The Curious Engineer

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French Reflections

davidabell.substack.com

My writings, mostly but not entirely about French history. Click to read French Reflections, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

HistorySociety / politics / economyEssays / personal

’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
122 from 19 Nov 2022 to 21 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (28 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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2026 23

  1. The French Protests and French History
  2. The French Protests
  3. The Need for Courage--And More
  4. AI P.S.
  5. Another AI Apocalypse
  6. The Future of Plagiarism
  7. The Future of Academia
  8. Is Truth Dead?
  9. On "Ideological Diversity"
  10. Paris Transformed (Again)
  11. Self-Defeating Moralizing
  12. Beating AI in the Classroom
  13. Resistance and Dissent Under Trump
  14. Resistance and Dissent Under Trump
  15. Military Arithmetic
  16. New Writing
  17. America in 2026
  18. Normandy 1944/2026
  19. Anti-Liberal Historians
  20. Jean-Paul Marat
  21. On Viewpoint Diversity
  22. "We are not an American colony"
  23. The Dumb-roe Doctrine

2025 35

  1. 2025: The Year of Trump?
  2. The American Historical Association Divided
  3. How to Celebrate the 250th?
  4. New Work Roundup
  5. No A for Effort
  6. Do We Need to "Stop Trusting the Experts"?
  7. France and America: Twin Crises, Different Trajectories
  8. The Rise in Left-Wing Violence
  9. The Power of Political Martyrdom
  10. The Myth of Faculty "Indoctrination"
  11. Macron's Fatal Misreading of History
  12. Harvard's Dilemma
  13. "An Officer and a Spy"
  14. Government by Extortion
  15. Derangement
  16. Houses Divided
  17. On Academic Productivity
  18. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble...*
  19. The End of the Affair
  20. Why This Assault on the Universities is More Serious than Earlier Ones
  21. Public Knowledge
  22. The Humanities Will Survive Artificial Intelligence
  23. Short Post: Are Universities Trying to "Have it Both Ways"?
  24. My Evening with Dominique
  25. The Ideological Offensive
  26. Trump's War on Science, con't
  27. Trump is Trying to Destroy Higher Education. Why Aren't Students Doing More to Protest?
  28. The McCarthyite Assault on Columbia University Ramps Up
  29. What Academics Do--And What Americans Don't Understand About It
  30. The Acceleration of Time
  31. Bobby
  32. Dave... and Elon
  33. Vichy
  34. The American Oligarchs and their Ideologies
  35. The End of History and the Age of Oligarchy

2024 21

  1. The Itch to Write
  2. Short French Politics Update
  3. Speak, Memory
  4. Academic Freedom and Its Limits
  5. On the Brink
  6. Days of Awe
  7. What Can Presidents Actually Do?
  8. The Enlightenment That Wasn't
  9. The Decline and Fall of J.R.R. Tolkien: From “The Lord of the Rings” to “The Rings of Power”
  10. A Beach House Divided Against Itself
  11. The Presidential Race
  12. The Biden Tragedy
  13. Le vieux Paris n'est plus
  14. Mob or Crowd? 1789 and 2024
  15. The Trump Trial
  16. In Our Political Language, World War II has Never Ended
  17. On Dune, Eugenics, and the New Film
  18. Writing About Lives
  19. Recent Writing
  20. Against “Pointiness,” or, What is Really Wrong With Elite College Admissions
  21. What is Liberalism?

2023 33

  1. The Election's Judicial Turn
  2. On Plagiarism, and the President of Harvard
  3. The Plight of the Elite University President
  4. Historians and the Public
  5. More Napoleon...
  6. Napoleoniana
  7. Natalie Zemon Davis, 1928-2023
  8. Quoting Napoleon
  9. The French Republic and Muslim Schoolgirls
  10. Why We Need University Courses in Public Speaking
  11. Playing Around with Machine Translation
  12. The New French Far Right
  13. How to Put America's Elected Monarch on Trial
  14. Biden’s Charisma Deficit, and Why it Shouldn’t Matter (but Does).
  15. The Death of the Magazine
  16. Two New Opinion Pieces
  17. Drawing Historical Parallels
  18. On the Writing of History
  19. What a French Middle School Reform Tells Us About How to Improve our University Admissions System
  20. Score One for the Evil Empire
  21. Summer Reading
  22. Are We Still in the Forever War?
  23. Liberty, Equality, Slavery
  24. “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
  25. Normandy, 1944
  26. How (and How Not) to Cover the "History Wars"
  27. The Ukraine War Debate
  28. In Memory of John Merriman
  29. Recreating the Past
  30. Erasing the Terror?
  31. The Limits on Change in Universities
  32. Debating the history of "total war"
  33. My Essay on "American Exceptionalism" in "Myth America"

2022 10

  1. Microhistory Today: On Thomas Dodman’s “Ordinary Radicalization.”
  2. What to Do About the History Job Crisis
  3. Ukraine, Genocide, and the French Revolution
  4. Universities; Enlightenment
  5. History Publishing and the NYTBR
  6. Debating the French Revolution
  7. Academic Publishing's Poor Stepchildren
  8. New Publications
  9. About "French Reflections"
  10. Coming soon