Image: mural of Govett’s Leap at Blackheath railway station.

That is not a period weapon, said Matt, ever expert on colonial Australia. And I dunno, I answered. If I were carrying bags of gold I don’t reckon I’d label them with GOLD in big black letters.

Here is a statue of the bushranger Govett, also in Blackheath, where he appears to be in the act of leaping.

Image: Statue of “Govett” in the act of leaping.

One suspects deliberate historical inaccuracy in the mural of Govett leaping (perhaps unlike the statue ), because William Romaine Govett was not in fact a bushranger.

Govett was actually a soft, kinda pudgy young man whose visit to Blackheath was not to escape the law, but to work as a surveyor. He started this job at 20 years old, in 1827.

Surveyors, of course, were necessary to building the infrastructure that would eventually enable the influx of gold miners and settlers whose occupation of Wiradjuri land to the west of the Blue Mountains would consolidate colonial military efforts against a recent uprising by Wiradjuri warriors, coordinated with other Aboriginal groups up and down Australia’s east coast.

Govett died in England at 41 years of age, just before the Australian gold rush made considerable use of survey efforts like his. His wife was still alive, however, when the apocryphal story emerged of a bushranger called Govett leaping over a cliff in the Blue Mountains, trying to escape the law.

Govett’s Leap, in fact (like the nearby Witch’s Leap) uses a Scottish word for cliff: leap. It was not intended for actual leaping, nor named after someone who did.*

Govett’s Leap is mythical, in the sense that it didn’t happen but that it also represents something real. This whole ‘you’ll never take me alive’ thing is part of Australian bushranger lore. It might not be true, but also isn’t all bullshit. The logic of the whip that literally governed New South Wales from its inception, continued after convict transportation. This week I was in the NSW State Records reading about appointing police officers who would escort gold from the gold fields to Sydney. Obviously police files see all police as honourable people, even though the newspapers report them randomly terrorising groups of Chinese gold miners. I did see a file where police character was evaluated. Lazy approaches to 1850s paperwork just wrote “good” for them all, but more assiduous officers described them as “very superior”, “excellent”, “indifferent” and, occasionally, “bad”.

Image: This is the real Govett. Image from SLNSW.

The police ledger also listed their previous occupations. Among the former farmers, bakers and clerks there were an awful lot of former soldiers: perhaps not surprising for a penal colony. Since the former occupation of a significant portion of the New South Wales non-Indigenous population was ‘convict’, relations between police and what was coming to pass for society was constituted by the state’s desire to have a monopoly over violence.

This matters to the way the gold was transported from the gold fields to what we would soon start to call the city of Sydney. As soon as gold was being violently extracted from the bed of what had been a beautiful creek at Ophir, near Orange, the Colonial Architect was compelled to procure a suitable carriage and an iron safe with three keys to be disbursed according to a specified system of rank and redundancy. Government procurement systems in 1851, I was surprised to see, were surprisingly similar to what they are now (though with many more letters that open with “I do myself the honour of…” – I haven’t seen that in the contemporary public service. Yet).

Having thus acquired the equipment and appointed police escorts, the government’s next job was to built a mint, ensuring the standardisation of the gold that would eventually underpin currency both in the colonies and ‘at home’, in London. That is a story for another post.

For now, we must follow the police escort. Archivists have retained some of the receipts and receipt books used by the Sergeant responsible for the gold escort. He collected a bag of gold, sometimes two, from the gold seller and hand him (or her…gold buyers were often women, so too money brokers, but that is another story) a receipt showing the weight of the gold. The names of gold sellers were repeated, regularly. This receipt book, collected over four years of back-and-forth between the diggins and Sydney only had four receipts of gold collected from Chinese gold sellers, on a field that we know had hundreds of Chinese people – who must have been selling to white gold buyers or else transporting most of their gold by other means.

Developing colonial ideas about the hierarchy of humans seems as present in the gold transport run by the colonial government as it was in racist violence by white miners – and white police – against Chinese people, on the gold fields.

For the first few years of the gold rush, when the gold Sergeant got to Sydney there were a bewildering array of people to whom each bag of gold must be delivered, often the manager of one of the handful of colonial (or, increasingly, but never overwhelmingly, British banks, known locally as the ‘Anglos’) that had set up in Sydney. Slowly some of these deliveries were to the Master of the brand-new Royal Mint of Sydney – as time passed, the Deputy Master would do. As the mint became more established, almost all of the deliveries were to the mint, which must have been a relief. Then, as far as I could tell, he would head straight back again, hand over the proceeds of the gold sale, unless the mint or the escort Sergeant was instructed to have it deposited in a bank.

Deposits were relatively rare before this, the preserve of Scrooge McDuck types whose specie amounted to something one could dive into, so this amounts to an interesting moment in banking practice that results from a growing acceptance of deposits (rather than specie) as pretty good stuff in the hierarchy of money.

Perhaps understandably, the bosses of a colony recently largely peopled by those they deemed to be criminals**, were a bit anxious about the safety of the gold. It shows the ways that the hierarchy of humans was linked to the hierarchy of money: property holders, including the owners of the gold, were as humans deemed more valuable, in need (like the gold) of state investment in the infrastructure that would enable them to continue accumulating wealth.***

The trips were often insufficiently eventful to be worthy of more than a note saying what date the Sergeant collected x oz. of gold from the gold field to transport to Sydney. In less populated areas where he felt there was more risk of being held up by bushrangers, the gold escort Sergeant would seek an armed escort. If the area was quite populated, he would let those fellas go and do something else and continue with just the carriage driver. We know this because on at least one occasion that was a mistake.

Sergeant David McClure was on the good list in the colonial police gold escort ledger. In the early days he escorted most of the gold from the Western Goldfields (jurisdictions defined by whether they are along the Northern, Southern or Western road out of Sydney), which included those around two hours’ drive west of where I now live in the Blue Mountains, collecting gold from Bathurst, Orange, Gulgong, Sofala and what would become Hill End. Sergeant McClure did this for years, approximately every 2-3 weeks. On one trip, When he got to Little Hartley at the western foot of the Blue Mountains, he knew himself to be in a fairly populous area, so let the armed guards go.

Between Little Hartley and Big Hartley, a distance hardly noticeable by car, the escort carriage was attacked by a gang of bushrangers. Two horses were killed (RIP horseys) and Sergeant McClure’s face was scratched by a bullet. But he kept his head and escaped without further harm to him or the gold. A protracted court case followed, but I got bored following it and can’t yet tell you what happened to the perpetrators. I’ll figure it out before I write a book about it. Really.

What we do know, however, is that what with having unsuccessfully held up the gold carriage at the bottom of the mountain, these bushrangers did not take the bags of gold over a cliff, regardless of whether it was called ‘leap’. Certainly not one of them was called Govett.

But the leap with gold over the cliff is still present, isn’t it, as an indicator of the type of liberation that one might seek from a heavy-handed government weighed down by soldiers who at times had a tendency to violent oppression of a citizenry that may have been characterised as too ex-convict, too Irish or Catholic, and certainly in too many shamefully racist instances, too Chinese.

The leap, even in error, speaks of liberation from poverty, backbreaking work, unearned authority, or the whip.

This liberation, either via gold, or by never being caught alive, was mythical. But, like all myths of those who were oppressed and/or joyfully wicked, it was also kinda real.

