Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is a novel built on the slow recovery of memory. Rather than unfolding in a straight line, the story emerges through chance encounters and long conversations between the narrator and Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian. At first, Austerlitz appears as an eccentric scholar, obsessed with fortifications and railway stations. Gradually, however, we learn he is a Holocaust survivor, sent on a Kinder transport from Prague to Britain at the age of four. His life becomes clearer little by little, as if he himself is uncovering it alongside the reader.

Sent away from Prague on a Kindertransport at the age of four, he was raised in Wales under another name, unaware of his origins. His adoptive parents, though well-meaning, effectively erased his past. They gave him shelter but not a history, safety but not belonging. Their refusal to acknowledge his origins—partly out of love, partly out of denial—left him doubly orphaned: first by the Nazis, and then by silence. His adoptive mother dies then his adoptive father, an eccentric minister, loses his sanity when Austerlitz is still a child.

The brilliance of Sebald’s narrative lies in this pacing. The novel mirrors how trauma is recalled: obliquely, unevenly, with sudden moments of clarity followed by long silences. As Austerlitz revisits train stations, libraries, and archives, memory attaches itself to physical spaces, and the architecture he studies becomes a metaphor for his own buried history.

Sebald’s novel is also a meditation on the way the Holocaust (and by extension the entire war in which the Holocaust occurred) brings pain and trauma to lives far from the horrors of the Nazi death camps. The victims were not only those who were murdered in camps, but also those who survived in exile—especially the children. Austerlitz, though “saved” from the Nazis, grows up an orphan of memory, severed from language, family, and belonging. His life is marked by absence: the parents he cannot remember, the home he lost before he knew it, the identity he had to reconstruct decades later. In this sense, Sebald insists that survival itself carries its own tragedy.

The use of blurred photographs embedded in the text deepens this sense of fractured memory. Images of buildings, train stations, and unidentified faces appear like ghosts, reminders of a past that resists full recovery. The photographs do not clarify the narrative; instead, they underscore its uncertainty, leaving both narrator and reader adrift in a landscape of half-revealed truths.

By the novel’s end, what remains is not closure but the recognition that some losses cannot be repaired. Austerlitz’s search is both noble and futile: he uncovers fragments of his past, but the larger picture remains irretrievably broken. Sebald’s shows that history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, is not a single story but a set of absences that shape the lives of even those who “escaped.”

Austerlitz is a masterpiece of memory, architecture, and mourning. It reminds us that the Holocaust claimed not only lives but also futures, identities, and connections—that even those rescued as children were haunted by destruction for the rest of their lives.

A Man Called Intrepid: How Intelligence Kept Britain Alive in World War II

 

William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid tells the story of Sir William Stephenson, the Canadian who became Britain’s intelligence chief in the United States during World War II. The book shows how espionage was not just an accessory to the war but a decisive factor in Britain’s survival against Nazi Germany.

By 1940, Britain was battered, nearly alone, and short on resources. What kept the country in the fight was a hidden network of intelligence and subversion. Stephenson’s British Security Coordination in New York linked MI6 with American counterparts, built support for Roosevelt’s pro-British policies, and paved the way for the OSS. Espionage provided more than information; it delivered influence.

Through deception and propaganda, Allied intelligence pushed Hitler into major errors. British support for a coup in Yugoslavia diverted German forces into the Balkans, forcing a delay in the invasion of Russia. Those lost weeks ensured the Wehrmacht ran into the Russian winter before reaching Moscow. Similarly, manipulation of German perceptions helped convince Hitler that Britain and the United States were weaker than they were. When Japan struck Pearl Harbor, Hitler rashly declared war on America—an act that sealed his fate.

The book makes clear that the war was fought as fiercely in safe houses, code rooms, and radio stations as on battlefields. Intelligence turned Britain’s weakness into time, time that allowed American industry and manpower to enter the war.

Stevenson’s account sometimes edges toward the dramatic, but the core argument holds: without Stephenson’s covert empire and the Allied ability to mislead Hitler, Britain might not have survived 1940–41. A Man Called Intrepid is a reminder that victory in World War II depended as much on deception and espionage as on tanks and planes.

I love this book.  I would recommend it to anyone interested in World War II and espionage.

Talking Electric Cars in a Rural Massachusetts Restaurant

 

I'm in Providence RI for the week.  My wife is at a math conference. I am riding and visiting friends here and in Boston.  Yesterday I rode east toward Taunton MA. On the way back I stopped at a local restaurant named iAlive in Rehoboth MA.  They describe themselves as a comfort food restaurant.  And they live up to the description.

I ordered the Monday lunch special: Scrod, mashed potatoes, green beans and rolls.  The portions were so big I was not sure I could ride the rest of the way to Providence.  Perfectly baked scrod.  

