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Appalachian Figures Few figures connect Kentucky’s small-town gyms to the college game quite like Robert G. “Bob” Wright. He captained Marshall as a player, molded Ashland’s Tomcats into a state champion, then steered Morehead State to the top of the OVC before finishing his public-school career as a principal in Pike County.

Appalachian Figures A Kentucky start with a global reach Peter Ault Tinsley was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, on January 21, 1939. He earned a B.A. from Hobart and William Smith in 1961, completed a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton in 1966, and joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Board while finishing his doctorate. After a three decade career in Washington he later taught at the University of Cambridge and at Birkbeck, University of London.

Appalachian Figures Jack Hatfield Smith came out of Pikeville, Kentucky, worked his way through the Dodgers’ farm system, and for three late seasons in the early 1960s took the ball in some awfully big moments.

Midnight in the museum In the yawning resonance Of empty space The great xylophone skeletons Play the lonely strains of Time Like cathedral organs Heralding the ends of ages.     Time rushes on The final predator Implacable Like Dinichthys Cruising the crinoid beds Sounding one note: Everything dies.

Appalachian Figures Pikeville beginnings John Paul Riddle was born in Pikeville in 1901 and came of age while aviation was still a dare. He graduated from Pikeville College Academy in 1920, a few years before airplanes became a common sight over the Big Sandy.

Appalachian Figures A Pike County racer who took Daytona Thomas Ferrel Harris grew up to be a stock car lifer with deep eastern Kentucky roots and a talent for high-speed drafting. He was born on October 8, 1940, in Seale, Alabama, and spent his adult life in Pike County, Kentucky.

Apple gets into protein folding, parsing R/Markdown and Quarto, vibe-coding an R package, AI in biosecurity and writing, nothing about AI is inevitable, conservation applications of de-extinction tech

In a book chapter I recently had published (Beattie 2025) I discuss how seminal British sitcom Desmond’s (1989-1994, Channel 4) illustrates how barbershops function as both community anchors and as sites of cultural education for Black communities.

I sat in a conference hall in Rio Branco, Acre State, Brazil. My mind was in a sanatorium of Algiers, Algeria. This was where my mother was sent as a girl. They told her she got tuberculosis because she was an “indigène musulman”. In 1938, the year of my mother’s birth and after over a century of colonization, about 5 out of every 100 Algerian people got infected with tuberculosis each year.

As online culture has moved towards algorithmic social media and instant messaging it is harder and harder to keep this site updated. September is almost finishing and I haven’t documented here the work we did convening the Comics & AI: Critical Prompts one-day conference at City St George’s University of London, on Thursday 4 September 2025. Shortly after the conference I published a quick post about it on LinkedIn, here.