In 1152, King Stephen of England very nearly killed a five-year-old boy.
He would have been far from the first child to die on Stephen’s account, because at this point England was fourteen years into a civil war so brutal that the Peterborough Chronicle recorded that men “said openly that Christ slept” (þa sæden openlice ðæt Crist slep. ⁊ his halechen),1 but this time was different. This time, the king had to order the boy’s death himself.
The medieval English royal succession was never as neat as Crusader Kings mechanics would have you believe, but even so Stephen I (and only) was an unlikely king. His mother Adela was the youngest child of William the Conqueror. She had four older brothers, three of whom survived their father, and Stephen himself was the third of her sons. But the Conqueror’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, mortgaged his duchy of Normandy to fund his participation in the First Crusade and would go on to spend the decades after his return in comfortable captivity. His second son, Richard, was killed as a teenager in a hunting accident in the New Forest in 1070, and his third son, William Rufus, succeeded him as king, never married, and was also killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest (this time in 1100). If this seems suspiciously convenient, it was: the youngest brother, Henry, was also on the fatal hunting trip. He immediately rode hard for Winchester, where he was crowned three days later.
Henry I promptly married Matilda, whose father was the king of Scotland and whose mother Margaret (later canonized by Innocent IV) was the sister of Edgar Ætheling: Henry and Matilda’s son William, born in 1103, united the blood of the Norman conquerors and the old Anglo-Saxon House of Wessex. Their daughter, another Matilda, was sent off to Germany at the age of eight to marry the twenty four-year-old Holy Roman Emperor Henry V. And that was it: Henry I also fathered at least twenty-two attested bastards, but William and Matilda were his only legitimate children. Which meant that when a drunken helmsman wrecked the ship carrying William and at least three hundred other flowers of the Anglo-Norman nobility across the Channel, Henry was in deep trouble. Luckily for him, his daughter soon returned from Germany a childless widow and once he had remarried her to Geoffrey of Anjou he was able to browbeat his barons into accepting her as his heir. Unluckily for him, they didn’t mean it: Empress Matilda was deeply unpopular even beyond the fact that she was a woman, and as soon as Henry died they were happy to crown his nephew Stephen instead.
The ensuing civil war, known to history as “the Anarchy,” was exciting and dramatic and featured such moments as a king captured on the battlefield, a queen climbing out the window of a besieged castle and escaping through a snowstorm, and a teenage boy invading England with a mercenary army he couldn’t afford to pay. For our purposes, though, all you really need to know is that in 1152 Stephen laid siege to a castle in Berkshire that John Marshal, a supporter of Matilda, had built without royal authorization. (These are apparently called “adulterine castles“, which I think is delightful.) Marshal asked for a truce to consult with his constable and organize the garrison’s surrender and offered his youngest son William as a hostage for his good behavior. Stephen accepted, took the boy into his camp, and withdrew to let Marshal enter with his men.
And then John Marshal stayed in the newly-reinforced castle instead.
Using your children as diplomatic hostages was standard practice in this era. Abandoning them to be executed as punishment for your bad faith was definitely not. But when Stephen’s men told John Marshal that his son’s life would be forfeit for his treachery, Marshal is said to have replied that he didn’t care, because he still had “the anvils and the hammers to forge even finer ones”. Stephen was not, in the end, able to bring himself to kill young William: the story has it that he lost his nerve when the boy asked on his way to the gallows whether he could play with a guard’s spear “afterwards”, and then again when William happily climbed into the catapult they planned to use to send him over the walls to his father (he thought it was a swing). He did, however, remain a hostage in Stephen’s camp until the end of the war a year later.2
Our only source for this story of William’s childhood, and for most of the truly excellent stories medievalist Thomas Asbridge recounts in The Greatest Knight, is a 19,215 line rhyming poem in medieval French. Probably composed a few years after William Marshal’s death at the behest of his friends or children, and pretty well corroborated by other sources where other sources exist, the poem is our only surviving example of a medieval biography of a “normal” person. (Relatively speaking; that little boy grew up to be an incredibly accomplished man but neither a king nor a saint, which is who usually got written about.) Moreover, it seems to have been compiled from stories told by people who actually knew him — which probably means that he was the one who told them about the child who thought the catapult was a swing. The poem exists in only one manuscript,3 discovered by Paul Meyer in the late 19th century and published with partial translations into modern French as L’histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. (You can find Meyer’s version here or here.) More recently, Nigel Bryant published a full English translation, the text of which isn’t available online, though I’ll point out that even Claude Sonnet does a pretty decent job with screencaps of the original.4
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Greatest Knight by Thomas Asbridge”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2026-04-27.
