Deborah Nam-Krane's Blog

I am not someone who gets depressed. Frankly, I resented that for years--I was surrounded by people who couldn't get or keep their lives together, and I had to pick up for them while everyone (sometimes including them) were scolding me for not having a better life of my own. Not being able to do something sounded like a luxury.

I understand depression a little more now, and I am grateful that I have been spared. When something terrible happens, I don't retreat, I get motivated. 

So I don't get depressed, but boy, was I devastated this week when that horrible budget bill was passed. That hit me worse than the election, and it's not like I was skipping through a field of flowers for that. It's not that I can't believe a bill which condemns the most vulnerable among us to destitution and death passed, it's that I can't believe we've been watching this slow-rolling disaster for months and NO ONE has a plan. No, do not say "the 2026 midterms". That is not a plan, that is a delay, and if that's the best you can do, that is you saying that you are fine with people dying before that. How can that be the best that anyone can do?

I am not the expert--please believe me, you don't want me to devise a work around for our medical system and housing availability--but the best bet we have seems to be a general strike. Nope, sorry, we can't wait until 2028, as some proposed previously. We do not have time for that. 

I'm very concerned that the media wants to see something like a general strike--you know, for the drama--but they are unwilling to do their part, which is truthfully report events. I take this personally; my uncle risked his safety as a reporter and then editor in South Korea to tell important stories. I don't see our press doing the same thing. In the prestige media, I see a lot of capitulation, and it makes me ill.

Someone on an episode of Tech Won't Save Us earlier this year advised that the platform decay (aka enshittification) of media and social media sites means we need to go back to smaller scale communication and distribution. We need newsletters--though, please, not ones generated from all of those popups--small group chats, and blogs. This was music to my ears in an otherwise depressing episode, because those are all things I've been enjoying. I hate the internet, but since Cory Doctorow recommended using an RSS reader, I've hated it a little less. Progress!...?

A few days ago, I stumbled onto a website called good internet. The writers are young enough to be my children, but it actually makes me feel better to know 1) that people that young feel the same way I do about the internet and 2) that they see a way out. Spoiler alert: it's about making the internet smaller and more interactive again, as opposed to the hellscape our tech overlords have been shoving down our throats. I'm enjoying it, and I recommend it, almost to the point that I feel guilty feeling so cheered by it.

But if we're going to get out from these fascists, we need to have a dream of what the world should look like. That, maybe, is part of my plan.

Deb in the City 

I had my conference on Sunday. There were things we should have done differently, but overall, I'm incredibly proud of the program we put together and the energy we generated. I am particularly proud that our plenary was about Environmental Justice and Energy Democracy, and one of our final sessions was about Rare Earth Minerals and the role that plays in our energy transition. (And because I couldn't get enough of that topic, I went into a webinar the day after that talked that issue as well. Please watch, it was awesome and thought provoking.) And I get to check off a box on a life goal list for having also included a session on organizing--and libraries!

I'm coming to my regularly scheduled programming in good conscience. I complain bitterly about how the universe is sometimes set against me, but in this case, I think my timing is working out well. I was healed up enough to limp around in a boot, and while I felt it that day--my weakest point? The calf muscle on the affected leg--I was able to keep up, and emboldened to walk around two days later for my annual physical. (And where do I feel it today? My outer and inner thighs. Walking--who knew?) I'm grateful to my sisters and husband for giving me the time I needed to heal up. 

As promised, I reformatted my phone and computer the next day. The phone was done in less than an hour, and I'm proud of myself for realizing that I could use my power cord to transfer data from my Surface to my phone. (I know, that doesn't sound like much, but when someone asked me to do that a decade ago, I had no idea what they were talking about, and I certainly didn't have the cord.) 

The Surface was another story, and that was in large part because I wanted to physically back up some of my files. I think some people will think that's quaint, but I needed to be sure that all would be well, and I wasn't sure that they wouldn't be lost off of the cloud as I reset the computer. Paranoid? Maybe, but I've lost too much over the years to risk it now with valuable files.

Hours of work, but it was worth it. The computer seems to be running more smoothly now, and it's nice to have so few things on my phone. (But it would be even nicer if I could remove more. Why is Samsung forcing me to keep the browser and store? Yeah, I know why, but still.) I am eagerly awaiting my new keyboard tomorrow--this one is eight years old--and then I'll have, as far as I'm concerned a new machine.

I've gone through all of this to simplify my digital existence and get back to my real life. After spending so much time with this machine the last few weeks, today I ordered four books, with a few more in queue at the next paycheck (not counting the one I just ordered for my niece yesterday). In the last few weeks, I've actually managed to read four books, and in the last month, eight. They were my lifeline when I was lonely, overworked, and uncomfortable.

It would have been very nice, and in some ways more convenient, to have had the internet I remember from ten years ago during that time, but that internet is gone. That internet was monetized out of existence, and it doesn't make sense to romanticize it too much. The people who wrote good things, took pretty pictures, and made engaging videos very quickly wanted an exit strategy that would mean, really, that they wouldn't have to do those things. The blogs and websites--even social media accounts--that I liked were always the bait for something else. I didn't know what it was, but I don't think those bloggers, writers, photographers, videographers, and even commenters knew, either, except that it was something that should "generate income". 

There's a world in which, maybe, that could have worked for some sites and people, but that world wouldn't contain AI-generated slop. Because that has ruined the value proposition of the World Wide Web.

People know this but they don't understand it: the internet is older than I am. But while people were using message boards when I was in grade school and really into email when I was in college, it wasn't until I was a young adult that the internet became something everyone needed to have, and that was because of the Graphical User Interface--that's GUI to you--that is the World Wide Web. Being able to, basically, attach graphics to hyperlinks changed everything. It's not an exaggeration to say that the World Wide Web was the killer app of the internet.

But I find myself groaning when I look at internet art now. Even if it isn't clearly generated by AI, it's quite possibly generated by it, especially if the "production values" are very good. Whenever someone posts a picture these days, I always wonder if it's real. (And have people already started interrogating definitions of reality and authenticity, the way they do "natural" and "artificial" food? I'll sit that inane argument out, thanks.) The whole thing makes me want to engage less and less with the kind of sparkly content that used to be so exciting a decade ago. And that's sad.

I expect to be reading a lot more books. Hopefully I can still find people to talk about them with.

Deb in the City 

I'm co-chairing another climate conference because people foolishly think I'm good at those things. I don't do anything alone, but I have worked hard. I'm hoping that the material we put out there is something people appreciate, even if we don't have a big audience on the day of. Ah, the magic of Zoom recordings.

The conference starts tomorrow at 7 AM (8:30 for the rest of the world) and goes until 5 PM. It's going to be a long day, there will be fires to put out and cats to herd, but then we'll be done. And then you know how I'm going to celebrate?

By bringing my phone and Surface to factory settings obviously.

When a friend mentioned doing that a few weeks ago, it pricked my ears. By the time I heard a journalist talk about it a week and a half later, I was ready to start strategizing. And now, having spent hours sorting and deleting files, I am so excited. I can't wait for my phone to be just that--well, maybe throw in a little texting--and I can't wait to get rid of all of the dreck that's on my computer. I have a good idea of the things I'm going to need to add, but it's not nearly as much as you would think if you saw my computer now.

I first heard about the internet when I was eleven years old, and it sounded like a great tool to do some research on (I was convinced there were other Greek myths that hadn't made it over to me at that point). Forty-one years later, and I can say that I do not want to use the internet for research unless I don't have a choice. In looking through my bookmarks and saved links and realizing that the biggest category was science--I bet you didn't see that coming--I pondered over the best way to use the information. Finally, it came to me, and I deleted all of them and got a subscription to Science News. I don't want to use my computer as a mediator for my research any more, though of course it would be foolish not to use it for writing my thoughts in a final format. (Ahem, ask me how I know.)

The money I spent on that was freed up in part by canceling my BuJo U subscription. I'm really grateful for the Bullet Journal system, and I appreciate that it's an idea the creator didn't initially make a lot of money off of. So I was happy to be a paying member of his community for a few years. And I would have stayed even through an increase in price, but NOT through it's evolution into a certification course. Ugh, ugh, and more ugh. Sorry, but having lived through mind body fitness--hell, having lived through tech--I know a scam when I see one. I can still enjoy the idea and utilize the concept, but I'm not going to be part of a community which can't survive without preying on its members.

Sadly, I have similar feelings about Marie Kondo. Much as I love her books and genuinely felt better after implementing her ideas, her consultant certification just boggles my mind, even more than selling products she implicitly warned against in her books. In her defense, she didn't set up the same kind of paid community Bullet Journal did, at least not in this country, but still.

These developments get me even more because what I think the internet is a very good mediator for is *communication* and sometimes even community, but organic communities, not those whose ultimate goal is sales. There's something very MLM about that, and I try to avoid those at all costs.

I think a lot about what Neil Postman et al had to say about how technology affects content--"The medium is the message"--and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that it's not a question of technology corrupting "content", but technology being misapplied. Just because something's good at presenting a drama that doesn't mean it's the best thing for music, and just because something makes a great message board, that doesn't mean it's where we should do our shopping (don't get me started on internet search). Maybe it's not a terrible thing to experiment, but when you fail, admit it and move on.

Well, that's what I'm going to do at least.

Deb in the City

I fractured my ankle on April 15 (of course I remember the exact date). I'm in a cast and on crutches for the first time in my life. It's not so great. My husband has been very attentive except when he's been absent, namely a four-day conference last week, a D&D game (on Mother's Day...), and a three day trip to another state to visit a client starting next Monday. I was threatened by the no-nonsense Orthopedic Nurse Practitioner to eat A LOT more protein and take Vitamin D3 so she can see more bone-growth if I want to avoid surgery. I want to avoid surgery, but now eating is joyless.

I'm grateful for visits from my children and the company of the one just home from school, but I'd also really like to vacuum. (You know it's bad when you *crave* housework). And I don't want to depend on my children for company. Plus there are a couple of big stressors, including an event I'm planning, a renovation I'm overseeing, and care I'm coordinating. Also, I'm feverish. 

As one can imagine, I'm craving a little comfort. I remember just a few years ago that there were go to websites where I could read something was either cheerful, aspirational, educational, or just plain enjoyable. Foolishly, I sought those things out this week, and I can say that those things do not exist. Everything that tech watchers have been warning about for the last quarter century have finally arrived, and just in time for one of the most difficult stages in our history.

Much has been written about our BS regulatory environment's contribution to the lack of actual innovation and the exploitative nature of the tech behemoths still standing. That's all true. But what people aren't talking about enough is the way that everyone is "monetizing" themselves. It's not a new trend--it's just a little younger than blogging--but it makes the internet less a haven and more a source of, well, the same kind of grift we see in the rest of the media landscape. There's still great *content* out there...as long as you're willing to pay for it. There are some things I am, in fact willing to pay for, but for the most part, I'd rather buy a book. Sorry. 

I think the most difficult part of the New Internet is YouTube. It feels sleazy in the way those websites with pass throughs to porn sites feel sleazy, with the added nauseating element of AI "recommendations" which are clearly enhanced ads. Things like this used to make me hyperventilate; now they're just exhausting.

I don't think there's a silver bullet, although I did gasp with pleasure when I successfully transferred my YouTube subscriptions to my RSS reader. Yay, a little less nausea, but it doesn't mean the whole paradigm hasn't decayed.

Do I have more to say? Maybe, but since my computer and phone seem to be freezing up, I'm going to take that as a sign to grab a book.

Deb in the City

It takes me a while to do things sometimes. I got the idea for the kernel of this SFF saga in the mid-1990s--I would guess 1996--but it wasn't until two decades later that I was finally able to put my thoughts to paper. It took me until August of 2023 to finish drafting, and it took me until now, April of 2025 to finish transcribing.

So this means the editing should be done before 2026...right? 

For the record, the time scale of letting a story percolate and then getting it down is basically the same for my last series, but move it back about a decade.

Most writers and artists wish for success not just so we can be comfortable but so we can have all of the uninterrupted time we need. Because while it isn't the worst thing in the world, having an idea, whether that's an image or a story, tormenting you for decades while you figure out how to literally manifest it is sometimes like having an itch to scratch that you can't quite reach. 

In a way, I envy people who can walk away--telling themselves they're not itchy anymore--but for me that was never an option. That's why I persisted with this project through a struggle with a family member's addiction, a pandemic, other family's mental health struggles, cancer, dementia in a family member, a suicide in the family, children going off to college, managing an adult sibling's care, and oh, yeah, the rise of fascism in my country, as well as the persistent environmental degradation of the planet. This series was supposed to be about history, but it is also about the present, reorganized, as we writers do, especially in the speculative genres. 

I'm taking at least a month off before I start editing this. My brain needs that. I took notes as I went, but I'm sure it's still going to be a bear. And it's not like I don't other things to keep me busy (see above paragraph). 

Part of me would have loved to have finished this in 2020, as I had originally hoped, but in some ways, it might have been a different story, because it took me about this long to figure out what this was *really* about. 

If only life worked the same way...that's part of why we write, isn't it?

Deb in the City

I didn’t appreciate the value of sociology until I started readingabout modern Russian history. Now I wish I’d studied it more incollege.

