history

Created
Thu, 10/08/2023 - 04:56
Madrid, 6 August 1973––fifty years ago. The son of one of Franco’s generals has summoned us, a gang of rowdy friends, to his absent father’s luxurious home. Lounging on gold brocade sofas, merrily we smoke dope and drink booze till we’re high as larks and tight as owls. At some befuddled point I pick up Continue reading »
Created
Sun, 06/08/2023 - 04:51
In the Ukraine War, scholar Serhii Plokhy has his own biases, which can get in the way of his profession’s fidelity to evidence. Are historians, as Serhii Plokhy suggests, really the worst interpreters of current events, except for everyone else? As a historian myself, I would like to believe so. It’s a comforting thought at Continue reading »
Created
Tue, 04/07/2023 - 17:19
I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding […]
Created
Fri, 02/06/2023 - 01:09
Quinn Slobodian’s new book, Crack-Up Capitalism is an original and striking analysis of a weird apparent disjuncture. Libertarians and classical liberals famously claim to be opposed to state power. So why do some of them resort to it so readily? In his previous book, The Globalists, Quinn argued that globalization was poorly understood. It wasn’t […]