Recently updated blogs

Ah, committees… how do you get your colleagues to do the work we all know needs to be done? Here (semi)regular contributor Greg Crowther suggests some techniques borrowed from journal editing and peer review. This fall, after years of avoiding substantial committee work, I will chair a campus committee for the first time. I didn’t […]

Review: The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London’s Financial District by Amy Thomas. A guest post by Paul Ranogajec. A City unto Itself? Lloyd’s London headquarters building opened 18 November 1986. Just three weeks earlier, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘Big Bang’ had lifted entry restrictions to the stock market and had opened the City […]

To slow down time. Life feels longer when there’s more of it to look back on. Take more photos and you preserve more memories. The more you do it, the richer your life looks in retrospect. Here are some photos I’ve taken with my iPhone 15 Pro Max this year:

Shoutout to Steve for this goddamned masterpiece. The boys have had their first day in court? I think? Or not? A couple of points here.If it was cancelled/postponed, why is there a courtroom drawing? "A number of witnesses" appears to mean "Steve's wife and Doug"I would really like to know if Councilor Ron Ashmore will be taking the stand in defense of his good friend Bill...This was posted in Steve's …

Before Madame Clara Anna Rich Devereux stuck her nose into things around 1880, Cincinnati’s polite society was an embarrassment of disorganization. A half-century earlier, Frances “Fanny” Trollope had lambasted the local gentry in her scandalous 1832 book, “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” in which she states:“All animal wants are supplied profusely at Cincinnati, and at a very easy rate; but, alas! these go but a little way in the history …

Peglin is like if Peggle and Slay the Spire had an unpredictable child. The pachinko-inspired mechanics reminded me of Peggle’s bouncy, chaotic fun, while the roguelike progression echoed the strategic depth of Slay the Spire. Add a bit of Hades-style satisfaction from finding perfect combos, and you get a game that’s hard to put down. Peglin takes elements from these popular titles and spins them into something fresh, creating an …

Stanley Cavell once remarked that “Kant depsychologized epistemology, Frege depsychologized logic, and Wittgenstein depsychologized psychology.” Eric Marcus’s Belief, Inference, and the Self-Conscious Mind, in opposition to a large amount of empirically oriented work in recent philosophy of mind, can be seen as aiming to develop the groundwork for a “depsychologized” conception of human mindedness, articulating core psychological notions such as belief and inference as essentially rational acts of the mind. …

Weird pigeon That heron was back, doing its worst pigeon impression.In "Garrett prepares to hunker down for autumn" news, I added some new purchases to the bookshelves. This is what 7kg of books looks like Doctor Aphra is one of my favourite characters in the Star Wars universe, but I never had the chance to read the complete run, so I’m looking forward to diving in.I can’t remember how I …

Difficult relationships between fathers and sons have been fodder for writers for millennia. Sometimes these relationships are simply power struggles, as in so many Greek myths, such as the conflicts first between Uranus and his son Cronus and later Cronus and his son Zeus. Or their conflicts are representative of social strife, as in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. And other times, like in many of Franz Kafka’s most famous …

Thanks so much to Joe Allen for the interview! I had written about The Jade, a fantastic Bristol band from the heyday of indiepop that for some reason only put out two demo tapes, no proper releases. After discovering them, I was wondering how come the band didn’t put out any records, their songs were really great! Happy to know to learn more details about the band, and also super …

From From Peoples into Nations: A History of Eastern Europe, by John Connelly (Princeton University Press, 2020), Kindle pp. 210-212, 238-240: In 1878, representatives of Europe’s major powers convened in the capital of the new German nation-state for negotiations that bear all the hallmarks of the more famous effort in decolonization and democratization that transpired at Paris after World War I. At Berlin in 1878, statesmen determined the boundaries, constitutions, …

Video: Lizzy McAlpine – “Pushing It Down and Praying” From the deluxe Older (and Wiser), out October 4 on RCA/Sony. I got into Lizzy McAlpine this summer after reading Amanda Petrusich’s New Yorker profile. Her album Older is great and now she’s releasing an expanded version with five new songs. The “deluxe reissue six months after the original release” game is a racket, of course, but that’s the music business …

Local heros: Three men of Kochi. A Little Trip To Kochi City On Sunday, that same Sunday I met a man and his mother, I continued on the bus to Kochi City. I got off in front of … 🐞 Read more about it ➞ ➞ ➞