Horizon
A collaborative general-interest blog of history, literature, culture, and stuff
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- Ratisbon Redux
Anyone interested in reading the actual work the pope was quoting from last year can find a (possibly bootleg) version of Manuel II Palaeologus's Interview with a Persian at this French website. Based on a quick skim, it's an engaging... - Geneticists More Optimistic Than Historical Linguists
Something about this New York Times Magazine article on British genetics set off my bogosity alarm. Think of your smoke detector when you're making blackened catfish. Dr. Oppenheimers population history of the British Isles relies not only on genetic data... - Comparative Alphabets
A few months ago I figured I'd try to pick up Yiddish. I've grown much less ambitious in the past year or so, figured the language wouldn't be too hard for someone already familiar with German and Hebrew. In fact,... - "Conservapedia"
Run by Phyllis Schlafly's kid. Where you want to go if the Bible is your authority on dinosaurs.... - Six words, all nouns
Being slap-happy after yet another morning bout with the Federal Register for my work blog, ">I'm inviting the public to submit any housing-related (non-military) government document containing a string of more than six consecutive mutually modifying nouns. As of today,... - Posthumous Paternity
A friend of mine makes the news.... - Lewis on Textbook Prose
I'm having great fun with Letters of C. S. Lewis. It's been savagely edited by Lewis's brother. This might disappoint a serious fan, but with the dross removed we're left with witty, perceptive observations on books and life. This is... - Democratic^H^H Party
Martha once corrected a commenter here for referring to the "Democrat Party." Apparently it's a sort of playground taunt used by the party's opponents when they're feeling puerile. It was news to me, but apparently not to The Weekly Standard's... - Lewis on the General Strike
Told in a letter from C. S. Lewis to his father, dated 5 June, 1926: The best strike story I have heard is about engines. A train (with amateur driver) set out from Paddington for Bristol, first stop Bath. When... - Love Story
And here I was getting excited about Tear Down The Mountain: An Appalachian Love Story, when I read this: She'd dislodged more than teeth; Sid's determination drained away when the crockery landed in his pie hole. Or maybe he sensed... - Too Late
Something about the passage I've highlighted in today's IHE interview with Danny Postel just doesn't work. In retrospect Im self-critical about that. I now think people like Mary Kaldor (from Helsinki Citizens Assembly) and Joanne Landy (of the Campaign for... - The Multiparty South?
This may be old news to everyone else, but I was astonished by Bill Moser's observation in his excellent Nation column "The Way Down South": The parity between the parties, unprecedented in the South's history, was neatly symbolized by the... - Welwyn Garden City and Jane Jacobs
I've been reading Jane Jacobs' The Death And Life of Great American Cities, and a wonderful productively cranky book it is. I hadn't otherwise heard of Welwyn Garden City except in a snide reference from Orwell in his famous diatribe... - Wells in Lewis
From C. S. Lewis's journal entry for 15 June, 1924: M. told us a good story of how H. G. Wells had dined at All Souls and said that Oxford wasted too much time over Latin and Greek. Why should... - Spamlish Revisited
We have talked about the odd language of spam, viruses, and assorted internet scams in the past. Now a bit of linguistic puzzling over at language log leads circuitously to the same conclusion. (Be sure to read through all of...
