The death of Olivia de Havilland made me very sad. For many years I had tracked the passing of various “Golden Age” movie stars. I myself don’t remember this period, but their fame and films haunted the last decades of the 20th century. These were the artistic ‘classics’ of my youth, and the human witness of that period decayed and dying in their turn, one by one.
Of the very oldest there seems to me to be three prominent women and one prominent man now that remain aliive. Of the former, Eva Marie Saint, June Lockhart, and Angela Lansberry (I date Betty White’s real fame to a much later phase in her career). And then, there is Sidney Poitier.
Poitier has always held a special place in my heart. As a small child, I remember watching his films such as To Sir, With Love, and Lillies of the Field, with great interest. Poitier was a striking figure, a black man with very dark skin who modeled a sort of dignified and earnest Western manliness. Unlike black actors such as Harry Belafonte, Poitier’s visage exhibited no glimmer of Europe. His very appearance was unapologetically black with no compromises. But his mien, his bearing, was universal and admirable, reaching out across the chasm of external difference, bringing home the common virtues which bind us.
The 21st century
In this way, he exemplified a particular conservative and traditional attitude toward race and culture which I have always been personally sympathetic to. Integration into the fabric of society as a man on his own terms, rather than separation as a people apart.
That was always my goal. Whether I succeeded or not is a different matter, though that might be due to my own eccentricities rather than the broader culture.
I am the father of two young sons. Men who will grow up in this century, nurtured by its cultures, tempered by its traumas. I worry about them. And yet sometimes I think of someone like Poitier, who experienced a level of racism simply due to his physical appearance that we couldn’t even imagine, and yet who became something of a role model and figure of admiration, even to brown children of immigrants new to this country.
Let your bearing be reverent when you are at leisure, be respectfully attentive in managing affairs, and be loyal towards others. Though you be among barbarians, these may never be cast aside.
Many years ago I wrote an op-ed which reported the simple and obvious fact that there isn’t a difference between men and women when it comes to abortion as a policy issue. The only reason that the op-ed was written is that the media seem to be under the impression that women are more pro-choice than men. Not really.
Now that abortion is in the news again I thought I’d check the GSS to see if anything had changed in the last few cycles. As you can see, nothing much has (perhaps a tilt toward more support for abortion rights?). Also, the plot above should make it clear: men and women seem to change their opinions in sync. Basically there is broad social consensus impacting both sexes.
The correlation between the two series over the years is 0.83. So your eyes aren’t lying.
In the spring of 1995 I was logging into Gopher, reading the CIA Area Handbook series archives, and using Usenet and Talk to communicate with people on the other side of the world. The period between 1995 and 2000 was a wide-open era when phrases like “information wants to be free” were asserted as mantras. Many of us believed on some level we were going to witness a flowering of a new “republic of letters” as the global mind emerged.
As someone involved in the blog-era of the 2000s, in particular the golden age between 2002 and 2006, some of that optimism persisted despite the .com crash. We are going to “fact-check” the press. The “Army of Davids”. It was a time and place when heterodoxy was tolerated, and “thinking out loud” was expected.
Sitting here in 2020 the vision was naive, wildly optimistic, and wrong-headed. In 2020 the massive information flows on the internet consist of:
– porn, to which people masturbate – social media, which facilitates gossip – streaming video, which replaces television – and e-commerce, which sends us packages of consumer goods
In the series which began with Ender’s Game the child geniuses manipulate the world through their eloquence on Usenet. This was plausible in the 1990s, and even somewhat anachronistically in the world of blogs. Today Peter Wiggin would be a teenage porn addict with dark obsessions, and Valentine Wiggin would have an OnlyFans with a low price point (because she’s compassionate).
To use an ancient framing the internet is not an extension of our noblest intentions, but our basest urges. There is far too much Rousseau. Just do what comes naturally.
The intellectual efflorescences of the past, the Golden Age of Athens, the House of Wisdom, and the Aristotelian Renaissance, to name a few, were I believe matters of contingency and fashion. That is, particular social and cultural forces come together to generate surplus amenable to intellectual leisure, and society or the rulers provide intellectuals patronage. These older intellectual subcultures were frail, a thin skein atop the real work of these societies as one of primary production, their “protection” (the men with swords), as well as the priestly classes which regulated social affairs.
Europe’s economic explosion and technology such as the printing press allowed for the emergence of an intellectual culture without a premodern parallel after 1600. But I do not believe that this is just a matter of economics. Elite European society valued science as an avocation. The fusion of science and engineering eventually made it indispensable.
