Abandoned Footnotes

Like many other people, when reading the political blogosphere I am often struck by the prevalence of expressions of contempt . It is not si...

R. John Parkes , a researcher at the University of Cardiff, Wales, studies microbes found in core samples collected by the  Ocean Drilling P...

The pot is a god. The winnowing  fan is a god. The stone in the  street is a god. The comb is a  god. The bowstring is also a  god. The bush...

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought). As I mentioned in a previous post , reading S...

I’ve been reading James C. Scott’s latest, The Art of Not Being Governed: an Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia , which had been hig...

As a picture book . Nancy found it in the public library, and we read it to our daughter. It is a fairly complete (and very nice) translatio...

William Easterly recently had a post on the "mystery of the benevolent autocrat" that illustrated the fact that non-democratic co...

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that preven...

I've been playing around in the last few days with free visualization software, trying to think of ways to create interesting visualizat...

A couple of months ago, there was a very interesting debate between Jim Manzi and others on the question of whether social science knowledge...

Adrian Vermeule, Law and the Limits of Reason (2009). I read this book for somewhat hazy reasons; perhaps I found the title in a footnote...

Apologies to my (very few) readers for the lack of blogging. Last week we got the flu - first my daughter, then me, then my wife - and we ha...

I recently rediscovered CiteULike , a free web service for bibliography management. I know I had used it in the past (I still had an account...

ARMAN archaea, orange circles, with an arcaheon of the thermoplasma order, below them. The small orange particles are viruses. Nobody know...

Elections in modern democracies function as mechanisms of both  selection  and  discipline . With a multiplicity of candidates competing for...