history
Book burning in the digital age
The right has long felt that some of our history needs adjustment. How far will they go?
When the future forgets the past
Knowledge disappears easily.
The future-history we want, and the future-history we deserve
Is it any wonder that we’re lousy at imagining any futures but complete apocalypse or vague utopia?
How do we talk about impending doom so that people will listen?
Books like ‘The Ministry for the Future’ offer a useful vocabulary for hashing out solutions to our overheating world.
On ‘tomorrow sorrow’: How we grieve the future today
Humans have the capacity to grieve the world ahead, knowing how much is going wrong today. But tomorrow sorrow can make us stronger actors.
Our secular struggle with medically assisted dying
Reading Time: 14 minutes Suffering from chronic pain, a friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news. I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devast
What fifty years of struggle can teach us, going forward
Reading Time: 9 minutes The year is 1973. In January, Richard Nixon is sworn in for his second term as president, the US officially withdraws from its conflict in Vietnam, and an investigation into the Watergate break-ins expands from the burglars to the statesmen. In the coming months, Nixon will o
The struggle for a more global response to climate change
Reading Time: 10 minutes On September 9, scientists and other protesters involved in the Extinction Rebellion (XR) launched their latest direct action by marching daily on the Utrechtsebaan, which is part of the A12 highway around the Hague, in the Netherlands. 2,400 protesters out of around 10,000
Did Krakatoa’s eruption turn Indonesia Muslim?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Starting at 11:05 p.m. on October 11, 2002, three terrorist bombs detonated in quick succession on the picturesque Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people, mostly Western tourists, in the teeming bar district. Historians said it had been a very long time coming—119 year
Can Ukraine find meaning in Russia’s murderous invasion?
Reading Time: 4 minutes After Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s occupation of Austria in 1938 and shortly before the United States entered World War II three years later, Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist, noticed a piece of marble lying on a table at his parents’ home in Vienna. His fa
Originalism: Why is the US Constitution being held hostage in 1788?
Reading Time: 6 minutes Whenever the deeply conservative ideology of “originalism” versus “living constitutionalism” is raised, we should remind ourselves of the sordid history of American slavery that the US Constitution once purposefully accommodated. More on that later. Because five current relig
From Hitler to Trump, strongmen’s lies have devastated the world
Reading Time: 3 minutes At the risk of exaggerating a connection to today’s American political environment, bald-faced lies disingenuously and persistently applied over time destroyed Germany’s pre-World War II Weimar Republic. The lies were spread by the racist Nazi Party’s fascist leader, Adolf Hi