Over the past few years, podcasts have become one of my favorite things to do while exercising or doing work where I need some preoccupation—cleaning, cooking, and the like.  They're great; perhaps they're allowing me to be distracted by a kind of higher intellectualized divertissement, and perhaps they're letting me escape from the silence I truly need; but I love them nonetheless.

One of my favorite podcasts is...

What caused the Younger Dryas cooling period?  It was the environmental episode that perhaps sparked the turn to agriculture and cities, and civilization.  Some scientists believe they have evidence now that it was not a meteor strike, but a period of vulcanism.  

Stefan Collini, not a mean public writer himself, on uncovering evidence of...

Sorry for my delay.  Nothing big--just change of station, getting settled in, etc..  All hale & hearty, safe & sound, hunky & dory.  

Now we return to our regularly scheduled programming.

This piece makes a common argument that religious belief has played and continues to play an important part in the struggle to overcome White supremacy in America.  The author points to Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. William J. Barber II as contemporary...

It's late in the day and I've said nothing on here.  We're self-quarantining, which is nice--we stay in our house--but begins to feel like we're in a bubble out of time in general.  Actually, that's nice too.

Is it the higher ed apocalypse? Maybe not. Gonna be thinking about...

Here is a really nice piece on what anthropology is doing: offering a critique of the "here and now" by looking at the "there and then".  Boas and his generation were engaged in a critique of the metaphysics of race, and white supremacy, which explicitly governed US policy, law, and cultural self-understanding, at least until World War II.  He also plays up the way this generation of anthropological theorists, many of them women, critically assessed the...

I agree with this piece on the importance of making distinctions.  The practice of making distinctions and weighing proportional significances can sound too much like casuistry, and casuistry can easily sound deeply, irredeemably corrupt.  (That seems to have been Pascal's view, for starters.)  But, as people who study ethics know, while casuistry can become corrupt, it...

The import of community colleges as drivers of immediate and medium-term economic development cannot be gainsaid.  This report shows how valuable and significant those institutions are in the United States, even from a narrow economic perspective. 

They can sharpen their focus on serving economic development, it is true; and the report makes a good case for that.  But as an educator, I want them also...

One of my favorite lines in literature is from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

So much of human life happens this way.  So much of social change is like this, too.

Two 

The Walkman is 41 years old.  I must have gotten my first Walkman by about 1982 or 83, I think.  It’s an amazing artifact, and as this piece makes clear, came on the scene just at a moment when people turned inward, toward more social isolation especially in large urban settings—and perhaps in part caused that inward turn.  Really worth reading.