I am grateful to a friend for recommending Timothy Snyder’s recent Yale lecture series, “The Making of Modern Ukraine” (2022), because it embodies precisely the type of boundless curiosity and command of context that led me to study history. Here’s a fabulous example from the preamble to the second class:

…when we’re thinking about this social form of the nation, what makes it particularly tricky is that the nation, once it exists, lays claim to the past. So the nation didn’t always exist but once it comes into existence, it tells a story about the past and the story that the nation tells about the past is wrong. That’s the short version. It tells a story which clears out the past and that story calls itself history. Although it’s not really history, it calls itself history.

We forget, for all of our recent tribalism, that the record not only includes what happened but also attempts to tamper or meddle with the record. We also forget, as a culture now obsessed with keeping score, the value of being able to navigate such context. It is so conspicuously absent from our present discourse that it often feels to me as though we’re on the cusp of inventing it.

Comedian Pete Holmes’s You Made It Weird podcast is consistently one of the more thoughtful ways you can spend a few hours. Last week, he sat down with one of my favourite television creators, Bill Lawrence.