The Post-Partisan Emporium

The amorality of tech and the illusion of superiority Carlos Ramalhete Photo by  Specna Arms  on  Unsplash There is a nice book by Michael Crichton,  Timeline , in which some historians find themselves in the Middle Ages. (yes, I do love escapist fiction; I even  write some .) The best thing in the book is that the author managed to avoid the ugliest and most absurd cliché of time-travel fiction, and his characters are not somehow superior to people from that other moment in time. In fact, they find again and again that some black legends about that time were wrong. Of course, the  awful movie version  reverses it, to the point of having a character saying they had centuries of superiority over the guys chasing them. Ugly, indeed. But movies, like camels, are made by committees. Recently I read another time-travel book — in fact, a trilogy ( Island in the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling ) — in which a whole islandful of XXth-Century Yankees become the contemporaries of Ulysses when an u

HOW I LEARNED TO START WORRYING AND HATE THE BOMB and why you should, too. Trish Wood On a chilly Seattle night, sometime in the early 1980s, I was huddled in the front seat of a rented Volvo with  John Kenneth Galbraith,  one of the most important intellectuals of his time. We were parked under a bridge near Ivar’s legendary  Salmon House  — me the eager and ambitious young reporter and Galbraith, an important Harvard economist who had counselled President John F. Kennedy. Patrician, elegant Galbraith was gracious when confronted with the makeshift studio I’d coaxed him into, away from the restaurant itself which was too noisy for a clean recording. At the time of our meeting, Galbraith was travelling to events in support of anti-nukes activism being propelled by doctors around the world. Spearheading the movement was Dr. Howard Hiatt — the storied former head of Harvard’s School of Public health back when PH actually meant something.  Hiatt and Victor S. Weisskopf ,one of  the father