Carl Sagan Issues a Chilling Warning About the Decline of Scientific Thinking in America: Watch His Final Interview (1996)

in Current Affairs, Science | April 18th, 2025

Until the end of his life, Carl Sagan (1934–1996) continued doing what he did all along — popularizing science and “enthusiastically conveying the wonders of the universe to millions of people on television and in books.” Whenever Sagan appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson during the 70s and 80s, his goal was to connect with everyday Americans — people who didn’t subscribe to Scientific American — and increase the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.

At the end of his life, Sagan still cared deeply about where science stood in the public imagination. But while losing a battle with myelodysplasia, Sagan also sensed that scientific thinking was losing ground in America, and even more ominously within the chambers of the Newt Gingrich-led Congress.

During his final interview, aired on May 27, 1996, Sagan issued a strong warning, telling Charlie Rose:

We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it.

And he also went on to add:

And the second reason that I’m worried about this is that science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking. A way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious who comes ambling along.

Nearly 20 years later, we have reached that point. Under the second Trump administration, DOGE has rushed to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of our government, haphazardly cutting the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and NASA. Next, they’re going after our leading research universities, intentionally weakening the research engine that has fueled the growth of American corporations—and the overall American economy—since World War II. And they’re replacing scientific leaders with charlatans like RFK Jr. who dabble in the very pseudoscience that Sagan warned us about. Needless to say, our competitors aren’t making the same mistakes. Few serious governments are stupid enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.

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Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking

Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

Daniel Dennett Presents Seven Tools For Critical Thinking

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The Real Story of Easter: How We Got from the First Easter in the Bible to Bunnies, Eggs & Chocolate

in Religion | April 18th, 2025

Popular culture has long since claimed Easter as an occasion for trickster rabbits, dyed-egg hunts, and marshmallow chicks of unnatural hues — none of which are actually in the Bible. Though that probably doesn’t surprise you, you may not be aware of just how far the modern holiday has drifted from its textual origins. In the new Hochelaga video above, that Youtube channel’s Tommie Trelawny recounts first the Biblical story at the basis of all this, that of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Then he examines how the latter event has since been commemorated, an evolution that has led to the Easter we know today.

“Jesus’ resurrection would have been celebrated in the very earliest days of Christianity,” Trelawny explains. “Initially, it was held on the feast of Passover, but eventually, it branched off into its own distinct holiday.” That initial overlap is reflected in the resemblance between Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover, and the Spanish and French names for Easter, Pascua and Pâques.

As for the English word Easter itself, it resonates with the name of “the Ancient Saxon goddess Ēostre, deity of spring and fertility.” Much as the Roman mid-winter festival Saturnalia may have inspired Christmas, could the pre-Christian holiday for Ēostre have inspired Easter?

To an extent, perhaps, though as Trelawny underscores, Easter was very much derived from Passover. Yet its associations with springtime go well beyond the time of year in which it occurs, not least in the form of all those eggs. In fact, “decorated eggs are an ancient custom that predates Christianity by many centuries.” Having stood as “a universal symbol for new life,” they also offered Christians an easily legible “metaphor for Jesus’ sealed tomb, and cracking it open as a symbol of his resurrection.” As for the Easter Bunny, he has a precedent in the Germanic Easter Hare, who “judged children on whether they’ve been good or bad” — now softened up, predictably, after so many years in America.

Stream Andrea Bocelli’s Easter Concert from Milan

A Map of All the Countries Mentioned in the Bible: What The Countries Were Called Then, and Now

A Survival Guide to the Biblical Apocalypse

Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence

The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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How to Evade Taxes in Ancient Rome: A 1,900-Year-Old Papyrus Reveals an Ancient Tax Evasion Scheme

in History, Law | April 17th, 2025

It was surely not a coincidence that the New York Times published its story on the trial of a certain Gadalias and Saulos this past Monday, April 14th. The defendants, as their names suggest, did not live in modernity: the papyrus documenting their legal troubles dates to the reign of Hadrian, around 130 AD. These men were charged, writes the Times’ Franz Lidz, with “the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.”

In other words, Gadalias and Saulos were accused of tax evasion, a subject always on the mind of Americans under the shadow of their tax-return due date, April 15th. While the prospect of an IRS audit keeps more than a few of them awake at night, ancient Roman law went, predictably, quite a bit harsher.

“Penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals,” writes Lidz. Such a fate presumably wouldn’t have been out of the question for those convicted of a crime of these proportions.

