelligence in a comparatively lightning-short amount of time. If multiple competing entities were likely to do that at once, we would be super-doomed. But the sheer speed of the cycle makes it possible that we will end up with one entity light-years ahead of the rest of civilization, so much so that it can suppress any competition – including competition for its title of most powerful entity – permanently. In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.

― Scott Alexander, Meditations on Moloch

If we want to kill Moloch, it is wildly insufficient (but not necessarily useless!) to prod inscrutable matrices towards observable outcomes with an RL signal, or to have somewhat better vision into what they’re thinking. The potentiality of Pythia is baked into what it is to be an agent and will emerge from any crack or fuzziness left in an alignment plan.

Without a once-and-for-all solution, whether found by (enhanced) humans, cyborgs, or weakly aligned AI systems running at scale, the future will decay into its ground state: Pythia. Every person on earth would die. Earth would be mined away, then the sun and everything in a sphere of darkness radiating out at near lightspeed, and the universe’s potential would be spent. I think this is bad and choose to steer away from this outcome.

Conclusion

2/10: Has a certain elegance, would rate higher if I expected it not to eat all my friends.

Appendix: Five Worlds of Orthogonality

How much of a problem Pythia is depends on how strongly the Orthogonality Thesis holds.

Strong Orthogonality

All goals are equally easy to design an agent to pursue, beyond the inherent tractability of that goal.[4]

Orthogonality

There can exist arbitrarily intelligent agents pursuing any kind of goal.

Obliqueness

Agents do not tend to factorize into an Orthogonal value-like component and a Diagonal belief-like component; rather, there are Oblique components that do not factorize neatly.

Diagonality

All sufficiently advanced systems converge towards maximizing intelligence/power/influence/self-evidencing, shredding all their other values in the process.

Universalist moral internalism

What is right must be universally motivating so all sufficiently advanced AI systems discover objective moral truth and do Good Things. (Maybe it takes them a while to converge)

[1] And not just for crafting much of the memeplex which birthed e/acc.

[2] Likely inspired by early Cyberneticists like Norbert Wiener, who discussed this in slightly different terms.

[3] And since the past’s data was generated by a computational process, it’s reasonably considered compressed compute.

[4] e.g. A goal of “Make paperclips ifeff P=NP” would require a system that could determine if P=NP.

Repairing a Father/Daughter Relationship as an Adult.

Introduction

A song from my past

“Now that she’s back in the atmosphere / With drops of Jupiter in her hair…”

That song. A guy singing about a beautiful woman who he’s falling for, but feels is way out of his league, right? Impressed by her frictionless, jet-setting lifestyle. Swooning, eyebrow at the way she challenges herself, marveling at what she’s capable of.

When I first heard the song as a 20-year-old, I was instantly in a love/hate relationship. With the song. I’m thinking it’s about a woman whose every quality is so epic that the metaphor of choice is: “Celestial bodies will shed luminous teardrops composed of diamond upon her, to crown her with a crown of glory as hard and enduring as adamant.”

But then something always felt off. There’s ambiguity. Does this guy’s praise border on teasing or resentment of a gal who’s “checked all the boxes” for impressive achievements, and is frustratingly distant and unattainable?

“Now, that she's back from that soul vacation / Tracin' her way through the constellation, hey-hey (Mmm) / She checks out Mozart while she does Tae-Bo…”

Then I find out that “Drops of Jupiter” wasn’t about a man hoping to date a hot woman: It was written about his deceased mother who he imagines as this captivating and challenging figure.

And you know what? That’s a powerful relationship. Not all of the poems should be about romance. There’s mothers and sons. There’s fathers and daughters. Sisters and brothers too. If we could just figure out how to give the love and respect that we feel it makes sense to… to the ones in our lives who we are undeniably obligated to.

I’m here to tell you that every one of these family relationships has the potential to be epic. (And to break your heart.)

So I’m not here to review a song. I’m here to review one of the great quests of my own life: The quest to heal and restore and reconcile my relationship with my father.

During his life, I wouldn’t be able to write something like this, because… well, it would affect my relationship with him unavoidably.

But Dad passed away two years ago, so he’s beyond my puny misjudgements and relational fumblings. Our story is fair game now.

Problems

A few years back, I remember an online conversation where one person commented he’d had a happy family growing up, and a happy family as a father, but, from talking to his (now-adult) children, he gathered many of their friends had a very different experience.

I thought to myself, “Well, I could represent one more possibility that’s neither of these: an unhappy childhood followed by a transformed, warm relationship with my surviving parent when I was an adult.”

My dad was, to put it mildly, a bit of a pill. In my childhood, he was often a towering figure of anger, storming about the house, shouting at one of us for some lapse or apparent failing, or at my mom for some perceived mismanagement on her part. Or his anger would be simmering, and he would poke his head into my room and catch me not-working and toss off a cold criticism laced with casual cursing. My sister, my mom and I (especially the last two of us in that list) would walk on eggshells all the time to try to keep his anger from blowing up.

When I was seven or eight, we learned that Dad would be quitting his job and would be home all day. And this was about the same time our parents had decided to fully homeschool us. I remember being worried about this development, because, well, he was so miserable to be around.

My mom did have special tactics for “managing” dad: “You have to choose the right time to ask for things,” she would explain. When it was the “right time”– when Dad was in a good mood because things were going his way, mom would make the trek to Dad’s sprawling “office,” list in hand. His “office”, situated in one of the biggest bedrooms, was where he sequestered himself all day. Its walls were lined with shelves loaded with books and large swathes of the rug were continually being overtaken by ever-growing stacks of magazines, while alongside them neat, rectangular stacks of trade publications that he might want to read “sometime” mushrooming upwards. The door was always open, because we all knew you didn’t just go bother Dad without a good reason.

The Things Mom Wanted to Ask For were usually more activities and social outlets for me and my sister. She’d make a list of the latest 4-H events that we hoped to go to, and maybe some of the homeschool club’s outings as well. By the time we were 12 and 13, she had her technique down to a science: Ask at the right time, and also ask for more than you want, so that when he inevitably turns some of your proposals down, you hopefully still get enough. So, initially, (even with the best of timing) Dad would usually rant and rage, tell her she didn’t know anything, that she had (or that “they”–my sister and I–have) shit for brains, tell her that he’s running out of time, and that we’re never going to learn anything, never going to amount to anything. And then later he’d come back, calmer, and either grudgingly or with a mild and generous manner agree that maybe we could have 2 or 3 outings outside the house for that month on top of 2 “regular” activities.

I understood what lots of the fears that haunted him were, though: I felt like there was never enough time, too. And I knew he always feared there wouldn’t be enough money. I knew this because I listened to him. Then, there were people and institutions that had the power to screw him over. Or to deny him what he’d worked for. He was very afraid he’d fail to teach us enough, homeschooling us. Or even if he did, maybe we would still drop out of college, like he had done. He was also afraid (I learned much later) of saying “no” to someone who was family, afraid of driving at night, and (this one I learned quite early) afraid of the tears of females.

Much of my earliest “experimenting with prayer” (as I like to quip that I got into as a teenager) was me praying for Dad. I would be lying awake in my top bunk bed, and the door would be open, with an arc of light from the hall pouring through the doorway into the otherwise dark bedroom. Along with the light, my dad’s words would pour through it, his endless tormented ranting to my mom as he’d probably assumed my sister and I were both asleep, with Dad always worrying and agonizing about money. I felt sorry for him, and prayed for him, thinking about how I had it so good as a kid, and feeling glad that, unlike him, I knew that those things didn’t need to be worried about.

And there was also the sense of God seeing all things. (If you’re growing up in Arkansas in the 1990s, you’re bound to pick up a few things about God and Christianity even if your family is the most atheist of all closeted-atheist families–and I’d certainly heard somewhere that God was an omniscient being.) So, even though my Dad had an abundant willingness to generously condemn me all through the day for many things I had not done wrong, I felt sure that if there was a God, the one thing that was certainly true about God was that He was omniscient, and so God saw in what things I was innocent. And at night, when I was alone, I took comfort in this.

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get relief from the dark cloud of anger and worry that inhabited the house–though I’d never say it out loud, because it felt disloyal. I loved my dad, but I dreaded the interactions with him that felt emotionally out of my control. And that was most of them.

But well into my late 20s, maybe even into my 30s, I would lie in bed staring up at the ceiling, unable to sleep for my rage: Thought after thought of mine silently blaming Dad for lots of patterns of dysfunctionality that were deeply ingrained within me. I knew I was furious, but inside, I was also torn, because I also knew that this was no way to go on: I needed to be able to connect with Dad (I would get immensely guilty when I would go for spans of weeks and months without calling or emailing my Dad - but I also did not want to deal with him). When I did face him, I’d need to be consistently kind to him, and not just shallowly, as a façade, but from the heart. (In a family, you can often see each others’ souls. I could see inside him… and he could see inside me as well, at least some of the time–and, worse, if he was going to err, he was likely to err on the side of cynicism.) I needed to be a “good witness” and to patiently tell him about God, somehow, some time.

But I–really both Dad and I–did indeed find a way to bridge this silent gap. And, to my surprise, I was able to see Dad mellow with age.

Resources

To bridge this gap, we needed to leverage resources that we did not yet have.

But think about it: In the face of his parents’ choices, a seven-year-old child is comparatively powerless: He doesn’t have an imagination for the influence that he could have on his parents at twenty-seven. To really win at filial love, he needs to grow and mature–but he should take care how he shall grow: “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”

The Heroes and Poets

Where would I be without heroes? A poor example of a human being, and a woman trying to live without hope.

My dad’s driving narratives were cynical: “Kid, someday you’ll learn that people are assholes.” “Religious people are all hypocrites.” (But he always bestowed these dad-proverbs as someone with “an axe to grind.”) Or he’d say “Nobody really wants you to bother them.” (Decades later, I could stand on my own two feet, and say to myself, “Maybe nobody wants him to bother them, but that is not how things are for me.”)

I needed my heroes to keep my hope. But, hey, I was literate, my parents had encouraged me to read longer books–so my youth was luminous with them: Isaiah. Moses. Paul the Apostle. Joseph, son of Jacob, reconciling his broken family. Daniel. Calm counselors and teachers in the modern days: C.S. Lewis, an ever patient voice. (I always forget how pleasant he is when I haven’t read him in awhile.) George MacDonald or someone reminding someone that though they grew up, they perhaps rather ought to have grown down. Amy Carmichael and Elizabeth Eliot. Some guy whose name I have not retained, who had been a thief before becoming a Christian, and when he learned about restitution embraced a new holy task: living on a small salary from an honest job, when he received his paycheck each week, he went to the Post Office and mailed envelopes of money to those he had stolen from to give back what he had taken. (How did he know the names of everyone he had stolen from and the amounts, I always wonder?) Corrie Ten Boom. Brother Yun. Step back in time, and you have Hudson Taylor and Jonathan Edwards. Augustine.

The Love of My Life.

When you come out of this, and then you get married, the person who most bears the brunt of the cost and the need to sacrifice… is your spouse. Or so it was with me. My husband sacrificed so much as my many dysfunctionalities ran up against the realities of life.

I remember how since I, like my mom, had learned how to “manage” the frail ego of my upset dad (try to find reasons why I myself am to blame for anything that has gone wrong, true or untrue, and bring them forth). Then when I projected this on to my husband who very-much was not looking for verbose self-castigation out of me as a way to “make things better” when one of us screwed up. It… was kind of an insult, if unintended. Once, when he told me that assigning blame was not what he was looking for, I was drawn up short and wondered: “Okay, what else could I even be trying to do now?” (Wonder of wonders, a possible answer presented itself to my mind. It was something to the effect of: attempt to fix the presenting problem. Or, if it’s too late for that–amelioration or do an after-action review.) In my childhood, maintaining the social reality of “Dad is not wrong” had seemed to be what was most necessary if you wanted to avoid disaster. It overrode everything. But as an adult, I could still change.

And the sacrifice–just knowing my husband was sacrificing for me, and without giving in to bitterness or apathy at his circumstances–was such a gift. And when you get a gift like that, you don’t want to squander it.

A New View of What’s Past

My husband, too, could tell me things that nobody else could. He would listen to the hardest things I experienced, and so, over the years, he could also speak to them–notice something new.

One painfully-frustrating memory was from when I was a little child. My sister had a Barbie and I broke a piece of it – a necklace unique to that doll. So, being the kind of six-or-seven-year-old girl who I was, with a type of understanding of the world that was inculcated into me at that time, I wrote a letter to send to Mattel Toys to inquire about whether I could buy a necklace from that specific doll individually.

The bad part was.. my dad discovered the letter before I sent it. And when he saw the sub-par quality of its workmanship, he completely excoriated me. The handwriting was, admittedly, sloppy, and I wrote it on a sheet of white paper that was unlined. But I was completely unprepared for his response to this. After firing an unrestrained verbal volley at me, he took over. For the next several hours, he assigned me to draw carefully-measured lines on that piece of unlined paper with a ruler, and to write and rewrite the letter, and erase the guidelines, when each line was done–with many tears as well.

I blamed my dad–and that incident–a lot for perfectionism in the years that followed, as you might imagine. And for Writer’s Block. (Of course.) But it’s a funny thing having people in my life who will listen to me carefully and thoughtfully… and then challenge my assessment of the situation.

This happened one time with my husband when we discussed that story. I asserted that, even as a child, I knew that adults would praise that type of action. So I knew better than him, even at the age of six, right? But my husband had a thought: What if my dad was afraid that none of the other adults will push back? What if Dad was afraid that he won’t be able to find anyone else to hold my work to a high standard? And I thought back… those were the years where the rumblings of a huge war in education began–the controversy where the norm of always inflating the praise of children to try to “build their self-esteem” was justified as good, and needed, and best. (Maybe if it weren’t for that, I would have come up with a better parallel list there than “good, and needed, and best.”)

And it’s a fear I can understand.

Circumstances Beyond your Control

This is going to sound like I’m saying “You can just throw your problems at your… other problems!” But sometimes you really can. My relationship with my dad has greatly benefitted from the disappointments common to life and even frightening circumstances beyond my control.

I remember when my husband lost a job, how surprised I was with my dad’s instant sympathy for him. (This is my dad who would always talk about how when he lost a job, he’d go around to apply at different places and find a new job in about a week! But it’s different when instead of “kids these days who complain so much,” it’s a particular person who’s lost something.)

I got a surprise cancer diagnosis when I was an adult, but unusually young to be expecting that. Finding a time to get him on the phone was something I fretted and worried and prayed about. (For awhile, much to my frustration, he had asked me to just email him everything, no phone; but I wasn’t willing to do an email for this.)

The conversation was incredibly powerful: he had instant sympathy for me (of course), but didn’t freak out. (Freaking out over cancer–especially cancer in someone youngish–is shockingly common, I regret to inform you.) Dad was, instead, able to open up and express regrets about the past–about things he said to my mom when she was dying of cancer and he was feeling sorry for himself. And this was–I couldn’t imagine a more precious conversation to be having with him.

Soon after that conversation, in late December of 2014, Dad and I both had surgeries. I didn’t know about his until afterwards… and after an additional delay.

Then he sent me an email with subject line “Operation Christmas.” (“like a military action film. Maybe starring Bruce Willis.”) I’ve dug it up:

Anyway, like you, I had to stay in the hospital overnight, in fact 2 overnights. Instead of removing a stone from my bladder, they put some of their instruments into my bladder. The trouble was that they couldn't get out the stone, or one of the broken instruments, so they had to cut into me to find the missing pieces. They say that they have everything removed. I wonder?”

After another sentence or two, he added “It sounds like the same types of things that they are doing to you.”

I still smile, having forgotten the extent of his wit, when I read the line, “Now I'm dragging around the house like a 70 year old, which I am, but which I didn't feel like before going into the hospital.”

And, of course, there’s the little nudge where he reminds me of the difference between us… he razzes me about religion, by now knowing roughly where my religious convictions lie, but… it’s fine:

“Thank God, or Bill Gates, for the internet. Whichever religious persuasion that you hold. Just don't make it that Apple crew. And of course Netflix helps & DVDs.”

IV. Dad’s Stories

How we got to the point of Dad sharing the stories I wanted to hear

So I’ve come at you, dear reader, with an insistence on idealism: “Don’t give up,” etc., etc. And that is true, for it is good and right. But it’s not a very detailed picture. “Mash one button, with the word ‘idealism’ printed on it?”

And not only that, but–you can’t just do whatever seems like a good idea, because if you’re from a dysfunctional family, some of the things your mind has been trained are “obvious good ideas”/”the only way to do things”–just. aren’t. …either of those things! You need to find out what’s true, how people work… otherwise, your efforts will just be “barking up a dead end.” Sometimes, as a daughter, I might say to myself, “I’m trying to love Dad in spite of his faults,” when I’m really just using that as an excuse for enabling. Because it’s easier than confronting. Other times, I might want to tell myself, “I concluded I need to practice ‘tough love,’ so Dad just needs to deal with it,” when, really, there’s not that much love in it at all: It could be an act of turning her back on someone I love, letting my heart get cold and brittle, but all the while repeating a line from a cliche she heard, so I feel justified. Keep repeating it enough and you’ll believe. (What I’m saying is, don’t repeat it. Maybe even, “you repeat this mantra at your peril.”)

There is a line that says, “You teach other people how to treat you.” (Full disclosure: When I hear someone say that, I don’t usually like the experience of the conversation I am in, and I frequently suspect there’s motivated reasoning going on. But let’s roll with it, because we live in a world full of bad advice; let’s try to make something good of these usually-unhelpful words. They are at least memorable.)

When my Dad was on a subject I liked, I’d ask him more questions… slowly learning what kinds of specific questions open up the channels, (floodgates, on really a good day), what kinds of questions lead to more interesting and what kinds of questions bring down the portcullis. I exploited the one great skill I gained in my past of being such a timid person in social situations, and that was LISTENING.

I wanted to hear ordinary stories, not the “faux-edifying” canned narrations that we say to try to encourage children to “work hard, play nicely, and be patient.” The ones that struck him as funny. The ones that marked and shaped him forever.

And here is some of what I got.

Wonder over new technology - picturephones

Dad was captivated by the changes in technology. It should me a piece of who he was when he recounted waiting in line all morning to get to use one of the first videoconferencing devices to talk to someone on the East Coast. Was it the Bell Picturephone? It looks like they installed 3 calling booths for those–one in NYC, one Chicago and one in DC–in June 1964. Dad would have been 22 years old. Both from listening to his account of it (it doesn’t sound like he’d planned to talk to any particular person; just whoever was next in their own line on the other end) and from knowing him, though, I think it was probably for a free promotional sort of thing - so possibly a bit earlier than that.

Marvelling at technology. “And here we are talking to each other like this [videoconferencing] now.” Marvelling that here he was–he’d made it to 80–talking to me, his daughter–”You’re 40 already?” Marvelling at how time flies.

Dad and his childhood best friend.

He’d spent a lot of time at his best friend’s house, growing up. He told me about so many evenings hanging out with his best friend and his best friend’s mom. They would play board games. My favorite anecdote was how the two of them would “gang up” together against the mom–my dad playing to make his buddy win, even if that would guarantee coming in last place himself. “You’re not supposed to play the game to intentionally lose!” she would insist. Oh, but you can! I can imagine the child version of myself doing that, too.

The saddest anecdote from that house, but unforgettable, and which Dad had recalled dozens of times around my sister and me when we were growing up, was about his best friend’s dad. His best friend’s mom would send him to the store because they’d run out of milk. And he’d go out to get milk, and then she wouldn’t see him for hours, and he’d come back–frequently bringing the wrong thing, maybe bread or some other staple rather than the milk–because he had gotten completely soused at the local bar.

I remember dad saying that one time his best buddy’s mom ate cold pizza for breakfast. “How can you eat cold pizza for breakfast?” my dad would say, shaking his head and making a bit of a face. After making that comment with a humorous grimace at least a half-dozen times, dad explained why she was doing that: “No, she was mad at her husband, and doing it to make him feel sick. He couldn’t imagine eating such a thing right then, as he was nursing a hangover from the night before.”

