How long it takes to do an octillion calculations with…

What is new is where—and how young—the search happens. The furry world these kids move through lives largely online: The International Anthropomorphic Research Project (IARP), a group of scholars who study it, finds a heavy overlap with digital media use, and nearly 60 percent of furries say they found the fandom before turning 18. It’s a place where identity is constantly performed, debated, and policed, often by other kids. Yet even for the most online generation in history, some things arrive before the algorithm. The Internet gave Sol the word for it, and others who understood. But the feeling was already there.

The fandom also overlaps heavily with other marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ and nonbinary young people—which has made it a target of moral panic. In 2022, the baseless claim that schools were installing litter boxes for students who identified as cats ricocheted across the Internet and into political speeches, sparking a new battle in the culture wars.

Furries are also routinely conflated with sexual fetish—adult furry content exists online—though that bears little resemblance to the kids sewing tails, painting masks, and trading art at PortCon. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s sort of an adult undertone when really, this is about expression, identity, and creativity,” Werkhoven says. “There’s the conception that furry is strictly like a kink, and that’s not true. It’s: ‘I have a character, and that character is a dog.’”

That fear-and-fascination cycle is where most parents come in. Catherine, a Newton mother of two furry kids (now 27 and 21), found out her older child was a furry only because her younger one let it slip years ago; the older one feared the stigma too much to say so. “These furries are all anonymous. They’re in big fur suits, right? It could be anybody. I don’t know, factually, if this has ever happened, but there is fear that pedophiles will take advantage of younger kids,” she says. Then she chaperoned her younger child to a convention and found it closer to an art fair than a den of iniquity: kids and caregivers, mental health workshops, and costumes of startling craft. “They come up with a whole character. They have very elaborate stories of their character and terminology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a boy or girl, gay or straight; they become this other person, and they can open up,” she says. “I was impressed.”

Catherine’s reassurance, though, rests on something therian parents don’t have. Her children invented their “fursonas.” Sol didn’t invent the cat. The question in Susanne’s house isn’t whether this is safe—it’s what it means that her daughter isn’t pretending.

“The dirt made me. The dirt made me, like a mother with no shame made me,” she sings, shockingly on “Kentucky Queen.” Who sings like that about their mom, much less about their mom the beloved country star? But Wynonna has been freed to tell the truth as she experienced it, hard as it may be.

A different day
The same ol’ call
Lost your mind in Mobile
Fallin’ off again
It’s too far, I can’t find you
A counterfeit fix, that’s what you run to
I know, Lord, I know

It’s a strange transaction
That nobody wins, but I buy in
Oh, here we go again

And I’m desperate for change
From the rain and stormy weather
I would drag you out of Hell if I could
But I don’t have the power
I can’t save you, but I try
I don’t want to, but I still believe
In a hopeful lie

I hear this song as being about the struggle when someone you love is in and out of rehab, for drug abuse or mental illness issues. She’s saying (I think) that she believed it, or tried to, or said she did, each time Naomi headed toward a recovery, or got more therapy. But perhaps the song is about her daughter Grace, who’s had similar struggles and is currently in jail. In any case, the song registers how the pain has been exacerbated by hope, which is a terrible truth. But she manages to sing about these matters directly, with no obscurity or evasion, and I hope that expressing it with this sort of intensity will help her.

His conclusion was, however, fatefully turned on its head in 1912 by Arthur H. Estabrook, working out of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Estabrook “reanalyzed” Dugdale’s data and decided that heredity mattered more than Dugdale realized. With Charles Davenport, one of the nation’s leading eugenicists and the director of the Eugenics Record Office, Estabrook published a study of another “degenerate” family, entitled The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics. Unsurprisingly, the two men concluded that there was nothing to be done to correct the genes of a criminal. “The rural communities of ‘degenerates,’” they argued, suffered from “an unusual lack of industry, retardation in school work, and a failure to observe the conventionalities in sex-relationships. There is reason for concluding that the first and second traits are hereditary and are, in a measure, the raison d’être of the foundation of such communities.” They used the term “cacogenics” (derived from an earlier concept developed by British physician and biologist E. E. Fournier d’Albe) for the generational deterioration of a (white) family. The sentiment behind the concept had considerable staying power, even if the term itself fell out of use.

