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6 min read 25

UofWinds 439, Week 25, 2026: Inventing the Renaissance, Once Upon A Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories, Foundational Texts: Puzzle Pieces


Good morning. I'm at my desk in the study, my body fairly well-rested but still heavy from the last two weeks in which I resumed cycling to work. Friends, I bought an e-bike (pedal-assist with no throttle if that is important to you) and it has made riding into headwinds and through this first summer heatwave not only so much easier, but joyful. My default inclination is to hide from the sun all summer, but that's no way to live.

This is my daughter's last year of high school and she will be graduating shortly. Her class organized a 'senior sunset' last night. They gathered at Reaume Park along the Detroit River where they enjoyed ice cream and the end of the day's light together. I like this idea of watching sunsets as something to do with friends.

Inventing the Renaissance


My current summer read is a beast of a book at 745 pages: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by historian and science-fiction author, Ada Palmer. From the book's blurb:

Palmer’s Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

Palmer's book is not just a work of history, but a work of historiography: a history of histories of the Renaissance. Palmer has been a professor since 2009 and over that time she has learned how to scaffold hundreds of years of history through storytelling so that her students leave with some sense of it all. Much of this book sounds like lecturing to her students as she helpfully reminds the reader where they have heard names before by referring to anecdotes that she had previously shared. If you are a regular reader of history, you might not find this particular trait endearing but I found it useful and I've been grateful for it. For an example, here's the opening sentence of Chapter 39:

Raffaello Maffei (1451-1522), called Volterrano, was a prolific scholar, translator, biographer, and author of a staggeringly ambitious and popular Latin encyclopedia of everything, who worked at the Vatican through the wild papacies of Paul II (reclusive Venetian), Sixtus IV (Battle Pope!), Innocent VIII (King Log), Alexander VI (the very, very, very, very...) and Julius II (Battle Pope 2: The Wars Get Weirder!).

Now, if you aren't up to adding a 700+ page work to your summer reading list, may I suggest the considerably lighter commitment of a two hour interview with Ada Palmer in which she shares some of the most compelling themes from the book? Here the timestamps to the stories she shares:

  • (00:00:00) - How cosplaying Ancient Rome led to the Renaissance
  • (00:28:49) - How Florence's weird republic worked
  • (00:38:13) - How the Medicis took over Florence
  • (00:58:12) - Why it was so hard for Gutenberg to make any money off the printing press
  • (01:17:34) - Why the industrial revolution didn't happen in Italy
  • (01:23:02) - The Library of Alexandria isn’t where most ancient books were lost
  • (01:41:21) - The Inquisition accidentally invented peer review

I have been enjoying Palmer's stories of history as she deflates historical figures into people and negates nostalgia with testimonies of the day to day lived experiences of the age.

Once Upon A Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories


Thanks to Inventing the Renaissance, I finally know who Petrarch 🌐 is and why he is considered such a big deal: "He survives the Black Death in the 1340s, watches his friends die to plague and bandits, and says: our leaders are selfish and terrible, we need to raise them on the Roman classics so they’ll act like Cicero." Petrarch's call to return to the much more stable days of the Roman Empire is what is said to have kick-started the Renaissance. It was a powerful story that ended up not being true as princes who think of the Roman Empire daily will still happily wage terrible war for personal profit.

“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around…Stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.” — Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

The quote above was shared by Shawn Graham in his recent Digital Humanities Benelux 2026 conference keynote address. Dr. Graham is "trained in Roman archaeology but has become over the years a digital archaeologist and digital humanist." His keynote is called Once Upon A Time: The Behaviour Space(s) of Stories (slides) and he starts with two stories for us to prime our thinking of how algorithms can act as strange attractors to particular stories that might not end up serving us well. Some stories might be better understood as parasites.

The part that resonated with me the most from Graham's talk, was the suggestion that history / "archaeology is or ought to be worldbuilding".

Which reminds me of the work of April Beisaw who is an archaeologist who has asked why do ghost tours do so much better than public archaeology events? I listened to her talk once about her work in upstate New York. She was exploring the way that the landscape was altered by flooding valleys and villages to serve the water needs of the metropolis. When it came time to share her research with the public, she quickly discovered that the authoritative story, the one with the politicians and the legislation and the aqueduct and so on, did not resonate with the locals. But she observed a local paranormal research group active in the same area, pointing to the same remains, the same drowned landscape and she noticed how they were so much better at the public history of the drowned villages than the archaeologists. What made their approach effective seemed to be, according to Beisaw, because they left space for participants to layer their own stories, to weave them together, to fill the trench according to their own understanding of what haunting means. The ghost hunters did not tell people what the world was. They invited them into the conditions for finding out. They brought the audience “along on the process of imagining a past and trying to detect its signatures in the present”. Worldbuilding in action.

Foundational Texts: Puzzle Pieces


Dan Sinker has done many things but he's probably best known for being the publisher and editor of Punk Planet magazine for over ten years. Now among other things, he hosts a blog and every month this year he has been sharing something foundational to himself. For May, he wrote an essay in homage to a children's book that also feels like part of my own personal foundation: Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game.

"The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east."
And so begins The Westing Game, a children's mystery written in 1978 by Ellen Raskin, one of only four novels she ever wrote. It is a perfect book—or at least, for me as a kid, it was as close as it ever got.
The Westing Game tells the story of a series of neighbors, all invited to move into the aforementioned Sunset Towers, built on the shore of Lake Michigan. They are strangers to each other at first, but quickly learn that they are all heirs to the fortune of paper mill magnate Samuel Westing, and whoever solves the puzzle laid out in his will inherits his millions. Each heir is paired with a stranger and the newly formed twosome is given a set of clues, each different than the ones the other teams received.
At that point the game, as they say, is afoot...

Dan captures why this book felt so extraordinary to me when I read it as a child. It presented a complex puzzle with a tidy solution but it also left the adults in the book as the mysteries they (we) are:

The Westing Game was the first book I read that didn't lie to me. It didn't lie the way Encyclopedia Brown lied, by keeping details hidden until the conclusion, making it impossible to solve the mystery on your own. There were no hidden clues in The Westing Game. From the very first sentence on, if you looked close enough, the answer to its central mystery was right there to discover.
But the book didn't lie about bigger things either: That parents were flawed, that adults were hiding secrets, that the world worked in ways that were both unclear and unfair. It was clear-eyed in the many ways that people fail themselves and each other, and it offered no straightforward solutions to any of it.

My copy of The Westing Game is a mere 185 (rapidly yellowing) pages. It would be a perfect read while waiting for the sun to set tonight.

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