Robert P. Baird lives in Kampala, Uganda and recently completed a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His website is robertpbaird.com and he's on Twitter (@bobbybaird). Email: [email protected]
by Robert P. Baird In a recent review of The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published “novel,” Garth Risk Hallberg writes: In the end, Wallace’s body of work amounts to an extended philosophical experiment. Can “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction help free us from the prisons we make? To judge solely by his suicide,…
by Robert P. Baird A little over a month ago I asked Mahmood Mamdani if he’d be willing to have a conversation about Ugandan politics in advance of the presidential elections here. Often described as the intellectual heir of Edward Said, Mamdani has attracted praise, scorn, and much international attention for his richly detailed and…
Historians are generally quick and correct to insist that we jump to easy political analogies at our peril. One of the first lessons of historiography is that grand generalizations are more apt to flatter an author’s own sympathies than to capture a disinterested abstraction of events. Did Tunisia, Wikileaks, Facebook, or Twitter contribute to the…
Aaron Bady won the internet last week with his explication of a pair of essays Julian Assange wrote in 2006. Paddling against a vomit-tide of epithets and empty speculations that threatened to bury Assange under a flood of banalities, Bady proposed and executed a fairly shocking procedure: he sat down and read ten pages of…