So sorry I've been silent.  It's been crazy around here.  But I've been storing stuff up, even if I haven't been sharing it with you all.  Here's a small down payment.

Intriguing fact--there are more people living alone than ever before.  As a species, the only previous examples of large-scale efforts at living alone are religious—anchorites in various traditions, and the like. Are there lessons to draw from the anchoritic traditions for today?

Hope for the American chestnut, almost wiped out by a blight in the first third of the twentieth century.

"No word in the Hebrew Bible can be rendered as monotheism."  A fascinating look at how monotheism developed across the centuries that the Torah was written down.  Crucial here was Second Isaiah: "The shift from the vaguer notions in the Shema or Song of the Sea about loyalty to YHWH to the monotheistic notions of Second Isaiah that YHWH is the only God, culminate in the philosophical monotheism of the Middle Ages." 

More on aging: Here's a great piece on Michael Apted's "seven up" series, which has tracked the lives of fourteen British boys and girls, now women and men, since they were seven years old, in 1963, with films every seven years. It's now about to finish filming "63 up," which will be released in 2020.  It's an amazing tracking of peoples' ordinary lives across the lifespan, including the life of the guy who has filmed almost all of it, Michael Apted.  The movies--I've only seen clips of them--are worth our all watching.  

Three interviews with historians--Gordon Wood, James McPherson, and James Oakes--on the NYT 1619 project.  They don't think the project is very well-grounded in scholarship.  They're all emeritus, so while they're extremely distinguished and accomplished historians, none of them are on the cutting edge.  This is interesting, though I'm not sure what to think of it yet.

And more: a good piece--a bit more ambivalent than it lets on--about the low-simmer controversy about the 1619 project.  It deserves your attention.  

This is totally accurate.  How did I miss it when it came out in March?