World War Two
Published 11 Jan 2022From the woods of the Urals to the burning city of Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev went out to hunt his prey. As a sniper, he learned his trade in the grim reality of Stalingrad street fighting. Deep in the ruins of the factories, he stalked his enemies with a team of battle-hardened snipers. For days on end, they would lay in wait for valuable targets to show up. With a finger on the trigger, they would decimate the German ranks within a few deadly moments.
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January 12, 2022
Sniper Warrior – Vasily Zaitsev – WW2 Biography Special
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“You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!”
When I was in middle school, my favourite teacher was a huge fan of the Leakey family’s discoveries in central Africa, and took every opportunity to show us films on the latest hominid remains uncovered (and by “latest”, it usually meant several years old, as 16mm films distributed through the county school system were rarely all that “new”). I assume she was a frustrated anthropologist herself, honestly, although I found her to be a very good teacher even if she’d “settled” for teaching as a career. In The Iconoclast, Geoffrey Clarfield remembers the late Richard Leakey, “the last Victorian scientist”, who died earlier this month in Kenya:
Richard Leakey at the WTTC Global Summit 2015.
Detail of original photo by the World Travel & Tourism Council via Wikimedia Commons.
Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey died on January 2nd at age 77, following an extraordinary career devoted to the scientific exploration of human origins. Richard was once my boss. And although we never became friends, I came to know him fairly well.
He died peacefully in his house overlooking Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where he’d made his most notable discoveries, and which occupied his imagination from an early age until his final days. It was fitting that he was buried beside his home, amid the same terrain from which he’d dug up humanity’s long-buried early ancestors. As I once heard him say to a group of visitors, “You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!” (Essayists are supposed to shun exclamation marks, but this was simply the way the man spoke.)
To an outsider, Richard’s work history may appear to comprise a series of disconnected, sometimes testosterone-driven adventures. By turns, he was a wildlife trapper and animal trader, safari guide, bush pilot, gifted (albeit informally trained) fossil hunter, archaeological excavator, scientific autodidact, museum and civil-service administrator, member of parliament, opposition leader, cabinet minister, conservation activist, Kenyan patriot, fundraiser, public speaker, and prolific writer. The public knew him best as a television and film presenter. But those who knew him privately will also remember him as an enthusiastic team leader and mentor of young talent.
In my case, he helped advance my own project to train young Kenyan researchers to record and document traditional music in the northern part of their country, the Turkana District in particular. When I’d raised funds for this initiative, he brought it under the auspices of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), of which he was then director.
While he may have seemed like something of an (enormously) overachieving dilettante to some, there was in fact a unity to his life and work. The times being what they are, many will focus on the fact that he was a white man taking a prominent role in a largely black country. But in truth, he likely attracted more scrutiny for being a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin, and a secular atheist, in a religious part of the world. He once published his own edited and illustrated version of Origin of Species, which I read when I was working for him, and his contributions to that volume gave me insight into what I believe was his fundamentally edifying professional motivation. I still have it on my shelf.
Richard emphasized that humankind had evolved in the Great Rift Valley, and from there had spread “out of Africa”, as the saying goes. He also believed that a previously underestimated factor in human evolution had been our species’ relationship to evolving biodiversity and prehistoric climate fluctuation — “paleoenvironments” as they came to be called.
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Soviet PPD-40: Degtyarev’s Submachine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Aug 2017Degtyarev’s PPD-40 was the first submachine gun adopted on a large scale by the Soviet Union. Its development began in 1929 with a locked breech gun modeled after Degtyarev’s DP light machine gun, but evolved into a much simpler blowback system. It was accepted as the best performing gun of 14 different submissions in Soviet trials of 1931/2, and first entered production in 1934. In this form, it used a 25 round curved stick magazine, and was chambered for the 7.62x25mm cartridge. In 1938 Degtyarev made a number of changes, most importantly developing a drum magazine based on the Finnish Suomi m31 drum. The PPD-38 drum had a short section of feed tower to allow the gun to use either drums or stick magazines, and this was dropped with the final iteration in 1940 when the gun was again changed, this time to accept only 71-round drum magazines of the m31 type.
The PPD-40 finally entered serious production in 1940, with just over 81,000 made. This production would continue into early 1941 with another roughly 6,000 made before it was replaced by the faster-to-produce PPSh-41 submachine gun. The PPD-40 was a relatively heavy SMG at 12 pounds (5.45 kg) unloaded, and with a rate of fire of approximately 900 rounds per minute. This particular example was captured and used by the Finnish military, and appears to have a PPD38 bolt in it.
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QotD: Baumol’s cost disease in architecture and furniture
Remember, the Baumol effect [Wiki] happens when new technology makes some industries more productive. Since the high-tech industries are so lucrative, wages go up. Then low-tech industries have to raise their wages so that their workers don’t all desert them for the high-tech industries. But since low-tech industries aren’t improving their productivity, they just because more expensive, full stop.
If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or, generalized, human labor) as possible.
This has gotten me thinking about furniture.
I got a new place recently and have been looking for furnishings. Sometimes I look at people’s furniture Pinterests. If Pinterest is any kind of representative window into the soul of the modern furniture-enthusiast, people really like Art Nouveau. […] As far as I can tell, you can’t buy any of these anywhere — they’re a combination of antiques and concept pieces. The people who pin these and pine after these end up getting minimalist Scandinavian furniture with names like UJLIBLÖK, just like everyone else.
Anything that even comes close to the above costs high four to five digits. I don’t know if this is because it’s antique, because it requires more labor, or both.
I’m harping on furniture because it avoids a lot of the complicating factors in architecture. There isn’t some vague collection of “elites” making our furniture decisions. It’s a pretty free market! There are lots of normal middle-class people spending big chunks of money on furniture, lots of them really really like the old stuff, and the old stuff is still either unavailable or unaffordable. It seems like it used to be affordable — it wasn’t just kings and dukes who had the old Art Nouveau stuff — but for some reason that’s changed. I think Baumol effects offer a tidy explanation here, and if we use them to explain furniture, then they start looking really attractive for architecture.
I want this one to be true, because it exonerates our civilization. If we could make things like the Art Nouveau furniture above, or the Taj Mahal, relatively cheaply and easily, then the question of why we aren’t doing that demands an answer. If it’s just a quirk of basic economics, then our civilization is fine, and maybe we can hope that stoneworking technology advances to the point where we can do this kind of thing again cheaply.
Scott Alexander, “Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-10-04.
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