Forgetting to Fall Has Become Harder: On Writing in Pandemia World
“There is an art, or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss” begins a memorable passage...
Category: thoughts
Die Stunde der Erklärer
Morgens die Pressekonferenz des Robert Koch-Instituts, mittags Nachrichten mit allerlei gesammelten Statements aus Ministerien, Ländern, Städten. Am Abend spric...
Past Prologue: In Between Conferences
Easter saw me returning from a trip across Europe for two back-to-back conferences, the biannual conference of the International Association of Inter-American S...
Deactivating Facebook
You may have landed here because you were looking for me on the internet. If you looked for me on Facebook, you may have noticed I’m not there. I’ve...
Art Is Worth Fighting For
Science, we march for. The humanities, however, have not fared well lately. That is, the way we talk about the humanities has not been much in the way of apprec...
Year Two: ‘Thus, History!’ Had a Birthday
Here’s a meta-post not about history, but about the blog which I use to share some of my thoughts on it. Thus, History!, the place where you are reading t...
Life on Mars, 2016
We pick our heroines and our heroes and we pick our battles and our places to stand. We may be wrong in these choices sometimes, but if our compass is true then...
Against Fear
What is terror, and who is a terrorist? The question comes up a lot these days. In Germany, the Berlin Christmas market attack was labeled a terrorist act prett...
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...
Prophet of the Present: Alvin Toffler Dead at 87
As my current research project deals with popular diagnostic books about the state of society from the 1970s and 1980s, I have been thinking a lot about Alvin T...