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Underrated ideas in psychology, vol. III - Experimental History

2025-07-01T13:09:21.000Z

photo cred: my dad

You should never trust a curmudgeon. If someone hates everything, it doesn’t mean much when they also hate this thing. That’s why, whenever I get hopped up on criticizing the current state of psychology, I stop and ask myself, “Okay, but what’s good?” If I can’t find anything, then my criticisms probably say more about me than they say…

Were ancient Ireland’s ‘incestuous elites’ just a myth? A tomb older than Stonehenge has new answers - HistoryExtra

2025-06-26T11:46:40.000Z

In the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland stands one of the world’s most fascinating prehistoric monuments: Newgrange.

Centuries older than the Pyramids of Giza or Stonehenge, Newgrange is a large passage tomb, and a 5,000-year-old marvel of ancient engineering. It’s also one of the best windows that researchers have into the ancient society that constructed it: how it functioned, what it valued, and who held power.

That final question has been the source of stunning theories with incredible implications. For years, many archaeologists and geneticists believed that a small, powerful elite ruled over Neolithic Ireland and commissioned monuments like Newgrange as a reflection of their social dominance.

That theory gained momentum in 2020, when DNA analysis of a skull fragment discovered in the tomb revealed that the buried individual – referred to by researchers as NG10 – was the product of an incestuous union between two siblings, or a parent and child.

Some experts interpreted this as compelling evidence of a dynastic elite that practised incest to preserve a sacred bloodline – not unlike royal traditions in ancient Egypt. This, in turn, painted a picture of Neolithic Ireland as a deeply hierarchical society ruled by a tightly knit, closely related few.

So, did a sacred royal family, buried at Newgrange, really rule over Neolithic Ireland? Or might the evidence have been misinterpreted?

That is the conclusion of new research led by scholars from the University of York and University College Dublin – ‘The ‘king’ of Newgrange? A critical analysis of a Neolithic petrous fragment from the passage tomb chamber’ – published in the journal Antiquity. Their findings cast serious doubt on these earlier assumptions and instead paint a very different picture of the society that built this monument.

The cosmic history of Newgrange

Newgrange is one of several monumental passage tombs built during the Neolithic period (c4000–2500 BC) across Ireland and western Britain. Located in County Meath, the monument consists of a circular mound around 85 metres in diameter, ringed with standing stones and containing a narrow interior passage that aligns precisely with the rising sun on the winter solstice.

Each year, on or around the winter solstice, the rising sun illuminates the chamber at the heart of the tomb for a few minutes via a precision-engineered ‘roof-box’ above the entrance. It’s an astonishing feat of prehistoric engineering that reflects both a deep understanding of astronomy, and a symbolic reverence for cosmic cycles of light and dark.

Read more | “Graves are like time capsules – little microcosms of prehistoric culture”: Alice Roberts on what bones and burials can tell us about early Britain

And Newgrange isn’t alone. Across Neolithic Europe, other monuments reveal similar concerns: Bryn Celli Ddu in Wales aligns with the summer solstice sunrise; Maeshowe in Orkney aligns with the winter solstice sunset; and Stonehenge captures both summer and winter solstice points.

For much of the 20th century, these Neolithic feats were seen as evidence of powerful and centralised leadership: they were thought to point to a social elite that wielded enough power to be capable of coordinating complex constructions and mustering vast amounts of labour.

The theory of Newgrange’s incestuous elites

In 2020, the NG10 DNA discovery appeared to add even more credence to that view. The rarity of such incestuous unions in ancient and modern populations led to comparisons with the Egyptian pharaohs and Inca royalty, both of whom famously practised incest as a tool to preserve divine bloodlines.

NG10’s relationship to the other occupants of the tomb seemed to support the idea of a ruling family, possibly dynastic in nature, whose status was maintained through carefully guarded lineage.

It was a powerful theory, selling Newgrange as a royal tomb that served as the resting place of Ireland’s earliest sacred elites.

New research at Newgrange reaches different conclusions

However, the new study challenges that interpretation, arguing that it dramatically stretches what the evidence can tell us. Can we really know that a powerful, incestuous elite ruled Ireland with an iron fist?

“The evidence all points to a much more collective ethos,” says Professor Penny Bickle, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology. “There are not wide disparities in diet, houses are relatively flimsy, and they are all similar to each other. There are no large settlement systems or trade mechanisms, and we also don’t see production of craft on the scale that we see in other ancient societies such as in ancient Egypt, where incest was thought to be practised by the ruling elite.”

So, according to Bickle and her colleagues, the archaeological evidence around Newgrange tells a different story. Nearby homes were modest and uniform. There is no evidence of grand residences, no wealth concentration and no consistent pattern of close-relative burials across Neolithic Ireland. This all points to a much more equal social structure than previously assumed.

And, Bickle adds, it’s not necessarily certain that NG10 had specific links to Newgrange. “It is by no means clear that the monument was the first burial site of NG10 and the tomb grew in stages, so tracing who this individual was is a very difficult task indeed,” Bickle explains. “As it stands, the incestuous origins of NG10 are a one-off compared to all of the DNA data we have for Neolithic Ireland.”

In other words, NG10 could be a genetic anomaly, rather than evidence of an all-powerful ruling dynasty.

Prehistoric Irish burial practices

If NG10 wasn’t a king, then who did get buried in monuments like Newgrange?

“People were definitely being selected for burial in passage tombs – the whole community does not end up in these monuments,” says Associate Professor Jessica Smyth, of University College Dublin. “However, we don’t know the reasons behind this selection, and why they were thought to be special.”

What’s also clear is that burial practices in Neolithic Ireland differed sharply from those in modern times, so applying 21st-century expectations to the past can be misleading.

“Unlike today, bodies don’t tend to be buried ‘whole’ or ‘intact’ in this time period,” Smyth adds. “Before they end up in megalithic monuments, bodies are broken down, sometimes cremated and even circulated around their communities.”

WATCH | Prehistoric stone circles: Everything you wanted to know

View Green Video on the source website

This process of disarticulation and redistribution means that the people who placed the bones into tombs like Newgrange may not have known – or even cared – about the biological identity of the individuals involved. In NG10’s case, the community may have had no knowledge of their parentage at all.

A new interpretation of Newgrange and Neolithic Ireland

Rather than a symbol of elite power and dynastic control, Newgrange might instead reflect the ritual and cooperative culture of a Neolithic society bound by shared beliefs, agricultural rhythms and ancestral commemoration.

Its solstice alignment still speaks to an extraordinary grasp of time and the cosmos, and its scale still demands coordination. But the latest research suggests these achievements were communal, rather than commanded.

“There are still many questions to solve here,” says Bickle. “But building this picture means looking at the monument together with the society that was built up around it.”

Spring-Heeled Jack: the fire-breathing phantom that terrorised Victorian England - HistoryExtra

2025-06-25T16:53:30.000Z

Tall and thin, with glowing red eyes, a monstrous face, sharp metallic claws and the power to breathe fire – this was, for several decades, the most common description of a supernatural entity that terrorised Victorian England.

Who was Spring-Heeled Jack?

Spring-Heeled Jack was the name given to a ‘phantom’ of urban legend that plagued fretful Victorians and delighted readers of penny dreadfuls. He was so named by the press for his seemingly supernatural ability to leap nine feet – or more – into the air to evade capture.

Newspapers struggled to keep up with an influx of alleged sightings, which saw this phantom appear miles apart in quick succession. Police forces across the country were likewise bombarded with reports of the ghost, which could not be captured on account of its ability to leap away at extraordinary speeds and distances.

And this earned it a moniker which was to become synonymous with the paranormal for nearly a century: Spring-Heeled Jack.

When was Spring-Heeled Jack first seen?

The earliest rumours of this ghostly entity emerged from rural villages south of London. In late 1837, villagers in Barnes reported that a white bull had attacked several people (mostly women) at night. Reaching East Sheen, it assumed the form of a white bear and was referred to by locals as the ‘Evil One’.

Spring-Heeled Jack first took human form in January 1838, when he appeared wearing brass armour, claw gloves, and the spring-loaded shoes that were to become his hallmark. He was occasionally accompanied by other apparitions, and evaded capture by scaling walls and jumping away – to heights of up to nine feet.

Gossip, rumour and occasional newspaper reporting quickly spread these alleged sightings of a fearsome, dangerous devil-man. Victorian Londoners were fascinated and horrified by this supernatural attacker that appeared to be closing in on the capital.

In January 1838, the Lord Mayor of the City of London announced that he had received a letter from a ‘Peckham resident’, who alleged a group of people had been donning different disguises – including those of a ghost, the devil, and a bear – and frightening women as part of a dare.

But this could hardly explain the apparition’s supernatural athleticism or its occasional targeting of male victims. If this was an attempt to assure the public that there was nothing supernatural to fear, it backfired. A report in The Times the next day marked the phantom’s entrance into the mainstream press.

Referred to as “the suburban ghost”, “Steel Jack” and “Spring Jack”, among other names, the press had until now struggled to agree on nomenclature. By the end of the following week, however, the Penny Satirist had put in print the moniker which was finally going to stick: Spring-Heeled Jack.

Soon, a “committee of gentlemen” had assembled to raise funds for a jackpot that would be rewarded to anyone able to capture Spring-Heeled Jack. But the question on everyone’s lips was the same: who, or what, was responsible for the hauntings?

Read more | Living in fear: the dangers of Victorian London

Was Spring-Heeled Jack real?

Many Victorians genuinely believed that Spring-Heeled Jack was a demonic entity endowed with supernatural abilities. His reputation as a devious and violent ghost was sustained by word-of-mouth rumours, which spread within and between communities. While newspapers often approached sightings sceptically, witnesses and many of their neighbours were gripped by a genuine fear of the supernatural.

But for many, there were less otherworldly explanations.

One prevailing theory was that there was no singular demonic entity called Spring-Heeled Jack, but rather a conspiracy of eccentric aristocrats who had placed a wager on the number of victims they could frighten while wearing costumes.

The Sun reported, apparently without any evidence, that a stake of £5,000 had been agreed on by “this gang of ghosts and hobgoblins”. This would explain how Spring-Heeled Jack appeared to be in multiple places at once.

The Marquess of Waterford, a nobleman known for his rowdy and unruly behaviour, was also a popular suspect, despite there being no solid evidence to back up this claim. Even the fact that Spring-Heeled Jack’s escapades continued long after the Irish peer’s death in 1859 did little to dampen the rumour.

Who were Spring Heeled Jack’s most famous victims?

On the evening of 20 February 1838, Spring-Heeled Jack ventured into the capital for the first time.

At about 8.45pm, 18-year-old Jane Alsop heard “violent ringing” at the gate in front of her family’s home in East London. Standing outside was an agitated man who claimed he was a policeman and implored the teenager to “bring me a light, for we have caught Spring-Heeled Jack here in the lane”.

