You need to know history to talk about history
The New York Times Magazine has a long piece, How Christian Were the Founders?, which outlines the efforts of school board members of fundamentalist inclinations to shift the narrative about the founding of the American republic. In short, these activists would like children to understand that the United States was founded as a Christian nation […]
What era are our intuitions about elites and business adapted to?
Well, just the way I asked it, our gut feelings about the economically powerful are obviously not a product of hunter-gatherer life, given that such societies have minimal hierarchy, and so minimal disparities in power, material wealth, privileges of a…
Not as the crow flies
A comment below:This thought has probably occurred to others as well, but isn’t it interesting that if this theory of Baltics being the “true” Europeans is correct, that history repeated itself several thousand years later when the Baltic peoples becam…
The Dark Age Mighty Whitey
This week David Brooks has a column up on the messianic variant of the “Mighty Whitey” motif. Steve points out that this is a relatively old genre, with roots back to the Victorian period. And, it also has basis in fact. Consider the White Rajahs of Sa…
The Royal Society on In Our Time
In Our Time has several episodes up on The Royal Society. You can listen online at the link, but I’d recommend that you just subscribe on iTunes to IOT.
Estimating black-white racial tension from 1850 to present
As a New Year’s gift, here is a free copy of an entry I put up on my data blog (details on that here). It’s a quantitative look at the history of race and culture in America, together with qualitative examples that illustrate the story that the numbers…
The limits of pluralism, and the necessity of an identity
I just finished Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Very much in the mold of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Nasr is the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will […]
Mythical heroes
There’s a new evangelical Christian college in New York, the King’s College. You can read a somewhat quizzical article in The New York Times about it. This part caught my attention:
Clues about the college’s philosophical underpinnings reveal themselves here and there. One bulletin board recently listed the activities of the various houses, the King’s College […]
The mosaic of North American populations
A few months ago an interesting paper connected the historical demographics of New Hampshire with genetic variation. One of the notable features of North American history and culture is that it is a mosaic of different populations, and, that mosaic has…
Elite ancient Egyptians had heart disease
Heart Disease Found in Egyptian Mummies:”Atherosclerosis is ubiquitous among modern day humans and, despite differences in ancient and modern lifestyles, we found that it was rather common in ancient Egyptians of high socioeconomic status living as muc…
A simple framework for thinking about cultural generations
In this discussion about pop music at Steve Sailer’s, the topic of generations came up, and it’s one where few of the people who talk about it have a good grasp of how things work. For example, the Wikipedia entry on generation notes that cultural gene…
A quantitative ecologist looks at world history (again)
Doing a literature search on the Price Equation for some weblog posts I found that Peter Turchin had written a new paper on world history using Price’s formalism explicitly. A quantitative ecologist by training, Turchin has already written a series of …