The long-misclassified document of this case was only properly deciphered, and even understood to have been written in ancient Greek, after its rediscovery in 2014. “A team of scholars was assembled to conduct a detailed physical examination and cross-reference names and locations with other historical sources,” which resulted in this paper published this past January. For any scholar of Roman law, such an opportunity to get into the minds of both that civilization’s judges and its criminals could hardly be passed up. Even out on the edge of the empire, prosecutors turn out to have employed “deft rhetorical strategies worthy of Cicero and Quintilian and displayed an excellent command of Roman legal terms and concepts in Greek.” This will no doubt get today’s law students speculating: specifically, about the existence of an ancient ChatGPT.

via NYTimes

Read David Foster Wallace’s Notes From a Tax Accounting Class, Taken to Help Him Write The Pale King

Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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How to Enter a ‘Flow State’ on Command: Peak Performance Mind Hack Explained in 7 Minutes

in Creativity, Productivity, Psychology | April 17th, 2025

You can be forgiven for thinking the concept of “flow” was cooked up and popularized by yoga teachers. That word gets a lot of play when one is moving from Downward-Facing Dog on through Warrior One and Two.

Actually, flow — the state of “effortless effort” — was coined by Goethe, from the German “rausch”, a dizzying sort of ecstasy.

Friedrich Nietzsche and psychologist William James both considered the flow state in depth, but social theorist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, is the true giant in the field. Here’s one of his definitions of flow:

Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.

Author Steven Kotler, Executive Director of the Flow Research Collective, not only seems to spend a lot of time thinking about flow, as a leading expert on human performance, he inhabits the state on a fairly regular basis, too.

Chalk it up to good luck?

Good genes? (Some researchers, including retired NIH geneticist Dean Hamer and psychologist C. Robert Cloninger, think genetics play a part…)

As Kotler points out above, anyone can hedge their bets by clearing away distractions — all the usual baddies that interfere with sleep, performance, or productivity.

It’s also important to know thyself. Kotler’s an early bird, who gets crackin’ well before sunrise:

I don’t just open my eyes at 4:00 AM, I try to go from bed to desk before my brain even kicks out of its Alpha wave state. I don’t check any emails. I turn everything off at the end of the day including unplugging my phones and all that stuff so that the next morning there’s nobody jumping into my inbox or assaulting me emotionally with something, you know what I mean?… I really protect that early morning time.

By contrast, his night owl wife doesn’t start clearing the cobwebs ’til early evening.

In the above video for Big Think, Kotler notes that 22 flow triggers have been discovered, pre-conditions that keep attention focused in the present moment.

His website lists many of those triggers:

Complete Concentration in the Present Moment
Immediate Feedback
Clear Goals
The Challenge-Skills Ratio (ie: the challenge should seem slightly out of reach
High consequences
Deep Embodiment
Rich Environment
Creativity (specifically, pattern recognition, or the linking together of new ideas)

Kotler also shares University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer’s trigger list for groups hoping to flow like a well-oiled machine:

Shared Goals
Close Listening
“Yes And” (additive, rather than combative conversations)
Complete Concentration (total focus in the right here, right now)
A sense of control (each member of the group feels in control, but still)
Blending Egos (each person can submerge their ego needs into the group’s)
Equal Participation (skills levels are roughly and equal everyone is involved)
Familiarity (people know one another and understand their tics and tendencies)
Constant Communication (a group version of immediate feedback)
Shared, Group Risk

One might think people in the flow state would be floating around with an expression of ecstatic bliss on their faces. Not so, according to Kotler. Rather, they tend to frown slightly. Good news for anyone with resting bitch face!

(We’ll thank you to refer to it as resting flow state face from here on out.)

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2022.

How to Enter Flow State, Increase Your Ability to Concentrate, and Let Your Ego Fall Away : An Animated Primer

How to Get into a Creative “Flow State”: A Short Masterclass

David Lynch Explains How Simple Daily Habits Enhance His Creativity

“The Philosophy of “Flow”: A Brief Introduction to Taoism

- Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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A Forgotten 16th-Century Manuscript Reveals the First Designs for Modern Rockets

in History, Science, Technology | April 16th, 2025

The Austrian military engineer Conrad Haas was a man ahead of his time — indeed, about 400 years ahead, considering that he was working on rockets aimed for outer space back in the mid-sixteenth century. Needless to say, he never actually managed to launch anything into the upper atmosphere. But you have to give him credit for getting as far as he did with the idea, a considerable progress documented in his treatise “How You Must Make Quite a Nice Rocket That Can Travel Itself into the Heights,” which no doubt sounds better in the original German. As Kaushik Patowary notes at Amusing Planet, its 450 pages are “filled with drawings and technical data on artillery, ballistics and detailed descriptions of multistage rockets.”

