One Nation, Divisible
There’s no sugarcoating it. This is it. This is the end of a noble dream of progress, dreamt happily and fully still a week ago by those who thought the m...
Category: opinion
Note to Self: Do Not Normalize the Trump Presidency
You’ve already heard and read much about what the stunning result of Tuesday’s U.S. election means. Opinions are about a-plenty, so I won’t ma...
After Trump, What Now? Tell True Stories Well
True stories save lives and change the world. Historians, cultural anthropologists and other students of the culture, ideas and inner workings of societies past...
History Rhymes: The Trumpian Moment And Its Jacksonian Parallels
Mark Twain is credited with all sorts of things he never said or wrote. He did not say “history never repeats itself but it rhymes.” That exact line...
Chuck Klosterman’s Limited Wrongs
Chuck Klosterman. Photo by Rich Fleischman for Kris Drake Photography. Chuck Klosterman’s new book But What If We’re Wrong? sets out to look at the ...
Three Things: Brexit Battle over Britain
Brexit has happened. Britain will be out of the EU. The people have spoken, what will follow now is just the business of a lot of i-dotting on new contracts as ...
These Untied States: Thoughts on History and Brexit
This morning my first thought was about Erwin Schrödinger. The man with the thought experiment cat, you will recall, which owing to the intricacies of quantum p...
The Donald and His Discontents
”We” live in Trumpy times, indeed. Caricature by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0) A quick note at the top: Donald Trump’s candidacy is obviously happening in th...
The Power Conduit: Robert Caro’s LBJ
Robert Caro’s growing multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson is a lesson in how to do biography as history, and one in how power works in the American...
