could not love this lede by @outsidethenba more!! cbssports.com/nba/news/knick…

Before you engage with a claim about a breaking event, check one thing first Who is the earliest identifiable source Not who's sharing it now Who put it into the information environment, and when That single check eliminates more noise than any other

The modern classroom has quietly taught students to fear difficult books by cutting them down before they can change anyone. Modern schools often reduce Moby-Dick to Ahab, the white whale, obsession, and the final chase, but Melville wrote a far stranger book filled with sermons, jokes, whale anatomy, labor scenes, racial encounters, biblical echoes, and failed attempts to master the world through knowledge. The so-called digressions teach the very discipline students need: patience, attention, humility, and the ability to sit with a book that refuses easy shortcuts. Ahab reduces the whale to one private enemy, while Ishmael survives because he keeps looking, doubting, wandering, listening, and learning. That is why students should read the whole novel, because the difficulty is part of the education. Read the whole book or admit that you have only met the whale. newsletter.thecultureexplore…

As the World Cup approaches, I decided today to make a sort of pilgrimage visit to the world’s oldest football. Found above Mary Queen of Scots bedroom in Stirling castle, the ball is thought to date to the 1540s. In fact, the young queen Mary may even have kicked it herself!

The dew point at Fujairah International Airport in the UAE is currently 86°F (30°C). Combined with an air temperature of 93°F, that's a heat index of 126°F (52°C), at 10:30 pm local time.

The hottest ocean water on the planet right now is located just south of the Strait of Hormuz. Sea surface temps off northern Oman are approaching 95°F (35°C), bathwater-warm, and the reason the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman produce some of the most insufferable humidity on Earth.

🤦‍♂️ deanblundell.substack.com/p/…

They were of a generation where you could make a living devoting yourself to the study of history. It will be hard to replace them because few can do this now.

We lost two giants yesterday. Gordon Wood's work on the American Founding and the early Republic stands second to none. Robert Louis Wilken was another intellectual great--a brilliant historian of early Christianity and the patristic age. Both are terrible losses.

🤦‍♂️ #DOGE #screwworm

You can read and download Gordon Wood's essay in full here: america250.aei.org/volume/de…

Gordon Wood wrote the lead essay for "Democracy and the American Revolution," the first volume in @AEI's "America at 250" series. I had to pick my jaw up off the ground the first time I read how he summed up the democratic force the Revolution unleashed:

The cheapest, most effective wildfire crew in California has four legs and eats the problem. Clearing flammable brush off a steep slope by hand is brutal, slow, expensive work. A herd of goats is none of those things. Hand clearance: - Around 28,000 dollars an acre - People with tools on dangerous slopes - Cuttings that then have to be hauled away A herd of goats: - Roughly 500 to 1,000 dollars an acre - Climbs slopes no crew wants to touch - Eats the brush to a firebreak and fertilises the ground on the way through - Reaches branches several feet up - Visibly thrilled to be at work Calling the goat a quaint throwback has it backwards. On this job the goat is the superior technology by a factor of about fifty, and it runs on the very scrub everyone else is paying to remove.

Offline, normal people keep normal-peopling.

It's weirdly reassuring that no matter how esoteric the subject, there's someone out there who knows everything about it . "Time Team" sometimes called in a man who was an expert on ancient pollens to clarify what a given landscape would have looked like 1000s of years ago.

The novelist Sharon Kay Penman famously owned a private library of niche books on medieval history, and once spent $300 to acquire a book about plants of the Levant so she could check one fact. I hope one day to own a home library that is similarly vast and niche.

I've just published a tribute to Gordon S. Wood over at The Redneck Intellectual. Link 👇

I'll just add this: Gordon Wood's explanation of Marbury v. Madison in "Empire of Liberty" is, I think, the best thing ever written on the case except the decision itself. It's concise, accurate, fair, and easy for the non-lawyer to follow. A masterpiece.

An reminder from @M_Ignatieff on the vast differences between political adversaries - and enemies. nytimes.com/2013/10/17/opini…