What did I get wrong in 2020? What did I change my mind about? As I have argued that the mark of a good mind is a willingness to admit mistakes and to come to terms with why one might have made them, I am now forced into the uncomfortable position of trying to live […]
Samuel Cohn’s Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS is true door-stop of a book, encyclopedic in ambition, coming in at a full 650 pages of prose and citations. In a new book review over at the Washington Examiner I describe the book’s origins: In the summer of 2009, Samuel Cohn, […]
As February turned to March I realized I needed a better understanding of epidemics and disaster response. It was clear to me then that the coronavirus was going to blow up in my own country, that I was going to be voicing opinions about it, and that in consequence I had a responsibility to inform […]
Image Source Several months ago I was twittering back and forth with Matt Watson, one of John Hopkins’ biosecurity gurus. Watson was trying to convince me to sign up for their newsletter; I, a man irrationally disturbed by poisons, pandemics, and all other means of non-kinetic mass death, demurred. I knew if I read too […]
Dolia, an example of one type of pottery common in Roman times that completely disappeared from Western Europe after the fall of the empire. “Ostia Antica Dolia” by AlMare – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.Image Source. Economic history blogger Pseudoerasmus published an interesting pair of posts earlier this month titled […]
Jun Fujita, “National Guardsmen Questioning African American, 1919,” 1919, Photograph, Chicago Historical Society Archives. Chicago. Image Source. A week or so ago I came across a short Pacific Standard column by Jim Russel on Twitter. The article highlights a new paper by economists Dan Black, Seth Sanders, Evan Taylor, and Lowell Taylor on the early twentieth century “Great Migration” of African Americans away […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. This is the first “Notes From All Over” I have written this month, so this list is a long one. TOP BILLING When We Lose Antibiotics, Here’s Everything Else We’ll Lose TooMaryn McKenna. Wired. 20 November 2013. If we really lost antibiotics to advancing drug resistance […]
A collection of articles, essays, and blog post of merit. This collection is a large one. TOP BILLING Our Internet Surveillance StateBruce Schneier. Schneier on Security. 25 March 2013. The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the […]
TOP BILLING: Beijing’s Secret Succession Battle Willy Lam. Wall Street Journal. 24 September 2009. The Hakka People, China’s Leadership Caste “Curzon” ComingAnarchy.com 3 October 2009. Few people possess as much power as the ruling elites of the Chinese Communist Party. For American statesmen and diplomats, few topics have as much importance as the internal divisions […]
