Because I suffer from a chronic psychological condition. You’ve heard of FOMO; I have FOBRO. Fear of Being Ripped Off.

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And in today’s algorithmically enhanced world, it plagues me constantly. Back in some soft focus day of in-person retail, clothing stores had annual sales. Now I get texts every single day telling me there’s a sale I’m about to miss out on.

Sales that “almost never happen” seem to happen a lot.

For one retailer, I have a dress waiting in my virtual shopping cart. I watch its price go up and down when I log in, depending on that day’s discounts. It’s like watching the stock market, as the price bounces $40 either way. Will the price move further? Is THIS the moment to buy?

I recently went to a restaurant, and received a notification later that I was getting a cash back reward from T-Mobile. Unbeknownst to me, this restaurant was part of their dining rewards program, for which I had signed up. But I used 2 different cards (one at the bar, one at the table). And I only got cash back on one transaction; the one with the card I’d registered with T-Mobile. So once again I didn’t feel rewarded, I kicked myself for missing out.

I can’t buy tickets to an event without wondering if I should have checked Groupon. When I go to a specialty store, I flick through the current offers from Amex to see if it’s there. Or should I have checked AAA? Is there a Visa reward? It’s soul destroying, this sense of constant failure (or small triumph, that I managed to get a whole $1.50 off my total at Sephora).

It’s like a low-grade anxiety, paralleling the one about being outright scammed by phishers or data thieves; this is a fear that I’ll be manipulated into paying more by an endless loop of ads.

If everything’s on special, nothing is.

Price is a signal.

And some people don’t seem to realize that interest rates are a price too - the price of credit. They aren’t an arbitrary number picked out of the sky, they reflect the risk calculations of the lender.

Someone with good credit and a 40% downpayment can get a very low mortgage rate. Because that loan is very low risk for the lender. The borrower has skin in the game, and moreover the house is an asset that can be repossessed if the borrower defaults.

Credit cards, on the other hand, are the riskiest bet for any lender. Completely unsecured. If you run up $60,000 on a Visa card and skip the country, there’s not much they can do. And you may be surprised to learn just how many people default on credit card debts! So credit card interest rates are high.

That’s how it works. Low risk loans, low interest. High risk loans, high interest.

But some people struggle with this.

This proposal is insane - and most of the people cheering it on won’t benefit from it.

Government interventions, like restricting credit card firms to only charging 10% interest does not mean “lower credit card bills for everyone”. It means a lot more people not getting credit cards at all. People who are too much of a risk will just be denied (And those who still qualify for cards, will get hit with other charges instead, as a way of recouping losses). If you think credit card companies are sharp operators - you’d be right. They can figure out an angle, but it won’t be one you like.

We saw the result of such attempts to override market price signals in the tragic California fires. Legislators had tried to cap what insurance companies could charge for coverage. But again - price is a signal. The pooled risk for houses in a fire zone is extremely high! Unlike other house insurance issues, like burglarly, wildfire is a correlated risk (this means it won’t just affect one property, it will affect dozens or hundreds, at the same time). So coverage prices reflected that. When laws were passed trying to cap the prices, insurance companies didn’t say “ok, here’s your lower policy premium”, they said “hell no”. They could not afford to offer policies at a price that did not reflect the true risk. Some just stopped offering policies in California all together. Which hurts those consumers who would have been willing to pay a market rate, but can’t find a provider.

However I do plan to keep posting!

Where I’m living now, I’ve seen more airborne squirrels than I had in years - they are everywhere, and I guess with such a mild winter never quite get the message to retire to their nests. Instead I step out in the morning to have a half dozen of them scampering in front of me - or leaping from a tree to the ground, and vice-versa. They’re in a paradise for urban creatures - the city means there are no large prey animals about (the dogs around are both small and leashed, and often also wearing little pullovers), and there’s plenty of free food thanks to all the humans.

They rustle in the leaves on the ground, and sit there watching me, their little haunches twitching. As a life-long squirrel fan, I think it’s adorable.

It’s not natural, in the sense that utility poles and cement roofs are not the habitats for which squirrels were created - but then they aren’t “natural” for us, either. We’ve created a world to suit our needs, and if it suits squirrels too: good luck to them.

They’re one of the species that have found a wonderland in man-made spaces. Warmth, food, opportunities. Of course, when we think of the built landscape vs nature, we think of driving animals out, and destruction of habitat. But we should remember that we’re a plus, not a minus, to many species. If the goal is species survival, the North American grey squirrels are doing pretty well.

They are there in the morning when I leave, and there when I come back in the evening. Busy, energetic, and full of life. I look at them and I feel optimistic. I hope you do too.

Where else I’ve been: a review I wrote appeared in the WSJ last weekend.

*I now live in Atlanta. If you do too, please say hi. I don’t know many people here yet.

" SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission kicked off early Tuesday, launching a four-person crew of civilian astronauts into orbit. And hours later they have already made history: reaching the highest orbit around Earth and surpassing a record set during NASA’s earliest days.

The company confirmed that the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying the crew reached its peak altitude of 1,400.7 kilometers (870 miles) at 9:19 p.m. ET on Tuesday.

That distance surpassed the record set by NASA’s 1966 Gemini 11 mission, which reached 853 miles (1,373 kilometers) during its trek around Earth.

NASA’s Apollo missions traveled farther but did not enter a traditional orbit around Earth. They were destined for the moon, which lies a quarter million miles away from our planet. The Polaris Dawn mission also marks the farthest any human has journeyed since the final Apollo mission in 1972 — and the farthest into space a woman has ever traveled. "

So human beings are no further into space than we were 50 years ago. Nobody would have expected that during the heyday of the space race.