- As a measure of the degradation of the times, the chroniclers’ English no longer employed grammatical gender.
The ⁊ is a Tironian note for “and”, incidentally, and halechen is obviously cognate with “hallowed”. Like and subscribe for more Old English in the least expected places.
- Stephen’s son and heir Eustace having died by this point, it was agreed that he would keep the English throne but be succeeded by Matilda’s son, the future Henry II, who had already conquered Stephen’s duchy of Normandy.
- Yes, like Beowulf. It’s depressing to realize how many incredible medieval texts survive in only one manuscript. Thank a Benedictine today!
- Claim not verified by anyone who actually reads medieval French, but I didn’t see any obvious errors.
September 5, 2026
QotD: The first (of many) near-death experiences of William Marshal, the greatest knight
September 4, 2026
QotD: My generation
That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.
Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.
September 3, 2026
QotD: Combined arms
Bret Devereaux, “Miscellanea: A Very Short Glossary of Military Terminology”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-25.
September 2, 2026
QotD: The great natural experiment in plant-based eating
It is the most vegetarian large country on earth, hundreds of millions of people, many vegetarian from birth. Grain at the base, pulses, vegetables, all cooked in vegetable oil: the government Eat Well plate, run as a national experiment for thousands of years.
The result. Around a third of its children are stunted, the largest share of the world’s stunted children of any nation. The Indian Dietetic Association reports 84% of the country’s vegetarians are protein deficient, against 65% of its meat eaters. And the nation that eats the least meat is the diabetes capital of the world, with over 100 million diabetics.
Before anyone blames poverty, a Journal of Nutrition study found a vegetarian mother predicted stunting across every wealth bracket, rich families included. The diet was carrying its own weight.
Bioavailable iron, zinc, B12 and complete protein build a child’s skeleton. Strip them out and it comes out smaller. The animal fat, meanwhile, got swapped for refined grain, sugar and seed oil. India is now the world’s biggest vegetable oil importer, per-person intake tripled since 2001.
The diet sold to the West as optimal human nutrition has been run here, at the scale of a billion people, for longer than the West has existed. It did not produce optimal humans. It produced the largest population of stunted, diabetic, protein-starved people on earth.
Sama Hoole, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-31.
September 1, 2026
QotD: “Down-line clear …”
On one occasion, noticing us waiting by the gates, the signalman slid open his window and asked us if we’d like to come up and see inside the signal box. I was up those stairs almost before he’d finished his sentence and he treated us both to a conducted tour of a fascinating and beguiling little empire.
When bells started ringing, he explained about the bell code system and announced that there was a cross-country passenger train about to pass through Stanford, without stopping, on its way to Rugby. Suddenly, he asked me: “Would you like to signal this train through the station?”
“Gosh, yes! Of course I would!”
The sequence started by closing the gates on the level crossing. These were the traditional, heavy timber gates, rather than the comparatively minimal lifting-barriers seen today. They were opened and closed by turning a huge ship’s wheel-type contraption in the signal box and it took all my strength, plus more than a little help from the signalman, to turn it sufficiently to get the gates completely closed. This reliance on a direct mechanical linkage is the reason why the signal box had to be immediately adjacent to the gates.
Next, it was the signals, which were operated by a system of wires opposed by counterweights. The signalman showed me which levers to pull. I had to pull with all my might to get that red upper-quadrant signal to rise. Pulling the yellow distant signal “off” took even more effort, because its greater distance from the signal box meant that the wire was very long indeed. All these tasks were completed solely by manual devices without any mechanical assistance. It was a technology which hadn’t changed since Victorian times.
After what seemed like a long wait, the train eventually appeared in the distance and I felt so proud, hearing it whistling a greeting. Actually the whistle is a warning device, but I was only eight and I was convinced that the driver was saying “thank you” as he steamed through the station past the signal box, courtesy of my hard work.
And just as it had been with the farm horses, it would not be long before Dr Beeching would sweep away rural railways, together with the way of life which went with them and make such experiences as this impossible.
Whenever I see a railway these days, with everything surrounded by high steel fences, their vertical pales topped with barbarous triple-spikes and further surmounted with coils of barbed wire, together with notices threatening huge fines for trespass, I’m reminded of just how lucky I was to grow up in a time when a signalman could invite a child and his father to join him and give them a singular experience which they would both remember for the rest of their lives.
