Category: Travel
Helsinki notes
Most of all, I like the city for its visual complexity, and for its recurring architectural surprises. It is the best Art Nouveau city in the world, with only Brussels as a rival, and also a top tier modernist city. Public buildings are excellent, and unlike in Stockholm you are never quite sure what is coming next.
The Finns are amazing at building out lovely, cozy rooms. In a used bookstore you might find a room for sitting on a comfortable chair and reading. It will look and feel perfect. I even saw one men’s room with this flavor, and yes it had a comfy chair.
It is striking, and instructive, that the Japanese have such a strong presence in tourism in Finland. Their groups dominate visits to the underground rock church, for instance. Japan and Finland both have something inscrutable in common? And they both share an obsession with design and with small detail.
One nice thing about Helsinki is you can find a good restaurant in almost any part of town. Unlike say Paris, New York, or London, they do not have “dining deserts” where tasty places are absent for reasons of rent or zoning. Similarly, Helsinki also has a very high quality of small shop, in areas such as jewelry, used clothing, and design. Again, as with the restaurants, you can find these in almost any part of town. Helsinki has avoided the trap of looking and feeling like the other global cities, as the price-rent gradients simply are not that oppressive.
Along related lines, you will see non-white immigrants in great numbers in the center of town. In Stockholm, in contrast, non-white immigrants are priced out of the center to a considerable degree, though of course you can see them working in service jobs there,
The spaces in the new public library are remarkably inviting for sitting and reading. The interior is also an example of an institution that has leapt into being retro, without ever having managed to be fashionable in the interim (the opposite of mobile money in Kenya leapfrogging more antiquated money and banking institutions). In an act of supreme wisdom, they have stacked the library with “technology,” most of all 3-D printers and advanced sewing machines. It now looks quaint and charming, much like the older buildings around town. It is the smart phones that hold the attention of the library visitors, even in this relatively reading-sympathetic culture.
In Nordic countries, Thai food usually is better than Chinese. Georgian food is something you also might try in Helsinki. Salmon soup is good, but you don’t need to have it more than once. The whitefish and small river fish I enjoyed.
The Finns are interesting to speak to, especially about Finland. One woman said (paraphrased): “We can talk to each other for hours, and still not understand, so how do you expect the immigrants to understand us?” Multiple meanings can be assigned to that remark.
Another said something like: “No, the Finns are not the happiest people in the world. Once foreigners stop asking us how happy we are, we go back to complaining at each other about everything.” Was she complaining about that?
Everywhere you go, you see Finns doing things with each other.
In my view, Helsinki is one of Europe’s great cities, information-rich and out of the ordinary. It should be noted, however, that hardly anyone else agrees with this assessment, least of all the residents here.
Tallinn bleg
Your suggestions would be most welcome, thank you in advance…
*Jan Morris: life from both sides*
That is the recent biography from Paul Clements, which I enjoyed very much. In part I liked it because I have never much loved her writing, or found it insightful. To me the book (to some degree unintentionally) raises the questions of why so much travel writing does not age well, and why so much travel writing is simply boring to read, even though a trip to the same place might be fascinating.
Here was one good passage:
…at a conservative estimate, Morris’s books alone contain more than five million words — and then there is her journalism and literary criticism, which run to several million more. From the days of the Arab News Agency in 1948 until its conclusion, her career spanned seventy-three years of publication. Every aspect of her life fuelled her writing; her entire published corpus, from 1956 to 2021, totalled fifty-eight books, while she edited a further five volumes.
