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.
Historical learning processes are omnipresent. They affect all age groups, forms of media, and are encouraged in both formal and non-formal education. But how do we learn to internalize and classify historical knowledge, to evaluate and contextualize it? And how can this be supported in the face of a digitalizing society facing tendencies of increasing … „Learning about history in a digital world.
Vuelvo tras la pausa del verano. De paso, anuncio el cambio del día de publicación de las entradas: pasa de los miércoles por la tarde a los jueves por la tarde. En la última entrada de esta serie dije que la identificación de saltos y omisiones es una tarea relativamente simple hoy en...
El acercamiento a las redes sociales de Rosendo Pineda, un destacado político porfirista, operador clave del grupo conocido como “los científicos”, ofrece una oportunidad para asomarse a la mecánica política de la época.