I'm not a fan of a lot of contemporary writing.  It seems very shallow to me, and self-celebratory, though with little recognition of the sheer difficulty of being a real self.  I say this because this morning I came across a very interesting essay on the current state of personal essays:

For a certain...

To focus your attention not on events, but on patterns; not on ruptures, but structures; not on the weather, but the climate.  And also to remind you that there is, as Auden once put it, always an "altogether elsewhere."  Several, in fact.

Between Coronavirus and this coffee company scandal, there's plenty of evidence that the...

Here's a different kind of post.  Most of the time I use this to talk about politics and religion and scholarship.  But much of my life is lived, in my head, in thinking about and remembering poetry.  I wanted to share a poem that's been haunting me of late.

We think of ghosts as spectral, immaterial, somehow apart from the world of matter.  Yet we also think of ghosts in discrete places; ghosts are not agents of international finance, flitting about the world.  They are anchored in spots, or at most to people whom they haunt, anyway to...

In recent years there seems to have been a growing attention to the injuries of history.  We've seen it definitely with the very dramatic turn in the narration of American history vis-a-vis native genocide and especially slavery and anti-black racism; we're seeing it with arguments about British colonialism (and English abuse of Ireland).  We see it in many places.

This is, I think, a good thing, and a sign of moral strength, though it hurts.  In fact I would argue it's part of the wrenching reconceptualization of our present through reconceiving our past (...

To read if you want.  Better than arguing with people on Twitter or Facebook, anyway, where no one's a winner. 

How Oumuamua—the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system, in 2017—might have been formed.  

“Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze...

Stuff to ponder, ruminate over, while taking your daily exercise, perhaps.  

This is neat:

“A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct—the largest number ever unearthed in a...

Just to read, think about.

The political struggles we are engaged in today are rooted in the survival after the Civil War, of a racist and patriarchal vision of the self, society, and government, and its escape from the Old South to the Far West.  So the book...

Some links from hither and yon:

Earlier this year, I discussed a piece on George Steiner and what he did, and didn’t do.  Today I share a kind, if mercifully general, encomium for...

A mega-drought seems to have begun in the American Southwest, according to this study.  And this good news: 

The 20th century was the wettest century in the entire 1200-year record. It was during that time that population boomed, and that has continued. "The 20th century gave us an overly optimistic view of how much water is potentially available," said Cook. "It goes to show...

Just for you. 

Reparations for black America: this is a careful, lucid, and seriously detailed proposal.  Not just for why, but also for how to make it happen.  Worth reading. And for the Brookings Institution to publish this?  Times they are a-changing, when policy wonks and...