Sublime

culled

In 2014 American character changed. A large and influential generation came of age in the shadow of accumulating failures by the ruling class—especially by business and foreign policy elites. This new generation had little faith in ideas that previous ones were raised on: All men are created equal. Work hard and you can be anything. Knowledge is po

monster waves, operated for his first three years with the quite remarkable cover of “surfie,” a globe-trotting beach boy looking for the perfect point break. He was one of the first foreigners

As the American ecologist Aldo Leopold deftly put it, we need to transform the way we see ourselves, ‘from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it’.41 Thanks to forty years of Earth-system research, we have a rapidly improving scientific understanding of how the Holocene epoch – with its stable climate, ample fresh water,

Americans gone rogue, as Prentice puts it, have long been a part of the Philippines’ landscape, but Truman Hunt, an inveterate liar, a bigamist and a slave driver, seems nearly unparalleled as far as scoundrels go. In some sense, this slick-talking charlatan becomes a stand-in for America itself, or a certain version of America in its more opportun

In eighteenth-century America, Colonial society and Native American society sat, unhappily, side by side. As time went by, settlers from Europe began defecting to live with the natives. No natives defected to live with the colonials. This bothered the Europeans. They had, they assumed, the superior civilization, and yet people were voting with thei

I was expecting a wealth of amateur historians, with an encyclopedic knowledge of the fur trade and fresh insights to borrow, but the first twenty people I talked to had never heard of Joe Walker. Reading history books, it turned out, was not a popular

The two men could not have been more different. Hunt was a charming risk-taker, and came to regard the tribespeople as a commodity. Schneidewind, who had been married to a Philippine woman who died giving birth to their first son, treated “his” tribespeople like family. He invited them to his home to meet his son and to eat dinner with them.

The resurgence of the indigenous peoples of the Americas means many things. One is that there are usually cracks somewhere in the inevitable and the obvious. Another is that capitalism and state socialism do not define the range of possibilities, for the indigenous nations often represent significantly different ways of imagining and administrating