Robert.mccowen

EXT. DAY. Some sort of veldt or taiga or what have you. KRANDAR and UDASH, two CAVEMEN, are squatting in a position that maximizes hip elasticity and digestive health before we ruined it with our westernized "sitting," and poking at a fire.

KRANDAR: So I've been thinking about asking Skirset to move in with me.

UDASH: Really.

KRANDAR: I...yeah. What, do you think it's not a good idea or something?

UDASH: Why do you say that?

KRANDAR: I don't know. Your tone of voice. Like you weren't asking a question. Like you were disappointed.

UDASH: I mean, if you feel like it's the right decision for you. I just --

KRANDAR: You just what?

UDASH: Her hip circumference?

KRANDAR: What about it?

UDASH: Exactly. What about it.

KRANDAR: Are you saying she's too skinny or something?

UDASH: No. Not exactly. I'm just wondering how she's going to successfully pass on your genes if your first attempt at reproduction ends up getting stuck halfway through and they both die.

Read more A Day In The Life Of Our Cavemen Ancestors at The Toast.

From the New York Times:

A Staten Island grand jury has voted not to bring criminal charges against the white New York City police officer at the center of the Eric Garner case, a person briefed on the matter said Wednesday

Read more Eric Garner’s Killer Won’t Be Indicted at The Toast.

There's plenty of talk nowadays about eating like how our ancestors used to, clawing birds directly from the sky and absorbing the vitamins from grasses through our skin and whatnot. And there's overwhelming evidence that our modern habit of sitting in our own filth as cereals are poured into our gullet by carpal tunnel robots is going to kill us. But what if the best diet for modern people isn't human at all?

You don't have to be a vole to benefit from the Redwall Diet. Have you ever seen a shrew with diabetes? I have, and it's terrible. But that's entirely beside the point. The point is that eating like a character in Brian Jacques' popular Redwall series is the key to health, strength, improved digestion, longevity, and ferret resistance. It's a diet that consists primarily of unprocessed grains, home-brewed ales, fresh produce, and cheeses the size of your head (with the occasional pike from the abbey pond). You won't feel deprived on this diet, but you will be asked to work hard -- if you're not lifting a sword the length of your own body over your head, you're building a bell-tower out of sandstone while trying to escape Tsarmina, the Mad Queen of Mossflower (and she's fast).

Read more The Redwall Diet at The Toast.

Oh man, this is just a straight-up Blog Post because I loved this interview over at Vulture so much and I want you to read it to. This is how blogging works, right? When I'm not just making jokes about books, it's just "here's something that somebody else wrote and you should read it because you trust me"? Anyhow, you should trust me and read this.

Read more “There Are No Race Relations” at The Toast.

On November 29, 1864, the Sand Creek Massacre took place, one of if not the worst and most disturbing massacre of Native Americans in the history of the United States. The Colorado militia, under the command of Col. John Chivington, an ardent abolitionist, attacked a camp of Cheyenne and Arapaho in southeastern Colorado, killing around 200. We have discussed this event before here in conjunction with Ari Kelman’s book. Ned Blackhawk, one of the leading historians of Native America, notes the connections between the Civil War and the final crushing of indigenous peoples on the Plains.

Sand Creek, Bear River and the Long Walk remain important parts of the Civil War and of American history. But in our popular narrative, the Civil War obscures such campaigns against American Indians. In fact, the war made such violence possible: The paltry Union Army of 1858, before its wartime expansion, could not have attacked, let alone removed, the fortified Navajo communities in the Four Corners, while Southern secession gave a powerful impetus to expand American territory westward. Territorial leaders like Evans were given more resources and power to negotiate with, and fight against, powerful Western tribes like the Shoshone, Cheyenne, Lakota and Comanche. The violence of this time was fueled partly by the lust for power by civilian and military leaders desperate to obtain glory and wartime recognition.

Expansion continued after the war, powered by a revived American economy but also by a new spirit of national purpose, a sense that America, having suffered in the war, now had the right to conquer more peoples and territories.

The United States has yet to fully recognize the violent destruction wrought against indigenous peoples by the Civil War and the Union Army. Connor and Evans have cities, monuments and plaques in their honor, as well as two universities and even Colorado’s Mount Evans, home to the highest paved road in North America.