“Born in 1509 in Dornbach, now part of Vienna, to a German family from Bavaria,” Haas moved to Transylvania, then part of the Austrian Empire, early in his adulthood. “In 1551, Haas was invited by Stephen Báthory, the grand prince of Transylvania, to Hermannstadt (now Sibiu, Romania), where he became the commander of the artillery barracks and a weapons engineer.”

It was in this professional capacity that he began his research into rocketry, which led him to discover the concept of “a cylindrical thrust chamber filled with a powder propellant, with a conical hole to progressively increase the combustion area and consequently the thrust,” a clear intellectual ancestor of the multi-stage design “still used in modern rockets.”

Haas’ is the earliest scientific work on rockets known to have been undertaken in Europe. And until fairly recently, it had been forgotten: only in 1961 was his manuscript found in Sibiu’s public archives, which motivated Romania to claim Haas as the first rocket scientist. Though anachronistic, that designation does underscore the far-sightedness of Haas’ worldview. So do the personal words he included in his chapter about the military use of rockets. “My advice is for more peace and no war, leaving the rifles calmly in storage, so the bullet is not fired, the gunpowder is not burned or wet, so the prince keeps his money, the arsenal master his life,” he wrote. But given what he must have learned while living in politically unstable European borderlands, he surely understood, on some level, that it would be easier to get to the moon.

via MessyNessy

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Meet the Mysterious Genius Who Patented the UFO

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

in Literature, Psychology | April 16th, 2025

In an old Zen story, two monks argue over whether a flag is waving or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, saying, “It is your mind that moves.” The centuries-old koan illustrates a point Zen masters — and later philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists — have all emphasized at one time or another: human experience happens in the mind, but we share reality through language and culture, and these in turn set the terms for how we perceive what we experience.

Such observations bring us to another koan-like question: if a language lacks a word for something like the color blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind? We can dispense with the idea that there’s a color blue “out there” in the world. Color is a collaboration between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visual cortex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sassi, professor of ancient philosophy at Pisa University, “every culture has its own way of naming and categorizing colours.”

The most famous example comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th century, scholars have pointed out that in the thousands of words in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer never once describes anything — sea, sky, you name it — as blue. It wasn’t only the Greeks who didn’t see blue, or didn’t see it as we do, Sassi writes:

There is a specific Greek chromatic culture, just as there is an Egyptian one, an Indian one, a European one, and the like, each of them being reflected in a vocabulary that has its own peculiarity, and not to be measured only by the scientific meter of the Newtonian paradigm.

It was once thought cultural color differences had to do with stages of evolutionary development — that more “primitive” peoples had a less developed biological visual sense. But differences in color perception are “not due to varying anatomical structures of the human eye,” writes Sassi, “but to the fact that different ocular areas are stimulated, which triggers different emotional responses, all according to different cultural contexts.”

As the AsapSCIENCE video above explains, the evidence of ancient Greek literature and philosophy shows that since blue was not part of Homer and his readers’ shared vocabulary (yellow and green do not appear either), it may not have been part of their perceptual experience, either. The spread of blue ink across the world as a relatively recent phenomenon has to do with its availability. “If you think about it,” writes Business Insider’s Kevin Loria, “blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations.”

The color blue took hold in modern times with the development of substances that could act as blue pigment, like Prussian Blue, invented in Berlin, manufactured in China and exported to Japan in the 19th century. “The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.” Color is not only cultural, it is also technological. But first, perhaps, it could be a linguistic phenomenon.

One modern researcher, Jules Davidoff, found this to be true in experiments with a Namibian people whose language makes no distinction between blue and green (but names many finer shades of green than English does). “Davidoff says that without a word for a colour,” Loria writes, “without a way of identifying it as different, it’s much harder for us to notice what’s unique about it.” Unless we’re color blind, we all “see” the same things when we look at the world because of the basic biology of human eyes and brains. But whether certain colors appear, it seems, has to do less with what we see than with what we’re already primed to expect.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2021.