The technology of the internet should have made this even better. Supercharged it. But I do not believe that is the case. Christopher Beckwith’s Warriors of the Cloisters has convinced me that the particular structure of the written text can matter a great deal in forwarding arguments and understanding. Though YouTube videos can be informative and engaging, they are often unstructured and their information density is low. The same with podcasts.
Twitter is text. But it too lacks structure. Tweet-storms/threads are always inferior to writing in paragraphs.
The platform is invaluable as a means to obtain information. And I have had many interesting conversations on Twitter. But as someone with many followers, the replies can be overwhelming. Many are not smart, because most people are not smart. Additionally, over the last few years, it has become obvious that the low barrier to entry means that those who will have little to add nevertheless will add, and, massive positive feedback loops can be generated as information bubbles emerge. Over time Twitter has begun to feel much like social life in one’s early teens. Too early to imagine one’s career or be involved in a serious relationship, but a time when hormones are flowing and new enthusiasms are taking hold. The reign of the Mean Girls.
Where do we go from here? Though Twitter will persist in its niches (e.g., it’s great for delivering “breaking news”), many will slowly become passive consumers due to the toxicity of the typical conversationalist (additionally, there are pretty clearly governments who are purchasing troll armies in bulk to try and shape conversations).
Many of us are moving to private channels of various sorts. But this is not a full replacement for Twitter. The blog is fine, as far as it goes, but several years ago friends of mine convinced me to start a newsletter. I have only used it for very rare announcements. In the next few weeks, I will debut a paid newsletter service. These are all the rage now, and I will try and combine more polished essays along with bloggy observations. My blogs will not go away, and I will continue to blog. This will be the place where my reviews of papers and such things will continue. But I am curious about the less cacophonous “captive audience” of a newsletter.
The ultimate goal is slowly pull myself out of the vast, thin, and toxic, soup of Twitter.
Reading Joe Henrich’s newest book I realized some things about my own life, which led me to a weird hypothesis: the WEIRDest people in the USA could very well be the children of Asian immigrant professionals in the 1970s and 1980s.
As I was growing up there was always a large cultural chasm between my parents and myself. I always attributed this to my personality, a natural individualist and liberal orientation in the broad sense. There were other children of these immigrants who were more traditionalist, after all. So there were natural dispositions that varied. At least that was my thought.
Without getting into personal details though, recently I found out that many of the young women I grew up within our family’s small Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani, social circle are not married. Most are successful professionals. In many ways far more successful than me! (e.g., I’m thinking of a girl who graduated from Yale Law, for example). There were way too many professional unmarried women to think of this cohort as “traditionalist.”
My parents have plenty of non-Western values and preferences. But when they arrived in the United States in the early 1980s they were the only members of their whole families who lived in North America. I did not grow up with a rich and nourishing extended family network, because I had no one in my family outside of the nuclear family. To be frank I grew up a bit jealous of my friends who would visit their cousins since my cousins were simply vague names and faint memories. Growing up in a small town in eastern Oregon there was no one of my notional religion and hardly anyone of my race. There were families who were well known around town, and with hindsight, I assume that they would help their nieces and nephews with summer jobs and other such things. I could not, and never did, rely on such informal networks. I lacked such networks. All I could rely on were explicit and formally objective institutions and systems.
Finally, this individuality did not just apply to me. My parents moved themselves to a foreign country without any social or familial network. In various ways, over time they rebuilt something of a non-kin community, but it took literally decades. They didn’t just have shallow roots, they had no roots. Like me, they relied on explicit formal institutions and systems. That was all they had.
Obviously it is somewhat different for later generations. The immigrants of the 1970s and 1980s sponsored their relatives. And in the 1990s a massive wave of Asians into places like Silicon Valley allowed for the emergence of genuine enclaves in a fashion that wouldn’t be imaginable in previous generations. In many ways, the Indian American Zoomers are probably more Indian than the Indian American Gen-Xers.
Over the past few days, there has been a somewhat noticeable Twitter conflagration (when isn’t there?) over a tweet sent out by the Paris-based writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. The author most recently of Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race, Chatterton Williams is someone with whom I have been relatively friendly (I interviewed him for a podcast last year). If you want to read anything by him, I suggest the piece in The New Yorker, The French Origins of “You Will Not Replace Us”.
