Part the First: Functional Art from the Enigmatic Daunians. William Morris famously wrote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Of course, his beauty in response to the immiseration of the working class was for the English rich but nothing is perfect. Our old house is filled with books (my much better half is an indulgent, very patient woman), recycled furniture well made in North Carolina before the Neoliberal Dispensation, and functional pottery produced by local artists. We are nearing capacity for books but there is always room for more pottery. While catching up the other day I came upon Daunian kyathos: A 2,700-year-old ceramic cup from Italy decorated with an exuberant-looking, bug-eyed fellow. Indeed, bug-eyed and beautiful:
Centuries before the Romans took over southern Italy, the heel of the peninsula was occupied by the Daunians, whose unique pottery and grave markers are some of the only remains of this enigmatic group. One common archaeological discovery is the Daunian kyathos, a one-handled, painted piece of pottery that may have functioned as a ladle for mixing wine.
The Daunians did not leave any literary records, so much about their culture is unknown. They were first mentioned in ancient literature in the seventh century B.C., and they were taken over by the Romans around 275 B.C., after the end of the Pyrrhic War. The Daunians were mainly farmers and animal breeders who traded with the Greeks and the Illyrians across the Adriatic Sea in what is now Croatia.
Archaeologists excavated the Daunian city of Herdonia, in the present-day province of Foggia, for four decades and discovered that the city was one of the primary places where Daunian potters produced the “extraordinary” vessels “that rank among the finest products of pre-Roman Italian ceramics,” Popular Archaeology reported.
The Daunians’ unusual style of ceramic decoration can be seen in their take on the single-handled cup that art historians call a kyathos. The base is a small, rimmed plate about 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) in diameter, and a human figure with raised arms and wide-open eyes has been attached to the side as a handle. The figure is decorated with geometric designs, and a stylized, bird-like figure is in the middle of the base. This kyathos was found at Herdonia and is in the collection of the Civic Museum of Foggia.
I would say these vessels “rank among the finest products” produced by any human at any time. We will never know what how the Daunians used this beautiful artifact, perhaps to mix wine or medicine, but that does not matter. I have seen a fair amount of Etruscan art. We now have a reason to visit Foggia, should the opportunity ever arise. Given the current state of the world, it makes me especially proud to be a member of the species that produced this kyathos.
And everyone has a bit of archaeologist in his or her soul. Not long ago I had reason to dig up a water line in my back yard (don’t ask). I cut my hand on a broken bottle that had been discarded along with other kitchen items more than 140 years ago, when the kitchen of my house was a small separate building according to the earliest tax map I have seen. This was a very minor thing, but a link to a living past, when the antebellum houses on my street were built of un-planed 2×12 heart-pine lumber milled on the site. No termite need apply…
Part the Second: All Life Is Local. And there is one more bookstore to visit, in Wichita, Kansas, described here, On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where They Happen:
Recently Warren Farha—a devout Orthodox Christian, a soft-spoken descendant of Lebanese immigrants and merchants, a lifelong Wichitan, and, most relevantly, the founder of the marvelous Eighth Day Books—passed away after a sudden illness. News of his death ricocheted throughout numerous churches, groups, and communities—religious, literary, cultural, ethnic, and more—both local and distant. In retrospect, that kind of interconnectedness is a manifestation of Warren’s whole ecumenical and intellectual vocation, a manifestation that was made clear on the evening of Memorial Day, a couple of days after his passing. To my recollection, never in any of my conversations with Warren, nor in anything I’d ever heard him say, did he ever identify himself as a Porcher or articulate anything like a theory of localism. Yet his deeply localized work—building up a bookstore that he turned to after a family tragedy, which inspired many to both the connecting work of the sharing of words and ideas as well as the creation of communities of interest, nodes in a network that Warren gave birth to—is the very ideal of local work par excellence.
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In the space that Warren created, and in the connections those associated with him built both within and out from that space, those inputs were primarily presented in terms of God’s gifts, and the Christian writings and traditions which articulated them, and for people who struggle with the conservative elements found in such writings and traditions, there’s bound to be tension. But Warren himself once defined “ecumenism” as “a turning toward one another, looking one another in the eyes, recognizing each other as human beings made in the image of God, loving one another, and discussing our differences with respect and love”; once, when I was talking to him about the challenges of keeping Eighth Day going during the pandemic, he commented—and pointedly emphasized to me that his words had more than just an economic meaning—that when it comes to creating spaces for ideas as well as commerce, “the door has got to be open so that people can come in and be part of something larger than themselves.” (emphasis added) In this way of thinking, I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities, than bookish places—libraries and, of course, bookstores. (emphasis added)
This remembrance of Warren Farha brings to my mind one of the best diagnoses of our distemper, written by the sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. These did exist in my small coastal city when I was young, and as soon as possible one wanted to be admitted to them. There you could learn to be a human being in the company of adults. As they said at the time, “little pictures should be seen and not heard.” But once you had something to say, respectfully, you were welcome.
