Mark R. Stoneman

@markstoneman.com

774 Followers 788 Following

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (🇩🇪 to 🇺🇸); longtime resident of Washington, DC, now caregiving in Conway, NH (he/him) 🏳️‍⚧️🇺🇦🗽 🌐 markstoneman.com 🗞️ stoneman.page 🔁 @markstoneman.org (from 🦣)

Text Shot: Thinking in terms of dichotomies – either/or, tradition/modernity, people/nation, myth/reality – is rarely productive. The most effective formulations will combine tradition with modernity, the secular with the sacred and reality with myth. The mythical worldview is inherent in every person, modern or not – we simply cannot live without it. It manifests itself especially powerfully in times of crisis and upheaval. –Yaroslav Hrytsak, Ukraine: The Forging of a Nation, trans. Dominique Hoffman (PublicAffairs, 2024), “Interlude: A Brief History of Ukrainian Song."
Text Shot: “The cops, together with the enlistment office,” are driving around towns in minibuses, “stopping everyone and taking them away,” people warn one another on social media.
Two women and one man from the upper middle class. The former are seated, and the latter stands in front of them. See blog text for title and captions.
A man in gray with a big mustache is standing amidst a group of dead women, children, and babies. All are drenched in the color of blood. A naked baby hangs from the sword he holds.
Text Shot: Perhaps the most psychologically devastating part is that occupation forces people to constant moral compromise.
Text Shot: Under occupation, reality becomes dominated by fear. And fear erodes trust. Some people collaborate with Russian authorities and report neighbors they suspect of supporting Ukraine or having ties to Ukrainian forces. Since danger can come from anywhere, people isolate and start to suspect everyone around them. It feels like nowhere, and no one is safe.
Two pair of shoes worn by humans laying in the grass, one pair from an adult, the other from a small child, each shoe is decorated with a flower.
Text Shot: When I see the destruction and the consequences of the occupation, I still naively think every time: ‘It shouldn’t be like this.’ Every time it feels that Russian shells hit the building of reality itself and cracks run along its fragile walls, and the world now lives according to the cruel logic of a terrible dream, from which it is impossible to wake up. – Oleksandr Mykhed, The Language of War (Allen Lane, 2024), “Explosion of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.”
Record label from the 78 of "When that man is dead and gone"
Text Shot: These days, I often have no words, which for me is saying something. Perhaps I'm still processing the American insanity that makes every day feel like I'm stuck in a time loop à la Harold Ramis's 1993 film "Groundhog Day." Or maybe I'm growing numb and dumb. In any case, I took this photo in North Conway on the actual Groundhog Day last week with nary a rodent in sight.
Sidewalk a couple days after the snow storm. Old train station visible. A snowy mountain and early setting sun in the background.
Small frozen, snow-covered lake. In foreground a sign: 'No Lifeguard on Duty'
Text Shot: People thinking about how to create web spaces for more productive and meaningful interactions might profit from a recent post by Mark Bernstein that draws inspiration from interwar Vienna’s coffee houses. See “Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna,” A List Apart, Oct. 15, 2025. It is also relevant to people interested in online sociability more generally.
A lobster and her spouse at the No Kings protest in Conway NH.
Text Shot: This winter, close to thirty tenured faculty at my regional public university in New Hampshire will “voluntarily” leave their positions… I am gutted for New Hampshire, and particularly for the North Country, the rural area that my regional college serves. Many of the Pell-eligible, first-generation college students that attend my university are students who, data shows, likely would not go to college at all without our university close to home. Because we “live [tax-free] or die” here in the Granite State, students pay exorbitant costs already to access higher education. And now the budget situation means the closing of many, many majors; the reduction of choice in what careers and passions our students can pursue; the possible consolidation or closure of campuses; and the reduction of student support and library services.
small light-blue/purple asters
Text Shot: Hayward, California [1940]. Youth on Relief. Looking in his pocket for his surplus commodities card. 'Not having a job is bad enough, but you keep goin' down and purty soon you're here and the spirit is gone. I turn my face when somebody I know real well comes along the sidewalk. It takes the spirit when you're in here and then you haven't anything left.'
Bright red foliage with a blue sky. Fir trees are also visible.
close-up of light-blue wild asters
Postcard with a photo of a woman from above the waist. She is wearing a man's suit and a top hat, and she has a pipe in left side of her mouth. The look on her face is playful.
Postcard with a photo of a woman from above the waist. She is wearing a man's suit and a top hat, and she has a pipe in left side of her mouth. The look on her face is playful.
