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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

No one could have predicted…

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

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You are here: Home / Archives for Tom Levenson

Tom has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

Tom Levenson

Blessed Increase!

by Tom Levenson|  May 10, 20259:19 pm| 130 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads

He’s here!Blessed Increase! 3

 

He hasn’t told us his papal name yet. (Leo has some obvious resonance, but current events–plus the fact that it’s my brother’s name–suggest that we might want to avoid that one.)

He’s a sweetie. He’s kinda just walked in and taken over.  He is relentless–and a pretty good cat-footie player. (The metal cap from a champagne bottle held him fascinated for quite a while.) And then he just goes boneless and ends up like this:

Blessed Increase! 2

He and Champ haven’t met yet. I think Champ figures something is going on, as she usually joins me when I cook dinner, and she’s remained firmly upstairs for the last few hours. But that negotiation is for another day.

But the name!?  I’ve usually found that cats tell you who they are, but it can take a day or so.  My spouse is partial to Felis or Felix–which isn’t too far off, but doesn’t seem right.  Sherlock crossed my mind, as Increase is definitely observant, but, again, it doesn’t quite slip on him like a glove.  We’ll see. (Suggestions gratefully received and almost certainly ignored.

Here’s one more.

Blessed Increase! 1

He’s hard to photograph in action–that boy moves fast. But he already is taking charge, which I need and love.

Open thread, y’all.

Blessed Increase!Post + Comments (130)

Thanks…and, uh…News

by Tom Levenson|  May 10, 20253:18 pm| 81 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Open Threads

Two quick things:

First:

Thanks to everyone who was so kind in your responses to my farewell to Tikka. It meant a great deal to read the outpouring of love for that magnificent cranky old beast, and I was very moved by the stories of the losses of beloved companions.  I know we’re not supposed to say this out loud, but y’all are good people.

Second:

Tikka left a hole in our household. Champ feels it.  She’s been very needy, somewhat confused, and constantly next to one human or another–mostly me, as I keep a bed for her next to my computer. She’s here as I type this:

Thanks...and, uh...News

The humans do too. Even though I was Tikka’s person, my wife and kid both feel the same absence I do.  I had been planning to let that just be the way things are for a while, but we all knew another cat was in our future.  That thought made its way to the same folks who connected us with Champ–letting us know one day in the first pandemic summer that there was a kitten who needed a rescue and if we said yes she would arrive tomorrow. And she did:

Thanks...and, uh...News 1

Well…they’ve done it again and my son has just let me know that the vague intention of a cat we expected to meet in late summer or fall will arrive in a few hours.  Seems another little one needed a home and we’re it.

It will be interesting to see how and how fast Champ adjusts. Tikka was surprisingly mellow when she arrived. Here’s hoping for a repeat.

Thanks...and, uh...News 4

I’m a bit stunned and am really not ready…but that’s how this works. Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

I’ll provide an update when blessed increase arrives.

And again: thanks y’all. It was a comfort to write that farewell post, and more so to receive the Jackaltariat reaction.

Treat this as an open thread.

 

Thanks…and, uh…NewsPost + Comments (81)

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone

by Tom Levenson|  May 2, 20255:25 pm| 181 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging

Dear everyone,

I’m deeply sad. Yesterday morning we had to say our last goodbye to Tikka.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 34

Tikka was a great cat. Gorgeous, best nose in felinedom, and utterly uncompromising. He was basically a one-person cat: I was his human. He tolerated my wife and son. He came to love, and near the end, draw great comfort from Champ.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 41

And that was it. My sister and sister-in-law, both cat people to their bones, convinced there isn’t a Felis catus they couldn’t charm, bear the scars of their presumption.

He was my dear companion for seventeen years. He slept in his corner (and I mean it was HIS corner) at the end of the bed for almost all that time. (He would flip corners from time to time. Didn’t matter. Wherever he was, that was his.)

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 18

It was only in the last month or so that he’d spend most of the night in a previously scorned cat bed on the floor.

He kept me company through four-and-a quarter books (he was here through the start of the one to come). He had a raucus purr which he’d unleash pretty much whenever I petted him. That’s how I knew the end was close, actually. Over the last few weeks it would take longer for the rumble to get going react and sometimes he just would slump into a doze.  He wasn’t a hugely talkative cat.  He’d save his meow — closer to a yowl– for 4 a.m. and his disdain for the indolent servant who had not laid out a middle-of-the-night snack.