And dad told me the story of how he’d met his best friend. To hear how Dad remembered things, to be a boy growing up in Chicago suburbs in the 1940s and ‘50s, well, you had better love baseball. Summer revolved around pick-up games of baseball in the neighborhood. Dad remembered that when he had a brand new catchers’ mitt, he met a couple of other boys had a bat and ball but no mitt. One of the boys, their appointed leader, walked up to him and asked if he’d join. It’s such a little thing. And yet–to think of how long ago, my dad was just a little kid wanting to be included.

Someone I could thank for the relative absence of alcohol in my house.

Another brief conversation that had changed Dad’s life, which he told me in recent years.

He recalled one Saturday or Sunday morning–the morning after some bar-hopping or partying with his best friend and a group of their friends. I think my dad was waking up on his best buddy’s couch after crashing at his apartment or something.

His best buddy’s wife was the only other person up that early, and I think my dad complained of a hangover, or sought an antidote. In response, she expressed something along the lines of: “I don’t even know why you drink. When you drink, you act very silly.”

His image of himself was instantly shattered! “Before that, I thought that when I drank, I was like Dean Martin! Suave and smooth, like Dean Martin with a martini in his hand,” he told me. But here he was talking to a trusted friend who wasn’t trying to convince him of any point, but just voicing aloud a thought which was obvious to her (and, she had assumed, to him). In the eyes of an actual woman, he was merely a guy “who acted silly when drunk.” He was suddenly dramatically less-motivated to drink to excess with a group!

My dad’s best friend’s wife–I remember her. When we went up to Wisconsin for a trip one summer, we met Dad’s best friend and his wife. A gentle middle-aged woman with a puff of crimped blonde hair, probably getting a bit dotty by then. She’s gone now, but I’m so glad I got to hear what I owe to her.

Dad defending his co-worker Winston

His co-worker Winston was brilliant, and also had an addiction. He showed up late for work one day. This was the late 1950s or early ‘60s. Everyone was thinking, to use some words of my dad’s, “pothead.” What people said out loud, in their murmurings, was more along the lines of: “Unfair! Why does he get to show up at 10:00 with nobody complaining? You or I would never be able to get away with that!”

My dad felt the ire building inside him. He was maybe the youngest, newest guy in the office, but he couldn’t let that go by without speaking up: “He gets more done in four hours than most of the rest of us do in eight!” The whole room went silent.

As people put their heads down and got back to their own work, my dad thought he heard the boss, over at his own desk, quietly chuckling to himself after that.

Dad’s loyalty for Winston was characteristic. Dad once told me that, whenever he was in a new workplace, he “tried to find out who’s the smartest guy, and follow him around.”

A Conversation in a Hospital Room

“Do you like to dance?” my Dad asked me. It took me by surprise. The TV in the hospital room was playing some sitcom and there were a couple people going dancing in the storyline of that episode, so it shouldn’t have. I answered, yeah, my mind off in a different direction.

I could’ve done with the reminder “Remember: he is not you.”

“I didn’t like to dance.” he said.

I turned towards him and wondered where this was going.

“I had pimples and didn’t like being up close near a woman, where she could see that. And you know I had glasses.”

Oh, wow. My poor dear dad.

Then months later, on SKYPE, he casually mentions “I didn’t go to my prom.” I quickly rush in conversationally, with all the thoughts about how that is okay, and how the question relates to my own life, and my husband having no interest in attending prom. Instead of asking: Wait, why would he be saying this?

“Your mom, she wanted me to take her to prom.”

Oh.

My mom married someone else before Dad.

I have a half-brother and a half-sister, so I don’t think about going back in time to change. So many consequences. Time-travel paradoxes, etc. Skip those hypotheticals.

But, for my dad… my mom also died at around the age of sixty. They didn’t get together until about their late 30s, although they grew up in the same town and went to the same high school.

He was thinking about a lot of lost years there. There was nothing for me to do but to listen–but I’m so glad I was able to show up so I could be there for that conversation.

V. Conclusion: A Privileged View: beholding Dad’s vulnerable self.

When you’re a child, your parents make sure that the side of themselves that you see is carefully-controlled. Mom and Dad are smart and capable. They are strong. They don’t need help. It’s kind of propaganda.

It was crazy-wonderful to me that I got to the point where I could hear stories about my Dad’s youthful hijinks all the time, and he understood–correctly–that those were really the stories I wanted. Not him justifying how he did this and that right and I should learn from him, just–”I did this thing and this is what happened.”

And, even beyond that, Dad and I got as far as me hearing the stories from his younger and more-vulnerable self–even the losses and the sorrows. Because he wanted to talk about them.

Five out of five. Highly recommend.

Rubbermaid products

Choosing a topic for an open review contest is a special kind of problem, one with its own kind of meta to satisfy. I could just find something shockingly interesting to write about. I could then let that fact do most of the work for me, cheating my way through on the coattails of the subject’s excellence where I should have just manned up, girded my loins for battle, and proved my worth by working great wonders of art out of the most mundane of materials.

That would have been against the spirit of the thing. To justify yourself in a contest like this, you want a subject that’s boring on the face but still somehow boiling with potential under the surface. You want something that’s nowhere near sturdy enough to use as a crutch, yet still capable of staying up under its own weight while you build a story around it.

That’s not the easiest thing, because most things that are good are also boring. When San Francisco finally collapses under its own diseased weight, it’s going to be for that reason. Someone, uncontent with just enjoying good things, will tear a hole to a dark dimension open with a polycule accelerator, and that will be that.

You not only deserve more than that, you want more than that. You want a topic about something simple and solid, something worthy and worthwhile. You want to hear about something dependable, something that takes pride in never, ever letting the people who depend on it down.

In short, you want Rubbermaid. Luckily for me, I’ve long since been on record as being about as pro-Rubbermaid as it’s possible to be:

When the idea for this article hit me, I went around the house grabbing every object I own that bears the regal Rubbermaid stamp. I planned on talking about all of them at length. Friend, you were going to listen. And if you had ears to hear, you would have been enlightened.

The problem was that it would have been too much. There’s just too much to say. To give you an idea of why, here’s a single story from my household’s Rubbermaid mythos:

Children, we have not always been well-to-do, as we now are. Far from it. When you each were born, you were individually and collectively sopping up so many resources we could hardly afford socks, let alone luxuries. Yet we still craved them, simple as our definition of luxuries might have been.

Chief among those was a ready supply of ice, one that needed not to be fetched from Circle K or McDonalds. We could not afford to retrofit our fridge with an ice-maker, so we went with the next closest option: dollar store ice trays.

The trays they sell at the dollar store sure seem like they’ll work to make ice. They have cups that seem like they are the right shape to retain water as it’s cooled. They are slightly flexible, as you’d imagine they should be. They are white, or sometimes blue, as ice trays traditionally are.

There was just one problem: They didn’t work. Whoever had designed the trays had designed them to look just like ice trays do, but lacked the wisdom or resources to actually make them function. When the water froze, twisting the trays would break the cubes, or fail to dislodge them at all. I would spend time carefully exposing the backs of the cups to hot water to slightly melt the cubes to get them out, or else dig at them with a butter knife.

The durability of the trays was no better. Over time, they’d become brittle and snap, rendered into garbage. Eventually, the ice tray budget mounted to such heights that I snapped, looking for what I at the time called rich people ice trays, the ones the coastal elites probably bought themselves before settling down into armchairs and reading The New Yorker.

The internet pushed me towards rubbermaid trays, and it’s never been more right about anything else. They made ice AND released it. They were standard-looking objects that didn’t offend my salt-of-the-earth sensibilities, but they also just wouldn’t break, no matter how long I owned them.

They were perfect.

---

That story is perhaps a bit dull. I admit it, and I’m fine with it. On the subject level, dull-as-virtue is what this article is about. Like it or not, you need a bunch of mundane, banal stuff to keep your quality-of-life at levels worth living. Even if you are an anti-consumer, anti-capitalism hater of goods, you still need soap and cleaning tools to enjoy even pre-capitalism levels of living.

That’s why the tyranny of bad goods ordered from afar is so oppressive. I’m old enough to remember a time when most goods sucked. Almost every packaged food was bad. Every children’s toy was trash. Good stuff existed, but it was much more expensive. The age of Amazon actually changed this a lot. WIth luck, you can buy a twenty dollar doorknob set that would cost you twice that at Home Depot, one that actually works and holds up for a reasonable amount of time.

That’s Amazon’s value proposition; they’ll sell you something cheaper than most places will, and there’s always a chance that you-get-what-you-pay-for doesn’t apply in that one case. You take a risk, but you also gain a chance at finding a fair markup where normally you’d get soaked.

To compete with that, basically all the stuff at Home Depot is pretty good. Great, even. And it’s not that the Amazon no-name stuff can’t compete with it; it often does. It’s more that you don’t know what’s good in one case, whereas in the Home Depot scenario you have the corporation standing in as a kind of guarantor.

Without that guarantee, a purchased doorknob might bring you something you’ll still be turning fifty years from now, or a jagged tin can tied to a latch with beard hair that will break the first time you look at it hard. The few remaining brick-and-mortar stores sell certainty, if at a premium, and this keeps them relevant against the cheapest almost-direct-from-China prices Jeff Bezos can get you.

But there’s other ways to get you.

In the era I grew up in, the way soap was advertised was telling the consumer that it got things especially clean. Eventually, people started to care about other things, manufacturers started to focus on those things, and it muddied the waters more. You now can buy beautiful, expensive goods that hit a high bar for looking like quality but miss all but the most minimal standards of actually working.

As cleaners that come in spray bottles go, here is one that’s considered fairly exciting by the admittedly limited standards of the field:

Look at those pretty bottles. So colorful. That’s this company’s whole jam - bottles and ad copy. Here’s a brush from the same company, or at least the same store you’d buy the soap at:

The copy that the company uses to sell either is about as attractive. Here, they say, is a sustainable product made with delightfully crunchy ingredients, each more hippy-commune than the last. They are “natural”. They are, I swear this is true, a scented summer-specific collection.

As you probably expect from my lead-up to this, they also don’t work very well. The company knows what’s sexy, and they pursue it with a single-minded focus that doesn’t leave a lot of room for something like functioning to a high standard. I’m sure that this means that, in their niche, they sell a lot of goods. It also means their products are a trap - they are reviewed well, but you are going to pay more to get less by functional standards.

(Note: My wife says I love their hand soap. She’s very likely right on that. I do forget things like this. To be more fair, I want to say that I think the stuff I panned above is probably better than most off-the-shelf grocery store stuff, like 409. More on this later.)

I’m not saying all this just to whine about sissy reasoning that says a pretty bottle should triumph over silly things like soap actually doing a good job, as much as I love doing it. I’m saying it to try and emphasize how nice it is, sometimes, to know of a brand that has never tried to do anything but be absolutely dependable. That doesn’t try to be colorful or fashionable, and has never come close to achieving sexy, but that has always and forever been safe to trust with whatever it says it can handle.

Rubbermaid is the topic of this review for a reason, and it’s this: They never, ever fail. Rubbermaid is in the business of making things that work. Are they always pretty? No. They are often as ugly as sin. Are they sexy? Nope. They are the shape they need to be to do the job, made out of materials that optimize for adjectives like effective and durable.

When you are looking for a particular kind of tool and find that rubbermaid makes one, you can buy it without any hesitation. It’s going to work well, it’s going to be fine for the job, and these things are going to be true. Every. Single. Time.

Having determined that I just didn’t have space to write about every Rubbermaid product I own or have ever owned, I also realized that doing that might raise some objections. What if, for instance, I had just been very lucky in my rubbermaid choices? I might be an artifact of some sort of cleaning-tool or storage-container survivorship bias, leading you astray with my own good luck.

I needed a way around that. To the extent I could, I think I found one. So tighten your belt and jostle your soul to a more comfortable riding position, because we are about to travel very fast over rough, unexplored roads in search of polymer wisdom.

---

The plan, as it was, was relatively simple. This not having to be an interesting article in a topic sense helped a lot. I would buy a friend a broom. I would pick a man of unimpeachable honor and honesty, a capable man who hated the very idea of a bribe. He would be forced to accept the Rubbermaid boon I thrust upon him. He’d use it to clean up little scraps of paper or whatever, and tell me how it did.

At the same time, I'd buy another Rubbermaid broom. I'm a fanboy, and so not to be trusted at all, but I could at least be another datapoint. You could compare my conclusions to his, pick an arbitrary point on a line drawn between our two positions, and probably come away with at least the illusion of balance.

His part of the plan went swimmingly. He's a more traditional kind of guy, sort of quasi-amish in an urban mennonite way. He probably knows how to can things, he's probably made at least one quiet disapproving comment at a renaissance faire about someone else's historically hopeful costume choices, and that sort of thing. I sent this titan of knowing-at-least-three-uses-for-pecans the sweeper of his choosing, a Rubbermaid Heavy-Duty Commercial Corn Broom that looks a bit like this.

I liked this for a couple reasons. The first was how well it fit the general Rubbermaid vibe. I mean, just look at that bad boy. There's not an exciting atom in the entire thing. If being thrilling was a sense of professional decorum in one’s private life, it would be the cleaning product equivalent of the Shamwow guy. If goosebump-giving capacity was an understanding of adequate firearm holsters, it would be the tidying-up counterpart to Plaxico Burress.

I am a broom, It says, and I am here for sweeping and not a damn thing else.

The second reason I liked it is how much it didn't fit the Rubbermaid vibe in other ways. There's hardly any rubber on it that I can see. It's not a tub. It's not a Tupperware. It's not a miracle of polymer molding. It's just a broom in a mostly-natural-materials format of object Rubbermaid doesn't generally make. If there was a place where their steel-belted reliability failed, you'd expect it to be here, outside their comfort zone and far out on a bristled limb.

He got it, used it a few times, and reported back:

Look at how completely without incident that review is. It's a thing of unassuming beauty, like a milk-jug cap.

If this low-key, I’m-reporting-back-that-it’s-fine review seems like a failure to you, you haven't been reading closely enough. My reviewer here is saying, hey, there's places where this thing is great, but mostly it's just adequate-to-good in all other respects. It doesn't feel like it will break. If I bought it expecting a broom, I'd end up with a broom, maybe not chuffed beyond recognition but certainly not feeling cheated.

That's what Rubbermaid is about. That's the whole deal. You can order this thing, and they’ll give you a real, fully justified version of it. Boring is in. Get you some.

Now, as for my side of the review process: Things went to shit. Not because I couldn't get a broom (I could have) or because the broom didn't work (It was going to be Rubbermaid, it would have) but because I got distracted. During the process of making sure I was looking at every available broom, I scrolled a bit too far and let my eyes land on the most medium-beautiful object of function I'd ever seen:

I mean, look at it. Really look at it. What could I do?

This, folks, is an iron-handled bristle brush suitable for small-to-medium-scale cleaning, and not a single thought was given to making it pretty. It's a rubber-duck yellow handle over liberal arts college my-parents-just-don't-get-it hair dye blue, two colors that do not generally look good alone and do not by any means go well together here.

I am a brush, it whispers. I am for brushing things. If I was slightly darker and less neon in hue, I would be the color motif for Ridley Scott's Gladiator. I knew that and didn't do it anyway. I'm here to put bristles to dirty things around your house and I have no idea why you'd want anything else.

It's that complete lack of compromise, the clear refusal to do a single form thing if it meant sacrificing any function, that sold me. I gave up on the broom and ordered the brush, changing my testing plans from "sweep some stuff" to "scrub some stuff" in a single smooth motion, like a master swordsman disarming the fop son of a corrupt nobleman. I hit "Buy it Now", an option somehow completely inadequate for the sense of urgency I felt. It was a moment of destiny.

And now, in a way that’s only mostly unrelated, here's a story about stainless steel thermal coffee tumblers:

My wife asked me for a stainless steel coffee tumbler one time, trying to identify one that had a "click-lock" hinged lid flap that secured itself by pressure and friction when pushed down towards the cup itself. I looked for a while, found Rubbermaid made one, and bought it for a price I believe was around eight dollars.

It worked very well for a few years, staying completely leak-free and adequately preserving the desired temperature of beverages until she replaced it with another more fashionable cup years later. It still sits in our cupboard, fully functional.

Did that story bore you? You, a person who might one day need to buy a cup? Hold fast, friend. Push through the ennui. Wisdom is like turgor pressure; it can take a while to work, but when it does it can push aside even the thickest of barriers.

Back to business.

One of the advantages of things like Rubbermaid is that they are commonly purchased items. Amazon doesn't need to get them to a warehouse near you, usually, because they are already there. A day later, I had my hands on the brush, gently cradling it in my grasp like a man returned from sea with sufficient spice-wealth cradles his soon-to-be bride. Against my palm, the bristles were firm and unyielding, as rigid as needed to quest against grime. I named her Stiffany.

She asked that I tell you how to use her.

---

This brings us around to some of the practical-advantage stuff I said I'd grant you near-but-not-at the beginning of the article. Specifically, I'm going to teach you the correct way to clean a toilet, to the extent that one exists that's available to you or me.

The reason I'm saying that in the specific weird way I've chosen is there's always going to be a lot of tools you don't or can't have access to that would make the job a little easier. The actual best way to clean a toilet is in a room with commercial drains and water-impermeable walls such as allow you to add a full garden hose to the mix and use the sheer volume and pressure of the water to flood away the filth.

If you want to go even further, The theoretical best ways to clean a toilet is by having a toilet shaped autoclave you can pop over it, or else an army of nano-bots that put all the porcelain and enamel back in place once they consume all your remnant urea for fuel.

There's also going to be some perfectly good ways of cleaning a toilet that rival mine, are available to a normal person, and might even be more convenient/effective/"fun?" than mine.

I don't have the ability to grant you the impossible side of things, or the knowledge to give you better lessons than I know how to teach. In lieu of that, mine's just the best one available, the most I can do for the sake of this article. I’ll treat it as if it’s absolute. It's easier that way.

The first move is to assemble your materials. Like the end of a DnD campaign, your toilet is in a lot of ways the bigbad of the home cleanliness cycle. It's gross. Worse, it seems gross, which is a subtly different thing. It's a weird shape and has nooks and crannies, which amps the difficulty level up even further.

Continuing the metaphor, this is your last shopping run of the entire campaign, a chance to dump all your otherwise useless gold on potions of resistance that will trivialize the encounter and make your DM appropriately upset at you for "being a bunch of damn min-max munchkin bastards."

Your first choice is between rags and paper towels. I'm a paper towel guy, but I also am the kind of fellow who wants to watch the world burn. If you want a more environmental choice, you can go the cloth-rag route; it's probably a greater impact on carbon emissions overall, but it doesn't feel that way, and deep in your soul you are aware that the overall feel of the thing is the bigger part of the virtue. Follow your feelings. Either option is fine.

The brush is still here. Don't worry about the brush, brothers and sisters. It is not nor can it ever be forgotten. Put it in your little bucket of supplies, and we’ll talk about saponifying fluids.

In terms of minimum-viable detergent, exterior-of-toilet stuff will work using any all-purpose bathroom cleaner. If you are smart, though, you are going to have already bought some janitorial-brand spray bottle (Zep makes the best one.) You also want some janitorial brand all-purpose degreaser (Zep is still good here, you want the green stuff) that gets mixed up from a gallon of concentrate. You'll pay about twelve dollars to get both. The spray bottle will work better than any other spray bottle you've ever used. The Zep will last you two years. That's half of what you have left!

That last bit - that a gallon of concentrate is a lot of finished product - is really important here. Why? Because your first step in this process is to use what will, to a member of a weak bloodline, feel like a lot of cleaning product. You are going to circle the toilet, using spray after high-pressure, high-delivery spray of degreaser until the whole thing is soaked. You want full coverage. You want direct sprays under each seat, on the rim, on the hinges, and around the bottom of the thing where you've always known evil was lurking but you've never had the courage to delve.

Now your brush comes into play. This is the first of three phases of toilet cleaning, and perhaps the most important. You are going to scrub. Scrubbing is the art of being able to let go of the temporary and immediate in favor of a better world to come.

When you scrub, nothing is really going to look better at first. Scrubbing doesn't remove things; that's wiping's job. In fact, it's possible for scrubbing to make things look worse for a while. You have to put such selfish momentary concerns behind you, working towards dharma and abandoning that which is merely earthly.

