Applied Epistemology

Justin Smith has written an interesting essay on early modern ideas about human races. I found especially suggestive his observation that the decline of cataclysm-based theories about race was a key step toward replacing myth with history.

The things you discover when you're curious about Coney Island:

c.1200, from Anglo-Norm. conis, pl. of conil "long-eared rabbit" (Lepus cunicula) from L. cuniculus, the small, Sp. variant of the It. hare (L. lepus), the word perhaps from Iberian Celtic (classical writers say it is Spanish). Rabbit arose 14c. to mean the young of the species, but gradually pushed out the older word 19c., after British slang picked up coney as a synonym for "cunt" (cf.

In the dark age of 1991, before Marvel produced its own movies, it produced an unspeakably bad licensed comic. Click on the links at the end of the article.

...I mean, how many cops can say they've arrested sorcerers?

Obama and Thomas Frank appear to be flat-out wrong.

Political philosopher Avishai Margalit has written a perceptive essay on the role of sectarianism in modern politics. An extended quote:

"The idea of the holy is the idea of that which is nonnegotiable. Commodities are divisible either physically or in terms of the duration of their use. What is divisible can be subject to compromise. We can split the difference. The idea of the sacred—at least in monotheistic religions—describes what is indivisible and hence not subject to compromise. If a fetus’s life is sacred, then no splitting of pregnancy into trimesters is allowed.

The NYT obit correctly points out Gygax's great accomplishment: he brought fantasy to the people. Before 1973, fantasy was a genre of fiction. After D&D, it became an interactive medium. In this respect, D&D is to fantasy what photography is to painting.

Fun fact from the original D&D book I ("Men & Magic"): "the referee to pl

Alan Wolfe (whom I have long regarded as one of America's most shallow public intellectuals) read a Pew study on religions around the world and draws the obvious conclusion: that religion is slowly dying. It's gratifying to find others draw the same conclusions I did a while back.

I knew that Stephen Colbert was a big D&D player, but only today did I discover this 2003 interview, in which Colbert shows his Tolkien IQ (and judgment about Faramir's characterization) to be mighty geektacular. (His paraphrase of Faramir's

Verbatim excerpt from a student paper:

For instance, when the September 11 attacks occurred during 2001, and most people started blaming the Iraqi people and a dislike towards them was established, I was taught in my household not to blame all the Iraqi people for a mistake that one person committed. However, most people including some of my friends and relatives till this day are against Iraqi people because of what one person by the name of Saddam Hussein did. [...] In this situation they were committing a fallacy called hasty generalization.