I sat in a small booth in the middle of the restaurant.  The counter near the entrance was full with a dozen customers who clearly knew each other.  They joked in thick Boston accents.  

Across from my booth was a table with six men between late 60s and early 80s.  They were railing against electric cahhs when I sat down.  "They sit for an ow-ah waiting for the chah-jahs," said one of the loudest of the group. The others laughed and added their stories of watching electric car owners wait for chargers. 

When my food arrived, I watched a 1986 Formula 1 race on my phone as I ate so I could not hear the conversation around me. 

When I finished eating (and watching Nigel Mansell win the British Grand Prix), I looked over and saw a woman sitting at the end of the table across from me. The talk was quieter.  I looked around toward the far end of the restaurant and saw eight women sitting at another table set end to end with the "guys" table.  I smiled thinking six men and nine women all about the same age meant six couples and three widows (men don't live as long as women).  

The woman at the men's table went back to the women's table.  The men started talking about a fair in Taunton.  

When I walked out I looked around the parking (pah-king) lot.  Several pickup trucks and big SUVs.  A few sedans.  No electric cars.  None of those guys were going to get stuck waiting for a chah-jah!!

RFK Jr. Has Turned Fake Science into America's Reality

If Trump did nothing more than appoint RFK Jr. as Health and Human Services Secretary, Trump would be the worst President in American History. 

The following is by Jonathan Cohn of The Bulwark. 

Last Tuesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump administration was canceling about half a billion dollars of federal contracts with companies and institutions that have been working to develop the next generation of mRNA vaccines.

MRNA stands for messenger RNA, the naturally occurring genetic material that cells use as their guide for making proteins. Vaccines with mRNA have a synthetic version of the material, with “coding” instructing cells to manufacture proteins that are part of viruses or other hostile elements, so that the body’s immune system can learn to recognize and fight them.

Research in this field goes back decades, with the first clinical trials of an mRNA vaccine (for a cancer treatment) in 2008. In early 2020, when COVID hit, the technology was ready for primetime. Scientists developed, tested, and mass produced mRNA vaccines that contained instructions for a protein spike on the coronavirus surface.

The process took about eleven months—a medical miracle given vaccines usually take years to develop¹—and it worked, saving literally millions of lives worldwide. Now the hope is to improve on that progress, making it possible to develop and deploy mRNA vaccines even more quickly in response to future outbreaks and to other medical threats, as well.

To realize that potential, the Biden administration decided to invest heavily in mRNA research, much of it through an agency called BARDA, which is the federal government’s R&D division when it comes to pandemic and bioterrorism preparedness. But BARDA is part of HHS, which means it’s now under the control of Kennedy, whose hostility to vaccines generally—and mRNA specifically—is no secret.

In May, he announced that he was canceling a contract with Moderna—which produced one of the original COVID shots—to develop mRNA vaccines for other purposes. Now he’s canceling nearly two dozen more.

Kennedy made the announcement in a two-and-a-half minute video and accompanying press release, in which he stated “we reviewed the science” and “listened to the experts.” Several days later—after repeatedly declining to answer inquiries (including mine) about just what science and experts he had in mind—HHS updated its online press release with a link on the word “data.”²

The link is revealing, though more for what it says about Kennedy than what it says about mRNA technology. It goes to a page with a long list of studies that purportedly show the harms of the vaccines. But, notably, the page itself is not a government website, nor is it from a peer-reviewed journal or some other reputable source. Rather, it’s a storage page on an open website where anybody can post data, coding, or other research tools for sharing.

And what you’ll find on the website is exactly the sort of stuff you’d expect to find on a site with no gatekeepers. The authors listed on the mRNA page include a scientist who has touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and another who has claimed the COVID vaccine creates toxins in the body. According to the listing, they and two collaborators originally compiled the citations for Toxic Shock, an independently published 2024 book that claims that mRNA vaccines “are the real menace to our country’s long-term wellbeing.”

That book, by the way, has an introduction by Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican senator known for spreading vaccine misinformation. It also includes a chapter from author Naomi Wolf, who famously claimed (among many other things) that COVID vaccines were causing miscarriage.

To say these views are out of step with the scientific consensus would be an understatement.

Here, for example, is what top researchers have actually found when it comes to the claim on vaccines and miscarriage.

And here’s a Factcheck.org overview of some other misleading or false claims that show up regularly in anti-mRNA rhetoric.

And here’s an article from STAT³ on all the experts who think mRNA vaccines look like the best weapon against future pandemics.

But you wouldn’t know any of this by listening to Kennedy speak. That’s because he has perfected the art of undermining public confidence in vaccines by leaning on a tiny handful of fringe researchers and then sounding “sciencey”—throwing around bits of medical jargon—to give the impression he’s an expert himself.