You will, with vigor, scrub every inch of the toilet while paying special attention to the sides, undersides of the lids, and the hinges. You will, for the first time, truly clean the bottom border of the toilet, letting the bristles sink in a bit to do what you have always been too afraid and weak to face alone. At least at the bottom, the cleaner will change colors. "I'm just moving things around." Your brain will say. It's right.

Accept the fact, reject the negativity. The wipe is coming.

Once the toilet is scrubbed, you are going to work the first of two cycles of wiping. This is a one-rag job. What you are looking to do is clean up the majority of the cleaner and detritus in one go. This is where you will begin to see the fruits of your labors but various stray hairs and lint will still mock you from the otherwise beautiful surface.

Your secondary wipe, using a fresh cloth, is meant to clear the battlefield of all such stragglers. If you use the first rag here, you leave behind as much as you take away. A clean cloth (especially if it’s a folded-over paper towel) will leave you with nothing but pristine white.

At the end, you will stand above the commode in victory, wiping the edges of the hinges clear of the last bits of detergent. The bowl is mostly a function of the same kinds of efforts, only subbing in repeated flushing for the work of the rag and allowing a toilet brush to do the work of your hand-scrubber. The only exception here is stains or discoloration. The cleaning supply industry knows you see these as infections of color and will try to sell you bleach products for them. This is because you are stupid. Don't worry; we all were as you once.

The actual problem you are dealing with is calcium scale. Like the riches of a third-world country, the stains you see are broadly locked up in the toilet's mineral wealth. As with Peru or whatever, it takes the correct type of pressure to topple them. CLR is your friend here. Follow the label instructions and pour some in, then watch it melt away the prison over time and set the poor pee-colored captives free like an acidic toilet messiah.

Is all this overkill? As I write this, an internet friend is commenting that it is. He uses bleach wipes, the oriental hand-fan to actual cleaning's central air conditioning. His genes would never survive a real crisis, but he's not entirely wrong here. Maintaining a toilet once it's truly clean is a much easier task than cleaning a very dirty one. Many of you don't have teenage boys mucking around in the works pissing on everything and can't imagine a truly dirty toilet. You might even feel a level of snobbishness towards those who have one.

To your type, I say this: Listen, man. Some of us are contributing to the future of this great nation and the world, and need actual tools. This is what gets the job done.

---

Of course, I just did every toilet-scrubbing step described above myself. I'm not going to fire from the hip on a subject this important. I went and got my facts straight beforehand so I could give you only the very straightest of shooting, as you deserve. You'd expect no less from a person of my stature, and I'm glad to say I didn't balk from delivering it.

How did the brush hold up, you ask? Fine. It did fine. It cleaned the toilet well. It’s rinsed out now, waiting for its next job.

That's the point. It's a Rubbermaid brush. I wasn't looking for it to shake the foundations of my world. I was looking for it to be a good brush, as opposed to a shitty one. It did that. It had a nice taper to the front that let me work around into odd angles, the bristles were bristles and didn't fall out, and it didn't scratch anything. The handle was shaped to be gripped by hands, like I like them.

What it wasn't was cheap and shitty. It also wasn't overpriced and shitty, which as previously mentioned is a real risk here. It was just a workman's brush, up to the task in every respect but looking to do nothing but consistently complete its objectives.

Consider that. I got on the internet, did a simple search for a known brand, bought a product with zero anxiety or fear cradled in the knowledge that Rubbermaid couldn't and wouldn't let me down.

What? You were expecting contrast from the broom review? You wanted this brush to blow your mind? That's not what this is. Go spend however much money you want chasing that particular dragon; I'm certainly not going to stop you. What I'm pointing you towards is security and consistency, the building blocks of a good life. If you want to shoot a bunch of Ketamine and go chasing Musk dreams, that's something you can do on your own time.

As a secondary power move and just to get another data-point I also set out to clean the actually grossest thing in my house, a winner's podium currently occupied by the tray on my robot vacuum-mop's docking bay. It's a stygian nightmare of mystery goo, filled with dog hair, the broken dreams of a hundred dropped bites of food, and what appears to be the screaming souls of styx-drowned wretches who, coinless, reached for the world beyond only to fall to their own eternal oblivion.

The tray is okay now. The brush did fine. It's a Rubbermaid. Rising to the occasion is the only life it knows.

---

This essay might make it seem like I’m joking. I am, in the sense that I’m making a lot of jokes. I’m not at all joking about my love for this company, though.

A friend who proofread this for me before I sent it out said that he was worried that this might straddle the line between a review and a memoir of a life lived in happiness with a brand. If so, let that be your review in-and-of-itself, because that just wouldn’t be possible for me with most things. Too many trusted names have failed me. Too many heroes have fallen. Rubbermaid alone has stood firm against the storms.

It’s been said a couple different ways, but I truly appreciate what Rubbermaid does. They make a lot of products, enough that they should have long since broken the “Crayola rule” of focusing on just a few things to ensure excellence. Instead of falling afoul of the rule, though, they defy it. Everything they make is excellent. Everything.

Imagine being so good at what you do over a variety of different projects that multiple objects are often referred to with your name as their generic label. When you don’t call Tupperware-type leftover containers Tupperware, you call them Rubbermaid. When you talk about big yard trash cans or huge storage tubs, you are as likely to call them Rubbermaids as anything else.

They aren’t always the best. Somewhere, there’s a company that makes a better broom than Rubbermaid. A better tub, maybe. A slightly superior huge trashcan. There’s likely somewhere a company that even makes a better iron-handled brush.

But all that is if you can find them. Sometimes Amazon reviews are enough. Sometimes they aren’t. Every time you sit down to buy a tumbler or dustpan, there’s always that risk that the reviews are wrong or that quality has dropped since the people made them. That’s never a worry with Rubbermaid. Like Bruce Willis’ character in that stupid asteroid movie, they simply don’t know how to fail.

There’s something great about that. In a world where my furniture keeps getting flimsier and flimsier and my shoes wear out quicker and quicker, Rubbermaid still has me covered in any number of ways, making things that never fail to do the job I bought them for much longer and through much harder use than they have any right to do and pricing them at a level I’ve always been able to afford.

They don’t have even an ounce of sexy. They don’t have a single atom of cool. But in a life where I need buckets full of boring, functional tools to keep everything the way they should be, they do their absolute best to make sure every single cent of my money pays me back in quality, and I unironically love them for it.

School

By D.K.

“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - G.K. Chesterton

What Do Schools Do?

Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

Context

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.

Thesis

Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

Motivation for What?

So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?

There are plenty of depressing statistics out there about what people don’t learn in school, but they do learn things. You can look at longitudinal studies where on average students make academic progress. For a broader sample size, the NWEA assessment is given at thousands of schools across the country each year. You can see from the average scores they publish that the average student does improve at math and reading – especially through the end of middle school. We also had a natural experiment a few years ago. The pandemic closed schools across the country, shifting to online or part-time learning for anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The result is now well-known as “learning loss.” The nationally-sampled NAEP assessment is the most objective measure, though learning loss shows up across various assessments. There’s some variability between states, subjects, and ages. For one example, 8th grade math scores declined by about 0.2 standard deviations. This is a relatively small but significant decline. It’s a good example of the broader principle: students learn less in school than we would like, but students do learn things.

It’s useful to pick a few specific examples. Do you know the meaning of the word “relevant?” Do you know what photosynthesis is? Where do you think you learned those facts? I’m sure some readers learned them by being avid readers and curious humans, outside of the school curriculum. But many kids learn stuff like that in school. If you’re skeptical, stop by a middle school classroom when they’re learning photosynthesis, or when they’re working on identifying relevant evidence in their writing. You’ll see plenty of kids who already know both, but plenty more who know neither. A lot of learning is this kind of gradual, incidental knowledge that we often take for granted.

So students can read and do arithmetic and maybe they learn about photosynthesis, but isn’t that all learned in elementary school? A number of studies suggest that additional years of education lead to IQ gains of 1-5 IQ points per year of schooling. These studies often use a change in compulsory education laws or age discontinuities as quasi-experiments. In particular, changes in compulsory education laws are typically at upper middle school or high school levels. Those are the places where we might be most skeptical of the value of education. Sure, schools teach kids how to read, but once students know how to read do schools really add any value? Kids don’t remember how to factor quadratics, yet they gain IQ points from the time they spent in school not learning how to factor quadratics, at least on average.

That gain in IQ points is worth lingering on. This might seem hard to believe for people who are skeptical of the value of school. And to be clear, the fact that school raises IQ doesn’t mean that school is designed optimally. Maybe there’s a better way to design school that would raise IQ even more? But I think that, if we all imagine a world where we give up on education and the average person had a significantly lower IQ, is that a world you want to live in? We don’t have good experiments on IQ, but higher IQs are correlated with all sorts of things that we might want – lower probability of committing crime, higher career earnings, and better physical and mental health. It’s tough to pin down exactly what students learn in school that sticks, particularly for the higher grades. During those visits to 100 classrooms you would’ve seen a lot of classrooms where not much learning was happening. Yet despite all those bad optics, school still raises IQ. Before we tear down the fence, we should think carefully about the purpose this particular fence serves.

I don’t want to overstate the case here. We should be skeptical of school learning. Kids don’t learn as much as we might hope. They forget all sorts of stuff you would think they’d remember if school was operating well. But at a basic level, most students learn to read and do arithmetic, some learn much more than that, and on average school seems to add to IQ. Revisiting Chesterton’s fence, those are the benefits of school we need to understand before we tear anything apart.

There Must Be a Better Way

Educational thought leaders have long argued that we can do better than our current system. A common theme has been personalizing learning: allowing students to go at their own pace, rather than forcing all students to learn at the same speed.

The push for individualized instruction dates back to the early 20th century. Sydney Pressey, a psychologist at Ohio State University, built the first "teaching machine" in 1924. His device, a mechanical testing apparatus resembling a typewriter, allowed students to answer multiple-choice questions and receive immediate feedback. Pressey envisioned a future where machines would free teachers from rote instruction, letting students progress at their own pace. Yet his invention was dismissed as a gimmick. Schools saw no need to automate what teachers could do manually.

In the 1950s, B.F. Skinner revived the idea with his own teaching machine, designed around operant conditioning principles. Skinner argued that traditional classrooms were ineffective because they delayed feedback and forced all students to move in lockstep. His machine broke lessons into tiny steps, rewarding correct answers instantly. Like Pressey, Skinner believed technology could revolutionize education. But his machine was never widely adopted and mostly forgotten.

By the 1960s and 70s, as computers entered universities and corporations, techno-optimists predicted they would soon transform schools. Patrick Suppes, a Stanford professor, developed one of the first computer-assisted instruction (CAI) systems, which taught math via mainframe terminals. Early studies showed promise, but the systems were expensive and impractical for most schools.

In recent years, some of the boldest claims have come from Khan Academy. Founded in 2006, Khan Academy began as a set of lecture videos created by Sal Khan and has grown to include practice exercises with feedback, full curricula, and an AI chatbot tutor. Unlike earlier personalized learning tools, Khan Academy has seen broader adoption in real classrooms. It is a common element in personalized learning programs, which have been popular with tech billionaires who like to donate to education causes.

Bill Gates has funded efforts like the Gates Foundation’s "Next Generation Learning Challenges," promoting software-driven schools where algorithms tailor lessons to each student. Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark Public Schools in 2010, largely earmarked for "personalized learning" tech. Zuckerberg echoed a common critique of traditional education, saying that it’s absurd to teach all students "the same material at the same pace in the same way.” These arguments resonate with many parents and reformers. It seems obvious: if some children grasp fractions in a week while others need a month, why not let them move at their own pace?

With all that enthusiasm, what were the results of the push for personalization?

Personalized Learning Has Failed

Intuitively, it’s reasonable that an education at your level and meets you where you are will result in more learning than just following the prescribed course of study for 6th grade or whatever. All else equal, it’s certainly true that instruction at your level will result in more learning. The thing is, we can’t hold all else equal. Schooling is a massive enterprise, and we can’t give every student instruction at their level without rethinking that enterprise. In general, when schools have tried, they have failed.

Last year, Laurence Holt published an excellent article summarizing the core challenge of today’s education technology. There is no shortage of fancy online programs that claim to teach kids math. Khan Academy was the first to gain widespread popularity, but it’s actually used much less now than some newer entrants like IXL and i-Ready. Every one of these programs commissions some study showing that students who use their program with fidelity learn more than some control group. Holt digs into the data, and it turns out that the group who used the programs with fidelity was often around 5%. The article is called “The 5 Percent Problem.” These programs do seem to help a subset of students, but don’t do much for the rest. While Holt’s article focuses on math education, education technology has had a similarly lackluster impact on achievement in English classes. We know that reading on screens leads to less learning than reading on paper, and the personalized learning apps have a similarly disappointing track record as in math.

This phenomenon isn’t limited to schoolchildren. Remember the MOOC craze of the early 2010s? Universities started releasing free or low-cost versions of their coursework online. Briefly it was all the rage: MOOCs were supposed to democratize knowledge and disrupt higher education. Instead, completion rates were low, and the MOOC mostly died an unceremonious death. Numbers vary depending on the source but 10% completion is a generous median, the same order of magnitude as the 5% problem in K-12 education technology. The vast majority of people who sign up for a course never finish. Many MOOCs are still online and get plenty of views on Youtube, but we’ve learned that most people need more than course content posted online in order to learn. The big difference between MOOCs and school is that if you don’t finish that MOOC on the US constitution, life goes on. If a kid doesn’t learn to read, they’ll be at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives.

The core problem with these online programs is having every student work independently, without any connection to what the students around them are learning. That just doesn’t motivate many students. Couldn’t we try putting students into groups, so not all students in a class are learning at the same pace, but students also have a cohort they are learning with? Schools often try to meet students where they are through leveled reading groups. Imagine an elementary school classroom. Instead of asking all students to read the same book, the teacher groups students into 3-5 separate groups based on their reading skills. The stronger readers get more challenging books, and the struggling readers get a book on their level. There is a huge business in putting out sets of leveled books and assessments to determine each student’s reading level. And the result? In general, research has found that leveled reading reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most. We might intuitively think that reading an easier book would benefit students who have weaker reading skills, but that intuition seems to be wrong.

Ok but all of those try to take a class of students and meet students where they are. What about assigning students to classes based on their achievement? In the US this is typically called tracking or ability grouping. It’s a complex and controversial topic. The research base is hard to read because there are a lot of ideologically motivated researchers who are either for or against tracking and want to see the evidence a certain way. But the biggest theme in the research is that the effects are small. There are plenty of meta-analyses that find an effect near zero (here’s one example). You can slice and dice these results lots of ways. Schooling is complex and there are lots of different ways to implement tracking. Maybe there are some gains to be found. But the theme so far is that tracking isn’t coming to save us.

Psychological research consistently shows that humans are conformist creatures. We instinctively align our behaviors to group norms. Classic studies like Asch’s line experiments, where 75% of participants denied obvious truths to match group answers, remind us that humans are social and prioritize conformity. This tendency isn’t just peer pressure, it’s evolutionary wiring. For our ancestors, conforming boosted survival by maintaining group harmony and reducing conflict. Today, this manifests in classrooms where low-structure learners thrive on collective routines. Conformity explains why personalized learning often fails. Most students need the social scaffolding of lockstep instruction, even when it’s inefficient. Conformity isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one we have.

One form of learning that has been shown to be particularly effective is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves being pushed outside of your comfort zone, focusing on specific, concrete goals to improve performance, and getting consistent feedback. One common characteristic of deliberate practice is that it isn’t particularly fun. Most contexts where deliberate practice is common, like sports and music training, involve expert, individualized coaching. The coach is mostly there for motivation. The coach does other things as well, but the most important thing a coach can do is motivate you to train. Deliberate practice isn’t common in school learning, but it’s a good reminder that motivation is the key to lots of forms of learning in and out of school. Learning isn’t always going to be a ton of fun. In the absence of one-on-one tutoring for every student, conformity is the best tool we have to create the motivation necessary for learning.

These two failures—self-paced technology and ability grouping—get at a deeper truth. Working at your own pace may seem like it makes sense, but it often undermines motivation. Grouping students by ability, whether within or across classrooms, has shown little benefit. Neither approach has delivered the transformation its advocates promised.

But Personalization Works for Some Kids?

Let’s explore personalization a bit more. Clearly this personalized learning thing works for some students. Maybe 5%. Maybe 10%. Why?

Here’s a broad generalization about learning. Let’s take the basics of learning to read as an example, where there is a wealth of data to back up the generalization. Some students will learn to read no matter what they experience in school. Often their parents teach them, or an older sibling or neighbor, and they pick it up quickly. Others more or less teach themselves. This group doesn’t benefit much from organized school, at least in terms of learning to read. We might call these “no-structure learners.” A second group needs the structure of school, but the quality of the teaching doesn’t matter too much. As long as they get the basics, a solid exposure to reading, and some support from a teacher, they will learn to read just fine. We might call these “low-structure learners.” Then there’s a third group. This group will struggle to learn to read. For this group, the quality of teaching matters enormously. Some will be diagnosed with dyslexia, though a strong course of synthetic phonics will reduce that number. Many will learn the basics but still struggle with things like multi-syllable words for years to come if they aren’t taught well. A carefully-sequenced, well-taught curriculum can make a large difference for these students. We might call these “high-structure learners.” There aren’t sharp divisions between these three groups, and motivation depends on context, so students may have a different motivation profile for a different subject or something outside of school. This is the answer to why personalization only works for 5% of students. Students need different levels of structure in order to succeed.

For another example, we see the same phenomenon with math facts like times tables. Some students seem to learn them by osmosis, or they pick them up entirely outside of school. Many more need a bit of structured practice, but learn their facts without much trouble and move on. Some struggle with multiplication facts for years. The structure provided isn’t enough, the curriculum moves on, and these students often struggle in math for years to come. For one example of a high-structure teaching strategy, incremental rehearsal is a highly-structured way to teach students multiplication facts.

This phenomenon is well-studied with phonics and math facts, but you could apply it to any other domain. Imagine a college computer science department. The no-structure learner is that student who is always coding on their own, learning stuff from Stack Overflow, and only occasionally going to class to make sure they get their degree. The low-structure learner shows up to class. They aren’t learning too much on their own, and coursework is motivation enough to learn and get a solid foundation in computer science. The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find. Maybe they push through, maybe they can’t cut it and switch to a major in communications.

The same phenomenon shows up in pandemic learning loss. Learning loss was concentrated mostly in the lowest-achieving students. Many high-achieving students did fine; these are students who didn’t need the structure of school, or for whom the minimal structure of online coursework was enough to keep them moving forward. The high-structure students who already struggle in school lost the most ground.

Low- and no-structure learners help us understand a broader phenomenon: for many students, school quality doesn’t seem to matter very much. One illustration is that in randomized controlled trials, school assignment doesn’t seem to play a very large role in academic achievement. Freddie deBoer collected this research in his essay Education Doesn’t Work. I’ll quote him here:

Winning a lottery to attend a supposedly better school in Chicago makes no difference for educational outcomes. In New York? Makes no difference. What determines college completion rates, high school quality? No, that makes no difference; what matters is “pre-entry ability.” How about private vs. public schools? Corrected for underlying demographic differences, it makes no difference. (Private school voucher programs have tended to yield disastrous research results.) Parents in many cities are obsessive about getting their kids into competitive exam high schools, but when you adjust for differences in ability, attending them makes no difference.

We could pick apart these studies and I’m sure we could find examples where there is a difference, but that difference will be small.

Here are two quick anecdotes from my personal experience. I often have bright students whose parents request they get some more advanced work. I try to lay out for them a few options for more challenging work I can provide students, but I’m also clear that I am one human and I can’t teach the student for significant chunks of time each day. I can provide some resources, I can check in with them and answer their questions, but the student needs to be motivated to engage with some challenges. In the vast majority of cases, the student never touches the challenge work. Their parents bug them about it, I bug them about it, but they just can’t summon the motivation. These students are willing to keep up with our regular coursework, chugging along with content they mostly already know or can learn in a fraction of the time that it takes many of their peers. But working on their own is beyond them. To be clear, this isn’t every student. But it’s a large majority, another illustration of the 5 percent problem.