But when Jane fetched a candle and handed it to him, the visitor suddenly threw off his coat, “presented a most hideous and frightful appearance, and vomited forth a quantity of blue and white flame from his mouth”. Glaring at her with fiery red eyes, he then began tearing at her skin and clothing with metallic claws.

Although she was ultimately rescued by her older sister, who grappled with the assailant and forced him to flee, the assault left Jane injured and in shock. Her subsequent testimony to the police garnered significant press coverage, catapulting Spring-Heeled Jack even further into public consciousness.

Read more | 5 Georgian ghost hoaxes

The supernatural fiend was apparently undeterred by an increasingly fervent public appeal for his capture. Only five days later, he reportedly terrified – but did not harm – a servant boy who had opened the door to his knocking.

A few days later, one Lucy Scales was walking home with her sister when the pair spotted a tall, thin man standing in the alley ahead of them. As Lucy approached the cloaked figure, he spewed blue flames in her face, temporarily blinding her and sending her into violent fits. He then fled.

Police investigators were by now exploring the possibility that the attacker’s fire-breathing abilities were in fact the product of a scientific contraption which used alcohol and sulphur, connected to a breathing tube, to produce flames when ignited.

How the media reacted to Spring-Heeled Jack

The newspapers of Victorian England were eager to capitalise on the attention being paid to Spring-Heeled Jack, though they rarely indulged the idea that he really was a ghost.

After the attacks on Jane Alsop and Lucy Scales, reported sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack appeared in press coverage across the country. Many of these were based on unsubstantiated local rumours which the media might not have entertained had Spring-Heeled Jack not already gained such notoriety.

Typically he appeared in the form that the two young women had witnessed – a tall man in a cloak who could transform suddenly into a monstrous figure.

The Bristol Mercury somewhat sceptically reported an appearance of the “mischievous personage” in June 1838. When the phantom was sighted in Surrey, the Morning Post shrugged him off as an impersonator.

Regional newspapers reported sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack throughout the next four decades, though his popularity was slowly waning. Even so, the more sensationalist newspapers continued to exploit reports of the phantom’s apparitions.

The Illustrated Police News reported in 1877 that Spring-Heeled Jack had climbed a Roman ruin in Newport, Lincolnshire, and been shot at by angry locals – but escaped unharmed. It provided a dramatic illustration of the encounter for readers to gawk at.

Was Spring-Heeled Jack caught?

There was no arrest which put a stop to the supernatural phantom’s exploits, but a number of very human copycats were caught red-handed. These included a Londoner who, in March 1838 chased after women and children while wearing a mask with blue glazed paper attached to his mouth to imitate fire.

In 1842, a man believed to be Spring-Heeled Jack, or one of his associates, was captured in the town of Eye, Surrey, but he soon disappeared from the police station in which he was being held. “Some suppose that by some chemical process Jack was converted into a spirit and so managed to make his escape,” the Ipswich Journal reported.

Though sightings of Spring-Heeled Jack dwindled towards the end of the 19th century, he had become a fixture of Victorian popular culture – the subject of street ballads, at least four plays, and a bogeyman used to scare unruly children into obedience.

In penny dreadful booklets, Spring-Heeled Jack was transformed from an evil spirit who terrorised women into a masked vigilante figure who used his supernatural powers to punish wrongdoers – an early kind of superhero.

One of these serials, titled Spring-heel’d Jack: The Terror of London, was published weekly in 1863 and saw 40 instalments. Anticipating that readers would be suspicious of its titular character’s new-found heroism, the writer had Spring-Heeled Jack describe himself as “one who is not so black as he is painted”. But its title suggests the apparition still had a less-than-stellar reputation.

The last widely reported sighting of Spring-Heeled Jack was in Liverpool in 1904, where he jumped between rooftops to the amazement of crowds of people. By this time, most alleged appearances were dismissed as attention-seeking imitators, and Jack the Ripper had dethroned him as England’s most terrifying character.

But Spring-Heeled Jack nonetheless continued to lurk in the shadowy margins of English society – as one of the country’s first urban legends which had caused generations of people to glance nervously behind them as they travelled the dimly-lit alleyways of Victorian Britain.

Spring-Heeled Jack is discussed further on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast.

Ghosts, vampires & Abba holograms: an uncanny history of London - HistoryExtra

2025-06-25T07:00:17.000Z

Millions of tourists flock to London each year, eager to snap a selfie in front of Buckingham Palace or Big Ben. But beyond the crowds lies a darker – and distinctly stranger – side to the city: a gothic metropolis haunted by tales of demons, poltergeists and murders most foul. Jon Bauckham talks to author and historian Clive Bloom about some of the capital’s spookiest stories, and why he believes that the eeriest encounters tend to unfold in the most mundane of places.

Clive Bloom is the author of London Uncanny: A Gothic Guide to the Capital in Weird History and Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Buy it now from Waterstones

From the terror of being strangled by violent thieves to tales that the sewers were infested with a squealing band of pigs, 19th-century Londoners spent much of their time living in fear. In this article, Emma Butcher and Tim Blythe reveal what seven such scare-mongering stories can tell us about the psyche of the capital.

Face it: you're a crazy person - Experimental History

2025-06-24T12:12:10.000Z

photo cred: my dad

I meet a lot of people who don’t like their jobs, and when I ask them what they’d rather do instead, about 75% say something like, “Oh, I dunno, I’d really love to run a little coffee shop.” If I’m feeling mischievous that day, I ask them one question: “Where would you get the coffee beans?”

If that’s a stumper, here are some followups:

Which kind of coffee mug is best?
How much does a La Marzocco espresso machine cost?
Would you bake your blueberry muffins in-house or would you buy them from a third party?
What software do you want to use for your point-of-sale system? What about for scheduling shifts?
What do you do when your assistant manager calls you at 6am and says they can’t come into work because they have diarrhea?

The point of the Coffee Beans Procedure is this: if you can’t answer those questions, if you don’t even find them interesting, then you should not open a coffee shop, because this is how you will spend your days as a cafe owner. You will not be sitting droopy-lidded in an easy chair, sipping a latte and greeting your regulars as you page through Anna Karenina. You will be running a small business that sells hot bean water.

The Coffee Beans Procedure is a way of doing what psychologists call unpacking. Our imaginations are inherently limited; they can’t include all details at once. (Otherwise you run into Borges’ map problem—if you want a map that contains all the details of the territory that it’s supposed to represent, then the map has to be the size of the territory itself.) Unpacking is a way of re-inflating all the little particulars that had to be flattened so your imagination could produce a quick preview of the future, like turning a napkin sketch into a blueprint.1

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked. For example, in grad school I worked with lots of undergrads who thought they wanted to be professors. Then I’d send ‘em to my advisor Dan, and he would unpack them in 10 seconds flat. “I do this,” he would say, miming typing on a keyboard, “And I do this,” he would add, gesturing to the student and himself. “I write research papers and I talk to students. Would you like to do those things?”

Most of those students would go, “Oh, no I would not like to do those things.” The actual content of a professor’s life had never occurred to them. If you could pop the tops of their skulls and see what they thought being a professor was like, you’d probably find some low-res cartoon version of themselves walking around campus in a tweed jacket going, “I’m a professor, that’s me! Professor here!” and everyone waving back to them going, “Hi professor!”

Or, even more likely, they weren’t picturing anything at all. They were just thinking the same thing over and over again: “Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure. Do I want to be a professor? Hmm, I’m not sure.”

Why is it so hard to unpack, even a little bit? Well, you know how when you move to a new place and all of your unpacked boxes confront you every time you come home? And you know how, if you just leave them there for a few weeks, the boxes stop being boxes and start being furniture, just part of the layout of your apartment, almost impossible to perceive? That’s what it’s like in the mind. The assumptions, the nuances, the background research all get taped up and tucked away. That’s a good thing—if you didn’t keep most of your thoughts packed, trying to answer a question like “Do I want to be a professor?” would be like dumping everything you own into a giant pile and then trying to find your one lucky sock.

THE BEAST AND THE WOLFF

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.

Do you want to be a surgeon? = Do you want to do the same procedure 15 times a week for the next 35 years?
Do you want to be an actor? = Do you want your career to depend on having the right cheekbones?
Do you want to be a wedding photographer? = Do you want to spend every Saturday night as the only sober person in a hotel ballroom?

If you think no one would answer “yes” to those questions, you’ve missed the point: almost no one would answer “yes” to those questions, and those proud few are the ones who should be surgeons, actors, and wedding photographers.

High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. For instance, shortly after college, I thought I would post a few funny videos on YouTube and, you know, become instantly famous2. I gave up basically right away. I didn’t have the madness necessary to post something every week, let alone every day, nor did it ever occur to me that I might have to fill an entire house with slime, or drive a train into a giant pit, or buy prosthetic legs for 2,000 people. If you read the “leaked” production guide written by Mr. Beast, the world’s most successful YouTuber, you’ll quickly discover how nutso he is:

I’m willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world’s largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy. This channel is my baby and I’ve given up my life for it. I’m so emotionally connected to it that it’s sad lol.

(Those aren’t hypothetical examples, by the way; Mr. Beast really did all those things.)

Apparently 57% of Gen Z would like to be social media stars, and that’s almost certainly because they haven’t unpacked what it would actually take to make it. How many of them have Mr. Beast-level insanity? How many are willing to become indentured servants to the algorithm, to organize their lives around feeding it whatever content it demands that day? One in a million?

Another example: lots of people would like to be novelists, but when you unpack what novelists actually do, you realize that basically no one should be a novelist. For instance, how did Tracy Wolff, author of the Crave “romantasy” series, become one of the most successful writers alive? Well, this New Yorker piece casually mentions that Wolff wrote “more than sixty” books between 2007 and 2018. That’s 5.5 novels per year, every year, for 11 years, before she hit it big. And she’s still going! She has so many books now that her website has a search bar. Or you can browse through categories like “Contemporary Romance (Rock Stars/Bad Boys)”, “Contemporary Erotic Billionaire Romance”, “Contemporary Romance (Harlequin Desire)”, and “Contemporary New Adult Romance (Snowboarders!)”.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like. (source)

Wolff and Beast might seem extreme, but they’re only extreme in terms of output, not in terms of time on task. This is the obvious-but-overlooked insight that you find when you unpack: people spend so much time doing their jobs. Hours! Every day! It’s 2pm on a Tuesday and you’re doing your job, and now it’s 3:47pm and you’re still doing it. There’s no amount of willpower that can carry you through a lifetime of Tuesday afternoons. Whatever you’re supposed to be doing in those hours, you’d better want to do it.