For as much as we seemed to be tumbling towards outer space exploration in the 60s, it hasn't happened. Nobody had a space odyssey in 2001. But 40 years earlier it seemed possible they might.

Even though the last moon landings were years before I was born, when I was a kid there were still books (both fiction and of the “learn about science” type) suggesting it was imminent. (“How much would you weigh on the moon?”). Astronaut seemed, in some way, a viable career choice.

Decades of popular media have shown humans in space in the pretty near future. Captain Kirk, that hero of 1960s optimistic futurism, was meant to be born in 2233. Alien, offering a much grimmer, and working-class vision of space, takes place in 2122. The producers of Lost In Space thought it would all be much sooner: the Robinson family left earth in 1997!

In the Apple+ show, Hello Tomorrow, set in a retrofuturistic 1960s, the protagonist is selling real estate on the moon. (It’s a fabulous mix: they have cute robots to do all kinds of things in their daily lives, but still use fax machines)

It manages to be an imagined future, as well as an imagined past.

Because it wasn’t meant to be this way. The space race underlined the pace of development in the twentieth century. There were only sixty years between the Wright brothers and the Moon landing. No other period in human history saw technological shifts at such speed. Surely, 60 years after Neil Armstrong we should have been making giant leaps onto other planets.

Instead, it seems we've been treading water. I mean no disrespect to the work of the ISS and the scientists who have sent probes to Mars, but it doesn't seem to have been anyone's national priority to get humans further.

Even as scholars warn us against the dangers of colonizing space, the prospect seems less imminent. There are people on the ISS, but no colonists on the moon, let alone Mars.

Of course the Challenger and Columbia disasters turned people off: to the casual observer, making space just one more example of things the government can't seem to do any more. (The current debacle of NASA astronauts being stranded on the ISS and having to hitch a ride home with Elon Musk pretty much takes the cake).

Things could have been different. Our unmanned emissaries, the Voyager craft, are still out there - plunging further into the unknown. Their cryptic messages home just flickers of connection.

But we are not following them. I don’t expect to visit the moon, or for it to even be an option.

Sometimes the future comes at you fast, other times it stays out of reach.

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First, it seems that a rewilding program of wolves in Colorado has hit something of a snag.

“Less than nine months after the first gray wolves were released into the wild in Colorado amid widespread attention as part of an ambitious reintroduction program, officials are now scrambling to capture and move the state’s first breeding pack.

The announcement by Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials on Tuesday that two of the 10 wolves that were released — along with three pups that they had this year — would be moved from their current area came after the animals were accused of attacking nearby livestock.”

The Colorado wolves have not made friends with their new neighbors and are now being chased out of town.

This is a setback, as wolves (and beavers) have been in a way the poster animals for the rewilding projects of recent decades.

Their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s (after decades’ absence), has been credited with creating a Trophic Cascade. This is the sequence of changes in an ecosystem caused by a change in the food chain.

In Yellowstone, wolves helped keep down the elk population. This meant the willow trees (that elks eat) were allowed to regenerate, providing more wood for beaver dams. More beaver dams, meant more meadows and food for other creatures - and less flooding.

Rewilding, especially bringing back predators like wolves, has been controversial. It wasn’t necessarily clear how it would unfold. Would the wolves stay in the park? Even advocates of the wolf plan weren’t certain. But the change to the ecosystem turned out even better than expected. Plans proceeded to rewild wolves in other parts of the world.

However, as we’ve seen in Colorado, people are not always thrilled to have an apex predator show up in their community. In Yellowstone, the wolves are protected in the park - not so much if they venture beyond it. Yellowstone wolves have been shot when they strayed outside the park boundaries.

But ‘rewilding’ is a slippery concept, with the idea it’s possible for us to somehow return a landscape to a natural state. This raises the question: natural for when? Landscapes and ecosystems have always evolved. What point in history are you trying to recreate with your balance of animals?

It should be noted that simply “letting animals go” (something else people do, even when those creatures are not in any way native) is not “rewilding”. Like the prize idiots who threw a bunch of living crustaceans into the water near England.

“Zhixiong Li and Ni Li helped throw live crabs and lobsters into the sea off Brighton as part of a “life release” ceremony in 2015, a court has heard.

The pair were part of a group of almost 1,000 people celebrating the visit of the Taiwanese Buddhist master Hai Tao.

Their ritual was performed in the belief that returning animals to the wild is good karma. But because the crustaceans were not native species, they threatened other marine life and government agencies had to spend thousands of pounds in an attempt to recapture the shellfish, offering fishermen a bounty to reel them in.”

(Hai Tao’s followers previously released a bunch of pythons in the mountains in Taiwan. It is apparently their thing.)

Most releases are not so dramatic. People decide to release their goldfish into a local pond or lake. What’s the harm? It’s a tiny little fish. And then the thing grows to be 18 inches long and weighs 9 pounds. (I once wrote about the perils of the invasive goldfish for the Atlantic).

When it comes to “rewilding” animals that we can say are supposed to be there, beaver rewilding goes back earlier than that of wolves, starting in different places before the Second World War, and famously featuring the “Beaver Drop” in Idaho in the late 1940s. Sedated beavers were put into spring loaded crates, with parachutes attached, and dropped from planes, with the hope they would repopulate the waterways where their ancestors had been hunted to extinction. They did. A groggy beaver would come to in a box—the door popped open on landing–and stagger to the nearest stream. (Beavers are simultaneously very dim and driven by a powerful instinct. If you play a recording of running water, a beaver will start building a dam. They know their life’s purpose).