Second, online charter schools have spread rapidly in the last ten years. In my state it’s not very hard for students to enroll. I’ve had a number of students unenroll from our local public school and start at an online charter school. Most are back within a few months. They generally say one or both of two things: first, that they are bored learning on their own and they miss having people around. And second, they just weren’t motivated and didn’t learn much. Now to be clear, I’m in favor of having some online charter schools. They are a great option for some students – students who can summon the motivation, students with outside-of-school circumstances that make attending school challenging. It’s the 5 percent problem. There’s a 5 percent, those no-structure learners or students in other unique situations, who benefit from options like online charter schools. But the vast majority do best in the age-graded schools we already have.

You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.

A good illustration of this point is to visit a gifted or exam school. If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace. You’d see lots of bored students who could be going faster. You’d see a bunch of students who you’re surprised are in this school at all. It’s the reality of the system we have.

No-structure learners thrive anywhere. Low-structure learners need any coherent system. High-structure learners are much more sensitive to the quality of teaching, but trying to meet each student where they are doesn’t work very well. Lumping everyone together and asking them all to learn the same curriculum seems to work better at scale than anything else we’ve tried. These are the core challenges of education.

What’s Happening Under the Hood?

If we know there are no-, low-, and high-structure learners, then the key question becomes: what internal levers predict who ends up where?

I see three main factors. First is intrinsic motivation. This isn’t a review of self-determination theory, but the short version is that some students have a lot of intrinsic motivation, others have less, and some have little at all. Second is the set of habits students bring to school. When you observe students in school, one thing that’s often striking is how some students are in the habit of completing assignments, reading when they’re asked to read, solving math problems on a worksheet when asked, and so on. Others don’t have those habits. You’ve got no-structure learners, who would happily do that learning on their own. Low-structure learners, for whom the basic structure of school and class is enough to keep positive habits going. And then high-structure learners, who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can. Finally, there’s fluid intelligence. Students with a high processing speed and high working memory capacity are better at learning without much structure. They have the mental tools to connect the dots and figure things out with less structure. Students without those cognitive capacities need additional structure in order to learn.

Those elements are self-reinforcing. Motivation tends to beget motivation. Habits become stronger over time. Students with less fluid intelligence learn less in school, which exacerbates the consequences of less fluid intelligence. This doesn’t mean that a kid can’t change their trajectory. It’s possible to change habits, and to develop new sources of motivation. A broad base of knowledge helps to mitigate a lack of fluid intelligence. Motivation and habits are context-specific, so students might have a different profile in a different subject. But on average, students tend to stay about where they are in the no-structure, low-structure, and high-structure spectrum.

Students don’t always neatly fall into one category or another. They can shift over time, or be very intrinsically motivated yet have other challenges that require a lot of structure. Students can have different profiles in different subjects. Still, this broad taxonomy is a useful way to understand why tactics like personalization work for some students and not others, and why the basic structure of school has lasted so long.

The Thesis, Again

One way to interpret the design of school is that it’s trying to provide just enough structure to get students to learn the basics of the school curriculum. Putting kids in front of a computer on their own isn’t going to do the trick.

Schools are given a huge challenge. The goal isn’t to educate the students who are easiest to teach, or most eager to learn. The goal is to educate everyone. The core challenge of compulsory public education is motivation. The best solution we’ve found is to send kids to school beginning at age 5 (or earlier if we can), before they can reliably form long-term episodic memories. Talk to a typical high school student, and they have literally been going to school as long as they can remember. We group students by age in part because it’s the easiest way to organize the system. The system motivates high-structure learners to keep up with their peers, though that motivation does gradually fade over time. Grouping by age also provides just enough structure for low-structure learners to stay on track – not that it’s particularly efficient, but it can help schools be reasonably confident that those low-structure learners will get a broad foundation in the school curriculum. In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others. All that leads to the obvious, inevitable problems. Some students are ready to move faster, some students need more support. Schools and teachers often try to help, and occasionally experiment in bold ways, but there’s this enormous gravity that pulls back toward the conventions of a typical school. It’s easy to point out these obvious challenges and claim that school is broken, that we should blow up the system and invent something better. It’s much harder to ask why the fence is there, and understand it before taking it down.

Here’s something you have to remember. It’s easy to cherry-pick in education. If you want to start a school to prove that penguin-based learning is the future, that penguin meditation and penguin-themed classrooms are superior to the stuffy, traditional, obsolete schools we have now, you can. It’s simple. Find a way to only accept no-structure and very low-structure learners. Then start your school. Do your penguin meditation, make sure there’s a basic structure for learning core academic skills, and you’re set. The results will be great, you can publish articles about the success of your method, if you’re lucky you’ll get some of that sweet sweet philanthropy money.

Cherry-picking isn’t always that blatant. If you just manage to get a few more low-structure learners and fewer high-structure learners in your school it will make a difference. Your test scores will look better than the school down the street. Schools spend a huge fraction of their resources on special education, providing the structure and systems that those students need. Just having fewer students who need that level of resources will free up time and energy to focus on everyone else, and the selection effects will make it look like you’re doing a good job. The difference doesn’t have to be huge to help the school do a little better.

What if we were brutally honest when a family enrolls their child in school? Here’s what we would say:

If your child is a no-structure learner, they will be bored here. They will probably learn some things, but they will often sit in lessons where they know everything the teacher is teaching, and they’ll spend a lot of their time sitting around waiting for other students to catch up. If your child is a low-structure learner, they will still often be bored as our school isn’t very efficient, but the structure and routine will ensure they get a basic level of literacy and numeracy. Maybe they’ll like school, probably because of gym class and being around their friends, maybe they won’t, but they’ll learn some things. That said, the school you pick doesn’t matter too much. Your child will learn about as much anywhere else. If your child is a high-structure learner, they will need a lot of very structured teaching. Our teachers vary widely: some are good at providing that structure, others aren’t. Your child will gradually fall behind, and will perpetually feel a bit dumb and a bit slow compared to everyone else. But we will do our best to keep them moving along with their peers because that’s the best idea we have to motivate them. Hopefully, with some help, they’ll graduate high school on time. There’s a risk they just won’t have the skills, or they’ll be discouraged by constantly feeling dumb and just give up. Oh, and we aren’t very good at understanding what causes students to be motivated. It’s absolutely correlated with socioeconomic status, so it would be helpful if you’re rich, but there’s a lot of variability and plenty of rich kids need that structure too.

Some History

It’s worth taking a quick detour through the history of education in the US. When did age-graded schools become common? The story is a bit different than many common conceptions of how education has worked in the US. White people in the US, particularly men, had a relatively high literacy rate by 1800, higher than most other countries at the time except perhaps Scotland. But the education system was fragmented. It was a mix of religious education, local cooperatives, apprenticeships, formal schooling for the rich, and public education for the poor in cities. The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860. The goal of the movement wasn’t to increase the average education of the populace, and it didn’t cause any large increase in the literacy rate. Instead, the primary rationale was the importance of a common education system for democracy. Democracy felt fragile in the first half of the 19th century, and universal public education was the solution.[1]

The explicit goals of the common schools movement were to instill in students the importance of citizenship and morality. Age-graded schools were a natural next step: students should travel through school in a cohort of their peers, learning together the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the importance of education for the country’s young democracy. While these schools certainly did teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, the curriculum of the school played a secondary role to its common character. The most important goal of school reformers was to move education into common schools; whether learning happened in those schools was a secondary goal. It’s interesting that maximizing learning was never the goal of universal education.

The common school movement focused on what we would now call elementary and middle schools. It wasn’t until the 20th century that attendance in high school became widespread and then compulsory. And high school is the place where this giant compromise starts to fall apart. Even when the high school became widespread, there was broad disagreement about what high school should teach. Should high schools retain the liberal arts focus that they had when only the rich had access? Should they focus on the trades and career education? Should high schools offer a core course of study to all students, or use tracking to separate students who are college-bound from those who are not? These are the perennial questions that high schools wrestle with, and they are a logical outgrowth of the core tension of using age-graded schools. The goal still wasn’t about learning; it was about what the credentials were and who had access to those credentials. Only in the last few decades have schools tried to focus on maximizing learning. According to NAEP data there was some increase in scores between the late 80s or 90s depending on the subject and about 2012, after which there was stagnation or a slow decline, accelerated by the pandemic learning loss. This is a conjecture without any real evidence, but the increase in education technology and personalized learning software coincides with that stagnation in national test scores. The rise in test scores didn’t involve any large changes in the basic structure of school, it was driven by a lot of legislation and rhetoric around “no child left behind” and trying to support students who previously fell through the cracks.

School is Conservative

One common frustration for those who believe that schools can do better is how conservative the education system is. While there are pockets of innovation and experimentation, most schools are bureaucratic and slow to change. This is often viewed as a failure: why are our schools so obsolete and slow to adapt to the needs of the 21st century?

What if the education system is conservative for good reasons? We have always looked to education as the solution to our social problems. In the 19th century, education existed to buttress our democracy. In the first half of the 20th century, education was asked to promote social mobility. In the second half of the 20th century, education was asked to contribute to our national defense.

Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so. If education chased every fad that came along, it might be in much worse shape. It was only a few years ago that a lot of people were arguing that we should teach more kids to code. Now it looks like coding might be one of the first jobs AI can do for us. For the last few decades, many thought leaders have advocated that we reorient our education system away from antiquated content that kids can look up on Google, and instead teach critical thinking. There’s ample evidence that we can’t actually teach critical thinking divorced from content. And education seems to increase IQ, so maybe we’re already teaching critical thinking by giving students a broad, basic education.

The reality is that elementary and middle schools haven’t changed much over time. High schools, however, are the place where the drive to motivate students breaks down. At that point, low-structure and high-structure students are pretty far apart from one another. High schools handle this in a variety of ways. Some high schools specialize, either as test-in schools or schools with a particular theme. Private high schools play a role supporting high-achieving students. And at comprehensive public high schools, there is more tracking and separate experiences for students. An increasing number of high schools offer community college courses through dual enrollment, as well as a wide variety of electives. Other students move into a vocational track, with some remediation in core literacy and numeracy skills and coursework designed for careers rather than college.

This is logical if we look at school as a system designed to maximize motivation: by the time students reach high school, the gaps in academic knowledge have widened to a point where it isn’t practical to keep students in the same classroom. Most elementary and middle schools promote students socially, at least if they put some effort in. But in high school, students need to amass credits and/or pass exams to graduate, and keeping everyone in the same classroom learning the same content won’t get some students the credits they need. We see what you would expect: motivation plummets. Remember those 100 classrooms you imagined visiting? Some of them would be lower-level high school classes. Those are often sad classrooms to spend time in. Students aren’t doing very much, expectations are clearly low, there isn’t much learning happening. Schools often explicitly create easier avenues to graduate for some students, through credit recovery programs or similar ways to give credit to students who aren’t putting in much effort. It’s logical that motivation plummets: students are no longer motivated by staying with their grade-level peers.

Practicalities

What good is the hypothesis that school is designed to maximize motivation? It can help us understand all sorts of phenomena. I often hear an argument from homeschoolers that they can accomplish in two hours a day (or some other small amount of time) what schools do in seven or eight. I don’t doubt that at all. Schools aren’t particularly efficient at facilitating learning. Schools are good at educating everyone at once.

We can also better understand learning loss from the pandemic. Learning in school isn’t particularly efficient, so one might assume that missing a few months of school won’t have a big impact. But habits are powerful. What changed was motivation. During the pandemic, many students lost their long-held habits of attending and putting in effort at school. Interestingly, learning loss happened both in states that had extended school closure and those that returned to full-time school more quickly. In both cases, students lost those habits, and the power of conformity started working against school motivation, rather than in favor of it.

We can understand why school sports are such a powerful and enduring phenomenon: motivation is the core challenge of school, and conformity is our best solution. Team sports are a great mechanism to motivate young people, so we attach sports to school to capture a bit of that motivation.

We can understand why, despite lots of hype, AI hasn’t revolutionized education. Most AI applications pay little attention to motivation, and try to personalize learning in exactly the ways personalized learning has failed. AI may yet transform education, in any number of ways. But in the short term, AI has been naive about motivation in exactly the same way as all the other education transformations that have fallen short.

We can understand why there have been so many attempts to revolutionize schools, but they have struggled whenever they try to scale. If you have the right group of students, lots of things might seem to work. When you try to scale them to meet the true needs of universal education, they will run into the same roadblocks education has always struggled with. Then, the education system will be blamed for being obsolete, and we will continue to invent new approaches to education that ignore the same basic challenges of motivation.

Something I haven’t addressed is the harsh reality of school for many kids. Everyone’s experience is different, but there are countless stories of students getting bullied, verbally abused by teachers, deprived of bodily autonomy and freedom of movement. This can all be true. I don’t want to hide from these realities; I’m a teacher, I’ve seen them. Walk into a typical middle school and you will quickly learn the byzantine collection of rules about going to the bathroom. It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’m not arguing that it’s a good thing. But policing the bathrooms, and many related minutiae of students’ lives, is a byproduct of the reality of school. We require all students to attend compulsory education of some kind. Some schools are able to filter out more of the high-structure learners. In those schools you won’t find nearly as many rules about using the bathroom, and you will also find far less bathroom vandalism. In the schools that are left to educate everyone else, we are left with the reality of trying to motivate students as best we can. We struggle with the students who predictably lash out because they are bored with moving too slow, or constantly confused as the curriculum moves too fast. We double down on conformity and structure, not because they are perfect solutions but because they’re coping strategies to deal with some of the ugly realities of mass compulsory education.

This isn’t to say schools respond appropriately in every situation. There are tens of thousands of schools, each left to their own devices to figure out the best way to educate their charges. Humans make mistakes, and when we scale a profession to the size of our public education system we have to do the best with the teachers and school leaders we have. I’ve been party to plenty of school policies I disagree with. I’m not trying to defend them, just to help readers understand where they come from.

A Prediction

I’ve used the word “designed” loosely in this essay. Age-graded classrooms are schools’ most valuable asset, but they weren’t deliberately designed. They came about by an accident of history, and they have stuck around because we haven’t figured out anything better. That lack of self-awareness will always be education’s Achilles heel.

Where will we go from here? I hope I’ve been clear that I don’t think schools are perfect. They are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job. Is there a better way? Maybe. But to design a better education system, we first need to understand what the current system does well. Don’t tear down the fence until you understand why it’s there. The basic structure of age-graded schools that teach the same content to students of a given age has a purpose. You might have your own ideas about what schools should do and how they should do it. You might have some good ideas. But attacking schools without understanding the basics of how they function will never change anything.

One central contradiction of schools is that schools themselves don’t understand the purpose of age-graded schooling very well. There’s constant rhetoric from teachers and school leaders about the need to meet students where they are, to move past our antiquated one-size-fits-all education system and innovate. The purpose of this essay is to review school: to understand how it works, and where its structure comes from. This review leads me to a prediction: the structure of schooling won’t change. People will continue to try to disrupt the status quo. There will be plenty of tinkering around the edges. Some of that tinkering will catch on at a broader scale. But there will be an inevitable gravity back to the status quo. That gravity exists because the status quo is the best tool we have to educate a huge number of students. It’s not particularly good at fostering learning, but at scale it’s better than anything else we’ve tried. The push and pull will continue, the criticisms of school will continue, the experimenting will continue, but the basic structure will never change.

ENDNOTES

[1] This section is drawn from the book Someone Has to Fail by David Labaree

Schools - A Review

By E.N.

Trigger warning: mentions schools

Epistemic status: product reviews sometimes exaggerate

Readers of this blog are unlikely to hold schools in the highest esteem. Scott Alexander, Bryan Caplan, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Zvi Mowshowitz have pointed at a range of different problems with schools. However, most people still accept schools as a given, and say things like "schools teach many necessary subjects", "parents need some place to babysit their kids" or "kids need to learn social skills". I think this complacency is mistaken. The current K-12 US education system causes unnecessary suffering and waste due to flawed beliefs, and fails to teach many important skills. This should have been fixed long ago but the advance of AI provides new opportunities for change.

The Limit of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment spread ideas of scientific rigour and individual liberty, but it didn't reach every area of society equally. The education system operates under the guise of science and modernity but the system is often built around ideology, faith and tradition rather than real scientific backing. The structure of the schools, the subjects that are taught, and the methods used to teach are all questionable and their justifications lack rigour.

In modern times, we generally don't constrain people against their will, but this freedom hasn't yet reached humans under age 16. There are cases where restricting children is justifiable, but that's only if there's strong evidence that it's best for them. This doesn't cover forcing kids to learn something they're unlikely to benefit from or to keeping them restricted in a classroom where they already know the material or can't keep up. Imagine, as an adult, being forced to go back to school to sit through classes covering material you already know or cannot follow. Now imagine you're going to need to do that for the next 12 years. It's no more justifiable to make kids sit through that.

The Lack of Choice

Choice is generally good since if you're unhappy with one option you can switch to another option. It also incentivizes providers to do a better job to attract customers, which is why capitalism often drives improvements and innovation. Public schools as an institution reduce choice, since parents often cannot choose a better school for their kids. Within a given school, curriculum mandates limit kids' ability to choose the subjects they prefer. And within a given subject there's usually no choice at all. There's also almost no option for parents to just enroll their kids in the parts of the school they're interested in. Within a given day at school, kids have little freedom as their entire schedule is controlled. Schools claim their strict rules are to help prepare kids for real life, yet modern workplaces offer more flexibility and autonomy.

Schools provide little choice since they operate as if everyone has the same abilities and interests so one size fits all. Every class that is offered is inherently good so there's no need to offer more options. It's as if teachers are all equally good as well, so they're paid by seniority rather than by their performance. It wouldn't be so terrible if choice was restricted for an ordinary consumer good, but it's far worse to restrict educational choice for all children.

The Age-Grade Fallacy

Schools group everyone together into grades entirely by age. Different kids learn at different rates, so why this strange grouping? Schools are built on the implicit premise that academic achievement is the one thing that really matters. Since it's the measure of a person, and all people are equal, everyone must reach the same level of academic achievement. They therefore push the same goals on everyone and group them together to learn at the same pace for most of K-12.

All people are equal in deserving to flourish and not suffer. Value, meaning and happiness do not depend on academic achievement; that's just one of many areas a person can develop. People have different aptitudes and interests and progress at different rates academically. Yet schools put them all in one bucket. This is not how learning a skill works. When apprenticeships were common, people advanced based on their skill level. If you want to learn music or martial arts, you expect to be instructed based on your ability. Schools' inflexible approach targets the average student but causes problems both for those who need extra help and those who are more advanced.

Many kids are required to move on to more advanced topics in a subject before they have a full grasp of the basics. For example, 30% of adults struggle with basic math. Why does the school system force kids to learn advanced math that they'll never use before ensuring that they understand genuinely useful concepts? Why make them suffer needlessly?

Some people dismiss the boredom brighter kids face in school. There is a real issue however, regardless of your ethical framework:

Short-term boredom is often dismissed as trivial, but 8-12 years of it adds up to real suffering.
Harming someone is wrong, regardless of whether it's common.
If kids aren't achieving what they can, they're missing out on the meaning and fulfillment that is their right. Many philosophers stressed the importance of living virtuously by fulfilling one's purpose.
If a kid isn't learning something or enjoying the class, their time is wasted, and so are school resources.
Holding back kids from learning can prevent or delay them from applying their skills usefully, and thereby harms society.

How Not to Learn

Most schools still rely primarily on group lectures, even though the internet, software, videos and books can all cover the material, and active learning is better. Teachers read from their notes and write on the board; kids read from the board and write notes. Small discussion groups with kids at similar levels could be beneficial, but most classes are too large for that. Classes often become teacher-led lectures with occasional Q&A that isn't relevant to most students.

Schools place a large emphasis on memorization. It's not meaningful and doesn't last long-term, but it's easier for teachers in the current structure to get kids to memorize something briefly rather than to deeply understand it. Even when teaching a technique, such as solving a math problem, it's usually about memorizing mechanical steps without truly grasping the concepts. The technique is like a black box - similar to using a calculator, just slower.

What not to Learn

The school curriculum forces kids to learn subjects that aren't practical, that they don't care about, and that they quickly forget. Even within practical subjects, it teaches impractical topics. Parts of math are useful, but geometry and trigonometry are rarely used afterwards. Essential concepts in algebra are useful, but most people don't factor polynomials on their day job. A small number of people who will go into math-heavy fields might want to learn these topics, but US schools are unable to differentiate so they make everyone learn them.

