Archive for the ‘General’ Category
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
19 Dec 2019One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade…
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The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
25 Oct 2019One of the most important scientists of the western tradition, and about whom we in America know little, is…
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Dominance and Dishonesty
30 Oct 2018“Men will not cease to be dishonest, merely because their dishonesties have been revealed or because they have discovered their…
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Barbs on War
31 Aug 2018“They were in the jelly of youth, and this learned Professor poured into their susceptible hearts all the gentle…
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All The Kings Men: Old Templates for New Demagogues
18 Jul 2018After recent study and due consideration I can say with certainty that to call President Trump the reincarnation of…
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J.D.Salinger – War Troubled
26 Jun 2018Combing through the archives for my proposed magnum hopus, “What We Talk About When We Talk About War,” I came…
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How War Began – Way Back Then
04 May 2017Why do we do it, so often, with such relish? Go to war, that is. Is it locked into our…
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The Populist Explosion by John Judis
06 Mar 2017The word “populism” has re-entered the American vocabulary with more force than since it first made an appearance in the…
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A Matter of Degrees
21 Apr 2016These are notes I took while reading Gino Segre’s A Matter of Degrees (2002) when it first came out. This…
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WW I In The Italian Alps: Torneranno i Prati by Ermanno Olmi
21 Oct 2015Ermanno Olmi is best known in the United States for his 1978 movie, The Tree of Wooden Clogs, even though…
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War in Movies: Small, Tense, and In Your Face
14 Oct 2015The 38th Mill Valley Film Festival has made a special effort to find and present Spanish language films this year,…
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Lakes Basin, Sierra Nevada, CA
12 Aug 2015Besides reading and pondering on the human history that got us here, I sometimes wander the really deep history —…
