For Scott Welch. When I walked away from linguistics, I walked upstairs into department IT support for the Languages Department. It was an underpaid but cosy sinecure, where I got to write papers, work on the side as a research assistant, and practice bad Italian, French, and German on my peers. That didn’t last, and […]
http://fusion.net/story/295515/quora-poetry-silicon-valley/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialshare&utm_content=theme_top_mobile Mergers and edits can, it’s true, impairthe incidental rhymes of Quora questions.The metre of such verse would brook deflectionsas well—though your example doesn’t care. But I’d dispute the questions need be live.They can be captured at the time of writing,and any links can redirect. Invitingtheir permanence is hope that cannot thrive. You posit here […]
The learned researcher Susan James (Vote #1: Susan James’ answer to Why do humans want to have sex with attractive people?) is of course right in the evolutionary selection angle, and even more right in the cultural situatedness of attractiveness. The body-ideal of Botswana sure isn’t the ideal of the 2016 US, which wasn’t the […]
Hoo boy. I’m being A2A’d this by Michaelis Maus, and he’s a trenchant one: I can’t give him a glib answer, and I can’t just protest that I’m an impostor. OK. I read a lot as a kid, as others did, and picked up a lot of encyclopaedic knowledge that way. It helps to connect […]
As Richard Farnsworth said, republicans are waiting for an unpopular and unfamiliar monarch to raise the question again. OTOH the celebrity appeal of Kate & Wills (which is driving the millennials’ affection for the monarchy) could still see it stick around. Part of the problem is that republicanism doesn’t have the emotional vigour it did […]
Habib le toubib, how do you manage to keep breaking my heart so with your questions? (Ah, by sending A2A’s that I leave in the too hard basket for weeks.) I admire and love the ideal of liberal arts education. I do. Really. It makes you a better person. But we live in an age […]
Michael Masiello: what are your views on theodicy? (“Fuck you” is not an adequate answer) Am I also Shaytan? Am I also Kali? Am I also Angra Mainyu? Am I also the Demiurge? If God is Good is He also God? If God is God is He also Good? Should pronouns referring to Satan be […]
Unsurprising that this question of yours, Habib le toubib, is attracting a lot of attention from migrants and diasporans. And it would: migrants and diasporans have a personal culture that hybridises their upbringing and their environment, so it will be perceptibly different to that of their local mainstream. It’s a big brushstrokes kind of personal […]
Nikos Tsiforos was a Greek humorist, who wrote a series of humour pieces covering all of Greek Mythology. I’ve cited his collection here a couple of times. At the end of the 640 pp book, he wrote this. Few of us Greeks know Greek Mythology well. (Before I started studying it to write it up, […]
Some good answers here, but none giving the obvious reference: Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel. It was despite (mediaeval) Christianity: Byzantium stopped all science very early. The Islamic world was into Science before Christendom was, and the switches in both worlds were not about the religion, but about interpretations of the religion. As for […]