Stuff to ponder, ruminate over, while taking your daily exercise, perhaps.  

This is neat:

“A team of retirees that scours the remote ravines and windswept plains of the Pacific Northwest for long-forgotten pioneer orchards has rediscovered 10 apple varieties that were believed to be extinct—the largest number ever unearthed in a single season by the nonprofit Lost Apple Project.” 

I love that we live in a world that has a “Lost Apple Project.”  Here’s what they say about why they exist:

North America once had 17,000 named varieties of domesticated apples, but only about 4,500 are known to exist today. The Lost Apple Project believes settlers planted a few hundred varieties in their corner of the Pacific Northwest alone as they moved across the U. S. West to try their hands at the pioneer life.

Though—sadly—apparently their work is now endangered by the Coronavirus.

A great chronicle of Indiana University during the first month or so of its time in the pandemic.  I have dear friends at IU; this brings it home to me.   

Germany once again leading the way, this time in involving humanists—philosophers, legal scholars, even (gasp!) theologians—in thinking through how and when to open up post-pandemic.

This strikes me as a pretty obvious finding: when villains in literature resemble us, we tend to use them to explore our self-knowledge.  But maybe for these scientists it's a revelation.

Fun piece about how Pepys’s diary during the plague year of 1665 illuminates our situation today.

Review of a biography of Julia Kristeva.  Among other things, I did not know that her husband, a native Frenchman, is “the scion of a factory-owning family with an estate on the Île de Ré.” I’m trying not to judge.  But then I also read this: that her aim is “a gigantic task … neither more nor less than refounding humanism”, and I’m more interested again.   

Finally--on the most important event of the past several days: A nice piece offering a brief description of Ramadan, one of the most powerful examples of others devotion in the world.

Ramadan mubarak, to all those who celebrate!