Nothing too exciting today--just some cool links: 

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is a place where you can keep up with the latest scholarly work published in classics. Since they consider their time-frame to run from about 1200 BCE till about 1000 CE, this is a wide scope of time.  It produces interesting reviews of interesting books.  Here, one major classics scholar reviews a book suggesting a new way to think about ancient literature, in a much more sociologically wide way.  Very interesting.

Amartya Sen is very polite about it, but this is the most comprehensive response I have yet seen to those who have written that England’s impact on India through its subjugation of it for almost 200 years was essentially benign.  Also nice shiv move on the English and cricket.

Good podcast on what makes us work so much—too much, in fact.  

Wow, a piece on the development of standard weights in antiquity—a kind of basic standard metric for trading commodities.  They looked at “the weight systems in use between Western Europe and the Indus Valley from 3,000-1,000 BC. Analysis of 2,274 balance weights from 127 sites revealed that, with the exception of those from the Indus Valley, new and very similar units of weight appeared in a gradual spread west of Mesopotamia.”

This guy is a republican state senator in Michigan. He ran the investigation into allegations of ballot stuffing in Michigan in the 2020 election and found it all nonsense. Now he’s terrified that his fellow Republicans are heading towards large scale violent conflict. That worries me.

I agree with this, which, because it is by Bret Stephens, is making me reassess my life in general.  But it has links to evidence, so check. This esp is true and widely applicable: "A regime that lies nonstop to others eventually lies to itself as well."

Be well everybody.  This "Delta variant" is scaring me a little bit--should I go back to wearing masks when I visit my favorite coffee shops, or perhaps always sit outside?  Not sure yet...