Posterity will remember Jan Morris. What makes her work sui generis is the genre-less way that she combined topography, the social landscape, history, personal anecdote, and an acute imagination. Morris forged an unlikely style that was vigorous, precise, and entertaining. Hers was a language nourished by the music of childhood, conditioned by The Book of Common Prayer and Shakespeare, energised by journalism, and inspired by travelling the world as a student of human nature. Like all writers, Morris had her foibles: her voluptuous vocabulary included words such as ‘tatterdemalion,’ ‘swagger,’ ‘gallimaufry,’ ‘coruscate,’ ‘fizz,’ ‘parvenu,’ ‘rodomontade,’ ‘gasconade,’ ‘palimpset,’ ‘simulacrum,’ ‘fandango,’ and ‘chimerical.’ The three Morris m’s — magnificent, melancholy, and myriad — ripple through her work, not forgetting her love of the two Welsh h’s —hwyl and hiraeth. Her writing could be indulgent at times, but Morris did not take an exalted view of herself as a writer. She was the one who called her work, in A Writer’s World, ‘hedonistic,’ ‘boisterous,’ and ‘impertinent,’ In a newspaper questionnaire in 1998, Morris was asked how she would like to be remembered, and she replied: ‘As a merry and loving writer.’
As an aside, not all those words cited seem so weird to this writer. Swagger, fizz, and parvenu are in ordinary usage, chimerical too.
Among its other virtues, I feel this book captures British history and British intellectual history very well. In any case, you can buy the book here, and I have ordered some additional Morris works to read. If I really like any of them, I will let you all know.
Finland bleg
Helsinki, Turku, and Tampere — what please are your recommendations? I thank you in advance for your sage counsel.
Does visiting South Africa make you more right-wing or more left-wing?
Perhaps “both” is the correct answer?
The right-wing tendencies are easiest to explain. South Africa is obviously much wealthier than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, and of course Westerners play a larger role in its history and also in its present. You can put different glosses on that, but a variety of those paths lead to right-wing conclusions. The left-wing lessons are more novel to ponder, here are a few:
1. Following the removal of apartheid, a black middle class and upper class arose fairly quickly. That testifies to the importance of environment, opportunity, and circumstance. Of course most of the blacks in South Africa still lack adequate opportunity, most of all because of poor education and also sometimes because of poor location within the country, a legacy from segregated apartheid times. Overall, visiting the country causes one to upgrade the importance of opportunity, and to recognize that bad circumstances for talented people can continue for a very long time.
2. Post-apartheid economic performance has been disappointing, and economic inequalities have risen not declined. That suggests more capitalism can exacerbate economic inequality, even as political inequalities are eased.
3. Apartheid was enforced with a remarkably small number of police, per capita much less than most Western countries at the time. That might suggest a kind of Marxian and Foucauldian view that oppressive systems take on a force of their own, through norms and expectations, and are harder to dismantle than an analysis of simple coercion might indicate. The disappointments of post-apartheid South Africa hardly refute that suggestion, as those earlier norms and expectations are by no means entirely gone.
4. In the new, non-apartheid South Africa, sometimes class appears to be far more important than race per se. A certain number of blacks have been slotted into the upper classes, through their business successes, but the all-important role of class continues very much as before. Tthat point appears more Marxian than contemporary leftist, but Marx still is on the left.
5. You can see how much of South African history has been shaped by the roles of gold and diamonds in their economy. That again points in Marxian directions, more than today’s left. In South Africa, the means of production really mattered.
6. What is the ideal of color-blindedness supposed to mean there, after so many centuries of color mattering so much and in so many formal ways? They even still call one group “Coloureds.” Would it be so wrong to suspect SA color-blindedness advocates of somehow missing the point, and asking for something that is both illusory and unobtainable?
I am not sure how much I agree with all of these, only that they are ways I can imagine visiting South Africa and coming away more rather than less left-wing.
What else?
Why you should visit Cape Town, South Africa
First, it is one of the most beautiful cities and surrounding environs. I would put it on a par with Vancouver and Hong Kong and Wellington, New Zealand. Perhaps it is closest to Wellington.
Second, it is far safer than I was expecting. Throughout the week, I never once experienced angst, and that included walks at night and a visit to a township. Certainly there are dangerous places around, but you can do a whole, fulfilling trip without them. I felt safer than in NW Washington, DC.
