KunstlerCast - Suburban Sprawl: A Tragic Comedy
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and World Made By Hand, takes on the converging catastrophes of the 21st century. Features a new guest each month. (Note: Episodes 1 - 214 featured conversations between Duncan Crary and JHK during the years 2008 through 2012 and focused on the topics of suburban sprawl, disposable architecture and the end of the cheap oil era.)

#371 — Dmitry Orlov, the author of “Reinventing Collapse”, moved to the USA as a boy when his dissident parents managed to get out of the Soviet Union. He spent most of his life here, went through school and college, but ventured back to Russia for a while in the 1990s out of curiosity after the fall of the USSR. He returned to the USA where he worked in IT and eventually moved onto a boat in Boston Harbor. He’s published many other books, including “The Five Stages of Collapse,” “Shrinking the Technosphere,” “The Pitfalls of English,” and has put out the Club Orlov Blog for more than a decade. I’m a big fan of his writings.

     After the Great Financial Fiasco of 2009, Dmitry divided his time between Boston and wintering on his boat in Central America. For several years after he started a family, he sojourned in the waters off Beaufort, South Carolina. Finally, before the Covid Melodrama, he up and resettled in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he is establishing a new phase of his literary career writing in the Russian Language. He continues to blog in English. He is a keen observer of the political and technological scene.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Direct download: Kunstlercast_371.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 2:09pm EDT

Stephan Sanders-Faes is an historian of Central and Eastern Europe at the University of Bergen, Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Graz in 2011 and obtained the Habilitation in Early Modern and Modern History from the University of Zurich in 2018. Before joining the Bergen faculty in 2020, he taught for ten years at the history departments at the Universities of Zurich and Fribourg, as well as held the István Deák Visiting Professorship in East Central European Studies at Columbia University in 2018.

Stephan’s research focuses on post-medieval Central and Eastern Europe (c. 1350-1850), with a particular interest in urban-rural relations, administrative, bureaucratic, and constitutional changes ("ABC history"), and state transformation — that is, the emergence, and change over time, of the European national state. He’s the author of two books: Urban Elites of Zadar (2013); and Europas Habsburgisches Jahrhundert (2018). His next book will be Lordship and State Transformation: Bohemia and the Habsburg Monarchy from the Thirty Years War to the War of the Spanish Succession, expected in 2022. 

He blogs on current events at https://fackel.substack.com. Fakel means “torch” in German.

Currently, Stephan is investigating the diffusion of state authority into the rural periphery of Habsburg Lower Austria from the late eighteenth century to the advent of constitutional rule in 1860s, exploring the role of non-state actors as state-builders, the patterns of transition, and the social factors influencing them.

His other contributions to the field includes consulting for the EU Commission’s Research Executive Agency (Marie Curie-Skłodowska fellowships), the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki), and the Swiss National Science Foundation, as well as serving on the international editorial board of Atti (published by the Center for Historical Research in Rovinj/Rovigo, Croatia), and as peer-reviewer for Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Archivio Veneto, and the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, among others.

The KunstlerCast theme music is the beautiful Two Rivers Waltz written and performed by Larry Unger.

Direct download: KunstlerCast_370.mp3
Category:podcasts -- posted at: 8:04am EDT