Dear Dr. History,

I currently live in a frat house that has been converted into an apartment complex where each room is a 'separate' apartment and the kitchen, bathrooms and living room are shared quarters for the fifty or so inhabitants of what has become known with pride, "The Slums." The reason this lovely toilet is so called is because with all of these people living together it is no one person's responsibility to clean up the common areas. This leads to the new frontiers of low standards of sanitation as excrement rot in broken toilets, dishes go unwashed and the entire house smells like week old Berkeley Hobo pee. House meetings have been called in several failed attempts to organize a Federation of the Slum States so that livable conditions are maintained but after working through the applications of Hobbes's, Locke's,  Marx's, Rousseau's theories of establishing formal foundations of cooperative societies but none have been able to foster much more than frustration. What should I do, Dr. History?
Yours,
Distressed Slum-dweller

Dear Slum-dweller,
Dr. History can only applaud your recourse to social contract theory. In a jam, I say go to the classics. Yet as much as the Dr. prefers to resist recourse to economics, you seem already to realize that you are suffering not from a "state of nature" so much as a "tragedy of the commons," in which the absence of private property rights leads to the irresponsible exploitation of shared resources -- in your case kitchens and bathrooms. Dr. History draws consolation from locating the origin of this idea in ecology instead of economics (chalk one up for wikipedia), but discourages you from engaging in any further game-theoretic modeling. The solution, unfortunately, is the obvious. You must move out of there as soon as you possibly can!!!
Love,
Dr. History

Dear Dr. History,
I am a Civil War enthusiast. On weekends I participate in a reenactment of the battle of Murfreesboro. On the day of a battle, I try to live, as much as possible, as one might have in the 1860s. I do not wear clothes with zippers or shoes with Velcro, and I certainly do not eat modern day snacks. Last weekend, while we were in the heat of the mock battle, I noticed one of my fellow confederates drinking a bottle of Hawaiian Punch on the forest’s edge. I was outraged at this thoughtless display of historical inaccuracy. I happen know for a fact that Hawaiian Punch was not invented until 1934! Just I was about to shout, “Stop drinking that Hawaiian Punch and get in here and be a team player!” I realized that a Civil War soldier would not know what Hawaiian Punch was. How can I confront this careless confederate with out compromising my own authenticity?
Yours,
Confused Confederate

Dear Confederate:
Yes indeed, the epistemology of anachronism is one of the greatest historical quandaries. How can we complain about knowing what we cannot possibly know? Dropping a reference to the Sandwich Islands -- say, "hey buddy, how would that red drink go with a lard sandwich" -- is probably too subtle for your temporally challenged comrade. And it has the further disadvantage of acknowledging that "Hawaiian" made sense to you. But the packaging of the offending libation may offer an opening. Assuming that it is in a plastic bottle, you might ask about the transparent material that looks so much lighter and thinner than normal glass.
Otherwise, keep your head down and your canteen full of clean water. See you at Appomattox.
Love,
Dr. History