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Discover the Cyanometer, the Device Invented in 1789 Just to Measure the Blueness of the Sky

YInMn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Discovered in 200 Years, Is Now Available for Artists

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Ark Before Noah: Discover the Ancient Flood Myths That Came Before the Bible

in History, Religion | April 15th, 2025

The Lord said to Noah, there’s going to be a floody, floody; then to get those children out of the muddy, muddy; then to build him an arky, arky. This much we heard while toasting marshmallows around the campfire, at least if we grew up in a certain modern Protestant tradition. As adults, we may or may not believe that there ever lived a man called Noah who built an ark to save all the world’s innocent animal species from a sin-cleansing flood. But unless we’ve taken a deep dive into ancient history, we probably don’t know that this especially famous Bible story wasn’t the first of its particular subgenre. As explained in the Hochelaga video above, there are even older global-deluge tales to be reckoned with.

In fact, one such myth appears in the oldest known work of literature in human history, the Epic of Gilgamesh. “In it, the god Ea learns of this divine flood, and secretly warns the humans about this coming disaster,” says Hochelaga creator Tommie Trelawny. Thus informed, the king Utnapishtim builds a giant coracle, a kind of circular boat “used to navigate the rivers of Mesopotamia for centuries.”

Like Noah, Utnapishtim brings his family and a host of animals aboard, and after riding out the worst of the storm, finds that his craft has come to rest on a mountaintop. Also like Noah, he then sends birds out to find dry land. But ultimately, “the story takes a strange turn: instead of being pleased, the gods are angry,” though Ea does step in to take responsibility and make sure that Utnapishtim is rewarded.

There are other versions with other gods, floods, and ark-builders as well. In the Religion for Breakfast video just above, religious studies scholar Andrew Mark Henry compares the Biblical story of Noah and the Utnapishtim episode of the Epic of Gilgamesh with the “Sumerian flood story” from the second millennium BC and the two-centuries-older “Atrahasis epic.” All of these versions have a good deal in common, not least the executive decision by an exasperated higher being (or beings) to wipe out almost entirely the humanity they themselves created. Ironically, we moderns are likely to have first encountered this tale of godly wrath and subsequent mass destruction in lighthearted, even cheerful presentations. Whether ancient Sumerians also sang about it in youth groups, no clay tablet has yet revealed.

Literary Critic Northrop Frye Teaches “The Bible and English Literature”: All 25 Lectures Free Online

A Map of All the Countries Mentioned in the Bible: What The Countries Were Called Then, and Now

Isaac Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: A Witty, Erudite Atheist’s Guide to the World’s Most Famous Book

Did the Tower of Babel Actually Exist?: A Look at the Archaeological Evidence

The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Oldest-Known Work of Literature in World History

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

William Faulkner’s Review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

in Literature | April 15th, 2025

Images via Wikimedia Commons

In the mid-20th century, the two big dogs in the American literary scene were William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Both were internationally revered, both were masters of the novel and the short story, and both won Nobel Prizes.

Born in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote allegorical histories of the South in a style that is both elliptical and challenging. His works were marked by uses of stream-of-consciousness and shifting points of view. He also favored titanically long sentences, holding the record for having, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest sentence in literature. Open your copy of Absalom! Absalom! to chapter 6 and you’ll find it. Hemingway, on the other hand, famously sandblasted the florid prose of Victorian-era books into short, terse, deceptively simple sentences. His stories were about rootless, damaged, cosmopolitan people in exotic locations like Paris or the Serengeti.

If you type in “Faulkner and Hemingway” in your favorite search engine, you’ll likely stumble upon this famous exchange — Faulkner on Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” Hemingway: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?” Zing! Faulkner reportedly didn’t mean for the line to come off as an insult but Hemingway took it as one. The incident ended up being the most acrimonious in the two authors’ complicated relationship.

While Faulkner and Hemingway never formally met, they were regular correspondents, and each was keenly aware of the other’s talents. And they were competitive with each other, especially Hemingway who was much more insecure than you might surmise from his macho persona. While Hemingway regularly called Faulkner “the best of us all,” marveling at his natural abilities, he also hammered Faulkner for resorting to tricks. As he wrote to Harvey Breit, the famed critic for The New York Times, “If you have to write the longest sentence in the world to give a book distinction, the next thing you should hire Bill Veek [sic] and use midgets.”

Faulkner, on his end, was no less competitive. He once told the New York Herald Tribune, “I think he’s the best we’ve got.” On the other hand, he bristled when an editor mentioned getting Hemingway to write the preface for The Portable Faulkner in 1946. “It seems to me in bad taste to ask him to write a preface to my stuff. It’s like asking one race horse in the middle of a race to broadcast a blurb on another horse in the same running field.”

