The good movie is a grand epic that dares to tell this story at all. Homer’s Odyssey is episodic and mythic. It has a lot of parts, each of which, on its own, can devolve into farce or fairy tale. It also has many themes. Some of them, like wandering and homecoming, are amenable to a modern blockbuster.

The bad movie spends a lot of time on themes that are difficult and confusing for a modern audience. Hospitality, the ancient Greek xenia, referred to confusingly as “Zeus’s law” in the movie, was a virtue in many cultures. Before travel was easy and portable money could reliably satisfy your needs, the life of anyone on their way from anywhere to anywhere else might literally depend on the kindness of strangers. In a series of overwrought monologues, Nolan asks his characters to connect this solemn duty between people to the fall of civilization, a jump that makes no scholarly or dramatic sense. I am excited that now everyone has heard of the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age Collapse. I’m not excited that Nolan tried to make Penelope have nostalgia for the concept of civilization in general.

The good movie is visually stunning. It makes the Homeric world, a world of relatively small numbers of people, in relatively small boats, seem grand. My breath stopped every time Agamemnon was on screen. What Homer did with speeches, Nolan does with costume design and a quick shot of a man holding a baby in front of an ocean. The movie shows the palace on Ithaca as an actually believable size, with a plausible kind of sparse decor, and yet makes it the site of sweeping drama. It makes Circe’s magic horrifying and specific.

The bad movie looks cheap. It looks like an animatronic dog tail, wagging its last wag. It makes Troy, supposedly the greatest city in the world, with unthinkably high walls, look like the set of an Indiana Jones ripoff, with flimsy plywood towers and one or two little streets, and a gang of generic-looking extras.

The bad movie is visually and aurally repetitive. I got bored of watching Matt Damon’s dark body outlined by fire. More fire. And yet more fire! Make it louder! More noise! Epic amounts of noise! Homer’s Odyssey has plenty of violence, and that’s important, but good storytelling weaves counterpoints, and doesn’t spend too long in any one mode. In the final palace fight, which felt like it went on forever, the guy upstairs is chucking weapons down through the hole in the floor. The bad guy downstairs shouts, “Gets the swords!” Then “get the shields!” then “get the spears!” I started laughing out loud at this moment. Does Nolan not think the audience knows what these objects are? Does naming them help us understand that they are weapons? Then again, I was bored watching Matt Damon do martial arts in the dark, so it was actually kind of a nice reprieve.

The good movie has strong acting. Penelope walks the knife’s edge. Circe is somewhere between righteous, manipulative, and insane. Telemachus is just trying his best.

The bad movie has overlong monologues. Blind Tiresias (totally awesome) tells Odysseus to feed the kid the blood. I’m on the edge of my seat. And then there’s a long discussion about the relationship between the kid who died at the horse and the bad guy in the palace. It’s mentioned like ten times, and the shot of the two of them with the lots is shown over and over, but I still don’t really understand who got paid for what. I kind of wish this shade would shut up and let us move on.

The bad movie has rapid switches between registers. Sometimes people are talking about grand ideas and speaking like they’re in an epic movie, but other times they talk like they’re in a Marvel movie or a Gen Z basement. I was never transported to another world.

The bad movie is long. It spends a lot of time on things that don’t serve the broader plot. Like, sure we have to spend a lot of time on the cyclops. That’s Homeric fan service. But we could have skipped the giants, and we could have trimmed the Pylos temple affair (more fire! more noise!). Many scenes could have been 25% shorter. I watched men eat meat, and I got grossed out, and then it just… kept going.

It was a fun romp and I’m glad I saw it, but I don’t expect I’ll ever want to spend 173 minutes to watch it again. Lord of the Rings this is not.

I knew Zappos wasn’t doing this for my benefit. A free returns policy is a sales tactic. (Considering how many shoes I returned, they might have lost money on me specifically.)

I have no illusions about why Amazon recently let me return almost any item. Amazon is not doing this for me. They auction off the returned items as an opaque heap of goods called a “liquidation pallet,” at a substantial loss. They’re doing it for my consumer confidence, so that I will spend more money on Amazon.

Many things in our society that might seem like they are for “us” are in fact for our consumer confidence. You might think your credit card lets you contest charges because of the Fair Credit Billing Act of 1974. That is reductively true. It is also true that the Act was supported by the major credit companies. It is in the interest of large businesses, like Visa, to compel small businesses to play by rules that will benefit the whole industry. Visa reasoned that, if consumers know that credit cards are safe in general, then they will get more business than by trying to convince consumers that Visa cards in particular are safe.

The Manichean view —“bad corporation versus good government,” one trying to take your money, and one trying to protect you— is reductive. The two sides, in fact, work together.

I work in public health. The ethos of many public health practitioners is starkly axial. We, the good guys, are out to protect health, the most basic of good things. Those guys, like Taylor Farms, are out to get money. They don’t care if they make you sick.

The reality is more complicated. It may not be in the myopic, particular interest of Taylor Farms to recall many bags of lettuce. It is in their longer-term interest, and in the interest of the food industry more broadly, that most people, most of the time, don’t think twice about buying bags of lettuce. Local public health inspectors enable me to walk into any restaurant, announce “Civis Romanus sum!” and eat with little fear I will get sick. Public health people are happy I do not get sick, and businesses are happy that I am a confident consumer.

Symbioses are not conspiracies or contracts. The fungus and the bacteria that make up lichen don’t have an agreement. The fungus attaches to the grow and extracts minerals. Bacteria land inside the fungus, use the extracted minerals, and do photosynthesis. They excrete energy-rich sugars, which the fungus eat. The fungus and the bacteria don’t keep doing their “jobs” because the symbiosis works. The symbiosis works because they each keep doing what they are genetically coded to do.

I previously wrote about how there is no such thing as corporate greed, or, more precisely, that “corporate greed” isn’t a useful concept for deciding how to regulate corporations.

It is easy to conceive of “a corporation” as an entity that makes decisions. A corporation gets some bad PR, so they decide to tithe some portion of their cashflow as corporate responsibility. But then the people who do corporate responsibility can truly believe that they are fighting the good fight.

A friend of mine worked at the EPA. His job was to regulate companies that manufacture appliances like refrigerators, to have them report how much ozone-layer-destroying gas they were emitting. The corporate people he worked with would hand over their reports and beam at him. “It feels so good to help protect the environment!” they would say. These people, environmentalists at heart, worked for a corporation that likely had other employees that were simultaneously skirting EPA regulations and lobbying against them. The corporation, the system, has parts that can operate essentially independently, synergistically producing a joint outcome, without overt conspiracy.

The selection of spokespeople is another example. My understanding is that DOGE operators believed that huge numbers of federal employees were useless at best and frauds at worst. Under that belief, firing people, even firing people indiscriminately, would be a net good. Now DOGE is out, but leaders at OPM (roughly speaking, the federal government’s HR department) say that reductions in force weren’t actually about federal workers but rather about giving federal agencies the freedom to reshape their missions and personnel budgets. It can be that (1) Elon Musk believed one thing, and (2) current leaders believe another thing, and (3) these beliefs interleave in a way that is beneficial to both of them.

If you want to change organizations, don’t think of them as coherent entities, controlled by a homunculus. Think of them as multiple organisms, each with their own DNA, pursuing their own projects, creating some emergent whole. If you want to help people, think about how you can co-opt your supposed enemies.

They want everyone to 8-to-4 rather than 9-to-5.

We say that, in spring, we change our clocks. This is a lie of partial omission. We certainly do something to the clocks. But the important thing we do is get up one hour earlier every single day until fall.

Think about it this way: daylight savings doesn’t change what’s going on with the sun. There is only one moment in the day when the sun is highest. Astronomers call this moment “solar noon.” We designed the world’s time zones so that solar noon is as close to 12pm as possible, in as many places as possible.

Daylight savings doesn’t change the motion of our planet. Solar noon remains when it is. We just call it 1pm rather than 12pm. During standard time, when you get to work at 9am, that’s 3 hours before solar noon. During daylight “savings,” 9am is 4 hours before solar noon. You’re getting to work at 8am standard and eating lunch at 11am standard.

Many people make claims about how daylight savings is better: they say there is “more daylight” after work, that we save energy, that we shop more, or that we are less likely to be victims of crime. Rather than dispute the evidence, I ask instead: are any of those things worth getting up an hour earlier and starting work at 8am rather than 9am?

Our bodies pay attention to the sun and they are not fooled by clocks. Our bodies know we are waking up an hour earlier every day, and, on average, they do not like it.

Imagine if I said: Hey, America! It would be safer and more efficient if we all got up an hour earlier every day. Then we could eat dinner at 6pm, rather than 7pm. We could go out to the club at 8pm, rather than 9pm. We’d be back home at 11pm, rather than midnight. Then we could get up at 7am, and be at work at 8am. Think of how great that would be!

If you want to work 8-to-4, I say, sure! Go ahead! But don’t make the rest of us do it.

This is an edit of a piece I wrote back in November 2022.

For my whole life, my last name has caused problems. Minor problems, but problems I decided I would fix.

First, Olesen often gets misspelled. “Son of Olaf” mutated into many forms across Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. The Swedes, the most numerous immigrants to America, wrote it Olsson. Ellis Island turned that into Olson. This is the spelling people expect. My name, Olesen, with two e’s, is relatively common in Denmark, but Danes are relatively rare in the United States. That middle e is often missed.

Second, its not obvious how to pronounce “Olesen.” My family usually says it with two syllables. This isn’t correct, but it’s easy, and they don’t stand on ceremony. Some people find it vexing that I don’t have a clear preference on how to pronounce my own name.

Here I tell you: Olesen has two e’s and three syllables: OH-luh-sn. To make that clear, I’m using the Brontë dots: Olësen.

I considered many alternatives to the Brontë dots. An acute accent (Olésen) would give the wrong emphasis (oh-LAY-sen). A grave accent (Olèsen) would give the emphasis and the wrong vowel (oh-LEHH-sen). There are many other options (ē, ě, ė, ę, etc.), but none of them do what I want: “hey, don’t ignore this letter!”

The two dots mark (ë) had two traditional functions, neither of which works for me either. The umlaut changes a vowel’s pronunciation: German Kamm sounds like “kaam” but Kämm sounds like “kemm”. The diaresis shows that two adjacent vowels should be kept separate: naïve is two syllables and doesn’t sound like “knives". We used to write coöperate to make sure it didn’t sound like “(re)cuperate.”

But two hundred years ago, a man faced a problem like mine, and I follow his solution. Patrick Brunty was born to a poor family in Ireland. He showed his intelligence to the local priest, who educated Patrick and helped him get to the University of Cambridge, where his started writing his name as Brontë. No one knows exactly why. Patrick respected Lord Nelson, who was Duke of Bronte, named after a town in Sicily. Patrick also would have known that the ancient Greek word brontē means “thunder.” But maybe he just didn’t like that Brunty looked lower class and that an unadorned final e in Bronte might get swallowed into “Bront.”