For some reason, this never seems to occur to people. I was the tallest kid in my class growing up, and older men would often clap me on the back and say, “You’re gonna be a great basketball player one day!” When I’d balk, they’d be like, “Don’t you want to be on a team? Don’t you want represent your school? Don’t you want to wear a varsity jacket and go to regionals?” But those are the wrong questions. The right questions, the unpacked questions, are: “Do you want to spend three hours practicing basketball every day? Do you want to dribble and shoot over and over again? On Thursday nights, do you want to ride the bus and sit on the bench while your more talented friends compete, secretly hoping that Brent sprains his ankle so you could have a chance to play?” And honestly, no! I don’t! I’d rather be at home playing Runescape.

When you come down from the 30,000-foot view that your imagination offers you by default, when you lay out all the minutiae of a possible future, when you think of your life not as an impressionistic blur, but as a series of discrete Tuesday afternoons full of individual moments that you will live in chronological order and without exception, only then do you realize that most futures make sense exclusively for a very specific kind of person. Dare I say, a crazy person.

Fortunately, I have good news: you are a crazy person.

YOU’RE NUTS

I don’t mean you’re crazy in the sense that you have a mental illness, although maybe you do. I mean crazy in the sense that you are far outside the norm in at least one way, and perhaps in many ways.

source

Some of you guys wake up at 5am to make almond croissants, some of you watch golf on TV, and some of you are willing to drive an 80,000-pound semi truck full of fidget spinners across the country. There are people out there who like the sound of rubbing sheets of Styrofoam together, people who watch 94-part YouTube series about the Byzantine Empire, people who can spend an entire long-haul flight just staring straight ahead. Do you not realize that, to me, and to almost everyone else, you are all completely nuts?

No, you probably don’t realize that, because none of us do. We tend to overestimate the prevalence of our preferences, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “false consensus effect”3. This is probably because it’s really really hard to take other people’s perspectives, so unless we run directly into disconfirming evidence, we assume that all of our mental settings are, in fact, the defaults. Our idiosyncrasies may never even occur to us. You can, for instance, spend your whole life seeing three moons in the sky, without realizing that everybody else sees only one:

the first time i looked up into the night sky after i got glasses, [I] realized that you can, in fact, see the moon clearly. i assumed people who depicted it in art were taking creative license bc they knew it should look like that for some reason, and that the human eye was incapable of seeing the moon without also seeing two other, blurrier moons, sort of overlapping it

In my experience, whenever you unpack somebody, you inevitably discover something extremely weird about them. Sometimes you don’t have to dig that far, like when your friend tells you that she likes “found” photographs—the abandoned snapshots that turn up at yard sales and charity shops—and then adds that she has collected 20,000 of them. But sometimes the craziness is buried deep, often because people don’t think it’s crazy at all, like when a friend I knew for years casually disclosed that she had dumped all of her previous boyfriends because they had been insufficiently “menacing”.

DR. PIMPLE POPPER WILL SEE YOU NOW

This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one: they don’t understand the craziness that they have to offer, nor the craziness that will be demanded of them, and so they spend their lives jamming their square-peg selves into round-hole jobs. For example, when I was in academia, there was this bizarre contingent of administrators who found college students vaguely vexing and exasperating. When the sophomores would, say, make a snowman in the courtyard with bodacious boobs, these dour admins would shake their heads and be like, “College kids are a real pain in the ass, huh!” They didn’t seem to realize that their colleagues actually liked hanging out with 18-22 year-olds, and that the occasional busty snowman was actually what made the job interesting. I don’t think these curmudgeonly managers even thought such a preference was possible.

Another example: when I was a pimply-faced teenager, I went to this dermatologist who always seemed annoyed to see patients. Like, how dare we bother him by seeking the services that he provides? Meanwhile, Dr. Pimple Popper—a YouTube account that does exactly what it says on the tin—has nearly 9 million subscribers. Clearly, there are people out there who find acne fascinating, and dermatology is the one of the most competitive medical specialties, but apparently you can, through sheer force of will, lack of self-knowledge, and refusal to unpack the details, earn the right to do a job you hate for the rest of your life.

On the other hand, when people match their crazy to the right outlet, they become terrifyingly powerful. A friend from college recently reminded me of this guy I’ll call Danny, who was crazy in a way that was particularly useful for politics, namely, he was incapable of feeling humiliated. When Danny got to campus freshman year, he announced his candidacy for student body president by printing out like a thousand copies of his CV—including his SAT score!—and plastering them all over campus. He was, of course, widely mocked. And then the next year, he won. It turns out that people vote for the name that they recognize, and it doesn’t really matter why they recognize it. By the time Danny ran for reelection and won in a landslide, he was no longer the goofy freshman who taped a picture of his own face to every lamp post. At that point, he was the president.4 5

COPS FOR TEENS

Unpacking is easy and free, but almost no one ever does it because it feels weird and unnatural. It’s uncomfortable to confront your own illusion of explanatory depth, to admit that you really have no idea what’s going on, and to keep asking stupid questions until that changes.

Making matters worse, people are happy to talk about themselves and their jobs, but they do it at this unhelpful, abstract level where they say things like, “oh, I’m the liaison between development and sales”. So when you’re unpacking someone’s job, you really gotta push: what did you do this morning? What will you do after talking to me? Is that what you usually do? If you’re sitting at your computer all day, what’s on your computer? What programs are you using? Wow, that sounds really boring, do you like doing that, or do you endure it?

You’ll discover all sorts of unexpected things when unpacking, like how firefighters mostly don’t fight fires, or how Twitch streamers don’t just “play video games”; they play video games for 12 hours a day. But you’re not just unpacking the job; you’re also unpacking yourself. Do any aspects of this job resemble things you’ve done before, and did you like doing those things? Not “Did you like being known as a person who does those things?” or “Do you like having done those things?” but when you were actually doing them, did you want to stop, or did you want to continue? These questions sound so stupid that it’s no wonder no one asks them, and yet, somehow, the answers often surprise us.

That’s certainly true for me, anyway. I never unpacked any job I ever had before I had it. I would just show up on the first day and discover what I had gotten myself into, as if the content of a job was simply unknowable before I started doing it, a sort of “we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it” kind of situation. That’s how I spent the summer of 2014 as a counselor at a camp for 17-year-olds, even though I could have easily known that job would require activities that I hated, like being around 17-year-olds. Could I have known specifically that my job would include such tasks as “escorting kids across campus because otherwise they’ll flee into the woods” or “trying to figure out whether anyone brought booze to the dance by surreptitiously sniffing kids’ breath?” No. But had I unpacked even a little bit, I would have picked a different way to spend my summer, like selling booze to kids outside the dance.

It’s no wonder that everyone struggles to figure what to do with their lives: we have not developed the cultural technology to deal with this problem because we never had to. We didn’t exactly evolve in an ancestral environment with a lot of career opportunities. And then, once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.

The beginning of that work is, I believe, unpacking. As you slice open the boxes and dump out the components of your possible futures, I hope you find the job that’s crazy in the same way that you are crazy. And then I hope you go for it! Shoot for the stars! Even if you miss, you’ll still land on one of the three moons.

You can think of unpacking as the opposite of attribute substitution; see How to Be Wrong and Feel Bad.

In my defense, this was a decade ago, closer to the days when you could become world famous by doing a few different dances in a row.

There is also a “false uniqueness effect”, but it seems to show up more rarely, on traits where people are motivated to be better than others, or when people have biased information about themselves. So people who like Hawaiian pizza probably think their opinion is more common than it is (false consensus). But if you pride yourself on the quality of your homemade Hawaiian pizza, you probably also overestimate your pizza-making skills (false uniqueness).

I’m pretty sure every campus politician was like this. During one election cycle, the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel groups started competing petitions to remove/keep a brand of hummus in the dining hall that allegedly had ties to the IDF. One of the guys running for class rep signed both petitions. When someone called him out, his response was something like, “I’m just glad we’re having dialogue.” Anyway, he won the election.

A few years later, a sophomore ran for student body president on a parody campaign, promising waffle fries and “bike reform.” He won a plurality of votes in the general election, but lost in the runoff, though he did get a write-up in the New York Times. Now he’s a doctor.

Top-tier insanity can sometimes make up for mid-tier talent. I’ve been in five-ish different improv communities, and in every single one there was someone who was pretty successful despite not being very good at improv. These folks were willing to mortgage the rest of their life to support their comedy habit—they’d half-ass their jobs, skip class, ignore their partners and kids, and in return they could show up for every audition, every gig, every side project. Their laser focus on their dumb art didn’t make them great, but it did make them available. Everybody knew them because they were always around, and so when one of your cast mates dropped out at the last second and you needed someone to fill in, you’d go, “We can always call Eric.” If you’ve ever seen someone on Saturday Night Live who isn’t very funny and wondered to yourself, “How did they get there?”, maybe that’s how.

The first mafia? How an early medieval kingdom perfected the art of deadly diplomacy - HistoryExtra

2025-06-23T14:00:02.000Z

In the rough and rugged landscape of early medieval England, power was rarely won by brute force alone. To survive (and thrive) Anglo-Saxon rulers needed more than willing soldiers. They needed cunning strategies, a mastery of kinship ties, diplomacy and, when required, cold-blooded violence.

One kingdom in particular defined this lethal blend of finesse and force. The rulers of Mercia, one of the dominant Anglo-Saxon kingdoms between the 7th and 9th centuries, created a network of influence that was both expansive and ruthlessly efficient.

And, as archaeologist Max Adams argues on the HistoryExtra podcast, their tactics may bear more than a passing resemblance to a later infamous institution built on blood ties and brutal deals: the mafia.

“Early medieval politics is like the politics of the mafia, really,” Adams says. “These people are heavily family-oriented. They’re prepared to do very unpleasant, violent things to people. And yet they have another side of them which is thoughtful and subtle.”

A violent world built on loyalty and reputation

The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain stretched from the early 5th century — following the collapse of Roman rule — to the Norman Conquest of 1066. During the majority of this time, England wasn’t a unified kingdom but a shifting patchwork of rival realms: Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia, Kent, and Mercia, among others.

In these competing kingdoms there were no standing armies, no central bureaucracy, and no clear rulebook for succession. Claims to power were fiercely contested. Kings relied on bands of warrior followers bound by oath and reward to enforce authority. Loyalty was earned through gifts, land, marriages and, when necessary, fear.

Read more | Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians: the warrior queen who crushed the Vikings

Mercia, located in what is now the English Midlands, rose to prominence in the 7th and 8th centuries. From a relatively marginal position, it developed into a political heavyweight, capable of confronting the powerful Northumbria to the north and Wessex to the south.

Its name, from the Old English ‘Mierce’ meaning ‘boundary people’, hints at its volatile origins. Positioned on the frontier between Brittonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, Mercia was shaped by a context of conflict and negotiation — traits it carried into the political sphere.