Third, the flight wasn’t nearly as bad as I had thought. I am used to very long flights to Asia that leave at 11 a.m., wihch is suboptimal for me. The flights DC to Cape Town — both ways direct I might add — left early evening. So you read for a few hours, sleep for seven hours, and then read for a few hours again. Then you arrive. I’ve experienced more painful flights going to the West Coast from Dulles. It never felt like 15 hours, nor the 14 hours coming back.
Fourth, it is inexpensive.
Fifth, the people are very friendly.
Sixth, during my trip the weather was excellent. Some rain, but mostly during my other commitments. It was in the 65 to 70 degree range, and sunny, most of the time I was going around.
I don’t have much to add to the tips in the guidebooks, and from MR readers. But definitely take a day tour by car down to the bottom of the Cape, and see where the Indian and Atlantic Oceans meet. Along the way, without much trying, you likely will see ostriches, baboons, and many penguins, in addition to various exotic African birds.
South Africa is one of those countries that has no other country like it. That means you can learn more by going there. That means you should go there. Q.E.D.
My Conversation with the excellent Michael Nielsen
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Michael Nielsen is scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He’s worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on scientific progress with Patrick Collison, and is a prolific writer, reader, commentator, and mentor.
He joined Tyler to discuss why the universe is so beautiful to human eyes (but not ears), how to find good collaborators, the influence of Simone Weil, where Olaf Stapledon’s understand of the social word went wrong, potential applications of quantum computing, the (rising) status of linear algebra, what makes for physicists who age well, finding young mentors, why some scientific fields have pre-print platforms and others don’t, how so many crummy journals survive, the threat of cheap nukes, the many unknowns of Mars colonization, techniques for paying closer attention, what you learn when visiting the USS Midway, why he changed his mind about Emergent Ventures, why he didn’t join OpenAI in 2015, what he’ll learn next, and more.
And here is one excerpt:
COWEN: Now, you’ve written that in the first half of your life, you typically were the youngest person in your circle and that in the second half of your life, which is probably now, you’re typically the eldest person in your circle. How would you model that as a claim about you?
NIELSEN: I hope I’m in the first 5 percent of my life, but it’s sadly unlikely.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re 50 now, and you live to 100, which is plausible —
NIELSEN: Which is plausible.
COWEN: — and you would now be in the second half of your life.
NIELSEN: Yes. I can give shallow reasons. I can’t give good reasons. The good reason in the first half was, so much of the work I was doing was kind of new fields of science, and those tend to be dominated essentially, for almost sunk-cost reasons — people who don’t have any sunk costs tend to be younger. They go into these fields. These early days of quantum computing, early days of open science — they were dominated by people in their 20s. Then they’d go off and become faculty members. They’d be the youngest person on the faculty.
Now, maybe it’s just because I found San Francisco, and it’s such an interesting cultural institution or achievement of civilization. We’ve got this amplifier for 25-year-olds that lets them make dreams in the world. That’s, for me, anyway, for a person with my personality, very attractive for many of the same reasons.
COWEN: Let’s say you had a theory of your collaborators, and other than, yes, they’re smart; they work hard; but trying to pin down in as few dimensions as possible, who’s likely to become a collaborator of yours after taking into account the obvious? What’s your theory of your own collaborators?
NIELSEN: They’re all extremely open to experience. They’re all extremely curious. They’re all extremely parasocial. They’re all extremely ambitious. They’re all extremely imaginative.
Self-recommending throughout.
Monaco on the Marin Headlands
The Dalmation Coast in Croatia, the Amalfi Coast in Italy and Monaco’s coast on the Mediterranean Sea are often found on lists of the most beautiful coastlines in the world. Here are some pictures. Hard not to agree. The fourth picture is of the Marin coastline near San Francisco. It’s also beautiful but is it obviously more beautiful than the other coastlines? Personally, I don’t think so. But one thing is different. Far fewer people are enjoying the Marin coast. Why? Because fewer people live there. Can something be beautiful if there is no one to see it?
