Noteworthy | Michael A. Innes

Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009.

16.07.2019 by Michael A. Innes

That’s the title of my book, to be published with C. Hurst & Co. in early 2020. I’m told it’ll be listed in the Fall 2019 Hurst catalog. Here’s the long form of the publication blub (I’ll add page links once Hurst goes live with the detail): STREETS WITHOUT JOY: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF SANCTUARY AND WAR, 1959-2009. By Michael A. Innes America’s wars after the Al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 were marked by a political obsession with […]

Categories: Noteworthy

Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined

07.08.2018 by Michael A. Innes

I’ve been digging into the use of Pearl Harbor analogies in America’s response to the 9-11 attacks – and, because of a curious twist in the political landscape in 2001, I’ve been looking a little more closely at a well known study of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, 1962). Wohlstetter’s book is a classic examination of military intelligence (and its failures). It also enjoyed a parallel life as a physical prop […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: forensic history, forensic research

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

08.10.2017 by Michael A. Innes

Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like “research” and “information”, and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It’s a world in which understanding is less contingent on a cognitive capacity for critical engagement and creative insight than it is on the accessibility of information. Access is […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: archival investigations, archive, forensic history, forensic research, historical research, history

A signed statement on the failure of language

14.02.2017 by Michael A. Innes

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 three reasons: First, there is paranoia: we have yet to fully understand and appreciate the consequences of speaking ill or in any way that might […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: body language, dominance, Donald Trump, framing, handshake, Justin Trudeau, Mexican stand-off

A brief foray into distraction’s history

03.01.2017 by Michael A. Innes

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 — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age. Yet […]

Categories: Noteworthy • Tags: books, cognition, history, information, literature, reading

Michael A. Innes

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Category Archives: Noteworthy

Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959-2009.

Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

A signed statement on the failure of language

A brief foray into distraction’s history