Lessons for newcomers

What would you want to insist that prospective immigrants to your country learn?

An obvious first choice is "the language." We don't have an official language, though we should. If you are to be part of the society and not in an isolated huddle, you need to speak English.

Another obvious body of knowledge is the history and general culture, and the basics of how the economy and government work, and what is expected of citizens--and what is expected of guests. Immigrants who learn these things from American movies are in for surprises.

Our local cultures do not all assume the same courtesies, but we should try to assemble a set, with explanations ("How are you?" is not requesting your medical history, give up your bus seat to someone infirm, etc). Now that I think of it, quite a few of our citizens never learned some of these...

How to arrange this is another problem. But for the moment just think about what you want an immigrant to know (and practice as needed) to be able to fit in.

Instructions on how to thrive (e.g. ignore the ubiquitous advertisements and save your money) may overlap with this curriculum somewhat.

A student coming for college will probably be associating with an unrepresentative group of people, and not see or understand what happens in the background to provide his education. Best be explicit upfront about what is acceptable and what is not.

I suspect that I'd get very different answers to this from painters at the union hall and from the HR staff at Target.

Niche dominations

An interesting exploration of ethnic domination of niche economic sectors, or, how to develop a jati.

How do some ethnicities wind up taking over (e.g.) hotel management? Aporia discusses the hows and the side effects--not all of them are benign. One is that a number of low-status jobs are no longer available as entry level jobs to youth of other ethnicities--nail salon employment is nearly locked down in LA.

Children

Althouse has a post on people not having children, and a lot of the talk is about economics and technology and social propaganda.

What I thought of was Chesterton and "The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial."

The world is rediscovered every day.

Artemis

Some people are excited about the Artemis mission, and others are pretty grumpy about it. Moon shots have been done before, of course, and the thrill isn't going to be the same. I remember the original well.

The same reasons for not doing it at all circulate again: Benefits are speculative, We've got great needs (wars, the poor, etc) that all need dealing with and this is a mere distraction, and so on. There's a new reason too: Why not use robots for exploration since they work so well now.

Of course the benefits of using low earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit are not speculative at all anymore, but we have a better handle on what we can find on the Moon and Mars and a better appreciation for how hard work there will be.

The "How can we spend money on this when we have so many poor/etc" sounds very noble-minded, but that argument has no boundaries or limits. Why did Beethoven waste his time composing music when he could have been agitating for peace and trying to relieve poverty?

No. There are things worth doing, things that make life better, that have nothing to do with the usual list of desperate needs. I judge exploration (physical and scientific research) to be among those, along with arts. "We can put a man on the Moon but we can't fix homelessness." Well, we can carve a Pieta but we can't cure drug addiction--and probably never will. I don't believe the societal-problem advocates should have an automatic veto on the work of the rest of us.

The question comes down to balance. You can overdo anything. And there are several kind of costs to consider: money of course, but enthusiasm and good will too. Thanks to the intervening years of development some effects can be had for much less (in constant dollars) than they could for the Apollo program. Enthusiasm seems harder to come by, for pretty much anything. A certain decadence set in in society, and NASA turned rather sclerotic. Private rockets pack a lot more enthusiasm now.

If you argue that the Artemis program lacks vision--that we're just doing what our ancestors did, just a little bigger; a little larger pyramid this time--I admit there's justice to the argument.

If you complain that it's inefficient to try to loft people instead of robots--granted.

If you complain that the Constitution doesn't mandate research spending like this--well, it doesn't mandate poverty spending either. And several decades of the latter have shown some stubborn problems with poverty elimination and a moral hazard or two as well--the programs are not an unmitigated good.

You could argue that private firms should take up the torch of space travel. I like the idea, though we have a tragedy of the commons problem already.

Where should the balance be--this year? I don't know. Existential problems, such as war or overwhelming debt, may demand cuts to the bone and beyond. We don't have a good track record of facing up to problems and making hard decisions either.

Nor do I know on what scales you weigh conflicting desires: smaller classes or more to teach about?

I do know that if I had funding authority, I'd want to keep trying to explore.

"Finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order"

An image rather than a logical analysis: The world of a pagan or animist is full of spirits and gods, sometimes in unexpected places, providing unexpected limits on what you want to do. Beware of transgressing the ancient sacred sites and sacred rites that divide the physical and moral landscape.

When monotheism arrives, most of the sacred sites are swept away, and those that remain are, as it were, baptized into meaning as part of the monotheism. The landscape is cleaned and emptied, to some degree dis-enchanted, certainly somewhat exorcised.

