Stephen Kotkin

Kotkin came to my attention through reading the first two volumes of his projected three-volume history of Stalin (the third volume has been long delayed). I just stumbled upon a two-part interview of Kotkin about his second volume. I was curious about what he looked like and how he spoke, so I watched them both. I found him to be articulate and incisive, summarizing vast swaths of detailed history into memorable oral commentary. He has a trait that I’ve tried to cultivate, which is the ability to speak continuously without saying “uh” or otherwise stammering just to fill space.

Those interviews were courtesy of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a notorious conservative bastion. At the time, he was still a professor at Princeton. Since then, he left Princeton to become a fellow at the Hoover Institution.

There are several interviews of Kotkin online giving his takes on current events. Most interesting to me are his takes on Ukraine. Until now, my touchstone on this issue has been historian Timothy Snyder, whose books “Black Earth” and “Bloodlands” I’ve read, and whose Yale course on Ukrainian history I binge-watched on Youtube. I’m also a subscriber to Snyder’s Substack.

With Kotkin, I was interested in hearing how another Russian-speaking historian analyzed the current war in Ukraine. I was pleased to see that there’s little apparent daylight between Kotkin and Snyder. This, in spite of the fact that Kotkin’s interlocutor asks questions based on quotes from the Murdoch Street Journal. He must have been a very effective teacher at Princeton, judging from how effectively he instructs his interviewer. 

Well worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ww4ofe0v70

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yes, the CDC can change its mind

The Nobel Laureate economist Paul Samuelson famously acknowledged in a Meet the Press interview: “Well when events change, I change my mind. What do you do?” This observation applies to the advice from medical authorities such as the CDC and WHO during the COVID pandemic. Some members of the public are fond of pillorying these agencies for having published different guidelines at different times, as though health officials are in the business of issuing ex cathedra dogma rather than responding to incomplete and ambiguous information. Science doesn’t deal in proof, it deals with the weight of evidence. A scientific hypothesis is one that is capable of being tested and falsified by experiment. I get it. I used to teach problem-based learning to first year medical students, and they often struggled with what to do with incomplete and ambiguous information, which is what physicians in clinics do every day. Sometimes, one cannot wait for all the tests to be completed and all the data analyz...
Read more

I agree with RFK Jr.

Though it feels weird to say it, RFK Jr and I agree on something: curtailing direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceuticals. “ The Trump administration is discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients, in a move that could disrupt more than $10 billion in annual ad spending.   Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.   “The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to d...
Read more

About that Trump lawsuit

So Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch for defamation because of the release of a salacious doodle. Nothing remarkable about Donald J. Trump weaponizing the legal system against his opponents, I know. But there are some things that do bear remark here: “ . . . he's suing Rupert Murdoch personally. But you know who he's not suing? Lachlan Murdoch, who's actually the chairperson of News Corp and Fox, who's actually the decision-maker. Rupert Murdoch has no official role there anymore. He's an adviser.   “So, I thought that was revealing in a lot of ways, because it isn't just about going after the entity. It's sort of this expansion spillover, trying to send as much of a message as you possibly can. He's sort of hitting every potential lever, not just against Murdoch and that empire, but then all the other media properties in the future. It's also about sending an example.” “HAYES: Yeah. That, to me, is the point here, is that these lawsuits are not lawsuits...
Read more