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Chivalric Questions

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Monday, November 10, 2025

Kirth Gersen goes shopping

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From Jack Vance's sf novel The Book of Dreams. ...Gersen sauntered along Corrib Place, looking into shops, which here affected a sp...
Sunday, November 09, 2025

Mexico: The advantages of having a woman as president

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Politico covers https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/mexico-president-sheinbaum-presses-charges-after-street-groping-incident/ar-AA1PTFmC?o...
Thursday, November 06, 2025

Some wise words from Umair Haque

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Months, nay years ago now, I used to post material from Umair Haque pretty regularly on this blog. He struck me as one of the few commentat...
Monday, November 03, 2025

The organization of Early Medieval (Carolingian and Ottonian) armies

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Medievalists.net has published an article by a distinguished historian, David Bachrach. He has written extensively on how Charlemagne and hi...
Saturday, November 01, 2025

AI generates a podcast reviewing my article " Heroic Kings and Unruly Generals: The "Copenhagen" Continuation of Prosper Reconsidered. Florilegium, 6 (1984) , 50–70.

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Yesterday an unexpected item showed up in my mailbox: a podcast, based on my 1984 article analyzing an Italian chronicle which preserves un...
Sunday, October 26, 2025

The 20th Century is a long time ago

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This morning I was reading a lecture by Alan Lupack The 2016 Loomis Lecture: Moral Chivalry and the Arthurian Revival . It started out rathe...
Monday, October 20, 2025

Jack (the real) Vance -- as I see him

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Jack Vance -- the sf and fantasy writer, not the guy who is US VP-- was a wonderful writer. He hhad a unique talent. His vast vocabulary, t...
Saturday, September 20, 2025

Tambora and the Year without Summer

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Link to Substack pictures to come. Here's some striking paintings of the Year Without Summer . Thanks to xtracurriculars for this l...
Thursday, September 18, 2025

Cobalt, Ontario 1931 by Yvonne McKague Housser

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Sunday, September 07, 2025

Deir el-Medina and The Golden City -- looking at artisan life in Egypt

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Material now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge gives us a look at daily life comparable to Pompeii according to experts. This post fro...
Wednesday, September 03, 2025

Timothy Burke summarizes one aspect of Graeber and Wengrow's "The Dawn of Everything"

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Timothy Burke writes an extensive thought piece on Substack on how Trumpism is possible (Thanks to Brad DeLong for alerting me to t...
Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Words of Wisdom from Frank Zappa and Steve Vai

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I was idly paging through YouTube shorts when I ran across this piece of an interview with the musician Steve Vai (who I don't know from...
Wednesday, August 13, 2025

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I recently spent two weeks in Patrick County, Virginia. The county is at the heart of Appalachia and part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. A...

Some good stuff from the earlier days of this blog -- and other people's blogs

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I spent much of a recent morning looking at earlier parts of this blog and I found myself surprised at the quality of the material. I don...
Tuesday, July 29, 2025

Brad deLong on AI and H.P. Lovecraft

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I am very impressed by Brad DeLong's essay Shoggoths among us. I've been going through my inbox, and except for all the great a...
Friday, June 06, 2025

Good books

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Brad deLong loves Peter S. Beagle's Folk of the AirFolk , which he called, back in 2021, "a fantasy novel of Berkeley and of the ...

Charlie Angus reflects on what he learned at a Juno Beach Commemoration some years ago

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Here's what he said. This in particularly touched me: At a beautiful ceremony in the vast Canadian cemetery at Bretteville-sur-Laize, ...