Who are the greatest Irish artists? part V, Harry Clarke
Harry Clarke, 1889-1931, born Dublin, stained glass artist and book illustrator, styles broadly Art Nouveau and symbolist.
He produced over 130 stained glass windows, the majority of which are in Ireland and then England. He was renowned for his rich, original colors and his deep blues. The value of his work is often site-specific (it would make for a great “go around Ireland” tour), and, unlike with most paintings, a jpeg picks up only one part of the broader work. Nonetheless here is one image:
Or try this:
Still not good enough. I don’t feel I can make a real case by giving you more images, maybe you would do better to just view a bunch en masse. A visit to the National Gallery in Dublin is better yet. Barring that, this excellent catalog has fine images. Here is a good short piece on Clarke’s weirdness (“the Irish artist welded Christian, Celtic and pagan imagery with the decadence of Klimt and Beardsley into an exotic futuristic fantasy”), also with quality images.
I see a few reasons for giving Clarke serious consideration:
1. He did most of his major work in Ireland. And his “Celtic revival” emphasis is perhaps closer in spirit to contemporary Ireland than are the Anglo-Irish backgrounds of many of the other leading contenders for best Irish artist.
2. He expresses the playful, dramatic, and rebellious sides of the Irish national spirit.
3. He is strikingly original. Some of his work also influenced later developments in illustration and graphic novels. He in turn drew on varied sources, including religious illustrations, Russian ballet and Russian theatre art, and the cinema.
4. The colors are memorable and the technical execution is very strong.
5. He and his studio did church stained glass for Bayonne, New Jersey.
6. You could imagine him doing a cover for a Camille Paglia book. As it stands, he did illustrate Goethe, Swinburne, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Ultimately he seems a little too concentrated in one direction to be my top pick, and maybe my number one Irish artist shouldn’t be so…”fruity”? But I enjoy his work greatly those (few) times I have been able to see it and I do recommend him highly.
I hope you’ll be getting the final installment in this series — my #1 pick — pretty soon.
My Conversation with the excellent Claudia Goldin
Here is the transcript and audio. Here is part of the CWT summary:
Claudia joined Tyler to discuss the rise of female billionaires in China, why the US gender earnings gap expanded in recent years, what’s behind falling marriage rates for those without a college degree, why the wage gap flips for Black women versus Black men, theoretical approaches for modeling intersectionality, gender ratios in economics, why she’s skeptical about happiness research, how the New York Times wedding announcement page has evolved, the problems with for-profit education, the value of an Ivy League degree, whether a Coasian solution existed to prevent the Civil War, which Americans were most likely to be anti-immigrant in the 1920s, her forthcoming work on Lanham schools, and more.
Here is an excerpt:
COWEN: If you look at a school, say, like Duke or Emory, is it a long-run problem that if they admit people on their merits, there’ll be too many women in the school relative to men, and some kind of affirmative action will be needed for the males?
GOLDIN: These are private institutions, and they can generally accept whom they would like to accept for various reasons of diversity.
COWEN: Should they do that? Or should they just get in 76 percent women, say?
GOLDIN: I’m brought back to the original issues that were raised by a small number of liberal arts colleges and universities in the ’50s and the ’60s about why they should become coeducational institutions.
Those reasons were that their marginal student was not going to Princeton but going to Harvard, not going to Princeton but going to Penn, not going to Princeton but going to Cornell, because that student wanted an education that was more balanced in terms of what the world would look like when they got out. And that more balanced, then, was not necessarily Blacks, Hispanics, and Jews, but the one major thing that was missing from Princeton and Yale and Dartmouth and Amherst and Wesleyan and a whole bunch of places was women.
Those institutions, in a process that I’ve described in the origins of coeducation, led these institutions to move in the direction of accepting more women. Now what’s going through your mind, I think, is, “Yes, but they weren’t lowering quality. In fact, they were increasing quality.” Diversity, in any dimension, can be thought of as a plus for everyone.
