Some Professor Says...

I have COVID, as do my wife and eight-year-old son. We're all fine; they seem mostly over it and in vaxxed and double boosted and fully planning on spending the next few days taking it incredibly easy. It's interesting that back in 2017-2018 we all thought there would be no way to write the history of the Trump era.  I remember tweeting about it sardonically, as did so many other much finer historians: there would be no way to capture a presidency, I thought, where every week brought a new scandal. But now, only two years after Trump's first presidency (I know, I know, he has no chance, except he had no chance in 2016 either, so I'm counting on nothing in this regard), I think it will be all too easy.  Everything about Trump's presidency, in the history textbook, will be discussed in light of what followed: That pandemic that hit us in 2020 was the defining moment of a generation, much like 9/11 was a decade before. People sometimes foolishly claim that 9/11 brought...

Still working out how often to post on here, clearly.  But it's been an interesting week.  Mostly because my mother fell. My mother is a set of contradictions, as much as anything else.  She's a working-class Italian American girl from a tough neighborhood who was going to be a school teacher but somehow stumbled into the sciences and became a laboratory technician (she finished her Ph.D. in biology the same year I did, only weeks after me; I think that makes her a second generation Ph.D. but will have to look it up somewhere).  A committed atheist who hates religion but who went to all Catholic schools right up through college, she once told me that Catholic schools are good training for atheists, because having gone to one atheism seemed the only logical course of action to her.  A political radical and fierce advocate for racial equality who for years told my Indian wife, then girlfriend, stories about an Indian roommate my mother had once had.  An incre...