Because the world is telling you that you need more on-screen time these days.  

In praise of slow reading.  

"A new study of the genetic history of Sardinia, a Mediterranean island off the western coast of Italy, tells how genetic ancestry on the island was relatively stable through the end of the Bronze Age, even as mainland Europe saw new ancestries arrive. The study further details how the island's genetic ancestry became more diverse and interconnected with the Mediterranean starting in the Iron Age, as Phoenician, Punic, and eventually Roman peoples began arriving to the island.…The group's results help explain similarities with DNA from mainland European individuals of the Neolithic and Copper Age, such as "Ötzi the Iceman," an almost perfectly preserved, 5,300-year-old human discovered in alpine ice in northern Italy in 1991. Specifically, among modern Europeans, Ötzi's DNA is most similar to modern-day Sardinians. The new study supports the theory that this similarity remains because Sardinia had less turnover of genetic ancestry over time than mainland Europe, which experienced large-scale migrations in the Bronze Age."   

And another report on what seems to be the same study suggests that larger population flows from Africa around and across the Mediterranean have been happening for a very long time.   

Diverse anti-liberal perspectives: An interesting grab-bag review.  However, I’m not sure that the author has really understood the deep attractions of these positions to those who are attracted to them.   

The position taken by the Dept of Ed about making higher-ed accreditors directly competitive seems to me deeply unwise and destructive.  The accreditors are the "refs".  If we can simply shop around for an accreditor we like, what's to stop them all from a race to the bottom?  It reminds me of the way that the credit rating agencies such as Moody's were material contributors to the financial boom of the 2000s.  Here the damage won't be quite as vivid and sudden, but it may be deeper and more widespread.  This stuff matters a lot if you're in higher ed--not so much for now, but for decades hence.  Mark my words.

Nice piece on the Grolier Club in NYC, a place for bibliophiles.  

And an older exhibit at the Grolier Club about Aldus Manutius, still one of the most important, because influential, printers and publishers in book history.  Do you like italic type or Roman type?  You owe them both to Manutius.   

Be well, and wash your hands, everyone--