Patrick’s great accomplishment, of creating a novel diacritical mark, neither an umlaut or diaresis, one that simply says “I’m a vowel, don’t forget me,” was overshadowed by the work of his daughters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne.

(In recent days, a band, wanting a name that looked Germanic and menacing, and caring nothing for learnèd orthography, named themselves Mötley Crüe, thus inventing the metal umlaut. This invention has nothing to do with ancient Greece, or Sicily, or Lord Nelson, so I completely reject it.)

First, the United States is special in being founded under an ideal. We are not a “nation” in the strictest sense of the word. A nation is a race of people with common ancestry and language, from the Latin natus, “having been born,” where we get words like natal or the Spanish nacer. The foundation for most of the world’s countries is nationalism, the idea that humanity can and should be divided into ethnic groups that occupy non-overlapping portions of the Earth’s surface. The logical end of nationalism is things like ethnic cleansing or the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. For hundreds of years, communities of people, Greek-speaking and Turkish-speaking, Orthodox Christian and Muslim, lived in a social and geographic patchwork inside the Ottoman Empire. I don’t claim that the Ottomans were just or fair rulers, or the fact that different people coexisted inside an empire meant it was anything like the “melting pot” of recent American invention. But when the Ottoman Empire fell, and it was decided there were such things as Greeks and Turks, and that they should each have a country, it was a logical conclusion that the Greeks should ship the Turks inside their borders to Turkey, and that the Turks should ship the Greeks inside their borders to Greece. The real losers in the nationalism that led to the exchange weren’t the Greeks or the Turks but the Armenians, Albanians, Jews, and everyone else who didn’t fit in this neat nationalist picture.

I once read a book, whose title I can’t remember, but was something like Who are the Greeks? The argument was that Greeks have, for more than a hundred years, had a narrow, nationalistic view of themselves. They’ve been a country of ten million people for a long time, locked in a zero-sum struggle with Turkey and neighboring Balkan countries. This narrow vision failed to grasp what Greece could be, not for Greeks, but for the world, that Greekness could be about trade and networks and innovation and philosophy, all the great things that Greeks say they are proudest about, but then neglect in the pursuit of nationalistic territorialism.

I love our country in large part because of its people, who I should love because they are my neighbors and family. But I also love that America can stand for something. We can debate what we stand for, and how well we have stood by what we claim to stand for, but no one can doubt that it is a thoroughly American thing to stand for something. Even if what we stand for, is simply the idea that a country can stand for something, beyond being a mere collection of its citizens, then it is a thing I want to stand for.

Second, that our notion of representational democracy is young and changing. The ancient Greeks did have a thing called “democracy” (literally, rule by the people) and they distinguished it from “aristocracy” (literally, rule by the best people), but their democracy would have seemed an awful lot what we would call aristocracy. We Americans are perfectly accustomed to the idea that members of Congress should each be elected by districts of similar size, originally 30,000 citizens each and more than 750,000 today. But as late as 1832 the United Kingdom passed a law that moved toward anything close to equal representation. Before the reform, electoral districts varied widely in size. The most egregious had only eleven voters. The United States ended property requirements for voting at around the same time, allowing most adult white men to vote regardless of wealth. The stories of enfranchisement for women and Black people are more familiar. The idea that every adult, really every adult, should have a voice in running a country, is only a few generations old.

Third, that our notion of democracy is founded on a philosophical ideal about human reasoning. When setting up our country, the founders took inspiration from ancient Greece, but they really leaned on John Locke and his ideas about humans and how we work together. Democracy only makes sense if you believe certain things about what people deserve and what they are capable of. Citizens in a democracy should be, among other things, rational and capable of learning. I am not arguing that Americans are not this, but merely that we live in a world very different than what a 17th century philosophy would have imagined, and that we know more about the human mind and methods of human organization than we did hundreds of years ago. Our current system, in which I go to a big room and fill in bubbles on a piece of paper, to select which other person will go to a bigger room, and debate other people, while yet other people who really should be wearing wigs decide if what happened in an oval room is in accordance with what the people in the bigger room wanted—it all starts to feel very 17th century. Good or bad, I do expect it to change.

In elementary school, I was taught the rhyme “A pint is a pound, the world around.” It’s memorable but in fact useless without the gloss “for they both have sixteen ounces.” Even then, it’s important to remember that the pint is sixteen fluid ounces, while the pound is sixteen dry ounces.

“Ounce” derives from the Latin uncia, meaning twelfth, which explains why the inch, derived from uncia, is one twelfth of a foot, but doesn’t explain why an ounce is one sixteenth of a pound (or pint). Just as the Roman foot was divided into twelve unciae (i.e., inches), the Roman pound (or libra, whence the abbreviation “lbs.” for pounds), was divided into twelve uncia (i.e., ounces).

The Roman pound was about three-quarters the weight of the pound we know, the avoirdupois pound. For reasons lost to time, we decided, rather than divide the avoirdupois pound into twelve bigger-than-Roman ounces, to make the avoirdupois ounce similar in weight to the Roman ounce (although not exactly the same), so that the avoirdupois pound is made up of sixteen almost-Roman ounces.

In fact, we didn’t go right from the Roman pound to the avoirdupois pound, but had other medieval units in between, like the Troy pound and the tower pound. Each of these pounds was used to measure different things, in different places, at different times. The avoirdupois pound was originally called the “wool pound,” and we still use troy ounces to measure the weight of gold and silver. The tower pound was used by the Normans to weigh silver, whence the “pound sterling,” the currency of the United Kingdom, which originally referred to a tower pound of silver, which was fashioned into silver pennies called, for reasons lost to time, “sterlings.”

Now, the most pernicious thing about “a pint is a pound, the world around” is not that most of the world uses the metric system rather than pints and pounds, but that a pint and a pound both have sixteen ounces only in the United States, since in the United Kingdom, a pint has twenty ounces. (The Imperial fluid ounce is very similar, but not exactly the same, as the US fluid ounce, so a UK pint is about one-quarter larger than a US pint. This is why a pint of English ale feels, to an American, like a lot of liquid.)

The difference between the UK pint and the US pint is because they were derived from systems used to measure different things. Just as the wool pound and the pound sterling were for measuring different things, so in Shakespeare’s day there was a wine gallon and an ale gallon. The wine and ale gallons were intended to represent the same amount of liquid at rest, accounting for the fact that beer, in a barrel being transported and otherwise moved around, would froth to approximately one-quarter larger than its resting volume. (Or so, at least, the little museum in Winchester claims.) The US adopted the wine gallon, and the UK the ale gallon, which explains why the UK pint is one-quarter larger than the US pint and thus has twenty ounces, one quarter more than the sixteen ounces in the US pint.

As I walked along the South Downs Way, in southern England, I noticed ripples in the landscape, and learned that these were the intentional result of medieval farming. Plows were asymmetrical, and always pushed soil to one side. The plowing team would mostly walk in a long, straight line to avoid the inconvenience of turning. When it did turn, it wouldn’t make an immediate about-face, but would instead move over some distance, thus plowing a single strip while piling up the soil toward the middle of the strip, creating an elevated and well-drained ridge for wheat and then furrows for drainage. The strip plowed by a single farmer in a day was an important measurement, and it came to be one furlong long (that is, one furrow long) by one rod wide. The furlong (one-eighth of a mile) and the rod (sixteen and a half feet) are no longer common measurements, but together they define a strip that is one-quarter acre (with an acre being the land you could plow in a day with a larger, post-medieval team of oxen).

I can’t easily prove it, but I have the sense from going apple-picking that a bushel was about the amount that a single person could lift and carry.

As a scientist, I’m naturally very pleased that we live in a world of precisely defined units. Even if you don’t know what a peck or a bushel is, you can feel confident that it converts to a precise number of grams, and that a gram truly is a gram the world around. But as a regular person, I wish we made more daily use of units of measures that reflect our daily lives. For example, I would vote for the recognition of the zoomlong, measuring about forty minutes, which is about the length of time I can pay attention to a video call before I wish it were over.

We give advice for at least five reasons. The first is a position of power or authority that requires rendering opinions. It is the duty of the doctor and the rabbi to say what you should do.

The second reason is special knowledge, from firsthand experience or from research. When I need to do something about my car, I ask my dad. He will have fixed this very problem before, or will have read more about it than I will ever care to.

Third, wisdom. Most human difficulties present different faces but have the same body. They are not matters of contingent correct or incorrect, but of universal right or wrong.

The fourth reason is to be a mirror, and a guide to wise thinking. We prize decisions made in accordance with our inner wishes. If the difficulty in question is not a matter of correct or incorrect, or of right or wrong, it is a matter of what is right for us. We train ourselves from an early age, asking children their favorite color or what they want for dinner, to know our inner wishes. But this training is imperfect, and adults need friends to help remind them of the colors they could like, or the things they could eat for dinner, and why some colors or dishes are better or worse than others. Your friend may need you to give advice at random, and react well or poorly to it, to know their own mind.

The fifth reason is biography. The contours of our lives are simpler and smoother, observed from outside our minds than from within. Facing a weighty dilemma, I called a friend. He saw a trivial decision. “Curiosity and growth is your whole deal,” he told me, “so of course you’ll take the path that optimizes for those.”

The final reason is to make a place in the space of deciding, merely for the purpose of standing in it. A request for advice sometimes is a request for companionship: do not imagine what you would do if you were me, but simply imagine being me, so I can share the weight of the decision I must bear alone.

Advice, knowingly given and knowingly received in one of these six modes, is a service or a gift. Beware advice given in one mode but received in another, and beware advisors who suppose they are giving in one mode but are in fact giving in another. A call for patient companionship, answered with analytical rigor, is disappointment. A composure of special knowledge, that masks the manufacture of hot takes, is discredit. An external composure of wisdom that emanates from an internal but empty expectation of wisdom, a person who believes their words are weighty merely because the words are theirs, is dereliction.

The short answer is no, I don’t. Rather than explain why not, I’d rather explain why the SIR model came to be in the first place.

The SIR model was not intended, as most people expect, to simulate any particular outbreak of any particular disease. Instead, the SIR model was a mathematical construct designed to prove an important but very general point about the dynamics of infectious disease outbreaks.

The SIR model comes from a famous 1927 paper by the mathematical epidemiologists Kermack and McKendrick. They make clear they are trying to solve a fundamental problem in epidemiology. Why doesn’t every disease outbreak, or “epidemic,” infect everyone on the planet? In an outbreak, the number of newly infected people starts small, goes up to a peak, and then comes back down. Why?

