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CONDITION: An Excellent Lunch wiA34 A34e Learned Bill Janeway!:

The brilliant Gary Gerstlea€!. The brilliant Tim Snydera€!. His remarkable Ukraine lecturesa€!. The 
remarkable Forging Global Fordisma€\. That genius Adam Toozea€!. The learned Sven Beckerta€!. 
America as a developmental statea€!. That genius Alexander Hamiltona€!. & many other topics
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FOCUS: Small People Dealing wiA34 Looming Fascism:


I volunteered to write an introduction to the reissue of three of my favorite alternate-history 
novels: Jo Waltona€™ s a€ceSmall ChangeaCO series:

• Farthing: Publishers Weekly: Starred: a€oeWorld Fantasy Awarda€“winner Walton (Tooth and Claw) 
crosses genres without missing a beat with this stunningly powerful alternative history set in 
1949a€!

•  Haa€™Penny. Publishers Weekly: a€oeThis provocative sequel to acclaimed alternate history 
Farthing (2006) delves deeper into the intrigue and paranoia of 1940s fascist Great Britaina€!. 
World Fantasy Awarda€“winner Walton masterfully illustrates how fear can overwhelm common sensea€!

• Haifa Crown: Publishers Weekly: a€oe Walton's fine conclusion to her alternative-history 
trilogya€!

Writing an introduction to a set of novels is hard! I want to SPOIL ALL THE THINGS!!!! But that 
would make people sad.
Herea€™ s my first draft: Does this work?

It started when David came into the lawn absolutely furious. We were down at Farthing for one of 
Mummy's ghastly political squeezes...

Jo Walton's Farthing seems to open in our world, in the upper-class English milieu of the 
mid-1900s. Farthing opens as a drawing room romantic comedy. The first voice we hear is that of 
thea€’’shallow?a€”ingA©nue. Hair. Pearls. The "dim... complete nincompoop" antagonist Lady Angela 
Thirkle. The ingA©nue's family's and their circle's belief that her marriage to David is a 
mA©salliance.

Then it shifts: at the end of Chapter 1 we realize that all of it has been the ingA©nue's 
explanation^’’scatter-brained and digressivea€”of why her reaction to the murder of Sir James 
Thirkle was "it well and truly served [Angela] right".

At the start of Chapter 2 enter the detective: Inspector Peter Anthony Carmichael. Farthing is now 
an English police procedural. And it is not our world. It is, rather, an alternate-history novel: 
We learn that Carmichael was "one of the last to get away from Dunkirk". We learn that it is 1949. 
We learn that England had "fought Hitler to a standstill". We learn that "Adolf admired England and 
had no territorial ambitions across the channel". We learn that England
and Hitler's Germany are good friends.

And so it shifts again: the ingA©nue's marriage to David is a Christian-Jewish marriage. That has 
suddenly become very fraught. Farthing is no longer a police procedural. It is, rather a novel of 
looming fascist dystopia.

The last of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms is: Freedom from Feara€”fear that someone 
might destroy the pattern of your life and so upend your pursuit of happiness, might imprison you 
and so take away your personal liberty, might execute you and so take away your life. Whatever 
other disagreements we might have about how to organize society, perhaps we all could agree that it 
needed at a minimum to provide us with Freedom from Fear:
security for our resources, for our persons, and for our lives. Once we recognized that as the 
foundationa€’’bought into the liberalism offeara€.”much could be built that would be solid, and 
good.

Or, rather it would be solid until it was not.

The Roman Republic was not a creature you wanted as a neighbor, and you really did not want it to 
come to visit. However, if you yourself were a citizen, and thus within the charmed circle, the 
Roman Republic secured your liberty: your Freedom from Fear. It had done so ever since King Tarquin 
the Proud had raped Lucretia Collatini and immediately been forced to flee for his life, or so the 
story went.


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Release date: June 2,2023 (USA)

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ONE IMAGE: Aze Arming of Akhilleus:


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OA34er Things Azt Went Whizzing bya€!

Very Briefly Noted:

•  Ethan Mollick: How to... use AI to teach some of the hardest skills: a€~When errors, 
inaccuracies, and inconsistencies are actually very usefula€!. You can create assignments, right 
now, using ChatGPT, that we will help stretch students in new ways...

•  Barry Ritholtz: 10 Tuesday AM Reads: a€~Why Muska€™s meltdown matters. Muska€™ s tweet was 
dangerous, ignorant, and insultinga€!. Why should we pay attention to a man-child who seems to 
delight in provoking people who care about democracy, truth, and decency?a€!. See also How Elon 
botched his war on hots PLUS: Why ita€™ s time to start leaving Twitter behind (Platformer)a€!

•  Matthew Cranston: FTXa€™ s inner circle a€“ including Sam Bankman-Fried a€“ had chat group 
called a€~Wirefrauda€™ a€!

• Matt Levine: How to Do Fraud at a Futures Exchange: a€~Oh Sama€!

• Max Chafkin: The FUD Behind the Crypto Collapse: a€~Sam Bankman-Fried and Binancea€™ s Changpeng 
Zhao were ostensible partnersa€!

• Jonathan Last: The Coup Texts: a€~The Republican politicians who wanted a€oeMarshalla€D lawa€!

• Stephen Witt: The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computera€!

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AJs:

Friedrich Engels: Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Chpt. 3): a€~The production of the means to 
support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all 
social structured!. The final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be 
soughta€! in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the 
philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing
perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become 
unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have 
silently taken place with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no 
longer in keeping. From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities 
that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed
condition, within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by 
deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the 
existing system of production...

John Ganz: What Is Even Happening?: a€~There has been something hallucinatory and psychotic about 
the past half decade or so: a sense of reality melting and a stomach-churning, vertiginous glimpse 
into the abyssa€!. Real fascism had Ezra Pound and CA©line as its bards, I guess our 
second-time-as-farce fascism has Kanye Westa€!. Is this just an accident brought on by temporary 
mental illness, or does this reflect something deeper or more problematic
going on in the culture and society? Is this a real thing or a spectacle? Is fascism in our era 
merely chimerical or a living political reality? My answer is, a€oeWell, Why not both?a€Da€!

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