Indian Residential Schools
Canadian residential school for Inuit girls Quatr.us honors Orange Shirt Day, in remembrance of the Native American children who were forced away from their mothers and fathers and held in [...]
National Coffee Day
Ottoman coffeehouse, 1500s AD (cf. S. al-Hassani, 1001 Inventions: Muslim Heritage in Our World, Manchester 2006) Where does coffee come from? When did people start to drink coffee? Why do [...]
QAnon: reviving old anti-Semitic lies
I can't do better today than to urge you to read this great blog post by Dr Eleanor Janega of the London School of Economics, which explains everything: On QAnon and Antisemitism [...]
Black Enlightenment philosophers
Old Church of Saint Mary of Zion in Aksum, Ethiopia, which was standing when Zera Yakob was writing In the 1600s and 1700s, many new ideas came to Europe from Africa. The [...]
Free Store PDX
PDX Free Store COVID update: we're not holding any regular free stores until other retail stores in the Portland area open back up, or until we figure out another arrangement. We're considering [...]
The United States and… Hadrian?
Mission Dolores, California - Native people playing the stick game (1816) People always ask me, and you probably, and the world generally, whether this catastrophe or that one is like the [...]
A review of the Met’s Sahel exhibit
One of the last things I did before the lockdown was to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to see their temporary exhibit, Sahel: Art and Empires on [...]
Ramadan 2020
The Islamic holiday of Ramadan moves slowly backward through Earth's seasons, because the Islamic calendar is slightly shorter than the solar year. A few years ago, Ramadan fell in the beginning of [...]
Earth Day coming up!
Earth Day 2020 will be tomorrow, Wednesday, April 22nd. I remember the first Earth Day, when my hippie-revolutionary grade school planted trees in the front of the school. The tree I planted [...]
4/20: the history of hemp
Did you know that people have been burning marijuana to intoxicate themselves for thousands of year - probably tens of thousands of years? And that in addition to this purpose, they've also [...]