Brian Meredith, “A 1950s childhood, Part 2: ‘Down-line clear …'”, The Conservative Woman, 2026-05-31.
August 31, 2026
QotD: India, “coasting on inertia”?
Moreover, if I happened to witness a crime … well, that wasn’t going to happen. I’d make sure of it. Pro wrestling referees got nothing on me. But if somehow I did get roped into an investigation, I was going to flee to the nearest Western embassy and hole up like Julian Assange. As with the Tubmans-in-the-passport thing, this is not because I condone or encourage crime. I really hope they find the guy whodunit, and nail his balls to the wall … in the abstract. But in the concrete, my main concern is that Officer Friendly-ji will have much less paperwork, and far more business opportunities, by pinning it on the burra sahib, so sahib — that would be me — is making his pasty pale ass scarce.
This is not a blanket condemnation of the Indian police. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of reality. India is a huge country of over a billion people, in which there are at least 30 major languages (= “spoken by over a million people”) and a thousand minor ones. There are at least six major religions, the adherents of which are always bickering with each other. Even granting that every single national official in India has the wisdom of Solon, how the hell are they supposed to pass laws that mean anything under those conditions?
The administration of “justice”, then, devolves to the lowest common denominator in the localities. About which I know nothing, which makes me a nice fat target, so … yeah. How many dolla dolla bills to make this go away, Inspector?
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-22.
August 30, 2026
QotD: Cant
Without hypocrisy, there would be no gossip; without gossip, there would be no literature and precious little conversation. The dose of hypocrisy necessary to maintain social intercourse is a matter of judgment, for while many individual instances of hypocrisy are reprehensible and properly the subject of adverse comment, and some instances are beyond the pale, hypocrisy is as necessary to human existence as love or laughter. We should never forget La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue: but at least he knows that there is a difference. The only effective way to eliminate hypocrisy entirely from human affairs is to have no moral standards.
Cant is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and because a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a mere hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion. Doctor Johnson defined cant as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments then go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or even wicked policies result.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Age of Cant”, City Journal, 2020-11-27.
August 29, 2026
QotD: Peter Green’s vengeance against the Hellenistic Age
But telling the actual narrative of the Hellenistic world, however bizarre and entertaining it gets, is really only the superficial purpose of Alexander to Actium. No, the real point of the book, and the real reason to stick around for all 700 pages, is to witness Peter Green’s incredible, almost maniacal act of vengeance against an era he despises.
Whether it’s playwrights …
The poet-playwright Menander … has always struck me as a classic example of a growth industry created by papyrological accident.
… poets …
Callimachus, like Ben Jonson, has always had a rather better press than he deserves, and for much the same reason: his academic ideals and credentials can hardly fail to appeal to those other academics … I cannot help finding him at once pretentious and faintly distasteful, a literary exhibitionist with an unpleasant groveling streak about him, a sycophant implacable in his attacks on rival sycophants[.]
… philosophy …
Popular philosophies — and Stoicism must be accounted one of the most popular ever — almost always tend to have an intellectually suspect quality about them.
… coin portraits …
Prusias I of Bithynia is porcine, crass, and self-satisfied. The early kings of Pontus resemble nothing so much as a family of escaped convicts: Pharnaces I has the profile of a Neanderthaler, and Mithridates IV that of a skid-row alcoholic.
… or academia itself …
Museum faculty developed a reputation for symposia, frivolous research topics, and alcoholism: to anyone in the same profession there cannot fail to be a certain sense of deja vu.
… Green knows how to write a burn. It’s not simply that he’s a hater: his book about the Battle of Salamis overflows with love and admiration for the golden age Greeks who defeated the Persians. No, Green specifically has a bone to pick with the Hellenistic era and its rulers, its people, its art, and its ideas. For those who read for entertainment, the best part of Alexander to Actium isn’t the battles, the George R.R. Martin-esque politics, or the even more Martin-esque incest — it’s tagging along as Peter Green gets revenge on the Hellenistic Age by writing a definitive textbook about it, so that all students of history who come after him will read of his scorn and contempt.
Green’s harsh attitude is clear right from the preface, when he sets the book’s scope.
[I will not] devote specific sections either to law or to school education, on the grounds that during our period the first … was little more than an elaborate sham masking the realities of power, while the second offered nothing, in essence, but literary rote learning, elementary mathematics, music, athletics, and — most important — a rhetorical grab bag that would enable men at the top to talk their way into, or out of, anything.
