Markets / Econ
People in and around the Trump orbit have long talked about overhauling the “Supplementary Leverage Ratio” — one of the most controversial aspects of the post-2008 financial reform package — and the OIRA notice was firm confirmation that this is now coming, and probably coming soon.
Thirdly, this could still take a loooooooooong time to happen. Despite the OIRA notice, the reality of US rulemaking is a bit like watching Man Utd play: soul-crushingly grim, unremittingly tedious, unbelievably messy, and by the end of it you’ll wish everyone involved had suffered an injury.
In other words, all those swap spread trades could be languishing in financial purgatory for some time.
The Fed vs. the World: Our Central Bank’s Unique Distrust of Private Markets
One central bank stands as an outlier, preferring governmental to private sector trading in setting short-term rates: the Federal Reserve.
As the Fed foresaw in March 2008, operating monetary policy using a floor system has degraded the interbank market. Previously, the Fed would provide the banking system with the quantity of reserve balances the system needed in aggregate. At the end of the day, when banks got a clear view of their likely end-of-day reserve balances, those with excess reserves would lend to those short of reserves in the federal funds market.
Banks did not need to keep a stock of reserves sufficient to meet their liquidity needs in all foreseeable situations but could instead meet unexpected needs by borrowing in the fed funds market….As a consequence, the Fed was able to be much smaller. Before the GFC, reserve balances were normally $25 billion.
Now, those trading desks and fed funds brokers are largely gone. While the repo market is active, its purpose is to provide funding for securities holdings; it does not operate at the end of the day. Reserve balances are now more than 100 times higher, at $3.2 trillion.
US dollar’s slide in April 2025: the role of FX hedging
In the case of Asian investors, there are indications that in recent years some have reduced the hedge ratios for their foreign currency portfolios. For instance, the hedge ratio for major Japanese life insurers declined from about 60% in 2021 to 40% in 2024 (Bank of Japan (2025)). As of late 2024, Taiwanese life insurers had hedged about 65% of their holdings, which according to estimates based on insurers’ financial reports was near historic lows (Bank of America Global Research (2025)). Some pension funds in Europe have also reportedly reduced their hedge ratios in recent years (Atkins (2025)).
Intraday movements in the dollar, along with intraday movements in bond prices, suggest that hedging by Asian investors played a role in the weakening of the dollar in April/May. As shown in Graph 4.B, most of the dollar’s depreciation in this period occurred during Asian trading hours. During those same hours, US Treasury securities posted gains (Graph 4.C). This suggests that the dollar’s depreciation was not correlated with the selling of US assets, at least not at a high frequency and not US government bonds
U.S. Primary Energy Production, Consumption, and Exports Increased in 2024
Germany is to the Euro zone what the US was to the world: a weak hegemon. The umbrella of protection it provides to the Euro zone is its fiscal space, allowing highly indebted countries like Italy and Spain to keep borrowing from global capital markets at low interest rates, when - without German help - they’d have been shut out long ago.
The problem with this - as in the US case - is that it’s politically unsustainable. The German economy was already struggling before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and it’s really struggling now. The rise of the AfD - like the rise of MAGA - is a symptom of this and will continue until Germany’s weak hegemon status ends: Germany will demand payment for its umbrella of fiscal protection and - unless that payment happens - this umbrella will be withdrawn.
Trump Has a Plan to Remake the Housing-Finance System. It’s baffling to many lawmakers and experts. The plan, best I can tell is:
Phase 1—Privatization, Phase 2—??, Phase 3—Profit! Featuring Bill Ackman in the role of an Underpant Gnome.
Is Millennium Worth $14 Billion?
Taking the $14bn and dividing it by the total $1.7bn net income would give a PE of 8x, which is the bottom end of where an investment bank like Goldman Sachs may trade and there is an argument that Millennium looks more like a Goldman than a Blackstone.
