SOUL MEN:

In search of Denmark’s soul : Jutland, land of bad beer and cheap pork, of beautiful heaths and shifting sands, of millennia-old corpses preserved in peat bogs, of Viking myths, and of wind, lots and lots of wind, continues both to define and contradict contemporary Denmark. (Michael Booth, 7/08/24, Englesberg Ideas)

Jutland, or ‘Jylland’ in Danish, is the bit of the country which thrusts phallically from Northern Germany towards the Oslofjord. To its west is the North Sea; making it Northumbria’s nearest neighbour to the east (something Northumbrians had cause to regret when Danish Vikings sailed on Lindisfarne in 793 AD).

Jutland occupies a strange place in the Danish psyche. It is part soul-of-the-nation, part embarrassing relative. For the 2.2 million Jutlanders who call it home, it is, well, home. For the 3.7 million other Danes, it is myriad things, but not least a place most are glad not to call home.

In a sense, Jutland is where Denmark began. The so-called ‘birth certificate’ of the nation, the Jelling Stone, still stands in the south-eastern Jutland town after which it is named, and is a pilgrimage destination for every Danish schoolchild (handily, Legoland is 25 minutes away). The 10th-century stone’s red-painted runic inscription proclaims Harald Bluetooth to be king of all the Danes. Bluetooth (after whom the wireless technology is named) was the first monarch to unite the nation and the first christian king of Denmark.

Despite being ground zero for the Danish monarchy, Jutland was never as dominated by a feudal ruling elite as Zealand (Sjælland). Instead, the monarchy and aristocracy gravitated to the largest Danish island to the east where, first Roskilde, and then Copenhagen became the capitals. And, so, relatively free of meddling kings, Jutland’s farmers tended to own their own land, or leased it from a distant monarch.

BIG FIASCO:

The Outlaw Tradition of Noodling for Catfish (Cameron Maynard, Jan. 20th, 2025, Texas Highways)

Tall fish tales follow every angling method and species of fish, but they may be a bit weightier with noodling since the practice didn’t see statewide legalization until 2011. For most of its modern history, it’s been practiced in the shadows, hidden from the watchful eyes of the law. Noodlers fished primarily at night, wading through dark waters, quietly coming up for air like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. Many homeowners were happy to turn them in. More than a few noodlers were arrested, ticketed, or socially scorned for their troubles.

One such instance is legendary within the East Texas noodling community. I kept hearing the story of the “East Texas Toe-Biter” from the 1980s, when a man at Lake Tyler got into some legal trouble for supposedly throwing a 122-pound flathead out of the water because it bit him in the foot. The kicker, though, was that the fish was still alive and well, just lounging around the aquarium at the Texas Freshwater Fisheries Center in Athens. The second part of the story is not only false but also caused a bit of confusion when I called the Fisheries Center to ask about it. Turns out the world-record blue catfish, caught on a rod and reel, was actually the fish held in their aquarium for a time. All that said, the 122-pound flathead did exist, as did the legal troubles that followed the man who caught it.

Because of all this, many modern-day noodlers are former outlaws of the waterways who have broad-shouldered themselves into polite fishing society. You won’t find these outdoorspeople donning waders and fishing fedoras, then fiddling with custom-made flies between picturesque back casts. You certainly won’t catch them bedding down at places called The Moose Elk Lodge, unwinding with a bottle of Chablis. Noodlers are more likely to sleep in their boats, rally with Red Bulls and honey buns, then barrel into the water to scavenge under boat docks. One of the biggest of these former outlaws is Jimmy Millsap, a longtime Lake Tawakoni noodler who is, according to some, “the Godfather of Texas Noodling.”

“I had paved the game warden’s driveway one day and got caught by him the next,” Millsap recalls. “I told him when he caught us, ‘I guess you’re tryin’ to get your driveway money back.’”

PAYING FOR THE COSTS YOU IMPOSE:

What, Exactly, Are Negative Externalities? (Donald J. Boudreaux, 2/5/25, AIER)

By far, the market imperfection believed, at least by economists, to be most common is that of externalities. An externality, as defined by the Nobel-laureate economist George Stigler, “is an effect, whether beneficial or harmful, upon a person who was not a party to the decision.” Consult almost any economics textbook and you discover a similar definition of externality. Because harmful effects of this sort (“negative externalities”) generally get more attention than do beneficial effects (“positive externalities”), the discussion in this Explainer will be confined to negative externalities, although most of the points I make apply also to positive externalities.

