The most recent issue of my newsletter points you to two songs about death and breath. Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rodgers.
I put a photos widget on my phone, and everyday it turns up a half dozen picture like this one.
My daughter made a genuine game, with a start screen and levels, all in Google Slides. You move a little spaceship around a city called Galactic X. It’s pretty cool. Now, the rest of her schooling …
📰 Newsletter: Presbyterians—tabulated, visualized, and interpreted.
Currently reading: Bob Dylan in America by Sean Wilentz. 📚
A bitter cup.
Today’s task: remembering what in the world I was doing the last time I touched this project.
Currently reading: Johnny Cash: The Life by Robert Hilburn. 📚
Consider the lilies of the field.
9 y.o.: “Daddy, can I ask you a question.”
Me: “Yes.”
9 y.o.: “Does anyone actually read your book?”
“Everybody’s Bible Box”
“To cast a free ballot ・A root of democracy”
The 4 y.o. wrote this letter (without help!) to his grandparents, who could not come visit this summer. It is beautiful and heartbreaking.
“MA AND PA i LOVE YOU TO[O] BUT YOU [ARE] AT YOUR HAWS MY [A]ND DAD[D]Y LOVE”
Currently reading: Religion and Profit: Moravians In Early America by Kate Carté. 📚
Well, that’s one take on the Oxford Movement.
I’m not 100% sure what it means to say “Democracy is the law of nature pervading the law of the land," but it sounds good.
Is it possible to be a low-level academic administrator without it killing your prose style? Asking for myself.
In the most recent issue of Working on It, I talk through how I revised a visualization to be as honest about what it represents as possible. Also, brief book notes on two books on evangelical masculinity and femininity.
This historian has been cited in an article titled “Dynamic courtship signals and mate preferences in Sepia plangon.” (If you, like me, were wondering, that is a kind of a cuttlefish.) Pretty good for an outspoken disciplinary chauvinist.
My daughter: “I’ve never understood why there is so much shouting at camps.”
Emphasis on my daughter.
I can tell I’m a low-level chump because I try to write meaningful email subject lines. If you are dean- or president-level important, all your emails begin, “A message from …”
Currently reading: The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power Of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Bowler, Kate. 📚
The book has six appendices, which is fantastic. The appendix is sadly underused in history books. An appendix (or six) lets you keep the body of the prose tight and clean, while letting you indulge in tangents, basic research that is worthwhile but can’t fit a narrative or argument, discussions of method, or things that are just plain interesting.
I’ve had my own domain for fifteen years, but it only just now occurred to me: I should manage my email by using donotreply@lincolnmullen.com as my primary email address.
Currently reading: [Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World](https://micro.blog/books/154176 2533) by Tara Isabella Burton. 📚
The most bizarre pattern of spam emails that I get are Verizon Fios ads a couple times a week, addressed to prominent-digital-historian@lincolnmullen.com. This most recent one is addressed to @dancohen.
I assume that by forcing people to use Outlook and only Outlook as the client for email, my university wants us to be more productive by never checking email again. If so, mission accomplished.
It is a pleasure to write code in Go, because it really does hit that sweet spot of letting you be 80% as productive as writing in a dynamic language but with 80% of the performance of C. Take this simple little script to turn a network stored as an adjacency list into a network stored as an edge list. It took me not much longer to write than it would have in R, the language I know best. And when I ran it, I thought it might take a few minutes like it would in R, but it was done in seconds.
As I contemplate five consecutive hours of Zoom meetings this afternoon, my soul dies a little, and I wonder what sins I committed.
Editing audio for the first time, and the waveform below is what “uh and uh” looks like.
The American Religious Ecologies project has released this interactive map of Roman Catholic dioceses in North America from 1511 to the present.
I’ve been making outlines of Lego figures for my son to color and cut out. We’ve made scores of them so far. Here are some of the best.
No fig tree, but at least I can sit in peace under my own vines.
What did the United States look like in 1860, only a half decade before Juneteenth? The enslavement of people was not just legal and common in much of the country. In huge—and growing—swathes of the country, more than half of the people were enslaved. That included parts of Texas near Galveston, where the Juneteenth proclamation was read. A myth of American history is that the practice of slavery would have died out on its own; in fact, it was growing and spreading rapidly in 1860.
I’ve often thought about adding 1870 to this map of slavery, showing no slavery in the decade following the Civil War. But it is still not the case that “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk" and that “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”
I’ve written a lot of talks. But this talk that I have to give soon is going to be a video instead of live. So I suppose preparing it is more like writing a script than it is like writing a talk. My rough draft looks more like a storyboard than an outline. And tomorrow is “shooting” day, to be followed by editing and post-production.
My wife saw me reading this book, and asked if she could read it when I was done. I told her I had already highlighted the good parts. 😉
August 2014 and June 2020: the two moments where I had more bookshelf space than books.
It is an awkward for someone with my first name to trust the governor of Virginia much more than the president of the United States. But here we are.
WFH.
The calculus of how best to game my caffeine consumption so as to be wired for an evening class and collapse to sleep immediately after it is done still has not changed.
One of my daughter’s homeschool assignments today was to identify the seven words from the cross in the Gospels. While doing that pious assignment, she also discovered the basic Synoptic problem on her own.
Ready for class tonight.
From one of the psalms appointed for morning prayer today:
My companions and neighbors you have put away from me, ✻ and hidden my friends out of my sight.
I’ve written a few blog posts over at the American Religious Ecologies blog, discussing the hundreds of thousands of congregational schedules we have from the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies.
The first post—“What can you learn from a census schedule?”—talks about the questions the Census Bureau asked, and describes one Armenian Apostolic Church. Believe it or not, there are accusations of murder involved.
The second post—“How the Religious Bodies census was first digitized … in the 1920s”—discusses how the Census Bureau tabulated the results with punch cards, with an aside about how they classified congregations by race.
My daughter got excited by her school spelling bee, so she and my wife have been making a podcast called Spellcast. If you only listen to one episode, try the one on “dinosaur.”
Very disappointed that no one seems to have caught the reference implied by the “Conjoined Triangles of Success” poster on my office door at RRCHNM. Perhaps they are too frighted by my son’s self portrait above it.
Two rules of thumb for making plots of change over time.
It is usually more illuminating to plot how the rate of change changes.
No one will ever understand such a plot.
I believe it was Kohelet who said, “Of commenting on other people’s work, there is no end.”
Helped my colleague and friend with his author website. The key to a good author website? Having already written a bunch of great books.