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Why I Teach Machiavelli Through His Letters

Hello! It’s been a while since I posted since, as usual, many projects press, so it’s rare for me to have the time to write the kinds of polished essays I like sharing here. But I’ve been hoping to share more things, since a lot of the history work I’ve been doing lately has helped […]

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Machiavelli and Intellectual Technology, plus Shakespeare & Summer Updates

Hello, patient friends.  The delight of brilliant and eager students, the siren call of a new university library, the massing threat of conjoining deadlines, and the thousand micro-tasks of moving across the country have caused a very long gap between posts.  But I have several pieces of good news to share today, as well as new thoughts on Machiavelli: Most important: […]

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Machiavelli V: Why We Keep Asking “Was Machiavelli an Atheist?”

Was Machiavelli an atheist?  We don’t know and never will, but we can learn much about our society’s attitudes toward atheism by examining the persistence of the question, and the different reasons we have asked it over and over for centuries even though we know we have no proof. (This is the last entry in […]

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Machiavelli IV: Julius II, the Warrior Pope

(See also Machiavelli Part I, Part I.5, Part II and Part III) Long has he waited, the new prince who in 1503 joins Borgia and Medici in stage center of Machiavelli’s tumultuous Italy: Giuliano della Rovere (1443-1513), intelligent, experienced, educated, well-connected, versed in the new old arts of the resurrected ancients, fluent in the subtleties […]

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Machiavelli III: Rise of the Borgias

Once upon a time (circa 1475) the whimsical Will that scripts the Great Scroll of the Cosmos woke up in the morning and decided: Some day centuries from now, when mankind has outgrown the dastardly moustaches of melodrama and moved on to a phase of complex antiheroes, sympathetic villains and moral ambiguity, I want history teachers to […]

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Machiavelli II: The Three Branches of Ethics

Machiavelli, Part the Second: in which terms are defined, moral codes collided, teachers betrayed, a hypothetical man executed, Batman and Sherlock Holmes placed before the reader’s judgment, and Machiavelli never actually appears. See also Part I: S.P.Q.F., and Part I addendum. Ethics, or moral philosophy, is the branch of philosophy which deals with decision-making, how […]

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Machiavelli I (addendum): thoughts on this style of presenting history

I have determined, based on the volume of questions my the first installment of my Machiavelli series sparked, that two entries on Machiavelli is not enough. I now have a four part plan in mind. I must, therefore, beg some patience from my readers, as I postpone tales of Borgias and adulteries and historically documentable […]

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Machiavelli I – S.P.Q.F. (Begins Machiavelli Series)

My year in Florence has flown by, leaving me to face up to a life without battlements and medieval towers, without Botticelli and Verrocchio, without church bells to inform me when it’s noon, or 7 am, or 6 am, or 6:12 am (why?), without squash blossoms as a pizza topping, without good gelato within easy […]

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More on the Web

Learn more about me at AdaPalmer.com, or about my music at SassafrassMusic.com.  Meanwhile, here are links to more of my work in different corners of the web, including published essays and articles, op-eds, guest blog posts, interviews, and my guest appearances on podcasts and vidcasts. Most Recent Pieces: Column: Strange Horizons: A Mitfreude of Anime […]

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Who We Think Has the Power to Change the World? (transcript)

NOTE: An unfinished draft of this post was accidentally published for a little while on March 2nd-3rd, but it wasn’t actually ready yet then, but here’s the finished version: Hello, wonderful readers!  What I have to share today is not a polished essay, but the transcript, slightly cleaned up but mostly as given, of a […]

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