This post is part of my research as the CH Currey Memorial Fellow for 2026 at the State Library of NSW.

*The Marxist archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (Indiana Jones’ favourite) probably died by leaping from Govett’s Leap, though some say he fell. Perhaps that is why they did not change the name to Childe’s Leap?

** This is an oblique reference to a scene in The Princess Bride.

*** This was connected to growing ideas about citizenship and the franchise, which was associated with a set value: though what with all the gold hanging around pushing up prices, inflation was rapidly threatening to ensure every random digger and more would have the franchise, which terrified what passed for colonial elites. Imagine if it included women?

Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not 1668.  And also, Ceuta has been under European control for even longer, because the Portuguese conquered it way back in 1415.  That’s knights-and-castles time, most of a century before Columbus.

[a long day of street-fighting with swords and axes]

So why 1668?  Because in 1560, Spain took over Portugal and all Portuguese possessions.  Then eventually the Portuguese rebelled against Spanish rule.  Which led to a protracted war of independence that wasn’t resolved until 1668 when, as part of the final treaty / divorce settlement, Spain got Ceuta.

Meanwhile, in Alaska, archeologists have found about a dozen glass beads of European origin.  They’re either Venetian glass beads, or French copies.  What makes these particular beads interesting is that, depending on which group of experts you believe, they are from sites that date either to the late 15th century, or the late 16th century.  Either way, these beads were in Alaska long, long before any European.

[around 500 years, give or take]

These two facts — the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta and the Alaskan glass beads — are related.  What connects them is, of course, deflation.

Apparently economic historians have been aware of the Great Bullion Famine since at least the 1970s.  But for some reason it doesn’t seem to have penetrated into popular history much.  Go figure.

Here’s the short version: by late medieval times, Europe had been running a trade deficit with the rest of the world for well over a thousand years.  Not kidding!  Back in classical times, you had Roman pundits wringing their hands over the relentless flow of gold and silver eastward towards India and China.  The underlying issue was that India and China had a bunch of stuff that Europe wanted, while Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted.  So European buyers had to pay with bullion: gold or silver.

To make matters worse, most of the stuff that Europe wanted from India and China consisted of consumables, like silks and spices.  They were luxury goods that got used up or worn out.  So there was literally no end to the outward flow of bullion.

For a while, Europeans were able to deal with the situation by just mining more gold and silver.  (Although the outflow may have contributed to the relentless debasement of the Roman currency from Nero onwards.)  But by the late 1300s, Europe was hitting a wall.  Europe isn’t that big a continent.  There were only so many places to mine gold or silver, and existing mines were coming up against hard geological and technological limits — for instance, Europeans hadn’t figured out how to mine below a water table yet.  So Europe began running out of gold and silver.

(Once again I feel the lack of an abbreviation that signals “Yes, I am oversimplifying a complex topic, and I acknowledge this.  That said, to the best of my understanding this brief summary is basically correct.”)

The inevitable result of this was deflation.  As gold and silver became scarce, they became more valuable.  So the prices of goods and services that were denominated in gold and silver tended to fall.

The effects of long-term deflation on the late medieval economy go beyond the scope of this blog post, but let’s just say that the bullion shortage and the accompanying deflation were causing all sorts of problems.  So people went looking for solutions.

Let’s talk about some of those attempted solutions: two from Portugal, and one from Venice.

The Venetian solution involved technology and marketing.  I said above that Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted.  But “not much” is not the same as “nothing”, and there were a few European goods that could be traded east.

One of these was Venetian glass.  Venetian glass had always been good, but in 1291 the Venetian government took the key step of moving all the city’s glassworks to the island of Murano.

This was partly for safety reasons — glassworks had an unfortunate tendency to catch fire or even explode, and glassmaking involved a number of toxic substances.  But it was also to protect Venice’s technological edge.  The glassworkers and their families needed special permission to leave Murano, and another special permission to leave Venice.

If a glassmaker wanted to emigrate to another city, taking his trade secrets with him, the Venetian government could (and did) hold his family hostage.  If that didn’t work, well,  they would send a hit squad of assassins after the defector, to kill him.

[a forward-leaning posture on IP protection]

As it turned out, one unexpected side effect of putting all the glassmakers in one place was that — when they weren’t busy setting themselves on fire or going mad from breathing toxic fumes or whatever — they started to compare notes and raise their game.  Murano became what industrial analysits call a “cluster”, like Silicon Valley or Hollywood.  So soon Venetian glass was not just good, but hands-down the best in the world.

So the Venetians decided to leverage this technological advantage by cranking out lots of beautiful glass beads, and using them as trade goods — especially in trade with the East.  These days we think of glass beads as something you pay a few pennies for at that one weird little shop that somehow survives at the far end of the high street.  But 600 years ago, glass beads were luxury goods.  And the Venetians embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to let the world know that Venice produced the best and most fashionable glass beads in the world.

And it worked!  Sort of.  For a while.  Venetian glass beads flowed into markets all over the world.  Egypt and Persia, India and China, everybody loved these beautiful beads.  The bead trade didn’t stop the relentless drain of bullion from Europe, but — for a time — they slowed it a bit.

And one cool side-effect: there’s a whole cottage industry of classifying and dating these beads, because Venetian glass beads show up in archeological digs basically everywhere.   They’ve been found in the tombs of Indian princesses and as decorations in Chinese temples and as bling adorning Central Asian steppe warriors.

And a few of them, somehow, got to Alaska.  The best guess would be something like “China -> Manchus? -> Siberian tribes -> trade across the Bering Strait.”  That may sound far fetched, but beads are small and very portable, and apparently there’s solid evidence for every one of those links.

(And the beads aren’t a one-off; there’s roughly a shoebox worth of Asian artifacts that have been retrieved from pre-Columbian sites in Alaska, including a bronze buckle that appears to have come from medieval China.)

I said the beads worked “sort of, for a while”.  Problem #1 was that unlike spices or silk, glass beads are quite durable.  So,  in spite of the best efforts of Venetian marketing, gradually the market got saturated and demand dropped off.

Problem #2 was that while Venetian glass was better, it wasn’t so much better that it was impossible to copy.  By the late 1400s the French were making pretty good beads using Venetian techniques that they had either stolen or reverse-engineered.  They got good enough that we’re still not sure whether the Alaskan beads are Venetian or French.  A bit later, the Chinese did the same thing.

[but sometimes, it rhymes]

So while it was a great boon to future archeologists, the Venetian effort to work around the Great Bullion Famine wasn’t a long-term success.  What about the two Portuguese attempts?

Well, by 1400 Europe was running short on gold.  But Europeans did have access — limited, intermittent access — to one source of gold from outside of Europe:  Africa.  Specifically, West Africa.  West Africa had a lot of gold.

And Europeans were aware of this!  Here’s a detail from the 1375 Catalan Atlas:

The guy at lower right — with the golden staff, golden crown, and holding a gold nugget — is labeled “Rex Mali”, the king of Mali.  (He should be much further down and to the left, but I suppose that would have literally put him off the edge of the map.)  History nerds may recall that Mansa Musa, the Emperor of Mali, controlled so much gold that he was arguably the richest human in the world up to that time.

