Just to while away the hours.

A good backgrounder on Anne Case and Angus Deaton, the economists (really we should call them by the older and more honorable title of “political economists” at this point) behind the rising attention over the past few years to “deaths of despair” in the white working class. This piece is worth reading only to see how they themselves don’t like the framing of “deaths of despair”.  In other words, biography morphs into theory in this piece.  Nicely done.  

This is really interesting--on the interface between Buddhism and the state in China, and Buddhism and society as well.  Check it out.

Nice piece on one of the most philosophically fruitful episodes of self-isolation since Descartes—namely, Wittgenstein’s time in 1913-14 in a cabin on a Norwegian fjord.

“His contemporaries’ reputations have diminished. But Eliot’s has grown.”  This seems curiously true to me.  Or maybe I want it to be true.  But I don’t think it’s just my preference.  Eliot remains not just an intellectual and cultural touchstone, but a literary one, in a way that a poet like Ezra Pound, or Wallace Stevens, has not.  (And I think both of them should have remained vital presences in our world; well, at least Stevens.)  Who else is there from that age writing in English—Virginia Woolf?  Maybe.  But Eliot seems durable.

William Wordsworth was famously radical in his youth, politically and poetically; but by his late 30s, the radicalism had faded, and the rest of his long life seems to many to be as aesthetically disappointing as it was politically.  This piece gently suggests that may be telling only part of the story, if an important part.  

Ferdinand Mount, novelist and onetime TLS editor, is always worth reading, though in this case barely so.  His ruminations, not very rigorous or serious, on a new biography of Machiavelli.  

This is crazy: everyone with blue eyes can be tracked back to one ancestor, somewhere around 8000 years ago.  

How will the Coronavirus pandemic end?  Lessons from history may be helpful here.  Or you could also just watch the "Jurassic Park" movies: people overreach, there's disaster, some escape disaster, but then, year or so later, amble right back into it. 

Keep social distancing.