There is something to be said for protecting natural wilderness but must we do so on some of the most valuable land in the world?
I agree with Market Urbanism, “Quite simply, we must build Monaco on the Marin Headlands.”
Hat tip to Bryan Caplan who makes the point about beauty in his excellent, Build, Baby, Build.
Croatia
Amalfi
Monaco
Marin:
What should I do in Cape Town, South Africa?
I won’t be there for long, but what should I see and what should I eat? How is the general level of safety these days?
I thank you all in advance.
My excellent Conversation with Benjamin Moser
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice Lispector. His latest book, which details a twenty-year love affair with the Dutch masters, is one of Tyler’s favorite books on art criticism ever.
Benjamin joined Tyler to discuss why Vermeer was almost forgotten, how Rembrandt was so productive, what auctions of the old masters reveals about current approaches to painting, why Dutch art hangs best in houses, what makes the Kunstmuseum in the Hague so special, why Dutch students won’t read older books, Benjamin’s favorite Dutch movie, the tensions within Dutch social tolerance, the joys of living in Utrecht, why Latin Americans make for harder interview subjects, whether Brasilia works as a city, why modernism persisted in Brazil, how to appreciate Clarice Lispector, Susan Sontag’s (waning) influence, V.S. Naipaul’s mentorship, Houston’s intellectual culture, what he’s learning next, and more.
Excerpt:
COWEN: You once wrote about Susan Sontag, and I quote, “So much of Sontag’s best work concerns the ways we try, and fail, to see.” Please explain.
MOSER: This is what On Photography is about. This is what Against Interpretation is about in Sontag’s work. Of course, in my new book, The Upside-Down World, I talk about how I’m not really great at seeing, particularly. I’m not that visual. I’m a reader. I’m a bookworm. Often, when I’ve looked at paintings, I’ve realized how little I actually see. Sometimes I do feel embarrassed by it. You’ll read the label and it’ll be three sentences, and it’ll say like, A Man with a Dog. You’re like, “Oh, I didn’t even see the dog.” You know what I mean?
On these very basic levels, I just think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t point it out to me, I really don’t see.” I think that that was one of the fascinating things about Sontag, that she was not really able to see. She was actually quite terrible at seeing, and this was especially true in her relationships. She was very bad at seeing what other people were thinking and feeling.
I think because she was aware of that, she tried very hard to remedy it, but it’s just not something you can force. You can’t force yourself to like certain music or to like certain tastes that you might not actually like.
COWEN: What was Sontag most right about or most insightful about?
MOSER: I think this question of images — what images do — and photography and how representations, metaphors can pervert things. She had a very deep repulsion to photography. She really hated photography, and this is why a lot of photographers hated her because they felt this, even though she didn’t really say it. She really didn’t trust it. She really thought it was wicked. At the same time, for somebody who had a deficit, I guess you could say, in seeing, she really relied on it to understand the world.
I think that tension is very instructive for us, because now, she already says 50 years ago, “There are all these images. We don’t know what to do with them. We don’t know how to process them.” Forget AI, forget Russian trolls on Twitter. She uses this word I really like, hygiene, a lot. She talks about mental hygiene and how you can clean the rusty pipes in your brain. That’s why I think reading her helped me at least to understand a lot of what I’m seeing in the world.
COWEN: Do you think she will simply end up forgotten?
Again, I am happy to recommend Benjamin’s latest book The Upside-Down World: Meetings with Dutch Masters.
The Screwworm
The Atlantic: Screwworms once killed millions of dollars’ worth of cattle a year in the southern U.S. Their range extended from Florida to California, and they infected any living, warm-blooded animal: not only cattle but deer, squirrels, pets, and even the occasional human. In fact, the screwworm’s scientific name is C. hominivorax or “man eater”—so named after a horrific outbreak among prisoners on Devil’s Island, an infamous 19th-century French penal colony in South America.