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Of course this kid isn’t the first person to break something on display. There was the spectacular incident at the Fitzwilliam museum, in which a guy took a spill on a staircase and managed to take out THREE Qing vases on his way.

The museum though now has a rather interesting web page detailing how they managed to repair the vases. Daunting stuff, given that they not only smashed on the floor, they were further crushed under foot by people rushing to render first aid to the fallen visitor. But it’s fascinating to see the process of repair.

The question was asked after this incident of why the vases were on an open windowsill rather than inside a locked cabinet. And it’s the kind of thing museum curators debate.

I work with museums and it can be a challenge to decide how things are best displayed. But the trend towards “interactive” museum displays does, unfortunately, create an impression in visitors that anything not locked away is ok to touch. I’m sometimes unsure when I visit a museum for the first time, which are the “play with this” items and which are the “don’t touch that” items, when there seem to be both in the same room - which is a design failure on the part of the curator.

The other part of the failure is visitors. I recall looking on with horror some years ago at the Louvre as a visitor lifted their toddler on top of a statue to take a picture (there were no guards around to say anything).

If anything, it is worse now with selfie-takers, who have managed to wreak destruction in museums all over the place. This is, as they say, why we can’t have nice things.

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I last stopped at a Stuckeys a couple years back, on the Delmarva peninsula. Heading north after crossing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which scares the hell out of me. I had a sandwich.

It’s the kind of place I *will* pull over. I am that driver. Ice cream? yes. Coffee kiosk? Don’t mind if I do. Was that a Krispy Kreme sign? Hold on, I’m making a u-turn. When I saw the Stuckey’s sign, we were stopping.

I’ve also always been about the roadside kitch. Stopping to look at the Giant Whatever. I sometimes feel like I’m the last person on earth who buys postcards.

Some of you will recall the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous, in which one of the pageant entrants celebrates the giant roadside ball of twine…

This kind of roadside attraction, like the filling station, the souvenir stand, various other pull-over opportunities, emerged with the arrival of the car.

Train travel had brought some attractions at stations, such as the Harvey House dining rooms designed to cater to hungry rail passengers (before there was much in the way of a dining car on board).

Before that, when long distance travel was often by stage coach, there were coaching stations, inns, where passengers could stop - and wait for the next service, or make arrangements to get to their destination. These places didn’t have to be good, or do anything much to “attract” guests. People arriving on the stagecoach didn’t have a great range of options.

But car travel was different. Not only could people travel faster, they could choose where to stop. Suddenly a lot more places had the chance to play up their tourism opportunities (and of course, anywhere with not much doing can sell itself as the “gateway” to somewhere else). The owners of houses or farms that found themselves suddenly on a much-more-beaten path than before often got enterprising, and opened their front window to offer refreshments.

Soon small establishments sprung up, like the one in James Crain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934). The protagonist, a drifter, arrives there by chance, after he gets kicked off the truck he snuck onto in Tijuana.

“That was when I hit this Twin Oaks Tavern. It was nothing but a roadside sandwich joint, like a million others in California. There was a lunchroom part, and over that a house part, where they lived, and off to one side a filling station, and out back a half dozen shacks that they called an auto court”.

He was describing the kind of place that would have been familiar to readers. (At the time he was writing, two-thirds of all households had a car).

The industry of roadside attractions had its heyday by midcentury, but dropped off with the arrival of bigger highways, often cutting past those older routes. Cars became more reliable (people didn’t need to pull in and find a mechanic so often). Longer road trips were also taken over by flights.

The services available today tend to be chain-run and generic. (For example, the Irish firm, Applegreen, is now a major provider of filling stations and road stops in multiple countries). Quirky and local don’t happen.

And nobody is building things like this anymore!

It’s a shame. We have the mass-produced and interchangeable, rather than the local and distinct. I think that makes our travel all the poorer.

Where else I’ve been:

I reviewed All That Glitters for the WSJ, and wrote about patent leather and the history of cricket in the US and Canada for JSTOR Daily.

But whereas Trixie Belden took place in the past, a picturesque world of the 1950s (ish - the beauty of this genre of books is the vagueness of the period). But Sweet Valley High was more current, at least to my childhood.

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The Olympics grew over the decades from a decidedly chaotic and amateur beginning. The winner of the marathon in 1904, Thomas Hicks, was given strychnine and brandy by his coach during the race - he was hallucinating as he crossed the finish line and collapsed. The first American woman to win an Olympic medal was Margaret Ives Abbott - a tourist who entered a golf tournament in Paris, without even knowing it was an Olympic event.

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What does it mean today to win at the Olympics? After the First World War, the games became more focused on international harmony and friendship: nationalism but peaceful. That after the hell of 1914-18, athletes from different nations could shake hands, and compete to demonstrate the best of human achievement. Of course by the 1936 Berlin Games, the Olympics could be used as a theatre for the grand scope of national ambition. Hitler wanted to demonstrate his nation’s superiority, both as competitors and as hosts of an epic spectacle.

The ridiculousness of the opening ceremonies has grown in years. More interesting to me though was the shift around the 1980s/90s, that athletes no longer marched around the track, in smart uniforms, as though representing their countries for an audience. They weren’t there to be observed, but to enjoy.

Rather, more and more of them strolled around, held ‘Hi Mom’ signs, as though they were the audience. They ambled along in tracksuits, taking photos. And we, the global audience, were somehow watching them have a fun vacation. They stopped feeling like it was their job to present a particular image. Or that anyone else had a right to care how they looked or acted.

At the opening ceremony this year, a singer performed “Imagine” (the absolute anthem of midwit cringe), creating an unintentionally hilarious counterpoint of “imagine there’s not countries” after we’ve just been introduced to all the teams and their flags.

