Before we moved to Rhode Island last year, I was familiar with Newport as the home of the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals. Indeed, we attended one afternoon of performances at the Newport Jazz Festival this summer. Newport is only an hour from our home in Rumford RI. Recently, I read in The New York […]
I saw an article online yesterday that claimed that over 1% of Americans are using semaglutides for weight loss. Since these drugs suppress appetite, the article was about the possible impact on food retail. Since global warming promises to destroy a lot of arable land on the planet, as well as ocean fisheries, reducing food […]
You know that Hungarian woman who shared this year’s Nobel in Physiology or Medicine? She struggled to get and keep an academic career. Eventually, she was pushed out of her lab at Penn. “That morning at the lab, Karikó’s old boss had come to see her off. She did not tell him what a terrible […]
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 […]