For untold millennia, screwworms were a grisly fact of life in the Americas. In the 1950s, however, U.S. ranchers began to envision a new status quo. They dared to dream of an entire country free of screwworms. At their urging, the United States Department of Agriculture undertook what would ultimately become an immense, multidecade effort to wipe out the screwworms, first in the U.S. and then in Mexico and Central America—all the way down to the narrow strip of land that is the Isthmus of Panama. The eradication was a resounding success. But the story does not end there. Containing a disease is one thing. Keeping it contained is another thing entirely, as the coronavirus pandemic is now so dramatically demonstrating.
To get the screwworms out, the USDA to this day maintains an international screwworm barrier along the Panama-Colombia border. The barrier is an invisible one, and it is kept in place by constant human effort. Every week, planes drop 14.7 million sterilized screwworms over the rainforest that divides the two countries. A screwworm-rearing plant operates 24/7 in Panama. Inspectors cover thousands of square miles by motorcycle, boat, and horseback, searching for stray screwworm infections north of the border. The slightest oversight could undo all the work that came before.
A reminder that civilization takes work. Excellent piece by Sarah Zhang. Read the whole thing.
Hat tip: Stone Age Herbalist.
Why do I prefer current airport procedures?
Michael Stack writes me:
“Hi Tyler – you wrote about preferring current airport procedures to pre-9/11 procedures. Do you plan to elaborate on this? I have a hard time understanding why you’d feel that way.
Here is the list I produced – these are guesses as to why you might feel the way you do:
- Because friends/family can’t meet you at the gate, it reduces crowding in some of the stores, restaurants, and waiting areas.
- Security imposes a higher cost on travelers which reduces crowding – what are the pricing effects? Is this a transfer from airlines? From travelers?
- You’re very worried about another terrorist attack and think our security substantially reduces the chance of an attack.
I can’t really think of many other reasons you’d prefer the current approach.”
TC again: My view is fully his third explanation. Whether we like it or not, people and policymakers respond irrationally to terror attacks on airplanes, or terror attacks using airplanes. I do think the current procedures stop or discourage some number of idiots, noting they likely would not stop a sufficiently sophisticated attack attempt. But a lot of criminals are simply some mix of stupid and incompetent or poor on execution. You don’t want to have attacks on airplanes become any more focal/copycatted than they already are.
I fully get all the “why don’t they just set off a bomb by the passengers waiting to get through security” points, and the like. I just don’t think that is how it works. Why don’t school shooters go to playgrounds instead, or wherever? Maybe someday they will, but for now there is an odd stickiness in the nature of the events.
I don’t doubt that various features of the status quo could be improved, such as more security entry points being open and a better bureaucracy for generating and confirming pre-check privileges. Some of those improvements, however, might be more rather than less intrusive, such as more spot checks of passengers at security or during boarding.
Many people have objected to the point I made, but I don’t think the benefit-cost analysis on this one is close. Nor do I see a huge voter or elite demand to return to the pre-9/11 world for airports.
What is the proper policy toward tourists?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, basically you should charge them fees rather than discourage them through other means> Here is one excerpt:
By this reasoning, the Japanese decision to raise bullet train prices for tourists is exactly the right approach. In the meantime, the Japanese government, which faces high pension costs, has more money at its disposal. There is no need to resent or otherwise restrict the tourists at all, and indeed I have found the Japanese people to be extremely gracious and helpful to foreigners. Higher prices for tourist train tickets will make it easier for them to stay this way.
If there is any problem with Venice’s five-euros-a-day charge, it is that it is not nearly high enough, given crowding and accumulated wear and tear on the city. How about 50 euros? But with a smile!
The same goes for the bus in Barcelona: Why not raise the fare? Just for tourists. It is easy enough to (partially) enforce this differential treatment with spot checks on the bus line. An alternative or possible complement to this plan is to run more buses to the park, to alleviate congestion. Higher fees for tourists can help pay for them.
