The History Impossible Weekly Newsletter

We're back with some updates!

Well, it looks like we are back with the (sorta) weekly newsletter. And honestly, having given this a couple of weeks, I think it’s paid off; I have more to talk about than usual, both in terms of what’s going on behind the scenes on History Impossible and of what kinds of things I’ve been reading, watching, and playing. But first I want to thank all of you who have supported the show, both by subscribing here and lending your financial support over on Patreon, which I’d love to see expand, so please share the word of the show and recommend it to all your friends (especially those with deep pockets!).

I also wanted to thank everyone for their patience as they waited for the return of the “Muslim Nazis” series with our newfound focus on Yugoslavia. That’s going to be case with the next couple of episodes before we get caught back up with the main characters of our story (though Yugoslavia will always play a part, hence the multi-hour, multi-part focus on it), but I promise you that it will be worth it. I’ve already been getting positive feedback, including from people from the Yugosphere who say that, apart from some details and the inevitable reality that nationalist-minded folks would take issue with anything I had to say unless it feel in line with their mythological views, I pretty much nailed the history. This isn’t just a brag (okay, maybe it is a little), but it’s also a reassurance (possibly just to myself…) that this series is on the right track, whether or not its main title is too click-baity for its own good. It’s also about to get more brutal than usual, even for the kinds of stories I explore on this show, so consider this my 48th warning so far (I think that’s how many it’s been). These episodes have indeed been taking up most of my time, but believe it or not, I’ve managed to carve out some additional time for my other interests. So let’s jump into it!

What I’m Reading

As surprising as it might be to read, I didn’t actually read a book about media failures these past couple of weeks. In a sense, the well has run dry on that topic (but it of course never leaves my mind, especially as I watch how news stories get framed, especially online). But also because my attention has been devoted more to both a.) researching the next next episode and b.) doing some additional research for an essay I’m working on that, in a lot of ways, is almost too controversial for even me to be completely comfortable.

In terms of the book I’m reading for the “next next episode”, it’s Bosnia: A Short History by British history writer and journalist Noel Malcolm. He’s also written a book about Kosovo by the same name which I may need to read one day if my research or topics ever take me there, but with this 1994 book, he gives exactly what the title promises: a concise and relatively easy to understand history of the country known as Bosnia-Herzegovina. While I’ve already read a lot about the place in my research leading up to this series, I realized that a specific deep-dive was in order for the region itself, since most of what I read always spoke of Bosnia in a relatively short-hand—even at times lackadaisical—way, rarely ever with focus. Bosnia becomes kind of an uncomfortable short-hand for a lot of Balkan historians, it seems and I kind of understand why: it’s been called the “microcosm of the Balkans” because its history seems to possess all the different things about the Balkans that make them so confusing to outsiders, particularly in the West. Malcolm did a great job clarifying the picture. While it’s certainly a very complex place—and probably more complex than your average European country—it’s full of rich and unique history that all plays a part in the wider narrative of just what happened to Yugoslavia in the 20th century, both leading up to and during the Second World War.

And in terms of the other book—the one I’m using for my edgy-boi essay—it’s Jay Caspian Kang’s 2021 masterpiece The Loneliest Americans, a sort of memoir/political meditation on the Asian American identity—such as it is; it’s a profoundly beautiful examination of history of “Asianness” in America, as well as the contradictions that have arisen because of it. I’m currently about halfway done with it, and I’ll probably be finished with it within a few days. It was recommended to me by comrade and friend Sheluyang Pang, whose excellent Society and Standpoint Substack is well-worth subscribing to (as are his articles for Tablet and The Free Press worth checking out), and who I’ve chatting with lately about possible future collaborations.

It’s worth mentioning that the reason I decided to read it wasn’t just because I live in an Asian immigrant-majority household—though that certainly plays a part, especially in my ability to relate to the content better than most laowai—but because it engages with the difficult questions that have been raised by the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action in the last week. Because I’m me, I started considering where I stood on the ruling and while I ultimately decided that it was probably for the best, I guarantee you that it’s probably not for the same reason as most people who oppose it (which is over half of the country, for what it’s worth). Where I split from that crowd—and I’ll try not to spoil where I’m going with this—is multi-faceted and I think needs to be said so that I’m not mistaken for some bog-standard conservative. First, I’m 100% onboard with the movement to crush legacy admissions from a legal perspective: as I recently said on Twitter, no one deserves anything for the accomplishment of existence. But that’s only one part of the equation; I also see the need for, well, need-based affirmative action, preferably with a blindness toward race, and if not, with a restriction to only Black Americans and Black Americans who have demonstrated economic need, as a form of reparations. We’re long past the point of affirmative action policies being “merely” about righting past wrongs, especially when there are plenty of applicants to universities whose ancestors have suffered at the hands of a white supremacist state and who aren’t benefiting in the same way. As I saw and see it, something needed to change for this to be a serious issue worth considering anymore. Maybe this ruling will be it, maybe it won’t; I guess we’ll see.

