What caused the Younger Dryas cooling period?  It was the environmental episode that perhaps sparked the turn to agriculture and cities, and civilization.  Some scientists believe they have evidence now that it was not a meteor strike, but a period of vulcanism.  

Stefan Collini, not a mean public writer himself, on uncovering evidence of a moment when Frank Kermode might have almost become a scholar.  Instead, Kermode became something of an instigator, and a journalistic writer of no little value.  Should we regret the lost scholar, though?  I don’t know.

A brief but good article about the new “memorial to enslaved laborers” at UVA.  One thing they don't note: the memorial doesn't really try very hard to solemnize itself--that is, to mark for visitors the change from "walking on a path" to "being in a monument," which I think will turn out to be a mistake.  (Just this past few days, I've seen several kids climbing over the walls, for instance.)  I fear it is not monumental enough.  It expects a piety that it doesn't try very hard to command.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online is very good.  It’s also overwhelmingly white and male.  Even in its contemporary references.

“The Next Generation’s quiet radicalism lies there, in the idea that there are so many facets of the human (and nonhuman) experience that lie beyond the all-consuming despair of unmet need.”  Keynes prophesied this world, too, in his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.”  It’s part of what I have always found so interesting about TNG—that scarcity is not the fundamental human problem; the fundamental human problem, beyond scarcity, is us.  

Small piece about Fernando Pessoa, the great Portugese “modernist,” though that doesn’t really capture his true oddity.  There is more than a bit of James Joyce, David Bowie, and Jorge Luis Borges in Pessoa’s writing.  

“…none of this means that libertarians are wrong about everything, or that libertarian ideas are worthless.”  Actually, it may mean that, at least to me.  But this guy is more mature than I am about libertarianism, or perhaps more convinced of its value.  They may not mean the same thing.   

One of the world's largest "waterfalls" is in the North Atlantic Ocean: the Faroe Bank Channel Overflow into the deep North Atlantic. It is an underwater canyon, more or less, that runs clockwise, from about 1 o’clock to about 7 o’clock, around the Faroe Islands, before dumping off into the North Atlantic abyssal plain.  A huge amount of very cold water runs out of the Arctic, through the channel, and over the “sill” into the North Atlantic, every year.  What a thing to think about.  And now scientists have found a new deep ocean current—an underwater river?—that feeds it.

Hope all have a happy weekend--