Just out of the oven.  Well, sort of.

Good review of two books on walking.  

This is...

A new week!  Enjoy every day, as much as you can.

The Coronavirus is the first truly global event.  This observation is made in this piece, but the author says little beyond the...

I am currently reading Kyle Harper’s quite stimulating book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and come across an interesting idea that to me speaks to our current situation.

Historians have been thinking about disease and its relationship to human history for some time. For me, an entry into this literature was Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian...

Just some literary pieces today, mostly.

A good older piece (from 2017) about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah.  She’s right about the “cannibalistic ethos” of the American left, too:

It swiftly, gleefully, brutally eats its own. There is such a quick assumption of ill will and an increasing sanctimony...

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...