Given the lack of publicly available data, this is a back-of-the-envelope analysis rather than a scientific valuation. The billion-dollar question is what changes Millennium is making to the fee structure as part of this process. Will they be charging both the management fee and the performance fee to create a distinct earning stream? Will they hike the management fee further, after all, it is a rounding error relative to the level of pass-throughs.
Multi-Manager Hedge Funds Escalate Talent-War ‘Arms Race’ With Nine-Figure Pay Packages. Granted, I’m jealous, but this would be retarded even if I was benefiting.
At the centre of the latest hiring frenzy was Kevin Liu, a young tech-focused stock picker previously at Marshall Wace, who recently became one of Wall Street’s most sought-after recruits. Liu was eventually signed by Point72 early this year after a heated bidding battle with Citadel, Millennium, and Balyasny Asset Management. Industry sources likened the scramble for Liu to an art auction at Christie’s, with Steve Cohen himself stepping in to seal the deal, offering mentorship and a five-year contract reportedly worth tens of millions.
The Hidden Costs of Modern Monetary Policy
These policies result in major transfers of wealth and risk across various groups in society. As we detail in our new book, "Crisis Cycle", with our co-author John Cochrane.
With QE central banks take “duration risk” out of private markets and place it on the public balance-sheet. When inflation surged in 2021-2022 and rates rose dramatically, bondholders had already locked in gains by selling to central banks. The losses fell on taxpayers.
Each crisis generates new interventions without credible exit strategies, making the next crisis more likely. Emergency measures become permanent, distorting incentives and concentrating risks. Outside major crises, central banks must return to small balance sheets, ensuring parliaments and governments, not independent central banks, make all important decisions about redistributing risks and wealth through public balance sheets.
Alternative Investments: Big Promises, Questionable Payoffs!
As funds have increased their allocations to alternative investments, drawn by the perceived gains on paper and the success of early adopters, it is becoming increasingly clear that the results from the move have been underwhelming. In short, the actual effects on returns and risk from adding alternative investments to portfolios are not matching up to the promise, leading to questions of why and where the leakage is occurring.
When alternative investing first became accessible to institutional investors, the presumption was that market-beating opportunities abounded in private markets, and that hedge fund, private equity and venture capital managers brought superior abilities to the investment game. That may have been true then, but that perception has faded for many reasons. First, as the number of funds and money under management in these investment vehicles has increased, the capacity to make easy money has also faded, and in my view, the average venture capital, private equity or hedge fund manager is now no better or worse than the average mutual fund manager.
What Are Inflation Surprises Telling Us About Tariffs?
In 2021, the Fed told us not to worry when inflation rose, saying it would be transitory. Now the Fed is telling us to worry even as inflation has slowed, saying more inflation is coming and it might be persistent.
The most logical explanation for the modest signs of tariffs on consumer inflation is that it’s too soon to see the effects. But that’s not the only possible explanation. The declines in apparel consumer prices in recent months also suggest greater demand sensitivity and some tariff cost sharing by foreign producers. That would imply a smaller boost to inflation from tariffs, as opposed to simply a delay in the boost.
Uncle Sam Is a Terrible Board Member
In short, Uncle Sam — in particular, the president — now has permanent influence over the future of U.S. Steel, and even worse, that influence is purely political and not even economic. One doesn’t need paeans to Milton Friedman’s shareholder revolution to realize that adding board directors with entirely divergent interests from the well-being of the company he or she directs is a tragedy in the making.
Yet, it’s not just the steel industry we should be worrying about, but the wider precedent this deal sets. With the expansion of the U.S. government’s authority to investigate and approve foreign transactions under the FIRRMA law passed in 2018, will other deals suddenly have Uncle Sam cozying up at the board table, ready to offer his parochial perspective, nay, commands? Unproductive job creation in battleground election states will be prioritized more than ever before — an outcome we’ve already seen in the defense industrial base.
