This is framed as being about norms in the media, but in fact it applies to public life, and public debates, more broadly.  Everyone has things that are taken for granted; everyone has things that are plausibly contested, and everyone has things that they think are simply abhorrent, and the boundaries separating...

A moderately powerful argument for recommitting to the common aim of supporting public higher education in the United States.   

Thomas Piketty...

A small observation:

Why has Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat—written in 1940-41 about the Fall of France before the Germans--become an object of especially charged interest, in thinking about the current status of France in Europe?  This article identifies this moment—it’s quite interesting; Bloch was a medievalist and one of the founders of...

I was reading around in the news today, I'm noticing the number of places where people are beginning to act as if everything is going back to normal, and so I wrote the below and shared it with people.

Just a thought:

I think we're seeing, around the world, people decide, "ok, that's it. this pandemic is over." And more and more people emerge out into ever-closer approximations of "before" behavior. Thus the structural efforts at opening restaurants, shops, etc., are inviting us to imagine the danger has passed, and we are...

Just some links today.  Don't get too excited. 

The artefact we studied, which comes from deposits dated to more than 60,000 years ago, closely resembles thousands of bone arrowheads used by the indigenous San hunter-gatherers from the 18th to the 20th centuries. It was excavated in the 1960s, but its importance was not recognised until recently, owing to confusion surrounding its age.

This piece on what “defunding the police” means is helpful in itself, and useful for background as well.

An interesting review, from a year ago of a volume of writings by Hannah Arendt that would have gone into the book on Karl Marx that she never completed.  I don't know why I didn't notice this review till now--it's pretty rich.

What an interesting work this is.  When I begin paying serious scholarly...

This is interesting about changes in US political views:

According to the 2019 Pew survey, 55 percent of white people over age 65 think too much attention is being paid to race and racial issues in America. So do 56 percent of white Americans who have a high school degree or less.

...

Again, along with the weather of today, pay attention to how the climate is changing.  I mean that metaphorically, but I think it's also literally true.

A nice backgrounder piece on the “anthropocene”.  

I try to stay somewhat at a distance from current events on this blog. I don't think I have any particular insight to offer on those events that is not available in many other places on the interwebs. What I think scholars can do, especially scholars who are not specialists on a particular topic, is continue to remind us of the larger dynamics and patterns that we see playing out in the stochastic chaos of our everyday.

It may seem strange to say, and it definitely reveals something about my disposition as it does my assessment of the state of the world, but I am an...