“This is what upsets me about him the most—and believe me, there are a lot of choices—but what upsets me most about him is that he couches his reasoning in scientific terms,” Paul Offit, physician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, told me in a phone interview. “It makes it sound like he knows what he’s talking about when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about at all.”

Offit is one of the most widely respected, widely quoted vaccination experts on the planet. So in order to get a reality check on Kennedy’s rhetoric—and some perspective on his decision to pull mRNA funding—I asked him and a few of his peers to evaluate some of the key claims from last week’s HHS video.

Here’s what they had to say.

Kennedy Claim 1: “MRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract.”

The idea that the COVID vaccine didn’t work is a staple of anti-vaccine rhetoric. And it is plainly not true. Studies have shown convincingly, unequivocally that taking the shot reduces your chances of getting very sick—and, ultimately, of dying.

“They probably saved 3 million lives in this country—and an estimated 250,000 people, roughly, lost their lives because they chose not to be vaccinated,” Offit said.

One reason Kennedy’s argument might sound convincing is that it gestures at somewhat complex reality: The vaccine did not stop transmission or prevent disease altogether. People were expecting a total eradication, the kind the polio vaccine delivered. They didn’t get it.

But while that’s partly a result of experts and public health officials overpromising—a mistake they’ve hopefully learned not to make next time—it’s also a result of people like Kennedy pretending there’s no difference between getting sick from COVID, which still happens all the time, and getting sick enough to die, which happens a lot more rarely.

“MRNA vaccines against COVID are very good at preventing people from dying from COVID and very good at preventing people from being hospitalized due to COVID,” said Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious diseases physician in New York City and the author of the book Booster Shots. “That’s really, really important.”⁴

Plus, Ratner said, there’s always the chance that mRNA vaccines could become more effective after more research—for example, the type that the United States had been funding until Kennedy canceled it.

“I just don’t think you can extrapolate to what mRNA vaccines will do in all infections based on what they do for COVID,” Ratner said.

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Kennedy Claim 2: “One mutation and the vaccine becomes ineffective. This dynamic drives a phenomenon called ‘antigenic shift,’ meaning that the vaccine paradoxically encourages new mutations and can actually prolong pandemics as the virus constantly mutates to escape the protective effects of the vaccine.”

It’s true that respiratory viruses can mutate quickly, reducing the effectiveness of vaccines. That is precisely what has happened with COVID, as it moved through variant stages from “Alpha” to “Omicron.”

But even with Omicron, “we still saw very strong [vaccine] protection against serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths,” said Michael Osterholm, professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota.

Osterholm, another widely respected scholar who is coauthor of a forthcoming book called The Big One, was especially exasperated by Kennedy’s use of the term “antigenic shift.”

“This is a classic example of someone who has no idea what he was talking about,” Osterholm said, explaining that what’s actually happening is antigenic “drift”—the phenomenon of viruses mutating incrementally in ways that reduce but don’t eliminate vaccine effectiveness.

“This is what he’s really good at, throwing words out there,” Osterholm said. “The level of protection against clinical illness and infection—meaning transmission capacity—is reduced over time, yes. But the level of protection against serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths actually is quite sustained with these vaccines.”

As for the idea that the vaccine has caused the virus to mutate more rapidly, that didn’t make a lot of sense to Kathryn Edwards, an internationally respected infectious disease professor at Vanderbilt.

“There is a natural mutation of viruses,” Edwards said. “Flu changes every year, and that’s clearly not a function of the vaccines—not enough people are vaccinated for that to be the case.”

Offit ticked off a list of technical reasons why he thought Kennedy’s theory about the vaccine accelerating mutation of the virus was wrong.⁵ “I don’t think there’s any evidence that is what’s happened,” Offit said, noting that COVID has been stuck in its Omicron phase for a while now.

“We’re still in the Omicron era,” Offit said. “So where is Pi?”⁶

Kennedy Claim 3: “MRNA technology poses more risk than benefits for these respiratory viruses.”

The specter of awful side effects is probably the one that fuels vaccine skepticism the most, in no small part because figures like Kennedy have repeatedly insisted certain kinds of shots cause autism, despite mountains of research debunking that theory.

But while all vaccines can cause mild reactions and some can, on rare occasions, cause more serious side effects—as all medical interventions do—“hundreds of millions, probably billions of people got the mRNA shots,” Edwards noted, “and the reactions really were quite minimal.” If there were serious, widespread risks associated with the vaccines, she noted, the evidence of it would be everywhere.

It’s one more area of broad consensus among scientists—including Ratner, who called Kennedy’s claim “wildly disingenuous. There are some side effects of the vaccines, but those are greatly outweighed by the protection that you get against COVID.”

