A collection of 362 posts
Frank Sinatra's “Come Fly With Me” was the best-selling album in the United States for five weeks in 1958, but the irony of its popularity (or, perhaps, the source of its aspirational appeal) is that practically none of us could take up the offer to "glide, starry-eyed&
A true and sincere confession of one’s actual sins and cruelties is a courageous act that leaves one vulnerable and exposed.
I wasn’t a patriot until it had all gone; then I would have sold my soul to buy it back. ~Tanya, in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong For more than 20 years, from the mid-’70s to the late-’90s, Morningside, a three-hour daily broadcast that mixed
Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy, was a warrior’s warrior. Hawk-nosed, ambitious, and brash, Philip had been a soldier since childhood. He was still a smooth-faced boy of 14 when he fought alongside his father, King John II of France, in the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Like King
The Nazi concentration camp system still remains a unicum, both in its extent and its quality. At no other place or time has one seen a phenomenon so unexpected and so complex: never have so many human lives been extinguished in so short a time, and with so lucid a
Mental hospitals emerged at a time, Foucault argued, when the state was seeking to impose rational order on societies.
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
The campaign to label Canada a genocide state isn’t an isolated phenomenon, but is playing out as part of a larger effort to destroy any publicly displayed symbol of national pride.
Chastising the followers of Marx for ignoring workers’ actual experiences, Weil was almost a nominalist, and she awaited insights, as opposed to going in search of them.
The comrades worked together, ate together, read together, showered together, used the latrine together, sang together to the sound of accordions late into the night.
Machiavelli’s clear preference was for an advisor to be principled, believing in his advice and stating it clearly, but not importunate.
There is much we can learn from Bourne, not only from his joie-de-vivre, his ideas about cultural diversity and disability, but perhaps most of all, from his toughness, his willingness to criticize associates.
The popular vision of race in America seems to be incapable of breaking the gridlock that places the fate of black Americans in the hands of white society and then condemns that society to the wasteland of history.
Isn’t it a little late for the rehabilitation of the Black Panther Party (BPP)? After all, the organization that first caught the public’s attention in 1969 was already in its death throes by the early 1970s, beset by internal splits, criminal prosecutions, and violent faction-fighting. Yet, five decades
Years from now, if anyone looks at a line graph (in the OED or Google dictionary) tracking the frequency with which a word is mentioned in print, they may notice the current affinity for the word “narrative.” An already overworked word (by virtue of its abstractness), it is now almost