Blog Archive

I realized something important today, thanks to a post by James Marriott who quoted a long passage from an Orlando Figes description of Russian peasant life: In every aspect of the peasants’ lives, from their material culture to their legal customs, there was a relentless conformity….The peasants all wore the same basic clothes.

Number 38. That’s the number of our plot in the garden club, also known as the volkstuin. I should say rather that it was our number, as we just canceled our membership. (Note: This was written in the spring of 2024.) We took our shovel and rake home, informed the directors, said goodbye to neighbors. We’re done. Do you feel the need to defend the decision?

Last week, I attended a summer school on ethics at the end of life, one of whose faculty members was an American bioethicist who teaches at a school of medicine in the US. On the first day, he began his talk lamenting the political situation in the US, its impact on science, and more generally its radical departure from long-standing American ideals.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about calls to bring US-based scientists to Europe and other countries, given the US regime’s sabotage of American scientific research, both in universities and federal agencies.

I’m a creature of cultural journalism. I read it; I write it; I buy it; I read aloud juicy bits to my kids. And so I want it to live.

This is something I wrote in the middle Obama years and recently pulled from the vault. Back then, the cloud wasn't a thing, so backing up to the cloud wasn't as easy as it is now. You don't hear many people mourning lost data in crashed hard drives like we used to.