So I’ve been VERY busy this summer, as I’ve alluded to, but I haven’t really explained why on here. It’s the main reason my updates have been fewer and far between than I have wanted.
Among the things I’ve been up to:
My new book, The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age has been finished, edited, proofed, and will be out in December!
I wrote a short piece for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that talks about one aspects of the book — Truman’s “stop” order on atomic bombings, issued on August 10th, 1945.
I’ve been working on the Oregon Road ‘83 game with a great group of undergrads this summer, moving it forward significantly.
And… I’ve been in the process of an international move.
Yeah, that last one is a biggie.
For various professional and personal reasons, I haven’t been advertising the latter loudly online, but now it is essentially a fait accompli, so I will just put it out there. For the next year at least, I will be living in Paris, France, and will be a visiting researcher at the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po. My wife and our dog, Lyndon, will be with me; we’ve uprooted ourselves almost completely for this. (We fly out tomorrow. Expect an update next week.)
I’ll still be an associate professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology for the next year at least — who have been, as always, incredibly supportive of me (and this is not about them at all) — but I will be on leave and not teaching or doing any service duties.
I have many reasons and thoughts for pursuing this very actively, but I don’t feel the need (or desire) to post them all online. But to address the obvious question: yes, this is in part a response to the current political situation in the United States, and its many implications for higher education, and specifically what it means to be a humanist in higher education. This has been some eight months in the making, and so far nothing has happened that has made me think that our initial conclusions have been wrong. I don’t claim to know what the future holds, and I’d be happy to be wrong. But right now I’m just excited to start something that feels genuinely new and open-ended. That sentiment is of course mixed with the more bitter aspects — leaving friends, colleagues, students, selling a house, etc., and jumping into a new, entirely foreign context.
What will I be doing next year? Some of that is still a bit in the air — there are possibilities out there which have not fully crystallized yet — but at a minimum I will be doing more writing, research, working on the video game, and making some video essays. So that is exciting in and of itself, and feels somewhat fresh. And I may be doing some other things as well, depending on how the cards fall. But the upshot is that I should be posting more on here than I’ve been able to for the past year.
What I will be doing after the next year? That remains undetermined, unforeseen!
So that’s my news. I’m aware that such news triggers a very broad range of possible responses in people — perhaps someday I will write about them, because they are interesting in and of themselves, but now is not the time for that!
I have some more, delayed updates of things I’ve been up to over the last few weeks, but I’ll save those for another post, as I think they would be drowned out otherwise!
D'accord pour la semaine prochaine! More updates soon!