I started college inJune of 1990. I started a little bit early—Northeastern Universitywas on the quarter system, and there was no one to say that Icouldn’t. (It was in college that I learned to start asking forforgiveness instead of permission.) I knew I wanted to study history,but for whatever reason, it was easiest for me to take two sociologyclasses (101 and Environment and Society) that summer. I very muchenjoyed those classes, but they weren’t part of the The Plan, andeven then I was dogged in my adherence to such things.

The Berlin Wall hadfallen just a few months before, and like clockwork, the world wasabout to pivot attention to the Middle East (or, as I now prefer tothink of it, the Middle World). I wasn’t quite eighteen, but I wasalready ignoring statements about the end of history, or however theyphrased it back then. I knew there would be things to keep mebusy...I just hadn’t figured on us returning to such a similarpoint as where I, in some ways, began.

I did take a Russianhistory class a few quarters later, but it was a lot of Peter theGreat, plus Catherine, and thus relatively insulated fromcontemporary developments. I wonder what a sociology of Russia/TheUSSR would have looked like in 1991.

Russia, Russia,Russia...or so said the progressive activists on Twitter in 2017,annoyed that people were talking about Russia’s interference in the2016 election. That’s okay, though, because I loathed those peoplealready, since they had shown how subjective their commitment tohuman rights was during the Syrian Civil War. (That, or theirorganizations had been bought co-opted by Russian interests—youdecide.)

The Syrian Civil War will get its own volumewhen we talk about Assador We Burn The Country. Sufficeto say that when I saw Russia starting to play a big, public role, mybreath hitched. That wasn’t going to be good. Obama’s obsessionwith the Iranian Nuclear Deal coupled with everyone’s insistencethat we couldn’t repeat Iraq (even though the civil war in Syriawas night and day from Iraq), meant that Russia was able to give fullcover to Assad while he terrorized his own country with, among otherthings, chemical weapons and barrel bombs. And, fromthe perspective of people who didn’t care,wouldn’t that have been just too bad except that the United Statesand Europe saw a completely predictable influx of refugees...perhapsyou remember what the consequences were?

Iconsidered that Russia’sfirst shove at the United States to see what it could get away with,but that was wrong. They may arguably have been publicly testingtheir limits since the 2004 poisoning of then presidential candidateViktor Yuschenko of Ukraine,and the shocking invasion of Georgia in 2008.(But why leave out what they did to Chechnya in the late 1990s/early2000s?) I do submit that there was something of a different flavor toall of that, if only because it was done when the US was embroiled inour own presidential cycles, and the rest of the world is lucky weremember they exist at that point. But they were all unbelievable,and more still because who would have thought in 1988 that we wouldlet a newly diminished Russia get away with any of that?

Right—andthen remember that time inthe 2000s they wererighteously indignant because Poland was going to be a site of USmissiles? How dare we!

Butall of that was just a test. The real action started in 2014, whenthey not only shoved the world community, but did it with a smirk asthey invaded Crimea. But, while the Obama administration was shocked,shocked, we were also assured that this was a bloodless coup, becauseessentially it mostly affected predominantly Russian speakingregions, and really, who were we to start pointing fingers at anyoneover anything? (Yes, that hurt to write as much as you think itwould.)

(I’msorry, did you say “diplomatic agreements”? Youmean Ukraine agreeing to give up its nuclear weapons in exchange forsecurity guarantees? But that was in 1994, and thingschanged—don’t you know anything about realpolitik?)

Evenif it was difficult for people to sort through what Russia was up toby 2016, it should have been clear that, of all countries, this wasthe very last one we would want interfering in our election. Butbringing up the possibility of espionage was just not as captivating,ultimately, as...Her Emails. (Note to my fellow Americans: next time,go for the candidate Russia *doesn’t* support.)

Ihad picked up Revolution1989 by Victor Sebestyen back in the halcyon days of Obama’ssecond election campaign, and while I had lived through the yearsthat saw the end of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of theirbloc, I hadn’t been following the developments preceding it thatclosely. It wasn’t until this book that I began to understand howcorrupt a totalitarian regime is, and in every way.

Loftyhistorians point out how draining it is to spend so much money on themilitary, and that is true; however, while many of us may questionthe amount of money the United States spends on our military, we are*still* the strongest economy in the world. It’s not just a lot ofmoney spent in dictatorships, it’s money badly spent, as generalsand officials frequently take a portion of their own budget through avariety of convoluted means. (Would that that were a totalitariangovernment’s only sin: they famously spend a lot on their internalsurveillance—more on that later.) How inefficient were theCommunist Bloc governments? So much so that the only way many of themremained solvent was through loans from Western banks. Without them,those governments would have been insolvent by the 1970s. (Ah, whydoes it always come back to the banks?)

Infairness, the Soviet Union itself wasn’t as financially stressed,but whatever advantage that gave them was effectively frittered awayby the early 1980s, thanks to the ill-advised entry into Afghanistanand the agitations in Poland. It should be noted that the war inAfghanistan was *not* the Soviet Union’s idea; to read Sebestyen’saccount, the Communist Party in Afghanistan made the decision, andthe Soviet officials were pretty desperate to pull them back as itwas apparent how it would turn out. Of course, not desperate enough,because once they went in, they stayed in for years, never mind theextremely high cost to their troops. The Polish, in many ways, can besaid to have benefited from the USSR’s preoccupation inAfghanistan, because that is arguably why they didn’t commit moretroops to put down the Solidarity movement, or terrorize them intonot submittingKarol Wojtyla, later known as Pope John Paul II, to theCatholic Church.

Revolution 1989gave me the first insights as tothe nature of the damage totalitarian regimes can do to people. Atthe time I thought of it as the guilt of the collaborator, but adecade after reading this, it might be better to say it’s thesublimated shame of the victim. A collaborator wants to succeed,while a victim wants to survive. The caprice of the dictator allowsfor the facade that the victim has any control over their fate, butin all too many instances, what survivors had was luck. (Is this whatthe Modern Person is really trying to court?)

Itwas Masha Gessen’s TheFuture Is History thatshowed the long-term consequences of that damage, and it was thefirst time I appreciated that a country can be sociologically damagedin the same way that a person can be psychologically damaged. Arethere other countries that might be suffering from the samephenomenon? Possibly—probably—but few were as thoroughlyterrorized as the inhabitantsof the Soviet Union for so long.

Inthe United States, we take it for granted that we have the right tosay what we want, however offensive our words might be. And if wedon’t always get to exercise that right—the Constitution is goingto do only so much for us when we’re outnumbered in a dangerousenvironment—we *know* when we’re being deprived of it, and webitterly resent it. Maybe that explains why some of us can be sohyperbolic about our own opinions (or maybe some people could do abetter job tempering themselves).

I’mwriting this as our freedom to speak and write is under explicitthreat. Just this month, a young PhD candidate at a nearby universitywas kidnapped by ICE off of her street while she was on her way tobreak her Ramadan fast. Her crime was co-authoring an op-edcriticizing her university for not divesting from Israel—in otherwords, she didn’t commit a crime of any kind. This is a dangeroustime, and people may find themselves curtailing their statements.They shouldn’t, but even if that is the case, that still won’t beas much constant terror as living in the Soviet Union, because thereyou weren’t even allowed to have *thoughts* people foundobjectionable.

Buthow do Iknow what someone else is thinking? Idon’t, of course, but I don’t have to *know*; you have to provemy suspicions are incorrect, and how are you going to do that? Thereis no right answer—such is the way of a totalitarian state—butthere are myriad ways to ensure that you deliver a wrong answer,right down to the look on your face. Are your pupils widening? Areyou trying to look away? Is your face twitching just so? Anyof that can condemn you to punishment, up to and including tortureand death.

Ican get you for anything in a totalitarian state, but you just mightbe able to buy yourself a little bit of luck with a credibledemonstration of belief in the prevailing doxa. And on the plus side,most of us are going to have a pretty good idea of what thatdemonstration—that performance—is supposed to look like. You justneed to pretend that you believe whatever it is you’re supposed tofor the amount of time that you are being interrogated and observed.

Butwhen aren’t you being watched? The panopticonthat Jeremy Bentham so cleverly designed is best tested out in thetotalitarian state, and itworks. Of course no one canwatch anyone else all of the time, but the trick is that you don’thave to. Make it known that you couldbe watched at any time, and make the consequences of being “caught”dire enough, and you haveeffectively created a condition that encourages people to policethemselves. And themost effective way to do that is to police your own thoughts. If yourthoughts don’t betray you, then it’s almost impossible for youractions to step out of line. Congratulations—you (probably) get tolive.

Justone thing: who do you become once you make sure you’re thinkingwhat the state wants you to? Answer: the perfect organelle of thestate, and one that has the capacity to reproduce the state.

FrantzFanon in Wretchedof the Earth explored theconsequences of being a fascist in a revolutionary milieu. Yes, itmakes people brutal monsters, but one who still has a mirror and cansee what they are doing. More importantly, the face looking back atyou resembles the person you used to be. In a totalitarian state,that face is the first thing that needs to go.

Whathappens to someone who has to live that way, and among other peoplein the same circumstance? What happens to the place they live in? Weare called Homo sapiens because we use our minds constantly,and we don’t like to be told to use them in limited ways. I believein the capacity of human beings to heal, but when they’ve beenterrorized for two or three generations, it’s unrealistic to expectthat such healing will happen overnight. It requires space and time.Unfortunately, those resources were in low quantities when the SovietEmpire finally collapsed.

CarlSagan caught it in his 1996 book TheDemon-Haunted World. The totalitarianismand terror had been the lid on a cauldron, and when it was liftedseventy-five years later, that cauldron was seen to have beenbubbling a toxic combination of superstition and prejudice. TheSoviets needed science and technology desperately, but they would nottolerate science that contradicted their state-sanctioned beliefs,facts be damned. (I submit that it is a characteristic of atotalitarian regime: facts are always subject to approval.) They didnot foster an ethos of inquiry but dogma. Suffice to say, that wasn’tan environment conducive to working out maladaptive habits of mind.

Itshouldn’t be a surprise that Russia went so retrogressive, soquickly. Gessen’s book outlined the rise of threats to Russianfeminists, the LGBTQ community, Jews, and activists in general. Itwas—is—the classic totalitarian, fascist playbook of values: thestate is under constant attack, and the only way it can survive is bythe return to the strong, god-fearing nuclear family. Feminists andanyone who isn’t straight push on this because they undermine theconcept of the traditional family, Jews undermine the mythology of aunitary Christian state, and activists *are* the attacks on thestate.

Thisis obviously nonsense if you are concerned with facts. The Russianpeople *are* under attack, but those attacks come from a politicalleadership aligned with a class of oligarchs that they created withaccess to fossil-fuel resources. This is to say nothing of the stateviolence they were frequently subjected to, whether that was carbombs or the murder of journalists. The reason that Russians have ashocking low life expectancy is because the state doesn’t meettheir needs, not because people are agitating for human rights.

Butwhen you’ve been living in a civilization as damaged as Russia,it’s difficult to establish that facts should matter in the firstplace. And that is deadly. Eight years after reading this, I’mstill chilled by the description of the murder of a young, gay man byan alleged friend in the 2000s. Evidently, they had had nodisagreement, and the victim had no reason to feel unsafe with hisattacker. For his part, the murderer did not express any animustoward the victim, other than that he was gay and everyone knew howdangerous gay people were.

Thatwas not an isolated incident, and as state television continued tobroadcast messages of hatred toward the LGBTQ community, Jews, andfeminists in increasingly hysterical tones—one is reminded ofFahrenheit 451, but that itself reminds us of much of cablenews—the danger to those groups increased. When we examine whatRussia looks like on the inside, the surprise isn’t that there isso little meaningful Russian opposition, but that there is any atall.

Evenif I no longer identify as a liberal or progressive (I seem to valuehuman rights too much), I had for a long time a lingering instinct topull back from criticisms of Russia or the Soviet Union, because, inmy lifetime at least, the majority of the people making thosecriticisms were people I would never identify with. (And yet, I amnostalgic for them now.) One of the reasons I loved Scott Anderson’sTheQuiet Americans was because he described this tension sowell. Once you know what the communist totalitarian regimes ofRussia, China, North Korea, et al looked like, *of course* you shouldbe anti-communist. (Please, let us save the discussions of whetherLeninism/Stalinism was ever truly Marxist/Socialist/Communist foranother day.) But, as Anderson put it, claiming to be so was not farremoved from being opposed to fluoride. American adherents ofcommunism could be alternatively ruthless and naive, but manyanti-communists sounded like crackpots within two minutes ofconversation. Contemplating this cognitive divide was one of thereasons Anderson set out to explore the history of the CentralIntelligence Agency in the first place.

Thisbook is relevant to a discussion of Russia because the CIA wasdefined by the Soviet Union. Yes,there was an Office of Strategic Services during World War II, butthe CIA was particularly devoted to prosecuting the Cold War.Anderson does not equivocate when he talks about the Soviet Union—asseen through the eyes of early administrators Frank Wisner andPeter Sichel, the Soviets did evil things in Romania and Germany,respectively, in the run up to their victory, and eviler still oncethey had won. My firsttwovolumes touch on how toxic and genocidal European and Americanculture is, so if we’re going to credibly censure another polity,they’ve got to hit a high bar. The Soviets did that, andmaybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a bad idea to have an organizationessentially dedicated to eradicating them.

