150 years

Gettysburg sesquicentennial celebrations are up and running. So far this article about Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels and this interactive map of the battlefield are my favorites. I didn't know that some of Shaara's research was new and influential at the time, though I did suspect that he had something to do with getting going the hagiography of Joshua Chamberlain.

In other news, I just bought Doctorow's The March. Don't know much about it, but looking forward to reading it.

Reinventing Writing

I just taught myself how to write in Latex yesterday. My instinct is to say it felt like learning to read another language, but it didn't. It felt like jumbling the entire idea of writing. It must have been a strange moment to learn to type in Word however many years ago, but I don't remember what that was like. This was probably just as strange and just as rare.

At least now everything I write will look just as official, and credible, as any other upstart economics graduate student anywhere else in the world.