Culture, Regulation, and Politics
At Human Progress, Marian Tupy offers an excellent rebuttal to “space billionaires bad!” takes, showing that they proceed from misconceptions about human nature, society, and progress. The good news:
Competition and additional supply will reduce the price of space travel until, one day, it will come within reach of NBC columnists. That’s how a mobile phone went from the “greedy” hands of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 movie Wall Street into the pockets of Kenyan farm workers and Bangladeshi fishermen.
The bad:
Since talent is unequally and arbitrarily distributed, free enterprise and its resulting inequality of outcome are unpalatable to the equalitarian Left. Yet progress depends on the flourishing of the talented. That means that inequality is truly the midwife of progress. And that’s why progressives hate progress.
In Reason, Jonathan Rauch explains how the Enlightenment democratized politics, economics, and the search for truth:
Because all people have eyes and ears and minds, and because we must check and consult with each other to find truth, the many, not just the few, are entitled to assert their own beliefs and contest others'.
The BBC’s Jonathan Josephs reports on Beyond Meat’s lobbying for a tax on actual meat. Their product may be new, but the business model of getting the government to mess with your competitors must have been around since back when our ancestors ate mammoths.
Science
On Advisory Opinions, David French and Sarah Isgur interview Avi Loeb about the mysterious extra-solar object Oumuamua, aliens, and science more generally. Professor Loeb sounds almost like the caricature of a scientist ― brilliant, curious, argumentative, and rather on the misanthropic side.
For the BBC, Alessia Franco and David Robson write about Europe’s largest volcano―hidden deep under the surface of the Mediterranean, but all the more dangerous because of it.
History
On New Books in History, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen discuss the book trade of 17th-century Netherlands. Surprisingly intereting!
For the BBC, Keith Drew tells the story of the sinking of several English warships in 1707 and of the innovations prompted first by this disaster, and then by the discovery of the wreck―first, the development of chronometers, and then legislation to protect historic shipwrecks.
Language
On the relaunched Lexicon Valley, John McWhorter discusses spelling bees―why only English-speaking countries have them, why they’re called bees in the first place, and why we can’t have nice things such as sensible spellings.
Law
The BBC reports about the trial in Germany an 84-year old man “who stored a World War Two tank, anti-aircraft gun and torpedo in his basement”. He must have had a pretty big basement for the Panther to have fit in there!
In The Guardian, Nino Bucci reports on an Australian Family Court case that reads like an instruction to litigants, lawyers, and perhaps the judge, in how not to behave themselves. Among the highlights, a motion for the judge’s
recusal related to the perceived unfairness of her admonishing [a party] for eating the banana when she had eaten a chocolate and drank from a mug during the same virtual hearing.
Media
The BBC reports about a South Korean TV channel’s choices of visuals and captions to enlighten its audience about the countries participating in the Olympics: pizza for Italy, presidential assassination for Haiti, Dracula himself for Romania, and other assorted clichés.
Music
Saint-Saens’ “Swan” is not a piece I’d have expected to hear in a jazz version, and yet that’s what Hacke Björksten, Ulf Johansson Were, and Hans Backenroth do. In fact, the whole album of which it is part, Top Three, is immensely fun.