Howhorrible was the SovietUnion? Anderson gets at someof Stalin’s depravity. One episode that comes to mind is laughingabout the execution of a Jewish henchman GenrikhYagoda with his replacement,Nikolai Yezhov—whom,you could have guessed, was going to be executed in short orderhimself. And of course there was the Great Purge between 1936 and1938 which saw the murders of hundreds of thousands who hadincreasingly tenuous connections to Trotsky. Andthat’s a drop in the bucket compared to the estimates of 20-30million killed during Stalin’s rule, including the Holodomor, andincluding not only the SovietUnion but also the bloc countries. There are, as noted above, otherways to suffer; when you include those, the numbers are much higher.

SeanMcMeekin’s Stalin’sWar goes into greater detailabout what Stalin was willing to do. I don’t give content warningsgenerally, but this isan exception. I have rarely been nauseated while reading, but thedescriptions of the prisons in Ukraine were horrifying. Please pickup the book because it is a very good read, but if you’re botheredby true gore, you might want to sit this one out.

McMeekin’stitle is a reflection of the thesis: Stalin was the only one whoendured World War II from beginning to end. Hitler, Tojo, Roosevelt,and Churchill were all either dead or compromised when everything wasover. He also marched outwith control over more territory than Hitler had dreamed of. 

InTheOrigins of the Second World War,A. J. P. Taylor describes Hitler as an excellent poker player but alousy chess player. By the end of the war, Stalin played both at amaster level: he read Roosevelt and Churchill well enough to know howfar he could push them, but with an eye toward the medium-term, ifnot long-term, he also seeded both the US and British governmentswith assets who could help him establish the logistical frameworkneeded to achieve his goals.

Pleasedo not think that McMeekin or I are praising Stalin’s brilliance.On the contrary, Stalin needed to be clever about getting at theresources of the American and British empires because he squanderedthe resources of the Soviet empire, including soldiers, before thedissolution of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Had Stalin utilized hisresources better, many more countries could have fallen behind theIron Curtain.

Whilesome of the gory details aren’t common knowledge, much of whatMcMeekin discusses is known to history, but more importantly wereknown at the time. Certainly, they would have been known by Rooseveltand Churchill, and yet Churchill championed Stalin as an ally, andRoosevelt gave the Soviet Union an aid package that wasstunning in its generosity. While the arrangement could becategorized, roughly, as American money for Russian soldiers (orcasualties), that doesn’t hold completely. The Soviet Uniondefended against Germany, but did nothing to help American defensesagainst Japan until the very end. It also can’t be emphasizedenough that Germany would not have been in as strong a position wereit not for theirinitial pact with the Soviets.

Pretendthat the Soviet Union were perfect allies who kept Americans andWestern Europeans safe from harm (suspend your disbelief for amoment). That justifies a generous aid package, but even by thosestandards, the Soviets still made out extremely well. They not onlyreceived billions of dollars from the Lend Lease Act, including stateof the art vehicles and war materiel that our own troops could haveused, but also almostprefabricated factories which transferred an astonishing amount oftechnical knowledge. And this is to say nothing ofbutter and crab meat, which the Soviets themselves fished in Americanwaters. At a certain point, you have to question the judgment of thepeople Stalin was negotiating with. Bettersaid is that Churchill and Roosevelt shouldn’t have been such easymarks.

McMeekinholds Churchill in greater disdain than Roosevelt, who by comparisoncomes off as something of a rube. Churchill had been at this longerand should have known better, but then again why would anyone haveheightened expectations of an admirer of Mussolini? Access to newsand intelligence didn’t deter Churchill’s admiration for Stalin,either, who was willing to bet on Stalin’s “personality” as acounter force to Hitler’s, even before their alliance was broken.While much has been made of Churchill’s foresight and nobility,McMeekin suggests that if Churchill had really wanted to protectPoland, he should have declared was against Germany *and* the SovietUnion after the invasion—but he did not. It seems Churchillunderstood how badly he’d judged everything by Tehran in 1943, butby then there wasn’t much the British empire was able to do.

IfChurchill should have known better, Roosevelt’s concessions toStalin come off as shocking naivete that betray, perhaps,callousness. It might beone thing to give away American resources to an ally one could onlycall untrustworthy, but it’s another thing to sign off onwar crimes and human rights violations. For as much as some want toblame the terms of the Treaty of Versailles for the advent of WorldWar II, Roosevelt did not agree, and demanded Germany’sunconditional surrender. He also insisted that there was no suchthing as a German Resistance and agreed to allow Stalin to shoot49,000 German soldiers without a trial. But probably the worst of allwas essentially donating Poland to the Soviets.

It’sfair to say that the Soviet Union as we knew it from 1945 to 1991wouldn’t have existed without the US’s initial acquiescence, butthat doesn’t mean we didn’t suffer from a case of buyer’sremorse ourselves. What we were willing to tolerate and even abet tostop a “greater evil” we saw as a threat in peacetime. And theywere a genuine threat. Again, maybe the CIA as an organizationdedicated to stopping the Soviet Communists wasn’t such a bad ideainitially. There was just one problem: they didn’t know how.

Itis worth repeating that the problemswere the Soviets and the Iron Curtain countries. It just so happenedthat those countries were the scenes of horrific fighting before andduring (and in some cases after) World War II. There were areas thatsaw German Nazis come in a wave to the east, followed by the Sovietspushing west, then once again by the Nazi coming east. (Andin many cases, the Sovietswere by far the most brutal.) By 1946,the uncompromised good guys in these places were almostall dead. If anyone was leftto work with the CIA, they had to hold their noses and work withpeople who had Nazi bonafides.

Inthe early years, the CIA did try to work with resistance movementswhen they could find them. Unfortunately, intelligence around thesemovements was difficult to find at best. When missions were proposedbased on this intelligence, they immediately aroused the concerns offield supervisorsbecause,in many cases, they seemedtoo good to be true. It took a few years—and a handful ofdeaths—for the CIA to realize that they were being baited by thetarget governments, particularly in Poland.

MI6agent Kim Philby pops into The Quiet Americansto demonstrate the shocking lack of operational security that plaguedthe CIA initially (surprisingly relevant in April of 2025). However,while that weakened the CIA, they were already in a compromisedposition: we had not done what the Soviets did and seeded our peoplein their governments, period. Given Stalin’s capricious purges, itmay not have mattered.

Let’ssay Churchill and Roosevelt suffered from a little bit of heroworship. However, Eisenhower doesn’t have that excuse, becauseeventually Stalin did what all dictators eventually do.

ByMarch of 1953, Stalin was dead, and his successor Nikita Kruschev wasthe most obvious of the celebrants. Anderson opens a chapter with ananecdote about the first general meeting Kruschev chaired. Whensomeone questioned out loud why no one stopped Stalin, particularlyin his later years, Kruschev demanded to know who asked the question.After everyone in the room remained silent, Kruschev grinned. “Thatis why.” He—and many in his generation—understood exactly whatStalin had cost them, and he wanted to remedy that.

IfI’m spending a lot of time on this particular book, it’s becauseAnderson did a fantastic job of underlining how Stalinism’s effectson the world endured beyond his death. The CIA couldn’t do anythingto the Soviet Union, so it concentrated on where it could getsomething done. Whether it was worth doing is the question.

Infairness, the 1950 civil war in Korea *did* feature not onlyCommunist actors but also Soviet influence and support. To theircredit, the CIA did in fact warn about the Truman administrationabout an upcoming operation. However, that intelligence was ignored,and thus the United States was caught off guard when the fighting didbreak out. I’ll leave it to others to dissect the missteps on allsides of the Korean War; suffice to say that our failures there werefurther inspiration to get something done in other theaters. Thus,Guatemala, Iran, and of course Vietnam, among others. Shame that mostof them had precious little Communist movements before the UnitedStates interfered with them. But at least people could see that wewere busy!

Kruschevmay have been sincere about wanting to improve relations with theUnited States, but decades of dealing with the machinations ofStalin’s Soviet Union left us suspicious at best, paranoid atworst. While it isn’t fair to blame Stalin entirely for the controlJ. Edgar Hoover and his FBI were able to exert on American life, itis difficult to imagine that said control would have been as total orremotely justifiable without Stalin. Anderson cheekily invokes theold saying, “Just because I’m paranoid, that doesn’t meanthey’re not out to get me” when referring to Stalin; similarly,the same can be said of the United States, but perhaps the emphasisshould be reversed. The United States government did have multiplepeople in positions of power who were more sympathetic to the SovietUnion than they should have been, but those people tended to operatein the open (see Lend Lease Act arrangements above). And if therewere “assets” that needed to be rooted out, that didn’t justifythe persecutions of homosexuals, civil rights leaders, and anyoneelse Hoover felt was “subversive”. But when Anti-Communism was atenet of American religion, all you had to do was invoke the word“communist”, and, like a magic spell, anything was allowed. Andjust like magic, the rules of logic seldom applied.

Thepenalties for stepping out of bounds in the United States weren’tas severe as they were in the Soviet Union, but you’d be forgivenfor thinking that they could be just as arbitrary and damning. Thefear of dissent chilled the sciences in the Soviet Union; here, theystifled or ended the careers of multiple people in the arts. Much aswe like to joke about East German films that featured someone sittingin a darkened room with a candle, possibly uttering gibberish, as thesafest meta-statement they could get away with under a repressiveregime, it’s hard to look at the arts of the United States in the1950s and not see at least a partial retreat to infantilization andabsurdity, and a haven in speculative fiction. Once again, EverythingWas Awesome, and you’d better make sure people knew you believedthat. Perfect your performance of Happiness, but now throw in aspecial flavor of Goodness that smelled like motherhood and applepie. The Medieval met the Modern in the strangest place.

Strategiesfrom a non-existent fourth dimensional chess game is the paradigm weinvoke when we see or hear something that doesn’t make sense froman actor that we trust. Merrick Garland didn’t immediately go afterTrump for the January 6 insurrection because he had secretinformation and had to make considerations that the rest of ushaven’t thought through. Trump didn’t prosecute Hillary Clintonfor her alleged crimes during the 2016 election because he wanted touse her to snare the Pizza Gate operation and ultimately the entireconspiracy reported on by QAnon. Perversely, those explanations mademore sense to many than Garland running out the clock on aninvestigation because he did not, for whatever reason, want to haveto prosecute Trump, or than Trump wanting to use misinformation toegg on and build up his supporter base.

Seeinga 4D chess game requires you to believe what people say, not whatthey do. It’s convoluted and comes up all too often in twenty-firstcentury discourse, but it was invented in the twentieth. It made itpossible for people to live in the world they believed they should,in spite of events transpiring around them that contradicted thevalues they were supposed to live by. Cynical as I am aboutEisenhower, I think he was genuinely caught up in the gamehimself.

Hungary in 1956 was legitimately ready and ableto take the United States up on its implied offer of assistance if itoverthrew its government. The protests were enough that Kruschevbelieved the game was up...but Eisenhower didn’t. So bereft ofmeaningful intelligence for so long, we couldn’t believe our luck,and then created facts on the ground to justify not acting on it.(While the United States may be excused for wanting to avoid heavycombat after World War II at all costs, that excuse wears thin whenthe alternative was nuclear weapons.) Kruschev evidently couldn’tbelieve his own good fortune at first, but when he finally realizedthe United States was, indeed, not going to move, the repression inHungary was swift, brutal, and long-lasting. The same may be said forthe consequences in the rest of the world.

It’snot the fault of the Soviet Union/Russia that the United States hastaken a totalitarian turn (and it wasn’t their fault in the 1930sand 1940s, either). For all of the influence both empires had in thetwentieth century, it was never just us. It might be fairer to saythat we were all influenced by similar philosophies. But that is notinnocuous: certainstrains of thought, if given credibility, canbe deadly.

WhenI finished The Future Is History, I made the impoliticstatement to my family that Russians were homophobic, antisemitic,and misogynists. You will be happy to know that my children have*never* let me live that down, and I regret my statement because, ofcourse, no group of people can be defined by the actions of some ofits members (regardless of opinion polls). I regret it even morebecause I was *not* trying to say that too many Russians have beenmurderously homophobic, antisemitic (and Islamophobic), andmisogynistic because of some essential characteristic. A Russianidentity is not any more toxic than, say, a Navajo one, and there areas many elements in Russian history to move them away from prejudiceas there are to move them toward it.

Sociologydoes an excellent job of explaining complex social interactions andeven cultures, but it is not prophecy. Russia is not mindless, and itwas never, even in the early 1990s, a plaything of the Western world.Its leadership and people made choices, even if admittedly theydidn’t always have good options. They didn’t have to becomefascists and, more importantly, they don’t have to stay that way.

And,I should add, neither do we.

I opened this series exploring the reality of the exploitation ofAfrica, African people, and the African diaspora as central to mythof modernity. I’m an American, and at this point it’s impossibleto miss that this country as it stands was built by enslaved andexploited bodies.

But another part of being an American isthat we have to acknowledge that this country was also built on theexploitation of indigenous people—Native Nations—that had been inthe “Americas” for eons, and on Native land.

(Hope everyone takesa deep breath, because I am going to stumble over terminology a lot.I hate using “the Americas”, but Turtle Island seems kind ofregionally specific. And while I’m going to avoid “Indian”because we’re all about accuracy here, I struggled to figure outwhen “indigenous” worked better than “Native”. I understandwhy the latter is generally preferred, but there is also a history ofEuro-Americans using “native” to describe *themselves*, hence the word “nativist”. Yeah...thank you for your patience with me.) 

