The New Yorker has an interesting article by Manvir Singh about fad diets, with a focus on all-animal diet as ostensibly the diet best suited to our species. A character who brands himself “The Liver King” specifically endorses grassfed beef liver. The paleo diet industry insists that humans evolved to kill animals and devour their […]
Hmm. Maybe Trump *does* have a point about the lying press after all. Here’s the Reuters headline:“Biden, Trump to woo union workers in Michigan as auto strikes grow” So where are Trump and Biden going to woo union workers? “Former President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit a Macomb County automotive supplier of engine and […]
Based on a recent article in New York Review of Books, I read the novel “Independent People” by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness. The book was originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1955, in part on the strength of this book. Like Moby-Dick, I […]
A few years back, my chairman was a big enthusiast of NFTs (nonfungible tokens). In one conversation I recall, I pointed to a picture of the founding chair of the department and suggested he could digitize it and sell it to alumni as an NFT. He said he thought that was a good idea. When […]
Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on Russian and Eastern European history. Yesterday, he narrated an essay on his subscription-only Substack site “Thinking about . . . “ on the occasion of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s […]
The 2024 presidential election will be between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Of that we can be certain. We can also be certain that the vote will be very close, and there are geopolitical players who will put their thumbs on the scale. “The Saudi Kingdom’s de facto rule Mohammad bin Salman’s coziness with the […]
Today, several folks have posted 9/11 remembrances online. I’m fine with that. We should remember the people who died as a result of the plane crashes, as well as their families and friends. But don’t stop there. Also remember how this tragedy was cynically exploited for political purposes by folks like Rudy Giuliani and George […]
AI is getting a lot of attention these days, and rightfully so. ChatGPT looks to take lots of jobs and to become the plagiarist’s tool of choice. Will AI replace artists, composers and novelists? Time will tell, but to look at what passes for “art” today in the mass consumer market, my money’s on AI. […]
The Yale historian Timothy Snyder first came to my attention in a footnote of an article in The New York Review of Books. The footnote gave a link to a series of 23 online lectures on the history of Ukraine, which I binge-watched over a period of about five days. I also read his books […]
There has been some head-scratching about the recent COVID variant, BA.2.86, which has 34 amino acid changes in the spike protein compared to its closest reference sequence. Commenter rjs asks: “how can one virus suddenly wake up one morning and find it had mutated 30 times overnight? And that all 30 of its mutations were […]