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Merry Christmas, and some reading recommendations if you have downtime

Razib Khan
Dec 25, 2022
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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

Entering Steppelandia: pop. 7.7 billion - Why the steppe matters to me, and why it should matter to you, Apr 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:

Ashkenazi Jewish genetics: a match made in the Mediterranean - How and when did the Ashkenazim come to be?, Sep 2021

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

A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution

A Short History of Humanity: A New History of Old Europe

And here are the five books I most wish someone I trusted had pressed on me as a child:

The Selfish Gene

China: A New History

History of the Peloponnesian War

From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents

The Genetical Theory Of Natural Selection

Posts of Substack Present

My five highest-traffic posts this year:

Getting a sense of the Russian soul- Looking into Russian genetics and history (not through Putin’s eyes)

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

You can't make this up: Madagascar, how our planet's strangest island was settled - The unreal journeys of Madagascar’s Malagasy people

My five most downloaded podcasts of this year:

Surveys of the great ancient human DNA Diasporas - Population genetic clusters carved around the joints of D-statistics

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

Ancient DNA at the edge of the world: Continental immigration and the persistence of Neolithic male lineages in Bronze Age Orkney

My five favorite new-release books of 2022:

Rise and Reign of the Mammals

Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921

How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth

A Brief History of Timekeeping

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings

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

Algorithmic Culture Before the Internet

How about you? What are you looking forward to reading in 2023? Comments are open to all.

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Jeff Vanke
Dec 25, 2022Liked by Razib Khan

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).

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Jane
Dec 25, 2022

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.

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