One of ourcomfortable national mythologies is that we improved on what wefound. This is the story all colonizers tell themselves, and it’snot true. As we fall into continuing ecological degradation, we’reforced to acknowledge that there is deep wisdom in the cultures andpractices of the people we committed genocide on.

Genocide. That is aconcept that we need to explore when we think about the people weexploited to build our country. I can probably only speak for Gen X,but the way genocide was presented to us, it was Hitler’s FinalSolution: it was the extermination of everyone from a marginalizedgroup. It did not succeed with the Jews of Europe, so it was alwaysan “attempt”, and the prevention of it was a victory ofenlightened civilization.

The truth about genocide is muchmessier. You can successfully commit genocide without completelydestroying an entire group of people. One of the most devastatingstatements I had to sit through as an adult was hearing someone at aShoah commemoration noting that there were so many communities thatwere so thoroughly decimated in Europe that there was no one toremember many of the victims. We light candles to remember those whodied that we are connected to, but more importantly we light candlesto commemorate those we never knew because no one else is left to doit.

That is a successfulgenocide.

Genocide isn’tsimply the death of a community or a people. It is also theeradication of a culture. My father is a South Korean national, buthe was born when the country was occupied by the Japanese. By thetime he was born in 1943, my grandparents were not allowed to givehim a Korean name. Japanese was being taught in schools, and the useof the Korean language was discouraged. This is why I look at Ukrainenow and shudder as I see children kidnapped and forced to speakRussian; moreover, they are told that they are not Ukrainian but arenow, in fact, Russian. When Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants saythat Ukraine and its culture do not exist, that is laying thegroundwork for genocide.

Putin and theRussian leadership are no less monstrous if they are ultimatelyunsuccessful. And the same can be said about my country.

I have seen the term“erasure” used repeatedly when I read about indigenous history inthe United States, and this is another facet of genocide. Theindigenous people of this country from their hundreds of nations arenot gone. Many were killed, many polities consolidated, and therehave been acts of horrific violence committed against them, but theycontinue to exist not just as a people but as many different peoples,with different cultures, histories, and customs. Talking aboutIndigenous Americans as if they met a tragic demise is to deny theircontinued existence. They are still here, and they’re not givingup.

I can’t tell youthe title of the first book I read about Indigenous American history,but it was in 1994, and it was a title I found, of course, in theBoston Public Library. It was the first time I had realized that weshouldn’t use the word “tribe” but “nation” to describe thepolities of the First Peoples of the “Americas”, and it drovehome for me how mistaken it was to lump together these diverse peopleas simply “native”. (Which, maybe, was an overdue realization:the family lore is that my great-grandmother’s great-grandmotherwas indigenous, and we are very specific that, if so, she was fromthe Creek Nation.) But I had a very young child at the time, and Iwas about to begin a career, so it wasn’t until much later that Icould read more.

I also can’t tellyou what drew me to Charles Mann’s 1491and 1493other than that theywere talked about in circlesI paid attention to, but I remember sitting in the Prudential Centerfood court (back when they had one) ona Saturday night after the library had closed, devouringchapters of both books.Mann opened up literally a whole new world of history, and in doingso exploded many of our comfortable mythologies about the“pre-Columbian” world.

Theone that sticks out the most is the fairy tale that the indigenouspeoples somehow lucked—stumbled—into an agricultural andhorticultural paradise. They were people alternatively more peacefulor more violent than the European settlers who later arrived, butthey were always simpler—youknow, because they hadn’t had the benefit of Christianity or theEnlightenment, or they were genetically inferior, take your pick—andthe only way they could survive for as long as they did was becausethey were in such a “blessed” land. That played into thenarrative of the tragic, lost peoples, and because it played to ourpathos, that in and of itself made most of us feel better.

Andof course, it wasn’t true. If the Amazon looks like a permacultureparadise in which you can be both nourished as well as cured of manyailments, it is because it was *designed* that way. Don’t look atit only as an example of a rain forest, look at it also as one of thelargest and most well-managed orchards in history.

LikeAfrica, the Americas were a net contributor to the world’sresources. Mann points out that Thomas Malthus’ theory aboutpopulation and resources in Europe really *was* accurate: a smallpopulation could grow only so much before there was too muchcompetition for resources, which would lead to war, disease, famine,or all of the above. There was a natural ceiling to populationbecause there was a limit to resources.

Thecrops of the Americas solved the Malthusian problem. Corn(maize), potatoes, and sweet potatoes, among others, made possiblelevels of nutrition for the European andAsian populationsthat had been unattainable before. He tells the story of a prisonerwho had been incarcerated for over a year and had been fed nothingbut a soupmade with potatoes. Shockingly, this prisoner emerged healthier thanhe had been before.

Potatoesand corn in all of their diversity were not accidents of nature butthe results of continuous experiments with breeding and cultivationmethods. Corn, in particular, is not found “in the wild” at all;it’s closest relatives are a group of plant species known asteosintes (and no, I don’t think they are a genus on their own). Tolook at the plant, which resembles cattails as much as anything else,it’s very difficult to imagine that it could yield somethingnutritious and filling, but, after centuries of careful cultivation,here we are.

(This is to say nothing of the other foodsof the Americas—vanilla, chocolate, tomatoes, peppers,squashes—that make the modern cuisines of so many culturesdelicious. But we’ll delve into that when we get to IndianGivers and InThe Shadow of Slavery.)

I’veread enough history to know that it’s a mistake to paint allindigenous peoples, even in North America, with the broad brush ofenvironmental conservationism. Cahokia, discussed in many of thesetitles, was an example of a centralized civilization that went bigand practiced agriculture with a capital A. (I have no clue whatthose mounds were for, but then again I can’t tell you exactly whatStonehenge is for, either.) As was the case all over the world, theythrived during the Medieval Warming Period and then declined duringthe Little Ice Age. Unlike European polities, the lessons many in theAmericas learned was to decentralize, both as a political organizingprinciple, and as a strategy for sustenance.

Amongother things, Cahokia demonstratesthat the Native Nations ofthe Americas were—are—assusceptible to abusing their resources as anyone else, and the factthat many nations instead adapted to their environments and practicedsophisticated land management techniques should drive home not thatthey were some deity’s chosen people but really good students ofhistory. Both KathleenDuVal’sNativeNations and Colin Calloway’sNewWorlds For All pointed outways these nations dramatically changed their environments in orderto accommodate new trade relationships. Importantly, this was whilethey held the numerical advantage andthe significant agency thatcame with it.

Ithas occurred to me that many of the First Nations of North Americalearned thelesson of living in balancewith their environments evenearlier than Cahokia, particularlyafter reading Alfred Crosby’s EcologicalImperialism. If this classichas not aged perfectly, it has still aged well, and I would recommendit to anyone who considers themselves a student of history. It wasfrom this book that I learned how European sailors figured out how touse the winds in the circlesof latitude to navigate furtherand further west, using the Fortunate Isles (The Canaries, Madeiras,and Azores) as their first destinations.While Crosby explains the saga of European navigational developmentsin detail, he also takes pains to note that the Chinese made theearliest global voyages, and both China and the Islamic worldcontributed the naval technology that made later European voyagespossible. Europe got out ahead of others because of politicalchoices, not because ofinnate cultural resilience or aptitude.

Thebulk of Crosby’s book is about the ways in which the flora andfauna of Eurasia were the foot soldiers of European settlercolonialism, and this is one of the primary reason that“Neo-European” colonies have been successful in certain placesand not others. My eyes popped as I read his accounts of wild horses,cattle (!), and pigs in the colonies, particularly North America.(Fun fact: it takes one generation for a domesticated pig to revertto form as a “razorback” hog. As much as I am a vegan, I woulddefinitely think twice about setting pigs free into the wild.) Butit cannot be overlooked that part of why those animals were sosuccessful in the Americasis because the plants they fed on were even more successful. Some ofthose plants were intentionally carried, some were “opportunistic”travelers on the voyages, and some were on the animals themselves.Regardless, Eurasian floratook so well and quickly to the soil of North and South America thatthey preceded European colonists and animals into areas, sometimes byseveral years.

Crosby’sargument about why the Americas as well as New Zealand were so mucheasier to colonize comes down to the relatively late introduction ofhuman beings to those areas. While human beings hadbeen present formillennia—Patty Krawec’s BecomingKin cites indigenous oralhistories that give credible evidence of possibly one-hundredthousand years—as evolution goes, even an eon is a relatively shortperiod of time. Human beings who traveled away from the land massgroupings of Eurasia and Africa were going to encounter othercreatures they had not evolved with. Importantly, those creatures,particularly the megafauna, hadn’t evolved with *them*, and thuslacked the defensive instincts when they encountered Homosapiens. Thus, by the timeEuropeans arrived, those megafauna were gone, and the balance of theecosystems indigenous people lived within was inherently moredelicate. Might that be another reason indigenous Americans were suchimpressive land managers?

Maybe.But maybe that’s also part of the trend toward romanticizing what’spresented to be a tragic story with an inevitable end.

Aswith Jared Diamond after him, Crosby’s primary concern is about therole of disease in shaping the fate of the continents. Of course theFirst Peoples were destined to lose, because their very immunesystems were so...naive (I did not come up with that terminology).And it’s true, there were a shocking number of people who died inthe Americas from European diseases. But it is also true that therewere many who didn’t, and simply being introduced to a diseasewasn’t in and of itself a death sentence.

NormanNaimark’s Genocide:A World History was thefirst book I read to affirmatively call BS on the narrative thatindigenous people died primarily of diseases and not brutality. Yes,exposure to novel diseases wasn’t something that induced health,but far more important were the conditions that people lived in whenthey were exposed. Those who have inadequate shelter, food, andclothing while they are forced to perform heavy labor for long hoursare, not surprisingly, more vulnerable to diseases—novel ornot—than those who have better living conditions (and this is tosay nothing of having access to medical care). BothNative Nations andRoxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s AnIndigenous Peoples’ History of the United Statesnotethat many nations lived through their initial encounters withEuropeans who were disease carriers, andhundreds lived through voyages to Europe, a place that would beteeming with novel pathogens.Native Nations pointsout that the numbers of fatalities didn’t begin to spike untilEuropean colonists settled and raised families (as anyone who hasever been a parent knows, young children are not only speciallysusceptible to disease, they can also be hazardous vectors of thoseillnesses). Regardless, the initial European estimates of indigenouspopulations were frequently unscientific atbest, and using those as abaseline to establish population losses isn’t going to give a clearpicture of how many people actually succumbed.

Iwould also point out here that populations by and large survive evenplagues. The Black Deathmight have killed as many as fifty percent of Europe’s populationin the fourteenth century. That hadlong-lasting repercussions,and it’s something we should work very hard to avoid, but itshouldn’t be overlooked that fifty percent of the populationsurvived. We need to believe that indigenous Americans wereextra-special vulnerable—”naive”—for it to be possible thatdisease *alone* killed, by some estimates, ninety percent of thepopulation.

Really?

Dunbar-Ortizisn’t having any of that for a second. While there were otherscholars of indigenous American history before her, she is the onethat, in my opinion, has focused attention on justice more than otherpopular authors (or should that be “popular”, since we aretalking about historians?). The title of her book made my eyes widenas I imagined it would explore the history of Native Americans duringcolonization. While it’s still a book worth reading, that wasn’texactly right. It is still a history of the United States, but fromthe point of view of the Native Nations. (The fact that the book isunder 250 pages should maybe have been a give away.) Dunbar-Ortiz ispowerful but blunt: she will lay out horrific history, but you neverget the impression that she’s wiping any tears, or that she wouldhave much patience for yours. And for what it’s worth, I didn’tcry while reading this, but I was filled with outrage going over thenumerous times European and then American governments made bad faithagreements with their native counterparts as part of a slow-rollingcampaign of genocide. (And I will never hear the term “red skins”again without wanting to vomit.)

Dunbar-Ortizmakes it clear that the history of exploitation of IndigenousAmerican lands and erasure of Indigenous American human beingswas—is—part of a toxic class-based system that reaches back topre-colonizing Europe. As Sabrina Strings outlined in Fearingthe Black Body, it is a system so racist it excluded theIrish (and when we get to Erika Lee’s Americafor Americans, we’ll get the chance to see what thevenerable Ben Franklin had to say about Germans). Dunbar-Ortizexplores how the newly arrived Scots-Irish were used as the footsoldiers in the long running war against the Native Americans.Whatever benefits they and other waves of arrivals realized for theirefforts—and those benefits almost always included stolen Nativeland—they were ultimately acting in the service of a larger nexusof power which they had no hope of breaking into for generations.

Native Nationswas the book I had thought Dunbar-Ortiz’s was going to be, thoughmaybe it’s fairer to say that it was one-percent of the book I hadenvisioned, since DuValexplores about a dozen Native Nations, and there are many more. Whileshe doesn’t reach as far back as Mann or Crosby in tracing theorigins of indigenous arrivalin North America, she does trace their history back millennia. WhileDuValis primarily concerned with residents of what is now the UnitedStates, she does note the similarities between the legendary Cahokiaand the empires of Mesoamerica (though, to pick up on her point about“lessons learned”, I’ll note here that the Aztec empire Cortesencountered wasn’t even a century old, and given their infamousbrutality, one wonders how long they would have lasted evenwithout Europeaninterference).

