Ayn Rand: goddess of the market

She was born Alisa Rosenbaum, the eldest daughter in a haute-bourgeois Russian Jewish family that was ruined by the 1918 revolution. When she came to the United States in 1926, she reinvented herself as Ayn Rand, charismatic philosopher and novelist who inspired a generation of rebels and free-market theorists.
Historian Jennifer Burns, author of the new [...]

Reading Homer as an anthropologist

What happens when you stop thinking of the Iliad as a work of fiction but instead see it as a primary text to help explain an ancient society?
That’s what archaeologist Tara Carter does in lecture 21 and lecture 22 of her great UC San Diego course Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed).
She presents the [...]

Unwanted side effects of democracy

Maybe it’s the legacy of the Cold War — all of those years of being the bastion of freedom and democracy — but somehow Americans got in the habit of viewing democracy as something completely good, something that everyone in his or her right mind must want, like a chocolate sundae with no calories.
But democracy, [...]

The Cold War is history

Many conditions were necessary for the end of the Cold War to happen as it did.
In an academic conference, entitled The Cold War is History (iTunes, website), Stanford historian James Sheehan reminds us that even when the Berlin wall fell, reunification of Germany was not a done deal. In fact, there were two enormously important [...]

Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).
First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by [...]

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.
So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).
Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling [...]

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):
“De omnibus dubitandum.”
Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you [...]

How to find the good stuff on iTunes U

Some of you have asked how I find the good stuff on iTunes U. After all, a lot of colleges offer mainly PR fluff, like virtual campus tours and welcoming speeches by the dean of students.
So, here are my secrets. Every few days I do some of the following.
1. Survey the main iTunes U [...]

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.
These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of [...]

Archaeologist Isabelle Pafford teaches new course

University of Santa Clara archaeologist Isabelle Pafford is back with a new course about heroic narratives, Heroes & Heroism (iTunes). The course covers heroic figures in ancient works like the Iliad, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Bhagavad Gita, and explores the historical background behind these tales.
Pafford has many fans among my readers who have praised [...]