[also one of the more reasonable NPC leaders in the Civilization games]

Of course, there’s another human figure there: a guy on a camel, wielding a scourge.  Which was a neat graphic representation of a geostrategic problem.  Because West African gold had to come north across the Sahara Desert, by caravan, passing through middlemen who were often hostile.

So Portuguese Idea #1 was to seize control of that trans-Saharan trade route.  Or anyway to grab one end of it. Because the main caravan route north from West Africa reached the Mediterranean coast at, you guessed it, Ceuta.

So after months of preparation — unusually careful and methodical preparation, by the standards of medieval rulers — the King of Portugal launched a surprise attack on Ceuta.  The Venetian attempt at a solution had involved technology and marketing; the Portuguese attempt would involve hitting people very hard with swords and axes.

And — it worked!  Ceuta fell.  The Portuguese installed a garrison, fended off an attempt by the local emir to retake the city, and settled in for a long term stay.

Let’s pause here and note that this was the first successful European expansion outside of Europe since the Crusades had petered out a couple of centuries earlier.  For reasons I’ll get to shortly, I don’t view the conquest of Ceuta as the first baby step towards European global imperialism.  But there are people who do view it that way, and I see their point.

— Digression for a bit of deep-cut nerd trivia.  When the Portuguese took Ceuta, they of course installed a guy to be the first Christian bishop there, or anyway the first one since the Muslim conquest 700 years earlier.  The new bishop was a Franciscan monk from England.

Why from England?  Because he was the confessor of Queen Philippa of Portugal.  And Philippa was English — she was the sister of Henry IV.  Her sons, King Edward the Eloquent of Portugal and his little brother, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator?  Were first cousins to Henry V, the guy who was winning Agincourt right around this time.

[Henry V and Henry the Navigator and it’s not just me, right? you can totally see it]

This means that the next few Portuguese monarchs were actually Lancastrians, with a better claim to the English throne than either the Yorkist kings or the Tudors.  However, by the time the Wars of the Roses were under way, the kings of Portugal had more interesting projects to pursue than chasing after the much-disputed throne of a chilly northern island.  So they never sent their Lancastrian cousins anything but thoughts and prayers.  End digression.

Right, so: the Portuguese took Ceuta.  And did this give them access to those desirable gold-carrying caravan routes?

No, it did not.  The local Moroccans, now more hostile than ever, simply shifted the caravan terminus 50 miles further west, to the port of Tangier. Which led to Portuguese Idea #1.5: attack and conquer Tangier!

Except that didn’t work.  This time the Moroccans were ready, and the attack on Tangier was a complete fiasco.

So the Portuguese were stuck.  Ceuta was a dead end, and they were no closer to that West African gold.

Except.

This is where Prince Henry the Navigator enters our history books.  Because Henry got behind Portuguese Idea Idea #2: sail down the African coast, avoiding the middlemen entirely, and make contact with the West Africans directly.

Henry funded a whole series of expeditions sailing south and southwest.  One of these discovered the Madeiras, which was an unexpected windfall — the uninhabited islands could be turned into plantations of wheat and wine, helping fund further exploration.  By 1445, the Portuguese had gotten past the Sahara and could interact directly with sub-Saharan Africa.

I say interact because the history gets complicated here.  The Portuguese hadn’t reached the gold mines; it turned out that those were another thousand miles further east.  So they tried slave raiding first.  That didn’t work out so well.  The Portuguese were at the very edge of their force projection, and West Africa had a couple of centralized states that could rapidly deploy large groups of heavily armed men.

It took the Portuguese a generation or so to figure out the formula: why raid for slaves when you could just buy them instead?  Make friendly overtures to the local rulers, establish yourself as a good reliable customer, build a series of forts and trading posts.  Unlike Indians or Chinese, West Africans were very interested in European trade goods.  And in exchange, they were willing to offer quite reasonable prices on ivory, gold and slaves.

— Yah, the African slave trade predates Columbus by about 50 years.  By 1492 there were tens of thousands of African slaves in Portugal, and a sprinkling of black Africans could be found across western Europe.

[Henry VIII’s trumpeter: famous, but far from unique]

Anyway: once friendly trade relations with West African states had been established, the money started rolling in.  And the profits got bigger as the Portuguese edged closer to the gold mines.  When they finally reached the mining region they built a huge fortress — A Mina or Elmina, “The Mine” — and settled in for a stay that would last for centuries.

[history’s first Bond Villain lair]

And did this end the Great Bullion Famine?  Well… the short answer is, it ended it in Portugal.  Since gold moves around, it’s more complicated than that —

[hello again]

— but it gave the Portuguese kings something that every early modern monarch dreamed of: a steady, reliable source of gold.

Which led to the next chapter of the story.  The Portuguese had gone to a lot of trouble to develop ships that could sail out of sight of land for thousands of miles.  They had built up navigation techniques and a cadre of highly trained long-distance sailors.  And it had made them rich!

So… why stop here?  Why not keep going, and see if they could reach the real jackpot: a sea route to India and the Far East?

— One last digression.  We all know the story of how the gold and silver of the New World first enriched Spain, and then led to Spain’s eventual decline and ruin.  This tends to get spun as a finger-wagging morality tale: see how unearned wealth is toxic in the long term!

Except that’s not always true.  Portugal started accessing extra-European gold long before Cortez rolled up to Mexico City.  And the Portuguese took their windfall and, for the most part, used it wisely.

Yeah, they blew some on royal bling, prestige building projects and wars of choice, the macroeconomic equivalent of hookers and blow.  But they also invested a lot of it — not just in further exploration, but in stuff like building bridges and aqueducts, dredging ports, and building up their merchant marine.  For a very rough modern analogy, consider the difference between how Norway and the UK have spent their North Sea gas-and-oil wealth.

Anyway, to bring it back: the Portuguese did eventually find a sea route to India.  Which freaked out their Spanish neighbors so badly that they were willing to roll the dice on Columbus.  Which led, eventually, to the conquest of Mexico and Peru.  Which gave Europeans access to literally a couple of new continents worth of gold and silver, thus definitively ending the Great Bullion Famine.

But not before that desperate scrabbling for bullion produced deflationary winds that blew the Portuguese into Ceuta, Venetian glass beads clear across Eurasia to Alaska, Africans into Europe and, eventually, Europeans all over the place.

And that’s all.

Quite a few, it turned out. We spend far more time in this garden than we had anticipated. But it was lovely: we took turns looking at the flowers and reading through the leaflet, helping each other out with formulations or googling the names of plants to see whether the translations were correct. All along, we were musing whether the translation had been done by a French person who had learned German the way French people learn German – or by AI. The longer we went on, the clearer it became that it was AI (as the woman at the counter later confirmed). As is often the case with AI, it got most factual statements right but could not deal with context. On a little plan that showed a “lookout point,” it had translated it as “point of view.” “We’re probably robbing a local translator of their job,” my husband said afterwards, and suddenly my heart sank. I had thought a lot about how algorithmic management might change the future of work (see some thoughts here), but I had not yet taken into account how customers might be part of the picture, too.

