Way back around 2009, Google did something stupid internally where people with names like "Nishit" were flagged as being "fake" or similar. I probably found out about this because I had worked on the accounts system at one point.

On the surface, it seemed simple enough: someone coded up a check to pick up an "four letter word" (in English...) and it matched it. Even though it's totally a name used by a lot of people, their systems told those people that they were invalid and unwelcome. Never mind they have employees that are directly affected by this.

Ten years later, nearly the same thing happened at Lyft. It happened late in 2019 as it rolled into 2020. The timing always made me think that someone particularly clueless was trying to make one final push to meet their so-called "quarterly goals" before the year ended.

These events, and others like it, have touched off a series of posts like "falsehoods that programmers assume about names", and then its own series of posts about whole other realms which are full of trouble.

I, too, have written about this. I mentioned how the Intel museum only allowed the ASCII characters A-Z as letters in your name, and anyone else was out of luck.

All along, I have been treating this as a case of "those fucking stupid programmers", and it's an easy groove to fall into, because believe me, there are quite a few really incompetent people out there doing this kind of work.

However, I've been starting to realize that this is overly simplistic and is missing a large possibility. Can you see it yet? I sure didn't for a very long time, and that time is immortalized in my older posts.

The thing that finally got me thinking about another side to this problem was when I went to get my hair done recently. The scheduling form on my salon's web site had a list of stylists with their names given. One stylist had a name that had a rather unusual consonant pair that you don't normally see in English. I wasn't really sure how to pronounce it.

Let's say her name was shown as "RJAY", even though that's not even remotely close to the real thing for both her sake and mine. I thought that was her name, and went with that, until finally I saw how she wrote it out: "R'Jay". That's when I finally understood.

The booking system had decided that an apostrophe was a bridge too far and had just dropped it, thus reducing a fairly easy-to-pronounce name to a blob of characters that isn't her damn name! That it also forced everything into capitals didn't help things.

As she worked on my hair, we got to talking about things and that in particular, and I admitted that I had worked at places that had also screwed people's names up badly. I told her about asking the person at Lyft to "if nothing else, promise you won't do it again" and only getting a blank look in response. Then, perhaps because of recent goings-on in the world, I finally saw another possibility for why it might be happening. It's not necessarily clueless programmers, much as I'd like to bag on them for being that way.

We owe it to ourselves and to those around us to admit the possibility that some of these people are doing it on purpose. They're being unmitigated assholes because they realize they can use their position to make someone else's life a little crappier.

Get it? "Assuming best intent" is probably a mistake. When there are enough people being hateful around you, that is no longer an option.

Hanlon's Razor falls down in this kind of environment. It's lazy.

I have definitely made this mistake. You need not go particularly far back in my posts to find that I wrote my "honest troubleshooting code of conduct" which incorporates exactly that. Actual life experience now says that leaning on that is the lazy way out, and that you actually have to do some damn work to figure out exactly what's going on.

It's stuff like this that makes me realize just how much I still do not know, even though some people *have* to know this, and have no choice in the matter. I'm finding it out much later, and while it bothers me that it's taken this long to even get started, it's not going to stop me from admitting my ignorance while pushing to understand more.

While I may never truly understand some of the things that are not daily lived truths for me (and are for others), I can always work towards realizing that it exists, it's valid, and it needs to be appreciated.

Oh, and finally, it's not the responsibility of folks like my stylist to explain it to me. They have enough work to do as it is.

aaronstjames:

One of our fabric sales reps came in for an appointment yesterday and we ended up talking about the long term impacts of the pandemic. The home quilting market is predominantly a conservative customer base, so when COVID precautions were politicized, those ladies followed along and didn’t get vaccinated, didn’t wear masks, etc. Now many of them are dead. Most of the fabric stores in the conservative regions that our reps call on have lost twenty percent of their customers. The ladies the shop knew by name because they could be counted on for annual trade-in upgrades of $9000 sewing machines? Dead. Viking is laying off half of its staff. It’s taken two years for the impact to become obvious, but the home sewing industry in the US is in shambles. A lot of experience, knowledge and artistry was lost and when the independent shops have to close, we’ll lose even more.

