[{"id":55524,"date":"2026-08-11T20:56:38","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55524"},"modified":"2026-08-11T20:56:38","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T20:56:38","slug":"my-comprehensive-plan-for-us-strategy-in-the-middle-east","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/11\/my-comprehensive-plan-for-us-strategy-in-the-middle-east\/","title":{"rendered":"My comprehensive plan for US strategy in the Middle East&#8230; *"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026 is set out over the fold. I\u2019m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it\u2019s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fourth repost since <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2011\/09\/20\/my-comprehensive-plan-for-us-policy-on-the-middle-east\/\">2011<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026 is set out over the fold. I\u2019m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it\u2019s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far. Fourth repost since 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55524"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55525,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55524\/revisions\/55525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55520,"date":"2026-08-11T07:13:03","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T07:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55520"},"modified":"2026-08-11T07:16:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T07:16:12","slug":"the-odyssey-and-the-bronze-age-collapse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/11\/the-odyssey-and-the-bronze-age-collapse\/","title":{"rendered":"The Odyssey and the Bronze Age Collapse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I haven\u2019t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod\u2019s <em>Intrusion<\/em> where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious \u201ccity burners\u201d responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age. Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer\u2019s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.<\/p>\n<p>Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn\u2019t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that \u201cwe are the Sea People\u201d and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse.<\/p>\n<p>More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour, were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause.<\/p>\n<p>The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).<\/p>\n<p>All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn\u2019t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the <em>Iliad<\/em> and <em>Odyssey<\/em>) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment.<\/p>\n<p>Add in an absurd misreading of Thucydides\u2019 Melian dialogue, and you have the MAGA theory of history.<\/p>\n<p>fn1. I have now, but I wrote this first and saw no need to change it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Hegsethian heroes destroyed themselves and their entire civilisation I haven\u2019t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod\u2019s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55520"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55528,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55520\/revisions\/55528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55481,"date":"2026-08-11T04:43:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T04:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55481"},"modified":"2026-08-11T04:43:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-11T04:43:39","slug":"fight-progressivism-and-performative-politics-michigan-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/11\/fight-progressivism-and-performative-politics-michigan-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Fight,&#8221; Progressivism, and Performative Politics &#8212; Michigan Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday&#8217;s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/projects\/elections-2026\/michigan-primary-results-us-senate\/\">Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties<\/a>, where the most Democratic votes will be in the general election. Without getting blacks in Detroit on board, he is toast. And a defeat in the general for the candidate who campaigned on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel would also support the argument of the establishment wing of the party, that progressive issues are too far left to win in Michigan, which features an almost exact 50-50 split between the Democrats and the GOP.