When Breit asked Faulkner to write a review of Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea, he refused. Yet when a couple months later he got the same request from Washington and Lee University’s literary journal, Shenandoah, Faulkner relented, giving guarded praise to the novel in a one-paragraph-long review. You can read it below.

His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.

And you can also watch below a fascinating talk by scholar Joseph Fruscione about how Faulkner and Hemingway competed and influenced each other. He wrote the book, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

The Art of William Faulkner: Drawings from 1916–1925

Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934

‘Never Be Afraid’: William Faulkner’s Speech to His Daughter’s Graduating Class in 1951

5 Wonderfully Long Literary Sentences by Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald & Other Masters of the Run-On

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William Faulkner Outlines on His Office Wall the Plot of His Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel, A Fable (1954)

Rare 1952 Film: William Faulkner on His Native Soil in Oxford, Mississippi

Jonathan Crow is a writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications.

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What the World Will Look Like in 250 Million Years: Mapping the Distant Future

in Science | April 14th, 2025

Most of us now accept the idea that all of Earth’s continents were once part of a single, enormous land mass. That wasn’t the case in the early nineteen-tens, when the geologist Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) first publicized his theory of not just the supercontinent Pangea, but also of the phenomenon of continental drift that caused it to break apart into the series of shapes we all know from classroom world maps. But as humorously explained in the Map Men video above, Wegener didn’t live to see these ideas convince the world. Only after his death did other scientists figure out just how the geological churning under the planet’s surface caused the continents to drift apart in the first place.

With that information in place, Pangea no longer seemed like the crackpot notion it had when Wegener initially proposed it. Less widely appreciated, even today, is the determination that, as the Map Men put it, “Pangea, far from being the original supercontinent, was actually the eleventh to have formed in Earth’s history.”

It seems that the continents have been cyclically breaking apart and coming together again, with no sign of the process stopping. When, then, will we next find ourselves back on a supercontinent? Perhaps in 250 million years or so, according to the “Novopangea” model explained in the video, which has the Pacific ocean closing up as Australia slots into East Asia and North America while Antarctica drifts north.

Other models also exist, including Aurica, “where Eurasia splits in half, and both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans close up”; Pangea Ultima, “where Britain gets closer to America”; and Amasia, “where all the continents congregate around the North Pole, except Antarctica” (whose drift patterns make it seem like “the laziest continent”). At this kind of time scale, small changes in the basic assumptions can result in very different-looking supercontinents indeed, not that any of us will be around to see how the next Pangea really takes shape. Nevertheless, in this age when we can hardly go a week without encountering predictions of humanity’s imminent extinction, it’s refreshing to find a subject that lets us even consider looking a quarter-billion years down the road.

The Plate Tectonic Evolution of the Earth Over 500 Million Years: Animated Video Takes You from Pangea, to 250 Million Years in the Future

Map Showing Where Today’s Countries Would Be Located on Pangea

Pangea to the Present to the Future: Watch Animations Showing 500 Million Years of Continental Drift

Paper Animation Tells Curious Story of How a Meteorologist Theorized Pangaea & Continental Drift (1910)

A Web Site That Lets You Find Your Home Address on Pangea

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

What Was Smoot-Hawley, and Why Are We Doing It Again? Anyone? Anyone?

in Economics, History | April 14th, 2025

When most Americans think of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, they think of economic disaster. But if you ask why, most Americans may need a short refresher course. Below, you will find just that. Appearing on Derek Thompson’s Plain History podcast, Douglas Irwin (an economist and historian at Dartmouth) revisits the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on over 20,000 products imported into the United States. The law was passed despite warnings from executives like Henry Ford (who called the tariff act “an economic stupidity”) and a petition signed by 1,028 American economists, who argued that the tariffs would raise prices and spark a trade war, leaving the United States isolated. Their concerns were ultimately well-founded. The Smoot-Hawley Tariffs, supported by a Republican president and Congress, had the unintended consequence of deepening, not ending, the Great Depression.

Mark Twain allegedly said that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” But sometimes history may well repeat itself or come very close, and that’s where we seem to be headed right now. As in 1930, we have Republicans implementing new tariffs, but this time with the hope of re-engineering the world economy and bringing manufacturing back to America. Meanwhile, economists (even conservative ones) warn that these policies risk repeating the mistakes of Smoot-Hawley.

