At first, I envied Austen’s characters this daily face-to-face social interaction: I often go weeks without seeing even my closest friends in person, staying in touch via Facebook or SMS instead. But I soon found myself wondering how the inhabitants of Austen’s world put up with this constant pressure to socialize—until I realized that we face just as much demand for interaction, albeit in digital form. 

A nice piece on what we can learn from Jane Austen about keeping a self amidst the buzz of "the social".   

Powerful and disturbing.  Ceija Stojka, a Roma survivor of Auschwitz, painted more than a thousand images of the camps. "Her art stood up for the possibility — even the necessity — for human creativity to represent, and take ownership of, the darkest chapters of history."

Another part, a distinct DNA line, of the human race that has "ghosted" us?

“The data, recovered from four individuals buried at an iconic archaeological site in Cameroon between 3,000 and 8,000 years ago, enhance our understanding of the deep ancestral relationships among populations in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains the region of greatest human diversity today.”

Here's another report on the findings, in the NYTimes, explaining more about what it tells us concerning human populations in Africa:  

Only two writers were responsible for the Samaritan Ostraka, a collection of potsherds with early Hebrew writing from the eighth century BC.  

If only two scribes wrote the examined Samaria texts contemporaneously and both were located in Samaria rather than in the countryside, this would indicate a palace bureaucracy at the peak of the kingdom of Israel's prosperity.  

Last, two things about movies:

An OK list, but I'd like some others on it. First of all I'm very happy that Lone Star is on this, as it is a hugely under-appreciated movie I think.  But where are two westerns--not High Noon but The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and also The Searchers?  Both tremendously about politics, at least as much as the other films on this list are.  What movies would you like to see on this?   

Sweet oral history notes on the movie “Before Sunrise,” one of the most charming films of my youth. I wish we could learn more about another movie of almost the same moment, Noah Baumbach's directorial debut "Kicking and Screaming" (not the one about soccer from the 2000s, the one about post-collegiate life from 1995).