Covenant Lite #24: Ozempic for Bank Balance Sheets
Iran/Foreign
Incoming from outer space: The geo-military radicalism of Iran v. Israel 2025
This strangely asymmetric mode of long-range warfare, with expensive air forces squaring off against cheaper one-way cruise and ballistic missiles, first emerged in modern history over eighty years ago, in 1944 over the skies of Western Europe, when Nazi Germany countered the overwhelming superiority of the British and American airforces with their V1 and V2 rockets. The V1 and V2 are the ancestors of today’s drones and ballistic missiles.
According to Israeli estimates, its interceptions of incoming missiles during an intensive bombardment costs as much as $285 million per night. Each Arrows 3 interceptor is priced at $ 2 million. And more importantly than price, it is physical stocks and production capacity that are limited. Even sharing the production runs on a 50/50 basis the military-industrial establishments of Israel and the US cannot keep up with demand for the interceptors. According to American analysts, the most pressing question in coming weeks will be whether Iran or Israel runs out of rockets first.
If diplomacy and Israel’s efforts fall short, Trump should bomb Fordow to end the war
The Israel-Iran war is coming down to a single question: What should be done about the hardened Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow? If Israel lacks the capability to destroy it, and if a diplomatic solution is not realistic, then US President Donald Trump should authorize the US bombing of Fordow and other remaining nuclear program infrastructure in Iran.
But doing so must come with a condition: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declares Israel’s objectives accomplished and ends the war.
Why Iran’s Nuclear Program Cannot Be Dismantled from the Air
…can airpower—supported by advanced ISR, precision-guided munitions, and even U.S. bunker-busting weapons—permanently dismantle a hardened and decentralized nuclear program? The answer is no. That remains true even if the United States committed its full arsenal of deep-penetration munitions and stealth aircraft. Iran’s nuclear system is built not just to resist physical strikes, but to survive them—strategically, legally, and doctrinally.
What Iran now possesses is structural latency. This is more than technical know-how—it’s the ability to reconstitute a nuclear program after large-scale physical degradation. Designs, enriched stockpiles, rotor manufacturing, conversion tools, simulation models, and trained scientists are spread across the Iranian state.
At best, the airstrikes will buy time. At worst, they will destroy inspection leverage, push the program further underground—both physically and politically—and risk triggering the very breakout they aim to prevent. They offer the appearance of resolution, not its substance. Denial, if it is to be real, must go beyond temporary disruption. It must mean verified removal of capacity, control of personnel, and physical access to infrastructure. The hard truth is this: if disarmament is the goal—as President Trump insists when he says Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon—then airstrikes alone won’t achieve it.
The Right Path to Regime Change in Iran. Neocons gonna neocon.
Iran belongs to the Iranians. They are the only ones who can in the end determine the direction of their country. They have taken to the streets in 1906, 1922, and 1979, and they can be counted on to do so again. All the United States and Israel can do is weaken the regime and accentuate its vulnerabilities. The Islamic Republic has never faced a crisis like the one unleashed by this month’s attacks. It’s a great irony that Israel—disparaged relentlessly by the Iranian leadership as a savage, illegitimate colonial settler state aiming to humble Muslims everywhere—may, just possibly, have opened the door for a new future for the long-suffering Iranian people.
Tic-Toc No. 6 on the War on Iran
But the reserves of missile for defense like Israel uses are counted in hundreds while the reserves of ballistic missiles Iran is using are numbered in thousands. Logistically and financially it is a fight that Israel can not win.
Its only hope is to involve the U.S. directly into a fight with Iran. But there is nothing in it strategically for the U.S. to win. Russian and China will not be sorry when the U.S. gets again bogged down in the Middle East.
Still it is of course possible that Trump's instincts will fail and that he will order an outright attack on Iran. Seymour Hersh's sources claim that the U.S. will strike during this weekend:
“This is a report on what is most likely to happen in Iran, as early as this weekend, according to Israeli insiders and American officials I’ve relied upon for decades. It will entail heavy American bombing. I have vetted this report with a longtime US official in Washington, who told me that all will be “under control” if Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “departs.” Just how that might happen, short of his assassination, is not known. There has been a great deal of talk about American firepower and targets inside Iran, but little practical thinking, as far I can tell, about how to remove a revered religious leader with an enormous following.”
