Category: Open Thread

I have mixed feelings about casting Dev Patel as Gawain. Though my feelings are not strong, they are similar to my feelings about casting white actors as non-Europeans in the past: you get over it, but it takes away from verisimilitude. Please make sure that you subscribe to the podcast (there are links to various…

The comments are open(ish).

India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 is a good read and I recommend it. I don’t read too many books on Indian history to be honest, because there seems to be a death of them (perhaps they are printed in India?). This is in contrast to China. Then again, China has a much stronger tradition…

Have at it.

India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765 is a decent read. Recommended if you have the time. I have a Wikipedia page. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Inferring Causal Direction Between Two Traits in the Presence of Horizontal Pleiotropy with GWAS Summary Data. The Age Of The Mega-City Is Over. Probably wrong. But…

What’s going on? Armin Navabi has angered both Muslims and Hindus on Twitter recently.

The usual. Like I said I’m moderating more, so watch yourself. On Monday some of the BP crew (and my friend Josiah Neeley of Urbane Cowboys will be talking to Matthew Yglesias of Vox about his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. Open to questions from the peanut gallery here too.…

Reading Persecution & Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom. After a hiatus, I’ve decided to start reading about religion again because of the religious behavior which seems to be so common in our society. This is Not The American Cultural Revolution. I really want Thermidor. ‘Tenet’ Takes $717K In Two Days Of Korea Preview.…

The usual. But I’ll make a comment here. I am of the school that thinks facts matter a lot. Many of you trade in standard Hindu nationalist tropes and generalities about Islam. As someone who told Shadi Hamid on our interview, I am not a big personal fan of Islam, I don’t really mind people…

Dog days of summer.. One of the things with Indian American analysis of Indian culture/politics is the unselfconscious filtering of it through an American lens, rather than Indian. It’s annoying to listen to news shows where they interview and Indian American about Indian culture, and the interviewer and guest proceed to discuss about Indian culture…

Reading Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. The author, Walter Scheidel, is my kind of thinker. This is a very rich and fertile book. Scheidel has thought long and hard about a lot of “big questions.” This is a page-turner. I asked for more positive views on The Insight.…

I’m traveling with my family a lot this week. Please stay under the control, because if you get out of control I’ll be more kludgey in my response than usual. Also, to be frank, I would appreciate it if every thread doesn’t devolve into arguments between guys you can imagine whacking off to physical anthropology…

A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane. I actually found out about this book via The New York Times, which reviewed this. Unless you have been sleeping under a rock, Haldane, along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright, was instrumental in fusing population genetics with the Neo-Darwinian…

I think when we started the Brown Pundits Browncast we planned a ~1 time a week affair. As it happens it’s not that regular. The Browncast will be gone for 3 weeks, and then come back every other day for a week. Really you should subscribe at one of the options (just click the link…

The “Open Thread” posts for Brown Pundits are going racking up hundreds of comments in a few days. What gives? Something about community. That’s what the blogosphere as a whole has lost. When was the last post that I wrote in response to another blog? It’s been so long. One Billion Americans: The Case for…

So How Asia Works is very discounted on Kindle in the USA. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. In light of the increased comment activity on this weblog, I ask commenters to shy away from too many stupid comments. If you think you may say something stupid, please be cautious, because I may…

Just a reminder, I contributed a chapter to Which of Us are Aryans? Some of you are probably skeptical of this book because the editor is Romilla Thapar. You know who that reminds me of? Kabir! He, the master of pollution and contagion (perhaps he’s descended from Brahmins?). I’ve noticed that there is an increase…

I got a review copy of One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. I’m curious about this because I’ve become much more open to flooding the country with immigrants since I of the opinion our elites have gone insane. I also got a copy of Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made…

The usual. I’m rather liberal for open threads, but let’s try to diminish the vitriol. Also, I am appreciating the links some of you are putting out there. I’m actually learning a lot.

After I posted The Myth Of Arabian Paganism, And The Jewish-Christian Origins Of The Umayyads, several people suggested I read Muhammad and the Empires of Faith: The Making of the Prophet of Islam as somewhat of a corrective toward my views. I am now over halfway through Muhammad and the Empires of Faith. I went…