On June 13th, 1973, my father took me to Jarry Park to see game two of a three game Expos home stand against the San Diego Padres. It was my first baseball game. I know the date, because one of the two things I remember from that game is a triple play, and my father…
Comment on Bennett et al.’s Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum: Looking promising, and I have a couple of minor questions
There has been no shortage lately of claims of very early archaeological evidence from the Americas, from the stunningly early but very problematic Cerutti Mastodon at 130kya, to the slightly less stunning and still problematic Chiquihuite cave at 30kya, to the more sedately dated definite maybes at Cooper’s Ferry and the Gault site. The latest…
Twilight of the moralizing gods: Lessons for a better academic world
The moralizing gods saga has ended, or at least its first chapter. Two years ago, Nature published (Whitehouse et al 2019) a widely publicized paper that claimed to demonstrate that moralizing gods, who care more about relationships between humans than relationships between humans and gods, developed following major social complexification events, and not prior to…
Four years of academic blogging: What I have learned so far
I put up my first blog post on April 28th 2017. In the previous 24 hours, I had seen the explosion of media coverage and public engagement about the first Cerutti Mastodon paper in Nature. I went to the original paper, and I knew that as an academic and as a teacher, I had to…
Thoughts on the post-pandemic university: A learning commons
We must reimagine university teaching and learning for a pandemic and post-pandemic world. Instead of seeing our campuses as assemblages of rooms in which sections are taught and exams are held, we should view them as learning commons in which learning and assessment are facilitated. We don’t need to create a course schedule for the…