We have also talked about this recently in terms of Andrew Graybill’s new book on the Marias Massacre in 1870. The miitiarization and industrialization that the Civil War wrought were very easily turned against Native Americans. That doesn’t mean that without these things somehow the bison are not exterminated and Native resistance crushed eventually, but it wouldn’t have happened so rapidly and with such brutal force at that time. Moreover, it’s really important to think of the devastating conquering of indigenous people in the West as part and parcel of the larger Civil War. The brilliant tactics we rightly laud William Tecumseh Sherman for when used against slaveholders we can equally say were horrifying when used against Native Americans, in no small part because when racism was added to them, the murder of women and children was openly practiced by the military in the West when it was not in the South.

….See also this excellent piece on a man who discovered his ancestor was directly involved in the atrocities at Sand Creek.

For a sizable faction of Republicans with significant electoral support, Obama’s immigration executive order is tantamount to race war. And they are ready take up the fight to protect the white race. We talked about Tom Coburn earlier today. There’s also Alabama congressman Mo Brooks. And then, of course, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach:

“The long term strategy of, first of all, replacing American voters with illegal aliens, recently legalized, who then become U.S. citizens,” Kobach said. “There is still a decided bias in favor of bigger government not smaller government. So maybe this strategy of replacing American voters with newly legalized aliens, if you look at it through an ethnic lens, … you’ve got a locked in vote for socialism.”

Koback also responded to a caller who was concerned about ethnic cleansing, which the caller claimed was a threat from immigrant and Hispanic rights groups.

“What happens, if you know your history, when one culture or one race or one religion overwhelms another culture or race?” the caller asked. “When one race or culture overwhelms another culture, they run them out or they kill them.”

Kobach then responded with his take.

“What protects us in America from any kind of ethnic cleansing is the rule of law, of course,” Kobach said. “And the rule of law used to be unassailable, used to be taken for granted in America. And now, of course, we have a President who disregards the law when it suits his interests. And, so, you know, while I normally would answer that by saying, ‘Steve, of course we have the rule of law, that could never happen in America,’ I wonder what could happen. I still don’t think it’s going to happen in America, but I have to admit, that things are, things are strange and they’re happening.”

For these people, the reconquista is a real thing and it must be fought, possibly with violence. That the rest of the United States thinks these people are loons doesn’t really matter, especially if the followers of these high ranking politicians start acting on this incendiary rhetoric.

Just consult the chart.

Dated phylogenetic tree of insect relationships. The tree was inferred through a maximum-likelihood analysis of 413,459 amino acid sites divided into 479 metapartitions. Branch lengths were optimized and node ages estimated from 1,050,000 trees sampled from trees separately generated for 105 partitions that included all taxa. All nodes up to orders are labeled with numbers (gray circles). Colored circles indicate bootstrap support (left key). The time line at the bottom of the tree relates the geological origin of insect clades to major geological and biological events. CONDYLO, Condylognatha; PAL, Palaeoptera.

Be sure to click on the image to see it at a better resolution!

This is from a paper that looked at the molecular phylogenies, and worked out estimated branch times. I like it. I want it on my wall.

Insects are the most speciose group of animals, but the phylogenetic relationships of many major lineages remain unresolved. We inferred the phylogeny of insects from 1478 protein-coding genes. Phylogenomic analyses of nucleotide and amino acid sequences, with site-specific nucleotide or domain-specific amino acid substitution models, produced statistically robust and congruent results resolving previously controversial phylogenetic relations hips. We dated the origin of insects to the Early Ordovician [~479 million years ago (Ma)], of insect flight to the Early Devonian (~406 Ma), of major extant lineages to the Mississippian (~345 Ma), and the major diversification of holometabolous insects to the Early Cretaceous. Our phylogenomic study provides a comprehensive reliable scaffold for future comparative analyses of evolutionary innovations among insects.

