Counting the cost
San-serif fonts seem to be de rigeuer these days, which is supposed to be good for people with certain visual impairments. It s bad for people with other impairments, and it s not great for anyone to be unable to distinguish between lower-case L and upper case i. This latter difficulty keeps getting me every time I [ ]
Decades ago, I was browsing in a used book store. A title intrigued me: Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, by Roland H. Bainton. I d just read a bunch of books by Augustine of Hippo, so I looked him up in the index. That led me to pages 99-100, where I read the following passage: [ ]
A few weeks ago, I stopped in a used book store I hadn t visited in a long while. I picked up some old paperback science fiction novels. One that shed quite a bit of light on contemporary politics was Jerry Pournelle s 1977 High Justice. There s the requisite dose of grandiose technological fantasy- fusion powered tugs [ ]
When I was a kid in the 1970s, I would often hear my older brothers talking with each other and with my parents about Vietnam and Watergate. I would ask them to explain what those words meant, which presented them with quite a challenge when I was three or four years old. I never gave [ ]
Aeon magazine posts a short article by Matyáš Moravec about philosophers at Cambridge in the mid-twentieth century who took a serious interest in telepathy at a time when the same university was a center of the Analytic school. Of course it would lead to interesting places were it proven that telepathy exists. How does it [ ]
An article in The New York Times Magazine reminds me of my typology of stories involving fictional US presidents. Fictional presidents appear in three kinds of stories- satires, nightmares, and fairy tales. In satires, they show that the rot goes all the way to the top. In nightmares, they show that even the highest authorities [ ]
I teach ancient Greek and Latin at a university in the interior of the USA. I ve often given a course on the ancient Mediterranean world in general, a core curriculum class that draws a cross-section of the undergraduate student body. When I first taught it, I was required to use a textbook by D. Brendan [ ]
I saw this sequence and thought it was time to log off Twitter, that I had seen the day s best post: Then, minutes later, this spectacular banger showed up: Here s a memorable line from a great scholar and fine poet: Avery Edison says what we ve all been thinking: Vinney Szopa contemplates what we ve lost: Samuel [ ]
Ken Layne is impressed by the British monarch: The most important news story of the last several years: A conversation between Otto von Bismarck and U. S. Grant: T Greer on the Iliad as post-apocalyptic literature: Tom Hamilton s wife gave their child some shocking news about herself: Ready for duty, and they couldn t be happier [ ]
Even when you know that Helga Stentzel did this on purpose, it is as striking as if it had occurred naturally: Bradley Birzer says something about World War Two: Sir Geechie may be the Afro-Fogey, but he would have you know that he is also a wild man: I read these four Luwian words aloud [ ]