Hammer & Jack

Tag: history

  • revolution

    The work of the French Revolution never quite got finished, and the problems with a capitalist industrial economy—problems that were spotted almost immediately by both participants and observers of the new industrial paradigm; thinkers that thought it was not a tenable system included economists, politicians, factory owners, journalists, and bankers, as well as utopian visionaries—broke…

  • Mirrors: Eduardo Galeano

    Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone. Eduardo Galeano, translated from Spanish by Mark Fried. 400p, Nation Books, 2010. (Powell’s) It all began at Christmas two years ago, when my daughter was four-years-old. And it was the first time that she’d ever asked about what did this holiday mean? And so I explained to her that this…

  • From Comic Con to Opera Seria

    This night… we went to the Opera, which are Comedies & other plays represented in Recitative Music by the most excellent Musitians vocal & Instrumental, together with variety of Seeanes painted & contrived with no lesse art of Perpective, and Machines, for flying in the aire, & other wonderfull motions. So taken together it is…

  • Worlds Collide

    I was fascinated by this profile, in The Smart Set of Henry Steel Olcott, the American leader of a Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. It would be hard to find a better example of an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things than Olcott’s life, spanning from antebellum United States: Henry Steel Olcott began life…