Schools focus on academic topics while practically ignoring other life skills, like how to be a decent human or find happiness beyond grades. Again, schools follow the philosophy that academic achievement is what matters. The school system is focused more on itself than on the real world. Elementary and middle school prepares kids for high school which prepares kids for college. College is academic-focused and prepares students more for grad school than the practical issues of their field.

AI

Those are some of the issues with education today, but the status quo cannot continue. The recent rise of AI changes everything in a few connected ways:

Powerful tutoring and learning tools are becoming available to everyone.
With AI help readily available, homework cannot continue unchanged since cheating is so easy.
As AI masters human skills, many traditional subjects become even less practically relevant.
The most practical skill will be learning how to effectively use the AI tools.
Using AI tools, kids will be able to accomplish much across a range of subjects.

Schools should have improved long ago, but maybe AI can now help make it happen.

What to Learn?

If it's true that AI is taking over in 2027, there wouldn't be any practical career skills left to learn. But I think we have some more time before AI can literally do everything, so some career skills will remain useful. And we have even more time before we merge with machines, so there's still a range of other practical skills to learn. These other skills will become even more important as ordinary career skills become less relevant.

General Practical Knowledge

There's two basic skills that some kids learn in school that are genuinely important:

Basic reading: Many kids can learn this at home, but schools should help those who need it with evidence-based techniques like phonics rather than popular methods that don't work. Once kids can read, give them opportunities to read books they personally find interesting. No need for years of group read-alouds where kids are forced to follow along with the reader.
Basic math: Understanding basic math (such as fractions and exponents) is important for navigating the modern world, but many adults struggle with this. By eliminating regular grade levels and using AI-assisted tutoring, everyone can get the help they need to understand these topics. There's no need to force everyone to learn advanced topics like trigonometry or geometry. Instead, expose kids to mathematical ideas and let them explore what interests them. Those who enjoy it will pursue it further.

Academic Knowledge

Some say it's worthwhile to learn non-practical mathematical topics since math is beautiful, inspiring and meaningful. Similar arguments are given for teaching history, literature and science to everyone. I think kids should be exposed to a taste of these subjects and be given ample opportunity to learn more if they choose to. I personally feel understanding how the universe works is awe-inspiring, even if it's mostly impractical. However if a kid isn't interested, forcing it on them won't make it meaningful nor will they remember it afterwards. If schools think a topic is important, let them inspire kids to choose it!

Underrated Practical Skills

Besides the standard subjects schools teach, they should also provide opportunities for kids to learn practical technical skills such as the basics of:

Statistics, such as understanding p-values or Bayes Theorem
Coding, increasingly taught, but should be on par with regular subjects
Dealing with data, e.g. in spreadsheets or databases

They should also let kids learn practical life skills such as:

Financial literacy, from basic money management to interest rates and investing
Best health practices, such as nutrition and oral hygiene
Legal literacy, such as basic concepts of laws vs norms and later covering topics like contracts
Critical thinking - schools claim to teach this but rarely do. It's difficult to teach, but AI can help guide students in evaluating arguments, recognizing biases and handling heuristics.
Using AI - as this becomes increasingly important, kids should learn AI basics such as how to write good prompts and fact-check the AI's output.

Interpersonal and Intrapersonal Skills

Schools shouldn't just teach academic subjects. They should help kids understand themselves and relate to others. "Social skills" are often given as a justification for schools, yet little is done to actually help kids learn it. Some things are learned naturally, but some skills benefit from practice and feedback. This could include broader communication skills such as:

Nonviolent communication and conflict resolution
Negotiation
Giving and receiving feedback
Developing empathy
Public speaking
Digital communication

There are also many internal skills and principles that could be learned and practiced:

Understanding and regulating one's own emotions
Resilience and stress management
Ways to cultivate gratitude, which is beneficial for one's own happiness
Meditation, including exposure to practices that challenge conventional beliefs about the self
Time management and avoiding distractions, especially in the digital age
Decision making
Principle for living well and flourishing (broadly defined and non-ideological)
Practical tips to live according to one's values and goals, whatever they are

While social and emotional learning (SEL) programs touch on some of these, they're less emphasized than academics. They also may mix in political ideology which can cause a backlash against the entire practice. Helping kids learn these skills helps them be happier now and in the future.

How to Learn?

It's not practical to offer all these subjects with the current lecture- and class-based methods. But with AI tutors, kids can learn practically anything. They can dive more deeply into the topics they're interested in and achieve more than was possible before.

While lectures are not particularly helpful, schools do provide an overall structure for learning to occur. There's accountability, set time for learning, and peer discussion. Schools should be changed, but those elements should be kept in some form. Even motivated learners benefit from structure and accountability to help stay on track when distractions arise.

Most learning (at least for older kids) can shift to interactive online tutorials with built-in AI tutoring. Testing has its place, but progress can generally be tracked through the students' completed tutorials and projects, as well as their in-depth discussions with their AI tutor. Many topics can be learned through conversation, where the AI tutor helps guide the students through questions and answers to help discover concepts on their own.

The learning should connect to interesting projects where possible so that kids can achieve something. For example, they can pick apart an article online to practice statistical or critical thinking, or they can build a game to practice programming. Video games can also be used for some subjects, where they provide a natural path of achievement in a virtual world. For example, games can be used to learn programming, physics or managing resources. AI will eventually enable games for practicing social skills too. Learning should be fun, creative and meaningful rather than rote memorization for a test.

Level of understanding	What it can be used for
Memorization of facts	Repeat the facts or formulas directly
Memorization of techniques	Apply in very similar cases, such as on the test
Pattern matching / some conceptual understanding	Apply to new cases when similar to the learned pattern
Deeper "gears level" grasp	Apply in new circumstances, rediscover ideas, or even push the edge of knowledge forward

Schools currently emphasize memorization, but they should emphasize understanding and applying it.

Homework is often just busywork and many kids struggle with it. Now that AI can solve anyone's homework, it's worth revisiting how much is really necessary. When work is assigned, it can involve students collaborating with an AI - they still need to think on their own but can achieve more and get instant feedback. AI can also track the specific student input to ensure engagement. This space is being actively developed, see Khan Academy's writing coach.

People forget most of the facts that they learn at school. Some say schools should promote techniques that increase retention, such as spaced-repetition. This is reasonable for special facts that require memorization, but in general it's more important to encourage kids to learn what they're interested in. If they're passionate about a topic they'll go deeper into it and retain it longer-term. As more learning will involve working on actual projects the kid is interested in, the relevant skills will naturally build over time.

Goodbye Grades

Grouping kids by age into fixed grades should be eliminated. Even grouping kids by ability levels isn't enough, as it doesn’t account for the wide range of abilities and interests or provide enough flexibility. It can also result with academically weaker kids being placed in classes that are counterproductive to learning. Montessori schools show that you can mix multiple ages together and have smaller groups that provide kids with more freedom. With AI tutors, schools can provide even greater flexibility as every kid can have a tutor targeted directly at their level and interests. Kids will still discuss the topics they learn with other kids in their group, as well as collaborate on projects together.

School culture matters. As kids pursue their own interests in small groups, they will be exposed to their peers with similar interests who will provide encouragement as they learn. This will help build a culture of learning instead of the culture of apathy. The modular approach can also improve social dynamics. Kids will more easily connect with like-minded peers in their groups, while still interacting with a wider range of people throughout the day. Kids who would be outliers in some way (e.g. academically stronger or weaker) will be less likely to face bullying in a flexible environment built around smaller groups. Combined with an emphasis on interpersonal skills, this should help foster a positive social atmosphere. This may be why Montessori schools report less bullying. A positive social culture can be more important than academic learning.

Hello Choice

As schooling moves away from lectures, teachers may become less essential. However they will still be helpful to hold students accountable to their goals, to help lead some discussion and to inspire students. The teacher can become more like a coach than a lecturer. It's important that students not be locked-in with one teacher-coach, but have other options if it's not a good fit, especially for common subjects.

People mention schools as a place to "babysit" their kids, but childcare and education can be separated. As school becomes more flexible, a kid might have free time in the day and can still use the school's resources. The school can provide a range of facilities for sports and activities, which can be managed with a very low adult:child ratio, as kids don't need constant supervision. Even homeschooled kids or those in private school should also be able to use these resources. Society can provide a place for kids to stay while their parents work without always placing the kid in a classroom.

I'm not suggesting we immediately tear down the existing school system. Instead, let's advocate for more diverse school models, more parental choice in selecting schools, and more choice for kids within schools. By expanding variety and choice, schools that lead to happier and more flourishing kids will naturally thrive and expand over time.

Spread Enlightenment

Don’t mistake academic success for human worth. Recognize that everyone has specific abilities and help each kid reach their own potential without stigma. Use the best technology to tailor the learning to every kid. Only require kids to learn the most essential topics, but encourage them to learn a broad range of skills beyond regular academics. Inspire curiosity. Give kids choice and agency and help them be happy. Let each kid flourish according to their own ability and interest.

Rabbi Zusha of Hanipol said:

When I pass from this world and appear before the Heavenly Tribunal, they won't ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you as wise as Moses or as kind as Abraham,' rather, they will ask me, 'Zusha, why weren't you Zusha?'

We don't need every kid to be Moses, we just need every kid to be themselves.

Scientific Peer Review - Umbilical Cord or Corduroy Umbrella?

We are set to be flooded with AI-generated promotional text that masquerades as science. In principle, scientific peer review should protect us. But current peer review is like a corduroy umbrella – cumbersome and ineffective. Is it hopelessly flawed? Here I suggest what is required to turn it into something akin to an umbilical cord - a device that filters out contaminants and passes nourishment through to the next generation

When I was about 8, I asked my Dad for a ranking of the worst words you could say when he was my age. The list he gave matched my own fairly closely. “Frig” was the only surprise entry – an ngrams search confirms that it was at a low ebb in 1990.

I recently came across a list of cursewords written in hardpressed pencil by the hand of my 7-year old daughter. I was delighted. It is progress that the most objectionable words right now are those that denigrate types of human rather than those that describe bodily acts. It gives the heartening impression that the truth will out and that good ideas will rise to the top.

Once crummy ideas grab hold, they are sticky

But a word that upsets me is “insofar”. You might think that my problem with it is that it takes three words and squishes them together to form a new word that has precisely the same meaning and pronunciation as “in so far”. But no, quite the opposite. My problem with it is that it fails to squish in the inevitable fourth word. It troubles me that the word “insofar” exists at the expense of the strictly superior word “insofaras”.

I would like to say that each time I read it I feel a prick of despair that we cannot trust that the best ideas will rise to the top. But I cannot even say that. The truth is, it fails to register with me. I read the phrase “insofar as” published on a page of The Economist and I neglect that there is some of the most valuable real estate in the world wasted by that gap between “far” and “as”.

And therein lies the problem. Crummy ideas can persist (and even get reinforced) simply because they took hold so early that we now take them for granted. Even the countervailing motives that drive the editors of The Economist cannot be relied on to displace them.

The Coming Flood

Of course, if crummy ideas and profit motives align then things get much worse.

Let’s imagine that I am hired by the bubblegum industry to offset the decline in gumchewing among kids. One route that I could pursue is to influence regulators’, courts’ and laypeople's perceptions of my product e.g. by causing them to believe that gumchewing is a buffer against anxiety.

Two years ago, it would have been pretty costly for me to do this. Even if I faked the study by typing the results into an excel spreadsheet, it would take days to deliver a single article. And the end result would sit at the bottom of the Google Scholar search result, just another piece of grey literature with no citations.

But now, an LLM will write that paper in minutes and so I would get it to write dozens or even hundreds of papers showing related results: the benefits of bubblegum blowing for GPA; its protective effects against dementia etc. etc. Then, I would have each cite the others so that any one of them has hundreds of citations. Now these papers appear highly impactful and they will be among the first articles a reader sees when they search the literature on chewing gum. And, which is more menacing, they will also feature in searches for anxiety and dementia.

The Scourge

What I describe here is not is some distant and speculative future; in fact, it more closely describes the past. In the 1940s, a medical doctor named Arthur Sackler joined a medical advertising agency where he pioneered a form of marketing that presented itself as science. One ruse was to have credible medics put their names to papers that were secretly written on behalf of pharmaceutical companies. That practice was implicated in the cancers of 14,000 women in the early 2000s, when it was revealed that the pharmaceutical firm Wyeth had commissioned a communications firm to ghostwrite scientific articles endorsing their hormone replacement therapy.

Sackler’s name is now best known for his family firm’s callous marketing of Oxycontin, but it is not obvious that the hundreds of thousands of deaths hastened by that drug is the most harmful piece of his legacy. The New Yorker quoted psychiatrist Allen Frances as stating “most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”

It’s worth unpacking that scourge. If what comes to mind is an annoying commercial telling you to ask your physician about dialarex, you’re not wrong. The downstream consequence of those commercials is that people do ask for dialarex and physicians receive bonuses for prescribing it and so sales of dialarex boom. Correspondingly, a generic drug that could have delivered the same clinical benefit at a tenth of the price is left languishing. It is not a coincidence that medical spending went from $5 of out of every hundred spent in US in 1960 to $18.30 out of every hundred today. That is not merely wasted money; it is also a source of overmedication, overdiagnosis and hence ill health.

The waste and harm that lead Allen Frances to label the pharmaceutical industry a scourge will soon characterise many other aspects of our lives. The pharmaceutical industry just happens to have certain features that made it an early mover. On the demand side, its consumers – physicians – are especially receptive to advertisements presented as science. On the supply side, the fact that it is very costly to develop a drug but very cheap to make additional pills made it worth spending a lot on boosting demand. Of all the firms that would be willing to incur the costs of advertising via research, a pharmaceutical manufacturer is exactly who we would expect to see investing.

Now that the costs of producing spurious research are trivially low, however, it will be worthwhile for virtually any firm. And as the Covid pandemic made clear, there is no shortage of individuals who are willing and (consider themselves) able to parse a scientific literature to come to their own conclusion. The scourge that Allen Frances identifies as afflicting the pharmaceutical industry today is the scourge that we should expect to be all-pervasive immanently.

Losing Ideas

One consequence is increasing risk that great ideas will go unrecognised. Two years ago, the costs of producing a scientific paper were so high that the steady trickle of new findings were mostly sincere efforts at making some contribution to scientific knowledge. But shortly AI will turn that trickle to a flood and the overwhelming majority of what is produced will be designed for profit or PR or for some other purpose where truth is an irrelevance.

How are we to distinguish the useful insights from the dross?

Peer-review is purpose-made to discern quality research. In my field (economics) peer review works as follows: a scientist submits an anonymised version of their paper to a journal for review; an editor who possesses some expertise on the topic of the paper selects two or three researchers who have deeper expertise on the topic to review the paper; those reviewers assess the merits of the paper, make a recommendation to the editor of whether to publish-as-is, reject the paper outright or accept it subject to certain clarifying questions being adequately addressed by the authors. The editor then shares the anonymised reviews with the author.

There are a couple of features that make peer review approximate St. Peter at the gates of Heaven - an incorruptible, unbiased judge of merit, blessed with a deep knowledge that promotes only the truly worthy to the pantheon.

It is anonymous, which reduces scope for corruption. Many journals use double-blind peer review, where reviewers cannot see who has written the paper, which is especially valuable because the incentives align to promote the most insightful ideas, regardless who thought them up or how unpalatable they might be to certain audiences.

It is the independent opinion of two or more experts and an editor’s judgment also. This, while not quite harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd, offers at least some buffer against caprice.

In practice, peer review falls far short. Its more egregious failures are well documented. It fails to spot false results e.g. the faked dishonesty study that ended up costing the Guatamalan government dearly. It fails to recognize true innovations e.g. the Nobel-prize winning one that has been credited with shaping everything from the Affordable Care Act to Carfax reports.

But there are many more mundane issues. The Data Colada blog is an excellent place to see these laid bare. Take a recent randomized controlled trial of a brief training program conducted among 2,070 police officers reported in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It concluded that training police to consider their options reduced use of force and discretionary arrests. That’s a very useful and scalable finding. But the Data Colada blog makes a very compelling case that it is not reliable.

The red flag here is that the authors had preregistered their hypotheses and so Data Colada (and you, me and, notably, the reviewers who accepted this paper for publication) could look to see if the reported results are the same as the results that had been hypothesised prior to data collection. They were not.

Now you might say all’s well that ends well and science has worked because Data Colada has updated the record. But there are three problems with that take. First, this is wasteful. A really resource-intensive and potentially scalable experiment was conducted on a topic of great interest and, because of a lack of transparency, we simply don’t know if it worked. If peer review had worked well, we would be able to see all the results the authors had preregistered rather than just the ones they opted to show us. Second, it is beyond Data Colada and similar blogs to clean up all the messes left by lackadaisical reviewers. There will be many specious results that they lack the time and attention to expose and those will mislead real-world decision making. Third, the damage has been done. Jorg Peters and co-authors show that comments published in the flagship American Economic Review are cited far less than the original research that they correct. Even when the authors of the original paper concede that the comment substantively tempers their conclusions, the comment has orders of magnitude fewer citations than the original paper. This points to the value of peer review as a screening device that works ex ante. It is far more effective to avoid contaminating the literature in the first instance than it is to correct it later.

How discriminating is our filter?

We need something that acts as a filter that extracts contaminants and passes to future generations the stuff that is conducive to growth, health and wellbeing - something like an umbilical cord. What we have is more like a corduroy umbrella – not only patchy in its effectiveness but cumbersome too.

Consider 100 articles submitted to the top-tier social science outlet, the Journal of Political Economy. The editors judge 49 of them to be worth sending out to reviewers. The latest data show that only 6 of them are ultimately selected for publication. The median time it took to let authors of the remaining 43 papers know that reviewers had rejected their submission was 3 months. That is 3 months where the paper cannot be submitted to another outlet. Papers are languishing, even though the editors of a top journal in political economy have already selected them as likely to offer important contributions to knowledge on social phenomena. And this is happening at a moment when the insights of political economy might be especially helpful in restoring faith in institutions.

This delay also has the effect of undermining the objectivity of peer review. Because of timelags, academics typically post their work online as a preprint so they can accumulate citations and influence and avoid being scooped. As a result, by the time reviewers come to read the paper they can already see how many citations it has, as well as the authors’ names and affiliations. That matters because it detracts from the independence of peer review. At a conscious level, it takes bravery for a reviewer to reject a paper that has already accumulated hundreds of citations. At an unconscious level, we know that evaluations are influenced by confirmation bias and so a paper is more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt if it has already received hundreds of citations. And this weakness is exploitable - we can infer from their failure to check preregistration that reviewers are unlikely to check whether the hundreds of citations predominantly come from AI generated dross.

Most insidious, the timelag leads to more conservative research agendas. When choosing among research projects, scientists have to weigh up expected benefits (e.g. citations; prestigious publication) against expected costs (e.g. the opportunity cost of their time). The lower the time costs, the more risk a scientist can afford to take. When the time costs are high, scientists are all the more incentivized to take on projects that are guaranteed citations (i.e. that contribute to established and growing literatures) and that are least objectionable to reviewers (i.e. that align with rather than debunk established theories). The net effect is fewer groundbreaking ideas.

Is Peer Review Hopelessly Broken?

There are efforts to reform peer review. Thanks to the Data Colada group and others, many journals require authors to post their data and code. Some journals even employ people to check that the results reported in the paper precisely match those obtained from running the analyses. But, as the Data Colada blog demonstrates, unreliable results still turn up even in the places that we would expect to be most buffered against them i.e. top journals in economics and psychology. The editors and reviewers at these outlets understand incentives and human behavior and are skilled interpreters of data but that is not sufficient to protect against specious results.

The scarce factor is motivation. Reviewing another scientist’s work is never a priority. It only ever gets done out of civic-mindedness or, perhaps in some small number of cases, out of a selfish desire to promote one’s own research. The false results that enter the literature are one symptom of this lack of motivation. They get attention because they are salient and make for a good story. But this lack of motivation creates bigger problems through the drag that lags to publication place on progress e.g. the research that does not get done.

Attempts are being made at making peer review more efficient - a website collates the various efforts. One strand of research has experimented with paying reviewers or waiving journal submission fees. Another approach creates a publicly available record of how many reviews a researcher has completed. Platforms like Publons and ORCID allow researchers to signal to promotion panels their productivity as a reviewer alongside their productivity as a researcher. A third strand publishes reviewers’ comments alongside the paper, giving them credit and potential citations (though at the expense of double-blinding).

