My new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, is now out! Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing, is both memoir and essay collection. I think it breaks new ground because bureaucrats don’t publish memoirs. It will change how you see government, politics, working life, and bureaucrats.
On the podcast this week I gave a rapid fire history of the Altlantic, structured around seven key dates. These dates provide glimpses into the multipolar history of the Atlantic Ocean, and the chameleon-like character of the Atlantic idea, institutions, alliance and civilization. It tells the story of how NATO emerged from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
Vladislav Zubok compared the Time of Troubles, Russia’s major civil war of the early 1600s, with the political situation in Russia today. It has the flaws of many historical articles penned this week. The mutiny fizzled so fast that the facts fell before the drafting was finished.
The protest of Yevgeny Prigozhin and a small group of his Wagner fighters is over. It began and ended in 30 hours. Noone died. So the Russian government has controlled the protest, and most likely emerged stronger.
The first casualty of war is truth. But what is the second casualty?
The most interesting aspect of Tooze’s use of the idea of polycrisis is not that many big things are happening all together. That is pretty standard, messy human history, really. The more interesting part is how he identifies a mismatch between decision-makers’ mental model of social reality, and the facts of social reality.
So I have decided to write a series of posts on my substack exploring theses on the world crisis. You can join my free weekly newsletter at jeffrich.substack.com, and I would encourage all readers of the blog to do so.
As it happened, I had watched on the weekend the earlier Soviet film, Come and See (1985). Perhaps next Victory Day, Michael Pezzulo should write to his staff, and urge them to watch Come and See.
On the podcast I discuss how the history of emotions might offer a framework to think mindfully about the past of the last three crazy years of the pandemic and its impact on democracy.
Towards, the end of Memory, History, and Forgetting, indeed, Ricoeur evoked the famous angel of history from the painting by Paul Klee, described in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. This image also inspired my poems, blog, podcast, YouTube and now Sub-Stack newsletter. It marked a deep, unexpected bond between Ricoeur, Macron and I.