bensozia

Last fall I explored an old house site in the Virginia woods, probably abandoned around the time of the Civil War. Growing near the stone ho...

Robin Hanson asked his Twitter/X followers, "Is there any 'fantasy' world where you'd prefer to live there as a regular pe...

Back in 2002, I worked in downtown Washington, DC, a pleasant area which was disturbed twice a year by protesters marching against the annua...

The good news about America. 500-year-old compass found buried near Copernicus' tomb, might have belonged to him. The top television ne...

Multiple Russian news sources have confirmed that Major General Mikhail Gudkov was killed in a Himars strike on a headquarters where he was...

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confro...

I've been wondering a lot lately how wacky holistic medicine became a right-wing thing. In the NY Times , Jessica Grose writes that some...

I've just self-published another book, which I'm calling a metaphysical thriller. Here's the blurb, written to send to agents an...

I've been reading a book, Best of the Achaeans by Gregory Nagy (1979). It's a relentlessly intense dive into the weeds of scholarsh...

I've been reading about Mongolian shamanism. A few observations: There isn't much emphasis on the shaman journeying to other lands; ...

Interesting that fantasy is close to the middle. Via Robin Hanson on Twitter/X .

This amazing artifact was found in an Irish lake back in 1986, and was conserved very carefully over the next 39 years. It is now on display...

The Bamberg Casket, Viking art from the 10th century The first Vancouver street given a new, unpronounceable Native name . More name changes...

From Ross Douthat's interesting interview ( NY Times ) with Peter Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. ....

Interesting piece in the NY Times by Vali Nasr: If this history is anything to go by, Ayatollah Khamenei will not retreat, let alone surren...

There is a theory of state formation, associated with people like Mancur Olson and James Scott, in which which early states are modeled as p...

So Trump and the Emir of Qatar have arranged a cease-fire between Israel and Iran. Which both sides promptly violated, which led Trump to pu...

Some negative reactions: Jeffrey Lewis (aka Arms Control Wonk ): Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to...

The flowers don't care about the news. They care about older, more basic things: the sun, the rain, the wind. On a sunny day after a rai...

First satellite image of the Fordow nuclear complex after the US attack Well, Trump did it.  I've been expecting it ever since he said t...

Just got around to reading Deirdre McCloskey's  somewhat famous review  of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, which is both a m...