Hannah Arendt on W.H. Auden in The New Yorker, a piece that's begun to recirculate on the interwebs:

In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very...

This piece, on masculinity in recent movies, has me thinking.  One of the interesting points about the Trump era is the reassessment of received norms and a rather more thoroughgoing examination...

Santa's elves are already hard at work on Christmas, so I've had to outsource this work to a bunch of Icelandic trolls.  It's a different labor contract, so forgive any bumps in the production chain...

We have a special deal on the links today--two for one!  This is basket # 1.

Pretty amazing story, offering one picture of where we came from.  “This study provides a window into the first 100 thousand years of modern humans' history.”  Which means it stops about 70,000 years ago.

An...

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil...

I suppose it is understandable that humans are essentially conservative creatures.  The bare fact of entropy puts all life in a perpetual struggle to keep its energy levels up. The velocity of change in the past several centuries has probably amplified our cellular-level anxieties in that regard.  When change happens, we have to adjust. Adjusting is hard.  We don't like change. 

There are lots of reasons to want to change, of course; in particular, considering how we sometimes find almost unbearable the disjunction between reality and our beliefs about...

This is a really interesting essay--a quick conspectus of what's going on in the field of economics masquerading as a book review of Heather Boushey's book...

As promised in my last post:

Interesting piece on how climate change may have affected the rise of the Assyrian Empire, and contributed to its collapse as well.  However, the scientists are so hyperventilating about these...

I'm at a conference for a few days.  We're by the sea!  It's lovely.  Some of us will have a party on a ship in a couple of days.  I'll see all sorts of friends!  It's going to be a blast.

It will also be busy and overwhelming and I'll not have much time to myself.

I've begun to learn, after almost thirty years of conference-going, that I survive these things better with some quiet, and a regular reminder to myself that you wanted to come to this thing, and there are things about it you really...

Soil erosion reduces the productivity of ecosystems, it changes nutrient cycles and it thus directly impacts climate and society. An international team of researchers, recorded temporal changes of soil erosion by analyzing sediment deposits in more than 600 lakes worldwide. They found that the accumulation of lake sediments increased significantly on a global scale around 4,000 years ago.  Is that one way to...