 Word to your moms, I came to drop bombs Steven Spielberg’s Masters of the Air miniseries concluded on Friday. On How the World Became Rich, the economic historian Mark Koyama writes that it was “a remarkably realistic and compelling depiction” of the Allied strategic bombing campaign in World War II. That campaign was bloody and dangerous, and many scholars have suggested it was ineffective, a waste of money and lives. But is that true? Not if you consider the opportunity cost which the campaign imposed on Germany, says Koyama. People imagine battles win wars, but a plane blown up in the factory is just as gone as one shot down in combat, and bombing raids destroyed thousands. The strategic bombing campaign forced the Wehrmacht to deploy vast numbers of guns and fighters at home, rather than on the Eastern Front. It also destroyed oil facilities, drying up supply, and cut off transport links. And it forced German factories underground, making them far less efficient. “Masters of the Air does a fantastic job of depicting the sacrifices made by the men of the 8th Air Force,” writes Koyama. “But the economic approach to warfare adds to our understanding of just how critical their contribution was.” Safe word There is a famous Biblical passage, from the Book of Judges, in which an Ephraimite soldier is captured by the Gileadites, and he tries to pretend to be a Gileadite to avoid being horribly murdered (the Old Testament involves a lot of people being horribly murdered). His captors test him: “Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right.” So they horribly murder him. That’s the origin for the English word “shibboleth,” meaning a word used as a tribal marker. Ed West, in Wrong Side of History, looks at the history of shibboleths, in their most literal sense. The “Peasants’ Revolt” in 1381 saw an English mob demanding people say “bread and cheese” — Flemish merchants were unable to, and 35 were murdered. The Flemish themselves massacred French people who struggled to say “schild en vriend” (shield and friend) in 1302. In the 20th century Dominicans killed Haitians who couldn’t pronounce the local word for “parsley.” And as recently as 2022, a viral video showed Ukrainians interrogating a suspected Russian saboteur by making him say the Ukrainian word “palyanytsya,” a kind of bread, apparently hard for Russians to pronounce. To every thing there is a season In February 2022, there were about 275,000 births in the United States. In August of that year, there were 335,000. Americans are much more likely to be born in summer than in winter. The seasonality of births is well-established, but it varies from country to country — Europe’s births tend to be earlier in the year than the Americas’ — and over time: In Spain, for instance, the annual fluctuations have declined, and also moved, shifting from a spring peak to a summer one. Why is this? On Scientific Discovery, Saloni Dattani tries to piece it together. Societies’ move away from agrarian economies might be relevant: Perhaps parents planned to avoid births during the busy harvest season. And climate seems to be a factor. Birth seasonality correlates with latitude, and a really hot day, 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, noticeably reduces births nine months later. Flagship speculates that some things are less appealing when you’re already hot and sticky. |
