My class just finished our section on _What Does It Mean to be 98% Chimpanzee_ today. I admit there are some reasons not to like this book, but overall I find it timely (rather than cobbled together out of a bunch of articles), wide-ranging (rather than unfocused), trenchant (rather than ‘trollish’) and ‘important’ (i.e. I [...]
If your idea of a good time is writing wikipedia entries on obscure (preferably nineteenth century) intellectuals, then you’ll love the “Biographical Memoirs of the British Academy”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=memoirs/index&session=826924A and the “Biographical Memoirs of the National Academies of the United States of America”:http://lab.nap.edu/nap-cgi/discover.cgi?term=biographical+memoirs&restric=NAP&GO.x=0&GO.y=0. The British memoirs are fantastic — “J.A. Barnes’s memoir of Evans-Pritchard”:http://www.proc.britac.ac.uk/cgi-bin/somsid.cgi?page=73p447&session=777523A&type=header has long been [...]