Author: Art Diamond

Do Not Ridicule Those Who Know How to Sew

15 years ago I ran a blog entry quoting Brian Fagan’s theory that we Homo sapiens (aka Cro-Magnons) outlasted the Neanderthals because we developed the sewing needle technology that allowed us to sew tighter fitting garments against the cold. Now added evidence elaborates and supports Fagan’s theory. Near the time when Neanderthals became extinct, the magnetic poles of the earth shifted over a few hundred years, allowing substantially more ultraviolet radiation to hit the earth than usual. With better-filling garments, due to sewing needles, Homo sapiens were better protected against that radiation.

The WSJ article summarizing the new research is:

Aylin Woodward. “New Light Shed on the Demise of Neanderthals.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Aug. 7, 2025): A3.

(Note: the online version of the NYT article has the date August 6, 2025, and has the title “Did UV Rays Doom Neanderthals?”)

The published academic paper summarized in The Wall Street Journal article mentioned and cited above is:

Mukhopadhyay, Agnit, Sanja Panovska, Raven Garvey, Michael W. Liemohn, Natalia Ganjushkina, Austin Brenner, Ilya Usoskin, Mikhail Balikhin, and Daniel T. Welling. “Wandering of the Auroral Oval 41,000 Years Ago.” Science Advances 11, no. 16 (April 16, 2025): eadq7275.

Innovative Entrepreneur Alfred Beach Privately Built and Operated America’s First Subway

Even classical liberals, strong supporters of free markets, often believe that utilities and mass transit need to be built and operated by governments. So I was delighted to learn from the book review quoted below that the first subway in the United States was privately built by a spirited innovative entrepreneur. That spirit still lives today, if we let it. (Ponder Travis Kalanick.)

(p. C9) In November 1869, the New York inventor Alfred Beach pushed the “move fast and break laws” principle to the limit in developing America’s first underground passenger railway. Without city approval—officials thought he was building a small system to improve mail delivery—he carved out a tunnel 8 feet wide, 300 feet long and right under Broadway.

. . .

Beach (1826-96) . . . was a remarkable character, a precocious innovator who channeled the forces—mass media and technological change—that were making the world modern. His father owned the New York Sun, the country’s most popular paper, and co-founded the Associated Press. Beach went to work for the Sun as a teenager; by 22 he was running it with his brother, and by 25 he sold his share to concentrate on his real passion: Scientific American, which he had bought a few years earlier. He and his partner made the publication a success and built a complementary business filing patents for the inventors who read it. When his client Thomas Edison “perfected the phonograph in 1877,” Mr. Algeo notes, he gave Beach the first demonstration, recording himself singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In 1849, when he was 23, Beach outlined in the magazine’s pages his vision of a railroad beneath Broadway, with two tracks, gas lights and stops on every corner. “The proposal was radical—the world’s first subway wouldn’t open in London for another fourteen years—and the technological hurdles were immense,” Mr. Algeo writes. The projected route involved a tunnel 20 times as long as the longest extant.

. . .

Beach . . . struggled to get approval for his plan, stymied by the interlocking corruption of Tammany bosses and real-estate interests. Elevated railways and other mass-transit rivals threatened in the meantime to crowd him out. When his railway finally did open, it lasted a mere three years, doomed by the financial crisis of 1873.

For the full review see:

Timothy Farrington. “Bookshelf; One Man’s Tunnel Vision.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 27, 2025): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 25, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘New York’s Secret Subway’: Tunnel Visions.”)

The book under review is:

Algeo, Matthew. New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2025.

Substrate Startup Develops Less Complex and Cheaper Way to Etch Computer Chips

To prepare for a workshop next week I have been reading a lot about Stuart Kauffman and Roger Koppl’s theory of the adjacent possible (TAP), as it is applied to the growth of technology. One of the implications of TAP is the that new technology gets progressively more complex, in the sense of using an ever larger number of components. I think that is often true but I can think of a couple of counter-examples. So I was interested to read yesterday that the production of computer chips may provide another counter-example.

(p. B1) In March [2025], James Proud, an unassuming British-born American without a college degree, sat in Vice President JD Vance’s office and explained how his Silicon Valley start-up, Substrate, had developed an alternative manufacturing process for semiconductors, one of the most fundamental and difficult challenges in tech.