And one other thing about these places, which Wendell Berry described as being a living part of his Port William, Kentucky. They are where you learn who can be depended upon to be undependable. This local knowledge makes life go much better for all concerned. Oh, and some of these third places are reappearing around these parts, and even in the utter ugliness that is Greater Atlanta. But not in the suburbs of the Great American Dream Nightmare. Imagine that!
Part the Third: Continuing on a Theme, Books are Making a Comeback. Sort of, according to Kristine Roome in Engelsberg Ideas in her The New Bibliomaniacs. I am not sure that rich people, young and old, collecting rare books for the hell of it is something new, but I have noticed a slight uptick in interest in analog devices –– books, paper, pen ––among medical students as some of them realize that downloading an AI generated pdf is not the same as mastering the material. We do not rank students, but they know who they are. And that those at the top of the class are seldom connected to their digital “helpers” seems to be registering. Or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part…
Anyway, this reminded me of a book from about ten years ago, The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why they Matter by David Sax, which was reviewed in the New York Review of Books by Bill McKibben. This was true then, and it remains true today. From McKibben:
The notion of imagination and human connection as analog virtues comes across most powerfully in Sax’s discussion of education. Nothing has appealed to digital zealots as much as the idea of “transforming” our education systems with all manner of gadgetry. The “ed tech” market swells constantly, as more school systems hand out iPads or virtual-reality goggles; one of the earliest noble causes of the digerati was the One Laptop Per Child global initiative, led by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, a Garibaldi of the Internet age. The OLPC crew raised stupendous amounts of money and created machines that could run on solar power or could be cranked by hand, and they distributed them to poor children around the developing world, but alas, according to Sax, “academic studies demonstrated no gain in academic achievement.” Last year, in fact, the OECD reported that “students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes.”
At the other end of the educational spectrum from African villages, the most prestigious universities on earth have been busy putting courses on the Web and building MOOCs, “massive open online courses.” Sax misses the scattered successes of these ventures, often courses in computer programming or other technical subjects that aren’t otherwise available in much of the developing world. But he’s right that many of these classes have failed to engage the students who sign up, most of whom drop out.
Are MOOCs still a thing? I am too lazy to look it up but even coming from MIT they seemed to be more than faintly ridiculous. I do know that very few of the online digital/AI helpmeets for medical students turn our students into physicians that I want to be my doctor one of these days. As for other analog things, the vinyl record store a mile down the hill on what would be a High Street in Great Britain has become another Oldenburgian Third Place. It has also taken over the storefront next to the original spot, a good sign. Something is happening, maybe for the better. We really do not have to eat the dogfood that is AI inevitability. Yes, this is being written on a MacBook Pro that is connected to the internet. But my notes are made with ink using pen and paper. Old fashioned but effective. And easier to keep track of. No printer, no cloud, no external hard drive necessary.
Part the Fourth: Back to the Actual World as We Know It. The attack on American science continues, as described in this article in Nature, Exclusive: NSF puts new research grants to top universities on hold:
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) — a major funder of basic research — has restricted the flow of new research grants to a group of elite universities, Nature has learnt.
Internal agency documents obtained by Nature’s news team reveal that on 9 April, the NSF’s Office of Award Management (OAM), which finalizes grants and handles their finances, put limits on new funding to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Princeton University in New Jersey; and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. A note applied to these universities in an NSF database reads: “Future Awards to Organization on Hold.” Since then, little fresh funding has been made available to these institutions by the NSF. (A note added to the original points out that a few awards have been released to these institutions.)
Having spent a good bit of my career, such as it is, at one of those “elite universities” and more time at very good universities one level down in the pecking order, it is easy to see the utility of spreading the research money around. But this actually happens. Both NIH and NSF have (or had) programs to make sure of this (COBRE and EPSCoR). In any case, I have never noticed serious discrimination based on institution, although it probably does happen at the margin. On more than one occasion in a basic science review panel, such a comment has been slapped down immediately. In the short-to-medium term the only thing this will bring about is the further eclipse of American science. In the long run, this will not matter at all. Other nations will take up the slack, with China (already) in the lead. But American science? It was good while it lasted, and I was privileged for a long time to be a minor contributor. RIP.
Part the Fifth: Longevity Mavens Are So Precious. Are we just going to give up and die like every other generation? Give up? That depends on the meaning of “give up.” Die? Most assuredly. Nevertheless, these people continue to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” even as a vanishingly small number of them have ever read their Dylan Thomas:
BERKELEY, Calif. (I know, shocking) — On a sunny Thursday morning, around 100 people sat on folding chairs beneath a lawn tent preparing to do a mass blood draw. Standing onstage with a tangle of morning glories as his backdrop, Robby Wade, CEO of at-home testing company Rythm Health, warned that the process might be a little chaotic given the size of the crowd
Wade explained how to activate the heating pads by popping a small silver coin, prompting a chorus of admiring oohs from the audience as rays of warming crystallized gel spread like the sun. Within a few minutes, everyone, me included, had matching stick-on Tasso devices trickling blood from our upper arms into test tubes that promised to give insights into the health of our hormones, metabolisms, various organs, and biological age.
“It’s like Theranos, but it works,” said the gentleman sitting in front of me, who had recently given a talk on bodyoids — creating headless sacs of organs to replace aging people’s failing hearts and kidneys. (emphasis added)
Like Theranos, but it works. That is probably the best description of the Longevity Movement, except there is no significant evidence it works. Yes, Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud (another book to read; they just won’t stop coming) from Stanford, naturally, from her very beginnings, but these conventional medical tests do work. For example, it is easy to monitor plasma glucose levels in real time, but there are no significant correlates with overall health in the absence of frank metabolic disease:
As the field works to make the showdown against death and aging mainstream, the longevity community is now in the midst of shifting from “a movement to really more of an industry,” said Christine Peterson, co-founder of the Foresight Institute, which focuses on research on longevity and nanotechnology.
But they also know there’s more work to be done. Many longevity people at the conference identified as a major hurdle the widespread public skepticism that greets their mission, and the dismissive tone of headlines about “billionaires who want to live forever.” Even if some billionaires are in fact chasing immortality, they’re actually not investing enough in what’s still a comparatively small field, multiple people at Vitalist Bay told me. (In 2024, global investments in longevity companies more than doubled from the previous year, to $8.5 billion, according to the U.K. research organization Longevity.Technology.)
To longevity enthusiasts, the strange thing isn’t that they’re so focused on avoiding death. It’s why, given the brevity of human life and how quickly it can pass us by, everyone else doesn’t share their sense of urgency.
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Most people in the longevity community are focused on preserving their health as long as they can — either to make it to the current outer limits of longevity, about 120 robust years or so, or to last long enough that science achieves what’s known as longevity escape velocity, where advancements keep piling up so that there’s no limit on how long life might last.
Whatever one’s goal, it was clear from the companies with booths set up at Vitalist Bay that there are ample opportunities in the business of longevity. Most of these were focused on personalized medicine. Along with Rythm ($79 a month), I spotted biological age testing company TruDiagnostic ($499 for a one-time test), brain age testing company NeuroAge ($1,398 for the most popular plan), and sleep testing company Empower Sleep ($1,200 for the basic plan).
Parked on the street outside the conference were BodySpec vans where attendees could get free DEXA scans (normally $59.95 for a one-time scan) to find out their body fat, bone density, and muscle metrics. Speaking onstage on Friday, venture capitalist Tim Chang outlined the health-testing business model: give people at least one “green” (or good) result so the overall picture isn’t too depressing; sell them on subscriptions, interventions, and coaching so they can work on improving areas in yellow and red. (emphasis added)
That last sentence sums up the entire grift. One doesn’t quite know what to do with these people, except ignore them. They will eventually and inevitably go away. Or start a religion in which the body is God, as the immortal wannabe Bryan Johnson is contemplating. I can’t be the only person who remembers that L. Ron Hubbard once said “Writing science fiction for about a penny a word is no way to make a living. If you really want to make a million, the quickest way is to start your own religion.” Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding…We do have a winner!
If you want to read about the most freakish book I have ever read regarding our society’s puerile fear of death, The Future Loves You awaits (I read it so you really will not have to). I saw a copy in Topping & Company in St. Andrews earlier this month. I imagine it will still be on the shelf if and when I ever get back, unless a precocious neuroscience undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews feels the need to waste £25 to read how he can live forever.
And on that note: Pay attention but don’t doomscroll too much, eat well, exercise, take a walk in the woods or on the beach, listen to the birds, read books, talk to actual people who have other views in Third Places, and get a good night’s sleep every night. The life you live will be rewarding, however long it lasts. Your grandmother was right, and there is nothing “scientific” to add to her folk wisdom.
Thank you for reading! See you next week.
