November 2020
On the Berfrois Radar

The survival of remains of one of the tiltyard towers was known, but the radar survey has shown up tantalizing glimpses of additional structures...
Read MoreCenturies of Constantinople

She dwarfed all other remaining cities of the Roman Empire as well as former western Roman imperial and cross-frontier territories, and all but a few eastern cities...
Read MoreSold-out meant three seats apart…

My first experience was at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a beautiful old building with a huge concert auditorium whose ceiling reaches up 90 or 100 feet above the seating area...
Read MoreScience needs birds and frogs…

If the history of physics with its creative interplay between frogs and birds is any guide, there is much cause for optimism...
Read More‘There were always more books than the small shelves could contain’

I grew up in the aftermath of Nasser’s Egypt, where public education was made free for all. For me, learning has always been remote…
Read MoreHow objective was Japanese transwar fieldwork?

The post-1968 era inaugurated the unraveling of Japanese anthropology’s transwar consensus about its goals to produce objective, field-based research that uncovered universal laws of social development and diffusion...
Read MoreRachel Howard: How We Voted

I now worship, through my computer, at a church 140 miles away, where talk of “social justice” is a normal part of nearly every sermon...
Read MoreSikkim’s Integration/Annexation/Merger

How the change came about is a story with multiple plots involving India’s greatest spymaster, a defiant king, his ambitious political rival, and two enigmatic foreign women...
Read MoreVida Goldstein and Australasian Suffragists in the International Sphere

What does this Federation-era snapshot tell us about Australia’s relationship to the wider world? And what is Goldstein’s place in larger histories of Australasian suffrage and democracy?
Read MoreAlbert Rolls: Myself/Condition

Wilt thou rob this leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, non-pated, agate-ring, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue Spanish pouch?
Read MoreWith the Seine as its mirror and protector…

The site has been holy since antiquity, perhaps explaining why Notre Dame feels spiritual, even for nonbelievers. A Druid shrine and then a pagan temple dedicated to Jupiter, the chief of the Roman gods, are believed to have stood on this spot...
Read MoreJournalism Planet

Is the title limited to hard-news reporters? Are bloggers journalists? Are producers at media corporations and TV programs journalists?
Read MoreA History of the Idea of Ending Poverty

History confirms the intuition that ‘ending poverty’ has little political traction as a near-term goal when mass chronic poverty is seen to be the norm and poor citizens have little political influence...
Read MoreCoding Children

A striking example is the distinction that one family made between using digital technology as a producer/creator and using it merely as a consumer; the parents sought to ensure that their children fall into the first group, with the aim of one day becoming a leader in the new...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
Read MoreNow it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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