Michael Wilcox, a Stanford University archaeologist, has a new book that takes a fresh look at the Pueblo Revolt. A university press release captures some interesting themes of Wilcox’s post-colonial work in the Southwest, such as this quote directly from his book: Archaeologists and anthropologists have imposed disease, demographic collapse and acculturation as explanations of…Continue Reading…
Tobis fires a few wild shots, Lambert does recon, while Real Climate tries to keep the posse in check. It’s quite a spectacle, this latest variation of Shoot the Messenger. Here’s a fact: university press releases that tout scientific studies are routinely vetted by the principal researcher(s). Assuming And that’s the case here, as I…Continue Reading…
File this one in the Department of Unfortunate Headlines. The head in the Times story that the blog post references is obviously more apt. But it’s possible the blogger was simply trying to be clever.
Reason magazine is running a multimedia series, “Reason saves Cleveland.” One of the episodes is titled “Fix the Schools.” After Reason is finished saving Cleveland from urban decline, I propose that staffers head out to the Lone Star state and save Texas from theocrats, who have hijacked the public school curriculum. Nor is that abomination…Continue Reading…
Over at Savage Minds, there’s an interesting post on the merits of anthropologists hanging in the field with jihadists. It quotes Roxanne Varzi wondering how to contextualize jihadi videos: These strike me as a rich source of information about a culture that is otherwise inaccessible to anthropologists: jihadi martyrs. How would you go about developing…Continue Reading…
Here’s another dispatch from a decades-old war, in which the policy and politics never change. You couldn’t read this kind of story in the country where the war is raging, because of a virtual news blackout, enforced by fear of vicious reprisal. So what does that mean for the people caught in the crossfire? As…Continue Reading…
It’s been on public display this past week. As the NYT reports: After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely…Continue Reading…
Earlier this month, the Center for American Progress (CAP) moderated an interesting panel discussion on the relationship between migration and climate change. Based upon this CAP paper on the subject, issued in December, it would seem that the liberal think tank is not above overplaying the scary climate migrant card. So, via The New Security…Continue Reading…
Remember the old saw, “I have some prime swampland to sell you in Florida…” As this law blog notes, the saying is based on events of the 1960s and 1970s where local scammers would attempt to induce out of state purchasers to acquire “lucrative” land which, in reality, turned out to be worthless, undevelopable plots….Continue Reading…
There is much that is astonishing about today NYT story on Somalia, above all this: One American official recently conceded that Somalia’s “best hope” was the government’s new military chief, a 60-year-old former artillery officer who, until a few months ago, was assistant manager at a McDonald’s in Germany. Meanwhile, in the Guardian, you can…Continue Reading…