Posts of Substack past, posts of Substack present...
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Posts of Substack past, posts of Substack present...
Merry Christmas, and some reading recommendations if you have downtime
The children are nestled all snug in their beds, which leaves me a moment to reflect. Below, I’ve thrown together some short-themed lists of past, present (or at least 2022) and projected future content, plus a handful of my usual unsolicited book recommendations. Maybe some of my readers whose Christmases include the gift of more time to read and reflect will find a podcast or worthy read they missed or be inspired to pick an old book back up. Merry Christmas, everyone!
Posts of Substack Past
My old friend John Hawks, this coming week’s podcast guest, says multiple people have asked him why he “has never been on Razib’s podcast.” But he has! I just had about 1/6th of the readership I have now when he first came on in early 2021. Here are five more sleeper podcasts only my earliest subscribers may have found.
Alina Chan on SARS-CoV-2 and "lab leak", Jan 2021
David Shor: the uncancellable, Dec 2020
Alexander Young: everything you want to know about cognitive genomics, Oct 2021
Ruben Arslan: sex, intelligence & fitness, Aug 2021
Ramesh Ponnuru on the pro-life movement in America, Jan 2021
Likewise, here are five favorite posts that went live before most of today’s readers subscribed:
Under the skin - The genetics and natural history of human pigmentation, Aug 2021
They came, they saw, they left no trace... except for all of Western Civilization, Mar 2021
The ultimate price of costless gestures - 2020's 2,000+ excess black lives lost to murder, Apr 2021
What happens in Denisova Cave stays in Denisova Cave... until now, Dec 2021
And here are my most trafficked pre-2022 Substack posts:
Applying IQ to IQ - Selecting for smarts is important, Dec 2020
Yo mama's mama's mama's mama... etc. - Part 1 of 3: our understanding of human origins in 2021, Dec 2021
Here be humans - We keep discovering how much less of humanity is… us, Jun 2021
A whole New World - Archaeology and genetics keep rewriting the ancient peopling of the Americas, Sep 2021
Here are the five books I refer to most often in my thinking to make sense of the world:
Principles of Population Genetics
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
And here are the five books I find most indispensable for approaching human history specifically:
Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past
Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth
The World Before Us: The New Science Behind Our Human Origins
And here are the five books I most wish someone I trusted had pressed on me as a child:
History of the Peloponnesian War
Posts of Substack Present
My five highest-traffic posts this year:
A Hun by any other name - On the genetic trail of Europe’s enduring bête noire
Eternal as the Nile - Three millennia of Egyptian genetic continuity
Built to Last: Continuity in Japanese Genetics - A nation endures across the millennia
My five most downloaded podcasts of this year:
Russia invades Ukraine and ends globalization? - How the current troubles are going to impact us all
David Sloan Wilson and Charles C. Mann on E. O. Wilson's legacy - A life in science
Rav Arora: psychedelics and spirituality - What has psilocybin to do with enlightenment?
The "southern arc" and Indo-European origins - Where were the Indo-Europeans from?
2022’s five most important ancient DNA papers:
The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe
Ancient DNA and deep population structure in sub-Saharan African foragers
A 2-million-year-old ecosystem in Greenland uncovered by environmental DNA
Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals
My five favorite new-release books of 2022:
Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921
How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth
Posts of Substack Future
Here are five geographical regions I look forward to diving into in 2023 pieces:
China
Latin America (I’ve had requests for Mexico, Cuba, Argentina and Brazil so far)
Africa (Bantu Expansion, the Khoisan and Ethiopia are all calling to me)
Scandinavia
Southeast Asia
Five books I have at the top of my list to read in 2023:
Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300
Cleopatra's Daughter: From Roman Prisoner to African Queen
Psych: The Story of the Human Mind
How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms
How about you? What are you looking forward to reading in 2023? Comments are open to all.
Posts of Substack past, posts of Substack present...
I'm still making my way through the four volumes of The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ancient to 2016, and highly recommend (published 2011-2021).
Two books I'm in the middle of, will finish eventually if the kids permit me, and would recommend to anyone who hasn't read them yet:
1. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine.
2. Stephen Harrigan, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas.
As someone who didn't discover John Steinbeck till recently, I'd recommend his novels to anyone interested in not-so-ancient history. There are details about what life was like for the down-and-out characters that are not impossible but harder to glean from conventional historiography.
Finally, I picked up Camilla Townsend's Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs after reading about it in one of Razib's monthly reading roundups and would echo his recommendation to those of you who haven't dipped into it yet. Townsend makes the unconventional decision to paint short fictional portraits of documented historical episodes at the beginning of each chapter, and they come about as close as one can get to having a Steinbeckian picture of the details of ancient Aztecs' lives. I don't mind the fictionalizing as much as I ordinarily would, because Townsend is so up front about why she does it, and 90% of the book is meticulously documented historiography taken from a broad range of more conventional sources.
Happy reading, everyone. Eager to see what books other nerds here will point me to.