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TST: New Content, Stories, Read-Aloud

Latest 5

The 5 latest stories.

One-minute tidbits.

1.

History Story.

R. G. Collingwood.

1889

Robin George Collingwood was born in England in 1889 and became a philosopher, historian, and practicing archaeologist. He taught at Oxford and became the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College. His work ranged across aesthetics, metaphysics, archaeology, and history, but he is best remembered for his philosophy of history. Collingwood matters because he treats history not as a dead pile of facts, but as an active discipline of reconstruction. To understand the past, the historian must do more than collect evidence akin to reporting; the historian must also be like a journalist and think through the actions, purposes, and questions of those who lived before.

Collingwood’s final years were difficult, as he felt death coming early for him, and pushed himself, hard. Too hard. He desperately wanted to finish his life’s work and send it into the future. After suffering from high blood pressure, and a series of debilitating strokes, he died in 1943 at Coniston in Lancashire. Nearing age 54, Collingwood was not quite done with his life’s work. 

Collingwood’s holistic eudaimonia was completed after his death by T. M. Knox, his friend, former student, and literary executor. Knox gathered the unfinished materials and edited them into The Idea of History, published in 1946.

The book became one of the major English-language works in the philosophy of history and helped shape later debates over historical explanation, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. In a fitting twist, Collingwood himself became part of the kind of story he studied: a thinker whose unfinished work was gathered from traces, reconstructed by others, and carried forward into history.

 


That History Story, 

was first published on TST 1 week ago.

2.

Philosophy Story.

Rudolf Steiner.

Lived from 1861 to 1925, aged 64.
Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science

Steiner was born in 1861, at a time when science was rising, religion was wobbling, psychology was emerging, and many were looking to keep meaning alive. Into that moment stepped Steiner: philosopher, lecturer,  and spiritual thinker. As the founder of anthroposophy, his influence founded Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and influenced architecture, medicine, and theater. His spiritual philosophy was not merely a mystic hiding from the modern world. He was trying to answer a modern crisis: how can human beings live with science and still feel spiritually whole?

At his best, Steiner’s spirituality was an attempt to treat the human being as more than a machine. He wanted education to nourish the whole child. He wanted farming to respect the living system. He wanted art, movement, and imagination to influence human development. From my view, that impulse is reasonable and even valuable. Humans do not live by data alone. We also live through meaning, ritual, and wonder. Steiner’s gift was seeing that modern life could become spiritually thin if it reduced everything to mechanism.

But we must place Steiner carefully. We can place his ethical, educational, artistic, and ecological ideas as rational frameworks. But his stronger claims about spiritual worlds, clairvoyant knowledge, cosmic forces, and “spiritual science” remain speculative. Don’t reject Steiner, just sort his ideas. His grounded insights support flourishing, but his unverifiable claims must not be promoted into public truth.

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861, in the Austrian Empire, now Croatia. He studied in Vienna, worked as a writer, editor, lecturer, and Goethe scholar (holistic knowing). He later became a major figure in the Theosophical movement before founding the Anthroposophical Society. He married twice, but had no kids. Steiner died in 1925, in Switzerland, at age 64.

 


That Philosophy Story, 

was first published on TST 2 weeks ago.

3.

Science Story.

Last Non-Cynodont Therapsids.

~205 Million years ago

The last non-cynodont therapsids likely included late dicynodonts, such as Lisowicia bojani and related Late Triassic forms. Dicynodonts were herbivorous therapsids with beak-like mouths and, in many species, tusks. They belonged to the broader mammal-side branch, but they were not cynodonts and did not lead directly to mammals. Their disappearance near the end of the Triassic marked the fading of the older non-cynodont therapsid lines.

By the Late Triassic, around 210–201 million years ago, late dicynodonts lived in a world increasingly dominated by archosaurs: early dinosaurs, large predatory rauisuchian-like relatives of crocodiles, pterosaurs, croc-line reptiles, turtles, amphibians, and other surviving therapsids, including cynodonts. Their environments likely included seasonal floodplains, river systems, forested lowlands, and open patches of vegetation across Pangaea. In Europe, Lisowicia bojani lived in what is now Poland, in a dinosaur-age ecosystem where large herbivores and large predators were both becoming more prominent. Its discovery showed that at least some dicynodonts were still competing in the “large herbivore” role at the same time early sauropodomorph dinosaurs were expanding.

