The main purpose of this micro-episode is to give you the details on the much ballyhooed Philadelphia area meet-up of fans of the podcast.  The date is this Friday, October 6, 2023.  The place will be Neshaminy Creek Brewing Company, 909 Ray Avenue, Croydon, Pennsylvania.  The official start-time is 5:00 pm, but if you can’t get there so early rest assured that I’ll be around until at least 7:30, and certainly as late as the conversation remains fun and interesting. I’ll aim to get there at 4:30 or so to check out the room I reserved, which I believe they call “the nook.”  I trust many of you will recognize me from my photo on the website or on Twitter or Facebook, but in case not I’ll be wearing a red “History Nerd” cap. 

I also read a short excerpt from Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, which I highly recommend. Mounk explores the philosophical roots of critical theory and the full range of ideas clumsily lumped together as “wokeism,” or “the successor ideology.” The book is extremely useful for understanding how we arrived at our current identity politics, and is relevant to understanding the “history wars” that have played out over the last four or five years. You can buy it through the link above.