Because in a time of social distancing, this is as close to Saturday Night Fever as you're gonna get.

Ancient footprints, an instant preserved in dried volcanic ash.  

Brookings demographer William Frey analyzes the changes in population in cities and suburbs over the past decade. The headline is that cities grew early in the decade, but then patterns seem to slow or even reverse.  Given that the growth in city populations happened in the midst of the last economic downturn, will that mean that this economic crisis, brought on by the pandemic, will lead to a renewed growth in cities?

Good survey of a new report on the humanities in higher ed right now.

Interesting profile of Lionel Shriver, a controversial author.  One fact I didn’t know here is that her father is Donald Shriver, onetime President of Union Theological Seminary in New York.  Also, We Need to Talk about Kevin and The Post-Birthday World are both, in their separate ways, devastating novels.

This looks like a good thing: a nice collection of free e-books, cleanly formatted, available for downloading.

There’s an interesting analytic distinction between political norms and political values in this piece, and it illuminates some of the complexities of political action.  I  do think, however, that any suggestion that a focus on values to the neglect of norms does need to be carefully watched, as that feels to me like a first step onto a gradually sloping, increasingly slippery, path.

Here’s an interesting idea: the "information bottleneck.”  Not sure about the quantitative historiography in which this is embedded, but it’s at least suggestive.   

Be well, everyone.  June is almost here.