And he had that stare. Turned on you, it confirmed that you had been judged and found wanting.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 32

We got him as a rescue when he was about 4 months old. He’d had a tough life up to then, the vet said, which helps explain his extreme wariness around almost everyone.  He really could terrorize the presumptuous.  He was a gentleman: he’d give fair and very audible warning before he’d swipe. But if you persisted in demanding that he allow himself to be stroked, well…it was not quite the arm-off-at-the-elbow but he left no doubt on your poor judgment.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 20

That changed over time, though his reputation never did. He grew more mellow and approachable (not really cuddly for anyone but me) as he moved through his teens. But what I love about him still is that he was always sure of his own self and autonomy. He let me love him, but I never had any doubt that it was his choice, one for which I will always be grateful.

He’d been declining for a few months, but over the last week went downhill quickly. I took him to the vet–actually Angell Memorial, the big veterinary hospital in town–on Wednesday and they confirmed it. Too many different things were going wrong, with treatments indicated that contradicted what some other problem required. There was nothing more to be done.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 36

I was able to take him home for one more night. I pulled out a mattress and slept (mostly not-sleeping TBH) on the floor. He spent much of the night in his usual position–curled up against my left leg. When we got up around 7:30, he was able to tolerate my pets and then began to purr; we stayed like that for quite a while.  Then I went to get dressed and he mustered the strength to climb down the stairs to find one of his favorite sun patches, the one on the welcome mat by the front door.  I curled up with him again and once again he started to purr. Not the idling diesel engine sound of his youth; this was more of a wheeze-and-rattle. But it was there.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 46

After another while–maybe half an hour–the hospice vet arrived.  She was sweet and very compassionate and talked us through what was going to happen. In time, she injected Tikka with the first dose. I was holding him, and started to cry. It went fast–he was so tired and so ready. In a couple of minutes the second medication went in and in no more than a minute or so he was gone.

I miss him terribly. I’m tearing up a little as I type this. He–up to and on his last day–curl in his bed just behind my writing desk. I’d spend every day with him, stopping for a visit every time something in the book needed a few paces to work out. We’d hang and chat and then I’d get back to the keyboard.  I’ve been looking over there all day today.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 12

I know his powerful gaze and occasional goofiness gladdened people here. I was privileged to spend almost two decades under his withering scrutiny.

Tikka was a great cat.

PS: Champ is perplexed and deeply needy. She may kill me yet–she keeps undercutting my ankles as I walk around the house. She’s never known a home without another cat, having come to us straight from her birth litter.  And yes: we will get another cat, and probably soon. But not just yet.

Goodbye, friend.

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is Gone 8

 

Sad News. The Lord of All He Surveys is GonePost + Comments (181)

Reading and Eating

by Tom Levenson|  April 29, 20256:11 pm| 34 Comments

This post is in: Cooking, Food & Recipes, Open Threads

Welp…

So Very Small went on sale today.

I put a post last week that talked about the book (and its imminent arrival) in some detail, so I won’t repeat all that here. Instead, I’ll just say that the editor of my last four books thinks it’s my best work to date, and I believe–more with each passing day that RFK Jr. remains the top US health official–that it’s my most important.

What I do want to do here is make good on a promise I made in that earlier post: to provide a food/cooking interlude at some later date. (I’m much later than I’d suggested, but I’m hoping that the thought counts.)

So two recent cooking experiences/suggestions.

1: This (with a slight variation).

That’s a Yotam Ottolenghi recipe for spatchcocked chicken cooked with butter beans and shallots, recently published in The Guardian. My cousin, a former producer on the BBC 4 Food Programme (now there’s a gig!) made it for me a few weeks ago when I blew through London for a few days, and I really liked it.  I came home, tried it once; thought it was good but could be better, and just this weekend made it again, and nailed it.

Reading and Eating

My variations on Ottolenghi’s original:

First, I used a much smaller bird than he prescribes. I like 3.5 to 4 lb birds (~1.6 to 1.9 kg); my cousin had made her version with a chicken on the larger end of what Ottolenghi suggests and it was tasty, but the texture wasn’t right and I think it’s easier to control the doneness of the whole dish with the smaller options.

Then I cheated just a little downward on the amount of turmeric. It’s a very strong spice and I think going a little lighter made the dish a bit more graceful.

I used water as mentioned in the recipe the first time out but on the second I used a 50:50 combo of white wine and home made chicken stock and it was really good.