Good Evening, Burkwood Hills Families—

Due to expected inclement weather, the Burkwood Hills school district is moving to a Flexible Instruction Day (FID) tomorrow. All students should log in virtually for instruction and follow their typical daily schedule. And by “typical daily schedule,” we mean an absolute clusterfuck of pleading and consequence-threatening to get your kids to do literally any of their required work while you also somehow do your job from home. You will break down emotionally and spiritually multiple times throughout the day and annoy everyone in your family.

Scheduled activities will include playing Twister with the cats in a pile of Magna-Tiles, crying, throwing half-eaten Uncrustables at the kitchen window, running manically through the house in pajamas, watching TV, more crying, and eating a gross ton of Z-Bars.

Students will log onto their twelve-year-old tablet with no power cord for a Zoom call with twenty other children, most of whom are screaming into their screens, asking what to do. Eventually, your child’s teacher’s exhausted face will appear and go through an inaudible PowerPoint presentation about addition or phonics that your child will utterly ignore. The teacher will then email you a worksheet. You will go through the worksheet with your child, who is now distracted by his brother hanging off the side of the table, throwing gobs of Fisher-Price slime at the dog, screaming, “I’m Spider-Man! I’m Spider-Man!” You will end up doing the worksheet in your child’s handwriting.

All afterschool and evening activities will proceed as scheduled. You cannot imagine what these might be, but they are likely attended by parents who have it more together than you. Parents on the PTA. Parents who hand out snacks at soccer games. Parents who make costumes for the school plays, even for kids who are not their own. That is not you—therefore, please disregard the announcement about afterschool and evening activities.

Why did you study the humanities in college? Why didn’t you do what your uncle suggested and go into engineering? Or study law like your mom wanted? Then you might have a high-paying job and could afford to send your children to private school, where snow days are probably spent at the museum appreciating fine art or planting trees. No, you had to study English literature, and you now teach at one of several dying colleges, shuttling between blank-walled classrooms and bussing home frantically to trade off with your spouse, who is attending to the nightmare of Flexible Instruction Day. The article you are supposed to be writing is not even half-done, and your kids are eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag.

What is wrong with you? When did your life become like this? Don’t even think about blaming the economy. Your single mother worked three jobs and helped you and your siblings with homework in the evenings. You started crying the other day because you couldn’t open a jar of banana peppers. There are parents fleeing from terrorism and war who manage to read their children stories before bed. Meanwhile, last night before bed, you watched three TikToks with your kids, and one of them had the word “fuck” in it

If you don’t get your shit together parenting-wise, your kids are going to start thinking that being a YouTuber is a viable career path. One day, they’ll have to go to an important dinner with their boss and be unable to eat anything but chicken nuggets, embarrass themselves, get fired, and die. They’ll forget how to read, which is probably impossible, but if any kids could test this limit, it’s them.

All staff, besides the facilities department, should feel free to work from home or come into the building if they like. Members of the facilities department should report to work based on virtual instruction protocol per their supervisor. Parents should fuck off and die but also make sure their children somehow complete a full day of schoolwork.

Thank you for your patience (lol),
BHSD Administration

“They get the one starving kid in Sudan that isn’t going to have a USAID bottle, and they make everything DOGE has done about the starving kid in Sudan.” — a White House official.

I’ve been a USAID contractor for most of the last 20 years. Not a federal employee; a contractor. USAID does most of its work through contractors. I’ve been a field guy, working in different locations around the world.

If you’ve been following the news at all, you probably know that Trump and Musk have decided to destroy USAID.  There’s been a firehose of disinformation and lies.  It’s pretty depressing.  

So here are a couple of true USAID stories — one political, one personal.


The political one first.  I worked for years in the small former Soviet republic of Moldova.



Moldova happened to be one of the few parts of the old USSR suitable for producing wine.  The other was Georgia, in the Caucasus.

