This piece seems importantly on-target to me, especially about American narcissism.  And about this too:

In trying to process and respond to Soleimani’s killing, the left finds itself in a bind, torn between two competing impulses. The first impulse combines an opposition to Western imperialism with a justified skepticism toward the use of U.S. military force. Human beings desire, or perhaps even need, moral clarity. Considering America’s destructive record in the Middle East, it is easy to assume that we are the problem, particularly when the resort to military action is buttressed by murky legal rationales. The second impulse is the left’s long-standing tradition of solidarity with the victims of repression and with populations rather than the regimes that subjugate them. In the unique context of Soleimani and the Iranian regime, this second concern comes into direct conflict with the first.

What Howard Thurman, Sue Bailey Thurman, and Benjamin Mays learned from, and about, Gandhi in visiting India in the 1930s, and how it changed American religious involvement in public life.

Anyone interested in Hegel or Idealism will find this piece, and the pieces it points to, helpful. Brandom is very good, even if (a) his beard is ridiculous and (b) his interpretation of Hegel is contestable.  He's just smart, erudite, and thoughtful.  And those three are distinct, and do not always go together.

“Personally, I think the left is losing around the world,” she said in an interview, “because they focus too much on redistribution and not enough on the creation of wealth.”  A nice piece about Mariana Mazzucato, an economist of growth who finds a space for, as one of her books puts it, The Entrepeneurial State.

Throwback to 2016 and the moment when a self-learning "chatbot" was released free on the interwebs, and became a "racist asshole" in less than 24 hours.  I don't know whether to laugh or cry.  Then again, as with so much of our age, maybe it doesn't have to be an either/or.

A nice piece about NPR's "Tiny Desk Concert" series.  Personally, my favorite of the ones I've watched was listening to St Paul and the Broken Bones, who I still think are one of the breakout bands of the decade, and will endure.

The story of Sin-leqi-unninni, the "editor" of the Gilgamesh epic, who took the disparate stories, many of them in Old Babylonian (basically Akkadian, c. 2000 BCE), and organized them according to (likely) his own best judgment, and translated them into Middle Babylonian, somewhere between 1300 and 1000 BCE. 

Even in the light cast by great scholarship, it can seem as though the journey has only just begun. Of the estimated 3,600 lines of Gilgamesh, 3,200 are known in whole or in part. Some of the parts are very small, and the complexity and ambiguity of the text will never let scholars rush ahead. In the next century or two the poem will not acquire even the relative stability of the Homeric texts. 

This is true about archival work around the world, by the way--there is tremendous labor ahead of us, in getting reliable pictures of a number of ancient works.  Universities may be under siege, at least rhetorically, at least in the United States; but the future of scholarship, which has been hosted by universities in the past few centuries, is vast and promising.

Speaking of Gilgamesh, here's a piece about the poem masquerading as a review of a book about the poem and its afterlife. 

May you all have a good start to the week.