Media
When I had a Twitter account, I gorged on news from Ukraine, spending at least an hour a day following about 20 accounts for up-to-the-minute news and speculation. My Twitter account getting locked after I used it for frequent criticism of the service owner provided me with an opportunity to
Economics
Copying an idea from Mita Williams... §1 Python At 12, I taught myself BASIC programming. Can I repeat the trick at 52 with Python? My plan: Work through Allen B. Downey's Think Python, letting each section sink in before moving on. Once I've finished that book,
Life
Perhaps the best piece of advice I ever got from someone other than my father was that if you're mourning a major loss (of whatever kind), the best thing to do is to patiently let the back of your mind adjust to your new circumstances. Don't
History
At Harvard Law School in the 1950s, I noticed the case books on property and contract law did not include commercial cases over slave 'ownership.' In pre-Civil War generations, the courts were full of litigation--slave families were valuable 'property' whose exploitation led to contractual conflicts between
Chapbook
...some of the academics want to write like they're writing for The New Yorker, and The New Yorker does so many wonderful things, but I think The New Yorker has also convinced us all that we need to find one perfect avatar that embodies the complex story we
Uncategorized
[A] number of central features of Marx's analysis remain valid and relevant. The first, obviously, is the analysis of the irresistible global dynamic of capitalist economic development and its capacity to destroy all that came before it, including even those parts of the heritage of the human past
History
The view that the great cathedral of history is being built brick by brick by historians, some of them filling gaps and forming pillars, while the majority of them add their small bricks in the form of monographs […] is not entirely a wrong one–but we must recognize that the
History
About one-fifth of the front of the Topps Baseball 2018 Series Two baseball card pack is coated in a shiny turquoise color. Generations of my ancestors rarely (if ever) saw a color like that. Its existence in the world was limited to the jewelry and paintings owned by the wealthy
Chapbook
[K-]72. There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly. This is very characteristic of brisk and lively people, which is why they seldom achieve very much: for they are cast down and give up as soon as
History
Yet what any individual in the Frankish Empire [of the 8th century AD] got to read was often a matter of chance. The full range of classical literature was by no means still available in its entirety. Much had disappeared and had been lost forever. Because of lack of knowledge
History
The most impressive application of Ibn Khaldun's approach is his historical and sociological elaboration of the cyclical pattern of rise, peak, and decline. If a society becomes a leading civilization or even the dominant culture in a region, according to Ibn Khaldun the peak of this civilization is
LIS + DataSci
While voting for ALA Council this weekend, I came up with five positive characteristics in a nominee: 1. Longer than five years' membership in ALA. Fresh voices on Council are good (see below), but please take a few season cycles to learn from the inside how ALA works before