Estabrook and Davenport helped normalize the notion that some families were burdened with an insurmountable defective inheritance. The state, it followed, could do nothing against a “cacogenic” family’s slide into criminal degeneracy and poverty. Combining policing, incarceration, segregation, and sterilization was the best course of action to protect the privileged from the hopeless.

Reducing complex social problems to a hereditary defect—to “bad genes”—had the virtue of sounding scientific while hiding a profound pessimism about American people. Conservative ideologues seized on this “diagnosis” to argue against state and philanthropic investment in the lives of people like the Jukes. Similar arguments about Black people were made during the period of Jim Crow segregation, with advocates of Darwinian evolution arguing against investing in a population destined to become extinct once forced into open competition with whites. In their 2009 book Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins, historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore describe how “natural selection was now predicated on the weaker being extinguished. Individuals, races even, had to perish for progress to occur. […] Europeans were the agents of Evolution.” Political pluralism and multiracial democracy effectively stood in the way of evolution. State investment could not possibly make a meaningful difference in the lives of inferior people—a view that has generated a lingering apathy plaguing US policy decisions around medical care, employment, and poverty ever since.

My book argues for a substantial restoration of this first, Scottish, Smithian, and individual liberty. Alone. It argues against a state-directed, collectivist, and faux-predictable pursuit of an unattainable utopia, a top-down social engineering advocated widely in the French Enlightenment, which promises, through what it calls its numerous nice-sounding but coerced ‘policies,’ to serve a general will.

In the spring of 1778, with the war in America going badly, a member of the House of Lords proposed that Britain withdraw its forces and recognize American independence. Charles Lennox, the third Duke of Richmond, was a great-grandson of King Charles II, one of the wealthiest men in the country, and about as well-placed in the British establishment as anyone could be. He was also, for 15 years, its most persistent critic.

Richmond is not a name most Americans would recognize. Danielle Allen’s Radical Duke makes a good case that he ought to be. […]

The central argument of the book, and its most valuable contribution, is that the reformers in London and the rebels in America were reacting to the same problem, and that the problem was not taxation as such. It was that Parliament had stopped functioning as an independent check on the Crown.

The great historian of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood, argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution that what is most overlooked in discussions is the radical transformation of society that resulted. Colonial America was a society of status, of privileges, of station. Patronage and personal favoritism by those with power played a major role in social mobility—to the extent that it existed. This social system would all be transformed by the Revolution. One prominent example of the legal transformation was the abolition state by state of the practice of primogeniture between 1777 to 1798. Not only did this change the laws of inheritance, but transformed the meaning and use of property, encouraged entrepreneurship, credit markets and social and geographic mobility. Legal distinctions based on rank disappeared, and economic opportunities were based in interest, aptitude and talent rather than birth. Certainly not perfectly, it must be acknowledged. But in a far more sweeping nature than anywhere else in the world, ordinary individuals were enabled to “give it a go,” as the historian Deirdre McCloskey likes to stress about the ascendancy of the Bourgeois Era. Almost overnight, Wood argues, Americans became “the most liberal, most democratic, most commercially minds, and most modern people in the world.”

As a result, America became the richest country in history over the next 250 years. It did so without an aristocracy, and without central planning or a comprehensive blueprint by the governmental authorities. The Revolution succeeded because it created the institutional conditions for commercial civilization. It unleashed the creative powers of a free people to a greater degree than had ever been experienced before. As Hayek would stress, the transformation for a society of status to one of contract is critical to experiencing modern economic growth. And this is only possible if the governing system seeks to eliminate privileges and instead binds itself to the rule of law.

