When Isabel Sawhill at Brookings confesses that she has become “wobbly” on the neoliberal paradigm, things are getting interesting, at last.

The new spiritual consumerism! Except it’s not really new, no matter what this journalist says—I guess she never heard of “retail therapy.” The not new, but classic form of journalistic consumerism is to declaim some long-standing behavior as “new”. It’s not, don’t buy it. In several senses. But, on the other hand, maybe what’s new is the shift from a “therapeutic” to a “spiritual” mode of framing this?

Eighteen hour flights? Sounds . . . not so pleasant, to me. But this piece unpacks the history of very long air travel.

Perhaps the problem the United States faces vis-à-vis the Confederacy and the Civil War would benefit from Learning from the Germans, as Susan Neiman’s new book suggests.

Deep history is on an entirely different level than the “events” that mark our lives. The French Annales historians tried to tell us this. Here’s a study of how we had pretty much domesticated the world by 1000 BCE.  And another piece about the same.

While we’re on the Anthropocene, here’s a much abbreviated version of Yuval Harari’s much-lauded but sloppily-written book, Sapiens.