Again, along with the weather of today, pay attention to how the climate is changing.  I mean that metaphorically, but I think it's also literally true.

A nice backgrounder piece on the “anthropocene”.  

This strikes me as relevant to a number of my friends (and myself).  Perhaps you will find it insightful as regards your own life.

An interesting interview with Katrina Forrester, whose recent book In the Shadow of Justice on John Rawls is getting a lot of attention. 

Rawls, and philosophical liberals after him, became adept at responding to political and conceptual criticisms in their own terms. They defanged criticisms by translating them into their philosophical vocabulary. One of Rawls’s great strengths was the ability to squeeze all sorts of ideas into his theory, accommodating all criticisms. I’m interested in that capacity itself. It sometimes seems like political philosophers have become so good at dealing with objections that the practice of social critique has been rendered obsolete. But what does that tell us? 

One observation: nowhere in the interview do the words “religion” or “Christianity” appear.  

It seems like every day we are learning more about the deep history of humanity:

These results support previous hypotheses that the spread of this Initial Upper Paleolithic technology originated in the Altai region of Russia around 47,000 years ago before spreading eastward and southward across Asia.

No one will be surprised that a book review in The Nation about corporate finance has a point of view.  But the point of view seems to me insightful and often accurate.  

This is interesting. The Hittites were one of the great empires of the Bronze Age, and a silent influence on much of our world through the memory of their empire carried forward by the Egyptians, Greeks, and in ancient Israel. People have begun to understand something more of their religion, and this is interesting: a study of a temple, which may also have served as an astrological calendar.

An article about Jason Isbell, one of my favorite singer-songwriters, and the challenges of making his new record.   

Here’s a rich conversation among three authors who have been thinking about Kierkegaard for some time.   

Maize is an amaizing plant (sorry for that).  High in protein and carbohydrates, it was first domesticated nine thousand years ago from Teosinte, a grass, in one valley in Mexico.   In the Maya lowlands, however, “Maize made up less than 30 percent of people's diets in the area by 4,700 years ago, rising to 70 percent 700 years later.”