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...

Because in a time of social distancing, this is as close to Saturday Night Fever as you're gonna get.

Ancient footprints, an instant preserved in dried volcanic ash.  

Brookings demographer...

Just an observation.  When people in the UK start talking about the National Health Service as “The New Church of England,” as Timothy Garton Ash is quoted here as suggesting, they may be saying more than they realize.

First of all, in coming decades, healthcare will continue to occupy a larger and larger share of our financial resources (as societies, regardless of whether...

Just another non-manic Monday.

Sounds like a fun new book by Wendy Lesser on Scandinavian crime fiction:

Lesser is especially interested in how Scandinavia and Scandinavians stack up against America and Americans. “Crime, in Scandinavia, is rarely seen as the bad action of a single bad actor,” she writes, invoking a...

This is an interesting article to me.  Its argument is that technology and the sheer velocity of life in our world is making it hard to be “deeply literate”.  In many ways, I want this argument to be right—I too fear that we are losing something important as a culture and as humans.  

But it’s weird that he anchors his argument in the evolutionary...

Good news!  ICANN has stopped a private equity company from buying the rights to control all .org internet addresses.  How is it possible that this was even conceivable?

Even economists no...

You think I've been sleeping?  Well, maybe I have been sleeping.  But also surfing.

“Beyond the bluster of Washington and Beijing, a fluid working group has emerged, with a rotating cast...