For us, it had been fun: almost a gamified activity that was pleasurable to do on a sunny summer morning, without any pressures. But the dynamics in this story can play out in far less benign ways: tasks that were bundle into jobs get rebundled, not only between different workers, but also by being redistributed to customers or volunteers. They end up being cheaper – but not because less work has been done.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of AI system, trying to deal with some problem at a bank, insurance company, or service provider, you probably know that value can not be added, but also be destroyed – at least in the sense of people’s time being massively wasted. A few days after our holidays, I stood in the queue of a postal office, and at the counter next to me a rather desperate elderly man told the – also increasingly desperate – officer about his odyssey of failed phone calls, many of which obviously with automated systems, in his attempts to get a mistake corrected. Nothing had worked, spelling mistakes had gotten in and made things worse, his battery run out when waiting endlessly in the phone line. The redistribution of work to customers can be brutal if the systems don’t work well, if people feel left alone, and if things that matter to them are at stake. Meanwhile, service workers have to deal with more cases of people who are frustrated and angry because the systems failed them.

The longer AI is around, the longer I’m waiting to see the cases where it would really bring progress to humanity, on dimensions that really matter – rather than make work worse and alienate human beings from each other. The greater ease at finding information is undeniable, but it is undermined by the lack of reliability. The reshuffling of tasks can mean that jobs that included some elements of creativity and agency – such as translation – risk becoming a matter of error-correction under increased time pressure. In countries where union exist, they struggle how to protect employees against employers’ expectation that everything can be sped up when AI gets used, failing to consider that somewhat simpler tasks in between things can also be moments that allow people to breathe.*

I’m very much hoping that my pessimism will be proven wrong, but when I look at the power relations – in workplaces, but also in many company-customer relations – under which AI gets introduced these days, I don’t see much hope. Apart from the fact that large language models have been a massive operation of expropriation, the risk is real that they will be used to survey and control ever more areas of human life. Maybe some jobs will become nicer because “boring” elements can be done faster – but overall, the number of “bad” jobs** is likely to increase, and the divide between “good” and “bad” jobs to widen, because AI can be used to instruct, but also control, employees in ever more fields of work.

I’ll therefore end with a shoutout to this excellent essay by Jelena Belic and Kritika Maheshwari, about what universities should do when called up to prepare students for an AI-driven labor market. Maybe not only critical thinking, but also strategies of resistance, need to be included in the curricula!

• An example that was given to me by a union representative was the writing of minutes of conversations between nurses and patients, which can be replaced by AI-produced transcripts.

** Or not even jobs, but gigs algorithmically managed on platforms.

I’ve been thinking about two questions. First, how did Swift become the cultural and economic phenomenon she is now? Second, what does her status as a self-made billionaire say about income distribution and public policy? I’ll write about the first today. If anyone would like to donate another $100, I’ll do the second.

For the first question, I’ll offer some amateur cultural analysis along with a bit of economics. As background, although Swift has had a long and successful career (beginning in 2006 at age 16) there was, until recently, nothing to predict the phenomenon we see now. As of 2015, she could have been seen as first among equals in a group of white female pop singer-songwriters that included Adele, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande and Meghan Trainor. That’s not a genre I follow closely (the female singer-songwriter I really admire is the marvellous Judy Small who is about as dissimilar as possible), but the song from that group I liked best was All About That Bass by Trainor, which seemed to prefigure huge success, rather than her subsequent sequence of modest hits.

Swift’s transformation began in 2021 when she re-recorded her back catalogue, outmanoeuvring the record companies who owned the masters of the originals. This turbocharged her career, setting the stage for the 2023 Eras tour, which turned her from a pop megastar (big, but not exceptional) into a cultural and economic phenomenon, whose tours were sought after by prime ministers and presidents. By this point the relevant comparisons weren’t with her contemporaries but with cultural figures like Elvis, Dylan, The Beatles and Michael Jackson.

As the re-recording episode shows, Swift is an exceptionally good businesswoman. Her success here contrasts sharply with that of the stereotypical 1960s rocker, forced out on the road again because their accountant has looted the bank account.

There’s still a puzzle remaining to be resolved. Taylor Swift has a lovely voice and is a talented songwriter, but, unlike the people I’ve named, she’s not a radical innovator. That’s not true of Swift alone. From the beginnings of rock-and-roll in the 1950s, through heavy metal and psychedelia to rap in the 1970s, radical innovation was the norm. Since the 1980s, new styles have mostly been hybrids and recombinations (acid house , dubstep and so on) or attempts at returning to rock purity (grunge and, before that, punk).

Drawing a long bow, I’d link to this to the decline of the teenager as a central category in music and culture generally. Before the 1950s, the word “teenager” was almost unknown. Young people turned from children at 13 into legal adults at 21, with the “awkward age” of adolescence in between. The advent of mass secondary schooling, followed by the impact of the Baby Boomers produced a large group whose tastes, for the first time, dominated popular music. And since the teen years are short, the demand for something new was ever present.

There’s not much of this left today. Teenagers are once again the subject of adult and parental concern rather than the central actors in cultural drama. The audience for popular music is no longer segmented by age in the way it used to be. This in turn makes it possible for someone like Taylor Swift to build up both an audience and a repertoire over decades rather than years.

That audience maps on to her own career remarkably well. The core group of Swifties is dominated by women aged between 16 (her age when she began her career) and 36 (her age today). Her songs chronicle her own journey through those years, and resonate with her fans. That broad spread makes it possible for her to pack stadiums around the world, even at the eye-watering ticket prices that prevail today,

As I mentioned at the beginning, this success has made Swift a billionaire. As someone who holds the view that “every billionaire is a policy failure”, that raises some questions for me. If you want my answer now, donate here. Otherwise you will have to wait.

Again, you can support me here

fn1. I don’t usually promote my fundraisers here on CT, but I thought this post might be of enough interest to justify an exception

It happened just after the Ceuta incident, in July 2026, when tens of thousands people from Morocco surged into Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in Northern Africa. The incident caused diplomatic tensions with both Moroccan and European leaders. It was precisely the kind of case that Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546) used to solve.

Vitoria, a Dominican jurist who taught theology at Salamanca, in Renaissance Spain, was familiar with migration issues. He lived at the time of the discovery of the New World when tens of thousands of Spaniards crossed the Atlantic. He was worried about the massacres they perpetrated against the indigenous people and he then devoted a relectio to clarifying the rights of Indians and of Spaniards. A relectio was an official lecture attended by the entire university, whose purpose was to apply the concepts studied in class to current affairs. Pronounced in 1539, De Indis argued that the Indians were the legitimate sovereigns over their territory – a claim that upset both the Papacy and the Spanish Crown.

Three perplexing questions

Vitoria would ask Sánchez three questions about Ceuta. First, why were there diplomatic tensions at all: had the newcomers cause any harm? But then, if they did not, why did Sánchez call their arrival a “violation of Spain’s territorial sovereignty”? Finally, will harmless foreigners who are refused entry wage wars of retaliation?

To clarify, Vitoria would find it hard to understand why these newcomers have caused any concern at all. Having just arrived, they could only be innocent and it is inappropriate to greet innocent people with fear or hostility. As they have swum to Ceuta with nothing but the hope to work, they appeared to be generous and perhaps too confident. That the Spanish government had deployed its armed forces against them would have stunned Vitoria. In his time, five centuries ago, the Spaniards did not arrive offering their labor; instead, many forced the Native Americans to work for them, at the cost of millions of lives. In spite of this danger, he had still advocated freedom of movement.