After the first by-the-book version, I tried slicing the lemon into thin rounds instead of two halves. That was better to my taste, though you give up squeezing the roasted lemon juice, which is fun.

Finally, I think one can play around with the variety of beans. I stuck with butter beans on the first iteration and really enjoyed them; they brown up well and play very nicely with everything else. Second time out, though, the local supermarket was out of them, so I substituted cannelloni beans (I’d been thinking about going this way) and they were great. They hold their shape and texture more than the others, and they tasted great.

2: I think I’ve already commended Yasmin Khan’s sumac-pomegranate chicken thighs to the Jackaltariat. If not, I should have. It’s grand, and I don’t do anything to the recipe. Just rock and roll and eat like a monarch.

What’s new (for me) is that last Friday I found myself with a small piece of boneless leg of lamb–a pound and a quarter, perhaps. I pounded that sucker into a more or less consistent depth, cut cross hatchings top and bottom, and then rubbed the marinade from that chicken recipe all over and into the meat. I let it sit for a little, then roasted it in a 375 degree oven to medium rare (a little closer to medium than I’d like, perhaps)–maybe 20 minutes, maybe a little less. It would have been good if I’d had time to marinate it for a bit, but it was damn fine as it was and was an unbelievably quick turnaround for supper for two.

Reading and Eating 1 Reading and Eating 2

This thread is open–but if you’ve got tales of fun variations on favorite recipes, well…as they say in kindergarten, bring enough for everyone.

 

 

 

Reading and EatingPost + Comments (34)

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post)

by Tom Levenson|  April 22, 202512:55 pm| 122 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Books, Open Threads, Science & Technology

Hey, everyone…

You may have noticed that I’ve been conspicuous by my absence lately. (Narr: for “lately” read “the anthropocene.”) It’s been for a variety of reasons–some health stuff (now OK, thanks for asking); some mental health/self care as we confront the barbarism of the US today; and, more than anything else, seemingly inexhaustible deadline pressure.

Some part of that pressure is finally getting its release–which is the longwinded way of saying that the publication date for my new book So Very Small is upon us. One week from today (4/29) in the US; 5/1 in the UK. (UK info here.)

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post
(Venice) Philosopher with book by Guercino

It’s good, I think. Early readers and reviewers seem to think so. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus both gave it starred notices, which is very comforting, and the blubbers  blurbers (I do love this autocorrect flub) wildly exceeded my imagination.* For example:

“So Very Small is very large and fascinating. Thomas Levenson expertly combines storytelling and big questions, most notably: Why not? Why wasn’t the germ theory of disease formulated 200 years earlier? Why, in general, are huge scientific discoveries delayed until they happen? This is exactly the sort of book that a literate citizen, keenly interested in science, reads for enlightenment, perspective, and fun.”—David Quammen, New York Timesbestselling author of Breathless

(Quammen is one of my writing heroes, so when he has something nice to say about my work, I kvell.)

One more:

“By peering through the lens of the modern germ theory, and our protracted battle with disease, Levenson has crafted a vivid, engaging, and timely reminder that we are not as omnipotent nor as clever as we often believe ourselves to be. So Very Small is a deeply researched and thoughtfully compelling exploration of our successes, failures, and precarious future with deadly pathogens.”—Timothy C. Winegard, New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito and The Horse

I blush! There’s more like this at the Random House link. ;-)

As these two blurbs indicate, So Very Small is ostensibly a history of the discovery that microbes cause infectious disease. The story of the results that added up to germ theory is usually told as a tale of a compressed explosion of discoveries in the second half of the 19th century, but when I started on this project I found myself wondering about what happened to get to that moment. Microbes were first observed in the 1670s, after all–and yet it took almost exactly 200 years to get to the first conclusive demonstration that a particular bacterium lay behind a specific diseases (Robert Koch’s identification of B. anthracis as the pathogen causing anthrax, achieved in January 1877.)

As I tried to piece together why it took so long to get from point a to point b, I realized I was onto a bigger story–one that extended forward from the discovery years to the present day. I argue that the biggest obstacles to making the connection between microbes and disease wasn’t scientific. They were cultural, religious, and social. And those same roadblocks obtain (in different form but recognizably kin to the ideas that went before) still–and help explain why so much of the benefits humankind gained from the insights of germ theory are now at risk.

I have to say that when I started to work on this book (first discussion in 2012; work in earnest starting in ~2021) I had no idea it would be so timely. I wish it weren’t. But with RFK Jr., wreaking havoc on the US public health and biomedical research infrastructure, So Very Small definitely looks forward by looking back.