I’ll stop myself from saying much more so the essay won’t be redundant, but needless to say, there is a historical element that I don’t think anyone else has considered, including those who love Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism as much as I do (which is another book I reopened during this writing process). A lot of reading has been done in the past week, both for the podcast and for my writing. So stay tuned for further elaboration on this subject.

What I’m Watching

What I’ve managed to watch during these last few weeks has been more limited; I gave Riddick a rewatch and I still firmly stand by my conviction that when he’s not being distracted with tens of millions of dollars and stupid special effects in the Fast and Furious franchise, Vin Diesel makes some pretty awesome stuff, especially when he lets his nerd flag fly (remember: he’s a big D&D dork). Part of this has been the Chronicles of Riddick franchise, which was birthed all the way back in 2000 with the excellent sci-fi adventure/horror film, Pitch Black, its bloated-but-super-fun 2004 sequel The Chronicles of Riddick, and the incredible prequel video game, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay that same year. The 2013 film was a low-budget sequel to a high-budget flop, but used that as an opportunity to create a solid film that both stands alone and continues the story, which is not all that common. It shows that when there’s passion and skill behind a project, it can really pay dividends. At least to me.

The more historical film I watched was the little documentary on MAX called The Automat, featuring the great Mel Brooks, talking about one of the weirdest-yet-most-iconic staples of American life that people of my generation would never and will never experience. The name of the film is the thing in question and the best way I can describe it to fellow millennials or Zoomers who don’t know what it is, it’s basically if a vending machine and a store had a baby—you went in, popped in a nickel and got a cup of coffee poured directly from a spout sticking out of the wall, popped in two nickels next to the piece of food you wanted—pie, sandwich, whatever—and pulled it out of a little cubbyhole. Some vending machines still have a set-up like this—I remember the courthouse in Chicago where I reported for jury duty back in 2014 one week before moving to LA had one, as did the Minneapolis Star Tribune where my father worked—and if you go to IKEA, their cafeteria is sort of set up like this. But the automat—which was a chain, funny enough—no longer exists. It’s an icon of a short, bygone American era that stretched from around 1900 until the 1950s-1960s. My knowledge of it was limited to two things: the 1998 film Dark City, and one of my favorite video games of all time, Grim Fandango.

What makes this—and thus the documentary about the Automat—so interesting is that thanks to my knowledge of this historical anachronism from modern pieces of entertainment that I consumed in my adolescence (junior and high school to be precise), I also feel this amorphous pang of nostalgia for the Automat. I’ve never set foot in one in my life; how could I? Perhaps some remnants existed somewhere when I was a kid, but I never went to one as far as I can recall. And yet, they have a warm, and cozy feeling for me. And I suspect that might be the case for a lot of people who aren’t in their 80s who talk about them; something about this cultural staple triggers something in a lot of us, the same way, I suspect, trains delight trainspotters, or lighthouses delight lighthouse enthusiasts (of which I tepidly also count myself). It’s a fascinating phenomenon—a fixation on structures instigated not through actual memory, but through the memory of a cultural depiction of that structure. If there’s a name for it, I don’t know, and I find it hard to believe a team of psychologists will ever have the incentive to figure it out, but I’d love to know more about such a phenomenon—we’ll call it “nostalgia-by-cultural-proxy”—if it ever happens.

What I’m Playing

Diablo IV. That is all.

Kidding, actually. Though I have been playing through it with Molly in couch co-op and it’s a really fun experience, especially for those like us who played the previous entry (or entries) all those years ago. There’s not much to say about Diablo that will woo anyone over to it that hasn’t already been woo’d. It’s a fun experience that can be enjoyed with all sorts of friends, which is why I recommend people jump onboard now so they can play with their friends while their attention is still grabbed. Go forth and kill the Daughter of Hatred, Lilith!

But in other news, I finally finished A Plague Tale: Requiem, which might be the best game I’ve played this year, at least in terms of story. I won’t spoil anything, but in short, it captures the real tragedy of the Black Death within its supernatural mythos—the cost of such a calamity upon the world, and the costs that come from surviving and, when possible, ending it. There’s nothing remotely factual about this game, so I wouldn’t recommend going in thinking you’ll get the Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption treatment, but I would recommend trying both it and its predecessor, A Plague Tale: Innocence if you’re interested in a more dark fantasy take on the Black Death years of Europe. It didn’t quite inspire any tears, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have a heavy weight within my chest as I watched the credits roll.

And That’s All She Wrote

That’s it for this week, friends. I’ll be watching a film either tonight or later this week that will actually play into the next episode of History Impossible but I’ll no doubt write some thoughts about it in the next newsletter, so stay tuned!