It was about 10 years ago that some dean in a small liberal arts college in the Midwest admitted to the fact that they were accepting men with lower SAT, ACT, and grade point averages to increase diversity.
COWEN: Men, probably, are not less intelligent than women, on average. What’s the pipeline problem? Is it too much homework and too many extracurriculars in high school or something else? Where are we failing our young boys?
GOLDIN: We can go back to as early as we have data on high schools and know that girls attended high schools, graduated from high schools at far, far greater numbers than boys. If there is an issue here, it’s certainly not extracurriculars. It may have to do with what’s going on in your cells and this difference between this Y and this double X.
COWEN: The value of an Ivy League degree — what percentage of that value do you think comes from signaling as opposed to learning?
GOLDIN: Very little. I think that it’s not signaling. It’s probably networks.
Self-recommending…
Wednesday assorted links
2. Ensnaring Sebald.
3. What is in the new budget bill?
5. Not how Thomas Friedman frames it, but it does sound as if “the Greens” are partially at fault (NYT). And UK natural gas prices are up 40 percent in a single day. Moving away from nuclear was an even bigger mistake than it seemed at the time.
6. Glen Greenwald on Facebook and the Democrats.
7. Gary Gorton on CBDCs and other stuff, using the word “Orkney.”
And:
I think you might be interested in this new entrepreneurial opportunity, the Impact Ventures Competition pilot.
Through the four-week competition, you will compete to level up your impact venture and entrepreneurial skills. You will receive constructive feedback, strengthen your ideas, and compete to win a prize of USD $50,000. If you are interested, here is a link to sign up. The deadline to apply is Oct 11th at 11:59pm EST.
For more information, please visit impactventurescompetition.com.
The Promising Pathway Act
Operation Warp Speed showed that we can move much faster. FDA delay in approving rapid tests shows that we should move much faster. There is a window of opportunity for reform. The excellent Bart Madden and Siri Terjesen argue for the Promising Pathways Act.
One particularly exciting development is the Promising Pathway Act (PPA), recently introduced in Congress. PPA would reduce bureaucracy via legal changes and provide individuals with efficient early access to potential new drugs.
Under PPA, new drugs will receive provisional approval five to seven years earlier than the status quo via a two-year provisional approval. Drugs that demonstrate patient benefits could be renewed for a maximum of six years, and the FDA could grant full approval at any time based on real-world as opposed to clinical trial data documenting favorable treatments results.
The PPA allows patients, advised by their doctors, to choose early access to promising but not-yet-FDA -approved drugs. Patients and doctors would make informed decisions about using either approved or new medicines that demonstrate safety and initial effectiveness compared to approved drugs.
…Patients and doctors can log into an internet registry database for early access drugs that would contain treatment outcomes, side effects, genetic data, and biomarkers. Scientific researchers, as well as patients, will also benefit from the identification of subgroups of patients who do exceptionally well or fail to respond.
Data from the registry will open knowledge pathways to improve the biopharmaceutical industry’s research outlays to benefit future patients.
With radically lower regulatory costs plus heightened competition as more companies participate, expect substantially lower prescription drug prices for provisional approval drugs.
Here is the text of the PPA.
Why are newer, nice neighborhoods so hard to find?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, Scott Alexander has been covering related issues. Here is one excerpt:
I can visit many European cities and find lovely parts of town to walk through. Closer to home, there is no recently created neighborhood in my own Virginia, or nearby Maryland, that can compare to the older homes of Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. The nicest residential neighborhoods of Washington, such as Georgetown, are typically quite old, predating World War II for most of their attractive structures and sometimes going as far back as the 18th century. Do I need to mention Prague, or the contrast between prewar and postwar German buildings?
A few caveats: The modern world has produced striking individual buildings, such as Guggenheim Bilbao or the Seattle Public Library, among many others. And there are neighborhoods that sell a kind of livability, such as the Kentlands in Maryland or Celebration, Fla., and it works well. It’s just not that beautiful or striking. In general, modern residential neighborhoods are not very aesthetically appealing.
