Good news!  ICANN has stopped a private equity company from buying the rights to control all .org internet addresses.  How is it possible that this was even conceivable?

Even economists now realize: the GOP has gathered to itself a group of people whose resentments are more important to them than reality, and who, when confronted with the opportunity to learn about reality, choose instead to marinate in their resentment.

A piece from last year on David Damrosch, the world literature professor, and on the idea of “world literature.”  I had no idea he had spent time at Yale Div School while in grad school at comp lit at Yale in the 1970s.   

You can go see some pieces of Aby Warburg’s “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” online now; check it out.  As a whole, I’d say it is one of the great Modernist art works, as well; much as Eliot at Margate completed The Waste Land, so Warburg worked on the Atlas while he was confined to sanatariums for years from 1918 on. Here’s an NYT article about it. And here’s some direct links. Did Joseph Cornell ever study Warburg? I wonder. 

This is a sobering and serious assessment of Ronan Farrow, whose meteoric rise to the top of journalism has come with a few cut corners, perhaps.  “We are living in an era of conspiracies and dangerous untruths — many pushed by President Trump, but others hyped by his enemies — that have lured ordinary Americans into passionately believing wild and unfounded theories and fiercely rejecting evidence to the contrary. The best reporting tries to capture the most attainable version of the truth, with clarity and humility about what we don’t know. Instead, Mr. Farrow told us what we wanted to believe about the way power works, and now, it seems, he and his publicity team are not even pretending to know if it’s true.” 

A nice little piece about reading in quarantine, mistakenly flips the roles of Augustine and Ambrose in the famous silent reading scene in the Confessions, but is forgiven for this nice thought: “It’s common these days to say that the chief virtue of reading is to understand others, but the appeal of private reading in its early heyday was that it was a way to understand ourselves.”

An article, tagged to an exhibition, about Wilhelm von Humboldt, the nineteenth century naturalist.  More than that, in a way, he was the intellectual who connected the study of non-human nature with the Romantics’ interest in a holistic analysis of the human and the human’s kultur.  In many ways he is the father of ecology, the idea of Gaia, and in general the possibility of a genuine “environmental humanism.”  (Pro tip: there’s a great biography of him, by Andrea Wulf, entitled The Invention of Nature; I highly recommend it.)  

An essay on Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations, which remains one of the most influential books (for its impact on policy-makers, in the US and beyond, over the past three or four generations) that you’ve never read.  

I had never heard of "genomic history” but that’s what some scientists have accomplished by mapping the DNA of almost 5000 humans in the central Andes.  As a picture of humanity in pre-Columbian South America, it is unprecedented.  

The analyses revealed that by 9,000 years ago, groups living in the Andean highlands became genetically distinct from those that eventually came to live along the Pacific coast. The effects of this early differentiation are still seen today.…The analyses revealed that multiple regions maintained genetic continuity over the past 2,000 years despite clear cultural transformations.  

Stay safe everybody!