Nonetheless, the whole rigmarole of flags national anthems does make it seem as though they are somehow representing us. We cheer for our own athletes, even as we recognize it’s hardly an even playing field (large nations field teams of hundreds; some small countries may only send one or two competitors. How fair is a “medal table” under those circumstances?). And that’s before we get into the issue of nationality-switching - and how certain countries’ recruiters seem to make no bones about picking up foreign talent to add to their “national” teams.

So what does it mean to win a medal for your country? Some countries certainly incentivize it with cash rewards to their athletes who bring back a medal. This in itself shows the disparities of income even among professional competitors. Spain currently offers $111,562 to someone who wins a gold medal, something Carlos Alcaraz seems on track to do in the tennis. But Alcaraz, at 21, has already won more than $31 million in prize money. His singles victory at Wimbledon just this summer came with a purse of £2,700,000. For him, another hundred grand is a rounding error.

Meanwhile, to a hurdler or shotputter, or participant in another less-marketable sport, that amount of money could make a huge difference. Most olympic athletes receive some level of support from their government, and some level of subsidized training, but not necessarily to huge degrees. Many still have other jobs - although that too is a challenge, when training for the Olympics takes hours every day.

For decades the IOC maintained the ideal of the contest being amateur only: even as the line between amateur and professional became increasingly blurred. In the 1980s they officially allowed professionals to compete, essentially acknowledging what had already become the case. But it allowed the “Dream Team” of NBA players to enter the basketball - adding medals to the various NBA rings and millions of dollars they already had.

When the modern Olympics started, it was something new. A chance for a real international contest, for athletes to strut their stuff. But in recent decades it’s become one among many. Governing bodies of various sports hold their own world championships, separate to the Olympics - and give out medals too. Every time I turn on the TV there’s a world championship of something or other. Most of these contests were started decades after the Olympics (the hockey world cup started in 1971; the basketball world cup in 1950; World Acquatic championships 1973; etc). For some sports to the chance to be a “world champion” and win a medal comes around much more frequently than the Olympics. Likewise for viewers, even the keenest sports fan has championship fatigue.

And as we have seen with golf at the Olympics, some of that sport’s top level players weren’t even that interested in attending - they want to win the Open or the Masters; the Olympics isn’t on their radar.

For sports that are less monetized, there are of course opportunities for sponsorship. General Mills pays athletes to put them on the Weeties box - according to Forbes, in the $70-100k range for lesser-known athletes.

They can get paid by Nike or Adidas for wearing their gear. But some are more creative. Italian gymnast, Giorgia Villa, is sponsored by cheese. Really. The Parmigiano Reggiano cheese consortium support her, and she just won a silver medal. Check out her instagram.

That’s the best thing I’ve learned about this Olympics. If someone else is sponsored by Ragu and pasta, let me know.

Today the head of the Secret Service was grilled by the House oversight committee, who had some pretty blunt questions about how this happened. But in the moments after the attack, the first thing being asked was who did it. The gunman, Thomas Crooks, had been killed on the spot by snipers.

Various photos of him were quickly shared on social media, with the community diagnosis that he was an “incel” or “redditor”. While further information (like whether he left a note or manifesto) has not been made public, people were pretty quick to fill in the blanks themselves.

As John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich wrote yesterday in the Washington Post:

“Where he fits into the ever-expanding catalogue of notorious American gunmen could take years to understand, according to experts and historians. He’s hard to categorize, in part because his still-evolving portrait evokes the profile of a mass shooter, at least one of whom he researched. But Crooks wasn’t a mass shooter, instead becoming what some historians believe to be the youngest person to make an attempt on the life of a current or past president.”

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And not just any sword. According to lore, it was the magical sword “Durandal”, that the mythical knight Roland threw, 1300 years ago, and buried itself in the rock.

Roland did live in the eighth century and was one of Charlemagne’s military leaders. But his real life (of which evidence is skimpy), became embroidered into lengthy legend. His tale is part of the medieval stories known as the “Matter of France” (the Arthurian legends are the “Matter of England”).

Via oral culture and traveling minstrels, the legend of Roland spread, and became part of well-known folklore in Western Europe. His brave horse gained a name, Veillantif. His adventures were shaded in, and his tragic death - in battle with the Saracens in Spain - is recounted with his fiancee’s grief.

But Roland came to mean more than a character in a story of heroic knights. In Germany people came to quite like him for other reasons. Independent city states put up statues to him, representing their autonomy outside the control of the nobility. From being a French soldier he came to mean something to people in other parts of Europe, as part of shared cultural identity.

The Roland statue in Bremen, the oldest still standing.

But the mysterious sword in the stone and the signs of the chosen one echo through European folklore. The obvious cognate is King Arthur and his sword, Excalibur. According to some accounts, this sword was retrieved from Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury in the twelfth century by Richard the Lionheart, and given to a crusading ally, Tancred of Sicily. (As diplomatic gifts go, that’s a pretty fancy one). Nobody knows what happened to it after that.

As for the missing sword in France, there are varying theories about its origins. It’s obviously been in the rock for a while, but scholars believe it hasn’t actually been there 1300 years. There are suggestions that multiple replacement swords have been put in over the years.

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One theory is that it was first put there to bump up tourism, in the late 1700s (the age of the Grand Tour). But the sword’s existence, whoever put it there, demonstrates the persistence of the Roland story, and its widespread familiarity, that it could be used to entice visitors to a French village. That it is probably much younger than its legend is also not surprising.

