Because the drama isn’t always all in one place. Sometimes it’s here.

ACT 1: SCENE III. A Starbucks near Brooklyn.

Sound of a modem connecting. Enter three Moderators.

First Mod
Where hast thou been, sister?

Second Mod
Killing trolls.

Third Mod
Sister, where thou?

First Mod
A right-wing nut had posts from NRO,
And spamm’d, and spamm’d, and spamm’d:—
‘Stop it,’ quoth I:
‘Amendment, First!’ the astroturfer cries.
His IP’s to McClatchy gone, with three diff’rent screen names:
But with my Mac I’ll thither wend,
And, faster than the troll can send,
I’ll ban, I’ll ban, and I’ll ban.

And sometimes there.

To ban, or not to ban: that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in men’s eyes to suffer
the stings and sorrows of discordant words
Or ban and thereby silence them? To ban,
Then sleep in peace, and by a sleep to say
We end the questions and the niggling facts
That thought is prone to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To ban, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.
For in the censor’s sleep what dreams may come
Though we forbade contrary thoughts,
Must give us pause.

But it’s all drama, nonetheless.

…well, at least on the internet. Seriously, I read more than the three blogs I’ve been running around interlinking with for the last few days. What else have I been reading?

Will Shetterly is also talking, as is most of the country, about race.

In Florida in the early ’60s—when I was marching with my family for civil rights, when we got anonymous death threats in the night, when we couldn’t get fire insurance because word was out that the Ku Klux Klan would burn us down—the classifications of prejudice were precise:

He’s also making pronouncements on the subject of endings.

There are two kinds of endings, abrupt ones and leisurely ones. When they work, they work for the same reason: they imply that characters’ lives have been changed by the events of the story. That may be especially true of stories that restore the status quo—in the best of those stories, the world is restored, but the characters and their relationships have changed.

Kelly McCullough is writing about endings too, specifically happy ones.

…one human being’s lie is another’s necessary myth. Sometimes you’re in a place in your life where you need look no further than tomorrow to see how ugly the world can be and then that lie of happily ever after can be the myth that keeps hope alive long enough for freedom or healing or happiness to become truth.

K. Tempest Bradford is, in her inimitable style, offering a different sort of advice for writers.

All you authors out there, we need to have a talk. Sit down.

Tell me, if someone were to Google your name, or the name you write under, right now, would they be able to find you?

Reesa Brown and Kit O’Connell are starting a series on business advice for artists.

Presuming the words “business model” haven’t already scared off our artistic readers, how do you start approaching this topic? Well, the same technology that provides new means of telling stories and sharing art provides new means of deriving income from the stories.

Christopher Waldrop just really wants to know whether zombies are dead.

But there are only so many things you can do with a walking corpse. What made Shaun Of The Dead so damned funny was that the zombies were almost secondary to the drama of a guy reluctantly growing up, but that’s also why, watching it, I felt like it was the apex of the zombie genre.

Jessica Palmer doesn’t just want to know things. She wants to know how we know things, and she features a project that can help us figure that out.

One of the hardest tasks I encountered as a professor was getting my students to recognize that all of their convictions – even assumptions as basic as “the world is round” or “the sun will come up tomorrow” – are built on a lifetime of accumulated experience. Sometimes the experience is direct: we’ve all seen the sun come up. But sometimes it’s not.

And almost immediately after posting an apology for her lack of posts (and hours before McCain tried to use it against Obama), Muse in Vivo brings us back to politics by dissecting the idea that spreading the wealth is a bad thing.

Seeing as that ideal – of a full time worker being capable of maintaining a basic quality of life – is not exactly working out on its own, we as a society need to fix something.

Enjoy. I did.

We’re off to see a friend properly married. (From her description of the shower gifts, her parents took care of the improper bits.) This is the third busy day in a string of busy days, so blogging falls by the wayside today. Instead, go read some of the folks I’ve been reading lately in my occasional spare moments.

Samia is being insightful about students setting their paths in stone too early.

PhysioProf is venting his spleen about the current financial crisis. It may not be terribly deep, but it’s deeply satisfying.

Dr. Isis is laying it down on why and when someone else’s behavior is not blog fodder.

Greg is looking into whether McCain not using email means more than just that he’s out of touch with technology.

Jessica is exploring a particularly epic fail at the intersection of art and work for hire.

Kelly is counting the ways in which people fail to comprehend that he and his wife don’t watch television.

Enjoy.

Uh, hell if I know, actually. I’m surprised it’s September.

There was major construction in there, resulting in so much (expected) damage to the yard that I still have trouble looking at it. I made some friends in unexpected places. There was catsitting. Oh, and blogging. Definitely blogging.

No real vacation, though, and given that, I don’t feel much like submitting to the grind today. Instead, I’ll give you some other folks who are back at school.

Lou is distilling his biology class into an excellent series of blog posts. The one on his termite lab is way cool, particularly as one student gets over the squicks by getting interested in the science. (Ooh. He’s also practicing his best teacher look.)

Samia has a review of her reproductive biochemistry text that should be a must-read for every textbook writer. Think about how students will read these things, would you (although I defy anyone to predict Samia’s reaction in full)?

Greg has already turned in a full book report, on Chris Mooney’s Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. Topical both meteorologically and politically. Whee!

Zuska isn’t actually back at school, but she’s still learning–from summer vacations past.

I don’t often write like an elitist bastard. I’m pretty careful about it, actually. Still, sometimes it just needs to be done.