Misof B, Liu S, Meusemann K, Peters RS, Donath A, Mayer C, Frandsen PB, Ware J, Flouri T, Beutel RG, Niehuis O, Petersen M, Izquierdo-Carrasco F, Wappler T, Rust J, Aberer AJ, Aspöck U, Aspöck H, Bartel D, Blanke A, Berger S, Böhm A, Buckley TR, Calcott B, Chen J, Friedrich F, Fukui M, Fujita M, Greve C, Grobe P, Gu S, Huang Y, Jermiin LS, Kawahara AY, Krogmann L, Kubiak M, Lanfear R, Letsch H, Li Y, Li Z, Li J, Lu H, Machida R, Mashimo Y, Kapli P, McKenna DD, Meng G, Nakagaki Y, Navarrete-Heredia JL, Ott M, Ou Y, Pass G, Podsiadlowski L, Pohl H, von Reumont BM, Schütte K, Sekiya K, Shimizu S, Slipinski A, Stamatakis A, Song W, Su X, Szucsich NU, Tan M, Tan X, Tang M, Tang J, Timelthaler G, Tomizuka S, Trautwein M, Tong X, Uchifune T, Walzl MG, Wiegmann BM, Wilbrandt J, Wipfler B, Wong TK, Wu Q, Wu G, Xie Y, Yang S, Yang Q, Yeates DK, Yoshizawa K, Zhang Q, Zhang R, Zhang W, Zhang Y, Zhao J, Zhou C, Zhou L, Ziesmann T, Zou S, Li Y, Xu X, Zhang Y, Yang H, Wang J, Wang J, Kjer KM, Zhou X (2014) Phylogenomics resolves the timing and pattern of insect evolution. Science 346(6210):763-7.

Growing up, my brothers and I were only allowed to watch an hour of television a week. We had to be judicious with that time because there was so much we wanted to see and so little time. In 1984, when The Cosby Show premiered, we quickly decided to allot half an hour to Cosby even though that meant we could only watch another half hour of some other show. We were a middle class black family, living in the suburbs where we were the only family of any kind of color. The only time we saw people who looked like us with any regularity was when we visited family in New York or Port au Prince. On television, there was nothing at all.

Read more Art or Humanity: Thoughts on Bill Cosby at The Toast.

1. Female when used to refer to a human woman.

2. Crazy when used to refer to your ex-girlfriend(s). They cannot all be crazy. Maybe it's just you.

3. Bitch, in nearly every context, but particularly if you are referring to your romantic partner, a woman you don't like, a woman who has spurned you, or really, any woman at all. Also, when gratuitously used in music ie: "Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe," or "That's how you let the beat build bitch," or "I see two of my bitches in the club."

4. Censorship, the cry of, when you have said something offensive and then resent that your offense hasn't been warmly embraced.

Read more Words That Should Actually Be Banned at The Toast.

Previously: Bible Verses Where The Word “Praying” Has Been Replaced With “Truckin.'”

Genesis 26:14
"He had so many flocks and herds and servants that the haters envied him."

Genesis 26:15
"So all the wells that his father’s servants had dug in the time of his father Abraham, the haters stopped up, filling them with earth."

Judges 3:31
"After Ehud came Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down six hundred haters with an oxgoad. He too saved Israel."

Read more Bible Verses Where The Word “Philistines” Has Been Replaced With “Haters” at The Toast.

Pulled Pork on Abortion Rye-ts:

A pig raised lovingly in the care of two lesbians, fed a proper diet and allowed to roam the backyard to their cottage in Sunset. This pig was put down under the full moon, in view of the goddess and has been marinated and prepared for your pleasure. Served on artisanal, gluten free, vegan, rye bread with pages from Judith Butler’s books as napkins.

Read more A Feminist Sandwich Shop Menu at The Toast.

What happens when our unjust immigration system deports parents of children who are under 18? It’s usually pretty grim. Orange is the New Black actress Diane Guerrero’s story is about as good as it is going to get:

And then one day, my fears were realized. I came home from school to an empty house. Lights were on and dinner had been started, but my family wasn’t there. Neighbors broke the news that my parents had been taken away by immigration officers, and just like that, my stable family life was over.

Not a single person at any level of government took any note of me. No one checked to see if I had a place to live or food to eat, and at 14, I found myself basically on my own.

