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Vitruvian man, MMXXV, seeks camaraderie, romance

I can get a couple of issues behind on the NYRB, but this a good recent-ish one for your Friday reading:

Because the practice of architecture requires such a store of knowledge, Vitruvius maintains that it is much more than a craft that depends on purely manual skill: it is a lofty liberal art, a pursuit that engages all the human faculties of imagination and reason no less than grammar, rhetoric, or poetry. His career included inspecting catapults for Julius Caesar and building a basilica at Colonia Julia Fanestris (modern-day Fano, on the Adriatic coast) with some radical innovations, such as gigantic two-story interior columns, that belie his popular reputation as a hidebound conservative. A man of strong, sometimes unpredictable opinions who thanks his parents in the preface to Book VI for having given him a first-rate Roman education, Vitruvius was bilingual in Greek and Latin and well read in Greek and Latin poetry, Cicero’s prose, Greek architectural pamphlets, and recent developments in natural philosophy and technology.

His proposed course of study for young architects continues Cicero’s recent efforts to create a system of Roman learning comparable to that of the Greek-speaking world (a world that notably included Alexandria as well as the eastern Mediterranean), and it participates fully in the contemporary effort, fostered by the emperor Augustus, to transform Rome into a capital of distinctively Latin culture. His ambitiously comprehensive treatise is almost certainly the first of its kind for the ancient Greco-Roman world, recasting architecture not only as a liberal art but also as a natural means to extend the reach of Rome’s expanding empire. Clear and precise, his remarks on education show how the Romans of the early Augustan era tried to define their place in a rapidly changing world—both native Romans and Romans newly absorbed into the Res Publica Romana, for Roman education followed swiftly on the legions to prepare young people in conquered territories for participation in the imperial state.

It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese.

Do not study marketing, kids.

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Wind and sun, things of that nature

A Russian nesting doll of spite and stupid.

This is straight up insane, which checks a box within-a-box within-a-box for the lobotomized party. So they’ll probably do it.

The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight on Friday, stunned observers.

“This is how you kill an industry,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors. “And at a time when electricity prices and demand are soaring.”

The bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027. Doing so, many companies say, could derail hundreds of projects under development and could jeopardize billions of dollars in manufacturing facilities that had been planned around the country with the subsidies in mind.

Those tax credits were at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022 in an attempt to nudge the country away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is driving climate change. President Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead promoted fossil fuels and demanded that Republicans in Congress unwind the law.

But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies.

That’s from NYT on Sunday, and there are literally no benefits from doing this.

Not unrelated to the way ‘policymakers’ are making pawns of Chinese college students studying and doing research in the US. Always running behind will always do the wrong things. Ahead is right there. In front of you.

 

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Don’t Look Away, Dixieland

Stone Mountain is a geological wonder that carries a social significance as profound as its granite heart.

Untold numbers of American soldiers have trained at bases named for treasonous leaders. A legion of Nathan Bedford Forrests gaze across the South from squares, courthouses and public parks, perhaps puzzled by the recent stirrings and troubled by the rumble of heavy machinery. Discussions on re-naming buildings and removing commemorative statues that celebrate heroes of the Confederacy achieved new momentum as America re-inspected its past in light of its present, for a moment at least. The stirrings introduced great unease in many citizens, whatever their physical distance to the South. Still, a logical elegance about re-evaluating our symbols, their connection to identity, and the poison they present to our democracy should be able to guide us toward better role models and more equitable public allegory.

But the options for what to do about the massive carving into the eastern face of Stone Mountain celebrating that past sparks a different kind of negotiation. The question elicits a category error, a kind of nostalgia for a monument that would better serve us as the marker for a tomb, the final resting place for a reign of terror.

The vast crimes we perpetrated on our own people still loom large today – unequal schools, segregated neighborhoods, glass ceilings as far as the eye can see. While calls for diversity harkened the great benefits of inclusion, the remnants of Jim Crow and abandoned commitments to Reconstruction still haunt our communities. The many millions living under the duress of poverty somehow continue to threaten those struggling within their well-tended fear of others. We cling to prejudices – and violence – and succeed in continuing to avoid reckoning with the facts. Violence privileges as much as it destroys.

Impossible to relocate to a museum with other relics, we could blast Lee, Jackson, Davis and their mounts off their perch, replacing them with and/or even adding more worthy images to the composition. But we should not – and hardly only because of the anachronism it would create by adding a kitsch element to what has such a serious and devastating effects we also misunderstand.

The carving at Stone Mountain should remain permanently ensconced as exactly what it is: a dark guarantee of second-class citizenship for the vast majority of the descendants of Black slaves, 12 generations at Emancipation. That it could succeed only in anchoring the entire country to the fulfillment of false prophets from time immemorial is its own testament.