One of the most striking features in the study of epidemics is the difficulty of finding a causal factor which appears to be adequate to account for the magnitude of the frequent epidemics of disease which visit almost every population. It was with a view to obtaining more insight regarding the effects of the various factors which govern the spread of contagious epidemics that the present investigation was undertaken. [...] The problem may be summarised as follows: One (or more) infected person is introduced into a community of individuals [...] The disease spreads from the affected to the unaffected by contact infection [i.e., directly from human to human, not via a polluted water source, mosquito, etc.]. Each infected person runs through the course of his sickness, and finally is removed from the number of those who are sick, by recovery or by death. [...] As the epidemic spreads, the number of unaffected members of the community becomes reduced. [...] In the course of time the epidemic may come to an end. One of the most important problems in epidemiology is to ascertain whether this termination occurs only when no susceptible individuals are left, or whether the interplay of the various factors of infectivity, recovery and mortality, may result in termination, whilst many susceptible individuals are still present in the unaffected population.

They set out to show that the two leading explanations of the day were either unnecessary or incomplete:

Two of the reasons commonly put forward as accounting for the termination of an epidemic, are (1) that the susceptible individuals have all been removed, and (2) that during the course of the epidemic the virulence of the causative organism has gradually decreased.

In other words, there were two leading hypotheses. First, the outbreak stops because everyone who could be infected was infected. This theory would have presented difficulty, even with the data available at the time. For example, it was well-known that measles, before the introduction of the measles vaccine, followed a two-year cycle: a year in which many children were infected was followed by a year with fewer infections. From this it would be clear that there were some children who didn’t get measles one year but who got it the next, which doesn’t fit with the hypothesis.

The second leading hypothesis was that, in every outbreak, the pathogen causing the outbreak begins as very capable of spreading between people and causing infected people to become sick, and then slowly loses that power. This idea was about as old as the germ theory of disease. Jacob Henle, in his 1840 On Miasmata and Contagia, tried to reason about this idea, based on the muddled and contradictory data available to him:

Pessina suggested a means of attenuating the intensity of the contagion, as follows: that ten sheep be inoculated from a sheep with natural pocks, that then others again be inoculated from that one of the first group which has the best pocks, etc. By this continued involution, as a homeopath would call it, the pox should become continually milder and produce fewer vesicles, until the eruption finally confines itself to the single point of inoculation.

This claim is opposed by more recent practitioners. The protective power and the milder course of the vaccinated sheep-pox has been put beyond a doubt, namely by Kaush and Müller, and Krüger, who at the same time also showed that the cultivated pox doesn’t at all lose its intensity as continually, as the Austrian authors claim, and that general eruptions are rather frequent, irregularly intermittent, and appear again in later generations.

The idea that outbreaks must come down because pathogens must become milder hasn’t died out; there was a common but misguided belief that every new COVID-19 variant would be less dangerous than the last.

Kermack and McKendrick proposed a different hypothesis to explain the finite size of outbreaks:

It will be shown [...] that [...] the course of an epidemic is not necessarily terminated by the exhaustion of the susceptible members of the community. It will appear that for each particular set of infectivity, recovery and death rates, there exists a critical or threshold density of population. If the actual population density be equal to (or below) this threshold value, the introduction of one (or more) infected person does not give rise to an epidemic, whereas if the population be only slightly more dense, a small epidemic occurs. [... T]he epidemic continues to increase so long as the density of the unaffected [i.e., susceptible] population is greater than the threshold density, but when this critical point is approximately reached, the epidemic begins to wane, and ultimately to die out. This point may be reached when only a small proportion of the susceptible members of the community have been affected.

Kermack and McKendrick pose their theory in terms of “density,” but I find it easier to think about rates in time: above the epidemic threshold, the rate of new infections is greater than the rate at which infectious people cease being infectious, and the outbreak grows. Below this threshold, infectious people recover faster than they produce more infections, and the outbreak shrinks. (In epidemiology jargon, the “effective reproduction number” falls below one.)

In short, they hypothesize that outbreaks (of this type, at least) do not cease because there are no more susceptible people, but because each infectious person cannot infect enough new people to keep the outbreak growing.

Rather than follow Kermack’s and McKendrick’s original derivation, which can be difficult for a modern reader to follow, I’ll lay out my own argument, arriving at the same conclusion. Our goal is to build a model that satisfies these requirements:

1. The number of susceptibles does not go to zero at the end of the outbreak.

2. The properties of the pathogen do not change during the outbreak.

3. Some interplay between the number of susceptibles, infectivity, and recovery leads to the end of the outbreak.

4. The model can be built with the knowledge and tools available in 1927.

First, to avoid depleting the number of susceptibles, let us consider an infinite population. This way, not only will the number of susceptibles not go to zero at the end of the outbreak, it will in fact be infinite.

Second, assume that the population is perfectly connected: every person in this infinite soup of people has an equal opportunity to interact with every single other person. Clearly this is impossible, and not a good modeling assumption for any actual outbreak, but we are here to prove a point, and I want to avoid any claim that somehow our model is causing a “local” depletion of susceptibles. Let’s make this impossible by assuming that any single infectious person is legion, that they could, in theory, infect everyone in this infinite universe of people.

Third, we say that each infectious person’s ability to infect more people is drawn from the same distribution, which remains constant over the outbreak. Each infectious person need not produce exactly the same number of onward infections, but they must have the same a priori capability to do so.

Fourth, in order to make the model tractable with 1927 technology, we assume all susceptible people identical. In reality, different people would be differently susceptible to the disease in question. For the purposes of this toy model, we make the simplifying assumption that all susceptible people are equally susceptible. This means we don’t need to keep track of each susceptible person, but instead can summarize the susceptibles by a single number, the proportion of all people in the infinite population who remain susceptible.

Fifth, we must make an analogous assumption for infectious people, so that we can track this infinite population of infectious people with a finite set of numbers, ideally just one. We can easily assume that all infectious people are equally “infectious,” that is, capable of infecting the same number of other people per unit time.

Naively, one might also expect we can assume that every infected person is infectious for the same, fixed amount of time. In fact, this requires keeping track of the time each infected person became infected, which was impossible for 1927 technology. Today I can easily run a computer simulation like this with one million people, but Kermack and McKendrick could only have done this for a very small number of people, which would not have produced a model that would prove their point.

In order to make all infectious people “the same,” each infectious person must have the same chance to stop being infectious, at any given moment, regardless of when they were infected. Whether you have been infected for one second, one day, or one month, your chance of recovering from infection in the next second is the same. (In statistics jargon, this is called “memorylessness.”) Mathematically, this assumption requires that the distribution of infectious periods be exponential, meaning that most people have very short infectious periods, a few have medium periods, and a vanishingly small number have very long infectious periods.

This would clearly be a bad assumption for any real disease outbreak. For most diseases, most people have “medium” infectious periods. I can’t think of any disease that has anything like exponentially distributed infectious periods. At this point, one can begin apologizing, creating intermediate disease states so that the distribution of infectious periods is not exponential but something more biologically plausible. Instead, let us remember that this is a toy model, designed to prove a particular point. (We could use those intermediate disease states to relax our core assumptions, and show that the key result about the existence of an epidemic threshold does not depend on the precise exponential distribution assumption, but that is a tactic to improve a demonstration, not to create a verisimilitudinous model.)

These assumptions —infinite population, well-connected population, identical susceptibility, identical infectiousness per unit time, exponentially-distributed infectious periods— together produce the familiar SIR differential equations, which in turn display Kermack’s and McKendrick’s desired behavior: there is a threshold combination of proportion susceptible, and infection rate. Above this threshold, an epidemic grows; below, it shrinks. In every parameter combination, at the end of the outbreak, there will always be some nonzero proportion of people who remain susceptible. That fraction might be very small, but it is never zero.1

The SIR model unraveled a long-running mystery in epidemiology: an outbreak of a disease, in a perfectly connected population, transmitted from person-to-person, whose infection bestows lifelong immunity, does not need to infect everyone before the outbreak stops. Extensions of the model show what happens when the duration of infectiousness is not exponentially distributed, or if you allow births, or if you have different classes of susceptibles, or if you have two competing diseases, or if immunity is not permanent, or any number of other questions.

Mathematically, the SIR model is really wonderful: its simplest form is amenable to undergraduate mathematical analysis, but it has just enough complexity to address some interesting, fundamental questions in epidemiology.

The model’s success in its original purpose, and its mathematical tractability, have also led to its abuse. It is a theoretical proof of a general pattern, not a law of nature. The assumption of an infinite population leads to weird effects. For example, outbreaks reach a finite size, but the number of infectious people never reaches zero. And while SIR dynamics lead to outbreaks of finite size, the fact that a particular outbreak goes up and comes down does not mean that reality is conforming to SIR dynamics. Foodborne outbreaks go up and come down for reasons unrelated to the depletion of susceptibles, and the waves of COVID-19 were driven by a combination of changing human behavior and an evolving pathogen.

Like all tools, the SIR model was designed for a purpose. It’s just not the purpose most people know.

In this lighthearted mood I made my way yesterday to the Zócalo, the main city square. The surrounding streets were packed with parked Army and National Guard vehicles, and the Zócalo itself was closed off to visitors. It was full of soldiers in parade order, listening to speeches. There was a row of howitzers and an enormous Mexican flag.

I learned that, on February 9, Mexican armed forces celebrate the March of Loyalty. On February 9, 1913, a group of cadets from a Mexican military academy escorted President Francisco I. Madero from his home, the presidential palace, to the seat of the federal executive, which is on the Zócalo. In American terms, this would be like West Point army cadets escorting the US President from Residence in the middle part of the White House to the West Wing.

At the time, Mexico was in the middle of a military coup, and Madero’s enemies had recently captured and then left the Zócalo. Madero made the march to rally other parts of the armed forces, keeping them loyal to his government.

The coup was part of the larger Mexican Revolution, one of many tumultuous periods in Mexico’s history, not to be confused with the War of Independence against Spain, begun by Miguel Hidalgo in 1810, nor the Second Franco-Mexican War, best remembered in the US for the Mexican victory in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, that is, Cinco de Mayo.1 The Mexican Revolution was a revolution against Porfirio Díaz. Originally a freedom fighter in the Second Franco-Mexican War, Díaz ruled the country from 1876 to 1911, eventually as a de facto dictator, winning rigged election after rigged election. Madero had organized the resistance against Díaz, deposed him, set up democratic elections, and won in a landslide.

Madero had difficulty uniting the country. He was liberal enough to get support from left-wing revolutionaries but moderate enough to alienate many of them once elected. The conservative elements who were in power under Díaz, including many businesses, parts of the armed forces, and the Church were always opposed to Madero’s leadership.

