MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN was released 45 years ago today. The second entry in the Monty Python film series, and regarded among the great British comedies, the story of how it was made will have you asking what have the Romans ever done for us…? 1/47

I had the good fortune to appear on Biblical Time Machine to talk about my work on the gospels and the field of biblical studies. Please check it out and my thanks to Dave and Helen for being such excellent hosts! 🤓 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rea…

A burglar who broke into an apartment in Rome was arrested after stopping in the middle of the robbery to read a book about Greek mythology. wantedinrome.com/news/rome-burg…

Due to lack of vegetables in the winter, many Americans suffered from "spring sickness" or pellagra (look it up, it's terrible) before the arrival of refrigerated railcars. (From Robert Gordon's "Rise and Fall of American Economic Growth")

But one thing history journals do insist upon--universally--is using the historical method, the thing that unifies the discipline. ANYONE can use the historical method, and many legal scholars w/out history degrees do it quite effectively (across the ideological spectrum). 3/

Robert Leider Same with Ed Baptist's the Half Has Never Been Told. It's full of misrepresented evidence, factual errors, false statistics etc that leading experts on the economics of slavery dissected and exposed. But it didn't matter to historians, who like its politics and showered it with

Robert Leider Sorry to be blunt, but the history profession has serious reputational problems right now that are almost entiterly self-inflicted and entirely due to an ideological echo chamber within the discipline that privileges left wing politics and covers up outright scholarly misconduct.

Not sure how common stuff as creative as this is in academic work but I find it incredibly inspiring. I also like living in a world where there are things like “Journal for the study of the Historical Jesus” , a rather recent phenomenon.

In chapter 3 of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford makes the case for celebrating human achievement against the currents of anti-humanism that run through society. Read his thoughtful feature now on Freethink. freethink.com/culture/techno…

Asimov's Foundation series, set 10,000 years in the future, opens with a guy taking an interplanetary journey—and then at the spaceport, getting in a cab with a human driver Also, people still smoke.

Reminder: the USA has tariffs on almost everything you need to build a house, and recent economic analysis shows that these taxes boost domestic prices. cato.org/blog/dumping-b…

In his detailed study of the decline of working hours in the US, Robert Whaples finds that only about 1/7 of the decrease can be attributed to unions. The biggest factor? Economic growth, which explains about half of the decline in hours. jstor.org/stable/2123280

🐕 Chris Freiman Scott Lincicome Here's from a more recent paper 2009: "Can unionization account for the trend in hours? Panel C shows the unionization rate. Despite a spike in the early 1920s, the noticeable movement appears to take place during the great depression. At this time, the trend in hours was

OH WAIT, American factories are just as productive as Asian factories???? NARRATIVE VIOLATION bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

My piece from a recent book on Free Speech, now available online: newideal.aynrand.org/free-speech-as… via Ayn Rand Institute

AMERICA *IS* THE MOST PROSPEROUS COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, JD Vance!!!