Irreverence might call this an opportunity, one instance where we might not politely look away, as the tune went, from who we are and how we arrived here. The monument represents a fraught reality in a difficult time that stretches across an open wound. A monument to a defiantly un-Reconstructed South, the three horsemen have ridden roughshod into our moment as a deliberate expression of what brought us exactly to here: a genteel façade that required decades of brutal viciousness to maintain. Overwhelming wealth mixed ever so precisely with extraordinary poverty presents as just one result of a systematic effort to elevate some and exclude others. But the power of the “Lost Cause” mythology that clouded the real outcome of the peace has kept the American Civil War alive in the imaginations of too many. Manifested through police violence, white supremacist ideology does a lot more than echo today.

When plans were initially finalized for a commemorative sculpture at Stone Mountain, there was no coincidence about the timing. In 1915, the KKK announced its modern rebirth by burning a cross on the mountaintop. Admittedly, it was not even an original gesture but one borrowed from the film, “Birth of a Nation.” Myth melting into reality was and remains one of the constant themes of celebrating the “Lost Cause.” And yet the implications of these social expressions remain as tangible as Stone Mountain itself.

After financial problems caused stops and starts on a Stone Mountain monument, an unfinished version sat untouched until the 1960’s. The project was reprised under state sanction when segregationist governor Marvin Griffin had Georgia purchase the mountain and fundraising began in earnest.

Why complete the monument then? Was the state government trying to make something clear? Is it possible to attend a laser light show at Stone Mountain Park and understand what it was? Deliberate and extensive efforts backed by unmistakable intentions on the part of the state and local governments sought to maintain segregation despite Supreme Court decisions about schools, despite federal laws and programs. It is folly to try and think of any other reason why the monument was completed then or why it should be destroyed now. The white majority decided and made itself clear with a statement visible for miles and in fact years, writ across inadequate housing projects and failing schools from the coast across the Piedmont.

White segregationists used the mountain to signal that they would turn the terror of white supremacist violence into a kitchen sink of socially acceptable but no less violent restrictions, from real estate redlining to voting barriers to gerrymandered districts, to assure the continued dominance of the white supremacist state.

The gargantuan efforts required to skirt the spirit of new laws, to soften your language but not your heart, merited a gargantuan symbol. And we can see the symbol and fruits of those efforts through today, from every vantage point. People mired in poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth; Georgia itself with the highest rates of felony convictions in the nation; voters still responding to dog whistles and scare tactics that hurt people, devastating families and local economies, attacking the very notion of a national commonwealth.

Let the carving stay and let it remind us that we still have work to do, that there will always be work to do while we have to convince ourselves that there is no they.

Stone Mountain should remain a permanent marker to who we are, to the deliberate cruelty and injustice that has so marred our society until the descendants of white supremacists rise up and plead for its removal. And then we should still say no. We need something to remind us: never again.

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Irrational gadgeteering

For reasons too dumb to reveal here, soi-disant AI has been coming up in my proximity. Yes, sure, we’re all hearing about it and maybe you are even using it – whatever you think that means. And yet when feeding [whatever it is] into an computer model to get some version of [wii] back is proffered as an acceptable work solution, it opens up to a much broader question: What is even work?

If parts or all of what you think you do can be so ‘taskicized’, what ever was work to begin with – to you?

And here I’ll yield the floor to Theodor Adorno:

Labor-saving devices … are invested with a halo of their own. This may be indicative of a fixation to a phase of adolescent activities in which people try to adapt themselves to modern technology by making it, as it were, their own cause… It seems that the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel they are the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them. The more they are gradually being transformed into things, the more they invest things with a human aura. At the same time, the libidinization of gadgets is indirectly narcissistic in as much as it feeds on the ego’s control of nature: gadgets provide the subject with some memories of early feelings of omnipotence.

From the essay Work and Pleasure in THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2015–17, oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sediment of an electrolysis on canvas, 110¼ × 149⅝ × 3⅝ inches.

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When will you know

Google anything and you’ll see what they’re up to, with the “AI” results pushed up top. Scare quotes for reasons but really, the Google is doing a weird thing to the internet by this strategy – and they know they’re doing it.

But when will people realize it? When will they know?

Because the appearance of “AI” in expected places has already become… expected and rather commonplace. And this is what they at the Google understand well, that humans get used to stuff. However, now, you must look past these top results to find actual websites, with real information from people trying to provide it. People trying to find you – or have you find them. That’s one reason they have a site. I know, it sounds trite.

But those sites are being buried beneath these “AI” results. How concerned should you be? Should you care?

So, context: Open AI has unleashed all these free products training models like ChatGPT and several iterations you can pay for, in order to train us to use and become dependent on their products. But they need to make money. Lots of money and fast.

So we can know that, should we so choose. It’s expensive to run these things – both in financial and environmental costs, and the information they provide becomes degraded rather quickly – a thing humans still readily recognize [they call that foreshadowing in the biz].

These tech companies realize all of this, plus the fact that the media does all of their PR for free. And yet they are still burning through cash, mostly, it seems, on the vibes that people aren’t noticing the sixth finger or the clunky syntax, will grudgingly embrace accept most of it with a kind of dull fascination.

Are you overwhelmed? Is it all so little that it seems too much? What if there was a way to sharpen your fascination instead?

 

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Word games

As puzzling as it seems [to me], maybe this is what the Times is ultimately after – a smash up of word games and news where terms are need to be replaced to convey meaning?

Example 1.  “While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics,” Moody’s Ratings in a statement as it downgraded the US thanks to government debt that’s approaching  $37 trillion. Hmm. Fiscal responsibility, but whose? A different kind of non-puzzle, but Points to Ponder. Keep playing to access the new clarity level.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Example 2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will scale back on the number of recreational sites at Lake Lanier that will be temporarily closed due to the USACE’s current staffing levels.

Who are these so-called engineers, and to whom do they answer? Current staffing levels has to be a clue. Who does what and for why bleeds into a little bit of everything and it might take some blurred vision to see the outlines of causes and effects of such downgrades and closures. So it’s a good thing you can’t afford those new glasses, see?

And isn’t this fun already?

 

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Prosperity Gospel Vamp

As mentioned many times, including public fora, sustainability is a vanishingly low bar. Just transfer the concept to say, friendship, and try to be whelmed at all.

Accordingly, this discussion about ‘everything-bagel-liberalism’ as a stymie to de-carbonization and other incursions into societal progress looks a bit pekid when corporate interests and provincial politicians are allowed the posture of disinterested bystanders:

Green-energy developers will tell you that among the biggest obstacles to new solar or wind projects online are 1) intransigence by gas-dominated utilities that make it practically impossible for renewable developments — which are less profitable for utilities than fossil-fuel infrastructure — to interconnect with the grid, and 2) campaigns by oil-and-gas front groups that work to gin up opposition to clean energy with deceptive claims like “wind turbines kill whales” and “solar panels cause cancer.”

We could pass all the federal permitting reforms Klein and Thompson could dream of, but if powerful fossil-fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we’ll never achieve the clean energy build-out we desperately need.

Similarly, when it comes to the scarcity of affordable housing, Abundance primarily blames zoning laws for constraining supply and driving up prices.

So much of the discourse on sustainable solutions reaches for just-in-time incrementalism that never can be, and only serve to preserve the status quo when radical change is required. Just like prosperity preachers, Abundance liberals need all of the attention for which they clamor. The best of among of them, like those cited here, even move us to consider why their arguments achieve such lift-off velocity in major media. Kudos – it’s a gift. Look askance and ponder.

 

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Phosphorus edition

The Devil’s Element is a tale of folly, waste, greed, and excess, which Egan unspools with a light touch and a brisk pace. He opens the book with a police foot chase; the unfortunate suspect is eventually fished out of an algae-choked canal and hospitalized in Cape Coral, Florida. In its final pages he describes a pilot project to capture phosphorus from the pee of residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, and its use of an educational video featuring a talking drop of urine named Uri Nation. Along the way we meet Hennig Brand, an alchemist who first succeeded in isolating pure phosphorus from urine in 1669 while searching for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead to gold. Others quickly discovered that while the waxy, glowing stuff did not produce gold, it was poisonous, extremely unstable as a solid at room temperature, and prone to exploding. These properties earned it the moniker “the Devil’s element,” which in turn presaged its other modern application as an ingredient in some of the most horrendous weapons that humans use on one another. (Egan writes about a German beachcomber whose leg began to melt and char after a small orange rock he had collected exploded in his pants—a pebble-size legacy of the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 washed up on a Baltic shore.)

At the outset of the Industrial Revolution many nation-states figured out that they couldn’t feed their fast-growing populations without finding a lot more phosphorus than was available from manure and crop residues and naturally occurring in soils. Egan gives a grim global tour of the various predatory lengths to which imperial powers and modern multinational firms have gone to secure phosphorus. Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living. In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American farmers became reliant on imports of guano (bird poop) strip-mined from Peruvian islands by indentured Chinese laborers. When those reserves were exhausted in the 1890s, they turned elsewhere. Thus began the century-long ordeal of the Banaba Islanders, displaced from their Pacific homeland by the voracious English-owned, Australia-based Pacific Phosphate Company. After a company agent discovered vast reserves of phosphorus-laden rock on Banaba one day in 1900, the firm’s miners carved up the island chunk by chunk. The rocks were carried by conveyor belt to ships that ferried them onward to fertilize fields around the world. Banaba’s destruction helped Australia and New Zealand boost the productivity of their soils and become wealthy agricultural exporters. After the late 1970s Banaba’s phosphate reserves were largely depleted—by that point, mining firms had stripped 90 percent of the island’s land surface and removed 22 million tons of material. In the process, they also ruined many of the sacred caves where the islanders had collected water to survive periods of drought.

From Planet Ooze by Jonathan Mingle in the April 10, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books

As always, support and invest in physical media. Subscribe to print journalism, buy books and records, experience the thrill.

Image: Decades of phosphate mining has left the surface of Banaba Island a moonscape of coral pinnacles. Photo by Janice Cantieri. National Geographic

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

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The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.