Posts

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey has already opened, and I still haven’t gone to see it. I probably won’t reread The Iliad or The Odyssey beforehand either, and I certainly won’t reread Ulysses — Joyce’s hundred-year-old rewrite of the same walk home — just because a director spent a reported quarter billion dollars and two years of 70mm IMAX film getting the wine-dark sea right. I’ll do what most adults do with the classics: let the adaptation take the first pass. But the more useful confession isn’t about the film. Even without a fresh reading, I already know what’s changed in how I encounter Troy. It isn’t the plot. It’s the algorithm I run over it. …

Run a simple substitution: everywhere the word “Buddhism” appears, write “Awakeism” instead. Everywhere “Christianity” appears, write “Anointedism.” Nothing about either religion has changed — only the name, translated instead of transliterated. And yet something breaks. Awakeism sounds like a wellness retreat. Anointedism sounds like a fringe sect. The exercise costs nothing and reveals a great deal: how much of a name’s authority comes not from what it means but from the fact that it doesn’t, to English ears, mean anything at all. …

The cliché says the best things in life are free. That’s not quite right, and the imprecision matters. Trust, respect, a friend’s attention, a stranger’s blood freely given — none of these are free in the sense of costing nothing to produce; they cost reputation, time, restraint, years of behaving well when no one was checking. What they share is something sharper than “free”: they are goods whose value depends on their not being for sale. Attach a price, and the thing on the other side of the transaction stops being the thing you wanted. …

Ask a surgeon why the gallbladder came out, and the answer arrives fast, almost cheerful: you don’t really need it. That’s true in the narrow sense that a person can live, eat, and digest fat well enough without one. It’s also one of the most quietly revealing sentences in modern medicine. Cholecystectomy — removal of the gallbladder — is now among the most common abdominal operations performed in the country doing the most of them, and the organ is coming out almost always because of gallstones that track, closely, with obesity and insulin resistance. Nobody is treating a design flaw in the gallbladder. They are treating the downstream damage of a metabolic environment the organ was never built to survive, and calling the removal a fix rather than a receipt. …

For most of history, scarcity was the honest explanation for suffering. There was not enough grain, not enough land, not enough medicine, so people starved and fought over what little existed. That explanation has been quietly running out of road for decades. The world produces enough calories to feed everyone alive today several times over, and still tens of millions go hungry every year while wars that serve no one’s stated interest grind on past the point of any rational return. The bottleneck was never only what we can produce. It is what we can agree to do with it. …

I read Pedro Páramo decades ago and thought I had understood it: a haunted town, the dead murmuring to each other across timelines, memory rendered as fog. Returning to it now, a second book sits underneath the first one. Juan Rulfo’s novel is not only a feat of atmosphere. It is a social diagnosis — abuse, incest, patriarchal impunity, and the mechanism by which private violence hardens into public order. The setting is unmistakably Mexican. The grammar it describes is not. …

As a kid in Colombia I had a free subscription to La Pura Verdad — the Spanish edition of The Plain Truth, founded in 1934 by Herbert W. Armstrong and mailed out of Ambassador College in Pasadena, near Los Angeles. It was, unmistakably, evangelical literature: prophecy, end-times reasoning, a specific reading of scripture aimed at conversion. I was never a Christian. Nothing about the magazine’s theology took. And yet I kept reading it, issue after issue, because some of the articles were very good — well-researched, well-written, curious about the world in a way that had nothing to do with doctrine. …

In 1966, at a symposium called “Man the Hunter,” the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins stood up with data other people had already collected — Richard Lee’s fieldwork among the Dobe Ju/‘hoansi of the Kalahari, the Arnhem Land studies from Australia — and said the quiet part out loud. Foragers routinely described as living at the ragged edge of subsistence were, in fact, meeting their needs on something like fifteen to twenty hours of work a week, and spending the rest of their waking hours resting, talking, and doing nothing in particular. Sahlins published the argument, expanded, in Stone Age Economics (1972) under a title designed to sting: “the original affluent society.” Not affluent because foragers had much, but affluent because they wanted little and got it without the compulsion the word “work” now implies. The finding embarrassed a whole civilizational story in which agriculture and industry had liberated humanity from want. They hadn’t. They had invented a new way of being busy, and then made the busyness feel like fate. …

Luca Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping — Venetian merchants had been using it for at least a century before his 1494 treatise wrote the method down — but he did name the discipline’s real trick. Every transaction gets entered twice, once as a debit and once as a credit, and if the two columns ever fail to match, an error exists somewhere in the world the ledger describes. The genius of the system is not that it records money. It is that it manufactures a built-in alarm for reality not matching the record. Historians of science have mostly ignored this as a source of method, filing it under commerce rather than epistemology. But run the same trick on nature instead of a merchant’s warehouse, and a surprising amount of the history of discovery turns out to be exactly this: someone auditing a ledger, finding it would not close, and naming whatever was missing so it would. …

Mercantilism, the economic doctrine that ran Europe from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth, held that a nation’s wealth was measured in bullion — gold and silver in the vault, full stop. It was a doctrine built around what a ledger could hold. A ship full of spices was wealth only once it had been converted into coin; a colony was valuable only for the specie it could be made to yield. Everything that could not be weighed, stamped, and entered into a column was, for accounting purposes, not there. Adam Smith spent much of The Wealth of Nations (1776) dismantling this confusion of gold with wealth, but the instinct behind it — count what can be counted, and treat the rest as noise — outlived the theory that named it. …