Loose Nukes in Iran Is a Scenario U.S. Special Operators Have Been Training For
Special operations forces are also well-positioned to help intercept high-value targets on the move, including nuclear material that might make its way out of Iran, or threaten to do so, as the conflict with Israel continues. This could potentially include operations on land or at sea.
This is not speculative, but reflects real mission scenarios the U.S. military is actively prepared to carry out. For instance, roughly a year ago, members of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment partnered with a specialized non-special operations unit, called Nuclear Disablement Team 1 (NDT 1), to conduct an exercise consisting of a simulated raid under hostile fire on a decommissioned pulse radiation facility serving as a mock underground nuclear site. As another one of many examples, NDT 1 teamed up with Green Berets from the Army’s 5th Special Operations Group for an exercise in 2023 involving a mock air assault on the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant in Alabama and a simulated shutdown of the facility.
Economic & Geopolitical History of Nigeria Part II
If someone argued that “Africans didn’t have writing before Europeans arrived”, while true for some African regions, Northern Nigeria was not one of them. The existence of Islamic law courts, royal correspondence, tax records, and Qur’anic schooling in Kanem-Bornu or Hausaland proves otherwise. Also, if someone claimed “Sub-Saharan Africa had no contact with the outside world until Europeans”. One could mention Kanem Bornu’s Idris Aloma’s correspondence with Murad III of Ottoman Turkey.
But there’s another narrative — that one shouldn’t romanticize the past. This era was also defined by dynastic violence, state failure and endemic raiding. Many of Nigeria’s modern challenges—ethnic conflict, weak institutions, military juntas, coups. and regional fragmentation—predate colonialism. From Kanem’s succession crises & military rule, to Kano and Katsina’s endless wars, to the Kebbi-Bornu battles and Jukun slave raids, the 14th to 16th centuries were marked by instability and violence long before European conquest. These weren’t peaceful empires — they were brutal, contested, and unstable.
The answer lies in Japan’s mixed modern relationship with the worlds of surveillance and espionage: promising beginnings followed by transformation into the handmaiden of authoritarianism in the mid-20th century, and finally a steady but highly controversial recovery between 1945 and the present day.
Politics / Culture
Why I’m not a rationalist (clean version)
Many of them seem to be constitutionally incapable of saying things in a straightforward manner.
—It’s not picking your battles, it’s Kolmogorov complicity.
—It’s not something people agree on, it’s a Schelling point.
—You’re not stuck between a rock and a hard place, you’re in an inadequate equilibrium under a Molochian system.
—You’re not challenging your assumptions, you're updating your priors.
—You're not copying anyone, you're under a Girardian mimetic paradigm
—It’s not reading the vibes, it’s a Straussian analysis.
The Amish Fertility Miracle (Part 2)
Across thousands of distinct cultural groups around the world, only a handful have rejected the dominant post-Enlightenment status hierarchy in favor of large families and traditional values. I’m not aware of any that managed it without significant insulation from the dominant culture. That tells me that the short-term incentive structure of modern society is more powerful than any historical cultural norms, and there is no passive solution that doesn’t involve collapse of that incentive structure and the civilization it rests on.
My personal opinion is that too much obsession with this issue is probably a waste of time. Again, I don’t think any “solution” we come up with is likely to be less dangerous than the problem itself. I expect things to play out over a long period of time, and for the population decline to eventually degrade our interconnected, high-tech global civilization.
Trump’s Continuing Illegal Refusal to Enforce the TikTok Ban
The Take Care Clause says that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Clause has a protean quality. It is the source of the president’s duty to comply with the law and a source of the president’s power to interpret and enforce the law. It is also the basis for the president’s discretion over law enforcement, criminal and civil. As the Court said in Trump v. United States, quoting Transunion, “Under Article II, the Executive Branch possesses authority to decide ‘how to prioritize and how aggressively to pursue legal actions against defendants who violate the law.’”
