I had coffee this morning with an old friend who stopped by to see our new office. His office, since he "retired" from his academic position, it turns out, is right around the corner. We agreed that next week he hosts the coffeeklatsch.

He's an historian (primarily of Soviet and Russian science and technology) and has the occupational disease of looking backward at all events, even - perhaps especially - the present. He is inclined to think that the future will look at 9/11 and the 'war on terror' as a tempest in a teapot - much as contemporary historians view some crucial aspects of, say, the Cold War as having been essentially pointless.

He certainly doesn't mean that this decade or its events will fade, insignificant. After all, he's living through these mad and interesting times too and he feels their profundity as powerfully as you or I do - just as he lived through, and made a specialty of, most of the turbulent twentieth. He knows though, professionally and personally, that this feeling of our own importance is almost always an illusion. He suggested that it will take all of the future historian's art and hindsight to make sense of the aughts and to answer the pressing question that only distance can adequately answer: "what the fuck were they thinking?"