The person who wrote this is a college sophomore. Read it and weep. Or don’t, ‘cuz it’s kinda talky and academic. But hey, at least the guy found a conclusive link between drought and civil war. The hell have you done lately?
So Achille Varzi once rolled a cigarette for a friend of mind as a female colleague of his looked on. “Maybe you should be thinking about what kind of an effect rolling cigarettes for undergraduates will have on your reputation as a professor,” she joked. “Ah,” said the logician/metaphysician, as he put the finishing touches on what was, in retrospect, nothing other than a carcinogenic work of art. “I think the real question is how this will effect this student’s life right now.” Mindblowing, I know. But not nearly as mindblowing as Varzi’s self-consciously manic reflections on time travel…
Ummm wow…just stop whatever you’re doing right now and read this
A reminder of how bad things were in the ’80s. And a chance to wonder if Bush-era “War on Terror” foreign policy will seem as arcane in 20 years as Cold War power politics does now.
Todd Gitlin finds an odd obsession…
In case you’re wondering what Bwog editrix Lydia DiPillis has been up to. For the curious, she’s been giving ecology lessons to South African youth!
And, in case you’re wondering what Philo has been up to. For the curious, it’s pretty much what you’d expect.
CODA: Midway through reading this excellent Alex De Waal piece on the roots of the Darfur conflict, it occurred to me that February marked the fifth anniversary of the SLA raid on a Sudanese airforce base that kicked the deadliest conflict of the 21st century into genocidal high gear. Curiously, the anniversary wasn’t observed anywhere–although reading De Waal’s exhaustive and additively readable analysis of the conflict’s roots is as good an act of commemoration as I can think of (other than donating money somewhere, obviously…)