For the past decade, semiconductors have been manufactured by a school-bus-size machine that uses light to etch patterns onto silicon wafers inside sterile, $25 billion factories. The machine, from the Dutch company ASML, is so critical to the chips in smartphones, A.I. systems and weaponry that Washington has effectively blocked sales of it to China.

But Mr. Proud said his company, which has received more than $100 million from investors, had developed a solution that would cut the manufacturing cost in half by channeling light from a giant instrument known as a particle accelerator through a tool the size of a car. The technique had allowed Substrate to print a high-resolution microchip layer comparable to images produced by the world’s leading semiconductor plants.

. . .

(p. B4) Mr. Proud moved to San Francisco from London in 2011 as a member of the first Thiel Fellowship class, a college alternative for aspiring founders created by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist.

. . .

After the Trump administration persuaded TSMC to build a plant in Arizona, Mr. Proud decided to build his own company. He and his brother Oliver, 25, started reading books and academic papers on semiconductor lithography. They questioned why the process had become so complex and expensive.

One of the major costs in modern lithography machines, which have more than 100,000 parts, is how they use high-powered lasers to turn droplets of molten tin into a burst of extreme ultraviolet light. The machines use the light to etch a wafer of silicon in a process known as EUV lithography.

. . .

The team spent much of 2023 building a custom lithography tool. It featured thousands of parts and was small enough to fit in the back of a U-Haul. They tested it in computer simulations.

In early 2024, Substrate reserved a Bay Area particle accelerator for a make-or-break test. The company ran into problems when vibrations near the particle accelerator caused the tool to gyrate and blur the image, Mr. Proud said.

A frantic, daylong search found that the air-conditioning system was causing the vibration. Substrate adjusted the fan speed until the process printed “very beautiful and tiny things repeatedly” on a silicon wafer, Mr. Proud said.

For the full story see:

Tripp Mickle and Mike Kai Chen. “A Less Costly Route To Computer Chips?” The New York Times (Weds., Oct. 29, 2025): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 28, 2025, and has the title “Can a Start-Up Make Computer Chips Cheaper Than the Industry’s Giants?”)

We Need to “Tolerate Heterodox Smart People” if We Want to Achieve Big Things

Peter Thiel is often quoted as having said many years ago that “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” (as quoted in Lewis-Kraus 2024), a reference to the original limit to the length of a tweet on Twitter. The quotations below are all from the more recent Peter Thiel, who was having a conversation with NYT columnist Ross Douthat. He still believes that we are not boldly pursuing big goals, the only exception being A.I. Is the constraint that big goals are impossible to achieve, or do we lack people smart enough or motivated enough to pursue them, or do we regulate motivated smart people into discouraged despair?

(p. 9) One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it.

. . .

And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments.

. . .

I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years. And I said: Well, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits because we’re going to have so much growth, the growth will take care of this. And then — well, he’s still worried about the budget deficits. This doesn’t prove that he doesn’t believe in the billion robots, but it suggests that maybe he hasn’t thought it through or that he doesn’t think it’s going to be as transformative economically, or that there are big error bars around it. But yeah, there’s some way in which these things are not quite thought through.

For the full interview, see:

Douthat, Ross. “Are We Dreaming Big Enough?” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 29, 2025): 9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date June 26, 2025, and has the title “Peter Thiel and the Antichrist.”)

Peter Thiel’s yearning many years ago for flying cars was quoted more recently in:

Lewis-Kraus, Gideon. “Flight of Fancy.” The New Yorker, April 22, 2024, 28-39.

Nimble Wine Entrepreneurs Adapt Grapes, and Wine-Making Method, to Warmer Temperatures and Changing Tastes

I have argued briefly in my Openness book, and at greater length in my “Innovative Dynamism Improves the Environment” article, that we tend to overestimate the harm from global warming in part because we tend to underestimate the nimble adaptability of entrepreneurs. The essay quoted below describes how wine entrepreneurs in Spain are returning to old grape varieties and old technologies for aging the wine, varieties and technologies that both are better adapted to warmer temperatures and are better at making the lighter and less alcoholic wines that are currently in higher demand.

(p. C3) In the rolling hills of Valencia in Spain, winemaker Pablo Calatayud has joined forces with scientists and archaeologists to mount a small viticultural revolution—one that reaches back to pre-Roman times to recreate what have become known as ancestral wines.

At his Celler del Roure, Calatayud is using large, egg-shaped clay amphorae to make wine pressed from grapes native to the region. The process is reconstructed from old texts and drawings carved into archaeological finds across the Mediterranean, including an ancient Iberian settlement that overlooks his own vineyard.

This sort of winemaking is not just a stunt, and Calatayud is hardly alone. Rising temperatures in most European wine regions are changing the taste and potency of red wine. Warmer weather means that grapes ripen more quickly and more intensely, with more sugar and thus more alcohol. In Spain, the alcohol level in notable wines aged in oak barrels now routinely exceeds 15%. But many consumers are turning away from such dark, heavy, tannin-rich wines, demanding instead reds that are lighter, more refreshing and lower in alcohol.

The grape varieties used to make ancestral wines are better suited to warmer climes than such stars of modern winemaking as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Tempranillo. The ancient varieties tend to ripen later, some even in late October, with lower sugar levels, and some have thinner skins, which makes them less tannic.

And in contrast to the oak barrels favored for aging modern red wines, which can add heavy, smoky flavors, amphorae don’t affect a wine’s taste. The clay allows for gentle micro-oxygenation—exposure to outside air—helping to preserve acidity and aromatic freshness.

As a result, the new amphora wines are breezy, light-colored and fruity on the nose—but never sweet nor exceeding 13% alcohol.

The results have pleased both critics and consumers. Wines by Celler del Roure now receive ratings as high as 96 points from top reviewers like Robert Parker Wine Advocate and are exported globally, including to the U.S.

For the full essay, see:

Bojan Pancevski. “The Growing Buzz Around Ancestral Wines.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 19, 2025): C3.

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date July 17, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Trump’s Budget Director Is Competently Dedicated to Dismantling the Deep State

Before the 2024 Presidential election I quoted an op-ed piece by Walter Block and another by Thomas Sowell in which Block argued, and Sowell implied, that given the choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, the better choice was Trump. I still agree with their op-eds.

A related, but different issue is whether on balance, Trump’s policies will hurt or help the economy. His tariffs, industrial policy, and crony deals will hurt. His deregulation and downsizing of government will help. I hope, but do not know, that the helps will help more than the hurts hurt.

The New York Times ran a long front-page article on Trump’s Budget Director Russell T. Vought that bolsters my hope. I quote from that article below. Vought is serious and competent and dedicated to “a much smaller bureaucracy.” When he nominated him, Trump wrote “Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end weaponized government.”

But a Vought failure would not prove Block and Sowell wrong. Even if Trump does more to harm the economy than to help it, he still will not match the harm that would have been done by Harris.

(p. A1) Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, was preparing the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal this spring when his staff got some surprising news: Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team was unilaterally axing items that Mr. Vought had intended to keep.

Mr. Vought, a numbers wonk who rarely raises his voice, could barely contain his frustration, telling colleagues that he felt sidelined and undermined by the haphazard chaos of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, according to six people with knowledge of his comments who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

. . .

Mr. Vought, who also directed the White House Office of Management and Budget in President Trump’s first term, had spent four years in exile from power. He worked through Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s presidency from an old rowhouse near the Capitol, where he complained of pigeons infesting his ceiling and coordinated with other Trump loyalists to draw up sweeping, detailed plans for a comeback.

He had carefully analyzed mistakes from the first term. And he had laid out steps to achieve the long-sought conservative goal of a president with dramatically expanded authority over the executive branch, including the power (p. A14) to cut off spending, fire employees, control independent agencies and deregulate the economy.

. . .

He works long hours and weekends in his suite in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House, where he oversees a staff of more than 500.

On the wall is a photo of his favorite president, Calvin Coolidge, the farm boy and small-town mayor historians say most purely embodied the conservative principles of small government and fiscal austerity.

. . .

“Russ knows exactly how to dismantle the Deep State and end weaponized government,” Mr. Trump wrote in a statement when nominating Mr. Vought.

. . .

Rob Fairweather, who spent 42 years at the Office of Management and Budget and wrote a book about how it operates, said there is reason for Mr. Vought to have confidence in a legal victory.

“What he’s doing is radical, but it’s well thought out,” Mr. Fairweather said. “He’s had all these years to plan. He’s looked clearly at the authorities and boundaries that are there, and is pushing past them on the assumption that at least some of it will hold up in the courts.”

Mr. Vought is already looking forward to that outcome, declaring on Glenn Beck’s show this spring: “We will have a much smaller bureaucracy as a result of it.”

