Last week was largely consumed with book-promotion activity around the release of the US edition of A Brief History of Timekeeping. This week was similarly promo-heavy, but this time around the UK edition, which was officially released on Thursday. This included a bunch of stuff that isn’t available to link yet, but I’ll be posting links in a future Week-in-Review once they’re available.
Anyway, here’s the stuff I can link from the last week:
Me on Substack:
— On Expanding Expertise: Spinning off a Josh Barro podcast, some thoughts on why I don’t feel too guilty providing expert commentary on things that aren’t really in the narrowly-defined area where I am certified as an expert.
—Please Plan to Get Back to Normal: An argument for articulating some actual standard for when we relax official Covid countermeasures.
—On Publicity: Some snowy-day reflections on different types of public events I’ve done to promote books.
Me Elsewhere:
—Book Review: ABSOLUTE ZERO AND THE CONQUEST OF COLD By Tom Shachtman, at Forbes: This is really, genuinely not about my book, even a little; it’s a review of an old pop-science book that I needed to return to the library this week.
—The Five Biggest Surprises From The History Of Timekeeping, at Forbes: People keep asking me what the most surprising thing I learned while researching the book was, so here’s that answer in listicle form.
—Why We Keep Things We Never Use & The Reason We Keep Track of Time at Something You Should Know: I actually did this interview a few weeks ago, but they released it in a podcast episode this week.
— Chad Orzel: A Brief History of Timekeeping at Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning: This ran a couple of weeks ago, but was behind a paywall until this week, so if you want to hear me talk about the book with Razib, look for it wherever you get your podcasts.
Links Dump:
—What time is it? Humanity’s millennia-old battle to answer that (surprisingly difficult) question, by Jake Kerridge: My book reviewed together with David Rooney’s About Time in the Telegraph (paywalled, but the UK publicist sent me a copy).
—More than one eye on the clock, by Leofranc Holford-Strevens: My book reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (as with the previous, I got a copy from the UK publicist).
— A Brief History of Timekeeping: The Science of Marking Time, from Stonehenge to Atomic Clocks, by Paul D. Pearlstein: A review in the Washington Independent Review of Books. I’m done with book links now.
— What anti-Covid policies actually work? by Milan Singh: The literature survey we need.
— The Supreme Court Should Be Less of a Ghoulish Parlor Game In Which We Try To Guess When People Will Die by Jeff Maurer: An entertaining pitch for term limits for Supreme Court justices.
— What to do after affirmative action by Matt Yglesias: This may get a lengthies response at some point, if I find the time. Or it may not, so I’ll at least include it here.
— The Photo: Off the Beaten Track by Timothy Burke: This is just a nice piece of writing.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
We got a winter storm yesterday, which was generally unpleasant, but I did enjoy playing in the snow with two of the smaller mammals inhabiting Chateau Steelypips.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
OK, the title doesn’t play as well now, but this is really a nuclear-powered earworm and it makes me smile whenever it comes up on shuffle play.
And that’s a bunch of stuff. Like I said, there are a few more book-promo things in various cans, and others that have yet to happen, links to come when they’re available. Here are the buttons:
And the comments will be open.