Below you can hear the assessment of the economic historian Niall Ferguson, who, in speaking with Bari Weiss, explains why Donald Trump’s tariffs will fail to re-industrialize America. The golden age of manufacturing in America is long gone, and it’s not coming back, partly thanks to automation. (Morgan Housel has more to say on that.) But even worse, the chaotic implementation of these policies risks triggering a trade war, “a major financial crisis comparable in scale to 2008,” or even a military crisis that an isolated America would be ill-equipped to handle. Speaking on Meet the Press this weekend, investor Ray Dalio ominously voiced very similar concerns, saying “something worse than recession” may be on the horizon.

For another take, you can hear Preet Bharara’s conversation with Justin Wolfers, where the Australian economist warns that Trump’s tariffs may have few benefits and mostly costs, some quite profound. By launching a trade war, America will trade less and find its global influence diminished, leaving a void that China can fill. Echoing Niall Ferguson, Wolfers also cautions that you can’t turn back the economic clock. He notes:

A hundred years ago, we had actually the same debate, but it was because we were moving from the land, from a predominantly agricultural economy, to a manufacturing-based economy. And we moved from an enormous share of the population working in agriculture to working in manufacturing, and that raised the American middle class.

There was a lot of nostalgia. Why aren’t we back on the land? And the subsequent stage of economic development is we move out of the factories, and we move and become engineers and computer scientists and software designers. And we’re in a much more cognitive economy.

And we are not inhaling black soot in our mines or in our factories during the day. And that’s the future of the American economy. And it’s one that speaks well to the skills that Americans have.

We’re the most educated workforce in the world. And so presumably the jobs of the future are those, the jobs we want are those that cater to the extreme productivity and education of American workers.

How have we reached the point where we’re running the same failed experiments again, all to reclaim an illusory bygone economic age? It’s a hard question to contemplate, but I ask that question again. Anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

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How Chinese Characters Work: The Evolution of a Three-Millennia-Old Writing System

in History, Language, Writing | April 11th, 2025

Contrary to somewhat popular belief, Chinese characters aren’t just little pictures. In fact, most of them aren’t pictures at all. The very oldest, whose evolution can be traced back to the “oracle bone” script of thirteenth century BC etched directly onto the remains of turtles and oxen, do bear traces of their pictograph ancestors. But most Chinese characters, or hanzi, are logographic, which means that each one represents a different morpheme, or distinct unit of language: a word, or a single part of a word that has no independent meaning. Nobody knows for sure how many hanzi exist, but nearly 100,000 have been documented so far.

Not that you need to learn all of them to attain literacy: for that, a mere 3,000 to 5,000 will do. While it’s technically possible to memorize that many characters by rote, you’d do better to begin by familiarizing yourself with their basic nature and structure — and in so doing, you’ll naturally learn more than a little about their long history.

The TED-Ed lesson at the top of the post provides a brief but illuminating overview of “how Chinese characters work,” using animation to show how ancient symbols for concrete things like a person, a tree, the sun, and water became versatile enough to be combined into representations of everything else — including abstract concepts.

In the Mandarin Blueprint video just above, host Luke Neale goes deeper into the structure of the hanzi in use today. Whether they be simplified versions of mainland China or the traditional ones of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, they’re for the most part constructed not out of whole cloth, he stresses, but from a set of existing components. That may make a prospective learner feel slightly less daunted, as may the fact that roughly 80 percent of Chinese characters are “semantic-phonetic compounds”: one component of the character provides a clue to its meaning, and another a clue to its pronunciation. (Not that it necessarily makes deciphering them an effortless task.)

In the distant past, hanzi were also the only means of recording other Asian languages, like Vietnamese and Korean. Still today, they remain central to the Japanese writing system, but like any other cultural form transplanted to Japan, they’ve hardly gone unaltered there: the NativLang video just above explains the transformation they’ve undergone over millennia of interaction with the Japanese language. It wasn’t so very long ago that, even in their homeland, hanzi were threatened with the prospect of being scrapped in the dubious name of modern efficiency. Now, with those aforementioned almost-100,000 characters incorporated into Unicode, making them usable throughout our 21st-century digital universe, it seems they’ll stick around — even longer, perhaps, than the Latin alphabet you’re reading right now.

Related content:

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The Improbable Invention of Chinese Typewriters & Computer Keyboards: Three Videos Tell the Techno-Cultural Story

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

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