Text Shot: Quoth Adam Kinzinger @adam_kinzinger@threads.net: I will say, watching the behavior of the Generals today, respectful but reserved and apolitical in the face of Trump was heartening. Hopefully the next generation of officers, the young ones, see that and take it to heart.
Text Shot: Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man's eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons. – Franklin D. Roosevelt, on poster titled "Books are weapons in the war of ideas" (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1942), via Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/pictures/item/96502725/.
Snapshot of the mountains named in this post from the shore of Lake Chocorua. Blue sky and some clouds.
Blue sky, small white wooden church in the camera's focus, a small road and power line in front of it, trees on either side, a mowed field in the foreground and a small wooden post fence from the cemetery.
RAPTURE-PALOOZA poster with Anna Kendrick and Craig Robinson, A MATCH MADE IN HELL.
Sunflowers at sunset with a bit of the Russian embassy in the background. A Metrobus seems to be hiding behind the leaves.
A black man's left forearm and fist and a white man's left forearm and fist shown striking a big swaztika. The black man has a broken chain dangling from his wrist. The text reads, 'Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!'
Man in a red Japanese outfit talking to the Russian Bear in green army trousers and brown army boots as he sits on the ground and holds his head. Stars over his head indicate the hits he took. There is ocean behind them and then the sun, indicating the far east. On the horizon, four warships have been blown into the sky.
Row of app icons from a screenshot of my iPhone in with black wallpaper. From left to right, the apps are Overcast, Drafts, Ivory, and Ulysses.
Illustration shows President Theodore Roosevelt firing a cannon to send a life-line to a ship in distress on rough seas with dark clouds labeled 'Prejudice' forming overhead; the rope spells out the word 'Tolerance'. A rainbow shines on the left with the word 'Liberty'. In the lower right corner is a quote from 'The President's Reference to Immigrants'.
Text Shot: It’s a common refrain that the news industry has failed to come up with a functioning business model in the Internet age, but that’s not entirely true. Jettisoning the requirement to report news in favor of inciting the rage and fear and hatred of your audience before serving them up ads for guns and bunkers is a perfectly functional business model. It might not be journalism, might be the opposite of journalism, but the checks clear. – Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), chap. 2.
Text Shot: If we take the Clausewitzian metaphor of war as a duel somewhat literally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a struggle between two equals, two entities with the same dignity, the same right to exist. After all, duels have traditionally been fought between two parties capable of giving satisfaction for a perceived injury by one to the other’s honor. An officer could duel another officer, but not a sergeant, a lowly conscript, or a civilian occupying a more modest social position. By calling its invasion a “special military operation,” Russia denies Ukraine’s worthiness and sovereignty. It casts Ukraine and Ukrainians as other, fundamentally inferior, or devoid of honor, so to speak. Rejecting Ukrainian statehood outright, the term “special military operation” facilitates what the talking heads in Russia discuss openly on state TV: genocide, the elimination of Ukrainian culture, ethnicity, and language.
Index card (3 x5 inches) with Grandma's summary of her Christmas cookie production between 1977 and 1985. 753 med to lg in 1977, 1042 tiny in 1978, 1352 tiny in 1979, 1192 tiny in 1980, 1067 med to lg in 1981, 438 med to lg in 1982 ('six varieties only'), 529 med in 1983 ('five varieties only'), unknown for 1984, 538 in 1985.
A parking lot with cars, mountains in the background, at sunset, with peach-colored clouds in the sky.
Text Shot: The California National Guard had 72 soldiers whose enlistment was set to expire during the deployment. Of those 72, at least two have now left the Guard and 55 others have indicated that they will not extend their service, according to the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is fighting Mr. Trump’s deployment in court. That number, if troops act on it, would amount to a 21 percent retention rate, far lower than the Guard’s typical 60 percent rate, officials said. –“Trump’s National Guard Troops Are Questioning Their Mission in L.A.” https://archive.ph/9lLIt
Text Shot: When Putin says that “all root causes of the crisis … must be eliminated,” he is referring to his sorry-ass excuses for ordering the illegal invasion of Ukraine. His words are nothing more than empty rhetoric to justify seizing Ukrainian land, kidnapping Ukrainian children, raping and murdering Ukrainian civilians, torturing and starving Ukrainian prisoners of war, seeking the eradication of Ukraine’s language and culture, and more.
color cartoon from Puck magazine that shows a bunch of incarcerated men and youth of various backgrounds in prison. They are wearing black-and-white striped prison garb, and they are all pointing indignantly at a single, smaller, empty cell reserved for what collar criminals.
Cartoon sketch with text in German that I’ve translated in the body of this post.
Map of most of Canada and USA showing wildfires and air quality. The fires are most prominent in central and western Cansda, and affected air quality can be seen especially from the Midwest eastward through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway.
