In which I abandon my main story and fall down a rabbit hole

I have spent far too much time over the last week working on a blog post about the Siberian Intervention: a minor American military expedition at the end of the First World War that has been crossing my path for more than a year. It just isn’t working. Even though I regularly reduce complicated stories…

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The Rutabaga Winter

I’m currently working on wartime food shortages in Berlin in the First World War. The short version? Things were rough. Then, in the winter of 1916, things got worse. You’d like a few more details? Okay then. Germany was not self-sufficient in terms of food even before the war. The country relied heavily on imported…

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