History Unfolding

One of my sons got AI to read every post in this blog and summarize it.

I spent the last week in Paris, which for me makes for days of restaurants, movies, bookstores, and museums.

It took several months, but a copy of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent and Young, the autobiography of Zayd Ayers Dohrn, the son of late 1960s Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, found its way to me via the local library consortium this week.

It's an irony of my life that while I wanted as much or more than anything to belong to some kind of larger institution that shared my values, I have instead become more of an intellectual lone wolf every decade.

Several weeks ago I commented favorably on Texas's new K-12 reading curriculum.

Our educational establishment, it seems, has catastrophically failed the nation's public schools over the last few decades.

The Boston Globe ran a piece recently about a controversy in the Cambridge Public Schools.

While I do grieve the world I grew up in, I also feel a compulsion to try to understand the one we are living in now.

The American experiment is not going well.

I spent the summer of 1974 researching my dissertation in London, and a lifelong love affair began.

I spent my last term as a college undergraduate in the spring of 1969.

One of my sons asked a leading AI program, Claude, for its analysis of History Unfolding.

The election of 2016 might have taught both parties something, but one of them didn't get the message.

The flood of deeply disturbing news from Washington never stops rising, no matter how badly we wish that the president and his administration could declare victory on all fronts and let us have some peace.

I met the late Barney Frank in the spring of 1966, when my older brother Bob visited me near the end of my freshman year at Harvard.

Our national political crisis has been going on for at least 26 years, in my opinion, and Donald Trump remains as much a symptom of it as a cause.

Last fall, the historian Jill Lepore gave an interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education about her career as an historian that sheds a great deal of light about what has happened to history in the last hafl century or so.

Last August, thanks to a column by Linda Greenhouse, I anticipated the voting rights decision that the Supreme Court just handed down, and said that I thought that it would in fact do some good--a rare, but not unheard of, position on the left side of the…

The crisis in higher education is much in the news.

Regarding the crisis in the Persian Gulf, nothing has happened in the last eleven days to alter the opinions that I expressed eleven days ago.

Even relatively apolitical Americans, I think, inevitably think of the president of the United States as a father.

I hesitate to write about the ongoing war.

My uncle Henry Kaiser was born in 1911 and died in the late 1980s after a long career as a labor attorney.

In January 1917, two months after his re-election and three months before the United States entered the First World War, Woodrow Wilson gave a remarkable speech calling for peace.

This story from 60 Minutes found its way onto my youtube feed this morning It may be the most important story they have ever done.

We awakened this morning to find that the United States has begun an unlimited war against the Iranian regime.

It was about five years ago, I think, that I discovered Coleman Hughes, a very heterodox Columbia graduate who was then podcasting independently.