Hellenistic historiography fares just as badly:
Polybius remains the only worthwhile historian of the Hellenistic period whose work substantially survives. Diodorus, as we are too often reminded, is a third-rate compiler … I have no wish to burden an already overlong book with yet another imaginative analysis of his chronological inconsistencies and synthetic rhetoric. Like Plutarch, he believed that one virtue of history lay in “recording the nobility of distinguished men, publicizing the vileness of the wicked, and in general promoting the good of mankind”. Successful statesmen, he thought, were righteous, while evil ones met with frustration: nothing, in short, succeeds like success. None of this inspires confidence.
From there the savagery continues almost non-stop, right down to the last page when Green ridicules imperial Roman literature for “guttering out” by the mid-2nd century. Virtually nothing escapes.1
Take philosophy, that most noble of ancient endeavors. The Hellenistic world’s biggest philosophical contribution was Stoicism. Today, Stoicism enjoys a good reputation for encouraging adherents to be stolid and uncomplaining in the face of difficulties. Green, though, puts the spotlight on Stoicism’s lesser-known traits like its determinism and pantheism, then singles it out as a shallow ideology perfect for helping elites rationalize their own hypocrisies.
Sandbach correctly notes that “the belief that the world was entirely ruled by Providence would have an appeal to the ruling class of a ruling people”. What Stoicism offered, in fact, was a built-in justification — moral, theological, semantic — for the social and political fixed order: it was the most powerful and subtle instrument of self-perpetuation that the Hellenistic ruling class ever conceived. The mere fact of anything happening meant that it had been fated to happen; and since nature was providentially disposed toward mankind, what was fated could not fail to be all for the best. This interesting version of determinism is most often presented as a source of comfort when things seemingly went wrong; but of course, as I have suggested, it would be of even greater benefit to those who were anxious to have some moral principles to offer the world in justification of ruthless self-interest. If it was bound to happen, it had to be right.
People have always wanted to learn the future, but Stoicism’s belief in a deterministic yet providential cosmos drove a tremendous increase in the popularity of astrology, divination, and other woowoo, often egged on by the philosophers themselves.2 Green even hypothesizes that Stoicism’s popularity directly sabotaged whatever nascent scientific progress there was in the late Hellenistic age.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
- Don’t assume that you, the reader, will be free from Green’s scorn. Green studied the classics at Cambridge back when standards were standards. The preface alone includes untranslated phrases in Greek, Latin, French, and even German, a norm that continues throughout the book for the first three languages (and for the fourth in the highly-entertaining footnotes). Green has no patience for the puny monolinguists of today.
- Posidonius of Apamea, one of the most famed Stoic writers of the ancient world, was also one of its most famed astrologers.
August 28, 2026
QotD: Roman roads
That said, for the major viae publicae, the combination of archaeologically preserved examples and a few references in literary sources gives us a good sense of what “best practices” for Roman road construction were. To start with, obstructions were cleared and then a trench was dug where the road would go. The trench was then filled with three packed layers: a stone layer, then a gravel layer and finally a sand or cement layer. On this was placed the surface of stone blocks, cambered so that rainwater drained to the sides of the road. The stone surface was then held in place by an umbo (literally a “knob” or “swelling”, the same word is used for shield bosses) on the edges of the road. Within a town, the umbo might in turn border a stone sidewalk, but out in the countryside, that wasn’t present.
On the one hand, we know that the high-quality construction of Roman paved roads impressed in the ancient world; Dionysius of Halicarnassus proclaims them one of Rome’s three most magnificent works (alongside aqueducts and sewers, Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 3.67.5; note also in this vein Strabo 5.3.8; Plin. HN 36.125). On the other hand, we also know that not all Roman roads were built to the same high standard. While we know that various Roman legislation spelled out required road widths, for instance, the actual width of Roman roads varied widely. And while we’re here, I should note, the story you have heard that modern roadway width or standard railway gauge being based on Roman road width (or, heaven help us, Roman “war chariots”, a thing the Romans did not have) is rather wrong. Nor were they always well-constructed or maintained; Julian, for instance, bemoans a poorly maintained road in a letter to Libanius in 363.
