Cosmos & History

THE NEW ISSUE OF COSMOS AND HISTORY is now available free of charge on the web. My article here is essentially a simplified and shortened version of my January 2009 lecture at the American University of Paris.

I should also say that Cosmos & History, based in Australia (where for some reason I’ve never been), has had a strange “small world” function for me.

In the present issue, to take one example, I was surprised to find an article by Keith R. Peterson. He was a DePaul classmate of mine, and I hadn’t been in contact with him for nearly a decade. Now we’re writing again.

But that pales in comparison with another example. In the 2009 issue there is an article by a gentleman named Frederic Will. Via another route, I learned that Will is a resident of tiny Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where I and my brothers and even my father grew up. After some inquiries I learned that my mother had even met Will (not too surprising in a town of 4,000 people) though I had never heard of him.

When I was in Iowa City in May, Will and I decided to have coffee. He was kind enough to drive to see me rather than the reverse (about 25 minutes door to door). Nice guy.