* The "Tea with Tolkien" blog is beginning its Silmarillion Summer
* Mateusz Strozynski, The Joys of Latin and Christmas Feasts: J. R. R. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham
* Brendan Hodge, After Dobbs: Abortion in America by the numbers, at "The Pillar"
* Philip Woodward, Technological Innovation and Natural Law (PDF)
* William Vallicella, Fetal Rights and the Death Penalty: Consistent or Inconsistent?
* After an extensive period of analysis, NASA has determined the proportion of total organic carbon in Mars soil samples from the Curiosity mission. The result is interesting, although not very conclusive; the total organic carbon is roughly on par with the most barren places on earth, a little more than might be expected, but still within the range of what can result from purely inorganic processes.
* Gregory Sadler, A Personalist Aspect of St. Anselm's Platonist Metaphysics (PDF)
* Ruth Boeker, Character Development in Shaftesbury's and Hume's Approaches to Self (PDF)
* Allen Habib, Promises, at the SEP
* John D. Norton, How Analogy Helped Create the New Science of Thermodynamics (PDF)
* Simon Parkin, Who Owns Einstein? The battle for the world's most famous face, at The Guardian.
* Allen Porter, Exercising the Virtues, on the role of physical fitness in the moral life
* Savannah Pearlman, In Tension: Effective Altruism and Mutual Aid, at "The Blog of the APA". One major point that is relevant here is that Effective Altruism is not (as it is often presented by its exponents in popular venues) directly concerned with doing the most good or finding the best way of doing things, but finding the way of doing things that is best according to the best available numbers. Mutual Aid, on the other hand, is concerned with finding many different ways of doing things that are good in many different ways and that are within the practical ability of ordinary people, and its standards are social, not quantitative.