Here is an interesting problem:
Amsterdam has a more difficult challenge. Barcelona and Venice have some unique attractions and sites that can be priced at higher levels, with exclusion applied to non-payers. In contrast, for many Amsterdam tourists the attractions are booze, pot and sex, all of which have prices set in basically competitive markets. I’m all for more expensive tickets to the Rijksmuseum, but that might not make much of a difference to Amsterdam’s “party tourism” problem.
Worth a ponder.
South Africa fact of the day
Two economists from the Harvard Growth Lab (Shah and Sturzenegger) estimate that the average transport costs for those who are employed in South Africa is equal to 57% of net wages when time to commute is accounted for.
Here is the whole John McDermott tweet storm, in part that is the spatial legacy from the earlier system of apartheid, and in part from poor public transport systems. Here is a related blog post.
What I am nostalgic about
With a group of friends I was having a chat about the merits of the current vs. past America. Battle of the Ancients and Moderns! I generally favor current times, but not unconditionally. So I promised them a list of what I missed from the past. To be clear, these are personal judgments, not claims about net social value. I’ll also offer comments on features from the past that many miss, but I do not. Here goes:
1. Visiting Borders in its heyday. Nowadays I have to go to London to have comparable experiences.
2. That you could just show up at various venues, pay modest prices, and see incredible performers. For instance I saw Horowitz and also McCartney at his peak. Leo Kottke at his peak. Pierre Boulez. Many more. Such experiences are hardly gone, but in terms of cultural resonance the earlier times were much better. How did I fail to go see Miles Davis!?
Similarly, you could just go see Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, Derek Parfit, and many other famous figures. No current economist or philosopher is comparable in this regard.
2b. Note that in some areas, such as NBA basketball, there are more “must see” players today than in any earlier era. Or say tech titans. So I am not favoring the nostalgic perspective per se, but for music, economics, and philosophy the nostalgic perspective on live performance is correct.
3. There were more and better museum art exhibits to see before 9/11. Much of that has to do with insurance rates and the ease of international agreements.
4. Good seafood was cheap and readily available.
5. Reading the Far Eastern Economic Review in its heyday.
6. Awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the Journal of Political Economy, knowing it would have exciting new ideas.
7. Many, many locations were better to travel to and visit. Amsterdam is one obvious example. But by no means is this true for all places, India for instance is better to visit today than before.
8. Hollywood movies used to be better, though global cinema overall is doing fine.
9. Very recently there are too many parts of the world you really just can’t visit, Iran and Russia most notably.
10. Mainstream media was much better, noting I nonetheless would rather have the internet. Still, I miss the quality of cultural reviews, local news, and several other features of normal newspapers.
11. San Francisco of the 1980s and Miami Beach of the 1990s.
12. So many intellectuals could afford to live in New York City, and indeed Manhattan. The city was overall more interesting, though worse to live in or to have to deal with.
13. Parking was much easier, even in Manhattan. I used to just get parking spots, even in the Village or Midtown. Now I would never bother to look.
14. The emphasis on personal freedom in American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
15. Paperback editions of the classics were so often far superior in earlier times. Nowadays most of them look and feel like crap.
A few things I have no nostalgia for:
1. I feel America today is overall a higher-trust society, admittedly with the picture being somewhat complex. American cities certainly are much safer, and most of them look much better.
2. I prefer current airport procedures to those before 9/11.
3. Young people are overall smarter, and arguably more moral.
4. Just seeing white (and sometimes black) people everywhere, except a few cities on the coasts.
5. The seafood issue aside, food in America is obviously much much better.
6. I can’t think of anything in the category of “how people interacted with each other” that I preferred in earlier times.
7. I don’t miss having more snow, quite the contrary.
8. Medical and dental care are far superior, obviously.
What else should be on these lists?