iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Journalistic malpractice: constant complaints about the extra $3.3 trillion (over 10 years) from the new tax bill; failure to point out that deficits were _already_ going to total $21.1 trillion over the same interval. Reckless fiscal policies driving the US off a cliff. www.cbo.gov/publication/...

cbo.gov

The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2025 to 2035

By the NumbersThe Budget Outlook, by Fiscal YearNotesSee Appendix B.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Summertime — when there are actually seats available in the best campus reading rooms!

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Reposted by William Glenn Gray

Agence France-Presse @afp.com · 02/06/2025

L'historien et éditeur Pierre Nora, membre de l'Académie française, est mort lundi à l'âge de 93 ans, a annoncé sa famille à l'AFP.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

When your letterhead carries an amazing font, every letter commands attention. (Admittedly, the drawing is kind of cheesy.)

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

This week's new archive was the Archiv Grünes Gedächtnis (Archive of Green Memory) in Berlin-Friedrichshain. They're only open a few days per week but they're very nice and have an enormous collection on the environmental movement, as one would expect!

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 18/05/2025

Second archive last week: the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich (built 1972 – was that peak brutalism?).

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

I’m actually seeing a bit of Argentina stuff since it’s often alphabetically in the same folders as Brazil. I’m in the 1970s today so I’ll try to get impressions where I can.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

But since they performed the search I have no way of knowing if there’s another cache of super-sensitive material they’re deliberately holding back. I will say that they clearly didn’t go through what I ordered to remove files, given the timing of the correspondence.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

Not too much postwar stuff is processed & open yet, but they are using the Nachlass of Hermann Abs as an entry point. And since he was at the heart of it all for several decades, that’s not bad! I’m working through two days’ worth of Brazil material and it’s fairly good.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

In Podgorica? (Frantically googling to pretend I got the reference, but no.)

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Today’s archive visit took me to the Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt. The mother ship of German capitalism called me home.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

People in my book group raved about the audio version. Multiple voices _can_ be cheesy but in this case it apparently works brilliantly.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Hearty congrats to Stefano Palermo, who successfully defended his Purdue dissertation prospectus – "Business Europe: A History of the European Round Table of Industrialists." Shaping up to be a landmark study on 🇪🇺 integration! @rkpejsova.bsky.social @drdaveatkinson.bsky.social @palstef.bsky.social

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Aki H Heikkinen @akihheikkinen.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Expressen: US abandons planning of new military exercises in Europe US has notified its allies that it intends to stop its participation in planning for upcoming military exercises in Europe. Already scheduled ones for 2025 are not (so far) affected www.expressen.se/nyheter/varl...

expressen.se

Uppgifter: USA hoppar av militär- övningar i Europa

USA har meddelat sina allierade att man tänker stoppa sitt deltagande i planeringen inför kommande militära övningar i Europa, erfar Expressen. Flera övningar i Sverige kommer att beröras av beslutet.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

These are passing thoughts from a historian of 20th-Century Europe. I have no idea how to organize institutional memory preservation at scale. What I can say from experience is that even academic history departments are not very good at passing along accumulated knowledge! 8 & final.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Corruption will make the challenge of restoration all the harder. MAGA loyalists will cynically abuse their power to enrich themselves and form mutual back-scratching networks. Outside interested parties will continue to offer bribes, given that such behavior is becoming normalized. 7/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

In effect, what we're dealing with is a wave of refugees from a foreign-occupied capital. We need to know what they know, so that after DC has been "recaptured," there will be some way to return to accountable governance. 6/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

One information nexus will be the government's on-staff historians (also fired?), though they may not have detailed knowledge of present operations. Privacy issues will arise in any recounting of paused investigations – and what to do with essential classified information? 5/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

So it seems urgent to debrief the fired workers now. Hundreds, perhaps thousands. They will need time and resources – and emotional support! – to commit their agencies' procedures to paper. Who will sponsor them? Private foundations may need to "adopt" specific agencies. 4/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

When the country's fever has broken – in four, eight, twelve years? – rebuilding such agencies will be a post-apocalyptic task. Nobody will be left who remembers how things used to work. Human and digital memories will have evaporated. Not enough of a paper trail any more. 3/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

We have to assume that many of the most competent people staffing the federal government are already out the door, searching for new work; and that the new agency leaders of "guard rail" institutions like the DOJ, FBI, or SEC will actively prevent them from functioning. 2/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

State capacity. Institutional memory. How can we preserve these things in the wake of mass firings and – perhaps even worse – several years of Trumpian cluelessness? Perhaps @historians.org is already at work on this, but anxiety over this woke me up last night. Some thoughts: 1/

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Yes, but this is the kick that Europe needed. Now there's a threat on two fronts, so the case for a heightened (unified?) military posture is clear to most everyone. Rearmament can no longer be decried as getting caught up in America's wars; quite the contrary. Terrible for the US, good for Europe.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

Wow. These folks are off to a great start with an… obvious falsehood.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 17/02/2025

What is the message of the protest, I wonder? There are so many outrages being perpetrated that I worry any oppositional message will be muddled. “Rule of law” is the core problem but that kind of rhetoric played poorly for the Harris campaign.