Second, Vitoria would not understand why Sánchez describes the arrival of almost naked newcomers as a violation of sovereignty. Vitoria does not underestimate sovereignty. In 1539, his lecture caused a political storm because he clearly recognized the Indians as the rightful masters of their lands. But in no way did sovereignty imply a right to prevent the arrival and settlement of innocent foreigners.

For Vitoria, human beings have a natural right to travel and settle abroad. This is partly for theological reasons: they are all children of God who gave them the Earth in common ownership. But Vitoria also thought that friendship is their natural condition and it would be “against nature to shun the society of harmless folk”. The only limit to free movement is harm: for while it is “inhumane to treat visitors and foreigners badly without some special cause, (…) the case would be different if the foreigners were to misbehave”.

Thirdly, Vitoria would worry that harmless foreigners, treated with unjustified hostility, might resort to wars of retaliation. Indeed, a long tradition (which I summarized here) drew on both biblical and secular sources to argue that such a war would be just. On Augustine’s view, this is exactly “how just wars were waged. For innocent passage was denied, which by the most equitable law of human society ought to have been open.”

Shouldn’t Pedro Sánchez be more concerned about the hostility his refusal is provoking than about a symbolic loss of sovereignty?

Short political answers

Pedro Sánchez did not expect this criticism. He is usually blamed for supporting migrants too much. Soon after becoming prime minister in June 2018, he had made a name for himself by announcing that Spain would welcome the hundreds of people aboard the rescue boat Aquarius, who had been refused entry to Italy and Malta. Not later than this year, he sparked again controversy among his European counterparts by deciding to grant legal status to half a million undocumented migrants living in a vulnerable situation and with no criminal record. More than a million applied.

As for Vitoria’s objections, Sánchez would be brief. First, innocent foreigners who do not misbehave individually can be perceived as harmful collectively when they are too numerous for a small place. Second, when he referred to a “violation of Spain’s territorial sovereignty”, he did not identify anyone responsible, merely mentioning the “mafia and human traffickers” who probably spread misinformation about open borders in Ceuta. Third, harmless foreigners whose entry is denied never retaliate, because in the 21st century, everyone knows that the right to travel and settle abroad is not recognized as a universal right.

Vitoria should accept that times have changed drastically. Contemporary law of nations no longer rests on religious duties of universal friendship, but on obligations entered on by sovereign states. While there is no acknowledged right to travel and settle abroad, the United Nations has adopted a Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizing only a human right to “leave any country, including one’s own, and to return to it”.

Weaponizing respect for human rights

Much has changed since Vitoria’s time – and even more rapidly since 1948, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. At the time, the UN Commission on Human Rights had warned that a right to emigrate is not effective without facilities for immigration and transit, but had recommended that member states cooperate to provide such facilities. The right to leave any country was eventually adopted in this form with only three abstentions from communist countries which opposed emigration.

For a time, respect for the human right to leave any country allowed Western countries to claim moral superiority over the Communist bloc. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, that right was not merely ignored, but actively undermined. Rich countries conditioned development aid on the ability to curb irregular emigration, thereby denying the right to leave any country, including poor ones.

Today, the erosion of this human right has entered its final phase. A state that, deliberately or inadvertently, respects the right to leave by allowing people to exit its territory is now portrayed not as complying with a human rights obligation, but as threatening another state’s territorial sovereignty.

Political scientists have defined “weaponized migration” as the deliberate use of migration by a state or non-state actor to extract political or economic concessions from another state. The Ceuta incident suggests that political leaders no longer feel threatened only by the deliberate use of migration. They also see a state’s failure to prevent departures as a violation of another state’s territorial sovereignty. This interpretation has applied not only to Morocco but also to Spain which some European leaders have sought to exclude from the Schengen Area. They are thus contributing to the weaponization of compliance with a human right.

Vitoria observed the disregard of a right that the states themselves have recognized. Yet, in his view, the law of nations did not rest on the states’ consent alone. It derived from the authority of the universal community of humankind to establish norms that are just and binding for all. His ideal may have fewer followers today, but Vitoria’s bust still stands at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

• Fourth repost since 2011

I haven’t yet seen the Odyssey film[1], but reviews mention a minor obsession of mine, the Late Bronze Age collapse and the ensuing Greek Dark Age. I first encountered this at the end of Ken McLeod’s Intrusion where the character Geena compares modern nihilists to the mysterious “city burners” responsible for the massive destruction of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean around 1200 BCE.

Following this up, I learned that the periodization I was taught in school had been totally abandoned over the second half of the 20th century. In that story, the Bronze Age was succeeded by the technologically superior Iron Age. Progress continued until Roman decadence led to barbarian invasion and the Dark Ages, now more neutrally described as the Early Middle Ages.

Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

Obvious candidates for the cause were the mysterious Sea Peoples, whom the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III claimed to have defeated around 1187 BCE. This claim was discovered in the 19th century, hadn’t been much discussed outside Egyptology (a point made by Emily Wilson in her highly critical review). In the film, Odysseus admits to his wife that “we are the Sea People” and foreshadows the Bronze Age collapse.

More recent scholarship sees the city burners, whoever they were, as secondary causes of a collapse induced by, and reinforcing, the breakdown of the complex economic structures required by the need for copper and tin to produce bronze. Bronze weapons and armour, were the central requirement of the aristocratic warrior class represented by the Acheans at Troy. Climate change, always a suspect in civilisational collapse, also appears as a possible cause.

The eventual emergence of iron as a cheap (though initially inferior) replacement ended the era of the heroic warrior. Iron weaponry produced something analogous to the modern mass army, in which the entire male citizen class was expected to serve (Socrates, for example, was an Athenian hoplite, noted for bravery).

All of this is directly opposite to the pop culture of the American manosphere. Rome wasn’t brought down by the decadence of Nero and Caligula but by the shift of power to what is now Istanbul centuries later. The Hegsethian heroes described by Homer either destroyed their own society (a reading perfectly consistent with the endings of the Iliad and Odyssey) or were brought down by their failure to manage the economy and the environment.

Add in an absurd misreading of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue, and you have the MAGA theory of history.

fn1. I have now, but I wrote this first and saw no need to change it

Yet on any issue other than Israel that would actually come up for a Senate vote, El-Sayed and Stevens would not vote much differently. Although El-Sayed throws off DSA vibes, he is not a member and calls himself a capitalist. I suspect that many of El-Sayed’s votes came from the considerable segment of Democrats who are upset with their party because it lacks “fight,” and are treating candidates who take what are seen as very progressive stances in an aggressive tone of voice as a proxy for being tough fighters. But that conflation is a serious mistake. It confuses a certain style of performative politics with having a real grasp of how to change things so that public policies that help ordinary people can be enacted.

El-Sayed is not really my target here, since he is a very smart and talented politician who will gladly vote for many policies short of Medicare for All that will extend health care coverage to more people and make it affordable. (Which is necessary, because Medicare for All has no chance of making it to the Senate floor, given that it would require a huge tax increase.) He is a pragmatic, goal-oriented politician, and knows how to compromise and build unity.

I want to contrast El-Sayed with the progressive winner of Ann Arbor’s Democratic mayoral primary, Yousef Rabhi, a DSA member who decisively beat establishment Democrat Christopher Taylor. The leading issue here is affordable housing. Taylor has been mayor for 12 years, energetically implementing an abundance agenda. Affordable housing units have tripled, rents were down 6% in 2025, they continue to drop, and lots of housing, including workforce housing, is still under construction or in planning. Like many deep-blue locations, Ann Arbor has a long way to go, especially given a huge post-pandemic surge of homelessness. But it’s building many units for the homeless, too, along with support services.