This is not a purely subjective judgment (though it is my personal subjective judgment). If you ask the objective and measurable question of which neighborhoods tourists pay money to see, the answers are almost exclusively older neighborhoods, dating as far back as medieval times but pretty much never after 1940. Tysons Corner just isn’t as charming as Old Town Alexandria.
The decline of neighborhood beauty is all the more striking because of economic development. The world is not just two or three times wealthier now as it was in the 18th century, it is dozens of times wealthier. That is why the increasing cost of craftsmanship, while real, cannot account for the decline of neighborhood beauty. And note that when it comes to interior design, product design, cinema and many other areas, there are still plenty of notable and beautiful creations, fueled of course by greater wealth.
And:
One common explanation for the decline of urban and neighborhood beauty is the rise of the automobile, which makes it harder to develop such places. Surely cars and traffic can ruin many an attractive scene. Still, this is not even close to a full answer. For one thing, there are autos all over Paris, so at least in principle it ought to be possible to build in ways that are both highly attractive and allow for cars.
Or consider college campuses and their central quads, which typically do not have automobiles even today. The ones people admire are the older ones, not the newer campuses, which tend to be functional but aesthetically mediocre. The beauty of the University of California at Santa Barbara relies a lot on the surrounding scenery, not the architecture.
No need to put this point in the comments:
“Selection effects” are also often cited as an explanation for the decline of neighborhood beauty: The best neighborhoods from the past are (at least partially) preserved, conveying an overly glorified sense of the aesthetics of previous eras. It’s a good point, but it’s hard for me to name many recent neighborhoods that will go down in history as aesthetically admirable.
My solution to the puzzle? I think we’ve given up on coordination and instead we devote our resources to making interiors much more pleasing, beautiful, and comfortable. The modern world is not aesthetically bankrupt! So:
These days, most homeowners decide to “go it alone.” Since they cannot hope for a latter-day Rothenberg ob der Tauber — namely, coordination around exterior excellence in a consistent style — they focus on the interior, and indeed interior design has made huge strides forward. The lovely and comfortable rooms of many modern houses, along with many other recent aesthetic creations, belie the common notion that the world is too depraved to express beauty.
In that equilibrium, the exteriors of houses often end up coordinated — around relatively inexpensive, highly functional, non-aesthetic features so common in suburbs. It doesn’t make sense to aim for a 19th-century-palace look if your neighbor is doing an Art Deco exterior.
We do end up with more beauty on net:
So outward appearances suffer as homeowners save the real beauty for private purchases. And when beauty is privatized, it makes more sense to spend your money on other things — such as a really nice case for your iPhone.
Ever try to sit on one of those older sofas? Ouch!
Addendum: As a side note, wonderful neighborhoods are great for tourists, but perhaps they are slightly overrated? There is one splendid neighborhood of modernist homes in Alexandria, and I could live there if I wanted to. But it would not improve my life, so I am staying put.
This experiment will be run
The New York Public Library is proud to announce a major policy shift: Beginning today, all late fines have been eliminated going forward—and all prior late fines and replacement fees have been cleared—so that everyone gets a clean slate at the Library. Research shows that fines are not effective in ensuring book returns—New Yorkers are quite reliable and responsible, clearly respecting our collections and the need for them to be available for others to borrow. But, unfortunately, fines are quite effective at preventing our most vulnerable communities from using our branches, services, and books. That is the antithesis of our mission to make knowledge and opportunity accessible to all, and needed to change. As New York grapples with the inequities laid bare by the pandemic, it is all the more urgent that we ensure the public library is open and freely available to all.
Tony
Anthony W. Marx
President, The New York Public Library
Via ZS.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Arcane regulations slow America’s energy shift.
2. Claims about Taiwanese air space (sorry Arnold, but there is genuinely good material on Twitter!).
3. Swiss Post is launching the Swiss crypto stamp.
4. Christianization without economic development.
5. “The impact of masculinity stress on preferences and willingness-to-pay for red meat.“
FDA Approves American Rapid Antigen Test
What makes the FDAs failure to approve more rapid antigen tests even more galling is that the test being sold cheaply in the Amsterdam supermarket is the Flowflex, an American test made by Acon Labs in San Diego.