<\/p>\n<p>Yet on any issue other than Israel that would actually come up for a Senate vote, El-Sayed and Stevens would not vote much differently. Although El-Sayed throws off DSA vibes, he is not a member and calls himself a capitalist. I suspect that many of El-Sayed&#8217;s votes came from the considerable segment of Democrats who are upset with their party because it lacks &#8220;fight,&#8221; and are treating candidates who take what are seen as very progressive stances in an aggressive tone of voice as a proxy for being tough fighters. But that conflation is a serious mistake. It confuses a certain style of performative politics with having a real grasp of how to change things so that public policies that help ordinary people can be enacted.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>El-Sayed is not really my target here, since he is a very smart and talented politician who will gladly vote for many policies short of Medicare for All that will extend health care coverage to more people and make it affordable. (Which is necessary, because Medicare for All has no chance of making it to the Senate floor, given that it would require a huge tax increase.) He is a pragmatic, goal-oriented politician, and knows how to compromise and <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/acyn.bsky.social\/post\/3mscravxvy426\">build unity<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I want to contrast El-Sayed with the progressive winner of Ann Arbor&#8217;s Democratic mayoral primary, Yousef Rabhi, a DSA member who decisively beat establishment Democrat Christopher Taylor. The leading issue here is affordable housing. Taylor has been mayor for 12 years, energetically implementing an abundance agenda. Affordable housing units have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.michiganpublic.org\/politics-government\/2026-08-05\/democratic-socialist-yousef-rabhi-defeats-long-time-ann-arbor-mayor-chris-taylor\">tripled<\/a>, rents were <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realpage.com\/analytics\/ann-arbor-rent-cuts\/\">down 6% in 2025<\/a>, they <a href=\"https:\/\/www.apartmentlist.com\/rent-report\/mi\/ann-arbor\">continue to drop<\/a>, and lots of housing, including workforce housing, is still under construction or in planning. Like many deep-blue locations, Ann Arbor has a long way to go, especially given a huge post-pandemic surge of homelessness. But it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/concentratemedia.com\/ann-arbor-millage-yields-big-results-in-affordable-housing-development\/\">building many units for the homeless, too<\/a>, along with support services.<\/p>\n<p>So what does Rabhi say about this? Check out <a href=\"https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v=EWwaH1j5W30&amp;ra=m\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" data-saferedirecturl=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/url?q=https:\/\/m.youtube.com\/watch?v%3DEWwaH1j5W30%26ra%3Dm&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1786466563394000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3vthwQs6Q6sjUZYJi9xskG\">his victory speech<\/a>. His campaign against Taylor objected to the fact that private developers are building a lot of the housing. That, apparently, makes Taylor a stooge of corporate overlords because the Man is making profits, which are coming back to him in the form of vast &#8220;dark money&#8221; donations. With Rabhi&#8217;s victory, &#8220;the people&#8221; have finally taken power!<\/p>\n<p>To what end? Rabhi&#8217;s housing agenda has two planks. First, indefinitely pause Taylor&#8217;s plan to upzone single-family home neighborhoods so triple deckers will be built. In other words, NIMBY. It&#8217;s keeping renters out of homeowners&#8217; neighborhoods. And not yuppie renters either. Yuppies will rent apartments in the fancy downtown towers. Triple deckers are workforce housing. Stopping them is not a progressive policy. It&#8217;s popular among those Ann Arborites who worry about &#8220;changing the character of the neighborhood.&#8221; There is &#8220;fight&#8221; on the right, too. (In an open-primary state, some Republicans will vote in the Democratic primary because the Democratic nominee for Ann Arbor mayor and practically every other city post is assured of victory in the general.) Yet I also know some people who consider themselves progressive and are so on many issues, but support Rabhi on housing.<\/p>\n<p>Rabhi&#8217;s second housing plank is public housing, so the Man can&#8217;t make profits from it. There is a legitimate role for public housing. But with taxes already high in Ann Arbor, this is can only meet a small fraction of housing needs. In addition, insiders on housing policy in Ann Arbor <a href=\"https:\/\/annarboraf.com\/episode-84-primary-election-2026-1-show-your-work\/\">report<\/a> that Rabhi doesn&#8217;t know what he&#8217;s talking about. There was a meeting where he literally screamed at some local housing policy experts who&#8217;ve been working on affordable housing for years, because they pointed out flaws in his idea for public housing on a particular city-owned lot (this had already been studied in depth and deemed infeasible for the location). It didn&#8217;t help that the experts were women. Mansplaining isn&#8217;t progressive, either.