Monthly Archives: July 2017

Read a bit of The Unholy Consult. People who say George R R Martin’s work is too dark? They need to really read a bit of R. Scott Bakker, and Martin will seem to like someone who sees the world through rose-colored glasses. I’m thinking of reading The Witchwood Crown later because I might need […]

Read more

Because I watch Screen Junkies‘ “Honest Trailers” I get recommendations like the above from Looper, The Real Reason Why Valerian Flopped At The Box Office. Of course no one knows the ‘real reason’ Valerian flopped, aside from “it didn’t seem like a good movie.” The reality is that Valerian and the City of a Thousand […]

Read more

As many of you know, Apple is doing away with the iPod Shuffle. One curious thing is that I’ve noticed several people buying these devices in the last week through my Amazon referrals. At $50 the price point isn’t high, but it does seem a bit much for an obsolete technology. Which made me reflect […]

Read more

India Today published my review of the current state of the genetics and genomics of the Indian subcontinent, and what it can tell us about the ethnogenesis of South Asians generally. In the piece I tried to be very circumspect and stick to what we know with a high, if not perfect, degree of certainty. … Continue reading “The Indo-Aryan question nearing resolution”

Read more

The piece is up at India Today. The headline and title are of course optimized for clicks. I would, for example, say that the Indo-Aryans came from the west, not the West. In the course of writing this it has become clear that many people have very specific commitments on this issue. I think it […]

Read more

Alpha, set 20,000 years ago in Europe, was apparently originally titled “Solutrean.” The change is probably for the best. It will come out next spring. I really hope that this movie is good and does well. It isn’t often that you have something which takes place during the Last Glacial Maximum. The plot seems to […]

Read more

If the film Rise of the Planet of the Apes had come out a few years later I believe there would have been mention of CRISPR. Sometimes science leads to technology, and other times technology aids in science. On occasion the two are one in the same. The plot I made above shows that in […]

Read more

priests are boring & teens aren’t invested in their faith, said no one who has ever been to a Saturday night at @go2steubenville #SteubieOTL pic.twitter.com/9wq03CYuGZ — KatiePrejean McGrady (@KatiePrejean) July 23, 2017 The idea of decline is an old one. See The Idea of Decline in Western History for a culturally delimited view. But whether […]

Read more

A few years ago I suggested to the paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer that the first modern humans who arrived in Europe did not contribute appreciable ancestry to modern populations in the continent (appreciable as in 1% or more of the genome).* It seems I may have been right according to results from a 2016 paper, The […]

Read more

Finished The Enigma of Reason. The basic thesis that reasoning is a way to convince people after you’ve already come to a conclusion, that is, rationalization, was already one I shared. That makes sense since one of the coauthors, Dan Sperber, has been influential in the “naturalistic” school of anthropology. If you’ve read books like […]

Read more

Before Nicholas Dirks was a controversial chancellor of UC Berkeley, he was a well regarded historian of South Asia. He wrote Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. I read it, along with other books on the topic in the middle 2000s. Here is Amazon summary from Library Journal: Is India’s caste […]

Read more

I know that Game of Thrones is premiering tonight, but just wanted to remind readers that R. Scott Bakker’s The Unholy Consult will be out in a week. The author, R. Scott Bakker, has a blog, Three Pound Brain. He has some strange ideas…much of which I can’t make heads or tails of. But that’s […]

Read more

The Week has published a screed against the low moral quality of Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones is bad — and bad for you. Obviously there is something to this insofar as one can see a coarsening of entertainment, or at least a decline in the stylized aspects of the depiction of reality. But […]

Read more

In the period between 2005 and 2010 I spent a fair amount of time reading about American history. And one aspect which interested me was the nature of the assimilation of white Americans of non-Protestant background, in particular Roman Catholics and Jews. This was triggered by reading The Impossibility of Religious Freedom, where the author […]

Read more

23andMe has gone below $50 for “Prime Day”! For those of us who bought kits (albeit more fully featured) at $399 or even more this is pretty incredible. But from what I’m to understand these sorts of SNP-chips are now possible to purchase from Illumina for well less than $50 so this isn’t charitable. At […]

Read more

Recently I had the pleasure of having lunch with David Reich and he asked me about my opinions in relation to the Afro-Asiatic languages. I thought it was a strange question in that I get asked about that in the comments of this weblog too. Why would I have any particular insight? I gave him […]

Read more

Lots of stuff at SMBE of interest to me. I went to the Evolution meeting last year, and it was a little thin on genetics for me. And I go to ASHG pretty much every year, but there’s a lot of medical stuff that is not to my taste. SMBE was really pretty much my […]

Read more

Some right-wing intellectuals are wont to say that multicultural and multiracial empires do not last. This is not true. Historically there are plenty which lasted for quite a long time. Rome, Byzantium, and the Ottomans, to name just a few of the longest. But, though they were diverse polities modern liberal democratic sensibilities would have […]

Read more

I’m a sucker for the aesthetics of Norden. Why? I wonder if part of it is that the fringe of Northern Europe is a science fictional setting. The long dark nights during the cold winter, and the twilight during midsummer. The sun may be bright, it never gets too high in the sky. The 13th […]

Read more

20/24
Razib Khan