Mercian muscle and medieval diplomacy

But Mercian kings also understood that soft power mattered as much as sharp blades. Highlighting this dual approach, Adams explains, they were able to wield the various instruments of power incredibly cannily:

“Mercian kings send assassins to kill people. And yet, they [simultaneously] correspond with missionary Christians on the continent exchanging gifts of falcons and fine robes.”

Read more | 7 medieval kings of England you should know about

Such gifts weren’t random. Falcons were symbols of elite status, while fine robes reflected access to trade routes and continental wealth. These were items that reinforced both religious affiliation and political sophistication.

England’s conversion to Christianity, beginning in the late 6th century, also added new tools to the diplomatic arsenal. By supporting monastic foundations and maintaining correspondence with the Pope and Frankish missionaries, kings could project an image of moral legitimacy, even as they plotted assassinations behind closed doors.

Family first: the politics of blood

No mafia comparison would be complete without the role of the family.

“Offa binds his family very much into his dynastic program,” says Adams, referencing King Offa, the most formidable ruler of Mercia, who reigned between 757 to 796.

Offa’s reign represents the apex of Mercian power. He ruled over much of southern England and exercised overlordship (bretwalda) over neighbouring kingdoms. His wife, Queen Cynethryth, was unusually prominent for the period. Her image even appeared on coinage, a rare honour for any woman in Anglo-Saxon England.

By placing family members in key religious and political positions, Offa created a network of influence that extended across ecclesiastical institutions and local lordships. Dynastic marriages helped secure allies and neutralised rivals. Sons were trained for kingship or bishoprics; daughters married into noble families.

A marriage offer from Charlemagne

Mercia’s influence extended well beyond Britain. Perhaps the most dramatic sign of its stature came from Charlemagne, king of the Franks and later the first Holy Roman Emperor, who dominated western Europe.

“Charlemagne sends an envoy to King Offa to ask if Offa’s daughter Ælfflæd will marry his son Charles. And Offa accepts, but then says, only if my son can marry your daughter.”

Read more | A brief history of Offa’s Dyke

This was an audacious move. Charlemagne had unified much of Western Europe and had been crowned Emperor by the Pope in 800 AD. For Offa to demand a reciprocal marriage was a bold assertion of equality, and it strained diplomatic relations for years.

But the proposal speaks volumes. It shows how Mercian rulers saw themselves as active players on a continental stage.

Mercia’s lasting legacy

While later Anglo-Saxon kings from Wessex — most notably Alfred the Great and his successors — would eventually unify England, it was Mercia that laid the groundwork. Its rulers developed many of the tools of kingship that others would later refine.

“[It’s in] Mercia for the first time, we really see these lines of political transaction being almost codified as tools of statehood,” Adams reflects.

Offa’s government standardised weights and measures, supported a unified coinage system, and built monumental defences — including Offa’s Dyke, a vast earthwork along the Welsh border. These initiatives speak to an early form of central authority and administrative ambition rarely seen in Europe outside the Carolingian Empire.

The comparison to the mafia might be provocative, but Adams’ point is clear: Mercian kings operated in a world where violence and statecraft were inseparable, and where family loyalty, intimidation and diplomacy functioned as parts of a single political strategy.

They ruled not with total control, but by navigating a volatile web of allegiances, marriage alliances and reputational power, and they helped lay the foundation for what would eventually become the English monarchy.

Max Adams was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

The real Nancy Mitford: meet the bestselling novelist who betrayed her sister - HistoryExtra

2025-06-22T21:01:33.000Z

Witty, waspish and armed with a pen as sharp as her cheekbones, Nancy Mitford – the eldest of the Mitford sisters – was the family’s satirist-in-chief and arguably its most enduring literary star.

As a young woman, she cut a dazzling figure among the ‘Bright Young Things’ – a gilded, hedonistic set of 1920s aristocrats and bohemians who danced (and drank) through London’s interwar years with a kind of giddy defiance.

Champagne-fuelled weekends, costume balls and scandalous gossip were their currency, and Nancy – a lover of both glamour and mockery – was right at home.

Her quick wit and elegant style earned her a place among the literary elite. She rubbed shoulders with the likes of Evelyn Waugh, who admired her withering observations, and other luminaries of the era’s cultural scene. These connections sharpened her prose and amplified her voice, placing her at the heart of British literary life.

What did Nancy Mitford write?

Due to her parents’ antipathy towards formal education, she had no training as a writer. Nevertheless, Nancy was encouraged to write by the likes of Waugh. Her work was mainly for gossip columns and she eventually obtained a regular stint with the periodical, The Lady. Her knack for observing the mores and whims of her social set soon evolved into more ambitious projects and she published her first novel, Highland Fling, in 1931.

Despite modest sales, she continued to write throughout the decade. In 1935, Nancy, whose politics were largely left-wing, caused a row within her family after publishing her third novel, Wigs on the Green. This lampooned her future brother-in-law, Oswald Mosley, and his British Union of Fascists movement – provoking the ire of her far-right sisters, Diana Mitford and Unity Mitford.

Nancy’s novels drew heavily from her own family and social milieu, especially her two most celebrated ones: The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949), both of which satirised the absurdities of the aristocracy with affectionate precision.

Readers among her family and friends were often thrilled to recognise themselves in these pages. Her crisp, ironic style set the tone for a generation of comic fiction about the upper classes.

She also dabbled in social commentary – her famous 1955 essay on ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ speech playfully dissected the linguistic quirks of the British class system and caused a sensation. Nancy eventually turned her talents to historical biography, producing elegant studies of French figures including Madame de Pompadour, Voltaire and Louis XIV.

Did Nancy Mitford betray her sister Diana?

Yes – in 1940, Nancy pushed for the British authorities to detain her sister, Diana Mitford, believing her to be a major risk to Britain’s resistance against Nazi Germany.

Diana, through her marriage to Mosley and their connection to Adolf Hitler, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, and several other high-ranking Nazi officials, had made several trips to Germany throughout the 1930s.

She was detained under Regulation 18B (a wartime measure that empowered the UK Government to imprison those suspected of being a national security threat).

Nancy admitted to a family friend: “I have just been round to see Gladwyn [Hubert Gladwyn Jebb, senior British civil servant] … I advised him to examine her [Diana’s] passport to see how she often went [to Germany]. I also said I regard her as an extremely dangerous person. Not very sisterly behaviour but in such times I think it one’s duty”.

This betrayal remained a secret for years – though Diana would later describe Nancy as the most disloyal person she’d ever known.

Nancy Mitford’s personal life

Nancy’s personal life was less glittering than her prose. She married Peter Rodd, the younger son of a British baron and diplomat, in 1933.

The couple found themselves at the French border with Spain in May 1939, assisting the relief effort for the thousands of refugees fleeing the country following General Francisco Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War. This experience profoundly affected her and strengthened her hatred for fascism.

After years of estrangement, rumoured infidelity on Rodd’s part and financial hardship, the marriage broke down and they divorced in 1958.

Later, Nancy poured her true romantic devotion into an unrequited love for the French colonel Gaston Palewski. She spent her final decades in Paris, where she cultivated a salon of sorts, presiding over expatriate life with her signature mix of charm and sarcasm.

How did Nancy Mitford die?

Nancy died in Paris following a battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1973 at the age of 68, having lived a life that was, much like her books – stylish, quietly subversive and always a little scandalous.

Following a cremation, her ashes were buried next to her sister Unity’s grave at St Mary’s Church in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire – the village where the Mitford sisters had spent much of their youth.

The Merovingians: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra

2025-06-22T07:00:31.000Z

Professor James Palmer guides us through the 300-year reign of the Merovingians, the Frankish dynasty whose legacy helped birth the very idea of France. Speaking to Kev Lochun, he explores how they used violence, myth, and immaculate hair to maintain power – until the pope brought the dynasty to its knees.

The real Diana Mitford: society beauty and unabashed fascist - HistoryExtra

2025-06-21T15:52:22.000Z

Diana Mitford was the most dazzling and infamous of the Mitford sisters, an aristocratic British family who became particularly well known in the 1930s. Tall, blonde and a celebrated society beauty, she captivated everyone from poets to politicians.

But her charm masked a steely resolve and political conviction that would embroil her in scandal for the rest of her life.

Diana Mitford and Oswald Mosley

At just 18, Diana married Bryan Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune and one of the most eligible young men of the Bright Young Things set, a group of Bohemian young aristocrats and socialites in London during the Roaring Twenties. Theirs was a golden coupledom: their London home became a hub for literary and artistic high society, frequented by Evelyn Waugh (who dedicated his novel, Vile Bodies (1930), to them) and others. They had two sons: Jonathan and Desmond.

But in 1933, Diana stunned polite society by leaving Bryan for Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists.

Their relationship began in secrecy, largely due to the disapproval of Diana’s father and the political explosiveness of their views. They eventually married in 1936 in a private ceremony held in Berlin at the home of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. The guest of honour? Adolf Hitler himself, who had close connection with another of the sisters, the openly Nazi Unity Mitford.

With Mosley, Diana had two more sons: Alexander and Max – the future president of the governing body for Formula One racing.

How fascist was Diana Mitford?

Fluent in German and deeply enmeshed in the European fascist elite, Diana served as a conduit between the British aristocracy and Hitler’s inner circle – a role she never publicly regretted.

In July 1940, Diana and was arrested under Regulation 18B – a Second World War measure that empowered the British Government to detain, without trial, individuals suspected of being a threat to national security. Her eldest sister, Nancy, horrified by Diana’s fascism, tipped off the British authorities and urged her arrest, as did her former father-in-law, Walter Guiness, Lord Moyne. Oswald had been arrested under the same law in May.

Declassified MI5 documents subsequently revealed that the authorities considered Diana a greater security risk than Mosley, with one observing: “[She is] far cleverer and more dangerous than her husband and will stick at nothing to achieve her ambitions. She is wildly ambitious”.

Why was Diana Mitford released from prison?

Conditions in Holloway Prison caused both Diana and her husband to fall ill at various points. Following a bombing raid by the Luftwaffe on the prison that led to unsanitary conditions, an irascible Diana exclaimed that Winston Churchill and the Tories should be executed.

In 1943, Mosley became gravely unwell, and Diana appealed for her mother, Sydney, to reach out to Winston Churchill’s wife, Clementine. Clementine Churchill replied that the couple would likely be lynched if released.

Nevertheless, mindful that Mosley could become a martyr for British fascists were he to die in prison, the government eventually arranged for the couple to be released under cover of darkness to avoid protesters. They were, however, to remain under house arrest outside London for the duration of the war.

What happened to Diana Mitford after WW2?

After the war, the Diana Mitford lived in genteel exile with Mosley, first in Ireland and then eventually settling in France.

