Open Thread – 06/25/2019
The first “Open Thread” in a month… Tim Mackintosh-Smith ‘s Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes is a book I recommend without reservation. Many of these types of books about Arabs tend to be focus on two periods, that of the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the 20th-century revival of Arab supra-national identity. Mackintosh-Smith’s small […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 05/26/2019
I’m having issues with the server load on this website in the past week. No idea what’s going on…I suspect that it has to do with WordPress plugins. I’ve tweaked caching and added Cloudflare. We’ll see. Since this website is kind of intermittent right now, remember to bookmark or note: * My newsletter. * My content (RSS). * […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 05/22/2019
Sometimes friends ask me about history books (usually scientists). For early modern Europe, Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815 is excellent. Read it! One of the reasons I stay on Twitter is direct-messages (DMs). In many ways, it is superior to emails. But over the last few […]
Open Thread, 05/12/2019
A History of Korea: From “Land of the Morning Calm” to States in Conflict is very cheap on Kindle right now. Seems less propagandistic (unwittingly to be fair) than some other Korean histories I’ve read. Basically, Korean histories seem less interesting in detaching from nationalism as they’re writing, and it can get grating (everyone has […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 05/05/2019
I don’t know what’s going on with the plugins on this website, but one of them is causing the issues with memory. Will keep looking into it. Starting to read The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall. This book, along with Nicholas Christakis’ Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, book […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
Open Thread, 04/28/2019
Reading The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades. A bit too many names and battles (narrative), rather than social and economic dynamics. But it’s a good inversion of the traditional narrative, and illustrates just how chaotic and fractions the Islamic world in the last decades of the 11th-century was. Western European society […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about. Also, I’ve posted a new linguistic podcast on the patron page. It’s 1 hour and 20 minutes, and really dense with information and wide-ranging. There were five people, but I didn’t say much, and Zach was mostly …
Open Thread, 04/12/2019
Just a reminder for people to check in on The Insight this week. Lots of talk about Denisovans between Spencer and myself. We’ve also got a follow-up podcast scheduled with a researcher working in Denisovan genomics in a few weeks (we’re on Spotify now by the way). Our three new hires at George Mason economics. […]
Open Thread – Brown Pundits
Please keep the other posts on topic. Use this for talking about whatever you want to talk about.
The end of the Kalash is nigh
Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all the Kafir Kalash bend the knee to the one true God! I think anyone who has given it any thought knew that this was inevitable and just a matter of time. That time seems to be now. The Kalash compensated for conversion with …
The end of the Kalash is nigh
Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all the Kafir Kalash bend the knee to the one true God! I think anyone who has given it any thought knew that this was inevitable and just a matter of time. That time seems to be now. The Kalash compensated for conversion with …
Open Thread, 04/15/2019
After reading Jared Rubin’s Rulers, Religion, and Riches: Why the West Got Rich and the Middle East Did Not I can say I highly recommend it. Not necessarily because I’m entirely convinced by the thesis, which is quite subtle, but can be reduced to the proposition that religious elites in the Islamic world were never […]