I try to stay somewhat at a distance from current events on this blog. I don't think I have any particular insight to offer on those events that is not available in many other places on the interwebs. What I think scholars can do, especially scholars who are not specialists on a particular topic, is continue to remind us of the larger dynamics and patterns that we see playing out in the stochastic chaos of our everyday.
It may seem strange to say, and it definitely reveals something about my disposition as it does my assessment of the state of the world, but I am an optimist about political change in the United States right now. I believe in the long term demographic patterns that suggest right when reactionary white nationalism is a declining force. But I also think that a cold-eyed look at American elections since November 2016 which point to a rather large scale recoil from what Trump and the GOP represent. But, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it, "the mode by which the inevitable comes to pass is effort." We have a lot of work to do. At different levels. I hope the stuff I post here, and my work as a scholar more broadly, aids, a very little bit, in that work.
Robert Shiller, of “Irrational Exuberance” fame, is a bit gloomy about the economic consequences of the pandemic. He worries people are expecting things to snap back to normal, when history shows they often do not.
Who were the Canaanites? A new genetic study hopes to help with the answer, a little bit.
While the direct contribution of the Canaanites to modern populations cannot be accurately quantified, the data suggest that a broader Near Eastern component, including populations from the Caucasus and the Zagros Mountains, likely account for more than 50 percent of the ancestry of many Arabic-speaking and Jewish groups living in the region today.
A review of a book by a theist about atheism. A nice thought:
Ryrie’s “emotional history” of atheism is clustered around two emotions that, he finds, affect our belief and unbelief in a particularly strong manner: anger (under which he places the various “grudges nurtured against an all-embracing Christian society, against the Church in particular and often also against the God who oversaw it all”) and anxiety (“the unsettling, reluctant inability to keep a firm grip on doctrines that people were convinced, with their conscious minds, were true”).
As a professed defense of John Barth, this review is too long, loosely casual and so rambling and free-wheeling it’s like the stochastic peregrinations of a buffalo herd on a prairie before migration season sets in, and it seems not to know what the complaints about Barth are (centrally intellectual laziness) and never quite gets around to addressing them. In other words, it’s a little self-indulgent--the kind of defense you could expect a Barth partisan to produce.
“Best Translated Book Awards”. The Drndić in particular looks spectacular.
This is long, but it is a fascinating account of the psychology of collaboration and complicity. Applebaum has wide historical understanding of the complexities of these behaviors, and the people who succumb to these temptations. It is very much worth your while.
A terrific analysis of one painting—Thomas Eakins’s “The Gross Clinic”—a great moment in 19th century art, engaging realism, the nature of what can be represented, the desire to know, and the fear of, or repulsion at, knowing. This is a really cool piece.
A nice story about the “Pratt Gingko tree” on UVA’s Central Grounds, near the Rotunda, and how it’s being used to produce other trees for the UVA library’s renovation.
This is really interesting, if also sad.
What exactly caused the rapid Neanderthal demise has remained elusive for a long time. This new computer modeling approach identifies competitive exclusion as the likely reason for the disappearance of our cousins. "Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for the last 300,000 years and experienced and adapted to abrupt climate shifts, that were even more dramatic than those that occurred during the time of Neanderthal disappearance. It is not a coincidence that Neanderthals vanished just at the time, when Homo sapiens started to spread into Europe" says Timmermann. He adds, "the new computer model simulations show clearly that this event was the first major extinction caused by our own species.”
And another piece, this one on the megafauna extinction event in the Americas around 13,000 years ago.
While the research team acknowledges it is difficult to assess the exact impact of human hunting on the megafauna, they believe there is now sufficient evidence to suggest our ancestors were the main driver of the disappearance of ice age species such as the mammoth and saber-toothed cat.
Short story from both accounts: humans are the cause.