Ramseyer's article got thoroughly destroyed on the New Yorker today

In one striking example, Ramseyer wrote about a young Japanese girl who went to Borneo to work as a prostitute: “When Osaki turned ten, a recruiter stopped by and offered her 300 yen upfront if she would agree to go abroad. The recruiter did not try to trick her; even at age ten, she knew what the job entailed.” (Ramseyer raised no question about a ten-year-old’s ability to consent to sex.)

How the hell did the journal even pass this through?

This is just ridiculous

For years, travelers coming into Nashville from the south on I-65 have been greeted by a very large statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on a rearing horse, cartoonishly rendered in fiberglass. The town has had a remarkably unified opinion of it: residents who hate Forrest hate the statue because it's Forrest. Disciples of the Lost Cause who love Forrest hate the statue because it's jaw-droppingly ugly. The owner, Bill Dorris, has never cared what people think. When it was recently vandalized with pink paint, he shrugged and stated it'd turn red and look fine. Years ago, somebody managed to loop some steel cable around the horse's hooves and string the other end across the nearby railroad track, obviously hoping a passing L&N freight would wrench it free and drag it north into town. Instead, the cable just sheared through the base and briefly toppled the statue, and so Dorris had it repaired and put up again ( if it had worked, the person(s) who'd done it would have people buying them beers in most every bar in town.... for years) .

Now Dorris has died. Having no children, he's left about $5 million to his dog, a border collie.

It is unclear what the dog intends to do with the statue.

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/features/article/21146178/what-will-happen-to-bill-dorris-infamous-nathan-bedford-forrest-statue

Oh sweet heavens, I've spent much of this week transcribing highly stylized 19th-century German hands, from Germans who pepper their writing with other languages' words in very weird places. It started out a slog, and now I'm getting fairly good at recognizing the ligatures and 'swallowed' letters. My German isn't fluent, and certainly not archaic regional dialects and older spellings, so this is a real godsend. I've had a passel of scanned letters for nearly eight years that I've only lightly picked through because of the writing to this point, but I decided to just buckle down and power into it with a little jumpstart on common words and particles via the Kurrent HTR of the very user-unfriendly, fidgety, and sometimes persnickety Transkribus. I've managed to go from taking a day to get through a couple of pages tolerably well to requiring a quarter of that time, which has now made the task economically possible to do myself--and better in that I know the specialist terms and most of the South African highveld Boer lingo that's being literally translated into German. (Why do you need to use 'Distanz' AND 'Entfernung' within two sentences of each other? Why?!? And subject-verb agreement, c'mon man, I you went to Realschule so I know you know better!)

I'm in the final month of my fellowship time and haven't written nearly as much as I hoped, and I haven't been able to go overseas as was meant. So that's a disappointment--but it's been a difficult time for everyone, so I'm doing my best not to feel despondent about it. Going back to teaching, even just a seminar, is not something I'm looking forward to though. Unlike most of my colleagues, I will be new to the process of planning a course for Zoom from the ground up. This ought to be ... interesting.

So I'm fleshing out the maps for a naval encounter in my fantasy series. I'll try not to get too heavy with the details, but basically imagine that a fleet of Greek triremes had to row upriver to secure something approximating the China's Grand Canal during the Ming Restoration. In researching how battle like this might play out I've come across a ton of fantastic resources for everything from the kinds of formations the Athenians used to the effects rowing upriver would have in various currents, but there is one fairly simple question that I cannot seem to find an answer to: when ancient triremes were rowing in formation, how much distance was there between each ship?

In other words, if I had a fleet of 18' wide Triremes sailing through a mile wide stretch of river (5280 ft.), and the ships were spacing themselves out roughly the same way the Athenians at Salamis would have, how much distance would there be between each ship? My gut says somewhere around 50 feet between each ship to give them enough berth to do all those fancy tricks (diekplous, periplous, etc) while still keeping them close enough to each other for there to be a real formation. If anyone could give me a little advice about whether my estimates are at least kinda close to the historical reality, I would be immensely grateful.

I am trying to find some good documentaries about lake ladoga. do you have any tips?

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When people mention to me Mohammed the prophet being a paedophile because of Aisha's age of marriage at age and consummation , what hadiths do they refer to?

A good book on the history of Switzerland? Preferably through the prism of ‘how did this mad little country even become a nation state and then become stupidly rich?’

Any ideas?

Why is there more attention, energy, reparation and praise directed toward African Americans for the atrocious things that European colonizers did to them than to Native Americans? Surely what was done to Native Americans was objectively worse i.e. genocide?

There is many a celebration for the first African American Baseball player, Astronaut, Governor, President etc. because these things were historically not achievable, but rarely any publicized praise for Native Americans that might achieve the same thing.

Because what was done to Native Americans, historically, was done prior to African slaves being brought to the Americas, I was wondering if there is a statute of limitations on the atrocities we choose to remember?

Question: can you recommend heavily illustrated book about everyday life in Antiquity/Early Middle Ages? I would like to know better about everyday life in the past, especially Late Antiquity, but most of the books about it are mostly text. So I am looking for something with many illustrations, be they photographs or pictures. The region doesn't matter that much, whether it's Europe, Middle East, South or East Asia.

I was listening to the History of Rome podcast, and recently listed to the episode where Cinncinatus was made dictator and I was wondering if anyone had further details on exactly how they chose the dicator?

Why do random elderly farmers, or far removed family members of well-known Romans end up leading the army and society into war ? It mentions each of the memorable dictators but is skant on details as to why and how they were chosen, was this information lost to time?