Category: Thinking Games
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Building an internal city to manage geopolitical trauma
How can I make sense of the ongoing atrocities in Ukraine? Each day we awake and write to family and friends (in Kamianske, Kharkiv, Kyiv…) to make sure they’re still alive. It’s a grim ritual. I don’t want to ask them to write back if they don’t have the capacity, either emotional or material. But…
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The Great Pause, continued
My hope, as I’ve written before, is that this time away from the normal processes of sustaining and reproducing our lives would give us the opportunity – both individually and societally – to rethink how things are. Obviously this is culturally dependent and different places have different values, but I’m referring to my experiences in…
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Two Drops of Oil
It’s probably not very academic to mention Paulo Coelho, I suppose, because of his new age connotations and the seductive sense of superiority that we get from relying on citations and peer review and institutional frameworks. But I don’t care, because it’s Week Forever of the Covid19 lockdown, I don’t talk with anyone outside of…
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The Great Pause
I’m sick of looking at logarithmic scales and comparing infection rates among different nations. I can’t peel myself away from the data, though, looking at site after site after site. I text with friends and family around the world, comparing the news media to lived experience. I feel lucky. I feel guilty. I feel scared.…
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Dissertation blues
Dissertation Blues Writing this thing is like building a house. Only I can’t actually see what I’m doing, the plans keep changing, and there are periodic earthquakes. It’s a wonder that I’m this far along at all! A brief progress report: I broke ground on this, officially, on February 28 2018, so almost a year…
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What is objective information? Robert Orttung in Zurich
“At some point you have to take a moral stance and say that undermining authoritarian governments is better than undermining democratic ones.” This is how Robert Orttung, from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington, answered my question today. Robert, together with Sufian Zhemukhov, have written enough about the Sochi Olympics that you…