Inherit the Wind
If you google “inherit the wind,” you’re overwhelmed with information about the film by that name from 1960. It is a dramatization of the infamous 1925 Scopes Trial, in which a schoolteacher is accused...
Category: history
“Modernism”
David Antin’s wonderful remark about modernism has been coming back to me a lot lately: “From the modernism you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve”. I’m guessing he said it sometime in the 1970s...
Mysterious Minoan: Crete and Linear A
Among the many memories of a recent trip to Crete are two different scripts that were developed there. Linear B is an early form of Greek, but Linear A, which seems to use the same...
Educated and Groundless
I finished reading Educated yesterday, Tara Westover’s memoir of her survivalist Mormon upbringing and subsequent separation from it. By her account, the separation was achieved by means of formal education. Only once in the book...
Family Lexicon
Before I learned of Ginzburg’s book, I used the phrase “family lexicon”(incorrectly, I think in retrospect) as the domain name for a website of family photographs. The project crashed and burned for the best...
The Devil and Time
The History of the Devil is the title of the second of three books Flusser wrote when he lived in Brazil (1940 – 1970), recently translated from Portuguese into English by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes...