One my betes noires has been in the news lately. Jonathan Haidt has been annoying me since at least 2012, when I was critical of his bothsidesism on the culture wars.

At the time, he was a concern troll, posing as a liberal worried about other liberals who were, he claimed, misunderstanding Republicans. Whereas liberals thought of Republicans as bigots and misogynists, concerned with preserving their own position in racial and gender hierarchies, Haidt explained that they actually had their own set of values, based on order, purity, honour and loyalty. The wheels started falling off that one when Donald Trump, the antithesis of all of these things, came along and received the unqualified support of the supposed believers in purity.

Haidt responded by reinventing himself a free speech advocate, concerned about cancel culture and the coddling of young minds. He hung out on the “Intellectual Dark Web” with Bari Weiss and Stephen Pinker. Now that Weiss is busy suppressing reporting of Trump’s crimes, the IDW appears to have shut up shop.

?Haidt’s next reinvention was an almost complete backflip. Despite having no relevant research background (as discussed his previous focus was on adult voters, followed by a shift to scolding college students) he suddenly became an authority on the effects of smartphone use on teenagers. His concerns about freedom of speech suddenly went out the window, replaced by a fear that the speech teens encountered on their phones was making them depressed as miserable.

Haidt’s work writings on this topic inspired the Australian government to pass legislation aimed at banning access to social media platforms for people under 16. It’s been mostly ineffective, but for the minority of kids who have left social media, a notable impact has been reduced access to news.

Possibly because recognition of this failure is spreading, Haidt has gone back to the “coddling” theme in a commencement address at NYU, for which he was roundly booed. Haidt appears not to have noticed that, far from protecting students from views that might upset them, NYU is busy suppressing speech by students that offends the administrators and of course the Trump Administration.

The kind of concerned punditry of which Haidt is an exponent never goes out of style, even if the topics of concern change from time to time. Given his ability to leap from one topic to the next with a fine disregard for consistency, I expect he will be around to annoy me for a long time to come.

Mostly I leave Sunday photography to our colleague, the estimable Chris Bertram. Still, this Sunday I was walking the dog in the hills above my town. (“My town” being a modest community of a couple of thousand people in the rolling countryside of northern Bavaria.)


[copyright me, yesterday]

And by the side of a grassy meadow, I stopped to photograph this pretty little yellow flower:

[they look so innocent]

A moment with the app revealed that this was Ranuncula bulbus, the Bulbous Buttercup.  There are a bunch of species in the genus Ranuncula, which is another way of saying there are a lot of different kinds of buttercup.  That’s because buttercups appear to be a recent evolutionary radiation, and a pretty successful one.

But when I did a quick search on these little guys?  I found they used to have another name.  The Bulbous Buttercup was once known as Saint Anthony’s Turnip.

Saint… what?
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Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief – by students and faculty alike – when a text has been submitted before the deadline. Think of all the praise for writers and texts that goes around in our fields (“prolific,” “rigorous,” “accessible,” …). Think of the proud social media posts with a pile of books fresh off the press (I’ve been guilty of that myself).

Generative AI, for all its problems, has one virtue: it forces us to rethink that assumption. The ease with which AI can spit out seemingly coherent text, or help rewrite a few convoluted sentences into elegant prose, has been perceived by some academics as a threat to the very meaning of our professional existence. “I feel like one of those coal miners must have felt when it was already clear that the mines would be closed soon,” a colleague recently said to me.

I want to resist this idea – maybe out of a desperate desire to cling to my professional identity, but with what I have come to think of as an important distinction: texts as products, or texts as means to something very different.

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Last week Australia’s central bank (Reserve Bank of Australia, RBA) raised interest rates. Again.

Political economists have been talking for decades about the RBA’s tendency to redistribute wealth from the bottom upwards. But now it seems most people understand that the latest interest rate rises requires ordinary people to hand over more of their cash to their bank, to get it out of circulation and bring down inflation.

Asking whether superannuation or taxes could also be used for the purpose of reducing interest rates, the ABC pointed out that interest rates were not always the way inflation was managed. They published an article asking ‘Would you rather hand over an extra $300 a month to your bank or the federal government?’ – suggesting that this might even be an option.

Rightly, the ABC points to the place of government in setting up this structure. But history shows that for all that government is nominally in charge. Well. You might have noticed that banks are fairly powerful. Government v bank doesn’t always mean the government wins…as we will see.

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That’s the actual name of the paper. Isn’t that great?

Here’s a prologue: a post I wrote a while back about the Portuguese Man-o’-War.  (It’s kind of long — I was new to CT back then, and still figuring stuff out). 

To summarize: the Portuguese Man-o’-War is a large jellyfish-type creature.  And when I say “large”, I mean they can grow as big as a large cat, with stinging tentacles dangling for many meters beneath and around them.  They’re carnivores, feeding on fish and small invertebrates.  Their stings paralyze prey, which is then drawn upward into the main body, digested, and eaten.  (In that order.)   

In the post I mention that they have a parasitic fish that afflicts them, but I don’t talk about any of their other relationships.  So now I’m going to talk about an organism that interacts with the Man-o’-War in a different way:  a predator. 

Specifically Glaucus Atlanticus, the Blue Dragon Sea Slug.


[yes, they really look like this.]

Also known as the Sea Swallow, or the Blue Angel, or… man, just look at that.  Isn’t that just ridiculously gorgeous? 

Well, these guys(1) look this way for reasons.  Let’s discuss. [click to continue…]

Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University (SMU); second the report by the Harvard Crimson that “Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity.’” (Wasn’t that what the visiting fellows program at the Kennedy school was for?)

First, Peterson’s comments (quoted at the top of this post) resonated with me. Of course, administrators are also people with mortgages, have parents with expensive care needs, and have kids with expensive tuition. American political economy with its go-fund-mes for urgent medical care and (say) funeral costs makes individual, principled stances incredibly fraught affairs in a job-market that is clearly imploding for mid-career academics, and that most certainly leaves fewer alternative opportunities than (the usually more lucrative options) former prosecutors have. Some of the administrators at Texas A&M may well have had tenure, and they do deserve special opprobrium for their cowardice.

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I said a while back that nobody’s going to Mars any time soon. Which is true. But that doesn’t mean Mars isn’t interesting! Mars is very interesting.


So today’s paper is about Mars.  Okay, it’s about a moon of Mars. 

TLDR: one of Mars’ moons may periodically tear itself apart, turn into a system of rings around the planet, and then put itself back together.

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