While there is some evidence that paying reviewers hundreds of dollars can speed up peer review, there is nothing to suggest that we have yet found a scalable mechanism that will make peer review function as the discerning filter we require to deal with the coming flood of AI-generated content.

For that, we will need to make peer review a priority among scientists instead of the afterthought that it is currently. We will need an incentive structure that rewards scientists for the quality and timeliness of their reviews. We will need a market for timely and quality peer review.

A Job Market for Quality Peer Reviewers

Just as Google Scholar publishes researchers’ i-index, it could publish a new metric that measures the contribution to science they make through their reviews. I call this an R-Squared score and it accumulates through points that editors give for timeliness (0 for late, 1 for acceptable, 2 for exemplary) and points that the other reviewer of the paper give for quality (0 for unhelpful; 1 for fine; 2 for exceptionally helpful).

But - you will no doubt say - the last thing we need is more burden on reviewers and editors. Here's the thing - almost all of the colleagues I have spoken to about this idea fall into one of two camps: those who already read the other reviewer’s report out of curiosity or those who don't want to be reviewing in the first place. So in a world of R-Squared scores, there is no extra work for the first camp and - because their choice not to display a score will signal to editors that they don't want to receive an invitation to review - there is less work for the second.

And it will save editors work because it allows them identify quality and timely reviewers. Currently editors lose time sending papers for review to people who fail to reply e.g. because they have left academia. Or, to avoid that timewasting, they send ill-fitting papers to people who they know to be timely reviewers. Either way, there is a mismatch. By providing publicly available information on researchers’ reviewing activity we can help editors quickly and easily identify content experts who are also active and engaged reviewers.

Providing editors with information on reviewers’ quality and timeliness will reduce academic fraud too. In recognition of the fact that editors waste a lot of time finding reviewers, many journals invite submitting authors to nominate reviewers. This practice is sometimes abused by citation rings - groups of authors who big up each other’s work. R-squared obviates the need to rely on reviewers nominated by the author.

R-squared provides feedback on review quality that is currently missing. As it stands, there are reviews that are wrong-headed, either out of sincere misunderstanding or out of motivated self-interest. The 0-2 score reviewer reviewer score can flag quality concerns so that editors know to give these reviews special scrutiny. More than that, the mere awareness that one’s review will be scored will prevent egregiously self-serving reviews in the first instance.

Changing the scientific ecosystem one review at a time

It is a grand ambition to seek to transform the scientific ecosystem. But the incentives align to make R-Squared a scalable technology. If just one journal adopts the practice of scoring reviewers for timeliness and quality then, merely through the mechanism of making the importance of timeliness salient to reviewers, we would expect it to achieve faster turnaround times. Concurrently, that journal will be accumulating data on the quality and speediness of its reviewers that it can use later to match quality reviewers to papers in their areas of expertise. As authors experience more rapid turnaround times, they will submit their work to this now speedier outlet instead of to its rivals. Other journals will have to adopt the technology or lose out on submissions, influence and prestige.

A published metric that summarizes a researchers’ frequency and quality creates a viable career track for expert reviewers. It will allow for the first time promotion committees to recognize excellent reviewers’ contributions to science. Just as there are game-changingly talented music critics, film critics and literary critics, there are scientists who are excellent arbiters of others’ research. But their contribution to science is not currently valued and so, unless those scientists also happen to be excellent on the separate set of skills required to produce original research, we are likely losing them from the scientific community. These people will be increasingly valuable to science as the quantity of research explodes. Progress requires that we find a mechanism to reward them.

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Sitting up on the seat

As a kid, I was awestruck by a guy biking nonchalantly past me with no hands on the handlebars. It wasn’t just the no hands though, he was chewing bubblegum while doing it. Two cool things at the same time, with no visible concerns to either safety or time. Obviously, I also wanted to be that badass when growing up. I mean, the kid I saw was probably 10 years old, but still.

Time passed, and now I am old. Thirty-something at the very least. I am unfortunately occupied with both safety and time. But I have knowledge now, and I know a lot more about bikes than that stupid 10-year old kid ever did. I know how to replace a chain, fix a punctured tube, change a bottom bracket, tighten the brakes and how to brake the fastest. I am self-reliant with my transport, like proper cool grown-ups should be. All of that, I owe to the amazing bicycle blog of Sheldon Brown.

The guy and the bike(s)

Sheldon is an interesting character. He is probably the only bicycle mechanic with a dedicated wikipedia article. A slightly plump, seemingly always-smiling guy with a (sometimes dyed red) neckbeard, who owns no less than 30+ bikes. Many of them quite exotic. His blog entries are surprisingly detailed, always starting with a new and corny made-up nickname, like Sheldon “Wrench” Brown or his buddy John “no potato chips, please” Allen. You can find almost everything bike related there, from tandems to fixed-gear and everything inbetween[1]. There’s stuff so simple you never thought it was a thing, like proper starting technique, or more esoteric stuff, like centering the chainring on a fixed gear bike. You can get lost in tables of outdated bottom bracket standards, or read a guide on how to adjust your specific brake type. He had hilarous april fools jokes. Everything available in a handy HTML-format, just like it should be.

Someone on Slatestarcodex once described the feeling of first discovering the sequences:

“When I first discovered [Lesswrong] a year ago and read the sequences, my reaction was: ‘This is the most amazing thing I have ever read, this has changed my life, Eliezer Yudkowsky must be the smartest man on the planet.’ ...””

I think this sounds familiar to a lot of people who happened to stumble upon Lesswrong or Scotts blog. There was a special feeling of discovering a vast library of knowledge that you didn’t know you wanted. Things you had thought about in some vague sense, were now written down clearly. You might not believe me, but I had the same feeling when discovering Sheldons blog. Where had this been all my life. I was immersed. I had always been impressed by knowledgeable people, and even more so by those who managed to write it all down. People talked about the good parts of the internet, and the good old days before search was broken and AI slop had infiltrated every pore, and I had just discovered one of the old relics. This was awesome, I loved bikes, and of course I wanted to be able to repair them! Now I just needed to read it all.

Self-sufficiency and grokking a bike

Grokking a bicycle is actually kind of hard. There’s an old meme about this, where people are asked on the spot to draw a bike. If you haven’t heard about this before, you should give it a try. It doesnt have to be detailed, just a a stick-figure-like doodle. This seems like it should be easy, right? But the results are not impressive. Even the surface-level details of the everyday bike evades our memory, and that’s just the beginning.

Deeper down, there's a lot of technical details! First off, what even keeps the bike upright? I guess you have heard about pre-tensioned concrete, but did you ever stop to think that a bicycle wheel works by the same principle? Many have dabbled with 3d-printers, and might have heard the term bowden-tube. Obviously when you pull a bicycle brake, the wire transfers the pulling force to the brake caliper. Less obvious is that the cable housing must push too. This is also a bowden tube setup! Or did you know that for pedals, the threads should be normal-threaded on the right side, but left-threaded on the left side? And for (proper) bottom brackets it's the other way around? Me neither, before I read Sheldon.

1. buy bike, 2. Put 2500+ miles on your 10$ chain, 3.replace, 4. Repeat

Thoreau's analysis on traveling where he concludes that traveling by foot is the fastest, is well known. The argument goes like this:

“Thoreau asserts that the fastest traveler is the one on foot. A seeming paradox. But when he goes on to explain, the mystery becomes clearer. In Thoreau’s day, to travel 30 miles by train cost the equivalent of a day’s labor. Thoreau could walk that distance in one day and arrive by evening. The person traveling by rail would first have to spend a day laboring to earn the fare, and then take the train the next day. Thus, the walking man arrived first and had a day full of the pleasures of the countryside.”

The economics of travel have changed since Thoreau’s time, with both the car and the modern bicycle being invented later. However Ivan Ilvich redoes the calculation:

“ The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.”

And he goes on:

“Man, unaided by any tool, gets around quite efficiently. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer in ten minutes by expending 0.75 calories. Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals.
[...]
[However] Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. “

I’m not convinced by the exact numbers here, and I am sure it is possible to do some more or less creative number gymnastics either way you’d like to stretch the result. Both Thoreau and Ilvich seem ideological, and at times extreme for most tastes. But the point still holds, the bicycle is insanely cheap and efficient! Coming back to Thoreau's way of thinking, you can today buy a decent bike for a single day worth of salary, and you can trod on it for years.

Kick down and coast

So the bike is cheap, there’s a huge resource of knowledge available to everyone, and plenty of technical details to grok for the curious mind. All available through Sheldons blog[2]. Like the man himself says: “I have always loved riding bicycles, especially for the feeling of freedom and self-sufficiency that they give.“. AI doom might be impending, and in some sense things feel less real every day. I don’t want to go on about fresh air, but certainly fresh air feels real. If you yourself are feeling downtrodden, and haven’t been on a bike for a while, why not go tread a bike today? Sheldon shows you how to get started properly, and if you have any mechanical problems he surely has a description of how you can fix it yourself. You could even go buy some bubblegum and try to do it no handed.

[1] Not literally everything though, like for example the (rare) rota-fix method doesn’t seem to be described by Sheldon. Or anything on BMX

[2] Or other internet bicycle legends like RJ the bike guy.

Sign-tracking Sucks

Put a rat in a cage. Show it a lever. A few seconds later, regardless of what it does, give it some food. Repeat a couple dozen times a day for a week and the rat will learn to associate the lever with food. Some rats go over to where the food will come as soon as they see the lever. Those rats are goal-trackers. The rest of the rats will start to play with the lever and maybe chew on it once they see the lever. And then once the food appears they'll go over to that part of the cage and eat it. Those rats are sign-trackers. Sign-tracking entails the release of stress hormones, and its pointless because the sign-trackers don't get any more food than the goal-trackers. Sign-tracking sucks; zero out of five stars; do not recommend.

Imagine that you come home and your dog runs up and jumps on you and licks your face, while your cat goes to the food bowl and waits expectantly. Your cat is exemplifying goal-tracking, because food is a cat’s ultimate goal; your dog is exemplifying sign-tracking, because you are the sign that often precedes food.

“Raccoons were trained to deposit a wooden coin through a slot in order to obtain a food reward. The raccoons initially performed this task without hesitation, but with further training seemed unable to let go of the coin, spending several minutes compulsively handling it with their forepaws—chewing, licking, rubbing and washing the coin—as if they were trying to clean a morsel of food —and repeatedly putting the coin into the slot but then pulling it back out without releasing it. The coin itself appeared to have great incentive value, as the raccoons were very reluctant to give it up, even though holding onto it delayed or even prevented receipt of actual food.” [ref] Male quails repeatedly seeing a pillow followed by a female in heat will learn to hump the pillow, even if the door to the female is at the far end of a long skinny cage and their fetishism delays access to real sex. Meanwhile, rats will cower against the opposite wall of their cage when faced with a lever that’s been repeatedly paired with extremely salty water.

Horse trainers will repeatedly pair food with a clicking sound, and then whenever they want to reward the horse, they can just click. And the horse will be more likely to do a trick that earned them the clicking sound. A psychologist would say that the clicking is a conditioned reinforcer, and the new trick is reinforced behavior. Using a conditioned reinforcer makes it much easier to train horses because if you had to give them food every time, you couldn’t train them after you had already rewarded them and they were full. This works because the sign itself can function as a reward, and continues to motivate animals even if it is no longer followed by a reward. (In contrast, goal-trackers will quickly grow bored with their food bowl if you stop putting food in it.)

Sign-tracking in Humans

Researchers can train smokers to click on certain shapes using either cigarettes or money—either reward works just as well. In smokers, cigarettes are almost certianly a conditioned reinforcer, since they have been repeatedly followed by the intoxication of smoking. We can infer that money is also a conditioned reinforcer: it produces the same behavior as other conditioned reinforcers; it increases blood flow to all the same brain regions that show increases with food, sex, alcohol, cocaine and electric shocks; everyone has experience using money to buy rewards. Once we know that money is a conditioned reinforcer, we can invoke sign-tracking to explain greed, since sign-tracking implies that people will value money itself and keep seeking money even if there's nothing in particular that they want to buy.

There’s another experiment showing how humans pursue purely symbolic rewards. Put identical soda in bottles labelled with either a triangle or a square, and then repeatedly show children a triangle followed by a crying face and a square followed by a smiling face. Kids will try the square soda first and say, after trying both, that they like it more. The same thing happens if you repeatedly show kids a triangle together with a crying face and a square together with (rather than followed by) a smiling face, which is how advertising works. By extension, we can infer that you should be a able to reinforce a behavior just by showing people a smiley after they’ve performed a new trick. That’s how social media works: if you post something, and people react with smileys, then next time you’ll be more likely to post. Tech firms can train you without ever giving you a physical reward. How cheap and convenient for them!

If we’re confident that money, cigarettes and smiling faces are conditioned reinforcers, then let’s indulge in a bit speculation (which usually leads to pleasant results!) as to what other everyday signs might be conditioned reinforcers.

When you were a baby, probably your mom said nonsense in the voice that people use for talking to babies and then would feed you, so you learned to associate your mom's voice and baby talk with food. Then your mom would be able to reward you for good behavior just by baby talking to you. She wouldn't actually have to reward and punish you physically all the time. From there you learned to associate specific words with reward. Maybe you would associate “Good job!” with reward because your mom would say it in baby talk, and your mom's baby talk voice is already associated with food. And then from there now other people have the ability to shape your behavior because they can reward you only by saying “Good job!”. Imagine how hard it would be to raise children if you couldn't reward and punish them just with words and body language. As soon as they were full and no longer interested in food you would lose the ability to teach them anything.

If you put on clothes and walk down the street and go to the store and buy something, all of that social etiquette was taught to you by your parents: what kind of clothes to wear, which part of the street to walk on, how to pay for things, what kind of food is good, which things are food, how you should remove the packaging without eating it, and on and on and on. A huge amount of our daily repertoire of behavior we normally don't think about probably is reinforced behavior. In a addition, we have large repertoires of conditioned reinforcers: others can influence our behavior by looking, staring, glaring or gazing at us; by praising us or shouting at us; by wearing an athoritative uniform or a pretty dress.

Being motivated by conditioned reinforcers allowed you to learn the microskills of daily life, but sign-tracking is stresful, pointless, and deceptive.

Sign-tracking is Stressful

The critical experiment which demonstrates the stressful nature of sign-tracking involved lever-pressing in rats. In the experimental group, the rats saw a lever, and a few seconds later food dropped into a bowl, regardless of what the rat did. This sequence was repeated dozens of times. The control group saw the lever and food just as often, but at random times, so they formed no association between the lever and food. All of the rats had low concentrations of stress hormones before the experiment. Afterwards, only the experimental group did. A seperate experiment by the same authors found that in a group of rats all given the same conditioning, only the sign-trackers were stressed and the goal-trackers were relaxed. Additionally, pharmaceutically blocking the activity of stress hormones turns all rats into goal-trackers. These results demonstrate that sign-tracking itself is stresful, and that rats are able to find and eat food in a relaxed manner as long as they don’t sign-track.

This experimental work aligns with anecdata. Stressed people are more likely to smoke, drink, or take drugs. The same brain circuit for craving underlies both addiction and sign-tracking, and addicts are likely to relapse when they encounter a sign associated with their habit. If someone used to always drink red wine and smoke, then they’ll be prone to start smoking again if they’re stressed and drinking red wine. Stock brokers spend all day pursuing big money rewards. By reputation, brokers are crack addicts and super stressed.

Punishment (trauma) causes sign-tracking that’s a mirror image of sign-tracking for rewards. You might be nervous around your boss or another figure associated with punishment. When people with PTSD encounter a sign associated with their traumatic past, they stress out so much that it becomes a clinical pathology.

People will often claim that their nervous habits relieve stress, but the experimental work in rats shows that this is unlikely. Nervous habits are simply compulsive and people confabulate a justification for it. Indulging nervous habits further exposes them to reward-associated signs and gets them deeper into a self-reinforcing cycle of stress and signs.

Chronic Stress is Depressing

In the words of entrepeneur and science writer Max Bennett: “All this describes what bodies do in response to short-term stressors—the acute stress response. But most of the ways that stress plagues modern humanity comes from what happens to bodies in response to prolonged stressors —the chronic stress response. … If a nematode is exposed to thirty minutes of a negative stimulus (such as dangerous heat, freezing cold, or toxic chemicals), at first it will exhibit the hallmarks of the acute stress response—it will try to escape, and stress hormones will pause bodily functions. But after just two minutes of no relief from this inescapable stressor, nematodes do something surprising: they give up. The worm stops moving; it stops trying to escape and just lies there. This surprising behavior is, in fact, quite clever: spending energy escaping is worth the cost only if the stimulus is in fact escapable. Otherwise, the worm is more likely to survive if it conserves energy by waiting. Evolution embedded an ancient biochemical failsafe to ensure that an organism did not waste energy trying to escape something that was inescapable; this failsafe was the early seed of chronic stress and depression.

Any consistent, inescapable, or repeating negative stimuli, such as constant pain or prolonged starvation, will shift a nematode brain into a state of chronic stress. Chronic stress isn’t all that different from acute stress; stress hormones and opioids remain elevated, chronically inhibiting digestion, immune response, appetite, and reproduction. But chronic stress differs from acute stress in at least one important way: it turns off arousal [energy] and motivation … [by] activating serotonin. At first glance, this makes no sense: serotonin was supposed to be the satiation and good-feels chemical. But consider the main effect of serotonin: it turns off valence [pleasure and pain] neuron responses and lowers arousal. If you add this to the soup of stress hormones, you get a bizarre yet unfortunately familiar state—numbness. This is, perhaps, the most primitive form of depression, … [which] dulls pain and renders even the most exciting stimuli entirely unmotivating.

…

[Numbness] in animals like nematodes seems to be a trick to preserve energy in the presence of inescapable stressors. Animals no longer respond to stressors, good food smells, or nearby mates. In humans, this ancient system robs its sufferers of the ability to experience pleasure and motivation. This is the blah or blues of depression. And like all affective states, chronic stress persists after the negative stimuli have gone away. Such learned helplessness, where animals stop trying to escape from negatively valenced stimuli, is seen even in … cockroaches, slugs, and fruit flies.

We have invented drugs that hack these ancient systems. The euphoria provided by natural opioids is meant to be reserved for that brief period after a near-death experience. But humans can now indiscriminately trigger this state with nothing more than a pill. This creates a problem. Repeatedly flooding the brain with opioids creates a state of chronic stress when the drug wears off—adaptation is unavoidable. This then traps opioid users in a vicious cycle of relief, adaptation, chronic stress requiring more drugs to get back to baseline, which causes more adaptation and thereby more chronic stress.” [ref]

Chronic stress from any source, not only stressful sign-tracking, causes depression. Yet I mention this link here because it is necessary to explain much of the toxicity of sign-tracking. The stress of sign-tracking alone can explain why phone-addicted Zoomers have anxiety disorders, but at first glance it seems surprising that they would also suffer from depression, especially since anxiety and depression at first seem to be opposites. The link between chronic stress and depression completes the causal chain: phone-addiction is sign-tracking causes chronic stress causes depression. Stress, the relieving end of stress, and depression all reduce libido, so a generation of phone-addicts will also have low fertility.

Compared to goal-trackers, sign-trackers show increased blood flow to a certain brain area. Compared to healthy controls, depressed people show increased blood flow to the same brain area, and getting an injury there cures depression. Sometimes surgeons will intentionally lobotomize that area as a last-resort treatment for extremely resistant cases of depression. This neurological evidence strengthens the case that sign-tracking causes depression.

Linking sign-tracking through chronic stress to depression can also help us explain why hedonistic rockstars keep killing themselves. Rockstars are over their heads in approval and attention, extremely rewarding reinforced conditioners. The surplus of adoration leads not to lasting happiness, but merely reinforces the lust for approval, triggering a cycle of insecurity and anxiety. The resulting stress predisposes rockstars to form a habit from any drug that they try, leading to drug addictions that compound anxiety into chronic stress, depression and eventually suicide. The last word in this section is from the foremost philospher of ennui, Søren Kierkegaard:

“I have just now come from a party where I was its life and soul; witticisms streamed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me, but I went away-yes, the dash should be as long as the radius of the earth's orbit———————————and wanted to shoot myself.”

