A raw, cold day!  Brrrrr. But now I'm sitting by the fire, warming myself with the happiness that comes with sharing these links with you.  

Practicing gratitude is an important skill, and...

Here is a piece that contrasts the style (micro and macro) of traditional "big books" like Zadie Smith's work, with the new move to "autofiction" and memoir-like genres, like Knausgaard's My...

Small stuff just for a quiet Sunday evening.

There was a "Mutual Admiration Society" of women writers at Oxford in the 1910s and 1920s.  Dorothy Sayers was one of them, and they...

Hannah Arendt on W.H. Auden in The New Yorker, a piece that's begun to recirculate on the interwebs:

In the forties, there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very...

This piece, on masculinity in recent movies, has me thinking.  One of the interesting points about the Trump era is the reassessment of received norms and a rather more thoroughgoing examination...

Santa's elves are already hard at work on Christmas, so I've had to outsource this work to a bunch of Icelandic trolls.  It's a different labor contract, so forgive any bumps in the production chain...

We have a special deal on the links today--two for one!  This is basket # 1.

Pretty amazing story, offering one picture of where we came from.  “This study provides a window into the first 100 thousand years of modern humans' history.”  Which means it stops about 70,000 years ago.

An...

Washington, D.C.
October 3, 1863

By the President of the United States of America.

A Proclamation.

The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God. In the midst of a civil...

I suppose it is understandable that humans are essentially conservative creatures.  The bare fact of entropy puts all life in a perpetual struggle to keep its energy levels up. The velocity of change in the past several centuries has probably amplified our cellular-level anxieties in that regard.  When change happens, we have to adjust. Adjusting is hard.  We don't like change. 

There are lots of reasons to want to change, of course; in particular, considering how we sometimes find almost unbearable the disjunction between reality and our beliefs about...

This is a really interesting essay--a quick conspectus of what's going on in the field of economics masquerading as a book review of Heather Boushey's book...