The Soviets, in their central planning way, decided that both Moldova and Georgia would produce wine — but Georgia would produce the good stuff, intended for export and for consumption by Soviet elites.  Moldova would produce cheap sweet reds, which is what most Russians think wine is.

So for decades, Moldova produced bad wine and nothing but bad wine.  But Russians liked it, so that was okay.

Then the USSR collapsed.  And, well, Moldova continued to produce nasty cheap sweet reds, because that was all they could do.   By the turn of the century, wine was Moldova’s single biggest cash export.  And about 80% of that wine went straight to Russia.

This continued through the 1990s and into the early 2000s.  Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia.  Back in 2003 or so, he wasn’t invading Russia’s neighbors… but he was already swinging a big stick in Russia’s “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics that he thought should still be under Russia’s thumb.  Which absolutely included Moldova.

So whenever the Moldovan government annoyed or offended Putin… or whenever he just wanted to yank their chain… the Russian Ministry of Health would suddenly discover that there was a “problem” with Moldovan wine.  And imports would be frozen until the “problem” could be resolved.  Since wine was Moldova’s biggest export, and most wine went to Russia, this meant that Russia could inflict crippling damage on Moldova’s economy literally at will.  

This went on for over a decade, with multiple Moldovan governments having to defer to Moscow rather than face crippling economic damage.

Enter USAID.  Over a period of a dozen years or so, USAID funded several projects to restructure the Moldovan wine industry. 

They brought in foreign instructors to teach modern methods.  They worked with the wine-growers to develop training courses.  They provided guarantees for loans so that farmers could buy new equipment.  They helped Moldovan farmers get access to new varieties of grapes… you get the idea.

(By the by, the wine project was not my project. But it was literally up the street from my project.  It was run by two people I know and deeply respect — one American, one Moldovan — so I had a ring-side seat for much of this.)

The big one was, they worked with the Moldovans on what we call market linkages.  That is, they helped them connect to buyers and distributors in Europe, and figure out ways to sell into the EU.  I say this was the big one, because on one hand the EU is the world’s largest market for wine!  But on the other hand, exporting wine into the EU is really hard.  There are a bunch of what we call NTBTs — “non-tariff barriers to trade”.  For starters, your wine has to be guaranteed clean and safe according to the EU’s very high standards.  That means it has to consistently pass a bunch of sanitary and health tests, and also your production methods have to be certified.  Then there are a bunch more requirements about bottling, labelling and packaging. 

The EU regulates the hell out of all that stuff.  Like, the “TAVA” number?  There’s a minimum font size for that.  If you print it too small, it’ll be bounced right back to you.  The glass of the bottle?   Has to be a sort that EU recycling systems can deal with.  The adhesive behind the label?  It can be rejected for being too weak (labels fall off) or too strong (recycling system can’t remove it).  There are dozens of things like that.

And then of course they had to do marketing.  Nobody in Europe had heard of Moldovan wines!  Buyers and distributors had to be talked into taking a chance on these new products.  This meant the Moldovan exporters needed lines of credit to stay afloat.  This in turn meant that Moldovan banks had to be talked into… you get the idea.

This whole effort took over a decade, from the early 2000s into the teens.

And in the end it was a huge damn success.  With USAID help, the Moldovan wine industry was completely restructured.  Moldova now exports about $150 million of wine per year, which is a lot for a small country — it’s over $50 per Moldovan.  And it went from exporting around 80% of its wine to Russia, to around 15%.  Most Moldovan wine (around 60%) now goes to the EU, with an increasing share going to Turkey and the Middle East.  



(If you’re curious: their market niche is medium to high end vins du table.  Not plonk, not fancy, just good midlist wines.  I can personally recommend the dryer reds, which are often much better than you’d expect at their price point.)

Russia tried the “ooh we found a sanitary problem” trick one last time a few years ago.  It fell completely flat.  Putting aside that it was an obvious lie — if something is safe for the EU, believe me, it is safe for Russia — Moldovan wine exporters had now diversified their markets to the point that losing Russian sales was merely a nuisance.  In fact, the attempt backfired: it encouraged the Moldovans to shift their exports even further away from Russia and towards the EU.