The American Constitution, democratic self-governance, geographic advantages, and abundance of resources all played a role, but it was the transformation of society that drove progress. The system of social hierarchy, deference, patronage, and inherited privileges was transformed into a system of equality before the law, civil society consisting of voluntary association, social mobility, entrepreneurship and dignity and respect for ordinary work. Commercial activity ceased being morally suspect and the marketplace was characterized by entrepreneurs, shopkeepers and independent participants rather than clients dependent on the good graces of the privileged and powerful elite.

The tragedy of Joe Biden was his disinterest in restoring the free movemnent of goods and people.

In many ways, robotics and AI are well suited to the relentless pace of work that is already happening inside e-commerce fulfillment centers. Amazon’s promise of speedy deliveries for its 200 million Prime subscribers in particular requires hundreds of thousands of human employees to speedily assemble and ship out customer orders that often combine a dizzying array of products.

Much of the work in fulfillment centers also frequently involves “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks that people may prefer to hand over to robots. The injury and illness rate for workers in the US warehouse sector has typically been more than double the average across all industries, according to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“You have almost 2 million people working in the warehousing sector in the United States, and it’s characterized by very high turnover and very high workplace injury rates,” said Greenwood.

Secretary Rubio’s desire to stay on his boss’ good side leads him to twist reality like a pretzel. He speaks about an alliance between the United States and Europe based on shared values, gliding over a president who clearly admires Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping far more than those of other democratic countries. He talks about the wonders of science and technology created by Western civilization, even as his administration is cutting funding for scientific research across the board. He celebrates the agreement over Greenland, without mentioning his desire to grab it away from Denmark.

Secretary Rubio praises thymos without regard to the ends to which it is directed. He would do well to remember that it was an excess of megalothymia that led Alcibiades and the Athenians into the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which Thucydides explains was the beginning of their defeat in the Peloponnesian War. The Secretary should also focus a bit on the lines from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal.” It is this principle of human equality, and not the celebration of great individuals, that has underlined a lot of American foreign policy over the decades.

On the last Sunday afternoon of September, Rhenda Strub was bundled up against the autumn chill for one final day at the ballpark, eating Cracker Jack and sweet and spicy pickles.

Another baseball season was ending as it often does in Seattle: abruptly and too soon. There would be no postseason for the Mariners, the only franchise never to have appeared in a World Series.

A. Bartlett Giamatti, a literary scholar who served as commissioner of Major League Baseball for five months until he died suddenly in 1989, famously wrote that baseball is “designed to break your heart,” because it “leaves you to face the fall all alone.”

Yet this season, Ms. Strub, 71, found that the opposite was also true: Baseball can help heal a broken heart.

After she lost her 27-year-old son, Wyatt, to muscular dystrophy three years ago, she retreated to his room and spent countless hours alone quilting and watching baseball games on television. The constancy of baseball helped to structure her days, but the loneliness only added to her grief.

So at the beginning of this season, Ms. Strub bought two season tickets to the Mariners in Section 120, on the first base side, thinking she would regularly go with her loved ones to T-Mobile Park. But her husband doesn’t like crowds, and the rest of her family has busy lives.

So she wrote a post on Facebook — with some trepidation, she said, because the “internet can be a cruel place” — asking strangers if they wanted to attend games with her.

“This season ticket adventure is part of me finding my way back out — getting out of the house, being around people, and doing something that brings a little joy again,” she wrote. “Baseball helps me heal.”

The post went viral in April, inspiring stories in local newspapers and on the radio.

Her family worried about her meeting up with strangers. Random people also messaged her with their concerns, offering safety tips.

But her inbox was also flooded with messages from people describing their own stories of loss. A child who died. The passing of mothers, fathers and partners. Failed marriages.

And a shared love of baseball.

“I had so many people contact me with remarkably similar stories,” she said. “They have had some sort of life event that left them feeling unbalanced to deeply grieving. And they didn’t really have someone to go to the game with but loved going to the game.”

“Baseball has a calming effect on them,” she added, “and they want someone to share it with.”

