Some more stuff here, and my opinions thereupon:

This review does a good job of telling the story behind this book. But I also think the reviewer goes to great lengths to excuse the behavior of Prof Karen King, or to deflect attention from her behavior.  Has she yet apologized?  Was there any reflection on the whole massive media roll-out?  I haven’t paid super-close attention, but I don’t think there was.  Yes indeed there was sexism in the response to this clusterf@#$!, but it is also the case that a good deal of the schadenfreude was directed at a super-high-status Harvard prof who tried to bulldoze all skepticism by having already signed, and begun, a National Geographic special and also named the fragment “the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.”  I decry sexism, but I also decry celebrity scholarship that seeks after PR. This review, in contrast, seemed to me to get this point:

In our moment of truthiness, to borrow a term from Stephen Colbert, Veritasoffers a vital lesson less about Christianity than about what happens when a scholar decides that the story is more important than the truth. King had spent her career presenting an important scholarly narrative about the need to re-evaluate and reinterpret the canonical story of Christianity, to allow for women to play a central role and to question some of the central tenets of how established churches told the world’s most famous story. But in Sabar’s convincing and damning assessment, when it came to Jesus’ wife, she bypassed the facts, ignored peers who warned her something was amiss and failed to thoroughly interrogate how Fritz came to possess this stunning artifact.

There’s a bit of “heterodox academy” about the end of this, but I genuinely believe his deep insight is true and important at this point for our common world: that we face real difference, globally, in a new way:

I was impressed by how imaginatively a young person was addressing the central problem of the times: the fact we’re all united mostly by our divisiveness. Whether in the context of climate change or the right to life — let alone the ethics of trying to protect others from a killer virus by simply wearing a mask — more and more of us refuse ever to cross party lines. And in an age of social media, when we all imagine we can best capture the world’s attention by shouting as loudly as possible, there’s every incentive to take the most extreme — and polarizing — position around.

Good review of what sounds like an interesting book about German philosophy in the 1920s, which particularly highlights the way that the thinking of Ernst Cassirer has been sadly—and unjustifiably—neglected.  

Adolph Reed had to cancel a talk he was going to give to the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America because he would argue in it that the DSA was becoming too focused on race to the disregarding of class.  An interesting story about fights on the far-ish left of today.  

The story of Cville’s Bodo’s Bagels, pretty interesting.

And here I thought this was only in The Lord of the Rings—ancient fire beacon watch-towers, to deliver news (of what? invasions? A simple message, no matter what). 

Wow, it is a pretty impressive what genetics can tell us.

The researchers found evidence that 3 percent of the Neanderthal genome came from ancient humans, and estimate that the interbreeding occurred between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago. Furthermore, 1 percent of the Denisovan genome likely came from an unknown and more distant relative, possibly Homo erectus, and about 15% of these "super-archaic" regions may have been passed down to modern humans who are alive today.

We seem to harbor in our genes the ghosts of many other peoples, passed down through countless generations.

Good piece on a song all Americans should know, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the "Black National Anthem."