Just a few:

An interview with Jill Lepore, whose recent book If then is about the origins of “data science” and the emergence of “data” as a new ideology which implicitly, and sometimes more than implicitly, critiques and seeks to replace the humanistic study of the human.  It’s also about the way that corporate money, especially tech money, has flowed into higher ed, harming higher ed and society.

We have not had that sort of ethical conversation about Silicon Valley. A few years ago, Harvard gave an honorary degree to Mark Zuckerberg. This is a person whose company has all but destroyed journalism and utterly undermined our system of political representation. In whose name are we endorsing this stuff?

And wow, it isn’t enough to talk about “the banality of evil” with these tech overlords.  The stories of what they did to a poor couple in Massachusetts are beyond horrific.  And of course they have been rewarded.  This was especially, um, charming:

Mr. Wymer has a new job, as the chief executive of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley. The chair of the board said the nonprofit was “aware” of what happened at eBay, but believes Mr. Wymer is “a leader with integrity” and was the unanimous choice for the job.

A pretty good piece about Randolph Bourne, The one that doesn’t fully understand how fundamentally his skepticism would be at odds with the more militant and messianic forms of progressivism visible today. 

Bourne never settled well within the new liberalism. The New Republic’s intellectuals lacked his agnosticism, or what he described as an “incorrigible propensity to see the other side”. They proved willing to sacrifice principle for intellectual influence in the halls of power, which Bourne felt was a betrayal of the demos. In his embrace of outsiders, feminists, migrants, socialists and pacifists, he was thus never far from breaking with established order. Like radicals then and since, he was searching for links between social and ideological renovation and collective agency.

Amazing stuff we can learn now from scientific studies of isotopes.  Here’s a story about “Alexandrian glass” from the Roman empire—a special kind of particularly transparent glass; it turns out it really was from Egypt.

Nice piece on Martin Amis, and a bit on Christopher Hitchens, with this insight about friendship, which faces a distinct challenge: “how the mutual accrual of knowledge and experience can alternatively corrode and nourish a friendship.”

Be well, stay safe!