Almost the weekend!  Free time ahead.  How will you fill up the abyss of meaninglessness that yawns before you?  What divertissements will you use to stave off the brooding awareness of death...

Happy birthday!  It's not my birthday but I bet it's roughly 1/365.25ths of the world's popluation's birthday, so to roughly 20 million people--happy birthday!!

I have a gift: Ten different...

I read an interesting piece on Italy yesterday.  It seems like people despair of the place, and never think it'll get better.  (Except in a few corners of the country, anyway.)

What’s...

A cold and wet day where I am.  Hope you are warm and dry, wherever you are.

Interesting fragments of an analysis of what’s going on in higher ed right now.

This is way cool: a...

The website Lit Hub has a genre of posts they do from time to time, "close readings" of various texts.  Some of them are good, some more meh.  But the texts they choose are always worth reading.  He...

Here where I am, it's rainy.  Outside, I mean.  Where I actually am, is inside a cosy house.  Which as you probably know is one of the best places to be on a cold and rainy day.

In...

An interesting review of two books, Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economists' Hour and Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man, are about the triumph of the economists in public policy, and also latterly...

Do these manuscripts change Buddhist history?  Well to most of us in "the West," NO, because we just don't know very much about Buddhist history.  But maybe we should.  (Here's a brief piece from...

Is Malcolm Gladwell "America’s most important public intellectual"?  That's not a title I would have granted him.  But the author of this piece makes an interesting case for Gladwell being central...

It's stormy and blustery where I am.  How is it where you are?  Still, despite all that, a good day.

First:

"As trees grow, they absorb details about their surroundings into...