The conflagration basically has to do with the fact that many American religious conservatives objected to Chatterton Williams evincing a disrespectful attitude toward prayer. Rod Dreher, again, someone with whom I have been friendly, posted Christian Coronavirus Scapegoats on his blog and attacked the tweet. Dreher refers to Chatterton Williams as a “Blue Chekist.” It is a pedantic point, but Rod, not Thomas, actually has the blue check. But we all know what Rod meant, at least if we’re on Twitter. The “blue check” in a symbolic sense is the smug descendent of mid-2000s Jon Stewart. Generally, they have a preoccupation with “social justice,” and are embedded in the New York to D.C. media culture. The “blue check” is Lauren Duca.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is none of these things. Rather, I think it’s defensible to describe him as an “IDW-adjacent” figure. Basically, a conventional late 20th-century liberal. As such, he takes a skeptical attitude toward conservative religion. In particular, toward conservative evangelical Protestantism, which is viewed as regressive and apocalyptic by 20th-century liberals. Recall Richard Dawkins’ interview of Ted Haggard in 2006 to get a sense.
With a serious world-wide pandemic coming toward us, I assume that many people of Thomas Chatterton Williams’ milieu were alarmed when they saw a photograph of Mike Pence leading the team tasked to respond to the pandemic praying. As the kids would say, “it’s not a good look.” The image was pregnant with many connotations.
Rod Dreher is not the only person who responded very negatively to the above tweet. I actually initially saw it via another conservative writer I follow. We can set aside the political opportunism of figures like Jeff Sessions. I think it is clear that many people were sincerely offended. Where the secular person might see a useless gesture at best, and a sinister one at worst, religious conservatives see normal, banal, and conventional behavior. For them, the act of prayer is a conventional part of daily life. It is not surprising they would be offended and angered that actions which they know to be in good will, and meritorious, were seen in a negative light.
The conflict between the secular intellectual and religious traditionalists is old in the modern West. It goes back a century at least, and conflicts are over substantive disagreements about the nature of the universe, and what that entails about the good life. But this is not truly the conflict that I believe religious conservatives are reacting to. Thomas Chatterton Williams’ tweet, which reflected late 20th-century tensions, was sucked into the undertow of 21st-century culture wars.
Though the blue checks may espouse secularism, their contempt and distrust toward religion has little to do with the metaphysical claims of religion, and all to do with the reality that they are presenting an alternative Weltanschauung to that of the religious conservative. They aim to replace religious morality with their own strident ethos. Whereas someone such as Richard Dawkins fixated on asking obnoxious questions dripping with acid contempt, the new cultural Left aims to revolutionize our understanding of what is good, right, and true, in a deeper manner. Dawkins himself is for this reason in bad odor with this set, because he still seems to prize thinking things through before agreeing to what the Ummah proposes.
In a dualistic form of Zoroastrianism, there is an evil spirit, Angra Mainyu, who is the enemy of God. The nature of this spirit is the inversion of God, as the two serve as a sort of balance. Someone like Thomas Chatterton Williams is somewhat outside of the dualism of the contemporary Western culture war. He is broadly liberal, but he is also skeptical of Ta-Nehisi Coates. He is an unbeliever in both regnant cults. Nevertheless, the above tweet was caught in the slipstream of the dualistic culture war. To some extent, we’re all drafted into this duality.
The conflict before us comes to us, even if we don’t seek it.
Scott Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion convinced me of many things. One of the things it convinced me is that aggregate espoused beliefs had a marginal consequence on the individual level. There were several reasons for this. Some of the elements of “higher religion” which were asserted by some beliefs, e.g., the rejection of free will in Calvinism and Sunni Islam, seem to have not been internalized in their actions by believers themselves (even if espousing those beliefs). In other cases, such as the Trinity, most believers had a very tenuous grasp on the details of what that belief entailed (e.g., the term “essence” is no longer as resonant in the modern age, even among intellectuals).
More broadly, the field of “cultural evolution” has convinced me that norms, values, and practices, can bind groups together to produce cohesion, and result in inter-group differences in characteristics which redound to their success in competition.
Where does this leave me? In David Abulafia’s The Great Sea the author mentions Amalfi’s repeated alliances with Muslim polities and corsairs. Similarly, Hungarian Protestants marched with Turks, Lithuanian Tatars with Catholics, and the Hindu generals of Muslim Mughals ruled the subcontinent for their potentate. Practicality and reality make strange bedfellows. But, on the whole, there are systematic trends and biases. It seems possible that though ideology has a weak to nearly zero individual impact, there are subtle differences on the margins in the aggregate which compound to produce large differences on the macro scale.