Dicynodonts were an older, highly successful branch of therapsids — mammal-side animals, but not cynodonts. Most were plant-eaters with heavy bodies, short tails, powerful jaws, and beak-like mouths; many had tusks, though Lisowicia itself appears to have lacked the classic long tusks and instead had a massive beaked skull. Lisowicia bojani was extraordinary: elephant-sized, late-surviving, and more upright-limbed than earlier dicynodonts, showing that this older therapsid branch was still evolving, not merely fading away. But they were not on the direct mammal path. Their disappearance near the end of the Triassic marks the fading of the non-cynodont therapsid world, while the cynodont branch continued toward mammaliaforms and mammals.

 


That Science Story, 

was first published on TST 4 weeks ago.

4.

Science Story.

Last Non-Mammaliaform Cynodonts.

~125 Million years ago

The last non-mammaliaform cynodonts included the tritylodontids, an advanced family of herbivorous cynodonts. They were close to mammals and shared several mammal-like traits, but they remained outside Mammaliaformes. Their extinction around 125 million years ago marked the end of the non-mammaliaform cynodont line, while mammals—the surviving branch—continued on.

By the Early Cretaceous, around 125 million years ago, the world of the last tritylodontids was no longer the old synapsid world. It was a dinosaur-dominated landscape of warm seasonal forests, floodplains, lakeshores, and volcanic basins. Tritylodontids would have shared these environments with early birds, lizards, amphibians, turtles, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs such as small theropods and herbivorous ornithischians. In places like Early Cretaceous East Asia, the ecosystem also included mammaliaforms and true mammals that were becoming surprisingly diverse, so tritylodontids were not simply “waiting for mammals.” They were living beside them. The Cretaceous ran from about 145 to 66 million years ago, and early mammals and mammal-relatives had already diversified into many ecological roles well before the dinosaur extinction.

Tritylodontids were advanced herbivorous cynodont therapsids, close to mammals but usually placed outside Mammaliaformes. They had small-to-medium bodies, strong jaws, large cheek teeth with multiple cusps, and a well-developed secondary palate, all pointing to a specialized plant-eating lifestyle. Some later forms, such as Fossiomanus sinensis, even show digging adaptations, suggesting they could occupy burrows or fossorial niches. They were among the last non-mammaliaform therapsids, surviving long after true mammals had appeared. That makes them a wonderful “living fossil” style branch in the mammal-side story: not mammals, not primitive throwbacks, but late-surviving cousins carrying an older version of the mammal-line experiment into the age of dinosaurs.

 


That Science Story, 

was first published on TST 4 weeks ago.

5.

Science Story.

First Therapsids.

~272 Million years ago
A more upright posture.

Therapsids are the advanced synapsids that began tightening the mammal-side body plan. Their most visible shift was toward a more upright posture, with limbs moving farther under the body instead of sprawling far out to the sides. Alongside that came a more powerful skull, more specialized teeth, and signs of a more active lifestyle. They were not mammals yet, but this is where the old synapsid line began to look more focused, more predatory in some branches, more specialized in others, and more clearly aimed toward the later mammal story.

To set the stage, picture the first therapsids living during the Middle Permian, around 272 million years ago. This is when Pangaea dominated the planet. Their world was warmer, more seasonal, and often drier than the earlier Carboniferous coal forests. A more upright posture allowing for running on dry land had real advantages. Picture open floodplains, river channels, muddy basins, patchy wetlands, seed ferns, horsetails, early conifers, and broad stretches of exposed earth. This was a changing world: less swamp-jungle, more seasonal land. In that setting, faster, more active synapsids had room to rise.

Raranimus dashankouensis is a good example of one of the earliest therapsids. It is known from a partial skull from Middle Permian China, and a 2021 reassessment confirmed it as a basal member of Therapsida. A 2024 paper also notes that until a newer early-middle Permian gorgonopsian find, Raranimus was considered the oldest known unequivocal therapsid. It still carried older synapsid features, but its skull and teeth show the early therapsid direction: sharper jaws, predatory adaptations, and the beginning of the line that would eventually include cynodonts, mammaliaforms, and mammals.

 


That Science Story, 

was first published on TST 4 weeks ago.

The end.

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