Pathways

Painting from Jaipur, India, showing the use and effects of bhang, anonymous, ca. 1800

The Public Domain Review has an excellent write-up on the first English encounter with marijuana. Though often thought to have only come to knowledge in Europe during the fin de siècle, the account of using bhang is more ecumenical than hedonistic, as the drug was associated with Islam at the time. Although “[r]eckless self-experimentation with drugs is sometimes assumed to be a modern practice . . . [a]ccounts like Bowrey’s disabuse us of this notion.”

Anton Howes’ blog Age of Invention is an ongoing genealogy of the British Industrial Revolution. In a recent post, he asks the question of why inventions sometimes appear long after they are possible. Borrowing Alex Tabarrok’s phrase of “ideas behind their time,” he addressed a curious case of one such invention: tabletop gaming. Despite the fact that we’ve had tables, dice, and various gaming implements for centuries, the Dungeons and Dragons franchise is widely regarded as the first in the genre. He previews a number of hypotheses crowd-sourced on Twitter, but arrives ultimately at the force of habit. The “reason we have had so many low-hanging fruit throughout history is just because very few people ever bother to think of how to do things differently.”

The grave of the unknown is a long-established custom in many cultures. Sometimes, however, the burial sites are unknown simply because of worn markers, lost records, and the pressures of time. A fascinating recent study at the University of Montreal was able to trace identities to a large number of unmarked graves in a Quebec cemetery by matching genetic material to databases, some of which contained the dead’s living ancestors. What might such techniques mean for historical genealogy in both the broad and narrow sense?

What is at stake in historical analogy between periodizations? Gabriel Winant at the University of Chicago takes aim at how our own era of inequality has been dubbed the “New Gilded Age.” This equation between two periods of wealth inequality betrays “positivist reasoning” that assumes the presence of a phenomenon implies the presence of the same causal factors. Rather, we should take “temporal heterogeneity” as our axiom. This “implies causal heterogeneity.” For instance, our own inequalities must take into account mass incarceration, a factor not present during the Teapot Dome Scandal.

There are several YouTube channels produced by Australian journalist Brady Haran that are excellent popularizations of mathematics, physics, and computer science, respectively. One of his most recent interviews was with The Pope’s Astronomer, Brother Guy Consolmagno. A fascinating interview that discusses how the Vatican Observatory’s work fits into the perceived science-religion divide. it includes a discussion, among many other things, of the Church’s condemnation of Galileo.