If the monotheism fades, what new demons come to fill that now-empty space?

"Different"

I get it. They want to make sure that someone with a birth defect is not considered of lesser worth. They want to be kind and fair, so they coin labels like "limb different."

I think it rises from the denial that there's a human nature – physical, mental, spiritual. The way they define things, and people, is by their actions. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck – nevermind if it needs batteries.

If you define humanity by the things a person does rather than some essence or nature, inequalities of ability are a problem for you. The world's economies define human worth by economic value added, but there's no reason for us to give assent to that. We know better (I hope).

There are normal differences in people, e.g. skin color. There are also abnormal differences, e.g. skin color (albinism). It's normal to have 5 digits on each limb, and rare indeed for more than 5 not to be a defect.

The Salisbury Organist goes to old country churches to play their organs. Not infrequently a note will be bad or the machine slightly out of tune – and you wouldn't be able to tell because he picks the music to fit the organ.

If you don't have a right foot, walking is more of an accomplishment than it is for a healthy youngster. If we flatten everything to "difference" you lose that extra accomplishment.

Plenty of things are legitimately just "difference": including a lot of the skills. Just because it isn't always easy to agree on the names of things that are human essence doesn't mean they aren't real.

We seem to have a hunger to oversimplify. A "definition by action" is very useful (especially in mathematics), while a "definition by essence" is also important in determining purposes – like what a government is actually for. If we don't know what the essence of human-ness is, how do we know what human flourishing is? Keep both approaches, but in tension with each other.

Sapir-Whorf and groups

AVI's recent post on Sapir-Whorf brought a few things to mind.

I took a course in linguistics as an undergrad. Our teacher assured us that there were no primitive languages. You could talk philosophy in any language. If you had to make up and define new words, that was always possible. I gather he didn't care for Sapir-Whorf, weak or strong.

I didn't attempt to prove him wrong – that's too many languages to learn. It seemed plausible, people being people everywhere. You can't talk about nuclear physics without words for nucleus, but you can explain what those are, just as you can teach the relevant math. To an adult, anyway.

But. Poverty of language makes it harder to communicate some things. If you have leisure, that doesn't matter, but when you don't have time to define nuances that aren't part of a common language heritage, you've got problems.

That matters a lot for slogans, which we often use as a shorthand for thought.

Step back from individual words and think of phrases, or words that have changed meanings. If a culture has succeeded in framing a dispute in terms that admit only a handful of options, you can theoretically describe an alternative, but in practice it's not easy.

Though some people make it look easy. Maybe the most famous framing situation is the one when Pharisees and Saducees tried to get Jesus to take a side in a political quarrel about the legitimacy of Roman oppression – should they pay taxes to the Romans or not? Answer "Yes," and the average folks give up on Jesus, "No" and the Romans will kill him. Jesus was able to rephrase the problem in two sentences (and change the course of Western Civilization). You or I would have been struggling to be nuanced and wind up looking spineless, and disgusting everybody.

The language includes things taken for granted (denotation or connation), most of which most of us never think through. Who has the time to think through what we mean by "liberty" when the the kids need supper? We quote "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" but those invisible assumptions mean that John Adams would be startled at how we interpret the phrase. (Liberty: is it intrinsic, something granted, or something achieved? An addict is effectively a slave no matter what the law says. "Slave to one's appetites" is a real condition.)

Orwell went with a strong version of Sapir-Whorf: without appropriate words there are no concepts. But if you expand what you mean by language to include the cultural associations of words and phrases, and think in terms of average behavior, a weaker version seems to be true for populations – subject to the caveats that languages and associations(*) can be made to change, and one on one dialog can go anywhere the participants have the endurance for.

Insofar as slogans rule us, weak Sapir-Whorf seems true.

(*) E.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin changed the image and mental associations of "slave owner."

Connections

Some mathematician with a sense of humor decided to borrow a bit from the study of graphs to illustrate how significant Erdos has been in modern math. You are "connected" to Erdos if you have co-authored a paper with him, or with someone who has co-authored, or with … and so on. Erdos himself has number 0, someone who wrote a paper with him has number 1, someone who wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with him has 2, and so on. I have Erdos number 4 – not because I'm a good mathematician (far from it) but because I was part of a physics experiment in which some theorists (who I actually never met) had co-authored a paper with some mathematicians who had number 2. The connection between me and Erdos is tenuous enough to make the matter completely silly.

