Tag
History
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What Happens When Belief Stops Mattering?
“From the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968 to the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost in the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was sustained not by terror or conviction, but by something harder to name: a routinization of participation.”
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The Art of (Not Forgetting) War
Many of the images in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit World War I and the Visual Arts depict the war in such violent detail that their authors …
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Burns and Novick, Masters of False Balancing
When Karl Marlantes takes the screen during The Vietnam War, he says …
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William Bradford Huie’s “The Klansman” @50
The rise of Donald Trump has thrust the Ku Klux Klan into the national spotlight. To better understand the true threat of the Klan and its history of violence and …
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Failed Fathers, Failed States
In 1992, 12 years after the Shining Path commenced their terrorist activities in the Peruvian Andean highlands with a view to overthrowing the state as well as the …
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Atheists in the Pantheon
Atheists, infidels, unbelievers. Humanists, materialists, naturalists. There are a lot of terms for the nonreligious, and many only tell us what people don’t believe. But what do nonbelievers actually believe? This is a tough question. The first three terms don’t help much because they all negate. They deny the reality of a Christian deity, and…
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Our Migrant World
Within the rhetorical toolbox of contemporary political discourse, the language used to characterize international migration, refugee crises, and border crossings might fairly be called impoverished. “Waves” of refugees are “flooding” the West, which is “overwhelmed” by the “swamp” of new arrivals; or, to swap a logic of inundation for one of infestation, migrants “swarm” their…
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Is Handwriting History?
Have you got a pen? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my backpack, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers to ask. For years an “e-signature” has sufficed for my letters of recommendation; it’s months since I wrote a check. Presented with a…
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Choosing Growth
Recently, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt defended the withdrawal of the United States from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord by alleging that the agreement had placed “constraints on the economy.” Rather than regulations, Pruitt promised, it was “technology and innovation” breakthroughs in the private sector that would curb carbon emissions, create new jobs, and spur economic…
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Cursed Masculinity
Masculinity is a curse. This, at least, is the driving conceit behind Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Ugandan epic, Kintu, published in Kenya by the Kwani Trust in 2014, and in the US by Transit Books …
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Rewriting the History of Racist Ideas
While first reading Ibram X. Kendi’s kaleidoscopic and admirably lucid Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, I had a flashback to my days as a graduate …
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Even Broken History Is History
Last month the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, spoke movingly about the removal of Confederate monuments and “the cult of the lost cause” they celebrate. The “Free Southerners” in Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, which opens in 2074, are also a cult of the lost cause: …
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What the Nazis Learned from America
Until the recent presidential election cycle, most of us had never heard of the “alt-right.” To those of us who had (likely because we spend too much time on …
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5,000 Years of Climate Fiction
Kim Stanley Robinson is not the first to write about Manhattan under water. Others, notably Nathaniel Rich in Odds Against Tomorrow (2013), have also …
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W. E. B. Du Bois’s Revolutions
“Today I have reached my conclusion,” wrote W. E. B. Du Bois on October 1, 1961: “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No …
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Teaching Kids to Resist
Do you know who Fred Korematsu is? He is not yet a household name like Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., despite the integral role he played in protesting the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. That’s because the story of how he managed to wrest a formal apology from the United…
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Hawarden: A Castle and Its Dogs
Hawarden, pronounced “Harden,” sits on the edge of Wales. Walk along the River Dee for an hour and you’ll cross into England. This is borderland …
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Shoptalk: Overheard at Kzoo
The International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) convenes every year at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI, and thus is far better …
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More Orwell
No political event in memory has been as shocking and bewildering as Donald Trump’s election. It doesn’t seem to belong to our history, the history we had and thought we would go on having. How to …
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Why Nixon Is Tricky for Novelists
We have Nixon to kick around again. During the election and then early presidency of Donald Trump …
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Presidential Comics: Part 1
The vitriol of modern elections is nothing new. Indeed, it is relatively tame compared to earlier generations. Ever since the emergence of the party system in …
