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 interesting piece. Capitalism may not be moving towards revolution, but it is undoubtedly a series of turbulent crises, which generate creative destruction again, and again, and again.  (There's a lot more here to think about than just that, but I hope you agree that that is enough.)

On this: here is a totally fascinating story on the sub economies within the larger economy that is the Amazon retail empire.  As this other story suggests, it is reasonable to suspect that the ambition of that corporation is to replace the free market as the inescapable medium within which goods are exchanged.  That is, I suspect its ambitions are to become the economy as a whole.  Three-dimensional (or maybe more dimensional) integration.

A challenging piece on Gen X by a Gen-Xer, indicting the class of people for being insufficiently revolutionary.  I don't buy it, but it's a point of view.

My main scholarly institutional association, the American Academy of Religion, has produced a set of guidelines on what they call “religious literacy quote. It is an interesting idea, though I would rather have people gain this literacy in high school, and have college be a space for more critical investigations and forms of learning.

I hope that everyone is having a quiet day.  Our here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, I've started a fire in our fireplace.  We'll keep it running all day, I hope.