Well the FDA has finally approved the Acon test! Apparently it is good enough for the Germans and for US citizens. Hoorah! USA Today notes:
ACON expects to make 100 million tests per month by the end of this year. Production could double to 200 million monthly tests by February, according to the FDA.
…The United Kingdom and Germany have made significant purchases of home tests and widely distributed them to their residents to slow the spread of coronavirus. Such large government purchases allowed manufacturers to continue making tests even when demand softened as cases dropped.
The Biden administration will spend nearly $1.2 billion to purchase up to 187 million home tests from Abbott Laboratories and Celltrion Inc., company officials confirmed. The Department of Defense announced additional contracts totaling $647 million to buy 60 million kits from Abbott and three other testing vendors: OraSure Technologies, Quidel and Intrivio Holdings.
The FDA has authorized seven antigen-based tests that can be used at home without a prescription. The EU has authorized 21 tests beginning with the letter A (I am not sure all of these are authorized for home use but you get the idea.) Turtle slow. Still this is a big improvement.
Frankly, I think all the pressure from people like Michael Mina amplified by myself and others over 18 months and culminating in David Leonhartd’s NYTimes article Where Are the Tests? finally pushed them over the edge.
More details on Instagram being underrated
Contrary to The Wall Street Journal’s characterization, Instagram’s research shows that on 11 of 12 well-being issues, teenage girls who said they struggled with those difficult issues also said that Instagram made them better rather than worse.
That is from…Facebook, but it seems to be true. Here is some further exposition:
In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal — including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues — more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said that Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse. Body image was the only area where teen girls who reported struggling with the issue said Instagram made it worse as compared to the other 11 areas. But here also, the majority of teenage girls who experienced body image issues still reported Instagram either made it better or had no impact.
The mainstream media, not surprisingly, are interpreting all this as a big takedown for Facebook, one of their main competitors I might add. Here is one relevant image:
I would make two more general points. First, you could very easily argue that eyeglasses make (many not all) teenage girls feel worse about their body image. Lots of things will. Automobiles. Parties. Clothes shops. Such costs are not zero, but they have to be put in perspective.
Second, the lives of teenage girls are messy and complex. Anything that plays a noticeable role in said lives also will have effects that are messy and complex. Deal with it. The same used to be true of the (old-fashioned) telephone as well, not to mention birth control pills and automobiles.
Instagram is a huge “universe,” and I have only a fragmentary knowledge of it. Yet virtually everything I have seen, read, and heard indicates it is one of the more positive corners of the internet.
All via Nir Eyal. And do note that I write for Facebook at marginalrevolution.bulletin.com. Not afraid to tell you, though, that this post is what I really think. I argued similar points years earlier in my book Big Business: Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.
p.s. Every now and then tylercowenfairfax does some Instagram Stories…
From my email
You sometimes draw attention to lookism––that is, discrimination based on a person’s physical attractiveness. I would say discussion of this form of discrimination is more taboo than others because of how deeply entangled it is with our intuitive perceptions of each other. And thus, that it is harder to overcome than other forms of prejudice. But I would like to suggest an even more subtle and intractable form of discrimination yet: interesting-ism. Have you ever considered how individuals and society discriminate against the boring and the mediocre? Have you ever considered that the more discriminating one’s taste, intelligence, and eye for talent is, the more one is apt to dismiss most people? Would you agree the most degrading slur you can receive in our culture is: “you’re boring”?
Monday assorted links
1. Redux of my March Bloomberg column on supply constraints.
3. “Although our work cannot be used to put a price on cryptocurrencies, it provides the first systematic quantitative evidence that the transactional use of cryptocurrencies constitutes a fundamental component of their value, at least under the current regulatory regime.” Link here.
