So this is a bit counter-intuitive, especially given where we are in the world right now, but I've been sitting on it for a bit and want to think out loud.

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking of blogging as a daily activity.  I mean, I really don’t know where that imperative came from.  But it’s here, definitely; I can feel the iron of it wrapping around my soul.

Loneliness today, and how to exist in it: “The weird gift of loneliness is that it grounds us in our common humanity. Other people have been afraid, waited, listened for news. Other people have survived. The whole world is in the same boat. However frightened we may feel, we have never been less alone.”  

Social isolation? The Faroes say, hold my beer.  A...

Some links for your Thursday.  Almost Friday, people!  

An opinionated, but still interesting and worth hearing, perspective on the crisis in the academy, which for this guy is mostly a crisis in the humanities, and also a crisis caused by traditional institutions.  What I would like to see is more information about the rise of for-profit institutions...

Mostly I don't find this review very gripping, playing as it does with the whole "end of [x]" genre, in this case about the novel, but then it has these two paragraphs which seem to me both significantly right and worth mulling over:

The art of writing, too, has undergone a metamorphosis. Once a way to engage with reality, it has become primarily a status-seeking...

Tips for surviving the now and seeing the big picture:

An article about “one of the oldest political frontiers in the world,” the foothills of the Zagros mountains.  For five thousand years the border separating present-day Iraq and present-day Iran has been here.  There’s even a new “discovery” of a wall there—the Gawri Chen wall—though presumably for the people living there, it was no...

The story of the “Florentine Codex,” one of the few documents saving a remembrance of pre-Columbian Aztec life; it was written in the midst of plague in Mexico City in the late 16th century.  An inspiration for people today, writing Coronavirus diaries, or Coronavirus...

Here's a just-so story: Liberalism emerged when bourgeois economics enabled (some) individuals to have enough material wealth, and thus power, to stand up to the state and its staff, which mostly meant in early modern Europe, a struggle between the nobility and the Bourgeoisie.  Liberalism was about securing "freedom," and the main danger was the state.  There was always subsidiary attention to other forms of consolidated institutional power, but the centrality of the state was always granted.  Perhaps now we have to reconceive the dangers, to see corporate power...

This is interesting:

any critic who wants to write something lasting—who believes that criticism can be a species of literature—must write partly out of aggression. Or perhaps a better word is animus, in the sense of a fixed intention, a partiality.

Must animus be mean, though?  That's another question.  What would it mean to have an edge, but not be mean?...

The coronavirus as a “global event.”  This seems intelligent to me, but a bit underbaked.  The author doesn’t really explore what it means to be a “global” event.  Here’s one feature I wish he had spoken about: the right context for this event is now the globe, not really anything smaller than that.  There are local differences, but the differences in national...

A set of things to take your mind off of the One Thing:

How can we protect the American prairie?  It's an amazing place, and deserves our protection.  This piece suggests some small steps...