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m worried that Rabhi is signaling &#8220;fight&#8221; through a very performative style of intraparty us vs. them politics that (a) paints a progressive veneer over unprogressive, even reactionary policy, (b) is dogmatic rather than informed and detail-oriented, and (c) tries to shut up actual progressives who know stuff.\u00a0 If this is what DSA is up to, watch out.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Progressives scored a win over establishment Democrats in the Michigan primary election for Senator on Tuesday&#8217;s election. Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens by 1 point, despite many polls predicting that he would win by 7 or more. And Stevens beat him soundly in Wayne (Detroit), Oakland, and Macomb counties, where the most Democratic votes will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55481"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55518,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55481\/revisions\/55518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55465,"date":"2026-08-09T15:15:46","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T15:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55465"},"modified":"2026-09-12T21:41:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T21:41:18","slug":"john-crowley-has-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/09\/john-crowley-has-died\/","title":{"rendered":"John Crowley has died"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.pinimg.com\/474x\/46\/6e\/ff\/466eff092197fd38955ff0cf48c3b82c.jpg\" alt=\"27 Seriously Underrated Books Every Book Lover Should Read\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don\u2019t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read at all in the space where science fiction and fantasy meet literature, you\u2019ll almost certainly have read someone who knew his books, and very likely loved them. Susanna Clarke said in her long ago <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/category\/susanna-clarke-seminar\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">Crooked Timber seminar<\/a> that she too had read <em>Little, Big<\/em>, and I think that it shows. Her most recent book, <em>Piranesi<\/em>, draws on Borges\u2019 Library of Babel, but I suspect that it was influenced too by the memory palaces that Crowley built on foundations laid by Dame Frances Yates.Ursula Le Guin described <em>Little, Big<\/em> as \u201ca book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.\u201d As James Hynes <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bostonreview.net\/articles\/james-hynes-genre-trouble\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">described <em>Little, Big<\/em><\/a> in the <em>Boston Review.<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>it is a long, gorgeously written, picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies. I\u2019ve read <em>Little, Big<\/em> four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it\u2013it is inconsistently in print). When \u201cYou\u2019ll love this\u201d isn\u2019t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I\u2019m claiming here) that <em>Little, Big<\/em> is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as <em>One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em> and Nabokov\u2019s <em>Ada<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Me too, on the tears, the giveaways, and the importance. Every time I see a copy anywhere, I buy it, later to press upon some unsuspecting person who seems a likely prospect. I could keep going. Kim Stanley Robinson admires Crowley\u2019s non-f\/sf book about Roosevelt\u2019s dream of industrial America, <em>Four Freedoms<\/em>. Francis Spufford\u2019s <em>Nonesuch<\/em> owes nearly as much to Crowley as it does to Narnia, and at one point practically quotes the thesis of Crowley\u2019s extraordinary long story, \u201cGreat Work of Time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t mourn Crowley because of his influence on others, but because of how his writing shaped me. I mention his work often in my own writing, but have never talked about it in its own right. What Crowley wrote is too deeply and intimately entwined with my sense of my own self to to be able to view it from the outside.<\/p>\n<p>When I think about <em>Little, Big<\/em>, I remember being twenty-one, walking up the hill from work to my family\u2019s house in a small town in Tipperary in Ireland. I had bounced off the book the first time I read it, but for some reason felt pulled back to try again, and read and re-read it, falling in love with it as I have never fallen in love with a book before or since. Walking up the road on a temperate summer afternoon, thinking about the book and how it folded back into the world and itself, felt like a quiet explosion of joy in my chest.