Friday Varia and Quick Hits

While the first day of winter is still a week away, it feels like winter right now here in North Dakotaland. With temperatures around 0 and flurries in the air almost every day.

There are plenty ways to keep warm, of course. Holiday parties, books by the fire, hot cups of coffee and stiff belts of whiskey, and layers of clothes under a warm blanket. If that’s not enough, the boys of Australian summer are playing in the first test of the Trans-Tasman Trophy, the Sixers vanquished their hated rivals, the Boston Celtics, and one of the best fight nights of the year is happening Saturday with Bud Crawford, Mick Conlan, and Teofimo Lopez sharing a card at Madison Square Garden.

There’s also a gaggle of good things to read these day, if you haven’t checked out Shawn Graham’s Failing Gloriously and Other Essays (Grand Forks, ND 2019) you really should! And if you’re looking for something a bit more literary, do check out what we’re doing over at North Dakota Quarterly!

If that’s still not enough (and when is enough, really enough?), here’s some more quick hits and varia:

• NEH Open Access Grant Program for Fellowship Books.

• Mediterranean Households, British Colonial Statistics, and Islands.

• in Open Peer Review!

• The Oldest Known Church in the Aksumite Empire

• Architecture and Asceticism: Cultural interaction between Syria and Georgia in Late Antiquity

• Punctum Books does really great stuff. I’m excited about Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon.

• The Ruin.

• Cooking with Roswell. 

• Dan Flavin’s Light in Sacred Space.

• Data Have a Limited Shelf Life.

• Claymont Christmas Weed!

• New Banksy.

• Anyone who wants to get their favorite blogger a Christmas gift.

• Some holiday jazz.

• What I’m reading: Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins : UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace. 2018.

• What I’m listening to: Abdullah Ibrahim, Water from an Ancient Well.