The time we have been recording history is an evolutionary wing-flap equivalent to a single character, the width of this period<.> And how sparse that history is! Documents vanish, dissolve, decompose. They are washed away by the weather, or consumed by insects and bacteria, or destroyed, hidden, obfuscated, or revised. That is before we address the subjectivity of the historical record. We can’t agree definitively on what happened in the last decade. Newspapers record stories with biases firmly in place. Cameras record images curated by people and only see what passes through the lens,
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