So what does Rabhi say about this? Check out his victory speech. His campaign against Taylor objected to the fact that private developers are building a lot of the housing. That, apparently, makes Taylor a stooge of corporate overlords because the Man is making profits, which are coming back to him in the form of vast “dark money” donations. With Rabhi’s victory, “the people” have finally taken power!

To what end? Rabhi’s housing agenda has two planks. First, indefinitely pause Taylor’s plan to upzone single-family home neighborhoods so triple deckers will be built. In other words, NIMBY. It’s keeping renters out of homeowners’ neighborhoods. And not yuppie renters either. Yuppies will rent apartments in the fancy downtown towers. Triple deckers are workforce housing. Stopping them is not a progressive policy. It’s popular among those Ann Arborites who worry about “changing the character of the neighborhood.” There is “fight” on the right, too. (In an open-primary state, some Republicans will vote in the Democratic primary because the Democratic nominee for Ann Arbor mayor and practically every other city post is assured of victory in the general.) Yet I also know some people who consider themselves progressive and are so on many issues, but support Rabhi on housing.

Rabhi’s second housing plank is public housing, so the Man can’t make profits from it. There is a legitimate role for public housing. But with taxes already high in Ann Arbor, this is can only meet a small fraction of housing needs. In addition, insiders on housing policy in Ann Arbor report that Rabhi doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There was a meeting where he literally screamed at some local housing policy experts who’ve been working on affordable housing for years, because they pointed out flaws in his idea for public housing on a particular city-owned lot (this had already been studied in depth and deemed infeasible for the location). It didn’t help that the experts were women. Mansplaining isn’t progressive, either.

I’m worried that Rabhi is signaling “fight” through a very performative style of intraparty us vs. them politics that (a) paints a progressive veneer over unprogressive, even reactionary policy, (b) is dogmatic rather than informed and detail-oriented, and (c) tries to shut up actual progressives who know stuff.  If this is what DSA is up to, watch out.

According to various sources, John Crowley has died. This probably means something to many of you: Crooked Timber readers are not a random draw even on the population of highly literate people. Those of you who don’t know who John Crowley was will likely have been indirectly affected by his work. If you read at all in the space where science fiction and fantasy meet literature, you’ll almost certainly have read someone who knew his books, and very likely loved them. Susanna Clarke said in her long ago Crooked Timber seminar that she too had read Little, Big, and I think that it shows. Her most recent book, Piranesi, draws on Borges’ Library of Babel, but I suspect that it was influenced too by the memory palaces that Crowley built on foundations laid by Dame Frances Yates.Ursula Le Guin described Little, Big as “a book that all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy.” As James Hynes described Little, Big in the Boston Review.

it is a long, gorgeously written, picaresque family saga, in the last fifty pages of which all the major characters, with one heartbreaking exception, turn into fairies. I’ve read Little, Big four times now, and wept shamelessly each time over those last, extraordinary fifty pages, and over the years have purchased and given away fifteen copies of it (when I could find it–it is inconsistently in print). When “You’ll love this” isn’t recommendation enough, I have proceeded to claim (as I’m claiming here) that Little, Big is an Important American Novel that bears comparison to such works as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Nabokov’s Ada.

Me too, on the tears, the giveaways, and the importance. Every time I see a copy anywhere, I buy it, later to press upon some unsuspecting person who seems a likely prospect. I could keep going. Kim Stanley Robinson admires Crowley’s non-f/sf book about Roosevelt’s dream of industrial America, Four Freedoms. Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch owes nearly as much to Crowley as it does to Narnia, and at one point practically quotes the thesis of Crowley’s extraordinary long story, “Great Work of Time.”

I don’t mourn Crowley because of his influence on others, but because of how his writing shaped me. I mention his work often in my own writing, but have never talked about it in its own right. What Crowley wrote is too deeply and intimately entwined with my sense of my own self to to be able to view it from the outside.

When I think about Little, Big, I remember being twenty-one, walking up the hill from work to my family’s house in a small town in Tipperary in Ireland. I had bounced off the book the first time I read it, but for some reason felt pulled back to try again, and read and re-read it, falling in love with it as I have never fallen in love with a book before or since. Walking up the road on a temperate summer afternoon, thinking about the book and how it folded back into the world and itself, felt like a quiet explosion of joy in my chest.

When I think about Aegypt, it is a memory from a year earlier, taking a long train ride from New York to Toronto to visit friends, and rounding a bend to see what was obviously the original for Butterman’s castle. Decades later, when I read “This Is Our Town,” collected in the small Totalitopia volume, it seemed to me a version of my own childhood, transplanted to a small American town; an ordinary Catholic boyhood, whose suffusions of the supernatural painstakingly captured with the apparatus of the fantasy genre.

I got to know Crowley very slightly via email, as he wrote his final book, Flint and Mirror, which was set in Ireland before and during Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion. It was a bitter war. My and Maria’s ancestor Turloch Breasalach was a contender against Hugh for the O’Neillship. Our family tree records that out of twelve sons that Turloch Breasalach had alive at the beginning of the Elizabethan wars, only three were surviving at the end of it. Crowley wanted to use the book to talk about colonialism. The brutal war and its aftermath set some of the parameters for what Britain did later in other parts of the world. John Dee, who appeared in Flint and Mirror as well as several other Crowley novels, was not just a wizard but an imperial propagandist.

There’s a single word in Flint and Mirror that I helped shape; a tiny return for the way in which Crowley’s work shaped me. The wave that sinks a ship in the last part of the book is the third wave, because in Donegal folklore, the third wave was the fairy wave. I passed that on to Crowley from a story that my and Maria’s grandaunt Maire MacNeill translated from Irish, “The Knife Against the Wave.” Since Crowley loved fairytales as well as writing them, here is that one. I will miss his writing very much.

The Knife Against the Wave

Long ago a fine able handsome man named Séimín Rua was living at Baile Mór. He and his crew went out fishing with lines to Cúl Fastó an Chladaigh Bháin, a fishing ground in Donegal Bay.

The day changed and the sea rose and it seemed they would be wrecked. Séimín was in the stern of the boat and saw a monstrous wave coming at them. He pulled off one of his shoes and threw it out against the danger. Before long he saw a second wave coming at them: he pulled off his other shoe and threw it out and the sea calmed a little but this was only a short respite. It was not long until the third wave of the sea rose at them and each one of the seven thought that this one surely would drown them. There was a big bait-knife stuck in behind the stern-seat. Séimín caught hold of it and threw it against the danger. No sooner had he done so than the sea fell and became as smooth as a board.

They came home then drenched to the skin and when they reached the shore their families were there waiting for them for they thought by the way the day had changed and the sea had risen they would never see them again. No wonder there was great rejoicing for them. When they had divided whatever fish they had caught and moored the boat they all went home.

Well and good. When darkness fell Séimín was sitting beside the fire, his soles to the warmth, all the neighbours in and he telling them about the hard day they had had. With that, there was a bang on the door. Someone went to open it and who was standing on the threshold but a rider on a white horse! The rider asked if Séimín was within and was told he was. The rider called from the door:

“Séimín,” he said, “I would be very thankful if you would come with me to such a place to pull out the knife you cast into my sister’s heart today!”