And yet there are limits. The Supreme Court’s classic statement on limits came in 1838 in Kendall v. United States. There the Court stated: “To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed implies a power to forbid their execution is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible.” It denied that the Take Care Clause gave the president a “dispensing power”—“the authority to license illegal conduct”—or “power to forbid [the laws’] execution.” More recently, the Court in Heckler v. Chaney (1985) stated that federal agencies cannot “‘consciously and expressly adopt[] a general policy’ that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.” And the Court said in United States v. Texas (2023) in a standing context that “an extreme case of non-enforcement arguably could exceed the bounds of enforcement discretion.
Is Embracing AI Intellectual or Anti-Intellectual?
What is becoming apparent is that while intellectuals and anti-intellectuals have co-existed in higher education for a long time, it may finally be time to go their separate ways. The reality we are facing is a rapid, irreversible shift in the educational production function. The cost of producing mediocre-to-good prose, standard analysis, and passing-grade problem-solving has collapsed to near zero.
The majority of institutions – public universities and less-resourced private colleges – already see they have no choice but to integrate AI at every level. AI proponents will win by default here. These institutions will use AI to deliver instruction at lower cost and offer more efficient credentialing. The value proposition is efficiency and scale.
The hand-wringers who survive will land at artisanal or boutique institutions featuring small, Socratic seminars, intense faculty mentoring, and “AI-proof” assessments (e.g., oral exams, closed-book handwritten tests, high-stakes live debates). They will offer an expensive, “human-centric” experience, where intellectualism is the core part of their brand identity. Their graduates will be able to think, write, and perform without a machine co-pilot.
James Frey’s New Novel “Next to Heaven” Is as Bad as It Sounds
Writers of autofiction have been accused of trying to preëmpt criticism by couching their work in self-awareness. That’s not the play here. What preëmpts criticism of “Next to Heaven” is simply how bad the book is: one character goes for a run and “can feel his virality flowing through his veins.” (I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing!) On the other hand, a goal of autofiction, which often attends closely to small details, is to cultivate exquisite awareness in the reader. And it’s true that, while reading “Next to Heaven,” I sometimes thought I could feel individual cells in my body trying to die. This happened, for instance, when a character referred to his penis as a “yogurt cannon” and again when a character called herself a “piece of white creamy sexual chocolate.”
The SALT Caucus’s Selective Outrage
Even today, New York SALT caucus members are still encouraging Albany’s spending from afar. Three SALT caucus members—Nicole Malliotakis, Andrew Garbarino, and Nick LaLota—signed a letter to House leadership refusing to support “any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations.”
Decades of generous federal aid encouraged Albany to boost its side of the Medicaid spending ledger. Federal cash aside, it’s the biggest part of New York’s state government spending. Today, Medicaid covers more than a third of the population, and hundreds of thousands of people get paid by a heavily abused “home care” program. Putting the bulk of the program off-limits for structural reform shows how unserious SALT caucus members are about the state tax burden from which their constituents need relief.
Neville Roy Singham and the New Ideological Front
Neville Roy Singham is not a typical tech millionaire. After selling his progressive software firm ThoughtWorks in 2017, he did not retreat to a life of private luxury or philanthropy focused on health or education. Instead, he devoted his considerable resources to constructing a vast, international network of nonprofits, activist collectives, and media organizations. At first glance, many of these institutions appear to be conventional left-wing or anti-imperialist groups. Upon closer inspection, however, a consistent pattern emerges: they frequently promote narratives that mirror the strategic messaging of the Chinese Communist Party.
