Here is the interview in Vox with James Carville that I mentioned in class today: “Wokeness Is a Problem and We All Know It.”

And here’s an article in The Atlantic that relates to a question we were discussing the other day: is progressive activism in some ways taking the place for many non-believing liberals that religion used to fill? “America without God.”

So we’re talking about implausible conspiracies in class. The Jewish space laser is a pretty good recent example. I ran across this hilarious add from the shop of the National Museum of Jewish American History the other day on Facebook. The ad copy reads, “Designed by Lazar Wolf and launched in 5780 from a secret base behind a Lower East Side deli, the Jewish Space Laser conducts orbital missions to smite anti-Semitic tropes and sabotage conspiracy theorists.
Now, you can carry a tchotchke-sized scale model of this very real and not at all fake satellite weapon which definitely exists.
50% of profits from this product will be donated to organizations working to defeat QAnon supporters. Your purchase also supports the Museum and its mission.”

Currently on back order. But they also have patches and tee shirts.

Regarding our ongoing discussion of how polarized American politics and society have become, take a look at this story in the New York Times showing detailed maps of red and blue patches in various cities.

The article reminded me of our conversation the other day about the possibility of cultures losing technologies if no one passes them on to the next generation: “The Ancient Fabric That No One Knows How to Make.”

Jacobs mentions the Long Now Foundation in Breaking Bread with the Dead. I’m most interested in them for their timekeeping project: building a mechanical clock that will run for 10,000 years. I’ve seen their Prototype 1 clock at the British Science Museum, and even that “rough draft” is a remarkable feat of engineering. The 10,000 year clock also gave Neal Stephenson the inspiration for the monastery in his book Anathem. There, the monks live in different walled-off sections of an enormous compound. A giant clock at the heart of the compound opens gates between those sections and the outside world periodically. Some monks can come and go every year. Other monks see their gates open only once a decade. Yet others live in a section with gates that open once per century, and some live in a section whose gates open only once every thousand years!

We’ve read a bit about mid-century parents buying encyclopedia sets for their kids. In the short piece “Epiphany, with Encyclopedias,” author Eugene Linden describes the techniques he used to sell encyclopedias to aspiring middlebrow parents.

Here’s an English translation of the Encyclopedie.

Here’s an interesting resource at NPR: a regularly updated list of everyone who has been arrested for the attack on the Capitol, along with some information about them and what brought them to that point.

This grim story at the PBS NewsHour describes how militants are killing educated professionals in Kabul, women in particular. It reminds me of other purges of intellectuals or even merely literate people at other times in other places, for example in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

This in depth analysis at the New York Times is bound to get a lot of attention: “77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election.”