DuValmoves forward in time, but around the continent. Because I’ve livedin Massachusetts most of my life, I note that she doesn’t spendtime on “New England”, in large part because this area was suchan outlier (Boston exceptionalism, forthe win). Thiswas one of the few places where Europeans had the numbers tooverwhelm the indigenous inhabitants earlyon, and thuswere less dependent on theirsocial and economic goodwill. This was not the case in the rest ofthe country, where Native Nations had the power and the agency thatcame with it. This was *not* something that they were unaware of,either. If they might not have been at all times privy to thegenuinely genocidal policies of European governments, they did getglimpses of maps that showed the vast holdings claimed by thosekingdoms. To read DuVal’saccount, it’s hard to imagine that they’re not snickering.

NativeNations’ central thesis is that it is not until almost themiddle of the nineteenth century that the European-Americanpopulation has the ability to make good on its ambitions to controlthe continent, and it was Native Nations who were in control of therelationships up until that time. To that end, European and laterAmerican powers had to make themselves useful to their indigenoushosts. DuVal relentlessly emphasizes that the nations of theAmericas were deeply sophisticated, not only in their management oftheir natural resources, but in trade. While many made the decisionafter Cahokia to live in decentralized polities, they did not chooseto live in isolation from others, and they saw trade not only as theexchange of goods, but as the establishment of a bond with anotherparty. This goes some way toward explaining why many have gone downin American history as generous to people they might have been betterto be wary of, but for the most part, it was a strategy that not onlycreated a strong network among the nations, but also set the termsfor what was a successful collaboration strategy with Europeans fortwo centuries.

Thisis not to imply that trade always smoothed over political differencesto the point that all lived in peace. The very mention of the word“Mohawk” drove fear into European imaginations, and while many ofthe stories about them were exaggerated, they earned their reputationas fearsome and efficient warriors, particularly against the Huronand other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. But it is overlookedhow powerful they were as traders, or how long they had been tradingwith Europeans.

Iwas shocked to read that the Mohawks had traded goods with the Norseas far back as possibly the tenth century. While the Norsesettlements famously didn’t endure in North America, traderelationships did, and the Mohawk were using glass beads and iron andbrass from Europe, both via trade networks and from the residue ofshipwrecks. While most did not have contact with Europeans but ratherwent through intermediaries, the Mohawk were beginning to integrateinto the global trade networks even before “conquest”.

Inthat light, it should not be surprising that theMohawk were an early ally ofthe Dutch. While it’simpressive that they traded with Europe before Columbus’ arrival,it’s even more so that Dutch industry was tailoring products justfor them, whether that was kettles with Mohawk markings, lighterguns, or wool blankets of different colors. By the seventeenthcentury, the majority of Mohawk towns used iron nails, imported wood,iron hinges, and linen shirts. By the end of that century, allHaudenosaunee warriors had a musket if not a pistol.

TheDutch are not known for their kind treatment of anyone who wassubservient to them in their colonial systems, and we might almost beable to judge the lack of exploitation duringthis period as evidence of the dynamics of their relationship withthe Mohawk. Fortunately, we can settle on firmer stuff by looking atthe prices the Mohawkcommanded. While willing to trade hidesand pelts, they set a highenough price that the only way for the Dutch to profit from it wasthrough the sale of the metal weapons mentioned above. Similarstories are to be found in, of all things, baked goods: the economicsof the sale of cakes and breads inthe towns the Dutch established evolvedto the point that the only people who could afford to buy the finecakes and breads made with refined flour were the Mohawk; the Dutch,it seems, had to settle for whole-grain loaves.

Theabove demonstrates the extent to which the Mohawk were in control ofthe trade with the Dutch, and it’s fair to say that they had a goodidea of the costs of that trade. To wit, the capture of beavers forthe pelts the Dutch wanted had an environmental cost that Callowayalludes to in New Worlds for All(and not just for the Mohawk—recallthat the continent already had well-established trade networks).Sharply reducing the beaver population had an effect on the physicalenvironment, in some cases changing the course of rivers. I bringthis up because it’s yetanothercounterpoint to the narrative that Native Nations are mystically intune with the needs of the land and would never compromiseenvironmental integrity. Indigenous people made these choices, andnot because they were somehow corrupted by European coins—or guns.They were sophisticatedactors exercising their agency, and for a long time they got thebetter end of the bargain.

Ipromise, DuValwrote about many more people than the Mohawk, but there’s one moreimportant facet to their relationship with the Dutch. The Mohawk andDutch lived in close quarters, and both communities had men andwomen. Close companyeventually resulted in mixed heritage offspring. (As was the case inmany similar cases, children were presumed to have their mother’scultural identity.) None of this is surprising, except that it’spart of the nuance of the early relationships between Europeans andNative Nations that is glossed over.

DuVal’spoint throughout the book is that while Europeans and then Americansdid harbor,indeed, genocidal, colonial intentions, they couldn’t act on themuntil the influx of European immigrants gave them the numbersthey needed by the middle ofthe nineteenth century. As she says, it’s difficult to call many ofthe relationships “colonial” since the European powers were doinga relatively lousy job of “extraction”. For a long time, whathappened in the continent would be better classified as “trade”.I think this is an important distinction, not to be an apologist forthe later brutal actions that followed, but as a reminder thatorganized Native resistancewasn’t invented in the twentieth century. For all of thepropaganda, Native Nations were never as naive or innocent as theywere said to be.

Noneof this is to say that NativeAmericans haven’t been harmed by interactions with European andAmerican settler-colonialism, because once we had the numbers, weused them. We have encroached on land from the beginning, and we havebroken treaty after treaty. BecomingKinand Kyle Mays’ AnAfro-Indigenous History of the United Statesexplore some of that damage and what, possibly, is needed to beginaddressing it.

Perhapsit’s because I’m married to an attorney, but outof all that I’ve read of Native history, the 2005 Cityof Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New YorkSCOTUS decision authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg wasthe most galling. (Another person you’re advised not to invoke as amoral authority to me.) That someone in the twentieth century wouldinvoke the Doctrine of Discovery is outrageous, and maybe it shouldhave been a clue as to the limitations of RBG’s advocacy. That thePopeeventually got out in front of this before the United States’judiciary did is an embarrassment.

BecomingKincites this case in a calm, measured, powerful way as part of theevidence of Krawec’s argument that settler-colonialism has beenlethal to Native bodies and culture as soon as it was able to be. Thelaws are illogical and in some cases just bad, but that’sirrelevant when the aim has been to lay claim to Native land. Krawecdraws a distinction between the treatment of Native and BlackAmericans, the former of whom had to prove their ancestry to beconsidered Native by the state, regardless of their acceptance into aculture, and the latter of whom werepresumed to be Black even if their last ancestor was agreat-grandparent. Why? Because when you want Native land, you needto eradicate—erase—Native people, but when you want Black labor,you need to *create* Black people. But both strategies are to thesame end: to increase the power of the settler-colonial state.

Denialof identity goes beyond not getting recognition from the Bureau ofIndian Affairs. One of the most horrific things to read about is thelegacy of residential schools in North America: children removed fromtheir homes, family, and community at heartbreakingly young ages,being ordered to change their appearance to conform to theEuro-American standard, being forced to change their names, not beingable to speak in their languages, and being told how deficient theywere in every way. There are generations of people who weredisconnected from their cultures as adults because of what theysuffered as children. It shouldn’t be overlooked that their ordealsincluded watching their peers—their friends—be murdered,sometimes at ages that can only make you weep. The discoveries in2020 and 2021 of suspected mass graves at former residential schoolsin Canada confirmed the horror stories “graduates” reported thattoo manywere loath to credit. Whileresidential schools have been closed, Nativechildren are still twice as likely as white children to be placed infoster care, and that is the average for the United States. A Nativechild in South Dakota is *eleven* times more likely to be in fostercare than a white child, and Native children are over half of thechildren in care (fifty-three percent, to be exact—which is just alittle bit more than the national average for Canada).

Krawec’sbook is a call for theNatives of the Americas to reconnect with their traditions as a wayof healing the present and forging a stronger future, but it alsooffers a way for everyone, whether Native or not, to connect to eachother. Indeed,muchof the cultural toxicity she describes is not confined to Nativecommunities, but affects everyone who might stand out from theEuropean-Christian “ideal”. Laws and policies make it all tooeasy for authorities to disrupt families who organize themselvesdifferently than the norm, and Krawec notes that vagrancy laws havealways been a way to weaponize normal human behavior against thepoor, who aremore likely to do in public what people with greater means can do inthe privacy of their homes. Shehighlights, in ways similar to Gikandi, Strings, and McCormack, thata civilization that sanctions inhumane treatment of one group has arot at its core.

Krawecdiscusses yet another scourge on the Native community, and this oneis indeed something they suffer disproportionately with: Missing,Exploited, andMurderedNative Womenand Children.While it is generally true that if a woman is killed or assaulted itwill be by someone in her ethnicity or community, that is not truefor Native women. They are more likely to be in sexual relationshipswith white men, to be sexually exploited by white men, and to bemurdered by white men. In general, they are an incrediblesix times more likely to be murdered than non-Native women. These areshocking statistics, and they should be inspiring all of us toprotect Native women. Instead, they are largely unknown or, at least,unremarked upon.

AnAfro-Indigenous History of the United Statesismessier than the other books because Mays is talking about theintersected histories of two groups in the United States that aregenerally seen to be in contest if not conflict with each other. Andit’s true that there have been instances and periods of both, butthere have also been significant periods of collaboration andsolidarity. Civilrights luminaries such as Angela Davis, Kwame Ture (StokelyCarmichael), and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw more common cause thannot.

Theconflicts are difficult to look at if we’re hoping to construct aclean narrative. WhileMays,who is himself Black and Saginaw Chippewa, wouldagree, asI do,that Black people have a right to reparations, where it can getuncomfortable is when the demand includes land, all of which wasstolen from Native Nations. On the flip side, Black people are morethan entitled to their share of bitterness at certain nations—lookingat you, Cherokee—for enslaving African captives.

Thereis the capacity of both parties to minimize the other, whether that’sNatives whousethe n-word a little too freely, or the denial that it is actuallyNative people who are killed by the police more than anyoneelse (thehair-raisingstatistics just keep on coming).ButMays, perhaps more than any of the other authors,is future-focused, and he sees opportunities for continuedcollaboration. Agreed.

Inthis country, at least when I was growing up, we liked to tellourselves a comfortable story about World War II, the Holocaust,fascism, and genocide. We, the United States, were the good guys, andwe were so horrified by what happened in Europe because we couldn’timagine doing such horrible things. The truth is that we did many ofthem first (read, for example, Isabel Wilkerson’s Castefor a discussion of how Nazi leaders drew on our race laws to come upwith their own). If you had any doubts, any of these books willdispel them for you.

Istarted by taking about modernity as an illusion—delusion—of astrictly rational and just existence that wills into being materialprosperity. It was dependent on enslaved Black labor, and that couldnot be negotiated. But the American version also literally resided inthe land of Native Nations. The land, and the numerous resources itcontains, is also an essential component...but Native peoples andtheir cultures were not. They were, in fact, an uncomfortablereminder of what the project of modernity really was. Hence, thedrive to erase.

KathleenDuVal cites the term coined by Ojibwe professor Gerald Vizenor to sumup what the actual history of Native Nations encompasses: survivance,a combination of survival and resistance. You live to fight anotherday, and what you’re fighting for isn’t merely physical survival,but also the preservation of your history. It is based on recognizingtruth and facts, even when they make you squirm, but it is the onlyway to build a truly durable future.

Perhaps this is a good time for all of us to start paying attention.

Deb in the City

This has been an incredibly busy month--and I feel as slapped around as anyone else by our current events. There have been far more days than I wanted where I didn't get to transcribe, and I'm not of the school of thought any more that says to push hard until you reach your goal.

But tonight, since I'm alone, I pushed hard, and now installment fifteen is done. 24,585 words, which brings the total of the series thus far to 387,996 words. Yeah.

My work and this moment are not unrelated, by the way. The whole series up until this point has been dancing around a historical genocide, and this is the installment where I let the readers see what it looks like. Spoiler alert: it's gradually, and then all at once, and it's never total, no matter what conquerors like to say.  

I think it's fair to say that writing about these things has been painful, but it's also probably saved my sanity. Talk about what you see--we need all the stories right now.

Deb in the City

What is Modernity?You can’t answer that question without talking about the BlackAmerican experience.

As a not-BlackAmerican, it’s hard to escape myths about what the Black Americanexperience is. I say this even after reading history, even feelingsafer in Black spaces than White spaces. But even if you can’tescape the myths—and the beliefs that frequently follow—thatdoesn’t mean that you don’t intuit that something doesn’t addup.

Which is why I openmy Books In Conversation with this collection. Yes, please, readIbram X. Kendi’s excellent StampedFrom The Beginning, amongothers. That will help explode much of what we’ve been taught. ButI wanted to explore these lesser known titles because they telldifferent aspects of the story. Other volumeswill touch on it later in the series as well.

Bornin Blackness byHoward French traces theorigins of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade from a startingpoint that’s been hiding inplain sight: Portugal. Thatcountry used to be seen as the loser of losers in the global rush forpower, but given their massive and productive holdings in SouthAmerica (Brazil) and Africa (Angola) into the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries, that’s nonsense. And certainly, they brokethrough many technological barriers to initiate sea travel on a scalenot seen before. More sinister is their early pilot of the infamoustransatlantic triangle, which I think is more fitting to see as atransfer of wealth from one continent (Africa) to three others(Europe and North and South America), which enabled the latter threeto continue trading and building wealth among themselves.