Recently a discussion emerged on Twitter about the relative success of Indians in America and Indian Americans and the origins of that success. While Noah Smith pointed to their cultural and economic status to begin the conversation, W. Bradford Wilcox noted the stability of the marriages of Indian Americans. There are lots of directions one could go with this discussion, but one response to Wilcox’s Tweet captures I think a way of thinking that is important to engage because it is influential:
Guess which immigrant group was colonized by a Western hegemonic power that indoctrinated the culture into American ideals, literally preparing them for upward assimilation? Also, Indian marriages are functionalist in nature, and not subject to ephemeral underpinnings of “love”.
One could take this as an affront to cultural or individual pride. That is, the success of Indian Americans being reduced to simply Western culture and civilization diminishes what they have achieved on their own (I’ll get back to the issue of marriage specifically).
This is not the issue that I want to explore, though I will note it here. Rather, let’s entertain the ideas and presuppositions embedded in this sort of assertion, and its correspondence to reality.
You could say that this attitude, which reduces non-Western peoples and societies as outcomes of Western history, is marginal. But the person who expressed the opinions is a graduate student in sociology, and this viewpoint does suffuse the assumptions of many educated Americans “in the know”, albeit less nakedly and brusquely expressed. Less enlightened Americans probably believe that Indian immigrants are just smart and well-educated (this is true), and that is the reason for their success (again, true). But those who are “in the know” “understand” that these sorts of reductive characteristics are outcomes of a particular historical process, and it is that historical process to which Indian American success redounds (“Well actually, British colonialism imparted bourgeois values to native allies in western India, and that’s why they succeed in the United States”).
Though I am not Indian American, I am obviously Indian American adjacent. Arriving in the United States just before elementary school, and growing up with parents raised abroad, I have a visceral understanding of intercultural dynamics which is probably not available to professional anthropologists. I am aware of elements of South Asian culture which are very different from American culture, and so am always curious about the new pattern of some Westerners to reducing South Asian culture as simply a postcolonial reaction to Western hegemony.
Obviously, on some level, the impact of that hegemony is hard to deny. Though Macaulay’s aspiration of creating “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” did not occur to full completion, the British period had a strong impact on the outlook and viewpoint of South Asian elites. Even those who were anti-colonial and anti-Western in orientation often reacted to European influence and domination. Their own nativist response would be incomprehensible without the British Other.
There is also the reality that for some aspects of culture native peoples may assert a deep and indigenous origin for practices and values, even if it is hard to imagine a particular phenomenon without European influence. A simple illustration of this is the popularity of drinking tea across the subcontinent, which arose through British commercial propaganda. Modern South Asians may not be aware of the origin of this deeply embedded aspect of their lives and assume it’s indigenous in a very deep manner.
A more subtle and rich illustration of this tendency is the Buddhist revival of 19th-century Sri Lanka. The peoples of this island have been Buddhist for a very long time, and have interacted with the Theravada societies of Southeast Asia for a thousand years. But, in the 19th-century Buddhism reformed itself in the face of Christian proselytization. Some Westerners, sympathetic to Buddhism (e.g., Henry Steel Olcott), were critical in buttressing the intellectual armamentarium of the local population. In the process, they may have influenced the self-conception of elite Sri Lankan Buddhists to perceive their religion as rationalist in a manner that was shaped by the post-Protestant Enlightenment and its critiques of Christianity. In this framework, Sri Lankan Buddhism can be thought of as fundamentally indigenous, but the movements of the last few centuries are impossible to understand without awareness of European influence, even if native Sri Lankans themselves now perceive these elements as deeply primal (i.e., the rationalist and less supernatural Buddhism is the “true Buddhism”).
Moving to the mainland of the Indian subcontinent, again it is not deniable that European colonial hegemony had a strong impact on the society. Consider that defining element of Indian civilization, caste. Some scholars have made a strong case that British systematic rationalization of governance and taxonomic anthropology of native peoples was critical in the crystallization of the caste-jati system (in particular, the 1871 Census of India). Yet genetics casts strong doubt on this claim as being the only explanation, as many jatis and broader caste groups, exhibit patterns of endogamy and relatedness which indicate the genealogical depth that is 1,000 years or more. As it happens, al-Biruni’s observations of India 1,000 years ago outlines a social structure which is broadly consonant with what we perceive to be Indian today.