While awaiting deportation proceedings, my parents remained in detention near Boston, so I could visit them. They would have liked to fight deportation, but without a lawyer and an immigration system that rarely gives judges the discretion to allow families to stay together, they never had a chance. Finally, they agreed for me to continue my education at Boston Arts Academy, a performing arts high school, and the parents of friends graciously took me in.

Being 14, having friends with generous parents, a great high school, this is not the norm. Even here, her family was deported and she was left behind, separated from her parents during many of the most important moments of her life. This is a horrible thing that does no one any good. Completely unjustified and it’s about time that President Obama take more concrete steps to deal with this unjust system, even without Congressional approval.

Assassin's Creed: The Nicene Creed

Mass' Effect

Everlasting Half-Life II

Grand Theft Auto-Da-Fé

Call of Duty V: God Will Know His Own

Doom II: The Helliquary

Assassin's Creed: The Apostle's Creed

Read more Video Games Set During The Protestant Wars Of Reformation That I Wish Existed at The Toast.

What happens when you revisit the woefully misremembered science fiction of your youth? Joe Howley (Latin teacher) and Johannah King-Slutzky (internet wraith/underachiever) asked adults to re-read their genre favorites from childhood. For the first in our Time Quartet series, we talked to bona fide adult Kate Franklin, an archaeologist who for the past seven years has worked for the Medieval Archaeology of the South Caucasus at the Oriental Institute (whew!) studying Medieval Armenia. We spoke with Kate via Gchat about how A Wrinkle In Time sparked her interest in archaeology, what the book says about faith and the unknowable, and why Charles Wallace may or may not be The Worst. The following conversation has been gently massaged for clarity.

KATE FRANKLIN: Hello!

JOHANNAH KING-SLUTZKY: Hello!

JOE HOWLEY: Hello! (That was me completing the third part of the harmony.)

KATE: I definitely heard those on ascending tones.

JOHANNAH: Okay, let's jump into it. I think first of all we were hoping you could summarize your background a bit for The Toast readers.

KATE: I am an anthropological archaeologist (so, an anthropologist who works through excavations to understand human societies in the past as well as the present). I received my degree from the University of Chicago, and I have been working for the last 6 years in the Republic of Armenia. I study the late medieval period (AD 12th-15th centuries), when Armenia was a place in between crusader states, caliphates, Mongol empire, etc. And pertinent to science fiction, I study how people contextualize their action in society through the creation of worlds, whether in materiality, history, architectural space, or landscape. Put another way, I am interested in how all politics are contingent on getting people to imagine the world (and themselves in it) in particular ways.

JOE: I have about a thousand questions about that, but to start, when did you first read this book, and have you re-read it many times since then?

KATE: I was actually trying to remember when I first read it-- I think it was in elementary school, perhaps third or fourth grade. And I have definitely not reread it since perhaps early middle school-- so I was amazed at how much I remembered.

JOE: What was the experience of reading it again like? What struck you most? Did it feel very different?

KATE: Well, I have been significantly trained in the 'art of reading' since I was eight, so there were things I was able to recognize and analyze on a level I was just not operating at at that point. But this also helped me realize how profoundly the book affected me as a child-- looking back, it's like a primer in scientific realism and the limits of reason. About three quarters of the way through the book, I thought, that if it were to have one of those hacky 1980's titles it would totally be "Margaret Murry and the Dark Cartesian Space Nightmare." It speaks to one of the really interesting aspects of the book, that while it centers on a standard sci-fi premise (tessering/the tessaract) what the story really revolves around is the human capacity to deal with things they are incapable of understanding, and to meet them with wonder instead of fear.

Read more In Which Three Adults Discuss A Wrinkle in Time Seriously and At Length at The Toast.

When was the last time you thought about Totino’s frozen pizza? When you were 16 and hated good food? Me too. That’s some nasty “pizza.” And other frozen pizza-like products. But I have to give them credit–their tumblr is seriously amazeballs. Like there’s some great drugs floating around Totino’s corporate headquarters amazeballs. Whoever is running this thing is pretty good at their job. I mean, it’s sure as hell not going to make me buy their product. But I’ll probably keep checking the tumblr.