It's the "6 degrees of separation" thing, just applied to a particular man.

Just for fun, can we extend this to Epstein? He's number 0, and just for fun assign 0 to Maxwell too.

But what do we mean by connection? Having spent time with him or in his parties, or having had professional dealings with him? Maybe both? His guards or his chef would have "Null" for social connections and "1" for professional. Trump and Clinton have a "1" for social connections; dunno about professional ones. In fact, never mind the professional connections, it's boring.

Do I need to say that I'm not going to be in the lists? I don't run in "connected" circles. But pretty much everybody in the House and Senate is either a 1 or 2: knew him or knew someone who did. The people who know/work with them in turn are 2's or 3's in social connections. The next ring out will be the state legislators and such.

So if you know a state legislator (a former one was in a Bible class with me), you might have an Epstein number of 5 or so. Of course that's attenuated enough to be pretty meaningless too.

Me? Well, theorists like Hawking (a "1"; Epstein seems to have liked to hang out with scientists) tended to hang out with theorists, but the top guys do meet sometimes, so I'm probably at least a 5, maybe a 4. I don't feel particularly tainted by such a distant association.

Pick a figure or two you don't like. How connected are you to them?

It seems trivial to say that the "well-connected" will be have more connections to each other than to the rest of us, but the rest of us group into clusters too. I had one set of connections at the university, and a different set at church. At separations of less than about 3, there was pretty much no overlap.

Some of those clusters map onto tribes, and some of the tribes are hostile, but even so there are still connections. If your church is helping some of the poor, members will be establishing relationships with them (I hope), and have less separation from the underclasses than, say, members of the math department will have with them.

Connections can be curious. How is O'Hare airport connected to Al Capone? If you don't know…

UPDATE: Closer than I thought! Lisa Randall spent some time in the CDF control room. IIRC the accelerator was down and so we talked a bit about what I was reading to pass the time: Augustine's Confessions. This was before 2008, so I doubt that there would have been any.

Romans 7 and zombies

A few years back I puzzled a bit about the popularity of zombie stories, and puzzled again.. I was thinking then in terms of fear of dissolution of social bonds and expectations, but ...

The zombie is a live body but dead mind and spirit. It looks alive, but isn't really.

Suppose one has a live body and live mind but dead spirit?

What could kill the spirit, though? Christians will probably see where I'm going with this; think of yourself in a world of living dead, with the fear that you are one of them yourself -- or can be one. Or were one.

"Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works." — Robert Farrar Capon

"Apocolypse" means "unveiling", so the zombie apocolypse means the revealing of a world of living dead.

More Motse

Following up on the earlier post

An easier-to-read site

From section I, a call for the rule of universal love:

Suppose everybody in the world loves universally, loving others as one's self. Will there yet be any unfilial individual? When every one regards his father, elder brother, and emperor as himself, whereto can he direct any unfilial feeling? Will there still be any unaffectionate individual? When every one regards his younger brother, son, and minister as himself, whereto can he direct any disaffection? Therefore there will not be any unfilial feeling or disaffection. Will there then be any thieves and robbers? When every one regards other families as his own family, who will steal? When every one regards other persons as his own person, who will rob? Therefore there will not be any thieves or robbers. Will there be mutual disturbance among the houses of the ministers and invasion among the states of the feudal lords? When every one regards the houses of others as one's own, who will be disturbing? When every one regards the states of others as one's own, who will invade? Therefore there will be neither disturbances among the houses of the ministers nor invasion among the states of the feudal lords.

And from section III, a claim that the sage-kings expressed universal love:

Nevertheless. the gentlemen in the empire think that, though it would be an excellent thing if love can be universalized, it is something quite impracticable. It is like carrying Mt. Tai and leaping over the Ji River. Mozi said: The illustration is a faulty one. Of course to be able to carry Mt. Tai and leap over the Ji River would be an extreme feat of strength. Such has never been performed from antiquity to the present time. But universal love and mutual aid are quite different from this. And the ancient sage-kings did practise it. How do we know they did?

