Adventures with History

1. no updates = I started trying to write my dissertation. 2. I clocked another 4 months in Paris since my last post, and I'm leaving...

"People who are short and tall," by the couple seated behind me, in seats 4 E and 4F: "sarkozy, now he's short." ...

As for many travelers, Paris for me was an idea before becoming a site of personal memories. Some people--superficial tourists, afraid of a...

I've now spent, collectively, three months in Paris over the last year; three months and a week in France (I went to Lyon for a week las...

The pressures of a blank page... ...weigh particularly heavy when that blank page is the first of 80 that one is expected to produce for a c...

I haven't written in a long time, and probably will not on this blog in the future, for the following reasons: 1. France was too amazin...

As many of my colleagues and I have learned, a large determinant of who people think they are (individually and nationally) is captured in w...

My dad has used the same stationary for letter-writing for at least the past twenty years: lavender, heavy. His letters smell like cigar bo...

You know that slightly ill feeling you get when you're at the movies, and an incredibly stupid preview comes on and to your horror, your...

do you see how our undergraduates look here? Are women supposed to dress that way? You don’t need millions, you just need a few floating ar...

editor's note-you can't transfer footnotes to blog postings. I assure you, the paper I handed in contained a-plenty. Between Lightn...

One year down (classes only, assignments pending). Here's what I learned. 1. You can speak more intelligently about a book that you...

It's a sunny, colder-than-expected April Saturday. In New York, these factors alone would have determined how my day would be spent--it...

Someone asked me yesterday if I would send my (fictitious) children to the New School, which is where I got my BA. The answer is no, and he...

1.You were lying on a side-table at my father’s house, closed, no sleeve. I was 8; the height of that little table, near the front door, pu...

"Man cannot do without feelings, but the moment they are considered values in themselves, criteria of truth, justifications for kinds o...

Introduction "A percentage! Nice little words they have, really: so reassuring, so scientific. A certain percentage, they say, meaning ...

grad school changes the tone of acceptable quotidian discourse; here's a list of words I use now and wouldn't have a year ago: prole...

Future graduate students: 1. One of the double-edged swords of being at an institution like Princeton has been the frequency with which I h...

A few years ago, while discussing his recently-published book (that he was gracious enough to assign the class), a professor of mine made an...

Until recently, I was convinced that inspirational politics, in the sense of a leader rising up and inspiring citizens to aspire to greater ...

On January 7th, Hillary Clinton said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 19...

I've survived another trip to the "alamo city," only a little scathed. I was greeted with a "welcome home" from my ...

1. Parties advertised as "Sleazy Grad Student Party" actually do contain a number of sleazy grad students. Most of them in finan...