The marvel of history, at least as it is beheld at the Effigy home office, is that nothing dies as long as there are human minds to live in. The horror is that those same minds can and do bring the past back to our beloved earth all over again.

But irregular shapes also have centers, even when those centers are (paradoxically?) multiple. I hope you've had an experience of remaining in some kind of orbit as you listen, even when the path was not always, let's say, mathematically predicable.

It is uncanny and humbling, and hopefully it provides a little ballast to my tendency to drift too much. This is a podcast largely about drift itself, about how digression forms a much more direct narrative line than we may expect, even dealing with historical events.

I've done almost nothing to heighten these resonances in the narrative. They are self-heightening for anyone following the news in real time. (IMO anyway; please lmk if your experience differs!)

But the resonances with the lives of Palestinians in the last 8 months, and in the decades of occupation before that have shimmered in each episode script as if they were written in silver.