There, they resided in suitably grand style at the Temple de la Gloire, a neoclassical mansion just outside Paris. With its Ionic columns and sweeping views, it offered the perfect setting for Diana’s brand of faded grandeur and polished froideur.

Diana became part of a rarefied social set that included her neighbours and fellow outcasts, the former Edward VIII and his wife, Wallis Simpson. The couples shared more than just titles and tailors – they were united by their wartime allegiances, their love of luxury and their mutual suspicion of liberal democracy.

In exile, Diana penned articles, essays and her icy, unapologetic memoir, A Life of Contrasts, in 1977. Unsurprisingly, it stirred renewed controversy.

One of the most enduring scandals of her later life came in 1989, when she appeared on the long running BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs. During the broadcast, she selected Wagner (Hitler’s favourite composer), trivialised the Holocaust and expressed her continued affection for the Nazi dictator. The backlash was immediate and fierce.

How did Diana Mitford die?

In old age, she remained unapologetically herself: cool, elegant and intellectually razor-sharp. She corresponded widely, maintained her trademark style, and even reconciled with her sister Nancy, visiting her in Paris and exchanging witty, often wicked letters.

She continued to write, variously for publications such as Tatler and the London Evening Standard; as well as penning a biography of Wallis Simpson, until her death in 2003, aged 93, in Paris.

The real Unity Mitford: meet the high society British Nazi whose was rumoured to have had Hitler's child - HistoryExtra

2025-06-21T15:28:03.000Z

Of all the Mitford sisters, Unity Valkyrie Mitford – nicknamed ‘Bobo’ and ‘Boud’ by her siblings – was the most chilling. Tall, striking and unflinchingly devoted to extremes, Unity was a Nazi fanatic who herself part of Adolf Hitler’s entourage.

Her very name was a dramatic flourish: Unity Valkyrie, chosen by her Germanophile parents as a nod to Wagnerian myth and martial grandeur. But even more eerie is the fact that she was conceived in a Canadian mining town named Swastika, Ontario – a coincidence that would later feed the mythos around her disturbing destiny.

What was Unity Mitford’s relationship with Hitler?

In the 1930s, as fascism began to spread across Europe, Unity became obsessed with Adolf Hitler. Alongside her sister Diana Mitford and brother Tom, she travelled to Germany, where they attended Nazi rallies, mingled with high-ranking officials and threw themselves into the theatrical pageantry of the Third Reich.

Unity was relentless in her pursuit of the dictator, and in 1935, after months of haunting his favourite Munich restaurant, she finally caught his eye.

Their relationship became disturbingly close. Hitler seated her beside him at dinner parties, film screenings and Nuremberg rallies. She wrote admiring letters to The Times, praising Nazism and wore a swastika brooch on her tailored English blouses.

Read more | Why did Hitler choose the swastika as a Nazi symbol?

During the Anschluss – Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria – on 15 March 1938, Unity stood behind Hitler on the balcony of the Hofburg Palace overlooking Heroes’ Square in Vienna.

That same year, the Nazi leader offered her a series of apartments in Munich. While touring one, Mitford excitedly discussed decorating plans while the dispossessed owners, a Jewish couple, wept in the kitchen.

What happened to Unity when WW2 broke out?

When war was declared in September 1939, Unity was devastated. Unable to reconcile her love for both nations, she took a pistol to Munich’s English Garden and shot herself in the head.

Astonishingly, she survived – though with a bullet lodged in her brain – and was repatriated to Britain via Switzerland under cloak-and-dagger arrangements.

Her return was a media sensation. One newspaper reported that when asked if she was pleased to be home, Unity replied: “I’m very glad to be in England, even if I’m not on your side”.

Did Unity Mitford have a child with Hitler?

In the early 21st century, hearsay that she may have been pregnant with Hitler’s love child and that the baby was subsequently put up for adoption, reignited interest in the circumstances surrounding her dramatic return to Britain. This was fuelled by testimony from a family living in Wigginton, Oxfordshire who claimed that Unity had been admitted to a maternity cottage hospital in the village in early 1940.

The closeness of Unity and Hitler’s bond was reputedly a source of jealousy for his partner and eventual wife, Eva Braun. In his 1969 memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer, the Nazi minister of armaments and Hitler’s architect, recalled that Unity was privileged among the coterie of women surrounding the Führer in that she was regularly permitted to voice her political and ideological counsel.

Nevertheless, the speculation that Unity may have borne his child remains just that: speculation. Her youngest sister, Deborah, dismissed the idea out of hand.

How did Unity Mitford die?

Unity spent her final years in a childlike state, mentally impaired and physically frail, cared for by her mother. She died in 1948 at the age of 33 from complications linked to her suicide attempt.

To some, she was a cautionary tale of ideological seduction. To others, she remained a chilling symbol of the British aristocracy’s flirtation with fascism.

Meet the blood-soaked African queen who killed her own people in the face of colonialism - HistoryExtra

2025-06-21T14:00:40.000Z

In the early 19th century, European empires were advancing across the African continent, dividing it up with arbitrary lines and draining its resources. The toll this exacted on the native populations was nightmarish – and described hauntingly by the likes of author Joseph Conrad in his 1899 novella Heart of Darkness.

Amid this scramble for Africa, one queen stood against imperial encroachment. Her name was Ranavalona I, and for more than three decades she ruled over the highlands of Madagascar with fear and violence, attempting to retain her country’s independence.

Her story is one of difficult contradictions. In the attempted defence of her homeland, she expelled missionaries, executed rivals and implemented policies so draconian they’re estimated to have halved Madagascar's population.

“She is remembered as quite a huge villain, including amongst her people,” says historian and journalist Paula Akpan, author of When We Ruled, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “[She was] very anti-Christian, anti-European imperialism… [and] ended up halving her population.”

Read more | “Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”: Paula Akpan on female African leaders

Like many powerful women in history, Ranavalona's legacy is entangled in the gender politics of her era and shaped by the colonial narratives that followed. As Akpan establishes, her story asks: how far is too far when defending sovereignty against destructive colonialism?

The queen who battled empires

Ranavalona ascended the throne in 1828, following the death of her husband King Radama I, who had embraced European-style reforms and missionary activity. Ranavalona reversed his policies swiftly and dramatically. She was 33 years old at her coronation, and quickly took firm control of a society already grappling with foreign pressure.

At the time, Madagascar's centralised Merina monarchy was expanding its influence across the island, and European powers were increasingly interested in securing trade and religious conversion opportunities – opening the door to outright imperial colonisation. While the island remained officially independent, foreign influence was steadily growing, particularly through British and French envoys and Christian missionaries.

But Ranavalona had no intention of ceding ground. From the outset of her reign, she launched a campaign to purge all foreign influence. Christian missionaries were expelled, worship was banned and converts were persecuted. European technologies and customs were restricted and trade with Britain and France became tightly controlled.

“She was so preoccupied with preserving her kingdom and preserving their way of life against the French and British colonisers who really sought to claim [Madagascar] as their own, she was willing to essentially purge the island of any hint of foreign influence, including Christianity,” Akpan says.

To European observers, her intense and violent isolationism made her a deeply unsettling figure. Many Victorian-era accounts cast her as barbaric, while ignoring the context of imperial aggression she was reacting to.

A reign of purges and paranoia

Akpan explains that Ranavalona’s rule was marked by mass purges, executions, forced labour, and pervasive state surveillance. Her resistance to foreign powers came at a steep internal cost.

Under her rule, trials by ordeal – including the famed ‘tangena ordeal’ – were revived and widely used. A person accused of a crime would be forced to drink an aconite-based poison to determine whether they were guilty. They were only considered innocent if they showed no adverse reactions to the poison over the following day. Thousands are believed to have died as a result of such trials.

Ranavalona also expanded the fanompoana system of state labour, forcing citizens to work on royal projects and military campaigns.

Some historians estimate that Madagascar’s population fell by as much as 50 per cent under her rule. Those accused of disloyalty or foreign sympathy risked imprisonment, enslavement or execution. Loyalty to the queen became a matter of life and death.

Read more | Africa's medieval golden age

One particularly chilling story has become emblematic of her ruthlessness. Accounts describe how she attempted to manufacture a pair of massive scissors to “cut her enemies in half”, Akpan explains. Ranavalona’s idea was simple: she would use the scissors to literally chop incoming Europeans in two. Though the plan never materialised, the intention speaks volumes.

Ranavalona I’s place in history

Ranavalona’s use of violence is undisputed, but how we understand her actions is complicated by the sources that survive. Many written records were created by missionaries, colonial officials, or other foreign observers with their own biases and agendas.

This Eurocentric lens has shaped how Ranavalona is remembered. While European rulers of the same era engaged in brutal colonial conquests, their violence was often framed as civilising or strategic. The pain inflicted by Ranavalona, by contrast, was maximised rather than minimalised.

But, equally, as Akpan cautions, “The fact that she is an African woman doesn't inherently make her good.”

How do we view Ranavalona now?

Queen Ranavalona’s methods were undoubtedly unjustifiably brutal, wreaking havoc upon her own people.

However, her basic instincts to preserve her kingdom’s independence against incoming European colonisation were, some would argue, understandable given what would follow in countries that pushed back against colonialism less ardently.

Elsewhere in Africa, colonialism’s advance brought horrors at an unfathomable scale. In the Congo, decades after Ranavalona’s death, Belgian ruler King Leopold II presided over one of the most appalling regimes in modern history. Under his control, millions were enslaved, mutilated or killed in the pursuit of rubber profits. Historians estimate that up to 10 million people died under Leopold’s rule.

Seen in this context, Ranavalona’s fierce isolationism might be viewed as a pre-emptive defence against a form of colonialism that unleashed devastating horrors wherever it took hold.

However, ultimately, she would only delay Madagascar’s colonisation by decades. “I guess the sad fact is that Madagascar was colonised anyway, despite her really dogged commitment to self-sufficiency; to repelling these Western forces,” Akpan reflects.

“Would she regret the harms [she caused]? How she went about trying to preserve sovereignty – would she do it again knowing that Madagascar was colonised anyway? What would [that knowledge] have done to her?”

What is certain is that Ranavalona I remains one of the most striking, and terrifying, figures in the history of African resistance to empire.

Paula Akpan was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Long before the Bible, an ancient Mesopotamian civilisation predicted one of its most famous stories - HistoryExtra

2025-06-20T13:00:47.000Z

When most people think of a legendary flood of world-ending proportions, their mind will jump to the story of Noah; a man chosen by God to build an ark, gather animals and survive a divine global deluge sent to cleanse the world. But that story, recorded in the Book of Genesis, is perhaps an iteration of a much older one.