Donot let the propaganda fool you: Africa is a continent of abundance,and that’s why itisso attractive. (The immensedisplay of wealth by Mansa Musa of Mali during his pilgrimage toMecca in the fourteenth century might have been an inspiration forinitial voyages there from Portugal.) And while no one should pitythe Portuguese during this time, they came to West Africa toestablish trade relations, not to conquer. They took enslaved people,but they were hoping to trade primarily in gold.

Anyonereading this already knows that, of course, enslaved human beingswere ultimately more profitable, and there’s an irony to this thatFrench underscores at the end of his book. Africa, large as it is,punched below its weight in population even before Europeans andAsians began plundering it, in no small part due to microorganismsmore readily found in the tropics. (InThe Shadow of Slaverydiscusses the means by which West Africa in particular adjusted forthe consequentagricultural conditions.) The sparseness of the population wasexacerbated by the slave raids, which were conducted more by otherAfricans than by Europeans, atleast at first. That this wasweakening polities, even as they traded human beings for commodities,wasn’t lost on African leaders, who recognized that they, asa consequence, would havefewer future allies as they weakened other nations. French does notexcuse the choices these people made to continue, but he does givethe sense that by the time this realization settled, they wereenmeshed in an economic system that was going to be brutal to get outof.

Evenbefore the conquest of the Americas began in earnest, Africa was thefulcrum of two other, early “trade triangles”. Thespice trade, particularly for melegueta pepper from the area that isnow Liberia, drove the exchange for metal and textiles produced innorthern Europe. This trade, surprisingly, integrated northern andsouthern Europe economically in ways that hadn’t been seen before.

Thetrade in textiles drove a triangle of a more “global” character.While Africans were able to produce fine textiles, thosewere more readily available in what is now known as India, and theyfeatured cotton, which was more comfortable in the tropics than thecloth produced in Europe. Portugalwas again the intermediary for this trade, and what they took forcloth was people.

Ibring this up to highlight that African leaders were making economicchoices, even if we find them repugnant—they were not beingpillaged (at least not initially). They were a source of both directand indirect wealth, and when they could leverage for advantage, theydid. That they were a source of significant wealth is something elsethat is also hiding in plain sight. Without the wealth generated byAfrican resources and African bodies, it’s hard to conceive of thepossibilities of the silver mines or tobacco, cotton, and sugarplantations which powered the European colonies in the Americas.

Ithink it should be clear to anyone that Africa and Africans sufferedlosses for their interactions with Europeans. This shouldn’t be amatter of debate, and yet there are those who had argued for decadesthat Africa somehow benefited from enlightened European systems.French slams this at the end of his book with statistics showing thatwhile Africa’s population may have been below the mean for its sizebefore European “trade”, even after the slave trade had ended andmost of Africa was colonized by European powers, the continent*still* hadn’t recovered its population losses, in spite ofallegedly superior public health systems. It wasn’t until afterdecolonization and independence in the middle of the twentiethcentury that Africa began to make up for its population losses inearnest—this in spite of the narrative that Africa is poor andstarving.

Born in Blacknessproved, to me, the case that Africa was a net contributor to ourglobal economic history (and that they deserve reparations, even ifnothing will ever be enough). One narrative exploded. Therewere times that I felt outraged and shook my head, but it was anunderstandable story because it dealt with history and economics.Much more difficult was Slaveryand The Culture of Taste.That is a book about psychology and sociology—and a level of sadismI both can’t comprehend and see everyday.

Slavery and TheCulture of Taste by SimonGikandi was the most difficult book I have ever read, no contest.(More difficult to read than Orientalismby Edward Said, and I don’t speak French.) The concepts were easyto understand, and that made it more painful.

Icame to the book because I finally noticed how much I had beenhearing the word “taste”. What, exactly, did that mean? Whywere people like Austin Kleon and IraGlass talking about how their tastes “improved” even as theirart didn’t while they were in the formative stages of figuring outwhat their artistic orientationwas? We judge people by itall the time—but why? What is taste, and what does it signal?

Ifinally did a search for it in my fantastic library system, and assoon as I saw this title, I knew I had to read it. While the titlemay seem a mashup, it’s not.

Gikandistarts with the problem of modernity, and this is something Frenchgets at, too: for all of our enlightened associations with modernity,it doesn’t begin in earnest until the explosion of enslavement. TheModernPersonis an independent contributor to a society that values, among otherthings, humanity and the values of The Enlightenment (rationalityand independent judgment being chief among them) and seesthemself in opposition to the hidebound traditions thatcharacterized, roughly, the medieval era, particularly religiousdeference and socially proscribed conduct. It is the original era ofoptimism, an OG Everything Is Awesome.

Whereasthe Middle Ages might have demanded, through its deference to God andChurch, the presentation and internal embodiment of Goodness so thatwe could be seen to Heaven, the Age of Modernity demanded theperformanceof Happiness, which spoke to our Success, so that we could be trustedwith future Opportunity. TheModern Era is the Age of Possibility and more than a little Awe overhow far we have come.

Butwhat these early modern specimens knew in a way that they could notdeny was that all of the Progress was underwritten by the enslavementof people who were not invited into the benefits of modernity in anyway. The modern subject saw the slave and knew that their age wasbuilt on a foundation of clouds.

Sowhat is taste in this context? It’s the set of aesthetic practicesand habits of mind that is supposed to limn the difference betweenwhat is supposed to be the idealistic magic of modernity and the rootof slavery beneath it. The Culture of Taste flowers in eighteenthcentury England, and it’s possibly where the British first learn tosublimate what they can’t make peace with (or control).

(Isthis a successful strategy? That tastes change so frequently wouldtend to indicate that it’s not.) 

Itcan’t be overlooked that the practices include politeness, andhere it’s hard not to think of the rule to avoid discussions ofreligion, politics, and sex. It is also, at its deeper root, anadmonition to make sure everyone is comfortable by making sureeveryone has a pleasant experience in which they can allexperience—wait for it—Happiness.

It’swhen you contemplate politeness that you start to realize Marx had itwrong: the opiate of the modern masses is Happiness, and like alladdictive drugs, we chase it most especially when we don’t have it.I would argue that our quest to always live in a state of perpetualhappiness is the cause of much of our sociological, if notpsychological, ills. As Ryder Carroll, the creator of the BulletJournal, pointed out, being in one emotional or psychological stateall of the time is generally considered a sign of mental illness. Iwould argue that it also retards our growth as a civilization—andthat just might be the point.

Gikandiis not the first to note that the presence of enslaved people andtheir importance to the economy built up around them is not an ironicbut a logical cause of the heightened calls for “liberty” amongthe people who aren’t enslaved. (We’ll talk about that more whenwe get to Sunny Auyang's The Dragon and the The Eagle.)

Itwas difficult reading about performance, for reasons that I’m suremany people will understand. I grew up with a parent who frequentlydidn’t seem to have emotions but performed them. I might not beputting that the best way, but it’s something that left me havingtrouble trying to distinguish between genuine displays of emotion andemotional manipulation. Part of why I’m having trouble putting itinto words is that it’s an extreme version of an acceptedphenomenon, which has led me to question the validity of thepractice. Gikandi’s analysis doesn’t do anything to affirmconfidence.

Itis harder still to read about the twisted psychic underpinnings ofour civilization. To the extent you suspected something was wrong,his explanation proves you’re correct. It should no longer be aquestion of what replaces this abusive system, but why haven’t westopped it already? Because even if you deny the humanity of theexploited people who make the system, it’s difficult to deny thetoll that living with the contradictions of it has done to even thosewho aren’t exploited by it—or, perhaps better to say, areexploited differently. (I think now of the psychological case studiesat the end of Frantz Fanon’s TheWretched of the Earth; a subject for another day, but for nowit’s clear after reading that the culture of violence does its owndamage to those who perpetrate it.)

Thesequestions are at the heart of the first part of the book. They’rethe easy part. The second half is devastating. As much aspeople have pretzeled their arguments to deny that enslaved, capturedpeople were just that, theircaptors understood perfectlythat they were dealing with fellow human beings. And they proceededwith that informed understanding to break and destroy their captives’previous identities.

Thisis part of what makes this particular flavor of slavery extra-specialcruel and evil. Yes, slavery and captivity existed before thePortuguese dropped down into West Africa, but the system that wasexported to the European colonies took on far more degradation thanwhat had been seen before. The people who were enslaved were nowintended to exist only for their service to someone else.

Therecognition of the humanity of these people is implicit in thecruelty of the methods thatwere employed, and yes, dear reader, this is where I cried. Imaginingthe psychological disruption of being removed from family, friends,community, and home, and being taken to a strange environment bypeople who were known to be brutal and violent was terrifying. Thefact that many of them did not speak the language of their captorswas even more disorienting.

Ican’t stress enough that this was known and obvious, if onlythrough the continued resistance to capture, captivity, andenslavement at every step of the way. And even if we look at themiddle-men of slavery and excuse them for not having power, they madechoices within that system. They did not learn the names of theircaptives; they renamed them. While some artifacts of their formerlives miraculously made the journey, for the most part, everythingthat had bound them to their previous identity was taken from them.Please imagine what it must have been like to have had theiridentities stripped from them, particularly as adults, but even forchildren. It made not only for loss but a certain kind of madness.

Thebarbaric cruelty of slave owners and their overseers is infamous.What may be less appreciated is that it was intentional. It wasn’tjust sadism—although that can’t be discounted—buta calculated strategy to keep enslaved people from asserting theirhumanity. When we consider the elaborate means of torture manyhouseholds with enslaved people employed, it’s clearthat the violence was plannedand strategic.Gikandi makes the point that the tools, preparation, and execution ofthe violence borders on sexual fetishism, and it’s hard to look atthe pictures of the idealized violence and not see sexual undertones.I would argue that this is a continuing, perverse, and unwillingrecognition that the people who are being subjugated anddehumanized are stillpeople.

Thispart was painfulto read, butit’s not all about dehumanization.Perhaps you’ve noticed—Black Americans are real people, and theirancestors fought for their humanity every step of the way, and inevery way. They went beyond mere survival. Foras much as enslavers tried to deny the humanity of their captives, inmany places they had to make concessions to them. (I would argue thatthe combination of these concessions and the inconsistently appliedviolence actually made conditions in some ways more terrifying.)

Enslavedpeople got precious little time off, but during those times manycommunities gathered to remember and reconstruct their identitiesfrom their original communities, including songs, music, and dancing,as well as sharing their original language. (Even this sometimesproved to be too much for their captors, some of whom reportedfeeling haunted by the sounds of that music.) In some places, theyalso had the “right” to grow their own food on small parcels ofland adjacent to their homes. While thismight stretch the definition ofa concession—thearrangement was frequently analternative to a captor providing food—many enslavedpeople used these plots to assert their identities, growing a mix ofsubsistence items from their nation of origin and their new settings.(If you’re wondering how they had seeds from their homes, InThe Shadow of Slavery touches onthat as well.)

Thiscontrol over their spaces, social as well as physical, is one wayenslaved people subverted their captors’ admonition that “thereshall be a place for everything and everything shall have a place.”(Boy, does housekeeping take on a significantly more sinister tone inthat light.) These are just some of the ways that African slaves wereable to not only maintain their humanity but forge an identity in theface of psychological oppression.

Gikandicites Freud to highlight theimportance of play as a psychological device to limitthe damage of oppression—but notes that is not a substitute forfreedom itself. Still, at times, it must have been brieflysatisfying, especially in the festivals popular in the West Indies,in which slaves openly copied the culture of taste in order toridicule it. Surprisingly, some of these, particularly the “JohnCanoe” festivals, actually included their aristocratizingcaptors. (Perhapsa contemporarycomparison would be a mashup of a drag ball and a roast.)

BothFrench and Gikandi make clear that Africa—and Africanenslavement—are the basis for modernity, in all its ugliness. Butlet’s admit that economicand psychological repercussions may require some thought andanalysis, because theyaren’t all immediately obvious. That’s alright—SabrinaStrings’ Fearingthe Black Body coversterritory that everyone will immediately, viscerally understand.

Icame across Strings’ book first when I heard Brooke Gladstone’sOnThe Mediaepisode about the moralpanic around body size. I would be remiss if I didn’t point outthat the study mentioned in that episode—and briefly in Strings’book—paints a different picture when smokers and people who havebeen diagnosed with serious illnesses—peoplewho are thin for reasons that no one wants to emulate—areremoved. Beingin the BMI category considered healthy weight is, in fact, healthierand encourages greater longevity. However, even though a lowerBMI is healthier, that doesn’t excuse, condone, or license bullyingof people with higher BMIs.

But what does all of this haveto do with modernity?

KidnappedAfricans were beginning to be seen in European cities in theseventeenth centuries, and the ambivalence people felt about thebenefits versus the material origins of modernity is reflected in theway they perceived those people. WhileEuropean artistic standards did not consider stereotypical Africanfaces to fit with the conventions of the time (pointed noses and“fine” lips were held to be more attractive), their bodies fitwith the European ideal of a “well-formed, proportionate figure”.Initially, there was even artistic admiration for these bodies.

