Author: Leland Renato Grigoli
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Boo
Ihave an affinity for useless information. The less practical or applicable it is, the more it sticks in my brain. Can I remember almost every line from The Pirates of Penzance because I worked a show as lighting crew in seventh grade? Sure, I have information vegetable, animal, and mineral, and I certainly know the kings of…
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Past, Perfect?
In April, the New York Times ran an op-ed interviewing “8 conservative men” who (according to the Times’s social media) all came to the conclusion that “this is not the America I remember growing up in.” The so-called newspaper of record had, in other words, determined that these men were subject to what Merriam-Webster calls an “ongoing and indefinitely continuing…
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Foucalt’s Pendulum and Other Prophetic Texts
The [conspiracy theorist] is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his [theory]. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that, sooner or later, he brings up the Templars. (Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum) When people come to historians with narratives we…
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Dirtbag Historicism
The dean asks the professor of Old English how her curriculum can respond to the fact that soon less than half the college students on the West Coast will claim English as their native language. Can Old English rely any longer on the implicit national and imperial argument of “our mother tongue” to justify its…
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Boring Is Good, Actually
It’s been a heck of a winter, what with the advent of the Omicron variant, trucker convoys, and war in Europe. As I write this, I’ve just moved 400 miles and three cultural zones from Providence, Rhode Island, to Washington, DC. Ominous and imposing fencing is once again being erected around the US Capitol, this time…
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Corvus corona
Plague—that’s something I know a bit about. I’ve studied the science of the human past under Michael McCormick, listened attentively to Monica H. Green’s lectures. I know that the Black Death gets all the attention but that the Plague of Justinian, transmitted, perhaps, across the Roman Empire by its famous roads, is what people should…
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Ringing the Changes
Some number of summers ago, I traveled to the tiny French town of Laon on my very first research trip, bright eyed and fresh faced. I found the city perched on a crescent plateau that rose steeply from a surrounding farmland still marked by shell and trench, and walking through its streets felt like exploring…
Mapper Mundi 