bensozia

Door in the Alhambra A few more lines of the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles found in an Egyptian papyrus. We remember Empedocles as a ...

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, via Marginal Revolution: I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that m...

Publishers' Weekly: A judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that Tracy Wolff did not plagiarize her YA fantasy series Crave,...

But supposing the world has been "filled up," so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppressi...

Representative David Scott of Georgia recently died, at 80, while running for re-election. That make five sitting Congressmen who have died ...

Via Cremieux on Twitter/X: The only rigorously proven things you can do for life extension right now are: Don't be fat Be fit Control y...

Francisco Goya, A Way of Flying , 1815 Writing advice from Scott Siskind, starting with "Tell the truth." Still Uploading Chapter...

From an excellent, fascinating interview with geneticist David Reich: The context that lot of my work in the last few years has been focuse...

According to some guy on Reddit: The house was built by the local crime lord Nikolai Petrovich Sutyagin and his family. It was considered to...

Crowd listening to a socialist orator, NYC, 1908 Long before cranks built followings on the internet, some of them got modestly famous by st...

Moche disk, gilded copper, 200 BC to 600 AD. The animals are deer. The Moche hunted deer by driving them into nets, and this net design may ...

Yale commissioned its own report on why trust in American higher education has declined so much. I want to emphasize, first, that trust in E...

After a hot day yesterday and a thunderstorm last night, little baby zinnias are popping up all over the garden.

US Grant statue, DC Matt Yglesias launches a campaign I am 100% behind: Recent revelations about Cesar Chavez have led to some of the statu...

With the danger of frost behind us and hot weather coming, this was seed planting weekend for my flower gardens. Some of the flower beds are...

It might surprise you to learn that historians know very little about pre-cannon naval combat. One supposes that triremes, galleys, or longs...

Beth Moon, Heart of the Dragon , 2010 More Beth Moon here and here . More and more fossils from the Ediacaran period  (635-542 million year...

The Scottish National Museum is putting on an exhibit called Scotland's First Warriors featuring weapons and shields from the Bronze Ag...

Sam Peltzman:  I document a sudden, sharp and historically unprecedented decline in self-reported happiness in the US population. It occurr...

Nicolaas Van Der Waay, Amsterdam Orphan Girls , 1903 Excellent, interesting interview with Ada Palmer  about Renaissance Italy. Still upload...

Interesting interview with Tyler Cowen. COWEN: What do you think of the pretty common view, it often comes from twin studies, that well ove...

How do people come to believe in things that are esoteric, unprovable, and not widespread in the culture? The best book I know on this quest...

Stockings, 1830, made of cotton and silk Meditation on the double-slit experiment and the strangeness of quantum physics ( Twitter/X ) Still...

From a review of David Stuart's big book on the Maya: Yet Stuart views their history not as an arc but as a series “of numerous ups and...

Henry Hobson Richardson (1834-1886) was one of America's great architects and the leading New World expositor of one of my favorite styl...

Daffodils in full flower. Star magnolia. And these little scilla, which came from the house where my wife grew up, bringing tears to my eyes...

Ogoh-ogoh is a delightful Balinese tradition, the building of temporary sculptures that are paraded during Pangrupukan, a holiday welcoming ...