Jason Walters: from Salafism to Sarte
Listen now (110 min) | An ex-radical Islamist speaks
RKUL: Time Well Spent 08/08/2022
The Summer Drought Edition
Maxim Lott: getting to the truth of the matter
About a month ago, during a COVID-19 wave, I saw a Substack post, How to Get Paxlovid Quickly, If You Get Covid – How to get the 89%-effective Covid cure called Paxlovid, despite government red tape, shared across various group chats. For non-Americans…
The flip side of globalization
It’s Bangladesh after Sri Lanka: Protests erupt over 52% fuel price hike: Following the tragic situation in Sri Lanka, thousands of demonstrators flocked to the streets in many Bangladeshi cities when the Sheikh Hasina administration raised fuel prices to their highest level since the neighbouring nation’s independence by about 52%. Global supply shocks due to … Continue reading The flip side of globalization
Ed West: Albion past and future
Listen now (83 min) | English history and its special relationship with America
Kansas abortion proposition vs. Trump support 2020
No big surprises it seems. The r-squared of between 2020 election and 2022 ballot measure is ~0.80, so 80% of the variance in the second can be predicted by variance […]
Varna is Indo-European and jati is Indian
A casual comment…most Indo-European societies seem to have originally had some sort of occupational caste system. I’m talking here of Dumezil’s trifunctional hypothesis, warrior, priest and commoner. But only the Indian subcontinent has jati. I was thinking about it when reflecting on work to come out soon from David Reich’s lab on ancient Pontic steppe ancestry … Continue reading Varna is Indo-European and jati is Indian
Manvir Singh: beyond anthropological dreams
What if everything you learned about anthropology turned out to be wrong? Well, OK, maybe not everything, but some very important things. Today Razib talks to Manvir Singh about primitive communism and misconceptions about hunter-gatherers, what anthro…
I wanna be like you
What we talk about when we compare chimps to humans genetically
Thank God the British are working on South Asian genomics
The sequences of 150,119 genomes in the UK Biobank: We defined two other cohorts based on ancestry: African (XAF; n = 9,633; Extended Data Fig. 4) and South Asian (XSA; n = 9,252; Extended Data Fig. 5) (Fig. 3a–c). The 37,598 UKB individuals who do not belong to XBI, XAF or XSA were assigned to the cohort OTH (others). … Continue reading Thank God the British are working on South Asian genomics
But why is the lactase persistent allele not in HWE?
Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe: In European and many African, Middle Eastern and southern Asian populations, lactase persistence (LP) is the most strongly selected monogenic […]
Ethan Strauss: the sports journalism disruptor is in the house
Listen now (100 min) | The author of the #1 sports Substack speaks
On the collaboration with Dry.io
I mentioned this in my latest Time Well Spent (a recurring feature of my newsletter), but I’ve started a collab with a firm called dry.io. On its website they say […]
Built to Last: Continuity in Japanese Genetics
A nation endures across the millennia
Judge Glock: it’s still morning in America!
On this episode of the Unsupervised Learning podcast, Razib talks to Dr. Judge Glock about the case for optimism in America in 2022. An economic historian by training, Glock is a Chief Policy Officer at the Cicero Institute. Though public polling shows…
Maxim Lott: getting to the truth of the matter
Listen now (58 min) | Two years of pandemics, moral panics and epistemological tribalism
The replacement of the Neandersovan Y and mtDNA?
Harvard Magazine has a nice piece up on David Reich’s biography and research. The section where Reich addresses the strange issues regarding Neanderthals jumped out at me, as I’ve had […]
Open Thread – 7/17/2022 – Gene Expression
The new Rings of Power series debuts on September 2nd, so they have a new trailer out. I’m skeptical, but they pulled all the stops for the effects. My expectation […]
Manvir Singh correct transcript link
Apologies for the second email, but I used the incorrect link for the Manvir Singh podcast written transcript (I assume most of you are not interested in a .vcf file). Guess it goes to show that I shouldn’t multitask. But if you want the transcript to my podcast with Manvir Singh, here is the correct link:
Dr. Iona Italia: a cosmopolitan liberal in an identitarian age
Dr. Iona Italia’s name often perplexes the public, but it’s entirely explicable considering her background. Her late father was from the Parsi community of the Indian subcontinent. Descendants of Persians who continued to adhere to the Zoroastrian reli…