So that’s the political story.  Russia had Moldova on a choke chain.  Over a dozen years or so, USAID patiently filed through that chain and broke Moldova loose.  Soft power in action.  It worked.

Nobody knows this story outside Moldova, of course. 

Okay, that’s the political story.  Here’s the personal one.

Some years ago, I moved with my family to a small country that was recovering from some very unpleasant history.  They’d been under a brutal ethnically-based dictatorship for a while, and then there was a war.  So, this was a poor country where many things didn’t work very well.

While we were there, my son suddenly fell ill.  Very ill.  Later we found out it was the very rapid onset of a severe bacterial infection.  At the time all we knew was that in an hour or two he went from fine to running a super high fever and being unable to stand up. Basically he just… fell over. 

Wham, emergency room.  They diagnosed him correctly, thank God, and gave correct treatment: massive and ongoing doses of antibiotics.  But he couldn’t move — he was desperately weak and barely conscious — and there was no question of taking him out of the country.  We had to put him in the local hospital for a week, on an IV drip, until he was strong enough to come home.

If you’ve ever been in a hospital in a poor, post-war country… yeah at this point someone makes a dumb joke about the NHS or something.  No.  We’re talking regular blackouts, the electricity just randomly switching off.  Rusting equipment, crumbling concrete, cracked windows.  A dozen beds crammed into a room that should hold four or five. Everything worn and patched and held together with baling wire and hope.   

We’re talking so poor that the hospital didn’t have basic supplies.  Like, you would go into town and buy the kid’s medication, and then you’d also buy syringes for injections — because the hospital didn’t have syringes — and then you’d come back and give those thing to the nurse so that your kid could get his medication. 

In the pediatric ward, they were packing the kids in two to a bed. Because they didn’t have a lot of rooms, and they didn’t have a lot of beds. And kids are small, yeah?  

But there we were.  So into the hospital he went.  Here’s a photo:

— Take a moment and zoom in there.  Red-white-and-blue sticker, there on the bed?  It says “USAID:  From The American People”.

Every hospital bed in that emergency room had been donated by USAID.  I believe they were purchased secondhand in the United States, where they were old and obsolete.  But in this country… well, they didn’t have enough beds, and the beds that they had were fifty years old.  Except for those USAID beds.  Those were (relatively) modern, light and adjustable but sturdy, and easily mobile.  The hospital staff were using them to move kids around, and they were getting a lot of mileage from them.

And of course, every USAID bed had that sticker on it.  And so did some other stuff.  There was an oxygen system that a sick toddler was breathing from.  USAID sticker.  Couple of child-sized wheelchairs.  USAID stickers.  Secondhand American stuff — USAID was under orders to Buy American whenever possible — but just making a huge, huge difference here.

As I said, it was crowded in there.  Lots of beds, lots of kids, lots of anxious parents.  So we got to talking with the other parents, as one does.  A couple of people had a little English.  And so my wife mentioned that we were here working on a USAID project…

…and god damn that place lit up like an old time juke box.  “USAID!”  “USAID!”  People were pointing at the stickers, smiling.  “USAID!”   “America, very good!”  “Thank you!”  “USA!  USA!”  “Thank you!”

This went on longer than most of us would find comfortable.  When it finally settled down… actually, it never really did entirely settle down.  For the whole time our son was there, we had people — parents, nurses, even the hospital janitor — smiling at us and saying “USAID!”  “Very good!”  “Thank you!”

I’m not prone to fits of patriotic fervor.  But I’m not going to lie: right then it felt good to be American.

Anyway, USAID stories.  I could go on at considerable length.  This is my career, after all!  I could tell more stories, or comment and gloss at greater length on these.

But this is long enough already.  More some other time, perhaps.

Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.

Here I presuppose three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense that he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.

In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).

By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group). To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants.