When Yu was working to bring the Deluge under control, he dug the West River and the Youdou River in the west in order to let off the water from the Qu, Sun, and Huang Rivers. In the north he built a dam across the Yuan and Gu Rivers in order to fill the Houzhidi (a basin) and the Huzhi River. Mt. Dizhu was made use of as a water divide, and a tunnel was dug through Mt. Lungmen. All these were done to benefit the peoples west of the (Yellow) River and various barbarian tribes, Yan, Dai, Hu, Ho, of the north. In the east he drained the great Plain and built dykes along the Mengzhu River. The watercourse was divided into nine canals in order to regulate the water in the east and in order to benefit the people of the District of Ji. In the south he completed the Yangtze, Han, Huai, and Ru Rivers. These ran eastward and emptied themselves into the Five Lakes. This was done in order to benefit the peoples of Jing, Qi, Gan, Yue, and the barbarians of the south. All these are the deeds of Yu. We can, then, universalize love in conduct.

When King Wen was ruling the Western land, he shone forth like the sun and the moon all over the four quarters as well as in the Western land. He did not allow the big state to oppress the small state, he did not allow the multitude to oppress the singlehanded, he did not allow the influential and strong to take away the grain and live stock from the farmers. Heaven visited him with blessing. And, therefore, the old and childless had the wherewithal to spend their old age, the solitary and brotherless had the opportunity to join in the social life of men, and the orphans had the support for their growth. This was what King Wen had accomplished. We can, then, universalize love in conduct.

When King Wu was about to do service to Mt. Tai it was recorded thus: "Blessed is Mt. Tai. Duke of Zhou by a long descent is about to perform his duty. As I have obtained the approval of Heaven, the magnanimous arise to save the people of Shang Xia as well as the barbarians (from the tyranny of Emperor Zhou). Though (Emperor Zhou) has many near relatives, they cannot compare with the magnanimous. If there is sin anywhere, I am solely responsible." This relates the deeds of King Wu. We can, then, universalize love in conduct.

And again from section III, examples of things that are nominally harder to do. One may harbor doubts about the wisdom of these kings...

Is it because it is hard and impracticable? There are instances of even much harder tasks done. Formerly, Lord Ling of the state of Jing liked slender waists. In his time people in the state of Jing ate not more than once a day. They could not stand up without support, and could not walk without leaning against the wall. Now, limited diet is quite hard to endure, and yet it was endured. While Lord Ling encouraged it, his people could be changed within a generation to conform to their superior.

Lord Goujian of the state of Yue admired courage and taught it to his ministers and soldiers three years. Fearing that their knowledge had not yet made them efficient he let a fire be set on the boat, and beat the drum to signal advance. The soldiers at the head of the rank were even pushed down. Those who perished in the flames and in water were numberless. Even then they would not retreat without signal. The soldiers of Yue would be quite terrified (ordinarily). To be burnt alive is a hard task, and yet it was accomplished. When the Lord of Yue encouraged it, his people could be changed within a generation to conform to their superior.

Lord Wen of the state of Jin liked coarse clothing. And so in his time the people of Jin wore suits of plain cloth, jackets of sheep skin, hats of spun silk, and big rough shoes. Thus attired, they would go in and see the Lord and come out and walk in the court. To dress up in coarse clothing is hard to do, yet it has been done. When Lord Wen encouraged it his people could be changed within a generation to conform to their superior.

Now to endure limited diet, to be burnt alive, and to wear coarse clothing are the hardest things in the world, yet when the superiors encouraged them the people could be changed within a generation. Why was this so? It was due to the desire to conform to the superior.

Now, as to universal love and mutual aid, they are beneficial and easy beyond a doubt. It seems to me that the only trouble is that there is no superior who encourages it. If there is a superior who encourages it, promoting it with rewards and commendations, threatening its reverse with punishments, I feel people will tend toward universal love and mutual aid like fire tending upward and water downwards - it will be unpreventable in the world.

So a realm of universal love is achieved from the top down, by conforming the inferiors by "Identification with the Superior."

About fifty years ago I decided to read Mencius, who was one of the great influences in Chinese thought. I wearied of the book well before finishing, but got through the section in which he excoriates Mozi's "universal love" ideas. He complained about propriety (insuffiicent filial piety) and hierarchy (You have to have hierarchy!). I don't remember a complaint that this just wouldn't work.

I think the 20'th century shows us that top-down proclaiming everybody to be comrades doesn't work very well.

Forging on: This sounds fairly timely. Economy of Expenditures

When a sage rules a state the benefits of the state will be increased twice. When he governs the empire, those of the empire will be doubled. This increase is not by appropriating land from without. But by cutting out the useless expenditures it is accomplished. In issuing an order, taking up an enterprise, or employing the people and expending wealth, the sage never does anything without some useful purpose.