Long before it appeared in the Hebrew Bible, a remarkably similar tale was written down on clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia – the home of civilisations that flourished in what is now Iraq, more than 4,000 years ago. That version, composed centuries before the Book of Genesis, is one of the most distinct and influential myths of the ancient world.

“It’s still remarkable that this flood story was written so early on. And then, with whatever variations, gets retold in a totally different context,” says historian Dr Moudhy Al-Rashid, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.

A civilisation between rivers

The setting for this myth is ancient Mesopotamia, a civilisation whose name literally means “the land between the rivers”. These rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – run through modern-day Iraq and parts of Syria and gave rise to some of the world’s first urban civilisations, including the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians.

From as early as 3000 BCE, these cultures developed literature, law codes, the first cities, monumental temples, advanced irrigation and vast mythological traditions. They wrote on clay tablets using cuneiform script and preserved stories that shaped religious thinking for thousands of years.

Among these stories is the Atra-Hasis Epic, a myth composed in the Old Babylonian period (c. 1900–1600 BCE), which contains the oldest known account of a divine flood sent to destroy humanity – and a chosen survivor tasked with saving life on Earth.

“[It] has a lot of commonalities with the story that appears later on in the Bible,” explains Al-Rashid.

The story of Atra-Hasis

In the myth, the Mesopotamian gods have created humans but quickly come to regret it, as the unruly people disturb the gods with their chaos and violate the cosmic order.

“The gods decide to send a deluge to wipe out humanity,” explains Al-Rashid, “because they become too loud and annoying, effectively.”

But one god, Ea (also known as Enki), disagrees. In secret, he warns a wise king named Atra-Hasis, whose name means “exceeding in wisdom”. Ea instructs him to build a boat, a great vessel that will preserve “the seed of all life on Earth”.

Atra-Hasis persuades his community to help him build an ark. “He’s got everyone in the town to help him build this boat basically in a day,” Al-Rashid says. “And they're having a feast to celebrate.”

But the feast is overshadowed by the king’s dread. Atra-Hasis gives a speech filled with puns and wordplay that hint at the catastrophe to come.

Read more | The ancient Mesopotamian civilisation’s weirdest job? Meet the veterinary exorcist

“He talks about how Enlil, the supreme god, will rain cuckoo cakes down and ktu wheat,” says Al-Rashid. “But cuckoo is very close to the word kaku, which means weapon in Akkadian, and ktu is close to katu, which means heavy.”

“So is he lying to them and saying all these lovely things will rain down from the heavens?” she adds. “Or is he basically trying to warn people?”

After the feast, overcome with guilt and fear, Atra-Hasis breaks down. “He weeps and even pukes,” says Al-Rashid. “He feels so ill that he has to abandon all these people and take this boat […] because he’s been instructed to do so by this god to ensure the survival of humanity.”

The flood then comes, washing most of humanity away. Eventually, the rain stops, and the waters begin to recede.

In the aftermath, Atra-Hasis releases a dove, a swallow and a raven to find dry land. “The raven eventually doesn’t come back,” says Al-Rashid, meaning it has found land and a possible future.

This sequence – three birds sent out, one failing to return – appears again, nearly identically, in the biblical story of Noah in Genesis.

Flood myths across cultures

This Babylonian version of the flood myth wasn’t a one-off, either. Instead, this was a recurring motif in Mesopotamian theology.

A variation of the same story appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and earlier still in Sumerian poetry. Each iteration changes names and details, but the essentials remain: the gods regret their creation, a great flood is sent, and one human is chosen to carry forward life.

Read more | This ancient and terrifying Mesopotamian demon was secretly a divine hero

And this archetypal structure isn’t limited to Mesopotamia. Similar flood stories appear in cultures around the world – from India’s tale of Manu to China’s story of Yu the Great, to Native American myths and Aboriginal oral traditions in Australia.

From cuneiform to Genesis

So how did this ancient tale reach the Bible? There is no definitive answer.

However, ancient Israelite scribes did live and write in a region heavily influenced by Babylonian culture. During the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century BCE, many Jewish thinkers lived in Babylon and had access to local literature and oral traditions.

Read more | Digging for the Bible: 10 key discoveries from the Holy Land

One theory is that this is how the flood myth, along with other Mesopotamian cosmologies, seeped into the Hebrew worldview, becoming reframed and retold through a monotheistic lens.

In the Book of Genesis, God chooses Noah to build an ark and save creation from divine wrath. Noah releases a dove and a raven. The flood ends. A new covenant is formed. This is a structure that echoes the voice of Atra-Hasis, speaking from a clay tablet inscribed four thousand years ago.

Moudhy Al-Rashid was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Ancient tips for health and happiness - HistoryExtra

2025-06-18T07:00:05.000Z

The science of health and wellbeing is a hot topic of modern life, and it was no different for the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome. From what you should eat, to how you should exercise, and when you should (and shouldn't) have sex, these cultures developed their own highly specific set of rules to live by to maximise health and happiness. In this episode, Claire Bubb examines the logic behind these health tips alongside James Osborne, and reveals what insights they give us into the Greco-Roman mindset.

Claire Bubb is the author of How to Eat: An Ancient Guide for Healthy Living (Princeton University Press, 2025).

Buy it now from Amazon

A Bronze Age Brexit: why did these Britons mysteriously cut themselves off from Europe? - HistoryExtra

2025-06-13T10:56:02.000Z

Around 3000 BC, while continental Europe embraced technological breakthroughs such as metallurgy and wheeled vehicles, the people of the British Isles – the Neolithic farming communities who would build some of the islands’ most iconic monuments, including Stonehenge – turned their back on the rest of the world. Isolating themselves off from continental Europe, these Britons wanted to be left alone.

“For reasons that we're just beginning to glean, Britain cut itself off from the continent,” says archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. It was, he argues, “an absolutely ridiculous thing to have done.”

Why did they do it? And was it a Bronze Age Brexit?

The end of the Neolithic period

This was the tail end of the Neolithic period, an era characterised by settled farming, communal living, and the construction of some of the world’s most famous – and mysterious – architectural achievements.

On the continent, new ideas and materials were moving quickly through a complex network of trade and migration. The earliest signs of the Bronze Age – defined by the use of metal tools and weapons made by combining copper and tin – were already emerging.

Read more | 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

But in Britain, the Neolithic peoples – descendants of early farming migrants who had arrived around 4000 BC – stopped engaging with that continental momentum.

“They were not plugged into the exchange networks of the whole of Europe,” Parker Pearson explains. “Given that metallurgy was available, given that knowledge of the wheel was also there on the continent, they were just blocking off all these potential innovations.”

An early split from Europe

The archaeological record bears this out. Pottery styles, burial practices and architectural forms all diverge sharply from those seen across the channel.

“We can also see that there’s absolutely no traded material going either way across the channel,” he adds. “The traditions that developed in Britain were completely different, both in architectural [terms] and [in] small items like pottery.”

However, Parker Pearson doesn’t characterise this divergence as a rejection of progress. It was during this era that these communities produced some of the most iconic monuments in British and Irish history.

“It’s within that period of isolation that they built Stonehenge and other major stone circles,” Parker Pearson says, “as well as the big henge enclosures – circular, ditched and banked structures.” These are styles that are, he says, “entirely restricted to the islands of Britain and Ireland.”

These monuments are a hallmark of what’s known as Late Neolithic Britain and Ireland, a period marked by spiritual and ritual innovation rather than technological progress. Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland are key examples, but there are more than 70 other ceremonial centres that became key locations for gatherings, ceremonies, and seasonal feasting.

Read more | Visiting Avebury and Silbury Hill, the site of Neolithic Britons

But these were not urban or densely populated societies. “It’s a community that is also without villages,” Parker Pearson says. “We have just single farmsteads scattered across southern Britain, and there are key places – centres for ceremonial and monumental activity.”

Rather than staying in one place, these communities could travel. “People were not quite nomadic, but highly mobile,” he adds. “They were living in different places at different times of the year, moving with their animals – their cattle and their pigs – to be at the ceremonial centres for particular times of year, for feasting.”

Then, around 2500 BC, everything changed.

The Beaker takeover

The Beaker people, so named by historians and archaeologists after their distinctive bell-shaped pottery vessels, began to arrive from continental Europe around 2500 BC, bringing this era of isolation to an end.

They brought with them not only new technologies like metalworking and individual burial customs, but also different genetic lineages. Within a few centuries, they had largely replaced the native Neolithic population, in both cultural and biological terms.

“Within some 16 generations of the initial Beaker arrival, we’re seeing the very large replacement of the gene pool. The population – 400 years later, 16 generations later – they've really got only about 10% of that British farmers DNA in their genome.”

So, the Beakers’ arrival set Britain on a new course, bringing technologies that would tie Britain closer to the progress elsewhere in the world. But why had Britain withdrawn in the first place?

“We don’t have any idea,” Parker Pearson concedes. However, recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA analysis point to one potential cause: disease.

Read more | How was Stonehenge built?

“One of the really interesting results we’re getting from DNA analysis is that we can see episodes of Bubonic Plague,” he says. The bacteria that cause plague, Yersinia pestis, can survive in ancient human remains, and has now been found in the teeth of people buried in Neolithic Britain.

“We know that there were at least two cases of Bubonic Plague in Britain,” he says. “One [occurred] before the Beaker people even arrived – around 2900–2800 BC, so about four centuries earlier. And then we’ve got a second event some 300 years after their initial arrival,” which can be seen in evidence “from burials in different parts of Britain”.

In both cases, the presence of plague raises questions about population movement.

Read more | Your guide to the Black Death

“It is possible that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg there,” Parker Pearson explains, “and that the whole point about these large-scale migrations is that they act as a vector for the spreading of diseases across the whole continent.”

It’s possible, then, that Britain’s decision to isolate itself wasn’t purely social or economic. Fear of disease – and attempts to halt its spread – may have played a key role in severing links with the continent, centuries earlier.

This dramatic period of separation ended with the arrival of the Beaker people, who reconnected Britain with Europe and ushered in the Bronze Age proper. But for three centuries before that, Britain stood alone and independent – isolated and insular, but also culturally unique, innovative in other ways that echo to the present day.

Mike Parker Pearson was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.

Three Dumb Studies for your consideration - Experimental History

2025-06-10T12:11:22.000Z

photo cred: my dad

It’s cool to run big, complicated science experiments, but it’s also a pain in the butt. So here’s a challenge I set for myself: what’s the lowest-effort study I could run that would still teach me something? Specifically, these studies should:

Take less than 3 hours
Cost less than $20
Show me something I didn’t already know
Be a “hoot”

I call these Dumb Studies, because they’re dumb. Here are three of them.

(You can find all the data and code here.)

