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The London Review of Substacks

Essays about a global historical phenomenon, death, and the home field advantage at the Olympics.

Updated Aug 12, 2024, 6:28am EDT
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Talking bull

The bullroarer is a simple device — a length of cord or string with a flat piece of bone or wood on the end. The user spins it around in a circle, and it makes a roaring noise. But what is interesting about it is that it is used in rituals in more than 100 apparently separate cultures, from aboriginal Australians to ancient Greece, and usually with the same cultural significance: It is often considered the voice of God or some mythical first ancestor; it is often used in male coming-of-age ceremonies to symbolize death and rebirth; and it is often said to have been invented by women, but stolen from them by men.

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It could have been independently invented, dozens of times — but it could also have been invented once, writes Andrew Cutler in Vectors of Mind. Anthropologists argued the two cases for decades, but the “diffusionist” position that they spread from a common ancestor became unpopular, when some construed it as suggesting some cultures were more creative than others, and it has since been neglected. But given the ritual similarities in its use between wildly disparate cultures — from Bantus to Navajos, Sami to Basque — “the simplest explanation for this set of facts,” says Cutler, “is the bullroarer was invented once, long ago, and spread.”

Life and death

In 2006, Clayton Schwartz, a 30-year-old philosophy student, was in a motorbike accident, and paralyzed from the chest down. A year and a half later, he died by suicide. In the time in between, he wrote a book, Two Arms and a Head, which acted as a combined memoir, suicide note, and manifesto. On Astral Codex Ten, an anonymous writer reviewed that book. The review itself is hard to read — Flagship can only imagine the book itself is even harder. In the book, Schwartz addresses the obstacles that lie between him and ending his life, which he considered a shadow of what it was, on his own terms.

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The obvious one was that when he wrote it, physician-assisted suicide was illegal almost everywhere in the US. But there are “smaller, more insidious roadblocks,” the anonymous reviewer writes. “The book is a scathing indictment of how our society enables the lifelong disabled at the expense of the newly disabled and terminally ill.” A major part of it is “toxic positivity” — a social ecosystem that “reinforces the idea that disabled people should be upbeat and optimistic about their life prospects.” Any hint that he wanted to die “would have gotten him locked up in the psych ward,” so “he has to write his book in secret, he has to lay his thoughts out for the world in secret, and he has to die in secret.”

Home advantage

Host countries tend to do well at the Olympics. France had is having a good Games this time around; Japan overperformed last time out; Great Britain raked in the medals in 2012. It’s not always true, but in general, you can see a decent bump in the medal haul for a country when it has the Olympics on its soil. The data-savvy blogger Dynomight has a go at determining why: Is it the refs and judges being biased? Is it the boost of the crowds?

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Honestly, it’s probably the money, says Dynomight. You can usually see an increase in the Games before a country hosts, and sometimes afterward, implying that it’s not home-biased judges or crowd fervor. And while most countries don’t disclose their Olympic funding, the UK does, and when the money started flowing after an embarrassing performance in 1996 and especially ahead of the UK hosting in 2012, the medals started to flow too. “Medal counts are not a measure of a country’s worth,” says Dynomight. “Mostly, they measure (a) population, (b) economic development, and (c) how much money you’re willing to set on fire to make numbers go up on a magic billboard.”

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