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Maria Popova @popovaprof.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

So I’m curious, if the US invades Canada would that falsify the democratic peace theory or prove the US is no longer a democracy?

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Reuters @reuters.com · 09/01/2025

On his public journey to embracing Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), Elon Musk has frequently amplified the online content of one young supporter of the party - climate change and COVID-19 lockdown sceptic Naomi Seibt reut.rs/405LtXL 1/8

reut.rs

Meet the influencer who has Elon Musk's ear on Germany's far-right

On his public journey to embracing Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany, Elon Musk has amplified the online content of one young supporter of the party: Climate change and COVID-19 lockdown sceptic Naomi Seibt.

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Alissa Walker @awalkerinla.bsky.social · 09/01/2025

Not what I thought I'd be writing about when I picked the name Torched. Thanks to everyone for checking in. We're fine. Many of our friends are not fine. I tried my best to describe what's happening with the fires and what LA needs to do now www.torched.la/zero-percent...

torched.la

Zero percent containment

Reporting from a city, torched

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 04/01/2025

“Today” is an expansive concept for the historical crowd, I guess!

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 03/01/2025

Forthcoming from @stanfordpress.bsky.social, a fascinating study on the Banat by Tim Olin! Proud of the great history scholarship coming out of Purdue's Ph. D. program. Discount code in the flyer.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

New article alert! Did not expect this to come out before the New Year, but here we are. Thanks to Felix Jiménez Botta for editing the special issue - it's a nice set of essays on human rights in West Germany! doi.org/10.1177/0022...

doi.org

Almost Infamous: Amnesty International, the Bonn Republic, and the Brazilian Dictatorship, 1964–85 - William Glenn Gray, 2024

This article examines human rights activism in West Germany on behalf of political prisoners and torture victims in Brazil under the military dictatorship (1964...

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 11/12/2024

Glad to see that my review of Hesse's _Exportweltmeister_ is out! The book is a "must" for folks interested in German political economy. @quinnslobodian.com

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Sounds like a plot line straight out of Chaplin’s _Great Dictator_!

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Joachim C. Häberlen @jchaeberlen.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

Now Cambridge UP has approached me regarding using my book as training data for AIs. (They do offer a royalty of 20%, though it's unclear 20% of what exactly, and how much that would be in real numbers.) I'm curious: what do colleagues think about this?

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

I've been wondering the same thing. I mean, maybe AI will improve through exposure to our immaculate prose? (grin) On the other hand, it does feel like we're being asked to train our own replacements... not that I entirely believe AI will get there.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

This is bad, folks. Without Gallium and Germanium we’ve already lost half of Western Europe!

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

Yeah, it came with brass screws — which disappeared shortly before installation day. The cat and the 4-year-old each blame the other.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

(Never mind, it listed just fine. Still getting used to Bluesky, sorry!)

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

New doorbell! But you need to click on the picture to see the design — I don’t know how to control the format otherwise.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Mood is _always_ better on a day like today, with 500+ words down on paper (metaphorically speaking). Why can't I get myself to do this every single day?! It only takes a few hours of good concentration to redeem this tab.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

The problem with following only sensible Ukraine voices is that it's hard to imagine what kinds of nonsense the "Putin peace" camp in Germany is flinging around: BSW, AfD, die Linke, large parts of the SPD. So, good to have encountered a poorly informed German-speaking colleague here on campus.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Got an indirect sense today of what the Ukraine conversation on the left wing of the SPD might sound like. (1) Ukrainians are starting to favor peace with partitions because they've lost so many loved ones. (2) Zelensky just escalated the war with long-range missiles. // Both wrong-headed!

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Andrew Hartman @andrewhartman.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

This by CS Lewis hits.

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William Glenn Gray @willgray.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

My Germany-Brazil project isn't mostly about culture – the main focus is on trade, corporate investments, and development aid, the "triad" of German engagement in Brazil – but these tangible expressions of cultural influence make the work more fun along the way.

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