Many things are not as old as we think. The mists of history drop very quickly. Something can be created and within decades acquire a legend of longevity and permanence.

Like the ritual use of Stonehenge. The rocks themselves are very old - yet their use by Druids (who have permission to access the site on the solstice), is quite recent. The “Ancient Order of Druids” dates back to the 1780s - a product of the age of fraternal organizations rather than direct link to Ancient Britons and their practices.

Stonehenge itself spent centuries largely forgotten, the landowner ignoring it, sheep meandering through it. The era of romanticism - and the beginnings of tourism - brought it to prominence.

While henges likewise are a phenomenon across Britain and France, some are not old at all. Like this stone circle in Ham Hill, Somerset. Not an ancient monument, but created around 2000.

It is however on the site of an ancient hill fort, captured by the Romans. The likelihood that visitors will come to see it as likewise ancient is high (regardless of what a plaque might say).

As for Roland’s missing sword, the search continues.

Where else I have been:

This week I wrote about cold cream for jstor daily, and also the history of teflon. I also reviewed John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke for Law and Liberty, discussing everything early 90s, from John Gotti to Ruby Ridge.

Packaged in a green tin, this ointment was first made for farmers. The “bags” for which it was originally made were cow’s udders. But it’s apparently useful as a face cream, hand cream, anything you want cream.

That this cow cream has become a desirable product is an example of those beauty fads that comes around, often for some cheap item that has been overlooked for fancier options. (Bag Balm ingredients include petroleum jelly and lanolin, common ingredients for many skin creams)

It's also not the only product for animals that has become popular with humans. “Mane ‘n Tail” shampoo is the perfect example, invented for shampooing horses’ manes, but “discovered” by pony club girls as good for their hair too.

(How much of this lore to believe is unclear, and how much to attribute to marketing schtick. While the label still has horses on it, and the bottles are from the kind of sturdy plastic you’d find at a farm supply store, it's quite clear that the bulk of it is sold for human use).

These trends represent a weird genre of life hack: the affordable product from the lower shelf is just as good as the fancy brand! crossed with Hints from Heloise, plus a bonus discovery element. This product was originally made for fancy horses but it's actually good for people too! (Shampoo is chemically pretty similar matter who it's made for or by)

(There is of course a limit to the products for pets we might be interested in trying: few of us would be interested in warming up a can of dog food).

But the air of triumph in finding a hidden bargain, especially one with a unique heritage, is also part of these fads. Something that might've been used by your grandmother is that good, so maybe you don't need that $200 face cream. Look at me on Tiktok putting Nivea cream on my face!

“Rediscovering” cheap(ish) products means all kinds of things have been rediscovered from the lower shelf of the drugstore, for a while it was Egyptian Magic, a cream that’s been on the market since 1991. Its crowded label and low-tech website pitch a certain authenticity against the sleekly designed elite beauty brands.

It also has a bit of an odd mythos written on the label, claiming it is:

“made with the blessings and guidance of our ancestors and with the following pure ingredients: Olive Oil, Bees Wax, Honey, Bee Pollen, Royal Jelly, Bee Propolis & Divine Love.”

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(Wacky origin stories and a strange message on the label is a huge part of Dr Bronner’s appeal too, and its a perennial of the “old school bargain”, for the more hippie set).

But cycles of people recognising the value in old-school products mean it’s a recurring theme for coverage. Here’s the New York Times in 1981:

Vaseline? Johnson’s baby shampoo? Have they ever really gone out of fashion? To be “rediscovered” means falling from view for a while. (I’m looking forward to the rediscovery of 4711).

What else I’ve been up to: my post last week got a lot of readers, and I received emails and comments about the real identity of the picture. Several people made suggestions. I hope to follow up when I have proof.

I’m also in The Hill today, with a piece about my uncanny AI experience.

This was the photo they use for Beasley.

You’ll see the problem, when I tell you that Beasley was born in 1836 and died in 1913. Judging by the hairstyle and blouse, this picture looks to have been taken in the 1940s. The woman in the photo was NOT born in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The illustration of Beasley elsewhere online is this:

So who is the fetching brunette from the St Mary’s College webpage? I tried a reverse image search, and found more sites identifying her as Beasley.

Also some identifying her as another woman inventor, Margaret E. Knight. In fact the same photo appears in a lot of places as Knight: but it’s not her either!

Margaret E. Knight was the same generation as Beasley, dying in 1914. She invented a machine to produce flat bottomed paper bags. She was also photographed in the early 20th century:

Yet the 1940s doll is everywhere as Knight. In Youtube videos. In illustrations for teaching.

Embarrassingly, even MSNBC included the photo in a brief piece on Knight.

The picture was included (as Knight) in a Ranker list of historical hotties.

That nobody looked at the dates and thought, hold on, that can’t be right is stunning. But it makes sense for a world in which history is all a blur, everything from the time of Christ to the Coolidge administration is just some vague “olden times”. It’s a black and white photo, so it was “in the past”. Any distinction between 1840 and 1940 is flattened.

The mystery of this photo is also very much like a phenomenon in academia, where a scholar (call him scholar A) will have made a claim, many years ago. This claim gets cited, over and over again, through many books and research theses. Over the decades, the citations will be “cited by scholar B [or C, or D]” linking back to a book, each of which cites an earlier citation - none with the original source. The end of the trail leads back to scholar A. Who just stated something and everyone else ran with it.

Someone said this photo was Beasley. And thus the incorrect information spread, like a virus, across the internet. And now it’s obviously been used in classrooms all over the place.

The real woman, the one in the photo, has no identity online - beyond the fictitious role she now plays as “female inventor”. There are worse fates, I suppose, but her life - her real life - has been erased. In order to push girls into STEM, websites are pushing a fiction.