Séimín recognized immediately what kind he was. “I will not go out the door on such a journey unless you promise me that neither you nor any of your kind will ever harm me or anyone belonging to me.” “I promise you that,” said the rider, “and I promise you as well that you will be left back home safe and sound before daybreak tomorrow.”

Séimín went with the rider and he neither heard nor saw anything until the white horse came to shore on the Red Strand at Mullaghmore in Connacht. The horse continued on to a crag at the top of the strand where a door opened into the hill and the horse entered. Before long they reached the finest castle Séimín had ever seen. The rider tethered the horse and led Séimín inside. They went upstairs and he was taken into a room where a girl was lying. The bait-knife he had thrown against the dangerous wave was stuck in under her heart and she was screaming with pain.

“Come here,” she said, “and pull this knife out of my heart!”

“I will do that willingly,” said Séimín, “if you promise me you will never harm me or anyone belonging to me.”

“I promise you that,” she said.

Séimín drew out the knife and she was healed. “Why did you try to drown us today?” asked Séimín. “Because I am in love with you and would like to have you for myself.”

“And you were going to drown the whole crew because of me!” “I was,” she said. “I would do anything in the world to get you for myself.”

“Well, you won’t get me,” said Séimín. “I must be on my way home.”

The rider of the white horse was standing at the door waiting for Séimín who mounted behind him, and the horse never stopped until he was left at the door of his own house. The rider bade him farewell and Séimín saw him no more from that day until the day of his death.

My, recent, error/irritation, was in the film Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer meets Jean Tatlock at a cocktail party and one of them (I forget which) almost immediately attributes the slogan “Property is theft” to Marx; the other (again, I forget which one) agrees that Marx said it. I then spent the rest of the movie wondering whether it was the characters, or the screenwriters, that made the error. If its the characters that tells us something quite interesting about them: they are basically poseurs, or at least posing in this context where they are also flirting, and (probably) one of them is refraining from correcting the other (for whatever reason, perhaps connected to flirting). It’s not out of the realms of possibility that someone who worked for the CPUSA at the time (as, I gather, Tatler did) would get this wrong, still less that she endorse a flirtee’s error. But… if it’s the characters who are in error surely the screenwriters know that the vast majority of the audience won’t pick up on the implication, and the tiny fraction of the audience that know Marx and Proudhon will likely spend some substantial part of the movie puzzling about exactly what I was (and still am, slightly, puzzled about). Why would they do that? So… I was tempted to conclude that it was a screenwriter error. But… did nobody who read the script catch it? Are they all really that ignorant? And then I thought of all the people I knew who went into that industry (surprisingly many, including someone who was nominated at a young age for the Academy Award for best director) and think, yes, they really might all be that ignorant. And then I thought, ah, but the only actual Academy Award winner I’ve ever known was a lifelong Trotskyist, and he would have caught it. But, of course, he was a Trotskyist, not a Communist (which returned me to realization that someone working for the CPUSA in the 30’s might well have made the error). [1]

My conclusion is that it was a screenwriters mistake. But: would you like to contribute other examples of errors like these two that have puzzled and/or irritated you?

[1] Ok, since I’m in a flippant mood today, I’ll share this one… I watch a lot of cricket through Willow TV, and in recent weeks I have been inundated a particular ad for the Tom Tiffany for Governor of Wisconsin campaign which, evidently, thinks that people watching Pakistan v West Indies test matches in Madison are fair game. His ad starts out by saying “This is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party. Or your parents'” and shows a picture of Saunders, AOC, and a couple of Democratic Party Governor candidates with, I kid you not, a hammer and sickle. My first thought was to wonder which voters are triggered by a hammer and sickle, and my second, quite seriously, was to wonder whether he is trying to convey the (true, as he no doubt knows) thought that whereas there were lots of Communists in “your grandparents'” Democratic Party (nearly every Communist I knew in LA in the 1980s was a Democrat, and nearly every Democrat I knew was some sort of Stalinist, because those were the circles within which I moved), not one of the people depicted in his ad is one. Obviously not.

— or golden pillars or anything.


What the paper actually found was the edge of the star-forming region of the galaxy.  And that’s a different kind of interesting.

So stars are formed from big clouds of interstellar gas.  And galaxies are born with a very large supply of such gas.  Very large, but not infinite.  After some billions of years, the gas gets used up.  After that, the galaxy can’t form any more new stars.  Astronomers call this “quenching”.

Astronomers refer to galaxies that have quenched as “red sequence” galaxies.  Galaxies that are still forming stars are “blue cloud” galaxies.  It turns out that if you plot this graphically, you get a sharply bimodal distribution: you get a lot of star-forming blue galaxies, a lot of quenched red sequence galaxies, and not much in between.  So the relatively sparse region in between got called the “green valley”.

— Why is it sparse?  Because quenching can happen pretty fast.  So you don’t see a lot of galaxies in that in-between period, because it’s a relatively short period in a galaxy’s life.


As it happens, our own Milky Way galaxy seems to be passing through the green valley right now.  The Milky Way is still forming new stars, but the rate of star formation is starting to drop quickly.  Another couple of billion years, and it’ll be mostly done.  Not entirely done, of course — a galaxy is a big place.  Here and there a few gas clouds will remain, occasionally giving birth to new stars.  But it’ll be a long tail of decline, the cosmic equivalent of searching for loose change under the couch cushions.

Which brings us back to the original paper.  Look at a spiral galaxy, and you can see that it gets denser towards the center.



So you’d reasonably assume that star formation would peak and burn out first in the center, because there’s more gas there — more stuff there generally.  And then you’d expect it to peak further out, and then last of all out near the ends of the spiral arms.  Space is emptier out there, so it takes longer for gas clouds to bump into each other and start condensing.  So you might expect to find fewer young stars in the center (raw material gets burned up quickly) and more young stars far out in the arms (star formation takes longer to get started).

As it turns out: half right.  There is indeed a gradient of older-to-younger stars (on average) as you move out from the galactic core.  But then — well before you reach the end of the arms — the gradient goes into reverse.  It makes a U-shaped curve.  The far ends of the spiral arms have a lot of older stars and not a lot of young ones.  The Milky Way is starting to quench, but not all at once.  Our galaxy has an aging heart, and aging extremities, but there’s a big donut-shaped chunk in between that’s still young and vigorous.

Okay, but — why?

Because galaxies churn. 

A galaxy is made up of billions of stars, all orbiting around the galaxy’s center of mass.  Most of the time, those stars are well separated from each other, light years apart.  But every now and then, a couple of stars will pass close enough to influence each other gravitationally.  When that happens, one star will gain a bit of kinetic energy and move “up” into a more distant orbit.  The other star will lose a bit of energy and move “down” towards the center of the galaxy.  This is known as churning, or “dynamical relaxation” if you’re feeling fancy. 


[dynamical relaxation at Eurovision]

So over billions of years, a galaxy will tend to slowly change shape: it will gradually extend outwards (some stars getting bounced up and out) and also get thicker in the center (some stars bouncing down towards the galactic core).

