Showing results by narrator "Jeremy Fouts" in All Categories

In January 1077 the most powerful man in Europe stood outside a castle gate in the Apennines, in the snow, for three days, waiting for a monk in his fifties to open the door. He was not being tortured. He had not been captured. He had ridden there voluntarily, in winter, across the Alps, with...

Everybody admitted it at the same time. The whole internet looked up from its phone and confessed that yes, actually, it thinks about the Roman Empire constantly. We turned it into a joke because that is what we do with things that scare us a little. But the joke had a secret inside it, and the secret is this: we cannot stop thinking about Rome because we never actually left it. This book takes the meme seriously without taking itself seriously at all. It argues something genuinely strange and genuinely true—that Rome didn't collapse so much as migrate.