Where else I’ve been lately:

I had two reviews in the Wall Street Journal in recent days. 

Julie Satow’s WHEN WOMEN RAN FIFTH AVENUE

and Joseph Cox’s DARK WIRE

Of course murder goes back as far as humanity, but the middle-man element comes much more recently.

As someone who reads a lot of about police work and crime, I can say that independent hit men do not come up a lot in official records. They are as much a cultural invention as they are a criminal phenomenon. (They are an endless resource supplying the plot for Liam Neeson movies - there’s new one every few months).

There have been high profile assassinations throughout history, and people carried them out. We think of the world of the Medici and the Borgias in Italy, where people seemed to be knocking off their rivals at a terrifying pace. (Machiavelli believed it was a valid strategy). But largely those who did the killings were those who directly benefited from it.

For the historical assassinations we know of, which go back to the Ancient world, the killers were courtiers, wives, bodyguards. Not hired outsiders.

The word “assassin” supposedly derives from Arabic, from the same root word as hashish. The Order of Assassins were functionaries of the Crusader-era Nizari Isma'ili state, killing its political and religious foes.

Having enemies eliminated was hardly unique, but this order were more effective: hence their name continued to describe political or high profile murders. But they were in the employ of a ruler, carrying out that ruler’s goals.

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If overthinking means doubting the obvious solution in order to find a more complex (or hidden) answer, a lot of us are guilty. But not without cause. Today, the old adage of “if you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras” has been turned upside down. We’ve been told to doubt the obvious. Not least by mainstream media snafus, telling us not to notice the horses right in front of our eyes.

In Amanda Montell’s new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, she wants to explain what she sees as a chaos of irrationality, driven by the information age. According to Montell, “While magical thinking is an age-old habit, overthinking feels distinct to the modern era—a product of our innate superstitions clashing with information overload, mass loneliness, and a capitalistic pressure to “know” everything under the sun.

Belief in authority started to slide in the 1960s, it has reached a new nadir since the Iraq war, the opiod epidemic (and other prescription drug scandals), and covid. Whatever your political stripe you’ve been given reasons for skepticism. And the online realm is full of hucksters ready to play on that:plus charge you a monthly subscription. Part of the problem of course is that what gets called “disinformation” turns out next week to have more than a grain of truth to it.

It was also easier for an educated caste to maintain mystique when there were fewer of them (and they weren’t showing their own idiocy on twitter). Social media is a magic cauldron of belief, the virtual Magic 8-ball of Tiktok or Instagram: every time you visit you can be served a new influencer offering you life guidance. And a video from some random person on instagram can be just as - if not more - convincing than an interview with a medical professional, zooming into CNN from his living room.

She wants to explore “so much of the zeitgeist’s general illogic, like people with master’s degrees basing their social calendars on Mercury’s position in the cosmos, or our neighbors opting not to get vaccinated because a YouTuber in palazzo pants said it would “downgrade their DNA.”

Yet Montell is relunctant to lay this at the feet of postmodern views in education, which allow for “different ways of knowing” and people to have their “own truth”. Indeed, people with Master’s degrees are precisely the target market for many Youtube influencers. The group most likely to be seduced by a message of “you’re not among the moronic masses, falling for the big con. You’re smarter. After all, you were curious enough to come looking for the truth”. And that’s the real lure of some scams, just as it is for cults. The victims are lured in by being told they are smarter than everyone else.

Pop-up ads tell us about this “one simple trick” that will melt belly fat, or cure baldness. That the medical profession is either oblivious to this “cure” (or conniving in hiding it, because they are in cahoots with the pharmaceutical companies), are the explanations for why we are learning about this medical miracle from Tiktok and not Johns Hopkins.

Montell writes about various oddballs, including the “Manifestation Doctor”, who apparently offers paid subscribers life advice. As she notes:

“Manifestation Doctor’s rise to fame, trust in the U.S. healthcare establishment, which was supposed to keep us safe from things like deadly plagues, had fractured so severely that plenty of citizens didn’t even want conventional shrinks. They were sick to death of red tape, insurance policies, and waffling chief medical advisers in $2,000 suits. They wanted a relatable populist who spoke their language, and whom they could access for free on their phones, to tell them in certain terms that there was one big, on-purpose reason why they were feeling terrible”

The “law of attraction” has been around for a long time, at least as far back as Napoleon Hill’s various bestsellers.

It’s the idea that if you just want things hard enough they will come to you. If you put a picture of a Maserati up on your wall, and just believe hard enough, you can get that car. Its an inherently moronic (and narcissistic) worldview, but it comes back each generation in different guises: and has expanded its reach thanks to social media.

After all, we can “manifest” what we want to be thanks to photo editing and filters. We can believe that we are the facetuned and airbrushed person in our pictures. Online communities mean people can live as though the “believing” and “being” phases are one and the same. The downstream effects of this shouldn’t be underestimated.

As Montell reminds us, “In 2022, a Bloomberg survey found that 98 percent of American middle and high schoolers expressed the desire to be internet famous.” This shocking statistic shows how much this world of manifestation and influencers have become our new reality. We may be under, rather than over, thinking how this is damaging both society and our shared sense of reality. These are the kids who are driving less, dating less, in many senses living less than earlier generations.

After all, if you live in an online world where you present yourself in one way, why would you ever wish to be seen in any other? (Huddling inside living on “no contact” doordash deliveries is an option, the accelerated hikikomori of a generation)

It’s a rather disturbing paradox, of teens wanting to “influence” others but at the same time feeling the generational vibe that any unmediated human contact is an affront.

