So Biden’s remarks were not a gaffe, not a slip. They are not words of petty anger, even if they are the simmering resentment of Captain Ahab’s obsessive revenge. Biden’s remarks are more boastful than angry, though they have that edge too. Biden is angrily defending his inflated image of his own prowess as political leader and foreign policy leader, and indeed the infinite ‘possiblilities’ of America.
Empress Zhu wrote, “Once I lived in heaven above, in pearl palaces and jade towers; now I live among grass and brambles, my blue robes soaked in tears. I hate the drift of snow.”
Episode 27 of the Burning Archive podcast asks: How did the Byzantine Empire acquire the secrets of silk production from China, and what does it tell us about the history of silk, the diffusion of silk trade across the world, and the Silk Roads of Eurasia?
This year, 2021, may be remembered as a pivot year in world history. Not because of…
A tragic sense of history does not limit the depth of the fall of the mighty…
Could it be that the current unrest in America and the disintegration of its political, social…
Since posting Is America reliving the 1917 revolution? a few days ago I have noticed numerous…
I am reading Stephen Platt, Imperial Twilight: the Opium War and the end of China’s last…