"Confession is always useful before execution, regardless of whether the executioner believes in an immortal soul or not."
Vox journalistAaron Rupar poked holes in the President’s indignant defence, saying it was “worth noting that it was sunny throughout Trump’s appearance at West Point. If the ramp was indeed ‘slippery’ it wasn’t because of rain. And it certainly didn’t appear to be steep”.
Rupar also pointed out the leader “repeatedly” having trouble pronouncing the name of General Douglas MacArthur; while other videos showed him struggling to lift a glass of water to his mouth.
Cyberextortion of universities.
Redux of my 2017 column on taking down statues and monuments.
The Poetry Foundation purge seems to me perhaps the weirdest purge — what exactly did they do wrong? (NYT)
My talk to Jason Crawford’s Progress Studies group. SoundCloud here.
This @WSJ report is absolutely devastating. Why was New York hit worse than any other state by COVID-19? The answer is state and local public policy. wsj.com/articles/how-n
Why was New York State so badly hit by Covid-19?
“Even when controlling for density, counties with a high proportion of #Trumpvoters have lower cases and deaths.” Link here. And an argument that the protests increased net stay at home behavior
Tim Harford has an excellent piece in the Financial Times that covers my work with the Kremer team on accelerating vaccinesbut weaves it into a larger panorama on the innovation slowdown and how barriers to innovation can sometimes break down with catastrophes.
There is no guarantee that a crisis always brings fresh ideas; sometimes a catastrophe is just a catastrophe. Still, there is no shortage of examples for when necessity proved the mother of invention, sometimes many times over.
The Economist points to the case of Karl von Drais, who invented an early model of the bicycle in the shadow of “the year without a summer” — when in 1816 European harvests were devastated by the after-effects of the gargantuan eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Horses were starved of oats; von Drais’s “mechanical horse” needed no food. It is a good example. But one might equally point to infant formula and beef extract, both developed by Justus von Liebig in response to the horrifying hunger he had witnessed in Germany as a teenager in 1816.
Read the whole thing. I also highly recommend, Tim’s new book, The Next Fifty on how seemingly simple things like the brick changed the world.
Empirical evidence on contemporary torture is sparse. The archives of the Spanish Inquisition provide a detailed historical source of quantitative and qualitative information about interrogational torture. The inquisition tortured brutally and systematically, willing to torment all who it deemed as withholding evidence. This torture yielded information that was often reliable: witnesses in the torture chamber and witnesses that were not tortured provided corresponding information about collaborators, locations, events, and practices. Nonetheless, inquisitors treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism. This bureaucratized torture stands in stark contrast to the “ticking bomb” philosophy that has motivated US torture policy in the aftermath of 9/11. Evidence from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition suggests torture affords no middle ground: one cannot improvise quick, amateurish, and half-hearted torture sessions, motivated by anger and fear, and hope to extract reliable intelligence.
The Spanish Inquisition and the learning curve the full piece by Ron E. Hassner, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Irish Landscapes On the Edges of Breathtaking beauty