Also, if I may stop a moment, one thing I hear frequently said about Roman roads is that their survival serves as some sort of indictment on modern road construction, “they don’t build them like they used to!” There are a few layered bad assumptions here. The first, of course, is survivorship bias; that road outside of Chalcis that Julian complained was sinking into a swamp probably isn’t available for us to see and similarly badly maintained or poorly constructed Roman roads are simply gone or only visible with archaeological methods and so unavailable for comparison. At the same time, modern roads are asked to do things which ancient roads were not; I do not suspect many Roman roads would last very long if hundreds of 20-ton (or more) trucks were rumbling over it daily. Indeed, preserved Roman roads outside of the cities often have deep ruts worn several inches deep in the stone from the passage of carts (carts and other vehicles were generally banned inside of Roman cities; city streets were for pedestrians). Finally we know that Roman roads, just like modern ones, required maintenance and reconstruction fairly regularly in the period of their use; Laurence (op. cit., 66) has a neat table of inscribed milestones on the Via Appia, for instance, referring to repair or reconstruction, with sections of the roadway repaired in stages from 97 to 110AD.
Nevertheless, the generally high quality of Roman roads, as noted, was recognized in antiquity and is still apparent in their survival today. In contrast to many unpaved sections of Persian royal roads, for instance, Roman viae publicae were paved as a matter of course and standard widths (c. 3.5m wide; the oldest Roman laws, the Twelve Tables, set a minimum width on straights of c. 2.4m though as noted this was not always followed) were fairly generous. And they tended to be well-engineered, with relatively flat surfaces (which are often quite a bit less flat today due to ground shifting as well as the erosion of concrete between paving stones) and straight lines, though the notion that all Roman roads were ruler-straight is, of course, wrong (though some are!). In particular, the Roman system of road construction, while it demanded considerable up-front labor costs, was seemingly designed to keep long-term maintenance demands low. This was a style of road building which accepted big up-front costs in exchange for lower long-term maintenance, which of course demands a lot of initial state capacity to manage the costs and labor demands (something Rome’s successors would mostly lack).
So as roads go, the Roman ones were uncommonly good (albeit with a wider degree of variation than is often appreciated), but the marvel of the Roman roads is not that they had a few good, paved roads – states had been building paved roads for some time, as noted above – but that they had a massive system of them. Scale, more than quality, was the Roman achievement here, though the quality was also quite high.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.
August 27, 2026
QotD: Useless and irritating computer tricks
Stop trying to grab my attention, dammit!
No, I do not want windows to fade in and out, or riffle like a deck of cards, distort into a crescent while they get sucked into the dock, or whatever other cute effect some UX designer thought up this week. Just no.
I’m sitting at my machine to work on something. I’m concentrating. I’m a human with a Mark I meat-brain, so my flow state is fragile. When I tell my interface to do a state change, I want it to go fast and clean, not razzle-dazzle at me in a way that risks breaking my concentration.
Actionable advice for people designing desktop environments: I get it about the eye candy, it’s marketing. All I’m saying is, have a freaking OFF switch? Give me a way to shut all that distracting shit right down.
Cosmic Desktop, which I’ve truly loved ever since I started using the alpha, doesn’t have animations. The roadmap mutters about adding them in a future release. I’m going to be very sad if they are mandatory.
To sharpen the point about distraction, let me talk about a fancy new-school desktop-environment hack that I do like; the ability to set a translucency level on terminal windows and docks and things.
I tried setting translucency on my terminal background. At first, it looked pretty over the deep-sky astronomical photograph that Cosmic uses as a default background (and which matches my taste — I’ve been using a collection of similar deep sky photographs as backgrounds for many years). But it got old after about five minutes; when I’m reading text, and my eyes trip over a detail in the background, that’s distracting.
On the other hand, I really like being able to set translucency on my application dock. I can mouse up and pop up the dock to select an application without losing visual continuity with whatever is going on under the translucency. That is anti-distractive.
I want my whole environment to be anti-distractive. Pretty is nice when I have the bandwidth to notice it on my own (yes, Cosmic I do like your default dark mode with neon-blue piping), but the moment an interface design tugs on my sleeve to say “look how cool I am!”, that’s when I reach for my revolver.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-19.
August 26, 2026
QotD: Putting US power generation in perspective
John Robson, “Tidbits”, Robson on Climate Nonsense, 2026-05-24.
August 25, 2026
Rome’s annona civilis
In the late Roman Republic, the rapid increase among the urban poor in Rome itself eventually led to the Senate introducing food relief for the very poorest Roman citizens, the Annona civilis. It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that giving away free stuff attracts people happy to accept free stuff:
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
The simple-but-not-easy-fix is to only allow people not accepting the free stuff to vote. You can imagine just how well that would go down in an election campaign at any level, can’t you?
QotD: “… and called it macaroni”
I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff … History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down … see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.
So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn“, a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others … well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):
The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.
Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique”. Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism”, you can do good work.
The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money”, respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though … well, consider this:
As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:
Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature …
… The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.
