I’ve been reading – and fighting – Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts; feeling admiration and anger in equal parts.

But Wiebe didn’t have the evidence to sustain many of the assertions that fed his thesis. Many of the things which he said happened in the Gilded Age had happened earlier and other things didn’t happen at all. Nonetheless, it’s a great feat of storytelling to fit so many disparate details into a simple framework. Even though I disagree with Wiebe, I always keep my eye on The Search for Order as a model of historical writing.

Well, I almost never agree with anything anyone in the current administration says, but I read their press releases and interviews and late-night tweets regularly, because I need to stay informed.

Hamilton – I disagree with him much more than I agree with him. This book is very much a book about a father and a son. The father is painted as the bad guy, and the son is the good guy, struggling to break free. I don’t accept that interpretation, or that framework of analysis. Nonetheless, Hamilton writes with a verve, an electricity, a passion, that’s rare among academic historians. As a researcher, he’s extraordinary.

Wasting time reading blogs, magazines, newspapers. They have their place but they can become an addiction. And the real ways to gain understanding about issues are reading books and traveling.