…

What, then, is difficult to increase? To increase the population is difficult. In ancient times, the sage-kings said: "No man of twenty should dare to be without a family; no girl of fifteen should dare to be without a master." Such were the laws of the sage-kings. Now that the sage-kings have passed away, the people have become loose.

…

In those ancient days, at the beginning of the race, when there were no palaces or houses, people lived in caves dug at the side of hills and mounds. The sage-kings felt quite concerned, thinking that the caves might keep off the wind and cold in winter, but that in summer it would be wet below and steaming above which might hurt the health of the people. So palaces and houses were built and found useful. Now, what is the standard in building palaces and houses? Mozi said: Just so that on the side it can keep off the wind and the cold, on top it can keep off the snow, frost, rain, and dew, within it is clean enough for sacrificial purposes, and that the partition in the palace is high enough to separate the men from the women. What causes extra expenditure but does not add any benefit to the people, the sage-kings will not undertake.

I'm not sure how popular some of these ideas would be today.

How about the supernatural?

Mozi said: The way to find out whether anything exists or not is to depend on the testimony of the ears and eyes of the multitude. If some have heard it or some have seen it then we have to say it exists. If no one has heard it and no one has seen it then we have to say it does not exist. So, then, why not go to some village or some district and inquire? If from antiquity to the present, and since the beginning of man, there are men who have seen the bodies of ghosts and spirits and heard their voice, how can we say that they do not exist?

…

Not only does the record in this book prove it to be so. Formerly the Lord Zhuang of Qi (794-731 B.C.) had two ministers, Wang Liguo and Zhong Lijiao, who were engaged in a lawsuit. For three years no judgment could be reached. The Lord of Qi thought of putting both of them to death, but was afraid to slay the innocent; he thought of acquitting both of them but was afraid to let loose the guilty. So he let them provide a lamb and take oath on the altar of Qi. The two men agreed to take the oath of blood. The throat of the lamb was cut and its blood sprinkled on the altar. The case of Wang Liguo was read all through. But before half of the case of Zhong Lijiao was read, the lamb arose and butted at him, broke his leg and prostrated him on it. At the time those people who were present all saw it and those far away heard of it. It was recorded in the Spring and Autumn of Qi. The feudal lords circulated the news around and remarked: "So speedy and severe is the punishment from spirits and ghosts to him that takes an oath in insincerity!" Judging from the record in this book, how can we doubt that spirits and ghosts exist?

Therefore Mozi said: One may not act disrespectfully even in woods, valleys, or solitary caves where there is no man. Spirits and ghosts are watching everywhere.

…

Those who deny the existence of spirits, saying "Ghosts and spirits just do not exist", are opposing the interest of the sage-kings. Opposing the interest of the sage-kings is not the way of the superior man.

Vanity

I have neglected some classical literature. The Vanity of Human Wishes by Samuel Johnson was suggeted to me. I'd not read anything by him that I can recall; I needed to remedy that.

But some great lines: "How Nations sink, by darling Schemes oppres’d," sounds very timely. Or "When Statutes glean the Refuse of the Sword" In context I don't believe Johnson was right. He thought the poor were less likely targets, but as Sowell quoted a sixteenth century German bishop as saying "The poor are a gold mine." Those statutes Johnson mentions don't glean much from any one of the poor, but there are so many that the income is large.

War and consequences: "And mortgag’d States their Grandsires Wreaths regret From Age to Age in everlasting Debt"

And about beauty: "Ye Nymphs of rosy Lips and radiant Eyes, Whom Pleasure keeps too busy to be wise," ... "What Care, what Rules your heedless Charms shall save, Each Nymph your Rival, and each Youth your Slave? An envious Breast with certain Mischief glows, And Slaves, the Maxim tells, are always Foes."

And I see where Austin got the phrase "Pride and Prejudice."

AI

is treated as a cure-all and factotum, embedded in everything and trusted by the best minds. Or at least influential minds. Haven't we seen this movie before?

Natural

English infamously overloads the word "love" with a riot of different meanings.

We overload "nature" too. There's the physical universe, and also the local ecosystem; alternatively, it means the rules they operate by.

And there's "human nature", which can mean the ways we were designed to function (human nature to love your children), or the brokenness we suffer from (human nature to be selfish). For the Christian there's a new nature given as well.

And there's the "nature" of the expression of individual gifts and traits (a "natural-born storyteller") or expressions of training ("a natural-born killer").