So the reason for the U-shaped curve is that most of the stars in the outer regions of the galaxy didn’t start there.  That region used to be empty intergalactic space, without enough gas for star formation.  But over billions of years, galactic churning kicked stars into higher, more distant orbits that took them into those regions.  The spiral arms slowly stretched outwards into areas of space that had always been pretty empty, without much gas for star formation.  You might occasionally get a young star bounced out there by accident, but no new young stars would form there.  

And there’s a fairly sharp border between the donut-shaped inner bit where stars are still forming, and the outer reaches where they don’t.  We’ve seen that border in other, distant galaxies.  And — this is the point of the paper — now we’ve found it in our own Milky Way.  

Okay, so that’s the “edge of the galaxy” that’s been found.  But what does this have to do with the end of everything?

Well, here’s the thing: the churning never stops. 

Over billions and then trillions of years, the Milky Way will continue to evolve.  Some stars will fall down towards the center; some stars will get pushed further out.  

And this will continue even after all the stars are dead.  The Sun and other stars like it will swell up into red giants, then contract into white dwarfs, then — very very slowly — cool down to dead cinders, black and cold.  Larger stars will become neutron stars or black holes.  Red dwarfs, the smallest stars, will burn for trillions of years, conserving their fuel, but eventually they too will die.  In the distant future of ten trilliion years from now, the Milky Way will be completely dark and cold.

But it will still churn.  The dead stars will still circle the galaxy’s center of mass.  And very eventually, by drunkard’s-walk statistical inevitability, they will either be flung out into interstellar space, to wander forever alone through the endlessly expanding darkness of a dead universe, or they’ll fall down into the Milky Way’s core.  Where they will encounter —



— Sagittarius A-Star, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

Eventually — very, very, very eventually — pretty much all normal matter in the Milky Way will end up a dead dark cinder.  And that cinder will either be flung out into infinite space to fall forever through darkness, or will plunge into the black hole.  The atoms that you’re made of, right now?  Churn, churn, flip a coin: either up and out, or down the hatch, as the universe very slowly grinds to a dead cold halt.

Right.  Have a great weekend, all!

Rather than bringing us back into the substance of this disagreement, I want to go off about something entirely different. As you’ll soon see, I’m far out of my depths on this one.

Call the claim as formulated by John Q, that “it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia,” “PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE.”

PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is under my skin. Let me try to explain why.

First, PERFERCLY PLAUSIBLE may be true. That would be interesting, just on the substance.

Second, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE could be true even if the thing it claims to be plausible is false, and it could be false even if the thing it claims to be plausible is true. That is, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE can be true (false) even if it’s false (true) that the number of US golfers exceeds the population of Australia. That’s because PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is (I think) a claim about what it would be epistemically reasonable to believe if you had some information on which to infer the relative quantities of US golfers and Australians,[1] but not enough information for deducing the fact being claimed to be perfectly plausible.

Third, and weirdly: In the context of the post, the truth (or otherwise) of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE strikes me as more interesting than the truth (or otherwise) of the claim being forwarded as perfectly plausible, that is, that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians. When I read John Q writing that it’s perfectly plausible that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians, I thought, “wow, that’s fascinating,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. If John Q had instead just checked and affirmed Matt’s supposition, writing that the number of US golfers does indeed exceed the number of Australians, I’d have thought “that’s wild, Americans and their golf, amIright?” It’s the plausibility of the claim, and not its (plausible) truth, that fascinates me. This isn’t exactly paradoxical: PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE forwards a different claim than the claim it asserts to be plausible, so it’s no great shock that in some contexts it could be more interesting. You might be surprised to be more interested in PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE if you thought it was just a vaguer version of the claim that US golfers exceed Australians. But it’s not that. It tells us something (so far imprecise) about what inferences it would be reasonable to draw on the basis of a (so far imprecise) body of knowledge. It tells us that we shouldn’t be surprised to hear someone who knows their stuff but hasn’t looked up the details telling us that the number of US golfers exceeds the number of Australians.[2]

Philosophers use the language of “perfectly plausible” all the time, and it’s generally used to lubricate a certain kind of argumentative move. It indicates that there’s some variable that we could inquire into, but that the argument being advanced (probably despite appearances) doesn’t ultimately stand or fall on the outcome of that inquiry. So, if I’m defending a moral principle of equal opportunity, I might say “but it’s perfectly plausible that free will is an illusion, so we should consider what this principle would tell us if that perfectly plausible thing were indeed true and ask whether the thing it would tell us on that condition is a palatable thing for such a principle to tell us.” (I would say that because some people seem to think, wrongly, that equal opportunity only makes sense if free will is real.) This is what John Q is doing in PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. He’s saying to Matt, “you may well be right about the relative numbers of Australians and US golfers. My point stands either way.” It doesn’t matter to John Q’s argument whether the number of Australians exceeds US golfers; what matters is that it plausibly could be true, and it wouldn’t matter if it were.

I think what I’m hung up on here is this: I think the most typical uses of “perfectly plausible” in philosophy apply it to claims whose truth status is difficult to discern or difficult to make a part of the common ground for the argument, e.g. normative claims or claims about free will. The thing John Q asserts as plausible is a descriptive fact, and one we could relatively easily learn the truth status of. Yet even in these circumstances, I think, PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE is a more interesting claim than “Australians < US golfers.” Contrast this case with the illusion of free will. If I knew free will was an illusion (and if that fact could easily be brought into common ground), there would be no point in asserting the fact as plausible. I’d say instead, “we know free will is an illusion, so let’s see if the implications of my principle, given that that’s so, are acceptable.” What is the difference between this case and PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE? Supposing Australians < US golfers, what is it that John Q conveys, intentionally or not, by writing PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE over “Australians < US golfers”? Or, why do I care more about whether this comparison is plausible than whether it’s true?

Maybe we could translate PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE into a claim with no epistemic language, such as “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark.” But I don’t really think that would preserve the meaning of PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. One reason I have for doubting it is that the whole time this has been under my skin, I haven’t figured out how to (dis)confirm PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE. In contrast, I could quite easily learn the two quantities and see if I think they’re in the same ballpark. And, if the two numbers are in the same ballpark, then “the two quantities in question are in the same ballpark” is true (and its denial false), even if anyone who knows their stuff should have been surprised to learn that fact. But, as I said, the truth of Perfectly Plausible just doesn’t turn on whether the number of golfers in the US exceeds or is in the same ballpark as the number of Australians.

On the one hand, I know just what John Q was doing with this construction. On the other hand, I can’t make precise to my own satisfaction what PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE means in this context, and why I should find PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE (and its truth status) so much more interesting than the claim that PERFECTLY PLAUSIBLE asserts to be plausible. Is there something simple that I’m missing? In what other kinds of cases might we be more interested in a claim’s plausibility than its truth? Is it about when we have reason to be concerned about what people might be in a position reasonably to infer, true or not?

Suppose the US is embarrassed to find that it is plausible that US golfers exceed Australians. Should they look into the numbers and then be reassured if they learn that it’s plausible yet false? Or should they be alarmed by, and take action against, the mere fact that it’s plausible? (Only half joking here.)

[1] I know that “the number of Australians” must be different than the “population of Australia” but I think I’ll write this more clearly if I use them interchangeably, and the difference won’t matter to the question I have.

[2] Does it also tell us that we should be surprised to hear someone who knows their stuff but hasn’t looked up the details contradicting the claim? I’m not sure, but I doubt it.