Here are some pictures from the successful landing of Philae on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Nice to see humanity doing one thing right this month. Open thread.

Share

According to a June 2014 Russell Sage Foundation report, the average U.S. household experienced a real wealth decline of more than one-third over the 10 years ending in 2013.

Table 1 shows that the net worth of the median household fell from $87,992 in 2003 to $56,335 in 2013, for a decline of 36%.  In fact, the last ten years were hard on the overwhelming majority of American households.  Only the top 2 groups enjoyed wealth gains over the period.  Also noteworthy is the tiny net worth of households below the median.

Figure 1 provides a longer term perspective on wealth movements.  We can see that most households enjoyed growing wealth from 1984 to the 2007 crisis, with wealth falling across the board since.  However, the median household is now significantly poorer than it was in 1984.  Only the richer households managed to maintain most of their earlier gains in wealth.

These trends highlight the fact that we have a growing inequality of wealth, as well as of income, and they are not likely to reverse on their own.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Vote today. How bad is it if cats of all animals have more civic responsibility than you?

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).

"It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford
Slowin' down to take a look at me"

She sounds like a lot of fun! She drives her own car and she stops to look at men in the street. I'll bet she's part owner of the local bar, too, and is a very sexually frank person.

"Wooo hooo witchy woman, see how
high she flies
Woo hoo witchy woman she got
the moon in her eye
She held me spellbound in the night
dancing shadows and firelight
crazy laughter in another
room and she drove herself to madness
with a silver spoon"

What doesn't sound appealing about that? She flies around the night sky and owns the moon and wants to have insanity sex in the darkness. I love this woman.

"I've got seven women on my mind...Four that wanna stone me"

Perfectly straightforward. You know what they want. They have not attempted to hide their motives. Stay out of their way if you can, apologize if you must, and duck either way. These women have no surprises for you.

"I've got seven women on my mind...Two that wanna own me"

These women are a little trickier. They should not be allowed to own you. Eagles have to fly free.

Read more Women In Eagles Songs, In Order Of Trustworthiness at The Toast.

Tip 1:

Kitties and puppies should have comfortable feet. Four of them! Even on sexy Halloween night! Make sure their costume doesn't have heels that are too high—even if your cat has calico legs that go all the way up in her Katy Purry costume. Your cat can't say thank you for it, but if you move your cat's jaw and mumble "thank you," it is almost the same thing!

Read more Five Tips for a Safe and Sexy Halloween for Your Cat or Dog at The Toast.

Oh, Christ
Anna, he's going to start reading poetry at us
what do we do
play dead?
no that's bears

what's wrong
nothing's wrong
nothing's wrong exactly
don't you like the flowers
the flowers are fine
i guess i just thought there'd be more
more than the flowers we have blanketing the party?
its fine i guess these are enough
i guess its fine if you dont really care about flowers

EXCUSE ME
YEAH HI EXCUSE ME
CAN WE HELP YOU
YEAH IS THERE SOME WAY WE CAN HELP YOU OVER HERE
THIS BED IS FOR TWO PEOPLE
YOU'RE MAKING US BE THREE PEOPLE AND WE DON'T WANT THAT

Read more Women Having A Terrible Time At Parties In Western Art History at The Toast.

So apparently drunken idiots rioted at the Pumpkin Festival in Keene, NH (thus proving John Oliver wrong- they really do need their MRAP), and in Morgantown, WV, another riot broke out because WVU upset Baylor. I doubt there is much cell phone footage from WVU, because they had all been drinking since 7-8 am and their batteries were probably all dead or they were too drunk to use them.

Assholes.

At any rate, via Jezebel, here are otters eating sushi from chopsticks:

Otters are my favorites, even though I don’t really like the whole concept of a zoo (although if you go to a circus you are dead to me). When I was a kid I used to spend hours at the Good Zoo with my family, and the only thing that broke up my routine of being a little obnoxious bastard trying to drive my parents into an early grave was the otters. I could spend hours watching them. In fact, I did. And still am.

*** Searches for otter screensaver ***

Share

Here are my picks for the bizarrest sexy costumes this year. Enjoy!

