1. A photoessay with Bolivian skateboarding girls, via kottke
2. Gimlet is killing it podcast-wise, including this 2-part Heavyweight episode and this one from Crime Show — whatever you expect from the titles, you will be wrong
3. Tatooine sucks
4. With such an experienced President and team, why isn’t Biden’s foreign policy coherent and bold?
5. How you can study history in the field rather than the archives

I would have never discovered these dynamics if I had stayed in the archives alone. It was only by spending extensive time talking to local elites that I gained insight into how palpable precolonial histories remain in rural West Africa. Although archival research was a core component of my research design, alone it would have produced an incomplete understanding of why Senegal’s precolonial states are shaping distributional outcomes today.