Descent from Glory

Recent News

• For their new show Explained (available on Netflix), Vox tapped Mehrsa Baradaran, author of The Color of Money, to help define the racial wealth gap and explore how “yesterday’s injustice becomes today’s inequality.”
• An ongoing online symposium at Law and Political Economy about Samuel Moyn’s Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World has thus far featured essays from Karuna Mantena, Joanne Meyerowitz, and the author himself.
• An adapted version of Vittoria Di Palma and Alexander Robinson’s contribution to River Cities, City Rivers (edited by Thaïsa Way), on centuries of power struggles over the Los Angeles River, was published at Places.

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May 21: Alcibiades in the Shadow of Achilles

I want to take you back just over 2,400 years to the high Anatolian plain of central Turkey. It’s the year 404 BC; it’s Autumn; and it’s the dark hours of the night. Alcibiades, perhaps the most controversial Greek of his generation, is living in exile in a compound at Melissa—probably modern Afyonkarahisar—where strange rock formations erupt out of the rolling plain, near the fabled Royal Road that runs from Sardis in the west to Susa, capital of Persia’s Empire, in the east. For now, everyone inside is sleeping, but then something awakens them. Perhaps the barking of a dog. Or perhaps the acrid smell of burning creeping through the rooms, or the ever-louder crackling of fire as brown smoke pours in beneath the door, and through the cracks beside the doorposts. Here, from my b…