Just a few today. 

Amazing recontextualization of American plantations, where many were enslaved, by making the descendants of the enslaved part of the story.

A good early piece on whether and how the White House and the multiple dimensions of the Roman Catholic Church will be able to work together throughout the Biden administration.  Magisterium is not looking positive, I must say.  Events since this piece in March have made me more pessimistic.

Piracy: not just a matter of lawlessness, but a matter of economic challenges, and judgments about future economic peril: “It may not be poverty or unemployment itself driving piracy, as much as the expectation that industrial fishing by foreign fleets will deplete fish stocks and harm livelihoods that depend on small-scale fisheries.”

This is, indeed, a big deal for pre-history: "The dawn of nuclear DNA analysis of sediments massively extends the range of options to tease out the evolutionary history of ancient humans" 

Good interview with Christopher Ricks, with among other things this gem about criticism as noticing: “I think criticism is being good at noticing things. If I write about a particular work of literature, I do have to believe – not always, as it turns out, rightly – that I have noticed something about it. Something true and, to some degree, new. So there are countless songs by Dylan that I find delightful or poignant, as to whose workings and playings I have never noticed anything that is at all likely to have gone unnoticed by others. So, nothing to set down. I can’t see that I have anything large to say about Henry James that is likely to have escaped others.”  This strikes me as related to some stuff that James Wood once wrote.

Interesting piece on history of trashing statues; it seems so old that conservatives would approve of it in general, which makes you wonder about their hesitancy now.

A fun piece on the history of the asterix.

Good, moving essay on Alan Krueger, the person who is behind the Nobel wins in economics in October, because he was right, but who didn’t win the Nobel in economics this past week, because he was dead. (And here is his essay on the history of the minimum wage.)

Take care everyone!