This posting follows close on the heels of the last one, which summarized an interdisciplinary conference I attended on “Rivers of the Anthropocene.” The conference left me with a lot to consider. There has been some informal discussion on Twitter about what an equivalent conference organized around coasts would look like. What is the anthropocene […]
I just finished Lena Lenček and Gideon Bosker’s The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth. [1] There’s a lot to think about here, but the most intriguing part of the book for me was the discussion of how many well-known modern beach resorts were—in various senses—built on reclaimed land, and cannot survive in their […]
Most of my readers, like me, will be shivering in the hemisphere of cold, snow, and ice for the next few months. If only for relief, I thought this would be a good season to write about more summery themes. My next few postings will be about the modern beach. It’s been a while since […]
I’ve received a number of questions about islands this year. In response, I’m trying to catch up on the scholarship surrounding them. This will be an ongoing process, but today I can offer a progress report. Utopias and Lost Worlds In Eccentric Islands, the poet and travel writer Bill Holm celebrated offbeat destinations like Iceland […]
