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Right! I hear it's good, sometimes.

As I understand it, the Pulitzer history jury is a mix of historians, journalists, and critics. The historians aren't necessarily knowledgeable on all the fields in their discipline, which of course is true for the others, too. Maybe this was in an area of ignorance for them.

I just read Richardson's Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement from 1933 and even though it is full of 1930s assumptions it is way more careful about facts and assumptions than this one.

Here's the weird thing. The guy not only didn't talk to any Comanche people, he actually was proud of it--he said he didn't want to be affected by their POV. I mean, dude, that's *why* you go and talk to people. Incredibly, he did a book talk in Lawton, OK, and said all this to a Comanche crowd.

This from p. 46 exemplifies what bugs historians. One thing to say that settlers saw natives as "primitive." Another to make that claim ("premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian") in your own voice, as Gwynne does here. Little wonder the Comanche nation officially denounced the book!

Stumbled across this floridly written summary of why every historian I know feels a bit queasy about SC Gwynne's "Empire of the Summer Moon."

If this is replicated elsewhere in Amazonia, like the researchers say, it means that the river basin was then as densely populated as, y'kmow, the Roman Empire or something. Which is pretty amazing to think about, frankly.

This LIDAR mapping is in Bolivia, parallel to the one that was mostly in Ecuador from '24. It's new work from the first group to draw attention to the earthworks back in 1999 (I covered this in 1491, FWIW). The main thing is that new analysis shows even more stuff down there than previously thought.

"We show that this [small slice of SW Amazonia] alone contains as many earthworks as previously estimated for the whole of Amazonia. We also propose that the total human population of the area in 100–300 AD was 1.25–3 million people. If similar results are found elsewhere in Amazonia..."

In general, the article treats AVs as if they are simply replacements for ICE cars. That's an assumption that seems unwarranted, esp. given the way I've heard urban planners talk about them.

I'd have to see more than the Smart Cities article to believe the tradeoffs are steep. The article doesn't even mention AVs are overwhelmingly electric, because of the power demands of the nav system and the precise throttle control. AV adoption is generally seen as leading to fewer emissions.

My sister, the public defender: "Hey, wouldn't it be funny if Congress saw the ludicrous surveillance and prosecutorial overreach here applied to one of their own class and decided it might be a bad idea to give the cops these powers? I know it's not going to happen, but let a girl have her dreams."

Waymo's not far from the specific use case (elderly non-drivers) I discussed. For my father-in-law, we'd've wanted geographic limits--no more than 20 miles from home--in case he got confused. Of course there are tradeoffs, as always in life. But the value of autonomy is pretty high for many of us.

I don't see why self-driving cars add sprawl in some special way that ordinary cars don't. As for safety, the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety reported this month that Waymos had "crash involvement rates 68% lower than human drivers" and rear-ending rates "91% lower." The data are pretty clear.

The other big win would be parents, especially single moms, whose schedules are now eaten up by being taxis for their children.

This so poignant for me. My late father-in-law had to stop driving at 93. We offered to take him wherever he needed, but he of course hated asking. A self-driving car could've restored his sense of autonomy. It sucks that he died before being able to have this.

The White House's claim that "America’s skyrocketing autism rates have long been ignored if not mocked” is bonkers. Here's a chart of the number of science articles on autism and adult autism, the latter a relatively small subset of the total autism literature. The field is *drowning* in attention.

People say Trump has no real political convictions, but here it turns out he might have one, and it's idiotic. archive.is/4JkDr

Nice NYTimes piece on a German effort to catalogue the global microbiome. "Gut bacteria can acquire as many as 100 new genes per year on average." "Poyet and her team had found at least one microbe that gobbles up blood cholesterol... and turns it into coprostanol, which can be excreted in feces."

Well, here we are. A few minutes into this podcast, the guest--a well-known conservative intellectual--says "the exorcists I have talked to." He evidently has them (plural!) on his contact list. The exorcists are "very worried" about Tucker Carlson, 'cuz he lives in the "demon-rich" Maine woods.