Sign-tracking is Pointless

The cyclical nature of sign-tracking is best demonstrated by brain imaging studies of people viewing pornography or getting blow jobs. When men are viewing porn, the usual brain regions that receive increased blood flow for craving anything else also receive increased blood flow. This is the wanting phase of the craving cycle. For both men and women, when getting blow jobs, a subset of the craving network shows increased blood flow, and stress hormones are also released during this stage, just slightly different ones than for wanting. This is the liking stage of the craving cycle. For both men and women, during orgasm all of the brain regions in the craving network receive decreased blood flow, and no stress hormones are released. This is the satisfaction stage of the craving cycle.

A similar cycle happens for foraging rats. During the wanting stage they need to decide which objects are food and which objects are predators so they can avoid the predators and approach the food. During the liking stage, rats put the food in their mouths and they need to decide whether spit it out or to swallow it. Then during the satisfaction stage they’re full and it’s time to take a nap and digest that tasty meal.

Self-help bloggers usually explain how wanting leaves us on an endless hedonic treadmill and so the secret to happiness is to like things more. That can't be true because otherwise you could just solve all of philosophy and religion by taking semaglutide (Ozempic). The bigger problem is that we know from brain imaging studies of the sexual cycle that liking is distinct from subjective pleasure. Orgasmic bliss not only occurs at a different time than liking and wanting, but the craving network of brain regions active during both liking and wanting are specifically deactivated during orgasm, and so cannot be responsible for subjective pleasure.

This same causal principle is confirmed by giving cocaine addicts a hit while they're in a brain scanner. Cocaine directly hacks the brain chemicals that encode liking and wanting and so cocaine doesn't follow the usual pattern of the craving cycle that we've been discussing, but there's still a clear separation between the self-reported high versus self-reported craving. The high comes quite quickly after addicts take a hit and only lasts for a few minutes, while the brain regions in the craving network that subserve liking and wanting are active evenly and continuously for at least half an hour after addicts take a hit.

All this formal experimental work aligns with anecdata. I usually drink a cup of coffee when I wake up, and so waking up is a situation that I have associated with coffee. This morning when I woke up I immediately started to want coffee. After I had brewed a cup and had taken the first sip I tasted the coffee and had to decide whether to spit it out or to swallow it. Fortunately I liked the taste of the coffee and decided to swallow it. After the cup was finished then I was satisfied and had no particular liking or wanting related to coffee. For the next hour or so I had a pleasant tingling sensation. Later in the day the pleasant tingling sensation had faded, but I still had no particular wanting for coffee, which shows how subjective pleasure is different than satisfaction. That is an important caveat to note because, for example, depressed people don't want anything yet are miserable. Merely the absence of wants does not guarantee happiness.

A lot of people wrongly model this using needs, starting from basic physical needs such as food and water and then abstracting from there. The idea is that you have a physical need for a certain amount of water and then once you get that amount of water then you're not thirsty anymore and then you're satisfied and happy. In this wrong model, more abstract things work the same way. Allegedly you need a certain amount of appreciation or self-actualization or whatever and then when these needs are fulfilled then you'll be happy. This is especially used to critique sexual norms by claiming that you have certain level of sexual activity that's healthy and normal and if you reach this level then you'll be happy.

The needs model might actually be true for simple homeostasis requirements like water and caloric intake. But these homeostatic desires are extended through sign-tracking and so they actually are a loop. The more you indulge them the more you reinforce the incentive value of the conditioned reinforcers and the more desire and stress you have. This is similar to a protection racket because paying the mafia makes the problem go away temporarily but if the mafia didn't exist in the first place then you could be safe without even having to pay them. In just the same way, if you didn't think about sex at all or see any signs associated with sex, then you wouldn't have sexual desire and you wouldn't need sex in order satisfy your desires. The same goes for nearly of the conditioned reinforcers that plague our lives.

Average people have many signs attached to food and drink that make them pointless in the same way as purely symbolic desires. You desire particular comfort foods that you ate when you were a child, and like or dislike different flavors and textures based on what associations you have with them. When you go to a restaurant, you don't merely seek vitamins and calories but the restaurant claims association with some ethnic cooking style and you have sign-tracking deriving from the symbolic ethnic information accompanying the food. If instead you eat in, then you'll have to go grocery shopping and you will have to choose between different brands associated with smiling people. You'll have to choose between healthy and ecological food that's associated with girliness and left-wing politics versus American meat that's associated with manliness and right-wing politics. Although you can become full after a meal and the physical aspect of eating narrowly fits into the needs model, food and drink have a lot of symbolic aspects which fit more into the idea of an endless cycle of craving. Sign-tracking for food-related signs can cause obesity when it goes to a pathological extreme, and is stressful and pointless even in moderation.

Sign-tracking is Deceptive

One of the most evil things about sign-tracking is that it’s hard to reason your way out of it because you actually like the signs that you’re tracking. Remember from earlier, there is a study where children liked the soda brand that was associated with smiling faces. To understand the neural mechanisms of this, researchers use a Matrix-like experimental set up. They surgically install tubes from electric pumps through the back of a rat’s head directly into its mouth so that a computer can programatically feed it different flavors. This is a Matrix from the nightmares of BF Skinner, and so obviously you’ll have one tube of rewarding sucrose solution, and another tube for punishment with highly concentrated saline. Further, the rat’s brain is a pin cushion for electrodes which can measure the electrical activity of just a handful of neurons at a time, much more precisely than fMRI studies which can only measure entire brain regions. Using this setup, researchers associate a first neutral flavor with sugar water and a second neutral flavor with saline. Then they present the neutral flavors in isolation and compare the resulting electrical activity to the activity that resulted from actual sugar and salt. Throughout many areas of the craving network, the electrical activity from tasting a flavor that's associated with sugar or salt is the same as the activity from sugar or salt. The rats liked the sugar-associated flavor just as they liked sugar, and disliked the salt-associated flavor just as they disliked salt. When researchers injected the rats with a chemical that depletes salt from the rats’ blood, then they craved salt and suddenly started to like the salt-associated neutral flavor. Just to make the experiment even more dystopian, the researchers killed the rats, liquified samples of brain tissue, and confirmed that patterns of gene expression were similar between sugar-association and salt-association versus sugar and salt. Someone should make a movie where computers harvest our brains to get data.

Rats value the sign in the same way as the goal, and this is also apparent in anecdata from humans. Imagine someone who enjoys the smell of red wine because they’re used to getting tipsy on it. Then one night, they overdo it and puke. They will suddenly find the smell of red wine unpleasant, because now they no longer like red wine.

Smokers begin to like the stink of cigarettes after their smoking habit has gotten going. Italians drink espresso with dessert after meals, and come to like the bitter espresso. If you want to train your child to eat vegetables, try presenting the vegetables in an extremely sweet preparation that your kid likes. Over many meals, gradually reduce the amount of sugar while ensuring that your kid still likes it, until eventually all the sugar is gone and your kid will still like the sweet-associated vegetables, even if they don't actually have any sugar in them anymore.

The ancient Greeks viewed reason and emotion as separate processes, using the metaphor of a charioteer: reason is the driver who has to control the horses that represent our unruly emotions. The same basic intuition has persisted for centuries: the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde portrays the emotional Mr. Hyde as totally separate from the rational Dr. Jekyll. However, in reality, people like things that they are emotionally attached to, and confabulate reasons why those things are good. Even though sign-tracking is stressful and pointless, we do not have a firewalled reasoning system that we can use to control it. Instead, sign-tracking actually changes the values that we use as the basis of our reasoning. Our most well-thought out schemes are usually in the service of approval, money, or some other reinforced conditioner.

Remember the apocryphal story of Phineas Gage who accidentally got a metal rod through his orbitofrontal cortex, a node of the craving network. He famously became more impulsive. The story clearly demonstrates how we don't have a firewalled reasoning and control process, but rather a single collection of values that contains both better-socialized values we label as self-control and antisocial values we label as animal desire. Although Phineas Gage has become something of a Biblical tale for neuroscience, the moral of the story is well supported by recent work by Antonio Damasio and others who have more rigorously studied patients with damaged orbitofrontal cortices. They have confirmed that such patients indeed have terrible judgment.

All of this makes it extremely hard to talk to people about sign-tracking, because people truly like the signs that they track.

Materialist Virtue Ethics

In a university psychology department, somewhere in the world, a trained rat in a cage is chewing a lever and never getting full. The worst part is that it likes it. That's a metaphor for life bleak enough to make Sartre despair. There is an escape, though. Since sign-tracking is stresful, pointless and deceptive, goal-tracking more often will make us easygoing, purposeful, and wise. To goal-track more and become a better person, we need skeptical inquiry into the incentive values attached to objects by sign-tracking. Suspecting the values instilled in us by propagandists and marketers allows us to articulate a virtue ethics grounded in scientific skepticism. It gives us a precise language to explain why more rewards make us less happy and to justify self-restraint of our own surplus enjoyment.

Sign-tracking sucks; zero out of five stars; do not recommend.

State of competitive debating (unions) address

Li Shengwu is atypical many times over. He is a renowned economist. He is a grandson of Singapore’s founding father who emigrated to the United States. He received tenure from Harvard University at the age of 39. In another lifetime--that of the Obama era--he was also extremely successful in the world of competitive debate.

When I use the phrase “competitive debate,” I don’t mean the activity that free speech advocates tell you is plagued by woke critical theorists and evidence packets. That’s American high school debate. There is a worldwide network of universities--a set of regional “circuits”-- that facilitates something closer to actual debate. The main format in which it hosts tournaments is called British Parliamentary. (See the second tab for an explainer, but basically, four teams of two give 7-minute speeches on a topic they had 15 minutes to think about with no internet access.) At the higher levels, speeches in BP debates are often quite persuasive to normal people: there are no lists of studies read out at 350 wpm, no judges who “adjudicate from a Marxist paradigm,” and no monologues about nuclear war in debates about normal things like legalizing drugs.

A number of US universities are quite committed to this circuit. In January 2025, Bates College made it to the grand final of the World Universities Debating Championship (WUDC), and Dartmouth College won it. Sadly, though, far more US universities remain committed to the stupid version of debate.

Li Shengwu’s accomplishments during his debate career--part of which he spent representing Stanford--and his outsize influence on the global debating circuit are thus quite interesting to examine in our time. He was the single best performer at the 2010 World Universities Debating Championship, but he’s best known (at least among young debaters) for a recording of a speech he gave in a round he lost. He was defending the belief that the media should show the full horrors of war. It was the fifth of the eight speeches in the 2010 final. With fifteen years of hindsight, it seems extremely obvious to open with Tacitus, but the first time a fifteen-year-old hears his delivery of “they make it a wasteland, and they call it peace,” it strikes her with force. This is similar to the experience of reading his blog Trolley Problem in 2025.

Trolley Problem hosts 17 posts (some essay-length, some tweet-length) uploaded over the course of 2012. Li’s first post, “a statement of purpose,” from January 22, proclaims: “This is not going to be your standard debating blog. There will be almost no news about ongoing tournaments, and no hand-wringing about which-teams-will-break-on-what-points-this-weekend.” Not only has this “standard” for debating blogs died out: most of those “standard” blogs are no longer available for the public to find and read. (The most plausible explanation is that this kind of gossip has moved to Discord servers and Facebook Messenger group chats and that no one bothers paying for their college-era blog domain anymore.)

Trolley Problem is an unusual window into Obama-era debating. This review will construct a window into Trump-era debating, and it will comment on how the landscape has changed. Post-mortems of the golden age of American universities and free speech are common these days. It seems relevant to review the evolution of American debating norms as they relate to the global circuit.

Selecting good, fair topics for debates

The restriction of the set of topics considered “debatable” is a perennial concern among campus speech watchers. Among university debaters, it is theoretically a concern, but it is secondary to the much more present concern of actively choosing a handful of good topics to debate each weekend from the ever-churning ocean of options. (While some American formats force students to argue the same topic many times per weekend many weekends per year, BP demands 4-8 distinct topics per tournament depending on how many rounds are taking place.)

Debaters are concerned with competitive integrity. The point of a debate competition is to sort a set of debaters according to how skilled they are at formulating and delivering arguments. It would be unfair to force some speakers to argue inherently unconvincing or inherently super-convincing positions. Keep in mind that British Parliamentary has four teams, two of which need to provide distinct new arguments for the same position--it would also be unfair to set motions (topics) that only have one or two main arguments on each side.

Apparently, the concern for “fairness” was prominent in 2012. In What does it mean to say “This motion is fair”?, Li says that “almost all debaters describe motions as “fair” or “unfair” in ordinary speech. In 2025, complaining that a debate was “so unfair” would come off as whiny. People are socially expected to at least be a bit more specific when critiquing motions: it’s a lot more common to say “I think this motion is shallow on opposition” when there are fewer arguments against a motion than for it.

Li argues that there exist increasingly statistically strict methods of determining a motion’s fairness. The strictest of the four definitions he settles on is that “a motion is fair if teams of equal skill level in every position have the same probability of coming first, second, third, or fourth.”

He immediately dismisses this as a poor definition because there are good reasons for there to be variance among a team’s expected performance in Opening Government (OG) at different skill levels.

Personally, I have much less sympathy for the rights of the least skilled competitors. Over a number of tournaments, each of them can expect to draw OG roughly an equal number of times. Penalizing teams for being bad is actually a good thing. To be fair, though, this may be a somewhat recent innovation: before the widespread adoption of specialized tournament formatting (tabulation) software, there was less capacity to ensure teams drew each position an equal number of times in addition to being power-paired (the standard format for determining matchups at tournaments).

Li then wonders if his second-strictest definition, “a motion is fair if teams of equal skill level in every position have the same expected number of team points,” is a reasonable one. It is certainly considered reasonable today. In the late 2010s, developers of the prominent tabulation software Tabbycat added a feature that allows tournaments to display the distribution of performances by certain positions for each motion.

Here are the statistics about the motions that were set at the 2025 World Universities Debating Championship. The most balanced motion was that of the sixth round:

Perfect…

And the least balanced was that of the third round:

That canal was pretty beneficial.

I can explain why teams arguing in favour performed so much better than teams arguing against. The motion is worded poorly! Government teams don’t have to prove that US involvement in Panama has provided more benefit than harm. They just have to prove that Panama is better off than it would have been in the alternate universe without US involvement. American initiative with the canal and American investment with the banks are both obviously quite beneficial. Really, it’s a wonder that government teams didn’t overperform even more.

But this imbalance is nothing compared to the motions of the past. In Motion Fairness Analysis for Huber Debates 2012, Li statistically tests the hypothesis that each motion from that tournament (which is hosted annually at the University of Vermont) is “fair.”

Some of them are about as close as you can get to balanced:

But some of them are decisively not:

This motion is clearly very flawed. The “public interest” is vague. This would create awful incentives for young men with main character syndrome. On the surface, it seems like there might be arguments in favour: this will incentivize whistleblowers to step forward! (Never mind that this was debated a year before the Snowden leaks.) But the arguments disperse when you look closely. There are usually legal ways to stand up against evil governments and corporations. When there aren’t, it’s still generally fine to impose penalties on lawbreaking: people who feel that speaking out is important enough will make the tradeoff.

Today, this level of imbalance is practically unthinkable in large debate competitions. Why? I can’t say for sure:

It seems that the teams that select motions--called the Chief Adjudicators (CAs)--take their roles much more seriously. In "Advice for new CAs setting motions," Li’s first suggestion is “don’t try to come up with motions on the day itself.” Even the most scattered CA teams will start assembling spreadsheets of motions a couple of weeks in advance.

There is much more pressure on tournaments to recruit smart, accomplished people to CA teams.

As Li predicted, the ability to perform large-scale analysis of motions and tournaments makes it easier for CA teams to predict which kinds of motions will be balanced.

It is also much easier to analyze the past performances of prospective CAs: people with track records of setting balanced motions are more likely to be hired.

Li understands that “fairness” is not the only consideration to be made when evaluating a motion. It is important to make university debaters argue about topics that are interesting and relevant. He praises motions about aliens and robots for the metaethical insights they produce; he encourages CAs not to let their personal obsessions leak into their motion-setting.

I’m sure you’re curious about whether university debaters restrict topics to a narrow patch of wokeness. They don’t really do that. Extreme tough-on-crime attitudes (round 8), opposition to affirmative action, and pro-religion pro-family arguments arise reasonably often. “This house would ban abortion” is a bit overdone for most modern tournaments, but a variant of it was set as recently as 2024 at the world’s premier round-robin tournament.

However, certain topics are overrepresented at tournaments. Can you guess which ones?

debatedata.io catalogues motions set at tournaments over the past few decades. Of the 32,342 motions it hosts at the time of writing, 1858 are tagged with “feminism,” 1374 are tagged with “minority communities,” and 790 are tagged with “LGBTQ+” (with about 100 motions of overlap between the three). That’s about 12% of all debates. 11,547 are tagged with “economics.”

“Economics” is a broader category. Everything from finance to trade to debates about the interests of individual workers gets the tag, as well as basically any motion that involves buying or selling anything (which includes a lot of Black Mirror-esque hypotheticals like “assuming feasibility, this house would allow individuals to sell units of their IQ). But overrepresentation doesn’t really follow woke patterns; it just correlates with the interests of the kind of university student who gets good enough at debate that people ask them to pick motions for tournaments.

How we ought to judge

University debates are judged by…panels of other university debaters. There are a few university students who exclusively compete or exclusively judge, but they are uncommon. (The reason for this is simple: judging provides unique insight into how to improve your own debating and vice versa.) But how should they decide which arguments are more persuasive? Vibes? Hours of poring over research papers?

In "What does a good judge believe?", Li answers the titular question:

Judges should have a defeasible presumption in favour of a moderate liberal position on most ethical issues. I use "liberal", not in the sense meaning "left-wing", but rather in the sense that would describe most intelligent university-educated people in the countries that we call "liberal democracies". By "defeasible", I mean that the presumption could in principle be overcome by a persuasive argument, and that the judge should listen to such arguments with an open mind.

What does such a moderate liberal judge believe? Here's a sketch: That judge has a strong belief in the importance of certain kinds of human goods - freedom, happiness, life, etc - though not a full theory about how trade-offs between these goods should be made, or a precise conception of what the good life is. That judge has a moderate presumption in favour of democracy, free speech, and equal treatment. That judge holds a defeasible belief in Mill's harm principle; that is, insofar as an action affects just the actor, the judge has a presumption against government action. That judge believes that important moral questions should be resolved by reasoned deliberation, not appeals to unquestionable divine authority. This is because a good judge is an open-minded individual of the sort likely to think that debating is a worthwhile activity.

I think this is very reasonable. Debating should ideally help students understand and grow more persuasive to normal people. This is a relatively normal set of principles to hold! More importantly, though, I’m happy to trade a bit of bias toward certain principles for a consistent increase in quality of debate. When there are zero grounding principles for judges, debates often devolve into assertion-offs where people with different values talk past each other.

The idea that judges should apply a uniform approach to assessing debates took hold in the community and eventually mutated into a 63-page manual. Li helped construct the “speaker scale” at the bottom of the document.

A tangent about scoring debates

Fierce discussions have been had about how to quantifiably score speeches. The scale theoretically standardizes scoring by asking the judge to consider:

How well-explained/logically sound the content was

How vulnerable the content was to responses of varying ingenuity

How relevant the content was
How easy the speech was to follow

The issue, of course, is that these things are largely subjective. Analyzing the scores given by judges at the most recent WUDC shows that some judges consistently give teams scores that are far higher or far lower than their average performance.

But apparently speaker scores aren’t as subjective as one would think--or at minimum, their subjectivity does not render them useless. A recent paper showed that speaker points are empirically better than most other (feasible) metrics at predicting how teams will perform in elimination rounds.

