LinkFest 2020-09-25

Welcome back to LinkFest, my weekly look at interesting things I’ve read, as well as retrospectives on my two main projects here, With Both Hands and The Long View re-posting project.


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Theodore Roosevelt and the Case for a Popular Constitution

TR is a common subject here at With Both Hands. This article looks at the elder Roosevelt’s popular and progressive politics, and what might be reclaimed from that tradition.


The Soul of an Entrepreneur: Work and Life Beyond the Startup Myth (David Sax)

Charles is doing something at Worthy House that I see as complementary to my own work a With Both Hands and the Long View Re-posting project. In his case, he does a lot more non-fiction than I do, and this is an excellent example. Charles takes a critical look at the myth of entrepreneurship, and what is and is not really innovate and useful work.


East Asian Gothic: a definition

A look at weird tales in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions. I think best seen in the sense of fantastical adventure being an ur-genre that crosses time and cultures.


Female Gothic, Chinese and American styles : Zhang Ailing's Chuanqi in comparison with stories by Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers

A dissertation that gives a fascinating look at how Western style Gothic novels influenced Chinese Gothic in Shanghai.


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A Sense of Perspective

Shortly after Teddy Roosevelt created the U.S. Forest Service, the Big Blowup happened, a series of devastating fires in the Northwest, that imprinted deeply on the new agency, which was not prepared for dealing with such an event. In the decades following, far worse was to come.


Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year

This is where the financialization I wrote of yesterday got started: the Consolidated 3% Annuities, also known as Consols. Trade in Consols created a financial market in England that ended up creating a host of ways to borrow, lend, and transfer money that hadn’t previously existed.


How Rich Is Mr. Darcy?
An attempt to translate £10,000 a year in Regency England into modern terms.


Why OSR?
I only played about an hour of D&D as a kid, but it looms large in the popular culture of my generation. The Old School Renaissance/Revival makes D&D available in any form you can imagine.


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The Future of the Papacy

John J. Reilly said “Although the broadest claims to papal authority are medieval, there is a lot to be said for the observation that the actual power of the papacy over the governance of the Church reached its maximum after 1870, when the Apostolic See was involuntarily stripped of the distraction of the Papal States.“, and I agree with him.


The Way of the Pilgrim by Gordon Dickson Book Review

This was the book where I started to expand my idea of what science fiction is.