I’m reminded of the Bruce Willis film, Surrogates, where everyone stays at home behind a computer screen while androids of themselves (perfect in appearance and un-aging) go about their daily lives. We’re not at the android stage yet, but we have social media projecting perfection while we hide our imperfect selves at home.

I’ve probably spent more than six months on ships, when I add it up. Which means I spend quite a bit of time thinking about ocean travel (if you want any cruise tips, drop me a line).

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In the days of ocean liners, old movies showed people with pets on board, hence my illustration above. I’ve heard of disability support dogs on ships, but I’ve never seen one (Cunard will take pets on their New York - Southampton route but they have to stay in cages in the pet area).

The wifi out here is patchy, but I get headlines floating up my phone screen from where it has managed to grab snatches of signal overnight. So I feel oddly disconnected. My podcast subscriptions pile up (undownloaded), my substack inbox fills. I’ll probably post this and have to wait and see what happens.

But travelling like this makes one appreciate distances, distances that get blurred and distorted when you’re packed into an airline seat with a Tom Cruise movie and a Xanax. There’s a different sense of knowing you’re literally thousands of miles from anywhere.

Where else I’ve been: I wrote about Rachel Gross’ book Shopping All The Way To The Woods for the Wall St Journal.

I read a lot about crime, and cops, and how the cultures of criminality evolve.

Today Sam Bankman Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison. The judge cited his lack of remorse for his massive (massive) fraud. But it’s always a tough one - how to punish a financial crime vs crimes against the person. There are stabbers and rapists who get less than 25 years. Bankman Fried is a crook, but is he worse than a child molester? (Or to put it another way, who would I feel safer living next door to?).

The pendulum has been swinging away from long sentences for many crimes, with many advocating for diversion programs, ways to keep criminals out of prison. It’s hard to square that with a non-violent first offender getting a long sentence. But I doubt the reformers will be out protesting for Bankman Fried.

This morning I was speaking about pirates, and how the piracy that evolved in the 1600s was at least partly a response to incentives (there were valuable ships available to steal, and a good chance of outrunning/evading what limited legal structures existed).

Much financial crime follows this model - from robbing strangers to embezzling from their workplace. People think they won’t get caught, and/or are surrounded by others whose moral compass tells them what they are doing is ok. (If you join up with pirates, the peer pressure is likely to be pro-piracy).

For someone like Bankman Fried, he received adulation (helped along by his generous political donations). People told him what he was doing was right and amazing and at the new frontier of tech and finance and all the usual Silicon Valley BS. Plenty of other weirdos have stumbled into a fortune.

Of course he didn’t stumble, he in fact seems to have a very focused worldview. An odd one, to be sure, but zealously held. I wrote about Bankman Fried when he was first arrested, and how his ponzi scheme was much like the old chain letter.

But the licensing, the permission he received - from those who are no doubt running fast to distance themselves from him now - was part of the issue. He was cheered on.

Which brings me back to old school piracy. Where there were pirates (bad, boo!) and there were privateers (also pirates, but pirates with permission slips). Bankman Fried got as far as he did because his message was not “I’m going to make a fortune and party with beautiful women” (he was living in a bizarre polycule), it was “I’m going to right the world’s wrongs through effective altruism”. It was a message that appealed to a lot of people, particularly in the tech world, which is full of the kind of individuals who write lengthy autistic posts about how the world would just be so much better if everyone would get with their “logical” worldview. Mostly they are harmless, but in Bankman Fried we saw truly weaponized the “reddit rationalist” worldview.

A 25 year sentence (no doubt to be appealed) of course is meant to deter those who would think to do the same thing.

Which brings us back to what we choose to deter (and what we choose to tolerate). Sam Bankman Fried was encouraged by society. Who else are we encouraging?

I’d never really thought of them anywhere else. There’s a picture of me somewhere, during a visit to Yosemite, looking especially tiny - even for a small girl - next to one of the redwood giants.

But there are also 500,000 of their kin just treeing away, doing whatever they do, in the United Kingdom.

They arrived thanks to Victorian naturalists and gardeners, who liked to plant exotic trees. Of course they weren’t alone, in terms of species moved to new places - for good and bad reasons.

Sometimes people thought the introduction would be useful in that climate. That’s why there are Eucalyptus trees all over California and the Iberian peninsula (they are native to Australia).

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Sometimes people just thought it was pretty and would make a nice addition: see those azaelia bushes in your garden.

Sometimes people thought something could be useful and it just got out of hand.

In the case of giant sequoias, they’re not the “getting out of hand” type. They’re not sprawling across the landscape like Japanese knotweed.

In fact, so quietly were they going about their business that nobody even realised til now there were half a million of them. But I guess if you live to be two thousand, you learn to take things slow.

What else I’ve been doing: I dropped into the Jimmy Malone show on IHeartRadio, which was great fun!

Check it out here.

I also wrote for JSTOR Daily about Benjamin Franklin and the marbling of banknotes.

It was a few years ago I saw someone say the difference between the 1950s and now was the reaction to hearing the doorbell ring.

1950s: Ooh, I wonder who that could be?

Now: WHO THE HELL IS THAT?!

Any unanticipated contact, even from someone you know, feels like an imposition. The drop-in? Forget it.

Much like people in the 1950s were happy to have their address and phone number shared with everyone in their city, in a big fat book that was delivered every year, while now such information sharing is called “doxxing”. We have our guard up against anyone finding us, even as we put more of our lives online for others to see.

But of course people in the 1950s hadn't already had 10 people at their door that day, lying about who they were and trying to pull a scam.

