The coronavirus as a “global event.” This seems intelligent to me, but a bit underbaked. The author doesn’t really explore what it means to be a “global” event. Here’s one feature I wish he had spoken about: the right context for this event is now the globe, not really anything smaller than that. There are local differences, but the differences in national location are actually far more “leaky” than before. People are watching what happens in Italy. Then we pay attention to what’s going on in India. Then all eyes are on the US. And everyone is aware of China’s patterns. The national patchwork is no longer a set of distinct and isolated cells, but more like a mosaic of different strategies. And success—or failure—in one strategy can have powerful effects, not always foreseeable, for others. In other words, the “globality” of the phenomenon is immediate to us in a way that other events like this have not so visibly been.
What Thoreau’s Walden can teach us about social distancing.
“If you don’t explain why people once believed things that today can sound ridiculous, you run the risk of turning the history and practice of religion into at best a curiosity, at worst a freak show.” A brief review of a Bart Ehrman book on Hell. Ehrman is distinctively himself, of course, but he’s also the example of someone equipped with ancient languages but little historical sensibility. And that is why I am posting this: His failings on this issue are more common across the field of “Early Christian Literature” than many scholars have fully registered. Scholars in that field are trained more as classicists than historians, about languages and texts, not as much about context, nor about historiographical method. That has changed a bit relative to thirty years ago, but when compared with the changes in ancient history, the changes in literary scholarship are inadequate. In some sense, this is all a consequence of the decomposition of the (older, more conservative) vfields of "Patristics" and "Biblical Theology" into "Late Antiquity" and "Early Christian Literature," and now three different disciplines (at least) train people in these areas--religious studies/theology, classics, and history. The differences between the approaches are more profound than many have realized.
Little piece on Newton, in the background of which is the shallow whiggism of contemporary thinking—“it wasn’t that hard to do what Newton did, after all math had only really been invented about thirty years before him” and “hey! If you want a good bio of Newton, Gleick’s bio is great!” This is crap. Read Westfall’s Never at Rest and you’ll understand something of the depth of this stuff. “Three Quarks Daily,” forsooth.
Good essay on Judith Shklar, liberal theorist against cruelty, among other things.
How boars became domesticated into pigs in the Ancient Near East. Fascinating hypothesis: “For pigs, the process of domestication probably began as a result of two changes. First, wild boar found Neolithic villages, with their stores of cereal grains and garbage, attractive places for foraging food. At the same time, beginning around 9700 BCE, Neolithic people began to hunt wild boar with greater frequency – a departure from boar-avoiding hunting tactics of their Paleolithic ancestors. Domestic dogs, which appeared in the Near East around 11,000 BCE, were probably key elements of these hunts.”
The banality of genius: Einstein in Bohemia. It makes me think of several times when I’ve known geniuses before they were famous, or perhaps outside the glow of their fame. Those of us who live in Bohemia do pretty well, but the people in the metropolis are doing something else entirely, and I’m not totally convinced they’re doing better.
I talked about the “megadrought” that some think led to the downfall of the Assyrian Empire back in November, and now here’s another piece from January on that. Still seems interesting, but over-hyped.
Well! I'm a bit snarky today. I am not sure why. It's Saturday, everybody! The weekend! SO different from the working week, amIright?
Take care; wash hands. We'll get through this.