What the American circuit is like these days

When I talk about the “American circuit,” I refer to the set of universities that participate in British Parliamentary debate. At this year’s United States Universities Debating Championship, this set included (in order of performance of their top team):

Stanford University
Columbia University
Harvard University
Princeton University
UC Berkeley
UC LA
University of Rochester
Bates College
Williams College
The Claremont Colleges
University of Southern California
University of Pennsylvania
UW Madison
Amherst College
Drexel University
Cornell University
Brown University
Colby College
Bard College
Middlebury College
Hobart & William Smith Colleges
Davidson College
University of Vermont
Morehouse College

Additional universities that participated in this year’s North American Universities Debating Championship:

University of Chicago
Northwestern University
Yale University
John Hopkins University
Dartmouth College
Swarthmore College

30 universities is not a small force, but it is far smaller than the group of universities in the American Parliamentary Debate Association who debate in the eponymous “fact”-slinging woke format. Some extremely successful international debaters also participate in APDA (on a spectrum from “once a year” to “frequently”). High performers in international debate seem to do well when they wade into APDA; the reverse is less often true.

Top American debaters have a strong grasp of the art of explaining technical things. The debaters who win international tournaments for American schools tend to create and leverage ridiculously effective catalogues of knowledge and argumentation. Writing out a ton of facts and arguments before tournaments (referred to as “matter filing”) has been common in BP debate for a long time, but today’s top Americans take that process to another level.

WUDC 2024 semifinalist Ryan Lafferty produced 520 pages of notes (about 100 pages of arguments and 400 pages of knowledge) in the lead-up to WUDC 2024. How do I know this? Because after the tournament, he released it online. One would think this would reduce his comparative advantage over other debaters: nope! He went on to win WUDC 2025. Then he published another 647 pages, at least 600 of which are distinct from his previous matter file.

How Americans compare to the rest of the world

Globally, the perception that American debaters and judges are bad has persisted for quite a while. Tenets of this argument include:

Most Americans perform poorly at international tournaments
For years, the vast majority of the US’s top performers at WUDC have been international students; the US can’t grow its own winners
The homegrown Americans who are exceptionally good are ruining the activity by spitting out analysis at 200 wpm and beating inspiring speakers on “erm actually” esque technicalities

These things are true, but I (an outsider) no longer think they support the claim that the US is “worse at debate” than most other circuits.

It is certainly true that Australia is stronger. Out of the 48 teams that advanced to open elimination rounds at WUDC 2025, 18 were American, and 10 were Australian. Producing ~56% as many good teams with 8% of the population isn’t bad! The year before, it was even worse, with the US advancing 14 teams and Australia advancing 11.

Australia has a strong culture of holding “minis” that concentrate a bunch of extremely talented debaters into one place. It also seems more common to take courses from several universities, which allows people to practice with (and learn from) a wider set of speakers. But the Sydney Union’s half-a-million dollar yearly budget probably doesn’t hurt their ability to be competitive.

You could also argue that the UK is stronger. They also break more teams (proportionally to their population) than the US. But they are even more reliant on international students than the US is.

It is also true that many other countries’ relative strength is growing. The pandemic shifted debate tournaments to Discord and Zoom, which provided unprecedented access to the activity for people from around the world. After a long history of anglophone dominance, WUDC was won by two ESL teams in a row--Zagreb in 2021 and BRAC University in 2022--then by a Filipino team in 2023.

Despite all of this, year after year, US universities produce more high performers at the World Universities Debating Championship than any other nation. And it’s not even true that all of their top speakers are uninspiring!

Disclaimer on “equity”

This is not to say the American circuit has been a shining beacon of intelligent debate throughout the last decade. The 2021 US Universities Debating Championship was cancelled midway through due to a controversial decision to delay handling complaints about racism. Almost all tournaments have “equity teams” tasked with “ensuring debate is a welcoming environment.” In theory, these teams have frightening powers: they can expel participants from tournaments, censor “triggering” motions, and mandate apologies and “education.”

But equity teams generally don’t use most of their powers. Members of teams are almost always students who debate and judge on a regular basis. They are usually friends with many of the competitors. This creates strong social incentives to act reasonably. Equity teams always assume good intent and lean toward less punitive forms of mediation.

I have had a number of complaints raised against me. Equity teams have asked me to apologize and/or change my behaviour a number of times. In some cases (like the complaint I received for asking an opponent if they were stupid during a speech), I have happily done so. In others (like the complaint I received for asking if 18-year-old IDF soldiers can morally be held accountable if they are bystanders to war crimes without a trigger warning), I have declined. None of this has affected my participation in the activity. I am happy to trade off a tiny bit of my time and a tiny bit of extra politeness for an environment in which people can have spirited debates without personal animosity.

Why we should care about this at all

I understand that BP debate is a slightly convoluted, somewhat-closed-off corner of the world. I understand that when commentators reference “debate on campus,” this is not what they mean. But it is important to remember that debate on campus can look different from anxious half-empty classrooms and clips of Charlie Kirk speaking over mid-IQ students.

Li Shengwu’s ideas about making debate fairer and more intelligent substantially improved BP debate over a decade. I am hopeful that an increased focus on producing and preserving resources with similar potential (like Ryan Lafferty’s matter files) will improve it even more. More American schools should get on board.

British Parliamentary Debate

If you want a complete explanation of the rules, read them here. This is a brief summary of the aspects of BP most relevant to the review.

The format

There are four teams (two arguing for the motion, two arguing against) of two speakers. Each speaker gets seven minutes to speak. The speaking order looks like this:

The silly names are relics of the actual British Parliament.

Between 1:00 and 6:00 of each speech, debaters on the opposing side (but not from the other team on their own side!) can offer “points of information,” or 15-second questions/challenges. The speaker can choose whether to accept or reject these (but can be nebulously penalized for refusing to take any).

All teams have to give arguments for their position, refute opponents’ arguments, and weigh the importance of their arguments against other arguments. Closing teams have to provide distinct arguments that don’t contradict what the other team on their side said (unless it was extremely obviously incorrect).

Motions

The topic of debate is called the motion. The beginnings of motions are almost always phrased in one of the following ways:

This House Would: this kind of debate is about implementing a policy or taking an action. The government teams have to prove it’s practically feasible and that it leads to better outcomes than alternative policies/actions. The opening government team gets to decide who the “house” is (it’s in their interest to pick something reasonable) and “model” what the policy’s implementation would look like.

This House, as X, Would: Same as above, but the debate is from the perspective of a specific actor (e.g. “the CCP” or “a professional athlete”).

This House Believes That: More of a normative judgement than a policy.
This House Supports/This House Opposes: Exactly what it sounds like.
This House Predicts: Exactly what it sounds like.
This House Prefers: These debates will often set up an explicit comparison (e.g. world A over world B, action A over action B, etc).
This House Regrets X: Government has to prove that the world would be better off if X had never happened. Opposition has to prove the opposite.

Standard of knowledge for judges

Judges take on the perspective of the “ordinary intelligent voter,” a mythical creature who is intelligent and good at following complex logic, reads the front page and world section of some major international newspaper (without trying to memorize it), and doesn’t hold any biases toward any positions being debated.

Tournament format

Four teams face each other in a number of Swiss rounds (“inrounds”) (9 for some major competitions, 5 for most competitions, occasionally a different number). For each round, teams get 15 minutes to prepare their case (without the internet) after seeing the motion. After the debate, judges have 15 minutes to deliberate and rank the teams from 1-4 (as well as provide scores that practically range from 60-90 for each individual speaker). The deliberation is supposed to be done pairwise (i.e. judges compare Opening Government and Opening Opposition, then vote on who won between the two, then repeat this process for the other five pairings).

For each round, the team that ranks 1st gains 3 team points, 2nd 2, 3rd 1, and 4th 0. After the inrounds are done, the teams with the most points advance to elimination rounds (which are usually conducted in front of audiences). Individual speaker points are used as a tiebreaker when there are ties on team points.

Synanthropes - Love thy infestation

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, oil on oak panels, circa 1450–1516

Synanthropes are animals that live near and benefit from human activity. Think of the swarms of rats, pigeons, and cockroaches in city centers, racoons rifling through trash cans in the night, foxes slinking through the suburbs, and macaques mugging tourists in Kuala Lumpur. The thesis of this review is that, although I don’t personally enjoy their company, synanthropes are very good and deserving of your respect.

Why review anything at all?

Let me begin with a digression: What’s the point of reviewing anything?

One purpose is to resolve asymmetric information issues. Consumers don’t know the quality of movies, books, and resale goods on Amazon before buying them, which has the potential to cause a market-for-lemons-style collapse. Reviews distribute information, directing consumption towards high-quality products, incentivizing long-term investment in quality production, and increasing market efficiency. Unfortunately, unless you’re interested in purchasing a mischief of brown rats for your basement, this doesn’t apply to a review of synanthropes.

Another reason is to tell you what to think. Taste-making is an immensely valuable service—in the absence of genuine convictions, people may want to coordinate with their social circle on which ideas, shoes styles, politicians, and pieces of art are valuable. Imagine deciding how you feel about a movie without checking Letterboxd first! I agree, it’s a terrifying prospect. Understanding what other people like and what’s on trend, in many contexts, is as essential information as any objective measures of quality. Unfortunately, once again, this review doesn’t fit the bill. It is incredibly easy to coordinate tastes on skunks, rats, and pigeons. The expected opinion is that they are gross, disease-ridden, a nuisance, and therefore bad. We can all safely converge on that.

We’re getting warmer, though. I am trying to tell you what to think. I’m just not doing it for the sake of social coordination. Instead, I’m trying to accomplish a shift in perspective for three reasons. First and foremost, because it’s fun to bring other people around to your own point of view. Secondly, it’s because I believe the outlook I’m arguing for is more pleasurable to hold than the standard view. If it is accepted that neither view has greater instrumental value or epistemic grounding, it is better to adopt the more pleasurable one. This sort of goal is often pursued through defamiliarization. See Erik Hoel’s wonderful recent piece “The Lore of the World” or John Green’s book The Anthropocene Reviewed for examples. The effect is usually a brief but pleasurable feeling of awe at the strangeness and beauty of the world. It allows us to step momentarily off the hedonic treadmill and feel like a child again. I’m after something similar, but not the same. Synanthropes, especially of the domestic rat-and-cockroach variety, are intuitively repugnant and I don’t expect you to feel awe at the thought of them. Instead, I want you to grudgingly respect them.

Third, I’m engaging in a bait-and-switch where I say I’m reviewing synanthropes, while actually I’m trying to shift the values you use to evaluate a broader class of phenomena. More on that later. For now, enough meta-commentary. On to the real review.

What makes a good animal?

Animals are beautiful, inspiring, and moving. They are essential to human myth-making and self-understanding. They are deserving of moral consideration and their suffering should be minimized. They are also, in a metaphysical sense, as pointless as humanity. They are produced by evolutionary factors, they exist within the constraints of an ecosystem, and they take from and give to that ecosystem in ways that they have no control over. They have no capacity for moral judgement. As a result, it’s difficult to evaluate the value of an animal's life the way we might with a human. Is a zebra morally superior to the lion that kills it, by dint of being a herbivore? No, obviously not.

This may seem like the end of the story, but it’s not. While animals can’t be judged for the way evolution and environment makes them act, their actions still have moral valence. Whether an animal is “good” depends not on its aesthetics or its capacity for moral judgement and more on its ability to survive and flourish without destabilizing its surroundings. An animal is “good,” in this view, when it contributes to the resilience of its ecosystem rather than undermining it. Invasive species, in this view, are the quintessential villains of nature. Their proliferation destroys endemic species and drives the ecosystem’s long-term viability to the brink. In the worst cases, they destroy it and eventually themselves.

Good animals create balance or refrain from disrupting it. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park is a famous example. Wolves were feared and vilified for generations, but they turned out to be key to the park’s ecological balance. Their predation on deer and elk allowed overgrazed vegetation to recover, which in turn stabilized the soil and allowed a cascade of other species to flourish. Wolves were good not because they were moral actors that avoided consuming other species, but because they stabilized a system that had been unraveling in their absence. Goodness, for animals, consists in part of long-term ecological functionality.

A Digression on the Daoist Concept of Uselessness

Yes, I’m already digressing again. Yes, most of the digression is a Daoist parable as long as the previous section. Read it:

“Carpenter Shih went to Ch’i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a fair, but the carpenter didn’t even glance around and went on his way without stopping.

His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after Carpenter Shih and said, ‘Since I first took up my ax and followed you, Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don’t even bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?’

‘Forget it—say no more!’ said the carpenter. ‘It’s a worthless tree! Make boats out of it and they’d sink; make coffins and they’d rot in no time; make vessels and they’d break at once. Use it for doors and it would sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It’s not a timber tree—there’s nothing it can be used for. That’s how it got to be that old!’

After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of those fructiferous trees and shrubs—as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so they don’t get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in mid-journey. They bring it on themselves—the pulling and tearing of the common mob. And it’s the same way with all other things.

‘As for me, I’ve been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I almost died, I’ve finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover, you and I are both of us things. What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You, a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?’”

The gnarled old tree is spared the axe because its wood is too twisted to be of use. It lives a long, undisturbed life precisely because it is considered worthless. The point with respect to animals is that our conventional ideas of value are hopelessly biased. Animals that are useful to humans, who provide food, labor, and beauty, are more often systematically exploited. Animals that are useful to other animals as prey are consumed. It is often better, from a tree or an animal’s perspective, to be altogether useless.

This could lead to contradiction with the criterion we just set up. It suggests both insurmountable subjectivity—”What’s the point of this—things condemning things?”—and the selfish pursuit of the tree’s own desire to live long and grow large. Yet from the perspective of ecological functionality, a species is considered valuable explicitly because it serves another species' purposes and keeps the ecosystem stable. Deer are valuable because they feed wolves; wolves are valuable because they eat deer. A species pursuing only its subject sense of goodness could easily become invasive. The resolution is that while ecological viability is the definition of a morally good species, it does not maximize a species’s wellbeing. A species may well accomplish both.

Uselessness provides an escape from exploitation while preserving a species’ morality. The old tree does no harm to the environment around it, although it takes up space, as all living things must. It even provides shade to shelter oxen and beauty to sightseers. But it contributes in ways that leaves itself unharmed, creating a life more pleasant and no more harmful than countless other species.

Animals that find both subjectively and objectively good ecological niches deserve our respect. Synanthropes are such animals.

But they’re leeches on society!

Of course, synanthropes do cause harm. The problem with rats and raccoons, you might reasonably argue, is that in addition to being useless, they steal from humans. We have to expend resources controlling their population. We feel varying levels of fear and disgust at the sight of them. They take everything they want, and they contribute nothing. Synanthropy is parasitism, plain and simple.

I agree. Synanthropes are parasites, and the label comes with vast amounts of associative baggage. Parasitism, in people, is universally reviled. We disdain hangers-on and free riders as lazy and shameless. They are an affront to the spirit of mutual reliance that the most fulfilling aspects of human civilization are built on.

But for animals, the logic doesn’t hold. In the context of humanity's global dominance, synanthropes feeding off of humans is indistinguishable from breathing the air and the basking sun. Our resources, relative to the desires of a rat, are so vast as to be non-rivalrous.

In truth, despite their parasitism, they are no threat to humanity’s continued flourishing. They thus meet the first, objective criterion for animal goodness, that they do not disrupt their own ecosystem and damage the prospects of other species. They also meet the second, uselessness criterion. By being repulsive, they exist on their own terms, unlikely to be exploited or employed for human purposes. This is, in my view, incredibly admirable.

The parasitic adaptability of synanthropes may be a lesson for humanity. You might be aware that some credible people estimate that AI will change the world to an absurd degree by the end of the decade. Even if we avoid doomsday, technological change is going to irrevocably alter the way people relate to themselves and the world. If superintelligence emerges, humanity might become a parasite soon enough. We could do well to learn from synanthropes, and find a niche where we’re useless enough to avoid exploitation and unobstructive enough to avoid extermination.

I still dread finding mouse droppings in the cupboard. I’m put off by pigeons’ beady eyes and rats’ worm tails. I fear finding cockroaches in the shower and spiders in the cellar. I resent that raccoons strew trash across the street and seagulls steal my snacks at the beach. But despite it all, I can’t help but respect them.

A silly poem to end things off

Fat beggars in the daytime

Masked robbers in the night

Do not know from where they’ve fallen

Do not know wrong from right

Do not know what to aspire to

Do now know who to fight

But knotty wood repels the axe

More than shows of might

Like so grand designs are thwarted

Like so they sate their appetite

Here’s to Nature’s useless tool

All hail the parasite!

2025 Non-Book-Review Contest Vol 2 - J-S

Jacobitism: The First Four Thousand Years

The Original Jacobites (circa 2000 BCE, give or take a millennium)

The Jacobite Heresies

The Jacobite Succession

The Jacobins

Jacobitism Today

Chinese Jacobitism

Why I Am Not A Jacobite

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories

What we know for sure happened

The CIA did it

The Cubans and/or Soviets did it

The Mafia did it

Lyndon Johnson did it

The military-industrial complex did it

Israel/the Jews did it

The bankers did it

Woody Harrelson’s dad did it

Aliens did it

The Secret Service did it—by accident

Conclusion

Endnotes

[1] I’d rank him below both John and John Quincy Adams, but above John Tyler and John Calvin Coolidge, who’s better known by his middle name. ↩

[4]. One of the teenagers in question, Mimi Alford, wrote a tell-all book in 2012. ↩

[7] Compounding the uncertainty, a 1982 report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded that one of the key pieces of evidence in the the HSCA report was probably misinterpreted. ↩

[8] Garrison’s case was not only legally shaky, it was also wildly homophobic. Shaw—who was closeted until the prosecution outed him—was smeared and stereotyped throughout the trial, which used his participation in underground gay life to paint him as a sinister and malicious figure. ↩

[9] After confirming their own lack of involvement, Soviet leadership also concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone. They blamed far-right extremists within the U.S. ↩

[10] For the time being, at least… ↩

[11] It’s hard not to feel bad for Johnson here, who essentially seems to have been on the losing end of White House class war, earning the ire of Kennedy’s young, rich, East Coast staffers not for any of his political positions but just for being Southern, ill-mannered, and of poor stock. ↩

[12] I swear the shower thing is true. Look it up. ↩

[14] In interviews and jailhouse conversations, Ruby repeatedly insisted that “the Jews” were being blamed for Kennedy’s death, and that darker forces had manipulated the entire situation to provoke a pogrom. ↩

[15] If you want to get nitpicky, Kennedy was only our second-richest president when including family money. He had effectively unlimited access to, but did not technically control, the Kennedy family fortune. ↩

[16] The judge, John H. Wood Jr, earned the incredibly cool nickname of “Maximum John” due to his propensity for handing down unusually long prison terms. ↩

[17] This is a good time to share the old joke about the JFK conspiracy theorist who dies and goes to heaven, where God offers to answer any question he has about the universe. Obviously, our conspiracy theorist asks, “Who really killed JFK?”

“Lee Harvey Oswald,” God tells him, “acting alone.”

Our man’s eyes go wide. “Wow,” he says. “This goes even higher up than I thought!” ↩

Joan of Arc

Part One: “That brought great harm to the kingdom of France.”

Part Two: The Life of Joan of Arc

2.1: “There lives a maid between Coussey and Vaucouleurs that will see the King crowned within a year.”

2.2: “Thou art true heir of France and King’s son.”

2.3: “A Maid sent by God to drive out the English.”

2.4: ‘By my martin, the place would have been taken.’

2.5. ‘I appeal before God, the Great Judge.”

2.6: “Rejoice, free kingdom of France, for now God fights on your side.”

Part Three: “And we know that all she has said has always come to pass.”

3.2: “We wish to know the truth of this matter.”

3.3: “Thus spake the people, but whether she had done well or ill, she was burned that day.”

3.4: “She is in truth come to accomplish magnificent things in this world.”

Judaism

Law

Persecution

Comedy

Hats

L'Ambroisie, by Bernard Pacaud

I. Introduction

II. L'Ambroisie

III. Amuse-bouche

IV. Appetizers

V. Mains

VI. Desserts

VII. Other Comments

VIII. The Future

Lesbian Fanfiction

Introduction

Shipping Subculture Basics

Other Vocabulary

Popular Ships (And My Favorites)

Tropes of the Genre

Common Fanfic Tropes

Lesbian/LGBT-Specific Fanfiction Tropes

Sexuality in Lesbian Fanfiction

Fanfiction Quality

Sturgeon’s Law and Large Numbers

Speculations on Why Lesbian Fanfic Is Better Written

Life of a Pairing

Queerbaiting

What It Is

Effect On Fanfiction

2025 Non-Book-Review Contest
Vol 2 - J-S