What does this have to do with Indian Americans? First, it is famously well known that Indian American migration to the United States has been highly selective, biased toward individuals with high levels of skill and education. Additionally, these people are not a representative cross-section of Indians themselves in regards to ethnicity and community. There are, for example, very few individuals of Dalit background in the United States. And, there is a preponderance of individuals of higher status communities. Using the framework above, one might say that communities that have internalized European mores, outlooks, and skills, have been advantaged and that this is why they have immigrated to the United States.
The problem is that this is clearly wrong. Some communities in South Asia have been literate for thousands of years. This is well known. The Muslims who arrived as an elite class after 1000 A.D. noted which communities were literate, and elevated them into service. Additionally, other Indian groups were inducted into military service. This is not to say that South Asian class, caste, and professional affiliations have been communally static for thousands of years, but neither was the portfolio of skills and preferences arbitrarily poured into the minds of some Indians as opposed to others. Some Indian groups were useful in particular places and times to various elite groups, whether Hindu, Muslim, or British, and that utility redounded to the long-term trajectory of that community (e.g., Parsis).
In the American context, there is an underrepresentation of people from groups which are the majority of Indians, the broad peasantry. Rather, various mercantile communities and service professional communities are overrepresented (though there are farmers from the Punjab who have moved to the Central Valley). Much of the accumulated human capital in many of these groups predates the arrival of Europeans.
How a group of people reacts to new stimuli varies. The Indian Diaspora is highly skewed toward people from Gujurat and Punjab. In contrast, there are far fewer people in the United States from the upper and middle Gangetic plains, the civilizational heart of India (a fair number of peasants from these localities did migrate to Trinidad, Mauritius, and Fiji). The literate elites and landowners the Gangetic plain have not reacted to the legacy of European colonialism and globalization in the same manner as the literate elites and landowners of Gujarat. Some of this is happenstance, but some of it is probably the reality that Gujarat has long been integrated into the Indian Ocean trade networks, which even predates Islam.
This sort of analysis need not be restricted to South Asia. When Europeans encountered the Japanese in the 16th-century they were struck by their industry and ability to imitate and perfect new technologies. The isolation imposed by the Tokugawa in the early 17th-century dampened this perception for centuries, but after the reopening of Japan in the 19th-century the same underlying parameters came to the fore. The Japanese remained distinct, but also assimilated many Western techniques and social structures.
In this globalized world roiled by economic change and characterized by migration, there is a temptation to fall into the trap of simplistic theorizing. We must avoid that temptation if we are to understand the true shape of a thing, rather than the fictions one could spin-out from our theories and preconceptions.
Going back to the starting point of his post: the strong economic performance and robust families of Indian Americans is not just a function of hegemonic Western values. These people are not simply persons Indian in blood and color, but white in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect, though there is something of that, especially by generation 1.5 and above. But the entrepreneurial aspect of some Guju communities, to give an example, illustrates that folkways derived from the South Asian context have been transmitted to the United States. The “joint-family” is quintessentially Indian, and though it is not common among Indian Americans, it likely casts a shadow on Indian American family life (additionally, divorce is very taboo for many Hindus). Most Indian Americans today are immigrants, raised abroad, and their orientation and mores are fundamentally distinct from the native-born and native-raised.
Of course, assimilation happens. But even that is contingent. The America that the children of Indian Americans are growing up in is highly polarized and post-Christian. This has some downstream consequences for how 21st-century immigrants and their children view themselves in the body politic.
One of the strange things about the whole Justin Trudeau brown/black-face affair is that it makes someone like me, nonwhite, but unconvinced of the extreme racism of most white people, reflect a bit. I spent my formative years in overwhelmingly white environments and didn’t encounter that much racism. I did not know anyone who did black or brown-face. Or so I think. Could it be that behind my back this what a lot of white people were doing?
I’m skeptical, but I’m not sure.
That being said, Justin Trudeau is a certain type of “progressive” white person when it comes to racial matters who puts a lot of stock in symbolics. So this is pretty bizarre for him to have done repeatedly. My own personal issue with this is always that I don’t see these people revealing in their life choices that they believe all the stuff about diversity they say. These people marry white people, and they live among white people, and are friends with mostly white people, all the while talking loudly about how nonwhite people are awesome! (though to be frank my personal experience is once you disagree with a woke white person you are not so awesome anymore even if you are from a “community of color”….)
