There's just a lot of good stuff out there.
A careful analysis of why rural areas in the US have a greater susceptibility to harm from COVID-19. Key factors are: a significantly larger number of older people, and significantly fewer hospitals, and more people without health insurance. The government could think about these things now, before the nightmare really hits in a couple months (or next winter), if President Trump could be bothered.
Anthony Grafton on the hidden role of correctors in early modern European book production.
Petrarch as a chronicler of the Black Death:
Fourteenth-century Italy was the first society to document in great detail the experience of a disease that transformed their world. By contrast, Thucydides’ description of the Athens plague in 430 BCE takes up only one chilling passage. Petrarch allows us to see not just what but also how people thought about disease. He astutely recognized the importance of having this public conversation, and through his dedication to recording his reflections, and eliciting them from others, he left a rich documentary record that we can still benefit from today.…There is a moral resiliency to his message worth remembering as the first wave of COVID-19 subsides. Petrarch never once offered any reassurances that things would get better. Instead, he responded creatively and thoughtfully to unexpected challenges, assuming that they would end neither quickly nor easily. His words, echoing across a chasm of more than six hundred years, continue to seek an audience. Amidst our own anxieties about what the future might hold, his is a voice from the past, speaking to posterity, challenging us to be creative in our own response to a time of pandemic.
John Cottingham on his work on Descartes, and his more recent increased attention to “a more humane philosophy of religion":
I would agree you that in the modern worldview ‘serious intellectual grounding’ is provided by science. But your question seems to presuppose a more extreme position – that serious intellectual grounding is provided only by science. Yet that cannot be right, can it? There is a whole domain of meaning and value, a whole range of human belief and activity, that is not grounded in, or encompassed by, the language and methods of science. This includes not just the meaning and value explored in literature, poetry, the whole domain of imaginative and affective discourse, but also the domain of meta-inquiry – what we are doing now when we discuss these questions about philosophy and religion and science. In your previous question you asked why I don’t think scientism is right. The obvious answer to that is that if scientism is the thesis that science provides the only possible serious intellectual grounding, that thesis itself cannot be established by the methods of science, and hence is self-refuting.…Traditional theology has always regarded the ‘transcendence’ and the ‘immanence’ of God as two sides of he same coin. The kinds of experience which for the believer point us towards the divine are not typically of a ‘spooky’, other-worldly kind, but include, as I’ve indicated, our powerful responses to the demands of morality, and the kind of exaltation at the beauty of the natural world which many poets have described.
It gets better the less it’s on Descartes, imho. And it’s got a good list of books at the end.
An argument that black religious leaders are central to the protests sparked by George Floyd. I’m not so sure; I would like to see data on this. My intuition is that black religious leaders are less prominent now, and this piece doesn’t really provide evidence to the contrary; it just asserts their continuing prominence.
I bet you didn’t know that the first recorded scientist in history is “En Hedu’anna, the chief astronomer-priestess of the ancient city of Ur in Sumer”, did you? Mesopotamia was an amazing place for mathematics and astronomy.
Omar Warshow on why the apt analogy for the George Floyd protests is 1964, not 1968.