Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Wikipedia: Aelius Aristides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aelius_Aristides#cite_note-4…

Doris Groshen Daniels: Theodore Roosevelt and Gender Roles https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-groshen-roosevelt-gender.pdf: ‘…

Jeremy Norman: Automata Invented by Heron of Alexandria https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=10

Wikipedia: Dialogus de Oratoribus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogus_de_oratoribus: ‘A short work attributed to Tacitus, in dialogue form, on the art of rhetoric. Its date of composition is unknown, though its dedication to Lucius Fabius Justus places its publication around 102 AD…

Wikipedia: Rota Fortunae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae#Origins…

Paul Campos: The Last Days of Donald https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/the-last-days-of-donald: ‘This report from Jonathan Swan reminds us that the presidency is still in the hands of a mentally ill aspiring despot who is decompensating quickly…

Wikipedia: New Atlantis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atlantis: ‘[Francis Bacon] portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, "Salomon's House", envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure science. The end of their foundation is thus described: "The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible"…

Scott Lemieux: Our Grifter Problem https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/12/our-grifter-problem: ‘As you are hopefully unaware of, a bunch of Twitter/YouTube grifters on the broad anti-anti-Trump “left” are ginning up a hate campaign against AOC because she won’t go along with their incredibly dumb campaign to “force a vote” on M4A, a tactic which (as AOC points out) has zero chance of making the enactment of M4A or any roughly equivalent program more likely on any time horizon. As Eric Levitz explains, this is very bad.… The idea that structural barriers can be easily overcome by individual politicians who just want it badly enough—like politics is a bad sports movie—is incredibly pernicious…

James McGrath: Teaching Cyborg Students https://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2020/12/teaching-cyborg-students.html: ‘Rather than prohibiting students from using technology, we need to realize how many ways they already are that we take for granted, and how many they ought to be yet are not or at least are not doing so wisely, efficiently, or effectively. We need to design activities and assessments that teach them and then evaluate them on their ability to do the things we have always been trying to train them to do–write, read, research–in a manner that does not rely on technology to tell them whether they write well or how to format a reference, but teaches them what they need to know in order to create a bibliography using Word’s built-in function, discern which search results are relevant and credible, and whether the words they have strung together make good sense regardless whether their word processing software has things underlined or not. Currently they are like Joey Tribbiani using the thesaurus function writing a letter…

Bruce Gyory: How Biden Won: Six Hard Truths https://thebulwark.com/how-biden-won-six-hard-truths/: ‘Digging into the exit poll data on gender, education, age, and more.... 1. Women Won the Election for Biden. Women outvoted men—by 4 percent in the Edison data and 6 percent in the AP VoteCast survey—and rejected Donald Trump, denying him re-election. According to the AP VoteCast, Biden carried women by 55-44, while Trump carried men by 52-46.... 2. The ‘Education Gap’ and Its Link to Race and Sex.... White men without college degrees (19 percent of the total vote), gave Trump a landslide margin of 64-34, while white women without college degrees (24 percent of the total vote) gave Trump a large but lesser margin of 60-39.... Among non-white voters, by contrast, Biden won regardless of education status (or sex): among non-white non-college-educated men (7 percent of the vote), he won by 68-30.... 3. Location, Location, Location.... The suburbs cast 45-47 percent of the total vote in high-turnout elections and 48-50 percent of the electorate in low-turnout elections.... 4. The Young and the Faithful. Fourth, the youth vote helped Biden win, even as it did not expand its share of the total vote from 2016.... 5. The Real Enthusiasm Gap.... Among the 46 percent of voters who reported in the AP VoteCast survey that they “disapprove strongly” of President Trump, Biden won 97-1. On the flip side, meanwhile, the voters who said they “approve strongly” of Trump, who voted for him by 98-2, amounted to a much smaller 31 percent of the electorate.... 6. Big Turnout But No Big Shift to the Left.... The one thing Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could agree on was that the impact of Never Trump Republican initiatives—like Republican Voters Against Trump and the Lincoln Project—would be minimal. That assessment was flat-out wrong…