Enter Henry Lane Wilson, appointed by US President Taft as ambassador to Mexico. Son of the US ambassador2 to Venezuela, Wilson worked in business until he lost everything in the 1893 economic crash, at which point he took up his father’s mantle and became US ambassador to Chile, then to Belgium, and finally to Mexico.

Wilson personally never liked Madero, and he concluded that US interests, especially the interests of US businesses that had profited from amenable arrangements during the Díaz regime, would be better served if Madero were removed from power.

Wilson organized and amplified resistance to Madero, maintaining plausible deniability for every particular action but clearly a key force behind Madero’s eventual ouster. Wilson failed to broker a peace between the anti-Madero generals, but he did succeed in ensuring that Madero was killed, rather than allowed to live in exile as Díaz had.

In the meantime, back in the US, President Taft, who had appointed Ambassador Wilson, was succeeded by President Woodrow Wilson (of no relation). President Wilson was horrified by the actions of Ambassador Wilson and recalled him.

But the damage was done. Madero was succeeded by a general who lost the support of the US, leading to another round of revolution and counter-revolution. It’s not clear exactly when the Mexican Revolution ended: you could say as early as 1917, when the current Mexican constitution was established, or as late as 2000, when the party of the military quasi-dictators first lost the majority in the lower legislative house.

On February 9, Mexico celebrates respect for institutions, especially respect from the military for constitutional law. This makes me wish we in the US had a holiday to celebrate George Washington’s resignation as commander-in-chief.

Cannae was part of the second of three wars fought between Rome and the north African city-state of Carthage. Around 50 years before Cannae, the Roman and Carthaginian spheres of influence had collided in Sicily. Rome had done relatively well in the first war but was now faring very, very badly:

[...] the eyes of all were now turned to the Carthaginians, who had great hopes of even taking Rome itself at the first assault. The Romans on their part owing to this defeat at once abandoned all hope of retaining their supremacy in Italy, and were in the greatest fear about their own safety and that of Rome, expecting Hannibal every moment to appear. It seemed indeed as if Fortune were taking part against them in their struggle with adversity and meant to fill the cup to overflowing [...]

(All quotes are from Polybius’s Histories, via Bill Thayer’s LacusCurtius. This was Chapter 3, section 118.)

Hannibal never actually besieged Rome, but he actually didn’t need to, to achieve his overall strategy. Carthage wasn’t out to kill all Romans. They “just” wanted economic and military hegemony over the Mediterranean, specifically in north Africa, Spain, and Sicily. One way they could do that would be to convince cities in the Italian peninsula to ally themselves with Carthage, changing Rome from a leading superpower to one squabbling city-state amongst many.

It can be tempting to project our understanding of politics and war backward in time, thinking about Hannibal’s war as something like World War II, or maybe the American Civil War, or even the Napoleonic Wars, where nation-states conscripted their citizens and aimed to destroy the enemy’s war-enabling economic engine.

In fact, Rome and Carthage were not nation-states but city-states. At this point in history, the only Roman citizens were the people who lived in Rome.4 Other people in Rome’s sphere of influence were citizens of their individual cities, which were in turn allied with Rome. Allied cities maintained their own militaries that would, ideally, resist the Carthaginians.

Rome’s alliances were strong but not unbreakable.5 Hannibal didn’t need to burn the city of Rome to the ground. He just needed enough of Rome’s allies to desert so that Rome could no longer project power outside Italy.

In other words, Hannibal was out to win hearts and minds. His treatment of Romans and Roman allies after one battle exemplifies this:

Hannibal [...] kept the Roman prisoners he had taken in the battle in custody, giving them just sufficient to eat, but to the prisoners from the allies he continued to show the greatest kindness, and afterwards called a meeting of them and addressed them, saying that he had not come to make war on them, but on the Romans for their sakes and therefore if they were wise they should embrace his friendship, for he had come first of all to re-establish the liberty of the peoples of Italy and also to help them to recover the cities and territories of which the Romans had deprived them. Having spoken so, he dismissed them all to their homes without ransom, his aim in doing so being both to gain over the inhabitants of Italy to his own cause and to alienate their affections from Rome, provoking at the same time to revolt those who thought their cities or harbours had suffered damage by Roman rule. (3.77)

Hannibal wanted to fight Romans in battle and defeat them, not so much that the Romans themselves would give up, but so that the Roman allies would notice their weakness and change sides.

Hannibal [...] made a bold dash at Falernum in the plain of Capua, counting with certainty on one of two alternatives: either he would compel the enemy to fight or make it plain to everybody that he was winning and that the Romans were abandoning the country to him. Upon this happening he hoped that the towns would be much impressed and hasten to throw off their allegiance to Rome. For up to now, although the Romans had been beaten in two battles, not a single Italian city had revolted to the Carthaginians, but all remained loyal, although some suffered much. From which one may estimate the awe and respect that the allies felt for the Roman state. (3.90)

Unfortunately for Hannibal, the Romans kept their heads after Cannae, and their leaders doubled down on the war, and the allies held the line with them, with a few exceptions. Hannibal lost the initiative and ended up spending 16 years in Italy, always hoping but never quite able to drive a wedge between Rome and the allies.

Hannibal’s Italian campaign was only possible because of Carthage’s prior conquest of Spain, which provided the money and manpower Hannibal used. As the years wore on, Carthage started to take Spain for granted, and the Romans realized their own opportunity to drive a wedge between a superpower and its allies:

[...] two of the greatest princes in Spain […] were supposed to be the most trusty adherents of Carthage, but they had long been disaffected and were watching for an opportunity of revolt, ever since [Hasdrubal, the Carthaginian general governing Spain] had demanded from them the payment of a large sum of money and the surrender of their wives and daughters as hostages. Thinking that the present time was favourable, they left the Carthaginian camp with all their forces by night and withdrew to a strong position where they would be in safety. Upon this most of the other Iberians also deserted Hasdrubal. They had long been offended by the arrogance of the Carthaginians, but this was the first opportunity they had of manifesting their inclinations.

The same thing has happened before to many people. For, as I have often said, while success in policy and victory in the field are great things, it requires much more skill and caution to make a good use of such success. So that you will find that those who have won victories are far more numerous than those who have used them to advantage. This is exactly what happened to the Carthaginians at this period. For after having defeated the Roman forces [in Spain...], they regarded their position in Spain as undisputed and treated the natives in an overbearing manner. In consequence their subjects, instead of being their allies and friends, were their enemies. And quite naturally; for they fancied that there is one method by which power should be acquired and another by which it should be maintained; they had not learnt that those who preserve their supremacy best are those who adhere to the same principles by which they originally established it, and this although it is evident and has been observed by many that it is by kind treatment of their neighbours and by holding out the prospect of further benefits that men acquire power, but when having attained their wish they treat their subjects ill and rule over them tyrannically it is only natural that with the change of character in the rulers the disposition of their subjects should change likewise, as actually happened now to the Carthaginians. (10.36)

Rome sent its best general, Scipio Africanus, to Spain. He trounced the Carthaginians and “liberated” the locals. Scipio then went on to North Africa, where Rome had managed to get the Numidians, nomadic horsemen who lived in present-day Algeria, to defect from the Carthaginians. Carthage recalled Hannibal from Italy, but Scipio had sufficient military genius to defeat even Hannibal and his die-hard veteran soldiers.

In other words, the battles in this war were the leverage, not the force. Hannibal gambled that winning key battles would drive the allies away from Rome. This is perhaps the inverse of a proxy war: in a proxy war, the great powers fight each other via some lesser powers, like how the US and Soviet Union supported opposing sides in Afghanistan and Vietnam, or how the French supported American colonists in the American Revolution. But in this Rome-Carthage war, the great powers fought each other directly, in the hopes that they would convince a landslide of smaller powers to stick with them.

The inverse proxy war might seem irrelevant today, when great powers like the United States can project force over vast distances. The US can blow up a jeep, or apprehend a head of state, almost anywhere in the world.

But to actually occupy a place is really hard. That’s not about winning a limited number of battles but about maintaining a supply of fighters, weapons, and strength of will:

For [Hannibal’s] forces had been trained in actual warfare constantly from their earliest youth, they had a general who had been brought up together with them and was accustomed from childhood to operations in the field, they had won many battles in Spain and had twice in succession beaten the Romans and their allies, and what was most important, they had cast to the winds everything else, and their only hope of safety lay in victory. The circumstances of the Roman army were the exact opposite [...] These advantages of the Romans lay in inexhaustible supplies of provisions and men. (3.89)

Victory isn’t about killing all of the enemy; it’s about creating the environment you want to live in. Rome wanted an allied Italy; Hannibal wanted a fractured Italy. The result wasn’t decidedly on a battlefield like at Cannae, but in the hearts and minds of Rome’s allies.

How many times have you had to navigate the labyrinth of Interactive Voice Response systems? “Press 1 for something, 2 for something else, and go take a hike if you have an issue that doesn’t fit neatly into those categories. Want to talk to a human? Good luck figuring out what series of buttons to push!” Wouldn’t it be nice if an AI agent could do that hard work for you?

Enter goons.ai, my newest business venture, where our motto is, “My AI is bigger than your AI.”

Why “goons?” (Yes, I have heard it also means something else. Our marketing team thinks any publicity is good publicity.) The anthropologist David Graeber made a taxonomy of bullshit jobs that don’t help society. One of these is the goon, a person who harms or deceives on behalf of their employer, and who often only has a job because their employer’s enemy also has goons. “Goon” originally referred to thugs and mafioso types, but clearly many lawyers and customer service reps fall in this category too.

I’m honestly surprised no one has already done this. It’s no secret that companies algorithmically screen resumes. So how is there not a market for companies that help people make resumes that will pass those screens? It’s also no secret that customer service sludge is real. Why navigate it without our help? No one else will.

But customer service goonery is only the beginning. The whole internet is turning into AI slop. How will you know what to believe? The Luddites will tell you to develop personal networks of trusted experts. They’ll probably also tell you to learn how to farm wheat. Here at goons.ai, we think the solution to AI slop is yet more AI. If you think that sounds stupid, then I refer you to the award-winning science fiction novel Anathem, in which a parallel Earth’s internet fills with slop, and then the information technology caste uses AI to clean it up.

Of course, the existence of goons.ai will initiate an arms race. For now, the demagogues and clickbaiters don’t need to try that hard to trick you. But soon, with free-tier goons.ai, you’ll be able to identify this low-grade slop. So then they’ll upgrade to create more sophisticated and convincing slop. At which point you’ll likely want to upgrade to a paid subscription with us.

We at goons.ai have no impression that we’re making the whole world a better place. We just think that you shouldn’t have to stand by while other people’s goons impede you, provided of course that you can give us more money than them.