That is, I have in mind the kind of places with employees involved in the Varsity Blues scandal, that is, parents bribing their children into an admissions spot.  I should disclose that during this period, I was a student representative, first on the faculty budget and priorities committee and then on the Board of Trustees (on the financial sub-committee). I spent three years of my life studying harder to understand the financial aid system than to master my coursework.

But the previous paragraphs also already hint at some of the underlying issues. These schools practice an incredibly opaque and unaccountable admission process that effectively practices differential pricing and unequal treatment shaped by preferential treatment for legacy, donor classes, and disadvantaged students. The outcome is neither impartial nor meritocratic.

It is no surprise that people come away from their first contact with elite formation institutions thinking that to get ahead in our society who you know, and how much money you have, is as at least as important as your effort. And university messaging makes quite clear that who you meet in college (and professional school), and which school you attended, may well be more important than your formal education. (This is also true, of course, in the academic professions.) If you think I exaggerate, I am happy to concede the point after you read this article reporting on Harvard University’s faculty on the subject. [HT Christopher Robichaud.]

That is to say, universities project to their students and their families a transactional ethos. Now, regular readers know I have no distaste for markets. Yet, this transactional ethos has led far down the slippery slope that, as was demonstrated again throughout 2024, major donors shape university policy and personnel in non-trivial ways. But this fact signals, anew, that who you know and what you have is more important than the underlying intellectual arguments. It’s also amazing that institutions that have incredible high reserves feel so vulnerable in response to donor pressure.

But that’s not all. To see what I have in mind, I remind you that relative to their institutional (or corporate in the medieval sense) mission, all universities have three main tasks: advance knowledge, teach it, and witness truth (for fuller explanation recall here and the links in it). As the debate over institutional voice has evolved, it’s clear that most university administrations prefer lip service to ‘free speech’ or the ‘market place of ideas’ — a concept wholly out of place inside a university which is characterized by disciplined speech — than to take on the task of witnessing truth. This itself is a forfeiture of any spiritual authority the academy could have. (And if you snicker at the thought of spiritual authority, you exhibit the corruption I have in mind.)

But the situation is much more alarming. In Lost in Thought (2020), Zena Hitz has forcefully argued (and I simplify her view here), “for intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy.” (See here for an engagement with her book.) My own view on these matters is less austere than hers, but I agree with her that when academics are incapable of imagining the intrinsic worth of the academic life, there is no spirit left to be authoritative. In addition, she has argued aptly that elite academics have succumbed to (what she calls) “the pursuit of spectacles” feasting while the prestige-pyramid that supports them and which is populated by increasingly precarious and stretched peers is sinking in quicksand. Enough said.

But, and this gets me to the promised third presupposition of this essay, and the more exclusive (fourth) task of elite universities. These also have the mission to educate a regime’s elite and to put it in a position to guide it prudently and maintain itself. This is not human capital formation, but rather ultimately the cultivation of good judgment needed for (ahh) the art of government. Judging by the ongoing consequences, perhaps somewhat unfairly (post hoc ergo propter hoc), the universities have failed miserably in this task.

Of course, I am not holding the universities responsible for the rise of MAGA. The longer-term causes can be found (I suspect) in the destruction of Glass–Steagall, the deception to justify war in Iraq, the Wall Street bailouts, and a permissive tax and political environment for concentrated wealth/power.

But it is notable how uncurious and how unprepared our educated aristocracy is for this moment. This is a feature (primarily) of their habitus, of course, but also (non-negligibly) the curriculum, which, against the evidence of history, insisted on American exceptionalism and the puzzling identification of the essentials of American political culture and institutions with a myth of enduring liberalism.

Now, as I have remarked before, universities are themselves incredibly long-lasting institutions. So, I have no doubt that they will aim to adapt to new circumstances and survive by playing the long game (that is to accommodate themselves to the new status quo). But from their perspective, the most damning fact of our time is the evident contempt by which their political enemies in MAGA-land hold them—and this contempt is not a product of ignorance, but of first-hand experience.

*The larger story would focus on the end of Jim Crow, the consolidation of the New Deal, the Civil rights revolution (including the embrace of expansive first amendment), the post-Watergate reforms, etc.

Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.

(Part of my series of posts counting down to the release of Inventing the Renaissance)

Florence’s Medici had a family curse: an agonizing hereditary medical condition causing torturous joint pain and severe mobility restrictions, so it was agony to stand, walk, or even hold a pen. Yes, Renaissance Florence, cradle of the Renaissance, was run by disabled people from a sickbed. The famous Cosimo had to have servants carry him through his own home, and used to shout every time they neared doorway. When asked, “Why do you shout before we go through a doorway?” He answered “Because if I shout after you slam my head into the stone lintel it doesn’t help.”

Portrait of Cosimo de Medici by Bronzino. Pictured in his 60s, his face is very lined with age (and pain).

Photograph of the interior of a bedroom on the main floor Cosimo inhabited in Palazzo Medici. The “Piano Nobile” or “Noble Floor” meant the first floor above ground in the period, the one the nobles of a household lived on so they could avoid having to go up more than one flight of stairs (the ground floor, vulnerable to flooding and cold was used for storage of barrels and jars and goods, not habitation). In the room you see period furniture, and a large wooden door with a very, very hard solid stone door frame. Hitting your head on these really, really hurts! I hit my head hard on one in a castle in Wales one time, my head was hurting for days! Stone is hard, people! If you’ve ever hit your head on a doorframe multiply it by ten!

We have a visitor’s account of visiting Palazzo Medici in the days of Cosimo the elder (1440s) and meeting Cosimo and both his sons lying side-by-side three in a bed in pain “each as cranky as the last” using their sickroom as their office as they directed staff in running the republic. Most texts call the Medici condition “gout” a word with the stigma of being the “rich man’s disease” caused by gluttony—a reputation less borne out by modern science. Diet does affect it, mostly alcohol which *everyone drank all the time* and avoiding seafood and organ meat. It isn’t caused by overeating etc. Now, gout in the modern sense is an agonizing joint pain condition caused by buildup of uric acid in the joints, but when a period source says “gout” they could mean any condition that cause swelling, inflammation, and/or pain, from basic arthritis through coeliac to rarer things.

Photograph in the same room in Palazzo Medici, focusing on the large four-poster bed. Around it chairs are gathered, where secretaries could take dictation or visitors meet with the leaders who often used such a bed as their main office. Above the bed hangs a relief carving of the Virgin and Child with angels, and on the wall to the right a painting of Saint Jerome hard at work at his desk as an old man, with an angel helping him. Saint Jerome was a patron saint of scholars, translators, Latin-lovers, and was famous for turning his back on comforts and embracing pain and mortification of the flesh as a way of urging himself to focus on his work and service to the Lord and humanity. The angel helper makes me think of Angelo Poliziano, the famous Homeric poet and dear friend of Lorenzo who often took dictation for him in this room when Lorenzo couldn’t lift a pen.

I talked in my earlier thread [add link here] about Clarice Orsini’s EXTREMELY ILLEGAL hat about how important it was for Medici men like her husband Lorenzo to perform humility. Florence had killed/expelled its nobles, it was a merchant republic and demanded merchant dress & merchant comportment. One had to be seen in the city always walking (riding or being carried was too princely), greeting peers in the street, bowing to each other—are you wincing by now? Imagining walking those stone cobbles while every joint in your body feels like it’s on fire? And going up tall stone staircases?

Lorenzo de Medici did his civic duty volunteering for the city fire brigade, and was a member of the Confraternity of Buonomini, who did volunteer work as shown in frescoes including this one from their headquarters. A Florentine gentleman hands a chicken and a jug of wine to a poor woman as, in the background, another woman lies in a sick bed, being tended by a doctor and another of the wealthy gentleman-volunteers who sits beside her… knees tightly bent to squat on a low wooden stool up a very tall stone step on which the bed is placed. When Lorenzo did this, he’d likely be in as much agony as she was from the pain of stepping up that step and crouching on that stool, but he couldn’t dare show weakness and let people *know* it caused him so much pain.

