Fall mood.

The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, two American scientists for their discovery of micro RNA:

The pair began studying gene regulation while they were postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the lab of H. Robert Horvitz, who won his own Nobel Prize in 2002.

And so the Nobel family tree grows.

From The End of the Modern World by Fr. Stephen Freemen:

Modernity is a rhetorical device. The modern world does not produce wonders or even Apple Phones. Those are the work of technology, something with roots in the ancient world (cf. the Antikythera Mechanism). Modernity is simply the place where the myth was invented — not technology.

And from a 2018 blog post comment (↬John Naughton):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes (sic) but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

M. John Harrison in an unpublished interview from way back before Sunken Lands… came out:

If people didn’t have Joseph Campbell’s artful wish-fulfilment (sic) fantasy to place them at the centre of events and keep them enchanted with their own reflection, they might dump their wish to be princess of all they survey, and instead channel their dissatisfactions into making a better world for everyone.

This line of thinking is why I am a grateful reader of Harrison’s and… not a Campbell fan.

Ben Werdmuller is an FT subscriber:

There’s a lot to be said for reading on paper. One of my more recent indulgences has been a daily subscription to The Financial Times, which on weekdays is a sober paper that reports the news fairly objectively. On weekends it’s a different beast: in particular it includes a magazine pull-out called How to Spend It that is apparently aimed at the worst people on earth and is generally indistinguishable from satire.

Of course HTSI — which is now the actual name of the weekend supplement — is tongue-in-cheek. They’re Brits. My favorite part are interviews with old-money Zoomer scions. “Q: What do you do these days? A: My wellness company Zubeeyqyo which makes fantastic goat milk-based facial creams has recently expanded to Asia. Thanks so much to my dear friends for their support.” Brilliant.

I have linked to a Conversation with Tyler (Cowen) in a while because most of them have to date been bland (Nate Silver? Seriously?) but the most recent one with Kyla Scanlon was compelling. She is a 27-year-old book author and… popularizer of economics (?) who writes on Substack and makes videos.

Michael Lopp wrote something yesterday in the useful-not-true category:

[…] I liked to describe humans in stark, clever ways. This often took the form of a “THIS or THAT” black-and-white structure, but I was 100% clear that the answer to humans was a hard-to-define grey area. My job was to get you to think, not to define every possible configuration of human behavior.

Derek Sivers had a similar idea:

Use what you learned from jigsaw puzzles. Start with the edges. Come up with extreme and ridiculous ideas that you’d never actually do, but are good for inspiration and finding the middle.

They are writing about different settings — Lopp about figuring out what’s already there, Sivers about creating something new — but the approaches are similar: to get to the grey area, first figure out the edges. This also tends to be my approach, but it is not how many people think and if you are to avoid painful misunderstandings better have a preamble ready.

Today’s Chris Arnade Walks the World newsletter features a guest post by Lilly Lynch, whose writing I’ve followed on and off for almost a decade now. Georgia has never been on my list of must-visit countries, and is even less so now after reading her post. So it goes…