Weekly Digest – March 19, 2023

Mac Bryan, Maryland Campaign Medal of Honor Series: James Allen, 16th New York Infantry:

Born in Ireland, Pvt. James Allen mustered into service with Company F of the 16th New York Regiment on April 24, 1861 at Potsdam, in upstate New York at the tender age of 17. During Allen’s enlistment his regiment participated in all the battles of the Army of the Potomac from First Bull Run to Chancellorsville, until his term of service expired in 1863.

Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, Iraq Veterans, 20 Years Later: ‘I Don’t Know How to Explain the War to Myself’.  “Nearly 20 years after their deployment to Iraq, veterans grapple with their younger selves and try to make sense of the war.”

Driftglass with the appropriate response to David Brooks, Nostradumbass Returns to Form: The Ongoing Adventures of David Brooks:

So since the Sulzberger family continues to pay Mr. David Brooks an obscene amount of money to extrude the same steaming logs of Beltway insider claptrap over and over again, decades after decade, I see no reason why we shouldn’t amuse ourselves by repurposing some of it to create an equally plausible and much more satisfying fairy tale about how the Republican primary Cocaine Bear Lane is wide open and how one of several, promising American Cocaine Bears could jump into that lane and perhaps ride it all the way to the Republican nomination!

Book review by Cordelia Fine, Building on sands of ignorance. How the Tavistock Trust’s gender identity clinic failed its patients:

How did an initially tiny, cautious and reflective gender service end up negligently medicalizing an unknown number of vulnerable young people? Barnes’s exhaustively researched account presents readers with a complex confluence of factors – from the “family” ethos within the GIDS team to the curtailed youth mental health services of austerity Britain – while rightly avoiding stressing any single one. In many ways this is a textbook organizational scandal, a perfect storm of multilevel pressures, weak oversight and readily accessible and well-meaning rationalizations.