For the full story see:

Coral Davenport. “Ticking Boxes on His Checklist To Make Trump All-Powerful.” The New York Times (Tues., September 30, 2025): A1 & A14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 3, 2025, and has the title “The Man Behind Trump’s Push for an All-Powerful Presidency.”)

The Review of Austrian Economics Publishes Diamond’s Review of Creative Destruction

The Review of Austrian Economics published my review of Dalton and Logan’s Creative Destruction book on Sept. 17. It can be viewed, but not printed or saved, at: https://rdcu.be/eIMJN

Adjuvants Did Not Arise from Theory, but from Open-Eyed Trial-And-Error Experimentation

Sometimes you see journalists, commentators, or politicians saying that ordinary people should not use trial-and-error experiments with health treatments, but instead listen to the advice of certified scientists. Listen to the “science” we hear. But many of the most common practices in medicine originated with ordinary trial-and-error experiments of the sort that can be conducted with little if any certified expertise.

Consider adjuvants. An adjuvant “helps” the primary therapy; aluminum can be an adjuvant to a vaccine or, with cancer, radiation can be an adjuvant to a surgery. As the passages quoted below show, the first vaccine adjuvants were not discovered through the theorizing of a certified genius. A motivated alert and practical veterinarian wanted to protect horses from disease. He noticed that a horse vaccine worked better when, by chance, the horse also had an infection at the vaccination site. He speculated that the inflammation from the infection aroused the immune system. So why not try deliberately causing inflammation? He tried different substances, landing on tapioca as the best of what he tried. Others later found aluminum to be more reliable.

Maybe what often matters most for medical progress is a sense of open-eyed urgency and a persistent willingness to engage in trial-and-error experimentation. The uncertified can have those traits. When they do, we should not ridicule, ban, or cancel them.

(p. A14) The origins of added aluminum in vaccines can be traced back nearly a century. In a stable on the outskirts of Paris, a young veterinarian had made a peculiar discovery: mixing tapioca into his horses’ diphtheria vaccines made them more effective.

The doctor, Gaston Ramon, had noticed that the horses who developed a minor infection at the injection site had much more robust immunity against diphtheria. He theorized that adding something to his shots that caused inflammation — ingredients he later named adjuvants, derived from the Latin root “to help” — helped induce a stronger immune response.

After testing several candidates — including bread crumbs, petroleum jelly and rubber latex — he found success with a tapioca-laced injection, which produced slight swelling and far more antibodies.

Tapioca never caught on as an adjuvant. But in 1932, a few years after Dr. Ramon’s studies were published, the United States began including aluminum salts in diphtheria immunizations, as they were found to invoke a similar but more reliable effect.

Today, aluminum adjuvants are found in 27 routine vaccines, and nearly half of those recommended for children under 5.

This extra boost of immunity is not needed in all types of vaccines. Shots that contain a weakened form of a virus, like the measles mumps and rubella shot, or created with mRNA technology, like the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, generate strong enough immune responses on their own.

But in vaccines that contain only small fragments of the pathogen, which would garner little attention from the immune system, adjuvants help stimulate a stronger response, allowing vaccines to be given in fewer doses.

Scientists believe that aluminum salts work in two ways. First, aluminum binds to the core component of the vaccine and causes it to diffuse into the bloodstream more slowly, giving immune cells more time to build a response.

It’s also thought that aluminum operates more directly, enhancing the activity of certain immune cells, though this mechanism is not fully understood.

For the full story see:

Teddy Rosenbluth. “Aluminum in Vaccines Is a Good Thing, Scientists Say.” The New York Times (Sat., January 25, 2025): A14.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 24, 2025, and has the title “Yes, Some Vaccines Contain Aluminum. That’s a Good Thing.”)

Norma Swenson Defended Health Freedom for Women

A recurring question raised by my libertarian and classical liberal friends is: how can we persuade others of the value of freedom? One answer is to especially seek conversation with those who strongly object to losing their freedom in some part of their life that they value. As I read the obituary of Norma Swenson, co-author of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, I thought I recognized her as a libertarian fellow-traveler. She passionately sought for herself and other women to have greater freedom in making their own medical decisions.

Today, born out of outrage over the government’s over-reaching Covid controls, a “health freedom” movement has grown and organized, seeking more broadly (though not always consistently) for all adults to be able to make their own medical decisions.

Libertarians and classical liberals should let those seeking health freedom know that we are with them, in principle and in practice. Many of my own blog entries defend health freedom, for instance here and here.

