The catalog of the library of Christopher Columbus’s son, Hernando Colón, not only contains summaries of books that no longer exist, it also tells us something about the reading habits of people 500 years ago. “The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years.”

This announcement is no surprise and, quite frankly, laudable for stating explicitly what has been the practice of some prize and grant committees for the past twenty years: “Arts Council England has revealed it will now decide what to fund based principally on how ‘relevant’ it is to audiences – and it will ‘no longer be enough’ to produce high-quality work alone.”

A modern Chekhov: “Dr. Anton Chekhov was dead at 44, in 1904, and collections of his short stories didn’t begin appearing in English until 1915. More than a hundred years after Chekhov’s death, in 2009, Dr. Maxim Osipov published his first short story when he was 45. He has published six collections of stories since then. This first book in English, featuring 12 stories from those volumes, is going to make a splash. It’s not his fault, is it, that his readers will be put in mind of Chekhov, but as we meet the sad, amusing down-on-their-luck contemporary characters, whose physical and emotional ailments and histories are diagnosed with a light touch, who else are we supposed to think of?”

Why do pyroclastic flows move so quickly? They travel on air: “When Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego erupted in June 2018, it sent a billowing hot cloud of gas, ash and rock careening down the slope of the mountain. In the many smartphone videos of the eruption, the rush of debris often looks reassuringly distant—until suddenly it’s not. How such pyroclastic flows, as they are called, can travel so quickly has long baffled volcanologists and disaster planners alike, leaving communities in volcanically active areas at risk. Now, though, a new study offers an explanation: forces within the flows create a cushion of air, allowing massive amounts of hot rock to slide like a puck on an air hockey table.”

Some appointments of note: A senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, Andrew LaVallee, joins The New York Times. Chris Lehmann, editor in chief of The Baffler, has been named editor of The New Republic.

People in the Middle Ages were relatively clean—except the clergy, Katherine Harvey writes, “who accepted filth as a sign of devotion.” Still, parasites were a problem for everyone: “Recent archaeological discoveries have brought revealing details about the realities of medieval hygiene. The preserved eggs of intestinal parasites have often been found in excavated latrine pits: for example, a recent excavation in the German port city of Lübeck suggested high levels of roundworm and tapeworm in the medieval population. And it wasn’t just the population at large who were affected. In 2012, when Richard III’s body was excavated in Leicester, his remains were found to be heavily infested with roundworm eggs. An examination of the mummified corpse of Ferdinand II, King of Naples, who died in 1496, showed that he had both head and pubic lice. The archaeological record tells only part of the story. It can tell us which parasites medieval people suffered from, but it can’t tell us what medieval people knew about parasites. How did they treat them? How did they feel about them? And what do their experiences with parasites reveal about life in medieval Europe?”

Essay of the Day:

What is a “Kirkian,” Michael Warren Davis asks in the latest issue of the magazine? A radical of a particular stripe—an anti-libertarian. Davis perhaps oversimplifies the incompatibility of libertarianism and traditionalism. Still, he hits the nail on the head here:

“My generation has seen the West undone by consumerism, lax divorce laws, the Sexual Revolution, outsourcing, urbanization, and centralization. All are defended (even if only half-heartedly) by modern conservatives as ‘the price we must pay’ to live in a free and prosperous country. They’re wrong. Liberty without morality is mere license; prosperity without charity is mere decadence. The traditionalist rejects both perversions while upholding the essential Good that they distort.

“To quote Burke: ‘Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.’ And what is it that Millennial traditionalists want? Friendship, family, community, an honest day’s work, real music, good books, and above all God. Kirk summed it up very nicely when he said that ‘conservatives declare that society is a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship, and Christians call love of neighbor.’

“This is the radical vision he posited against the ‘dreams of avarice’ shared by socialists, progressives, and libertarians. This is what conservatives once fought for. We’ve abdicated that duty in the decades since Kirk’s death, but a new generation of conservatives is taking up the fight again.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Abyssinian cat in Kleinwalsertal

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