A classic example of a negative externality is a railroad that builds a line next to farmland and, when it runs its trains, throws sparks onto the farmland, occasionally burning the farmer’s crops. The farmer suffers damage that he did not bargain for. If the railroad doesn’t pay for this damage, it does not cover all of its operating costs, which include doing damage to crops. Because incurring costs restrains the actions that generate the costs, not having to pay all of its costs leads the railroad to run too many trains. And when the railroad runs too many trains, the farmer winds up supplying too few crops.

To induce the railroad to produce the optimal amount of railroad services, it must somehow be obliged to pay not just for some of its costs of doing business—to pay not just wages to compensate its workers, and prices to compensate its suppliers of fuel—but to pay for all of its costs, including whatever damage it causes to farmers and other parties who suffer incidental losses as a result of the railroad’s operation.

A.C. Pigou and Ronald Coase

The government can “correct” this market imperfection by imposing on the railroad a tax equal to the value of the crops damaged by its trains. This tax—called by economists a “Pigouvian tax” (after the British economist A.C. Pigou)—“internalizes” on the railroad the cost that it once imposed on the farmer. A cost that was previously external to the railroad’s decision-making processes is now internal to it given that the railroad must pay the tax. With this cost “internalized” on the railroad, it will now produce the economically optimal amount of railroad services, and allow the farmer to supply the optimal amount of crops.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The Gospel According to ‘The Office’: What Dunder Mifflin Teaches Us About Grace, Forgiveness and Cringe-Worthy Community (Taylor Berry, Jan. 27th, 2025, Relevant)

At its core, The Office is a masterclass in relationships—and not the glossy, Hallmark-movie kind. It’s the unfiltered, frequently cringe-inducing reality of human interaction. Grace and forgiveness weave their way through the fabric of this show, often hidden beneath layers of awkward pauses, office pranks and absurd team-building exercises led by Prison Mike.

Think about it: How many times does Michael completely mess up—offending, embarrassing or downright traumatizing his employees—and yet, they stick around? Whether it’s Pam forgiving Michael for outing her pregnancy at a company meeting or Jim patiently enduring Dwight’s endless shenanigans, The Office is a celebration of second chances. It’s about extending forgiveness not because it’s deserved, but because community only works when grace abounds.

Biblically speaking, isn’t that the whole deal? “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” says Romans 5:8, a verse Michael probably would have butchered during a motivational speech.

The characters on The Office mess up in spectacular fashion, yet time and time again, they’re welcomed back into the fold—reminding us of the gospel’s radical, all-encompassing grace.

LESS SOUND, PLEASE:

Do You Write, Mr. Faulkner? ( Ron Rash, Feb 7, 2025, Sporting Classics Daily)

This anecdote tells us much about Faulkner, a private man who disdained the attention of intellectuals and literary critics, preferring instead the company of simple, unassuming men who, as he once put it, were not “even very literate, let alone literary.” He was also a man who, as an accomplished hunter and outdoorsman, was much more comfortable in the silence and isolation of the wilderness than in the sound and fury of a city.

The “big woods,” as he called them, offered Faulkner an escape from the pressures of his art, a turbid personal life and, at least late in his life, fame. But the hunt and the wilderness were more than just an escape for Faulkner; they were also an inspiration for some of his greatest literary works.

“He taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill, and better, what to do with it afterward.” —Go Down, Moses, 1942

William Faulkner was probably destined to be a hunter and outdoorsman, for patience, self-discipline and an ability to work in solitude — the traits of both a writer and an outdoorsman, marked his character and temperament. These traits were developed amidst a family and society that made his interest in hunting and outdoors almost inevitable.

THE BEAUTY MYTH:

Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without it – The Grateful Dead (Graeme Tait Can’t, 2/05/25, Americana uk)

“American Beauty”, the band’s fifth studio album, was released in November 1970, barely four months after the release of their previous offering “Workingman’s Dead”, and the two albums are seen very much as companions, some would say like brother and sister. The comparison is understandable, as prior to these recordings the band’s legacy had been forged on the stage rather than in the studio, mainly because they used their songs as starting points for improvisation that suited their psychedelic sound, of which they were the original true explorers, rather than ideals simply to be duplicated. However, the fading embers of the 60’s marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Hippie Dream‘, requiring the band to take stock and, in the studio at least, find a new approach. Crosby, Stills, & Nash had long been friends with the band, especially Garcia, who was particularly impressed with how the trio used their vocal harmonies, and was looking to embrace a similar approach, while the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter began incorporating more American folklore into the narratives including trains, guns, gambling and alcohol, using the country’s geography and religious symbolism to help create a visual soundscape full of American myth. The musical arrangement was also changed, now drawing heavily on the Bakersfield sound, a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950’s in California defined by its use of electric instruments, and strong backbeat, being highly influenced by rock’n’roll, and born out of a reaction to the slickly produced sound emanating from Nashville.