Luckily, there’s a place for this kind of writing. I say, “luckily,” because if done well, it can be highly entertaining to read. Blake Stacey, of the newly relocated Science After Sunclipse, has collected some of the best elitist bastardry of the last month and incorporated it into a sheer work of art at his own blog. He deigned to include my post, but I think he did it to just to show up my writing, the bastard.

But he can’t overshadow them all, no matter how hard he tries. This month’s carnival contains some of the elitest of the elitists, so go check it out.

I need sleep more than I need to blog today, so here are a few people doing it for me (sort of):

Betül is covering a study on stereotypes of scientists that should be seen to be believed.

ERV connects PZ Myers and Terry Pratchet in a way that still has me laughing, days later. Seriously, she wins the internet.

Benjamin Collard, one of the young men at the center of the cracker storm, tells us how the whole thing was blown up by a simple political rivalry. And here we thought it was all about religion.

And Lyda discovers that some editors are taking a prurient attitude toward language in romance novels. Yes, romance novels.

Yeesh. On that note, good night.

Welcome to the 47th Edition of Four Stone Hearth.

Those of you who read my blog with any regularity are probably asking, “Stephanie, why are you hosting a blog carnival on archaeology and anthropology? Aren’t you a writer who does math for a living?” Well, yeah. I have a degree in psychology, but the closest my blog has ever come to anthropology is a little armchair sociology.

My motivation for hosting this carnival is, for once, pretty simple. I like reading outside my field. Almost invariably, I’m handed the answers to fascinating questions that I, not being part of the field, would never have thought of. So, without further ado, allow me to share with you a whole bunch of questions I had answered before I could ask.

First up, what should I do with my spare time if I think the modern Olympics are all just a bit, well, modern and commercial? Rex at Savage Minds makes the games more interesting by framing them as a window onto Western social thought. Vaughan at Mind Hacks covers a study on whether the expressions of winning and losing competitors are innate or culturally determined. Kris’s Archaeology Blog has a lovely suggestion for getting back to the games’ roots.

In case the Olympics aren’t controversial enough for you: Do recent studies have a hope of settling the boys-are-better-than-girls-at-math, are-not, are-too debate? Greg at Neuroanthropology presents a detailed critique of the critiques, including an excellent analysis of the problems inherent in relying on testing data, particularly No Child Left Behind test data.

Daniel at Neuroanthropology discovered his own unasked question when he took a recent vacation: What was he missing by focusing on biology versus culture in his research? What other parts of the human equation were he (and others in his field) overlooking?

Jonathan Jarrett of A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe asks almost exactly the opposite question: What can a historian learn from talking to an anthropologist? In this case, the answer is why markets exist in areas where everyone is growing a relatively few staple crops.

Back to questions for anthropologists: When might an anthropologist not want to add to the knowledge in the world. Afarensis discusses the reservations he and others have with the Minerva Research Initiative.

More on the responsibilities of nations: How can a country best protect its historical resources? Stone Pages gives examples of a country doing it well (Ireland) and one that is failing (Australia).

Is there any place for treasure hunting in archaeology anymore? Antiquarian’s Attic gives an example to suggest that if the treasure hunter is an honest one, yes.

Aside from their being an excellent brewery there, why do I really need to make a point of getting to Orkney next time I’m in Scotland? Remote Central covers some discoveries and theories to come out of a recent dig at the Ring of Brodgar.

Reaching further back: What does the recent sequencing of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA mean for our understanding of human evolution? John Hawks reports that this lays to rest the idea that some modern humans may be descended from Neandertals, and he’s very excited about the evidence he sees in this study for positive selection on mtDNA in ancient humans. Anne of Writer’s Daily Grind is less convinced about the evidence that Neandertals were a separate species from our ancient ancestors. And Babel’s Dawn uses the information to place a lower limit on how recent the biological support for language is.

What can “fake” languages tell us about how language evolved and continues to evolve? Anthropology.net covers recent research into the transmission of an artificial language through generations of learners.

If fake languages can tell us about us, what can fake organisms tell us? Technovelgy.net has fascinating coverage of a robot that appears to show social behavior, including responding to attention and avoiding apparent threats.

To end on a cheerful note: Why is the electric chair a chair rather than some other shape? Headsman over at ExecutedToday.com answers this question, tell us where the word “electrocution” comes from, explains how the electricity wars played into the development of the electric chair, and provides an eyewitness account of the first execution by the chair.

That’s it for this edition of Four Stone Hearth. I hope you found answers to some questions that had never occurred to you as well. The next edition will be hosted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy on August 27.

I link to Will Shetterly in my blog roll for a couple of reasons. One: he’s a good writer who speaks well about writing. Two: although I disagree with him on certain things, he’s very good at helping to keep me honest online. He does mostly it by asking questions of himself. He’s that kind of guy.

He’s also apparently the kind of guy who gets banned from Boing Boing. I can’t find anything on Boing Boing, much less track a conversation across threads, but Will posted about it at his blog.

It started here, when Will pointed out a problem with a source of information for a post. It was, apparently, pointing out with some insistence on Boing Boing that this problem mattered that got him banned. From there, he was moved to speculate about how to make moderation more open and transparent. Then a note about what gets lost in disemvowelling. A diversion into keeping the web from being edited out of existence. Then he started wondering who really owns our comments?

His latest post on the topic is pretty near and dear to my heart just at the moment. “When the Benefit of the Doubt Goes Wrong” is classic Will. It’s all good, solid, gentle advice about living with other people. Everyone in the story but Will comes off as insightful. He’s attracted some very smart people to the comments. And he refuses to get angry at any of the people who have banned him largely for trying to keep conversation open (which, honestly, probably drives them nuts).

Will…Will is the kind of person I often wish I wished I were.