Tag Archives: Life in the Tax Haven

The era of Assad is over. Turkish-aligned Syrian rebels, first coming out of a small pocket in Idlib, captured Aleppo before driving south without being stopped. At the same time, rebels that had gone to ground in the south rose up and seized Damascus. What seemed like a permanent stasis only two years ago hasContinue reading “Weeks Were Decades Happen”

I’ve recently returned to my Albanian history ways. I became interested in the subject after my application to be a Peace Corps English teacher in Kosovo was accepted. I began reading about Albanian history in January 2020, but after COVID made the Peace Corps impossible, I found myself sucked into the world of Albanian history.Continue reading “Balli Kombëtar, Albanian Fascism, and the Death of Nineteenth-Century Nationalism”

19 June. I have a free day in Paris. My thesis has been submitted, Léa (with whom I have been spending my time with since Andy returned to the States) is at work, and I have no plans for the day. I have been reading Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring which was published two weeks agoContinue reading “On the (im)Proper Uses of Public Space”

This blog will be brief. My master’s thesis is now complete and I wish to share it with the world. My supervisor will probably emphasize the unscientific nature of my work. Perhaps I could have chosen sources systematically rather than in the hap-hazard nature that I did, going from one archive to the next inContinue reading “Historical Joy, or Why I Wrote My Thesis”

Andrew (Weeks) has commented on the miracle of walking since he arrived in Paris. I can sympathize and I want to argue in favor of a second miracle that we also take for granted: language.  I’m not a great language student as all my long-suffering German teachers can confess. I lacked the discipline required toContinue reading “Petits miracles”

I was recently introduced to Reinhart Koselleck by an article in aeon (an excellent magazine, by the way) about his historical theories. The article juxtaposes Koselleck with the communist Eric Hobsbawm, whose historical method was a direct outgrowth of his communist politics. For Hobsbawm, history was praxis. The journal he helped found, Past and Present,Continue reading “The Political and the Apolitical Historian”

At a one-day conference about public ceremonies in the Fifth Republic that I recently attended, Xavier Darcos gave a short presentation about France Mémoire, the organization that he is the director of. With the help of government funding, Darcos explained that France Mémoire is meant to depoliticize memory in France by promoting its most harmlessContinue reading “It’s Politics, Stupid!”

Before I was born Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron summarized the beliefs of Silicon Valley as The Californian Ideology. Techno-utopianism, “free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism” grafted itself onto the organs of ‘Actually Existing Capitalism’ like a virus, beginning a plague that has not been fought in the name of the immune-compromised but celebrated inContinue reading “The Luxembourgish Ideology”

Written on June 25th, 2022, the following lines were my attempt to contribute something meaningful in a moment of total dread. It is not timely, nor is it timeless, but even now I think about one of the final lines, about a woman I will never meet, nor will I even know existed. This textContinue reading “Moral Outrage”