Sexy George Washington (via):

Sexy Crime Scene:

Sexy Lobster:

Sexy Yoda (via):

Sexy Scrabble (via):

Except — I know, I know — nothing’s sexier than Scrabble.

Sexy Mr. Peanut:

I take it back; that costume is fantastic.

Sexy BDSM pig (via):

Okay, I admit. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on here.

Want more? See sexy what!? (2012) and sexy what!? (2010) or What do sexy Halloween costumes for men look like?

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

We've got scores of interesting elections next week and people want to talk about whether Jeb wants to lose the 2016 GOP nom? Smh

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) October 27, 2014

Barring a moral awakening or some other improbable event, it looks like we’re gonna be forced to witness the Bush clan attempting to shoehorn yet another family member into the White House. Per CNN:

… The Des Moines Register reports Tuesday that GOP Iowans recently received mailers from the former Floridian governor that sounded more like a campaign pitch than a donation plea for his social fundraising group, Excellence in Education National…

In recent days speculation about a potential bid has increased following several comments made by his family members. On Sunday, both of Bush’s sons hinted that their father is seriously considering running. In an interview with the New York Times, Jeb Bush Jr. said that people and donors are “getting fired up” about the idea of his father running for president.

“I think it’s more than likely that…he’ll run. The family will be behind him 100 percent if he decides to do it,” George P. Bush, the governor’s youngest son, told Jon Karl on ABC’s “This Week.”

Jeb also, per the AP, criticized President Obama’s crisis management as “incompetent” and called his Middle East strategy “an unmitigated disaster”, because his target GOP voters have had six whole years to forget everything about the Dubya/Cheney administration.

So I’m happy to see that Mother Jones has published an early primer of “23 Reasons Why Jeb Bush Should Think Twice About Running for President“, including helpful links to some of the many shady characters in Jeb’s business background:

… The fraudster: In 1986, Camilo Padreda, who had been a counterintelligence officer for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, hired Bush to find tenants for office buildings financed with US Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed loans. Bush took the gig, despite the fact that four years earlier Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from a Texas savings and loan. Those charges were dropped, but in 1989 Padreda pleaded guilty to defrauding HUD of millions…

The international fugitive: In 1986, Miguel Recarey, who’d done 30 days in jail for income tax evasion in the 1970s, paid Bush $75,000 to help him find a new headquarters for his health care company. The company never moved, but while Bush’s father was serving as vice president, Bush lobbied the US Department of Health and Human Services to help Recarey access millions in Medicare funds…

The fortunate son: Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million.

The shady company: In 2007, Bush joined the board of InnoVida, a building materials-manufacturing startup founded by a businessman whose previous company had gone bankrupt under suspicious circumstances. Bush and his fellow board members subsequently failed to notice that InnoVida officials had used forged documents to fake solvency, hidden the company’s financial problems, and misappropriated $40 million. The company’s Maserati-driving founder eventually went to jail for money laundering, and investors lost their shirts when the company went bankrupt in 2011. Last year, Bush agreed to repay the $270,000 he was paid by the company as a consultant to reimburse defrauded investors….

Share

As you might have noticed, there’s a new book by George R.R Martin out today…and it’s not The Winds of Winter (the eagerly anticipated next book in the Song of Ice and Fire series). Instead, it’s the “World of Ice and Fire,” a fictional history and travelogue of Westeros and lands beyond. For the hardest of hardcore fans, this is methadone until the sixth book actually arrives; for causal viewers of the TV show, this is a good opportunity to figure out exactly who everyone is and how they’re all related, and who’s the third bearded guy in that one scene. But it’s also a great opportunity to talk about the intersection between genre fiction and academics…

Make no mistake, George R.R Martin is a genre fiction writer down to the bone – his first published writing was in the fan letters column of the Fantastic Four when he was a kid, he was involved in the first sci-fi cons back when they were being held in people’s living rooms instead of overflowing the biggest convention centers our metropolises have to offer, and his route to pop culture phenomenon came after a long career of winning Hugos for short stories, and heading to Hollywood to write for the Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. But, as I’ve argued many times over on my other blog, he’s also a genre writer who’s deeply immersed himself the historical discipline from an auto-didact perspective, mining and remixing the past to give his fantasy world a realist edge that instantly set it apart from the reigning High Fantasy style of the David Eddingses who ruled the genre in the 90s.

