Read Theory

Retvrn

Hello, armor lovers! ⚔️ My latest for @hyperallergic.com is a review of the reopening of the arms and armor galleries at the @worcesterartmuseum.bsky.social. As you will see, there is a global take on armor from Corinthian helmets to Samurai to Mughal soldiers to the Mandalorian that I loved.

It's Protesting if you walk out of an Imperial diet, otherwise its sparkling religious disobedience

There's a particular chapter of the Nick's Discourses on Livy that keeps coming to mind these days, but I ain't saying which one.

Thanks for pointing that out! It's probably going to make me pretty sad.

at this point baudrillard’s on a run like the ‘95 bulls

Thucydides did not write the Melian Dialogue for people to forget Athens lost the Peloponnesian War.

people should eat more organs. they're good.

I wouldn't exactly blame someone for getting soured on the whole philosophic/humanistic education thing after seeing how Alcibiades and Critias turned out.

I want to be that Tantalus, unfed forever, that my want's agony declare that such as we want has nothing to say to the world; if the world wants, it nothing wants for us. Let me be unsatisfied. William Bronk, The Abnegation

Coleman Barks is a charlatan and my enemy.

John Crowley wrote a fascinating novel, Flint and Mirror, about Hugh O'Neill and the Flight of the Earls where Dee tries to use this mirror to magically connect O'Neill+his loyalties to the Queen, while he obtained the titular flint from the Tuatha Dé Danann for opposite reasons.

Watch out, Brother Fredegar will take you for all the tithes you collected. His dice are Providential.

*everybody knew even back then that type theory was repugnant*

Unfortunately I have found out. Fuck!

one of the minor frustrations of the 2020s internet is how many sites now don't respect boolean commands in search, like they'd rather give you a bunch of unrelated content to sift through than turn up only a handful of results

An old military maxim often attributed to Napoleon is “an army marches on its stomach” and I feel the same way that a university thinks via its library. The slow and steady financial diminution of research libraries and the librarians who staff them is, to me, a slow-rolling higher Ed catastrophe.

Someone stole my argument from when I was 8 and tried to convince my mom that eating whipped cream straight out of the can was healthy because it had air.

People should use more sumac.

I’d never really experienced it much before but holy shit now I know what people mean when they say Opus Dei has a war on Christmas problem

some douchenozzle with a handlebar mustache in 1912 decides that they just won't do an annual report that year because he's too busy campaigning for Taft or whatever and more than a century later I'm paying for it

Got some questions for the minister who decided to dig up his college crush's corpse

You might think this is a joke, but think of the centuries of harm from Plato playing sockpuppet with his dead advisor. What were the peer reviewers thinking!

Now die, die, die, die, die.

I crave warren-thriller Watership Down. Tom Clancy would explain the hell out of brutal rabbit-on-rabbit tunnel warfare. I need to know precisely what gas the farmers used, the physiological effect on a variety of small mammals and a 3 paragraph digression on how dangerous it is to manufacture.

Forthcoming in SHPS 'A pink lie in French medicine' where I tell you the story of Spasfon/phloroglucinol - a pink shiny pill created in France in the 1960s - and one of the most prescribed pharmaceutical drugs in France, especially to women philpapers.org/rec/FERAPL-3

Feeling lazy, okay if I just bring Bentham? Less digging.

Author. Co-weaver. Visionary. Plus actor.

I want to spotlight the clarity and beauty of the language Kelsey uses: the dead have a right to stay dead. They do. We're going to need to develop standardized, universal, opt-out-only legal means to allow them to. To allow /us/ to, for we will all be citizens in the kingdom of the dead in time.

Something you might now know about Vancouver Island is that it is covered in feral cottontail rabbits. they are *everywhere*. and this morning i was witness to BUNNY VIOLENCE

"Smut" by Tom Lehrer - RIP to one of the titans of American comedy youtu.be/iaHDBL7dVgs?...

Is disruption in science decreasing? Maybe not... "Due to a factual plotting mistake, database entries with zero references were omitted in the CD index distributions, hiding a large number of outliers with a maximum CD index of one, while keeping them in the analysis" the classic Seaborn bug 🫣

Can't go around in the middle of the night knocking heads off Obelisks, can you?

"berlin alexanderplatz" episode of "wishbone"

The island was concrete so the protagonist could pull sick tricks in futile attempts to be noticed by drivers

Inventing Temperature, Hasok Chang (2004)

There are snails on slopes everywhere for those with eyes to see.

ChatGPT is down but The Museum of English Rural Life still stands, proving once again that Silicon Valley cannot compete with the history of rural England and its people.

Yes.

English Plebeian: no way they’re fitting ALL SEVEN ages of man in this monologue!!!??!!

This is a less-sympathetic iteration of a major problem in the information ecosystem, particularly re: mis/disinfo: quality sources are paywalled or otherwise inaccessible, while conspiracy and garbage is free and easy to access. Guess which gets consumed more?