Just some links today.

Brief intro to Olga Tokarczuk’s novel, Flights.  It has this nice suggestion about the book: “If Tokarczuk is a Penelope, weaving her fragmentary narratives together, she is also a world-travelling Odysseus, whose voyages are shown in the novel’s final map.”

This is a good example of the way that natural science is developing (or rather, has developed) skills to help contextualize human history:

Compared with existing large-scale temperature reconstructions of the past 1200-2000 years, the study reveals a greater pre-industrial summer temperature variability, including strong evidence for the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) in the 6th and 7th centuries.

Then, working with historians, the scientists found that relatively constant warmth during Roman and medieval periods, when large volcanic eruptions were less frequent, often coincided with societal prosperity and political stability in Europe and China. However, the periods characterised by more prolific volcanism often coincided with times of conflict and economic decline.

An old and distinguished tradition. I wonder if, with the professionalization of diplomacy after World War II, this tradition has simply become impossible.

James Raven, historian of the book, on what actually counts as a book, what are the borders of the concept:

however unfamiliar material “book” forms might be, the central concern is one of communication, of the creation and dissemination of meaning originating from a graphic and legible as well as a portable and replicable form. Whether made of a clay, a skin or a natural fiber, or enabled by a digital screen, central processing unit, random access memory or a graphics card, books function as portable objects.

This makes a book different from an inscribed monument. Books might travel over very short or very long distances and serve, in varying degrees, as resilient transmitters of knowledge, information and entertainment. Such a definition with its reliance on transportability, might exclude posters fixed on walls and inscriptions on immovable entities, and yet again, there is an undeniable connection between such texts and books, especially when a book might be created by multiples of small and otherwise non-book items.

Cool.

Wow, I had not known the Pope was going to produce a new encyclical.  This one sounds pretty interesting--especially the focus on "fraternity," which may have a slightly different, more French-revolutionary, ring in Europe than it does in the US? 

This is interesting from David Brooks, some typical stuff from him disparaging “moral freedom” (drawing from Alan Wolfe) and indulging in a bit of “both-siderism” while not confronting how racism is really a major driver, and he avoids that in favor of discredited talk about status.  Still he says this, and it makes sense to me:

The period between the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 and the election of November 2020 represents the latest in a series of great transitional moments in American history. Whether we emerge from this transition stronger depends on our ability, from the bottom up and the top down, to build organizations targeted at our many problems. If history is any guide, this will be the work not of months, but of one or two decades.