Mellow day, some links for you, wherever you are.

“I doubt, in its 200-year history, the University has ever been quieter.”  This is true—a series of pictures of the eerily, spookily empty spaces of the University of Virginia, my school, in the midst of Coronavirus.  

Work out like Nelson Mandela did on Robben Island.

"Human responses to climate and ecosystem change in ancient Arabia" is the topic of a new study, which looks pretty interesting to me.

This is a fun behind-the-scenes look at the 2005 season of the Washington nationals, the season that they came from Montreal to Washington, and it was full of chaos. If you’re a Nats fan, it’s worth reading.

This review, by Michael Ignatieff, of a book about how racism is the decisive force in American public life, almost gets the core point of the book; but then recoils from acknowledging it, suggesting instead that what the nation has to do is simply try harder.  I am all for trying.  I am all for effort.  But I think that the evidence of resisting the obvious is all over Ignatieff’s review.  (Which is not surprising, given that he only lived in the US as an adult, for a brief time--non-Americans are often bewildered by US racial cues, in my experience.)  I’ll look out for this book.  

This book looks good too—about a bouregois man’s struggle with the various sub-communities of our world seeking to escape it, one way or the other.  I’m especially taken by the suggestion he gets from Sarah Sharma, and the gendered nature of escapism vs. an “ethics of care.” Knowing a bit about the tradition of “ethics of care,” I suspect she’s on to something.  I’ll check her work out. 

Practice the ethics of care today, wherever you are.