This Thursday at 8:30am PDT / 11:30 EDT / 15:30 UTC, my friend Adrian Lory and I will hold the third in our series of live conversations about psychology and philosophy. Inspired by my friend Dave…

> Human beings conflict not simply because they imitate one another or desire the same objects, but because social recognition is structurally scarce, grammatically constrained, and inherently lossy.…

An arctic fox peeking out from its den. Image by Eric Kilby via wikimedia commons. The authors I usually work on tend to admire “the ancients” — an important part of their scholastic game is figuring…

John M. Mossman (1846-1912) was a bank vault engineer who operated out of New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His customers included the Stock Exchange and Bank of America, and…

Russian bibliographer Semyon Vengerov (1855-1920) spent his life accumulating two million filing cards, but he died before he finished the dictionaries and bibliographies he set out to create. His…

In the season of Lent, we turn to resisting the powers of evil. I'd like to start by surveying some tools and strategies of evil that we see in the Bible: Deception - whether outright lies,…

Thoughts on "Transmitting Terror."

Chatting with my wife on the way back home from an archeological conference she was attending, and the subject turned to burial customs and cave findings. She shared some ideas I had to put together…

seekingstars:ALTThe Second Coming - William Butler Yeats(for my friends who are fond of reading poems aloud)

Nicholson Baker's Anthologist displays poetic reverence

I recently read a complete-Hemingway-short-stories book. (Spoilers here for a few Hemingway short stories.) There’s a story fairly early on in it, “The End of Something” (1925), in which Hemingway’s…

Translated from french (please notify us of errors) It is tempting to assume that Italian olive cultivation began with the Romans – or at least with the Greeks, who supposedly handed down the press,…

Sakura-ko was a samurai’s daughter who had become a geisha to feed her mother after her father died. She lived on a narrow street. Sounds of geisha practicing their shamisen filled the air at all…

Welcome to our weekly study! Each week, our reading plan will take us through three different parts of the Bible: a psalm, a passage from Proverbs, and a few chapters from another book as we journey…

Reading this morning as Professor Campbell kicked some knowledge about ol’ King Minos of Crete and I had sort of a déjà vu type moment regarding our current times. Seems we’ve been here…

Faith, morality, and why believing in God can sometimes feel less like a question of goodness and more like a question of membership.

When size matters I have marked my recent visit to Manchester with a series of posts on three of the city’s small architectural gems – a cinema, a chop house and a library – structures that many…

People often like to speculate about whether future AIs might be conscious, a discussion that presumes that the ones we have today almost certainly aren't. But today I'd like to ask a different…

In recent years, I have seen a downward trend for the two largest religions in Vietnam, and, namely, the one that I have my eyes on, Buddhism. Scandals after scandals burst into the public forum.…

The Fort Myers Amateur Radio Club (FMARC) will be honoring Army Air Force members that trained at Buckingham Army Airfield during World War II. The special event station will be on the air March…

When you're sick, all your effort resets to zero. But Epictetus said: be a person who is sick well.

Schopenhauer is probably the most famous pessimist in philosophy. He believed suffering is the default state of existence and that desire only leads to more desire. So a book about happiness from…

How curious that these very different applications have all become similar tasks in the world of AI, approached through similar pieces of engineering. Comprehension questions are treated as…

To so zapiski iz razstave Prebujanje lepote II, tako le te iz vodenja kot moja opažanja. To sem napisala čisto na zaletku Decembra 2025, vendar sem potem čakala, da so izdali katalog te rastave, da…

I found myself returning to khipus with a different kind of curiosity: not archaeological or interpretive, but operational. Could the computational tools I work with every day be useful to the…

In memory of Jürgen Habermas. One cannot say his ideals of liberal democracy has been leading the way lately, but I am certain we will see a comeback of his theory of communicative action. It’s…

​During his appearance on A. J. Gentile’s The Basement podcast, Scott Wolter claimed that he had uncovered an old prune juice jar from the 1940s within which he found a nineteenth-century…

The only time I've ever "believed" was when I was a child. I would have nightmares about burning in hell, my body becoming part of a molten pit of fire. Luckily, I grew up in a really diverse area…

Two years ago I wrote about how the Old Order Amish "use religion to manipulate and control others." Last year I attended a Catholic-focused conference and now see a parallel between the Old Order…

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In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace. Addressing the…

Orginal post: 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks This week we look at the Niehoff family of Gronau (Westf.), Germany. The earliest member of the family is Hermann Arnold Niehoff who was born about 1770. This…

In this interview, we talk to Brigitte Nerlich about her career in the history of linguistics and the public understanding of science Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube…