Razib Khan’s Content Aggregation Site
-
Rand Simberg: Elon Musk’s Starship and making spaceflight great again
Listen now (76 min) | An aerospace engineer discusses the possibilities for space in the 21st century
-
In defense of behavior genetics
Stuart Ritchie, the author of Intelligence: All That Matters and Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth, has written a trenchant critique of The […]
-
The werewolves were the koryos of yore
The London Review of Books has a review of a book between two scholars, Old Thiess, a Livonian Werewolf: A Classic Case in Comparative Perspective. The crux is the case […]
-
Euro Vision (part 1)
Who qualifies as a European anyway?
-
Molson Hart: “Chimerica” and the supply chain
Listen now (54 min) | An American businessman talks about his experiences in international trade
-
Dan Davis prehistory YouTuber par excellence
I’ve been on the record of being skeptical of a lot of content being generated on YouTube, but I think the author Dan Davis does a really great job. The […]
-
James Lee: genes and educational attainment
In this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to James Lee, a professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota. Lee is a co-author of a new paper in Nature, Polygenic prediction of educational attainment within and between families from ge…
-
A video on the Sintashta Culture
-
The truth still matters
On Twitter I ran into a peculiar argument about vegetarianism and Brahmanism: This is just factually wrong from what I know. The standard narrative I was taught is that the shift toward vegetarianism was driven by non-Brahmin-led religious movements, in particular the Sramanic sects like Jainism and Buddhism (that seem to have had a Kshatriya…
-
Games within games
Many years ago I read Adin Steinsaltz’s The Essential Talmud. Steinsaltz was a Charedi (Chasidic more specifically) rabbi who spoke about the text and work from the perspective of an […]
-
Happy Rama Navami!
A Hindu friend clued me into the fact that this was Lord Rama’s birthday. Since I’m not Hindu or from a Hindu background I had no clue (to be fair, Google calendar is how I know when Ramadan starts). I don’t know much about Rama as I have not read the Ramayana (after all these…
-
Against blood quantum as a measure of indigeneity
The figure to the right is from a Substack post I wrote last year, Stark Truth About Aryans: a story of India. In it, I posted about the different streams of ancestry that led to the variation in the modern Indian subcontinent. In short, there are three primary threads: 1) Steppe Indo-Aryans who are identical…
-
So what’s wrong with being kaala?
In the comments below there’s a lot of discussion on colorism among brown subcontinentals as well as a fixation on particular facial features. Since I’m an American coconut I don’t really understand many of the nuances, though I’m curious from an anthropological perspective. Much of it obviously seems ludicrous for American browns. What’s the point…
-
Open Thread – 4/9/2022 – Gene Expression
I’ve been reading The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann before I go to sleep. Not sure I would recommend this, as the author, Ananyo […]
-
Alex Nowrasteh: the last migration expert standing
Listen now (63 min) | No immigration in the US and refugee crisis in Europe
-
Josiah Neeley: energy matters
On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib talks to Josiah Neeley, Senior Fellow in Energy at the R Street Institute and co-host of the Urbane Cowboys podcast. They discuss the past, present and future of the energy markets, and how best to underst…
-
Indus Valley on Tides of History
Patrick Wyman interviewing a specialist on the IVC. Pretty interesting, though I’m mildly skeptical of the idea of what seems like a pre-state primitive democracy being the political system in the IVC.
-
The twilight of American behavior genetics
Many people, including some prominent scientists, have emailed me about the review of K. Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery in The New York Review of Books: Why Biology Is Not […]
-
How Indians view themselves vs. how Westerners view Indians
As A South Asian Woman, Seeing Two Darker-Skinned Women On Bridgerton Means Everything. The headline is obviously a bit much. The casting of dark-skinned actresses of Indian-origin really isn’t going to change the norms of the Indian subcontinent, or the whole of Asia. But it’s an interesting window on aesthetic standards and cultural creation. Indians…
-
RKUL: Time Well Spent 04/04/2022
Spring has sprung!