And by “you” we also mean the American people. Eventually we will be doing cyberwarfare, and we’ll have gotten so good at fighting enemies domestic, that we’ll easily crush enemies foreign. Would you rather count on some government-employed hackers or a robust, capitalistic market force? (goons.ai of course will be unable to create a healthy peacetime domestic market for artillery shells, so we can’t guarantee we will win a kinetic war.)

I wish I were kidding.

I find this particularity absurd, in the existential sense. Of all the possible worlds we could live in, I live in one where the song I hear most often this year was one by Mariah Carey about hearts. I live in one where there is a thing called a church that has pictures of humanoids with wings and, for only one month per year, also has trees in it. I live in one where I was born into a religion whose sacred liquids are water, oil, and wine. What will we do when we go to planets that don’t have any of these things?

At Christmas I have a hard time doing what I call “delighting in the world that is.” My literary touchstone for this sensation are Tolkien’s elves:

The doom [i.e., fate, which in Tolkien’s archaic usage isn’t necessary bad] of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when “slain,” but returning – and yet, when the Followers [i.e., humans] come, to teach them, and make way for them, to “fade” as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed. The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world.

The elves are part of the world. Even when they “die,” they go to another part of it: “dying they are gathered to the halls of Mandos in Valinor, whence they may in time return.” The souls of humans, by contrast, leave the boundaries of creation. (It is a mystery, even to all the gods except the creator, where humans “go” and what will become of the elves when the world ends.)

Sometimes I can live in this kind of embedded wonder. Back when I had a backyard, my partner jestingly accused me of “plantgazing.” I would do some kind of yardwork but then just silently look at the plants, and marvel, and be still. This is the same sensation I have any time I pet my cat. Even after picking him up for the thousandth time, I delight in his catliness.

I contrast this delight-in-the-world with the transcendental sensation that comes when viewing a particularly arresting sunset, or fragment of nature, or work of human art. Transcending is about leaving the boundaries of creation; delight-in-the-world is decidedly bounded up in it.

A surefire method for not delighting-in-the-world is to look at one’s phone. But that doesn’t mean looking up is always helpful. Unlike the elves, we rarely build our roads, homes, and cities with delight-in-the-world. They usually seem to be made with the opposite. Nothing is worse to me than a patch of hard-packed dirt, wedged between broken concrete slabs, speckled with some small pieces of trash, like one-time-use flossers.

Delighting in the world must also entail humanism. One cannot delight in the world except via the body, and that body must be loved for what it is. I’m one of those cerebral people who by habit thinks of themselves as a sort of brain in a vat with a bipedal motor system attached to it. It takes work to overcome that Cartesian dualism.

I expect it also takes work for cerebral people —who by habit think of human existence as a series of interactions in spheres, like economic spheres, and family spheres, and so forth— to value humans in and of themselves. Last Christmas, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople had this to say in his Christmas encyclical:

Today there is much talk about “the metahuman” and praise of artificial intelligence. [...] The concept of “the metahuman” is based on technological progress and his equipment with means previously unimaginable to human experience and history, through which humankind will be able to transcend currently valid human measures. The Church is not technophobic. It approaches scientific knowledge as “a divinely granted gift to human beings,” without however overlooking or suppressing the dangers of scientism. The Encyclical of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church [...] also emphasizes the contribution of Christianity “to the healthy development of secular civilization,” since God “established human beings as stewards of sacred creation and His coworkers in the world.” [...]

The answer to the crucial question—namely, how can we preserve the “culture of personhood,” the respect for its sacredness and emphasis on its beauty, until the final “eighth day” in the face of the titanism1 and prometheanism2 of the technological culture, its evolution and transmutation, in the midst of anthropotheistic changes and exaggerations of humankind—has been given once for all in the mystery of Divine Humanity. God the Word became flesh [...]

Unsurprisingly, the head of a church says that the way out of the pickle of titanism and prometheanism is religion, specifically, by remembering that god became human.

The rest of us must find some other way. The closest I’ve come is via John Ruskin, foremost art and social critic of Victorian England. Here is part of his address for the opening of the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), which emphasized drawing:

[W]e shall obtain no satisfactory result, unless we [...] set ourselves to teaching the operative, however employed–be he farmer’s labourer, or manufacturer’s; be he mechanic, artificer, shopman, sailor, or ploughman–teaching, I say, as far as we can, one and the same thing to all; namely, Sight.

Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps on the whole, the most important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be taught to read—what is the use of this, if you know now whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think—nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.

Didius Julianus came from a good family and had climbed the political ladder, distinguishing himself as a general and administrator. His ascent was stymied by the previous emperor Commodus who, in the end, was drowned in the bath by a professional wrestler. (Commodus’s mistress had discovered that Commodus had planned to have her executed, and she hired the wrestler-assassin for a pre-emptive strike.)

Into the resulting power vacuum stepped the Praetorian Guard, an elite military group based inside the city of Rome:

[The Praetorians] made proclamation that the empire was for sale, promising to hand it over to the man who offered the highest price, and promising to conduct the purchaser safely to the imperial palace under the protection of their arms.

When they made this proclamation, the more august and respected senators, those who were nobly born and still wealthy, the scattered survivors of Commodus’ tyranny, did not go to [the Praetorians’ camp]; they had no desire to use their wealth basely and shamefully to buy the empire.

But the praetorians’ proposition was reported to a man named Julianus while he was giving a dinner in the late afternoon amid much drinking and carousing. This Julianus had already served a term as consul and was thought to be a very wealthy man; he was one of the Romans censured for an intemperate way of life.

Then his wife and daughter and a mob of parasites persuaded him to leave his dining couch and hurry to the wall of the [Praetorians’] camp to find out what was going on. All the way to the camp they urged him to seize the prostrate empire; he had plenty of money and could outbid anyone who opposed him.

And so, when they came to the wall, Julianus shouted up a promise to give the praetorians everything they wanted, assuring them that he had plenty of money, that his strongboxes were crammed with gold and silver. [...]

Lowering a ladder, they brought Julianus up to the top of the wall, for they were unwilling to open the gates until they knew how much he would pay for the empire.

When he came up, Julianus promised [...] to give each soldier more gold than he asked for or expected to receive.

Convinced by his promises and delighted with their expectations, the guard proclaimed Julianus emperor [...] Then, raising their standards, to which pictures of Julianus had been attached, they prepared to escort the emperor to the imperial palace.1

How did it come to this? Less than a hundred years before, Rome was in the middle of its golden age, and now the throne was being sold off.

Naturally the answer is “it’s complicated,” but I want to focus on just one element: the Praetorian Guard.

The word “praetorian” comes from praetorium, the word for the tent of a Roman general on campaign. Although there was an official system for soldiers in the legion to post guards at the praetorium, the general might have his own personally procured bodyguard, a “praetorian guard” in the literal sense.

In 40 BC, Octavian, the man who would later go on to become the first emperor Augustus, was co-ruling Rome with his two frenemies. In part to protect himself against his colleagues, he posted his praetorian guard inside the city of Rome.

This was an enormous breach of precedent. In Rome’s early history, legions were mustered for one summer of warfare against close neighbors and then disbanded. Later, Rome’s military became a professional, standing army, but soldiers were fighting wars throughout the empire and rarely came to the city of Rome itself.

Over Octavian-become-Augustus’s reign, his praetorian guard evolved into the Praetorian Guard, progressing from a bodyguard into a kind of military police and counterespionage unit. By the time the second emperor Tiberius quasi-retired from public life, the Praetorians had accreted so much power that the head of the Praetorians, Sejanus, was essentially in charge of the empire:

[Tiberius] warned the public by an edict not to disturb his retirement and posted soldiers here and there to keep off the throngs of townsfolk. But he so loathed the towns and colonies and, in short, every place on the mainland, that he buried himself in the island of Capreae which is separated by three miles of strait from the [mainland]. The solitude of the place was, I believe, its chief attraction [...] It commanded too a prospect of the most lovely bay, till Vesuvius, bursting into flames, changed the face of the country. [...] Tiberius had by this time filled the island with twelve country houses [...] Intent as he had once been on the cares of state, he was now for thoroughly unbending himself in secret profligacy and a leisure of malignant schemes.2

In 31 AD, Sejanus attempted a coup, which Tiberius defeated, in part by giving the Praetorians a “donative.” This word is an English translation of the Latin donativum, which literally means “gift” but which has come to refer specifically to the money given to the Praetorian Guard to buy their loyalty.

Starting with Tiberius’s donative, it became standard for new emperors to give the Guard a donative to ensure their loyalty. The one-time donative upon accession morphed into more regular “gifts.” From there it’s not too hard to see how we end up, 150 years later, with the auction won by Didius Julianus.

In summary, there are many potential problems with posting military units in the capital.3

I never got an answer I could really make sense of. So I went to the library, and I made a new friend: Joseph de la Vega. He wrote the first book about a stock exchange, the aptly named Confusion of Confusions.

De la Vega was a Spanish-speaking Portuguese Jew who lived in Amsterdam in the 1680s. He saw the hustle and bustle around the Amsterdam Exchange, where shares in the Dutch East India Company, or VOC,1 were traded. The VOC was the first publicly-traded company in the sense we understand it now.

In one sense, the Exchange in the book was much simpler than the stock exchanges we have now, since basically only a single stock was traded: shares in the VOC.2

And those shares were also relatively straightforward, at least in the early days of the Company: you put your money into a pool, the Company used that money to outfit a trading expedition to Southeast Asia, and then they paid out the profits of that expedition to shareholders as dividends.

So clearly the stock’s price was rooted in the profitability of the Company. More profits means more dividends means more expensive shares:

In order that you should not come to the conclusion that the movements of the stock exchange are inexplicable and that nothing is firm, take note and realize that there are three causes of a rise in the prices on the exchange and three of a fall: the conditions in India, European politics, and opinion on the stock exchange itself.

But dividends don’t explain that much of the variability in the VOC stock price, in part because of the high price of individual shares. Unlike today, where a typical price for a share in a typical company is about $100, the individual East Indian Company shares were very expensive: equivalent to about hundreds of pounds of pure silver.3

This high share price means that only very few people, who de la Vega calls “princes” and “financial lords,” can actually afford to own shares and live off the dividends. These people didn’t drive stock prices because they usually had no interest in selling off one of the most successful forms of passive income that had ever existed.

Instead, many people were “gamblers and speculators” who made bets on the changes in the price of shares. In a word, these people made futures contracts (as well as other derivatives like options).4

If you don’t know how futures contracts work, here’s an example: I’m a speculator who thinks the price of the stock will go up from its current value of 500 pounds,5 but I don’t have 500 pounds to buy a share. So I find a merchant, who has a share and wants money, and make this deal: on the first day of next month, I’ll give the merchant 500 ducats, and he’ll give me the share.

