It's not surprising that the intellectual universe of science major freshmen at UCI is yet narrow, full of weird prejudices and misconceptions. What strikes me is that they're not trying to expand it: they tend to take what I mentioned in …

"Virtually all hill peoples have legends claiming that they once had writing and either lost it or that it was stolen from them. Given the considerable advantages in plasticity of oral over written histories and genealogies, it is at least…

"The huge literature on state-making, contemporary and historic, pays virtually no attention to its obverse: the history of deliberate and reactive statelessness. This is the history of those who got away, and state-making cannot be unders…