<\/p>\n<p>When I think about <em>Aegypt, <\/em>it is a memory from a year earlier, taking a long train ride from New York to Toronto to visit friends, and rounding a bend to see what was <a href=\"https:\/\/bannermancastle.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer nofollow\">obviously the original<\/a> for Butterman\u2019s castle. Decades later, when I read \u201cThis Is Our Town,\u201d collected in the small <em>Totalitopia<\/em> volume, it seemed to me a version of my own childhood, transplanted to a small American town; an ordinary Catholic boyhood, whose suffusions of the supernatural painstakingly captured with the apparatus of the fantasy genre.<\/p>\n<p>I got to know Crowley very slightly via email, as he wrote his final book, <em>Flint and Mirror<\/em>, which was set in Ireland before and during Hugh O\u2019Neill\u2019s rebellion. It was a bitter war. My and Maria\u2019s ancestor Turloch Breasalach was a contender against Hugh for the O\u2019Neillship. Our family tree records that out of twelve sons that Turloch Breasalach had alive at the beginning of the Elizabethan wars, only three were surviving at the end of it. Crowley wanted to use the book to talk about colonialism. The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world. John Dee, who appeared in <em>Flint and Mirror <\/em>as well as several other Crowley novels, was not just a wizard but an imperial propagandist.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s a single word in <em>Flint and Mirror <\/em>that I helped shape; a tiny return for the way in which Crowley\u2019s work shaped me. The wave that sinks a ship in the last part of the book is the third wave, because in Donegal folklore, the third wave was the fairy wave. I passed that on to Crowley from a story that my and Maria\u2019s grandaunt Maire MacNeill translated from Irish, \u201cThe Knife Against the Wave.\u201d Since Crowley loved fairytales as well as writing them, here is that one. I will miss his writing very much.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Knife Against the Wave<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Long ago a fine able handsome man named S\u00e9im\u00edn Rua was living at Baile M\u00f3r. He and his crew went out fishing with lines to C\u00fal Fast\u00f3 an Chladaigh Bh\u00e1in, a fishing ground in Donegal Bay.<\/p>\n<p>The day changed and the sea rose and it seemed they would be wrecked. S\u00e9im\u00edn was in the stern of the boat and saw a monstrous wave coming at them. He pulled off one of his shoes and threw it out against the danger. Before long he saw a second wave coming at them: he pulled off his other shoe and threw it out and the sea calmed a little but this was only a short respite. It was not long until the third wave of the sea rose at them and each one of the seven thought that this one surely would drown them. There was a big bait-knife stuck in behind the stern-seat. S\u00e9im\u00edn caught hold of it and threw it against the danger. No sooner had he done so than the sea fell and became as smooth as a board.<\/p>\n<p>They came home then drenched to the skin and when they reached the shore their families were there waiting for them for they thought by the way the day had changed and the sea had risen they would never see them again. No wonder there was great rejoicing for them. When they had divided whatever fish they had caught and moored the boat they all went home.<\/p>\n<p>Well and good. When darkness fell S\u00e9im\u00edn was sitting beside the fire, his soles to the warmth, all the neighbours in and he telling them about the hard day they had had. With that, there was a bang on the door. Someone went to open it and who was standing on the threshold but a rider on a white horse! The rider asked if S\u00e9im\u00edn was within and was told he was. The rider called from the door:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cS\u00e9im\u00edn,\u201d he said, \u201cI would be very thankful if you would come with me to such a place to pull out the knife you cast into my sister\u2019s heart today!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>S\u00e9im\u00edn recognized immediately what kind he was. \u201cI will not go out the door on such a journey unless you promise me that neither you nor any of your kind will ever harm me or anyone belonging to me.\u201d \u201cI promise you that,\u201d said the rider, \u201cand I promise you as well that you will be left back home safe and sound before daybreak tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>S\u00e9im\u00edn went with the rider and he neither heard nor saw anything until the white horse came to shore on the Red Strand at Mullaghmore in Connacht. The horse continued on to a crag at the top of the strand where a door opened into the hill and the horse entered. Before long they reached the finest castle S\u00e9im\u00edn had ever seen. The rider tethered the horse and led S\u00e9im\u00edn inside. They went upstairs and he was taken into a room where a girl was lying. The bait-knife he had thrown against the dangerous wave was stuck in under her heart and she was screaming with pain.