A review in The New Republic of Cambridge historian Tim Harper's Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. The book looks fascinating. A couple of bits caught my eye. This one: The locales that interest him are cosmopolitan ports that were at least partly incorporated into Western empires—cities such as Canton, Kuala Lumpur, … Continue reading Magnets for Militants on the Move
Category: Noteworthy
Poetic Nods to an Atomic Indochina
Bernard Fall... nuclear strategist? One of the pieces of archival treasure I discovered among Fall's personal papers is a document that reveals his awareness of and engagement with nuclear issues. In a general sense, that's a claim that could be made of just about anyone at the time. At the height of the Cold War, … Continue reading Poetic Nods to an Atomic Indochina
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: "If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?" The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey's If: The Untold Story of … Continue reading If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you
A signed statement on the failure of language
I've stayed away from commenting publicly on the new US administration. There's so much fodder, so much grist, that it could easily overwhelm. It does overwhelm. Daily news feeds are prefaced and filled with coverage of Trump, his family, his appointments, his interests. My instinct is to stay completely away from it, for at least … Continue reading A signed statement on the failure of language
A brief foray into distraction’s history
This looks interesting: A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017 When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — … Continue reading A brief foray into distraction’s history
MICHAEL A. INNES 