Add the fact that Europe’s normal diplomatic class at the time were all nobles, so every envoy from anywhere is at least the son of a baron and must be greeted with obsequious bowing and scraping, and walking along beside his horse leading it to where he’ll be staying, as an act of symbolic servant-like humility. Ow.

The ceremony of holding the stirrup of an arriving high-status guest, illustrated here showing Emperor Frederick Barbarossa doing it for Pope Adrian, kneeling beside the horse and holding the stirrup as the pope mounts. This kind of thing casually for any arriving minor noble from anywhere was a brilliant way for Medici to perform non-princliness, since it’s usually a servant’s job (hence the pope humiliating the emperor by making him do it) but look at those harshly bent knees!

Mature Medici—Cosimo, Piero, Lorenzo, Lorenzo’s mom Lucrezia Tornabuoni had it to—all had to save their endurance for *performing fitness* in the streets, being seen walking to or from the cathedral or church or the Palazzo Vecchio where wary eyes judged them, collapsing back into their beds and servants’ arms (period wheelchairs) the instant the door closed. It was carefully stage-managed agony, and accounts from visitors describe Lorenzo walking alongside their horses, joining dances and parades—performance of fitness necessary to hide his increasing weakness.

Lorenzo’s pain was likely worst, since bone examination suggests that, on top of the family condition, he also had acromegaly, the growth hormone overproduction that makes your bones keep growing & swelling at the joints. 2x debilitating arthritis!

The famous terra cotta bust of Lorenzo. His flattened nose (broken in a brawl in his teen years) makes him look very different from his family, but its conspicuousness made it take a long time for us to notice he also has thickened bone development in his brows, cheekbones, and unusual jaw shape, and a tightened mouth consistent with muscle strain from overgrowth of the jawbone. Skeletal examination found evidence in his hands, his knees etc.

And if you remember my post about the very, very tall towers of the Renaissance, imagine with me the agony of answering the summons to visit the Priori (ruling council). A great honor! But a good floor higher than the tower I lived in that was up 111 steps!

A photograph of Florence’s beautiful Palazzo Vecchio. An arrow points out where the room to meet with the priori was located, on an upper floor above the skyline of the rest of the city, meaning a floor above being up 111 steps!

Diagram of one of the sets of stairs inside the Palazzo, burrowing like worm tunnels through the stone. These are the secret tunnel passage stairs for emergency evacuation and servant movements, but the main stairs, though harder to diagram so clearly, are just as numerous and just as stone!

Tall, tall, tall stone staircases inside the Palazzo Vecchio, sloping intimidatingly down and up, made of slick, dark, unforgiving stone.

A narrow twisty stone staircase in a different part of the Palazzo Vecchio, with no banister to help!

You couldn’t be carried (Princely! Ambitious!) you had to go on foot. Once Lorenzo’s father Piero on a really, really bad pain day when summoned asked if, for once, the priors could visit him. There were riots, and an assassination attempt. How dare he *summon* the senators like a duke his servants! Books where the Medici are the bad guys (tyrants who corrupted the republic!) will make this incident proof of Piero’s haughty decadence. But I know can’t do those stairs on a pain day, and we could equally call it a disability accommodation. He’s still called “Piero the Gouty” to this day.

Portrait of Piero the Gouty. We call him “Piero the Gouty” to differentiate him from his grandson “Piero the Unfortunate” but I think it’s pretty unfortunate going down in history named for your stigmatized disability!

Speaking of disability accommodations, eventually the Medici built a ramp. This ramp. It connects from the floor where the priori were, passes through the bureaucratic offices and all-important guild HQs, sloping at an easy grade down to the living-quarters level of the family palace.

Outside of the Palazzo Vecchio, directly above those many flights of twisty stairs. An elevated walkway supported by an arch comes out of the wall and connects to the next building.

Long hallway interior, lined with portraits.

Continuation of the ramp, you can see it bending and sloping downward in segments as it bends.

The long interior descends at a gentle grade with minimal turns and staircases, mostly stair that a horse can climb—horse ramps and riding horses or donkeys *indoors* at a walk was another proto-wheelchair disability tool, one architecture had to plan for with things like horse stairs.