With the beauty of the internet, there is a simple way to check if some people “walk the walk.” A few days ago an educational consultant of some sort decried “dead white males.” The person was himself a white male. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if this person who believes in diversity walked the walk of diversity. Within a few minutes, I uncovered the fact that this person lived in a 94% white neighborhood tract according to the census (the city in which he lives is 78% white).
This person, the author of Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education has done quite well for himself. The house in which he lives is valued at $456,000 dollars in a city where the median home value is $280,100.
So how did I find all this out in a few minutes?
Look up someone in Family Tree Now. I checked the CV of the person above to get a sense of age and where they had lived. Family Tree Now tells you where people have lived as well as their ages, so it allows one to make a positive identification.
The easiest way to lookup demographics is Justice Map. It draws on census data. Put the address in, and you’ll see the racial demographics visually.
Why are these tools relevant? Sometimes it is useful to know where someone has “come from.” For example, it is easy to find out if particular people speaking on class issues who seem to be vague about their own background come from the upper-middle-class (lookup where they lived and the value of the home in which they grew up). Usually, when someone doesn’t mention their class background in this context they are privileged or grew up as such.
The racial stuff is more interesting because there is constant talk about it today in the United States. But in the choices well-educated Americans make they exhibit underlying beliefs and preferences often at variance with their averred values (at least once they have children; diversity is something of a ‘life phase’).
Sometimes the results of this snooping can be weird. Recently a black education professor at NYU wrote an op-ed weirdly stating that elite schools were eugenic. I mention his race because this warrior for social justice happens to live on a block that is 89% white near the NYU campus.
I think cultural influence and power outlasts and lags peak military or economic power. Greek culture with the rise of Rome, Roman culture during the post-Roman period in the West, and Italian art as the locus of power was shifting north in Europe during the early modern period. The glamor of culture, history, and the past, can echo down centuries after temporal power fades (ask the Bishop of Rome!).
So it will be with American culture. But there’s also something in our highly exportable popular culture which is becoming highly derivative, recycling 20th-century motifs over and over. Influential, but perhaps not original.
But should we be embarrassed by this? Or surprised? The Italian peninsula had a second efflorescence during the Renaissance, but Greece has never been as influential or original as it was in the 5th century BC.
I’m not sure I believe the model outlined in Robin Dunbar’s Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language. I’m not even sure about the specific details of Dunbar’s number. But, the overall insight, that the vast majority of human history has been defined by small groups with people you see again and again had an impact on our psychology seems robust.
The connotations of the very word “stranger” are complex but generally lean to the negative. And I think that makes sense. One of the tasks of cultural norms and values is to figure out a way that strangers can be interacted with in non-zero sum relationships.
All of this is to preface a banal assertion about interaction in day-to-day life if you are a middle-class professional. I get a lot of emails from people with common names, and it’s a non-trivial cognitive load to figure out if I should pay attention or not. Names like “David”, “John”, and “Omar” are so common that I’ve actually ignored people I shouldn’t because I didn’t realize it was that David or Omar. I’ve almost even responded to the wrong person when two people with the same first name are emailing me at the same time.
In a premodern village or a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer tribe, having a common name on a population-wide scale wasn’t a big deal. The people you would address by name regularly was far less than 100 over a year. But in today’s world, some people have to interface with ten different strangers per day, along with all the “regulars.”
If I was a parent considering names, this would be something that I would take into account. It’s probably not optimal to have a very rare name, because people might misspell it or misremember it, though it will be salient. But having a very common name can also be annoying, to the point where many people with common names now go by their middle name or a nickname. Rather, a familiar but not-so-common name is probably optimal.
To give an example, the name “Dennis” is not too common for people my age (as opposed to “David”). If I get an email from a “Dennis” there is only one or two people it could be.
The death of Olivia de Havilland made me very sad. For many years I had tracked the passing of various “Golden Age” movie stars. I myself don’t remember this period, but their fame and films haunted the last decades of the 20th century. These were the artistic ‘classics’ of my youth, and the human witness of that period decayed and dying in their turn, one by one.
It is a pedantic point, but Rod, not Thomas, actually has the blue check. But we all know what Rod meant, at least if we’re on Twitter. The “blue check” in a symbolic sense is the smug descendent of mid-2000s Jon Stewart. Generally, they have a preoccupation with “social justice,” and are embedded in the New York to D.C. media culture. The “blue check” is 