Luckily, as time goes on, the stock price goes up, so I find another merchant, who has money but no shares. With the second merchant, I make this deal: on the first day of next month, I’ll give you one share, and you’ll give me 510 pounds.

Then, on the first of the month, I pass the share from the first merchant to the second, and I pass 500 pounds from the second to the first, and I put the remaining 10 pounds in my pocket.6

Of course, if I had made the wrong bet, I might need to take 10 pounds out of my own pocket to make the deals work out. And this is where things get interesting, since the financial success of the speculators depends on what other people think the stock will be.

Maybe because there was only one stock to trade, traders and brokers aligned themselves into two camps: the bulls, who always wanted the price to go up, and the bears, who always wanted it to go down.

These groups appear to be fairly organized and very devious. There were very few restrictions, legal or otherwise, on trading, so bulls and bears would create fake news, corner the market, exhaust the money supply, or do anything to get their way. De la Vega lists at least 12 bear strategies. For example:

[T]he syndicate [of bears] borrows all the money available at the Exchange and makes it apparent that it wishes to buy shares with this money. Afterwards, however, large sales are executed. Thus two birds are killed with one stone. First, the Exchange is supposed to believe that the original plan is altered because of important news [i.e., suggesting that external events will soon cause prices to rationally fall]; secondly, bulls are prevented from finding money for hypothecating [mortgaging] their shares. They are, therefore, compelled to sell, since they do not have the money to take up the stock [and prevent the appearance that no one wants to buy, which would further drive down prices …]

My personal favorite tactic is from the bulls:

Our speculators frequent certain places which are called [...] coffee-houses because a certain beverage is served there called coffy by the Dutch [...] The well-heated rooms offer in winter a comfortable place to stay, and there is no lack of manifold entertainment. You will find books and board games, and you will meet there with visitors with whom you can discuss affairs. One person takes chocolate, the others coffee, milk, and tea; and nearly everyone smokes while conversing. [...] while one learns the news, he negotiates and closes transactions.

When a bull enters such a coffee-house during the Exchange hours, he is asked the price of the shared by the people present. He adds one or two per cent to the price of the day and he produces a notebook in which he pretends to put down orders. The desire to buy shares increases; and this enhances also the apprehension that there may be a further rise [...] Therefore, purchase orders are given to the cunning broker. But, in order slyly to reach his own objectives, he replies that he has so many other orders that he cannot be at anyone else’s disposal. The naive questioner believes in the sincerity of the statement; his desire to buy becomes even more ardent [i.e., driving up prices...]”

But it doesn’t even take trickery per se for prices to swing. De la Vega notes that every piece of good news, such as information about a successful expedition, causes its own small bubble in the price:

The expectation of an event creates a much deeper impression upon the exchange than the event itself. When large dividends or rich imports are expected, shares will rise in price; but if the expectation becomes a reality, the shares often fall; for the joy over the favorable development and the jubilation over a lucky chance have abated in the meantime. [...] But as soon as the ships arrive or the dividends are declared, the sellers [i.e., the bears] take new courage. They calculate that for some months the purchasers —the bulls— will not be able to expect very propitious events. So the leaves tremble in the softest breeze, and the smallest shadow causes fear — and therefore no wonder that the shares fall, because they are abandoned by the one side and are attacked by the other.”

These stories gave me a lot of comfort. Clearly, somewhere, deep down, stock prices have some rational basis in the world. If a company is profitable, and they pay dividends, or I get a controlling share, then I can put some of those profits in my pocket. But for the most part, the value of a single share is whatever someone is willing to pay for it, even though they might also not be in a position to skim profits.

If 300 years ago, a stock market with a single stock could cause Confusion of Confusions, I shouldn’t be surprised that someone on the Internet can make GameStop’s stock price shoot up or down, nor that the global economic slowdown caused by the pandemic wouldn’t depress stock prices.

Instead, I should take de la Vega’s personal advice. First, don’t give advice about trading. Second, be happy with the gains you have rather than be sad about the gains you missed. Third, remember:

Profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins. At one time they may be [gems], then coals, then diamonds, then flint-stones, then morning dew, then tears.

Before the penny, only one coin had been eliminated for its low value: the half cent. At that time, also 1873, the value of a dollar (and therefore also a cent) was 10 to 25 times higher than it is today. In other words, the last time we eliminated a coin for its low value, it was worth something in the range of a nickel or a dime. (And yes, I do think this means we should also be eliminating the nickel and the dime and rounding to the nearest quarter of a dollar.)

Aside from the ridiculously low value of the penny, it was also costing the American people money. It took about 3 cents to mint a penny, and we were minting about 5 billion per year, leading to a loss of about $100 million per year.1

All the proposed reasons for keeping the penny were either blatant special interest or painful ignorance. The blatant special interest came from the one company that manufactured the zinc blanks used to make pennies. The painful ignorance came from people not understanding how rounding would work if we eliminated the penny, or from convoluted arguments that it would hurt the poor.2

As an aside, I’ll also note that people —in the world generally, if not Americans— are grownups and can deal with change to their money. All the Euro countries converted to the Euro. In 1971, the UK converted from its delightfully insane pounds-shilling-pence system —where 1 pound had 12 shillings, and each shilling had 20 pence, so that 1 pound was 240 pence— to a decimal system where 1 pound is made up of 100 “new” pence. In 1998, the Russians simplified the ruble by cutting off three zeros: 1,000 “old” rubles equaled 1 “new” ruble.

So why hadn’t we already eliminated the penny? The US Mint’s FAQ answers with a simple “Until now, no Secretary of the Treasury had determined that the production of one-cent coins was no longer necessary to meet the needs of the United States.” Clearly, this doesn’t really answer the question.

To me, the penny was an example of what kind of inefficiency we are willing to tolerate in our political system. To a layperson, $100 million per year sounds like an enormous quantity of money. In the world of the federal budget, this is an amount barely worth talking about. Said another way, the opportunity cost for Congress members is to eliminate the penny was too high. It was not worth their time to develop a coalition to incrementally reduce the federal budget by opposing the pernicious special interest of a single company. They have other, better things to do.

I certainly celebrate the death of the penny. (Again, I would lobby to get rid of the nickel and the dime.) But if we were going to do it, I would want it to have come via Congress, because penny elimination had become so ridiculously necessary that it cut through Congress’s opportunity cost.

In other words, I would rather pay the cost of small inefficiencies like the penny to ensure a representative government. Democracies tend to outperform autocracies economically (and have many other, arguably more important benefits). I hypothesize that incremental accumulation of power in the American executive will set inefficient and otherwise unfortunate precedents, even if there are small wins like penny elimination or even more substantial, near-term gains.3 In this sense, the elimination of the penny may not actually be a win for efficiency.

And so I began some very idle speculation into a concept I call the capital correlation coefficient (CCC). As a tourist, the CCC would tell you how much of the “stuff” in the country you can experience if you visit only one city. As a citizen, there’s a potentially interesting network effect: if there’s really only one “good” city in your country, that’s where all the coolest and most interesting things and people will be, where “interesting” means arts, business, whatever.

A quick clarification: by “capital” I mean the leading city, which is not necessarily the legal capital. For example, the US’s “capital” in this sense is New York City, not Washington, DC. Other examples are Canada (Toronto not Ottawa), Australia (Sydney not Canberra), Brazil (Sao Paulo not Brasilia), and Turkey (Istanbul not Ankara).

As a first pass, I’ll use number of people as a proxy for amount of “interesting stuff,” and look at what percent of each country’s urban population lives in that country’s most populous city.

These data1 already reveal some of the patterns I expected:

United States. Unsurprisingly, the US scores low: a relatively small proportion of Americans live in New York City. The Los Angeles metro is about two-thirds the size of New York City, so even though New York is the largest metro area by a good margin, there is definitely no sense that New York “has all the stuff” or “is the only place” (unless you are a New Yorker).

Germany. Berlin is the largest city proper in Germany, with almost double the population of Hamburg proper. However, the Rhine/Ruhr metro region is about double the size of the Berlin metro region, and the Frankfurt metro has about the same population as the Berlin metro.

France makes an interesting pairing to Germany. The Paris metro is six times more populous than the second most populous metro (Lyon). I expect this is a result of France’s long history of centralization: France has been an integrated country since the medieval period, and Paris has been accumulating power, money, and stuff for about 800 years. Berlin, by contrast, took off only in the past 200 or 300 years: the Prussians made Berlin their capital in the 1700s, then in the 1800s the Prussians unified Germany, such the Industrial Revolution caused Berlin in particular to boom.

Japan. The Tokyo metro has twice the number of people as the next competitor (Osaka). But Tokyo and Kyoto are both the top destinations for tourists, which suggests to me that Kyoto has a disproportionate share of the interesting “stuff.”

In general, total population is anticorrelated with this concentration. China and India clearly stand out on the big end. The United States and Indonesia are the points closest to China and India, with large, unconcentrated populations. Germany and the Netherlands have notably small concentrations, while Egypt is exceptionally concentrated (with Cairo being more than triple the size of Alexandria).2

Population alone surely doesn’t tell the whole story. A lot of Japan’s interesting stuff is in Kyoto; I expect a lot of Russia’s interesting stuff is in St. Petersburg. The UK appears to have a relatively low concentration, but the London metro is five times the size of the Manchester metro, and I’m doubtful that Manchester can compete with London for cultural “stuff.”

Some other proxies might include more economics, like GDP by metro area, and cultural metrics, like education. For example, in the US, zero of our top 10 universities are in our top two metros; you need to go to our third city (Chicago) to get a top 10 university. Compare this against, say, Turkey, where three of the top 10 universities are in Istanbul and four are in Ankara.

I certainly love the idea of living in a highly concentrated country, where there wouldn’t be a trade-off between the most interesting jobs (for me, that’s Washington or Boston) against where the best arts and food are (New York City and Los Angeles). Presumably you could run into both of Iceland’s prime minister and its top pop singer on the streets of Reykjavik.

Why things can get better

I am fundamentally optimistic about the ability of museums to fix this problem, for three reasons. First, museums have the resources. This could be a time of declining resourcing for museums, but the kinds of improvements I’m thinking of only require a modest collection and some well-designed placards. I’ve been to museums that have really cool technological experiences, like the virtual reality experience at the Baths of Caracalla or the interactive language lessons at Planet Word, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. I don’t think people are disappointed that museums are full of things in cases with placards. The analog experience is part of the attraction.

Second, visitor are willing to do the work. I am perpetually astonished that, inside the magic locus that is the museum, people are willing to read difficult texts while standing up. For all our dismal crises about shortening attention spans, museums have some ambiance that makes people willing to put in the work to learn. So don’t blame the people for being too dumb or unwilling to learn.