Text Shot: Putin’s regime and its supporters would have us believe that Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine is purely defensive. This 1939 propaganda image by Heinrich Hoffmann and its accompanying caption offered a similarly cynical story in the run-up to Germany’s invasion of Poland. In this tall tale, Britain appeared as the aggressor, arming for no good reason. The giant anti-aircraft cannon was meant to suggest “monstrous” bellicosity.
Black and white photo of a large anti-aircraft cannon in peacetime with six uniformed men. It appears to be armored on all but the back side.
Photo of chalk drawings on pavement: a snowman, a sun, an arrow, and a flower. The pavement also has its own drawings in black tar, the sealant added to the cracks this past spring.
Text Shot: If we do not course correct, if we do not vote these bums out of office and demand or do better ourselves, we can look forward to the end of comity. Instead of gradual, if often bumpy or unsettling change, we’ll get brutal, systematic oppression followed eventually by violent, institution-destroying revolution. Imagine something like the French Revolution or the Russian/Bolshevik Revolutions instead of the American Revolution.
Text Shot: The United States is not a forgotten Elysian island. Our two oceans connect us with the rest of the world; they do not separate us. They are carrying, at this moment, machine tools, automobiles, raw materials, and all manner of manufactured goods to the whole world and they are bringing here other materials, such as rubber, tungsten, and tin, that are absolutely essential to the continuance of production at even its present level. They protect us, still, from armed attack upon our soil, but they do not protect us from assaults upon our economy or upon the public mind. They in no way relieve us of the responsibility of doing everything that a great nation can do to maintain a world order in which the interests
Text Shot: Placing will above reason; the ideal over reality; appealing, unremittingly, to totem and taboo; elevating tribal fetishes; subjugating and destroying the common sense that grows out of human experience; of an oceanic boundlessness, Naziism … is the enemy of whatever is sunny, reasonable, pragmatic, common-sense, freedom-loving, life-affirming, form-seeking, and conscious of tradition. – Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), p. 3.
Text Shot: Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: “Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it’s the KKK he’s copying.” – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap 6.
Text Shot: Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the general public. Security officers will enforce these restrictions, and your cooperation is appreciated.
Text Shot: The question that has dominated strategic warfare since it emerged a century ago remains the central question today: Does strategic warfare work? For the moment, the answer seems to be no; at the very least, it cannot on its own win wars or … induce an adversary to change its posture. – Raphael S. Cohen, “The False Promise of Strategic Bombing,” Foreign Affairs, February 18, 2025
Grey, wet sky with wild green field framed by a tree on each side and filled with trees in the background. The colors are all dampened by the light rain.
Book cover for Silvie by Jennifer Sattler. Silvie, the protagonist, is a pink flamingo.
Text Shot: Western journalists are … taught to report various interpretations of the facts. The adage that there are two sides to a story makes sense when those who represent each side accept the factuality of the world and interpret the same set of facts. Putin’s strategy of implausible deniability exploited this convention while destroying its basis. He positioned himself as a side of the story while mocking factuality. “I am lying to you openly and we both know it” is not a side of the story. It is a trap. – Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap. 5.
Text Shot: Putin has correctly surmised that lies unite rather than divide Russia’s political class. The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin power. – Charles Clover, quoted in Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, chap 5.
Text Shot: As always, the most accurate assessment of the mood in the Kremlin came not from its robotic public statements, but from its highly-paid propagandists in the TV studios. Since they are regularly briefed by the Kremlin’s handlers on what they can and can’t say, their scripted narratives and carefully crafted discussions offer the best window into the regime’s views and aims.
A middle-class woman and her son, dressed as if in a nice town or city, but they are in an industrial area, factories on both sides of them, smokestacks and power lines, hazy, presumably polluted. There is a small road, but no sidewalk. They are walking in the dirt and gravel.
The brothers' heads poking out of the locomotive, smiling, as they look down at something from the moving train.
Photograph shows librarians, mostly women, in large room with alphabetized drawers of catalog cards; 1917 Red Cross poster by Hayden Hayden hangs on the wall.
Black and white photo of a woman at a behind-the-scenes catalog with a library cart with books and other items she's apparently pulled for researchers or for Congressional staff. She is squatted down with an open book, a card she is consulting, and an open card catalog drawer.
Older apartment buildings of six and more floors with balconies. Newer, tall buildings in the background. Small cars on the street, some parked. Street food vendors with red tarps against the sun. An assortment of wires running from a single pole to the older apartment buildings on each side of the street.
Newspaper ad from the studio's pressbook featuring Stanwyck's legs and shoulders. The teaser asks, 'How would you lead your life—if you weren't afraid of being talked about?'