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCome here,\u201d she said, \u201cand pull this knife out of my heart!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI will do that willingly,\u201d said S\u00e9im\u00edn, \u201cif you promise me you will never harm me or anyone belonging to me.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI promise you that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>S\u00e9im\u00edn drew out the knife and she was healed. \u201cWhy did you try to drown us today?\u201d asked S\u00e9im\u00edn. \u201cBecause I am in love with you and would like to have you for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAnd you were going to drown the whole crew because of me!\u201d \u201cI was,\u201d she said. \u201cI would do anything in the world to get you for myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWell, you won\u2019t get me,\u201d said S\u00e9im\u00edn. \u201cI must be on my way home.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The rider of the white horse was standing at the door waiting for S\u00e9im\u00edn who mounted behind him, and the horse never stopped until he was left at the door of his own house. The rider bade him farewell and S\u00e9im\u00edn saw him no more from that day until the day of his death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don\u2019t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-intellects-vast-and-warm-and-sympathetic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55628,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55465\/revisions\/55628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55462,"date":"2026-08-09T11:45:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T11:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55462"},"modified":"2026-09-12T21:50:34","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T21:50:34","slug":"sunday-photoblogging-castletown-harbour-isle-of-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/09\/sunday-photoblogging-castletown-harbour-isle-of-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday photoblogging: Castletown harbour, Isle of Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/chrisbertram\/55442825244\" title=\"Castletown, Isle of Man (dusk)\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/55442825244_73ec90e24b.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\" alt=\"Castletown, Isle of Man (dusk)\"\/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55462"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55629,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55462\/revisions\/55629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55433,"date":"2026-08-07T15:11:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T15:11:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55433"},"modified":"2026-08-07T15:11:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T15:11:40","slug":"summer-lightness-errors-that-puzzled-and-or-irritated-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/07\/summer-lightness-errors-that-puzzled-and-or-irritated-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer lightness: errors that puzzled and\/or irritated you."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error &#8212; naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I&#8217;m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but even if I didn&#8217;t know them!).<\/p>\n<p>My, recent, error\/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget which) almost immediately attributes the slogan &#8220;Property is theft&#8221; to Marx; the other (again, I forget which one) agrees that Marx said it. I then spent the rest of the movie wondering whether it was the characters, or the screenwriters, that made the error. If its the characters that tells us something quite interesting about them: they are basically poseurs, or at least posing in this context where they are also flirting, and (probably) one of them is refraining from correcting the other (for whatever reason, perhaps connected to flirting). It&#8217;s not out of the realms of possibility that someone who worked for the CPUSA at the time (as, I gather, Tatler did) would get this wrong, still less that she endorse a flirtee&#8217;s error. But&#8230; if it&#8217;s the characters who are in error surely the screenwriters know that the vast majority of the audience won&#8217;t pick up on the implication, and the tiny fraction of the audience that know Marx and Proudhon will likely spend some substantial part of the movie puzzling about exactly what I was (and still am, slightly, puzzled about). Why would they do that? So&#8230; I was tempted to conclude that it was a screenwriter error. But&#8230; did <em>nobody<\/em> who read the script