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1 week ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
A quick follow-up to my latest paying-subscriber post on the historical, ethical, and political problems—the religio-fascist narrative tinge—that emerges from pretending the US Army is 250 years old, that its origins are synonymous with those of the Continental Army: I’m startled, even somewhat shaken, to see Mount Vernon, the major historical site that was the home and business headquarters of George Washington, and has long been a major public-history institution and center of...
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1 week ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
Inspired, or something, by my recent post asking Grok to consider a question about Hamlet and Ophelia, my brother Webster Hogeland decided that, as he put it “rather than getting all Shakespearean” he would ask ChatGPT to deal with a far more immediate question.
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2 weeks ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
The US Army celebrates its birth every June 14 because it officially locates its origins in the creation of the Continental Army, which occurred on that day in 1775. If the official story were true, today would be the 250th anniversary of the creation of the US Army, and if you think big, round-number anniversaries are a big thing, this one would certai…
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3 weeks ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
ME: When Ophelia says '“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown,” is she revealing delusions about the Hamlet she used to know, or does the speech show that she has a keen understanding of his character before his “madness”? GROK 3: Ophelia’s line “O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown” (Act 3, Scene 1) reflects both her emotional attachment to the Hamlet she once knew and a perceptive grasp of his current state.
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1 month ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
George Lewis [sic] told the Englishman, the Italian, and the Jew / You can’t open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view. — Bob Dylan, “High Water (for Charley Patton)”I think it’s important for all thinking and aspirationally fair-minded people of every type and background to look critically, yet again, at the progressive 19th …
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1 month ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
For my recent post on how Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias got up in front of an audience in Wisconsin and presented a scary bar graph about non-citizens getting Social Security numbers that was nothing but total bullshit, I had to do a bit of thinking, and some very quick-and-dirty online research, but nothing deep or heavy. That’s how unconcerned these p…
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2 months ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
In 1798, during the administration of President John Adams, Congress passed the Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president a power to identify, detain, and deport citizens of hostile nations during wartime. The Trump administration has invoked the act in arresting, detaining, and deporting and attempting to deport a wide variety of people. At its inception, the act was a wartime measure; since then, it’s been used only in times of wars declared by Congress.
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2 months ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
If you ask me, the real problem is this cover design (City Lights Books, 1957). You may have seen that the Nimitz Libary at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, has issued a list of books removed from the library in response to an order by Defense Secretary Hegseth. This latest display of what the Trump Administration frames as a crackdo…
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2 months ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedIText within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAs I lay asleep in ItalyThere came a voice from over the SeaAnd with great power it forth led meTo walk in the visions of Poesy.
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2 months ago | 
williamhogeland.substack.com | William Hogeland
When I was an ad copywriter, with a speciality in digital-interactive user experience, I worked on a project where I sat side-by-side at a desktop computer with a gifted data guy and we worked up visual representations of our client’s data—sets of graphs and charts, basically—to tell the story our client wanted to tell, which was about, if I remember correctly, some sort of financial crisis supposedly looming for pharmaceutical benefits managers in state governments.