“Workingman’s Dead” proved to be a resounding success, but in many ways it was a just template for what the band would create just four months later, having moved the recording process to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and choosing to co-produce the album with staff engineer Stephan Barncard, rather than previous producer Bob Matthews. They had also just discovered that manager, Lenny Hart (father of the drummer Micky Hart) had renewed their contract with Warner Brothers Records without their knowledge, before skipping town with a sizeable amount of the band’s wealth.

Like it’s predecessor, “American Beauty” was innovative for its fusion of bluegrass, rock’n’roll, folk and of course country music, though where “Workingman’s Dead” mixed the grittier Bakersfield sound with the band’s psychedelic roots, the new release was mostly acoustic in nature, with Garcia replacing his electric guitar for a pedal steel, while there was a greater focus on major-key melodies and folk harmonies. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann later explained, “The singers in our band really learned a lot about harmonising from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who had just released their seminal album “Deja Vu”, (recording their vocals around a 360 degree mic, before adding identical overdubs at 3/4 of the level). It was also on this album that Garcia first collaborated with legendary mandolinist David Grisman whose playing is heard to great effect on the tracks ‘Friend Of The Devil’ and ‘Ripple’.

Just as significantly was the increased writing input from the rest of the band which was in stark contrast to previous albums where almost all the songs had been composed by the songwriting partnership of Garcia and Hunter. This was immediately apparent from the opening number, the sublimely beautiful ‘Box Of Rain’, co-written by Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh, it was the first Grateful Dead song to feature Lesh on lead vocals. Harmonies were provided by Bob Weir as well as Garcia who also played piano, while David Nelson (of New Riders Of The Purple Sage) guested on lead guitar. As recently as last year ‘Rolling Stone Magazine’ ranked this song in the ‘Top 500 Songs Of All Time’. Second track ‘Friend Of The Devil’, a song written by Garcia and Hunter along with John Dawson, (also from New Riders Of The Purple Sage) opens with Garcia playing a delightful descending G major scale in the bass register, while Hunter’s lyrics skilfully succeed in connecting the fatalism of the physical frontier with the wonder of the psychedelic one. Third track ‘Sugar Magnolia’, with writing credits shared between Hunter and Weir, who also supplied the lead vocals, has long become one of the band’s best known songs and remained an integral part of their live set throughout the following decades while fourth number ‘Operator’, was written and sung by co-founder and original frontman for the band Ron McKennan (aka Pigpen). In truth, this was his only real contribution to the album as by this time his role within the band had become vastly diminished due to his deteriorating health. The first side of the original vinyl album comes to a close with ‘Candyman’, another classic Garcia/Hunter track with its beguiling structural simplicity and sweetest of melodies encouraging the listener to just drift away on a warm summer’s breeze.

THIN ICE:

Winter on the Fens (Archie Cornish, September 7, 2023, The Fence)

This wasn’t a football tournament, though the similarities are uncanny: there were corners, offsides and 11 players per team. The sport of bandy is played on vast swathes of ice, up to 110 metres long and 65 metres wide, with curved sticks and a hard pink ball. To the untrained eye it seems like a variant of ice hockey, but the closer you look, the more the differences emerge.

It’s a global game: in Russia, Sweden’s counterpart as a great bandy power, it’s a national sport played by about a million people. Elsewhere it’s growing: India, Japan and Mongolia are members of the Federation of International Bandy (FIB).

So is Great Britain. Bandy originates in the villages of the Fens, East Anglia. But like so many things invented or codified in England it fizzled out, thriving better in the places where it was exported. I went to meet the enthusiasts, undaunted by obstacles and accidents, who have kickstarted the revival.

CAIN IS THE HERO, NOT ABEL:

Natural doesn’t always mean better: How to spot if someone is trying to convince you with an ‘appeal to nature’ (Amanda Ruggeri, 2/12/25, BBC)

Often called an “appeal to nature”, or the “naturalistic fallacy”, it is one of the most commonly-seen types of logical fallacies, or flaws in reasoning that can make a claim sound surprisingly convincing. Anytime you hear someone make a claim that a product or practice is superior because it is “natural”, or that one is inferior (or even harmful) because it is not “natural”, this is the naturalistic fallacy at work. So are arguments that something is “as nature intended”, or that something is bad specifically because it is a “chemical” or “synthetic”.

Nature is, in many ways, wonderful. And it has a great deal to teach us. So why isn’t it true that something is better merely because it comes from nature?

