Last week’s tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a passionate discussion about how to respond to gun violence in the United States. The horrific imagery of twenty six- and seven-year olds being gunned down alongside their teachers and school administrators is enough to make even the coldest heart skip a beat. However, [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/12/the-price-of-empire/
te Heesen, Anke. The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. Translated by Ann M. Hentschel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Anke te Heesen chooses an obscure artifact as the subject of her 2002 monograph, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia. te Heesen, currently [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/11/review-the-world-in-a-box/
Last weekend I inhaled Brian Castner’s new memoir of conflict and social reintegration, The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life that Follows (Doubleday, 2012.) It is a riveting examination of war from the individual perspective, so often overlooked in social discussions of war, patriotism and sacrifice. I highly recommend it. Castner confides [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2012/07/the-cost-of-conflict/
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, American philosopher There have been a rash of history issues in the news recently and unfortunately, the news has been mostly bad. The New York Times posted this article on their website yesterday, which points to dramatic knowledge deficits of [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2011/06/the-santayana-affliction/
Recently, I wrote the attached essay for a historical methods class I took this past quarter. It addressed the question of the relationship between history and the past, and as a device I used the controversy over the National Air and Space Museum’s planned exhibit of the Enola Gay in 1995. Since it was written [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2011/03/culture-warriors-and-the-enola-gay/
I came across this blog post by Stanford economist Anat Admati, explaining the germane issues of banking regulation, in light of the recent Basel III conference. It’s accessible and important information that will inform the debate over too-big-to-fail regulation. You can also watch her interviewed on the Bloomberg network. Anat Admati Says Banks Should Increase [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2010/12/the-too-big-to-fail-debate/
I really enjoy following Jay Rosen of pressthink.org on Twitter. This morning he posted a great piece of social commentary about the nature of Fox News. For some reason, it reminds me a bit of Neil Postman, the late social and media critic. The video was shot from his desktop webcam, but his insights are [...]
http://www.born2synthesize.com/2010/11/social-comment-otd/