Some interesting old stuff has been discovered in Italy recently. Is it the weather, journalists looking for copy, chance, or some combination of all three? Who knows? But here you go: Europe’s oldest known tree was discovered in Italy. It’s a species of Heldreich’s pine, and it is apparently 1,230 years old. Also, an ancient Roman chamber tomb was found during the construction of an aqueduct in a Rome suburb a few weeks ago: “The tomb was dated to between 335 and 312 B.C. on the basis of a coin found next to a skeleton. One side depicts the head of Minerva, the flip side a horse head with the lettering: ‘Romano’… One expert, Alessandra Celant, a paleo-botanist at the University of Rome La Sapienza, carefully collected ancient pollen and plant samples from the tomb — ‘the tip of a pin is enough,’ she said — that she will study to potentially reconstruct the flora and landscape of the area, as well as funerary rituals.” A guy who survived the initial eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79 has been found. He was killed by a falling stone as he was apparently fleeing the city. And Michelangelo’s secret room in Florence’s Basilica di San Lorenzo has some interesting sketches. The room was actually discovered 40 years ago, but for some reason NPR ran an article on it over the weekend. Why not?
Remembering the London houses and buildings that were torn down in the name of progress: “Amid the lost houses, lost districts and lost masterpieces, it’s the former enticements of the high street that shine most brightly.”
The paper that poisoned its printers: “An entrepreneur created a golden-toned newspaper for Victoria’s coronation. Then his printers started getting violently ill.”
Hadley Arkes on the true meaning of the Pentagon Papers: “Shrouded in liberal mythology perpetuated by a new Hollywood film, the landmark court case was wrongly decided—and has been wrongly remembered.”
How do you write a serious biography of someone about whom we know very little? Check out this recent bio of Vercingetorix: “It is all just a matter of careful manipulation of narrative past tenses. When you have genuine evidence for something, you can use the passé simple (and a footnote): ‘After his defeat at Alesia, Vercingetorix threw his arms down at Caesar’s feet (Caesar, Gallic Wars VII 89.4)’. When the evidence gives out, but there is space for legitimate speculation and analogy, you can use the passé spéculatif: ‘Caesar may well have required Vercingetorix to pass beneath a yoke of spears, the standard Roman military ritual for humiliating defeated enemies’. But your secret weapon is what we might call the passé présomptif, a special linguistic tool only used by struggling historical biographers. We have not a scrap of evidence for Vercingetorix’s childhood, or indeed any aspect of his life before the revolt of 52 BC; but presumably he came from a chieftain’s family, presumably among the Arverni, who presumably lived as other elite members of the Arverni did in the first century BC – and suddenly your book starts writing itself.”
Essay of the Day:
Why is it no big deal if a white Hispanic is removed from a band simply because of his skin color? Coleman Hughes asks the question in Quillette:
“In the fall of 2016, I was hired to play in Rihanna’s back-up band at the MTV Video Music Awards. To my pleasant surprise, several of my friends had also gotten the call. We felt that this would be the gig of a lifetime: beautiful music, primetime TV, plus, if we were lucky, a chance to schmooze with celebrities backstage.
“But as the date approached, I learned that one of my friends had been fired and replaced. The reason? He was a white Hispanic, and Rihanna’s artistic team had decided to go for an all-black aesthetic—aside from Rihanna’s steady guitarist, there would be no non-blacks on stage. Though I was disappointed on my friend’s behalf, I didn’t consider his firing as unjust at the time—and maybe it wasn’t. Is it unethical for an artist to curate the racial composition of a racially-themed performance? Perhaps; perhaps not. My personal bias leads me to favor artistic freedom, but as a society, we have yet to answer this question definitively.
“One thing, however, is clear. If the races were reversed—if a black musician had been fired in order to achieve an all-white aesthetic—it would have made front page headlines. It would have been seen as an unambiguous moral infraction. The usual suspects would be outraged, calling for this event to be viewed in the context of the long history of slavery and Jim Crow in this country, and their reaction would widely be seen as justified. Public-shaming would be in order and heartfelt apologies would be made. MTV might even enact anti-bias trainings as a corrective.
“Though the question seems naïve to some, it is in fact perfectly valid to ask why black people can get away with behavior that white people can’t. The progressive response to this question invariably contains some reference to history: blacks were taken from their homeland in chains, forced to work as chattel for 250 years, and then subjected to redlining, segregation, and lynchings for another century. In the face of such a brutal past, many would argue, it is simply ignorant to complain about what modern-day blacks can get away with.
“Yet there we were—young black men born decades after anything that could rightly be called ‘oppression’ had ended—benefitting from a social license bequeathed to us by a history that we have only experienced through textbooks and folklore. And my white Hispanic friend (who could have had a tougher life than all of us, for all I know) paid the price. The underlying logic of using the past to justify racial double-standards in the present is rarely interrogated. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with modern-day blacks, who experienced neither? Do all black people have P.T.S.D from racism, as the Grammy and Emmy award-winning artist Donald Glover recently claimed? Is ancestral suffering actually transmitted to descendants? If so, how? What exactly are historical ‘ties’ made of?
“We often speak and think in metaphors. For instance, life can have ups and downs and highs and lows, despite the fact that our joys and sorrows do not literally pull our bodies along a vertical axis. Similarly, modern-day black intellectuals often say things like, ‘We were brought here against our will,’ despite the fact that they have never seen a slave ship in their lives, let alone been on one. When metaphors are made explicit—i.e., emotions are vertical, groups are individuals—it’s easy to see that they are just metaphors. Yet many black intellectuals carry on as if they were literal truths.”
Photo: Hartshead Pike with Flower Moon
Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Sea’s Fool”
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