catch it? Are they <em>all<\/em> really <em>that <\/em>ignorant? And then I thought of all the people I knew who went into that industry (surprisingly many, including someone who was nominated at a young age for the Academy Award for best director) and think, yes, they really might all be that ignorant. And then I thought, ah, but the only actual Academy Award <em>winner<\/em> I&#8217;ve ever known was a lifelong Trotskyist, and he would have caught it. But, of course, he was a Trotskyist, not a Communist (which returned me to realization that someone working for the CPUSA in the 30&#8217;s might well have made the error). [1]<\/p>\n<p>My conclusion is that it was a screenwriters mistake. But: would you like to contribute other examples of errors like these two that have puzzled and\/or irritated you?<\/p>\n<p>[1] Ok, since I&#8217;m in a flippant mood today, I&#8217;ll share this one&#8230; I watch a lot of cricket through Willow TV, and in recent weeks I have been inundated a particular ad for the Tom Tiffany for Governor of Wisconsin campaign which, evidently, thinks that people watching Pakistan v West Indies test matches in Madison are fair game. His ad starts out by saying &#8220;This is not your grandparents&#8217; Democrat Party. Or your parents'&#8221; and shows a picture of Saunders, AOC, and a couple of Democratic Party Governor candidates with, I kid you not, a hammer and sickle. My first thought was to wonder which voters are triggered by a hammer and sickle, and my second, quite seriously, was to wonder whether he is trying to convey the (true, as he no doubt knows) thought that whereas there were lots of Communists in &#8220;your grandparents'&#8221; Democratic Party (nearly every Communist I knew in LA in the 1980s was a Democrat, and nearly every Democrat I knew was some sort of Stalinist, because those were the circles within which I moved), not one of the people depicted in his ad is one. Obviously not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A friend on facebook says that Hamnet contains a pretty serious error &#8212; naming the Costwolds the Chilterns (or, pretty much equivalently, mislocating the Chilterns between Stratford and Oxford). I&#8217;m not sure that would ruin the book for me, but I definitely would find it annoying (knowing both areas very well makes it worse, but [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55433"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55433\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55451,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55433\/revisions\/55451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55204,"date":"2026-08-07T10:05:37","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55204"},"modified":"2026-08-07T10:05:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T10:05:37","slug":"occasional-paper-the-edge-of-the-galaxy-and-the-end-of-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/08\/07\/occasional-paper-the-edge-of-the-galaxy-and-the-end-of-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Occasional paper: The edge of the galaxy and the end of everything"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering &#8220;the edge of the galaxy&#8221;.\u00a0 They were referencing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aanda.org\/articles\/aa\/full_html\/2026\/04\/aa58144-25\/aa58144-25.html\">this recent paper,<\/a> which&#8230; doesn&#8217;t really say that.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s an interesting paper anyway, so let&#8217;s discuss.<br \/><br \/>As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a flat spiral containing several hundred billion stars.\u00a0 And spiral galaxies don&#8217;t exactly have an &#8220;edge&#8221;.\u00a0 We can&#8217;t see the details of the Milky Way, because we&#8217;re inside it.\u00a0 But we have excellent photographs of thousands of other spiral galaxies, and they mostly sort of gradually blur off into intergalactic space.<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eso.org%2Fpublic%2Farchives%2Fprint_posters%2Fscreen%2Fprint_poster_0051.jpg&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1&amp;ipt=bcd00421c64b846b382c596ae2c5009196d8ac29cbc056f2d46ad14dbde93fa1\" alt=\"Poster: Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232 | ESO\" width=\"386\" height=\"546\" \/><br \/><br \/>So if you travelled outwards from Earth, away from the center of the Milky Way, there wouldn&#8217;t be any sudden cutoff where stars just stopped.\u00a0 Stars would gradually get further and further apart.\u00a0 At some point, there wouldn&#8217;t be any stars anywhere near you.\u00a0 <br \/><br \/>But there wouldn&#8217;t be any &#8220;edge&#8221; as such.\u00a0 No glowing purple force field &#8212;<br \/><br \/><\/p>\r\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fthf.bing.com%2Fth%2Fid%2FOIP.