Nihilistic times
Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber by Wendy Brown My rating: 5 of 5 stars What are “nihilistic times”? Our times, today, when for politicians, media hosts and other opinion leaders, nothing is sacred, there is no clear standard of right or wrong, truth or falsity that they are required to observe, and thus no … read more »
Sociological fiction
My fiction is often set amid upheavals that have changed the world — or attempted to. Revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements in Latin America, in Welcome to My Contri; the tensions leading to the fall of the Byzantine and rise of the Ottoman Empire in A Gift for the Sultan; or the Franco-Prussian war and the … read more »
Wajda’s Polish saga
A note on academia.edu prompted me to reread this article from 2015. If you have any interest in Poland, or in filmmaking, you may enjoy it. End of a Saga: Andrzej Wajda’s Wałęsa: Man of Hope
Progress & impediments: Why I’m leaving Facebook
Back on January 1, I posted my New Year’s Resolutions, here. Sorry to report less than satisfactory progress on all but one goal, learning German. Thanks to the exercises on DuoLingo, that’s going quite well. I can now read texts much more easily, though still with frequent recourse to the dictionary. However, my main purpose … read more »
Albania!
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History by Lea Ypi My rating: 5 of 5 stars ALBANIA! If you haven’t yet read Lea Ypi’s delightful and surprising book about growing up in that eccentric little country, you must! From the death of « Uncle Enver », as patriotic tots like little … read more »