The latest Distribution of Household Income report from the Congressional Budget Office finds that average inflation-adjusted household income in the US grew for every fifth of the income distribution between 1979 and 2023, both before and after means-tested transfers and federal taxes. The richest fifth of households saw their incomes grow the fastest, but households in the bottom and middle fifths also enjoyed substantial gains. Among households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, average real annual income rose by 50 percent before means-tested transfers and federal taxes and 108 percent after.

The Left/Right is united by hating the hand that feeds them.

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm.

Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside her. Otto, who sometimes goes by the name Rainer, and whose last name is only known as “Z” because of Germany’s strict privacy laws, was a doctor who had cared for his mother for years, ever since she had suffered a stroke and moved in with him. He described the course of that night to me. He woke to the sound of her short breath and tried to sit her upright. Her eyes were shut, and her lips pursed. She stopped breathing. Otto reached for his phone to call for help, but then Doria opened her eyes and stared into his. She smiled, drew one last deep breath, shut her eyes again, and lay still.

Otto sank into his chair. As a doctor, he had seen death many times, but his own mother’s passing sent him into shock. He felt frozen, watching the windows glisten in the fading light. He was 66, and his brother and father had died years before. He had no friends. He had given all of his time, energy and attention to his mother’s care, and now that his task was suddenly over, he had no one to turn to. He mourned in solitude, with an impromptu ritual. He lit candles and set metal plates at the four corners of her bed. He sat beside her and thought about her soul.

Once the rite was complete, Otto picked up the phone and called a funeral home. He knew the procedure: as a doctor, he could issue his own mother’s death certificate. After he hung up, Otto waited. It was the last calm moment he would experience for many months.

In the years after they reunited, there were signs that Burgess’ wife could not fully overcome the attack she suffered: “Lynne could not bear to be left alone at night,” Burgess wrote, “even with a dog that flew into an ecstasy of noise at the scuffle of a mouse. She feared the dark, and the fear had its origin in blacked-out wartime London when she had been viciously attacked by four GI deserters.” The attack inspired an early passage in one of the most disturbing scenes of A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. The final chapter of the book, where the main character outgrows his sociopathy, was cut by the U.S. publisher to maintain a darker ending for the novel: “Eric Swenson, Norton’s vice-president, insisted that the book lose its final chapter,” Burgess explained. “I had to accede to this lopping because I needed the advance, but I was not happy about it.”

Following Lynne’s death in 1968, Burgess was asked to return to the hospital to collect her rings. To obtain the wedding ring, her finger had to be broken, the same one the American GIs had attempted to break many years before.

This is the account you will read—or a slight variation thereof—if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on the topic of Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true.

The Wonder of Consumer Surplus: Is the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country a good measure of economic wellbeing? No, it’s not (David R. Henderson, 10/08/26, Defining Ideas)

And what exactly is consumer surplus? The idea itself is straightforward. The consumer surplus that you get when you buy an item is the maximum amount you would have been willing to pay for the item minus what you actually pay. So, for example, if you would have been willing to pay $50 for a shirt, but actually pay $30, your consumer surplus on that purchase is $20. Another way of saying that is that the consumer surplus is a measure of the consumer’s gain from a particular trade.

Why consumer surplus matters

One of the hardest ideas for non-economists to accept is that both sides gain from trade. The good news is that when I gave examples in class, most students got the point quickly.

Indeed, one of my students gave an example that I hadn’t previously considered but that I have since used in speeches to illustrate the concept of consumer surplus. It goes like this: You go to a store and find a shirt with a price tag of $50. You try it on and decide you like it. You go to the cash register to pay. The salesperson points out something you hadn’t noticed: the shirt is on sale for 40 percent off and so the price is actually $30. My student pointed out that a minimum estimate of your consumer surplus is $20 because you would have been willing to pay $50 but instead paid only $30. Of course, that’s a minimum estimate because you probably would have been willing to pay at least somewhat more than $50. How do we know? Because you probably weren’t indifferent between buying the shirt at $50 or keeping your money.

Once you understand and really appreciate consumer surplus, you can start looking around and appreciating what you have.

Status is the basis of all primitive “law”. The prehistorical paterfamilias ruled his roost by fist and club. Law amounted to the memory of past practice as carried in the memory of the head of the tribe. Decisions or commands going beyond tradition represented pure power, which was therefore not law in any acceptable modern sense. That was the ancient version of autocracy, or traditional kingship.

Whereas status depends on fist and club, contract depends on the voluntary agreement of two or more parties who, at the moment of signature, are juridical equals. That is a functional legal fiction which works because there is a greater power, the state, which will enforce the law which makes agreement possible in the first place. The principle behind all that is engraved above the entrance to the US Supreme Court: “Equal justice under law”.

Status imposes hierarchy; contract is based on voluntary agreement. The two principles represent, respectively, the vertical and the horizontal axes on the graph of all human power relations.

Though status is the basis of all physical power, even in the animal kingdom, contract has other sources of strength. Since the invention of writing, and the ability to store agreed texts (on clay tablets to begin with), legally enforceable agreements have been the insurgent power in human affairs. At first this was largely private, but soon the principle was applied to public affairs too.

From the point of view of Western political culture today, the effective starting point of organised resistance to status unbound was the sealing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

…by those who think themselves incapable of competing as equals.

For nearly 28 years Karl Bushby has been walking around the world with two rules: no transport and no going home to Hull unless he arrives on foot.

On Monday afternoon, for the first time since 1998, the former paratrooper, now aged 57, stepped on to British soil after swimming the Channel.

Bushby started his epic trek in Chile on November 1, 1998, shortly after leaving his mother Angela’s home in east Yorkshire. Since then, he has traversed the Darién Gap as fighting raged between the Colombian government and Marxist guerrillas; covered the frozen Bering Strait on foot; and become the first person known to have swum 184 miles across the Caspian Sea.

Many of the same countries that became economically powerful off the back of fossil fuels are now trying to transition to renewables. But they are held back by centuries of legacy infrastructure.

Because a gas boiler won’t run on wind power, and a diesel truck cannot be solar-powered, societies looking to shift to green energy need to use more electricity and increase their share of renewables.

That is where many middle- and lower-income countries have an advantage. With less existing energy infrastructure built around fossil fuels, they are better placed for a faster rollout of renewable electricity sources.

In many instances, solar power in particular is now cheaper to produce than fossil electricity. And unlike large coal or gas plants, which take years to construct and millions in investments, solar and wind farms can be built quickly and with much less upfront cost.

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I’d heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

Here’s how it was: Because most children died in infancy, a woman needed to give birth many times, and sooner or later one of those births would almost certainly kill her. If somehow you survived infancy, childhood diseases would probably kill you, and if they didn’t, the education you got would be either no school or a nightmare school. If you made it to adulthood, the lack of transport would limit your marriage prospects to the people in your village, to whom you were probably related, and with whom you were therefore condemned to produce genetically questionable offspring (as you probably were yourself). You lived in a one-room shack filled with filth, or in a tenement in a town whose streets were filled with filth, and so the air stank and the water was unsafe to drink, which is why you were sick most of the time. You had just a few stinking lice-infested rags for clothes, and lice in your hair too, so you itched all the time. The food was of low quality and limited variety, and generally available in inadequate quantities. But even if on rare occasions you got something good to eat, you would not enjoy it much because, by the time you reached adulthood, most of your teeth were gone. You worked from dawn to dusk, but, exhausted as you were, you might not get much sleep because you shared your home with livestock, and even if they were well behaved and made little noise, you needed to be alert at night because there were no police, and you were living in a criminal-infested combat zone. After the development of printing, there were books, but even if you could read and afford them, you would not have much time to read because you worked all day and it was dark at night. Then, if you survived all this to live long enough to face old age, things really went downhill.

As solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles and connected devices spread, millions of things that consume electricity can also store it, shift when they use it or, in some cases, send it back. “Everything-to-grid” is the emerging idea of coordinating those resources so they become active parts of the power system rather than simply sitting at the end of the network. The World Economic Forum included the concept among its Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2026.