-ebPxlngSb6VwF-NShO2BAHaFp%3Fcb%3Dthfc1falcon%26pid%3DApi&amp;f=1&amp;ipt=03b65a886867d7fc66342f6f08b4cebd98ed6c620507f3687f437e63c5dd6bac\" alt=\"The Legacy of Star Trek's 2nd pilot - Warp Factor Trek\" width=\"381\" height=\"290\" \/><\/p>\r\n<p>&#8212; or golden pillars or anything.<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/journeytothewestresearch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/09\/the-great-sage-defaces-buddhas-hand-from-son-goku-1939-small.png?w=640\" alt=\"The Monkey King and Graffiti | Journey to the West Research\" width=\"309\" height=\"214\" \/><br \/>What the paper actually found was the edge of the <em>star-forming<\/em> region of the galaxy.\u00a0 And that&#8217;s a different kind of interesting.<\/p>\r\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\r\n<p><br \/>So stars are formed from big clouds of interstellar gas.\u00a0 And galaxies are born with a very large supply of such gas.\u00a0 Very large, but not infinite.\u00a0 After some billions of years, the gas gets used up.\u00a0 After that, the galaxy can&#8217;t form any more new stars.\u00a0 Astronomers call this &#8220;quenching&#8221;.<br \/><br \/>Astronomers refer to galaxies that have quenched as &#8220;red sequence&#8221; galaxies.\u00a0 Galaxies that are still forming stars are &#8220;blue cloud&#8221; galaxies.\u00a0 It turns out that if you plot this graphically, you get a sharply bimodal distribution: you get a lot of star-forming blue galaxies, a lot of quenched red sequence galaxies, and not much in between.\u00a0 So the relatively sparse region in between got called the &#8220;green valley&#8221;.<br \/><br \/>&#8212; Why is it sparse?\u00a0 Because quenching can happen pretty fast.\u00a0 So you don&#8217;t see a lot of galaxies in that in-between period, because it&#8217;s a relatively short period in a galaxy&#8217;s life.<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/astrobites.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Fig-1-1.png\" alt=\"Galaxies sprinting] through the valley | astrobites\" width=\"450\" height=\"238\" \/><br \/>As it happens, our own Milky Way galaxy seems to be passing through the green valley right now.\u00a0 The Milky Way is still forming new stars, but the rate of star formation is starting to drop quickly.\u00a0 Another couple of billion years, and it&#8217;ll be mostly done.\u00a0 Not <em>entirely\u00a0<\/em>done, of course &#8212; a galaxy is a big place.\u00a0 Here and there a few gas clouds will remain, occasionally giving birth to new stars.\u00a0 But it&#8217;ll be a long tail of decline, the cosmic equivalent of searching for loose change under the couch cushions.<br \/><br \/>Which brings us back to the original paper.\u00a0 Look at a spiral galaxy, and you can see that it gets denser towards the center.<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net%2FiB4jB6X22rmibNe5pKmpAN.jpg&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1&amp;ipt=24b5dd30af345b796f1409c4c6dbda8894382ca5d0cc655a10e0b5ce0374e954\" alt=\"Hubble Telescope's views of enormous spiral galaxy illuminate a big ...\" width=\"448\" height=\"252\" \/><br \/><br \/>So you&#8217;d reasonably assume that star formation would peak and burn out first in the center, because there&#8217;s more gas there &#8212; more stuff there generally.\u00a0 And then you&#8217;d expect it to peak further out, and then last of all out near the ends of the spiral arms.\u00a0 Space is emptier out there, so it takes longer for gas clouds to bump into each other and start condensing.\u00a0 So you might expect to find fewer young stars in the center (raw material gets burned up quickly) and more young stars far out in the arms (star formation takes longer to get started).<br \/><br \/>As it turns out: half right.\u00a0 There is indeed a gradient of older-to-younger stars (on average) as you move out from the galactic core.\u00a0 But then &#8212; well before you reach the end of the arms &#8212; the gradient goes into reverse.\u00a0 It makes a U-shaped curve.\u00a0 The far ends of the spiral arms have a lot of older stars and not a lot of young ones.\u00a0 The Milky Way is starting to quench, but not all at once.\u00a0 Our galaxy has an aging heart, and aging extremities, but there&#8217;s a big donut-shaped chunk in between that&#8217;s still young and vigorous.<br \/><br \/>Okay, but &#8212; why?<br \/><br \/>Because galaxies churn.\u00a0<br \/><br \/>A galaxy is made up of billions of stars, all orbiting around the galaxy&#8217;s center of mass.\u00a0 Most of the time, those stars are well separated from each other, light years apart.\u00a0 But every now and then, a couple of stars will pass close enough to influence each other gravitationally.\u00a0 When that happens, one star will gain a bit of kinetic energy and move &#8220;up&#8221; into a more distant orbit.\u00a0 The other star will lose a bit of energy and move &#8220;down&#8221; towards the center of the galaxy.\u00a0 This is known as churning, or &#8220;dynamical relaxation&#8221; if you&#8217;re feeling fancy.