If y’all are interested, I’ll ask Watergirl if we can set up a post and/or Zoom book talk sometime after the pub date. In the meantime, if you’d like to hear more about it, the excellent Sean Carroll and I talked about it (at length, but what else would you expect from me? ;-) on his Mindscape podcast.

That’s enough. To make up for such naked self-promotion, I promise a good food/cooking post a bit later in the day (maybe tomorrow if the rest of the afternoon eats me alive.)

And with that…this thread is as open as a Hesgeth Signal chat.

*The question of blurbs and blurbing is a vexing one, and some publishers (and lots of authors) want to get away from the practice. Happy to talk about this issue in another post if there’s interest.

Image: Guercino, Philosopher with book, 1635

PS: one more thing. As is their wont, my US publisher, Random House, and my UK folks, Head of Zeus, chose radically different cover designs. Got a preference?

(Images below the fold)

show full post on front page

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post)Post + Comments (122)

US: So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post 1

UK:

So Very Small (Self Aggrandizement Post 2

Tariffs and the End of the American Century*

by Tom Levenson|  April 2, 20256:51 pm| 251 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, How Stupid Are These People?, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity

We should probably talk about the madness Trump unleashed this afternoon. As someone on Bluesky said (the actual author is now lost to endless flow of my timeline), the question of whether a nation could more thoroughly punch itself in the groin than the Brits did with Brexit has now been answered with a resounding “Yes.”

Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 4

I’m completely buried in book stuff–trying to finish a rapid turnaround short work on vaccines while promoting the almost-here tome on the history of germ theory (which has become waaaaaay too timely thanks to RFK Jr.)–if anyone’s in the neighborhood, I’ll be talking at the Oxford (UK) Literary Festival, on Sunday afternoon; love to see any UK Jackals. So I’m not going to add my gloss to the disaster we’re about to enjoy.

Instead, let me give you a random sample of Bluesky reactions as prompts to start the chat here. Have fun inventing invective of the ferocity Terry Pratchett would have placed in the mouths of Commander Vimes et al.

Tariffs and the End of the American Century* Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 1 Tariffs and the End of the American Century* 2

To add some grist to your mills, here’s an excerpt from a note Paul Krugman just posted on his Substack:

But you know that having once claimed that Europe charges tariffs more than 10 times as high as reality, Trump will never drop that claim. I don’t know how many people noticed, but he’s still claiming that we’re subsidizing Canada by $200 billion a year. Aside from the basic mistake of claiming that a Canadian trade surplus means that we’re somehow subsidizing Canada, he’s inflating the actual trade surplus by a factor of three. Many, many people have pointed out the error, but Trump is sticking with it, the same way Musk is sticking with the millions of dead Social Security beneficiaries thing.

If you had any hopes that Trump would step back from the brink, this announcement, between the very high tariff rates and the complete falsehoods about what other countries do, should kill them.

With that, this thread is open–but I rather hope it stays focused on the matter at hand.

*That outcome is now wildly overdetermined, to be sure.

Image: Angelo Bronzino, detail from Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, 1540-1545

Tariffs and the End of the American Century*Post + Comments (251)

Tragedies of the Commons…

by Tom Levenson|  March 18, 20254:25 pm| 117 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Science & Technology, Space

…or How moving fast and breaking things…breaks more than just things

(Crossposted with Inverse Square)

So…it turns out that among his many other sins, Elon Musk, with a boost from the now-unmentionable fact of climate changes, is turning low earth orbit into an overgrazed commons…to the impoverishment of us all. That’s the message of this study, published last week in Nature Sustainability. That work explores the effects of injecting anthropogenic (AKA us) greenhouse gases on the thermosphere—the bit of the upper atmosphere that extends all the way into Low Earth Orbit (LEO, up to 2000 kilometers above the planet).

The TL:DR is that climate change heats the earth’s surface, but cools and shrinks the higher-up regions of the atmosphere. That in turn means satellites in low earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag. Which leads to the following problem: without such drag bits of space junk don’t get slowed down…which means their orbits don’t decay (as fast) and they don’t burn up. As the corresponding author of this work, MIT graduate student William Parker put it in an interview with the MIT news office, “The sky is quite literally falling — just at a rate that’s on the scale of decades…And we can see this by how the drag on our satellites is changing.”

More dead satellites and orbital debris boosts the risk of collisions that knock out still-useful spacecraft. Such wrecks generate more debris, which makes crashes yet more likely, until it becomes too dangerous to try to park a satellite in some patches of space. And when that happens, a global commons will have been tragically exhausted.

Bit of backstory here: the idea of a common is an old one. In practice, it probably dates back to the beginnings of anything resembling hominid society, and as an explicit term in property law (in England, at least) it extends back to the feudal manorial system.

The basic concept is simple, and kind of evident in the name. A common is (in its first incarnation) some bit of land on which the people who live on or around could do something—the ability to use the property for one or more purposes, usually up to some defined limit. For example, someone could hold the right to graze five sheep, or gather some amount of wood, or some similar privilege.

Tragedies of the Commons...

 

Note the idea of limits—constraints on an individual’s use of a common resource. Our commoner (!) could put five sheep out to nibble…not six or seven or any number they chose. And if it turned out that the already granted rights of pasturage were too much in a bad year, existing rights could be reduced. All of which is to say that on a lasting, well run common property, its use was tightly regulated. If that weren’t so…well that’s where the tragedy comes in. If any member of commons can run as many ewes as they want on a field of grass then the endgame comes fast: the meadow gets munched down to the roots and its carrying capacity drops. Fewer animals can graze and everyone grows poorer.

Historically, lots of commons have avoided this outcome. They have been actively managed and the commoners involved in any given set of rights have policed potentially cheats with great assiduity.

But, beginning perhaps in the 19th century, certainly by the 20th, new kinds of commons have emerged that have proved much more difficult to police. Think the oceans and overfishing, or of the use of air, land, and water as depositories for pollution, or (my current focus) a way of thinking that sees the effectiveness of antibiotics as a kind of commons that can be destroyed by uses that promote antibiotic resistance. And, of course, there is the most common commons of them all: the earth’s atmosphere, in which the tragedy of billions of individual decisions (and national and multi-national corporate choices) is producing profound physical and chemical changes on a planetary scale.

Back to the cooling thermosphere and the rise of space junk. In the study authors’ analysis, less drag leading to longer decay times for debris will reduce the carrying capacity of some or all of the LEO region. As they write, “the worst-case scenario capacity carries many fewer satellites across broad swaths of LEO by the year 2100.”

2100 is a bit of ways out. But the problem is already here. Why? Because of Musk and a handful of other overgrazers of this space-commons. Here’s what’s happening, again, as told to the MIT news office:

Their predictions forecast out to the year 2100, but the team says that certain shells in the atmosphere today are already crowding up with satellites, particularly from recent “megaconstellations” such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which comprises fleets of thousands of small internet satellites.

“The megaconstellation is a new trend, and we’re showing that because of climate change, we’re going to have a reduced capacity in orbit,” [MIT associate professor Richard] Linares says. “And in local regions, we’re close to approaching this capacity value today.”

In other words: as Musk and his minions are attacking the US federal gov’t efforts to combat climate change, he’s running his space-grab as fast as he can, to the point where we may lose access to the territory currently used by everything from earth sensing satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, both the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong sation, not to mention a wealth of communications satellite (including Starlink, of course).

The response is obvious, previewed in the history of the commons. Resources that belong to/are valuable to society (or societies) as a whole need to be closely regulated. We have to make sure that the asshole in the third cottage down doesn’t ruin it for everyone by grabbing the temporary advantage of running some extra livestock on the pasture. In other words: we have to tell Musk and his ilk that a common resource like low earth orbit—is not one in which they can do whatever they want.

Of course, the idea of regulating global commons is exactly the antithesis to the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” credo, the one Musk embodies, of course. But as that techno-capitalist view takes hold it’s important to recognize how unsustainably extractive it is in many domains—and how much can be broken.

I have little hope of anything moving to protect LEO as a resource under the current regime, nor any of the other crucial modern commons. But here’s the thing: nature, the material world we inhabit, gets its vote too. It doesn’t care if MAGAts think climate change is a hoax (or rather, that elite MAGAts are happy to suggest it’s a hoax to squeeze the next dollar out of a declining resource). Elementary physics tells us that if we go on as we are now, the troposphere will shrink and satellites will crash. That’s reality. I hope that we can minimize the cost of our education at the hands of this most explicit of teachers. But pay we will.

And in the meantime…open thread.

Image:  Thomas Sidney Cooper, Shepherd with Sheep,  1868

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