Compassion for the Homeless Demands Coercion
When activists like Aaron Carr provide figures blaming “the problem of homelessness” on the cost of housing, they’re performing a neat sleight of hand, conflating the experience of temporarily having nowhere to live (literally, homelessness) with chronic street dysfunction among a small permanent underclass (“the homeless”). People involved in the former far, far outnumber the latter but nobody complains about them because they don’t make trouble for anyone. The problem of “homelessness” (temporarily not having anywhere to live) is solved inside of six months for 75% of the people who experience it, while “the homeless” (the permanent street-dwelling underclass) remains an intractable issue immune to billions in spending on a growing cottage industry of faux solution peddlers and paper pushers.
The permanent street underclass will not snap out of it and accept shelter and treatment of their own volition. They must be forced: forced to get clean of drugs, forced into psychiatric evaluation and treatment, forced to sleep in a shelter instead of in a tent. They won’t do it on their own, and we won’t make them, so there they sit or lie, day after day, and no amount of money will change that. Talk to anyone with a relative or close friend living on the street, someone who suffers from schizophrenia or crippling addiction, and they will tell you they have begged the relevant authorities to intervene, to force their loved ones to get the help they need to resume a life worth living. If they’re lucky, their unfortunate son or brother does something serious enough to actually wind up in prison, which is the only circumstance that can temporarily interrupt their self-destructive behavior.
Karen Read, the OJ Simpson of Massachusetts
Read’s Lexus showed her car driving backwards at 24 miles per hour, which seems awfully fast for reverse in a snowstorm, for about 60 feet at the very residential street address where the next morning she and two women found an unresponsive O’Keefe with a fractured skull. At the very time this happened, O’Keefe’s phone stopped moving from 12:32 a.m. until the discovery of his body at 6:04 a.m.
Science / Tech / Health
Fear and Self-Loathing in Silicon Valley
There used to be an undercurrent of self-loathing in tech, or at least a twinge of shame. We sat behind desks and typed secret codes into a computer, and then became the richest professional enclave in history because of it. Everyday employees were paid embarrassingly well for doing so little; tycoons were paid embarrassingly well for breaking so much. It was gauche to talk about it, so we pretended it wasn’t true.
That shame seems gone. Perhaps that’s healthy? Perhaps that’s self-care? Perhaps that’s just a more convenient belief to hold—it is easy to get a man to believe something, when his salary feels more deserved when he does. Or perhaps this is just an industry maturing, from a quirky upstart, through its ideological adolescent, and into a more pragmatic middle age.
These may well be good things; they may be progress; they may be the application layer of the gentle singularity. Or they might also be the first dominos in a long cascade of unintended consequences. What happens when stores are run by inscrutable electronic managers? When we all have personal assistants doing our chores? When we can conjure worlds on a whim? When we forget how to think? What happens when we request that thousands of 20-year olds reinvent entire industries, for the sake of their own entrepreneurial aspirations first, for our returns second, and for the consequences third?
A new paper has shown early evidence that using LLMs will, over time, make you stupider. Smartly titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” (academics - you have to market yourselves!), the study took EEG measurements of the brain activity of three groups of essay-writers - LLM users, search-engine users, and “brain only” writers. The meat of the conclusion is that “EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use.”
In short, using LLMs to think for you makes you worse at thinking. It’s an intuitively obvious conclusion that, like the Apple “LLMs aren’t actually thinking” paper from last week, has the AI Booster community in a bit of a shambles.
Sky Wars: The Race for Drone Dominance
Unfortunately, the western world has some catching up to do. For years, China was the only real innovator in drone hardware. I’d say we were asleep at the wheel, but in reality, US regulations stifled the industry. Now, spurred by the urgency of war, ten years of technological progress are being compressed into one.
Innovators in Ukraine and Russia are leading the way. But a motivated talent pool with plenty of capital in the US and elsewhere is sprinting to build next-gen drone tech. That includes AI swarms, microwave weapons, lasers, automated turrets, electronic warfare systems and American factories that pump out defensive drones by the thousands.
