Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on April 5, 2025

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on March 29, 2025

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Nunca Más, CONADEP’s (The National Commission on Disappeared People) report of their findings from their project to document what happened to the disappeared in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, begins with a historical contextualization of how the military junta came to power, by Nick Caistor from the Index on Censorship.

Like any historian of the Dirty War, Caistor begins with the return from exile of Juan Domingo Perón, who returned to Argentina on the 20th of June 1973. His party had just won the election with 62% of the vote, and Hector Cámpara, who had run, stepped aside for Perón to return as president.

From the start there were problems. Peronists gathered at the airport to welcome Perón back to Argentina, but there were two factions that had won Perón the election (both considered themselves Peronists), and they were not ideologically aligned.

On one side were the Montenegro’s, a left-wing revolutionary group. On the other side were the right wing labor bosses. Fighting broke out at the airport, and what seemed to be a celebratory moment ended with 25 dead and many more wounded.

It’s a sadly befitting beginning for the era that would follow.

QOTD: What are you currently studying?

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on March 22, 2025

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This is going to be a little weird because it’s written for my much more developed and longstanding audience on instagram (many of whom have been with me for years), but I want to replicate what I’m doing over there so that folks know they can come here and find the same thing, so here it goes.

Because my focus on this microblog has always been to re-engage with educating, I don’t often get into the details of how I create my visuals here.

My goal is to create a visual that inspires a studious mindset, something that rehabilitates the idea of learning that we inherit from Western institutions, often as a rote and punitive practice. Learning is and can be a pleasure. So that’s what I aim to construct here.

But I also know many of you are interested in the how of how I create, so I wanted to incorporate more of that, both to show you what I use and also to share some of the de-influencing behind it as well.

Today I just wanted to highlight an ink I’ve been loving. I’ve been exploring the Filipino ink brand @inksbyvinta, a company with a mission to support education. So, I’ve been buying ink samples of their inks and trying to decide what I want to add to my collection.

A full bottle is a big commitment, which is why I’ve been testing samples first. A current favorite sample that I hope to add to my collection eventually is Pusan, this lovely, pale, color changing shimmer ink you see pictured. It has a beautiful silver shimmer and shades a more reddish purple with dark blues.

I feel inspired when I break it out and much more driven to create, even though it is lighter than my usual inks. I treasure that sense of joy.

QOTD: What is your go to writing color right now?

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Getting back to the subject of Argentina’s Dirty War, I recently had to renew my library card, which conveniently took me to the main branch of the New York Public Library at precisely the moment when I was realizing that I was going to need to go there in order to access Nunca Más, a book that consolidated the 50,000 pages of documentation that CONADEP, the National Commission on Disappeared People, put together in preparation for the 1985 trial of the three military juntas that terrorized Argentina for nearly a decade (really a decade if you consider that the terror started before the coup).

Sadly, Nunca Más is out of print, making it largely inaccessible to readers in the United States, which seems a pity in the Information Age that this report—part of the truth and reconciliation efforts—isn’t more widely accessible. In an ideal world it wouldn’t be so challenging to access this history.

But, aside from the pity that this documentary effort is widely forgotten in the Anglophone world today, it’s a pity from a publishing perspective that this book is out of print. The President of CONADEP, appointed by the at the time newly democratically elected President of Argentina, Raúl Alfonsín, was novelist Ernesto Sabato. And as I sat in the Rose Main Reading Room, riveted by the account I was reading, I kept thinking that the writing and translation were so compelling that they required no rewriting, no general public version.

I’ve been watching some true crime on Hulu, and I kept thinking this book had the same propulsiveness, if you’re interested in humanity and criminality. Similarly, with people reintroduced to Say Nothing, now in television form, the disappeared are certainly back in the public imagination.

Alas, Nunca Más remains out of print, so I’m going to do my best to give you a taste of it here over the next few weeks.

QOTD: Do you ever listen to true crime podcasts or television? Or did you watch Say Nothing?

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on March 15, 2025.

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We hear this phrase a lot in society right now: “Do your own research.” And, in the internet age we all get to live with the consequences of that perception that reliable research is just freely available to us. So, as a one time professional researcher (as many of you know my Ph.D. Is in comparative literature) I wanted to write about what makes that impossible.

It boils down to this: well done research requires a lot of context. It isn’t possible to pick up any topic and “research” it with equal skill. Especially in this era, when propaganda and misinformation are so prevalent. And, unfortunately, in an anti-intellectual environment, doing your own research seems to mean disregarding experts in the name of pursuing your own gut.

There’s a phrase for that, it’s “confirmation bias,” when we go on the hunt for the information or resources that confirm what we want to believe.

Now, can experts be wrong? Sure. And a lot of scholarly debate involves drilling down into nuance to correct the incorrect or add specificity to where things have been too broad. But research requires a baseline acceptance that certain resources are basically reliable, that they rely on concrete quantitative and qualitative data when available. That primary and secondary sources have been utilized to verify claims. That, as you research, you are drawing from a wide range of perspectives that have been properly vetted.

In doing my research for this series I’ve relied on investigative journalism, peer reviewed sources, official documentation by human rights organizations. I disregard unverified or unverifiable claims and I do that through cross-referencing.

I also question my perspective, my motives if I find myself pursuing an unverifiable phantom. I learned to do all of this through a decade of training. The skill doesn’t come cheap and it continues to cost time and resources to maintain. It isn’t static, it requires repetition with every new subject. #fountainpen #notes #journalspread

Notesnook is a cross-platform end-to-end encrypted open source note-taking alternative to Evernote

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on March 8, 2025

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on March 1, 2025.

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Notes for the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me show that aired on February 22, 2025.

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