why we should

I have just been reminded that Sargon was the first known ruler of the known world. This happened before empires were a thing. It was at a time when kingdoms were not yet available to be captured and incorporated. Imperialists had to make do with cities. This was in a post about Sargon's daughter Enheduanna by Historical Snapshots. Enheduanna being…

"Is there, in fact, such a thing as the specialization of the generalist?" Bill Ward asks this question after describing their own reading style and their attitudes towards those who read in a generalist manner and those who read with a special focus. Go read it, SPECIALIST AND GENERALIST READERS. It’s from 2009, it deals with the question from the…

This blog started out as a multi-voice poem nine years ago one easter. Well, laying it out by hand with coloured pencil in a highlight-coding for each 'voice'. The nine year old FB post said I am a year in at this stage. Before that is was just a ‘unsplit’ univocal poem. Or notes. I have lots of notes. The…

Below is a reworking of a comment at J. N. Nielsen’s Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon on the post ‘A Thought Experiment in the Aggregation of Civilizations’. This post is also the third on Reading Joseph Henrich see ONE and TWO. As such my comment used the terminology found in that post and my own favoured herbs and spices…

Preamble In ONE I discussed some of my reading of Joseph Henrich’s books, and this morning I am riffing within the same books on the idea of the individual as a social institution. Or at least the interplay between the acknowledgment and the possibility of the individual as social institution. This is some more exploratory & metaphoric work on the implication…

This avenue of reading began like my discovery of the creator or promoter of the umbrella term ‘Man the hunter’ in two ways. It was a family hand-me down book and it was the writer’s second book. See Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative (substack.com). In Joseph Henrich’s case the second book has made a bigger splash than the first, and…