Resurgence

1.5 hours writing, 3.5 hours reading / researching, 1 hour phone call, page count = 124

This week's monitor is Christa Roth, in San Francisco. We used to work together at Hispanics in Philanthropy, and she taught me practically everything I know about management. A few years ago, Christa adopted a boy from Russia. His name is Miles, and he's obsessed with Tigger, which is surely a sign of deep and native wisdom. Welcome, Christa!

Well, I'm feeling much better today. I had a great phone conversation with Mary Roldan, a professor of history at Cornell, and author of Blood and Fire, an exemplary regional history of La Violencia that I've cited before on this blog. We had a fun, wide-ranging conversation about local history in mid-20th-century Colombia. In a perfect world, academia would be structured so that political science and history weren't at odds but complementary, and I'd just write books about Colombia the rest of my life. But instead, I get to pursue my other passion, for philanthropy - submitted two job applications over the weekend!

Mary has written about the state of Antioquia, and I was most interested to get a sense of what the archives are like, for the trip I'm planning in the coming weeks. It sounds like they're pretty accessible, but not as organized as they could be. That's OK; I'd rather have to work to find things than to see immediately that there's nothing there.

In terms of writing, I wrote up the piece about comparing my "critical-juncture" argument to others that are out there. These are versions of the "punctuated equilibria" argument in evolution, that things go along steadily until boom! certain moments happen that move things along relatively swiftly and more or less irrevocably. Some authors identify later critical junctures, another an earlier one, and another one that's basically at the same time as mine (1880-1910). Key things I took away from this: I need to think more about whether my critical juncture happens at the same time in all countries, and I need to address the role of political parties, as the two other critical-juncture arguments that include Colombia both score it as heavily influenced by parties, which makes perfect sense.