4. Survey of work on corporate culture.
5. Malmendier survey on the relevance of personal history for economic issues.
DNA Virus Creates Computer Virus
From Wired:
…a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer. While that attack is far from practical for any real spy or criminal, it’s one the researchers argue could become more likely over time, as DNA sequencing becomes more commonplace, powerful, and performed by third-party services on sensitive computer systems. And, perhaps more to the point for the cybersecurity community, it also represents an impressive, sci-fi feat of sheer hacker ingenuity.
UV-C and the Future
Are you surprised that the airport pictured below (I assure you, it is a real place) has also installed high-capacity air filters and UV sanitization?
Since the onset of COVID-19, the air-conditioning system filters across the passenger terminals have been upgraded from MERV-7-rated models to MERV-14-rated ones. These higher grade filters can effectively remove about 85 per cent of the particles of 0.3 to 1.0 micrometres in size in the air, smaller than the size of a COVID-19 particle in a respiratory droplet.
To ensure the MERV-14 rated filters continue to operate at effective efficiency, they are replaced every one to two months, depending on the condition of use. All used filters are sealed for proper disposal by maintenance workers donning the highest level of personal protective equipment (PPE) for safe handling.
In addition, fresh air intake for the air-conditioning systems have also been maximised by fully opening the dampers to admit outdoor air.
As a further layer of protection, Changi Airport is installing Ultraviolet-C (UV-C) sanitisation equipment in Air-Handling Stations (AHS) and Air-Handling Units (AHU) progressively across all terminal air-conditioning systems. The UV-C kills any remnant virus traces in the mixture of fresh and returned air passing through the cooling coil, providing a second level of defence after the MERV-14 rated filters.
Singapore will thus have air filtration and UV sanitization in the airport before we have it in the hospitals.
Is the future slipping away from the United States? It seems that way sometimes. Only the high-tech sector is keeping us afloat and, of course, that is under attack by the elites.
Here and here are my previous posts on UV-C sanitization.
Hat tip: Randall Parker.
Photo Credit: Matteo Morando.
Depression and shopping behavior
By Katherine Meckel and Bradley Shapiro:
Using a large survey panel that connects household shopping behavior with individual health information, this paper documents correlations between self reported depression and the size and composition of shopping baskets. First, we find that roughly 16% of individuals report suffering from depression and over 30% of households have at least one member who reports suffering from depression. Households with a member suffering from depression exhibit striking differences in shopping behavior: they spend less overall, visit grocery stores less and convenience stores more frequently and spend a smaller share of their baskets on fresh produce and alcohol but a larger share on tobacco. They spend similar shares on unhealthy foods like cakes, candy, and salty snacks. These cross-sectional correlations hold within counties, suggesting that they are not driven by region specific demographics or preferences that are incidentally correlated with depression status. They also hold when considering only single-member households. However, we rule out large differences in shopping behavior within households as they change depression status throughout the sample. Further, using the take-up of antidepressant drugs as an event, we document little change in shopping in response to treatment. With our results, we discuss the takeaways for health policy, decision modeling and targeted marketing.
There should be much more research on the intersection between economics and mental health.
More energy shocks, and it was crazy to move away from nuclear power
The global energy crunch forced a German electricity producer to halt a power plant after it ran out of coal.
Steag GmbH closed its Bergkamen-A plant in the western part of the country this week due to shortages of hard coal, it said by email. The closure is the first sign that Europe may need to count on mild and windy weather to keep the lights on as the continent faces shortages of natural gas and coal is unlikely to come to rescue.
Energy prices are soaring from the U.S. to Europe and Asia as economies rebound from a pandemic-induced lull and people return to the office. The shortage is so acute that China ordered its state-owned companies to secure supplies at all costs and Europe is burning more of its already depleted stocks of the dirtiest of fossil fuel, a move that may complicate climate talks next month.
Here is much more from at Bloomberg. Coal is trading at record-high prices, but is this doing us or the environment much good? You need something to substitute into!
I would like to repeat my earlier question in earnest. Was anyone forecasting all these energy shortages even a month ago?
Via Anton Maier.