You know, some of these centers indeed emerged in the 1970s, like at Columbia and Notre Dame. But many others, like this one, came when human rights were the morality of the End of History in the 1990s, and they have been defined by the realities of the last 25 years — of that moment when there was an open acceptance of unipolarity and an implicit acceptance of neoliberalism. And human rights were about global justice within the terms of those two facts. Uh, but they’re not facts for long!

Uh you know, in the haze of insanity that has marked many of his statements, Vladimir Putin remarked the other day that the Ukraine war is about whether the West accepts that the unipolar reality is passing. And I think he’s right about that.

And when it comes to neoliberalism, it’s under unprecedented challenge — Liz Truss fell from power today because she tried to restore it in its pure Thatcherite form. And it’s not by any means dead. But we don’t know what the terms of struggle over its succession will be like. And what’s the relation of the human rights idea to these changes? Well I’m not sure that it’s going to have a major role . . . .

Sam Moyn speaking as member of the large stage panel assembled for an evening of celebration of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the University of Chicago’s human rights center last year — held the same day Liz Truss’ brief tenure at 10 Downing ended, in a coincidence of perhaps no great significance.

‘Do I have an opinion on Tim Snyder’s analysis?’

I’m going to be sharing an opinion because — Tim is very beautiful, but Tim is doing a fascinating balance between being a public intellectual and historian and being an activist. And we’ll be exploring that balance of his.

He is getting — what you’re not seeing, ’cause everybody loves Tim in the public sphere — but he’s being eviscerated in the academy. A lot of people are very mean about him at the moment for over-generalizing, for jumping too quickly to conclusions.

So we’ll try to parse that out, actually, by clarifying, always, What hat is someone wearing, right? ’Cause you don’t want to criticize somebody, right, for not cooking good mashed potatoes when they’re trying instead to do a parsnip purée.

That’s Vlad Vexler replying to a livestream attendee’s question this week and promising, in a video to come one of these days, to give Tim Snyder a closer critical look.

(To follow Snyder’s every word would be a full time job. I do think his whole fall Yale Open Courses series on Ukraine a solid recommendation and also, at the same time, am taking interest in cautions about his material as I have opportunity to consider them.)

[UPDATE: Vexler delivers at some length, about 45 min. It’s a pretty good listen, a thoughtful analytical performance. He, too, encourages you to give Snyder’s Ukraine lectures a try, I want to note.]

[Capehart] I can’t help but think of Nikole Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project when reading your book The Rediscovery of America. You and she not only argue for, and present, a fuller telling of our history, in the process, you’re challenging how we as a nation view ourselves. This is just my view. I’m wondering, is that a stretch for me to say?

[Blackhawk] Well, I really was intrigued by your kind of general thematic emphasis on race in America. We do kind of live in a historical environment in which multi-racial paradigms have yet to fully dislodge the kind of binaries of black-white racial formation or studies that are at the heart of much recent American historical inquiry. So, I’d like to think that The 1619 Project and The Rediscovery of America are both moving us towards a point where we can have more interrelated, rather than segmented, multi-racial histories. And I was insufficiently able to fully engage some of the classic and really recent kind of canonical works in African-American history, some of which have really helped expose things like the hybridity of Native-American communities in the American South, who incorporated generations of African-American runaways, slaves and later freedmen. And we hopefully can reach a point in the not-too-distant future where we’re not talking about racial histories in isolation but in relationship. . . .

[Capehart] I think we might be around the same age. I’m old enough to remember, you know, those encyclopedias or biology books where you’ve got the main page and then you’ve got those plastic overlays, that — you lay one down, you see one set of organs, you lay another one down, you see more, but you see them all together. And looking at The Rediscovery of America and having looked at 1619 Project, that’s what it felt like to me. . . .

[Blackhawk] You know, that’s a great kind of visual and even pedagogical metaphor to think about . . . .

From (about the last third of) a not-very-long conversation between Jonathan Capehart and Ned Blackhawk on Capehart’s Washington Post show, which I confess I’m only listening to for the first time here. Occasioned by a thread by High Country News writer B. Oaster this week.

Not all the media-biz news out there is terrible. (Most of it by far is, yeah, okay.)

This I’m a bit slow to learn of — partly perhaps because my own audio consumption doesn’t lean so much to entertainment-style general-audiences podcast fare. But if you’ve followed me here for a while, chances are that you’ll have a sense already of my interests in cooperative organization and in smaller-scale media and publishing.

Useful comparisons with the reorganized Maximum Fun are Defector, more text- than audio-content and entirely employee-owned, and Nebula, video / audio only and creator- (rather than employee) owned in significant part.

I’ve listened several times to the Anne Conway episode, below, of Justin Sledge’s Esoterica series. My education from youth well into adulthood (owing heavily to church community I chose for myself), no doubt conventionally like that of many North Americans in the broad strokes at least, established an idea of the British 17th century dominated by Puritans. (Who did, after all, literally dominate for a good stretch there.) That’s had by extension lasting implications for my picture of N.-Atlantic-world modernity and, really, of the whole course of western-Christian cultural evolution. Certain aspects of the wider historical reality that tend to be obscured in such a picture are captured nicely in a snapshot way, it seems to me, in Sledge’s short presentation here.

Especially would like to be more tuned in on connections between the secondary-stream, theology-inclining (and more or less heterodox) strands of early modern turns in Christian-society intellectual culture and what’s going on in the 19th century rolling over into the 20th with figures like Bergson. I’d also like to be more attuned to the knock-on effects of Inquisition and Iberian expulsions of Jewish populace around turn of the 16th century, with impacts in e.g. Amsterdam, on those early modern currents in northern Europe & Britain.