Category: Uncategorized
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Hope for Iran
Imaginative Future History seldom moves in thunderclaps. We remember the explosions.We forget the quiet reallocations of budgets.The curriculum revisions.The young student deciding whether to stay or leave. Empires do not fall only to armies.They shift under pressures too small to headline — until one day the map looks different. We began by imagining rivalry without…
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Rudolf Diesel and the Imagination That Learned to Burn
Rudolf Diesel was born on March 18, 1858, in Paris, the son of Bavarian immigrants who carried Germany with them wherever they lived. His childhood unfolded across borders—Paris first, then London—an early schooling not only in mathematics and science, but in displacement, movement, and the idea that the modern world was already becoming a machine…
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A Cheap Week in Spain
The winter in London was long. It was cold and dark. I went to lectures and drank at night. By February I wanted sun. On the Underground there were posters for Spain. A cheap week. I did not want the Costa del Sol. I wanted somewhere quiet. Someone said Alicante. They said there was camping.…
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When Imagination Forgets to Stop
Along the Same Coast The Baltic speaks in repetition. It does so at Travemünde and again, farther along the same coast, at Peenemünde. The water is flat, the light undecided, the sky slow to declare itself. Nothing in the landscape announces what history will do beside it. And yet two radically different imaginations once took…
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Buddenbrooks; Travemunde to Peenemunde
Two worlds apart in Modern Day Germany Three Hours Apart Three hours by road separate Travemünde from Peenemünde. The distance is modest; the moral gulf is immense. Yet the people who lived, worked, and vacationed in these places belonged to the same culture, spoke the same language, listened to the same music, and shared the…
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The Trains of Spain and USA
Manchester NY and the recent Spanish train wreck: Similarities Hidden Rail Failures, a Century Apart: What a 1911 New York Wreck Reveals About Spain’s Latest Disaster By Martin Ademovic | Special to the Record A century separates the Manchester, New York train wreck of 1911 and Spain’s recent high-speed derailment near Adamuz, but investigators are…
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Buddenbrooks Redux
Imagination in Travemunde The first thing you noticed at Travemünde was not the sea but the way people behaved as if the sea were an excuse. In the city—where the streets ran like rules and the houses held their breath behind tall windows—one walked with purpose, even when one had none. One gave reasons for…
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A Ceasefire to End All Ceasefires
Will Israel fully withdraw? Gaza is 41 kilometers (25.5 miles) long and 10 kilometers wide, and, after two years of conflict, the Israeli army said it controlled most of the coastal enclave. The peace agreement sponsored by US President Donald Trump says Israel would not control or annex Gaza, and that Israeli troops should withdraw…
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The Age of the Knot-Cutter
We are living in the age of the knot-cutter. Our President This is not a comment on ideology or party, but on a style of leadership that emerges when complexity feels intolerable. The knot-cutter is a figure who confronts entanglement—social, geopolitical, cultural, institutional—and concludes that the problem is not the strands themselves, but the time…
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Prosperity, Discipline, and the Moral Divide in American Thought
One of the deepest moral tensions in American political culture lies between two competing explanations for social stability: whether prosperity is sustained by individual discipline or by collective management. The warning that the “greatest danger to the American moral mission is prosperity without discipline” expresses a classical civic fear—that wealth, comfort, and success can erode…
Marty's thoughts 