Third, I believe curators can change. I hypothesize that the fundamental problem with museums is that curators design exhibits for other curators. In his book Bureaucracy, scholar James Q. Wilson (who I reference in a previous post) writes that, when it’s hard to tell if professionals are doing a complex task well, we use the approval of other professionals as a proxy for success. This is explicitly the case in academia, where academics decide which other academics deserve money and promotions. It is implicitly the case in the law, where judges decide what is “good” law based on what they think “better” judges in higher courts would think.

This dynamic, where professionals appraise each other’s work, is generally a good thing in the case of the law, because it keeps the law stable and buffered from the political interests of the day. I hypothesize that curators also form a professional class, talking to one another about how to do museums. And I say that we should take the power back.

Principles for making things better

Answer the f— question, by which I mean the “fundamental” question. Freeman Tilden, who wrote the National Park Service’s first practical and theoretical guide to ranger guiding, said that a tour should start by answering the first questions people will have. If you’re in front of the ruins of a paper mill on the banks of the Shenandoah River in Harpers Ferry, you need to answer questions like “why do you need a mill to make paper?” and “were there paper mills everywhere in America, or just here?” before you can try to tell any story about who owned this paper mill, in what years, etc.

Start high-level and allow people to dig arbitrarily deep. Here’s an idea: on each placard, have one or two sentences in big text that answers the fundamental question and is suitable for children and adults making a speed run; then medium-sized text for people who want to know a little more; then fine print full of jargon and technicality, speaking to professionals and amateur enthusiasts.

Here’s another idea: every single artifact has a QR code linking to the web catalog entry for that artifact. The web entry in turn has links to other relevant artifacts in the museum as well as resources for further learning. All professional museums have this kind of catalog, and they have a way to link pieces to that catalog. Why not have an intern print out these QR codes and put them in place? It would take them like a day and would improve the experience for so many visitors.

De-emphasize audio guides and human-led tours. I estimate that, in most museums, 5% of people use audio guides and 1% are on some kind of guided tour.1 That means 94% of people are relying solely on placards. I’m not saying audio guides are bad, and there are certainly people who will get more out of the museum because of them, but if 94% of people are only using placards, then you better be sure that the placards provide a really good experience. Guided tours are not the meat, nor even the gravy, but more like 15 grams of caviar.2

Learn from museums for kids. Every time I went to the Museum of Science in Boston, I interacted with an exhibit that children were interacting with, and I also learned or reinforced my understanding of a science concept. Consider the possibility that, if children couldn’t get something out of your exhibit, then it is also boring and difficult for adults.

You’re not an art museum; you can tell people what to think. I hypothesize that, because a lot of art eludes a single, neat interpretation, art museums generally avoid explanatory placards. They talk about the facts of an artist’s life but generally shy away from telling you what an art piece means or how to think about it. Forget about that! You’re an educational institution, not an art museum.3 People need basic knowledge about the objects before they can advance to second-order subtleties and controversies. Ending the exhibit with a little room that says “What do you think?” on the wall and letting people write sticky notes is not empowerment but a sham.4

Display less stuff. More stuff isn’t necessarily more interesting. The displayed artifact is usually the culmination of a learning experience, not the start. Sometimes I can look at a piece and go “wow, what’s the deal with this? Better look at the placard!” But normally my experience is more like “OK, that’s yet another Greek vase.” I need some education about schools of painters or how vases were used before I can look at a piece and so “oh cool, this is just like what they were talking about on the placard!”

Have you ever met someone who has a hobby you don’t share and who then launches into inexhaustible and excruciating detail about it? This is how a lot of museums feel to me. A lot of stuff and not a lot of answering the fundamental question about why it’s interesting.

Display the most educational pieces, not the “best” or most beautiful. One of my favorite pieces on my Berlin trip was a broken pottery shard from Hellenistic Egypt with writing on it. This piece is not beautiful or, I imagine, particularly interesting for a professional archaeologist. But to me, it is such a wonderful piece. The writing shows a counting exercise, one number per line, starting with “39 thirty-nine” and ending with “52 fifty-two.” You see the human effort required to learn handwriting, alphabets, and numerals. You see first hand how pottery shards were “scrap paper” at a time when paper (well, papyrus) was rare and broken pottery was ubiquitous. This one unremarkable piece can teach so much about language, the scribal profession, and pottery.

Another example from the Neues Museum: hidden away on the top floor were some pieces of literal garbage, detritus from an Iron Age iron smelting furnace. Again, these are pieces that are decidedly un-beautiful and likely uninteresting to a professional archaeologist. But with good contextualization, it becomes a real gem: this little exhibit was the best explanation of early iron metallurgy I’ve ever seen.

If that sounds boring and useless, let me ask you: have you ever wondered why we humans even bothered with the Bronze Age, when bronze is weaker than iron and the raw ingredients for bronze (copper and tin, mostly) are found in smaller quantities and in fewer places than iron? No? Well, that’s because museums have failed to answer the fundamental question.

If people don’t get the chills, you’re doing it wrong. At Skara Brae, a Stone Age village in very northern Scotland, you go through the museum and through a replica Stone Age house before you go to the actual site. This way, the climax of the experience isn’t just looking at some holes in the ground. Instead, you can actually imagine what it was like to live in one of those buildings, what kinds of relationships you had with the people around you, and what kind of physical objects you used in your daily life. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it.

Here’s a contrasting experience: when I went into the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the thing that made me really awestruck wasn’t all the golden stuff but instead a piece of circular stone in the ground. This was the omphalion, ancient Greek for “navel.” The Byzantines considered this place the navel, or center, of the world. It’s the spot where, for a thousand years, the Eastern Roman Emperors were crowned. Because there was insufficient contextualization, only I knew that. While my travel companions snapped pictures, I was in a reverie, living through resplendent coronations that happened a thousand years ago.

I suspect this experience is fairly common, that it’s hard to get value out of a museum unless you have prior context. As a friend told me, if you haven’t served on a submarine or watched Das Boot, it’s hard to visit a museum submarine and have much deeper of a thought than “it’s cramped and has a lot of valves.” With a little more context, you can have a terrifying experience. Imagine being a young German man in the 1941. You are conscripted for the submarine service. You leave home, see the ocean for the first time, and go to sea in a submarine. In combat, you are squeezed into a torpedo room, waiting to be told to hit a lever and shoot that torpedo, hoping you aren’t first hit by a depth charge and drown in the dark. To me, it’s almost criminal to just have the dead object sit there, with no attempt to contextualize it.

Help people understand the museum process. How do exhibits get chosen? How do they get put together? Where does the money come from? Transparency isn’t the absence of obfuscation; it’s an active effort to reveal how you work to the people you are trying to serve.

Innovate. I don’t know exactly what needs to be done, only that there should probably be more experimentation.

For example, if you put those QR codes on every piece, then you would passively collect data on how many people read about individual pieces, which would help you know what stuff people find most interesting (or, potentially, most confusing). I’m not saying Big Data will solve museums’ problems, but it is the 21st century, and it’s inexcusable to not be thinking about passive data collection.

Here’s another question: What are other ways, beyond reading and looking, that people can interact with museum pieces?5 I’ve seen a number of experiments here, none of which seems to be a real success, but we should keep trying. (Again, to be clear, I think a little room at the end of an exhibit that asks you to answer “what do you think?” with crayons is a sham.)

I’m not a museum professional, and I’m sure the work is full of all kinds of constraints I don’t understand. But, as a museum-goer, I can say I’m shocked that the overall experience hasn’t changed that much over the past, say 25 years. I’m sure we can do better.

And if you run a museum, oh my gosh I’d be so happy to put my labor where my mouth is. Call me.

More times they did it wrong

If you visit the British Museum, you’ll likely walk past the Rosetta Stone. The Stone is one the of the more important artifacts in all of archaeology: it helped us decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus unlock thousands of years of history. In the Museum, the Stone is in a case, by itself, prominently positioned at the intersection of two hallways, usually with a mill of people taking photos. The Stone has a little descriptive placard of about 200 words. And that is it. This piece could have an entire museum devoted to it, explaining how the decipherment happened and what it unlocked. (Indeed, there is such a museum in France.) Or, the many other hieroglyphs in the Museum could be linked to this piece. Or, the piece could have been contextualized: how did it end up in the Museum at all? But no. It just sits there, getting photographed.

Back in Berlin, I’m in the Altes Museum. I wander by a small, out-of-the-way case. In skimming the placards, my eye is caught by this sentence: “The Duenos vessel features the oldest Latin inscription.” I’m a big archaeology nerd, so I had a vague memory of the Duenos vessel, which led me into a stunned half-belief. I needed Wikipedia to confirm what this placard failed to communicate: the weird 3-inch piece of pottery in one corner of this display is the oldest Latin inscription, not in this case, not even in this museum, but in the entire world. And they have it just, you know, next to some other thing with writing on it that is so unimportant that it gets this description: “Plate with Inscription: Titeles. Caere (Italy), acquired in 1872. Clay, 500-480 BC.” What else would you want to know about either piece?

I’ll pause the anecdotes for a moment to observe that I can enjoy myself in museums like the British Museum and Altes Museum because I studied archaeology and I’ve learned about many of the pieces. It’s not a complete disaster to have me approach the contextless Rosetta Stone because I know what it is, know part of what it says, and have even learned how to read parts of it. I get the pleasure of seeing the real thing, appreciating its true size, shape, color, and detail, while also basking in its aura. But I’m really not sure how normal museumgoers are supposed to get any of that.

Still in Berlin, outside the Bode Museum, there are some flags advertising that the Museum is a “healing museum.” I’m honestly curious. Education is priority one, but there’s no reason a museum couldn’t also do some healing, or that healing might be a way to get people in the door to do education. After going through the whole museum, I conclude that the way in which the museum is a “healing museum” is that there is one smallish, moderately tucked away room with signs at either entrance announcing that, because the Bode is a healing museum, you are welcome to meditate in this room. There are a half dozen pillows, and that’s it. Two people are sitting and apparently meditating, which I find astonishing because I am so irritated by how patronizing this “healing” thing is. I’ve been to Denny’s franchises that have put more effort into “healing.”

I once had the privilege of attending a private event at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. I end up in the little room with the gems. I scrutinize some placards, trying to get oriented and make sense of what I’m seeing. Rather than doing my normal struggling and Googling, this time there is a museum employee, so I turn and ask: “OK, before anything else, can you just tell me what a gem is?” It turns out this person is the (junior) curator of this very gem collection, and therefore she knows everything about gems. After asking all my questions, I give my honest feedback, that the room is pretty but confusing and not very educational in its current state. She sighs and nods knowingly, and I infer she is waiting for the current (senior) curator to retire, so that changes can be made.

