One of the great Irish songs is The Parting Glass. Nobody performed it better than Liam Clancy. At the end of every December, he sang it to remember those who had been lost during the year.
As modern technologies such as artificial intelligence grab today's headlines, it's worth remembering that their foundations were being laid more than half a century ago by computer scientists, philosophers, psychologists, developers, entrepreneurs, and more. These pioneers and those who followed tackled issues and solved problems that future generations may never know existed - but without their seminal work, we wouldn't be where we are today.
Pop's ex-wife was my biological grandmother, and there is no generation in our family that was not touched by her emotional, physical and financial abuse. In 1980, she kicked my teenage parents and me out of her house when I was an infant. She'd decided on a whim that my underemployed father and postpartum mother were able to make it on their own, without a single resource to their names.
You have to dig deep into Pierre Nora's dazzling career to find the slightest hint of anything unseemly: reports that "the English essayist Perry Anderson criticized for its 'consensual blandness'" without mentioning Anderson's leftist politics and the controversy sparked by Nora's public refusal to translate and publish The Age of Extremes , a highly acclaimed book written by English historian and Marxist Eric Hobsbawm.
