2025
“To the Man on the Northeast Regional” by Charlotte Clymer, charlotteclymer.substack.com… 🏳️⚧️
I’m assuming the poignant service for Jimmy Carter in the National Cathedral went over TFG’s head and he got bored. Mercifully, the CSPAN camera didn’t linger on his mug for very long.
I love the art deco lettering on this modernist “Air Show” building from the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “A Century of Progress.”
Source: The Newberry Library Digital Collections, Modern MS Monroe Exposition vol. 28 no. 37.
Public Domain Image Archive, pdimagearchive.org.
“Digitization Complete for World-Renowned Franco Novacco Map Collection,” www.newberry.org….
Newly digitized map collection makes over 750 sixteenth- and seventeenth-century maps available online.
Had to cut short a walk this afternoon because I was not dressed for the wind, which was making 19°F / -7°C feel like 5°F / -15°C.
Besides marking a massive mob attack on the Capitol four years ago, this date reminds me of the early signs of the coronavirus pandemic a year before that and of my parents' tumble down the stairs in that same period, my father landing on my mother. That’s also when I finished writing “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC,” meeting with my coauthor in Frankfurt a.M. via FaceTime from a hotel room in North Conway, NH.
I had to relocate to NH for eldercare 20 months after that. That means I’ve lived up here for 40 months now, though I still haven’t got used to all the changes. Except for becoming a grandfather—that part has come easy to me. My grandchild is a joy.
Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. The bodies of the women seem almost choreographed, embodying the dignity and high purpose of their labor. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.
Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.
🇺🇦 Excellent satirical primer on the Russo-Ukrainian War: a half hour of military and foreign policy animations by @Freeonis in 2024 (in Ukrainian with English subtitles), youtu.be…
Poster from the Spanish Civil War, ca. 1936–39. The main text reads, “We charge the rebels as assassins! Innocent children and women die. Free men, repudiate all those who support fascism in the rearguard.” The text, bottom right, with the arrow pointing at the mother and child reads, “Here are the victims.” Note, too, the black and red triangle of the Anarchists in the lower right-hand corner.
Source of image and main text translation: Special Collections & Archives, UC San Diego, https://library.ucsd.edu/dc/object/bb5188576r. This page also offers historical context and analysis.
A book that manages to historicize a century of strongman regimes in an accessible and readable way while maintaining intellectual and scholarly rigor is a helluva thing. If you haven’t yet read Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020), I highly recommend it.
21°F / -6°C outside with a real feel of 11°F / -11.5°C, and people are still ordering iced coffee drinks.
Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Molly White, “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia,” www.citationneeded.news…
I enjoyed rewatching “Saboteur,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (Universal Pictures, 1942). It offers plenty of action and suspense from Los Angeles to New York City, inside and outside, with positive patriotic messaging that could put twenty-first-century billionaires and MAGAheads to shame.