So is a writer using "nature" to describe something common to all humans, or specific to this individual? Is it something built in, or thanks to training (marching towards the gunfire)? It makes a difference in what is changeable, or even what's good--and I see a lot of disagreement on that.

Until we learn to disaggregate these meanings, and quit playing motte and bailey with them, I guess we're stuck making sure we parse out how the writer is trying to use them.

FWIW, about 400 years ago a "natural" was an idiot.

Noble-minded

Acts 17:10-11: "The brethren immediately sent Paul and Silas away by night to Berea, and when they arrived, they went into the synagogue of the Jews. Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so."

In an internet of "news" pass-alongs, I hunger for more noble-minded souls.

I'm not sure panic is necessary

"ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners"

The story struck me as a bit odd--where did the author find so many couples using such an oddball approach to fighting with each other? I guess you could do it with a request on some website, though you'd get a serious sampling bias that way, and it would take a fair bit of work to make sure you had more or less the real scoop. Or maybe the author asked a bunch of divorce lawyers for people who'd talk to him.

I can't imagine going to the computer to try to come up with something to say to my wife. Partly that's because I don't find the systems all that intelligent, and partly because it seems too indirect. If I'm angry or happy, I want to just say so myself, not ask a ghost writer. (Think of Cyrano as a cautionary tale.)

But I can believe some people do it. That you can get yourself in an echo chamber with AI that reinforces all your opinions--that sounds easy. In fact, it sounds faster than the traditional approach, which is to gripe to your friends and rely on them to take your side, until you've worked yourself up into fury.

But stories about walking around just reading the ChatGPT responses out loud to the spouse sound like absolutely no one I know.

I don't live in the phone, though.

A better classification

If you're not reading Sippican Cottage, go enjoy "The Sixties Never Happened."

The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.

and

Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at.

I wish I could write as well.

If you want another sample, try Hostile Workplace

Pronouns

There's been a time or two when it would have been nice to know pronouns for someone. When you've never met the collaborator and the name is unfamiliar and their language isn't English -- you can chase the odds when you talk about them and say "he", but you'll be (I was) wrong sometimes.

A few years back I attended a conference, and the name badges had a "my pronouns are" section. I wasn't the only one who didn't bother filling it out. In practice, as you can imagine, they were irrelevant. When you're talking to someone, you address them by name or by "you" or just by looking at them when you speak. And nobody bothered to ask what my pronouns were.

Face to face, it's slightly insulting -- perhaps designed to be so -- to demand that a man tell what his pronoun is. "Am I so un-masculine that you can't tell?" I imagine it's just as much or more so for a woman.

Dad-bod, male pattern baldness, 5-oclock shadow -- you figure it out.

For what it's worth in medical care

I've noticed that getting a doctor's apointment is taking longer, both in call-back and scheduling. The ER doc yesterday said they'd seen a massive uptick in visitors, which he attributed to fewer medical professionals. The closest Walgreens pharmacy has apparently had to close some afternoons because of staffing issues.

Feiffer

I remember mostly liking Jules Feiffer when I was adolescent. His "Marriage Manual" seemed, to an "outsider," cynical enough to be realistic.

But older me found him "OK in small doses," and his thoughts on marriage missing the points. His dancer might dance for hope, but in the end there never seemed to be any.

I read a collection of his work that covered several years, and some years were downright bitter. Every now and then he hit the nail exactly, and for those times I'll be grateful.

Lure of magic

Andy Crouch writes about modern magic, and the side effect of instant gratification on development. Some things demand time and discipline to develop.

Tangentially, some fantasy pays at least lip service to the notion that magic takes lots of preparation effort, and that once you've shot your bolt you have to figure something else out if it didn't work. A story about a magician spending hours prepping and practicing would be pretty boring, though. (Did it trace to Jack Vance?)

And while these stages of life are singular and essential, magic is equally disastrous at other formative moments. A friend of mine found himself seated on an airplane departing Los Angeles next to a couple en route to their honeymoon in Hawaii. He observed with growing horror as the newly-married young woman opened up TikTok on her phone, began scrolling and swiping through videos, and did not stop, even for a bathroom break let alone a word to her husband, until the plane landed five hours later. One can only wonder how the rest of the honeymoon unfolded. Even and especially when we face the defining seasons of our lives, the temptation to use magic to evade their demands as well as their gifts can be—as every one of us knows one way or another—overwhelming.

UPDATE:

Grim has a couple of essays about magic and alchemy (the essay I linked uses the word "magic", which isn't quite right), and about magic and chivalry and virtue.