So it’s no surprise that his world-building book is, on a meta level, all about academic history versus genre fiction. Start from the fact that the book’s fictional authors, Maesters Yandel (GRRM’s co-authors) and Gyldane (GRRM himself), quarrel all the time over whether the more fantastical (and fun) aspects of the past should be interpreted through a skeptical, neo-Beardsian lens that reduces metaphysical conflicts between light and darkness into more mundane conflicts between different tribes over land and resources, or whether the lurid, the supernatural, and the dramatic have their place in history. Then you move on to the citations, where maesters from ages past debate conflicting accounts of how old the world is and when various peoples migrated between continents, trying to square written records against archaeological evidence, comparing mythology and legend from different cultures just like classic anthropologists, and whether the loyalties of maesters both past and present to one royal dynasty or another have skewed the historical record.

The academic focus is actually quite appropriate, given the origins of world-building. J.R.R Tolkien was, after all, an Oxford don rather than a pulp scribbler. Not only did the inspirations for his work pour forth from his academic studies of Middle English, Arthurian and Scandinavian myth, and not a little bit of Wagner, but he went about writing his stories as only a philologist would. Start from the language, build it up from the bones, think hard about how structure reveals culture, establish the history and genealogy – and then work on plot and character.  It’s not a coincidence that the Lord of the Rings came with academic appendices, even before Tolkien went to work on the Silmarrillion; real history or imagined, Tolkien was going to do a proper job of it.

As Martin has pointed out, he’s not an Oxford don. But he is clearly someone who’s thought a lot about both the reality of human history – the often petty squabbles that under-gird supposedly grand conflicts, the inconsistencies in primary sources, the way in which academics’ own biases color supposedly objective recounting of past events – and the fantasy of it. In interviews about the book, Martin’s repeatedly cited the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” and how much he prefers the more exciting narratives of your Herodotuses and Procopiuses than the dry caution of modern academics. Notably, Maester Gyldane is the voice always arguing for the more dramatic, the more fantastical interpretation of history.

And that’s because Martin is, for all of his world’s attention to the grim realities of medieval society, a romantic. (For more on this topic, see my various chapter-by-chapter essays, or buy my book) And because it’s his world-book, he gets to subtly champion his genre’s romantic impulses against all comers. Because in a world which really has dragons, it’s the sober scientific-minded maesters who want to reduce science to a history who are the crackpots, clinging to their telescopes and their theories in denial of what’s happening all around them, whereas the storytellers, dreamers, and occultists have their finger on the pulse. Archmaester Fomas, in his Lies of the Ancients, might insist that legends of the Others are simply rationalizations of tribal conflicts and demonization of the “other” to legitimize the theft of land, but people who’ve watched the show or read the books know that there really are undead massing in the wilderness and that winter really is coming. The entire order of maesters might insist that magic doesn’t exist, but we get the secret thrill of having seen people brought back from the dead and dragons birthed from fossilized eggs.

At the same time though, as both a historian and a fan of the books, I have to say that I’m impressed by Martin’s world-building. He may not be an Oxford don, but the details hang together.  As I delve into the details, bringing to bear the historian’s art of close reading of source materials, I’m not finding much in the way of holes. Rather, the information is revealing a remarkably coherent world: a small factoid about the title used for Valyrian governors fits with the modern political institutions of the Free Cities of Essos, explaining why some cities are ruled by merchant councils and others by elected executives. Not only do the kings and queens act like real people, as opposed to impeccably moral heroes and consistently evil villains, but the smallfolk also have agency and can shake the world around them. At moments of contingency, historical figures have reshaped the future of entire dynasties, and the relationships between elites can be deeply important, but you can see larger cultural, social, and political forces at work beneath the surface.

So…treat this as an open thread for people who want to discuss the book.

If there’s one thing the world needs, it’s Martha Stewart’s website telling people how to host punk rock parties.

The comment section is really great here.

A couple of weeks old, but I figure most of you hadn’t seen it.