(p. B11) Norma Swenson was working to educate women about childbirth, championing their right to have a say about how they delivered their babies, when she met the members of the collective that had put out the first rough version of what would become the feminist health classic “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

. . .

She . . . [knew] quite a bit about the medical establishment, the paternalistic and condescending behavior of male doctors (only 6 percent of incoming medical students were women in 1960) and the harmful effect such behavior had on women’s health. She had lived it, during the birth of her daughter in 1958.

. . .

She would go on to help make “Our Bodies, Ourselves” a global best seller.

. . .

The author Barbara Ehrenreich called it a manifesto of medical populism.

. . .

It was her daughter’s birth that had made Ms. Swenson an activist. She wanted to deliver the baby naturally, without medication. Her decision was such an anomaly that residents at the Boston Lying-In Hospital gathered to watch her labor. It went swimmingly.

But Ms. Swenson, who was in a 12-bed ward, was surrounded by women who were suffering. They were giving birth according to the practices of the era: with a dose of scopolamine, a drug that induced so-called twilight sleep and hallucinations, followed by a shot of Demerol, an opioid.

She remembered the women screaming, trying to climb out of their beds, calling for their mothers and cursing their husbands before being knocked out by the Demerol, their babies delivered by forceps.

It was barbaric, she thought. “These women weren’t being helped,” she said in 2018, “they were being controlled.”

For the full obituary, see:

Penelope Green. “Norma Swenson, 93, an Author Of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves.” The New York Times (Friday, June 20, 2025): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated June 16, 2025, and has the title “Norma Swenson, an Author of ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves,’ Dies at 93.”)

The most recent edition of the book co-authored by Norma Swenson is:

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Ourselves. New York: Atria Books, 2011.

F.D.A. Approves Vertex’s Nonaddictive Drug to Block Pain

Ann Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair is a depressing but important book. I have read parts of it but plan to read it from cover to cover soon. They document and analyze a substantial group of Americans, mostly whites without college degrees, who die from alcohol, narcotics, or suicide. Starting in the 1990s their numbers grew. Part of the problem for some of the despairing is having jobs that give them hope for a better future, jobs that at least allow them to securely start and raise a family.

The growth in narcotics use is thoughtfully described in an earlier book, Dreamland by Sam Quinones. In some of the book Quinones writes about the same non-degree despairing whites as Case and Deaton, but he also in other parts of the book, discusses rising narcotics use among the better-off. His is a thoughtful complex narrative, involving diverse victims and diverse causes.

One component is that, from desire for euphoria, or to end pain, people start using narcotics that are addictive. Then they must fight, or succumb to, the addiction for the rest of their lives. For those drawn in by a desire to end pain, the news in the passages quoted below is important–the approval of suzetrigine, a drug that blocks some kinds of pain without being addictive. Quinones in his 2015 book reports his conversation with an expert who was pessimistic that such a drug would ever be possible (pp. 311-312).

A second reason suzetrigine is of interest is that it is being brought to market by Vertex, a firm that I have discussed in earlier blog entries, most recently here. Vertex was a once-small innovative mission-oriented start-up that got big. The continuing question is whether the big Vertex can sustain its earlier innovative culture.

(p. A11) The Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication Thursday [Jan. 30, 2025] to treat pain from an injury or surgery. It is expensive, with a list price of $15.50 per pill. But unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive.

That is because the drug, suzetrigine, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and to be sold as Journavx, works only on nerves outside the brain, blocking pain signals. It cannot get into the brain.

Researchers say they expect it to be the first of a new generation of more powerful nonaddictive drugs to relieve pain.

To test the drug, Vertex, which is based in Boston, conducted two large clinical trials, each with approximately 1,000 patients who had pain from surgery. They were randomly assigned to get a placebo; to get the opioid sold as Vicodin, a widely used combination pain medicine of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and hydrocodone; or to get suzetrigine.

. . .

Suzetrigine eased pain as much as the combination opioid. Both were better than the placebo at relieving pain.

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “F.D.A. Approves a Non-Addictive Opioid.” The New York Times (Sat., February 1, 2025): A11.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 30, 2025, and has the title “F.D.A. Approves Drug to Treat Pain Without Opioid Effects.”)

The Case and Deaton book, cited in my introductory comments, is:

Case, Anne, and Angus Deaton. Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. Reprint, pb 2021 (with new preface).

The Quinones book, cited in my introductory comments, is:

Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.