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1 week ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
What would you tell young people graduating today — given how much is horribly broken in our world? Frankly, I was glad the question wasn’t addressed to me, and I was as eager as any of the roughly 200 people in the audience to hear the answer. It was last Friday, and I was in a theater in downtown Washington, D.C. at the DC/DOX film festival, for the world premiere of my new documentary The Last Class.
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1 week ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
The naked pretense for this authoritarian parade was always a farce. This was never about celebrating the U.S. Army’s birthday. It was about appeasing the fervid whims of a small man, playacting his militaristic tough-guy fantasies. Lost in the bluster of endless coverage is any real consideration of the Army’s actual historical origins—and what they might tell us about our moment.
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2 weeks ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
We can never truly know what it was like to live in a time other than our own. Still, I often wonder what those who will look back on this moment—decades or even centuries from now—will see from their vantage of detachment. Much of that, of course, will depend on what happens next.
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3 weeks ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
Dear Friends,If you’re in need of a smile today, I hope you’ll keep reading—and please share with others. The world could use a little more happiness in our inboxes. I was scrolling on my phone last night, confronting the doom and gloom that seems to be everywhere, feeling my anger rise—when I came across a story that made me feel something increasingly rare: a moment of pure, unabashed joy.
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3 weeks ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
We measure time in many ways—by years, generations, and centuries. Monarchies marked the reign of kings. Today, we use the quadrennial cycle of presidential administrations. In sports, we recognize eras and dynasties. In music, evolving genres and successive styles. In art, new schools and movements. To make sense of our world, we contextualize experience into containers we can count, note, and sort. And yet, time does not start and stop in tidy delineations.
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1 month ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
On this Memorial Day, we can’t help but wonder about the future of our nation. We honor those who gave their lives to protect and defend this land and its ideals. While we also recognize the deep imperfections of our history and our uneven and sometimes tragic path toward progress, which has included wars not always just or in service to our nobler instincts.
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1 month ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
English offers a rich vocabulary for describing things coming apart—each word echoing the slow, inevitable slide toward entropy that defines the physics of our universe. With so many verbs to choose from, we instinctively pair them with certain nouns, shaped by repetition, memory, and habit. Fabric frays. Concrete cracks. Earth erodes. How lovely that these pairings are often alliterative. Wood warps. Stone splits. Metal melts.
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1 month ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
Dear Friends,I’m having a sickening sense of déjà vu, flashing back to the early days of the pandemic. Remember when Covid-19 case counts still seemed isolated and low, but infectious disease doctors and researchers were urgently trying to explain the concept of exponential growth to the public and policymakers? They warned us that the virus was already everywhere, even if we couldn’t see it—and that it would inevitably get much worse. Where are those prophets of science now?
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1 month ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
It is the height of American self-centeredness to see every occurrence on the global stage through the lens of how it pertains to us. However, we justify this view through an undeniable truth: For decades, our nation has been the most dominant power—militarily, politically, economically, and culturally. There are forces, akin to the laws of physics, that shape the fate of nations, and the United States exerts a disproportionate gravitational pull on the rest of the world.
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1 month ago | 
elliotkirschner.substack.com | Elliot Kirschner
I hate waking up to a headline that really pisses me off. I hate it even more when reading the actual article just makes me angrier. This morning, at the top of The New York Times website, was an article entitled: “Harvard’s President Is Fighting Trump. He Also Agrees With Him.”Both of the headline’s sentences are problematic—borderline abominations. I’ll get to the first one in a moment. But let’s start with the second. Whoa boy.