philosophy
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Her Birthday
It’s hard, sometimes, to put things into words. I’ve been stuck for a long time on that Stoppard quote—we are forced to work in a language which makes up in obscurity that which it lacks in style. It is, I… Continue reading
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An Ambiguous Defense
One of the weirdest things I learned as a Boy Scout is that concealment in the dark is relative. That is, if you’re trying to hide in a shadow, it doesn’t actually matter how dark the spot you’re standing in… Continue reading
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Memorial Day, 2024
Two and a half years out, my writing has started to stall. There are only so many big ideas one can develop to the degree that they can be written about, after all, and I’m starting to feel like the… Continue reading
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Defining History’s Future
For the past two years, as soon as June came around, I went into the AHA job ads database and access the data for the last year, the first step in writing the AHA’s annual report on academic hiring. For… Continue reading
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More of a Comment Than a Question
In The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a novel set on a distant future planet where the concept of gender does not exist, Ursula K. Le Guin imagined a group of fortune tellers called “the Answerers.” Through long practice, the Answerers could… Continue reading
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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… Continue reading
MapperMundi 