Assistant Village Idiot

Mary Parker Follett The Godmother of Management  She saw the invisible authority of common purpose as more powerful than hierarchical author...

 Islam in America by Reiham Salam. American Muslims, especially those young, female, and US born, believe that Islamophobia is rampant. The...

 

My college roommate was from Wayne Township and knew one of these guys. This song should have been a natural for us, but somehow it just was...

Instead of booksignings on tour, the new thing is to go on podcasts and get interviewed when you have a book come out. Steve Stewart-William...

 Slogging Through Woods on a Slushy Morning (Jump Off The Page Title)   The first appearance of JM Smith, our resident geographer, in the co...

 The Shocking Truth About Fairness,  by Lionel Page.   The idea that ruling ideas about fairness are an ideological veneer used to placate d...

 Always a joy.

Robert Plomin is a big name, and I think I have seen some of those other names with his before.  He has a King's College lab in the UK. ...

Adult Sunday School is reading John Mark Comer's The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry this summer. It will change the blog, I imagine. My ...

  This was an upgrading of an 80-y/o deck at my son's previous house. Much of the framing underneath this was kept, but the upper portio...

Amy and Becky want to start a restaurant.  Amy will be the chef, Becky will be the business manager. To get started, they ask their friends ...

My older Romanian son used to have a T-shirt that read "I'm Big In Europe." That seems to have been true of The Sweet, previou...

Kathairo,  to purge or cleanse. What if Purgatory is hard work but deeply satisfying? What if it is painful hard work but even more deeply s...

Something long believed by anthropologists and prehistorians is receiving support from ancient DNA data. Cities were population sinks, where...

For the Bicentennial, I moved from Colonial Williamsburg to Sudbury, MA, Zip Code 01776, just south of Lexington and Concord. Frying pan. Fi...

So the old superstition goes.  Personally, I don't relax a bit after the third one.   Shakespeare said it better.:  Claudius, in "H...

I never fill out surveys from medical practices asking me how they did.  I know that's part of how their economy works, but having been ...

It was written for Duke Ellington and became his signature piece . But lots of other jazz musicians took a swing at it and I read that many ...

 James and his wife now have a substack .  I have one also, but never write anything on it. 

I do not pretend to know diplomacy and strategy, whether short or long term.   I am seeing foreign opponents of Iran's IRG, and Hamas/He...

I have a dislike for people explaining the behavior of women without children as somehow tied to that. I grant that instincts are powerful i...

I get it that you almost have to do something flag-related for the World Cup and the 250th, but I'm not sure they got quite the look the...