Having listened to the forty-odd studio albums comprising Neil Young’s catalogue this spring, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente traces the thread of the Canadian-American musician’s environmentalism back to the first Earth Day fifty years ago. In the hallways of the ages, on the road to history What we do now will always be with us. It’s a…
Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente reviews Bohemians: A Graphic History (Verso, 2014). In Bohemians: A Graphic History (2014), Paul Buhle, David Berger, and Luisa Cetti help a dozen artists bring to life an impressive cast of historical characters who lived on the margins of mainstream society while pushing the creative boundaries of diverse forms of art.[1] Covering the…
Contributing editor Graeme Pente highlights the prescience of nineteenth-century utopian thinker J.A. Etzler and what that might offer us in the face of climate catastrophe. The future is grim. David Wallace-Wells’s recent New York Times bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) looks unflinchingly at what the latest science on climate change suggests is…
Contributing editor Graeme Pente sketches the history of immigration policy in his home country as migration may become a central issue in Canada’s fall federal election. As a settler-colonial society like the United States, Canada also tends to bill itself as a “nation of immigrants.” The line seems to run thus: the genocide of the…
In time for the annual celebration of all things frightening, Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente brings together several recent pieces that address aspects of the rising tide of the far right around the world. Who Loves War? You Guessed Wrong In this podcast episode of Scheer Intelligence on KCRW in LA, University of Rochester PhD candidate and…
Contributing editor Graeme Pente examines the founder of the New York Times. My friends on the political left—the left proper, as distinct from liberals or the figments of Fox News’s feverish imagination—have sometimes expressed shock or dismay at the hostility The New York Times shows to elements of their program. The liberal paper of record’s efforts…
Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente reflects on a summer of research and how researchers are amassing personal digital archives with thousands of photographs in each one. He believes we have an obligation to share them. Like many graduate students, I spent a good part of my summer rapidly snapping pictures of archival documents. I only had…
Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente examines the relationship between neoliberalism and the spread of market thinking to the proliferation of different conceptions of truth, competing truth-claims, and the “post-truth era.” There’s truth that lives And truth that dies I don’t know which So never mind — Leonard Cohen, “Nevermind” (2014) Politicians’ increasingly widespread use of…
In the fifth installment of “The Monuments Among Us” series (see Sara Porterfield’s post on Bears Ears here, Travis May’s discussion of British memorials here, Alessandra Link’s reflection on Louisville’s city parks here, and Caroline Grego’s review of South Carolina house museums here), Erstwhile contributing editor Graeme Pente draws attention to the National Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Covering…
The word “fascist” has been used as an epithet rather casually in the last two years, especially in commentary on US politics. In the hope of bringing clarity to this slippery term, Erstwhile editor Graeme Pente sat down with Dr. Mike Ortiz (Ph.D., CU Boulder, 2017), whose dissertation focused on global anti-fascism in the interwar period, and…
Erstwhile: A History Blog 