EXPERIMENT 1: I AM BABY

I’m bad at tasting things. I once found a store-bought tiramisu at the back of the fridge and was like “Ooh, tiramisu!” Then I ate some and was like, “Huh this tiramisu is kinda tangy,” and when my wife tasted it, she immediately spat it out and said, “That’s rancid.” We looked at the box and discovered the tiramisu expired several weeks ago. I would say this has permanently harmed my reputation within my family.

That experience left me wondering: just how bad are my taste buds? Like, in a blind test, would I even be able to tell different flavors apart? I know that sight influences taste, of course—there are all sorts of studies dunking on wine enthusiasts: they can’t match the description of a wine to the actual wine, they like cheaper wine better when they don’t know the price, and if you put some red food coloring in white wine, people think it’s red wine.1 But what if I’m even worse than that? What if, when I close my eyes, I literally can’t tell what’s in my mouth?

~~~MATERIALS~~~

My friend Ethan bought four kinds of baby food. They were all purees, so I couldn’t use texture as a clue, and I didn’t look at any of the containers beforehand.

~~~PROCEDURE~~~

I put on a blindfold and tasted a spoonful of each kind of baby food and tried to guess what it was.

~~~RESULTS~~~

Here’s how I did:

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

I would rate my performance as “humiliating”. Butternut squash and sweet potato are pretty similar, so I’ll give myself that one, but what kind of idiot tastes “pear” and thinks “lemon-lime”? I knew in the moment that there was probably no such thing as “lemon-lime” baby food (did Gerber’s acquire Sprite??), but that’s literally what it tasted like, so that’s what I said. Mixing up banana and strawberry was way below even my very low expectations for myself. When I took the blindfold off, people looked genuinely concerned.2

Here’s something interesting that happened: once my friends revealed the identity of each flavor, I immediately “tasted” it. It was like looking at one of those visual illusions that looks like a bunch of blobs and then someone tells you “it’s a parrot!” and suddenly the parrot jumps out at you and you can’t not see the parrot anymore. Except in this case, the parrot was banana-flavored.

EXPERIMENT 2: MISS PAIN PIGGY LOVES TO PUT HER HAND IN A BUCKET OF ICE

My friends and I were hosting a party and we thought it would be funny to ask people to stick their hands in various buckets, just to see how long they would do it. We didn’t exactly have a theory behind this. We just thought something weird might happen.3

~~~MATERIALS~~~

We got two buckets, filled one with ice water, and filled the other bucket with nothing.

~~~PROCEDURE~~~

We flipped a coin to determine which bucket each partygoer (N = 23) would encounter first. (The buckets were in separate rooms, so they didn’t know which one was coming next.) Upon entering each room, we told the participant, “Please put your hand in the bucket for as long as you want.” Then we timed how long they kept their hands in each bucket.

~~~RESULTS~~~

On average, people kept their hands in the ice bucket for 49.26 seconds, and they kept their hands in the empty bucket for 31.57 seconds. The difference between these two averages was not statistically significant.4

But averages aren’t very revealing here, because people differed a lot. Here’s another way of looking at the same data. Each participant has their own row and two dots: a red dot for how long they spent in the empty bucket, and blue dot for how long they spent in the ice bucket. For privacy, all participants’ names have been replaced with the names of Muppets.

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

We learned two things from this study.

People are weird

Putting your hand in a bucket of ice is supposed to be a universally negative experience. It’s known in the science biz as the “cold pressor task,” and they use it to study pain because it hurts so bad. But some people liked it! One guy thanked the experimenter for the opportunity to make his hand really cold, which he enjoyed very much. Another revealed this: you know those drink chillers at the grocery store where you can put a bottle of white wine or a six pack in a vat of icy water and it swirls around and it chills your drink really fast? He used to stick his hand in one of those for fun.

Feeling pointless might hurt worse than feeling pain.

Say what you will about sticking your hand in an ice bucket: it’s something to do. You feel like you’re testing your mettle, your skin changes colors, your fingers tingle and that’s kinda fun. When you put your hand in an empty bucket, nothing happens. You just stand there like an idiot with your hand in a bucket. People think physical pain is inherently negative, like it’s pure badness. But when you lock eyes with Miss Pain Piggy and she holds her hand in ice water for 466 seconds straight, you start to question a lot of assumptions.5

EXPERIMENT 3: SUGAR DADDY SALT BAE

Here’s something that’s always bugged me: people love sugar and salt, right? I mean, duh, of course they do. So why doesn’t anyone pour themselves a big bowl of salt and sugar and chow down? Is it just social norms and willpower preventing us from indulging our true desires? Or is it because pure sugar and salt don’t actually taste that good? Could it be that our relationship with these delicious rocks is, in fact, far more nuanced than simply wanting as much of them as possible?

This study was partly inspired by cybernetic psychology, which posits that the mind is full of control systems that try to keep various life-necessities at the right level. Sugar and salt are both necessary for life, and people certainly do seem to desire both of them. And yet, if you eat too much of them, you die. That sounds like a job for a control system—maybe there’s some kind of body-brain feedback loop trying to keep salt and sugar at the appropriate level, not too high and not too low. One way to investigate a control system is just to put stuff in front of someone and see what they do. That sounded pretty dumb, so that’s what I did.

~~~MATERIALS~~~

I got a measuring spoon marked “1/4 teaspoon” and some salt and sugar.

~~~PROCEDURE~~~

I ran this study at an Experimental History meetup in Cambridge, MA6. I brought people (N = 23)7 to a testing room and sat them at a desk. I first showed them the measuring spoon and asked them, “If I were to give you this amount of sugar, is that something you would like to eat?” If they said “Yes”, I poured 1/4 teaspoon of sugar into a tiny cup and gave it to them. Once they ate it, I asked them to rate the experience from 1 (not good at all) to 5 (very good), and I asked them if they’d like to do it again. If they said yes again, I gave them another 1/4 teaspoon of sugar and got their rating. I repeated this process until they refused the sugar. (Nobody took more than two shots.) Then I repeated the process with 1/4 teaspoon of salt.8 I should have randomized the order, but in all the excitement, I forgot.

~~~RESULTS~~~

About half of the participants flat-out refused the sugar, and two-thirds refused the salt. Anecdotally, many of the people who refused the sugar said something like, “oh, I’d like to eat it, but I shouldn’t.” People did not feel that way about the salt. They were just like, “No thanks”.9

The people who did try the sugar generally liked it. The people who tried the salt did not. (The latter were, by the way, all men.) A few of the guys put on a brave face after downing their salt, but the rest said things like “blech!” and “oh!”. Four people took an extra shot of sugar, and they liked it fine. The two people who took an extra salt shot gave the experience a big thumbs-down.

~~~DISCUSSION~~~

Why don’t people eat big spoonfuls of sugar and salt? For sugar, the answer might be “we think it’s sinful”. But it also might be because raw sugar isn’t actually super delicious. I’m a bit surprised that the sugar ratings weren’t even higher—isn’t sugar supposed to be pure bliss?10 For salt, the answer might just be “it tastes bad on its own”.

It’s weird that people had such strong reactions to such small amounts. There’s about 1g of sugar in 1/4 teaspoon, and a single Reese’s peanut butter cup—a notoriously delicious treat—contains 11x that much. Meanwhile, 1/4 teaspoon of salt is about 1.4g, and I happily ate more than that in a single sitting yesterday via a pile of tater tots dunked in ketchup. For some reason, people seem to find these minerals far more appealing when they’re mixed with other stuff.

Why would that be? Maybe it has to do with how much you need to survive, and how much you can eat before you die.

The estimated lethal dose of salt is 4g per kilogram of body weight, and people really do die from ingesting too much of it. In one case, a Japanese woman had a fight with her husband, drank a liter of shoyu sauce containing an estimated 160g of sodium, and died the next day. In another case, a psychiatric hospital forced a 69-year-old man to drink water containing 216g of salt (they wanted him to throw up because he had ingested his roommate’s medication); he was declared brain dead 36 hours later.

Meanwhile, the estimated lethal dose of sugar is much higher: 30g per kilogram of body weight. An extremely trustworthy-seeming Buzzfeed article called “It’s Actually Pretty Hard to Eat So Much Sugar that You Die” estimates that the average adult would need to eat 680 Hershey’s Kisses, 408 Twix Minis, or 1,360 pieces of candy corn before they kicked the bucket.

It takes a lot longer to eat several pounds of candy than it does to chug a liter of shoyu, so it’s easier for the body to defend against a sugar overdose than a salt overdose (by making you feel nauseous, cramping, throwing up, etc.). The best way to avoid death by salt, then, is to avoid eating large doses of salt in the first place, and the best way to do that is to make it taste bad. Maybe that’s why the same amount of salt tastes nasty when served raw and tastes delicious when sprinkled over a basket of french fries or dissolved in a bowl of soup—you’re only getting a little bit at a time, so you won’t shoot past your target level.11

Anyway, these results suggest that we do not “love” sugar and salt. We love a certain amount of sugar and salt, consumed at a certain rate, and perhaps even in a certain ratio to other nutrients. The results also suggest that coming to an Experimental History meetup is a super fun and cool time.

THE BURDEN OF RESPECTABILITY

I’m showing you Dumb Studies as if they’re something new. But they’re not. At the beginning of science, all studies were Dumb.

Robert Boyle, the father of chemistry, did a thorough investigation of a piece of veal that was weirdly shiny (results inconclusive). Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the father of microbiology, blew smoke at worms to see if it would kill them (it didn’t). Robert Hooke, the father of a bunch of stuff12, sprinkled some flour on a glass plate and then ran a bow along the side like he was playing the fiddle and was like “ooh look at the lines the vibration makes”. These studies looked stupid even then, and people duly ridiculed them for it.

Ever since then, the most groundbreaking scientists have always spent a big chunk of their time—perhaps most of their time—goofing around. Francis Galton, the guy who invented like 10% of modern science13, took a secret whistle to the zoo and whistled at all the animals (the lions hated it). Barbara McClintock learned how to control her perception of pain so she wouldn’t need anesthesia during dental procedures. Richard Feynman did about a million Dumb Studies, including a demonstration that urination isn’t driven by gravity because you can pee standing on your head. The neurologist V.S. Ramachandran was able to temporarily turn off amputees’ phantom limbs by squirting water in their ears and making them look at mirrors. They all had what I call experimenter’s urge: the desire to, quite literally, fuck around and find out.

After science became a profession, we started expecting our science to look very science-y, no Dumb Studies allowed. On top of that, the replication crisis left us all with a cop mentality that treats anything fun as suspicious. People want to blame the slowdown of scientific progress on the “burden of knowledge”14 or “ideas getting harder to find”—I disagree, and will fight such people, but I do agree that we're suffering under a modern burden: the burden of respectability.15

There’s a time and a place for the Serious Study. Sometimes you’re spending millions of dollars, for instance, and you can’t afford to be loosey-goosey with the procedure. But reality is very weird, and if you ever want to understand it, you have to bump into it over and over, in as many places and from as many angles as possible. You need the freedom to be Dumb. You must inspect the shining meat, you must pee standing on your head, and you must, I submit, eat this baby food.