The Problem With Early Cancer Detection
This paradox reveals a central flaw in our current model of cancer screening. We have become adept at locating cancer’s physical presence—its corporeal form—but remain largely blind to its character, its behavior, its future. We employ genomic assays and histopathological grading, but many early-stage tumors remain biologically ambiguous. They might be the kind of early cancers that surgery can cure. They might be slow-growing and unlikely to cause harm. Or, most concerning, they might already have metastasized, rendering local intervention moot. Three possibilities—yet we often cannot tell which we’re confronting.
A Primer on the Current State of Longevity Research
Did the therapeutic focus on sirtuins amount to much?
TLDR: The whole sirtuin theory was losing steam by the time I started reading about it a few years ago. It’s only gotten worse. Nothing particularly useful has come from sirtuin-focused therapies, and likely nothing ever will.
Has cellular reprogramming yielded anything useful?
TLDR: Cellular reprogramming has shown promise in animal studies. However no therapies have reached clinical trials yet. One is close though!
What’s the state of biological clocks?
TLDR: Not great, not terrible. Lots of work left to do. Everyday consumers probably shouldn’t get their biological age tested.
How Exactly Did Hunter-Gatherers Sleep?
The earliest bed that has been discovered dates from around 200,000 years ago. What did it look like? Well, it was of course not a box spring with padded headboard and lovely quilt. It was rather less comfortable and consisted of grass, branches and leaves, and it was located in a cave. You might think that such a place was no fun to doze off in at all, but there is more. Next to the influence of changing weather circumstances, strong variations in temperature and the possible presence of dangers, insects terrorized primal man at night. How do we know? Insect-repellent plants covered the prehistoric bed! If you are an artist who portrays our primeval relatives, if you happen to read this, and if you then decide to draw a primeval man with a silly look in his eyes, I demand that you erase your drawing immediately! They were actually very resourceful types, our ancestors. That insecticide, by the way, was not the only extraordinary finding. Archaeologists found ashes in the various layers of the bed. Primal humans had rather unconventional methods of changing their beds and chasing away insects. They regularly set fire to their beds after sleeping on them. This probably had an effect not only on the creatures that were already crawling around in their bed, but also on any new intruders. Most crawling insects cannot move properly through fine powder because it blocks their breathing and causes dehydration.
our tacit reliance on facial cues when judging competence in the workplace is just another outcome of adaptive mechanisms being shoehorned into (evolutionarily novel) modern problems.
It turns out that while we may be godawful at figuring out whether, say, it’s John or Mike who is more likely to land those private equity deals just by looking at their LinkedIn profile pics, we’re preternaturally skilled when it comes to knowing, from face pics alone, that Ngaola will outhunt Madura on the savanna woodlands of Africa.
..until the Victorian era (1837-1901), there was no conception of a dog breed. Instead, they were often referred to as races of dogs (a word that still is used to refer to breed in several languages). As Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton note in their excellent book, The Invention of the Modern Dog:
“The names given to varieties derived from where they came from geographically, as with the Newfoundland, the St. Bernard, the spaniel (Spain), and the Skye terrier [the Isle of Skye]; or what they did, as with the foxhound, pointer, retriever, or sheep dog.”
Dogs, then, were defined by location or function, not form. The classifications were therefore rather broad. In 1576, John Caius1—an eminent royal physician and the second founder of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge—wrote the charmingly titled work Of Englishe Dogges, the diuersities, the names, the natures and the properties. In it, he claimed there were but five varieties of English dogges:
Hunting beasts
Those good at finding game
Gentle comforting companions
Farmers’ assistants with livestock
The “mongrels and rascal sort”
Dog breeds could even be created by one person. Jack Russell Terriers were created by, you guessed it, Jack Russell—a Victorian parson who bought a dog named “Trump” (I’m not making this up) from a milkman in Oxford. Every Jack Russell Terrier is descended from that dog. All Border Collies, including my beloved dog Zorro, are descended from a single exceptional sheepdog named “Old Hemp” who lived near the border of Scotland and England.