You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster […] which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni”. But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.
Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:
In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni”.
That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:
The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.
In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.
Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency”, I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.
In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture.
Severian, “Monastic Vices”, Founding Questions, 2026-01-13.
August 24, 2026
QotD: The difference between “book smart” and “street smart”
Joca @jocadbz
Translated from Portuguese
How many geniuses have you heard about in recent years? They all had very superior IQs and were supposedly going to change the world
Know what happened? Nothing. Nothing ever happensWe hear a lot of people go on about the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”.
But psychologists who test and study intelligence know there’s no such thing. Smart is smart. So is this all just a way of coping with envy of higher IQs?
No. We’ve all met that guy who is clearly very intelligent, but can’t seem to accomplish anything outside a cloistered academic environment.
But we always seem to find him in a academic environment, don’t we?
“Book smart” is an incorrect name for a person who is intelligent, but has been mentally and psychologically harmed by an educational system, to the point where he can’t actually use that intelligence properly for tasks outside that environment.
Ironically, the more a child is obviously intelligent, the more the education system conspires to destroy him … because everyone with a “degree in education”, almost without exception, is either actually stupid, or is himself the end product of this same sort of mental mutilation.
Here’s how it works.
There are two types of intelligence tasks: answer tasks and result tasks.
A result task is graded by the reaction of the environment to your work. Either your software runs, or it doesn’t. Either your rockets fly, or they don’t. Customers buy millions of your product, or none.
You have unlimited tries unless you run out of money, but there’s no partial credit, and you can’t talk the universe into accepting your answer if it doesn’t.
Result tasks typically require a lot of work, are data-intensive, and have lots of sub-problems, because the ones that didn’t are already solved.
Result tasks are why we care about smart at all. Because smart people are the ones who can do this. And every human advancement or achievement ever was a result task.
Answer tasks are quite different. They are artificial problems created by a human being for another human being, whose goal is to produce the known answer.
Tasks like this have useful features. They can be tightly calibrated for appropriate difficulty. They are easy to grade. They can be used to teach particular subjects or skills.
But there are certain things they don’t teach.
How to do the boring parts that don’t impress anyone with how talented you are.
How to fail and try again.
How to change the question instead of answering it, because the question itself was wrong.
How to absorb from others what they had to learn the hard way, instead of reinventing the wheel.
How to deal with problems that have no solutions, only tradeoffs.
How to work with others and pass the ball.
How not to adapt instead of freezing when the universe gives the exam before the lesson.
How to substitute the adequate you can afford for the ideal you can’t.
How to prioritize what is needful over what is elegant or cool.
Without this learning, and other similar lessons, the talent child turns into an adult with an unbalanced intellectual development, like a bodybuilder who skipped far too many leg days.
You’ll find a lot of men like this in academia because it provides them with a sheltered, tightly controlled environment, where the problems are abstract if not utterly fake, and the persuasiveness of a solution trumps its workability.
They tend to scorn achievers, especially achievers with modest academic credentials or none, and this invites scorn in turn from people with real jobs.
But really what they are is victims. Entire campuses and networks full of what was potential greatness, crippled in it youth by bureaucracies that claim to serve it.
Homeschool your children.
Give them projects, not puzzles.
Teach them to build things.
Devon Eriksen, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-05.
August 23, 2026
QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”
I once asked a friend in the French music biz how the song went over there. I hummed him the tune and he sang me the French lyrics and, although I can’t recall any of them, I remember they were entirely different from the English words. It’s not just the five-and-ten that’s hard to translate or the million dollar baby. But the concept of finding the latter inside the former is also very American. There are a ton of Mitteleuropean operettas in which the prince or duke or count wanders into the streets in disguise and falls in love with a serving wench, but the serving wench usually turns out to be a Countess or Margravine or some such also wandering around in disguise. Even the British are prone to this syndrome (Spring In Park Lane, etc). But in an American song the shop girl is a genuine shop girl, and she’s still a million dollar baby. That’s what makes it American.
In the Sixties, by the way, you could have found a future billion dollar baby in a five and ten cent store: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, got his start in retail as a franchisee at a Ben Franklin’s, founded in 1920 by the Butler brothers, who’d been in the five-and-dime business since the 1870s. I’m not saying “I Found a Million Dollar Greeter in the Big Box Store at the Strip Mall on the Edge of Town” would be as big a hit, but there is an historical continuity from the Butlers to Wal-Mart.
Mark Steyn, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”, Steyn Online, 2020-10-25.
