This week’s selected media, September 6, 2026: Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence, Decline in Independent Activity, RIP Gloria Steinem, and some smaller articles

This week I finished: Should Letting Children Play Alone Outside Be a Crime?, by Ian Frisch in the New York Times: Reading this article prompted me to comment in an online community and to follow up with a string of other articles. The article recounted stories…

Robert Carter III officially began freeing his slaves 235 years ago today. We can extend even more freedom today if we choose.

I’ve written plenty about a person who has become one of my great role models, whose actions are poignant today. He freed the most number of slaves of any American before the Civil War. He didn’t ask to be born into a culture in which…

What I’m doing when I’m working on my book

I’ve written lately about my writing process, trying to explain what is taking so long. I figure people know that the process of writing for any writer includes editing, rewriting, research, reading, and more. Still, I figure people wonder how long can those processes take.…

Another voice about environmentalism lacking vision

When I posted yesterday in Does environmentalism have a vision? that environmentalism doesn’t have a vision, I linked to a post on Donella Meadows’ page, Envisioning a Sustainable World. It didn’t present a vision, I didn’t find it readable, and it said things like: Environmentalists have…

Does environmentalism have a vision?

Do you know of a vision of environmentalism? Have you heard or read of one? I haven’t. A search on “does environmentalism have a vision” returned nothing meaningful or memorable. The best I found was an essay by Donella Meadows titled Envisioning a Sustainable World.…

The Left’s and environmentalists’ folly: “They don’t care”

In fairness, the following dialogue would happen with people from the Right or those who disagree with claims that humans are seriously degrading the environment’s ability to sustain life. In that case, we’d substitute something like “They hate America!” for “They don’t care!” though the…

Fiji Water or Piss?

Do you drink bottled water? What do you consider more unhealthy in the picture below: the plastic, the yellow liquid contained in it, or the water that was in it that was shipped around the world. I wish I could convey how disgusting the plastic…

Did you know about the US Treaty of Tripoli in 1797?

Following piracy enslaving Americans and non-Muslims afflicting the young nation’s Mediterranean trade, the United States signed the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797. Article 11 of the treaty states As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the…

This week’s selected media, August 30, 2026: Civilized to Death, Vanishing New York

This week I finished: Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, by Christopher Ryan: This book covered a huge part of what I’ve understood about how our culture formed. I didn’t learn much anthropology in school, maybe none. I woke up to it starting with…

The benefits of writing first thing in the morning

I should have tried years ago what I tried yesterday: to write first thing after waking up. For years, I’ve started nearly every day: wake up, make the bed, cross the room and turn off the alarm within sixty seconds of it going off, then…