Psychologically, if not literally, that's where we all are now.

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These might seem like two separate phenomena, but I’ve come to realize these narratives twist together.

Rosenfield described how Ozempic seems like “cheating” when it comes to weight loss. (I've heard the same arguments made for gastric bands and liposuction). Weight loss is meant to be hard, and to those who struggle with counting calories, a diet injection seems like an unfair short cut. Looking good is meant to represent effort and discipline. (Not that it always does, it’s just supposed to. Indeed, one of the selling points of “smart lipo” is that it's slow process means you can apparently pass off the effect off as the result of dieting and exercise and so not admit to having had assistance)

Rosenfield writes about her own experience maintaining an extreme regimen for the purposes of bodybuilding and getting down to a very low body fat percentage. She was only permitted to have sugar straight after a workout in a very small prescribed quantity. This was a diet composed by her trainer, to manage macros and calories, to terrifying exactitude.

Few of us have the capacity to maintain such a regime, or a personal trainer to create one. Nonetheless, many people today do have food rules and taboos that they create themselves. Historically, dietary restrictions tended to dictated by religious doctrine. You didn’t eat this, or eat anyting at certain times, because those were the rules of your faith. More recently, with the increase of food intolerances and allergies, some people need to avoid certain foods so as not to die1.

But aversion/allergy/aviodance/taboo all seem to be blurred. (for example: those avoiding gluten by choice are a much larger number than those who have an actual celiac disease or diagnosed intolerance).

Among people with self-selected restrictions, the foods avoided seem to be (variously): meat, bread, dairy products “processed foods”, refined sugar, MSG, “additives”, “carbs”, “anything that's not organic”. (How any of the above categories are actually defined tends to vary from person to person).

Being able to afford to turn things down is a luxury - and being able to afford only organic food is a brag in its own way. Such selective diets also reflect perversely our world of abundance: in earlier generations people didn’t turn their nose up at anything that would add some calories to their day.

The term for this, “Orthorexia” was coined a few years ago: like anorexia, but an obsession with only eating the correct things. If you scratch the surface, these very very specific dietary rules start to look a lot like a cover for an eating disorder.

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Which in itself reflects our conflicted and contradictory views on weight loss. Those of us who grew up in the era of supermodels and heroin chic will recall the insane standards pushed out by the press. This is what we were told was “fat”.

Against this we got the “body positivity” movement. Heavier models appeared on catwalks and magazine covers. Fat shaming was no longer acceptable. So nobody wants to admit that they're slimming.

In a psychological pincer movement, we shouldn’t talk about wanting to be thin but we want it still.

A woman in the early 1980s would have ordered a salad or bought slimfast because she was slimming (see my earlier post). Now she just eats only green things because they’re organic, or fit some other convenient definition of permissable in her food cosmology. (She’s still losing 5lbs though).

Admitting that you are dieting, or needing to diet, or want to diet itself is seen as shameful or embarrassing, because diet culture is bad, diet culture is wrong. You're naturally thin. And it’s probably easy to believe that if it just so happens you eat hardly anything for other reasons.

Meanwhile, these obsessive food restrictions get mixed in the public mind with genuine allergies, because often people with their own baroque food regime will tell restaurants for example, that they are allergic. And this contributes in turn to restaurants and other people not taking allergies seriously.

Reddit is full of people posting about the time that someone tried to slip them the food that they avoid, like tricking vegetarians into eating meat (or George Costanza putting lobster in the scrambled eggs of a woman who kept kosher). In some horrifying cases, even giving dangerous allergens to people as some sort of test.

Meanwhile, people do suffer from actual allergic reactions (sometimes fatal), often involving restaurants, who it seems in a lot of cases, were fairly cavalier about the notion of allergies altogether.

Sometimes it seems like they don’t believe allergies are a real thing, and this can be cultural (in parts of the world where peanuts are in everything, peanut allergies don’t exist to the same extent as the do today in the West).

I lived for a time in Southeast Asia and regularly encountered “vegetarian” meals which I would then query and be told “It’s just a little bit of pork” (!!). Or worse, the dish rojak, which is fruit-based, would be listed as a “vegetarian” option, when it is made with a shrimp-based sauce. I’m not allergic to shellfish (fortunately) but this kind of flexible use of the term vegetarian is also the vagueness around allergen-free.

Thinking allergies are some kind of Western affectation (rather than something that could be fatal) seems to be one piece of what’s going on. People who have whole rafts of “dietary restrictions” that are more like preferences than actual allergies seems to muddy the waters.

In another way this has been a mixed blessing for those with genuine need for special diets. The numbers of people avoiding gluten for whatever reason have grown, thus increasing the market viability of gluten-free products. The allergen-free section of supermarkets has expanded from a tiny shelf to whole aisles. Partly this is obviously due to a rise in childhood allergies, but also due to a lot of other people selecting their diets around exclusion. The downside of course, is having much of the public regard allergies as a lifestyle choice, not a medical need.

And labels like organic and “fair trade” have turned out to be another nexus on which people can judge their moral righteousness in what they choose to eat. A newer version of ascribing moral values to food (I’m sure you’ve known people who talk of chocolate cake as “naughty” and eating salad as “being good”). I meet people who are “eating clean” (rather than what, eating dirty?), a spectacularly hazy concept that just means “better than you”.

It’s just a total coincidence that clean = thin.

Updates:

You may recall the Crooked House pub fiasco, which I discussed here

Now these vandals are being forced by the courts to rebuild the pub. Brick by crooked brick.

HAHAHAHAHAHA good.

Where else I’ve been:

Writing about condensed milk for JSTOR Daily.