Thisdoes not last, though sexual objectification and exploitation ofBlack bodies endures to this day. Strings makes clear that it is inperceptions of the Black body that we can see the twisted and uglyways Europeanstriedto justify the contradictions of modernity: If an enslaved person isbeing treated as a beast by someone else known to be rational, itmust be because they are, in fact, a beast. Like all other animals,they don’t control theirdesires for food or sex, which both explains and is explained by thedifferences in the average body types of Europeans and Africans. (Oneis tempted here to remind early and contemporaryobservers that members of both groups have never had a unified bodytype, but I suspect this would fall on deaf ears.)

Nowthe special, modern twist: Make sure you prove yourability to control your baser impulses, particularly around food,lest you be revealed as a beast. Ludicrous as this sounds, it seems anumber of Europeans were in danger of being revealed to be just that.

Theslave trade made the sugar trade possible, as French discusses inBorn in Blackness.While Europeans had used sweeteners before, the explosion of theavailability of sugar in the eighteenth century was a new paradigm.What came right along with it was the availability of coffee (andtea—but we’ll let Raj Patel talk about that in Stuffedand Starved).There’s some debate about whether sugar is addictive, but there isno debate about coffee, tea, and caffeine in general. Evenmore importantly, coffee had a prestige we in the twenty-firstcentury have trouble appreciating. Consuming it, at least initially,was a signal of sophistication and even erudition, and in thebeginning of the Age of Performance, coffee was the perfect prop. Andif consumed in the new cafes that were popping up all over Europeancities thatbecame a stage for intellectual activity,so much the better.

I don’t think I need to explain why sugar consumption made coffeedrinking more palatable (confession: I hate coffee), and I probablydon’t need to explain that consuming large amounts of sweeteneddrinks—many times with milk—in combination with the sedentarylifestyle of the cafe dweller led not only to health problems likegout but also weight gain. This phenomenon was a subject of deep,almost existential concern, and part of their response was thedevelopment of the “standards of taste” Gikandi refers to. Politeindividuals are also admonished to practice table etiquette and showrestraint when dining.

It’s during this period that we begin to see women being encouragedto be the smallest people they can be, as well as the beginnings ofthe diet craze (or is that crazy diets?). Once colonization of theAmericas begins in earnest, new women’s magazines begin toencourage their readers to take responsibility for their own dietsand the diets of their families to make sure that they are thehealthiest specimens possible. This projection of a perfect body is acrucial part of the performance of morality as well as an assertionof their Anglo-Saxon superiority.

As ideals of European and then White American bodies developed, Blackbodies continued to be denigrated. But while the definition of“Black” has contracted and expanded—how people feel about mixedrace children has changed repeatedly—the definition of “White”is even more amorphous. One of the things that perked my ears upabout this book was during Strings’ interview with Gladstone, whenshe saw how frequently *Irish* bodies were denigrated in similar, attimes identical language as that used for Black people.

I continue to take exception to comparisons between the indenturedservitude of White Europeans and the enslavement of Africans andtheir descendants—one was not permanent, nor was it passed down tochildren—but when Edward Said in Cultureand Imperialism points out that the English took theirfirst stab at colonialism in Ireland, it’s difficult to deny thatthe Irish were treated as little better than property. (And not justthe Irish: per Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning,African enslavement didn’t take off in earnest until the Slavs ofEastern Europe built fortifications to protect themselves from slaveraids.) As bizarre as it may seem to us today, the Irish were notseen as White, and in fact many tried to argue that they must havehad “Asiatic” or African roots because they were darker skinnedand smaller in stature. English writers and philosophers like ThomasCarlyle went so far as to use the Irish Famine, which brought so manyof the Irish to the United States, as proof of their animal nature,because surely it was their “gluttony and poor self-control” thatled to them not being able to control their food sources.

It was, of course, not only the English who held a poor view of theIrish. Proud American Anglo-Saxons like Ralph Waldo Emerson agreedthat the Irish were deficient specimens, as well as being short,dark, and of Asian origin. However, Emerson didn’t confine hiscritiques to the Irish. He, like many other Americans, held that the“Anglo-Saxon” combined the best of Western and Northern Europeanpopulations and were the “Ultra-Caucasians”. Not surprisingly,part of the proof of this superiority was in the (ideally) taller andthinner bodies of these Anglo-Saxons. Heaviness was a sign that maybeyou—and the rest of your “race”—really weren’t ultraanything, so the pressure increased to be thin. (Please don’t namecheck Emerson to me again.)

It should go without saying that the penalties were stiffer forAnglo-Saxon/White/European/Whatever women who were heavy. Andyet...don’t be too thin. Per Harper’s Bazaar in the latenineteenth century:

 “...a woman must have some fat to avoid the scrawniness ofthe Reform years, and...beauty [is] to be found only in women whosedelicacy and littleness cause emotions of tenderness and protectiontaking them to be admiration of beauty.”

There’s a discussion to behad about how the Victorian abhorrence of adult sexuality led toinstitutionalized pedophilia, but that’s anothersubject for another day. For our purposes now, it’s self-evidentthat most adult women are going to have a very hard time fitting intoan ideal of “delicacy and littleness” that’s more appropriateto a child. As the majority of American women (and men) know, it’sakin to being thrust into a game with rules stacked against almosteveryone forced to play. That, in part, goes some way towardexplaining the rise of Diet Culture in the late nineteenth century. 

Onething we can say about the likes of Graham, Kellogg, and the SeventhDay Adventists is that they beginto emphasize the consumption of “good” foods over the prohibitionof “bad” foods. We might also thank Kellogg for his emphasis on“hydrotherapy” and vegetarianism, which may have had genuinepublic health benefits (even if you’re a committed omnivore, youprobably wouldn’t have felt safe eating the mass-produced meat ofthat age). But that is all.

Kellogg, perhaps surprisingly,didn’t want to see (White) women too thin—because that might makeit difficult for them to bear children, and that was abhorrent to aeugenicist like him. (Also, he was not alone in the belief that Blackpeople were so constitutionally inferior that they were eventuallygoing to die out as a “race”. We can only assume that it didn’toccur to him that health problems Black Americans experienced couldbe ameliorated by not having to live in a racist system.) Thisshould sound familiar to anyone who has had to listen to any fascistrhetoric—please think of that next time you buy breakfast cereal.

What Strings showed is that much as we try to run away from thecontradictions and hypocrisies of our modern system, there is noescape, because they are baked into the systems that govern—literallyand figuratively—our very bodies. Of all of the books in thisgroup, I saw hers as the one with the strongest, if unstated, call toaction to dismantle the systems that are destroying our health andpsyches. It just works out, as far as I’m concerned, that doing sowill dismantle the rot of modernity as well.

The books above explain the economic, social, psychological, moral,and even physical origins and consequences of our pervasive systemsof modernity. While these are paradigms that we should be activelychanging, they are total. There is no one who lives in thiscivilization who isn’t in some way a party to these modes ofexisting. So it is always, but we should be forgiven if we’re leftunable to *see* it for what it is even if we *know* it for what itis. It is here, perhaps, that we can use our visual media as a clue,or at least a partial glimpse in the mirror.

Catherine McCormack’s Womenin the Picture is light reading compared to the other threetitles. But her subject matter—systemic sexism as reflected in ourmedia—is just as serious as the systematized racism that makesmodernity possible. And if the other three titles made me cringe inhorror, this one made me wince in recognition.

McCormack is concerned with European and American art, and she openswith an acknowledgment of how privileged and rarefied the world ofart history and criticism is. As with so many other professions, it’sself-selecting: you must already come into the field with deepknowledge of history, Greco-Roman mythology, and religious imagery,as well as familiarity with classical works. If art history is itsown language, you need to be privy to the syntax before you start, atthe very least so you can get all of the in-jokes. In and of itself,these prerequisites limit participation to those who come from means,and until a few generations ago, to men. 

Which is all tosay that a critical feminist perspective of art was lacking untilrelatively recently. While McCormack isn’t the first to attack theproblem, she’s still going into relatively uncharted ground.

Women in the Picture dividesits subjects into four categories: Venus,The Mother, Maidens and Dead Damsels, and The Monstrous Woman. Theyare all classical archetypes, but we see reflections of them to thisday.

Part of my admiration for McCormackstems from her analysis of the myth of Venus (Aphrodite). Proud mythnerd thoughI am, I had never heard the goddess’ origin story in quite thisway. My understanding was that Cronus colluded with his mother Gaeato take down his father Uranus. (Gaea, you may recall, was outragedbecause Uranushad imprisoned their younger, uglier children within the bowels ofthe earth after they were born. He couldn’t stand to see themwalking on their mother, the earth—so he kept her pregnant withthem.) Cronus, youngest of the Titans, was the only one willing totake on his all-powerful father, and he did it when he was at hismost vulnerable: coupling with Gaea. Cronus emasculated Uranus withhis famous sickle. Uranus fled, and from the drops of his wound’sblood sprung up the Furies. His genitals were tossed into the sea,and from that foam arose Venus/Aphrodite.

Only maybe itwasn’t the foam, but the genitals themselves that the goddessformed from. Maybe she is infact Uranus’ genitals—his penis, in particular—reborn as anobject of desire...to stimulate other male genitals. She is, in thisinterpretation, male sexuality,re-presented to itself infemale form. Perhaps thismight explain why representations of Aphrodite/Venus are sounrelatablefor so many women,because she was never intended to be a woman but a proxy for maledesires—the perfect object of the Male Gaze. (We’ll pick this upwhen we talk about Narcissus, Echo, and the rest of the gang inRoberto Calassso’s TheMarriage of Cadmus and Harmony.)

Inmany ways, the archetype of The Mother is just as limiting as theunattainable goddess because it was created to be. McCormack takespains to make clear that this is not the same as the maternal figuresof older religions and mythologies which were so closely intertwinedwith nature, in all its glory and terror. This mother is a walledgarden, her fertility channeled in the most contrived ways, to servethe ends of the civilization that stands in opposition to nature. The“virgin mother” is perhaps the perfect starting point for ourunderstanding: she is production that isn’t preceded by personalsexuality or even desire. She ultimately exists to serve.

“Cringe” doesn’t appropriatelydescribe my reaction to McCormack’s descriptions of theaspirational Dutch paintings of the perfect wife and mother, cuddlingher children in a chair or managing their studies while getting onwith her own work.These paintings were made for the husbands who were making theirfortunes overseas, an assurance that everything was as it should beand would be waiting for him in a perfect state when he returned. Theaesthetic of those paintings is surprisingly similar to modernInstagram and magazine spreads, wherein TheMotheris presented in an open but luxurious space, using the latesttechnology, and surrounded by her always clean, happy, and beautifulchildren. And it reminds of nothing so much as how we imagine MarieKondo’s advice come to life, right down to “everything beingin its place”. Here is where I wished I could sink into my chair,as I uncritically love Kondo’s advice and genuinely feel betterfollowing it, but it’s impossible to deny what it legitimizes.(More, I promise, when we discuss Marie Kondo and TheCultures of Collecting.)

There is another side to the modernarchetype of the perfect mother, and that is one who is noble in herloss, particularly of her child. This trope is repeated and veneratedad infinitum in our modern media—how we love to watch a Blackmother in particular mourn the loss of her child, usually her son, toviolence, addiction, or other wickedness of our civilization. Someonecould mount a collection of photos of the Mourning Mother—whetherin the initial throes of grief or the numbed shock of theaftermath—and fill a museum. 

It goes without saying that peoplehave been calling BS on these narratives for centuries. McCormackhighlights the struggle to recognize mothers’ (and women’s)unpaid work as exactly that. Moderncapitalism has demanded divisions of labor, necessitated by the siteof work, and that translated for centuries into a sexual division oflabor. The rise of capitalismis arguably intertwined with the rise of sexism,and because of the extreme violence against women during thecenturies’ long persecution of witches (though, as Carl Sagan notesin TheDemon Haunted World, not allof the victims were women), women lost much of the power they neededto challenge their confinement to domesticity and the devaluation oftheir work. 

The artistMireleLaderman Ukeles created a photography project in 1969 thathighlighted women’s work, documenting her everyday tasks ofcooking, cleaning, and child-rearing, as well as participation inreligiousceremonies. She saw that workin solidarity with other “maintenance” work, particularly ofpublic structures, that was only slightly more valued andcompensated. Ukeles’ work is of interest to McCormack because thiswas, in one way, an answer to the question of how a woman could existas an artist—or vice versa—and still fulfill her“roles”. Work as an artistic statement was part of Ukeles’answer.

It isn’t lost on historians ofwork and feminist activists that women who function as homemakershave better tools to do their jobs. However, they turn the marketingnarrative on its head: instead of seeing vacuum cleaners, washingmachines, dryers, and dishwashers as devices to make their workeasier, those machines have made work harder because they have raisedthe standard of expectation of cleanliness. I would argue that theyhave also worsened the class-divide, as those standards apply even tothose households that can’t afford to make those purchases.Further, they make women’swork even more devalued, after a fashion, as expensive gadgets arenow seen as something essential to work that isn’t compensated.

All of the archetypes McCormack discusses suffer from a form ofviolence, but violence is baked into the definition of the Maiden andthe Damsel in Distress. The violence, or at least the threat of it,*is* the distress. The Maiden or Damsel is frequently raped or aboutto be, and if she isn’t, likely dead. (If the reader immediatelythought “...a fate worse than death” after the word “rape”,that might be the best demonstration of the archetype.)

