The other day an article appeared in my Facebook feed called “Being South-East Asian.” It was written by historian, political scientist and public intellectual Farish Noor and published in the…
I came across a Vietnamese newspaper from the late 1930s-early 1940s called the “Tràng An Báo.” This name is interesting. “Tràng An” is usually written now as “Trường An” and…
I can’t read fiction anymore. When I was young, I found novels to be a great means to “travel” to places (both in the literal and figurative senses) that I…
For a long time now I've been witnessing a decline in interest in area studies, the Humanities, the field of History, etc., all of the fields that I was trained…
The late archaeologist Wilhelm Solheim would probably be very surprised to find that statements he made way back in 1971 are cited today as "evidence" that the ancestors of the…
One of the great joys of my work is making videos of conversations with scholars who research about Southeast Asia. It was my great pleasure and honor to recently make…
In 1971, archaeologist Wilhelm "Bill" Solheim made some comments in the magazine National Geographic about the origins of agriculture. His comments were premature, and turned out to be false. Then…
For the past half century or so there has been an idea circulating in the Vietnamese world that holds that the ancestors of the Vietnamese were the first people to…
This is my first attempt at making a video in Vietnamese. . . You gotta start somewhere. . . In recent years some Vietnamese people interested in history, both inside…
Following up on the ideas in the previous post about how valuable it is to try to understand what "users" of a product/service actually think, and given that I've been…