23. Slippery Reality, Drug Ghouls, and the 1910s Cross-Border News Cycle, Part I
A foundational moment in twentieth-century drug history
Dear Readers:
If there’s one thing historians love, it’s the facts. Reality with a capital R. We’re all about “evidence-based approaches.”
If there’s a second thing historians love, it’s insisting that we surely don’t have all the facts, and that we’re probably wrong about some of the facts that we have, and that, in any case, reality is really hard to pin down, so you never want to trust the facts too much.
This is especially true with respect to the present, of course. To quote perhaps the most famous voice on this important matter: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.”
Though I think it’s important to add that, even when you do look around, you’re missing most of it. The present is just moving too fast, with too many moving parts, for us to really understand it.
Buddhists have been saying this for a couple thousand years. A Buddhist would probably say that …
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