This week’s round-up is a bit skewed towards essays and think pieces rather than the academic equivalent of cat pictures, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on how much you need to chuckle today. If you do find any more-diverting tidbits for our next round-up, please do pass them along to the editor. One of the values of anthropology is that it can do a good job of putting abstract, theoretical conversations about things like technicity in contact with profoundly concrete things like stone tools and human brains. Sapiens’ recent piece on brain evolution and tool use was fascinating, but perhaps tilted towards the concrete: we read it with an idle, speculative dream of a four-fields anthropology of science.   Nehal El-Hadi has a suitably haunting look at the spectral reproduction of Black death by contemporary communications technology at The New Inquiry (exemplifying a subtle and deeply ethical approach to using critical theory in (read more...)