The condition that frequently comes up in these discussions is myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, which monitoring showed was a rare side effect of the shots (and one that appeared mostly just for adolescent boys and young men). Moreover, myocarditis is substantially more likely to occur—and to cause serious harm—for unvaccinated people who get COVID, Offit noted.

“I would argue,” Offit said, “this is one of the safest vaccines ever made.”

THESE WERE JUST THREE of the specious claims Kennedy made; there were others, too. But it’s likely that for many people who viewed the video—especially RFK Jr.’s most dedicated MAHA acolytes and longtime admirers of his anti-vaccine activism—hearing fact-checks from the likes of Offit, Osterholm, and the others may not make much of an impression.

That’s not true for everybody, however. Lots of people actually do listen to the most credentialed, most highly cited experts, because they assume those are the people who know best. It’s a good assumption—and all the more reason to worry that Kennedy is ignoring them so brazenly, in ways that could hurt so much in the future.

1 That speed is one reason why the scientists behind the vaccine were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine three years later.

2 The online press release as it was originally published, without any link on the word “data,” can be seen backed up here and here. So much for Kennedy’s pledge, during his confirmation hearings, to usher in an era of “radical transparency” at HHS.

3 The STAT article is by Helen Branswell, one of the most trusted journalists on this subject, who called Kennedy’s decision to pull mRNA funding a “crippling blow” to pandemic preparedness.

4 The idiosyncrasies of respiratory disease do have implications for vaccination, Offit added, but not in the way Kennedy explains it. Upper respiratory diseases tend to have short incubation periods, which will always make blocking infection more difficult. But that’s hardly the same as rendering them ineffective. “The goal of the vaccine for a short-incubation-period disease is to prevent serious illness,” Offit said. “That’s the goal—to keep you out of the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, keep you out of the morgue.”

5 Among the reasons that Offit cited was the role of cytotoxic T-cells in the immune response—which, Offit said, remained able to do their jobs of fighting infections even after viruses have mutated.

6 Although the COVID variants are named after the letters of the Greek alphabet, a couple of letters have been skipped. 

"Colossus" at 20: How Niall Ferguson's American Empire Became Reality

 

Colossus by Niall Ferguson (2005)

The Republic Is Dead. Long Live the Empire.

In Colossus, Niall Ferguson strips away the post–Cold War illusions of American restraint and neutrality. He lays out a blunt thesis: the United States, for all its protestations, has always functioned like an empire. What makes America different, Ferguson argued in 2005, isn't a lack of imperial ambition—it’s the country’s refusal to admit it.

Ferguson saw America as an “empire in denial.” It had military bases across the globe, economic leverage everywhere, and cultural influence that dwarfed that of past empires. What it lacked, he claimed, were three key ingredients to make that empire sustainable: the will to act long-term, the cash to pay for it, and the people willing to run it.

He was half-right.

The 20 years since Colossus hit shelves have been a case study in imperial evolution. Ferguson's warnings have aged better than most predictions from that era. The United States didn’t withdraw from empire—it doubled down. But it didn’t become Rome or Britain 2.0. It became something uniquely American: an empire without borders, without colonial offices, and without a consistent moral compass.

The Will:

What Ferguson thought America lacked—imperial will—turned out to be plentiful. Not in the form of long-term strategic planning, but through endless war and intervention dressed up as counterterrorism, humanitarian action, or “democracy promotion.” Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, drone strikes in a dozen countries. The will wasn’t missing—it just wasn’t honest about its goals.

The Cash:

Ferguson worried about imperial overreach breaking the American bank. Instead, the empire learned to run on debt. Trillions spent, deficits shrugged off. Military budgets climbed while bridges crumbled. The financial system became an extension of the empire—Wall Street as colonial administrator.

The People:

Ferguson thought Americans wouldn’t want to run the empire. But who needs boots-on-the-ground administrators when you have surveillance tech, global finance, and client states? A handful of military contractors and NGOs filled the gap. It’s empire by proxy.

And Now, 2025:

Two decades later, America looks less like the “shining city on a hill” and more like the imperial core Ferguson predicted—overextended, bureaucratically sclerotic, and increasingly indifferent to the ideals of the republic it once was. Domestic surveillance, a permanent war state, and a foreign policy driven by commercial interest (and Trump's infinite personal greed) rather than democratic values have become normalized. The line between citizen and subject is blurry. Elections feel ritualistic. Congress is performative. The courts are political. Empire has swallowed the republic.

Ferguson’s biggest miss was that he still wanted to rescue the project. He saw imperial America as a potential force for good—if only it would admit what it was and act with competence. But competence wasn’t the missing piece. Integrity was. By 2025, it’s clear: America isn’t an empire in denial anymore. It’s just an empire run by a pathetic wannabe dictator.