Wasteland Wrap-up #40

Paris scenes, declassified documents, drug cartel economics, a nuclear cake...

We have officially been in Paris for over a week now — it feels like ages, but it has not been. To say that it is very charming and lovely here feels like quite a silly and obvious understatement, but it is true.

The lights of the nearby Odessa café, which is very pretty, almost impressionistic, even with a spot of rain…

I enjoyed New York’s energy a lot of the time, but it was much more frantic and gritty than Paris feels like. That crowded energy of New York was very energizing to me when I first moved there, but after 10 years in the area it started to feel just tiresome, as did the crowds and the cost.

Lyndon takes in the Boulevard du Montparnasse while we get a lunch…

Granted, we are still in the month of August, which many Parisians take as a vacation month, so perhaps it will become more frantic when people are back next week. We will see!

Lyndon’s love of sunbathing has reached new heights, here, thanks to a lot of end-of-summer sun and large Parisian windows.

We live in an area that is sort of half self-consciously charming and half very practical (“utterly without charm,” as one guidebook puts it, describing the commercial activities nearby), which, for me anyway, feels like a very positive mix for someone living in a place (as opposed to just visiting it).

Lyndon in one of the “charmless” areas near Tour Montparnasse — he does not seem to mind.

Separately, I received two documents from the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration as a result of a FOIA request I filed in 2023; by DOE standards, this is a pretty speedy reply. I have actually received many more FOIA responses over the past month (some from very old requests indeed) than I have received in a long time, along with a letter from the NNSA which requires all people with outstanding FOIA requests to inventory them all in order for them to stay active. My sense is that there is some mandate to clear out the backlog through one method or the other.

The introduction for the 1949 report… more soon.

The reports are two Los Alamos studies, one from 1947 and the other from 1949, on how many nuclear weapons it would require to make the atmosphere toxically radioactive (answer: a lot more than it would take to destroy civilization as we know it). I will be posting the new documents next week on here with some commentary.