\u00a0<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/static.independent.co.uk\/s3fs-public\/thumbnails\/image\/2014\/05\/13\/10\/donatan-cleo-eurovision.jpg\" alt=\"Poland's Donatan &amp; Cleo went 'two boobs too far' for UK's Eurovision jury |  The Independent | The Independent\" width=\"375\" height=\"281\" \/> <br \/>[dynamical relaxation at Eurovision] <br \/><br \/>So over billions of years, a galaxy will tend to slowly change shape: it will gradually extend outwards (some stars getting bounced up and out) and also get thicker in the center (some stars bouncing down towards the galactic core).<br \/><br \/>So the reason for the U-shaped curve is that most of the stars in the outer regions of the galaxy didn&#8217;t start there.\u00a0 That region used to be empty intergalactic space, without enough gas for star formation.\u00a0 But over billions of years, galactic churning kicked stars into higher, more distant orbits that took them into those regions.\u00a0 The spiral arms slowly stretched outwards into areas of space that had always been pretty empty, without much gas for star formation.\u00a0 You might occasionally get a young star bounced out there by accident, but no new young stars would form there.\u00a0\u00a0<br \/><br \/>And there&#8217;s a fairly sharp border between the donut-shaped inner bit where stars are still forming, and the outer reaches where they don&#8217;t.\u00a0 We&#8217;ve seen that border in other, distant galaxies.\u00a0 And &#8212; this is the point of the paper &#8212; now we&#8217;ve found it in our own Milky Way.\u00a0\u00a0<br \/><br \/>Okay, so that&#8217;s the &#8220;edge of the galaxy&#8221; that&#8217;s been found.\u00a0 But what does this have to do with the end of everything?<br \/><br \/>Well, here&#8217;s the thing: the churning never stops.\u00a0 <br \/><br \/>Over billions and then trillions of years, the Milky Way will continue to evolve.\u00a0 Some stars will fall down towards the center; some stars will get pushed further out.\u00a0\u00a0<br \/><br \/>And this will continue even after all the stars are dead.\u00a0 The Sun and other stars like it will swell up into red giants, then contract into white dwarfs, then &#8212; very very slowly &#8212; cool down to dead cinders, black and cold.\u00a0 Larger stars will become neutron stars or black holes.\u00a0 Red dwarfs, the smallest stars, will burn for trillions of years, conserving their fuel, but eventually they too will die.\u00a0 In the distant future of ten trilliion years from now, the Milky Way will be completely dark and cold.<br \/><br \/>But it will still churn.\u00a0 The dead stars will still circle the galaxy&#8217;s center of mass.\u00a0 And very eventually, by drunkard&#8217;s-walk statistical inevitability, they will either be flung out into interstellar space, to wander forever alone through the endlessly expanding darkness of a dead universe, or they&#8217;ll fall down into the Milky Way&#8217;s core.\u00a0 Where they will encounter &#8212;<br \/><br \/><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/external-content.duckduckgo.com\/iu\/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.origo.hu%2F2025%2F08%2F93we0U2znMCGrkW_G9LsDnjw13NAecWXQKtVMw_HhGE%2Ffit%2F1200%2F1200%2Fno%2F1%2FaHR0cHM6Ly9jbXNjZG4uYXBwLmNvbnRlbnQucHJpdmF0ZS9jb250ZW50LzY5MDJkZDY2MmJkMDQ3ZDNhNDM4NmYzNDExYzRhYjhk.webp&amp;f=1&amp;nofb=1&amp;ipt=66a0428d3a66c39ec45746e21c4aa0c48c68827a5bc65b14fcc930a4d3fa9ef7\" alt=\"Sagittarius A*: a Tej\u00fat fekete lyuk\u00e1nak \u00e9bred\u00e9se dr\u00e1mai ...\" width=\"420\" height=\"420\" \/><br \/><br \/>&#8212; Sagittarius A-Star, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.<br \/><br \/>Eventually &#8212; very, very, very eventually &#8212; pretty much all normal matter in the Milky Way will end up a dead dark cinder.\u00a0 And that cinder will either be flung out into infinite space to fall forever through darkness, or will plunge into the black hole.\u00a0 The atoms that you&#8217;re made of, right now?\u00a0 Churn, churn, flip a coin: either up and out, or down the hatch, as the universe very slowly grinds to a dead cold halt.<br \/><br \/>Right.\u00a0 Have a great weekend, all!<br \/><br \/><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So there was a modest puff of articles last month about astronomers discovering &#8220;the edge of the galaxy&#8221;.\u00a0 They were referencing this recent paper, which&#8230; doesn&#8217;t really say that.\u00a0 But it&#8217;s an interesting paper anyway, so let&#8217;s discuss. As we all learned back in school, our Sun is one star in the Milky Way galaxy, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":207,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/207"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55204"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55449,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55204\/revisions\/55449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]