Micro-reviews of the first 12 books I read in 2025 My annual round-up of the books I read in 2025 was pre-empted by a request from Research Professional News (RPN) to write 250 words on my favourite reads of the past year.
On finding joy in slow, imperfect code in an age of copilots, agents, and chatbots. 1.2k words, 5 min reading time.
Three weeks ago, I wrote a the post Rescuing Scholia: will we make it in time?, where I sketched a future without Scholia. Scholia, started almost 10 years ago and I think it is worth keeping around longer.
Appalachian History If you stand in Vardy Valley on a foggy morning, the mountains almost fold in on you. Newman’s Ridge rises to the south, Powell Mountain to the north, and the narrow strip of bottomland along Blackwater Creek feels like its own small world. For more than two centuries, outsiders have looked into that world and tried to give a name to the people who lived there.
Appalachian Figures On a Nashville night in 1948 a young woman from Perry County, Kentucky tagged along to the wrestling matches at the old Hippodrome Arena. She was not a fan. Her sister sewed jackets for the wrestlers and had talked her into going. During the women’s bout one of the wrestlers, Dot Dotson, took a spill out of the ring and landed squarely in the visitor’s lap.
Appalachian History On a map, the Cumberland Gap Tunnel looks simple enough, just a short segment of divided highway where U S 25E disappears under Cumberland Mountain and reappears on the other side. On the ground, it is something stranger.
Repurposed Appalachia High above Pineville, on the spine of Pine Mountain, a long rust colored chain hangs between two blocks of sandstone. From town the links look like a line of stitches trying to hold the cliff together. At the overlook itself the effect is stranger. The rock feels solid underfoot. The drop to the Cumberland River and U.S. 25E feels anything but.
Repurposed Appalachia On a summer evening in Jenkins, headlights snake up Amphitheater Road as families ease their cars onto the gravel lot beneath Pine Mountain. Crickets tune up in the tree line.
Starting this week, the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has consolidated authentication into a single Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, powered by a self-hosted Keycloak instance at https://auth.front-matter.de.
Appalachian Figures On Berger Street in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, a dark brick church rises from ground once worked by German Catholic farmers. Sacred Heart of Jesus Church began in the 1870s as a mission for immigrants who arrived through the Cincinnati Homestead Society.
Appalachian Figures On a November night in 1961, a six foot guard in a Saints jersey kept firing jumpers against the Kansas City Steers in the short lived American Basketball League. By the time the buzzer sounded, Whitey Bell had poured in 30 points for San Francisco, one of the highest individual totals in the league that winter.