TheRape of Europa by Titian isperhaps the most famousexample of this archetype. In the myth, Europa is a princess in AsiaMinor, little more than a child, when she’s kidnapped by Zeus as abull. One of the first things I noticed when I saw the painting washow *womanly*, how adult, Titian’s Europa was. However, she is justas helpless as a child,and in fact the painting features on-lookers who don’t seemmotivated to protect the princess from what must look to them like awild animal. They are bystanders, as casually observing a kidnappingas many do acts of violence now.

I’ll take a brief detour toCalasso’s Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonybecause he does a very good job explaining some of the tension inthis myth, which I’m sure McCormack would nod along to. Beforethere was Europa in Asia Minor, there was Io in Greece, the nymph whowas the daughter of a powerful river god who did not want hisdaughter consorting with Zeus. He as well was married to Hera, whowas famously jealous (as one might expect the goddess of marriage tobe when monogamous marriage was being dishonored). His solution wasto turn Io into a cow, whom he then let Hera torment, first with thegiant Argus, then with a gadfly that chased Io all the way to Egypt,where she finally found relief.

There, Io became a queen and then agoddess, and had Zeus’ son Ephaphus. He and Memphis, anotherdaughter of a river god, had a daughter named Libya, and from herrelationship with Poseidon (which we can only imagine was slightlyless dramatic than one would have been with Zeus), she became themother of, among others,Agenor, who was the father of...Europa.

That is the myth,and while we may have much to say about what it means to be thedaughter of a river god, thesymmetry of the story was enough to make me raise my eyebrows even atthe age of ten. Calasso’s theory is that both myths are a record oftit-for-tat kidnapping, or perhaps a trade in human bounty. It isalso impossible to ignore the imperialism and nativism of the story.Io and her descendant/mirrorEuropa are the transmissions of empire, but they are also haplessvictims whose only solace are their children. The best hope for theDamsel in Distress is to survive long enough to become the mother ofsomeone who might avenge them. By my reckoning, that is cold comfort.

McCormack’s final archetype is TheMonstrous Woman, and part of her monstrosity is that at times sheembodies or rejects the other three archetypes all at once. She isthe ultimate “mess” of a woman because she is her own person. Sheis Lilith, who refuses to allow Adam the privileges in marriage heassumes should be his. She is the Sphinx, the woman who not onlytalks back to men, but tests their comprehension. (And, boy, wouldOedipus have been well-served to figure out what her presence infront of him was warning him of.) She is Medusa, the snake-headedmonster who freezes men in fear...But before that, she was the Libyanserpent goddess Anatha, and before that the triple goddess Neith, whocombined the attributes of Medusa, her foe Athena, and Athena’smother, Metis. She is, ofcourse, The Witch, so threatening to the patriarchy that she embodiesthe temptress and the crone. 

If a monster is a creaturethat combinescharacteristics in ways that don’t hew to an easy performance ofgender roles, maybe we are all monsters. Patriarchy’s answer is todivide us up into the other three archetypes and, because they are soartificial, demand that we stick to those proscribed roles, or else.

The most chilling thing McCormackpoints out about art criticism and criticism in general is that it isthe culmination of the attempt to understand, know, and own. It iscommon to discuss analysis of a work of art—or a person—as a“dissection” of its meaning, and especially if we find it worthy,to “absorb” it. There is an inherent violence in that language,and McCormack questionswhether the act of knowing can itself be a violation at times. Thiswould especially be the case when that act is extended to people. Asa woman who isn’t white, I have many memories of people peering tooclosely to try to “understand” what I am; as much as I and otherslike me want to be “seen”, we don’t want to be taken apart, andmany of us have had the same instinctive defensive mechanism to pullback when someone tries to push too far in.

We come full circle back to the contradictions of modernity and thespecial madness of those who live in it, particularly those firstgenerations. Perhaps it wasn’t just that they couldn’t escape thecognitive disconnect of the hypocrisies of Enlightenment alongsidethe material advantages only slave labor could provide; perhaps itwas because they were regularly confronted with the exercises ofviolence on the Other, something that artists’ consciences inparticular were unable to ignore.

The madness persists until it is confronted and the source of it isdestroyed. I write this as my country is in the middle of aslow-rolling coup, and people who learned about the Holocaust andagreed it was wrong are justifying why Trump and his lieutenants aredifferent from the dictators who came before. We see what we want tosee, we ignore or disregard facts that are inconvenient, and weemploy a laser-focus on what we want to see to avoid beinguncomfortable.

To answer the question I posed in the beginning, Modernity is acomfortable lie that those of us who deserve material comforts canhave them without the suffering of anyone who doesn’t deserve it.It is a magic wand that makes possible the belief that our idealsalone can make possible our prosperity. It is a fairy tale foradults. It is a special kind of madness, and it is in a constantstate of unraveling.

Deb in the City

But, what are Books in Conversation?

Before 2016, I usedTwitter with a frequency that made my husband raise his brows. Ilive-tweeted debates; I followed the news to the point that I neverlost a Breaking News Off. I had always been exposed to the news—myparents never thought to protect me from current events, for betteror worse, and some of my earlier memories are of my mother talkingabout Carter’s inauguration, watching Carter at Camp David withAnwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, and Reagan getting shot on livetelevision. And don’t get me started on the Iran Hostage Crisis. Iwas better informed than most seven and eight year olds, though myunderstanding was probably more age-appropriate.

I studied history incollege. I talked to people. I’d like to think my understandingimproved. Some things still didn’t make sense to me, but at thispoint I think that was because they didn’t make sense, period. Iwas very, very well-informed by 2016, and for more than twenty yearshad been “the political one” in most circles that weren’t,well, political. I expected Hillary Clinton to win the USpresidential election not because I wished it so, but because thesmartest people in media told me I should.

The smartest peoplewere wrong.

I was as devastatedas many other people by the results of the election. I didn’tbelieve Trump could be as evil as he turned out to be, if onlybecause I thought he would be stopped. I was wrong. But I was alsoangry that I had been so misled. By my reckoning, the media had tolda story that they thought should be true because it always had beenbefore; they saw what they wanted to see, and it wasted precioustime. (Also: “But, her emails.”)

I had alreadyintended to start writing my science-fantasy series, and I needed toknow a lot more than I already did to flesh out the family saga thatdealt with the aftermath of genocide. I had an ambitious amount ofreading to do, and after stumbling onto a book about recent Japanesehistory, it occurred to me that my time was going to better spentreading books for a deeper understanding than memorizing how manychildren a tertiary character in an ongoing news-of-the-week storyhad, or what color tie they favored. I wasn’t going to be theperson who kept track of intrigue in the presidential cabinet—boy,would that have been a full-time job—but I was going to be theperson who understood better what was really going on.

I read more history.It’s what I do and how I am, but I branched out into militaryhistory and areas of the world I’d been too afraid to delve intobecause they were so complex. I read less political history andfinally dived into Edward Said’s Orientalism.That was intense! However, I’m a better person for it. I foundIbram Kendi’s Stampedfrom the Beginning and hadmy mind blown every other paragraph as I read about things I thoughtI already knew. I learned about Asian American history and laterSouth Korean sociology. I read King (thecivil rights leader, not the horror author),Fanon, and more Said. I finally found someone who put into words myfeelings about the Syrian Civil War and reminded me that my memorywasn’t faulty. I learnedthe term “settler colonialism”, and I’ll probably never stopshuddering.

Iread about the value of solitude and that, no, you actually don’twant everyone to be a prodigy a la Tiger Woods. I read about theimportance of nature in our lives, and I read yet more Marie Kondobefore I read about what it really means to “collect”.

Becauseof what I wanted to write, Ifinally decided to readscience fiction and fantasy, even as I cringed over getting caught upin medieval imperialist fantasies. I got started with TheColors of Madeline, V.E.Schwabb’s Shades of Magictrilogy—Amazon’sVine Program was good for something—and then read Naomi Novik’sstandalone novels.I branched out to N. K. Jemison’s BrokenEarth trilogy, and started feeling seen. I finally jumped intoLiu Cixin’s Remembranceof Earth’s Past trilogy, and everything followed from there,including Ken Liu’s amazing DandelionDynasty Quartet, Fonda Lee’s GreenBone Saga trilogy, the NamelessRepublic Series by Suyi Davies Okungbowa, the devastatingstandalones of TochiOnyebuchi, and the Akata series by NnediOkorafor. (And how can I leave out the works of ShannonChakraborty?) And more! I had finally found the niche I wanted tospend a lot of time in.

Throughit all, I’ve been struggling to be the most productive, Modernperson that I can be, and believe mewhen I tell you that I loved my BulletJournal as much as I loved MarieKondo. That community, as well as the artist AustinKleon, recommended Howto Take Smart Notes by SonkeAhrens, and the idea that I could do something interesting with mynonfiction observations and book reviews beyond using theperspectives in my fictionbegan to take shape. Ahrens talked about notes beginning to“converse” with each other to create new information, and I gotexcited because it reminded me of all of the times I’d made anoff-the-wall connection between two disparate facts. I took copiousnotes in my Bullet Journal—I am Team #OneNotebookToRuleThemAll—andhalf-heartedly took some notes on note cards (500 isn’t that many,is it?).

Myhusband read many of these books with me, but at a certain point thatwasn’t tenable, and I didn’t have people to discuss these topicswith. I can write book reviews, but that doesn’t invite the samekinds of conversation on my library website as I might like. I havebeen thrilled to interview authors in the past, but while I’veenjoyed most of those writers, I wanted to put some of those peoplein the same room and have them talk about specific ideas in theirbooks. I’m really not that persuasive, especially when the subjectmatter is vastly different, and some of the authors in question aregone. (How sad to know Edward Said isn’t here for me, since he wasthe person who made me realize I hadn’t been imagining racismeverywhere I turned.) I can’t get the authors to talk to eachother, but I can—after a fashion—get the books to talk to eachother.

“InConversation” will hopefully not only apply to books but toreaders as well. Idesperately hope that people who have read some of these titles willchime in—whether in the comments or their own blogs or videos—totalk about the themes that I see and what these books meant to them.I don’t know how we get out of this mess, but I do know that wehave to do it together, in solidarity.

Atthe time of this writing,we are seeing a degradation of the establishment news media we couldonly barely imagine eight years ago. Major papers pulled endorsementsfor Kamala Harris because they were betting Trump would win and theywanted to make sure that their other businesses wouldn’t bepunished for allowing some journalistic integrity. Thisis a predictable outcome of monopolization—and by predicted, I meanpeople were warning of it in the 1990s, notjust the 1910s—but to seeit happen so shamelessly is still shocking.

DoI sound smug about my reliance on books over current event coverage?Sure, but please know that I rarely enjoy feeling superior aboutanything for long. I’m an indie author, and I’ve followedAmazon’s predations on traditional publishing. I’ve also beenaware since the 1990s that all aspects of the media landscape,including book publishers, have been subject to consolidation. Withvery few exceptions, publishers are always more powerful than theirauthors; this is the way of the world, and this is why so many of usjumped at the chance to publish independently. But when there weretwelve important publishers, authors at least had more theoreticaloptions. Today, there are four that are making decisions about thevast majority of what is being read and discussed, and publishers andeditors are not making decisions in a vacuum. Those decisions areshaping our narrative, and it is *always* worth pausing to considerto what extent our beliefs are being actively shaped. Questioningyour own beliefs is always a good idea. I would add that readingolder books—going back at least one generation—can be one way todiversify perspective, but again, those books were chosen by someoneas well. Another is to lookfor truly independent authors, although it is much rarer to findindie history and politics than it is indie fiction.

Iwant to mention a couple of invaluable resources for helping me buildmy virtual library. The selection at the New and Notable area of theBoston Public Library at Copley shouldwin an award; if I’m ever hurting for reading material, I know Ican go there and find a title that I’ll be glad to have read—Iwould never have found DonnaLeon’s CommissarioBrunetti Series withoutthem. The NoveList feature on the library website helped me find orconfirm fiction titles that enriched my life. Brooke Gladstone of OnThe Media is amazing—I found the magnificent Fearingthe Black Body on one of hershows, as well as the author Cory Doctorow, whose blogpluralistic.net has been aninvaluable source of information. I reluctantly admit that the blogof Austin Kleon has pointed me in the right direction more than once;now, I hope, someone will convince Kleon to get off of Substack andlet someone else keep Nazis company. Finally, I must also admit thatGoodreads has been helpful—not because of their algorithm, butbecause of the recommendations of several authors, including N.K.Jemisin, Ken Liu and ShelleyParker-Chan; without them, it probably wouldn’t have occurredto me to read Considerthe Fork, Oralityand Literacy, and Womenin the Picture. I also wouldnot have found the podcast GaslitNation, which has been a source of irreplaceable community duringthis bleak moment in history.

Ifany of that sounds like an endorsement for a subsidiary platform ofAmazon, it’s NOT. I’m not so grand to hope that my little projectwill be the beginning of a return to a decentralized blogosphere, butI do hope we start writing about what we’re reading and what we’reexperiencing in spaces that can’t be weaponized against us on awhim. Let’s stop worrying about SEO—the fact that you’re notgoing to make a lot of money on Facebook hasn’t stopped you fromposting there—and start talking to each other again. Who knows? Aconversation in the ether just might turn into a meaningfulrelationship...one that hopefully includes discussing new ideas, andacting on them.

I'll update this page as I post the "conversations". Thank you for your patience!

Deb in the City