I’m in a national park in the American West. (I can’t remember where.) There is a giant hole in the ground, like someone took an ice cream scoop a mile across and just scooped out solid stone. What on earth happened here? I consult the placard. I can’t remember what it said, only that my travel partner and I, both PhDs, couldn’t make sense of (1) the geological terminology, (2) how the colored diagrams on the placard corresponded to that terminology, or (3) how either the diagrams or the terms corresponded to the giant hole in the ground. I consider that placard actively harmful, since its main message seems to be that I’m too dumb to understand geology.

I have a non-specific contempt for exhibitions in ethnographic museums that try to make their collections relatable by (1) abstracting away everything specific and relatable about their content and then (2) asking you to relate to the generalized categories. “Hello, museum visitor! Do you have a job and sometimes get sick? Then you’re probably also interested in the intersection of labor and illness in pre-contact Mesoamerica, right? They’re just like you! Doesn’t that make these photographs and random objects so interesting and relatable?”

A museum that does it right

One of my favorite museums in the world is the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, UK. At a glance, this might be surprising. It is a small museum: the British Museum gets 400x more visitors per year). It also has no notable authentic pieces: almost everything is a copy, such as plaster casts of marble sculptures.

I love this museum because it does not “wow,” it educates. My memory is that the museum visit follows a single main circuit of ancient sculpture, arranged in historical and aesthetic order. You start with very old, stiff-looking kouroi and advance through changing patterns in ancient Greek sculpture. When you arrive at the famous Aphrodite of Knidos, you understand the (very possible true) stories about how men were so bewitched by the statue’s beauty that they broke into the temple at night and tried to copulate with it. You remember the name of its sculptor, Praxiteles, because his name is helpfully repeated and contextualized across multiple pieces, tracing his artistic innovations in subject matter and posture as they ramified through ancient Greece.

You continue on through the Romans, seeing the influence of the Greeks and the innovation on top of it, pausing at the Augustus of Prima Porta and then proceeding to learn how to roughly date busts of Roman emperors using their period-specific hairstyles, clothes, and facial representations. In an hour I learnt more than I have in years of going to museums since then.

I think this museum is successful in part because it is emphatically about education. You are supposed to walk in and learn about classical archaeology before you walk out. It does not have original pieces to negotiate with, and it is not trying to be hip or groundbreaking.

Of course, not every museum can be like this, with its rather arcane and fairly narrow subject matter. Not everyone wants this kind of dry education, even in a museum. And the “great” museums have the great pieces that present high risk and high reward in their display. But great museums must start from this educational nucleus and carry the challenge of their great pieces to educational triumph.

In the Part Three of this series, I’ll propose directions for museums, to make things better.

I got to see some of those things, but I also got a good dose of museum discontent.

This post is the first in a short series on what museums are doing wrong and how they can do better.

What are museums for?

My first thesis is that the primary purpose of public museums of history, archaeology, and anthropology is to educate the public. Museums certainly have other functions, like doing research and maintaining collections, but those other functions ultimately serve the purpose of educating the public.

This contention elides a lot of complexity, but its value is in contrast: my second thesis is that many, if not most, of the “great” museums of history, archaeology, and anthropology fail miserably at this educational goal.

My experience in most “great” museums is that they are not designed for the public, or even for amateur enthusiasts like me. Instead, I think most museums are designed by curators to please other curators. It is a conversation and competition between members of a profession, and any exhibits that seem to be speaking to “us” are a result of that professional conversation, which is, to a large degree, about how people like you and me will interact with their exhibits.

My rational argument

Think about the last time you walked into a “great” museum. You were likely awed and overwhelmed by its vastness. You consult a map, select a destination, navigate with some difficulty to some particular room, and then begin your museum experience.

You probably start by reading a wall of text, squinting and thinking hard, trying to make sense of what the exhibit is about, realizing that you are ignorant about many things the text treats as self-evident and about many things that the text treats as important but you find inscrutable. You then proceed to Look At Objects, each of which has a little placard that tells you very little that helps you know what to make of it.

Now, think about how it would be if you had a friend or teacher who wanted to educate you about the same topic. Where would they start? What questions would you ask? What things would help you learn fastest and most deeply?

I hypothesize that the things you would want to see and hear have almost no overlap with the things you saw in the museum.

My mini-screeds

I’d like to share some stories about times when a museum or museum-like experience disappointed me, when there was a missed opportunity for learning. (These stories are not necessarily the best ones to support my rational argument, but they are ones that stand out most firmly in my mind.)

I’m in the Bode Museum in Berlin. It is a vast and beautiful museum, mostly full of Medieval art. I wander around, hoping to find something that strikes my fancy. In one corner of one random little room, my eyes set upon a small, intricately carved piece. It seems special, but the placard merely informs me “Altarpiece, mother of pearl, some time, some place.” I puzzle for a moment. Well, if I can’t learn about the piece, I might as well remind myself what mother of pearl is. So I whip out Wikipedia to read the page on nacre (the technical name for mother of pearl), and on that wiki page, dear reader, the first example of artwork is literally exactly this piece I’m standing in front of. I am stunned. Now I really think this piece must be important, but I have almost no way to figure out if that’s true. So I wander off. The end.

I’m still in the Bode Museum. One of their treasures, highlighted on the map, is a mosaic from a church in the later Western Roman Empire. I hunt it down and am quite surprised by what I see. It looks like an Eastern Orthodox mosaic, and so must be an interesting example of East-to-West cultural flow, which seems to be a theme in some other pieces in this part of the museum (but which is not indicated anywhere). Mercifully, this piece has a placard with some explanation. But what does this placard tell me? About how this mosaic was, at some time in the past, taken off the wall at its original location and then imperfectly reassembled here in the Bode Museum. There is nothing about, you know, art or history.

Now I’m in the Neues Museum, whose most treasured piece is the Nefertiti Bust. The bust is closely guarded, in a room all by itself. You can only take a picture at a distance of about 30 feet. (Why? I could guess that it’s about ensuring that photo flash doesn’t damage the pigments, but who cares about educating the peasantry about archaeological conservation? Certainly not this museum.) I walk up close, admire the object, and then read the approximately 150 word placard, mostly talking about how Nefertiti is beautiful but also realistically portrayed (i.e., she has gentle wrinkles under her eyes). This is the museum’s single most prized piece, and they’re just like “Oh yeah, that thing? Let’s give it as much explanation as we do the random stuff down in the basement.”

I climb the stairs to the top floor of the Neues Museum. There are very few people, presumably because of the stairs but also because the first room you walk into is literally a bunch of dark, dusty cabinets. But I’m a nerd so I skim all the placards. I read one and am stunned: this is Virchow’s collection. Wait, that Virchow? Virchow, who I know from my biology and public health background is one of the founders of modern biology and medicine, was also an archaeologist? The placard says something oblique about this “medical career” but nothing else. I consult Wikipedia and find out Virchow was staunchly anti-Darwinist (purely on scientific grounds), anti-germ theory of disease (we would say in modern jargon that he considered social determinants of health the true cause of disease), and anti-racist (in part because of his scientific comparisons of human bodies). This dusty pile of bones in a case isn’t that interesting on its own, and the opportunity to link to this fascinating person is lost.

In the second part, I’ll share a few more screeds and then some actual constructive ideas.

The idea that our constitution is changing can be confusing for Americans, who use the word “Constitution” almost exclusively with a capital C, to refer to the written Constitution. I suspect this confusion comes from the fact that the US has the world’s oldest written constitution, one which we can amend (or, used to amend) but never changed wholesale via a constitutional convention. (Contrast this with, for example, the United Kingdom, which has no written constitution; France, which has had 16 written constitutions; and the Dominican Republic, which has had more than 30.)

How do we think about changes to the little-c constitution that aren’t formal amendments to the capital-C Constitution? To understand where things are going, let’s look back.

In an archaic sense, the constitution is how the body politic is constituted, how it is put together. It is the supreme law in the sense that it fills in all the gaps left by other kinds of laws. Even the word “law” can be thorny. Again, as Americans, we tend to have a narrow view of this word, reading “law” as federal statutes, specifically, the US Code, and the corresponding state and local statutes.

There are probably hundreds of definitions of “law” and “constitution,” but for our purposes here, think of “the law” as the socially accepted system for formal, nonviolent conflict resolution, and the “constitution” is the supreme law.

Consider a few crucial examples of our little-c constitution that aren’t part of our big-C Constitution. First, and most importantly, is the Supreme Court’s ability to declare laws unconstitutional. As a child, I learned that the Founding Fathers designed a government with three branches that had checks and balances against each other. This is a post hoc explanation. The Supreme Court’s ability to strike down Congress’s and states’ laws as unconstitutional is nowhere in the Constitution, not in the original text and not in any amendments. The Supreme Court itself decided, in a Supreme Court case, that it could declare laws unconstitutional, 14 years after the Constitution was ratified. The Court had to be clever about getting this decision enforced, navigating a conflict between political parties, coming to a decision that the party in power wanted to enforce, but for reasons that strengthened the Court. It was, in a sense, a mini-coup.

There are hundreds of more examples where Supreme Court or other case law are crucial, such as rules for federal executive decisionmaking from Chevron (overturned by Loper Bright) and for determination of unwritten constitutional rights from Roe (overturned by Dobbs).

Second, consider the House and Senate rules, which determine how Congress operates and thus have immense impacts on our lawmaking. Most notably, the filibuster, which essentially requires a supermajority for most laws to pass the Senate, is nowhere in the Constitution (beyond the part where the Constitution says that Congress can make its own rules). Congress has toyed with removing the filibuster for at least 20 years.

Third, there are countless examples of small things that are just “the way we do things,” things that UK lawmakers would firmly call part of their constitution but which we, as Americans, don’t know how to name. Defeated presidential candidates are expected to concede the election. Presidents are expected to release their tax returns and divest themselves of any remotely problematic investment. Federal agencies are expected to spend money that Congress has appropriated.

In a sense, each of these things —a Supreme Court decision, the Senate’s “nuclear option,” unprecedented Presidential actions— is a constitutional crisis. Some crises are more acute or more important than others, but they are all constitutional crises, even if they don’t directly involve someone directly flouting the Constitutional text.

I don’t use “crisis” in an alarmist sense. Again, looking back, “crisis” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “decision.” The word originally came into English to refer to the deciding moment in the course of a disease, when a patient’s fever would either peak and fall, or not.

But while every crisis is a decision, not every crisis is life or death. Our constitution is clearly changing in a way that grants more latitude to the party in power with respect to unwritten constitutional norms and, potentially, with respect to actual written laws.

This need not signal immediate disaster. As an American learning about Greek politics, I was mortified to learn that, in the Greek system, the ruling party substantially changes election law with each major transition in power between parties, essentially gerrymandering the whole country. And yet, they have traded between relatively conservative and liberal parties multiple times since their civil war and subsequent junta.

Elections are still real, at least for now.