For one thing, because nature, of course, does not have intentions – not in any conscious sense. As such, nor does it have intentions to be good, or to help humans, specifically.

We don’t need to get too philosophical to grasp this. Just consider a handful of nature’s creations. Arsenic, which can kill an adult with a dose as little as 70mg, is natural. So is asbestos, which causes cancer. Cyanide, which can kill with as little as 1.5mg per kilogram of body weight if ingested, is a phytotoxin produced, naturally, by more than 2,000 different plant species, including almonds, apricots and peaches. This is also why some “natural” remedies frequently marketed – such as ground apricot seeds – can in fact be dangerous to consume.

And this is the trouble with the use of the word natural that is so commonly used to market products. It is a poorly defined term that doesn’t necessarily mean the product labelled as such will be better for you, or indeed safer, than any other alternatives.

NEIGHBOR LOVE:

Gut-wrenching love: What a fresh look at the ‘Good Samaritan’ story says for ethics today: Philosophers have always wrestled with how love can be so morally important, yet so personal and even arbitrary. (Meghan Sullivan, February 11, 2025, The Conversation)

What exactly did the Samaritan do that reveals the core of the love ethic? Jesus says specifically that the Samaritan’s “guts churned” when he saw the man in need: the Greek word used in the text is “splagchnizomai.”

The term occurs in other places in the Gospels, as well, evoking a very physical kind of emotional response. This “gut-wrenching love” is spontaneous and visceral. […]

In Jesus’ time, as in our own, there was significant debate about how to understand the commandments to love one’s neighbor. One school of thought considered a “neighbor” to be a member of your community: The Book of Leviticus says not to hold grudges against fellow countrymen. Another school held that you were obligated to love even strangers who are only temporarily traveling in your land. Leviticus also declares that “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself.”

In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus seems to come down on the side of the broadest possible application of the love ethic. And by emphasizing a particular type of love – the gut-wrenching kind – Jesus seems to indicate that the way of progress in ethics is through emotions, rather than around them.

There’s nothing arbitrary about human dignity.

TV WRITERS SHOULD DO THE SAME:

Rifling Through the Archives With Legendary Historian Robert Caro (Chris Heath, March 2025, Smithsonian)

Students of Robert Caro know of a particularly famous trope of his: In order to write a book, he must first know its final line. Deep into his reporting of The Power Broker, he tells me, “I couldn’t figure out how to write it. It was just such a mass of stuff, and I couldn’t see how it all tied together.” He was, he says, “in a sort of mood of despair.”

Then on June 3, 1967, he attended a dedication ceremony for a park at the site of the 1964 World’s Fair. Moses’ power was waning by then, but the front two rows were stacked with his old-guard loyalists. “All his engineers and architects,” Caro says. “You know, the ‘Moses Men.’ What I remember was they all had gray heads.” Moses alluded to the public’s ingratitude to great men. “And I remember them nodding,” Caro says. Afterward, the men walked past Caro, and he could hear them talking, saying that Moses was right and wondering why people didn’t appreciate what Moses had done. And a phrase stuck in Caro’s head that summed it all up: Why weren’t they grateful?

In that instant, Caro says, everything became clear. “When I heard that line, I said, ‘Oh, that’s what this book is about,’” he recalls. And he didn’t just know how the book would end—with a description of that day’s event, ending with those four words. He could see—“in a flash,” he says—how everything he had learned and everything he was still to write would lead to that point. “I knew in that moment how to do the book. And I remember going back to my office and writing an outline as fast as I could. I was abbreviating words because I wanted to get all the words in there.”

With each subsequent book, Caro has needed to know where he would end before he could launch into writing it. “I mean, everybody has their own way of writing,” he says. He is careful to clarify that knowing a final line isn’t some kind of glib talisman. “Somehow that ending tells you what’s important in everything that’s come before it, even if it’s 1,000 pages that came before it.” He goes on, “Once you have it, everything becomes easy for me.”

The moment he says this, his chosen adjective—“easy”—hangs in the air between us. The first volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, The Path to Power, which is about Johnson’s early life leading up to his first failed campaign for public office, took seven years. The second, Means of Ascent, detailing Johnson’s eventual election to the Senate (an election that Caro’s groundbreaking research definitively established was stolen), arrived eight years later. The third, Master of the Senate, about Johnson’s years as Senate majority leader, came 12 years after that. Then another ten years passed before the publication of The Passage of Power, which ends in 1964 after Johnson has assumed the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. That book was published nearly 13 years ago.

“Easy,” I point out, doesn’t feel like a sufficient adjective.