Month: October 2020

Recently I read Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. The book has a certain kind of ethos, which I found moving and beautiful, but which can seem -- to some, and to some parts of me -- questionable. In this post, I'm going to try to gesture at that ethos; in the next, I… Continue reading The gestures of trees →

I started reading The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's account of the beginning of World War I. One passage in particular struck me. She describes the German general Alfred von Schlieffen, who authored, in 1905 and 1906, the plan that Germany eventually employed in attacking France in 1914, via Belgium on the right wing. Image… Continue reading Mistaking the plot →