Welcome to March, if "welcome" is the right word.

Some of this is platitudinous, and some of this is inane, but some of this was very useful, at least for me, both in introducing new ideas to me and in consolidating or re-formulating ideas or approaches I had already, but latently and obscurely, possessed.  

New study argues that the dinosaurs died out from the asteroid blast, not the volcanic eruptions that created the Deccan flats in India. 

Two approaches to recovering the American Chestnut.  Worth considering both.

We have learned a lot about economics from the event of the past decade. This piece nicely encapsulates some of the lessons that we might take away from this period. It would be useful if we did.

Large scale restoration of the Ghent altarpiece is underway, maybe even nearing completion. This is an incredible legacy of the (Northern) Renaissance, and for other Camus fans out there, It was one of the panels of this other piece – – the one known as “The Just Judges “– – that Camus’s character John-Baptiste Clamence stole in his novel The Fall.

This is quite a feast of books, and interesting reflections on all the books by a thoughtful demographer and commentator on Higher Ed.

Scientists found that emotions have different meanings across 2,474 spoken languages, but that there are universal sources of structure.

Oddly, another article on the same report highlights the discovery of difference.   

Is this six in one hand, half-dozen the other?  Or ideological framing?

A thought-provoking excerpt of a book about imagination, this excerpt is really more about inspiration--about the phenomenon, common among authors, of feeling like the ideas or the events you were putting down come from nowhere inside yourself, but rather from outside yourself, or at least outside your conscious self, or anyway, they are not from you.  The book apparently has some kind of pop theory about why this happens. I may look up the account of what happened, but I’m much more interested in the fact that it happens, than in this guy‘s account of why. It is again one more example of the way that the realities of our lives are much deeper than the rather thin, and narrow, picture of our lives that we operate with.