Another interior section, showing two small sections of half-height shallow stairs. A horse or donkey could climb these, or one could dismount this close to one’s destination after taking the living disability aid this far. Even on foot these stairs are much gentler in grade and easier to climb, and separated into half-flight segments, making them much easier than those in the Palazzo Vecchio itself.

A shallow sloping section of floor something between a ramp and a staircase, as each step itself slants but is about 2/5 feet deep, while the lips up from step to step are very shallow and slightly raised. This type of staircase is optimized for taking on horseback, and common in the Medici family’s Boboli gardens, which is where this specimen is located.

This is why the Vatican has so many weirdly shallow staircases—popes are old so the Vatican was a palace expecting to always host a disabled monarch, so it’s full of built-in accommodations, the most complex and fascinating accessible architecture case study in the world.

Swiss guards in uniform on duty at the Vatican. Above them is an elevated walkway above an arch, one of many elevated walkways optimizing passage without stairways throughout the maze of the Vatican, ideal for the old popes and cardinals constantly at work there. Even the modern elevators have a bench in the elevator! In the elevator! Because old guys need to sit down!

Floorplan diagram of part of the Vatican palace, showing the many, many rooms and hallways slanting in odd angles that were added on century by century as new occupants expanded and modified the palace to suit their ever-cycling needs.

And it’s not chance that it was the first Medici pope, Lorenzo’s son Leo X, who finally installed a donkey-powered elevator in the papal fortress Castel Sant’Angelo. Leo was elected young, still fairly fit, but had memories of his parents’ condition getting worse, and knew his would.

Detail from Raphael’s portrait of Pope Leo X, that is Giovanni de Medici, Lorenzo’s second son.

So, Lorenzo’s descendants finally built Earth’s largest, most famous disability access ramp. It’s name is the Vasari Corridor, the elevated walkway I discussed last week as conquering Duke Cosimo I’s project of architectural domination, the tyrant’s assassin-proof walkway piercing the city’s heart. Diversity celebration or tyrant’s monument? It’s the same piece of architecture but feels completely different depending on what question we ask about it: Why was it built? For power? For chronic pain? Yes. Both.

Diagram of the full Vasari Corridor winding its length from the Palazzo Vecchio along the river, across the bridge, and above the houses until it ramps gently down to the Palazzo Pitti where the later Medici had moved. Thinking of it as a ramp it looks appealing! Thinking of it as an armored walkway to stop the outraged people from striking back at the tyrant, it feels like a gnawing worm in the heart of the ancient republic. It’s both!

The Vasari corridor bending around the Mannelli tower, whose tall stone edifice blocks its otherwise gentle descent. Last week my story about this building made it a celebration of resistance against conquerors, as the bend in the corridor shows the citizens of the city defying the tyrant who wanted to blast his corridor through the ancient tower that was the birthright of an old respected family, and was forced to go around, leaving this bend which has stood ever since as a symbol of resistance against the tyrant. From the inside, it’s a super awkward narrow twisty space where you have to turn, and anyone with a walker or a scooter struggles to make the turns. Looks very different depending on your point of view, literally and figuratively!

Years ago I attended a conference on “The Medici: Citizens or Tyrants?” Dozens of scholars presented evidence for the family’s sincere, humble service to the republic, or for their princely power-hungry cunning. ALL the presentations had GREAT evidence, and, in the end, they came out exactly fifty-fifty: half showing evidence for humble servants of the state, half scheming tyrants. You can read the papers in this incredible book. We always worry about bias in history, but one part of bias is: What question were you asking in the first place?

Was Piero the Gouty demanding the obsequious submission of the priori (like summoning the Senate to the White House) or a disability accommodation just this once? Both, is the answer, but the same questions won’t get to both, it takes different historians asking different questions then comparing.

“Inventing the Renaissance” is a history of histories of this supposed golden age, and much of the process of making history lies in adding new questions to the braid as historians ask new and more diverse questions with each generation.

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