Quentin's Weeknotes 9/20/20-9/26/20

weeknotes teaching museum books politics

This Week:

I had a socially distant visit with my old friend Nate, who, with his partner and their new son, are driving to New Mexico in a converted House Shuttle.
This week, I taught the transition in Collecting through the Renaissance and Early-Modern periods, with a focus on Cabinets of Curiousity, PT Barnum, and Hans Sloane.
I finished Owen Hatherley’s “The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity” which, like his other books, is funny, insightful, and deeply committed to a just and humane world.
Like a lot of people, I was shocked (okay, not really, the woman was 87) by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Everything that can be said about her (from her amazing feminist legacy, to her more complicated legacy as a Justice, to the impact of her retirement) has been said. So, I’ll just point people to the essay by Howard Zinn that I read every time there’s a shift on the court to remind myself where real power lies, as well as to Political Scientist David Faris’s book “It’s Time to Fight Dirty."