Monday 15 April 2019

Miscellaneous links

1. Why Birmingham is not rich - poor public transport. Is good public transport (part of the reason) why London is rich?

2. She was 0-6 0-5 and matchpoint down - and she won!

3. The facts are true, the news is fake: why Taleb will not talk to English journalists (apropos of l'affaire Roger Scruton).

4. How quickly mores change. 20-something adult woman gets engaged to man of similar age she has known for many years - and is met with disapproval. Her love-life would have been nearly the world's most boring story a generation ago. Now it is a news story - or at least, an online magazine story. I am sorely tempted to take the (old-fashioned) feminist line on this: would anyone have expressed disapproval if she were a man? (By which I mean: a man marrying a man?) Human societies are capable of some weird varieties - don't be at all surprised if teen marriage comes back into vogue one day.

5. The gender gap in voice pitch has halved in the last decades, with women moving toward the lower pitch levels of men. Sounds like a laboured metaphor for a worthy novel.

6. Why the world of sperm donation helps the likes of Wickham and hurts the likes of Darcy.

7. The world as seen from America: a woman goes to the Gaeltacht and suggests it is one of few places where promoting native identity is uncontroversial. I suggest: most of the world.

8. "Thus, in several dimensions, areas in the US where Scandinavian descendants live resemble a ‘Scandinavia in miniature’." Worth looking at together with this piece on inequality in the Economist.

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