They're "start of the week" links, but they're not the weakest links, for sure.* Far from it: Some cool ones in here -- the podcast especially, I can't recommend it enough:
So I've praised the podcast Talking Politics a number of times, but I wanted to say they've had a series of great episodes lately. They had one about being an English football fan, and being the fan of one team over decades--a great story, and I hope they have a future episode where they talk to some US baseball fan in comparison. Then they had one with interviews with Judith Butler from 2016 and from a couple weeks ago. Now they have an old interview with Piketty. Seriously, this is a pretty great podcast--check it out.
My colleague Melody Barnes, on living on Richmond’s Monument Avenue, where people like her were not, by the avenue’s designers, meant to live.
This is really important:
The new estimates show that nearly four of 10 Americans identify with a race or ethnic group other than white, and suggest that the 2010 to 2020 decade will be the first in the nation’s history in which the white population declined in numbers.…racial and ethnic diversity will be an essential ingredient of America’s future. The mostly white baby boomer culture that defined the last half of the 20th century is giving way to a more multihued, multicultural nation. The demographic underpinnings for this have been set in place for a while, but the new census data places an exclamation point on them. It suggests that past projections of increased racial and ethnic diversity may have been too cautious given the accelerated aging and decline of the white population. We will know more when the full 2020 census results are released next year.
Good review of a book that synthesizes scholarship on Qumram—the site of the “Dead Sea Scrolls.” If you’re interested in the Ancient Near East, this is worth your five minutes.
A piece full of fun tidbits on Max Weber, but one that in the end turns into some kind of grudge match with Anne Appelbaum about people supporting Trump. I don’t know Daniel Johnson’s work but, apart from the fact-gathering, I don’t think I would like him.
An interesting interview with people who are analyzing how TickTock is changing politics.
The word is "lox." Cool. Also, even with the asterix, this sentence is weirdly misleading and should be corrected:
After discovering a word that might have existed in the Indo-European, linguists compared how its pronunciations changed from language to language. For example, sound [k] changes to [h] from Latin to Germanic, and the Latin word casa transforms into the English house while the French word cœur transforms into the English heart.*
I don't think a linguist would say coeur "transforms into" heart; they're on different branches. It may be roughly equivalent to, but unless there's some (cheap-ass) sense of "transforms" to linguists, this is misleading. "Heart" is much more closely related to "Herz" than "coeur." Germanic and Latin languges are both related to PIE, but the latter does not "transform" into the former, forsooth.
Nice cache of digitized documents:
The National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem is digitising its world-class collection of items in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, dating from the ninth to the 20th centuries, including spectacularly beautiful Qur’ans and literary works decorated with gold leaf and lapis lazuli.
The NLI’s treasures include an exquisite Iranian copy of Gift to the Noble (Tuhfat al-Ahrar), created barely three years after the completion of a 1484 collection of verse on religious and moral themes by the great Persian mystical poet Nur al-Din Jami.
(*Sorry about the gateway pun, everybody.)