I thought this was common knowledge, but apparently it’s not. In this New Yorker article about blind wine taste-testing, a professor of “viticulture and enology” confidently states that no one would ever mix up red wine and white wine right before the author does exactly that.

Come to think of it, why is “strawberry-banana” such a common flavor? Where did that come from?

An initial writeup of this experiment was previously published in the first, and so far only, issue of The Loop.

Specifically, t(22) = 0.69, p = .50. The more statistically-minded folks might be wondering: “Did you have enough power to detect an effect here? You only had 23 participants, after all.” Great question! With N = 23, we have about an 80% chance to detect an effect of d = .6 with a two-tailed paired t-test. That’s roughly what we consider a “medium” effect, based on something one statistician said once. To put that in context, the standardized effect of SSRIs on depression is .4, the effect of ibuprofen on arthritis pain is .42, and the effect of “women being more empathetic than men” is .9. The Bayes factor for this difference is .27, meaning moderately strong evidence for the null, according to something another statistician said once. So we can’t say there’s no difference between the empty bucket and the ice bucket, but if there is any difference, we can be pretty confident that it isn’t large.

Maybe this is also why, if you leave people alone in an empty room with a shock machine, they will voluntarily shock themselves.

This meetup was co-hosted with The Browser, a terrific newsletter that curates interesting internet stuff.

Not a typo; somehow every party I host ends up with 23 people at it. (Some people were there both times, but most weren’t.)

The party took place in the afternoon and had both salty and sweet snacks available, so each person was coming in with a different amount of sugar and salt already in their system.

This was one of the fun parts of running Dumb Studies: you let people do interesting things. In a Serious Study in psychology, for instance, we don’t usually let people say “no”. I mean, we do, obviously, for ethical reasons, but if they refuse some part of the study, then the study is over.

When you run a Dumb Study, you can treat all behavior as data. If someone doesn’t want to put their hand in the empty bucket or they don’t want to eat the salt, that’s not noise. That’s a result.

I don’t quite have enough data to tell, maybe there’s more variance in sugar preferences than there is in salt preferences. One participant remarked that he had eaten pure sugar earlier that day. And “salt tooth”, while apparently a thing, is far less common than “sweet tooth”, and it sounds like a D-list pirate name.

This would also predict that Gatorade tastes better after a run on a hot day; you’ve sweated out some of your sugar and salt stores, so your taste buds give you a thumbs-up for re-up.

For instance, Hooke’s law, Hooke’s joint, Hooke’s instrument, and Hooke’s wheel.

To be clear, both good stuff and bad stuff

Supposedly the “last man who knew everything” was English polymath Thomas Young, who died in 1829.

Weirdly enough, “being respectable” does not include “posting your data and code”, which most studies do not do.

What did Victorians do with their poo? The battle over the 19th-century excrement explosion - HistoryExtra

2025-06-06T14:10:23.000Z

In the 1890s, Manchester’s civic leaders faced a mounting crisis. The city’s population had exploded, its industries were booming, and with them came an ever-growing tide of human waste. By the later decades of the 19th century, Victorian Britain’s sanitation revolution was well underway, but as historian Richard Jones explains in an April 2025 article from the Environment and History journal, ‘Excremental Flows: Manchester Corporation’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ and the Rampton Manor Estate, Nottinghamshire, 1892’ (available to purchase or access via a subscriber login), the transition from solid waste systems to water-borne sewage was anything but smooth.

By the late Victorian era, Manchester’s “existing waste removal infrastructure – designed to deal with the much smaller volumes and narrower range of waste materials of the pre-industrial age – had begun to struggle with the prodigious quantities of polluting waste its people and factories now generated,” says Jones.

The sanitary reformer Dr Southwood Smith vividly described a scene he was greeted with upon a visit to a Manchester privy in 1860: “The floor… is completely covered, several inches deep, with ashes and night-soil, so that it is impossible to get to the seat itself without being over shoes in abominable filth. The seat itself is, in every part, besmeared, and in some parts covered several inches deep, with the same filth.”

By the mid-19th century, Manchester was already producing more than 100,000 tons of ‘night-soil’ (a euphemism for human excrement) annually. This waste was collected from thousands of ash-pits – an open pit into which all domestic waste and excrement was disposed, partially dried and deodorised by adding ashes from hearths and ovens – and privies. Then, it was often transported by rail to distant farming regions in Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. But this system was expensive and increasingly unpopular.

In one step to cope with the growing burden, Manchester introduced pail-closets, which replaced open cesspits and ash-pits with sealed containers that could be regularly emptied. By the late 1870s, the city had phased out most of its older waste systems, replacing them with 28,000 pail-closets and 10,000 water-closets. But the problem was far from solved.

A deluge of waste

“The total replacement, by the early 1880s, of cess-pits, ash-pits and middens by the pail-closet system represented an impressive achievement,” says Jones. “Yet still, in 1884, around 200,000 tons of waste were annually arriving at the Corporation’s depot.”

Though unpleasant to deal with, this was valuable stuff – it was sold as night-soil or processed into a dry powder and marketed as concentrated manure that could be delivered to farmers up to 100 miles away in less than 24 hours.

With the context of current attempts to quickly transform domestic heating systems from oil and gas boilers to air source heat pumps and solar, it’s notable that the municipal authorities of Victorian Manchester were able to drive domestic infrastructure change so rapidly. According to Dr Jones, “The Manchester authorities began with a rolling programme of improving existing infrastructure rather than replacing this with new technology. Retrofitting existing properties with water closets was more problematic but was solved by requiring landlords to do this work. Building in water closets and connecting to the sewers was much easier when planned from the outset in new builds.” However, the problems kept mounting as the population kept growing.

Jones memorably describes the city authorities’ struggles to “keep their noses above the rising tide of excremental waste”. The challenge was made harder because Manchester was “water poor”, which made it difficult to implement a water-based sewer system. Plus, the 1876 Rivers Pollution Prevention Act had made it illegal to dump untreated sewage into rivers, cutting off one traditional route of disposal.

Faced with these challenges, Manchester looked for new ways to rid itself of its waste. One solution was Carrington Moss, an area with 600 acres of boggy land and c500 acres of agricultural land on the city’s outskirts, purchased by the Manchester Corporation in 1886.

Read more | Urban animals: the growth of city farms in 20th-century Britain

Roads, drains, and a light railway were built to carry the waste there. But by the early 1890s, Carrington Moss was nearing capacity. In the five years after the purchase of the site in 1886, the population of Manchester had increased by over 150,000 people to a total of over half a million. All those people had to live somewhere – and the human waste that they produced had to go somewhere too. Water-closets were being introduced in the city, but that was a slow process, and in the meantime, Manchester was producing an extra 20,000 tons of excremental waste a year.

Residents kick up a stink

In 1892, Manchester’s Cleansing Committee hatched a bold plan: to purchase Rampton Manor, a large agricultural estate in Nottinghamshire, and transport 20,000 tons of waste there annually, by rail. The scheme promised to relieve pressure on the city’s depots and provide valuable manure to farmers – and handily, the estate was up for sale by its owner Colonel Henry Eyre, the MP for Gainsborough, Lincolnshire.

But the proposal sparked a furious backlash. Rampton is many miles from Manchester and there were concerns about transportation of waste. Local residents, tenant farmers, and neighbouring towns like Gainsborough and Retford were horrified. As Jones explains: “When the residents of Rampton, surrounding villages and the nearby towns of Retford and Gainsborough got wind of Manchester’s intentions they were quick to kick up a stink.”

At a public inquiry held by the Local Government Board, the Manchester Corporation tried to reassure the public. It was a robust affair: “Among the testimony heard were the views of local farmers, delivered in characteristically robust language and with a general disregard for the pseudo-legal niceties of the inquiry,” says Jones. “The chairman struggled to keep order.”

The inquiry revealed a clash of worldviews. Manchester saw the scheme as a practical solution to an urban problem, while rural communities viewed it as an environmental threat and an unwanted intrusion. The efforts of the Manchester authorities to demonstrate that the “problem waste removed from one place would miraculously metamorphose into beneficial manure in another” proved a very hard sell indeed.

Local concerns centred around the ability of the ground to cope with the volume of manure, the risk of water supply contamination, and the threat of disease. But also, there was the question of reciprocity and standing up for one’s own area. As the vice-chair of Nottingham County Council’s Health Committee, Mr Earp, put it, “Every town should stand on its own bottom”.

Read more | Victorian daily life: what was it like for 'ordinary' Victorians?

“At root, what was at stake was the right or otherwise of an urban centre to colonise distant places with its waste,” says Jones.

The Local Government Board ultimately sided with the objectors. In December 1892, it refused Manchester’s request for a £60,000 loan to purchase Rampton Manor. The city was forced to abandon the scheme.

But the waste problem remained. In the aftermath, Manchester turned back to an earlier idea: purchasing Chat Moss, another area of bogland closer to the city. Acquired in 1895, it became a major dumping ground, capable of absorbing 50,000 tons of waste annually.

The ‘sewage question’ was a topic of national conversation through the second half of the 19th century. Manchester’s ‘Dung Hill Scheme’ in Rampton was just one of the solutions.

Elsewhere, Joseph Bazalgette’s famous London’s embankment sewage system took the capital’s waste out to the tidal Thames, but the idea of water-borne sewage networks was not the only option. Rev. Henry Moule, for instance, patented his dry earth-closet scheme (not dissimilar to modern composting toilets) and that attracted a lot of interest.

Some resolution came in the form of the main drainage system in Manchester, which was designed in the late 1880s, but its operation had to wait until the construction of the Thirlmere reservoir and aqueduct, completed in 1894. This brought much needed water from the Lake District over a distance of nearly 96 miles.

Read more | Tales of the toilet: a historical A–Z

A wasteful legacy

With the threats facing today’s water supply, and growing numbers of people advocating the use of dry systems like Moule’s, the Victorian experience has long echoes into the 21st century.

“In many respects, the current sewage crisis has its origins in the decisions made by Victorian civil engineers,” notes Dr Jones.

“In particular, the decision to opt for combined sewerage systems that captured and combined both industrial and domestic liquid waste and rainwater and ground water (the model designed by Joseph Bazalgette for London), generated much larger volumes of albeit highly diluted but nevertheless tainted sewage water requiring treatment.”

“Had separate sewerage systems been adopted, which kept these different liquid streams apart, then the volume of sewage proper would have been much reduced, and stormwaters more easily and safely sent back into our rivers and streams.”

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