I came across this piece a few weeks ago and it seems right to me.  Short story: since 1990, global homicide rates have declined by 20%--that's a huge decline.  You may not know it, but over the...

Flowers!  Well, no, not flowers.  But links!  Lurvly.  If less fragrant.

As I have grown up, I have come to appreciate Frank Sinatra's singing, as (in my uninformed opinion, anyway) the...

Small little post:

I like the Google N-gram viewer, which I use from time to time, more as provocation.  It allows me to check on any word, or phrase, and see how frequently it appears in...

Another in an occasional series...  

Gossman's book is a lovely study of the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Swiss city of Basel in the second half of the nineteenth century, when its...

I have a long-standing interest in T.S.Eliot, at times bordering on obsession.  He's someone whose thinking I find enormously powerful. At times the racism and anti-semitism of his work (which is, I...

Just because today's a special day.  Not because I'm engaged in New Year's cleaning, or anything. 

Wow. Forget Triumph of the Will--it's the Hallmark Christmas movie that is the most...

This piece, from the summer, still strikes me as very apt for the New Year.

Fashionable fatalism is an easy thing for an academic to engage in, because we are educated to have critical minds...

Happy New Year!  A pretty oblique post to reality today.  

Up through the early twentieth century, Greek and Latin classics as a discipline was understood in a fundamentally textual way.  Texts...