Some more stuff here, and my opinions thereupon:

This review does a good job of telling the story behind this book. But I also think the reviewer goes to great lengths to excuse the behavior of Prof Karen King, or to deflect attention from her behavior.  Has she...

Yesterday I had what, at the end of the evening, I thought was my most successful day so far of the semester; but then, my wife and I were awake for half of the night dealing with a mysteriously sick child.  So it feels like we're back to square one this morning.  Oh well!  Here are some links for you.  

“There is a big conversation to have about what to do about Turkey,” a senior European diplomat said. “But it’s not for now.”  After Trump leaves office do you have to walk in front of number of foreign policy...

Here, public school begins today. Our son starts seventh grade! Of course, it's all remote. What a year it will be. 

Meanwhile I have links for your own continued education: 

Using some advanced mathematics to talk about cryptology; most of this is just beyond me. But it seems pretty cool...

Some stuff for you all!

This is an incredible review—ten years old now—of Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, a book about post-war American fiction writing.  Elif Batuman really takes on the book in a serious way, from a position of strong dissent, but she does not, I think, slander the book, trash or disparage it; she just disagrees.  It’s very...

Good stuff here.

A sharp essay about English historians of the mid-Twentieth century, such as EH Carr, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the like.  They were genuinely popular historians, that is, historians who is writing was not only for fellow professional academics, but for an intelligent general audience.  What happened to render such an audience...

A great essay, by Anthony Grafton, on Arnaldo Momigliano, his revered teacher.  Anyone who knows Grafton knows that for him to revere somebody, that somebody must be really impressive.  The simplest way to complete this thought is just to say: Momigliano was.  

Above all, he told me stories—the principal...

Do artists cross ideological lines these days, in their fan bases?  It’s hard to think of someone, maybe Marilynne Robinson’s novels?  What about movies or music; has aesthetics been colonized by partisanship?  

It's a new month!  Always a chance to start afresh.  Read some stuff!

A good analysis of the 1994 crime bill—a topic of interest now because of Biden’s support for it back in the day—and a careful accounting for what we can say about its effects, and what it was doing at the time.  As ever, policy...

I picked this book up in a charity shop in the UK, and having read a couple of his history books, and knowing of his work with the so-called “grand strategy“ undergraduate program at Yale University, I was interested to see what he would do here. But it was not good.

There’s a lot here to sniff at, legitimately or no. First of all, he relies on something called dictionary.com for his word definitions. This reminds me of...

I’ve yammered on about demographics a lot on this blog, but for reasons I think are important.  It turns out that we don’t think about demographics much, imagining that the future will be a lot like the past.  But that is not necessarily true.  

First, two